The Firewalls Of The Republic Against The Purchasing Of Truth
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We are never rid of interesting things happening in our country. We’re still in the midst of President Donald Trump trying to cling to power. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom go in-depth into an interesting New York Times article that talks about the three key firewalls that saved the Republic from Donald Trump. In particular, they dive into ethics versus legal, the line people do not cross, and how the purchasing of truth with our biases and beliefs on the line can become powerful. They then talk about how much the Republican Party has changed since Trump and why, even more so, there is a need for a restoration of truth and trust.
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Bill, it’s very interesting to see what’s happening in the country. We’re still in the middle of the president trying to cling to power. He and others on his behalf continue to try to get the Supreme Court to look at something and try to overturn votes. It’s very interesting to see what’s happening. It doesn’t have a lot of chance of succeeding. There was a very interesting article written in the New York Times that talks about how there are these three key firewalls. The title is what saved the Republic from Donald Trump.
They’re saying it’s not constitutional issues. At the end of the day, these three firewalls come down to the people in the Justice Department, judges, prosecutors, that there was a line they wouldn’t cross that’s more of an ethical line. There’s also the military that wouldn’t cross a line of getting involved in keeping order in our cities as the protests were happening especially the summer around the country. Most importantly, the last one of the firewalls is the state elections officials especially in Georgia and all the election workers around the country. Especially at the state level, the ones that would not throw out votes because the president asked them to. They’re following the law but there’s a line they won’t cross. You and I have talked about ethics versus laws and civics. This appears to be what has saved the republic from a leader desperately trying to cling to power despite his will to do whatever it takes to hang on to power and trying to convince everybody to ignore the will of the people, the votes.
The challenge is ethics versus legal, and what is something that’s going to be legally prosecuted versus something that’s ethical. The need for trust and integrity is the thing that make democracies fragile. The fragile part of a democracy is you’ve got to trust the poll worker. You’ve got to trust the election officials, those people that ran for those positions, the people that we elected to be those positions, the governor, and the various different secretary of states to execute the law as it’s being described. Every vote will be counted.
Are people going to make mistakes? Yes. Are people going to try to maybe vote twice? Will people do that? There are people who will do that. As Bill Barr said, “There’s no evidence of any extensive fraud in the election system.” Why would Bill Barr do that? It’s because he has a sense of what integrity would look like and he’s not going to get in the place and be the person to go like, “No, I’m going to throw this one out.” Other things, he has been a champion for protecting the president.
Some people would agree with me and agree with you, or not agree with other things about whether it was right for him to protect the president or send a counter-message about the seriousness of an elected official, making some of the choices or communicating with some people that might not have America’s interests in mind. They have the interest of their country in mind, not our country. We talked about the Justice Department, that’s partly. The State Department, not as much so. They partly stood up.
That was the whole trial for the impeachment. Those State Department officials, Alexander Vindman and all those wonderful folks that said, “Yes, no,” that was illegal. It was like abroad. They were going like, “Yes, it was.” They had the vote to impeach him and they did. When it went to the Senate side, there weren’t the numbers of people that were willing to put truth and integrity ahead of the party. They put the party and also Donald Trump or the presidency ahead of those.
People can disagree with me, but that’s called democracy. You could speak up to say, “That wasn’t such a big deal that there was a quid pro quo. There was a trade/a bribe that was put in a place.” Meanwhile, that’s not what the money was for and what it was voted for us to do hold it hostage so that he could get a political favor done. The money was allocated for them to have weapons to defend themselves. That’s what it was designed for. The strength of Democratic walls has been tested through this experience.
If you think about some of the need for integrity and trust to be met, or even respect for us as Americans is like, “What are we going to stand for?” Are we going to stand for a person not saying the elections weren’t fair, they were rigged and allow that to be the truth that America does rigged elections? Is that the truth that we would like as America? Is that what we want to show to other democratic nations? This goes to how little Americans know that other countries don’t have it as good as we do.
