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wi-fi institutions. comcast support c-span is a public service. along with these other television providers. giving you a front row seat to democracy. y. ♪ announcer: this morning on washington journal we will explore the latest headlines and take your calls live. stephen heidt will join us to discuss his book homelessness in america. the history and tragedy of an intractable social problem. washington journal starts now. ♪ host: good morning it is wednesday, december 28, 2022.

we will be discussing homelessness in america with stephen heidt. over the course of 2022, we have discussed foreign affairs, legislative policies, and come the end of the year, we want to talk about you. give us a call and let us know how your life experiences have influenced your politics. republicans is (202) 748-8001 democrats (202) 748-8000 independents (202) 748-8002 and you can also text us on (202) 748-8003 host: and we want to know about the events in your life that have influenced your politics. two individuals one is well

known one is less well-known. here's the story from npr yesterday. it states that former president george h w bush highlights his wife barbara's death. -- levinson serves as the director of this -- his goal church in houston and got to know the couple of ravenna decade. he reflected a lot on his relationship with them and has discussed what he learned from them a witness of dignity. i felt that was an important story to tell in their life because i thought i saw a true earnest faith thatd the way they were and the way they lived their lives. e steep -- story from epr yesterday. and a story from the washington

post is a lesser known figure in georgia and unlikely rebel against tr the life of cody j offers one answer. that is cody johnson in t picture that goes with the story. here is the lead of the story. it says he was white, 33, an electrician, n college degree. he had a beard and used a pickup with 151,000 miles on it. he was angry at what the country has become. and he is from georgia rural america. america where people who look like him have voted for donald trump. now he took one last inhale of his vaped, he walked into the polling place, and he voted against all of that. he voted against every republican on the ballot and

supported joe biden in 2020 which is the first time he voted in his life. "i don't want extremist in office. " host: this is talking about the events in his life and the influence on politics. that is what we want to talk about with our viewers in 2022. let us know how your life experiences have shaped your politics. republics is (202) 748-8001 democrats (202) 748-8000 independent (202) 748-80 a story from recent years looking at the issue of politics wondering if it is hereditary. wondering if i something we get omur parents. that is from a professor at boise state university.

that roughly three quarters of kids have two parents from the same political party that have similar views to them. things that happened early in life are important to things that happen later in life he said in the story. once someone adopts this affiliation it is far less likely for someone to change their beliefs. so if parents it kids down in a early part in their life it is were difficult to deviate. once you tell yourself you're a democrat or republican you will interpret information in a way that reinforces those beliefs. we will show you more from that story and a variety of studies. but we want to hear you from this first hour of the washington journal and how this life experience shaped your politics. phone lines for republicans, independents, and democrats. we start in florida -- good

morning. >> we heard all the christian phone many -- family -- christian family values and the christian pat robertson's christian coalition. we are all works in progress. if you say i love the police, but those who lost three court cases get an armed response to a legal -- get convicted of three felonies in the state of washington, take over the courthouse, leading to a shootout with the fbi. no blue lives lap -- no blue lives matter. you don't care about birth -- host: so patrick. what has made you independent?

you are calling on the independent line. caller: from both parties the democrats say of those jobs. the g7 has the most -- eight uses the most robots and computers in manufacturing, but they have the most number of people in the population and democrats do not care about that. we have to hear about root -- fiscal responsibility from republicans. they serve it up and you help them serve it up all the frauds and lives. we are a country based on judeo-christian values. that is where we are. you talk about the keystone pipelines and ignore florida, georgia, and drilling off the coast for more than 50 years. texas will not capture the

national gas burn off and drilling for energy, but if we do not have it pipeline in pennsylvania, the u.s. national security. host: that is patrick in florida we will stay in florida. vicki republican orlando. what is made you a republican? caller: ok, well, i am 66 years old. what got me against the government was at 70 years old, in the second grade, they came in and told me they assassinated my president. i did not vote my whole life because i had a bad taste. they even killed the man who killed the president. we never got a clear understanding. i've never voted one time in my life until 2016.

i saw donald trump and i thought he wasn't one of them politicians and bats the only reason i voted that one time. i'm not a republican, democrat or nothing. but that is where my view of the government started. as a little bitty girl. and then coming in, my teacher crying, and telling me they had killed our president. it didn't make sense to me. host: do you think you trust the government more since the trump administration? since coming back to voting? and since the election in which the candidate you voted for one -- for won? caller: i cannot say that anybody has made much difference for the american people. i know this is a good country,

this is the best one we got. i am not bashing america, but i am just telling you that's -- that's why i just stayed away from it all them years. i thought with donald trump it would be a whole different ballgame. it seemed like it got worse. not saying worse for him, but everybody attacks. i don't think they give him a chance. but i don't know everything that goes on in government either, so, i don't know. host: that was vicki in florida. a line for democrats becky in bethesda. what makes you a democrat? caller: good morning. what makes the end democrat is that i hope -- what makes me a democrat is that i hope they keep to democrat values. i know a lot of corporate democrats do not do that but

bernie sanders and a few aggressive -- progressives aoc, they do, i hope in the coming year, progressives have a bigger voice because i see that nancy pelosi and that wing of the government. i think they use a lot of the -- of joe manchin as a voice. there are probably four or five other senators who are just like mention -- joe manchin in cinema. host: where did you learn what democratic values were? caller: ok. basically i got that from fdr the new deal. a lot of the things that republicans rail against our new deals. and lb today programs.

i am also 66 just like vicki, and i remember when the first republican i voted for was jacob unit -- jacob janet in new york. i lived in new york city for a time. republicans were reasonable then. they were not just clinging to -- all i want to do is stick it to liberals and own the liberals. we will never get anywhere in society as americans if we just tear each other down. in 2023, i hope to do something to reconcile with my republican neighbors and friends. and not tear them down. not see them as bad people. i realize patrick has a different view of gun ownership than i do, but i still need to

live in the same country he lives in. host: that is a call from bethesda. back to the line for independents. candace in tennessee. what is shaped your life in politics? caller: torture has shaped my politics. i have been tortured by a technological totalitarian terrorist government that are stalking everyone through technology. the money is based on what the central banks say that it is based on. there is no other money, there is just, you know, people that tell us what our value is worth. other people. i have been, like a said, tortured. and that is what may be an

independent starting to read books and not -- i actually obtained a copy of an ibm book on good friday 2022 that laid out the new role orders and plans for a one world government. and guns being used as weapons. host: that is candace. this is steve in st. louis. what has shaped your politics? caller: well, good morning. i come from the fully -- from a fully democratic family. my whole life. i voted for obama twice. what really shaped me and started changing me many years ago, we were dirt poor, we had nothing. my mom and dad had small jobs. they always preached to me and i

say preached the democrats for the poor and republicans for the rich. and i believe that, ok? i really believe that. went to vietnam and got drafted, spent a year in the jungle, came back and went to college. i worked really hard. i consider myself a success through that hard work. what i saw is that -- and what i -- i still disagree with this, anybody, anybody in this country can make it. if i can make it, anybody can. but i see our country falling into an entitlement country. you owe me nobody owes you anything. go out and take it. it is here for the taking. and i -- that is why i realign with that republicans more. i am against the entitlement issues that are happening right

now. i mean, i will help anybody. i will help out. i give too many chits. but there is a saying that the lord helps those w help themselves. so, that is all i have got t say. host: steve in st. louis, missouri. more on the atlantic piece in 2018 looking at the idea that somebody's politics is herediry can you inheritoupolitics from your parents. here is more what the story had to say. moving away from home, whether going to college, joined the military, or take a job in another town, is one of the main factors that contribute to someone's political attitudes. going to college is particularly important. that's not a result of college campuses indoctrinating students have more -- liberal sensibilities as a sense of fear, but as a result and introduction to new ideas. people from different data -- backgrounds better distinct from

their homes. it could make kids liberal homes -- from liberal homes more conservative. science professor said it is a double-edged sword for parents because they want their children to have access to a good education and be more sick as flat life, but they -- be more successful at life, but they also want their children to be like them. that statement is concerning politics possibly being hereditary. one of the reasons we discussed this is we want to know how your life experiences have shaped politics. that is our question in the first hour of the washington journal. (202) 748-8001 republicans (202) 748-8000 democrats (202) 748-8002 independents steve, texas, democrat, good morning, your next. caller: hey, i tell you, when i was younger, i don't think i even voted. until i was like in my 40's.

but my parents were democrats, but not big politics, but then i got married and my wife sort of made me see that things are not always black-and-white either. that kind of help, but after that, that was about the time bill clinton was elected. i noticed how the public he campaigned, he had been -- had not been convicted of wrongdoings. he got in trouble for that woman, but whatever. they were making up lies. that was a republican thing. propaganda lies. they are almost like a nazi party. anybody who does that i have no use for. i know democrats are not perfect, but to me it is just a no-brainer, i do not know why anybody would vote for

republican. host: that was stephen texas. this is -- that was steve, in texas. this is joe. what made you ever republican? caller: my father was a democrat a union guy. i always thought it would be a democrat but then i went into the military when i turned 18, and my first time i got to vote, i voted for jimmy carter. i thought he was a formal name is -- a former naval officer. i thought he would be great to help with the military. over the next couple years, he destroyed the economy. military people are on food stamps. young married g.i. with kids living on base they had to live on food stamps to be able to feed their families. i swore i would never vote for a democrat again. i spent my entire life working

with the government on the national security arena. i've seen so much crime and corruption. some of the politicians are -- i know for a fact they are traders. if we put a light on their lives, we would put them in prison. i have no trust at all with the democrat party. host: that is joe in ohio this is julie winston in north carolina. independent. good morning. are you with this julie? caller: good morning. host: go ahead. caller: i am republican. i am a republican and i never voted before donald trump came in because he is not a politician. he is a businessman. anyone that says he did not do great things for us in the last four years that he was in there,

has to be blind. especially for the one that is in there now that has corrupted our whole country for the last two years. host: when did you become a republican, joy? caller: the year that trump came in. that was the first time i ever voted in my life. host: why did you feel like you wanted to vote? caller: because i did research and saw how crooked the world has been with the last president that we have. anybody that thinks the clintons were good, the clintons were so bad. and what happened with monica lewinsky was a ruse to keep our eyes off of what bill clinton was doing because he would have been charged with treason if they had not brought something else to see what we are doing -- he was doing. i am a very good fact checker and i know how crooked these

politicians have been. i will be glad when trump comes back in. if anyone thinks he will not come back end, they are fulling themselves and they need to wake up. and trump went out of office, it is all propaganda lies. and these big corporations own our news companies. they have to say what they are told to say. host: that is a caller from north carolina. this is david in new york city. good morning. caller: good morning you do such a great job what a great question this is. i am 74 years old i live in new york city on the upper side. i have had a long political trajectory. i am very political i would say. and i was in elementary school in long island, they wanted us to pray in school and my parents did not like that. we had a music teacher that wanted us to sing part of --

republic crisis on the lilies and i didn't want to do that. and then, i have more influence by the civil rights movement. and then, we moved more left. in the 1973 where the u.s. government i tian tian predecessor to at&t -- i.t. and t predecessor to at&t -- became a communist. i vote democratic, alexandria ocasio-cortez for president. and i signed for bernie sanders. so i become -- i am jewish, but i am not a -- i support the rights of palestinian people. i am in opposition to most of my family they would never go to

israel until the palestinians -- they say rip a really multinational is really on bloomberg -- host: you still consider yourself an economist today? caller: yes. host: what does it mean to be at economist in 2022? caller: it means i live in the central world of materialism. with wall street, we mess with everybody, i am not -- i don't like china or russia of course. and i support zelenskyy and his war in ukraine. but it means i see the world differently. i've talked with brazil a lot -- i think trump -- the last really political thing i did a few years ago was walked around with signs for black lives matter.

