The Fred and Joe Show: Can These Two Guys Help America Heal?

Last night, @WalshFreedom and I hosted a community forum at Dominican University in Chicago for out Two Dads Defending Democracy tour. We disagree on many things, but we have become friends because of our disagreements. What we both agree on is the need for civility and voting. pic.twitter.com/3QVlSIAzgx

— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) April 10, 2024

They call themselves “Two Dads Defending Democracy.” They’re now on the road with the message that if an unlikely duo like them can become good buddies, there’s hope for the rest of us and, by extension, for our country.

With time and determination, they’ve found common ground on one of the most intractable issues in our country, and they hold up their example as evidence of how democracy can work when people are willing to listen to and learn from those with whom they disagree.

Fred Guttenberg came to prominence in the most horrific way imaginable. His beloved daughter Jaime, a beautiful and talented fourteen-year-old, was one of seventeen students and staff murdered in 2018 in the Marjorie Stoneham Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Until then apolitical, Guttenberg transformed himself into a gun safety activist, lobbying and lecturing primarily for this cause. He founded an organization titled Orange Ribbons for Gun Safety, which seeks universal background checks for the sale of ammunition. He also wrote a book, American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence, with Thomas Gabor, PhD, a criminologist.

Through Orange Ribbons for Gun Safety, Guttenberg advocates for a new law, which was introduced in Congress in 2019 by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Ct) and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-FL). The American Background Check Act, if enacted, would implement instant universal background checks for the sale of gun ammunition. It would be referred to as “Jaime’s Law.”

On several occasions, I’ve watched Guttenberg being interviewed, always with a gorgeous backdrop photo of his daughter, caught forever in what looks like a professionally balletic dance pose, and my tears have descended each time. How does a parent ever get over the anger and the terrible sense of loss?

Guttenberg has found his way, and he told an interviewer for Time that he has stopped talking about Jaime in the past tense. He’s still the parent of two: he has a son, now age 23, with whom his life is rich in the present; while his life with Jaime is rich in memories that drive his actions in the present to prevent other parents from suffering as he has.

Joe Walsh’s persona is embedded in my brain as the member of Congress who shouted at President Obama “You lie” when the president was speaking about health care. (This bad behavior was shocking at the time, indicating how much our political discourse has deteriorated since then.)

[CORRECTION: I mixed up my outrageous Republicans, two Joes whose last names begin with W and who both accused Obama of lying. It was Joe Wilson of South Carolina, not Joe Walsh of Illinois, who yelled “You lie!” at President Obama. SEE *NOTE BELOW.]

Walsh was elected to the House of Representatives in 2011 as a Tea Party Republican insurgent from Illinois. He subsequently claimed Obama was lying about the deficit—and, what’s more—the president was a Muslim. Walsh served only one term in Congress. He still describes himself as “a rabid gun rights advocate.”

But by 2019, as a conservative radio talk show host, he was apologizing for his past behavior and verbiage, which he said contributed to Trump’s election. In a New York Times Op Ed, he appealed for another Republican to step up to oppose Trump, acknowledging that

“In Mr. Trump, I see the worst and ugliest iteration of views I expressed for the better part of a decade…At times, I expressed hate for my political opponents. We now see where this can lead. There’s no place in our politics for personal attacks like that, and I regret making them.”

When no one responded to his call for a Trump primary opponent, he declared his own candidacy, which of course went nowhere.

For the most part, Walsh retains his conservative views about government, which he espouses on a podcast called “White Flag with Joe Walsh.” But in podcast #372, “We can’t be free without tolerance,” he says one of our responsibilities in a free country is to accept the truth that there are people who espouse views different from your own–even if you don’t agree with what they espouse “to make this free society work.”

The Guttenberg/Walsh unlikely friendship began in an unlikely place: Twitter, shortly after the Parkland shooting. Not surprisingly, they haggled over gun policy with unproductive personal attacks. (It’s hard for me to see how Walsh, who then appeared to be having a personal epiphany, could have allowed himself to attack a man who’d so recently lost his daughter, but apparently there were limits to his conversion at that time.)

Walsh has said:

“We really went after each other. Five years ago, Fred and I were doing what most of America is doing now.”

But something had changed. Guttenberg had begun circulating a pledge among political leaders stating that they would oppose gun violence and support gun safety legislation. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough noticed their Twitter battles and invited them to come on his show, Morning Joe, to continue their debate.

