The Culture War #35 - Tim Pool & Cenk Uygur, Cenk Running For President 2024
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Yeah, no, I come bearing revolution, and so there's a reason why I came.
But what you're pointing out is actually important, and I think it's actually been harmful to the left that we have not engaged as much.
Um and so uh I think like for example we'll get into it probably later as to like our differences and and there's plenty of differences for sure and then I I think that uh I would cue the audience to look out though for the similarities uh because there's so much that we disagree on But there's also a ton that we agree on.
And what I mean, I don't mean necessarily me and you, but we'll find out.
To varying degrees, some are more resistant to capture than others to their own detriment.
But this has been something we've talked about.
And I agree on the Joe Rogan thing, too.
People get attacked for going on Rogan.
They get, you know, I don't go on, he's far right, why are you doing it?
I mean, there are even people who are saying it's a bad idea to have you on the show, but that's the most laughable thing in the world, because we try to get as many people as possible.
Across the spectrum and the strange thing about it is when people will say that like Tim cast IRL is far right or whatever or my favorite was when Hassan called Ian Crosland a conservative.
Do you know who Ian is?
I mean, he's a hippy-dippy crystal weirdo who doesn't like Donald Trump.
Good for him.
Well, we don't really know how to describe Ian other than he's just like a wild card kind of guy who doesn't follow the news in the same way as everybody in the culture war.
And so he's often pushing back on us in very strange ways, such as he said Palestine should be the 51st state of the United States, which is a strong departure from anyone in politics.
Um, but then he'll get called conservative just by virtue of being on the show with us.
Okay, well let's get into it because, uh, I get it.
And, uh, but I, I've kind of changed my mind on something there and that's partly why I say come Bering Revolution.
All right.
Um, because, look, uh, the thing that really, uh,
set me off and I thought that you were in that group but I'm now beginning to change my mind a little bit on it is that this is a old tried and true tactic of the right wing is that they get people who used to be left wing and then they turn them into turncoats they pay them a lot of money and then they trot them out there like in like hostage videos and then Tulsi Gabbard and Tulsi Gabbard will come and go I am a left winger, but the right wing is right about everything.
The right wing is right.
The right wing is right.
And then they love it.
And they just all like this orgiastic reaction of like, oh, even the left wingers agree with us.
We're so right.
And it's like a trick that works every time with the right wing audience.
Yeah, of course, she was... First of all, to be fair to her, in a deeply ironic way, she was always a secret right-winger, but she was lying that she was a progressive.
Uh, and so the first person to suss that out was Anna, and Anna did a Bunch of stories about how Tulsi was a right-winger back when she was pretending to be progressive and running for president in 2020.
She was trying to... Yeah, she went to Syria, met Bashar al-Assad... But that was for peace, right?
Nah.
She's, like, she's a... I don't know what she's doing, but she's not a progressive, so her going out there and pretending to be a progressive and doing right-wing propaganda gets under every skin I have, okay?
So, but now that gig is up, right?
Or that jig is up.
Like, her, Glenn Greenwald, a couple others... I don't want to start the drama, right?
Again, to be fair to both Tulsi and Glenn, they had right-wing tendencies throughout.
And Glenn used to do it in a principled way.
So I remember we had a debate on Young Turks between Glenn Greenwald and Larry Lessig, who's like a Legendary campaign finance reform professor and leader and godfather of the movement.
It was right after Citizens United, because we've been around forever, and Lessig was saying that Citizens United was decided wrong and Glenn was arguing that it was decided right.
So Glenn was in favor of money in politics.
Now he'll probably say some BS about Well, no, I'm not in favor of money in politics, I just think that politics should drown in it, and that it's like free speech, that it's awesome that all these companies bribe all of our politicians, but hey, free speech.
So whatever that was, but back then, I mean, like, that was out of actual principle, whatever, you know, principle he thinks he has.
So there was like a little right-wing tinge to him even back then.
But now it's so over the top.
Everything is, oh, Tucker Carlson is so right!
I'm a liberal and I think Tucker Carlson is the most right person in the world.
But that's where we're getting into now the new world.
So that frustrated me about Rogan and Marr and you as well.
Like I thought, here's three, here we go again, pretending to be left wing and then saying things that are all right wing and going, see the right wing's right about everything, right?
But I now think a little bit differently about you three, okay?
I still, I think Tulsi and Glenn are still Just plain a scam.
Total, total, utter scam.
Okay?
But, and it's, oh, Dave Rubin is a classic example of that scam.
You know, he also had, like, right-wing tendencies a little bit.
He, like, loves, you know, anything that's brutal on the Israeli side.
He's like, occupation is great!
Bombing the hell out of the Palestinians is awesome!
So he always believed that even when he was pretending to be a liberal.
So, but for, like, Like, Dave, there's nothing left about him.
Nothing.
And no one thinks that Dave Rubin is left anymore.
And as long as you don't think he's a left-winger, and you're not running that scam, and you just say, okay, you're a right-winger, then I have no problems.
The more the left refuses to come on, the more you get conservative, right, libertarian, or post-liberal, whatever you want to call it, and then the more your views are going to be shaped by those that are surrounding you.
You know, you are the summation of the five people that surround you.
So, like, I say this at the very beginning of my book, we have hardware and software, right, in our heads.
So our hardware is our DNA and what we're predisposed to.
So maybe later we can get into my hardware, which is complicated because I'm generally very progressive in my nature, but there are parts of me that are conservative, that Like, I don't like change.
I like staying in the same house.
I like driving on the same road, et cetera, et cetera.
So there's, the hard word's a little complicated, but the software is the interesting part.
Software is where you get all of your ideas from.
And where do you get them from?
You get them from family, friends, media, your surroundings, et cetera.
The bubble that you're in.
And we're all in a bubble.
And I try to get the left to understand, brothers and sisters, the right wing's not the only people in the bubble.
Like, we think MAGA's nuts, right?
We think, like, the election being stolen is the craziest thing that anybody's ever thought.
And I believe that 100%, okay?
So they're in their bubble, in our opinion.
But we have our own bubble, right?
And our own bubble has some things that aren't true in it either, and I can give you some prominent examples in a minute.
But now the new thing that's happening, getting to the Corey original question, Tim, is that Now I sense a disturbance in the force, and before everything was left-wing or right-wing, and it isn't that anymore.
Especially in the last six months or so, I have started to see hosts who are no longer easy to define.
Okay, that have opinions that are in different parts of the spectrum.
And then the best part of it is I started to see the audience in left-wing audiences, right-wing audiences, middle audiences, starting to have opinions all over the political spectrum.
And that's actually a beautiful thing.
And the reason that that's great is because these preset ideologies Just believing in them is irrational.
Like, so what?
We're supposed to be either left-wing or right-wing, and that comes with like 80 different policy points on each side.
And somehow, magically, we're supposed to agree with all 80 on the right-wing side or all 80 on the left-wing side.
And that's not how humanity works, right?
We wind up in different parts of the spectrum for different issues.
So I've noticed this too, because we've had guests on that I would probably describe as tribalist left, and they hold default positions you expect to hear on Twitter, on X, or whatever, or in the news.
And then we'll have people like Destiny on, and Destiny will give a well-thought-out, reasonable response addressing the points that were made and have a real conversation about where positions are.
The fascinating thing, I'm a big fan of Destiny, he's great, and he'll passionately say, Trump sucks, like, here's the problems with Trump, and then we'll have other conversations about culture war issues, and he's like, oh yeah, that's totally true and correct, right?
When he said he got in trouble on Twitch for this, Kyle Rittenhouse was the clearest cut case of self-defense he had ever seen, and so that's taboo in the tribal aspect of it, but You know I see I see Destiny as someone he's just a guy who sees things and forms a moral framework around news facts and information we might disagree on some things but that's totally fine.
Yeah I think Destiny is a great example of it actually and I was on his show too and we so then even though he's the right of me on a lot of cultural issues he's So this is where the spectrum bends, it doesn't even make any sense.
But people in DC would say he's to the left of me on Democratic Party issues.
Like I, even though I'm running for president on the Democratic side, CenkForAmerica.com, but I think Democratic leadership is awful.
And Destiny is like such an interesting character and a bit of an avatar for the new paradigm because he will not agree with the orthodoxy of some of the left, but then he loves Biden.
And I think it's hilarious.
Like he's genuine about it so I don't mind at all.
What they were really saying was that she does not compromise with Republicans.
So her voting record is almost more aligned with Democrat Party politics, whereas Bernie Sanders was willing to compromise with anybody to get a bill through, which shows, in my opinion, more reasonable behavior.
But then the media narrative is because she's voted without Republicans, she's more left, which is like literally makes no sense.
No, that's a great point because they actually do that to progressives all the time.
That's mainstream media trick 101.
Bernie Sanders is not a real Democrat!
But wait a minute, what does a real Democrat mean?
The Democrats used to be the party of FDR and so it meant Social Security.
and lbj you know medicare and civil rights and voting rights and all these progressive policy positions uh you know war on poverty etc and bernie sanders represents that infinitely better than kamala harris or joe biden but the democratic parties become corrupted now and so they vote for things that are not left-wing at all they're that are just corporatist and then the media comes in which is corporate media and they go
the corporate positions are the democratic positions the These FDR positions are...
Terrible right-wing positions.
You're like, no, you're just now, you're making up things that are weird and ridiculous and that's partly why mainstream media lost all credibility.
Claiming that Kamala Harris is further left than Bernie Sanders, you'd have to be in an institution to believe that, but that is how they, but they're tricky.
They're liars.
So they don't say, they don't say Kamala Harris is more left-wing than Bernie Sanders.
They say Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat.
Yeah, and it cues the Democratic voters to think he's a Republican because he's not a Democrat, when in reality he's further left than the Democrats.
The media knows that trick, but they go, technically I didn't say he wasn't left-wing, I said he wasn't a Democrat.
Well, I think Trump and Bernie caused this fracture in 2015 into 16.
Bernie was too far left and they could not let him gain popularity in the party.
They could not let him win the nomination.
It was a meteoric rise.
Donald Trump was called by Vox.com a moderate Republican, and he was actually taking more moderate, even right right leaning Democrat positions to try and generate mass appeal, resulting in the Democrats having to oppose whatever it is Trump was suggesting and then creating this weird amalgam of neocons and neoliberals taking corporate establishment positions, which was then the left.
Yeah.
We try to have this debate very often with people on the right when they say leftists take guns.
And I'm like, no, the left, they like guns.
Liberals want gun control.
There's a distinction there.
