How Hippies Became Republicans (Did Our Two Parties Switch Sides?)

This episode explores the ideological evolution and apparent role reversal of the American political parties, focusing on how historically liberal or "hippie" values have shifted towards conservative alignments.

1. Political parties in the U.S. have not fully swapped ideologies but have realigned on key issues over decades.
2. Stereotypes about hippies have found new life in modern Republican narratives.
3. The Democratic Party's success in integrating into the establishment led to a shift away from its anti-establishment roots.
4. Misunderstandings about the nature of party shifts often overlook the complexity and gradual nature of these changes.
5. Current political discourse is marked by confusion and misconceptions about the historical identities of the parties.

1: Introduction to the Topic

Overview of the episode’s theme on the unexpected ideological shifts between the political parties. Simone and Malcolm introduce the historical context and current misconceptions. Simone: "Hello everyone. We are excited to be doing an episode today on hippies being Republican."

2: Historical Context and Misconceptions

Discussion on the historical shifts in party ideology and how these are misrepresented in modern political discourse. Malcolm: "The Democrats went from being seen as the party that was pro civil rights to the anti, went from anti civil rights to pro civil rights."

3: Current Political Climate

Analysis of how modern Republicans and Democrats align with or diverge from their historical positions, especially concerning civil rights and economic policies. Malcolm: "Republicans, up until Trump were not the party of small government. They said they were the party of small government, but they were not."

1. Understand the nuanced history of political parties to avoid oversimplified views.
2. Recognize that stereotypes often do not represent complex political realities.
3. Engage critically with political narratives to discern underlying biases and agendas.
4. Foster dialogue that respects historical context and encourages informed understanding.
5. Stay informed about the shifting landscapes of political ideologies to better participate in civic discussions.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the surprising ideological shift that has occurred within the Republican Party, transforming it into a haven for anti-establishment and anti-globalist sentiments once associated with hippie culture. The hosts analyze the factors that led to this change, including the Democratic Party's success in capturing major institutions, the ideological capture of corporations, and the rise of global bureaucracies. They also delve into the historical context of party realignments in the United States and the current state of the Republican base, highlighting the disconnect between influencer opinions and voter preferences on key issues like abortion.

People

Malcolm Collins, Simone Collins

Content Warnings:

None

Simone
Hello everyone. We are excited to be doing an episode today on hippies being republican. Now this is a really laid back place. Oh wow. You guys shouldn't be doing that.

Don't you know what you're doing to the world? You're playing into the corporate game. See, the corporations are trying to turn. You into little Eggmans so that they can make money. Who are the corporations?

The corporations run the entire world and now they fooled you into working for them. Are you serious? We never heard that the government is. Using its corporate ties to make you sell magazines so they can get rid of it. Those dirty liars.

This is a really nice town you have here. That's why the corporations are trying to use you to take it down. Just hang with us for a bit. We'll fill you in on everything you haven't been told. It is wild how we have met this exact archetype of person and had these exact conversations that Salisburg used to use as the stereotype of what was annoying about hippies at a number of republican conferences this year.

Would you like to know more? We have been to a number of republican conferences this year. I'm going to break them down into really three major ones. Ark, which was of UK republican elites. Conservative.

Simone
Yeah. Yeah. Then there was the one in New Hampshire that was for libertarians and then there was the one that was for the new underground sort of dissident right group, which was replatformed. So what was really interesting is, yes, the hoity toity UK one didn't have this hippie class as much. It definitely had a portion of them, but the other two were just pure like most of the lines I would see in this South park making fun of hippie attitudes we saw in this environment.

Malcolm
So if I'm going to go over some one is the globalist theory, I guess I call it, which is to say that there are a number of elites who run large companies and ostensibly run world politics and the globe and that you are playing into their hand if you go get a normal nine to five bureaucratic job and that this group has a secret agenda which is just to use you for your labor. And then in the episode you might have noticed, oh, they've come to your town because you have this nice small town and they want to ruin it. So not only that, but that they disproportionately target nice healthy communities, which is definitely something you often see in these circles. And that a lot of people in the world are brainwashed and that if you just hang out with them and there's a sociological and ideological bubble. That's how you get out of this brainwashing.

