The following is a conversation with Cenk Uygur,
a progressive political commentator
and host of The Young Turks.
As I've said before, I will speak with everyone,
including on the left and the right
of the political spectrum,
always in good faith with empathy, rigor, and backbone.
Sometimes I fail, sometimes I say stupid, inaccurate,
inelegant things, and I frequently change my mind
as I'm learning and thinking about the world.
For all this, I often get attacked,
sometimes fairly, sometimes not.
But just know that I'm aware when I fall short
and I will keep trying to do better.
I love you all.
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In this episode with Jank,
I talk a lot about capitalism.
Now I think I disagree with him and I do in the episode
and I'll have to really think through it.
And really my favorite episodes is when I'm really
challenged to think and learn for weeks and months afterwards.
But I don't think our capitalist system
is as broken as Jank suggests.
So he feels that companies have completely captured
our politicians, our government.
But I think that a significant number of companies
have undue influence on our politicians.
But not as much as Jank says, and I have a lot of hope.
Primarily underlying that hope is a kind of sense
that even among the politicians, there's integrity.
Not every politician, but a lot of them.
I don't think that money can so easily buy the human heart,
can so easily corrupt the values of the people
who want to serve, so I don't know.
I just think if you wanna make money,
you're not gonna go into politics.
There's a lot easier ways, cleaner ways,
more pleasant ways to make money.
It's just such a dirty game, and I think you go in that game
to try to help, so anyway.
But yes, corporatism is a very serious problem.
So the way out to me is great companies, quite honestly,
and celebrating those companies.
And that's something I try to do.
Call out bullshit, call out shitty behavior
on the parts of companies when they do it,
but celebrate companies when they do great stuff.
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And now, dear friends, here's Cenk Uygur.
You wrote a book, a manifesto that outlines
the progressive vision for America.
So the big question, what are some defining ideas
of progressivism?
Yes, so in order to do that, Lex, we gotta talk about
where we are in the political spectrum.
And in fact, there's two different spectrums now.
People often think of left-right, and that's true,
that exists, but layered on top of that
is now populist versus establishment.
So I'm center-left on the left-right spectrum,
but I'm all the way on the populist end
of the second spectrum.
So where does progressivism lie within that?
Well, I would argue that it's exactly in those places.
It's populist, and it's on the left,
but it is not far-left.
So far-left is a different animal,
and we could talk about that in a little bit.
So in terms of what makes a progressive,
so expand the circle of liberty,
and justice for all, and equality of opportunity.
Now, people will say, well, that seems pretty broad
and all-American, but is it?
Think about it.
So expand the circle of liberty.
Everybody's in favor of that, right?
No, absolutely not.
So certainly the king of England was not in favor
of expanding the circle of liberty,
and the founding fathers said, we're gonna expand it.
And they expanded it to propertied white men.
And then progressives have been, they're progressives,
because they expanded the circle of liberty.
Then from then on, as we were perfecting the union,
progressives always say, expand it further,
include women, include people without property,
include all races, and at every turn,
conservatives fight against it.
So that doesn't mean if you're a conservative today,
you don't wanna include women or minorities, et cetera.
But today, you would say, for example,
well, I don't wanna expand the circle of liberty to,
for example, undocumented immigrants.
And maybe you're right about that,
and we could have that discussion
in terms of a specific philosophy.
And I don't believe that undocumented immigrants
should immediately be citizens
or anything along those lines.
But I do believe in expanding liberty overall.
And the contours of that are what's interesting.
And then you say justice for all, everybody's for justice.
No, right now, marijuana possession is still illegal
in a lot of parts of the country.
Now a lot of right-wingers and left-wingers agree
that it should be legal.
But for my entire lifetime,
black people have been arrested at about 3.7 times
the rate of white people,
and the entire country has been fine with it.
So is that justice?
No, they smoke, white people,
black people smoke marijuana at the same rate,
black people get arrested about four times the rate.
That is an injustice that an enormous percentage
of the country was comfortable with.
Well, progressives aren't comfortable with it.
We want justice for all.
So the equality of opportunity is an interesting one
because the far left will say,
so at least some portions of them will say
equality of results, right?
So progressives just want a fair chance.
So free college education,
but afterwards you don't get to have exact same results
as either the wealthiest person
or we're not all going to be equal.
We don't have equal talents, skills, abilities, et cetera.
There's a lot of questions I can ask there.
So on the circle of liberty,
yes, so expanding the number of people
whose freedoms are protected,
but what about the magnitude of freedom
for each individual person?
So expanding the freedom of the individual
and protecting the freedoms of the individual.
It seems like progressives are more willing
to expand the size of government
where a government can do all kinds of regulation,
all kinds of controls in the individual.
So Lex, what we're probably going to talk about a lot today
is balance.
And so a lot of people think,
oh, I'm on the right, I'm on the left,
and that comes with a certain preset ideology.
So the right is always correct,
the left is always correct.
So there's two problems with that.
Number one, how could you possibly believe
in a preset ideology if you're an independent thinker?
It's literally by definition not possible.
If you say I lent my brain to an ideology
that was created 80 years ago or eight years ago
or 800 years ago and I'm not going to change it,
you're saying I don't think for myself.
I bought into a culture, and by the way,
there's a lot of different forms of culture
you could buy into, religion, politics,
sometimes racial, et cetera.
So that's why you need actually balance.
The second reason you need balance
other than independent thought
is because the answer is almost never black and white.
And that gets into a really interesting nuance
because mainstream media, in my opinion, is the matrix.
And its job is to delude you into thinking
corporate rule is great for you
and we should never change it
and the status quo is wonderful.
So they have created a false middle.
What mainstream media calls moderate
is actually, in my opinion, extremist corporate ideology.
So for example, they'll say Joe Manchin is a moderate.
None of his positions are moderate
other than potentially gun control in West Virginia.
He's not for gun control, the people of West Virginia
are not for gun control, generally speaking.
So, and he uses that and they usually have
these shiny objects where they're like, you see this?
I'm a moderate because of guns.
Or I'm a moderate because I'm a Democrat
from West Virginia.
But wait, let's look at your positions.
You're against paid family leave, that polls at 84%.
So you're a radical corporatist who say
that women should be forced back into work
the day after they have birth.
You're against a higher minimum wage.
You're against, you're for every corporate position
and they all poll at 33% or less.
So Joe Manchin is not at all a moderate
and this applies to almost every corporate Republican
and every corporate Democrat.
They're all extremists in supporting what I call corporatism.
So you have to get to a balance
in order to get to the right answer.
So that's an interesting distinction here.
So you're actually, as far as I understand, pro-capitalism.
Yes.
Which is an interesting place to be.
That's the thing that probably makes you center left
and then still populist.
You're full of beautiful contradictions, let's say this,
which will be great to untangle.
But what's the difference between corporatism and capitalism?
Is there a difference?
Yeah, so I really believe in capitalism.
I don't think that there's really a second choice.
Where it gets super interesting is the distinction
between capitalism and socialism
because that's not at all as clear as people think it is.
And people often say socialism and communism
as synonyms when they're not synonyms.
And so I view it as there's basically four distinct areas.
It's obviously a spectrum, everything is a spectrum.
On one end, you have communism on the left
and on the other end, you have corporatism on the right.
And I would argue that capitalism is in the middle.
And so communism, we know, state owns all property.
You're not allowed to have private property.
So I will piss off a lot of people in this show.
And so I'm asking for their patience, please hear me out.
And because don't worry,
I'm gonna piss off the other side too, okay?
So communism makes no sense at all,
totally opposed to human nature.
It never works.
It always evolves into dictatorship
because it is not built for human nature.
We're never going to act like that.
It's not in our DNA.
You could try to wish it into existence and they have,
and it never works.
And it's because once you have almost no rules
in terms of, oh, we're all equal,
even though communism eventually winds up having
an enormous amount of rules, right?
It creates a power vacuum when you say,
hey, there's no structure of power here, right?
We're all equal, it's a flat line.
One guy usually gets up because that's human nature
and goes, eh, I don't think so.
I think if you're gonna leave a power vacuum,
I'm gonna take that power vacuum.
That's actually a really interesting way to put it
because when everyone is equal, nobody is in power
and human nature is such that there's everybody's,
that there's a will to power.
So when you create a power vacuum,
somebody's going to fill it.
So the alternative is to have people in power,
but there's a balance of power.
And then there's like a democratic system that elects
the people in power and keeps churning and rotating.
That is exactly it, Lex.
You got it exactly right in my opinion, okay?
So that's why communism never works and can never work.
So it's an idea of like, we're all gonna work
as hard as we possibly can and take only what we need.
Where, when, when has that ever happened
in the history of humanity, right?
We're just not built that way.
So, okay, we can get into that debate
with my friends on the left, et cetera.
Now, corporatism is just as extreme and just as dangerous.
And that is basically what we have in America now.
What we have in America now, and this is another giant trick
that The Matrix played on everybody.
That they, they did in a shell game
and all of a sudden extreme corporatists like Manchin
and almost every Republican in the Senate are moderates.
Oh my God, Mitch McConnell all of a sudden is a moderate
and et cetera, as long as you're not a populist.
Populists are never moderate, okay?
But if you love corporations and corporate tax cuts
and everything in favor of corporations,
you're magically called a moderate
when you actually, according to the polling,
have super extreme positions that the American people hate.
And by the way, that's part of the reason
for the rise of Trump.
You can come back to that, okay?
But the second shell game is taking out capitalism,
putting in corporatism, but still calling it capitalism.
Okay, so what is corporatism?
It is when corporations slowly take over the system
and create monopoly and oligopoly power.
So that snuffs out equality of opportunity.
So how do they do that?
When people say the system is rigged,
they oftentimes can't explain it that well.
And then mainstream media goes,
oh, you're sound conspiratorial.
Ricked, yeah, I wonder how.
Yeah, super easy to explain it.
Here's one of dozens of examples, carried interest loophole.
So that is for hedge funds, private equity,
the top people on Wall Street,
that's part of their income.
They get two and 20, right?
So 2% is a flat fee, no matter what happens to the fund.
And 20% of the profits of the fund
goes back to the people who invested it.
It's not their money, it's not their investment.
What they're getting is actually just income.
It should be taxed at the highest rate.
But because of this loophole,
it's taxed at a much lower rate, at around 20%.
So do you know at what income level you go above 20%,
if you're a regular Joe, it's at $84,000 a year.
So these billionaires are getting the same tax rate
as people making $84,000 a year.
It's unbelievably unfair,
and that's corporatism taking over
and starting to rig the rules.
I'm gonna pay less taxes, you're gonna pay more taxes, okay?
So again, I can give you dozens of those examples.
So mergers, so that they get to oligopoly power,
that's how you rig a system,
lowering the corporate tax rates,
making sure that there is no real minimum wage,
making sure there's no universal healthcare,
we all become indentured servants of corporations.
They take away power from the average guy,
give it to the most powerful people in the world.
But the most important distinction, Lex,
is that corporatism hates competition.
It wants monopoly and oligopoly power.
Whereas capitalism loves competition
and wants to free markets.
And I remember, we started Young Turks back in 2002,
so we've been around for 22 years,
longest-running daily show on the internet ever.
And so we were pre-Iraq War, and Iraq War starts,
and Dick Cheney starts handing out no-bid contracts.
I'm like, what part of capitalism is a no-bid contract?
You can't negotiate drug prices.
That's the most anti-free market thing I have ever heard.
It's almost like communism for corporations.
They get everything,
and you get nothing, right?
So it's preposterous, it's awful,
and it kills the free markets,
and it's killing this country.
And it is the main ideology and religion of the establishment.
Are all companies built the same here?
So when you say corporatism,
it seems like, just looking here at the list
of by industry lobbyists,
it seems like there are certain industries
that are worse offenders than others,
like pharmaceuticals, like insurance, oil and gas.
So it seems to me it feels wrong
to just throw all companies into the same bucket
of they're all guilty.
No, they're not all guilty.
So let's make a bunch of distinctions here.
So first of all, can you,
first of all, are they, quote unquote, guilty?
No, they're doing something that is logical and natural.
So if you're a company,
do you wanna pay higher taxes or lower taxes?
Of course you wanna pay lower taxes.
Do you wanna have higher employee costs
or lower employee costs?
Of course you want lower employee costs.
So, but the government needs to understand that
and protect us from that power
that they are going to exercise to get to those results.
And if you think free markets is there is no government,
you read it wrong.
Go back and reread Adam Smith.
He says, you must protect against monopoly power.
If you do not protect against monopoly power,
you will have no free markets.
And he's absolutely right.
So second distinction is between small business
and big business.
That's why Republicans will always be like,
oh, we're doing this for small business.
That's why we got the biggest oil companies
in the world, $30 billion in subsidies.
What happened to small business, right?
So I run a small business.
And so if people were to say like,
hey, maybe there should be exemptions
for some of the regulations.
If your company has less than five employees,
10 employees, 50 employees, et cetera.
There's some logic in that
because businesses have different stages of growth
and they have different interests
and different needs in those stages of growth.
And we wanna facilitate small business growth
because that's great for the economy.
That's great for markets, freedom, et cetera.
But the bigger corporations,
even there there's a third distinction.
It isn't that there are certain industries that are worse.
There's just that there are industries
that are better at lobbying.
So anyone who like right now,
number one donor in Washington.
A lot of people make a mistake.
They think it's APAC
or they think it's the oil companies or the banks.
No, it's big pharma, okay?
And who has the most power in this country?
Big pharma.
So we can't even negotiate the drug prices.
I mean, look guys, think about it this way.
That's like saying, okay, here's a bottle of water.
And normally in the free market
that would cost about a dollar, right?
And for Medicare, the drug companies come in and go,
no, I'm not charging a dollar for that water.
I'm charging a hundred dollars.
And the government has to say, yes, sir, thank you, sir.
Of course, sir, we'll pay a hundred dollars.
That's why compared to communism
because I can't imagine anything more diametrically
opposed to the free market than you, the consumer,
have to pay whatever the hell a corporation charges.
That's insanity, let alone the patents,
let alone the fact that the American people
pay for the research
and then they make billions of dollars off of it
and we get nothing but robbed by them.
So it's about lobby power.
Oil companies have huge lobby power.
Defense contractors have huge lobby power.
It's not that they're more evil.
It's just that they have figured out the game better
and they have basically taken the influence they need
to capture the market, capture the government
and snuff out all competition or a lot of competition.
Figure out the game better.
So I think a lot of companies are good at winning
the right way by building better products,
by making people happier with the work that they're doing
and the winning of the game of capitalism.
And then there's other companies
that win at the game of lobbying.
And I just wanna sort of draw that distinction
because I think it's a small subset of companies
that are playing the game of lobbying.
It's like big pharma.
So Lex, first of all, you have to set rules
for what makes sense, not,
oh, I don't like this industry or I don't like this company
or hey, this company is not doing
that much lobbying at this point.
They will later when they realize what's going on.
So for example, in my opinion,
APAC has totally bought almost all of Congress.
And so now other countries are gonna wake up and go,
wait, you could just buy the American government.
So APAC is gonna spend about $100 million in this cycle
and then they're getting 26 billion back.
So every country in the world is soon gonna realize,
oh, take American citizens that live there,
get them a tremendous amount of money
and just buy the US government, right?
So that, but for corporations,
they've already realized that on a massive scale, right?
So for example, in the two industries you gave,
automotive, so in New Jersey, about a decade or so,
one of the most powerful lobbies is car dealerships.
So at the national level, you got pharma
and you've got defense contractors, et cetera.
At the local level, guys who have huge power,
number one is utilities, number two is real estate
and then car dealerships are hilariously among the top,
right, because it's local businesses
that are financing the politicians at the local level.
So they passed a law saying that
you have to sell through dealerships,
but Tesla doesn't sell through dealerships
and it was intended to bully, intimidate
and push out Tesla out of the market.
They then did that in a number of different states
throughout the country.
So does that make any sense in a democracy?
Of course not, why do you have to sell your product
through a specific vehicle or medium?
You could sell it any way you like,
that's the most anti-free market thing possible.
Why?
It was just total utter corruption.
But it's not, but it's perfectly legal.
The Supreme Court legalized bribery.
So then what happened in that case?
So then Elon came in and gave campaign contributions
and reversed it.
So now we're in a battle where it's an open auction, right?
Different companies are buying different politicians
and then they're pretending to have debates
about principles and ideas, et cetera.
So now let's look at tech.
In the beginning, Facebook was not spending any money
in politics or almost any money in politics.
So what happens?
They're getting hammered.
They get it pulled into congressional hearings
and Facebook's got fake news and oh my God,
all this trouble from Facebook.
Then Facebook does the logical thing.
Oh, it turns out I need to grease these sons of bitches.
So then they hire a whole bunch of Republicans consultants.
They go grease all the Republicans
and most of the corporate Democrats.
And then all of a sudden, we're no longer talking
about Facebook at all and Facebook are angels.
And now we've turned our attention to who?
Facebook's top competitor, TikTok.
Funny how that works, okay?
And by the way, then Donald Trump goes,
oh, TikTok's big dangerous company.
They're working with China, okay?
And then Jeff Yas comes in on this cycle,
part owner of TikTok and he doesn't want TikTok.
Managed, of course, right?
So he gives Trump a couple of million dollars.
Trump turns around the next day and goes,
we love TikTok, TikTok's a good company, right?
So that's a big contributor to influencing
what politicians say and what they think,
but it's not the entire thing, right?
No, it is, it's 98%.
I'll go on mainstream media and they'll be like,
oh, I see what you're saying.
I can see how that influences politicians about 10%.
I'm like, no, no, it's 98%.
So, and even a lot of good people think it's 50-50.
They have principles and they have money.
No, they have money and they're major principles.
That's why I wanted to clarify 98, too.
Okay, so how do we fix it?
So it's really interesting and nice
that you're pro-capitalism and anti-corporatism.
So how do we create a system where the free market can rule,
where capitalism can rule,
we can have these vibrant flourishing
of all these companies competing against each other
and creating awesome stuff.
Yeah, so in the book, I call it democratic capitalism
as opposed to Bernie's democratic socialism, right?
We can get into that distinction in a minute, but,
so as Adam Smith said, and anyone who studies capitalism knows,
you need the government to protect the market
as well as the people.
Because, so like, why do we have cops?
Because if we don't have cops, somebody's gonna go,
well, I like Lexus equipment.
Why don't I just go into his house and take it, right?
So you need the cops to protect you,
and that's the government.
So people say, oh, I hate big government.
Do you?
Right, it depends, right?
If your house is getting robbed,
all of a sudden you like the government.
But you also need cops on Wall Street.
Because if you allow insider trading,
the powerful are gonna rob you blind
and the little guy's gonna get screwed.
So that's this easy example.
And so if you don't have those cops,
the bad guys are gonna take over.
They're gonna set the rules, rig the rules in their favor.
So that's why you need regulation.
And so the Republicans on purpose
made regulation a dirty word.
They're like, oh, raw regulation is bad.
And then sometimes on the left,
people fall for the trap of all regulation is good.
A guy I like and has a great analogy on this.
Matt Stoller, he's one of the original,
I would argue, progressives.
And there's about four of us, I'm sure there's more,
but that have stayed true to the original meaning
of progressivism and populism.
Me, Matt Stoller, David Sirota, Ryan Grimm, okay?
And they used to be, in that original blogger group,
there was guys like Glenn Greenwald
and other interesting cats, right?
But they went in different directions.
So Matt has a great line.
He says, if somebody comes up to you and says,
how big a pipe do you want?
There is no answer for that.
It depends on the job, doesn't it, right?
What are we doing?
What are we building?
I'm gonna tell you the size of the pipe,
depending on the project.
So when people say, are you in favor of regulation
or against it?
That's an absurd question.
Of course you need regulation, it just means laws, right?
So don't kill your neighbor is a regulation, right?
So my idea is a simple one
and one we're gonna keep coming back to, balance.
So when my dad was a small business owner in New Jersey
and they inspected the elevator six times a year,
that was over-regulation.
And I said to my dad, so should they not expect it at all?
I'm a young kid growing up and he said, no, no, no,
you gotta expect it at least twice a year.
I said, why?
He said, because in Turkey, sometimes they don't expect it
and then the elevator falls, okay?
So bounds of reason, correct regulation
to protect the markets and to protect the American people.
Yeah, but finding the right level of regulation,
especially in, for example, in tech,
something I'm much more familiar with, it's very difficult
because people in Congress are living in the 20th century
before the internet was invented.
So like, how are they supposed to come up with regulations?
Well, that's the idea of the free market
is you should be able to sort of compete,
the market regulates and then the government can step in
and protect the market from forming monopolies, for example,
which is easier to do.
Yeah, but that's their former regulation.
But then there's like more checking the elevator
twice a year.
That's a more sort of specific watching, micromanaging.
So Lex, here's the deal.
There's no way around the laws are made by politicians.
Okay, so you can't give up then and go,
oh, it's a bunch of schmucks.
I think most politicians are just servants
for the donor class, all right?
The media makes it sound like they're the best of us.
Oh, they deserve a lot of honor and respect
and they kiss their ass, et cetera.
I think generally speaking,
they're usually the worst of us,
especially in this corporative structure, right?
Because they're the guys who their number one talent is,
yes, sir, no, sir.
What would you like me to do with your donor money, sir?
Absolutely, I'll serve you completely or 98%, right?
So in this structure, the politicians are the worst of us.
But at some point you need somebody elected
to be your representative to do democratic capitalism
so that you have capitalism,
but it's checked by the government on behalf of the people.
It's the people that are saying these are the rules
of the land and you have to abide by them.
So how do you get to the best possible answer,
which is related to an earlier question you asked, Lex,
which is the number one thing you have to do
is get big money out of politics.
Everything else is near impossible
as long as we are drowned in money
and whoever has more money wins.
And by the way, when it comes to legislation,
again, that's true about 98% of the time.
Like we predict things ahead of time.
People are like, wow, how did you know
that that bill wasn't gonna pass or was gonna pass?
It's the easiest thing in the world.
And we like literally like teach our audience
on the Young Turks, watch,
you'll be able to see for yourself.
And now like our members comment in,
they do these predictions,
they're almost always right, right?
Because it's so simple, follow the money.
So if you get big money out of politics
and I can explain how to do that in a sec,
then you're at a place where you got your best shot
and honest representatives that are going to try their best
to get to the right answer.
Are they gonna get to the right answer out of the gate?
Usually not.
So they pass a law, there's something wrong with the law.
They then fix that part.
It's a pendulum.
You don't want it to swing too wildly,
but you do need a little bit of oscillation
in that pendulum to get to the right balance.
By the way, I was listening to Joe Biden
from when he was like 30 years old, the speeches,
he was eloquent as hell.
It's fun to listen to actually.
And he has a speech he gives
or just maybe a conversation in Congress,
I'm not sure where,
where he talks about how corrupt the whole system is.
And he's really honest and like fun.
And that Joe Biden is great, by the way.
That guy, I mean, age sucks.
People get older.
But he was talking quite honestly
about having to suck up to all these rich people
and that he couldn't really suck up
to the really rich people.
They said, come back to us 10 years later
when you're more integrated into the system.
But he was really honest about it.
And he's saying, that's how it is.
That's what we have to do.
And that really sucks that that's what we have to do.
Yeah, so we did a video on our TikTok channel
then and now of Joe Biden.
This is when I was trying to push Biden out.
We should say you're one of the people early on
saying Biden needs to step down.
Yeah, I started about a year ago
because I was positive that Biden had a 0% chance of winning.
And it turned out, by the way,
two days before he dropped out,
his inside advisors inside the White House said,
yeah, near 0% chance of winning.
So we were right all along.
You got a lot of criticism for that, by the way, but yeah.
Yeah, well, we can come back to that.
Yes, I did.
And which makes it Tuesday for me.
Get a lot of criticism for everything.
And by the way, Democratic Party, you're welcome.
So, but Biden's a really interesting example.
I'm really glad you brought it up.
So the video on TikTok was just showing
Biden then, Biden now, and you're right,
Biden was so dynamic.
When you see how dynamic he was,
we did like side by side, right?
And then you see him now going like,
you're merely finishing, anyways, right?
You're like, oh, that's not the same guy.
I get it, right?
So, and I got like 5 million views because it resonates.
They're like, yeah, yeah, of course, right?
But when he first started,
to the point you were making Lex, he want to,
in fact, I know, because I talked to him about this,
his very first bill was anti-corruption.
Why?
Because at that point, everything changes in 1976 and 78.
The Supreme Court decisions that basically
legalized bribery.
But remember, Biden is ancient.
So he's coming into politics at a time when money
has not yet drowned politics.
And in fact, the American population is super pissed about
the fact that it's begun, they don't like corruption.
So early Biden, because he's reading the room,
is very anti-corruption.
And the first bill he proposes
is to get money out of politics, okay?
