 It's November the 24th, 2021. It's Wednesday. It's 11 o'clock. That can mean only one thing. Time for What Now, America? I'm Tim Appichell, your host. And today's title is Trump plays white fear card for Kyle Rittenhouse. Back in 2008, John McCain lost the election to Barack Obama. And at that time, after that loss, the Republican National Committee did what is called an election analysis of the loss, otherwise known as an autopsy report for the election loss. And the primary thing that was discovered in that report was that the GOP needed to be a more inclusive, a bigger tent party to allow the inevitable demographics of minorities that are gaining population in this country. And if the GOP was expected to win future elections, they had to be more inclusive, more willing to allow minorities and platform policies and platforms that minorities would gravitate towards. Fast forward to 2016, Donald Trump just did the opposite. When he came down the escalator, no sooner opened his mouth and accused of Mexicans crossing the border that were rapists and drug dealers. He took the exact opposite tact. And as a result, he was successful. He wasn't trying to appeal to the existing voters. What he did is he attracted those voters who are sitting on the sidelines for years, maybe have never voted or voted maybe once a decade ago, but gave up on politics. He appealed to their sense of white fear and did so very successfully. And as a result, he won that election. And so now we fast forward to where we are today. And we're going to talk about the subject of how racism and white fear has entered the GOP and whether or not that is a basis of their platform. And that's perhaps why we are so polarized as a nation because it's not about politics. It's about white fear and racism. So with me today are my guests, Jay Fidel and Winston Welch. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Kim. You know, Jay, going to you like never before our politics is polarized. We have tribalism like we haven't seen since the Civil War. We have Donald Trump who has stoked, and we'll talk about the many examples, has stoked white fear amongst white voters. And to what degree, I think that these voters have allowed Donald Trump to get a free pass on deplorable behavior, his lies, and certainly the big lie that the election was stolen from him. To your opinion, to what degree has white fear or racism entered the GOP and is a mainstay of that party and why they're so oppositional to the Democrats? Not for socialism, but racism. To a large degree. I mean, they've replaced, to use that term, they've replaced the regular rank and file of the Republican Party who is now more than likely sitting on the sidelines. And the Republican Party is a misnomer. It's not the same party as it was. The question, and you and I have discussed this offline, the question is whether what Trump has done is doing, whether what the Republican Party is doing and turning itself inside out is sustainable in a country which is diverse and which is likely to become more diverse. So yeah, they can hold on. They can stop the flow adversity if that's what they wanna do. They can muck up the voting laws. They can do racist things. But at the end of the day, the country is diverse. And that is Trump's biggest, biggest mistake. He's an ignorant man. He doesn't understand the country. He doesn't understand the laws. He doesn't understand democracy. If he gets away with it, it will be a great travesty, a tragedy of enormous proportion. But he may not get away with it. Then the diversity that you speak of, Tim, may be the ruling factor. Maybe not sooner, maybe a little later, but whatever the voting laws are, a country which is diverse, which has people that will vote against racism, will ultimately return to democracy. Well, to that point is, you know, back in 2008, they said by demographics alone, the GOP is in for loss. It's going to be scheduled to lose elections. Is there any correlation between demographics and increasing minority population and the GOP's desperate hold to change election laws and to discourage minorities from voting? Is there any correlation to that? No, I think they're trying hard. And I also think the GOP is more sophisticated. And it was an article by David Brooks in the Atlantic a couple of days ago. Winston, I don't know if you sent that around, but I saw that. And David Brooks is usually, you know, a sort of mild mannered in his approach that when he appears on PBS NewsHour, he's mild mannered. He's sort of in the center. But this article was pretty scary. What he said was he went to the conservative meeting conference a few days ago and he talked to people and tried to understand where they were. And he found they were very sophisticated. They were wrong. They were off the wall, but they were sophisticated in their messaging. And it reminds me of Yonkin, you know, in what, Virginia. He was sophisticated in his messaging and saw the Republicans are more sophisticated now to avoid being tagged with Trump, to avoid being tagged as racist. And in a certain short or intermediate term, that sophisticated approach is gonna get them votes. But in the long term, as I said, as you said, the country is diverse and diversity will prevail. It may take a lot of pain and suffering. It may take some terrible election results. It may take the risk of autocracy, which we're engaged with right now. But at the end of the day, our strengths, if you will, and the future is in