And another thing that I think is really interesting is the mood and the vibe from the hippies, especially this era of hippies as depicted by South park, is much more similar to republican conferences and stuff. I've gone to the Democrat ones. With Democrat ones, it is very gatekeepy. When you enter a community, they want to make sure that you are the right kind of person with the right kind of ideas. Where at most of the republican conferences, it's more of a.

I'm eager to share with you the theory I have about how the world works. Or basically a conspiracy. Yeah, very much like in the clip. Like you got to know. Don't you understand?

Simone
Yep. Like they're trying to turn you into tools of the corporation, man. Yeah, they're trying to. They're trying to save you from something that they think is harmful. And then the second clip, I'll play it here, which I think is pretty elucidating right now.

We're proven we don't need corporations, we don't need money. This can become a commune where everyone just helps each other. Yeah. We have one guy who, like, like, makes bread and one guy who, like, looks out for other people's. You mean like a baker and a cop?

No, no. Can't you imagine a place where people live together and, like, provide services for each other in exchange for their services? Yeah, it's called a town. You kids just haven't been to college yet, but just you wait. This thing is about to get huge.

Malcolm
So in this clip, a misunderstanding of economic systems and a belief that the economic systems we have now existing just to screw over people, and that through essentially rebuilding these systems, we can have something that works. Now, this isn't as pure within republican circles as it was within. This isn't as pure an analogy to the older hippie movement because these groups often want to move to. I mentioned a gold, Simone, and someone at the libertarian event paid me was like a gold slip of paper and. Literally a laminated piece of gold leaf, if I understand correctly.

Yeah, yeah. Where they are trying to reprint currency, like recreate currency, but I guess have it be backed by something. Is the idea just literally paying with gold? Yeah, but the gold in it isn't worth the price of the currency. They inflate the price of the currency.

Simone
Oh, I see. Okay. It's just an even weird. It's just a currency again, that's what they've done is they've recreated currency, the gold standard. No, it's not the gold standard, because the gold standard was.

Malcolm
It was pinned to the price of gold. Yeah, it is pinned under the price of gold so that they can make a margin off of selling the currency. Oh, I get it. I see what you're saying. Okay.

Okay, so it's not the gold standard. Now she's a little dense. I'm sorry, Malcolm, but why are we seeing these convergent beliefs? How did this ideological system that is conspiratorially minded believes in a globalist conspiracy, believes that the globalist conspiracy is disproportionately targeting otherwise wholesome areas, and believes that by working bureaucratic jobs, you are serving that global conspiracy and that the world's economic system is in service to that global conspiracy or globalist conspiracy. How did that move from being a democratic movement to a predominantly republican movement?

Simone
All right, I will give my assumption, my hypothesis, and then you'll tell me why it's dumb. Okay. I think it's because ultimately, the progressive movement, Democrats, et cetera, were too successful. And because they became so successful, especially among college educated elites. And keep in mind, a key punchline in these South park clips is, oh, you just haven't been to college yet.

You haven't been educated. So we are talking about a group of people who went through institutions and also became commercially, financially successful and influential within various institutions. These people, they went to college, and then they went on and they became lawyers, government workers, policymakers, bureaucrats. We have another podcast on this where we discussed with Tracy Woodgrains how the republican party is boned. Because basically anyone who can implement policy within government, to be a bureaucrat, to be a legislator, is probably someone who's gone through this university system and become progressives.

It's hard to find, like, the talent you need to get things done as a Republican. If you are in a position of power, you. You have a mandate or a majority. I think what happened is Democrats and progressives became too successful. Then their mindset shifted away from this anti establishment mindset because they became the establishment.

Now when I go to more progressive gatherings and meetings, and when I remember the ones that I attended throughout my college years, when I was still very progressive and very democrat, it was all about, we have to get the institutions to do this, we have to get corporations to do this, to execute better on our mandate. We have to get governments to execute more effectively on our values. And it wasn't, you can't trust them. Stay away from them. They're trying to manipulate you.

