Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, welcome to Call It Like I See it, presented by Disruption Now, I'm James Keys. And in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to try to make sense of all the efforts that we're seeing around the country to make voting more difficult or inconvenient or otherwise just to restrict people's ability to vote. And later on, we're going to try to figure out how the US government acknowledging that UFOs are among us is not a bigger deal.
Joining me today is a man who goes to a place where danger awaits him, which, by the way, is bound to forsake him. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde. Are those friendly skies still looking good for flying?
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Always, man. Nice and clear.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Cool. And since we're talking voting, we wanted to bring in our resident American history aficionado.
So also joining me today is a man who is looking to find a way to bring some understanding here today, Rick Ellsley. Rick, are you ready to tell us what's going on?
[00:01:22] Speaker C: All the time. Thank you very much for the invite. Again, I always love joining you guys.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: All right.
[00:01:28] Speaker C: All right.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: I'm happy to have you.
[00:01:30] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Now, we're recording this on May 2, 2021, and to get right to it, since the 2020 election, we've seen many states, and this includes Georgia, Iowa, and most recently Florida, move to make voting more difficult or inconvenient or to give state officials more power over the vote counting and the application of the election.
The stated reason for a lot of these moves has been to increase election security.
So, Tunde, what stands out to you with these recent efforts to add restrictions on the way people can vote? And do you buy that these things would actually improve election security or do you think this is just an effort to engineer an electorate?
[00:02:11] Speaker B: I'll be direct. I think it's an effort to engineer the electorate.
It's interesting because I think we should acknowledge that nothing's perfect.
So I recognize that. I think in Georgia there was an example of two dead people that had voted.
I recognize some people will sit there and point to those type of discrepancies as a reason to start changing and upending.
I guess what we've considered normal or norms in the voting process.
And I just think that it reminded me of something like the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, where 7 million doses are administered. There's six people that had blood clots, and everybody's making such a big deal. And what I'm saying is that when you have millions of anything, one can expect Some slight discrepancies. And I think our elections are no different. That's why even when you look at polls, there's usually a 2 to 3%, what they call the margin of error. They call that for a reason.
So I think that what otherwise would be considered normal discrepancies in any process for political purposes has been blown up to try and convince a certain portion of Americans that somehow the whole election system and voting system is either fraudulent rigged or somehow not to be trusted.
So I do think it's an example of engineering.
I also believe that with the amount of.
It's almost like with the amount of technology used and all the systems that we know have been put in place post the year 2000 election and the issues that we had there, which I'm sure we'll touch on a bit here, it appears that this election of 2020 was probably the most scrutinized in the history of the United States. And I think we alluded to this on a prior show in terms of even having something as mundane as the counting of electoral votes being live streamed on the Internet. I mean, I don't think that ever happened before. So, you know, I think for anybody being a fair observer, this was a very, very watched and transparent process. Then all the court challenges going all the way to the Supreme Court. So I think at this point in May of 2021, for those to still act and challenge the results as if they were somehow fraudulent, I think it is all about engineering the electorate and
[00:04:43] Speaker A: using them as a basis to do all this, to make all these changes which otherwise people may not be interested in understanding why you're doing it. What about you, Rick? And by the way, Katunde, well said. I thought you really laid that out well. But Rick, what do you think about that?
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Thank you, sir.
[00:05:00] Speaker C: Well, what really stands out to me is who is pushing these efforts.
And clearly our federal government at this point is narrowly controlled by the Democrats, but the state governments are overwhelmingly controlled by the Republicans. And voting is something that is controlled by the states. And if you look at this, there's 361 bills that have been filed related to voting and voting restrictions over 41 states.
So I think obviously it's kind of a power grab among the state legislatures and the state governors to, you know, stem the blue wave maybe that they, they thought they would see. And I think that, that that's a problem. If you look at where the, the bills I looked at this, which states actually were, were blue states in the presidential election in 2016, that had now turned, excuse me, red that have now turned blue. For 2020 you got Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona. And in those states there were 10 bills. In Wisconsin, 14 bills. In Pennsylvania, 21 bills. In Michigan, Georgia had 27 and Arizona had 25. All of those were considered voting restrictive laws that they were trying to pass. There was only one that was considered know, sort of a blue law. So in the states that are now voting to pass these rights, these are the states that had, that had turned. And obviously the Georgia law is the most media covered and, and I think the most sinister especially with the food and the water that they can't deliver to people in line.
So I agree with Tunde. I think that it's, it's definitely an attempt to engineer. There were a couple of things that seemed okay in some of the bills as far as increasing security and having more accountability on cybersecurity checks.
But the things like, you know, restricting where the drop boxes can be located, the hours of the drop boxes and then how many mail in ballots can be returned by one person. I mean those are clearly attempts to restrict the voting opportunities for people who may not have access otherwise.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: No, I agree with you actually in terms of the. I start with looking at the whole. So that's, you know, clearly like the, when you look at the, the Republican Party over the last, let's say 50 or 60 years, like the efforts to control who votes has been a part of what they do. We look at the way this has been approached here. It follows allegations of fraud that were never substantiated or election, that the election was stolen or anything like that that were never substantiated with evidence.
