Special Political Series – Part 2: SOS U.S.A. – The Dangers of Losing Our Democracy

The Missing Conversation, Special Political Series, Part Two.

If Trump were president, he’d be fully on board with Putin. Can you imagine the light being taken out of the leader of democracy in the world? Let it inspire you. We must vote. We must overcome any obstacles in our way and get to the polls and vote for those who truly want to be elected to serve us and not themselves.

In this podcast, we will propose critical new strategies to address world issues, including homelessness, immigration, amongst several others, and making a connection to how our individual psychology contributes and can help transform the dangers that we face. We will break from traditional thinking. As we look at our challenges from a freer and more independent point of view, your host Robert Strock has had 45 years of experience as a psychotherapist, author, and humanitarian, and has developed a unique approach to communication, contemplation, and inquiry born from working on his own challenges.

A passion. Welcome back to The Missing Conversation. In about a month, we’re gonna have one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime. And I know we’ve said that about the last couple elections but this time we’re really seeing that we’re in danger of losing our lifestyle. Perhaps aside from the rejection of Trump and election of Joe Biden in 2020, the goal of these next few missing conversations will be to discuss the importance of doing whatever you can to not only vote but help get out the vote. In this partisan time, so many elections are so close that literally every vote matters—supporting organizations directly or indirectly too. Today we’re going to continue to introduce the massive importance of each of us facing reality that we will reveal the details we perceive about the immense danger facing us in this election and beyond with the MAGA Republicans and the potential of Independents, mainstream Republicans and passive Democrats, most vitally getting involved, including finding their voice through voting.

(02:25)
As you listened to me? I know there’s a real possibility that you may just hear the mad passion that sounds like I’m angry, but I know how many of us love America that are proud of America, Republicans that are proud of America, Democrats that are proud of America, Independents that are proud of America. And the real appeal is to try to touch that place where we can keep our democracy. And I ask you to please hear the passion as being an intensity, trying to reach that place of love and trust and really seeing America as the light and the hope for democracy. And so I ask you to please give me the benefit of the doubt or more important give the message the benefit of the doubt. When you’re listening to each of the podcasts, as we talked about in the last episode, we’re making a very, very clear distinction between MAGA Republicans, the hardcore Republicans that are really dictator supporters. And we’re separating out, uh, significant majority of the Republicans that are really having second thoughts and trying to really appeal to review the truth and to break up the rationalizations that you’re holding that would allow you to support a dictator that will change your very life. Like to start off by introducing Dave, my partner at the Global Bridge Foundation and my dearest friend for over 50 years,

Robert, thank you, and I can only say I I love your optimism in light of all the difficult subjects. The amount of people that are receptive, that are what I would call MAGA Republicans, I think we may see slightly differently. And yes, am I rooting for there to be a significant number of them? Sure. I wanna really speak to those though that are already feeling the impact, already are turning away because it’s so gross. And you know what is going on here, with all the different reasons that you’ve already illuminated and what we’re about to talk about. And just say, we have to get out there and we have to do it.

I admit I’m ignorant and I don’t know whether I’m being optimistic or not, but I’m doing my best to assume potential goodwill of some elements of even the mega Republicans, let alone all the rest of the Republicans. And just wanna make it very clear cuz President Biden has made it clear, but not very clear, that this is absolutely not an attack on Republicans. So in the last episode, we ended with Trump saying, oh, that’s wonderful with the Declaration of Independence for Luhansk and Donetsk. And this is absolutely a great starting point again for this podcast. Can you really let in the, I don’t even wanna say childlike, I wanna say infantile nature of a delinquent infant being demonic with her child and say, oh, that’s wonderful that I just punch my five-year-old in the face. That’s basically what’s happening, and later, listening to Trump.

