 Think Tech Hawaii's burning issue for America 2022, a webinar panel program sponsored by Hawaii Pacific University. I'm Tim Apachello, your host for the 60-minute discussion. 2021 was a time of confusing and confounding issues and events. These are likely to continue to perplex us in 2022 and to affect the future of our country going forward. Today, we look at five of the most trouble-similar of these issues with our five blue ribbon panelists. John Waihe, former governor and community leader, will examine the changes reflected in set motion by the January 6th insurrection. Neil Milner, former political science professor from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, will address the changes and threatens our democracy. Louise Ng, attorney, community leader and Denton's partner, will help us understand the changes that are affecting the social order of our country. Rupmani Kanadar, author and executive director of Global Relations Forum, will cover the changes that have emerged from the pandemic. John David M, history professor at Hawaii Pacific University, will analyze the historical and philosophical changes in our national perspective. In our discussion today, we will try hard to connect the dots, to make sense of these troublesome issues and events and to learn how they affect and exacerbate each other. We wanna separate the critical issues that are changing our world from the less important distractions we are subjected to in these difficult times. Click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to submit questions to our panelists. Keep your chat box open to see other attendees and what they're saying. And if you want closed captions, just click the CC button on the bottom of your screen. And now to our first topic and examination of the challenges reflected and set in motion by the insurrection with former Governor John Waihe. Good morning, Governor. Good morning, Aloha. Aloha. Go ahead, you have the floor. Well, you know, it was my privilege at about a few days, just a few days after the insurrection to actually interview all the members of our congressional delegation, both senators and the members of the House. And there's no doubt in my mind as they describe the events that were actually happened, that they happened as they happened that there was real fear there, that there was an idea that something horrible was happening to our government that had never happened before and that the insurrection was real. And by the way, they made very clear that their feelings were shared by colleagues on both sides of the House, that Republican colleagues are feeling the same way. Democratic colleagues are also reacting. And then when you got in, followed up in the news as to how these things are, the aftermath was unfolding. There were all these stories coming out like the Republican speaker calling Trump and begging the president to do something about what was happening at the state Capitol. The timing, everything. It looked like we had a non-partisan moment when people would say in America, hey, look, it's been fun, but enough is enough. You know, let's get serious about what is serious. And it was a very serious event. And yet as time went on, it's become very clear that the whole event is becoming something more like a political milestone. And that the former president has actually have been very able to use it not as an indictment, but as a, see, I told you so, these guys are picking on me kind of response. So in terms of what they, what's going on now may mean to America, you know, there are really two parts to it. I mean, and it's a mostly pressing subject for me anyway, in this sense that there's a kind of a policy emphasis where we actually have people looking into the merits of everything. And there's a political, there's a political aspect to all of this. And let me put it this way, that if Trump was a Democrat and the Republicans were in charge of studying the insurrection, my opinion would be that there might be some actual prosecution of the whole thing, I mean, it would get there. But unfortunately Democrats are so interested in being correct that the politics of this may play out so that nothing will ever be, nothing will happen because it all depends on who, if I'm making this point very clear, but it all depends on who wins the next election. If the Republicans take the majority of the leadership in the House of Representatives, my opinion is this will just be moved aside. And all of this content that would have been dug up and neatly packaged would just be started to be swept at least out of Congress. And I think that they, I don't know a president who was more worthy of being impeached than Trump and yet we could never get beyond the partisan line. So this is, the insurrection really is a part, a bigger part of America. And the current president actually really knows how to turn all of this massive to his benefit. When he's recent speech where he's promising to pardon everybody who not only participated in what happened on January 6th, but what may happen in the future if the, and this is really critical. I mean, this to me was the most depressing statement that he made if he is in the future prosecuted in any of the urban areas that he mentioned, by racist, racist, politically motivated prosecutors. And also with this racist House committee, all of which are, what most of which are headed by African American leaders. And so here we, you know, what do you do when you have a call like that? I mean, how much crazier is this African cat? So in terms of what the implication is for America, you know, I don't know, I don't know because I don't know. Let me focus in on that point, John, let me focus in on that point because it's a good one. You mentioned this very important, you know, rally he had in Texas and the fact that he was going to, he stated explicitly, he was going to pardon all those that were convicted in the January 6th insurrection. Then he, you're talking about the prosecutors, you know, being focused upon for protests in the future. Does this give his base more incentive to act violently at future events? Absolutely, you know, what he has learned is what every Tim Horn, you know, I guess what Trump is doing in my opinion politically is he's doing what we grew up being taught would be unthinkable. It would be unthinkable to even think the kinds of things that think up the kinds of things that he is doing in America, I mean, just not done. And therefore nobody did it. And yet every Tim Horn dictator all over the world in many times in history use the same kind of tactics to avoid prosecution, to, you know, to keep themselves in office and the rest. So what he is doing is he is appealing to, for