And so it's impossible I think to separate that context from what's being done. And then also if you look at what the bulk of the restrictions are geared towards, they're not things that are really geared towards stopping large scale fraud or providing for a better paper trail with audit. A lot of the things go into giving state officials control over the local election administration and so forth. And so from my view, yes, this is a partisan power grab attempt. Power grab, meaning grabbing it not from the other party, but from the people we as partisans want to control, how the leadership is selected in a partisan way basically. And so that's what I see here. Now that being said, this is pretty common throughout the history of America. And so it's something that has, has happened throughout the time. I mean the going back to, to the founding of the country, only men were allowed to vote. That's Controlling the electorate, so to speak, that's trying to manipulate the electorate in a way, not necessarily in a partisan way, but it's still manipulating the electorate. The exclusion of black people and then for long, you know, then when, when blacks first got it, it was of course just black men because that was prior to women getting the franchise. So all of those things are trying to engineer the electorate, sometimes for partisan reasons, other times for other reasons.
So it's not that we've never seen this before. This is something that's unprecedented. But what we are seeing or what the significance of this to me as we see it right now is just how it's coming in on the heels of increased participation from people. So more people are trying to participate. And then the reaction from a partisan standpoint is to, no, no, no, we need to scale back. We make it, make, need to make it more difficult. That's, it's crazy to me that we see all these laws that we say we're going to make it more difficult, more inconvenient to vote. We don't want it to be something that someone can do relatively easily or that is they don't have to go through great burden or at least some people. We want people to have to wait in lines, or at least people in urban environments, we want them to have to wait in lines. We want them to, while they're waiting in line, not to be able to be given water. You know, like, so that doesn't do anything for security, you know, like that's not helping it election be more secure. So I mean, to me, I don't think you can look at this outside of the who and the why that, that who is giving. And if you do that, then it becomes a pretty plain partisan power grab, attempted power grab. Taking power from the people, in my view.
[00:10:22] Speaker C: Yeah, I agree.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, we all agree on that. But how in the world though, if we are a democracy, if we're a country that fashions itself as that we select leadership democratically. You know, again, people argue about republic and whether we're a republic or democracy, it's not an argument for, at least not for today, because what we do is select our leadership, we select representatives, which makes us a republic. But we select those representatives, not randomly, not because of who, when they were born or who their dad is. We select the representatives democratically. So when we say when somebody says we're a democracy, that's what you're talking about. We select our representatives democratically. And so in this.
Why do you think voter Participation is not something we can all agree on. You know, we say we're a democracy, which means people vote to select leadership. But why is voter participation such a hot button issue in our society?
[00:11:19] Speaker C: I think it's because it's human nature. I mean, it was Balzac who said power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so those in power fear losing it. And I think that. I think it's a human nature thing. And I think the. The experience, the American experiment and the challenge of democracy is always facing this.
And it's very difficult when you have a party in power or a group in power to kind of change that tide significantly.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: Rick, you know, I feel like you are. I must have shared my notes with you.
My top line of my. The thing I want to say is that the American experiment is an exception to human nature. This is. We're trying to do something that goes against the tide of our human nature. And so just to hear you start with that was like, oh, man.
[00:12:06] Speaker C: Well, you know, I mean, I listen to you guys all the time. Maybe it's getting through.
And I'm just. I'm just, you know, usually when I listen to your podcast, I'm like, oh, I would say this here or that. So, you know, maybe we all kind of on the same wavelength. But I think the problem, though is, you know, can you have a system that's. That's sustainable that way? But on the other side of that coin is, well, look, we're in the year 2021. The country was founded in 19, in 1776. I mean, we've done pretty well so far. We. We've made it. We have to keep making it somehow. The problem is, is when you have, you know, a group that's in power and. And whatever group that is, and they don't want to allow for the, you know, equal opportunity of the others, you have a complete injustice. And so as that continues, that becomes the problem. So we have to find ways, I think, to. To reach out and allow the tent to be bigger for those who vote.
If we don't, that is a threat to the system.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: I want to jump in on you here, because the thing is, is that the way you said that was, again, presenting this as if it's a new issue. Like, we've had a group in power the whole time tried to keep others from getting their hands on the lever of power. And over time, actually, the. This started, you know, as well. I think Tunde cited this several times. White male property owners was the initial group that had the power and they wanted to keep everybody else out. And then over time that's expanded and expanded and expanded. And so clearly it's not a new problem.
This is just a current push of a issue that's been here the whole time. I just, other than saying, okay, well, it's our human nature to once we have something to try to hold on to it, to play these zero sum type of things. But it seems counter to the fact of whether when we call ourselves one thing yet we behave in a way that is contrary to that in a sense, you know, like eventually isn't. Is one side going to give or can we just perpetually be in this battle or will we just be perpetually in this battle?
[00:14:10] Speaker B: I think we'll be perpetually in it just because like you guys said, first of all, part of this is human nature.
But then I think there is the other part. Side of this coin is our culture that you alluded to. As Americans, we have in the last few decades, big demographic shifts. I think a lot of this is natural. It's a natural offshoot of the 1968 Southern Strategy.
It's a natural offshoot of the demographic changes in this country. And it's a natural offshoot of, I'd say the last, probably, definitely 10 years, if not maybe longer, 20 years of hyper partisan messaging in the media.
So what happens, you throw all that into a big stew, you know, a bunch of, as parts of a recipe of how we got here.
