What Really Happened To Joe?; Kamala's Revealing Personnel Choices with Moe Tkacik; Interview with The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur | SYSTEM UPDATE #304
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
What Happened to Joe? (2:56)
Moe Tkacik on Kamala Harris (37:24)
Interview with Cenk Uygur (1:05:10)
- - -
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter
Instagram
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, or in today's very special case, 8 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
I am Michael Tracy.
Glenn Greenwald is away vacationing at some secret exotic locale and most likely sadistically snickering at me from afar.
Nevertheless, for the time being, you're all stuck with me.
First, let's all hold on a second.
What the heck exactly just happened with Joe Biden, Joseph R. Biden Jr.? ?
Much of the media is already eagerly rallying around Kamala Harris like she wasn't just imposed on the country through some incredibly opaque insider process that nobody can even really explain.
Why doesn't anybody care that this is the most democratically illegitimate presidential nominee in modern American history should she become the nominee which she appears on a glide path to becoming?
We'll talk next to Mo Tasek, Investigations Editor at the American Prospect, about the personnel just kind of swirling around the firmament, around the newly coronated Kamala Juggernaut.
And I'd like to know what the people in her orbit foretells about minor stuff like, gee, I don't know, how would Kamala actually govern?
Seems like a minor issue for most in the media.
And finally, I will dramatically reunite with my old pal Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks who was agitating so passionately for Biden's removal that he actually technically ran for president himself.
That is, Cenk did that.
So we'll discuss whether Cenk is satisfied with this curious Kamala switcheroo.
But first, a few programming notes.
System Update is available in podcast form on Spotify and in every other podcast platform.
If you would like to support System Update, you can sign up to Glenn Greenwald's Locals Community at greenwald.locals.com.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, beginning now.
So the media would have us believe that it's entirely normal and uneventful and expected and unremarkable that the nominee or presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party had accumulated something like 99% of pledged delegates from
from the primary elections that technically did take place in the 50 states and a few additional territories.
It's just totally, again, something for all of us to just politely accept that he has now just withdrawn without real explanation.
And I say without explanation because Biden finally emerged from whatever Hole he was in, I guess the hole in Delaware, Rehoboth Beach.
It's a very, you know, comfortable hole for him out there in Delaware.
Corporate capital of the country, by the way, which he weirdly sometimes likes to tout as a credential on his part.
But anyway, Biden emerged yesterday at the Oval Office and sat at the Resolute Desk and explained to the American public that he officially was no longer seeking the Democratic nomination.
But the funny thing was, he actually really provided no explanation.
It's just as mysterious, at least officially, in terms of what's in the public record, as to why this apparent switcheroo has taken place.
So let's take a look at what old Joe said in his address.
You know, in recent weeks, it's become clear to me that I need to unite my party in this critical endeavor.
I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America's future, all merited a second term.
But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy.
That includes personal ambition.
So I've decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.
That's the best way to unite our nation.
You know, there is a time and a place for long years of experience in public life.
There's also a time and a place for new voices.
Fresh voices.
Yes, younger voices.
And that time and place is now.
Okay, so that's just a string of cliches.
Pass the torch, younger voices, the time and place is now.
He's not actually saying Dear Americans, my fellow Americans, I hereby wish to concede that I lack the cognitive fitness to continue in office, despite having adamantly insisted all this time that I was unimpeachably fit to not just complete my current term in office, which would be until January of 2025, but to run for another four-year term.
Until age 86, that's how old Joe Biden would have hypothetically been if he had followed through on his adamant assurances and completed a second term.
You know, one thing I had done in the past couple weeks is go around to all these frantic Democratic insiders, anybody I could get a hold of, and ask them, okay, so are you guys really trying to tell us that you have no issue, you see no possible concern with an 86-year-old Joe Biden Retaining unilateral authority, sole authority, over the United States nuclear arsenal at age 86?
And needless to say, very few of them had a particularly persuasive answer to that question.
Most of the time they looked like they had just seen a ghost and were frozen and petrified into inaction and unresponsiveness.
But just to kind of underscore the utter bizarreness of what's really transpired, which the media has just memory hold at record speed, let's go back to a defiant letter that Joe Biden issued to Democrats in Congress under his own letterhead.
On July 8th, 2024.
Not July 8th, 2014 or 2004 or even that long ago at all.
It was just a couple of weeks ago.
And Biden lays out his rationale for why it is that he believes it would actually be profoundly wrong and undemocratic for him to be forcibly pressured out of the race.
And so here's the most jarring portion of this letter that I want to just read aloud.
I don't know if you're accustomed to reading Joe Biden's written tracks, but I actually happened to read this letter when it was first delivered.
And here's what Joe Biden says.
We had a democratic domination process.
And the voters have spoken clearly and decisively.
I received over 15 million votes.
87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process.
I have nearly 3,900 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin.
This is a process open to anyone who wanted to run.
And he goes on to brag that only three people chose to challenge me, one fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent.
That's a not-so-thinly-veiled jab at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Biden continues, another attacked me for being too old and he was soundly defeated.
That's Dean Phillips, who I actually also interviewed in New Hampshire in January for a system update.
Joe Biden resoundingly concludes the voters of the Democratic Party have voted They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party!
And he asks, do we now just say this process didn't matter?
That the voters don't have a say?
Wait a second!
Why couldn't you pose the very same question today?
This was July 8th, what the heck is today?
July 25th?
On July 25th, how is this question just rendered magically moot?
How have the voters had their say?
They're just doing this little switcheroo scheme to impose Kamala Harris through a private coronation with zero voter input.
So little voter input that a few nights ago I was giving you all a historical lesson on the parallel or lack thereof with Hubert Humphrey.
In 1968, I know not everybody nowadays is running around with Hubert Humphrey at the tip of their tongue, but 1968 tends to be the parallel that is most commonly invoked as a precedent for what Joe Biden just did in withdrawing from his pursuit of the domination.
But Hubert Humphrey Who, as I mentioned recently, was at that time the Institutional Democratic Party's choice, and he was running against Eugene McCarthy, the senator from Minnesota, and Robert F. Kennedy Sr., who was a senator from New York and was then assassinated.
Hubert Humphrey, the incumbent vice president to Lyndon Johnson, was kind of the almost, you know, somewhat lackluster consensus choice among the institutional or establishment Democratic Party factions in that cycle.
But even Humphrey had to go around and do some semblance of public campaigning, like going to petition delegates at state Democratic Party conventions
He didn't just have the nominee or the nomination handed to him through some divine intervention or from on high like the clouds opened and a light shone down and there was the nomination just rested into Humphrey's hands.
No, he actually had to do some public campaigning.
And remember, that was before the dawn of the modern primary system where states generally came to allocate their delegates.
Starting in the 70s, by popular vote outcome vis-a-vis primary elections.
So even in that pre-modern primary era, you had candidates who had to do, who had to, you know, take it upon themselves to at least deign to do some degree of public campaigning.
Kamala Harris has done none!
At least none in pursuit of actually accumulating the requisite delegates To obtain the nomination and Joe Biden said it better than anybody.
He suggests here in his letter that if he were to be forcibly removed by some insider or donor or operative putsch, that would mean the voters no longer have a say.
Now have you heard the New York Times or the Pod Save America guys or MSNBC or CNN or the Washington Post, Ezra Klein, Matthew Iglesias, all these people who were beside themselves With anguish about how Joe Biden needed to do the right thing and pass the torch, which he even repeated their favorite cliche in his Oval Office address.
Have you heard them address the substance of what Joe Biden laid out in this letter just a couple of weeks ago?
That if this were to be done, if this maneuver were to be executed, and Joe Biden were just to be switched with somebody else, that would render the voters irrelevant in actually contributing their say To the facilitation of a Democratic nominee being chosen.
What happened to that?
Joe Biden says he feels a deep obligation to the faith and trust of the voters of the Democratic Party.
It was their decision to make, he says, not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors.
Not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well-intentioned, the voters and the voters alone, Biden says, decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.
Well, that's certainly not the case anymore, because the voters have been unprecedentedly excluded from the decision as to who the nominee of the Democratic Party will be.
Biden finally says, how can we stand for democracy in our nation if we just ignore it in our own party?
I cannot do that, he concludes.
I will not do that.
And I'm banging the table now for emphasis, because you could imagine Joe Biden, you know, pensively drafting this letter, and perhaps, maybe in his own mind, maybe he didn't have the physical ability at that point, but you could almost see him symbolically slamming his fist on the table like Khrushchev in the, whatever that was, in the early 60s, I think.
at his U.N.
speech, but that's a pretty obscure reference.
Maybe I shouldn't have made that reference, but hey, it's my show, I can do what I want!
So, okay, so there, I mean, that's an amazing statement for Biden to have made in light of subsequent developments, right?
He says, how can we stand for democracy?
Because remember, the Democrats love to go around and pontificate that they're the party Who have this steadfast commitment to preserving democracy, whereas Donald Trump and the mean old Republicans, they want to destroy democracy, right?
That's the thrust of their argument.
That was Biden's argument.
But Biden's saying, if the Democrats move forward with what the donors and the pundits and the, you know, the selected groups of insiders want to do, Then they'll be undermining their own argument about how the Democrats are these amazing defenders of democracy, heroic saviors of our democratic order, and the Republicans are these nefarious saboteurs.
And yet they've done it!
And nobody in the media Has the presence of mind or the interest to go back and consult this letter that Biden drafted just a couple of weeks ago and say, look, the same rationale that Biden warned about here has now been actualized.
