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I feel like people are being led around the nose in the country and not being told what to think and I think a lot of people are falling right into it. You see people making excuses for political candidates, political parties on both sides of the aisle, and to be honest, I just find it rather disgusting. I want to talk about how the US government might be able to get the trust back in the American people. I don't know if that's even possible at this point, but we'll find out.
Tim, you just always have your super level-headed guy, you always have a unique and different perspective than what everybody else is saying, because they'll feed off of each other. I love the perspectives that you bring and I respect everything you have to say, and so thank you for coming up. Thank you. I'm so grateful for the support of diving into these topics.
Usually I give an introduction, but you'd be an on for the third time. I don't feel like I need to give an introduction, but Powerhouse Attorney been involved in several huge national cases. For anybody that has interested, all you got to do is Google the name. I know the other reason you probably came back is for the presence.
Oh, wonderful. My wife ate the last ones. Hey, they're still legal in all 50 states. Thank you.
Believe it or not, you're welcome. Love the gummy bears. But, you know, let's just kick it off. One thing that we were kind of talking about at lunch is the recruitment numbers in the military and how they are retention is atrocious, recruitment is atrocious.
Now, I just had my friend Scott Mann here not long ago to help me put together a different interview that was rather complicated. And in the middle of that, he had told me how they are reaching out and contemplating bringing military retirees up to the age of 70 back into the military. What is your perspective on that? You know, it's an interesting issue.
It has a lot of facets to it. Bottom line, I think it's a good idea to make that something that is open because I think that a lot of retirees do have a lot to offer depending on the role. I mean, I don't think we want to have somebody who's up to the age of 70 going to kick in and a door at this point. But certainly from the perspective of leadership, one major problem that I've always thought in the military is there has to be this kind of continuity up the chain of command through your career progression.
And if you kind of fall off at any one point, you can't continue to progress. And so if you haven't hit the wickets by a certain time, then you can't get promoted to the next rank and therefore then you have to get out. And that's a concept that I really don't think makes a lot of sense. But then once you get out, there's no way back in.
And so if you look at every other industry out there, including every other branch of the federal government, people go in and out all the time. You know, you can be an FBI agent, then go work in private industry and apply to come back in. But in the military, you can't really do the reserves to a certain extent, but on the active duty side, not really. And so what you end up with is at the higher up positions, you have some good people and you have some people who just decided to do that.
And you have some people who just decided to stay. And you have some great people who decided to leave earlier on, get experience on the outside. And if they were able to come back, and I think that this, you know, we're talking specifically about retirees for right now, but the idea of bringing back a retiree who has tremendous experience. But also who has tremendous perspective from what they've done after they've gotten out to then come back and bring all those lessons back in.
I think it's an incredible value at it. Now, obviously, the articles about this are written from a slightly different perspective of, isn't this a sad state of affairs that we are unable to meet our recruiting goals. And so therefore we need to reach out to people up to the age of 70, he had to come fill these, you know, these slots, which I think is a little bit of a logical misstep, because while we can't reach the recruiting goals, that's for the lowest ranks. We're not bringing retirees back in to fill those slots.
We're bringing them back in because of retention issues. And when you think about as people go up, if you have more people putting in their retirement papers at 20 years than you expected, all of a sudden, how many people do you have left to take on these bigger jobs? I really appreciate the perspective that you bring, and I don't disagree with it. I do.
I don't think that the government or whoever is trying to get retirees back in is, I don't think, I just don't feel like that's their goal. It may not be. I feel that their goal is, well, maybe not their goal, but it's these guys already served. We have problems.
We need to get them back in. Instead of actually looking at why nobody is signing up for the military, why they can't keep anybody in the military, the old warrior mindset, I guess I can't say it's completely gone, but it's not like it used to be. And maybe instead of forcing retirees back into the military, because they're not going to, I don't feel like they would use their experience. I think that they would take a 70 year old man who, I mean, the last war was 20 years, put 20 year seasoned warrior back in and force him to go through pronoun training, gender training, and try to, it's trying to fit a square into a round hole.
It is definitely one of those counterintuitive things of trying to bring in these old war horses into a newer evolved organization. And I think kind of the perspective I have on it is not based on what I think their intent is, but rather what the effect could be. I think that the intent is probably honestly just desperation that we don't have enough people. I mean, you have issues considered in the Navy where so many people are leaving at the 05 level, but how many people do you have left to screen for major command?
So all of a sudden, you know, whereas when I came in, the idea of being the captain of a cruiser or an aircraft carrier was like the highest thing that you could possibly aspire to. And yet now to screen for major command, it's so much of a smaller group. And so it's not as rigorous or as difficult to screen for that job because so many people are leaving earlier. And the reason they're leaving earlier is, you know, various things.
There's a lot of reasons why. And yes, it certainly does make sense in the long term to identify why did people leave? How do we get them to stay? Maybe the unintended benefit is when you start to bring some of these older men and women back in that they can help you fix that problem and say, okay, you know why I get out?
This is why this is how you can fix it. They have to know why people are getting out. I mean, they sent letters, you know, with the mandatory vaccine requirement that they shoved in everybody's face. You know, now they're sending letters saying, because didn't they got, was it dishonorable or other than honorable?
