Kristen Monroe Why Don't Republicans Stand Up to Trump

Show Transcript

Why Hasn't the GOP Stood Up to Trump?

[00:00:00] Despite Donald Trump's many legal and moral abuses, most Republican party leaders continue to support him. Now, why is that? How can we explain Republican complicity? What's happened to the GOP where unquestioning Trump loyalty is now more important than traditional conservative values? Author Kristen Monroe offers an analysis of today's GOP mindset and why only a handful followed their consciences.

[00:00:31] Her book, Politics, Principle, and Standing Up to Donald Trump, Moral Courage in the Republican Party, has just been published by Ethics International Press Limited in the UK. The book, co authored with 13 students, includes many interviews, including one time Trump aide, Anthony Scaramucci, and Lincoln Project co founder Rick Wilson, both of whom now are outspoken Trump critics.

[00:01:00] Monroe, a professor at University of California at Irvine, provides insights into courage and politics and new analysis into the Trump phenomenon would be harmful to our democracy. We're delighted to have her with us today on the Lean to the Left podcast, where we focus on politics and the key social issues of our time.

[00:01:22] Welcome, Professor Munro. Thanks for being with us. 

[00:01:25] Thank you for having me. 

[00:01:27] I've been looking forward to this conversation and I'm just wondering, what prompted you to undertake this detailed analysis of moral courage or the lack thereof in the Republican Party? 

[00:01:39] Yeah it's interesting.

[00:01:40] One of my sons is a lawyer who, in his spare time, writes science fiction fantasy, and he's a very good writer. And I sent him I was trying to come up with the title for the book, and I sent him the title, and he wrote back and said, moral courage in the Republican Party? I guess I'm not the only person in the family that does science fiction fantasy anymore.

[00:01:57] Yeah it's always interesting. A couple of things. It's always interesting to look at cases that don't fit. Cause it'll tell you something about the norm and what's going on in there. And then the other thing was that I run a summer program every summer at the university of California, Irvine ethics center.

[00:02:16] And I have a bunch of students every year who work with me. and a mentoring program. So you show them how to do research and you get them involved in it. And I had just finished a book on moral courage as a general phenomenon, because I've studied moral courage and moral choice. And some of them said what about people who stand up to politicians and they wanted to do some work.

[00:02:38] So I agreed to work with them during the year and these kids were great. They worked all year. We each of them got assigned a person that we thought was an interesting person to examine. Some of them were very obvious like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Some of them were less obvious, like Miles Taylor, one of the students actually came up with Taylor, wanted to look at him.

[00:03:02] We tried very hard to get interviews with people, nearly did with a couple people who then said maybe we really shouldn't go on the record. So what we did was when we had were able to get interviews, we interviewed the people and ask them directly. Why did you do this? What made you different from other people?

[00:03:19] And when we weren't able to get interviews, we looked at a lot of written writing social media Interviews they gave to people who are more important than I was and so there's a lot of testimony and material out there. So Liz Cheney, for example, we nearly got an interview with her, but at the last minute she backed out.

[00:03:38] Oh, it's too bad. 

[00:03:38] Yeah, it's too bad. And what's interesting, I'm a very liberal Democrat, but as a scholar, you have to go into this objectively. And I had a lot of respect for these people after I read some of their works, more for people like Cheney and Kinzinger perhaps than some of the other people who are still waffling on things.

[00:03:56] But these are people that I think did act on a basis of conscience. 

[00:04:01] Yeah. Okay. Numerous Republican, leading Republicans who once strongly criticized Donald Trump. People like. Lindsey Graham from South Carolina. He called Trump in 2016 a kook, crazy, unfit for office, among other things.

[00:04:20] Now he's one of Trump's leading supporters. And then of course we've got Trump's own VP choice, Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, who criticizes childless cat ladies. Vance in 2016, that cracks me up. Childless cat ladies. He's got all the women that have cats pissed off at him. What's he think he's doing? 

[00:04:43] He did give a comment where he said he was being sarcastic.

[00:04:45] He really likes cats. He didn't say anything about women, but cats are okay. 

[00:04:49] That's good to know.

[00:04:52] Anyway, 

[00:04:53] In 2016, he called Trump a disaster, a bad man, and morally reprehensible. Now he's Trump's sicophant-in- chief. That's just the tip of the iceberg. So why is it that so many Republicans who once held strong anti Trump views like these two guys now kowtow to him?