(05:57)
But here’s a guy that says, you know, I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent. He used the word independent and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace. You gotta say, that’s pretty savvy. And you know what the response was from Biden? There was no response. They didn’t have one for that. No, it’s very sad. Very sad. Now here’s the outrage of here. You have Trump declaring that Biden is weak when Trump is Putin’s great advocate. Trump is like a best friend and he’s trying to criticize Biden for not having a direct response. He’s a cheerleader for Putin and not even relating to what he would’ve done, which is to support Putin to fight Ukraine. What happened to the Republicans that didn’t trust Russia? What happened to the Reagan Republicans take down that wall Gorbachev. What happened to them? Where are they?

(07:07)
How can they become a Jekyll and Hyde? It’s not too late. It’s so important for there to be a turnaround with as many people as possible. Trump’s comments on the Ukraine invasion are eerily similar to what he had to say in 2014 when Russia took Crimea. Well, he is done an amazing job of taking the mantle, he told Fox news personality, Eric Bowling and he’s taken it away from the president. And you look at what he’s doing and so smart when you see the riots in the country because they’re hurting the Russians, okay, we’ll go and take it over. And he really goes step by step and you have to give him a lot of credit. Independents, conservative Republicans, please know that Ronald Reagan is turning over in his grave. Do you not see us? Can you not have the courage to go against the grain of the cult?

(08:10)
As Dave said, can you not break free from the cult? Can you not have a mind of your own? Can you not face the truth? The many truths that even the Republican judges have voted against, even Bill Barr voted against, Ronald Reagan wasn’t my hero, he was yours. Referenced back to your beliefs with Reagan, even with President Bush and Bush Senior. It is these overtly authoritarian views and tendencies that define Trumpism and the MAGA Republicans who have managed to have a good part of our country beholding to them politically. And as we move forward in these podcasts, we will continue to see that like the frog when put in cold water being heated, slowly boiling. Now you don’t see this, some of you that are really in this pot and I’m asking you, you still have awareness, look and see that you are in the pot of a cult and that pot is heating and you are a frog. And if we don’t wake up, those of us that are in different ends of the political spectrum, and if you don’t wake up and wake up quickly, we will lose more and more of what we have had these past centuries in this country.

You mentioned, and I think this is important to call out George W. Bush, of course his father is no longer around. Reagan is no longer around, but just as an indication of what seems to be so difficult to speak out, he’s not even spoken out. He has not just been a voice, a voice, and he knows better. He knows his history is that he knows. The best you can see is a Cheney. The best you can see is the daughter and father speaking out and, and grant you, there is some political motivation that was there to get her elected. She lost thanks to Trump. But there are so many people just sitting on the sidelines saying amongst themselves to each other, to journalists and others, how crazy this is. But no, do they speak out? No. And these are Republicans. These are people in Congress. These are people that could make a difference and they don’t. They’re afraid, politically afraid. And as we may get into, I think they’re even physically and violent afraid of, of what could be acted out upon them.

And what you’re saying is an understatement. There are so many threats of death, deaths to the family, death to anybody who defies it. And yes, we will get into it. So we must vote. We must overcome any obstacles in our way and get to the polls and vote for those who truly wanna be elected to serve us and others in our world and our country and not themselves. And the serving of themselves is really an absolute irony of words because it’s grotesque, it is rooted in domination, in control, in sadism, in megalomania thinking. And all you need to do, and I’m asking that you do this now and more than now, is repeat the 20 truths that we’ll be bringing up over and over and over again. The lies that are obvious that you’ve seen in front of your face. You’ve seen it on the camera, you’ve seen the Georgia phone call, you’ve heard the Georgia phone call.

(12:05)
You’ve heard the the contact between President Trump and Ukraine before when he was basically asking for an investigation of Biden even before the elections. Repeat these things to yourself and don’t let these be the minor things. Let these things be the major things. And for those of you that are already clear about this, let this light the fire in your belly. If you have money, give more money, if you have time, give more time. And obviously vote, vote, vote. When we reference Kim Jong Un, who he has an absolutely bizarre love affair with, if he is to be believed and frankly, whether we believe it or not, it’s insane to broadcast it. This is a man who has concentration camps, who is treated his people like Hitler treated the Jews. He is utterly insane. And it’s utterly Hitlerian, which reminds me of the Charlottesville anti-Semitism chants of Jews will not replace us.