So it depends on the one, but most of them did get honorable discharges, but they got honorable discharges with RE codes, re-enlistment codes. They prevented them from coming back in and I've seen some of these DD 2014s, but they actually wrote down at the bottom, honorable discharges, before the end of enlistment in lieu of charges. And it doesn't specifically say charges for vaccine. You can look at that and say, you know, what were they going to be charged with?
Yeah, yeah. It's, I just don't see any, I'm getting angry. I don't see any steps to actually rectify the situation or to keep your attention. To me, this seems like a, like, like an overstep on, hey, we know you've spent a lifetime here serving your country.
We can't get the younger generation to sign up, so we're going to need you back. Oh, and you're going to play by all these new rules that you retired early to get out and get the hell away from, whether it's vaccine mandates or whatever the, whatever the, the, the, this week's latest agenda is we've all seen the recruiting videos that the Navy put out. Wasn't Navy, right? Probably.
You know, and, and it was probably all of them, but I mean, they completely changed the culture within the military, completely changed the values, and nobody wants to sign up now because they draw from a certain demographic of people. And guess what? The people that want this other shit, they don't, they don't want to serve in the military. Well, maybe you should start the draft and draft the people that wanted this in in there.
Get them in there. Let them serve in the shit. And, and, man, is she such a double edged sword and it really, it just irks me and it bothers me. I go to bed thinking about these things and, and it's a double edged sword because it's our country.
Somebody's got to defend it. And, but it's a voluntary program, right? It is a voluntary program. And that's, that's one thing is, you know, the, the program on the table right now, it's just the army for right now.
It is voluntary. You know, there is a mechanism where they can recall retirees to active duty, but that this program, they go out and they get retirees who are willing to volunteer and therefore they consent to what would otherwise be an involuntary recall. So they're not forcing anybody to come back yet. You know, I don't, I don't think anybody believes in what we're, I can't say anybody.
I can't say I don't think anybody believes because I think a lot of people that have never been to work and support what we're doing right now, but everybody who's been to war is against what we're doing right now while the proxy war in Ukraine. You know, the way that we left Afghanistan and a violent abandoned our allies to be murdered, raped, killed, abused, all the women's rights are gone again. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it makes me wonder what the, what the hell was my service for? A lot of guys are wondering this.
He does. And I guess for me, I look at it as one of those things of, yes, there are problems. And I could either be the angry veteran that's just sitting there saying, oh, it's not like when I was in and they're all screwed up. Or I could go and say, Hey, I'd like to be part of the solution here.
You know, and, and so I think that the retirees that are going to sign up for this problem, for this program rather, are going to be the ones that want to be part of the solution. And, and that's, you know, that's something that, you know, I can't tell you how many clients that I've talked to where they sit there and they say, you know, Tim, I just want to drop my papers. And I beg them not to. And oftentimes, and I tell it kind of in two phases, please don't do it right now because I don't want to lose that leverage point in your case.
But please don't do that after because the experience that you're going through now with, you know, whatever it is, sometimes it's, you see them j things, sometimes it's, I j things, whatever it is that I'm going through with this client. If we can overcome this, you may be a great lieutenant colonel, but after this experience, you're going to be an amazing colonel. You may be a great one star. I'm going to have to do this.
This is going to give you so much more perspective to be an incredible two, three, four star and so I beg these people. Don't put in your papers. Use this experience, overcome this experience, and then use it to turn around and make things better. Yeah, because that's, and you haven't asked me about, you know, the reasons why there's retention problems, but I think that one of the major reasons why is because of the way that we're treating our people and the way that the legal system disciplinary system has worked in the military that gets a lot of people just wanting to get out.
The IG, I think the inspector general system, the way that it's set up right now, it's a necessary program, but the way that it's set up right now, it itself drives retention problems. When I was a brand new officer, we looked up at our commanding officers and thought they were gods, and these guys who were in command, men and women in command, like they all seem to be really enjoying being in command and I had some great CEOs. You know, Captain Streater, Captain Blake, who later became Admiral Blake, they were incredible commanders. And then when my generation gets to that age, and I'm talking to a lot of people, what a lot of them are saying, I can't wait to finish my command tour because I'm terrified at any moment.
I'm going to get an IG complaint, and it's all going to come crashing down. And everything that I fought for 20 years, I'm going to lose. And then the Navy looks at him and says, good job, you survived your command tour. Would you like to scream for major command and do it again?
So, and if you want to get deeper into this, but I think that a lot of the way that the disciplining and the legal system is set up in the military's whole drives non retention. And if you fix that one problem, maybe it's not the biggest factor, maybe it's only a partial factor. But even if that takes your retention numbers and moves it 5%, how many more retirees do you not know have to recall? So, and it's just, you know, the system in that way is broken, and it's something that drives me out of my mind dealing with regularly, because I sit there and I say, you know what, DOD wide, and I'm going to pick on the Navy because they're the ones that I was a member of and that I spend the most time with.
As a Navy, we can train the greatest fighter pilots in the world, the greatest ship drivers in the world, the greatest maritime warriors in the world, submariners. But we can't train our lawyers to do basic trial skills. We can't train our lawyers to conduct basic investigations and to properly represent the client or properly figure out how to prosecute, whether we should prosecute, make good decisions. We train our physicians to be phenomenal, emergency room physicians that cause so many people that in past wars would have died that today are alive because our medical community is so well trained to piece them back together.
