The Culture War #29 - From Gamergate To Civil War w/Brianna Wu & Alex Baldwin
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Some say, for those that pay attention heavily to electoral politics, that Donald Trump's emergence, that phenomenon, resulted in this.
But there was a lot of stuff that was going on well before this.
And there are many people who believe Gamergate was the beginning of the culture war.
I think that's a fair assessment.
There were certain things going on that, with media outlets, with Facebook, with the algorithms, that ultimately lead to this phenomenon, which leads to things like Gamergate.
But I think this was the first time we got a higher level political conversation.
And I wonder if it actually has anything to do with politics and more so to do with just a bifurcated generation.
Two different tribes of younger people, two different worldviews, and as they get older and move into the political spaces, their divergent worldviews eventually clash.
We're going to talk about that and a whole lot more.
Joining us to talk about this, we have Brianna Wu.
That we need to have a culture war and we need to be fanning these issues that are on the side, having very hyperbolic approaches to talking to each other.
I think I have a different assessment, respectfully.
But what I wanted to say is, the conclusion I've come to is, I think if you're really serious about making women's lives better in this country, you know, talking and screaming at each other on Twitter, I don't think it's an effective way forward.
I think we need to be far more focused on policies that improve women's lives.
And I think that's one of the main things that feminists miss during Gamergate.
I watched the segment, I came to a different conclusion.
My point here is I think there are, even if I will give you the premise just for the sake of a discussion here, your show is not part of this.
I think it is, but just to move forward, let's say other shows are doing this.
I think we are so, I think we are madmen with our hands around each other's throats and I think we cannot let go.
You did a segment with Jackson Hinkle that I found tremendously disturbing, and I think he was here talking about a bunch of frankly pro-Kremlin talking points, and the whole time I'm watching it, Tim, I'm thinking about how the whole reason That Vladimir Putin chose to invade Ukraine at this particular moment is we are so divided.
He sees us as weak and stupid and unable to agree on anything.
And I think January 6th was really his moment that he knew America was too divided to stop what he wanted to do.
And I do think that division is a function of the culture war.
Vladimir Putin took the opportunity, January 6th being a component of the division in America, to say, if war is to escalate in Eastern Europe, or in say the Pacific Theater, the U.S.
is in serious trouble because it can't even agree with itself how to respond to these things.
So if you've got Republicans just saying no to funding Ukraine's, the war in Ukraine, and Democrats saying yes to funding it, Vladimir Putin, China, they've basically got carte blanche to a certain degree.
Because the United States, if it escalates to a direct confrontation with NATO, which it's on the verge of doing... Sure.
We voted out.
I mean, you're going to get a lot of people who are going to vote for someone like Donald Trump to avoid getting involved in international conflict.
To be fair, though, I mean, if you were to combine all of the other candidates polling, which is fairly pro minus DeSantis and minus DeSantis is a bit middle of the road.
Minus DeSantis and Vivek, you've probably got around, what, 28-30% GOP support for intervention in Ukraine.
But I think if you actually do polling directly on US involvement in Ukraine, it's lower than that in the Republican Party.
Yeah, I think that, you know, what I find in my job, which is running a PAC and doing a lot of polling and missions like that, I do find that Ukraine is not a top thing.
And one of the things I think people like you and I sometimes forget is we're tuned into this stuff 24-7.
I subscribe to like five newspapers.
I watch every show I can all day on YouTube.
Normal people are out there, they're thinking about drug prices, they're thinking about their house, they're thinking about inflation.
They're not as focused on foreign policy as you and I are.
And I think one of the reasons I think you're really wrong about the Biden administration, I think, I think sometimes when I've watched your show, and you can tell me if I'm wrong here, it's felt like you've characterized the Biden administration as eager or very happy to be supporting Ukraine.
I think from the Biden administration's position, every single presidential administration since George Bush has wanted to do a pivot to Asia as far as our foreign policy.
There's a whole world out there besides, you know, the Middle East, And Russia, and they've wanted to look at China, which I think both you and I would agree is an increasing threat to the national security of the United States.
And I think when Putin invaded the Ukraine, I think there were a lot of people in the Biden administration that were thinking about the domestic agenda that they had really focused on, that they would be unable to really push forward as much as they believed because Vladimir Putin was going to be such a mission priority.
Yeah, if you go back to right before the transition in 2016 into 2017 with Donald Trump, the Obama administration's position was that China is not the threat.
And that was the conversation with Michael Flynn, that Vladimir Putin was.
So I don't think the past administrations have... I mean, maybe they say they want to pivot to Asia, but if you take a look at the policies regarding the Middle East, Syria, Turkey, into Ukraine and Europe, with Russia and their gas monopoly and things, I think this is exactly where they want to be.
I mean, I think you and I would probably agree that our long stay in Afghanistan was a serious foreign policy mistake that, frankly, got friends of mine killed.
You know, there have been a lot of missteps in trying to withdraw from that region.
My main point here is I feel like you've mischaracterized what the Biden administration wants to be focused on.
I think this is something they feel forced to focus on.
So I think this is where, and I've watched your show.
I know sometimes like when Emma was on, you criticized her for not watching your show.
I actually watched a lot of your show preparing for this.
So I think one of the ways that I would differ with you is I think generally speaking, directionally, when I've watched your show, I feel like you feel the United States is strongest when we withdraw from the world, and we are not an active participant in geopolitics.
Just as a fact check, it is factual that many of the weapons that we have sent to Ukraine We're sitting here in the United States in warehouses.
There was a huge cost to us keeping that and maintaining it, and many of them were scheduled for decommission anyway.
And there's an under-discussed fact that in many ways we're getting rid of these things that we were going to have to take apart anyway, and there's a cost savings there.
That said, you know, I fully agree that we should be focused more on domestic policy in this country.
I think if you look at the accomplishments of the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Act is clearly, you know, his biggest accomplishment, right?
Well, I think the fact that, you know, gas prices are, what is it, $1.80 less than their peak in 2022.
I think a national unemployment rate of 3.5%.
You know, the United States is not the only country in the world that has dealt with inflation, but I think we have gotten it under control faster than other developed countries.
I wonder though, it's hard for me to give an assessment on that considering COVID overlapping the Trump administration and the Biden administration, so setting a metric on how much we've improved is difficult considering COVID lockdowns.
And just to add on to that, I think if the Biden administration continues to say the economy's good, the economy is good, more Americans are working than ever before, can we swear on this show?
And now you've got, I don't know exactly where we're at with the Fed raising interest rates, but it's getting quite alarming, in fact.
I agree.
And I'm wondering if, you know, as student loans start kicking in, the people who haven't been paying over the past several years are not going to be able to start paying now.
So it doesn't seem like, you know, whatever the Inflation Reduction Act may do, I do think the name is one of those, right, they give these bills names to make it look like, you know, Patriot Act or whatever.
But I'm quite concerned about where the economy goes, and I'm not an economist.
I just, I can see what the Fed is doing, and I can see how, I mean, you got two big indicators socially, which is like Michael Burry saying, or the reports that Michael Burry took a 1.6 billion dollar short against the U.S.
stock market.
And he's the guy from the Big Short.
Right.
And so I'm wondering if he's looking at it similarly to how the housing crisis happened in that the government gives out student loans to people who don't have a career, and there's no indication they'll be able to pay that money back.
And now with student loans kicking back in, we may be looking at something similar.
Not the same, because I don't know, I don't think they're doing student loan-backed securities or anything like that.
But when these people stop paying, there's going to be a hiccup, which is going to cause a serious issue.
More importantly, to add to that, if young people can't buy houses, Then the housing market ceases to exist.
I mean, it's gonna plummet when we're looking at millennials into their mid to late 30s and they can't buy homes.
To come back to the point though, rent, I really do believe that large data aggregation is one of the major factors.
Rent in the United States has skyrocketed because you've got landlords using large data.
There was a really good report that came out recently on this talking about how they will figure out how to push the rent higher, higher, higher, higher, higher to the point people will actually pay it.
And it's caused this huge skyrocket in rent all across the United States.
Additionally, I don't know if you follow the account CarDealershipGuy on Twitter.
Really, really interesting person.
He does a lot of data research into used car prices.
I collect and restore old Porsches, so I love this account.
And, you know, he's talking about how you've got used car dealerships just absolutely folding in Florida right now.
The prices have gone through the roof, the inventory is down, and you've got even wholesale businesses that cannot make any money from this.
You know, the United States is a, you have to have a car to get around, and just normal people are priced out of it.
I mean, maybe that's why Michael Burry is betting against it because the value of something is what someone's willing to pay for it.
Right.
And what we have now is people are looking at houses and cars and they're saying, well, if they're selling it for this price, I'm going to sell it for this price.
And, you know, so interestingly, at the same time, inventory is low.
Yeah.
I went to, we went to go look at used car because we have guest transportation and we go to these dealerships and they're like, we have two vehicles available.
I'm like, What?
We had to go to like five different dealerships until we could find something.
We ended up buying one and I'll spare the auto manufacturer but it was a piece of garbage we lost a ton of money on because it kept breaking and we're struggling to find a vehicle.
Prices are through the roof.
It's crazy and we're a company that can afford to do this.
I don't, and I don't understand how whatever the system is persists as it is.
You look at things like Uber, with how many people, you're not making a living doing Uber.
The cost of wear and tear on your vehicle, you're probably making a couple bucks, I think New York Times said it was like a couple bucks an hour, after you pay for your gas, you pay for your brakes, your tires, and all the damage to your car, and then The intrinsic value of the car is decreasing because you're driving it too much, but there are people who think this is short-term cash.
So all of that, especially with housing markets, oh man, don't get me started on like Airbnbs and everything.
Let's talk about where the disagreement comes in and how The concern, I suppose, is, as tensions escalate in this country in scary ways, many people believe it all started with the first big battle of the culture, whatever you want to call it, you mentioned you were a four-star general, is Gamergate.
It's just there are clashing narratives about what it is.
On one side, you've got people that were fighting a fight for better transparency, better ethics in games journalism and the gaming industry as a whole.
Less nepotism, so on and so forth.
And on the other side, you've got people who say, no, this movement is – any kind of ethical concerns they have is a smokescreen.
What they're actually about is harassing women and minorities and trying to get them out of the gaming sphere.
I truly believe, you ran the Gamergate subreddit, something I had some issues with, but I truly do believe you personally were in it to, because of some concerns about journalism, I know you yourself went to J school, and this is your focus.
I believe you when you say that.
I think the outcome of Gamergate is actually a lot wider.
It was the start of how we now argue online.
And Tim, I want to bring this back to you and ask you a really honest question.
So with my current job, you know, I work with Cenk Uygur.
I've gotten to know a lot of people in the space.
Destiny, I know you're friends with him.
He's great.
Really good person.
And a commonality that I see as I get to know people in this space is All of us carry a certain level of, I think trauma is too strong a word, but you get screamed at all the time by everyone taking the worst possible interpretation of everything you say.
And I think it damages every single public figure out there on the right and the left.
I had a conversation with Lauren Southern about this a few days ago.
You know, this is just, it's a commonality.
And I think at its core, Gamergate was the start of this really destructive, personal way that we argue online.
Where if you don't like somebody, you go into their past, and you find stuff they've said that you disagree with, and you get a mob together, and attack, attack, attack, clip chip it, put anything you've set up that's stupid on subreddit, and you destroy the person.
And that's my core message to you, man, is, look, my hands are covered with blood in this, as much as anyone's can be.
I've come to the conclusion that this is a war and a tactic that does not do anything but lead us into misery.
And I think if you're serious about the issues we're talking about, I think the only sane thing for people to do that truly cares is to get off Twitter and talk about public policy.
Just one more thing.
If I could go back in time for Gamergate and do something different, I would have deleted my damn account and I would have taken that moment where Intel was putting up $100 million to help women in tech initiatives.
I would have spent all that effort behind the damn scenes trying to get game companies to commit to getting over this hiring bias that they do have in the game industry.
That would have been a trillion times more constructive.
It would have led to actual changes in the game industry.
And now as we find the labor conditions in the game industry are an S show, no matter if you're male, female, whatever, like it would have helped set a standard that would benefit everyone today.