But the media will only give you one narrative and they try to lump everyone into the same categories.
No, I'm just- I just want to know, a lot of people on Twitter were saying that you're- the first thing that happened was we talked about your campaign.
The first thing I said was if it was between like Mitt Romney and Joe Biden, I'm voting for you!
But it's because I even donated to Nancy Pelosi's progressive primary rival because I think, yeah, she's primeval.
I would rather have an idealistic young person who's wrong than evil corporate Nancy Pelosi enriching herself through government and squeezing the vestiges of power until she dies.
It's horrifying.
But when this came up, Yeah, so first of all, I'm mainly in the race to make sure that Biden drops out.
And I was like, oh, okay, well then, what are we talking about?
Like Mike Johnson gets elected Speaker of the House, right?
I think he's extreme MAGA.
I think he's a nutjob in a thousand different ways.
We can get into it later.
And then when the press secretary is asked about it by Peter Alexander at NBC, they get into Biden mode where they're like, well, that was in the past and we're looking forward to the future and we're looking forward to working with him.
Why are you defending Mike Johnson, who's the leader of the other party?
You're supposed to fight for us!
You're not supposed to go around being like... and Biden says it in nearly every speech.
Oh my Republican friends!
I love Republicans so much!
unidentified
I work so well with Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy!
We've been ripping off the American people on behalf of corporate donors for decades!
No, okay, he didn't say the last part out loud, but even if you don't think that, even if you're the most hardcore Biden dude in the world, which, congratulations, there's three of you, okay, there's like no enthusiasm I can get into that too, it's not gonna change the fact that the country's not into him.
So that's another one that's long and complicated because I thought that there were good parts of that and then of course disastrous parts of it right?
Okay so I'm not a native-born citizen I'm a naturalized citizen okay and so everybody then goes well duh can't you read man it's in the Constitution it says right there you have to be native-born.
Yeah that's in the original Constitution and and right next to it is the clause that says that black people are three-fifths of a person.
Well, can't you read, man?
It's in the Constitution!
It's right there, man!
Yeah, but there's a thing called amendments that amend the Constitution.
So that part got amended out.
The three-fifths part, obviously.
Tons of the Constitution got amended out.
And the natural-born citizen thing was amended out by the 14th Amendment.
So the 14th Amendment says very, very clearly Anyone who is born or naturalized has due process and equal protection of the laws.
So the Supreme Court has ruled that due process and equal protection means you have the same exact rights and they didn't put naturalized in there by accident.
They put it in on purpose.
That very clearly amends the earlier part of the Constitution where naturalized citizens did not have equal rights.
Now we do have equal rights.
Again, the whole point of the 14th Amendment was to take out the discrimination in the earlier part of the Constitution, and they didn't say like, oh, born and naturalized have equal protection of the laws, asterisks, except for those goddamn naturalized citizens, they're not allowed to be president.
If they wanted to say that, they could have said that, but there is no asterisks.
They didn't say that.
They said, no, naturalized citizens have all the same rights.
So there's, you know, in Schneider v. Russ, they say that Nationalized citizens and natural-born Americans have the same exact rights.
It would be, you know, wildly unconstitutional to treat naturalized citizens as, quote-unquote, second-class citizens, okay?
Now, in Schneider, they mention the presidential clause, but they don't comment on it.
They don't say yes or no to it.
They just note it and move on, okay?
And then there are decisions with this guy, Hassan Like, did kind of a fake run.
He's a good guy, good intentions.
I imagine, I don't know him personally, but kind of did this amateur litigation and the courts then didn't really get a chance to fully consider it.
He came in with a really weak case and so he got some rulings against him.
But that is not at all definitive.
And when you get into court decisions, even though the 14th Amendment is crystal clear, Lawyers get in there and they're like, well, did they mean born or naturalized, even though they said born or naturalized?
And then they mean equal, even though they said equal.
Well, how about this case where even though it says equal, it doesn't mean equal.
Yeah, we can fight that out and we are going to fight that out.
We're going to fight that out in the courts and we're going to win.
So, Tim, let me see if I can get agreement on logical and moral grounds, okay?
So, should naturalized citizens be second-class citizens, where we go, we don't really trust you.
Like, in the beginning, the reason they put that into the original constitution hundreds of years ago was because back then the Habsburg dynasty was sending in princes into other bloodlines and royalty and stuff, and we didn't want to be taken over by the Prussian Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
So that's why it's an anachronism, right?
So, like, Congressman Ted Luce, a Democrat, came here when he was three years old.
Uh, from Taiwan.
Grew up in Cleveland.
Doesn't remember Taiwan, right?
He's a colonel in the U.S.
Air Force.
Patrick Bette Davis, a right winger, was in the 101st Airborne.
His family ran from Iran during the Iranian Revolution.
He's Armenian Christian.
Is he disloyal?
Is he more disloyal than other Americans?
No way!
I mean, you tell me, do you think, you look at those guys, Arnold Schwarzenegger, et cetera, and go, they don't love America enough, I bet they're gonna sell us out to Austria or Iran or Taiwan.
I think people, you'll find there's traders of this country, we had that story about the military couple selling nuclear secrets, I think, what was that, like last year or whatever?
Yeah.
So, you know, in this globalized, Culture and world that's being built with communication technology.
I think that the question that comes up is you have to choose one of two directions, which is either they either amend the 14th or amend the Constitution away in that direction or recognize exactly what you're saying.
The issue being, you know, what we see now is birth tourism.
So based on the 14th Amendment, you have women in China, men and women in China will hire a surrogate in California I mean look, my family is a perfect example.
so that kid is both Chinese and American.
And then what?
That kid's gonna grow up in China and come back to the United States and be president?
So I think-- - I mean, look, my family is a perfect example.
It's not perfect in that they're not anchor babies because my sister grew up in America like I did.
But she went back to Turkey.
And when she came here, she wanted to have birth here more because of, not like anybody thought like, "Oh, these kids are gonna be the president." Right?
No, because it's better healthcare, comfortable.
And with her parents, with my mom and dad to take care of her.
So when she had both Hasan and Murat, my two nephews, she came back to America, where she grew up, to have the kids.
But they did spend their childhood in Turkey, so Hasan actually came to America when he was 18.
So I grew up in America, and culturally I'm 100% American, right?
If a couple in China has a surrogate give birth to their son in California who is then immediately, at the age of two months, brought back to China, raised completely under the CCP, and then at 35 moves to the United States and says, I'm gonna run for president, I think we'd be upset with that.
We'd say, wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on.
And for someone like Patrick, Bet David, or you, I know people are going to say politics, they might not like yours, they probably like Patrick, Bet David, but you would much rather have, in my opinion, either of you who grew up in America, American culture, and we disagree politically, it's better than someone growing up in China and having a technicality allow them to be our president.
I think a large component of what we're saying This is going to open a can of worms because I'm going to bring up Israel-Palestine, but there's a video coming out of San Francisco of a bunch of students marching through the halls, chanting from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
And a question is brought up is, why are these kids saying this?
Why is this in their mind?
My reaction is not immediately like, oh, it's the left is doing this and the right is doing this.
My question is, why aren't they chanting about Burma and Myanmar?
When a conflict that started in 1948, 12,000 dead this year alone has been ongoing.
And, you know, I made the comment about why does everyone care so much about this?
The question I have for these young people is why do they care about Palestine, but not Myanmar?
And it really is the information that they're consuming, where the information is coming from.
And I think, as you mentioned, the media, so is division.
I don't so much believe that the corporate American interests are trying to cause mass fighting between left and right.
I do think there's a political component of it's good to have left and right fighting.
I believe more so foreign interests are hell-bent on making sure we keep fighting, especially as you've got war in Ukraine, you've got now war in the Middle East, there is a vested interest in watching the United States rip itself to shreds, which results in young people, whether you agree or disagree on their position on Palestine, being polarized in that direction.
By the way, before I get to that, which is a really important question, I should say that, look, whether you think, to finish up the earlier topic, whether you think that you're dissatisfied with Biden as an option in your left wing, or you think you're a naturalized citizen and you think, yes, goddammit, take this to the Supreme Court and be done with this thing, let's get a decision once and for all,
Chippin' a dollar at jankforamerica.com is just like a protest, like, no, obviously it shouldn't be Biden, and yeah, obviously naturalized citizens should have 100% the same rights.
And, you know, right-wing personalities are rooting for you, too.
You said they should want Biden in the race, that's true, but a lot of people have said any dollar going to Jank is a dollar not going to Biden, is a dollar not going to the DNC.
Because right now black people and white people smoke pot at the same rates and black people get arrested at four times the rate.
And so and a lot of and part of the reason why I said in the beginning but the lines are moving is because now the right wing has moved on that position.
And so the voters say, no, that is unjust, you're right, and stop putting those guys in prison, plus it costs money, plus it's not fair, plus it leads to more racial issues, et cetera, right?
But the Republican politicians are like, oh no, no way, black people should be arrested at four times the rate of white people, we're not changing a goddamn thing!
But I think all of these can be broken down to the more complex nuances of the argument.
So when it comes to... I'll just go quickly, but then we can start and focus on one.
When it comes to, say, like you mentioned, trans rights, it's a question of when does one person's rights and privileges infringe on someone else's rights and privileges?
I just think the the earlier years of someone's life are the most important and if we can get One of the one of the initiatives my buddies were talking about ten years ago was converting libraries into hacker spaces effectively workshops where The kids want to be there because they're they're making little hot-air balloons or they're but you know what would happen next to him what they would immediately look at porn and
And then the librarian, nowadays, like it'd be in Tennessee and then the librarian would get arrested for 20 years because she let the kids accidentally see gay porn, like straight porn.
She'd be like, go for it all day long, all day long.
Oh, somebody's gay!
Arrest the librarian!
That's what Well, just don't let kids get access to the stuff at all and... Yeah, I mean, first of all, that makes the whole book banning and all that stuff and all the stuff that DeSantis passed totally absurd.
They're like, okay, we're gonna keep these out of those kids' schools and then that way they won't have it in the libraries, the classrooms, they won't have any access to it.
Dude, it's called the internet, okay?
They can get access to any kind of sex, any kind of materials, any kind of literature.
They're going to find out that gay people exist online.
I'm afraid of saying it because then Republican politicians are going to want to ban the internet.
But my actual position is, yeah, I don't understand how we got to the point where a child can't go into an adult bookstore, but a child is allowed to go on porn websites.
And so the right wing weirdly lost track of parenting because they think that they're the parenting kings, but then they're always like, society has kidnapped my kids and they gave them this.
