The SAVE America Act’s Assault on Voting Rights (Half the Answer #67A, with Hunter CG)

Trent and Caitlin chatted with Hunter CG of RoteRote Media and Democrats Abroad, looking at the GOP's latest assault on voting rights, the SAVE America Act. This act has passed the House of Representatives and will be addressed by the Senate in the next couple of days. They talk about all the different ways this piece of legislation disenfranchises voters in the US and abroad, and they exhort everyone to reach out to their senators and make it clear that its passing would be unacceptable.

Half the Answer can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Resources:

https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/9-things-to-know-about-the-proposed-save-america-act

https://www.tiktok.com/@roterotemedia

https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/save-act-lgbtq-voters

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/nation-world/senate-to-vote-on-save-america-act-as-voter-id-debate-intensifies-susan-collins-chuck-schumer-photo-id

Transcript

**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:30]**
Well, happy days are here again. And well, you know that understanding a question is half of an answer, and this is, of course, Half the Answer with your host, Trent R. Nelson, and Caitlin M. Green. We're co-hosts. And well, you know this one — he writes and edits and philosophizes and historicizes and talks on the camera too. And then we've got Caitlin who, well, she is just the bee's knees, cat's meow. She's madre. She is linguist, she is writer, she's editor. She does everything that you could ask for. And she comes on to the program and we talk, and it's a good deal. Caitlin, how are you? How are you feeling?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:00]**
Dog bollocks.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:15]**
That's a good question. I'd like to dedicate this episode to my close personal friend and then-savior, pseudoepinephrine. It's keeping me alive at this time. So it's fine, it's good, and it's fine.

**Hunter CG [00:01:29]**
Right? You?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:32]**
Hey, you're not the first person to make it through a long battle on speed. But Caitlin, what is the word? What are we doing today? Who are we talking to and what are we talking about? It's another big day because, well, the fascists are trying to take away freedoms. How does that intersect with what we're doing right now?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:51]**
Oh, I'm so excited. We got another attack on our freedoms coming down the pike right now. It's called the SAVE Act, and so I wanted to bring Hunter on to talk about it, because he's been researching it, and he has a connection to the ways that it really affects the people that he works with. So I would love to welcome Hunter CG. The CG, of course, does stand for Caitlin Green. We all know this.

Hunter CG, better known online as Rota Rota Media, a political content creator who covers Europe, the US, and far-right politics. He's an officer in Democrats Abroad, which is the Democratic Party's organization for Americans abroad. He is a longtime activist, formerly holding leadership positions with the UK's Fabian Society, Austria's Solidarität, and the Young European Socialists. He's worked in politics and comms for 17 years. How can that be? You look so young, you're so youthful, on both sides of the Atlantic. Well, my resolution is not that good.

And he has a forthcoming book about politics and our future coming out later this year, and it's called *We Could Have Had It All*. There's no brackets, "Rolling in the Deep" — it's just *We Could Have Had It All*. Welcome, Hunter.

**Hunter CG [00:02:18]**
That's canonical. I appreciate that.

**Hunter CG [00:02:54]**
And look, there's white hair coming out here. But —

**Trent R. Nelson [00:03:02]**
No, hey —

**Hunter CG [00:03:14]**
Exactly, exactly, exactly. Well —

**Hunter CG [00:03:18]**
It is so lovely to be here, and it is actually awesome to finally get to chit-chat face to face. And yeah, the SAVE Act is not a good time, and unfortunately, it is being heavily undersold in the US media — how bad a time it actually will be.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:03:33]**
Right.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:03:37]**
Right. Let's go into the thing. Yeah, let's do it.

**Hunter CG [00:03:38]**
Want me to launch into a spiel? Yeah, all right.

**Hunter CG [00:03:42]**
So, all right. The SAVE Act — most people know it from a version that was kicking around last year, and now we're on versions two and three that are both sitting in Congress right now. One of them is called the Make Elections Great Again bill, and then the other one is the SAVE AMERICA Act, one of them significantly longer than the other. And in my professional opinion, more well-constructed to do evil stuff, and the other one's a bit more of a sledgehammer. But both of them do effectively the same thing, and that is disenfranchise millions and millions of voters. But particularly for me and Democrats Abroad, it would effectively wipe out every single abroad voter by forcing them to in-person go and cast their ballot and prove their citizenship, which would honestly balloon costs to thousands and thousands of dollars for people.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:01]**
Good God.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:38]**
So do they mean that you have to go to the US to do this, or can you — is it like you could go to your consulate or something?

**Hunter CG [00:04:45]**
Nope, nope. You would need to go back to wherever you were registered to vote and go to your local elections office to prove your citizenship. So it is a physical thing. And yeah, exactly — your brain starts tickling at that, and you're like, wait a minute, that seems like a bad idea.

So it's not just the Americans abroad who have to do this. This would be for every single American — you would have to go and make sure that you could prove citizenship in person to a local election office. If you're not a giant nerd and know a lot about nitty-gritty election stuff, election offices are not very well staffed or funded, and they've been underfunded for many, many years — probably your entire life — in your area, unless you're very, very lucky.

So this major plan — it's basically being sold in the media as a voter ID law, but that's the lowest-level version of what this is trying to do. The goal of this law is to be a doubt machine. It is meant to cast doubt on the election by forcing election systems to effectively buckle through a very, very quick and required verification process that inside this bill — all the versions of it, mind you — has around three- and four-day turnaround clocks. And if your local election worker does not hit these particular clocks on sending things in — and imagine you're trying to do this in New York City or any major metropolitan area — you would start having the situation where that person would be now criminally liable for doing some sort of illegal election action, even though they're just trying to process the paperwork that now is newly existent.

Half of the bill basically goes immediately into effect, and this will hit elections immediately after this. So even primaries, depending on when it gets passed, or if it gets passed — it actually becomes a lot more dangerous the closer it's passed to the election, because there's less lead time for anyone to do anything.

So that's one part of it that's all quite bad. And the main function there is to basically be like, okay, why were these ballots not turned in, or why didn't the verification happen, and create these chains of questions on whether someone is ready to vote.

The other major thing is the SAVE database. So this is the MAGA plan to require every single secretary of state — so that's your state-level election czar, basically the king of elections in your state — to turn over all the voter rolls to DHS, to Kristi Noem. And then Kristi Noem and DHS will go through this big list, this big SAVE database, and determine who is a real citizen and who is not a real citizen. And this is the list that they will be checked against from your local election office sending information. But ultimately, DHS gets to decide if you're a citizen or not. And so that's all very, very bad.

