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It's 10:05 am on Easter Sunday morning, so you know that I'm watching "This Week with George Stephanopolous." The main topics today are Harvard fighting back against sanctions by the Trump administration and the hullabaloo over a guy named Abrego-Garcia being sent to a prison in El Salvador - without due process.
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There is a common denominator - Trump. He and his dominions are getting really good at wielding power. This is similar to what Democrats did for years with "wokeism" or "cancel culture" or whatever you want to call it. As you know, I gave a commencement speech in which I used my nonsense language called "Ishka maloofka" to silence crying babies. You can laugh, but it works. I'll use the language today when I walk my grandson.
The chancellor of Purdue Northwest followed me and attempted to join the jocularity. He tried "Ishka maloofka" and it came out sounding like a little kid mimicking Chinese. There was an international incident for two weeks going into Christmas. I won't go into the machinations of the situation - perhaps I'll do that it a book someday - but there is certainly the issue of prejudice against Asian-Americans in higher-learning institutions.
But there was also the issue of people with an agenda using the situation for their own purposes. There was complete denunciation of a man who had given his life to inclusion in higher learning. No mercy, no forgiveness, no common sense. I said at the time on my morning show - "this is the top of the market for political correctness, for wokeness." That was December of 2022, and it was the top of the market for this cancel culture. The antidote to wokery is Trump. And he's doing the same thing that the Left did when it was in charge - grab as much power as possible through autocratic processes. Cancel culture equals Trumpism in the most ironic of ways.
I, of course, was on the precipice of being "cancelled" also. For two weeks going into Christmas of 2022 - a very slow news time - our appearances at the podium for the winter commencement at Purdue Northwest was a top story on nearly every conventional media outlet from the Asia Times to CNN to Yahoo News. Every day for two weeks I'd wake up and go online and see the story on news feeds and I'd quickly turn off my phone. I couldn't figure out what was going on. There was a concerted effort to get the chancellor fired. His gaff became a catch-all for all prejudice against Asians in America, which is real. I sat on this couch that I'm sitting on right now and watched a 10-minute expose on CNN how the chancellor's mimicking of my nonsense language embodied hundreds of years of prejudice against Asian-Americans.
Certainly there is prejudice against Asians and Asian-Americans in higher education. As mentioned on the morning show, I dated an Asian-American woman in college whose parents were both PHD's. They wound up being instructors at a small college in Oklahoma or somewhere thereabouts.
My friend explained it - "It's rarely talked about - but there's this unwritten quota. You can't have too many Asians in your faculty. My parents are victims of that quota," she said. This didn't make any sense to me. I'm a white guy from the middle of country.
"What do you mean that faculties can't have too many Asians. Isn't it just the best person available who gets the job?" I asked her.
"You have a lot to learn, Jimmy Dedelow," she said. "A lot to learn." She was right. And with this in mind I've been doing the show in Hammond, Indiana, for the past two decades trying to figure things out. I have not been successful.
Now we face extremism from the other side. Trump is gathering up people and sending them to a prison without due process. He's putting random tariffs on countries, screwing up the economy. And he's going after national law firms and universities, making them accede to his demands or risk all sorts of sanctions. Don't even talk about not heeding the orders of the Supreme Court. It's been Trump for 90 days, and America is up for grabs. Trump is somehow breaking down American institutions that have been around for centuries.
Is this good or bad? Isn't constant pruning of the political bushes a good thing? I certainly don't want the dictatorial nature of cancel culture. But is Trumpism any better? I don't know. I'm sitting on the couch typing to you while Republicans then Democrats then Republicans then Democrats come on the screen in our living room. I have somehow deluded myself into believing that through a unique combination of education and real life experience that I have insight. I present it as such to my morning audience. It's not a national audience. It's working people in the middle of America - all kinds of working people.
To sum, I am a failure in terms of having a grasp of what is going on in America. Trump is attacking longstanding institutions and having success - but I sense that even if there wasn't Trump there would still be an attack on traditional institutions. People in America are pissed, on both sides and in the middle. You can hear it every day on my show.
Somehow, Democrats have become the defenders of our institutions and mores. This is completely opposite of the 1960s when the Left that was out to blow up the military-industrial complex. Now they're the ones trying to preserve it, and they're not very good at it.
So where does that leave me and my morning show and radio stations and news/talk outlets in terms of figuring out what's happening at the bottom of Lake Michigan? Democrats, Republicans, rich people, poor people, new immigrants and people whose families have been here since the 18-hundreds, including me - What are we saying? What am I missing? Are our institutions about to break down to be replaced with what? Or is it just hyperbole, that give it a few years and we'll all settle down and get along?
