| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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Kirk's influence and impact on young conservatives. | |
| And then Wall Street Journal White House reporter Meredith McGraw on White House News of the Day and TYT Network founder and CEO Jank Uger on the political polarization of the U.S. and news of the day. | ||
| Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Monday, September 22nd, 2025. | ||
| A three-hour Washington Journal is ahead. | ||
| And this morning, we began on the subject of law fair. | ||
| Yesterday, Republican Senator Rand Paul expressed concern about politics contaminating the justice system. | ||
| It's a problem, he said, that predates the Trump administration, but one that also persists. | ||
| So this morning, we're asking about the concepts of lawfare and equal protection under the law. | ||
| Do you think our justice system has become more or less political since President Trump returned to the White House? | ||
| Phone lines split as usual by political party. | ||
| Democrats, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can also send us a text, that number, 202-748-8003. | ||
| If you do, please include your name and where you're from. | ||
| Otherwise, catch up with us on social media, on X, it's at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| On Facebook, it's facebook.com slash C-SPAN. | ||
| And a very good Monday morning to you. | ||
| You can go ahead and start calling it in now. | ||
| It was Rand Paul on Meet the Press yesterday morning who was asked about this idea of lawfare. | ||
| This is what he had to say. | ||
| I think lawfare in all forms is bad. | ||
| What they did to Donald Trump by changing the statute of limitations, changing the law, adding up a bunch of misdemeanors, adding up a bunch of records violations and making them into felonies, approving hundreds of millions of dollars in fines when there was no agreed party, none of the banks complained. | ||
| That was lawfare. | ||
| But it's also wrong if Republicans do it too. | ||
| We need to get politics out of the judicial system as much as we can, but we can't do it without acknowledging that the king of law fair was Biden. | ||
| And so, yeah, it's wrong if we do it, but it certainly was wrong when Biden and the Democrats were doing it throughout the country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But, Shutter, if it was wrong then, you're making the argument it was wrong then. | |
| Is it wrong now? | ||
| I mean, do you explicitly disagree with President Trump's post? | ||
| I just said lawfare of all sorts is wrong, Republican or Democrat. | ||
| It's wrong now. | ||
| But you have to put it into context also and acknowledge that the king of all law fare was Biden and the Democrats for four years. | ||
| What they did to Donald Trump was an abomination. | ||
| But yes, it is not right for the Trump administration to do the same. | ||
| Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul yesterday on the Meet the Press. | ||
| Kristen Welker referring to the president's posts there. | ||
| It was two posts from Saturday night directed at his Attorney General. | ||
| This is the headline about those posts from today's Washington Times. | ||
| Trump puts pressure on Pam Bondi to pursue his political foes. | ||
| The story notes that in those social media posts over the weekend, Mr. Trump demanded that his Attorney General move quickly to go after some of his top critics, signaling out former FBI Director James Comey, Senator Adam Schiff of California, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. | ||
| We'll show you the post itself. | ||
| It's a lengthy post from the president on his truth social page from Saturday night. | ||
| It was about 6.45 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| He is addressing Pam Bondi directly, saying, Pam, I have reviewed over 30,000 statements and posts saying that essentially same old story as last time, all talk, no action, nothing's being done. | ||
| What about Comey, Adam Shifty Schiff, Letitia? | ||
| They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is being done. | ||
| The Post goes on to say that we can't delay any longer. | ||
| It's killing our reputation and credibility. | ||
| They impeached me twice and indicted me five times over nothing. | ||
| Justice must be served now. | ||
| That was the president in his post to his Attorney General on Saturday night. | ||
| As we said, it generated plenty of discussion on the Sunday shows yesterday. | ||
| Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, was on a CNN and on the State of the Union program, had this to say. | ||
| I think it's a real threat to democracy, Dana. | ||
| You know, the Justice Department has always been a very, very strong civil service. | ||
| No matter who was in charge, a Democrat or Republican, they went after law violators without fear or favor. | ||
| What Trump is doing is he's turning it. | ||
| He's firing anybody who doesn't seem to be part of his acolytes. | ||
| And he's turning it into an instrument that goes after his enemies, whether they're guilty or not. | ||
| And most of them are not guilty at all. | ||
| And that helps his friends. | ||
| This is the path to a dictatorship. | ||
| That's what dictatorships do. | ||
| It is so very, very frightening and damaging to our republic. | ||
| Chuck Schumer yesterday on CNN. | ||
| So that's our topic of conversation for this first hour of the Washington Journal this morning, lawfare, equal protection under the law. | ||
| Do you think the justice system has become more or less political in the eight months since Donald Trump has returned to the White House? | ||
| Phone lines, as usual, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll start on the independent line. | ||
| Andy Hyattsville, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| It's a tough question because Trump is attempting to politicalize the justice system, and I believe in a firm separation between the executive and judicial branches. | ||
| However, I think the courts are doing a good job of stopping him, but that delays the system because you get more of a backlog in the courts with things that just shouldn't be there, which creates a very unstable system. | ||
| I don't think Trump has any understanding of the Constitution. | ||
| If he does, it's a very warped understanding of the Constitution. | ||
| And I think he's very dangerous for America, and the people he surrounded himself with are very dangerous for America for that reason. | ||
| Andy, what's an example of the courts, as you said, doing a good job of stopping him? | ||
| What case would you cite? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every time a federal judge turns back one of his executive orders, that's a good job of the courts stopping him. | |
| However, how many months does that take? | ||
| Andy, would you put this one into that category? | ||
| A federal judge threw out last week President Trump's $15 billion libel and defamation lawsuit against the New York Times ruling. | ||
| It didn't provide a succinct complaint for the court to consider. | ||
| That happening last week. | ||
| You probably saw the headlines on it. | ||
| It's in today's USA Today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm a retired journalist, and I have both a bachelor's and master's degree in journalism. | |
| So I've had to study libel law. | ||
| No one's ever tried to sue me. | ||
| I guess I studied it very well. | ||
| And I believe truth is an absolute defense for libel. | ||
| Andy, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was stupid of Trump to even try this suit, and I'd like to see him beat the legal cost for both parties in this. | |
| But for them to throw it out in one week shows how frivolous the suit was, A. | ||
| And B, it also shows how the time factor there was very quick, and I'm glad to see it happen that fast. | ||
| Andy, as a retired journalist, let me give you one more story that's getting a lot of attention. | ||
| The Trump administration unveiled a new crackdown on Friday on journalists at the Pentagon, saying it will require them to pledge that they won't gather any information, even unclassified, that hasn't been expressly authorized for release and will revoke press credentials of those who don't obey. | ||
| That's the Washington Post story on it, but there's plenty this weekend about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's just an absurd decision, again, by one of those Trump gathered around him who's unqualified for the position at the Pentagon. | |
| I think the Pentagon, yeah, the Pentagon Papers case that the Supreme Court ruled decades ago clearly speaks against that. | ||
| And if I were a journalist at the Pentagon, I would ignore the order. | ||
| I would make S. I can't even pronounce his name from Fox start pulling credentials, and I would wait for the lawsuits to come in, and I would wait for the public backlash. | ||
| Andy, thanks for the call from Hyattsville to Brad, Jacksonville Beach in Florida, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think we're headed in the final direction. | ||
| I'm a little concerned about a president going on a public forum like he did, apparently, with this tweet or social meet using social media. | ||
| But I think that his staff is moving in the right direction and is solely needed because we're in serious trouble for what Biden and the far left have allowed this country to come to. | ||
| How are they moving in the right direction, Brad? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're going to go ahead and pursue by law and using the Constitution to get back to our traditional values and do what is moral and legally right. | |
| One of the things, this is a little off topic, but is there anybody? | ||
| I'm 79 years old. | ||
| The biggest, and I was a political science major, but I'm not normally that politically active. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But to me, the biggest problem we have in the United States is the election process. | |
| Whereas whether it's on a federal, local, or state level, to be a public servant, you must take private money and you must be bought. | ||
| And our judicial system and the legislature, they've expanded that over the years. | ||
| In other words, everybody's on the take. | ||
| But nobody wants to talk about election reform. | ||
| Is that not even possible? | ||
| Or have you heard anybody discussing that within the last year or so? | ||
| You're talking about campaign finance reform, Brad? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes. | |
| Certainly a topic that comes up, though. | ||
| I will say it usually comes up around election season in election year itself. | ||
| I bet you we'll start hearing even more about it in the 2026 cycle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But there's been what I'm saying is getting worse and worse and worse, where to be to go and be a public servant, you have to have a lot of money. | |
| And to get that, you're going to be bought. | ||
| And that's why we've come to the extremes. | ||
| That's why we've gotten so far off and we're not really paying attention to our traditional values. | ||
| And we're letting the extremes and polarization continue to bring down this country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is there any merit to what you think I'm saying or am I off base? | |
| Brad, we'll take your point. | ||
| Thanks for the call from Jacksonville, Florida. | ||
| This is Denise next here in Washington, D.C. Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, American. | |
| We are in a crisis. | ||
| We will hammer this like we've always handled crisis. | ||
| We will stand strong. | ||
| Trump is our president, but he doesn't have the final saying. | ||
| Keep the faith. | ||
| Keep looking up. | ||
| This is not the end. | ||
| It's the beginning of a new era of pride, of honesty, and of decency. | ||
| We are Americans. | ||
| God bless you and your family. | ||
| It's Denise here in D.C. | ||
| This is William in the Buckeye State Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I got to say a couple things about this. | ||
| Number one, how can you call yourself a party of law and order when you pardon over 1,500 people that are very bad criminals? | ||
| And, you know, I know it's all political right now, and he's trying to own the political department. | ||
| We've got to look out for this man. | ||
| He's a false prophet, and he's really scaring me because he wants to be a dictator, and I don't want him to be a dictator because I love my democracy. | ||
| And he's politicizing everything for his benefit. | ||
| And he's taking money from everybody, including foreigners. | ||
| And, you know, he's the most vircuous country's ever had as a president or a human being. | ||
| Don't forget Epstein. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| That's William in Ohio. | ||
| More on Donald Trump's true social posts from Saturday night being asked about on the Sunday shows. | ||
| Yesterday, Mark Wayne Mullen, the Republican of Oklahoma, was being interviewed by Dana Bash on CNN. | ||
| Here's that exchange. | ||
| Well, I think what we know is President Trump is very open and transparent with the American people, and he speaks his mind. | ||
| And that's what his supporters love about him, and that's what America loves about him. | ||
| I don't think there's any question that Comey should be looked at. | ||
| I mean, we just got to look at the 86 comment that he made. | ||
| And when we start looking at the lies that he chose to continue with Russian Gate, Adam Schiff went out while he was the chairman of Intel every single meeting and said that we had the smoking gun. | ||
| And he said that for how many weeks straight? | ||
| And you're going, where was the smoking gun? | ||
| At some point, their actions need to be looked into. | ||
| And if they did something, I don't know. | ||
| This is a country that should look into it. | ||
| If they did something illegal, if they were leaking classified information, if they used their position of power for corruption, then they 100% should be held accountable. | ||
| And what President Trump is saying here is it's time to look into them and say and hold them accountable for what they said. | ||
| Mark Wayne Mullen yesterday on CNN. | ||
| This is Margaret at Elevenworth, Kansas. | ||
| Democrat. | ||
| Margaret, after listening to that, do you think that that is lawfare, this term that's being talked about of politics creeping into the justice and the judicial system? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| You're on, Margaret. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yes, because he's always looking at judges and talking about them and saying horrible things. | |
| There's no respect for just the common courtesy, respect, and not calling people names. | ||
| And he has done this, it's scary. | ||
| Now, the second thing I'd like to say, good morning, but I would like to say a shout out to late night. | ||
| I want people to remember during the COVID crisis that late night comedians came back that day and they came back and they kept us together through all that COVID and isolation and they never got a thing for it. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| That was very brave. | ||
| Every one of them kept coming and talking. | ||
| They didn't just, you know, they were under COVID isolation too. | ||
| And that was very beautiful. | ||
| And thank you very much for that, for those courageous people. | ||
| And Trump is the scariest thing how he's destroyed our justice system, how he's destroyed it. | ||
| And we've got to keep fighting because this man is not going to quit until we're all, you know, whatever he calls names all the time and things. | ||
| We are Americans, you know? | ||
| We are Americans. | ||
| I'm not calling my neighbor names. | ||
| This man needs to clean. | ||
| This is the worst thing that's ever happened to our country. | ||
| Margaret, on comedians, before you go, I want to get your take specifically on Jimmy Kimmel's show being canceled. | ||
| There's a column in today's New York Times about it, the on comedy column. | ||
| It's written by Jason Zinnemann, and the headline, being a high-profile comedian right now is no joke. | ||
| With the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel on the heels of the cancellation of Stephen Colbert's show, The Landscape has unquestionably shifted for comics comedians and hosts. | ||
| What do you think of what happened with Jimmy Kipple's show specifically? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I thought that was terrible. | |
| And I always wanted to thank him during the COVID shootdown. | ||
| He opened up a little playhouse and his kids would come down the slide. | ||
| It was just beautiful. | ||
| And the work he did after his son had heart surgery, what he donated, what he helped, what he started. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, he spread and he helped other people with heart problems. | |
| He donated money. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So I love you, Jimmy Kimmel. | ||
| I will always remember you during the COVID shutdown, how you came back, how they all came back and kept us going. | ||
| And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. | ||
| It kept us together through a horrible isolation. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And this will pass if we survive, if we fight back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Margaret in Leavenworth, Kansas this morning. | ||
| More comments from Republican senators about the actions of the Trump administration and those in it. | ||
| Ted Cruz on his podcast on Friday calling the FCC had Brendan Carr's threats to Disney's parent company, the one that took Jimmy Kimmel off the air, quote, dangerous. | ||
| That statement by Ted Cruz getting praise in the editorial pages of today's Wall Street Journal. | ||
| It's the editorial board of the Conservative Wall Street Journal, calling it Ted Cruz's finest hour. | ||
| The statement specifically from Ted Cruz on his podcast on Friday. | ||
| Mr. Carr, this is quoting Ted Cruz. | ||
| Mr. Carr says that we can do this easy or we can do this the hard way, Mr. Cruz told his listeners. | ||
| That's right out of Goodfellas. | ||
| That's right out of Mafioso coming into a bar and saying, Nice bar that you have here. | ||
| It'd be a shame if something happened to it. | ||
| The editorial board saying the sender added that he's no fan of Mr. Kimmel, but he warned conservatives that government power abused in this way won't only hurt the left. | ||
| What Mr. Carr said is dangerous as hell, Mr. Cruz continued. | ||
| It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it's used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it. | ||
| Again, the Wall Street Journal calling it Ted Cruz's finest hour. | ||
| Ruth, Detroit, Michigan, Independent Line, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it never ceases to surprise me. | |
| Well, anyway, the last time I called you guys on Washington Journal, I warned you about the attack before September 11th when they took the Twin Towers down. | ||
| Ruth, you haven't called since 2001? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, no, because you thought maybe I should get psychiatric treatment, you know, and stuff like that because I warned about us coming shortly under attack. | |
| But the next time we will be attacked, okay, will be because of some of the things that the news media and stuff like that get all confused. | ||
| Trump will say one thing: news media will come out and twist it and turn it around. | ||
| Now, you got to remember: millions of other people, other countries, other leaders listen to TV. | ||
| They understand English. | ||
| And that's why the next war that will be caused will be because of the news media. | ||
| And by the way, loose lips sink ships. | ||
| That's why the journalist should not even be near the department, the Pentagon, or any place like that. | ||
| During the Kennedy administration, and believe me, I knew Kennedy. | ||
| I spoke with him for several hours. | ||
| He would never allow a journalist in the Pentagon. | ||
| They would consider them spies. | ||
| Why would they want to be in the Pentagon? | ||
| There's nothing there for them. | ||
| And to say they're going to say anything they want to about what they see in the Pentagon, are you out of your mind? | ||
| Ruth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's why I say it'll be a journalist. | |
| It will be somebody from the news media that causes World War III. | ||
| Ruth, how did you meet JFK? | ||
|
unidentified
|
People can be laughing and cheering in the ashes in dust after this country starts getting bombed because nuclear bombs aren't funny. | |
| Ruth, how did you meet JFK? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I met him when I was in the military years back. | |
| I was in the Signal Corps. | ||
| I was supposed to be going into communications and stuff like that. | ||
| So, I mean, I was in communications in the Signal Corps, and that's how I met him. | ||
| So, this is, I mean, very interesting individual. | ||
| He was truly interested in what you had to say. | ||
| He was truly interested in the average individual. | ||
| He wanted to know how they felt about the situation then in 1960. | ||
| I also warned him that he was going to be assassinated because he was doing things. | ||
| He didn't want the war in Vietnam. | ||
