Back in America

If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Welcome to Back in America, the podcast. This is Stan Bertelot and we are on Back in America. I'm a French journalist living in Princeton, New Jersey, and I'm delighted to welcome you all to this live interview. In this podcast, I explore Americans' identity, culture, and values. My guest will join us in just a few minutes. He's a social justice warrior, a social media expert, and a Twitter celebrity, an author, a digital designer, and a proud father of five. And I will add that he's pissed off.

He's been upset at the politics of this country since November 8, 2016, and the election of Donald Trump. So upset, in fact, that he decided to change his Twitter handle to Brooklyn Dad Defiant. He rapidly grew his Twitter fans to over 665,000 followers, becoming one of the most popular anti-Trump commentators on Twitter. Brooklyn Dad Defiant has been quoted across the globe, from LOPs in France to Newsweek and CBS in the US. Today in Back in America, we will try to go beyond the Twitter personal in order to understand who's the man behind the indoor. So welcome to Back in America, Majid Padelan. Hi, Stan. Thank you for having me on the show. So before we dive into the world of Twitter and politics, let's go back to your pre-Trump era. You are an art director and you

worked for big names companies such as Pricewaterhouse, Cooper, and Ernst & Young, right? I've seen some of your work, and they are extremely polished, professional, high-end graphic design. At the time, you wore suits and ties. When did you start to consider yourself an activist? Well, I guess that would have been 2016. I mean, my life prior to November 9th, the day that we all learned that Donald Trump won the election, my life before that was, I was relatively unconcerned with the goings-on in the White House and in Congress. I mean, even, I would say even during the presidency of George W. Bush, I didn't like the guy and I definitely didn't like what he did with the Iraq War, but you still got the sense that there was someone relatively competent

in the White House unlike what it is today. I guess I became an activist when I realized that I had a voice that people kind of wanted to hear, people wanted to listen to, and more and more people were joining me on this journey, this journey of defiance, I guess you could say. On election night, I saw a lot of people in discussion rooms, people that I had been talking about. We were planning tweet storms and when they learned that he won, they're like, okay, well, I guess I'm just going to pack it in and hide my head because these trolls are going to come after me. I was like, what? That's insane. This is the time when we need to stand up. Yeah, that was when I changed it to Brooklyn Dag Defiant. I didn't set out on this road

with the intention of being an activist, but I guess that is kind of what I turned into because I realized how critical it is that we avoid having this fascist in the White House for another four years. America will be unrecognizable if that happens. When you say you're an activist, I mean, I see yourself as being an anti-Trump. What are your fights? Do you have any other fights? Oh, yeah. Obviously, Black Lives Matter is very important to me because I have three Black adult sons and I've had the talk with them. The talk is when you tell your young Black son that if you are in a police encounter, if you are stopped or pulled over by police, you must comply with them. You must not resist. You must be respectful and polite.

Don't worry about anything else. I will get you out of prison. We will get lawyers. I cannot replace you. It's scary when you see other people's children get shot and they weren't armed, they weren't being threatened. It's scary when you realize that could happen to your son just because of the color of his skin. That is a cause that is near and dear to my heart.

Today, how many hours would you say you spend on Twitter? To me, it feels like 24 hours a day. Okay. If I had to guess, I'd say somewhere between 12 and 16 hours.

Yeah, there are several groups that I have aligned myself with for the purpose of helping elect Joe Biden in November. Not just Joe Biden, but also blue Democratic candidates throughout the country. There's one group called Demcast 14. Demcast 14 set up a website, demcast.com. What it does, it's like a resource center. It helps you find candidates to support financially. You can make a donation there. You can also volunteer your time to fill out postcards or do a phone bank thing or text bank or appear at events. It even has a center that has tweets already set up, pre-written tweets that you can just customize yourself and share. That's really helpful. There's another group called NDLB, No Dem Left Behind. They focus on getting

Democratic candidates elected in rural districts, red rural districts. These are winnable, but they don't have a lot of bandwidth. They don't have a lot of visibility. Guys like me, who have a pretty large following, it's helpful that I can amplify their candidacy and help them to be seen. Another group, Really American. Really American is a great group that I do consulting for. I help craft the messaging for these awesome videos that we've been putting out that are it's like a one-two punch at Donald Trump. It's similar to the Midas Touch group or Vote Vets or groups like that that are producing content that tell the story. They tell a persuasive story about why Donald Trump is the wrong choice for president and Joe Biden is the right choice.

