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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I’m your host, Rich Helppie. Today we’re kicking off a special series. We’re going to be featuring Substack writers. They’re doing some great work out there. And at the top of this episode, I want to say this: journalism in the established media ecosystem isn’t journalism anymore. It’s stuff to get you alarmed, it’s stuff to feed your biases, but it’s just not reporting, and it’s just not news. Everybody that’s been upset about an event of recent days knows that it might be comforting to some, but most of us just want real information and good straight reporting. So we’ve got with us today a returning guest to The Common Bridge, the author of the Substack “Tell Me How This Ends,” from Southern California, welcome back, Chris Bray. Chris, it is good to see you. How are you doing?
Chris Bray
Great, how are you?
Richard Helppie
Chris is a very qualified journalist. Among his other accomplishments, a significant amount of time with the Washington Post. He is a guy that goes out there, gets the story, firsthand information, digs for the facts, does his research, and oftentimes is his own photographer too. I’m going to encourage everybody here to subscribe to Chris Bray, because he doesn’t have a Washington Post behind him. I think this is a way to let people know what they would like to get in terms of real reporting. To that end, also, if you’re not a subscriber to The Common Bridge, please consider that. Or you know what, maybe per episode, right? I’d say like something old school, like two dollar suggested retail price. You can send a Zelle to Rich@RichardHelppie.com or a Venmo to @Richard-CBridge. Well, that’s enough promotion for The Common Bridge. Let’s get into our discussion with journalist and reporter, Mr. Chris Bray. Chris, if you don’t mind just maybe a quick thumbnail of some of your background. I know artillery officer, journalist, reporter and other things you’ve done in your life. Maybe a quick recap of your bio for the listeners, readers and viewers of The Common Bridge.
Chris Bray
Sure. Two things I have to say, that I wasn’t artillery, I was infantry, point of pride. And second, I freelanced for The Washington Post for about ten years. They never gave me a job, but my byline was in the paper a lot when it was still a newspaper, when it still had remarkably high standards and very capable editors. I really enjoyed it. I freelanced for a lot of people 20-25 years ago, when I thought that editorial standards were at least pretty good, when I talked to a lot of people who were at least reasonably sharp at their jobs. I felt watching from that inside perspective that I was watching the decline of standards, and there was a point at which, clearly, I became much less welcome. I was never canceled, but I sort of watched my freelance career drift away. People, editors who had been happy to give me things, happy to assign me to things, sort of stopped answering emails and stopped returning calls. I have watched the change in the media landscape from inside the media landscape, and from that perspective, I feel very, very grateful for Substack and for independent media. I feel very, very grateful that there is a disintermediated place where we can speak, a place where we’ve removed the gatekeepers and middlemen. Also, I got a PhD in history at UCLA, and I was going to work in academia as an alternative to the decline of legacy media and traditional media. I feel like I managed to walk into two cultures that were dying at the same time; I managed to jump from dying legacy media to declining academia. So everywhere I go, cultural death follows. [Laughter.] I probably worry Substack about that.
Richard Helppie
Your Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends,” is the title. Look, I unabashedly say that Chris is my favorite writer on Substack, and there are some others that are close seconds and thirds and the like, but he has a great way of phrasing, of framing things, and also he’ll show you where he gets his sources, and he’s bulletproof in terms of the rigor that he puts into it. Let’s show the legacy media infrastructure what we want as citizenry. Chris, what do you think the top three issues are that you’re writing about, or that need reporting, and maybe on what we’re not getting the full or the accurate story out of legacy media? What would you - I know there are a lot of topics you write on - but what would be the top two or three?