And currently — I haven't checked this in a couple of weeks — but they were suing 44 states to get their voter rolls. Currently, they tried to also do this through an executive order a little while ago, but it got immediately slapped down in the court because, in the American system, the President does not run the elections. The federal government doesn't run the elections. The states run the elections, and the localities run the elections.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:07:23]**
Yeah, didn't we just have a whole war in Minneapolis over whether Kristi Noem could have our voter rolls? Wasn't that a whole thing?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:07:48]**
No, no, so — so this is a doubt machine, of course. But needless to say, Americans — known for our determination to do things, even if it takes a lot of paperwork, right — this is going to depress turnout, just naturally, because so many people are not going to go to their office, to their election office, to do this. It's just — and they know that this is part of that, they know that this will stop people from doing that, because historically, we need to remove barriers to get people to vote, not increase the barriers to get people to vote.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:08:32]**
Now, Trent, you're talking a lot of sense, okay? And I have seen people talk themselves out of voting because they weren't totally confident that they would be able to do it correctly, right? And go to the right place, or fill it out right, or whatever. And so this is just another huge opportunity for people to fall off the voting train, which is the opposite of what we want, but clearly not the opposite of what the Republicans want, because they keep doing this shit.

2002 — I remember, and I feel like we're just constantly relitigating the early 2000s. This feels exhausting. I was in middle school at the time. It was bad enough, and now we're doing it again. I don't want to be in middle school again. I can't go back.

**Hunter CG [00:08:56]**
I get it. I hate the flashbacks of the Bush years that just come through all the time. I'm just like, oh God, I did this once. Why? Why again?

But the thing that is much more different — and this is probably also why the media is failing at it — is that they are assuming it is like those earlier voter ID things. So the main issue back then was that a lot of people don't have IDs. For whatever reason — it's kind of irrelevant — but the states generally do not give out free IDs, and that means you create some sort of effective poll tax to access the election. And because there is poverty in America and some extreme poverty in America, it's just not a thing that will be possible unless the government is literally handing out IDs to every single person and then regularly remembering to make sure everyone still has IDs.

So that's the basic level of a voter ID issue on accessing the vote, and it has been proven time after time after time to depress the vote. Most famously, in one of the recent UK elections, the man who passed voter ID there, Boris Johnson, showed up at his polls, and they couldn't let him vote immediately because he forgot to bring voter ID. Because things like just forgetting you brought it with you are a big deal.

And for some reason, the Republicans like to play on the game that you've never actually voted before. And while some people haven't, most people have. And you know that there's a person there with a big, giant chart with a ton of names, and your name is literally there — once you sign it next to it, that's it. That's the whole thing. And then if someone else comes there and they're like, "I'm also this person," they're like, "No, you are not. It's not here. There is a provisional ballot, and then we're going to check this, and now you've created a problem for me." And that's the poll worker's job. That's literally what they're there for.

But the other thing — we need to put away the idea that it's just a voter ID thing, because it's not just voter ID. It's about citizenship proving and whether or not DHS has the right to determine if you are a citizen. If you think back on all of your IDs that you have in your pocket right now, very few of them have your citizenship on it. Only really your birth certificate has it, or your passport, or tribal documents and a couple of other things.

But most importantly, a lot of people will change their names. Women will change their names. Trans people will change their names. People who don't like their names — this is just a thing, and it's millions of people who have done this. By very, very conservative estimates, 69 million women in the US right now have changed their names through marriage. That's a lot of people. And they want your birth certificate document to be the same as what your ID document is, which is the same as your voter registration. And if you can't do that — sorry, Charlie. Right?

And you can get these documents amended. But no one even knows that that's a process most of the time, and way fewer people have ever done it. It's just not a thing you ever need to really do, unless someone creates an insane, Kafkaesque system.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:12:20]**
Yeah, which — I'm gonna say real quick — just changing my name after marriage was annoying enough, right? I had to go to multiple offices, wait in a bunch of lines, talk to a bunch of different people, figure out the exact right order so that I would have the documents I need for the next guy in order beforehand. It was so annoying. A lot of my friends who got married were like, "I'm not doing it because I don't want to deal with all that admin." And I get it.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:12:47]**
Every time my mom moves to a different state, it's like a whole kerfuffle every time because they ask her about her maiden name, then they ask her about her first marriage's name, and then the second marriage's name. And they're caught.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:12:54]**
Yeah. Have you ever had another name? Yeah? Oh, if you've been married multiple times, it is — and my dad has had multiple last names because he took the last name of his stepfather each time his mom remarried. So that's its own thing.

**Hunter CG [00:13:07]**
Oh, my God, that would be horrible.

**Hunter CG [00:13:16]**
Nah, your dad messed up. He should have kept adding hyphens, and he'd have some giant initials.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:13:22]**
He should have the longest name in the world. Yeah.

**Hunter CG [00:13:27]**
But so the other big thing — and this is one that I've not, unfortunately, heard nobody talk about apart from basically Democrats Abroad — a lot of people's birth certificates were not digitized, or still remain undigitized. If you lived in a place — so, for example, I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana. I lived through Hurricane Katrina. A lot of people have paper records. Then some of the hospitals they were born in do not exist anymore. So you have effectively people who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s — some even around my age as well — who will have no documents from this period. They'll just have a newly reissued one.

And we have to remember, these are people acting in good faith. They want to depress the vote. The reason they're trying to force this through at this particular moment, now, instead of later, closer to the presidential election, is because they know they're facing some cosmic-level wipeouts. And you don't have to be the biggest Democratic fan to just read the tea leaves in front of you. Places that were ruby red Trump literally 13 months ago are swinging 20 points Democratic. This is just bonkers stuff. Rural Louisiana seats that — if you told me literally two years ago that they were winnable, I would be like, "You're out of your damn mind."

**Trent R. Nelson [00:14:38]**
Places that haven't voted blue since Richard Brevard Russell was in the Senate. Yeah, insane stuff.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:14:30]**
And it's a huge swing. Yeah.

**Hunter CG [00:14:43]**
Yeah, and they're looking at FDR-level wins for the Democrats, and that is terrifying them, because things have changed. They have pushed way too hard. There is a reckoning that will come.

So what do you do? You need to be able to pick your voters. And this is the most extreme way of doing that. They tried to play the game on the redistricting, but there's a hard limit on how much they can wiggle based on how many state houses they control. But what they can do is try to create the illusion that they control elections, to try to create the illusion that they determine who is and isn't a legal voter.

And this, if it passes, will not only create the legal mechanisms to justify the kind of conspiracy they keep pushing, but then give it a way to create so much more doubt. It's a solution to create doubt. That's — like I said — the doubt machine.

The other thing that I caught that's sticking in my head is that during segregation and earlier periods — so this would be people in their 60s, 70s, 80s — they would have not had birth certificates issued to them in some hospitals. So this affects primarily Native Americans, Black people, other minorities in the Pacific Northwest. And this is a significant number of people. We're talking several hundred thousand people.

And then, going back to my group and Democrats Abroad — that's 7 million voters. That's enough to swing every single election, some districts — that is a lot of people. And remember, we think of this big number of 333, 340 million Americans, but half of those people are children, and then less of those people are registered voters. So when we're talking about 7 million people getting knocked off, this is huge chunks of the total vote, and large chunks of vote in very specific districts too.