I didn't, I got caught up in something that was, I understand why I did it, but it was not productive.
And this is what I'm trying to tell people.
We've got to focus more on policy and less at screaming each other.
And so when it comes to issues of the internet, you do have, there are grifters.
Grifters exist.
They exist to generate attention and they put out things that are fundamentally false or mischaracterizations with the intention of generating traffic, making money.
And so there's a video that was tweeted out by an account called Clown World showing a thin man and woman and then a fat man and woman.
For clarification, the woman is not the same person.
She's a cyclist.
She's fit and exercising and all that stuff.
But this is a similar phenomenon that people embrace something that generates revenue and traffic, and then they keep exacerbating it and getting crazier and crazier with it until you have a guy who is morbidly obese riding around on a mobility scooter, but using that to generate revenue.
So after there were serious concerns about this dude's wellbeing, because he started gaining mass amounts of weight, There was like a conversation saying, you need to stop doing this.
Instead, he's put out videos of him riding a mobility scooter and smashing his chin and embracing the morbid obesity because it generates, my presumption is, he is playing into the role that gets him traffic, the shock content.
His videos went from hundreds of thousands as a thin man eating food to millions now as two morbidly obese.
And I got to tell you, man, You look at the comments on his latest video, there was that woman.
She's grunting and making noises as she stirs noodles.
And I'm like, this is not content where it's like a food taste test.
This is not Gordon Ramsay saying like, I really like the salting.
This is some kind of like a fetishist content where they want to hear the man and woman grunt and groan while they eat food.
And then they embrace the vice, I suppose.
That's just, I don't want to just go too much into that, but my point is, that happens in every, every genre.
You name it.
Every, every space, be it gaming, movies, food, cards, politics, people are constantly looking for the next thing that will get them more traffic to embrace, to push, and to become.
I think the industry exists on the left and the right, and I think people on the right would say, it's the left doing this every day, and people on the left would say it's a problem of the right, when in reality, as CGP Grey described it, uh, he had a video, I don't know if you've seen it, called this, what is it called?
This video will make you angry?
Or something?
Where he explains that no one, no one in these spaces are talking to each other.
Which means the only thing you're likely going to hear is the worst thing that your rival faction has done, or rival tribe, and there's very little conversation about the good things or the merits of what they're describing.
unidentified
Don't you think you've played a role in that, though?
Well, Tim, I've watched every video you've ever put out, but I watched a fair sampling of your last week.
I could not find one credible example of you saying something nice about the left.
I think your guests, generally speaking, tilt far to the right.
You're doing an event soon with Donald Trump Jr., which is fine that you're right, but I think my message respectfully to you is I think you've played a role in this culture war.
Kyle Kalinske is a cool dude, and he's actually, yeah, I've talked to him for quite a bit about this stuff.
I'm actually a big fan.
And he said, yeah, we'll figure it out.
I'm not gonna drag anybody for having a show and not canceling their show to come on my show.
That's ridiculous.
So for Janko, Hasan Piker agreed to come on at one point, DM'd me, this was during COVID and said, I just don't think I can travel because there's concerns of COVID.
I said, totally fair.
And later went on to say that he won't do my show.
Then Sam Seder, of course, is the best example of duplicitousness.
And I think majority report is the epitome of what you've described.
That is not to say that no one on the right does anything similar, but I view the majority report as like political WWE.
Yeah, I think their whole game, their mission is exactly as you described.
To take things out of context, manipulate them, to satiate their viewers' basest instincts or whatever.
So, you know, a couple examples is I was critical of David Pakman and then apologized for this because I said, wow, he's got so many videos about Trump.
And then I was like, oh, I mean, we do too, right?
We should reflect on that.
We're both talking about high-level politics.
I can respect that.
I've known David for a decade, longer than that.
You look at Sam Seder and Majority Report, their videos are all about people.
It's about Dave Rubin.
It's about me.
It's not about high-level politics or policy.
It is the basis of social conflict and complaints.
The example that I often give, which exemplifies this, is we put out a song, totally apolitical song, I don't agree with what you're about to say, but please proceed actually.
actually over here produced it.
And when they played it on their show, they played it in such a way, I don't understand. - I don't agree with what you're about to say, but please proceed. - Right, so if you listen to it, they played in such a way that the quality was dramatically reduced, and then they said it sounded like Nickelback.
Two things.
Yes, sure, if you play it at low quality and say it sounds bad, it sounds bad, but the song's actually masterfully done.
They say it sounds like Nickelback.
Well, that's nonsense.
The genre of the song we produce is closer to emo and not modern rock.
They're saying things with the goal of riling up their bass to generate revenue.
Okay, so first of all, I have been a majority, like Sam's my dude, I have watched majority reports since the Bush administration.
He kept me sane.
I was living in Mississippi during the Bush administration and the only voice saying anything sane about the Iraq war, which you agreed with back then, I do believe.
I think they bring on people like Digby, Heather Pardon, who you should definitely invite on the show, Andy Kimler.
I do think they go after Dave Rubin, and I'm not gonna lie, I'm not above enjoying those segments, and I have laughed my ass off when they've gone after you.
But I just, I think that it is, I think it is done in a smart way, and I think it's, I don't think it's politically productive.
I do want to say two things and I want to come back to Sam in the majority report.
What I find really frustrating about Cenk's public reputation is I've worked with Cenk for five years now.
Cenk is the most He is literally the best boss I've ever had in the sense that he listens to problems, he raises millions for the Democrats, gets no credit for it whatsoever, is always trying to do constructive things for the party and back channel.
There's no person I've ever worked with ever in any industry that hires as many strong women to surround himself with.
And truly listens to them and respects them.
And just is, even as a friend, is always there if you've had a bad day to listen to them.
And it's just mind-boggling to me because the reputation of Cenk is this like, you know, jackass, frankly.
It's just not the guy I work with at all.
And, you know, so I think that I think that you're wrong about Cenk, and I think if you look directionally at the totality of his work, I think you would see he's someone that is truly trying to build this.
No, I think he's, as you described, the culture war.
Somebody who is saying what needs to be said because it generates revenue.
I'll give you another example.
Something called the Alternative Influencer Report came out.
This was back in, I think, like 2018.
It was essentially a fictitious document that had a bunch of nodes, like the conspiracy theory things where people tie ribbons to each other.
In this, for instance, they said that Chris Ragon, game content creator, today rather apolitical, was directly linked to Richard Spencer.
They drew a line directly between a guy who talks about video games and, quite literally, the most prominent white nationalist at the time.
Right smack dab in the middle of it was me, connected to everybody.
And they connected me to people I'd never met before.
They connected me to people like Stephen Molyneux I'd never even spoken a word to or spoken about.
And so when this report comes out, it instantly gets picked up by a whole bunch of mainstream corporate publications.
It's absurdly false in its premise.
The Young Turks produced a segment where they used an image with my name right in the middle about the influencer network of the far right or whatever.
Me, actually knowing Anna and Cenk, having been on their show several times, DMing with them.
The last time I saw Cenk Uygur, he walked up to me, we shook hands, says, how's it been?
How's it been going?
Everything good?
I met Politicon, and I see Jake standing in the hallway.
And I walk up, I was like, hey, how's it going, man?
And he's like, hey.
And I was like, I sent you a message about that video you produced where you put, you know, you put me in this thing about, like, Richard Spencer or whatever, and I was like, I just, you never responded, so...
What does Cenk do?
Starts screaming in my face at the top of his lungs.
It's filmed by multiple film crews and I just went, why are you yelling at me?
And then he started screaming about Donald Trump and about the right and I can't remember exactly what was said and then he stormed off, went in a room where I was told I wasn't allowed to go in.
And that was the last physical interaction I've had with the man and since then we've only ever invited the likes of all of these left prominent left personalities.
So I'm not going to speak for anybody on the right, but I can tell you I agree with you about the culture war and I see You've got people like Ben Shapiro, who you can say he's wrong for days, but he doesn't do these things either.
He sat down with Anna, and she agreed to sit down with him.
If when Hassan told me publicly on Twitter he would come on the show and then the same exact tweet that I put out saying we try to get people on the left to come on the show and talk to us.
Hassan said I'm game or something that effect.
I DM'd him.
He said let's figure it out.
He then responded and said I'm actually concerned about traveling around due to COVID and I said no worries man I really appreciate you reaching out.
Sam decided to turn it into rage bait content and persist in his endeavor to use it.
It just seems to me, if I can be here today and be sitting down with one of the Gamergate mods, someone, you know, like, I know you did not do this, but the Gamergate movement sent me quite a lot of death threats, rape threats, made my life terrible, hacked my bank account, you know, really, really, really disrupted my life.
If I can let that go, and there was a Washington Post article about me trying to forgive Gamer Gators and move forward, like, maybe you should, like, you're clearly, I'm not saying you're wrong to be upset about these things, and I truly understand.
I've been the target of those kinds of shows as well.
But, you know, the truth is we've got to find a way to live together in this country and move forward.
So I think, I genuinely think, Maybe have your producer, Lisa, she's a lovely person, talk to Sam, set some ground rules, leave personal stuff out of it.
Just talk to him like an adult.
Let that go.
They sent me letters, dude, talking about cutting my skin off my body and boiling it and feeding it to me.
So, despite the things, say, like Anna said about me, or... Actually, to be fair, I'm not... I think it may have been Anna and Nando Villa, which is really funny, because I know Nando as well, and I've no beef with them, and I'm just confused as to why they're making a video insulting me.
Because I was reading a Washington Post article that was deemed true by them.
Cenk screamed in my face in a shocking way that I was confused.
The BBC company said, what just happened?
And they interviewed me about it.
I was like, I have no idea.
But the thing with Sam Seder...
If you look at like the Ethan Klein, Steven Crowder bit, it's just, it's a clown show.
And you can, I understand that they talk policy and they talk about these things, but you can't come in here and be like, the fact that people are doing these things and making a spectacle and, you know, having each other at their throats, we can't do things like that.
It's like, well, Sam Seder is the epitome of that.
You can criticize a lot of people on the right who do similar things, but Sam is the... It masquerades as fact content, which it has a decent amount of, that's fine, but it is WWE.
It is, you know, when they come in here, they intentionally... Look at Emma, right?
What did she say when she came in here?
Why do you think your show influences neo-Nazis to get mass murders or something like that?
Which is an outright fabrication and a manipulation.
Well, that's in response to her saying that there should be books explaining scat and sexual activities to minors when we discussed a teacher who actually had the police called on her because she was talking to 10-year-olds about how to use Grindr and Emma said that she supports that.
I said, the only assumption we can make if someone wants children to learn how to use Grindr is that they have proclivities towards children.
What I think I would like to propose is, you know, I can't speak for Cenk, but I bet, I think there's a good chance if you talk to him, he would consider coming on the show today.
It's, it's more like, uh, you know, if, if, if I'm engaging, if I'm going to play basketball and someone asks me to come and play basketball, I am not going to go play on the Washington Generals or the Harlem Globetrotters.
That's not actually playing the game.
Now, if you want to put on a show where the generals slip, fumble, and then there's like, it's entertaining for people as the guy spins the ball on his finger.
He knows, and it is not my place to come say, hey, this person has explicitly said these things for a variety of reasons.
I am not going to get involved in the WWE of Sam Seder.
I'm going to explain my position, but by all means, by all means, when Emma was on the show, she outright admitted they know exactly what I'm talking about.
I asked her, you know that Sam's blacklisted from various shows, and she said, of course, and it's because they're scared to debate Sam, or whatever her opinion was.
And that's fine, you can believe he's blacklisted for whatever reason, but I can tell you explicitly, some of the biggest podcasts in the political space have outright said that the dude, Sam, will have, like, I'll use this example as the perfect example, When Emma, in the middle of conversation, abruptly said, why do you think your show inspired a neo-Nazi mass shooter?
That thing right there is why people be like, scratch this guy's name off the books, he's not welcome on this show.
As a matter, so I don't agree with her assessment, to be clear, but the factual basement of what she was talking about is there was a mass shooter, as I understand, correct me if I'm wrong here, and they were found to be a really big fan of your show.