[00:05:14] Why is that? 

[00:05:15] I think they're I haven't studied them particularly, so I'm guessing here. 

[00:05:20] Okay, I'll take your guess. 

[00:05:22] All right. I think it's a combination of things. I read through the the material that Vance had, they published in the papers on all the emails that he had with his friend from law school, transgender friend.

[00:05:35] And it was very interesting. I don't know if you read those. I did. Yeah, it's a whole series of emails that were Shared back and forth with a person who I think is now a woman called Sophia, was a man I think when Vance first knew them, and he sounds very liberal in many ways he talks about how it wasn't George Floyd, it was another black murder, and said, I must be difficult to be a black man in this country, I don't have any idea what it's really but I know it must be hard said things that are very reasonable.

[00:06:08] And. Then as it goes on, the friendship kind of ends. And I think a lot of it is political opportunism. I think he just realized, he has a comment about Sidley and Austen, which is a big law firm that he took a job with. Didn't really want to work there, but he, the prestige and the money were so good, he couldn't turn it down.

[00:06:26] And I think that's what happens with a lot of people. It's political opportunism. You realize that there's, it's going to be in your benefit to work with this guy. I think another part of that is he's the one you have to work with them. And I think a third part of it may just be that Trump has things on people.

[00:06:44] He's not above pulling out a lot of stops and blackmailing people in many ways. So people like Scaramucci were very adamant that this was a part of what was going on, that Trump has just got. That thing's on people that they don't want to know. 

[00:07:01] Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all. Now, what about Mitch McConnell?

[00:07:07] He initially said that Trump's role in the January 6th insurrection was clearly impeachable. 

[00:07:14] Yeah. 

[00:07:15] Yeah. But then, the big flip. He made sure that the Senate didn't convict Trump after he was impeached by the house for inciting that attack on the Capitol. Why'd he do that?

[00:07:28] I don't know. Mitch McConnell is probably the most puzzling to me because at that moment, I think McConnell could have changed things. During the period, I think, when it just happens, he said, if this isn't impeachable, I don't know what is, and I think privately he said, I've had it with this guy, let's get the Democrats, get rid of him.

[00:07:46] And if he had gone against Trump, I think it would have changed things. I don't understand why McConnell did this because, Trump has not gotten along well with McConnell. They've butted heads, and I think Trump likes to be the boss. He doesn't want to have anybody challenge him, and McConnell does too.

[00:08:02] So I don't quite understand what was going on here, especially given the way Trump treated McConnell's wife. She was in the cabinet, wasn't treated too well. 

[00:08:11] But, 

[00:08:12] yeah, that's a mystery to me. 

[00:08:13] Yeah. It surprised me that, first it surprised me that McConnell came out and said it was an impeachable offense, because I didn't really think he would say that, but he did.

[00:08:25] But it didn't surprise me when things went south when it came time to, vote on the impeachment and 

[00:08:33] McConnell has made it his goal in life, politically, political life to frustrate what the Democrats wanted to do. And that he thought this is something that again, like his McConnell's refusing to even consider Obama's nomination for the Supreme court.

[00:08:48] That was outrageous.

[00:08:49] It was just, I want to win. That's the only thing I could figure out. Then that's just a guess. 

[00:08:54] Yeah. I got one question for you. Do you think these people have any kind of core values at all? 

[00:09:01] They don't have the same core values that you and I have. This was very clear.

[00:09:05] That when I did interview the people and we looked at the writings for the people that there were a couple of things that were core values. First of all, Oath of office was very important. And it wasn't just the people we interviewed. There's a long there's a wonderful frontline show on January 6th.

[00:09:21] And they have interviews with Rusty Bowers. And he talks about how they lied to him and they wanted him to violate his oath of office. And this was something that was sacred to a lot of people. They take it seriously. And. I grew up in a political family, my father was a judge, my grandfather was a state senator, I was always around the courthouse, I knew all these people, there were, they weren't big people, they weren't terribly important, they might be a county clerk, they might be but they took seriously what they were doing, when they were given the chance and the opportunity and the responsibility to certify an election, this was something that was their job, this was who they were, and that was a contribution, And I think they were deeply offended that Trump would actually push them to do that.

