Founder and editor of ConservativeOpinion.com, Jordan B. Rickards, appeared on The Advocates with host Dan Cirucci to discuss conservative principles, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and school choice, amongst other things.
Dan
Cirucci: 00:09 Hi everyone. Welcome
back. This is the advocates and I’m Dan Cirucci and you are on RVNTV. Remember
we’re always at RVNTV.TV and you can find me anytime @dancirucci.com. Now our
guest today is an advocate. He’s an attorney so he’s got to be an advocate and
he is Jordan Rickards and he has his own law firm here in New Jersey and he’s
also the founder of a marvelous website, Jordan how are you?
Jordan
Rickards: 00:43 Good to see you Dan,
thanks for having me.
Dan
Cirucci: 00:46 Good to see you. I’m
so happy to have you on the program.
Jordan
Rickards: 00:49 Thank you. Happy to
be here.
Dan
Cirucci: 00:50 This is going to be
an interesting interview, Jordan, because you are an interviewer yourself.
You’ve interviewed a lot of fascinating people.
Jordan
Rickards: 00:58 Sure.
Dan
Cirucci: 00:59 And you’re an
attorney and he’s also a very, very bright person. So I’m going to have to
watch my P’s and Q’s now today with Jordan over here. I love to have bright
aware young people on the program. Jordan, you are a New Jersey product born
and bred, correct?
Jordan
Rickards: 01:20 Yes, I was born up
in a, I’ve spent my whole life in North Brunswick.
Dan
Cirucci: 01:24 Okay. And your law
offices now are where?
Jordan
Rickards: 01:27 It’s in Milltown
It’s on the Milltown, East Brunswick border. So about three minutes from where
I grew up.
Dan
Cirucci: 01:32 So this is in
Middlesex County?
Jordan
Rickards: 01:35 Very blue County.
Dan
Cirucci: 01:37 It’s a blue County.
There you go. He’s, but we’re going to get to that. Yeah. And it’s in what we
might call central Jersey.
Jordan
Rickards: 01:44 It’s basically the
center of New Jersey. That’s right. If you were to throw a dart right at the
center of New Jersey, pretty much hit my office.
Dan
Cirucci: 01:50 Okay. And one of our
governors was one of our governor’s from there, Jim McGreevey.
Jordan
Rickards: 01:55 He was from up in
Woodbridge. In fact, he worked for the Middlesex County prosecutor’s office as
a prosecutor, which is where I started.
Dan
Cirucci: 02:03 Okay. Now, but that
was before, way before you.
Jordan
Rickards: 02:07 Right.
Dan
Cirucci: 02:07 Um Jordan, he, he
gives off a boyish charm, honestly, but he’s actually handled over 3000 cases
in a 14 year career as an attorney.
Jordan
Rickards: 02:18 That’s a
conservative estimate. It’s probably been significantly more than that.
Dan
Cirucci: 02:22 That’s a
conservative estimate and you’ve handled a lot of criminal law cases, Jordan.
Jordan
Rickards: 02:28 Oh, sure. I was a
prosecutor for three and a half years and so I obviously did a lot of criminal
law then and I’ve handled I think three homicides just in the last year and a half
or so, two of which resulted actually in probationary sentences, believe it or
not, and one which was pleaded down. But yeah, I handle a handle all kinds of
cases.
Dan
Cirucci: 02:46 What do you say,
Jordan, to people who say, you know, how can you defend these unsavory
characters?
Jordan
Rickards: 02:53 Well, there’s two
things. First of all, they’re not all unsavory. In the two cases which resulted
in probationary sentences were regular folks with no criminal histories who I
think were a little bit overcharged in the first place. They were guilty of
something but not guilty of what they were charged with. And sometimes even,
for example, I represented somebody who was involved in a very serious murder
and he was the least involved person. Okay. It was questionable whether he
should really, even though he was charged with murder, whether he was really
guilty of murder or a lesser included offense, manslaughter, for example, or
robbery or something like that. It’s certainly not fun to have to defend
somebody who’s done a horrible thing, but even that person is entitled to be
found guilty of only that which he did and not charges that exceed his conduct.
Dan
Cirucci: 03:39 Uh do you feel that
the criminal justice system is stacked against minorities? People of color?
Jordan
Rickards: 03:49 Uh wow, that’s a big
topic. I would say no on balance. But with this caveat, see there’s two halves
of the criminal justice system and we didn’t talk about this ahead of time.
