Special Election Premiere!

 

Welcome to the first full episode of Let’s Talk UNCENSORED. Just in time for the elections, this is a Special Election Premiere where I bring three stars from my previous podcast, America’s Voices, where we had Americans from across the political spectrum, from all different backgrounds and religions, come together for an honest conversation. We go underneath the headlines and even find some common ground. Well, my three returning guests once again, do not disappoint!

Meet Joel Patrick, an honest former Democrat turned Conservative Libertarian Christian American; David Nemetz, a moderate Democrat Jewish American; Dr. Mark E. Lipp, PhD, a Jewish Conservative American; and me, a former Liberal-turned-passionate We The People Patriot and Mamabear.

It’s a lively discussion where I too answer all the questions asked of my guests. The questions I ask are not the typical questions of what you would see in a debate or on the news. I wanted to pull from my psychotherapy background and curiosity to really understand certain perceptions from an honest point of view. Why?

I’m sure you guys will agree that it feels like we are living in parallel realities in America today. We see different pain points. We don’t see eye to eye because we depend on different news sources. Many of us believe that is actually by design; when you divide, it’s easier to conquer. More on that later!

In the meantime, please enjoy this candid, in-depth, and powerful discussion. We cover a lot, including controversial topics such as media bias, the economy, immigration, abortion, fear-mongering, and more.

Obviously, there’s going to be some disagreements, and we’re not all voting for the same candidate. But in this episode’s journey, there’s ultimately a lot of common ground and hope to take away.

Enjoy this episode. I would love to know what you think. Send me an email, or drop me a DM. And don’t forget to vote on November 5th! This is probably the most important election of our lifetimes. God Bless. See you next time.

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Special Election Premiere!

Let’s Sit Down With Real Americans UNCENSORED And Go Underneath The Headlines

Welcome to the first episode of Let’s Talk (Uncensored). I am so excited about this show because this is a throwback to my earlier show, America’s Voices. We brought Americans from all across the political spectrum together to have honest conversations, to go underneath the headlines, and maybe even find some common ground. I thought what better timing to get our stars of America’s Voices back together for a special election edition?

We have a wide range of Americans here with a whole bunch of different political beliefs, affiliations, and backgrounds to bring them to where they are now. We are going to have fun. Unlike the debates, all the candidates had questions ahead of time, not some of them. It is also out in the open that I am a biased moderator.I’m MAGA. I’m Trump and RFK all day.

We’re going to have some fun. We’re going to go around and everyone is going to introduce themselves. We’re then going to get into some questions from a psychotherapist’s point of view, questions that you might not hear typically in a debate. Let’s get into it. I’ll start. My name is Daniella Bloom. I am a former Liberal turned We the People Patriot. I voted for Obama not once, but twice. I’m doing all of my atonement now. I am an awakened Mama Bear and support Trump, RFK, Vance, Elon, and his entire ticket in office. Joel, why don’t you go next? 

My name is Joel Patrick. I voted for Clinton, and Obama twice. I changed my vote around 2016 when I finally started to vote Republican. It wasn’t because of the Republican party. It was because of Donald Trump. He was saying things that I felt were different. He made it okay for me to vote for a Republican. In my opinion, growing up, I always felt that Republicans were a corporate party that was warmongers. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I also saw it as a party for White people. That’s the way I perceived it. The Democrats were a party that I believed was for the people. I also believed that Democrats were the anti-war party. Since then, I’ve changed my views.

Here’s what I mean when I say that. There was a period of time when I felt that the Republicans were the ones that were waking up and they started talking about things like free speech. They were saying the anti-war things that I believed in. Trump was echoing those sentiments. Recently, I feel that the Republicans have gone back to what they originally were at the very beginning. They’re a warmongering party like the Democrats. The Democrats are also a warmongering party. I don’t consider myself Republican or Democrat. I do have Conservative beliefs. I’m in that camp of Conservative Libertarians. That’s enough about me.

Who’s your candidate?

I’m voting for Trump.

Let’s do David.

I’m David Nemetz. I consider myself a moderate Democrat. I don’t know what the Republican Party is anymore. It seems like it’s going through a lot of changes in philosophy and sense. I’m free market. I am more socially Liberal and economically more Conservative. The party systems try to over-lump and move around. Overall, I am generally moderate. I am voting for Kamala and Walz. I’ll also add a little background. I grew up in California. I live in Washington now. I am a small business owner. I have two kids, one in college and one senior in high school, so family and a small business.

Thank you so much. We now have Mr. Mark.

Technically, I’m Dr. Mark Lipp, PhD. People call me Mark. It’s very simple.

You pulled the Jill. I’m sorry, Dr. Mark.

It’s okay. If you paid for the degree, you might as well use it every once in a while. That’s how I look at it. No, Biden did pay my tuition. I come from New York City. I’ve been predominantly a Republican. I did vote for Bill Clinton twice. He is one of my favorite presidents. Other than that, I’ve been fairly Republican, although I do consider myself a fiscal Conservative. I am similar to David, which is why we probably get along so well. I’m more Liberal on the social side. Who am I going to vote for? I’m going to vote for the person who I feel is best for America because the person who is best for America, quite frankly, is best for America. I’m voting for Donald Trump.

We got that cleared. Three people are voting for Donald Trump and one for Harris. All of us probably have a lot of alignment on some social issues. It’s all going to come out. We’re going to go around and say the top reasons you are picking your candidate and your biggest concerns for the opponent. Why don’t we start with Mark?

I’m picking Donald Trump. Why am I picking Donald Trump? I saw what I had for four years, and in most cases, I liked what I had. All presidents overpromise and under-deliver. There’s not one that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime that hasn’t done that. In Donald Trump’s case, he delivered a lot of things that I didn’t expect he could deliver.

 

My biggest fear for Kamala Harris is I’ve seen the last many half years in which she has been responsible. She has a tremendous responsibility for it. Let’s take a look at the Border Czar issue. Whether you call her the Border Czar or whether she was in charge of the border, she still couldn’t get it solved. If you can’t solve that, how are you going to solve the Ukraine disaster, the Israeli wars, and all the other issues that are going on?

We know that China is beating the drums and other people are beating the drums. To be honest, Trump is a good negotiator. He comes from a place of strength. Kamala doesn’t have the background. She was a horrible DA in California, by my estimation. I lived in California for over 30 years before moving to Las Vegas. There is no substance to the answers by which she is giving as most of her comments or most of her slogans come from a Marxist background. I’m done.

I concur, says the biased moderator. David, why don’t you go next?

I’m happy to vote for Harris. I’m not terribly disappointed with how the government has run America for the past few years. I agree there are some issues. I won’t cow down and say it was perfect, without a doubt, but I do not want to run back to the chaos of Trump. He’s a bad manager. He puts people in place as favors in a transactional sense. It was an utter failure.

One of the things you mentioned was good negotiating. I don’t think he’s a good negotiator. He is a good madman so people don’t know what he is doing. That keeps the people at bay because you’re not sure what he’s going to do. That’s a great tactic, Don’t get me wrong, but ultimately, the amount of chaos that he causes outweighs any benefit that he does. I don’t think he’s grounded in the Constitution or American values. He destroys those pillars of the American way, and that’s what scares me the most.

Thank you so much, David. As we speak, feel free to take notes if you would like to address some of these points later on. Joel, go ahead. 

Why I’m picking the candidate that I’m picking mostly has to do with values. I’ll start by saying that I’m a Christian. That will explain a lot right there. For some people, it will. For other people, it will leave them baffled because I know that Donald Trump isn’t the most moral person out there when it comes to certain issues. However, on the big ones, I feel like he’s on point for me. There are a lot of things that I’ve heard since 2010 and 2011 coming out of the Democrat party that I don’t agree with.

I don’t like a lot of the things that are happening in schools. I don’t like a lot of the stuff that’s happening with children, the LGBTQ, and all of these things I have a problem with. It’s not that I have a problem with these kinds of people in general. I believe that a lot of this could be solved, that people could be people, and we don’t need to have it shoved in our faces as part of some agenda. For me, it’s more about morals. I feel like Trump aligns more with the things that I believe in. There are other things too, but that’s probably the biggest for me.

The second part of that question is your biggest concern for the opponent.

My biggest concern for the opponent is whether we will have a country in four years. How many more people are they going to let across the border? We’re on the verge of World War III. We have a war in Ukraine. We’re on the verge of an all-out war happening in the Middle East. We’re about to go to war with Iran. I’m very concerned about all of these issues.

I think that Donald Trump will do a better job of mitigating those issues. That might even go back to the whole madman thing. A person like Putin doesn’t want to play around with somebody like Trump. I feel like with the candidate, I don’t believe that she believes anything that she’s talking about. I feel like any time she is asked a question, it turns into a long rambling word salad about how she comes from a middle-class family with a nice lawn. I’ll leave it right there.