That's now what we've been beset with.
And I guess the implications of that are now just being dutifully memory hold as is customary.
So let's go to what Joe himself bellowed At a campaign rally in Detroit, not long after he sent this letter.
Any other reason in America, they die for that for more than anything else.
Any disease, any problem.
It's sick.
Above all else, we're going to stand up for our Constitution and save our democracy.
Okay, so there's the Save Our Democracy line.
I mean, that's just totally rote Democratic rhetoric at this point.
But obviously the purpose of that letter that he sent was to connect his determination to withstand internal party pressure.
and remain the nominee to this larger thematic injunction around defending democracy writ large, yes against the Republicans, as Joe would put it, but also against Democratic antagonists of his at that time who were trying to force him out of the but also against Democratic antagonists of his at that time who were trying to force him There's a lot of speculation lately.
What's Joe Biden going to do?
Is he going to stay in the race?
Is he going to drop out?
Here's my answer.
I am running and we're going to win.
I'm not going to change that.
Just today, the Marist poll released a national poll that has me beating Trump 50 to 48.
Honorola's drop-off story took place in the United States.
There's so much of my narrative in my campaign has fallen apart, they say.
I'm the nominee of the Democratic Party and the only Democrat or Republican that has beaten Donald Trump ever.
And I'm going to beat him again.
Okay, so I know these clips might now be inconvenient for a lot of the people who just want to rush and exalt Kamala Harris as, you know, the second coming of some intersectionality, you know, triumph for America, and she's gonna, you know, ride in on a horse-drawn carriage of democracy or something with, you know, waving the banner of
Womanhood and abortion and all these other Democratic pet issues and she'll be the savior against Trump.
But I'm sorry, the guy who did receive, whether you like it or not, and it's true, they did manipulate and you might even say rig the 2024 Democratic primaries to ensure that Joe Biden would effectively be guaranteed the nomination with very little challenge.
But even so, Biden received the delegates.
That was the whole crux of his argument when he was trying to fend off these demands that he relent and buckle to Democratic insider pressure to make way for some new generation of candidate.
And where's the Democratic Party's curiosity as to this turn of events?
How about the media's curiosity?
Ought or not we see like some Inquisitive New York Times editorials or, you know, Vox podcasts or whatever asking, wait a second, Joe Biden couldn't have been more unambiguous just a couple weeks ago that he was staying in the race and that it would have been an anti-democratic coup essentially for these insiders and donors and hotshots to get their way and to get him out.
But it's all down the memory hole at warp speed.
Remember Operation Warp Speed, which under Donald Trump brought us the wonderful COVID vaccine?
This is Operation Warp Speed, but for the media essentially vaccinating us all against the memory that the past several weeks or even months happened.
Now we're all supposed to start anew.
And Kamala has been graciously handed to us as the answer to all our problems.
We're all supposed to be coconut-pilled.
I frankly don't even want to know fully what that meme is supposed to mean in order to signify one's undying adulation for Kamala.
But it's incredible how we're not even being told What led to this ouster?
This is unprecedented in American history!
I would say, look, I'm not an expert on every single presidential nomination cycle in all of American history, but I know enough to confidently posit that there's nothing like this that really has ever happened, or to put it another way, there is no apt parallel to what we've just seen transpire, and yet, I guess the move is to just
Jump up and down celebrating this sudden emergence of Kamala with zero voter input as having contributed to her ascendance.
And let's go to what Joe bellowed to Morning Joe.
So this is some Joe-on-Joe action just a couple of days after he sent that letter because, I don't know, maybe we need to refresh our memory even further with how vehement Biden was, at least ostensibly, at this time, and who he was claiming were his enemies, who he was positioning himself against and positioning himself As defending.
He was saying that he was going to stick it to the elites.
He was going to defend the average voter, the average Democratic voter, against these unwarranted intrusions from the dastardly elites.
So let's hear him on Morning Joe.
Remember all this talk about how I don't have the black support?
Come on.
Give me a break.
Come with me.
Watch.
Watch.
I'm getting so frustrated by the elites.
Now, I'm not talking about you guys, but about the elites in the party, who they know so much more.
If any of these guys don't think I should let them run against me, go ahead, announce the president.
Challenge me at the convention.
So there's Biden saying, look, if any of these know-it-alls think they know better than me, Joe, let them challenge me at the convention.
Let them throw their hat in the ring.
Let them not just maneuver behind the scenes or leak stuff to the media or connive to try to execute this private little ouster plan that they have circulating on their Google Docs and that they're tweeting up a storm about or they have on their group text.
Let them actually put themselves into the glare of public scrutiny And come at me in a public fashion.
And they didn't do that.
And Biden says there, look this is an attempted elite imposition.
So Joe there is saying that he's standing with the average Joe.
So you have Joe, Biden, morning Joe, and average Joe.
Lots of Joes in the mix.
I need a cup of Joe to just keep track of them.
But the bottom line is that what Biden was warning of was that the elites would have supplanted the expressed will of the average voter, and that was unacceptable, intolerable of the modern Democratic Party, especially if they wanted to maintain their credibility when they make their campaign argument against Trump and the Republicans as being these Existential foes of democracy.
And that's all gone by the wayside!
It's amazing!
I almost feel like I could be accused of, you know, dwelling on old news at this point, because Biden withdrew on a Sunday, Kamala had all the delegates locked down by Monday or Tuesday, and now we're on Thursday, and everybody's just moved on!
I guess in general, what I really despise is this whole memory-holing.
Refrain.
On lots of issues.
I mean, not just related to electoral politics or this scheming that went on to bring about the Democratic insider's preferred outcome.
It's just this whole tendency on the part of the elite media class to just conveniently forget stuff that is inconvenient or contradictory to whatever preferred narrative they're trying to promote at any given time because it serves their interests.
And this is just another really jarring example of that.
So now I want to go, one of the excuses that you hear Democrats often making is that In voting for Biden in the Democratic primaries this year, Democratic primary voters were also voting for Kamala Harris because Kamala Harris is the incumbent vice president and therefore she more or less is being voted into power for a second time along with Biden.
But that's a deliberate misconstrual or misportrayal of what the presidential primary process actually consists of.
Look at some of these sample ballots from the primary races.
Here we have Connecticut.
Do you see Kamala Harris' name on that ballot?
I see Joe Biden, Uncommitted, Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips, and Cenk Uygur.
Who's actually going to be our guest a little later on the show, so I will raise this issue with him.
Most definitely.
Let's go to New York, which is next.
I only see Joseph R. Biden Jr.
on that ballot.
I don't know about you.
And then he's accompanied by individual delegates, because in some states, you vote for the candidate, and then they also have the individual delegates who are pledged to that candidate, who you also have the option of voting for.
Other states do it differently, where you vote only for the candidate.
It's a whole patchwork of different laws and regulations and customs that govern the primary That's why the sudden imposition of Kamala is so wild because candidates have to do a lot of legwork to even get themselves on the ballot.
I mean it's a whole Byzantine network of of laws and expectations and requirements that you have to adhere to even to get yourself into official contention.
Kamala Harris has just been gifted this unbelievable ability to bypass it all and just proclaim herself nominee, essentially, with no public process whatsoever.
It's actually staggering.
I know I'm doing all my gesticulations and my wild hand movements and people criticize me for that, but hey, what can I say?
I'm just moved by the spirit of the ridiculousness of this situation until I have to flail.
Okay, so go to the next state.
This, I believe, is Michigan.
You got Joseph R. Biden Jr., Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., that is, Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson, uncommitted.
So no, if any Democratic partisan tries to tell you that Democratic primary voters voted for Kamala Harris in voting for Joe Biden in the primaries this year, they are lying.
Joe Biden had every right, every ability, if he so chose, To select an entirely different vice presidential nominee at the convention.
Now, in practice, he almost certainly would not have done that.
He would have kept Kamala Harris on his ticket.
But it was up to him!
There's no vice presidential primary.
There are no vice presidential primary ballots that go out to voters.
At least in the modern era.
Biden would have been fully within his rights to pick an entirely different VP.
So no, Kamala was not on the ballot.
Whatever spin the Democratic partisans might want to invoke to make it seem as though this were just An unblemished democratic procedure that led to Kamala being coronated.
And then we have one more ballot here, just to underscore the point.
Maybe this is excessive, but I have North Carolina.
And in that particular primary election, you had a grand total of two choices.
One, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and two, no preference.
So it's Biden or Bus, essentially.
That was how they organized these primaries.
And for Democratic insiders, power brokers, pundits, whoever, to now try and claim that Biden just went hand-in-hand with Kamala Harris, they are actively deceiving you because they don't want to actually address
The criticism that Biden himself articulated in that letter that we went over just earlier, which is that this whole switcheroo deal would manifestly undermine the Democrats' own argument for how they're these incredible defenders of democracy and they're going to beat back the insurrectionist, anti-democratic, existentially threatening Republicans and Trump.
They don't want to address it because There's really nothing to say.
They just have to kind of pretend none of this ever happened.
And down the memory hole it all goes.
So I want to now refer you to a memo.
This was circulated as of July 3rd.
It was strategically leaked to Friendly Media, which is how the Democratic Party does a lot of its dirty dealings, evidently.
And these were unnamed Democratic strategists who had a Google Doc And they were named, they didn't put their name to it, but the media still eerily circulated this memo, and they popularized now what has been this inspiring new slogan to christen Kamala as the savior figure for the Democratic Party, and I guess the nation, and even the world, maybe the universe, the cosmos, has been saved by Kamala, according to the current narrative.
