Take a look behind the curtain with a real whistleblower, an
American patriot. Prepare to embrace the
uncomfortable truth, because this program has no time for
comforting lies. Here is civil liberties
enthusiast, Second Amendment defender, and recovering FBI
agent Kyle Sarah. Well hello my friends and
welcome to the Kyle Seraphin Show.
Today is Wednesday and it is March the 13th.
We are midweek and we are mid interview cycle here.
We've got a whole week full of interviews that you guys are
going to enjoy. I think you guys will appreciate
this one as well. Today's guest is going to be Ron
Coleman. No, not Ronnie Coleman the
bodybuilder. Although as he has told me,
they've never been in the same room together.
No one can prove they're not the same guy.
We're going to have a good interview, a little discussion
about about free speech, about religion.
It's placed in the workplace, it's placed in your life as it
sets your values. I think you guys are going to
get a good kick out of this and let me start off with my
sponsors so we can get them appropriately addressed.
Let's start off with something that is in the workplace and
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Type in your e-mail, type in your zip code and you will get
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Hopefully. Hopefully you're getting the
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They are an advocacy group and you guys can always donate to
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Yeah, on all the major ones. All right.
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We'll talk about the merch store at the end here.
Without any further ado, let's bring on Mr. Ron Coleman.
All right, folks. Today's guest, Ron Coleman.
He needs a little bit of introduction because he's a
lawyer, he's an activist, he's a podcast host, he's semi retired.
It's very funny. He let me on his podcast and we
had a lot of fun with it. It was actually probably one of
the most fun podcasts that I've done, and I'm going to bring him
on right now. Mr. Coleman, thanks for joining
me. Well.
It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you.
And your podcast is like like a play on words.
It's the culmination, which you think some people probably don't
get, but I think my audience gets that.
What do you think? I think your audience is well
above average, although some of the smartest people in the world
haven't gotten it because it sounds it's like other people's
shows where they call themselves like a thing, a nation thing.
But I never would pretend to think that there's a nation like
that. I have a nation dedicated to me.
I mean, who Who used to do that? It was that crazy old Jewish guy
who did radio. I don't remember his name now,
but he had a he. Had a whole nation a followers.
Had a nation. I don't have a nation but
culmination finishing. The fact of the matter is
culmination isn't really a great concept either.
It's it's the I wanted a pun because that's what I do.
But what's the pun? I mean, why would I?
Anyway, here I'm glad to be on. You're much more logically
entitled. I'm not sure that we're going to
do that. I think we're going to prove
otherwise right now. Let me throw it on the screen
here, folks. Culmination season three is
going on. You can find me on Season 2, and
I had a lot of fun doing it. It was one of the more, I'm
telling you, it's one of the more fun conversations that I've
done in this space. I I, I as you know I used as an
excerpt you're comparison of leaving the FBI to breaking up
with a crazy girlfriend. It's a spot on.
It's 100%. All right.
I'm sure your listeners have heard.
Use it. Use it many times.
Yeah, we call the FBI my ex-girlfriend.
They love that I it. It's the easiest way to quickly
convey a point. And that's that's what we're all
about, All right. So, as people can tell by your
voice, you're from just outside of Dallas.
And let's get into, let's tell, let's tell about who you are as
a person. Because.
It's really that obvious. That Texan blood, it shines
through. I could see it by the cowboy
hat. Tell tell folks a little bit
about kind of who you are as a person where you grew up.
I want to kind of give them that lens before we get sarcastic.
We have a long. We have this is long form.
Yeah, as long as you. I am originally from Brooklyn,
NY, the Brooklyn, NY section of Texas.
Yes, and I went to the public schools in New York.
And that meant that my parents saw what was going on during one
of the earlier crises of urban left wing meltdown, which took
place in the late 60s and early 70s.
So we participated in part of the Great White Flight leaving
the city in the early 70s and moved to New Jersey's first
planned unit development, which was called Twin Rivers in East
Windsor, NJ. Was that a prestigious move?
Did the white flight. It all depends on what you're
used to. I mean, moving from a
two-bedroom apartment to a four bedroom attached house to us was
pretty much a Beverly Hillbillies guy in reverse.
Like, wow, we have our own postage stamp sized backyard and
you know, we we really, we were very, very and plus central air
conditioning. Oh man, that was big time.
We so we were, and and I lived there through my high school
years. I attended Hightstown High
School and then found myself quite unsurprised, quite
surprisingly, at college at Princeton University.
And I say, surprisingly not, because I didn't always know I
was the smartest guy in the world, but I didn't necessarily
think that it would. I'm out that way.
Neither of my parents had attended college.
My mother is an immigrant. She legal, of course.
She came here from Cuba, her parents having left Poland.
They're Polish Jews from who wisely left Poland in the 1930s.
My father was an orphan who was raised by his grandmother on the
upper on the Lower East Side of New York.
And we were, you know, regular kind of people.
So no one had gone to college and all of a sudden I'm in this
unbelievable world and those days.
Too, right. I mean that's.
Well, yeah, that was the long shot.
That was the long shot. I was like everybody else.
I was prepared to go to Penn if I had to, you know, But I I sold
him a bill of goods and but apparently I had a great time in
college, learned of some stuff, but mostly had a great time.
I was a radio. DJI was, you know, a singer, a
dancer, a writer, everything like I said.
And sometimes I went to the library, not too much.
Did you have a bar that was called the library outside of
Princeton? Is that a thing there?
No, we oh, so people could say to their parents, if I'm in, I'm
at the library. Yeah, this was a big thing.
So they imported that. There must be one.
Maybe outside of Yale. They had one of those where I
went to school in Oklahoma and I, you know, you could go to the
library, you could tell your wife if you were a grad student
or whatever, and you'd be like, no, I'm.
I'm at the library grading papers.
We did great papers. We just had beer.
Well, keep in mind, in my day there was, there wasn't the kind
of I graduated in 1985. So there were no cell phones.
Like if your parents heard from you once a week from the phone
in your room, that was considered to be respectable.
OK, So what wasn't so much they were calling you and wondering
where you were, you know? But I went on to law school at
Northwestern University in Chicago, worked in a bunch of
law firms of different sizes, none of which really was a very,
very good match for me because the bigger the firm, the worse
of a match. I am a little bit of an
out-of-the-box guy, but I'm a litigator.
I developed an interest in trademark law and ended up
getting involved in a lot of very cool trademark law cases
and also in free speech. And in fact, part of what I had
sold Princeton on was that I had been involved in the writing and
publication of the of an underground newspaper, such as
it was an underground mimeograph newspaper in high school.
And so I was very interested in free speech and censorship, and
also in in brands, and I got a little bit more and more into
speech, and especially when the Internet was invented.
By Al. By Al Gore, and I remember it
very clearly. I remember him rolling that out,
and I began to see on the Internet from a business
perspective, how intellectual property laws such as copyright
and trademark in particular, were being used as a way to shut
down competition and also to shut down wrong think.
So I got a little bit more and more involved in that sort of
stuff. And ultimately, I had the
experience of appearing before the United States Supreme Court
in a case called Mattel versus Tam, which was a perfect fusion
of trademark law and free speech.
In which the United States Supreme Court affirmed A ruling
that we had secured from the US Circuit Court for the Federal
Court for the Federal Circuit, US Circuit Court for the Federal
Circuit, to the effect the US government could not refuse to
register a trademark on the ground that it was disparaging.
Because that just don't cut it. Under modern First Amendment
law. You can't.
Government can't decide what points of view it will endorse
and which ones it will not endorse.
Trademark registration is a ministerial act.
If you do XY and Z, use a trademark in commerce and
Interstate commerce, and it's really legitimately entitled to
be recognized as a trademark, Fields don't matter, and that
was the rule. That's that's a very modern take
on it. The fields don't matter And yet
isn't it interesting that a lot of the stuff is coming back into
view because we keep seeing it seems like the government is
coming in with a either a hand on the scale or they have
they're they're looking for an outcome.
One of the guys that I I talked to all the time, Bill Shipley
talks about the government is supposed to remain agnostic.
That's really the purpose of government.
It's not supposed to have any of those fields as you said.
How interesting is it? But what year was that, that
Supreme Court ruling? 20/16/2017 was the Supreme Court
rule. OK.
And then as you've seen that kind of roll forward and some of
the other sort of infringements in that space, did you start off
as a conservative guy? Is that where you were in the
household? Is that your, you know, at a
young age was your dissident, you know?
You know that famous expression that is attributed to Winston
Churchill, though? Nobody knows that he actually
said it. You know, if you're a young man
and you've never been a liberal, you have no heart.
And if you're an older man and then you never and you're not a
Conservative, you don't have a brain.
I never had a heart. I was like the guy from what was
the What was the show? What was that show?
How can I? I didn't really actually watch
it. But there was family something.
Something. Family ties, yeah, where they
had a son who was, you know, this conservative and the rest
of the family was a bunch of hippies.
