June 24, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:16:20
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Abby. | |
| Hello, Joe. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Nothing much. | ||
| I saw you chilling with Oliver Stone the other day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What was that like? | ||
| It was pretty cool. | ||
| He's an interesting guy. | ||
| Very interesting guy, yeah. | ||
| He likes to support radical politics, so he came out for the screening of the new film that we did. | ||
| Yeah, he's a very unusual character in that regard, right? | ||
| Because he's like this blockbuster movie maker guy, but he's also a pretty radical guy in the way in his politics and when he supports and... | ||
| Yeah, he was kind of like the black sheep of Hollywood for a while, you know, doing all the radical outlier of Hollywood, basically. | ||
| Yeah, but you saw the JFK movie, right? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| That was a weird one, right? | ||
| It's like, I kind of like it, but I'm kind of like, hey man, that fucking general wasn't even a real person. | ||
| Like, you made up a real person. | ||
| Like, you put him in there. | ||
| Like, that guy didn't exist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| A lot of the movies are really good. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Very, very good. | ||
| But I get it. | ||
| He kind of needed to move it along for a 90-minute or two-hour movie, whatever it was. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| He kind of needed this little character to be dishing out the inside scoop, the Donald Sutherland character. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But in real life, there was no guy. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Goddammit, Oliver. | ||
| If you knew, would you... | ||
| Tricked again. | ||
| Would you be like, hey, motherfucker, what'd you do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why'd you add that guy? | |
| Because it's weird, because people talk about that. | ||
| They say, hey, you know, in the Oliver Stone movie, they detailed all these things that happened, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but they also added a guy that wasn't a real guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I guess at the end of the day, it's a fictional film. | ||
| But how is it, if it's a real president who was shot by someone, and you're trying to explain who in your movie, and you have all these real characters, but then you got this one guy you just kind of shoved in there. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah, the professor. | ||
| What did he call himself in the movie again? | ||
| The Donald Sutherland character? | ||
| I do not remember. | ||
| I haven't seen it in years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because if I remember correctly, it was him kind of just filling in the gaps and kind of tying the narrative together. | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They used him as a tool to kind of move the movie together. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| There's no other way to do that. | ||
| Make up a dude. | ||
| Brilliant-ass movie, though, right? | ||
| Very good movie. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What do you think happened? | ||
| The Oliver Stone story. | ||
| What do you think happened? | ||
| Right off the bat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not? | |
| Fuck it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think that... | ||
| But if you had a guess, if I gave you a hundred bucks, you said, all right, Abby, bet on red or bet on black. | ||
| Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? | ||
| Or do you think that there was some sort of conspiracy involving various nefarious groups? | ||
| I think Oliver Stone's movie is closer to the truth than obviously what the official narrative is. | ||
| I think that if you look at all those high-profile assassinations in that era, I think a lot of them are highly questionable. | ||
| It doesn't just stop with JFK. We're talking about RFK. I don't believe that story at all. | ||
| Martin Luther King. | ||
| You know, I mean, all of these people, there's really, really sketchy things about all of them. | ||
| And if we were conducting, the CIA was conducting basically an assassination program around the world to expedite U.S. foreign policy and imperialism, why would we not have been doing that here at home? | ||
| You know, I mean, we know that Fred Hampton was killed outright, the leader of the Black Panther Party. | ||
| So all of these things are kind of make more sense when you look back at history and see how kind of out of control the CIA was at that time. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it only makes sense that they would want to get rid of certain characters that were causing trouble. | ||
| You know, I had Mike Baker on, who used to work, he was a CIA operative, and he looked into the JFK, or excuse me, the Martin Luther King assassination, and he said that one, more than any other one that he looked into, seemed like something was really, because James Earl Ray was like a loser, just like this shifty guy. | ||
| And then before the assassination, all of a sudden, he had money. | ||
| All of a sudden, it looked like he was being steered. | ||
| And he went into great detail about it. | ||
| I don't remember all the details, but he was shaking his head about it. | ||
| He's like, that one, out of any one that I looked into, had the fingerprints of manipulation on it. | ||
| Well, you know about his family, obviously, Martin Luther King's family that had that civil trial and basically concluded that the US government had to have been involved for the circumstances to have happened the way they did. | ||
| And if you look at how Martin Luther King at the time was considered the most dangerous, quote unquote, Negro in the country, that's what the government was saying about him. | ||
| I mean, he was hated, he was loathed. | ||
| He was trying to basically implement like a poor people's campaign to occupy D.C. to give poor people economic rights. | ||
| That was really, really threatening, I think, to the establishment at that time. | ||
| Also, you know, it's hard for us when we're thinking back about that era. | ||
| I mean, we weren't really – I mean, I was born in 67. You were born after that. | ||
| We don't understand that era. | ||
| That's a hundred years after slavery. | ||
| Just a hundred. | ||
| A person's lifetime. | ||
| A person's lifetime, yeah. | ||
| Kind of crazy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And things still hadn't been resolved. | ||
| And then when you look at it now, I mean, Juneteenth, they had the congressional hearings and they're talking about reparations. | ||
| And you see just the different polarized sides of how people look at it even today. | ||
| Whether or not reparations should be given or whether or not there should be any Any sort of effort to rectify the obvious, if you look at the economic strife that's in these southern cities that are primarily African American, that are really from slavery. | ||
| I mean, this is literally the remnants of slavery and it's never been fixed. | ||
| It's almost like any other problem that would be in our infrastructure, any other problem that would be in anything with, you know, Pollution or anything else that people clearly did, where someone did and fucked it up, there's efforts made to fix it, and there's discussions about it, but this is so much resistance. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think his name is, he was testifying there. | ||
| And he was saying that, you know, the argument is we had nothing to do with this because, again, it was more than a person to go. | ||
| Why should we have anything to do with what slavery did? | ||
| And it's beyond that, though, as you're mentioning. | ||
| I mean, this is an institutionalized racism that we still see the effects of very starkly within the prison community, within, I mean, all these things. | ||
| And he said, we were still paying out civil war soldiers' families' pensions decades after that. | ||
| So why do that but not actually try to provide some economic justice to the black community? | ||
| It's a weird conversation because it's not just a conversation about whether or not something wrong was done, but it's also a racial conversation. | ||
| I've seen some weird posts like, you know Chuck Woolery, the guy who's from the Love Connection? | ||
| We'll be right back in 2 and 2. Remember that guy? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That guy has turned into this serious, hardcore, right-wing pundit. | ||
| And I think it was him that was tweeting about reparations for Union soldiers for their families that died fighting in the Civil War. | ||
| It was like, how about these people? | ||
| And then not saying, how about the fucking people who's brought over here from Africa in chains and their great-grandchildren are alive today in the same communities? | ||
| Well, it was the basis of our capitalist society. | ||
| I mean, that's why we're the richest country in the world, because it was predicated on the enslavement of Africans. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if you can fix it by giving people money today, but I do think the money should be spent to try to fix those communities, and I think that can be engineered and done. | ||
| And I don't hear anybody talking about it, other than Tulsi Gabbard talks about it, and I think Bernie Sanders has made some indications that something should be done, although I don't know if anybody has a real definitive plan. | ||
| But when you talk to people that have, like, Michael Wood, who was a Baltimore police officer, I've told this story before, but it's a crazy story. | ||
| When he was a cop in Baltimore, they found these papers that showed that the exact, it was papers from the 1970s, the exact same crimes... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Imagine that feeling. | ||
| Like here you are, you're a police officer, right? | ||
| You're putting your life on the line, literally. | ||
| And you're out there dealing with the same problems that existed in the same exact areas. | ||
| And no one's ever done anything to fix it. | ||
| We don't ever get to the root. | ||
| Just arresting people. | ||
| Yeah, we don't get to the root. | ||
| I mean, Tulsi and Bernie are the only candidates worth giving a shit about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What about Buttigiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegiegieg How many candidates are there now? | |
| I feel like two other ones just jumped in the race. | ||
| Who else? | ||
| I don't fucking know their names. | ||
| Do you know anyone beyond Buttigieg? | ||
| Beto O'Rourke. | ||
| Yeah, Beto. | ||
| Beto's on the way out, though. | ||
| He's too close to Beta. | ||
| It's too close. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He does look like he would be called that. | |
| But his dad actually just openly said in an interview, he's like, yeah, I called him Beto because I wanted him to get the Mexican vote because I knew he would eventually run for office. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| His real name is like Robert. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| That sounds like a soldier. | ||
| I mean, these people are like a hundred shades of Hillary. | ||
| I mean, every single one of them other than Tulsi and Bernie just seem like they're just like Hillary Clinton, light or dark. | ||
| Well, they've also done this weird thing where they're like, no straight white men. | ||
| Like, okay. | ||
| There's like straight white men. | ||
| We're not voting for straight white men. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That's just as bad as saying you're never voting for a woman. | ||
| That's just as bad as saying you're never voting for a black person. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| There's been a lot of straight white men that have been president. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| But to say no straight white, to disqualify someone based on something they have no control over whatsoever is a form of discrimination. | ||
| I know you don't think it's a form of discrimination because so many of these people have already had that job. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| It seems unfair. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| But you can't say that, because that's a shitty way of thinking. | ||
| It's piss-poor logic and thinking. | ||
| It's discriminatory. | ||
| It's identity politics. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It reigns supreme. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so dumb. | |
| And I saw there was, like, combating supporters from Kamala Harris and Bernie at some rally or something, and they just kept shouting, we need a woman president! | ||
| It's like, that's the only reason why you like Kamala Harris, you know? | ||
| Kamala Harris... | ||
| I saw this one speech that she was giving where she was talking about forcing children to attend school by holding their parents accountable where she instituted a policy where if the kids miss school the parents could be arrested. | ||
| Do you know about that? | ||
| No. | ||
| It was super disturbing. | ||
| It was super disturbing. | ||
| And she was talking about how effective it was. | ||
| And that, you know, they had cops show up at the door of the woman's house who was a single mom who had these children and the kids weren't going to school. | ||
| Like, hey, no. | ||
| She was a cop. | ||
| I mean, she's a top cop. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But that authoritative, authoritarian nonsense, like that way of thinking, you know why you do that? | ||
| Because no one's ever done that to you. | ||
| Somebody ever knocked on your fucking door and said, hey, we're going to lock you up in jail because you're a 16-year-old boy when you have three kids. | ||
| Listen, if you're a single mom, anyone who's a single mom who has a boy knows, and that fucking boy hits puberty. | ||
| If they run with the wrong crowd, good fucking luck trying to control them. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| It's real hard. | ||
| And if she's got a job or two jobs, maybe, because she's trying to put food on the table and keep the fucking lights on, and you're going to arrest her because her kid doesn't show up at school? | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Can you imagine looking at all the problems in our country and being like, you know what? | ||
| We need to arrest parents if their kids are truant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Make sure I'm right about that. | ||
| I'm 99% sure I'm correct about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're talking about her regret about this policy in 2013. Maybe because she's running for fucking president. | |
| You should regret something like that. | ||
| You want to hear another insane policy? | ||
