 This is Think Tech Hawaii, and this show you're watching is Politics for the People. I'm your host Stephanie Stoll Dalton. Our topic today is coming soon, possibly dystopian America. We are beginning with a brief video on our title topic. With our panel of Jay Fidel, Tim Apichella and Winston Weller, Stensay. To him, do American politics justify the points made in the video, or is it hyperbole, Jay? What do you think? I think you think about it, it's not hyperbole. You know, connect the dots every day, see little flashes of optimistic light, and I'm sure that we can find some of those. But the long haul on this, not to use the COVID term, the long look at it is that we're going down. Our democracy is going down, our healthcare is going down, our economy is going down. We have a bubble going on in the stock market, but it's only a bubble. And our, you know, the divisiveness in our country is a, it's a permanent thing already. It's going to go, you know, I always like to say that, you know, that we have a political virus too. And the political virus is going to turn endemic. So at the end of, you know, the pandemic, the political pandemic, which we're in right now will have an endemic political problem. And that will be, you know, a dystopia. I mean, the first thing that happens is that we have a change in government to the GOP, and we can imagine what that's going to be like. And then there's going to be pushback on that. And that'll be in the street. And then we'll wind up with a sort of an endemic condition. And the endemic condition will be a change in our quality of life. And really the great inquiry, if you make assumption on all those things, the great inquiry is what will that be like? Will you be able to get a dentist and a doctor? Will there be food on the shelves? Will the tax department treat you fairly? Will, you know, the regular services provided by government be available? Will the regular protections provided by government be available? What will our lives be like? It's out of a science fiction movie, I know, but we're in a trend, a transformation right now. I'm going to say transition. It's not a transition. It's a transformation. We've enjoyed a wonderful time under the cover of our democracy, all our lives, but there's no reason to make the grand assumption that it is so resilient that it will continue with all of these factors that are undermining it right now. And the big question to me, and I think it's more than an intellectual exercise, is what will that be like? It's coming soon. Thank you. That is chilling. Tim, as Jay says, we're in a political virus as well. Do you think that with the likelihood of a change in government from the Democrats to the public and control as is predicted on the media, and it is only a prediction, do you think that this scenario is likely given that predicted change in government? The question is centered around a prediction. And I'm reminded of the old Charles Dickens play, A Christmas Carol. And in that play, in that book, and in the movies, the very end Scrooge is being shown his future and the demise of his life. And he asks the spirit, are the things that you show me things that will be or things that may be? And I hate to say it, but we've already predicted the demise of the loss of the House from the Democrats to the Republicans. And with that goes the Senate. And I'm not sure I'm 100% behind that. The gerrymandering process has worked out far better for the Democrats than initially thought. And you know, there is something called, you know, if you think therefore you are, and I think we have to not necessarily give up on the fact that the House could be retained. And I think they do it under the guise of democracy should triumph, not GOP, steal, steal the elections, steal the vote. And the geo platform, which there is no platform, the Democrats will have a platform, they'll have a go, they'll have ideals and policies that independent voters and Democrats and those dissatisfied Republicans can get their arms around. So yeah, I know the show's about dystopian future, but it ain't over until it's over. Well, all right, a little more optimistic there, Tim. Thank you. Winston, what do you think Republicans would say after viewing this video? Well, they're probably going to not appreciate it because they're specifically called out in the video. But if you could say that given just the state of our politics, this is a possible likely scenario. And I appreciate that. I don't think it's a chicken little scenario either. I think it's a real possibility that we could be facing here. However, I'm going to err on the side of cautious optimism. Like Tim said, it is a Scrooge thing. It is a possible scenario. And what this video shows us is indeed what is pretending to be a sort of a grim state coming down. And how would that come about? And how does it bleed through? But Jay's right. Are you going to be treated by the tax authorities fairly? Are police going to be following you because they're under directives? Because you appear on ThinkTech and they're looking to pull you over and throw you into the reeducation camp in Utah, or whatever it is. These are all things, and I love the dystopian movies as much as anybody else. I think they provide us actually a roadmap of where we don't need to go and how things fall apart. That said, what we really need to do now is take that video and every single slide in it and come up with the antidote. What is the antidote to this, that, or the other? And I think the Republicans or the Democrats, both, let's just take out their names and say, no one has a vested interest in this happening. And there has been a stranglehold on the use of what we used to call