But as Biden goes on for his epic 200 year career
in Washington, he starts to get not more conservative,
more corporate, because he's just taking more and more money.
By the middle of his career, he has a nickname,
the Senator from MBNA, okay?
MBNA was a credit card company based in Delaware.
And the reason he had that nickname is because
there isn't anything Joe Biden wouldn't have done
for credit card companies and corporations based in Delaware,
which are almost all corporations, okay?
So he became the most corporate Senator in the country,
and hence, the most beloved by corporate media.
And corporate media has protected him his entire career
until about a month ago.
So for example, in the primaries, both in 2020 and 2024,
if you said the Senator from MBNA,
I guarantee you almost no one in the audience has heard of it.
If you heard of it, good job, you know politics really well.
But the reason you didn't hear of it
is because the mainstream media wouldn't say
that's outrageous of Joe Biden to be such a corporate stooge.
They'd say, that's outrageous of you
to point out something that's true
and something we reported on earlier, okay?
And so they protected him at all costs.
Now finally, when you get to this version of Joe Biden,
he can't talk, he can't walk.
He bears no resemblance to the young guy who came in
saying that money in politics was a problem.
Now he's saying money in politics is the solution.
And in 2020, he said,
well, I can raise more money than Bernie.
I can kiss corporate ass better than Bernie.
I'm the biggest corporate ass kisser in the world.
So I'm gonna raise a billion dollars
and you need to support me.
Now, of course, he doesn't say it in those words,
but that was a message to the establishment
and Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Obama, Clyburn,
everybody goes, that's right, Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden,
not Bernie.
I don't know that there's anybody in the country
who instinctually dislikes Bernie more than Barack Obama.
Oh, that's an interesting,
I'm not taking attention at this moment.
Because you mentioned mainstream media.
What's the motivation for mainstream media
to be corporatist also?
So first of all, they're giant corporations.
So they're all multi-billion dollar corporations.
In the old days, we had incredible number of media outlets.
So you go to San Francisco, there'd be at least two papers
and there'd be a paper boy, I'm going all the way back,
paper boy on each corner
and they're competing with one another.
Literally, they'd be caddy corner, right?
And one guy's going, oh, I hear all this details.
They're trying to get an audience.
They're trying to get people interested.
So they're populist, they're interesting,
they're muckrakers, they're challenging the government.
Fast forward to now, or not now,
but about a decade ago, five years ago in that ballpark,
now there's only six giant media corporations left
and it's an oligopoly, right?
And they're all multi-billion dollar corporations.
They all want tax cuts.
Half of them are also, especially about 20 years ago
during the Iraq war, half of them are defense contractors.
So they're just using the news as marketing
to start wars like the Iraq war.
And then GE, which owned MSNBC,
makes a tremendous amount of money.
So much more money from war than it does from media.
That media is a good marketing spend for these corporations.
Now that's part of it, that they themselves
want the same exact thing as the rest of corporations do
for corporate rule, lower tax cuts, deregulation
so they can merge, et cetera.
But the second part of it is arguably even more important.
So where does all that money in politics go?
So for example, in 2022, it's just a midterm election.
No presidential should be lower spending.
A ridiculous $17 billion are spent on the election cycle.
Where does the 17 billion go?
Almost all of it goes into corporate media,
mainstream media, television, newspapers, radio.
They're buying ads like nuts.
So we have a reporter at TYT, David Schuster.
He used to work at MSNBC, Fox News, et cetera.
And David once did a piece about money in politics
at a local NBC news station.
And his editor or GM spiked the story.
And David goes into his office and asks him,
so why this story is true?
It's a huge part of politics.
If we're gonna report on this issue,
we gotta tell you what's actually happening.
So he says, David, come here.
He puts his arm around his shoulders,
takes him to the big newsroom.
And he goes, you see all this?
Money in politics paid for that.
That's really fascinating.
So big corporations are giving money to politicians
to different channels.
And then the politicians are spending that money
on mainstream media.
And so there's a vicious cycle
where it's in the interest of the mainstream media
and not to criticize the very corporations
that are feeding that cycle.
So it's not actually direct.
It's not like corporations are,
because I was thinking one of the ways
is direct advertisement.
Pharmaceuticals obviously advertise a lot on mainstream media.
But there's also indirect,
which is like giving the politicians money,
or super PACs and the super PACs
and spend money on the...
That's why media, mainstream media,
never talks about the number one factor in politics,
which is money.
Like we all know, I mean, now as we talked about earlier,
we see it with our own eyes, open auction,
any country, any company, anybody that has money,
the politicians will now literally say,
I am now working for this guy, as Trump says,
because he gave me a strong endorsement,
which means a lot of money, right?
And the press never covers it, almost never, right?
So you're telling me you're doing an article
on the infrastructure build or build back better, et cetera,
and you're not gonna mention the enormous amount of money
that every lobbyist spent on that bill?
That's absurd, that's absurd.
That's 98% of the ballgame.
And the reason they hide the ball
is because they don't want you to know
this whole thing is based on the money
that they are receiving.
And by the way, one more thing about that, Lex,
it's that the ads themselves, actually, they work,
and they work pretty well,
but that's not the main reason you spend money on ads.
You spend the money on ads to get friendly coverage
from the content, from the free media
that you're getting from that same outlet.
And so since every newspaper
and every television station and network
knows that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party
are their top clients,
they're going to get billions of dollars from them.
They never really criticize
the Republican and Democratic Party.
On the other hand, if you're an outsider,
they'll rip your face off.
That's also really interesting.
So if you're an advertiser,
if you're a big farmer and you're advertising,
it's not that the advertisement works,
it's that the hosts are too afraid,
not like explicitly, just even implicitly.
They're self-censoring.
They're not going to have any guests
that are like controversial anti-big farmer,
or they're not going to make any jokes about big farming,
they're not gonna make,
and that kind of, that continues and expands.
That's really interesting.
Sometimes it's super direct.
When I was a host on MSNBC,
I had a company that I was criticizing in my script
and management looked at him.
By the way, I used to go off-prompter a lot
and it drove him crazy,
not because I wasn't good at it.
I think my ratings went up whenever I went off-prompter,
but because they couldn't pre-approve the script.
And what do they want to pre-approve?
Hey, are you going to criticize one of our sponsors,
one of our advertisers, et cetera?
So they, we had a giant fight over it,
and the compromise was I moved them lower in the script,
but kept them in the story, right?
So sometimes it's super direct like that,
but way more often it's implicit, it's indirect.
You don't have to say it, right?
So I give you a spectacular example of it
so that you get a sense of how it works implicitly.
So since GE is a giant defense contractor,
they own MSNBC at the time of the Iraq war.
They fired everyone who was against the Iraq war on air.
So Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura, Ashley Banfield,
but Ashley Banfield, they did something different with, okay?
She was a rising star at the time.
She goes and gives a speech in Kansas,
not really even having a policy position,
but just talking about the actual costs of this Iraq war
and how we should be really careful.
They hate that.
So they take their rising star and they take her off air,
okay?
And she goes, okay, good, let me out of my contract.
It's okay, I'll go.
Because she was such a star at that time,
she could have easily gotten somewhere else.
And they go, no, we're not going to let you
out of your contract.
Why not?
You're going to pay me to do nothing?
Yeah, not only that, we're moving your office.
Where are you moving it to?
They literally moved it into a closet, okay?
And they made sure that everybody in the building
saw her getting taken off the air and moved into a closet.
The closet is the memo, right?
That's the memo to the whole building.
You better shut up and do as you're told, okay?
So that way I don't have to tell you
and get myself in trouble.
It's super obvious.
There are guardrails here and you are not allowed
to go beyond acceptable thought.
And acceptable thought is our sponsors are great,
politicians are great, the powerful are great.
So how do we begin to fix that?
And what exactly are we fixing?
Is that the influence of the lobbyists,
the influence of, it feels like there's,
companies have found different ways to achieve influence.
So how do we get money out of politics?
So it's very difficult but doable.
And we will do it.
So, but in order to do it, the populist left
and the populist right have to unite.
Because, and by the way,
that is why we have the cultural wars.
That's why you're voting for Trump.
No chance.
Okay, so we can get into that in a minute.
So the cultural wars are meant to divide us.
If we get united, we have enough leverage and power
to be able to do it.
But you can't do it through a normal bill
because if you do it in a bill,
the whole point of capturing the Supreme Court
was to make sure that they kill any piece of legislation
that would protect the American people.
You're saying the Supreme Court is also captured by this?
Oh, 100%.
So, okay, so let me explain.
Again, people for the uninitiated,
they think, oh, that sounds conspiratorial.
Well, in this case, that's actually somewhat true
because people now know about this.
It's the Powell memo, right?
The most infamous political memo in history.
Lewis Powell writes a memo for the Chamber of Commerce
in 1971 that's basically a blueprint
for how the Chamber of Commerce can take over the government.
And Lewis Powell explains one of the most important things
you have to do is take over the media.
But even more important than that
is taking over the Supreme Court.
Because the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter
of what is allowed and not allowed.
And he says, we need, quote, activist judges
to help business interests on the court, okay?
And then Nixon reads the memo and goes,
that sounds like a really good idea.
How about I put you on the Supreme Court?
And he puts Lewis Powell, the guy who wrote the memo,
on the Supreme Court, where he's the deciding vote
in Baladi and Buckley.
So, Baladi's, those two decisions are 76 to 78.
And what they say is, yeah, yeah, I read the Constitution
and it says that money is speech.
No, it isn't.
And no, it didn't.
That's not even close to true.
They just made it up.
And they said, okay, and corporations, they're human beings.
No, they're not.
That's preposterous, right?
And they have the same inalienable rights
as human beings and citizens do.
And money is speech, and speech is an inalienable right.
So, corporations can spend unlimited money in politics.
And there goes our democracy, gone, okay?
So, Citizens United just shot a dead horse
with a Gatling gun and made it worse
and put it on steroids.
But it was already dead in 78.
So, that's why every chart you see
for the rest of your life, you'll see this,
every chart about the American economy
starts to diverge in 1978.
So, until 38 to 78, we have golden 40 years
of economic prosperity.
We create the greatest middle class the world has ever seen.
And our productivity is sky high,
but our wages match our productivity.
After 78, productivity is still sky high,
best in the world, okay?
Sometimes people, oh, the American worker's lazy.
Not remotely true, we work our ass off, okay?
But wages flatline.
And they've been flatlining for about 50 years straight.
And the reason is because the Supreme Court
made bribery legal.
So, in order to get past the Supreme Court,
you only have one choice, that's an amendment.
And so, you have to get an amendment.
Amendments are very difficult.
So, for example, you need two thirds of Congress
to even propose the amendment.
So, well, why would Congress propose an amendment
that would take away their own power, right?
Because almost everybody in Congress
got there through corruption.
Their main talent is I can kiss corporate ass
better than you can, right?
So, they take the most amount of money.
A person with more money in Congress
wins 95% of the time, right?
But the good news is the Founding Fathers were geniuses
and they put in a second outlet.
They said, or two thirds of the states
can call for a convention where you can propose an amendment.
And after an amendment is proposed,
then three quarters of the states have to ratify it.
That's what makes it so difficult
because getting three quarters of the states,
there's so many red states, so many blue states,
getting three quarters of the states
they agree is near impossible.
But there is one issue that the whole country agrees on.
93% of Americans believe that politicians
serve their donors and not their voters.
So, this is the one thing we can unite on.
If we unite on this, we push our states
to call for a convention,
we all go to the convention together,
we bring democracy alive,
and we propose amendments to the Constitution.
The best amendment gets three quarters of the states
to ratify, you go above the Supreme Court,
and you solve the whole thing.
So, if 93% of people want this, why hasn't it happened yet?
I mean, the obvious answer is there's corporate control
of the media and the politicians,
but it seems like our current system
and the megaphone that the president has,
you should be able to kind of unite
the populist left and right.
So, it shouldn't be that difficult to do.
Like, why hasn't a person like Trump, who's a billionaire,
or on the left, a rich businessman,
run just on this and win?
Well, eventually they will, right?
And so, that's why I actually have a lot of hope,
even though things seem super dark right now.
So, and that's why it was for Bernie.
And so, I can come back to that.
But why hasn't Trump done it as easy?
He's like, what am I, a sucker?
The guy gives me money, I do what the guy wants.
Why would I get rid of that?
That's how I got into power.
And so, that's how I'm doing it now.
I get go to Miriam Edelson
and say, give me a hundred million dollars
and I'll let Israel annex the West Bank, right?
So, I'll go to the oil companies and give me a billion dollars
and I'll give you tax subsidies, I'll let you drill,
I'll take away regulation.
Why would I stop that?
You think he likes money more than he likes being popular?
Because there's a big part of him as a populist
in the sense that he loves being admired
by large masses of people.
Yeah, so, and you're absolutely right,
but that is the fault of MAGA.
And so, MAGA, you're screwing populist
in a way that is infuriating, okay?
And smart libertarians like Dave Smith have figured this out
and that's why he's just as mad at Trump as I am.
And it's because he took a populist movement
and he redirected it for his own personal gain.
MAGA, figure it out, come on, right?
And so, if you say, oh, you think Democrats have figured out
that these, no, they largely haven't figured it out either
and I think there's blue MAGA
and I could talk about that as well.
But for those of us on the populist left,
yeah, we're not enamored by politicians.
And for example, when Bernie does the wrong thing,
we call him out.
Well, I'm not, Bernie's not my goddamn uncle.
I don't like him for some personality reason.
It's not a cult of personality.
You do the right thing, I love you for.
You do the wrong thing, I'm gonna kick your ass for it,
right?
So, but Donald Trump does this massive, ridiculous corruption
over and over again and MAGA's like, I'm here for it,
love it, as long as you're doing the corruption,
I'm okay with it.
Why?
What does Trump say about getting money out of politics,
does he?
He says nothing about it.
Go, and MAGA, why haven't you held him take out?
Like, so when Bernie helped Biden take out $15 minimum wage
from the Senate bill on the first bill that was introduced
in the Biden administration, we went nuts.
We did a petition, we sent in videos to Bernie,
our audience going, don't kill it, Bernie, don't kill it.
And so, Bernie then reintroduced it as an amendment,
it got voted down, but he did the right thing, right?
That is us holding our top leader accountable
and saying, you better get back on track, okay?
Because we're not here for you and your personal self
and grand, aggrandizement, we're here for policy, right?
And if MAGA was actually here for policy,
they would have absolutely leveled Trump on the fact that he,
I mean, remember what he ran on, train the swamp,
that's why he won in 2016, right?
So, I predicted on ABC right after the DNC
and Hillary Clinton was up 10, 12 points, whatever she was,
and I said, Trump would win, okay?
And the whole panel laughed out loud, right?
They're like, get a load of this crazy guy.
I said, he's a populist who seems to hate the establishment
in a populist time.
And so, and drain the swamp is a great slogan.
And I knew he would win when he was in a Republican debate
and he said, I paid all these guys.
Before I paid them and they did whatever I wanted.
And I was like, that's so true, right?
And people will love that
and especially Republican voters will love that.
I actually have a lot of respect for Republican voters
because they actually genuinely hate corruption.
So, what would an amendment look like
that helps prevent money being an influence in politics?
So, I started a group called Wolfpack and thank you.
Wolfdashpack.com.
And the reason why I named a Wolfpack
is because everyone in Washington I knew
would hate that name.
It's a populist name and everybody in Washington's snickers
like, now you're supposed to name it Americans for America
and just trick people, et cetera.
No, no, no, Wolfpack means we're coming for you, okay?
We're not coming for you in a weirdo, physical,
or violent way.
We're coming for you in a democratic way, okay?
So, we're gonna go to those state houses.
We're gonna get them to propose a commission
and we did it in five states,
but then the Democratic Party started beating us back.
We'll get to that.
And so, we are going to overturn your apple cart
and we're gonna bring,
put the American people back in charge.
So, what does the amendment say?
Number one, a lot of people will have different opinions
on what it should say
and that's what you sort out in a convention.
So, for example, one of the things
that conservatives can propose,
which makes sense, is term limits.
Because the reason why these super old politicians
are in charge is because they provide
a return on investment.
So, you know, if you give to Biden, Pelosi, or McConnell,
they're gonna deliver for you.
They love that return on investment.
They don't wanna risk it on a new guy,
or a new guy might have principles.
Ew, or, you know, might wanna actually do a little bit
for his voters, boo, whereas these old, you know,
and every corrupt system has these old guys hanging around
that help maintain power, et cetera.
So, my particular proposal in the amendments
would be a couple of things.
One is end private financing of elections.
So, if, and look, if you're a business person,
you're a capitalist, you know this with absolute certainty.
If somebody signs your check,
that's the person you work for, right?
So, if private interests are funding politicians,
the politicians will serve private interests.
And then you're gonna get into a fight
like Elon did in New Jersey,
where the car dealerships and Tesla
are getting into an auction.
Can I hear 100,000 million, two million, three million,
right, and now you gotta go bribe the government official.
That's called a campaign contribution.
And this is a terrible system, right?
And the private financing,
go to complete public financing of elections.
That's when conservatives,
because they've been propagandized by corporate media,
yes, mainstream media got into your head too,
and right-wing media got into your head too.
And right-wing media also financed
by a lot of this corrupt interest.
And so they tell you,
oh, you don't wanna publicly finance.
Oh my God, you'd be spending like a billion dollars
on politicians.
Brother, they spending trillions of dollars of your money,
because they're financed by the guys
that they're giving all of your money to.
So, can you educate me?
Does that prevent something like Citizen United?
So, like Super PACs are all gone in this case.
So, indirect funding is also.
Indirect funding is gone, direct funding is gone.
You have to set up some thresholds.
Not everybody can just get money to run.
You have to prove
that you have some sort of popular support.
So, signature gathering,
you would still allow for small money donations,
like up to $100, something along those lines.
Not $5,000 or whatever it is now.
Yeah, I think $5,000 is too high,
but those are fine debates, yeah.
But you basically wanna create an incentive.
Everything is about incentives and disincentives.
Again, capitalists realize it's better than anyone else.
So, you wanna set up an incentive
to serve your voters, not your donors.
So, if you take away private donors,
well, there goes that incentive, and that's gigantic.
And then if you set up small grassroots funding
as a way to get past the threshold
to get the funding to run an election,
well, then good, because then you're serving small donors,
which are generally voters.
So, that's what you want.
And ending private financing is critical.
But the second thing is ending corporate personhood.
So, this is where you get into a lot of fights,
because you have two reasons.
One is some folks have a principled position against it,
and they say, well, I mean,
the Sierra Club is technically a corporation.
ACLU is technically a corporation.
And so, if you end corporate personhood,
then that could endanger their existence, right?
No, it doesn't endanger their existence at all, right?
So, it doesn't endanger GM or GE's existence.
It doesn't endanger anybody's existence.
Corporations exist.
We're not trying to take them away.
I would never do that, right?
That's not smart, that's not workable, et cetera.
We're just saying they don't have constitutional rights.
So, they have the rights that we give them.
And by the way, Read the Founding Fathers
is also in my book.
They hated corporations.
The American Revolution was partly against
the British East India Company.
And so, the Tea Party in Boston
was against that corporation.
They threw their tea overboard.
It was not against the British monarchy.
And so, they, and all the Founding Fathers
warned us over and over again,
watch out for corporations, okay?
Because once they form, they will amass money and power
and look to kill off democracy.
And they were totally right.
That's exactly what happened.
And so, it's not that you don't have them.
It's that through democratic capitalism,
you limit their power.
They definitely, you can give them a bunch of rights.
You say, hey, you have a right to exist.
You have a right to do this, this, and this, okay?
But you do not have constitutional rights of a citizen.
And so, you don't have the right to speak to a politician
by giving them a billion dollars.
And you believe that the people will be able
to find the right policies to regulate
and tax the corporations,
such that capitalism could flourish still?
Yes, you know why?
Because I'm a real populist and I believe in the people.
So, I drive the establishment crazy
because they don't believe in the people.
They think, oh, Jacob, have you seen MAGA?
Have you seen these guys?
Have you seen the radicals on the left?
We're so much smarter.
You know how many Ivy League degrees we have, right?
And we know what we're doing.
No, you don't.
No, you're, everybody to some degree
looks out for their own interests, right?
Why I like capitalism and why I love democracy
is because it's the wisdom of the crowd.
And so, in the long run, the crowd is right.
Oftentimes, in the short term, we're wrong, okay?
But the wisdom of the crowd in the long run
is much, much better than the elites that run things.
The elites say, well, we're so smart and educated,
so we're gonna know better what's good for you.
No, brother, you're gonna know what's better for you.
And so, here's something that a lot of people get wrong
on the populist left and right.
They think, oh, those guys are evil.
They're not evil.
I met them.
I worked at MSNBC.
I worked on cable.
I went to Wharton, you know, Columbia Law.
I know a lot of those guys.
And so, they're not at all evil.
They don't even know that they're mainly serving
their own interests.
They just naturally do it, right?
And so, they think the carrot interest loophole
makes a lot of sense, right?
They think corporate tax cuts makes a lot of sense.
You not getting higher wages.
You not having healthcare.
It makes a lot of sense.
It doesn't make any goddamn sense,
but they get themselves to believe it.
And that's another portion of the invisible hand
on the market.
So, there's problems with every path.
So, the elite, like you mentioned,
can be corrupted by greed, by power, and so on.
But the crowd, I agree with you, by the way,
about the wisdom of the crowd versus the wisdom of the elite.
But the crowd can be captured by a charismatic leader.
So, the problem with populism,
and I'm probably a populist myself,
the problem with populism is it can be and has been
throughout history captured by bad people.
But if you say to me, trust the elites or trust the people,
I'm gonna trust the people every single time.
Well, that's why you're such an interesting,
I don't wanna say contradiction,
but there's a tension that creates the balance.
So, to me, in the way you're speaking,
might result in hurting capitalism.
So, it's easy in fighting corporatism to hurt companies.
So, to go too far the other way.
Yeah, of course, of course.
And so, like when you talked about corporate tax,
so, what's the magic number for the corporate tax?
Because if it's too high, companies leave.
Yeah, companies have so much power right now.
This pendulum has swung so far.
And guys, we're almost out of time.
The window's closing.
The minute private equity buys all of our homes,
the residential real estate market, we're screwed.
We're indentured servants forever, okay?
There goes wealth creation for the average American.
So, you're right, Lex, that it's not a contradiction.
It's a tension that is inevitable to get to balance.
The reason why people kinda can't figure me out,
they're like, well, you're on the left,
but you're a capitalist, et cetera.
That's not a contradiction.
That's getting to the right balance.
And in order to do that, if you say,
well, if we change the system, I'm afraid of change,
because what if the pendulum swings
too far in the other direction, right?
Well, then you would be opposed to change at all times.
So, if you do that, it actually reminds me
of the Biden fight, right?
So, I'm like, guys, he has almost no chance of winning.
He stands for the establishment.
He can't talk.
But then the number one pushback I'd get from Democrats
was, yeah, but what if we change?
It's so scary.
We don't know about Kamala Harris.
What if it's not Kamala Harris?
It's so scary.
Don't change.
And I'm like, yeah, but if you say change might be worse,
it also might be better.
And you're at zero.
Anything is better, right?
And right now, in terms of corruption in America,
we're at 98% corruption.
So, we've got 2% decency left.
Brother, this is when you want change.
And so, and Lex, if you actually have wisdom of the crowd,
just like in supply and demand,
and how it works in economics,
it works the same way in a functioning democracy.
You go too far, you come back in.
So, for example, when Reagan came into office,
me and my dad, my family, we were Republicans.
Why?
At that point, the highest marginal tax rate was at 70%.
70% is too high, right?
Now, then he brought it all the way down to 28%.
That's too low, right?
So, and that's how the system modulates itself.
Already, we were headed towards corruption
because it's the 80s now.
We're past magic 78 marker, right?
So, and even Carter was way more conservative economically
than people realize,
because we're already getting past it
by the time it's in his administration.
But the bottom line is, yes,
whenever you have real wisdom of the crowd,
whether it's in business or in politics,
you're gonna have fluctuation.
You're gonna have that pendulum swinging back and forth.
You don't want wild swings, communism, corporatism, right?
You wanna get to, hey, where's the right balance here
between capitalism and what people think is socialism?
Yeah, so I guess I agree with most of the things you said
about the corruption.
I just wish there would be more celebration
of the fact that capitalism
and some incredible companies in the history
of the 20th century has created so much wealth,
so much innovation that has increased the quality of life
on average.
They've also increased the wealth inequality
and exploitation of the workers and this kind of stuff.
But you wanna not forget to celebrate the awesomeness
that companies have also brought
outside the political sphere,
just in creating awesome stuff.
Look, I run a company.
And so I don't want companies to go away.
And I don't want you to hate all companies.
I think Young Turks is a wonderful company, right?
We provide great healthcare.
