How Hippies Became Republicans (Did Our Two Parties Switch Sides?)

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the surprising ideological shift that has occurred within the Republican Party, transforming it into a haven for anti-establishment and anti-globalist sentiments once associated with hippie culture. The hosts analyze the factors that led to this change, including the Democratic Party's success in capturing major institutions, the ideological capture of corporations, and the rise of global bureaucracies. They also delve into the historical context of party realignments in the United States and the current state of the Republican base, highlighting the disconnect between influencer opinions and voter preferences on key issues like abortion.

[00:00:00] Hello everyone. We are excited to be doing an episode today on hippies being. Republican now,

. This is a really laid back place.

Oh wow, you guys shouldn't be doing that. Don't you know what you're doing to the world? You're playing into the corporate game. See, the corporations are trying to turn you into little Eichmanns so that they can make money. Who are the corporations? The corporations run the entire world, and now they've fooled you into working for them.

Are you serious? We never heard that. The government is using it's corporate ties to make you sell magazines so they can get rich. Those dirty liars! This is a really nice town you have here, that's why the corporations are trying to use you to take it down.

 Just hang with us for a bit. We'll fill you in on everything you haven't been told.

It is wild, how we have met this exact archetype of person and had these exact conversations that couth park, used to use as the stereotype of what was annoying about hippies.

At a number of Republican conferences this [00:01:00] year.

Would you like to know more?

. We have been to a number of Republican conferences this year. I'm going to break them down into really three major ones. ARC, which was of UK Republican elites.

Yeah, yeah. Then there was the one in New Hampshire that was for Libertarians. And then there was the one that was for the new underground sort of dissonant right group which was re platform. . So what was really interesting is, yes, the Hoity Toity UK one didn't have this hippie class as much. It definitely had a portion of them, but the other two were just. Pure, like most of the lines I would see in this South Park, making fun of hippie attitudes we saw in this environment.

So if I'm going to go over some, one is the globalist theory, I guess I'd call it, which is to say that there are a number of elites who run large companies [00:02:00] and ostensibly run world politics and the globe. And that you are playing into their hand. If you go get a normal nine to five bureaucratic job.

And that this group has a secret agenda, which is just to use you for your labor. And then in the episode, you might've noticed, Oh, they've come to your town because you have this nice small town and they want to ruin it. So not only that, but that they disproportionately target. Nice, healthy communities which is definitely something you often see in these circles.

And that a lot of people in the world are brainwashed and that if you just hang out with them and they're sociological and ideological bubble, that's how you get out of this brainwashing. And another thing that I think is really interesting is the mood and the vibe from the hippies, especially this era of hippies as depicted by South Park is much more similar to Republican conferences and stuff I've gone to than Democrat ones.

With Democrat ones, it is very [00:03:00] gatekeepy when you enter a community. They want to make sure that you are the right kind of person with the right kind of ideas. Where at most of the Republican conferences, it's more of a, I'm eager to share with you this theory I have about how the world works. Or basically a conspiracy.

Yeah. Very much like in the clip, like you gotta know don't you understand? Like they're trying to turn you into tools of the corporation, man. Yeah. They're trying to, they're trying to save you from something that they think is harmful. And then the second clip I'll play it here, which I think is pretty elucidating.

Right now we're proving we don't need corporations. We don't need money. This can become a commune where everyone just helps each other. Yeah, we'll have one guy who, like, who, like, makes bread. And one guy who, like, looks out for other people's safety. You mean like a baker and a cop? No, no, can't you imagine a place where people live together and, like, provide services for each other in exchange for their services?

Yeah, it's called a town. You [00:04:00] kids just haven't been to college yet, but just you wait. This thing is about to get huge!

So in this clip, a misunderstanding of economic systems and a belief that the economic systems we have now exist just to screw over people. And that through, Essentially rebuilding these systems, we can have something that works. Now this isn't as pure was in Republican circles as it was within this isn't as pure an analogy to the older hippie movement.

Because these groups often want to move to, I mentioned a goal, Simone at someone at the libertarian event paid me was like a gold slip of paper. And literally a laminated piece of gold leaf, if I understand correctly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where they are trying to reprint currency, like recreate currency, but I guess have it be backed by something is the idea.

Just literally paying with gold. Yeah, but it's the gold in it isn't worth the price of the currency. They inflate the price of the [00:05:00] currency. Oh, I see. Okay. Like that. It's just not even it's weird. It's just a currency again. That's what they've done is they've recreated currency. The gold standard. No, it's not the gold standard because the gold standard was, it was pinned to the price of gold.

