Republican’s Needs For Party Loyalty Votes Over Truth
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What are your rubrics in voting for a leader? Do you vote based on a candidate’s character, accomplishments, or title? Today, Bill Stierle and Tom share their opinions about the risks of voting against the identity of one party. They discuss how capitalism and its versions have evolved to be more important than the United States Constitution. Moreover, they also talk about how Republicans are not lining up with the truth. Letting people empathize with them and the issues they are concerned about has been a tactic done by this party. Learn how marketing and branding has been used to get people into a space where they start beating up their competitor in a bullish manner, distracting the world from the truth, and voting those who have most likely deceived them.
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Bill, I am feeling somewhat lost, shocked and disheartened all at the same time. Many things have happened that, from at least my perspective, are unbelievable. I never thought we would be here.
The feeling of shock, surprise, lost, confused and overwhelmed. What do you do next? How do you balance your response? What do you say next? When the vote comes in the way it does and you’re on one side and you’re celebrating on the other side. You’re shaking your head, going like, “How could a person vote against this?” This brings up our topic. How do you do truth when there’s much of a threat of physical safety, emotional safety, protection, loyalty to the vote and to the party? They’re stuck. Those senators need a lot of empathy because they’re in a tough bind.
From the place of right or wrong, right is not winning. From the perspective of the vote for protection, emotional safety, loyalty, identity, those values cause those senators to vote the way they did. There are other values that are under the bus like integrity and truth. There wasn’t as much gray area as there was in The Mueller Report. There was some gray area in The Mueller Report, so it was a little hard to press it and people were having a hard time understanding the difference between something that was criminal and something that was ethical. High crimes and misdemeanors are not criminals. People don’t know that the system is run by two levels of justice.
The criminal thing is, “It’s clear that you stole this thing and we have a law for that.” If you steal a candy bar from somebody, if you steal money from somebody and it’s on a machine, is it a crime? It’s not a thing. That’s the Wall Street bailout. No one could see that it was stealing people’s homes from them. This is a strategy to put somebody underwater to steal their home. They didn’t see it that way because it was paper, but a candy bar is a crime from a 7-Eleven. Regrettably, the truth is a struggle here because people in America don’t know exactly what they’ve signed up for when they signed up for the constitution fully. They more understand the criminal system that bad people should be locked up because there’s a lot of religious writing about this stuff that bad people get punished. It’s hard for us to face the decision because they had to stay in line.
This is the shocking part, Bill. You have someone who is clearly staying within integrity for their personal beliefs and what they truly believe is correct by the constitution. This is in Mitt Romney who says, “I cannot vote to acquit this president because my loyalty to God is above my loyalty to the president or party. In order to be a whole person to do the right thing, I have to vote to convict the president.” He has been demonized by his party. There are calls for him to be ousted and expelled from the party. I’m like, “What kind of high school clique is this?”
That’s an eighth-grade thing. This is what eighth-graders do. It’s difficult because I’ve spent time talking about not labeling people. It’s hard not to label that this is the mindset. Labels provide us a little bit of a guard rail to get some understanding. It doesn’t help us with the solution because calling an adult person an eighth-grader will not work. What we want to do is use our adult brain and our adult brain goes, “They need compassion for how difficult it is,” because I’ve raised two eighth-graders and I have a seventh-grader on board.
You’ve got to bring a lot of compassion and understanding of where they’re coming from. They don’t have the language to get there. They don’t have the strategy to get there. They don’t have the adult mind to tolerate things. As a nation, we’re also struggling with that same thing. When our educational system becomes too difficult to get through because of costs or not applicable because the jobs are not there, just go to get a college degree. I hired an administrative assistant with a bachelor’s degree. That’s nuts that she went through four years of college and she is working because that’s the job that’s available.
I remember hiring one of my first administrative assistants in business in the late ‘90s. Hiring somebody that went to what was the equivalent of a trade school to learn the skills to be able to provide administrative support, but it wasn’t a four-year college degree. It was a 1 or 2-year school.
Paying attention to as a nation where the jobs are and putting people in alignment with those jobs helps self-worth and get people in alignment with where they need to be. Otherwise, what happens is that you’re leaving a broken system in place and not doing anything to fix it. We’re not and there’s not the will to do it because there’s not the money to do it. It’s not in the best interest of the people. It’s in the best interest of the few people.
What’s in the best interest of all these senators that are staying in line with Donald Trump? Are they afraid of Donald Trump? Probably. Are they afraid of Donald Trump’s loyal voters? They’re leaving all of their integrity. The casualty is truth and integrity among other things.