all over the city of bronx, brooklyn, and my sign said that i still -- i still believe it to be the truth i think i was the first person in the city to say this, that trump was a fascist. look at what they did to george floyd they kidnapped and lynched him. and i am unreformed. i see the world quite differently from most americans. but i think -- i vote democratic. i elected bernie sanders and as a said aoc. i think she is wonderful. i am not out there in a sense, but i support, as i said, zelenskyy. host: that is a call from new york city. this is vernon in new haven, michigan. good morning, you are next. caller: good morning. good morning. host: go ahead.

caller: ok i will try to make this short and sweet. i was raised in a fundamentalist christian family community where it was all white and the bigotry was excepted strangely, you know. so i grew up with some -- a little bit of confusion. anyways, i turned 20 in 1968, got into the whole liberal movement. became liberal because of vietnam -- a lot of things, but the whole 60's movement turned me into a liberal. and my statement is i have to concentrate a little bit on current politics. donald trump, you hear so many versions, but it seems like i don't know how misinformed i am,

but donald trump is always kind of a con man. and when he ran for presidency, he became a quintessential con man. he got a lot of americans to believe a whole lot of things that are just, my god, seeming not possibly true on their face. but yet, 70 million americans believed some part of it. i am in all of that. --awe of that. it just shows what a divide is in the country. that's all i got to say. have a great day. host: we are talking about your life experiences and what shape your politics. having that conversation in a time in which the life story of an incoming number of congress is under a lot of scrutiny for the falsehoods that he his admitted to about the life story. here is the latest on republican

congressman elect your santos. that republican jews coalition says it would not invite him to any future event citing what the influential groups that were misrepresentations about his jewish heritage. a day after mr. santos admitted that a significant part of his biography were not act -- not accurate. he is from new york, embraced a jewish and catholic identity and publish interviews and events. and his campaign website said that his grandparents fled persecution in -- as you up in -- in europe. many have raised questions about his family history. in radio stations on monday, mr. santos said he was catholic and he never said he was jewish because i learned my maternal family had a jewish back bash background. he said i was jew-ish. he

admitted he lied on the campaign trail about his education, and working arians but he says he has not committed any crimes and -- work experience but he says he has not committed any crimes. coming up on 7:30 this morning. we are with you for the next 2.5 hours on the washington journal. news from yesterday, a topic we touched on yesterday we are waiting for a word from mr. ream court about title 42 the pandemic era border policy -- from the supreme court about title 42 the pandemic era border policy. we are waiting for them to weigh in. the wall street journal says justices leave the ball -- policy in place -- the court

acted in the wake of a temporary state that the chief justice imposed on december 19 two days before the title 42 regulations were set to end. border officials had already saw an increase in border crossings ahead of this. and more than 10,000 migrants waiting in mexico inspecting the measure would be lifted. as is typical, this story notes the majority did not lay out reasoning for this. the court ordered expedited hearing said -- setting the arguments for early february or march of 2023. we will learn more about title 42 in the new year. back to your phone calls, the question this morning, how your life experiences shape politics. it is at democrats (202) 748-8000

republicans (202) 748-8001 independents (202) 748-8002 jenison florida good morning. caller: hello good morning i was disconnected but i am glad i'm back. i hope that i will be allowed to say both of what i want to say. because i feel some of the callers i have heard calling -- i have one specific thing you want to talk about but now i do several different issues. host: give me one or two go ahead. caller: ok, what has framed my decision about becoming a republican -- i don't believe i am a republican, i believe i am independent, my parents are both democrats and always have been. in 77, my mother change her mind for donald trump because you realize the democrat -- all they

do is spend a lot of money. at the end of the day, she ended up giving into the pressure and going back to the democrat party. i, on the other hand, never voted. i didn't think i vote counted for many years. until -- i voted for clinton and then i voted for trump. i did not vote for obama because the first time i thought he was too young. same age as me too young. and the second time i did not get politics at all. i thought it was a sellout. and i think he used race to manipulate the black population and black people. i will talk is quick as i possibly can. joe biden is the worst president in america's history. i don't understand how so many people are against trump, but

still so forgiving of joe biden with a climate bill and be segregation he is voting for to keep his kids from going to black schools. but on and on, but they talk about trump. the community needs to turn to the republican party. the only reason i am a republican is because i wanted to vote in the primary. you cannot be independent in california you had to be one or the other. but i truly am an independent. however, one thing about the democratic party, they have not changed at all from the days of old when they wanted to control the people. and run their lives based on tactics of hanging them and so forth. they have changed their words, but they have not changed their tactics. as far as i am concerned, i will

remain an independent republican and till the day i die, but i will never go back to the democratic party. i am an african-american woman, i am 60 years old, i turned on december 2, and i think god for the appearance i had to they always told me you never -- i think god for the appearance i have -- the parents i have because they told me you never -- democrats are the most demonic set of people i have ever witnessed in my life. host: jenison florida this is george in louisville, kentucky. democrat. good morning. caller: good morning. first of all, i grew up in a small town. there was little opportunity, but i grew up in that town.

it was very conscientious town you have your well-off areas, and then a lot of poor areas. we went to school, you learn the term high see it referred to the kids from well-off areas and they were snobbish and looked down their nose at people. they came from a business class in the town. a handful of businessmen ran the town pretty much. they were all ultra-white republicans who looked down there knows in retail outlets and all that. he could see the snobbishness of the gop throughout my whole growing up. and in high school i saw snobbishness against me. but when i got into the workforce, i am college educated now, but i worked in

retail outlet and corporate retail. but i found that there was nothing ethical that the corporate bosses would not do, corporate bosses at all levels were ultra right-wing. they would put notes in employee envelopes and determine whether they would get fired. that breaks federal law. they would put cameras where they consume in on the corporate office down to our nametags and they would have listening devices where they could hear our conversations. i never met a corporate boss who would do unethical to cut worker wages. one right-of-way nash pay -- one rate of pay, they would take a lower pay rate.

host: what do you do now? caller: right now i wait tables and an upscale pizza place. i -- it is really good i have a decent employer right now. but most unethical employer practices i noticed -- all the corporate bosses were hard-core gop-ers. host: you know the politics of your employer now who you seem to like or call pretty good? caller: yeah. i think the entire area of louisville are kind of liberal. they take the corporate side. my boss that i have now he leans more liberal. he is a union guy, so that is a good situation. they look after the workers and they take that as a priority a little bit more. one last thing, i used to do a

lot of new hire paperwork in the corporate chain, and a court ordered me to look at the box on the back of application that said they would educate their right to any civil -- go through company arbitration. there was nothing unethical from corporate bosses and all of them were hard-core -- they felt like the standard of living for their employees is something they should never be concerned about at all. host: we got your point. gail is in new smyrna beach. good morning. caller: good morning. host: go ahead. caller: good morning. host: how have your life experiences shaped your politics? one last try. we will go to ray in lexington,

kentucky. good morning. caller: good morning. i was raised in the haulers -- hallowers. and we were just poor. when the government stuff came up with commodities they would tell us how poor and tell -- terrible we were. we were happy with what we had. we would drop them out of the hallower. we couldn't do anything for ourselves. host: what is an example of a government program they were trying to start? what would a trying to do? caller: they would bring cheese,

powdered milk, eggs, things like that for food stamps. host: just to hand out? caller: yes. handouts like that. mother always told us we went to church every sunday every chance we could, and we had to walk to church or right of course, but we had the church would tell you, at those towns, and it was stolen. if it was in the government, people did not really want to do that. they had to have it forcefully taken from them. we learn these things just like i want to start a charity in your name, and all the money i put in that charity, i want to deal -- steal from your friends. i will go out and do good works with it in your name. see, god does not like that. that is what catholics and most of the religions do.

they are 501(c)(3) organizations and they say look at here lord what i stole for you look at all the good work i did in your name with it. it cannot be like that. god hates that. he likes love. that is what esau did that is why he hated him and why he loved jacob. he said thank you lord, for what you do for me. host: lakewood new mexico democrat good morning. caller: good morning. good morning how are you? host: i am doing well. caller: good. i grew up in a military family and i grew up on air force bases. and my father retired i think it was 1972 he retired from the military, but in the military, it was more -- when i discovered the difference from being in the

military and out of the military was that the families that we knew, there was more equal opportunity within the military family. my parents were republicans and they still are. i am a democrat. and i am a democrat because of the things that i saw. and the differences between the two ways of relating to people. and i think that -- host: what are some examples of that? caller: when we were out of the military, i didn't know what racism was, you know, because i had -- in the military you go to school with everybody. and there is no rich or poor, there is no. things are more equal. so when i got out of the military, and went to high

school, there was serious -- i could see serious racial divisions that i did not see in military high school. and so it was just odd. host: and he saw the breakdown along party lines? how did you distinguish that? caller: yeah i did. i saw that on party lines and religious lines. i saw hard-core -- what i saw was people punching down i guess, that is how you would call it. people who feel like those who are less fortunate than them, or they do not understand their culture or where they come from, or how they talk, those people are not as good as they are. you know, so, i found that really repulsive. and i first voted for jim coder -- jim carter. i have never voted for a republican for anything because of the things that i learned.

i learned that republicans are racist and that they punch down. host: becky and new mexico. washington, max is an independent. good morning. caller: yes. i grew up in government reservation in the 1940's and 50's on that reservation, the federal government had general election build eight or nine plutonium reduction reactors. and everybody that lived -- that was a town richland on that reservation, and you could not live there with the government allowed you to. everybody in the town was

investigated by the fbi. every few years. and my political outlook, it was mostly governed by motion pictures and television. my parents didn't talk about politics at all. ever. and -- host: what movie or tv show do you specifically look to when you think about that being an influence on your politics? is there a specific movie? caller: not a particular movie, but all of them combined over a number of years. a lot of movies the subject was in tolerance -- in tolerance --intolerance and in history. you know, it is the kind of

stuff you watch on who is it, to carters, -- host: classic movies? after that how did you end up as an independent? caller: well, in the state of washington, you do not have to register as republican or democrat. i have never missed not even school votes for local votes that had no candidates on them at all yeah, i voted in every single election. from the time i was eligible to vote until now. my first -- vote was for nixon in 1960. host: sandia mind telling who your 2022 vote was for? caller: by 20 vote?

