Biden Pardons Hunter, Trump’s Tariff Proposals, Kash Patel’s Appointment to Lead the FBI

26:42He 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. Like 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.

27:26During 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. Mm-hmm. 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.

28:01We'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 gotta give it to the guy. He's at least a little, he's sort of a Renaissance man in hell, so to speak. Like, he's just sort of this, he's a bit of an odd duck. And also, I've always found that, I thought Christopher Wray, 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, you know, like Joe Friday from Dragnet, just the facts, ma 'am.

28:42And he was, 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 it's so just culturally, it's got to be so demoralizing. There are FBI agents. I mean, first off, Tulsi Gabbard to me is by far, other than Getz is the most outrageous, I actually think the most dangerous is Representative Gabbard.

29:25Because there are people that spend their entire lives, the majority of their professional lives, putting themselves in harm's way, knowing that if they're caught, they're not just going to be killed, they're going to 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 Gabbert knowing who I am. This is someone who met with Assad, who's been an apologist for the Kremlin.

30:00There's no evidence she's an actual asset, but I can see her, like, 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 risking my life and limb and staying away from my family when this person, 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.

30:42This is someone who would die for his country. And I think these people are like, no, 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, because 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 to the country and finding finding bad guys.

31:24And 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.

32:02But, you know, this is Kash 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 X job. And that's how he'll be able to do it.

32:45The standard of luminaries within our party, you know, lifelong Republicans, people who have served, you know, great Republican presidents like the Bill Barrs of the world, they just it doesn't matter anymore that the general populace doesn't believe in these institutions. I mean, these quotes are crazy. Like from Bill Barr's 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.

33:24Like, 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. I thought 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 Akash 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.

34:21Patella's 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 Kash Patel as the head of the FBI. What you mentioned, which I think is really one of the probably the key drawback, is that no one nation is big enough or strong enough to effectively monitor the world or secure itself from all threats.

35:06And one of the most powerful things we have with NATO and some of these alliances is that MI6, the Mossad, 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.

35:55You 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 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.

36:35We can't. The European economy is as big as the U.S. 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.

37:11You get them fighting with each other. And that is happening here. Okay. We have one more quick break. Stay with us.

37:23This episode is brought to you by Amazon Business. We could all use more time. Amazon Business offers smart business buying solutions so you can spend more time growing your business and less time doing the admin. I can see why they call it smart. Learn more at amazonbusiness.com. There is a lot to talk about when we talk about Donald Trump and Jimmy Kimmel. One big question I've got is why in 2025, our late night TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel's show still on TV? Even in our diminished times, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, they're just some of the biggest faces of their networks. If you start taking the biggest faces off your networks, you might save some nickels and dimes.

38:10But what are you even anymore? What even is your brand anymore? I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels. And that was James Ponowozik, the TV critic for The New York Times. This week, we're talking about Trump and Kimmel, free speech, and a TV format that's remained surprisingly durable for now. That's This Week on Channels, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Welcome back. Walmart announced it's scaling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion DEI efforts. This includes ending racial equity training for employees, re-evaluating programs supporting minority-owned suppliers, and winding down its Center for Racial Equity, a nonprofit it created to address systemic racism.

38:55Walmart 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 Rufo, who was the principal kind of attack hound over Claudian 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 Rufo originally.

40:01But the numbers on the DEI rolls going down are pretty astronomical. So there was a 29 percent 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?

40:47Like, do you need there to be 100 roles like this or do you need 10 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?

41:27I 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.

42:12And 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 going to teach a 28-year-old to be more ethical. These departments never go away.

42:50We 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.

43:36Oh, 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.

44:17Meanwhile, 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 want to better yourself and you can pay a couple hundred bucks per credit, you're in.

44:58And 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. were about an adversity score. And I'm a beneficiary of affirmative action because my household income was less than$40 ,000.

45:34I got free Pell Grants, or I got Pell Grants, which aren't even loans. So 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. And 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.

46:10No, 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?

46:49Like 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?

47:25Right. 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.

48:02And 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. And now, and I live in the neighborhood, I rarely see a kid coming out of Stuyvesant who isn't Asian, right? It is totally meritocratic. However you do on the test is whether you get in or not. And 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 decades ago, then it started being pushed back against Jews.

48:42There 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 um 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 54 percent of gay men will get a college degree it's 34 percent 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.

50:01Let's widen their aperture. Let's widen their perspective. Let's give some people a hand up. I just think, I gotta 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. Case in point, Pell Grants for a 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.

50:34And 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, you know, unfortunately, the Democratic Party has become totally obsessed. So we're going to save the easy stuff for the end here, Jess. Can I say before we do the end? Of course. But in the dissent on the SCOTUS opinion, Justice Jackson essentially accuses Clarence Thomas of turning his back on the system that got Clarence Thomas where he was going.

51:20And 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 percent 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 one of the reasons I love economic-based affirmative action is that it would actually impact 70 percent of the same people. Because we do still have, you could argue, an economic apartheid in the United States.

52:01If you're the daughter of a private equity billionaire from Taiwan, that's not diversity. You don't need our help, right? Right. And a lot of 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.

52:39Jess, 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 six three. 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.

53:20So 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.

53:54It'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 I thought that was great. And I'm going to plead to 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, you know, I can just see all sides of this issue. Or not all sides. I empathize with 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.

54:46I 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 want to weigh in. And it just feels like law enforcement, the courts should not be in the business of this.

55:27To that point, the Dobbs decision is referenced over 10 times in this suit for that exact reason. So, you know, 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 Burrows. 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.

56:07Do it right now. Oh, no. 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.