I thought based on his past behavior, the actions he took, especially where Bill Barr got the Mueller Report, wrote up his synopsis, his memo of it, framing it how he wants to saying there was no there, there. Coming out and publicly publishing that no attorney general’s ever done anything like that before. Before the Mueller Report saw the light of day, he came out and said, “Yes, there’s nothing there.” That was considered to be shockingly inappropriate for a sitting attorney general of the United States. I thought, “There are no lengths to which this person will not go to support Donald Trump. He is fully loyal and indoctrinated. He’s on Donald Trump’s team.”
To see William Barr come out here and say, “There was no widespread fraud.” He broke with Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s furious at him for not towing the line and supporting what Donald Trump is saying that there’s widespread fraud and this election was rigged. To me, it searching to see there was even a line William Barr would not cross when it comes to loyalty to party or loyalty to the president at the expense of loyalty to the country. It seems that William Barr had a line he wouldn’t cross. That’s what these firewalls, the New York Times article is talking about. There are lines that people have at least integrity to some level, if not completely an integrity. There are things they won’t do.
Can you imagine if there was one piece of evidence of voter fraud that was 1,000, 10,000 or 20,000 votes? There isn’t that range. Can you imagine how difficult this conversation would be if the difference was 1,000 votes in the State of Georgia? It was only 1,000 votes. People will even more so believe. The only difference in the state of Florida with Al Gore and George Bush was 578 votes, yet the Supreme Court would not say or make Florida to do a recount. Are they going to jump in now? I’m feeling doubtful and skeptical that they’re going to jump in. Will they say we are going to weigh in on these states that have certified their elections?
They’ve said, “Yes. This is where the chips fall fell.” Are they going to weigh in? I feel doubtful and skeptical, although you and I, as well as many people in the nation have said, “Donald Trump can’t do that much damage. There are all these different protective things. Here are the things that will keep him in check, the various different systems, the various different things.” What they didn’t know regard to this is that branding, marketing and sales can overcome systems.
You can sell and market to a population and deliver a crappy product. There’s not much they can hold you accountable because you sold it so well. The people believe it so well. They’ll even buy something that’ll hurt them because it’s been branded in marketing that it’s the best thing that they need to have in their house. I wish the human brain wasn’t like that. It’s not that people are gullible. It’s that the way we invest in the things that we believe in, our beliefs and our biases and our fallacies are so much more powerful because they provide us certainty. If we can do a good job over the next 4 to 8 years to restore trust in the courts, trust in truth, fairness and equanimity with people, but it’s going to take eight years to restore those things. We have a bit of work to do to restore the Democratic firewalls with the values that we’ve left behind.
By Democratic firewalls, you don’t mean Democratic Party. You mean our republic, our norms of government.
The ‘firewalls of the republic’ is a better way to say it.
I didn’t want people to think you were saying the Democrats need to take over. We’re all Americans and what that means. To some people, it means freedom, but it doesn’t mean freedom to do whatever you want at the expense of others. At the end of the day, Americans voted, more than 81 million people.
They voted in the firewalls of the Republicans that say is that we’re staying in the process. Stepping up and stepping into things like what does the word conservative mean? What does a balanced budget mean? What are these things put into proportion? If you’re giving food stamps and it is only 0.5% of the taxes you pay, yet you’re paying $0.25 on the dollar for the military, that proportionality is not considerate to your fellow Americans.
If you’re not supporting infrastructure, helping our nation grow, develop and move forward as a nation and you’re not building, the whole point of infrastructure is in order to help commerce. These are the fundamentals of good capitalism is you let the government handle infrastructure pieces and you let capitalism to grow and grow upon those different things. Even the Romans had this down during the Roman Empire. You build bridges, you build sewers and you build roads. When you build roads that allow the military to travel around. That allows commerce.
The hearts and minds of things appealing to a person's beliefs, biases, and fallacies are not fully true.
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I can sell olive oil and I can sell pizza. I’m making something up to be funny now for all your historians. You allow trade to take place because your roads and your infrastructure are being supported. You’re developing protections. You’re holding people accountable. You’re not taking shots at the entire system and letting the thing fall apart. Regrettably, as a very young nation at 200 plus years of doing the things that we’re doing, it’d be nice if we remember the fundamentals of running a successful society. Let the government do things that provide an infrastructure for capitalism to sit on top of, not the other way around.