And so why bring that up without doing any, it's shock WWE content.
But I'll tell you exactly what it was.
The guy in Texas had four screenshots of one episode where one guest had said a specific thing.
The screenshot in question was quoting a specific thing said by one time a guest.
To then come out and say that your show did this thing when this individual simply posted four screenshots of one guy is exactly the issue with the majority report.
Well, that's lying to people and manipulating the space and If you're trying to convince people that because one crazy person posted four screenshots that my show had anything to do with that, these are the people who are making the culture war worse and fanning the flames of violence.
Now, I have seen your show, like, promote some things.
Like, you yourself have said, civil war, civil war, civil war.
There's a civil war coming.
We're in the middle of a civil war.
So I think if there's anyone in this situation that is advocating violence and stochastic terrorism, I think, respectfully, you would be the party I think would have done that much more than majority.
I think that you, this is my issue with, and this is, I didn't come here today to adjudicate the beef between you and Sam.
This is what I wanted to say to you, Tim.
I understand that you are going to vote for Donald Trump in 2024.
That you're right.
I wholly support that, or respect you for it, right?
You've thought your way into the position.
That's democracy.
We've got to work our butts off and beat you at the ballot box.
I don't worry about losing an election to your audience as much as I worry about you convincing your audience that the Justice Department is crooked, and the FBI is crooked, and the local police department is crooked, and the elections are crooked, and that there's no point to believing in American democracy or fighting for it.
That's probably a technicality in which I've said... Elections have never been this, two guys stand up, say I have position A, I have position B, and then everyone smiles and shakes hands.
Elections have always been dirty politics, ads that take quotes out of context, but I've never said that the elections are unwinnable or that there's no point.
In fact, I've said quite the opposite.
Since Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden, I have even argued to Steve Bannon's face, he is wrong about how Donald Trump lost.
Donald Trump lost because people voted against him.
And there are people who think Joe Biden could not have gotten those votes, and I'm like, he didn't get those votes.
They were anti-Donald Trump votes.
This is what everything the media had said up until the 2020 election, is that the famous article, I think it was Atlantic, stay alive Joe Biden, we just need your corporeal form.
Joe Biden got more votes than Donald Trump and then there's the nuance of policy procedure and what people would argue is free and fair is what's at question.
What's not at question is I do not believe China mass printed votes or that Dominion was flipping things or any of that stuff.
What matters is that through a overwhelmingly legal strategy and process, Democrats ran an election strategy which resulted in Joe Biden beating Donald Trump.
And it actually distracts from the actual issues conservatives and Republicans would have to address if they want to win, which is Democrats masterfully played policy and procedure to the extent that they could, resulting in victories.
And that's exactly why I said no election has ever been two people standing up saying, here are my beliefs, and then people just shake hands and agree.
You have jurisprudence, you have people working through the legal, hold on, Working through the legal department in every single state and coming to this.
Now I think if you want to go back to 2000 and look at like the Miami-Dade County and some of the ways Bush won in 2000, I think there was some really, like Catherine Harris and all of that.
The people around him that he hired were were abysmal.
But in this this article, for instance, this this gets to the core of what we mean by free and fair elections.
The average person you probably ask who is a Trump supporter is probably not going to say the election was stolen because China did X or Venezuela or Germany or whatever.
What they're going to say is, here you go, an article about which includes Facebook putting in, you know, half a billion dollars in funding to influence policy, executives of states changing voting law without approval of state legislature.
These are things that Republicans say, hey, you're playing dirty.
So one of the issues that was, this is Texas v. Pennsylvania, that the judiciary or the executive of various states changed election law without the approval of a legislature.
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The Constitution... But if that's the process... It's not.
Well, I think we are, or at least this is my disagreement with you.
I think there are ways to talk about, like here's one.
An issue I really care a lot about is cybersecurity and elections.
This is huge.
This is something I care a ton about.
We have, what is it, 50 states, a ton of territories, individual counties in every single state, different voting systems, different operating systems, different voting machines.
There's a way to talk about that calmly and rationally that doesn't mislead the American people into thinking that, you know, say, China has hacked into our voting machines.
I think my critique of your show, respectfully, would be, I think there's a sleight of hand that leads your audience to frequently believe that our Justice Department is broken.
So in the middle of Gamergate, I worked directly with the Eric Holder Justice Department trying to get some of the highest profile death threats on my life prosecuted.
It was plainly illegal, had multiple calls with the White House about this.
The Justice Department personally failed me.
So I've got my own beefs here, but I think directionally, if you look at who works at the Justice Department, it tends to be career prosecutors that are not partisan, that are there trying to do the best they can.
And I do believe, I think Sean would agree with me, our mutual friend Sean, actual justice warrior, that the United States does have directionally one of the better justice systems in the entire world.
I completely agree with that, but that doesn't mean the DOJ is Well, let's talk about, I don't know, like Martin Luther King Jr.
or Malcolm X. Let's go back in time and talk about, you know, you got that really great meme about the CIA, which I also think very much applies to the FBI, that we know they've done crooked things in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s.
There's been no serious reforms, but don't worry, everything's okay now.
There's no one in this room I think today that would not strongly argue that the United States has not made immense foreign policy missteps.
But I think directionally, if you look at the work of the Justice Department, I do think these are honest professionals trying to do the best.
And just one more thing on this.
This is a complaint I have about the left too.
Because something I deal with so often is people that just believe automatically like every police officer is corrupt or crooked and we just need to be like they're all evil.
And I think about my conservative friend Connor.
CounterPoints on Twitter.
Y'all should follow him.
Yeah, he was telling me the other day about how when he was a cop, he got paid $40,000 a year to wrestle crackheads to the ground every other day.
It's a terrible job.
So I think that I wish that we could reframe the ways that we talk about these issues as constructive instead of destructive.
I think destructive is talking about the Justice Department as if it's crooked, it's in the bag against Trump.
I think constructive is to look at the situations like Martin Luther King, to talk about reforming it within the system and make sure those excesses do not happen again.
There has never been a point in which I have advocated for, or even defended in any way.
In fact, I've become triggered in the people trying to maintain these absurd narratives to the point of anger, when they would say things like, the real inauguration date is March 11th, and then it doesn't happen.
And then the most annoying thing about the whole fraud narrative is that Trump comes out right after the election saying it was stolen from me, convincing his voters not to vote in Georgia.
And so this is the frustrating thing about political commentary on the left, nonprofit organizations that profit off of lying about what my position is.
Because I watched multiple clips of you before this show.
And you're talking about how, like, the prosecutions against Trump by the Department of Justice in multiple states, like, what's her name, Frannie... Fannie Willis.
Talking about her in Georgia, how as if she is out here doing something that's underhanded or wrong, when it's just Trump meeting the fate he decided.
Jenna Ellis is charged on counts one and two, simply being part of a criminal conspiracy and solicitation to a public official to violate their oath of office.
Why?
Because she provided legal counsel to Trump.
That's it.
She's not charged on, there's 30 some odd counts, one and two only for Jenna Ellis.
And the question is, if you go to a lawyer and you say, what should I do here?
And they provide you legal advice, to say that's a conspiracy is insane.
More importantly, one of the Republicans indicted in Georgia He was indicted because he was working with what's called an alternate slate of electors, which this country has always had.
So if you sit here and say Fonny Willis didn't do anything wrong, it's absurd, but you don't understand the historical context of what an alternate elector is and how they operate.
Knowing the election of 1960, I'll tell you exactly what happened.
Hawaii went Republican.
It was certified Republican.
The Democrats convened an alternate slate of, as you described, fake electors and delivered the fake electors to the electoral vote count.
Richard Nixon, as Vice President, said, I am not going to count the certified vote.
I'm going to choose the Democrat vote.
Does anyone oppose?
They did not, and it was chosen.
Now you can argue that shouldn't be done.
You can argue that the Republicans should not have done it.
But it's not a crime to say that the process of the Constitution requires there be electors in the event a lawsuit is won in court.
The first thing is, you know, Trump is facing... I don't care about Janet Ellis as much as I care about Trump, right?
There are multiple indictments in multiple states.
Trump is the person I care about.
And I think it's worth saying, like, we haven't had a chance to really talk about Ukraine policy yet, but, you know, like, when Donald Trump went and, like, January 6th happened, like, this was, like, just roll the credits for Vladimir Putin on, like, seeing the United States destroy itself.
Like, this was his wildest, wildest dream.
Well, you have Jackson Hinkle on here to just put forward pro-Kremlin propaganda.
Coming back to this, this was a tremendously dark day for the United States.
I do think Donald Trump played a role.
It's not like there's no evidence.
Anyone out there can listen to him saying that clip, you know, I just need you to go find me X number of votes, that phone call of Brad Ratzberger.
And so when we talk about say like the corruption in our judicial, our justice system, I don't say, for the most part, you know, look at this charge against Donald Trump for this specific thing he did.
In fact, I say Jenna Ellis almost every single time.
Don't get me wrong, I think the charges against Trump are laughable and they're egregious, but the real crux of the issue is they're going after his lawyers.
And you can argue about Giuliani, because Giuliani was deeply involved in a lot.
And there's a question about what's the line, but Jen Ellis didn't do anything.
And you can also take a look at Mark Meadows going after former administration.
Now, I'll tell you what's really shocking is acting assistant attorney general, Jeffrey Clark.
He's quite literally appointed to a government position.
Trump asks him a question about policy and he says, here's how it works.
Here's what I think would happen.
And they criminally charge him for it.
The fact that Fannie Willis is trying to indict former executive branch officials for giving their legal opinions, as is their duty, is insane.
The Justice Department, meaning the justice system of the United States.
Well, what I think is happening here is, I think, frankly, you have a business relationship with the Trump campaign.
You're doing events with Trump and, you know, I think that it would lead a reasonable person watching your show on the outside to go, what is going on here?
Is Tim really being an impartial observer of this?
How about all of the issues we've brought up pertaining to... He stopped disclosing the number of drone strikes happening in the Middle East and the argument around that.
Oh yeah, my position is we are looking at a deeply broken and corrupt system that has been for quite some time.
And don't get me wrong, the US has a lot of really great things about it.
In fact, it's probably the best country on the planet in a lot of different ways.
But to sit back and take a look at like how the FDA revolving door politics work, how the Obama administration and the big... FDA revolving door politics?
Yes, right.
Like someone will work for a major pharmaceutical, and then when they retire, they get appointed to the FDA.
You take a look at the Trans-Pacific Partnership, you take a look at Monsanto, you take a look at how the United States gives favorable... I mean, man, look at 2008.
Let's talk about the housing crisis, which destroyed middle-class Americans.
The banks were offloading their screw-up, and none of them get arrested for the fraud they committed.
And I think, oh boy, he, uh, he did a lot of what I expected it to be.
I mean, come on, John Bolton, the people he brought in and brought around him, they say like, oh, did he drain the swamp?
And I'm like, yeah, come on, man.
There were some things he did that I liked.
The economy was, was, was doing better.
He brought back $3 billion worth of, uh, manufacturing into Michigan for the auto industry.
I like the Abraham Accords.
I like the, the, the work he did in crossing the DMZ, trying to bring peace to North Korea.
And then he did a whole lot of, you know, Bad, stupid things that he justified.
I respect that he was honest about a good amount of it, such as selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to profit for the US economy, or keeping troops in Syria to protect oil.
That was hilarious.
I'm glad that we had someone like that.
But my view of Trump today is, what we need is bureaucrats, who have been in government for decades, career government employees, to be fired.
And the closest we'll probably get to it is a Donald Trump presidency.
You know, the Biden administration will reinforce it.
DeSantis will compromise with it.
Trump, I don't know, if he goes in like a bull in a china shop, we'll get a bunch of broken glass.
But we can then go in and clean that up and get rid of the problem.
So I think this, this is what we should be talking about today.
Because I think you and I have very different theories of change for the United States.
You know, I know this sounds idealistic, but you know, my father was a naval officer.
I think every single day about duty to my country and what I owe my country.
I genuinely do.
And you know, what I've seen throughout my lifetime I think you have an era of leadership in the United States with the baby boomers that history is going to be brutal to.