I really want to come back to that internet war that we are creating. Before anything, I've got a very basic question. Do you think anything positive can come out of all that noise on social media?

Absolutely. I think people, first of all, are becoming more aware of issues like since climate change is something that I'm going to be 100% honest. I fully support the science that says climate change is real and that climate change is an impending catastrophe on humanity, not just America, but on humanity as a whole. I didn't really know much about it, despite the fact that guys like Al Gore have been talking about it since 2000, 2001. He's been pushing this. Actually, I also learned that people in America have been concerned with climate change since the, I think, the 80s and maybe even the 70s. It's been something that scientists have been tracking and following and some politicians have been talking about, but

these big fossil fuel companies have been squashing the noise and keeping it down.

But yeah, we are having discussions, this whole thing. We are having discussions in social media about things that are very important to everybody, women's choice, healthcare. Healthcare is a big thing too. Actually, I learned in the past year how important healthcare is because the past year, my wife broke her ankle and sprained another ankle. My daughter broke her arm. My son broke his, I swear to God, in my whole life, I've never had so many broken limbs in a family short period of time. At the time, I was still working. Okay, so you were insured. Yeah, I was insured, but I could not afford to put my family on healthcare. Under my employer

provided health care, it was so expensive. I had to choose between the mortgage and the healthcare. I had to choose the mortgage because we need a roof over our heads.

So I had to come out of pocket for those expenses and they're not x-rayed. Yeah, there is no safety net in this country. Definitely not. I mean, me coming from Europe, the difference is blatant. You lose your job, you lose your healthcare. Let me ask you, and I'm sure it's a question that a lot of your followers have. You said you spend most of your day on the internet. You are so active with the political crazed going on at the moment. Where do you make your money? Well, with freelance graphic design, when I can find it, with message consulting. So like I said before, when I do message consulting, that is an actual skill. It involves writing. It also involves design. So yeah. And then if I could really include

my book, The Littlest President. I was planning on talking about that. Yeah. So do you make any money?

Not enough, really not enough to support a family. If you are self-publishing a book and you think you're going to get rich, unless you get an appearance on like Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah's The Daily Show. One of those things where like a bunch of people find out about it all at once, then yeah, you can make some money. But really it's hard work. Because I've spent so much time focused on these political issues, it's taken a lot of time away from promoting my book. So let's talk about that. The Littlest President, what did you try to achieve with that? Why did you write it? The idea came a year ago. Donald Trump was in the middle of a controversy. It was the Ukraine phone call. It's a perfect call. It was a perfect call. And he was

tweeting mean tweets towards Adam Schiff, who is in the House of Representatives. And he was calling Adam Schiff little L-I-D-D-L-E, little apostrophe, little apostrophe Adam Schiff. And I thought it was weird that he kept going back to this. And then it started to get funny. And then one day he blew up because CNN dropped the apostrophe. And then on Twitter, he called that apostrophe a hyphen. And I was like, this stuff is ridiculous to not document. It's too ridiculous. And I just thought the Littlest President would be like the perfect title for this book. And I drew it. So I literally made him a little president. Excellent. Yeah. I wanted to make it like a children's book because the way he speaks and the way he writes and the way he attacks his enemies is so childish.

I thought, OK, so let's frame this in a children's book format. So it's landscape. It's a hardcover book. And it's got a childlike narrative throughout. But the narrative itself is very true to actual events. It tells the story of how a horrible little man, who was a

draft dodger, a tax cheat, a horrible dad, how he rose to the highest office in the country. And it tells the story of his inevitable bigly fall. Well, yeah, that is still to be seen. But yeah, well, let's go back to the internet and what's going on. A Pew Research Center study claimed that 97% of the tweets from US adults that mentioned national politics came from just 10% of the users. And I'm sure you are one of those 10%. How does that make you feel and how do you see your role? So I'm a big comic book fan. I love comic books. And my favorite comic book character is Spider-Man. And Spider-Man learned in a very hard lesson early on that with great power comes great

responsibility. He was given these gifts. He can climb walls and he has super strength and super speed. And he was given these gifts. He can climb walls and he has super strength and super speed. And despite that, he was unable to save his Uncle Ben because he was being a jerk. And so he took that seriously. And I take that seriously, too. I realize that not very many people have an audience the size that I have. And I'm not even sure I reach all of them at the same time. But I understand that I have a responsibility to use that audience for good, for good. And I think the best good I can do right now is to help not only elect Joe Biden, but elect as many Democratic candidates across the country so that we can give Joe Biden a helpful