Right. So I was, I was always that guy.
And that was despite the fact that I grew up in, you know, a
fairly, I mean my parents were not particularly ideological,
but I did attend Jewish Labor Bund summer camp for six years.
You know, this was before I was, I became religious.
I I became an observant Jew. I decided to step up my
religious observance after college and before law school.
So and and when I did that one Orthodox friend who I'd had in
college was actually was my roommate and his mother
introduced me to my wife. Later I said, well, now you make
sense because before you didn't really make a lot of sense.
You had all these right wing views, but you you weren't.
You didn't really have the true theological basis for it.
And the thing my problem was that I didn't really understand
that a Jewish person, like there aren't really different kinds of
Jewish obligations to God. God says Jewish people, here's
what you have to do. Can't eat this.
You got to eat that, got to get up in the morning, you got to go
to say your prayers and that it that's that's for everybody.
So I never wanted to displease God.
So can we. Can we go down that road a
little bit? And here's why I say that in the
in the Northeast, people are very familiar with sort of
culturally Jewish people and then religiously Jewish people.
Where I grew up in Texas, there are no Jewish people that we are
aware of. I think there's in Houston
there, there's some now, but not that anybody was really
understood. So my first real big experience
with this was my wife who is from Brooklyn as well.
She's her buddies were a lot of more Jewish guys and they come
down and they would talk about Jewish stuff like at a bar in
Austin, TX and they're like doing this talk back and forth
this New York Jewish thing and and I'm like guys knock it off
like nobody here knows what you're talking about and you
just seem weird like this is not the this is not the place for
this and they're doing this thing he's like look at you Jewy
knows like look at you like everyone knows what's going on
in your head and I'm going this is Texas, America, man.
Like nobody has the concept of it.
So I'd love to go down that rabbit hole a little bit.
Actually, and I'm the best person in the world to go to go
down it with you because I I have thought about this a lot
and I've written on the topic and I and I.
And one of the things that I consider to be my job on social
media is to acquaint Americans with the what we might call the
21st century version of Orthodox Jews who are conservative.
You know, people think of Jewish people as being liberal.
And in fact Orthodox Jews are overwhelmingly politically
conservative super family oriented.
You know I I married off my youngest son although his twin
who is 3 minutes older is still on the market at the and he's
25. He's you know that that in our
in our circles that's not that's not late but it's a little bit
beyond the the median. I have more grandchildren than I
would like to say because we are a little bit superstitious about
that kind of thing. But I have two other married
children, very family oriented, very traditional, and we are
embarrassed to a large extent by the prevalence of Jewish people
doing the wrong things and saying the wrong things.
And, you know, we consider that to be a a fairly predictable
result of what happens when you separate yourself from God.
You're either 'cause you're pretty much either there, or
you're not. And it's and people you know
aren't comfortable with that. But I'm not here to make people
comfortable, Kyle. There's no reason.
Yeah. I mean, and you know, what's
interesting too is that I think this is the time when that is
going to be the most relevant to most folks.
We're seeing this, this, this sort of there's been a soft and
squishy culture in America for the last maybe 30 years, maybe
40 years. I don't know where it got softer
and squishier, where everything was OK And if you think it, it's
fine and all this kind of nonsense.
And then it got like, like the hard way has always been the way
that people have sought out. At least people at principle
have always looked for something like what's difficult, what's
being asked to me, How do I achieve that?
There's a reason why the Navy Seals recruit and most people
don't become Navy Seals. They become dudes who like chip
paint on a battleship. You know, finding things that.
Are. I don't think we even do that
anymore. Do we not?
We have somebody else we have like.
Like, have you know, have you seen these pictures of U.S.
Navy ships with rust on them? In history, the US Navy has
never sailed around with rusty ships.
We don't do that anymore. We have.
More drag Queens than we need, though.
That's right, DEI. Is, is, is job one.
Yeah. But yes, you're right.
You're look, you have to find a mission.
You have to. If you go through life floating,
floating through it without meaning and without an uphill,
some kind of uphill struggle, you might get by just fine.
But you are. You're going to, if you if you
even, I mean look, anyone who has children and raises them or
as my wife insists you say, wears them.
She got to do a better law school than I did, see.
So I have to defer. If you were children, then you
have had some uphill experience if you, if you make any effort
whatsoever. But if you want to hand over to
your children any kind of character, any kind of sense of
what, what does a person achieve in this world?
And then they've got to see you, you know, moving against the
stream on something at some point.
Now, you and I both know from past experiences that we've had
we're mostly surrounded by people who are comfortable to be
spectators and lurkers. And one of the things I do try
to get to do, You know, often people say, Ron, what's the one
thing we can do to change things?
As if I'm some wise guy? Well, I'm old, right?
And that gives you a certain amount of people, I think do
need to do what you've done in your life, step up and be
counted and be prepared to be separated from the herd.
Because if you're not, first of all, when you do, besides
possibly maybe achieving, you encourage other people to
achieve, you encourage other people to step up.
We do, you know, even those of us who look, I mean, I'm with
Army, Dylan's law firm. Now that's a Group, A group of
troublemakers, a group of people who are willing to put their
names out there. Again, you're a you're a
whistleblower. You know what I'm talking about.
If you don't stand up for the truth, at some point you will
have to compromise, like anyone who's ever worked in law
enforcement. I mean, gosh, coming out of
Brooklyn, you know, the the Serpico hearings were when I was
very, very young. But everyone knew about that.
The premise was if you work in the New York Police Department,
you you're some kind of crook and you're either in on it.
It's kind of like the the 1960s version of Training Day.
You're either in on it. Everybody gets a taste or you
make everybody else nervous. Right.
And and and and if it's the latter, they're going to take
care of you, they're going to take care of you.
And that's how that you know if anything means anything to you.
Now, the amazing thing is, in this world, there are a lot of
conflicting. We've gone so far off where you
wanted to talk about but we've got so many conflicting feedback
mechanisms and one of them is money and wealth.
And I remember taking a reading a book in or part of a book in
in college about in America we associate success with wealth.
In other words, that that's how you you've made it when you've.
Got. That's how we keep.
Score. But in fact, that can I'd like
to be wealthy. I'd like to, I just, I'd like to
have a short experience of it just so I can say I've been
there and done that. But if, besides the fact that it
that it makes you soft, being wealthy makes you soft, very few
people are able to retain that sense of mission and remain
wealthy or continue to, you know, to earn money.
And that's, which is what makes what Elon Musk has done in the
last couple of years so extraordinary.
And there are people, there aren't really committed people,
who will stick their necks out, but you know, a lot of moving
parts to this. No question about it.
The the original spot that I wanted to kind of hone in on,
you said at some point you decided that you were going to
be an observant Jew. Yeah, and.
And I don't think that's disconnected from anything we
were just talking about there, but at some point.
No, no. You may actually agree the
decision connected. Yeah, let's kind of hone in on
what that So you were your family members, were they not
observant or were they not particularly?
They weren't so my like, like most people my age, I'm 60.
I I had grandparents whose own grandparents and and parents
were religiously observant. This was true of most people in
East, most Jews in Eastern Europe 100 years ago.
Then there was a massive dislocation that took place as a
result of World War One, social dislocation as well as
geographic and economic. A great deal of, you know,
communities that for hundreds and hundreds of years had been
insular and who did not expect to have any kinds of rights.
The combination of the experiences of World War One and
the changes in politics and and regimes, as well as the
influence of the Enlightenment from Western Europe finally
finding its way into Eastern Europe and the Scientific
Revolution resulted in people of faith.
You know, a traditionally faithful community losing its
faith and going, going in the direction that Jews in Western
Europe had already gone 100 years earlier.
So by the time my grandparents were raising children, they were
not observant. They spoke Yiddish at home,
Judeo, German, that was that was their idea of how to ethnically
realize. In other words, it was a very
clear thing to to people like my grandparents that of course were
Jewish. Of course, of course I'm a Jew.
Not only that, of course I'm a Jew.
And I and I and I'm very proud of it because it makes me
special somehow. That was just baked into them.
This is also food. This is style of speaking.
These are valves. There's all that.
But that was kind of cultural. I mean, again, in my, in my
grandparents, they, they they've, by the time I'm born,
they're living in Brooklyn by way of Havana.
Like they've had plenty. What a wild way.
Yeah, right. They've had plenty of
opportunity to assimilate. But they did a very poor job of
it because, yes, they're Yiddish speakers and my grandmother
cooks what her mother cooked. So yes, you have this kind of
cultural, but by the time. So here, now, let's Fast forward
20 years. I'm now in Princeton, OK?
And I'm a member of the Tower Club and I'm going out with the
daughter of the Unitarian minister who is the nicest,
finest person I ever met in my life.
And yet I know that we can never get married.
But I'm also saying to myself, but I'm like my grandparents,
I'm not a bigot because I grew up in the 60s and the late 60s
and I'm not prejudice against non Jewish people.