I think that this is an era of their leadership where they've done nothing about climate change, where income inequality has gone through the roof because of their lack of attention, housing policy is broken, public transportation is broken, college is broken.
Loans are broken, our auto industry is broken, and they've just made bank the entire time.
Not the people that vote, but the leaders themselves.
On both sides.
I think history is going to be brutal.
This is where I think we have a difference of perspective here.
I see this, and I think to myself, you know, Gen X, I'm the youngest Gen X can be in the last year, Gen X, for whatever reason, did not take our place in government.
We sat it out, we let our cynicism take over, and we really left the United States to the baby boomers to have an unusually long tenure of power.
And Alex, one of the lessons I've learned since Gamergate is there are productive things that I can do about that, and there are unproductive.
Unproductive is having a very emotional response on Twitter when I'm getting a death or a rape threat and trying to, you know, basically shame men into acting better.
That's not productive.
A productive thing I can do is work through a pack to elect candidates that I believe in, who will work on the policies that I believe in.
And I think, generally speaking, Tim, what I've seen from your show It's the same criticism I have of a lot of communist Twitter, where they believe there's going to be this glorious revolution, or just break everything apart, then step to his question mark, and then it's utopia.
Like in Massachusetts, we have a terrible housing crisis.
And look, don't get me wrong, I'm Team Democrat all day, every day, but I've seen up close in my own efforts to get elected the problem of institutionalized democratic power in a major city and how it is beholden to the money from big developers and the powerful business interests, right?
Massachusetts has some of the strongest unions in the entire country.
So I hear what you're saying.
I've seen the downside to that.
I don't think you can conclude that, you know, the entire system should be thrown away because But I'm not saying the entire system should be thrown away.
I think the issue is that we've got people who are appointed positions in government, be it intelligence agencies or administrative positions, that are unelected, that are doing a bad job, that we need to fire.
But they're in these positions, and there's too many of them.
There's tens of thousands of bureaucrats.
We want to whittle this down and kind of take an assessment as to why we're spending so much money on, say, housing, but not actually solving the crisis.
The simplified version is you've got bloated inconsistent departments that don't seem to be solving their problems.
So I'm referring to say like Department of Education employees.
What I go as far as to say abolish the DOE like Thomas Massie or many of the Libertarians like they go a little bit further far from me, but I certainly think when you take a look at why we are struggling as a nation in education, but we have all of these employees in this department.
So Donald Trump comes in Towards the end of his first term, he's got Schedule F, which would allow for the speedier termination of many of these government employees.
I'm in favor of that.
I think centralization of power, be it corporate or government, leads to serious problems, oppression, and periodically we have to work to decentralize these systems, be it either through being able to assess and lay off people that have been here for too long and shouldn't be there, or, you know, I think that's probably the best way to do it.
Yeah, a book that really changed my understanding of how government operates at the highest levels.
There's a guy out there, former editor of Time, his name is Richard Stengel.
He wrote a fantastic book.
It's called Information Warfare.
It's all about the State Department's efforts to basically do counter-narrative to information warfare by ISIS under the Obama administration.
So you have a guy that works in publishing his entire life covering powerful government officials, and then boom!
He's in the middle of the highest levels of the State Department and learning how the State Department functions.
And you learn things like, you know, the computers there are Windows 98 and you cannot receive email.
In a real way, and that the reason Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton had this server, email server issues, because the computer system there is so broken and not maintained, it is because they needed to offload to Google so they could do their damn jobs, right?
And you learn about, like, the way it's very It's very decision-hesitant, because you have career professionals there that know they're going to be there for a Republican or a Democratic presidency next, so they're very hesitant to do anything that will put their neck out on the chopping block, right?
So, I read Information Warfare.
And the conclusion I come to with this isn't, you know, the State Department is broken because we need to fire all the middle managers.
It's actually the opposite.
We need to invest in computer systems.
We need to invest in, like, a way to open the front door.
We need to, like, invest in the culture so people can speak their mind more freely.
But this is... I'm trying to be respectful to your Republican listeners, but it seems to me, generally speaking, if you're talking about the infrastructure of the United States, our airports are completely broken right now.
And I think that is largely because we've been unwilling to invest in the kind of information technology overhaul that the FAA really needs.
I think the same thing is true at the State Department.
We need to be doubling down on the infrastructure, particularly technology infrastructure.
Let's start from the beginning.
jobs and I do think disproportionately it has been Republican administrations have been unwilling to fund it. - Well let's start from the beginning.
So everyone is going to fight as hard as possible to keep the position they have in the government, and we're probably at the point where I think after several decades of this, we have to say, tear off the bandage, clean it down, new program, or maintain same funding, but you've gotta clean it up.
If you look at government, and let's just be clear, the Obama administration had a wonderful program with a bunch of people from the tech industry that worked for his administration that started looking at the technology infrastructure challenges of the United States and wanted to bring their experience at Google, Apple, Microsoft, all these tech companies to come in and fix our broken processes.
I believe that one of the reasons our technology infrastructure in the United States is so broken is because boomers don't consider these problems the way you and I understand that they're problems.
This is Gen X's fault and the boomers fault because we understand these problems.
And I must give credit to the Boomers for things like Star Trek The Next Generation, Stargate, and the great things they did, but for whatever reason, Uh, it's not just the Boomers, I'm being hyperbolic, but also, I think, was it Silent was before Boomers?
So now you have Gen Xers and Millennials who are just like, I'm not gonna be involved in this.
And you've got Mitch McConnell freezing in place, Dianne Feinstein in a wheelchair, hospitalized.
These people are clearly too old for this job and we need anyone.
When Nancy Pelosi was running, I think this was, it might've been 2018, I actually donated to the Progressive Challenger because I'm like, we desperately need the octogenarian to retire.
These, these, we, There's just too many people who, for whatever reason, are grasping to power instead of sitting in a rocking chair in the sun having some tea and enjoying the rest of their days.
And just give me a minute here to talk through this, because my perspective as a political professional might be slightly different than yours.
But something you were talking about with Emma that I really found super striking is you were talking about the way your show was funded versus the way Majority Report is funded and the difference there.
And am I correct to understand, like, a lot of your revenue doesn't come from Google AdSense?
One of the things, at least Cenk has found frustrating, he's talked to me about, is because Google controls so much of who sees his content, It's very hard for him to mobilize the Young Turks audience, and every single show has this problem, because Google is, from a data perspective, a black box.
So it's difficult for Cenk to go to his audience and say, Compare it against the voter file and figure out who is registered to vote to send them a link to register to vote to make sure they can do that in this election.
It seems to me, since so much of your show is membership supported, my challenge to you is you do have that information.
And I would prefer your audience feel empowered to go participate in elections and make their voice heard, even if they aren't going to vote the same way I do.
I would hope, I think you have a responsibility, I think all of us that are public figures have a responsibility to back away from this brink of civil war and to talk about healthy ways to engage and solve our differences in this country.
And I just have to say, man, if you've studied civil wars around the world, and how they work, and the bloodshed, and warlords getting control of medicine, and food, and water supply, and rape, and it is horrible.
This is a fate we should all be deeply concerned with.
I would rather talk about feminism a million times more than democracy, but most of my job is talking about democracy now, because I do think we're on the brink.
I invite you, just last thing, I invite you work within the political process.
That's the literal message of the show we've made every single day for the past.
In fact, I went on like a 20 minute tirade on the last two nights ago on the Uncensored Show about the need for people to go knock on doors and go vote.
And that's what we've always said.
So, I suppose the issue we're dealing with is, Civil War isn't something that the average person ever wants.
Revolution, for the most part, isn't something the average person ever wants.
Not even in the American Revolution.
The issue, though, is...
What is happening in terms of the bifurcated view of people in this country and the absolute rejection?
There is no argument to be made on some of these issues.
And as this generation, I believe predominantly millennials, I'm not sure how it will affect with Gen Z. This could be averted if Gen Z is more unified in their worldview, but I'm not so sure that's the case considering the data we've seen.
Pew Research shows that Gen Z, while almost entirely comparable to Millennials in terms of their political views, tick slightly right for the first time in a hundred years.
So I just want to say, because I've literally paid for this poll myself, done it professionally through YouGov, professional data scientists, all of that.
We didn't release it to the public, but I can show you after the show.
What we have found is Gen Z are remarkably pragmatic voters.
They don't particularly like Biden, but they really don't like the Republican Party.
And they will vote for anyone who is not a Republican from the data that we've seen.
Not all of them, but directionally the majority of them.
If you look at civics, you can see that there's almost four.
It used to be Democrat and Republican, but now you overwhelmingly have a third of, probably not more than a third of young people, but a third of voters being like, the Democrats suck, and then a third being like, Republicans suck.
And it's created four positions where it's like, conservative leading person who hates both parties, Democrat leading person who hates both parties, then Democrat voter and Republican voter.
This just came out at the end of July.
High school boys are trending conservative.
So this led to, you know, a big internet trend.
I mean, even it's dropped precipitously.
But here's my point to go back to the conversation about Civil War.
It's not an issue of people have been convinced to believe in something.
It's an issue of people were raised in two different worlds and now they're getting older and coming into power at odds with each other in extreme ways.
So to come back to the graph you just put on screen, you could show an identical graph for young women who are being born in a world without access to abortion.
Right, you can see a liberal spike.
So I think you can look at the result for women as practically a mirror of that.
One of the lessons I've learned from Gamergate is I really remember thinking this, Alex, back in the day.
that if we just shamed people enough and we pointed out the bad behavior enough and just retweeted enough of the death and rape threats that were going on, that there would be a moment where the shame would kick in and gamers would act better.
Of course, that's a future that is never going to happen.
When the actual Gamergate TV show that's in development, one of the things I pitched and kind of turned it into is talking more about what happened with the men, the young men during Gamergate.
That's the more interesting story to me.
What's going on in their lives to make them feel like they have no voice, to make them feel lonely?
Why is Andrew Tate taking off so much?
Like, why are young men so angry?
A lot of reasons for that.
And I think, like, if we don't get really serious about solving this crisis of lonely young men in this country, like, don't get me wrong, you and I probably disagree on gun safety policy, but an equal part of that problem is the fact that we are creating so many phenomenally dangerous, young, lonely, desperate men.
And there's a mental health crisis that we've got to pay very close attention to.
So you're not gonna like my answer, and feminists are not gonna like my answer, that I've been in this game enough to recognize there are political realities we need to think through.
And, you know, if we had to sacrifice, like, say, abortion a month out of actually, you know, like, eight months out to get a solid, like, non-interpretive, absolute right to abortion for the first eight months, I would be fine with that.
I am, generally speaking, if I'm looking at a policy, I'm asking myself, what is going to do the most good in this particular moment?
And I want to move the needle towards what gives women the most freedom over their own bodies.
But I'm talking about the worldview of the citizenry who voted for certain things.
Sure.
The leader is not material to how these things come to conflict.
So one of the challenges we had going back to the First Civil War, which existed since the dawn of this country, is who does the Constitution apply to?
And this leads to the 14th Amendment to make it unambiguous that if you are born in this country, then you get human rights.
But there is a question in the 14th Amendment about whether you have to be born or not.
Being born grants you citizenship, but human rights apply to humans.
So the question that's being brought up now is, like back then, who is human?
Oklahoma says an unborn human has human rights.
Colorado says they do not.
According to the jurisprudence right now, but yeah, so so yeah, I think it is a it's a question of the federal government not state governments to determine who is to be granted constitutional rights.
This has to be clear and unambiguous by the Supreme Court, which is probably why at first I thought Roe v. Wade being overturned was probably good in that states would determine what was best for their states.
And then shortly after realized you can't have a question of human rights be determined individually at a state level when the Constitution applies federally.
So if the Constitution guarantees you certain things, we have to determine at what point we recognize.
My concern is, if we're coming to a point where that's actually eroding, it doesn't matter if the states determine it one way or the other, or the federal government does.
What matters is that the country is split completely in half on the issue of who gets human rights.
See, this is where I think you and I have a disagreement.