We need to build an alternate system because they own the system. That is an interesting point. There is an element, I know. I think there is an element of truth to that world framework. A framing I would add to that world framework is that the parties flipped and a lot of people, american parties flip all the time when rarely a lot of people say that they flipped from when the Democrats went from being a predominantly southern party to a predominantly northern party.

Malcolm
The Democrats went from being seen as the party that was pro civil rights to the anti, went from anti civil rights to pro civil rights. They went from being a party that was. They just changed in a lot of ways, not in every way. A lot of people get this in. The early nineties when.

Simone
When time wise. Claude's answer to this question is the general consensus among historians is that the republican and democratic parties underwent a gradual ideological shift, often referred to as the quote unquote party realignment or party switch, over the course of several decades. In the 20th century, particularly between the 1930s and 1960s, one of the most significant turning points in this alignment occurred during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat. Roosevelt's New Deal policies, which expanded the role of federal government in addressing economic and social issues, began attracting more liberal voters to the Democratic Party, including many African Americans who previously supported the Republican Party since the civil War era. However, the realignment process continued through the 1960s, particularly during the presidency of Lyndon Bj.

Claude
Johnson, also a Democrat. Johnson supported the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965, further solidified the Democratic Party's alignment with the civil rights movement and led to a backlash among many southern white conservatives, who began shifting their support to the Republican Party. It's important to note that this realignment was a complex and gradual process, and there is no single president or event that marks a definitive quote unquote, switch between the parties. The ideological positions of both parties have continued to evolve since the 1960s. I can add more specifics after afterwards in editing, but.

Simone
Perfect. Did you not study this in school? No, dude, they stopped right before the Vietnam War. After basically after World War Two, they. Were like, okay, but anyway, the point being is when you point out to Democrats today that they were the party of the Klan and that they were the party of slavery, they're like, don't you know that the parties flipped?

Malcolm
And it's important to understand what they mean when they say that they mean flipped on a few issues that allows them to disavow the tendencies that have reconverged on racism within the party. But when you go through party flips. Historically speaking, you don't actually flip everything. You don't actually flip your whole constituency. You don't actually flip every member.

You flip in a few key ways that then become really important to the party. Identity, history and narrative going forwards. And this is where the confusion happens, is there is a belief that when the pro slavery party flipped, that it do in part, and we need to say this in part to some civil rights issues, that it became holistically the pro civil rights party. And this is just wrong and not aligned with historical reality. The parties did not flip in every one of their beliefs.

They flipped in a few key beliefs. In the era of Trump, we saw this again, the parties flipped in a few key beliefs, but there was a. Trump flip that no one talks about. They don't talk about it now, but they'll talk about it in history books. A lot of people are like, oh, the left me.

You hear this line all the time where there's the famous comic of the guy standing in the middle and then the leftist is running away and now the central line is against him and he pushes the guy. Or there was the one where the leftist guy like, pushes him and he's like, why are you standing over there on the right now? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And both of these, I think, cover a key idea, which is a lot of people that identified, part of their personality was a liberalist framing of reality, that people should be allowed to live and let live, that we shouldn't have any sort of racial hierarchy within this country, that people should be allowed to practice their own beliefs at home so long as it wasn't hurting anyone else. They identified these beliefs with the democratic party, and yet these beliefs are now really not at all on the democratic side in terms of policy and sort of key republican events, belief systems in the post Trump era.

And they don't know how to deal with this. Like, the media doesn't know how to deal with this. The media will lie to people and pretend that there's like these big racist Trump factions, which we've pointed out is just not really true. The, and I will say this statistic, until the cows come home by 538 polling binary silver, a mainstream polling organization, more white Democrats than white Republicans, said they wouldn't vote for a black president until Obama was elected. This shows that they dims, never really fully stopped being the party of the Klan.

And what happened is the media decided that they were Democrat, decided that racism was bad. And so they began to weave a narrative that many in the public bought that the dims had stopped being the party of the Klan. And a lot of whether you're looking at base or policy isn't really reflected in how these parties govern. So a great example here that I always point out is Republicans, up until Trump were not the party of small government. They said they were the party of small government, but they were not the party of small government.

