The Truth About Systemic Racism, DEI & The Political Divide | Adam Mockler DSH #1208

MAGA does have a lot of crazy you don't even have to like paint Trump in a negative light You just have to cover what Trump is doing and it seems negative That's like I don't have to paint Trump I don't have to lie about Trump's Ukraine take I just have to show Trump's tweet about Ukraine and you can see that he's kind of taking Putin's side and he's also saying that Zelensky was the one who caused the invasion not true.

He also said that Zelensky is a dictator who doesn't hold election like as a conservative you seem open-minded as well, right?

Pretty open-minded.

Yeah, can you see how it's scary when the president of the United States is saying that Zelensky is a dictator when Putin is the one who has doesn't really hold real elections?

Like, Putin is the one who has been in power for 20 years.

I think maybe 25 years at this point.

He's the actual dictator.

I just don't know how the president can call Zelensky a dictator.

Can you see how that's backwards?

Yeah, I could see that.

All right, guys, Adam Mockler here today.

First time in Vegas.

Yes, sir.

Let's go.

What are your thoughts so far in Vegas?

It's insane.

I got in pretty late last night.

A lot of bright lights.

I stayed at the Venetian.

Super nice hotel.

It's my favorite.

I love Vegas.

Yeah, it's super sick.

I want to come back and not on a work trip so I can just chill for a weekend and enjoy the surrounding area, see some shows.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So we're a month into Trump's first,

well, not first presidency, but his presidency.

How are you feeling overall so far?

Man,

you know.

Kind of a mess.

It's kind of, there are certain areas where he's really gone below my expectations.

And I'm already a liberal, so I already had low expectations.

But dude, we can just dig in with what he was saying about Ukraine yesterday.

Yesterday he was trying to place the blame on Ukraine for their invasion, even though Russia invaded.

Also called Zelensky a dictator.

I just think that is beneath the pale.

You can't be doing that as the US president.

But I mean, you want a broad overview on what I think about most things that have happened so far?

I think that right away he did a flurry of executive orders.

I think that's the Steve Bannon sort of flood the zone strategy, if you've seen that, where Steve Bannon's like, if you can do 100 different things at once, you can sort of overwhelm your enemies, and they don't know which one to start to attack.

So Trump did all these executive orders.

Some of them got challenged in the courts, like when he tried to challenge birthright citizenship.

A Reagan-appointed judge actually challenged him on that.

Then there was the whole trade war.

We could talk about that as well.

Or the almost trade war where he was threatening Canada and Mexico.

I think that was mostly performative.

And then, man, the Ukraine stuff was the truly offensive.

Like, that was, it was, it was, I think it's not a a good, not a good position for our president to have.

Yeah.

So that's a lot right there.

Yeah, that is a lot.

We'll start with the trade war though with Canada and Mexico.

How do you think he handled that situation?

I think that it was all performative with no real concessions, right?

So I was on this debate show the other day and they were asking me about this.

I was debating someone about it and I asked a conservative, can you name me a single concession that Trump actually got from Scheinbaum or Trudeau?

Because you can look.

You can look this up on the Canadian government website.

They announced this $1.3 billion spending package back in December.

And then Trump sends out a tweet declaring victory in mid-January saying, hey, we secured this $1.3 billion spending package.

So it was all performative.

And I know you're more conservative.

So I think that, like, what was your opinion on it?

I think he did the tariff stuff as a negotiation tactic.

I don't think his plan was to ever actually do that.

Yeah, I agree.

And you could see this, you could see the shreds of it when he was doing it with Colombia.

He threatened tariffs on Colombia.

But did he actually get anything from Mexico and Canada?

Didn't they send troops to the border, though?

Yeah, but they did that before.

Sheinbaum already did that under Biden a few times, which is interesting.

I didn't know that, actually.

Yeah, no.

Sheinbaum sent troops to the border under Biden and under Trump's first term.

And then what Trump did was acted like this was some new grand revelation.

And he acted like this was a massive victory.

And then people are like, oh, shit, Trump's a master negotiator.

He did the same thing with Trudeau.

Did you know that Trudeau had a $1.3 billion package beforehand?

No.

And then Trump declared, you can look this all up, too.

Like, I'm not even bullshitting.

You can look it all up.

There was already a $1.3 billion border package.

All that he got from Trudeau was the borders are.

There's a new thing called the Borders R.

But it's like, did you have to almost start, do you think he could have done that without starting a trade war?

Probably, yeah.

So you think he basically did it as a sign to assert dominance?

To do that, but he's also a showman, right?

Like we can agree on that.

Like the dude is a showman.

He knows how to grab the headlines.

He he knows how to be performative and i sometimes think that he can be performative without actually getting results so you could say it was to assert dominance i think it was to get a sort of superficial victory he got this victory in the form of

like

50 of the country right now thinks that trudeau and sheinbaum basically kneeled in front of him and they were like okay you win you win this trade war but it was all just performative so i think it was to to get a performative victory.

And I think that a lot of the stuff he does is like is performative.

Yeah, I I can agree with that.

I mean, he comes from reality television.

But it works, man.

I mean, what am I supposed to say?

I mean, he beat the Democrats.

They have all a few chambers of Congress.

So I can't say that performative theatrical stuff doesn't work to get voters, but I just think there's a difference between marketing yourself and

actually governing, right?

The governing part is a little bit harder.

Right.

How shocked were you with the results of the election?

There's two different pieces.

So like I knew going into it that it was 50-50.

I'm a big believer in like Nate Silver's model and stuff like that.

I was like, okay, okay, it's 50-50.

It's a coin flip.

I totally think he can win.

But on the night of when he actually took the victory, just thinking about Elon Musk having that much power started to kind of blow my mind.

And I remember the night of, how shocked was I on a scale of one to 10?

Like a four.

I wasn't that surprised.

But yeah, it always sucks to lose, right?

It always sucks.

I just, I was more surprised by the victory margin.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, I wasn't surprised he won, but the fact that it was basically a landslide.

When I saw the popular vote, yeah.

I mean, it was, I wouldn't say it was a landslide electorally.

Well, he won all the swing states.

Yeah, he won all the swing states.

That's normal.

That's very normal.

When you're the swing states basically always go in one direction.

I think what was more surprising is that he won the popular vote.

Like Republicans never win that.

It's been a while since they won the popular vote.

I thought that was pretty wild.

You've been to over 40 of his rallies.

Has he ever said anything that like impressed you or changed your opinion on anything at those rallies?

Him and his supporters change my opinion on things all the time.

I wouldn't say,

yeah, Trump has taught me a lot.

I don't know about if impressed is the word.

I don't know if I've ever heard something that Trump has said and be like, I am so incredibly impressed.

Like, that is deep.

Trump's never opened my eyes on anything, but he has taught me a lot about how the world works regarding

the interactions between two people.

Like, when I see him use these negotiation tactics, and it sounds bad, when I see him use these, like, quote-unquote negotiation tactics and he tries to bully other countries or he tries to use the anchor, I start to see it a lot more in the business world now.

So after I hear Trump talk about like his, I see Trump do this, I see it more in the business world behind the scenes, even in the industry that I'm in.

I see people using Trumpian tactics.

So he's taught me stuff in that regard.

His supporters, I've had a lot of good, interesting conversations with them.

They've taught me some interesting stuff.