Unburdened by what has been.
The case for Kamala.
Gee, I'm swelling with pride.
I'm swooning.
To be unburdened by what has been.
I mean, funnily, they call Joe Biden a burden, you would think, implicitly, but that's another item that's being tossed right down the memory hole, probably, because now he's being venerated as this hero, right?
The new George Washington relinquishing power.
And so I want to now go to an under Notice, or a little notice section of this document, which, I mean, these people, whoever wrote this memo, congratulations, you got your way!
You schemed to fruition!
You achieved your little, you know, insider coup, or whatever you want to call it.
First of all, they note that Kamala's best asset, perhaps, is that she's repeatedly demonstrated that she is a strong and capable messenger on our single most important issue, abortion.
So that's telling unto itself.
These Democratic insiders Who were conniving amongst themselves to try to get Biden out of the race and put Kamala in there instead.
They are unswerving in their belief that the single most important issue to everyone, I guess, is abortion.
Now, I'm not saying abortion is unimportant.
I know that it has a certain importance to some.
But to just state as though it's objective fact that abortion is just the be-all end-all for how We, or our, they're invoking this like royal we, kind of orient our issue matrix in terms of what we prioritize.
Really?
Abortion?
I mean nothing else?
National security?
Foreign policy?
I mean the areas where the president wields the most unilateral power by far?
Life and death?
Nuclear obliteration?
All this stuff?
Abridging civil liberties or securing them?
Even economic policy, regulating Wall Street or not, this apparently matters not at all to the Democratic insiders who were so crucial in setting out this little plan to bring about Joe's ouster.
But what I also want to point out here is something that we'll also get into with some of our guests.
I really love how they phrase this little aside that they include.
They say, meaning the unknown pro-Kamala people who drafted the doc, and they say, while the issue is complex and distance here is relative, she, Kamala, is broadly considered to be, to Biden's left on Israel-Palestine, an issue where he has major vulnerabilities.
So notice, they're not saying that on a substantive policy level, Kamala Harris diverges at all.
From Joe Biden.
They're saying she's broadly considered to be to Biden's left, which is an odd way of even phrasing it.
So there's a perception that they want to utilize for maximum political effect that has no necessary connection to the underlying policy substance.
And that, in a nutshell, I think, is a great encapsulation of the whole Democratic Party tactic here.
The perception is that this is new and exciting and we're unburdened now by Joe's foibles.
And whether or not that has anything to do with the policy substance at hand, who cares?
Let's just march forward with our fun memes and pretend like the past several weeks or months never happened.
So when Glenn asked me, or instructed me really, to cover for his vacation here at the studio to cover for his vacation here at the studio in Rio, I told him that my number one requirement was that there be plenty of coffee, because I'm always guzzling that stuff all day and night.
And by golly, Glenn sure did keep his end of the bargain.
Because here at the studio, we're loaded up with Rumble's very own 1775 coffee.
And it is great!
It gets you hyper-caffeinated.
It gets you, you know, eager to support a free speech and an unregulated internet.
Not only does the coffee taste good, It supports Rumble's free speech mission.
1775 Coffee is ethically sourced, not ethnically sourced, that might be questionable, ethically sourced, from a family farm in the high altitude mountains of Bolivia.
There are several roasts to choose from.
I got to sample them all here and have been drinking the light roast.
Because I'm a light guy, I'm light hearted.
Go to 1775Coffee.com right now and pick up your first bag.
Use the code Glenn.
To save 10% off your first order.
I might do my own coup and have you use the promo code Michael.
But don't do that.
Use Glenn.
You know that your hard-earned dollars are going towards supporting Rumble in its mission for free speech.
So wake up every day, brew up a hot cup of Joe, not Joe Biden, not the average Joe, not Morning Joe, and choose freedom.
Order at 1775coffee.com slash Glenn.
Use code Glenn for 10% off your first order.
OK, so I'm happy to be joined now by Moe Tasik.
She is the Investigations Editor at The American Prospect.
Followed her for many years.
Very good writer, so definitely check her out.
And I'm sure she has some penetrating insights on the Kamala Harris juggernaut.
So we will now turn to Mo Tassic.
Hello Mo, how are you?
Hi!
Thanks so much for having me on to talk about Mamala.
Yeah, I was here, I'm speaking to you now from Fire Island, where as soon as, no sooner had Joe sent his tweet with his electronic signature A crowd of gay men were photographed in lime green, brat green t-shirts with Kamala in the brat font.
And I found that extremely alarming because I don't, you know, I'm sure that you've gone through the 2019-2020 primary season, you know, trying to remember what it was exactly that everybody is, you know, getting so excited about.
Didn't we already sort of decide that this That this politician was sort of an empty suit.
I remembered her big moment in the debate with Biden when she accused him of being a racist and said, that little girl was me, talking about busing and school integration.
And quite instantaneously after that moment, the campaign had little t-shirts on its website for sale that said, that little girl was me.
And I was waiting tables at the time, and the next morning I was working lunch, and a bunch of women who were regulars in my section, I worked at this restaurant called Fiole Mare, Very, very popular with Obama.
Obama had his 55th birthday there and held parties there every few months.
And this gaggle of very thin women who never ate carbs, they would basically nibble on tuna tartare for a few hours and drink about four bottles of rose champagne They were all going crazy over that little girl was me moment.
They were literally crying to one another about what a beautiful moment it was.
I've had a lot of moments of alienation in my life, especially waiting tables, but that was a really profound one that stuck with me.
there's something that feels just very imposed about Kamala right now, the coconut pill, the unburdened by what has been as you, you know, as you have, uh, have, have been discussing in the last segment.
And I think that like through, since the debate, um, a lot of people, insiders, I know guys like my boss, David Dayen, um, and, uh, my other, uh, boss, uh, Matt Stoller at American Economic Liberties Project.
He's not really my boss anymore, but, um, you know, he'd, he'd like to be, um, but, but, um, you know, they were very, uh, alongside Bernie and AOC and, and, and, and lots of folks sort of on the populist left, but in the insidery populist left, and lots of folks sort of on the populist left, but in the insidery populist left, and I'm not an insider as, Um, they, uh, they were very upset and I could tell, um,
They've gotten bad vibes ever since the debate with what you're calling a coup, and I don't know what to call it.
But the fact is that it's been a really weird year.
And, you know, it's a year that, like, you know, just about a year ago in September of 2023 is when the anti-Semitism crisis really got touched off.
That happened at University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater, after they The university president refused to cancel a Palestinian literature festival.
There was a donor boycott organized by Mark Rowan, the CEO and co-founder of Apollo Global Management, the massive private equity firm about which I could talk for hours.
They weren't quite sure what it was that they wanted.
But then October 7th came along, and they decided that they wanted the head of the president, and they wanted to turn this into something bigger.
And ever since then, I've been trying to figure out what was going on.
been trying to figure out what was going on.
There's, you know, there was clearly this, it felt like there was this oligarch clamp down on our speech.
You know, there were absolutely insane things happening, like Israel declaring its intention on October 8th to starve a nation, you know, 2.5 million people.
And, and, you know, really, you know, equaling the death count on the civilian death count on October 7th, within, you know, 24 hours.
of October 8th, the morning of October 8th.
So I felt insane all year, I think a lot of people have, by the sort of constant gaslighting and the constant sort of reality.
Like the constant insistence that reality is something vastly different from what we know it to be and that the recent past is something, you know, vastly different from what we just experienced.
Yeah, so I want to just remark on how the reality Lucky you are to have such a front row seat to these historic moments in the ascendance of Kamala.
First you saw the low-carb wine moms at their lunch swelling with glee for this moment where Kamala effectively accused Joe Biden of being a racist.
Apparently that was her optimal strategy for getting later named Vice President, which is also odd.
Indeed.
But one thing that I commented on at the time after that debate, because I actually attended that debate, I believe that was in Miami.
There was huge media adulation for how wonderfully Kamala Harris did in that debate.
The Democratic insider class, the strategists, they were all over the moon in how awesome they thought Kamala did in showing herself to have been that benighted little girl in Berkeley, California, who was a victim of Joe Biden having the position that he did on busing in the 1970s.
And my point at the time was, you know, before anybody gets ahead of themselves and proclaims, That Kamala Harris's debate performance portends any kind of electoral success.
Why don't we wait a little while and see what the voters have to say?
And the voters clearly didn't agree with the insider pundit Democratic consensus on Kamala, right?
She flailed.
Her campaign imploded.
She dropped out before the Iowa caucus.
And so clearly there was not a A rush on the part of the voters to coronate her in the way that some of the insiders wanted to.
Yeah, so... Right, so Mo, I was just saying that this insider consensus that anointed Kamala, this savior figure, because of her amazing debate performance, allegedly, did not translate into votes, right?
And so now it seems like there's a similar thing happening.
Where, because she has this, you know, meme energy, we're told, or because she has the support of the Democrats who have facilitated her imposition and ousted Joe Biden, you know, I call it a coup, kind of facetiously.
I don't know what to call it either.
Maybe a putsch.
Maybe some kind of removal under duress or something, but we went through all the clips in the intro where Joe Biden was absolutely adamant that he under no circumstances would be leaving the race because if he were to do so, he would be capitulating to these know-it-all donors and people who get everything wrong, And want to afflict the country with these officious impositions of their own myopic will.
And lo and behold, that's what we've got now, and the end result is Kamala.
So I enjoy that you were also witness to this outburst of euphoria on Fire Island, with all the gays running around, super excited that they have a new mommy to look up to.