| He was doing his best to avoid any wars. | ||
| He spent his time, you know, maybe in a PT boat, but that was a battlefield out there, too, on those PT boats. | ||
| He knew what war was like. | ||
| That's Ruth in Detroit. | ||
| This is Roy in Georgia, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I saw the post about the president, about the Justice Department, and what he was telling Pam Bondi. | ||
| We need to understand that Comey and all of those people, they actually broke the law. | ||
| The FBI director, they broke the law. | ||
| And somebody have to hold them accountable for what they did. | ||
| I mean, who else going to do it except the Justice Department? | ||
| All the things that they did, they actually tried to attempt a coup against a sitting president in New York. | ||
| Like you said, they changed the rules that the president can be sued by this woman that had no rights to sue him. | ||
| I mean, how else are you going to stop all of this stuff by the deep state unless you have a legitimate Justice Department to go and highlight all of the lies they told? | ||
| Roy, do you think Pam Bondi's doing a good job? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think she's doing a good job. | |
| I respect her. | ||
| But, you know, again, somebody have to hold these people accountable for what they did. | ||
| Are we just going to sit back? | ||
| And that's, I hold Republican accountable because the Democrats get out there and they fight, they lie, they cheat, and the Republican will hold a meeting, an investigation, but nothing comes out of it. | ||
| All of the money that Joe Biden stole with his son, the billions of dollars he didn't get to threaten Ukraine. | ||
| What happened to that? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| That's Roy in Georgia. | ||
| The post again from President Trump on Saturday night, it was about 6.45 p.m. Eastern speaking directly to Pam Bondi, encouraging her to asking her, what about Adam Schiff and Letitia James and Comey saying that we can't delay any longer. | ||
| It's killing our reputation and credibility. | ||
| They impeached me twice and indicted me five times over nothing. | ||
| Justice must be served now, the president said in all capital letters. | ||
| That was his True Social post in the evening. | ||
| It was about an hour later that he came back onto True Social. | ||
| This is just before 8 p.m. Eastern time, saying Pam Bondi is doing a great job as Attorney General of the United States, and she's very careful, very smart, loves our country, and needs a tough prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia promoting his recommendation, his pick. | ||
| Lindsay Halligan is her name. | ||
| And then the president going on to promote his pick for that position. | ||
| But a series of posts on Saturday night that raised a lot of eyebrows, caused a lot of discussion on the Sunday shows yesterday, and was the impetus for this question this morning on the Washington Journal asking you about lawfare, equal protection under the law. | ||
| Has the justice system become more or less political in the eight months since Donald Trump has returned to office? | ||
| Eugene in Freeport, New York, Democrat, what do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No doubt about it. | |
| The justice system has become far more one-sided. | ||
| But besides that, if Donald Trump, let's just remove his face and say if there was anyone else who had upwards of 95 felony counts, who had more than 19 women filing sexual predator kinds of complaints, | ||
| who had currently, who was implicated in Epstein case who is proven to have cheated the people of New York who came in on tropes of racism and dehumanizing people and who continues to this very, | ||
| very day to put people down, create divisions, to talk about people very badly, and to just act completely corrupt and lawless in his position. | ||
| I don't think anybody like that deserves to be president. | ||
| Moreover, I really question, I was really disappointed to see, with all due respect, I hate to see anyone harmed, let alone killed. | ||
| I feel bad for the young man who died, his family. | ||
| I really, no man should die because of what he said. | ||
| But had he been another person of another group, would the highest echelons of the country attended his funeral? | ||
| Did you watch any of that funeral yesterday? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, because I am a black person and everything he said about black people was very disrespectful, very dehumanizing. | |
| And I was particularly disturbed that he calls himself a Christian. | ||
| I'm a Christian as well. | ||
| And I don't know what Bible our communities read out of, but we obviously read out of different Bibles because my Bible says every man is a reflection of God. | ||
| So when you begin to decide some people are human, some people aren't, when you begin to decide that your color makes you better than someone else, this isn't something that I can consciously, morally justify or celebrate. | ||
| This is something that is very, very damaging to our country. | ||
| Trying to erase people's history, trying to pretend like Americans didn't enslave people, trying to get involved in every single thing you can stick your hand in, change everybody's life. | ||
| This is not a good thing. | ||
| We are headed down the wrong path. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Eugene. | ||
| This is the front page of the Washington Times this morning. | ||
| Charlie Kirk, a martyr now for American freedom. | ||
| Trump and his cabinet joins tens of thousands of mourners at Charlie Kirk's funeral. | ||
| Here's about two minutes of President Trump from that memorial service yesterday. | ||
| In that private moment on his dying day, we find everything we need to know about who Charlie Kirk truly was. | ||
| He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. | ||
| He did not hate his opponents. | ||
| He wanted the best for them. | ||
| That's where I disagreed with Charlie. | ||
| I hate my opponent and I don't want the best for them. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I am sorry, Erica. | ||
| But now Erica can talk to me and the whole group and maybe they can convince me that that's not right, but I can't stand my opponent. | ||
| Charlie's angry. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| He's angry at me now. | ||
| He wasn't interested in demonizing anyone. | ||
| He was interested in persuading everyone to the ideas and principles he believed were good, right, and true. | ||
| Before each appearance, he prayed these words, God, use me for your will. | ||
| Always said the same thing. | ||
| Use me for your will. | ||
| And that is exactly what God did. | ||
| When you think, that's exactly what he did. | ||
| The more success Charlie had, and he was getting more and more successful, the more dangerous his mission became. | ||
| On campuses all over the country, his quest for open dialogue was met with menacing hate. | ||
| There were bomb threats, pulled fire alarms, and countless rage-filled radicals who tried to shout him down. | ||
| It was nasty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I used to say, Charlie, this is nasty stuff you're doing. | |
| At what event, police had to build barricades to protect students from an angry mob of thugs. | ||
| Many of these people, by the way, are paid a lot of money to do this. | ||
| They're agitators. | ||
| They're paid agitators. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| That was President Trump yesterday from Glendale, Arizona at the funeral of Charlie Kirk. | ||
| Back to your phone calls this morning. | ||
| Fred is waiting in Michigan. | ||
| Republican line. | ||
| Good morning, Fred. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| This is my first time being on here on C-SPAN. | ||
| I've been watching you guys over the years, but this is my first time. | ||
| Anyways, I'm sorry for Kirk's wife's husband's death. | ||
| This is for Trump. | ||
| Yeah, this is my first time. | ||
| Fred, do you want to talk about the question that we asked this morning about the justice system? | ||
| Has it become more or less political under President Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't. | |
| I just got up. | ||
| What's the deal with that? | ||
| What's going on with that? | ||
| That's the question we're asking folks to call in and talk about, Fred. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Justice, I think. | |
| I'll tell you what, we'll let you think about it. | ||
| You can call in once a month on the Washington Journal and you can call back in again and hope to hear from you down the road. | ||
| This is Kevin in San Antonio, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I think that we have to focus on 2026. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Democrats, independents, whoever disagree with Trump, understand that the check on Trump is going to be the 2026 election. | ||
| So all these people that's running around here, and if you don't agree with it, you got to vote. | ||
| That's Kevin in San Antonio. | ||
| This is Mary in New York City, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, C-SPAN. | |
| I love to hear the voices of the American people every day. | ||
| And so I'm going to add my voice to it this morning. | ||
| And good morning, John. | ||
| I just wanted to start by saying Dr. King, Dr. Monte King Jr., said that a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. | ||
| And lawfare is often used as political retribution. | ||
| It's important to change this. | ||
| It's crucial that we change this by voting for people, for elected leaders, for leaders who have integrity, who have morals, who have that lead in truth. | ||
| I understand, you know, a lot of our elected officials get, sometimes they get compromised and it causes complications. | ||
| But we have to do what's right for the people. | ||
| And that's the moral responsibility of any elected leader is to lead with justice and truth and honesty. | ||
| And almost every elected official you can imagine who has really risen up has endured some form of lawfare or some form of attack. | ||
| Elizabeth Warren has gone through it. | ||
| President Barack Obama went through it. | ||
| He was the one who said children are off limits when it comes to these issues. | ||
| Other elected officials have. | ||
| I mean, there's so many people who've endured these kinds of things. | ||
| But the most important thing about it is to do something about it by electing leaders who are going to do something about it. | ||
| And the ones who are in charge right now, they have a moral responsibility to act on behalf of their administration to do what's right. | ||
| So not pointing the blame at anyone. | ||
| You know, I'd like to see, you know, even our president putting out that, you know, on Truth Social, you know, do something. | ||
| You have the, when you are in that seat, you have the power to do something about it. | ||
| Don't pass it on to, oh, I have to have this person do it or that person do it. | ||
| You can do something about it. | ||
| And in fact, people are expecting you when they elect you. | ||
| They expect you to do something. | ||
| They expect you to change it. | ||
| They expect you to show leadership and morals and values. | ||
| So that's what I want to see happen. | ||
| I want to see that upheld. | ||
| I mean, I've personally seen, you know, no equal protection under the law. | ||
| I've personally experienced, you know, some really unjust things that are very sad and very, very hard to deal with. | ||
| And I don't want anyone else to go through it. | ||
| What I've been doing, I've done a petition. | ||
| I've been getting other elected officials to join with me in trying to help what's right. | ||
| What's the petition for, Mary? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The petition I have is on change.org, and it's called Letter to Legislation. | |
| So you go to change.org forward slash letter to legislation. | ||
| And this is about protecting our children. | ||
| It's about standing up for our young people, standing up for women, mothers who are dealing with domestic violence situations or have been dealing with, you know, political, you know, retribution or any kind of thing that is not with the Constitution. | ||
| We have constitutional rights that have to be upheld. | ||
| And every elected official knows this when they take that oath and when they decide to lead. | ||
| So we need our leaders to just have morals, integrities, values, and change it for the future generation. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Mary in New York. | ||
| This is Sean, Columbia, Maryland Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| About 20 minutes left in this opening segment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| First of all, until I see somebody with drummed up charges from the previous administration go away to jail, it's not been politicized. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| There's people that need to be investigated. | ||
| I'm sorry if it hurts the Democrats or the far left. | ||
| You guys committed some heinous crimes. | ||
| And when they're investigated, they're done fairly. | ||
| As far as Charlie Kirk is concerned, I hear so many people calling in as if they've listened to the guy. | ||
| I've listened to him. | ||
| He is not a racist. | ||
| He's not anything that these people put him out to be. | ||
| Because he happens to speak to the right and looks at values and wants to challenge young minds. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| If that's what he got shot for, we have a sick world. | ||
| And previous callers said if it had been anybody else, if it had been anybody from the left, anybody, the streets would have burned down after they took out an innocent life. | ||
| He was an innocent person. | ||
| And when's the last time somebody from the left has ever sat down at a university and listened to conservative thought? | ||
| Give me one example, and then I will shut up. | ||
| Hey, man, have a great day. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Sean in Columbia to Alexander, Ann Arbor, Michigan Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There I go. | |
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Doing well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I would like to talk to some issues that were said during the memorial of Charlie. | |
| That's fine. | ||
| Do you want to talk about the justice system as well, which has been the... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Well, I'll talk about that, too, right? | ||
| I believe what you said was it one-sided. | ||
| And what it is, is not one-sided. | ||
| It's just that legally, there's a lot of things that you cannot do according to the letter of the law. | ||
| All right? | ||
| And Trump is asking these people to ignore the letter of the law and just bypass all that and do what he wants done. | ||
| And that's what's illegal about what's going on there. | ||
| And a lot of them refuse. | ||
| Now he's talking about firing people who don't agree with what he's saying. | ||
| And he put these people in there in the first place. | ||
| The woman, she disagrees with doing it the way he wants to do it because of the law. | ||
| He wants to circumvent the law. | ||
| That is not right. | ||
| That is not the way America was built and not what it was founded on. | ||
| Now, the other things I want to say is also that the memorial, I don't agree with violence in that sense of execution. | ||
| What I believe is what our teachers of peace taught us about marching. | ||
| Vocalizing what you say in a march, peaceful march. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Let the government know how you feel in a group. | ||
| Let them see how you feel in a group. | ||
| If you disagree with something, you come out and you voice your opinion about it. | ||
| Not to get violent about it. | ||
| That's Alexander in Michigan. | ||
| We'll stay in Michigan, Millington, Michigan. | ||
| Randy, Democrat. | ||
| Morning, Randy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| I'd like to start by thanking you and all the other men and women it takes to bring us this great program. | ||
| You're doing the nation a great honor. | ||
| Yes, unfortunately, I believe it has become more political, the Justice Department, but also other departments in the government, like your FCC. | ||
| You're looking at wanting to go after people that without even when lawyers look and there's no evidence, you should still prosecute them. | ||
| Well, that's punishing somebody because it still takes money. | ||
| You have to defend yourself. | ||
| And that's not what our Justice Department is supposed to be about. | ||
| I just don't agree with that. | ||
| I've seen it too much with the talk that goes on. | ||
| We're not supposed to hate our enemies. | ||
| I live out here in the middle of red country, and most of the people I know are Republicans. | ||
| But we can still sit down and play cards together, have dinners together. | ||
| We might not agree on everything, but we're still on one agreement is that this country is a great country, and it has to be taken care of, and all sides have to be represented. | ||
| You can't keep doing that because it is it going to do anything right away? | ||
| No. | ||
| But you keep it up, and it will erode this American dream that we're all one. | ||
| And you just can't have that. | ||
| We don't need that kind of talk anymore. | ||
| I'm not saying everybody's going to go kumbaya or anything like that, but it's time to get back to where politics are politics and not in our justice system. | ||
| Randy, on lawfare and politics and investigations, how do you read this story from today's Washington Post? | ||
| The Trump administration's border czar, Tom Homan, was caught on tape accepting a bag filled with $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents in Texas in September 2024 when he was a private citizen, according to two people familiar with the matter and a government document confirming the existence of the probe. | ||
| At the time, Homan was being floated for a top immigration job in the incoming Trump administration and allegedly took the money from agents posing as businessmen in exchange for potentially helping the men land contracts related to immigration enforcement if the Trump administration won the election. | ||
| That's what people said to the Washington Post. | ||
| The Justice Department, in the final months of the Biden administration, launched a bribery investigation, but the Trump administration shut it down this year, citing a lack of credible evidence and calling it a political investigation into Tom Holman. | ||
| How do you read that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I read it that it was political. | |
| He hid that fact that if you had agents that actually were there, that man should be prosecuted for bribery. | ||
| You can't, you know, it's just like the you just can't write it off and say it's political because somebody else is, you got one of your people got caught when they actually got caught by federal agents. | ||
| That is not political. | ||
| That's breaking the law, and it should have been prosecuted. | ||
| You know, just like the January 6th, you can't pardon everybody there. | ||
| That was a terrorist act, in my opinion, when you attacked the Capitol. | ||
| It's stuff like that that erodes the confidence, I believe, in the American whole justice system. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's my two cents worth. | ||
| You have a great day. | ||
| Randy, we'll talk to you next month in Millington, Michigan. | ||
| This is Joseph out of Buffalo, New York, Independent. | ||
| Joseph, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, there's a couple layers of this. | |
| I think if you want to have a nonpartisan answer to your question, I would like to see how many people, how many district attorneys have been fired under Trump in this first term and on his second term. | ||
| The other thing, in terms of justice, I think it's kind of hilarious that we can go back in time and see how Mitch McConnell and how he maneuvered these justices on the Supreme Court. | ||
| And then thirdly, when you look at the multi-billionaires that have been in contact with these Supreme Court justices, well, this is what we have. | ||
| Joseph, on your first stat that you're looking for, are you saying him firing his own district attorneys or those who came who were still in the job when the administration changed? | ||
| Because my understanding is when there's a change in administration, especially from one party to the other, most, if not all of the U.S. district attorneys do usually resign or lose their jobs and get replaced by district attorneys appointed by the new administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
True, but here's a situation. | |
| If you look at something like in the Southern District, okay, you had these people that were still leftovers that were doing their job. | ||
| Then all of a sudden, something comes up, like, say, like this $50,000 handoff. | ||
| All of a sudden, it seems like that district attorney in that area all of a sudden was fired. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's situations like that that I just think there's something funny about what's going on. | ||
