Narrator 0:00
Welcome to the Common Bridge where policy and current events are discussed in a fiercely nonpartisan manner. The host, Richard Helppie, is a philanthropist, entrepreneur and columnist, who has over a million listeners around the world. His podcast and YouTube shows draws guests and audiences across the political spectrum.
Richard Helppie 0:23
Hello, welcome to the Common Bridge. This is your host, Rich Helppie with our guest today, Father Thomas Reese. Father, welcome to the Common Bridge.
Fr. Thomas Reese 0:31
Thanks. Good to be with you, Rich.
Richard Helppie 0:33
So glad that you’re here. The Common Bridge, of course, is available on most podcast channels. Just look up Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge at YouTube TV, Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge YouTube TV channel, and now on Substack, as well, Please register at Substack for deeper content, newsletters, custom columns, and more. Also of course, at RichardHelppie.com for free subscription. Today we’re going to talk about recent writing from Father Thomas Reese, who’s got a great perspective on many of the issues going on today. One thing that attracted me to him is a recent column that he wrote, we’ll be discussing that, but before we get going, Father, our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests. Tell us a little bit about you. You’ve got quite a background. Where’d you grow up? And what’s been your career arc? And what kind of jobs have you had?
Fr. Thomas Reese 1:26
Well, I just celebrated my 77th birthday, but I grew up in Southern California, I spent my summers as a beach bum on the beach, but then entered the Jesuits in 1962. And during my training as a Jesuit priest, I also worked to get a degree in political science. So I have a doctorate in Political Science from the University of California Berkeley. So I’ve always been interested in religion and politics and the mix of the two. So this makes for interesting times.
Richard Helppie 2:03
Indeed, I have to think you were a fish out of water in all of those places… with you were the only one with that. You’ve written books, authored columns, and you had some pretty big publishing jobs as well, “America magazine,” “National Catholic Reporter”… what were some of the highlights from those roles?
Fr. Thomas Reese 2:20
Well, yes, I have had quite a varied career. My first job actually was as a lobbyist for a tax reform group, because my doctoral dissertation was on the politics of taxation. And that was, that was a lot of fun, but not very successful. We certainly did not reform the tax code. So I went from there into journalism, and worked at “America magazine,” where I wrote about politics, about the U.S. Bishops, about the Vatican-all sorts of things. And I really enjoyed doing that. It’s, you know, the role of a general journalist is just a lot of fun, because you get to write on whatever you’re interested in. So I’ve enjoyed that quite a bit. I was Editor of “America magazine” for seven years. My proudest achievement, I think, was bringing it into the digital era, creating a website and getting it going and that into the 21st century. So that was, that was a lot of fun. Now, as I’m aging and slowing down a bit, I write a column. So at Religion News Service, I’m a columnist there at religionnews.com. And there I write on all sorts of things that have connections to the Catholic Church, or religion and politics. So it’s been a varied career over time, but it’s one that I’ve enjoyed. And as a priest, I’ve tried to help out on weekends at parishes, where they need help the saying mass and hearing confession. So that also is a very joyful part of my life as a Jesuit priest.
Richard Helppie 4:22
You certainly haven’t been a man to shy away from controversy, and your writings have a lot of clarity, and I think we’re fellow travelers in that regard. Indeed, my brand promise on the Common Bridge is that everybody should find something to not like in every episode, because I try to give it a 360 degree look, and I don’t mouth the talking points. The thing that made me want to look you up and get you on the show here, is that you wrote a column and its title is “Someone is Killing Republicans and Trump Voters,” and we will have a link to this at Substack and also at RichardHelppie.com. Kind of a provocative title. What’s the paper about? And who was the audience? What made you decide to write that?
