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unidentified
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This week, C-SPAN marks the 80th anniversary of the UN. | |
| We'll dig into the C-SPAN archives for historic speeches from U.S. presidents and world leaders delivered at the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York. | ||
| On Tuesday, at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2, we'll feature George W. Bush, who laid out the case against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction in 2002. | ||
| And then a 2006 speech by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, criticizing the United States, calling President George W. Bush the devil. | ||
| And President Barack Obama in 2009 speaking to the body as the first African American to ever hold the office of U.S. President. | ||
| He called for a new chapter of international cooperation amid the war on terror. | ||
| Watch the 80th anniversary of the United Nations all this week at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| 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-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, 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, etc. | ||
| 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 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 Gutfeld, 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 Gino 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, 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. | ||
| Jank, you're with us until the end of our program at 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 sign 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, oh, 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
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She did. | |
| Did she have a job? | ||
|
unidentified
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She got a job. | |
| And let me tell you how she got a job. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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've 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 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. | |
| 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 APAC 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 Jenkins. | ||
|
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 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 if they want to do price fixing. | ||
| Already billions have left that state. | ||
| It goes on and on. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They had good policies, which they never talked about. | ||
| You're right on. | ||
| I hope they don't change, though. | ||
| I hope they don't take what you're saying up their party. | ||
| I hope they're set back 30 years to go in 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. | ||
| 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 Jenky Uger 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'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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 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 when with the Republican Party, when I don't think he even knew where Mississippi, Alabama, were before he decided to run for president. | ||
| He's both the most, I think he's broken every commandment except for maybe two. | ||
| And all in McClaus, he's getting filthy rich while 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 Jank 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 paid, he's 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 that 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, I mean, what's far better than that? | ||
| Fred, I want to let Jank 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 trying assassin. | ||
| Two assassination attempts. | ||
| I mean, he's being indicted. | ||
| He's under, he's below the law instead of above that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jane Gugger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 Jank Uger. | ||
|
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 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 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 hosts 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, 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 was 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. | ||
| You have to say that Turkey never did anything wrong. | ||
| And if you ever criticize Turkey, you're anti-Turkish and you should lose your job. | ||
| You sound like a lunatic. | ||
| That is also true when you say it about Israel or when you say it about any country. | ||
| Put all that junk aside. | ||
| And here, by the way, at the same time, do not put the actions of a foreign government on our American brothers and sisters here. | ||
| Nobody called my Jewish friends and said, hey, should we bomb Gaza? | ||
| No one. | ||
| There is no such thing as the Jews or the Muslims or the Christians. | ||
| It's a giant range of people, poor, middle class, people with power, people without power, et cetera. | ||
| So the Israeli government did these atrocious things. | ||
| But Jewish Americans have been on the forefront of the peace movement and have been amazing throughout. | ||
| So let's all unite, not around being Jewish or Muslim or Christian, or, hey, you're from Israel and the other one's from Turkey and the other one's from Venezuela. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Unite around being an American, where we put that stuff aside and we look at our shared humanity and we fight for equality together. | ||
| That means not just equality for me, by definition, equality for all of us and justice for all of us. | ||
| Jenk Uger is the founder and host of the Young Turks TYT.com, and we always appreciate your time on the Washington Journal. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will attend a UN Security Council meeting to consider peace and security options in Ukraine. | |
| We'll have that live for you at 4 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app. | ||
| Also online at c-span.org. | ||
| Congressman Cohen, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| It's good C-SPAN still funded by the government. | ||
| It is not funded by the government. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean? | |
| Well, I thought you didn't get any money from the government at all. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| And we never have. | ||
| What a disappointment to Elon Musk. | ||
| I'm sure he liked to doge to you. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Love C-SPAN. | ||
| Appreciate the opportunity to come out. | ||
| You know, I wish we could have a thousand C-SPANs across the media spectrum. | ||
| Unfortunately, we don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think C-SPAN is a huge, huge asset to America. | |
| Not just the coverage that we get of both chambers on one and two, but programs like Washington Journal that allow policymakers, lawmakers, personalities to come on and have this question time during Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's a huge benefit. | |
| I hope that all these streaming services carry C-SPAN as well because it's an important service to the American people. | ||
| I'm actually thrilled that this time in Washington Journal, I'm getting a lot of really substantive questions from across the political aisle. | ||
| Our country would be a better place if every American just watched one hour a week. | ||
| They could pick one, two, or three, just one hour a week, and we'd all be a much better country. | ||
| So thank you for your service. | ||
|
unidentified
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America marks 250 years, and C-SPAN is there to commemorate every moment. |