**Hunter CG [00:16:36]**
It's hard to understate how extreme this is. And as I said earlier, whether we're talking about the MEGA bill, which is the big 18-page-long one, or we're talking about the new SAVE AMERICA Act, which is, I think, three pages or something — these are both very intense and extreme things.

And then we got to add what Donald Trump wants to add in addition to what is already in the bills, because he wants to go much further. He wants to ban mail-in voting. He wants to nationalize elections — that's the thing he's caught on.

And if you go back, I don't know, middle of January or something, or maybe early January, they were at their little retreat, I think in Florida or somewhere, for the congressional Republicans to basically talk about how they're going to win the election. And this was what he talked about. He was like, "We have to pass the SAVE Act. If we don't pass the SAVE Act, we will lose." This is the strategy. There is nothing else. It is not trying to campaign better. It's not coming up with a better policy. It's not trying to make Americans like him more. It's, "Let's kick a bunch of people off the voter rolls, and let's do it real fast and as messy as humanly possible," so he can not only cast doubt on this election, but every election going forward.

And as people have learned hard this year, it's not that there's just one election in November or an election in the primary. There's nonstop elections in the US all the time. People are dying, there's special elections, there's resignations, there's weird off-year elections. I come from Louisiana. I understand that crisis.

So this is not something that'll just hit us this year and next year once or twice. It'll constantly be hitting us. It'll constantly be putting literally people working in small election offices in legal jeopardy every time they want to have an election. It will mean that the federal government will be able to reach into all these places, because now we've empowered DHS to do crazy amounts of things that nowhere in the Constitution was it designed to allow. And we know that even when they're given immense power, they take way more. The Laken Riley Act was extreme, and then they jumped ten feet past that one. So it's very much a give-them-an-inch, they'll-take-a-mile situation.

And we already know they don't care about the legality — they will do the illegal thing with the illusion that they have the power. And that's really the magic of Donald Trump, right? He tries to make you look at this one thing while they're taking all these other things around you.

And that's why it's scary when I watched the MSNBC reporting on this from a couple of days ago, and they just kept talking about it as a voter ID thing. And I'm just like, you guys are missing — you're not even looking at one tree, my dudes. You're looking at a piece of bark, and that is not what this is. And you're missing so much and how dangerous it is, because they have made this the issue. There is a government shutdown right now — this is what they're focused on. This is the only thing that's important right now.

Sorry, that's me giving you a long spiel.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:19:22]**
Yeah, interesting. Well — no, no, that's good. That's what we're here for. We want to spotlight the things that are being missed, right? That's really important to me and Trent. I was just thinking — I think you're ignoring the fact that voter fraud is a really big problem in this country. Everybody's always voter-frauding, and everybody's dead Democrat grandma is voting all the time, right?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:19:53]**
Yes, constantly — all my grandmas vote. Rest in peace.

**Hunter CG [00:19:54]**
Yes, I mean, famously, Donald Trump won the election on dead people. That's my new conspiracy. It's real.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:19:58]**
At least 12 times.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:20:06]**
Delightful. Let's go hard for it. I don't care anymore. Do you know anyone who voted for him? Are they alive? Are you sure?

**Hunter CG [00:20:07]**
Every one of his voters was dead.

**Hunter CG [00:20:18]**
I think my grandmother is still alive, but she is — she's very good. I'm sorry, grandma, if you heard that.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:20:21]**
Are you sure? Because I have a theory that a lot of MAGA is actually no longer biologically alive, and they're just being operated by spite and evil. So it's possible that she is being weakened at Bernie's by just her mean energy.

**Hunter CG [00:20:42]**
God, wouldn't that be nice though — that could quickly end it, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:20:46]**
Yeah, if we could just cut off the source.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:20:56]**
Yeah. Well, I was trying to tee you up to debunk the idea that voter fraud is an issue, but I feel like not even one single one of our listeners even believes it. So who cares, right?

**Hunter CG [00:20:53]**
President, adult man —

**Hunter CG [00:21:01]**
Sorry, sorry. No, no. But it is important, because —

**Hunter CG [00:21:07]**
This is the nonsense. But I can't even remember who did this study — I think it was Cato or somebody. It wasn't anyone lefty, and they were like, yeah, it's 21 people over the last 20 years, and it's like four people per election. And I'm just like — and they're always old people, or people who just didn't have any idea what they were doing. It's very rarely even a malicious person. It's just someone being like — there's low-information people who can't vote, who think they can vote, and that's just it. People are like, "Oh, well, I live here. I guess I can vote," and that's it. Nobody thinks deeply about it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:21:20]**
Yeah, they voted and then forgot they voted and went in again or something.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:21:46]**
Yeah. I mean, those are the famous moments that we know of, right — the 1948 Senate election in Texas that was stolen. These moments that we know of have been taken advantage of by bad-faith actors, bad-faith publications, bad-faith individuals, to make us think something that, as you just alluded to, doesn't happen. And even more importantly, the way that things have been structured in our country makes it really difficult to happen. As you noted, they're mistakes — mistakes by elderly people, low-information people. People aren't stuffing ballots anymore, right? They're not counting them, as the term used to go.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:22:35]**
You didn't see *20,000 Mules* or whatever that thing was called — the documentary about one bajillion, thousand, hundred, gazillion mules, where your dad took your ballot, your brother's ballot, your mom's ballot, and your grandma's ballot and dropped them off for you because he's nice, and now he's on grainy surveillance footage being accused of voter fraud?

**Hunter CG [00:22:40]**
One million mules.

**Hunter CG [00:23:00]**
Papa, why did you do that to the mailbox?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:23:05]**
Why did you save us all the trip and take our ballots to the dropbox for us? You monster.

**Hunter CG [00:23:11]**
Yeah. And then one of the groups I did forget to highlight is how much this will affect disabled Americans, especially if Trump gets through his goal to get rid of mail-in voting. And also, some states have really heavily moved over to mail-in voting — they've made the shift already. And also, we know because there's been study after study, not just in the US but abroad — people like mail-in voting. It's really easy. It makes life very simple, especially if they get their little explainer sheet with it to tell them who the candidates are. And people enjoy that. It would be good.

Oh, and then the other thing. So check this out — this is even a bit more of a super niche issue. You might have heard about all the foreign postal services stopping service to the US, or creating some sort of issues around that. Can you imagine how that affects Americans abroad for voting purposes?

So most of yesterday, we were trying to figure out whether or not one of the postal companies in Europe was just not doing it anymore, because someone had their registration or something just stalled. And then we had to go through a whole rigmarole of contacting this corporation, making sure they understood what this was. And then you create just barriers and barriers and barriers to people doing it. And even if you really want to do it, if you hit one barrier and you're like, "Okay, I'll do this tomorrow," then you just forget. Then you can just forget for a while, and then you just forget to vote.

And because now they want to mess with — and then also on the US side, right? Because the USPS, once it makes the transfer, is an underfunded organization. So you're creating more and more friction at every level of this — somewhere where it can get lost, somewhere it can sit in an office too long because it's not moved, somehow it doesn't get stamped on the right time. So you create all these little itty-bitty parts that hit you very, very hard, and it becomes just a tiresome task.