example, when you call the chairman of the Senate select committee investigating January 6th as his actions as racists, who is he being racist to? You know, and for the first time, you're having people playing through the ultra-right wing base of the American public and thinking it's comfortable. But what you're really doing is you're trying to avoid prosecution by political means. You're using the institutions of politics to avoid prosecution because it's like when he called, everything Trump does, he does publicly. And so all of a sudden, okay, it's not that bad. It's not really a crime. It's not really a sin. Doesn't feel like it because why would it? He's talking about it, he's admitting it. I'm going to pardon everybody before I pardon everybody. He used to, that was done in a sixth grade, well, I don't know if we teach civics in sixth grade anymore, but if we teach civics in a class, that's obstruction of justice. You don't go and tell the jury or tell people or tell the witnesses that, hey, if you don't prosecute, you know, you don't testify against me, I'll make sure you get away with it as soon as I've really left it. It's just not done. You know, John, I'm going to assume that you remember the 60s and 70s. You're old enough to live the 60s and 70s. Do you draw any parallels or do you see any parallels between the conflict and all the problems we had in the late 68 to 71 year period to where we are today? Remember the weathermen, they were blowing up buildings almost every day. Do you see any parallels between that group and say the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers? And what do you think about that? Well, I used to see parallels. I mean, they obviously were, you know, the Proud Boys and the Minutemen and all of that, were maybe different expressions of the political continuum. What's different is when you see those groups being supported in a political fashion. First of all, by the symbol of one of our parties, by the way, the party that was probably most likely to have prosecuted the dissident groups of the past. And all of a sudden, this becomes not so much, doesn't resemble in my mind the 60s and the 70s as much. Which we used to have a Ku Klux Klan's matching through towns and villages. I mean, those things are defensible, actually. But what we see now is something more akin to the brown shirts that appeared in Germany in the 1930s, in my opinion. And people going along with it. It's amazing to me and I think the difference is this. Democratic party that's supposed to fix these things sometimes gets caught up in their own self-righteousness. And they're more important about making sure that the T's across and the I's are dotted, then going after and ending something that may be evil. I don't think the Republicans have any, I'm not calling them evil, but I don't think they have any compunction about dotting I's and crossing T's. What they have is a belief that their side is right. And therefore, whatever it takes to get that right established, that culture established is worth doing. I mean, before the last election, the Republicans took 27 days to confirm a new Supreme Court justice, just like that before the election. Our, and I love them. I mean, it's the judiciary chairman for the Senate is saying, no, we're gonna take our time. We're gonna make sure Republicans are being, giving them a chance. We're gonna be non-partisan. Yeah, maybe, and maybe we should and maybe we'll get it done. But we also maybe missed the deadline. And if we lost the election, I don't even mean the presidency. I mean, you know, in the Senate, we'll do the same thing happened to us that happened in Obama. So when you look at the country, the groups that use totalitarian tactics to overthrow governments historically, we're not the majority groups. They were groups that knew how to take advantage of government institutions and flip themselves into power. Okay, all great points. Thank you, John, for bringing that to the table and for our panelists to think about and further discuss. Thank you. Going now to our democracy, we have Neil Milner. Neil, you have the floor. Thank you. Let me start by saying this. Right now, I can much more easily imagine a civil war in this country than I can imagine any other way that we're gonna move forward. I'm not saying that with relief. I'm not saying that with pleasure, obviously. I'm saying that in the sense of that's the most likely thing to happen. And the way that I go about looking at this is to try to look a little bit beyond the specific activities of the day. Specifically, I look at what kind of evidence is there about our situation that really shows how close we are to losing democracy and moving toward a civil war. And there are two really interesting things that I've come across very recently done by researchers who have been at this for a long time. One is a piece that says, we're at a tipping point. On the basis of all kinds of data, we're at a tipping point. What that means is that this is a very unique time in our history. It is a time at which we've come to a point where issues, crises, don't unite us. They make it worse for us. The people who did this research said the tipping point is moved in that direction. Republicans move there first, but everybody is moving in that direction so that they use as an example would be COVID. Most crises of that proportion in this country you can think about 9-11, united us. COVID is an example of separating us. Barbara Walters, Barbara Walters, not Barbara Walters, an expert on democracy and civil war is part of a group that has for years been studying a large number of countries over a long period of time to see what is it that makes democracy unstable and that leads to civil war. And it's a very interesting finding. They say that the least democratic countries are not the most likely to have a civil war, not the most democratic countries, but what they call anocracy. Anocracy is a kind of democratic process that's quasi-democratic. It's weakened. And he said if that is the most important thing that predicts whether or not there's gonna be a civil war. And in fact, all of the information suggests that we've moved from being this country from being on the high democratic side into anocracy. And so we find ourselves in a position where for all kinds of reasons we are much more weakening than we are before. You can talk about Trump, you can talk about other things, but the process has been a longer developing kind of process. What's the main cause of it? Polarization, if you pick out one factor that shows up, Walter talks about a kind of factionalization that happens. We have the polarization for sure. We have a kind of polarization in this country