Republicans. That may be lessening. Let's see what happens. I thought it was, it's just interesting to see Joe Biden talking about the Senate in really sort of sad terms. It's just a shell of what it used to be. It's not what you want to hear coming from the mouth of the president. And then an hour before he was supposed to go before the Senator or to give a talk about his democratic reforms today, then Kristen's system comes out and says, I won't support any filibuster reduction. And she could have waited until after his speech at a minimum. We all know where she stood on this. But his message, and I think there's what she and let's just assume that Joe Manchin are on the side of right and that they're worried about what a future minority status party might mean for the Democrats. However, that said, I wonder if the tables were reversed here if every advantage wouldn't be taken and the filibuster broken if it could be. Let's not forget that Mitch McConnell pushed through would not allow Barack Obama's Supreme Court justice to be nominated in the last year of his term, but had no problem pushing through one in the last three months of Donald Trump's presidency. Good point, Winston. Well, let's take your notion of an antidote for all of the points made in the film in the video and go to Tim and say, what's an example of an antidote for free press rooted out? Oh, my favorite topic. Jay and I have talked about this a hundred times. I want to see government regulation to differentiate the difference between real news versus commentary and editorial. I want to see the editorial desk, you know, 20 feet away from the news reporting. And I think if that occurs, people start watching the news again and start accepting the facts of the news rather than being filtered through a Tucker Carlson or a Sean Hannity type personality, and they can't distinguish between fact and opinion and the filtering of the news. And if we start doing that, that's a good step forward to kind of reduce the temperature of our polarization and our disagreements with one another. Tim, is the Walter Cronkite scenario of the past the sort of thing? And I don't think there's anything that can prevent it from being enforced. We talked about infringements on the First Amendment, but it's just, again, when opinion can now shape facts, and those facts are literally killing thousands of Americans by misinformation of COVID or facts that create insurrection and sedition, then the media is being used as a tool of propaganda and is not for the good of the public. And therefore, the government should be able to come in and say, no, we're going to put a firewall between news and commentary. You can comment all you want. You can offer opinions all you want. You're just not going to do it in the same five sentences as a news story fact. Okay, yeah. Good border of the screen for that. Okay. Well, Jay, do you think that the video does a good job of differentiating the democratic and the autocratic kinds of government is basically the first question? And if you do, do you think that most Americans know the difference? Oh, no. I think we have 300 and some odd million people who don't know the difference. They didn't learn it in school and not learning it now. There was a very interesting piece on CNN last week where they paralleled clips from what Trump was doing and the GOP is doing now with what Adolf Hitler was doing. And it was very chilling. We've all heard that comparison made before, but in this case, they showed you step by step about how we're proceeding down the same road he was proceeding. Every country, even countries that have great democratic experiments going on, is subject to the same kind of human frailty. And we are finding that out. There's nothing that guarantees us the continuation of our democracy. Germany was a democracy at the end of World War I. And Hindenburg was his name and he was well liked, but Hitler found ways to replace him. And at the end of the day, the democracy went snuff in like a week when Hitler was made the chancellor. And this could happen here too. And it's really kind of a fertile ground for that with half the country being on Trump's side and not having a clue about where that could lead. So I think it's a nourishing experience to look down the Charles Dickens Road and see what the ghost of Christmas future is, because I don't think people realize that. They don't realize what autocracy can bring for them. They don't really study what happened in other countries, not just Germany, where autocracy took over. And all of a sudden, the assumptions you've made about the quality of your life and the quality of your future and the quality of your thought, if you will, is taken away from you. And I think that there's a fair chance that at least some of that is going to happen. And maybe it's a question of degree, but the great likelihood is we're going to find our world has been transformed. And things we took for granted won't be available to us anymore. And this is going to happen in connection with the 2022 election, if not sooner, make that the 2020 election. This year, we're right on the precipice of this whole thing we're talking about. This is a very relevant discussion because it is happening. And even if you don't agree with me about some of my assumptions, if you want to be optimistic about some of those things, the fact is we're being transformed. And let me add that it's not to a better place. I guarantee it's not to a better place. Thank you. Winston, do you think that the video is strong enough on what shows America as exceptional or is it too lightly inferred? I mean, what is the inference out of this video? How strong is it for what America