Latest / Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger / Defender of Election Integrity—for Real

Transcript

Defender of Election Integrity—for Real · Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everyone and welcome to Q&A.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jay Nordlinger and our guest today is Gabriel Sterling, an elections official in Georgia.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: He is the COO in the office of the Secretary of State who is Brad Raffensperger.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Both Raffensperger and Sterling are Republicans.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: They were two of the officials who in 2020 refused to falsify the presidential election.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: This was despite tremendous pressure from the president And the Republican Party at large.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier this year,
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Ravensburger tried to move up to governor and Sterling tried to move up to secretary
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: of state.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Neither one succeeded, but they have earned the gratitude of all Americans in my book.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I like my own book, as listeners know, Gabriel.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Nice to see you.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Good to see you, Jay.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's an honor to be asked to
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: be on with you.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, honor all around.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Are you in the state of Georgia this afternoon?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in Sandy Springs, Georgia.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And a little biography, please, or autobiography.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Where'd you grow up?
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I was born in Decatur, Georgia.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: And my family lore is that I was the first joint custody child after the divorce.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I lived basically all over metro Atlanta.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Anything with the word park in it, I seemed to live in for some period of time.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Inman Park, Candler Park, Mountain Park.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Went to Onona Park Elementary School.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like I was all over the place.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Destined for parks and rec.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And were you a politics minded kid or did that come later?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: I was a politics minded kid.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: I was nine years old when I wanted Ronald Reagan to be Jimmy Carter,
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: which was not the most popular thing in my third grade class in Atlanta, Georgia.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: I can tell you that much.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I was always that way to a degree.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: I went to high school.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was Pretty conservative.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: It was the Reagan era.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you get accused of being Alex P.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Keaton at that point because of the Family Ties television show.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: I went to University of Georgia when I was 17 and joined College Republicans immediately.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: And my very first press conference I ever did, I was 17 years old.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: We went to Hawkinsville,
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Georgia,
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: because Mike Dukakis for some reason decided that was a great place to campaign.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's the middle of the heart of South Georgia.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I had a bunch of people dress up and,
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: you know, pins,
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: striped soups like prisoners and say,
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: thanks for letting us out for the weekend, Mike.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that was what you did back in 1988.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I was the one chosen to talk to the press for some reason.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: There was a, I'll remind listeners and viewers, there was a furloughing scandal.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: In 1988.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And why, can you remember today what drew you to the Republican side?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Over the years, I've given this some thought.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: I believe there's two different kinds of conservatives.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's sort of gut conservatives who are just preternaturally lean that way from the womb.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's these sort of intellectual conservatives.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: I was sort of a gut conservative that rationalized it by reading
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: the intellectual conservative side.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of how that was the arch.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I started really with international politics more than a lot of this stuff
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: because my stepmother was Cuban.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: And her father,
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: when she was young,
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: In the beginning of the revolution,
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: they had a fertilizer factory that her grandfather had founded.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: And her father had married the daughter of her grandfather.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he was running the fertilizer factory.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: And he was a psychiatrist.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: And young men, 17,
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: 16, 18, 15-year-olds walked in with guns and said, none of this is yours anymore.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Then they had to leave the country.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: And within three months,
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: the fertilizer factory,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: which supplied a big portion of that area of Cuba, was not running anymore.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a very big lesson to learn early on.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, man, was it?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: I noticed something, Gabriel, in a write-up of you, and it made me smile.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think when you were 16, you volunteered for Senator Mack Mattingly.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I was 15, actually, but yes.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was in 1986.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to tell you that I, in 1984, was a college intern in the office of Senator Bob Dole.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a staffer who was very nice to me personally.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Young guy.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, not as young as I was, but he's probably in his 20s.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think from Georgia.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he said,
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: the senator I'd most like to work for is Matt Mattingly,
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: but he can't be reelected because Georgia is such a democratic state.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he won in 1980 and he's a wonderful senator.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: But it's going to be tough for him to be reelected.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And reading about you gave me that memory.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Are there Republicans today in Georgia of the Mattingly mold?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: There are still, in fact, Mack is still with us.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: He is still doing okay down at St. Simons.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Saw him last year.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, he's living his best life.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he became the ambassador to the Seychelles after he lost the Senate seat.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Today, there are two U.S. senators from Georgia who are Democrats.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Ossoff, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's Ossoff.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Ossoff and Warnock.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: They strike me as good politicians,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: capable politicians, whatever we think of their views and their votes.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Able politicians, would you say?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, absolutely.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: John Ossoff has a set of skills and he lost to Karen Handel in the special election
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: in the 6th Congressional District when Tom Price became HHS secretary.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: And by a small amount of votes.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the first indication that there might have been a problem going on
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: in terms of how voters were perceiving our situation.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he came back.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: And what we see from a lot of Democrats today is, let me go on MS now.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: Let me say the craziest thing I can and raise lots of money.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: Ossoff went very old school, in my opinion.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic constituent services,