right now in which everything important is defined by whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. Everything, your lifestyle, who you want your kids to associate with when they are thinking about getting married, all of these sorts of things, how you worship, where you worship, if you worship, that's what life has become. And it's become a kind of a way where we no longer trust the other side. John used the word evil before. We use the word evil to describe our opposition. And so there's a lack of trust, there's a lack of so on. It's an extreme kind of polarization. So you have differences. You have significant differences. You have elements of race. What Walter suggests is that what's very important in the movement towards civil war are some various kinds of things. One of the things she calls is an ethnic entrepreneur. That is someone who will kind of light the fire to create ethnic differences. Trump is an ethnic entrepreneur, whites versus everybody else. That's one thing. A second thing is militias and the possibilities of violence. Well, let's talk about the possibilities of violence now. The recent polls all show the same thing that a significant minority of people in the United States are willing to think about using violence if they don't like what the government is doing. It's pretty much the same percentage of Democrats as it is Republicans. You also have, in this country, you've had for a long period of time a well-organized militia movement that's becoming even more well-organized. That's part of what you saw, just part. I'm gonna get to the rest of it in the insurrection of January 6th. And of course, you have a very polarization on whether the insurrection was even an insurrection, just as you have a polarization on whether people should be able to vote easily. You have the presence of these militias. You have, along with this kind of presence of militias, ones that have already used violence, that have attested to use violence. So the conclusion that she comes to and that the others come to is that there is a very good chance that you will have a civil war in this country. It's not gonna be the blues versus the grays. It's not gonna be a half million men on one side versus half million on the other. There's gonna be guerrilla warfare. Or remember, this person is not writing from her emotion. She's writing from good data, as are the others, who have this kind of experience to talk about it. So that's essentially where we are right now. A country that is really on the edge of moving in that direction. You want me to be optimistic? But I can say, okay, here, can I give you, do I have time, Tim, or? Yeah, very quickly, and then I wanna ask you a question. Sure, three things. None of them is easy. They require a whole different way of thinking about ourselves. One of which is powerful law enforcement and the political institutions that can put down attempts at insurrection. And it's a war. That's an open question for all kinds of complicated constitutional reasons and also because our political institutions aren't operating that well. We'll see, we'll see how that comes out. A second one is that, in effect, you have to change how you think about politics. You have to understand that if rebuilding and trust and a depolarization is gonna occur, it's gonna occur at the local level and moving itself up. That may sound my students' favorite slam word, idealistic, but look at the national institutions. The final one is that you have to begin to think about our conflict, not as a political conflict in the standard sense, but as an intractable conflict. Intractable sounds like a pessimistic word and it is. But I'll say just quickly what optimism is about it. Intractable means you have to think about the situation in the United States, the way you thought about the situation in Northern Ireland or the way you think about significant religious conflicts in other countries or the way you think about Israelis and Palestinians. Now, that's very hard to do. Very hard to think along those lines. There are people who do intractable political conflict work with some success. There's a whole group of them around the country, but the first thing that people have to do for the most part is to start posturing themselves and picturing this country, not as a unique democracy that knows how to settle itself in the usual kind of political sort of way, but as a country that has moved away from democracy in important sorts of ways and that may not be able, probably isn't gonna be able to recover on the basis of standard things like elections or who controls the Senate or whether Joe Biden is a good bridge builder and so on. All right, you know, while you're on this topic, you know, the filibuster for decades has paralyzed Congress, has gridlocked Congress. To what degree does this gridlock and the continuation of Congress's inability to get anything meaningfully done for the population? To what degree does that add fuel to the fire for those who say that democracy is seen as best of days? Nothing's getting done or under a democracy. To the base of Trump, does that further incite them to try to overthrow our democracy? Well, I think that there's two things going on there. The base of Trump is the base of Trump. Now, remember, Trump's base for the most part are people like you and me. The people who participated in the insurrection on January 6th, there was a small group of well-organized people, the health keepers and so on. The majority of people who were there were presumably Republicans. They were small businessmen. They tended to have jobs or women. They tended to have jobs. Their base is that they don't trust institutions anymore. I think from the broader standpoint is if you think that the filibuster is causing this problem, then you're underestimating the problem. And if you think that they had gotten the filibuster changed so that this law would have passed, as far as I'm concerned, that would have been great. But the fundamental structure of polarization and the fundamental inability for our political institutions to respond, which by the way is one of the things that gets democracies into trouble because people, not just those alertly against it, but people who become fearful and worry about whether the institutions can protect them, that's where we're going now. All right. Thank you very much for your perspectives. And now to discussion about our society, Louise Ng. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you, Tim. And thank you for ThinkDec Hawaii for this invitation. And I have to say that I was depressed coming in. I'm not going to be just as depressing on the social aspect because what we're seeing in politics, we're seeing in society as well, and that is increased polarization, increased intolerance. And it's not just the US, I think it's global. I mean, we're seeing religious intolerance and human rights violations, not just in the US, but all around the world and democratic institutions being threatened. I mean, it's all tied together. And what we're seeing here in the country that really upsets me is just the cultural and racial anxieties that are driving people apart. That's really kind of, for it sort of calculated and shown in many ways. I mean, we're seeing a calculated perpetuation of the big lie by GOP leaders and a great majority of their voters. And as Governor Wahey mentioned, the Trump saying publicly, that he essentially supports insurrectionists, we're seeing that in the assault on voting rights and fair elections, gerrymandering and issues that are going to hurt minority communities. Battles in school boards about what is going to be taught, the double-edged sword of technology, which is being used to just sort of foment extreme views where we really should be using it as a, to break the digital divide, it can be used for the power of good and education, but instead it's being used to divide people. We're seeing the politicization of public health issues, COVID-19, vaccinations, testing, even the whole issue of reproductive freedom is back and in danger. All of which, as we're seeing, can lead to civil violence, breakdown of society. As Neil mentioned, we're seeing increased polls and studies of increased fears of succession as well as civil war. And that's what keeps me up at night. I hope that there are ways that we can break through that. But yeah, that, and I agree, I think with Neil, that I think it's gonna have to start at the local level. We're talking, to try to fix these things, it's gonna be individual communities, local communities, local government and people coming together despite the ugly talk to try to reach common ground and have a more civil discourse. I guess that's the big picture. But Tim, what are your thoughts? What did you wanna ask me? Well, Neil mentioned that racism, like no other president, Trump has been successful of using that as a wedge issue. And I guess my question is, to what extent has white fear, if you will, white fear and the fear of being replaced, the old mantra from the white supremacist groups for decades and if not a hundred years, how has that entered into our politics today and polarized this nation? Well, Tim, I would say that's front and center. Thank you, I was gonna get to that because it's to me, and I've heard this, I've heard commentators mention that. I mean, that's our original sin. That's not just the country's original sin. That is original sin of colonialism and Western democracy, much as I love, I'm happy to, I love being here and glad my parents, my great grandparents immigrated, et cetera, et cetera. We need to reckon with that. And the problem is that some people are denying that and they're afraid of the old order being overcome. And I've recently, two things that I've got that I'm listening to on Audible and I think we're really illustrative is one is the warmth of other sons, which talks about the great black migration and talks about what people were escaping from the South, which is really horrifying, but we need to deal with that. We need to open our eyes and people need to be educated. We can't cut that out of the education system. The other thing that I just listened to recently was an Audible of Joe Wall. She has a talk show called White Flag and he interviewed Wajahat Ali, who is an author of a recent book, go back to where you came from which I heard about on NPR and he talks about the fact that we need to come to terms of the fact that this needs to be a multi, what we need to aspire to as a multicultural society. And that ties into the need in our workplaces and in our communities to support diversity, inclusion and equity. I mean, as we're seeing all these ugly trends but there's some good trends going on that good people need to get behind. Diversity, inclusion, equity, multiculturalism, appreciating the multiculturalism of our country and not feeling that that's a threat but it's a way to celebrate everybody. And I wanna see that also happen in education too. We're not, we shouldn't just talk about ethnic studies. That should be part of the American narrative and the American history that's being taught. So. All right, that's my story. Thank you. I have a question from one of our viewers here and that is the following. Is there a tipping point by which local government can't do anything? How do guns and gun owners figure into the possibility of that tipping point? Well, that is a concern. I mean, we are seeing people turn to violence. That's always been an undercurrent in our country. It's not new for 2021 and 2022. We've not been able to stop mass shootings. So, we've got the individuals who are sick but then we also have people who are talking. We saw that with the insurrection, with threats of violence. We need to, and I don't know, that's another intractable problem that we need to deal with but we need to fix the way people use guns not as a way to get out at other people. It's really going from, we're not using them as protection, we're using them as tools of insurrection and overthrow and getting out people's frustrations. And we need to put those guns down really and talk about, again, civil discourse. Civil education, civics education need to get that back into the way we educate kids. Critical race, there is not even an issue but let's get back to teaching kids and adults what the basis for our democracy are. Guns are not supposed to be there to affect social change. Louise, do you think that our younger generation has an opportunity to step up to the plate, so to speak, to make a difference in what seems a conflict that right now seems unsolvable? Do they step up in our society and what would it take for them to do so? They definitely need to step up. I think that it has been said that a lot of this anxiety and the fear of replacement is from older white people who will die off soon. Is that true? I don't know. I think we still have to think about our next generation. I think there's a lot of our next generation who are being raised in a much more multicultural society who are more willing to accept gender differences, gender orientation differences, being around kids of different races and cultures and that's what we need to encourage and celebrate but we can't forget to educate them as well on what makes this democracy strong. But I would say that maybe I'm just talking to all the kids that I agree with but many of them realized early, and I saw this in