As the female and the Mama Bear on the panel, I’m also going to answer. The main reason why Trump and his team are the only way to go is because I believe that peace is through strength and war is through weakness. Under Trump, we had no new wars. We didn’t have this blank check chaos in Ukraine and Russia. We had stability in the Middle East. Not only that, we had the Abraham Accords. If Trump was still in office for several more weeks, we would be on our way to normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, which would’ve been a game changer for the Middle East. In the last four years, all of my fears have come true. We have chaos at the border, out-of-control inflation, and global instability.

Also, we have an extra huge bonus of RFK who will bring to light what every single American should be concerned about. They are MAHA, Make America Healthy Again. 60% of Americans have a chronic disease. One out of thirty-five children is diagnosed on the spectrum of autism. This goes back to how we source our food and what we put in our medicines, which affect the food supply and the water supply. I’d like to see light shined on that. Not to mention, there’s Elon Musk, who is all about government efficiency. He has done this with X. He has done this with his own companies. We need a lot more transparency and checks and balances.

My biggest fear regarding Kamala is she does not stand on her own two feet. She is a brand. It’s more about fear-mongering against not voting for Trump. I wish I didn’t feel that way. I wish I had respect for her in terms of how she got her positions and what her policies are if we ever hear from them. I don’t have confidence in her abilities. She can’t even interview without having someone like her VP sit down with her, and that was edited down to eighteen minutes. If she can’t do that, what else can’t she do? I’m very disappointed that she chose Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro who would’ve been a much better pick.

We’re going to have an open discussion. Save all of this so we can have that back-and-forth banter. We’re going to go to the next part. We’re going to go to stereotypes. The question is, how does each party perceive the other? If you are a Harris supporter, how do you see a typical Trump supporter? If you’re a Trump supporter, how do you see a typical Harris supporter? We will let David go first this time.

In the first part, Danielle, you showcased what scares me about MAGA. Half the things you brought up aren’t necessarily true. She has done interviews since the Walz interview that have been by herself. She has put out policies. People like to stick to talking points. I figure that’s what gets me on the MAGA. They’re cultish. They fall in line and believe what they’re told like Leamington copying a parrot despite the fact that things change and things aren’t necessarily true.

There is so much that is taken as fact that it’s a good talking point so it just followed. I’m not going to say it doesn’t happen on the Left as well, but to me, the MAGA line is what Trump says is right when half the stuff he’s making up goes through. People fall in line and go, “That’s right,” because it’s said authoritatively or it’s said repeatedly.

If you look at inflation and the border, has it been bad for four years? Yes. Is it better in the last six months? Inflation is way down from what it has been. The border is much tighter. I wish they passed the bill. I wish Congress acted on that. We go back to these points that are good parroting and good talking points because it’s the cult of MAGA. We’re going to keep repeating things until we believe it. That’s Trump’s motto. He said it to Billy Bush. He said, “If you say things often enough, people will believe you.” That’s, to me, what MAGA is. If you keep saying it, it becomes true in your mind.

More on that later. In the meantime, let’s hear from Joel.

I remember when George Bush was the president. In his second term, there was a period of time when he started to fall out of favor with the public and then they began to protect him. You would never see him in an interview unless it was scripted. They tried to keep him on point because anytime he did speak, he would say something. It wasn’t even bad, the stuff that he would say, but he would give some type of line that they could use on Saturday Night Live. You would see it in some kind of a skit. They tried to protect him.

Barack Obama changed that because he did countless interviews. He wasn’t like somebody that they were constantly trying to protect all of the time. Donald Trump also was always giving interviews all the time. I’ve seen him on different podcasts, having very loose conversations with people. With Kamala Harris, I don’t know how many interviews she’s done, so I can’t say that she hasn’t done any interviews, but I’ve had this feeling or a perception that they’ve been trying to protect her. They’ve been trying to not let her get off script. They’ve been trying to not let her have an open dialogue conversation. Why doesn’t she go on a podcast, sit, and have an open conversation?

She did the interview with Oprah. I’ve only seen snippets of that. I didn’t see the whole thing. I have to admit. The clip that I saw was the word salad. That’s the thing that people wanted you to see, which was the word salad. I don’t want to criticize her for something that I didn’t see. I’m not going to claim that she doesn’t do interviews, but I will say that I have a feeling that she’s being protected.

She’s not doing hard interviews. Joel, the question too was if you are a Trump supporter, how do you perceive Harris supporters?

A good example of that would be you had a friend over for Shabbat who was a very nice person and a beautiful human being. There were a few ideas that we introduced to her specifically about the subject of abortion. When we talked about the whole late-term abortion thing, she couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea that people were having abortions in the way that we were describing them.

You had to go get a video and show her a video. I don’t know what the bill was called, but it was a bill about long-term abortion and the idea that there are botched abortions. While the baby is alive on a table, they’re trying to figure out, “Do we terminate this or do we give it medical care?” This was a bill that was debated in Congress. There’s a long-form video about this.

Despite seeing and hearing all of that, she was still having a difficult time wrapping her mind around it. She was looking for the edits. She’s like, “That was edited.” There was a cut right there, but you could still make out what the person was saying. I say all this because she had a hard time wrapping her mind around that issue.

It’s called cognitive dissonance. It’s physically uncomfortable to take in new information.

Cognitive dissonance would be a good word. They’re in the dark on a lot of very basic things. I’m not saying that Trump supporters are the most educated people in the world either, but I’m saying this is something that I perceive.

Some Trump supporters aren’t educated. A lot are, like Dr. Mark.

Both parties have been media-ied, if that’s even a word, to the point that everybody thinks anybody who votes for Trump has their knuckles dragged on the ground. They have no real competence in anything. Let’s go back to Hillary Clinton calling us all deplorables. On the other side of the coin, the media has done a great job of making all the Democrats have multicolored hair, having pronouns that are not in my vocabulary, and making them look like they are pansies. You have to look past the media to know the people.

If you look at antisemitism, it’s much harder to be an antisemite when you know a Jew that you like. It’s much harder to hate Democrats the way Republicans would like or hate Republicans like Democrats would like when you know somebody from the other side and you find they are intelligent and well-spoken.

I agree. Are you done? I don’t want to cut you off if you have more to say.

I feel that if you look at the politicians on both sides, Republicans and Democrats, they are all corrupt to some extent or another. We would all agree on that after we see what has been going on in Congress. The ability to separate us keeps us from saying, “They’re all bad. I got to be a Democrat because the other side is all knuckle-dragging Republicans.” Republicans say, “The other side is all pansies.” It keeps us separated so we don’t address the true problem, which is the people in our government.

I forget the stats, but 90% of people think Congress sucks, and yet they all would vote for their person again.

That’s a good statistic.

The statement goes back to, is this the best two people we have out of a country of 330 million-plus?

How did we get here? It’s not even half an hour and we already found common ground. It serves the powers that be to polarize and vilify the other. When we can displace our frustrations onto the other, it’s distracting from holding accountable the people who need to be held accountable. If I’m answering the question of how I perceive the Democrats, my perception of the Democrats is that they’re so distracted by social issues and climate change that they’re throwing out the baby with the bath water when we have real issues that affect all Americans.

Open borders affect all Americans. Someone having to give shelter, food, work, school, and healthcare will tax all Americans. There is a naivete put on the Democrats. For example, the idea is that most people who are immigrants are asylum seekers. That’s not true. Most people who get abortions are the result of rape and incest. That couldn’t be further from the truth. To your point, David, you used the word cult. That’s exactly how I see the Democrats. It’s designed that way. I see the Democrats voting blue no matter who, as long as it’s not Trump.

That’s different than a cult though.

It sounds like a cult, voting blue no matter who and no matter what.

There’s a difference between not liking somebody and voting against it as opposed to believing anything somebody says.

I also think that’s a problem. They believe a lot of what Kamala says. The Democrat party and the media which supports her don’t correct her. We saw that very candidly in the debates, especially when she said things like there are no late-term abortions. The moderator said, “That’s not true,” which is a lie when she said there’s no active military in the world.

They didn’t say there were no late-term abortions. They said nobody kills a live baby.

They said there were no abortions all the way up until the ninth month.

It was on execution after an abortion.

That does happen. There are botched abortions. There are 250 cases of babies being born alive and left to die.

Left to die is different than being killed, but that’s a different debate.

Ninety-three percent of abortions, and you can check this with Pew Research, are in the first trimester. We’re talking about a diminishing problem. David, not to correct you, but Kamala keeps saying 2025 project. Trump has said repeatedly, “I never even read it.”

I agree he didn’t read it, but he also said that Heritage is going to give him his blueprint and put people in. I’ll show you the quote on that.

Go look at Platform 47. I happen to have read a part of the 2025, ridiculous as that may seem. It has 978 pages.

Donald Trump surprised many people by delivering things he was not expected to deliver in the first place. Share on X

How many people were on his staff and will be rehired? Put that together.