And I I understand that our backgrounds are different.
But what is it that makes me so certain that I have to raise a
Jewish family and that to do so requires that I have a Jewish
wife? And the thing about Princeton in
particular, Princeton, and schools like it in particular,
is that, as opposed to if I'd gone to Rutgers, my father tried
to pay me off to go to Rutgers, he'd buy me a car.
If I go to Rutgers, they offered me, they offered me a
scholarship, and it was a lot less expensive than Princeton,
which of course was chump change compared, even adjusted for
1980s money. I mean, the numbers were because
the racket, it was a very different the most you could
borrow in those days was $2500 for the government.
That was it. In any event, these elite
schools provide tremendous opportunities for assimilation.
Now looking at me now as a 60 year old man, much less with a
yarmulke and a beard, you might say, well, Ron, you would never
have passed anyway. Who do you think you're kidding?
And that might be true, but I But what I did see was that
other Jewish students who were further up the assimilation
curve than I was because their families had been in the in the
US for multiple generations, not just 1 1/2 as mine had been.
I saw what they how assimilated they were.
And indeed, they didn't pass. They were still conspicuously
Jewish to me. Interesting, Judar, I guess you
know. Yeah, you can see it.
Well, it's like, well, I'm talking about my, my, my wife's
buddies who are down in Texas who are not practicing.
They're not observant Jews and they're.
But I would say that they are more obvious to us as New
Yorkers than they are as Jews, which is, which is also a thing
because the thing that is always, maybe This is why I have
a fondest for talking to you. You remind me very much.
I have two father in laws. I have my wife's stepfather and
my wife's actual father. One of them is Italian, from
Manhattan, grew up in Manhattan, raised his family in Brooklyn,
now lives in Florida. Classic New York story.
The other one married with my my mother-in-law at 16 years old
when she was 16. My my wife was 16 rather And
then the stepfather. They now live in Connecticut and
he's non observant and Jewish. The two of them have many
similarities because they're both New Yorkers and New
Yorkers. The Italian guy is more Jewish,
is more Jewish style, then you're Connecticut Jew.
Maybe he's because, but he's he's like sort of an atheist and
hates religion and so I don't know.
I don't I don't know if that's true.
Anyway, I I see you as kind of a.
Religion. He's not an atheist.
He actually, he's angry at God. He hates that he.
Really hates to care about it. Have no attitude toward it
whatsoever. But he's but he.
Which I actually yeah, that may be the case.
He he does have a strong feeling about it.
It's it's the same thing we talk about guns.
Listen, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance If you live
in New York and you have thoughts that don't make any
sense, like nobody should own a gun.
But the police can't help you because you don't believe he
grew up with that. Police are all corrupt attitude
too. And I was like, yeah, that's why
we have the Second Amendment. And he's like, no, you know,
it's just it just doesn't jibe. But there is something, New
York, about your character that is maybe more recognizable than
specifically Jewish, minus the Yamaha.
You take that off. And yeah, I don't know that
everybody sees that, at least not a no.
No, I agree with you 100%. You go around the country and
you and you meet guys like me, you know, and you don't know
anything about our religion. But yeah, this guy's in fact,
when I was when I was registering, like we on the
first day of law school, there was, I was talking to a friend
of mine who was also going to Northwestern, who was from the
Upper West Side of Manhattan. And there was a woman behind us
who had spent her entire life in the Chicago area.
And she was Jewish. And she was listening to us
talk. And she finally said, you people
from New York have opinions on absolutely everything.
Yeah. Yeah.
I guess that's. I guess that kind of nailed it.
Yeah. Anyway, I in so in the so this
raised my consciousness when I was in Princeton of what it
means to be Jewish and what it means to assimilate.
And that I really had priorities, that I didn't really
understand where they came from, other than just a sort of
cultural gut feeling. Which if that's all it is, I owe
it to myself to transcend that. Because I, I, I Why should I be
deprived of love or other opportunities just because of a
sort of a cultural bias. Meanwhile, however, my roommate
for three or four years that I was in school was a graduate of
the high school division of Yeshiva University and he was a
Sabbath observer. And not only was he not a sort
of medieval figure, because of course growing up in New York
and my my grandparents had a store on the Lower East Side.
So I I knew what Orthodox Jews looked like.
But this guy was modern and he majored in chemistry and he
graduated summa cum laude from Princeton.
I mean, so he's a super smart guy.
He's keeping the Sabbath. So obviously I see you can do
that and succeed. He's at Princeton, as I am.
And you know, all this consciousness raising resulted
in my choosing to go to a a summer program in Israel geared
towards overripe fruits such as myself, or maybe I should say
overripe fruit such as myself. Because that's one thing no one
ever accused me of. And they they knew it, you know,
that was what I was looking for. They they explained to me, they
fill in gaps. And the fact is, my father, my
late father, had did not have much of A Jewish education.
But he made sure that my brother and I had a something with
Jewish education because he wanted us to make our choices
regarding observance from a base of knowledge rather than a base
of ignorance. And the vast majority of people
who are critical of religion have no real understanding of
what religions teach, much less the specific religion that
they're usually criticizing and and seldom their own religion.
And that often can include people who have attended one of
the some of the most anti Catholic people in the world are
people who will start out by saying I went to Catholic school
and. Yes, or I would.
Or you'd be like my brothers. I have, I have two brothers that
are both sort of functional atheists at this point or
agnostics. I don't know what they're what
they claim and they both went to Catholic University, one of them
getting a degree in like theology, philosophy and walked
out. But that's like, kind of a
classic Jesuit move. OK.
But that's, I mean so that's that's that's an A truly
exceptional situation well. If you if you knew my brothers,
that wouldn't surprise you even a little bit.
Like not surprising built in contrarians.
I have a whole family of contrarians.
If I told them one thing, they would set their watch the other
way. Well, I think there's also,
there's a, there's a particularly American aspect to
this, which is Americans and we see this in social media all the
time. Everyone's an extra to every
damn thing. And Americans don't want to be
told and they're used to. And you know, they take a great
deal of pride in having this anti authoritarian streak and
what people often call organized religion.
And if you've ever been to an Orthodox synagogue, you would
laugh at the concept of organized.
But the concept or institutionalized religion makes
people think, well, you know, there are all these doctrines
and they're all these ideas and then they're all these forms of
conduct that I'm not going to have full comprehension of and
that I'm going to be asked to do.
And that's UN American I I 'cause I'm a free man.
And that isn't an unreasonable conclusion to come to.
If you have not been exposed to the idea that God is infinite,
you will never understand in this world the true nature of
what God demands of us and and what the divine, what the
Godhead is about. And now it's only a matter of
degree and we have a a tradition.
This is actually something that came up in the in the recent
weekly Torah reading that when the Torah was given on Mount
Sinai, the Jews said we will obey and we will learn in that
order. In other words, look your God,
you know what's best for us. You created us.
You made a special mission for the Jews, whatever it is.
You gave us this recipe. Here's what's again.
Here's what you're going to eat. You're not going to eat.
We're going to do it because you want what's best for us.
And now we're going to spend the rest of our lives trying to
figure out what what you want, because we want to love you as
much as you love us, which is impossible.
But to at least get on that road or that level of affection and
understanding as somebody who prided himself on his
intellectual attainments, this was something that I recognized
I would have to do. And when I made the commitment
to become observant, it was at, it was at a sort of what's
called a a beginner. I call beginners yeshiva.
You know Yeshiva University people who may not understand
this. Yeshiva is a generic word that
means a place where rabbinic studies take place.
Yeshiva University is named is so named because it combines
rabbinic studies with traditional collegiate study.
So in this beginners yeshiva they certainly in in the 80s.
It's not the same. Now someone had like me would
make the commitment, say, OK, I want to, I want to live the rest
of my life religiously observant.
I want to do it and say, OK, but I know you want to go back to
law school now, Ron, but you don't really know what you're
doing. I mean this your, your roommate
in college grew up that way. You're not, you're not going to
just recapitulate what you saw from.
And I said, no, I'm an American, but also not so much that I was
committed to it. And you know, I I recognize that
the there are limits to autodidacticism that I can only
teach myself so much. But again, I came from this
working class background and I've been admitted to this top
ten law school. And I'm not going to just walk
away from that to studying Yoshiva.
Let me let me get the law degree and I'll come back to you Shiva.
And they said, Ron, no one comes back.
You you're you're not going to come.
So of course I'll show you three years later, right after the bar
exam. This is the Luke.
Skywalker story You're just describing Luke Skywalker
walking away and coming back. Did you know this?
Did you know we were going to do a Yoda thing?
Well, I will tell you that my father and I have a much better
relationship than Luke and his father.
That's probably good if you cross swords with your father.
It just doesn't end well. My father didn't did not really
get me because he was a smart guy, but he was normal.