Unknown Speaker 5:11
Well, what originally stimulated me was back when President Trump was attacking the whole idea of COVID and vaccination and that sort of stuff. And I scratched my head, and I said, Boy, it’s gonna be a real problem if his supporters listen to him, because they’re going to get sick, and a lot of them are gonna die. And a year, about a year later, the data started to come in. And it’s quite clear, if you look at, for example, at counties in the United States that went to 60% or more for President Trump in the 2020 election, and compare those with counties that went for Joe Biden, 60% or more, the death rate in the Trump counties is almost three times as high as the death rate in the counties that went for Joe Biden. And there’s only one explanation for that. And that is that the Trump voters are not getting vaccinated. And it’s quite clear that people who aren’t vaccinated get much sicker from COVID and die at a much higher rate than those who are vaccinated. So, ah, yeah, the tragedy here is that, you know, the leaders of the Republican Party and Trump himself are killing their own supporters. I mean, it’s totally, it’s mind boggling when you look at this data and look at the situation, the reality that’s out there. And, you know, it’s ironic, the more the liberals and the Democrats talk about the need to get vaccinated, the less the Trump supporters, and the Republicans, I think, you know, are supportive of it. I think it’s a plan of some sort.
Richard Helppie 7:32
We know that the clarity that we have– by the way, I did health data for decades, that was my business– and I actually culled the death rate from the COVID, a month before the CDC did and published it. The guests we’ve had on our show, clearly are people that brought to the fore that vaccines have had an effect on mortality, and the preponderance of the evidence at this stage says that there is a strong correlation between those that are vaccinated and those that avoid death, as we know now that not necessarily will someone you know, be immune, but certainly they’re going to have an easier time of COVID, if they get it. That’s, that’s well established at this point. And so we can just stipulate that, but you know, look, I’d like to go over some of the stats, but I did some looking in preparation. So the city of Detroit, for example, voted 95% for Joe Biden, 95%. Their vaccination rate as of three days ago is 35.36%. Okay, so I said, Okay, now, I don’t think they’re listening to Sean Hannity. You know, you know, contrast that in New York 73% vaccinated, Los Angeles 75.6. Chicago, surprisingly, it’s up to 65.3 are fully vaccinated, but only 50% of black, non-Latins are fully vaccinated. Okay, now Alabama, kind of a stronghold for Trump 48%, fully vaccinated. And then Missouri, very interesting, 53% of Missourians are vaccinated, and in St. Louis, also 53%. And it’s a nice midsize city, you know, 300,000’ish people about equal numbers of black and white people, and Biden won 82% of the vote, but it’s the same across the state. And we of course, saw in the run up to the election, that the shoe was on the other foot, right? Democrats were saying that the vaccines can you trust them? Early in the pandemic, we had Nancy Pelosi going to San Francisco and saying, Don’t worry about this virus. There’s nothing to it. I think Donald Trump failed miserably, but I think that the Republicans and the Democrats have politicized this, and the kinds of statistics you and I are talking about aren’t being reported in the traditional media.
Fr. Thomas Reese 10:01
I agree with you, you’re absolutely right. I mean, there’s a real problem in getting vaccinations into the black community. Because, you know, our public health service is so weak in this country, compared to other countries, there’s a great need for it. I mean, that, you know, this is the sort of thing that you just got to get out there and have the programs. Part of it is also, you know, poor people don’t want to take off work, to go get vaccinated, and they hear from people– “well you might be sick for a day or two”– you mean, that means, you know, I’m going to lose three days of pay. They’re really worried about the economic consequences of that, because their employer is not going to pay them, you know, while they’re out sick. So that’s been one problem with the poor…in poor communities. You know, and let’s face it too, the black community has been suspicious of the white medical community for decades, because of the Tuskegee experimentation and other things like that. So there’s a lack of trust. Now, what you need to get the vaccines into the black community are black ministers out there pushing it, and black doctors and nurses, you know, they got to see people who look like themselves out there pushing that, talking to them, people that have credibility in their own community. That’s, and that’s the same thing with Trump people and Republican’s–if you want to get them vaccinated, don’t send a liberal in to tell them– then send conservatives in to talk to them. And local people, their local doctors, their local nurses.