could lose? Well, I think it loses our sense of what this country means. It points out what we can lose our very identity and our values. And so for that, it's instructional. It's useful. But again, I want to see the emphasis on, okay, so what? Now what do we do about it? Now, it doesn't matter which direction you turn in, whether it's a moral, political, philosophical, educational, cultural. We have a lot of work to do to shore up our values and our shared values and understand that we do really share most of our values. When you asked earlier about what would be the advantage for the Republicans, even though Mitch McConnell has certainly advanced the old Republican agenda, let's say, and made an alliance with Donald Trump to advance his aims, that almost went very south. And you saw Kevin McCarthy and you saw Mitch McConnell come out on July 6th and July 7th, saying this fellow was squarely the problem. Then you saw two or three weeks later, Kevin McCarthy going down to kiss the ring of the Pope again in Florida, or Emperor Trump. And then you had Mitch McConnell, though, he's on sort of the official enemies list, I guess. But he has no vested interest in seeing America come off the rails either. He doesn't. He's been in the Senate probably as long as President Biden was, or almost as long. He knows how to play the game. He's very good at it and pulling the strings. But let's face it, nobody has an interest in seeing the type of scenarios, like Jay suggests, because they know that that could be wielded just as easily against them. They don't want to see economic collapse or stores without things or people being roughy and up at protest or all of the scenarios that are envisioned in that. No one has a vested interest in that. And so my hope is that they, just like with the larger scenarios of NATO and Russia meeting, that they will come to some sort of understanding that, look, folks, let's pull back from this. This is stupid. We've done our posturing. It got hardened. It's time to pull back. It's time to just regroup and say, we're not going to agree on these things, but we can agree on most of these other things. Interesting. All right, thank you. I want to snap back to Jay for this. It's kind of like a follow-up on his previous answer, which is given some of what Winston said. Ken, do you think that actually Jay, the senators and the representatives, that they can differentiate between ontocracy and democracy? But these are our leaders and highly educated. So now, moving that same question I asked you before into the sphere of the leadership, what do you think? Do they have a good grasp of this? What are they thinking? You know, we've grown up thinking that if you walk through the hallowed halls of Congress, especially the Senate, you will find them well educated. You'll find them committed to the, you know, a good future for the country. That's just not true. They won elections, and sometimes they used trickery to win those elections, and they made, you know, rhetorical statements and engaged in the demagoguery to get there. They're not PhDs. They're not worldly. I'd take any one of you for the Senate before I would take most of them. Sorry. So I don't think they understand it. And, you know, we can be aspirational about how, you know, that ultimately humanity will prevail, and that wisdom will prevail, and that the essential values of the country, if they're identifiable anymore, will prevail. But I think that you have to admit that they haven't prevailed yet, and as a matter of fact, it's getting worse. Joe Biden is becoming impotent. Sometimes he doesn't understand the mistakes he makes. He's got a number of high officials now that are refusing to cooperate with the select committee. They're still completely Trumpers. We've got the base, the party. We've got all those Republican states, and they're waiting. It's kind of a calm before the storm. They're waiting for November, and they have got a whole list of strategies lined up. I don't know how you could be optimistic and think that, you know, that the right and the good will prevail. We are, if we connect the dots, just look at the trajectory, which is in the title of this show. Look at the trajectory, or maybe not, but it is the trajectory toward Republican control of Congress. It is the trajectory toward Republican control of the White House, and it is the trajectory toward confirmed control of the Supreme Court. And they have no agenda, but if you have to shake it and bake it and find out what they would do if they are in power, that's easy. They would grandize themselves. They would cater to the 1%, they would dump on the poor and disadvantaged and the immigrants. They would dump on most of us, and they would take our civil liberties away. I mean, it's clear to me that even if my predictions, which I agree are dire, don't come true, some of them will, part of them will. And the notion of endemic is kind of social compromise where, okay, it's not going to be, you know, like Xi Jinping in Xinjiang or Hitler in Germany or any of those great dictators, but it's going to be pressure from the right, from autocracy, doing away with the institutions that we have developed over the last 200 years, doing away with the Bill of Rights and representative government, modifying those things. So maybe it seems that way, but it isn't really that way. Kind of a Putinesque way of running government. Yeah, we have elections. Sure, we have elections, but they don't mean anything. And everybody's intimidated. And you want to run against them, you want up in jail. That sort of thing. So that's the endemic approach to what happens when democracy is undermined. It doesn't have to be completely the seventh