He was not a nerd. But I came back.
I spent then two years in yeshiva's before starting my
legal career and I was a different person.
No question about it. You know, I'm gonna Look, I was
not such a wild and crazy guy in the 1st place.
I had conservative tastes. I you know, I mean, I like girls
like them a lot, but I tended to be a one woman man all the time
and wasn't much of A partier. I was kind of an intellectual
so. I like that you said nerdy.
I can relate to that sort of thing.
I like to be like a like to be like a poet jock, you know, or a
jock poet kind of thing. I want to go.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, I like and in fact, if
you mentioned being a jock, there was a period in my late
teens when I said I'm going to, I'm going to force myself to be
a sports guy, a sports guy. How do you think I had never
sports, sports. I mean, I would, I'm not a
natural athlete. Just trust it.
Can't jump, can't run. But you know, I had some bulk
and, you know, upper body strength.
I'm pretty good actually. You know, decent hitter, cannot
make a layout. But I kind of got tried to make
friends with and get into the sports scene, which we're like
with a nice Jewish guys were, you know, playing ball after
school and that kind of thing. For a couple years.
I was kind of a jock, but it didn't really take because it
wasn't. So when I got into high school
and I found the drama clubs guy, I was, I was home.
That was, that was your career. That was really where I wanted
to be. And you know, that was pretty
much the end of sports. You.
Can't You can't live in both of those worlds at the same time.
Oh, I think you can. I think you can.
But if you really suck at sports.
No, that's what I mean. Yeah, you're not.
If you're not both good at both you.
You get a pretty good actor, you know?
I mean, it's kind of like with me on the SAT's.
I mean, yeah, I had a respectable math score, but I
had a much more respectable English score, and therefore I
kind of left calculus behind in high school and, you know, went
with the words instead of the instead of the the integers.
What do? You you said that coming out
after the yeshiva experience really changed the way that you
went into law and not from being conservative to to or you know
not conservative to conservative but to being maybe more
principled. Is that is that would that be
accurate you had more? No, no, no.
That was always a goody 2 shoes, to tell you the truth.
I was always a nerdiness. I was always pretty much a rule
follower. I mean, I had my, you know,
adolescence stupidities, but by and large, you know, I was a
pretty good to shoes. But people who met me after
yeshiva could tell the difference.
The way I spoke, the words I didn't use any more than I used
to use it's and I found that interesting because I didn't
really think I was. I was so different.
I don't. What was fascinating to me was
that when it well a lot of things were but here I was now
in law school in Chicago. Well, just like there were there
were two steps. There was the commitment over
the summer and then sort of the self education during law school
And at Princeton there had been this, you know, which is in the
New York area. There had been this community of
Modern Orthodox kids. So I said OK, all major
universities must have something like that.
No, they don't. They don't.
This is not New York, this is Chicago.
And there was one guy in my class who was an observant, but
he happened to be a Lubavitcher classic.
And Lubavitch is that's Kabad. Those are the guys with the
house in Crown Heights and their thing is outreach.
I mean, he wouldn't have been in law school otherwise because
other Hasidim don't go to law school.
So they kind of helped get me up the curve as well.
And there were a lot of, you know, a lot of growth took took
place, you know, as part of that experience.
And that was kind of interesting because because of my
background, I was unusual among newcomers to the Achieva world
because I already understood Yiddish pretty well.
Most people in my situation don't know a stitch of Yiddish,
so you know, that kind of made it a little bit more interesting
for me. How critical is that the Yiddish
skills? Well that combined with the the
Brooklyn style enabled me and and plus having a having a good
cup, a good, a good head. OK, I'm smart, I was able to
pass for a non newcomer and I was also very sensitive to
social cues. I knew how to dress like how to
had a pass. So it's not a matter of, you
know, fooling people. It's a matter of not wanting to
feel the social discomfort of being an outside.
So I was able to integrate well, but I was, of course, I was
really an an ignoramus. And even after two years of
yeshiva, I had made what's considered to be very, very good
progress. But it got me to the level where
my kids were in 8th grade. OK, you know, you know, and here
I am a 25 year old Ivy Leaguer, but it, you know, it certainly
helped. It got me a much better quality,
you know, girl for, you know, who wanted a guy with that kind
of background. And then I got into the
professions and I will tell you that, you know, here I have
broken through this ceiling that my father never could
professionally. He was like a benefits clerk in
in one company and then they kind of got smaller and smaller
and they had fewer and fewer benefits.
He was like a really good guy and with a good head on and he
and he ended up becoming kind of a small time private investor
and ended up having a decent retirement and you know
providing for my mother decently well in a way that I mean people
an hour age can't even imagine that somebody with just a high
school degree could could do right, Unless they were in
social media of course. You know, yeah, well, that's
that's, that's not real. That's so gross.
And it's such a small fraction of people that can do that.
And then I get into but then I get into into this into this
elite environment and I'm leaving early on Friday and I'm
not really able to go out for lunch to network and and and
it's it's a gigantic choice It's it doesn't just implicate that
hour or that evening. It implicates your entire the
entire way that you relate to people because you're just not
developing the same kind of contacts and the same kind of
social you know shared social experiences.
But I never never did I say to myself boy what a mistake.
I mean, I had come to the conclusion that this was what
and who I should be. And wherever things took me, I
would, you know, I would do my best with them.
Frankly, I had a harder time adjusting to the social milieu
of the professions because of my socio economic background than I
did because of my religious observance.
Because I didn't really pick up on cues all around me that even
that that at Princeton, that people really studied
assiduously in a way that I had never had to do in high school
in. Other words, they spent more
time just literally consuming. Studying books, preparing for
tests, doing outlines. And I didn't really.
I I didn't know how to do that because I had, I had been in a
much less competitive environment than kids from like
from Chappaqua, OK? And I just was the best in the
class, one of the three or four best in the class, just by being
Ron Coleman. And it wasn't until I got, you
know, and then when you were in college, you get to choose which
classes you want. So you choose, you know, the
ones less resist. One thing I did do that was kind
of intellectually idealistic was I majored in economics when I
didn't really. I'm not a quantitative person as
such, and I really my history, my interests were in history and
politics. But I said, well, here's a
paradigm for analyzing problems and behavior that will at least
introduce some level of rigor into my thinking in my.
And I think that was very valuable for me.
And it really paid off in law school, because when I got to
law school, Northwestern is good, but it's not full of
people from Princeton, Harvard and Yale.
And I ran the table first year by by studying but because I
because I had watched the paper chase and I knew that in law
school you do study so. You learned that from the movie?
I learned I wouldn't have known otherwise.
That's. So good.
I think that's so relatable for most people, too.
It's like, how'd you know about that?
I saw a movie. It just let me know what was
coming. It's like how?
I learned that's how I learned manners.
Standing up on a lady leaves the table.
The rest of, like, all the taking off your gloves and you
shake someone's head. My father's from the Lower East
Side. You know, He's a real polite
guy. Thank you.
Please. But, you know, he's kind of
nice. Cities were not the kind of
things that I was going to pick up at home, nor did we have, I
mean, who I wasn't even interacting with people like
that. I was interacting with a bunch
of Eastern European. And, you know, Eastern Europeans
are really blunt. God bless you.
You put on a lot of weight. Yeah, just straight up.
No, no punches pulled, no, no niceties.
So it's a harsh world. You you mentioned that
difference was not so much the religious difference that you
saw and even walking into the profession, but it was a class
difference. At least, yes and and it cost
me. I remember, in fact, one time
after I I I was out of a Park Ave. law firm.
I'm not avoiding mentioning and it just doesn't mean anything to
anyone. That's fine, yeah, nobody knows.
But one that was known as having a lot of Orthodox Jews and one
time as so we have, we pray three times a day, once in the
morning before you go to work, once in the evening before you
go to sleep or after work, and then once in the afternoon or
evening and you've got to find a time to do it.
And we had a we had a, it's called a minion, a group of 10
men who would meet in one of the offices at this law firm for
this afternoon service. At one time, one of the older
partners who you know, an observant man, called me over.
I said, I want you to know we're with you.
And he said, you really have to. You're going to have to change
the way you you interact with you, you, you.
You're not going to make it in a place like this.
You, you you're too maybe. I think it's you.
You you picked up too much in the Shiva world with the
expressions and and and talking with your hands.
And I really had no idea what he was talking about.
I'd gotten through instead of gotten through Northwestern.
He was 100% right. I was not clubbable.
I really still had the stink of and and by.
I mean history is full of people coming up from the, you know,
from much more modest backgrounds than mine and
learning how to do this. And it might be that if I had
been a really good law firm associate, I might have gotten
away with being who I am. But I wasn't a very good law
firm associate. So you're you're.
I didn't last. They could tell where you were
from. They could tell by your
mannerisms, by your inner like that, that sort of like a
Polish. They used to have this thing.
Do you ever, have you ever heard of cotillion?