No, no, look, I see things in society that I don't agree with.
And you know what I do?
I sit my kids down and I talk to them and I say, here's what's right and here's what's wrong and here's why.
And, and, and the other thing is Tim, sorry, but, If it was like, hey, you know what, we don't want them exposed to violent material or sexual material, okay, right?
But once they started going...
No, but we don't want him exposed to the gay people and trans people.
unidentified
We don't want anybody talking about that crap, okay?
So the issue that I see is when I did sex ed, I was in fifth grade.
Parents signed off on a permission slip.
There was one kid, only one kid out of my class who was actually taken out of the room and the parents were like, he's not allowed.
And so I don't know what he did.
He went to lunch or something.
Yeah.
Sex Ed was the boys and the girls were separated.
They then explained organs, organ function, and the process of fertilization, how babies are made, and things like that.
And we were all like 10 years old.
And now, we actually have a sample of these books that are considered sex ed, but it's actually kink.
Talking about scat, and if you want me to show you the book, I'll show you the book.
No, it's... I mean, so when... I'm good on scat.
Right, what happens then is...
You, uh, I think you've talked about this too, uh, someone on the right will say, like, there's a parent, and not even necessarily a right-wing person, says, I discovered this book in my school which shows graphic kink depictions and kink education about things totally unrelated to reproduction and sex, and then you get a knee-jerk reaction from the tribal left saying, you want to ban books, you're anti-gay, and it's like, wait, wait, wait, hold on, like, this book just shows someone giving a blowjob, you know, and playing with strap-ons and things like this, that's not for kids.
But by the way though, what you're saying applies exactly to the right-wing as well about those platforms.
Where the platforms say, hey, we're not going to allow terrorist videos on, we're not going to allow child porn on, and we're not going to allow Nazis on.
And then they go, oh censorship!
Oh our beloved poor Nazis!
They're not allowed out anymore!
You left-wing censors!
Right?
But they're correct.
Well hold on, let's break it down.
What do we mean by censorship?
Like to your point, We all agree with some degree of censorship, right?
I hope everybody agrees don't allow childborn anywhere, right?
Easy, right?
So then the question is where do you draw the lines?
So like we already agreed Ron DeSantis was wrong.
He drew the line too far out to 12th grade.
He went too far in banning things that weren't about sex but were just mentioning gay people.
I don't know if you agree with that but I'm saying it, okay?
I agree though, and I think that is more of a... I don't know how to describe that.
I think, at least for us, the conversation we're having is There's a teacher in Illinois who gave kids access to this book is gay, which it teaches, it was to ten-year-olds, how to use Grindr.
- Well, but the problem to him is, no, I didn't, but-- - The FBI called them terrorists.
- No, but, so you guys get so carried away with the FBI calling people terrorists because you think that they're doing it in such an expansive way, but they're not.
It's like this hysteria.
FBI is mainly targeting domestic terrorists that are actually right-wing terrorists.
And so like then again people catch feelings because they're like, right wing, can't be terrorists.
No.
Definitely could be terrorists.
The dude sent pipe bombs to anyone who opposed Donald Trump.
And the FBI is saying at this point, the FBI, which is historically massively right-wing, the idea that the FBI is some sort of left-wing deep state is hilarious.
Not backed up by A single fact.
So the FBI is saying, hey guys, we wish it weren't the case, but most of the domestic terrorists in America now are right-wingers, and they're all trying to kill anyone who disagrees with Donald Trump.
No, but it's not of course because the right-wing says anytime it's a white person or a right-winger they go mentally unwell.
And because I'm honest, I agree, right?
And so half of them will have their manifestos like in Charlottesville they had a manifesto about race wars and Black people were terrible and that's why he went inside a black church and shot him up.
El Paso was against Latinos.
There's the synagogue shootings.
So these are political, there's no question, but no one who's mentally well goes into a synagogue or a church and shoots people.
But that is also true of Muslims!
When it comes to right-wing, they're like, oh yeah, that's so true when it comes to right-wingers.
So true.
They're just mentally unwell.
They don't represent us.
Muslims.
Oh, it's all Muslims.
It's all Muslims.
They're all mentally well.
That's why they shot up people.
They don't have any mental health problems.
Their problem is that they're Muslim.
No, no, no.
That's exactly bigotry.
No, all those dudes have massive mental health problems as well.
So instead of saying, hey, I hate black people, they're saying I hate the West or whatever it is.
The examples you gave are these extreme examples that are horrifying we try to prevent and these people are, they're acts of evil, abject evil.
On the left you get what I would call more blunt terror.
So for instance, the George Floyd riots.
When you had small towns across this country, Michael Tracy's reporting, showing a grocery store that's windows smashed out and they spray paint on the boarded up window saying, please don't hurt us.
When you have people in Berkeley, they all... I was at a bar in Berkeley, and they had Trump sucks, Trump is a pig on the window, and I'm having a drink, and I asked, this is like 2017, I asked, I was like, you guys not big Trump fans?
And the bartender's like, no, we like him.
And I'm like, why would you put that in the window?
If we don't, they'll smash our windows out and attack us.
That people live in... Have you been to Berkeley?
There's a Burger King with a big sign in the window saying, we are not a corporate chain, we are family-owned, please don't hurt us.
I'm like, why would you live that way?
You look at May 29th, when far leftists firebombed the White House grounds and St.
John's Church.
And this is not major news.
There's no committee hearings.
But if you're somebody who lives, I'll give you a more recent example.
When I'm in Reston, Virginia, having dinner with the team here, a guy comes up and says, you're not going to hear this a lot in Reston, but I'm a big fan.
And I was like, actually, like four people already have come up and OK, that's the blunt terror of In a town I live in, I have to whisper and I'm scared that someone might find out I listen to TimCast, when in reality, people who worked there and other people had already said this, but they all seem to say the same things.
In fact, there's a guy who had a Trump sign in the middle of Pennsylvania and his neighbor, I'm sorry, a Biden sign or something, and his neighbor shot him and killed him because he's like, you're against Trump.
No, but they have a massive impact, the right wing does, in the middle of the country.
What we hear all the time on The Young Turks is, Oh, thank God, I thought I was alone, right?
Like, I see you guys and it gives me sanity, because I live in the middle of Tennessee, I live in the middle of Arkansas, I live in the middle of Texas, and everyone here thinks that, you know, if you're against Trump, you're the devil, and, you know, you molest kids, and, you know, it's just, like, what you would call cultural terrorism.
And so I don't think that's fair to call terrorism on the right or the left.
It's just cultural domination in certain areas and part of what I'm trying to do here is shake people out of that and go I hear you and look at all the things we disagree on and all the things that I've said that probably made a bunch of right-wingers angry already but let's not lose track of the things we also agree on.
They all... I mean, Biden was known as the senator from MBNA, which was a credit card company back then.
That was his nickname!
Like, even the people in the Senate, they're like, oh, it's so funny, even among us sellouts, Joe Biden's the biggest sellout.
Let's call him the senator from MBNA, right?
So, we lost it.
This is chapter five of my book.
I'm not trying to plug the book.
I'm just, it's a natural thing that's coming up and I want to go back to policy, etc.
But chapter four, I explain how we lost the Democratic Party.
So the chapter three is why Republicans suck, and that explains how the Republican Party went from the party of Lincoln to, in my opinion, the party of hate.
So the party changed completely, and they changed completely because of the Southern strategy.
But for the Democrats, they think, oh, you're so right about that, Cenk.
Jacobin has been very strong on defending free speech, and so when I started seeing the articles they were posting, and of course I know a ton of people who have been consistently very left economically, and I started seeing the articles and I started reading Jacobin articles, I'm like, This is the kind of left that I want to have an argument with, one that understands the importance of free speech.
Well, so this is a point I did want to make on that.
You said, you know, the right saying, oh no, our precious Nazis or whatever.
But it's not so much our precious Nazis, it's especially right now with Israel-Palestine, the people who are going to bear the brunt of that legislation is the pro-Palestine left.
So Ron DeSantis just banned, this is a bit of debate right now among Republicans, Vivek Ramaswamy is very critical of Ron DeSantis saying this student group should be banned and forced to reform because in their school toolkit they say they are Hamas.
They are Palestinians in exile who are a part of the resistance that is... I don't know how they explicitly define it.
They say these are resistance fighters who attacked.
We are part of that resistance.
And so Ron's argument is that means they are declaring support for a terrorist organization.
Therefore, we have to disband this group.
Vivek says, oh, it's a bunch of kids in a college saying stupid things.
We tried to get out the word through Yahoo Messenger, through AOL.
We were AOL bloggers.
We put up videos on MySpace.
So we're as old school as old school gets.
Having been around so long, you have all these videos that show indisputably your consistency, right?
So, I was against Don Imus being fired, I didn't think Rush Limbaugh should be censored, or Glenn Beck, or when I was outraged when Megyn Kelly was fired.
I'm like, okay, so she said this thing about blackface.
Okay.
It's wrong.
And I can explain why it's wrong.
But if you fire her, nobody's even going to find out why it's wrong.
So if like Al Roker was upset, then guys, why don't you take the opportunity to bring in Al Roker and Megyn Kelly and have an hour long conversation.
And guess what?
That'd be the highest rated show you did that year.
Right?
And then people would learn what's wrong with blackface.
Instead, you fire her.
You never have that conversation.
And a whole bunch of white people who've never understood the history of blackface go, what the hell, man?
I don't get it.
So I was Michael Jackson in 1983 and Halloween.
I didn't do it because I was racist.
I'm not evil, right?
And that's because they don't know the history of blackface and how white people would put it on and then lynch black people, etc.
But you can't blame them if they don't know, right?
So my point is, and Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Charlie Kirk going on college campuses, every time I defended them, okay?
So I believe in free speech completely.
Now, having said that, nothing's complete as you pointed out earlier, there's always some form of censorship.
So where do I draw the line?
I draw the line at Verifiable but extreme hate speech, okay?
So hate speech isn't, I don't like the current right-wing government of Israel.
No, that's a policy position, okay?
And hate speech isn't, I think black people committed more crime in this country than white people.
Now, I could break down why I think the context of that is wrong, right?
But that's not hate speech, you're trying to have a policy discussion and maybe you're having it in the wrong direction, but I wouldn't call that anywhere near hate speech, right?
So, but if you're going around saying we have to eradicate the Jews, no, no, that's Nazis, sorry.
A lot of people could mean different things by from, I hate this term from the river to the sea, but people, different people mean different things by that.
So, uh, and then I suppose you can cut away the nuance.