| Going back to Robert O'Rourke. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| The human cost of Kamala Harris' war on truancy. | ||
| The progressive prosecutor wanted to transform how California responded to students missing school. | ||
| Parents like, I don't know how to say her name, Cherie Peoples wound up paying the price. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So this lady probably wound up going to fucking jail. | |
| Yeah, and there was a good reason. | ||
| Her kid was sick or something, and she... | ||
| So Beto, no, let's not call him Beto anymore. | ||
| His name's Robert. | ||
| Robert, yeah. | ||
| Robert actually has a really great idea, Joe. | ||
| He wants to tax non-military families to pay for veterans' health care. | ||
| What? | ||
| And to pay for veterans. | ||
| Yeah, isn't that nice? | ||
| So punish the people who don't want to join the military. | ||
| What? | ||
| Very smart. | ||
| Robert, 2020. How about punish the fucking people who make the weapons, who influence the politicians? | ||
| Let's tax the defense contractors. | ||
| Find out what the military-industrial complex is really made of. | ||
| Find out how much money they're really making and saying, hey, look at you guys. | ||
| You made X amount of billions of dollars. | ||
| And look at all these guys that we have to fund. | ||
| We have to rely on charities and we have to rely on things like the Wounded Warrior Project and all these foundations that are taking care of these veterans when you're the ones who are profiting. | ||
| I mean, that's where the money should come from. | ||
| It's not like they're poor. | ||
| These are fucking insanely rich organizations. | ||
| Yeah, their stocks have tripled in the last four years. | ||
| They're doing real well. | ||
| When we had that situation where Dick Cheney, who was the CEO of Halliburton, was giving Halliburton no-bid contracts to go over and fix places that we bombed, it's like, what? | ||
| That is like a doctor breaking people's legs so he can fix them. | ||
| It's It's so crazy! | ||
| And then driving around in a Porsche. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| Yeah, well, Trump was sitting down at some table with all the head defense contractors a couple months ago, and it was after the Khashoggi dismemberment in the embassy. | ||
| And he was openly talking about how we cannot stop that $110 billion weapons deal. | ||
| And you should see just the glee on these people's faces. | ||
| I mean, it's just unbelievable how transparent it is, especially under Trump. | ||
| That was a weird conversation. | ||
| Who was he being interviewed by? | ||
| Oh, Steve Hilton, my friend. | ||
| I know Steve Hilton. | ||
| I've known that guy forever. | ||
| We're actually family friends. | ||
| Our families have gone on vacations together and shit. | ||
| It's a good guy. | ||
| Is that the Fox News guy? | ||
| Is that the Hilton heir? | ||
| No, it's... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Where the fuck is his name? | ||
| Paris Hilton's dad? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| No, he's British. | ||
| But... | ||
| He was interviewing Trump, and they were talking about... | ||
| And Trump was openly discussing how these people want to go to war. | ||
| The military-industrial complex wants to go to war. | ||
| I mean, Trump's saying that he didn't want to have anything to do with this, but that they want to go to war. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| Trump is a weird guy, because he's such a loose cannon, that he says shit like that, that Obama would keep in his cards. | ||
| Obama would hide his cards. | ||
| But Trump, hate him or love him, He gives you glimpses that you're not going to get as far as what kind of influence does the military-industrial complex really have on policy change and decision-making and whether or not they take action. | ||
| And he was openly discussing it. | ||
| He removes the mask. | ||
| It's interesting because I think that he's talking out of both sides of his mouth because on one hand he says that kind of stuff. | ||
| But then on the other hand, he hired all the most... | ||
| I think we're good to go. | ||
| All of these efforts. | ||
| I mean, it's like starting a fire and then getting applauded and congratulated when you stop the fire at the last minute before it erupts and takes over the whole planet. | ||
| And that's what would happen if we actually did bomb Iran. | ||
| I think that people don't understand how precarious the situation is that Trump and these cronies have laid out. | ||
| Not just is, but came so close to being a reality just a week ago. | ||
| You mean you don't think we should go to war for bombing oil tankers and Saudi oil tankers? | ||
| You don't think we should go to war over that? | ||
| For shooting down a robot? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They shot our robot. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I would die for Saudi oil tankers. | ||
| I'd be the first one to put my body on the line. | ||
| There was a lot of people that were saying this seems like the Gulf of Tonkin too. | ||
| They were like, I'm not buying this at all. | ||
| There were so many people that were like really kind of credible people who were openly saying this stinks. | ||
| Like it just seems staged. | ||
| It seems like some big, like why would they do that? | ||
| It's total false flag shit going on over and over and over again. | ||
| They're just trying so hard because they want to provoke Iran to the point where Iran will be forced to respond. | ||
| And this is after suffocating, asphyxiating sanctions that are costing people's lives. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| For the folks at home that haven't been paying attention to this, what is it that makes them want to go to war with Iran? | ||
| So, we have to just look at what Iran is. | ||
| I mean, Iran just won its independence less than 100 years ago in a wave of anti-colonial struggles, and we immediately, the MI6 as well as the CIA, instigated a coup. | ||
| So we always talk about how we want Iran to have democracy. | ||
| They had democracy. | ||
| They had a revolution, a people's revolution that was overthrown. | ||
| We overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh and instated an absolute monarchy. | ||
| For decades and at the time it had the highest human rights abuses documented in the world. | ||
| It was pretty unique in that sense and you know you can only imagine why Iran is the way it is today and there was such a suppression of the left and of the Communist Party in Iran that the Islamic Revolutionary Revolution happened and the Ayatollah was the leader of that political movement and that's why Iran has the political system it has today. | ||
| But it's about the oil, man. | ||
| It's always about the oil and it's always about the foreign domination of the region. | ||
| They hate that Iran is an independent country and doesn't bow down to U.S. imperialism and U.S. capitalism. | ||
| And Iran also is allies with a lot of states that Israel and the U.S. and Saudi Arabia do not want it to be allies with, you know, Hezbollah, Hamas. | ||
| And so that's a big problem for the U.S. | ||
| And it's getting in the way of a lot of kind of goals in the region. | ||
| But it's really fascinating when you look at what actually happened because, you know, the nuclear deal was amazing. | ||
| It was huge. | ||
| I mean, Trump keeps belaboring the fact that Iran should not have nuclear weapons. | ||
| They didn't have nuclear weapons. | ||
| They never did. | ||
| And they were agreeing to never have them. | ||
| That was the whole Iran nuclear deal. | ||
| But Trump just immediately rescinded that, slapped insane sanctions on Iran. | ||
| And now, you know, sanctions every month just continuing to constrict their economy and even basically sanctions on threatening sanctions on China and India and other countries that actually do deals with Iran now too, which is totally insane. | ||
| So once you do that, And then you say, you know, you're hitting yourself. | ||
| You're hitting yourself. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| It's like, no, you're doing this to them. | ||
| And on top of that, John Bolton keeps saying, you know, there's all these unique threats coming from Iran. | ||
| We need to surround them with all these warships. | ||
| And they keep sending thousands of more troops, thousands more troops. | ||
| So you're getting to a position now, and now the drone, right? | ||
| We're flying a drone into Iranian airspace and expecting that they're not going to shoot that down. | ||
| Why the fuck are we flying a drone in Iran? | ||
| What the fuck would we do if Iran flew a drone in here? | ||
| I mean, it's just unbelievable the chauvinism and arrogance of the US to be doing all this shit and then be like, okay, now you guys are a belligerent threat. | ||
| We have to do something. | ||
| It's like, no, you guys are the ones encircling them. | ||
| Enclosing all of their, you know, basically just encapsulating their entire territory and threatening them over and over and over again, basically hoping for something to happen. | ||
| And if you look back at the Gulf of Tonkin, there was a guy who was actually on the USS Maddox, the ship that was eventually attacked and got us into the war with Vietnam. | ||
| And he even said, my dad was on the ship and he said, we had no idea why we were there. | ||
| And one of the generals or captains on the ship just said, they want us to be hit. | ||
| They want us to be attacked so they can get into a war that they want to get into. | ||
| And that's exactly what's going on. | ||
| And what's sad is whoever's in the Navy circling Iran, they're going to be the ones who fucking die when Iran does launch back. | ||
| They're sacrificing themselves for these generals and defense contractors' profits. | ||
| Now, there's some reason to believe that Iran is not being honest about its nuclear program, right? | ||
| I mean, that was one of the reasons why it wasn't that... | ||
| What was the virus that the United States... | ||
| Stuxnet? | ||
| Yeah, Stuxnet virus that they put on the Iranian nuclear program to kill it while they were in the middle of doing whatever they do to uranium. | ||
| Right, the centrifuges for the enriching uranium. | ||
| I mean, yeah, that was also crazy. | ||
| Cyber attacks. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the cyber attacks, weren't they effective though in stopping the nuclear program? | ||
| There was like a secret nuclear program that they were doing? | ||
| I don't know what exactly they – I don't think that there ever was a nuclear program, but I know that that was another crazy thing that the U.S. did was basically infect their thing and destroy all of this technology. | ||
| But I mean, basically, all we need to know is that they agreed to not develop nukes and it was all agreed from the international community. | ||
| And then Trump gets in there and just unravels it all. | ||
| And it's so dangerous because Iran would make Iraq look like child's play. | ||
| Yeah, it's not a joke. | ||
| And I mean, it's literally so precarious at this point that anything can happen and erupt into a full blown war. | ||
| And then when Trump says, oh, I pulled back the airstrike because I wanted to save 150 lives. | ||
| No, dude, you're starting fires all over the world. | ||
| And then you get applauded and you want to congratulate yourself because somehow he's still kind of appealing to this like non interventionist line, which is just fake to me. | ||
| Because you don't appoint the most rabid war hungry people to surround you and to carry out these policies if you don't want that to a certain extent. | ||
| Well, it also created this really weird ideological rift where people were complaining that he didn't do anything. | ||
| And people were upset that he was going to take action and he didn't. | ||
| About the drone? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| About the drone and about the attacking of the oil tankers and that he was ready to launch and then he didn't. | ||
| And wasn't one of the Fox guys that was talking about the consequences of taking no actions? | ||
| Was it Brian Kilmeade or one of those guys? | ||
| The media is insane. | ||
| The media has been attacking him. | ||
| And the Democrats, too. | ||
| The media and the Democrats always attack this administration from the right whenever there's some sort of military involvement. | ||
| They always want him to bomb and go to war. | ||
| It's pretty shocking. | ||
| I mean, I guess not too shocking when you realize the corporate media is literally subsidized by oil companies and banks and defense contractors. | ||
| But it's pretty crazy. | ||
| You didn't have to deal with that at RT, but what do you think happens when someone is a pundit and they're on a television show and they're talking about something that has these global implications? | ||
| Do you think they get talking points? | ||
| Do you think they're allowed to express their own personal opinions or are they informed that they're supposed to toe a certain line? | ||
| I think there's varying levels. | ||
| I think that it would be naive to say, okay, these people are paid to lie. | ||
| I think that the vast majority of people working in corporate media are lackeys for the empire. | ||
| They really truly believe that, you know, they believe that America is the greatest country in the world. | ||
| They believe that we're the world's policemen. | ||
| They actually believe that these countries are evil and they need to be taken out to instate kind of global hegemony. | ||
| I truly believe that they cater to the line of American exceptionalism. | ||
| And that's pretty sad, but also pretty dangerous because they're the perfect mouthpieces for U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| I mean, they essentially are stenographers for whatever the government is laying out, which is really disturbing because the premise of journalism is to actually challenge power and challenge the U.S. government, especially when you are working in America. | ||
| You're an American citizen and there's all this destruction going on from on behalf of your government and you're not challenging that, especially when it's war claims, especially when you have assholes like John Bolton claiming, you know, all these things are happening in these channels and bodies of water and people are just like, OK, I mean, go. | ||
| goddamn, you should see when fucking Mike Pompeo was talking about how Hezbollah was in Venezuela. | ||
| And these people just printed it. | ||
| They're like, well, Hezbollah's in Venezuela now. | ||
| It's like, what are you talking about? | ||
| You're literally just printing what the Trump administration's saying without even questioning these claims. | ||
| It's disturbing. | ||
| Do you think that the people that are talking about it on TV are just saying it because... | ||
| They really don't understand what they're talking about, and this just seems to be a way to cover the subject in sort of a way that is acceptable to the network and acceptable to the party and acceptable to this sort of ideology, whether it's left or right, whatever ideology they're participating in. | ||
