TRANSKRIP 🔗
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PBD, here's the kicker.
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Where do these people get their information?
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Lower propensity voters get information on TikTok.
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They're not watching CNN.
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You know why?
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These folks are darn tired by the time they get home.
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They're not turning on cable news.
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They're watching NFL football games.
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They're the ones that are not going
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to be able to quote to you, Marbury.
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It's back to the strategy.
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By the way.
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It's also this.
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Yeah, it's also the phone.
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So what Donald Trump's campaign did
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is they hacked the 2020 for election, not in a way
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that people would think, where they said, wait a second.
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Everyone has a supercomputer in their right hand pocket.
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Why are we worried about what CNN is saying or MSNBC is
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saying?
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Why don't we win the information war?
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And then finally, the kicker.
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They said, why don't we go on the most ambitious,
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over-the-top, low propensity voter communication strategy
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on Theo von, Joe Rogan, Nelk Boys, Logan Paul, influencer
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strategies, right?
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And so what they said is there's this whole reservoir.
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And the final kicker, my mandate at turning point
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was very simple.
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Charlie turned Trump supporters into voters.
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And that's what we did.
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Hey, everyone.
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Rich Lowe just coming to you here
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with the Midas Touch Network with our Leaving MAGA video
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series.
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Got a new testimonial for you today
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of a lady who was in MAGA like myself, decided to leave.
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Again, if you're not subscribed to our channel here,
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make sure you get subscribed.
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The lady I met, her name is Patty Ann Giles.
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And the way that we got introduced and acquainted
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to each other, I put out on my socials, like I always do,
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hey, we want to give a chance for those who are in MAGA
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and left to tell their story.
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So I want to bring Patty Ann in.
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She is in Virginia.
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Patty Ann, how you doing?
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Hello.
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Nice to meet you.
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Yeah, same to you.
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And in case anyone out there is wondering,
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we're doing a late night video here, leaving MAGA
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and Midas Touch.
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I want to say we don't sleep.
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We do sleep, but we don't sleep an awful lot.
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So thank you for being able to join us
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at a really late hour here.
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So I want to ask you what it was about the MAGA community
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that you gravitated to.
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What was it about MAGA and Trump as a candidate
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that appealed to you?
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OK, well, I was a Republican for about 35 years
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until Trump ran.
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And while I was starting to get disenchanted with the elitism
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in the Republican Party, I didn't
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like the way the war on terror was going.
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I didn't believe it was meeting its goals, its objectives.
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I was tired of all the corruption with the status
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quo in government.
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And I thought that Donald Trump was an outsider.
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He was anti-war.
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He had a populist message that really spoke to me.
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And I thought that I was ready for somebody like him
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who had more in common, I think, with what I believed.
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And I thought that he would be a good businessman.
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I listened to his old interviews.
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I thought he sounded very patriotic.
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And this message, just a populist message,
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just really spoke to me at the time.
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You know, as you're saying this, I
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have this very eerie, to use the old maxim, deja vu
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all over again.
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Because so much of what you said was
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why that was really my entree into MAGA.
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I was disillusioned with the two parties.
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I thought they were the same.
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Yeah, Trump ran as an outsider, or as a Republican, rather.
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But as an outsider, he didn't have any government,
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any political, any military experience.
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And I felt like the entire two-party system needed
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to be obliterated.
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And he seemed like a guy willing and able to do that.
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And for that reason, I thought that he was the right guy
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at the time for the job.
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And the reasons that you're bringing up, Penny Anne,
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I know for those who are very strongly anti-Trump, anti-MAGA,
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which I understand, I think one of the misconceptions
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amongst those who are very anti-MAGA
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is this sense that everyone supported Trump because
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of some of his statements about immigrants and about women.
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I knew that those were indefensible statements.
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But I also thought that the other side was infinitely worse.
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So I looked the other way.
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And because I looked the other way,
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yes, that was part of why I eventually left MAGA.
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But I just looked at Trump coming in and thinking,
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this is the kind of person needed
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for the job at this moment.
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And I think that there are a lot of people
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who overlook the fact that there were some anodyne
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non-controversial reasons and some valid good reasons
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for supporting Trump.
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Jobs going overseas, communities hollowed out.
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Were there some specific issues that were brought up,
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that he mentioned on the campaign,
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that you felt like really resonated with you
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and really made you someone who said,
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OK, I'm going to support Trump.
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I'm all in right now.
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Well, the economy was part of it.
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And I think more so on the issue of taxes.
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And that's why I supported the Republican Party
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for so many years is because I believe the Democrats were tax
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and spend and creating an environment of government
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dependency.