Because I look at the loss of Rome, and the way I think of this is, You know, I've seen enough of your show to understand you have a certain stereotype of what leftists are.
This is my experience of who the Democratic Party is.
It's a bunch of women my age that are moms that go phone bank and knock on doors and do all this unglamorous, unsexy work behind the scenes.
It's people that live in their town and go to DTCs that stand up.
I think that this issue is ginned up by the media in a way that is disproportionate to its impact on people.
And I think if the media were concentrated, this is a larger critique of the media, if we talked more about the issues that actually affect people's lives, housing policy, inflation, Real wages, income inequality.
I think if we solved those issues, I think that this kind of culture war stuff would be less divisive.
And I think it's a choice we make every single day.
Let's take a look at a couple books that we've we got on the table here I can't defend that book.
I looked at it before the show, but why why does the corporate press?
Why does the Democratic Party?
Why does the Department of Education?
Why are these school boards and for it to be specific it two books genderqueer and this book is gay completely inappropriate for kids Why when we when a teacher a middle school teacher provided this book to her 10 year old 12 year old students Which includes instructions on using grinder they called the police on her.
I think it is utterly routine for libraries across this country to look at what is in the books for their students and to make judgment calls.
I have no objection to that whatsoever.
I do think that access to LGBT material, which is age appropriate, is just a free speech, free information, libraries, open society kind of issue, and I support that.
But if an individual book is like someone's looking at it and is determining it's too graphic for an age audience, I have zero issue with that.
So when you have, at the highest level of politics, a bifurcation between worldviews, whether you agree with me or not, that's granular.
The issue being, when Florida, for instance, passed the Parental Rights and Education Bill, which was fairly broad, The response from the Democratic Party and the media was, don't say gay, which was a complete misinterpretation of what the bill actually was for political reasons.
This is the kind of thing that is leading people to say, like, we are on the verge, among many other things, there's grains of sand that ultimately make a heap, but these are things that are leading to the bifurcation of this country.
I know this sounds idealistic, Tim, but this is something Cenk and I talk about a lot.
That I think that this is something that's meant to divide us.
And I want to be really clear, I have a different assessment of LGBT rights than I think you do.
But at the same time, in my experience, like when I ran for office, I counted it one time, it was tens, twenty, thirty thousand conversations I had when I ran for office.
Getting off effin' Twitter.
Out there in the real world, shaking their hands, talking to people, meeting them at the door, asking them questions.
What's important to you?
What's important in your kid's life?
What's the biggest policy issue that you care about?
And overwhelmingly, Republican or Democrat, It is housing.
It is real wages.
And something Cenk and I feel very, very, very strongly about is, yes, this stuff is important to me, but if we're looking at getting America back on the right track, we've got to focus more broadly on what impacts your audience's lives.
And just one more thing, I think if your audience was being real, and they were in the room today, I think they would tell me they care a lot more about how they're going to pay their rent than that damn book.
I think the issue is people looked at 2019 and the strong economic numbers and then the Democratic Party's underhanded manipulations to try and stop Trump.
I think that there is a very big difference in someone giving the Justice Department a free hand to pursue illegalities where they may exist, and someone doing a shakedown, threatening things that affect our geostability in the entire world and the national security policy of the United States.
Do you think Donald Trump had the authority to withhold congressionally approved loan guarantees to Ukraine unless they took the political action he wanted?
Okay, so the issue of question is... Well, I mean if you don't know about it... Most people looked at this when it happened and reached the same assessment that I did.
I think saying most people is probably one, an appeal to authority, but doesn't apply when the country's split in half, right?
With 75 million people voted for Donald Trump, clearly they didn't agree with what you're saying.
I think something you're really skilled at doing is you find these edge cases that prove a point you want to have.
I think directionally, most reasonable people would look at the phone call that he had, that Alexander Vindman came forward and talked about, and understand that's an underhanded thing to do.
Right, so it's really easy to use, this is a beautiful trick of the corporate press, and I'll criticize a right-wing publication for using this technique.
The CDC recently came out, said with the B2, I think it was the B286 variant, those who have immunity, either because of previous COVID infection or the COVID vaccine, are more susceptible to this virus.
Leading report, I think it's called, tweeted, the CDC says if you've been vaccinated, you're more likely to catch the new variant, which is, Tim, I would ask you to talk to me with respect.
of the context.
So it's masterfully done.
I think it was masterfully done how the Democrats took a legitimate national security issue for which Trump did what he was supposed to do and turned it into Trump did something wrong.
But of course you'd hold that position if you don't actually know the circumstances around it. - Tim, I would ask you to talk to me with respect.
I did follow this. - But no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's not a question of respect that you don't know this.
It's not a question of being disrespectful or respectful.
This is the first impeachment of Donald Trump and why it was done and who did it.
So there's a whole lot to this.
For instance, Joe Biden, we now know, was involved with Hunter Biden's business dealings.
Of course, at the time, they said it wasn't true.
We now know that he used an alias, was it Robert L. Peters or Robert Ware, to provide government information to Hunter Biden and to Devin Archer as they were engaged in foreign business dealings.
It's that the assessment I reach is, look, if the Justice Department wants to investigate Hunter Biden and look at the stuff with Joe Biden, I have zero issue with that.
The difference in our assessment here is I have no objection to the rule of law in the Justice Department looking into politicians that do things that are wrong.
I think we need a million times more of it.
I think you and I would probably agree like there was a bill before the House when Nancy Pelosi was in charge looking insider trading by Congress.
And respectfully, I think you're doing that with Donald Should Joe Biden be impeached for threatening the President of Ukraine with withholding congressionally approved loan guarantees unless they fired the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma?
Okay, yes, Joe Biden is on camera, sitting with the Council of Foreign Relations, and he said, I went to Ukraine and I spoke with the President, and he said, unless you fire the prosecutor, you're not getting the billion dollars.
So the assumption I'm going to make here, and this is in good faith, the assumption I'm going to make here is there were issues with corrupt prosecutors in Ukraine.
False.
As I understand it, that is what was going on there.
And I would strongly suspect that's what Biden is talking about because there were issues getting people the money.
I mean, sure, when someone mugged someone, they said, I didn't mug him, I was just asking for the money.
The evidence that we have currently is that Joe Biden was involved with Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma.
Hunter Biden was receiving $83,000 per month with his partnership with Devin Archer.
They were involved in a slew of business dealings for which Joe Biden claimed he wasn't involved, but we now know was using an alias to provide government information.
The prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in Ukraine had about a dozen-plus, according to Matt Taibbi, open investigations into the corruption of Mykola Zlochevsky.
It is now known that Hunter Biden was asked to make a call to D.C.
to help solve this problem, for which a few days later Joe Biden flew to Ukraine, and without the authority to do so, because the vice president does not have authority to withhold congressionally approved loan guarantees, threatened the president that he would withhold it unless they fired the prosecutor, because After the fact they say this, we put in someone good.
Now, the problem with this story is... How do you know intention?
Let's get there.
Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma, had fled the country during these investigations.
We know that Hunter Biden was asked specifically to call DC to deal with the prosecutor investigating Burisma.
After Joe Biden went and got the prosecutor fired, they put in someone who he said was solid, and then the corrupt Zlochevsky returns to Ukraine.
When Donald Trump began looking back into what this was about, Zlochevsky flees the country again.
So here we have evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence, for which you've never heard.
But the fact remains, Joe Biden was engaging in private business dealings.
If you want to argue it's fine he does because they all influence Petal, make arguments about Ivanka Trump.
That Ivanka was doing trade deals or copyright stuff with China, fine.
But for the vice president to fly out a few days after Hunter Biden contacts DC with a problem of a quote-unquote prosecutor investigating or a prosecutor quote-unquote investigating Burisma, and he then threatens a quid pro quo against the country, which he has no authority to do.
And then when Donald Trump says, what's this all about?
I think you're making a conclusion where there's not evidence you can tell what's in Joe Biden's mind there.
But if you're talking about throwing Hunter Biden to the wolves of the Justice Department, I have no issue with that.
My problem here, Tim, is I think it's about proportionality, right?
It's like, I think directionally, if you look at the integrity of the State Department and the processes under Joe Biden, I think directionally, of course, you can find things that you can criticize, but I think it is shown infinitely more integrity than you can find under the Trump administration.
I mean, an argument, if we're talking specifically about the impeachment, then feel free to say everything you want to say.
You want to turn the monitor over?
Look, you can deny- I just want to say this is a very sloped side because you can put up any clip and demand- Hunter Biden called DC to get Ukraine prosecutor fired for Burisma, his ex-business partner.
It's Joe Biden, and when Donald Trump actually called D.C.
to Ukraine, and then four days later, Joe Biden flew to Ukraine to get the prosecutor fired.
If you're going to be that obtuse, you're not here in good faith.
Four days after Hunter calls and says, the prosecutor's shaking us down, Joe Biden goes and threatens to withhold illegally, I might add, congressionally approved loan guarantees.
And when we have a president, you can call Donald Trump all the names in the book.
You can call him disgusting, lewd, lascivious, and corrupt.
But if he calls and says, what's going on with this Joe Biden thing?
And they say, quick, impeach Donald Trump.
I'm sorry, I don't think Trump is the corrupt one in that story.
What I think a problem with your show is, and I think this is...
Yeah, Tim, what I was hoping we could talk about today is how you moved from Occupy Wall Street, which one of my critiques of Occupy Wall Street is there was a lot of, I think, I don't want to say conspiratorial thinking, but it was not a productive paradigm of why wealth inequality is where it is in the United States.
And I think there is a part of your thinking that falls into false equivalence and to believe there's some huge conspiracy when I don't think that's always here.
What conspiracy?
I think in this particular case, I think you are magnifying a single event.
And you're coming to the conclusion that because this phone call was made, this is evidence that the Democrats were impeaching Trump in bad faith, and that the Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans, and we had no good reasons for doing this, and everything Trump did in Ukraine is justified.
And I just, I don't think that's a credible argument.
So when a historical event happens in the news, such as evidence emerges that Hunter Biden was engaged in business dealings and solicited his father for assistance in removing a prosecutor investigating a company for which he was the board of, those are exactly the kind of things that I cover.
Okay.
Probably why my audience is a lot smaller than say the likes of Steven Crowder or I'm assuming to the Young Turks as well.
If I came out and just did surface-level shot content with a political angle, I'd probably get way more views.
But if we come out and we break down the inner workings of, like, Matt Taibbi's reports on the investigations into Burisma, we talk about the Qatar-Turkey pipeline, the former CIA director who was also on the board of Burisma and the U.S.
intelligence operations that were playing a role in, you know, gas and energy in Europe and stuff like that.
Sure, but you also allow Jackson Hinkle onto your show, who, by the way, is not Hold on, I'm talking about this individual segment with him.
You let Jackson Hinkle onto your show, who I looked, he is not registered as a foreign lobbyist in this country, despite the fact that he's out there Doing a lot of esoteric talking points that I think a lot of reasonable people would look at his content and have some questions, right?
And he is here, he's putting a bunch of stuff out there, the most pro-Russian argument you could possibly have in a million years.
Talking about Russia as if they are strong and powerful and smart and the United States is weak and dumb and fragile.
And I watched the whole segment.
No other voice, no contesting any of it.
And I just think if you're talking about, like, proportionality, I think that looking at what's going on with hostile nation states, I think that, like, you're so quick to believe the stuff about America, it just, it doesn't seem credible to me.
I don't understand why you're pulling up a single guest that we just had on the show and not any of the other guests who are in favor of conflict in Ukraine.
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Because I think it is indicative of the argument I have against your show, which is proportionality.
So, Tim, in preparing for this show, I looked at most of your shows for the last week, I looked at most of your tweets over the last month, and I think directionally, they were far more, they were very pro-Trump.
They're a very anti-justice department, very pro-ending support for Ukraine, and I think this is a common line in your thinking, to break up the national security apparatus and to, you know, the United States is the bad guy, basically.
We're let down currently under Merrick Garland when we've had the bomb squad sent here multiple times.
We were evacuated for three hours once as they did a bomb sweep in the building.
We've been swatted 13 times plus the two bomb swatting incidents.