(13:14)
And blood and soil, a direct Nazi slogan, the grossness of Trump saying there were good people on both sides to the whole country. And that not creating a different kind of gut feeling and supporting neo-Nazis over and over again, through not in any way opposing them as they’re coming out more and more, including the insurrection and their racism on top of it and the history of racism, Muslim bans, misogyny, and lawbreaking on an industrial scale. The examples are so numerous and the most current are the subjects of investigations into January 6th election Fraud by Trump with the fake electors, the taking of classified and other documents and the sheer magnitude of the corrupt Trump organization forever. My God, are you really going to support neo-Nazis? And the answer so far for the MAGA Republicans is, yes, look at your kids, look at yourselves and look at the cult as Dave is so aptly pointed out.

(14:32)
And I have to assume you don’t know what you’re getting into from these love letters. With Kim John Un, to his ongoing obsession with pleasing Putin, his authoritarian drives are utterly apparent, culminating in what we see Putin doing now in Ukraine with war crimes, annexation and threats of nuclear war. As I pointed out in the last episode, these threats of nuclear war have to be magnified times 10. It’s not just one threat of nuclear war, it’s setting an example for all other dictators. And if we don’t radically stop this now, there are gonna be threats up the kazoo for the rest of our lives until they finally are followed through. If Trump were president as MAGA Republicans and many other Republicans think that he should be, he’d be fully on board with Putin. Can you even imagine what kind of partnership that would be? Can you imagine the light being taken out of the leader of democracy in the world?

(15:45)
Can you really let that in? Can you really stay in the cult? Can you really not get off your chair if you are a passive Democrat and become a passionate Democrat? Not just because you believe in all the democratic thought or actions, but because you believe in democracy. This is a fight for democracy. This is not a fight for Democrats. It is a fight for Democrats because they’re the only one supporting democracy. And yes, I may support more of the democratic views, but I see myself as someone that is a supporter of democracy and dominantly a centrist. So please listen. Listen to your true voice, listen to the truth, speak it back to yourself. See the dangers. See what your eyes have seen. Listen to what you’ve heard directly and realize we’ve only heard what we’ve heard. We’ve only seen what we’ve seen. We know there’s more. Hearken back to just a few of the things that he has said.

(16:52)
Will you allow yourself to contemplate what the implications are for further expansion of Putin attacking other countries and further dangers of China being given incentive to do the same? It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat, a more conservative, sensible Republican or an Independent. If the full power of the United States doesn’t send weapons, then expansion of those with nuclear power will be appeased by the United States. And no other country has the power that we do to stop this. It’s hard to believe that this isn’t staggering to you, no matter who you are. And it, let it get you off your seats again. Let it put that fire in your belly. And if you see the virtual inevitable danger, if either Trump, DeSantis, Abbot, or anyone aligned with Putin is elected for president, then let it inspire you. Let it be part of what moves you from your passivity in life.

(17:58)
If you’re not already passionate about this, because then you are being passive in life, you’re not gonna have a better reason to get alive, to get really inspired to make movements, to talk to everybody you can, even out of the realm of who you think you can talk to as you wake up in the morning and say, who can I talk to, how can I make this move? The same danger exists in this midterm election that the advocates that are denying the election. A Putinesk move is a central move of any dictator. And this time it’s the whole world that’s in danger. The nuclear age allows for threats that didn’t exist before. This brings in really all the other countries. Let’s pause here and see what the other rationales are from MAGA Republicans. He’s only claiming his territory in the old USSR. If we all did that, if we all looked at what was the old territory, can you see where that would go if we appease and give credibility to that? Every country would say, I used to own this country, so I’m now gonna attack it. Are we really gonna allow that to be the rule of the day? Some of the people that I know are using this as the ultimate rationalization that that’s all he’s doing and don’t see the implications of if that we’re expanded to the other countries that have that, then the whole world would be in a world war immediately.