diversity. All right, just one last point. You know, Donald Trump, you know, he wasn't using a dog whistle. He was using a bullhorn on his racism. That was something we have never seen in the nation since, you know, the 1950s and 60s. It was really shocking to see it in this present day and age. Are we going back to the days of Yonkin using a dog whistle that only certain individuals can hear about racism? And is that gonna be embedded in the GOP moving forward? Or does the GOP say diversity and demographics is the future and we need to be a bigger tent party? Which way will the GOP move? Oh, I think the GOP is stuck. It's gonna take like a miracle to recover for the GOP. Recovery would mean, you know, opening the umbrella, but they're not likely to do that because their leadership, you know, they're all terrible people. So really what's I think has to be pronounced here is that Trump is, you know, you thought his comment after Charlottesville, you know, some good people and all that comment that he was only maybe mildly racist. He's rampantly racist, rampantly racist. His father was rampantly racist. All his life, he's been rampantly racist. And the people around him are rampantly racist. That's what attracts them. And the GOP, Marjorie Taylor, she's rampantly racist. And the message is gonna get out that they are. I mean, if it isn't out completely already. On the other hand, the country doesn't necessarily, when I say the country, I mean, the grand mass of the electorate doesn't really accept that. They see an uncomfortable disconnect at the least. I mean, look what happened in a trial in Georgia, Ahmad Arbery, that was a racist murder and the jury of other twists and turns we could discuss today. The jury found all three of those morons guilty of murder, which has a minimum sentence of life in Georgia. That's pretty serious. And the other is that the case where, I forget their names, but they went after, in a civil suit, was it Wisconsin? They went after these guys who were racist and got a $25 million verdict yesterday. That was the Charlottesville, South Carolina. Sorry, Charlottesville. Yeah, yeah. No, you're right. And the message there is that, as far as the jury is concerned, these are both jury trials and high-profile jury trials. And the message there was we don't tolerate racism. And to hear the lawyers talk about it, Dunn and Kaplan, I think, with their names, they made it clear that we're in a new time and the people of this country cannot tolerate that. And I think they speak for a huge number of people. The other thing is both of these cases send messages. They send messages. You wanna do a lynching with a shotgun, you're gonna have to pay the price. You wanna chase around and do racist murders, you're gonna have to pay the price. If you wanna do the Charlottesville thing and run cars through people and break up protesters that way, you're gonna pay the price. Furthermore, what it says is, if you all of you wanna be on the right side of things, you better shed the racism right now. It ain't working. And the people of this country are rising up against it. So we'll see what happens. I could be wrong, but- Well, okay, that's the point I wanna take to Winston. I wanna take your point to Winston, that is Donald Trump seemed to agitate and motivate those white voters that were disengaged in politics and he used the race card to do it. And it wasn't just the race card, he used the white fear race card, which is to say your race, your prominence in society in the United States is gonna be pushed aside and diminished. And if you don't do something about it now, wink, wink, you're gonna be on the losing end of politics and economic prosperity. And it worked. He got those that were apathetic to fully engaged in politics. And certainly not politics, but Trumpism. So the question is, all the tactics that Donald Trump used, the immigration caravans from South America and recently Haiti, the Muslim country ban, the Muslim countries that were forbidden to immigrate to United States, the comments about Charlottesville, good people on both sides, was that for the benefit of everyone in his party or those that just appealed to that type of dog whistle or in this case, bullhorn? Winston, the question is, how successful will that tactic be in the 2024 election, presidential election? Or are they gonna have to switch tack where it had a one-time pass and it's not gonna work again? Well, if they don't, they're on their last gasping breaths. And I was sort of heartened to hear Jay's optimistic prediction that diversity will win in the country in the long term. There may be some pains along the way, but it is a demographic fact. And when we look at the phenomenon of Donald Trump, this will extend beyond all of our lives and our grandchildren's lives. He was a unique player in a time. I can't quite understand it all the way because as we looked at election results in 2020, Donald Trump gained with minorities. He gained with blacks, with Hispanics, with even Muslims voters. So this is- Well, when you're at zero percent, it's easy to get some gains and percentage-wise. You know what, he got 18% of, I was just checking out of black male votes in the country, but those who voted, it's one out of six. So while we may hear something when Donald Trump talks, and that for us, we also can hear the dog whistle, or it's very plain, there's a good people on both sides type of argument. Other people, he speaks in very interesting ways so that