You know what that is? Yes, I mean, I've, I've heard of
it. That's the best fact.
I got invited. Yeah.
I got invited one day to be some girl's date when I was in, I
don't know, 4th grade or fifth grade.
It was some, you know, childish thing.
And I went to it and they were doing the box step and they were
doing the foxtrot. And I was like, what is this
nonsense? Like, what is this all about?
And they were talking about where the forks go.
And I was like, who cares? Because that's not the world I
came from. My dad grew up very, very
modestly and then did really well and and you know, but that
wasn't our world. We were just like regular
people. We didn't have multiple forks on
the table. That's crazy.
Well, what are you going to do? You have one fork.
That's what you need. So I went to this thing.
And there are people that do that, though, like, they
literally are raised in a way that is outside of my
understanding and probably outside of what your
understanding was at the time. And it's visible when you show
up. And we can pretend at a certain
age you learn to observe around you and kind of adapt if you're
a good enough chameleon. But if you don't even know what
to look for, and you don't even know if there's a difference.
And and Princeton was great for that.
It was a finishing school for me in many respects, even though I
didn't, you know, even though Stanley could still tell that I
was from Brooklyn. And but I did learn how to tie a
bow tie, a real bow tie, you know, and had had a dress.
You know, I mean the things, the things you would learn.
And then I go and spoil it by putting this really conspicuous
big black yarmulke on my head. And I go to like I sometimes
have occasion to go to formal events now and I feel quite well
prepared to present. And in fact I I would say that
I'm on the upper quartile of nailing it in terms of because I
look around and I see how people they don't know what they're
doing with their with their
evening clothes. OK And then I'm wearing the
wrong kind of shoes and but I'm the most but I'm the one with
the yellow star because I'm in a I'm in a Penguin suit and then
the the black this just does not it just really doesn't go that
is what God wanted for me and that's just that you know it it.
And I will tell you what was a very interesting turning point
though. For most of my career I did not
wear my yarmulke in professional settings especially as a
litigator. You know going into court what
you don't want to give, You don't want to cede anything and
you're not. You're there to represent your
client and to maximize ethically and what not his or her or its
results. Not to make a statement about
your faith or to tell people when you're not reachable, what
you can and can't eat, whatever it is when COVID came and every
which is not to say that I was hiding like everyone who met
with me or work with me knew. Because when I would, when I
would eat and, you know, I would, everyone saw me in a
yarmulke, but it wasn't part of my presentation as such.
But then when COVID came and we were all on zoom, thinking I'm
taking off my yarmulke in my own house, No, I'm not going to do
that. I'm not going to do that now to
this day. I mean, I was in front of the
9th Circuit a couple weeks ago, especially, guess what?
There's a thing of anti-Semitism going around.
You might have heard about this. Yeah, I want to.
We're going to get to that too, I think, because it's so wild
how raw it is right now and on the surface.
And I obviously, again, I'm not fooling anybody about who I am.
But when you were a yarmulke, people quite mistakenly are
under the impression that if you were a yarmulke, you were more
of an Israel guy than someone else who doesn't necessarily.
I just didn't want that baggage. And so, you know, I went bare
headed in front of the in front of the 9th Circuit.
I don't know whether that's going to help my case at all
because it was. I was brought in as a ringer on
a kind of a stinker of a case at the very end.
But this nonetheless became around that time I started doing
video on social media because the platforms became so much
more powerful and amenable to it, and I began to socialize.
My wife, she's, she's from New England and she's a very modest
and private person and she knew that she was not marrying that
kind of person. But she has a very, very well
developed sense of dignity and privacy, which is, I mean
there's a lot of good reasons to marry someone who is your
opposite, not when it comes to values, but when it comes to
personality, there are limits. And sometimes it, you know,
because I'm a bull in a China shop kind of guy and she's a,
you know, she's a little Pussycat, but.
Does she? Does she temper you?
Yeah, she she does. As bad as it would be, as bad as
it is as many Ron Coleman faces you see staring out at you on
on, you know, in My stream, it would be worse if it weren't for
Jane. She has given me a, you know, at
least the sensibility to understand that smearing
yourself as she puts it around is not necessarily an inherent
good. Do you rub off on her in the
same way that she has a little more assertive nature?
Yeah, a little bit. The fact is, she really, really
hated Twitter. It's a long, long time.
It's the worst. But then she realized she's a
writer. If she wants anyone to read what
she writes, she needs to be on Twitter.
You know, unless you're really a very big, established person,
that's how you know that's how it's going to be.
So she has, you know, she sends me stuff to retweet.
And you know, I love this. I mean, I frankly, I wish she
would get on the podcast with me because she's she's really
smart. When she writes about something
she like she said to me, Ron, what?
What if we would have met when we were in college?
Wouldn't that be cute? We would never have met if we
were in college. Because you were in the library
the whole time. That's right.
I never went into the library. Plus, you would have looked at
me and said that kind of wild, irresponsible guy is not the
kind of guy I'm looking for. Yes.
So it, you know, God has a plan. I don't always know what it is.
I always tell people I can only see it in the rear view.
That's when it like sort of makes sense to me.
That's me attempting to justify something that was always going
to be and always made sense, but it made no sense to me at the
time. And it makes no sense often
times afterwards, if it gets far enough away, you start seeing
this sort of the bigger picture and you go, oh, what an
interesting arc that we are on right now, how you can't see it.
It looks like a straight line. The straight line looks like
it's going and God knows what way.
And then you look and you're like, no, it was a natural
curve. It always went to the way it was
supposed to go. My wife and I joke about this
all the time, too. We met when we were 27, and we
would have never met before that.
In fact, we actually did meet briefly for one night.
We were in the same dance club with some friends and we were
all kind of out. And she was the only gal that
was there. And it was my buddies from
college and buddies from high school and and there was
nothing, there was nothing there.
And then, you know, two years later, you know, then it wow,
stuck forever. So that's kind of wild.
Well, my so went went out. So Jane and I were in law school
at the same time I was in Chicago.
She was in Palo Alto, and I became a writer for the AB as
Law Student magazine, which was called Student Lawyer.
And the editors there were fascinated by the fact that I
was attending law school. But I was an observant Jew.
And that I would walk up eight or ten flights to my dorm room
on Friday nights because I couldn't take the elevator and
they just thought it was fascinating.
And they, they asked me to write an article about this
experience, which was much less common than it is now, although
it was hardly, you know, exotic. But then again, I was from the
New York area, so I wrote this article and then actually ended
up winning a couple of of awards.
And they had one of these little, like editor's words in
the beginning of the magazine and they had a picture of me
and, you know, introducing the article and how how much they
liked it. And someone else who was in law
school, a friend of my wife's, said, oh, why don't you marry
this guy and like that one look at me in my bomber, my leather
bomber jacket and said no, that's not, that's not what I'm
looking for. Like she wanted a, like a
rabbinical student looking guy and I was a cool looking guy.
I love it. She ended up actually getting
the cool guy who dressed like a rabbinical student, so.
That's a perfect. That's the that's the perfect
jam. So my my wife and I, I'll just
share this kind of briefly. It's the same kind of sense she
says everyone thinks that you're really mean and I'm as mean as
anybody. And I I feel like that given the
opportunity. Oh yeah, if you're on the wrong
side, I'm, I'm heartless. You you talked about the guy
that was born without a heart. I almost sociopathic.
I have the ability to just, you know level in and get mission
focused. But.
Never with my or with the FBI after.
All you have to well, you have to be able to do what we call
flip the switch, which means that when it's time to do work,
feelings don't matter. Nothing else gets in the way of
accomplishing what is happening. And I'm very driven in that way.
And I think it came from from many, many years of being a
swimmer where I just had my own thoughts in the water and
nothing else. That's interesting.
Yeah, just I love being alone. I I.
In fact, even around people, I can be alone.
As long as I can't hear you, I don't care.
Oh no, I get that. Yeah, it's funny, actually,
because I'm I'm an INTJ. I should know what mine are, but
I think that sounds right. Yeah, I'm an introvert.
Me too. OK, Ron, I could be an
introvert. You're.
No, no, no. At a party, I'm not afraid to
talk to people. But I'm.
I'm very happy to sit there with my own thoughts.
I, I, I, you know, I don't need, you know, it's a contradiction.
But I you you know. Yes.
You know what? Your energy is not coming from
being around those people. It probably it drains you.
It's exhausting to be around people for me and I feel the
same. We probably.
Especially especially when you're so much smarter than
that. It's that's the worst.
There's nothing worse. I had a, I'll tell you a funny
little story with my one of my FBI bosses, she said.
She said something. You know, the throwaway line.
I'm not the smartest guy in the world.
Objectively true, right? You're not the smartest guy in
the world. I'm not the smartest.
Even I don't think I'm the smartest.