And you're also already voting facing people who think the vote's not going to matter, the election is going to be rigged, what's the point of me voting. And these things are very, very dangerous, because there's already a lot of hassle and effort to get people to remember to vote. And this is even people who vote regularly — you really have to put time and effort into reminding people, "It's this day at this time, you really need to go." But you create more and more issues, and then you have to create chains of, "Okay, they've changed this new process. You're gonna have to do XYZ thing." And now they're like, "Oh, fuck."

**Trent R. Nelson [00:25:46]**
It's a crisis of confidence, right? It is. And purposely — it is a purposeful explosion of what Carter called the crisis of confidence. Just continuously make it so that we don't believe in what we're doing, we have a certain apathy, and that apathy, as has been noted, is more dangerous in a democracy than a tyrant, because that's how he gains his power. Through our apathy, through our disinterest, through our "it's fine, it doesn't matter, somebody else will do it for me."

**Caitlin M. Green [00:26:16]**
Or even if I try, it's not gonna work. So who cares? Right?

**Hunter CG [00:26:28]**
I mean, it's — to quote Dune, "Fear is the mind killer." It's true. If you lose hope that there will be an after, that something can matter — especially if we're talking about democracy itself — then once you lose faith that democracy can work, it is very hard to get yourself to believe it can again. And that happens in a big gestalt. Enough people start believing that, and that becomes the norm of how people think, and it doesn't even matter at that point if the elections are happening or not.

I mean, this is why people like Vladimir Putin have elections — because it is to create this effect of: it will never work, this charade of democracy is worthless, and it's pointless to do anything even if we're going through the motions. And this illusion of democracy is even more dangerous.

And even before all this more recent Trump stuff, the US had many barriers to voting, many barriers to having fair and free elections in the fullest extent that we need. And this is just putting all the bad things that the Republicans have wanted to do happening all at the same time. And because they're willing to really push through on forcing a talking filibuster with the Democrats, they're going to put their wish list on it. If they're going to break it, if they're going to do it, they're going to go as hard as they can. That's why there are two versions of this bill even floating around, because if they think they can do it once, they'll fucking do it again. This is how they roll.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:27:59]**
So Hunter, I'm curious for a second. Hungary has been going through a sort of liberal democracy erosion, thanks to Viktor Orbán and Fidesz for so many years. I'm curious — with their actual election coming up as well, and a lot of discussions surrounding the defeat of Viktor Orbán, the possible defeat through a coalition — I guess my roundabout question is, how has Hungary sustained this hope, this desire, this ambition, to sort of break from this illiberal democratic circumstance, where other nations don't? They do fall prey to apathy and to the sort of hopelessness.

**Hunter CG [00:28:51]**
So the problem with explaining Hungary and trying to apply it to the US is that there is something that Hungary is in that the US is not, that creates a large backstop, which is the European Union.

Because of this, it's not that — so Viktor Orbán can rig elections. He can do lots of sketchy things, but it has a very high price that comes with EU budgeting being taken away, or intense pressure from — so in the European Union, there's these big, Europe-wide political parties. The one that Fidesz is in is Viktor Orbán's own. He used to be in another group before he got kicked out. And there are other ones that back other political parties in Hungary.

And because of this, it means you basically — when Viktor does something, it's not that Viktor does something in Hungary and there's Hungarian blowback to deal with. There's also EU-wide blowback to deal with constantly. And people fucking hate Viktor at the EU. I mean this in the truest of ways, because — and I mean this in the broadest way too. If you have worked at the EU and you actually wanted to do something that is productive with your job, at some point in your entire work life, he has personally screwed up a project of yours. So everyone has a very deeply personal thing he has messed up in their life.

But that's to the side a little bit. The other thing is that Fidesz has had a party split — a very violent, big party split — which is something that is not happening in the Republican Party, as far as I'm seeing. And because Viktor has been there a long time, other people start thinking, "Why the hell does this guy got to be king?" Especially if he's stagnating out the economy, it's not good, he continues to just put all the stuff into enriching his own family, and he's not giving out as many handouts to everybody else.

And, to be honest, they've gotten a crazy pedophilia scandal as well that he was just never able to recover from, involving his justice minister pardoning someone. And it was a whole thing — the justice minister's now-ex-husband had recorded it and released the information. So there was just audio of literally an incredibly corrupt, hard-to-dig-up-details-on pardon of a pedophile, on audio.

And after that happened — yeah. But literally, after that, Viktor's numbers never recovered. So from the moment that scandal started, the person who's now probably going to become the Prime Minister of Hungary, Péter Magyar — there was a party split in Fidesz. Everyone who was already not really down with Viktor staying there infinitely, or maybe they wanted to run the country in a slightly different way — and remember, when we're talking about the party that's leading at the moment, whose name is escaping me right now — it's so bad I'm gonna have to look it up, because I feel like an idiot now.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:31:49]**
Well, no — the opposition party.

**Hunter CG [00:31:54]**
TISZA, sorry.

Anyway, so TISZA is also a very conservative party. But going back to the European Union and the EU-level European political parties — the EPP, so the center-right group, which is a very right-wing group, but it's center-right on paper — they immediately jumped on board and were like, "TISZA, you're going to join us. We're going to back you. We're going to put a ton of fucking resources into crushing Viktor."

Not saying foreign interference, but they're all in the same party family now, so their prerogative is to boost him and make it work. And more importantly, basically it was like — they believed he had it. Because it wasn't like Viktor was coming back. Normally, he's able to shake off a scandal. Normally he's able to spin it into something else, do a little handout to his people, maybe cut some random taxes, give some random whatever, make it go away.

Like Trump is tough on — but this wouldn't go away because everyone heard the tape. Everyone heard the tape, and there was no reason for this guy to do it, because he immediately got blackballed by a bunch of his ex-colleagues, kicked out of the party — ex-wife drama, divorce stuff. It was a whole thing. And so he had a lot to lose out of this too. He just managed to kind of scoop out of it.

So Viktor was not able to punt this away. And then once you break that thing out there, all the other stuff starts building up. And Viktor started acting very erratically. He started trying to do all the things that Trump is trying to do right now, and kind of turbocharge it, but already after losing the mandate of heaven — his legitimacy on any level — because no longer did he even have his proper majority anymore, because he kept losing party members, and he kept losing MPs, and he kept losing everything.

And at the same time, part of this is kicking off when Donald Trump isn't president, and that's really, really critical at this moment. This is all kicking off about two years ago. He does not have all the buddies in power around the world that he had at slightly earlier moments in time. And also — now critical, critical gap in time — this is also why you see a lot of right-wing figures around the world moving really fast right now, because Donald helps them have a shield.

The other big thing is that there is a strong democracy in Hungary — there was a democratic spirit there. There's a lot of political parties. There's a lot of belief in wanting to do that. It was not very long ago that they got out of the communist system, and there was popular uprising. So there's this memory of revolution, trying to build democracy, trying to get through all these things — living under fascism, living under the Soviet system, getting crushed in the Hungarian uprisings. So this sense of wanting to get rid of the dictator is there.