We believe we have strong evidence as to who did it and they will not pursue it.
But hey, Bubba Wallace has got a pull rope in his garage and they'll send 12 agents down.
You had a lady in Alaska who was in D.C.
on January 6th but not in the building and they raided her home.
You have Enrique Tarrio who wasn't even in D.C.
and they gave him 22 years.
You have a guy who burns down a police station, he gets four years.
There is a clear failing going on in terms of equality under the law across the board.
I met a woman who was in D.C.
on January 6th, was not at the Capitol when any violence happened.
Several hours after the violence had halted, she and her husband had walked on the opposite side of the building where the riot was, and they walked up the stairs with no police around, with no barricades.
She didn't know what was going on, and she apologized to the Federal Police, to the Capitol Police, and to the court, saying it was a misunderstanding, she didn't know, and they said, we don't care, you were part of a mob, and their sentencing guidelines were 16 months.
And then he was thrown in, he was very correctly sentenced because of this.
So the part of the story that you hang on to was somebody's tweet where they were admittedly, incorrectly, saying he was actually at the Capitol that day.
He was not at the Capitol that day, but he did play a huge organizing role.
Do you know why Owen Schroyer, uh, what his, his, his sentencing, uh, his charging documents, his sentencing documents... Do you believe that the January, the people that planned the insurrection... Who planned it?
The people who plan... Do you believe that directionally, the people they've been charged for malfeasance on January 6th, do you think in the totality that these are cases that should be brought to the justice system?
Now, to say that the government is correct in who they charge is a question of innocent until proven guilty and who you're speaking about specifically.
So, for one, I'm not referring to anybody who engaged in active violence.
There are, for instance, one guy was acquitted of all charges because there's a video of the police fanning them into the building.
There's a video of the police opening the doors and allowing people into the building, which is why some people got misdemeanor trespass and some people got seditious conspiracy, right?
So first, I don't trust the government, right?
That's the basis of our constitution and how the justice system is supposed to operate.
But when it comes to the Proud Boys, It is definitive they had no plan.
I'm telling you about the court case, not my opinion.
They said no evidence was presented of a plan in advance.
They knew that there was going to be a protest, and they went.
According to court documents, Enrique Tarrio was not in communication with the Proud Boys during the riot, the breaking into of the Capitol.
At some point, he said either before anything happened, don't leave, and at some point afterwards, he referred to someone as George Washington.
I think you can look at that situation and come to the conclusion, like I looked at this and I've come to the conclusion that she probably murdered her baby.
And as far as I'm concerned, you know, the justice system played out.
I personally think she did it.
Justice was done.
The appeals process went through.
This was a fine verdict.
And in a democracy, sometimes the Justice Department comes to conclusions I don't agree with.
So sometimes in a democracy, the Justice Department, in my estimation, looked at these cases And came to conclusions, in my reading of the facts, they seem utterly fair and even a little conservative in many cases.
You've reached a conclusion and the way you feel about it is your judgment and your appraisal of the situation supersedes what the judge and jury in our justice system came up with.
You seem like you're saying that January 6th, that this should not be prosecuted, and the conclusion I'm getting... So when I said... Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here.
It's a reference to the commonplace of evil that happens without thought, typically because people aren't paying attention, don't know what happened, and they just carry on with it.
It's typically a reference to, how did Germany get so bad, right?
My statement to you, which I will repeat, is every single court case I've followed from this makes it seem like the Justice Department has followed an excruciating process and has given people their fair day in court and has arrived at a situation that seems reasonable to me.
I think you're trying to suggest to your audience that Joe Biden is corrupt, and the reason for that, that gives Trump an excuse to do what he did in Ukraine.
I think that is the plain message that you're giving there.
And he's been in for two and a half years already.
I kind of think, you know, when I was at Occupy Wall Street and I watched occupiers rip down barricades and punch cops in the face, 20 years would be a bit too much for that.
I do think that there is extenuating circumstances pertaining to the electoral vote count, and that is going to exacerbate the charges, but come on.
I think that when January 6th happened, this was, you know, this was the, it was a real event in American history where the peaceful transfer of power was being threatened.
And I think if there's any situation for the justice system to take their role extremely seriously, and to dole out very harsh punishments, I think it's imperative.
Because if you don't crack down on that very aggressively, it makes it far more likely that future elections are not going to result in the peaceful transfer of power.
So while not knowing this case specifically, I think directionally it is incredibly important that we prosecute the people involved in January 6th because without peaceful transfer of power, we do not have a country.
I would appreciate if you'd let me finish my points.
You're not going to find a tweet from me like defending Stop Cop City.
And the alleged racketeering charges, I want to see this borne out in court.
But I think if there's a case to be made about people colluding to destroy equipment and vehicles and things like that, that seems to be something that should be passed.
You're not going to find a tweet or a statement from me defending any of the violence of Black Lives Matter.
Where's our, where's our 529 commission in Congress to figure out what happened when these people tried breaching the White House and nearly destroyed a historic church, the presidential church?
So, look, this is just me speculating about this, but one of the things it seems like we found in the aftermath of January 6th is that the procedures at the Capitol for these kinds of events were not where they needed to be, and that we do need cameras and surveillance and law enforcement processes and the mechanisms to bring out the National Guard and things like that.
Seems like a lot of things in government.
We just probably don't have the infrastructure for that So if you want to pass a funding bill to create that infrastructure, I would happily support that alongside you Well, my point is we have a nine.
We have a January 6 Commission sure or I don't think calling it a commission, but you had the committee But we've not got that in the other direction for the the summer of love riots.
When they firebombed the White House grounds and forced the president to a bunker, we... See, it's all equal to you.
You're saying that when people showed up with firebombs and attacked the White House, that was shocking to the soul of this nation in a way we've not seen ever, and you act like it didn't.
I have outright said that what happened on January 6th was egregious and was extenuating circumstances.
The people who committed violence should go to prison.
And then you're shocked that I'm saying the attack on the White House was in some way comparable.
Well, I suppose the question is if you think there was a plan for an insurrection, then you have a very low opinion of these people, which is a fine position to have considering they didn't really have any structure or plan.
I mean, you had Jacob Chansley being escorted by the police into the Senate chambers.
They told him what to do.
He didn't know what he was doing.
You had police in the building taking selfies with people.
So, I mean, I think all those cops should be in prison, to be completely honest, especially because, I mean, these are the guys who opened the doors.
The people who led Jacob, I think it's like five cops led, you know, the shaman.
They led him into the Senate chambers by request.
Those cops got to go to prison, and probably for two decades, because that's the standard that we're setting here.
Don't you have a little bit of compassion for them if they're in the middle of a riot where they could be killed just trying to calm the situation down?
Cops on one side of the building, who are not SWAT, who are not riot, who are opening a door and letting people in, and then tell Jacob Chansley, the shaman, yes, we'll bring you to the chambers, don't worry about it.
They could have told him to leave.
He's by himself.
I mean, AOC asked this question.
She said that there are police who are clearly involved.
Well, I think if you look at the historical examples and even our, I mean, God, our cultural understanding of the things that these organizations have done, you know, I'm not so convinced that we need a banana republic to happen in Nicaragua so that a corporation... No, of course not.
You know, but these are the things they do.
I'm not so convinced that it is the authority of the United States to decide that oil should not be traded in dinar or euro, but I'm not so naive to think that the world is in an active state of peace at any moment.
I mean, the world is in active conflict perpetually.
Yeah, and always will be.
So the question we have to ask ourselves is, the function of the United States government and the things we view, I'm saying like, you know, me and my friends, moral libertarian and anti-war leftist types, we view as abject evil.
Do we tolerate these things for, say, the petrodollar?
What is the result of the petrodollar?
Mass pollution, ocean acidification, mass carbon emissions.
If you look at everything we've gotten out of it, I'd say we've quite literally set the world on fire with gluttony, greed, and lust, and we've used a weaponized intelligence apparatus to destroy anyone who opposes it.
I can certainly respect the idea that we want to defend America's interests, but are America's interests, I don't know, multinational corporations pumping out carbon emissions, sending manufacturing overseas to China so they can bypass our regulations, and then acidifying the ocean to the point where we're facing fishery collapse, the Pacific garbage patch.
What is being perpetuated by the system is the gutting and destruction of human society outside of just the United States.
I like that we live in comfort and splendor while producing very little.
I enjoy being able to eat avocados in winter and strawberries in winter.
The United States has its problems.
We've got, like I mentioned, Flint and Pittsburgh and Newark with leaded pipes.
Of course there's always going to be poverty, but oh boy!
Our poorest people have clean running water they can pick up at a Taco Bell.
They've got air conditioning in low-rent apartments.
Granted, there are very serious problems with the economy as it is today, but only from an American perspective.
The question is, should we maintain our standard of living at the expense of the world, the environment, the climate, and the other countries?
This is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in the UN, and multilateralism, and working with other countries, and coming to geostability.
I remember when I was a young radical, and by the way, you may not know this about me, I protested the Iraq War so much I ended up on the terrorist watch list.
I felt really, really strongly about that.
There's a story about the Bush administration over prosecuting people.
I obviously never did anything illegal, but I felt really, really strongly about that.
So, obviously, I agree with you, like the things we did in Nicaragua and all these other countries and, you know, securing oil around the world.
I think that, in many ways, has been an abuse of power.
I also think you have things like, you know, ISIS and al-Qaeda.
You know, one of the successes of the Biden administration has been using our drone program to take these leaders off the battlefield, right?
I do think for a nation like the United States, adults have to look at this and come to the conclusion we do need intelligence agencies out there looking at terrorist cells, looking at the way Russia, here's a good example, when I was running for office, I had to report to the FBI that my emails had been hacked and we believe Russia was responsible for that, right?
I wasn't a government official, but I'm running for an office.
You've got to take that seriously.
We need agencies to look into this stuff.
And I think, again, my critique with your thinking is I think you look at individual instances where I agree with you, there are serious problems, and you conclude the whole thing is just rotten.
How are you any different than the tankies on my own side?
We have a huge problem on the left of these people that get the critique of capitalism dead on.
I agree with every single word of it.
It's about the rich.
They capture governmental systems.
They tilt the table for themselves.
We don't get policies like universal health care because it's Like, word for word, agree, agree, agree, agree.
Just like I'm agreeing with you on all of these systems having these problems.
Where I really differ with you is the tankies, you ask them, okay, so you want the revolution where, you know, capitalism is defeated.
How do you design something that figures out, what drugs we're going to research.
How do you figure out domestic, like, how do you figure out our trade policy with other countries and what we import and what we give them as, like, you start asking these granular, like, questions about how their glorious revolution is going to work.
Yeah, you say that this is going to benefit women, right?
What are the systems in your glorious revolution that are going to guarantee women have a fair shake at the table?
Oversight board would probably be appointed through Congress or state representatives.
What we would probably want to do is keep it at the state level because we need more state level involvement in federal government, considering the federal government is mostly people who know each other.
Mississippi sends representatives to Congress who then vote on things.
So my view is the state should say we also will appoint a representative for our intelligence oversight review to report back to us and probably function outside of Congress because we want to make sure that we've got akin to like a special prosecutor, right?
So, hold on, I just want to repeat this back to you.
So your vision for oversight of the CIA is we have an oversight board of civilians that are appointed by every single one of the states in the United States?
I don't know about every single state, and I think getting into, like, the, can you build me an architecture for a plan right now to deal with CIA corruption is a bit disingenuous.
Civilian oversight through state legislator level cooperation to assess whether or not in our name we are actively actually being represented which would be akin to kind of like a special prosecutor version of a legislative review specifically for the intelligence agencies.
We would then Determine whether or not, or I should say, my assumption is we're going to clean house and restructure.
Well, so what we would probably have to do is have Congress Congress would have to vote for a special panel comprised of state delegates or representatives to oversee actions of the CIA, internal documents, obviously they're gonna need clearance, it's gonna be classified, things like that.
Then, we figure out how to deal with the problems we uncover.
Right now, when we look at, like, Republicans' House oversight, it's... I mean, you look at the people who are in the SCIF and the people who are on these panels, they're working alongside the intelligence agencies, so we're not getting an independent review of what they're doing.