[laughter] now that -- i will refer the democrats that ran the state things, the part of the state i live in is 100% republican. except for patty murray and the governor at the state level and the federal level. we have democrats. but at the local level, in eastern washington, you get the ballot and there is nothing but republicans on it. host: max, thank you for chatting about it. less than 15 minutes left in this segment. i want to hear about your life

influences and -- experiences and what shape your view of politics. we have numbers where you can call in and discuss. republicans (202) 748-8001 democrats (202) 748-8000 independents (202) 748-8002 this is dave out of the peach state, republican. good morning. caller: hello first of all, you will not believe this, but i grew up about 50 miles down the road from where max was calling from. i am calling from georgia. any how, one thing i would like to ask is the next time you get a communist on the line, that he says he votes democrat, would you ask him why? why he doesn't vote for the communist party. and he votes for the democrat party. host: sure, dave.

what is your life story? caller: basically i was born in mollo all and grew up there and then i went to the navy after high school. and i went back after four years and spent the next 47 years in the tri-cities which is part of -- paschal and richland. then when i retired, and my wife retired, we sold everything and moved to georgia to be with our daughter. host: where your paralytic -- were your parents military? what got you into the military? caller: i was a kid and i wanted to get out of town. it is a little town it is a beautiful community now when i look back. host: do you think your politics are the same as your parents politics even though the specifics of life have changed since then? caller: my politics are

basically the same as my dad. but he was not very educated he was born in 1900. he quit school basically out of the third grade or something like that. but, he was born and raised in missouri. him and his brothers and dad and mom came and -- washington state. host: do you think your kids have the same politics views that you do? caller: i think they are conservative to the point where they do not have the same. i have one son that is very, he does not want -- noncombatant. he doesn't. he is kind of funny. he is achieve in navy reserve. and he is college-educated and all this stuff, but we do not talk because he does not want to talk about it. and i respect that. host: you think your politics

and his politics disagree so much? caller: not really to the point of conservative or liberal. i just think he does not want to go into it. other than that he is a decent nice guy. i like him. but in my daughter she is also college-educated and she met her husband in the air force. so really all of the ones in our family are veterans it set for my wife. host: do you think the grandkids will join the family tradition? caller: i don't know. that is a question we -- my oldest grandson graduated from high school last year. right now, he is thinking about what he wants to do and whether he wants to go to college, go to work, what to do. so we will have to wait until later.

host: ok. thank you for the call. from georgia, back to michigan nancy is in st. charles. good morning about 10 minutes left in the segment. caller: good morning. i am 89 years old. my father invented the process for the gold inlay, he was a dentist. and the word freedom comes into my mind when we talk about donald trump. because of been there. we used to go to lunch at the ymca. and, now, i realized my father was an -- a communist. throughout my lifetime, i decided that the republicans tried to get people there individual minds to work with.

and it, i think, has tried to wake us up in a way of either being a heard thinker or an individual --herd thinker or an individual thinker. and i became a republican. now i see us looking for some freedoms for ourselves and people have been influence one way or the other. people in unions are more of a group thinker and they deal with groups of people and we have lost our freedoms with all of the things and regulations that have come into our -- he never would have been able to invest anything then. with all the regulations we have

now, to prevent people from being able to think. host: thank you for sharing your life story. calling in on the line for democrats if you can stay on the lines you identify with it makes the conversation go easier area we appreciate your call. this is a caller from new york. independent. good morning. caller: thank i'll make it short and sweet. here's the thing, for me, like, i had a lot of different families, but my mom she did everything she could. she still obviously [indiscernible] she try to pack bags and everything. the people that were well-off, and the markets where she was trying to make away, they -- make a way, they were kind of snobbish and they were representing different things but it didn't matter.

the thing about it, what shaped my independent party, i thought you know what? i can do whatever i want to do and get whatever i need to. what may be respect donald trump? first of all, he was trying to make sure everybody was ok. i never saw him as a 2 -- the racism i never saw that. i never got a chance to see that. i knew the men was like me -- man was like me and he built from the ground up businessman. he may not have been anything political, with the things he was trying to do, he knew where he was going. he did a great job if you ask me. but that is my opinion. host: is he a politician now? is he the president -- as a president of running again. caller: yeah i voted for him even independent i voted for him. but i couldn't vote, they would

not let me vote, my vote was for him, but i could not vote because i did not have the code or whatever it was. that was that, but that was my pick. but i will be honest, with everything i see, with my profession, we feel some type of way because we were forced with the vaccine. i have breast cancer and i say where in the hell did i get this from? and i said you know what? i may have gotten it from where i got this shot. and i don't want to think that my politician would do that. they are the rulers of the country. and i think we can do better in this country. period. host: soraya out of new york. this is vickie five minutes left in the segment. st. petersburg, florida. republican. good morning. caller: good morning.

and good morning america. it is so nice to have c-span for all of us that are listening to your program every morning. i'm calling on the republican line because i turned republican this year. i was a democrat all my life, i went to parades, we said the pledge of allegiance, we were so patriotic, it felt like that is what a democrat is supposed to be, but i found that it is not. there are some things that have happened in the past several years that have changed me, my party. one was donald trump. he brought patriotism back to our country. and i am sorry that the other medias are not showing the wonderful boat raid down here in florida thousands of votes. people that came out are loving, kind, considerate people that believe in god.

i know that we did not have much time, but the reason it broke me, i know my parents would be turning in their graves to know i went to republican, the reason i changed was this and this life abortion issue. i do not understand why anyone would want to go ahead and approve that someone carrying a baby for 12 months and been suddenly they say i do not want to baby they kill it on delivery. that is what changed my party. i am not agreeing on all the republicans, but i did not agree with everything with the democrats. but i do know donald trump did wonders for this country about patriotism. if he runs again, i would vote for him. host: that is vicki. this is wayne. a couple minutes left. go ahead. westminster, maryland. democrat. caller: i care about my country.

i am here because of that. i care about the people in my country. i served in the military. i enlisted in the mirror and terry. nash in the military. -- in the military. i love my country and i think it is a great place for people in the world to want to come to. i invite them here. because this is a great place. and personally, i think the border situation, if we just had open border where people could pass back and forth freely, there wouldn't be an immigration issue because people would be able to go back and forth as well. there would be no big pile up at the border and the people would be able to zoom over whenever they would like to. before the border, that is what

people did anyway. thank you for the call this is the last call stephen in palm beach, florida ending on the line for independent. caller: how much time do i have? host: we do not have to do a specific time limit just go ahead. caller: to answer your question, the reason i think call them berlin. that has always influenced my politics. the founders understood this. it does not matter who was doing it too, but anybody who was in power exercised knows that is always a vulnerability of human nature. the modern issues come out the modern events that really affected my thoughts were threefold if i recall. number one, the clinton impeachment. when i saw that happen, i knew

something had changed in this country. that impeachment proceeding, the impeachment process is only designed for someone who is a threat to the nation because they are engaging in treason, they are taking bribes, espionage, something like this. that man should have never been impeached. after he is in office, do whatever you wish. that is the first thing. host: run through the other things quick for me. caller: yes, in 2000 in the summer, when the dust in the spring, sorry. when the government of the united states nearly legalized 17 million illegal is -- illegals in this country. despite the fact that the government had some and against it. for the first time on c-span you changed the number that people called from democrats,

republicans and independents to those who were in favor of the bill and those who were against because it was lopsided. host: we did opt in with legislation if you were for something or get something. caller: but that is not so thing i saw. the bill was going through congress, it was so lopsided you almost had to. i remember they came within a hair's breadth of actually doing that. i remember baby bush coming out and giving a press conference immediately thereafter. i've been watching for more than six years. i had never seen anybody so angry in my life. host: in the last two things come out real quick. caller: number three was when they passed the affordable care act. despite the fact that all these town halls, they are saying they want to be accountable and so on, and everybody was coming out in these town halls and saying

don't pass these things and they did it anyway. host: our last collar in this segment of -- caller in this segment of washington journal. up next, our continuation of our authors week on washington journal where we will be joined by stephen eide, a senior fellow at manhattan institute, author of the book “homelessness in america: the history and tragedy of an intractable social problem.” stick around, we will be right back. ♪ ♪ >> this holiday week, explore the people and events that tell the american story, every day on american history tv on c-span3. and watch our featured program this weekend on c-span two on saturday at 7:00 p.m. eastern. the 1988 new year's messages from ronald reagan and mikael gorbachev. president reagan addressed to

the nation about the holiday season, the treaty between the united states and the soviet union at a possibility of another meeting between the two countries while general secretary mikael gorbachev addresses the relations between the u.s. and the soviet union and offered a bright picture of the future. at 7:15, the author of the book "rosa parks? we on the box -- "rosa parks; beyond the box." watch this this weekend on c-span3, saturday on c-span two, or find a full program guide on c-span.org/history. ♪ >> live sunday on in-depth, author and pulitzer prize-winning list chris hedges will be our guest to talk about potil revolution, war and incarceration in america.

the books include america, the federal tour, "hourglass" and " the greatest people's war." jo u with your comments, tes and tweets. chris hedges live on sunday at noon eastern on book tv on c-span2. >> there are a lot of places to get political information. but only at c-span you get it straight from the source. no matter where you are from or where you stand on the issues, c-span is america's network. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. if it happens here, or here, or here, or anywhere that matters, america is watching on c-span. powered by cable. >> washington journal continues.