But the thing that has kept Orbán there for so long is because the apathy was very strong for a very, very long time. There was never someone they felt could actually take down the king. But once his kingdom starts splitting in half itself, then you're like, "Oh, wait a minute. We can push this — we can take this crack and we can wrench it open."

And I would say a lot of the last year, on the Hungarian opposition political party side, was trying to decide: do they want to back up Péter Magyar, who is the man who broke the whole scandal and has become kind of the messiah figure in Hungary, or do they want to run their own candidates and try and have a normal election?

And this has become the topic for quite a while. And for the most part, as we're seeing with the election going on right now, it looks like they've aligned more or less on: "Let's just help make TISZA win. We get rid of Viktor. We'll figure it out after." That's the thing, because getting rid of the dictator is more important than the immediate fulfillment of anything else.

And that is more or less how I see how the election will go down. Because Viktor hasn't been able to swing back. He has been sinking and sinking and sinking in the polls for a very long time. He has not been the first party in more than a year. It is bad for him. And he keeps spinning out of control. He keeps trying to change the narrative. But the narrative is just — "The pedophile scandal, my man. The pedophile scandal."

And the other thing is, a lot of his other stuff — he's very negative on Ukraine, he tries to create lots of drama — and it just doesn't stick anymore. It doesn't have that ability. And you saw that really intensely. So there was Budapest Pride a few months back, and Viktor made this his war-path thing. He passed a lot of laws to restrict protest and striking and a bunch of other stuff because he's trying to preempt — I won't go on that tangent just yet — but to preempt actions after the election.

So he was like, "All right, we're banning Budapest Pride." This didn't work out for him. He lost in the courts. They had to do it. Then he was like, "No, we won't give —" and he created these mechanisms to make it so you'd have a fine if you attended this thing. They passed it through the parliament, because he still has a big majority right now.

Then people showed up — hundreds of thousands of people — knowing they would get very expensive fines. Not for everyone, but expensive for Hungary. And they just went out in droves. They decided to just ignore the government, to ignore Viktor. And people are in modes of nonstop non-compliance with Viktor Orbán's government anymore, because they view him as no longer having any legitimacy. He's just there for the next two months.

And even if you're very cynical about it — a lot of my Hungarian friends in the Social Democratic Party, super cynical — they just honestly cannot believe the idea of him actually leaving. Even if they look at the polling, they know in their mind that it can be there, but their heart is, "I can't actually imagine him walking out and being gone." So it's very difficult, but they want to make it happen. And people are working really, really hard to make it happen.

So it's a very complicated mix, but I think the party split was super critical in taking Viktor down. If the party split had never happened, he's still there and quite strong and maybe even able to get through the scandal, right? Because people knew kind of what was happening, but they didn't have audio — they didn't have it in front of them. And that makes it very different.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:37:57]**
Right. Well, keeping that democratic fire, even at a kindling, right, even in just a little spark — I mean, that seems something that we can take from Hungary and the circumstance, that there are problems and it's not exactly the same. But as apathy rolls in, we have to do our best to keep that fire above the water, to keep it burning.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:38:57]**
And yeah — the people not complying in large numbers is huge, right? Because you're like, if we're all here not recognizing your authority, if so many of us are here that it actually becomes an administrative problem for you to repress us, then that's a win, right?

**Hunter CG [00:39:15]**
Yeah, and it's just — he's widely unpopular as a thing, so the non-compliance just is on various levels.

And I think the other thing that we can also take away, actually — this is quite useful — a lot of Hungarian institutions went abroad when the crackdowns were happening. Whether it's universities, think tanks, NGOs, whatever, they went and set up abroad and also had operations back in Hungary. But they set up externally so they could keep functioning — the whole civil society.

And this is very important. When you have intense authoritarian crackdowns domestically, you need to have people leave to be able to continue that existing, to have the space and the ability and funding to make sure that exists. This is very similar to kind of like World War II governments in exile. These are civil societies in exile, because the actual government is the one doing the oppressing.

And this is how Hungarian free society is able to gestate and grow and still be infectious, even though within the country they face intense repression and it is very hard to do open political work, because they have their own sketchy paramilitaries, they have the police, they will mess your life up. And you have to always be thinking, "How much politics can I do before I will get huge whiplash on me?" And knowing the dictator could last for decades more — you don't know the timeline on this, right? You have to be like, "Okay, do I do something extreme now and maybe get in really big trouble, so I can't do any work?" — and these are the weird calculations you have to bring, even if you're a youth activist.

But the other really good example from the region is actually Serbia. We're now into almost the second year of the student protest there, which has blossomed out to a society-wide, nonstop, non-compliance, and on-and-off general strikes. And every single minister in the government has had to resign, except for the President, and he's just not going to resign, because if he did, he'd go to jail.

But people, even in regimes that have been longtime authoritarians — where not only have they been authoritarian under one bad dictator, they've had multiple dudes who are authoritarian leaders from the same party who just stay there forever — people can still find freedom. They can find justice. And it seems quaint and it seems silly, but people yearn to be free. They don't want to put up with bullshit forever. The funny clown who's selling you the world and the monorail will work for a while, but it won't work forever, because reality starts to seep in.

And I mean, this is desperately hard for places like Serbia and Hungary because they aren't hermit kingdoms. You can go over to another country and you can be like, "Oh, I guess we don't have to have this thing." And I think this also makes it a little harder on the US side, right? Because way fewer people travel, way fewer people have experience in other systems — even Canada and Mexico, people haven't visited. So you don't really understand what a country can be like, or how it can be, or all the shades of how it can be. And it makes it a lot easier to truncate people. It makes it easier for people to get stuck into media bubbles and silos and to be manipulated in a very strong way.

And you, as an individual, really have to fight against that in a very desperate way. You have to push yourself to learn and experience things outside of your national framing, or else you will really get caught up in believing stuff that isn't your own beliefs — it's just some nationalist bullshit that you don't even realize, that you've never thought about or really reckoned with.

That's something I learned really hard when I moved abroad. It was like realizing what stuff was real — things I personally believed that were part of my constitution, my deep values — and what was stuff that I'd heard growing up in the US and just never, ever thought about, or never wondered why I even thought it was real or true.

The Trump world helps us kind of realize that. It helps us make hard understandings on what we care about and what matters. And I think this is true for people on the liberal left. I think this is true for even conservatives who are finally waking up now with some of the more wild Epstein stuff or whatever it is that makes them break.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:43:34]**
Yeah, the thing is, we had audio of Trump admitting that he touches women against their will. We had him admitting that he would go into the Miss Teen USA changing rooms just so he could catch a glimpse. And yet that wasn't enough for us somehow. And I continue every day to curse the fact that that wasn't enough.

**Hunter CG [00:44:00]**
I think this is also maybe where Péter Magyar as an individual, charismatic figure comes in — where he was able to go really hard against Viktor Orbán in a very on-camera, all-the-time way.