We had that video out of Cooper Union, I don't know if you saw, where the students are banging on the doors with the Jewish students in the room screaming from the river to the sea.
And so, I think it was Riley Gaines who had given a speech about how trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete in female sports, and she was in a college campus somewhere, I think it was in the Northwest too, but I forget.
And so for me, and so it gets nuanced and this is difficult because people like to take those things and then go to extremes.
So one extreme is Then the Ron DeSantis extreme where okay that's it we're gonna ban all people showing any kind of support to rhetorical support to Hamas or to Palestinians or whatever and and the mainstream media shuts out Both right-wing and left-wing opinions by going, these are not acceptable thoughts.
But when you have someone captured in a room where they fear for their safety and cannot leave, you have gone too far, okay?
No, it's too much to call it terrorism, because look, then you take away the power of the word.
Okay, so nobody got killed, nobody even got assaulted.
But at the same time, I'm not excusing it.
I'm saying it might even be a crime, but when you call it terrorism, it lessens the actual terrorism that Hamas does, or that right-wingers here in America do.
This morning, McKay Coppins revealed another part of the book about Mitt Romney, where Mitt Romney said that most of the Republicans that did not vote to impeach or convict Donald Trump, especially after January 6th, Or because they were physically worried about their safety.
They thought that right-wing supporters of Donald Trump might kill them or their family members.
Specific people on January 6th, but that's a whole very nuanced conversation, and the issue with January 6th... Well, whenever it comes to the right wing, we get more nuanced, but okay, go ahead.
Well, we'll be nuanced with the left.
I'm not saying that leftists who are privately saying, you know, they want to eat the rich or whatever are committing acts of terrorism.
If someone on the left says, I'm scared of people on the right doing something at some point, it's vague and nebulous, I'm scared of people coming here not for political reasons.
Because you're saying when right-wingers yell at people and surround them, that's not terrorism.
But when the left-wing does it, because they didn't say they were going to kill them in the left-wing scenarios, they surrounded the room and yelled at them, and that is terrorism?
It's not because you've... There's a line somewhere.
Yeah, and the reason why I say it might be a crime is because then they don't have freedom of movement, so it's, you know, false arrest is almost certainly the wrong crime, but something where you're... There's a clear distinction what I'm saying.
Yeah, you're limiting somebody's freedom.
But Tim, if you think that the right-wing guys are not physically threatening these congressmen and others, you're crazy.
I'm talking about if there's a guy in Congress surrounded by all of his guards, there's no active threats or anything, and he goes, I better not vote this way because someone's gonna get mad.
Right, but if people are screaming things at you, making demands of you, and there are acts of violence, people fighting cops and bashing cops, yes it is.
Yeah, so if right-wingers, you know, my sense of it is, we talked about the bubbles earlier, right?
That right-wingers are in their bubble and never see the right-wing attacking them.
Why would they?
Because they're right-wingers.
So you don't get to experience what we experience.
And for a brief moment there, around January 6th, even the Republican congressman got to experience what the left-wing experiences.
So what the left-wing experiences is right-wingers threatening to kill us 24-7.
Now that's not all right-wingers.
We're fair.
We're reasonable.
It's not the majority of right-wingers.
But is there a crazed Percentage of right-wingers in this country constantly threatening to murder the left-wingers, Democrats, and now Republican congressmen.
Yeah, and so every left-winger, every left-winger in media, but only a couple of the congresspeople, which is amazing because when it happens to them they flip out and I'm like, oh wow, apparently that doesn't happen to them every day.
But for people in left-wing media, Our death threats from the right-wing are non-stop.
When I was at Occupy Wall Street, in support of the activists, to the degree of getting information out, rejecting the arbitrary police restrictions, do you know who physically attacked me?
One of the right-wingers.
It was the far left.
We called them Black Black Anarchists at the time.
People call them Antifa now.
I mean, it's like a vague term for groups of left-wing ideologues who dress up and attack people.
I know that if, if I go to a, if, if we have people on the show who rag on Trump, the responses we get are, you are wrong.
If we go to places and we challenge the left, we get threats of violence and death.
Yeah, so look, there is a strand of that on the extreme left, and it's always been around in the extreme left, but it got so muted it's now back to rising up, it's bubbling up, and I'm worried about it.
You know, whether it's Tankies or whoever they are, I don't really, like the Antiva thing, you guys hyped up so much and then they never arrived.
So in the case of the George Floyd issues, the riots are different than the occupations, right?
So the riots are great frustration, but then after the riots is the looting, and the looting is not frustration, that's just stealing, okay?
And then the occupations...
are not the rioting they're not they're usually white people okay and white liberals who are like zany extremists and so if you're on the left and you think we're talking about you no we're not talking about you we're talking about the guys who say that there should be no laws within this city block or within these ex-city blocks and whenever you have no laws you know what happens Chaos.
I think it's been amended now based on people making arguments about what constitutes a death during the riot versus someone died while the riot was happening.
But it's between like 20 and 30.
So when you have nationwide mass protests over what I would say is arguably serious disinformation coming out of what happened with George Floyd, people fear terrorism.
Well, no, no, we need to clarify what I mean by disinformation.
I'm not saying... So obviously the dude, Chauvin, put his knee on the guy's neck and this general area, it's like covering a large portion of his back.
But the disinformation comes around the circumstances that resulted in that, the moral questions of what should be done, how it should be done, and the fact that what did happen doesn't warrant 30 plus more deaths and mass rioting across the country, which destroys more lives and burns down innocent people's buildings and homes.
Yeah, and what happens, Tim, is that sometimes people die because they can't breathe because you cut off the floor of oxygen and sometimes they die and they say they can't breathe.
It's because they have a heart condition or some other condition and when you press down long, compress long enough, they literally have the feeling that they can't breathe and then they die.
No, I think it's, look I'll tell you Tim, to the average guy it sounds like you're excusing it.
I know you're saying you're not because you're putting in the caveat that the nine minutes was wrong and it was murder, but like don't get into it because if you want to talk about nuance there's a thousand cop videos where they drag him out of the car and you could say, no that's totally okay, that guy's on speed, he was causing a significant issue where people might have gotten hurt and the cops had to subdue him.
Make the argument in that case.
If you make it about George Floyd, everybody's going to think you're defending this racist guy who murdered that guy.
I don't care what people think about me if I'm trying to find a solution so this doesn't happen again.
And so if the issue is, a guy uses a counterfeit $20 bill resulting in a police call.
Police find him behind the wheel of an SUV chewing on hard drugs.
He's removed from the vehicle, he's sat down, eventually they move to arrest him.
George Floyd becomes combative, says, take me out of the car, take me out of the car, I can't breathe, put me on the ground, put me on the ground, put me on the ground.
Chauvin arrives after this, kneels on his neck.
Those are the circumstances of what happened.
Crowd forms.
They're mad at it.
George Floyd dies.
Nine minutes.
The questions are, where was the point at which this should have stopped?
But Tim, you're purposely picking the worst case to talk about because it gets, like my honest opinion, sorry, but it's because you know that it's going to get more attention if you say it in the context of George Floyd.
The guy, the two redneck racist sons of bitches who murdered him said that he was in the house that was being built, which by the way, apparently tons of people had come by to say, hey, how's the construction going?
Right?
So do they know that he was one of the, how's the construction going?
Well, they don't know anything because he didn't steal anything.
But you're wrong.
So, but they see a black guy at a construction site, and they're like, let's chase that son of a bitch down and shoot him.
I don't care what people think of me if I'm following the facts to try and figure out what happened and try and solve the problem, but you have already shown you don't know the case.
How about the police then show a picture of him to various people in the neighborhood saying, this is our suspect of the burglaries that have been happening over the past several weeks?
So let's say, let's take your bullshit facts, so-called facts, let's accept them as true, okay?
So they show me a picture, please come by my house, they show me a picture of a black guy and they say this might be a suspect in a robbery.
If I see him, I'm not going to chase him down with a gun because that means that there's a high chance that we're going to get into a conflict and someone's going to die.
Okay, if there's a suspect in a crime and the police say this is who we think he is, then you believe this man may have actually stolen the gun out of my truck.
So when it comes to the case like Ahmaud Arbery or many of these others or Breonna Taylor, I'm not going to start making declarative statements about the personal opinions of people I've never met and don't know anything about.
I'm going to try and understand what the argument from the prosecution was.
And guess what?
The prosecution did not dispute that Ahmaud Arbery was a suspect in the felony burglaries.
It's because every time a black man is killed by either authorities or vigilantes, like in the Ahmaud Arbery case, what right-wingers do is, did you know that back in seventh grade he was once tardy?
And we heard that in eighth grade he was smoking marijuana.
He was evil and had it coming.
Did you know George Floyd might have stolen 20 whole dollars?
Oh my god, these black people, they're so evil.
Did you know that Trayvon Martin was caught in school maybe smoking pot?
And that's why Zimmerman had to murder him in cold blood.
So I can understand if conservatives and right wingers have done that, and so you're just frustrated and don't want to hear it, but I'm not doing that.
But it's in the Ahmaud Arbery case and the George Floyd case, you're taking the most extreme cases with the most clear racism, with the most clear murders, and you're trying to nuance it.
And what I'm telling you, Tim, and what has made me uncomfortable in the past about you, which is what I was trying to get past, is that that attracts a huge right-wing audience because they want somebody to excuse the death of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.
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And when you seem to excuse it with your nuance, then they go, Yes!
Finally somebody's sticking up for white people killing black people!
And my argument was, there's different entrances to the building.
The people who are violent and riding should be charged, they will be charged, and they should go to jail.
To what degree?
I mean, there's a debate on the timeframe.
I mean, 20 years is probably a bit excessive.
On the other side of the building, there's a video of the police opening the doors to a calm group of people walking in and waving to the cops who say, explicitly, I don't agree with it, but I support it.
I support your right to it or something to that effect.
And I said, those people are going to get acquitted because you can't allow someone into a building to claim it's trespassing.
You made the argument that Tim Poole said they're stepping over broken glass and didn't know they were trespassing.
I didn't.
And it turns out I was correct.
Several of these people have already been totally acquitted or partially acquitted due to this fact.
And so, although it's hilarious that there are some right-wingers, and again, whenever I say right-wingers, guys, don't catch feelings.
It doesn't necessarily mean you.
I don't mean just you, Tim.
I mean the audience, right?
It could mean that there are other people in the right wing who feel that way.
I'm a left winger and I've told you a hundred times about extreme left wingers, I don't agree with.