Richard Helppie 11:48
I mean, wouldn’t you agree, though, it shouldn’t be a black-white, right-left issue. It’s this is about science, and I think when I look at the serious breakage that we have in the country today and the polarization, it wouldn’t be illogical for people to be skeptical of the united media talking points. Alright, there’s been so many false stories floated, so much misinformation, it seems to me to be logical to be resistant to it. And you bring up public health, and I’m in 100% agreement, our public health system is very weak, and this was I thought, an opportunity for us to come together. But we went and we split politically, very early on. And I had on my program, Dr. Martin Kulldorf from the Great Barrington Declaration, who was very prescient about what would happen with societal lockdowns, he said, we’re going to extend the pandemic, we’re going to open the door for more variants, we’re going to damage kids that aren’t in school, we’re going to disrupt the economy, and it’s going to…and we’re going to have a mental health crisis. All which has played out versus what following the public health protocols of protect the vulnerable, and let other people go about their business with appropriate masking, handwashing, vaccination and the like. So it just boggles my mind that it becomes partisan, but I understand it. And I don’t know if you’d agree with this or not, but I will throw it out to you that this partisan divide that we have that is stimulated further by journalistic malpractice. And you’ve been a journalist, you know, there’s very clever omissions, there’s outright falsehoods. But I think the big thing is the people that are doing the reporting, they don’t bring the skepticism about claims made by politicians that they need to. It’s kind of tribal, right? This guy’s saying it so we’re not going to challenge them. You as an observer of this, what’s your view on that?
Fr. Thomas Reese 13:54
Yeah, I think that’s a serious problem. I mean, the difficulty of course, in the United States today is you know, when I grew up, there were three TV stations, people got their news from NBC, CBS or ABC, you know. We watched Walter Cronkite, and if Walter Cronkite told us to get vaccinated, we probably all would have gone and got vaccinated. Today, it’s a cacophony of voices out there and each, each group only listens to their own, you know, and so it reinforces the views of each one. So you got to find other ways of getting the message out. Religious groups, for example, can be very important. You know, the Catholic Church has been pushing, you know, vaccination, and the importance of it. You know, most of our Catholic schools, they simply tell the parents, your kid has to be vaccinated if he wants to go to our school. You can’t…it’s tough to get away with that in the public schools. But that’s one of the reasons that Catholic schools have been able to stay open and have less people coming down with COVID: we just simply tell the faculty and the students, you’ve got to be vaccinated.
Richard Helppie 15:04
Yeah, well public schools have done that forever–whooping cough, diphtheria, tuberculosis test, measles, mumps, rubella vaccination–they’ve been very strong about that, but those were done at different times. Those requirements were put in at a time of more trust in the political system, in less polarization, in more media integrity, or at least we thought. Now we’ve got outright censorship going on, and so people are saying, you know, I’m listening, but I don’t know what I should believe. In recent days, what we’ve seen is there were voices throughout the… you know what I’ll call the media unity, the people that are in the reporting business, all kind of scoffing at the notion that natural immunity from a prior infection didn’t offer protection. And there were voices saying, oh, wait a minute, that’s not true, that’s not what the data says. And in recent days, now, this reporting, corporate reporting organizations are finally leaking that, you know what, maybe this post infection protection works and last longer. And you know, we just but we weren’t in a position to say we don’t know.
Fr. Thomas Reese 16:13
Well, that’s the real problem. Nobody wants to say we don’t know. In fact, when they didn’t know, they didn’t know how much, you know, getting infected would, you know, protect you into the future. And you won’t know… you can’t know… until you’ve got some data. Now that means, Okay, people, we got to wait six months, we got to wait nine months to find out. People don’t want to hear that; people want answers. But I’d like to go back to something that I think is important, because of the kind of writing I do, and that is the voice of the religious communities. You know, the churches have to get out there and push this. And let me give you an example of the kind of effect it has. It’s fascinating when you look at Hispanics, for example. You know, Hispanic is a tough group to get vaccinated too, but what the data shows is one of the highest… one of the groups with the highest rate of vaccination are Hispanic Catholics. Hispanic Catholics, much higher vaccination rate than Hispanic Evangelicals, because the message they’re getting from the Catholic Church is get out there and get vaccinated, protect your family, protect your community, you know, using the buzzwords that work with the community, and it’s coming from trusted voices. The trouble with the Hispanic Evangelicals, is the Hispanic Evangelical ministers have been corrupted by the messaging from the white evangelical ministers who have, you know, just bought in to this anti-vax messaging. So you know, I think churches can have an effect. One of the problems, of course, is ministers are afraid to say anything too, you know, to look out at your congregation, you know, they get up there and say, get vaccinated, they’re apt to have, you know, tomatoes thrown at them. (So because of the partisan nature.) They don’t want partisanship in their congregation. And yet, you know, and so even so they’re afraid to tell people what’s actually good for them. It’s a real problem.
