I’m doing something a little different this week. Politics is invading my film criticism website for one very specific reason. I am of the firm belief that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, democracy is done for. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and if that means a politics interview inexplicably appearing on a website dedicated to movie reviews, so be it.
I’m a reader of the Substack newsletter Lone Star Left, published by Michelle Davis. Since she’s here in Dallas, I wanted to talk to Michelle in an effort to spread the word about her work and to discuss the state of both Texas and national politics. She graciously agreed, and the result is available as the MP3 above — you can either listen within this page, or download it to your device — or, below, as a transcript.
One caveat about the transcript: I’m a one-man-band on a shoestring budget, so I used a free online AI program to produce it. As a result, it has a fair amount of typos and errors. Please be aware of that going in. I did some light editing and cleaning it up, but I didn’t go over it with a fine-tooth comb.
Also, please see below for a link to the Lone Star Left Substack, as well as links to an article and newsletter referenced during the interview.
The Scourge of Moral Narcissism
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Transcript of interview:
You might notice that what you're about to listen to has nothing to do with movies. You'll have to bear with me, I know it's weird for me. It's because, as you'll hear me say during the upcoming interview, I truly believe we are in a break glass in case of emergency kind of moment for American democracy. If Donald Trump is re-elected, it's game over for the rule of law, and I want to do anything within my power to help prevent that. I want to use my platform, however modest it might be, to help effect positive change. Thus, this interview. Michelle H. Davis is a political thinker and writer living in my own home state of Texas, which is why I reached out to her. She writes and publishes a Substack newsletter titled Lone Star Left in which she shines a light on the authoritarian rule of the Republican Party of Texas and the National Republican Party more generally, and how we can fight back against it. I've included a link to Lone Star Left in the notes section of this post. As you'll hear us say during the interview, please make sure you're registered to vote, and please, when you do vote, don't vote Republican. Thanks for listening.
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FFC: So, I guess, elephant in the room, you probably, when I reached out to you, I emailed you a couple months ago and then DM'd you to see if you would do an interview with me. You probably looked at my website and were like, I don't, this is a movie review website and he wants to talk politics? I don't understand. What were your thoughts when I first contacted you?
Michelle Davis: First thoughts, I mean, I thought your website was interesting. I definitely like movies. But I did go to your Instagram and saw some leftist hashtags.
Right.
I figured you were friend. And what I do, the most important thing, or the goal that I'm trying to achieve, is just to get the word out about what's happening and what people need to know about, and any opportunity for me to talk about it or let people know what's on the horizon. I'm super glad too.
Okay, yeah, and that's what I was about to get into because, so anybody who reads my website or knows me personally knows I have a leftist bent. I am what Donald Trump would refer to as a member of the radical left. So I've just been getting more and more tense and more and more feeling that really bad stuff is coming if we don't let enough people know. I have this, you know, platform, I'm at the point now where I feel like we really are in the in the place where it's, you're gonna regret anything you didn't do if, you know, the worst happens. We were just talking before we started the interview, this probably was gonna be a very different conversation if we'd had it probably a month or so ago. I reached out to you initially before Biden had dropped out of the race. He has dropped out, Kamala Harris looks like she's gonna be the nominee. Did you feel the same sense of, like, dawning, like, hope and sunshine that, like, the rest of the left is kind of feeling right now?
Um. Honestly, no, not at first. Honestly, I was like, oh, people seem really excited. OK, but how long is it going to last? Like, can I trust this excitement? I mean, we're in Texas.
Yeah, exactly.
We have felt failure in Texas. We have been let down in Texas one too many times. So I'm always apprehensive to get my hopes up real super high, especially at first. Now, I do feel really good about the Harris campaign. I do feel good about what she's doing. She's made four trips to Houston. So it's possible that the Harris campaign is looking at Texas as in play, and specifically in Houston. They've got millions and millions of Democrats out there. 17% of all the Democrats in Texas live in Houston. So they're expecting 1.1 million Democratic voters from Houston or Harris County alone. So it does make a lot of sense for her to go out there.