So I take it then that you are not coconut-pilled And could you explain why that is, also by reference to the personnel that are swirling around in her orbit that may have some foreboding omens to you?
Sure.
Can you hear me?
I've been trying to fix my audio.
Yeah, we can hear you.
Or I can at least.
Okay, good.
So, no, I'm not a coconut pill.
Although, you know, I was trying to have an open mind.
I cracked open Kamala's 2018 memoir just now.
And, you know, she comes across at the beginning.
I didn't get that far into it.
The first few chapters, she's sort of an Olivia Benson type.
And as a diehard SVU fan, you know, I was getting into it.
I was feeling it.
I liked I like Kamala the cop, I have to say.
But at least her depiction of herself.
But, like, there's something, the thing that I think that I find very alarming about it is the same thing that I found unnerving about her in 2018, which is in 2019, which is they're trying to, like, shove Obama which is they're trying to, like, shove Obama 2.0 down our throats.
And I think that, like, there's been a real understanding within the Democratic Party, at least, you know, there was in the Biden administration really reflected this, if it didn't actually explicitly acknowledge it, that Obama was a policy failure.
here.
He was, you know, God, he was a good looking guy and great taste and, you know, wonderful family.
But he, The policy failures of justice handling of the financial crisis alone, much less the murders that went through during his administration, much less the foreign policy.
I mean, you can go on and on.
Labor, the loss of so many Democratic seats in state legislatures and state senates across the country.
It was a horrible, horrible time for the base of the Democratic Party, the traditional base of the Democratic Party, which is the working class, right?
And the idea that he, you know, this Obama nostalgia is a specifically DC thing, and it doesn't really Nobody else has it.
And I understand it sort of because, again, I waited tables, and Obama was amazing, you know, for the restaurant industry, right?
His people spent a lot of money.
They tipped really well.
They loved, you know, uni, and they loved all kinds of, you know, they loved caviar.
They loved, like, interesting wines.
And again, they were great tippers, and they knew how to act.
And that was not how the Trump administration went at all, as a waiter who was not working at the Trump hotels, which I'm sure was a different story.
So I understand, people get these fuzzy feelings, the D.C.
people do, about Obama when they think about him, when they talk about him.
But I think that for most people, they felt that in 2008.
They felt that when, you know, a black man whose middle name was Hussein, and was just such a powerful orator, at least he certainly seems that way in hindsight, won by a landslide.
But We were immediately all betrayed by that, because he didn't even bother doing kind of the minimum.
I'm almost certain that McCain would have gone harder on the banks, because Republicans like bossing people around.
Even the Bush administration had a lot more moments of speaking truth to corporate power than Obama did.
And so, you know, Kamala feels like they're trying to shove that thing down our throats again with the Obama coalition and all of the ties to pop culture.
Let me stop you there because I want to play a clip that gets to this point that I was only just shown for the first time a short while before beginning the show and I was just speechless.
So I want to get your reaction to this.
Kamala Harris overlaid in green to a song off of the record.
Brat, me just calling it a record.
There I go.
This is a mash-up of the coconut thing put to a song off the album.
You exist in the context.
The newly-minted Harris campaign is fully leaning into their candidate being memed.
They changed their campaign Twitter background to look like the Brat album cover.
They tweeted out a fresh new Venn diagram, which we know is Vice President Harris' favorite means of data visualization.
What do Biden HQ and Kamala HQ have in common where they overlap?
Holding Trump accountable.
Yeah, so I guess insofar as they're forcing this down our throats, they're doing it in a meme-ified fashion that's supposed to be super appealing to the kiddos.
And we're told this is working.
I have no way of verifying whether it's working.
I don't think it's particularly borne out in the polling data that's so far emerged.
Where there's a surge of youth support for Kamala.
But this is apparently the tack that they're going with.
And yeah, I mean, it does remind me a little bit of how Obama's image was generated.
But at the same time, Obama had to run a very rigorous Very much prolonged primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, where at least he had to prove that he had some political skill, right?
He had to win elections.
He won the Iowa caucus as a black man and an overwhelmingly white state.
Kamala's proven nothing electorally in that sense, so I don't know.
It's just, it's just staggering to me that we're all supposed to, in a matter of hours it seems, just accept that she's this juggernaut and her political skill should just be taken as a given.
Completely.
And, I mean, I think that she's proven the opposite, right?
She flamed out before the first primary.
You know, you go back and read the stories.
Fifty separate campaign staffers talked to the New York Times and the Washington Post for those stories that they wrote on how, you know, what a mess her campaign is and how much disarray and how they couldn't agree on a message and how there was all this, you know, sort of infighting.
They had so much money and they didn't know what to do with it, and then they just spent it all on bullshit.
I think that she could be fine.
I don't know.
I'm just very confused by it, and I feel like, again, everything that's happened in the past month especially, it's just very confusing.
We're trying to draw a contrast with Trump.
And we're doing it in the least dignified way possible.
You know, I don't know, like, Charlie Bratz, I don't know if you've listened to the album.
You know, it's a lot of things, but like, Profound isn't really one of them.
I've been told it's a pretty good album.
I'm open to it.
I'm open to it musically.
I don't know how open to it I am politically, so that remains to be seen.
It's just so, you know, it's throwing a lot of things against the wall.
And one thing that I really am reminded of is during the 2008 campaign, which I followed really closely, I was working at Jezebel and Gawker at that time.
And I remember the week that Sarah Palin was, you know, the week of the RNC that Sarah Palin was named the VP pick.
And the entire week, maybe week and a half afterward, you know, McCain had this incredible bounce, and there was all this momentum on his side, and people were really like, oh my God, you know, he's gotten it.
Like, he could win now.
This is, you know, this is like some, she's got the juice.
And I remember thinking at the time, like, no, she doesn't?
Like, what?
Like, what is this?
You know, and it's sort of like mistaking what gets hits.
This is the thing.
Mistaking what gets the hits, what gets, you know, engagement on Twitter, on social media, with, like, what people actually want to vote for, you know, for the most important job in the fucking country.
And, you know, again, the youth vote, I mean, the youth who are most likely to vote, right, the most politically aware, politically active vote, what are they angry about?
They're angry about a fucking genocide.
I don't know if you heard this from the intro, but I want to pull up an excerpt from the so-called Case for Kamala.
This was an anonymous Google Doc that was circulated among, who knows, some Dem Insiders, and it was strategically leaked to all the friendly media outlets.
But pull up that little excerpt from the Google Doc, if you can.
It basically says that Kamala Harris, one of her assets potentially, is that she is considered to be to Biden's quote-unquote left on Israel-Palestine.
Now notice they don't stipulate that she is in any way substantively divergent from Biden on the issue.
Of Israel.
They're just alluding to this supposed perception and fixating exclusively on this totally uncorroborated perception, to me, is very nicely emblematic of how the democratic elite class often tends to conduct its business.
Right.
It's like she's and that is everything about Kamala and this type of politician is is perception.
And perception management.
Is she?
Is she not?
You know, again, she's just a kind of vacuous figure and I don't know if she is that at her core.
That is just the vibe and that's what, you know, her handlers have chosen to lean into for whatever reason.
I was listening to that part of the segment and it's very distressing because the other side of the coin too is right now there's been all these stories about how Kamala is maybe going to fire Lena Khan or that's what the business community really you know, wants her to do.
She has hinted to donors that she views with skepticism.
Lena's expansive view of antitrust powers.
I'm sorry.
You know, it's not Lena's anti, you know, expensive views, you know, Louis Brandeis.
It's, it's a, it's a, it's a lot of, a lot of much older white men's view of antitrust.
It might not be forks, but so I, it's, it's, that's been very disorienting because of the, like, there's, I have no way of knowing, no one has any way of knowing what she really thinks, how she really feels.
But, And by the way, we'll wrap up with this.
The reason we don't know what she really thinks or feels is because she's been able to just magically bypass any open public primary process.
Remember, the Dem insiders were saying, we got to get rid of Biden.
This is going to be a disaster.
Let's have an open convention.
That was Ezra Klein's big idea, right?
But now, apparently they've just overnight accommodated themselves to A closed convention process.
They're apparently even going to have a virtual vote to install Kamala.
So she's not going to have to do any challenging interviews.
She's not going to have to do any debates.
She's been entirely insulated from any of the typical scrutiny That would accompany even a truncated primary, but she's been absolved from all of that.
So that to me is the crazy part, and it's especially crazy that this is not even being noted by the media, who would rather fixate on, you know, Bratz, and I mean, Charlie XCX is, I'm sure, wonderful, and the memes are great, and funny, blah, blah, blah, coconuts falling from the trees.
But how about maybe a little bit of curiosity about how it is that she came to be foisted upon us with everybody having to speculate about what her feelings are or what her policy positions are or, I don't know, how she would govern?
I mean, has that occurred to anybody?
Right.
It's total criminology.
And, you know, another alarming thing, obviously, that we didn't bring up was Eric Holder.
She hired Eric Holder to vet her VP candidates.
Does that mean he's also in charge of the whole transition team?
Eric Holder is one of the most toxic forces in Washington.
He was a defense attorney for Purdue Pharma, who got a sweetheart deal from West Virginia and Kentucky when those states sued Purdue Pharma for addicting large portions of their populace to their supposedly abuse-proof narcotic.
Um, you know, represented Chiquita Banana in, um, in, uh, uh, Death Squad, I think, like, um, and, and, and bribery, uh, sort of, uh, charges there.
