Major Wins Against Woke Trans Insanity, Interview with America First Legal President Gene Hamilton | Triggered Ep.323
Gene Hamilton details America First Legal's victories against "woke trans insanity," including lawsuits blocking school transitions and defending NextGolf. He highlights wins stopping government race-based benefits, designating cartels as terrorist organizations, and filing petitions for documentary proof of citizenship on voter forms. Hamilton critiques left-leaning law schools, launching programs to train conservative lawyers for executive roles while suing Target over swimsuits and UC admissions. Ultimately, these efforts aim to restore zealous advocacy and enforce common-sense ID requirements across voting, banking, and commerce. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey guys, and welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
Hope you're having a great start to the week.
Today, we're sitting down with Gene Hamilton, the president of America First Legal.
He was formerly Stephen Miller's partner before Stephen went back into the White House.
He actually went back into the White House, but came back out understanding that someone actually has to fight some of these battles from the outside.
He's one of the most important legal organizations and figures in the country right now.
And the work these guys are doing in the courts is absolutely critical to everything we're fighting for, from the border to election integrity, to dismantling DEI to going after the cartels, going after Hollywood.
They are in the trenches every single day.
So a really important conversation you're not going to want to miss.
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And joining me now is the president of America First Legal, Gene Hamilton.
Fighting Secret School Transitions00:07:42
Gene, how's it going, man?
Good to have you on the show.
Thanks for having me.
It's going great.
Well, welcome.
I mean, I think this is the first time for you, so that's good.
Absolutely.
So you're back at America First Legal after serving as Deputy White House Counsel.
What made you want to come back to the AFL?
What does the organization look like now compared to when you left and went into the White House?
Well, that's really great questions.
Look, what I came back, as hard as it was to leave with the dynamic White House, the personnel that you know so well, dedicated to achieving the president's promises, delivering on those promises.
When I was in the White House, I looked around and surveyed around me and thought, well, my gosh, where's our help?
Where's our outside support?
Where are the lawsuits that are coming to help the administration?
Where are the things that are being done to help propagate and support and train up the next generation of lawyers to be supportive and to fill roles in the administration?
And I realized that that was not happening.
And so, of course, I came back to America First Legal ever since coming back.
It has been kind of a how to put this.
It has been a runaway train of productivity.
We have been just hitting on all cylinders with a team.
We lost a lot of people, good, talented folks to the administration who are serving, but we're coming back now.
We're staffing up and we are really, really dedicated to moving the ball forward for the American people, helping assist achieve the president's policies from the outside and everything in between.
Yeah, I mean, as a politico, that's got to be a little hard leaving this White House because let's just say after this presidency, I can't imagine another time where the White House will be, politics is going to go back to being relatively boring, which is, I'm not saying that's bad or good, but being a fly on the wall and what's going on there is pretty amazing.
But yes, you're right.
I mean, you need that outside help.
You know, most of the other, you know, certainly the Democrat administrations, every firm out there is basically doing their bidding on the outside.
I mean, we're much more limited.
I mean, can you tell the people exactly what America First Legal has done?
What have been some of the causes they've championed, the wins that they've had, just so they get a perspective of what's going on?
Yeah, that's a really great question.
So one of the things that everyone knows on the left, the ACLU, everyone understands what the ACLU does, what their role in life is.
So they file lawsuits, they intervene, they get involved with things.
And the ACLU is just one.
There's about a dozen, two dozen organizations that are out there on the left who file lawsuits against the administration, who defend policies that are supported by liberals.
And for the longest time, the right really didn't have a lot of a kind of a call it like a jack of all trades type of an outfit on the right.
There were some good niche firms that were set up to help with issues, say religious liberty, some other, you know, firearms support, some other things.
It was good, but really not somebody who does just kind of everything.
And so what we've done since Stephen and I founded this organization five years ago is we have focused on bringing affirmative litigation against bad actors, whether that's in the public sector or the private sector, conducting oversight as well of everything that the government has been up to to the extent that we can.
And then now, of course, it also includes helping to set, let's just say, policies and agendas in motion to help support what is needed to be done from the inside of the White House perspective.
And so if you look over our history, we've had some really fun and big wins.
I mean, one of the ones that just comes to mind to me is on censorship.
So I remember, this is a few months into our existence, watching Jen Saki at the White House podium say, oh, of course we partner with social media companies to combat misinformation and disinformation.
Well, you got to be kidding me.
Why would anyone ever admit to that?
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
So we filed a bunch of open records requests.
It took some time to get those from the different government agencies.
But when we got those records, we were able to show definitively that there was in fact this collaboration.
That helped support some of the ongoing litigation that was going on at the time from the state of Missouri.
And since then, we've taken a lot of actions against some of those supporting networks.