Now, so you just mentioned that some people are thinking maybe Texas is in play because of places like Houston. So we're in Texas, we're in maybe the reddest state in the country, Oklahoma or Mississippi might have something to say about that, but we're definitely in one of the reddest places in the entire country. What… have you lived here? Have you lived in Texas your whole life? Are you from here originally?
Fifth generation.
Oh, wow. Okay.
Third generation Dallasite.
What brought you to writing about politics, especially given the fact that you are not the wanted voice in this state, as far as politics talk goes.
Well, you know, not to get too much in the weeds, but when I was in my 20s, I lived in Arlington and I commuted to Dallas every day. And that's a long commute, you know, an hour each way. We don't have any talk shows out here, you know, that are leftist radio. And this was before, you know, satellite radio was a thing. So I listened to a lot of, like, Mark Levin and Mark Davis and even Rush Limbaugh sometimes. He was, like, horrific. But I think the worry about it is like, oh people are gonna listen to that and it's gonna radicalize people towards the conservatives, but I would say it did the opposite for me. And I found some people that I really just disagreed with. And then it was late 2000s, 2008, 2009, and I somehow got pulled into Living Blue in Texas, which is a Facebook page. There was like five admins. And like organically we grew the page to like 80,000 followers. We did that for a long time, a long time. And I worked in corporate digital marketing. And when COVID hit, I would say a lot of things changed. A lot of things changed with COVID, and I just started writing about it. I just started writing about what was going on politically, what was the governor doing especially. There was a lot of misinformation during that period of time. And to my surprise there was a lot of people in Texas that are hungry for this type of knowledge. You know, because we don't really have the media infrastructure that caters towards the left.
Yeah.
And, you know, right away, you know, my blog, it was, at the time it was Living Blue in Texas took off, and I decided to quit my job, quit the corporate world. I cashed out my 401k.
Oh, wow.
That's what I have been doing since. I did rebrand in 2022 to Lone Star Left because I wanted to make it clear that I was progressive and I think a lot of people were assuming that it was liberal with Living Blue in Texas. So I did rebrand in 2022 to Lone Star Left and I mean we're doing, you know, just chucking along since then. I would say I'm doing pretty good, you know. I've got about 200,000 subscribers on social media, but on my actual Substack, it's more around like 4,000.
Okay. I also was gonna tell you, I can't exactly remember how I found you. I wanna say it was probably, cause I'm a big fan of Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American on Substack, and I think I probably, the algorithm probably fed me your account. That's probably how I found you.
So on Substack, you could see like how much of your audience overlaps with other Substack pages. So it's like 30% of my audience overlaps with hers.
Oh, with Heather Cox Richardson. OK. So I want to get into the politics. I think most people on my website probably come or are in Texas, but you know, obviously it's a website so anybody in the world can see it. So I want to kind of cover national politics, but also a lot of Texas politics. You know, I think that's one of the problems we have in this country is that people only pay attention to national politics. They let the local and even statewide stuff go by. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, there's been a lot of kind of news stories written about the Republican Civil War going on down here in Texas. Can you kind of give us an overview of what that all entails?
Yeah, and just to make it clear, Lone Star Left, I focus on state politics. I mean, sometimes I'll talk about national politics, but my main focus is on what's happening in Austin and what's happening in the state house. And the state politics are a total mess right now. The Republicans, yeah, they're in a civil war. The far right wing billionaires Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes have funded a lot of Republicans in Austin that they want certain things their way, this Christian nationalism. And that included not impeaching Ken Paxton. So Ken Paxton is their go-to boy or whatever. And when the House impeached him, it was based on legitimate charges, like legitimate corruption, like legitimate things that he did. But the Tim Dunn billionaire people came in. They’re like, "We like Ken Paxton, he owns the Libs, we wanna keep him", and so I think that that's part of what started it, and then what kind of exacerbated it is the Tim Dunn faction, they don't want Democratic chairs in their committees, and so in the Texas House, it's always been done, no matter who's in charge, Democrat, Republican, they have been giving chairs on seniority and field of expertise. So when the Republican speaker, Dade Phelan, gave chairs to Democrats, they're like, “no, that doesn't work with our culture wars, and you are a secret liberal.” And he got a far right challenge from like, I don't even remember the guy's name, David Covey, I think his name was, but David Covey was well, well funded. He had Trump support. He had all of the big names, Ken Paxton and Dan Patrick, but Dade Phelan managed to pull out a win. He's going back to the house. The thing I think most people don’t realize is how much state politics impacts their life opposed to national politics. You know like this DEI ban you know that we've recently seen in colleges. Now that I'm writing, I have the time to go back to college so I'm in college right now.