Richard Helppie 18:22
It is. So there’s partisanship and censorship, and journalistic malpractice has now invaded the church. And if it’s holding people back, when, what others are doing and something we’re trying to do on this program, is to say, what are the facts? It’s a balancing of the risks. All right, it’s risk mitigation. So where is the CBS, NBC, you know, ABC, I don’t care one of the cable channels, bringing on a panel of immunologist physicians and saying, Okay, tell us how these vaccines work. Okay, I’ve done that on my program with James Baker. And it made me confident to become vaccinated because I thought the risk of getting the disease at my age versus the risk of an adverse event, it really made it a no brainer. Okay. Now, to be fair, we don’t know what the five-year effect is, because we haven’t been out there five years. But you know, as of now, so far, so good. And we can’t have those reasoned dialogues because side A goes this way, side B goes that way. And the journalistic, or the people that should be doing journalism, seize one set of talking points, or or set the others. And we’re prevented from doing things that are now… that are entering just now the corporate media– used to be refered to as the mainstream media–the difference between hospitalized from COVID, hospitalized with COVID. Now by the way, I’m a healthcare data guy with pretty good contacts. I couldn’t get the data. I want to know what was the admitting diagnosis? We’re finally now getting that that two things are emerging that most of the deaths are dealing with four or more comorbidities. Okay, so even when we adjust for age in these populations and adjust for political affiliation, nobody’s gone through there and said, What are the complications or comorbidities? Okay, we know obesity, asthma, weakened immune systems all cause that. And so when people aren’t hearing the full story, they’re going to pull back, in my estimation. And then think about this– what I kind of think is the biggest whopper in this whole thing– remember what the media was telling us that this virus definitely, absolutely did not originate in a lab, despite the happenstance, it was a lab designed to study and manipulate deadly viruses. in Wuhan. It’s like… and again, I’m not a scientist… I had a scientist on the program, who said, this is definitely zootomy. It came from a bat or a pig or something. Okay, cuz I don’t have the depth to understand that. But now we’re saying Yeah, well, maybe it came out of the lab. So you can see, I mean, doesn’t it make sense that people are going to be skeptical!
Fr. Thomas Reese 21:39
Yeah, let me, you know, I’m a social scientist, you know, I love data. You know, I’m with you all the way.
Richard Helppie 21:47
You and I are both like that, yes, we are.
Fr. Thomas Reese 21:49
Yes. But at the same time, a couple of things. You know, the media is a business, as you say, corporate, and so they’re gonna watch, you know, how many people are continuing to watch our program. And the more data you give people, the fewer people that are going to keep watching your program. People want yelling and screaming, they want to be entertained in the news, they don’t want to be educated. This is, this is part of the failure of our education system, we need to educate people to be learners to, you know, to take their civic responsibilities seriously. So that’s one thing I would say. You know, what we found in some of the surveys is that, for example, poor people and Trump voters don’t hate rich people. They hate elitists, they hate elites, they hate the professionals, they hate the lawyers, they hate the doctors, they hate the social workers. Because those are the people that are always telling them how to live their lives, and how to raise their children. So don’t you know, if you present those people, you know, as the voice to convince these, it ain’t gonna work. You gotta have people from their own communities, you know, who say, you know, I lost my brother, I lost my sister, I lost my mother, because, you know, I wasn’t vaccinated, and I brought the disease home to her. Don’t make the same mistake I did. You know, the other thing is, I wish you know, our privacy rules these days means that we can’t get a camera in and watch somebody die with a ventilator, because we respect people’s privacy. We can’t do that anymore. So we sanitize this whole thing. All we have, you know, we have statistics. So we have talking head, we don’t see people dying. It’s like warfare. We don’t see people dying. The news will, you know, will have people interviewed, but we don’t see people bleeding out and dying on television. We just, we don’t do that. I think that’s what convinces people, not statistic. Statistics convinced you and me, but I’m not sure they’re going to convince the people who are not vaccinated today.