And our investigators are horrific. I've done cases with law enforcement agencies across this country, local, state, federal, and I've never run into investigators as bad as in DOD. And again, I'll pick on the Navy, but you know, Army and Air Force have a similar structure where the NCIS agents, they're special agents. They love to tell people the same as the FBI.
They just have a TV show. But the reality is the way they become an NCIS agent is you want to be a federal agent, you go on USA jobs.gov, you upload your resume, check all the boxes, and then you have to get rejected by the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, HSI, and all the three letter agencies before now NCIS is the one that hires you. So NCIS, in my opinion, is primarily staffed with rejects from the other agencies. Then you go down to the IG level where you have investigators that are not carrying guns or badges and how well trained are they.
If you want to be an investigator, you're not going to go to DOD, you're going to go to DOJ, you're going to go to the NYPD, the LAPD, you're going to go to an agency like that, state police somewhere. But you then have the IG, which is kind of the next level down, and then the next level down from that, command investigations, where they'll assign some officer to do an investigation that has zero training and zero experience. And some of those do really wonderful job. Honestly, when it comes to command investigations, I haven't seen a mediocre one.
They're either really good or really bad, because it's either somebody who, like, you know, clears their schedule and puts all their effort into trying to, you know, be as good as they can possibly be on it. Or you get something that sits there and says, well, I think they're guilty because they refuse to answer my questions and evoke the Fifth Amendment. When you run a business, you track every dollar, and your bank shouldn't make that harder or hold you back. Chime is changing the way people bank by offering the most rewarding fee-free banking.
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I know this is an issue that I'm passionate about and I've gone off in a little rant here, but I think that if you fix a lot of those problems, that's going to cause a lot of the people, the good people who have left, they would have stayed. If they couldn't have impacted that while they were in, why would they think that they can come back off retirement and make the impact now? They may not. Those individuals probably wouldn't be the ones to sign up.
But I think a lot of it depends on the changing climate and if they're given an opportunity to do things again. But here's the other thing. What opportunity do you have to make change when you are on this ladder? And you know, I have to do everything just this way if I want to make the next rank.
But if you come in from retirement, you don't have to worry about your next promotion anymore. There's an element of that. I'll be an example. I represented 405s in a single case.
It was three Navy commanders, one Marine Lieutenant Colonel, aviators. Great guys. Two of them had already been screened and selected for 06 and CAG. They were going to be the commanders of carrier air wings.
And because of this IG complaint that went completely and totally out of control, I got it all remedied. But all of them were tired as O5s. That's two carrier air wing commanders taking off the board in one move. And that's just one story.
But there's a lot of these. Now, if you went to one of those guys and said, Hey, would you like to come back? And whatever the role is, and that's the interesting thing that I noticed in this program is that the retirees can apply to come back into fill a specific bill. They're being advertised for specific jobs.
So it's not just that a retiree sits there and says, Yeah, I'll come back in and I'll let PERS decide where to put me. They would be looking at a very specific, Okay, they need senior instructors at the flight school. They need somebody to run operations out of this port here. They need whatever it is.
And again, I know it's the Army program and I'm using Navy terms. But if they see a job that they want to do, that they feel like they can make a difference at, and they're not worried that they might, you know, they're not worried about trying to make rank. Maybe they can be more effective. Okay, I agree with you there.
I still don't understand why they would consider that rather than try to figure out why everybody left at the beginning. And so it sounds like I never thought about the IG stuff. Yeah. I don't think that is the biggest reason people are leaving.
No, I'm not saying it's 50 plus percent, but I do think it's a percentage. Do you feel, I'm going to tell you a theory that I've had. Yeah. And this happened, I, I, this crossed my mind way back when the whole defund the police movement started.
Mm hmm. And I feel that the demoralization of police and the defunding the police movement was to change out the old guard. Get rid of the old mindset, bring in the new mindset. Then I think that carried over to the military.
They brought all, I mean, when you think of, when you think of the guys that have been on the show, you know, that have joined. They didn't join. You have a lot of clients on your show. Yeah.
Good point. But these guys didn't join for this kind of shit. They didn't join to be, to have Vax mandates. They didn't join to go through whatever, what do you even call it?
Like the inclusion or whatever you want to call. Yeah. They didn't, they went to defend this country and to go to war, not to be told about pronouns, not to be told what to jam into their arms, not to be, not to be told any of that. They went into become warriors and fight for this country and, and, and, and, and, and stand up for American values and beliefs and, and train our allies, which we've abandoned.
And I, I feel that, I mean, what do you think of that? You know what I'm saying? I, I, I, I wanted to get rid of the warrior mindset in the military and they wanted to get rid of the old mindset in the police department completely revamped it. And if it's, it's almost like we're just watching a failed experiment real time.
Or we could take these lessons and figure out how do we apply the Congress to get rid of all those people kidding slightly. But you know, here's the thing, you're right. And I think that a lot of this focus on, on these other programs, I mean, look, the vaccine mandate was a total disaster. It was a total failure.
And I think that the courts have been very clear on this and the fact that we now have the army sending out letters to people saying, Hey, I know we kicked you out for not taking the vaccine, but we'd like you back and you don't have to take the vaccine. Now, it's an admission that that was a total failure. As to a lot of these other initiatives, I think that they're pushing very hard on the language and everything. But the reality is, I was thinking about this the other day.