Congratulations.
Yeah, thank you. So you know the DEI ban basically, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Now the Republicans during the debate, and I watched all the debates, try to say, you know, diversity, these diversity and equity things are unfair to conservatives, but you know and I know when they say it's unfair to conservatives, they mean it's unfair to white people, and as a result a lot of people have lost their jobs from this DEI initiative in Austin. They've had to shut down programs that were, like, to help first-generation students. It's also about disability and veteran status and things like that. So this is definitely one thing that we saw coming from the state house, that a lot of people weren't even paying attention to because they're focused on national politics. But everything else, from the fact that we don't have clean water in most places in Texas, the fact that our electric grid is not working properly. We have high, really, really high property taxes. I mean, all of that is coming from the state house. And so, you know, my goal with Lone Star Left has always been to inform people on what's going on in the state, how that impacts them, and you know, how voting for a state legislator can fix all the problems that we see in the state.
I noticed you had just published something called, with a headline, Are You Still Registered? The Importance of Verifying Your Voter Status in Texas. Can you talk about like where we are in the process, how many more days you have to get until the election to get registered and to make sure you're good? Are we, have we missed it already?
No, no, I don't know the exact date right off the top of my head, but it's like 68 more days. I've been counting down on Twitter at Lone Star left on my Twitter. I'm counting down every day. So you got 68 days left to register. It's so much more complicated to register in Texas than it is in almost every other state, you know, and that's intentional from the Republicans. But if I, sometime in October is the last day, 68 days from now. And even when you are registered, I mean the state does a lot of voting purges. They've got the suspense list. The suspense list, if you miss a federal election, you go onto the suspense list. If you don't vote in the next federal election, you're taken off the vote rolls. So you have to make sure you vote in every election or they'll take you off. But they're trying to change that to every two years instead of every federal election. So that's one of the things that will be coming down the pipeline if conservatives win again next year that you have to vote in every two-year elections and if you don't you go on the suspense list and if you don't vote for a second time then you're taken off the voter rolls.
Okay. I want to talk about, you know, we effectively have one-party rule here in Texas. Republicans pretty much run the entire show.
Yes.
Which leads to some really ugly things when, you know, politicians are getting primaried from the far right of their own party, which, you know, that eventually just feeds into a system of you always have to constantly be ratcheting up the rhetoric and the fear and you know, that's how they kind of do their thing. What do you think? What can we do here in Texas to break that fever? How can we, I mean, aside from getting to the polls, obviously is the most important thing.
Even spreading the word about it, like how important these state elections are, and you know, getting people involved, I think that a lot of people feel disengaged or apathy because there is this mindset that, well, you know, Texas is red, we've been red, we're not going to be able to change that. However, when you look at all of the presidential elections since 2000, every single presidential election we're moving four to six points to the left, every single one. So this last one in 2020, we were still five points away. So if we're moving four to six points to the left every election, that means that if we don't flip this election, then 2028, that's a good opportunity for us to flip. But further, when you break down like these gerrymandered districts, Texas is now a majority minority state. So only 38% of the state is white, but they have somehow managed to make all of these gerrymandered districts also white. So I will say this, because of white people now being a minority in Texas, that when they broke up the districts, districts that a lot of them there were only like 52% white or 55% white and they did that because there was just no more pie left for them to cut up. And so I think because of that, because Texas is growing and diversifying so quickly that we may also see the state house flip definitely before 2030. I mean as soon as this year, I’m always hopeful, but we will definitely cut down their margins this year for sure.
