 Welcome to American Issues, Take One. I'm Tim Apachele, your host. Today's title is MAGA GOP, A Race to the Bottom. In the 1988 presidential election, we had a Democratic candidate by the name of Gary Hart. Gary Hart was actually front runner to become president of the United States. Unfortunately, Gary Hart was traipsing around with other women. And in 1987, I don't think that was very much appreciated. And in September of 1987, Gary Hart challenged the media to find dirt on him, and certainly they did. They found a young woman by the name of Donna Rice sitting on his lap, photographed, and on his boat, and the name of the boat was monkey business. That was enough to take Gary Hart out of the presidential election. His poll numbers plummeted immediately. The voting population that was supporting Gary Hart said, this is not the qualities of a presidential candidate that we wanna see run for the president of the United States or potentially become president of the United States. And with that, Gary Hart was out and George Bush became our president. So let's fast forward to Donald Trump when he ran for president. The first thing he basically did was to call Mexican immigrants, rapists, and drug users. He immediately called John McCain. He wasn't a hero. He wasn't a war hero, although John McCain gave many, many years of his life in a North Vietnamese prison, a bamboo prison cell. Not soon after that, we saw and learned about the Acts with Access Hollywood video about Donald Trump bragging and boasting about how he liked to grab women's genitalia. The list goes on. He degraded Gold Star families about their loss of their children who served in this country. He degraded them. We have policies that Donald Trump set forth that took children away from the arms of their parents at the Southern border. No regret, no remorse for that, but the children are ripped away into this day. We don't know if they've all been, found a reunions with their parents. Donald Trump called the World War I dead veterans, suckers and losers. No regret, no remorse. He definitely called out that his election is stolen. He's broken so many rules of law that will soon come to light. But again, no regret, no remorse, but most importantly, no regret, no remorse from his voting base, his MAGA crowd. Now, I'm gonna make very clear that I'm not saying all GOP, I'm making a distinction between the MAGA GOP versus the decent GOP. So let my words not be confused on that point. Then we have Donald Trump looking for 11,780 votes with the Secretary of State in Georgia. Clearly that's gonna come back to Hanum. Again, no remorse, no regret from his voting base. So I go to the question. To you, Cynthia, welcome. Cynthia Lies and Claire to the show. Jay Fidel, my co-host is out on assignment. So welcome, Cynthia. Hi, good morning, Tim. Thanks for having me. Good morning. So Cynthia, in your opinion, I know you're not a clinical psychologist. I know you're not a doctor of psychology, but this is a pattern that has displayed itself for many years and it's getting worse. And the question is to you, what is behind the MAGA GOP, the Trumpers, to abandon all sense of decency on their opinions of who should lead this country? What has turned them from being conscious civil citizens of this country to accepting the deplorable behavior of Donald Trump and recently, Governor DeSantis? Your opinion, please. Well, I often bring up the Dunning-Kruger effect and that is an actual psychological definition of a syndrome that people can fall into and they will promote and buy into programs and people and things that actually can even be against their own benefits, but they feel like it gives them more standing. So they see that Trump lies and can grow in power. So therefore they think they can lie and grow in power. They think that by supporting him, they somehow get more credibility for their own devious behaviors. And that's a loose definition, okay? That's not the... You know, your comment just reminded me of a show we did months ago and we had former Governor John Wahey on and he said something that has stuck with me and I think it goes to what you just brought up. And what the former governor said was, Donald Trump in his way gave permission to would-be followers and existing followers, permission to think and act badly and support borish behavior, deplorable behavior. It gave them permission to say, yeah, we know it's wrong. I know they know it's wrong, but we don't care because we now have permission to act badly and actually wear it as a badge of honor. What do you think about that? What do you think about John Wahey's comment months ago? That's exactly what I just said. That's exactly right. And then I have a personal experience with this kind of stuff in some ways. As far as I was a minister in Alabama for many, many years, in very rural Alabama where racism whispers behind their hands because they knew what they were doing was wrong. They knew to come out in public and to come out