you hear what you want to hear from him. And I think that's true. Most people do practice some sort of selective listening, but he speaks to a grievance politics. And it obviously on some level has transcended race, gender, age. As Jay was talking about, the article by David Brooks, which is an excellent article, and I would encourage our gentle viewer to definitely, we've been, I've been asking, and I think we've been asking on the show, what has been motivating, what motivates, what is the folks who have supported Donald Trump, or who are up and coming now in the right? Because this article takes it to the next level, and it says, where are we going from, where are the, what's the future of American conservatism? And the article is titled, The Terrifying Future of the American Right, what I saw at the National Conservatism Conference on November 18th. What he lays out is basically that there's three parts of American conservatism. There's the traditional conservative who's over 50 or 55, and they're turned off by certain elements, whether it's LGBTQ rights or race identity, or whatever it is on the left, which I guess we could have called grievance politics, but it's gone the other way, or identity politics. Then there's the career politicians, the Holley's, the Cruzes, the Rubios, who are just taking advantage of it and making outrageous statements, if you know that the left hates America, Democrats hate America, and they're just using that too. It doesn't really matter what they say. It's just read me to a crowd. And then his interesting part is that it's the young, that the largest segment is the young, and these are people that have been raised in a Facebook environment, who have gone to the Princeton's and the Harvard's and the Yale's, and they're, as he says, they're tired of having wolfism sort of shoved down their throats and identity politics, and they're rallying against it. And I think that it also is combined with this level of feeling, it's like this reverse oppression that since the powers and levers of culture and the economy are now combined, and you can be canceled, and you will be canceled, and corporate power, that there isn't one Fortune 500 company that doesn't have a robust diversity statement on its books. It just doesn't exist anymore. And the same with our media sources, which is why when we suggested there'd be a muzzle on Fox, Fox should be treated as entertainment, like wrestling or anything else, a motor derby. But the reality is people look for news, and that's the mistake. However, his article, David Brooks' article is spot on that says that these folks speak a language of grievance, of fear, and they're able to hit some things on the head that I think if the Republicans are smarge, they'll capture those things and say, okay, we don't wanna be canceled in our own sphere. The logical conclusion is that the state needs to step in here and regulate behavior, regulate our culture, our society, because we've lost it in the economic and cultural and corporate sphere, which I can, I understand, I mean, I've posted something to Facebook once, which got flagged as political speech. It wasn't political speech, it was a completely unrelated topic that I was just sharing an article on, but it had a word in it that people got excited about at Facebook, and they said, oh, we're not allowing this post. It was the boosted post. I said, this is not political at all, and they ended up taking it down, but those types of things were really, really irritating and spoke the right. Well, I appreciate you bringing up the specifics of that article, because I did read it and it was an excellent article, and you're right, if the GOP is smart, they'll take a few pointers from it and implement it. Jay, to what degree is the embedded white, fright, fear of minorities taking over and shoving them aside? To what degree is that manifesting itself in violence in our politics? The things that we've seen with the Rittenhouse trial and most recently, the Arboret Arboret trial. It's interesting in the Arboret trial, the prosecutor did not wanna bring up race and was concerned to bring it up to an all-white jury. And so that trial was, that conviction was one on the merits of vigilanteism versus racism. Well, we'll see if the feds take that up as a hate crime or not, but isn't that interesting that race did not really enter into the details of that prosecution? I don't forget, there's another trial beginning Friday, the same defendants, and it's a hate trial, hate murder trial in the federal court, which will be very interesting to follow. But I've convoluted my question, to what degree is all this manifesting itself in violence and the defense, if you will, vigilanteism and militias, to take a chapter of the Second Amendment, the right to form militias when the police can't defend you? That's absurd, but let me also offer this. In that regard, I think we have a lot of people in the country who are tending toward violence and receive violence. And we see violence, it pops up even in forms that are not anticipated. For example, was it Kenosha, the fellow who ran the car through all these people? He might have been on drugs, we don't know yet, but there's a lot of violence there, a lot of people died. It shades of the attack in Germany last year, where the terrorist drove his car into a crowd at Christmas, if you remember. But I think there are various things happening and we ought to connect those dots. For example, I don't