| Yes, there is definitely that as well, where they know kind of the line that they can't cross. | ||
| So even if you individually believe, you know, you think that climate change is an existential threat, you think that the war in Yemen is a serious thing that you should address, I think that you definitely get kind of knocked down in the editorial meeting before, and you're just like, okay, no, I can't do that. | ||
| But what I can do is just, you know, talk about whatever... | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| The advertisers will agree with. | ||
| In this day and age, there's not a really respected, independent source of news. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You've got the online stuff, which is... | ||
| Some online stuff is very good, but some online stuff is so entangled with insults and bullshit and emotions and distorted perceptions and ego that it sort of discredits whatever they're trying to promote, whatever ideas they're trying to get across. | ||
| There's no Walter Cronkite. | ||
| There's no... | ||
| There's no one person or no one organization who you emphatically trust with their perspective on the news. | ||
| Everything is either left or right. | ||
| Everything is flavored by an ideology. | ||
| I don't have a place that I go to that I know I can get clear, unbiased... | ||
| Emotion-free, objective analysis of any international issue. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It doesn't exist. | ||
| I mean, unless you can tell me of one. | ||
| What do you go to? | ||
| I mean, I go to Real News. | ||
| I go to Democracy Now! | ||
| And the only reason... | ||
|
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But Democracy Now! | |
| is super left-wing, right? | ||
| Left-wing leaning, but you think they're... | ||
| Left-leaning. | ||
| I mean, I go to places that are not... | ||
| This is the problem with capitalism and trying to have an independent media is that you need funding. | ||
| And you need funding from donors and grassroots sources because once you get funded by these right-wing billionaires and corporations and states and governments, then it becomes very ideologically driven. | ||
| And then you're kind of just catering toward what those interests want you to present. | ||
| And that's why The Empire Files does what it does. | ||
| We're basically based on donations now because Trump's sanctions on Venezuela shut down the show. | ||
| Right. | ||
| A year ago. | ||
| So we did a big donation drive. | ||
| Are you guys on Patreon? | ||
| Patreon. | ||
| We're on GoFundMe and just PayPal. | ||
| But we're just trying to survive on a very minimal budget because I don't want to lobby to corporations or states or go that route because I don't want to... | ||
| I don't want to answer to anyone other than myself. | ||
| But then you just come with a whole host of problems. | ||
| You're not getting your message out there. | ||
| I mean, that's why it's incredible for you to have me on. | ||
| But that's why the fake news mantra resonated so much with the Trump campaign, because people are extremely disillusioned with the corporate media. | ||
| You know, New York Times, Washington Post, these so-called Beltway publications that pretend to be like the arbitrators of our objective reality. | ||
| They are the premier advocates of fake news when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, you know, American exceptionalism and corporations and like the corporate lines. | ||
| They're always the ones towing the things that basically prop up the system. | ||
| And so I think people, you know, became really, really just attracted to that whole fake news mantra that Trump was saying because people have an extreme distrust in the corporate media because of the Iraq war, because of all these things that have happened. | ||
| But as you know, and as you've talked about extensively, Joe, this wave of censorship that has happened in the last two years since Trump got elected because of Russian propaganda and fake news hysteria. | ||
| And it's just propped up these same institutions, and it's really just gone after a lot of alternative and independent media that have gone by the wayside. | ||
| And, you know, people who have been propped up by right-wing billionaires and billionaires in general are not going to be affected at the end of the day, but all of the people who have been caught up in this censorship with the algorithms, with the deplatforming... | ||
| It's really scary. | ||
| It's really, really scary what's happened. | ||
| It is scary to me because the internet in my eyes is this unique place where people can get information and distribute information. | ||
| And then on top of that you have this... | ||
| Almost parasitic entity that is allowing you to distribute information and gather information through it, but also controlling the flow of information. | ||
| and then controlling the flow in its own ideological bend, like to sort of... | ||
| I think we're good to go. | ||
| We'll call people alt-right and just change our algorithms to make it much more difficult for them to propagate their ideas. | ||
| I just find that really distressing because I think that in the marketplace of ideas, You're supposed to be able to combat a bad idea with a better idea. | ||
| And this is how ideas evolve. | ||
| This is how people get to communicate. | ||
| You get to look at what someone's saying, look at how someone's dissecting what someone's saying, and then, for yourself, figure out what you believe and what you don't believe. | ||
| And there should be a free exchange of information so that you can figure that out. | ||
| And when someone's shown to be a bad actor or a liar or have deceptive news, fake news, whatever you want to call it, okay, now we know, and this is a clear example of that, so now take it with a grain of salt whenever they say anything about anything else. | ||
| But when you de-platform them and shove them aside, they say, see, they're trying to silence us because they don't believe us or they don't want us to be in power because they're trying to prop up whatever left-wing socialist economy or dictator that they want to put into place. | ||
| And it's this weird sort of situation where you've got people dictating and almost engineering our culture. | ||
| Right, curating our reality. | ||
| You know what's going on in Toronto with Alphabet, the parent company of Google? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a very disturbing thing to a lot of people, where they're essentially setting up blocks, and they're putting cameras in these places, and they're gathering data and information, and they're trying to engineer a utopian city. | ||
| Yeah, I was reading about it yesterday, and I was like, no! | ||
| Like, this is a terrible idea. | ||
| Google is so fucking terrifying. | ||
| What if these people don't want to be filmed? | ||
| What if these people don't want information gathered about them? | ||
| Like, they're doing it under the guise of, here it is, Alphabet's plan for Toronto depends on huge amounts of data. | ||
| Yeah, we need more data collection, data mining. | ||
| Their idea is that they're going to make it easier for people to get around and smoother. | ||
| But how? | ||
| By, like, facial recognition? | ||
| I love how they always say, oh, people are being sex trafficked and this will help. | ||
| It's like, no, dude, this is like.0001% of all the people that you're, you know, data mining. | ||
| It says, Sidewalks Labs released more detailed plans for Toronto, the site of Google's sister company's first attempt to bring its techified digital-forward sensibility to a full-scale development project. | ||
| The Sidewalk Labs project dates to 2017 when the Canadian city welcomed the company to an undeveloped section of its waterfront. | ||
| Now, after 18 months of speculation work... | ||
|
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God damn these motherfuckers. | |
| Spectally, it can work in backlash from local advocates. | ||
| The company has a 1,524-page master plan for the 12-acre lot called Quayside. | ||
| First of all, I hate the fucking name. | ||
|
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What is it, though? | |
| What is Quayside? | ||
| Four-volume plan highlights ambitious and sometimes flashy innovations from Sidewalk Labs, which has pledged to spend $1.3 billion on the project if it goes forward. | ||
| The company hopes to construct all the buildings with timber, which it says is better for the environment. | ||
| also catches fire and build an underground pneumatic pneumatic tube system for garbage removal it wants residents to lean on public transit walking and biking rather than personal vehicles good luck it's fucking zero degrees in toronto you assholes and plans to build streets with autonomous vehicles perhaps from a sister company waymo listen we're really robots would No. | ||
| Delivery robots might trundle down its wide sidewalks. | ||
| The strategic use of very large umbrella-like coverings might make outdoor spaces comfortable all year round. | ||
| No small feet in Lakeshore, Canada. | ||
| Sidewalk wants to designate 20% of the apartments as affordable and another 20% as middle income. | ||
| So they're engineering a city. | ||
| This is by people who are really... | ||
| Just openly social justice warriors. | ||
| I mean, these are the people that censored that James Damore guy and fired him for having this memo that really kind of discussed women in tech based on evolutionary biology, based on studies. | ||
| And they said that he was highlighting harmful gender stereotypes, which is not true. | ||
| It's not accurate. | ||
| If you look at what he actually said and what he actually wrote, he even had a page and a half dedicated in that memo trying to come up with strategic ways to encourage women to get into technology. | ||
| The paper that James Damore wrote has no relation to the way he's been framed and the way people talk about him. | ||
| This is a direct result of Google. | ||
| And Google's social justice warrior sort of ethos, like the way they operate as a company. | ||
| Well, Google pretends to be, you know, don't be evil. | ||
|
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This seems like some algorithmic shit that they- They gave up on don't be evil. | |
| They took that down, by the way. | ||
| Which, why the fuck would you ever take that down? | ||
| They're like, okay, we're evil now. | ||
| But this just seems like they plugged in some shit in an algorithm and they're like, all right, this is our city now, like where they're creating Sims. | ||
| It's control. | ||
| I mean, Google, I agree with David Pacman's kind of depiction on Google. | ||
| I think that they're a giant corporation. | ||
| They have billions offshore in tax havens and they are not liberal. | ||
| They appear to be liberal because that's capitalism. | ||
| You're trying to basically adapt to where society is at and you want to pretend like you are socially conscious. | ||
| But when you look at their actual policies, they're conservative as fuck. | ||
| I mean, they actually fund a lot of crazy like Koch brother, Alec. | ||
| They fund a lot of right wing organizations, the Federalist Society. | ||
| They've given huge grants to. | ||
| So I think that they're kind of playing both sides. | ||
| Deregulation, to lobby for kind of the deregulation of their industry. | ||
| So I think that all of the perception and the mantra of Google and YouTube and, you know, catering to like the social consciousness and, you know, what you're talking about, I think is honestly just to make more money. | ||
| Well, I'm sure they're going to make more money in the process of doing this, but the idea that they're going to engineer a city to me is terrifying. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| I just don't like it. | ||
| You know, there was a great podcast that Sam Harris did with the guy who was explaining what Google has essentially done and what they've done with data. | ||
| The data is essentially a commodity that we didn't know was a commodity. | ||
| And we all gave up our rights to this commodity. | ||
| And this commodity, it turns out, is worth billions and billions of dollars. | ||
| And no one had any idea. | ||
| And they just took it. | ||
| And now they have it. | ||
| And they have it. | ||
| And what are they giving you for this? | ||
| They let you search things? | ||
| Like, what are they giving you for this? | ||
| They let you use their email? | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| They search your email for certain keywords, and all of a sudden, you're looking for a patio chair. | ||
| You know, like, I'm looking to buy a patio chair. | ||
| And all of a sudden, your fucking Google mentions are filled with patio chairs because you sent an email to a friend. | ||
| It's really, really creepy. | ||
| Or just talk about something. | ||
| Yeah, talk about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My guest yesterday, my friend Will Harris, he was talking about trading in his car. | ||
| And he got a fucking text message. | ||
| A text message that said, hey, I hear you're looking to trade in your car. | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| You know, here's a link as to what you could get for it. | ||
| And he goes, I'm not clicking that fucking link. | ||
| Like, a text message with a link showed up on his phone because of something he was talking about. | ||
| He wasn't even talking on the phone. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| That's really, really scary. | ||
| It's fucking insane! | ||
| Yeah, no, that's terrifying. | ||
| What is happening? | ||
|
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How is that happening? | |
| Does anybody know how that happens? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, if you and I were talking right now, and you said, I need a new laptop, and you started getting laptop ads in your Google feed, what is happening? | ||
| Is your phone listening to you say that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Is that legal? | ||
| No, I mean, it combs through everything. | ||
| I mean, that's what's so fucking scary about it. | ||
| And Apple is the best at it in terms of, like, not giving up your data. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why I still use an iPhone and support Apple. | ||
| Apple goes out of their way to not share your data when you use Maps. | ||
| That's why Apple Maps suck. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why it's not good. | ||
| There was a fucking great article that was written about it that called Apple Maps the Bing of navigation tools. | ||
| It's like, you know, Bing, the search engine for... | ||
| Who the fuck uses that? | ||
| I use a Windows laptop. | ||
| I use Bing. | ||
| The fuck out of here with that. | ||
| Because Google's better. | ||
| So you just automatically use it. | ||
| But Google's just constantly collecting data. | ||
| Going back to this whole tech censorship thing, they preemptively changed the algorithm. | ||
