Tim Pool:
Is He The Millennial's Equivalence to the Late Great Tim Russert

I don't know how or when Tim Pool fell into my scope of talking head protagonist for this generation of Millennials. Here he was, on his YouTube channel, wearing his signature knit cap and wire-rimmed glasses looking like some Seattle grunge band dropout, speaking on his own terms on a variety of political issues, cultural issues, entertainment issue, on just about anything he felt was a need that piqued his curiosity. Tim Pool is a thirty-something (33), self-taught journalist. He didn't graduate from any institute of higher learning. His claim to fame was his own self-reporting during the Occupy Wall Street gathering meant to protest the inequality of wealth in this country along with political corruption and corporate influences.

The Guardian newspaper showcases some of Tim Pool's more visual coverage of the protest as Mr. Pool has deployed aerial drones in much of the protesting. For some, what Mr. Pool was doing was considered as authoritarian surveillance but in the end, some of the drone camera footage was used to exonerate a photographer who had been arrested by the New York Police Department.

I don't know if Mr. Pool found his career in journalism or if he just fell into it but things began to start happening for him. He took on challenges and assignments and job opportunities and the timing couldn't have been more appropriate. With each challenge and with each expedition, Tim Pool would seem to learn more about the highs and lows of this world of journalism. With each from his invite to the White House Social Media Summit to experience from his invite to the White House Social Media Summit to a 4:00 a.m. intruder.


Let's take a look at his channels. Mr. Pool has at least three avenues to get his message out. He has TimCast, Tim Pool, Subverse and the latest one, Timcast IRL. His viewing numbers are also quite impressive, 102,442,972 (Tim Pool), 206,388,623 (Timcast), 3,726,139 (Subverse) and still growing. With these types of numbers, you would think that some network would entertain the thought of having Mr. Pool as a weekly political commentator for the Millennial generation. It would appear that he has the temperament and verbal gymnastics of the late NBC Meet The Press host, Tim Russert. There was a time in my life where I was a Sunday morning talk show junkie. There was Meet The Press with Tim Russert, ABC This Week, Face The Nation on CBS and Fox Sunday. I would listen to all sides of an argument. And then Tim Russert died from a heart attack and the substitutes that replaced him have been piss poor empty suits and dresses. They never had the flow and subdued edginess that Russert employed with the guests on his show. I soon lost interest with all of the shows as they became static white noise as each guest talking head regurgitated what they wanted you to hear and not what was asked of them.


When I was young, my political leanings were more to the Democratic side. As each year passed and the rhetoric intensified and the half-truths became outright lies and whoever was president failed to live up to a promise, my leanings became independent and conservative. I don't just blindly follow a group or fall into a collective hive mindset because that's what the group is doing. Tim Pool has stated that he grew up in a Democratic household and he has a moderate position. I'm not predicting this but as he continues to delve into the political waters, maybe there will be some jaded arenas that may befall him and he'll take the independent course? When Barack Obama won, the only thing I saw from his time in office was a huge insurance premium bill that was out of my range. But I digress.


I just happened to catch Glenn Beck interviewing Tim Pool on Glenn Beck's podcast. In participating in that interview, I saw a calm and more measure Tim Pool. On his own in front f his channel, he's speaking into a camera. With Glen Beck, the dynamics had shifted as there was someone sitting across from him engaged in a conversation. This demonstrated to me that Mr. Pool has options. He had to give feedback to Glenn Beck and make a salient argument on the position he held while not giving ground to that position. For an interview that went close to an hour and forty-four minutes, Mr. Pool held his own. He may not have the seasoned bravado like Bill Maher or Jon Stewart but he's more capable than NBC's Chuck Todd.

There are those who are critical on Tim Pool. There are some who find him not as liberal as they would like and there are some who find him as not conservative enough for their liking. In a couple of recent articles, one article described him as an extreme leftist while another article described him as a far-right personality. But it seems more than the people on the left is doing more bashing of late with Tim Pool. It has gotten to the point now where Mr. Pool's safety has come into play. In a recent YouTube broadcast, Mr. Pool was letting his followers know that he was visited at four in the morning at his home by a stranger who had walked a long distance because he had something to tell him. My question to that is, did anyone put this person up to this and how did he get Tim Pool's home address?