And you've got, you know, like you, like you alluded to, James, certain sections of town remember the 2020 election when they were blaming on what areas of the country had fraud. If it was Pennsylvania, it was Philadelphia. If it was Michigan, it was Detroit. If it was Georgia, it was Atlanta. So it's kind of the same idea that we've heard from the history of America is those people over there are doing something suspicious. They're not doing it if it's, it's somehow illegitimate. If they did, if they achieved something, right?
So there's that part of our culture that always, just like birtherism and all that, there's no way that someone like them could do this legitimately. So that's one. The second then is like you guys say, the power, right? The party in power wants to stay in power. And if they're willing to accept these type of things as how they want to operate, then it's going to happen.
And I think the other is really then going to the media side because for the last 20, 25 years, between talk Radio, cable news, and now social media. In the last decade, you know, there's a whole section of Americans, a third to, you know, 50% of Americans who really believe the other side is diabolical. And so what happens when you've got such a hyper partisan environment?
The ends also justify the means. So people that support, let's say, the political party, let's say certain Republican voters might say, you know what, I recognize in a vacuum this might not seem right, but the other side is so bad I can't have socialism or I can't have this or that, that I'm going to overlook what my party just did. Like you guys are saying that, well, I know it'd be nice to give people water while they're standing in line, but you know that I don't want these socialist views and these other views coming in. So I guess in this one, you know, because it's not my people, I'll let it slide. And I think what we saw with the Capitol riot or insurrection on January 6th was kind of a culmination of all of it. It was, you know, those people to me represented a certain percentage of Americans that kind of don't, don't get it that the country is changing and that, you know, they do need to accept the fact that there's other people out there that have opinions and views. And then they also at the same time represent people who have been in a bubble of this kind of ecosystem of this right wing media.
And they, I'm pretty sure a lot of them really believe that, you know, whatever it is, that, you know, their political opponents are pedophiles or that they're socialists or whatever the, the meme of the day is. So I think it's part of it.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: Before you get too far away from that, you could maybe harmonize the two of those. Maybe they do get it. But what they get is blown out of proportion, so to speak, because they're in this bubble. Like, what they get is that these other people are taking over and we need to go to any means necessary basically in order to prevent this. And like you said, I think it's an excellent point you made as far as the hyper partisanship almost forces people to, to choose between their, their beliefs, their virtues, so to speak, or their side. And it's like, no, our side has to win or else everything is lost. And so you excuse anything. I mean, you know, we've talked about or we've mentioned in the past just how George Washington warned of the dangers of partisanship. And so forth. And I mean, you had talked about, man, we need to do a show on this speech that he did because it's like warning us of a lot of the stuff that we see how this plays out when you get this hyper partisanship. And like you said, I thought it was very well put, like the ends, whatever the ends are, or, excuse me, whatever the means are, they're justified to prevent the warned catastrophe that's going to happen if blank, if the other side is allowed to win or whatever.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: But you know what? And I want to say this
[00:19:03] Speaker C: like
[00:19:03] Speaker B: the saddest part, and as I'm hearing you say it back to me, it's like I'm realizing that we all lose. That's the problem.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: The Americans as a, as a country, all of us as American citizens, lose because what gets lost in all this is now governing like there's no, there's no ability for people to govern. And I'll, I'll put think about the first hundred days of the Biden administration. And I'm not here to be a fan of Joe Biden. I'm just saying that, you know, there's infrastructure, there's this and that. And like we did a show on this, zero Republicans supported in the infrastructure bill when last year you did have a bipartisan voting on the CARES act, the stimulus for the pandemic. And again, I'm not here to be a Democrat because I'm not a Democrat. I'm just making the point that it's at, at some point you can make the false equivalence that's the same on both sides. We have a party right now in the Republican Party in the United States that is an obstructionist party.
That is, that is undemocratic, as you guys mentioned, in terms of the state legislatures and what they're doing.
And the Democratic Party is not behaving that way. And that's not a.
This is why it's tough to have these conversations in this polarized environment.
I'm not making a case for an ideology here. I'm not saying conservative ideology is wrong. I'm not saying Republican Party ideals are wrong or anything that they have on paper. But I'm not saying that liberals or progressives are better. I'm just making a case that from the way that both parties operate today.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: One clearly is trying to suppress the access to voting for a lot of Americans. And the other isn't.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: Well, no.
[00:20:43] Speaker B: And that's simple as that.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: That's, that's along the lines of the point that's been made by George W. Bush by John Boehner. It's about the operation, how the party is going about business.
Not necessarily. It's not talking about the ideology of the party, meaning the, as far as the views on economics or the views on tax or the views on, you know, whatever the. It's. It's about how the party is operating has become very anti Democratic, and that is a threat to the, the nation as a whole. If, if one of the parties, so to speak. There's nothing in that ideology that requires you to be anti Democratic. It's either. Let's either try to persuade a bunch of people to support us so that they'll vote for us, or if we don't think we can do that, let's try to even or change the odds in our favors through other means, through people who won't support us. Let's try to make it more difficult for them to exercise their franchise. So that's the concern here. You know, we're no longer. There's not even a facade of a battle of ideas. It is, we're right, they're evil. So therefore we need to do anything we can to stop them. And so that's why it seems like voter participation is not something we can agree on right now is because one side has decided they're not interested anymore in persuading people based on their ideas, based on their principles. It's just we need to win and do what we want to do by any means necessary. And that's, yeah, that's, that's concerning. Rick, you had something for this?