host: we continue with our annual authors week program on the washington journal. each day of this week, featuring top authors from across to the political spectrum. today we welcome a stephen eide. he is from manhattan institute, author of the book “homelessness in america: the history and tragedy of an intractable social problem.” there is a quote in your book, people don't become homeless when they run out of money, to become homeless when they run out of relationships. what do you mean? guest: i think that many of us have not personally experience homelessness, but we think about -- we have a lot of economic anxiety, what we can do if things really went south for us economically. and we rely on friends and family, that would be the social safety net, for we had to turn to the government safety net. the people who are on the

streets in san francisco or los angeles who are living on the subway system in new york, in many cases, that was once the situation that they faced, but at a certain point they lost the social safety net, they sometimes as we say burned their bridges with friends and family and had to rely on government programs. and some of them even felt throughout safety net as a result. what i'm trying to do with my book is rethink this concept of homelessness. one concept at one point in time is place looseness. people who are homeless don't have that defined place in any known social order. in some ways it captures a little bit better the problems we are facing then simply we are talking about people who don't have access to permanent housing. host: we are showing our viewers at some numbers on homelessness in america and have you talk us through it.

this fm e department of housing and urban devopnt, december of 2022, approximately this many people experience homelessness in the united states. 60% in a shelter location, 40% unfiltered. 28 percent of people experiencing homelsns have families with chdr. and this many were under 25. black people are 38% of people disgracing homelessness, veterans declined in 2022. what do you see in those numbers? guest: there is a lot there. what i appreciate about what you are doing they are, to illustrate the complexity of the problem, you are talking about this umbrella term homelessness that brings under it a lot of different groups. all of whom are struggling, most

of whom struggling with different problems. but in order to make some progress we need to make more of an effort to break it into its parts and talk about what we can do individually for some of these different groups instead of just trying to talk abstractly about this group as a whole, the homeless. host: can we shelter all of the homeless in this country if we wanted to do that tonight? why is so many of that group unsheltered? guest: when we talk about building housing, providing housing for the homeless programs, we can build them permanent housing given the units they could live in for the rest of their lives, or we can set up some sort of shelter program. temporary housing. you not going to stay in there for the rest of your lives but it is better than the streets.

shelters have a bad reputation. there is survey data in which people on the street explain why they don't like to go to shelters. but you are always going to be better in shelters then you are on the streets. it is impossible to exaggerate how vulnerable you are on the streets, how much more likely you are to be victimized in the streets than in a shelter. but it is difficult to persuade everybody on the street that they are going to be initialed to her. frustratingly, a lot of time what happens when you expand shelter programs, in new york city for example there is a right to shelter. in new york city, there is a hard-core who insist on remaining on the streets and a lot of the problems and public outcry stem from that small but significant, troubled population. host: the book is “homelessness in america: the history and tragedy of an intractable social problem.” that is what we are talking

about with stephen eide, author and senior fellow at the manhattan institute. you can call in at (202) 748-8000 if you live in eastern or central time zones, (202) 748-8001 if you are in the mountain or pacific zones and a special line for those who have experience with homelessness, (202) 748-8003. as folks are calling in, the subheading of your title, the intractable social problem. right in the book, "americans react to homelessness with a mixture of anger, perplexity and little progress is made. it is a top priority of politicians in major cities and despite the billions public resources have devoted to it, ideally come when spending on a social problem goes up public concern goes down. homelessness in america has not followed the trajectory to why

-- trajectory." why? guest: we seem to have a problem of not making better use of the resources we are devoting to a. this can be a story of government because the places that are wealthiest and have the most political commitment to taxing and spending those resources on homelessness, new york and california in particular, have made the least amount of progress. california is the place whose reputation is defined by its homeless crisis. more than any state in america, and the resources devoted toward homelessness in california are simply staggering. in california in particular, you have a problem with lack of enforcement. there has been a drawing back on sort of criminal justice dimension of the response as we are investing more and more in social programs.

those elements need to be moving along separate tracks together. if the idea is that we are going to get everyone off the streets, we are going to provide them with permanent housing, in california you have seen that experiment that in recent years, and the success has been very modest. because they have been unable to stop the flows even as they have been expanding resources and programs. so we really need to do more rethinking of our response to the problem that has been going on in recent years. host: on the response, traditionally, whose job is it to leave that response? the local level, the state level, the federal level? guest: yeah. the modern homelessness crisis

developed in the early 1980's and it was thought as a local problem. the cities were responsible for it. and as our knowledge of the nature of the crisis shifted, we understood that state governments probably bore some response ability. if you talk about the mental health dimension of homelessness, state governments always took the lead on mental health. so there are mental health problems there, you need to talk about the state role. as well as the county. those are big players in some states. the housing role, why are they not more -- why are there not more housing for people, regulations on housing, we lost a lot of cheap housing the homeless used to rely on and that is local policy. so who is responsible? and points directly to the local and state authorities. the federal government does get involved in the 1980's. substantially, an industry that writes checks.

we now have a system where there are a lot of state and local resources devoted to the problem and the spending jurisdictions, particularly new york and california, but the federal government's role has expanded in terms of funding, california and new york to align with the federal government. but you especially see the federal government's influence in places that don't spend a lot of their own resources. places in the south or the midwest where the problem is smaller than on the coasts. because they dilute -- they devote so little resources, they are very affected by the federal government, very dependent on the federal government, very influenced by what the federal government wants to do. so it is actually a little different in different parts of the country, what type of state, local, federal mix you are talking about in steady behind this homeless services system. host: has there ever been a homelessness czar, a cabinet level position? do you think

that would fix this problem? guest: the position sometimes referred to as the homelessness czar is the head of a federal agency called the united states interagency council of homelessness. what that agency does, it is small but it's job is to coordinate the other agencies, health and human services, the veterans administration, who have some sort of responsibility for homelessness. so they are supposed to coordinate that. but it itself does not have a lot of big budget or resources it is exclusively responsible for and in practice it mostly functions as a bully pulpit for what the current administration thinks needs to be done on homelessness. it is a problem and because it is not just about this, it is

about behavioral health and law enforcement, prisoner reentry. we do try to develop these individual programs that are just sort of for the homeless funding, homeless grant programs and homeless services, these agencies at the city level. but that compounds the your credit complications that it was supposed to be a solution to fix things. in response to your question, the case with a lot of these questions, what centralization help? theoretically, it would help at least to provide more accountability. however, are you really talking about taking away authority from these other agencies? and that is probably unlikely to happen. host: what solution on any level do you think would help the most homeless people in this country right now? guest: well, i have been a critic of the current approach. the most influential approach to

the homeless crisis which is housing first. it is certainly the most influential at the federal level, which maximizes the amount of resources that goes toward permanent housing without any expectation of service participation, sobriety, work participation services. that is where the action is these days. we have invested a lot of those types of solutions, sort of low barrier solutions. and not as much work in sobriety oriented programs for the homeless population. i think that was a mistake and i think it would help the homeless themselves on the community's agenus problem if we did a certain rebalancing of programs that were where we devoted more resources than currently toward homeless people are capable of more than just being in a private apartment.

not up to much else. people who are capable of work, sobriety. those people have trouble accessing programs that could support them. and there are efforts right now. so that is the type of flip the switch recommendation i tend to spend most of my time focusing on right now. host: stephen eide is the author of “homelessness in america: the history and tragedy of an intractable social problem.” he will talk about it for our authors week series it is with us for the next 45 minutes. jeff is up on that line from frederick maryland for those experiencing homelessness. caller: good morning. host: good morning, you are on with stephen eide. caller: stephen, the first of your information that resonated was what you are classifying as

a loss of relationships rather than a loss of just the physical place to stay. and that boils down to the root cause. it brought up a few different ways that i see it happening and ways that -- one of which -- more than one of which i experienced. whether that is you are in a relationship as far as innate spousal -- in a spousal function, like a significant other that there is a family and that goes south and all of a sudden, whether it is courts or living arrangements or being in a different city, all of a sudden you are left without a home. there is also what i have begun

to think about recently, a lot of people growing up, you see inherit a parents estate or even just a home. more and more i think i have been seeing the generation that is our parents -- i'm in my 30's. and this is dependent upon income class. a lot of our parents are taking equity out against their homes, whether it is because they don't get enough from retirement or whatever their living situation is, or maybe they are having to support their children that are now having a higher cost of living and it is harder to make it as a single person or a single parent. whatever reason that may be,

once you are a parent, your last living immediate family, that may put you out. and it might come as a surprise to some who don't know, the bank is actually getting the house. and that may be something you don't figure out until you see a will or lack thereof. host: let's pause there and let stephen eide jump in. guest: yeah. we talk about the intersection of the socioeconomic factors that put people into homelessness, with the family, we are talking about how we redistribute or share resources within the family unit. in some cases, dependency can bring family members together. too much independence -- or too much of a false sense of independence separates families and makes it harder to repair

those bonds. but if -- think about how you are going to be sharing resources long-term. and have a very clear eyed approach to that. that can really create a lot of strain and ultimately lead to maybe less resources being available to you then you thought. so these are very -- like, discrete, intimate. these are problems that are hard for government policymakers to get at. how do you keep families together and make families better at sharing resources among themselves? and that is one reason why even though we know there are problems, that are at play in these household crises, what could government do to make those situations better?