That’s fine. There’s the arresting half. Okay. And then there’s the prosecution
half. Now the, those neighborhoods that are majority minority, let’s say
they’re probably policed more severely. Okay. But if you’re looking at the
actual sentences that are given out, if you’re talking about who’s held to
account more severely for their conduct by far and away, the lightest sentences
on balance are given an areas like Newark, Camden, Trenton, all the majority
minority areas where every case is put on the rocket docket. The prosecutor’s
offices are totally overwhelmed. The police can’t handle all the crime there.
The judges are all liberal and you have a hard time getting witness
cooperation. The, the Star Ledger about 10 or 15 years ago did an expose on
homicides in, in Essex County, which is where Newark and Irvington are, and
they found the average homicide there got about a six year sentence and only
half of them were solved. So really if you were to kill somebody you’re looking
at on average, three years in prison. Okay. Not to bring race too much into
this because it’s not a comfortable topic. But if you think those are the kinds
of sentences that are being handed out you know, to non-minorities in
nonminority counties, it’s just wrong. You know, the white person who commits a
murder in Monmouth or Ocean counties looking at life in jail, up in, up in up
in Newark. You know, witnesses aren’t even gonna cooperate. The police don’t
have the resources to, to manage all those homicides and things like that. And
so everything is reflectively downgraded. And then, you know, when you get to
talk to the prosecutor, there’s lots of pleas that go even further. That’s why
you have so much crime in those areas. It’s not because it’s, it’s so unfair.
It’s that, you know, you can deal drugs in Newark or Camden or Trenton. Okay.
And you’ll get arrested and you know, get downgraded and you get put on
probation and you go out and you do what you were doing. It’s is part of the
cost of doing business.
Dan
Cirucci: 05:53 Very thorough and
informed answer Jordan, no question about that. And now we know why folks he
graduated with the high magna cum laude from Liberty University and then got a
scholarship to Washington and Lee School of Law. Wonderful school. Yep. A very
rigorous, I would imagine.
Jordan
Rickards: 06:14 Sure, sure.
Dan
Cirucci: 06:15 Washington and Lee.
Speaker
3: 06:16 Well, the average, I
mean w when I went there, the average LSAT score of students who were admitted
was like in the 94th percentile and then they were all A students. So when you
get there, there’s no like bottom of the class that acts as a cushion to
elevate everybody else. I mean, they’re all A students. And so if you want to distinguish
yourself at a school like that, then you really have to go out of your way. But
you know, what’s the point if you’re not going to challenge yourself.
Dan
Cirucci: 06:38 So it was very
competitive.
Jordan
Rickards: 06:39 In a relaxed way. It
wasn’t cutthroat. I mean, I’ve heard stories from people who go to other law
schools about how students, if they go into the library and find the books that
other people needed and they’d rip the pages out so that, you know, so people
couldn’t study from them and things like that. Yeah. So it wasn’t like that. It
wasn’t, it wasn’t cutthroat. You could, there was a very strong B bias. So I
would say 80% of the class could get a B. But if you want to get an A, if you
want to kind of escape that gravity, that orbit, you really had to commit
yourself to doing it.
Dan
Cirucci: 07:10 And then, eh, you’re
a member of Mensa. Now, tell us what Mensa is and what it means. Because I
think a lot of people have a misconception about it. They, they, I mean if you
were to ask me what it is, I would say it’s a society of geniuses, but what is
it?
Speaker
3: 07:27 It is a social
organization for people who have scored in the 98th percentile or higher on an
IQ test. And it’s not certainly something I go around telling people on a
regular basis. I don’t wear like a men’s pin or anything like that, but I do
put it on my business website because you know, people these days have a choice
of lawyers and they’re not just looking at me and my website, they’re looking
at a bunch of others and I need to be able to distinguish myself, especially
with my preternatural youthful looks.
Dan
Cirucci: 07:56 Yes. He’s not as
young as he appears to be folks. Okay. So this is and he wants you to know that
he’s, he’s experienced, he’s, they’re really experienced, he’s qualified and
he’s, he handled cases in family law, criminal defense, personal injury. And
you also have been a public defender in East Brunswick in South river. So
you’ve been on both sides of the criminal justice system. Right? Right. And you
also taught history at your Middlesex County community college?
Jordan
Rickards: 08:34 That’s right. Yet it
was a funny thing about that. I was just looking for something I didn’t have. I
wasn’t seeing anybody at the time and I was looking for something to do with my
spare time. And one day I just applied online to teach and it was like in
January of whatever year and I forgot about it. And then in the summer of that
same year, I got a phone call from them and asked me to come in for an
interview and I’d forgotten even what I had applied to teach, I think. I
thought it was like government or something. And they just hired me. They hired
me for the history department because they said they have too many liberals and
they wanted a conservative voice in there. So I just said, I can do that.
