“Where’s the Republican conscience? We don’t have a conscience anymore.”

Hi, my name is Nitin, and I am a Republican voter in New York City.

Like many Republican voters, I voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and now I have deep regrets for voting for him.

What he did on January the sixth was an untold and a very bad horror that I would not have imagined in my country.

I was an immigrant and I became a U.S. citizen and I exercise my right to vote.

Donald Trump must be stopped. His enablers must be stopped.

And I hope that all Republican voters who are against Donald Trump would hopefully listen to this message and understand the danger that he is to our country, to our democracy and to our world as well.

I hope that the Republican voters who voted for him in 2020 also have deep regrets for supporting him in the voter suppression efforts, in the legal efforts to overturn what was a fair and honest election conducted by all the states in the United States of America.

The election was secure.

The election was safe.

The election was honest.

Donald Trump is a sore loser.

I'm Donna and I'm from Indiana. I left the Republican party a few years ago for several reasons. But one of the major reasons is that the leadership of the Republican party was trying to get me to believe absurdities. And Voltaire said long time ago, that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. And that's exactly where we are today.

Now, let's look at some of these absurdities, a couple of these big lies. The first lie was that this election, this past election, was stolen. Now we know from so much data, so much science, that this was one of the most secure elections in history, if not the most secure.

And there were so many conscientious officials, Republicans, and Democrats, both, who were secretaries of state, election officials, governors, even the vice president of the United States, who said the results of the election were that President Joe Biden had won the election. There's no doubt about that.

But then these absurdities we are asked to believe that ballots are coming from China,
Venezuela rigging our voting machines, thousands of dead people are voting.

I mean, really would rational educated people believe any of this? This is what they want us to believe. Well, if this is happening, then we have to make sure we have a secure election.

And how do you have a secure election? You put these draconian bills in place.
And what you really are doing is you're disenfranchising a group of people who actually did nothing. Absolutely nothing.

For example, the black voters in their districts. So many of them, and this was so unfair, we're the people who waited in lines for hours and hours and hours.

They shouldn't have been even waiting in line that long. Why is it that they had to even endure that in the first place? And now let's further penalize those people by making it harder for them, making their lines longer, not letting them vote on their days off, not letting them vote during the night.

This is an attempt to sway an election in a certain direction because as even the past president stated, if people are allowed to vote, Republicans will not get elected in this next election.

But now is the really sad, tragic part. The atrocity. January 6th. Oh my goodness. That is a major atrocity. And that's what occurred. But now. Now more absurdities - the big ones.

You know, this was a love fest. The former president saying people were hugging each other.
It was a peaceful protest. Come on people. What did you see? I saw videos. I saw people with flag poles of our flag, smashing windows.
A police officer being crushed in a doorway. That's not my definition of hugging. That's not my definition of peaceful. And that scaffold with a noose and chants of "hang Mike Pence."
I don't know what your definition of a love fest is, but that's not mine. Now I'm going to read some quotations. I want to read these because I want to make sure I get them correct.

But these were by George Orwell. This is chilling.
"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

And he further says, "in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

Now let's look at some of these people who told the truth. Liz Cheney, oh, I admire her for telling the truth, but she was stripped of her position. How about Adam Kinzinger ? He told the truth and he was censured by his party. Lisa Murkowski told the truth and now she's being threatened by the former president.

We have got to make our voices heard because we're the majority and we need to be loud.
And we need to let these who are committing these atrocities and promoting these absurdities that we don't buy into it.

So this is the call to action. Please make your voices heard. You can do it through your vote. You can do it through writing your representatives. You can do it through where you submit your donations. And especially in this next election coming up, do everything you can to vote no matter what is tried to suppress your vote.

Hello. My name is Carl Young. I live in upstate New York. I've been a Republican for better than 50 years. I held office for 16 years, including eight years as the county executive in Broome county. But I have to say, to be brutally honest, the Republican party that I joined and I served and I supported is today nowhere to be found.

For example, today's Republican party is a policy desert. It has no ideas, no proposals, no thoughts on how to deal with any of the national issues we're confronting in healthcare, climate change, crime, immigration, COVID-19. Pretty much, nothing other than to simply say no to any other proposal that comes down the line.

And worse than this, the party of Lincoln has become a refuge for the Ku Klux Klan, the proud boys, numerous other white supremacist collections that have no real agenda that is consistent with our values.

Worse than that, even the state legislatures, Republican legislatures, are seeking ways to limit access to voting for blacks and other minority groups.

Furthermore, they didn't even create a party platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, something that would articulate ideals and goals, something that might unite the party and unite the people of this country.

Instead, that devolved into a kind of a cult of personality, loyal to an anti-democratic narcissist. But as disgraceful as all of this is, it pales in comparison to the total abandonment of integrity by elected Republicans in the run up to, and then the two months after, the 2020 election.

The big lie that the election was stolen, a lie originated by president Trump, but embraced by countless Republican elected officials and state party officials: that is just unconscionable. Undermining the faith of the public or trying to undermine that faith in the legitimacy of our electoral system is the stuff of anti-democratic totalitarian regimes.

Putin would be proud. This is Brave New World and 1984, all rolled in. I taught history and government for 15 years. And I believe that the insurrection of January 6th was a far greater threat to our system then September 11th, 2001.

That the Trump inspired assault on our democracy and our capital that occurred at all is disgraceful. That in the wake of that riot, however, worse was that 140 Republican members of Congress voted basically to overturn the results of the election.

That is just beyond reprehensible because they knew that it was a lie. Countless numbers of courts, including the Supreme Court, had thrown out the cases that they had brought.

Bill Barr told him that it was his term was bullshit. Not exactly strict legal ease, but we know where he was headed. That violation of their oath, the oath that they had just taken a few days earlier to defend the constitution, that alone should disqualify all from ever holding office.