and say that their racist was bad. So they couldn't, so they didn't. They whispered it behind their hands. And now they don't have to whisper behind their hands anymore. They can come right out and march down the streets of Charlotte with their torches and their chanting and they can come right out everywhere and say that their racist and their proud. And even to the opposite extreme, we see all this projection stuff. Would they shrink if they were called out on it? Usually people will shrink if they feel there's an element of shame to their words or their thoughts or their thoughts expressed as words. They'll shrink. They'll cease their behavior or at least in public. In your case, did they ever shrink from allegations of being a blatant racist? Absolutely they did. They would never want to be considered a racist. No possible way would they ever. And for a while, I was a manager at a club down at a private golf club and they all were like whispering behind their hands, right? And they didn't really have to whisper much though because, you know. Everyone was doing it. Everybody's white. And the only people that are in that club that are black or colored are workers that are the lowest workers, you know, the cleanup crew, the housekeeping people. That's it. And so I one time had this one black gal sit down after work and she goes, we've been talking and she goes, well, you know, you're pretty cool for a white girl. And I had just moved there. And I thought, oh, that's funny. I laughed it off. Growing up in California, I understood racism intellectually but I had never experienced it on my own. I didn't get it. Well, and so I laughed it off and she goes, no, no, you don't understand. I don't like white people. And I don't know why, right? I had always made jokes. I don't think I can handle the bigots and the alligators when I moved there and it never occurred to me that I was gonna be hated for being white. Duh, of course I would. And she, you know, explained it to me and I thought, gosh, you know, and her explanation was I don't know hardly any white people. And I thought, yeah, but they don't know hardly any black people either. So there's this ignorance that's involved in all this normally but now enter stage left, you know, Donald Trump comes in and says, there's, you know, fine people on both sides whereas they don't have to be embarrassed anymore. And then on top of that, the media did not call them out at all. Well, I think they did but it fell on deaf ears. I think the media did call out that Tiki Torch little parade. Yeah, maybe the Tiki Torch parade but the rampant racism that was growing and growing and growing and being fueled and fueled and excused by both Trump and other top Republicans. So their voices kind of got drowned out and they didn't keep it up. And so I actually am really mad at the media right now because it seems like they are just... Well, how many times can you say something until the population that's listening to your message is so desensitized? Because they've heard it so many times that it's not making its mark. Well, I don't know as I... You think it's that? No, I don't really think it's that. I don't think it's a matter of being desensitized to it because when Charlottesville happened, we were still... Racists were still having to hide and whisper behind their hands. And if more people had come out in the media, I think plenty of people came out. Individuals here, individuals there, I think as a whole, had they come out and really condemned that behavior, there would have been more of an effect. But because it was just sort of in dribs and drabs, it didn't really make a difference. Interesting. Well, let me fast forward to present times because Charlottesville seems almost a decade away, but it's not. President Biden was in Pennsylvania and he called out the MAGA GOP. Again, I emphasize MAGA, not the regular GOP, not the decent GOP that I've known and used to be one many, many years ago. But he called out the MAGA GOP as semi-fascist. And people decried, that's a bridge too far. How dare you? And I was reminded of Hillary Clinton when she was running for President of the United States as a candidate and she made a reference to what we didn't really define as MAGA GOP, but she referred to him as Trump's followers as a basket of deplorables. Well, if you remember, she backed down. She retreated. She wound walked away from that comment because the outcry was so great, but she was dead spot on. And had she had stuck to it and had the media maybe focus a lot more on what she said and why she said it and examined what really was behind the term deplorable, basket of deplorables, maybe Donald Trump would have never came to be because it was early enough in his candidacy where people actually saw the light that Donald Trump indeed was and is deplorable. Right. So the question is, was Joe Biden correct to say that the MAGA GOP are a bunch of semi-fascists? That's a fairly stringent definition, your opinion. I