Yeah, that was Eric Schmidt as AG in Missouri and what was then A.G. Landry, who's now Governor Landry, and Schmidt's obviously now Senator Schmidt from Missouri.
But that was the big one against Facebook, basically being used and weaponized as a part of the U.S. government propaganda machine.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that was a big one.
And that was just one kind of one thing.
So one of the things that I think we're probably most known for for the folks who track us Is our fight against discrimination, our fight for equality, hiring and firing decisions based on merit?
So we've stopped a number of government programs that provided government benefits based on race or denied white people the ability to compete.
We've done the same against corporations all across America.
We're fighting for parental and student rights across America.
Everyone's been tracking this recent court decision that just came out related to schools secretly transitioning children behind their parents' backs.
We've been very active in that space, got a number of lawsuits and things that are kind of out there across the country, whether it's in California, whether it's in Virginia, and everywhere in between, we've been very, very active.
In fact, we have a toolkit now that has a template letter that any parent across America, where you have a school, a school district, or a teacher or somebody who says, look, we're going to try to transition your kid and we're not going to tell you about it.
We've got a form letter that people can use, just plop in the information and then send it to their school.
That asserts their legal rights.
And if the school doesn't respect them, we will represent those parents and we will sue the school district.
So by the way, obviously, I guess you can go to America First Legal and probably get the template, but tell everyone exactly how to get that because I imagine this is something people want to do proactively, even if there's a hint, get after it.
Because that was a big ruling last week at the Supreme Court.
A big win that was basically going unchecked in California and was obviously going to be used to spread elsewhere.
Yeah, absolutely.
Look, if people go to our website, aflegal.org, there is a parent and student action center where we have a whole host of templates.
This is just one of them of things that parents and students can do to assert their rights, to vindicate their rights.
Look, we're one organization.
I can't represent every single person, but what I can do is equip people with the tools that they need to fight back on their own.
We will help wherever we can and whenever we can as well.
But if they go to that parent and student action center, there is a lot of resources that are available there.
Yeah.
And honestly, even if you're not worried about it happening to your kid because they're normal and not doing those things, I mean, I imagine just being proactive and getting this kind of stuff sent out there puts the schools, A, it puts them on notice, and B, you know, the squeaky wheel gets the oil, so to speak.
You know, maybe they're not going to try to push this stuff if they realize, hey, there's already sort of overwhelming thing against this.
You know, that's job security if you go against the vast majority of parents.
If you think what has happened for so long because social media was, you know, the trans are, you know, they're beyond reproach.
They can do no wrong.
Like, it's actually a privilege to be trans.
Like you want, you know, hey, your kid could be an idiot, but they're going to Harvard if they're, just check the trans box.
I think we could head some of this off at the past.
Fighting for Women in Sports00:15:59
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it really seems that way.
And look, this is something that conservatives, I think, have generally failed to do as a movement is to empower and equip everyday average Americans to do things on their own, to take action, because that very nature, what you just described, of creating a sense, the legitimate sense that the American people are opposed to something helps stop people, some of these woke school bureaucrats, from trying to impose their ideology on everybody.
Yeah, I mean, the left has done the opposite and very effectively, which is flood the zone, make it seem like this is a, you know, I mean, basically everyone's trans.
It's like, oh, well, then we got to go along with this.
I mean, it was never a thing.
I speak all the time about, I was one of the early guys coming against the trans women in, well, whatever, you know, the men in women's sports, essentially.
Yeah.
And even then, you know, it was like 17, whatever it was, 2017.
And on Twitter, I'd put this stuff up, like, this is insane.
And this was Twitter 1.0.
Let's call it 90% leftists.
And they're like, ah, man, I hate Don Jr. with a passion.
But he's right.
This is insane.
Like, it was never a thing.
Even the left, it was never a thing until like there was never pushback.
And they're like, it must be a thing.
Let's just, we'll make it the thing.
And it became a thing.
You know, we don't do that well.
They will do that.
They'll get out there.
They'll pretend like it's real.
They'll make it real.
They have the voice box of the media.
We sit there and be like, this is insane.
Of course, that's not going to ever happen.
But it does time and time again.
It does.
And that's why conservatives have to step up.
And so as another, for example, we are actively defending NextGolf right now in litigation that was brought against NextGolf, a women's golf tournament from a biological man.
Now, this is the kind of thing that for the longest time, conservatives would just, or business owners or corporate owners or other folks would just cave.
They would say, oh, well, you know, I've got this demand.
I'm just going to let this guy play in the women's sports, which, you know, 20 years ago would have seemed outrageous.
It would have been a Saturday Night Live skit 20 years ago.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it would have been a wonderful Saturday Night Live skit.
I mean, we would have all laughed and we would have ridiculed it and said, that's ridiculous.
It's never going to happen.