Richard Helppie 24:12
Well look, I think your broader point is that we need to treat people like intelligent human beings, and say that look, we have a virus here and there’s a risk. To your point about… it’s a terrible death, okay. It’s a it’s a horrible, horrible ending. We’ve had people on.. Rob Casalou from Trinity Health, talked about what an awful death, a COVID death is. And Brian Peters from Michigan Hospital Association who has a very national role too, talking about the burnout of healthcare workers witnessing these deaths over and over again, and the distress in the families. These are all a real part of this story, and I just think if we were able to talk to people to say it’s all part of the story, here’s the balance of the risks: okay, we know that there’s infections around the heart, particularly with certain demographics, but yes, that’s treatable. And if we don’t address that, we just give rise to a lot of fringe players saying, you know, exaggerating either the efficacy, or the risks of the disease, or the vaccination when again today, clearly, higher vaccination rates correlate with lower deaths. They’re terrible deaths. What I like about the vaccination rates and the death rates, they’re both binary, you either got vaccinated, or you didn’t, you either died or you didn’t. It’s not, you know, tests are really immaterial. Hospitalizations, a lot goes into making a decision about an admission and a discharge. But those two things, there’s undeniable correlation. There is a creeping correlation around the comorbidities and complications: we think we’re pretty solid on that. And today, when people are revisiting, what did we do right, what did we do wrong? And just in recent days, the realization that we probably should have manufactured the therapeutics faster. That is coming along for people that the vaccines didn’t work for, didn’t get vaccinated for one reason or another, but can we treat them faster? But again, that public dialogue of what are the facts, where do we go from here has collapsed in favor of, we’re going to caricature this demographic this way, and we’re going to– because we don’t like them– we’re going to attribute all these bad attributes to them. And over here, we’re absolutely right about everything. And and they’re both doing it. And as a consequence, we’re stalled, and I just want to punctuate the point you made, that the news outlets are saying we’re going to stimulate this group and make them mad at these guys, or where they’re going to go we’re going to stimulate these guys and go the other way. I was driving and listened to Fox News on one channel, and then I went over and listened to CNN. And I literally started laughing out loud, because their guests both talked about how the other side was criminal, they had to get the word criminal in there, it was nonsense on both sides. But that is where we are.
Fr. Thomas Reese 27:20
My point is that the people who can communicate with Trump supporters need to look like the people who stand behind Trump during his rallies. That’s the point I want to make. Those are the people who can communicate, not people who look like they’re from Yale or Harvard. You know, they have to be people that, you know, that they can identify with, they can say that he looks like a neighbor. You know, he looks like my brother-in-law.
Richard Helppie 27:49
On the campaign trail, Joe Biden, to his credit, said, Look, these people that like Donald Trump, they’re not nuts. He said, they’re my neighbors. They’re the people I grew up with, that our government’s failing them. We need to listen to them. And that’s what I’m saying we all share a humanity. And for us to be divided by our ancestral heritage, for us to be divided by our station in life, by our region, by the pigment of our skin, by our gender, that to me is the damaging foundation and the pandemic went right in on top of that, and it’s just given… if one thing should have taken us in a different direction, it should have been a virus that gets everybody. And instead, it split, it splintered us further. It’s just, it’s madness. I don’t understand.
Fr. Thomas Reese 28:40
I would I agree with you totally. I would just make one one, add one nuance to it. And that is when you’re communicating to different groups, you’re going to have to do it in different ways. We cannot have a homogenized message that goes out to the public. I mean, I mean, look at Coca Cola look at all the the they know, you know, when they’re advertising in one neighborhood, they know how to do it in one neighborhood. And they do it differently in another neighborhood. And that’s the point I would make in terms of trying to message on on public health issues, whether it’s masks or whether it’s vaccination, or these kinds of things.