| And then on your point about the Supreme Court, so Gallup has been polling on this for a while on trust in the Supreme Court, and they asked you to approve or disapprove of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job. | ||
| When it comes to the Supreme Court, July of 2025, 75% of Republicans said they approve, just 11% of Democrats say they approve a 64-point gap there. | ||
| Probably no surprise. | ||
| But back in earlier times, heading back to 2001, the gap was significantly smaller between those who approved and disapproved of the Supreme Court, depending, usually depends on who's in power or the majority, whether it's a conservative or liberal majority on the Supreme Court. | ||
| But back in 2001, it was a 38-point gap. | ||
| It was a 40-some-point gap as recently as 2015. | ||
| Today it's a 64-point gap. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, the Republicans would approve of January 6th, so that's where we're at. | |
| That's Joseph in New York. | ||
| This is Paul Alexandria, Virginia, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning to you. | |
| I decided to call when the man from, I'm not sure where he was from, but he was identified as African American and said that he didn't listen to the memorial service yesterday because he was African American and because he said it was anti-black. | ||
| I want to see where I wish that you had asked to substantiate that allegation because I've listened to some of the of Charlie Turk and I don't hear it. | ||
| So that's one thing I would like to see you follow up with and ask people who make these allegations to provide some documentation. | ||
| Another thing, if I may, I am old enough to have seen my grandmother cry when President Roosevelt died, and I was crying because I had just gotten a smallpox vaccination. | ||
| So I've been following politics since then. | ||
| And what I've seen is that during that period, being from New York, I knew a lot of people whose relatives were blacklisted by the FBI and by the processes that went along with the McCarthy period. | ||
| And these people, their descendants have shamelessly used the FBI during the first term and before the first term of Donald Trump to go after their opponent. | ||
| So, Paul, you're saying lawfare has a long history in this country and people have short memories? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what I'm saying. | |
| Yes, I guess you can put it that way, but it wasn't called lawfare then. | ||
| It was called persecution. | ||
| It was called I remember that when the Pledge of Allegiance was amended to say under God. | ||
| And that was a Cold War maneuver. | ||
| So I accept it now. | ||
| But people who people were hounded by the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives. | ||
| And there was guilt by association, and history is not taught. | ||
| in our country. | ||
| There's just way too much vindictiveness. | ||
| And I don't blame Donald Trump. | ||
| Well, first of all, I do see that the Attorney General of New York ran promising that she would get Donald Trump no matter what. | ||
| She'd find a way to get him. | ||
| And now people are referring to Donald Trump as being a convicted felon. | ||
| He hasn't had his appeal yet. | ||
| And just before your program came on, the Q ⁇ A had Peter Navarro, Peter Navarro was on, and he did four months in prison, | ||
| four months in prison, because the judge wouldn't allow him to go free pending his appeal for contempt of Congress in a situation where there had never been that kind of prosecution before because the issue was about executive privilege, and they made an example of him. | ||
| Peter Navarro sitting down with C-SPAN's Peter Slen for an hour in our Q ⁇ A program. | ||
| It aired last night, but it's available on our website at c-span.org if you want to watch that entire program. | ||
| On teaching history, the caller brings up that topic. | ||
| Adam Liptak, the Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, takes a stab at teaching some history when it comes to the Jimmy Kimmel case and freedom of speech. | ||
| And he dives into it in the form of First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court. | ||
| As the Supreme Court ruled back in 1963, the Constitution's protections of free expression also prohibit the government from leveraging its power over private parties like the network to censor speech. | ||
| The court has continued to explore and reinforce this distinction between persuasion and compulsion, ruling just last year that even indirect threats from powerful regulators like the FCC cross the constitutional line. | ||
| The 1963 case, he writes, Bantam Books v. Sullivan involved a commission established by Rhode Island lawmakers concerned that young people might be reading obscene books. | ||
| The commission sent notices to wholesale book distributors in the state listing disfavored publications and noting the commission's, quote, duty to recommend to the Attorney General violations of the state's obscenity laws. | ||
| The notices also said that the lists of blacklisted books had been circulated to local police departments and that the distributors' cooperation would eliminate the necessity of any referral for prosecution. | ||
| Still, the commission had no independent power to punish the distributors and the retailers. | ||
| All it did, it said, was try to persuade them to decline to sell immoral books. | ||
| Four publishers sued, and the Supreme Court ruled that the Commission's actions, though indirect and informal, had violated the First Amendment. | ||
| Quote, people do not lightly disregard public officers' thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around. | ||
| Justice William Brennan Jr. wrote at the time, it would be naive to credit the state's assertion that these blacklists are in the nature of mere legal advice when they plainly serve as instruments of regulation independent of the laws against obscenity. | ||
| Adam Liptak with a bit of a Supreme Court history lesson there in his column today for the New York Times, if you want to read it. | ||
| Back to your phone calls. | ||
| Just a few minutes left here in this first hour of the Washington Journal. | ||
| This is Hattie out of Houston, Texas. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| I'm doing well, Hattie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Well, I just like to, you know, it really hurts me so very badly that, you know, anybody that killed, you know, each other, I mean, you know, man, it's really. | ||
| But there was Martin Luther King, there was Kennedy, and so many people that got killed. | ||
| And they just, you know, ignored. | ||
| Now, since Trump's been in, that has been walls. | ||
| There's been people that's been shot down in the street with guns and everything else. | ||
| And they haven't realized this. | ||
| Now, what is this? | ||
| What is he doing, you know, to try to stop that? | ||
| That is food, that is gas. | ||
| Everything is going up. | ||
| I would come and always fall down. | ||
| You know, I hate to say this because, you know, I've been here a long time. | ||
| I'm over 80 years old here. | ||
| And every time the Republican get in, we have so much, so much tragedy. | ||
| We have so much to come in that's really, really go down. | ||
| And all the poor people since be outdoors and everything else here. | ||
| We need to, you know, Trump, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| I don't think, you know, that was wrong when they killed this little man, 32 years old, and had kids. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Hattie. | ||
| This is Jeannie in Austin, Texas, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just want to say that this is going to be controversial. | ||
| I don't really care. | ||
| I've become an anti-American, born and raised in Texas. | ||
| I cannot stand this country right now. | ||
| It's just so frustrating. | ||
| What don't you care about, Jeannie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, here's the deal. | |
| We got, I voted for Biden. | ||
| I'm independent. | ||
| Totally corrupt man. | ||
| Trump said, I'm going to get rid of the swamp. | ||
| He is the swamp. | ||
| I have voted for the Green Party. | ||
| I'm very independent. | ||
| We have Tom Home. | ||
| I just heard that story that broke yesterday. | ||
| My God, to kill that story, the FBI just, nope, not guilty. | ||
| And, you know, this whole Charlie Kirk thing, the man should not have been killed. | ||
| It's sickening to me. | ||
| But to me, I didn't see the funeral, but, you know, the thing that happened, but they had people saying that he claimed he was a prophet. | ||
| What are we coming to in America? | ||
| He was a racist, okay? | ||
| And I'm not afraid of anybody to try to shut me down. | ||
| So I just want to say, you know what? | ||
| I can't stand this country. | ||
| I wish I could move out. | ||
| Thank you for letting me speak my mind. | ||
| That's Jeannie in Austin, Texas. | ||
| This is Jeff, St. Cloud, Minnesota, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| As far as your question goes, is the justice system becoming more or less political under Trump? | ||
| It hasn't. | ||
| He was elected to do a job, and that's what he's doing. | ||
| Yes, and as far as Charlie Kirk, I am so sick and tired of people claiming he's a racist. | ||
| He was a fascist. | ||
| Apparently, people in America today just don't understand context. | ||
| They don't take the time to listen. | ||
| They're too quick to pass the block and throw a judgment out there. | ||
| And it's like, you know, come on. | ||
| It's like, grow up. | ||
| You know, they were sad enough the man was taken from his kids and his wife, you know, and he was deeply rooted in faith. | ||
| It's like, let the man rest. | ||
| But no, as far as the justice system becoming more or less political under Trump, it hasn't. | ||
| Because he was hired, he was elected to do a job, and people are mad because things are getting done. | ||
| Democrats are mad because they're not getting their way. | ||
| And as far as Jimmy Kimball goes, Jimmy Kimball got canceled by the FCC, not Trump. | ||
| And people like getting things twisted up is so ignorant, and it's just astounding how people don't take the time to pay attention anymore in this country. | ||
| So, with that, I send nothing but prayers out to the world, and God bless everyone, and thank you. | ||
| That's Jeff in Minnesota, our last caller in this first hour of the Washington Journal. | ||
| Stick around, though, plenty more to talk about this morning. | ||
| A little later today, we'll be joined by Jenk Uger, the host of the progressive news and commentary program, The Young Turks. | ||
| But first, conservative commentator Alex Rosato joins us about his recent piece examining Charlie Kirk's influence on young conservatives. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| I want to show viewers a recent Newsweek headline. | ||
| It is this. | ||
| Generation Z Conservative writes, what Charlie Kirk meant to my generation. | ||
| That Gen Z conservative is Alex Rosato. | ||
| He joins us now. | ||
| Alex Rosato, what did Charlie Kirk mean to conservatives under the age of 30 in this country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thank you so much for having me on the program, John. | |
| And may our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ protect the soul of Charlie Kirk in heaven. | ||
| We have to say, at least for someone in this generation, I'm 23 years old. | ||
| And Charlie Kirk went and made inroads with us when a lot of culture and a lot of institutions just refused to do so. | ||
| He represented authenticity in a time of political participation that felt like it didn't include us in the national conversation. | ||
| According to a study from The Hill, about 88% of college students self-censor themselves on campus because they think it's necessary for them to succeed. | ||
| You're seeing that from the Steamboat Institute as well, that 52% of individuals say that it's necessary to block students from attending a so-called controversial speaker. | ||
| So Charlie Kirk just didn't offer us a seat at the table. | ||
| He lended the microphone to those who dissented the most against him. | ||
| And I truly think that conversation and courageous dialogue benefits when all people are involved in that conversation. | ||
| 23 years old, you said? | ||
|
unidentified
|
23. | |
| When did you first encounter Charlie Kirk? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd say many years ago, just through the social media algorithms on YouTube and Instagram. | |
| I would say around high school as well. | ||
| And he's been a big part of at least understanding and developing my beliefs. | ||
| And I'm sure that goes for many people in Generation Z who agreed and disagreed with him as well. | ||
| Gettysburg College? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's correct. | |
| Did Charlie Kirk ever come to your campus when you were there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He did not, but TPUSA tried to start a chapter there many years ago, but to no avail. | |
| Do you ever go to one of the prove me wrong events that he would do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wish I had the opportunity to do so, and one of my biggest regrets now is that I wished I listened to him more when he was still alive. | |
| What do you think those events meant to conservatives on campus? | ||
| That dialogue back and forth that has gotten so much attention in the days and weeks since his death? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think especially with that banner of prove me wrong, it wasn't proving him wrong. | |
| It was proving to ourselves that the values and the social mores that we hold near and dear to our hearts are really the ones that are worth promoting and the ones that are going to contribute to an enduring moral order. | ||
| You see, especially with civility, it's on the decline in America. | ||
| According to ABA, 88% of Americans say that civility is on the decline, but there's a need for these conversations not only to restore it, but also for people to just be more engaged about current affairs and events that are going on within the country. | ||
| And Charlie Kirk, by going essentially into the lion's den of more so, liberal arts colleges that essentially stymie independent thought as opposed to foster it. | ||
| That was very brave of him to do, and especially that infrastructure strode out in droves, especially in the 2024 election, when you had a swarth of young people go out and vote for the GOP, vote for Donald Trump, vote for conservative values that they thought was representative of what they needed the country to present. | ||
| You write in your Newsweek article that Charlie Kirk took the public square to us, to Generation Z. Was the public square limited? | ||
| Was Generation Z not allowed in the public square before that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's studies that show that Gen Z feels incivility the most out of every other generation, whether it be online, in the classroom, in their daily interactions. | |
| And especially, you're seeing that with a lot of social anxiety that is built up within Gen Z. About 50% of Gen Z feels that they've felt depressed or anxious at least once in this last year, and 80% say that it's like this almost all the time. | ||
| You're seeing it too with economic insecurity. | ||
| According to Newsweek, 31% of Gen Z runs out of money at the end of the month, according to the Walton Family Foundation. | ||
| You're seeing too that two-thirds of Generation Z feels that financial resources are a barrier to their growth and their success. | ||
| So there's a lot of confounding factors that make Gen Z scared of and discouraged of current affairs in this current environment. | ||
| But what Charlie Kirk tried to do is say, not everything is doom and gloom. | ||
| I want to give you the opportunity to extend your voice and opinion and to contribute to the larger zeitgeist that we shouldn't be passive recipients in. | ||
| We have a stake in it as well, and it's about time that people in my generation and even all generations claim their stake. | ||
| Alex Rosato, our guest, his column about Generation Z and Charlie Kirk is in Newsweek. | ||
| And you can join the conversation. | ||
| Phone line split as usual by political party. | ||
| Democrats 202748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| Viewers will see on your ID that pops up on their screens Young Voices Contributor as your title. | ||
| What is Young Voices? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Young Voices is a nonprofit talent agency that helps libertarian, conservative, and independent thinkers get placed in media such as C-SPAN. | |
| Is that how you ended up writing the Newsweek article? | ||
| How did you get that writing gig? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Originally, when I first saw the news, I was at work and I was very distraught for the rest of the day. | |
| And I felt that this was something that needed to be published, encapsulated not only of a lot of the angst and anxiety that's caught up in my generation, but I'm sure many people who are watching that event unfold around the world, South Korea and Britain, you're saying that now we are Charlie Kirk. | ||
| Young people are going out on the streets and declaring their independence. | ||
| So I think this was something that was necessary to write, but also encapsulative of that environment that seems to exclude Gen Z. You talk about the angst and anxiety of Gen Z, Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, after the Charlie Kirk shooting that called social media a cancer on American society. | ||
| As a member of Gen Z, are you on social media? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Is it a cancer on American society? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How do you use it? | |
| I use it primarily to gather news. | ||
| And I know traditional media, especially legacy media, has lost its sway with a lot of younger folks, particularly according to the Media Research Center, that 31% still have an enduring trust in legacy media to report fairly, not including C-SPAN, of course. | ||
| And having studies from the Rochester University showing that there's 1.8 million headlines that they analyzed in news outlets like MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, they've been growing particularly partisan and polarizing over time. | ||
| So people are scouting out alternative media, such as podcasts, just going on social media, to try and fill that void of what legacy media left behind. | ||
| I wouldn't necessarily say it's a cancer on society, not by any means. | ||
| I think it's just a different alternative as to what we're used to, because the systems that are in place haven't been able to uphold their journalistic integrity for quite some time. | ||
| Where do you go for your news? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I go on Twitter, go on Instagram, no TikTok for me, and just usual outlets like Politico, go on New York Times, go on Fox News, other ones like that. | |
| So you consume that content just through social media? | ||
| Or are there specific podcasts that you go to for your news? | ||
| Are there specific social media influencers that you trust more than somebody who has a White House reporter in their title? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I listened to folks such as Benny Johnson, Jack Pisobic, some of the more mainstream conservative commentators, a little bit of Charlie Kirk when he was alive as well. | |
| And I think this goes to show that there is now an enduring stake that a lot of these more sort of alternative media outlets have because 20% of people in my generation actually get news from influencers as opposed to reporters and anchors and journalists. | ||
| So I think you're seeing competition that is arising from that free market as well and making sure that not only is there a diverse sway of different opinions and perspectives, but also one that's going to fuel the national conversation. | ||
| And I think that's important to have. | ||
| Alex Rosato, joining us, taking your questions and comments with us till about the bottom of the hour or so. | ||
| So go ahead and get your calls in. | ||
| We'll start on the Republican line. | ||
| Joe is in Cleveland. | ||
| Joe, you're on with Alex Rosato. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I have a, I don't know if that's a question, but I would like to make a statement of my disapproval of my Republican Party for what they're attempting to do in cities where they're not welcome. | ||
| And Joe, are you referring to National Guard deployments? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, no, I'm what I'm displeased with is not the National Guard deployment, was the fact that we're sending any kind of troops or police or whatever into the Democrat-run liberal progressive cities when the people that live there voted for their elected officials and they don't want to take care of crime, murder, rape, break into department stores and what have you. | |
| So I feel like if the people elected their officials in there, then why do we have to, why do we have to go in and try to correct their mistakes? | ||
| They don't want us there to start with, so why are we there? | ||
| That's Joe in Ohio. | ||
| Alex Rosato, do you have any thoughts on the National Guard deployments and also serving in the military and what that means for people of your generation as somebody who's come on to speak as a voice for Gen Z? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Certainly. | |