Chris Bray
Let me say before I answer that, very briefly, that you mentioned something that I think needs to be discussed, which is that I try to show what I’m writing, and I think it’s really telling. I think if you’re a consumer of news, you should look for this. When I say the Supreme Court has released an opinion on this case, here it is: here’s a link to it, here’s a PDF file of it, here are screenshots from the decision. When I tell you something, when I describe something to readers, to the greatest extent possible, I try to show it, and that’s really easy to do now, you can embed links, you can embed PDF files. You can do all these things. You can embed video. You read news that tells you something has happened, but they don’t show you, they don’t give you a chance to go look at it for yourself. And this week, I’ve seen a million examples, because I’ve seen a bunch of headlines saying, “ICE Officer Guns Down Woman in Minneapolis,” but they don’t link to video of it, and they don’t link to sources that allow you to look at it for yourself. When people characterize things for you that they could show you, and they don’t show you, it’s important to notice that, because when someone can show you something and they don’t, they’re probably trying to mislead you.
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Richard Helppie
Look, I would also just amplify that; if you read something that is a conclusion, that is indication that they are trying to drag you in one direction or the other. By way of example, just in recent days, I saw someone citing a law that Tim Walz was supposedly violating. So I went and read the law, and it’s like, no, they really mischaracterized what the current governor of Minnesota is doing. Similarly, earlier this week I released a column about the situation in Minnesota - and I’ve cited the Minneapolis Separation Ordinance as the law that really precipitated this whole event - and my conclusion is that it prevents federal law enforcement from enforcing federal law, and prevents Minneapolis police department from enforcing local laws. I put a link to the ordinance. If people want to go read it themselves, they can go read it themselves. That way I think it has enough integrity. Now, am I saying I got it 100% right? I never think that, always worried about getting it wrong, but at least it’s informing and not trying to get people excited in a negative way or excited in a positive way. It’s just, it is what it is, and let people apply their own intellect to it. Again, I invite those of you that are the podcast listeners of The Common Bridge to consider subscribing over at Substack, you’ll get all the columns and other material that we do there. So Chris, as we go into that depth here, when you’re looking at that landscape you could write about anything, what’s top of mind for you today?
Chris Bray
The big one, the place I start - this is sort of something we’ve been hinting toward for a while - is what I think you could call an epistemic crisis; a crisis of just basic perception and discussion. The degree to which we can all look at the same video of Renee Good being shot, and half the country says, oh my god, she was murdered, she wasn’t doing anything. And half the country says, well, you idiot, she hit the guy with her car. We can all look at the same topic, we can all look at the same event, we can all look at the same evidence and come up with completely different conclusions. And I think that crisis, that crisis of basic perception and description, it’s a crisis of before we can get to a crisis in “how do we solve these problems,” we have a crisis in “what’s happening.” We have a crisis in discussing among ourselves what the very most basic reality is. And I think that crisis has to be solved and gotten through and has to be discussed, and we have to find the origins and the causes of it before we can get out of it, before we can clear it.
Richard Helppie
It’s the disease of the hot take. I was watching a college football game the other night, and it looked like a touchdown... wait, we’re going to pause and review this from half a dozen different camera angles, and we’re going to slow it down, or we’re going to go frame by frame, and we’re going to bring in an analyst to explain the rule and then we’re going to either confirm or overturn the original decision. Yet, we have a tragedy on a city street and one single video comes out from one single angle, and all of a sudden there’s a conclusion and people are buying it and relaying it. So I’m 100% with you on please, folks, pause, get the facts. Generally, the faster something comes out driving you to a conclusion, the more wrong it is.