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: keeps his head down, doesn't go on the national news that often.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: And he shows up at every groundbreaking where a federal dollar showed up.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: He will make sure that he's in every one of those towns,
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: and he has an operation he's built over the last five years,
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: and he's managed to put $42 million to get cash on hand for this coming election.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: He will be very difficult to beat.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Warnock is a different animal on that front.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: He's very much trying to get the national attention.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think more than anything, he is probably trying to run for president of the United States.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: And with the move of the Democrats putting the South Carolina primary first
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: on their calendar, Very large majority black vote.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: And Warnock will likely win that because he grew up in Savannah right next door.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Gabe, is South Carolina the new New Hampshire or is it the new Iowa even?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: I would call it the New Hampshire because it is still the first primary
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: where everybody gets to vote.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: So but that's what the Democrats do.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what New Hampshire does, I have no idea.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how they're going to react to it because they buy
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: by their state law has to put theirs ahead of it.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the Democrats basically say, if you go and campaign there, you lose delegates.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it'll be a fight.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a them thing to figure out.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: When I think of Kemp, I think of Jack Kemp.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: He's my Kemp, the Kemp I grew up with, so to speak.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: You have a Brian Kemp in Georgia.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Does he have a future in politics beyond the state or do you think probably not?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: He is an extremely talented retail politician,
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: and he's been very skilled at governing through some really choppy waters.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: and one of the big things that kind of defined him was he opened up the state
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: of Georgia before Florida did.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And not as flashy.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're speaking of the pandemic.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, the pandemic.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things I'm paraphrasing,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: basically, he had,
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: I believe,
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: an African-American barber came up to him and said, Governor, thank you so much.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you Hadn't allowed us to continue to work.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: There was a 5% chance I might get this disease.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: There was a 100% chance I was going to lose my business I'd built for 30 years.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: So when you have those situations, you can't just take into account one side.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: That was one of the things that I personally was not happy with the federal response
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: on was the overemphasizing.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: You have to balance all these things.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: You have to balance the economy.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: You have to balance lives.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: You have to balance education.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: You have to balance the science.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of people overcorrected,
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: but Kemp said,
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: you're all individuals,
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: you have agency,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: you can decide how you want to handle this,
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm not going to have the government just flatten everything out.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, Georgia, every state in America lost per capita GDP.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Georgia lost the least of all 50 states in the District of Columbia.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I credit Brian Kemp for that.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Gabriel Sterling,
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Election Day 2020,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: you know how they say in courtroom dramas, tell us in your own words?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they don't do this anymore, but the shows I grew up on.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sir, tell us in your own words, what happened after that in your life?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, to explain what happened after, we need to explain what happened a little bit before.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: We had a very close election for governor between Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Stacey Abrams would not concede.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: Stacey Abrams said the election was stolen.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Stacey Abrams filed a lawsuit saying that machines flipped votes.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, all these very familiar sounding things that we all got to hear post-2020,
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: we got to hear in 2018.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: What was the margin that year?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was about 50,000 votes.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was pretty close for a Georgia race.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: It was the closest it had been in 20 years.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the other thing for us.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Can I tell you something?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm interrupting you, Gabe.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm from a place called Ann Arbor, Michigan.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: In the 1970s, we had a mayoral race and Albert Wheeler's name was won by one vote.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that when I was a kid, that taught me the importance of voting one vote.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: But that's our town was, I don't know, 90,000 people.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: But please go ahead.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we were concerned about stolen election claims from the left.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of our voter outreach efforts were to liberal communities
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: and African-American communities and urban communities saying,
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: you can trust the system, the outcomes will be real.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: So we were focusing on that, thinking that was going to be the issue.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: But also a lot of people don't realize was this was the first election in Georgia
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: in 20 years where we actually had paper ballots because we had implemented
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: a brand new voting system.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, at the time, that was my Job title was Voting System Implementation Manager.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: We had a lottery for those bureaucratic sounding name and that won.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: So we- How to look on a business card.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: Took up a lot of room.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: Took up a lot of room.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's two lines.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: But so I,
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: when you're an elections official,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: as a Republican,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: yes, I cared who won, but you're so focused on, is everything working?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Is everybody who wants to vote able to vote?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Are there lines?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a car crash somewhere?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Is power out anywhere?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And election day went by great, very smooth, almost no lines.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: We had had 70% of the people already cast their votes by either early voting or absentee voting.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: So no lines.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: We had no real issues that day at all.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: So we were kind of like in a victory lap mode that night going, this is great.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Our system worked.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: There was no problems.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And really, it was about three o'clock the next day.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: When, as I said earlier, I kind of grew up in politics.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: In the afternoon, Gabe?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, three o'clock in the afternoon the next day.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I sort of did some back of the envelope math and saw what was out, where it was out from.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I pulled the team together.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: I said, okay, the president's going to lose by about 10,000 votes, give or take.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: And ended up being 11,779, which for some reason just sticks in my memory.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: So we knew that it was coming potentially.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, neither side,