Yeah, we've met people smarter than ourselves and and you'd be
ridiculous. I I know a guy, I I've said this
once before, maybe on a podcast. But I had a a guy in my class
when I was in high school and his physics notes were in the
shape of a cartoon bird character and he had an entire
series that was called The Birds of War.
And if you got drilled down the tiny little lines were all
physics equations that he was working through.
But they were. They were animation.
OK, that's another level of weird.
Smart. He also was socially kind of
retarded. He just wasn't able to talk to
people. He wasn't a cool guy.
He was as. You might well expect.
As you might expect, almost. You know, we would always say
spectrum type, but he wasn't. He was just he was just a very
cerebral guy with A and his dad was a lawyer and that was
interesting. So long and short.
He's that guy. So I know there are smartest
people. I'm talking to my my boss and
she says something to me and I go, look, I'm not the smartest
guy in the world, but I know this it was a set up to the next
line. I know this is true.
And she said, Kyle, I mean, I think you're smart.
Who are you to affirm me? I don't require this of you.
I don't know who you are, lady. And at some point she pushed me.
And then we started getting into breaking out where I stood in
the the IQ scores to let her know that I don't need her
affirm your assurances anymore. She wasn't.
I was just saying it, I'm. Just saying it.
It's a throwaway line lady. Get off my back like you're not
a good manager. We we touched him briefly on
this anti-Semitism thing. I feel like it's we have Kamala
Harris that's going to solve the problem in the Middle East now.
That's really exciting for me. And she's going to go and she.
Did so well at the border she did.
Got to give her a shot. And she's handled AI, so I'm no
longer afraid of the Terminators.
So all the things they put her on, she's handled.
She's going to deal with the with the the Middle East.
What in the world is happening in this country where we have
people that are blatantly saying the the only solution is
revolution and Intifada and all these other kind of wild things.
People that don't even know what is going on in the Middle East
or don't understand the conflict.
They are now marching in the streets, shutting down traffic
mostly in the northeast it seems like, but all sort of live big
city areas. How are you seeing that?
Well, these are mostly Muslims, overwhelmingly international
students or recent immigrants from the Obama era.
It's interesting to me that you're talking.
I mean these are the ones who are snarling up traffic and you
know rushing into synagogues and you know causing the real, the
real problems. And it's really important to
understand that yes, they are animated to, you know, they they
really are. I think the word hate is
overused. They they're interested in
asserting power and dominance and they see Jews as part of the
power equation in the United States, quite understandably,
especially in universities which are filled with these
assimilated Jews who can't do enough to show how down with the
revolution they are. And what they're mostly doing is
flexing. I'm not saying that they aren't
vicious anti semites. They are.
But just the word hate has just become empty.
It's become empty. They are confronting
institutions, academic, government, you name it and
spitting it in their faces. Not because they're interested
in a saliva covered face on the other side, but because they're
pissing out territory. They're they are the the
vanguard of a Marxist destructive, nihilist movement.
And I think all those words apply.
All those adjectives apply whose mission, the mission of which is
to undermine the institutions in the United States and in the
West, to take what we have and which they cannot build for
themselves and they can never build for themselves in any
country, anywhere. You take what we've built either
for themselves or just to. Destroy it?
That seems more like it. Just to destroy it out of pre
modern rage and the institutional majority left.
In other words, I mean white, overwhelmingly female.
Now, even males are females feminized, either approve of
this or have convinced themselves that they approve of
it, which is by a much larger group than the first group.
But they have hip MO ties themselves into believing that
they approve of it because they can't imagine any other way of
living. And if they did, they couldn't
say it. And that's the third category.
They don't even believe that they approve of it, but they are
terrified for their careers, for their standing, for their
whatever, for their social standing.
And it's it's, you know, it's hard for me to really envision.
I mean, I've spoken to, I keep citing him.
It's not name dropping, but he really helped me to understand a
lot. James Lindsay, about the Marxist
roots of of this phenomenon. I'm hard pressed to believe that
even in the darkest moments of the Soviet secret services
during the Stalin era that there was and I, I I have seen that
video of that former KGB guy who who says, no, Ron, you're wrong.
And really this is what we plan and this is how we do it.
I get that. But I think to some extent he
would like to take credit for more.
This is Yuri Besman or whatever. I'm sorry.
Yuri Besman off, or whatever his name was.
Yeah, right. There is a real, a really strong
inclination towards when when a society succeeds.
We see this in the history of every great civilization.
It gets soft and it gets weak, and there's going to be some
vulnerability somewhere. I don't know.
You know, to me, the generation that let this happen above all
is the one that my generation grew up being told was the
Greatest Generation. The ones who won World War 2 are
the same ones who opened the doors, opened the gates to the
Barbarians in the 50s, sixties and 70s when they were running
things. And I remember even perceiving
this as a young child in the late 60s when rioting, race
riots and Vietnam protests were taking place, and wondering when
does somebody stop this? When do the people in charge,
those white people with the square jaws and the full heads
of hair? My dad doesn't look like I
remember looking at we we used to have the Dick and Jane, you
know, right. And I was remembered.
It's so I didn't know what it was, but I knew that that dad
didn't look like my dad. And I love my dad, but I could
tell it was a different kind of. This was the guy that that you
know he he he ate K rations and you know he had a he had a
helmet that you know when he when he when he came home he
didn't have that. He had the full head of hair and
he wore like a tie or something, but for that.
Absolutely cigars, guys who were in, who were in charge, and why
wouldn't they act like they were in charge?
So there's this strain of liberalism, of American
optimism. He'd let everybody have his say,
and we have an airing of grievances and we have better
communication. It's going to be OK.
And it seemed that we had gotten past that and a lot of the
problems that that attitude permitted.
But what we didn't realize was that, again, I don't really
understand that it was people sitting around a real or virtual
conference room table planning this out.
Because I think natural forces and people whose interests
coalesce acted in a coordinated way.
That wasn't planned, but but nonetheless, you've had this
Color revolution that is underway right now that just
satisfied so many agendas. And when we left New York, one
of the things, again as a child in the early 70s, one of the
things that was going on was bussing.
They were bussing kids. And I remember being so confused
because my Eastern European relatives would say to me, you
have Stratches in your class. Why were they asking me that?
Why do they care? Why do they even care?
Like, who care? And then what does that?
Start again. Help me what that means?
Schwarzer. You never heard the word
Schwarzer. I may have but but it doesn't.
Say yeah, so that's the Yiddish word for a black.
Person that makes sense. I mean, that's what I took from
context, but I. Yes.
So it's a famous scene from emblazing saddles.
Mel Brooks, playing the Indian chief, watching, watching the
black sheriff arriving. He says, oh, schwarzers, they
dock it in India. You could never make those
movies today. No.
The point is, though, when black kids from other neighborhoods
started showing up in our schools, I was astonished they
were coming to school in underwear.
In other words, T-shirts, right? How do you go to school in your
T-shirt? How is that a way to go to
school? It was this big, this big shock.
And then we experienced 2016 and the the rioting that took place
and no one who was in charge of do anything.
It was such a deja vu that. 2016 You know we're talking post
Freddie Gray This actually Ferguson 2020.
No, 20/20/16, no, but the, I mean after the, the, the
inauguration. In 2017, when when Trump was at.
He's right. He's right. 2017.
That's the 2016 election. It was that same feeling of why
are we letting everything just utterly go to go to hell now?
But but in retrospect, as a conservative and someone who
had, by virtually becoming orthodox again, as my roommate
had observed, I I now really had a consistent worldview for being
a bona fide social conservative. And you could I remember on the
right one of the things that had really bothered me.
I I've been active in the Federalist Society, which
everyone knows about, right? The lawyers, the conservative
lawyers, one of the some of the leading lights of the Federalist
Society though of the 90s were very involved in achieving same
sex marriage. And you know this was where the
libertarians and the cultural conservatives really parted
ways. And I, and this was, this is
something that has really never quite been examined because it's
uncomfortable for the conservative movement.
But I knew that there was a certain amount of rot there.
And besides, how pure can you really be?
We're part of the entertainment complex, the news complex, the
business complex, the government complex.
These are all severely compromised.
And I have a theme that I'm beginning to develop.
I might actually write. I might have really actually
found the book. We have been cursed with
abundance, and it's not some kind.
I'm not making some sort of vague connection between wealth
and or poverty and virtue, but rather saying a lot of the
things that when I said this sort of American optimism is
liberalism which turned into affirmative action, which turned
into DEI, which turned into anti war, explicit anti white racism.
There's enough to go around. There's so much freaking wealth
out there and so many people among the elites who are who
have learned how to absolutely glom onto it in ways that you
and I could only dream of that there was the sense that what's
the harm? So we'll let people into schools
who don't really belong there. They'll figure it out.
Meanwhile, we've our system works.
Everything works. And now it's 2024.
What do we see? I let's Who don't know what
they're doing? Doctors who are being trained on
wokeness instead of medicine. Right.