So you are open-minded.

That's cool.

Definitely open-minded.

Yeah, I mean, I'm...

I'm incredibly open-minded.

I'm actually pretty center-left.

Like, I am a capitalist.

I agree with Trump on capitalism.

I don't think socialism would work.

I think to a degree, you need to have like welfare nets, basically, nets to catch people.

But I don't think that,

yeah, I mean, dude, the Trump supporters are very cool.

They're very cool people.

It's kind of odd because I'll talk to these people and it's like my aunt or my uncle from a different reality.

Super nice people.

They love me.

Like, this dude gave me the glove off of his hands.

The gloves off of his hands.

He was like, I see that you're cold.

Here are my gloves.

But then he'll say some weird, like, race realist stuff, right?

Where it's...

there is that section of MAGA.

Yeah, for sure.

But overall, I think MAGA gets painted in a really bad light on the media.

Sort of, but they kind of do it to themselves.

Like when Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson and Tucker Carlson, when all the people out there are like the loudest voices are

saying crazy shit, or I can cuss, right?

That's not a big deal.

I should have probably asked that.

No, you're good.

But when they're out there saying crazy stuff, you're kind of asking for it.

And I do think the media can be unfair.

I mean, sure.

But

yeah, I mean MAGA does have a lot of crazy you don't even have to like paint Trump in a negative light You just have to cover what Trump is doing and it seems negative That's like I don't have to paint Trump I don't have to lie about Trump's Ukraine take I just have to show Trump's tweet about Ukraine and you can see that he's kind of taking Putin's side.

And he's also saying that Zelensky was the one who caused the invasion.

Not true.

He also said that Zelensky is a dictator who doesn't hold elections.

Like, as a conservative, you seem open-minded as well, right?

Pretty-minded.

Yeah, can you see how it's scary when the president of the United States is saying that Zelensky is a dictator when Putin is the one who

doesn't really hold real elections?

Like, Putin is the one who has been in power for 20 years, I think maybe 25 years at this point.

He's the actual dictator.

I just don't know how the president can call Zelensky a dictator.

Can you see how that's backwards?

Yeah, I could see that.

Yeah.

What are your thoughts on the Ukraine situation?

I wasn't a fan of his take.

Yeah.

I think, yeah, it doesn't look like he's going to end that war like he said he was going to, right?

Yeah, he said 24 hours, within 24 hours of taking office, I'm going to end that war.

And it seems like maybe he's getting a little bit frustrated because now we're exactly a month in.

He hasn't ended the war in Ukraine.

Prices haven't gone down, but that's to the side.

I just feel like

he's now siding with Putin after one phone call, which I think is weird.

That is weird.

Who knows?

There's a game behind the scenes that the public doesn't know about, too, I feel like.

Yeah, you could say that, that it's like 3D chess, 4D chess.

I hear that argument a lot.

And there are times when I thought, you know, like going into the tariff, going into the tariffs,

when he was threatening Canada and Mexico, there are times when I thought, like, is he just, is there an end goal here that I'm not seeing?

Is he negotiating with them and trying to get some massive concession or get them to fall in line?

But then, like I said earlier, at the end of those negotiations with Canada and Mexico, Trump got no actual real concessions.

They were all just stuff that had previously been conceded.

So I don't know if there's this 3D chess.

I think Trump is actually just kind of ignorant when it comes to the Ukraine situation.

I think he had a phone call with Vladimir Putin.

Putin changed his mind.

And then, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, she also has the same take that, like, it was Biden's fault.

It was Zelensky's fault that Ukraine was invaded.

So she's giving him his daily briefings now.

I'm sure that's not helping.

And you just have to remember when he says that

the invasion was Biden's fault,

Ukraine got invaded in 2014 as well.

Crimea got invaded in 2014, which is like that's how it cannot be Biden's fault.

Yeah, I didn't know that actually.

That's good to know.

Yeah, Crimea got invaded in 2014.

Georgia, which is another country in Europe, got invaded in 2008.

Basically, Putin always has these imperial ambitions.

All Putin wants to do is take land.

He wants to take the next country.

And the next country, I mean, Putin's like a dictator.

He's literally a dictator in the most literal sense.

So when Trump is trying to claim that Crimea, or sorry, when Trump is trying to claim that Ukraine was only invaded because of Biden, that's BS.

Ukraine has been invaded before, a decade ago.

So it's just, it's interesting to see him falling for that.

Yeah.

Now, I know you're not a fan of Elon Musk, but can you agree that the stuff he's been exposing is good information for the people to know?

I guess, but

yeah, I mean, it's good information, but it was already out there before.

The social security numbers?

Not the social security numbers.

I don't even know the validity behind what he's claiming there.

I've seen multiple reports that when Elon Musk claims there's there's like millions and millions of dollars being spent on people above certain ages, I don't even know if that's fully true.

I thought that

they found out that there were a few different theories.

Number one, it could have been a type of code in the database, what is it called, COBOL or whatever, where the code actually goes up to 150, or there is a chance that the someone I wrote I wrote read some article saying that those payments weren't actually being sent out to the people after they die.

I don't know.

I think there's a more rational explanation.

Here's the thing.

If Elon Musk actually exposed tens of millions of dollars being wasted in social security, I would think that was a good thing.

But I'm having trouble buying it.

I just don't think that that's it.

You just don't believe it's that.

I think that there's a more rational explanation.

I don't think our social security was so corrupt that I think, what do you say, 60% of it was going to other...

And when it comes to him exposing...

like $10 million going to Mumbai or $10 million going to like Dubai, bisexual clothes, whatever the fuck.

The condoms.

Yeah, whatever the hell.

Number one, this was already publicly available data this was all in congress bills congress appropriated this and that's all public stuff so elon musk isn't really again it's the performativeness of it i think he's kind of performatively doing all this but i will say yeah if he can make the government more effective i'll be behind him when he does that Liberals in general want the government to be more effective.

It's not like I want the government to be a huge bureaucracy.

I'm open-minded to that.

Like we were I'm open-minded to making the government like trimmed down.

But I think the way Elon Musk is doing it is kind of scary sometimes.

Yeah, proposing mass layoffs, right?

Yeah, and just doing it.

He keeps saying he's doing it

with a lot of oversight, but it seems to be selective oversight, right?

So, when Elon Musk is the one that's running the Doge account and the account that tweets out all the stuff, they are selectively releasing certain documents.

Real oversight would be having some sort of external validation, some sort of external oversight committee that can come in and see what Elon Musk is doing.

But he's kind of blocked that time time and time again.

When

people tried to go into the USAID buildings, they weren't let in.

They tried to go into the Department of Education, they weren't let in.

There are reports that CNN tried to put in a FOIA request for Elon Musk and to see like what his clearance was.

And Elon Musk fired the entire FOIA team.

So they couldn't.

Yeah, yeah, the whole team, I think it was called the privacy and communications team or something.

The privacy team in the government was actually fired by Elon Musk and the people.

So if he wants to make the government more efficient with oversight, that's fine.

But there are legal avenues to do that.

You can take waste, fraud, and abuse to certain courts.

And yeah, that's just,

I think there's a way to do it where it doesn't have to be so breakneck.

It's interesting.

Did you see his interview with Trump on Fox News the other day?

I didn't realize how much power Trump is giving Elon.