Yeah. It is pinned under the price of gold so that they can make a margin off of selling the current. Oh, I get it. I see what you're saying. Okay. Okay. So it's not the gold standard. No. She's a little dense. I'm sorry, Malcolm. But! Why are we seeing these convergent beliefs? How did this ideological system that is conspiratorially minded, believes in a globalist conspiracy, believes that the globalist conspiracy is disproportionately targeting otherwise wholesome areas and believes that by working bureaucratic jobs, you are serving that global conspiracy and that the world's economic systems in service to that global conspiracy or globalist conspiracy.

How did that move from being a democratic [00:06:00] movement to a predominantly Republican movement? All right. I will give my assumption, my, my hypothesis, and then you'll tell me why it's dumb. Okay. I think it's because ultimately the progressive movement. Democrats, et cetera, were too successful. And because they became so successful, especially among college educated elites and keep in mind a key punchline in the South Park clips is, Oh, you just haven't been to college yet.

You haven't been educated. So we are talking about a group of people. Who went through institutions and also became commercially financially successful and influential within various institutions. These people, they went to college and then they went on and they became lawyers, government workers, policymakers, bureaucrats.

We have another podcast on this where we discussed with Tracy Woodgrain's, how the Republican party is boned because. Basically anyone who can implement policy within government to be a bureaucrat, to be a legislator is probably someone who's gone through this [00:07:00] university system and become progressive.

So it's hard to find like the talent you need to get things done as a Republican, if you are in a position of power, you have a mandate or a majority. I think what happened is Democrats and progressives became too successful. Then their mindset shifted away from this anti establishment mindset because they became the establishment.

Now when I go to more progressive gatherings and meetings, and when I remember the ones that I attended throughout my college years, when I was still, Very progressive and very Democrat. It was all about, we have to get the institutions to do this. We have to get corporations to do this, to execute better on our mandate.

We have to get governments to execute more effectively on our values. And it wasn't, you can't trust them. Stay away from them. They're trying to manipulate you. We need to build an alternate system because they own the system. That. is an interesting point. There is an element. No. I think there is an element of truth to that [00:08:00] world framework.

A framing I would add to that world framework is that the parties flipped and a lot of people American parties flip all the time. When rarely. A lot of people say that they flipped from when the Democrats went from being a predominantly Southern party to a predominantly Northern party. When the Democrats went from being seen as the party that was pro civil rights to the anti, went from anti civil rights to pro civil rights.

They went from being a party that was you They just changed in a lot of ways. Not in every way. A lot of people get this wrong. In the early nineties? When? When time wise?

Claude's answer to this question is the general consensus among historians. Is that the Republican and democratic parties underwent an gradual ideological shift. Often referred to as the quote unquote party realignment or party switch over the course of several decades in the 20th century, particularly between the 1930s and 1960s, one of the most significant turning points in this alignment occurred during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a [00:09:00] Democrat Roosevelt's new deal policies, which expanded the role of federal government in addressing economic and social issues began attracting more liberal voters to the democratic party, including many African-Americans who previously supported the Republican party.

Since this. The civil war era. However, the realignment process continued through the 1960s, particularly during the presidency of Lyndon B Johnson. Also a Democrat Johnson supported the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 for this solidified the democratic party's alignment with the civil rights movement and led to a backlash among many Southern white conservatives

who began shifting their support to the Republican party.

It's important to note that this realignment was a complex and gradual process and there is no single president or event that marks a definitive quote unquote, switch between the parties. The ideological positions of both parties have continued to evolve since the 1960s. I can add more specifics after, afterwards in editing, but. Perfect. Did you not study this in school?

No, dude. They stopped. [00:10:00] right before the Vietnam War after F basically after World War Two, they were like, okay, or the but anyway the point being is when you point out to Democrats today that they were the party of the clan and that they were the party of slavery, they're like, don't you know that the parties flipped?

And it's important to understand what they mean when they say that they mean flipped on a few issues that allows them to disavow the tendencies that have reconverged on racism within the party. But when you go through party flips, historically speaking, you don't actually flip everything. You don't actually flip your whole constituency.

You don't actually flip every member. You flip everything. In a few key ways that then become really important to the party identity, history, and narrative going forwards. And this is where the confusion happens, is there is a belief that when the pro slavery party [00:11:00] flipped that It do in part, and we need to say this in part to some civil rights issues that it became holistically the pro civil rights party.