But here we are today.
And that's a result of people not fighting and not pushing back.
Yeah, no, it's crazy.
And again, you've seen what they've done to some of those people.
I remember Martina Navratilova, the tennis player.
I mean, like literally a gay activist for almost 40 years, one of the top women ever to compete in sports.
And she was like, it's crazy that a man would play in women's sports.
And this is literally like the leader of the, I guess, LGB before you get to the T movement.
And like she said that.
And as an athlete, she would know, she's like, I'd get destroyed by like, even as I was number one tennis player in the world, I'd get destroyed by the number 200 or 500 or whatever male.
And so she said this literally from a place of just fact and sports and science.
And like they almost threw her out of, they did throw her out of the movement.
I mean, she had to come back and be like, oh, I was wrong.
This is totally normal.
I mean, that's how aggressive they get.
So we got to play the same game.
100%.
Absolutely.
So could you get into the actual statute and laws, you know, at issue here in a case like this?
Well, so like in Nex Golf in particular, this is someone who is trying to assert a claim that's based on contractual rights and torts and various human rights type of issues.
And it's really, I think, quite frankly, it's a meritless case.
We'll let some of the case results speak for themselves as it plays out in litigation.
But there's been a use and abuse at the federal level of Title VII, which, for example, everyone is familiar now with the Supreme Court's decision towards the tail end of the first Trump administration in Bostock that said that transgender identity was some kind of protected status for the purposes of employment.
There's a lot of different federal statutes.
And what the advocates on the other side have done and what they try to do in like they're doing here in state court with this next golf case is they take these square pegs and they try to jam them in round holes.
And that's just like the nature of the beast.
And they just keep doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it until the square peg is so worn down that it actually fits.
And everyone just says, oh, well, this is the way it's supposed to be.
So there's a number of statutes that are at play at the federal level, at the state level.
There's various employment-based or human rights-based type of provisions, constitutional provisions.
And really, when it comes to the trans stuff, with the exception of the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock, there really isn't a leg to stand on.
And I think that was an erroneous decision anyways, for a whole variety of reasons that we could get into.
Well, for people who don't know, I mean, take us inside America First Legal because this isn't just one of these Washington, D.C. think tanks and people pay themselves a lot of money to talk about stuff and never actually do any action.
I mean, you're actually in court.
You're actually fighting.
You're actually putting points on the board.
And I think a lot of that can be confusing for a lot of people who are, again, they're used to a lot of talk, not a lot of action.
Can you talk about that?
And again, you've mentioned some of these cases, but get into the details of that so people really understand it because I think it's frankly comforting to see that there's someone on our side actually fighting back again outside of the people in the administration.
Yeah, look, I mean, what we do, I am a person who for most of my professional career has witnessed a Washington that likes to talk, that likes to write white papers, that likes to sit around and pat itself on the back.
And sure, there can be a time and a place for writing a white paper, a position paper, whatever.
That's fine.
But that can't be at the expense of actually doing things, of actually fighting, actually suing, actually doing things that move the ball forward.
And so we have cases all across the country, primarily in federal court.
We're also active in state court.
I have lawyers all across the country.
We're a small team right now in comparison, resource-wise, personnel-wise, to compared with the Mark Eliases of the world, with the ACLUs of the world, and everyone in between.
But we are committed to fighting and actually doing things, holding people accountable, vindicating our clients' rights in court, holding bad actors accountable in the public eye, in the public mindset.
You have to win in the court of law, in the court of public opinion.
So when Stephen and I started this organization, it was just the two of us.
The two of us and nobody else.
Stephen Miller is an animal, so that's probably, you know, that's not bad.
I mean, you know, it's a solid team anyway, but yes.
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it's been great.
And we have been fighting on so many fronts, and especially during the Biden administration, I mean, we've partnered with a lot of states across the country, state attorneys general.
We sued on behalf of the state of Texas regarding a number of the Biden administration's immigration policies.
And in fact, right before the president's election in 2024, we secured a massive victory.
We stopped one of the largest amnesties that would have ever been done by Joe Biden by stopping one of his policies on behalf of the state of Texas.
So, you know, it's really one of these issues where we are America first.
We are here to support America first policies.
We are here to fight for the average American who looks at the world around them and says, what in the hell is going on?
What happened to just common sense?
What happened to our Constitution?
What happened to the way that I understood the world to be as I was growing up?
And they look around and they see men playing in women's sports.
They see all kinds of other things, people being discriminated against.
And we are here to fight for them.
And so that's what we do.
That's who we are.
We will always do what's right for our clients.
We will always engage.
We would rather be fighting than talking.
I love that.
I mean, Gene, you mentioned Title VII, but what about Title VI and disparate impact theory?
I think the DOJ recently took action on that.
What does that mean for those watching and what's the effect?