Yeah, yeah.

Trump pretty much said every time he writes an executive order, Elon is there to enact on it.

Yeah, yeah.

That's pretty crazy, right?

It's wild, and I think that Elon Musk has too much power.

Does it not scare you that Elon musk basically bought his way into that position yeah well it scares me when any single person has that much power you know what i mean just in general yeah especially when they're unelected and there's no way to really hold elon accountable that's the thing about unelected bureaucrats right

like if elon musk did something absolutely heinous and trump just like looked the other way we can't vote elon musk out we can't really like we can't do anything because he's rich as fuck and he could just buy his way out of any lawsuit not buy his way but he could just pay the lawyers and get it get out of any lawsuit like that.

So yeah, I mean, having someone buy their way into the most powerful position, or I guess second most powerful position in the world, is kind of scary in my opinion.

Yeah.

What do you think about the argument that if George Soros were doing this with the Biden administration, conservatives' heads would be exploding?

Like, could you imagine for one second if George Soros, oh, no, that's too on the nose.

Let's just say.

Could you imagine for a second if before the 2020 election, Bill Gates and Joe Biden were just walking around together?

Bill Gates and Joe Biden were court side, chilling out at a Lakers game, and Bill Gates bought Facebook and then used Facebook, leveraged that, to make sure that Joe Biden has propaganda in his favor.

While Bill Gates was doing this, he was donating hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to Joe Biden.

Now, do you think conservatives would be okay if after Biden wins the election, Bill Gates is in the White House helping him draft policy and enact that?

It is scary.

I don't know if I'd be cool with that.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's just interesting that conservatives are...

I'm not talking about you when I say conservative, like the MAGA conservatives are oddly okay with Elon Musk being in power.

Well, I definitely lean that way.

I've actually never voted.

Oh, really?

But I lean conservative.

Why have you never voted?

I don't know.

Interest.

You know, I just never voted.

When you

I was gonna say, are you open-minded enough to ever vote blue?

Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Jersey, and I was, my family was blue probably my whole childhood.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

I would do it if the, if it made sense to me.

If the candidate was right.

If the candidate was right.

What if it was like Mark Cuban next election versus, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Yes.

It's like Mark Cuban versus like a far-right MAGA support.

I would go Cuban.

I like Cuban.

He's a cool guy.

He's got some wild takes though.

Yeah.

I wasn't a fan of the DEI take he had.

Yeah, where he was in favor of it.

Yeah.

I think that there's, you know, there's like a nuanced view.

See, the thing is, you have to be open-minded on this, all this stuff, because when you go online, people are so

black or white.

There's a take on the DEI that I think liberals and conservatives can both get behind.

And I'm still drafting the best way to like say it, articulate it.

But a lot of the DEI programs are actually pretty terrible.

And liberals need to be admitting that.

A lot of the DEI programs are antithetical to what we actually want, which is diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But there are ways to draft them where everybody is actually included.

I don't know.

There's a...

Mark Cuban's DEI take wasn't fully wrong.

He was just looking at it in a very nuanced way.

I agree.

I just, as a capitalist and as an entrepreneur, DEI never made sense to me.

Yeah,

I guess it depends on like what the working, what's your working definition of DEI?

What do you usually think it?

When I think of DI, I think of just hiring certain ethnicities to fill the job position.

Yeah, I think that there's a way.

Here's the question.

If there's a talent pool of a bunch of very highly specialized people, and you have two people, they both have the exact same qualifications.

So they both had a 4.0 GPA in high school.

They both have the exact same college degree.

They even went to the same college, but one of them grew up in

a worse family.

Like they had a worse family life.

They were able to accelerate their career much faster and get to the same position as the other person who had a great, really wealthy life.

Do you think it's okay to hire the person who had a worse-off life?

Because

that's a form of DEI.

Oh, is it?

If they came from not as rich of a background, basically?

Yeah, like it's it's not even just diversity in

race or more women in the workplace.

It's a diversity in lived experiences.

So you want people from all different types of backgrounds.

Even if it's a white dude who had a less privileged life growing up,

and then a white dude who was super rich growing up, DEI would still be picking the white dude who was less privileged.

I mean would you would you think that's okay?

No, I didn't know that.

I thought it was just ethnicity.

Would you think that that was okay if that's a form of like DEI that uh yeah, I I mean for me I just I don't have a huge company so I hire people based off if I like them or not in skill.

Like like that's all that matters to me.

Yeah, I think when Mark Cuban was talking about DEI, I don't think he was talking about, because

it really depends on your working definition.

I grew up in Indiana, so I've got a bunch of Trump supporting friends, and we had this conversation recently, and they were saying essentially, DEI is just hiring black people just for the sake of hiring black people, or women, hiring a woman just because you think you need more women on the team.

I don't think that's the case.

I think it's looking at a very highly qualified pool and making sure when you're pulling from this pool of highly qualified people, you have a diverse portfolio of people on your team.

So I think having people from like lesser privileged backgrounds, more privileged backgrounds, you want a highly qualified black person.

You probably want women on a team.

It's like you just want some sort of diversity, but you don't want to force it in there.

No.

I think the liberal idea of forcing it in there is pretty...

That's what pissed people off, I think.

Yeah, people feel smothered by that.

Like I was trying to say this earlier, there's a middle ground to it.

There's a middle ground to DEI where you're not like pushing it in people's faces or

making sure that people can't get jobs because of it, but you're actually making sure you have like a really high-qualified, diverse, functioning team where everybody is like really super good at what they do.

Would you ever vote right, Republican?

I could.

I mean, it depends.

For the modern-day Republican Party, hell no.

Like if Vance ran next election.

No, no, I couldn't see myself voting for Vance.

I'm just so diametrically opposed to him on basically every belief.

Wow.

If I were ever to vote for the Republican Party, it would have to be a completely different Republican Party, But I don't vote just based on...

It would be very ignorant for me to say I'm only going to vote blue for the rest of my life.

Right.

Because a lot could change over time.

A lot could change.

Who knows?

If the Democratic Trump comes out in 30 years and the Democratic Trump is somehow just has terrible positions on everything, then maybe I'd vote for the more Republican.

It just depends on what the party looks like.

Do you feel like the Democrat ⁇ because I hear this a lot.

Do you feel like the Democratic Party has changed a lot over the years?

Yeah, I'd say so.

I mean, over how many years, though, because...

I'd say 15, 20.

No,

I think that the Republican Party is the one that has gone really far to the right.

The Republican Party is a side that has gone off the chains.

Have you ever seen that meme that Elon Musk posted and all these people post where it's like, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, it left me.

It shows the Democratic Party going way off to the side of the Republican.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think that's not true.

The Republican Party...

The MAGA wing of the Republican Party is the one that has gone far right.

Because if you look at 2008, who was the vice president?

In 08, that was...

Joe Biden.

09, 09.

Joe Biden.

If you look at 2008, 2009, Joe Biden was the vice president.

15 years later, Joe Biden was the president of the United States.

So the party really hasn't moved that much.

It's gone from Biden as the VP to Biden as the president.

Maybe he got a little bit more progressive, but if you look at the Bush era of Republicans to the Trump era of Republicans, dude, it is night and day.

Think about the Bush Republicans.

Think about what they cared about, which was like NATO, which was

not expanding the deficit too much, which they did, going to war and stuff.

