Episode 302- Seeing Clearly: Journalism Without Gatekeepers. With Chris Bray

What if the cure for our political fatigue is as simple as slowing down and looking at the evidence? We kick off a new series spotlighting Substack writers with journalist and historian Chris Bray, whose work strips away spin by linking directly to source documents, video and on-the-ground reporting. Together we map the contours of an epistemic crisis: the way one angle of footage becomes the entire narrative and how that snap judgment fuels outrage, policy mistakes, and deeper division.

From there we follow the money. California and Minnesota have seen explosive growth in public spending, but residents struggle to point to matching improvements. Bray walks through allegations of social services fraud in Minnesota and the telltale response from officials: attack the messenger rather than open the books. We lay out a simple test any listener can run—pull the budget, tour your streets, and compare the line items to what you can see and touch. If the numbers swell while services stall, demand receipts, logs and outcomes.

We dig into the loss of recipe knowledge inside institutions—grand goals with no workable steps. Homelessness plans multiply while encampments grow. The California high-speed rail, sold as an LA–SF link, stands today as scattered concrete in the Central Valley. Ignore the talking points and walk the site; steel either connects or it doesn’t. Yet there are bright spots: when mission and method align, defense operations and shipbuilding show what competent execution looks like. That is the path back to stewardship—leaders who measure progress, adjust, and deliver.

If you’re ready to trade hot takes for primary sources and performance politics for real results, this conversation is your starting point. Listen, share with a friend who cares about evidence, and leave a review to help more people find the show. Then tell us: what should we verify next?

Transcript

Kicking Off The Substack Series

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to season seven of the Common Bridge, hosted by Richard Helpie, a leading analyst, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. Now expanded with healthcare, education, finance, science, and world affairs bridges, the podcast, now in its seventh season, with an audience of over 7 million worldwide, explores issues in a fiercely nonpartisan way. Find us at the Common Bridge at Substack.com, YouTube, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Why Legacy Media Lost The Plot

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Hello, welcome to the Common Bridge. I'm your host, Rich Helpie. 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 that 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. And everybody that's been upset about an event of the recent days knows that. Yeah, it might be comforting to some, but most of us just want real information and good straight reporting. And so we've got with us today a returning guest to the Common Bridge, the author of the Substack page. Tell me how this ends from Southern California. Welcome back, Chris Bray. Chris, it is good to see you. How are you? Doing great. How are you? Chris is a very qualified journalist, amongst 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. So I'm going to encourage everybody here to subscribe to Chris Bray because he doesn't have a Washington Post behind him. So I think this is a way for citizenry to let people know what they would like to get in terms of real reporting. And 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, you know, something like old school, like, hey, uh,$2 suggested retail price. You can send a Zell to Rich at Richardhelpie.com or a Venmo to at RichardHyfen C, the letter C Bridge. All right. Well, that's enough for promotion for the Common Bridge. And 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.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Sure. Two things. I have to say that I wasn't uh artillery, I was infantry. Um point of pride. Um and second, I I was uh I freelanced for the Washington Post for about 10 years. Uh 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, and I really enjoyed it. I I freelanced for a lot of people 20 and 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, and 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. Uh, and people, editors who had been happy to give me things, have 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. And I also I got a PhD in history at UCLA, and I was going to going to work in academia as an alternative to the decline of legacy media and traditional media. And I feel like I managed to walk into two cultures that were dying at the same time. I managed to jump from from dying legacy media to declining academia. So uh everywhere I go, cultural death follows. I I probably weren't Substack about that.

Chris Bray’s Background And Standards

SPEAKER_02 4:33

And your Substack, tell me how this ends is the title. Uh you know, look, I unabashedly say that Chris is my favorite writer on Substack, and there's some others that are close seconds and thirds and and the like, but he has a great way of phrasing, framing things, and also he'll show you where he gets his sources, and he's you know bulletproof in terms of his rigor that he puts into it. Let's show the legacy media infrastructure what we want as citizenry. So, Chris, what do you think the top three issues are that you're writing about or that need reporting, and maybe what we're not getting the full or the accurate story out of legacy media? What would you, and I know there's a lot of you write on a lot of topics, but what would be the top two or three?