We don’t know that. How many of Biden’s staff who have screwed things up immensely are going to be rehired by Kamala?

The Heritage Group has a pretty strong connection, and Trump pulls them. That’s how we got our Supreme Court justices.

He already said he’s not implementing it.

He’s not because there was too much outcry.

If he goes into power, he says, “I’m going to implement it,” then you have something to say. If you’re going to take Kamala on her face value of, “I didn’t do that. I’m not saying that,” you have to take Trump the same way.

I don’t believe Kamala either.

That’s fair enough.

That’s the other issue. At least Trump is answering the questions honestly and consistently. Kamala Harris seems to be going back and forth on so many basic issues like fracking.

She has been very clear on fracking. First of all, let’s talk about fracking for two seconds. The federal government cannot stop fracking in Pennsylvania. They could only do it on federal land. Pennsylvania will still be fracking despite what the federal government says. She says she was against it four years ago when she was running. Ever since then, she said she’s for it.

She’s saying whatever she thinks can get her elected.

Trump hasn’t?

Trump is consistent.

How is he consistent?

He does say some stupid shit, don’t get me wrong. He says stupid shit that should never come out of anybody’s mouth.

How is he on abortion consistent? He said he would sign a federal ban.

He never said that.

Before Roe v. Wade was stopped, he said he would sign a federal ban.

He said, “Energy Independence. Therefore, I will do anything to be energy independent.” He won’t ban anything.

David, if Kamala can switch her position, then Trump can too.

I’m not saying they can’t switch him, but you said he never does. I’m telling you he does.

I’ve never heard that. I’ve always heard him say consistently that it goes back to the state and some states are better than others.

I’ll show it to you. Before it went back to the states, he was ready to sign a ban. He said, “Bring it to me.”

The original question was how Republicans see Democrats and how Democrats see Republicans. How do we see each other? You made a comment, Daniella. You said that Democrats are culty. I’m not homing for Republicans. I’m not even homing for MAGA, although it is clear who I’m voting for. There is a culty element about MAGA also that I have seen. It is there with the Democrats, but I’m not delusional enough to believe that it’s not there with Trump supporters also.

There are lunatics everywhere. There are crazy Trump supporters who are way too into some conspiracy theories. There are crazy Harris supporters who are total socialist lunatics who hate America. I don’t think we should be judged by those examples. We’ve seen in America’s Voices that there is probably a lot more we agree on as people who care about our family, care about our future, and love this country than the media would like us to believe.

Especially on the abortion issue, most Americans are probably consistent. I’m pro-choice myself in the first trimester. Trump has said very clearly in the cases of rape, incest, and the medical health of the mother, but also, abortion should not be used as a form of birth control when the majority of cases are just that and doing late-term abortions just because.

What are the numbers of late-term abortions? Here’s my issue with late-term abortions. Rarely are they ever done without serious personal familial issues. It’s not, “I don’t want a baby.” It’s usually a fetal disease, a condition, or something major that’s making people decide. It’s a non-viability issue or a defect that’s causing it. Looking at it, something like 95% or 98% of the cases are those.

I would need a statistic for that. I don’t believe that.

I’ll give you Minnesota stat.

David, if that was the case, I would support that as well. If that was purely for medical reasons, that’s great.

The late-term is that way. It is not people going, “I hadn’t decided yet.” It’s usually a major issue because it’s not easy at that point.

According to Pew Research, only 2% of abortions are for medical reasons.

Honestly, late-term abortions are probably less than 2%.

Ninety-three percent are first-term abortions, so 7% is scattered over the next six months.

That’s what I’m saying.

With this math, we’re saying at least 5% is late term without it being medical.

Not at all. I’m saying 7% in the last six months. I don’t know the distribution per month for the last six months, but I can’t believe it’s more than 3%.

It’s very low. I took a look at Minnesota because they were the ones that were touted.

I was doing national.

What is 3%? That’s still a huge number.

Forget that stat. Out of that 3%, how many are not viable?

I am in agreement with you. If the baby is in danger or the mother’s health is in danger, it’s a no-brainer. We agree, but I’m not talking about those cases. 

Those are the cases.

There are a lot of states in Planned Parenthood. I’ve spoken to women who’ve worked at Planned Parenthood. Women can get abortions up to no limit. It says no limit in terms of when they come in to get an abortion. We don’t have to spend the next hour on this. Education is important. Voting for Kamala Harris just because of abortion is silly because it goes back to the state. It’s not like she can do much about it anyway. Her falsely saying, “The Trump abortion ban,” is misleading. It pulls off people’s fears. I don’t think it’s accurate. 

They’re calling it a Trump abortion ban?

Yeah, because he’s not banning anything. It goes back to the States.

We had no problem calling it Obamacare. It is his ban. It is the Republican legislatures that people are afraid of. Trump is giving the Republicans power to do that.

He wasn’t in office when it happened. 

That’s right, but I’m saying that’s why Trump gets labeled. He’s moving it to the states where states could then ban it. He has allowed that opportunity for people to ban it. That’s why he gets the name. He can’t leave himself from that. It might be an extra step, but that’s the way politics play.

What can Kamala do to change that?

Try to get the legislature to kill a filibuster in the path and legislate women’s rights. That’s what it comes down to. We’ve let it go to the court system because we don’t put in laws.

Twenty-two states either limit or deny abortion in their entirety, which makes 28 states available. Some of those states, to be honest with the 22, haven’t voted on them yet. They’re old statute laws from many years ago pre Roe v. Wade. I don’t believe in abortion, but I believe you should have the right to do whatever you want to do within certain limitations. You’ll find that most states are going to be that way. I like the States’ Rights. I don’t want everything in the federal government. What has caused our education system to collapse in the United States is the fact that it’s governed by the federal education system, which Trump wants to ban. I have a horse in that game as I have a twelve-year-old kid.

I’m happy with the Supreme Court’s decision. It should be in the hands of the state. Having said that, my position on abortion is very extreme. I don’t see any reason to have an abortion ever even in the case of the life of the mother. I’ve heard from several OBGYNs that it’s safer to deliver the baby than to go through the process of trying to abort a child. It’s safer to try to deliver it. That’s where I stand on the subject of abortion. I can’t give you all the statistics about how many are being done in a late trimester or whatnot, but that’s pretty much where I stand.

To step in for one second, on January 19th, 2018, Trump became the first sitting US president to address the pro-life March for Life broadcast and voiced his support for a federal ban on all abortion after twenty weeks. He was actively calling on the Senate to vote on the measure, which already had passed the House.

I have a question, and I hate doing this. Usually, when I read things, I have to see the person say it.

That’s a direct quote. I’ll get you the satellite feed of it.

What’s the source, David?

It was Yahoo, but it was NPR. I could get you the video broadcast, which goes to politics, and then will go somewhere else.

That’s left-wing.

It’s source to source.

After all of these years of Trump, this is what I’m used to happening. Trump is the one that made me aware of this. They will say something that Trump said, and then I will go watch the video.

I agree with you.

David, for example, the misquote of Trump saying, “Very fine people,” that was debunked so many times. Yet, Biden and Harris continue to misuse it as if Trump was referring to White supremacists when he clearly was not when you see the entire quote. In the quote itself, he condemned them.

I’ll get you an exact quote. Not a problem.

Can you admit that they do that though?

Having everything under the federal government caused the education system to collapse in the United States. Share on X

Both sides take words out of context.

I have to see the video.

What David is saying is there are liars on both sides.

This quote is on the TrumpWhiteHouse.Archives.gov. That’s a pretty solid source of Trump. I’ll send you a link if you want it.

What year was this, David?

This is now six years ago.

You’re knocking Kamala for something four years ago. People change.

She’s flip-flopping on things in the last few months. The things that she says to a Jewish crowd are very different from what she says to a Palestinian crowd in regard to Israel and guns.

I don’t think I would disagree but don’t tell me Trump has never changed. That’s my point.

People have a right to evolve. Look at Biden.

You didn’t get Kamala that, right?

No. That’s fine. I’m not referring to something four years ago. I’m saying now.

The problem with Kamala is we don’t know where she’s going.

Can we move aside that she’s changed on fracking? Can we put that point aside and go, “She has evolved. It has been four years since she said that. She has changed.”

Everyone is allowed to evolve, but if you’re going to campaign for president, we should have a clear idea of where you stand and what your projections are.

She has clearly said that. Meanwhile, Trump also talked about a national abortion thing in a private conversation. You could look up March 24th in an interview.

I’d have to see that private conversation.

It’s out there. My point is I don’t go to the high lofty. My side never did this.

I never said that.

You said Trump never changes.

It’s because I didn’t know about this thing in 2018.

Pick another thing. I’ll find something else. It’s not uncommon.