Chris Bray
And people, like the mayor of Minneapolis the day of the shooting, said this ICE agent has murdered someone in our city. He didn’t even say, it looks like that’s what happened, or, I think that’s what happened. We saw a bunch of politicians declaring what had happened and declaring their view of it. I think it’s breathtakingly irresponsible and ugly behavior, destructive behavior. The second thing, I think for me, as someone who lives in California, I think watching the explosion of - and I encourage everyone to go look at this for yourself, go Google this up for yourself, especially if you live in a blue zone - the explosion of government spending. The state of California is spending much more money, even adjusted for inflation, than it was spending ten years ago. State of Minnesota is spending much more money than it was spending even adjusted for inflation ten years ago. There’s been explosive growth in government spending. My argument to people, I say all the time, is use your eyes when you see that your government is spending way more money. Go try to see where they’re spending it. Go look at the roads. Go see if you’re getting way more, much better infrastructure, way more parks, many more fire stations, if you’re getting more services or if you’re not. I live in California, and I can tell you very clearly that we are not, our infrastructure is in dreadful shape, but our government is spending a lot more money. Once you see that, once you look for yourself, go look at your state budget on the state government website, don’t look at someone’s interpretation of it. Don’t look at someone’s characterization of it. Go look at the budget. When you see that your government is spending far more money than it was ten years ago, eight years ago, pre-pandemic - I think the pandemic is when government spending really took off - when you see that for yourself and you look around and you don’t see where the money is being spent, that’s a problem. You need to think about where that extra money is going. So when I look at Minnesota, Tim Walz, for example, has said - after the very famous viral video online - he said, oh, this is right wing conspiracy theory, and he tried to discredit the messenger. But in Minnesota, the state legislative auditor has also said that there’s a bunch of social services fraud. The New York Times ran a very long and very detailed story about Somali social services fraud. In Minnesota, a newspaper called County Highway that’s published six times a year, ran a very long and detailed story about it that dug deeply into details and was carefully reported. When you see way more spending and you see that you’re not getting more for that spending, you see that people are saying, hey, there’s a bunch of fraud here. And the response of the government officials who are spending way more money is to attack the messenger and say, oh, this is just a right wing information operation. When you put all of that together, it’s your responsibility to understand what it means and to see that money is being wasted and that you’re being defrauded. And you can put that together for yourself. You can put that together for yourself by looking at your state budget and then using your eyes and looking at what government is doing on the ground. You can look at your infrastructure. You can look at what government services are available to you. At some point, at some level, I think with a little bit of work, you can cut out the middleman. You can cut out the interpretations and the characterizations, and you can go look at the thing yourself. I think that’s something we urgently need to ask people to do.
Richard Helppie
If I may interject, Nick Shirley is the name of the independent journalist that went and publicized the public services fraud that is apparently rampant in Minnesota. Nick Shirley had another fellow in there, Dave Hoch, I believe is his last name, who’s also been following the story with months of direct observation. He’s going into addresses where businesses are said to exist and there’s no business there. It’s empty fields. It’s a house. If the policy response says we’re going to stop funding, I’m waiting for okay, if this was providing restaurant meals to 30 million people, then surely, once the funding stops, we’re going to see lots of news reporting with people saying, hey, I went there and fed my kids there every day, and now it’s not there. It’s crickets. You don’t hear anything. Coupled with the character assassination that is being done by - in this case - the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of Minnesota, clearly, to me, they’re acting like guilty people. I don’t know if they’ve had a hand in, but unless there is a counter story factual, it is either incompetence at a level that I can’t comprehend, or it is graft and corruption that is being exposed. (Chris Bray: Yeah.) Other than that, you should have a defensible group of citizens that you’re providing these essential services to, and you’re doing it in an efficient way. There are only three things you can get out of this.
