The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Biden Pardons Hunter, Trump’s Tariff Proposals, Kash Patel’s Appointment to Lead the FBI

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov discuss the implications of President Biden’s pardon for his son, Hunter. Then, they get into Trump’s tariff proposals, whether Kash Patel is fit to run the FBI, and why companies are eliminating their DEI initiatives.   Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov.  Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Go to constantcontact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to constantcontact.ca for your free trial. Constantcontact.ca. Amazon Q Business is the generative AI assistant from AWS. Because business can be slow, like wading through the mud. But Amazon Q helps streamline work so tests like summarizing monthly results can be done in no time. Learn what Amazon Q Business can do for you at aws.com slash learn more. That's aws.com slash learn more.

Support for the show comes from Alex Partners. In business, disruption brings not only challenges, but opportunities. At pivotal moments of change, Alex Partners is the consulting firm chief executives can rely on. With clarity, direction, and above all, implementation, Alex Partners can be a steady hand for your business when decisive leadership is vital.

You can discover insights and learn how to convert digital disruption into revenue growth by reading Alex Partners' latest technology industry insights, available at www.alexpartners.com slash vox. That's www.alixpartners.com slash vox. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results, when it really matters. Welcome to Raging Moderates, I'm Scott Galloway.

And I'm Jessica Tarleff. Jessica, it's time for banter. Don't do it. It's time for banter. What were you worried I was gonna do so I can do it? Where do I find you today? And then I would say in the same place I always am, but where are you?

I do not recognize this room. I'm at home in London and we're moving. So I've been charged with, I am so good at purging. I won't even show it, but I'm literally throwing out like 200 pounds of clothing and all sorts of stuff. But I'm back in London. I've been here two days already can't wait to get out. The weather, I don't know if you've heard,

the weather here is awful Jess. The weather here is awful. I lived there six years. I actually started using happy bulbs after like three. I gave in and said, oh, this is legit depressing. I need a lift at home. So people don't know this, right? I don't think people know.

You got a PhD at the London School of Economics. Is that right? It is right. And what did you get your PhD in? It was in the government department. I guess it was like technically political economy. Wow. You're so impressive.

And did you enjoy living here? Would you ever move back? Yeah, we would love to do it. I mean, we never lived there together, me and my husband, but he has an office there, which is appealing. But I, as of now, couldn't work there. But once all of this pans out for us, I'm sure I'll be able to work anywhere in the world.

There you go. So all right, our producer's getting angry at me. Let's move on. In today's show, we're discussing Biden's pardon for his son, Hunter, Trump's tariff proposals, and appointment of Cash Patel, and why companies are rolling back DEI initiatives. All right, let's do it.

On Sunday night, President Biden pardoned his son Hunter, wiping out convictions for gun and tax crimes and covering potential federal offenses from 2014 to 2024, including his Burisma dealings. This reverses Biden's earlier promise not to pardon Hunter. The clemency canceled sentencing and blocks any future prosecution, with courts expected to dismiss all charges. Reactions, as you might have guessed, have been mixed, even among Democrats, with Colorado's Governor Jared Polis tweeting, While as a father, I certainly understand President Joe Biden's natural desire to help his son by pardoning him. I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country.

Trump posted on Truth Social, Does the pardon given by Joe to Hunter, including the January 6 hostages who have now been imprisoned for years, such an abuse and miscarriage of justice, J6 referring to January 6 insurrection. Jess, did you see this coming and what are your thoughts here? I guess I always thought it was feasible though. We talked about it on air and I said, he said he's not going to do it and you have to take him at his word. I think that he thought he was going to win the election or that Kamala Harris was going to win the election. And then maybe things were going to be different,

but back against the wall, the sentencing I think is coming up this week. And apparently it's NBC, I think is reporting that they decided in June to say that he was never going to pardon Hunter even though it was still on the table, which feels definitely deceitful. So there's a lie, right? There is a lie in this and him saying that.

But I think with the timing that he saw Trump make Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner's dad, who did one of the more insane things, you know this story about how his brother-in-law was cooperating with the feds against him. So he sent a prostitute to seduce him and then sent the tape of it to his sister. He exposed that her husband was cheating with a prostitute because he was cooperating on other crimes that he actually didn't end up being convicted of. So I think he saw that Charles Kushner is going to be the ambassador to France, Trump's pardon, everyone and their mother. He's also pointing people to his cabinet who openly want to put Hunter away,

to avenge enemies from the press, people who went after him for the quote enemies, you know, from the press, people who went after him for the quote unquote Russia hoax, Russia collusion hoax. And so I think he just said like, F it. Like I have a few more months with power and I'm going to protect my kid. I think you nailed it.

You know, on the downside here, we are kind of devolving into that place, right? I remember when Speaker McCarthy got so upset about some of the holdouts, he kind of stormed up the aisle of the rotunda, and it felt like we might become that nation or South Korea that every 18 months the Congress breaks into fisticuffs. And I feel like we become that nation. And that is we now have people in power abusing their power. This is an abuse of power. And I don't believe, I believe if Harris had won, he wouldn't have done it.