Dan
Cirucci: 09:05 My goodness, I can’t
believe it. They actually sought intellectual diversity in a college. This is
an astounding story. We’ve got a really,
Jordan
Rickards: 09:18 Their idea of
intellectual diversity is, you know, in the history department they had ten
liberals and me.
Dan
Cirucci: 09:22 So ideological
diversity, they should say.
Jordan
Rickards: 09:25 Barely.
Dan
Cirucci: 09:26 Yeah. So you were
the token conservative.
Jordan
Rickards: 09:29 That’s right.
Dan
Cirucci: 09:31 So Jordan, didn’t
you are a conservative. How did you become a conservative? That’s a good
question. Here in New Jersey, which is such a liberal state, how did this guy
become a conservative.
Jordan
Rickards: 09:41 I
can actually remember the first time I realized I was a conservative. I was
about five years old and I was, I was in my mother’s bed and she had bought
some movies for me to watch. I don’t know if I was sick or what if she had, you
know, rented some movies and she put one in and one was the Disney version of
Robin Hood, you know, where all the characters are, cartoons or whatever. Like
Robin Hood’s a fox and made Marion’s a fox and there’s bears and things. I had
never heard of this. And I, I was, I think a little too serious as a five year
old. And I said to my mother, what is this? And she goes, well, this is Robin
Hood. And I said, well, what does Robin Hood do? And she says, well, he, he
robs from the rich and gives to the poor. And I thought, well, gee, I sure hope
they catch that guy.
Dan
Cirucci: 10:23 And you were like
five years old, just didn’t seem like he was already thinking thoughts like
that. He was, yeah, he was. Even then, you, you had a sense of justice and
fairness.
Jordan
Rickards: 10:33 I’ve always had a
sense of that’s true. I’ve always had a very strong sense of justice. Whether
or not I was right or wrong about it, but I remember I remember learning about
communism when I was 10 or 11 from my mother and she explained to me what would
happen where the government would take property and just give it to other
people. And I remember thinking it was wrong for people to get light sentences
for severe crimes. And I thought it was wrong that people couldn’t choose what
school to send their kids to and that if you sent your kids to a private or
Catholic school or something like that, that you know, the money that you paid
in taxes couldn’t be applied to it. So yeah, when you’re very young, you see
the world in kind of simplified terms. But I think back then I had a very low
resolution idea of what conservativism was, but I knew I was attracted.
Dan
Cirucci: 11:15 Okay. But then you
went to Liberty University. Okay. Which is a conservative school. I mean, was
it not just like an a factory for indoctrination?
Jordan
Rickards: 11:24 Well, it’s a
university like any other, I mean it’s whatever you make of it. If you want to
go there and be indoctrinated, you have that choice. But the funny thing about
me is I tended always to move away from whatever environment I was in. So when
I was in that kind of ultra conservative environment, I actually became more
libertarian at the time because I wasn’t satisfied with just being force fed
answers without understanding why those were the right answers. And so as long
as you always maintain an inquisitive mind and you always ask and you seek
truth a, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t think what school you go to
[inaudible]
the trick is to learn to think for yourself and not just to learn
to do it, but how to have the courage to do it.
Dan
Cirucci: 12:03 Would you describe
yourself then as a liber… Libertarian as well as a conservative?
Jordan
Rickards: 12:09 I
was a libertarian through law school and then I became a prosecutor and
realized you can’t be libertarian for very long because libertarians, there are
a few problems with them, but they take the position that well, if you want to
do drugs, that’s your problem. But as a, as a prosecutor, you realize that your
problem becomes someone else’s headache very quickly. So I would say I’m a, I’m
a pragmatic conservative with a libertarian streak in me where they’re wrong
about a lot of things. I, and I like Rand Paul, but he’s totally wrong on
criminal justice reform. He, his ideas are informed, um I think too much by the
left. And the problem with libertarians, you see, they have a unified theory of
the world, which is that the government is the cause of every problem. And so
when you see prisons being overcrowded, they think, well, that’s too much
government. Well, unified theories are rarely right. And they allow people,
they empower people to think they can comment and they are experts on any topic
especially. But most topics require a great deal of thought.
Dan
Cirucci: 13:07 When somebody has an
overreaching theory of everything.