think it's also very clearly true. So, and so was Hillary's assumption of it all too. So, yeah, I think it's important to say the truth. Tell the truth, not opinion here, opinion there. It seems to me that truth has been completely destroyed and devolved into nothing but opinion. And so facts don't matter anymore because they don't really exist anymore, right? Well, not only facts, but apparently the law. Seems to be not all that important for certain segments. Well, not certain segments, the MAGA GOP just say, we don't care, we don't care what the law is. Maybe the term semi-fascist came out of Joe Biden's mouth is that there's an acknowledgement that the pending election here, and certainly in 2024, no matter who wins, they may just decry, well, we didn't win, therefore it's a fraudulent election and we're not going to accept the results. That seems to be part of a definition of a fascist is to ignore elections or the results of elections, no matter how legitimate. Therefore, they're not just quasi-semi-fascists, they're full-on fascists. Okay, all right. I don't mind calling them. So did Joe Biden stop short? Did he stop short of saying that? And if it's true, why do you think he pulled the brakes on it by saying semi-fascist? Well, all I know is he hasn't walked it back. No, he hasn't, you're a good point. So that's what's important. And semi-fascist, because maybe they're not totally in control right now, he can call them semi-fascists because they're wannabe fascists. I think I would have preferred wannabe because that's what they wannabe as opposed to just semi-fascists. But you can look at what that Carrie Lake lady, she absolutely, when she in the primary was 100%, if I don't win, it's rigged. She won, suddenly it's not rigged. And so we can- Well, I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is part of that ilk. Oh, absolutely, they are. They're all going to do it. We have to be ready for that. And that's what worries me. They've got a new bill that's been put forward by Zo Lofgren and Liz Cheney, that is probably not going to get put into law before the election. And we're in big trouble. What's the nature of that bill? It's the election, oh gosh, I can't remember the name of the bill. That's all right, what's the just behind it? It's for election security. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's totally for election security. It's to get rid of the ability and to put more solidly the fact that the vice president cannot change the results of the elections. I think it's- Oh, that bill is actually moving along, actually. Now I know it's what you're talking about. It's in conference and they're discussing it. It's going to pass. Right. There's bipartisan support for it. Right, I agree. And hopefully it'll pass what, before the midterms? I don't know. That's pretty- Well, since that bill focuses more on a presidential election, maybe isn't it that critical? I don't know. This is critical if you ask me. And the thing that I think we all have to remember that's so important right now. And this applies to the midterm, right? This isn't like, these aren't laws that are going to come into effect later. They don't just affect the presidential election. They will be in effect for the midterms. We have eight states that already have bills that have been signed into law that give the legislatures the power to veto any election results. So they can just decide that they didn't like their election results and change them. So it's not just a matter of people crying. Oh no, it was fraud. It was false, where there, I'm sure will be some of those, but the ones in those eight states, they can just say, no, this is the one. And we legally have the right to say this. So eight of the states whether, I mean, my only hope is that the blue tsunami is so huge and women just flood everything so much that there's no way that those places, that those eight states can just take the boats away. Because it will be too extreme. Well, too, in that vein of your thought here is that the Washington Post did a recent survey and asked many candidates, Republicans and Democrats, whether or not they would accept the 2022 midterm election results. And as you can imagine, a number of them, many of them declined to answer or said, no. I mean, they said, no. Because they're already doing, performing a Donald Trump maneuver and that is to decry an election's fraudulent before the election even takes place. So what do we do about that, Cynthia? What do you think when you have candidates who've already decried that election's gonna be unjust unless they win as a country, what do we say to that? What do we do about that? What can we legally do about it or otherwise? Well, there's not a lot. The Luke Cheney bill obviously, but that hasn't passed yet. Right, so there's not a lot that just you and me can do. We can protest, we can call all of our representatives and our senators and flood offices with complaints and this and that. But look