[00:22:08] Speaker C: Well, I just, I think the, the irony here is the Republicans have this wave of America first, but if they truly believe that they would want to have a battle of ideas and not try to change it structurally to limit who can vote, the concept of America first makes sense. Let's all, you know, get together, argue about the best ideas and then come up with something like they did kind of in the 80s with Reagan and Tip O', Neill, where they would battle and battle them, but they'd get stuff done.
And that's, I think, what George W. Bush and Boehner are lamenting. I mean, Boehner was very hard Republican, and Eric Cantor, who got voted out by the, by the Tea Party, is now maybe making a comeback, I heard. So you've got people who have maybe some good ideas, who've maybe been in government and want to do the right thing for America, but then you've got the other side of that. And that's a battle, I think, within the Republican Party between, you know, let's change the structure or let's try to get better substance. And it doesn't seem like they're trying to get better substance. It's the same thing they did with Obama, which is don't let anything pass at all, regardless of the consequence.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, it's really unfortunate because our system needs the way we're set up. We need both sides to be actively contributing ideas, critiques, honest critiques, good faith critiques. And that's. Yeah, the failure here is that that's just not happening. And it is kind of an intro. There's nothing really that I shouldn't say nothing. There's little that from the outside that we can do other than just call attention to this because it's like this is kind of an intra Republican Party battle that we're watching where one side literally, like the platform in 2020 for the Republican Party was just whatever Trump wanted to do to support Trump. They didn't have any other ideas to put forth on the official party platform for 2020. That's shocking.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: That's like. It is. That's like, how responsible is that?
[00:23:58] Speaker C: It's just pure arrogance. And that.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: That's not arrogance, man. This is the culmination of all that stuff, man. The big lies. It's not just the big lie of the election. There's been big lies for decades.
And this is, this is what it's culminated to. It's, it's.
And this is why I hate to keep beating this drum.
And I used to joke with James about this. Is America a race or an idea? Think about that.
America is a very. I mean, Ronald Reagan had that beautiful speech when he left office, which is, you know, you can go to Germany, you can move to Germany, but you're never going to be a German. You can move to Japan, but you're never going to be Japanese. And you named a few other countries, for example.
But he said, only in America can you come from anywhere else in the world and be an American. That was Ronald Reagan. That guy would get primary today.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Yeah. And stuff like that. Yeah.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: And that's my point is, Rick, that's the difference is like, I'll speak on me, not you guys. I was naive. I believe that most Americans believe that. When I was young, and what I'm saying is this last decade or so has, has shown me that what I thought was that put back in the bottle back in the 60s and 70s, like that attitude of the real hardcore side of, of kind of right wingness in America that. That maybe it. It wasn't put back in a bottle like I thought. Or maybe people are susceptible when they get stoked that it comes out a lot more than I would have thought.
But again, that's why I said I think the insurrection in January 6, all these things are the symbolic representation of the last couple decades of that fomenting under the surface and people getting ginned up and now they want to believe certain things. And I think for the rest of us. And this is where, in preparing for today and reading, I was even realizing, again, I think it's a miscalculation on the Republican Party side long term. And it's sad that they went down this direction because the demographics. I think what they didn't realize, that the demographics of this country aren't what they were in 1968.
And just like we saw with the summer last year of 2020, people aren't gonna stomach this this time around. Like, they may have been scared out, you know, to not push back back in the day. So it's sad because everyone's gonna have to do the heavy lifting again and prove that this is undemocratic and all that.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: But, you know, well, yeah, it'll backfire or it'll take us all down. And so the hope is that we can shine a light on. On it in a way. And that's kind of the thing. You shine a light on it in a way. That's not to say we want to destroy this other side or this group here or that. Because that's not the objective here. You actually want them to come with ideas and have those ideas challenged and see where we end up.
But that's a difficult path to walk in this day and age right now, because, as you like to note, Tunde, you say something halfway negative about anyone, and instantly it's framed in a way that you're just attacking someone from a partisan standpoint. The reason for that is the misdirection, obviously, because if you make everything partisan, then no one ever looks at the criticism to see if they're legitimate. And we enter this world where you can just say anything about anyone and the people on your side, quote, unquote, will be expected to believe it. And the people on the other side will. Will be expected to not believe it. And nobody's ever looking to see if any of the stuff that people are saying are true or have any merit. And so it disarms all of us, you know, us being the people, which is, you know, to me, that's What I look to in terms of where the energy should be trying to support and put forth.
This is a governance of the people, by the people, and for the people like this. This is a people game. And if we don't allow the people to have sufficient knowledge to exercise their franchise and then actually to have the ability to exercise the franchise and vote without crazy amounts of inconvenience and so forth, then we're all. We're hustling backwards. We are allowing the power to go from being in the hands of the people to being concentrated in the hands of the very few. And we're doing so without a fight, which just, you know, that. That just can't be allowed to go. But tell me this. I want to get you guys thoughts on this before we move on. You know, with the. Okay, so we have voting restrictions floating around out there. We see gerrymandering has been obviously going on forever. But that's picked up ste with, you know, like the ability to model these things on computers now where they can do the gerrymander so precisely.