Yeah, well, look, the president issued an executive order last year addressed at ending disparate impact, which is a garbage legal concept that we've been struggling with as a country for decades.
The whole notion that a neutral policy, something that applies to everybody, it's not discriminatory on its face.
It's not discriminatory in purpose.
It is just a neutral policy that applies to everybody.
And that somehow, some way, if there is some adverse effect as it applies to some group of people, that somehow there's a problem.
And so, Title VI, I mean, there are a lot of different areas in federal law, a lot of different areas in state law where disparate impact has kind of seeped in and has created these conundrums.
So, if you're a business owner and you have a neutrally applicable policy that is set in your employee handbook, for example, if it has an adverse effect on one group of people or another group of people, then they bring you into court.
They haul you into court and they say, this policy is hurting me.
It's discriminating against me.
It's garbage.
It's garbage.
It's neutral.
That is what led us away from hiring, firing, doing all kinds of things based on merit, which is ultimately the metric for success for anybody who wants to run an organization, any business, anything in life.
It should be with success.
Right.
Yes.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Not that anyone in government actually cares about that.
Certainly not under VIDA, but like minor details.
Yes, exactly.
So, you know, I know this is a huge priority for you personally and for the AFL, you know, just combating the cartels.
We had a counter-cartel conference in Doral just last week.
Could you talk about the cartel threat from a legal perspective?
What statutes and authorities are really in your legal toolbox to stop narco-terrorism and save American lives?
I'm watching Democrats out there, you know, Maduro's a great hero.
People, you know, running GoFast boats with, you know, 400, 400 Mercuries, you know, out of Venezuela, you know, not exactly a standard, you know, maybe a standard fishing boat in Miami, not exactly a standard fishing boat in Venezuela.
And yet they're taking their sides and all of these things.
You know, what can we do outside of government?
Because you've seen literally 50% of the U.S. government literally taking their side over the 100,000 Americans killed every year.
Yeah, it's a great question.
I think a lot of this from the outside, what we can do is we can provide support to the president.
We can provide support and we can call out people when they come up with BS arguments against what the president is doing.
President Trump, for about this time last year, through the Secretary of State, through great Secretary of State Marco Rubio, designated a lot of these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
That unlocks a whole range of tools to the government to be able to do to combat the threat that these cartels face.
So for decades and decades and decades, leaders in Washington and kind of really across the country, I think although they took some approaches to try to combat kind of at the street level and try to take down certain kingpins every now and then, there was no concerted effort.
There was no concerted whole of government approach to stopping a threat that was pervasive throughout the entire hemisphere, that crippled governments throughout Latin America, that threatened and killed American people, whether through the use of drugs that they were bringing into the country or whether literally through threats in violence against Americans and other folks throughout Mexico.
So we can all call out the BS of the media. collectively.
Whenever someone says something about, oh, well, this boat strike of these cartel members who are smuggling cocaine through the Gulf of America, somehow, well, we violated international law.
Call them out.
What is international law?
That's not even a thing.
It's not real.
There's no international police who are going to do something.
And every nation has the right to defend its citizens.
And these are hostile actors, these cartels, they are violent.
They are paramilitary organizations that cause untold death and destruction across communities all across the United States.
So, you know, we all too often will say, oh, well, you know, that's just a leftist.
And they're just, you know, that's just their vantage point.
I'm just going to let them do that.
It's okay.
It is okay to politely but firmly tell them that they're full of it.
That is absolutely untrue that what we're doing violates international law.
And what they can also do is they can try to encourage folks, whether it's through their political representation in Congress, their governors, their attorneys general across the country, to support what is happening, to support the president, to support the president's team and their mission to create hemispheric peace, which brings prosperity and success to the American people and also across Latin America.
Yeah, I mean, I can't think of all the engagements around the world that are going on, I mean, whether it's Russia, Ukraine, whether it's Israel, whether it's whatever it may be, I can't think over the last few years, what's a bigger, clear, and present danger than the fentanyl crisis that's killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
I mean, these cartels are essentially waging a chemical war on our country.
What more needs to happen legally to hold them accountable?
What are the other things we could be doing or that you guys want to start doing to be able to really end this nonsense once and for all?
Yeah, I mean, look, I think that Congress could do a number of things related to financial transactions.
There's already a lot of tools that are available, but it's very difficult to build some of these compelling cases.
So when Pam Bondi comes in and has a prosecution of some cartel member who's smuggling fentanyl into the United States or some street thug who's dealing it in the United States, sometimes it can take a lot of time to take out these individual folks.
And so Congress could provide some additional tools to the federal government to be able to stop some of the financial transactions that result in illicit money flow.
One of those things could be in stopping remittances or at least taxing remittances.