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: either the Biden nor the Trump side,
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: were making any claims yet because there were so many votes still out because of
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: the overseas,
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: the UACAVA, which is the military and overseas votes, that they weren't sure.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then we were doing reconciliation.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: And there's always in every election in the world,
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: there's issues because the weakest part of the system is always a human being.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: And like in Floyd County, Rome,
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Georgia,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: which is Marjorie Taylor Greene's district, they had had an early vote vote.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Scanner that went out and they put it to the side and we're looking at the numbers.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: We saw 2,400 more check-ins and they had votes cast like, guys, you're missing a box.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: So they had to go and find this box they put to the side to re-scan.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: So they put those in.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then in Walton County, there was a memory card they were missing.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's like four of these little things.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's a few thousand votes here,
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: a couple of hundred votes there, then these 8,000 other votes.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I could see and I basically knew where it was coming from.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was on November 9th that the real issues began.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that was when I got a text message from someone who had worked in our office
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: who was then working for Senator Loeffler.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And they said,
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: and it was a copy of a press release with the two senators calling
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: on Secretary Raffensperger to resign.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I said back to them, aha, funny joke.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: And they said, no, no, this is getting released in five minutes.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I was sort of caught off guard with that because it didn't make any sense to me.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because I knew we were doing a good job.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it was released.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a day that the sexualized death threats started showing up
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: on Secretary Raffensperger's wife's phone.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: The death threats started coming in.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's where the damn broke of just craziness.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Did you yourself get threats?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Not in the first couple of days, but yeah, they started coming.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, because I became the face when I would go and do the press conferences, obviously.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: So emails, text messages, phone calls.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: I got this weird FedEx package at my house.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: The police had to come and get it.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was a bizarre time.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: But again, at the same time, Jay, I've said this to audiences before.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody in America should know who the heck I am.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: But because of all the craziness, a lot of people do.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you said in the beginning that there's a lot of pressure.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess there was pressure, but there was never a time.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: I've had people ask me, when did you decide to do the right thing?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: I say, well, we didn't have a meeting.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: You just do the right thing.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: You follow the law.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is not rocket science.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: I will speech on that.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: I may lay it on you later, but I understand what you I'll lay it on you now.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: OK.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a story I've told, I've written many times in different contexts.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: In a former life, I was a student of golf, knew a fair amount about golf and its history.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: In the 1925 U.S. Open, Bobby Jones called a penalty on himself, a two-stroke penalty.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you're a fellow Georgian.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: No one else saw it.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: He was the only one who knew.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: But golf is a game of honor.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he called a penalty on himself.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he wound up losing the Open by a stroke.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: By a stroke.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Know that story.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And later, when people praised him for his sportsmanship and honesty, he would have none of it.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: He scoffed.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: He said, sooner praise a man for not robbing a bank.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I agree with the principle.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with Bobby Jones.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: So Sterling obeyed his oath.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: He followed the law.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: So did Raffensperger.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Tough.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Big deal.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: It is a big deal because so many other people were robbing banks or wanting to.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: You, Mike Pence,
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Stephen Richer in Arizona,
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Rusty Bowers in Arizona, other Republican officials who are responsible.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: All honor to you.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, you shouldn't praise a man for not robbing a bank.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: But in a time of bank robbing, it's exceptional.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why you get where, as we said in the 1970s, you get where I'm coming from.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I appreciate it.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I still, I mean,
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: listen, I was at Costco earlier today and I had the gas station attendant thank me.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just, it's, and it's still, it's pretty consistent.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember there was once very early on,
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: it was one of the first early times that I got thanked, I guess.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was at Publix, which is the grocery store chain here in Metro Atlanta.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: It goes from Florida and Georgia.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was a little further north than that.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a young African-American man wearing a mask and he was,
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: Mopping, he was down the floor cleaning up a spill.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: He saw me and he got up immediately.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's Mr. Sterling, Mr. Sterling.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, yes, I just want to thank you so much.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is my first vote.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so proud to know that you were defending it.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I got I'm getting teary eyed now thinking about it.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: That was the first time I realized it was a thing.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: So but that was that was a moving moment.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I know that the Raffensperger's had police protection or FBI protection.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Were you ever afforded such protection?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's a funny story because before I was in this role at the secretary's office,
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was a city councilman in Sandy Springs,
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Georgia,
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: which was a city that I had worked for years with many people in our community,
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Eva Galambos,
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Rusty Paul, the current mayor, Eva Galambos, the first mayor to make a city in 2005.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: We were the first new city in Georgia in probably 50 years.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so what we did was, Was I worked with the police and everything.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I called the police chief and said,
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: hey, I'm not asking for protection, but can you do anything?