We take care of our employees.
We care about the community, et cetera.
And we're building a whole nation online
on those principles in the right way to run a company, right?
But guys, we're at the wrong part of the pendulum.
The companies have overwhelming power
and they're crushing us.
We're like that scene in Star Wars
where the trash compactor is closing in on them,
the walls are closing in.
We're almost out of time
because they've captured the government almost entirely.
They're only serving corporate interests.
We've got to get back into balance before it's too late.
And that's why I care so much about structural issues.
So I formed Justice Democrats.
So that's AOC, et cetera, right?
That's people know it as the squad.
They know it as Justice Democrats, et cetera.
I'm one of the co-founders of that.
And my number one rule was no corporate PAC money, okay?
So you're not allowed to take corporate PAC money.
By the way, now Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley
have stopped taking corporate PAC money
and they've become to some degree
on economic issues, genuine populists.
It's amazing.
It happens overnight.
All of a sudden they're holding,
they're talking about holding corporations accountable,
et cetera.
Now, just Democrats wind up having other problems.
They got too deep into social issues, not economic issues.
There's a general sort of criticism of billionaires, right?
This idea.
Now, you could say that billionaires are avoiding taxes
and they're not getting taxed enough.
But I think under that flag of criticizing billionaires,
it's criticizing all companies that do epic shit,
that build stuff, that create stuff.
That's what I'm worried about.
I don't hear enough genuine,
I like celebrating people, I like celebrating ideas.
I just don't hear enough genuine celebration
of companies when they do cool things.
Okay, so are you right?
Not about companies, but about capitalism?
Yes.
Because you look at life expectancy 200 years ago
and you look at it now and you go, wow, holy shit,
we did amazing things, right?
So, and what happened in the last 200 years?
We went from dictatorships more towards democracy,
wisdom of the crowd.
We went from serfs and indentured servants
and a nobility that holds the land
to more towards capitalism and boom, the crowd is right.
Things go really well.
The advances in medicine are amazing
and medicine is a great example.
So, and on our show, I point all those things out
and I say, look, we hate the drug companies
because of how they capture the government, right?
But we don't hate the drug companies for creating great drugs.
Those drugs save lives.
They should save my life.
They saved countless millions upon millions of lives.
So, the right idea isn't shut down drug companies.
The right idea is don't let them buy the government, right?
So, and I know we get back into our instinctual shells.
So, on the left, there'll be,
oh, we should get rid of all billionaires.
Why?
Like, how does that fix the system?
Tell me how it fixes the system and I'm all ears, right?
My solution is end private financing.
Then you can be a billionaire all you like.
You can't buy the government, right?
That's a more logical way to go about it.
I've never worn an eat the rich shirt
and it drives me crazy.
I'm like, you would have eaten FDR, right?
And FDR is the best president,
most populous president in my opinion.
And so, no, there's wonderful rich people.
Of course, of course, there's a range of humanity, right?
But you don't wanna get rid of the rich.
You don't wanna get rid of companies,
but you also don't wanna let them control everything.
So, I'll give you an example that's really,
and that informs a lot of how I think about things,
which is my dad.
So, my dad was a farmer in southeastern Turkey
near the Syrian border.
No money.
In fact, his dad died when he was six months old
and so they were saddled with debt.
And no electricity in his house,
like as poor as poor gets.
And he wound up living the American dream.
And so, how did he do that?
What made the difference?
Well, what made the difference is opportunity, right?
So, I'm a populist because my dad was in the masses, right?
And the elites say the masses are no good.
We're smart, you're not.
We're educated, you're not.
We at Meritocracy, we talk about that.
We have earned merit.
And if you're a poor middle class,
you have not earned merit, okay?
You're useless or worthless.
And I hate that.
So, what did Turkey do back in the 1960s
that liberated my dad?
They provided free college education.
You had to test into it, okay?
But the top 15% got a free college education
at the best colleges in Turkey.
So, my uncle saved all of our lives
when he came to my dad and said,
do you like working on this farm?
And my dad's like, fuck no, right?
It's super hot, it's super hard.
They gotta get up at four in the morning.
If they're lucky, the family next door gives them a mule.
If they're not, they gotta carry the shit themselves, okay?
So, my uncle told him, work just as hard in school
and you'll be able to get a house, a car,
pretty girls, et cetera.
So, my dad works his ass off, gets into the school
and he comes out a mechanical engineer
and starts his own company.
He creates a company in Turkey, hires hundreds of people.
He then moves to America, creates a company here,
hires tons of people, right?
So, do I hate companies?
No, my dad set up two companies
and I saw how much it benefited people.
I saw how much employees would come up to my dad
20, 30 years later in the street and hug him.
And they tell me as a young kid,
your dad's the most fair boss we ever had
and we love him for it, right?
That's how you run a company.
And he taught me the value of hard work
but the reason I brought up here is because he taught me,
look, like skill and ability is a genetic lottery.
So, you're not gonna just get the rich
to win all the genetic lottery.
No, there's gonna be tons of poor kids
and middle-class kids who are just as good if not better.
You have to provide them the opportunity,
the fair chance to succeed.
You have to believe in them.
So, this isn't about disempowering anyone.
It's about empowering all of those kids
who are doing the right thing or smart
and wanna work hard so they could build their own companies
and add to the economy.
What in general is your view on meritocracy?
So, I love meritocracy.
I wish that we lived in a meritocracy
and I wanna drive towards living in a meritocracy.
So, that's why I don't like equality of results.
So, okay, now people that are on the left
will get super mad at that and go, what do you mean?
Well, okay, brother, let's say you're at work
and you got one guy who's working his ass off,
another guy that's going, I don't care,
I'm not gonna do it, right?
Well, the guy who works super hard has to pick up the slack.
Now he's working twice as hard, right?
And now you want the same results?
You want the same salary as that guy?
No, brother, no.
He's working twice, four times, 10 times harder than you.
That's not fair.
Fairness matters.
I lived, we wound up, I mean, we were in the suburbs
of Jersey but we wound up in Freehold eventually
and we lived across a farm which is kind of,
in Central Jersey it happens, right?
And it was called Fair Chance Farm.
I was like, how did I get, this is amazing, right?
And I love that.
That's the essence of America
and that's what I want to go back to.
So, we've got to create that opportunity
not just because it's the moral thing to do
but because it's also the economically smart thing to do.
If you enable all those great people
that are in lower income classes and middle income classes,
you're gonna get a much better economy,
a much stronger democracy.
So, that's direction we got.
So, again, it's about balance
but what do you think about DEI policies?
Say in academia and companies,
so the movement as it has evolved.
Where's that on the balance?
Is that...
How far is it pushing towards equality of outcome
versus equality of opportunity?
Okay, so now we're getting into social issues, right?
So, this is where we all rip each other apart
and then the people at the top laugh their ass off at us
and go, we got a fighting over trans issues.
They're killing each other.
It's hilarious and they're so busy.
They don't realize we're running the place, right?
Okay, but let's engage.
Some people will look at DEI and go,
well, that just gives me an opportunity
just like anyone else.
I love DEI.
Another person will look at it and go,
no, that says that you should be picked above me
and I hate DEI, right?
So, the reality of DEI is a little bit more complicated
and so, but you gotta go back.
So, first, did we need affirmative action in the 1960s?
Definitely.
Why?
All the firefighter jobs in South Carolina as an example
are going to white guys.
All the longshoremen jobs in New York, L.A.,
wherever you have it, are all going to white guys
because that's how the system was.
Yes, also in the North, right?
So, we now are in a civil rights area.
We decide we're gonna go towards equality.
Minorities, in that case, mainly black Americans,
had to find a way to break in.
I'm not trying to, like if you're a longshoreman
and it's a good job, you naturally wanna pass it
on to your son.
I get your instinct.
I don't hate you for it, right?
But we gotta let black kids also have a shot at it, right?
So, you need it in the beginning.
But, at a certain point, you have to phase it out.
So, when I was growing up, it's now in the late 80s,
early 90s, I hated affirmative action.
And I've been principled on it from day one
and to this day.
I don't, I'm not in favor of affirmative action.
I say it on the show all the time.
Why?
I'm a minority.
Being a Turk, I grew up Muslim, I'm an atheist now,
but generally speaking, a Muslim is certainly a minority
in America and pretty much a hated one overall.
So, but I didn't check off Muslim or Turkish
or any ethnicity when I applied to college
because I believe in a meritocracy,
as we were talking about.
But we don't really have a meritocracy now.
And so, I can come back to that.
But right now, so I didn't check it off
because I didn't want an unfair advantage
because I want to earn it.
I want to earn it.
So, now I'm in law school
and I'm hanging out with right wingers
because at that point, I'm a Republican.
And one of the guys says to me about one of our black
student going to Columbia.
He says, oh, I wonder how he got in here.
God, that is the problem with affirmative action.
It devalues the accomplishments
of every minority in the country.
You have to transition away from it.
If you don't, it sets up a caste system.
And that caste system is lethal to democracy.
So, does DEI go too far in some instances?
Yes.
But is it a boogeyman that's gonna take all the white jobs
and make them black,
as Trump would say, black jobs, right?
And give minorities too much power, et cetera.
No, the idea isn't to rob you
and to give all the opportunity to minorities.
The idea is to make it equal.
But as the pendulum swings,
did it swing too far in some directions?
Yes.
The left can't acknowledge that
and the right thinks can't acknowledge that.
Of course, at some point, you got to give a chance
for others to break in so they have a fair chance.
By the way, Michelle Obama had a good line
about the black jobs and the DNC speech,
where somebody should tell Trump
that the presidency might be just one of those black jobs.
Anyway, but why do you think the left doesn't acknowledge
when DI gets ridiculous,
which in certain places and in certain places
at a large scale has gotten ridiculous?
Because people are taught to just be in the tribe they're in
and to believe it 100%.
Like I've gotten kicked out of every tribe.
I might be the most attack man in internet history,
partly because we've been around forever
and partly because I disagree
with every part of the political spectrum
because I believe in independent thought.
And the minute you vary a little bit, people go nuts.
And so the far left tribe is gonna go
with their preset ideology,
just like the far right tribe is.
So for example, on trans issues,
we've protected trans people for over 20 years
in the Young Turks.
We fought for equality for trans people
and for all LGBTQ people.
For two decades, we did it way before anyone else did.
When Biden came out in favor of gay marriage in 2013,
we're like, this is comically late.
So like we're all supposed to like congratulate him
in the year 2013 that he thinks gay people
should have the same rights as straight people.
And then he had to push Obama to get there, right?
So on the other hand, I'm like, guys,
if you allow trans women to go into professional sports,
not at the high school level, but professional sports,
but let's say they go into MMA or boxing
and a trans woman, I mean, it happens in boxing,
it happens in MMA, punches a biological woman
so hard that she kills her, right?
So you're gonna set back trans rights 50 years.
I'm not trying to hurt you, I'm trying to help you.
You have to do bounds of reason.
So when I say simple things like that,
and I say, you give LeBron James,
every hormone blocker on planet earth,
he's still gonna dominate the WNBA, okay?
It would be comical.
He might score 100 points a night, okay?
And they'll say, oh, that's outrageous.
And some have called me Nazi for saying that trans women,
or that professional leagues should make their own decisions
on whether they allow trans women in or not.
So why do they say that?
Because they're so besieged,
they think we cannot give an inch.
We cannot give any ground.
If you give any ground, you're a Nazi, okay?
So we've got to get out of that mindset.
You can't function in a democracy
and be in an extreme position
and expect the rest of the country
to go towards your extreme position.
So why do you think we are not in the meritocracy?
So because of the corruption, it's, so for example,
but there's also, but remember,
corporate media is the matrix
and they plug you into cable, right?
In the old days.
Now it's a little bit different because of online media.
But especially 10 years ago,
and remember we started 22 years ago.
So I've been losing my mind over how obvious
corporate media corruption has been for decades now, right?
But no one acknowledged it until online media got stronger.
But one of the myths that corporate media creates
is the myth of meritocracy.
Not that meritocracy can't exist or shouldn't exist,
but they pretend it exists today.
So the problem with that myth, Lex,
is that it gets people thinking,
well, if they're already rich,
they must have merited it by definition.
So all the rich have merit.
And the reverse of that, if you're poor middle-class,
well, you must not have merited wealth.
So you're no good.
We don't have to listen to you.
And that's a really dangerous, awful idea.
And so if we get to a meritocracy one day,
I'll be the happiest person in America.
But right now it's, look, here I'll give you
an example that I put in the book.
And it's not us, this other folks in this YouTube video,
I can't even quite find who they were,
but it was a brilliant video.
And they said, okay, we're gonna do a 100-yard race.
But hold on, before we start,
anyone who has two parents take two steps forward,
anyone who has went to college,
take another two steps forward,
anyone who doesn't have bills to pay for education anymore,
take two steps forward.
They do all these things, right?
And then at the end, before they start,
somebody's 20 yards from the finish line,
and a lot of people are still at the starting line.
And then they go, okay, now we're gonna run a race.
I think I was right next to the finish line wins.
And they go, meritocracy, okay.
So the challenge there is to know which disparities
when you just freeze the system and observe
are actually a result of some kind of discrimination
or flaw in the system versus the result of a meritocracy
of the better runner being ahead.
That's right.
There are some parts that are easy to solve, Lex,
so if you donated to a politician
and he gave you a billion-dollar subsidy,
that's not meritocracy, right?
So if you fall on the money,
you can see the flaws in the system.
Exactly, and again, nothing's ever perfect
at any snapshot of history, right, or of the moment.
You're gonna be at some point in the pendulum swing,
but if you trust the people and you let the pendulum swing
but not wildly, then you're gonna get
to the right answers in the long run.
So you think this woke mind virus that the right refers to
is a problem but not a big problem?
No, so the right wing drives me crazy.
So look, guys, your instincts of populism is correct.
Your instincts of anti-corruption is correct, right?
And I love you for it.
And so, and in a lot of ways, the right-wing voters
figured out the whole system screwed
before left-wing voters did it.
I shouldn't say left-wing voters
because progressives and left-wing have been saying it
for not only decades but maybe centuries, right?
But democratic voters, a lot of democratic voters,
some of them actually like this current system,
some of them, a lot of them have been tricked
into liking this current system,
and the left should be fighting against corruption
harder than the right, but right now,
unfortunately, that's not the case.
So there's a lot that I like about right-wing voters, okay?
But you guys get tricked on social issues so easily, right?
So how many people are involved
in trans high school sports,
and a girl who should have finished first in that track
in a race in the middle of Indiana finished second?
First of all, this is the big crime.
This is, and how many people are involved?
About seven, 13 out of a country of 330 million people,
and you can't see that that's a distraction, right?
So, and everything that is like bait
that the right-wing media puts out there, they run after.
I mean, Tucker Carlson doing insane segments
about M&M should be sexier, Mr. Potato Head has gender issues.
Guys, get out of there, get out of there, it's a trap, okay?
Yeah, that doesn't mean that there, absolutely.
It doesn't mean that there's larger scale issues
with things like DEI that aren't so fun to talk about
or viral to talk about on an anecdotal scale.
There is, DEI does create a culture of fear
with cancer culture, and it does create a kind of culture
that limits the freedom of expression,
and it does limit the meritocracy in another way.
So you're basically saying,
forget all these other problems,
money is the biggest problem.
So first of all, on AOC, as an example,
and I don't mean to pick on her,
but she won through the great work of her
and shortcut Chakra Barti and Corbin Trent
and others who were leaders of the Justice Democrats
that went and helped her campaign.
They were critical help,
and we all told her the same thing.
So it's not about me, me, me.
And so we all said you've got to challenge the establishment
and you've got to work on money and politics first,
because if you don't work on money and politics
and you don't fix that, you're going to lose
on almost all other issues.
But she didn't believe us because it's uncomfortable.
And all the progressives that went into Congress,
they drive me crazy.
They think, oh, no, no, you're exaggerating.
No, these are, and the minute they get in,
all of a sudden, my colleagues, right?
Your colleagues hate you and they're going to drive you out.
You're a sucker, and Jamal Bowman, Cori Bush,
what did they do?
They drove them out, Marie Newman drove them out, right?
And because they're not on your side,
they're not your colleagues.
And what happened to $15 minimum wage?
And I remember talking to one of those Congressperson people,
I won't leave out the name, and saying,
hey, you know they're not going to do $15 minimum wage.
And he's like, oh, Cenk, you're out of the loop.
Nancy Pelosi assured us that they are going to do
$15 minimum wage.
I'm like, I love you, but you're totally wrong.
Moneyed interests are not going to do $15 minimum wage.
You have to start fighting now, right?
And they didn't get it.
So they lost on almost all those issues,
because it's all about incentives and disincentives
and rules.
If you don't fix the rules,
you're going to constantly run into the same brick wall.
Now, the second issue that we were talking about
is in the culture wars,
the rest of us are stuck between the two extreme
two percenters, right, on both sides.
So the two percenter on the left goes,
you know, if you're a white woman,
you need to shut up and listen now, okay?
That's ridiculous.
No, you don't.
If you're a white woman,
you have every right to speak out,
you have every right that every other human being has.
And so would I love for all of us to listen
to one another, to have empathy for one another
and go, hey, I wonder how a right-winger thinks about this.
I wonder how a left-winger thinks about this.
I wonder why they think that way, right?
I love that and I want that.
So I want you to listen,
but I don't want you to shut up.
So that two percent gets extreme and I don't like it.
But on the right wing, you got your two percent
who think that that's all that's happening on the left.
And that's all that's happening in American politics.
And they think the entire left believes that tiny two percent,
right, and so they hate the left.
And they're like, oh, I'm not going to shut up.
I'm not going to wear a mask.
I'm not going to do any of these things.
And I'm not going to do any, that's a freedom.
And then a Republican comes along and goes,
oh yeah, that thing you call freedom,
that's deregulation for corporations
because you shouldn't really have freedom.
Companies should have freedom, right?
And then a guy goes, yeah, freedom for ExxonMobil.
No, brother, they tricked you.
Yeah, the two percent on each side
is a useful distraction for, yes,
for the corruption of the politicians via money.
Still, I'm talking about the 96% that remains in the middle
and the impact that DEI policy has on them.
Yeah, so here's where it gets absurd.
I'll give you a good example of absurdity.
So in a school, I believe in California,
they noticed that Latino students were not doing as well
in AP and honors classes.
So they canceled AP and honors classes.
Oh, come on, what are you doing?
That's nuts.
No, your job is to help them get better grades,
get better opportunity, et cetera.
That's the harder thing to do and the right thing to do.
Your job isn't, I'm gonna make everything equal
by taking away the opportunity for higher achievement
for other students.
If that's what you're doing and you think you're on the left,
you're not really on the left.
I actually think that's like an authoritarian position
that a no progressive in their right mind
would be in favor of.
But it's all definitional.
So here's another example of definitional, communism.
Like they say, oh my God, Kamala Harris is a communist.
Well, when you're telling on yourself, brothers and sisters,
when you say that, that means A,
I don't know what communism means.
And B, I don't have any idea what's going on
in American politics.
Kamala Harris is a corporatist.
That's her problem.
Not that she's a communist.
She's on the other end of the spectrum, right?
The idea that Kamala Harris would come into office
and say, that's it, there's no more private property.
We're going to take all of your homes
in the style of government property,
all your cars, et cetera.
She was not going to get within a billion miles of that.
Her donors would never allow her
to get within a billion miles of that.
That is so preposterous
that when you say something like that, it's disqualifying.
Like I can't debate someone
who thinks that Democrats are communists
when they're actually largely corporatists.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, so let's go there.
So when people call her a communist,
they're usually referring to certain kinds of policies.
So do you think, I mean, I think it's a ridiculous label
to assign to Kamala Harris,
especially given the history of communism
in the 20th century
and what those economic and political policies have led
to the scale of suffering that led to.
And it just degrades the meaning of the word, right?
But to take that seriously, why is she not a communist?
So you said she's not a communist
because she's a corporatist.
Okay, but that can't be,
okay, everybody in politics is a corporatist.
Almost.
Almost everybody in politics is a corporatist.
But that doesn't mean the corporations
have completely bought their mind.
They have an influence on their mind
and issues that matter to those corporations.
Yep.
Right?
Yep.
Outside of that, they're still thinking for the voters
because they still have to win the votes.
Barely.
Okay.
So here, let me give you an example
so you see what I'm saying.
So if you just wanted votes,
you would do a lot of what Tim Walz did, okay?
And by the way, a lot of what Bernie did,
that's why Bernie who had no media coverage
went from like 2% in 2015 to by the end about 48%
because he was just doing things that were popular, right?
And that American people wanted, et cetera, right?
Because he's not controlled by corporations.
By the way, neither is Tom Massey on the right wing side,
on the Republican side, right?
So it's not all, that's why I always say almost all, right?
So if you're doing things that are popular, people love it.
So today, what would Kamala Harris do
if she actually just wanted to win, right?
So number one, she was trying to pass
paid family leave right now.
Why?
It pulls at 84% and even 74% of Republicans want it.
Why?
Because it says, hey, when you have a baby,
you should get 12 weeks off, bond with your baby.
Right now, in a lot of states
that don't have paid family leave,
you have to go back to work the very next day
or you have to use all of your sick days,
all your vacation days,
just to have one or two weeks with your baby, right?
So conservatives love paid family leave,
liberals love paid family leave.
That's why it pulls so high.
So why isn't she proposing it?
It's not in our economic plan.
Tim Wall's already passed it in Minnesota.
He showed how easy it was.
If you want votes,
and then you know what's gonna happen
if you're a proposed paid family leave,
the Republicans are gonna go, no,
our beloved corporations don't wanna spend
another dollar on moms, right?
And they fall for that trap
and then you're in infinitely better shape.
So why doesn't she do it?
She doesn't do it because her corporate donors
don't want her to do it.
$15 minimum wage, layup,
over two thirds of the country wants it
because it not only gives you higher wages
for minimum wage folks,
but it pushes wages up for others.
And what do the elites say?
Oh, that's gonna drive up inflation.
No, you shouldn't get paid anymore.
Wait, wait, wait, hold on.
So you're saying all other prices should go up,
but the only thing that shouldn't go up is our wages?
No, our wages should go up, okay?
So these are all easy ones.
Here's another one, anti-corruption.
Why isn't she running on getting money out of politics?
It pulls it over 90%.
Why isn't Trump running on it anymore?
He won when he ran on it in 2016.
He didn't mean a word of it,
but he ran on it, it was smart.
They don't do it because their corporate donors
take their heads off if they do it.
So in contradiction to that,
why did she propose to raise the corporate tax rate
from whatever, 21% to 28%?
Because that's easy because that is something
that's super popular and she's not gonna do it.
That's why.
So guys, this is where I break the hearts of Blue Magga.
Blue Magga thinks, oh my God,
these Democrats, they're angels and the right wingers
and the Republicans are evil and they work for big business
but not Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden, right?
Okay, well, Donald Trump took the corporate tax rate
from 35% to 21%.
So that's trillions of dollars that got transferred
because guys, you gotta understand,
if the corporations don't pay it, we have to pay it
because we're running up these giant deficits
and eventually either they're gonna,
not eventually, they keep raising our taxes
in different ways that you're not noticing.
They keep increasing fees and fines and different ways
for the government to collect money.
So we're paying for it.
And on top of that,
eventually they're gonna cut your social security
and Medicare because they're gonna say,
oh, we don't have any options left anymore.
Yeah, you don't have any options left anymore
because you kept giving trillions of dollars in tax cuts
to corporations.
So we're gonna have to pay for that.
So then Trump, then Biden says, oh my God,
I'm gonna bring corporate taxes back up to 28%.
I'm like, wait, hold on.
They were at 35.
You already did a sleight of hand and said 28.
Okay, then he gets into office and Manchin says,
no, 25, that's the highest I'll go.
And he goes, okay, fine, 25.
And then while you're not looking, they just dump it.
They don't even do 25.
It's still at 21.
So hear me now, quote me later.
I do predictions on the show all the time
because you should hold me accountable.
You should hold all your pundits accountable.
If you held all your pundits accountable,
we'd be the last man standing
and that's kind of what happened.
Okay, so I guarantee you
she will not increase corporate taxes.
So would the same be the case for price controls
or the NT price gouging that she's supposed to-
So it's not price controls, it's price gouging.
Well, it is price controls,
but I mean minimum wage is price controls also.
Now we're gonna get into a lot of minutia,
but I'll try to keep it broad.
So price controls are a disaster.
They never work.
If you say, oh, here's a banana.
It has to stay at a dollar, a pound, make up a number, right?
Well, supply and demand is gonna move
and then that's gonna,
and so the minute it moves to $2
at where the price should be,
then you're gonna run into shortages.
So we all know this, it's a bad idea, right?
But are there laws against price gouging?
There already are and they're a good idea.
So why?