Everybody is entitled to change their opinion. She can change her opinion on fracking. She can change her accent. I’m okay with people changing. Donald Trump can change his opinion too. As long as he stays consistent on the big ones, I’m okay with it.

I like to think that people learn and change their positions with knowledge rather than stick to something wrong. I dream of the day Trump figures out that tariffs hurt Americans. We pay for tariffs, not the other countries. I hope one day he figures that out.

That is a perfect segue into the economy, which we all care about as we’re business owners and we care about the future of our children. These policies that Kamala wants to do with unrealized gains and price gouging.

Price gouging was started by the Republicans, that legislation.

I’m going to let Mark.

The anti-gouging legislation came out from Grassley. That was a Republican platform.

Was it when Grassley was a senator in 1902?

No, a couple of years ago during COVID. They were doing anti-gouging legislation.

I’m for free markets, so I don’t care. Companies can do what they want. If people don’t choose to buy their products, fine. If they put tariffs on the products, you don’t have to buy them. Nowhere is it written that you have to buy them.

Who pays for it?

If you buy the product, you’re paying for it. TikTok shops and people like that, I don’t buy from them, but their prices are inordinately cheap. Why? It’s because they’re dumping products here. Should that be allowed?

It depends.

It should not be allowed. You put a tariff on to stop that low price that will kill American businesses. There is a purpose for tariffs if used effectively. I’m not saying across the board. I’m saying it’s for things like that. I remember in the days when they were building DVRs and you could buy them at Walmart for $15. Does anybody remember those days? Are you old enough?

Being in the electronics industry for most of my life, I took it apart. I couldn’t even get the parts, let alone the labor and the chassis for that. They were dumping it in America and killing off the television and DVR manufacturers in the United States, which they’ve done a great job at. Show me how many manufacturers there are. There may be 1 or 2 left, Vizio and one other that builds in the United States because they were price dumping. There is a place where you have to restrict trade, and tariff is the way to do it. I’m not saying across the board or every product, but there is a place for it.

I agree. Tariff is a thing, but it does also cause inflation.

We are not in out-of-control inflation because of tariffs. Tariffs are still enacted by the Biden administration. These were mainly in countries like China which should pay their fair share if they are continuing with their products.

The Biden administration printed more money than any presidential group ever. When you put that money in the M-0 supply, you’re going to get runaway inflation. I was telling a good friend of mine, David Nemetz, that a few years ago, I went to Trader Joe’s and bought wild salmon for $9.99 a pound. Now, it’s $12. 99 a pound. That’s a fact.

Can I tell you a fact? Every year of the Biden administration, my local El Pollo burrito has gone up. It went from $9.40 to $13.40. If the local El Pollo burrito has gone up, everything has gone up because nothing is free. The problem, David, is that, from my perspective, and tell me if you agree, two years into the Biden administration, they still had lockdown policies. They were still handing stimulus checks. When you don’t allow an economy to operate and then all of a sudden, you open it and take credit for job creation when it wasn’t job creation but job return, something has got to pay. There was a disaster with the supply chains. Someone has to be accountable for it. 

Two-thirds of COVID relief was paid under Trump.

Let’s go past COVID. Let’s go to inflation for a second. What I want to say is when you raise the rates to $20 and $22 an hour for a fast food employee, you’re going to get inflation. What is happening, and you’re seeing it in Chipotle, is they’re putting in robots. You are going to eliminate all of those low-level jobs because it’s going to go to robotics. I have a two-armed robot that we’re using for my wife’s company to bring production to America. You’re going to see robotics take over all fast food. The jobs that the kids and the seniors have, because the first job everybody had in high school was fast food or most of us, it’s going to be gone.

This isn’t necessarily a presidential thing. This is a California thing, but it seems like the way California goes, the rest of the country goes. The minimum wage in California is $16 an hour, speaking of fast food. On April 1st, 2024, it’s going to be $20 an hour for fast food, which is ridiculous. Some people have a college education or a bachelor’s degree and they’re barely making $20 an hour. Some kid off the street in high school could walk inside a McDonald’s and make the same as a college-educated person.

This is my problem with raising the minimum wage. Let’s say you’re making $25 an hour or $30 an hour. You are that much closer to poverty. These politicians who are raising wages like this know what’s happening, but it sounds so good to people to say, “Let’s raise the minimum wage.” If I was president, and this may sound crazy, but we need to go back to $10 an hour.

The federal is $7.

Maybe that would have a ripple effect throughout the entire economy. Things will start to reverse and go beyond the minimum wage.

I’ll step in and say that I do have an MBA. I’ll use Walmart as a good example of who is paying people minimum wage. These weren’t kids. They weren’t seniors. They were people with careers. They were real Walmart people. What do you do? You’re paying them $8 an hour. They’re in poverty. How are they getting by? Our local government is then subsidizing their wages. We are paying for their healthcare.

David, you have a choice. That choice is you don’t have to shop at Walmart. When Walmart gave benefits to the employees, I never shopped there. I do now.

That’s my point. By keeping the wages low, we subsidize those workers in different ways. We don’t force the company or government to subsidize them.

What are you going to do when they’re all replaced by robotics?

AI is a huge issue. It’s not just the fast food worker. It’s the writers. There are so many.

We’re starting there. We’re seeing that happen in front of our eyes. We’re seeing restaurants in Las Vegas have robotic servers. The question is, do you have to tip a robot?

The tipping has gotten out of control. Can we all agree on that? You stand there with an iPad and they want 25%.

I’m not for raising the minimum wage, but there’s a fine line between what we consider poverty, what is a living wage, what makes sense, and what goes up with CPI. It should be targeted that way so it’s not political.

I want to add to that. I don’t think the answer is raising or lowering the minimum wage. What does it matter If you’re making $2 more an hour if your electric bill, cost of living, insurance rates, gas, eggs, and milk have exponentially gone up? This has to do with getting energy independent again and running a lot more efficiently, which is what Trump understood. That’s why our economy was booming under him. You cannot count the last year of COVID when the entire country and world were unnaturally shut down. When we have more money in our pockets, we all do better. We shouldn’t be focused on the minimum wage issue. We should be pulling back the lens.

You have to be careful when you say we’re all doing better with more money in our pockets because we saw during COVID that too much money was chasing too few goods, which caused even more inflation. Trump and Biden are both guilty.

It was stimulus checks and incentivized laziness. It affected the workforce. We’re not there. I’m talking about now. The problem is not going to go away by raising a lowering the minimum wage. We are in such overspending that we have to cut the fat and get back to more efficiency. 

That’s good humor right there. How much did Trump raise the deficit during his term?

I’m not saying he didn’t raise the deficit. We didn’t have the inflation that we have now. We didn’t have the prices that we have now.

Part of that is not just America. Every country printed money, so there was more money in supply in the world. We’re not the only country that had an inflation thing.

When did COVID end?

Two-thirds of spending on COVID came under the Trump administration. Biden did one and we spent more money, but those don’t turn on a dime. Inflation is lower now. I won’t say it’s under control, but it’s better than it has been.

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The rate of inflation has lowered, but the damage has been done.

That’s from both presidents.

Let’s not mislead that. It went exponentially up and now it lowered by some, but that’s not comparable to the rates under Trump.

I feel like we’re talking about a bunch of minutia. You could go back and forth.

The president’s economy doesn’t turn on a dime. The president is responsible for some, but a lot of it is lingering. When you look at, “Did Biden do this?” Results take eighteen months, 1 year, or 2 years. Things take time. It’s not like inflation popped up on day one with no underlying effects. It’s not going to go away on day one because we start producing even more oil than we’re already producing. Things don’t happen in a second.

I’ll give you the eighteen ones, David. The inflation got worse up three months ago. It has gotten a lot worse based on the Biden-Harris policies. If you don’t think that’s true, listen to Kamala’s ads. She doesn’t claim she’s the vice president. They’re saying she was the DA, this, and that. She is disassociating herself from Biden’s regime.

I’ll ask you how Pence is doing the same.

It’s clever. Will it work? I don’t know. The inflation is much worse than Biden’s. The guy who takes the hit is the guy on top, good, bad, or indifferent.

Who’s going to be best to deal with the economy? Trump or Kamala?

Trump.

I don’t know.

I feel like for Kamala, it is going to be a continuation of what we already have. I’m not one to speak on the economy, but I could look out into the world and I can see. In Beverly Hills, there used to be booming shops open everywhere. Even in an area like Beverly Hills, everything is shut down. Everything is closed. I’ve never seen it like this in my life. I do remember that when Obama was president, there was a period of time when I felt like at the very end there, a lot of businesses were shut down but I’ve never seen it like this. This is bad.

Have you been to the 3rd Street Promenade, Joel?

I haven’t been there.

It’s decimated.

San Francisco is a ghost town.

Hasn’t there been online shopping? Honestly, we don’t go to malls. Malls are dead.

David, it’s not just online shopping.

How do you buy your stuff?