know if I've told the two of you about my theory about the stock market. It's called the fatigue theory. And the fatigue theory works this way. The stock market goes up until it gets tired of going up. And when it gets tired, it goes down. And then it stays down for a while until it gets tired of being down and then it goes up. And I think if you look at humanity, I know that's simplistic, but if you look at humanity, look at this country, look at the social psychology of it. I think people have got to be getting tired of violence and divisiveness and pulling the rug out from under our norms and our democracy. They've got a certain number of people. It's always a demographic question and it's a numbers game. It's a percentages game. It's a survey game. But I think a lot of people have got to be getting tired of this. So that's a factor. And the other factor I was going to mention is Biden. There was another article this week. I think it was in the Atlantic yesterday, Molly John Fast, okay? And Molly John Fast writes about why, and this is something we have talked about here on this program. Why isn't Biden responding to the craziness that Trump is engaging in? Why doesn't he attack some of the nonsense that's coming out of their mouths? It's like he's a wallflower. He's an observer. He doesn't wanna get involved. He doesn't wanna take the risk of speaking on these things. He doesn't have to get in there with a meat ax. He doesn't have to lower himself to Trump's level. But he could comment on these things and say it's really awful what they're doing and attack them one at a time and ridicule them and stigmatize them and get out into the public sphere about pushback on what they are saying and doing. He's not doing that. And the recommendation of the article, and it would be my recommendation too, is, hey, don't be a wallflower. Don't be Mr. Nice Guy. Get rid of that persona. You have to be a fighter. You have to fight for us. You have to fight for the right. You have to be a hero and emulate heroes and heroism instead of just being this Marcus of Queensborough sort of president. We need more than that. And if he doesn't come up with that, he will lose. Yeah, no, we've talked about this in many shows and I think I'm right up there on the microphone saying, you know, you're aggressive. You guys can't just sit back and take it. Don't let your GOP define you. But you know, I remember also some earlier shows right after the election and certainly before inauguration of Biden that we also said, don't give Donald Trump any oxygen. Let's, you know, let him just deflate over time but that doesn't seem to be happening. So your point about standing up to him and at least making some comments to defend yourself I think are well in order. Yes, I agree. Well, that's the question, whether he's gonna do that. You know, I think of Ron Klain. Ron Klain, we've seen him on MSWC before the election. We know how smart he is. We know how cogent his thinking is and experienced. You know, he's been in the White House before but I see him as a valuable advisor. I'm waiting for Ron Klain to advise Biden accordingly. I'm waiting for his other advisors to advise him accordingly because I think his present course is not gonna work. It's not sustainable. He's gonna lose votes. Every mistake will be magnified. Every success will be quietly put under the rug. Should Biden address white fear tactics that Trump has instilled in the GOP? Should he address it proactively and just get it out there rather than skirt around it and ignore it? That's a complicated question. If you, Tim and I and Winston and Ron Klain were in the room just next to the Oval Office and we decided we had the power to recommend to Joe Biden what to do, yeah. That would be in our list of things to cover but it's not a matter of saying, don't respond to white fear. You can't tolerate white fear, you know. It's more sophisticated than that. It's nuanced and more nuanced than Trump could ever be. It's not dog whistle. It's just a nuanced way of putting things right, of talking about the norms and the ideals of the country, of talking about sustainability of a democracy, of talking about human rights for everybody in the country and the world. There's ways to communicate that without being gross about it. So if us guys with Ron Klain and whoever else advises him we're in that room next to the Oval Office, I'm sure we can find a more sophisticated way, more sophisticated than what Trump and Yonkin do to get that message out there and to accelerate the diversity process that I talked about earlier. All right, thank you, Jay. Winston, Jay just mentioned the word nuance. To what degree is critical race theory and the diminishment of the, again, white culture? Is that a nuance, a tactic that the GOP is using? Actually a tactic that's not being implemented. I don't know anyone, you know, educators saying they don't know anything about critical race theory being taught in schools. Is that just the wedge issue that's been contrived to tap into the white fear movement in the GOP? Well, it would seem like it. But again, you know, you've got this percentage of the population that's not white that is appealing. I'm guessing the Republicans are gonna try and broaden out, go to the rural voters more, the less educated. The whole critical race theory, it's teaching history as what it is. I was looking at just, as we look at the Sesame Street, look at the original cast of Sesame Street, then look at the