Ingram's June 2022

B E T W E E N T H E L I N E S

Pointed Perspectives & Penetrating Punditry | by Jack Cashill

What We Need to Know About the Average Joe

Americans may gripe about high energy pric es, but they’ll find a way to cope. They’re less tolerant of elites telling them to shut up. We are lucky to live where we do. As of this writing I have yet to pay $4 a gallon for gas, a price that already seems a distant memory to Californians and may seem quaint to Ingram’s readers by the time this magazine hits the newsstands. “It looks like gas prices are going to continue weighing on consumers throughout the rest of 2022,” writes William White of Investor Place. “Add in inflation and rising interest rates, and it looks like this will be a tough year for the average Joe.” In the ordinary election year, the average Joe could take heart thinking that authorities would work overtime to keep gas prices down, but this year, Joe Average has no such hope. President Joe has preemptively dashed it. “[When] it comes to the gas prices,” Biden said in late May,

supposed to do that! On my side, however, was the official “fact checker.” As he attested, my numbers were right. I wouldn’t enter a hostile arena—and it was that—without knowing they were. The “moderator” on climate change panel, Martin Rosenberg, made Katz look like the soul of restraint. In the evening’s most telling exchange, James Taylor, president of the free-market Heartland Institute, challenged the assumption embedded in the program’s title, namely that “the climate is chang ing” in some negative way. The search for a solution, Taylor argued, “implies a problem.” He then cited a litany of data refuting just about every scare headline on droughts, hur ricanes, tornados and the like we’ve seen for the past 20

“we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.” To praise a budget-busting surge in gas prices as an “incredible transition” suggests that President Joe—and the green activists who program his teleprompter—have chosen to sacrifice the needs of Average Joe to that very transition.

years. Although the fact checker backed Taylor, “moderator” Rosenberg could barely contain him self. Citing a United Nations report, he asked rhetorically, “The science of climate change is settled. Do you dis- agree?” When Taylor dared to disagree, Rosenberg pulled

A public-issue forum is a classic example of American civics in action. The trick to making those discus sions work is keeping the playing field level.

Curious to know what local greens think about the average Joe, I watched a video from an American Public Square event staged in late May at William Jewell College. The name of the program was “The Politics of Mother Nature: The Climate is Changing—Should You?” Framing the Debate In the way of background, Allan Katz, a former UMKC pro fessor and U.S. ambassador to Portugal, launched the American Public Square project seven years ago. The idea is a solid one, namely the restoration of civil discourse across political divides on a wide range of issues. In the ideal world, forums along these lines would be staged more often and on more visible platforms. The challenge, however, is to keep the playing field level. As I know from experience, it is not easily done. Six years ago, I served as a panelist on an American Public Square program of which Katz himself was the moderator. At one contentious point in the conversation, Katz hung up the whistle, took off the zebra stripes, and scolded me for being “disingenuous.” Hey, I thought, moderators aren’t

out the ult imate weapon in his arsenal, The New York Times , “which,” said Rosenberg, “I consider the best newspaper in the world.” Rosenberg’s imprimatur carried extra weight, he informed the audience, because “I have a training as a journalist. I have a mas ter’s in journalism.” Rosenberg seemed to have no idea that to the average Joe, his boast sounded like the punch line to a joke. Had Rosenberg ever left his bubble, he would have known that. True to form, Rosenberg fretted about “equity” issues. This is mandatory in any discussion about anything today.

Jack Cashill Ingram’s Senior Editor P | 816.842.9994 E | Editorial @ Ingrams.com

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Kansas City’s Business Media

June 2022