And so let's talk about the things that's flipped during the Trump era. You had the Republicans become a much more dovish party and the Democrats becoming a much more hawkish party. This used to be the antithesis, and this is a major foreign policy flip. I wouldn't say dovish, I would say isolationist. But yes, I agree.

It's the same thing. But, yeah, that's what the Democrats used to be. It was, don't. We shouldn't be the world police. That was the Dems always complained about during the Bush era.

Simone
Yeah, but it was more from the place of, like, how dare we commit these atrocities and tell other people how to govern their countries instead of, you can't tell us going to. That. It was, we shouldn't try to be the world police. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Malcolm
And dims now explicitly believe we should try to be the world police. Now, the other. Unless it comes to helping Israel. No, they think that we should put our thumb on the side of Gaza. They think that we should assist Gaza.

Simone
Help Gaza. We should be okay if we run together, Miss Yuzu. Of course I will, because you and I are via this to sheep. Let go of me. Damn it.

Malcolm
Bitch. I said let go.

Simone
No. What do you think they're protesting for when they say from river to sea and they're protesting in university, they think Gaza's gonna get the Israelis off the land. No, they're talking about us. Oh, shit. I think that people don't understand how crazy the people who actually control leftist policy have got.

Malcolm
But anyway, sorry, we have to go back here. So that was one thing that flipped. Another thing that flipped was protectionism versus free trade. Republicans were classically the party of free trade and Democrats were classically the party of protectionism. That completely flipped other waste, which was.

Simone
The part in some ways, right, because Democrats are still super pro union. And I see that as an inherently protectionist policy. But now, as we discussed with Zvi when we were talking about the shipping policy, that the Jones act, that now keeps me up at night, there are so many globalist default democratic policies that ultimately hurt unions and they run counter to progressive values, which is really interesting. Yeah. Another is which was the party that was about enforcing a set, the dominant cultural system in the country's values on other people without their consent.

Cultural supremacist. So you can take something like gender identity, right? So historically, the Republican Party was about enforcing the dominant cultural group in the country. This was the christian cultural framework. Beliefs around things like gender and sexuality, through the school system, through laws.

Malcolm
And now you have the opposite happening, where because the dominant cultural system has changed to the urban monoculture, and that's the culture that's represented in the Democratic Party, they will do things like, say if your kid doesn't conform to the way that your culture sees gender, then we get to take that kid from you. That's a CPS offense that say, this never would have happened in a historic context. Dims would never say that it is our job to police the way another family see something like gender or sexuality or police what other people are doing in their bedrooms. And yet now you have these ridiculous ideas among Democrats, like that a person can revoke consent after sex. Is there anything more policing of bedrooms?

It's saying that our social norms around sex apply, even post facto, within a legal context, which is insane. This is never the way Dems were historically. And I think that just as much as many Dems feels bewildered as the parties have switched positions, we also see some Republicans feel equally bewildered and acting, I'd say, pathetically. There was one well known podcaster who I was looking at doing something with them, but they just have an extreme antagonism towards us and our beliefs because they see us as sort of part of this previously democratic faction that is moved to the republican side of things. And they're like, but they don't represent our old values, and they're polluting the republican party with this value system.

And what they mean by that is just like the Democrat who doesn't realize the parties have flipped. They don't realize the parties have flipped either. And they're here thinking that the Republicans party's job is to impose upon the population a theocratic value system that aligns with their interpretation of Christianity. And it's. I'm sorry, one.

Most of the people who have this perspective are Catholics. And Catholics were actually always on the outs. Like when my family was fighting the Klan. One of the main reasons we were fighting them was because we had catholic friends who we wanted to protect. Like, the Catholics were never an accepted theological framework when Christians were a dominant group.