That's good because you know I feel like it's been, I moved to Texas when I was five years old so I've essentially been here my whole life, but yeah, at least the last 20 years, I've been here and, you know, “it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, any day now, any year now, it's gonna… we're gonna flip it,” and it never quite happens. I read your piece, I highly recommend anybody listening to this interview go back and find, you wrote a piece about, it's just called Will Texas Ever Turn Blue, and it takes you through, you take us through, you know, what's happening with the demographics and how it's almost not inevitable. That's a, cause that's a problem I think Democrats have run into in the past is just assuming that it's inevitable, it's gonna happen. We have to continue to engage with voters and make sure they're voting, you know, for the policy we want. But it does, reading your piece made me think, well, there really is actually a shot that we could turn the state blue at some point.
We probably could have turned it blue long before now if we were a voting state. So in 2020, you know, even though we had moved five points to the left, we were number 51 for voter turnout and that's with all states and Washington, DC. So we're moving left even though we're not voting. So if we were able to get people to the polls and actually vote, you know, that would be amazing. But you know, and I think that that's a thing that a lot of people are like, you guys said that we're gonna be left. You already said that, I already heard it, didn't happen. But we move the needle every time. And the reason we haven't moved the needle quicker, in my honest opinion, is because of poor leadership at the state party. The current leader of the state party, Humberto Hinojosa, it's a part-time job for him. It's an unpaid position. He is, all the way down in Brownsville. I don't think he travels the state very much, and not to get in too much about him, but he is allegedly supposed to retire in 2026. Regardless, the Texas Democratic Party at their state convention just passed a new bylaw that said that the state party position will be paid. So we will get in some really great contenders to run for the state party in 2026. We'll see how that goes. I think new leadership in the state party will change a lot of things.
Yeah, hopefully. I want to kind of segue to national politics. I'll kind of go back a little bit and say I've always been interested in politics. Movies for me is a bigger thing that I'm more obsessed with. But again, when, so when Trump got elected in 2016, I was... Until the election happened in 2016, I was like, there's no way. We'll do the right thing. It's not going to happen. And then it did happen. I was like, oh, there really is no stopgap. There's no magical thing that's going to save you. And so this time around, when Trump ran again, I mean, it's pretty clear that he intends to end democracy. If he gets back into office, voting is over. We don't really need to worry. I mean, he said it himself.
He said it himself, yeah.
Just the other day, he said to a group of Christians, we just need you to vote one more time. If you can just vote one more time and get us in office, you don't have to worry about voting anymore. There is no other way to interpret what he said there. So that's again, that's why I wanted to have you on and why I want to try to get the message out to as many people as possible that the Republican Party is now essentially a fascist party. I mean, they are only focusing on taking control and ruling over the majority with their minority opinions. So can you tell us, because I'm sure you know a lot about it, can you tell anybody out there who does not know about Project 2025 and the plan if and when Donald Trump or any future Republican gets into office with the what the Project 2025 plan will do.
So Project 2025, it's interesting because Trump has really tried to distance himself from Project 2025. However, the people who wrote Project 2025 are current and former staff members of his. They're people that he has close relationships with. And, you know, he'll talk about, well, Agenda 47. Agenda 47 is basically like the Cliff’s Notes version.
And sounds creepier than Project 2025, honestly, the name of it.
Right, right. So, you know, what they wanna do is fundamentally just change the entire government. They wanna do away with the Board of Education and the National Energy Board and the National Weather Association. Everything that you could possibly think of that the government runs by. They wanna get rid of it, and they wanna replace all of the government staff people with Trump loyalists. They want to end discrimination protections for women, for the LGBTQ community, minority communities, for everybody. So as bad as you imagine a fascist government would be, the Project 2025 is basically the how-to step to get there.
Yeah and the scarier part about it is like I said before, even if Trump doesn't get elected, they have this ready to go for any Republican president that gets elected in the future who says, “yeah, bring it on. I'm ready to go with this,” you know?
And it's not gonna go away, so even, you know, if Kamala wins and, you know, she's president in 2025. The next presidential election, 2028. They'll just update the name to Project 2029 or something like that and so an interesting thing that I do want people to know about the current Project 2025 was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. The current CEO of the Heritage Foundation is Kevin Roberts. Prior to being the CEO of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts was the CEO of Texas Public Policy Foundation. Texas Public Policy Foundation is, you know, I'm doing air quotes right now, a think tank, a conservative think tank, but they're also really like a lobbyist and they're funded also by Tim Dunn and other billionaires.