Unfortunately — and this is an issue we have in Democrats Abroad all the time — when Hakeem Jeffries or Schumer goes out there and gives some bland, know-nothing statement, it makes people not care. If, when this stuff started rolling out, they — if you saw Chuck Schumer say, "Fucking Donald Trump is a pedophile," blah, blah, blah, and he was just out there every day doing this in a way that would be uncharacteristic too, where he's up in arms — you'd be like, "Oh, shit. Maybe this is the realest thing that has ever happened." And you have to go to the most extreme level because you're playing a game where they really want to win. Their end state is you not existing politically.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:44:54]**
But Hunter, isn't that just a distraction? Hunter, isn't it just a distraction? Isn't it just a distraction, Hunter? Everything is a distraction, except for the strange things that I think. Chuck Schumer, yes —

**Hunter CG [00:45:07]**
No, no, no, I hear this all the time, and it drives me up the wall, because there are no distractions. There are just multiple things they want to do, and the way they're able to do them is by doing them at the same time. People think that flooding the zone is a communication strategy. It is not. It's a governance theory. You do all the things because individually, it's hard to get them done on their own. They create cover for each other, regardless of how popular or unpopular they are. The function of doing them all at the same time is the task.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:45:30]**
Yeah — you hide the shit under more shit.

**Hunter CG [00:45:39]**
Also — what's the other one that people always do? It's the distraction one. Oh, the taco thing makes me bonkers because it's like, guys, what the hell are you talking about? He still does the crazy thing.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:45:53]**
He just strategically backs off of something so that you will crow about it for a while so he can go do something else.

**Hunter CG [00:46:01]**
Yeah, we're on round three of taco for Minnesota. And I'm like, there's still fucking ICE agents there. There's guys — there's ICE guys. Yeah.

Sorry, that was a downer.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:46:09]**
That's a good one. Well — and we just had a whole discussion about the idea of polarizing and things being "divisive" and stuff as another way to avoid confronting actual issues. Right? To be like, "Well, we don't want to be defending DEI because it's divisive," and "it's an example of left polarization" — it's like, no, no. We should defend those things because, on their merits, they are good things to have. We do want to actually defend diversity.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:46:56]**
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Hunter CG [00:46:38]**
Yeah, the line I've been saying — so this is a bit crude, but I'll say it anyway. The line I've been saying when we're having conversations around get-out-the-vote efforts — because people will just think about the vote, the actual process of it. And I say, "People don't vote because they're horny for process. They vote because they believe in things, whatever those things are."

And that's why — that's it. If you don't have values, if you don't fight for values, if you don't state clearly, consistently, and always what you are fighting for, where you are going, what we are doing, then you are failing to get people to believe in the politics you do. People are not going to just send you to Washington these days because you have a title and you've been there already. We've lived in a different time in the Democratic Party.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:47:19]**
The problem is a lot of people become politicians because they're horny for process, right? And so then they imagine that's how everybody feels.

**Hunter CG [00:47:32]**
Oh, yeah, this is why we should ban lawyers from being politicians. Throwing it out there. Throwing it out there. No, no, I love my lawyers. They're okay people.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:47:42]**
Except for the ones who have been on our podcast. Of course, those lawyers should be in charge of everything. Josh, Clay, Chris — you can run stuff. It's okay, because they don't want to, and that's why it's — it's Douglas Adams. "Anybody who wants to be president should on no account be allowed to do so." That's why we have Zaphod Beeblebrox.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:48:10]**
We have a lot of lawyers on the program, Caitlin, and they're the only ones you should trust, just as Hunter said. Yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:48:06]**
Oh, my God, I recently reread that.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:48:21]**
Oh, yeah — you just sent us into a flurry of ass-covering there. Thanks for that, man. There's so many asses and they're all exposed.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:48:34]**
We had to cover all the butts. Well, thank you for taking us on a tour of Europe to help sort of give us perspective on what we're going through here. Now, there is much more to talk about as it regards the SAVE Act. How do we pressure everyone in the whole wide world to make this not happen? How do we go about trying to ensure that this doesn't happen? As you noted, they might just decide that the filibuster should be eliminated anyway. Rule 22 should be done away with anyway. But let's say that they think a little bit farther than that. What can we do? How can we be loud and obnoxious?

**Hunter CG [00:49:20]**
So it sounds very silly, but you really need to nonstop call your senator every single day till they block your number. Literally, call all the time, every day. Be very direct. Be like, "Do not vote for the SAVE Act. If you vote for the SAVE Act, I will spend the rest of my human life making sure you are never in politics." And you have to be — not angry, mean, threatening, because that might get you a knock at your door — but you have to be like, "I'm very serious. I will spend the rest of my life making sure you are not elected."

**Caitlin M. Green [00:49:46]**
"I'm gonna make you regret this in the most legal way possible."

And even if you have a senator that you're confident would not vote yes on this, I think it's good to call them and remind them how you feel. Also ask them to pressure their colleagues.

**Hunter CG [00:50:04]**
Yeah, and also — you can bank on one thing: politicians are jellyfish without a spine. Between a hundred of them, they are scared of shit when their voting polling goes way, way, way down. The Republicans are already looking at losing all their seats. If they start hearing from independents or — because you need to introduce yourself on the call, right? You have to be like, "I'm Bob from Nantucket and blah blah blah, I'm a moderate and blah blah blah." And they'll be — if you say, "If you pass this, I will never vote for you. I'll tell everyone I know, do not vote for you. I will tell everyone I know not to vote for the Republican Party for the next 50 years of my human life" — and then they'll be like, "Oh, shit. Maybe even if we get rid of all the voters, the voters that are left won't vote for me."

They will panic about this. They are jellyfish — I mean this in the most serious way. I've worked for a lot of politicians and a lot of political parties. You have a lot of leverage, especially with the ones that are already a bit shaky.

Even my senator, Bill Cassidy in Louisiana — that guy, if he got 50,000 calls over the next few days and realized, "Oh, my God, everyone's gonna hate me forever" — that would have an effect. Because a lot of these people are afraid of Trump. They're on board with the project, but they're not willing to ruin their cushy lives as politicians to do it. There's so much self-interest in this too, and that's unfortunately the reality.

Also, if you think there's some wobbly Democratic people — like John Fetterman, Senator John Fetterman — call that dude up, because he's already on Fox News the last few days just being like, "I don't know why people would be angry about a voter ID law. It seems sensible to me." You need to scare some of these people. And fear is a powerful motivator, and a loss of votes is a very powerful motivator.

But that aside — let's say it does happen. Then it will become much more difficult, because we will need to be making sure that we're working through big community efforts, through hopefully also Democratic Party-led efforts and democratic-world-led efforts to make sure that people understand what the hell just happened and to get their ducks in order. And this means that we will need to make sure that Democrats are going to be like, "The second year in power, you reverse the law. You immediately change it back, you wipe out these things."