i think it is a hard question to answer. host: in spokane, washington, good morning. caller: good morning, i hope you will let me finish, i have watched all three channels of c-span for years. one thing that is a big problem and i would like to see them do a program on it, when everybody had to go online, older people do not know how to do that. the phonebooks don't even list all of the phone numbers in it. you can't hardly use the phone book. if you do get online and you managed to order something from somebody else's smartphone, they will try to call you back and if they don't get you, which you don't have a phone, and don't know how to use it, then you -- they don't even come to your house. host: what about on the issue of homelessness? caller: yes, because i try to

get an insurance policy from my daughter in california. and trying to call and make a phone call, trying to find out something about it, i could not even do that for her because they just referred her to the website. i would like you to do a program on the change -- host: why does that connect to the issue of homelessness? caller: people can't get service. they can't do anything without a credit card in a smart and knowing how to use it. i would love to see you do a program on that. host: guest: -- host: thanks for the call. stephen eide on that issue. guest: yeah. of hiram early on you had some statistics, had one portion of seniors who are homeless. sometimes you see articles about about elderly people, part of the homeless population that is

increasing in some places. when we are trying to divide this into different kinds of problems, there is the problem -- there are problems that are administered of in nature and then there are ones that are political in nature. dealing with in cap meds is heavily political, a very front issue. it is not just a question of how we organize. in the case of seniors it should be more a administrative problem. if you have a problem with seniors who are homeless in your community, you hope -- probably have something organized poorly in terms of services. if they qualify for entire domain -- entitlement, neighborhood problem in providing housing for people, many neighborhoods are not enthusiastic about the idea of boosting a shelter or 75 to 100 mentally ill single men. most neighborhoods are much more comfortable with the idea of boosting senior housing. so that should be less of an issue. so whether you are not

prioritizing appropriately or just oversight in your communities, you are distracted elsewhere, inducing any senior related homelessness, seniors becoming homeless, that should be something governments, even in america when it seems so dysfunctional a lot of times, should be able to wrap his arms around. host: your book is about the history as well of homelessness in this country. you mentioned shelters, there is a shelter just a few blocks from where c-span is in this building on capitol hill. the mitch snyder shelter. who is mitch snyder? guest: he was the most famous and the most influential homelessness advocate in american history. advocates play a outsize role in shaping homelessness policy. if it seems to like we as an asian doing something different from what most people would

support, that is because most people don't support -- don't follow the issue as intensely as certain advocacy organizations for whom it is their job to follow homelessness policy. they are broadly supportive of accommodating encampments, housing first policies. they are critical of any sort of behavioral requirements in exchange for the receipt of housing benefits. mitch snyder -- schneider was an advocate. in the d.c. scene in the 1980's, he states a lot of spectacular protests -- staged a lot of spectacular protests in washington square and elsewhere in d.c.. a major impact he had, although he had a number, was he federalized the issue quickly. it was not obvious it needed to become a response ability of the federal government as soon as it did. there are a lot of reasons as i alluded to early -- earlier for

thinking this was for the states. but because he was so active on the d.c. scene and aggressive i would say on convincing federal lawmakers to pass legislation on funding and as a result, ronald reagan left office with what was in place and remains the most important federal program on homelessness. that is what i would say his name might do. host: in washington, on the line for those with experience with homelessness. good morning. caller: good morning. host: you are on with stephen eide. caller: hi. i want to share my experience with homelessness. my homelessness started from when i was 14, i was removed from my mom's home -- from personal abuse. for my mom's husband.

i had been involved with human trafficking, sexual abuse. i have domestic violence, gun violence. everything. i am 52 now. like i said, i have been homeless pretty much 90% of that time. the resources are out here. there are so many resources. but you have to fit certain criteria. you have to either be actively using, you have to be sleeping in your car out in the rain, inattentive, to get any kind of resources. what i'm finding with our resources into,, washington, we have the housing -- in tacoma, washington, the housing resources, homeless males, you know they are out there. they have all of these funds to house people but we are being

stolen from, we are being lied to. numbers are being lied about. and we have nobody that we can turn to that -- i have been looking for the leaders -- or the leader of the d.c. y s program. the leader of the homelessness, who runs this and that? i have children. i have been homeless with my child. i get no resources because i don't fit their criteria. and because i have done 17 years in prison. what are these programs for? what are they designed for? what i'm finding out is the programs and our government is doing exactly what they are supposed to do. what they're designed to do. that is to keep us homeless. because we are their job security. host: thank you for sharing your story. stephen eide. guest: yes, thank you for

sharing your powerful story. there is a lot in what you just said. i think -- the system is very often people who are homeless currently or have been homeless in the past say that it is the system that is impossibly complicated to navigate. while you are being shuffled around through these different programs, who do i talk to, enjoy hold responsible if something went wrong for me? if someone broke a promise to me. people often feel they have been lied to all the time. in terms of trying to build a better system, we have to think about some of that complicated nests -- complicatedness of the system.

sometimes that fragmentation is there because we are trying to divide. to design programs for people in a specific situation everyone programs, let's say for x offenders, we also want programs for people with substance abuse who have no major prison record in their background. and sometimes people get caught between which one is for me, what if i fit both those criteria? but it makes sense to have different types of programs. what is less legitimate is when government creates more bureaucracy in response to the existing bureaucracy, grading another agency, another program that makes it more bewildering for people to think about what they need to be focusing on. we need to build the systems that are optimally responsible to people who are sincerely motivated to improving their lives and making their way out of homelessness.

whatever happened in the past come out right now they are locked in, they are trying to move up the letter. can we be confident we are meeting those people where they are and doing everything we can to help those people? because of the fragmentation, because sometimes, and this is another thing she alluded to, it seems to be the case that we are overfocus on the people who are worse off and the hardest cases. the people who are trying get taken for granted. similar to a school classroom. kids who are doing ok but could be motivated to do more get overlooked because of the trouble cases. the attention. that is something we are grappling with. what the state of washington and other places like california, the resources are so staggering. how do you bring those resources to bear, set up programs with them to create systems that are

not too complicated for people to navigate and really meet people where they are in a way that does not -- that is not biased against the people who are the most motivated to improve their lives? host: about halfway through our discussion with stephen eide, joining us for this authors week. joining us with discussion of his book “homelessness in america: the history and tragedy of an intractable social problem.” also senior fellow of the manhattan institute. what is that? guest: it is a think tank, a center-right think take and we are focused on dementia problems. host: -- domestic problems. host: new york city focusing on its own problems. new york city mayor eric adams announced a new policy on

homelessness when it comes to those dealing with mental health issues and involuntarily getting them help if needed. this is about one minute from his announcement from earlier this month. >> no more walking by or looking away. no more passing the buck. knowing forward, we are focused on action, care and compassion. if severe mental illness is causing someone to be unsheltered and a danger to themselves, we have a moral obligation to help them get the treatment and care they need. today, we are embarking on a long-term strategy to help more of those suffering from severe and untreated mental illness, find their way to treatment and recovery. it begins with an immediate shift in how we interpret our obligation to those in need. and calls upon outreach workers

to take the per actions for more intensive engagement. we can no longer deny the reality that untreated psychosis can be a cruel and all-consuming condition. it often requires involuntary intervention. supervised medical treatment and long-term care. we would change the culture from the top down and take every action to give care to those who need it. host: that announcement from eric adams office, what was your reaction to that and what has been the policy since that lead to that announcement? guest: it is something i have followed closely. i have written in support of his new initiative. one thing i talked about is the paradox of compassion in modern

american society. think of ourselves often as more compassionate of previous dutch than previous generations. we are more tolerant, we don't use corporal punishment as much as previous generations do. we seem like a gentler society then and this is -- then in the past. but one big exception to that is the indifference with which we passed by and go about our daily lives to people obviously suffering in the street. people with untreated serious mental illness, living on the street or the subway system and obviously deteriorating. obviously not getting better. when mayor -- what mayor adams is saying is that you don't need to wait until that person is actively suicidal, is actively attacking someone, to intervene. to initiate some sort of clinical intervention and start

the process toward involuntary treatment. these people on the streets, in the subways, they are approached by outreach workers. they have certainly been offered services and they have declined those services. they are what you might call service resistant people. in the case of those people who are seriously mentally ill, that is the cause of their service resistance, their inability to pursue the services offered to them, we need to be talking about involuntary treatment. what he is saying is that the law does not -- there is a popular misconception of many front-line workers that they need to wait until this person is really troubled. you don't need to wait. the law allows you to intervene just while someone is deteriorating if the deterioration is severe enough, to bring that person infer clinical intervention.

it is time to move away from an emotionally passive and neglectful approach to people with untreated mental illness living on the streets, one that is more proactive. host: to the state of washington, this is bob into coma. you are on with stephen eide's. caller: how are you doing today? host: we are well. go ahead with your question. caller: thank you. i was looking at the numbers and it was close to 13% of minorities in america and only 39 or 40% minorities that are homeless. this is not really seem -- this seems like a minorities homeless problem. i am wondering how does redlining plan to this, how does systemic racism play into this? how does the criminal justice system play into this? a lot of people when they are left from the criminal justice system, certain things they don't have access to because they are denied those things.

i am wondering, are we looking at this as an overall thing, or this is basically minorities not being housed because of the history of america? even the hispanic community, i think there are 18% and they are like 25% of the homeless. it seems like it is mostly the minorities. host: let's take up that issue. stephen eide's. -- stephen eide. guest: good question. there is no question that the homeless are disproportionately minority. this proportionately black especially. what is made about the history of the phenomenon and i have spent a lot of time researching is that homelessness used to be disproportionately white. do not use the term homeless in the 50's or the 1890's. but the population who was very poor, not attached to families or communities, the place list

population, we used to call them hobos, bones, they were the white people in the skidrow neighborhoods. white guys. the black population of america was extremely poor at that time and they also experienced an enormous amount of social discrimination. but for whatever reason, that did not lead them into the homeless population, essentially. that starts picking up and completely flipping actually in the letter decades of the 20th century. when you start seeing more black people comprising the population living out of subways and in the streets. so forth. there is no question as he alludes to in his call that this intersects with the high rate of involvement in criminal justice system, and other social problems.