Same guys you were talking about earlier.
And they are deeply entrenched in a lot of Republican politics in the state house. Every year they have like a mini convention. And this year they had speakers that were all Republican politicians in the House and the Senate. And they also had Project 2025 speaking alongside of these current Republican officials. So I think that what people don't know is that a lot of what Project 2025 is based on are things they have already done, or have pushed for in Texas. And so as bad as the fascist outlook appears on the national politiscape, it really, it looks a lot worse in Texas. And I would say the political situation in Texas is... It's past that fascist thing, because right now we do have a fascist government in Texas. We look at, like Houston just went two weeks without power. While that was going on, we had 40 Republicans in Taiwan and Asia doing this tour on the economic growth of Texas, but there are people here with no lights. Poverty in Texas, especially in places along the border where one out of every five children is suffering with hunger. And so Republicans, they want to say, oh, Texas is so great because CEOs and business owners don't pay a lot of taxes. But if you're a homeowner in Texas, you're making up the cost. Right now, the property taxes are the fifth highest in the nation, in Texas. So I mean, when you look at our overall tax burden, our overall tax burden is higher than California. It's higher than most other states.
“Don't California my Texas,” right?
Yeah, really.
So well, let's talk about some statewide candidates. Do you think Colin Allred has the opportunity to beat Ted Cruz and make Ted Cruz not one of my senators anymore? Is that possible?
I would say it is possible. I think driving that is going to be his enormous war chest. He has raised a lot, a lot of money. I do think there are going to be some challenges for him to win. I think it'll probably be a close race. But if he wins, Kamala wins and we flip a lot of house seats. Colin Allred is like a kind of middle of the road guy. In Texas, Democrats are more left than center. And we know this because they just had their state convention and they put out their platform and they're very, very progressive. They're very progressive.
Yeah, can you talk about the platform a little bit? Just a few different things that have been included on it?
Yeah, I mean the platform, I love the platform. I went to social media, as soon as the platform was published, I'm like, “look at Texas Democrats, we are so far left.” Further than California Democrats. And at the time, I think they were, because we had very aggressive policies on Palestine. So not only did we ask for a ceasefire, but we were also asking for divestment in the war over there. We were asking for a two state solution. Other things on the platform, universal healthcare. Universal child care, green energy. I don't know all the points exactly, but everything that a progressive would pick up and look at and they'd be like, oh, I like this.
Right.
So I would say that overall on the Texas Democratic Party platform there really are not centrist positions. So like a centrist might be like in favor of, not in favor of universal healthcare or something like that. We definitely, we want universal healthcare. And that's a big one. So going back to Colin Allred, I think that, there is, there has been some pushback from prominent Democrats. Sarah Spector, to name one, I don't know if you're familiar with her. She's a West Texas influencer. She's got a platform. But because of the money that Allred has, if he can get in front of the right people, if he can get the right ads out, the one thing about his campaign that I think is really smart is that he's partnering with every other campaign down ballot. So they're doing like, you know, kind of like a double block walking events and stuff like that, so. I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that he'll win. I thought we were going to turn blue in 2020. I thought Beto was going to win in 2018. So I've been wrong before. But I know that regardless, there's nowhere in Texas, besides maybe South Texas, that Republicans are making gains. If you look at the maps from like, you know, over time, like what Texas is doing by precinct or by Congress district or whatever, you can see that, you know, since 2000, we've just… left, left, left, left, left. Republicans just aren’t making gains anywhere. So I mean, I think that even if we don't turn blue, this November, their time here is numbered.