Walsh had clearly been paying attention to what Guttenberg had been saying. On that show, Walsh said he still disagreed with everything Guttenberg wanted to do, but he agreed with his overall goal to maximize gun safety and wanted to support the initiative.

“I’m gonna sign it,” he said on the show, and his signature became the first on the petition.

They moved their discussions offline and found that they had a great deal in common—even with regard to gun violence.

Guttenberg said that although Walsh and others had been quick to demonize him as the monster who wanted to take their guns away, that was never his intention. Pointing to the statistics—four hundred million weapons in circulation, more than twenty-five percent of them AR-15s—he said the need for greater gun safety is clear.

Several safety restrictions were passed by bipartisan vote in the Florida legislature after Parkland, he notes, and no Republicans who supported them suffered politically as a result.

The ardently pro-gun Walsh said on a podcast in March that “ninety-nine percent of gun owners are responsible people,” adding “all the gun violence has given us a bad name, and I’m sick of it.” He concurs about legislation designed to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong buyers—such as universal background checks.

But Walsh says as a student of history who’s taught history, he’s very protective of the rights guaranteed in the the first, second, third, and fourth amendments. He expressed concerns about how to draft red flag laws so they wouldn’t be unduly intrusive.

He also stated that none of those guaranteed rights is absolute—an indication, to me, that he’s open to additional changes in legislation.

He and Guttenberg continue to disagree about some aspects of gun safety, including raising the age of gun ownership to 21 (which passed in Florida) and arming teachers, but they are willing to extend their debate on these and other issues.

Their point is that they’ve both been changed by their discussions and the friendship that’s evolved. On the podcast linked to above, Walsh called Guttenberg his “hero.” Guttenberg said he’d regarded Walsh as a “lunatic who tried to demonize everything because he thought I wanted to take his guns away,” but now “I love the guy; he’s one of my close friends.”

And they concluded that if they—polar opposites in nearly all things political—could surmount all their differences and become friends, perhaps that was a message worth sharing widely.

Walsh observed:

“It said a lot when these two knuckleheads went on national TV to try to do something about gun violence and were willing to put their names on the same piece of paper.”

Beyond gun violence, the overarching point about which they agree is democracy. For that reason, they both support Biden. Guttenberg is an enthusiastic supporter who often praises Biden; Walsh is a Never Trumper who says “I come from MAGA; I talk to MAGA people every day.”

As “Two Dads for Democracy,” they are speaking at college campuses around the country—and in view of the roiling crisis involving pro-Palestinian protests, it appears this effort is unfolding not a moment too soon.

Their opening event occurred on February 21 at the University of Delaware. It was part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Ithaca Initiative, a pilot program at the university’s Biden School of Public Policy & Administration that’s designed to encourage college students nationally to meet and “discuss, debate, and develop policy solutions that would benefit from bi-partisan collaboration.”

Not incidentally, the chair of the Biden Institute is Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens. In her introduction to the discussion, she said of Guttenberg and Walsh:

“These two are modeling how to respectfully have a dialogue with [those with] whom you disagree. We need to equip the next generation with skills to handle divisive issues in the public square.”

In their talk, both men stressed how important it is that young people vote in the November election—while being respectful of those on opposing sides. Somehow, despite their strong agreement that Trump must be defeated, their intention is to keep these discussions bipartisan and not give directives about candidates.

Guttenberg told the audience:

“Hate gets media coverage, and that’s not where we should be as a country. The majority of us need to see that it’s OK to have real conversations and come out and vote against hatred.”

Walsh stressed during their talk something I’ve heard him say since: as long as the kind of demonization of the opposition that so many of us have fallen into continues, our democracy will be in trouble.

Guttenberg said:

“It’s easy to talk to people when you agree, but it’s necessary and important to find common ground with those you don’t. That’s how change happens.”

And that’s how these two men–once fierce adversaries, now the best of friends–see democracy flourishing.

Annie

*NOTE: Thanks to eagle-eyed reader friend and reliable political historian ali register & vote! redford for correcting the record. Joe Wilson (R-SC) was the House member who yelled “You lie!” at President Biden–in 2009–at a joint session of Congress, before Joe Walsh was in Congress. Wilson subsequently apologized to Obama, who graciously accepted his apology.

According to The New York Times (April 11, 2017), Wilson got a taste of his own medicine at a town hall meeting in 2017 when constituents who were angry about his response to a question about Obamacare yelled “You lie!” at him.

Joe Wilson remains in his Congressional seat.