I think the expectations now have become so low and you get so little reward for trying to live up to the expectations and acquit yourself as past presidents have. You actually get dinged for it. It's not even like no reward. I feel like you're penalized for being ethical. Well, that's a fair point.

And I just want to be clear, if I were President Biden, I would do the exact same thing. If I'm, I mean, the guy's not gonna be around, I doubt much longer. Or he's definitely on the back nine. And my sense of his son, pure speculation, struggled with addiction, loves his dad immensely, trying to get his life together, I think, a total fuck up. You know, one of his kids killed in an auto accident.

His other son died of a brain tumor. His one son loves him immensely. And then he sees, as you said, okay, let me get this, the president's son-in-law's dad gets pardoned and then becomes the ambassador to France. Fuck it. I mean, that's exactly right. I would have done the exact same thing.

And the problem is it's become a race to the bottom where no behavior now seems off limits or shocking. So this is a weird analogy, but I'm aggressive on my taxes. I don't do anything illegal. And for a long time, I'm like, no, it's good to pay taxes. And I thought, why am I disarming unilaterally? You know, no one's going to say at your funeral

that he was great, he paid more taxes than he really needed to. And it's the same thing here. It's like, let me get this. These guys, this guy's going to pardon the Duck Dynasty insurrectionists. I'm going to potentially pardon people who have been campaign donors.

You mentioned the Kushner. By the way, that's gotta be. I would love a Thanksgiving with the Kushners. I know the kid, Jared. I like him. He was my student. His brother seems like a total baller. His brother's also married to a supermodel. I've always liked Ivanka. I've met her once or twice. She's always been nice to me. But I definitely want the father, his wife, the prostitute.

I just think it would make for such an interesting Thanksgiving. I gotta think their Thanksgiving is one of the more interesting Thanksgivings. And we should do it at the US Ambassadorship in Paris, which by the way, is the literally the coolest ambassador residence in the world. But back to our central theme here, this is the problem with an administration that is

descended into essentially a kleptocracy that has absolutely no moral standards. As the other side goes, well, why the fuck are we trying to pretend to be ethical when there goes, well, why the fuck are we trying to pretend to be ethical when there's no payoff, when the market and the public doesn't seem to mind? If I'm an 82-year-old father, yeah, I'm pardoning my son. I would have done the exact same thing. Yeah, that seems to be the overwhelming response, putting aside Governor Polis, who also had quite the hot take on RFK Jr. that he got destroyed over when that nomination came out.

But generally speaking, like, hardcore Dems seem to be like, yeah, okay, and it was also time to have some backbone. And one of the main complaints that I feel like rank-and-file Dems have is that we have no Mitch McConnells amongst us, no one who's ruthless enough, right, to not give Garland a hearing. And that they're mad at Merrick Garland once he became AG, that he took two years

to appoint Jack Smith, right, to look into all of these crimes that Trump has allegedly, or we're supposed to say alleged, though everything's been dismissed now, committed. Like, we just sat around for too long and now all of it is gone, poof. The Republicans never would have done that. They take every swing and if they miss, so what? I'll put someone in.

You swing with Matt Gaetz, guess what? You got Pam Bondi, who's kind of like Matt Gaetz in a dress and a bit more confident, which I guess is a good thing. We'll see how that bears out. But one point that Dave Weigel, friend of the pod, if we can say that, I always like that term, made was that if you read the text of what Biden said, his point was that he still believes in the rule of law,

but that this was an abuse of the law for political reasons. And Weigel harken back to the defense that Bill Clinton gave in the 90s, why he was pardoning people, and he thought that all of it was just junk. He's like, this is all just politically motivated. If you get me on something that's actually a crime, and he perjured himself, and that is bad,

and you shouldn't have done that. But the point is, no one cares about who I'm having sex with, except for Ken Starr and rabid Republicans. Right? And so this doesn't actually have anything to do with my competency. It doesn't have anything to do with how I do my job. And so I'm not going to treat this as the real world. And I'm going to pardon people that are associated with it. And I'm going to move on with my life and frankly think pretty highly of myself still.

And that's clearly the tact that Joe Biden was taking. I thought that was a really interesting and smart take on this. I don't know if you have a 90s reflection. But don't you think Republicans could claim the same thing, that the New York case, the Alvin Bragg case against Donald Trump, again, it was about sex. That that was also purely politically motivated and then if so, should warrant a pardon?

Well, yeah, I don't know. That yeah, sounded too enthusiastic for me. It was always the weakest case. And I think part of living in the conservative media world that I do because of work is that I can see that. It's glaring at me. Because I'm like, OK, this is one that they can so easily take apart, but they struggle more with the Mar-a-Lago

documents. Or I guess you could kind of tit for tat, was it an insurrection or not. But there's so much testimony surrounding January 6 and how this was planned, right? That Trump was like, this is how we're going to do it. We're going to overturn the elections. We're going to fan the lawyers out to all the swing states,

et cetera. So yeah, you could make that argument. And Tish James hasn't helped anyone by giving 50 press conferences where she just says, I will stop at nothing, right? Until Donald Trump is behind bars. So you could totally make that argument, but I don't know, there's so much other stuff

that he was indicted on and that juries found him to be guilty of that I think it goes beyond it. But the Stormy Daniels case was always the weakest and it was annoying, frankly, that it happened and that it went first. You brought up a really interesting point, and that is we suffer from a lack of mendacious fucks.

And that is McConnell was always playing us. And everyone was just so disgusted and disappointed. I'm like, well, where are our Senator McConnells? Is it Representative Nadler? Quite frankly, and I hope this election does it. I hope they just clean house the Democratic leadership. I want to see Jeremy Raskin. I think Speaker Pelosi has a touch of Machiavelli to her.

I think she's outstanding. Senator Schumer, I think is incredibly weak. I think he's weak. I don't think he has nearly the strategy or the sack that McConnell has demonstrated. We need just some ruthless motherfuckers in there. And it'll be interesting to see if representative Jeffries brings that kind of Machiavellian strategy. Everything against Hunter Biden was a function of who they were or who they are.

Not of the crimes. No one, had it not been Donald Trump, if he paid off a mistress, a porn star, I just don't think that would have ended up in court. I think that that is a misuse of prosecutorial resources. Hunter Biden, that was bullshit. He would have gotten some charges, fine. He would have been on probation. This is the idea I like,

and I think you're gonna like this. All right, gun charge, he's handsome, he's made porn films, he's been pardoned. I think he's our answer. I think he has, I think he's now the number three or number four most likely Democratic nominee for president in 2028. I think Hunter Biden is the Democrat we need right now, Jess.

What do you think? I mean, I'm not against it. Think of all the bumper stickers we have that we can use. Biden, Biden's the president. Yeah. I mean, have we ever things happen? Maybe Donald Trump, yeah. Right.

All right, we need to move on. All right. Last week, Elon Musk celebrated Thanksgiving with Trump and Mar-a-Lago. As he gears up for his new Dozier role and meets with House Republicans this week, just before the holiday, President-elect Trump proposed 25% tariffs on goods

from Mexico and Canada, raising serious concerns among business and world leaders. Mexico has warned that such a move could cost nearly half a million U.S. jobs while companies fear it will drive up prices for consumers. President Biden is urging Trump to reconsider warning that tariffs could strain relationships with key allies, have inflationary effects at home and result in higher prices across the board. Jess, what do you think's gonna happen here? Do you think it'll fall through on this?

To some degree, I don't think it'll be a 25% tariff, but I'm sure that he'll sprinkle them around, and Scott Besson, who will be the Treasury Secretary, is naturally not a tariffs guy. I think that was one of the kind of final sticking points to make sure that he was gonna be on board with this approach of using it as a way to cultivate results.

And I don't think that that's insane. And we should, you know, you gotta be honest about the fact that Biden kept nearly all of the tariffs that Trump had put on China. He's done things, I think a little bit smarter. Like he put tariffs on things that we don't get as much of, like, EVs, for instance. We don't get a ton of them from China.

So, like, it makes sense to kind of hike that up so it doesn't really hurt the American consumer base. But, you know, tariffs aren't unilaterally a stupid idea. It's stupid to say, I'm gonna put 100% tariff on this, or I'm gonna put 25% on Canada and Mexico. He doesn't talk about, what is it, like, something insane? Like, 60% of our vegetables come from Mexico, our construction supplies that come from Canada.

But what I think is the interesting corollary to Trump doing all this bluster is, what will the world leaders' responses be? Because we have two different prototypes now. So Claudia Scheinbaum, the president of Mexico, had a very different response than Justin Trudeau from Canada. So Justin Trudeau is like, hey, Donald, I'm coming to Mar-a-Lago for dinner.

Let's do the photo op. I'll meet your people. This will be great. And Claudia Scheinbaum released a pretty scathing statement that essentially said, you don't know what you're talking about. Because Trump said, I'm going to put this tariff on if you don't stop sending migrants and drugs here. And she first of all said, by the way, all of the guns that are here are from your country.

So maybe you could figure that out. And second of all, we have been stopping the migrants. And according to your own CPV numbers, it's down, crossings are down 75 percent in the last year because of a program that we put in. Now, is anyone paying attention to the fact that that's what she said? No, because Trump went and said, see, presto change-o. It happened right away, right?

Like I said, jump. And she said, how high? And now everything's fine. As if he stopped migrants from crossing the border. It happened under Biden. But those are the two different models. And I'm curious to see where other world leaders fall on that. Like who will be going to kiss the ring

and who will be issuing sassy statements? It will be the Jewish woman that is issuing the sassy statement. The Jewish climate scientist. That's right. Yeah, I love, it tickles my sensors to see her saying this and she's right. Trudeau's probably smarter.

My understanding as among world leaders is just go kiss this guy's ass. Pull a Tim Cook. Tim Cook goes there, shows him the new iPhone, it tells him he's handsome, compliments him. Love your playlist. Love your playlist. And what do you know?

Somehow the tariffs on China, Apple manages to sequester the majority of their components from those tariffs. This sycophantry, this obvious pandering, it works. And to be fair, some of the tariffs that Trump increased on China, Biden kept in place. While China is no longer our biggest trading partner, it's now a toss up between Mexico and Canada.

You know, there's just so many wrinkles here. You know, most US cars have parts from Mexico or Canada. Yeah. And the way this all ends in my view, is he implements anything resembling these tariffs, which any of these, one of the most heartening things about these appointments is it almost seems like I'm gonna fuck with the American people.

I'm just gonna reward loyalists. I don't care about the DOJ. I'm just going to reward loyalists. I don't care about the DOJ. I don't care about the education. But when it comes to the economy, it feels like he becomes remarkably adult and he wants adults in the room around the key key appointments around the economy. I think the majority of those candidates all seem like adults, all seem qualified. I don't think many of them are going to go for this tariff thing.

At least nothing. I think they'll throw them a bone and say, okay, we'll increase tariffs here, here and here. But the first quarter, or even the first month, where it looks like there's a spike, a respike in inflation or a reigniting of inflation, and it's reverse engineered to tariffs, oh, there's trouble in Mudville. Because the thing that brings down nations is not usually that they get invaded, it's they either go broke or there's inflation. Because you want to talk about rage when you have to go from meat to chicken,

chicken to rice, and then you can't pay for your kid's summer camp, you don't care who's in office. When they realize 88% of gifts under the Christmas tree are from China, and that their prices might go up 10, 20, 50% and that to a certain extent, Trump becomes a lame duck president sooner rather than later.

I think they find their backbone and say, no, I am not down with these tariffs at all. And the moment, the moment inflation starts to spike back, which we're already seeing some evidence of, and someone verse engineers it to tariffs, boom, that dog won't hunt. I think this is much more, much more hat than cattle. What's the term? That's a Brian Williams term, hat and cattle. All hat, no cattle.

All chip, no salsa. Sounds very Yellowstone. There you go. By the way, I could never get into Yellowstone. Did you like it? Really? I did the first couple of years and then I just thought it was ridiculous.

But I just didn't buy it. I just didn't buy it. I thought it was succession for Republicans. I didn't buy it. Well, they deserve to have joy too. Yeah, I don't know. I don't get it. Just to add to that,

it was interesting to see when Scott Besson was the treasury pick, the market bumped up. It was very excited with the news. The next day, this was after his Truth Social post about the tariffs coming, market goes down, right? It was the same thing with RFK Jr., right? Then all of the pharmaceutical stocks tanked. So Trump is going to have to figure out where his levers are, like how much he can push things, how much he can pull things in order to keep us making 30% or whatever crazy

amount the market has been going up. Because that is the only thing that people are grading these administrations on. It's crazy, because all this other stuff that went on during the Trump administration, no one remembers it. They only remember this feeling of this is what my gas costs. This is how much toilet paper was. This is before COVID came when obviously everything became terrible and super expensive and people didn't even blame him for that, which is very annoying to me as a partisan.

But he just wants to leave with a good economic record and probably put away some enemies if he can, Hunter Biden included, definitely was going to be on the list. So I think he'll just be watching those numbers closely. And like, I remember when we first started talking about the potential picks, and you said, like, why not bring back Steve Mnuchin? And Steve Mnuchin left completely unscathed, right? His wife was this incredible viral meme that I enjoyed all the time. And it seems like he did a pretty good job. And I imagine Scott Bassett will be similar. Yeah.

He's an adult. And by the way, just you were right. Mexico is now our biggest trading partner. In the last seven years, China's gone from 22% of US imports, it's dropped to 14. That's a dramatic decrease. And Mexico has gone up from approximately 13

to now close to 16. And Canada has gone from about 12 and a half to about 14. So Mexico and Canada, it's so interesting. Trade is still largely a function of proximity. Almost every country's biggest trading partner is usually, they usually share a border with. Anyways, some more fascinating insight from the Nehemiah Stern School of proximity. Almost every country's biggest trading partner is usually, they usually share a border with anyways, some more fascinating insight from the Neumann-Weister School of Business. All right, Jess, let's take a quick break. Stay with us. Support for PropG comes from Quince.

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slash propg for 20 if you have existing numbers with another service, Open Phone will port them over at no extra charge. Welcome back on Saturday. Trump shook things up. That's another statement by picking Cash Patel, a controversial maga-loyalist and deep state conspiracy theorist to lead the FBI. This is an unusual move because FBI directors typically serve tenure terms to stay above politics. This all comes as Trump considers firing Christopher Wray, his own appointee with three years left on his term, all while doubling

down on promises to prosecute political opponents. What's your take on this, Josh? Same as every week is, this is bad. No bueno, this is very bad. I mean, there's so much to go through in the craziness of Cash Patel, but something that does stick out to me is that other Trump loyalists have a worldview that they come to the table with.

Like Steve Bannon wasn't born the day that Trump came down the golden staircase, right? And Stephen Miller has had his views for a very long time. Cash Patel is like a blank slate that was created in Trump's ideological likeness. Like he has nothing seemingly that he believes in that existed before Donald Trump. And that's what makes him uniquely frightening to me.

Because he just lives to please this guy. I mean, he even wrote a children's book about him. Like, he mimics everything he has. He like, hocks clothes. He has a clothing line. He works his business. I think it's the Cash Foundation, which gives to people affected by the terrible atrocities of January 6th, like families of January Sixers, J Sixers, I think we're supposed to call them.

He produced Justice for All, which is a version of the national anthem that the January 6th defendants that Trump played at his first campaign rally. He is so enmeshed in this world. He feels like a Trump child more than the others do to me. Yeah. This guy is a little bit, during his time where I believe he was, what did he do? He was a prosecutor? Yeah, he was a prosecutor.

He worked for Devin Nunes. You remember him, who was crazy. And he did have some high level intel jobs. He was the deputy to acting DNI Rick Grinnell. He supposedly also fed Trump back channel information on Ukraine that contributed to Trump's plot to push that nation to help him smear his political opponents during his time. Patel also authored a memo

arguing that it was disloyal for then Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who I've met and strikes me as a world-class high character person, to oppose a request by Trump to deploy military troops against American citizens protesting police violence against black people. After Trump lost to President Biden in 2020, Patel pushed lies about the election being stolen

and argued that reporters debunking Trump's election lies should be targeted by the government. He said, open quote, yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections, we're going to come after you, close quote. I mean, I don't know. And he's also authored three children's books that are pro-Trump fan fiction.

So going after your political enemies and finding time to write children's books, you got to give it to the guy. He's at least a little, he's sort of a Renaissance man in hell, so to speak. He's just sort of this, he's a bit of an odd duck. And also I've always found that I thought Christopher Ray, it's exactly what you want as an appointee because when he sat in front of Congress, I couldn't tell if he was a Democrat or a Republican.

I just thought he was like Joe Friday from Dragnet, just a fax man. And I just thought he was so good and lended so much credibility to the Trump administration that, okay, in these important roles, you have someone like this, you see above partisanship. The same way I do think he's acting that way

on the economics appointments, and he used to act that way at least a little bit on security appointments and defense appointments, he seems to have totally lost that now. and defense appointments. He seems to have totally lost that now. And it's so just culturally, it's gotta be so demoralizing. There are FBI agents.

I mean, first off, Tulsi Gabbard to me is by far, other than Gets is the most outrageous. I actually think the most dangerous is representative Gabbard. Cause there are people that spend their entire lives, the majority of their professional lives, putting themselves in harm's way, knowing that if they caught,

they're not just gonna be killed, they're gonna be tortured and killed, implanting themselves in high level positions with a lot of access within our adversaries. And there are only two people who know who they are. They're a case handler and the head of the CIA or the head of the security services. And I just got to think if I'm that person, I do not want Representative Gaber knowing who I am.

This is someone who met with Assad, who's been an apologist for the Kremlin. There's no evidence she's an actual asset, but I can see her. If I'm an undercover agent or officer with the CIA And I think this individual might decide it's good for America to out all undercover assets in the Kremlin I'm out. I'm not I'm not risking my Life and limb and staying away from my family When this this person who doesn't seem who seems to be more fond of Putin than of Democrats, I'm out.

And the one thing that the majority of, I think, our presidents and our directors of national security and the heads of CIA have had, I think George Bush was the head of the CIA and president. I believe most case officers of the CIA probably thought George Bush would die for me. This is someone who would die for his country. And I think these people are like, no, they would let, they would let me die under some fucked up notion of what they think is some sort of conspiracy theory. This is, she is a dangerous appointment and having this guy as head of the FBI,

I just got to think that is so incredibly damaging to morale. Cause I've always thought as the FBI is there's just a few places where they really, they put country above politics. They say, presidents are going to come and go, political parties are going to come and go. I am about our country, fidelity of the country and finding bad guys. And now this place has been weaponized politically and I don't know if I can trust these people. But there are millions of people who think

that it was the Democrats that weaponized the FBI, who look at Andy McCabe and his text messages with Lisa Page, they go back to Jim Comey. I mean, listen, the firing of Jim Comey, I will never understand since I think he was the key ingredient in Trump being able to win actually, him coming out 11 days before the election and saying,

we looked at Anthony Weiner's laptop again, like no biggie though. And then everyone thought that, you know, she had done something unbelievably evil. But you know, this is, Cash Patel is part of the wrecking ball approach to all of these institutions. And I don't think that he would be able to get confirmed, but it seems like that's not even necessarily the approach that Trump feels like he needs to go.

So Christopher Wray has a 10-year term, so he has three years left on his term, but he can be fired. So let's say that happens January 21st, right? 2025. And then using the federal vacancies reform act, Patel can be there, I think 210 days without being confirmed. So we might just again have a cabinet full of acting ex job and that's how he'll be able to do it. The standard of luminaries within our party, lifelong Republicans, people who have served great Republican presidents, like the Bill Bars of the world,

it doesn't matter anymore. The general populace doesn't believe in these institutions. I mean, these quotes are crazy. From Bill Bars' book, he said that Patel would be the deputy director of the FBI over my dead body. You have Mark Milley, who told him life looks really shitty from behind bars. Gina Haspel, who was the head of the CIA threatened to resign when Trump was going to make him the deputy director of the CIA. Like these are all people that you, you know, whether you like their politics or not,