They loved the endless wars or whatever.

And compare that to what the modern day Republicans are.

It is night and day.

So I think the Democratic Party from 2008 to 2025 hasn't really changed that much, but at the same time, the activist wing of our party is kind of dragging us down.

Right.

And that's what people associate with on social media.

Yeah.

Every Democrat is like that.

Every Democrat is like the college blue-haired activist.

Destiny.

Yeah, yeah, like Destiny.

And it's, you know, it's fair to flip it on the other side.

People think the craziest MAGA supporters are every single Trump supporter.

That's not true at all.

But I think that there is some truth to the idea that our activists don't usually make it into Congress.

Actually, our activists vote against us.

So these far-left people, when you look at like Hassan Piker, he doesn't even vote blue.

He doesn't even tell his audience to vote blue.

He's so far left.

He's way farther left in the Democratic Party.

So our activists give us a bad name.

Like those pro-Palestinian protesters who give us a bad name, they didn't even vote for Biden, right?

but then when you look at the far-right people they're actually given a seat in Congress like I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is definitely farther right than both of us she pushes a lot of conspiracy theories um half of republicans in congress maybe even more say they believe the 2020 election was stolen so you've got Republicans in Congress actually believing conspiracy theories meanwhile it's just our activists that make the democrats look bad you get what I mean yeah I could see that yeah do you feel like there's a lot of corruption within Congress

um define corruption, like, in what way?

What do you mean?

So I see these charts of, like, who's funding who, basically, like, APAC's funding some people in Congress, uh, big pharma's funding Bernie Sanders.

Like, I see these like, where's the money coming from?

Do you think that's corrupting them in a way?

No, I don't even know if that's corruption.

Well, it's hard if we want to play with terms a little bit.

It's not corruption because you're kind of just using the system as it's set up.

When you're getting money from lobbyists or a company like or not a company, but a lobbyist like APAC or from certain lobbyists,

that is just kind of how the system works I wouldn't say it's corrupt but you can say it's guiding the way people vote in Congress for sure but that's kind of just leveraging the system as it's supposed to be leveraged I mean I give you money then I have a little bit of control I have your ear I can tell you what to believe and

Yeah, I don't know.

I think the thing with Bernie and Warren being funded by these big Medicare companies, I read an article about that, that it wasn't actually big Medicare companies funding them.

It was small donors that worked for Medicare, like like worked in hospitals.

It was nurses, people like that, making small-time donations that added up to like these huge numbers because they want to see reform.

Oh, so that counts as the company funding when that's the case?

I don't even know if it was the company.

I think that maybe we're talking about different things, but from my understanding, I thought Bernie Sanders was being funded by a bunch of like smaller time people that work in healthcare.

But yeah, I mean, is there corruption in Congress?

I'm sure.

Yeah.

Well, with the stock stuff, that's undebatable.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The stock stuff.

And like even Menendez, who's a Democrat, he recently got arrested and charged.

And yeah, he's corrupted.

Yeah.

And Eric Adams, as a Democrat in New York, the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, super corrupt.

So there's corruption between mayors, between congress people, but I just think that

not to take it back to Trump, but the level of corruption Trump shows is kind of just next level.

Yeah.

I like that you call out your own party, though.

That's that's respect, man.

Yeah, I mean, right now is the time to do that for sure when we took a massive effing loss.

Call out your own party.

and yeah i'm not i'm definitely not like a far-left hardliner who's crazy about the democrat i'm a democrat for sure i am liberal to the core but i can call out when my party has messed up what did you think about uh what did you think about trump's meme coin i didn't buy it i was actually in dc when he launched it and i met a ton of people that made money off it damn i was in dc as well oh you were oh you went to the inauguration i covered the rally the day before but then when they moved the inauguration inside we decided like i'm just gonna go back to the studio and do stuff in the studio.

But, yeah, I think the meme coin was wild.

I wasn't, I'm in crypto, by the way.

I wasn't a fan of it.

Why not?

Be honest.

It's just a bad look, dude, when the president launches a meme coin.

Like, meme coins are for like degenerates.

Literally, the president's launching it.

It's kind of weird to me.

The president launched it, but the worst part is he used the hype of his own inauguration to kind of like boost it.

He did it, I think, 48 hours before the inauguration.

And then Melania launches a coin.

That was terrible.

Dude, how that crashed Trump's coin?

It crashed Trump's coin.

I remember that.

People

that had just bought in basically

were freaking out because they bought a Trump's coin.

But yeah,

it's pretty insane that the President of the United States is openly doing D-Gen stuff.

And I just think that, like,

I think it enriched him, too.

I just think that when people talk about both sides, like both sides are corrupt, you can say that the Democratic congressmen and women do stock trading like that, but that's a wholly different level of corruption than the President of the United States leveraging his inauguration to launch a meme coin.

I think it's just two different sides.

Well, crypto is not as regulated.

Yeah.

So you could get away with stuff like that.

But yeah, the stock stuff blows my mind.

I don't know how they're getting away with that.

Yeah.

I like how AOC always vows to never buy individual stocks.

AOC, I think she doesn't own any stocks or indexes or anything because she just says, you know.

Would you vote for her if she ran in 28?

Yeah, if she ran against JD Vance in 28, I would.

But in the primary, probably not.

I think that AOC needs a little bit more time So if there's a primary full of a bunch of experienced people as much as I think AOC is the most probably the most charismatic messenger in the party right now when she talks I listen she's really good at messaging.

I think that

If a few clips of Kamala from 2019 could nuke her campaign like those clips of Kamala saying far-left stuff Yeah, they have 10 times as many clips of AOC saying really far left stuff as recently as 2022 AOC is saying like super far left stuff.

So I just think that would nuke her yeah well she was on on the pronoun wave for a bit, right?

Yeah, she was like on the, yeah, and I also don't know if,

I don't know if Kamala Harris, or sorry, I don't know if AOC,

yeah, I just, I don't know if she's ready to make a presidential run.

I know it's a bit early, but who do you, who do you think would be the best right now, Newsome?

Um, Newsom's a little bit,

I don't even think Newsome, I think that, uh, let me see.

It is really early.

Here's the thing that I always say.

In 2004, the Democrats took a massive loss to Bush, and the party was kind of in shambles, and nobody knew who the Democrats would have in four years.

And Obama comes out of nowhere and takes the whole country by storm.

And then in 2012, the Republicans, Mitt Romney, lost to Obama.

And I remember the Republican Party was like, we are so cooked for a decade.

Like, the Republican Party is fucked.

Four years later, Trump comes out of nowhere and just wins.

So you never know who's going to come out in four years.

But if there was a ticket, I like like a Shapiro.

Maybe a Newsome Shapiro could work.

Newsom is a little bit too slicked back sometimes.

This is nothing against him personally.

I don't trust him.

I think he's probably a good guy, a really charismatic guy, but he's got this California slicked back hair.

Like he'll shake your hand and then talk shit about you behind the scenes right after.

Yeah.

That's how I feel.

But I think he's probably a good guy.

I would vote for him.

I would vote for AOC.

Buddha Judge.

How do you feel about how do you feel about Buddha Judge?

I don't know him enough, to be honest.

I'm not as deep in the space as you.

He's really cool.

He's really cool.