| I think Joe brings up a very potent point in today's national conversation, especially when local officials that are assigned and elected to cater to backyard needs and they fail to do so, alternatives get scouted out in place. | ||
| We're taking a look right now at potentially Trump sending in National Guard troops to Chicago. | ||
| And you're seeing there that Brandon Johnson, who ran on a bold progressive message of defund the police and other tactics that do not favor law enforcement, he has a 27% approval right now in Chicago, which to his credit is more than the 14% approval rating that he had earlier this year. | ||
| But you're seeing that most 911 calls of high priority aren't being answered or attended to. | ||
| You're seeing that seven out of ten people who commit crimes in Chicago are released before trial. | ||
| So there is no reputation for law and order. | ||
| So I think having the National Guard come in and fill in these cracks that local leaders have just refused to do so, I think it's necessary to uphold social order. | ||
| I think it's necessary to garner freedom, whether it be economically, the ability for people to congregate and freedom of expression as well. | ||
| It's actually studies that show that areas with low crime correlate with higher rates of investment. | ||
| So you're going to procure a lot more freedom from this as well. | ||
| Speak on the second issue for military servants. | ||
| That is completely up to my generation if they choose to enlist. | ||
| Certainly would help with our national defense and our national security. | ||
| We would implore Generation Z to take the steps necessary to defend and be active within this country. | ||
| But ultimately, they have agency. | ||
| They have choice. | ||
| And that is up for them to decide. | ||
| David, Cincinnati, Ohio, line four Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're on with Alex Rosato. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, correcting him, as I should. | |
| People who relief before trial in Chicago are released on bond most of the time. | ||
| Get it straight, kid. | ||
| Anyway, Charlie Kirk was these people's propaganda minister. | ||
| Just like Trump's hero, Adolf Hitler, he had a propaganda minister, too. | ||
| All right, we'll hold off on the Nazi comparisons. | ||
| Alex Rosato, did you watch any of yesterday's funeral? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did. | |
| I watched all of it. | ||
| And I would say particularly there was one quote by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that stood out to me. | ||
| It was his mother's advice. | ||
| And when he asked, does the whole of losing a loved one ever get smaller? | ||
| She says no. | ||
| We just grow bigger and stronger around it. | ||
| And I truly think that that's the direction that the country needs to go in, especially in the wake of this horrific assassination, is that we need civility back in America. | ||
| Actually, according to the Ronald Reagan Institute, six, seven people say that they want to be part of the national revival. | ||
| There's a spiritual revival going on as well, especially in my generation. | ||
| Generation Z is attending church at higher rates than every other generation. | ||
| They're giving up vice, they're giving up alcohol. | ||
| They want seeking, they want belonging, and truly they want continuity, family, the ability to have social stability, and also just the American dream that for so many of them seems to be slipping through their fingers. | ||
| But America needs a robust defense and promotion of its values, a free speech, a freedom of expression, limited government, free markets, individual responsibility and agency, and that enduring social and moral order that is founded on religious principles. | ||
| How do we bring stability back? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think we carry on the message of Charlie Kirk. | |
| Truly, it's getting in those places that have been brushed over for far too long, including academic campuses, including those communities that feel left behind. | ||
| And Donald Trump Jr. actually said this yesterday in his speech at the funeral. | ||
| He said, you must be crazy to try and persuade college campus people. | ||
| We'll get them to vote Republican after they start paying taxes. | ||
| But Charlie Kirk represented that ability to take the chance on the youth because these are the people that are going to take the mantle and lead us into the brighter future and the ascent of America that is still going to happen. | ||
| Now, for people in my generation, I understand your pain, your anxiety, your anguish. | ||
| And it seems like we live in a society that has improbable circumstances and impossible expectations. | ||
| But sometimes it pays to be the underdog because there's nothing else for us to do except to go out and shock the world. | ||
| And truly, I think that's what we need to do with peace, with conviction, and with faith. | ||
| Among those who also spoke at Charlie Kirk's funeral yesterday, his widow, Erica Kirk. | ||
| This is about two minutes of her address to those 70-some thousand people in the arena and hundreds more, millions more watching. | ||
| My husband, Charlie, he wanted to save young men, just like the one who took his life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That young man. | |
| That young man. | ||
| On the cross, our Savior said, Father, forgive them, for they not know what they do. | ||
| That man, that young man. | ||
| I forgive him because | ||
| it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The answer to hate is not hate. | |
| The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love. | ||
| Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us. | ||
| Erica Kirk yesterday at Charlie Kirk's funeral. | ||
| Alex Rosato, your thoughts on that moment yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's difficult to not be moved by such a moment. | |
| There were 200,000 Americans in attendance in Glendale, Arizona yesterday. | ||
| Even more in the overflow. | ||
| Millions watching from around the world online. | ||
| And what you saw in that moment is exactly the trajectory of what America needs to adopt. | ||
| It's faith, it's forgiveness, it's empathy. | ||
| And truly, Erica Kirk in that moment represented the very best of us. | ||
| Tyler Robinson, the assassin who took Charlie Kirk's life, the husband of and the father of her children. | ||
| He's no longer with us. | ||
| But his spirit is going to carry on through the ideals that he paved. | ||
| And that moment right there truly represented what the American renewal is all about. | ||
| It's having the ability to speak up courageously. | ||
| We shouldn't be defined by our darkest hour, but by the light that we bring in and how we react to that circumstance. | ||
| It's one of conviction. | ||
| It's one of hope. | ||
| And it's one that I know a lot of people really, really resonated with during that time. | ||
| And for folks who want to watch the entire funeral, you can watch it on our website at c-span.org. | ||
| Back to your phone calls with Alex Rosato. | ||
| This is John in Norfolk, Virginia, Independent. | ||
| Morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I just have a quick comment and a quick question. | |
| First of all, I want to say I do not believe that nobody should be killed, or anybody should be killed based on their personal beliefs. | ||
| But I also believe that as far as Charlotte Kirk, if he was such a person who wanted to help, especially minorities. | ||
| Now, to be fair to Charlotte Kirk, I didn't see all his videos, but the videos that I did see, whenever he talked about minorities, it was always in an insulting fashion. | ||
| He never talked about solutions. | ||
| And when I think about somebody trying to help somebody, I think about them offering solutions instead of always trying to criticize somebody and especially about their IQ. | ||
| Why was Charlotte Kirk so critical, especially of minorities and always questioning their IQ? | ||
| And to me, if somebody's trying to help you, they're coming with more solutions instead of a whole bunch of criticism. | ||
| And what I heard for Charlotte Kirk was more criticism. | ||
| Nan, you do have that right to criticism, criticize somebody. | ||
| But as far as Charlie Kirk trying to help all these people, that people are trying to claim that Charlotte Kirk is trying to help, I doubt that verse seriously. | ||
| What I heard from Charlotte Kirk from Charlie Kirk was more criticism than anything else. | ||
| John, got your point. | ||
| Alex Rosado. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Certainly, I think you speak to a greater cultural malaise that exists within America, especially for everybody, not just minorities, but truly all demographics, races, creeds. | |
| I think Charlie Kirk embodied principles that wanted to uplift America as a whole, not just cater to one certain sect of the population. | ||
| You're seeing that Charlie Kirk advocated, especially on programs like Jubilee, especially in town halls, going to college campuses, he promoted economic equality of opportunity, not of outcome. | ||
| We need an entrepreneurial spirit again in America, not only to create businesses, because one-third of businesses were lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, but you're also seeing too that you need to have the ability to have a secure financial footing and sound ability to reason. | ||
| I think especially endowing those traits in the youngest generation and even for those that are older, that's going to benefit everybody. | ||
| He championed principles that were not only eternal but relevant to everybody, whether that be in the economic sphere or having individual agency in terms of participating and making your stake and claim in the national or even local environments. | ||
| Truly, we need a message of empowerment. | ||
| And I think that's going to come from all sectors, whether it be religious, whether it be social, whether it be political. | ||
| And truly, it's going to take every single one of us to get that national spirit back. | ||
| Let me come back to Gen Z and other generations, trying to understand Gen Z, what you're thinking, what you were raised on. | ||
| The Pew Research Center breaks down political affiliation by generation and within that by gender. | ||
| And they look at Gen Z, they break down 52% of those aged 18 to 29 in this country, 52% of men are Republican, 34% of men are Democrat. | ||
| It's pretty much the opposite when it comes to women. | ||
| 58% of Gen Z say they are Democrats. | ||
| 37% of women say they are Republican. | ||
| It's a bigger gender gap than any other generation. | ||
| Our viewers can see it on their screen. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think it has to do with a lot of lifestyle choices. | |
| You're seeing now that Generation Z is taking things a lot more slow. | ||
| They're delaying milestones such as getting a job, having children, getting married. | ||
| And I think in that sense, it's more so trying to feel out the environment for themselves as opposed to staunch political beliefs. | ||
| But you're seeing that reflected in dating statistics as well. | ||
| About 77% of Gen Z, especially those who trend in a more liberal direction, don't want to date those who have opposite political affiliations or beliefs than them. | ||
| So you're seeing also a romantic crisis within Gen Z, and that's why people feel so lonely. | ||
| They lack connection. | ||
| They lack intimacy. | ||
| And I think truly that it's something that is resemblant of the times, but it doesn't have to be that way. | ||
| I guess the question is, do Republicans need to do a better job of reaching out to young women? | ||
| And you could ask Democrats the question, do Democrats need to do a better job of reaching out to young men? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it goes for both parties that inroads must be made with the younger generation, regardless of politics. | |
| Because as long as you recognize that they're going to have a stake in the future of this country, yes, and campaigning specifically on issues that are going to unite rather than divide people, I think having stable income is something that's going to unite people. | ||
| I think having patriotism at the center of every political message is necessary for our generation. | ||
| Because according to Gallup, earlier this year, you saw that only 41% of Americans that are in the 18 to 29 age group think that America is a great country. | ||
| They believe in America. | ||
| In 2023, only 18% said that they were extremely proud to be an American. | ||
| Contrast that with findings from the Democracy Fund, where they said that about two-thirds of Americans feel that America is an unjust country, and that four out of ten believe that the founding fathers were villains rather than heroes. | ||
| There's a civic gulf that exists within my generation, and even broader America. | ||
| You need to have those principles front and center for a way for a national renewal, and that's going to make effective messaging and political messaging better for both Democrats and Republicans. | ||
| Las Vegas, this is Lynn, line for Republicans. | ||
| Lynn, you're on with Alex Rosado. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I have a different way of breaking down the Bible. | |
| Lord, I believe, is living organism road, and you put the cross in the middle of that, and the living organism is our body and our mind. | ||
| Solomon was the wisdom in God Almighty, and Jesus was the flesh that we all live in, and that's why we're supposed to unconditionally do everything. | ||
| Because when you have a condition in your heart, then you have a reason to hate somebody next to you. | ||
| And if that's what's in your heart, then you're going to do it no matter what. | ||
| So we all live on the living organism road, and when we get to the end of the road or a decision, if we don't look to Jesus, then we're looking to the flesh or whatever the lust is that we desire. | ||
| And Jesus wants to be in the center of the cross. | ||
| So when you look back, you see a door, BR, not a doctor and not somebody else, but you see the door of the Almighty Jesus. | ||
| And when you look down, you either have Jones, which is the Dow Jones, which is money we need, or you have Jesus. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Lynn in Las Vegas. | ||
| Just a few minutes left with Alex Rosato. | ||
| You're 23 years old. | ||
| What are your career plans? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm in Washington, D.C. I've been working at a foreign policy think tank for a few months now. | |
| And just looking in the broader future, my plans are subject to change, truly. | ||
| I don't even know what tomorrow is going to be like. | ||
| So really just sticking with what I know, what I have to offer, and truly the impact that I can make today, regardless of the environment, I think is going to be crucial. | ||
| And we'll see what happens in the future. | ||
| Is politics something you could see yourself going into? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, if duty calls, certainly wouldn't close the door on it, but if it happens to end up being that way, so be it. | |
| When did you start, when were you first interested in politics? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say this was back in 2016. | |
| My parents were originally from New York. | ||
| They weren't very political. | ||
| But then one man came down a golden escalator, Donald Trump, and he promised an American renewal. | ||
| And my parents got involved. | ||
| They started paying attention. | ||
| And truly those values trickled on to me. | ||
| And those were ones that I resonated with as well. | ||
| So you were 14? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Around that time, yes. | |
| And you were paying attention to politics at 14? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Passively, but yes. | |
| What was it that resonated with you? | ||
| Was it a specific policy? | ||
| Was it you talked about Donald Trump said he was going to drain the swamp and what the swamp was. | ||
| What do you remember about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We appreciated brevity, especially at a time when a lot of politicians were essentially shapeshifting around different priorities and policies. | |
| Donald Trump gave us a clear message, identified the problem, identified a solution, cut out all of the fat that existed within the middle. | ||
| So I think especially for a lot of Americans that you saw in 2016 and 2024, they resonated with it, especially those in my generation. | ||
| There was a study that came out from Tufts University that showed that back in 2020, Joe Biden won the age 18 to 29 age group demographic by about 20 points. | ||
| Kamala Harris in 2024 still won that age group, but she only won it by four points. | ||
| You saw that also with voters who identified as moderate, where Joe Biden won them by 25 points. | ||
| Donald Trump won them in 2024 by five points. | ||
| So you're seeing these large swings towards clear messaging, identifying problems, and having it just be front and center as opposed to kind of dancing and beating around the bush. | ||
| Time for one or two more phone calls. | ||
| This is Kelly Texas Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I think that, yes, this generation does not have the hope of a better life than their parents and their grandparents. | ||
| It's the first time in generations. | ||
| But it doesn't mean that young people, especially young Christian men today, need to go and follow someone just blindly. | ||
| College is for resistance, critical thinking, critical learning. | ||
| It's not the time to just blindly follow white Christian nationalist men who have not been discriminated against to also the detriment of the rest of society. | ||
| Thank you very, very much. | ||
| Alex Rosato, how would you respond? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I would say that the American uplifting and the spirit of America consists of all of us, but especially what you spoke upon about faith is truly today you have to have faith in something. | |
| Have faith the eternal, seek joy. | ||
| And I think this speaks to the larger fundamental question that a lot of folks in my generation and otherwise are asking themselves. | ||
| Do you want to feel good or do you want to be good? | ||
| Marcus Aurelius, who's a famous philosopher, spoke in one of his pieces that we shouldn't waste time debating what a good man should be. | ||
| You should be one. | ||
| You should exemplify the values that are going to create permanent things, things that are going to resist, things that are going to develop into a culture in which everyone can be proud of. | ||
| Diversity of viewpoints and perspectives are going to help enrich the national conversation and include those who feel marginalized and those who are right now tinkering at the margins of the world. | ||
| It's going to have faith because our country, our culture, our communities, and Christ are all worth defending. | ||
| So it's time to get active. | ||
| It's time to get in the fight. | ||
| One last call. | ||
| Cindy's been waiting in Northport, Florida, Republican. | ||
| Cindy, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'm glad to see you on today, Alex. | ||
| I want to tell people that I'm a 75-year-old woman. | ||
| I have followed Charlie Kirk for years. | ||
| And I watched him bring light to college students all over the world. | ||
| He let them have their say, but he also planted seeds about what was going on in the world. | ||
| We cannot abort all of our children. | ||
| We cannot tell them it's all right to think they're a boy and a girl at the same time. | ||
| We cannot allow lawlessness and all of the fighting and arguing and the stealing and the theft. | ||
| The murders are out of line. | ||
| All of the things that are going wrong, Charlie Kirk tried to make young people see. | ||
| He tried to teach history and history repeats itself and he wanted young people to see where we were headed and change it for the good. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| It's Cindy in Florida. | ||
| Alex Rosato, give you the final minute or two here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thank you, Cindy, for that. | |
| Matthew 17, 20 commands us that as long as you have faith the size of a mustard seed, that nothing is impossible. | ||
| We've lost our sense and our passion and penchant for national conversation, substantive dialogue that is going to create the change and the disagreements that are necessary to drive our country forward. | ||
| We're no longer able to operate within echo chambers because you're seeing this country be pulled apart at times it seems at it seems. | ||
| So we need to have mutual understanding and unity around the shared values that are going to make America prosperous, flourish, and have the interdisciplinary knowledge to see its best days ahead in this next 250 years. | ||
| And again, I will preface, it comes from limited government, free markets, free speech, free expression, recognizing the agency and responsibility of individual people. | ||
| It comes from compassion. | ||
| It comes from empathy. | ||
| Truly, I say this as a 23-year-old after everything that just happened with the Charlie Kirk assassination, is my hopes for this country have never been higher. | ||