Like you have a natural disaster,
all of a sudden the water that was a dollar,
now they're charging $100.
The government has to come in, democratic capitalism,
they come in and go, no, I'm gonna protect the people.
So you're not allowed to price gouge,
maybe charge $2, et cetera,
but you're not gonna charge 100, but it is temporary.
We get that done, we end the problem there,
and then we bring it back to a normal supply and demand.
So that's what she's proposing.
That's all political
because the price gouging has already passed.
They did it in 21 and 22.
And so now the grocery stores
are actually low margin business.
She says grocery stores,
that's how I know she doesn't mean it
because the grocery stores weren't the problem,
consumer goods were the problem, those companies.
She's following the polls when most people will say
that the groceries are too expensive,
so she's just basically saying the most popular thing, yeah.
100%, and you could tell in which proposals she means it
and which proposals she doesn't
because of the framing, right?
So this is a mediocre example,
but in housing, she said,
we have to stop private equity from buying houses in bulk.
I'm curious that they put the word in bulk there.
Why does it have to be in bulk?
Why don't we just stop them from buying any residential home?
Like you could set up normal boundaries, right?
For example, Charlie Kirk was on Young Turks this week.
By the way, sorry to take that tangent.
I really enjoyed that conversation.
I really enjoyed that you talked to,
but that was like civil.
You guys disagreed pretty intensely,
but like there was a lot of respect.
I really enjoyed that.
Thank you, brother.
That was like, that was beautiful.
You and Charlie Kirk and I think Anna was there.
Yeah, that's right.
So, yeah, quick tangent,
and look, I've done a lot of yelling online, okay.
And I yell when A,
there's a issue that you should be passionate about,
40,000 people, 25,000 women and children slaughtered in Gaza.
If you're not emotionally upset by that
and you think it's no big deal, I think that's a problem.
But when you add gaslighting on top,
that's what drives me crazy.
And then when you add filibustering on top,
then that sets me off.
So for all my life, right-wing has gone on cable
and filibustered, they take up so much more time
than the left-wing guests.
And the left-wing guests always like,
oh, okay, well, I'm offended.
He's taking up too much time.
No, brother, go over the top, go over the top.
You're not gonna talk over me, I'm gonna talk over you, okay.
So, and then when you gaslight and you go,
oh, no, 1200 people in Israel being killed is awful,
which it is, but 40,000 people being killed in Gaza,
it's no big deal, we should keep giving them money,
keep killing, keep killing.
And that that's normal, no, it's not normal.
I'm not gonna let you say it's normal, that's nuts, okay.
When you, like, we were against the Iraq War,
there was only two shows that were on the air nationally
that were against the Iraq War,
Us and Democracy Now with Amy Goodman.
And at the time, I used to yell all the time
because mainstream media would gaslight the fuck out of us.
We're gonna be greeted as liberators.
Me and Ben Mankiewicz on the air,
Ben doesn't yell as much,
he's now the host of Turner Classic Movies,
but he's saying it in a calm way,
I'm saying it in a screaming way,
we're not going to be greeted as liberators.
When you drop a bomb on someone's head,
they don't greet you as a liberator,
stop saying insane things.
And seven out of 10 Americans thought
that Saddam Hussein had personally attacked us on 9-11.
We got lied into that war by corporate media, okay.
Now, there's a couple of good things that Trump has done.
One is get people to realize corporate media
is the matrix, right?
And so now, and get them to an anti-war position,
he himself doesn't have an anti-war position,
but his voters do, and that's a positive.
We can come back to that.
But these days,
the reason why the Charlie Kirk conversations
are going great, and Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell,
and historically though, we've been,
go back again 10 years, 20 years,
we've always been respectful
when someone comes on our show and we have a debate.
As long as they're not yelling,
I matched a tenor of the host, right?
You and I are having a reasonable conversation,
I'm not raising my voice,
I'm not yelling at you for no reason, right?
So now, when Charlie's not going to battle anymore
for talking points, I'm shutting off my mind,
all I'm doing is yelling at you,
then I'm gonna yell back at him.
But now, he's saying,
okay, let's have a reasonable conversation.
Great, I love it, I love reasonable conversations.
It was great, it was refreshing.
And what were we talking about, buying up housing?
Yes, so Charlie, when he was on, said,
hey, listen, you know,
I think that there should be a cap, though.
I forget if he said $10 billion or $100 billion in assets.
If you have less than that,
you should still be able to do real estate as an investment,
even if it's residential.
But above that, it gets to, okay, that's good, no problem.
We can have a debate about that
when we figure out is the right number 10, 125, no problem.
You could put in reasonable limitations.
But we gotta get them to stop buying their homes.
So when Kamala Harris says,
oh, we'll stop them from buying homes in bulk,
I'm like, okay, there's the loophole.
And so they're gonna use that loophole.
And besides which, it's not gonna pass.
Wall Street owns the government.
So there's no way corporate Republicans and Democrats,
which are about 98% of politicians,
are gonna limit private equity.
And so when do we ever get a little bit of change?
When Democrats are in charge,
they do five to 15% of their agenda.
And that's not because they're warmhearted,
it's a release valve, right?
Oh, see, under Obama, we got about 5% change.
And what was that?
That was Obamacare, right?
That was most of the change that we got.
And what's the greatest part of Obamacare?
And now a lot of right wing also agree,
almost all of right wing agree about this portion,
which is they got rid of the bias
against preexisting conditions.
Why did they do that particularly?
Because the country was about to get in a fucking rage.
We all have preexisting conditions.
If you deny me when I'm sick,
what the fuck's the point of insurance, right?
And the anger had gotten to a nuclear level.
So release valve, get rid of preexisting conditions.
Let's go back to just milking them regularly.
And oh, by the way, put in a mandate
so that they have to buy it from us, right?
Do you know who originally came up with Obamacare?
The Heritage Foundation.
It was their proposal.
Romney did it in Massachusetts.
It was called Romneycare.
So I think this is a super important election,
but I've earned the credibility to be able to say that.
Because in 2012, I said,
this is a largely unimportant election.
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama's policies on economic issues
are near identical.
Obamacare was literally Romneycare.
Right now the left says, oh, the Heritage Foundation,
it's so dangerous, Project 2025.
Well, brother, they're the ones who wrote Obamacare.
And you say that's the greatest change in the world, right?
So that's why the Democrats,
yeah, I'll take the 10% change overall.
I think Biden did about 15%, Obama did 5%.
But they'll also march you backwards
by deregulating like Clinton did and Obama did.
The bank bailouts like Obama did.
But 10% is better than 0%, but it's not to help you.
It's the release valve so the system keeps going.
Is it possible to steel man the case
that not all politicians are corporatists,
or maybe how would you approach that?
For example, this podcast has a bunch of sponsors
and I give zero fucks about what they think
about what I'm saying.
I could have zero control over me.
Maybe you could say that's not,
because it's not a lot of money,
or maybe I'm a unique person or something like this.
But I just think it's possible to have,
and I would like to believe a lot of politicians
that this way, that they have ideas.
And while they take money,
they kind of see it as a game that you accept the money,
kind of go to certain parties, hug people and so on,
but it doesn't actually fundamentally compromise
your integrity on issues you actually care about.
I could steel man almost anything.
I could steel man Trump.
I could steel man conservatives easily, right?
Corporate politicians is a hard one.
So first, it's not all politicians.
We could start out nice and easy.
Tom Massey, now Hawley and Gates,
not taking corporate PAC money.
Bernie, the squad, they don't take corporate bank money.
You could disagree on either end of those folks
on social issues, but generally,
they are a thousand times less corrupt.
They're more honest.
And part of the reason you might hate this squad
is because they're so honest.
They tell you their real opinion on social issues
that you really disagree with.
A lot of the corporate politicians won't do that,
because they're trying to get as many votes as possible
so they can fillet their donors when they get into office
and do all their favors for them.
Okay, but you see, I'm already falling apart
on the steel making of corporate politicians.
Let's zoom in on that.
So if you take corporate PAC money,
that's it, you're corrupted.
Can you imagine yourself, say you're a politician,
you're a president, you're a human being,
you're a person with integrity,
you're a person who thinks about the world.
You're saying if I was a corporate PAC
and I gave you a billion dollars,
you still, you'd be, I could tell you anything?
So Lex, everything is a spectrum.
Humanity is a spectrum.
So can you find outliers who could take corporate PAC money
and still be principled enough to resist this lure?
Yeah, and I would hope that I would be a person like that,
but I wouldn't take corporate PAC money,
but if you force me to,
I think I would still stay principled and do it.
Could you find 10, 20 other people in the country?
Yeah, but on average, that is not what will happen.
What will happen is they will take the money
and do exactly as they are told.
I think most people have integrity.
Okay, hold on.
So what I'm more worried about
is when you take corporate PAC money,
it's not that you are immediately sold, it's over time.
Over time, that's true.
So yeah, I get it, but I wonder if the integrity
that I think most people have can withstand
the gradual slippery slope of the effect of corporate money,
which if what I'm saying is true,
that most people have integrity,
one of the ways to solve the effect of corporate money
is term limits, because it takes time to corrupt people,
you can't buy them immediately,
and then the term limits can, for the listener,
Cenk is shaking his head.
Yeah, so look, you're right
that over time it gets way worse,
and as we talked about earlier,
Biden's a great example of that,
comes in anti-corruption,
winds up being totally pro-corruption by the end.
But he was also here for almost all of it
as we started in a world
that was not run by money in politics,
and is now completely run by money in politics.
So does it get worse over time?
cinema is a, Christian cinema in Arizona
is a great example that comes in as a progressive,
doesn't wanna take PAC money,
cares about the average person, et cetera.
Over time, she becomes the biggest corporatist
in the Senate, and a total disaster.
But if you say that the majority of politicians have,
I don't know if this is what you're saying,
majority of politicians have integrity?
No, let's start at the majority of human beings,
and I think that politicians are not,
they are not a special group of sociopaths.
I think they are.
They lean a little bit towards that direction,
but they're not only sociopaths going to politics.
It's like you have to have some sociopathic qualities,
I think, to go into politics,
but they're not complete sociopath.
I think they do have integrity,
because sometimes for very selfish reasons,
it's not all about money.
Even for a selfish person, for a narcissist,
it's also about being recognized
for having had positive impact on the world.
Yeah, I get it, but all right, so let's break it down.
So first, human beings then we'll get to politicians.
Do human beings have integrity?
Well, it's a spectrum.
So some people have enormous integrity,
some people have no integrity.
So there is not one type or character, right?
So some people have a ton of empathy for other human beings,
and they literally feel it.
I feel the pain of someone else, and I'm not alone.
Most people feel the pain of someone else.
If you see it on video, a baby being hurt,
an overwhelming majority of human beings will go,
no, right?
You have empathy.
That's a natural feeling that you have.
Some people have no empathy,
because they're on the extreme end of the spectrum,
serial killers and Donald Trump, okay?
And so I'm partly joking, but not really.
He has never demonstrated any empathy
that I have ever seen for any other human being.
I'm gonna trigger some right-wingers,
because they think every terrible thing he said
is out of context or joking or not real or fake news.
But his chief of staff didn't make it up.
He called people who went into the military
suckers and losers.
Why did he say that?
Just hang with me for a second,
don't have your head explode, okay?
I'm not saying to Lex,
I'm saying to the right-wingers out there, right?
So the reason is, because if you're like Trump
and you don't, you literally don't feel the empathy,
you think, why the hell would I go in the military,
get killed for someone else?
What a sucker.
No, I'm gonna stay out of the military,
I'm gonna stay alive, I'm gonna make a ton of money,
and I'm gonna look out for myself.
And he assumes, because everybody does this,
you assume that everyone thinks like you do,
but they don't.
So Trump assumes everybody's as much of a dirtbag as he is,
and because he doesn't feel it, he doesn't feel the empathy.
And so he's like, yeah, you'd be an idiot,
a sucker and a loser to go into the military
and have sacrifice for other people.
So you see the spectrum.
Even if you think Trump's not on that end
and you think I'm wrong about that,
you get that there are people on that end, right?
So you have a spectrum of integrity, empathy, et cetera.
That's what I would call your hardware.
You layer on top of that your software, okay?
And the software is cultural influences.
Your parents, media, your friends,
all these are cultural influences.
So now when you're in certain industries,
they value more integrity.
So religious leaders, if you're doing it right,
which is also very rare, right?
But if you're doing it right,
you're supposed to have empathy for the poor,
the needy, the whole flock, right?
So that profession is incentivizing you
towards empathy and integrity, okay?
And even then, a giant amount of people abuse it, right?
But okay, good.
In politics, it creates incentives for the opposite,
no integrity.
And that software, to your point, over time,
gets stronger and stronger and stronger until it takes over.
Now, you might have someone with a lot of integrity,
like Tom Massey, a Republican from Kentucky.
And whether I agree with him or disagree with him on policy,
I get that the brother is actually doing it
based on principles.
And there isn't any amount of money you can give Tom Massey
for him to change his principles.
Why?
He's on the principled end of the spectrum
as a human being, right?
So is Bernie.
They're on the same part of that spectrum, right?
But for most people, the great majority of the spectrum,
if you overload them with software
that incentivizes them to not have integrity,
they will succumb.
And now let's switch to politicians in particular.
Why do I think that they're, on average,
far more likely to be on the sociopathic part
of the spectrum?
Because of the incentives and disincentives.
So this changes every congressional cycle.
And when just Democrats were winning a lot,
it got all the way down to 87.5%.
But on average, for congressional elections,
the person with more money wins 95% of the time.
It doesn't matter if they're a liberal or conservative,
Republican or Democrat, or any ideology they have, 95%.
So now, let's say you got the 5% that went in
that are not hooked on the money.
Well, they're gonna get a primary challenge.
Then they're gonna get a general election challenge.
And 95% of the time, the one with more money wins.
So eventually, this system cycles through
until almost only the corrupt are left.
Wait, hold on a second.
Is that real?
95%, so if you have more money,
95% of the time you win, huh?
Yes.
I'd like to believe that's less the case for, for example,
for the higher you get.
Yes, that's true, you're right.
So you know why?
So the presidential race is ironically,
in some ways, the least corrupt.
So let's dive into why.
If you're running a local race anywhere in the country,
you're gonna get almost no press coverage,
meaning a congressional race, right?
If you're running a Senate race in the middle of Montana,
you're gonna get almost no media coverage.
So that's where your money in politics has the most effect
because then you could just buy the airwaves.
You outspend the other guy, you get all the ads plus,
you get the friendly media coverage
because you just bought a couple of million dollars
of ads in the middle of Montana.
So the local news loves you, the TV stations,
the radio stations, the papers.
So some of the papers are principled,
they might say, oh no, but overall,
they're not calling you a radical,
they're not calling you anything,
and you're buying those races.
But when you get to the presidential race,
that's much harder because presidential race,
you have earned media, free media,
that overwhelms paid media.
Perfect example is 2016.
Hillary Clinton outraces Trump by about two to one,
but she loses anyway, why?
Because Trump got almost twice as much earned media
as she did, and the earned media is better,
it's inside the content, right?
It is definitely better.
So in a presidential election,
as long as you got past the primary,
you could actually win with not that much money,
and that's part of the reason why I have hope, Lex,
because all you gotta do is get past
a Republican or Democratic primary.
And now that's very, very, very difficult,
but Trump did it, right?
Now he took it in the wrong direction,
but he did leave a blueprint for how to do it.
And so once you get to the general election,
you're off to the race, you could do any goddamn thing
you like, okay?
You could be super popular,
you don't have to give a shit about the donors,
you can get into office, you could bully your own party
and the other party into doing what you want,
and you can get everything done,
you could even get money out of politics.
So don't lose hope.
I mean, we even started Operation Hope at TYT,
and our first project was to knock Biden out,
and everybody said, you guys are nuts,
that's totally impossible, and we knocked Biden out, right?
Did we do it alone?
Of course not, we were a small part of it, right?
But we laid the groundwork for hope,
and we laid the groundwork for when he flopped in the debate,
people had already been told,
remember, he's bad, he's old, he's not right,
and the debate proved it.
If we hadn't done that groundwork,
and not just Young Turks, obviously,
but Axelrod and Carville and Nate Silver
and Ezra Klein, et cetera,
Charlamagne the God, Jon Stewart,
all these people helped a lot,
so that when the debate happened,
it confirmed the idea that out there
that he was too old and couldn't do it.
So my point is, hope is,
if you lose hope, you're done for,
then they're definitely gonna win, right?
Hope is the most dangerous thing in the world for the elites.
So whether you're right wing or left wing,
I need you to have hope,
and I need you to understand it's not misplaced.
We just gotta get past the primary,
and we're gonna turn this whole thing around.
So basically, a presidential candidate
who's a populist who,
in part, runs on getting money out of politics.
Okay, well, let's talk about Donald Trump.
So to me, the two biggest criticisms of Trump
is the fake-electro scheme.
Out of that whole 2020 election,
the fake-electro scheme is a thing that really bothers me.
And then the second thing across a larger time scale
is the counterproductive division
that he's created in, let's say, our public discourse.
What are your top five criticisms of Trump?
Okay, so number one, I have the same exact thing as you.
The fake-electro scheme is unacceptable, totally disqualifying.
So the fake-electro scheme was a literal coup attempt.
So he doesn't win the election.
For folks who don't know,
I need to explain why it's a coup attempt,
because you just throw out words,
and then people get triggered by the words,
and then they go into their separate corners, right?
So the January 6th writers,
they were not gonna keep the building.
That was not a coup attempt.
It's not like, oh, the MAGA guys have the building.
I guess they win, right?
No, that was never gonna happen.
So what was the point of the January 6th riot?
It was to delay the proceedings.
Why did it matter that they were gonna delay the proceedings?
Because if you can't certify the election,
they wanted general confusion and chaos
so that the Republicans in Congress could say,
well, we don't know who won,
so we're gonna have to kick it back to the states.
In the states, they had the fake-electros ready.
And remember, the fake-electros are not Trump's electors.
Both candidates have a slate of electors,
Biden's electors and Trump's electors.
They go to the Trump electors first in this plan,
and half the Trump electors go,
no, I'm not gonna pretend Trump won the election
when he didn't win the election.
So they're like, shit,
now we gotta come up with fake-electros, okay?
So they enlist these Republicans to go,
yeah, I'll pretend Trump won, right?
And so they sign a piece of paper that's fraud,
and that's why a lot of them are now being prosecuted
in the different states.
And so the idea is the Republican legislators then go,
we're sending these new electors in,
and we think Trump won Arizona and Georgia and Wisconsin,
right, that was the idea, that was the plan.
And then you come back to the House at that point
when there are two different sets of electors,
the rule, constitutional rule is the House decides.
But the House decides, not on a majority,
because the Democrats had the majority at the time,
they decide on a majority of the states,
they vote by state,
and the Republicans had the majority of the states.
So in that way, you steal the election,
even though Trump didn't win,
you install him back in as president.
That is a frontal assault on democracy.
And I loathe it, and then Trump on top just blabbers out,
well, sometimes if there's massive fraud in an election,
in other words, I think I won,
I don't even think that, I'm just saying that I won, right?
He says, you can terminate any rule regulation or article
even in the Constitution.
No, brother, you cannot terminate the Constitution
because you'd like to do a fake electors scheme
and do a coup against America, fuck you, okay?
So I'm never gonna allow this wannabe tyrant
to go back into the White House and endanger our system.
And so you wanna endanger the corrupt system?
I'm the guy, okay?
Let's go get that corrupt system and tear it down.
If you wanna endanger the real system,
democracy, capitalism, the Constitution,
then I'm your biggest enemy.
So I'm never gonna take that risk.
And you see it every time he goes to talk to a dictator.
Look, guys, I'm asking you to be principled, right?
I asked the left of that,
and we drive away some of our audience when we do that,
so we got the balls to do that to our own side.
So for the right wing, be honest,
if it was Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Kamala Harris
that went and wrote quote unquote love letters
to a communist dictator who runs concentration camps,
you would say, communist, we knew it, look at that.
And Trump literally says about Kim Jong Un,
we wrote love letters to one another.
I fell, we fell in love.
If a Democrat said that,
they'd be politically decapitated, right?
Their career would be instantly over, right?
But Trump, whatever is Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin,
I'm not, don't get into Russia, Russia, Russia,
but it's just that he's a strong man, right?
Kim Jong Un or any, Victor Orban,
Duterte in the Philippines,
any time it's a strong man that says,
screw our Constitution, screw our rules,
I want total loyalty to one person,
Trump loves him, he loves him.
He said once, he's like, oh, it's great,
you go to North Korea or China,
and when the leader walks in, everybody applauds,
and everybody listens to what he says,
that's how we should be here.
No brother, that's not how we should be here.
You hate democracy, you wanna be the sole guy in charge.
As a populist, you should loathe Donald Trump.
I agree on the fake electric scheme.
Can you steel man and maybe educate me
on, there's a book rigged that I started reading.
Is there any degree to which the election was rigged
or elections in general are rigged?
So I think the book rigged, the main case they make
is not that there's some shady, fake ballots,
it's more the impact of mainstream media
and the impact of big tech.
So rigged is another one of those words
that triggers people and is ill-defined, right?
So let's begin to define it.
So the worst case of rigged is
we actually change the votes, right?
So a lot of Trump people think that that's what happened.
Nonsense, that didn't happen at all, okay?
So then you move, and by the way, some on the left
thought the votes were changed in the 2016 primary
and it was literally rigged against Bernie.
No, that did not happen, okay?
That is a massive crime and is very risky
and is relatively easy to get caught.
People who are in power are not interested in getting caught,
they're not interested in going to jail, et cetera.
It is a very extreme thing.
Could it happen?
Yes, it could happen.
Have I seen any evidence of it happening in my lifetime?
Not really.
Given how much people hate this,
you probably just need to find evidence of one time.
Like one vote being changed where you can trace them
saying something in some room somewhere
that would just explode.
That evidence just doesn't seem to be there.
And by the way, for the right wing
who say verify the vote, goddamn right verify the vote, right?
So you want to have different proposals
like paper ballots, recounts, hand recounts,
which by the way, you had not the paper ballots
but the three recounts and a hand recount
in Georgia and so many of these swing states,
he lost, he lost, he lost.
There was no significant voter fraud.
Now, the second thing in terms of rigging
is voter fraud.
So how, and the right wing believes,
oh my God, it's voter fraud everywhere.
Not remotely true.
Heritage Foundation does a study.
They want to prove it so badly.
And it turns out no matter how much they move the numbers,
the final number they got was,
it happens 0.0000006% of the time, okay?
It almost never happens.
They found like 31 instances over a decade or two decades.
So it's a-
What counts as voter fraud?
So a lot of times these days,
it'll be Republicans who do it because it'll be,
and it's not nefarious.
It's a knucklehead who goes in and he's,
oh, they're having non-document, the illegals vote.
So I voted for me and my mom, even though she's dead.
But that's fair, they're doing it.
No, brother, that's not fair.
That's not how it works, you're under arrest.
So what about non-citizens voting?
So it's preposterous.
Of course, non-citizens shouldn't vote and they don't vote.
But there's not,
you don't have to prove citizenship
when you're voting, right?
No, you do.
I mean, it depends on what you mean by prove
and when you vote, right?
So you're not allowed to vote as an undocumented immigrant.
So that happens upfront.
When you go to, again, it's a Hall of Mirrors.
There's so many different ways to create mirages.
So the Republicans will say,
well, when you go to the voting booth,
they don't make you show a passport.
Yeah, that's true,
but you showed it earlier when you registered, right?
And so, and we can get into voter ID laws.
There's all sorts of things,
but we gotta, we'll speed up the spectrum, right?
So these things almost never happen.
Voter fraud happens, but super rarely
and not enough to swing elections.
And by the way, sometimes if there is an issue,
they'll redo an election.
There is actually a process for that.
And it happened in North Carolina
because the Republicans did voter fraud
in this one district, okay?
And it wasn't the candidate himself.
It was this campaign person
and they did ballot harvesting and then,
but ballot harvesting, again,
it depends on what you mean.
If you're just collecting ballots, that's okay.
He changed the ballots, that's not okay.
And so they had to redo that election.
So now the real place where it gets rigged
is before elections.
And there's two main ways that things get rigged.
One is almost exclusively, no, that's not fair.
I was gonna say Republicans,
but Democrats do it too in a different way.
So Republicans will come in like Brian Kemp
is the king of this in Georgia.
So he was against Trump doing an ex post facto.
He's like, no, you idiot,
we don't cheat after the election,
we cheat before the election, okay?
So they'll go, well, I mean,
you gotta clear out the voter rolls every once in a while.
And that's true because people die, people move,
and you gotta clean out the voter rolls.
So then they come in and they go,
we will clean them out, mainly in black areas, okay?
Oh, look at that.
There goes a couple of million black voters.