circle, but it's likely to be a lot less appealing than what we had. Thank you. Well, Tim, does it mean that this video is lacking in the message it's sending? Is it a phone? I think the message is a good message and that is wake up, you know, if you're complacent or you're apathetic because you think, you know, there's always crises in America and this is just one of many and nothing's going to disrupt our democratic way of governance and voting. I think it's a great video to say not so fast. Think twice, think three times. And I think it's a call to it's an alarm. Let's get involved. What can you do on an individual basis to let people know that you're concerned about our way of democracy and our way of the rule of law and our way of how we elect our officials? So from that standpoint, I really do appreciate it. It is dystopian, but I think maybe that's appropriate to have that tone right now. And I think it's on the news quite a bit, isn't it? That democracy is under attack and I think people are listening. And you know, I think of the Georgia election, the two Senate seats that were clearly marked GOP in 2020. And I think that the issues of what could be with another second term of Donald Trump got people up and out of their chairs and engaged. And I don't think it's any different now in 2022 that the stakes are high. And people have to say, what is that stake? And yeah, normally I don't like to vote or I don't want to wait in line three hours, but by gosh, it'll be worth it. And I'll do it. And I'll bring my own water since it's illegal for me to be given water. And I jump in for a minute, Stephanie. We know there's a problem. And we know that the larger solution is for people to take action, not to be complacent. We know that. And we tell people that and the media in general tells people that, well, those commentators, they tell people that. However, what can we do? You know, you can stamp your feet. Let's see. You can go out in the street and protest that may or may not have any effect on anything. You can vote, but you're not sure if the voting system is going to work next time. See, I think I ran out of options. Oh, you can go to the media. But I'm not sure the media really does the job. I'm not sure that the media is really bellying up to the problem. They talk about it, but it's just talk. And so there's not a lot of options for us, meaning us guys here and the public in general, to take the action people suggest to avoid complacency. Very good. Flawed options today. Winston, I had one other question that I wanted to ask about the video. How broad do you think the audience is for this video? That's at the first level. And the second level is who will watch it. But how broadly should the audience be for this video? I'd like to think that all of our compatriots watch Think Tech on a daily basis. Whether or not that's actually true remains to be seen by statistics that will bear out on how many people click on the video. If we took out the GOP part in that video, would it still remain as relevant for people? And I think what you'd see on the other side is the same as people also very fired up saying, where did my nation go? It's being stolen. We need to have these laws so that we can protect ourselves from the Democrats who are trying to overturn our elections. You would find a parallel universe on the other side of the coin, right? So it may be relevant for both. And for both people to say, okay, how do we bridge this gap that has not been insurmountable to bridge before? Honestly, when Jay's talking and what he's saying, there's the part of me that agrees completely that wants to just throw up my hands and say, yeah, he's right. Let's just give up. Let's not give up. That's not what he's saying. He's saying that this situation exists. It's just going to get worse. And while that may be true, I like to, anyone who watches this show knows that I like to be optimistic, that I like to get up on the right side of the bed. And if I get up on the wrong side of the bed, I want to go back to bed and get up again. That said, it may not be enough to change the course of things. But at the end of the day, I would like to think that each of us is that butterfly that flaps his or her or their wings and creates that change that results in the storm coming 1,000 miles away. So what can we do? Can we stomp our feet? Can we write to the media like Jay was saying? But maybe it's the simple conversations we have. And maybe like the endemic or the pandemic, if we share that with three people and they share it with three people and we're able to bridge these concerns and we're able to share our concerns mutually and actually listen to each other and try and break past the nonsense and chaos and noise out there, maybe our little butterfly flapping wings will have the effect of bringing us back together to a path of sanity and kindness and real American values that we can all share. Nice image to end on because we're out of time. Oh, shoot. Okay. So brief. Yeah, very brief. Stomper feet, protest, write to the media, have conversations. It comes down specifics. Be innovative. I could have a conversation with my kids saying, if you vote for Donald Trump in 2024, you're not getting a penny of my inheritance. Period. I will change two votes. So it's not generalities that we need to focus on, it's specifics. And power. We all have power. All right, I'm done. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. We're out of time. And I'm Stephanie Stull Dalton, your host for this Politics for the People once a week talk show. And Jay Fiedel, Tim Epicella, Winston Welch have been our guests today and on all days. We'll see you next week. Thank you and aloha.