Entertainment companies like Disney unable to enunciate a
single rational creative work because of the damage that
because all these, whether it's in brand equity, I mean also
the, you know, the news and journalism business and
nothing's legit anymore. Nothing's legitimate.
Everything is compromised because we thought we had enough
fat enough extra that we could get away with moving away from
meritocracy. Now, there's a legitimate
argument that meritocracy is over soul.
After all, I went to Princeton, and what it took me many years
to learn was places like Princeton largely reinforce
existing social networks. They're not there to introduce
you and include you into new social networks.
True, I made friends and contacts I never would have
done. But those people were not
inviting me to their events. They were.
I was not coming up to their
houses for the weekend. You weren't joining their
country clubs that have been. There for 200.
Years or whatever. That kind of thing.
That's right. So yes, there is a distinct
there's always been nepotism. There's always be that as it
may, We know that hypocrisy is the is the the the tribute vice
pays to virtue by at least holding out meritocracy as a
goal. We have a standard to say when
favoritism or nepotism or departures from a meritocratic
goal of achievement and capability and responsibility
are not being met, and then we can have the discussion based on
some baseline. What we've seen in the last
couple of years is you may not even assert the existence of a
baseline. That's the problem is the
baseline for for people now. And you know, what's interesting
is that, and I keep saying it in a different way, but I think
we're saying the same thing. In the same way that people
debase a currency which has a standard and you can depart from
it and you can cheapen the standard, which we've done, we
also debased all of our institutions in that same way.
And you're saying it is a departure from meritocracy.
I'm saying people have basically they've they've traded away
their credibility and to the point where.
They don't have a great, a great display of that.
So the Supreme Court I have actually, look, I've been
disappointed in the Supreme Court plenty over the last 10
years, the incrementalism, the all the things.
But one thing I did say was I do believe there is a sense of
seriousness retained in the Supreme Court, having stood in
the well there that has been lost in most of the courts where
I practice on a more regular basis.
So I don't know how long your delay is between recording and.
Yeah, we're going to play this in a couple days.
So folks, this will still be fresh enough for folks.
So today, of course is Monday the 4th.
And the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that this taking
Trump off the ballots because some, either local trial judge
or some state official, like a Secretary of State, has decided
that he engaged in insurrection and they're going to
unilaterally declare that. That being the same as the Civil
War. OK, 9.
Nothing. How many commentators,
distinguished professors, leaders in civil rights law and
constitutional law signed their names to predictions that Trump
would lose on this appeal? Yeah.
It's and it was shocking. It's shocking because it's such
a dumb, obvious statement. It's like there's no way the
court retains any legitimacy and rules in favor of what they
thought I. And and and to some extent this
is also an answer to well, you know that incrementalism, Ron,
that you are so critical is of instead over caution gives that
court the remainder of a backbone to do this.
Even when all the elites are saying, of course they're not
going to do this. Even to the extent that justices
who from whom we do not expect particularly rigorous work, one
of whom has admitted that she doesn't know the difference
between boys and girls, actually feel obligated to do their jobs.
It was too much of A shock to to do this ridiculous like this was
a step too far even for them. Look, it's an it's an amazing
thing that we live to see it. But look who they've left behind
now. And now you have an entire
sector of society that believes that a, there there's one
Supreme Court Justice who happens to be the black, the
black one, the the black male who shouldn't even be allowed to
decide cases because of some preposterous thing they they
cooked up. And which is largely coextensive
with a group that believes that the entire Supreme Court is MAGA
extremists, including Justice Jackson.
Judge Sotomayor, I mean. Having listened to their bump
stock arguments and their questions which they brought
their fantasy world to to play. And I you know, I don't listen
to oral arguments to the Supreme Court all the time.
But when I happened to be an expert on things like firearms
and their and their and the way that they work, which I am
compared to any of them on the court for sure, compared to most
people. You know, I've I've built them.
I've taken them down to the springs.
I can pick up a spring and tell you usually what what weapon
system it comes from. Not very many people to.
That now you had a very good shooting range story for me on
my podcast. It turns out, yeah, I I know a
little bit about that, that world.
And when you watch a justice come in and say the purpose of
the function of the trigger, which is the operative term
right in the in the discussion of of the Firearms Act of 1934
or the national. Yeah, the NFA, she said it's to
to initiate a chemical reaction. And that's objectively false.
There are multiple things in the chain that is, you know,
sometime down the the the cause, the the chain of events that
happened, but not always. In fact, as I I want to do on my
podcast, sometimes I have one right here.
We have a weapon system that is empty and there's nothing in it.
And this is the function of the trigger.
And you'll notice its job is to make the click, which is a
hammer going forward. That's the that's the function
of the trigger. I can debunk what she said right
there. They won't let you bring a gun
into court, but that's the function of the trigger.
That trigger functions properly. So she's wrong, but she brought
that to bear anyway. And then for that Lady to be a
MAGA stream is is hilarious to me.
It it reminds me one to one honestly, 51 intelligence
officials, this has all the hallmarks of Russian
disinformation. And then it didn't because that
was made-up. This is the same sort of
debasement, I think, for you to put your name to this opinion.
That's, that's right. And, and, and the reason, again,
you know, someone just decided to stop in the middle of this,
you know, video and say, oh, they're talking about the usual
MAGA complaints about, you know, how the world's gone to hell.
No, no. This is a very specific point
and very relevant to what we've been talking about all along,
which is, yes, a systematic debasement of meaning of the
very idea that there are boundaries, that there are
governing standards that adults should be prepared to apply.
I remember the big I guess it was one of the banking
meltdowns. And as an economics major, I
learned all about moral hazard. And you just know, every time
there's going to be some kind of whether there was the savings
and loan crisis, whatever limit the FDIC said was the limit,
Congress would say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Any amount you have, we we, we got you covered.
There are no consequences there. I mean, think of how our
government operates now. No one is held responsible for
anything. Even when that person is
personally responsible for something going terribly wrong.
There's zero accountability. You don't win wars that way,
Greatest generation, but that's the will, you.
That's what they bequeathed to us.
OK, this is where I wanted to end.
You just said something that I hadn't thought of because of the
Greatest Generation gets a pass on almost everybody's book.
They always want to blame the boomers.
And I kind of have have listened to that and it made a lot of
sense. It's like, yeah, the boomers
were the people that were busy doing their careers or cocaine
or whatever was going on in the 80s, and they allowed things to
happen the way that they did. And so the world went the way it
went. They were raised by their.
Parody, it turns out most likely right this this idea that as
these social revolutions were happening, the group of folks
that went overseas and won World War 2 liberated Europe in very
young ages, came over here and then ignored.
They went back to work. They shut their mouths, they put
their head down and they try to accomplish and build businesses
and do the things that they did. But that generation essentially
let a a a misbehaving teenager let's call it of the American
youth run the show and we are now seeing it happen in the same
way. So the question I I think and I
guess every generation is to blame every time one of these
things happens because my generation now in the 40s, we
are now the folks that my generation went to war for a
very different reason but came back.
A lot of folks that are listening to the show right now
have either lost limbs, have lost loved ones have given a lot
for this country even if those were for bad reasons.
Even if we look at it in the past and go, we don't think
those were you know just or or ethical wars.
They were fought and the skills that picked up and the hardship
that was endured were real regardless.
And when that happens is it time for my 40 something year old
generation to start putting putting the the consequences to
these 20 somethings that are basically unruly teenagers that
are acting out and and seem like they're desperately in need of
boundaries. Is that where the the line has
to? Because it sounds like the The
Greatest Generation may have missed it.
Let's put it this way. Those children of the Greatest
Generation are the octogenarians who are running everything.
Still, you're the people your age are the ones who should be
coming into their own, and instead what they have done is
signed up for a system in which as long as they get a big piece
of the pie, they don't care who's in charge.
And remember Joe Biden was chosen specifically to be the
person regarding whom it doesn't matter who's in charge because
he would not in fact be in charge.
Meaning that as as going down to what you said, the 40 somethings
and 50 somethings who should be in charge in that are being
bought off. Look, I was once in AI, once
almost tasted. Well, I once was in a law firm
that was very, very profitable, small law firm.
And it began to occur to me that they were not and I was an
equity partner. They were not dealing faithfully
with me. They were withholding
information from me that was relevant to they had no right to
withhold. But they were not.
They were not playing fair with me.
And I left that law firm and I never made that kind of money
again. They couldn't believe it.
Why would you run? We were paying you so much to do
what you do here. Why would you complain about
these insults to yourself? Respect.
And many, many people would ask the same question.
Answer is you can't buy me, you can't buy me.
And I didn't go through everything I've gone through in
my life, which is why people's problems all the way down, OK.