[00:10:06] Bowers makes that very clear in his testimony to Congress. 

[00:10:12] Okay, so I want to know what you think about MAGA followers that continue to believe in him. Even on Twitter today, they're writing that Trump was sent from God to save our nation. Now, how has he managed to convince people, most of whom he could care less about, Yeah, 

[00:10:34] it's a big question, isn't it?

[00:10:35] How the religious Christians and the MAGA people, a lot of them are deeply religious, have gone for a guy who is a serial womanizer, been married several times, is a casino owner, they should not go for him. All I can figure out is that he's done the kind of populist appeal that I think What he, this is Scaramucci really helped me understand that the Trump I don't necessarily know that Trump was conscious of it, but he tuned into something, which was a deep seated need, a feeling of being wronged, a feeling of being rejected and overlooked especially by the elites the East coast elites, this is the name they always use.

[00:11:18] And I think when 2008 came along, And the Wall Street got bailed out and Main Street didn't, as the phrase goes. I think these people felt very aggrieved. And I think Trump came on and said, I've been, I'm going to take it all. I understand you. I hear you. I will be your savior. And this is a kind of classic thing that you see in populism and authoritarianism, that there's a crisis and it's a kind of strong man comes and he will take care of you.

[00:11:45] He will restore you. to where you should be. And he foments the crisis and keeps the crisis going, which Trump did very well. There's always a kind of chaos around him. So that's the only thing I can figure out that the kind of legitimate sense that the, a lot of working class people who are poor, who weren't getting educated, who looked around and they saw a lot of hyphenated groups who were getting Benefits getting into college, getting jobs that their kids weren't getting.

[00:12:12] They resented that and Trump both fostered it nurtured it and exploited it, and that's, I think really the, that's the basis of it. And even now when he says things like they're They're going after me. I'll take it because then they'll come for you. That's the kind of Christ like metaphor that I'm being persecuted.

[00:12:33] And I was shocked when I saw people comparing him to Christ.

[00:12:37] I know. I saw it on Twitter this morning. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Some lady said that. Yeah. It's incredible to me. When Trump was at the apparent, I shouldn't chuckle, I guess it probably wasn't, it wasn't funny when somebody took a shot at him and nicked his ear.

[00:12:56] But he certainly has played that for all it's worth. That's for sure. Yeah. Anyway there was a woman that was interviewed on on the news and She tearfully, she was one of the supporters there at the rally, and she tearfully said that his rallies always made her feel wonderful. I'm wondering why.

[00:13:18] That guy, first of all, he just drones on and on and repeats the same crap all over again. All of his grievances against Democrats and the media. Who wants to listen to that? So I don't understand why anybody could say that he makes her feel better. 

[00:13:36] I think he makes you feel she's important, that he's listening to her in a way that other people are not listening to her.

[00:13:42] Patty Murray, when she first got into politics, Senator Murray from Washington State when and somebody said, Oh, get out of my office. You're just a mom in tennis shoes. And she used that as a slogan when she ran for the Senate. And I think that's the kind of phenomenon that you're having that a lot of politicians don't want to mess with these people.

[00:14:01] Hillary Clinton refers to them as a basket of deplorables. People don't want to feel that they're not valued. And I think Trump does feel that. And I think he adopts this kind of it's a folksy air in some weird way. Even the vulgarity that he has and the expletives and really crude stuff.

[00:14:19] It's he's just one of us. He's not any better than we are. He's not talking policy to us. If you looked at the debate between Biden and Trump, the thing that struck me was not so much that Biden was having cognitive difficulties is that he'd been very badly advised. He was getting lost in the thicket of policy.

[00:14:38] So he would go on and go into great detail. And most people don't understand it. They don't have the background for it. They want a simple answer. They want something that's clear that they just distill the essence of it. And Trump does that. He does it by fabricating things and seeing things that aren't true, but he gives them a narrative, which makes sense.

[00:14:58] It's some, and this is very classic academics look at something called social identity theory, where we think about who we are in relation to other people. And Trump is has pegged into that by saying, you've been overlooked, you've been neglected, I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to right the wrongs.