Congress so he can actually get something done. Let's say if Joe Biden gets in, if he's elected, but he has a Republican-controlled Congress. That means anything he wants to do, he won't get it done because the Congress will just stop him. So we need all of these lower, we need the senators, we need representatives, and then we need mayors and governors and all those folks to help him restore America, help them build back better. We are in dire straits right now. There's almost 200,000 people have died from COVID, and there is still no national plan. He won't agree to a national mask mandate, despite the fact that it's proven masks will help prevent the spread of COVID-19. I mean, it's so basic. You don't need millions and millions of dollars

for ventilators and heavy duty medical equipment and all this stuff. If you can just prevent it from spreading. But instead, he's having rallies with thousands of people, none of them socially distanced, none of them wearing masks, and it's just compounding. It's compounding the issue that we're having. Then these people, they go back to their communities. I saw something yesterday where it says one person can spread it to 400 people. This guy, he continues to even poke fun at people who are wearing masks. It's the most irresponsible I've ever seen any national leader in my entire life. I heard you say anger is the best thing to kick out depression. Absolutely. Anger can sometimes be very constructive. By the way, if I said that, that's not wrong. If somebody is

sitting in their house and they're depressed, the best way to get them out of their house is throw a brick through their window and watch them get up and start doing something.

Donald Trump was that brick that crashed into all of our windows. Look, I was just happily living my life before 2016. You know what I was using Twitter for? I was tweeting about TV shows and complaining about the bad ones, tweeting about movies, tweeting about businesses that you like bad customer service experiences. That's what I was tweeting. I was probably using Twitter once a week, maybe at the most. I was happy doing that. I just said the other day, I'm starting to really hate politics because I feel like I am plugged in to this 100% of the time. When I wake up, the first thing I do is I check my phone to see if this idiot has gotten us into a war with anyone yet or if he's resigned. I'm looking for one of those two things. Let's talk about Trump.

I don't know if you know, but at the beginning of his time at the White House, Trump was tweeting and retweeting about 164 tweets per month. That number increased to 986 tweets or retweets per month in the recent month. That's a five-fold increase. We know that for Trump, Twitter is a direct link to his voter and it's also a way to create news coverage. I know you hate Trump, but we have to concede that the guy is sort of a master when it comes to using Trump. Would you agree with that? No. I think he knows he's figured out that in order to get the news cycle off of his previous outrage, just to do something a little bit more outrageous and just keep the cycle going.

A week ago, we were talking about the fact that he admitted to Bob Woodward that he downplayed the virus. A week before that, we were talking about the fact that he called our fallen soldiers suckers and losers. Every week, it's a different outrage. I've seen people say that, oh, he's brilliant. He's intentionally misspelling these things. I don't think so. There's no hidden value to his misspelling things unless he wants to project the image that he's like, I'm stupid like you guys. If that's the message that he is trying to convey, then maybe, oh yeah, maybe that's brilliant. When I was in school, I was a nerd. There used to be a time when being smart was not cool. By the time my kids were in school, being smart actually turned into that's a good thing.

I don't know if his culture war includes the smart folks versus the dumb folks, and we're the dumb folks, and there's more of us than there are smart folks. If that's his hidden culture war, then yeah, maybe he's brilliant. I think it's a long-term loser losing strategy if you're trying to somehow denigrate. They call people like myself elites because we're educated. I'm sorry. There's nothing wrong with being educated. That's what we want for our children. That is the whole purpose of trying to shove our kids back into COVID-infested schools because we want to educate them, right? Or is it because schools are now babysitters, so we, the parents, can go back to COVID-infested workplaces where we have to sign a waiver

that if we are infected by COVID, it is not the employer's fault. Education is very important. I just learned today on Twitter that two-thirds of America's youth don't even know that the Holocaust killed six million Jews. They don't know this. We're in a public school. It's scary. All right. I can get a read of the idea that somehow you sort of played Trump's game and I'm afraid that a lot of people may think that you are polarizing this nation within two blocks of people just fighting on the internet, one against the other. I mean, what do you say to people that might think that?