Jordan
Rickards: 13:11 Right. And so it
allows libertarians to think they have wisdom sometimes where they don’t and to
think the answers are more simple than they are and answers are rarely very
simple and rarely 100% on one side of the aisle either.
Dan
Cirucci: 13:24 Fascinating
discussion folks and we will be right back after this break with Jordan
Rickards, founder of conservative opinion and he is the Law Offices of Jordan
Rickards.
Dan
Cirucci: 13:41 Dan Cirucci here.
Welcome back to The Advocates. We’re here with Jordan Rickards. He’s an
attorney here in New Jersey and the founder of conservativeopinion.com. You
want to go there and check it out? Conservative opinion.com so marvelous
marvelous website. Now the word of the week is “subterfuge,”
subterfuge, S U B T E R F U G E, and it means using deceit to achieve your
goals. You don’t know any people who used to see to achieve their goals?
Jordan
Rickards: 14:23 No, I certainly
don’t know any lawyers or politicians like that. Not at all.
Dan
Cirucci: 14:26 I
mean they’re like there’s nobody in Washington engaging in subterfuge are
there, is there?
Jordan
Rickards: 14:31 No one, certainly
nobody running for president who do anything like that.
Dan
Cirucci: 14:34 Oh no, of course
not. My goodness. No.
Jordan
Rickards: 14:37 A friend of mine,
Roger Daley, who was involved in politics became a judge later on. He used to
say in politics, everything is always about politics and nothing is ever what
it seems. It’s the art of subterfuge.
Dan
Cirucci: 14:49 The art of
subterfuge, you know, will they know how to make deception and art? That’s
right. Well, someone said that romance is all about deception. I don’t know.
Jordan
Rickards: 15:04 I
think romance is about is about honesty.
Dan
Cirucci: 15:07 And Oscar Wilde said
the wonderful thing about marriage is it depends on the subterfuge of both
parties.
Jordan
Rickards: 15:20 I
don’t know that I take much romantic advice from Oscar Wilde.
Dan
Cirucci: 15:24 No I wouldn’t
either. He had his own share of problems, didn’t he? Now, Jordan, you taught
American history.
Jordan
Rickards: 15:30 That’s right.
Dan
Cirucci: 15:31 Now what would you
say if I said to you, who is the single most compelling figure in all of
American history?
Jordan
Rickards: 15:43 Well, it depends
what you mean by compelling. I think Nixon is an especially compelling figure.
I don’t think he was our greatest figure, but it’s very compelling in that
he’s, on the one hand, a very American story, right? He starts with very humble
beginnings, you know, contrast that with, you know, European aristocracy and
monarchy that he comes from absolute nothing, and he’s not part of the Eastern
establishment. And he builds himself up and he becomes president of the United
States and he can’t get out of his own way. And he is, the architect really
have his own demise. And it’s, it’s a, it’s kind of a pathetic ending for
somebody who, you know, had the world in the palm of his hand and just dropped
it.
Dan
Cirucci: 16:19 A brilliant man.
Jordan
Rickards: 16:20 Yeah.
Dan
Cirucci: 16:21 Very tragic story,
right? It’s of Shakespearean proportions, isn’t it? Really?
Jordan
Rickards: 16:26 Well, I think Gerald
Ford said it best. He said, you know, anybody who has so many enemies that he
has to keep a list has too many enemies. And you know, Nixon I think Nixon got
hung up on that and got hung up on, on beating his enemies. If you think about
what Watergate was, Watergate is a break in in a campaign where he’s gonna win
overwhelmingly anyway. It’s totally unnecessary, but it wasn’t enough for him
to win. He had to, he had to hurt the people who he thought was hurting him.
Dan
Cirucci: 16:53 Botched 20 cent
break-in. Right. Okay. That should have been easy for anybody else. I mean, the
whole thing, it’s just, I think Nixon, I think you’re right in the sense that
Nixon will be studied forever. There will be bookshelves of books about him.
They perhaps they’re already are right? But he will be studied forever.
Jordan
Rickards: 17:18 Caught up in the
whole us versus them mentality, which I think a lot of people today in
Washington also get caught up in.
Dan
Cirucci: 17:25 Absolutely. Now,
Jordan, what possessed you to start this website? Conservative opinion. And by
the way, I’ve been to this site, it’s wonderful. There’s a lot of great things
and Jordan himself on the site has a podcast telecast in which he interviews a
lot of people. But what possessed you to start it?