my own kids of wanting, realizing early on in the national debates, my apolitical kids realizing that Trump is just talking a lot of hogwash but unfortunately people were buying into that. I'm also seeing kids want to help further diversity and inclusion and just seeing why what are people, why are people even concerned about gender differences and gender orientation, stereotypes and the like? So yes, I think we need to look to our younger generation, encourage them to get engaged, run for office, vote as a way of trying to get past what are very depressing issues and situations right now. Alrighty. One last quick question. It's a tough one from one of our viewers and that is how do we as a nation conceptually get it beyond our tribalism? I think that's, yeah, good question because I think tribalism is almost a human nature and reaction. And we see that in the way Democrats and Republicans for instance, use the same language to vilify the other side. I think it's outrageous that Trump is using the term racist to justify what in my view are very racist things that he has done. And so how do we get beyond tribalism? I saw there was an interesting, somehow for this foreign policy magazine started popping up in my email. And at the beginning of the year they had maybe 10 commentators talk about how you save democracy. And one suggestion was you need to break down barriers societally, which is that people need to live together, work together, go to school together, be able to talk. And I think in Hawaii we have kind of a maybe a Petri dish here where we can use our closeness and the fact that we have family and we know people on opposite sides of the aisle that, but there are aunties and cousins and we can talk to them to try to heal that tribalism, try to understand where the other side is coming from, see if there's common ground. And if there's not, we just try to do our best to bring along enough people to, that agree that we just need to make our society better and overcome differences. Kind of the optimism we were looking for for this program, thank you. Tim, can I add one? Go ahead Neil, go ahead, question. The first thing you have to do to get rid of polarization is to admit that your tribal, tribalism is to admit you're a tribe. You know, this group here, when we're talking about tribalism, there's a kind of up to now an implicit notion that tribalism is because the Republicans are tribes. You're a tribe, we become tribes. We talk, I'm not saying everybody, I mean, I know what side, I know what side I think is right, but that's not the point. If you wanna get rid of tribalism or polarization, you have to realize that you're undoubtedly part of one of the polarized groups. If you wanna argue that you wanna impose or get certain kind of policies, that's different. But if you wanna get rid of polarization, you have to participate in the process of getting rid of polarization at which we're not very good right now, but it certainly doesn't involve just saying those people are evil because they're saying the same thing back to you. Good point Neil, thank you. Yeah, we need to just understand that yet we all have our biases and we need to get beyond that. We all need to deal with that and be uncomfortable about that. All right, thank you so much, Luis. And Neil, thank you very much and to our viewers that have presented these questions. Thank you. Moving along to the pandemic, we have Rootmati. Rootmati, you have the floor. Aloha, Tim, and to the other panelists also. Now, I wanna talk about, when you say my pandemic, it gives a feeling that the impact and spread of this pandemic has occurred at such an unprecedented pace because we live in a highly interconnected, interdependent global village. And the economic political social systems that went into a shutdown because of the unnatural number of deaths countries had to just implode because of the populations being arguably introduced to the concept of a pandemic. You know, it is the third year that we are running into this pandemic and the devastation that the pandemic has brought, it's around 900,000 deaths that have occurred. And still we have a huge portion of the population that denies the pandemic. They still say that, you know, they refuse COVID protocols, they refuse the viability of the vaccinations. And in the process, they become super spreaders or they become victims. So as this dangerous brew of people like Jay says, calls them, it makes it difficult for governments to control them, to function and to provide effective relief to this pandemic because irrespective of the models of governance, this pandemic is going to be a leveler. It's going to hurt you, whether you're a Republican, whether you're a Democrat, whether you're atheist, whether you're anything, it is not going to see what is your identity. It is just going to affect you. So in a democratic form of governance, we find it more difficult to control the pandemic because of the fundamental rights, the issues of my right, my zone, my space, and I will not believe in the vaccine and it's okay for me not to come into the community and maybe I will not participate in this. So the governments find it difficult, whether it's Trump, whether it's Biden, now America needs an effective and robust healthcare system. We need, which is financially, it has to be diverted towards preventive care for the pandemic. It's unknown territory that this pandemic has brought about. Really, nobody knows how the vaccine is going to mutate or a study into the genome sequence of the, what do you call it, of the pathogen is not going to give us an insight of how it's going to predict, how it's going to behave. We have to make sure that we follow the government's instructions now. If we go to see forms of governance in which there is democracy is restricted, have been arguably more successful in controlling the pandemic. So that's a point to debate about whether you require force to make people understand the viability and of the threat of the pandemic. It is not an easy place to be in because it's really raging for three years. It can go on for infinite numbers because it's a mutating virus. If it was a zoonotic virus, we could have, it would have faded away. But it is mutating. And we don't, yeah. Well, one of our viewers has asked this question and I'm curious to get your answer on this. To what degree has Governor E. Gay effectively addressed this in the state of Hawaii, in your opinion? See Hawaii, Hawaii becomes, it is the safest, right? As the safest state during COVID-19. So it does say a lot that Hawaii has effectively controlled the pandemic situation as compared to the other states. We have a 19th position on the positive testing rate. We