I came in in 1998. So it was during Don't Ask Don't Tell. And I remember when they repealed it, was that a six ish? It was around a six.
And everybody was predicting doom and gloom and everything, everybody on the outside. But I don't remember. I don't know if you remember what it was like on the inside, but I remember when they were talking about repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell, we all thought, who cares? When they repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell, one of my academy classmates, like on the effective date, he got married at one minute after midnight on the first date that he could be open about his orientation.
And you know what, all of our classmates said about it? Good for him. Was anybody surprised? Oh, no, we all knew.
Nobody cared. Don't Ask Don't Tell in a weird way was used more, at least towards the end. I mean, obviously earlier on, it was definitely abused. But towards the end, all the time I was in, Don't Ask Don't Tell was primarily used by people that wanted to get out.
You know, young sailors who got on the ship and decided, oh, my recruiter lied to me. This is not what I really wanted to do. Let me go to confess to being gay as a way of getting a simple and easy, honorable discharge without any questions asked. And, you know, when that went away, they of course then started, you know, they turned to smoking weed instead to get out.
But their DV2 14s looked worse. It didn't matter. And I think that if you, you can have both, you can have the warrior culture and you can have all this, you know, inclusion. Because the reality is, if you have warriors out there, do you care who they're sleeping with or what they're doing on their free time?
No. Exactly. If they can do their job and help us to go over there and kill the people that we need to kill, it doesn't matter what they do in their free time, what they, you know, how they want to address what their pronouns are. None of that matters.
So you can do both. And I think the idea that we have to only do one or the other is something that we have to get passed. You know? Yeah.
I mean, I'm with you. All I'm saying is the current model is not working. No, it's not. You know, and so if you, if, if, if, if I think it's, you know, with the, with the initiatives that we're talking about, I mean, it's, it's being forced down everybody's throat.
And I think that is, I personally think that is one of the main things that is affecting retention and recruiting is, they don't want to hear it. They don't want to be forced to sit through the, whatever the training program is. I don't believe what it is. Yeah.
You know, and so, yeah, it's all that mandatory training. We always had the mandatory training where you sit through the every six months you sit through the sexual assault prevention course and to this course and to that course. And I had a department head when I was a junior officer who said training is valuable because trying to do that. It's valuable because training is documentation to cover somebody else's ass when it gets screwed up.
And it's not so much about did you learn something during this diversity train? It's like getting your signature on the attendance sheet so that later if you go out and you, you know, discriminate or you do something bad, they can say, ah, well, we trained that officer on how to do this. We told them that they should, you know, treat all these people with, you know, their correct pronouns and everything. And so therefore, it's not on the command.
It's on the individual and then they can use that as evidence in the administrative or disciplinary proceeding to show that they were that bad. So, you know, the training is always had too much of that. You know, the lecture based, you know, power death by PowerPoint training. And yes, right now it's even heavier on that side of things because that's what the politicians are driving.
That's kind of what I'm because I do agree with what you're saying with everything that you're saying. It's just they've amplified it. It's on the recruiting videos. It's everywhere you look.
Right. It's, I mean, what do you think about? What do you think about when I said, I think this was on purpose to get rid of the old guard and bring in the note with the defunding the police movement? Do you think there was a deeper agenda than.
There is always a agenda. I mean, throughout the history of this country, there's always been an agenda to get rid of the old, you know, the younger generation always wants to take over. Okay. The old, you know, the older generation, their dinosaurs, their, you know, their thinking is in the past, we know better than them.
We need to push them out so we can get, you know, the next generation of generals. I think that's a constant throughout history. Is this perhaps one tactic that was used? Sure.
To a certain extent, you know, it probably did work and getting a lot of people up. But then the fact that we're now asking those exact same people to volunteer to come back might be an indication that as much as politicians refuse to ever admit that they made a mistake or they're wrong about something. Maybe they're trying to correct it in a way that doesn't require them to actually make any ambitions. I don't know.
I mean, it's, it's interesting. It's throughout the history of this country, throughout the history of the world, it's been a pendle where you swing too far over to one side. You get abuse, correction, over correction, abuse, correction, over correction, and it has been that way throughout history. And so, you know, might, you know, were things way too far over at the time when, you know, NCIS, then called NIS, the Admiral's Gestapo went out to frame people for being gay so that they could get rid of them.
Yeah, that was way too far over here. Have we now swung way too far over here to where we're forgoing marksmanship training in favor of, you know, pronoun training? Probably. Where is the right place?
Right in the middle. How do you get the pendulum to stop because once it starts swinging this way? Where do you think, I mean, that brings us into the divisiveness in this country. And it's so bad.
I, it's so bad. I, I don't even, I mean, it's been going on for years now and years and years and still, it still has not registered 100% of my head because I, I constantly think, how, how do we get here? Is this really as bad as it sounds? Is, is this real?
Am I really seeing what I'm seeing? And, and it just seems to be getting worse. And, and, you know, I'm, I feel like I'm pretty center. I'm not, I don't have, at least I don't feel like I have extreme views and, you know, I do.
I'm extreme moderate. Yeah. Yeah. But I guess what I'm saying is, I mean, I just, I see it swinging.
Where did it start? Where did the pendulum start to get out of control? Honestly, probably back in 1776. I mean, or before, look all the way back to the beginning.
Okay. The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Ben Franklin. Step back to the site for a minute. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were allies, very close friends in the fight for independence and to convince the Continental Congress to vote for the Declaration of Independence.