Well, some of those I suppose are real voters,
but they'll have to re-register
and then they'll find that out on election day.
And oh, well, now, sorry, you couldn't vote this time.
Remember to re-register next time.
And so do they go, hey,
we're going to take black people off the voter rolls?
No, what they do is we're having more issues
in these districts, right?
Here's another way they do it.
How many voting boosts do you have in the area?
So primarily Republican areas will get tons of voting boosts
so you don't have to wait in line.
You go in, you vote, you go to work, no problem.
You're in a black area run in a Republican state.
All of a sudden, hey, look, that city,
well, we sent you four voting boosts.
Oh, you got a million people there?
Well, what are you gonna do?
I guess you gotta wait in line the whole day.
You can't go to work, et cetera.
So that's the way-
I refuse to believe it's only the Republicans
that do that, I would say.
So that's why I paused.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That just seems too obvious to do by both sides.
No, no, the Democrats are so weak, Lex.
They mainly don't do that,
but they do do the third thing, which is gerrymandering.
So both Republicans and Democrats-
Also their favorite flavors of messing with the vote, okay.
Yeah, so gerrymandering is the best way to rig an election.
That way the politicians pick their voters
instead of the voters picking their politicians, right?
So all these districts are so heavily gerrymandered
that the incumbent almost can't lose.
They'll push most of the voters into one district,
most of the voters in another district
because they don't want competition, right?
So then you're screwed.
The vote isn't rigged, but the district is rigged
so that the incumbent wins
almost no matter what, right?
So that's why we've gotten so polarized
because the gerrymandering creates like 90% of seats
that are safe.
So they don't have to compromise.
They don't have to get to a middle.
They could just be extreme on either side
because they already locked it up.
Okay, so that's the number one way to rig an election.
Now, finally, the last part of it
is maybe the most important,
maybe even more important than gerrymandering.
And that's the media.
So it just happened to RFK Jr.
It happened to Bernie in 2015.
It happens to any outsider, right or left.
The media, if you're an outsider, will say,
well, radical, number one, they don't platform you, right?
So they're not gonna have you on to begin with.
Nobody's even gonna find out about you.
If nobody finds out about you, you're done for, right?
So Bernie broke through that because he was so popular
and the rallies were so huge
that local news couldn't help but cover him.
Jesus Christ, what are all these people doing
in the middle of the city, right?
And he slowly broke through that.
But do you know that in 2015,
as he's doing this miraculous run against Hillary Clinton,
nobody thinks he has a chance.
And here comes Bernie and he's almost at 48%.
He had seven seconds of coverage on ABC that year.
They just will not put you on.
That is the number one way they rig an election.
Bobby Kennedy Jr. sitting at 20% in a primary, no town hall.
20% is a giant number, right?
And you're not gonna do a town hall.
You're not gonna do a debate.
12% in the general election.
A giant number in a general election.
No town hall, no debate.
If no one finds out about you,
they don't know to vote for you, right?
If they don't find out your policies.
Corporate media rigs elections
more than anything else in the world.
Now this is something you've been a bit controversial about,
but the general sort of standard belief
is that there's a left-leaning bias in the mainstream media
because as I think studies show,
a large majority of journalists are left-leaning.
And then that there's a bias in big tech.
Employees of big tech companies
from search engines to social media are left-leaning.
And there that's a huge majority is left-leaning.
So the conventional wisdom is that there is a bias
towards the left.
Yeah, so-
Do you think, first of all,
I think you've argued that that's not true,
that there's a bias in the other direction,
but whether there's a bias or not,
do you think that how big of an impact that has
on the result of the election?
Okay, so let's break that down.
Tech and media are totally different.
So let's do media first and we'll do tech.
So on mainstream media, corporate media,
and I actually think that right-wing media like Fox News
is part of corporate media.
They just play good cop, bad cop.
And so in that realm, the bias is not right or left,
except on social issues.
Okay, and that's where that image comes from.
On social issues, yes, the media is generally on the left.
And right-wing, sorry, but like this started in the 1960s
and the right-wing got super mad at mainstream media
saying that black people were equal to white people.
That's not the case anymore.
Okay, right-wing, calm down.
I'm not calling you all racist.
But in the 1960s, were there racism?
Was there racism?
Of course, of course,
they wouldn't even let black kids into the schools, right?
There was massive segregation in the South,
but a lot in the North as well.
And at that point in mainstream media says,
well, I mean, they are citizens.
They should have equal rights.
And the right-wing goes, bias!
Okay, yeah, I mean, you're kind of right.
It is a bias.
It is a bias towards equality in that case,
but that is perceived as on the left.
Now, fast forward to today,
you don't have that on the racial issues
as obviously as much as we had it back then,
but on gay marriage that existed for a long time
where the media is like,
well, they kind of should have the same rights
as straight people, right?
And the right-wing went, bias!
Right?
So, okay, you're kind of right about that,
but at the same time, I would argue
their position is correct, right?
So, but can they go too far?
Of course they can go too far.
Okay, now, but that's not the main deal, guys.
That's to distract you.
The main deal is economic issues.
And again, we say it ahead of time,
and you can see if we're right or wrong, right?
So we will tell folks,
when we get to an economic bill,
you will see all of a sudden the guys
who theoretically disagree,
Fox News and MSNBC close ranks,
and you just saw it happen with price gouging.
That issue of price gouging,
all of a sudden there's a lot of MSNBC hosts,
CNN hosts, Washington Post writes an op-ed against it,
and everybody panics and is like,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
you can't control anything a corporation does.
This is wrong, this is wrong, right?
Oh, what happened?
I thought you guys hated each other.
All of a sudden you totally agree.
Fascinating, okay?
Same thing happened on increasing wages.
When they were talking about increasing the minimum wage,
Stephanie ruled, giant screed against it on MSNBC.
All of a sudden Fox News and MSNBC agree, right?
Do not touch beloved corporations.
So now that gets us to our real bias.
It's not left or right.
It's pro-corporate for all the reasons
we talked about before, corporate media,
corporate politicians.
So if you don't believe me today,
whether you're on the right or the left,
watch.
Next time on Economic Issue, where do they fall?
How do they react?
When anytime it's a corporate issue,
where does the media go, right?
So that's the real bias of the media.
And so since the real bias of the media
is pro-corporations, that is not a left-wing position.
That is considered more of a right-wing position.
I even think that's a misnomer
because to be fair to right-wing voters,
they're not pro-corporations.
They're not pro-big business.
They're not pro-corruption.
But the Republican politicians are,
so it gets framed as a right-wing issue, right?
So if you think that the corporate media is too populist,
you just don't get it.
They aren't, they hate populism.
So now when you turn to tech,
so tech's a complicated one because, yeah,
people write the code.
If they're left-wingers,
they're gonna have certain assumptions
and they might write that into the codes or the rules.
And so, but they're also, generally speaking, wealthy.
They're usually white, they're usually male,
and those biases also go in.
And there's a lot of people on the left
who object to that bias, right?
Okay, but that's a fair and interesting conversation.
And one we have to be careful of,
and one we could find, hopefully find a middle ground.
But that's not the major problem.
The major reason why big tech gets attacked
is because they are competitors of who?
Social media competes with mainstream media.
So mainstream media has been attacking big tech
from day one, pretending that it's a,
they're really concerned.
Yeah, they're really concerned
because that's their competition
and they're getting their ass handed to them.
So I did a story on the Young Turks about CNN article
about all the dangers of social media.
I'm like, guys, this is written
by their advertising department, okay?
And in fact, they go to the advertisers
and they find a random video on YouTube or Facebook,
right out of billions of videos.
And they're like, look at your ad is on this video.
Do you denounce and reject every big tech company
and every member of social media?
And the advertisers is like, shit.
Yeah, I do, right?
Meanwhile, they're doing MILF Island on TV.
Okay.
I didn't know that.
Okay, there's literally a show that came out recently
where it's moms and their sons and they fuck each other.
Oh, wow.
Okay, they don't have sex with their mom.
They have sex with a different mom or they date,
but then the show is,
oh, then they go off into a corner, et cetera, right?
I'm like, you're doing this kind of like
the worst degrading, ridiculous, immoral programming.
And then you found a video on YouTube that has a problem.
Get the fuck out of here.
You're just trying to kneecap your competition.
Let's talk about the saga of Joe Biden.
So over the past year, over the past few months,
can you just rewind, where have you,
maybe tell the story of Joe Biden
as you see from the election perspective?
Yes, so about a year ago, I'm looking at the polling
and first of all, I have eyes, right, and ears.
So whenever I see Biden, I'm like, this is a disaster.
And then I go and talk to real people.
And when I say real people, I mean, not in politics.
That's not their job, right?
Because people involved in politics for media
have a certain perspective and it's colored
by all of the exchanges in mainstream media,
social media, et cetera.
Real people aren't on Twitter having political fights.
They're not watching CNN religiously, et cetera.
Whenever I was at a barbecue,
you guys all Democrats in some barbecues?
Yeah, what do you guys think of Joe Biden?
Like almost in unison, too old.
Every real person said too old.
So I look at what real people are saying,
that's why I thought Trump was gonna win in 2016.
I go in the middle of Ohio,
I can't see a Hillary Clinton sign for hundreds of miles,
right, there's Trump paraphernalia everywhere, right?
So that's not end all be all, you could say it's anecdotal,
but you begin to collect data points, right?
But then the real data points are in polling.
Okay, so now I'm looking at Biden polling.
He's in the thirties.
No incumbent in the thirties has ever come back to win.
So I'm like, it's already over.
Then all of a sudden, oh my God,
Trump takes the lead with Latinos.
It's double over.
By the later in the process,
Trump took the lead with young voters.
I'm like, this is the most over-election in history.
A Democrat cannot win if they're not winning young voters.
That's impossible.
Trump's cutting into his lead with black voters.
This thing is over, right?
And I go tell people and they're like, you're crazy.
Why do they think I'm crazy?
Because MSNBC is lying to them 24 seven,
telling them that Joe Biden created sliced bread
and the wheel and fire.
And by the way, and my favorite targeting point was,
he's a dynamo behind the scenes.
Yeah.
I'm like, okay, let me get this right.
It's like an SNL skit, right?
I'm like, so behind the scenes is like, all right,
Sally, get me the memo on that and we're okay.
We're going to do this and I'm in command of the material.
Then he goes in front of the camera.
Anyways.
Why would any politician do that?
Why would they be terrible in front of the camera
and great off camera?
It doesn't make any sense.
But once you get people enough propaganda
and MSNBC created Blue Maga, right?
They'll believe anything.
So they believe that Biden was dynamic and young
and that he was the best possible candidate
to beat Donald Trump.
When in reality, he was about the only Democrat
who couldn't beat Donald Trump.
So number one, I don't co-sign on a bullshit.
I don't care which side you're on.
Number two, as you heard earlier,
I can't have Trump winning.
It endangers the country.
It endangers our constitution, et cetera.
So I'm going to do something about it.
And so I start something called the Operation Hope
on the Young Turks.
And we asked the audience, what should we do, right?
So there's different projects in Operation Hope.
But the first project that pops up
is knock Biden out of the race, okay?
And so then I ask our paying members on TYT.
I say, guys, you're gonna vote
and then I'm gonna do what you tell me to do.
If you say, no, I like Biden
or I think Biden's the best candidate,
or even if he isn't, we're not gonna be able to win on this.
So don't do it, right?
Should I enter the primary against Biden?
Okay, 76-24, go.
Enter, right?
I'm a populist, you tell me to go.
You're my paying members, you're my boss.
I'm gonna go, okay?
So I enter the primary.
Now I'm not born in the country,
so people are gonna freak out about that.
I'm a talk show host.
Like the establishment media despises me, right?
So I'm not gonna get any airtime.
In fact, we consider hiring the top booking agent in New York.
We talked to him and he says,
well, you know, I'm actually in New York this week
and he says, I'm gonna go talk to those guys
and I'll come back to you.
And he was really decent because normally, you know,
he charges a lot.
Just take the money, right?
And go, oh yeah, yeah, I'll get you on.
But he was a wonderful guy.
He said, I talked to them, you're banned.
So don't do it.
Like you're banned at CNN, you're banned at MSNBC
and I think you're banned on Fox News, but I'm not sure.
Okay, so long odds, why do you do it?
Because if you think we're gonna crash
into the iceberg, you might as well bum rush
to captain's course, right?
I'm lunging at the wheel.
So what difference can I make?
Well, I can make a difference by going on every show
on planet earth and going, he's too old.
He's in the thirties.
He has no chance of winning, no chance of winning.
I go on Charlemagne's show, Breakfast Club, right?
Charlemagne agrees.
All of a sudden, we're having buzz.
And then people go, oh, Charlemagne said,
he has no chance of winning.
Then Charlemagne's on the daily show, talks to Jon Stewart.
Jon Stewart does a segment.
This is not necessarily causal, but buzz is building, right?
So then Jon Stewart does a segment, if you remember,
and people got super pissed at him.
Too old, can't win, and all that buzz is building.
Meanwhile, unrelated to us, David Axelrod and James Carville,
and I'm like, guys, figure it out.
Who does Axelrod speak for?
The top advisor for Barack Obama.
Who is James Carville the top advisor for?
The Clintons.
This is the Clintons and the Obamas
sending their emissaries to say, we can read a poll.
He's going to lose, change direction.
So when the debate happens, we laid the groundwork.
If we hadn't laid the groundwork,
debate would have been the first time
that Blue Magga would have thought,
oh, maybe Biden can't win, right?
But since all of us said it, and strange bedfellows,
I loathe Nancy Pelosi, but she was on our side.
I got a lot of issues with Bill Maher.
He was on our side, right?
I got a lot of issues with Axelrod and Carville,
and they were on our side.
So the people who believed in objective reality
kind of independently made a plan,
let's show people objective reality.
And we did, and we drove them out,
and it made all the difference.
So you think he stepped down voluntarily,
or was he forced out?
Both.
So again, it depends on what you mean.
So was he forced out?
Of course he was forced out.
You think he just woke up and he's like,
oh yeah, you know what?
Screw my legacy.
I don't want to be a two-term president.
I'll just drop out for no reason.
No, we forced them out.
Of course we did, right?
And when I say we, I had a tiny, tiny, tiny role.
The people who had the major roles,
Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and all those folks.
But even they were not the main driving force.
The number one driving force were the donors.
What is the source of power of Bernie or Massey?
The people, right?
What is the source of power for Biden?
The donors.
The donors made Biden.
He is the donor's candidate.
And the donors, that's why he told the donors,
nothing will fundamentally change.
That it, like you can, if you say, Lex,
no, Cenk, I think you're too extreme
that Biden works for the donors 98%.
I think he only works for them 80% or 55%.
Fine, we could have that debate.
But you can't argue that it isn't his source of power.
And you can't argue it anymore,
even if you were gonna argue it earlier,
because once the donors said,
we're not giving you any more money,
he didn't have any options.
He couldn't go on.
So, but was he forced out of like knife point or something?
No.
So was it voluntary?
Yeah, ultimately, if Biden decided to stay in,
there was nothing we could do about it.
And so he had to voluntarily make that decision,
but he voluntarily made it because he had no choice left.
Yeah, I wish he stepped down voluntarily
from a place of strength.
So I think presidents, I think politicians in general,
especially at the highest levels, want legacy.
To me, at least, one of the greatest things you could do
is to walk away from at the top.
I mean, George Washington, to walk away from power
is I think universally respected,
especially if you got a good speech to go with it
and you do it really well,
not in some kind of cynical or a calculator,
some kind of transactional way,
but just like as a great leader.
And maybe be a little bit even more dramatic
than you need to be in doing it.
Yeah, I thought that would be a beautiful moment.
And then launch some kind of democratic process
for electing a different option.
Not only did I agree with you 100%,
I reached one of his top advisors,
one of the guys you see in the press all the time
as in his inner circle.
I never said that before because we were in the middle of it
and I'm never gonna betray anyone's confidence
and I'll never say who it was, okay?
But he was gracious enough to meet with me
as I was about to enter the primary.
And look, it's smart too,
because you get information, intelligence, et cetera,
is this guy gonna be trouble or not trouble, right?
But at least he took the meeting.
And the case I made is exactly the one you just said, Lex.
I said, if he drops, this is about 10 months ago.
I said, if he drops out now,
they build statues of him, right?
The Democrats, if you go right wing or you hate him,
I get it, but the Democrats would have said
he beat Trump and protected democracy in 2020.
And he steps down graciously now
to make sure we beat Trump again in 2024.
And he lets go of power voluntarily.
He's gonna be a hero, an absolute hero.
But if he doesn't, you're gonna force all of us
to kick the living crap out of him
and tell everybody he's an egomaniac, which he is,
and he's doing this for two, so that he could be,
if you don't know Washington, in that bubble,
if you're a one-term president, you're a loser.
If you're a two-term president,
you have a legacy and you're historic.
He's running for one reason, one reason only.
My legacy, I will be a two-term president.
I will be considered historic.
I'm like, brother, now you're gonna be considered a villain,
the villain of the story.
You're handing it right back to Trump.
You're not gonna win, and you know, look at the numbers.
Any political professional knows you're not gonna win.
So you have hero or villain, and you get to choose,
but if you think you're gonna be a hero and beat Trump,
that is not a choice you have.
That is not going to happen, and they didn't believe us.
But by then, they did.
Were you troubled by how Kamala Harris was selected
after he stepped down?
Yes and no.
So I argued for an open convention,
and so if Biden had stepped down
when we were trying to get people
into the primary, knock them out,
then that would have been a perfect solution.
Then all the governors could go in,
Walls, Bashir, Whitmer, Kamala Harris goes in, obviously.
They have a real primary.
At that point, me, later Dean Phillips came in.
Me, Dean, and I mean, Mary, I wouldn't drop out.
Me and Dean would definitely drop out,
because our whole point was get other people in the race.
Make sure we win, right?
So okay, then you would have had a great primary.
It would have been the right way to do it,
both morally, you know, constitutionally, et cetera,
but also as a matter of politics,
because you would have gotten a lot of coverage
for your young, exciting candidates.
And you would have legitimized the idea
that you're protecting democracy.
Okay, so that didn't happen because of Biden.
It is what it is.
So now when Biden drops out,
at least do a vestige of democracy.
Go to the Commission and do what it's designed to do,
which is pick a candidate.
Ezra Klein made a great case for this
in the New York Times podcast that he did.
That made a huge difference,
and he was great for doing that.
So I believe in an open convention,
but I know Democrats, they love to anoint,
because they don't trust the people.
So they think the elites are geniuses.
Don't worry, we'll pick the right candidate.
Yeah, I remember when you picked Hillary Clinton,
how'd that work out, right?
And I remember when you said Joe Biden
was the right candidate in 2024, how'd that work out?
Do not anoint, right?
So, but in the end, they didn't.
So what happened was Biden does the first announcement.
He either forgot or on purpose
didn't put Kamala Harris in there.
So there's all this kumbaya now.
Nah, they don't like each other, okay?
And Biden's been screwing her over the entire time
she's been vice president.
So he doesn't put her in the original statement.
And I'm like, whoa, I do a live video immediately.
I'm like, Kamala Harris is not in the statement, right?
In the middle of my video, they put out a second one.
Go, okay, okay, fine, Kamala Harris, right?
Because that's too much for the president not to endorse.
You think he was like really,
like somebody like stormed into the room
and said, you absolutely must?
I don't know, I wasn't there, but probably, right?
Or they plan, I don't know.
But the bottom line is it was glaring
that he didn't put her in the first letter, okay?
So he had to put her in the second one, fine, no problem.
But Obama, Pelosi and Schumer did not endorse Kamala Harris.
That's huge.
Normally the Democrats would all endorse her
and would all say, she's anointed, shut up everybody.
And then MSNBC would scream, shut up, shut up.
She's anointed, right?
But they didn't do that.
So then Kamala Harris had to win over the delegates.
And I thought she would win them over in the convention,
but she locked them up in two days.
And I know, because I know delegates because I ran,
and the delegates are calling me saying,
she's getting on on a Zoom right now with us, right?
She went to all the states and worked her ass off
and locked up enough delegates
to get the nomination in two days.
Yeah, but come on, Biden endorsed.
Of course.
Why is that, and of course?
Why not say, sort of lay out walls
and Shapiro and Kamala Harris and the options that say,
let's like, at least a facade of democracy,
of a democratic process.
There's what should happen and what is likely to happen.
So should Biden not have endorsed?
Yeah, of course.
I think Biden should have done the same thing
as Obama and Pelosi and not endorsed and say,
hey, we'd love to have a process where we figure out
who the right nominee is.
And at that point, I'm really worried about Kamala Harris
because she's doing word sales nonstop, right?
So I'm like, don't make the same mistake we did before
and just pick someone out of a hat.
Test them, test them.
You get stronger candidates when you test them.
The authoritarian nature of the DNC drives me crazy.
They don't believe in testing candidates.
They don't believe in letting their own voters decide.
And look, when we were in the primary,
they canceled the Florida election.
And they took me, Dean, and Marianne off the ballot
in North Carolina and Tennessee.
I'm like, guys, if you're gonna make a case
for a democracy in the general election
and you cancel elections in the primaries,
do you not get how ridiculous you look,
how hypocritical you look, right?
So I didn't want them to Biden to endorse anyone,
but I'm shocked that they didn't all endorse her
because normally what happens is they all endorse.
So bottom line, Lex, is did she like earning
in a perfect system, not even close, right?
But did she earn it enough in this imperfect way
where at least she showed some degree of competence
that assuaged my concerns?
Yes.
So because a normal Democrat would bungle that.
They wouldn't go talk, like Hillary Clinton
wouldn't have talked to the delegates.
She would assume that she's the queen
and that they would all bow their heads.
So the fact that she did elementary politics correct
for Democrats is like a big win.
It just really frustrated me
because it smelled of the same thing of fucking over Bernie
in 2015, 16 and RFK and just the anointing aspect.
Now they seem to have gotten lucky in the situation
that it's very possible that Kamala Harris
would have been selected through a democratic process,
but I have to say, listening to the speeches at DNC,
Wallace was amazing, Shapiro was really strong
and Kamala actually was much better
as compared to her as a candidate previously,
but personally don't think she would have been the result
of a democratic process.
So you don't often give your opinions,
but when you give the opinions,
I actually agree 90, like a huge percentage of the time
in this conversation.
So I fought for Shapiro in the primer
and when she was trying to pick for a VP
because I thought there's no way she's gonna pick walls.
He's way too, not just progressive,
but more and more only populist, right?
So I didn't think she'd go in that direction
and Shapiro actually did a bunch of populist things
in Pennsylvania, that's part of the reason
why he's so popular in Pennsylvania.
He looks like a smooth talking politician,
but his actions are pretty good.
And so Shapiro was great, Wallace was great,
the Obamas are legendary.
Even Clinton at his advanced age makes terrific points
in his speech where you go,
well, that one's hard to argue with, right?
And so they all, I'm shocked at the competence of the DNC,
shocked at it, but of all those likes,
so you can give a good speech
and the Obamas give a mean speech.
But I saw Obama as president,
he didn't deliver on that.
But the one guy that stood out is Wallace.
And the reason is, because he's a real person.
Yeah, real person, populist.
We all gotta work towards
picking the most genuine candidates.
So here, on the right wing side, for example,
I would prefer Marjorie Taylor Greene
to a Mitch McConnell any day.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is genuine.
She might be genuinely nuts, I don't agree with her,
she might be even more right wing than others,
but I believe that she means it.
And I'll take that any day over a fraud corporatist
like Mitch McConnell, who's just gonna do it
as donor's command of him, et cetera.
I gotta ask you, because I also love,
Bernie's still got it.
I love Bernie, I always have.
I enjoyed his, I think he might still do it,
but I enjoyed his conversations with Tom Harmon.
He's a genuine one, like Bernie.
Even if you disagree with him, that's a genuine human being.
So just talk about that.
Is it troubling you that he's been fucked over in 2015, 16,
and again, 2020, he seems to be,
and why does it keep forgiving people?
So I love Bernie for the same reason you were saying it,
because he's a real person, he's a populist,
he means it, and that is so rare in politics.
He's, I feel like I'm Diogenes,
and I went looking for the one honest man
and found it in Bernie.
And so I did a video in 2013 saying Bernie Sanders
can beat Hillary Clinton in a primary.
In 2013, that video exists,
because why did I think that?
I didn't say it of any of the corporate politicians
and the guys who were supposed to challenge her and stuff,
because populist and honest, right?
And the country's dying for an honest populist,
dying for it, right?
So love the brother.
Now that doesn't mean that he's right on strategy,
and he drives me crazy on strategy.
So two elements of that.
Number one, in 2016 and in 2020,
for God's sake, attack your opponent.
You said something about Trump that I disagree with,
where I'm defending Trump, okay?
You don't like what he did to the public discourse.
No, I don't mind it, and I'll tell you why.