[00:15:16] And a lot of people really feel that they have been overlooked and neglected. And I think that's what Trump is doing. And that's what classic happens with a populist leader and that populist leaders don't have so much policy because they don't really have an agenda. Trump doesn't really have, now he has the 2025 project, which is very frightening to me but but now he's got serious intellectual people behind it that are going to try to change things in ways which are very disturbing if you care about democracy. But basically it's, trust me and if people like, they tend to like politicians and then sort out the policy issues Afterwards. 

[00:15:55] So what do you think what he's done to the Republican Party?

[00:15:58] Is it doomed? Do you think 

[00:16:00] I think it's totally changed it? I don't know if it can go back or not. It's to see how it can be. You're asking about core values, and I think. The core values that emanated from people that I interviewed religion was often important to them Cheney talks about being about God and her faith Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake are both Mormons, talk about that the other thing they mentioned is their legacy. A lot of them said, How was I going to explain to my children that I stood by and did nothing while the democracy was being destroyed?

[00:16:34] So that was part of it. And then it was the basic beliefs in democracy. And I, if you look at it, There were three reasons, three things that really motivated the Republicans who opposed Trump. One was that he's not really a conservative. He doesn't have a consistent conservative agenda. Second one is that he's not really democratic.

[00:16:54] He doesn't understand and certainly doesn't respect the norms of a democracy. So that trying to get on the phone with the Secretary of State Raffensperger and telling him give me a break. I just need 11, 000 more votes. That's he doesn't have any concept of what this is. But the third part of it was, I think, a very visceral kind of gut reaction.

[00:17:15] This is not who we are. So Miles Taylor said that he was in the White House. He's very conservative. He was excited to be there. He's young. He was ambitious. And they had this policy where they were separating children from their parents when they came across the border. And they were putting the children in cages.

[00:17:32] And they finally, his advisors finally talked him out of doing that. And Taylor said, Trump kept coming back and saying, We've got to do this, we've got to do this, only a harsh policy will make these people know that we're serious. And Taylor said, I went home and it's I'm not the kind of person That can be part of an administration that puts children in cages.

[00:17:53] And this is, I think, a very basic kind of human decency factor. So that was the third factor that I think went on. I gave a talk in one of the about the book and one of the women came up and said, I'm a lifelong Republican, but he lost me at grab him by the pussy. And it's just the crudity of it, the vulgarity.

[00:18:12] It offends the fact that we're supposed to use the Department of Justice to, have a military trial with Liz Cheney. It's ridiculous. This isn't something that Americans are used to doing. And I think it offends a basic core set of decency that we have. 

[00:18:28] That grab them by the pussy comment probably solidified them with a bunch of MAGA males, don't you think?

[00:18:36] Oh yeah I don't know if you ever watched Jordan Klepper on the Daily Show, but he had a wonderful interview. He went out and he was talking with people at Trump rallies and he asked them about it. And a couple of the guys says, I want to grab him by the pussy too. I'd like to get all the pussy Trump gets.

[00:18:52] And it's Oh my God, there's no shame here at all. One man said, another man's sexual harassment is another man's flirtation. And I thought, Oh my goodness gracious. So there are some definite differences in values that are going on. 

[00:19:08] Yeah, and what do you, what did you think of Trump of defending the size of his whatever because he was being teased because he has small hands and so therefore he must have a small, so what do you think about that?

[00:19:22] This is one thing, it's make it stop. I don't really want to look at this anymore. We have to listen to this. 

[00:19:28] I know, and that's a guy that's the president of the United States talking that way. 

[00:19:33] I had a, I had what I called my mouth would be flapping. It would be what did they do? And I was in Berlin for part of 2017 and I, Didn't watch much American news while I was there, and I got on the plane back and read the article about Melania going out in to see immigrant children wearing a jacket that says, I really don't care, do you?

[00:19:54] And I thought, what? Again, where it's, I'm just flabbergasted. It leaves me speechless. I don't know what to say. It's such a, Contrast in values.

[00:20:05] It sounds like it would be hard to happen for you not to know what to say. That's all I got to say about that. 

[00:20:11] I thought the Lincoln Party Lincoln project has done a lot of really interesting ads.

[00:20:17] Yeah, I have. The most effective one in 2020 was a woman with a child who was eating pizza. And the kid says, who are you voting for? And the woman says that's a secret. It's private. And he says you can tell me. And she says I'm voting for you. And he says, what? And she says, yes, I'm voting for a world where people are they care about each other.

[00:20:37] They respect the law, they respect each other. And he says, you're not really voting for me. Are you? And she says, yeah, I am. And then they have a picture of Joe Biden. It's time. Really what elected Biden was the idea that he was a decent human being. 

[00:20:51] That's right. 

[00:20:52] No use. And I I was ambivalent about whether or not Biden should go.

[00:20:56] I thought he'd exited very gracefully and I thought it was really interesting to look at the proposal that he put forward for the reforming the Supreme Court. Yes. Totally, in some ways, very sensible. Thought out. It isn't, he worked with people and he's in a position now to say that he actually is not in, he doesn't have a dog in the game anymore.

[00:21:19] He's not in the election. He can do things that's freeing him and I think he's going to go down as one of our better presidents. 

[00:21:26] Yeah. 

[00:21:26] Simply, in some ways, because he was a decent person, he cared about other people, and there's no evidence that I see that Trump really cares very much about anybody but himself, 

[00:21:35] even 

[00:21:36] his kids.

[00:21:37] What do you think about Harris chances? 

[00:21:41] I think they're pretty good. I think she's going to do well. She's, I don't know if you read the Borowitz report, but they had a thing today about J. D. Vance and they're not happy. They're going after women, childless women. And they have this picture of this childless woman who's laughing and they have Harris with her great laugh and her beautiful smile.

[00:22:00] And it says Donald Trump won't be happy until no women are laughing in this country. So I think he's, I think he's managed to galvanize the Harris appointment I think has galvanized a lot of very critical communities. I think the women is very important. A lot of young people are coming out now.

[00:22:17] A lot of people who are not women care about birth control and care about some of the, 

[00:22:22] Can you believe that right now that the Republicans are actually seriously talking about somehow regulating contraception? 

[00:22:30] It's yes. It's very interesting. They say they want to get rid of government, but they want them in our bedrooms.

[00:22:36] Yeah. They want to know when a woman's having a menstrual cycle. It's bizarre. Yeah, it's I remember when Obama came in, I think David Letterman said, Obama's, he's so good, you can't really joke about him. So I'm going to continue to joke about George Bush. And I think, Trump was good for the late night comedians, but he was a disaster for the country.

[00:22:55] Yeah, that's for sure. I hope she does well. I think it's going to be interesting to see who she picks for her VP. Yeah, that's for sure. It will be. I think she's vetting him very carefully. 

[00:23:04] Have you got a favorite? 

[00:23:07] I think, as Pete Buttigieg says, there's so much talent there. Anyone that they're talking about, I think Mark Kelly might be a good person because of the border.

[00:23:16] He's familiar with the immigration question. He lives there. He's an astronaut. Shapiro is interesting choice because, he's come out and said, J. D. Vance says he's from Appalachia. He's not it's really, going to Yale law school is a little hard to present yourself as poor kid from Appalachia, which he is in some ways.

[00:23:35] We need to have Pennsylvania. That's a good state to get. I think he's a little old, but 

[00:23:40] yeah. 

[00:23:41] So I think they're all good choices. 

[00:23:43] Yeah. Yeah. I like I like guy's name just escaped me, you just mentioned the guy from The Astronaut.

[00:23:50] Oh, Mark Kelly.

[00:23:51] Mark Kelly. 

[00:23:52] Yeah, I really like, I like that background, but I don't like the fact that He'd have to leave the Senate. 

[00:23:59] He's got a governor who's a Democrat. Yeah, that's true. 

[00:24:04] He'd appoint a Democrat. 

[00:24:06] Yeah, I don't think that's a problem so much. 

[00:24:08] Okay, that's a good point. Yeah, okay. Alright as you worked on your book, you and your group of students that you worked with, you interviewed many Republicans, right?

[00:24:22] Yeah. And I've read where some, where you said that some of them are confused about Trump, but still support him.. 

[00:24:29] I think the people who are the supporters of Trump, are there are some people who are very confused. I think it's a, it becomes a very basic kind of identity question. If you've been a lifelong Republican, it's hard to vote for a Democrat.

[00:24:43] And I think. These people have taken, the prominent ones have taken tremendous risks here. And one of the things that troubles me is that we're not doing a good job in this country at having conversations across differences, so that if you have very strong, political views, you tend to speak only with people who are like that, who share those views.