Jordan
Rickards: 17:44 Well, I thought I
had a lot of things that needed to be said that people weren’t saying, you
know, you can turn on the cable news. And we have, the funny thing is we have a
great diversity of news outlets, but not a great diversity of opinion that if
you turn on something like Fox news, you pretty much know what they’re going to
say within the first two minutes. You turn on MSNBC, you know what they’re
gonna say. And then you have the groups that just kind of parrot those people.
And I thought that there was an intelligent discussion to be had and compelling
people to speak to and things that needed to be said that weren’t being said.
And I wanted an outlet to be able to do that. And I want to do it myself
because I didn’t want some editor telling me, well, we can’t say that we can’t
do that, or you have to only do it in 700 words. And so what
conservativeopinion.com is and really its accompanying Facebook page as a forum
where people can go and, and talk about the different issues and have their own
voices expressed. What, what I enjoy about it is not so much seeing myself
published, although that, you know, gives me some satisfaction. What I enjoy is
that in a given month, we have about half a million interactions on our
Facebook page and interactions are people who either, you know, are liking it
or commenting and are sharing it. That’s the idea to stir the pot and get the
discussion going. So that’s what gives me satisfaction.
Dan
Cirucci: 18:55 And, and you’ve, I
think would, would people will come to realize if they go to the site is that
conservatism is a big tent, right? And it’s fascinating the sorts of people
that are drawn to it and the reasons why they are drawn to it. You’ve had
African American conservatives on there, you have gay conservative one there
that you’ve interviewed. The conservative movement today is a very broad and
vital movement.
Jordan
Rickards: 19:25 Yeah. Actually, the
gay person they had on there was a a gay, illegal immigrant Trump supporter.
And a, what, what you find if you listen to people like that is that you don’t
have to apologize for conservatism. There are certainly some things that you
can’t be entirely doctrinaire about and you can’t you can’t be thoughtless
about it and you have to realize that other people have perspectives too. And
there’s probably something to what they’re saying, but you don’t have to
apologize for believing that everybody should have opportunities in this world.
You don’t have to apologize for believing that socialism is wrong and that it
hurts the very people it purports to be able to help that. If you’re a
conservative, you don’t have to say, “Oh, I’m a conservative, but I, but I
don’t hate the poor.” You can say I’m a conservative because I love the
poor, because I love African-Americans, because I care about gay Americans and
immigrant Americans. And that’s why I don’t want to see them hurt by what the
left is doing, which has failed everywhere it’s been tried.
Dan
Cirucci: 20:17 It’s sort of like
when president Trump said to African Americans, you’ve tried the other side and
it hasn’t work, come to me. What do you have to lose?
Jordan
Rickards: 20:31 That’s true. But
words will just go so far and once you say it, you have to actually do
something. And I actually wrote an essay that suggested president Trump should
advance his own civil rights act. That’s based on, you know, school choice for
one thing. School choice being a civil right, a good job being a civil right, a
college education that’s affordable as a civil right, and call it the civil
rights act and go into these cities and campaign for it and tell them that it’s
your Congressman who you elected, this Democrat, who’s opposing your kids going
to a better school because they’ve sold you out to the teachers unions.
Dan
Cirucci: 21:02 Oh yes. School
choice. I mean, it’s really sad. It’s really a shame.
Jordan
Rickards: 21:07 The money we spend
spending $40,000 a year to send some kid to some failure factory in Camden, for
that much money, you can send them to the best private schools in this state
and they’ll have an opportunities to succeed.
Dan
Cirucci: 21:18 You know, Jordan,
I’m so impressed with your breadth of knowledge and not only that, like your
passion, regarding these, these issues and so forth. But what do you do for
fun? Jordan.
Jordan
Rickards: 21:31 This is, well, this
is my idea of fun. I mean I’m seeing a nice young woman at the time right now
and that’s wonderful and everything and so that takes up a lot of my free time.
But even before that, I mean this is what’s fun to me. You know, politics is
fun. American history is fun.
Speaker
2: 21:45 Oh, it certainly is
fun and I’ve enjoyed it myself from a very early age. This has been a
fascinating conversation with Jordan Rickards founder of conservative opinion,
and he has his own law offices in Middlesex County. Check him out and we’re
going to end with a quote here. When the advocates, as we always do, and this
is a quote from the queen of pop culture herself, Oprah Winfrey, here’s what
she said. And it’s good thing to remember where there is no struggle. There is
no strength. This is Dan Cirucci This is The Advocates. Thanks for tuning in.