John Boehner has said that the Republican party is not the Republican party, that this is the Trump party. That the Republican party is taking a nap. Well, until the real Republicans wake up to run the party, I believe we should all hold these individuals and the party itself accountable by retiring them.

November, 2022 would be a good time to start. Thank you.

I'm Lisa. I was a 30 year voting Republican. That all stopped when Donald Trump became our president. And when he lost the election in 2020, honestly, I was relieved.

Until January 6th. I'd seen him perpetuate the Big Lie that he somehow had the election stolen from him. I saw many people in his camp parroting the same thing. And then after the insurrection occurred on our nation's Capitol, I could not believe that people I had voted for in the past were supporting the Big Lie still. It continues today.

So I'll never vote for anyone, anyone who continues to parrot that lie.

But what I'm also seeing today are states, notably those that Donald Trump lost, trying to limit voters in the future. They're doing everything in their power to prevent people from getting to the polls to vote. You know why? Because they don't stand for policy anymore.

It's no longer the party that I once supported that was based on ideas and principles. Now it's about stopping people. It's about a personality. It's not about a policy.

I would ask that you would find it in yourself to contact your state elected leaders, convince them that if they want to win voters and elections, they need to put forth policies that encourage voters to vote for them, not just to restrict people from going to the polls.

Hello, I'm Rev Graham. Recently it's come to my attention that a lot of states are trying to put laws on the books that make it hard for people to vote, that interfere with a basic right we have casting a vote, trying to impede people's rights, and pretty much based along some sort of party line.

When it comes to voting, we really shouldn't be looking at party lines. Our allegiance should be to principles. Not people, not party. Parties and people should pledge allegiance to a flag, to a country, to a Constitution.

Those are principles we've gotten away from.

If I'm only pledging allegiance to a party and someone else in the country pledges allegiance to their party, we have no common ground, we have nothing to work towards. Which means instead of trying to find common ground and move the country forward, I resort to tricks like trying to prevent them from getting to the polls and vote, which means my representatives don't have to be better at their jobs.

They don't have to be good civil servants. They just have to have more money and more resources than the person in the next party. That's not fair. That's not what our country is about.

We need to change that.

Hi, I'm Chris Vance from Sumner, Washington. I'm a former Republican elected official and state party chairman. Democracy is based on a very simple concept, which is that if you lose the election, you've got to be willing to accept that loss. You lose, and you accept it, and you move on.

Donald Trump's unwillingness to do that, and his spreading of the lies and insane conspiracy theories that this election is somehow been stolen or it's fraudulent, is causing deep rot within our democracy. It's leading people to not believe that our system is fair, and it is leading Republican state legislators to actually pass legislation to make it harder to vote. All because Donald Trump won't accept that he lost.

We have to confront this.

We have to say that it's wrong. We have to say that it's not true. We have to defend Republicans who are standing up, like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Jamie Herrera Butler from my state, who are defending the constitution and the rule of law. And we've got to unelect Republicans who refuse to support democracy.

Democracy is fragile. It's failed in other countries at other times, and we can't let that happen here.

We've gotta stand up.

Hello, my name is Julie Nichols. I'm a pediatric therapist from San Antonio, Texas. And I'm also a practicing Catholic, and I'm an ex Republican. And there's a big reason for that. I can list them all. They are numerous, but I'm going to single out a few of them.

The first one is destroying faith in our democracy. Another reason that I have left the Republican party is conspiracy theories. And lies and misinformation that has cost our nation over half a million lives in COVID deaths. And that rate keeps growing because there's so many people that have refused to get vaccinated and masked. Because there's so much information or misinformation going around that it has not allowed us to reach herd immunity as a country, as other countries have.

Another reason that I left the Republican party is that there are so many people that I personally know that believe that the election was stolen. And it was not stolen. Or that the insurrection was just a tour guide, and it was no big deal. I can tell you it was a huge deal. They tried to hijack the election and brought violence and tried to kill people. That is not a tour of the Capitol.

And another reason that I left the Republican party is the restriction on voting rights. The restrictions on voting rights have been so severe that it excludes millions of minority Americans from voting, and that is wrong. That is wrong. There are so many reasons that I could list, but I believe that the evils far outweigh the Democratic party at this point.

Hi, my name is Brian, I live in Houston, Texas, originally I'm from Wisconsin.

I remember coming of age during the Reagan era when Reagan and the Republican Party stood for something. And the Republican Party of today is nothing like the Republican Party that I know and that I remember. This version of the Republican Party has put one person, the former president over American ideology, over American values.

I mean, think about it. Liz Cheney, who has a 85% conservative voting record, was kicked to the curb for one reason: she would not kiss the ring of the former president. This is about loyalty to a person not loyal to a country. It can't stand.

The other problem with today's Republican Party is there's no integrity or accountability. Look, President Biden won the election fair and square. They still won't admit it. They propagate the Big Lie. And then this country faced an unprecedented domestic terror attack, and they're whitewashing it. They don't want to have any hearings. They don't want to get to the bottom of it.

Instead of pitching a big tent, that big tent is gone. Republicans have a shrinking base right now, and they know that the only way to keep power and the only way to win elections is to suppress the vote, is to prevent targeted groups of people from voting and make it a lot harder. And that's just not American. Instead, have ideas! Stand for something, attract votes, but they don't. They have grievances and they have loyalty to a failed president. That's not going to win the day.

So the only way that they're going to win is to change the rules. And they just might, they just make it away with it. And that spells trouble for our democracy and for the country. They can rebuild, they can rebound, but it starts with denouncing Trumpism. It starts with marginalizing the extreme voices and getting back to what made the Republican Party great.

Thank you.