16 Unexpected Quotes From A San Francisco Republican To Inspire You
"Republican Environmentalist?" Bill Shireman reminds us that when it comes to the planet, we are In This Together.
Bill Shireman, a Republican from San Francisco, has some really surprising nuggets of wisdom to share. His politics and his party could be considered polar opposites. Bill is an environmental activist, co-author and co-founder of In This Together, and he was recently a guest on the Fractal Friends podcast. We discussed his views on extremism, racism, recycling and activism, among many others.
The episode is a great listen, with arguments and thoughts that will resonate with everyone. Maybe it’ll even change the way you view the world, democracy and humanity.
Read on to see if you’d expect these words to come out of a Republican’s mouth, whichever side of the political divide you fall on!
I’ve included audiograms so you can listen to the conviction behind Bill’s words. (These audiograms are fully accessible as they also show the words on the video.)
On opposites:
“When we bring complementary opposites together, that's the source of creation. It's the yin and yang, the masculine and feminine. And, I think it's the progressive and conservative. To me, it is [about] connecting across the divide, not just hanging out with people who share your perspective and denigrate the other one.”
On dividing the populace:
On befriending the enemy to win:
“It's our job as citizens to get together and empower alternative structures. Where we really get the power is when we use our votes and our buying dollars to say: ‘All my favorite brands are going to go along with this too, all my favorite retailers are going to go along with this too, and all my favorite politicians are going to go along with it too. I'm going to support them with my dollars and my votes.’
Once we have that, we drive advertising out of the hate-based media and into the alternative structure: unifying media that's authentic and that hasn't lost its soul.
So, we begin to bring resources into that, and it all comes because we decided. As soon as we decide we'll do that, we will win. But what it takes is doing the most horrifying thing imaginable: Talking to the people who voted for the other guy a few days ago. Talking to them, listening, hearing, understanding where they're coming from, respecting, and honoring them, their lifestyle, their music choice, their cultural orientation, their religion, their spirituality, whatever it is, respect and honor it and understand that it's a complement to yours.”
On institutions:
“All those institutions, they get everything from us. It's our money, it's our labor, it's our muscles. It's our minds, it's our inspiration. And it's not a ‘we versus them’ because there is no them; it's all paper constructs.”
On lobbying:
On activism:
“My life has been about bringing together complementary opposites. In my life, it's been bringing, first of all, corporations and activist groups together to save the planet.
I used to be an activist. I'm that weird hybrid Republican environmentalist. I worked with Ralph Nader because I was concerned about the power of corporations, but I'm also a free enterprise guy who's concerned about the overarching power of government.
Years ago, I wanted to help make our economy more sustainable. I thought, we're throwing all this stuff away. We live in a consumer economy. We're consuming all this stuff. We're chewing up the planet like we're termites. How do we turn this around? And I thought, well, recycling!”
On building the corporate state:
“If we understand the power that we have, we can work in creative ways together to drive exactly the changes that we need to create a much more diverse, integrated, creative culture. We're on the cusp of that, but we're so stuck. With one side saying we're veering toward corporatism, the other side saying we're veering towards statism.
The corporatist side is saying we need a bigger state so we can control the corporations. The statist side is saying we need more giant corporate so-called free enterprise to control the state. All we're doing is building the corporate state together. Well, how insane is that?”
On racism:
On the media:
“Our fundraising was all about killing the enemy, but the reality is that the ones who really make money from that [are] the political industry and the media industry.
Media will not cover you if you don't have a demon, you don't have an enemy. So what, you're saying we've got world hunger and you're thinking that if we're nice to each other, maybe we can tone down the subsidies that destroy foreign agricultural industries and deal with the underlying effects of all this?
‘No, I want you to attack a global corporation.’”
On winning votes through negatives:
On the Green New Deal:
“If you believe people just naturally provide for one another and that nature has plenty to support all that, you don't have to figure out how to get that done. So, the liberal or progressive mindset is just control the oppressors and all that will just happen. The right sees the other side of that.
They say, oh great. So, you're going to guarantee everyone healthcare. You're going to guarantee them a job and an income, and you're going to guarantee social justice for them. And where are you going to get the resources to do that? By the way, I heard you're going to be defunding the police and you want soldiers to not have any resources and you don't want any of those churches out there because whatever, that creates fear.
The Green New Deal is a nice objective, and I support that objective, but the method is in complete denial of economic reality and functional reality. I think the right actually knows how to save the environment because the right has a better handle on the institutions that turn our selfishness into something that's good for everybody, the free market system, the balance of powers in our constitution. The right understands that things go wrong and that people are not always as good as we would like to be, and it creates institutions that help us harness and civilize those impulses. So, that's why we've got to work together on this.”
On extremism:
On legalized extortion:
“So, what specifically happened on the Clean Power Plan under the Obama administration, there were the heads of a variety of giant utility companies and oil and gas companies who basically were fine with it. They didn't like it; it's not like they thought that's the greatest way to deal with climate, ‘cause it wasn't, but they were willing to put up with it. And individually, they went to lawmakers, some senators and they said, we're okay with the clean power plan, you can let it go.
And the senators sent them into a room with a strategist who told them, 'Listen, I understand that you're okay with the clean power plan, but climate is a wedge issue for us. That means it's an issue we use to efficiently divide the voters into these camps. And so, we've discovered that the message ‘job-killing EPA’ is very effective at making sure that Republican voters stay voting for Republicans.
So, we need you to use that language, ‘job-killing EPA',’ and that means you are opposed to the clean power plan. We'll do something about climate eventually, but if we are to stay in office and to be able to protect your existing structure...' you get the point. This is what companies operate under.
It's a system of legalized extortion that extracts money from big companies, big unions, big institutions of all kinds in order to manage public policy to protect the status quo.”
On exploiting fear and division:
“What's really happening is nobody's in charge, but there's a group that are exploiting them. That group are the political strategists and the media strategists that use each to create fear on the part of their audience. So, they will promote anything that AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) says that feels like an insult to the right.
And they make that so that the right feels, ‘Oh my God, this crazy woman is on the attack.’ Then they go to Ted Cruz or whatever, and he says something as objectionable, and they scare the left. They scare the middle so much that we're willing to sit in our echo chamber with our somewhat crazy people because we know the other echo chamber is filled with nothing but crazy people.”
On left and right differences:
On defunding:
“We need to defund hate; we need to defund fear.
That means we need to take our money away from the politicians and companies that are spending money to drive this advertising, bingeing hate-driven culture.”
You can listen to this Fractal Friends episode with Bill here.
The podcast is full of thought-provoking discussions, and you can see the complete directory of Fractal Friends episodes here.
You can find Bill Shireman at:
https://www.future500.org and https://inthistogetheramerica.org
You can find more information about the work I do in conflict transformation on my website: https://www.omni-win.com.
You can schedule a call with me here: https://calendly.com/duncanautrey
Don’t forget to check out the rest of my posts as I discuss how we can work together to ensure we all win.
Subscribe to Omni-Win Visions here on Substack: