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-host 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 it 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, including with his wife, Erica, and they were all incredibly warm.
So it's a paradox, but that was the paradox of Charlie.
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, you know, 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, you know, 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.
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 of 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've 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 Tunker 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.
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 says something about blackface, what we said is Al Roker was really upset about that, and 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, cancel, 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.
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.
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.
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 can 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 were 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.
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.
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's 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 Momdani is talking about in New York.
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.
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 either out in the right field or out in the left field.
What I would truly like to ask this gentleman is on earth that Donald Trump become so powerful when the Republican Party, when I don't think he even knew where Mississippi, Alabama were before he decided to run for president.
He's about 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.
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, 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.
He 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 uses 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.
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?
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.
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.
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 all the time.
I'm from a Muslim background.
I'm atheist now, but I'm proud to be from a Muslim background.
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.
Just a couple minutes left here with Janky Reynolds.
unidentified
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I want to make a reference to post-World War I history when Kamal Atator 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 Turkish population, the Kurdish people, at the same time they are empowering Muslims like Shara in Syria, who are also going after the Kurdish people.
United Nations General Assembly Meets00:00:15
unidentified
We are going to leave this here for live coverage of remarks from New Hampshire Senator Jean Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
She's in New York City for a conversation on foreign policy hosted by Axios as the United Nations General Assembly meets this week.