I agree.

You can’t steal without penalty on online shopping. It’s better to go retail.

I used to go to any small city downtown. I was in the middle of Wyoming. It was Rapid City. All downtown were salons, tattoos, and service models. They were things that you can’t get online. That’s what stores are because, for most of your needs, you’re buying online. That’s the only place my kid will shop. That’s the kid that would go to the mall in our generation.

It’s not just online. There’s no foot traffic for coffee houses and shops. A lot of it has to do with crime. There are literal signs that say, “Over $1,000, you will be in trouble.”

This was in a red state.

Rapid City is in South Dakota.

I drove through them all. They all blended.

It’s not just the crime. In California, they make it impossible to do business because there are so many taxes. Rent is so expensive. There is so much overhead. My mother used to own a staffing service. One time, somebody came in from the state and they wanted an accounting of everything that was in the office, every pencil and all the paper. Anything that was there, they wanted an accounting of it so that they could figure out how much her staffing service should be taxed. I’m not saying not to pay any taxes at all, but it’s ridiculous that somebody can walk into your office and want an accounting of everything so that they can find out how much they need to bill you for that.

Let’s wrap up the economy.

The stock market is doing great.

Please, no stock market.

You do know, David, in an election year, they conveniently lower the interest rate to show that the economy is stimulated. That happens all the time.

It was a Vance thing where the people booed the interest rate coming down. It’s good for the general person for the interest rates to go down. That’s the Fed. We should be independent and not related.

I agree.

If you take it as political, that’s your choice. I don’t think it was a political move. Everybody was expecting it because of their measuring jobs and inflation. It seemed like the proper thing to do.

We are going to agree to disagree on how the economy was doing out of Trump.

Let me add a question here. This is a question on the federal policy of the Federal Reserve. Should that be somebody independent or should it be controlled by the president?

Mark, do you want to answer that?

It could be completely independent.

That’s how it is now. Trump wants much more control as marginally independent as it is now.

It’s not independent. You got Janet Yellen, right?

You’re right.

Where did she come from? She came from the Obama administration. She is highly partisan.

You still get to pick your person, but you don’t control it.

They don’t owe allegiance to that person either, do they?

Correct.

It should be independent, maybe voted in by Congress or something. I haven’t thought it through completely. Going one step further, I don’t think Supreme Court justices should be on there for life.

We all agreed last time that there should be term limits on everything.

At least on ethics.

We agreed on that. To sum it up though, if you look at it at even face value, Trump is a business guy. He went to the Wharton School. He knows what it takes to run companies and employ the free markets.

Also, bankrupt them.

That doesn’t mean he’s not successful. Business is taking risks. You have to look at the guy’s overall performance.

In government, we don’t like to take the risk of going bankrupt.

He understands there are opportunity zones. When everyone has opportunities in free markets to create small businesses, contribute to the economy, and push capitalism, we all do better.

Both sides agree.

There’s one international item that scares me, and that’s the dollar being pushed out of the oil standard by the BRICs, which are Brazil, Russia, India, and China. That is very scary.

That’s why he’s embracing crypto. This is very scary.

That also is scary.

Crypto scares me.

Like AI, it’s new. These are things we have to deal with. It’s the unknown that we’re having to come to terms with. We can all face that together. We have more common ground on some uncertainties.

Who has crypto? Does anybody have crypto?

I bought $500 on Coinbase. That was it.

Does nobody have crypto?

No, Mark. We don’t have the expendable income that you have. Are you connected?

I don’t have that much crypto. I have a few thousand dollars in crypto to play. I live in Las Vegas. I don’t gamble, so I might as well try crypto.

Here was the Trump comment that threw me. Capping interest rates on credit cards to 10% was the latest giveaway that he was trying to offer.

Credit bills have gone up by 33%.

I won’t knock the policy or even talk about it. My question is the government’s role in the free market.

Let’s go back to Kamala Harris’ price gouging. Interest rates on credit cards are 28% to 30%. If you put your money in the bank, you’ll get 2% or 3%. There is a point when the government has to intervene.

It can become a monopoly.

Visa is being sued for monopoly.

You started off going, “We’re all against price gouging,” but if Trump says it, it’s suddenly genius.

When you raise the rate of a fast-food employee from $20 to $22, of course you will get inflation. Share on X

David, you know I never said that.

I know. Going against the price gouging of credit cards could be reasonable.

They’re entitled to make a profit, but they’ve got the American public. Is it over $1 trillion in credit card debt?

My point is it’s going after gouging. You would sum this up as going after gouging.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem like it’s the same thing when you go after certain things like meats and find meat companies thinking that they’re price gouging when they’re not. They’re supply issues.

That’s what you would find out.

Versus credit card companies that don’t have to deal with supply chains. They’re monopolizing. 

I guarantee the credit cards will put up a good legal defense about their cost of money and the people they employ to do it. They’ll make a defense for it like the meat packers will.

There are losses for people who don’t pay the cards.

They’ll fight it and show, “This is a reasonable fee,” like the meat packers will. They will go to the courts and it will be solved.

There is no question that both sides of the fence are panderers to the highest degree. Trump comes to Nevada and says, “No tax on tips.” That’s not pandering.

Kamala took it as her own four months ago.

Trump ups it. He says, “No tax on overtime.” They’re all pandering and we’re paying for it. Look at the national debt. It’s going to surpass the defense budget. The interest is going to pass the defense budget. How could this possibly go on?

We had a wonderful Congress.

David, you and I both have MBAs. We know this isn’t going to go on forever.

Neither side wants to talk about it, and neither one can find a budget.

Since we’re all having fun, what about this unrealized gains tax and how ridiculous that is?

That’s fucking insane.

Thank you. 

I agree.

Do you agree that that’s insane? Look at Mark Cuban who was like, “What are you doing?”

Nobody can afford that. Let’s go back to the stock market for a second. If you sell stock for a profit, you get to pay your taxes at the end of that year on the profit. That’s fair. If you lose money, you don’t get to take that loss in the year. You get part of it and it gets extended over to other years. This is what’s going to happen if they do this. Every year, our house values go up, my commercial buildings go up, or whatever goes up. Your crypto goes up. You are going to be paying some percentage of cash you don’t necessarily have. You’ll be borrowing on your house from selling off crypto to pay the debt. It’s insane. It won’t work.

Everything crashes. The housing market crashes. The stock market will crash. Everything will go.

I’m not worried.

You’re not worried? You’re saying it’s a bunch of hogwash?

Yeah.

It passed in Canada.

The state tax needs to be altered. They’ll play with that before they do other stuff. They’ll have that fight first.

Why do you think it should be altered?

I forget what it is.

I worked 40 years and paid taxes for 40 years on that, which I own. If I want to give it to my kids, should I pay tax again?

That depends on the cost basis. It’s a matter of what the limit is. It’s set at a limit. The limit keeps bouncing. It’s a matter of where you put that number.

We’ll see.

What is it? Is it $17 million or $2 million? It keeps bouncing.

It keeps changing. I don’t know because I’m not planning to die anytime soon.

No one wants to be double-taxed. Of the two huge areas that I would like to address, we’re going to get to one of them. Israel deserves its whole other show. It’s a big topic for all of us, but because it’s not a domestic issue and we’re talking about the main issues that affect us domestically, I would like to talk a little bit about immigration. David, I’d like to start with you because I know that Mark, Joel, and I think this is a huge issue. I want to hear how you see immigration. 

I think it’s a huge issue as well. I don’t believe that Democrats want an open border. I’ll step back and say the border issue is bad. We do have to use better tools and better things to close our border and keep it safer. There’s no doubt about that. I wish that Congress acted on it and changed our asylum, our citizenship, and our pathways and the asylum rules, which is Congress’s job. Anybody in Congress is refusing to put their name because they know they won’t win an election if they try to compromise on it. Ultimately, I blame Congress for a lot of our immigration issues because they haven’t solved it in 30 years or changed anything.

Our border is a huge issue, but also, the xenophobia and the stirring of anti-immigrant emotion, policy, and rhetoric are terrifying. That’s going on. We’re targeting anybody who looks different, or they came here and they’re dirty and are eating dogs and cats. There are people here legally and people who are here illegally. Xenophobia scares me.

We do have to clean up our border. I don’t think mass deportation is an effective tool. We do have to get some people out. We’ve always done deportations. Turning us into a deportation state and clearing people out is horrible. We do have to solve DACA and give a pathway to citizenship to people who’ve been here long-term, who are paying taxes, and who are good citizens. We have to make them pay good penalties and make them pay good fines. If they’ve been trained here and have been in our Army, we should be doing stuff to help.

I would like to respond to the xenophobia column because this is a perfect tactic that I see in legacy media and Democrat media. It’s a great way to not talk about the real concerns that we have. The least of which is xenophobia on my part. When you have a rise in a fentanyl crisis, when you have a rise in sex trafficking, or when 700,000 children at this point have gone unaccounted for, these are the real concerns that I don’t think make it into your media, David.