He has, um, he, Covington and Burling, um, uh, have, you know, Google and Amazon as their clients and, um, and, and have, uh, as antitrust clients, as antitrust defense clients.
He is the pioneer of the Obama-era doctrine that said, you can't really go after big banks or corporate executives because it might cause systemic risk, and we wouldn't want that.
I so so there's a lot of real bad signs and in the absence of anything else and like you said a an open primary process and it calls to mind right like Biden didn't like we all know that Jill Biden hated Kamala and and this is likely why they you know hung on so long for whatever reason Joe Biden didn't really like her gave her some really dog shit jobs to do
You know, admittedly, I don't know, you know, I don't know if I would have done a better job as borders are than she did.
Not that, you know, I would just say it's a pretty thankless job, or the Democrats certainly don't have any coherent vision as to, you know, how they would do that.
But we know that, you know, there was no love lost between her and Obama.
I mean, her and Joe Biden.
He was sort of forced to pick her because he made this promise that he would pick a black female.
We all would love to see Nina Turner in that spot, but we know who it's going to be.
I think it was between her and Susan Rice.
And so, you know, it seems clear, okay, she was foisted upon her by the same crew that sort of anointed Joe Biden when, you know, Bernie was on the precipice of possibly winning the, you know, the primary.
I still think that was, you know, sort of Bernie's fault for not making some sort of alliance with Warren to pull their delegate.
Um, but the fact is that like, you know, he was anointed and she was anointed and probably as part of that, you know, probably as a condition.
Um, and why?
Why?
What is she?
She's kind of the most, um, just astroturf, uh, presidential candidate.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And unfortunately, Mo, we have to now move on, but we'll continue the conversation hopefully at some point in the future.
But AstroTurfed champion, that is definitely Kamala Harris.
So thank you, Mo Tasek, Investigations Editor, American Prospect.
People should check her out.
And we'll talk soon.
OK.
Now, my next guest, this one is going to be exciting for me.
I'm excited to welcome Cenk Uygur.
He is the founder of the Young Turks.
I formerly worked for the Young Turks in a previous life.
I always respected and appreciated the autonomy that I was given within the Young Turks to do my own thing, even when it rustled some feathers.
And maybe everyone didn't always agree.
So Cenk has my admiration for that.
And Cenk actually technically ran for president for the Democratic primary nomination in 2024, largely, he says, because he was so insistent that Joe Biden was going to be a disaster electorally.
So I want to check in with Cenk and see what he makes of the current DNC machinations to coronate Kamala in this bizarre private process and see if that satisfies the grievances that he articulated.
So, Cenk, welcome to System Update with Glenn Greenwald, although I'm not Glenn Greenwald.
I'm Michael Tracy and I am filling in for the time being.
So how are you?
I'm good, and I'm familiar with both of your work, so I'm pretty sure I know.
Yeah, I'm good.
Thanks for having me on.
So, Cenk, you, as we said, you ran for president.
Obviously, you never maintained that you stood a particularly good chance of winning the nomination.
That wasn't really the point.
The point was you wanted to force the issue and get Democrats to realize that if they pressed ahead with Joe Biden, they were gonna be in for a nightmare, that Donald Trump could romp, that Joe Biden didn't have the capacity to run a vigorous campaign. that Joe Biden didn't have the capacity to run a And I wanna just pull up a primary ballot.
Your name was on one of these ballots along with Dean Phillips, Narayan Williamson, and of course Joe Biden, but conspicuously missing from that list of candidates was Kamala Harris.
So one of the points that I've been making is that Kamala Harris is being ushered to the nomination through a process that has remarkably little actual small d democratic input from voters.
She hasn't had to win a single vote, a single primary.
She got a grand total of zero delegates in 2020 and zero in 2024, at least if you go by state and territory primary election outcomes.
So I thought we were going to get this open convention process where they could have a mini primary or something truncated to actually gauge the will of the electorate.
And in fact, Joe Biden was denouncing these insider maneuvers against him just in the past couple of weeks.
He said that they would thwart the will of the primary voters.
And we're now even told that the DNC's gonna have a virtual nomination still, a virtual roll call, before the convention, basically negating the whole purpose of the convention, which they were gonna do with Biden, now they're gonna keep doing with Kamala, so that nobody can even contest it, apparently, on the floor, or the whole purpose of a convention has now been overturned.
So what do you make of it?
I mean, does this satisfy your criticisms of how the primary process was conducted, now that Kamala is just having the red carpet rolled out for her?
Well, let's start with a fun fact.
I have received more votes for president than Kamala Harris has.
That is a fun fact.
That is a very fun fact.
Yeah.
And not only am I just an online talk show host, but I'm a naturalized citizen.
So that's why I was only on seven ballots.
That's a civil rights issue somebody should get back to someday.
But that was, of course, not the primary reason that I ran.
I ran, as I stated from the beginning and in almost every interview that I did, it was an act of desperation because I felt like we were all on board the Titanic and We all saw the iceberg, or at least a lot of us saw the iceberg, apparently.
And I was actually surprised later in the process to find out that Blue Maga existed, and that they actually had not seen, they didn't see the iceberg at all until the debate.
But I saw it, I know a bunch of people saw it, and I thought, well, it doesn't look like anybody's going to do anything about it, so I'm just going to lunge into the captain's quarters and try to move the wheel.
Because otherwise we're toast and Donald Trump's gonna win and God knows what happens to democracy, etc, etc.
So, but you know what?
All the folks who decided to try to make a difference, whether it was like, and it is strange bedfellows.
I don't know anyone who criticizes Nancy Pelosi more than I do.
And so me and Nancy Pelosi on the same side, that is weird.
And, and Ezra Klein and James Carville and David Axelrod.
And by the way, let's also note, Axelrod, top advisor to Barack Obama, James Carville, top advisor to the Clintons, and no one got the memo.
I'm like, it's the Obamas and the Clintons are telling you there's something wrong with Joe Biden, and you knuckleheads aren't getting it, right?
So there's the old fights, Michael, between progressives versus establishment.
And in this particular election, Since I'm one of the few Democrats who actually think that democracy is on the line, it led to completely different coalitions.
People who were perfectly happy to lose to Donald Trump, and people who really, really didn't want to lose to Donald Trump.
So, me, Carville, etc.
were the ones who didn't want to lose to Donald Trump.
Blue Maggot was like, who cares?
As long as we obey democratic leadership.
That's what Morning Joe taught me.
Oh, I have to bow my head.
The top value of the Democratic Party is obedience, right?
I'm like, man, you guys have lost a thread.
You completely forgot what the Democratic Party was supposed to be at.
So am I satisfied with the result?
Well, I'm enormously satisfied that Joe Biden's out of the race because we went from about a 0% chance of winning to about a 50% chance of winning.
So, hard to not be satisfied with that.
Now, when you talk about, okay, but what about the process of democracy?
Was that fulfilled here?
Oh, of course not.
But look, democracy has a number of issues in current day American politics.
And then I'm going to get to, yes, but what's the best we can do, right?
So, number one, Come on, the donors control everything.
We don't have a real democracy anyway, right?
And I talked about this in my book, Justice Is Coming.
You know, a person in Northwestern did a 20-year study, 1800 policy issues.
The bottom 90% of Americans have zero effect on public policy.
Absolutely zero.
Okay.
The top 10%, they don't control everything, but when they want something, they get a 45% of the time.
So, so already it's hilarious and ridiculous.
I mean, Reid Hoffman today gave $7 million to Kamala Harrison, demanded that Lena Khan will be fired.
And guess what?
She'll be fired!
So that's an AIPAC who went and, you know, bought all of Congress, then Yahoo, a notorious war criminal, one of the most evil men of my lifetime, getting standing ovation after standing ovation.
So what democracy?
But secondly, when you get into the primaries, the Democratic primaries are a joke and have been for a long time.
So under the Bullshit rubric of unity.
Notice they never have unity around progressives.
There's never any unity other than corporate democratic leadership.
So this was a sham primary.
Again, I know because I was in it.
In Florida, they just canceled the election.
North Carolina, Tennessee, they didn't just take me off.
A lot of states took me off because of the naturalized citizen issue.
That's a totally different thing.
But they took Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson off of the balance in North Carolina, Tennessee.
The joke of a primary.
And I kept saying the whole time and mainstream media just didn't pay any attention because running against Joe Biden was a violation of etiquette.
And so I was the bad guy.
I was the radical for wanting democracy.
And I would say, like, if you're going to try to defend democracy in a general election, wouldn't it be nice if you had one in the primaries?
And people in mainstream media were like, how dare you bow your head to Joe Biden?
He's the most young, dynamic guy that anybody's ever seen.
But Michael, at this point, that ship is sailed.
So then the next layer of it is, OK, I call for an open convention, as Ezra Klein did and others did.
And that's obviously the last vestige we have of democracy at this point.
And at this point, Kamala Harris has gotten the majority of the pledged delegates.
No one's even running against her.
I mean, the Democratic Party is just incredibly frustrating.
So she's going to be the nominee.
Let us at least go to the convention.
Nope.
Nope.
They're lying about Ohio this and we can't get on the ballot stat, and so they're going to do a virtual roll call on August 7th and snuff out any delegates changing their mind before the convention because the DNC is authoritarian by nature.
So they just can't help themselves.
But with a straight face, they'll say they're wanting to protect democracy.
And these same guys who wanted to keep their job because Biden hired them.
We're willing to totally risk democracy and give Donald Trump about a 99% chance of winning.