cast now. And not that I watch Sesame Street a lot, but an article about how they had, this year I introduced a gay couple with I guess I think they adopted a daughter. But as I was looking on there, they have had autistic kids in there, kids explaining the parts of their wheelchair. They've had black characters from the very beginning. The diversity of our nation could be sort of said to be reflected in Sesame Street and how that's changed. And so that's critical race theory applied to a children's show, although children shouldn't be watching TV unless it's think tech. And even then, let's scare them. Basically at the end of the day, we talked about at Bill Biden needing to be more loud or obnoxious or whatnot. You know what? I never said obnoxious, it would be just the opposite. I will just say just louder and touting normality as values. But you know what? But what he's doing is touting normality. And I really encourage our viewers to read Dana Milbank's article in the Washington Post, be thankful that sanity has returned to America hyphen for now. And he says in this season of Thanksgiving, let us be grateful that some measure of calm and sanity has returned to the White House. The United States at least for now has a stable functioning government. The president is not making everything about himself nor creating chaos for its own sake. And I think that's really important. You know, the stock markets hit 50 record highs this year, 5 million new jobs, fastest economic growth in decades. We do have a pandemic, we do have a lot of issues, but things are happening. He's got a lot of attack dogs that he should release, whether it's the sort of charming and sophisticated Oshuk's Pete Buttigieg or if it's Kamala Harris who doesn't hesitate to mince words, either one of them do actually, he's got a lot of people, his press secretary is great. Basically, you know, we have Thanksgiving is tomorrow in this great nation of ours. We are moving towards a more perfect union. We at least have some glimmers of how we can deal with what's coming down the pike after Donald Trump while we're still dealing with Donald Trump. Maybe he's just gonna be Don the Don kingmaker or partial kingmaker or semi-kingmaker, but he's unleashed something. And the more we can grab that confronted and work with folks to assuage their fears and lift all of the votes as best as we can. You know, there's always, it's a great nation that we have this show and the ability to speak our minds clearly. And that's something that there's so many good things to be thankful for about this nation. I'm fully on the future of America. Jay is fully on the future of America. I think we all are, that's why we come on this show because we happen to give it up and nobody's giving up. We just need to find the better ways to communicate with each other and get back to common shared values, which I think most people hold together in this nation. 85% were on the same page. We just need to realize that. Thank you, Winston. I was gonna ask you for your closing remark as far as a Thanksgiving wish for our politics and our nation in the future. I think you've done it quite eloquently and I think you did perfectly. Thank you so much. Jay, your Thanksgiving wish for our politics in our nation, whether you believe that we're polarized or not, I think you do. Your Thanksgiving wish for moving forward. My wish is that Joe Biden use Thanksgiving in his bully pulpit to tell people, point by point, that article Winston, I saw that article also, point by point of what he's achieved in 10 months, it's really remarkable how he's put things right from where Trump was. Trump was gonna destroy us. He tried hard to destroy us, the country, and for that matter, by extension, the world. But Biden has put things right in that way in establishing a moral guardrails, returning to the norms, and he ought to spend a little time tooting his own horn. He ought to go through that list of successes and achievements, which are remarkable and make people aware because they're not aware. It's the old story. So what's in the Build Back Better Build? Nobody knows. He's gonna tell him. He's gonna tell him what he's done. And that's the beginning of a new not so Mr. Nice Guy kind of approach. And he should go from there, to to his own horn to make it clear that he is the president. He's got as much strength or more strength. He is as much a hero or much more of a hero than Trump could ever be, and that we should rally around him. And if you want the quote of the week, it was what the lawyer Kaplan said. And it touched me. The people of this country will not tolerate racism. That's what she said. And I think it's true. It resonates with a lot of people. Thank you, Jay. I can always depend on Winston and UJ for bringing to the table wise and sage and memorable comments on Think Tech Hawaii, what now America? It is Thanksgiving tomorrow. And I hope that those who get around the table realize that our politicians have told us what's wrong with our country. And it's my hope that we realize as we enjoy one's company and dinner around the table is that we realize what's great about our country. And if you do engage in politics and it gets down to the nitty and the gritty, remember, it's just that less, much less of Christmas presents you'll have to buy a month later. And with that, I'd like to say, join us next Wednesday at 11 o'clock for What Now America? I'm Tim Appichelle, your host, and we'll see you then. Aloha.