| The great people of this nation are going to rise to the occasion because that is what we've always done. | ||
| Our founding fathers were statesmen. | ||
| They were businessmen. | ||
| They were scientists. | ||
| They were churchgoers. | ||
| They used their knowledge to form documents and enduring principles that we still feel today, and those that resemble with the hearts and minds of everyone that are involved. | ||
| It's those principles that won us a revolutionary war, brought us back together after a civil war, won us two world wars and a Cold War. | ||
| And that's going to be the one that takes us and carries us into the next chapter of this great democratic experiment that we call the United States of America. | ||
| So thank you so much for your time and God bless. | ||
| Alex Rosato, if you want to read his piece on what Charlie Kirk meant to Generation Z, you can do so in Newsweek. | ||
| I do appreciate you joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much for having me. | |
| Coming up in about 40 minutes this morning, Jenk Uger joins us, host of the commentary program, The Young Turks. | ||
| But until then, it is open form. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about, now's your time to call in. | ||
| Phone numbers are on the screen. | ||
| Go ahead and start calling now. | ||
| And we'll get to those calls right after the break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
High school students join C-SPAN as we celebrate America's 250th anniversary | |
| during our 2026 C-SPAN Student Cam Video Documentary Competition. | ||
| This year's theme is exploring the American story through the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| We're asking students to create a five to six minute documentary that answers one of two questions. | ||
| What's the Declaration's influence on a key moment from America's 250-year history? | ||
| Or how have its values touched on a contemporary issue that's impacting you or your community? | ||
| We encourage all students to participate, regardless of prior filmmaking experience. | ||
| Consider interviewing topical experts and explore a variety of viewpoints around your chosen issue. | ||
| Students should also include clips of related C-SPAN footage, which are easy to download on our website, studentcam.org. | ||
| C-SPAN Student Cab Competition awards $100,000 in total cash prizes to students and teachers and $5,000 for the grand prize winner. | ||
| Entries must be received before January 20th, 2026. | ||
| For competition rules, tips, or just how to get started, visit our website at studentcam.org. | ||
| And past president. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a kangaroo. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. | ||
| Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Join political playbook chief correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns as host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue to find common ground. | ||
| Ceasefire this fall on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Here's where we are on Capitol Hill today. | ||
| We are eight days away from a potential government shutdown. | ||
| The House is away this week, not planning to come back until October 1st after passing their budget at the end of last week. | ||
| The Senate met this morning for a brief pro forma session and otherwise not planning to meet this week. | ||
| We'll see what happens when it comes to a potential government shutdown when both parties return and what happens in the days ahead of that September 30th deadline. | ||
| Here's what's going on in Washington today and around the world. | ||
| Today, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, is set to discuss the future of U.S.-Canada relations and the changing global economy and other foreign policy priorities. | ||
| It's being hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, and we are airing it live on C-SPAN and c-span.org and the free C-SPANNOW video app. | ||
| 12:15 p.m. Eastern Time is when you can watch that on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Right now, it is open forum. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about, now's your time to call in and lead this program. | ||
| We will begin in Jackson, Tennessee. | ||
| Pat, Democrat, good morning. | ||
| What's on your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm a very old person, and I vote Democrat, I vote Republican, I voted Independent. | ||
| I vote for the person, not the politician. | ||
| And yesterday, I watched Charlie Kirk's funeral. | ||
| I have no doubt in my mind that that man was a Christian. | ||
| He believed every word he was saying. | ||
| But when the politicians got on stage, I listened for about 30 minutes and I had to turn my TV off. | ||
| I just, I cannot believe at a funeral the hate and the mean things that were being said. | ||
| It scares me. | ||
| This country is absolutely scaring me to death. | ||
| Pat, what did you think about President Trump's remarks specifically? | ||
|
unidentified
|
About just the hate, just the other side. | |
| And I mean, I don't even know what he's talking about when he says the other side. | ||
| The other side of what? | ||
| The other side of evil? | ||
| I mean, People, you know, every person in this country was made in God's image. | ||
| Brown, black, white, whatever. | ||
| And I've heard so, I've heard politicians, I've actually heard this now say, make America white again. | ||
| Now, when they get rid of all of the immigration people, they need to. | ||
| A lot of the criminals, they need to. | ||
| But when they get rid of them, what are they going to do then? | ||
| They're going to start on the African Americans and send them away too? | ||
| Is that what they mean when they say make America white again? | ||
| That's Pat in Tennessee. | ||
| Charlie Kirk's funeral was yesterday in Glendale, Arizona. | ||
| President Trump spoke at that funeral. | ||
| This is about two minutes from his address to the audience. | ||
| In that private moment on his dying day, we find everything we need to know about who Charlie Kirk truly was. | ||
| He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. | ||
| He did not hate his opponents. | ||
| He wanted the best for them. | ||
| That's where I disagreed with Charlie. | ||
| I hate my opponent. | ||
| And I don't want the best for them. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I am sorry, Erica. | ||
| But now Erica can talk to me and the whole group, and maybe they can convince me that that's not right, but I can't stand my opponent. | ||
| Charlie's angry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
| He's angry at me now. | ||
| He wasn't interested in demonizing anyone. | ||
| He was interested in persuading everyone to the ideas and principles he believed were good, right, and true. | ||
| Before each appearance, he prayed these words, God, use me for your will. | ||
| Always said the same thing, use me for your will, and that is exactly what God did. | ||
| When you think, that's exactly what he did. | ||
| The more success Charlie had, and he was getting more and more successful, the more dangerous his mission became. | ||
| On campuses all over the country, his quest for open dialogue was met with menacing hate. | ||
| There were bomb threats, pulled fire alarms, and countless rage-filled radicals who tried to shout him down. | ||
| It was nasty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I used to say, Charlie, this is nasty stuff you're doing. | |
| At what event police had to build barricades to protect students from an angry mob of thugs. | ||
| Many of these people, by the way, are paid a lot of money to do this. | ||
| They're agitators. | ||
| They're paid agitators. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| President Trump yesterday in Glendale, Arizona, at Charlie Kirk's funeral. | ||
| If you want to watch it in its entirety, you can do so on our website at cspan.org. | ||
| In those remarks, President Trump mentioning his political opponents, one of his former political opponents has a book coming out this week about the 2024 campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris with her book about the 107 days of her campaign. | ||
| USA Today breaks down some of the key points, including her two conversations with Donald Trump. | ||
| Here's what they write. | ||
| Harris describes those two conversations, both remarkably conciliatory, they write. | ||
| Quote, I'd readied myself for a conversation with Mr. Hyde, but Dr. Jekyll had picked up the call, she said, after that first conversation. | ||
| She had placed a call to express her concerns after a would-be assassin was arrested in September of 2024 at his West Palm Beach golf course. | ||
| Quote, you've done a great job. | ||
| You really have, he said to her. | ||
| Quote, my only problem is that it makes it very hard for me to be angry at you. | ||
| The second call was in November to concede the election. | ||
| Quote, I'm going to be so nice and respectful. | ||
| He said then, you're a tough, smart customer, and I say that with great respect, end quote. | ||
| She wasn't persuaded. | ||
| Quote, he's a con man, she writes in her book. | ||
| He's really good at it. | ||
| That book, 107 Days, comes out tomorrow from the former vice president. | ||
| This is Tanya, Fredericksburg, Virginia, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, C-SPAN, and good morning, everyone. | |
| I was watching this young man, and I wanted to talk to him so badly because I think the problem with our young people, and he did say this, they live in a social media bubble, and that's why they're depressed. | ||
| When you did ask him, John, you know, where does he get his news? | ||
| He said, he said on social media, TikTok. | ||
| He didn't say he really watched any legacy media. | ||
| And when you hear some of these conservatives talk, they talk how they say how legacy media is one-sided. | ||
| He said he went to Politico and other websites and mentioned that he consumed some of that legacy media through their social media feeds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, but I still think they're missing so much. | |
| CBS has this wonderful series on kindness. | ||
| I think conservatives, I mean, everyone, and especially our president, need to watch it. | ||
| Another thing that really just bothers me is that, you know, Charlie Kirk and they were trying to, they were talking to these young people, but they also needed to, I just lost my train of thought here. | ||
| The reason that they're depressed, they really aren't talking to each other. | ||
| This young man said, well, some people are not going to get married because they can't really talk to each other. | ||
| You need to talk outside of your circle. | ||
| You know, there's no reason why someone who is a conservative and a Democrat cannot get married. | ||
| You know, they need to get out of the social media bubble. | ||
| You know, more kids are online talking to AI than that sense people. | ||
| In that sense, is what Charlie Kirk was doing with the prove-me-wrong events on college campuses. | ||
| I imagine you disagree with some of what he was saying, but do you agree with what he was doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, you can go out and talk to people, but there were some things that he said that was very divisive, like the Civil Rights Act, that was wrong. | |
| Or Martin Luther King was a bad man. | ||
| I would have to say to this young man, watch the Eye on the Prize and watch what black people went through. | ||
| When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, there were bomb threats on HBCUs. | ||
| We had nothing to do. | ||
| Young black people had nothing to do with Charlie Kirk's assassination. | ||
| So why were they being attacked? | ||
| So I just need that these young people need to get off of social media, read some books, go and read about some facts about the Civil Rights Act, what has happened to black people and other minorities in this country. | ||
| Social media is going to be the death of this country. | ||
| Tanya in Fredericksburg, Virginia. | ||
| This is Ray, Sarasota, Florida, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I would just like to say that history is basically repeating itself. | ||
| If we looked how this country was founded, and when the so-called pilgrims set foot on this land in the name of Christianity, we know what happened during slavery and, you know, teaching different ideas of Christianity among the slaves, we know what happened. | ||
| During Jim Crow era, etc., we know what happened. | ||
| I have nothing against Charlie Chris. | ||
| I commend Charlie Chris. | ||
| I respect what he said. | ||
| At the end of the day, we have our own opinion, but this country is heavily, heavily divided. | ||
| I think that this is an issue that minorities, so-called African Americans, have nothing to do with. | ||
| I believe that this is an issue that's going on with the deeper state, those who actually run this country, the LGBTQ, ABC, whatever you want to call it, and it's among them and the Republicans. | ||
| All right, that's right. | ||
| This is Sharon in Bemidji, Minnesota, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| Good to see you. | ||
| Been a while since I've talked to you. | ||
| I just want to say a couple of things. | ||
| Number one, I think our president sounded like a big fat joke yesterday, but nothing else is to be expected from that. | ||
| I wish I would have got into your last guest to ask him. | ||
| I have two quotes from Charlie Kirk, and I would just have liked to have asked him how these quotes are mistaken. | ||
| The first one is: I've never met a black woman that doesn't look like a gorilla. | ||
| And when I see a black pilot, I always might ask myself, whoa, I hope he's qualified. | ||
| I really would have liked to have heard how them are mistaken. | ||
| I just, I am having a hard time seeing how I'm misunderstanding them. | ||
| I would like to remind everybody back in 2017 when Trump was on one of his stump rallies, he literally told the people in the audience that if they see a tomato getting thrown, that they should knock them out. | ||
| I don't care, just knock the crap out of them. | ||
| I'll get you out of the legal troubles. | ||
| So when people say that this is just a Democratic thing, we Democrats out here, we've had enough. | ||
| We've had enough. | ||
| And just two more points. | ||
| I want to say that I'm hoping that today is the last day that we're done talking about Charlie Kirk now. | ||
| Let's let the man rest. | ||
| Let's move on and let's brace for what's yet to come because we all know that Charlie Kirk was not the last one, right? | ||
| We all know that. | ||
| This country that we're living in is volatile. | ||
| You're concerned about more political assassinations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, you bet. | |
| You bet. | ||
| And I would imagine within the next couple of weeks, John. | ||
| How do we bring the tension down in this country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, of course, it should start at the top, of course, but we know that that's not going to happen when he's telling people to knock somebody's head off or when he's retweeting a meme where he's hitting a golf ball to the back of Hillary Clinton's head. | |
| Remember that? | ||
| That was a lot of fun. | ||
| John, I wrote a paper back in 1981 in my high school year. | ||
| I think you and I have discussed this a couple of times, actually. | ||
| And it was all about, I called it the Great Migration. | ||
| And it's all about, I've never thought I would ever agree with somebody like the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene. | ||
| But I am with her 100%. | ||
| When they say that this country needs a divorce, and I mean cut this country straight down the center of this country, those who want freedom, those who believe in civil rights, those who believe that you have rights as a human being, go to the north. | ||
| And if you don't, if you don't believe in climate change, if you believe in white nationalism, go to the South. | ||
| Let's put up a border. | ||
| And hey, we can still be friends, but this is ridiculous because we will never, ever, ever, ever, never get past this, ever. | ||
| That's Sharon in Bemidji, Minnesota. | ||
| This is Joyce, Houston, Texas, Republican. | ||
| Joyce, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Let me first say, I'm a 92-year-old black American, not African American. | ||
| And to hear, I'm so saddened this morning to hear my people, the people of my heart, that say that they couldn't listen to the memorial yesterday because Charlie Kirk is racist. | ||
| You know, I get so tired of my people blaming those old white Republicans for where we are. | ||
| We are our own worst enemy. | ||
| And I don't know why this is not talked about more. | ||
| We kill more of each other than any other group. | ||
| But we don't want to discuss that. | ||
| We want to blame the white, the old white Republicans. | ||
| The white Democrats are more against us than those old rich white Republicans. | ||
| And stop blaming white people for our problem in our community. | ||
| We can't walk in our community. | ||
| We can't go to the grocery store and there's a basket. | ||
| We can't go to the pharmacy and get a basket to shop. | ||
| A 92-year-old woman have to go in the pharmacy. | ||
| There's no basket. | ||
| That's the cause of blacks took those baskets out of those stores, not white Republicans. | ||
| Stop blaming the white Republicans. | ||
| We are our own worst enemy. | ||
| We are locked in our homes. | ||
| We are not locked in our homes for no white Republicans. | ||
| We are locked in our homes because of these black thugs that walk our streets and break into our homes. | ||
| They have broken into my home. | ||
| I walked in my home. | ||
| It wasn't a white Republican up in here to steal anything. | ||
| It was a young black man up in here. | ||
| And I could have shot him, but I didn't. | ||
| So stop blaming white. | ||
| We are our own worst enemies, black people, and there's nothing in this nation that we can't become. | ||
| There are rich millionaires in this nation today. | ||
| So why are we continuing to blame white people? | ||
| They are not our prop. | ||
| The Democrats have kept us down. | ||
| All right, that's Joyce in Houston, Texas. | ||
| This is Ryan, Jamaica, New York, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, John. | |
| While everybody's complaining and do y'all know that come January 1st, that your good friends, the Republicans, are raking and stealing us from us half a billion dollars that they're taking out of Medicare. | ||
| That goes into effect to 3034. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So y'all have a wonderful day. | ||
| Y'all keep following these lunatics, y'all following. | ||
| Have another one more saying. | ||
| You people who don't like us black people, please leave friend one. | ||
| Please leave us alone forever, okay? | ||
| We don't have to break bread. | ||
| We don't have to do nothing. | ||
| Have a blessed day. | ||
| Goodbye. | ||
| That's Ryan in Jamaica, New York. | ||
| It's coming up on 9 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| It's open forum. | ||
| Go ahead and keep calling in on any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about. | ||
| And as you keep calling in, we're going to head to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. | ||
| That is where Meredith McGraw, Wall Street Journal White House reporter, joins us this morning to look at the week ahead at the White House. | ||
| Meredith McGraw, what's on President Trump's schedule this week? | ||
| What's a White House reporter to be covering over the next couple days? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, President Trump today is going to be taking part in what's expected to be a major announcement on autism with HHS Secretary Kennedy. | |
| They're expected to announce a warning for pregnant women taking Tylenol that it could actually contribute to autism in babies. | ||
| And they're also going to be talking about a potential treatment for autism at this event later today. | ||
| President Trump is then heading up to New York City where he's going to be participating in the UN General Assembly. | ||
| He'll be addressing world leaders there, but also having some meetings on the sidelines with the President of Syria and Ukrainian President Zelensky as well. | ||
| And then later this week, the president is going to be meeting with the President of Turkey, and then he's also expected to make an appearance at the Ryder Cup out on Long Island at the end of the week. | ||
| Another busy week for the president. | ||
| Let me come back to the UN meeting. | ||
| What is the president saying or what are you hearing from the White House on a move by the UK, Australia, Canada to recognize Palestine as a state over the weekend? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, this was addressed at the press conference that the president had when he was over in London last week. | |
| You know, the UK, it was broadcasted that they were going to be recognizing Palestine as a state. | ||
| And it's something that's certainly going to be a focus at the UN General Assembly tomorrow. | ||
| The president is really looking at a lot of conflicts abroad and also the funding cuts that his own administration has made to the UN. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I'm sure all of that will be part of the conversation when he's up in New York tomorrow. | |