Because everyone thinks, oh, well, you know, it's just some guy up here working in landscaping and he's just sending money home to his family to help support his family in Guatemala.
Well, that does happen.
But how do you identify those transactions and segregate them in the absence of anything else from transactions involving the cartels sending money south of the border?
And there's a lot of ways in which they do that, whether it's through wire, whether it's through mail, whether it's through crypto, whether it's through any number of things.
The United States government can take actions.
Congress could give the government tools to do additional things to choke off the money flow, which I think is really one of the most important things.
I think that one of the things, the most important thing for this, the most important strike against the cartel chokehold on the United States in recent memory, and I think, quite frankly, ever, will be Donald Trump's securing of our southern border.
Everybody understands, I hope, at this point in time, that nobody comes through Mexico up to the southern border without paying off a cartel.
Trump Secures Border to Stop Cartel Money00:04:10
And so when Donald Trump secured the southern border, which no one else said could be done, everyone said, oh, it was impossible.
We needed legislation to do this, that, and the other.
Think of the numbers that were flowing through during the Biden administration.
The hundreds of thousands of people every month, each of them was contributing cash to one of these cartels.
And so drying up that financial resource was a major blow against them.
And so if Congress wanted to do additional things to help secure and cement into place some of the policies that the president has adopted that shut down illegal immigration at the southern border, I think that we would see this lockdown that he has delivered, that he has personally delivered, secured for generations to come.
Yeah, you brought up the stuff about remittances.
I get it.
Someone's working and they send 50 bucks a month back home.
I get it.
When the cartels do it, how does that work?
Because I mean, you're talking about billions of dollars.
I mean, the human trafficking component of the cartels almost became their bigger money maker.
It was a little bit easier, a little bit safer, certainly, than running a drug boat for them.
It became a really big business.
How did those transactions work?
Is it the quantity, the size of the transaction that we're able to figure out?
Is it just the volume from certain places?
They seem like they're very sophisticated.
I mean, probably, whether it's as a paramilitary organization, probably more sophisticated than the Mexican military, as we've even witnessed over the last few years.
How does that work?
Is that then treasury monitoring those kind of remittances and kind of figuring out what is and what isn't real?
How do you do that and how do you combat their?
You know, they're pretty innovative.
They will change and figure out how to make that happen.
You know, how do they separate the wheat from the chafe there?
Yeah, that's a really great question.
Look, I mean, these folks are dedicated.
They are firmly dedicated to the success of their enterprises.
And so they are going to use every available tool, financial tool, to try to evade detection and try to evade seizure, ultimately, of their assets flowing south.
And so a lot of times it's, look, whether it's money laundering through a different type of business, whether it's sending wires under certain thresholds, reporting thresholds down below.
Some people try to use other financial tools.
The Department of the Treasury, in combination with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, as well as the intelligence community, have a number of tools that are available to them to try to monitor, to try to stop transactions based on intelligence, based on, you know, in some ways, just hard law enforcement work, traditional law enforcement intelligence, actual signals intelligence, and other things that are available to the United States government writ large.
There's a whole combination of things that can be done.
One of the things that I don't think has been available to the government in a way that it is now, just based on modern technology, is the availability of tools like AI-based tools that can help to go through large sums of transactions and flag things that might take an ordinary person doing things or a lesser complex system a lot longer to go through,
and to be able to determine whether or not there is something that might be a foul or might be a problem that previously and decades prior, would have been unimaginable.
And I think based on current technologies and resources that are available to us, the government has a lot of opportunities to do things now that can stop the financial flow of assets to these cartel members and to these cartel leaders.
And again, the ultimate goal in the partnership with the president is delivering with all of these other countries across Latin America will produce hemisphere peace and the restoration of the Monroe Doctrine or the Donroe Doctrine that will create lasting prosperity for the American people for decades to come and get China and some of all the other bad actors out of the hemisphere.
Stopping Financial Flow to Cartels00:14:00
I mean, you guys have active immigration cases going on right now.
What are you seeing on the ground in terms of the legal battles around border security and who's trying to actually block us?
Yeah, look, it's all the same players.
I served in the first Trump administration for all four years, day one to the end day, overseeing the litigation portfolio related to immigration.
So it's all the usual suspects, the ACLU and any number of other organizations and open borders advocates who find illegal aliens anywhere in the country and they bring cases on their behalf.
And they try to stop and join the president from doing things.
And because there's any number of radical district court judges who are willing to disregard the text of the law and just do what they think feels right, we're always on defense.
We're always on our heels.
Now, the Trump administration so far in just one year, of course, in addition to stopping the flow of folks across the southern border, was able to secure an important Supreme Court win related to nationwide junctions.
Now, the advocates have switched their tactics a little bit, and they're not pursuing nationwide junctions as much.
They're pursuing things otherwise known as vacator under the APA.