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So Trump spoke to me in that respect
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that I believed I was going to get a tax cut
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and that he was going to streamline government
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and trim a lot of waste and abuse.
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And that was very important to me.
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Do you feel like some of those beliefs within the Republican
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Party and what was championed, do you
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feel like some of those have been
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proven to be inaccurate since?
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Because I want to read something actually
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that you posted in November of 2019.
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And here's what it was a tweet that you put out there.
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And your tweet was, the biggest threat to MAGA
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is not coming from the left.
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It's coming from fake Trump supporters
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who tell you what you want to hear
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but don't tell you the whole story.
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There's a large movement of phony right wing branders
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who are getting paid by the globalists to fool you.
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And again, that sounds like me.
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I look at that, I read that tweet,
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and I think that's something I did right.
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Maybe I didn't use the verbatim, but I
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made those exact kinds of comments about elitists
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and about globalists.
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In fact, I've always said that in some cases,
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perhaps even more than Democrats,
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we in the MAGA community, we despised anti-Trump Republicans
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and conservatives.
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And one guy, for example, I've gotten to know recently,
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actually over the last several months, is Adam Kinzinger.
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And I told Adam after I apologized to him, I said,
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we hated you in MAGA.
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And there are others, but we viewed, just like these,
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as you called them at the time, fake, phony right wing
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branders, these were individuals we felt like were actually
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traitors to the cause.
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If you weren't with us, you were against us.
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And if you were 99% with us as a Republican or conservative,
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you were 0% with us.
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So that tweet, again, November 2019.
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So what happened?
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What were some moments that served
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as the catalyst for your eventual leaving?
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And what was that process like for you?
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Moments, occurrences, how long did it take you to leave?
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Get into the real specifics here,
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because I think that this particular part of the story,
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viewers really want to know what was it that eventually
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led you to exit.
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OK, the pandemic was the tipping point
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for me.
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I have a medical background.
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And what I was seeing, in a nutshell,
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was dangerous disinformation.
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Not only about the pandemic, but about other issues as well.
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All started to make sense to me.
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It all started coming together.
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I think I've been fooled.
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So that would have been probably like, I guess, early 2020.
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And I was seeing a lot of pandemic disinformation
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being promoted on the right.
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And that concerned me.
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And being in the medical field, I
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was seeing people and knowing of cases,
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people not getting vaccinated, not wearing masks,
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not social distancing.
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And we were losing a couple of thousand people a day.
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These treatments, these unproven treatments,
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like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and all of this,
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well, people were taking those in lieu of proven treatments.
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And I was very, very concerned about my fellow Americans.
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So keeping with the disinformation thing,
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one thing led to another.
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And as I started to do more research on the people who
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were promoting pandemic disinformation,
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and I'm talking about the political hacks mostly here,
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I started to realize that I believed things
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that weren't true in other areas as well.
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You know, again, I'm going to reiterate this point
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and forgive my repeating this, but the pandemic
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was part of the reason I left also.
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There were moments within my time in the MAGA community
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where I was with fellow MAGA Americans,
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and we did harshly criticize and censure the president privately.
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And the pandemic management was one of those moments.
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We knew just how much he was botching, leading.
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Now, even giving some benefit of the doubt
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that there's no way anyone could have fully
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controlled what was happening.
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But to your point, going up and giving medical advice
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as someone who's not a doctor, shunning people
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who had medical expertise that had been,
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who were in the medical and health fields for decades,
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you're reminding me of another testimonial.
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We had a lady named Stefania Messina,
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who also in the health care industry,
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and just like with we, she started to take a closer look
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and inspect what was happening with the pandemic.
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So for me, that was also a key moment.
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And the catalyst for me, I would say, that really accelerated
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was my leaving of MAGA was really Ron DeSantis,
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my governor, because I thought that he handled the pandemic
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pretty well in the first year and a half.
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And then all of a sudden, he's got anti-vaxxers
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at his press conferences.
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And he's talking about Fauciism.
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And he eventually starts talking about biomedical security
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state.
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And I never believed COVID was a bioweapon,
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and I've never been anti-vaccine.
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So Ron DeSantis, when he did that, it confused me.
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And what I did, and I want to ask you about this point,
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as soon as my doubts commenced after Ron DeSantis,
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I diversified my news and information sources.
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So because I was just, I was fully right-wing media.
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I was consuming it.
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I lived in the comments.
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I was also writing for it.
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I have bylines in places like Fox News and The Federalist
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and some others.
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Was that the case with you?
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Were you consuming just right-wing media?
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You were in the echo bubble.
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You were in the information silo.
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Talk about that a little bit, because I
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feel like you mentioned disinformation.
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I just think that fuels so much of the lies
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and the mis and disinformation.
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Yeah, so that would be like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens,
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Jack Posobiak, Ian Miles Chung, Charlie Kirk,
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a lot of material that came from Turning Point USA,
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a lot of the Fox News reporters, Sarah Carter,
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I believe was her name, Mike Cernovich, Stephane Monu.
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Just any of the pro-Trump influencers I followed.
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I'm thinking about all those names
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because I also followed many of them.
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And something that I liberatingly but painfully
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realized when I made the decision to leave MAGA
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is that pretty much everything that I believed was a lie.
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And I'm not going to say that everything, those individuals,
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you mentioned that everything is a lie,
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but the vast, vast majority of what they say,
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they actually don't vet.
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There was just a United Nations study that just came out.
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And in that study, it inspected and looked
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at lots of influencers.
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And not just on the right, but on the left as well.
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And yes, while there were some on the left,
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the vast majority of the ones the UN studied
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were on the right wing and showed that they don't vet
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anything that they say.
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And something else that I came to realize
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is that when you look at these mythologies that
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exist within MAGA and the Republican Party,
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Donald Trump and the Republican politicians,
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they take their cues from those influencers, from the media.
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It's not the other way around.
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It's not that President-elect Trump calls up, for example,
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Charlie Kirk at turning point and says,
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OK, I want you to say this and this and this at your events.
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That's not what happens.
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It's that Trump is getting his talking points
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from the Charlie Kirks and the Alex Joneses
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and the Tucker Carlson's.
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Especially a guy like Tucker Carlson,
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he was massively influential when
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I was in the MAGA community.
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And we didn't even like Fox News that much.
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Even Fox News was regarded as MSNBC or CNN light.
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Yeah, we thought it was better than those networks.
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But we weren't that enamored with Fox.
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But Tucker Carlson, we were.
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So you're in the echo chamber.
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You're consuming all this media.
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How did you start to come out of that?
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What did you do that made you start
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to question some of your beliefs?
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And you started to think, OK, is that actually true?
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I have this workshop I'm developing called
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Where Did You Hear That?
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And I'm thinking about if you were still in MAGA
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and I met you now, I would ask you, where did you hear that?
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So how did you get out of that?
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Because I feel like part of leaving MAGA
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is also leaving behind that right wing echo chamber.
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Yeah, well, with the pandemic being my impetus
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to search out better information,
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I just taught myself to fact check.
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And I made a conscious effort to leave that right wing bubble,
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mind bubble, and to seek out other sources of information.
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Now, I'm not saying that left sources are always right,
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always correct.
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But I did try to diversify my content
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that I was using as information to inform end of fact check.
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So I just researched some tips on vetting media sources,
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how to tell if a source is biased.
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I use ad fontes as a guide for media bias.
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And I just was very careful then about what
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I allowed myself to believe.
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I approached media sources and content creators
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with much more skepticism during and after the pandemic.
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Yeah, this is so common in our testimonials we do here
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at Midas Touch Network for those who leave.
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And all of us, and it's not hyperbolic to say this,
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we were consuming essentially the same media.
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So we all thought alike.
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We all said the same.
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I remember in the community, I was
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in the community, if there was any information that even
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remotely refuted the pervasively held beliefs and mythologies,
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we would shun it.
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It was kept out.
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Because any media we did not read or watch
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was considered what I used to call the Democrat
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media industrial complex.
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That was a phrase that I actually used.
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And I believed it at the time, just like your beliefs.
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They were sincerely held until we started to realize,
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you know what?
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This actually doesn't sound true because I just
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read in a different source that it's inaccurate.
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And this all seems so simple to just say, OK,
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I'm going to mix up and diversify my news and information
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sources.
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But it had a profound and positive impact on my life.
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And I could tell that it did for you as well.
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So what I want to ask you here in closing is,
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I left MAGA in August of 2022.
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And I didn't think anyone would care.
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That's the God's honest truth.
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And I spent the next year just telling my story
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until the idea for leaving MAGA or organization
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started to congeal.
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Why do you want to tell your story?
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What is it that you hope to get out of telling your story?
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And what is it that you want others to take away
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from your testimonial here?
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Speaking to people who are still in MAGA, yes.
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I would like to tell them that they're being deceived.
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And what they believe and what they support
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is to the benefit of the very people
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that they claim to be against, like elitists,
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and the wealthy, and white supremacists.