It’s the same answer with what do you do with an eighth-grader? What do you do with an eighth-grader that was rebelling? What did you do with an eighth-grader when they’re tanking their grades, they’re in their bedroom? They’re throwing all their stuff around their bedroom, they’re breaking stuff and they’re angry because they can’t get their way?
I get to consequences and discipline or something. I don’t know. What would you do?
It’s compassion for the amount of pain that they have with being stuck in the condition they’re in. They’re not old enough. They don’t have enough vocabulary. They don’t have enough skills to run their own life, but they want to. It’s clear, my thirteen-year-old wants to drive a car now, “I want to drive a car, dad.” He’s got a couple of years, but he wants to drive a car. Some kids are too scared to drive a car. Why? They’ve been sitting on the computer. They’ve been not in the world as much. They see these machines and it’s tough to deal with and they could take an Uber. They can Rideshare. They can do this and avoid it. What need is that? Protection, emotional safety, ahead of freedom, ahead of transportation, ahead of independence. That’s problematic. When a young person is in black and white thinking early about the danger about something. One kid said, “A car costs too much. I don’t have to pay for it.” There’s not even the possibility of being able to pay for the insurance or pay for the car. I need money for these other things. I’d rather upgrade my computer than to drive.
I think admittedly it’s a little different learning to drive maybe than when we were kids and learned to drive or maybe you didn’t need insurance. My stepfather talks about this all the time where he used to buy a $50 car or $100 car. It was a heap, but drive it for a while and then it fails, get another car. There wasn’t a need for insurance and all this, but we’re in a different place.y Loyalty Votes Over Truth appeared first on Bill Stierle .
It’s the same thing in our politics, we’re in a different place. There’s too much danger to vote against the identity of one party. Why are Republicans not going, “He voted the way you voted, but I voted the way I voted?” Lamar Alexander’s excuse finally came out. “I voted for this because it wasn’t enough. What do you want? Do you want Bernie Sanders in here?” That came out of Lamar Alexander’s mouth.
This is the lesser of evils type of thing.
“I don’t want Bernie Sanders in here. I don’t want that mindset here. I don’t think that’s the direction of our country.” As soon as it leaked out of his mouth, I’m going like, “You’re voting because your identity is that this current system of capitalism, the way it’s constructed is better than some of the principles those progressives are interested in. You don’t want them in, so you’d rather vote against it even though you said it was wrong in the next sentence.”
That’s scary, Bill. What he’s said there is that this version of capitalism that I benefit from and that I identify with is more important than the constitution of the United States because that’s where that takes us. Truth, justice, fairness, right or wrong. That’s strange. Senators by and large are lawyers, black and white thinkers. They’re not thinking black and white in terms of the constitution or the law. They can black and white in terms of party loyalty.
That’s the big shift that’s taking place and that’s why it’s empty, confusing and lonely to get out of this position because you’ve got to have empathy for Lamar Alexander and his mindset. His mindset is a progressive agenda where the government does more or is not capitalist agenda where the private industry does more. The private industry is more important to me than this public system.
Medicare for all. I want what is happening in the drug companies in the hospitals to stay where it’s at. I don’t want that to have a complete rework and the profit comes out of it because if you take the profit out of it, there are some problems with that. He’s partially right if you take the profit out of it. The thing that he’s not getting on the other side is there are ways to incentivize the capitalist part of medicine and still cover everybody.
There are still ways to do that, but he doesn’t have the creative mind to do it. Most certainly, he doesn’t have the fortitude to stand up to it. There are ways to do it, but they’re not interested in the way to do it. They’re interested in the stability and what the voter can grasp or understand. What is the propagandize or the repeated message that I could promote to keep the thing in place and hang on to a fragile system? How fragile is it? Look at 2008, they had to make stuff up and print a whole crap load of money in order to prop up things enough. They didn’t fix it. They pushed it down the road.
It was triage. They put a tourniquet on it to keep it from completely bleeding out, but they still got a lame system.
The people that set it up got paid the most. The weirdest part about it is no one went to jail on it. All the banks got all their payouts. There was no consequence for running a business that way. One mortgage broker told me, he says, “Bill, they incentivize us to do this.” I said, “What do you mean they incentivize to do this?” He said, “They kept saying we had to do it to keep writing these mortgages.” I go, “You got incentivized to do it too?” They said, “The government incentivizes us to do it.” I go, “How did that come about?” He said, “The votes were there to open up to not regulate it.” I go, “They were?” I would have never done that.
