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Student-created content originally broadcast on Hillsdale College's student radio station, WRFH 101.7 FM.
Well, it's finally here. I'm so excited to be back with you. If you haven't listened, welcome to Hart on the Hill. If you have, welcome back. I am so excited to be back on this show talking to all of you about all of the things that are going on in politics, and all the things that I love to talk about so so so so much.
Micah Hart:If you're wondering where I've been, well, I haven't done an episode since last December. So this is my happy 2024 to you. But I was actually spending the semester in Washington DC, where I was interning and taking classes through Hillsdale College. It was a great opportunity. I am so blessed that I had the opportunity to go and study there and learn from some great people, do some great internship work.
Micah Hart:But I am so excited to be back in the studio, ready for this farewell season, my final season of Hart on the Hill. You did hear that right. It is that final season. I am very sad about it, but I am so excited that we have the next several months all the way until April, so we're not gonna think about it. We're gonna think all about the politics of our world.
Micah Hart:What's going on? There has been so much going on since I've been gone. I mean, I have wanted to sit in here and talk about this with you for so long. And I'm so happy that I finally get to say that I'm back and we're doing this. And we're gonna talk about all things politics.
Micah Hart:We're gonna go through today everything or as much of it as I can in this time what happened while I was gone. Because, unlike a normal show, I just wanna go through what we're seeing in politics because it's crazy. And for me to be gone at a time like that was so frustrating. I was always wanting to get back here and talk to you about what is going on? What are we doing?
Micah Hart:Where is our country headed? Because there's so much going on in our world and in our country more specifically that I think needs to be talked about, especially from a young voice. Somebody who is seeing it, was in DC, saw it, and is trying to figure out what's going on. Where do we go from here? So if you're new, this will not be like a normal episode.
Micah Hart:Don't worry about it. Next week, we'll be back to normal where I'll talk about the events of the the week, and talk about the news that happened, and explain them with some commentary. That's what I normally do. But for today, I wanna take a step back and look at where we've been, and then look forward for the year to come, and kind of give a overall view of where we are looking forward to, and what we've seen, and how we figure this all out, and we can do it together. So without further ado, this is Heart on the Hill, and this is the first season episode of the farewell season.
Micah Hart:I'm so excited. Well, first off, I just wanna start with looking at our last year. So let's think to what happened at the beginning of the year. We started out our year, politically speaking, with presidential primaries. We saw a huge amount of Republican candidates and, like, no Democrat candidates.
Micah Hart:There were obviously a few, but it was Joe Biden. Right? We all knew that. So I wanna talk about the Republicans for a second. We saw a lot of candidates contest former president Donald Trump.
Micah Hart:And I personally think that this was good. When you have political parties that have infighting within them during a primary, that is good and healthy. There should be discussion. It shouldn't be name calling, whatever that is. It should just be on policy.
Micah Hart:We disagree. We're all running. Let the voters decide. That is how elections should work in this country. I think the Democrats should have taken note on that.
Micah Hart:I mean, we'll get there in a minute and talk about all of that. But, look, when parties have these differences and they can work them out through the primary process, that is healthy. It's a good sign that a party is working through things. They're having policy disagreements. They're talking about it.
Micah Hart:I think we saw that we had on that stage, Asa Hutchinson, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy. We had Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis. Donald Trump was on the ballot. We had so many people on these ballots who had differing views on some things, foreign policy and others, but they all understand the fundamentals of their party, and that is healthy. Now after a primary is done, I do think there needs to be party unification, and I'm gonna get to that in a minute.
Micah Hart:But in these primaries, it is healthy what we saw. Now I also wanna now look at what happened after the primaries. So we saw that Trump won the nomination. So did Biden. Biden and Trump both got it.
Micah Hart:We all expected a redo of the 2020 election. Right? We all knew this was gonna happen. We all suspected it, and we were we were getting that. Right?