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Let me say before I answer that, uh, very briefly, that you 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's 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. And when 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 and this week uh I've seen a million examples because uh I've seen a bunch of uh of headlines saying Ice Officer guns down woman in 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 they're probably when someone can show you something and they don't, they're probably trying to mislead you.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

Look, I would also just amplify that like this. If you read something that is a conclusion, that that is indication that you're trying to be dragged one direction or the other. By way of example, just in recent days, I saw someone citing a law that Tim Walls was supposedly violating. So I went and read the law, and it's like, no, they they really mischaracterized what the current governor of Minnesota is doing. Similarly, earlier this week or I released a column about the situation in Minnesota, and I 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. And I put a link in 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? 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. And again, I invite those of you that are the podcast listeners to the common bridge, consider subscribing over at Substack, and 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?

Show The Sources, Not The Spin

SPEAKER_01 8:32

The big one, the place I start, and and 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 Gooden 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 and uh description, I mean, 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 um 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 the origins and the causes of it before we can get out of it, before we can clear it.

SPEAKER_02 9:38

It's the disease of the hot take. And look, I was watching a college football game the other night, and there it looked like, oh, it's a touchdown. Well, wait, we're going to pause and review this from half a dozen different camera angles, and we're gonna slow it down, and we're gonna go frame by frame, and we're gonna 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. 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 a hundred percent with you on please, folks, pause, get the facts, and generally, the faster something comes out driving you to a conclusion, the more wrong it is.

The Epistemic Crisis Of Perception

SPEAKER_01 10:29

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. And I think it's it's breathtakingly irresponsible. And uh ugly behavior, destructive behavior. The second thing I think for me as as uh someone who lives in California, I think watching the explosion of, and I 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 10 years ago. State of Minnesota is spending much more money than it was spending, even adjusted for inflation 10 years ago. There have been there's been explosive growth in government spending. And my argument to people like 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, you know, much better infrastructure, way more parks, many more fire stations, if you're getting more services, and if you're not, and I live in California and I can tell you very clearly that we are not, and 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 10 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, and you need to think about where that extra money is going. So when I look at Minnesota, and Tim Walls, 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 uh about Somali's social services fraud in Minnesota. Uh, 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, 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, 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. And I think that's something we urgently need to ask people to do.

SPEAKER_02 14:05

If I may just interject, just uh 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, uh Dave, whose name uh David Hoke, H O C H, 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 uh empty fields, it's a house. If the policy response is we're gonna 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 gonna 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 uh 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 counterstory factual, it is either incompetence at a level that I can't comprehend, or it is graft and corruption that is being exposed.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

Other than that, that's 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. It's only three things you can get out of this.

Politicians’ Hot Takes And Harm

SPEAKER_01 15:52

And 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. The response should not be I I think the response of attacking the messenger and trying to discredit the messenger instead of addressing the accusations and the evidence is the most telling behavior you can see. I I frank, sitting on the other side of the country, I watched Tim Walls. Do you know who Nathan Therm is? I don't. There was a Saturday night live episode, probably 30 years ago, maybe, maybe 40 years ago at this point, with Martin Short. They did a fake 60-minute episode, uh, 60 Minutes episode where Nathan Thorm was a lawyer defending the uh the defending big tobacco. Oh no. And Nathan Thorm was a Martin Short character who was very, very nervous and he was smoking a cigarette. And as Mike Wallace, as fake Mike Wallace questioned him, you know, Mike fake Mike Wallace was saying, like, Mr. Thurm, you seem very nervous today. And Nathan Thurm said, uh, I'm not nervous, you're nervous. Why are you being nervous? I look at Tim Wallace and I see Nathan Thurm. I look at Tim Walls um defending himself, not by saying, Here's how we've spent the money, here's how where we believe it's gone, here's how we're checking, here's a discussion of our system of oversight, but by in increasingly desperate and what looks to me crazy ways, attacking the messenger and and summoning, I 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 Walls is a it he looks guilty to me. I I would not say that I can prove he's guilty. I cannot say that I 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.

Spending Explodes, Services Don’t

SPEAKER_02 17:50

A great outcome would be we understand there's these reports out there, but I've got the executive director of the non-emergency medical transport here, and they're gonna tell you what they've been up to. And here's 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. And even, you know, we didn't get the whole thing right, but here it is. And when the sum total of the reaction is Donald Trump's president and it's causing terrible problems because racism, something, something, you know. I 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? And 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 will end 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?