And this is just wrong and not aligned with historical reality. The parties did not flip in every one of their beliefs. They flipped in a few key beliefs. In the era of Trump, we saw this again. The party's flipped in a few key beliefs, but there was a Trump flip that no one talks about. They don't talk about it now, but they'll talk about it in history books.

A lot of people are like, Oh, the left me, you, you hear this line all the time.

Where there's the famous comic of the guy standing in the middle and then the left is just running away. And now that's it. Oh yes. Against him. And he put, he pushes the guy, he's or there was the one where the leftist guy like pushes him and he's like, why are you standing over there on the right now?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And both of these, I think, [00:12:00] cover a key idea, which is a lot of people that identified part of their personality was a liberalist framing of reality that people should be allowed to live and let live, that we shouldn't have any sort of racial hierarchy within this country that people should be allowed to practice their own beliefs at home so long as, it wasn't hurting anyone else.

They identified these beliefs with. The Democratic Party. And yet these beliefs are now really not at all on the Democratic side in terms of policy and sort of key Republican events belief systems in the post Trump era. And they don't know how to deal with this. Like the media doesn't know how to deal with this.

The media will lie to people and pretend that there's like these big racist Trump factions, which we've pointed out is just not really true. The, and I will Say this statistic until the cows come home. By 538 polling, Bionate Silver, a mainstream polling organization, more white Democrats than white Republicans said they wouldn't vote for a black president until Obama was elected.

This shows that they, Dems never [00:13:00] really fully stopped being the party of the Klan. And what happened is the media decided that they were Democrat, decided that racism was bad, and so they began to. We've a narrative that meaning in the public bought that the Dems had stopped being the party of the Klan.

And a lot of whether you're looking at base or policy, is it really reflected in how these parties govern? So a great example here that I always point out is Republicans up until Trump were not the party of small government. They said they were the party of small government, but they were not the party of small government.

And so let's talk about the things that's flipped during the Trump era. You had the Republicans become a much more dovish party and the Democrats becoming a much more hawkish party. This used to be the antithesis and this is a major foreign policy flip. I wouldn't say dovish, I would say isolationist, but yes, I agree.

It's the same thing, but yeah, that's what the Democrats used to be. It was, don't, we shouldn't be the world police. That was the Dems always [00:14:00] complained about during the Bush era. Yeah, but it was more from the place of like. How dare we commit these atrocities and tell other people how to govern their countries instead of, I don't want my tax dollars going to that.

It was, we shouldn't try to be the world police. Yeah. Okay. And Dems now explicitly believe we should try to be the world police. Now the other thing. Unless it comes to helping Israel. No, they think that we should put our thumb on the side of Gaza. They think that we should assist Gaza.

Act to help Gaza?

We should be okay if we run together, of course I will! Because you

No. What do you think that they're protesting for when they say , from river to sea, and they're protesting a university. They think Gaza is going to get the Israelis off the land? No, they're talking about us. Oh s**t. I think that people don't understand how crazy the people who actually control [00:15:00] leftist policy have gotten.

But anyway, sorry, we have to go back here. So that was one thing that, that flipped. Another thing that flipped was protectionism versus free trade. Republicans were classically the party of free trade. And Democrats were classically the party of protectionism that completely flipped the other was, which was the party in some ways, right?

Because Democrats are still super pro union and I see that as an inherently protectionist policy. But now I as we've discussed with Svee, when we were talking about the shipping policy that the Jones Act that now keeps me up at night there, there are so many globalist, default democratic policies that ultimately hurt unions and are, they run counter to progressive values, which is really interesting.

Yeah and another is, which was the party that was about enforcing a set of the dominant cultural system in the country's values? On other people without their consent. Cultural supremacists. So you can take [00:16:00] something like gender identity, right? So historically the Republican party was about enforcing the dominant cultural group in the country.

This was. The Christian cultural framework beliefs around things like gender and sexuality through the school system through laws. And now you have the opposite happening where, because the dominant cultural system has changed to the urban monoculture, and that's the culture that's represented in the democratic party, they will do things like say If your kid doesn't conform to the way that your culture sees gender, then we get to take that kid from you, that's a CPS offense that say, this never would have happened in a historic context.

Dims would never say that it is our job to police the way another family see something like gender or sexuality. Or police what other people are doing in their bedrooms. And yet now you have these ridiculous ideas among Democrats, like that a person can revoke consent after sex. Is there anything [00:17:00] more policing of bedrooms?