Where do you rank Trump just being totally objective out of presidents in your lifetime in terms of effectiveness?

Presidents in my lifetime in terms of effectiveness.

Um, last.

Just be objective, though.

Put your differences to the side.

Okay, it depends on what you mean by effective.

There's a few things that you could say.

Has he signed a a huge amount of executive orders?

Yeah.

But, like, to what end?

How effective is it to sign an executive order that gets blocked by the courts?

And the thing is,

Biden was way more I know that people will disagree with this.

Biden was way more more effective than Donald Trump.

Biden is the negotiator Trump dreams of being, and I can back that up.

Biden took office and due to his massive amount of experience in Washington, he was able to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, a massive COVID bill.

He was able to pass the Chips and Science Act, the PACT Act.

He was able to pass all of this stuff and a lot of times get Republicans to sign on.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has to do everything via executive order.

If Trump was actually effective, like as effective as he claims to be, then he would be able to pass this stuff through Congress and get both sides to come together, but he has to do executive order after executive order after executive order.

So to answer your question, where do I rank Trump on effectiveness?

Well, in his first term, we can go off that.

He ran on building the wall.

It didn't really happen that much.

He said he was going to lock up Hillary.

It didn't really happen.

Not that I would want it to.

He said that he was, all he got done was this tax bill.

the tax cuts that he did in 2017, the Tax Cut and Jobs Act.

So I don't think he was that effective in his first term.

Now, there is an argument to be made that during his second term, he's been effective because he signed like 100 executive orders.

But again, Congress hasn't really passed anything.

Trump doesn't really have his landmark piece of legislation.

Like, for Obama, it would be Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act.

Biden, probably the Inflation Reduction Act.

I just don't know if Trump has been that effective at passing legislation.

But

Trump has reshaped the entire Republican Party in a way that no Democratic politician has.

Yeah, you gotta give him that.

Yeah, there's things I can reach across and give Trump certain things.

Like, Trump is incredibly good on camera.

And a lot of liberals won't even admit that.

But when Trump goes on camera, this dude is fun to watch.

He's funny.

And I disagree with him on everything, of course, but this dude is like, he's fun to watch on camera.

He's also a really good marketer.

Like some of the slogans he comes up with,

some of the stuff they come up with is pretty clever.

I think he's a pretty good strategist.

I think there are times in politics when he outplays the Democrats or he baits the media into saying something about him.

So I do think he's actually a pretty smart political strategist, but I don't know if he's effective at governing.

Yeah.

You know how I was saying earlier that there's a difference between marketing yourself and actually governing?

I think that he's effective at marketing himself, but not a very effective governor.

Yeah, I guess time will tell.

We'll see how his second term goes.

Yeah, very true.

You're right, though.

He doesn't have that landmark thing.

I've seen old videos of Biden, and it's actually impressive the way he used to talk.

Biden was, Biden was sharp.

He was a good politician.

I think recency bias plays a role in people's perception of Biden because they think he can't talk or walk or whatever.

But I've seen old videos of him.

He was sharp back in the day.

Yeah, he was very, very sharp.

Even in 2011, 2012, he was given really powerful speeches.

And I think that history will look back fondly on Biden's presidency, I hope, because he passed a lot of stuff.

It's really easy to overlook what Biden passed because he couldn't really articulate it much.

He couldn't really speak about what he passed.

He couldn't speak at all like uh in that debate um and market himself.

So I think that uh hopefully history will vindicate the Biden presidency and we'll see with Trump time will tell yeah well I think uh conservatives were just upset they they were hiding it yeah his mental decline Yeah, and there's still people like Harry Sisson saying he didn't have any mental decline, but come on now He clearly had a level of mental decline Yeah, clearly had a level of mental like deterioration But I still think even a mentally declining Biden would be better than Trump who is currently alienating NATO and our allies and putting Ukraine down.

It's like I would take a mentally deteriorating steady-handed president who could who could actually speak with Zelensky Zelensky and not bully him than someone who's it's not like Trump's that far behind Biden.

He's really old.

78, right?

78, and that dude's starting to slur his words a lot too.

So I don't know.

Well, with that his diet, I mean, he's drinking Coke, Coca-Cola every day.

Eating McDonald's.

True, true.

And that dude, he does work a lot.

I mean,

you have to be to be in that position, to be in, like, the presidential role.

But when I was covering his campaign, it would like tire me seeing the amount of events that he and Kamala do.

This applies to Kamala as well.

But Trump used to sometimes do four to five events a day.

Jeez.

He would be in a, he would be in, and Kamala would do this too, but Trump would be in

Philadelphia, then he'd be in Arizona, then he'd be in, like, talking to farmers in Iowa, like every single state, a swing state, he would be hitting.

It's pretty wild.

That's nuts.

What do you think of his pardons?

I know the Silk Road one was probably the biggest one, right?

The Silk Road pardon.

I don't really have a strong opinion on that.

I thought the J6 pardons were pretty abhorrent.

Really?

Yeah, I don't think the J6ers should have.

You don't think any of them?

No.

I've had a few on the podcast.

Oh, you've had a few honest ones.

I had the guy with the horns.

There was one in Vegas, Nathan DeGrave, and then John Strand.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think there's a lot of disinformation that floats around about how they were treated.

Were they saying they were actually treated terribly in these prisons?

Because.

Yes, all three of them said they were.

As far as I'm aware, they got the same amount of due process that everybody else got, right?

Really?

So they got access to a team of lawyers.

I mean, wasn't the dude that you talked to out on, like, bail or whatever?

He was, like, out.

Yes, the one with horns was out.

Yeah, so, I mean, if he was being treated so horribly, then why did he get a team of lawyers?

Why did he get everybody to help him get out of prison?

I think that if the prisons treated them bad, that's more of an indictment on U.S.

prisons and how U.S.

prisons operate.

But every single Jay Sixer got a due process.

They got a team of lawyers, just like anybody else.

They got to give their arguments in court.

A lot of them actually were out on bail.

The vast majority of them were out of prison.

The ones that were staying staying in prison were on like seditious conspiracy charges.

And I think it's just abhorrent that the president pardoned people who like stuck tasers in cops' necks.

They beat the shit out of cops with American flags.

And he then emboldened these people to

do it more.

I don't know.

You've seen a few of them have already been re-arrested, right?

Oh, no, I haven't.

A few of the January Sixers got arrested on gun charges.

One of them got arrested with like child solicitation charges.

Yeah.

One of them got shot and killed because he got in a fight with a cop.

Yeah, one of the J-Sixers got in a fight with a cop and he got shot and killed actually in Indiana where I grew up.

And it's like, what do you expect?

If you pardon somebody who got in a fight with a cop and you call them a patriot, then yeah, they're going to feel emboldened or above the law and they're going to feel like they can fight with cops further.

And eventually it's going to lead to death.

So the fact that like five or six J6ers within a month have already ended up back in jail or dead is kind of just an indictment on how these people are.

They're just impressionable.

That's easily radical.

So I don't think they should have gotten all pardoned.

I think they should have gone through the legal system.

I think that

if you,

yeah, if you try to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, you should go to jail.

So do you like pardons at all?

Like, do you think there's a place for pardons in general?

Yeah, presidential pardons are fine.

You think so?

I know, but Biden did a ton with his family as well.

And I had mixed feelings about that.