I don’t want capitalism in my education. I don’t want capitalism in my jails. I don’t want it there. It doesn’t belong there. It’s not the type of capitalism you want. I don’t want capitalism fully in my medical system. What’s hard for people to have a healthy perspective about is that we are a unique nation. We have unique levels of structures the way we depend upon people. Ethics and values matter. Tom, where can we go with this restoration part? As a nation, how we can move things forward with this? I know we could have talked a lot about how states are filing things against the voting. Don’t we need to work on the process of truth even or the process of trusting each other? Those things need to be restored.
There is a lack of trust. You talked about the marketing and branding. It’s the marketing and branding of a leader who is propagating information that’s so far from the truth. There are hardly even partial truths there. People believe him and they distrust the government. That’s a dangerous thing. One interesting way to look at this is that if you look at how much the Republican Party has changed in Donald Trump. Look at somebody like Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, who was running against Donald Trump in the primaries.
He had said at one point, “Donald Trump is a pathological liar. There’s not one word that comes out of his mouth that is true. He is the ultimate narcissist.” Now the Texas attorney general has filed the hail Mary of a lawsuit to try to get the Supreme Court to weigh in and trying to get them to say these swing states that went for Joe Biden that their votes should be thrown out. It’s not going to go anywhere. Donald Trump has asked for Ted Cruz to argue before the Supreme Court if they’re allowed oral arguments.
Ted Cruz has said he would do that. He wants to have the spotlight to get more exposure for who he is, maybe running for president in the future. The Republican Party has flipped on its head because Donald Trump has the backing of this base and they’re abandoning their very core values and principles to be in alignment with Donald Trump. That is scary. That’s where I see trust is eroded, but values have eroded or shifted too.
There is a restoration of the values that are needed. There is a restoration of truth and trust. We have big problems to face. To be arguing over something that go count the votes. Are you trusting? The media has got to do a better job when somebody says something fraud. The follow-up question is, “Do you have one piece of evidence that you can put in front of us at this moment or otherwise we’re not going to cover this.?” Tell them right off the bat that they’re not going to cover it. Can you show me something? Do you have a picture? Do you have something that’s admissible in court so that I can take you seriously? What you’re saying is hearsay. It’s something that you have seen, is that right? Is that what it is or is this something that someone told you? Ma’am in a court of law, that’s called hearsay. You can express yourself and this thing because you have some speculations and ideas, but unless you can prove it, it’s very hard for us to consider it because, in our government, we focus on what truth looks like.
In every hearing forward, that’s got to be the narrative. The official has got to start fighting for truth. Do you have evidence in your possession? Is this a hearsay? Where did you hear it from? That is not a credible source for us until we have a piece of evidence. I can appreciate that a TV personality on Fox News has said something like that, but unless they put a piece of evidence in front of us, we cannot consider it as true. Thank you very much for sharing, next.
Every judge has done that, where’s the evidence? Even Rudy Giuliani who speaks from the podium all the time says this massive fraud everywhere when he’s been in front of a judge every time. He would have said the judge when asked about wherever that’s a fraud is, “No, we’re not alleging fraud.” It’s like, “Why are we here?” The judges have stood up for the truth.
The judges need to include the following sentence, “This is a marketing effort. This is something so that you can get the message or the perspective of truth taking place. This is not about finding truth. This is about you providing a marketing, a sales or a branding effort so that you can get your message out and hopefully people will cover it and believe you. Is that what this is? We don’t do that in the court of law.” They’ve got to start calling for what this is because this is a marketing and branding effort to win the hearts and minds of people not to pursue truth. That’s the hard part about our discussion, Tom. That’s why we’re doing this show that we did. This Purchasing Truth piece because you’ve got to call it for what it is. The hearts and minds of things appealing to a person’s beliefs, biases and fallacies are not fully true. We could link like stick it right there. That’s where the landing is. We’ve got to do some things to restore truth and trust in our conversation and to make it go better.
It’s shocking how it’s such a struggle to agree on the truth and to restore trust. It’s a hill. We still have a long way to climb.
Thanks, Bill.
Talk to you soon, Tom. Thanks a million. Bye.
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