It's saying that our social norms around sex apply even post facto. Within a legal context, which is insane. This is never the way dims were historically. And I think that just as much as many Dems feel bewildered as the parties have switched positions, we also see some Republicans feel equally bewildered and acting I'd say pathetically.

There was one, well known podcaster who I was looking at doing something with them, but they just have an extreme antagonism. Towards us and our beliefs, because they see us as sort of part of this previously democratic faction that is moved to the Republican side of things. And they're like, but they don't represent our old values and they're polluting the Republican party with this value system and what they mean by that is just like the Democrat who doesn't realize the parties have flipped, they don't realize the parties [00:18:00] have flipped either.

And they're here thinking that the Republicans parties. Job is to impose upon the population a theocratic value system that aligns with their interpretation of Christianity. And it's I'm sorry, one, most of the people who have this perspective are Catholics and Catholics were actually, always on the outs.

Like when my family was fighting the clan, one of the main reasons we were fighting them was because we had Catholic friends who we wanted to protect. Like the Catholics were never an accepted theological framework in when Christians were a dominant group, I guess maybe for a brief period in like the nineties, but not really.

So one, they're fighting for a fantasy in the past. It didn't really exist. If we went back to those time periods where the dominant cultural. Form of Christianity was being enforced. It would have been being enforced in a way that was detrimental to their kids. But in addition to that it like no Christian group in this [00:19:00] country, no theological group in this country has enough voting power anymore at the federal level to win elections.

The idea that they can enforce their minority culture on the mainstream Is just as insane as like a Muslim America trying to enact Sharia law in our country. It doesn't make sense. And this also gets me to something that always just boils my blood when people say America was created as a Christian country with a Christian value system.

I'm like, no.

It was created as a Calvinist country with a Calvinist value system, and then the Calvinists basically died off due to low fertility rate, and you, other Christian groups, with radically different value systems, came in like a hermit crab sizing up a shell, and then, Play this little shuffle game where you go back and you're like, look, they were technically Christians at the founding of America.

And you can look at the heritage study.

Hey study titled almost comically to prove [00:20:00] my point. Did America have a Christian founding? A lot of people don't know this, that it was something like 60, 75 percent or something of white Americans during the founding of America, especially the ones in positions of power were disproportionately of the Calvinist cultural group. And if they weren't at the Calvinist cultural group, they were mostly like Quakers.

They were not the, Perspectives on Christianity that people have today in America. These have very different framings around things. Probably one of the biggest, which changes the way they act from a legal standpoint is the belief in predestination. And Irresistible grace.

 But both of which basically mean the not limited atonement. I feel like limited atonement is a bigger policy. Yeah. Limited atonement as well. But together, what it basically means is the people who are going to go to heaven have been.

Pre chosen to an extent. So there isn't as much of a reason to go out and proselytize and it's okay to live alongside Jews or Catholics because they were born to go [00:21:00] to hell. There's no reason for you to really disrupt their lifestyle. It's much more important to focus on you and your own community. Which makes them much more similar culturally to like the way Jews are today, where Jews might not go out and try to impose their cultural value system.

And here, like Orthodox Jews, not reformed Jews, which are a totally different thing. But. Like ultra Orthodox Jews are not out there trying to turn you into an ultra Orthodox Jew because they just don't think that you are meant to live correctly. And what this means from a legal perspective is that they set up a legal system that was meant to be culturally pluralistic.

Whereas the What we would call dominating cultural systems, some of the more modern Christian systems are that think that everyone is meant to convert, and it's their job to convert everyone have a very different view towards this, and things like separation of church and state can seem really weird to them.

And they're like they didn't mean separation of, no, what they meant, was separation of every individual church and state. Yeah, they didn't mean that [00:22:00] the state should be wholly secular. What they meant is that it shouldn't be any one denomination of Christian in a time period where the denominations of Christianity were blindingly different from each other.

And they believed this because they didn't believe as Calvinists that they needed to go out and convert the other denominations. And Quakers felt largely the same way, but for different reasons. So this Sorry, that was a huge tangent there. What it means is that there's this fantasy among this part of the old holdout of the conservative party before you had this flip in cultural systems.

They. can realistically turn the conservative party into a system for imposing their denomination of Christianity's value system on the country in a legal and school system methodology, and that's just not going to happen. That's a completely unrealistic vision of what can be achieved with the current demography of this country.

And keep in mind, if [00:23:00] you look at Gen Alpha, they are becoming de religious at a much faster clip than other generations. Like they are. Losing right now. Like it is getting worse for them as time goes on. Not better.