And we're to. Where like just, just for example, like certain states now a party can get 40% of the vote statewide and end up with like 60% of the legislature, you know, because the. How. How they draw those districts and what they do basically is they concentrate the district so that the one side will win 90% of the vote in one district and. But to concentrate all their votes in one district and so they dispersed everywhere else. And so. But that's how you end up with 40% of the vote in one place, giving you 60% of the representation. But so you got gerrymandering, you know, even like with the census, you got census shenanigans.
You know, what do you guys see as the biggest threat that we face within it if we have to like, prioritize and say, what do we need to push back on? We as people, we as Americans push back on, you know, which of these or all of them or what do you. What's the biggest threat do we have?
[00:29:18] Speaker B: I don't know if there's the biggest. There's probably several.
[00:29:21] Speaker C: That's kind of an amalgamation.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I think. I think part of it is our system. And I think because I feel torn between this. You know, I like the idea of something like the electoral college because I like the idea that, you know, the minority should be hurt. And by that I don't mean a racial minority. I just mean, you know, if, like rural areas, for example, I think that the idea of politicians having to go to certain states that are not as populated and still perform and do their backflips to show people that they care about them. I think that's very important.
But I do think that the Electoral College also presents problems in the modern age because of our population, where you got a state like California with 40 million people, they have two senators which have the same power as the two senators from, let's say, North Dakota with 500,000 people.
It allows for disproportionate representation from the minority as well. I think what we've seen in recent years is people that are smart enough and want to manipulate things are able to use that to their advantage.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: Just to clarify, the Electoral College, meaning the way we select the president by having the states actually vote with a certain number of electors assigned for each state, is fundamentally. It's meant to balance rural and urban, but it is fundamentally change the ballot. It's not one person, one vote as far as per presidents. And then same thing with the Senate is something that. Because by giving two representatives to every state, regardless of size, it balances the power amongst large states in population versus small. And it does kind of the same thing in the legislative branch as the Electoral College does in the executive branch. And so I just wanted to make sure we didn't cross that. But, yeah, I mean, you're right, though.
Those are parts of the system that smart people can get in and say, okay, I see how this works. Let's figure out a way to almost game this. It's not really when you're doing, when you're trying to prioritize certain states or other states, that's not really doing anything unbecoming. You know, you're just saying, okay, well, we need this state, this state, and this state in order to get enough Electoral College votes or to put together a Senate majority, that, that you can game the system, so to speak, within the rules. So it does set up the kind of a thought process there of, hey, let's try to game this here. I would say, and this is probably cheating, but I think it actually is. All of these efforts together creates the biggest threat because most of them feed into each other.
And so when you rig systems in one way or when you restrict the voting, then you get into power, then you can gerrymander. And then when you gerrymander, then even if you do things that the electorate doesn't like and they want to vote you out because you've set up things a certain way, and because you have so many restrictions on voting, they're not going to be able to vote you out. So you can end up with minority. And again, not minority as in ethnic or racial or religious, but like minority in terms of worldview or ideas or, you know, things like that.
Controlling things in a way that can be really difficult to break because once they get into, once, once they get into power, they can continually amplify their advantage to stay in power. And that's why we started with this is talking about maintaining power, holding power. It's important to not look at that from just a pure partisan lens or a pure racial lens or religious lens. It's about, it's trying to maintain power from. It could be from any standpoint. It could be from partisan, it could be from regional, it could be from anything. So that desire to maintain power is strong no matter what. And these type of things you can put together to amplify each other, to allow you to accomplish that or to really put you on a track to accomplish that. So what do you think, Rick?
[00:33:22] Speaker C: Well, I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to pinpoint. There's a lot of problems with it. But some of the people, I can tell you what I don't like as a solution, and we may have touched on this previously in other podcasts, but, you know, some people talk about, let's maybe federalize or have one system for federal voting for, you know, Senate seats in the U.S. senate or the president.
And I think what that leads to is arguments, consistent arguments about illegitimacy, about how it was done by the losing, you know, from the losing party. And I think that if you have a situation where you have the states, as they do now, are controlling the voting for federal elections with their own sort of different systems that are localized, it's. It, I mean, it didn't stop what happened in the 2020 election in terms of the big lie. I'll grant, I'll grant you guys that, and I agree with that. But it just seems to me that the more different systems that are involved, there's a little bit, there's a little bit less opportunity to say, hey, there's one federalized system prevented me from voting or prevented me from doing this, and therefore it's illegitimate.
[00:34:30] Speaker A: RICH, Let me add in that, let, let you, let me add into that. Actually, for anybody who's actually really thinking about it, for any critical thinker, it actually makes it impossible to believe the big lie because you spread that power out of so many different people. Like, the big lie is like, all right, come on, you're Saying that over six or seven states, all of these people work together, all of these local officials, like, it's like that's implausible on its face. And then you don't prove it, you know, so it actually.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: Twice the big lie.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: Talk about this before it actually makes it harder to game or harder to rig when you have all these different people controlling different parts of it. So that's a, That's a helpful piece of. Yeah. If it was one central system, it would be easier to claim this thing was rigged because it could have just been three guys in one office.