I guess maybe for a brief period in, like, the nineties, but not really. So one, they're fighting for a fantasy in the past that didn't really exist. If we went back to those time periods where the dominant cultural form of Christianity was being enforced, it would have been being enforced in a way that was detrimental to their kids. But in addition to that, it like, no christian group in this country, no theological group in this country has enough voting power anymore at the federal level to win elections. The idea that they can enforce their minority culture on the mainstream population is just as insane as, like, a Muslim America trying to enact sharia law in our country.

It doesn't make sense. And this also gets me to something that always just boils my blood. When people say, America was created as a christian country with a christian value system. I'm like, no, it was created as a calvinist country with a calvinist value system. And then the Calvinist basically died off due to low fertility rate.

And you other christian groups with radically different value systems came in like a hermit crab sizing up a shell, and then play this little shuffle game where you go back and you're like, look, they were technically Christians at the founding of America. And you can look at the Heritage. Study, a study titled, almost comically, to prove my point. Did America have a christian founding? A lot of people don't know this.

It was something like 60 75% or something. Of white Americans during the founding of America, especially the ones in positions of power, were disproportionately of the calvinist cultural group. And if they weren't at the calvinist cultural group, they were mostly like Quakers. They were not the perspectives on Christianity that people have today in America. These have very different framings around things.

Probably one of the biggest, which changes the way they act from a legal standpoint, is the belief in predestination and irresistible grace, both of which basically mean. The not limited atonement. I feel like limited atonement has a bigger policy. Yeah, limited atonement as well. But together, what it basically means is the people who are going to go to heaven have been pre chosen to an extent, so there isn't as much of a reason to go out and proselytize.

And it's okay to live alongside Jews or Catholics because they were born to go to hell. There's no reason for you to really disrupt their lifestyle. It's much more important to focus on you and your own community, which makes them much more similar culturally to like the way Jews are today, where Jews might not go out and try to impose their cultural value system. And here, like orthodox Jews, not reformed Jews, which are a totally different thing. But like, ultra orthodox Jews are not out there trying to turn you into an ultra orthodox jew because they just don't think that you are meant to live correctly.

And what this means from a legal perspective is that they set up a legal system that was meant to be culturally pluralistic, whereas the, the, what we would call dominating cultural systems, some of the more modern christian systems are that think that everyone is meant to convert and it's their job to convert everyone. We have a very different view towards this. And things like separation of church and state can seem really weird to them. And they're like, they didn't mean separation of. No, what they meant was separation of every individual church and state.

Yeah, they didn't mean that the state should be wholly secular. What they meant is that it shouldn't be any one denomination of Christian in a time period where the denominations of Christianity were blindingly different from each other. And they believed this because they didn't believe as Calvinists that they needed to go out and convert the other denominations. And Quakers felt largely the same way, but for different reasons. So this.

Sorry, that was a huge tangent there, but what it means is that there's this fantasy among this part of the old hold out of the conservative party before you had this flip. In cultural systems, they can realistically turn the conservative party into a system for imposing their denomination of Christianity's value system on the country in a legal and school system methodology. And that's just not going to happen. That's a completely unrealistic vision of what can be achieved with the current demography of this country. And keep in mind, if you look at Gen Alpha, they are becoming de religious at a much faster clip than other generations.

Like they are losing right now. Like it is getting worse for them as time goes on, not better, okay? At least in the short run, eventually they'll come back, as we pointed out, with fertility rates and everything like that. But in the short run, it's just not a winning play. And so now let's talk about the hippies.

Where did they come? Like, where did the anti globalists come from? And how did they find themselves on the conservative side or the anti corporates or the anti whatever? Right? So two core events that happened.

One was the corporations being ideologically captured by the dominant cultural group in society, which created these sort of memetic viruses, as we've talked about them, as transmissible cancers, which is these DEI departments that are meant to ensure ideological conformity within these large companies. Even when the base turns against them. So you can see this in the gaming world right now. It's very obvious in Gamergate two right now with the sweet baby and controversy and everything like that, that the general public is not on the side of wokeism anymore and will likely not buy games that are in any way involved with wokeism. And yet large corporations like Xbox are doubling down.