Chris Bray
It’s public money and you should be prepared to defend your use of public money when you’ve been elected to represent and serve the public. I think the response should not be attacking the messenger and trying to discredit the messenger instead of addressing the accusations and the evidence, [that] is the most telling behavior you can see. Sitting on the other side of the country I watched Tim Walz... do you know who Nathan Thurm is? (Rich Helppie: I don’t.) There was a Saturday Night Live episode probably 30 years ago, maybe 40 years ago at this point, with Martin Short. They did a fake 60 Minute episode where Nathan Thurm was a lawyer defending big tobacco. (Rich Helppie: Oh no.) Nathan Thurm was a Martin Short character who was very, very nervous and he was smoking a cigarette. As fake Mike Wallace questioned him, fake Mike Wallace was saying, like, Mr. Thurm, you seem very nervous today. And Nathan Thurm said, I’m not nervous, you’re nervous. Why are you being nervous? I look at Tim Walz and I see Nathan Thurm. I look at Tim Walz defending himself, not by saying, here’s how we’ve spent the money, here’s where we believe it’s gone, here’s how we’re checking, here’s a discussion of our system of oversight, but by an increasingly desperate - and what looks to me crazy way - attacking the messenger and summoning - it seems to me, you can talk me out of this, you’re closer to it - summoning disorder and rioting and encouraging people to create chaos in the streets. What I see watching someone like Tim Walz is he looks guilty to me. I would not say that I can prove he’s guilty. I cannot say that I can prove wrongdoing at this point, but I sure hope someone’s looking into it, because when you watch people speak, they tell you who they are.
Richard Helppie
A great outcome would be, we understand there are these reports out there, but I’ve got the executive director of the non-emergency medical transport here, and they’re going to tell you what they’ve been up to. Here are their call logs and their run logs. And we’ve got a couple of people that have been served by this, and we’re making a difference in people’s lives - even, we didn’t get the whole thing right, but here it is. When the sum total of the reaction is Donald Trump is president and it’s causing terrible problems because racism, something, something; okay, you’re not talking about the issue there. Before we go too far down the Minneapolis rabbit hole, I hope you’ll write more about this. What other stories do you see out there? You’ve done a great job, by the way, about being a little ahead of the curve and bringing to light things that other people then pick up, and that’s why I think people should subscribe to “Tell Me How This Ends” with Chris Bray on Substack. You can’t spend your money any better unless you want to be lied to by the established media ecosystem. But Chris, what other things are you looking at these days?
Chris Bray
One more thing, I talk about the epistemic crisis, I talk about the explosion of public money and how much you can’t see it, how much you can’t see where it’s going. I talk about the idea of recipe knowledge, the idea that if you want to achieve a particular outcome, you know what steps you have to perform, in what order you have to perform them in, to make something happen. So, for example, you know if you want to stabilize Afghanistan and prevent the emergence of a new al Qaeda and limit the Taliban’s authority over Afghanistan, the Taliban’s presence in Afghanistan, and you wage war in Afghanistan for 20 years, and then leave and the Taliban takes over the whole country, and the country is radically destabilized, you have demonstrated that we have institutions that don’t have recipe knowledge. They don’t know what steps to take to achieve the outcome they want to achieve. I see examples of institutions and elected officials, government officials without recipe knowledge everywhere I look in California. Gavin Newsom was the Lieutenant Governor of California before he was the governor, and he was the mayor of San Francisco before he was the lieutenant governor. I think it’s been close to 20 years now - it might be 15, I haven’t looked at this for a while - since Gavin Newsom announced his ten year plan to end homelessness in California, and homelessness in California just keeps getting worse. We have tens of thousands of homeless people just in Los Angeles County, homeless encampments everywhere, and we keep spending more and more money on it. We keep creating new tax measures to fund new anti-homelessness programs. Our mayors and our governor and our state legislators keep announcing their new plan to end homelessness, and it just keeps getting worse. To me as a general theme, the degree to which our institutions have recipe knowledge and can apply it, they can identify a problem, tell you what they’re going to do about it, and then the thing they do about it matters and does the thing they tell you it’s going to do; that decline of recipe knowledge strikes me as the maybe second - maybe first, with the explosion of spending and where it’s going - most important thing about how institutions are working in the United States. For example, as a comparison, when you see something like the capture of Maduro in Caracas with no American deaths - apparently a helicopter pilot badly wounded - but a 90 minute operation that succeeded with no Americans dying, and accomplished the task it was designed to accomplish, quickly, effectively and thoroughly. I see people now saying that Pete Hegseth is unqualified to be Secretary of Defense. He must be removed. We demand that he resign. But you look at what the military is doing and everything that it declares as a purpose seems to be working, operationally it seems to be better, recruiting is improving. The long standing American problem of the Navy declining and the Navy struggling with ship building, we seem to be moving toward a solution of that. The Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, introduced a plan to improve ship building. In institutions, I look for here’s what we’re going to do, here’s what the problem is, here’s what we’re going to do about it and then you wait a year and see if it worked, how much do our institutions know how to solve problems.