what happened with Trump when he did it. So this is why it's so important that Biden came out and said these are semi-fascists. He's going to call them for what they are. And unless the media gets on board with this and what we've got, well, we already know Fox is just a state or Trump TV, right? Or fascist, now we can call it fascist TV because it's not just Trump that they support anymore. It's fascism that they support now. It's the concept, so the virus has grown and spread. Yes, absolutely. Look at all the DeSantis down in Florida. Okay, we're going to talk about Governor DeSantis here in a minute, but I want to answer this question because I still have a fond spot in my heart for the GOP, the old GOP. So if you're a member of voting, registered member of the GOP and a large segment of your party's being defined by the president of the United States as semi-fascist and you don't necessarily disagree with that. How's it, put yourself in the shoes of one of those GOP potential voters. How would you feel? I know it's hard to ask you to do that, believe me, but if you were in the shoes of a traditional decent GOP member, how do you think you're feeling right now? I know a few. And actually they're starting to question whether or not this whole new movement in the GOP isn't really what they want. And so I'm like, well, then don't vote Republican. It's very simple right now. It's not like some big existential question, some big existential change you have to make in your personality, right? It's a, let's vote for what we know can get us through and keep this democracy going. You can become a Republican later when they come back to their senses, if they ever do. And to tell you the truth, I don't think they ever will. I, you and I way back in the early days of Trump week, what, three and a half, four years ago, longer even, you would talk about that, how did these people come back, you know? Will the Republican party survive this? And at first I thought, sure, the Republican party can survive this, the next election cycle and we'll be all right. And as we went along further and further and saw more and more and we watched the spread of this crazy fascist mentality spreading through, it seemed more likely and more likely that it's not gonna come back. It's like the Republican party is gone. Well, we'll see, I hope not. I hope that they can recover from this. You know, Ken Burns is doing a great PBS series, documentary on the Holocaust and certainly the United States reaction to the Holocaust. And people don't know this, but fascism was alive and well in the 1920s and 1930s in this country. And it's not like that fascism grew with a flip of a light switch, but it grew slowly in nature. And it started off with the anti-immigration of basically colored people and Jews certainly were part of that, but it wasn't solely an anti-Semitic movement. But after watching Hitler and what was going on in Germany, many groups in the United States started to support it. The most famous was Charles Lindbergh. So it didn't happen quickly. It just slowly, slowly evolved into a full-on fascist movement in this country. And I guess the question is, do you think that's a potential moving forward for our country again? Are we already there? Well, okay, that's my question. Are we there? Sorry, but I have to answer that question with another question, which is, does it look like that? It looks like that. And when you look at it and you look at the definition of fascist, then we're there. It's already happening now as we speak. I gotta quote the famous Nazi Joseph Goebbels, right? Yeah. Goebbels or Goebbels, right? Minister of information, yeah. Goebbels tells us to accuse the other side of that which you are guilty. He also tells us that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Magus, are they Nazis? Well, no, I mean, these are the tenants of propaganda. I mean, it could be the propaganda of the 1920s, the 1930s, or the propaganda of Donald Trump starting in the beginning of his presidency and before his presidency. So the big lie that has been identified is the election was stolen from him. That's the big lie. And it's unfortunate that certain news outlets, CNN, I believe is to be named, won't allow its correspondence or its news anchors to use the big lie in the same sentence as Donald Trump. And I find that deplorable. It is the big lie and to deny that this election was stolen is ridiculous. And after 60 court cases, and that's how we resolve our election disputes in the court of law, be it federal or be it the Supreme Court, that's how we settle our issues. And after 60 of them going against Donald Trump, I think it's time to stop it. But Donald Trump will get votes, he'll get money based on a sense of grievance from the MAGA GOP. And I guess that's my last question on this topic is, has this all grown as a smoldering grievance that the Donald Trump voters retain within them and their vitriol feelings of anything Democrat that the Democrats