| That's what's so scary to me, is that there wasn't even a law. | ||
| Like China, we all know that China censors the internet. | ||
| We've done the same thing here, but people just think that we still have freedom of information, that we can all access all these things. | ||
|
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No. | |
| I mean, Google, YouTube, because YouTube is owned by Google now, but they preemptively changed the algorithms. | ||
| They backpaged all of this progressive media, independent media. | ||
| So it wasn't just... | ||
| About what they're saying. | ||
| It's about, I mean, this was targeted to basically all extreme views. | ||
| Everything that they felt like was too radical. | ||
| I mean, going back to the DNI report, which is where this all started from, this kind of conclusive report that they said these 17 intelligence agencies, you know, here's all the evidence of how Russia colluded and cost the election for Hillary. | ||
| They cited my show on Breaking the Set. | ||
| You did it? | ||
| Yeah, they said I was part of the conspiracy of Russian meddling. | ||
| Did you Russian meddle? | ||
| Abby Martin, are you a Russian medalist? | ||
| I just did what Putin told me to do, man. | ||
| I mean, I'm sorry. | ||
| Someone should take that and use it as a snippet. | ||
| But in the report, it said she fomented radical discontent. | ||
| And when you look at what all this is, sowing discord, all of these, you know, the black box algorithm from Hamilton 68 dashboard, like this U.S. government funded Twitter platform. | ||
| It's fake news. | ||
| And then you have, you know, Facebook working with the Atlantic Council, which is an organization stacked with literal spooks, cops, CIA heads, and defense contractors, UAE, US government. | ||
| That's who's like curating our reality now. | ||
| And it's all about expunging the most radical views on the internet to prop up essentially the system and the establishment. | ||
| And that's why I know it's not a liberal or conservative thing. | ||
| It's literally just extremist thought and radical thought that challenges the status quo. | ||
| Because sowing discord just means disagreement. | ||
| That's what they said this was about. | ||
| These websites sow discord, Joe. | ||
| I mean, I thought that was a fundamental thing about American democracy is that you talk about what we disagree on. | ||
| And when you look at what the report says of what Breaking the Set covered, DMT, I mean, that wasn't in the report. | ||
| You were on there talking about DMT. We talked about aliens. | ||
| We talked about who the fuck we wanted. | ||
| But because I talked about things like inequality and Occupy Wall Street and Hillary Clinton, that was all part of this grand conspiracy to sow discord on behalf of the Russian government. | ||
| So it becomes very comical once you kind of poke at the underlying narrative driving Are you aware of Renee DiResta's work? | ||
| Did you ever pay attention to it? | ||
|
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No. | |
| She was on my podcast and she detailed what the IRA did, the Internet Research Agency did in Russia. | ||
| And it was really fascinating. | ||
| They set up like a fake Black Lives Matter account and then they would talk about how as black Americans we can't vote for Hillary Clinton because of this. | ||
| And they started, they developed these communities, these really large online pages, whether it was on Facebook or Instagram or whatever it was, where they spoke as like a southern separatist or as a Muslim. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they had dozens of them. | ||
| And they developed these communities, and they developed these communities, and they would set up these organizations, and then they would have events where they had one where they had a Texas secession event directly across the street from a Muslim pride event, and they did it on purpose so that they would fight. | ||
| They put them across the street from each other. | ||
| They organize these Facebook pages and these events. | ||
| And then these people show up. | ||
| These people that are Texas and say, we should leave the union. | ||
| You know, we can. | ||
| Texas is a republic. | ||
| And then they have these other people online. | ||
| They want, like, Muslim rights and they want the Sharia law. | ||
| And they put them right next to each other. | ||
| And they're literally engineering argument. | ||
| And they're engineering fighting. | ||
| And the idea was that someone wanted this argument. | ||
| promoting discord. | ||
| They wanted arguments. | ||
| They wanted to fuck with our democracy. | ||
| And then they could shift it just a little bit by doing this, by having these arguments, by pretending that they're there for LBGTQ rights, but they're really not. | ||
| But they're really just some Russians who are just talking shit. | ||
| And that this is what we need to do. | ||
| We need to radicalize. | ||
| They had Antifa groups. | ||
| They had all these different groups. | ||
|
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Right, right. | |
| I mean, Israel and Saudi Arabia do the same thing except way more dramatic. | ||
| We do that. | ||
| I'm sure we do it. | ||
| I'm sure the government's doing it right now. | ||
| It's fascinating that we just focus in on Russia when, my God, this is happening on every front. | ||
| I mean, look at going back to Pete Buttigieg. | ||
| I don't know the fuck you say his name, but he has like hundreds of sock puppet accounts that are We're all propping each other up on Twitter. | ||
| He does? | ||
| Oh my god, I just saw... | ||
| It's like, blacks for Pete Buttigieg, gays for Pete Buttigieg. | ||
| So who's making these? | ||
| I mean, I guess he thought that that was, I don't know, injected with corporate money, that he's just like, all right, make a hundred sock puppet accounts. | ||
|
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It's like... | |
| Everyone does this shit, but when we focus in on just Russia, and then of course you have the removal of Syrian accounts, you have the removal of Pro Maduro accounts on Twitter, why is it only that we're talking about our so-called enemies, that these are the people who are sowing discord and fomenting radical discontent? | ||
| What about all the other countries that we do it all over the world? | ||
| What about all the other countries that are doing the same thing? | ||
| So if he really does have these sock puppet accounts that are doing this, that are pretending that these are just fans, that's some sleazy shit. | ||
| Yeah, it's sleazy as hell. | ||
| I mean, that's as sleazy as it gets, in my opinion. | ||
| That's some dirty shit. | ||
| You're pretending you're a person who's just an independent person who's supporting you, when really just is an employee who's there for some propaganda purposes. | ||
| And especially the identity politics thing, all of the different groups, marginalized groups, support you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's all fake. | ||
| Well, the crazy thing is, you saw that town hall after the shooting. | ||
| A cop shot this guy. | ||
| And everyone's saying, how the fuck are you going to run for president when you can't even run a city? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Doesn't he have a job? | ||
| This is what I'm confused about. | ||
| These people have jobs. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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Big jobs. | |
| Why are they running for president? | ||
| Giant jobs. | ||
| Who's running the city while he's there? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Imagine? | ||
| Right. | ||
| If I just said, hey, I'm not going to do this podcast anymore. | ||
| I'm going to go get Brian Callen. | ||
| He's going to be me from now on. | ||
| And I'm going to run for president. | ||
| Yeah, just jump in the race, Joe. | ||
| You might as well. | ||
| Hey, this is Brian Callen from the Joe Rogan experience. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| People would be like, what the fuck is happening here? | ||
| It's like Bill de Blasio. | ||
| It's like, you have a fucking city to run. | ||
| Why are you running for president? | ||
| How can you? | ||
| The fucking metro's falling apart, dude. | ||
| How much time do you spend actually being mayor, you piece of shit? | ||
| Give that money back. | ||
| Dude, they just want the book deals. | ||
| They want to go on The View. | ||
| They want to have a reason to be relevant. | ||
|
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The View. | |
| It's disgusting. | ||
| It's pretty gross. | ||
| It should be illegal. | ||
| Meghan McCain. | ||
| It really should be. | ||
| If you really want to do it, you should quit your fucking job, whatever you have, and dedicate 100% of your time to doing that. | ||
| If you think that you could have that, first of all, everyone knows what a grueling thing it is to run for president. | ||
| It is a fucking time-consuming, massive commitment to your energy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How can you do that and also be the mayor of South Bend? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| You just have to be on the phone begging for donations when you're not, you know, jumping on tables like Robert O'Rourke is all over the country. | ||
| It's a lot of work. | ||
| Yeah, there's no way you're running that city. | ||
| And how fucking crazy are these people's egos? | ||
| I mean, they say that Trump is this existential threat, that he's the next Hitler, he's mentally incapacitated, yet they all jump in the race because they think they're the smartest people in the world. | ||
| So it's like, I mean, Bill de Blasio, it's like, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're pulling so low. | ||
| Drop out! | ||
| Dude, this is all to try to prevent Bernie from winning. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Who makes sense to you? | ||
| Does Bernie make sense? | ||
| Bernie is my guy. | ||
| Bernie's my guy through and through, and I'll tell you why. | ||
| Because, A, we need Medicare for All, we need to abolish student debt, and that shit, you just tax Wall Street gambling, done. | ||
| Medicare for All, cut the military budget, done. | ||
| I don't want to live in a country where people are rationing insulin. | ||
| I don't want to live in a country where half of the GoFundMe campaigns are because people are going to die if they don't get donations for healthcare. | ||
| What is wrong with this country? | ||
| But back to Bernie, I mean, you look at the last 30 years of political advocacy. | ||
| This is a guy who's been saying the same thing for 30 straight years, no matter if it's veterans' rights, about Gulf War syndrome, about just a political revolution as needed. | ||
| I mean, he's been talking about that since he won the Senate seat initially. | ||
| And you can't really say the same thing about any other candidate. | ||
| And I do like what Tulsi Gabbard is saying, and I do like some of the things Elizabeth Warren's saying, but it seems like she's just making it up on the fly and adopting kind of Bernie-lite policies. | ||
| And I think this is all a strategy to siphon all the delegates away from Bernie because we already know this third-way corporate Wall Street-funded organization that's like corporate Democrats have said they want anyone but Bernie. | ||
| Bernie is the biggest threat to the establishment by far. | ||
| Did you see when Charlemagne called Elizabeth Warren the original Rachel Dolezal to her face? | ||
| See, she doesn't have a chance! | ||
| She doesn't have a chance with the Trump shit. | ||
| All Trump has to say is Pocahontas over and over again. | ||
| What's hilarious to me is they say Pocahontas is racist. | ||
| It's a fucking Disney movie. | ||
| How can Pocahontas be racist? | ||
| Elizabeth Warren fucked up. | ||
| She really, really screwed up. | ||
| That's a big fuck up. | ||
| It's a really big screw up. | ||
| And then she wound up getting the DNA test. | ||
| I am 200 times more African than she is Native American. | ||
| I'm 1.6% African. | ||
| The ego of these people, man. | ||
| The ego of these people. | ||
| It's like she's just so upset that Trump... | ||
| It's so nuts that she went and got jobs saying she was Native American. | ||
| I mean, yeah, it's one thing to say I have Native American blood. | ||
| It's another thing. | ||
| And I don't know how much, you know, ancestry, Native American ancestry she has, but I do know that she was, you know, that was on like her Harvard bio and all this stuff. | ||
| And it's just like, what is going on? | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| James talked about it. | ||
| He did. | ||
| He did on here. | ||
| He did the same as Kim. | ||
| He got into school. | ||
| You're a professor. | ||
| He got into Ohio State. | ||
| He thought he was. | ||
| A lot of people thought he was. | ||
| My wife thought she was. | ||
| My wife thought she was part Native American. | ||
| So she got her DNA done. | ||
| She's like, oh, hmm. | ||
| Bunch of fucking liars. | ||
| Elizabeth Warren's more Native American than your wife. | ||
| That was the thing. | ||
| I think my wife's still more Native American. | ||
| She's a little bit. | ||
| But that was the thing where people were like, they wanted it to be spiritual. | ||
| They would say they were part Native American. | ||
| They wanted it to be extra cool. | ||
| Whoa, my Native American blood. | ||
| Oh, I smell when wolves are coming. | ||
| You know, like you put your ear to the ground. | ||
| You know when it's going to rain. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They felt like they were more connected to nature. | ||
| It's like some weird thing. | ||
| I remember in high school, like when kids wanted to be cool, they would say they were part Native American. | ||
| You're like, oh, wow. | ||
| Well, the Native American community came out after she got the DNA test and they said, this does not make you native. | ||
| Native is much more than like whatever percentage of your blood. | ||
| I mean, native is a way of life. | ||
| It's a culture. | ||
| You have to grow up in it. | ||
| And it was really kind of gross. | ||
| That whole thing was just bizarre. | ||
| Well, what was gross is, even after the testing, she was trying to use that as proof that she was correct. | ||
| And then people who analyzed the data are like, are you fucking crazy? | ||
| You know how small this percentage is? | ||
| This is an insanely small percentage. | ||
| But she was saying that Trump needed to give her a million dollars because of the fact that she did take the test. | ||
| Like... | ||
| It was insulting to the Native community. | ||
| It was embarrassing all around. | ||
| And it was also just weird that she even did it at the behest of Trump. | ||
| Like, why did you do that? | ||
| He gotcha. | ||
| He gotcha. | ||
| But she had to do it because he kept saying it over and over and over again. | ||
| I feel like she's a politician. | ||
| And I say that in the most unflattering of terms. | ||