Yeah, I think one of the really good arguments to expand Congress and have more representatives there is the population of the United States has grown so much, we need more people to serve on more committees. - I wonder if we need regional Congress, you know what I mean?
Like the challenge we're facing is that we are just increasing the amount of people a member of Congress represents, so it's becoming ineffective. - It seems to me that if you're talking about oversight for the CIA, you're talking about getting state level control, that seems to be a recipe for a cluster F as far as not being able to decide that seems to be a recipe for a cluster F as It seems like that's going to get political really fast.
As to cite the humor of, we know the CIA was doing horrible things in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, there's been no reform, and we're gonna assume they're doing everything right now.
My critique of your show, I don't think you're a bad person, Tim.
I've really enjoyed this conversation.
My critique of your show is I think you focus on things to a disproportionate amount, the impact that they have on people's lives.
I think you inflame situations with a lot of very personal rhetoric in a way that undermines the ability of our country to solve problems and move forward together.
One of the reasons we can't solve the problems in this country and we're dealing with massive multinational pharmaceutical corporations that are gutting, not just pharmaceuticals, but all of them, gutting, ripping, exploiting, destroying.
The reason why we get things like the housing crisis, the reason why we get things like the student debt crisis, is because the average person does not pay attention to who's in charge of their country, who's being appointed.
They take things immediately at face value and wolves in sheep's clothing are guiding them to the slaughter.
So my critique for you is your rejection of blatantly reported facts as conspiracy theory.
So then, outside of you personally, we had the example I often give is Hunter Avalon.
I don't know what he's doing.
But he said the exact same thing.
In fact, every single, aside from Destiny, every single left-wing person we've brought on to ask them about the Burisma scandal has said, I did not know Joe Biden said that.
And that's fine if you don't.
But it is worrisome to me that our position typically here is, if I don't know, I don't know.
If I do know, I'll tell you.
But the position we find from those on the left is, I don't know, but I think I'm right anyway.
Well, the example I'll give is you thought what happened with the impeachment of Donald Trump in Ukraine with Ukraine was correct without knowing the finer details of who was involved, why they were involved.
Tim, I think one of the things, again, you know, I don't need to go through this again.
I think that I looked at that situation at the time.
I came to the conclusion it was a just outcome at the time.
I think it's not a burr in my sandal in the same way it is in yours.
And I think if you had asked me back then, I would probably have more specifics to give you feedback on today.
Well, I would suggest if you want to have a conversation about specific things, have Lisa write out to me, say what you want us to talk about.
I'll do all the research, I'll watch all the right-wing clips you want, and I will have a conversation in good faith about that.
It's difficult.
It's not a question of fact.
This is something I have found frustrating as I try to enter right-wing spaces and have good faith conversations, that y'all do have your own cinematic universe.
And it's difficult for someone who reads the New York Times and Washington Post to catch up on, like you have a sense of the specifics, but there's individual things that y'all are really angry about.
And I just have not followed the storyline that much.
So it's not a question of, do you know this individual story?
My point here is, you've taken a political position without knowing what the story is.
I'm not talking about one story, I'm saying what we typically experience is, as you asked me about Casey Anthony, I don't know enough about it to comment.
And then every Democrat personality I've spoken to says, I believe in X, but I don't know what you're talking about.
Dennis Prager goes on Bill Maher's show, I think this was 2018 or 19, and he said they're putting tampons in men's bathrooms and he said this is a lie and they're saying this.
Bill Maher and the entire audience response was to laugh and say it wasn't happening.
Instead of saying I don't know what you're talking about.
So it seems weird.
Instead, they laugh and they dismiss.
And then later, Bill Maher was like, oh, yeah, well, you know, they were doing that.
There is a video out there called Tim Pool Fence Sitter, which, as I understand it, you enjoy, and it talks about your tendency towards looking at two things and to conclude that it's an example, that it's all equal, and it somehow all ends up in supporting the right wing.
I think it's a consistency in your thinking.
I think it's the reason you get so much critique from the left.
And I think you've evidenced that very strongly today.
I'd like to move this to a more productive direction.
I wanted to ask you today, are there any bipartisan issues or subjects, like you claim you're a centrist or you're in the middle, you're not a right winger.
I wanted to ask you today, like, are there any issues that you feel really passionate about that you think the left and the right could agree on that you would ask your audience to support?
There are some things that I think we should agree on, but I'm not sure we do.
Some progressives are in favor of nuclear power.
But I think nuclear energy is the path towards reducing carbon emissions and helping America become more energy independent and being cleaner.
That's one.
I'm in favor of reforming the tax system.
I think we need to lower tax on the lower end and increase it on the higher end, which would be overly simplified to say, tax the rich.
I'm probably a little bit closer to Steve Bannon, but Steve Bannon goes into the wealth tax stuff, which is repressive and oppressive.
I think it goes too far.
So I think there's compromise in abortion, because I fall in the pro-choice but more traditional pro-choice camp, which was like, you know, at the point of viability, there's no reason to kill the baby if it can survive on its own.
So that's typically where I draw the line.
But when it comes to questions of an individual having a medical issue, I don't like the idea of a government regulation form or something to justify it.
However, we typically find that in the more prominent spaces, if you say I'll walk up to like Eric Adams as a video, I think it was, I'm not sure, it might have been a lie.
Virginia State Senate who proposed the bill that was in, you know... Proposed a bill, someone in a state senate proposed that, but on a... And then I think I got struck down because... I think I got struck down because she was questioned as... Do you really think Democrats directionally don't believe in border control here in the United States?
So, we're talking about gradients, we're not talking about absolutes, we're talking about... The left will say it's not as big of a deal, or I shouldn't say the culture war.
I mean, now Eric Adams is saying it's destroying New York City, so it's... I'm not a big Eric Adams fan, but... But you have sanctuary state policies in California.
I think there is a right-wing lie out there that characterizes the left and Democrats in general as not caring about border control policy.
I'm old enough to remember at the end of the Bush administration there was an incident where someone was trying to bring a dirty bomb and smuggle it across the border.
Thank God We caught that.
That could have been a radiological disaster.
It is obviously national security policy.
It is our economic policy with people smuggling goods into the United States that shouldn't be here.
It is such an important issue.
And I do believe in a pathway to citizenship and DACA and things like that.
But I think it makes sense to take a hard look at to increase the policies, increase the security of how people get into this country.
unidentified
Yeah, I think most mainstream Democrats agree with me.
Well, I wouldn't call him a mainstream Democrat, but I think... New York... This is one of the things I've found, Tim, and this is the longer I'm in my job, and I just want your audience to notice that when we're sitting down talking about policy, it's a much different conversation than, you haven't read this news story, and this is what I feel about you because of that.
But one of the things I've discovered about policy is it's impossible for someone to have a comprehensive knowledge of every single area of policy.
Our disability policy and how we figure out who gets Social Security and how they qualify for it and what the court system process is for that, for deciding if you get a stipend if you're an adult with a disability, is so Complicated.
And it's this whole world I had no idea about until, you know, I ran for office.
And, you know, I think with, uh, if you're talking about immigration policy at the border, I am sure that if you brought someone in that was an intelligent person that really could answer some damn questions, like how do we stop radiological material from going across the border?
Where are all the people coming?
Like, how is New York having, what did Eric Adams say, 12,000 people a month coming in?
How is that happening?
I think if you start to understand those problems, I think that you can find smart people in government that are committed to solving it.
So we've gone way over, but I do want to ask just one final question.
January 6th was really bad.
You described it as an insurrection.
CNN right now shows Trump polling above Joe Biden, and right now the general assessment from analysts and politicos is that while it is nearly a statistical tie, Trump has the edge.
Joe Biden's favorability is down.
There's currently efforts in, there's a debate in New Hampshire which may have been resolved, a lawsuit in Florida, there's a debate in Arizona, may have been resolved, and now a lawsuit in Colorado to remove Trump's name from the ballot.
There are procedural efforts being taken place under the argument that Trump tried to overthrow the government.
I'm curious what you think happens if Trump wins or loses.
So I was saying this on Twitter, and I got a lot of backlash from leftist Twitter.
I'm not a lawyer, but I think my gut instinct is telling me that if you are trying to keep someone off the ballot, that I think just the gut reaction from a lot of people, I think it feels kind of dirty and dishonest to a lot of people.
So I'm sure there's an excellent constitutional case for this, but I have a long way to go before I personally believe this is a really good idea.
And you know, I can't remember who was talking about this.
Was it George Conway?
Somebody was talking about how, imagine we woke up Um, on 2024, and the reason that Trump lost if he is the nominee is because he couldn't get on the ballot in one of these states.
I think if you're trying to turn the temperature down in a democracy and make people believe in the rule of law, I think that my friends are discounting how this is going to impact people.
I think the difference between the Justice Department bringing cases against Trump when there's a lot of evidence for it, I think that's a very different situation than someone who can bring a lawsuit or not bring a lawsuit choosing to do that.
I think that what you and I both have a responsibility to do is to calm the temperature down.
And I think we've got to double down on democracy and the rule of law and making people, like, correcting the flaws in our system in a non-inflammatory way and to treasure our democracy.
Again, we've had a peaceful transfer of power for 200 years in this country.
I agree, but my question is not what we should do, because I agree with you, but what do you think these people, as of, if right now today, we have the election, Trump's name, let's say it's removed from one state, do you think these people continue the pattern of behavior that they engaged in on January 6th?
When you look at all of the cultural endeavors that are taking place and the victories that the right is actually gaining, the stupidest thing anyone can do is any kind of violence, any kind of riot.
I mean, right now, the best path forward is knocking on doors and just leafleting.
Trump lost 2020 by only 42,000 votes, despite the fact that the popular vote was skewed pretty heavily.
It was three swing states that totaled 42,000.
Trump won by 77.
It's close.
So...
The opportunity for people on the right who are upset is to stop thinking you can't win.
Start realizing you almost did twice and you can win again.
It was his, you know, and so my concern, however, is when you look at 2016, They accused Trump of being a Russian spy.
Jonathan Chait actually went on MSNBC and said maybe the Soviet, going back to the Soviet era, Trump may have been secretly colluding with the KGB or something like that.
And it resulted in a 30 plus million dollar investigation and restrictions placed on, to a certain degree, legal but also political, what Trump could or couldn't do.
These were false.
It was shockingly absurd and it was devastating to the confidence in our country.
How did Bush win again in 2000?
the Clinton's funding of the Steele dossier and this other, these other fictitious political tax, the Democrats tend to play things like rogues and Republicans tend to play things like warriors or fighters, brawlers.
Tim, there are serious people that care about national security in this country and our foreign policy and geostability worldwide that believe in NATO.
That are looking at Donald Trump's closeness to Vladimir Putin.
And when he came out... But this is not my point.
Hold on, hold on.
And when he came out, when he came out and said, I believe Vladimir Putin wore their own intelligence agencies.
That is a very serious situation.
And there are people that are worried about Trump's ties to Russia.
Michael Flynn, in his prosecution, I'm not speaking about anything else, he was in an informal discussion where he answered some questions off the cuff and they accused him of lying and threatened to arrest him.
We know that, I think it was Kevin Clinesmith, fabricated evidence, manipulated to get Papadopoulos investigated.
These things are serious degrees of corruption that need to be investigated.
I think there's every reason for Americans to be concerned about the degree to which Russia seems to be aligned with the degree to which people in the Republican Party seem to have taken up Kremlin talking points.
I think the best case scenario is Russia has been very effective in bringing people onto their side just by connecting with them.
I think the worst case scenario is I think we have traitors in the United States.
If Donald Trump, so when Donald Trump won, no, I'm not speaking for you, I'm saying we had years of coverage of Trump being a secret Russian spy.
After Donald Trump loses, we get the fraud narrative, we get the storming of the Capitol, you get these claims that Trump's secretly president, and the weirdest things.
I don't see how after 2024, no matter what happens, you're going to have people accepting.
If Trump wins?
I mean, you had in the Boston Globe it was reported that prominent Democrats and Republicans came together for a war game.
Are you familiar with this one?
This story?