have the fourth lowest death rate and we have the second highest vaccination rate that is around 74.8 or 75%. So that itself is ample evidence that our governor is doing good things for this. If he had not been in a position to give these figures, we would have had one of the highest rates. But, you know, he's got the advantage of being isolated, the island, it helps. And the vaccination has been highest. Now he has to just concentrate on the tourism industry so that we have the income coming back because in the, all over the world, the pandemic has struck people financially more than, you know, the death rate is even all over. Financially it's hurting. And Hawaii, because it depends on tourism, we need our tourist industry to be back to normal. You know, that is giving incentives to travel that is showing that you can follow COVID protocols and come to Hawaii. All right, well, good points. And thank you very much for your perspective on the pandemic and how it affects not only here, our society in Hawaii, but our nation as a whole. Thank you. To wrap things up or to round things out, we have John, would you please take care of this and wrap it up? Right, so let me zoom out a little bit. And, you know, it's dark, man, I'm feeling a lot of darkness here and I'm not sure it's that dark, but it certainly is complex and deep in American history, deep in American political culture. So let me just outline some work I've been doing on my, on a book project that I'm working on that I call Liberty Battles. And I call it Liberty Battles because I see two different definitions of liberty in that are at play right now. And then I've actually been at play in American political culture for a long time. The first one is the civil rights concept of liberty, which we're all familiar with, right? The abolitionist freedom from slavery, the 14th Amendment, the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and then of course, the current day civil rights movements that are fighting for more rights for disabled people and LGBTQ people and all of the rest of this. So the other side, so we understand that well, the other side of this, I don't think this second definition of liberty, I don't think we really understand it all. And this is a much older concept of liberty that comes out of, it goes way beyond the American revolution back to Machiavelli. And of course, Machiavelli we know for, you know, writing the prints and, you know, the ends justify the means, but he actually wrote a lot on liberty and republics. And his concept of liberty can be characterized through what he wrote as, what he called Viveri libato, which is translated as to live freely, essentially what he meant was to live freely without outside interference. And this of course was very appropriate to his time, but it's also appropriate to our time as well. Machiavelli was involved in the Florida time republic, which was under pressure from outside forces throughout his career as a diplomat, but his ideas then made their way into Europe generally. And then Cross the Atlantic in the 18th century became a part of the American rebellion actually, which led to the American revolution. And at that point, the American colonists became afraid that the British crown was going to steal away their liberty to prevent them from living freely, just like Machiavelli feared outsiders would destroy the Florida time republic. Now, so when we think about the American revolution, we actually have to think about this kind of liberty, which is darker, more fearful, and more reactive than the other, the civil rights kind of liberty. So when this happened in the, so this actually drove the American revolution, not the civil rights form of liberty, which was really not on the table during the American revolution very much. It was a very beginning of those kinds of concepts. So when we look into the 19th century, this form of liberty, this dark kind of reactive form of liberty, this fearful form of liberty, gets fused with racism in the question of whether or not you give political rights to African Americans in the Northern States, where you have lots of free blacks, but should you actually give them the right to vote? And when you read what commentators say about this and making these decisions, political leaders, what they say is these people are going to destroy our liberty, they're gonna take away, they're gonna degrade our liberty and destroy the republic, and therefore we cannot allow them a political rights. So in this way, this darker kind of Machiavellian version of liberty became embedded in American political culture and has done battle, liberty battle, has done battle with the civil rights version of liberty ever since that time. Let's pull it quickly forward to the present day. And when we look at issues like the Berther movement, like counter protesters who express fear about Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests. And then of course in the insurrection itself, what we see in the language, the symbols and the concepts behind these movements very much matches this appeals to the American revolution, appeals to freedom, appeals to liberty. And so these movements actually have a progenitor, they've inherited political language and concepts from something which is very old in our history. So this darker form of liberty, now it should be noted that in the history of our country, this darker form of liberty has never won permanently. One could argue that you could see this in the American Civil War, in the secessionist movements, their claims to the generation of 1776 and the American rebels and American protests, the Tea Party protests and the rest of this are echoes of this darker form of liberty. The one thing about this darker form of liberty is it seeks to protect the political community from outsiders. And so I think that's how conservative and kind of these radical protesters that we see what they're trying to do, what they see themselves as doing is protecting American liberty from outsiders who threaten it. And so in the long train of history, it matches the Machiavellian concept of vivare libero. It's not to say that these two concepts of liberty are mutually exclusive. They can be held within the same communities and even I think by the same people. John, let me hit that point because you're saying that they're protecting the liberty from outside influences. Hasn't that always been the case with the know nothings and hasn't that been the case with all immigration issues is not just protecting the liberty but really trying to keep the races at bay? Right, so yes, and I think that's a good example. I mean, even you can even look at the populist movement of the 1890s, these are movements