There is no answer. I share this with you during a George Stephanopoulos interview with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who just had his residence attacked by an arsonist in the middle of the night. He and his family had to evacuate a burning house. This story comes at 42 minutes into George's show, making it not even that big of a story. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's because this kind of stuff happens a lot in America. Crisis to crisis, chaos to chaos, urgency to urgency, dust to dust. It's Easter, everybody, 2025. I hope that by the time you listen to this we'll have some of the chaos figured out and that we won't have blown ourselves up on the way to discovery.
The chancellor of Purdue Northwest followed me and attempted to join the jocularity. He tried "Ishka maloofka" and it came out sounding like a little kid mimicking Chinese. There was an international incident for two weeks going into Christmas. I won't go into the machinations of the situation - perhaps I'll do that it a book someday - but there is certainly the issue of prejudice against Asian-Americans in higher-learning institutions.
But there was also the issue of people with an agenda using the situation for their own purposes. There was complete denunciation of a man who had given his life to inclusion in higher learning. No mercy, no forgiveness, no common sense. I said at the time on my morning show - "this is the top of the market for political correctness, for wokeness." That was December of 2022, and it was the top of the market for this cancel culture. The antidote to wokery is Trump. And he's doing the same thing that the Left did when it was in charge - grab as much power as possible through autocratic processes. Cancel culture equals Trumpism in the most ironic of ways.
I, of course, was on the precipice of being "cancelled" also. For two weeks going into Christmas of 2022 - a very slow news time - our appearances at the podium for the winter commencement at Purdue Northwest was a top story on nearly every conventional media outlet from the Asia Times to CNN to Yahoo News. Every day for two weeks I'd wake up and go online and see the story on news feeds and I'd quickly turn off my phone. I couldn't figure out what was going on. There was a concerted effort to get the chancellor fired. His gaff became a catch-all for all prejudice against Asians in America, which is real. I sat on this couch that I'm sitting on right now and watched a 10-minute expose on CNN how the chancellor's mimicking of my nonsense language embodied hundreds of years of prejudice against Asian-Americans.
Certainly there is prejudice against Asians and Asian-Americans in higher education. As mentioned on the morning show, I dated an Asian-American woman in college whose parents were both PHD's. They wound up being instructors at a small college in Oklahoma or somewhere thereabouts.
My friend explained it - "It's rarely talked about - but there's this unwritten quota. You can't have too many Asians in your faculty. My parents are victims of that quota," she said. This didn't make any sense to me. I'm a white guy from the middle of country.
"What do you mean that faculties can't have too many Asians. Isn't it just the best person available who gets the job?" I asked her.
"You have a lot to learn, Jimmy Dedelow," she said. "A lot to learn." She was right. And with this in mind I've been doing the show in Hammond, Indiana, for the past two decades trying to figure things out. I have not been successful.
Now we face extremism from the other side. Trump is gathering up people and sending them to a prison without due process. He's putting random tariffs on countries, screwing up the economy. And he's going after national law firms and universities, making them accede to his demands or risk all sorts of sanctions. Don't even talk about not heeding the orders of the Supreme Court. It's been Trump for 90 days, and America is up for grabs. Trump is somehow breaking down American institutions that have been around for centuries.
Is this good or bad? Isn't constant pruning of the political bushes a good thing? I certainly don't want the dictatorial nature of cancel culture. But is Trumpism any better? I don't know. I'm sitting on the couch typing to you while Republicans then Democrats then Republicans then Democrats come on the screen in our living room. I have somehow deluded myself into believing that through a unique combination of education and real life experience that I have insight. I present it as such to my morning audience. It's not a national audience. It's working people in the middle of America - all kinds of working people.
To sum, I am a failure in terms of having a grasp of what is going on in America. Trump is attacking longstanding institutions and having success - but I sense that even if there wasn't Trump there would still be an attack on traditional institutions. People in America are pissed, on both sides and in the middle. You can hear it every day on my show.
Somehow, Democrats have become the defenders of our institutions and mores. This is completely opposite of the 1960s when the Left that was out to blow up the military-industrial complex. Now they're the ones trying to preserve it, and they're not very good at it.
So where does that leave me and my morning show and radio stations and news/talk outlets in terms of figuring out what's happening at the bottom of Lake Michigan? Democrats, Republicans, rich people, poor people, new immigrants and people whose families have been here since the 18-hundreds, including me - What are we saying? What am I missing? Are our institutions about to break down to be replaced with what? Or is it just hyperbole, that give it a few years and we'll all settle down and get along?
There is no answer. I share this with you during a George Stephanopoulos interview with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who just had his residence attacked by an arsonist in the middle of the night. He and his family had to evacuate a burning house. This story comes at 42 minutes into George's show, making it not even that big of a story. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's because this kind of stuff happens a lot in America. Crisis to crisis, chaos to chaos, urgency to urgency, dust to dust. It's Easter, everybody, 2025. I hope that by the time you listen to this we'll have some of the chaos figured out and that we won't have blown ourselves up on the way to discovery.
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