 And welcome to Think Tech Hawaii on July the 15th, 2021. This show is America Finding Its Way. And today, I'm your host, Stephanie Stoll Dalton. Our topic is, as the title says, our voting rights about to fade away before the COVID virus leaves us. We know that alarming reports show the surge in Delta variant infections is large and unforgiving for all the unvaccinated. According to national medical data, reports 99% of recent hospitalizations and deaths are Delta infections in patients who are unvaccinated. So while state legislatures with increasing hospitalizations and death numbers do nothing allowing citizens to infect others by not imposing masking and vaccination laws or requirements, they are also, at the same time, mega-legislating to curtail citizens' right to vote. Sleaze many states' Democratic legislators powerless to ensure citizens are safe with viable public health policy. And the breakdown in support for voting rights eliminates citizens' real engagement in self-government. So today, I want to ask you all, what are your comments on this and how are we thinking about these issues, which are dire? So with these reports about the Republican legislative aims to curtail all citizens' full voting rights is unaligned, actually, with even Republican voters' wishes, because 58% say that they're in favor of extending early voting and some other of the issues. But it appears that the changes Republicans seek in the laws are going to hurt all, and even those that they want most to be voting. So are they cutting off their noses despite their faces? So Jay, what are they doing? Well, again, hardly argue with success. They're successfully adopting these bills. And Republican governors are signing these bills. And at the same moment in time, they're successfully opposing the vaccines and taking dramatic action against anyone who encourages the vaccines. My favorite, favorite story, Stephanie, my favorite one, this may be my favorite in some time. In the state of Missouri, if you want to get a vaccine, you'll be criticized. Your friends and neighbors and anyone who finds out you got the vaccine will criticize you. So now the health authorities are offering secret appointments where you can come down and no one will know that you slipped in the back door and got a vaccine. That's where we have gone. And although, you know, it's hard to make a connection rationally between the political forces that call for voter suppression and the political forces that, you know, that would oppose vaccines. Even when it's like suicide, not to have a vaccine in a state which is rampant with the coronavirus, including Delta and wait, there'll be Lambda. Lambda's coming up from South America, wait. It's a strange thing, but they're connected somehow. And I think that, I think part of that has to be that it will make Trump happy. It will somehow satisfy a need to please him. And that's what we have. I think going forward, I think, as I said yesterday, I think Joe Manchin is a fake. He is really not going to do it. We can talk about what he had for breakfast at lunch and what he's spent today or didn't say today, and we can spot him out moment for moment, but he's not going to do it. No change in the filibuster, no voting rights act. You can disagree, but I think that's where we're going. And of course, if you oppose vaccines, the country will be rampant with coronavirus, not only the people who have not been vaccinated, but some who have. And when the new variants take greater hold, other people who have been vaccinated. So we're in terrible shape because at the end of the day, it sounds like, A, it will be sick. And our economy will suffer. And at the same time, we'll have inflation, which appears to be rearing its ugly head right now. And B, the Republicans will have both houses. We borrow. Chilling. Yes. Well, I think that we're, we have the Democratic legislatures who have sought to act and in their actions, they took flight to the US Congress. So Cynthia, what do you think, what do you think that's going to do for them? And how will the Congress do anything? Well, I'll tell you, I am trying to hold on to hope. I'm trying to be optimistic. Like Winston always is for us. I heard on. I, I, I'm Stephen Colbert last night. I guess night before last, I was talking to one of my colleagues, I was talking to one of my colleagues, Norton, that we representative from DC was on talking about making DC, you know, it's, it's own state. So it can have two senators and how she doesn't even get to vote. She gets to do all the work, but doesn't even get to be part of a final vote. But this was something that she said that really stuck with me. That was really cool. She says, you saw what happened in 2020. And she said, you know, I'm not going to vote. I'm not going to vote. I'm not going to vote it. Tell us we can't vote. Yeah. Well, now you are really going to piss us off. And I thought, okay, let's get some people pissed off and get them out there to the polls, regardless of the suppression techniques that are happening. And in that case, it is our only hope. We used to talk about last, you know, all this other stuff, but what good did it do us if it doesn't get us over the edge? And so really this one coming up in 2022, that's the one that's really going to be able to make a difference. And if we can get the same kind of turnout in 22 that we got in 20, regardless of whether or not we can't get to the polls at the right times or whatever we need to do to get there, right. But then we got to talk about the fact that there's these other things that are involved in all these bills, and it's making it easier for them to change the electors, make them pick their own. They can change whatever the results are. And there's like no backlash for that. There's no accountability. There's no anything to the voters. It's like they get to, if the Republicans are in charge of that state, they get to pick whatever outcome they want, which to me is what's terrifying. And that I believe the voters will be like representative Norton said, they'll be more