It’s troublesome. We want to have empathy for the people that are in the place because they’re doing the best they can, but they’re not adult-like. It’s more childlike. I did a label between adult and child and I’m going to separate it as adult thinking is much more black and white. This is wrong because I think it’s wrong. An adult is, there’s a gradation of wrong and right and sometimes a person is going to pick a need for peace and harmony over the need for fairness. “I want this to go this way,” this other person says, “I want it to go this way.” Why is that? Why do they want it to go that way? It’s because they would like it their way and all of a sudden the person says, “I’ll take peace and harmony. I’m going to go your way because it’s too noisy if I went my way and I want it my way.”
Bill, I hear you that in a different operating world, we need to give compassion to these people and how they’re thinking to try to get them to see things differently. You mentioned Lamar Alexander. I get that. That works, but it would have to happen on such a large scale in order to make a difference. It does seem like small moments.
All you get to do is small moments, Tom. Human beings can only manage a moment at a time, anyways. Small messages, small moments of what adult thinking looks like. More adult thinkers have adult language. If I was coaching Elizabeth Warren, she would be up to ten points in the polls because she’s not using adult language. She’s using adversarial language, wrong, right, good, bad. You can’t beat a bully in a spitting match between who’s wrong or who’s right. You can’t go, “Yes, but,” to a bully because they’ll, “Yes, but,” you back.
That language is ineffective thinking. Even Joe Biden is struggling because he’s going like, “Yes, but,” and there’s not enough credibility, momentum and support and his languaging skills are not strong enough. It’s not Joe Biden. The advice to him is it’s not kissing the baby on the forehead anymore like it was when you first got started. Be a nice guy and talk nicely to people. You’ve got to upgrade your compassion and empathy was a stronger language. People don’t think empathy is a strong language, but it is. It’s strong. What you’re doing is you have power with the person that’s upset.
All of this one-sidedness, ignoring the fact, party loyalty over truth, party loyalty over the constitution. At some point, is this going to build to such a point that regardless of the small messages missing and these things changing? Let’s take where you were talking about your son who wants to drive a car or an eighth-grader who is having a tantrum and is unhappy that they don’t have freedom. They don’t like the rules being put upon them. I said, “I would probably go toward consequences and discipline,” which was definitely not compassion and empathy.
It’s not the strongest thing because they’ll act out in another way. They’ll let you pay for it in another way.
I get that but don’t you think that at some point if the Republican party doesn’t start lining up with truth, with integrity, with the constitution, there are going to be harsh consequences that are going to be forced upon them? I saw a post on Facebook and several people have posted it on how Americans are being called for jury duty. It’s to rule on Donald Trump’s impeachment where the Senate didn’t do it. They pass the buck and your call for jury duty is what? November 3rd, 2020 or something like that to go and vote him out. Is that the consequence that at some you’re going to get thrown out of the office and I hope you’re happy with your choices because you’re going to have to live with the consequences?
It’s the same thing that the United Kingdom did with Brexit. They turned it over to the people. It’s a stupid move. Why is it stupid? Because it’s a complex issue. It is something that the population cannot handle because the populations are eighth graders and below. Even though they’re adults, they can’t handle the nuances of trade between the European Union. They can’t handle the nuances of what you’re paying for and what you’re not. It’s a very eighth-grade mindset about what’s fair and not fair. How old is your young one, Tom? You’ve got a couple of young ones.
She’s almost six and then the other one’s almost eleven.
You’ve got a 6 and an 11-year-old. Do you want them deciding on what fairness is?
No.
Let’s make this tough. Let’s look at the complexity of abortion. That is a tough thing. In fact, people vehemently hate Donald Trump, but they hate abortion more. They’ll vote for Donald Trump because he’s doing things to get that agenda moving forward. People have beliefs about Israel through Christianity and what their beliefs are about the Bible. Therefore they’re going to pick Donald Trump because their beliefs on spirituality, the way they’re doing it are not looking at a complex system of human beings living in another country and us having influence over that because their spiritual beliefs are there. What’s fairness to your daughters, they would be more like a rich person. If they have a dollar and you’d tell them, “We need to pay for taxes. Here’s the change for the dollar. You get to keep 80% and give me two dimes back.” “Give her $100.” “Here’s $100.” “Give me $20.” “$20? I’m not giving you $20.” It’s the same percentage.
Fairness for rich people is different than fairness for somebody because the perspective is if you have $1 million, it’s giving $200,000 in taxes. The poor person is going to be outraged. You should have to pay all that money, but it’s okay for the person that doesn’t have money to pay $0.35 out of their dollar and the rich person gets to pay only $10,000 out of that $1 million. What is going on there? It’s cognitive dissonance. Do I want a 13-year-old, an 11-year-old, a 5-year-old in charge of how that works? The answer is that’s what we have because they don’t have an adult mindset about fairness, equanimity, and equality. How can we afford to make the nation better? We need a jobs program as we’ve always needed a jobs program.