They're filing class actions, trying to stop things.
You have judges in district courts across the country who look at a statute that says the courts actually doesn't have jurisdiction to hear this case, but they disregard it because they're outcomes oriented and their outcomes directed.
So the means always justify the ends.
Now, what the president has also benefited from and is delivering on in the long kind of grand scheme of things is that he has nominated great judges at courts of appeals across the country throughout his first term and certainly now in his second term.
And they are helping to stop some of this nonsense before it even has to go up to the Supreme Court.
So, look, is enough being done?
No.
In the grand scheme of things, we need more good judges across the country.
We need more support for the Department of Justice.
The DOJ needs more lawyers.
If you're a conservative lawyer and you want to make a difference for your country, you should go apply to go work for the Department of Justice.
You should go apply to work and help the Department of Homeland Security.
They need good people to help combat this lawlessness because the end result of this lawlessness, the end result of this entire propaganda machine that they have been driving for years and years and years is the destruction of this country.
And when America goes, there's nowhere else.
Yeah, I mean, the left always tries to run to some activist judge to try to stop everything.
You know, how do you deal with that component?
I mean, it's something that definitely shows up in the comments a lot.
You know, how do you get rid of the activist judges?
You know, not so simple.
I think a lot of them should be impeached.
I don't believe that's a reality of what happens.
But how do you deal with that overall situation where they just sort of venue shop to find the one that's the most radical, gives them what they want, drag the process on?
Oftentimes, the process itself is the punishment.
How do you guys handle that at AFL?
Yeah, well, look, it is absolutely all of those things that you just said.
Look, when you are, oftentimes when you are bringing a case, of course, you are going to bring the case where the client is located, where the client ultimately is.
Now, of course, for the left, they find they have this magical way of finding clients in the most favorable jurisdictions all across the country and filing lawsuits there, right?
I mean, they're just fabulous at it.
Now, there's a couple of ways that you can combat it.
And some of the stuff is stuff that's kind of outside of our direct control, but it's things that we can help try to create support and influence for.
So, things like impeachment.
There are judges across the country who have engaged in conduct that is worthy of engaging in impeachment proceedings in the House.
Now, whether the House does that or not, it's a political question.
That's a whole other thing, but they should at least begin that process to try to hold some people accountable.
On the flip side, the other side of the hill, when it comes to the Senate, where when we are in power or we're not in power, what we need to make sure is that the blue slip process when it comes to district court judges is not used in a way in that the folks on the judiciary committee,
when they are vetting nominees, when Joe Biden was in power, he had any number of complete and total radicals that he got through that in some cases actually received Republican support for their nominees.
We have to be smart about stopping people before it's too late.
Just one, just one district court judge in one jurisdiction can unfold all kinds of harm and damage and create all kinds of problems for totally lawful, totally constitutional policies of this president and any future president for that matter.
And so, that when we have to understand the stakes, we have to understand and appreciate, and we have to use the tools that the founders intended for us to use when it comes to impeachment to hold folks accountable who otherwise will hold lifetime seats in court.
Yeah, I mean, the AFL has also been one of the leading organizations really going after DEI.
You've got multiple active cases right now.
You know, tell us about that fight because it feels like in the court of public opinion, DEI is over.
They get it.
But in reality, in corporate America, I imagine it's still very much a thing.
It is.
Look, I mean, we've seen some corporations come to their senses, some businesses and institutions come to their senses, especially after the Supreme Court's decision in the Harvard case.
But anyone who thinks that just because you get one win in like that Harvard case that was almost three years ago now, thinks that it's going to magically turn into results in other areas of life is very Pollyannish thinking.
What instead you have to do is you have to continue to sue and hold bad actors accountable.
So we represent clients all across the country in lawsuits and litigation against major corporations and government institutions, universities, across the whole gamut for violating their rights.
Now, one of the things that you will see is that, especially in the Biden era, a lot of these companies were very brazen and very open about what they were doing, right?
We're proud to, you know, we want our workforce to look like the community in which we operate.
And they were very proud to openly create numerical targets for people based on nothing more than the color of their skin or their sex, which is insane.
It's insane.
You should only want the best person for the job, regardless of who they are and what they look like.
They can't control how they were born.
But here we have that.
Now, what has happened since then, I think, over the last couple of years, and especially since the president took office last January, is that more and more folks are shying away from it.
Some people who are committed are trying to hide things less on the surface, trying to bury their discriminatory policies in politics through other means.
Yeah, that was literally what I was going to ask.
It's like, are corporations actually changing their behavior or are they just masking it?
Are they just hiding their DEI programs under other names?
Yeah, we're not really doing it.
Yeah, it's a little bit of both.
I think there are some good actors.
There's some good folks in the C-suites, good folks in corporate leadership who recognize that these policies were actually never helpful to them.