So in the case of the right wing being absurd on January 6th, is right wing cops let the guys into the building and then the right wing goes, and then the right wingers go, deep state left wingers.
No guys, that's not deep state left-wing, it's just the right-wing cop letting right-wing protesters in.
So, you know Martin Luther King famously said that riots are the voice of the unheard, right?
And I think that there's, that's definitely true in what happened after George Floyd, but I also think that there's some truth to that when it comes to January 6th, which you'll never hear anybody on the left wing say, okay?
And so I'm not 1% excusing the hang Mike Pence chants and I think those guys are super dangerous and I've talked about it before, I'll talk about it 2000 times after.
But for a lot of the right wing, First of all, the guys on the ground were not, they did not, other than the leaders, they did not know that they were a plot to overthrow the American government.
I think they were, and I'll explain why, but they didn't know that.
Yeah, oh definitely, and so we'll get into that in a sec.
But the guys on the ground didn't know that, they were just fodder, okay?
And so they're super frustrated.
So here's what the establishment and the Democrats don't understand about that frustration.
It's because you guys keep lying to them, the mainstream media does, and keeps telling them, no, these politicians are honorable people and they're having legitimate debates, and let's find out what Lindsey Graham's opinion is, and let's find out what Joe Manchin's opinion is.
Their opinion is, who wrote me the biggest check?
Okay, so since mainstream media lies about that 24-7 and the average right-winger has the same problems as the average left-winger and the average independent in the country, which is that our wages are too low, corporate power is run amok, big business in cahoots with big government is crushing our lives, so their voice is unheard and so they're in a rage!
Now, Trump then takes their rage and misdirects it.
But I understand the rage.
And I understand that sometimes riots happen when your voice is unheard.
Both on the left, the right, the white, and black.
So I'm incredibly consistent on that.
Now, why do I think there was an actual coup attempt?
Because the coup is not the riot.
It's not like they were going to take the Capitol and keep it, and then we were all going to be like, oh, I guess the right wing has it now.
I guess the Oath Keepers are now the Secretary of State, the Proud Boy guys, the Treasury Secretary.
No, no, no, no.
Here was their role that they didn't know they were playing.
So guys like Peter Navarro wrote a book about it, Steve Bannon brags about it all the time, Eastman, Cheeseboro, all those guys who are charged now in Atlanta wrote memos about it.
One of the memos was called the fraudulent elector memo.
And so the plan was We get a bunch of fake, and Sidney Powell accidentally admitted all the way back in November on Lou Dobbs' show.
The plan is, you get a bunch of, now they wouldn't say fake electors, they would say Trump electors.
But they're not even technically the Trump electors, because you have a slate of electors for both candidates, right?
But the slate of electors for Trump would not go along with the coup attempt.
So they had to find new random Republicans in the swing states, and they even did it in New Mexico, which was not even close, right?
And these were the fake electors.
And so the plan was, delay the proceedings so that they cannot certify the vote.
Plan A was, have Pence say, I'm not certifying the vote.
But Pence wouldn't do the unconstitutional thing, and he deserves enormous credit for that.
And he nearly got murdered for that, okay?
I mean, that is a Republican that had significant courage.
And I don't think he's ever really gotten the credit he deserves for that.
Now you could disagree with Pence on everything else and I do, right?
But I give him credit where credit is due.
So he was supposed to delay the proceedings.
He refuses to do it.
Trump is in a rage.
Instead, they get the guys to bum rush the building so that it delays the proceedings.
The next part of that plan was then the Republicans are supposed to go in and go, well, I can't tell who won.
We had the There's no certification.
We're gonna bring it back to the states.
And then at that point, the swing states had Republican legislatures.
And so the Republicans in the legislatures were supposed to go, we now install the fake electors, okay?
And that's a coup attempt, knowing that you lost the goddamn election.
When the state legislatures say that Trump won when they know he didn't win.
By the way, more credit to Republicans in a second.
When they say he won when he didn't, it then goes back to the House because then it becomes an open question, a political question that the House has to decide.
And the House, even though there was more Democrats at the time, they vote by state and the Republicans had more states.
So it was actually, if you're going to do a coup, It is a logical coup plan.
And they discussed other coup plans.
Michael Flynn proposed rolling out the tanks and doing martial law.
They had a three hour conversation about it.
Now let me give credit to courageous Republicans.
Even Trump administration guys who I despise.
Everyone, the reason Trump didn't roll out the tanks is because everyone in his administration that was in the room said, we will all resign immediately if you roll out tanks against the American people.
Okay?
So, so credit to those Trump administration people.
And then the state legislature is filled with what I think are radical right-wingers Most, the great majority of them said, no, we're not going to do the fake electors.
It was the original jurisdiction lawsuit between Texas and Pennsylvania arguing that several states violated the Constitution by altering the rules of the election, not at the legislative level, but through the judiciary and the executive branches.
And so Texas's argument was, if Pennsylvania is acting in violation of the Constitution, it's subverting our vote in this process, and we want the Supreme Court to rule on this.
This is what actually ignites fervor and expands the conflict.
Thomas and Alito agreed that when a state has a dispute with another state, as per the Constitution, original jurisdiction means they must hear it, but the other justices just said, no, we won't.
And so what ends up happening is the case expanded to include, I think, 48 states with like 24 versus 24, whatever, or it was like 23, 25, where half the states were saying, You know, we've got five or six states that have altered the rules of the election, but the Constitution explicitly states the legislation must handle how the elections are handled.
So if a governor changes the rules or a judiciary rules on it, it's not gone to the legislature yet.
The legislative branch must then Like, they have to vote on it.
Because I don't want the right wing thinking that it was like, oh, fraudulent election and Hugo Chavez or the ghost of Hugo Chavez and a kraken and a mule went in and changed the votes.
No one changed the votes.
Period.
And so because Trump and Fox News and Newsmax lie about a 24 goddamn 7, and Fox News had to pay 800 million dollars for their lies, people think that the election was stolen when it wasn't.
You know what election was stolen?
And then I'll tell you the reaction that happened instead when it happened in the left wing.
So let me explain the details and then I'll relate it back to today, okay?
Al Gore not only won the popular vote, and nobody disputes that, but after the case was over and the election was over, all the news organizations went in and did a recount of the entire state of Florida.
And under every kind of way of counting, Al Gore won the state of Florida.
So he got flat out robbed.
He won the electoral college as well.
But the Supreme Court in that case said, No, I don't care what Florida laws.
I don't care that we've been making an argument for states' rights our whole lives.
That liar Scalia, that piece of crap hypocrite, was like, oh yeah, did I say states' rights for decades?
I mean, screw states' rights!
You know what I'm saying?
States don't have any goddamn rights!
And they ordered Florida to stop the recount.
They said, we don't want to know who won.
Because then we might find out Al Gore won.
We don't want Al Gore winning.
We just want to steal this goddamn election and give it to our buddy George Bush.
He brings in John Bolton who's a warmonger and a neocon.
Sheldon Adelson owns casinos in Vegas but he mainly owns casinos in Macau.
You know that like so Trump did like half a dozen giant favors for him but the biggest favor was Two biggest favors were he basically dismissed corruption charges in China against him, and he allowed him to bring his money back from China.
Instead of a 35%, he created a special rate of 8% for repatriating taxes from a foreign country.
So a guy who, he's deceased now, but back then, a guy who had his main line of business in China Had bought the U.S.
President.
He gave him $100 million, two different times, and totally bought him, and Donald Trump was 100% his bitch.
His bitch so much that not only did he give him every single thing that he asked for, but he also made his wife, he gave her a Presidential Medal of Honor.
It's the highest honor America has, and he threw it in like a tchotchke.
Like, oh yeah, if you act now, Sheldon, I'll also take your rando wife and give her a presidential medal, okay, of honor.
And he's like, Sheldon's like, I was gonna go 90 million, but I'll go the whole hundred, okay?
And so he purchased Donald Trump.
He's just as corrupt as anyone else.
He's just corrupt on his own behalf.
But Bernie, he's not corrupt.
So that's why the establishment's like, Trump we can deal with.
So for all of Hillary Clinton's whining, she never said the election, that there was fraud in the voting, that the election was stolen from me through the fraud in the voting, and it's an illegitimate election, and I should be president.
So here's an analogy to that line, even though Bernie never said it, but his supporters said it.
So the primary was in 2016 was quote-unquote rigged against Bernie Sanders, okay?
Now how was it rigged?
Because it's very important.
So it was rigged in that They did as few debates as possible.
They put the debates on when people would least watch them.
They tried to take the oxygen out of the room for Bernie.
We broke the story on Young Turks that Donna Brazile took questions and fed them to Hillary Clinton in the debates.
Oh, and then a huge part of it was they did a money laundering operation where these huge Democratic donors would give to the states and the state parties would then funnel it into Hillary Clinton's campaign.
So if you say that primary election was rigged in that way, okay, that's fair, okay, but if you say the votes were actually messed with, And a lot of Bernie supporters at the time said that, and we at The Young Turks came out and said, no guys- Superdelegates.
So, but guys, understand how the mainstream media rigs things, because they rig things against the left and the right, okay?
So it's important that you understand how they do it.
So in that case, What they did was the superdelegates technically actually vote at the end of the process.
And oftentimes, even if they declare earlier, they switch their votes.
So for example, a lot of superdelegates said that they were going to support Hillary in 2008, but in the middle of the campaign they switched to Obama.
And none of that was technical.
Only at the end do they vote, do the superdelegates vote.
But what the media did instead in 2016 was, They showed the superdelegate count in every tabulation, right from the get-go.
So they'd be like, Hillary Clinton has a 468 to nothing lead on Bernie Sanders, this thing's almost over!
You're like, wait a minute, nobody's even voted, including the superdelegates!
You're just saying that those superdelegates declared for Hillary as a way of saying this thing's already over, Hillary Clinton's already won, so they're manipulating the voters into thinking that Bernie Sanders is doing a long shot campaign that is hopeless and he's just a piece of crap who's trying to hurt the actual Democratic nominee when these beloved superdelegates have already weighed in, right?
You had this one group out of Stanford argue that I'm one of the super spreaders of election misinformation or whatever, when since Joe Biden won, I was like, guys, this is not true.
Trump is not going to be reinstated.
There are no Dominion weird switching.
There's no German servers.
But they just pump out lies in the media saying I claimed it anyway.
Yeah, so now the thing that I'll tell the right-wingers that still believe Trump's lie is, alright guys, you have a perfect opportunity.