And the suggestion was to the Democrats that if Donald Trump doesn't cede policy, they actually secede Western states from the Union.
This was the game played by them.
I'm shocked they would say such a thing to the Boston Globe.
With those things being taken into consideration, if Trump wins, I don't see things being procedurally sound.
If Trump loses, I don't see the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th simply being like, good game, guys.
In what scenario do the people who stormed the Capitol decide, okay, this time around everything's fine and Democrats are legitimate?
If a committee goes and finds, like from the video you played, that there's actual intent there, and you want to impeach him, if there's malfeasance in this White House, my position is we need to be prosecuting more politicians.
I just think when you look at the state of politics over the past seven years, I have not seen something to suggest that at the conclusion of the 2024 election, America comes together and carries on like normal.
What do they have a couple hundred redcoats in Boston to maintain the intolerable acts because the colonial government was like this is unjust and it resulted in a bunch of farmers outside of Boston saying we are not going to abide by the rule of the crown.
Sure.
They enacted the Suffolk Resolves where they basically had a bunch of random locals What happens?
The Redcoats decide we're going to seize the weapons from these individuals because they should not be forming militia.
We now call that the shot heard around the world, the start of the American Revolution, despite the fact it was basically just a handful of cops trying to seize weapons from some farmers.
But my point is that So, the conclusion you're trying to tell your audience is, no matter what happens, the election is going to result in chaos if few people can take it over.
I like the fact that Donald Trump like acted like such a child after he lost the election, that we now have to pursue these court cases that are deeply damaging to our democracy.
It's a lose lose situation.
If we do nothing, it signals to everyone out there that, hey, attempts to hijack an election are 100 percent OK.
If we engage in the rule of law, It sends the message that, yeah, we're one step closer to making people not believe in democracy, man.
I think that's historical precedent that actually the solution right now would be for Joe Biden to pardon the January Sixers who already spent two and a half years in prison and outright say, please work with us.
I think two and a half years is long enough and we don't want to exacerbate tensions in this country.
I think you'd have to be selective about who you did that for.
One of the things I found really troubling is after a lot of these court cases, they come out and they're pumping their fist or doing things that seem to indicate they have no remorse.
But I think if you can find some people that are genuinely apologetic for what they're doing, I would not have any issue with that.
There are two key moments I think we can see in our history that suggest the appropriate move forward to help this country is for Joe Biden to pardon the J6ers.
Two and a half years, time served.
People have already been in prison for a long time.
You've got Shays' Rebellion, a blanket pardon for all those who fought against the government.
Why?
We cannot start a country fighting amongst ourselves over unpaid debts, etc.
And then you also had the election of, I think it was 1876, which was contentious.
Determining what electoral votes to count resulted in a committee between Democrats and Republicans, an agreement made to end the Reconstruction era in exchange for an amicable path forward for how the country would be governed for this next election cycle.
Right now, we're looking at people who outright are saying that the election was stolen still to this day.
Owen Schroyer's sentencing guidelines from the prosecutors explicitly cite his speech afterwards as justification for why he should go to prison for three months.
The problem, Tim, is we have a right-wing ecosystem that has... We have a right-wing media ecosystem that's amped things up and told people they're the victim.
And we are now in this situation where you have domestic terrorists and people trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
I'm talking about the domestic terrorists that tried to take over the country on January 6th and stop the peaceful transfer of power.
And we're put in this situation of we can't talk to right-wingers like adults.
There are some people on the right, Mike Pence, I don't agree with the guy on a lot, but his statements in the Republican presidential primary the other day, I really appreciated the integrity that he talked about on that day.
I think that we are in a hellish situation where there are a ton of media commentators in flame, in flame, in flame, tell people they're the victim.
And it makes it, they make it so they don't believe in democracy.
This is well after the fighting had resolved and they shrug.
They were there on the grounds for a total of six minutes and they left.
Feds burst into their house, arrested them as insurrectionists.
They didn't even know that they were wanted for anything or they'd done anything wrong.
Their immediate approach was to apologize and say, "We're so sorry about this." The judge said, "So you admit you were part of a mob, you are guilty, and now they're facing a year and a half." I think if I looked into the situation, I'd probably reach a different perception.
How about the man who was acquitted?
unidentified
Okay, how about the man who was acquitted by the judge?
I'm telling you that if I go to someone and they say, this thing happened to me, and your response is, you're spinning it and you're wrong, that's the conflict.
I said that story does not sound credible to me, and I suspect that if I looked into that situation, I would probably understand there's more to the story than what you're saying.
My point is, if you're adjudicating a dispute between parties, and your position is, I'm assuming there's something more to this, and that's it, you are on one side of that dispute.
I'm on the side of believing, like, the only fact I really have here is the Justice Department, the justice system came to a guilty verdict, right?
So that seems to me, like, as far as, like, if I'm writing that in the newspaper, the moment a guilty verdict is found, that's the time you don't say alleged murderer, you say murderer.
And I think, yeah, I can't remember exactly what's happening, but this comes to disparate worldviews and trust that exists in this country.
Sure.
It doesn't matter whether or not in the political space, what Jussie Smollett said was true.
What mattered is, Ellen Page at the time, now Elliot Page, went on TV and said, this happened, and for this, we will.
So even though something happened that wasn't true, the political ramifications were exorbitant.
This is true across the board.
If a Trump supporter gets arrested, you could have definitive proof.
I mean, this guy's dirty as they come.
But if the narrative that emerges, for whatever reason, conflicts, and they all seem to be doing it, it doesn't matter what is true in the political sense.
It always matters what's true in the moral sense.
It matters that people are going to respond as if it's true no matter what.
And is willing to hold your own side accountable when you F up.
So, I think that the answer to this, Tim, is for all of us to have a much higher standard of what we retweet, what we believe, to have sourcing on things that aren't this, like, litany of garbage sites, to be more thoughtful about all of that.
And I think this is something, respectfully, I don't think you do a good job on.
You make a lot of, like, here's, here's a good example.
The other day, and God, I don't, you know, actually, I know people want me to get into the whole thing where you were like, oh, and I, I know they're probably making this thing up about Obama being gay.
The issue is a false narrative is created over my views on elections, abortion, taxation, intervention.
In order for someone to get clicks and make money.
Which then results in people talking to me and saying things like, it's remarkable that people make the assumption that I'm like, one, the right does this.
They say Tim's an atheist.
And I'm like, what?
Never said that!
The left says I'm pro-life.
And I'm like, I've never been pro-life.
But it's because someone will take a clip, alter its context, because it gets them traffic and makes them money.
They do it to Cenk, they do it to Sam Seder, they do it to Vosh, they do it to Destiny, they do it to Emma.
I mean, this is just, it's part of being a public figure.
It's awful, right?
It's crazy to me, so many young people want to be famous when I've got like the lowest level of fame you can have, which is feminism fame, and it just ruins your life, right?
What ends up happening is there's a shadow version of you that gets created, and everyone out there will believe anything bad about you if it adheres to a narrative and it is deeply destructive to your psyche.
What I hear you're telling me is you feel like you, from your perspective, show a great deal of integrity, you feel like there's an ecosystem out there that profits from distorting what you say, and I hear you on that.
I personally, the things I've seen on you directionally have seemed like fair critiques, but I'm sure there are some examples you could bring up.
I just, you know, I'm less interested in adjudicating who you are as a person.
Oh, that's why I tell people the key to winning is to knock on doors, go vote, start a business, protect your family, focus on your kids, make money, be successful, and support companies that support your values.
And that's all you have to do.
And the last thing anyone should be doing is any kind of fighting or violence.
In fact, I even said people shouldn't protest in front of the court when Trump was being arraigned.
And I said, if you do, you should be on your knees with your hands cuffed in a Visual protest of what was going on, do not create an open door for any kind of escalation or violence.
I want to come back to something you said we could do earlier.
So you've accused me and the left multiple times today of, I don't want to say intellectual dishonesty, that's too strong, but like talking as if there's no point where I could reach a conclusion, right?
I gave you multiple examples of where that's not true.
I think Conor Biden and Joe Biden, if you can find out he's done something truly That shows collusion there.
Yeah, I would welcome a court case there.
In fact, it would probably be good for the Democrats because then we'd have a new nominee for 2024.
My question, I feel like you're getting off course here.
If you look at the totality of the Trump administration, which you've got to admit, it had a lot of scandals.
What is something that could happen to lead you to the conclusion, it's not that the Justice Department is crooked, it's that we're dealing with someone that is fundamentally a criminal.
Trump, it puts on a video, how about this, a video of Trump jumping into the front of the beast and grabbing the steering wheel and screaming, go back to the Capitol.
Right, so, like, the first challenges, I- This was something in a story, by the way.
It was the lead story, like, Trump wanted to go back to the Capitol and engage in- It was color in a story, a wider story about those protests.
So the first issue is, what I was trying to say initially is that I don't have a very favorable, like a very high favorable view of Trump as it is.
So it's not a high bar for me to be like, oh yeah, I bet he- You're doing stuff with Donald Trump Jr.
Seems like you do.
But Trump Jr.
as an individual versus Trump Sr.
and I mean, the sins of the father, there's a lot of questions there.
Besides, sitting down with the son of the president for a live conversation is not like the dude and I are going to play golf together and jumping in there and high-fiving in celebration.
Elizabeth Warren is a really good example of somebody in politics I think really gets a bad rap, and I think this is how the process really distorts who people are and what they stand for.
When you see Elizabeth Warren in person, and she's my senator, I've been to a ton of events with her,
She's warm, charismatic, she's the best people person I've ever seen work in a crowd, sharp on policy issues, laser-focused, and then you look at how the right-wing spin machine takes her and turns her into Pocahontas and the serial liar that's making up stuff, and she's just like the most dedicated, good-faith servant from Massachusetts you could possibly imagine.
So, I would say 98% of the politicians, and I'm telling you, these are conservative, these are Republicans, because Democrats, for the most part, don't come on the show.
We've had maybe two or three Democratic people in our longevity.
But it's like, you bring people in, and then it's just like, you ask them a question, and they'll say, that's a really good question.
You know, when I think about questions like this, I'm like, oh, here we go.
But a small handful of people that just have the conversation.
I agree with the Democrats need to get off message and be able to have real conversations.
My experience with elected people is I think it is a thankless job in a way you can't appreciate if you have not done it.
You're fundraising every second you're awake, you're going to events, you don't get a vacation, like it's supposedly breaking Congress right now.
There's someone I'm working with and they're doing events every few hours on their quote-unquote break.
So I think it is a very, very difficult job that people don't appreciate and I think most people actually go into it for the right reasons, including on the right.
And I think my final thought is just that, you know, we can't always just look at how things were or what we think they were historically, because every policy we put in place has results that we could not foresee.
So taking a look at, like, one member of Congress representing 775,000 people clearly makes no sense.
Maybe 35,000 made sense back in the day, but now it's becoming untenable.
And so it's resulting in Political classes, financial classes, like we have, we have, it's weird that we have profession, royal families almost.
Like, you know, the third person in the family to go into finance.
The third person in the family to be a race car driver.
It's like everything's becoming, you know, isolated or whatever.
And this is true for politics.
I think that results in a political class.
Which results in resentment from people who are not privy to what it's like in the political class and people in the political class who don't know what it's like to say work at a mechanic shop or something.
One of the things I see in Massachusetts is there's an entire industry of people that went to Harvard.
And they go straight into the electoral class in Massachusetts, and they just don't have any idea what it's like to be homeless, to struggle to pay your rent.
It's just privilege, privilege, privilege, privilege.
Working class people as if they're a dumb animal you've got to manipulate.
I've absolutely seen that.
I just, I think my last thought would be, you know, Tim, the very, very best case in life, the most we got in life, is what we fight for.
And the very best government we get is the one that we work to bring to fruition.
And I think one of my biggest problems with many people in politics right now, on the left and the right, is they believe if you burn the system down, We're one step away from utopia, and I don't think that's true.
I think that the way to move forward as a country is to focus on democracy, to work on improving what's broken, and we need to believe in this, and I think all of us need to get out there and talk to people on the other side, which is why I'm here today.