And I think — we have to make sure that if Democrats are going to get this huge majority, what would be the alternative version of this law that actually hardcore protects all of our rights to vote? Who makes sure that — there's basic things that the US needs. Automatic voter registration. It's ridiculous that you have to register in the first place. These things are real basic. They exist everywhere — a bunch of places in the world. Nothing's new. We can implement these things and do it fast.

If we get the crazy majorities — I'm thinking we can have veto-override ability. We'll be able to do really profound things. But unfortunately, if we get House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, there's a high likelihood of that not happening. So it's also very important to tell people that you want to make sure you have a leadership that is able to lead and not just follow polling.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:52:23]**
Yeah, that needs to be a policy promise.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:52:51]**
Yeah, it should be opt-out, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:53:08]**
Yeah. And give us things that we need. So, yeah, automatic voter registration — great. I think let's throw in freedom hot dogs as well. Australia has been doing that for a long time. You get a hot dog when you vote. So good. Let's do that.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:53:32]**
Absolutely. We need to have time off to vote. That needs to be either on Sunday or it needs to be a day off on Tuesday — whichever is more expedient and gets more votes is fine.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:53:52]**
We love to have a federal holiday on a Monday. We can do that. Let's do that. Voting Monday.

**Hunter CG [00:53:58]**
I mean, I would put the elections on — moving the election day would probably be just as crazy toxic for a bunch of the states. But the idea of having a federal paid holiday for elections, and not just elections, but also primary votes — every election you get this, right? It's not just one.

Because if you want to have a democracy, you need to make sure that everyone can participate in the democracy. So the state has a huge vested interest to make sure that every single person does it. If a party wants to make a system that doesn't allow every single person who has the right to vote to vote automatically, they're destroying that democracy. And that's just the reality.

And we're in a time of politics where it's not the 90s. It is a time of political warfare. You need to play to win. You need to play to build the society you want — one that also makes it so that you cannot have the society that your opponents want to build. You can't find a middle ground between getting rid of tens of millions of people's right to vote and not doing that. It just doesn't exist anymore.

And in a big, powerful way, at the same time, we have to realize — Trump is not the majority. He never was. He didn't get the majority of Americans, ever. And we have seen that people do not even like the things he was most popular on. The man is losing. Woke is winning. Democracy is powerful, and that's what people want.

Whether or not the Democratic Party — my party, and y'all's party — sees that moment and is able to do something with it and doesn't just create another two-year clock where the Republicans swing back in again, that is the real question.

But right now, if the SAVE Act, SAVE AMERICA Act passes, it will make the possibility of shifting government incredibly difficult. And that is in the world where they just do the things that it makes legal — but we're not in that world. They will do the things that they believe it empowers them to do in the will of the people and Donald Trump's holy mandate.

So that's the danger — it's not even what it legally allows them to do. It's what narrative it builds. It is a doubt machine. That's what it exists to do. And to create doubt in the elections is what Donald Trump wants to be able to say the day after the election, or even midnight that night: "There is mass voter fraud everywhere. We need to audit every election. We shouldn't swear in any of the newly elected people anywhere. We need to shut this whole thing down until we figure out what's happening" — just like all the other wild Trump ideas.

And this is the danger — because if people think that is remotely acceptable, then enough people will go along with it, enough states will go along with it, and it will create a constitutional crisis that makes all the other ones look like a playground.

I mean, we saw this in a very tiny way with the congresswoman from New Mexico, right? With the special election — six weeks was waiting. Whose name I am blanking on right now — Grijalva, yeah. And it's like, that was a test. They run these little test runs. They were able to get six weeks out of that. What if you did that with every single one of them and then staggered them? You could just carousel an entire year doing that kind of nonsense. You would not have quorum. And also, unfortunately, we live in the world where Congress doesn't want to do Congress stuff anymore. So we have two branches of power that don't function at the moment, and then one that is trying to eat the other ones. And this makes all of this much more dangerous.

I guess the other caveat is — it's not just the federal elections that you need to be focused on. Who determines the control of the states will determine what the 2028 election looks like. It determines how many states will probably run their elections fairly, and how many states will not. So who wins those state legislatures, who wins those governorships, and critically, the Secretaries of State — the most important election officers in the entire country. Those 50 people are vital for making sure that the 2028 elections are legitimate. That is the game right there.

In real talk, Democrats could lose the midterms, but as long as they cleaned up in the statehouses across the states and got a bunch of the Secretaries of State, that would fix the 2028 problem for us. We could still be out of power on the congressional side of things, but that would give us the ability to install a new legal precedent. If we don't get the statehouses and we don't have Congress, this just compacts everything.

So it is layers of bad things and potentials that can get progressively worse depending on how things go. In a perfect world, we have relatively fair elections. Democrats come in on margins that you and I will just be doing tequila shots to at 3 a.m. and being like, "This is great." It could go the other way, though, because they are actively convincing people the elections failed — you have to have all these things to prove you're in there, all this other stuff. And it's just one plan after another.

And that's where we're at.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:59:04]**
Yeah, I have to say, I have noticed in the numbers, and also just in my neighborhood, that people have gotten a lot more mobilized and a lot more protesting and a lot more vote-y. And I think that's going to help us to become undeniable, right, as a people.

And I think it sucks to be like, "Individually, you have a responsibility to fix America," but we kind of do have to maintain that energy, right? And call all the people, show up at their places of work, show up at their houses. We're at the mayor's house all the time being like, "Hey, revoke the ICE permit, please" — without the "please," usually.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:59:47]**
Yeah, I mean, in Springfield — I'm in the capital of Illinois — it is, we've been militant here since jump. Kristi Noem came and highlighted a horrifying murder that occurred here that included a friend of mine, actually, who was killed. And she came here, and there were people with megaphones driving up within minutes to drown her out, to bitch her out, to get her out of town.

And Caitlin sort of alluding to — it feels really good for the state of our democracy when, as the year progresses, you see more and more people who maybe you wouldn't have associated with that sort of thing, that sort of behavior, all of a sudden coming out, being a part of it, getting these interviews like you see in Minneapolis — "I've never done this in my life, but I feel compelled to, I feel compelled to for my community." Right? That is the spirit of democracy, whether it's in Hungary or Serbia or Brazil or Illinois, Oregon — it's special.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:01:02]**
I got a phone full of aunties and grannies who are doing their singing resistance thing. My Signal is blowing up at all times because they all want to show up and sing songs of protest at important places in our area, and it's so cool. They all learned how to use Signal for this.

**Hunter CG [01:01:25]**
And also, people need to run. There are still seats being run, being elected, that are uncontested. The only person running is a Republican. So if you have ever, ever, ever, ever, ever wanted to be a politician, or even think you have 5% of it in you, this is the moment in time to run, because you could probably automatically win because of how big the swings are. And if you aren't running, no one else is going to be running, and the Republicans are going to get that seat.

And you need to think of the entire map of the country as a chessboard that we're trying to fill in right now and maximize every single space with a Democratic person. Because if things go very, very, very bad, we want to have more people in power and more places across the country than not. And that's just the brutal world that we're living in right now.