| And then what's the latest from the White House on efforts to end the war in Ukraine and how much is that going to be the focus of the president's address at the UN? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Ukraine, you know, Gaza, those are all things that we expect the president to touch on when he addresses the world leaders tomorrow. | |
| And then of course his meeting with Zelensky. | ||
| The president has repeatedly said that he's been frustrated with Russian President Vladimir Putin for continuing to drag things along as they've wanted to come to any sort of agreement that could potentially end the now years-long war. | ||
| And then you mentioned the meeting with the president of Turkey coming up this week. | ||
| The president also tweeted at the end of last week about wanting to have a meeting with President Xi of China. | ||
| Have you heard any more on that of when that could happen or any more movement to have him visit the United States? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's expected that the president is going to attend APAC, which is held in South Korea this year at the end of next month. | |
| So that provides just an opportunity for the president to be in the same region, of course, as President Xi. | ||
| And so maybe we could see a meeting happen then. | ||
| Although some of these meetings take a lot of preparation in advance, so it might not be something that happens until next year. | ||
| And then bringing it back to domestic politics and the president's comments before those who had gathered for Charlie Kirk's funeral in Glendale, Arizona yesterday. | ||
| What reaction have you heard from the White House about the President's comments and how they're being received in the past 24 hours? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, this was just a massive memorial service in Arizona, thousands of people. | |
| The president touched on a lot of political themes in his speech about Charlie Kirk. | ||
| And, you know, Kirk himself played a big role in getting Donald Trump elected. | ||
| His organization donated millions of dollars, and there was a lot of organizing efforts that he did, and the president recognized that. | ||
| But he also talked about Charlie being a kind of martyr. | ||
| And he talked about the left, and talked about how he attacked the left for being partly responsible for Charlie Kirk's death. | ||
| And we saw a lot of senior White House officials there, people like Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, his cabinet secretaries, and even Elon Musk. | ||
| The president and Elon Musk had a pretty rocky end to their relationship here at the White House. | ||
| But the two were seen in Arizona together, and Elon Musk tweeted out a photo of them together that said for Charlie. | ||
| And then finally, what else are you covering on your beat at the White House this week? | ||
| What are you working on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, tomorrow at the UN General Assembly, we're also expecting to see First Lady Melania Trump. | |
| And she doesn't make a lot of public appearances, but she's expected to be there as well and potentially be meeting with some of the spouses of other world leaders. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that's something that I'll be looking out for tomorrow. | |
| Meredith McGraw and her colleagues covered all at the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| WSJ.com, of course, is where you can find their articles. | ||
| Thanks so much for your time this morning. | ||
| We'll let you get your day at the White House. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| And back to your phone calls in this open forum. | ||
| Any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about, go ahead and keep calling in. | ||
| This is Ryan in New Orleans. | ||
| Democrats, good morning. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, how you doing? | |
| The Republicans really think, they really want a civil war, just like they wanted back in the day. | ||
| And did you say a civil war, Ryan? | ||
| Yeah, they really want a civil war. | ||
| How do we keep from getting there as a country again, Ryan? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think you can stop it. | |
| It's so much, you have evangelical Christians that's on that side. | ||
| Ryan, you think a civil war is inevitable? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't think we can stop. | |
| I think God is going to let his hands off America and really show the people who think that they're winning this, they're doing this. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I think he's going to let, you know, because I live in the South and you can feel it. | ||
| And you can really, it's not everybody, but you can feel the business leaders that think that they're, that think without them, everybody else can't make it. | ||
| You know, they really, they really, the people that own the banks and the jobs in the South, they really think everybody can't make it without them. | ||
| They think America is them. | ||
| And that's what God is, I can feel God is kind of like, yeah, I'm going to have to show them. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| So I really appreciate it. | ||
| But you can feel it in the South, bro. | ||
| That's Ryan in New Orleans. | ||
| This is Peter in Massachusetts Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Listening to Alex Rosado reminded me of listening to my son when he was getting his information from the internet and not from what we are now calling legacy news sources. | ||
| I was taught a long time ago that news is the who, what, where, and when. | ||
| Everything else is opinion. | ||
| Almost all of what you get on the Internet is opinion, although if you are a careful consumer of news, you can find an awful lot that is news. | ||
| News is things like the president firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he doesn't like the information that comes out of his policies being enacted or Project 2025's policies being enacted. | ||
| News is things like what I just read this morning from Heather Cox Richardson: that Tom Homan is on video accepting a $50,000 bribe last year before Trump was inaugurated from people who thought that he could get them good contracts to help with building the border wall and things like that. | ||
| And since Trump became president, that investigation has disappeared. | ||
| So we have a man who is being now interpreting from the news. | ||
| This is not the news. | ||
| This is an interpretation of it. | ||
| A man who is being ruthless in how he handles people who may or may not be in illegal status. | ||
| He's a guy who is clearly a criminal, and he has been elevated to a very high position. | ||
| And his investigation, like many investigations we've seen in the recent past, has been dropped. | ||
| Not because it wasn't true, not because there wasn't evidence, but because of who's in charge. | ||
| The White House, in their response to it, calling it shutdown for a lack of credible evidence and calling it a political investigation. | ||
| That was the response to the Washington Post story on that investigation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They give that kind of response to everything. | |
| It's Russia, Russia, Russia, witch hunt. | ||
| That means nothing. | ||
| The fact that he's on video by FBI agents who were not corrupted by the president administration, they've got that as facts. | ||
| Now, what they're going to do with it is nothing. | ||
| And that is news that concerns us all. | ||
| That is news that can be interpreted by any of us as to why it is that the United States is no longer the great country that it once was. | ||
| Peter, you started by saying your son used to get his information just from social media. | ||
| Has his news habits changed? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not that I know of. | |
| And where do you get your news, Peter? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I get my news from NPR, from Heather Cox Richardson, who is a professor at Boston University and who writes a daily letter that's published on Substack. | |
| I get my news from the Wall Street Journal, from the Washington Post, from the Boston The Globe. | ||
| The Globe, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I learned more than 50 years ago to question all of it. | ||
| Does it make sense? | ||
| You know, at five years old, at eight years old, every person by the time we're 30 years old or 23 years old, like Alex Rosado, that meter has been turned off in favor of a bias toward what one wants to have be the news. | ||
| Never forget that there is a maxim in the newsroom that if it bleeds, it leads. | ||
| That doesn't mean it's the most important. | ||
| It just means it's the thing that's going to get people watching through the truck commercial and staying tuned. | ||
| That's Peter in Massachusetts. | ||
| This is Ron in West Chesterfield, New Hampshire, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, John, and thank you, thank you, Washington Journal, for this time. | |
| So listen, there was a black lady on a little while ago who said that the big problem with black folks right now is the black-on-black crime and that it's not the rich white people. | ||
| Let me ask you something. | ||
| If every poor person, and there's more poor white people than there are black people, but if every poor person was given, say, $200,000 to start a business or put a down payment on a home or whatever, do you think there would be all that crime in the black neighborhoods? | ||
| Do you think there would be that much crime anywhere? | ||
| If everybody has money, what do they need to go out and steal and kill for? | ||
| As far as... | ||
| Ron, is that an argument for the, what do they call it, the universal basic income? | ||
| Is that what it's called? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think everybody deserves some sort of basic living conditions. | |
| You can't just leave people out on the street to starve and die houseless and in the freezing weather. | ||
| But I did want to touch on Charlie Kirk and the Republican hypocrites. | ||
| And that's really what they are. | ||
| You know, that Charlie Kirk funeral was filled with people that say that they're Christian. | ||
| But it seems like all they did during that whole thing was speak nothing but hate and divisiveness and retribution. | ||
| And, you know, to listen to Republicans that they're so Christian, yet the person that they elected to lead us is, he admits to grabbing women by their private parts because he's rich and powerful and can. | ||
| He was Jeffrey Epstein's best friend for 15 years. | ||
| He doesn't want to release the Epstein files. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Unless he's on them. | ||
| You know, the man, Donald Trump has never, ever, ever been a good person. | ||
| Never. | ||
| So why these hypocrite Republicans? | ||
| And the South has been saying for the longest time. | ||
| I moved down to the South 40 years ago down in Florida, and it got to the point to where I couldn't stand anymore. | ||
| But as soon as I moved down there 40-some-odd years ago, I made some friends down there. | ||
| They're saying the South will rise again. | ||
| They've been looking for a Civil War for decades. | ||
| And so I think a Civil War is definitely on the slate, especially for the Republicans. | ||
| How do we keep that from happening, Ron? | ||
| When people bring that up and saying it's definitely, how do we keep that from happening? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that was the question for the last Civil War. | |
| And we wasn't able to keep it from happening because there was just so much hate. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| How do we get to a place where there's less hate in this country then, Ron? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop a lot of these podcasts. | |
| Again, I don't know of any Democrat podcast that has people like Nick Filentes going on there and spewing their hate. | ||
| I don't know much about Charlie Kirk. | ||
| The first I heard about Charlie Kirk was on South Park, the South Park episode, because I love South Park. | ||
| And so I looked into him a little bit, and he wasn't that hate-filled. | ||
| He said he was all Christian and everything, Christian values and everything. | ||
| But again, he was demonizing gay people as being like an abomination against God. | ||
| He's demonizing black people for being lazy and having to have everything handed to them and things like that. | ||
| You can't demonize groups of people and expect not to have some blowback. | ||
| Now, what happened to him was, yes. | ||
| I just really want to make sure that that is not what you just said is saying that it's okay to shoot somebody for that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| To not have blowback is a really loaded term, Ron. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no, absolutely not. | |
| I was going to say, what happened to Charlie Kirk should never have happened, especially a public execution in front of his wife and kids. | ||
| That was just, that should never have happened at all. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Ron. | ||
| Time for just a couple more phone calls. | ||
| This is Peter in Valley Cottage, New York. | ||
| Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning, John. | |
| I wanted to address that tweet that you had on earlier regarding Pam Bondi that Trump put out. | ||
| I mean, logically, one would look at it. | ||
| First of all, I think Pam Bondi is a very ethical person, and I don't think that she would engage in lawfare unless she actually had a legal case against somebody. | ||
| So logic would say, why would President Trump put out a tweet telling Pam Bondi to go after these people when he could do that privately? | ||
| The smart thing to do would be to tell her privately because he meets with her all the time. | ||
| So for folks who haven't seen it, Peter, this is what it says. | ||
| 6.45 on Saturday night Eastern Time, Pam colon. | ||
| I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that essentially, same old story as last time, all talk, no action, nothing is getting done or being done. | ||
| What about Comey, Adam Shifty Schiff, Letitia James? | ||
| They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done. | ||
| Then we almost put a Democrat supported U.S. attorney in Virginia. | ||
| He goes on the there talking about the district attorney. | ||
| He ends by saying we can't delay any longer. | ||
| It's killing our reputation and credibility. | ||
| They impeached me twice and indicted me five times over nothing. | ||
| Justice must be served now. | ||
| And then signed it, President DJT. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, John, the thing is, is there's a difference between unethical behavior and illegal behavior, okay? | |
| And I don't think that Pam Bondi is going to engage in any of that. | ||
| So what was the purpose of the president putting it out there? | ||
| He knows that the base, the Republican base, wants something to be done. | ||
| But if nothing is done, they're going to blame him. | ||
| If you recall, when in President Trump's first term, he said that, oh, Hillary Clinton should go to jail and so on and so forth. | ||
| And then, you know, not too long ago, he said, well, I could have prosecuted Hillary Clinton, but I didn't want to do that. | ||
| So he doesn't want to take the hit publicly if nothing is done. | ||
| But Pam Bondi is not going to do anything illegal, in my opinion. | ||
| Adam Schiff, yeah, he came out. | ||
| He was on the intelligence committee and he came out and said, oh, yeah, there's plenty of evidence in plain sight and so on and so forth. | ||
| But he didn't say anything illegal. | ||
| He didn't give out any information. | ||
| But what he did was put doubt in people's mind regarding the president's participation in the Russia scandal or the hoax, so to speak. | ||
| Same thing with Letitia James in New York. | ||
| Yeah, what she did was unethical, but now they want to go after her because of her falsifying information on a mortgage that she applied for, saying it was her main residence. | ||
| The same thing with Adam Schiff in California, saying it was his main residence, what it wasn't. | ||
| But I believe those are not federal issues. | ||
| I think those are local issues. | ||
| And even if there was a prosecution, which I doubt would happen because those states are run by Democrats, they would get a pardon from the government. | ||
| Peter, I'll take your point. | ||
| Last caller in this open forum. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| We've got 45 minutes left this morning. | ||
| Jenk Uger's going to join us. | ||
| He is the host of The Young Turks. | ||
| We'll talk about political polarization in this country. | ||
| Stick around for that conversation right after the break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This fall, C-SPAN invites you on a powerful journey through the stories that define a nation. | |
| From the halls of our nation's most iconic libraries comes America's Book Club, a bold, original series where ideas, history, and democracy meet. | ||
| Hosted by renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein, each week features in-depth conversations with the thinkers shaping our national story. | ||
| Among this season's remarkable guests, John Grisham, master storyteller of the American justice system. | ||
| Justice Amy Coney Barrett, exploring the Constitution, the court, and the role of law in American life. | ||
| Famed chef and global relief entrepreneur Jose Andres, reimagining food. | ||
| Henry Louis Gates, chronicler of race, identity, and the American experience. | ||
| The books, the voices, the places that preserve our past, and spark the ideas that will shape our future. | ||
| America's Book Club, premiering this fall, Sundays at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| I was initially very skeptical about embarking on a full-life biography of anyone, let alone a figure as big as Zbig. | ||
| Edward Luce is talking about President Carter's former National Security Advisor, Zbignud Brzezinski. | ||
| Mr. Luce is the Financial Times chief commentator and columnist. | ||
| Luce is a native of Sussex, England, and has spent close to 20 years in the United States since the mid-90s. | ||
| He is an Oxford grad. | ||
| Zbignud Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, Poland, got his PhD at Harvard, spent time in Canada during the time his father was posted as Polish Council in Montreal. | ||
| Brzezinski was National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Edward Luce with his book, Zabig, The Life of Zbignud Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet. | |
| On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | ||
| BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Washington Journal continues. | |
| Always glad to welcome back the Young Turks host and founder, Jank Uger, to the Washington Journal, joining us a day after Charlie Kirk's funeral. | ||
| And Jank Uger, you once had a beer with Charlie Kirk, a fact that some viewers might be surprised to learn. | ||
| What were the circumstances? | ||
| Yeah, Charlie came on our show at the RNC, then at the DNC, and we had a surprisingly productive conversation. | ||
| My whole life, when I talked to Republicans, they would have talking points from Fox News, and it would just be like hitting a ball against the wall. | ||
| There was no point to it. | ||
| But when Charlie and I had those conversations, and my co-hosts on the Young Turks, Anna Kasparian as well, it was productive. | ||
| There were things that we disagreed on almost every part of the culture war. | ||
| We disagree on, what we think is divisive speech we would argue over. | ||
| But when he came to some economic issues, the corruption in this country, housing prices being far too high, and how we could ban private equity from buying our homes, there was a surprising, even shocking agreement. | ||
| Then he invited me to AmericaFest, which is the big program that he puts together. | ||
| And that's the thing with Charlie. | ||
| His actions, let me put it this way. | ||
| His speech was not inclusive, but his actions were. | ||
| So he would consistently ask people on the left to come join him and give them an open forum. | ||
| And even on not just on the things we agreed on, but also on the things we disagreed on. | ||
| And we had a personal interaction there, and including with his wife, Erica, and they were all incredibly warm. | ||
| So it's a paradox, but that was the paradox of Charlie. | ||
| We just had an open forum where viewers could call about any topic they wanted to talk about. | ||
| Two of the callers, I believe, said that they were convinced that this country is headed for a civil war. | ||
| How would you describe the political moment we find ourselves in right now? | ||
| Yeah, I totally disagree. | ||
| I see hope where not very many others do. | ||
| And it's because we're at the very, very beginning of hope, and that's because we're at the very darkest moments. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| That's also a paradox, right? | ||
| So people look around and they see Donald Trump's speech at the Charlie Kirk Memorial and talking about how we have to hate the other side and we have to attack them, et cetera. | ||