But I think that,

yeah, pardons definitely have a place.

You can't blanket pardon 1,500 criminals, 1,500 people who try to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

Like, you know, all the January 6th arguments, right, about how Mike Pence was inside the Capitol that day.

Is January 6th something you think that Trump went too far on?

I was surprised when he pardoned everyone, yeah.

Yeah.

I think the ones that committed violent crimes shouldn't have been, personally.

Because it's like, yeah, because Mike Pence, on January 6th, like four years ago, Mike Pence was in the Capitol certifying the election results, and you had all these people trying to break in to essentially stop Mike Pence.

And Trump was tweeting out Mike Pence didn't do what needed to be done.

So it just made me wonder, I don't know.

It's just all these people don't need to be pardoned.

Is there any picks, cabinet picks from Trump that you agree with, or do you dislike all of them?

I don't dislike all of them.

I think

when Marco Rubio got confirmed, I didn't really have a problem.

Marco Rubio seems to be like a clear-headed, normal Republican who he opposed Trump back in 2016.

Now, what Marco Rubio has done since has been kind of, I haven't liked it.

But

that might be the only one I don't have a problem with, because all the other ones are sort of characters.

They're real characters.

It goes back to what I was saying earlier.

Trump prioritizes showmanship over governing, right?

Like this dude, he would rather put on a good show than actually have effective policies.

So when he picks people for his cabinet, he picked a bunch of TV stars.

He pulled Pete Hagseth straight off of Fox News.

Dr.

Oz he chose.

He chose a bunch of people who are straight up, just like TV personalities.

And I think that it's because he wants to

he wants to have a good like propaganda network on TV so that he could show people,

I don't know, he could play shit up.

Like also, the mass deportations that he's claiming are happening, it's all performative in my opinion.

From every single fact that I've seen, he's not even beating Biden's daily deportation rate.

It's about the same, or maybe a little bit above Biden's daily deportation.

But what they do is they plaster it on all the TVs.

And they have a,

yeah, they have like Dr.

Phil out there.

They have all these TV personalities claiming these are crazy mass deportations.

That was a major selling point for his last campaign, the deportations.

Yeah, yeah, so it's just.

People were scared, actually.

I got a lot of friends that were really scared about that.

Getting deported?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What do you think about them?

I think if they're here just, you know, not committing crimes, making honest work, I don't see why they should be deported personally.

I think that's what the average American thinks about.

Yeah, like that's literally the most average view.

I agree.

Now, here's the thing.

If you commit a crime, you can get out of the country, especially if you're a repeat offender.

We should kick those people out.

And no liberal is going to disagree with that.

Like, Trump was always saying stuff to the effect of liberals want to flood the country with criminals.

It's like, number one, you're the one that pardoned the January 6thers.

Those were a bunch of criminals who are now on the streets.

But number two, liberals will say, if there's an illegal immigrant here who committed a crime, get them the hell out.

But if there's someone who has a family here and they're just working, you don't have to deport them.

Mass deportations seem kind of cruel, especially for a country that was built off of immigration.

And again, he's not even doing the mass deportations.

I keep going back to this

back to this point of like showmanship over actual results.

So what does it tell you when Dr.

Phil is on TV

making a show out of the deportations, but then you check the numbers and we're not actually beating what Biden was doing in his presidency.

Like we're on track to just do the same.

That's crazy.

I didn't know Biden was supporting that money.

Biden, there's a normal level of deportations that happen every single year.

And with Obama, you know, they used to call him the deporter-in-chief.

I've heard that, yeah.

Yeah, Obama would deport the hell.

But it's not even like him.

It's not even Obama sitting there pulling a lever.

It's just that ICE has a normal level of deportations.

And yes, it went down after Obama, actually.

In Obama's last year, it went down.

And then throughout the Trump presidency, it was kind of low.

Trump's first term didn't beat Obama's second term.

And then Biden's presidency...

It was rather low at the beginning due to COVID.

And then it picked back up.

And right now, I think Trump is slightly beating Biden in the deportations I think he's doing a little bit more per day but it's like not what he campaigned on it should be more though based off all the number of people that got in during Biden right yeah they're saying 10 million plus yeah yeah they say that I don't know what the actual number is it's hard if they're undocumented if they came here legally or sorry illegally then how do you know that it was 10 million I think people just throw a number or Trump just like throws numbers out there but um

Yeah, if

immigration should be streamlined.

Liberals want to streamline the immigration process.

There's a lot of misconceptions about what liberals believe.

Like, from the liberals that you've talked to, Harry Sisson, I know you've talked to Beasley.

Pac-Man.

Pac-Man, too.

Does it seem like any of us actually want immigrants to be flowing in, like, committing crimes or anything?

Yeah, yeah.

It's not actually like that.

So, like, both sides have these warped perceptions of each other where Trump will try to make it seem like liberals really want immigrants coming in here, like, killing young women or whatever the hell.

It's not true at all.

And,

yeah, I mean, there's probably a middle ground that people could do.

Yeah, that's why I keep multiple perspectives around me.

Because you could easily live in a bubble.

And you see that with politics, people living in D.C., especially.

Oh, yeah.

Now everyone's leaving D.C.

You see that?

They're listing their houses.

Yeah, yeah.

I've been in D.C.

a few times over the past month, actually, and

it's always interesting.

What's the energy there recently for you?

Well,

before the Trump term, it was kind of doom and gloom a little bit.

Like, I went there in December for a White House event.

The White House invited a bunch of creators.

And it was kind of like a last two-aw.

I saw that one.

Yeah, our last time in the White House.

You were with Hunter Biden.

Yeah, we were with Hunter Biden.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's a cool guy.

But we were all just kind of like talking about what's to come.

And I think that,

yeah, it's probably a dark place in D.C.

because a lot of civil servants are having a rough time.

They're getting fired from the government.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think he just declared remote work is no longer allowed with the government.

What do you think about that?

Again, there should be a middle ground with these things.

You don't have to say blanket ban on all remote work.

That actually caused a bunch of clutter in D.C.

There was this one, I can't remember the exact station, but they have 4,000 parking spots and 18,000 people were coming back to work on the same day because they were all supposed to come back.

So there was a huge traffic jam in D.C.

Because

they're not very thought out about some of these executive orders.

Should people work in office when they can?

Probably, but there should be a middle ground to it.

I mean, you should be able to have like a certain amount of days.

You work from home.

I agree.

I work from home, and I love it personally.

I love it too.

I feel like there's also this

old like

saying, I don't know if it's a saying, but it's like if you work for eight hours at the office, you probably only spend three or four hours working and you find other, you use the other time like filling in the gaps, figuring out what to do.

You can actually be more efficient at home, I think there's an argument.

But if you're only working at home, you're losing a lot of crucial social interaction that you need.

Which is needed, yeah.

So there's a middle ground.

That's why I come here a couple days a week and then work from home the other three days.

Yeah, there's a middle ground.

That's probably healthy.

Absolutely.

So Cash Patel looks like he's going to get confirmed today, right?

Oh, he got confirmed?

Yeah.

What do you think about that?

Not a fan.

He seems like he's really interested in weaponizing the Justice Department for Trump's end goals.