Okay. At least in the short run, eventually they'll come back. As we pointed out was fertility rates and everything like that.

But in the short run, it's just not a winning play. And so now let's talk about the hippies. Where did they come from? Like where did the anti globalists come from and how did they find themselves on the conservative side? Or the anti corporates or the anti whatever, right? So there's two core events that happened.

One was the corporations being ideologically captured by the dominant cultural group in society which Created these sort of memetic viruses as we've talked about them as transmissible cancers, which is these DEI departments that are meant to ensure ideological conformity within these large companies, even when the base turns against them.

So you can see this in the gaming world right now. It's very obvious in Gamergate 2 right now with the Sweet Baby and Controversy and everything like that, that the general public. is [00:24:00] not on the side of wokeism anymore and will likely not buy games that are in any way involved with wokeism. And yet large corporations like Xbox are doubling down.

And people are like, why? The way that this ideological virus works makes it very hard for any large bureaucracy to escape from it. Even when it's obvious that it's not with the public, it's not how you sell to the public anymore. And it's not how you appease the mob anymore. Okay, problem number one is that so the corporations are now legitimately against legitimately aligned with the urban monoculture, meaning anyone who's anti sort of a consolidation of power at the global level is going to be antagonistic to them.

But then you have the second problem. Which is one of the goals. So in the old system, when the Republican party was quote unquote, controlling the world, they were doing this through clandestine operations, FBI, CIA, stuff like that. But it was being run out of the United States.

The way that the left has tried to [00:25:00] consolidate the world is different, but equally scary to people who don't like this sort of. Unelected consolidation of power, which is a giant global bureaucracy with a bureaucratic and unelected bureaucratic class that is put into position due to their ideological conformity, really, and to some extent abilities to navigate bureaucracies and that then make decisions for everyone else in the world from the position at the top of ivory towers.

And So if you were somebody who in the past would have been antagonistic to the consolidation of global control by a shadowy unelected cabal this previously would have put you squarely in the leftist movement and now puts you squarely in the rightist movement. But what's interesting is the way that these two parties aesthetically relate to these ideas.

And it, then in, in a sense, the South Park college educated hippies haven't gone away. It's just that their message is more [00:26:00] refined now. It's not corporations or the government, whatever is not to be trusted. It's that the wrong corporations are not to be trusted. The wrong groups are not to be trusted.

I I think that they changed. I think that the people who were hardcore old school hippies like that I don't trust the government, have largely become rightist. Maybe. I mean I, I feel like I have seen this. In terms of like older individuals I know. Yeah the one thing that isn't happening though is people aren't going to university and just deciding that Corporations are.

Corporations can't be trusted. Bad and can't be trusted. And the government is bad and can't be trusted. No. Now it's the poor are bad and can't be trusted. Oh, sorry. They don't call them the poor. They mean the rural disenfranchised are bad and can't be trusted and corporations are our tool to fight them.

But it is fascinating that we've undergone this party shift and like collectively, we're pretending like it didn't happen. Yeah. [00:27:00] And I don't understand I, I do understand why, right? Like people don't like admitting it. And both parties try to hide that it happened because they want to maintain as much of their old voting base as possible.

They don't really stand for what they stood for in a historic context. Trump, sorry. And a lot of Republicans are like, no, Trump's a hardcore old school Republican. I'm like, what? Do you know what Republicans stood for in the 80s and 90s? This guy was a Howard Stern appearing New York elitist liberal, okay?

In the clearest form of this, all right? And not many of that views have changed. I think this lack of realization that things have changed is one of the biggest threats to the Republican party's efficacy now, because for example, all of this, and this has been decades of work, for example, to overturn Roe versus Wade, which of course like was legitimately overturned, but still to make reproductive [00:28:00] choice an issue at the forefront.

That isn't really, this, as you were pointing out earlier, social coercion element of the Republican party is representative of what it was pre flip. And now the biggest thing killing it is this coercive element that doesn't even really represent what it has become since. Yeah. And people who don't understand why she's going on about this, there's a few things to note about Roe v.

Wade. We do think that abortion restrictions should be tighter in our state, for example. Although we also think that some states go way overboard in the amount of control that they're exercising over this. Yeah. Considering, fetuses, a human life, when You know, even famous Catholic theologians like Thomas Aquinas and Augustus of Hippo wouldn't have considered it a living person until 30 days after conception.

Yeah. Or just basic humaneness and suffering where it's obvious that. Any, the baby is not viable, that the baby will die in excruciating death shortly after birth or leading up to [00:29:00] it. If you don't abort sooner yeah, some states are taking that way too far too. Yeah. But the point is that this is not in line with the desires of the current, at least at the federal level,

Republican base which is.

really interesting.