that we see with the black population. i guess, what type of problem are we talking about? where talking about somebody with long involvement in the criminal justice system and is now homeless, which is the underlying problem? that is difficult to disentangle. certainly we had less crime in america and we have most middle justice involvement, we would have less homelessness almost certainly. but is that an easier problem to get at and to -- then to take homelessness on or crime question mark -- crime? i don't know. but it is the same question in all of these different policy areas and it is very difficult to disentangle. but i want to emphasize that racial dimension of it because i think it is lost sometimes in

the debate in terms of the history. host: new york city come out west harrison, new york. good morning. caller: hi. you seem very well-informed and i have a question about the relative cost of housing which is the ability of the population to pay. how it has changed over the years is the first question. in the second, you think the federal government pouring money into housing, it actually increases the cost of housing, causing an inflationary spiral, making housing less affordable. you're very honest about the right-center of the manhattan institute. but usually i would think their support helping people come out when the government helps you you want out, that is what reagan said. i wonder if homeless people are targeted because of their high anxiety and severe mental owners. it is because they are living in an insecure united states where

it is for everyone, disease and everything. most homeless people are white, most of the homeless people i have met are white. so those questions, the cost of housing and whether the federal government increases the cost of housing. guest: yeah. to take your first question, in my book i focus on four main causes of the homelessness crisis. unstable families, untreated serious note -- untreated serious mental illness, lack of law enforcement and all four of those, we're talking about big changes over the last decades of the 20th century. i think those do explain the problems that we face right now. housing, if you look at the places with the highest homelessness rates, it is not a coincidence that it is difficult

in new york to find low-rent apartments. that housing dynamics make it difficult -- different and drive homelessness, there is a scarcity of very low rent apartments that somebody with very little income can pay for on their own. this did not used to be the case in america. we used to have a lot more bad quality housing, but that was also very cheap and as a consequence, commit 50's, -- and as a consequence, back in the 50's, it was not unheard of for someone in new york to pay for their own housing. nowadays they can pay for other consumer goods but not so much housing. something really went wrong with housing, particularly over the later decades of the 20th century. we don't have very good solutions because the standard

solutions, have governments replace the role of the small-scale landlords. it is expensive to build, they can't bring them online fast enough and they can't give up. people keep falling into homelessness and it is a trickle in terms of a number being brought online to solve homelessness year-in and year-out. in terms of the second question of dependency, i do believe that in terms of thinking of the larger question, what kind of society do we want to build, how do we want to see families and communities, we do need to be talking about the risk of dependency and overreliance on government benefit programs. i think that within family units, those units are most likely to stay together and stay cohesive in such a way that they will be able to help each other respond to purchases and help

one another. if everyone is contributing, that creates strength. it does help the family aspect of the problem when we try to design these programs to promote things like work and sobriety. but that is what we are talking about. there is no serious question of dismantling the welfare state, cutting back on these programs, getting government out of the business of providing subsidies and income support. it is just not realistic. you are talking about a situation with the welfare state that has not existed within anyone's lifetime. in my mind it is not do we have government benefit programs, but how big do we want them to be, what the eligibility should be and what kind of expectations do we want to come along with the receipt of government benefits.

host: you mentioned your book is a lot about the history of homelessness in this country. you mentioned terms, that we did not use the term homelessness, we used vagrant, tramp, drifter. did those terms mean different things over the years or do they all just mean homeless? guest: good question. they had specific meanings. focusing on hobo, from and tramp, those were common in the late 19th and early 20th century when we had people writing freight trains, traveling in these huge masses of migratory workers, native migratory workers who went around working the barns. the hobo was someone who was a

worker who moved around. the tramp was someone who moved around but did not work so much. who sort of scrounged up and existence based upon his wits. it was particular to the jack london culture. and the tramps -- there were former tramps and hobos who did not work. and did not move. so they had specific meanings and these were terms that these guys used amongst themselves. they were not -- sometimes people use them with a sense of pride. hobo was used as a sense of pride. now we don't use them anymore. but it was very interesting

about the phenomenon as it was back then. and maybe the most interesting about them is the most obvious fact that these had nothing to do with someone's housing status. people were not defined by their house was status -- housing status as now with the term homelessness. host: this is kathy in michigan. caller: thank you and good morning, stephen. my first experience with homelessness -- homeless people was after a concert in flint in the early 1970's and a gentleman who was an alcoholic i believe, he sang to us for some money. within the next year, my sister and i and a friend, he found him lying on a bridge that crossed the flint river. we took him to the hospital. currently i am working with eight young man who has some severe childhood trauma.

there was enough money in the family, that was never an issue. but he is in the jail again and i support him. he has tried living out of a storage unit, but of course there is no running water. he keeps working so hard to try to make it. but his criminal record, which is nothing really serious, is stopping him from being able to rent. because he would be diligent in making those payments. but it is the saddest things and i'm quite worn out. it has been going on for years but there is no help out there. the government does not help abuse victims and overall, the government does not help the homeless people. and there should be housing provided. and we can do it. we know how to do that. it is a matter of getting rid of the discrimination against people and really wanting to help people. and i see it here. i see it at a certain place, i

will look over the water there and in the summertime they sleep there. i see it many times riding my bike in the morning and it is never addressed. and i have spoken to the authorities and the city council about it. but whether anything will ever happen, i don't know. host: thanks for the call. stephen eide. guest: thank you for that account and for your work and helping individual homeless people. i don't know if you're doing it on a professional basis or a purely volunteer basis, but it is easy to forget that when we are talking about system failure and how much the governments let people down, we have already touched on that, government agencies are made up of individual people who often are doing the best they can in troubled circumstances. that is common and they don't get as much credit as they deserve. in places like flint where

housing is, i suspect, much cheaper than in california and new york, in the midwest, in old rust belt cities, you find places that are very poor but housing is more affordable because the copulation -- population declined. more people have left and there is more housing that people can access versus san francisco where there is nothing. so you can make more progress, but often times have this mismatch where the resources are being devoted to extremely expensive crisis jurisdictions where it seems like it would be a drop in the bucket. and some of these poor places, the smaller problems such as in the midwest amount like flint, the tragic irony, this could probably go a lot farther.

but we are unable to do much about this mismatch problem it seems at the moment. host: to paris, tennessee, jeff on the line for those who have experience with homelessness. good morning. caller: yes, my name is jeff and i was homeless from about 1988 till about 2003. between those years i was married to a beautiful lady, to get off the streets she had a green card. i fell into drug addiction really bad, methamphetamines and i did unspeakable acts to get my drugs. most of the people i knew on the streets were basically severely drug addicted. i knew a few mentally ill homeless people who could not manage their money and would actually get robbed by drug seekers. what happened to me was the cartel started taking over san

diego and they were making homeless people you'll drugs for them and i was scared to get caught. they cut one guys hand off for stealing a spoonful. but anyway, i want to talk about the solution, for me it was basically i started going to aa. everybody that let me stay in their house, i stole from so i could get high the next day. that was another good reason i was homeless. i stole for my life. that is why we are not together -- from my wife. that is why we are not together no more. she was a beautiful lady from italy. i was mad at god. somebody who introduced good, orderly direction. what that meant to me is not spending your money on methamphetamines and stupid stuff like that. well i had to leave san diego because of a gang problem.

then i went back home. i was kind of welcome there but i wasn't because i was so screwed up. then, in a lockout, i am still a junkie but i'm sober now. but i was in a blackout at a loss every thing i had again because of my drug and alcohol problem. but my family, they are very religious and i love them. now they love me. they helped me get my disability and they helped me basically get a piece of property with my backpack and a place to live and it is paid for. host: thanks for sharing your story. stephen eide. guest: thank you for that powerful account. i think that the more we learn about the success story, the particular success stories with recovery, the more those details of family, aa, state and social

support come out. disability benefits, housing, anybody who is trying to work in recovery come out we want those to be in the picture. but to make sure that the process takes, that it holds, it seems so essential that people have something to recover for. to the point we are there with the decision of making a contribution so they can show support to their family and social network. so that the family does not have to just take their word for it that they can change. that comes up a lot in these stories of recovery and i think what we do with that from a policy perspective may be complicated, but it really grounds us in terms of making sure that we understand clearly how this is going to look if it is going to be successful. host: just one or two of those stories. this is rj with the line for

those who have experience with homelessness out of oklahoma. good morning. caller: yeah, good morning. there are so many factors to this. i was abused as a child so i started using ivy drugs at 13. you are not going to have many relationships like that. then you go up and keep doing bad things, you are an athlete, you are a good athlete and you go to college and play sports, ok. but you shoot dope for 20 years. i understand the relationship part, there are 70 factors to that. if you had never done drugs and you -- so many factors to that. if you are never done drugs and had good role models as a child. but there are so many people who get abused as children who people don't know about. and when they grow up it intensifies. anyway, my story real quick. i played college football and got a bachelors degree.

got married come still was doing drugs. she kicked me out for doing drugs over and over again. i went to prison, got out. i went to prison in 95 for eight months, something happened to me in their. then i went to treatment after that. then i started believing in something besides myself, i started looking at something else. a higher power. then i want to treatment. when i got out of treatment, i went back to college and got my masters degree. now i am a therapist for 14 years and just retired. there is hope. there are some new factors to it.

it is really tough. guest: it seems in other recovery stories that we talked about today, it has a lot to do with the individuals that he let along the way. recovery happens to -- poem own individual. for a lot of people it is when they start to change. host: a couple of callers bringing up the idea of faith. one thing we have not talked about, as much as the role of faith-based organizations in this effort to fight homelessness in this country and how the intersex with some of the -- intersects with some of

the local. guest: these places that do not have a big government, on the rural areas, there is a limit on how much you can expect them to do. you cannot realistically ask that they take that on, it really needs to be a government responsibility. someone needs to take that on. they need to work with the people they are capable of working with. one thing that they really understand it well better than the government organization, people need something to recover for. when there is not something like faith or moral in the picture, often times it is sometimes people to go up that ladder. they relapse.

that structure, that trajectory. guest: a couple of callers who have been waiting to chat with you. host: angelo in florida. go ahead. caller: i live in south florida where some people are homeless. i seem to encounter them when i go in a fast food place sometimes or outside a grocery store. not in enormous numbers like san diego. usually i will get food for the person or i would chat briefly. sometimes they do not want anything. sometimes i had a woman who did not want a blanket or hot food. i would appreciate your thoughts on this. would it make a difference if more of us who are not in that situation would interact and in

safe ways, whatever ways make since. does that connection -- would that connection on a large-scale change anything for these people? it makes me feel better, whatever little thing i do, hopefully it is helpful to that person. what if more of us were doing this? i would appreciate your thoughts. guest: that is a really good question. should more people have that sort of personal relationship? some people paid money to support homeless programs to their taxes. that is not compassionate. it is not the developed connection. some people can be so instructive to teach someone about the nature of human society that they are more likely to ignore or not be aware of.

i think it is important and probably more people do that type of stuff. when people are providing charity organs to homeless people in a way -- charity or providing grants to homeless people in and enable them to stay on the streets. it is very easy to feed yourself on the streets of san francisco. so many charitable groups are coming through. some young person who is living on the street in san francisco, his family out in the midwest preferred he would be doing more to get out of that situation. sometimes the charitable groups are being counterproductive. i think it is important to keep that in mind, even while you

stress the idea that the individual act of charity. there is something very powerful, instructive about that. host: one last call from bolingbrook, illinois. thank you for waiting. caller: thank you for taking my call. i have a quick comment and a question. the comment is about the data. one thing that you mentioned, the timeframe is mostly in the 20th century. i am also interested in the mid 20th century all the way up to the present. you also mentioned that there has been a change. i think to some extent, a lot of the people who are homeless today are in the range of working people who cannot afford to get housing.

one of the caller's earlier asked about whether or not the government is helping or hurting. my question to you, the sense that the government does help the people who are building the houses and trying to gentrified, what about the government policy that helps the investors to create housing that is so expensive and gentrified areas and push people out. where do we find data also, the other part of the policy that helps investors. host: got your point. guest: there's a lot of discussion about the housing shortage broadly in america. the easiest way to address

is allow developers to build what they want to build. that would be easiest. the government does not have to be involved. there are a number of reasons. the middle class has not kept pace. whether that will do enough to keep up within reach in a satisfactory way of the middle class, i think it is a important question. whether or not it will be enough to produce homelessness in a community where it is so bad. we do not have to say all of the solutions are they going to fix homelessness.

particularly examples for the health of the middle-class and working-class. host: we will have to end if they are. the author of the book, homeless in america. you can see his work at manhattan. institute.org. i appreciate all of the time this morning. up next, we will return to t question that we began our program with we're focusing on you, our viewers. you have a chance to let us know how our life experiences and influence influences ou politics. you can do that by calling in on phone lines for republicans, democrats, indepennts.