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, we can put a car in front of your house.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like a car with a cop.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, no, no, just a car.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: So they would put a car in front of my house.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: So at night it would get like, you know, frost on it and everything.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: So when people ask me, like the media would talk about your protection.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: I said, well, we don't talk about my protection because in fact I had no protection.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: But it sounds like you do because we don't talk about it.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we had a show.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: My grandfather sold insurance for a living.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't know my grandfather,
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: but I think he said that leaving the lights on at night is
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: the best home insurance you can buy, he would say.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Your police car reminded me of that.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier in our talk, you mentioned, I don't want to screw up the number, 11,779 votes.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Biden won by.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, sir.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so President Trump asked for just one more.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny they didn't build himself a little cushion.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Why not 100 more?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why not 1,000 more?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: He asked for, he said, find 11,780 votes.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's a specific number.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you get the intention.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the funny part about that phone call was when they did it,
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking to my boss, Jordan Few.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: She was the deputy secretary of state.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: We were on the phone on that Saturday afternoon.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: She goes, oh, I got to go.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to have a phone call with the president.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I go, wait, wait, what?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: Click.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, so for about 18 hours, I was stewing.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: I said, well, I should be on that phone call.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: I know more about this than anybody.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then I heard the phone call on the Washington Post the next,
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: I guess, around noon the next day.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, wow, I am really glad I was not on that phone call.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: Secretary Raffensperger and Ryan Germany,
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: their demeanor of having somebody rant at them for 56 minutes and basically saying,
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: well, the problem you have, Mr. President, is your numbers are just wrong.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: And just calmly saying that it was just the best way to deal with the situation.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: Remember,
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: this is the guy who had said he was an enemy of the people,
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: had forced people to call him to resign,
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: had caused death threats and people had gotten to his property.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: And yet he was coming to him saying, come on, give me a break.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Let's find these votes for me, man.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it showed the transactional nature of the president as well.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: The other stuff doesn't matter.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's a transaction for him.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: On Thanksgiving Day in the White House, he called Raffensperger an enemy of the people.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: Talk for a minute, if you will, about Dominion voting systems.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they won a big defamation suit against Fox News.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people convinced a lot of the country
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: that there was something fraudulent about Dominion.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: But there isn't, is there?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: No, there's not.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's not with any of these things.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: In Georgia specifically, I mean,
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: one of the things they were claiming was that there was fractional votes,
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: which I still only kind of understand, are votes that were flipping.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: We literally did the regular count.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Then we did a hand tally,
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: and the hand tally came within 0.1052% of the overall votes cast and 0.0099% of
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: the margin,
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: essentially showing through a hand count that
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: the machines absolutely counted correctly the ballots presented to them.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then we did a recount again, and that became the final certified number of 11,779.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is the funny part.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: All the actual evidence shows the systems worked.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: There is literally no real evidence showing it didn't.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: In fact,
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: in Georgia,
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: the way you do this in Georgia and in most states is you file an election challenge
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: and you eventually go to court and you present your evidence.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: In Georgia,
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: the day before they had to go to court and sit down with lawyers
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: and start swearing people saying certain things,
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: the president's team withdrew their own lawsuit.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Something about being under oath.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, something about being under oath.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: Under threat of perjury.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: I met two women, a mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: They were election, they were Fulton County election workers.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Rudy Giuliani defamed them.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: Their lives were turned upside down.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: They were threatened.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know those women?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: Gabe, I've been around Ruby more than Shay, but I know them.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was really funny because when I first dealt with Shay actually was before
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: the election.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: And here I am, the state Republican guy walking into the Fulton County office.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: I got I got some side eye.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what is this guy doing here?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: But no, they obviously were just doing their jobs and they had been there all day.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that's always bothered me about the state farm situation,
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: which is where they were working.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's where they were counting the absentee ballots.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: There was tape showing my age.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: There was video showing everything that happened.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: I say tape too.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Golf clubs are still irons.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: They haven't been made out of irons for years.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Tape, yeah.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: For 48 hours, showing everything that happened in that room.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Anybody with a semblance of good faith could watch that and know nothing bad happened there.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because like the suitcases of ballots that were pulled out,