[00:25:05] I grew up in a small town outside of St. Louis and I have a couple really good friends who were Trump people. And I tried to go into interview mode and say, okay, rather than saying, what's wrong with you? How can you possibly support this man? I said, what is it that you like about him? And the first thing was abortion.

[00:25:23] This was before Roe was overturned. And I can understand that if you genuinely believe that it is life at inception, then it makes sense. So that was something where I didn't want to say you're an idiot. I could understand and respect that. I disagreed with it. And then the second thing was immigration.

[00:25:40] And it's interesting to me, I don't think anybody has a really good immigration policy. We came pretty close to one, which Trump torpedoed, because he wanted to be able to use it as a campaign thing. So this is another example of where he cares less about the country than more about his own political future.

[00:26:01] And the contrast between him and Biden is so striking when I don't know if you watched Biden's speech. 

[00:26:07] Yeah, I sure did. 

[00:26:08] Everybody did. It was very gracious, and it was absolutely right. It's time you recognize you care about the country more than you care about yourself.

[00:26:16] And that's what you want in a politician. You want somebody that recognizes reality, which Trump doesn't, I don't think and somebody who cares about someone and something more than themselves. That's one of the things that troubles me about it all, I think the Republicans are issuing a warning to us that it's it's ours to be lost and it can be lost.

[00:26:36] People say it can't happen here, but it could happen here. We've had different movements in the past, in the 30s. We had Father Conklin and Huey Long. A lot of people were very extreme, more populist, authoritarian leaders, it could happen again. And this is something where I hope people will go out and vote because it really is about Trump.

[00:26:56] It's the issue is whether or not you want to have the joke was you can vote for an 81 year old and then vote again later, or you can vote for a 78 year old and never have to vote again or never be able to vote again. I know it's not this situation anymore, but I do think that people need to go out to vote because it's not clear what Trump would do.

[00:27:16] Yeah, he said the other day that if people voted for him then they wouldn't ever have to vote again. 

[00:27:22] And what did that mean? Was he really saying that he was going to end elections and become a dictator for life? 

[00:27:29] I think more likely what he was saying was, I don't really care about any other politicians, just vote for me and then that's it.

[00:27:35] Yeah, that's probably it. 

[00:27:36] Yeah. I 

[00:27:37] think that's really what he meant. There is a subtle interpretation and sometimes those things are there and some of the people who are leading the 2025 project are not people who care about democracy. Yeah. And they have very sophisticated plans to change things. Getting rid of the Department of Education, getting rid of the DOJ this is outrageous and that's not democratic.

[00:28:01] People need to pay attention to what's in Project 2025, because it would just upend our whole democracy. 

[00:28:08] I think it would. 

[00:28:09] Yeah. 

[00:28:10] As a side note, I just want to put in a plug my I have a blog site, it's called lean to the left. net, and we're doing, I have two writers who are doing a series of articles that take Project 2025 apart, topic by topic, and explain the impact of those topics on voters.

[00:28:36] And we're about halfway through the series, and 

[00:28:40] That's important to do. I'm glad you're doing that. 

[00:28:42] Yeah. Anyone that would like to see that, just go to leantotheleft. net and you'll find them there. Now you've written a book on moral courage. You mentioned it a minute ago at the top of the show.

[00:28:57] It's called When Conscious Calls Moral Courage in Times of Confusion and Despair. And that's among, what, you've written about 20 books together so far, right? Yeah. How did that book influence your decision to write this latest book, Politics, Principle, and Standing Up? 

[00:29:13] It grew out of it as I was trying to, if you look at moral courage as a concept, which most people don't I'm a political theorist and an ethicist, so I think about it.

[00:29:23] Yeah. We generally define moral courage as doing the right thing. What does that mean? That's a little vague. So I wanted to take a kind of Aristotelian approach and say, if you want to understand something, go out and find, what people think of as they call a sheep and see what they all have in common.

[00:29:40] And so we took People that most of us agreed had demonstrated moral courage and we did some wonderful interviews with them. Really interesting people, some American, some abroad really interesting human beings. And we tried to say what it was that made up moral courage. And it's basically behavior that it strikes your core values so deeply.