So when Kamala kind of threw her hat into the ring, and it's I think it's presumed now she's going to be the nominee. I think she got enough of the delegates wrapped up and stuff. So I think she has like an actual policy agenda, whereas the Republicans do not care about policy anymore. All they want to do is drink liberal tears. So I think Kamala has the opportunity to say, this is, I'm standing for something. I want to do something for the country. And by the way, you Republicans are just a bunch of weirdos, which is, it's been like a breath of fresh air almost, you know? Because they are weird. It's weird to want to control a woman's body. And it's weird to want to force people onto the streets if they can't afford rent. It's just like, I'm hopeful that Kamala is going to continue what Biden's been doing. He's been doing some really good things. The Inflation Reduction Act, that kind of stuff. And I think she has a chance to carry on his legacy.
No, I absolutely agree with that. In fact, the thing that I'm most excited about her winning would be continuing Biden's climate initiatives. He's taken more climate action than any other president in history and, you know, because of that we see like the LNG pipeline in South Texas being shut down and that pipeline was going to be a disaster. I have been getting emails about it from some activists in South Texas for like the last year about the environmental impacts of it and so it's like things like that, you know, are good. You know, he shut down the Keystone pipeline. That was good. And so continuing policies like that for Kamala Harris, I think is really, really important, especially right now, because what we're facing during the climate crisis.
One of the best things about your newsletter is you're very strident. You're very like, kind of no nonsense. You call out nonsense where you see it. There was one thing you had about Chip Roy, who is a representative, who said he wanted to "ethnic cleanse" liberals out of Texas or whatever, you know?
He said progressives, which kind of like threw me off because it's like usually people are mad at white liberals, but he specifically said white progressives. I was like, OK, where did that come from?
Right. So I think doing what you do carries some risk. Have you gotten threats?
So in 2020, when I was writing about the Confederate statues, because, you know, in 2020 we had the, you know, George Floyd civil rights movement and we had a lot of activists all over the state of Texas protesting Confederate statues that were still in their state and a lot of them did, like, live streaming and I saw these events and I was horrified, horrified, by how these, like, white militia people that were involved with, like, three-percenters, like, that would show up at these protests, these peaceful protests with guns, you know, and full camo gear and, you know, ballistic armor or whatever it's called. And, you know, they would just, like, stand across the street and it was very intimidating and it was very like, frightening, I would say. And one of the articles that I wrote about was the incident in Weatherford in July of 2020. And I still think about this a lot, because I had friends that were there from Fort Worth and from Weatherford. And they went out to protest the statue. It got leaked on Facebook. And they were met by 500 angry white people with guns who pointed guns at them. They assaulted them. They punched them. They pulled knives on them. Every single person that was at that protest on our side, which was maybe 50 people, was assaulted. They got out of there pretty quick and it all happened in front of the courthouse, in front of the police station, and, you know, the police didn't come in and do anything about it, you know, Weatherford, Texas, and, you know, writing about that, I got several threats.
Really? Yeah, okay, so you have received threats before for your work?
Yeah, but it not for, you know, politics exactly but for when I talk about local issues that, like, involve race or involve, like, what happened, because, you know, I wasn't nice about it. I think the title of my article, you know, it's like four years ago, but I think the title of my article was, like, Racists Attack Peaceful Protesters, or something like that, and they did not like that. And you know, I actually did, one of the threats I received I did contact the FBI and, you know, yeah, informed them of it. And so, yes, I have gotten threats before. Usually it's not behind politicians, but it's behind local things, especially when it has to do with direct action initiatives. But I mean, what can you do? If I feel like it's a legitimate thing or something, I'm definitely gonna report it.
Yeah, sure. And it's an important enough cause, I think, that it's worth the risk. Obviously, I don't want you to get hurt, I don't want anybody to get hurt, but, you know, we're here now. We're at the break-glass-in-case-of-fire moment.
But so, like, you know, and you probably are aware of this, like we're in Dallas, you know, and so when we look around, when I look around, you know, I see people like me and like you and people who are not these crazy nut jobs. So I feel so much safer here in urban areas, you know, opposed to living out in East Texas or West Texas. I think that if I did, I don't know if I would be so open with it and so publicly about my politics.