Unlike MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, Tim Pool vets his story and does extensive research on a topic. If he doesn't know about certain things, he'll say he doesn't know. He doesn't put a spin on it like other media outlet nor does he inflict any type of tone on a question like many media outlets do especially when they imply something nefarious when it comes to a certain president. It becomes a game with them now on how they construct questions that are insulting but they couch it in verbiage that's meant to masquerade the meaning. Please stop the "land mining" of questions just to show your disdain for the 'orange man is bad' campaign.


We are in this new evolution of journalism led by social media. For good or bad, these platforms have become more relevant than traditional outlets. In his short period run as a political commentator, Tim Pool has amassed more viewers to his channel than some of the Sunday morning talk shows. One video alone had more than 667,000 views to it and that was better than ABC and CBS combined. It seems like Tim Pool puts out several videos per day and thus continues to grow. YouTube has started to demonetize political commentary that doesn't make sense to so many. Mr. Pool, however, is forging ahead because there lies an answer to his situation. Maybe some network will recognize his efforts and he too can reach a bigger audience, someday.

Hey, Chris Cuomo, “Fredo” is Nowhere Remotely the Same as the “N-Word”

What The Hell Were You Thinking?

Christopher Charles Cuomo is a famous person. He’s famous, in part, because he has a television show called Cuomo Prime Time. He’s also famous because his father was Mario Cuomo, former Governor of New York, and his brother is Andrew Cuomo, current Governor of New York. With that sort of pedigree and name recognition, Chris Cuomo should not be a stranger to people who aren’t a fan of his political leanings. Such was the case when Chris Cuomo unleashed his anger on a stranger who called him “Fredo” while out at a local event with his family. Cuomo took umbrage with the comment and released a fuselage of expletives on the guy who was also recording the interplay. One of the interactions between Cuomo and the stranger was when Cuomo stated that by calling him “Fredo” was the same as calling him the ‘N-word’. Really, Chris, you’re going to lobe that out there and not expect to get any push-back on that? Guess again.

This is not the first time I heard a white person use race, particularly racism and racial discrimination as a tool to bolster their position that benefits them. It’s an easy caveat to deploy when there is no opposition to counter that argument. I remember early on in Ellen DeGeneres’ career where she was becoming an advocate for gay causes that she invoked this statement that being gay is the same as being black. I believe she said that on her TV show in her early development. There are so many points to counter that statement that will say that being gay is nowhere close to being the same as being black. But she pushed her narrative through without a hint of protest.

Chris Cuomo, on the other hand, has taken the position that a fictionalized character from the Godfather movies is now a racial slur because he deemed it so? Fredo has never had any history of being recognized as a racial slur. I looked up a list of ethnic slurs and nowhere in this compilation did I see ‘Fredo” listed as being an ethnic slur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs . Calling you ‘Fredo’ is the same as calling you Gilligan or Urkel or Shemp. You’re just the butt of a joke.

Cuomo has used ‘Fredo’ on many occasions as well as his cohorts when they have described Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and anyone else who are on the opposite side of their political point of beliefs. Moreover, CNN, his employer, has taken the position to defend his tirade as acceptable behavior. Chris Cuomo is a seasoned journalist, a lawyer and a New Yorker. He shouldn’t have easily taken the bait from this guy.

But the underlying point to all of this is that Chris Cuomo wanted to infuse race into this argument that would make his tirade more of victimization on to him. I don’t know Chris Cuomo personally. I don’t know anything about his life and upbringing. I can only speculate and that he and I had two diametrically opposing lives growing up in this country. I grew up in poverty, he did not. I saw violence first hand as a child, he probably did not. I saw friends die from drug overdoses, gun violence, and other events before I got out of grade school and he probably did not. I saw friends bring weapons to school and openly brandish them and he probably did not. For me, this was part of the culture, for him it may have been an exception.

Cuomo’s name gave him a leg up in job placement. How can someone with no journalism degree find work at ABC? Maybe a Harvard law degree is the same thing? Having the Washington name only means that your ancestors were once the property of General and President, George Washington.

Was Chris Cuomo wrong to place race into a baited exchange? Yes. He laid insult on more than just one group of people, he laid it among his own because he didn’t want to be the butt of a joke. Ethnic and racial slurs have weight, have substances, it robs people of their history, their dignity, their self-worth, their humanity. You don’t get to qualify ‘Fredo’ as any of that just so that you can shift the narrative.

