Finding Common Battle Grounds

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Josh, Ryan, and Tom tackle four topics. We start with a discussion of Elon Musk leaving Washington DC, something Ryan partially predicted in November. We explore why and what it means. We then do some rapid fire questions on Biden's cancer diagnosis and Ukraine's sneak attack inside Russia. After that, we discuss whether America is exceptional, particularly as relates to its culture. We all agree that Americans are not morally or biologically superior to anyone else and have no greater moral worth, but Josh is insistent that American culture is superior, Tom seems to lean that way, and Ryan is skeptical.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we start with a discussion of the new luxury plane the Qatari government has promised to Donald Trump. It takes a while, but eventually we all agree that if Donald Trump gets to keep a $400 million luxury plane after he is no longer president, that is clearly bribery and corruption. Josh insists that, even though that is true, it's not like this isn't "business as usual" in politics. We then turn to a NYPost article claiming Biden went on a spending spree right before leaving office. The article doesn't provide sufficient information to verify the claims (in classic tabloid fashion). But what we could find suggests that their estimates are off by at least a factor of 10. This leads us back into a discussion of the national debt and other topics we cover regularly. Josh then raised the recent event of a woman in Minnesota who used a racial slur in reference to a 5-year-old kid and used that to argue that both the left and the right are now rallying behind anyone on their side, including criminals. Ryan clarified that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not a criminal and not a member of MS-13, and Trayvon Martin was not a criminal either. But the bigger point is a good one.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Ryan and Tom talk about how Trump's tariff chaos tanked the stock market. Josh was supposed to join us, but he ended up bailing at the last minute (leading us to speculate as to what he was doing instead). Tom and Ryan agree on most everything in this episode. They agree that the market was ripe for a correction and that Trump's tariffs were the catalyst. They also agree that there are indications that Trump may have been engaged in market manipulation and probably should be investigated for what he has done. They agree that Trump is primarily using tariffs as a means of bullying other countries. They spend a lot of time discussing how terrifying our national debt and deficits are, and that there is no will among politicians to fix it. And they agree that the market is likely going to continue to go down for a while as we head into an economic recession.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Ryan and Josh hold down the fort without Tom, who’s mysteriously absent—prompting wild speculation about his whereabouts, from fighting in Ukraine to joining Elon Musk’s secret DOGE team. The duo dives into a discussion about recent left-wing criticisms of Tesla and Elon Musk. Josh questions the strategy of targeting Tesla to hurt Musk, arguing it's both ineffective and misguided given Musk’s vast resources. Both agree that targeting Tesla owners isn't a great idea, especially since most of them are left-leaning individuals who bought Teslas to be environmentally conscientious. We then turn to a discussion of the recent Signal scandal, where top-level members of the Trump Administration invited the editor of The Atlantic into a Classified Signal chat and then proceeded to discuss an attack on Houthis in Yemen. We also agree that this was a reflection of incompetence and stupidity. Ryan gets Josh to admit that there is rampant hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle - if Hillary Clinton had done this, Pete Hegseth's head would have exploded on Fox News about how bad it is and that she should be put to death. Instead, Pete Hegseth denied he did anything wrong and instead pilloried the journalist and The Atlantic, which Josh admits isn't good.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we discuss immigration. The launching point for our discussion is a recent increase in murders and shootings in Sweden that are mostly stemming from gang battles between immigrants from Eastern European and predominantly Muslim countries. We discuss the violence and then explore to what extent that violence is tied to the cultures of the immigrants. That leads us to a general discussion of culture and whether some cultures are better than others. Josh and Tom ultimately argue that US culture is superior to those of all other countries while Ryan rejects that premise, arguing that culture is far too complex to evaluate on a hierarchical value scale. Ryan agrees that some cultural practices are bad or unethical (e.g., female genital mutilation) but cannot condemn entire cultures on the basis of one practice he finds objectionable.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Josh, Ryan, and Tom explore one of the initiatives of the Trump administration and DOGE - Elon Musks destruction of USAID. We examine what happened - that their expenditures were put on hold and the roughly 10,000 employees were told they were going to lose their jobs. Josh celebrates this. Tom points out some of the programs that USAID was funding appeared to have a left-leaning bias. Ryan supports cutting out wasteful spending, improving government efficiency, and even firing people who aren't doing anything. But suggests that there are better ways to do this than destroying an entire government agency and potentially harming innocent people around the world. It takes us more than an hour and a half but we ultimately agree that the wholesale destruction of USAID without consideration of how it will affect some of the most vulnerable is a serious problem.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Josh, Ryan, and Tom discuss the recent spate of Presidential pardons - Biden's pardon of family, friends, and people in his administration and Trump's pardon of nearly 1,500 people who were involved in the January 6th riot. We pretty much agree, though how fun would a podcast be if we all just agree and don't fight over the details?!? We all agreed that Biden should not have felt like he needed to pardon the people he did. Josh insists he pardoned his crime family but Ryan argues that he was protecting people from the clearly stated threats leveled by Kash Patel and Donald Trump. We all also agreed that Trump making a blanket pardon of all 1,500 people was wrong. He should have pardoned the nonviolent individuals, but anyone who physically assaulted a police officer or engaged in conspiracy should not have been pardoned. We all agree that there should be limits to presidential pardons and that the current state of presidential pardons reflects how partisan and divided our country has become.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Tom, Josh, and Ryan discuss the killing of United Healthcare's CEO, Brian Thompson, by Luigi Mangione. Josh starts out by saying that it is murder and wrong. Tommy and Ryan agree that it was murder but also recognize that many see Mangione as a "folk hero" because they are so upset with health insurers who deny coverage a lot to maximize profits. We wrestle with who is at fault here. Tommy and Josh argue that this was inevitable because of crony capitalism and the government not doing a better job of breaking up monopolies and regulating healthcare industries. Ryan doesn't disagree but points out that this is what capitalism does - ignore people to maximize profits. Tommy and Josh don't disagree but argue that the government should be preventing that. We wrestle with these issues for a while before concluding that both the government and corporations bear responsibility for leading to a situation in which lots of people are cheering the murder of a CEO by a vigilante who is seen as a folk hero. (Do note we had some connection issues in this episode, which led to some choppy audio but we tried to edit out as much as possible.)