Richard Helppie
Look, you’ve articulated it. It comes down to leadership. We have an opportunity here in the state of Michigan, where Mike Duggan, who was a three term mayor of the city of Detroit, has a terrific track record: took the bankruptcy situation, resolved that with a governor from the opposite party, and the street lights are on, the parks are clean, the police department’s equipped going into the community for violence prevention, right down the line, just like, okay, I’m going to be a good steward, and we’re going to take care of stuff. Mike Duggan is now running for governor of the state of Michigan as an Independent. The fascinating part about this is the Republicans are attacking him, not because they didn’t think he did a good job in Detroit, but well, he’s just another Democrat. And the Democrats are attacking him, well, he’s got people that also supported Donald Trump that are also supporting him. But they say nothing about how Mike Duggan made a lot of progress in Detroit. Detroit, of course, still has issues, but when you look at what’s been accomplished, it’s very impressive. If he becomes the next Governor of Michigan, it could be a watershed moment. But I take note that Gavin Newsom - I’ve got quite a bit of experience with California - is not running on his track record. He’s running on hyperbole and insults and “aren’t I not Donald Trump?” The media ecosystem is picking it up and relaying it. I don’t get it.
Chris Bray
You used an important word in there. You talked about stewardship. You talked about the idea that if you are the mayor of a city, you have to be a steward for the city. You have to protect it and make it better than it was when you found it. I think there is a startling decline, an explosive decline, in the model of stewardship among our elected officials. I think we are seeing the Gavin Newsom performance, the Tim Walz performance, the elected office, as activism and TikTok performance model [which is] very much exceeding the model of stewardship and focusing on the thing itself, the place itself, and making it better. Particularly in California - being a Californian and watching the state in crushingly obvious ways decline - there is no way you can live in California and not see that the state is declining. I don’t know how we continue to move down a path in which elected officials have abandoned stewardship and they get away with it, and they keep getting re-elected.
Richard Helppie
Chris, do you think that maybe the decay of the media ecosystem lends itself to the people that we elect not doing their job? Think of the major newspapers of the day asking the same questions you’re asking – where has the money gone, Governor Newsom, how many billions to not build a rail line are we going to go down? I mean, I looked at the spin on that one recently, and it was, well, we’ve now prepared to be fixing, to begin to put in, the infrastructure that will one day lead to actual rails being put down, not to go from LA to San Francisco - I think Merced, some other place - but it was like so far away from actually even a rail, much less a train. But let’s spend another $300 billion of the taxpayers money and not do a thing. This is where, again, for my listeners, readers and viewers, please support independent journalists. “Tell Me How This Ends,” Chris Bray at Substack, The Common Bridge at Substack, lots of other good writers that we’re going to be featuring. Today I know that some of the targets that we’re talking about, they happen to be Democrats, but it doesn’t really matter, all of them have to be held accountable: Democrat, Republican, Independent, some type of third party. It’s not that hard of a concept. Taxpayer money in, services out, and we can probably get policies for everything: healthcare, firearms, infrastructure, immigration. Those are all solvable problems, but we have to get off the sound bite, TikTok hyper-partisanship. Chris, maybe one more story that you’re focusing in on. What can people expect to read from you in the coming weeks and months?