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: you literally see them being put under the tables
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: because all these people genuinely thought they were going to get to go home.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: So they're putting them in there,
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: putting seals on them to control the chain of custody in front of the press,
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: in front of the monitors, in front of everybody else.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then under the no good deed goes unpunished.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: The state found out that they were shutting down,
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: and we got annoyed because everybody else was counting to try to finish.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted to get to a result.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted to finish the work.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: So our elections director called their elections director and said, why are you shutting down?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: And their elections director, Rick Barron, said, we're not shutting down.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, no, not you, Rick.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: At the other location, your manager there says he's shutting down.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: So he calls him and says, you can't.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: So you can literally go to the video and see Ralph Jones,
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: who's the guy there in charge, getting the phone call from Rick.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: And his shoulders slump.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: And he's being told, you have to keep on going.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, all these people are working.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: They're mainly women.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: And they've been there since like, you know, six in the morning.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: It is now 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: And you see him literally walk over some other boxes, kind of pull himself together.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, I got to go tell these people they got to stay.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: He walks over to the corner of a desk, puts his hands down, says, okay, ladies, you got to stay.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: You see him take their coats off and they go pull the things they just put away
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: and start working again.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, anybody with any sense of fairness knows Nothing happened there,
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: but it looked so good on video.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: This is why I think AI is not as big of a deal,
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: because that was real video with a false narrative.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: It can do just as much, if not more damage.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Giuliani said they were passing around computer tabs like cocaine vials or something.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: There was a mint.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: A mint, yeah.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was a mint that they passed back.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: According to them,
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, but again, even if it was, if let's say they had a thumb drive, so what?
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't you can't do anything with it.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: And we hand tallied all these paper ballots, guys.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: they they take things that look weird and try to conflate to what people want
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: to hear that it was stolen and it was there was nefarious people involved.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: He was my heroic mayor here in New York, genuinely heroic, genuinely.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Gabriel Sterling, I saw some weeks ago, a few months ago, maybe pictures.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Of the director of national intelligence,
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Tulsi Gabbard, as she was then, sort of skulking around Atlanta.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: What was she doing?
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: As I understand it,
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: she was under directives from the president to try to root out the fraud and find
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: the fraud.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: And there had been discussions of an angle of foreign intelligence agencies
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: and actors trying to influence votes.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's two different ways foreign entities could potentially do things.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's the influence campaigns, which we are all aware.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: The Russians do it.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: The North Koreans do it.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: The Venezuelans did it.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: The Iranians do it.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: This is mainly through social media and social engineering where they try to do that.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Then there's the idea of actual interference,
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: which would be they somehow get in and mess with voter registrations or mess
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: with votes.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: There's no evidence of that happening.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: And at one point,
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: the Russians had gotten into a state's registration system and just sat there.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't do anything.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: But even then, the only thing they could really do was cause chaos.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: They couldn't, again,
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: flip votes or do anything because almost all voting machinery in America,
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: where the votes are tallied and kept, are not attached to the internet.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: So there's no real external way to do that.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: We hear these people talking about hacking and doing machines.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's really talking about individual machines that aren't connected to each other.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: So there's nothing, there's no cascading threat.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: And in the speech that President Trump gave,
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: I guess,
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: a couple of Thursdays ago,
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: there was the implication left that these machines are all open to hacking.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not what the intelligence reports that he then released said.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: In fact,
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: it literally said in the assessment,
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: That there is no viable threat that could cascade on a large scale.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: It just doesn't exist because of the nature of the vulnerabilities that are there.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because like any machine, there's a vulnerability.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: If there's an eighth floor window open in an office building,
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: that's a vulnerability, but not very easily exploited.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's right.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: The evidence the White House released contradicted the president's speech,
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: which should have bothered him.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: He seemed nonplushed about it, though.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not surprised.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: I have a view, Gabe.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: You tell me whether I'm right or wrong.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: People speak of constitutional guardrails.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I learned the phrase, a nation of laws, not men.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I always thought that our country sort of ran on a constitutional autopilot
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: or cruise control.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't believe that anymore.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: I believe that there are no constitutional guardrails anymore.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: The guardrails we have are flesh and blood are people like you, if you don't mind my saying so.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: You and Stephen Richer and the rest, you are the guardrails.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just...