Their interests were perfectly aligned. And then we fought a war. And after the war was over, one of the interesting things not a lot of people realize about the Revolutionary War. At the end of that war, we all of a sudden we're sitting there like, okay, we don't have a king.
Now what? Nobody had a plan. Nobody had an idea of what do we want to create in its place. And so that's when the debates started.
And John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, these close allies, became polar opposites, because they each have very different ideas of how this country should be being put in place. They didn't speak for years. Thomas Jefferson was John Adams vice president, because back then the way it worked is you have a presidential election. The first place winner gets the presidency, second place winner gets the vice presidency.
And they fought and they didn't speak for years after that, because they just had very different ideas. They both knew they didn't want a king. They didn't know what they did want. And that divisiveness, the only president we've ever had that's not been a member of a political party is George Washington.
After him, it split into the federalists and the Democratic Republicans. John Adams on the federalist side, Jefferson on the Democratic Republican side. And that began this partisanship and the fighting back and forth that has continued throughout history. The parties have changed.
So, you know, the way that you currently have Democrats and Republicans, I can't necessarily point to, well, this one was derived from federalists. This one was from Democratic Republicans, because different issues, they kind of move around. And then sometimes parties disappear and new ones pop up. But it started then.
And are we divisive today? Yes. Does it seem as bad as it's ever been? Yes.
And a lot of that is because of the prevalence of the media. However, is this the worst it's ever been? Well, half the states aren't putting on gray coats and picking up rifles to shoot at the other half of the states that are wearing blue coats. So, we're not there.
And I think that it looks a lot worse than we think it is because of the way that the media and social media portrays it. Because ultimately, divisiveness gets you more clicks and more likes and more comments than a message of unity. And you think this goes all the way up to the president, worried about clicks and likes? Yeah, absolutely.
But it starts there. Because why is the president one clicks and likes? He wants votes. And if you look at the way that a lot of these presidential elections are running today, they're not appealing to the undecided voters.
They're appealing to the base because presidential elections are now by and large decided by whose base goes to the polls. Who's more excited to go and vote? Not so much that we have these people that are reliable voters and we have to convince these people in the middle to vote for one side or the other. I think that the percentage of people in this country that are sitting there today saying, I really don't know.
I would like to hear a debate because I'd like to hear on the issues whether I like Joe Biden or Donald Trump. I think that hypothetical person, there aren't many of them. There are plenty that are probably sitting there saying, I will decide whether to vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden or not at all. Or I'm trying to decide between Joe Biden and RFK.
I'm trying to decide between Donald Trump and whatever third party candidate they find. I mean, what was it? One of these states in their primary, the second place when an actual delegate's got assigned to none of these candidates? So, yeah, I do think it goes all the way to the top.
And even when we say the top, and you assume that the president is the top, it's the parties. It's the DNC and the RNC that are really driving us. Do you feel like the, I mean, you say the pendulum began at the beginning? I'm sure it swung out of control before and then come back into...
Made 1800s when it swung furthest out of control. What about in recent times? I think it looks worse than it is. Because you don't have conversations with people as much that you disagree with.
I'm not talking about you in the visual, but people don't have as many conversations with people that they disagree with as much. I like having conversations with people I disagree with. You're an attorney. It's one of the things I'm paid to do.
But I mean outside of the courtroom, I enjoy talking to somebody that's not just going to sit there and nod their head with everything that I say. And if you can sit down, in fact, last week, I was sitting in the cafe at my gym, lifetime in Clarendon. And this woman walked past me, this younger black woman, and she looked at me. She says, oh, I recognize you.
I saw you on TV. And I said, yeah, it's nice to meet you and everything. And we sat down. We had a conversation.
And she expected me to be this, you know, Trump lawyer, therefore, it must be some crazy, right-wing person. But instead, I didn't have any of the expected rhetoric. And so she dropped not doing any of that rhetoric from the other side as well. And instead, we just had a conversation about things in the news.
And even though she was a very liberal person, I told her I'm an extreme moderate. That's what I identify. But we had an intelligent conversation. And at the end of the conversation, you know what she said to me?
She said, people need to have more conversations like this. And she said, you know what? I have a close friend that I haven't talked to in the past few years. Because she became a Trump supporter, and we got in a fight and I haven't spoken to her in years.
I'm going to call her tonight and try and have a real conversation with her without saying without starting it by all those people are crazy. So I think that we're not as far apart as everybody thinks that we are. There was a really good podcast, or friend Andy Fusall had, Hawk Newsom, the head of the New York BLM chapter. And I thought it was such a fascinating podcast because two guys that were very much on the opposite ends of issues, but they decided to sit down and try and have a respectful conversation with one another.
And they listened to each other. And when it came to the issue of defunding the police, Andy asked them, you know, what do you think about the police? Oh, abolish them. Yeah, but what do you replace them with?
Social workers. And they started having a conversation about that instead of just saying, oh, that's crazy. Okay, what does that mean? How would it work?
And as the conversation evolved, he said, well, what, but there are situations out there that are dangerous. And you have, you know, assaults in progress and things like that. And Hawk, they responded, oh, I want the social workers to have guns. And Andy said, are we talking about the same thing then?
We're using different words for the same solution. You want social workers with guns. I want cops with more training and social work. And when you defund the police, they're not getting any more training.