| I feel like she's one of those people that just says what needs to be said in order to get elected. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's what it seems like. | ||
| Where I don't get that impression from Tulsi at all. | ||
| I don't feel like that's who she is. | ||
| I feel like she's a veteran who did two tours in the Middle East and who's a congresswoman from Hawaii who really wants to do good. | ||
| I mean, I really do think that what she's... | ||
| And she doesn't take any corporate money. | ||
| None. | ||
| She wants this... | ||
| She wants this job because she thinks she can do a better job than what has been done before and the other people that are running for it. | ||
| I really believe her. | ||
| She makes sense to me. | ||
| What do you think about Bernie? | ||
| I like a lot of things Bernie says. | ||
| You know what I think is interesting now that people are mad at him that he's rich. | ||
| That he made a lot of money off his book. | ||
| And he said, you go write your own book! | ||
| Make your own money! | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of, you know, criticisms that people lobby against him. | ||
| What I like about him socially is... | ||
| That what he is standing for is the downtrodden. | ||
| He's standing for the people that don't catch a good break. | ||
| When he starts talking about things like income inequality, I'm like, okay, I understand what you're doing and why you're saying it, but what is the cause of income inequality? | ||
| That's what we need to find out. | ||
| We need to find out what's the cause. | ||
| Why are these poor communities the way they are? | ||
| That needs to be helped. | ||
| That needs to be fixed. | ||
| There's so much that can be done that's not being done and at least he seems to be calling out to the people that are ignored, that aren't being served by Wall Street. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, a big problem is when automation happened, wages stopped going up with inflation and then credit subsidized all of the wages. | ||
| And that's why people are just indebted to credit cooker companies. | ||
| We're up to our ears in debt. | ||
| And he does talk about that and he talks about the solutions to that. | ||
| But you're totally right. | ||
| I mean, what other candidate of these 25 people Andrew Yang. | ||
| Andrew Yang is. | ||
| I like what Andrew Yang is saying. | ||
| He, again, like Tulsi, does not seem like a politician. | ||
| I believe him. | ||
| He's an entrepreneur and a businessman, and he's warning everyone. | ||
| He's like the fucking Paul Revere of automation. | ||
| He's like, you know, look, Professional intelligence is coming and you're going to be out of jobs. | ||
| The fucking half the country is going to be out of jobs. | ||
| And we can actually figure out a way to get through this. | ||
| And there's a bridge that we can make. | ||
| And through this universal income, universal basic income, you can develop a bridge where you can give people their basic needs. | ||
| Food, water, shelter. | ||
| Give them food. | ||
| Make sure that no one's starving. | ||
| Even though people are out of jobs, make sure that their needs are met so then they can go and find a way through this mess and then figure out a way to contribute and make an income and make a living and adjust. | ||
| But to have nothing. | ||
| To have nothing? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| You can't just have people out of work because of automation. | ||
| And people go back to the industrial age. | ||
| Well, hey, that happened during this and that. | ||
| Yeah, okay, it did. | ||
| But it didn't work out well for all those fucking people that lost those jobs back then. | ||
| We shouldn't have to go through that massive, chaotic situation again if there's a way to engineer a better way through it. | ||
| I don't know if universal basic income works. | ||
| You know, I've talked to a lot of people that think like Naval, he was on my podcast recently. | ||
| And his perspective is it doesn't give people meaning. | ||
| And it's not a good idea. | ||
| Because you need a life. | ||
| If you want people to be happy and you want to be able to do something, they need to have meaning in their time and what they do. | ||
| Just to give people money is not going to make people happy. | ||
| I think it's a band-aid. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a band-aid. | ||
| I agree with the concept that Yang proposes about UBI. But yeah, I think that if we give people health care and have their basic needs met, then that It's going to give them the ability to maneuver to find their passion and to be able to have that space where they can fulfill their lives. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think there's a way to do both. | ||
| There's a way to find meaning and have your needs kept. | ||
| I mean, the idea is that I don't think that people should get free money to the point where they could live a full, rich life and go on vacations and have a nice car and a nice house and never have to work again. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| You should contribute. | ||
| Everyone should contribute. | ||
| But if you're in a job that's going to be completely annihilated by automation and artificial intelligence, I don't know what that would be. | ||
| You know, and when I talked to Tulsi about that, she didn't know what that would be either. | ||
| This idea of trying to promote new jobs. | ||
| People say that. | ||
| We're going to create new jobs. | ||
| I hate that expression. | ||
| Like, what does that mean? | ||
| If there's not a job, how are you going to create a new job? | ||
| Well, look at our infrastructure. | ||
| I mean, goddamn. | ||
| Fix all that, right? | ||
| I mean, good God. | ||
| We've been giving an F like every year by the Army Corps of Engineers saying, Shit's falling apart, dude. | ||
| I mean, look at the New Deal. | ||
| Look at what FDR did. | ||
| And that's what Bernie keeps saying. | ||
| He's like, I'm literally instating an economic bill of rights that FDR did 100 years ago. | ||
| Why am I considered a radical extremist when I'm just trying to give people basic economic rights and trying to propose jobs to rebuild this country? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What happened to that promise that Trump levied during the campaign? | ||
| You know, he talked about our infrastructure crumbling. | ||
| What the hell's been done on that front? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| And also, the big one is the economy, like the debt, rather. | ||
| Like how much we're in debt? | ||
| We're in debt more. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| Crippling $1.6 trillion for student debt alone. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| What do you think about the people that are calling out to try to eliminate student debt? | ||
| I'm 100% on board. | ||
| Do you think that's possible? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And you just tax Wall Street gambling. | ||
| Literally, that can do it alone. | ||
| You do not have to pay. | ||
| What do you mean by Wall Street gambling? | ||
| Bernie laid it all out. | ||
| I just read this morning on the way here, so I don't know the full proposal. | ||
| But Wall Street just makes billions of dollars. | ||
| I don't know how often, but just betting on these... | ||
| Trading and shit. | ||
| Like, Wall Street just makes so much money and if we just taxed Wall Street or, you know, like you're talking about taxing these defense contractors or actually trying to change the laws to not have these corporations hide billions of dollars offshore in tax havens, it solves all of these problems pretty quickly. | ||
| And it's not a matter of how can we do it. | ||
| It's a matter that we have to do it because students are totally crippled. | ||
| There's no opportunities in this country. | ||
| Inequality is the highest that it's been since the Great Depression. | ||
| And that's a huge problem. | ||
| We're not going to be able to get people opportunities at all or a better life. | ||
| It's also so crazy that you do that to people that are 17 years old. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| They don't have any idea what it's going to be like to be 35 and be a quarter million dollars in debt. | ||
| Did your parents have student debt? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They did? | ||
| Yeah, my stepfather was in debt when he graduated from school. | ||
| It just seems like it's getting so exponentially worse. | ||
| But not bad. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he handled it. | ||
| But what you have today, if you don't have any grants and you just try to go to school based on loans... | ||
| Greg Fitzsimmons was here. | ||
| What was he saying? | ||
| His kids were—it was $60,000-plus a year for each one of his kids? | ||
| $62,000, I think, a year. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For each one of his kids. | ||
| And then there's no jobs once you go and, you know, go to school. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, especially if you have anything technologically related. | ||
| The idea that at the end of four years, the technology is going to be relevant. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Here's the crazy thing. | ||
| We all know that kids, human beings, their frontal cortex doesn't even fully develop by the time they're 25, until they're 25. Wow. | ||
| I smoked way too much weed before then. | ||
| How much smarter could I have been? | ||
| I'm so lucky that I only smoked weed like maybe six times before I was 30. Really? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| When I was 30, I became a stoner. | ||
| I was not a pothead at all. | ||
| I thought it was for losers. | ||
| And a lot of people that don't smoke pot think that. | ||
| They think it just makes you lazy and stupid. | ||
| But being lazy and stupid, it turns out, makes you lazy and stupid. | ||
| It's not actually a pot. | ||
| Turns out it was not the pot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Turns out it's not the pot. | |
| It was you! | ||
| But yeah, I tell everybody, just don't do it when you're a kid. | ||
| Or if you do do it, don't do it often. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I don't think it's, you know, like if you're fucking 18 years old, you smoke weed once in a while with your friends, I don't think you're going to get fucked up. | ||
| But, like, everyday stoners, it's terrible for you. | ||
| It's just, you're in a fog. | ||
| Like, you need to be able to deal with reality. | ||
| But, like I always say, it's a tool. | ||
| Use it. | ||
| Use it correctly. | ||
| Don't, you know, don't try to do everything with a fucking hammer. | ||
| Sometimes you need a screwdriver. | ||
| Sometimes you need a saw. | ||
| Don't just batter your fucking life with weed. | ||
| But occasionally, you smoke a weed, smoke a joint, rather, and, you know, you have a meal with a friend, and you feel like... | ||
| More close to them, communication's fun, you're warm and friendly. | ||
| It's a great... | ||
| I don't want to call it a drug, because I don't like that expression, this blanket that we throw over amphetamines and sedatives and all these different things, and you throw marijuana in there. | ||
| It's a sacrament, and I think it should be used in the most general and lightest use of that term as a sacrament. | ||
| I like to use it. | ||
| I like to use it for certain things. | ||
| But it's definitely not something you should use all the time. | ||
| It's definitely not something you should use as a kid. | ||
| And I see a lot of kids that are smoking every day. | ||
| I'm like, man, I don't think that's a good idea. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's used as a crutch more and more because I think people are just trying to numb out what the hell is going on. | ||
| But, hey, better that than pills. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, better that than alcohol. | ||
| Oh my god, dude. | ||
| I just read something about how death by suicides is going up in the U.S. and it's going down in almost every other country in the world. | ||
| It's like a uniquely fucked up problem. | ||
| Everything, man. | ||
| I mean, it's the same reason why so many people are- It's all Trump. | ||
| It's the same reason why people are dying on, you know, ODing on prescription pills. | ||
| It's like America is uniquely fucked in so many reasons. | ||
| And I think it can be the lack of healthcare. | ||
| It's that we're, you know, the center of global capitalism. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of reasons why... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's also the empty pursuit. | |
| It's an empty pursuit. | ||
| And when you get there, it doesn't feel good. | ||
| You just keep trying to chase in more and gather more things. | ||
| Just like that study that shows there's a cap on happiness. | ||
| It doesn't make you happier when you have more money at a certain point. | ||
| I 100% am in agreement with that. | ||
| Doing something you love is what makes you happy. | ||
| Having good friends and having family and people that you love, that makes you happy. | ||
| Doing things that you find rewarding and helping people, that's the weird one. | ||
| Helping people makes people happy. | ||
| People are like, yeah, you've got to look out for yourself. | ||
| You've got to take care of business. | ||
| Turns out, no. | ||
| Looking out for other people is super rewarding. | ||
| It's a selfish thing to be generous and kind. | ||
| Selfish in a lot of ways because it really helps yourself. | ||
| Well, that's the whole mantra of growing up in America is you need to help yourself and you're a loser if you don't get rich and all this shit. | ||
| It's all these impossible goals that we can't do without actually help from each other. | ||
| You know the biggest losers? | ||
| Rich people who are sad. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Goddamn! | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're rich and you're still depressed? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're super successful and you're still depressed? | ||
| Like, wow, you built a shitty house. | ||
| Like, your foundation sucks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because your foundation, who you are as a person, the way you treat people, the way you view the world, the way you love your friends and your family, that's your foundation. | ||
| And if you become successful and you have that foundation, I feel like you can still be happy. | ||
| But if you become successful and you just shit that foundation away because you just wanted to make it, I'm just going to make it, fuck all that stuff, I don't need that, I don't need love, I don't need any of that. | ||
| And then you make it and you're just sitting there alone. | ||
| It's just like a fucking tomb. | ||
| I think that's why a lot of people like Trump because they think of him like, I've actually heard this term, like a blue-collar billionaire. | ||
| And it's like, what? | ||
