In other news, earlier this week we told you about the Hardin County Republican Party chair posting a video showing former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.

The Republican Party of Kentucky was quick to condemn the post.

Well, today I spoke with Whitney Westerfield, a former three term Republican state senator and attorney from Christian County who is calling on his party to do better.

Tell us why you feel now is the time for you to speak out, and the manner in which you have.

Well, there's no time like the present to speak out.

And and we've been trending this way for a long time, I'm afraid.

And and it just keeps getting worse.

And I, I highlighted three examples in the piece, and you mentioned the one from Hardin County where the the chair of the Hardin County Republican Party shared an AI generated video with, among other things, showing President Trump's face over the superimposed over the body of a lion.

But disturbingly, President Obama and First Lady Obama's faces imposed on apes.

And it's disgusting and foul.

It's racist.

It has no place in our our government, has no place in our politics, has no place in everyday talking with fellow human beings.

And it's it's disturbing that that didn't register before that post went up.

She has since taken the post down and she's apologized and and I mentioned there's a piece I'm so thankful for, Chairman Robert Benvenuti, the state party chairman, for quickly and unequivocally, condemning it for the racist, vile nonsense that it was.

But we continue to see more of this encroaching.

We we have, that example, we have the candidate for former Senator David Yates seat who has written derogatory things and demeaning things about women, and has defended himself and, and then, in fact, in the coverage, I saw the county party chair over in Jefferson County didn't condemn it really at all.

The commentary I saw, I didn't see a full quote.

Perhaps the commentary I saw was him saying, well, you know, we didn't really put our shoulder into this.

I'm paraphrasing.

We don't really put a lot of effort into this the last time around.

It's always been a Democratic held seat for a number of years, but maybe this year we can put a little bit more effort into it.

Where was the where was the call to action to stop this?

We're better than this, frankly.

It doesn't matter what party we are, we should all be better than this.

And you wrote in your piece that appeared this week that the president, President Donald Trump, is modeling what you call offensive and racist behavior.

So you believe this is coming from the very top of the Republican Party?

I think you'd have to be intentionally burying your head in the sand not to believe that that's a source from where a lot of this comes from.

A week ago, Renee, the president of the United States, gleefully shared an AI generated video of himself in response to these know King's protest, which I think was a relatively harmless, First Amendment protected speech it bears.

But in response to that, showed this video and shared it, of himself flying in a jet, with King Trump written on the side, flying over protesters and jumping, dumping feces, all over the protestors, including a specific one, who's a liberal activist, I believe, down in front.

When you have the, the party leader, which I'm ashamed to say is the party leader and the sitting president, United States setting that sort of example, and normalizing that sort of rhetoric and tone, that approach to to just policy and politics.

Of course, other people are going to take his lead for ten, 12 years now, we've been doing nothing but seeing people take his lead and and move into the places that he has broken the envelope on.

And it's all to the worse.

It's all to the, the detriment of our society and our civil discourse.

We should remind folks that you are a Republican, a conservative Republican, even though your description, at the in your signature line or of who you are when you wrote for the Courier Journal, you say, you know, you're at the evangelical Christian, right?

And you served in the Kentucky General Assembly as a Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

So are you being held?

Are you being called on the carpet for calling out Republicans when some people would say that the Liberal Democrats have some similar offenses?

And if you were to go through, I have no doubt that you can find a ton of, of this same sort of garbage, on both sides of the aisle.

But as I mentioned in the piece, I am a staunch conservative, you know, that, and the viewers that pay any attention to Kentucky politics know that, that you can't challenge my conservative bonafides.

But in the in the piece, I mentioned the fact that both offline and online, I'm occasionally criticized.

Why don't you always get on Trump?

You always complain about the the Republicans.

Why?

Why aren't you complaining about this?

Well, first of all, I do complain about those things when I see them and when I when I'm aware of those instances when they cross what I believe is a line, but more to the point, I want my son to do better than this because it is better than this.

We we should rise above this because that's where we belong.

The policies that we believe in should be the things that we stand up and support when the other side gets it wrong.

Absolutely.

Call it out.

But I'm going to make sure my side's doing it right so that when we do call it out, when we do say that this is wrong and this is right, that we're more credible when we do well, when you Westerville, we thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, and we hope that maybe, perhaps we can engage with you again in the future.

Thank you for your time today.

Glad to get it.

Good to see you, Renee.