mad. They'll be even more engaged. They're going to want to come out even more so. But what good does it do us? If those other things are in place that make it so they can recount our votes, whatever way they want. So what are the plans? Because if, if we can't vote, if not everybody can vote for Eleanor in the district, not even vote for her, what are we going to do to intervene? What is the intervention? What do you think? Excuse me. You want to. I think the intervention needs to be people. I need people need to come up in droves. Like when black lives matter after George Floyd, we flooded the streets. Well, I think voting rights needs to be that important also. And we need to flood the streets. We need to be bold like the people in Texas, what they just left so they can't have a quorum. So they can't vote right now on that. That initiative going forward, right? They can't vote on that legislation because there's no quorum, but what so they can't stay out of Texas forever. That doesn't work. And I think they were very smart. And I applaud what they did going to, to DC, to try to really take a spotlight for all of America, to really look at what's happening here. We were all so. Overload mode after the 2020 election. Nobody wanted to pay attention to anything. And I. Think about it. Do you think that what, what Cynthia is saying about taking action. Regardless of it, any outcome, promised or expected. Or likely is that, is that what we do? What, what are the interventions? How do we hold this? I'm probably veering more towards what Jay has been pounding all along, which is that it's looking more grim as we go by. I mean, when you have all the Democrats leaving Texas to prevent voting, essentially a takeover of the voting system in that state, this is insane. This is America in 2021. And we're having at least 17 states introducing laws to restrict voters' rights in some ways. I mean, and we know what it's all about. This is not so that we're enfranchising more people to vote or making it easier or safer or anything about that. I was looking at our Canadian friends in the Lawrence Martin wrote in The Globe and Mail and he says the cornerstone of US democracy is crumbling. And he says that Joe Biden was not hyperbolicizing. That's not the right pronunciation. This week when he claimed that American democracy, given the raw and sustained elections subversion by Republicans, was under its greatest threat since the Civil War, I think they're right in this. And he says basically that all hell all will come to a head in the midstream elections in the fall of 2022 when all hell could break loose of a voter eligibility, voter count confrontations, overturned verdicts are all three. To win, Republicans are convinced they have to disenfranchise minorities. Their very purpose is to see the current voting system undermined. Unless Mr. Biden overcomes prohibitive odds to pass legislation, you might say stop the steal. It will very likely happen. And he has renamed the Republicans the grand old disgrace of a party. And I think there's a lot to that. You have other ones where Washington Post had a story yesterday that says under Trump, Republicans touted the coronavirus vaccines. Now under Biden, they're questioning them. This is just craven political crap. It's Rand Paul. I mean, everything that comes out of this, not the suspect, honestly. But you have Ronnie Jackson saying this Marjorie Taylor Green, of course, intellectual head of the Republican Party, giving her two cents. Why was it good under Trump and now it's not under Biden? This is really confusing people. But on the other side, you have some other things, which is, I don't know if you saw on the Hill, that the Alabama military-based ordering troops to get vaccinated because they're at 33%. Exactly, the ambivalence that you're pointing out, the ambivalence. So I want to move over to ask about a prediction that relates to that and is another variable in the mess that you're describing, which is we are going to go even more bipolar because we're going to have two groups in the country, which I think you're leading to in insinuating. We're going to have the vaccinated and the infected. And these are going to be two polarized groups. So Tim, how do you think that's going to fit into the picture as we go forward to the election and to dealing with this and trying to intervene? Well, I hate to say it this way, and it's going to sound awful, but those who are not vaccinated and related to voting, they're not going to be around to vote. The delta variant is going to kill them. And this is a more variant in much, it's COVID on steroids. And I know of a personal situation where, again, this individual poo-pooed COVID and the family poo-pooed it. And of course, he got COVID and now he's dead. He was on a vener for some time. And his wife decided that maybe it was time to get the kids vaccinated, and maybe it was time for her to get a vaccination. But it took the death of her husband to realize that. And they sacrificed their family member because they listened to a false narrative, which started with Trump and then was amplified by Fox and all the enablers on Fox and in Congress. And so to answer your question, with more time that the delta variant will have its time to work into those red states, that they deny the validity of the vaccination, they're going to get sick. And maybe all of them won't die, but all of them will die. And it's unnecessary and it's uncalled for. And I don't want to see any of my fellow Americans to perish under something that they don't have to perish under. It makes us look really, as a nation, it just makes us look like we're back in the Middle Ages. And so I wish it would stop, but it's not. And as far as the voting rights, I think we're on here. It's a concentrated effort to do what's happening. I look at Oklahoma. Oklahoma in the 2020 election, presidential election, Donald Trump won that state by almost 66%. Joe Biden, 30.3%. What is Oklahoma doing? They're demanding an audit. Now of 77 counties, all counties voted for Trump. And yet they want an audit because they think something's suspect. And the bottom line is it's not. But they want to cast out. Every state now wants to cast out on the validity of our presidential election. That's not by accident. This is a concentrated effort. And I'm not saying as a conspiracy that every state is doing it. But you take Oklahoma as an example and you go, what's behind that? Other than what the obvious is to discount the validity and the credibility of our national elections. And it's got to be stopped. And I think Joe Manchin, contrary to what Jay thinks, I think Joe Manchin is going to support the John R. Lewis Advancement Voting Act. And I think you'll do it carefully and he'll draw it out, maybe for more drama. He'll draw it out. But the bottom line is I think it's going to pass. And it will take Vice President Harris to break the tie. Well, as we face this and as the delta and then as Jay says, the next one has come in the lambda. And the children and the young are infected, which is clearly what is occurring now. So there's data to tell us that the 20s and the 30s are getting it as much as anybody else. So they're in the pot with the boiling water. So do you think, Jay, that bringing, broadening the infection into the entire population, now not just getting rid of the oldsters who should be gone anyway and let the other people take their place. But now that we're getting our youngsters threatened, do you think that might make a difference? No. I think the country is broken. I can see Vladimir Putin dancing the kazatska every day because it is the secret police. And his internet research agency, which we saw surface a few years ago in connection with the first Trump election, one of the basic rules is divide. Divide and conquer. Divide it as many ways as you can. Create division among the population. Confusion among the population. So that's what we have. We have confusion about COVID. We have confusion about voting rights. Then in the process, we have a complete deterioration of confidence, confidence in the government, in the system, and in the country. I think we're really right now unable to take action on any of these things as hard as Bill Biden cries. And he's trying very hard, and he's achieving some things. But the bottom line is the principal points here, the voting rights. And you know, maybe one bill gets through, but the John Lewis bill is not enough to counteract all these states that are pulling the rug out from voting rights. Going to make everybody confused about the time you get to November election day 2022. Gee whiz. There's going to be such confusion over what applies, what doesn't apply, what's in the courts, what the courts have done, what the Supreme Court will do. You can bet they're going to do something stupid. And so what we have is a lack of confidence in the system. And like the representative from Washington DC says, and a quick note to that, by the way, is that that is a bill that is never going to get through. So I wouldn't spend any time at all on it. Never happen. It's at the very end of the list of priorities. Not going to happen. But what she says about people getting angry, you bet they'll be angry. And Vladimir will be doing another kizotska when he sees all the people in the street fighting with each other. And the government coming in and fighting with you. And then all of this, remember that Trump is the underlying force of so much of this. And that despite all these books that are coming out revealing his craziness and calling him unhinged and deranged, and what have you, really good books about people who know, because he's still got a certain amount of popularity. And we stand the risk in 2022 of letting, if they take, GOP takes both houses of Congress, who do you think the real winner is with Trump? And he'll try to run then for 2024. And he'll stand a good chance. If the Republicans take Congress, they're going to do all kinds of dastardly things. If he becomes president, it's time to file your immigration papers with Canada. Well, I didn't think that we'd get to this quite so fast, but my question, next question is for everybody to comment on, do you think the US democracy is going to be the same or different in the next couple of next decades? What do you really think now? I think it's deteriorating. I think it's actually coming apart while we watch. We can't agree on basic facts. We can't remember the founders' principles. We can't even agree on voting rights. And we are bringing back the post-reconstruction era of racism in the country. That's the highest priority for a number of those states and for everybody in those states. We are completely dissembled. How do you bring that back? Maybe Winston has a positive idea. Well, we'll try it. I thought that a positive, that we would be assured of a human response in the direction of making the best for everyone if the children are involved. Nobody refused the polio shot. There wasn't any problem at all with the polio vaccine, okay? Nor with the surrogate cube it was. Remember only a couple of years ago there was a big controversy about measles, which is also ridiculous and irrational. And there were hundreds of thousands of people in this country who were opposing measles shots which have been established as they. And now, I don't know how many tens of millions of people have taken the vaccine against COVID, they're still not, it's not settled. Now, one of the problems is, for some reason that escapes me, maybe somebody here knows better. The CDC has not finalized its approval of the COVID vaccine, any of them. And this leaves a big channel wide open people to say, well, I'm hesitant. They haven't finally approved it. I'm hesitant because it can have side effects. And therefore, you know, you have this fragmentation on that too. Bottom line is that nobody seems to agree on anything. It's getting worse. And I need trying hard. You have to give them good marks for that. But it's getting worse. When I knew there was a thing in, there is a thing in Europe. In France I mentioned yesterday that Macron is putting