And people are like, why? The way that this ideological virus works makes it very hard for any large bureaucracy to escape from it, even when it's obvious that it's not with the public, it's not how you sell to the public anymore, and it's not how you appease the mob anymore. Right. Okay. Problem number one is that, so the corporations are now legitimately against, legitimately aligned with the urban monoculture, meaning anyone who's anti sort of a consolidation of power at the global level is going to be antagonistic to them.

But then you have the second problem, which is one of the goals. So in the old system, when the Republican Party was, quote unquote, controlling the world, they were doing this through clandestine operations, the FBI, CIA, stuff like that, but it was being run out of the United States. The way that the left has tried to consolidate the world is different, but equally scary to people who don't like this sort of unelected consolidation of power, which is a giant global bureaucracy with a bureaucratic, an unelected bureaucratic class that is put into position due to their ideological conformity, really, and to some extent, abilities to navigate bureaucracies and that then make decisions for everyone else in the world from the position at the top of ivory towers.

And so if you were somebody who in the past would have been antagonistic to the consolidation of global control by a shadowy, unelected cabal. This previously would have put you squarely in the leftist movement and now puts you squarely in the rightist movement. But what's interesting is the way that these two parties aesthetically relate to these ideas. And then, in a sense, the South park college educated hippies haven't gone away. It's just that their message is more refined now.

Simone
It's not corporations or the government, whatever, is not to be trusted. It's that the wrong corporations are not to be trusted. The wrong groups are not to be trusted. No, I, I think that they changed. I think that the people who were hardcore old school hippies like that, I don't trust the government, have largely become rightist.

Maybe. I mean, I feel like I have seen this in terms of, like, older individuals. I know the one thing that isn't. Happening, though, is people aren't going to university and just deciding that corporations are. Corporations can't be trusted.

Bad and can't be trusted. And the government is bad and can't be trusted. No. Now it's the poor are bad and can't be trusted. Oh, sorry.

Malcolm
They don't call them the poor. They mean the rural disenfranchised are bad and can't be trusted. And corporations are a tool to fight them. But it is fascinating that we've undergone this party shift and collectively we're pretending like it didn't happen. And I don't understand.

I do understand why. Right. Like, people don't like admitting it. And both parties try to hide that it happened because they want to maintain as much of their old voting base as possible. They don't really stand for what they stood for in a historic context.

Trump. Sorry. And a lot of Republicans are like, no, Trump's a hardcore old school Republican. I'm like, what do you know what Republicans stood for in the eighties and nineties? This guy was a Howard Stern appearing, New York elitist liberal.

Okay. In the clearest form of this. All right. And not many of that views have changed. I think this lack of realization that things have changed is one of the biggest threats through the Republican Party's efficacy now.

Simone
Because, for example, all of this, and this has been decades of work, for example, to overturn Roe versus Wade, which, of course, like, was legitimately overturned, but still to make reproductive choice an issue at the forefront that isn't really this. As you were pointing out earlier, social coercion element of the Republican Party is representative of what it was pre flip. And now the biggest thing killing it is this coercive element that doesn't even really represent what it has become since. Yeah. And people who don't understand why she's going on about this, there are a few things to note about Roe v.

Malcolm
Wade. We do think that abortion restrictions should be tighter in our state, for example, although we also think that some states go way overboard in the amount of control that they're exercising over this. Considering fetuses a human life, when, you know, even famous catholic theologians like Thomas Aquinas and Augustus of Hippo wouldn't have considered it a living person until 30 days after conception. Yeah. Or cases of just basic humaneness and suffering where it's obvious that any.

Simone
The baby is not viable, that the baby will die an excruciating death shortly after birth or leading up to it if you don't abort sooner. Yeah. Some states are taking that way too far, too. Yeah, but the point is that this is not in line with the desires of the current, at least at the federal level, republican base, which is really interesting to give you an idea of the statistics here. These days, around 66% of the republican base in the United States thinks abortion should be legal under certain circumstances.