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: Words on paper don't cut it.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, leaving yourself out of it, if you like, you contradict me.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me I'm wrong.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I just...
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: I guess I, at my age...
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'd never and I was something of a student of American government, American history.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: But at this late, late stage, I now understand that it has kind of run on the honor system.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Am I?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's kind of like it's kind of like golf.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: The rules are written down.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: We all know the rules.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: You need to play by those rules.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: When you have people who flout them, that's what the situation comes.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: It goes back to Scalia parchment guarantees.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: If we go back to when Scalia was discussing those kind of things.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: For me, America and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: the systems we put in were designed by beyond brilliant great men who happen
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: to be all in the same place at the right time.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it makes me think that there is a divine ordination almost for that
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: to have been able to occur to essentially take all these Enlightenment ideas.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: And take them and fight it out.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the one thing that a lot of people think,
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: they think all these old dead white guys got together and all agreed.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: And you and I know this was a slobber knocker, knockdown, drag out.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: How do we make this work?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: We have slaves.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have slaves.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about freedom.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about systems.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: We all know that human nature is terrible.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Mob rule would be awful.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, a royal system would be terrible.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: How do we have these things fight?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean –
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: And they willfully have handed away things to a point now where
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: the Supreme Court has stepped in and said, no, Congress, you're going too far.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the best things that's happened in a while was when they overturned Chevron.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the best part about that was we don't let bureaucrats write laws anymore.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: There has to be accountability.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm getting off from your question somewhat,
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: but it's an imperfectible system because it's human beings involved
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: in like every system.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: We are the most vulnerable part because we are human and we are fallen
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: and we are flawed and we will screw up and we will try to hide our screw ups instead
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: of trying to do that.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's all the human nature coming in at one time.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: But America has been the best way, the best light to make that work.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: And when I talk to people,
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: because I had an opportunity to go around the country now and say,
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: You have to realize something.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: You do live in the best country in the world.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: I know it feels awful right now, and you're told all the time how terrible it is.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, we literally now all carry the font of all humanology in our pocket.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you get sick, you're going to get treated, and you're going to get well.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: We may not know how to pay for it yet, but we're working on that.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're going to live longer.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: Your kids have the best opportunities in the history of mankind.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: If you're an artist before this,
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: the reason it was a starving artist is because no one could see your stuff.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now you have Etsy.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: We have so many possibilities of what you could do,
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: and yet everybody's walking around pissed off.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't fully understand it.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: We have access to every bit of music, art, history, writing.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like still, it's not enough for some people.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, what do you want?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: There was a comedian one time talking about when the internet,
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: when they first got the internet on airplanes,
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it went out and the guy said, oh, typical.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, you're flying at 700 miles an hour,
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: 30,000 feet, and you're complaining the internet that didn't exist 10 minutes ago
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: for you is now not there.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: During a pandemic, there was a lot of complaining about Zooming.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you and I are Zooming now.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I said that when I was growing up,
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: futuristic shows,
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: television and movies,
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: showed a person talking to another person in this box thousands of miles away.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just Widely fantastic.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can hardly imagine.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: And here we are, we're living it and griping about it.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: Gabe, a lot of people,
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: they've been convinced that through politicians and the media they consume,
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: that our elections are not secure.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: Are our elections by and large secure?
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, 2020 was secure.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: 2022 was more secure.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: 2024 was more secure than that.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: And 2026 is going to be more secure than the previous ones because we learn
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: and we grow and we do better.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: We put in better systems and better controls.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're secure.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, every state in America now votes on paper.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: Except for Louisiana, and they're coming around soon.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: They've had some procurement issues.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, almost every state in America has audits.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Every state in America has some kind of system to try to verify the individuals
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: who are voting, whether it's voter ID or some other kind of swearing.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: Every state has citizenship at some level of verification,
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: not as strong as Georgia in some cases, but it's all over the country.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: Very few non-citizens actually get on the rolls.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Even scantily fewer than that actually vote because the risk reward is so low.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: if you vote in a presidential election as a non-citizen and you're trying to get
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: to be a citizen,
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: you've committed a felony,
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: you've lost your past citizenship,
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: and you're going to get deported for one vote out of 160 million cast,
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: which is nothing.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't make any actual sense at the end of the day.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: Do people sometimes do it accidentally because the government has said,
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: hey, you're registered now because we screwed up?