There's a reason people like the school boards — there was a reason Steve Bannon spent so much time telling people to sign up to win the school boards, trying to get all these tiny little municipal positions. Because, as we've seen — because Zohran Mamdani has become very popular and stuff — municipal government does a ton of stuff. It does everything, basically, in your day-to-day life around you. And so those roles have such intense and imminent impact on people's daily lives — the ability to control education systems, to control disaster systems, the election systems. All these little bits and pieces.

Your sheriff is elected in lots of places. You don't have to have Mr. Klan Leader sheriff in your area. You could just run and maybe win this year, because the swing against Trump is so hard. I'm from the Deep South, guys — that's the real talk.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:03:02]**
Yeah, listen, I'm from Maricopa County, Arizona, okay? I know about bad sheriffs. We had Joe Arpaio, one of the worst in the biz. We don't have him anymore. Look, that guy — one of the first times that I had to become aware of what the government was, was being a little kid being like, "Who is this man, and why is he bragging about depriving people of food on my television? Why is this happening?"

I had this whole thing when I moved to Seattle for college — somebody said something about a tent city. And I was like, "Oh, my God, no, you have those here too?" Because I thought they were referring to the outdoor prisons in Maricopa County, where they would make them stay when they were doing the rock-breaking shit. And I was like, "Oh, no, you guys do the same, but it's rainy here. Those guys are in danger of being too hot, your guys are in danger of getting rained on." And they were like, "No, no. That's tent cities where homeless people put up their tents." I was like, "Oh, that's different, okay."

But that's what Tent City meant to kids growing up in Phoenix in the 90s — where prisoners were. It's a bad time. It was a bad time.

**Hunter CG [01:03:16]**
Talk about a blast from the past. Joe Arpaio, what a main character from the Bush years.

**Hunter CG [01:03:36]**
Yeah, that seems — he is such a bad person.

**Hunter CG [01:04:14]**
Oh, my God, but that's sad. That's depressing.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:04:17]**
That's a different problem. Yeah, that's a different American problem.

**Hunter CG [01:04:30]**
Yeah, my parish had a slogan — like a fun meeting slogan — "Come on vacation, leave on probation."

**Trent R. Nelson [01:04:41]**
Horrendous. Horrendous. I mean, I tell people all the time — I mean, Louisiana is one of the only states I've never been to. I hear it's absolutely one of the most beautiful and intensely individualistic states in the union. But I'm honest. I tell them — I say, I go there, and everyone in Louisiana — I'm scared.

**Hunter CG [01:05:01]**
Oh, but no, no, honestly, I gotta tell you — you gotta go down to New Orleans at some point in your life. You gotta go down the bayou, you gotta go see Lafayette.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:05:11]**
I want to hear that jazz. I want to hear the French Creole. I want to hear all the good stuff and see all the beautiful architecture.

**Hunter CG [01:05:18]**
Yeah, you also gotta be real, real ratchet and listen to bounce music and shake. It's good stuff. Yeah, shout out to Big Freedia, the greatest bounce performer ever.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:05:27]**
In between jazz shows, that's fine.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:05:33]**
Excellent. We'll look them up. And I'll just wear a disguise, right? I'll be, "This is Troy Nelson. How's it going?" Right? It'll be very good. Yeah, it's my dad. So you don't look like me.

So, so Hunter — Hunter, you are absolutely supreme. Did we miss anything? Is there anything that you need? Did we miss anything on the SAVE Act, SAVE AMERICA Act? I mean, I know they want to take our freedoms, take our beloved country away. Do you have any more for us, Hunter?

**Caitlin M. Green [01:05:43]**
Troy Nelson — oh, perfect disguise, yeah.

**Hunter CG [01:06:07]**
Just to reiterate — millions of US citizens and military members serving overseas will be disenfranchised through this. There's a requirement for voting in person, requirements for registration, and both ballot requests and submission. So I even skipped that in the earlier part. It's actually three times they hit you on this per election, basically.

And also, there's another segment where there's going to be rolling checks on these, again — it's very bad.

And also, if you have some time and you're — do you silly reading legislation — they're not super long. Just go through it. The things will immediately jump out at you because you'll be like, "Wait a minute. That doesn't sound like it can happen." I've had that feeling with every single clause of this bill. I was just like, "That seems like a bad idea."

But it is an imminent thing. It is very radical. It's very dangerous. If Trump's Big Bill was the thing that funded the police state, this is the thing that legalizes election meddling by MAGA. This effectively creates a mechanism to legalize January 6, Stop the Steal-type conspiracies into American law, and that's how you have to think about it. What if they could legalize January 6-style conspiracies? What if Kristi Noem was the person who gets to determine who can vote? These are the real ways this will be implemented.

And if they pass it tomorrow, half of it goes immediately, kicks into effect. The other half kicks in in the next election, in 2027 — so there's rolling parts of this. It's very bad.

And even if they passed this first version, they could go back and still pass the MEGA bill, and that one's got a whole bunch more stuff in it. And that would take us a lot longer to go through, because it is much more intricately woven together. Sometimes you're reading this legislation and you're like, "This guy knows how to write a piece of legislation," because it's self-reinforcing to itself. That's not so much with the SAVE AMERICA Act.

But they're very serious about this. They do not believe in democracy. They do not believe they need to have legitimacy through the democracy. So how do you kill the democracy while creating the aesthetic that it still exists? And that's the goal right now. This is the same path as Viktor Orbán. This is the same path as Putin. This is the same path as so many leaders around the world. And this is just the game. You make elections so people lose faith in elections. You make things complicated so people create doubt in the system and doubt in their ability to affect it, and then you ride on that wave of apathy to loot the country and harm your enemies. And that's where we're at.

I gotta say, thank you big for having me. It was a great time. No problem.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:08:11]**
Hunter CG, you are supreme. Can you tell us where we can find your writing and your rantings? Give it to us all.

**Hunter CG [01:09:07]**
Yes, you can find me — let me make sure I get this website right, because I feel like I'm gonna get it wrong. You can find me at TikTok, at Rota Rota Media. You can also find me on Instagram, YouTube, and a bunch of the other platforms. I also have writings on rotarotamedia.com. I also have a Discord you can sign up to, and Patreon and Substack, and all the things, all the things. If there's a platform, you're probably gonna find me on there. And I post about all sorts of fun stuff, and usually it's quite depressing, but it's very informative.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:09:39]**
Right, but the videos are engaging — a great way about you. So give us the bad news in a nice way.

**Hunter CG [01:09:54]**
Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. That's the vibe I'm trying to go for. Yeah.

**Hunter CG [01:10:03]**
Oh yeah, no, it was a good time. I had a great time. It was wonderful, honestly. I love the work y'all are doing over at Liberal Currents. I think it's the kind of startup that has needed to happen for a long time, and it's real good stuff you guys are putting together. You're building something good. Yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:10:20]**
We're happy to be involved. Well, this has been Half the Answer. We're understanding a question is half the answer. We will see you next time. We love you. We miss you when you're gone. Bye.