But I think that's why this is
[00:35:18] Speaker B: sad, because it's just, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. James is just. That's why. James, what you just said is what makes this whole thing sad. Is that it?
You know, like, you're saying any objective adult who looks at this and just with a fair mind would say, yeah, you know what?
I don't see. There's nothing to see here. And it's just. But what the rest of us got
[00:35:42] Speaker A: plausible on its face. And then.
[00:35:43] Speaker B: I know.
And then it's like the rest of us got to deal with this. That's the sad part. Like, you know, like, I think most of us in this country want to move on and, you know, live in a nice country. We can all disagree on certain things, you know, and. And I think there's this one, you know, this part of the country that if it's not 100% their way, they're going to blow it all up for the rest of us. And instead of, I think.
And maybe that's part of it too, is just, you know, figuring out how we change our culture, of educating ourselves about our own country and our democracy, which is, you know, it's okay, 70, 80% of something is a win when you're in a democracy because you're with other people that aren't always going to think like you, period. And I think that for some reason there's been a, you know, again, one political party in this country has, has. Has become very authoritarian. And, and if it's not 100% a certain way or you think a certain way, then you're impure.
And I want to say this, too.
There's people on the left that think that way, and we all see that the difference is the Democratic Party as a party, doesn't have a leadership that behaves that way from the top down, where the Republican Party does. And that's where we're at today. So I'll get off my high horse
[00:37:06] Speaker C: Let me transition real quick, because you're talking about a high horse, just the quick imagery.
It's kind of like a headless horseman, this reckless solution in search of a problem.
Because, as you said at the beginning, we had the highest voter turnout, one of the most clean, secure elections. I think that they had said, we don't hear stuff in 2020 about the Russians infiltrating it. It seemed like it went well. And now here you have 361 bills and 41 legislatures. I mean, just.
[00:37:33] Speaker A: It's really. It's actually, I would say it a little more broadly than Tunde, but his sentiment, I think, is right on. It's. It's a strain in America. This is. And it's been here since the very beginning, what Tunde just said. As far as there is many, many, many Americans that just want to live their life, and, you know, they're okay if they don't get their way 100% of the time, but there is a strain. And this. This is the same mentality, you know, these. If they don't get their way, they want to blow it all up. Well, that's exactly what happened with the Civil War. There was a group of people who. And that's not the same political parties that we see right now. But they said, you know what? If this can't be the way we want it, then forget it. We're not doing it anymore. Like, we want to blow it all up. That was the Civil War. That was post Reconstruction. It's like, look, if we can't do it our way, we're going to be, you know, terrorizing people and we're going to be murdering people, and we're going to put it in our system, though we want it 100%, or else it's not happening. And so this strain in America and this thing, sometimes if you go back throughout American history, it was dispersed and existing in both parties, or it would be in one party or the other party.
And right now it seems to be concentrated in the Republican Party. But it's not something that's unique to the Republican Party, so to speak. This is a strain in America that's just this my way or blow it all up mentality that has existed in this country and that we, the rest of us, have tried to find a way, or have to, on an ongoing basis, find a way to have a country without allowing them to blow it up.
And so. And it's difficult. It's difficult. This isn't, you know, something that we can just wave a magic Wand and make go away. Because this kind of malcontent strain has been here the whole time, and it's going to be here the whole time. And it's their mentality is, hey, our way, or let's blow it up. And that's something. If you want to preserve the system, it's difficult to.
When you have. It's difficult to battle, so to speak, or to go adversarial against someone who, if their goal, if they don't get their way, is to blow it up. Because you're not only fighting against their kind of mental approach, but you're also fighting to prevent them from blowing it up. So that kind of clunkily said. I did want to get to our second topic today where, okay, I don't know if everyone heard about this, because to me, like, if this happened in the 90s, it would feel like that the world would have stopped. But the US Government literally just confirmed and provided a video of something. They are calling and saying this, hey, this was a ufo. We don't know what this was.
And, like, there's been conspiracy theories for decades. Oh, government knows about UFOs and all this other thing. The government just said, hey, yeah, hey, here's a video of a ufo. And nobody really, like, I shouldn't say nobody, but people didn't really have a big reaction to it. And I just couldn't believe it. Like, it was like, okay, yeah, look, here's a ufo. So did either of you guys, like, look at this and say, hold on, hold on, how come more people aren't talking about this? What's going on here?
[00:40:37] Speaker C: Well, I think everybody's just focused on TikTok and Snapchat.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: I was going to say, we're all distracted.
[00:40:43] Speaker C: All these cat videos and, oh, there was an attempt to overthrow the government on January 6, you know, in Congress and everything. But I found this story fascinating, and we've had little drips of this for the last few years. There was something else about this where they couldn't tell what it was. So I've got a couple thoughts on this.
[00:41:02] Speaker A: One is we're gonna crank up the speculation machine, all right?
[00:41:07] Speaker C: No, no, no, I'm not saying. I'm not saying what it is. I got a thought on, on the concept of their release, just like you did, like, wtf?
What happened here? But the government says in their release that it's now an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. That's different than a UFO. So the DoD is trying to get us away from this concept of, you know, unidentified Flying Object. From the science fiction. We now have the DoD saying an unidentified aerial phenomena. We don't know what it is.