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: That happens.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know it is scantily small, scantily small.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: And there's going to be illegal voting in every election,
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: but fraud, a large scale planned fraud is not a real thing.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: The same way that large scale planned suppression is not a real thing.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: You're two sides of the same coin and they're both used to stir up their bases and raise money.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the bad part of it is the incentives are for the left
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: to say you're being suppressed and they're all racist
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: and they're stealing your votes away from you.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: And for the right to say,
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: They're all committing fraud and stealing elections with non-citizens voting because
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: the only way we can lose this election is if they steal it,
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: which is not the case if you look at the previous 250 years or so.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: You lose elections sometimes, then you come back in two years and you win elections.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's how it normally is supposed to go.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: Gabe, there are people who want to federalize our elections.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: Is this a bad idea?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: Not only is it a bad idea,
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: it's a horrifically,
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: ridiculously stupid idea because one of the best Steve McLaughlin One
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: the biggest pieces of security we have is
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: the 10,000 individual jurisdictions doing things ever so slightly differently.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: Once you centralize,
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: if there's a vulnerability,
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: a key point vulnerability,
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: it can be exploited,
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: and then it can be cascaded because they can learn from those things.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's a ridiculously bad idea to federalize our elections.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: Some baseline stuff, non-citizens can't vote.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, we all agree on that, and that's a federal law.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: That makes sense.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: But the processes, procedures, procedures, I mean, Alaska is very different from Georgia.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: Utah is very different from Michigan.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Arizona is very different from Massachusetts.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: So the local proclivities of these,
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: one of the interesting things in America is east of the Mississippi,
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: mail-in voting is a lot bigger.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, sorry, west of the Mississippi, mail-in voting is a lot bigger because of the scale.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's a lot of rural areas.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Utah, a very, very deep red state has been doing a vote by mail for, gosh, 20 years now.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: in Georgia,
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: a deep sort of purplish state,
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: We did pandemic mail voting,
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: but when we got to go back to voting in person, we voted in person.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's a cultural thing here.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we have one of the largest African-American populations in America.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: They love doing souls to the polls.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: They show up.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I like voting in person.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: We should open your ID and you vote.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: So 95% of us vote in person.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Florida is a mixed bag.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, that's because they're culturally different.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: Everything south of Orlando is actually Yankee land.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Everything north of Orlando is southern.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a very different cultural shift in that state.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's so interesting.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: North of Orlando is Southern.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: South of Orlando is Southern.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: How interesting.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: How counterintuitive,
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: so to speak.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Gabe, a couple more here at the end.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: I said once to, I was interviewing, doing a podcast like this with Thomas Sowell.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I said,
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: do people scurry up to you and say they like you and look around so,
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: being sure no one's watching and they whisper they like you and scurry off?
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, he said, I call this private support.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I'm right, as in, I'm right behind you, Tom, way behind you.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Do you, Gabriel Sterling,
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: among Republicans, have you in the last, since 2020, have you had private support?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: People who whisper to you, good going, I'm proud of you.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: But who shrink from saying so in public?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's some of that.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: Not much, though.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds like not much.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: The most frustrating ones is when there's elected officials.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: They said, we know you did the right thing.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: We understand it wasn't stolen, but we've got to do this for our people.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: We've got to do this and that for the president.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, you really don't.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: You can choose not to.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: But it's hard sometimes.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things I don't want people to walk away from this There are tens
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: of millions of good, honest,
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: hardworking,
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: God-fearing Americans who have questions and have been told by people they love
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: and trust that bad things happened.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: We should never dismiss their concerns.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: They should be talked to and educated as best we can and explain to them
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: that this stuff didn't happen.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: I've got family members who to this day are still a little concerned about it.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that I think oftentimes on the left
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: that they don't understand, why do so many of the Republicans still love Trump?
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: What is it?