Where do you have a figure of 700,000?

That’s the number I heard. We can Google it.

Let’s Google that because I’m not going to go by, “I heard.”

I appreciate that. Do the research. It’s a very easy way to say, “The Trump supporters or the Republicans don’t want immigrants because they’re xenophobic and racist.” That is not the case at all.

Not at all?

From my point of view. Many of us would agree that our main issue is not xenophobia in terms of wanting secure borders. There’s a reason why the Latino community especially, those who are immigrants to this country, has completely exponentially grown in their support of Trump. My family is a family of immigrants. What makes this country great is immigrants.

On the first day of office, Biden lifted all of the Trump border bans, didn’t let him finish the wall, and got rid of his remaining Mexico policies. This is not just putting a Band-Aid on it right before the election. This has been a problem from day one. We’re left having to deal with it. It’s very distracting to make this about the cats and dogs issue when this is a real issue affecting all Americans, especially with the Fentanyl crisis and child sex trafficking. More light should be shined on that.

I’ve been hearing the argument that Republicans didn’t vote on the bill that was up in front of Congress. That has been the criticism that they’ve received. There’s no sense in voting for a bill if the bill doesn’t have any teeth in it.

A lot of it went to aid for Ukraine.

I don’t see any reason why Republicans would’ve voted on that bill.

All the border groups were supporting it. It was Republican-led.

I feel like when Trump is the president, we’ll get an actual border bill that’s better. I won’t even go into more details on that. I can’t make a solid argument for that because I can’t quote for you what exactly is in the bill. We need to take care of the border. There was a lot made about the dogs and cats. Ironically, I happened to be online and was watching a video of a man, who I don’t know if he was Haitian or not, cooking a cat on the sidewalk while a White woman in a residential neighborhood was walking down the street screaming at the person. I thought it was a random thing that happened at that point in time. I wasn’t looking at it like, “This is happening in a certain part of the country.” When Trump said that, I harkened back to that video.

He said it because he saw firsthand accounts. We don’t have to focus on that. That brought the issue to the front.

I want to get off the Haitian cat-eating because I’m not so sure I buy into that whole bullshit. I’ve been to Haiti. I can tell you what it’s like. We have 320,000 missing children that came across the border. That comes from the New York Post. You can believe the New York Post or not. That’s the source of where I got it from.

The border was secure under Trump. What is the predictor of future performance and past performance? He locked it down without Congress. He got it all done. We had the least amount of people coming in illegally into the country. The fentanyl crisis, although was probably still bad and unreported, is not nearly what it is now.

Biden should have, without the help of Congress, shut down the border like Trump. Why didn’t he do that? I believe you want to let all the illegal immigrants in. The purpose is for voting. Can we go ahead and deport 13 million to 20 million people? How the hell are you going to do that? I don’t know how you would begin to do it.

We’re going to get to that. That’s a huge concern of all of ours. We were saying this from the beginning. Once you have so many people here and they do need jobs and residence, the next step is they might as well vote. They’re paying taxes. I heard this statistic. Trump lost the swing state of Arizona by 11,000 votes. Since the Biden and Harris administration has taken over, there have been 65,000 naturalized citizens in Arizona alone. That is very concerning.

I’m not concerned.

You’re not concerned?

If they’re citizens, they’re allowed to vote.

Were they allowed to be citizens? Did they pass everything? Did they do everything right? If they did everything right, hallelujah.

My wife is an immigrant.

The president’s economy does not turn on a dime. They are responsible for some, but a lot of it is lingering. Share on X

How can they do everything right when they’re given everything?

Immigrants are okay. It’s the illegal immigrants that is the problem. I was watching a video about what’s happening in Chicago. We have Venezuelan gangs in Chicago. There’s a conflict between the Black Gangs of Chicago and the Venezuelan gangs in Chicago. They’re a different breed, the ones that are coming from Venezuela. It’s chaos. On top of that, all of these illegals that are coming in, they’re giving them all the financial aid. They’re giving them thousands of dollars. They’re living for free.

It’s to buy a home or start a business.

It’s ridiculous.

It’s going to tax the middle class, the hardworking taxpayers, and the veterans. It doesn’t seem fair. I’m all about asylum sinking, but it’s a fraction of who’s into this country. We already know there ARE terrorist cells of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda.

Look at the United Nations protest.

The thing too, David, and didn’t know if you missed it, is when Biden had the debate with Trump and Biden said, “The border guys love us,” that was the first thing that was immediately fact-tracked by the border patrol. They do not endorse Biden. They endorse Trump. That’s because they have no support. They see the chaos.

They also wanted the bill to get through Congress.

That was a Band-Aid.

All of Trump’s things were Band-Aids.

That’s not true. Trump had very secure borders.

They were Band-Aids because we don’t have a policy.

Trump had policies, and we saw the difference.

Executive actions are Band-Aids.

You can’t argue with the numbers of how many people have gotten over that we know of, not even including got-aways, compared to under the Trump administration. That bill happened during the election year. A lot of it had to do with aid to Ukraine. It wasn’t fixing any of the problems. It was a Band-Aid. It gave more aid to absorb the immigrants. It didn’t talk about stopping them at the border and making it more of a checks and balances way of ruling out who’s here with good intentions and who’s not. Did you hear that number from Mark? 350,000 children.

According to the New York Post? I’ll read into that a little deeper before I take it as a fact.

I wish you knew about that more. I wish you knew more about the fentanyl crisis and not focus on xenophobia.

It has gone up exponentially. It’s been on the same arc over the eight years that it’s going on. It decreased a little bit in the last six months but it’s been on the same slope over the last eight years, the fentanyl. Sadly, it’s rising on a slope that has not changed.

I would have to see the sources for that as well. I don’t think it’s a consistent slope.

It’s a consistent slope. The numbers are much higher because it’s a slope. I’ll send it to you.

I appreciate that. We covered the top topics. I want to bring it back again to our original questions.

You poo-pooed the xenophobia. I’m not taking that away from our border issues. We have huge border issues, but I have a huge issue with xenophobia. I don’t want that to be, “I’m using that as an excuse because I don’t want to talk about the border.” MAGA, Trump, and Vance are going after legal immigrants the way they are because they’re different is scary, especially as a joke.

I don’t think that’s what they are doing at all. They’re trying to shine a light.

Can we agree that they’re here legally?

They might have some sort of status.

They have temporary protective status. That’s legal. That makes them legal. It’s simple.

It doesn’t mean the city is equipped to absorb them.

The city is not equipped, but that doesn’t make them illegal.

David, I’m not judging and being xenophobic. Haitians have their own practices and cultures. God bless them. I saw pastors being interviewed who opened their churches to feed the homeless. They say they are tapped. They used to serve 30 a week. Now, they’re serving 300. They don’t have the resources. Desperate times come for desperate measures. I don’t think it’s without the realm of possibility that some migrants do eat animals. They eat geese and goats. They eat whatever they can find. I’m not judging them for that. I’m saying it’s irresponsible to have such an amount of observation of absorbing immigrants without seeing that there is a cost to that.

I have no problem with saying, “The city has infrastructure and needs greater federal support and greater state support.” That’s not an issue. My issue is saying, “We’re going to get rid of them and kick them all out because they’re here illegally,” when there’s no proof that they’re here illegally. They are completely legal despite you wanting to push through what a temporary status is. It’s a government-mandated legal status.

That policy is not a legal way to let someone in.

They have legal status here.

How about the 13 million to 18 million people who have been let into the country and don’t have temporary protection status?

Those don’t, but the Haitians do. It’s not a question of whether it is legal or it is a temp. It is a thing that’s been around since Bush of temporary protective services.

We’re unable to take care of those with real temporary protection status because we are inundated with illegal aliens.

100%. When we have politicians go, “I’m going to call them illegal even though they’re illegal,” and go after them, I consider that as xenophobia.

When they’re legal and you give them some kind of status, it’s semantics.

I don’t think it’s xenophobia. It’s Trump’s saying, “Americans first.” I don’t look at it as xenophobia. We all agree that Trump says things that can be too brash. I wish he would be a little bit more diplomatic.

I would love to see an example of what you would consider xenophobia if this is not the general description of foreigners eating cats and dogs with no proof, kicking them out, and wanting to send them back to their country.

There is proof. I saw tons of videos at city council meetings of people seeing this firsthand.

The city council members and mayors have shown none.

I don’t listen to mayors. I listen to the citizens who come to the city council and say, “I’ve seen this. I’ve seen that. My children have seen it. I’m appalled.” I’m going to believe people.

The two that were quoted have apologized.

We’re seeing different things.

I’m sure if I was hungry enough and I came from a country where it was considered okay to eat cats and dogs.