| He was given a million. | ||
| If everyone's given a million dollars from their pappy. | ||
| It's a couple million. | ||
| Yeah, a couple million from their daddy. | ||
| Yeah, you'd probably have it a lot better off. | ||
| A small loan of a couple million. | ||
| No big deal. | ||
| Unbelievable, dude. | ||
| To him, that is a small loan now. | ||
| That's what's really bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, I think Matt Taibbi described him best. | ||
| He's like what a stupid poor person thinks of as a rich person. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| And his idea is just to throw money at everything, like the Palestine-Israel thing. | ||
| Did you see Jared Kushner's whole layout of like, this is the new peace plan? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| God, it's literally just let's give them jobs, meaning let's have corporations like basically profit off the occupation. | ||
| What's interesting to me is that even right wing Trump supporters in particular, right wing Trump supporters do not seem to like them. | ||
| Do not seem to like Jared Kushner or Ivanka. | ||
| They don't like the fact that his daughter is working at the White House and that the son-in-law is there running things like that. | ||
| They're very disturbed by that. | ||
| They don't like that. | ||
| Yeah, nepotism. | ||
| I mean, what's weird is they just blow at the fucking wind, man. | ||
| I saw Fahrenheit 11.9. | ||
| Totally recommend it to everyone who's listening. | ||
| Michael Moore's newest documentary. | ||
| Oh my god, it's amazing. | ||
| But the first 20 minutes just shows how Hillary lost. | ||
| And it shows that Jared Kushner actually lobbied to have sicko in theaters all across the country. | ||
| I mean, he was for socialized medicine. | ||
| And he was working hand-in-glove with Michael Moore to roll this out. | ||
| It just shows you how fickle they are and how they just have no actual values. | ||
| Just trying to make money. | ||
| Yeah, just trying to make money. | ||
| He was like, this is a great idea! | ||
| You know, his voice is really high. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's like, this is really good! | |
| We should have... | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Yeah, it's super weird, man. | ||
| I see the two of them together. | ||
| It's a very strange couple. | ||
| I can't believe they have sex. | ||
| You think they do? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think he jerks off in a cup. | ||
| She gets a turkey baster and she squirts it in there and she kicks him. | ||
| Remember how in Fair Night 11.9 he shows just how bizarre and inappropriate Trump is with Ivanka. | ||
| But there's this one talk show where the host is just like Ivanka. | ||
| She's like, what do you have most in common with your dad? | ||
| And she's like, real estate and golf. | ||
| And she's like, Trump, what do you have most in common with Ivanka? | ||
| And he's like, well, I would say sex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, what father says that? | ||
| Well, imagine that. | ||
| Like, what do you have most in common with your baby? | ||
| Sex. | ||
| We have a lot of that in common. | ||
| We have a lot of that in common. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Just in common. | ||
| Just in common. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| That's such a crazy thing to say. | ||
| It's super just Freudian, like, I want to fuck her, but I can't because she's my daughter. | ||
| He just says so many crazy things. | ||
| I think that guy is just always talking. | ||
| When you're always talking, you don't ever get a chance to really contemplate what you're saying. | ||
| You're always just talking. | ||
| So many times during the campaign trail, it just seems like he would say things, and then you would just have to justify what he said. | ||
| I've done that when I was younger. | ||
| I would say something stupid, and then I would have to try to figure out how to make that stupid thing make sense. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Trump's just constantly going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but I was 20. Like a seven-year-old man. | |
| Let's hear it. | ||
| Ivanka, what's the favorite thing you have in common with your father? | ||
| Either real estate or golf. | ||
| Donald, with your daughter? | ||
| Well, I was going to say sex, but I can't relate that to that. | ||
| That's the crazy thing is he thought about it and decided he wasn't going to say it. | ||
| I was going to say sex. | ||
| I was going to say sex and everyone's like, oh shit! | ||
| Maybe that's because he's on Wendy Williams and he wanted people to scream. | ||
| Just a good opportunity to say sex. | ||
| Oh, it's the Wendy Williams show! | ||
|
unidentified
|
He went crazy! | |
| He went there! | ||
| But there's a whole montage of creepy shit that he said. | ||
| He would date her when she was a baby. | ||
| He was like, she's going to grow up and hopefully have big tits or whatever. | ||
| He said really insane. | ||
| And he hates Tiffany. | ||
| He hates Tiffany because she's not attractive. | ||
| Why does he hate Tiffany? | ||
| Because she's not attractive. | ||
| Oh, that's the one he had with Marla Maples? | ||
| Is that the other daughter? | ||
| Good point. | ||
| I don't actually know who Tiffany is. | ||
| I think he had her with Marla, who's very attractive, so it's weird. | ||
| That is weird. | ||
| Something happened. | ||
| Some sort of cross-inbred breeding... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lightning storm. | |
| But he just pretends like she doesn't exist. | ||
| It's kind of sad. | ||
| Well, what are you going to do? | ||
| Look, I don't know how the fuck you can pay attention to anything. | ||
| I don't understand how a president is still a job. | ||
| I mean, it was a great job when Lincoln was running things, you know, and probably extremely chaotic. | ||
| But with today's economy, when you're dealing with all these different threats to the environment, cyber... | ||
| Threats, the economy, all the shit they have to deal with. | ||
| The idea that one person is supposed to be the general manager of the company. | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
| It's completely absurd. | ||
| And the pardoning power, usually that's supposed to be like sympathy pardons for people like Chelsea Manning, not for war criminals who have killed a bunch of civilians. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| I mean, that's basically saying... | ||
| Has he done that yet? | ||
| Is he... | ||
| He's talking about it. | ||
| This is the seal. | ||
| Yeah, this is like more than just the seal. | ||
| I mean, he's contemplating actually pardoning the Nassir Square massacre Blackwater employees. | ||
| It's like, what the fuck is going on here? | ||
| But that's, to me, that's like sending a message to soldiers, like, act like ISIS and you'll be fine, I'll pardon you. | ||
| Meanwhile, look at what he's doing to Julian Assange. | ||
| This is like going beyond the pale. | ||
| The Julian Assange thing is weird, because I thought that he would be a guy that would want Julian Assange out. | ||
| Talking out of both sides of his mouth, he said how many times during the campaign trail, WikiLeaks! | ||
| I love WikiLeaks! | ||
| But then you look back before the campaign, he said Julian Assange should get the death penalty on Fox and Friends back in the day. | ||
| But again, I think he probably thought about that a microsecond before he said it, and then how to justify it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He's just talking crazy. | ||
| He probably had eight cups of coffee, four Red Bulls, two diet pills, and just went out there and... | ||
| So scary, though. | ||
| I mean, Assange, it's beyond the pale because now you're not just prosecuting whistleblowers with the Espionage Act. | ||
| You're actually prosecuting publishers. | ||
| That's like a whole level of direct assault on the first... | ||
| On journalism. | ||
| I mean, he's a legitimate journalist in that regard. | ||
| What he's doing is he's distributing information that is literally going to change the way people view the way the government and the military work. | ||
| I mean, it's incomprehensible how much the world has changed and what we are aware of because of WikiLeaks' revelations in the past 10 years. | ||
| I mean, even just the film that I just made, Gaza Fights for Freedom, I cite a WikiLeaks cable about how Israel wanted Hamas to win in Gaza and they said that they were strategizing for that to happen so then they can regard Gaza as a hostile territory and then just relentlessly bomb them. | ||
| That was because of WikiLeaks. | ||
| I found that out because of them. | ||
| I mean, I can't... | ||
| Believe what is going on. | ||
| Because people, I don't think that people really knew that Trump would take these powers and become so authoritarian with them. | ||
| Well, what's disturbing to me is, WikiLeaks used to be something that people on the left would cite as evidence that the military was out of control. | ||
| Or that the military industrial complex is out of control. | ||
| Then, because they feel like somehow or another WikiLeaks was involved in helping Trump, They became a Russian mouthpiece and a traitor. | ||
| I mean, like, the left, over the last few years in particular, since 2016, WikiLeaks has been sort of redefined. | ||
| They're conflating Julian Assange's personal politics, and I don't know what those are. | ||
| I know that he had those private DMs with Trump Jr., which looked bad, but... | ||
| What did he say to Trump Jr.? | ||
| He was talking to him about, you know, we need your tax return so then people don't think of us as like a biased organization and it would look good and kind of like, you know, a little too buddy-buddy with Trump Jr. But that does not take away from the importance and, you know, validity of what WikiLeaks is as an organization. | ||
| It's also a person talking to another person, giving their opinion, which makes sense. | ||
| People just really don't like Julian Assange as a person, and it doesn't matter how much you hate Julian Assange. | ||
| This is completely beyond the pale, what's going on to him, and he needs to be defended. | ||
| His rights need to be defended. | ||
| But very few people are defending him. | ||
| That's what's even more important. | ||
| Very interesting. | ||
| What's crazy is these charges that just got unveiled with the Trump administration, they're trying to extradite him to the U.S., of course, and he'll just be sitting in a cell for the rest of his life if he doesn't face the death penalty. | ||
| But the charges have nothing to do with the 2016 election at all. | ||
| They all have to do with the massacre, the collateral murder. | ||
| That's what it has to do with. | ||
| It has to do with the same thing that Chelsea Manning was in jail for releasing to him. | ||
| And so they've just trumped up all these charges based on him publishing war crimes. | ||
| And that's really what this is. | ||
| It's publishing war crimes and embarrassing the U.S. empire. | ||
| And what are they saying? | ||
| What are they calling it? | ||
| Like, what is the actual charge? | ||
| They're saying that he helped Chelsea Manning hack into, I forget, it's like some sort of charge that it's basically concocted. | ||
| They're saying that he helped Chelsea Manning basically release the information to him and that's how he's part of the conspiracy. | ||
| It's total bullshit. | ||
| Completely concocted. | ||
| He's a political prisoner and he needs to be freed and it's absolutely astounding that the Trump administration is doing this and that people are going along with it. | ||
| I see people applauding this. | ||
| It's sick. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's weird the shift in how people used to defend him and now no longer do and nothing really has changed in terms of what he's actually done. | ||
| It was a traumatic election and people's reptile brains got activated hardcore and they think everything is Russia and they think Julian Assange is Russia and they think anyone who's talking about US foreign policy is towing the Russian line, towing the Kremlin line. | ||
| It's not about the people who control this government, it's the dark evil forces behind your friends and family and the people who are talking about sowing discord and shit. | ||
| It's a disturbing time because it's hard to relate and actually have these discussions with people. | ||
| Yeah, I think you nailed it when you said the 2016 elections have sort of awakened this reptile brain. | ||
| Because that's what it seems like. | ||
| You're seeing so many people that think that there's a war going on, like a war in this country. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Instead of discussing things, they don't want any discussion. | ||
| They want to shut things down. | ||
| And that's part of, I think, some of the motivation behind this and justification for deplatforming people, wiping them out, like remove them, get them out. | ||
| We're at war right now. | ||
| We have to fix this. | ||
| We have to get a woman president. | ||
| We have to get a gay man. | ||
| It's like this kind of shit that you see. | ||
| They feel like they're in an ideological war. | ||
| That's why identity politics is so fascinating because it's just been adopted by the establishment, by the liberal wing of the establishment, to try to trick people that we're somehow a progressive society. | ||
| It's all just like corporatism under the flag and the banner of social politics and identity politics, and it's completely absurd. | ||
| I mean, with Barack Obama, we thought that we were in a post-racial society because we had a black president, and we know that that's absolutely a falsehood. | ||
| So I just think that we're just going down the wrong path here. | ||
| And neoliberalism has really done a number on this country and the world. | ||
| And we're going to see kind of more authoritarian fascist policies take root because people are really down and out with how capitalism has morphed. | ||
| It's really disturbing because, you know, you're looking at, like, left identity politics, but it's under the banner of capitalism. | ||
| So really, it's just about privatization. | ||
| Neoliberalism is just about privatization. | ||
| So it's not about, like, leftist, you know, socialist politics. | ||
| And even you look at someone like Bernie Sanders, he's not a socialist. | ||
| He's a democratic socialist, which means that he just wants social democracy. | ||
| He's not talking about abolishing private industry. | ||
| He's not talking about nationalizing anything. | ||
| He's just talking about having workers have a seat at the table and getting the fair share. | ||
| So we've gone off the wayside of rhetoric and we just have no idea how to talk about these things in a fair way because things are so heated. | ||
| And ideological and people are just blinded, I think, and don't really understand these issues well enough. | ||