which characterize themselves as protecting the American Republic, as protecting American liberty. And they were actually, you know, they were quite racist and exclusionary. So I think we're dealing with this another moment in this kind of conceptual framework of American political culture. It has implications for how we think about the opposition. I mean, Neil was talking about how, you know, we can't actually solve the problem of polarization without really understanding and maybe exercising some empathy for the other side. Well, if you understand the other side is making claims upon liberty just like your side, then you might be able to develop a little more empathy for the other side even though some of their creeds are quite noxious. Well, let me go to that. How do we do that when we seem to be in a mindless cult, the cult of Trump? How do we see what the other side thinks and whether they have valid points or not? Right, so I think you start with education. I liked what Louie said about, you know, civics courses. We've kind of dropped the ball or certainly I see a lot less education about basic education about American civics. I'm not talking about patriotism courses. I'm talking about solid education about American political institutions and political ideas. So education, you know, I'm in the education field and I feel some responsibility for this. So education is very important. So let's put our resources into education and let's get word out that the other side even as it attempts to demonize our side, they're not demons, they're still Americans. And, you know, so I do think a better, you know, look, I'm an intellectual historian. So I think ideas are very important. And if we express the right kinds of ideas, if the party in power expresses a kind of cherishment or a love of liberty, that might be language that all Americans can kind of gather around and kind of rally around. So we saw some of this in the inauguration, but then, of course, the political divisions reappeared and Biden is really struggling now because of those divisions. So, yeah. Okay. Governor, I see your hand up. Yeah, no, I saw one of the questions that came over, you know, on the chat lines from the viewers, which I really wanted to ask is John because I think it's an important issue and it's somewhat what he's talking about. And that is the equalization of various events as equally bad or equally productive. And the question was, do you find it a little hypocritical that politicians have given so much attention to the capital riot, to the insurrection? Yet, when small businesses are getting looted and destroyed doing the George Floyd incidents, most politicians and most people remain silent. The idea being, why are you treating the looters in the same political fashion that you may be treating the insurrectionist? So how does that fit into your discussion? Right, well, of course, you have to distinguish, right? I mean, the property damage is different from the overthrow of the American Republic, the American democracy. And I guess the point is why do people see things as being equal when you just said they're different? Right, right, right. Well, that's, you know, part of that does have to do I think with Donald Trump and his whole notion of fake news and kind of the disintegration of truths we hold dear or at least the degradation of truths we hold dear in this country. But yeah, so that's, you know, that's kind of a false comparison, but I do think the conservative counter protesters saw a Black Lives Matter through the Machiavellian lens as every bit the deepest threat that this country faced at that moment and made appeals to the American founders. I mean, Jefferson, of course, Jefferson participates in both concepts of liberty. Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence, which invokes unalienable rights, but Jefferson also wrote about the Tree of Liberty being nourished with the blood of patriots and tyrants. So there's a more radical, Jefferson has had so much influence on our political culture and he's dipped into both sides of these definitions of liberty. And counter protesters have called in Jefferson, said, look, you know, we're gonna nourish the Tree of Liberty with the blood of communes, referring to the Black Lives Matter movement as communists or Marxists. Alrighty, you know, John, thank you very much. We've come out to the end of our hour and it goes very quickly, but we can't leave until we go around the virtual table here and ask for final comments or thoughts. So with you, John, Governor, for you first and we'll go around from there. Well, yeah. And first of all, I really enjoyed the discussion and I want to thank everyone for, you know, participating, giving us the time to discuss this. But I think the perceptions in our society, when we look at things and we give them the equal weight of this question that the person brought up is a very important one. So whatever little time I get left, I'm gonna pass it off to Neil. And hopefully he'll have a shot at giving his insight into that, so thank you for inviting me. Second place is to refer more to me, right? Thanks, John. Look, let me say one thing first. If you're gonna refer to the people on the other side as a mindless cult, you're off to a bad start. I'm not saying that I don't understand why you're calling them that. I am saying that that is a stigmatizing term that isn't gonna get you anywhere and that somehow doesn't explain the fact that if there are any Republicans living near you, your friends, your neighbors, people that work out with me at the Hawaii gym, they think that way. And that means that you're creating a kind of situation that reflects other people out there, not the people close to you. Now, that doesn't mean you have to accept them. It doesn't even mean necessarily you have to empathize with them. That's a tough word, but you have to have some sense. Let me just say one more point. I agree with the kinds of liberal agenda that Louise presented, but there are two fundamental issues here, one of which is every one of those things is contested and polarized now, which means that you can't do them easily. Another thing is that liberal America doesn't really have a good way of doing these. If you think that somehow we can bring about this kind of better emphasis on these good things, it's pretty hard. I watch my granddaughter go to school in Portland where there is an enormous amount of really interesting discussions among fourth graders and their teachers about gender fluidity. But it's contested, you can't just, you just can't want it to be there. So that, and I think the Democratic Party, I read a lot of the anti-Trump conservatives. And I think in this way, a