Nothing is xenophobic. That’s what they know. They know how to kill. They know how to cook. They’re hungry. I don’t blame you if that’s what you do.

Our grandparents were called dirty Jews.

I don’t think anyone is calling them dirty. They were saying they were eating some cats and dogs. I didn’t see anything of them being called dirty. 

What you’re calling them is hungry.

The resources in Springfield have been tapped. They do what they know.

We have plenty of people in this country who eat squirrels.

Also, dog. I don’t have an issue with what people’s practices are. I have an issue that it’s tapping the resources of Americans who didn’t ask for this. Look what happened in Colorado with the building being taken over by Venezuelan gangs. That’s not okay. That’s not fair. When I see people in their 60s and 70s saying that they’re living across the street from 2-bedroom houses that are holding 40 immigrants, they have filth everywhere, and they have no rights to complain to landlords because they have the status, I don’t feel that’s fair.

We can get a little bit more of a handle on the border so things can be handled in a more orderly, productive fashion so everyone gets their needs met again. I have no problem with Haitian immigrants. God bless them. I have a problem with open borders, tons of got-aways, and people here for the wrong reasons who are not being held accountable and not having to wait in line like a lot of other legal immigrants did. 

We would all agree that it needs to be controlled, stabilized, and done in a sensible manner. We may not agree on what is sensible, but as Dr. Phil said, common sense has to make a comeback.

Getting distracted by the cats and the xenophobia takes away from what we would probably agree on. That’s what is at hand. The border crisis was a crisis within the first year of the Biden administration. Now, it’s exponential. I don’t even know what to do about this. I’m very concerned about giving voting status to people who are not even full citizens because that is a threat to democracy.

That’s a concern how that’s going to affect the next election. In my opinion, I believe that’s part of the reason why this is happening. The Blacks used to be the golden goose of the Democrat party. They then figured out that they need more than just the Black vote so they’re bringing in all these other voters, turning them into citizens, and hoping most of them are going to become Democrats. Ironically, a lot of these people are coming from very Conservative places. If they stick to their morals, then they will eventually figure out, “I’d rather be a Republican.” I see that happening with some of the Hispanic votes. The real goal is they want to flip this election.

This election? They’re not allowed to vote.

Are illegals allowed to vote?

They’re already making cases in counties to do that though.

They’re not allowed to vote for federal. There are some things that they could vote for local issues but not for federal.

How do you check someone’s citizenship on the day of the election?

That’s another thing too. It is so easy for anyone in any country to come to California and vote. There’s no ID at all.

Mail-in ballots are fine. Mail-in ballots are not an issue.

You don’t have to have an ID. I could be in Zimbabwe. If I could get an address in California and a computer, I could go online and I could fill something out so that they mail that to a certain address.

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David, there’s no way of checking.

There are ways to check.

Can I say what I was going to say? If the person at that address doesn’t send something back saying, “This person doesn’t live here,” they will go on a voter log. Someone could show up and they could vote. It’s simple. Since we have no ID, it’s incredibly easy to do this.

Regarding the voting issue, David, wouldn’t you agree that it’s better that we all feel that there’s election integrity in that there should be same-day voting, the date could be a holiday, and we should have voter ID?

No. I don’t.

I don’t even want to say voter ID because when you say voter ID, people think that’s some type of special identification. A voter ID is simply a driver’s license. Should people have to show identification to vote?

Yes. You don’t agree with that? 

I do agree there are some issues with it as far as disenfranchising. Mark will know this. I forget if it’s Nevada or Arizona where they’re allowing 90,000 people without IDs to vote because they think they’re Republicans without IDs.

I like it, but no.

There was a mistake with the DMV that they didn’t check their IDs when they gave it to them, so they’re going to allow them to vote because they didn’t do it properly.

I didn’t hear that.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never heard that.

The only people who are disenfranchised by an ID would be somebody who that maybe in Appalachia or somebody who lives so far off in the country that it’s difficult to get to a DMV. Other than that, I don’t know who would be disenfranchised by not having identification. Every single Black person I know no matter where they are has an ID. I say that because that’s usually the argument, “They want to pin this on Black people. Black people are going to be disenfranchised.”

It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations.

We are lucky. We’re in California. I’m up in Washington. Our voting has always been easy. When you look at Georgia four years ago when people waited in line for 4 to 6 hours and there was one precinct in a 10-mile block, it’s different in other parts of the country. Suppression is much better than what we have here as far as ability and things.

If you go back to where people do not have access to their birth records or whatever criteria are met, I’m all for some kind of ID. There are some places where there are seventeen different levels of ID that you could use. As long as you show up with one, it’s a matter of how hard it is to get when you limit those IDs and go from there. I’m somewhere in the middle there as far as, “It takes more than my signature on a piece of paper that calls it an ID,” but less than, “I have to go through eight weeks of hoops to get it from a hospital from the 1930s.”

Getting a driver’s license does not require a birth certificate. Everyone has a driver’s license.

That’s not true at all.

That’s not the reason to allow no IDs for the entire country.

That’s what I’m saying. There are multiple levels.

I don’t like hearing that there’s only one precinct in districts. It should be easy to vote.

I’m in Washington. Mail-in voting is all we do here and it works fantastic.

We had absentee ballots. Since COVID, I’m not comfortable with early ballot voting and mail-in ballot voting because people can legally ballot harvest and take people’s ballots.

They can’t legally do that.

They do.

It doesn’t make it legal.

It’s happening. We see people voting more than once.

You believe it’s happening but there’s been no cases or anything shown that it has any effect.

That’s a whole other can of worms that we don’t have to go into because it’s not going to change.

To go back, it was in Arizona, not Nevada. It was in Maricopa County.

They have had 65,000 naturalized citizens in the last three years who will likely vote Democrat. I don’t think this is the American way to open borders to ensure elections. It’s a mess.

I’m surprised in this day and age that with the technology that we have, why can’t we vote online?

Agreed.

That’s an easy way to hack.

You have to have a lot of trust.

We bank online.

Banks get hacked all the time. Bank of America was hacked.

I don’t trust the voting machines. If I don’t trust the voting machines, I feel like online is going to be the easiest way to hack. When we were having the hanging chads, it was far more efficient than what we have now. We’re waiting days to find out the results. It’s ridiculous.

Hand counting is going to make it slower. Here’s my prediction. Georgia will not pick a president. There’s no way they will figure out the vote in Georgia this election.

It doesn’t matter. They’re still going to have to call it like they did last time.

They are not going to figure it out. They will not call it.

How can they legally do that?

That’s because it’s going to go through battles. It’s going to be such a mess because they’ve changed all the laws. It’s by hand only. There are going to be issues. There are so many changes to the collection that I figure Georgia will never be able to solve who won this thing.

They’re on the right track.

You’re not going to get an answer that night, which is what you want. It’s going to go through weeks.

Here’s what I think. No matter who wins the election, the other side is going to say there was cheating.

Without a doubt.

That brings me to my next question. It’s November 6th, 2024. What happens after November 6th if your guy loses or your candidate loses? Where do you see the country going in the next six months?

If Kamala loses, she would concede. If Trump loses, we’re going to be in legal battles and claim it was rigged. He has already claimed it’s rigged if he loses because he cannot emotionally accept that he could lose a race. We will be in a hellish battle if Trump loses in the courts and legal. We’ll go through a game of corruption if he loses as we did before.

Mark? Joel? 

I will go online and watch people posting videos of news broadcasts where they show the election results. They refresh the screen and Trump has 10,000 votes less than he had a second ago. That’s what I remember from the last time. There were videos like this that were online. If we had January 6th the last time, I can’t say that we’re going to have the same thing again, but there will be a huge uproar. People will feel like the election is stolen. We’ll have a divided country again.

We already know based on every last four elections that the Democrats are going to win the popular vote easily. It’s going to be an electoral college issue. You’re going to have the will of the people who will lose like they tend to lose based on the electoral. You’ll have an unhappy group.

The country is already divided. The election results are going to amplify all of the mistrust, all of the frustrations, and all of the fears that we have been digesting.

I disagree. That’s one-sided. If Kamala loses, I guarantee there’ll be feelings of dissent but there won’t be a battle.

I disagree. She may concede, but as we saw with the BLM riots, there will be people taking to the streets, finding an excuse to riot, and using the excuse of, “We have Hitler in office.” David, they keep trying to assassinate him.

It’s not they. It’s people with mental health issues. If you’re going to say the same thing with gun reports in every school, it’s not them.

I agree with you. Anybody who does this has mental health issues. Anybody who does mass shootings has mental health issues. My point is the rhetoric for years of Trump being a threat to democracy and if he gets in office, it’s the end of America.

Both sides are using the same rhetoric.

Either way, you would agree that there is something to be said about Trump’s derangement syndrome when it’s not about his policies. It’s about them emotionally looking at him as the equivalent of war.