So, Cenk, on that note, I want to just quote to you, this was a letter that Joe Biden delivered to Congressional Democrats on July 8th.
This is the same day that he had his infamous defiance morning joke call in.
Here's what he wrote in that letter.
And maybe I'm unusual because I actually read the letter.
And I remember it.
It was only a couple of weeks ago.
I know everything we just throw down the memory hole at warp speed nowadays.
But he says, the voters of the Democratic Party have voted.
They have chosen me as the nominee of the party.
Do we just now say that this process didn't matter?
That the voters don't have a say?
I decline to do that, he says.
I feel a deep obligation.
To the faith and the trust of the voters of the Democratic Party who have placed in me this year.
It was their decision to make, not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well-intentioned.
The voters and the voters alone decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.
And this is the kicker, okay, Cenk?
Biden says, how can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?
I cannot do that.
I will not do that.
So, how are the Democrats, with a straight face, going to start screaming as they have incessantly forever?
And you apparently agree on the substance of this point.
I might quibble a little bit.
I think a lot of the rhetoric around democracy and Trump overturning it tends to be a bit histrionic and overblown, but that's more of a substantive conflict we may have.
But in terms of the consistency of the Democrats' own messaging, Joe Biden himself is the one who said that it would be undermined if they allow this insider push to go forward.
So are we just going to now memory hole this letter?
Is Joe Biden really now going to be so cast by the wayside that everybody's supposed to forget?
Ezra Klein, Matthew Iglesias, Thomas Friedman, The Washington Post, Vox, name your Democratic-aligned pundit or media outlet.
Are we all going to forget that two and a half weeks ago, Joe Biden said that if you go through with this ouster of me, it means that our own party, the Democratic Party, is thwarting democracy?
I mean, to me it just seems, I feel crazy.
Yeah, look, Joe Biden wrote that same letter for the same reason that he said, you know what?
I demand to have a primary in Florida.
I can't believe they canceled that election.
And I demand that everybody be put back on the ballot.
North Carolina and Tennessee during the primaries.
And I demand that we do debates during the primaries so the candidates could be tested and that the voters get what they want.
Oh, right, he didn't do any of that.
No, he's monumentally full of crap.
He loved that the primary was totally authoritarian, totally rigged to not only make sure that he was a candidate, but that he was protected and hidden in a basement.
And that he wouldn't have to actually run against any of us.
I mean, look, they were hiding him from me, Marianne Williamson, and Dean Phillips.
They knew he was going to lose.
If you can't beat us in an open debate or an open and fair contest, of course you're going to get your ass handed to you even by a moron like Donald Trump.
So that letter is garbage.
It's trash.
He never meant a word of it.
So I don't really care about that letter just because I already know that Joe Biden's a hypocrite.
But look, that goes to the point that I'm making.
So I'm one of the few people Who actually believe it because I think Donald Trump had fake electors and that's a real coup attempt against democracy.
And he's a spoiled little brat and he wanted to take his toy and go home when he lost.
And so he's a super dangerous guy to have in charge and just never believed in democracy.
Praises dictators at every turn.
Let me stop you there.
Let's delve into this a little bit for a second.
Yeah, finish your thought.
Hold on, let me just finish the thought.
Go ahead, yeah.
But I have proven that I'm not a hypocrite on that.
That I actually believe in democracy all the way through the process, and I actually believe that he's a danger to democracy.
That's why I did the desperate thing that I did, which helped a little bit in setting the party in the right direction.
But everyone else who Yeah, so let's delve into this notion that Donald Trump represents some profound threat to democracy.
This couldn't be more standard rhetoric among Democratic partisans.
And you said you believe it.
I believe you, that you are sincere and you are contention on that.
And I will also acknowledge that you're consistent in matching your actions with your words because you took the rather drastic step of even running yourself to try to make clear that you thought the threat was so severe that it compelled you to throw your own hat in the ring.
So I fully acknowledge that.
But I don't know, shouldn't we step back for a moment Does Donald Trump throwing a hissy fit after the 2020 election and trying to come up with cockamamie theories as to how, you know, Mike Pence could potentially take a different set of electors than the one sent by the states and that was denied by Pence and then
He, you know, he whips up a mob of yahoos who really had no ability or even seeming intention to overthrow the United States government.
I mean, temporarily delaying a legislative proceeding on January 6th of 2021 never even had the ability or the possibility of actually In any way, implementing a coup in the United States government.
That's outlandish rhetoric to underscore the pre-existing grievances that people have about Donald Trump.
So I agree, and people on the right get mad at me all the time because I don't buy into the election fraud stuff that I don't feel has ever been remotely empirically proven, but Donald Trump, you know, throwing a tantrum And then leaving power and now running again.
I mean, so let me ask you this.
What would Trump do if he were to win this time that would actually sabotage democracy?
Would he not obey the Constitution and leave power after a second term?
Would he defy the 22nd Amendment?
I think that's the correct amendment.
Like what tangibly would he do that would throw, you know, flush democracy down the toilet?
That's what I'm, I'm not clear on the specifics of what people are alleging when they make this argument.
Yeah, so he would do anything and everything to keep power.
He has said that he would suspend the Constitution.
So he's not unclear about it.
But Michael, you're incredibly wrong about what he did after the 2020 election.
That was not some sort of like, yeah, is he a spoiled brat who didn't like that he lost and he's a loser and he has been his whole life?
Yes.
But it was not inconsequential.
And it's and it totally could have worked.
So let me explain that plot.
So and Peter Navarro wrote a whole book about it.
They have memo after memo, which I've read, including a memo that said fake elector memorandum.
So, and in fact, I just interviewed Rudy Giuliani at the RNC and he admitted a part of the plot.
So the idea wasn't just a delay on that day.
So what I, look, mainstream media is super frustrating because oftentimes they're simpletons and they can't really, they just want to show you pictures and they can't really explain concepts.
So the guys who entered the Capitol on January 6th, It's not like they were going to keep the building and that somehow that was going to be the coup.
And I feel like Democrats and mainstream media leave people with that impression.
That's preposterous.
No, their job in this plot was simply to delay the proceedings.
So why would delaying the proceedings matter?
Because the next step in that plot, again, written by Eastman, who Trump's lawyer is, then you say, well, since we couldn't certify the election, we have no choice but to go back to the state legislatures and ask Who are their electors that they want to send up?
Now at that point, that's when they had the fake electors that were ready to go.
But Cenk, this was a harebrained scheme that Eastman cooked up in concert with other Trump operatives to try to invoke some, I think, unsound, unfounded constitutional I don't think that that was a defensible strategy.
the certification of the votes, and have the veracity of the election outcomes in individual states re-tabulated, and the idea was they would prove that some fraud took place, and therefore the legitimate electors would be awarded to Trump. and therefore the legitimate electors would be awarded to Trump.
I don't think that that was a defensible strategy.
All I'm saying is to conflate that with an attempt to overthrow the government, abolish democracy. - No, no, Michael, let me say that.
No, you're wrong.
Let me finish.
It's not.
It's not.
- This is insane democratic hyperbole, and all the more ridiculous given what Biden just said is the undemocratic tendencies within the Democratic Party itself.
I mean, you even had Democrats in individual states try to strike Trump from ballots by invoking this insurrection clause of the Constitution, and the Supreme Court unanimously said that that was not legitimate.
So I just think that, you know, if you want to talk about democracy, I'm not saying you, but if Democrats or whomever wants to venerate the sanctity of democracy, well, you know, you have points that are scored on each side in terms of Democratic infringements, right?
Including on the Democratic side and the Republican side.
Doesn't mean that they're equal, and I agree that what Trump did after the 2020 election was discreditable, but there seems like there's this inveterate need for Democrats to just chronically exaggerate what that actually signified.
And the reality is there was never a chance, it was impossible that it ever would have actually overthrown the government.
No, you're totally wrong about that, Michael.
Look, again, consistent, I thought the idea of taking Trump off because the insurrection act off the ballots was absurd.
I spoke out against that.
You want to say Democrats are hypocrites and don't really believe what they mean?
Of course.
They're politicians and politicians controlled by donors.
That's not an issue for me.
But when you're excusing what Trump did and minimizing it, I think you're factually excusing it.
I'm not excusing it.
I'm saying it hasn't been perfectly depicted.
Let me finish.
Go ahead.
So, the part that you didn't let me finish is that when they kick it back to the states and they bring in the fake electors, and Rudy Giuliani, I asked him, hey, Trump already had an alternate slate of electors because each candidate does.
Why don't you guys just use that instead of the fake electors?
He said because half of them wouldn't do it because they knew that it was illegal and unconstitutional.
So, now, what would be the next step?
The next step is, they would then not say, oh, the fake electors win.
They would say, well, now we have these electors and these other electors, and golly gee, we don't know who the real electors are.
So I guess we're going to have to go to what the Constitution says next, which is that in a case of this kind of deadlock, the House decides.
But the House votes by state.
And the Republicans had more states than the Democrats did.
So the minute you bring in the fake electors, they're gonna say there's confusion, and they're gonna win on that, because the press will go, I don't know, 50-50, I can't tell who the real electors are.
In which case, you go to the House, and yes, then the Republicans would have put Trump in, and voila, there's your coup, when he definitely didn't win the election.
So it was a perfectly realistic plot.
That's what was so scary about it.
And to be fair to the Eastmans and Navarros, It was a smart plot.
They actually definitely could have done it.
And they were in the middle of doing it.
And if you think it was inconsequential and they didn't really mean it, maybe you should ask Mike Pence.