and I certainly don't like Bill Barr's politics, but I never felt like he couldn't do the job. What he did around the Mueller report, writing that little four-page summary was extremely deceptive, but I never thought that he couldn't do it. You know what I mean? Like I didn't like that decision, but it wasn't someone that I would fear like a Cash Patel who's just there, honestly, to pay no reverence to the institution at all. He's just there to break it and that he will destroy, like you said, the morale of the rank and file agents

who are what make it great. And that our allies and our enemies just will laugh at us for four years and our allies won't be sharing with us, which is the big Tulsi Gabbard problem there for sure. That everyone will just go about their business and kind of cut us out. Patel is concerning on a whole host of issues,

but that's really it. I just, I don't want to, I understand the argument for America first. I understand how that resonated with voters who didn't feel like American lives were being prioritized, whether it comes to the economy, national security, immigration. But to me, this just doesn't feel like the answer that you can find competent people that have a little bit of your emphasis on rooting out corruption within institutions without having Cash Patel as the head of the most powerful things we have in with NATO and some of these alliances is that, you know, MI6, the Mossad, you know, the CIA, our security services, their security services, we share information and whether it's

Israel coordinating with Jordan and the kingdom of South America around incoming missile barrage from Iran. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And around intelligence and information identifying threats, whether it's terrorist activity or IP theft of key chip technology, if all of a sudden our allies are much more remiss to share information with us because they don't trust us and they think this guy has no business and they don't want to compromise their own assets or their own intelligence, then we lose what is supposed to be, you know, largely what has kept the peace is that in general democracies have said, all right, we're going to create something,

we're going to create a unified military structure called, called NATO, and we're going to cooperate with each other, not only economically, but around intelligence and militarily, because if we do in fact, present a united front and cooperate with each other, we're just much harder to fuck with. And that has largely created unprecedented peace and prosperity over the last, since World War II, over the last, what is that now, 80 years.

And if that goes away under this notion of America first and some arrogance, I really do think we suffer from too much prosperity and this delusion that we can go it alone. We can't. The European economy is as big as the US economy, which largely indicates their security services and their access to information

and their intelligence units are just as valuable and have a diversity of thought, a diversity of information, a diversity of sources. And when we share information with each other, you can bet there are a lot of bad things that never happened that we can't be grateful for because they didn't happen. And this notion that our allies might no longer share information with us and we might no longer share information with them is how you defeat an enemy. And that is you atomize them, you get them fighting with each other. And that is happening here. Okay, we have one more quick break.

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to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters. Welcome back. Walmart announced it's scaling back its diversity, equity and inclusion DEI efforts. This includes ending racial equity training for employees, reevaluating programs supporting minority-owned suppliers and winding down its Center for Racial Equity,

a nonprofit it created to address systemic racism. Walmart isn't alone. Other major companies, including Lowe's, Ford, Harley-Davidson, and John Deere, are also pulling back on DEI initiatives, as well as reducing their support for Pride marches and LGBTQ events. Many had embraced DEI programs in response

to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the murder of George Floyd. Jess, do you think these changes are happening because Trump won the election? What do you think is inspiring this kind of pullback or rollback? Well, it's been going on for a while, for the last couple of years. I think that it's getting more intense because of what life will be like under a Trump presidency and the kind of folks that he's associated with,

but also who are just kind of in the ecosystem, like activists like Christopher Ruffo, who was the principal kind of attack hound over Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, who was pushed out for a multitude of reasons, including the response to the anti-Semitism issues on campus, but also the plagiarism scandal, which came from Chris Ruffo originally. But the numbers on the DEI rolls going down are pretty astronomical.

So there was a 29% uptick after George Floyd was murdered between November 2020 and November 2021. Then there was a 23% decline in the amount of jobs posting with DEI in the title between November 2022 and 2023. And it's down as much as 43% as of this summer. So that's obviously the trend line and where we're going. And that's in part, I think that a lot of these roles were invented for self-soothing,

to make people feel better about it also to communicate to consumers and internal stakeholders We really care about these issues Without having a thoughtful plan of how to do it or what you actually need like do you need there to be a hundred roles Like this or do you need ten really good people that are going to come in and make important changes and help you reflect your values, which is what you hear over and over from organizations that they need help being able to communicate what their values are to internal and external stakeholders.

So I think it's the combination of everything coupled with as well the affirmative action decision from the Supreme Court, which has changed the way a lot of people think about admissions to college and beyond meritocracy in terms of getting your jobs. And I know the UC system doesn't do race-based admissions, right? I think this is what often happens with democratic initiatives or an orthodoxy, and that is it's a good idea, and then the world changes, they don't change with it, or it goes too far.

I still think there's a need to focus on diversity or ensuring that if you have a company where the majority of your consumers and endorsed athletes are non-white, i.e. Nike, and pretty much your entire board is white dudes, you have a problem and you should be called out for it. So there's still work to be done here. I have generally found that any company or any university

with a DEI officer or department is already one of the most diverse and inclusive places on the planet. And what I have generally found at universities is DEI is filled with a lot of virtue signaling and they become impervious. These jobs are impossible to do away with because you're kind of called implicitly, although it's happening now, a racist

if you're in any way question them. And they're generally very expensive, they never go away. It's resulted this among other things, whether it's ethics or leadership, that's my favorite. We teach ethics at Stern. Give me a fucking break. I can't give my 14 year old to make his bed, but I'm gonna teach a 28 year old to be more ethical.