Because when Trump goes to court in Atlanta and in the federal case on the actual election issues, so not the national documents and not the fraud in New York, but the ones that are actually about January 6th, right?
He can win those cases very easily, because the core of the cases is they have to prove that Donald Trump not only lied about the election results, but knew that he was lying.
But the good news is, the defense to that is, I wasn't lying, it's true, the election was stolen.
And in fact, if you're a Donald Trump supporter, and you really think the election was stolen, if Donald Trump does not present that evidence when it would free him, and it would liberate him, and it would prove you right after all these years, Then you have to be livid at Donald Trump, right?
You can watch the votes come in, get placed in the box, put under the table, and at the end of the day, they then pull them out and start counting them.
There is a video of a woman running the votes twice.
There's a question of whether or not it was, were the votes rejected from the machine so she had to run them twice, or was she trying to count votes twice?
And if that's the case, how is it possible to run the same vote more than once?
They should be serialized or something.
But those are things I think are worth having a conversation about.
So, first of all, I'm not getting into any of that nonsense about the votes, but in terms of Texas, Pennsylvania, Look guys, there's challenges that come in any election, and it's very normal, and sometimes the Supreme Court takes the challenge, sometimes they don't.
And sometimes they rule in an outrageous way, as they did in Bush v. Gore.
By the way, the Supreme Court has ruled in many outrageous ways.
They've ruled in Citizens United that corporations are human beings and have even more rights than human beings, that they are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights.
Yeah, and that corporations have freedom of speech.
No, that's called a bribe, okay?
That's what it's called.
And guys, if you're a right-winger, super frustrated with the establishment, you're not wrong.
The establishment keeps telling you you're wrong and you're crazy.
You're not wrong.
But there is a crazy line, right?
So in terms of the establishment, they frame everything as if the status quo is great, that corporate rule is awesome, and that you should get nothing, and that the rich and powerful should get everything.
And mainstream media is one giant corporate propaganda outlet, okay?
And so I can show you all the ways that they've screwed over the left wing, I can show you a lot of ways they screw over the right wing, okay?
So if you're frustrated about that and mainstream media figures keep yelling at you, You know, no, you're imagining it, man.
These politicians are wonderful and those aren't bribes.
Those are just people talking with one another and you guys are all radicals.
No, that's crap and that's why nobody believes in mainstream media anymore.
But when you jump the shark and you come up with conspiracy theories that aren't even remotely true, guys, all you're doing is hurting your cause.
And then you get people who won't vote because they think it's pointless when they should be voting.
But I think here's where the big challenge comes.
I think I said this on the show when you announced you were running, if it was between Mitt Romney and Joe Biden, I'm voting Cenk Uygur.
And it's because I'm willing to believe that you're the more likely candidate to pardon Julian Assange.
You're the more likely candidate not to bring us into psychotic foreign wars.
And I can't speak for anything else, but I'm not voting for the war machine.
And so the challenge comes here.
Here's why I voted for Trump in 2020.
I did not vote for Trump in 2016.
What did we get?
Afghan withdrawal timeline.
Okay, well, I'll take a grain of sand over, you know, a bushel of wheat if I can get something.
Getting our troops out of Syria?
Why were they in Syria in the first place?
I can't believe it.
Donald Trump openly admitting to America's foreign policy, boastfully saying, we're gonna sell all these weapons to Saudi Arabia, make a whole bunch of money, The bombing in Yemen, all of these horrifying things, and I'm like, if I can get 1% out of Donald Trump in that he's gonna focus more on whatever's going on in this country and it means we're not blowing up kids in foreign countries, it's the best candidate I've laid before me in terms of who can actually win and do something.
And then I saw a bunch of people on the left...
Prominent people say, you have to vote for Joe Biden.
And I'm like, but he's going to Hillary Clinton this.
We're going to see war.
We're going to look at Libya.
I came, I saw he died.
It's been, it's been chaos and a disaster.
We're going to see American troops dying.
We're going to see conflict and chaos.
And they said Trump would bring about World War III.
And then we didn't get it.
We got no new wars and we actually got withdrawal timelines.
I'm not saying he did great.
I'm not saying he did perfect, but he did better than anyone I'd seen in my lifetime.
Abraham Accords, I thought were fantastic.
He crossed the DMZ into North Korea with no security detail.
And I'm just like, holy wow!
I'll take it, please, just whatever Biden has to offer.
It's going to be crony BS.
It's going to be warmongering.
It's going to be neoliberal, neoconservative war.
Just give me whatever I can get.
And now I see a lot of these leftists who are like, nope, we have to vote for Joe Biden.
It's the only path forward.
And I was like, oh, spare me, dude.
I will take a bowl with no direction, smashing everything over the neolibs, over the Democratic Party.
Yeah, so let me tell you why you're right about my positions and obviously why I would be better and I'm running against them, but then I'm going to tell you someone who could easily win that isn't me.
Is it Bernie?
No, it's a Republican.
Okay, so first off, on my positions, would I pardon Julian Assange?
Of course!
That's not even a close question.
He should have never been hounded in the first place.
Trump is so full of crap, it bothers me so much that people who are legitimately angry about what mainstream media has done, what corporate politicians have done, are gravitating over towards another con man.
Okay, so Donald Trump, why on God's green earth wouldn't you pardon Julian Assange?
Not only is Julian Assange never did anything wrong, he's as much of a whistleblower as anyone has ever been.
Yeah, and then on top of that he arguably helped Trump, okay?
In fact, I thought he got too political and I started to get mad at Julian Assange, but that never changed my opinion that he should be freed immediately.
And this is speculative based on meetings that had happened, but the general idea is Donald Trump had his people make Julian the offer, you give us your sources on this information and you're free to go.
And Julian said, never.
And they said, if we don't give it to us, we'll take it by force.
And that's what's resulted in his arrest and extradition attempts.
And Tim, even if that story is true, and it's your speculation, but I'm okay with it, I'm okay with it, but even if that story is true, that doesn't make it any better, it makes it worse.
Assange is a journalist, Yeah, we can get into that, but it's not important.
The point is that they revealed information about American wrongdoing, the government's wrongdoing, and that is a classic whistleblower, and they tried different paths to get it out otherwise, and Assange is a journalist, period.
Getting us in a war is Of all the candidates, there's no question that I'm the one that is most likely to avoid war.
Because I don't want any piece of it, F to defense contractors, all they do is rob us, they get our sons and daughters killed, they kill tons of innocent civilians, and it's all, it's not about the killing, it's about the robbery.
The whole point is to execute the robbery.
So now Biden comes out with Israel's attacked.
It's terrible how they got attacked.
We're going to get back into that issue in a minute.
But then he's like, give me $105 billion for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
Look, I'm on the side of Ukraine, but we just authorized Like, eight different multi-billion dollar packages to Ukraine, and Israel, we already give them more money than we give anyone else, and now, unfortunately, they've become the aggressors.
Taiwan, there's no war in Taiwan, right?
So, no, this $105 billion is gonna go straight into the pockets of the defense contractors.
And then they're gonna take out a small percentage and give it as bribes, I mean campaign contributions, to Joe Biden, Nikki Haley, Almost every corporate Republican and almost every corporate Democrat, okay?
And those guys, in order for the criminals to make more money and to rob us even more, they'll start more wars.
So there's no way in the world that I would do that.
I mean, disagree with him on policy, totally fine, but he's...
He's getting, he gets grassroots contributions, he rejects the PAC money, and he's told these stories about, you know, all of these people get into Congress, and they're enjoying the parties, the big military contractors just, they got the private jets, they got the luxury vehicles, they got the $100,000 party in Vegas, and it's, this is what our members of Congress get to enjoy when you bend the knee to the war machine.
So yeah, I have very nuanced opinions about Matt Gaetz.
So first, jankforamerica.com, okay?
Or if it's easier to remember, bidenisgoingtolose.com, okay?
So if you agree that Biden's going to lose, sending a dollar is a form of a protest.
And I'm a proxy candidate for every other candidate to get in this race already if you don't want Joe Biden to lose and the Democrats to lose, which is almost certainly going to happen.
Okay, now for Matt Gaetz.
So Matt stopped taking corporate PAC money, and it made a giant difference.
So for the Democrats, it didn't make any difference at all.
They look at Matt Gaetz, and they see the devil, right?
And so on his radical right-wing positions and his conspiracy theories, I got no interest in it, and I'll fight him all the way on that stuff.
But the minute he started taking corporate PAC money, at least he started becoming honest.
Because Trump's entertaining, we'll also get good ratings.
So the corporate media thought it was a win, win, win for them.
It's just that when Trump started doing things just on his own behalf, instead of on behalf of everyone else, the corporate elitist crowd, right?
That's when they turned on Trump.
But again, if Trump had done that to stick up for the average guy, then I would have liked him.
But he didn't.
He only did it for his own benefit.
So then that gets back to the question of if it was just Trump or Biden, right, then I'm definitely going to vote for Biden in that scenario.
Why?
Why?
I told you a hundred bad things about Biden here, right?
Because of the coup attempt.
I'm not going to put a guy back in charge of our democracy who already tried to overturn our democracy, who already did a coup attempt against democracy.
That is a fascist and that is a guy I do not trust under any circumstance.
The Democrats overused the word fascist.
Ron DeSantis is loathsome, but he's not a fascist.
He did not try to overturn any democracy.
He did not pass laws that make it impossible for democracy to exist.
No, Trump is the only person who had a fake elector scheme that tried to execute a coup, and I would never ever take that risk, and besides which, that guy betrayed our country.
There's no way in the world you should ever vote for him.
I grew up in Chicago, traditionally liberal, pro-choice, pro-progressive tax, a whole bunch of these things that used to be associated with Democrats, safe, legal, rare, etc.
And the majority of people who watch our show are middle-of-the-road moderate types.
Many of them switched to Donald Trump, and the reason greatly is For the average person who doesn't have time to pay attention or lives in an area that's split 50-50, you've got what is viewed as unreasonable cultural positions from the left and young people, and then you've got Who's right when it comes to did Donald Trump try to steal the election or did Joe Biden?
And I understand your position.
And then I hear an inversion from the right.
And of course, you'll assert you're correct.
Of course, inside your facts, they'll do something similar.
And of course, there is an objective truth.
But for people who are in the middle, they're just like, man, I just I hear two sides bickering.
Again, I understand there's an objective truth, but I don't see you being able to cut through to the person who's like, I don't want to hear the fighting.
What ends up happening with Trump is, you get this fervent, I will fire everybody revenge.
The way you get rid of the corruption is you get rid of the corrupt politicians who are taking money from corporations.