Because at least he got a little bit past the fakeness.
Like he's a con man and he's a fraud overall,
and he does everything for his own interests,
but at least he doesn't speak like a bullshitting politician.
Right?
And he's not wrong that you have to bully your own party
to amass enough power to get things done.
And he showed that that's possible.
So the problem with the Democrats is civility.
So my whole life, they're like,
oh, no, no, no, don't say anything.
Let's lose with civility, right?
So for example, in debates,
whether it's on TV, online, or whatever,
Democrats or people on the left are always saying,
I'm offended.
I never get offended.
No, after I'm done, you're gonna be offended, okay?
Fight back, fighting back wins.
And we couldn't get Bernie to fight back.
In 2020, he was one state away.
He won the first three states, he crushed in Nevada.
All we needed was South Carolina,
but in order to get South Carolina,
we all knew, everybody on his campaign,
everyone who's in progressive media,
we all knew you've gotta attack Biden.
If you don't, they're just gonna tsunami you.
You know, corporate medias and the corporate politicians
are gonna run roughshod over you.
You have to make the case against them.
And so two times Bernie flinched.
One in 2016 in the Brooklyn debate,
they asked, did the money that Hillary Clinton
taken from the banks affect her votes?
And he said, no, of course it affected her votes.
Of course it did.
You have to say yes and you have to show it and prove it.
The bankruptcy bill, when she was first lady,
she was totally in favor of the American people
and against the bankruptcy bill,
because it has the banks, you can't discharge any debts,
the credit card debt and bank debt, et cetera.
It's an awful bill.
It's one of the most corporatist bills.
She was on the right side as a first lady,
she becomes a senator, takes banker money,
and all of a sudden she flips over to the banker side.
Say it Bernie, for God's sake say it, right?
Then in one of the debates in 2020,
his team prepares attacks against Biden.
They're not personal.
They're not like, you can sense by now,
if I'm in a political race,
my objective is rip the other guy's face off, right?
Politically, rhetorically, never physically.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And so, but I would get it to a point where they'd think,
I don't know if I'm gonna vote for Cenk,
but I know I'm not voting for the other guy, okay?
So you got to do that if you want to win.
So they prepare this.
He says, I'm gonna do it.
He goes on the podium and doesn't do it
because he can't, he's too damn nice.
He just can't attack the other guy.
Now that's problem number one in strategy.
Problem number two is something you alluded to.
So Biden gets an office.
Bernie thinks they're friends.
They're not friends.
Biden's just using him.
So he uses them to get the credibility
and then he eviscerates 85% of the progressive proposals
that Bernie put forward.
Biden throws away $15 minimum wage.
That was Bernie's signature issue.
Doesn't even propose the public option.
Dumps paid family for no reason.
I can go on and on.
And Bernie cosigns on it because he thinks
he's in an alliance.
He thinks Biden's on his side
and he thinks we're gonna get things done.
And to be fair to Bernie, like I said earlier,
Obama got only 5% of his agenda passed
and Biden got 15%.
Okay.
So you're right, Bernie.
You got three times more than under Obama,
but you're wrong.
That is not fundamental change.
And without fundamental change, we're screwed.
Let me ask you about another impressive speech, AOC.
Is it possible that she's the future of the party,
future president?
No.
So AOC, in my opinion, lost her way.
And so.
In which way?
So it's tough talking about these things
because people take it so personally, right?
And that's why you'll see very few politicians
on our shows because we give super tough interviews
and the words out on the street, right?
Like, don't go to Young Turks.
They'll ask your super hard questions, right?
So only a couple do it.
Like, Ro Khanna does it, he's brave.
We'll get into shouting matches sometimes
in the middle of bills and stuff,
but at least he's there to defend his position.
I respect him for that.
Tim Ryan, a little bit more of a conservative Democrat
when he was in the house.
He would take on any debate, et cetera.
So there's a couple of good guys that do it,
but generally they don't.
So this relates to AOC because when AOC is running,
we do 34 videos on her.
We get her millions of views.
We founded Just Democrats and now launched it on the show.
Our audience, Ryan Grimm documents it in one of his books.
Our audience raises two and a half million dollars
for those progressive candidates overall.
And at that point, AOC and all those Rashida Tlaib,
et cetera, they're all dying to come on to Young Turks.
Makes sense, I would too, of course.
It's not because it's the Young Turks,
they're any media outlet.
And most media outlets,
almost all the media outlets reject them.
We cover AOC more than all the other press combined, right?
And she wins for a number of reasons.
That's one of the reasons, but there's many others
and she did a terrific job herself.
She then takes Shoy Khan and Corbin,
who were the, Shoy Khan was a head of Just Democrats
and Corbin was communications director for Just Democrats.
Then Shoy Khan made one of the most brilliant
political decisions in, arguably in American history.
He said, he called me and he said,
Cenk, I'm gonna go from head of Just Democrats
to running AOC's campaign.
And I'm like, well, the other candidates
are gonna get pissed
and you're staking the entire enterprise on one candidate.
And I'm like, Shoy Khan, I'm not in it.
I'm doing the media arm, you're in the trenches.
You're the guy making the decisions.
So I'm gonna trust whatever you say.
You sure?
And he said, yeah, I'm sure.
So him and Corbin go over to AOC's campaign.
AOC then wins, that miraculous win.
Then she hires Shoy Khan to be her chief of staff
and she hires Corbin to be her communications director.
Within six months, they're gone.
And once they're gone,
AOC then goes on an establishment path, okay?
Because why were they gone?
Oh, they insulted one of her colleagues.
Yeah, that colleague who's a total corporatist
and was selling out one of our policy proposals.
If you don't call out your own side,
you're never gonna get anything done.
But if you call out your own side,
you become persona non grata and it is super uncomfortable.
And we couldn't get them to do things
that were uncomfortable.
Now she's gonna find that outrageous
and she's gonna be very offended by that.
And she's gonna point to a bunch of things she did
that were uncomfortable.
And to be fair to her, she has.
Until that speech, she was pretty good on Palestine
when we desperately needed it.
She was pretty good on a bunch of issues.
Cori Bush did that campaign on evictions,
et cetera, on the Capitol steps.
That was great.
AOC's original sit-in in Pelosi's office.
That point, we're all still on the same team.
It's a spectacular success.
Me, Corbin and Shortcutter are saying,
do it again, do it again.
Like, no, don't abuse it.
Like, don't be a clown and do it every other day.
But like, when it matters,
you need to be able to challenge Pelosi, right?
And in my opinion, she just got to a point
where she got exhausted being uncomfortable.
It's like, it's really hard.
The media hates you and they keep pounding away
and calling you a radical
and you're destroying the Democratic Party.
You're destroying unity.
So whereas if you go along, all of a sudden you're a queen.
And now all of a sudden the mainstream media is saying,
oh, AOC, she could be the progressive.
I mean, there's some degree to which you wanna
sometimes bide your time and just like rest a bit.
And I think from my perspective, maybe you can educate me.
She seems like a legit progressive,
legit even populist, charismatic, young,
like a lot of time to develop the game of politics,
how to play it well enough to avoid the bullshit.
I guess she doesn't take corporate PAC money.
That's right.
No, she's still true on that.
So as far as just looking over the next few elections,
like who's going to be running?
Who's going to be a real player?
She just seems like an obvious, like to me,
she seems like an obvious person
that's going to be in the race.
So while I fight for the ideal, I'm very practical.
So for example, she wins and then one cycle later
after 2020, there's these guys who want to quote unquote
force the vote.
And it was on the speakership of Nancy Pelosi
and they wanted to use it to get Medicare for all.
I'm like, guys, forcing a vote is a terrific idea.
On the speakership, okay, who's your alternative?
Oh, we don't have an alternative,
already giant red flag, okay.
What's the issue you're looking to have them vote on?
Medicare for all.
Oh, you don't know politics.
So I love Medicare for all.
We have to get Medicare for all.
But if that's the first one you put up
without gaining any leverage, you're going to get slaughtered.
Put up something easy, force a vote on $15 minimum wage
or pick another one that's easy, paid family leave.
These are all polling great
because if you're forced to vote on that,
you could actually win.
And if you win, you gain leverage
and then you do the next one and the next one.
And then you do Medicare for all,
not bullshit gradualism that the corporate Democrats do,
but actually strategically,
practically building up power and leverage
and using it at the right times.
So if I thought that's what AOC was doing,
I would love it, right?
So I don't need her to force a vote on Medicare for all.
I don't need her to go on some wild tangents
that don't make any sense
and is only going to diminish your power.
But when they eviscerated all the progressive proposals
and build back better, how did that happen?
Manchin and Sinema used every ounce of leverage they had.
They said, I'm just not going to vote for it.
I don't care, okay?
You know, the status quo is perfect for my donors,
so I don't need you.
I vote no, okay?
Now take out everything I want.
And Biden did, right?
Progressives had to push back and say,
here is two to three proposals, right?
Not everything, not everything, two to three proposals.
They all poll over 70%.
They're all no-brainers,
and they're all things that Joe Biden promised.
We want those in the bill, otherwise we're voting no.
At that point, the media, what would have happened
is the media would have exploded,
and they would have said AOC and the rest
are the scum of the earth.
They're ruining the Democratic Party.
We're not going to get the bill.
They're the worst.
You have to withstand that.
If you cannot withstand a nuclear blast
for mainstream media, you're not the person,
because you have to run that obstacle course
to get the change.
If they had stood their ground,
they definitely would have won
on one to two of those issues.
Instead, they went with a strategy that was called,
it was literally called, trust Biden.
All right, so big question.
Who wins this election?
Kama or Trump, and what's Kama's path to victory,
and if you can steal man, what's Trump's path to victory?
Yeah, so there's not enough information yet.
So, since I make a lot of predictions on air,
and then brag about it unbearably,
people are always, they'll stop me in the streets,
and they'll be like, predict this.
Predict my marriage.
Brother, I don't know anything about your marriage.
How could I possibly predict something
without having any information?
So, in the case of this campaign,
right now I got Kamala Harris at 55% chance of winning,
okay, which is not bad.
Doesn't mean she's gonna win by 55,
because then that wouldn't be a 10 point margin.
That's not gonna happen, right?
But I say around 51 to 55, but it's nowhere near over,
because of a lot of things.
One, the Democrats are still seen as more establishment,
and people hate the establishment.
Two, if war breaks out in the Middle East,
which is now unfortunately bordering unlikely, right?
If that war breaks out, all bets are off.
Do you mean a regional war?
Yeah, like Iran, Israel gets to be a real thing,
not just a pinprick and a little bombing here
and an assassination there.
But no, we're going to war, right?
If that happens, then all bets are off,
and no one has any idea who's gonna win, okay?
And if they're pretending that they know,
that's ridiculous, because it's so unpredictable.
And then the third bogey for her is
if she goes back to word sales.
So that, so there's three phases of Kamala Harris' career.
She's not necessarily any different in terms of policy.
She's, you can frame it in a bad way,
you can frame it in a good way.
You can say, oh, she's just seeing
which way the wind is blowing,
and then, oh, she's a tough prosecutor.
Oh, and then she's doing justice reform
when you need people who want justice reform.
Oh, she's a waffler, right?
Or you could paint it as, she's pretty balanced, right?
She prosecuted serious criminals very harshly,
but then on marijuana possession, got them into rehab.
And you know what?
That's actually what you should do, right?
So I'm not talking about policy.
So there you could have one of those views
about Kamala Harris, and I get it.
I'm talking about strategic stylistically.
So Kamala Harris, until the second debate
in the primaries in 2020, is a very competent politician
who's in line to be the next Obama, right?
She's killing it, district attorney, attorney general,
senator, and then the first debate, if you remember,
she won.
She had that great line about, you know,
there was a little girl on that bus
that was integrating the schools, and that girl was me.
And Biden being the knucklehead that he is,
he's caught on tape going,
like don't have that reaction, brother.
Okay, because she's criticizing his segregation policy
on buses back in the 70s, right?
So anyways, so she's doing terrific.
And then after that debate, until Biden drops out,
is it disaster area for Kamala Harris's career?
In the primary, she starts falling apart.
She can't strategize, right?
She's for Medicare for all.
No, she's not, she's for Medicare for some.
What's Medicare for some?
I don't know, right?
And she goes into the next debate,
and Tulsi Gabbard kicks her ass,
and then goes into the third debate,
gets her ass kicked again,
and she's starting to drift away.
Then at this point, and this is funny,
I have more votes for president than Kamala Harris does.
Because Kamala Harris dropped out before Iowa,
because that's how much of a disaster her campaign
turned into when she was leading.
She was leading, right?
So then she becomes vice president,
and Biden, probably because of that bus line,
Jill Biden caught tremendous feelings over that line, okay?
So Biden's like, here, have this albatross around your neck.
It's called immigration.
Good luck.
I'm not gonna do anything about it.
I'm not gonna change policy,
but I'm putting you in charge of it
to get your ass handed to you, okay?
And she does, so that's a disaster.
And then she starts doing interviews where she's like,
we have to become the being,
but not the thing we were, and the unbecoming,
and you're like, what is going on?
Why can neither one of them speak?
And so, but then the third act shocks me.
Biden steps down, she goes,
grabs all those delegates in a super competent way
that we talked about earlier,
and then she goes out and gives a speech.
I'm like, oh, that speech is good.
Okay, another one, another one.
I'm like, wait a minute, these are good speeches,
no more word salads.
Then she picks Tim Walz and shocks the world.
I'm like, that's a correct VP pick.
That is a miracle, right?
And then she goes and does the economically populous plan,
all those proposals, about housing that people care about,
grocery prices that people care about, real or not real.
That is correct political strategy.
So this Kamala Harris is back to the original Kamala Harris,
who was a very competent, skilled politician.
And as I was telling you offline,
she's doing, whoever's doing her TikTok is blowing up,
and they're doing risky, edgy stuff.
Yes!
I did not expect that from somebody
that kind of comes from the Biden camp of just like,
be safe, be boring, all this kind of stuff.
So you have to give Kamala Harris ultimate credit,
because she's the leader of the campaign,
and she makes the final decisions.
But there's apparently a couple of people
inside that campaign that are ass kickers.
And they have convinced her to take risk,
which Democrats never take.
And it is correct to take risk.
You cannot get the victory without risk.
So the vice president pick is the bellwether.
When Hillary Clinton picked Tim Kaine,
I said, that's it, she's gonna lose.
Because Tim Kaine is playing prevent defense.
He's wallpaper.
I mean, he'd be lucky to be wallpaper.
He's just a white wall, right?
And when he speaks his white noise,
he never says anything interesting.
He's the most boring pick of all time.
That's saying, we already won, ha ha, okay?
If Kamala Harris had picked Mark Kelly,
that's the Tim Kaine equivalent.
Okay, oh, he's an astronaut.
I don't give a shit that he's an astronaut.
What is he saying?
Is he a good politician?
Does he have good policies?
Is he exciting on the campaign trail?
Is he going to add to your momentum?
Mark Kelly, he might be a good guy,
but number one, he's a very corporate Democrat.
And number two, it's like watching grass grow.
Oh, he's terrible at speaking if you ask me, right?
So I thought for sure she's gonna pick Mark Kelly, ha ha,
because that's what a normal Democrat does.
Or if they wanna go wild and crazy, they'll go to Bashir.
So I was like, please let it be Shapiro,
because he's at least not bad.
He's done some populist things and he's strategic.
He's really smart.
I need smart candidates.
Dumb candidates don't help.
They don't have a mind of their own.
They can't take risks.
They're not independent thinkers.
They're gonna lose.
So she picks the smartest, most populous candidate.
Boom, boom, we got a winner.
That's a good campaign.
Speaking of risks, when they debate,
when Kamala and Trump debate,
what do you think that's gonna look like?
Who do you think is gonna win?
Oh, that's not close, Kamala Harris.
Yeah, unless she falls apart.
Unless she goes back to the bad era, right?
That's risk number three.
Well, hold on a second.
Oh, I guess in a debate, you can have pre-written.
It seems like when she's going off the top of her head
is when the word salad sometimes comes out, sometimes.
Yeah, we'll have to see, right?
We'll have to see.
She hasn't done any tough interviews.
She hasn't really been challenged.
So I hope to God that doesn't happen.
That she doesn't fall apart, you mean,
because I hope she does a bunch of interviews, right?
Oh, definitely, definitely.
This is gonna sound really funny.
I'm too honest, but I am.
Like in the context of Kamala Harris
probably shouldn't come on the Young Turks.
We do a really tough interview and it would hurt her, okay?
You know, it's tough, but you're pretty respectful.
Maybe I just have my sort of like,
I'm okay with a little bit of tension.
You're pretty respectful.
Even when you're yelling, there's like respect.
Like you don't do like a gotcha type thing.
There's certain things you could do.
Like you said this in the past.
You can say a line from the past that's out of context.
It forces the other person to have to define the context.
You just sort of debate type tactics over and over.
Like you don't seem to do that.
You just like ask them questions genuinely,
and then you argue the point.
And then you also like hear what they say.
The only thing I've seen you do sometimes
is tell if you sometimes like interrupt,
like you speak over the person
if they are trying to do the same.
Right, only if they're filibustering.
Yeah, if they're filibustering.
But like that's a tricky one.
That's a tricky one.
No, but like the problem for her coming on our show
isn't that we would be unfair to her.
It's that we would be fair.
So we would ask questions
she is gonna have trouble answering.
Other corporate stuff.
Right, I mean like so Biden said
he was gonna take the corporate tax rates 28%
and he barely tried.
You say you're gonna take it to 28%.
Why should we trust you?
Right, you guys said $15 minimum wage
and then you took it out of the bill.
Why should we trust you?
Right, those are very tough questions.
She's never gonna get that in mainstream media.
Mainstream media is going to have foe toughness
but in reality they're gonna be softballs.
Right, and so the debates you're right Lex
is a little bit easier
because Sarah Palin proved
that you could just memorize scripted talking points.
And she admitted it later.
She's like, she was super nervous.
She memorized the talking points
and no matter what they asked
she just gave the talking point.
Which by the way, people barely noticed
because that's what all politicians do.
Okay, she just admitted it.
And so no, Trump's a disaster in a debate.
He's a one man wrecking crew of his own campaign.
So any competent debater would eviscerate Donald Trump.
I mean they just on any given topic
when he says something like here
let's take one lunatic conspiracy theory
that he just had recently.
And by the way, if you're a right winger
and you keep getting hurt every time I say he's a lunatic
or I insult Donald Trump,
don't like, you sound like a left winger.
I'm offended, I'm offended, I'm offended.
Get over it, get over it, okay?
So we have disagreements.
Hear what the other side is saying.
And by the way, I say the same thing to the left, okay?
I say, you think everybody on the right's evil?
You're crazy.
No, they just have a different way of looking at the world.
Which by the way is an interesting conversation.
We should talk about that in a minute too.
But so I do it to both sides.
But okay, Trump says, oh, I don't think
there's anyone at Kamala Harris's rallies.
All the pictures are AI.
Okay, so let's say he says that in a debate
because he's liable to say anything, right?
You just say, okay, so you think every reporter
that was there, every photographer that was there,
every human being that was there,
they're all lying.
They have a conspiracy of thousands of people,
but none of them were actually there.
Do you understand how insane you sound?
So this is a good place to,
can you steal man the case for Trump?
Yeah, yeah.
So Trump is a massive risk because of all the things
we talked about earlier.
But there is a percentage chance that he's such a wild card
that he overturns the whole system.
And that is why the establishment is a little scared of him.
So if he's in office, here, I'll give you a case
of Donald Trump doing something right.
Something wrong first and then something right.
So he bombs Soleimani, the top general of Iran,
and kills him.
That risks World War III.
That risks a giant war with Iran that devolves Iran
as four times the size of Iraq.
If you're anti-war, you should have hated
that he assassinated Soleimani.
But after the assassination, Iran doesn't wanna get into it
even though they're in a rage and they do a small bombing.
You could tell if it's a small or a big one, right?
So that's them saying, we don't really want war,
but for our domestic crowd, we have to bomb you back, right?
And that's when the military industrial complex
comes to Trump and says, no, you have to show them
who's tough and bomb this area.
And Trump says, no, they did a small bombing,
I'm not gonna do anything on a large bombing,
I don't want the war, I'm not gonna do that bombing.
That was this shining moment.
Yeah, for me, one of the biggest steel man for Trump
is that he has both the skill and the predisposition
to not be a warmonger.
He, I think better than the other candidates
I've seen is able to end wars and end them.
Now you might disagree with it, but in a way where
there's legitimately effective negotiation that happens.
Like I just don't see any other candidate currently
being able to sit down with Zelensky and Putin
and to negotiate a peace treaty
that both are equally unhappy with.
So on the one hand, almost all other politicians
are going to be controlled
by the military industrial complex
and that complex wants to bleed Russia dry.
And that's what the Ukraine war is doing.
It's a double win for the defense contractors.
Number one, every dollar we send to Ukraine
is actually not going to Ukraine.
It's going to US defense contractors
and then they are sending old weapons to Ukraine.
The money is to build new weapons for us.
So a lot of people don't know that.
So the defense contractors want that war to go on forever
and they're an enormous influence in Washington.
The second win is they're depleting Russia
and Russia has gotten themselves into a quagmire
like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan and they're bleeding out.
So the military industrial complex,
once Russia to bleed out for as long as humanly possible,
they actually care more about their own interests,
of course, than they do about Ukrainian interests.
So in fact, there's a good argument to be made
that Ukraine could have gotten a peace deal earlier
and we prevented it.
So, but the bottom line now is probably how a deal gets done
is they let go of three more areas in Ukraine.
They already lost Crimea.
They'd have to let go of three more regions.
And that is tough because at that point,
Russia's a little bit encouraged.
Every time they do an invasion, they get more land.
They might not get all the land they wanted,
but they get a lot of land.
So that's, it's a very difficult issue.
But literally which person, if they become president,
will end the war?
Trump will end that war because Trump will go in
and he loves Russia and Putin anyway.
I just disagree with it.
He loves Russia, the implication of that,
meaning he will do whatever Putin tells him.
I think-
He'll do 90% of what Putin tells him.
I just disagree with that.
I think he wants to be the kind of person
that says, fuck you to Putin while patting him on the back
and being, but out negotiating Putin.
So I don't like talking about Russia
because there's so much emotions that go into that topic.
The right wing, the minute you mention Russia,
they're like, oh, it's a hoax
and all this baggage that comes with it, et cetera.
To me, Russia's not any different than Saudi Arabia
or Israel for Trump.
You give me money, I like you.
You get by my apartments, I like you, right?
If you don't give me money, I don't like you.
It's not that complicated.
So okay, take like,
don't worry about the Russia part of it.
Like the bottom line is Trump thinks,
what do I care about those three regions of Ukraine?
I wanna get this thing done, right?
So he'll go and he'll say Ukraine,
we're gonna withdraw all help unless you agree
to a peace deal with Russia
and Russia wants those three regions.
That's the peace deal, that's it.
So Ukraine will lose a part of their country
and we'll get to a peace deal.
Yeah, I hope not, I hope not.
I think Trump sees themselves
and wants to be a great negotiator.
So, and I personally want the death,
the death of people to end.
And I think Trump would bring that much faster.
And I disagree with you, at least that my hope is
that he would negotiate something that would be fair.
He's not, his anti-war record is so complicated
because moving the embassy in Israel
and killing the top Iranian general were super provocative
and they could have easily triggered a giant war there.
And then you know what's gonna happen
if you get into any kind of real war.
Trump's gonna wanna prove his buttons larger.
So then he's gonna do massive, ridiculous bombings.
I mean, I worry about nukes.
And so we had Giuliani on the show on the RNC
and I asked him this question.
I said, you know, I keep saying,
oh, they wouldn't do it if I was in charge.
I'm like, what does that mean?
Because it sounds like what it means is
they wouldn't do it because they know if they did it,
I would do something insane like attack Russia
or use nukes.
And Rudy said, yeah, that's what it means.
So that means you have to at least bluff that
and you have to get them to believe that he's a madman.
That's the madman theory of Nixon.
And Rudy said that too.
He was very clear about it.
But the problem is if you get your bluff called.
And so if you actually attack Russia,
you're gonna start World War III.
So that's why, yeah, if you could just get away
with bluffing, maybe, but he's playing a very dangerous game
and he massively increased drone strikes.
On the other hand, he didn't bomb Iran further.
And on the other hand, he started the process
of withdrawal from Afghanistan.
So not black and white, complicated record.
And one thing, I'll give him another piece of credit here.
I think I'm taking this steel manning too far.
But here's the credit was that he changed the rhetoric
of the right wing.
They went from the party of Dick Cheney, war is great.
And let's say, all Muslims are evil.
And so he hates Muslims too, but that's a different thing.
But like, oh, we have to attack the enemy.
We have to start wars, et cetera.