I would disagree. Look, if what I say is polarizing, so be it, but you do have to pick a side. You do have to pick a side now. This is not somebody who is a regular leader. This is not a George W. Bush. This is not a Ronald Reagan. It's not a Jimmy Carter. It's not a Gerald Ford. This is a guy who has lied 20,000 times, and his most recent, most deadly lie was saying, this is going to go away, COVID-19. COVID-19 disrupted people's lives here throughout the planet. What's disrupted everything is the fact that we don't have a national plan because this guy tried to downplay it so that the stock markets wouldn't panic. All he cares about is the stock market. He doesn't care about lives. He doesn't care about saying, how difficult would it be to

stand in front of the TV and say, look, the most patriotic thing you can do as an American is wear a mask. That's the most patriotic thing. You know what? If I'm being polarizing for calling out his lies on a daily basis, so be it. I'll be polarizing. I don't really care. I feel it's that important. I would much rather sit down and enjoy reading my comic book. And watch my movie. Seriously. I would be so happy doing that. That was my life in 2015.

I wasn't on this at all. A bit controversial here again. I like to get you going.

Some people say that we are increasingly living online in a filter bubble that only exposes us to the idea that we already agree with. And honestly, when I look at your feed and all the comments, yes, you have the occasional troll, but most of the people that subscribe to your Twitter feed obviously like what you post and like your ideas and agree with you. So is it achieving anything? Yeah, I think so. And here's why. 2016 was when I was baptized in the Twitter waters. And that's when I learned firsthand what was happening. And what was happening in 2016 and what's happening again today is there are a ton of online trolls, Russian bots, produced by bots and they were produced to insert a lot of chaos and confusion. They were introduced to have us

fighting each other. So there were some Russian troll bots that look like me, for instance,

pretend to be a liberal Democrat. And then there are other Russian troll bots that look like conservative Republicans. And they have these things infiltrating and flooding our social media conversations to start up trouble, to start up trouble. So I am that steady ship navigating through the nonsense. If people are coming to my feed to confirm what they already know, that's fine. But I'm not here for that. I'm here to keep folks focused, to keep them motivated, energized and plugged in. In the last election, 2016, we had over 100 million people that did not vote. If my tweet can reach one more person that didn't vote in 2016, I'm already ahead of the game. If I post a tweet that goes viral and somebody posts it on Reddit or Facebook or whatever

and somebody's like, yeah, that guy makes some sense. He's making some good sense, then mission accomplished. Have you seen that happen already? Yeah. Yeah. Do you have an example? I don't have a specific example. I get people text messaging me and saying, hey, Majid, I saw your tweet on Facebook the other day. Wow, that's really cool. Just this morning, somebody messaged me on Facebook, Facebook Messenger, says, hey, I see you're making an impact. And this is a guy, let me tell you how random this is. This is a guy that I used to work with at a place called ENK International. It's like a fashion trade show company. That was a low point in my graphic design career. And this guy, Kevin, this is a guy I hadn't spoken to in probably 10

years. And just out of the blue, he's like, hey, I see you're making an impact. So I think it's great. I'm not only using my Twitter for angry rants. In fact, my rants have decreased as my Twitter feed is full of more candidate endorsements, messages for volunteer to be a pollster, to work the polls, volunteer to do this, donate money for that. Well, I must say, it takes some guts to do what you do. Have you been threatened in online or real life? Yeah, not so much in real life, mostly online. And when it looks like a serious threat, I report them to Twitter for whatever good that does. I've been threatened sometimes and Twitter does absolutely nothing. And that's bizarre. Yeah, I've had some people email me nasty things. In

fact, on my previous job, I was actually, yeah, so that would be a real life example. My last job that I lost on March 21st, there were trolls who were emailing the company and saying, your employee Majid Pardellan is tweeting things that are negative about the president and we don't like it. And if you don't fire him, we're never going to do business with you. And it's weird because I never posted anything about my previous employer on my Twitter. In fact, to this day, I'll talk about my previous employer and I don't say his name, I don't say the name of the company. They would call up the office phone screaming, Brooklyn, dad, dad. So yeah.