And if you showed me, hey, here's a guy who's a government bureaucrat, but he's following money to corporations in a way that is wrong, then of course fire that guy.
But if you come in and you blanket fire everybody in the Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of this and that, and then you find out, oh, Department of Energy runs the nukes, oh no, we don't have staff to run the nukes!
If you gave me an honest person that's doing a staffing audit, I think we should audit the Fed.
I think the Pentagon never passes an audit.
They say, oh, we can't find the $400 billion.
Well, then I'm going to cut your budget by $400 billion.
Absolutely.
Because apparently you can't find it.
I'm not going to give you money that you then later, oh, honey, I'm sorry.
I forgot where I put $400 billion.
And by the way, you want to talk about corruption and bureaucrats.
Actually, the number one Cause for concern, other than politicians themselves that get corporate contributions, are the generals.
Because the generals almost all get hired by defense contractors after they retire.
So they literally have millions of dollars on the line and they know if they play ball they're going to get rich and they're going to have a house in McLean or Fairfax, Virginia.
It's not going to be a house, it's going to be a mansion.
And then NBC is going to bring them on and go, Revere General blank, blank, blank says, well, we need to attack Iran right away.
The establishment, the military-industrial complex, the massive multinational corporations, their cronies within government, I think the government mostly are working as employees for these individuals.
They give them loans.
To us, we are butt chickens in a coop.
And so, they look at what we produce and what they can take from us, and you and I are pretty big roosters in that coop.
That's exactly what I'm proposing.
thing they really wouldn't like is if all the chickens roosters got together and just jumped the fence.
But I agree with you on Citizens United, the idea that you have super PACs where they can just say $100 million goes into their campaign, wink wink, we're not coordinating, but we know they are.
Look, the right is livid at Pfizer, the left is livid at Monsanto, and everybody hates the military-industrial complex, and they are who buy the politicians through super PACs, which basically violates what the intention of campaign contribution limits were supposed to be.
So the guys taking the corporate PAC money are the politicians.
But remember, where does that money go eventually?
It goes into, why do the politicians need all that money?
Because they need to run ads to trick you into voting for them.
So to trick the good people of South Carolina who do not want war, But they want them to elect Lindsey Graham that's going to start more wars, so Lindsey Graham has to buy a lot of ads that lie to the people in South Carolina about his positions.
Now, where do the ads go?
Oh right, the money goes into mainstream media.
So last cycle they spent $17 billion in ads.
So that's 17 billion reasons for mainstream media to lie to you and to pretend it's not corruption because they're the biggest benefactors of that corruption.
I think that if you and I and a bunch of other commentators said something like, let's stop focusing so heavily on the culture war issues, obviously people are passionate about it for reasons, and focus on these reforms, you'd be demonetized on YouTube overnight.
And I also formed Justice Democrats, and our one rule in Justice Democrats, there was no litmus test on policy.
There's only one rule.
You're not allowed to take corporate PAC money.
And so as much as you might, you know, if you're a right-wing, you might hate AOC or Rashida Tlaib or whoever, right?
But at least those guys, they never suck up to corporations.
And they're loud, but they're honest.
You might disagree with them on cultural issues, and I might disagree with Matt Gaetz on cultural issues, but they are honestly fighting against corporate power.
You know, when it comes to Israel-Palestine, I think there's probably a position the majority of the left and the right would agree on, and that's we shouldn't be funding it or be involved.
Here's the simple yet complex answer, and there's a conspiracy answer, but the simple complex one is...
Simply put, the U.S.
wants to go to war with Iran, and we need as many strategic locations as possible in the Middle East, so of course we're going to be with Israel being as powerful as they are.
Why do we want to go to war with Iran?
It has a lot to do with oil and energy, which is why we surrounded Iran with Afghanistan and Iraq.
Look at a map.
We invaded two countries to surround Iran.
John Bolton said under Trump, we will be celebrating in Tehran, and next year he didn't get that.
And then you look at the Qatar-Turkey pipeline.
The US and Western interests wanted a pipeline from Qatar through Turkey and Syria into Europe to compete with Russia.
A lot about energy and economic expansion.
And so this results in massive conflict in the Middle East where we say we want control of Iran.
There's a strong reason for the US in that capacity to defend and fund and secure Israel.
And then my favorite, which has just popped up more recently, is the more conspiratorial answer and it's that Jewish people and Christians believe the Holy War is coming, and they want to make it happen so that the Messiah returns.
And I kid you, I know it's very religious, but there are a lot of people tweeting this out.
Oh yeah.
A video of politicians in Congress, both Democrat and Republican, saying, we will defend this blessed land and things like this.
So first of all, Jewish people don't want Armageddon or any of that stuff.
Of course.
You have to leave them out of that equation completely.
In fact, in that Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs scenario that the evangelical Christians believe.
Almost all the Jews die.
So there's no way the Jews are in favor of that.
Israel's not in favor of that.
But does Netanyahu use our religious nuts in this country for his own benefit?
Yes.
Did Ariel Sharon?
Yes.
Okay?
And when asked, Sharon would say, of course I don't agree with them, but if the schmucks are going to send me money, I'm not going to disagree.
Okay?
I'm going to take their money.
So the evangelical Christians, yes.
It's not all Christians.
It's not all right-wing.
It's not all white people.
Let me give those standards.
But important caveats.
But there is a percentage of the country that thinks, hey, the end times require Israel to exist, for the Al-Aqsa Mosque to be destroyed, for Israel to control the West Bank and Gaza, and then praise Jesus!
He returns and murders everyone!
And only the true believers are sucked up in a giant vacuum into heaven and everyone is killed in a bloody slaughter like no one's ever seen before and we rejoice and we look down from heaven at all of you lying in blood with your babies and grandmothers murdered all over the world and go, Yes, praise the Lord!
Well, you guys are sick.
That's a sick fantasy.
It's not gonna happen.
You're cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
And by the way, in that scenario, Israel gets obliterated and almost all the Jews die, okay?
So no one in their right mind should be rooting for that.
It saddens me that a significant percentage of this country is mentally ill and believes those kind of apocalyptic Revelations that no one actually said.
Jesus never said it.
It's totally made up by con men, American preachers, who just wanted to rob you blind.
The last person on earth you should trust is a preacher, and that is true of all the religions, not just Christianity.
So imams coming around telling you how holy they are, and then they go, oh, take a suicide vest.
No, you first, dick, and then we'll talk about it, right?
You can do that deal right now with the Palestinians.
1967 borders, build the biggest walls you've ever seen, and just like Egypt, everyone will say, oh, they're Muslims, they won't listen, they're savages, right?
And then, what happened?
You were wrong.
The Egyptians did listen.
And so will the Palestinians, because they're tired of being murdered, and they're tired of being occupied.
And Tim, you can't When you have a situation like the occupation, the extremists always win.
But when you have a democracy, moderates have a shot at winning and then creating more moderates and more stability and more peace.
A lot of civilians dying and each and every one is a horrifying tragedy and and you know people get mad at the term collateral damage because they take take offense to it because it's they feel that it downplays civilian death.
I just think collateral damage defines when when actions are being taken in war that kill civilians and that's it's it's wrong.
It needs to stop.
My big thing is like And look, I hear everything you're saying.
The bottom line is all that is important and those things are relevant in this conversation, but I actually agree that the most relevant thing is the money.
It's almost always the money.
And don't go into crazy conspiracy theories about Jews and stuff like that.
unidentified
I'm not saying you, I'm saying People online are posting this thinking that the end of days are coming.
Yeah, the war machine putting on a progressive face is hilarious, right?
Like, oh no, okay, we got a black woman to declare that war.
Oh, well, that makes it so much better.
Okay.
No, it doesn't make it any better.
And to your point, that theory about how they wanted to attack, the neocons wanted to attack all the Middle Eastern countries, that's not a conspiracy theory.
That's just a fact.
And General Wesley Clark, who was the head of the Allied Forces, back in the day, was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces.
He said, right after 9-11, it was seven countries that they wanted to attack.
The neocons have published those in the past, even before we got attacked on 9-11, that they wanted to attack those seven countries.
And their prize, their cherished prize, is Iran.
So why do they want to attack Iran so badly?
Number one, Iran doesn't have nukes.
If you attack Russia or China, the defense contractors also live in LA and Washington and they might get nuked and they don't want that.
So they pick on countries that don't have nukes and pretend they're going to have nukes and they use that as an excuse.
And is it just to make money for defense contractors?
Well, that's a huge part of it, but that's not all.
When you do a war in the Middle East, oil prices spike.
You'll be paying five bucks more per gallon and the oil companies will make trillions of dollars.
We all get screwed, and the guys at the top profit off of the deaths and the oppression of the American people, let alone the civilians that live in those areas.
What we're really talking about in the minds of the ultra, the warmongers, the elites is It's kind of like, we'll force you to sell everything you own, buy it for pennies on the dollar, and then charge you 10 times more for it when you need it.
So we control more of the resources and more of your life and take from you.
So I'll give you another example of that, because this is how corporate rule is crushing us all.
We're like all in that trash compactor in Star Wars, and the walls are closing in on us, right?
And that's why the right wing is so mad, and that's why I'm so mad at Trump and Steve Bannon misdirecting that anger toward their own benefit and making it racial and religious instead of focusing on, no, get the people in power.
And so what we were hearing a lot of is people saying, you know, young millennial couple having their first kid, want to buy their first home, find a house that's $200,000, put in an offer, they get a call back from the agent, Blackrock put in at $230,000.
Can you compete with that?
And they're like, no, this house isn't worth $230,000.
When you say, hey, let's power down on the culture wars, you're exactly right, because the people up top Or using the culture wars to rip us apart so we can't unite to fight back on the actual power and money issues.
Have you seen there's a comic of a guy sitting in his office outside the window is a bunch of people holding up signs saying we are the 99% and the guy in the office is on the phone says introduce identity politics.
And look, to be honest, and again, right-wingers don't catch feelings, but the original identity politics was a Southern strategy.
And that's what Nixon did to, once the Democrats voted for the Dixiecrats that were the original racists in the South, and opposed the Republicans because they were the party of Lincoln, okay?
Once they, Lyndon Johnson, browbeat them into voting for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Nixon and Pat Buchanan, and Pat Buchanan said this to me on MSNBC, okay, executed the strategy of let's go get those Southern voters.
Now the part they leave out is the Southern voters who don't want integration, they wanted segregation.
Now that's back then, it's not on you today, don't take it personally, okay?
But that launched identity politics.