| And it's really disturbing because we're at a point in our country where we need to have conversations. | ||
| We don't just want sound bites. | ||
| But going back to the censorship stuff and the consolidation of corporate media, people don't have the platform, they don't have the voice to get these ideas out there. | ||
| Which is why your show is so important. | ||
| I mean, having people like me, like Tulsi, I mean, Bringing out these concepts and shifting the consciousness is very, very important. | ||
| Well, I think that when people are hearing the same thing over and over and over again from one side and then an opposite view over and over again from another side, it's very difficult to have an understanding of what the fuck is going on. | ||
| It's very confusing to most people. | ||
| And I think they tend to either... | ||
| Just give up. | ||
| Or they tend to just find whatever side seems to get them the most social credit or the most reasonable perspective in their terms, whether it's left-wing or right-wing, and then just support that. | ||
| Just give into that. | ||
| And then just have this... | ||
| Pattern that they adopt, this conglomeration of opinions that they adopt. | ||
| And then they're so busy with their jobs, they're so busy with their family, they're so busy with their life. | ||
| And then all this other shit, when you're seeing deregulation, all this other shit you're seeing, the stuff that caused the banking crisis, all this stuff is going on. | ||
| And it's going on without their knowledge. | ||
| It's all happening underneath the surface. | ||
| And then something erupts, like the economic collapse of 2007, 2008. And they're like, what the fuck is happening? | ||
| How'd this happen? | ||
| I didn't see this coming. | ||
| And now the economy crashes. | ||
| And then we have to buy out all these fucking banks. | ||
| And then it rebuilds back up and people are still doing the same goddamn thing. | ||
| They're still working and trying to get ahead. | ||
| And then all this is happening behind the scenes. | ||
| And it's so incredibly difficult to pay attention to all of it. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And to really develop a nuanced perspective of what the problems are, how to fix them, and then who is actually going to support a real tangible solution versus who is just saying some Elizabeth Warren type shit to get elected. | ||
| Well, that's why we need a real mobilization in the streets, because there's no person who's going to change this. | ||
| There's no top-down implementation that's really going to revolutionize society and get people living wage and get people healthcare. | ||
| Even Bernie said, I'm not going to be able to do this. | ||
| I need you to come out. | ||
| To get my back. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, there's nowhere in the country that you can live if you're living on minimum wage and actually afford a two-bedroom apartment. | ||
| I mean, that's the reality here. | ||
| But when we bailed out the banks in 2008, no one had fretted about how we're going to pay for that. | ||
| I mean, it was just kind of understood. | ||
| Okay, we're going to pay and give the banks the bailout. | ||
| What about fucking us? | ||
| Don't we deserve a bailout? | ||
| What about the people? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Banks are too big to fail. | ||
| If the banks fail, then the people fail. | ||
| It's unbelievable, man. | ||
| And all this shit that we're spending, I mean, the Venezuela shit, all these sanctions, it is... | ||
| The Venezuela coup, I mean, were you following that? | ||
| That was insane. | ||
| Well, I was following it as much as you were sort of... | ||
| You were putting a very alternative view as opposed to what we're seeing in either left or right wing publications. | ||
| And you faced a lot of resistance because of that, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But you were there. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| I was there and that's why I saw with my own eyes the reality on the ground. | ||
| What do you think is happening over there? | ||
| So what is happening over there? | ||
| I mean, if you poll Venezuelans themselves, they will say that their quality of life has lessened because of U.S. sanctions. | ||
| So back in 2015, Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat. | ||
| Very random. | ||
| There was no threat, obviously, posed to the U.S., but it was just to kind of start the sanctions on them. | ||
| What was the justification? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Pressure? | ||
| I mean, there's always been pressure because, of course, the U.S. has always hated Maduro and hated Hugo Chavez. | ||
| And the U.S. empire doesn't forget and it doesn't forgive. | ||
| And, you know, going back to 2002, Bush tried to engineer a coup against Hugo Chavez. | ||
| That didn't work. | ||
| And so what we've done with these civil society organizations is try to foment radical discontent on the ground in Venezuela to try to, you know, get some sort of uprising and The guy, Juan Guido, was just some guy plucked from obscurity who was just well-known in Georgetown and Washington, D.C., much more well-known there than he was even in Venezuela. | ||
| So, you know, this was completely engineered. | ||
| It was totally concocted. | ||
| No Venezuelans really knew who he was. | ||
| I think like 80% of Venezuelans had no idea who Juan Guido was. | ||
| But, you know, the economy went into a spiral because oil prices dropped and they would have been able to pick back up their economy. | ||
| But unfortunately, the sanctions were so debilitating that it went into complete freefall. | ||
| Venezuela is not a socialist country. | ||
| That's actually the vast majority is private industry. | ||
| And a lot of those private CEOs are very anti-government. | ||
| Long story short is that the coup was initiated, you know, during the Trump administration after he slapped like 70 sanctions on Venezuela. | ||
| And we're talking about medicine, food, all the things that they're saying that they need, right? | ||
| That they're trying to stage these fake aid caravan deliveries. | ||
| That was all bullshit. | ||
| What they're doing is actually preventing the delivery from food and medicine from getting to Venezuelans. | ||
| This coup was a failure because the resilience of the Venezuelan people, they believe that they have a democracy. | ||
| They do have a democracy. | ||
| It's actually more free than our democracy. | ||
| There's not a dictatorship there. | ||
| Maduro won a presidential election last year. | ||
| He won a presidential election. | ||
| The US lobbied the opposition candidates to not run against him so then they can say it was illegitimate, that it was a dictatorship. | ||
| And so he won. | ||
| He won the popular vote, and they tried to implement all these things, and they've been blocked. | ||
| And, you know, the opposition keeps crying to the U.S. that they need help, that they need to be invaded. | ||
| It's pretty disturbing when you have opposition candidates saying, slap sanctions on us, invade our country, help us, Trump, help us. | ||
| I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| But when I was on the ground, I saw flourishing democracy. | ||
| I saw dozens of people, hundreds of people who said that they Love the process there, that they believe in the Bolivarian movement and that they're Chavismo till death. | ||
| And we don't understand because those people's voices are totally censored from corporate media. | ||
| The only Venezuelans that we hear from in corporate media are rich opposition, either, you know, expats or people who just have fled. | ||
| And what do we hear from corporate media? | ||
| What is the corporate take? | ||
| So this is even Elizabeth Warren, even Bernie Sanders has been terrible on this. | ||
| I mean, it's really bad. | ||
| I mean, their take on corporate media, if you're looking at like Fox News, they'll say we need to overthrow Maduro and everyone's starving and it's a failed state. | ||
| They never mentioned the sanctions. | ||
| They never mentioned the fact that U.S. sanctions just from 2017 alone has killed 40,000 Venezuelans. | ||
| This was just a study out by CEPR. | ||
| 40,000 Venezuelans have died from Trump's sanctions, from insulin shipments not getting there, primarily. | ||
| A lot of other things, medicine-wise, that people have not been getting, and they are dying. | ||
| So that is absurd. | ||
| You know, we like to think of sanctions as kind of like the soft power that just targets elites of the country. | ||
| No, it's an act of war, and that's exactly what's happening to Iran. | ||
| And Trump's implemented sanctions all over the world in a really devastating way. | ||
| But the corporate media will say, we need to overthrow them. | ||
| They're a failed state. | ||
| They're a dictatorship. | ||
| In reality, no, they're not. | ||
| They're a democracy, and we don't like their politics. | ||
| That's really what it is. | ||
| We don't like the fact that they're politics. | ||
| Their politics are that they nationalize the oil. | ||
| And that's really where it comes from. | ||
| This fake ambassador that was trying to get into the embassy here, Carlos Vecchio, he's an ex-Exxon lawyer. | ||
| And you see all of these people who were involved in ExxonMobil and all of the oil industries that were flourishing in Venezuela before Chavez got elected. | ||
| And they just want their profits back. | ||
| They want their money back. | ||
| They don't like the fact that Chavez took the profits from the oil companies. | ||
| That's what the crux of the problem is, Joe. | ||
| And it's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing how transparent it is. | ||
| So ever since these failed coup attempts over the last decade, the US has been fomenting regime change through the civil society organizations, USAID offshoots in the country, and basically trying to foment violent unrest. | ||
| Violent unrest to the extent that they burn down streets. | ||
| There's lynch mobs. | ||
| I mean, when I was there during the height of the violence in 2017, like 200 people died. | ||
| And the news just kept saying, like insinuating that Maduro was going out there with police forces and actually gunning down people in the streets. | ||
| It couldn't be farther from the truth. | ||
| We looked at all the deaths. | ||
| We broke them all down. | ||
| We looked at death records and we found out that the opposition lynch mobs were actually responsible for the overwhelming majority of deaths in the streets. | ||
| So that's happening. | ||
| People get lynched for being black. | ||
| They get lynched for being chavismo. | ||
| These people are targeting maternity clinics, hospitals, basically any enclave of government services because that's what this is really about. | ||
| It's about a kind of a fascistic bent of the opposition wanting to take back the power from the poor. | ||
| The poor people got power and they didn't like it. | ||
| And that's what the crux of the problem is. | ||
| But when you're looking at the corporate media, it's an absurdly cartoonish brush that's being painted. | ||
| And then if you look at the liberal media with Maddow and all these other people, they either don't talk about it or they say Maduro needs to let the aid in. | ||
| You even saw Bernie and Elizabeth Warren saying Maduro needs to let the aid in. | ||
| Let the aid in, Maduro. | ||
| The aid was the coup. | ||
| The aid was a trick. | ||
| They're getting aid every day from countries that are not trying to actively overthrow them. | ||
| But we staged this big stunt on the border of Colombia. | ||
| And by the way, Colombia is actually suffering more than Venezuela. | ||
| Colombia is in dire poverty. | ||
| There's people getting assassinated every week who are labor leaders and teachers. | ||
| I went there and I talked to a teacher who's living in exile because he's scared for his fucking life. | ||
| But we don't hear about that, right? | ||
| Because they're allies with the US. So it's a cynical stunt to try to get this humanitarian international outcry to say, oh my god, people are dying. | ||
| People are hungry. | ||
| It's not a matter of that there's no food. | ||
| It's that food is very expensive because there's an actual economic war being waged by massive corporations in the country and just external entities, whether it be the Trump administration or U.S. multinationals that are asphyxiating, preventing aid and food from coming in. | ||
| And the aid that they're claiming that they need to accept is basically a hoax. | ||
| It's a stunt to try to get regime change to happen. | ||
| We just saw Richard Branson stage some ridiculous big concert on the border of Colombia. | ||
| And they had like what they said were aid trucks on this big bridge. | ||
| And you had CNN on the ground being like, all right, they need to let the aid in. | ||
| Why don't they let the aid in? | ||
| And the aid was fake. | ||
| It was just a truck full of, I don't know, very minuscule things. | ||
| But they wanted to try to ram these trucks through just to get the soldiers up in arms and to try to get them to defect. | ||
| It hasn't worked. | ||
| They've been trying over and over again to try to get something going. | ||
| And basically, at the end of the day, what happened was just a giant money grab. | ||
| It was basically a money laundering scheme. | ||
| You look at these people who are the opposition leaders now, Juan Guido, Carlos Vecchio, they've just stolen all the money back. | ||
| Maybe they realized the coup wasn't going to go forward, but they basically ended up stealing at least $70 million and just putting it right in these people's bank accounts. | ||
| It's pretty shocking. | ||
| I mean, you have international, it's an international conspiracy to try to take the money back from the people whose money was basically administered by Maduro for social services. | ||
| And the root of it all is nationalizing the oil. | ||
| Nationalizing the oil is the root of it all. | ||
| And also just uplifting the poor. | ||
| I mean, poor people got a voice and they never had a voice in that country their entire lives. | ||
| And that country was, you know, it was a colonial holdover. | ||
| And so the Bolivarian movement started this pink tide all across Latin America. | ||
| And it was scary. | ||
| It was a giant threat to the US establishment. | ||
| And actually, that's why Telesur was founded. | ||
| Telesor, the organization that I used to sell the show to, it was started as kind of a counter to this global hegemony and this corporate narrative trying to overthrow these democratically elected leaders. | ||
| But it's shocking when you see like the Bank of England seized all of this gold that was rightfully Maduro's. | ||
| They seized it illegally. | ||
| All of these banks and international bodies just stole all this money and they just gave it to these opposition leaders. | ||
| So even though the opposition leaders weren't able to take the power back in the country, they still have taken all the money. | ||
| And no one's talking about that. | ||