Chris Bray
I’m hoping to talk more about the rail project. I think we should talk about that a bit more, because I think it’s a perfect example of how the breakdown of real thing versus discourse about thing is working. And that’s the heart of what I’m trying to do is talk about the way that physical reality - and how we talk about physical reality - are becoming disconnected and breaking down. California voters approved that high speed rail project in 2008. We started active construction in 2015, so we’re in the 11th year of active construction, and Gavin Newsom is saying it’s great, it’s fantastic, it’s going so well. I think they’ve spent about $14 billion the last time I looked, and they think they need something like another $100 billion to finish it. But the high speed rail project that voters approved, that was supposed to be done by 2020, that was supposed to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco so you could ride between the two in a couple hours - as you say - has now turned into, well, maybe for $100 billion we can connect Bakersfield to Madeira or Merced - cities in the Central Valley. As Gavin Newsom was talking about that and holding press conferences to say, oh, it’s amazing, it’s brilliant, I went and walked around on it. I actually climbed up on the structures that they’ve built, the unsecured concrete structures. You can park next to them and go climb around on them. They’re not even that well fenced. So you can find places where you don’t have to jump a fence and walk up onto these $14 billion concrete structures. I showed with pictures and video, that there are concrete structures that are built in the middle of nowhere, isolated, that aren’t connected to anything, that don’t have rail, that have concrete structure, dirt, miles of dirt, new concrete structure, miles of dirt. You can take the hyperbole, you can take what politicians say is happening, and you can go look at it. You can actually just go look at something yourself. And so when Gavin Newsom says, “Oh, it’s great, our high speed rail is magnificent,” the framing and media is all, “Trump makes extreme claim that high speed rail is failing.” It’s about how bad Donald Trump is, that the Trump administration is declining to continue funding this rail. It’s an ideological conflict between Left and Right. And if you go look at the thing, if you go stand in Fresno and look at what they’ve built, it’s not an ideological conflict. The news says it’s an ideological conflict. The physical reality of the thing is that they’ve spent ten or 11 years and many billions of dollars building structures that are nowhere near functional, that are nowhere near being connected to a functioning system. If you put aside the fake ideological framing and go look at the physical thing, the physical thing doesn’t work and it isn’t going to work. The best case scenario is it might work in ten or 20 years with another $100 billion. And you can just go find out for yourself, you can actually go look into this stuff.
Richard Helppie
Going to Merced was something that the governor did not promote as a means of saying that that’s where taxpayer money should go. Merced is a fine place, but it’s not the place that we need to spend hundreds of billions to get to, if we ever get there. An active media could potentially hold the next governor accountable, or even this governor, and say, hey, you know what? We had this idea. We tried. It doesn’t work. We are going to stop now in the best interest of the taxpayers. I guess we’re coming full circle to where we started. It’s when the messenger is being attacked and when it’s going down along partisan lines, you know that things are lost, and that is something that both of us have been devoting our time, our energies, our profession to. Can we please get off the partisan divide and let’s start looking at reality. Chris, you’ve been generous with your time and with your knowledge. Again, please, I encourage everybody, if you go to The Common Bridge at substack.com or go to “Tell Me How This Ends” with Chris Bray at substack.com, there is lots more content for very, very little money. Most of our content is out there, just available, but this is a way to show your support for this march to a better future in journalism, which hopefully will lead to a better future in policy and in governance. So Chris, any closing thoughts for the listeners, the readers and the viewers of The Common Bridge?
Chris Bray
Use your eyes. Go look for yourself. Try to move past people’s interpretations and characterizations. When you see a public controversy being debated, try to go see. I think what Nick Shirley did is a model for how we should all behave. Here are all these government funded, alleged businesses, social services organizations providing medical care and medical transportation and child care. When you go stand in front of the place, is the business listed on the address where the checks go present in the building where that the address is? Go look. My entire message is, go look.
Richard Helppie
We’ve been joined today by Chris Bray, of “Tell Me How This Ends” at substack.com. With our guest, Chris Bray, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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