But ultimately don't these two things, you know, come together. Military justice reform, same thing. I talk to people up on the Hill and they're so wrapped up in their individual rhetoric and their individual issues that they can't see that the solutions are the same. You have Republican members of Congress that are, you know, because of some of the work that I've been involved in, Eddie Gallagher and other things, they want to reform the system because they see how it has abused our warfighters.
You have people like Kristen Gillibrand who want to reform the criminal justice system because they see how it has, you know, negatively impacted issues of sexual assault. Kristen Gillibrand is never going to stand up and say Eddie Gallagher was mistreated. Any more than these Republican congressmen are going to stand up and say, you know, we have a sexual assault problem in the military. And yet if they can both get past their rhetoric, her solution is the same as theirs.
And because they can't get past it, you end up with these half-baked measures, you know, like the reason to reform where they created this office as a special trial counsel, which I think is a baby step in the right direction, but actually is more of lip service to the problem than an actual reform. If you could get people to get past the rhetoric and just sit down and say, okay, I'm not going to call you names. You don't call me names. What's the solution?
We're not as far apart as everybody thinks we are. It's hard to say. I want to agree with you. I really do.
I don't see it happening here, but I live in a bubble. You know, I don't know what it's like elsewhere. But when I think about, you know, things like the border, is it that bad? Or is the media portraying it to be that bad?
You know, I'm going down there in July to, I don't want to say where, but because I have to see it for myself. I tried it on another section years ago, and it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. So now I'm going to go to another section and see for myself. But, you know, when you see things like that or the Afghanistan withdrawal, you know, that's a divisive issue.
It is. Now we left. And that isn't. That is very real.
You know, the fact that we are funding the Taliban $40 million a week. I mean, this, it is that bad. It is. But a lot of that is the politicians, not the people.
And that's, that's the difference is the border that bad probably is. I mean, I haven't been down there myself, but I've seen, you know, what impact it has on the communities, you know, in DC and New York. And it certainly has had a significant impact, but that is not the people. That's the politicians.
And I think that one of the things you're seeing here as the pendulum, you know, starts to swing a little bit more wildly. One thing that Trump is effective at. I don't want to call him brilliant. I have the effect of that is drawing his opponents into polar opposite positions of where they would otherwise be.
When he took a strong position on immigration, his opponents took a strong anti position on immigration. And if you look at, I love watching Bill Clinton's State of the Union dresses. Google, it's going YouTube. Look up Bill Clinton's State of the Union.
Look what he said about immigration. And when you listen to it, you're going to sit there and shake your head and say, I forgot the Bill Clinton was Republican. You didn't forget what it was, is that the positions of the parties have moved so far away from one another from back in the 90s where they weren't really that far apart. And so when you had this build the wall, how far can we swing away from build the wall open border?
When you have overturned Roe v. Wade, how far can you swing away from that partial birth post birth? And again, this is the politicians that are trying to play to their base as opposed to appealing to the middle swinging as far as they can out. And so I think that's really what you're seeing here.
And so I believe that most Americans do want a reasonable immigration policy. It's not build a wall and lock it down, nor is it open border. You know, one thing in the beginning of the 2016 election cycle, when Trump first started talking about build a wall, everybody focused on build the wall, going to get Mexico to pay for it and everything else. And everybody missed one key element of his early speeches.
And because they missed it, it didn't then reappear in later speeches. He said, Oh, it's going to be a big, beautiful wall. And it's going to have a big, beautiful door. Nobody talks about the door.
Do you even remember, remember, I'm talking about a big, beautiful door? No, right. And I think that the American people would be okay with a wall. If there was focus on what the door looks like, we are a nation of immigrants.
We need immigrants in this country, but there's a process. And if you fix that process, focus on the door, then the wall is no longer divisive. My mother-in-law, she was born in Beijing. She ran away to Taiwan when she was like two or three years old during the Communist Revolution.
Her family left. And then she came to this country legally to go to grad school. And she and her family went through hell to get to go through all the immigration processes to become a citizen. And she did it.
And so when she looks a lot of these things, one of the things she hates about the illegal immigration is that she did it the right way. And I think a lot of immigrants, legal immigrants, probably think the same thing. If we did it the right way, it was way too difficult for us to do it. But this is a swing too far to the other side.
So maybe you improve the system of legal immigration, and then nobody's going to dispute the issue of illegal immigration. And then the Democrats can dust off Bill Clinton's old speeches and use those and said, yeah, it's interesting to say that because I've been saying that ever since I went down to the border and saw the migrant camps of people who are waiting to come in legally years, and years, and years, and years, they're waiting. And so that's, you know, you incentivize people to come here illegally when you make it too difficult to come here legally. If you're going to leave them in a migrant camp for years, why don't you think?
Why is nobody working on the immigration process and just opening the borders? Because you have politicians on those sides. I'm glad you brought that up. You think that the problem is the politicians and not the people?
Yes, I think the problem is both. I mean, let's talk about Congress and these numbers are off, but it's some it is and they are extreme numbers. So I'm just going to use Congress's extreme. So Congress has something like a these numbers are off, but I know they're close.
Congress has what a something like a 90% disapproval rating in a or let me rephrase that. People hate Congress. Congress has a 10% approval rating, but a 90% reelection rate. That's not a problem with the politicians.