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I hate to say it, but it seems to be the case
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that the agenda is extreme, that you have the Christian
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nationalists trying to superimpose their extreme
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beliefs on people, racism, sexism.
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And that's not what I believed the Republican Party stood for.
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And I didn't believe conservatism
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stands for that either.
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So yeah, I think my message is that they're being deceived.
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And they need to start really considering
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how their decisions affect others and not just themselves.
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Yeah, I appreciate that you're taking
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an approach of empathy and education.
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I don't defend my or anyone's ignorance.
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But I implore everyone to remember
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something I say a lot, which is that all of us
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are susceptible to being influenced.
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And this idea that intelligent people, people
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of good character, cannot be deceived and influenced
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into believing these really traumatic mythologies that
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kept me in these perpetual states of desperation
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and panic and despair.
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And I imagine you experience very similar emotions.
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And we felt this way being on the winning side.
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We felt this way because we felt like there were
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existential threats against us.
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And so you're telling this story.
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I just want to thank you, especially as a woman.
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I think it takes a lot of intrepidity
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to do what you're doing.
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It's difficult
to tell this story.
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00:23:41,140 --> 00:23:45,220
But I just want to commend you for doing what I believe.
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00:23:45,220 --> 00:23:48,180
All of our testimonials is really
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an invaluable public service.
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00:23:50,620 --> 00:23:54,220
And I appreciate what you're doing.
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00:23:54,220 --> 00:23:55,820
Our viewers are going to appreciate it.
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00:23:55,820 --> 00:23:58,180
I promise that your story is going to resonate with others.
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00:23:58,180 --> 00:24:00,420
And you're going to move.
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00:24:00,420 --> 00:24:03,100
Your story is very moving to people.
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00:24:03,100 --> 00:24:07,980
Because those in our country are looking for a reason
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to believe that their friends and their family who
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00:24:11,140 --> 00:24:13,580
are in the thrall of MAGA can eventually leave
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and they can restore those relationships.
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It's why we also do videos here at Midas Touch with friends
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and family of those who are in MAGA.
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So I want to personally thank you.
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00:24:24,220 --> 00:24:26,020
I want to thank you on behalf of the team.
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00:24:26,020 --> 00:24:28,620
Where can the public find you?
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00:24:28,620 --> 00:24:32,060
I know that we met originally via Twitter.
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00:24:32,060 --> 00:24:35,780
So thank you for responding to my request and inquiry.
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00:24:35,780 --> 00:24:39,060
But where can people find you out there on Twitter?
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00:24:39,060 --> 00:24:39,780
What's your handle?
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00:24:39,780 --> 00:24:40,900
Thank you for inviting me.
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00:24:40,900 --> 00:24:41,980
Sure.
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00:24:41,980 --> 00:24:45,100
What's your Twitter handle if anyone
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00:24:45,100 --> 00:24:47,380
wants to connect with you?
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00:24:47,380 --> 00:24:52,420
It's pattyann640.
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00:24:52,420 --> 00:24:53,220
OK, we got it.
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00:24:53,220 --> 00:24:55,020
pattyann640.
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00:24:55,020 --> 00:24:57,820
Pattyann Giles from Virginia, thank you so much for joining us
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00:24:57,820 --> 00:24:58,300
tonight.
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00:24:58,300 --> 00:24:59,940
It was a real pleasure having you.
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00:24:59,940 --> 00:25:00,740
Thank you.
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00:25:00,740 --> 00:25:01,060
Hey, guys.
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00:25:01,060 --> 00:25:03,020
If you like this video, make sure you subscribe
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00:25:03,020 --> 00:25:05,540
so you don't miss any updates from the Midas Touch Network
435
00:25:05,540 --> 00:25:09,260
and Leaving MAGA here at leavingmaga.org.
436
00:25:09,260 --> 00:25:10,940
And if you left MAGA or you're having
437
00:25:10,940 --> 00:25:12,780
doubts about your support for Trump,
438
00:25:12,780 --> 00:25:16,220
or you've got friends or family who are in MAGA,
439
00:25:16,220 --> 00:25:17,420
we want to hear from you.
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00:25:17,420 --> 00:25:21,660
So again, make sure you contact us at leavingmaga.org.
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00:25:21,660 --> 00:25:24,020
As always, really appreciate you guys.
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00:25:24,020 --> 00:25:25,380
Thanks so much for watching.
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00:25:25,380 --> 00:25:26,340
Love this video?
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00:25:26,340 --> 00:25:28,780
Make sure you stay up to date on the latest breaking news
445
00:25:28,780 --> 00:25:31,220
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446
00:25:31,220 --> 00:25:41,540
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