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host: over the course of 2022, we ask you about foreign policy issues, legislative policy, election year at decisions. in this last 45 minutes, we will focus on you. we are asking how your life experiences shaped your politics. you can call republicans, (202) 748-8001. democrats, (202) 748-8000. independents, (202) 748-8002. jonathan in grand rapids is next. jonathan, how did you become a independent? caller: i am a libertarian. if you want to split it democrats and republicans, that is up to you. i have been in three near-death

experiences related to car accidents. i cracked my head open on my 21st birthday. i have been transient since the age of nine and 10. i have seen the inside of adult foster care homes, where individuals were dealing with schizophrenia, bipolar, all different kinds of mental illnesses. i have been in nursing homes. i see in america a grand amount of resources in very poor use of those resources. i believe we have everything we need to make america, not great again, america has always been great. to make america the place where people do not have to worry about having food insecurity or a place to stay, people do not have to worry about effectively voicing their opinions. we do not have to worry about radicals because we have everything we need. we just need to ban together as

a community and use this to give back to the foundation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. host: thanks for sharing your story. donald is next. caller: --. host: we are talking about how your life experiences shaped your politics, political views. you are calling on the line of democrats. what made you a democrat? caller: i ran for president for the united states of the united states in florida. i could not get any support. host: what was your platform? guest: i contacted a news leader

. host: what was your top issue when you were running for president? caller: i can't remember all but 206. that is it. host: all right. donald in virginia. to michigan, this is denise. independent. what made you an independent? we do not have to declare republican democrat in michigan. caller: i am the quick essentially baby boomer. i was born exactly in the middle of the 20th century. it was after the second world war. i was 10 years old in 1960, 20

years old in 70's. i got a bachelor's from wayne state university in sociology and anthropology in 1972. i was opposed to the war. when i went to michigan state on a government-sponsored scholarship and loan, i got involved with spf. there was a policy for women, but not from men. i opposed that organized demonstration, met some people. i got involved with the weatherman for a a while. then i was in a fatal car accident. anyway, it inspired life experiences. i also backpacked across europe.

anyway, one of the most significant things i think in my lifetime was the fact of becoming sexually active at 18 years old, in 1968 because the women's role was so different in the first half of the 20th century. like my mother. what i think most is physiologists, what most affected the times was the birth control pill. it freed woman from being pregnant most of their life. prior to reliable contraceptives, which the churches opposed because they get their membership from reproduction. anyway, i will try to type this up. i think the first controlled killed freed women from their

role in having to get married -- he birth control pill freed women from the row in having to get married. i think that changed everything. host: this is michael in oklahoma city. michael, what life experience has shaped your politics? caller: a vertical question. my life experience, i thought about it. i hope i can relate this. it is a very emotional. segregated of the homeless city, mid 50's i was maybe four or five -- oklahoma city, mid 50's, i was maybe four or five. i have a feeling she warned us to stay away from the drugstore counters. we were sitting and waiting to

get on the bus to go back home. there was a little black girl there about my age. we made eye contact. i did not experience black people before. i was four or five. i wanted to play. i do not know what happened then. to me, that is where the adult world just disconnected from where i was. throughout my political life, it is race. i have grown up around racist people all my life. i tolerated it. i quit tolerating it. it is the southern strategy of the republicans. they cannot leave the 20th century. we are a good country, we accept

everybody, we love diverse. thanks for your time. [indiscernible speaking] host: you might be interested from the story from the washington post. it is about the building over my shoulder. 118 congress is sworn in on tuesday, members will walk the building with paintings and statues they homage to 140 enslavers. the washington post in the last more than 400 artwork in the u.s. capitol building and the ceiling of the capital, they found one third honoring enslavers or confederates. congress has made some efforts to address the legacy of slavery in the 2020 protest following george floyd's death. house speaker nancy pelosi had

porches of the speakers who participated in the confederacy removed -- portraits of speakers who participated of the confederacy removed. on tuesday, president biden signed a bill to remove and replace the supreme court justice roger -- with the decision denying black people citizenship. the washington post story goes through the capital with maps of or the various pieces of artwork can be found, pictures as well of some of their artwork including this one that goes with the story. the president of the confederacy is honored in a capital with a statue since in mississippi.

it is a part of that collection. beyond the statuary collection, the senate weighing in the capitol features nine depicted enslavers, jefferson, richard johnson, john tyler william king, john breckenridge and andrew johnson. tyler breckenridge also joins confederacy. on the house side there is portraits of every house speaker. this is that washington post story. if you want to read more on it, it is in today's paper. back to your phone calls. this is jerry out of long beach, washington. republican. what made you republican? caller: to start it when i was very young. we lived in government housing. there was a little kid in my

neighborhood. i played with a little kid who was black. one day i went over across the way to ask his mom if he can play. there was this gigantic black woman who told me never to come to the house ever again and he was not allowed to play with me. that was the beginning of it. i went back and crying to my mom. as i grew up during high school, my family never spoke too much about politics. i knew on my mother side they were democrats. my first experience with politics had to deal with john f. kennedy. when i was in high school he was killed. i consider myself a democrat at that time. i went to vietnam a couple of

times. i want to college. during my college years i began to look at both sides. i find -- found i really cannot go with democrats. i became a independent. it seems to me that most of the values that i had and the senses that i thought most about were republicans. host: jerry in washington. mike. what is your story? caller: i love your show. my brothers and i started a construction business in 1974. i was 17 years old. my best piece of advice my father ever gave his three sons, do not ever talk religion or politics with your customers.

you will cause problems for your business. our business did very well under republican leadership. it seems like our company would be doing gangbusters in all of a sudden a democrat would come along. we would have to shut our business down because of how the economy went. in those days, we used to be able to hire people that could read and write. read a 12 inch ruler. in a construction business it is very important to know math and to be able to read. the more years, our business lasted 40 years. in the later part of our business, guys would, for work. you have to basically attractive for them to figure out if they can -- basically try to fall them to figure it can read and write.

the problem with the country today, with the homelessness and all of the crime, i related to the democrats and the union gives all of the money to the democrats. a lot of them goes to the teachers unions. the crime is because these young men who are shooting up the cities are uneducated and are desperate because they cannot get a job because they cannot read and write. you take that right there. there are so many problems in this country just because of our education system. i am telling you, if we do not get these kids educated, we are in a lot of serious trouble. there are so many young people in this country that are desperate. you look back at their families. a lot of their families cannot even read or write and it is carrying on to their children. host: claudia is in tallahassee,

florida. a democrat. it would make a democrat? caller: at 78 years old, i grew up mainly being cognizant of anything. g of anything in the 50's. i lived in the black community and the world was fine. i did not know that segregation was a bad thing. it was just what it was. when we got to school, we were educated very well i believe. mainly, we were told you can do anything you want to do. you are no less than anybody else. we believed it. then martin luther king came along.

it made me realize, segregation is not the best thing for me or for the country. i began to think politically. here comes john f. kennedy, who made it clear, more clear to me, that america -- i belong to america to,o. i'd love to hate america who everyone knows who is not likely experienced. -- i belong to a america who everyone knows is not likely experienced. the democrats to me seems to be more favorable and sensitive to my concerns than the republicans. the republicans tended to me to

favor money. people who did not look like me and as opposed to the democrats, who appeared to be, still today, to care more about my issues, my concerns. i will say that the last caller had a really good point about education. i thought i was -- i talked as a educator for four years. i talked --taught as a educator for four years. if a child is unable to communicate, express their thoughts in writing and speaking, that is a huge problem . people will think that you are

ignorant if you are unable to do that. your skill may very well be hidden because of your lack of education. host: thank you for sharing your story. that is what we are doing here in our final segment of "washington journal". we are asking you how your life experiences has influenced your politics. (202) 748-8001, republicans. democrats, (202) 748-8000. others, (202) 748-8002. republican. how are you? caller: my life experiences, i lived all in the midwest and southeast and east coast. -- was the president of the historically black president in maryland.

seeing how moneys would be allocated to historically black universities versus the predominantly white university, having grown up in a primarily christian home. seeing how in the name of goodness and god, there was still segregation's and inequities rampant in church. i am a formal police officer. i am a tenured professor at a university in orlando. of those things have shaped my politics. there is an abundance of

government moneys that are given to reinforce nothingness. what do i mean? you could go view the launch that launched this morning. it is nothing but homeless people out there. i was out there a couple of weeks walking around and i saw them on a cell phone. i saw, i noticed you are homeless. where do you get the cell phone? government issued. i said government issued? yes. i spent some time out there observing them. these were young people. young black men i am a black man. i said, i said, have to pay for my cell phone. my taxes are going towards you and nothingness. i think we have a overabundance

of that. i think that the democrats promote this idea of equity. really, it is a underhanded backdoor manner. host: what did you teach? caller: i am in the school of communication. conflict management. my area has helped research medication. host: what do you think about the kids these days and what has searched their life experiences? caller: an abundance of things, such as a, when you have issues such as transgender and gender affirmations. you are bombarding kids, i say

kids, as young as the first grade, six-year-olds. talking to them about being transgender. i have a oldest son. when he was in first grade, the teacher said he wants to be a girl. the teacher said, do not worry about that mom and dad. today he might want to be a girl, tomorrow he might want to be a dog. their brains are undeveloped. expecting them to make adult decisions. host: california. caller: i am also a educator. i teach computer science. i am a videogame developer.