To now, Republican voters are generally anti-war
and hate Dick Cheney.
Oh, I'll take it, I'll take it.
So that's a great thing that Trump did.
Even if he didn't mean it, even if he does
these provocative things that could lead
to a much worse war, even if I'm worried
that he'll be so reckless, he'll start a bigger war,
at least he did that right.
And so I'm happy to have our right wing brothers
and sisters join us in the anti-war movement.
And I'm not being a jerk about it.
Like, I love it.
And so this is another thing the left does wrong
from time to time, which is if you agree
with a right winger 2%, they'll be like,
oh, welcome in, come on, vote for Trump, come on in.
Yeah, woo hoo, water's warm, right?
If you disagree with the left 2%,
they're like, that's it, you're banished and you're a Nazi.
Well, brother, how are we gonna win an election
if you're banishing everybody there is, right?
So hold up, these Republican voters are coming
at your anti-war position, take the win.
No, they're MAGA and I won't deal with them.
Even when they agree with you, that doesn't make any sense.
That doesn't make any sense, take the win, right?
So when Charlie Kirk says yes to paid family leave,
when Patrick Bet David on his program says yes,
roughly says yes to paid family leave, take the win.
RFK Jr., you said some positive things
for a while about RFK Jr.
And I think you said you would even consider voting for him,
given the slate of people.
This was at the time when Biden was still in.
What do you think about him?
What do you think about RFK Jr.?
As a candidate, as a person, he's been on the show, right?
Yeah, so he was on our show.
People love that interview, you could check it out
anytime, right?
And why do people love it, whether they're right or left?
Because we're fair.
We actually asked him about his policy positions,
he explained them, I challenge him, and then he explains,
and we give him a fair hearing.
But I knew Bobby a little bit before he ran,
when he was an environmental lawyer, right?
And his legal work is excellent.
And he's been on the right side of most of the issues
for most of his life.
So A, I like him on that.
Two, on his wildlife, the dead bear,
and the worms, and all that stuff, right?
So there's two important lessons you should get
about out of that.
Well, one's just about Bobby, but the other one's a general
one that's really important for you to know,
no matter what you think of Bobby Kennedy.
On the personal front, I have a friend
that's very similar to him.
In fact, he's one of my best friends.
And I know why, this is my theory,
on why Bobby and my friend led a wildlife.
Both of their dads died young.
When my friend's dad died, he was 18
and his dad died in his arms.
And he has a motto, what is lived cannot be unlived.
So if I had a great time and I thought it was hilarious
to dump a dead bear at Central Park,
then I lived it and I had a great time
and nothing you could do about it, okay?
And sometimes that'll get you in trouble.
And sometimes you'll have a fantastic time, right?
And obviously Bobby's dad was killed when he was young.
And maybe that got into his head of like,
you better live strong and live an interesting life.
And so I don't begrudge him that.
Even if I begrudge some of the things
that he did in that life, I get why he did it.
So I don't hate him like other people hate him
for some of those personal stuff, right?
So, and I like him for all the things that he did positive,
holding fossil fuel companies accountable,
protecting communities that had poison dumped
into the rivers, et cetera, right?
So the thing that affects everybody is when he gets,
like corporate media, smeared the hell out of him
and they didn't allow him to speak.
And then they did the needle in a haystack trick.
So whenever it's an insider,
they find the best parts of their lives
and then they amplify.
So Joe Biden is average Joe from Scranton.
Motherfucker's been in DC for the last 52 years.
You think we don't have eyes and ears?
Okay, like average Joe from Scranton, who are you kidding?
So there's a guy named Fred Thompson, who's an actor
and he was a Senator from Tennessee later.
And he had this great little trick that he would do
as a red pickup truck that he would campaign with, right?
So he looks like a regular Joe, right?
But he's a millionaire actor.
But here's the funny part.
He would drive for the red pickup truck in a limo
and he would drive back from the campaign event in a limo,
but the press never reported the limo.
They only reported him in the red pickup truck
as if that's what he drives.
See, that's the theater of politics.
Why?
Because Fred Thompson was a corporate Republican.
So they loved him.
So they go, yeah, sure.
Yeah, red pickup truck.
Oh, good old Fred Thompson, right?
So, but if you're an outsider and they don't like you,
then they're gonna look at the haystack of your life
and they're gonna try to find needles.
So they've done this to Trump, they've done this to Bernie,
they've done this to Bobby Kennedy Jr.
And with Bobby, they're like, ooh,
there's some juicy needles in here, okay?
So they find those and they go, you see this?
The only thing you should know about Bobby Kennedy Jr.
is that he found a dead bear and put it in Central Park.
Oh, wait, wait, wait, I found another one.
The other thing you should know about Bobby
is that he once said in a divorce deposition
that he had a brain worm that he ate.
By the way, it turns out that affects millions of people
and it's not that big a deal, right?
But look, he has a radical.
Ah, yes, this defines him completely.
The spectacular case of that actually happened to me.
So I ran for Congress in 2020
and the New York Times, LA Times, CNN,
they all butchered me with needles, okay?
So they said, it is a long history
of making anti-Muslim jokes.
Well, first of all, they didn't even say these jokes.
They said anti-Muslim rhetoric.
I'm like, I'm Muslim.
I mean, I'm an atheist, but I grew up Muslim,
my family's Muslim, my background's Muslim.
You don't think that's relevant in this story?
And they did it based on one joke I told about.
And they said, oh, also, of course,
I mean, they say that I'm anti-Semitic.
That's like, you start with that.
That's just baked in for everyone, right?
So I made a joke about how Orthodox Jews and Muslims,
they think that getting into heaven
is a little bit of a fashion contest, okay?
So the Orthodox Jews go in there with the Russian coats
from the 1800s and the giant Russian hat.
You know, the Muslims going with their robe
and the skullcap and stuff.
And God's looking around going, no, no, no.
Ooh, nice outfit, come on in, right?
Like, do you really think the creator of the universe
gives a damn what you wear, okay?
So the New York Times took that and said,
long history of being anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim, okay?
So there's this, oh, this is a famous one, relatively famous.
I did a joke about bestiality like a dozen years ago.
Very nice.
So I start out the joke nice and dry,
and I go, look, is the horse gonna object
if he's the one getting pleasure?
Now, Anna's my co-host, she's younger at that time,
and she's like, that seems like a bad idea, Jake.
I'm like, of course it's a bad idea, okay?
But I'm being dry, but some people are laughing
in the studio and stuff.
And then I say, you know, if I was emperor of the world,
I would make that legal, and they cut the tape.
If you watch the rest of the tape,
I say, now, would the horse object?
No!
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
So, but they cut the tape.
So the New York, so originally a right-winger did that,
and then like a establishment troll in that primary
started putting out those tapes to everyone.
Jake Tapper retweeted it, didn't look to see
if it's edited or not edited.
The New York Times implied that bestiality
was part of my agenda.
Jesus Christ!
Please tell me that's part of your Wikipedia,
that the bestiality thing is part of your agenda.
I don't know, I don't know.
But guys, so in those stories, I'm not important,
and even Bobby Kennedy Jr. is not important.
What it reveals about the media is what's important.
So they're gonna find those needles, whether it's,
and even if they don't have the needles,
you know what, we'll cut the tape
before your joke's punchline, right?
So we'll just run it and we'll lie about you.
Who cares, right?
And so, oh, they also said that I had David Duke on
to share his anti-Semitic point of view.
If you watched the interview, I told David Duke,
you're an anti-Semite, you're a racist, you're a bigot,
you're an idiot, right?
It was the toughest interview
he's probably ever had in his life.
And other journalists got mad at that part.
And they were like, no, guys, you're just flat out lying.
Like, I watched the interview.
Did any of you watch the interview?
He takes the guy's head off, right?
And so the New York Times issued a correction on that one.
So they're like, okay, fine.
He was being sarcastic when he said,
sure, you're not racist, Dave.
One of the sources of hope to all this is
there's a lot of independent media now,
but mainstream media has a lot of power still
and cares a lot of power.
Do you think they're gonna die eventually?
Yeah, definitely.
So two things about that that are super important.
First of all, this is why I tell people to have hope.
I don't believe in false hope, right?
So if you think Kamala Harris is your knight
in shining armor, she's gonna come in,
she's gonna get money out of politics,
she's gonna ignore the donors, that's false hope.
It's crazy talk, right?
So why am I in favor of Kamala Harris?
I'm gonna live to fight another day.
I'm worried that Trump's gonna end the whole thing.
And then we're not gonna have an opportunity
to actually get a populist win, right?
So, and I'm encouraged by some of the things she's doing
and maybe she does even 25% of her agenda,
but I'm not gonna give you false hope
that she's your savior, right?
But I believe massively in hope.
And number one, because it's true to the point
that we were talking about earlier, Lex,
and how last 200 years have been choppy,
but overall fantastic.
Terrible things have happened in that time period,
some of the worst things that have ever happened in history,
but overall life expectancy is higher,
everything is, you know, incomes are higher,
health is better, et cetera, right?
So hope is not misplaced, it's real, it's empirical, okay?
So now we talked about how you could get money
out of politics and that's a legitimate hope,
but media is another place where we have huge hope.
So of all the corporate robots,
the most important robot is media.
So when mainstream media has you hooked in
at the back of your neck, you're gonna believe
all these fairy tales about how politicians are nice people
and they're trying to do the right thing
and donor money doesn't have any influence on them, right?
So once you unplug from the matrix,
well then you begin to see, oh yeah,
hey look, you took the donor money,
did what the donors wanted.
You took the donor money, did what the donors want,
98% of the time, right?
So then you see clearly.
So now what's happening at large?
Mainstream media is losing their power.
And now online media is swarming, swarming, swarming, swarming.
And so this goes back to why I started The Young Turks.
So let me touch on that here
and then we can come back to it if you want.
So in 1998, I write an email to my friends
and I say, online video is going to be television.
And unsurprisingly, and they say, you're nuts.
That's never gonna happen.
At that point, we're still doing AOL dial-ups.
Like, right, online video barely exists
and television's mammoth.
I say, guys, it's just a matter of logic.
Like, for me, there's so many ironies.
I'm known for yelling online sometimes,
but in reality, I'm obsessed with logic.
So when you have gatekeepers,
gatekeepers pick based on what they want,
what the powerful want, in that case,
advertisers, politicians, et cetera,
they are never going to design programming
as good as wisdom of the crowd.
When people start doing online video,
I'm like, boom, there's no gatekeepers.
This is democratized.
Wisdom of the crowd's gonna win.
So if you start with no money,
and let's pick a different example, not The Young Turks.
Let's say Phil DeFranco, he's been around forever, okay?
And he also does news.
And so Phil starts doing a show
and he doesn't have any money, just like us.
And so what does he have to do to get an audience?
He has to do a show that is really popular.
He's gotta figure out a way.
How do I get their attention?
How do I keep their attention?
And he starts doing a great show, right?
And so every year it's us and Phil
for best news show for like a decade, right?
And meanwhile, I'm back over at CNN,
Wolf Blitzer's still droning on from a teleprompter.
You put Wolf Blitzer online
without the force of CNN with him.
He gets negative seven views.
No one's interested in what Wolf Blitzer has to say.
It's not personal.
I don't know the brother, right?
I'm just saying institutionally, logically, et cetera.
So I'm like, these guys are gonna win.
So when YouTube starts, we go on YouTube right away.
We're the first YouTube partner.
So I am literally the original YouTuber, okay?
Nice.
Susan Wojcicki, former CEO of the late Susan Wojcicki,
wonderful woman.
And if that triggers you again on the right,
you're wrong.
She was a terrific person.
And when she started her own YouTube channel,
I was the first interview
because we were the first YouTube partner.
So I love that.
So we're in that, but let me connect it back to the hope.
When mainstream media has you hooked,
you got no hope
because you don't have the right information.
You have propaganda, you have marketing,
you don't have real news.
When you're in the online world, it's chaotic.
And don't get me wrong,
it's got plenty of downsides, right?
But within that chaos, the truth begins to emerge.
And so, for example,
Young Turks has had dozens of fights
with different creators throughout history.
When you're number one in news online,
the algorithm rewards anyone attacking you
because then you get into their algorithmic loop.
It's not an accident
that we've been attacked dozens of times.
One, we're independent thinkers.
So anyone, if we don't match their ideology,
they're gonna attack us.
But number two, they get in our algorithm loop,
it's too hard to resist, right?
So all of a sudden,
they think that we're being funded by Nancy Pelosi
or the CIA and then, oh, we're off to the races.
There's another fight, right?
But our competition is a graveyard.
And so we won almost all of all of those fights.
Why?
Because we try really hard to stick with the truth,
with logic, and we don't do audience capture.
Even if our audience is going in one direction,
we don't think it's right.
Anna and I will come out and go, no, sorry, guys, love you,
but rent control is not a good idea, okay, et cetera.
So in that world, the people,
it's gonna take a while, guys,
but people who are telling the truth
are eventually gonna rise up.
And when they do, now we're free.
And now the second part is even more devastating
for mainstream media because I'm a businessman, right?
I keep looking at the revenue for CNN, et cetera,
and they have a massive problem.
And people don't realize how big the problem is.
That thing's gonna capsize.
I don't talk about it often
because I don't want more competition, okay?
I also have a company in the online world, et cetera,
but I'm too honest, I gotta say it, I gotta say it.
So they have two revenue streams.
One is ads, that's why they serve advertisers,
and politicians are huge advertisers, as we mentioned.
The second revenue stream,
depending on the company is arguably more important,
which is subscribers.
So now what happens in a business normally is,
so they started out low and then they got high
and now they got a ton of subscribers.
At its peak, cable has 100 million households, right?
So they're raking in unbelievable money
from subscriber fees and they got advertising on top.
So when you're all the way up here,
your costs start to rise.
Why do they rise?
Because then the on-air talent has leverage.
And as an example, there's many others, yes.
And so the on-air talent, like Sean Hannity says,
I do a program that brings in X amount of maybe 100 million,
maybe 200 million.
So give me 40 million a year, and they do.
Sean is making 40 million a year last I checked, okay?
So I don't know if he's still getting that kind of money
and I'm just spacing out and reporting, right?
But that's a monster.
So they have all these giant costs,
but the minute you go from 100 million,
now we're at I think around 70 million,
you just lost a giant chunk of your revenue.
Now when your costs are higher than your revenue,
nighty night, it's been nice knowing you.
Yeah, and it's gonna collapse and it's gonna be painful.
But what we need guys is like,
sorry, last thing on that is we need the print guys
like AP Reuters, Intercept, the lever that Sirota runs,
whatever Ryan's working on now, it's at Ryan Grimm.
So we need those badly.
We need someone to collect actual information
and do the best they can in presenting it in an objective way.
We all gotta support that.
So you can't lose text, that's so important.
The TV guys are just actors.
You can lose them overnight and it won't hurt you,
it'll help you.
Yeah, it's gonna be a messy battle for truth
because the reality is there's a lot of money to be made
and a lot of attention to be gained from drama farming.
So just constantly creating drama.
And sometimes drama helps find the truth
like we were mentioning, but most of the time
it's just drama and it doesn't care about the truth.
It just cares about drama.
And then the same is like conspiracy theories.
Now some conspiracy theories have value in depth
and they allow us to question the establishment
of institutions, but the bottom line
is conspiracy theories get clicks.
And so you can just keep coming up
with random conspiracy theories.
Many of them don't have to be grounded in the truth at all.
And so that's the C we're operating in.
And so it's a tricky space too.
But Lex, look at all the people who are the biggest now
because we've now had a couple of decades at this, right?
So, and I mean, as an industry.
So I would argue you're huge and you don't do that.
You don't do the conspiracy theories,
you don't do the drama at all, right?
Rogan is huge.
Yeah, maybe there's drama, but he's genuine, right?
I got a lot of issues with some of his policies.
I mixed opinions on Joe in a lot of different ways,
but I don't doubt that he's genuine
and people can sense that, right?
And he's huge.
We're genuine, we're huge.
So this is the market beginning to work.
Yeah.
So speaking of Joe, let me ask you about this.
Here we go.
I didn't actually know this,
but when I was prepping for this conversation,
I saw that you actually said at some point in the past
that you can beat up Rogan in a fight.
No, you said that you have a shot.
It's a non-zero probability.
Yes.
Do you still believe this?
Yes, but the probability is dropping.
It's dropping every day.
I think it's the probably the stupidest thing
I've ever heard you say.
So I didn't, I wrestled and the jiu-jitsu and judo
and all the kinds of fighting sports my whole life.
And I just observed a lot of really confident, large guys,
roll into gyms.
He's ripped, he could deadlift,
he could talk all kinds of shit
and he believes he's gonna be the next world champion
and he just gets his ass kicked.
Yeah, of course, okay.
And I've seen, like I saw this Israeli MMA fighter
taking on an anti-Semite who was huge
and thought that, you know, he believed in like
Nick Fuentes conspiracy theories or something.
And the MMA fighter dismantled him and I loved it.
Okay, and then he like, we tweeted back and forth, et cetera.
So guys, first let me just assure you, I get it.
So now let me tell you why I said it
and then why I think it's a non-zero chance.
So Michael Smirkonish had written this blog
like, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago on Huffington Post.
We're both bloggers at that point
and about the wussification of America.
Now he was saying the left is a bunch of wussies, right?
So I wrote a blog saying, hey, Michael,
I would rather debate you.
So if you wanna debate about how we're wussies,
let's do it, let's find everything.
But, you know, you're mentioning physicality, right?
And how you guys are tougher.
So if you prefer only in a prescribed setting, right?
And we're not gonna go do it in the streets like idiots,
right, but if you want, we'll have a boxing match
or whatever you want and we'll see who's tougher.
And he panicked and he cried to Mommy,
which was Arianna Huffington.
And oh, Jack's intimidating me, right?
Okay, all right, well, who's the wussy now, bitch, right?
So that is not to actually get into a fight
with poor Michael Smirkonish, right?
It's to prove, hey, don't use rhetoric like that.
That's dumb and this is me proving that it's dumb, okay?
So now Joe had said, I forget what he said at the time
and he'd said something similar, right?
And I'm up to here with Joe at that point.
I don't know if we're ever talking yet, right?
You've been on a show and I really,
that was a good conversation.
It was a great conversation.
That was a while back, yeah.
I hope he has you on again.
Yeah, so I get it.
I bet you, I don't like this take you have a lot.
I bet you he hates it because him as an MMA commentator,
he gets to hear so many bros.
It's all about the mindset, bro.
Now, to steal, man, the point you're making,
which I do think it's the stupidest thing you've ever said,
but the actual intent, which is whether you're left or right,
there's strong people on the left,
like mentally strong, physically strong.
Like I think the whole point is not that you can beat them,
but you're willing to step,
you're willing to fight if you need to.
That's, it's- 100%.
So it's not like I believe I can beat them.
It's like, I'm willing, like all this shit,
calling the people on the left whistles or whatever,
I'm willing to step in the fight.
Even if I'm untrained, even in my father's shape,
I'm willing to fight.
Yeah, I get it.
I understand that, but it's just pick a different person.
That's why I wrote down my genuine curiosity
is if you can beat up Alex, Alex Jones versus Cenk.
That, the legitimies, I would pay for that
because you're both untrained.
You both got, I would say the spirit.
No, no, he has, look, I'll give the same fairness.
I think I got an 8% chance of beating Rogan.
You're lost.
I know, I got it, hold on.
And I think, to be fair, Alex has an 8% chance
of beating me.
Oh, wow, okay.
Okay, because you never know.
He catches you on a lucky punch.
I got punched in the ear once,
and you lose your balance,
and then you're in a lot of trouble, right?
So I can get lucky, Alex Jones can't get lucky.
Me against Rogan is harder.
Like, if you said to me, you don't have 8% chance,
but Alex does.
Okay, I'm not gonna, it's fine, right?
So why would, does Alex stand almost no chance against me?
So first of all, it's not just because I'm big
and he's big.
One, I wrestled.
Oh, you wrestled.
Yeah, if you wrestled, then you're,
like, I watched this show with my kids,
Physical 100, it's like a Korean show,
where they try to find out who's the best athlete.
They have one thing where they have to wrestle away the ball
and keep it this big, giant ball.
I'm like, every wrestler's gonna win.
Every MMA fighter's gonna win,
and every time they win.
And they're like, dad, how'd you know that?
Because we get trained.
We're not gonna lose to a non-wrestler
in a wrestling contest.
It's not gonna happen, right?
So you can get lucky, but it's unlikely.
So one, wrestling.
Now that was from a long time ago,
but at least you know the mechanics, right?
Number two, I've gotten into about 30 actual street fights
in my life, and you can say street fights
not the same as MMA, of course, that's true,
obviously true, right?
But it's not no experience, it's some experience.
And the most important part of a street fight
is being able to take a punch in the face, okay?
Yeah, knowing what it feels like
to get punched in the face, yeah.
So I've been punched in the face, I don't know,
dozens of times in my life.
I used to start fights by saying,
I'll let you take the first punch, okay?
So I didn't start the fights, they just started
because they'd punch me in the face, okay?
So, and then for Alex, the main thing,
and also true for Rogan is it's about willpower, right?
So if Joe has a 92% chance, in my opinion,
of knocking me out or beating me because he has the skill
and he's trained and he knows what he's doing,
so all the willpower in the world isn't gonna help you
if you get kicked upside the hat, right?
So, but in the unlikely circumstances
that I've worn him down, right,
then I'm a little bit more in the ballgame
because I got willpower.
For Alex, he doesn't have the willpower I have, okay?
Because to me, the idea of losing to Alex Jones
is unthinkable, I would do anything not to lose, anything.
Let me just say, so that's beautiful, I love this.
I would pay a lot of money to watch the two of you
just even like Russell, but with Joe, I think,
I just, I have to say, it's like,
it's .0001% chance, you have a chance
before you even get to the mentality.
And the other thing is, on the mentality side,
one of the fascinating things about Joe
is he's actually a sweetheart in person like this,
but there's something that takes over him when he competes.
Brother, we've been around 22 years
in the toughest industry in the world.
I understand, yeah.
Right, if you, like, do you have any idea
how hard it is to run a 75-person company
and make money online and survive after all the guys
who took billions of dollars went to-
tremendous willpower.
But overall, you're, this is not the hill I'm dying on.
Okay, Joe would win, I get it.
I think we're all allowed one kind of blind spot, I suppose.
So you don't think a big guy that still is in good shape,
that was a wrestler, that's been in a lot of street fights,
you still think .0001?
It depends on the street fights, but yeah, .001.
Okay, yeah, and it's such a minute disagreement
because, so take me out of it,
so you take out the willpower part of blah, blah, blah.
I think it's one to 2%, yeah, he could catch the guy
on about, you know, and get lucky.
I think it's because I've talked to,
so I train with a coach named John Donner,
and we talk about this a lot,
and I think technique is just such,
technique is the thing that also feeds the willpower.
It actually builds up your confidence
in the way that, like, nothing else does.
In the more actionable way,
because you won't need that much willpower.
No, I totally agree.
If the technique is back.
You don't have to be, like, a tough guy to win debates
if you're just fucking good at debates, right?
So I think people just don't understand the value in sport
and especially in combat of technique.
No, a great irony here is,
I actually totally agree with that.
That's why I mentioned the physical 100.
Technique's gonna win every, like, almost every time.
We're having a debate about whether it's eight,
or one, or .01, right?
It's either way, technique wins.
We agree.
Okay, beautiful.
In the, one of the controversial things you've done,
in the 90s, as a student at UPenn,
you publicly denied the Armenian genocide,
which is the mass murder of over a million Armenians
in 1915 and 16 in the Ottoman Empire.
You have since then publicly and clearly
changed your mind on this.
Tell me the process you went through to change your mind.
Yeah, so when you're a kid,
you're taught a whole bunch of things.
That's the software that we talked about earlier, right?
So cultural software is media, family, friends,
social media, et cetera.
And so growing up in any tribe,
whether it's a religious tribe or an ethnic tribe,
you're gonna get indoctrinated
into that tribe's way of thinking.
So you take a Turkish person who's super progressive,
loves Bernie, believes with all their heart and peace,
and you tell them something about Kurds,
and they'll say, oh no, not those guys.
They're terrible and evil,
and we have to do what we do to them.
You see, that's the tribe taking over, right?
And so you tell any religious person what's wrong
with the other religions, they're like,
oh yeah, yeah, that's totally true.
You get to their religion, tribe takes over,
know how dare you, I'm offended, right?
So I grew up with Turkish propaganda.
So I'll tell you a couple of funny instances of it.
When we were kids, we'd go Turkish-American Day Parade.
I'm like 10 or 12 years old.
It's in the middle of New York,
because I grew up in Jersey.
That's why I gotta know all those fights.
And we would chant in Turkish,
Turkey is the biggest country.
There's no other country that's even big.