And it seems like we already have

the Justice Department kind of clashing with

certain it's I don't know if you I don't know if you've been following this at all, but Eric Adams the mayor of New York kind of I saw Tucker's episode yeah yeah so Eric Adams is like very corrupt like brazenly corrupt And he's a Democrat, too.

So I'll say that he's corrupt.

And his charges are about to get dropped by the Trump DOJ because they cut a deal.

Wow.

And it's like corrupt.

It's total corruption.

It's totally illegal.

Everything about it is illegal.

And

they basically said, hey, Eric Adams, if you follow our immigration policy, if you help the Trump administration out with immigration, we will drop your charges.

So Trump is already weaponizing and abusing his Justice Department.

And I think that's part of the reason why Biden thought

here's the thing here's what i'll say seeing cash patel get confirmed today makes me understand a lot more why biden pardoned his entire family and pardoned all these people because when trump is appointing people who openly will weaponize certain departments to target people yeah cash patel i don't know if you read this but cash patel had a list he had a list of people that he wanted to target if he got into power and it was like oh really liz cheney i think it was uh jack smith all the people that trump hates

and yeah we probably shouldn't have people like that in power, especially when Trump loves loyalty and when he loves to have people that will just do anything for him.

But wouldn't you say the Justice Department was already weaponized?

I don't think so.

I don't think it was.

Because the attorney general before was Merrick Garland, and he was like the biggest, honestly, pussy ever.

Like, Merrick Garland.

See, here's the thing.

So are you getting towards that Trump was being targeted unfairly by the Justice Department?

Yeah.

Almost every single...

I just don't buy that for a few reasons.

Well Tulsi too Tulsi gathered she got put on that flight no flight list or whatever the watch list Yeah, yeah, but I think there are valid reasons for all this Okay, so there's a few things when I think of the justice department being weaponized you need to have clear communications between the president and the justice department saying like hey go after Donald Trump and target him There's no clear evidence of that.

There's no evidence at all and also

all of these indictments were brought by prosecutors and confirmed by grand juries.

So before the indictment can even be brought before Trump can even be charged in New York, for example, in the Manhattan case, a grand jury of his peers had to make sure that

the indictment was like fine.

And then Trump and his lawyers got to choose the jury for the actual jury pool.

The process is called voidir, where you pick people for the jury pool.

They picked people.

They said these people are impartial or they can put their biases aside.

And then Trump was found guilty by a jury of his peers of Democrats of Republicans of men of women so I don't know if the Justice Department was being weaponized to target Trump when it's like a jury it's in jury pool the whole time that's of citizens of other citizens and yeah going back to the first point there's just no real evidence that's interesting because I asked when Charlie Kirk came on I asked him what the biggest threat to America was he he answered the threat of um the justice system being compromised basically I would argue that Charlie Kirk is is pushing the justice system justice system to be more weaponized than it was before because again Merrick Garland was the AG, and this dude did nothing.

He didn't go after Trump at all.

In fact, he slow walked all of the cases against Trump and he said, we want everything to play out very slowly, essentially.

We don't want to throw Trump in jail.

We want this to be a process where he has a fair trial.

So what he does is he drags it out.

Trump has four years of not being in jail.

He didn't go to jail once because the process was being slow.

If they were truly weaponizing the Justice Department, Trump would have been in jail within like a year probably, a year or two of Biden's admin.

But

yeah, I mean, they didn't end up doing that.

And I also just think,

yeah, I don't know.

This is a good segue into Trump's recent tweet.

He who saves his country does not violate any law.

Yeah, that is wild.

I just feel like that's wild to say.

As the president of the United States, first of all, he's quoting Napoleon, who's an emperor.

You can't quote Napoleon with like an emperor quote and say that you're above the law.

I mean, you agree that he's saying he's basically above the law there, right?

I could interpret it that way, yeah.

Yeah, or he's at least laying the groundwork to begin to violate the law, which is kind of scary in my opinion.

Right.

He uh, yeah, I mean, as I was saying earlier, the Justice Department with the whole Eric Adams thing, it seems like they're already starting to violate the laws.

And there was a court that filed a temporary restraining order against Trump, right?

Not against Trump, but against this whole admin, because Trump tried to freeze government funding.

He tried to freeze all the funding from the government.

So a court issued a temporary restraining order.

And what happened is Trump just ignored the court order.

And a judge had to come out and say, dude, the president is currently ignoring the courts.

We're about to have a huge constitutional showdown.

And while this is happening, Trump tweets out, the president is above the law.

Yeah, wilder.

Yeah.

Do you believe America should be funding any wars?

Yeah, some of them, for sure.

Ukraine, we should be funding in the sense that we send our old military equipment.

They get our old military equipment.

They get to fight.

They get to

fend off an authoritarian threat.

And we get to benefit.

We get rid of our old equipment.

Ukraine gets to protect their border.

We get the new ally of Ukraine.

Europe is strong.

I think that other wars we probably shouldn't be dipping our toes in.

I think that if we want to go into the Middle East again,

like if Trump actually wants to

go boots on ground in Gaza, or take Gaza as the U.S.

land, we shouldn't be doing stuff like that.

But, yeah.

Because I see this argument all the time.

It's like, why can't we help our own people, our own homeless?

Why are we funding these wars?

You see that too, I'm sure.

Yeah, definitely.

Well, you can do both.

Like I said, when we're sending money to Ukraine, it's not actually money.

It's largely just military equipment.

So we send them tanks, we send them shells.

Have you heard this argument before?

Yeah.

Yeah, so we're sending them a lot of military equipment.

So it's not mutually exclusive.

Like, are we going to send our homeless people tanks or whatever?

No, like, we could send the tanks over to Ukraine and still allocate money towards our homeless people, but Republicans don't want to do that.

Every time there is actually a program that helps veterans or helps homeless people or helps any like minority, any group that's in pain, Republicans slash that or they shoot it down.

Like right now they're stripping the VA, the Veteran Affairs Committee, because they want to downsize the government.

But it's like,

so we're not helping the people at home.

We can help both.

I think that's true.

But I think that people using that argument don't understand how we're actually helping other countries.

Yeah, I got a lot of veterans, veteran friends.

They're struggling.

So if they're stripping down the VA, that's pretty scary for them.

Yeah, and they are.

The VA is being stripped.

And I just think that when you're moving at breakneck speeds like that, when you're trying to slash the government, you're going to have unintended consequences.

You're going to do things that end up screwing people over, and you don't realize it till after.

So like, did you read this article?

A few days ago, they fired the entire team, the entire nuclear stockpile division in some U.S.

like institution.

And then 24 hours later, they were trying to rehire those nuclear people already because they realized, holy shit, we made a massive mistake.

These were highly specialized, uniquely trained people who are supposed to be maintaining our nuclear stockpile.

We can't just cut that division.

So when Elon Musk is going through and slashing and burning and cutting all of this stuff and saying, we'll fix it afterwards if there's a problem.

There are real problems that can arise with veterans or with the nuclear stockpile.

Yeah, that's good to know.

You see this Fort Knox stuff with the gold?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I did see that.

There's a lot of concern over gold right now.

Yeah, yeah.

Didn't Trump, I read an article about it late last night, but Trump made a post about it recently.

He's going to go check.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm not too caught up to speed on that.

Okay.

That particular story.

JFK documents, hopefully those drop soon.

You got any predictions for what happened?

A lot of conspiracies on that one.

