Doctor Paul Alexander was Senior Covid advisor to President Trump. Since the end of the Trump Administration, he’s been warning that thousands upon thousands of children could be harmed directly by having this vaccine forced into their arms. The pandemic has brought a lot of changes to America, and it’s also changed a lot of individual people. Belinda Blease is a nurse, and she is no exception. She told me in an email that in March of last year she was a liberal atheist who hated Trump and hated America. Now, she calls herself a patriotic, Trump-loving conservative Christian. That sounds like a story nearly as interesting as the one she has to tell about Covid. Vernon Jones is a lifelong Democrat running as a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Georgia. Jones joins Stew today on the show! We’ve spoken to two Democrats turned Republicans so far today, but you all know that one of the biggest problems in the Republican Party is the opposite: People who are lifelong Republicans but don’t put America first and just see the base as a bunch of cattle to be manipulated. And we have a remarkable example of this, courtesy of a left-wing source. Rolling Stone magazine has put out a lengthy, heavily-researched article detailing how Congressman Kevin McCarthy was given a “MAGA makeover” by donors and establishment party operatives to make him appealing to the Trump-loving base. Quote: “At a critical moment in McCarthy’s ascent, a network of swampy operatives mobilized in his defense and a mysterious dark-money group carpet-bombed the airwaves to position McCarthy as the heir apparent to lead the Trump-era Republican Party. And when you follow that money, you discover a campaign of deception that’s even phonier than McCarthy’s rebirth as a right-wing MAGA congressman.” Lobbyists tied to the petroleum lobby and other traditional deep-pocketed business concerns funded a fake astroturfed conservative group named State Tea Party Express. The group popped up in 2018, ran a bunch of ads promoting McCarthy as an immigration hardliner, just long enough for McCarthy to fend off a GOP leadership challenge from Jim Jordan. Once Jordan was beaten, the group folded up shop and vanished. Mission accomplished. I have to say, thank you to Rolling Stone for doing the investigative reporting that Fox News, National Review, and all the other well-funded “conservative” outlets are too lazy or too corrupt to actually do. Lauren Witzke is a former Senate candidate. She joins me to discuss this article.