That scares the hell out of me that the Department of Defense doesn't know what it is, because that could be. And that they admit that they don't know what it is. So without getting into outer space or aliens, let's just talk about, you know, their release for a second.
Why do they not know? I mean, they're supposed to protect us. There's a. There's a limit to technology and knowledge. Maybe. I get that. But they're admitting that they have that limit.
That could be a foreign threat, a foreign satellite, a foreign military threat. That's scary. We don't know about that. Maybe it is. And they don't want to panic everybody.
It could be a private aviation enthusiast or something here and there that they don't. They haven't been able to figure out what kind of craft this is. That's worrisome, because they should, with all their radar and their technology and all the money we put into defense spending every year. And then my third thought is, as much as I love the podcast and everything else about my current life and everything that we see in today, if it truly is aliens and they are hostile, then we really, you know, are just kind of pissing in the wind with everything we talk about, because that's. That's a big deal.
So I love this story.
I'm, you know, I'm waiting for the people to go on the rooftops and, you know, start worshiping the aliens like you see in the movie, and then they get blown up to smithereens.
[00:42:52] Speaker B: No, don't wish for that, man.
[00:42:54] Speaker C: This is a very, very serious problem. And I do agree with you, James, that CNN and Fox would rather, you know, cover some stuff that's maybe not as important. This should really be front page news every day until it figures out there should be 60 minutes with the DOD, the Department of Defense. Secretary, we need to address this, so.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: Well, see, but the news channels, this says something, though. The news channels are in the business of trying to get ratings. They're not in business of giving us news. So clearly they don't think if they turn. They don't think if they give us information about this that people would watch. They think people would rather watch other stuff.
[00:43:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I know that's.
[00:43:30] Speaker A: People just aren't interested in this. Like, that's funny.
[00:43:33] Speaker C: Yeah, sorry. It's a human nature of internal conflict that sells.
[00:43:37] Speaker B: It's funny. It's a good point. You make that had this been at another time, let's say 20, 30 years ago, it would have engendered more like attention. But it's not now. And I think it's an interesting point you make.
It probably points to where our attention is as a society and to the point we just were talking about in the first half of this show, which is people are more emotionally drawn to be, to look at the other side of their partisan argument and emotionally want to look at that train wreck. So I think that because of where we are today, it's interesting that UFOs are taking a backseat.
They're not as exciting as they might have been. That's just. I never would have thought to think that.
[00:44:19] Speaker A: But that's crazy to me about this.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: Think about it, think about it. Space invaders coming to get us are not. Are boring now because we're so, you know, ginned up on, on, on qanon theories and all this stuff.
[00:44:31] Speaker A: So turn that off. We're trying to own the lips here.
[00:44:34] Speaker B: Yeah, but, but what I was going to say is I tend, I, I agree with Rick that it's interesting. I tend to think this is probably cause I'm into aviation stuff. And I remember coming back from the air show about a year ago or. Yeah, year or two ago, and it was the first time I had ever seen an F35 in person.
And I'm really into this stuff. So I've, you know, grew up looking at, you know, going to air shows, seeing F18s, F14s, all that. And I remember coming home and telling my wife, I just saw a plane do something I never thought I could see. I mean, the guy did a 90 degree, just boom, full speed.
I watched him three bursts come off the side of the plane when he broke the speed of sound in like two seconds. It was amazing. And so what I was telling her was I can see how like if they were tested, testing this thing in the Nevada desert 20 years ago, and you know, as a person, you used to seeing planes do certain things and then all you see is like the tail light of this plane just in the middle of the night doing all these acrobatic moves, you'd think this was a UFO. And I remember because I grew up in the D.C. area and we had at the time it was Andrews Air force base in 1990 was the first time on a clear blue sky I saw the F117, the Nighthawk.
And I mean, it looked like Darth Vader's helmet flying in the air. It was such a unique new looking thing. And I mean I kind of, I knew it was not a ufo but like if someone would have told me that, I could have believed it was believable. So, so, so that's what I tend to think is going on here is probably we have some high level classified stuff going on that probably like the Navy pilots who are taking these films aren't privy to what, you know, what they, what the highest, you know, classified experiments are need to know security.
[00:46:23] Speaker A: Security claims we have 20,000.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: But remember too, we have at any given time up to 20,000 aircraft over this country. Just civilian, military, you know, cargo flights. So there's a lot more air traffic in the air that can see other things. And it's just like anything else. They got a chance to bump into each other and you know, 40 years ago maybe there was only 3,000 aircraft at any time where if the military was experimenting, we wouldn't have seen it. And so that's all I'm thinking. And the last point I was going to make is when I was a kid, I remember believing all that stuff about Roswell in 1947 and all that looking at pictures and wondering if the aliens were the bodies that were found really.
And I was like in preparation for today, I went online and I looked at pictures of the, the debris from Roswell. And it's funny now looking at it, it's like I don't that from what I know just of space and science, like man, that crap couldn't have survived reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. That was a weather balloon, man. There's no way that was looking out of that little like tin foil and some.
[00:47:23] Speaker A: I want to piggyback. I want to piggyback on one of your other.
Or what you had your previous statement like, yeah, the assumption that we kind of would walk into this with is that the every member of the government or of the military or whatever would know what every other member of the military is doing is it's a faulty assumption. Like to me, this approach really stands out to me about this is that the Pentagon, the DoD admitted that they don't know what this is. And I mean I say admitted kind of in quotes because you can assume that they're telling the truth, but they could be lying. They could be like, yeah, we don't know what it is, but they know exactly what it is and this is some secret thing that they're working on. And this is just how you have to deal with these types of things. To your point, Tunde, now that there's so many other aircraft in the sky now. Now that everybody walking around has a camera and a video recorder on them all the time. If 30 years ago when everybody couldn't record things like this, if somebody came out saying, hey, I saw some crazy thing in the sky, like it's some F34 that was secret at that point that they never, you know, that nobody knew about and somebody saw it and they're like, it was doing things that none of our planes could do. The Pentagon could just be like, ah, he's lying, he's crazy, you know, yada yada yada. But now that same guy would have a video and say, look, I saw this and I recorded it. Or a pilot who, you know, again, doesn't have this high level security clearance to know what the experimental stuff is going on. They were like, oh, I saw this thing and so forth.
So maybe the fact that the government admitted it is just that they're just playing the game. Like they're just like, oh yeah, yeah, sure, we don't know what it is because they're not, they're not going to tell us. Like, oh no, we have some amazing technology that does things that you couldn't even imagine that we're getting ready. Like part of the, of having that stuff is not saying you have it because you know, obviously they want to maintain some level of secrecy. So I think that the, well, it's
[00:49:15] Speaker B: already been confirmed though because that was what the Air Force confirmed that they did that in the 50s and 60s, I mean now. So. Yeah, because they said, you know, we were in a cold war, we were, you know, fighting, you know, trying to build arms against the Russians and we're
[00:49:30] Speaker A: not going to tell you guys everything we have.
[00:49:32] Speaker B: Yeah. So when the cattle rancher in Nevada see something, we're going to say, yeah, that probably was an alien that wasn't, you know, the new, the new, the new stealth jet we're testing.
[00:49:42] Speaker A: And so my point is, is that that's this, that now that we live in a camera world, they probably would just lie and say, oh, we don't know what it is. Like in the same kind of just kind of try to defuse it so people stop asking questions or people stop digging in or start people aren't trying to investigate it and things like that. Like oh yeah, that's just some crazy thing. And then, and apparently society is like,
[00:50:02] Speaker C: ho hum, just admit it, it's an alien. But let's get back to the other Trump stuff that we're people don't care about. Aliens anymore. You know what was shocking to me and.
Go ahead.
[00:50:14] Speaker A: No, I was gonna say, I mean I also wonder and you know like, does like maybe the MCU was kind of like just maybe made everybody less sensitive to. It's kind of desensitized everybody. Like if this was like, if this was Iron man for real, like some real Iron man guy flying around then until we actually meet him, until he comes out on camera and says, hey, you know, that was me flying around in some special suit, we're just not that interested. You know, this is like ah, whatever, you know, like tell us if you're gonna try to take over the world or if you're gonna try to save everybody. One of the two. And otherwise if you're just playing around and in the skies, we don't really care. So I wonder if we've just been desensitized basically because we see all that stuff with special effects obviously, but we see it all and then so it's just not as amazing as like. Because I'm like, oh yeah, I see this. I saw something cooler than that in a movie the other day. So how cool is that?
[00:51:07] Speaker B: I don't know, I just think it's, it's, it's, it's.
Maybe we don't really care about UFOs like we thought we did.
[00:51:15] Speaker C: That's what I'm saying. And they changed the name from ufo. I think the Department of Defense is like, okay, it's aliens. What's next? You know, like who cares? You know, they just admit it because the, the, the interest is in the COVID ups. So once they admit it or whatever
[00:51:28] Speaker A: they say or the conflict. Cover up or correct. So yeah, like unless, unless they start shooting.
If these things start shooting, people will start paying attention. But if they're just up dancing in the sky, it's like ah, whatever.
So now, I mean it's, I, I know we kid with it, but it was, you know, it is kind of just, it's a window into ourselves, you know, and kind of just what interests us, which doesn't and how we react to certain things. Because yeah, without a doubt, if this was something that was admitted 40 years ago, it would have captivated the imagination of society immediately.
And now DOD maybe just can read the room and it's like ah, we can just tell people we don't know what it is and they won't, you know, it won't even be a blip. And so it's very interesting though. Very interesting.
And you know, it's a good reminder that we don't know everything all the time like that us or our government or even if they say they don't or if they do or whatever. But there still can be some unknown, there still can be some wonder of things that go on around us and that's okay. And that's okay. We got plenty of stuff to keep our minds occupied with.
[00:52:35] Speaker C: Maybe they're just trying to raise support and money for the Space Force.
[00:52:40] Speaker A: Hey maybe. Maybe. Well they failed because nobody paid attention.
They needed, they needed to a better trick if they were going to do that so. Well, we appreciate everybody for joining us on this one as we we wade into the voting restriction and the UFO topic. So until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:52:59] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Golana.
[00:53:01] Speaker C: I'm Rick Elsley.
[00:53:02] Speaker A: All right, subscribe Rate Review Tell us what you think of the podcast and we'll talk to you next time.
[00:53:13] Speaker B: I.