That's a problem with the people. It's a problem with we have a bunch of people that want to bitch moan complain, not take a stance on anything, not not not take a stance out of it. If it inconveniences an American, they're not going to do it. Right.
They're not going to say anything. They're not going to make any changes. They're not going to stop sharp shopping at certain places. They're not they're not going to do anything.
And that's a perfect example. 10% approval rating in a 90% reelection rate. That's a people problem. Yeah.
It's not just a people problem though. It's a party problem because the prospect of anybody running for office is so daunting. You know, I I love my job. I'm never going to run for office.
I don't want to. You know, but my wife and my daughter my daughter likes saying that he should be president like new way. Not because of the job, but because of the election because you see what happens to people that are challenging the I don't even want to call it the deep state and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I have two friends on both veterans, both who decided to run for office, both of them I recommend it.
Maybe you don't want to do that because, you know, maybe this won't turn out the way they want to. Both of them said, you know, no, I've got a good clean record. I, you know, I want to do this. Both of them had to spend their campaigns or lost the election after false allegations of child abuse came out during their primaries.
So why does somebody want to get into a congressional race? If we have raised the stakes to that level that if you're not a party insider, we are going to destroy your life to make sure that you can't possibly win. So is it a people problem for re-electing the incumbents? To a certain extent, yes.
Is it a party problem for not allowing a real choice? Yes. Yes, it is. Because ultimately the party and the incumbents, they have their power by the arrangement that they have.
And as soon as somebody comes in that's not a party insider that threatens their power. And so whether it's a false claim of child abuse or whatever it is, they will do something, you know, to prevent that. And you don't even have to have done something wrong. You know, I could sit there and say, do I have any skeletons in my closet?
Does it matter? They'll find somebody that I went to law school with that says, oh, yeah, he did this. He did that. Look at what happened to Breck Avenue.
Good people are disincentivized from taking elected positions or Senate confirmed positions because of the process of getting the job. So is that a people problem or is that a party problem? I think it's both. And I don't think that's the only reason I'm saying that we have a people problem.
You know, we have people that I'm just going to run through some examples. We have we have people that will go on and on and on about the act of shooters and how there needs to be. You know, we obviously have a problem with that in this country. And we have parents that will bitch, moan, whine, complain, threaten, very few of them take action.
If you don't get an armed security guard at this school, I'm going to yank my kid out. Do they yank their kid out? No, we could still there today from from from them going on and on about this years ago. You know, we have, you know, how many companies have come out here.
How many companies have come out with with advertising that doesn't align with certain groups? The woke, the woke agenda, right? And what are we, what are we here? We are all these people.
Bitch, moan, whine, complain. I'm never this is ridiculous. I'm never, you know, going to shop there again as a telling you that you look in their backseat and they got shopping bags from the exact thing they're complaining about. Correct.
You know, we've got people on on on on both sides that are calling each other sheep, right? The mental gymnastics that I'm seeing people perform are. It's, it's almost impressive. You know, you'll hear people go, Oh, man, you can, you can show them the lie.
You can show them the lie. And they still, they won't even look at it. I've heard this for years. And then you show them the lie about their candidate.
Immediately, what do they do? They dismiss it. They make excuses for their candidate. They make excuses for their party.
One being, one of them being the Bud Light fiasco. Right? Whether you're, whether you're, whether you're, agree with what Bud Light did, whether you don't. There was a big thing on the right, right?
We're going to boycott Bud Light. Well, until Donald Trump comes out and says, Oh, Bud Light, I sent you this article in the Federalist. Oh, Bud Light actually isn't that bad. They employ a lot of veterans.
Okay. Well, let's go down the list of all the companies that employ a lot of veterans. Right. All of them.
Google, you, uh, face meta. Oh, everybody employs veterans. That's a ridiculous statement to say. And, and oh, what happened?
Supposedly, there was what was it? A campaign fundraiser or something that was put on the list. Something that was put on by Bud Light right after he said that, you know, but you show, you show people that and what do they do? They, they immediately dismiss it.
They make an excuse for their candidate. You know, and it's the same on the other side with the border stuff. Right. You know, if you say, if you say, if you say anything, if you give Trump any constructive criticism or any criticism at all, it's, what do you hear?
What, what do you, what do you go Biden supporter? And if you give Biden any criticism at all, what do you have Trump supporter? And it's like, what do we lose the ability to? To, to, to criticize or call out corruption for our elected officials.
They are elected officials. You don't owe them shite. You don't owe Trump shit. And you don't owe Biden shit.
They owe you. We elected them. They're supposed to represent us. And they're not doing that.
Right. And now you have people who refuse to look at the flaws and on either side. And so once again, that brings me back to this is a people problem. They're making excuses for their candidates and for their parties.
And instead of going, yeah, I am on this side, but this is not right. What's wrong is wrong. What's right is right. And that is not good for this country.
That's accurate. And I think that some of that may be driven by the media as well. I think it's largely driven by the media. But there is this blind loyalty to candidates or politicians that it shocks me.
Sometimes when you have to think about this because there are no perfect people in Washington, D.C. Every single one of those politicians has good points, has bad points. None of them is 100% wrong. None of them is 100% right.
And so when you sit there and every single thing Trump does is wrong, or every single thing Biden does is wrong. And you don't acknowledge anything that they do that may be right. It's not honest. It's dishonest.