And I was like, this is crazy.
I'm like, dad, isn't this crazy?
America's big, China's big, why are we chanting
this nonsensical chant, right?
So that's the beginning of beginning
to realize you're indoctrinated.
I'm in college, and I read about some battle
to the Ottoman Empire loss,
and I'm like, that can't be, right?
The Turks have only lost one war, World War I, right?
And then I was like, oh my god, I'm an idiot.
I got taught that in third grade in Turkey.
Of course that's not true.
That's ridiculously untrue, right?
All those thoughts are in your head,
you don't even realize it.
And so on the Armenian genocide,
I read the Turkish version,
and the Turkish version has all of this evidence, right?
So it's real in that it exists,
but here I'll give you a great example of it.
I think it was Colonel Chester,
some random American military guy after World War I.
And he says about the Armenians after the mass march.
The forced marches.
He says they returned to the area fat
and entirely un-massacred.
Okay, I'm like, hey, that's an American colonel
that's saying that, so that's obviously true.
You see, they didn't happen, right?
Or at least in the way that the Armenians say.
Now as a grownup, I look at it and I go, are you kidding me?
That guy's obviously trying to get a contract
with the Turkish government, right?
Nobody returns from a forced march fat
and entirely un-massacred, right?
So that's propaganda.
And so, and that one was so indoctrinated
that it was tough to let go.
So at Penn, I write that op-ed, et cetera.
And then over the course of time,
and so Anna and I disagree on things from time to time,
and we've been co-hosting now for,
she's been at the Young Turks for 18 years
and co-hosting for almost 18.
And so she's Armenian.
And by the way, I love America.
We came to America because we love this country,
land of hope and opportunity.
That's part of why I fight so hard
for the average American for the American idea.
So here's a Turk and an Armenian doing a show together,
and it becomes the number one online news show.
That's the beauty of America, right?
So she's telling me things
and we're having some on-air discussions about it, et cetera.
And then it just dawned on me like,
no, this too was obviously propaganda.
So at that point, once you realize that, it becomes easier.
That's why I'm trying to unplug people from the matrix.
Because once you realize it's propaganda,
oh my God, it gets infinitely easier
to start telling what's true or not true.
So maybe by way of advice,
how do you know when you're diluted by propaganda?
How do you know you're not believing a kind of,
how do you know when you're not plugged into the matrix,
when you're plugged into the matrix?
You have to keep testing it against objective reality.
Okay, they said something.
Did it happen or did it not happen?
So here's an easy one.
Alex Jones, for a long time, especially under Obama,
kept saying, they're gonna put us on FEMA camps.
They're gonna stuff us all in the FEMA camps,
and they're gonna put us in and they're gonna let us out.
I know it, I know it for sure, right?
Nobody's been in a FEMA camp.
Obama left, there was no FEMA camps.
So when I asked for the right-wing conspiracy guys,
guys, has any of their things ever come true?
Like, they always say all these crazy things
that never, ever happen.
So the third time it doesn't happen,
can you please start to wonder,
maybe I'm on the wrong side, maybe.
But that's not just for right-wingers, that's easy, right?
But it's also for mainstream media,
and that's where I get the biggest pushback,
and that's where, because my tribe
is what the kids call PMC, professional management class.
Okay, they're curious, you go up the ladder,
you have this route, that route, et cetera.
And so for that class, the status quo is pretty good.
So when Biden gives you 15% change,
you're like, what else do you want?
That's amazing, he just course-corrected a little bit,
now it's perfect, right?
But for the average guy who needs 100% change, not 15,
they look at it and they go, what the fuck?
He only did 15% and everybody's declaring him a hero, right?
So those are the hardest guys to get through on,
and those are the guys who get most mad at me,
not the right-wingers, the establishment,
that's why I'm nails on a chalkboard for them,
because I'm on the left, but I call out their crap,
and their marketing and propaganda,
and that's why I mentioned earlier,
no one probably, he might not even consciously know it,
but no one dislikes Bernie more than Obama,
because if Bernie got into office,
he'd embarrass Obama by doing a lot more change,
and Obama told us the change wasn't possible,
you could only get 5%, and so if Bernie does 50%,
then Obama's humiliated, and his record
and his legacy is ruined, right?
So I don't think he makes that conscious decision, right?
But it's subconscious, it's a way of thinking.
So if you're watching Morning Joe, test him.
He says something that Biden is for $15 minimum wage,
when Biden takes it out of the bill,
know that Morning Joe was lying to you.
He says that Biden said he was for the public option,
but he never even proposed it.
When Morning Joe still defends him,
and you see an objective reality,
Biden didn't actually propose that bill,
you know that they're lying to you.
Test it against objective reality.
Did it actually happen or didn't it?
I mean, there's some of that,
just to steal me on some of the conspiracy theories,
do you think there's some value to the conspiracy theories
that come from the right,
but actually more so come from the anti-establishment?
I mean, for me, there's a lot
that raise a bit of a question.
A lot of them could probably be explained by corporatism
and the military industrial complex,
but there's also a lot of them can be explained
by creepiness and shadiness in human nature.
Epstein is an example of that.
There's a lot of ways to explain Epstein,
including the basic creepiness of human nature,
but there could be bigger explanations underlying it.
So sometimes when we have long,
thoughtful conversations like this,
I'll say it depends a lot,
and then people get frustrated by that.
But then you're frustrated by the world,
because it depends.
So conspiracy theories,
if you say, are they all right or are they all wrong,
already the question's wrong.
So it depends, what is the conspiracy theory?
So if it's some of the absurd ones we've mentioned here,
that's easily disproven, right?
On the other hand,
there's a conspiracy theory about JFK's assassination.
Which one's the conspiracy theory
that Lee Harvey Oswald from like 12 miles away
shot a magic bullet that went like this
and hit like 13 people and came out of Kennedy's brain,
or that the government might have wanted to cover up
an assassination of the president for whatever reason.
Okay, come on.
Now I'm of course doing hyperbole,
and like the JFK enthusiasts will be like,
no, the bullet didn't actually go like this.
It didn't actually hit 13 people, I'm kidding guys, okay.
But in terms of, is that conspiracy theory real
that JFK was not just killed by Lee Harvey Oswald?
Almost certainly, right?
And so if you read real books with tons of information,
the most likely culprit is Alan Dulles,
the head of the CIA that he fired.
Back when there was a deep state,
there actually was a deep state,
they did coups against other countries leaders all the time,
but they tell us, oh, they wouldn't do it
to our own leader.
But remember, it's not the CIA,
he'd left the CIA already, right?
So I don't know if it was ex-CIA guys,
I don't know if the mob was involved.
I don't know any of those details,
but I know some things that are obvious.
That bullet didn't magically hit him from over there.
As Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald,
Jack Ruby was a mobster who on the record
had said that he hated Kennedy.
All of a sudden he became patriotic overnight
and shot the assailant who was unguarded,
maybe less likely.
Okay, so let's speed up though.
So my point is, yeah, some conspiracy theories could be true,
it depends on objective reality, right?
You get to Epstein.
Again, I always do it ahead of time
because I want you to test me
and see does it match objective reality.
So I said the minute that it happened,
you'll have your answer based on
whether the video in the hallway worked or not.
If the video in the hallway works,
there'll be just as many conspiracy theories,
but it'll show actually who went in and didn't go in, okay?
But if the video in the hallway doesn't work,
they definitely killed him.
Okay, so a couple of days later,
oh, the video in that particular hallway
happened to not be working
and the guards both happened to be on break
at the same time.
And the most notorious pedophile criminal in the country
happened to be unguarded
and that is the one time he decided to hang himself.
Listen, man, the only way you believe that
is if you got mainstream media to get you to believe
that the word, that the minute the phrase
conspiracy theory is mentioned,
you have to shut off your mind
and you have to believe whatever the media tells you.
Yeah, well, it's interesting you just mentioned,
do you think the CIA has not grown in power versus?
No, no, they've greatly waned in power.
Interesting.
So in the old days, the CIA has an actual deep state
and because the country was run by a bunch of families.
So you go to Yale, the skull and bones thing was real.
And you go to Harvard, you go to this
and half the, look at the Dulles family.
Half of them go into government,
the other half go into banking.
Why are the Central American countries
called Banana Republics?
Because we, America did a coup against one of those countries
because a banana company wanted it, okay?
Because they're like,
how dare you charge whatever you want
for your natural resource?
We American corporations have the right
to all of your natural resources
at the lowest possible rate.
Alan, get rid of these guys, okay?
And Alan would.
And so, and sometimes they would go extra judicial, right?
Like potentially with the JFK assassination.
So now, and by the way, you pissed off J. Edgar Hoover,
he was just gonna put a bullet in your head
and we were done with you, okay?
Fred Hampton, among others.
So, but nowadays that's not how the world works.
So a small number of families cannot control a country
and an economy this size.
New people pop up while Mark Zuckerberg
wasn't part of those families.
Elon Musk wasn't part of those families.
Neither was Bezos, right?
For you to believe those conspiracy theories,
you have to think that Bezos and Musk, et cetera,
were like, oh, you guys are still running the country?
No problem, go ahead.
You're not gonna do that, right?
So now we've gotten into a system
where it's the invisible hand of the market
that runs the country.
But unfortunately, it's only for the powerful.
And so it's more of a machine.
And they don't do, and this is super interesting
in ties to what we were talking about earlier, Lex,
which is that they don't do
political assassinations anymore.
They do character assassinations.
That's the needle in the haystack thing.
So, and if you do an assassination of someone,
you build up their status.
They become a martyr and you build up their cause.
But if you do a character assassination,
you smear the cause with the person.
And the cause goes down, not up.
So the market found a better way
of getting rid of agitating outsiders.
Well, that's one of the conspiracy theories with Epstein
is that he's a front for, I guess, CIA.
And they're getting data on people,
like creepy pedophile kind of data,
that they can use to threaten character assassination
and then they put them, in this way,
put the people in their pockets.
So look, we're not in on it,
so there's no way we can know, right?
But I just always go back to logic.
So he has dirt on a lot of powerful people.
He dies in a way that is an obvious murder
and not a suicide.
And then you begin to think,
who would have enough power
to be able to get away with that crime?
And that is a very limited number
of either people or governments, right?
So that's probably your answer
without knowing anything that's internal.
Yeah, that's crazy.
We don't have the list of clients.
What is the best way to achieve stability and peace
in Israel and Palestine?
In the current situation and in the next five, 10 years.
If people wanted to get to peace,
it's relatively straightforward.
There's already a deal that was negotiated.
The Saudis agreed to it.
And they're an important player in this game.
The Palestinians and the Israelis
have initially agreed to it.
Even Hamas has kind of agreed to it.
That deal exists and it's just waiting
on the shelf to get done, right?
And it's pretty straightforward.
Israel gets out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
but they keep an X percentage.
It used to be 4%.
Then it went up to 6%.
It's probably a higher number now.
The Palestinians keep losing leverage as we go, right?
So you remember how hard it was
to get a deal on Ukraine, I thought.
That's a very complicated one.
Israel is much more straightforward.
Get the hell out of the occupying territories.
Keep some of the God,
like those settlements are the worst thing.
They're cancer.
But anyway, I don't know.
But there is an answer to the settlements
and it's probably that Israel keeps them,
even though that drives me crazy.
No right of return for Palestinians.
There'll be symbolic right of return
for a couple of families.
And so Palestinians go, oh, no way.
Guys, you have no leverage.
Take the deal, take the deal, okay?
So you're not gonna get a right of return.
Israel's not gonna allow millions of Palestinians
to go and vote in Israel.
It would end the Jewish state.
You have to get to a practical solution.
So honestly, the number one person blocking it now
is then, Yahoo, it's not even, that's obvious.
That doesn't take a lot of courage to say that.
He says publicly, I don't want a Palestinian state.
I'm against a two-state solution.
He's been monstrous.
He's one of the worst terrorists of my lifetime.
So that's easy.
The right wing of Israel has lost its mind.
So the Smotrich and the Ben Gavir
is openly talking about ethnic cleansing
and driving them into other Arab countries.
I mean, this is the definition of ethnic cleansing.
So, but is like, I know that the Arabs
are gonna take the deal.
Saudi Arabia cannot wait to take the deal
because they just want to get business going, right?
Do you think Hamas takes the deal?
So I had a solution where you don't need Hamas,
but yes, Hamas would definitely take the deal.
Hamas already publicly said that they would even get rid of,
that Israel doesn't have a right to exist.
But there's so much propaganda in American media.
It's maddening, right?
So in this idea that you don't deal with Hamas,
it's so dumb.
So the reason it's dumb is you don't negotiate
with your friends, you negotiate with your enemies.
Well, I don't want to negotiate with them.
I don't like them.
Well, then you're not gonna get to peace, right?
But still there is a path that doesn't include Hamas.
So make a deal with Fatah that runs the best West Bank.
Then they get, right now Fatah went into Gaza Strip,
they wouldn't be able to manage it
because they don't have enough credibility.
They're mainly seen as in cahoots with the occupiers,
whereas Hamas is hardcore and fighting against the occupiers.
But if Fatah delivers a peace,
not only a peace deal, but a Palestinian state,
then they come in as heroes.
So you make the deal with them,
you let them run the Gaza Strip,
and you empower them to drive out Hamas.
That way they do your dirty work for you in a sense, right?
But good, because Hamas is a terrorist organization,
they're not helpful.
And especially if the Palestinians get a state,
the violence has to stop immediately.
That's the whole point.
The trade is you get a state, Israel gets safety and peace.
So no more rockets than Israel.
No more rockets.
If you do any other rockets,
when an Israel does the barbaric thing they just did,
even I would say, hey brother, we had a peace deal, okay?
So if you violate a peace deal and you do a bomb,
they're gonna do a bomb and their bomb is much larger, okay?
So that, and by the way, can it work?
It already has worked.
The Israel already did it with Egypt.
So Egypt was a hundred times Hamas.
Egypt gathered all the Arab armies
and actually physically invaded Israel
when Israel could lose and they did it several times.
And Lex at the time, all, not just the right,
like the war hawks, but most people thought
there's no way Egypt will keep that peace deal.
Oh, they're suckers.
We're giving them the Sinai Peninsula back
and then they're just gonna keep bombing and attacking us.
There hasn't been a single bomb from Egypt
since the peace deal.
Peace deals work.
War gets you more war.
Peace deals get your peace.
And if you should never, this is true of all of life.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
So if you're saying, well, I'm not positive
that a peace deal is going to be perfect
and 12 more rockets might be fired.
Well, brother, what do we have now, right?
We have endless rockets now.
If Israel's supposed to be a safe haven for Jews
and I get it and I want it, okay,
then become a safe haven.
The way that you're a safe haven is stop the occupation.
It's not complicated.
And the reason they're not, let's be honest,
the reason the right-wing government of Israel
is not stopping the occupation
is because they want to take more and more land.
And so they have throughout time taken way more
of the West Bank than they had originally.
And now Netanyahu is saying,
I want a corridor in the middle of Gaza
and I want a corridor at the border of Egypt.
Now we're back to occupying Gaza,
physically, let alone through power and et cetera.
So Bibi has to go.
Definitely.
What's the role of US in making a peace deal like that happen?
It's going to sound outlandish,
but I can get you a ceasefire almost overnight
if Bibi's gone because the Israeli negotiators
have said publicly, not publicly, got leaked
and it was in the Israeli press.
You have to give us a little bit of wiggle room.
If you don't give us a little bit of wiggle room,
obviously they're not going to do the deal.
And he's like, I know, right?
That's why he's not giving them the wiggle room.
So don't ask for land in Gaza, get the hell out of Gaza.
You're a ceasefire, that's the easy part.
So the hard part is the occupation, ending the occupation.
But even that, I can get it to you in two months
as long as Israel actually wants a deal.
So go to an election, get rid of Netanyahu,
put in Benny Gantz.
Is Benny Gantz an angel?
No, he's the one that ordered all the bombings
of Gaza to begin with, right?
Look, Benny Gantz has got massive war crimes on his record.
So don't worry, he's not a softy, okay?
But he's not my favorite guy in the world, to say the least.
But Benny Gantz can do a peace deal if he wants to.
So look, only one group of people can actually settle this.
Well, it's actually two groups of people.
One is the Israeli population.
You vote on someone who wants to do a peace deal,
you'll get a peace deal, okay?
Number two is the American president.
So if I'm the American president,
I'm saying a hypothetical, right?
Or any American president that actually wants
to get a peace deal done.
You just say, I'm gonna cut the funding.
Israel will do the deal immediately.
They don't say they wanna cut the funding
because APAC gives them $100 million.
It's not complicated, not 1% complicated.
So Lex, tell me this, okay?
So if the US president said, I'm gonna cut the funding,
do you think that it might have a giant problem
for Netanyahu, might it hurt his government,
might they have to go to an election?
Would the Israeli politicians,
let alone the population, begin to really, really worry
that they're gonna lose an enormous source
of funding and weapons?
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
So why wouldn't we use our leverage?
It's crazy not to use our leverage.
Yeah, and this is where we go back
to the steel man of Trump.
It feels like he's the only one crazy enough
to use that leverage.
By crazy, I mean, it's a good kind of sense.
It's bold enough, not giving a shit about convention,
not giving a shit about pressures and money
and influence and all that kind of stuff.
Yes, but with the biggest asterisks
in the history of the world,
which is 12% chance he does that, and that's great,
but a huge chance he does the opposite,
and he goes, let's call it 80 again, 80%.
Oh yeah, Miriam wanted me to give West Bank to Israel.
So you have it, guys, now.
You're just talking about the whole thing forever, okay?
A giant war.
Oh yeah, I'm gonna prove how tough I am.
I'm gonna nuke Iran.
Oh no, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
Trump is a massive risk.
He's an enormous amount of risk.
If you were running a company and not a country,
would you hire Trump as your CEO?
Everyone watching just screamed inside their heads.
No, okay.
You would never take that kind of risk with your company.
You got an 80% chance the guy's gonna blow up the company?
No way, no way, and you know it too.
If you're, especially if you're a businessman,
you know you're not gonna hire
that loose cannon to run your company.
It's unacceptable risk, but you're not wrong.
We talked about it earlier, but as part of that risk,
there's a sliver in there
that he could accidentally do the right thing.
We talked a lot about hope in this conversation.
Zooming out, what gives you hope
about the future of this whole thing, of humanity,
not just the United States, of us humans on earth?
So why am I center left and not center right?
It gets to that question.
So you look at the polling, not just here in America,
but in almost any country,
and it almost always breaks out to two thirds of one third.
Two thirds of the people say, let's be empathetic,
let's share, let's do equality, justice,
let's be fair, right?
One third goes, no, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
That's just the nature of humanity.
And so, and usually the same third goes, no change.
And the other two thirds go, well, some change, right?
So, because if you don't do any change,
you're never gonna get to the right answer.
For the wisdom of the crowd to work,
for free markets to work, for everything to work,
you have to keep changing because the times change
and the culture changes and the situation changes, right?
So that's why there's amendments in the constitution
because you need to be able to change the document
from time to time.
Be careful with it, right?
But you need to allow for an avenue for change.
So, now why does the one third keep winning
in so many different places?
Because they have more money and power.
And by the way, if you're more selfish,
you're more likely to get more money and power, right?
And I wish that weren't the case, but it is.
And these are not blanket rules, they're on average.
So, that third winds up winning in so many circumstances.
But the bottom line is we are a species that requires consent.
So, I mean, I'm a stone cold atheist.
So, I don't think we're kind of like apes.
I think we are apes, okay?
And so, and all the scientists out there are going,
well, of course we are.
Everyone else is going, that's crazy, okay?
So, when you look at it as a species,
different species react in different ways.
Snakes have no empathy because it's not in their DNA.
And that's why we have a sense of what a snake does, right?
So, for good news is for higher level apes like us,
bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans,
we all roughly want consent.
So, a chimpanzee, for example,
has a violent reputation, and they are violent,
and unfortunately we're pretty close to them.
But what people don't know is a leader
doesn't win through violence, especially for bonobos.
They win by picking lice off of other chimpanzees,
by going and doing favors,
going to a hunt, getting food,
and giving it to someone else,
because what they're gathering
is the consent of the governed.
And that's how you become the alpha.
You don't do it through physical dominance,
you do it through consent.
So, that's how we're hardwired.
That's in our DNA.
That two thirds in the long run will win.
And we will have empathy, we will have change,
and that's the hope that we're all looking for.
Hope has got the numbers, it seems like.
Yeah, and in fact, one more thing, Lex.
Look at history.
Hope and change always win.
And so, again, conservatives don't catch feelings.
There is a need for conservatives
because you have to balance things out.
If you just had, even though wonderful two thirds,
that still wouldn't be the ideal system.
You need a Winston Churchill
if you're in the middle of World War II.
You need someone to say regulating six inspections
of the elevators is too many, right?
So, you need that balance,
and conservatives have a role,
and it's a really important role.
But having said that,
they're assigned to losing throughout history
because they're fighting on losing ground.
A conservative says no change,
but the world is constantly changing,
so they're destined to lose.
That's why the Founding Fathers won
against the British monarchy.
That's why the Civil Rights Movement won.
They didn't win overnight.
It took them 100 years to get equal rights,
let alone pass slavery, right?
So, we won on women's rights.
We won on gay rights.
We keep winning.
But every snapshot in time
makes it feel like we're losing.
There's a bad guy in charge.
We are living under corporate rule, et cetera.
But in the long tide of history,
change always wins.
So, the empathetic, generally speaking, left wing.
But again, don't worry about the titles, right?
People get obsessed with the labels.
The two thirds, that's empathetic.
That includes a lot of right wingers, right?
You win at the end in history, every single time.
So, we fight forward.
We're tough when we need to be.
We need that willpower to win any fight, right?
But we're civil and respectful to the other side
because they are us.
So, progressives all the time,
we say, look, and this is like the ending of my book,
which is, for conservatives,
you have a lot of empathy for inside the wagons.
So, conservatives are great to their family,
generally speaking, to their community, to their church,
to anyone that's inside the wagons.
But they have, they set up electric fences
and barbed wire around their wagons.
So, if you're on the outside, you're the others,
and you're gonna get electrified.
And it's constantly, right?
And so, I like to think the left wing has wider wagons.
So, we view the world as more us and not you.
But the good news of that is, if we win,
we're not gonna do Medicare for only the left, right?
We're gonna do Medicare for all.
You're all gonna get universal healthcare.
We're gonna do higher wages for all.
The right wing is not gonna be left out.
And if we're, and like, I can tell you a fun story.
It's about my family.
And I'm sure that parts of it are apocryphal
because it's from like 500 years ago.
But it gives you a sense of the old Mark Twain quote,
if it's really Mark Twain's, of change happens
really gradually and then all of a sudden.
So, my mom's last name in Turkish is Yawasha.
It means slowly.
It's a weird name even in Turkish.
And so, one day we're walking past the mosque in Istanbul
when I'm a kid.
And it says on the mosque, Yawasha.
We're like, what is this, okay?
So, it's a small little mosque.
We go inside and my dad starts asking the mom questions, okay?
So, he says, why is the mosque named that?
And he said, well, you don't know?
And he said, because my dad said my wife's name is,
last name is Yawasha.
He's like, oh my God.
And he's like, your ancestor was the admiral
of the Ottoman Navy when they conquered Constantinople.
Okay, so grandpa from five, 600 years ago
came up with the idea.
So, you can't ever conquer Constantinople
because there's a giant chain underneath the Bosphorus.
All the ships get stuck on the chain.
There's cannons on both sides.
Half the ancient navies in the world
are at the bottom of the Bosphorus, right?
So, hasn't been conquered in over a thousand years.
Nobody thinks seeking to be conquered.
Grandpa comes up with the idea of,
why don't we build giant wooden planks over land
and grease them and pass our fleet over land
onto the other side?
Everybody goes, because whenever anybody proposes a new idea,
no matter how logical it is, they go, oh, it's impossible.
No way it's gonna work.
Oh, you're crazy.
This is an unconquerable city.
What are you guys even doing?
Every day amendment, the conqueror comes up to grandpa
and says, all right, how's your plan
to do this project going?
And grandpa says, slowly.
And he names them commander slowly.
And one night after the whole thing's done,
they pass the entire Ottoman fleet over the land,
wind up in the middle of the Bosphorus
and the Holy Roman Empire concedes.
They surrender.
Because change happens really gradually
and then all of a sudden.
Good story.
Well, Cenk, thank you for fighting for that change
for many years now, for over two decades now.
And thank you for talking today.
Appreciate it, Lex.
Thank you for having the conversation.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Cenk Uygur.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Hannah Arendt.
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means,
namely through the state and a machinery of violence.
Thanks to its peculiar ideology
and the role assigned to it in the apparatus of coercion,
totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating
and terrorizing human beings from within.
Thank you for listening.
I hope to see you next time.