Just to expand on that, you take that logic and you say, Okay, well, so Great Britain then because they lost the colonies, now Great Britain really owns the United States. Great Britain, you know, owns all the countries that were in the empire, in the British Empire. They have now got control over India, Australia—not as a commonwealth, but they control—it and on and on and on. And it really is the manipulation of nuclear, really the nuclear threat itself that is making this such a difficult one, and a threat of that and the manipulation of that. And there are other people, there are, the Chinas, there are the potential North Koreas that can look at this example if it isn’t stood up to, and can say, okay, well hey, you know, China says I’m going to Taiwan. North Korea, I don’t know where they go. You know, they start, they start looking at how far can I get my nuclear bomb to get to the West Coast of the United States? And what can I do to threaten and manipulate and get power based upon just the threat?

Thank you for these very tangible examples. It’s so important that you let in the concrete reality that if you allow that rationalization, the world is dead. Let it in the world is dead. If you support that logic, the world is dead. We’re all fighting against each other. The outrage of claiming that Biden should take a stronger stand and overlooking the opposite of what any MAGA leader would do. Take a look at that. Rubio, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Senator Daines of Montana showed screenshots of where Zelensky is in spite of being asked not to disclose it because they’ve already been three assassination attempts to kill him. Lindsay Graham on Twitter calls for Zelensky assassination. Let this in. McConnell calling the aid to Ukraine as “too little too late.” Who the fuck is he to speak, the puppet of Trump for so long?

(22:12)
Whenever it serves his self-centered interest, he’s a puppet and he’s complaining as too little too late. What authority do you have? How can you not look at who you’ve been when it’s quite obvious with a MAGA Republican president he would be advocating Putin’s entitlements to reunite the original USSR and ignore the further danger and the loss of life as well, creating the nuclear threat in spades. Can you really not see this, at least with your fleeting awareness? And by fleeting awareness, I mean a flash. Let that flash, which is really your wisdom, let it guide you, not your gut feelings. I don’t believe that there even is virtually any MAGA Republicans that don’t have at least a flash that if we were to give this authority to the whole world, we would have World War III. We all need to keep pointing this out.

(23:17)
This is a talking point. This is something that we can say even to the MAGA Republicans, even if we don’t have ability to penetrate, even if we get back, uh, whole bunch of grief, it’s worth it. We all need to do it and we need to do it with strength, not with anger. We need to do it from our sincerity and from our potency. And so we need to very much, powerfully, make this statement to everybody in our way. A key component, which we’ll go into later, is how the denial of death plays into how the MAGA Republicans can continue to go into where they go into. They’re not taking into consideration how many people will die if a MAGA Republican president takes power. How many people will automatically be opposing it because they want their freedom back? How much this will be a setup for having to control everybody in the world, and how much unresolved anger, which again will go into in one of the future episodes as my 50 years of psychotherapy has seen.

(24:35)
When you have suppressed your anger in life, you are capable, much more capable of being a cult member. That anger can make you rationalize a whole large scale of thoughts that don’t really make sense because your gut level feels support and that gut level is rooted in all your unresolved anger and allows you to fantasize and to come up with believing conspiracy theories or come up with conspiracy theories on their own. This is the key. While listening to the words that promise you more money, more America first, while being in love with the most powerful dictators of the world in alienating our allies and NATO. How much did you not at least have a fleeting awareness that if there was no NATO, how predictable is it that the world is gonna fall apart. And later the Trump trumpets, here’s a guy that says, you know Putin, I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent.

(25:48)
He used the word independent and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace. You gotta say, that’s pretty savvy. And you know what happened, what the response was from Biden, there was no response. Now we need to keep repeating this because it’s so outrageous that the best buddy of Putin is gonna declare that Biden is weak because there was no response. The alternative would’ve been well, he’s justified, he’s brilliant, he’s savvy. Let that in. This is based on three big denials that we’ll go into in the next episode. So please join us for the next episode and thank you for your wrapped attention. And thank you for staying open for what rules your gut. Be the monitor of your gut, be the awareness of your gut so that you can have your wisdom guide you rather than gut feelings that are rooted in anger.