The Truth Behind Republican Disinformation

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 In the run up to the election, we’re now at the point where there are not months left, there are weeks left. There seems to be so much disinformation flying around. The volume of disinformation is getting higher and higher. There are many things to talk about around this and try to see how truth is getting purchased. The first one that’s shocking and it’s in the news is that the State of California has discovered that the California GOP, the California Republican Party has set up and installed their own unofficial ballot drop boxes. If you look at the images, it’s a pretty official looking drop box if you didn’t know what an official State of California drop box for ballots looked like. You might think, “This looks safe and secure. I’ll put my drop box there.”

The California Republican Party has taken upon themselves to put up these unofficial drop boxes at locations they deemed safe like churches and other locations. They’re collecting illegally people’s ballots. The state attorney general said these are unauthorized. They’re unlawful and ordered the Republican Party to remove them. Thus far, the California Republican Party has refused. They’re not willing to remove the unofficial drop boxes.

There are a lot of details about this that we don’t need to discuss and debate, but to me, the scary part of how this is purchasing truth is here. You have the President of the United States who’s been sewing doubt and skepticism around the ballots saying that if he loses, there was fraud in the system. The mail-in ballots are a disaster and people should vote in person. The Republican Party and the President know because it’s been proven time and time again that mail-in voting is safe but the Republican Party is trying to prove that there’s a problem with ballots by tampering with them.

This is very difficult. There’s a lot to unpack in this. In a live conversation, I wouldn’t have let you talk as much to set it up. In other words, if I’m going to use empathy and compassion right away, but for our reader, we needed to give them time to slow down and you giving us full of like, “Bill, here’s some construct. Here the foundation to stand on.” It helps us with the feeling of shock as we’re trying to get our need for understanding or clarity amount. What did they do? A lot of times our body is feeling doubtful about the need for truth not being met and we’re fighting that. I know when you initially told me the story, I was going like, “What?” Doubt skepticism showed up in my body, which takes my logical brain offline a little bit and say, “What is the real impact of this?”

All my problem-solving brain goes and says, “Isn’t there somebody that’s going to arrest these people for doing this unlawful thing?” It’s exasperating and another thing in our saturated information society that you can get one of that takes place and then you can make it global. The President did that during the debate. He said, “There’s this thing that happened in Pennsylvania. There’s this thing that happened over here in this Creek about ballots.” They happen to be Donald Trump’s ballots. He’s sowing the feeling of doubt and skepticism to meet and support his own need, to stay connected in the position of being reelected. “I want to stay in the position. I don’t want to go anywhere. This is a great job. I get all of these different things that I get being the president. I’ll do this job for four years. All I’ve got to do is tweet every night and watch the bugs scurry under my feet.”



It’s unsettling because when the need for truth and trust are run over and people start having two things that happen, they don’t go fully to the medical system. They don’t extend trust to the post office. They don’t trust the government fully anymore as if that hasn’t been chiseled away. A budge, law enforcement gets to have doubt and skepticism about it. That’s the need for militias and people have their own guns. It’s sewing a narrative that’s not a stable narrative. In the need for stability, we get scared, nervous and anxious. You and I were talking about that a little bit before we got on, nervous and anxious for the next three weeks, the need for stability and for trust not being met.

 Truth can be easily purchased once you know what somebody’s biases are.

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We don’t have much certainty about how peaceful or violent it’s going to be, what the transition is going to be like? We used to be able to call votes and get a sense of the idea within 24 or 48 hours after the election. Once you put doubt and skepticism into the system, what happens is we’ve got to make sure we’re counting every vote. That’s what we did last time. If you’re getting it within the margin of error, if you’re getting into the space of this state is going for because of early voting, it’s going to be difficult. Now we have to wait for all of the precincts to come in, but there are not enough people in that area. I’m ranting a little bit here because you can see how confusing it gets down the mental rabbit hole when doubt and skepticism get introduced with the information piece.



As we set up the top disinformation, the California Republican Party is trying to say, “These ballot drop boxes are very safe. It’s no different than you handing your ballot to somebody or a friend that you trust to take it in. Isn’t it more safe to put it into our drop box than to hand it to a stranger that you don’t know?” I thought that was such a false equivalence, because nobody is going to give their ballot to a stranger they don’t know and trust to take it in for them.

The validation of what Donald Trump has said, “This is my party. I’m going to be loyal. This is my identity. This is my guy. I’m going to support him. He is telling me this one thing. I am following this thing. I’m going to believe it to be true.” It’s unsettling because truth can be easily purchased once you know what somebody’s bias is. If you have their bias and their belief structure, you know what it is, what I’ll do is to tap it a couple of times and their brain is right there with you. It’s like, “If I would have done this, my wife wouldn’t have left. If I would have done this, my husband would be nicer to my kids. I must be the person that’s the problem.” We tell ourselves disinformation to create doubt and skepticism inside ourself, to validate a bad thing. We’ll make up an entire story against that. It’s hard.

This is not the only disinformation running around in the final weeks. Although this is a shocking one. I don’t know why this is happening now because sometimes the administration forgets that Hillary Clinton isn’t running for office again, but that Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, is now set to release a lot of Hillary Clinton’s emails. I’m like, “Why?” I don’t understand what that’s doing except being a distraction again or trying to throw more disinformation out there. The government did report an exhaustive study that they found that she did not intentionally disclose classified information and that was the end of it. They’re saying, “We don’t want that to be the end of it. We’d like people to still be unhappy with Hillary Clinton so we’re going to release her emails.”

The need for trust in public officials is where the damage is. You don’t trust these Democrats. I’m trying to get them all in the same bucket. Hillary Clinton is the biggest bucket I can use. It’s the only one I’ve got. They can’t go back to bill because there’s not enough traction there. They’ve got to go to, “Here’s where Hillary Clinton was and what she said and did in order to make her life wonderful by using emails in the way she did.” Why? It was easy to do her emails at home and she didn’t do the things that needed to be done to be compliant. It doesn’t matter a negative story so much time somebody throws a bunch of mud on you.

The Republican narrative has been pulled so much over to the other side of tolerance and civil discussion.

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There’s a lot of that going. Take the President back out on the campaign trail, his doctor says it’s okay for him to do it. Apparently, he had a negative COVID test now. He put out this video saying he was cured, that there is a cure for this now. That’s a dangerous word that was used to purchasing truth. There are many problems with that because nobody else in the United States can get the level of care the President did with an experimental therapeutic drug, which is helpful. I’ll give you that. There’s hope for the future of treating this virus, but nobody else can get that treatment. There’s a lot of doubt and skepticism being thrown around the number of people that have died.

A lot of conservatives tend to say, “The number is inflated. There haven’t been 200,000 people that died because a lot of people died of heart attacks or they died of diabetes or something else. It wasn’t COVID.” There’s been a lot more in studies that have come out to suggest the number is probably even higher than they’ve reported. It’s more like 250,000. I’m not getting into the details of the data right now, but there’s definitely some evidence on the other side. Here’s the thing that’s scary that no matter whether you trust the death numbers as being from COVID or not, or you trust the number of people that have been tested to be infected, there’s cause to have doubt and skepticism as to where there all those numbers are.

There’s nothing wrong with the emotion of doubt and skepticism. It’s winning to being used to purchase truth away from what we need to focus on, which is the primary target of consideration and health for other fellow Americans. The number is 1 in 16 Americans are going to pass from this thing or have passed from this thing. The number is way too darn big to go, “When is it it’s going to get one-in-one? What are we going for here?” We’re going to see how many people have this experience of COVID and the long-term health problems that it causes. That’s not a good thing.

It’s not, and what we’re seeing now happening as we are in the last few weeks before the election, is that the number of cases in the United States, the daily cases identified are going up. You can doubt and challenge that number, but here’s the one thing that is hard to challenge. I was reading that the number of people being admitted to the hospital is going up fast. That is not something that is easy to doubt. The stress on the medical system, the number of people in the hospital, that’s not fuzzy math. That’s a reality. The hospitals are filling up with people that need critical care in order to survive this virus. It’s hard to fudge those numbers. You either have people in the hospital or you don’t.



There are 30,000 people in hospitals throughout the nation that has COVID. That’s close to capacity because we are not built for crisis.

The stress on the medical system is not fuzzy math; it’s a reality.

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If it takes that long, honestly.

The prediction right now is close to 400,000 by February 2021. At least, by my simple estimation, it will be at 500,000 by May or June 2021 easy. The mask wearing works. I’m repeating it because a scientist repeated. It’s like, “The numbers go down.” California went from 1 worse to 5. We’re in the middle now. Some parts of the state are going, “Let’s see if we can at least relax a little bit.”

People are relaxing and getting out a little bit. It’s a big thing. The place to land here with our truth in disinformation and people looks at the researcher that does the work. Look at the scientist that spent twenty years studying that and could they be wrong or could they have a small variation not true because they discovered something new? That’s the way science works is you have a truth.

We’ve got to then say, “This is what we know at this time.” What we knew at one time is Christopher Columbus was this Italian person that came across the ocean and discovered America, where it was named after a different guy. It’s still a head shaker what people believe is true. Christopher Columbus was not a nice guy and now we’re changes day to indigenous cultures day. We’re making a change because you discover things and that’s what the adult mind does is say, “Change can take place.” We can do a change thing.

Did you see though how the President was doubling down on Columbus? He’s creating this culture of not wanting to rewrite our history and he was elevating Christopher Columbus in many ways, trying to reinforce original political beliefs and myths about him instead of accepting that, “We can learn more about somebody and that our culture changes.” We can realize, “Maybe he wasn’t a great guy and can rewrite our history and change it to Indigenous People’s Day.” He’s trying to recreate his 1950s version of America that he wants it to be.



It’s unsettling when a belief bias gets put into place that way. More to come on this, Tom. I appreciate us going down this rabbit hole. We need to take a look at information and we do need to double-check things as we put things up and it can make a big difference.

Thanks for your help, Bill. I appreciate it.