These departments never go away. We bring in formally important people. We pay them a lot of money so they can talk about war stories, teach them leadership, or anything with the term studies on it means that if you take this course, you might get four stars instead of three as an Uber driver or barista. We have totally lost the mission, in my opinion, the script. There are now 16 employees at MIT for every one who actually teaches. And we invent these departments, sustainability,

leadership, ethics, DEI, and all of this translates to student debt. And where we've lost the script around DEI is we've decided, okay, essentially the easiest way to identify or put forward an orthodoxy around DEI is that oppressors over here, oppressed over here. Oh, and by the way, if you're white and wealthy,

you're probably an oppressor. And who's ground zero for white and wealthy? Jews. And what you have seen on campus is a level of bigotry that I don't think you've seen in other American institutions in a long time. And a lot of it started and was inspired by this weird virtue signaling

and everyone barking up the same tree, largely inspired or somewhat inspired by these DEI initiatives. I can't wait to see these things go on campus. The whole DEI initiative on campus has been nothing but a misdirect. And that is Harvard obsesses over quote unquote diversity. Meanwhile, they sit on an endowment

that's the GDP of Costa Rica, $54 billion, and they refuse to expand their freshman class. They've grown their endowment 4,000%. They've grown their freshman class in 40 years, 4%. So they create a misdirect around who gets in. The conversation shouldn't be around who gets in, it should be around how many get in. Let in more trans kids, let in more black kids,

let in more gay kids, let in more white kids from rural states. The question shouldn't be who gets in, it should be how many. You know who doesn't have a DEI problem? Junior colleges. Because they say if you show up and you wanna better yourself and you can pay a couple hundred bucks per credit, you're in. And

there isn't all this bullshit agita. It also ends up creating more racism than it solves on campus because the kid next to you who might not be non-white, you wonder if he or she deserves to be there, and it creates all of this resentment among good kids who don't get into school because they don't have a story of adversity. And you brought up the University of California, one of the great gifts to American society. In 1990, it was either four or seven, they said, we're no longer about race-based affirmative action, we're about an adversity score. And I'm a beneficiary of affirmative action because my household income was less than

$40,000. I got free Pell Grants, or I got Pell Grants, or aren't even loans. The DEI apparatus, I hope it is disassembled immediately across campuses. I still think there's work to be done in corporations as someone who serves on boards, who knows a lot of senior management. There's still too many people with outdoor plumbing running these companies. I don't think it's ever going to be 50-50 because I think more women will decide to exit the workforce for a variety of reasons. Anyways, that was my TED Talk. Any thoughts?

I think I actually have heard that as one of your TED Talks, and I enjoyed it then and I enjoyed it this time as well. No, I generally agree with it. And I also, I thought that Harvard's response after the Supreme Court decision made a lot of sense, where they said, OK, well, we're going to find a way to ensure that we have a diverse class, no matter how you say we need to do it. And there are other things that you can look at in terms

of an application or a background of a student to make sure that you have the widest swath of students represented. And increasingly, this is a conversation that I'm having with my friends, even down to the preschool level, where people aren't as concerned anymore about racial diversity because, knock on wood, thank God, we have generally become less racist, right?

Like the Cheerios commercial with the biracial couple, that kind of broke all testing standards where little kids they showed it to a five-year-old and to their parents and all the parents noticed that it was a biracial couple and none of the kids did because that's life for them now that they see mixed race. Everything is getting more of a melting pot and that is a good thing. But what is not happening is we are just hanging out with people from our same socioeconomic background. And that's really what people are hunting in terms of diversity.

Like I think about that all the time. Will Cleo, my daughter, have friends who don't have every toy that they want? Right. Will she go to someone's house who doesn't have a playroom in the building? You know, those kinds of things are much more top of mind for us than worrying about whether she's going to think that a kid who is black or brown is less than. And it was so important, I think, for the evolution of this discussion that it was Asian Americans that brought that lawsuit about being discriminated against versus making

it, we always think of it as a black-brown issue or a person of color issue. And we don't tend to lump in Asians in that bucket, which is something that they've had to be up against. And I've had a lot of difficulty with that. And it made me think about the change in New York City as I've grown up. So when I went and took the test to get into Stuyvesant, which was a premier public school here in New York,

one of the main filters to Harvard. It was predominantly white kids that were getting in. Now, and I live in the neighborhood, I rarely see a kid coming out of Stuyvesant who is an Asian. It is totally meritocratic. However, you do on the test is whether you get in or not. The fact that they were then going on to be discriminated against in terms of

getting into these top universities, which we should note as well as something that happened to Jewish students at a certain point, like a couple of decades ago, then it started being pushed back against Jews. There were too many of them getting in as a proportion of the population. Then it moved on to Asians. And I think that it allowed us to actually have a more honest conversation about these admission systems and how society is structured because it wasn't a black versus white issue. Because everyone just tunes out then and just says well of course I'm I'm for equal opportunity. And

the reframing has led to more discussions like this which I think are important for people to have and then to also integrate into it the socioeconomic aspect of it which is the real dividing line in all of this. Like, there aren't enough opportunities for poor white kids to be able to get on the ladder, whether it's about going to school or getting the jobs that they want, the same way that we would have discussions about poor black kids or poor Latino kids.