| They see the beginnings of martial law in the streets and the massed ICE agents, et cetera. | ||
| I mean, we can go on and on. | ||
| And obviously what's happening in Gaza is a nightmare beyond imagination, right? | ||
| So we're in super dark times. | ||
| So where's the hope? | ||
| Well, it's also from the same memorial. | ||
| And that's why, again, that's the third paradox we're talking about in the scope of a minute. | ||
| Then Erica Kirk comes out, his wife, and gives this beautiful speech about forgiveness. | ||
| And I can't believe she said it. | ||
| She said, as a Christian, we should forgive the shooter. | ||
| I don't know that I could forgive the shooter, let alone her. | ||
| And she said, we should not operate based on hate. | ||
| We should operate based on love. | ||
| So if it was just her, I'd say, okay, that's a beautiful moment, but it's just a moment. | ||
| No, I'm now seeing it all over the internet. | ||
| And you're not seeing it in mainstream media because mainstream media, in my opinion, is in the business of division and furthering hatred. | ||
| And people might be surprised by me saying that I could show that to you in 100 ways. | ||
| But in the online community, we have a thousand fights. | ||
| But what's happening now is unique, which is agreement is beginning to break out. | ||
| We have agreement on Epstein files. | ||
| We're beginning to have agreement on Israel. | ||
| We're beginning to have agreement on paid family leave. | ||
| That's a little bit down the road. | ||
| And I know no one in Washington is talking about it, but the rest of the country wants it. | ||
| We're beginning to have agreement on freedom of speech. | ||
| So I'm encouraged that that kernel exists. | ||
| I believe it will grow and grow and grow. | ||
| And what we will eventually realize is the politicians and the media were trying to divide us. | ||
| And there's actually at least 60%, maybe all the way up to 80% of the topics that the American people actually agree on. | ||
| And we're going to wake up and realize that. | ||
| On agreement on freedom of speech, are you referring to Ted Cruz's comments on that topic from Friday? | ||
| Yeah, two huge developments there. | ||
| Again, in the darkest of times, I don't want people missing this light. | ||
| So number one, Pam Bondi comes out and says, you know, we should treat basically criticism of Trump and the Republicans or the right wing as hate speech. | ||
| And the right wing roars against it. | ||
| Okay, so if you're on the left and I'm on the left, when's the last time you saw the right wing being principled like that? | ||
| In my lifetime, usually what happens, and to be fair, all the Democrats do a similar hypocrisy. | ||
| Whenever anybody's in power, they just switch positions right away, right? | ||
| And the media never notices it. | ||
| They drive me crazy. | ||
| They're constantly flipping positions. | ||
| We should have a filibuster. | ||
| We shouldn't have a filibuster. | ||
| I can go on and on, right? | ||
| But here, the right wing, to their infinite credit, said, no, we said all along we don't want laws against hate speech, and we're not going to change our minds just because we're in power. | ||
| Add a boy, that's great news. | ||
| So then, number two, then Brendan Carr comes out as the head of the FCC and starts to intimidate stations and networks to try to get Jimmy Kimmel off. | ||
| Obviously, as you all know, it worked, and they suspended him. | ||
| But then pushback began. | ||
| Universal, absolutely not. | ||
| The majority of the right wing? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| But Clay Travis, Travis, then Greg Guttfeldt, and then Tucker Carlson, then Candace Owens. | ||
| And the list started to build of people going, I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think we should take this guy off the air. | ||
| I don't think that's what we stand for. | ||
| And then, of all people, Ted Cruz saying we should not use the FCC to intimidate people's rights away, right to speech, right to the freedom of the press, et cetera. | ||
| And then Rand Paul did it again just yesterday. | ||
| So a shocking support for, and if you're on the right, you're going to say us supporting free speech is not at all shocking, right? | ||
| But guys, my whole life, both parties have switched positions the instant they got into power. | ||
| So the fact that some of those guys are holding on the principles of free speech is great news. | ||
| I think it was Clay Travis that you might have retweeted, talking about what Jimmy Kimmel, Roseanne Barr, and Gina Carano have in common. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And so, look, I don't know how many of us there were on the left. | ||
| I suspect there's a number of us. | ||
| But I was always against cancel culture, and so was my co-host, Anna, right? | ||
| So when they went to cancel Megan Kelly, for example, because she said something about blackface, what we said is Al Roker was really upset about that. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with being upset about that. | ||
| But why don't you guys get together, Al Roker and Megan Kelly? | ||
| You're both working at NBC News and do an hour-long special and talk it out. | ||
| And Al can explain why Blackface is offensive. | ||
| I bet tons of people in this country have no idea why it's offensive. | ||
| And then Megan can give her perspective, and the country can grow and heal from it. | ||
| Instead, we got canceled, canceled, canceled, and everybody had to be canceled, right? | ||
| So I was always against it, and we've been principled from day one. | ||
| Seeing now some on the right, like Clay Travis being principled about it, and Greg Gutfeld and all the other guys that I listed, it's a bomb for the wounded whole to make the wounded whole, as Martin Luther King once said. | ||
| So, and, you know, guys, we're not going to get to Nirvana overnight, right? | ||
| But the fact that we're even taking these small steps or mid-sized steps towards agreeing on principles, American principles, is also a really good day in America. | ||
| Jank, you're with us until the end of our program, the top of the hour, 10 a.m. Eastern, joining us from New York. | ||
| Phone lines, as usual, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. | ||
| And as usual, Jank Uger, they're lit up for you when you're on. | ||
| I want to get to those calls in just a second, but did want to ask you about Kamala Harris's book. | ||
| It's coming out tomorrow, about our 107 days. | ||
| Are you going to read it? | ||
| I wasn't going to read it, but then Charlemagne the God sent me a message saying it's pretty good. | ||
| She's actually really honest in the book. | ||
| So if she's being honest, then I might pick it up. | ||
| But that would be shocking for a politician in America. | ||
| At this point, looking ahead to 2028, who do you think is the best progressive leader in this country to take on the mantle of presidential candidate? | ||
| So, look, I believe in economic populism, and that's what Bernie Sanders was in favor of, especially in 2016. | ||
| I think that's the right side of the progressive movement. | ||
| What I would characterize also as left-wing populism. | ||
| Among the people who are legislators and politicians, I think there's a clear favorite. | ||
| It's Roe Conna. | ||
| Congressman Conna was one of the chairs of Bernie Sanders campaigns. | ||
| He's introduced more bills to try to help the average American with their wages, with prices, et cetera, than anybody else in Congress. | ||
| He has this brilliant idea where he took a Trump executive order on lowering drug prices. | ||
| I personally don't think Trump means it. | ||
| But he said, okay, if you do it as an executive order, the courts are going to knock it down. | ||
| I'll turn it into a bill. | ||
| Okay, let's make sure that our drug price is as low as four other developed nations to compare us to them, right? | ||
| And so every Republican should vote for it. | ||
| It was Trump's executive order. | ||
| It's actually Democratic policy, so every Democrat should vote for it. | ||
| He keeps finding things like that where it's hard to disagree. | ||
| And of course, the real reason why his colleagues disagree is because they're almost all corrupt. | ||
| They almost all work for big pharma and all of the lobbies. | ||
| So they go, that's a great point. | ||
| And yes, over 80, 90% of Americans want that, but we're not going to give it to them because we got bribed by the drug companies. | ||
| And so they're all legalized bribes. | ||
| I despise it. | ||
| A guy like Roe Khanna is a rare gem. | ||
| In terms of non-politics, I love Jon Stewart. | ||
| And I've been trying to get him to run for president for a long, long time now. | ||
| He got a bill passed from outside of Congress. | ||
| He's smart. | ||
| He's honest. | ||
| He's strong, just like Roe. | ||
| So there's some beautiful options out there. | ||
| Let you take some callers. | ||
| This is Diane in DeSoto, Kansas. | ||
| Republican line, you're up first with Jenk Uger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to, it's widely reported that young people that are recent graduates are having a terrible time finding a job. | ||
| And I believe that. | ||
| But I want to give some advice to these same people. | ||
| I gave this advice to my granddaughter, who is a recent graduate. | ||
| She had been submitting her resume to these agencies that are online and waiting, and there's no answer, there's no calls, there's no feedback, no nothing. | ||
| I know this won't work on Wall Street, but it works in the Kansas City area and should work in similar cities. | ||
| Get dressed up, pick up your resume, and start knocking on some doors. | ||
| Literally, go to these places. | ||
| You can figure out where they are in most cases from the listings on whatever the agency is. | ||
| Diane, did your granddaughter take the advice? | ||
|
unidentified
|
She did. | |
| Did she have a job? | ||
|
unidentified
|
She got a job. | |
| And let me tell you how she got. | ||
| She went to like three different places one day, and the one place she stopped was at this basically was a dental clinic. | ||
| It was one of several clinics under the same management. | ||
| And she went in there with her resume, talked with the front desk clerk. | ||
| Well, she handed it over, said she'd like to have an opportunity for an interview. | ||
| She went out the parking lot to her car. | ||
| By the time she got to her car, she got a telephone call. | ||
| Diane, good luck to your daughter in that first job. | ||
| Jenk Uger on young people and getting jobs these days. | ||
| Yeah, so I love that story. | ||
| And it basically reminds me of the American spirit. | ||
| And when I was younger, yeah, I went to law school, became a lawyer, but I really hated that job and I didn't want to do it. | ||
| And I decided to be a radio talk show host. | ||
| God help me. | ||
| And it took me a long, long time to make it to where I am. | ||
| But in the meanwhile, when I first got started, I sent out 400 tapes to 400 different radio stations in the country. | ||
| If you work super hard, there really is a future for you here in America. | ||
| Unfortunately, that future is, our opportunities are getting more and more limited. | ||
| I think we live under corporate rule. | ||
| I think things are getting worse. | ||
| I think young people are very right to criticize and complain to try to make the country better. | ||
| Their housing prices are worse. | ||
| Their wages are lower over time when you adjust for inflation. | ||
| Everything is harder for young people. | ||
| So when people like Joe Biden used to say, oh, you guys don't know how good you have it, that's not true. | ||
| He doesn't know how good he had it. | ||
| For younger people, especially when you pile on student debt, it's much harder. | ||
| So don't give up hope on an individual level. | ||
| Fight hard. | ||
| You'll get to the right place. | ||
| On a macro level, we got to help them. | ||
| We've got to have better policies that give them the same kind of opportunity we had growing up. | ||
| On young people, we had a young Gen Z, a 23-year-old, came on to talk about what Charlie Kirk meant to Gen Z. Why do you, and one of the things he talked about was young people turning to conservatism, identifying as Republicans more than they used to. | ||
| Why do you think that trend is? | ||
| And what do you see in those trend lines? | ||
| Yeah, so unfortunately, the Democrats became the party of scolds, and it drove young people away, and especially young men. | ||
| You can't say this, you can't say that. | ||
| You can't joke about this, you can't joke about that. | ||
| Not only that, we're going to use a time machine. | ||
| We're going to go back 20, 25 years. | ||
| Oh, that's it. | ||
| When you were 17, you joked about that. | ||
| Now you're canceled. | ||
| And everybody got canceled. | ||
| And some of my friends on the left deny this. | ||
| And I, come on, guys. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| What planet are we living on, right? | ||
| So we also people are getting canceled right in front of our eyes. | ||
| And look, you could say I'm biased, and that's fair because every part of the political spectrum has tried to cancel me, the right, the establishment, the left, et cetera. | ||
| So I'm sick of this. | ||
| I'm sick of it. | ||
| And so people who are sick of it didn't want to go to Joe Biden. | ||
| They didn't want to go to a guy who was 198 years old, pretending to be 23. | ||
| Everything was a lie and a sham. | ||
| They pretended that he was FDR 2.0. | ||
| Meanwhile, I'm on the left screaming my head off, as usual, on the young Turks, going, nope, do something for them. | ||
| Do something tangible. | ||
| Increase the minimum wage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lower drug prices, not for one drug, for thousands of drugs. | |
| Do something. | ||
| And you would tell Democratic leaders, and they're like, oh, no, if you just praise us on air more and you did our propaganda more, then young people would like us. | ||
| No, brothers, that's not going to work, man. | ||
| That's old school mainstream media where you could brainwash people 24-7. | ||
| In the online world, we're all going to get the information. | ||
| Yeah, it takes a long time for the truth to filter up. | ||
| Yes, there's tons of misinformation in the short term. | ||
| But stop insulting everyone and stop insulting our intelligence. | ||
| So that's why they got driven away from the Democratic Party, not because of our ideology, which I think is excellent and would appeal to them, but because of our leadership that is so incompetent and so corrupt. | ||
| And if you're a Democrat and you think, oh, the Republicans, they take all that donor money and big pharma and AIPAC and they're evil, but our guys are angels. | ||
| No, the guys, they take the same money and they serve the same donor class. | ||
| And that's why they've almost destroyed the Democratic Party. | ||
| I think we could revive it with true economic populism and going to old school Democrats like FDR and JFK. | ||
| But we've got to get this party out of the clutches of the super old and corrupt Democratic leadership. | ||
| Columbia Station, Ohio. | ||
| This is Ed, Republican Line. | ||
| You're on with Jenk Uger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I'm listening, you, and I give a fair opinion of people. | |
| I mean, I give you like you're saying. | ||
| And at first I was a little against you until I started listening to you. | ||
| And now you're fair. | ||
| Now you're left or progressive. | ||
| Now I'm far from that. | ||
| But what you're saying about the, I call it the Democrat Party, they aren't even just progressive no more. | ||
| They're Marxist. | ||
| I mean, the guy's probably going to win New York. | ||
| They want to do price fixing. | ||
| Don't, don't, don't. | ||
| Already, billions have left that state. | ||
| It goes on and on. | ||
| Did they do that? | ||
| We'll see, but, and they probably will. | ||
| House fixing, you name it. | ||
| They want to own the stores. | ||
| What I'm getting at, the Democrats or Democrats, I'll call them. | ||
| Okay, I'll be respectful. | ||
| If they had good policies, which they never talked about, you were right on. | ||
| I hope they don't change. | ||
| I hope they don't take what you're saying up their party. | ||
| I hope they're set back 30 years to go on this. | ||
| People today know what's right and wrong, what's good or bad for this country. | ||
| I don't care how much fake news is out there. | ||
| The social media, these people are educated in their 30s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm 66 this month. | |
| I still work. | ||
| You name it. | ||
| I own my own business. | ||
| 17 vets I hired. | ||
| I'm a 30-year vet. | ||
| I got man all up, but what I'm saying is every policy wrong the Democrats are on right now, wrong on just about. | ||
| Not everyone, but almost. | ||
| Ed, you bring up a lot of issues. | ||
| Let me let Jenker jump in. | ||
| Yeah, first of all, the most important thing you said there is that you hired 17 vets for your business. | ||
| Okay, I'm proud of you, brother. | ||
| So we got to stick together as Americans. | ||
| And so that's a beautiful story you told. | ||
| Now, in terms of Democrats, there's two different things here, honestly. | ||
| There's the Momdani, who is an actual socialist. | ||
| I mean, I've had Republicans my whole life call everyone in the Democratic Party socialist, communist, Marxist, where they were nowhere near it. | ||
| And I'll get back to that in a second. | ||
| But he actually is a socialist, right? | ||
| And so I'm not sure that I agree with all of his policies. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of rent control. | ||
| I'm not sure that the city owning grocery stores is going to make a huge difference. | ||
| But I like that the brothers for change. | ||
| I can't stand the status quo. | ||
| So if we just re-elect Andrew Cuomo, we're just going to get right back to the status quo, the donors being in charge, nothing ever changing, housing prices continuing to go up, and no one even trying to make a difference. | ||
| So the fact that he's trying to make a difference is huge. | ||
| And yes, some of those policies might work great in New York and they might not play as well in Nebraska. | ||
| But let New York try their thing and let Nebraska try their thing. | ||
| Now, in terms of the main Democratic leadership, I do think you have it a little bit off there, brother. | ||
| So first of all, Marxists is so extreme. | ||
| Even Momdani is not Marxist. | ||
| So it's just, but those are definitional issues. | ||
| Those are just terms, okay? | ||
| But he's at least going in that direction you're talking about. | ||
| The other guys are not at all going in that direction. | ||
| They're something else entirely. | ||
| They're corporatists. | ||
| So whether it's Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Pelosi and all those guys, and on the right wing, Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and you name it. | ||
| They all take the majority of their money from corporations and they serve corporations. | ||
| They're not our representatives. | ||
| They're the representatives of ExxonMobil, Pfizer, Johnson ⁇ Johnson, Israel. | ||
| And guys, whenever Israel is mentioned, everybody catches feelings, right? | ||
| No, Israel is like any other country. | ||
| At this point, if you have enough American citizens that like that country, you could buy off Congress for that country. | ||
| You can. | ||
| And if you're saying they're not buying off Congress, that's absurd. | ||
| Of course they are. | ||
| But so is Big Pharma. | ||
| So is Big Oil. | ||
| So are the defense contractors. | ||
| And all these guys, the Democrats and the Republicans, take money from those corporations and they institute corporate rule that oppresses both of us. | ||
| Both the left and the right have lower wages and higher drug prices. | ||
| So we're both getting oppressed by the same people. | ||
| That's the opposite of Marxism. | ||
| That is when corporations take over. | ||
| By the way, corporatism is not capitalism. | ||
| In fact, it's the enemy of capitalism because capitalism is about free markets and corporatism is buying off the government to end competition and free markets. | ||
| You should be much more worried about corporatism than you are about a theoretical Marxism that doesn't even exist or a nascent socialism that Mamdani, a democratic socialism that Mamdani's talking about in New York. | ||
| You talk about terms, Marxists, communists. | ||
| What's your reaction when you hear somebody on the left call somebody on the right a Nazi? | ||
| Yeah, so look, the right wing, first of all, I try to clarify this all the time now. | ||
| There is no the right wing, there is no the left wing, the Democrats, the Republicans. | ||
| There's a giant range of people, right? | ||
| About a little over 70 million voters on both sides and well over 100 million people on both sides. | ||
| And within that range, there are good people. | ||
| There are people that are closer to the middle or more to the extremes on both sides. | ||
| So in terms of the extremes of the right wing, does a strand of authoritarianism exist there? | ||
| Yes, it does, okay? | ||
| So when Trump is constantly trying to bring the military into the streets, a lot of people don't know this. | ||