And when I sit there and I think about some of these commentators on TV talking about, for example, the Trump legal stuff, I'm one of the few people that goes out there and I say, okay, this is good, but this is bad. They shouldn't have done this, but this is okay. I hear people on there that are any decision that is issued, that is negative to Trump, any judicial decision. Oh, that's airtight reasoning that will never get overturned.
That's perfect reasoning. But then if the judge says something that's rules and Trump's favor, that should be instantly overturned on appeal. And I kind of sit there and I've been in some of these and I was like, have you even read the decision? Have you even read the see what the judge's decision was based on?
Are you saying that it's airtight because you like the result? And I think that that's one problem that we have now is that Biden must be perfect because the alternative is Donald Trump. Or Trump must be perfect because the alternative is Joe Biden. And I remember I had a brief meeting with Tulsi Gabbard while she was still in Congress.
While she was still a Democrat. And she said something that was so insightful and so stuck in my mind. And she said that when she started her career in politics, her hope and some of the things that she saw was about working together to find solutions. And at the time that she left, what she saw was every decision was driven by making sure the other side doesn't get away.
It's not about what's best for the people. What's best for the country. It's about we have to make sure that the other party can't claim this is a win. And so when you have that and then you have the media that's kind of driving that narrative to the people.
And when people only listen to one media outlet or one side media outlet, the woman I was telling you about earlier, she told me that she only listens to CNN. And actually I pulled out my phone and I showed her right now. I'll show you how do I get my news? Okay, I get my news.
See all those apps? Fox News, CNN, Politico, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. You cannot watch just one outlet and think that you're possibly getting the truth. I have been part of many newsworthy events, whether in court or representing people.
And then I read the articles after the fact about what I allegedly did. And depending on which outlet it is, it's a totally different story. During Eddie's trial, depending on which outlet it was, you'd think that there were two different trials going on. But if you read both articles, now you're getting at least partially a balanced picture.
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Thank you. Let's get back to the show. So, people that don't diversify their media, they get that one point of view, and then they get really bought into the idea that everything Biden does is wonderful, or everything Trump does is wonderful. And Trump is the savior because Biden is trying to destroy the country, or vice versa, either way.
But if we can stop, sit back and be honest about it, neither one of these candidates is perfect. None of these candidates is perfect. They all have good things, they all have bad things, they all have things that you should agree with, things that you should disagree with. And anybody who follows perfect party, author worksie is wrong, they're being dishonest.
How would you even begin to get the population of the US to do that? I mean, because of what I'm telling you, you can put the facts right in their face, and they will completely ignore it. Look, this is what your guy did. He did this.
Well, he must have, you don't understand the plan. Oh, I don't understand the plan. No, these are the facts. This is what happened.
And that is both sides of the aisle. It's not new. It's not new. This has been throughout our history.
The oldest newspaper in the United States, the New York Post, was founded by Alexander Hamilton as a Federalist Party propaganda paper. Newspapers, at the beginning of this country, were founded by members of the political parties, specifically as a vehicle in which they could publish articles attacking mostly falsely the figures on the other side. The literary wars fought between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were legendary and all written in pseudonyms. And people would read the paper of their party, and they would believe that Alexander Hamilton wanted to tear up the Constitution and return to a monarchy.
They would believe these things. And you take a kernel of truth, and then you embellish it, and then it becomes something believable. How do we break that? It all comes back to me, to the political parties.
So how do we regain the trust of the American people and regain a sense of perspective is to get rid of the RNC and the DNC? How would you do that? Preferably non-violently, but I'm not advocating that. But I think that the people, this is one of those things where there could be today in a way that there never has been before, a popular, illegal, nonviolent, popular uprising driven by some of these social media campaigns to get rid of the incumbents.
And to say to these parties, you don't represent what our true beliefs are. Because a lot of these political parties, positions, they don't actually represent what their constituents do believe. But nobody's standing up and saying that. And so if the people stood up and said, we don't support you guys, and maybe it's through fundraising, maybe it's through, I mean, and here again, what's one thing this country does have a history of?
Changing political parties. It is not something that we just sit here and say, these are the two parties that we have, we've always had these parties. No, we haven't always had these parties. We've had plenty of other parties throughout history.
And I'm not talking about like, you know, minor ones, but major political parties have been disbanded and replaced. Can you give me an example? I'm sure the Democratic Republicans and the Federalists look at the two original parties. You have the Bolmous party.
You have plenty of parties that have come up throughout the history like that. And I mean, the modern Republican party was really Abraham Lincoln. So, and even there, you look at how the positions of these parties have shifted over the years, where the Republican party was the party of civil rights. And, you know, and everything in the Democratic party was the party of slavery and Jim Crow and all those things.
And then that switches. A couple of years ago, I was reading George W. Bush's autobiography. And there was one part in it that I did not believe I was sure he was lying about.
And it was when he was talking about running for governor. And he said, I want to run for governor of Texas. And he was told, that's a waste of time. You'll never win.
No Republican could ever win the governor's race in Texas. And I put the book down and I went to my computer and looked it up. And I thought that can't possibly be true. And yet, George W.
Bush was the first Republican governor of Texas in decades. Hmm. I did not realize that. So think about that.
George W. Bush, he's not that old. And yet, prior to him, Texas was reliably deep blue. People like to think that so many institutions as they exist today cannot be changed.