Bette Midler Got it Oh So Wrong on Black Men Supporting Trump

There Exist a Deeper Conflict and Resentment with Black Conservatives and White Liberals

About a week or so ago, Bette Midler, the actress, and singer of movies and song felt embolden to make a comment about a photo she had seen that showed a couple of black men at a Donald Trump political campaign. She was taken aback by what she had seen and seen fit to comment on it. What she had said would have been seen as a cursory flippant comment but the vehicle she used was with Twitter. She tweeted out, “Look, there are African American men in this shot! How much did he pay them to be ‘blackground’?” What she was met with was a barrage of criticism that insinuated and labeled her as being racist.

I personally cannot speak on the claim that Bette Midler is or is not a racist. I’ve seen a few of her films and have listened to her music in the past. On the surface, she does not present as racist but she did show being comfortable referring to black men as “blackground”. Was this more of an insensitive comment? Yes. Was it racist? That’s debatable and depends on a few factors, one being the history of the person saying it. Still, this doesn’t address the real underlying issue here and that is black conservatism.

Bette Midler is a liberal white woman. She, like many of her liberal cohorts, has continually made the assumption that all black people are Democrats and liberals. It’s an honest mistake and she would be and is so wrong. At one point in our political history, there was this surge of black voter support during the administration of John F. Kennedy coupled with advancing strides in the Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Act and the dismantling of old Jim Crow laws. But like everything, there is context.

While it is true that black Americans, in large parts, have voted in the majority for the Democratic Party, there are shifts in the landscape that says this trend is eroding and nobody is paying attention. While it may be true that a majority of blacks do vote for the Democrats, their political stance is not liberal but conservative. I’ve been noticing this quiet transformation for over a decade now.

When Barack Obama became president for his first term, he was a more “palatable” president. He wasn’t threatening, he was an unknown and was comfortable to middle American housewives. Barack’s second term in office was mainly because he was already in that boat and the public saw no viable opposition to rock that boat. What he did as president was a mixed bag of issues that he either found the mark or missed the mark completely. For the most part, he was a scandal-free president.

And for the most part, blacks overwhelmingly voted for Obama. Trump came along and rewrote the rule book on campaigning. Nobody, including the access media, took him or his candidacy serious. He was a buffoon a clown with orange hair. He won the nomination and faced Hillary Clinton but what the access media didn’t count on that Hillary wasn’t the heir apparent. If they would have been paying attention, they would have felt the rumblings of discontent with Hillary. Hillary came with more baggage than a Princess cruise ship. She wasn’t trustworthy. Her views were left of center and she just was a holdover from the Clinton years who stayed too long on the political stage. The 2016 election showed that Hillary didn’t fare as well with minority voters compared to Obama while Trump did fare better with blacks and Hispanics than Mitt Romney did in his election bid.

Black conservatism isn’t new, it’s just widely under-reported. People have forgotten the history of black voters over time. American Blacks were heavily associated with the Republican party due in part with Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves. During the Jim Crow years, it was the southern Democrats who placed opposing legislation to blacks at that time including opposing some civil rights measures.

When Condoleezza Rice and Gen. Colin Powell became a part of the George W. Bush administration, these high profile appointments became the role models of black conservatism. George W. Bush would appoint 18 more black conservatives to his administration during his first year in office.

Thanks to social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. you can find plenty of black conservative spreading their point of view and commentaries on the days' event. We no longer have just one point of view or spin on a story now from the liberal sources. When you see the number of hits a black conservative gets on their platforms, you can see the influence they are having with the political discourse. It is these conservative voices, black, brown, Asian, white, that the liberal media is ignoring in the same manner in which Hillary ignored Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. I, myself, do not align with any political party. I’m an Independent who is conservative. I really didn’t call myself a conservative until I was speaking with a guy down at the City Building Permit offices when we got into a discussion on a variety of issues and after speaking with him, he pointed out that I was conservative even though I advocate First Amendments issues. Maybe I’m liberal conservative?

What changed? Maybe it was the usual suspects on the Democratic side where promises were made and nothing happened in those black communities for years. There were the same problems that existed in the black communities no matter who was in office but the Democrats laid it on thicker with the false hope. It had reached the point where these black communities felt like candidates were giving them lip service and that their votes were being taken for granted. It comes to the point where you become jaded by the rhetoric. Obama’s hope and change were really nope and pained.

No, Bette Midler, black people do not think in a monolithic manner. We are independent thinkers in varying degrees of positions. It was wrong for you to assume such outdated, outrageous, and illogical divisive thinking. You probably think you’ve done nothing wrong as I have yet to see any type of apology issued on your behalf. Maybe no apology is due and your hubris will definitively be on display. After all, it won’t be the first time blacks have been denied equal treatment of an apology since that first whip cracked on a slave back in Virginia.