lot of them are right because the data supports it. The Democratic Party has moved more to the left of his constituencies. It's showing up in the recent polls where Biden's numbers are abysmal. He's losing support among moderates. And you never, I mean, the Republicans, the Republicans, the strong Republicans and the strong Democrats pretty much mail in how they think about how their presidents are going. He's losing it. Part of the reason is he's losing it is that they don't like what he's doing about the race and policing. And he doesn't like what he's doing about immigration where the Democratic Party has moved to the left. They don't think he's governing effectively. You can blame it. You can say whatever you want, but you've got a conundrum, right? Especially for those of us who are left of center. If you want all this stuff, but you can't get this stuff by means that we understand conventionally, that means you have to do something else. All right, thank you very much, Neal. Louise. Well, hard to follow up on Neal because that's an intractable issue. But okay, let me start. That means something, aren't it? Yeah. Let me start at maybe at the individual side because that's where we start, right? With how we think. And going back to that author Wajahat Ali, he had an interesting take on this, which is that maybe we need to be less like Daffy Duck and more like Bugs Bunny. Daffy Duck being the one who gets angry and frustrated and Bugs Bunny being the one who somehow uses humor to turn things around and get the last laugh, get the last word. And I think that that goes ties into, okay, the importance of storytelling, for instance. We all need to be able to listen and hear each other's stories to get an understanding and empathy on where people are coming from. And maybe that helps overcome divides. I think that I hopefully will help us get to a more tolerant acceptance that we are stronger because we are multicultural, we are different and our differences unite us to use a term. And I have to go back to the role of education and how we turn around the digital divide and the bad things that social media and digital access do to really help use that to inform people, educate people, help people go back to books and reading and critical thinking and just again, learning more about our system and what makes us strong and what we need to do and why we need to vote and run for office and support our institutions. All right, thank you so much. Rootmani, your last thought. Yeah, so now to this webinar, I can give you the keywords that are to survive, adapt and to thrive. Like we have the Delta B1, 16, 15, 17, Omicron 16, 15, 29, these are all fuzzy names, but in 2022, we have to affirm that the pandemic is just not an event, it's going to be a process that is going to engulf individual lives, our national lives, our international realms. So we have to make sure that we are better prepared for it. There's a response strategy that has to come in, there has to be a capacity building for facing this pandemic and you have to have leadership, leadership at the individual level, at the community level and it has to come, it becomes very personal to international level. So you have to make sure that you span this entire spectrum without any prejudice and you have to believe in your leaders because they are the ones who are going to guide you at this moment because it is absolute unknown territory that we face through this pandemic. Politics will happen, history will happen, yes that will happen, but this pandemic is unknown territory for all of us. We don't know how it's going to mutate next or what is going to be the next genome sequence that is going to come up. So I think for me, it is a very neutral and without anything, without any bias, we all have to face the pandemic together. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. John, you get the last word here for this program. Right, so it should be noted that Machiavelli has been proven wrong. I mean, the American Republic has lasted for over two centuries and I guess I'm not quite as negative or concerned as some of the other panelists. I do think that we need to re-up our understanding of it. I think very few people actually have a kind of a deeper understanding of the kind of the political combat that's going on right now. They get kind of a talk show, kind of a hot shot, very quick comments, just tiny little Twitter comments about this, which is not very helpful, but like I say, our republic has proved to be quite durable. I mean, we survived a civil war and as much as Neil might think that we're close to a civil war, I'm not sure that's the case being a historian. I'm actually teaching the civil war right now and I think the political combat was much more fierce than it may be 10 years from now, we might be closer to a civil war, but so I think the republic is durable and we need to find ways, find symbols, find a language that can unite people and try to resist, you know, kind of delving into our kind of basis, kind of most fearful instincts. I do think the Machiavellian version of liberty is dangerous. It's inherently dangerous because it plays upon our fears and the civil rights version of liberty. Of course, I embrace strongly, you know, the comments that Louise made about multiculturalism. That's been the progress that we've made as a country has really been largely connected to our openness to more liberty, more freedom, not less and not simply trying to protect the liberty that we have. So I think that's our future is to fight for that and not to fight to contain the forces of darkness around us and protect our liberty against others' liberty. Alrighty, thank you so much. You know, we're out of time. One thing that this discussion has shown to me is that these issues are not independent of each other so they certainly are intertwined. And I think through this discussion, our audience has seen that, that they're intertwined. My last thought is about the discussion is that after 245 years of trying to make a more perfect union, trying to break down our tribal boundaries is key and paramount to finding that more perfect union. So I'd like to thank our guests for today. John Wahey, Neil Milner, Louise Ng, Group Mani Kannadar and John Davidan. I'd also like to thank HPU for sponsorship of this program. I think it's something that we might look at again in the future to do again because we certainly just didn't have enough time and I apologize to all those that submitted questions but we weren't able to get at them. So maybe next time. Thank you for joining us for Think Tech Hawaii and we hope to see you again in the future. I'm Tim Apachele, your moderator and we'll see you again. Aloha.