How did your employer react? So he himself was a Trump supporter. Yeah. And I used to walk into his office and he would have bright bark.com on his computer screen in January of this year, January. He brought me into the office and he says, you cannot tweet between the hours of 12 midnight and 7 PM. So mind you, I only worked there from 9 30 to 6 30. And I said, how are you going to tell me I can't tweet during the, I'm not even working for you during those are my own personal hours that it is what it is. He told me. And he says, and another thing, no more posting about racial issues. I said, you do realize I'm your only black employee, right? I realized that that is an integral part of my life. Well, we can't have it. It's inflammatory. And he said,

no more dropping bombs. No. And, you know, I never represented myself as his employee on my Twitter. You know, did he fire you ultimately? Yeah. But not as a result of I, I adhered to his demands, right? He didn't put it in writing. I learned afterwards if he had put it in writing, I would have had some kind of legal recourse against him, but he didn't put it in writing. And I think he did that intentionally. The day that I launched my book, The Littlest President, I got a phone call from him maybe 15 minutes after I finished my live broadcast. And he said, we're closing up the shop, go file for unemployment. And, and that was that. Well, I've got a question here from Rebecca Gillespie. What will your platform morph into come November 3rd, if the landscape changes?

What are the plans? Are you involved in other activism?

Ah, well, that's an excellent question. March 23rd, two days after I lost my job, I started broadcasting a show from Twitter or from Periscope and it's called Storytime with BDD. And originally, I started that as a way to help people help distract people from the propaganda press briefings that they were having. It was supposed to be about coronavirus, but it turned into anything but. And so people are like, I'm not going to watch that. I said, okay, watch this. It's a one hour show where we cover the current events of the previous 24 hours. And then in the last 15 minutes, I read a few pages from my book. I've already read this book on the show, probably about 10 times. Seriously, it's a fun book. It's really fun. It's available

on BrooklynDadDefiant.com. So I will most likely keep that show going because I have a community of people who tune in. You do. It's amazing. You've got hundreds of people tuning in. Yeah. And they're friends with each other. Like these are people that came together on the platform that I created. And what is this ritual you got at the beginning when you call out everybody? Ah, the roll call. Yeah, that's the roll call. People like that. Basically, I'm just reading the comments on the screen and they tell me their name and where they're from. Deborah Baldini says me. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, for the regulars, I have this, you know, I have a relationship with a lot of the regular people who show up. And it's fun. It's some good

feelings. People say, you know what, you are the highlight of my day. I look forward to storytime with BDD. I will probably be a lot less active when Joe Biden is elected. I will probably be a lot less active on a daily basis. I won't feel that life or death compulsion to, you know, to keep things going, to keep people energized. But I will still feel the need like if, for instance, if Mitch McConnell, God forbid, if Mitch McConnell is not defeated, then I will still have a purpose on Twitter because he is the worst. He's sitting. Mitch McConnell is the senator, the U.S. Senator from the state of Kentucky, and he is sitting on 500 bills that have been passed by the House. And he refuses to even bring them to a vote. And why is he even getting a salary, a paycheck,

if he won't bring these issues, these critical issues to vote? What is election security? How do you have Donald Trump saying that there are going to be foreign powers? He said there are going to be foreign countries interfering in our election and you won't bring up election security. That is insane. It's insane. Of course, you know, he's just saying things. Donald Trump is just, here's the thing that pisses me off the most about Donald Trump. Okay, nobody likes to be lied to, right? And when someone is lying to you, when someone's a bad liar and they're lying to you and you know it, it's insulting. It's insulting to your intelligence, right? If you, Stan, if you knew somebody in your personal life and you knew for a fact they lied to you three times, just three