But what my parents and grandparents went through to
enable me to live the life that I do today and to have the
healthy family that I have and to make a living even if I can't
have the wealth. And to you know to have a little
bit of thought leadership role in a little tiny part of the
intellectual you know world because I have things to say and
and I'm going to put my name on them and get involved in sexy
cases from time to time and sharing a big win for all the
many losses because we we do tilted windmills quite a bit in
in in in my little little spot I wouldn't have gotten to do any
of those things and I would have to give up all those things and
I left. I had to leave two other law
firms because I was because of controversial social media cases
or or political cases that I took on.
That's what life is about. Meaning goes back to the
beginning of our conversation. It's about meaning and to be
bought off. I don't care if Joe Biden.
I don't care if Joe Biden's not really in charge.
I don't care if he's realized this.
He's obviously senile. He's obviously senile and the
people around him, the 40 and 50 somethings around him, are just
fine with it. And the people in the press room
were given scripted questions to ask and who he calls on,
according to his his, you know, cheat cards.
They're fine with it. They're making ridiculous money.
They're all available to be bought.
Every single person who looks at your career and says Kyle
Serafin, there's a guy who wouldn't be bought.
He's not going to make more money.
But eleven people call you a grifter because you try to you
you want to do a podcast and maybe you want to get a sponsor
or maybe you want to monetize. You know, on a grifter.
You don't have the slightest inkling of what I've given up
for principal and now you want to deny me the ability to to
bring in 5 bucks a monthly subscription and you're going to
call me a grifter. That's it.
Anonymously. Anonymously.
Keep doing what you're doing, Kyle.
It's that's really fun stuff too.
There's something very amusing about people calling out with,
like you say, calling you out on social media with this sort of
nonsense. It's like #1.
I've already shown you that I I did the math on it.
You'll appreciate this. You do the math on what your
career is worth. If you have a constant income
with a steady growth and the curve is predictable and then
you have a pension and that's predictable as well and adjusted
for inflation, etcetera, etcetera, you can do it out.
It's about $5,000,000 with the benefits and paychecks that I, I
walked away from. And and that's not that much
money. I mean, it's a lot of money to
me. It's a lot of money to a lot of
people. But that's not like the kind of
money that you could buy my soul for because I, I don't know what
my cost is, but it's a lot higher than that.
And so you think I'm going to sell it out for 5 bucks a person
on a subscription or for 500 bucks for a tweet, which
somebody accused me once of that we were taking money for tweets.
It's like you got to have you lost your ever loving mind you.
I went for an entire year without a paycheck.
Like, I went for a whole year where I just didn't quit until
the FBI showed up with a letter that said we're investigating
you for 13 different charges, including a felony.
And I went like, well, that's not real.
And I'm not going to be an internal affairs investigation
for you and make it any easier. So my attorney and I had this
like easy conversation where it's like all right dude, he
goes there's nothing that you're going to benefit from doing
this. By the way they accused me of
things like having my podcast and putting a an upside down
picture of the badge like you see spinning there as a federal
that was that was a misdemeanor according to them which is
absurd. These are publicly available
designs. I mean we pay for them with our
tax stock anyway. Actually that that'd be an
interesting sort of trademark discussion at some other time
the the the federal badge being used.
But what a weird moment and and it all comes down to lack of
values and I I have to believe if you believe that there's a
God and there's accountability at the end and that you're
you're going to be meant to explain.
I I always say we're accountable for every round that we send
downrange. That means verbally that means
you know a weapon system doesn't make a difference.
Whatever you're shooting downrange, you're accountable.
That's yours. Own it.
And if you're there's. A judge and there's judgement.
There's a judge and there's judgment that that's exactly it.
And at the end of the day, if you think that you're going to
be accountable for all those things and it's cool for you to
ask soft questions and be a Gavin Newsom who pretends like
Joe Biden is so tough that you couldn't even keep up with him
on his schedule or whatever other phony thing they've said.
Saturday Night Live made fun of this, by the way.
Did you see that? No, no.
I will send you a link. They they they had this pretty
white lady, whoever she has the guest house who just lampooned
all of these leftists. They're like, now we're going to
go to someone from the Golden State Warriors who said he's
like, oh, Joe Biden. Don't tell me it was
disrespectful. He did a windmill like like
they're they're they have to debase themselves to act like
something that we know is not true.
Same way they talked about Ruth Bader, Ginsmer Ginsburg by the
way that she was working out so hard that 25 year old
journalists couldn't keep up with her.
I want to put a bullet in my brain when I hear that stuff.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
It's embarrassing. And and they're not embarrassed
and they'll know that we know that they're lying and when
everything is negotiable. Yeah, there's there's no
concrete standard and that's the opposite of Western society and
and all of western civilization been based on a standard.
What is of what it's supposed to be anyway?
There's always been that tension, but you're supposed to
aspire to do. Better.
And he said it any better, that's it.
Can't be bought. I appreciate you jumping on with
me. Let me throw this up on here.
What's the best way? What do you like people to come?
Do you like to mix it up on Twitter best?
Find it on Twitter events. Then you're going to get
everything else shoved in your face.
If you come, if you. If you, if you get the Twitter.
Yeah. And plus, I've got the spelling
there. I've got, you know, I've been on
Twitter taking up taking up real estate for quite some time and I
have a lot of fun. I appreciate your hot takes.
I appreciate that you're reverend and can't be bought.
Thanks for joining me today. That was fun.
That got more serious than I thought, that we're going to
have more silliness, but the world is too serious sometimes,
especially on this I really want.
Fun. They can go to the culmination
episode we did have. We didn't laugh a lot.
We laughed. We cried.
I went back and watched that whole episode again.
Just so you know, I watched it again by myself and laughed at
myself telling jokes that I had already told.
That's how much fun I had with it.
That is fun. That's a high level of fun,
ladies and gentlemen. It didn't.
That's it, Ron. Thanks for joining everybody.
I hope we do this again. Thanks, bud.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, and that is the game.
Thanks to Ron Coleman for joining me and a really
interesting character. And you definitely have to go
check out that version that we did.
All right. And that is it.
That is the interview of the day.
You are midweek on Weird Wednesday, and I hope that you
guys have a not so weird Wednesday.
I want to do a couple things before we ended up here.
Let's say thanks to my buddy Garrett for continuing to put
out cool merch for you guys. He's doing the best.
He he's a one man operation. Be patient with my buddy who is
slinging merch, including those T-shirts, including the new Kyle
Serif and Show T-shirt which should start shipping pretty
soon. It's the Dash suspendables.com
that's the website for Suspendables merch.
It's the, I don't know, the Suspendables gift shop if you
want to call it that. It is the O'boyle family
sweatshop, the Dash suspendables.com.
You can use my name as a promo code and you'll save a couple of
bucks. It just takes a little bit more
off the off the totals. We understand that times are
tough. Nobody benefits from that, at
least not from this show. That actually goes 100% to
support a permanently suspended FBI whistleblower who's doing
the right thing. He can't quit folks.
If he quits and takes another job, the FBI wins and that's
what he's doing. So this is his wife's company
and they're out there pressing out shirts in order to keep you
guys showing support Physically, visibly and physically.
Is that is that a thing? Physically, I'll just make that
up. Yeah.
Support the Dash suspendables.com by going over
there, you guys can pick up the pins.
You can pick up the the shirts and so on.
I think the hoodies are basically almost done.
Maybe there's a few more of the light duty ones.
And I think the hats are done for this run.
There's going to be another run in any case, New stickers coming
in, new PVC patches, all that kind of stuff.
The Dash suspendables.com. All right.
Five star review and then we'll get ourselves out of here.
Here's a good one. We're we're kind of changing the
game a little bit. I'm taking it from Spotify, so
this one came in a couple days ago, says good afternoon, Sir.
Thank you for all that you've done for our country.
You've been listening. I've been listening to your
podcast for a few weeks. Really enjoy the podcast.
The truth we present. The truth you present getting
ahead of myself and corruption exposed.
And that's from I in or maybe it's I in.
Either way, thanks for the comment.
If you are listening on Spotify, you'll see that you're prompted
with a automatic comment from me, and that is to say, if you'd
like to contribute a question, a comment or a sarcastic remark,
I'm happy to see it. I approve all those.
I don't. I don't filter any of them.
So if you guys have something on there, it'll take a second for
me to put it through. But we want to acknowledge our
listeners on Spotify, which is our second biggest platform.
Thanks all of you who are leaving reviews on Apple, on
Spotify, on iHeartRadio and so on.
The comments below and the live chat that goes on every single
day here on rumble.com/kyle Serif and all the weekdays.
Thanks so much. Make sure you've given us a
like, make sure you're following, make sure you share
the show if there's something that tickled your fancy or
touched your heart. And we will see you again
tomorrow with a a really important interview, I think an
update with my friend. Davy Nelson.
So stick around. We'll see you in the morning.
God bless. Be safe.
See you soon. Thanks for listening to The Kyle
Serafin Show streamed live weekdays on rumble.com/kyle
Serafin. Follow Kyle on Twitter, Truth,
Social and Instagram at Kyle Serafin.