Richard Helppie 29:22
That’s, you know, that’s a beautiful example, because Coca Cola doesn’t come out and say you either drink Coca Cola or you’re stupid. And because that wouldn’t be a very good way to sell Coca Cola, yet we’re trying to sell life saving therapeutics and diseases. Father, anything else on this topic, because I really want to kind of jump into schools a little bit (Fr. Reese: that’s fine let’s go) And just broadly, what do we know about schools and the impacts of the shutdown and, you know, public schools versus parochial schools and you know, when you’ve been pondering this question, what kind of things have you been thinking about?
Fr. Thomas Reese 30:04
Well, there’s no question that kids have suffered by not having, not being able to go to school in the classroom. You know, some places have done virtual education better than others. I think, frankly, a lot of the private schools have done it better than most of the public schools. Sometimes it’s just because they have resources. Sometimes it’s just because they’re smaller and more flexible, and know how to adapt. And, you know, and some, some teachers had already, you know, been familiar with computerized education and things like that. So, but the bottom line is kids are suffering from not being in the classroom, not interacting with their peers, not interacting with their teachers, missing the whole social life, the interaction, I mean, teachers are telling me that when students come back, now, after being away, they’re immature. They’re a year behind in their maturity and growth. And so it is quite, you know, it is problematic. I think today, you know, I’m no expert, but you know, listening to the people who are, it seems to me that if we require vaccination, and if you know, we put on N95 masks, I think schools would be pretty safe places to be in today. Now, of course, January, you know, as everybody is telling us, is going to be a just awful month. Now, everybody’s hoping it’s going to peak quickly and then go back down. I don’t think it’s going to peak in January, I think it’s going to continue into February, and hopefully by the end of February, we’ll see it going down everywhere. But it’s like a wave, it takes time to get across the country. And you know, it’s going to peak in New York sooner than it’s going to peak in the Mountain States because it’s getting to the Mountain States later. So every, you know, situation is different. But I think I agree, try and get the kids back into school. But make sure they’re vaccinated, make sure all the faculty and staff are vaccinated and get those N95 masks up there for them. And I, I think, then, this will be, you know, this will be controllable. Well, you know, won’t be perfect, but life is never going to be perfect.
Richard Helppie 32:55
Well, I agree that the kids need to get back in school. I know Sweden’s experience that they never closed schools, zero deaths, and they’ve done better on the second and third waves, and, you know, we can’t undo those policy decisions that people made, but I’m hopeful that kids will get back in school. And I’ve worked with a number of schools, and as you go through various socio economic strata, it gets very, very challenging. And to your point about the immaturity; a principal at a high school told me he has three freshmen classes right now, because the young people don’t have the experience of going through a couple of years, and they’re the upperclassmen, now. Father, this has been a great conversation. I hope you’ll come back and talk to us about education and journalism and the the role of the church– I think it is an important part of the fabric of our society, teaching us you know, unifying principles of love and charity and all of the good things that come from a religious foundation. Is there anything that we didn’t cover today that that you’d like to chat about? Or make mention?
Fr. Thomas Reese 34:03
No, I think we’ve done pretty good.
Richard Helppie 34:06
We’ve been talking today on the Common Bridge with Father Thomas Reese, a fascinating conversation with a learned man with a PhD in political science as well as his priesthood within the Jesuits. Great conversation today, please consider subscribing on Substack or at Richard Helppie.com and of course, the Common Bridge is available on most podcast outlets and on YouTube TV. This is Rich Helppie, with our guest, Father Thomas Reese, signing off on the Common Bridge.
Unknown Speaker 34:40
Thanks for joining us on the Common Bridge. Remember to rate us, review us, and comment about what you heard today and recommend us to your friends. Visit us at RichardHelppie.com and sign up for special promotions. This broadcast was produced by Stunt3 Multimedia and is available on YouTube and all podcast directories. All rights are reserved Richard Helppie
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