legislation through or some kind of executive order requiring vaccines for everybody. That's what we need to do. We can't tiptoe around this. And on voting rights, I mean, somebody ought to really come down on mansion. He's been holding it up for months. And I don't believe a sincerity. Quite a bit of agreement, consensus on that. Well, Cynthia, why do you think that we are losing our strength? And something as august as the CDC is weak, is acting weak, as Jay says. I think the CDC got gutted during Trump's presidency. So I think that might be part of it. We, I don't really trust any of that anymore so much because of the difference in the way he could manipulate some of the people that work there to do things that were totally against what's real and just do what he wanted them to say or do. And that just undermines my confidence in the CDC. As far as that goes, I agree with Jay. There's this weird anti-vaxxer movement that started back about for kids with they said that it would cause autism. And so they blame the rise in autism on vaccines. And even though they debunked it and it said, this post or this thing that was put out there is wrong. It's not true, but people still believe it. So how do you reach through that kind of psychosis? I don't really understand it. And then give us a little help here since you've been lauded as the positive one even during this conversation. So what if what are your remedies or what do you think is going to happen? Are we going to get strength again or are we continuing to weaken? And what will keep us from sliding into more weakness? Can I say first before Winston's then it starts? Sure. I think it's all about 22. It's all about 2022. If we can hold the houses, maybe even gain some people will be fine. If we don't, we're toast. Sorry. Okay. We're going to pause on the Winston. That's the way Winston to see the remedy. I'm not feeling, well, let's just say, we're going to, I want to be cheery. So, okay, educate yourselves, viewers of the show. I love the review and slate of Michael Wolf's landslide. It's like he says, I love reading this because it's just such horrible smut and yet it's true. And so it's just like, but he says it's something delicious about being validated by just reading about the slime we just have all experienced. But next week, let's look very much towards I Alone Can Fix It by Pulitzer Prize winners, Phillip Rucker and Carol Leonig. And then also, and they wrote a very stable genius coming up as well. So, I believe that they are the same ones that wrote it in any event. We have information coming out, order copies for your friends, or at least the Cliff Notes version, send them out. Remind them that we have all been deeply traumatized that our nation, our institutions, our workplaces, our families have been deeply traumatized by this. And I was just talking with the neighbor and she said, my niece and nephew voted for Donald Trump. I can't even talk to them anymore. And I thought, good gravy. This is what's happened in our nation is that we can't even talk to our friends, families, neighbors, relatives anymore because we're so weirded out by people that are living in an alternate universe. And so we have to go back and educate ourselves. We have to realize what's happened, deconstruct it. Joe Biden, keep on. When the military, the scary thing was I was also reading a Washington Post about General Miley, a warning of the Reichstag moment. And he said that he called McMaster and said, what the FMI dealing with? And he said he was feared in an American equivalent of brown shirts in the streets. This is very scary stuff. So he says, if someone wanted to seize control, they'd need to gain sway over the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department where Trump had installed staunch allies. So I think that he said, everything's going to be okay. We're going to have a peaceful transfer of power. We're going to land this plane safely. This is America, it's strong. The institutions are bending, but it won't break. Last thing I want to say is COVID, a year ago, COVID didn't exist in our minds really. I mean, it started to super grasp us in about March, right? Here's this, we talk about Lambda. In Peru, it's 90% of the cases. They have half a percent of their entire population died, 30% of their people are in poverty now. And in neighboring Chile, it's 31% of the cases. Princeton, that's really frightening. Now we're going to have to, in time, for time's sake, we have to move over here to Tim. Well, I would just say COVID is the C variant, the D variant, the X variant. It's coming. We're going to get so many things coming out. We don't even know what's going on. What's that mean to us for a recovery, Tim? Is there a recovery or do we stay in the muck? My first answer, I tried to get at this. I think sometimes Americans learn the hard way, and in this case, I think more deaths are going to occur until they finally get it. They'll finally realize that our belief in Donald Trump and the whole hoax of the virus wasn't a hoax. It was real, and it took a lot more deaths. We already have 600,000 Americans dead. Is it going to take more? I'm sad to say it's going to take more, and until they get off the Kool-Aid, the Jim Jones Kool-Aid, if you will, more are going to die. And in our democracy, if they believe this big lie, they certainly still believe in the big lie of the election fraud, and it was stolen from Donald Trump. So we're dealing with multiple conspiracies as a nation we have to contend with. And the two big ones, that is the denial of the vaccination and the denial of the election loss. And until we get those two wrapped around our heads and truth enters into the picture, you can expect more mayhem for our democracy and how we do business as a nation. Well, we're not doing the business we need to do, and now it's our aloha time here on the show, so we're going to have to wrap it up. So I'm Stephanie Stolldahlton, hosting for the America Show program, Finding Its Way. So see you next week, same time and day. Mahalo, everybody, and thank you.