times, would you want to continue a relationship with them? Of course, no, but that brings the question. How come Trump supporters don't see that? Do they see it? Do they realize he's lying? Do they care? There are two realities. Or do they live in a different reality? Yeah, there are alternate realities and he has created this bubble where everything that is negative about Donald Trump is fake news. That's it. It's fake news. Even if his voice is recorded, either video or audio recording, he'll say that's fake news. And this is where I come back to his usage of Twitter. I mean, the guy got it very quickly that by addressing his public directly without the filter of the press, he could do whatever he wants. In my podcast, which is really

trying to understand what is America from my perspective as a European, I ask a very basic question at the end of each of my podcasts to my guests. It's what is America to you? America is my home. I was born here, lived here all my life and I love America. I love the opportunity that I have. I love the freedom that I have. And it's imperfect. It's flawed. There are people from many different backgrounds and many different beliefs and they have many different opinions about it. Some folks will tell you, if you don't like it, you should leave. But no, I believe if you like America, if you love America, then you should be willing to fight for it. You should be willing to fight to make America better. That's not always a conversation that is

pleasant or easy, but it's a conversation that has to happen. I used to tell my kids when they were growing up, if you love somebody, if you care about them and they have a booger hanging from their nose, you should tell them. You should tell them. And why did this come up? I think one of the kids might have had a booger hanging from their nose. I said, if I let you walk around with that booger hanging from your nose and everybody else can see it, including me, and I don't tell you, that means I don't love you. That means even though it's... And the point was, when things are difficult, when it's difficult to tell somebody something and you still tell them, it means you care enough to tell them. So yeah, America, if you don't like what

Brooklyn Dad has to say or us liberals, what we have to say, tough. We're going to say it because we love America too. And we believe that America can and should be better. And it's not going to get better if we don't admit that there's a problem that needs to be addressed. Yeah, right on. I like that. Do you have any books or movies that you would recommend? So we are currently watching a show called Ozark on Netflix and it stars Jason Bateman. It's fantastic. It's basically a story about a guy who launders money. So he is an anti-hero. You should not be rooting for him, but yet you are because he faces crisis after crisis after crisis. There's a deadly dangerous drug dealer who is right on his heels. And then he moves down to Louisiana to... Wait, Mississippi?

Somewhere down south. Okay. He moved down to Ozark and there's even more danger for him and his family, his wife and his two kids. There's even more danger for them down there. And it kind of feels, so far it kind of feels like, have you ever seen the show Breaking Bad? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Ah, so it kind of feels like that, except Jason Bateman is a much better Walter White. He's got ice water in his veins. It's a terrific show. I highly recommend it. Yeah. I would watch it. And the book. Oh yeah. How come? Yeah, I should have thought about it.

Yes. So The Littlest President is available on BrooklynDadDefiant.com, also available on Amazon.com. You got to make sure you spell Littlest correctly. You need to make the typo, right? And in the very beginning of the book, you get the end of the story.

Which is your Twitter. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Finally, do you think that country will heal? Yeah, I think it will heal. And I think Joe Biden is the perfect guy to heal it. And I'm not just saying that because I dislike Trump. I'm saying it because Joe Biden is a man full of compassion. He's a man who has suffered tremendous loss in his life. You can't heal unless you have a guy at the top, guy or woman, man or woman, who has dealt with loss, who has empathy, who has compassion. They have to have those qualities. Yeah, I think Joe Biden is a guy who has proven over the length of his career, he's proven the ability to talk across the aisle, as they say. There are people, there are Republicans who like

Joe Biden and like and respect Joe Biden. And the process of healing, it's not going to be overnight. It's not going to be like November 4th, we're going to be healed. And in fact, it's going to take a while. It's going to take a while. There's going to be a lot of hurt feelings. He's not a guy who is going to be antagonizing the people who didn't vote for him. And that's the difference. That's the difference. Donald Trump has spent the past four hours trolling Democrats and trolling the states that did not support him. He's been, you know, just very wicked and malicious. And Joe Biden is the complete opposite of that persona. So healing, yeah, we will heal. I shudder to think what will happen to America if Trump is reelected. That's a reality I don't even want to consider.

Right. Well, let's stay on this optimistic note. The country will heal. Majid, thank you so much. Thank you so much for making time for Back in America today. And we'll keep on following your adventure online. Thank you for having me. A pleasure.