host: how long have you been doing that? caller: for 30 years. i am still doing it there is a special place, it is the birthplace for silicon valley. of silicon valley. i would say shaping the students experiences, i encountered would be mostly music and cultural values. the family experiences are lack thereof, including the impoverishment and financial. one thing i think politically could help us all because we have such a diverse span across

the nation. we have a urgent call to do something about this. start focusing more on the specifics on where we are failing. it becomes a cultural thing, it becomes something we can integrate around. or something we can integrate into. i am not speaking about education. more in terms of the patients and their students. i think the kids themselves are already doing it. they are exposed to things that may turn our nation around. host: thanks for the call. paul is next.

an independent. how did you decide independent? caller: i was a democrat. then i changed to a regular republican. the reason why i call it congress in the senate, they just keep enriching themselves. the proof is in the pudding. look at our southern borders. host: did you ever feel like congress did something for you growing up? was there a time you felt like the house senate did something for you? caller: not really. while they do, they are in there

for 30 years and they enrich themselves. look at the southern border. what are they doing? nothing. they only use those people over here for slaves. host: leaving that pandemic era border policy in place while it considers the weather. nearly two dozen republican led states can intervene. the court acted in a wake of a temporary stay. officials have already started observing and expecting to see even more. yesterday, the court set an expedited hearing on title 42.

those arguments will take place in february or early march. we will be hearing a lot more about title 42 in the new year. 20 minutes left of the washington journal. what political events in your life has shaped politics. (202) 748-8001, republicans. (202) 748-8002, democrats. others. (202) 748-8000, democrats. caller: good morning. i appreciate c-span and having this opportunity to discuss how things have shaped my political leanings. i am an independent. i see different things that are going on with republicans and

democrats. i came to the pro-usa for military, pro anything that is going to be positive for usa. i am educated through our great university of toledo. i make it my business to be employed in the manufacturing filled. i also have experience in the health care field. i think we as americans really need to give each other a break and try to live from a grace standpoint. i have christian values into christian heritage. i the all need to be more solution based going forward for 2023. host: how would you define christian values?

caller: we did not celebrate christmas. christmas is about three people, mary, joseph, jesus. just looking at the core family, how that impacted the world is a great place to start. it was about mary and joseph being in a political atmosphere back in those times. being pregnant. we look at how joseph was a protective type of father. he did everything he could. you can read in the scriptures of luke. i can to not be so specific in some areas that are defensive. i look at the hold terms in terms of what christmas is all about. it is about being kind to

pregnant individuals, kind and caring to young individuals. in some respect, men being responsible for their families. in this aspect, i could go deeper into it. if you are a dad, i don't care if you are a republican or democrat, try to be educated as much as you can, try to get a variety of educational skills. be educated. take advantage of educational opportunities, whether through loans, grants, whatever. host: cornelia is in alexandria, louisiana. good morning. caller: good morning c-span. happy kwanzaa to everybody. i happen to be a african-american in louisiana.

the question of the day, how has your life experiences changed your politics. i started off as a democrat as a african-american because of what president kennedy did for african-americans. over time i became an independent. now i am a republican because of president trump. president trump did a lot of good things for black folks. he was the first president of the first historic black colleges who fully funded those colleges for four years. the others would wait and would have to beg for money from washington, d.c. my dad was a korean war vet. covid-19 took him. he died during president trump's administration. president much before my dad died wrote him a letter and

everything. that proved he was not racist or nothing because he wrote my dad a letter. host: what did he say in the letter? caller: he thanked my dad. we both prayed for president trump. if they not have done all of the stuff, the hospital and staff, he would not have survived covid-19. the reason why i think that lady in ohio is right, we need to turn back to our values. when i went to school, we had a prayer, a pledge, national anthem. i was in segregation and went into integration. as a white school, they did the prayer, pledge, national anthem. it just became one thing, the prayer, the pledge, national anthem. black schools still did

national anthem's. they believed that the 10 commandments, once they took all of the stuff out of school the devil stepped right in. host: this is mark in evans, georgia. independent. good morning. caller: thank you for taking my call. i am a long c-span follower. i am a first time caller. when i was young, i was watching a protest of the vietnam war. my father was in washington. seeing the protest from the students. there were reports of them tearing up the campus and destroying property. people began to get shocked.

t. i looked at my father, he said they deserved it. they should not have been there. i remember all of the protests that were coming out with that. that was one major event that shaped me. host: what did you think of that? why did you take away from that? caller: the take away was, it seems -- it was more shocked than anything that people protesting would be shot. they were not that much older than me in college. that really disturbed me. i grew up in ohio, very industrial area. i seen it in my area. ohio really supported skilled

labor. the pollution and the water later on in life. i saw it because i was a big fisherman outdoors. they gave the warning signs, do not play in this area. that was another thing that shaped my politics. the major event that shook my soul was when people try to disenfranchise. over half of the population united states. this has got to stop. we believe in democracy and are americans. emily moore democrat. i think the republicans did a

disservice to this country. host: he watched this program at c-span for a long time. this is your first time coming in. why is that? caller: why today? when i started listening to people talking about their experiences, i thought i should share mine. host: thank you, mark. jack. palm beach, florida. republican. good morning. caller: i have a couple of experiences. i was a young adult living outside of boston. i went to the polls to vote on a issue. the issue was rent control. i owned my own house. i voted on the issue. the majority of the people -- majority of the people voted

rent control. a month later, the city council voted out rent control. i was so upset. i filed in -- found an attorney and we filed a lawsuit against the city council and the mayor. i will never forget the day i went to court. the judge ruled the vote of the city council. that really changed my whole philosophy. the second thing was, i worked for a major company. in my office, 15 guys -- people

went to jail protecting money from lobbyist. i was absolutely shocked. after that, i traveled and i seen how fast we were ahead on every single country in the world. i was in china. i was treated like a king because i was a american. the next year i go to russia, the russians could only buy this are that on tuesday and wednesday and they were treated like that. because the politicians have lowered the standards in this country that really changed my philosophy. host: do not have a higher opinion of politicians. going back to the story of the city council, you have a lot of

trust in the court system and the judicial country in this country? does it work? caller: in that case it did. i was really thrilled and could not believe it. what i was trying to say is, which is why i am an independent. i changed because i do not want to get stuck or have a d or a i met to my name. host: joe. caller: host: give collin in every 30 days. -- you have a called in every 30 days. caller: in the late 50's when i

was going to school, there was a powdered milk. it was for children in school, so their parents can put milk in your tea to give you strength to go to school. in the late 1959 to early 60's, there was a program. it was called the program for the islands to go back to the agriculture. they said the program -- what it

was, the government that received the money from the kennedy administration or the kennedy program, they would give you the plan. most people who have to learn have become very wealthy. all of this was said to me like the kennedys. when i came in this country, i went to college here. i went to college in 1971. i was already in my 20's.

they gave me two years in high school. i had to go another two years so i can deal with college. i remember all of these things from the kennedys. when i was ready to register to vote, i reached out to the kennedys. he told me he was democrat. host: it is good to learn a lot more about your background after talking to you every 30 days or so. i have a few more calls to get to and not a whole lot of time. joe in new york. jay in fredericksburg, virginia. good morning. caller: thanks for having me on.

i am a longtime listener, first time caller. as far as lead has shaped my politics, i grew up in ac. this message was -- the unspoken message was, you do not talk about religion and you do not talk about politics. as a result of that, i began to question everything. i was like and why. then i learned that those are the two subjects that affect us more in this country than anything else. politics, when i went to register at 18 and they asked if i was republican or democrat, i am going like, what am i doing signing up for some sort of team sport. i chose to be independent from the beginning.

it has been quite a ride. i was walking around the sea, i would be like, why is it -- around d.c., i was like, why is it so many that have so little and a few that has so much. i studied finance and economics. i have been a community activist . now, i considered myself a online activist. i actually enjoy talking about religion and politics. i used -- usually comment on twitter, both c-span -- or c-span. that is what really shapes my politics. host: why calledhost: in for the first time today? caller: it is a topic i actually write about.

politics and religion. i know my experience well. i am not into debating and all of that. i share what i know. it has been good. host: caller: good morning. host: go ahead. caller: thank you for taking my call this morning. i happen to hear your subject and i think it's an interesting subject and i think a lot of people's lives to been shaped differently. mine was in a small town in indiana where i learned -- basically, it was white, white town. it did not have many black folks in it. i never considered myself racist. i don't think my parents were. i went to purdue university and

i thought i got an excellent education there. what got me interested in politics was the vietnam war. we had protest and i had two brothers in the service and one was serving over in vietnam. i heard some of his experiences and it definitely affected me greatly. i am a big supporter of the military. also, my work career and how i was brought up. my father was very conservative. i don't even know if he was a democrat or republican, to be honest. i don't really care. he raised me and taught me of sound financial background and i

learned an awful lot as far as how you had to run your life. you are responsible for your own life. since i called in on the republican line, that is why i have leaned further republican. host: did you talk about politics with your brothers? are they in line with where you are? caller: absolutely i do. like i said, i talked to my older brother who was in vietnam and i am sure he is a very conservative fellow and also republican. host: did either of them have a guess on what your father's politics were? caller: i never asked them that. i can answer that one. maybe that was a good thing, maybe it was not. i don't know. my father was a very good man. he taught us some very good principles and we were religious.

i believe in the 10 commandments. host: what was your dad's name? caller: jerry. host: thank you for telling us about jerry today. thank you for the call from south carolina. have a good one. that was our last collars in today's washington journal. we will be back tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. eastern/4:00 a.m. pacific. in the >> gordon guthrie chang is a

well-known opinion writer, book author and graduate of cornell law born in long branch new jersey and grew up 25 miles outside of new york city. at columbia heights go in maplewood, new jersey he was president of his class. mr. chang spent almost two decades in china practicing international law. in the past 20 years he appeared regularly in the american media. he was the author of the coming collapse of china in 2001. we discuss with him if he is still sticking by that production.

>> author of gordon chang on this addition of book notes plus on the c-span now out or wherever you get your podcasts. the opening of the 118th congress is january 3, with many new member swearing in. get to know your representative or senator by pre-ordering your copy of the federal directory with bio and contact information for every house and senate member, important information on congressional committees, the president's cabinet, federal agencies, and state governors. scanned the code to the right to order your copy today for early spring delivery. every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations at c-span shop.org. >> c-span is your unfiltered view of government funded by these television companies and more including cox. >> homework can be hard. squatting in a diner for internet is harder. that is why we are providing lower income students access to affordable internet, so homework n