Empathy is a strong language because what you're doing is actually having power with the person that's upset.
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We need an education program that’s in alignment with new jobs that are coming up that we’re not even close to it. The gap between the education of people and the jobs that are available or the future-oriented jobs, we’re getting creamed worldwide. The companies are going, “We’ll do it over there. We’re going to pay less over there anyways.” Forget America, no. Our job is to our shareholders and to our margin because it’s legally that we have to grow quarter over quarter. That’s a part of it. We’ve got to do that to give dividends to our shareholders. This is the complexity of adult thinking that’s not available because one party specifically, but both parties are struggling with how to get the engagement and once being more inclusive than the other party. You’re causing the fight to take place. It’s various beliefs regarding social services. Social services are to stabilize the country and the people.
You can’t continue to help the 1% advance. Even if it was the 10% advance at the expense of 90% or 98%. It is not sustainable. What’s shocking is the Republican Party, at least those in power, are throwing their own purported values under the bus. Are they not?
They are.
Remember the balanced budget? What are we going to do about that? The budget proposal is close to $4 trillion. The president’s wish list is in order to make it not any bigger is to cut Medicare and social services. “We don’t want to help the little people out at all. We want to prep up the military.”
“It’s so our house doesn’t burn down and be invaded by the police.” They’d rather hire their own private police force than to pay a social police force to take care of the good of the population. It’s short-sighted it because you do that enough and there’s not enough police to support. What happens is that it’s like, “You have all the money over there. We’re going to take your house and your life.” They don’t get that it’s not the healthiest way to run a civil society. Here are the electable values that the Republicans will stay tied to which is abortion and fairness from the mindset of a rich person. Social services are handouts because these people don’t deserve it. Strong military and safety. They’ve got to find a war or a narrative that is dangerous that they can run with. Immigration, these foreigners are going to come into our country and take our stuff and system.
Those are all on the Republican electable playlist. Because 9/11 was long ago, it’s hard to scare people about that. There have been many people that have been born that don’t remember that. You’ve got to scare somebody again. They need another catastrophic event to scare people again so they can keep feeding the military-industrial system. We can watch in the next several years that there’s going to be a scary event either manufactured or the world’s volatility will start to go up so they can pay people. The Republicans are going to stay after the opposite identities. We are not socialists. We are not communists. We are not Democrats. We are not crazy liberals. There are crazy liberals but they’re on the margin. The more they could take our margin and bring it towards the center, the less the liberals bring their crazies because their crazies have moved to the center. John Bolton is the Warhawk that was in there and you could see where his integrity lay. His integrity was, “I’m not coming in because the Democrats will take advantage of this.” Notice that his loyalty wasn’t an adult loyalty either. It was an eighth-grade loyalty. It’s, “I’m staying with the cool kids. I’m not going with the other kids that are being inclusive. Even if it’s wrong, I’m not coming in.”
These guys, they’ll keep recycling. Alan Dershowitz and Karl Rove, we see Karl Rove in front of us again. It’s like, “Those guys?” The ones that they think that are coming up go like, “I don’t think I want to be that guy.” Rudy Giuliani, we’ve got to see that guy. They’re staying inside the narrative and they’ve got their own limited mindset. Under the bus for the Republicans are balanced budgets and integrity. They can’t play family values, they can’t do compassionate conservatism because they’re not that. They’re not using the law is equal to all. They’re only the law is applied to others, not us. Party over truth. They are picking the line over the truth. This is the playbook to summarize it. Anybody that’s reading, whether Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders or some of their people. Tom Steyer could get ahead of this and run and get points. Michael Bloomberg could get the points that he needs. Michael Bloomberg is taking all of Joe Biden’s votes.
He’s the centrist. He’s a rational guy and he’s got enough to look at that. It’s the angle that Donald Trump says he’s short. He wanted a stand on. Notice how that’s what an eighth-grader does to bully. They pick on appearance, not the content of their character. Not the accomplishments. Marketing and branding can get into that space where you start beating up your competitor in a middle school way and that’s what he’s doing, labeling and diagnosing people. Do we want that style of leadership anymore?