I mean, they were chanting, hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.
People looking to murder Trump's vice president.
Trump said, when informed of that by his chief of staff, I don't mind.
So this guy's kind of a murderous dictator.
And so you're telling me, oh, no, he won't try another coup attempt.
You know, they had a three hour conversation in the White House where they considered martial law and rolling out the tanks against the American people.
To the credit of the rest of the Trump team, they threatened to resign en masse if he did that.
But General Michael Flynn was making that argument, and Donald Trump was very receptive to that argument.
So no, he's definitely a dictator wannabe, and you'd be taking a wild, terrible risk with democracy if you put him back in.
Here's my problem with that variation of a Trump critique, Cenk, and I think you'll probably have some sympathy with this.
My frustration is that Trump has governed in a far more, quote, establishment fashion or a far more conventional fashion than these hyperbolic portrayals of him would lead the average person to believe.
I call him Jeb Bush with a wacky Twitter account.
That was how the first term largely went.
There were a couple of exceptions around the margins.
But, you know, he tried to do a regime change in Venezuela.
He bombed Syria several times.
He vetoed a war powers resolution to keep immiserating Yemen.
He started arming Ukraine and he defied what Obama had done on that score.
He abrogated arms control treaties with Russia.
And on and on and on, a lot of these actual policy measures that he introduced, I mean, the one big legislative item that the Republicans passed when they had unified control of government in the first part of Trump's term was just corporate tax cuts.
It wasn't something that was dictatorial, right?
So I feel that the more grounded critique of Trump, at least in my estimation, kind of gets lost in the hysteria when people run around screaming that, oh, Trump is this dictator.
My criticism would more be, you know, Trump actually He actually isn't taking on the deep state.
We had the Project 2025 guy on this show last night and I've got him basically to admit what that whole, you know, supposedly devious plan prescribes is basically just bipartisan continuity when it comes to national security and foreign policy.
On Israel, Trump brags that, you know, he's the best president Israel could ever have hoped for, and Netanyahu reiterated that yesterday.
So, I guess, you know, in general, and I wonder if you have any sympathy with this point of view, my issue is that when people fixate so relentlessly on some of these speculative, and I would say overblown, notions of Trump wielding some kind of dictatorial power, what gets lost in the fray is the reality of how Trump governed, which was really
Very much establishmentarian, maybe a few twists and tinkers around the margins, but far from what a lot of his most ardent supporters try to valorize him as, which is this warrior against the deep state who is opposed by every establishment faction, which is just not true.
I mean, he's getting money poured into his coffers from every private equity tycoon in the world right now.
And I feel like that critique Yeah, so a couple of different points here.
So first of all, I actually agree with you that in the first term, he managed mainly as a corporate Republican.
And that's why I would not have flipped out if he hadn't tried to do the coup attempt and And he said that he was going to bring in the same kind of establishment figures because they provided a break in the car.
And whenever he had some stupid idea, they would talk him out of it or just ignore him.
And look, the administrative state is in charge both during Republican and Democratic administrations.
I mean, Joe Biden says he can function between 10 a.m.
and 4 p.m.
And after eight, he can't do anything.
So obviously he's not fully in charge.
Kamala Harris was going to give a speech on Palestine in March, and it got edited by the National Security Council, so obviously she's not in charge.
And during Donald Trump, he would give insane orders.
He said, I want to increase the amount of nuclear weapons we have by tenfold.
And they walked out of the meeting and Rex Tillerson said, he's a fucking idiot.
Let's just ignore him.
And they all did.
And that happened over and over again because he's too stupid to realize they never even followed his orders.
That would have bankrupted the country anyway.
But one of the things I am concerned about this time around, Michael, is that he's saying that he's not going to have the same establishment figures.
Now, I loathe the establishment figures because they're all corrupt and they all work for the donors.
But they're not insane.
They have different problems.
Insanity is not one of them.
But if he removes all those people, and he just goes with his instincts...
We're cooked!
His instincts are maniacal!
So, I mean, you can go back to the dictator stuff, where every time he talks to ironically communist dictators like Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, etc., he says, man, it's amazing!
People always stand up and applaud him, and no matter what he says, they listen to it.
Yeah, because otherwise he murders them!
Right?
Anyway, you know, and then in terms of policy, I think these backup policies are super extreme and without the establishment brakes in the car, they're going to run that car right off that cliff.
So that's a second giant problem in reelecting Donald Trump.
But Cenk, I can just hear the online right-wingers swelling with glee hearing you postulate that in a second term Trump is going to diverge dramatically from all these establishment influences because that's what they want.
Right?
But I was at the Republican National Convention last week, too.
I saw you briefly, but I was running around like a maniac so we didn't get a chance to talk that much.
But I grilled a lot of Republicans on this very point.
And one thing that a lot of them told me was, don't worry.
All these hysterical liberal fears of Trump are once again overwrought because guess who he's going to be bringing back into the fold?
Mike Pompeo, who also got a prime speaking role at the convention again.
Robert O'Brien, who was another Trump national security advisor, who was on, you know, meet the face of the nation recently and was saying, look, we need to sanction Russia even harder than Biden.
That's how we're going to force some kind of settlement in Ukraine.
You know, he's surrounded by people associated with this thing called the America First Policy Institute who are submitting to him policy proposals about how the U.S. has to keep arming So it's the polar opposite of these MSNBC style histrionics about how Trump is Putin's puppet, he's going to totally depart from mainstream policy consensus.
I just don't really buy it and I think it's kind of unjustifiably, almost glamorizing or valorizing of Trump to assume that he even has the organizational focus or presence of mind or even interest to do something that's genuinely anti-establishmentarianism.
Who are these anti-establishment figures that he's supposedly gonna be filling his administration with?
I don't know who they are.
Everybody who's been basically cultivated by this so-called Project 2025 thing are just conventional DC conservatives.
So I just don't really see this outcome that you're warning is so much likelier under a second Trump term.
Yeah, so here, again, I partly agree.
So Trump is both complicated and simple.
So he's complicated in that you can't pigeonhole him as purely establishment or purely populist.
I mean, again, I think he's a fake populist.
He just suggested he would appoint Jamie Dimon as his Secretary of the Treasury.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I get it.
And he's definitely not purely MAGA.
So he's complicated in that he doesn't fit into the political spectrum in the conventional way that we think of it.
But he's simple in that he's very easy to solve.
He just cares about what's good for Donald Trump.
Period.
End of sentence.
Doesn't care about anything else, okay?
So why does he then seem like an establishment character when he says, oh, maybe I should bring Jamie Dimon in, Steve Mnuchin.
He had more Goldman Sachs bankers in his cabinet and his administration than any other president in history.
So he brings in all these establishment figures because, A, he wants money, and he's always very clear about that.
He's like, look, the Saudis gave me $30-40 million in apartment.
What am I going to do?
Not like them?
So he very likely did money laundering for the Russians earlier in his career.
So he's like, what am I going to do?
Not like them?
They gave me money for free.
These oil companies, I want them to give me a billion dollars in campaign donations, and then in return, I'll let them rob the place blind.
Take away all the regulations, take away any taxes they need to pay, etc.
So he's a very transactional, old school, corrupt politician.
So that has its own set of problems.
I mean, on Israel, he moved the U.S.
Embassy in Israel and risked World War III.
Also in killing Soleimani, he risked World War III.
Because Sheldon Adelson gave him $100 million in 2016, and then for a job well done, he gave him another $100 million in 2020.
And Miriam Adelson, you might have seen, was at the Republican convention last week in one of the VIP suites flanked by Ted Cruz, Glenn Youngkin, Carrie Lake, and has pledged a minimum of another $100 million To a Trump super PAC for 2024.
So that's why I'm trying to suggest that it's probably more of the same, more than it is going to be some radical departure.
Otherwise, why is he getting showered with even more Adelson money than he had the first time?
I think if anything, you know, you could foresee something like Trump just allowing Israel to annex the entire West Bank.
And actually on that note, Jake, and I want to wrap up on this and I appreciate your time.
I want to go to a clip of Kamala Harris, actually, from AIPAC, the AIPAC convention in 2017, and get your reaction to it.
So let's play that clip, please.
So let me be clear about what I believe.
I stand with Israel because of our shared values which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations.
I believe the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable.
And we can never let anyone drive a wedge between us.
Our bonds are rooted in our shared history and are strengthened by the ties between our peoples.
And in the words of Shimon Peres, whose loss we mourn so deeply, for Israel's existence, we need the friendship of the United States of America.
Of course, he knew that feeling goes both ways.
And there's no question, that friendship and our partnership must be unwavering.
Okay, so Jake, there's Kamala Harris in March of 2017, shortly after she was first elected senator and probably was already planning to run for president.
And so one of the customary things that you do when you're an ambitious politician in that role is to go to the AIPAC conference and recite all the standard lines and bask in the applause for proclaiming how unshakeable the U.S.-Israel relationship is.
why I bring that up is in part because one of the issues that obviously you raised in your Democratic primary campaign against Biden was the Israel-Gaza issue.
It's something that you cover quite a bit.
You obviously have strong feelings on, I am just aghast that Kamala Harris is now going to be coronated Democratic nominee without ever once having to undergo a serious challenge on what her stance is on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Gaza war, maybe another war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in the next few weeks.
She just magically bypassed that entire process.
That's supposed to be one of the main functions of a primary, right?
That you subject the politician to scrutiny, you contrast them and compare them with other candidates.