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I finally kind of figured it out to a degree
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: because I had somebody I love and know very well said,
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Trump's the only one who fought for us.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, Romney fought for you.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: Ryan fought for you.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: Gingrich fought for you.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: Help.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: Robert Taft has been fighting.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: If we go farther than the fact,
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: you've had people fighting for the values you care about for years.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: But what they didn't have for 50 years,
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: people who believe like you and I do to a degree have had sand kicked in our face by
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: the people on the coasts and the big media and culture.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been told that we're racists and stupid.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: And Donald Trump hit those guys in the mouth.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: And for a lot of Americans, it felt good to have somebody finally hit them in the mouth.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now,
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't like it because I don't think that's that's that's not how we play cricket,
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: you know, as we.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: We're conservatives.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: We are better than that.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: But that's part of the emotional appeal for it, I think.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I've had some people still in the area that I live in.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was a pretty Republican area.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's sort of a mixed area.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: I got a lot of support, a lot of very verbal get them.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I've had very little to my face.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: Go die in a fire kind of thing.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: I remember I went to a Republican convention to a precinct caucus meeting.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: And one woman just came to my face and said, you helped steal this election.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, ma'am, you were just incorrect.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I apologize if you think that way.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll be happy to answer any questions you have.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: She goes, no, I just know you did it.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: She walked off.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then a woman I'd known for a long time said, well, don't go to the convention.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to throw rocks at you.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, oh, you're not really going to throw rocks at me.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, oh, I will.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: I will throw rocks at you.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't go to that convention.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to test that that hard.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I believe we break through these things over time.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even now,
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's 50 or 60 percent of Republican voters still think
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: the election was stolen.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: But for me, that's great progress because in 2021 it was 90 percent.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it's all about perspective.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if you keep on telling the truth and keep on doing the work
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: and watch how governing occurs.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: People will want stability.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: People will want sanity.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the problem right now is the incentives on both sides are
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: the crazier thing you say,
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: the more money you raise,
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: the more clicks you get,
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: the more times you're on Fox News and MS Now and Newsmax and you raise more money.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: Doing the boring,
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: deliberative work of actually governing doesn't get you kudos,
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: doesn't get those kind of things.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it's hard.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really hard.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Governing is hard.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: I have been a city council person.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: I have this one thing that I love that I tell people,
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: if I could do one Total unconstitutional king for a day thing.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone for higher office, state house, state senate, governor, congress, senator, president.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: You have to serve one full four-year term on a city council, county commission, or school board.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: You have to look your constituents in the eyes.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: You have to take responsibility for what you do.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if it's a council of six, you have to learn how to count to four.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because all these people who throw bills out for the sake of throwing a bill out,
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: knowing it's not going to go anywhere,
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: wasting everybody's time and emotional energy,
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: We have a responsibility gene that normally runs through the American politics.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: We usually figure it out.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: This is an odd time.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not one of those things.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: I do not believe Donald Trump caused it.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think he's a symptom of the outcome based on social media,
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: based on the speed of information, and based on how we do a lot of our systems now.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think he was an inevitability.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that Mondami,
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: similarly in New York,
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: was an inevitability based on the situations there and the fact
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: that young people don't know what the heck socialism actually is.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Going back to my earlier statements about my stepmother's father in Cuba,
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: we learn,
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: we will stumble, we will skin our knee, we'll be like, oh, can't do that again.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll get through all this.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like the Republican Party will find its way back.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: I remember, as I've read about this one, In 1974, we were toast.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: We were dead.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then Carter came in 76,
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: and then four years later,
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: Ronald Reagan wins, and then four years after that, he wins 49 states.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if we can have somebody win 49 states again,
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: but I think we probably can at some point in the future when we kind
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: of figure it out and have a better understanding of each other.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Gabriel Sterling,
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard it said,
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think women say that if you give birth to a child,
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: you don't want to think about being pregnant.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: There has to be a decent interval before you think about being pregnant again.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: I know you had a political race recently, so maybe too soon.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: But do you think you may run for some office again?
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: Or are you in a never say never mode or?
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to be.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: There was a joke that people said about me for a long time when I was younger,
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: that the only thing that would get politics out of my blood is embalming fluid.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I you never know.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm never going to say never.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: I can't not fight for the values that I believe it's impossible for me to not do it
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: on some level.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, whether it's.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: In my community,
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: I serve on a little local board called the Standish Prince Conservancy that works
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: on green space and parks,
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: because I believe in that de Tocquevillian kind of way that
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: if you don't stay engaged in your local community, you're not doing the right thing.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I go to my farmer's market and I see people and I help people where I can.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I there's.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: I never want to say never, but it's not exactly top of my list right now.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a nine-month-old at home.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: I went for 10 months with making no money while I was running the campaign.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I got to go earn some money back.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: My wife's kind of thinking, it's about time.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: You need to start bringing it back in.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, yes, ma'am.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm never going to say never.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm 55.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: And heck, the presidents are all 80 now.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I'm not crazy enough or self-important enough to ever consider running for that.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, there's...
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think service at all levels is to be appreciated.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: Ladies and gentlemen, we have been hearing from Gabriel Sterling of Georgia.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jay Nordlinger doing Q&A.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: Gabe, thank you.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for this talk and thank you for your service, if I may.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: Your public service.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's an honor to be here with you.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're one of our favorites, so I appreciate it.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: So long, everyone.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: Till next time.