SPEAKER_01 19:10

One more thing. I, you know, I talk about the epistemic crisis, I talk about uh the explosion of public money and 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 and 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 uh 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, uh, 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 uh for a while since Gavin Newsom announced his 10-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 uh anti-homelessness programs. Our mayors and our governor and our state legislators keep announcing their new plan, excuse me, to end homelessness, and it just keeps getting worse. And 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, the most important thing about uh how institutions are working in the United States. And for example, as a comparison, when you see something like uh the capture of Maduro in Caracas with no American uh no American deaths, apparently a helicopter uh pilot badly wounded, but it a 90-minute operation that succeeded with no Americans dying and uh accomplished the task it was designed to accomplish quickly, effectively, and thoroughly. I I see people now absolutely constantly saying uh saying that Pete Heggsath is unqualified to be Secretary of Defense and he must be removed. Uh, 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 uh the Navy declining and the Navy struggling with shipbuilding, we seem to be moving toward a solution of that. The Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, uh introduced a plan to improve shipbuilding. I look for in institutions, here's what we're gonna do, here's what the problem is, here's what we're gonna do about it. And then you wait a year and see if it worked. How much do how much do our institutions know how to solve problems?

Minnesota Fraud Allegations Examined

SPEAKER_02 22:38

You look you've articulated it comes down to leadership, and uh 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 departments equipped, going into the community for violence prevention, right down the line, just like, okay, I'm gonna be a good steward and we're gonna take care of stuff. Mike Duggan is now running for governor of the state of Michigan as an independent. And the fascinating part about this, the Republicans are attacking him not because they didn't think he did a good job in Detroit, but well, he he'll 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 nothing about 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. And, you know, I could, if he becomes the next governor of Michigan, it could be a watershed moment. But I take note that Gavin Newsome, and 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? And that media ecosystem is picking it up and relaying it. I don't get it.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

You used an important word in there. You talked about uh stewardship. You talked about the idea that that if you are the mayor of a city, you have to be a steward for the city, you have to protect it and and uh make it better than it was when you found it. And I think there is a startling decline, an explosive decline in the model of stewardship among our elected officials. I think we we're seeing the Gavin Newsom performance, the Tim Walls performance, the the elected office as activism and TikTok performance model very much exceeding the model of stewardship and and focusing on the thing itself, the place itself, and making it better. And it I I don't know, 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.

SPEAKER_02 25:24

You know, Chris, do you think that maybe the decay of the media ecosystem lends itself to the people that we elect not doing their job? You know, think if the you know major newspapers of the day asked the same questions you're asking. All right, where's the money gone, Governor Newsom? How many billions to not build a rail line are we gonna 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, but I think Merced, some other place. Yeah, 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, 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. It's 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. That's all solvable problems, but we have to get off the soundbite, TikTok, hyperpartisanship. Chris, what other, maybe one more story that you're focusing in on? What can people expect to read from you in the coming weeks and months?

Accountability Versus Attacking Messengers

SPEAKER_01 27:36

I mean, I I'm hoping to talk more about the rail project. And 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, you know, oh, 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, we can connect Bakersfield to Madeira, Madeira or Merced, cities in the Central Valley. I went as Gavin Newsom was talking about that and holding press conferences to say it, 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. And I showed with pictures and video that there are concrete structures that are sort of built in the middle of nowhere, isolated, that aren't connected to anything, that don't have rail, that that 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 our high-speed rail is magnificent. The framing in media is all Trump makes extreme claim that high-speed rail is is failing. It's about how bad Donald Trump is, that that he's 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 10 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 10 or 20 years with another hundred billion dollars. And you can just go find out for yourself. You can actually go look into this stuff.

Recipe Knowledge And Institutional Failure

SPEAKER_02 30:57

Going to Merced was something that the governor did not promote as a way, uh a means of saying that that's where taxpayer money should go. Um 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. A 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. And 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. And again, I please encourage everybody if you go to thecommonbridge.substack.com or go to tell me how this ends with Chris Bray at Substack.com. Lots more content for very, very little money, but 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.

SPEAKER_01 32:41

Use your eyes, go look for yourself, try to move past people's interpretations and characterizations. And and when you see a public controversy being debated, try to go see. Just I I think what Nick Shirley did is uh a model for how we should all behave. Here's uh here are all these government-funded, alleged businesses, uh social services organizations providing medical care and medical transportation and child care. When you go stand in front of the place, is the business uh is the business listed on the address where the checks go present in the building where that the address is for? Go look. I my my entire message is go look.

SPEAKER_02 33:26

We've been joined today by Chris Bray of Tell MeHow This Ends at Substack.com with our guest, Chris Bray. This is your host, Rich Helpie, signing off on the Common Bridge.

SPEAKER_00 33:39

Thank you for joining us on the Common Bridge, where we continue to seek clarity across divided lines. Subscribe and support the Common Bridge on Substack, YouTube, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Until next time, we invite you to stay informed, stay engaged, and help build a bridge of common understanding.