We're told that she's perceived as having some difference with Joe Biden, but of course, she is a member of the Biden-Harris administration, so therefore incurs all that record vis-a-vis the Gaza War.
And if you believe it's a genocide, right?
Then Kamala Harris is complicit in the perpetration of a genocide.
Swapping out Joe Biden didn't resolve that quandary, did it?
So, it's just amazing.
Are you as amazed as I am that Kamala Harris hasn't had to give one foreign policy pledge on a single issue, whether it be Israel, China, Ukraine, before she just swoops into the nomination and the entire, like the New York Times and MSNBC, they're all cheering with Adulation!
It doesn't even occur to them that maybe that would have been a good idea to get her on the record on at least a couple of issues, especially foreign policy and national security, where the president has by far the most unilateral authority.
So, what do you make of that situation?
Yeah, so no, I'm not surprised.
So I explained this in Justice Is Coming that so we live under corporate rule and mainstream media is the marketing arm of corporate rule.
So, of course, they're not going to ask the simplest, most basic questions.
So, Michael, you're bringing up her policy on Israel.
I'm going to come back to that in a second.
What policies has she explained?
She hasn't explained any of her policies.
So, for example, in 2020, for a while, she was pretending to be for Medicare for All.
Then she switched it to Medicare for Some.
So, is she for Medicare for Some now?
Whatever the hell that means?
Medicare for None?
Medicare for All?
What's her policy?
No one even bothers to ask.
So I could list you a dozen domestic policies and foreign policies that mainstream media hasn't even thought to ask of her, because they're like, oh, she's a corporate Democrat.
Great.
Wonderful.
Woohoo!
Right?
And that's why they didn't mind if it was Biden or Kamala Harris, because they're like, who cares?
They're not in charge anyway.
Corporate rules in charge.
Status Quo's in charge.
The donors are in charge.
And now, of course, they're never going to explain that to their audience or their viewers or their readers, but that's the reality.
So that's why they're not even bothering.
Look, I tried to make this system, in my own small way, as fair as we possibly could be and should have been.
So that's why I ran against Biden.
That's why I asked for an open convention, demanded an open convention.
But by the way, For all these people who think it's such a great idea to not test your candidates, you are empirically incorrect.
In 2016, the Republicans had the most vicious primary I've ever seen, and they won!
In 2020, the Democrats had a primary with 27 people that was super active and contentious, and they won!
Jake, on that note, very quickly, as a point of information, Remember when Howard Dean was the chair of the Democratic National Committee after the 2008 election?
And the 2008 primary, the Democratic primary, between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was extremely prolonged.
And I spoke, I wasn't a journalist at this point, I was just hosting Howard Dean to come speak at my college event, but he told me privately that
He attributes the reason why Obama went on to win Indiana and North Carolina in the general election in 2008, which were staunchly Republican states, especially Indiana, that one was a shocker, was because that extended primary process forced Democrats to do lots of organizing in states that they otherwise wouldn't devote organizational resources to.
So, that just further bolsters your point about it being the opposite of empirically proven that even a bitter primary redounds to the disadvantage of the eventual nominee.
So, on the primaries, look, when you have a contested primary, you get literally billions of dollars in free media.
Throwing that away is political malpractice.
And they say, oh, that's okay, we're going to throw that away because Democratic leadership is so wise that they're going to anoint a leader and that leader is always going to win, so all you have to do as Democratic voters is obey authority figures.
Which was the whole, like, it's exact opposite of what the Democratic Party was supposed to do, right?
And those rocket scientists said that Hillary was a guaranteed win in 2016, and that Joe Biden was a guaranteed win in 2024.
So, if you believe those guys, you're a schmuck.
So, no, you should have contested primaries and pick the strongest candidate.
That's super obvious unless you're brainwashed by mainstream media and the DNC.
Now, to Kamala Harris' position on Israel, it is identical to every politician in America.
They all have the same exact position, which is Israel will get whatever they want.
We've given them $300 billion because they're our special ally over the years.
All right, if they're such a special ally, when are they going to give us the $300 billion back?
Oh, I see, this special friendship only goes in one direction, where we start wars for you, we give you hundreds of billions of dollars, we let you commit every war crime in the world, we protect you in the UN, but is Kamala Harris different than any other Republican or Democrat?
No, they all kiss Israel's ass and they do it because AIPAC funds their elections.
Mystery solved.
Yeah, so Jake, let's conclude with this.
I know a couple of months ago, correct me if I'm wrong, but you went on some kind of hiking excursion out there in L.A.
with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Is he a viable alternative at this point to you, or are you all on board with whatever the Democratic Party barfs out as an alternative to Trump?
I mean, it seems like this is a climate that really should have been As ripe as ever for a third party, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
has gotten some traction.
He has identified a certain void in the electorate for what at least certain elements want, who are disillusioned from the two-party system.
So I guess this is a concluding thought.
Why isn't it that he seems to be rising up as a truly viable alternative, at least to the point where you would be more willing to entertain him as somebody to advocate for and to vote for?
Why just revert back to the default of whoever the Democrats deign to beset us with?
Yeah, so there's a difference on whether I think he's got a shot and whether I think that, you know, he should be considered.
He doesn't have a shot because the mainstream media totally assassinated him, right?
Character assassination, every slight thing in his life.
Maybe not the greatest part of the news with respect to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but I take your point.
You meant metaphorically.
Yeah, of course.
And that's why I said character assassination.
And so look, for example, that is the brain worm.
Like he shouldn't have said that even in a divorce deposition many years ago, because of course it could be used against you.
But it turns out millions upon millions of people have the same condition.
Now, did you get that from mainstream media?
No, you didn't get it.
All you got was, ha-ha, crazy guy, brainwashed, ha-ha, not backed by the establishment, right?
So I'm not in that camp.
So we had Bobby Kennedy Jr.
on the show, on The Young Turks.
We gave him a super fair hearing.
If you watch that interview, I think everyone across the political spectrum will think that was fair.
And so what's my issue?
Well, there's a couple of positions he has that I think are actually really great and that nobody talks about.
And there's a couple of positions he has that I Are potential deal breakers.
So look, I believe in vaccines.
I don't know when it became a populist thing to hate science, but I don't hate science.
I don't think that Bob on Facebook knows better than 99% of the doctors in the world.
So that's tough for me.
And I know that his position is a little bit more complicated.
Actually, Trump's position on vaccines is arguably worse.
And then the second problem is Gaza.
And I know, yeah, all the politicians are the same.
I just said it.
But he's just so bad on Israel that they're just the most beautiful moral army in the world and preposterous statements like that.
Especially if you're going to position yourself as opposing the military-industrial complex and you're fighting all these establishment interests.
And yet you're among the most vehement political figures in the entire country in championing Israel in its ongoing offensive.
I mean, that's almost an irreconcilable contradiction.
Yeah, there's a potential explanation.
But anyway, if he meant it on the military-industrial complex, he says he'd cut the Pentagon's budget in half.
Yeah, the half that they can't ever seem to find when they can't pass an audit.
Now, that's an unrealistic one.
I would love it, but it's never going to happen.
But at least if he went in that direction, I would like that.
His stance on money in politics is fantastic.
He's for a convention An Article 5 convention to get around Washington and propose a constitutional amendment by the American people.
I love that.
That's as populous as it gets.
It's exactly what a group I founded called Wolfpack is trying to do.
It's nonpartisan.
And then finally, his best policy, I mean, money in politics is the most important issue, so that's his best policy.
But one that's not being talked about at all, and that's fantastic, is his housing policy.
He says he would prevent private equity from buying residential homes.
Now, that is doable.
They weren't buying residential homes just a couple of years ago.
They're the ones that have driven up the housing market prices so that it's unaffordable for the average American.
And they're the ones choking off wealth creation in this country because we mainly create wealth through purchasing homes.
And now the bankers are going to buy all those homes and drive us out of the market.
If he prevented that, that alone might be worth it.
So I've got an open mind and I'm not a robot for mainstream media, so I look at his upsides and his downsides as I do with Trump and Kamala Harris, and at the end I'll make a decision on who I think is the best.
But right now, his deal-breakers are hugely problematic for me, so very likely I'll vote for the Democrat.
All right, well, Cenk Uygur, we really appreciate you joining us.
Like I said at the outset, I did in a previous life even work for the Young Turks briefly, and I appreciated it largely because you follow through on your pledge to me.
And gave me the autonomy to do what I wanted to do, notwithstanding any disagreements that you and I might have, or I might have had with other people who were on the staff.
And so I respect that you follow through on that promise, and I do think that it's an honorable thing, especially for somebody who runs a big media organization, who could micromanage things, who could impose his will on others.
You were tolerant of disagreements.
That's a laudable trait.
Thank you, Michael.
than I even try to embody in my own dealings.
I'm not running a media organization, I'm just filling in Brooklyn Green World right now.
But at least in spirit, it's something that I've definitely tried to replicate.
So thank you for that, and we'll talk again soon. - Thank you, Michael, I appreciate it. - All right, that's Cenk Uygur.
All right, that's Cenk Uygur, as I've said several times now.
I hope you enjoyed my second full edition of hosting System Update.
We bear with any snafus that come our way.
We're a resilient squad here at the System Update team, and we're trying to give you the best content that's reasonably within our power to provide.
And I would like to think that I did that for all you beautiful, gorgeous, Wonderful people out there who are just drooling by watching me on TV or your computer or wherever you might get your programming all this time because you're just so enthralled with the wisdom and insight that I'm bringing to you full throttle.
So thanks for watching and we'll be back tomorrow with more system updates.