are socialists, they're cannibalistic according to Q-non, that they're pedophiles according to Q-non. So they're adopting these terms of deplorability, they're adopting them as their own. How do we probe are these kind of thoughts of conspiracy and grievance and vitriol away from these voters? We need the opposite. You need to balance it with the truth. If they're gonna tell the big lie enough times, we got to tell the big truth enough times so that it can balance out. So people can understand what they're looking at. We got to remember that quote I just gave you from Joseph Goebbels. We got to remember Trump is not alone doing this all by himself. He didn't just come up with all these ideas out of his own little brain. This is, there's a lot of people behind him that are feeding in this stuff too, right? And we also know from lots of different people that his favorite book is Mind Conf and we know that he followed the whole Nazi rise and he thought that's what he wanted to follow. And we've been sort of connecting the dots for a lot of years now to the rise of Hitler and how similar it is and how many of the same tactics and techniques and things that Hitler used, that Trump has used. Yeah, well, it's just again, you could call it Hitler, you could call it Nazi, you could call it Putin, you could call it Stalin. Propaganda is propaganda. It's a tool that can be used over and over again for I call it evil purposes. Right. So, okay, I want to fast forward very quickly. We're almost out of time. In fact, we are out of time but I want to talk about Governor DeSantis. That was quick. Yeah, I want to talk about Governor DeSantis for a bit. A lot of people are applauding Governor DeSantis as a crafty and how wise it was to teach the liberal, libtard woke Democrats in the Eastern States, particularly out in Massachusetts, Martha's Vineyard of the immigration issue that has been delivered literally to their front door. And to that end, how smart Governor DeSantis was to orchestrate the transferring of several legal asylum applicants via airplane from Texas to Martha's Vineyard. To what degree do you find his actions either commendable or deplorable? Was it a wise crafty move to teach Democrats a lesson and gain some national attention on that point or was the treating of legal asylum seekers as described deplorable and really sinful and shameful? Sinful, shameful, deplorable and ridiculous and not actually not only that but not his idea. So why is he getting all the credit? What's the guy's name in Texas? Abbot. Abbot, yeah, thank you. Governor Abbot. Abbot did it first. He'd already sent a couple of buses to Chicago and one to Washington, DC. So it's not like he was an original but nobody really talks about that. They just talk about it. Well, you just did. Thanks for reminding us. Okay. And so this is the thing and neither one of them are actually really original either if you remember the old freedom they used to call them the reverse freedom rides or whatever. Right. Put all the black people on the buses and send them north. It's the same sort of thing. And it's been likened to that lots of times in the media and it's true though, it is like that. And so I think that the idea itself and not in, I mean, just to randomly bust these people. Oh yeah, wait, really quick before I forget. Did you know that just today those asylum seekers that got bust up to Martha's Vineyard have filed a class action lawsuit against DeSantis. Go get them as well. Well, there may be criminal charges as well against Governor DeSantis as a potential involvement with human trafficking criminal issues. So we'll see where that goes. That's where I was going with that. But the thing is, it's not a bad idea. And once they get into this country they absolutely should be organized and coordinated with other cities so that they don't have people sleeping on the street because they're in Texas all their shelters are full. Okay, so we've got shelters over here. Let's get them up there, but you got to coordinate with the people that you're sending them to. Well, let me ask you this. We don't have time for an immigration question show here. We're out of time. But what about the Republicans and actually some Democrats that support keeping legal asylum seekers outside of the United States borders and retain themselves in Mexico until their court case comes up? I don't think that's such a bad idea. Okay. I don't see why that's such a bad idea. Well, that was a Trump policy and a lot of Democrats feel that that may not be an unreasonable one. And that's what the Republicans that are supporting these bussines and flights out of Texas, out of border states, Arizona, that's what their basis of rationale is that we should go back to that policy that Trump implemented is to keep the asylum seekers out of the borders of the United States until their court date comes up. Wasn't that started for COVID though? Wasn't it? Yes, that was, that was. It was just for COVID and now that COVID restriction is gone. That's what loosened that back up again. So he didn't actually make that as just a blanket. They got a weight outside no matter what. It's all around COVID and now that COVID is under control, that kind of a reasoning is gone. Is that reasoning out of bounds? Is it immoral? Is it reasonable? I think it is actually, but that's just my opinion. I think it's fairly reasonable because they have to wait for their court date. And as their court dates get closer, if they have a, you know, to say they've got a court date with an immigration judge in Texas and they've just been sent to Chicago and they have no money. How are they supposed to get back? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, excellent point. You know, if they're close right there to where the immigration judges are now, this is what I think they should do that 12 million that DeSantis was on camera saying, I'm going to use every penny. Right. Well, why doesn't he use some of that money to put some more immigration judges on and get some of those people processed faster? And really, if you want to fix the immigration problem at the border, why don't you flood money to that problem instead of just trying to spread it out? These people that they don't want in this country, they want to send them all over the country. And I think, do you guys even realize what you're saying you want to do with like, I think they quite get that part of it that they're sending people that might be hard to track if they're all over the country, right? And they're sending them there anyway. Whereas when they're right there in Texas and that's the other part, what does Florida have to do with all these people coming in through Texas? They don't go to Florida. And Florida is what, three, four states away? So it's like, wait, DeSantis is just doing this as a photo op, as a big look at me, I want to be president. And so I think it's hopefully going to make it worse for him. But there's a lot of Democrats that are worried about immigration also. So it's not just a Republican problem. It is an American problem that we need to get right. But whatever the problem is, it's important to resolve it without using deplorable tactics and degrading human beings, even though they're not citizens of the United States, they're still human beings. And they may not have a lot of legal rights in this country because they don't have any citizenship status or even green cards for legal protections. But my God, we're a country that wants welcome immigrants, particularly if they're claiming political refuge from violence. And we've seemed to have lost our way on that point. All right, Cynthia, I'm going to give you the last word. Oh, okay. Because I want to say one last thing. And then I have a really great Liz Cheney quote to finish. But one last thing about this immigration stuff that, excuse me, I think is important. And that is that we got to fix it in the places where they're coming from. Now, this huge, crazy onslaught of immigrants to our border didn't happen until Trump started saying, look at these crazy caravans on their way here. So who sent those caravans? How did they go? There's already been a lot of, it hasn't gotten to court, so it's not proven yet, completely in a court of law. But there's all sorts of witnesses that say they were given money to go to America. At the same time that Trump took away all the money that was aid money for that country. So it's like he was behind some of this so then he could cry, oh, oh, and yes, we had an immigration problem before that, but it wasn't to this degree like it is now. And I can't help but wonder since he's the head deplorable and he has no problem using deplorable means to get what he wants. And what a great way to make the Democrats look bad by the onslaught of people at the border. Okay, so that was my last immigration thing. And this is what I want to say. Representative Liz Cheney launched a blistering attack on Donald Trump and this came from the times and his allies Monday accusing Republican leaders of treating the former president like a king by defending him at every turn in a federal investigation into classified documents stored at his Florida home. Those are, okay, this is quote by Liz Cheney. Those who are protecting Donald Trump, elected leaders of my party are now willing to condemn FBI agents, Department of Justice officials and pretend that taking top secret SCI documents and keeping them in a desk drawer in an office in Mar-a-Lago or in an unsecured location anywhere was somehow not a problem. They are attempting to excuse his behavior. She said this in a speech. She said bit by bit, excuse by excuse we're putting Donald Trump above the law. All right, I remember hearing that quote and it's a good one. So Cynthia, thank you for bringing that to our attention. Thank you for appearing on American Issues Take One. Join us next week. I'm Tim Apachele, your host and we hope to see you then. Until then, aloha.