Let me make one comment on that. Both sides are saying the exact same thing. One side is saying, “If Kamala gets in office, we’re a Marxist country and democracy is over as we know it.” On the other side, they’re saying, “If Trump gets in office, democracy is over. A dictator goes in.” It’s the same thing.

I personally can be very critical of Trump, but I stand by his policy and his personality.

Here’s my question on this, Daniella. I don’t like his personality. I’m for his policies. I get that. There are some policies that I’m fine with that Trump did. However, his personality is so narcissistic and immature, for lack of a better word, that it drives policy. If he doesn’t like you, he creates a policy to go against you. His policy is driven by vendettas.

Can you give an example?

Yes. Bezos and his contract for data storage. He didn’t like Bezos so he blocked that transaction. It went to court.

I don’t know much about that. Going back to what we were saying about credit cards, there might be more to the story. Politics are politics. You say Trump’s a narcissist. That’s fine, but Kamala doesn’t seem the most competent. She cannot talk to the press.

That’s a different tangent. Stay on Trump. I’m talking about personality-driving policy.

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One can say that she can’t stand on her own two feet so she’ll let everybody else talk.

I’m talking about your candidate, not mine.

I don’t agree with you.

Which president with the exception of maybe Jimmy Carter wasn’t narcissistic, megalomaniacal, and wanting power? Name me one with the exception of maybe Jimmy Carter.

You have to take the job, without a doubt. Here’s my issue. The others have tougher skin and could say, “If somebody doesn’t like me, I don’t care.” When somebody says anything against him, he makes it a personal issue.

David, I cannot stand when he makes it personal, he says things like Ron DeSanctimonious, or he calls names. It’s so childish. We’re beyond that. It’s tiresome. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s necessary.

You don’t think that goes into any of his policies? Do you think it’s all separate?

There’s an image of Trump on the outside. Do you know why I think he’s a very different person behind the scenes? It is because he got things done that no one could. He was able to land in North Korea. He was able to do the Abraham Accords, which no one thought was possible. He was able to sit down, negotiate, and make things happen behind closed doors. I look at his children. I look at his employees that he’s had for 25 to 30 years who are devoted to him.

The two in jail?

Two out of how many?

Two of the top.

It is Hunter Biden who should be in jail. We don’t have to play that game. Hunter Biden is completely taking a plea deal to cover his dad because there’s no doubt the nefarious connections between his dad, Barisma, and this mess with Ukraine. It’s a moot point because he is not running anymore. How convenient. I’m a positive person, but I do have concerns about the outcome, the pressure of World War III, and what’s happening in the Middle East. I’m concerned.

I have a question for the three of you. Can Trump legitimately lose without things being rigged or election issues? Do you think he can lose this election fair and square?

I think if we have better election integrity, he will. David, Trump did win the election. You cannot tell me that he had the most votes of any sitting president in a second term and Joe Biden got the most votes in history. How convenient during COVID. It doesn’t matter. There were enough loopholes. No evidence was even seen.

Evidence was seen.

David, I’ve accepted that like I’ve accepted OJ Simpson’s verdict even though I disagree with it. We’re all concerned.

I want to answer this question. I’m not sure that I understand the question correctly.

I’ll rephrase it.

Go ahead and rephrase it.

My question is, can Trump legitimately lose without it being corruption or something else? Would it only take corruption and manipulation for Trump to lose this election?

Here’s the problem. I legitimately believe the only way he can lose is if they cheat. I honestly believe that. I’m saying that after 2020 traveling across the country. You can’t go to every city. As we were traveling, me and a friend of mine whom I was driving with, we were taking note of all the signs, like when you see the “Vote for Biden” or “Vote for Trump.” I hardly saw any Biden signs at all. Every state that I went through was Trump. When I got to Chicago, I saw my second Biden sign. What I’m saying is I truly believe that the only way that Trump loses is if they cheat.

I’ll say humorously that I drove across the i-80 from Washington to Indiana.

What did you see?

I wasn’t expecting to see any Harris signs and I was shocked when I did. There was more Trump, but I was still stunned that I saw any anti-Trump signs.

In Washington?

No. Crossing from Washington to Indiana.

I’m going to answer your question slightly differently. I know there was fraud in the 2020 election, but do I think there was enough to change from Trump to Biden? No. Biden won the election. My wife will disagree with me. Let’s go to 2024. If Trump loses, and I don’t think he will, he will not accept the loss. Anybody who tells you differently is a liar. He’s going to say, “There was cheating. There was stealing. It was the voting machines.” They’ve been saying there’s been cheating since, in my lifetime, Jimmy Carter. We know about the hanging chads. We brought it up. There is always some election fraud.

Are elections not supposed to be close?

It’s the swing states that we all have to pay attention to and even things with RFK when they fought tooth and nail to even let him get on the ballots. When he said, “I’m pulling out,” they’re not even letting him get off the election.

He has to hit the right deadlines.

He did. He wasn’t even printed on the ballots in some of these states where they all of a sudden said, “Now you have to stay on.” When they move the line, it’s not even just Trump. I agree with you. Trump does not take losing well. It’s not Trump. It’s the people as what Joel was saying, what Mark’s wife feels, and what I feel. There was election interference. This is not just a Trump ego thing. This is all of us feeling collectively. You can’t argue that even before the election 2020, they were suppressing stories like the Hunter Biden in laptops saying it was misinformation when we all knew it wasn’t six months later. When you have big tech, you have social media, and you have media working together, it already doesn’t feel fair. 

I’m talking about illegal election stuff.

There was one more thing I was going to say. This all contributes to it because when you go to Google and you only see positive articles about Kamala and can’t find any of her histories when she was a prosecutor, all that’s gone. There was a time when you typed in “Trump rally” and what came up was all of the places Kamala was going to be. This is not being made up. We tried this on our own and we saw these results.

When you have these incidents, it already builds the feeling of mistrust. It’s not just Trump. It’s the people who support him that feel frustrated. Even when you see an interview from Don Lemon, and I know you are going to say this is anecdotal, he would go to the bluest cities and the bluest states expecting everyone to say Harris and they kept saying, “I’m voting for Trump.”

We all feel that Trump is doing far better in the polls than the media wants you to know. That’s why I do think it’s going to be a mess either way. It’s going to be a mess if he wins for the Democrats. There will be rioting. It’s going to be a mess if Trump loses. Everyone on his team will be like, “There’s cheating.” This is where we’re at.

Going back to the beginning, there is some design to this because we are a much stronger country when we can come together on what we have in common. The powers that be don’t want us to have these kinds of conversations. You have to look to podcasts where you have thinking people who are not caricatures of their party but can have sit-down conversations like we’re doing and hear each other without gotcha moments and without trying to paint the other party as a stereotype.

Why aren’t we seeing that in mainstream media shows? Why aren’t we seeing that on a regular basis on The Today Show or The View? It’s by design. I hope these conversations continue to amplify because we are Americans. As a therapist, when I have a couple and they’re arguing, I’ll turn to one of them and say, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be married?” I feel like that’s the same in our country. It’s not a matter of, “I’d rather be right and you wrong, and we all lose.” We have to pull back the lens and realize that we are all being hurt in some way by these narratives. 

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Here’s what I think would be interesting. I don’t have the talent to do it, but it wouldn’t take much. I would love to see a picture of America by state. Instead of all the states being shown as red and blue, show me the mixture of red and blue with what the actual population is. You’ll see a much greater purple America than red and blue states.

I agree.

That’s true because it’s the independents that call the election.

It’s whoever shows up to vote because you take out 30% of the states. You would see a big relative shade of purple across America. Most states are 55 or 45 or that close.

They’re very close.

You would see how homogenous things are as opposed to a red world and a blue world.

If they don’t divide us, what are we going to argue about?

It’s easier to control when you’re divided, divide and conquer.

The government sees how bad we are. When you look at the government, you say, “These people suck.”

 

The way David summed it up, I thought his words were perfect, and they were very hopeful also. The red and blue labels only work in media. That’s not the case in the real world. People have more in common with each other than they do with differences. Other than that, I don’t have much to add. David summed it up in a succinct and hopeful way.

Mark?

The only last thing I would comment on is we talk about the media being so divisive. The media is divisive because that’s what pays the bills. People tune in to hear this. It’s the business of making money. Opinion news makes money news. Boring news doesn’t make money.

The Democrats and Republicans do have to work together.

Yet, they don’t.

We’re all suffering for it. I’d like to see us be made out to be more human. We would all do better if we were made out to be more human, that we’re thinking and feeling, and have legitimate concerns so we can see each other again and not as the other. I want to thank you guys all for being a part of this. We’re talking to real Americans. We’re going underneath the headlines to find some common ground from Americans from a wide range of a political spectrum, and we did find a lot of common ground, and we still all like each other. Thank you guys so much for all being here. Until next time, God bless you and God bless America.

Important Links:

• Dr. Mark Lipp, PhD