Micah Hart:But then we got the Trump and Biden debates, and I wanna spend a second on this because I watched the debate from Washington, DC, and I can tell you this. I was not surprised. I was not surprised how much the president was struggling. President Biden really struggled on that stage. He stumbled a lot.
Micah Hart:And I think Democrats saw what the American people have seen for the past three years. They finally woke up to it and saw, look what's going on. Look at the president. He's struggling. He can't do this for another 4 years.
Micah Hart:It's not fair to our country, and it's not fair to Joe Biden. It wasn't fair to put him through it. It's not fair to put our country through another 4 years of that. We need a strong leader more than ever right now. We see the chaos we've seen throughout the world.
Micah Hart:We see our chaos at home at the border. We see prices through the roof still. Our country needs a leader who can lead and be strong and be present. And Joe Biden showed that he couldn't do that. The debate made it very clear.
Micah Hart:And Trump Trump knocked it out of the park, in my opinion, in this debate by not talking a lot, letting Joe Biden do the talking and stumble and dig his own pit in that debate, dig his own pit of he can't get out of it now. He's stuck. His numbers are sinking. All of that. That was very good on Trump's part.
Micah Hart:And then after this, we had the former president, Donald Trump, got shot. Now I remember I was getting off an airplane when I heard this news, and it it just broke my heart. I mean, I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat or independent. Whatever ballot you take at the ballot box, I don't care what you are. We are Americans, and we are people at the end of the day.
Micah Hart:This is not about politics. It should never be about politics. This is about people. This is about people's lives, families. I don't care who you vote for.
Micah Hart:I think every person should realize this is dangerous, and this is really a sign of where our rhetoric has gone in this country in politics. Politics should never get to the point of this. It should never get here. We need to go back to a time when politics was civil. Politics was about policy.
Micah Hart:We didn't attack people. We talked about the ideas. The ideas that made this nation so amazing that have helped us grow as a nation, helped our people. Those are what politicians should be talking about, not name calling, not calling each other all these aggressive things that don't help but they divide. They don't do us good.
Micah Hart:They just hurt us. That's what our politics has been. And I thought maybe this was a turning point. Maybe we would move forward and move up where we would go back to just policy. But, again, the name calling continued.
Micah Hart:We had people representatives saying we should never have things like this happen. Good. Yeah. We should not wish ill on anyone, anyone at all. But then they go back and start name calling.
Micah Hart:That is ridiculous. We need to change the tone of politics in this country. We need to, and we need to do it now more than ever. We are so divided. And I think a lot of that is the media, is the rhetoric we see of that, is that we're being divided into 2 camps.
Micah Hart:But if we look at it at the end of the day, we agree on a lot more than we disagree on. And at the end of the day, the fundamentals of it, we are all people at the, at the end of it. We are all human beings who have hearts, who have souls, who have emotions, have feelings, have family, have friends. We have all these things in common, yet the media and politics tries to divide us. They try to put us into sides, so we go at each other, and we attack each other, and we call each other names.
Micah Hart:That is not the America we should be wanting for ourselves, for our kids, and for the future generations of proud American patriots. We should want better. We should expect better. So the former president got shot, and we had that right before on the heels of the RNC convention. So Republicans literally within the next day were getting ready to nominate officially nominate Trump as the nominee for the Republican Party.
Micah Hart:And after we had them all get there, everything was getting figured out, obviously, with what was gonna happen. Now the president former president, who's gonna be our nominee, he gets shot. What do you do? And the the the convention still went on. They still went on with it.
Micah Hart:They said, we gotta do this. And what I saw watching the convention was this. I saw unity. I saw some unity, glimmers of unity within the party, a party that had, as I said before, a rough primary where you had a lot of debating, a lot of party infighting. But you started to see that healing.
Micah Hart:You started to see people who ran against Trump in 2016, like Marco Rubio, get up there, support the former president. You had people from 2024, get up there, support the former president. People such as Nikki Haley, who was his last opponent left in the primary. People like Ron DeSantis, get up there and say, we're gonna support Trump. They did that.