And then the Democrats jumped in with two feet and they're like, okay, I like this identity politics because that means if I am X, Y, or Z, name the group, right?
Then I am owed something.
Okay?
No, but wait a minute.
Wait a minute, brother.
What do you mean?
Like Ben Carson's black.
He's not owed anything.
I'm not going to make Ben Carson the Democratic president just because he's black.
So why would I take your corporate stooge, who happens to be black, and say, oh, OK, then good enough, just because they're black.
It's a trick.
And so when you say Jim Clyburn, who's one of the most corrupt members of Congress, is corrupt because he takes all this corporate donations and he serves those guys, they go, how dare you Jim Clyburn as a respected elder African American fighting for civil rights.
You look into his record, he actually almost did nothing on civil rights.
unidentified
He's just a corporate dude who happens to be black, right?
And they use it as an excuse, you're not allowed to attack these people, they won't call you sexist and racist.
I mean they even did it to Bernie.
They even called Bernie anti-Semitic.
Even though he's Jewish.
Very Jewish.
And so there is nothing that they won't stoop to and it's a cudgel and a weapon that mainstream media and corporate politicians use to distract us, to get us to fight each other, instead of focusing on money and power.
Cenk for America dot com.
So who's the Republican who can win?
Well, it does depend on one thing, which is me winning my court case, okay?
No, no, you can't, you gotta go through a process.
So first thing is you apply to get on the ballots, and we know that the great majority of states are going to reject us in the beginning, that's part of the process, right?
Because they say you have to be natural born, in the form you cross that out and say naturalized, because our argument is that the Constitution has been amended, and that your form is wrong, right?
So I'm not gonna sign and say I'm a natural born citizen when I'm not, And so I have to change the form.
Then they go, okay, well, you changed the form, so we're going to reject you.
Okay.
Then you go to the next layer.
And in the case of New Hampshire, for example, there's something called a law ballot commission.
So likely very soon, maybe as early as next week, I will go and make an argument to them.
And I will make an argument that the FEC has already ruled that naturalized citizens can run for president.
Whether they can actually be president, serve as president, is a matter for the courts to decide.
But the FEC says you should let them run.
So one, we're going to make an FEC argument.
Number two, we're going to make a 14th Amendment argument.
Number three, in the state of New Hampshire, it's all about letting the voters decide.
So if the courts are going to decide the legal issue, why are you blocking the voters from having their say?
And by the way, Biden is not on the New Hampshire ballot.
I could win New Hampshire, okay?
And that could be an amazing phenomenon.
Imagine this anti-war, anti-corruption candidate shocks the world and wins New Hampshire, okay?
Now all of a sudden we're in a super interesting conversation.
Let the courts do what they're going to do but do not block me from getting on the ballot because then you're blocking the voters and the voters get a say in this and so when and if the next step in the process is also rejected then we file in court and it goes up to district court, circuit court, then Supreme Court.
I think people on the right, well I think everybody in this country should have this conversation right now.
I brought up early on, who would they rather have?
Cenk Uygur for president, or a person that was born in California through birth tourism, who was raised in Beijing as a loyal CCP member, but by being born on this soil of the United States, they can run for president.
I think everyone's gonna be like, oh man, like, a lot of conservatives say neither!
But I'm saying if you had to choose, you'd realize you're better off with someone who was raised in this country, who believes in this country, even if you disagree on their politics, over someone who was literally raised entirely somewhere different.
Which brings up a really interesting question of...
I see what you're saying with the argument with the 14th Amendment.
If the argument then is to go in the entire other direction, which is to remove birthright citizenship, meaning you have to be born of American parents, well then all you're doing is separating it by generation.
Then you'll get someone who was born through birth tourism, who is raised in China, and then has a kid, and that kid's never been in the United States, but they now have the right to be president.
Something is broken there, and I'm not saying that you are correct completely, I'm saying this situation I've brought up needs to be answered by the American people and the courts as to how we address it, because it exists.
So that's why when people say, like, oh, you're doing an illegitimate run.
No, guys, if someone doesn't run, that injustice can never be addressed by the court.
It can never be addressed by the justices.
By the way, I'm not, like, there's 25 million naturalized citizens.
So, and tons of them are Republicans, tons of them are right-wingers, especially for immigrants that come in, hard work, family values, a lot of them have conservative traditions, backgrounds, etc.
And we're saying, like you said, someone who was born here but never lived here can become president, but those Americans who chose to be Americans, who love America, and came here because they love America, shouldn't be allowed to run.
That is not a bureaucrat decision, that is a courts and voters decision.
A question for many on the right too would be who would you rather have as president Joe Biden or Dinesh D'Souza?
And everyone's gonna be like, but we love Dinesh, but he's not born here, but then you get Biden.
So I'm not coming here to give a moral position that I think we should change it or that you're right.
I think these questions should be talked about.
People should have the conversation and explain why it is they believe it should remain or be amended as such.
But I do think that there is a very important question, as many on the right are concerned about, birth tourism in the United States.
Well, now you're creating, that is a path towards People who are absolutely loyal to other countries coming in here and asserting the right to be president, when there are people who are not born here, who many on the right would absolutely agree, are much better candidates.
Look, we haven't said the one name, and I'm afraid of saying it, because I don't want people thinking that I agree with this guy or I want this guy to run, okay?
But there's another naturalized citizen whose name is Elon Musk.
This will change when we run into a, you know, someone raised in China, never spent any time in the United States, announces they're running for president, you're gonna see a lot of people be like, well, hold on, that's not what we meant.
It's like, well, they're following the rules.
So again, I mean, I think we have to have a conversation about what our intention is with the Constitution as it is written.
Ultimately, I think it's going to require, I think you make an interesting argument, the 14th Amendment has already stated, naturalized, has those rights.
The purpose of the 14th was basically, at the end of slavery, to say, this country must recognize all of these individuals have the same rights as everybody else.
So, but again, I'm not here to answer this for everybody, but I certainly think someone's going to have to have that conversation soon.
Yeah, so last thing on that, Tim, is think about why they put naturalized in the 14th Amendment.
So for the people saying it's in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment is also in the Constitution and the amendments win because they're amending the original Constitution.
But why did they put the word naturalized in there?
Because the slaves were not natural-born citizens.
And no one thinks that after the 14th Amendment, the slaves couldn't run for president.
So it's actually on the plain meaning, which is how conservative justices are supposed to decide cases, on the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment, it's an open and shut case.
So if someone like me never runs, we never get to test it, and we never get to have a firm conclusion on it.
The inverse could be, like I mentioned, I say China because there's so many people who view them as a very serious threat or adversary, but let's say Russia.
The inverse could be someone who was born here of Russian parents on vacation, and within a day of being born, they fly back to Russia.
The kid grows up never speaking any English or knowing anything about America, and then one day arrives and says, I was born here, and so I'm going to live here now so I can run for president.
You're going to have people being like, wait, hold on a minute.
But I will give a final thought on this too.
I'm imagining everybody was hoping that we were gonna be screaming at each other the whole time.
When it comes to Israel-Palestine stuff, that's the hot issue right now.
And a lot of the time, I'm not concerned with arguing about moral positions I don't know enough about.
I'm interested in what can we do to solve these problems and move forward.
One of the things that we do, that we're working on, is Cast brew coffee in our coffee house.
Why?
It's not about me writing a bunch of books and putting these books in schools and countering a narrative or... It's about creating physical spaces where people can come together and talk to each other because this is what I think helps repair the damage in this country.
We used to have people gathering at churches.
They used to gather community centers, now they're all online and they're all isolated from their neighbors.
So I'm like, instead of just... Look, we can argue all day and night, there's a lot of things we really do disagree on, but if we're going to fix the problems, we need to prioritize what we can solve.
We had Max Blumenthal on the show, he made the same point.
If everybody on the right and everyone on the left, not everybody, but the majority, say, hey, let's stop funding these foreign wars, how come we can't just solve that problem right now and then go back to arguing after that?
And look, at some point, whether it's me, Arnold, or anyone else, it doesn't matter, we have to break through and we have to get on in a way that mainstream media cannot deny us.
And making these powerful cases in front of the entire country And at that point, people will rally, okay?
But we need small leaders, we need large leaders.
We need you doing what you're doing.
I mean, again, it's amazing the similarity here, given our differences on other topics, but we have too strong coffee.
And so I don't give out the URLs to that or to the book or anything like that because I'm running for president.
I don't want people thinking that it's about anything else, right?
But my point is we're doing coffee too.
That's a funny coincidence.
But the main thing is on Young Turks, especially in the bonus episodes for our members, what we keep telling them is go out in the real world and meet people.
Start having conversations.
Take a little bit of a risk, right?
And start talking to conservative family members.
Start re-engaging.
We even shot a pilot at TYT of an American family that split.
And they refused to talk anymore because of politics.
And we brought them back together.
And we're not trying to split them up.
We're trying to bring them back together.
And it's an analogy for the American family.
And what split us apart was media.
They got us to fight on culture wars.
They got us to hate each other.
And because they wanted us distracted, because the reality is big business and big government got together and they're taking trillions of dollars of our money out the back while we're distracted.
It's just like a heist, like you know in the heist movies, the robber set up a distraction somewhere else, the cops rush there, and then they rob the bank.
A lot of people are making the federalist argument, states rights, it states what they want, and if the end result is Red states say, blue states do your thing and live how you want to live and we'll do our thing.
And that results in the only actual federal level things that get solved will then be the things we all agree on.
And then if you want to live in Colorado or Oklahoma because of your stance on abortion, you choose the state that fits you.
It may result in us solving a lot of the federal level problems.
I don't know if it's the solution, but... But I don't know, I guess we can... Unless there's anything else you wanted to add before we wrap up and wind down?
No, brothers and sisters, I hate to break your heart because you like these people, right?
The Democrats love Pelosi and Biden and they have this emotional attachment to them.
But a billion dollars is a billion dollars, and ExxonMobil and Pfizer don't give you money for your health, they give it to buy you and to bribe you.
So it's the same for Pelosi, the same for McConnell, and I give the right-wing credit here.
You guys got onto McConnell and the rest of the phonies before the Democrats have fully figured out that their side is filled to the rim with phonies too.
We didn't do a WWE-style screaming match like everybody wanted, but I think this is more important, and I hope that, you know, I hope we can solve problems and bring people together.
And I want everyone to disagree with everything you've taken, every stance you've had that they disagree with, and I want them to recognize if we can agree on anything and solve those problems, let's get that out of the way.
And if that's I mean, World War III, I think, is a great thing to try and avoid.