Hopefully, not. We’re going to perhaps see some wisdom in Michael Bloomberg’s campaign strategy of not wasting time in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and jumping in at Super Tuesday. First of all, he got a little lucky because Iowa was a disaster. Regardless of who won or didn’t win, what’s clear is the vote is split early on in that state. New Hampshire may be the same thing with no clear runaway winner. You’ve got 2 or 3 of them splitting the majority of the vote, they’re not going to have an of strength and momentum any candidate running into Super Tuesday. Michael Bloomberg comes in and that completely changes the race. Maybe we ended up having a brokered convention. I think people get worried about if we don’t go into the Democratic National Convention with a clear winner already, that it’s going to be cast. That’s the way it always used to be. We’ve had multiple candidates come into the convention and there is a vote that takes place there and you pick one there. That may be what happens again. That may not be a bad thing.
Even when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama came into their convention and Barack Obama got the final nod, Hillary Clinton had to say, “Maybe in a few years it will be my time, but it’s not my time.” She came around and she did Senate for a while and did the Secretary of State for a while. She did things. It’s valuable. We’ve done the Republican side and having some empathy for the things that they’re picking. If you know what they’re picking, even though you might not agree with it, who would say agree to abortion? Nobody wants to agree to that thing. It’s difficult, but at the same time, do we want to, as a government, take medical choices away from our population? For the people on the religious side of the fence, they go, “It’s moralistically not right to do that thing.”
Who wants to talk against life? We all had to go through that to have life. The candidate that is most compassionate to the plight of abortion will gain 5 to 10 points. You’ve got to be compassionate to the plight, to the difficulty of the decision and let that sink about how much you as a candidate value life and choice. That person has got to struggle between life and choice. I’m not going to say my view is over your view. When we start doing that, that doesn’t go as well. People like eighth-graders will act out and then we have this entire underground system, which we used to have that’s away from the medical community. These back-alley abortions and the worst-case scenarios to put a traumatized woman to do that. They’re already stigmatized and already have got to drive to another state to have an abortion. There are some states that have one clinic you can get to.
Those states and the people in control of the state legislatures are intentionally trying to make it difficult for people to get abortions so that they won’t have them. They don’t want to pay for the social programs that are going to help care for that mother and child when the child comes.
You’ve got a child, you’ve got to be able to pay for it. The economy doesn’t allow me to pay for it. You give me a living wage and I’ll have the child because I’m stable. The weird part about this is the Republicans are worried about not having the votes that immigrants coming in are going to be more this. There are not enough people in our belief structure. If you had a living wage, more conservatives would have more children. They are not even clear that we are animals. That if you create a stable environment for an animal, they will reproduce. Do you want more of your voters to have their environment be stable? You could sell conservative values all day. Family values, here’s what we do. You get to have a picnic on Sunday. There’s nobody having a picnic on Sunday anymore because they’re busy working two jobs. They’re worried about what’s going to happen by Monday and they’re trying to get through the weekend and plopping in front of the TV. They’re not doing it because they’ve got to worry about the next day.
It’s difficult. A collaborative and stable society is the thing that stabilized the population growth too, but no one’s asking me quite yet on how to fix this thing. We have empathy about how people get scared and they want to have a strong military. Do we need to have more money being spent in that direction more than the top seventeen countries? We’re spending more of our GDP on that because we keep scaring our people. Why do we scare them? They’ll watch more TV. If it bleeds, it leads. I need their attention to sell ad revenue. That’s where the money comes from.
The Republicans want them to watch Fox News. Did you see there is a TV network that started that is a counter to Fox News and the mainstream media that is run by and for the African-American market? It’s an interesting thought that you can’t get enough attention for your population through mainstream media and Fox. You’re going to start your own. Fox News has shown, “This is working, so why not?”
There’s going to be the diversity thing, but the thing that the Purchasing Truth backed to us, Tom, even in all those different media outlets is that what need is the person talking about? Is it a truthful way that they’re talking about integrity? Loyalty for the small is never as powerful as loyalty for the big. If I do loyalty for Fox News and I’m not doing loyalty for America, there will be a moment that Fox has stepped over the line. They’ve got to quick backtrack because they promoted violence too much. The Gabby Giffords thing is a great example. There was violence. We got to take these people out. One of the congressmen got shot because they were motivated by it. Even some of the gunman, they said that there are problems in El Paso, so I’m going to drive down there and do that.
That is when the propagation has moved across the line. They’ve got to keep it at the sweet spot to scare them enough, but not enough to get them to act on how scared they are, so it’s difficult. Tom, the next time we’re going to make this same list for Democrats. The electable values, the values that they put under the bus, the fringe messages, the way they’re fighting between the candidates. Does it work? What is a good way to separate yourself from a candidate? We know that the Republicans have placed their bet on Donald Trump. He’s an incumbent President. Your chances of being a one-termer are low because we acquitted him but this is a big difference.
It sounds good. I like looking at the other side. Let’s do that.
Tom, have a good one.
You too.