Micah Hart:They said, look. We're putting telling our voters who voted for us in the primaries, go vote for the president former president. They got up there and did that because they understood they wanted a strong unified party. And they also knew that this was about more than more than themselves. It was about a party and making sure that Biden, Kamala Harris were not elected.
Micah Hart:At this point now, obviously, we get Biden dropping out and all of that ensuing as well. We get right after the convention, we are seeing chaos in the Democrat party now. So Republicans dealt with those early in the year. Democrats now dealing with it Kind of right now, just a few weeks ago, actually, we saw Biden drop out of the race, and chaos ensued. We saw a lot of confusion over what's gonna happen.
Micah Hart:Where are we gonna go from here on the Democrat side? And they ended up uniting behind Kamala Harris as their nominee. Now I'm not surprised about this. I I think that this was considerably reasonable to happen on this ticket. I think Kamala being the nominee also did not surprise me because, I mean, she was she is the vice president.
Micah Hart:She would be the next one up. It makes sense. But what concerns me about Biden dropping out and then Kamala Harris becoming the nominee is that she was selected and not elected. People didn't vote for her to be the top of the ticket when they went to the primary polls to vote. They voted for Joe Biden.
Micah Hart:And then all of a sudden, she just gets all the delegates because they all vote, do it online, do that, and then they have their convention. Right? I don't love that process. I think the American people need to decide. I don't care that she was on the vice president for that ticket.
Micah Hart:Really don't care at all. She should have to be selected or elected by the people. The Democrats who vote in the primaries have a right to have a say in this process, and I feel like that was kind of taken from them. I feel like they were not given the full opportunity, not all the candidates they could have heard from. I think there were other candidates who may have considered, but they all put their force behind Kamala Harris, which also does show party unity, I think.
Micah Hart:I think Democrats did a good job at uniting behind Kamala Harris. They said, yes. She's gonna be our nominee. We're getting behind her, and they got in line. They did a good job at getting in line and saying, we're gonna get this done by getting in line.
Micah Hart:And then we had the Democratic National Convention, which, well, I think was kind of a mess. I mean, we saw protesting, and we just saw a lot of division 2 there. I mean, there's a lot of contesting thoughts in the democrat base on Israel and what to do with that. And I think that kind of did shine through throughout the convention a bit, and I think that also shined shown through in Kamala Harris picking Tim Wells as her VP of who does she pick, what does she do, and she picked Tim Wells from Minnesota as her vice president. I think there was a lot of, chaos over what what where does the Democrat party go now?
Micah Hart:But they've seemed to really line in and try to get their message home, and they're fighting for Kamala Harris now. And they're they're really lining up for her and saying, we need to get her in. And I think if we look at the polls, to be quite honest, they're starting to narrow. They're starting to get closer. We're starting to see Democrats and Republicans be very close, where it might be a really close race for the house, senate, and presidency, which is what I'm thinking is going to obviously happen as we've seen in modern politics recently in every race we're seeing.
Micah Hart:So it's gonna be a really close one now. I think if it was Trump and Biden, it would have been very easy. Now it's a little different because I think also Kamala Harris' age. But what I want to tell Republicans right now, if you whoever's a Republican listening listen. Donald Trump needs to stop focusing on Kamala Harris' gender, all of that.
Micah Hart:I don't care about her gender, her race, any of that. That should not matter when you're voting or when you're talking to to the public. It should be what's her policy? What is she going to do? And I think it's very clear what she wants to do in this country.
Micah Hart:We don't have to go far as to just looking at the presidency of Joe Biden to see what she's going to do. If you look at her website, there's no policy. So let's just go with what the Biden administration, the Biden Harris administration has done or what they haven't done. I mean, go to the grocery store. You see the prices.
Micah Hart:You know. You go to the gas station. You see those prices. You know as well. You literally can just go to their foreign policy and see how failed it has been.