To give you an idea of the statistics here. Uh, these days around 66% of the Republican base in the United States thinks abortion. Should be legal under certain circumstances. And I think shockingly to a lot of people, nearly half of Republicans under 30, say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. So for Republicans of our age range, we are actually right. Leaning on our views around abortion It's actually really gets my goat when I'm talking to other Republican influencers. And they're like, well, you guys are really sort of Democrat in a lot of your perspectives and there'll be pointing to positions that we have that align with like the midline of Republican voters in the United States.

And I'm like, no, [00:30:00] you have just been cocked because you are drinking from a fire hose of extremist opinions and you haven't taken the time to actually connect with the Republican base in this country or.. We're look at any recent statistics for what young Republicans actually think in this country. So, let me be clear about this as I can. The average opinion of Republican. Influencers. Is not the average opinion of Republican voters. Yeah, it's just an inertia thing that has ended up really slapping them in the face, like stepping on a hoe. Like people who don't know how badly they lost in the last midterms because of this. It was bad. And it could completely like if the only reason Trump will not win this cycle is that for people who have looked at the data we know this because Simone's running for office.

That and the election integrity narrative, which is totally the hippie thing, right? Can't trust elections. Yeah, can't trust elections. They're all rigged. So that is the new wave. [00:31:00] And yeah, I would say both Hippies used to say that all the time, by the way. Yeah, so I'll say the old version of the party is going to kill it.

And or the new version of the party is going to kill explain why the election integrity will kill it. Yeah. And so we're seeing it this local meetings too. It's incredibly frustrating. So there is concern about election integrity. Of course, there are issues with election integrity.

Everyone's cheating. But. There are limits to how much you can cheat, meaning that if a district or an area gets more votes than there are registered voters, clearly voter fraud is taking place, meaning that the amount that someone can cheat is limited. And the way that you overcome that is by overwhelming your opposing side with votes.

It's all about getting out the vote. Unfortunately, what's happening is in our area and all around the United States Republicans that are concerned about voter integrity. Our election integrity are going out and telling people about how, Oh don't vote at this time and don't vote with this way and this way, because people are cheating this way and people are cheating that way.

And here's all this proof of the cheating. [00:32:00] People are just not going to go out to vote anymore. They're just, they're suppressing. This is active voter suppression. That they're doing right now. And I were looking to like mess with the, this year's election and you would elevate these narratives. I would want a hundred percent elevate voter integrity concerns among Republicans.

From a native perspective, obviously yeah, man, can't trust the booths, the technology, the internet, the wifi. And I want to be clear. We're not saying that votes aren't manipulated. We're saying that you can win by overwhelming them. But, and they are manipulated in both ways, I'd point out, there have been election fraud cases on the right that have been proven in the story.

Everybody cheats because it's part of, when it's possible to cheat without getting caught, people are going to cheat. We're gonna try. Yeah. Yeah. But again, the margin of I would rephrase that. I would say some people will cheat when they think it's possible to do so without getting caught.

If you're talking about this at a national level, of [00:33:00] course, you're going to see cheating. And sometimes, now keep in mind, it's not like this is some top down order from some Republican or Democratic, high up party operative. Often this cheating comes in the form of literally like older, 65 year old people who care way too much about their party and have become totally myopic and don't care about the democratic process and start, doing a Little mess in with stuff, but then there are more organized efforts to whatever, but the point is that the cheating, the amount of cheating you can do is inherently limited.

And the way to overcome cheating is not to spend all your time fighting cheating, which is going to happen in a system like this. There are going to be bad actors when it is possible to act badly. The point is to overwhelm that bad acting. You should try to fight cheating where you can, but you also need to be realistic, which is to say that it is important that in the way that you are fighting, that you don't disincentivize your [00:34:00] own base from voting.

Which is what the Republican party is doing. What local, very well meaning Republicans are doing. It drives me nuts. Yeah.

Anyway, that was really interesting. I enjoyed the conversation and I'm surprised that despite the fact that you've basically had no sleep in a very long period of time, you are somehow still awake. Maybe I'm talking with a sleep talking Malcolm. Maybe one day I'm not even, I'm not even drinking now.

That's how little sleep I've had. Oh God. That's bad. I haven't had anything to drink in days. This is getting terrifying. How about you hit the hay? And I'll make dinner for the kids. I love you. I love you too.

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