Latest / Breaking The Meta / Justice of the Peace: The Race Nobody's Watching — Will Robertson
Transcript
- Breaking The Meta: Hello everyone and welcome to Breaking the Meta. My name is Mike Winson. Today we are sitting down with Will Robertson who is running for the Justice of the Peace in Denton County. Now I know people are going, Mike, you have never interviewed someone who's going for the Justice of the Peace. I don't even know what the Justice of the Peace is. And you know what? Me neither. ⁓ So it happens, there's two reasons we're doing this. Will. ⁓ was actually running for a different seat at one point and then changed to this. But also, I happen to be friends with someone who is very close to Will. And, you know, I will help out anybody that can use a little bit of help. this feels like not only can I help Will, but we can have a teaching moment for anyone that doesn't happen to know what a Justice of the Peace is and why knowing who you're voting for and voting for someone in the Justice of the Peace is just as important as any of the other seats that we're talking about. Well, hello. Thank you for being here today. Will: Thanks for having me. ⁓ Yeah, so it's funny that you say that because honestly, ⁓ before I started looking into running for the position, I was pretty ignorant on what ⁓ JustBeast did also. I was like, all right, let me see what I'm gonna get into ⁓ here. Look, whenever I was planning on running for Congress, it was very easy. I knew exactly the points I wanna attack, affordability, demasking, ICE regulation, all of the things that we are all screaming about. Breaking The Meta: Ha ha! Will: on social media, right? And then I met the current candidate for ⁓ the Democratic Party for Congress in my district. And I was like, you know what? He's a nice dude. And I aligned with him on many things. And I don't want to take away from the hard work and the momentum that he had. ⁓ Because I think too often the Democratic Party splits and fights among itself, so much so that it's to our own detriment. ⁓ Whereas like you don't see that on the right side, right? The Republican party will literally change their values to make sure that their friends are still protected. ⁓ So justice and peace, right? ⁓ It's that it's really a, it's a nonpartisan job, right? There, shouldn't be political. It really shouldn't. ⁓ We're there to enforce the laws. So in the state of Texas to be a justice piece. You actually don't have to have a law degree or have passed the bar. They call it the people's court. ⁓ They used to call it the cowboy court. ⁓ But it's, yeah, it's Texas. So ⁓ justice of peace is going to deal with things like misdemeanors, ⁓ a lot of evictions, a lot of truancy for children that are missing too much school. Breaking The Meta: I'd use Texas, so that's not surprising. Will: ⁓ small claims court, things like that, right? ⁓ Dealing with ⁓ marriage certificates, death certificates, just general community things. And that's really once I went in and I was talking to my local Democratic chair and I was like, hey, I'm tired of just complaining about what's going on. I want to get involved. How do I get involved? And we were looking through all this stuff and they're like, well, here's where we need stuff. And I was like, all right, talking through and I was like, I wanna make an impact locally because we've seen all the amazing people that we have in Washington or at the state Senate doing everything they can and it's still hard. It's still roadblocks after roadblock. And so I was like, I wanna start out locally, impact my community and then go from there versus being this young guy who's attractive, who thinks he can just. win by his looks and get into Congress, right? I was like, let me go learn what I need to be doing to better my community. That way, whenever I do go to Washington, I don't lose touch. Long-winded answer, but I think the answer to what justice and peace does was in there somewhere. Breaking The Meta: It was in there, yes, yes, yes. ⁓ Well, why don't we just give us a little background, just who you are. And you sort of said it a little bit, but if there's like why you specifically decided to run for office in the first place, obviously you let us know why you changed, but give us a little bit of your background, but then why you decided you wanted to run in the first place. Will: So ⁓ I'm actually not from Texas. I tell people all the time and they kind of like give me a weird look, especially whenever I'm running for an office in Texas. Yeah, I've been here long enough, right? ⁓ So I always say I chose Texas. And in my opinion, that's more important because I didn't get stuck here. I chose to come here and have a life and have a family here. ⁓ But I grew up in Northern California. Breaking The Meta: You do have that kind of Texas sound to you. Okay. Will: and Idaho. ⁓ I say my four years were in Idaho, right? Middle school, high school. And man, I grew up in Idaho in the like, early 2000s. And it felt like we're in the 80s. ⁓ Just it was like 10 years behind everything. And I was a horrible student. I hated school in high school. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. ⁓ My best friend at the time who was supposed to go to college with moved away. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Mmm. Will: changed plans and I was like, all right, well, I don't know what to do now. And so I had many friends who got out of high school and went to the Marine Corps, talked to them a little bit, looked at all the different branches. And then the Marine Corps was the one that looked at me the least crazy, right? ⁓ Cause I was a gung ho, gung ho kid, man. was, I was, I was raised very conservative. Fox news was a religion in my house. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Will: ⁓ I wanted to take the fight to the enemy. Like I told the army recruiter, I was like, Hey man, I want to shoot shit and blow shit up and go kick down the door of the enemy. And he looked at me like I was nuts in the Marine overheard me and he was like, Hey, come over here. And so that was my ⁓ lead into becoming a Marine. So I became an infantry machine gunner. I was stationed in Camp Pendleton and I held those Breaking The Meta: There you go. Will: conservative values pretty much up until when I am by values. I mean the propaganda, right? America is the best. We lead in everything like everywhere else sucks and like they're evil. And so my first deployment was a Mew, which is a Marine expedition unit. And we, we, was the 31st. So we went to Okinawa, Japan, which was my first time being out of the States and Breaking The Meta: Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Will: Big culture shock, right? And I loved it. I loved being around other cultures, learning the history, just really understanding that across the world, people are the same. We want safety for our family. We want to make sure they're fed and protected. And we want love and the ability to love the ones that we love. And the real wake up call is we did a Breaking The Meta: I bet, yeah. Will: a training mission to Thailand. And we're getting off the ships and we come up on this beach and we get out of like these amphibious vehicles. And I step onto the beach for the first time and I look to my left and right and it's this beautiful Thai beach. And as far as I can see, there's about a two foot mound by three foot of trash in both directions on the shoreline. Just... Breaking The Meta: Mm. Will: littering the whole place. And I then thought back to being on ship and watching some of the guys just having to throw trash overboard. And I was like, ⁓ we might be the problem. We might be actually the bad guys a little bit here. And then I went on to work ⁓ in embassies. So I was in Marine security guard. I worked at embassies all over the world. Breaking The Meta: Hehehehehe Will: I was in Bangladesh, Tokyo, ⁓ Paris, France, three missions to Africa. And in every place, I found the same thing to be true. Everyone just wanted to protect their loved ones and to live their lives without the fear of harm. And I saw what corrupt politics did for that. I saw what misinformation did with that. And there was... times when I even saw how misinformation was helping America. There was a time when I was in a country in Africa that was in the middle of a coup, and we were right there in the heart of it to protect ⁓ the consulate from getting overran. And I think we had maybe 18 Marines, and I was a squad leader at the time. And all of the intel that was getting dispersed by locals was that we had 300 plus. Breaking The Meta: Wow. Will: So there was times that the misinformation saved us and prevented a catastrophic event, but it really just showed the manipulation. ⁓ So I go through my five years in the Marine Corps. ⁓ I decided to get out after a lot of deliberating of being like, do I want to sleep in the cold, like mud all the time, or would I like to sleep next to my beautiful fiance? And I chose her. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: You And I'm sure she appreciates that as much as you do. Will: I know I do still. ⁓ So I got out and I decided to go do political science ⁓ for my undergrad. But I fell in love with acting. And so I ended up actually switching ⁓ my major at Southern Methodist University. And I did film and television and media. ⁓ And then then I learned how much were manipulated by. Breaking The Meta: Mmm! Okay. Will: our propaganda, like our biggest export in America is propaganda. And I think most people don't realize that our media and our, are just popular music, popular films, popular TV shows, that is our biggest export. And that, that we're losing the propaganda war now against these other countries like China, India, ⁓ Korea. Korea is doing great. ⁓ So I learned a lot about just the fakeness of anything that's on a screen, right? And how dangerous it is. And then I opened a small business. I'm a photographer also. It's a passion I picked up early in my life as a child and then continued with my travels. And I've used that to bring some of that happiness to the families, right, that I get to take photos of. Breaking The Meta: Okay. Will: To get to your question of what was it that made me want to run? Well, when we were looking at 2024 election coming up and Biden was still in the race, I was like, oh man, I was like, we were not doing it. We're not doing it right. I was like, I don't know what they're doing, but I was like, we need younger people to get involved. And so I decided to go back to school for my master's in political science. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Mmm. Will: So I'm about to finish up at the University of Arizona ⁓ with international security. ⁓ And it was scary that every class I was taking, every thing, every subject was so relevant. We were talking about tariffs in the middle of like coming up on the election, right? And how horrible, like how much they don't make sense ⁓ for what the actions we're trying to achieve. Russian-Ukraine conflict, all these things. And I was like, Breaking The Meta: Nice. Yep. Will: I started my TikTok. Some of those out there might know me as Sergeant Rob, who started off just very pissed off. And I'm still a little pissed off, I think as we all should be. But I just sat one day and I was like, know, I can't keep just screaming into the void. I was like, I do the best when I'm around people. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Mm. Will: and when I'm impacting change and there's no reason that people of our generation shouldn't be leading the way. I think it's time, it's in every previous generation, our age bracket would be coming up on taking over control and it's this, for whatever reason, the prior generations are really not wanting to let that happen. And I think it's a manipulation of everything we've talked about, right? Wealth, ⁓ politics, it's all just, it's been a ride. Breaking The Meta: Yeah, yeah, that's an understatement, I think. ⁓ Well, it. It's amazing to me how common that experience is for you. actually, ⁓ Just as I always found it interesting talking to veterans about what's ⁓ stuff that's going on in the world today, ⁓ specifically in regard as someone who has been around the world. A lot of things have happened in this last year that have. destroyed is probably a good way of putting it, ⁓ the United States place at the table. The world order, the work that this country has done to place themselves, whether good or bad, at the head of most tables in the world ⁓ has really been damaged in the last year, whether you're talking those tariffs or Venezuela or Greenland. or the back and forth of tariffs with some of our closest allies or NATO, know, talking about leaving NATO, leaving the who, ⁓ things like that. What do you see as America's place going forward in a situation like this? Because there's going to be a supreme lack of trust by a lot of our allies in the United States moving forward. Will: As there should be. ⁓ like it's it's been one thing like like we've always been foreign like at the forefront of our motivations has always been world superiority for the United States because that's just the safest thing. Now, I think there's a lot of rebuilding that needs to happen. I think there's a lot of programs that need to be reinstated, brought back. ⁓ USAID, for instance, is the first one that I thought of whenever we were talking. I worked closely with USAID members all over the world. ⁓ As embassy employee and a diplomat, we were right there. They had offices. We did events with them. We saw the impact that they had on the communities in which we were in the countries of. And I think it's so important to remind ourselves, yeah, we might've been doing things that were in a selfish interest, but we also were giving back. And we had individuals who were trying to truly better the situation of the country they were in, right? And to rip away that not only affects those countries, because they weren't just free handouts, but it affects America too, as we've seen with the farmers. Breaking The Meta: Mm. Will: Like how many farms have been lost to foreclosure because their USAID contracts were ripped out from under them. Because guess what? Americans don't, they don't eat soybeans all the time. Like, and it's just ridiculous to see how many have fallen into that trap, but it's a trap that we built ourselves. And so yeah, to answer your question, I think there's a lot of rebuilding, a lot of trust that needs to be brought back. and our allies have no reason to trust us right now. And to be honest, it's hard for Americans to trust us right now. I mean, with everything going on, the fact that no one trusts us, that makes me feel better about their instincts, right? Because if they were still on our side, full blown, I would be a little worried that we're all just doomed. Breaking The Meta: A little bit, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if you look at the nations that are, quote, still on our side, they're not the ones that I want to be on that list. So getting back to your county and what you hope to do there, what kind of issues Will: Yeah. Breaking The Meta: is Den County feeling as a whole and how do you see the justice of the piece helping in that regard? Will: ⁓ So we are growing rapidly, like massively. ⁓ The neighborhood that I live in here is 10,000 plus homes and it's pretty new, right? ⁓ Over the past 10 years, but they're about to like quadruple the size of Denton with a couple of the new ⁓ developments that they're working on out here. And the infrastructure is been a big issue. So we're going to see a rapid increase in the misdemeanor crimes of tickets and evictions. Evictions is the number one thing I'm really concerned about going forward as Justice of the Peace is, all right, how are we going to protect not only the tenants, but we will have to work with the landlords also. Breaking The Meta: Hmm. Will: And at the moment, I don't think there is any compassion when it comes to that. I think there can be compassion on both sides, right? I understand that there are laws and regulations, but a lot of those laws and regulations are a little bit out of date. They aren't really built for a community that is this rapidly growing. ⁓ And as we see data centers move in, Breaking The Meta: Mm. Mm. Will: and we see AI starting to take jobs. I think we're seeing an increase in evictions and people losing homes. And that's still be a hard thing to protect. ⁓ And then with that also the school voucher system, right? That's impacting so many of our school districts, losing millions and millions of dollars of funding because of these school vouchers. And I see there's a of an increased truancy issue with kids attending school, ⁓ of childcare system, all the things, right? Like it's, it starts, it's a low level court, but it's often the first court that people interact with. So a little bit about my history, right? I was born to two addicts. Both my parents were addicts. I grew up with my father's Breaking The Meta: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Will: parents. My grandparents raised me my entire life. And I went through my shithead teenage years, right? And I got in trouble. And there is a point where I had to be in front of a justice of the peace. And I got a lighter sentence of probation, where if if it wasn't for that moment, my life could have had a completely different trajectory. I could have never gone to the Marine Corps because I would have had a criminal record, all these things, right? And so I understand that the compassion that a judge at this low of a level shows can impact a child's life or a person's life long-term. And I am a firm believer in if you don't fund your education system, you will have to fund your prison system. And there's no reason that a small mistake should hold someone back and keep them from being able to be a community member who is prosperous and contributes. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. ⁓ If anyone in Denton County ⁓ has listened all the way up to this point, what are some things that you would want to make sure that they walk away with? One or two things that no matter what, that they walk away knowing about you and what you hope to bring to the position of justice of the peace for their county? Will: So just like in my Marine Corps service, I plan on serving with honor, courage, and commitment and compassion. ⁓ I believe so many people, no matter what the political position is that they're running for, again, this should not be a political position. Like there shouldn't have to be an R or a D by my name to be able to run. The fact that there is an issue, in my opinion, because it should be based off of merit. Breaking The Meta: Mm-hmm. Will: and what you're going to do. So as we approach, we're in primaries right now for early voting, and we're going to midterms in November. As we approach midterms, look at what people have done. Look at what they've said they're going to do and see if they've changed just to get the vote because the people who won't stand on their morals won't stand for you. because they're constantly just trying to win the opinion or the favor versus making a change. And there's some great politicians that are running right now and they call out the Republicans as they see them, but then there's not a whole lot of legislation that they're pushing to fix those changes. And I have... have just as many qualms with the Democrats as I do with the Republicans. Well, that's hard. The qualms are bigger on the Republican side right now. They're bigger, more important issues. But the Democrats do the same thing. They're politicians. They lie. They don't stand up for what they believe in until their donors make them. Yeah. And so I think that's what, as a voter, educate yourself. Breaking The Meta: They think it'll get them votes or money. Yeah. Will: look at someone's morals, look at their ethics and see if they actually truly act on those. ⁓ Now, as far as myself, look, I am fired up. I am pissed off, but I'm just a normal, normal person like you. Yeah, I served in the Marine Corps for five years. I've done some other like local things, but when it comes down to it, I'm a person going to represent the people in my community as a person in my community. And I'm not using this to climb the ladder to famous success. I hope that if I enjoy this and it doesn't completely break me, this election, right, of like just worrisome, like, cause it's a lot, like we talked about, it's a demanding career field. ⁓ I hope that I can continue to grow and learn and make an impact. for a positive change because I think there are so many things that we're getting sold that are just lies. And it's, to be looking back on it, and it's to be too late by the time we realize it. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there, I know with smaller seats, it's not always the case. Is there somewhere where people can find you if they want to learn more about you? Will: Yeah, so Robertson, R-O-B-E-R-T-S-O-N-4-F-O-R-T-X.com is my political campaign website. You can find my donation link and everything there. The crazy thing is that politics takes a lot of money to even just get your name out there. ⁓ The filing fees, the information, the website, it all builds quickly. and there are bazillion rules around how to collect money and how to donate. And I don't understand with all these rules how we have so much corruption still. I've done so much paperwork. ⁓ But Robertson for Texas.com. You can also find me for Robertson for Justice 4 on ⁓ Instagram. And then TikTok if you really want to see my unfiltered ⁓ opinion about most everything. Sergeant Rob. So, that is, those are the morals I stand on, I say, because I believe it. And I'm not going to change that. Unless I get a really convincing argument that makes me see something in a different point of view from a perspective I haven't thought of, because I think everyone can change perspective and learn from it. And I think that if you don't, then there's an issue with that also. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Well, well, thank you for sitting down and talking with us for a bit. It was really it was really cool to ⁓ to get to know you a little bit. ⁓ For anyone listening that's gotten this far, thank you for for everything. Please like and subscribe. Hit all the buttons down below. It helps make it possible for me to keep doing what I'm doing. For those of you that don't know what I'm doing is specifically along with far too many other things. I'm sitting down with as many progressive candidates as possible who are running for office, who Will: Thanks man, it was great. Breaking The Meta: aren't taking PAC money, who want to fight the status quo, who want that kind of change that we keep talking about needing and wanting all over the place. ⁓ they don't have millions upon millions of dollars. They need name recognition and visibility in a way that not everyone can. So. Please watch and share this video. If you know anyone in Texas, specifically if you know anyone in Denton County, please share this video with them when you see it, because that is how people like Will get their name known, who ⁓ can, you know. So people can learn that there are other people out there that aren't just ⁓ a letter by their name kind of thing. ⁓ And for anyone who's new to this podcast, just so you know, Breaking the Meta is all about having hard conversations when they're necessary, breaking the status quo, and fighting for the idea that all people, no matter your race, religion, gender, or identity, get rights, respect, dignity, and safety. Will, again, thank you very much. For everyone else, we'll see you next time on Breaking the Meta. Bye, guys.