Micah Hart:Look what's gone on. In the last 3 years, we had a withdrawal from Afghanistan That was a mess. Horrible way to to remove troops to to get out of Afghanistan. Made us look like a laughingstock to the world. Showed our allies that we were just leaving.
Micah Hart:And what did it tell our enemies? It told our enemies we were weak. It told our enemies we were giving up and giving out. Let's look at Israel. Democrats are not consistent on Israel.
Micah Hart:We see what they've done in terms of their support, their lack thereof, kind of in in middle area for the Democrats. They don't really know what they're doing. They're not strong allies to Israel, who is quite literally our strongest ally in the Middle East, who is helping us against Iran, against Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas. We need Israel so so so much. And the Democrats are weak in the knees at that.
Micah Hart:They don't really know what they're doing. And then if you just look at the chaos that we've seen with Russia and Ukraine, we have concerns with China and Taiwan. You have to look at the foreign policy of this as well. You don't have to go far to look at Kamala Harris's record. Even though she is the new nominee, it's all right there.
Micah Hart:It's gonna be a second Biden administration. So I think that's what you need to look at when you're looking at this election. There is going to be a lot to cover on it because, obviously, we have a new candidate who just emerged from this field that was nonexistent because it was supposed to be Joe Biden. But now we gotta look at what do they do. I am not gonna get into who they are.
Micah Hart:I'm not going to. That's not what I do. I am a firm believer that we talk about policy and not people. We can talk about who they are a little bit and say, oh, I don't love their character, this or that. But we don't talk about anything about race, gender.
Micah Hart:I don't do that. That is not on the table. I'm gonna talk about policy. And this is what I'm noticing from Kamala Harris's policy slash Joe Biden's policy, failures on all these fronts. And I have to go back and look at Trump's policies as well, see what we like, what we don't like.
Micah Hart:I mean, we also see dangers at the border. What do we consider with those? I think at the end of the day, it's take a look at whose policies you align with most and go from there. That's what we need to do as people is look at policy, not people. Look at what's going on in this country.
Micah Hart:Why why is it harder for me to afford certain things? Or am I doing better off than I was 4 years ago looking and questioning about where to go from here? That's what the American people need to do. And I think American people are smart and that the American people know what needs to be done. I I trust the American people a great deal.
Micah Hart:I trust you a great deal to know what you need to do to to live your life, to do what you want to do. I think that we really need to consider where we go as a country, and I've already said this, but I think, for me that just means look we need to understand this is an election yeah it's important it's a really important election but at the end of the day we are people. It's one election. We move on. We move forward.
Micah Hart:We don't look back. We look to the future. We don't demonize one another. We don't call each other names. We support each other.
Micah Hart:We agree to disagree. We stand up for one another because that's the right thing to do. We don't hate one another. We support one another. We love one another.
Micah Hart:When tragedy strikes, we are there for one another, whether you're a Republican, Democrat, or an independent. That's the America I want. That's the America I think we can have. We just need leaders who allow us to do that, who bring us together, who don't divide us. We need American people who understand.
Micah Hart:At the end of the day, we are people. We're not our politics. We're people. We have feelings. We have emotions.
Micah Hart:We have likes. We have dislikes. We have family. We have friends. That's what we need at the end of the day.
Micah Hart:And that's why I think we can get at the end of the day. I just think we all need to hope and have hope and trust in each other. Nothing more. Just in each other knowing we're people and that we can get through this. We can do this as people.
Micah Hart:We're not as divided as we think we are. And I think that way, we can continue this beautiful experiment we call America. This beautiful concept of freedom and liberty and pursuing happiness. Because I believe in all of us. I believe in our country, and I believe in our ideals.
Micah Hart:And I believe the American spirit can continue to be strong and stronger than ever if we come together. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Heart on the Hill. I am, again, so fortunate to be back on the air talking to you, getting my feelings out there, and just explaining, I think, what our country needs to hear and what our country can hear. So thank you so much for tuning in. I'll be back next week with another episode of Hart on the Hill.
Micah Hart:Have a great day.