I tend to move away from the conspiracies where it's like, where it requires a bunch of people to be keeping something secret for decades on decades on decades like when it comes to JFK or like a 9-11 investigation people those conspiracies are all the same to me where it's like you really think hundreds to thousands of people are all colluding quietly and there's been no leaks about this or that I think it'll all be a nothing burger conspiracy theorists will find something to point out either way about it so you're not a fan of Candace Owens then no I wouldn't say I am

she's a big conspiracy theorist I mean she did expose BLM you know For what, I can't remember.

For like money laundering, basically.

Oh, yeah.

Do you remember that one?

Yeah, yeah, I do remember that one.

They bought a some one of them bought a house.

A bunch of them bought a house.

Yeah, you probably shouldn't do that.

But I will say,

to do the libbed argument and defend BLM, there is different organizations.

There's this BLM parent organization, which is super corrupt.

It's like the people that bought the house, and they funneled all these donations.

But there's also all these grassroots movements across the United States.

I'm pretty sure BLM was one of the largest grassroots protest movements, which means that there were like 1,500 protests that were all decentralized.

They had nothing to do with the parent organization that was corrupt.

So I will say that corruption, which exists, it's real.

I'm not going to say it's not.

It shouldn't take away from the fact that there were actually protests about systemic violence.

I can see that.

Do you think, can I ask you a question?

Yeah.

Do you think that

systemic racism is real?

in the sense that BLM makes the argument?

Like people are racist towards black people, do?

I guess the definition of systemic racism would be

well here's the thing just to like back up a lot of people think that systemic racism means that like either black people are just put down every single day black people are pushed aside but it's just there were my definition of systemic racism is that there were racist laws on the books in the 60s and way before that too.

And there are still downstream remnants of those laws.

Would you say that that's something that yeah, so I'm not familiar with those laws, so I can't speak on that, but I would say racism exists.

People are racist to me growing growing up.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, but I wouldn't, here's the thing.

There's the victim card from there, right?

You can say people are racist to you and then play victim, but instead you could choose to just ignore it and move on.

Yeah, well, I think that, so to point out some of the specific laws, in the 60s, there were redlining laws that said that black people couldn't take out loans to buy houses in certain areas.

So only white people could take out these loans.

Therefore, white people were getting houses disproportionately compared to black people.

And their downstream effects, like decades later, this was in the 60s.

My grandparents were alive.

And you could see how if the white family is allowed to buy a house, build that generational wealth, and then continue to build on top of that, build on top of that, then black Americans are left behind.

And when people say, like, hey, you can't play victim or you got to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, can you see how it's like sometimes it's outside of your control, outside of your circumstances?

In that situation, yeah, if they can't even buy a house, that sucks.

Yeah, or they couldn't buy a house 60 years ago, and now there's downstream effects.

Or I just, can you understand how the system

the institutions can screw over black people even if there's not personal racism involved?

So I'm not even talking about a KKK member with like a hood.

Do you think that uh

Do you think that the institutions can make black people's lives harder?

I think so, yeah.

They have the power to control where the money goes so in a in a sense they can control how many people get this amount of money, right?

Yeah, yeah, that and there's also just statistics like black and white Americans smoke weed at roughly the same rate.

Like they we smoke weed at roughly the same rate.

But black Americans are arrested and charged at a four times higher rate.

Wow.

And it's because it's not because of any laws on the books.

There are no racist laws, but it's because

at an individual level, some judges or some cops may be more

inclined to pull over and arrest.

I mean, that's, I hear that one all the time.

When black people get pulled over, they're going to get arrested.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So like, I guess my broad definition of systemic racism is just the cyclical pattern over the years of how people are kind of sucked in to the system.

So for example, like the war on drugs disproportionately affected black Americans.

They literally put drugs in majority black neighborhoods, and that creates a fatherless household.

So then that kid has no role model growing up, and they grow up into the same sort of system, and they get arrested for pot with the judges that we were just talking about.

And then they're, so you can see how the system sort of creates this

cycle where it makes black people's lives harder, not based on anything they did, just based on the color of their skin.

I have heard that theory where the government planted drugs in those neighborhoods.

They did.

They absolutely did.

Do you believe that?

Oh, yeah, it's not even a theory.

Like the government put crack in black people's neighborhoods as well on drugs.

Was that the CIA?

I don't know if it was a CIA in particular.

It might have been.

I think, yeah.

Damn, so they really planned this out for a while.

This is like a long-term plan.

It's not even that.

I don't even think it was planned out.

It's just that black Americans have always gotten the short end of the stick.

Like, even when...

Have you heard the Monopoly analogy?

No.

Can I explain it to you real quickly?

So so there's an analogy a mat you've played monopoly before right classic imagine you're playing monopoly and there's two separate teams there's the a team and the b team now the a team is able to number one spend 400 rounds building up wealth acquiring properties or wait let me let me restart with there's an a team and there's a b team the a team is able to spend 250 rounds building up wealth acquiring property building wealth for generations with all of these different houses and businesses and then

um team b is forced to play for team a and this is this is equal to white americans and black americans right it's like white americans brought over black americans on ships and they enslaved them So imagine you're playing Monopoly and the second team has to work for the first team to help build wealth for years and years and years.

And then about 200 years into the game, the white team says, okay, the black team is allowed to play now.

You're allowed to have cards on the board.

You're allowed to play.

Well, the black team is inherently going to be behind, right?

They are going to be behind because they don't have the generational wealth.

They don't have the property that the white team has.

In fact, they've spent the past few years building wealth for the white team.

So then they're kind of released and they're saying, like, that's like, hey, the playing field's supposed to be even now, but it's not going to be even if the white team had 200 years ahead start.

I kind of explained it in a botched way, but

I'm saying that's a good comparison.

Yeah, if you're playing Monopoly and you have a few hundred year head start, then how are the teams supposed to be equal at the end?

You can't expect there to be an equal playing field.

Right, because you're going to own all the properties.

The black people have to rent from you, right?

Yeah, the black people have to rent from you.

And the big key point there is that the black people, black Americans were building wealth on behalf of white Americans for

generations.

So then the idea that black Americans can come and just like pull themselves up by their bootstraps just because in the 60s things were made equal.

Like things weren't made equal until the 60s so that's why that's why I said there's 250 rounds because that's 250 years since you definitely opened my eyes I did not believe in systemic racism before before this so interesting yeah now you've definitely opened my eyes thank you thanks for sharing that yeah yeah yeah I'm glad I could I mean that's a thing with both sides the side is like a lot of its definitions.

So when I say systemic racism, you think, like, are there people being mean to black people?

Of course.

No, but it's deeper than that.

It's, are there systems at play and laws on the books that are hurting black black people?

There aren't any laws, but there are remnants of laws left over.

Yeah, same with DEI.

Like my DEI analogy, it doesn't have to be, hey, let's just hire more black people just to hire more black people.

It's like, can there be a qualified, diverse amount of people?

That makes sense.

Adam, it's been a fun combo, man.

Where can people find you?

Youtube.com slash Adam Mockler.

Adam Mockler on YouTube.

You can go Adam Mockler on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok.

It's Adam Mockler everywhere.

M-O-C-K-L-E R.

Thank you for having me on.

Absolutely.

Check them out, guys.

See you next time.

Great conversation.