They were actually never helpful for their workforce.
They never created the economic benefits that were touted as supposedly flowing from the adoption of these policies.
I'm shocked.
I'm shocked, gee, that a trans unicorn didn't magically improve shareholder value at a Fortune 500 company.
I'm shocked to hear that that didn't actually work out, which is amazing.
Right.
Yeah, no, I mean, there's other companies that are still engaging in this conduct, and we hear from them.
We hear from these folks all across the country, and we represent these folks all across the country based on things that have happened.
One of the difficult things that we face, though, to be honest, with a lot of these discriminatory policies is when it comes in the employment context.
There's a short window of time to be able to file something after the discriminatory act occurs.
And you have to start the process with the EEOC typically and file your administrative complaint.
And a lot of the times what we end up hearing from folks is that conduct that was engaged in years ago, five, 10 years ago, discriminatory acts, there's no relief in court for some of those folks.
And so it's very important that if somebody is discriminated against on the basis of their skin color or the basis of their sex or any other available reason under law, that they go and they work to vindicate their rights.
We hear from people all the time who say, well, I don't want to do that.
I don't really want to put a target on my back because then the whole industry is going to, you know, they're going to put a big, you know, scarlet letter on my chest and I'm never going to work in the industry again.
And I very much sympathize with the human beings who are having to go through this type of a situation.
The problem is, is that so many of them don't realize that the industry is never going to hire them again.
They are never going to use them again because they're just that woke and they're that out there.
And so the only option that people have is to vindicate their own rights.
And when enough people stand up and they're willing to fight and enough people say, screw this, I am not taking it anymore.
Then collectively, we create a healthy ecosphere where C-suites and other folks who are making decisions understand it's best not to racially discriminate against Americans.
I'm not going to adopt that policy.
But it takes more and more pushing back and fighting against these policies for it to rapidly spread.
Yeah, no, you've seen that a lot.
I mean, you've heard literally from some of these corporations like, we don't hire white men or at least straight white men.
We just won't do it.
It's like, so I understand the fear of being like, hey, I got to go out there.
But like when you know you're already being discriminated, guess what?
You're right.
That industry, it's not just that company.
It could be the entire industry that's never hiring you again.
If they can find someone who checks a few boxes and may not have anywhere near the merit that you have, it no longer matters.
It hasn't for a while.
So I agree with you that people have to really get up there.
It's not easy.
But if you sit back, I promise you, it's not going to improve on its own.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the biggest thing that I think that most Americans, whether it's in this sector in particular, or whether we're talking about stopping some of these woke corporate policies.
And we have clients in Hollywood, for goodness sakes, where this stuff has been rampant.
But it's whether it's there, whether it's with any of these other things that we've been discussing.
It takes individual acts of courage that collectively have a huge impact in the aggregate.
But when folks lack the courage, and again, I understand you are sticking your neck out there.
You're putting your face, you're putting your name on a complaint, a federal lawsuit.
I get that there is some people are a little bit hesitant and I understand, but you have to realize, every single person across the country has to realize is that that's all it takes for the bad guys to win is for people to be afraid to step up and to defend themselves and to defend their rights and to say, hell no, I'm not going to take this another day.
I am pushing back.
That's when, that's when we are able to create a better country for the American people.
And that's how we preserve this great country that we love for future generations.
Gina, you know, I know the AFL filed a petition against the Election Assistance Commission to require documentary proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form, which, I mean, you know, the fact that we even have to have a fight about this tells you everything you need to know.
But, you know, why is it that you need an ID to go to the DNC, to go to the Democratic National Convention, to go to the bank, to go to that, you know, pretty much anywhere, but you don't need one to vote in a federal election?
Yeah, I mean, it's one of the most insane things anyone could ever imagine.
That the federal government, the United States federal government, would issue a federal form that allows people to vote by mail or to register to vote by mail and not require actual proof of citizenship.
I mean, it's one of the most basic things that any other country, any other functioning country across the world typically requires.
And so it's just this common sense thing.
If you have to use your ID to go purchase alcohol, to go purchase a lotta ticket, to go get into a convention, to go do anything, to go transact business at your bank, all aspects of life, everyone has ID.
And so the whole notion, and of course, the counter argument from the left has traditionally been, oh, there's certain groups of Americans who lack access to ID.
They don't know how to obtain IDs.
They're not capable of obtaining IDs.
And so it's discriminatory to require people to prove their citizenship, which I think is just one of the most demeaning, fundamentally demeaning and insulting remarks someone could ever say about another American, another human being, that they're not functionally capable of going and securing an ID.
It is not the case.
No one who needs an ID lacks access to obtaining one now.