Claude
And I think, shockingly to a lot of people, nearly half of Republicans under 30 say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. So for Republicans of our age range, we are actually right leaning on our views around abortion. This actually really gets my goat when I'm talking to other republican influencers, and they're like, well, you guys are really sort of Democrat in a lot of your perspectives. And they'll be pointing to positions that we have that align with, like, the midline of republican voters in the United States. And I'm like, no, you have just been cucked because you are drinking from a fire hose of extremist opinions and you haven't taken the time to actually connect with the republican base in this country or look at any recent statistics for what young Republicans actually think, think in this country.

So let me be as clear about this as I can. The average opinion of republican influencers is not the average opinion of republican voters. Yeah. It's just an inertia thing that has ended up really slapping them in the face, like stepping on a hoe, like people who don't know how badly they lost in the last midterms because of this. It was bad.

Malcolm
And it could completely, like, if the only reason Trump will not win this cycle is that for people who have looked at the data, we know this because Simone's running for office. That and the election integrity narrative, which is totally the hippie thing. Right. Can't trust election. So that is the new wave.

Yeah, I would say that all the time, by the way. Yeah. So I'll say the. The old version of the party is going to kill it and. Or the new version of the party is going to kill it.

Explain why the election integrity will kill it. Yeah. And we're seeing it this at local meetings, too. It's incredibly frustrating. So there is concern about election integrity.

Simone
Of course there are issues with election integrity. Everyone's cheating, but there are limits to how much you can cheat, meaning that if a district or an area gets more votes than there are registered voters, clearly voter Florida staying in place, meaning that the amount that someone can cheat is limited. And the way that you overcome that is by overwhelming your opposing side with votes. It's all about getting out the vote. Unfortunately, what's happening is in our area and all around the United States, Republicans that are concerned about voter integrity, election integrity, are going out and telling people about how, oh, don't vote at this time and don't vote with this way and this way because people are cheating this way and people are cheating that way.

And here's all this proof of the cheating. People are just not going to go out to vote anymore. They're just, they're suppressing. This is active voter suppression that they're doing, honestly, right now. And I were looking to, like, mess with the, this year's election.

Malcolm
And you would elevate these narratives? I would 100% elevate voter integrity concerns among Republicans. From a native perspective, obviously. Yeah. Man can't trust the booths, the technology, the Internet, the Wi Fi.

And I want to be clear. We're not saying that votes aren't manipulated. We're saying that you can win by overwhelming them. Them. Yeah, but.

And they are manipulated in both ways. I know there have been election fraud cases on the right that have been proven in the. Everybody cheats because it's part of when it's possible to cheat without getting caught. People are going to cheat. Yeah.

Simone
Yeah. But again, the margin of. I would rephrase that. I would say some people will cheat when they think it's possible to do so without getting caught. If you're talking about this at a national level, of course you're going to see cheating.

Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes, now, keep in mind it's not like this is some top down order from some republican or democratic high up party operative. Often this cheating comes in the form of litig, literally like older 65 year old people who care way too much about their party and have become totally myopic and don't care about the democratic process and start doing a little messing with stuff. But then there are, you know, more organized efforts, too.

Whatever. But the point is that the cheating, the amount of cheating you can do is inherently limited. And the way to overcome cheating is not to spend all your time fighting cheating, which is going to happen in a system like this. There are going to be bad actors when it is possible to act badly. The point is to overwhelm that bad acting.

Malcolm
You should try to fight cheating where you can be realistic, which is to say that it is important that in the way that you are fighting, that you don't disincentivize your own base from. Voting, which is what the republican party is doing, what local, very well meaning republicans are doing. It drives me nuts. Yeah.

Simone
Anyway, that was really interesting. I enjoyed that conversation. And I'm surprised that despite the fact that you've basically had no sleep in a very long period of time, you are somehow still awake. Maybe I'm talking with a sleep talking, Malcolm. Maybe one day a little bit.

Malcolm
Well, I'm not even. I'm not even drinking now. That's how little sleep I've had. Oh, God. Bad.

I haven't had anything to drink in days. This is getting terrifying. How about you hit the hay and I'll make dinner for the kids? I love you. I love you, too.

Simone
I love you, too.

Malcolm
I love you, too.

Simone
I love you, too.