It depends on where you are, your surroundings, how safe you feel in your surroundings. That's a good segue into the last topic I wanted to talk to you about. I sent you an article yesterday. So my wife pays attention to this woman called Sharon Says So. I don't know if you were familiar with her before I sent the thing, but she's real... explaining the nuts and bolts of how government works to people who don't know, because again, we don't really civically train, you know, or teach our kids in schools anymore. She does a good service, but sometimes bothsiderism comes up in her work, and she wrote something called The Scourge of Moral Narcissism, and I'll include a link to it in the notes for this interview, but she basically talks about how… it's a pretty simple, like, “we need to lower the temperature” call to everybody. She gives an example of group A and group B, and group A in this scenario bans blue cheese because they find it unclean to eat. And they're passing laws, even though studies show things are worse with the ban. More people die because more people, or just as many people, want the cheese. And then she talks about group B, who have decided that group A are monsters because of their beliefs, and, basically are shitty to them on the internet, is essentially what the setup is, and my problem is, you know, one group is legislating laws onto other people's bodies and the other group is being assholes on the internet. To me, there's just no equivalence. I wanted to get your take on the article, what you thought when you read it yesterday.
Well, I do think, like, we do have an issue, especially, like, on the left, with, like, this moral purity or how did she phrase it?
Moral narcissism.
Moral narcissism. You know because we have a lot of people online, especially, like, maybe on TikTok, I would say is the most place I see it.
Oh, really?
Where they're like, well, Kamala Harris has also been part of the Biden administration, who's funded Israel. So we're not gonna vote for her. Instead, we're gonna abstain from voting or we're gonna vote for a third party because of our moral narcissism. But, like we said, if Trump wins, it's goodbye for democracy, it's goodbye for liberty and freedom and justice for all, it's goodbye for all of that stuff. So I think that the term narcissism, I mean it really does fit in there because, even though they might be feeling “I'm voting my conscience,” in the long run you're hurting a lot of people. However, with that being said, I don't know if I see it as a both sides thing. You know, like take Texas for example. They passed a law to ban books because they don't want their child reading certain types of books. And now, they'll say it's because the books had pornography or explicit material, but when you look at the book lists, you have authors like Toni Morrison and W.E.B. DuBois. I mean, they aren't just banning, you know, books that have, what do they call it, spiciness, in it. They're also banning books that, you know, talk about civil rights. And so it... It's hard to both-sides fascism.
Yeah, yes, that's an excellent way of putting it. Her, the piece that we're talking about, the penultimate paragraph says, "is it a virtue to believe the right thing if that thing is actively harming your community? Is it an arrogance to believe that our personal opinions must be valued above everything else?" It's just, it's not my opinion that I'm putting above everything else. It's the desire for every human being on the planet earth to be treated with basic dignity and respect. That's, that's what I'm putting above everything else. It's not my opinion that that feels right. Their opinion is they don't like certain things, so no one should have access to it and they're going to pass laws for that. Again, like I said, it just doesn't seem, it's not apples and apples as far as I'm concerned. You know?
And you're right, and if you look at history, and you look at, specifically, Mussolini wrote a book in the 1930s called, it was more like a pamphlet, The Doctrine of Fascism. And they've translated it to English, so you can find it online. But it's really interesting, because they talk about the strong man, and they talk about the family, and they talk about Christian values. And, you know, the doctrine of fascism, which, you know, literally spelled out by Mussolini is the exact ideology that the right, I don't know if I would say especially the Texas right, has right now where you know they want to control your life, they want to control your body, they want to control what you see, what you do, what you, how you live, and to them it's all about… I would say religion, maybe? I don't know, I mean, because that's the way that they portray it. They portray it like, well, my god says that being gay is wrong, and therefore we're going to ban every book that has the word gay in it. You know? But it's just like... I don't know, in my opinion, the left is more like, “I do me, you do you”, you know, “let's just mind our own business.”
Right, exactly, and I mean, I think the best way of putting it is, and this is how we'll kind of end the conversation, but all those things you talked about, the things they wanna ban. It's just weird. It's weird behavior and we've got to come together in November to defeat this weirdness. So, anybody hearing the sound of our voices, please make sure you can vote. Please go vote. Please go vote for NOT Republicans and thanks for listening! Michelle, thanks so much for doing this interview with me. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much and take care.
Okay, thank you.