Anyway, that was my TED Talk. I don't know if I would have gotten it though. It was good? All right. In the United States today, you would rather be born non-white or gay than poor. 54% of gay men will get a college degree. It's 34% for straight men. And that goes into a variety of issues.

But affirmative action is a wonderful thing. We should lift people up. There are just some people, and I even think the majority of Republicans feel that, okay, there's some people with so much wind in their face. Let's widen their aperture. Let's widen the perspective. Let's give some people a hand up. I just think, I got to think most people believe that, that, okay, it's easy to talk about. And they've been beneficiaries of it to some degree, however it has manifested. Yeah. It's the case in point Pell Grounds for straight white male, but it should be based on color.

And that color is the following green. We should help poor kids. They're the ones, they're the ones, the biggest forward-looking indicator of your success, unfortunately in our nation, has become how rich your parents are. Basically your zip code and your parents' income. And we need something that helps kids

brought up in low-income neighborhoods, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of their sexual orientation, regardless of their gender. All right, you have grown up in what is in a capitalist society, the biggest headwind in your face, and that is you don't have money. And I think it would solve so many problems

and move away from this identity politics where unfortunately the Democratic Party has become totally obsessed. So we're gonna save the easy stuff for the end here, Jess. Can I say before we do the end? Of course. But in the dissent and the SCOTUS opinion, Justice Jackson essentially accuses Clarence Thomas of turning his back

on the system that got Clarence Thomas where he was going. And I don't know if I'm ready to fully throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that there should be no, race should not be considered at all, because I think there are systemic challenges that face people of color that are different than the socioeconomic challenges that are out there. I just, I'm like 75% there.

And I thought that there was some compelling arguments made by the liberal justices to maintain it. But wouldn't most of that, so the reason, one of the reasons I love economic based affirmative action is that it would actually impact 70% of the same people. Because we do still have, you could argue, an economic apartheid in the United States.

If you're the daughter of a private equity billionaire from Taiwan, that's not diversity. You don't need our help, right? And a lot of kids, a lot of non-whites, like I said, if you have money, most of those problems can be addressed and handled. Anyways, point taken. This week is a big moment for transgender rights as the Supreme Court takes on its biggest case yet. The issue at hand is a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers

and hormone treatments for transgender minors. With over two dozen states having similar laws, the case is sparking tensions among conservatives, even challenging their usual stance on parental rights. Jess, what do you think might happen here? I mean, it's a conservative court. So I imagine it'll go as many things have now, and they'll go 6-3.

But 26 states now have laws restricting treatments like puberty blocking drugs. And what's interesting about this case, and it'll be used as the model. So it's the ACLU plus the Biden administration, the DOJ, I should say, not the Biden administration, bringing this. The problem or what they're identifying or using is the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, that essentially these drugs are being authorized for non-transgender youths.

So all of the kids that are bringing this case have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. So there are doctors that have said, you have this. And they are not getting access to these medications that kids who do not have gender dysphoria have access to. So they're saying it's discrimination on the basis of equal protection because they're transgender. Again, I imagine it'll get shot down by the court. I like that they're taking it at least,

and so that we can have this discussion, because when you think that this is going on in 26 states, and even how prominent of a role it played in our election, conversations around trans issues and people believing that kids, you know, go to school and come home a different gender, it's obviously top of mind for people, but I'm not optimistic that they're going to rule

in favor of as one transgender girl and two transgender boys that have brought the case. Yeah, I thought that was great and I'm gonna plead the fifth on this. This is something we talk a lot about on pivot and I finally come to the conclusion that I have no fucking idea what I'm talking about. And this issue is so sensitive, so complicated,

that I can just see all sides of this issue, or not all sides, I empathize with so many so many different viewpoints. And I think this is really another instance of where government should kind of be out of people's lives and let the family and the doctor and the right professionals and the American Pediatric Association

decide the best solution here. I think it's government outreach. I think the Democratic Party has become too obsessed with this issue and has cost us dearly. At the same time, I'm just absolutely horrified by the demonization of this group. This one, I really do think this is government. I understand cases get elevated to the Supreme Court.

This does feel, it's just so weird. I feel like Republicans talk such a big game about staying out of people's lives in small government and on the most sensitive, complex, nuanced decisions they wanna weigh in. And it just feels like law enforcement, the courts should not be in the business of this. To that point, the Dobbs decision is referenced

over 10 times in this suit for that exact reason. So, small government no more when it comes to sex, reproduction, trans issues, yeah. Yeah, when the left and the right agree on something, it's usually reckless spending. All right, that's all for this episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. Our producers are Caroline Chagrin and David Toledo.

Our technical director is Drew Burroughs. You can find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That's right. Please, if you're enjoying this episode, please subscribe to Raging Moderates on its own feed. Do it right now. Oh, what up? Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

Just have a great rest of the week. I'm glad you're joining us. You too, have a great move. Yeah.