And so when we submitted this petition to the EAC for them to adopt a common sense rule, a common sense modification to the federal form to say, yes, in fact, you have to prove that you're a citizen to be able to use this form, to be able to register to vote.
Training the Next Generation of Conservative Lawyers00:05:08
This is one of the most common sense things anyone could ever do.
And yet, again, here we are.
We look around and we say, why hasn't this been done before?
Yeah, I mean, law schools have been woke.
Most of the, you know, the vast majority of trial lawyers are woke.
You know, anyone probably going to law school, generally speaking, is going to be left leaning.
You know, what can we do at the law school level to raise the next generation of conservative lawyers and law professors?
What does that look like to you?
Because I think that's a really big place to start.
That is a huge place to start.
In fact, and it's something that we have made a priority since our early days.
I employ law clerks throughout the academic year and throughout the summer.
We take groups of law students and we use them to help research and work on our cases and do things that they're able to do as law students under the supervision of lawyers and everything else, of course.
But in the process, also help train them up in how to think and how to be a fighter and what are the things that you actually need to do to function as a conservative lawyer in America in the year 2026.
And so we run a program there.
We use a number of law students.
We bring them on all the time.
We also have a program called what we call the Next Gen program, which is more oriented towards younger lawyers, a few law students, historically speaking, but we are trying to train up and cultivate the next generation of fighters, the next generation of people who understand how they need to function as a lawyer in society.
That used to be the case, used to be the case in law school.
They would teach you, they would say, your role as a lawyer is to be a zealous advocate for your client and to do X, Y, and Z and blah, And they at least extolled those virtues as a profession.
More and more and more, of course, that has not been the case because of the dominance of the left in the law schools, amongst the professors, amongst the activities, the student groups, the administrations.
And so we have now as a result, a lot of law students, a lot of people who have come through legal training and no longer understand how to fight or how to zealously advocate.
So when they come to us, we are there and we are ready to train them on how to do those things.
And so as we grow, as we expand, right now I'm running a program that is training up young lawyers with a specific focus on how they can thrive and succeed in the executive branch, how they can move the ball forward.
If they want to go get a career working as a lawyer in the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense, or the Department of War, I should say, the Department of Justice, DHS, wherever, how do you move the ball forward?
How do you use your skills, experience, and knowledge, understanding the laws that you're subject to and understanding that your ultimate client is the president of the United States and your job as a political appointee is to deliver success for him, deliver access for his mandate.
How do you do those things?
And so we're training up a whole cadre of young lawyers who I think will be future leaders in the movement, future leaders in America, and it'll be a ripple effect from there.
So, you know, that covers the legal side.
What do you need from everyday Americans to keep the fight going?
And perhaps looking ahead, what are the biggest cases and fights coming up for America First Legal in 2026?
What should people be watching for?
Yeah, so there's a whole host of things that we can do and that we're not currently able to do just because of bandwidth.
And so what we need more of right now is lawyers.
And so I need good lawyers.
I need also the support of people who are able to donate.
We do not charge our clients.
We do not charge fees to our clients.
We provide all of our representation pro bono to our clients.
And so people can go to our website.
They can donate if they're able to.
If they feel compelled to do so, they can and should support us right there.
We will use those resources to hire more lawyers and we will use those resources to hire lawyers to fight on the kinds of cases that we've been talking about so far over this over today's session.
And so, you know, we haven't even scratched the surface of some of the other cases.
We have a lawsuit against Target Corporation that still continues.
It's ongoing based on their woke campaign that they engaged in a few years ago when they used these tuck swimsuits for kids and they advertised it and they threw shareholder value in the trash, basically diminished the value of their shares significantly.
We have a case that's still pending there.
We have cases pending against school districts across the country.
We have a case right now against the entire University of California system for their continued use of racial discrimination in admissions.
We're fighting there.
We're fighting in other colleges and universities.
We have cases against major corporations.
We have cases against Hollywood.
For example, one of our clients, Jeff Vaughn, was an anchor on the evening news for folks in Los Angeles.
People know him.
Support Our Fight Against Bad Actors00:01:45
He was the household name, the guy you went home, you ate dinner, you heard the news from.
He was fired from his job, allegedly, as we allege in our case, because of who he was, a white man.
There are a whole host of cases that are ongoing across the country on any number of these issues that we are litigating against bad actors right now, and that we are confident in our ability to produce results and achieve success for our clients and ultimately for the American people and for our country.
Well, Gene, that's amazing.
Keep it up.
Guys, really important to support these kinds of things.
Make sure you go check out America First Legal.
Go to AFlegal.org to support their work.
Gene Hamilton, thank you for all you're doing.
Keep up the good work.
It really matters.
And hopefully everyone's going to jump on and help you win that fight because it matters.
Well, thanks for having me on and thanks for all the kind words.
Keep it up, sir.
Thanks a lot.
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