[00:30:03] We have core values that basically become who we are so that you're not somebody who can murder someone when it. Push comes to shove. You're not somebody that can lie or can cheat. It just isn't who you are. And to violate those core values is like a betrayal of yourself. And so most of these people were people that stood up and said, I can't do it.

[00:30:25] So we had an Indian. An Indian gentleman who was in the civil service, he'd had a wonderful career, and he felt very strongly that his boss was discriminating against people on the basis of caste. And he said, I'm an Indian civil servant, so I swore allegiance to the Indian Constitution, which says you won't discriminate on people on the basis of caste.

[00:30:45] And so He sued the Indian government and he actually won. And he thought that he was probably ruining his career. The person who did the interview with him was his granddaughter. Yeah. And she said, what did you think about? You were going to lose your job. You were, how are you going to support mommy and auntie?

[00:31:01] And he said, being a parent is about more than just putting food on the table. Being a parent is showing you what it means to live, to be a human being. And that's what a lot of these people were like. We did an interview with Loretta Lynch, who was the public utility commissioner for California when they had the Exxon crisis.

[00:31:20] And Gray Davis, who had appointed her and said he would appoint her to the California Supreme Court if she would just not do this investigation. And she said, I took an oath of office. I have to do it. And she was on the phone with Bob Ruman and Bill Clinton and Gray Davis and she stared them all down.

[00:31:37] She did the right thing and she was absolutely excoriated. They really criticized her and ruined her career. She's gone on and she's done other things. But lot of people one of the guys was head of the Los Angeles school district. And he said when Trump came in, he got him the board to pass a ruling that they would not yet let any ICE people come on and look for illegal aliens immigrants.

[00:32:01] And I said, what are you going to do if they come with troops? He said, I don't know. I worry about that at two in the morning. I was raised by grandparents who were immigrants, and when I hear Trump criticizing immigrants, I think about my grandparents, and he said, All these immigrants who come here, they just want the American dream.

[00:32:20] They want what our grandparents wanted, what Trump's ancestors wanted, a better opportunity. So these are people that it's very much who they are as human beings, and it means that they really can't. Do anything other than stand up and say, no, this is wrong. Even if it's going to hurt me, I have to do it.

[00:32:36] It was a wonderful project. It's interesting for me to work with some of the students on it too. 

[00:32:44] You must, that must be a real thrill for you to do that. 

[00:32:47] I love working with these 

[00:32:49] kids. I bet you do. 

[00:32:50] Yeah they're, I don't take any pay for it. We just do it during the summer. Sounds good. They don't get any credit.

[00:32:56] They don't have to pay anything. It's just a great opportunity. We now have, after COVID, we had about 40 students in the project in 2019. And after COVID, we went online. We now have over 500 kids. 

[00:33:08] Oh my goodness gracious. Wow. Wow. That's impressive. 

[00:33:12] All over the world. So one, one year I had a couple of kids from India and China who got up at three in the morning to do the modules.

[00:33:18] I thought that's really dedication. So yeah. 

[00:33:23] You know what? Mark Kelly must have heard me when I couldn't remember his name because I just got an email from him. 

[00:33:30] Oh, really? You're kidding. Oh great. 

[00:33:32] It's Fundraising email. 

[00:33:35] Oh, okay. 

[00:33:37] It went out it's in support of Colin. Alred.

[00:33:41] And who I do support. Absolutely. Yeah, but I just thought that was funny because I couldn't remember his name and then right then the email came in. I think he remembers me. Don't you know who I am? 

[00:33:55] No, it's great. That's funny. Yeah. 

[00:33:59] All right. Listen, give me your elevator speech on what's at stake in the November election.

[00:34:04] I think democracy is at stake in the November election. And I think the American, the civic culture of the United States, which is a basically very decent, warming, welcoming culture where we take people in and everybody's equal. The rule of law, fairness. I think these things are at stake. I think if Trump gets in, I think we're going to have these challenges to these very basic ideals that make up who the American population and country is.

[00:34:33] Okay. On that note, how can people find your book? Where is it? 

[00:34:38] You can go online at Amazon. It's there. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's good. That's probably the easiest.

[00:34:45] Yeah. All right. Listen, I want to thank you so much for being with us on the Lean to the Left podcast. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we sign off?

[00:34:53] No, my, my pleasure being here and I hope people go out and vote. 

[00:34:57] All right. Thank you.