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Josh, Tom, and Ryan explore new gender/dating norms. We focus on a recently published editorial in the New York Times that argues the advances women have made in education, income, and independence have resulted in men feeling confused about how they are supposed to interact with women and how to be a "man." Women in the US increasingly have more education than men. They are also more likely to be homeowners and some are making more money than men. Dating norms have grown rather complicated, with highly successful men being in a position to pick and choose among partners while less successful men are being marginalized and forced out of the dating market entirely. The result is a growing number of men who are frustrated, lonely, and angry. Josh and, to some degree, Tom attribute this to progressive approaches that have argued that men and women are the same and should be treated the same. Josh and Tom agree that men and women should be equal and have equal opportunities, but they also argue that men and women are different and have different motivations, wants, and needs. Ryan agrees that there are some meaningful differences between men and women but tries to soften the magnitude of the differences and make it more of a distribution rather than a dichotomy. We ultimately conclude that current dating norms are challenging and causing problems, though we don't really have a solution.

The 2024 Presidential election just occurred and Donald Trump won convincingly against Kamala Harris. In this episode, we examine reasons people gave for voting for Donald Trump, including: immigration, wages, funding for the military, the federal deficit, government bloat, stock market volatility, and identity politics. We spend a fair amount of time discussing identity politics, which we ultimately conclude is privileging minority candidates over majority candidates despite their qualifications and, importantly, if someone doesn't vote for a minority candidate (or disagrees with their policies or views), accusing them of some form of bigotry. We also discuss briefly how the media depicted the candidates and portrayed the results. Finally, we touch briefly on the response of progressives to the outcome.