| When I debated conservatives, then they looked it up. | ||
| They were kind of shocked, and they said if they knew that earlier, I'm not sure how much they would have supported Trump. | ||
| After he lost in 2020, he not only did all of the crying and the ranting and trying to stay in power, et cetera, but he even put out a post saying that we should terminate the Constitution because he thought there was fraud in the 2020 elections because he didn't win. | ||
| No, brother, nobody's terminating the Constitution under no circumstances, right? | ||
| So when we, and then all this talk of hate speech and targeting their political opponents, et cetera. | ||
| If you thought the Democrats did that with Trump, your answer shouldn't be, oh, that's very unprincipled and terrible and un-American. | ||
| We should also do it. | ||
| No, your answer should be, no one does it, right? | ||
| And when you're empowered, that's when you get to be principled and do the right thing. | ||
| So there is a real authoritarian strand in some of the right. | ||
| At the same time, when we start calling each other names endlessly, Nazi, fascist, racist, this, that, the other thing, we start hating each other. | ||
| And then the people in power win. | ||
| I don't want the people in power to win. | ||
| I don't want the status quo. | ||
| We all desperately need change. | ||
| And the only way we're going to get change is if we unite. | ||
| Because the left on its own cannot beat the establishment, and the right on its own cannot beat the establishment. | ||
| We have to unite in order to beat them because they have so much power. | ||
| They own almost all of our Congress. | ||
| And if we're being honest, almost all of our media. | ||
| Westby, Wisconsin, Tim, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I would just like to say, I don't know where the country's headed. | ||
| I do not do social media. | ||
| I think that's a big share of our problems. | ||
| I just say everybody's in their bubble and they're either out in the right field or out in the left field. | ||
| But what I would truly like to ask this gentleman is how on earth did Donald Trump become so powerful with the Republican Party, when I don't think he even knew where Mississippi, Alabama, were part of decided to run for president. | ||
| He's both the most, I think he's broken every commandment except for maybe two. | ||
| And his emolument clause, he's getting filthy ritual. | ||
| He's in the White House. | ||
| He can have a party in the Rose Garden with the richest billionaires and multi-billionaires in the world to enrich himself more and more. | ||
| And these people blindly follow him. | ||
| I mean, it just, it baffles me. | ||
| Do you have any answer to that, sir? | ||
| Yeah, kind of. | ||
| So, first of all, on the Young Turks, we tell folks, don't attack Trump supporters, attack Trump. | ||
| And if you say, well, okay, attacking Trump is bad, but we also attack Biden. | ||
| We also attack Pelosi and McConnell. | ||
| So when we say attack, we mean in the context of politics and rhetoric, right? | ||
| We criticize all those people because they're in power. | ||
| When you're in power, you're supposed to receive criticism. | ||
| For the voters, we're supposed to try to find common ground. | ||
| So when it comes to Trump, look, I think he's a disaster. | ||
| And I criticize him all the time on the show. | ||
| And I'm worried about the authoritarian streak. | ||
| I'm worried about so many other things with Donald Trump. | ||
| But honestly, I think he's going to get caught. | ||
| Now, is he already quote unquote caught by the left and huge portion of independents? | ||
| Yeah, we can already see it. | ||
| Like, guys, so if you're on the right and you're dug in, I know because I tried to convince Democrats that Joe Biden was too old, and they were super dug in. | ||
| And they were like, nope, nope, nope, he's young and dynamic, young and dynamic. | ||
| He's totally fine. | ||
| He's the best Democrat in the country. | ||
| He's the best equipped to beat Trump. | ||
| And now, of course, everybody says, Oh, I never said that. | ||
| No, a huge percentage of Democratic voters believe that because mainstream media lied to them and told them, Oh, yeah, he's totally fine behind the scenes. | ||
| Nonsense, right? | ||
| But we can all be blind. | ||
| I saw it happen to our side. | ||
| So now when you turn to the right, look, guys, we, the rest of the country, can see that Trump's a con man. | ||
| I know that that really offends a lot of people on the right, but I think you're going to see it eventually too. | ||
| The guy had a fake university, had a fake charity. | ||
| Who has a fake charity? | ||
| And that fake charity bought six-foot portraits of Donald Trump. | ||
| He said he was going to go give the money to people in need with cancer and this and that. | ||
| And instead, he used it for himself and for his legal battles, et cetera. | ||
| And he, a con man always has his number one tool is trust. | ||
| So when you trust them, and Democrats trusted Biden too much, literally, a progressive caucus had an absurd plan called Trust Biden. | ||
| I loathed that plan. | ||
| I was like, you don't trust politicians. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you insane? | |
| And he didn't do any of the things that he promised, right? | ||
| Now on Trump, you're going to see he's not going to do any of the things he promised. | ||
| What's the first thing he did? | ||
| Giant tax cuts for rich, for the corporations. | ||
| You guys get a little crumbs off the table. | ||
| Oh, tiny little bit of tax cuts for the middle class. | ||
| Just like the Democrats go, here's a tiny bit of action on climate change and one drug that we're going to reduce prices on, but I'm going to protect 10,000 drugs. | ||
| It's all theater. | ||
| And when the right wing finds out that it's been a game and that Trump's been part of the game, that he is part of the establishment, he is part of the elites. | ||
| Yes, other elites didn't like him because he was grabbing too much power for himself, but he couldn't wait to be among the elites. | ||
| And he didn't deliver for the average American. | ||
| I think they're going to be furious. | ||
| But in that moment, we cannot go, haha. | ||
| We cannot go, we told you, or we hate you, or you're this or you're that. | ||
| We have to welcome our fellow Americans and give them an alternative. | ||
| The alternative, look, we have a populist plank on TYT.com, okay? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Get money out of politics. | ||
| Over 90% of Americans want it. | ||
| No one in power wants it because they're all corrupt, okay? | ||
| We want to end all the wars. | ||
| Nobody in power wants to end any of the wars. | ||
| Is this a left-wing or a right-wing position so far? | ||
| Two out of two. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's both. | |
| It's both. | ||
| The right-wing and the left-wing said would say we're totally against corruption and we want to end all the wars. | ||
| And then you go down the list: lower drug prices, lower housing prices, higher wages, paid family leave so moms can get 12 weeks off after they have a baby. | ||
| 84% of the country agrees. | ||
| It's not us versus you. | ||
| It's all of us versus the politicians who are taking all that corporate money and the foreign government money and never serving us. | ||
| About 10 minutes left with Jank Uger this morning. | ||
| Jank Uger, would you ever run for office again? | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| So, look, I love where I am, and I love getting the message out through young Turks and the entire TYT network. | ||
| And I love this little community we've built who is open-hearted, cares about everyone, including right and left voters, open-minded. | ||
| So we discuss these issues. | ||
| We take what the Conservatives say seriously. | ||
| We think it through. | ||
| We do it together, and I love it. | ||
| But we do need to find together, collectively, and if I'm a small part of this, I'll be very proud of finding the right candidate. | ||
| And I think we can do it as a country. | ||
| And we certainly can do it within the Democratic Party. | ||
| If you just go back to the same corporate robots, you're going to get the same result. | ||
| You're going to get clowned by con men like Trump who are just going to say they're populists, and you're going to say that you're for, you know, Kamala Harris bragged about having 93 corporate CEOs back her. | ||
| The whole time I'm ripping my hair out going, shush, shush. | ||
| What are you crazy? | ||
| Do you know how much Americans hate corporate CEOs? | ||
| What is wrong with these insiders? | ||
| Right? | ||
| So Trump also loved the corporate CEOs. | ||
| He has more Goldman Sachs guys in his cabinet than anybody else, more billionaires, more business people. | ||
| And all of a sudden, by the way, all the cops are off of Wall Street. | ||
| All the regulators are gone. | ||
| Who are regulators? | ||
| They're just cops, making sure there's no white-collar crime. | ||
| White-collar crime and corruption is going to go through the roof. | ||
| Again, when people get angry about that, please, Democrats, give them your popular policies that are in that populist plank on TYT, and they'll love you for it. | ||
| But you have to do it. | ||
| If you don't do it and you lie to them, they're never going to trust you again. | ||
| Jessup, Maryland, this is Fred Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're on with Jenk Uger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, everybody. | |
| I must admit, you seem a little middle of the road. | ||
| You're riding the fence on both sides. | ||
| And I appreciate that. | ||
| Mostly with Democrats, you don't get that. | ||
| It's all one-sided. | ||
| I mean, they hated Donald Trump for coming down the escalator, man. | ||
| I mean, that's no excuse to go after him. | ||
| He's our first citizen president. | ||
| He's been beaten up by this government his whole life. | ||
| He's not a politician like the normal ones are. | ||
| Authoritarianism. | ||
| Authoritarianism is when they tell you to take the experimental government shot or you're fired. | ||
| Setting up disinformation councils to determine whether to try to hide what they're doing. | ||
| We've been told he was sharp as ever. | ||
| He's the sharpest he's ever been. | ||
| We were lied to. | ||
| Donald Trump just used his own money to redo the Rose Garden, to create that ballroom. | ||
| He donates his presidential check. | ||
| I mean, you're supporting communists in New York City, Mamdani. | ||
| Your side has gone so far left, you're never going to come back. | ||
| So you have to use ways like rigging the election, like all the Democrat swing states where they changed their election laws because of COVID. | ||
| They used COVID to get rid of Trump, and you guys are doing the same messaging over and over. | ||
| It's not going to work. | ||
| Fred. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, what's more than that? | |
| Fred, I want to let Jenkin Uger jump in. | ||
| Can you just define a term for me? | ||
| What do you mean by first citizen president? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, his whole life, he's been a businessman, real estate tycoon. | |
| He's an American icon. | ||
| As soon as he gets into politics, they try to attack him. | ||
| He's been assassinated. | ||
| Two assassination attempts. | ||
| I mean, he's being indicted. | ||
| He's below the law instead of above. | ||
| I mean, given a basic chance of basic rights, he was beneath all that. | ||
| This is a joke. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| Got your point, Fred. | ||
| Jank Uger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I understand what he's saying about first citizen president because Washington still doesn't get it. | ||
| When people ask me, hey, who would you want to run for president, as we talked about earlier, I almost always mention Jon Stewart. | ||
| And then half the time it's a smirk or an eye roll. | ||
| If I mention someone that is not as famous as Jon Stewart, you'll get the full eye roll. | ||
| Like, oh, please, they have to be a politician. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Why? | ||
| What have politicians done for us? | ||
| They've been a disaster my whole life. | ||
| I'll take a non-politician almost every time. | ||
| Now, in the case of Donald Trump, yeah, it's true. | ||
| He's a non-politician. | ||
| And I thought he was going to win the Republican primary three months before they started voting in October of 2015. | ||
| And I said it on the show. | ||
| And I'm on the record and you can go back and check it. | ||
| And when did I know Donald Trump was going to win? | ||
| When he was on the debate stage and he said, you know, I gave all these guys money and they did whatever I wanted. | ||
| I was like, that's it. | ||
| He's going to win. | ||
| Because American people understand that there's corruption. | ||
| The only people who don't understand it is mainstream media reporters. | ||
| They're like, what is corruption? | ||
| Oh, look, APAC gives money and then they do exactly what APAC wants. | ||
| Again, same thing for Big Pharma, Lockheed Martin, et cetera. | ||
| They're like, no, you cannot say that. | ||
| You are all anti-Semites or anti-corporate. | ||
| It's your fault. | ||
| No, it's not our fault. | ||
| It's not our fault that our politicians are corrupt and this entire system is based on corruption. | ||
| They bribe them through campaign contributions and then they work exclusively for those guys. | ||
| Now, back to Trump and what he's talking about authoritarianism. | ||
| Even though Trump was not a politician, what wound up happening, in my opinion, brother, I don't agree with you on Trump because I think he just wound up becoming a politician. | ||
| So now he's doing favors for his donors. | ||
| The oil companies get 18 billion extra dollars in subsidies. | ||
| Look, I'm outraged by the 4 billion that Israel gets every year, but the oil companies get 18 billion for what? | ||
| They're the most profitable companies in the world. | ||
| This is corporatism, where corporations like them take over and force our politicians, or the politicians are happy to do it, take our money and give it to the most profitable companies in the world for no reason other than the bribery. | ||
| So I'm sick of all that. | ||
| But to your point about authoritarianism, I will give you one thing, brother. | ||
| Look, on COVID, we'll still have some disagreements because I think it was healthcare that affected all of us. | ||
| And good news, we don't have to get back into those battles. | ||
| But I understand what you're saying, and I understand that some freedoms were curtailed there. | ||
| So you're not making it up. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| And we can debate about whether they should have been curtailed to some degree for health reasons or not. | ||
| But when you talk about speech, I think you're totally right. | ||
| So Democrats kept saying, well, this is speech that's offensive, so we should ban it. | ||
| Well, but wait a minute. | ||
| It's offensive to you. | ||
| It's not offensive to others. | ||
| And some of the things I say is offensive to the right wing, or nowadays sometimes to the radical left. | ||
| So I'm certainly offensive to politicians. | ||
| I'm offensive to mainstream media. | ||
| So is that hate speech? | ||
| Should I be banned? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| If you're an American and you're offended by speech, I have a revolutionary question for you. | ||
| So what? | ||
| Okay, so for example, Charlie Kirk. | ||
| He offended me all the time. | ||
| I'm from a Muslim background. | ||
| I'm atheist now, but I'm proud to be from a Muslim background. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| We're all human beings. | ||
| We're all human beings. | ||
| And Charlie would say things about Islam that I really, really disagreed with. | ||
| And I would fight him on that. | ||
| Okay, then what happened? | ||
| I didn't melt. | ||
| I didn't melt. | ||
| Okay, he said that. | ||
| I said this. | ||
| It's called the First Amendment. | ||
| It's our most sacred coding in this country. | ||
| The Constitution is the code, the source code for this country. | ||
| And the first thing we wrote was freedom of speech because it gives us the freedom to think what we want and to say what we want. | ||
| That freedom is beautiful and precious, and we must protect it. | ||
| And so whether you're on the left or the right, I'm never going to agree with you on taking away people's speech rights, whether it's because you were offended or for any other reason. | ||
| Upland, California, ARC, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Just a couple minutes left here with Jenkins. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I want to make a reference to post-World War I history when Kamal Atatork came to power and under his leadership, the Young Turk movement started. | ||
| And later on, there was a book recently published called Kamal Atatork in the Imagination of the Nazis. | ||
| My question for the speaker is: how come if he's so pro-democracy and pro-speech, his country, Turkey, and the young Turks have killed the culture and the language of 25% of the Turkish population, the Kurdish people, at the same time, they are empowering Muslims like Sarah in Syria, who are also going after the Kurdish people in Syria. | ||
| I was wondering if that ideology back home is influencing the domestic policy here in the United States and what his answer is regarding importing that ideology here to the United States. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Jank Uger, you can have the final four minutes if you want to. | ||
| Yeah, so unfortunately this brother is making the mistake of looking at everything through an ethnic lens. | ||
| So you said my country. | ||
| Brother, do you know what my country is? | ||
| Right here. | ||
| America. | ||
| America is my country. | ||
| So now we all came from different places, whether it's in this generation, the generation before, or 18 generations earlier, right? | ||
| So yes, I came from Turkey originally. | ||
| That is not my country. | ||
| I literally took an oath to this country. | ||
| So now you want my opinion on Turkey. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| I have an opinion on a lot of countries, right? | ||
| So the Committee on Union and Progress are the people who did the Armenian genocide. | ||
| Did the Armenian genocide happen? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And do a lot of Turks deny it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Why? | ||
| You know, it breaks my heart to say this, but it's the same reason why Israelis deny the genocide that's happening now. | ||
| Because of ethnic pride. | ||
| Well, it couldn't be us. | ||
| We're so moral and lovely and decent. | ||
| We would never commit a genocide. | ||
| They're lying. | ||
| They attacked us first. | ||
| They were using human shields. | ||
| We had to move them. | ||
| The Ottoman Empire's excuses for the Armenian genocide were identical to what Israel is saying today about the genocide they're committing in Gaza. | ||
| So now, wait a minute, I'm from Turkey originally, and I just criticized Turkey and a previous Turkish Empire. | ||
| Wow, it turns out it's possible. | ||
| But when you ask people who support and love Israel that maybe, maybe your current government is doing something wrong, what do they say? | ||
| Anti-Semite! | ||
| Okay, guys, you guys look ridiculous. | ||
| And we're all super tired of it. | ||
| So I can be honest about Turkey. | ||
| The other guy from Norway can be honest about Norway. | ||
| The guy from Mexico can be honest about Mexico. | ||
| But when we get to Israel, no, no. | ||
| No one's allowed to criticize. | ||
| No one's allowed to be honest. | ||
| You all have to bow your heads. | ||
| Otherwise, we're going to say that you hate people and that we're going to try to ruin your lives. | ||
| No. | ||
| When we're in America, we get past those old ethnic allegiances. | ||
| And those racial allegiances and those religious allegiances, that is part of the core of America. | ||
| Look at what we do on TYT right now. | ||
| It's a Turkish American and an Armenian American and a Kasparian who host a show together. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| That's what I love about this country. | ||
| But if you go back to, oh, yeah, but your ancestors did something 150 years ago and somebody else did something 75 years ago and the other one 475 years ago, we're never going to get to the end of it. | ||
| We're going to be at each other's throats for past crimes forever and ever. | ||
| But that doesn't mean you shouldn't acknowledge it. | ||
| You should acknowledge it. | ||
| That's how you get past them. | ||
| And when he's talking about the Kurds not being able to speak their language for so long, that's terrible. | ||
| And I fought to make sure that they could speak their language. | ||
| You see, it's not that hard to be unbiased. | ||
| You have to get past these old school allegiances, which honestly are to some degree betraying America. | ||
| America is about equality and justice. | ||
| That is at our very, very core. | ||
| So when you say no, but if I'm from Turkey, then Turkey has to be first. | ||
| And you have to give money to Turkey. |