| And everyone's just acting like this is some crazy dictatorship that needs our saving. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Who the fuck do we think we are? | ||
| We're uninformed, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah, you should check out, everyone should check out our Empire Files YouTube channel because we've done extensive coverage on the ground, really going into the nuts and bolts of what the economic crisis really is. | ||
| And my partner, Mike Preissner, did this epic takedown of John Oliver and You know, the liberal media is just as bad. | ||
| John Oliver did some fucking absurdly false kind of, like, analysis of the whole Venezuela situation, and we just went through and debunked every single line of it. | ||
| I mean, it was extremely disingenuous. | ||
| I bet he had someone who wrote all that, right? | ||
| So I bet he probably has no real knowledge of it. | ||
| Nor could you really, unless you extensively studied it the way you have, and especially if you have feet on the ground. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think that most people just, in order to understand a complex, nuanced problem, like some sort of an international conflict that we're involved in that has to do with nationalizing oil, like, god damn, you gotta do a lot of work. | ||
| You do. | ||
| You do. | ||
| And have you run a show like Last Week Tonight or whatever the fuck that show's called? | ||
| You have producers doing everything for you. | ||
| Someone else is doing that. | ||
| I mean, you find that with a lot of these so-called online experts. | ||
| When you talk to them one-on-one and you get them off the record without notes, they're just people. | ||
| Well, there's this guy, this UN human rights investigator named Alfred de Zayas that I did this big interview with, and he said he tried to propose this to the UN saying there is no humanitarian crisis there. | ||
| This is all fake. | ||
| Yes, people are suffering and dying, but it's not because of Maduro's policies and corruption. | ||
| This is because of US sanctions that have asphyxiated the economy and prevented any sort of recovery from taking place. | ||
| And the economy is still in free fall. | ||
| They can't work with international bodies. | ||
| Again, we have the threats of sanctions with institutions that now work with Venezuela. | ||
| So they've been isolated. | ||
| They've been isolated from the world. | ||
| So is the idea that they just put these sanctions in place, allow this political unrest to take place, support the opposition, and then just have a slow burn until it all collapses, and then come in and swoop in and fix everything and make it a part of the United States government? | ||
| And then these people will not have a voice any longer. | ||
| And another thing that they hate is that Maduro has given 2 million free homes to people. | ||
| That's something that's completely unheard of to maybe Americans. | ||
| But that's one thing that Juan Guaido said that he would do. | ||
| He immediately implemented a new hydrocarbons law, or he was proposing to implement a new hydrocarbons law, which is, again, reprivatizing the oil, and also just immediately privatizing all of the social services that Maduro and Chavez did. | ||
| So... | ||
| It's pretty shocking what would happen and pretty devastating what would happen if Waido's coup did succeed. | ||
| And the whole Trump administration, I mean, it's not just Venezuela. | ||
| It's Nicaragua and Cuba, too. | ||
| I mean, we can't go to Cuba anymore. | ||
| Yeah, that's a new one, right? | ||
| When did that happen? | ||
| Just a couple weeks ago, right? | ||
| What was the purpose? | ||
| I mean, what was the rationalization? | ||
| Because socialism is terrifying and we can't just let this small island nation just live its life. | ||
| We have to create some genocidal blockade that prevents food and medicine from getting in there too. | ||
| But was there a justification? | ||
| Did they say why they were doing this? | ||
| Why they were imposing these new laws? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's just John Bolton's bizarre speech about the Troika of Tyranny. | ||
| Remember the Axis of Evil? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| Now it's the Troika of Tyranny. | ||
| Now it's the Troika of Tyranny. | ||
| Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela. | ||
| It's like, wait, I thought that we were fighting a war on terrorism. | ||
| We're going after Nicaragua too? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because of Ortega. | ||
| Yeah, they hate anyone who leans left. | ||
| They want to crush. | ||
|
unidentified
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Crush. | |
| Hmm. | ||
| It's pretty fucking nuts what's happened. | ||
| The Cuba one is a weird one, right? | ||
| The Cuba one's... | ||
| Because what has happened over there? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Yeah, they're not... | ||
| They haven't done anything to us. | ||
| The only thing they just did was actually give out free HIV prevention pills and they... | ||
| Well, that's where they fucked up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Which... | |
| Big Pharma! | ||
| Yeah, that's where they fucked up. | ||
| We're not into that. | ||
| Yeah, no, the Venezuela thing's a mess. | ||
| It's so difficult because it's so nuanced, but I encourage everyone to maybe check out Venezuela Analysis and Empire Files and Telesaur if they want to learn more about that situation. | ||
| Have you encountered any demonetization of your channel from discussing these complex issues? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So we actually stopped monetizing altogether, so we are ad-free. | ||
| But we would have been demonetized, I'm absolutely sure. | ||
| And we also are slapped with age restrictions and sensitive content bans on almost every single video that we put up, whether it be Israel, Palestine, or Venezuela. | ||
| Really? | ||
| What would cause you to get an age restriction or a sensitive content ban? | ||
| Is there anything that is a fairly innocuous video that you guys have put out that has also got an age restriction? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Mike's video about John Oliver was just literally taking clips from John Oliver and then critiquing them, and they said that was a sensitive content ban. | ||
| It's like, well, what do you mean? | ||
| Why is that sensitive content ban? | ||
| Do you think that's a corporate issue because you're criticizing an HBO show? | ||
| No, no, because it's happened with almost every single one of our videos. | ||
| And so you have to make sure that you're logged in, that you prove your age, just all these different steps and gatekeeping methods to prevent people from getting access to our channel. | ||
| And another crazy thing about it is if you just search like Empire Files, Venezuela, like it will take you a really long time to actually find our work, even if you type in the channel name. | ||
| Abby Martin and these subjects. | ||
| It's really difficult to find. | ||
| And they've made that difficult to find on purpose. | ||
| I have no doubt. | ||
| Well, it's also weird how they determine what is trending. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because it's not real. | ||
| What is trending is not really what is trending. | ||
| Alex Jones freaked out. | ||
| Because the video got millions and millions of hits. | ||
| They're censoring us from trending. | ||
| I'm like, dude, I got news for you. | ||
| I've never trended. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Oh, you know that's fake then. | ||
| That's why it's fake. | ||
| Zero times. | ||
| That's ridiculous, but shouldn't they be building your channel up? | ||
| No. | ||
| Some people like it. | ||
| Some people over there like it. | ||
| I think it's too fucked up. | ||
| You know, I think, like, they don't know what I'm doing. | ||
| Like, there's not, it's not, you can't put it in a clear box. | ||
| And there's too many comedians on, and there's too much weed, and people get drunk, and they talk crazy shit, and it's uncensored. | ||
| I just think... | ||
| It's a very complex thing, this sort of... | ||
| But you know it's happening. | ||
| Well, someone has made a choice to never have it trend. | ||
| It's trended zero times. | ||
| How many views have we had total? | ||
| You're talking about that one report the guy did? | ||
| We have trended, but it's been like a very few amount of times, like over five years. | ||
| That report was like over a one-year period. | ||
| But we haven't trended in years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The main channel has, and our clips channel pops up there every so often. | ||
| Your clips channel, that's not... | ||
| It's a weird... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wouldn't use that trending page. | |
| The only one that's up now is ours. | ||
| That trending page isn't a good gauge to mark stuff. | ||
| It's not like this is the news of the day kind of page. | ||
| But it does help people see, people that are trendy. | ||
| People see what to look at. | ||
| I know that he's your friend too, Peter Joseph, who's been on this show before. | ||
| Zeitgeist and the Zeitgeist Trilogy was one of the most popular videos online, and that was totally... | ||
| Totally fucking censored. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| You can barely find that anymore. | ||
| This is the issue that people have with Facebook and Google and any of these gigantic online corporations that are deciding what is and isn't popular and using algorithms to steer people in directions. | ||
| You know, one of the more fascinating discussions that's happened over the past few years is this understanding that their algorithms favor people arguing about things. | ||
| Like if you want to have a subject, like say abortion, and you put up a, you know, if you're a pro-choice or a pro-life person, you're going to get steered towards things you disagree with so that you engage with them more because that's where the money is. | ||
| The money is in you being upset and engaging. | ||
| I mean, that's where people really get into it. | ||
| So the more you engage, the more profitable it is for Facebook, and the more they encourage that type of behavior. | ||
| So their algorithm actually encourages pissing you off. | ||
| And wants you to stay on YouTube and just go down the rabbit hole on every issue. | ||
| Particularly Facebook. | ||
| But with YouTube, that was one of the... | ||
| that weird New York Times piece, the radicalization of some soft-minded child who got online and was turned into a right-winger and then was subsequently turned into a left-winger by another video. | ||
| And they're like, finally, he was saved. | ||
| Like, are you sure? | ||
| I didn't read it. | ||
| Yeah, it's nonsense. | ||
| Because it sort of connected a lot of people that aren't even right-wing, including me, With the radicalization of this young man. | ||
| And they did link some websites or some YouTube channels that are right, you know, that are right-leaning and even far-right. | ||
| But they also threw in a bunch of other ones, like Philly D, right, who's not right-wing at all, me and a few other folks. | ||
| Well, that's the algorithm. | ||
| You know, the algorithm just takes you down, down, down. | ||
| Yeah, but the New York Times article was suggesting that we all were right-wing because it was a sloppy article. | ||
| It just wasn't really well done. | ||
| But what's interesting is the conclusion, ultimately, he was saved by this by their algorithm. | ||
|
unidentified
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Their algorithm led him to someone... | |
| Got him down and then got him out. | ||
| Yeah, led him to an opposition of that. | ||
| I bet he was a left-wing person. | ||
| YouTube employee wrote it or some shit. | ||
| But this idea that... | ||
| This is the thing that drives me crazy. | ||
| Say you believe something, right? | ||
| And then if you go online and you read something else, and that something else is contrary to what you believe, and you start believing in that something else, somehow or another that's bad. | ||
| This is one of the great arguments against censorship. | ||
| It's like you have to figure out what the fuck makes sense. | ||
| The only way to figure out what makes sense is to read all kinds of things. | ||
| To engage with all kinds of content. | ||
| The idea that we're supposed to protect people because we know what's right. | ||
| We know what's correct. | ||
| Well, who are you? | ||
| Let me talk to you. | ||
| If you think you know what's correct, you're the arbiter of free speech, you're the arbiter of logical discourse and common sense in this world, let me ask you things. | ||
| Let me talk to you. | ||
| Let me get to the heart of how you feel. | ||
| How do you feel about trans kids transitioning when they're six? | ||
| How do you feel about all sorts of crazy weird things that have just been propped up as logical and make sense? | ||
| How do you feel about war? | ||
| How do you feel about abortion? | ||
| How do you feel about ghosts? | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| And you just get to choose whether or not information that comes to them leans left or right. | ||
| I think it's preposterous. | ||
| I just think it's incredibly dangerous because you have to have an unbelievably complex and nuanced perspective in order to be able to dictate what makes or does not make sense. | ||
| You have to have a lot of information at your disposal. | ||
| If you're talking about something like Venezuela, let's look at that, for example. | ||
| Look at what you know, and then look at what you see in what you would call progressive left-wing media that... | ||
| To your knowledge is incorrect and is basically propaganda points that's being redistributed in this way that is palatable. | ||
| Now imagine if people decide that you, Abby Martin, are somehow or another part of some right-wing conspiracy now and they're going to censor your voice and censor your – because it doesn't fit in to this narrative that they're – because you need so much information. | ||
| To be able to really understand what's happening in this one part of South America that we're talking about. | ||
| It's so complex. | ||
| Well, they treat us like children, and they think that we're not smart enough to actually discern what is information that we need. | ||
| I mean, I want the Russian perspective. | ||
| I want the Venezuelan perspective. | ||
| I want the Chinese perspective, because I feel like we're smart enough to really determine our own reality based on All the available information. | ||
| But this is where we're fucked, is that we don't have a reliable, independent source that's not filled with hyperbole and emotion and dunking on people and screaming and insulting. | ||
| And I want someone who can break things down logically and clearly with no ideological bend. | ||
| You're not leaning left, you're not leaning right. | ||
| Where is that? | ||
| And why doesn't that exist? | ||
| I think it's because it's not necessarily human. | ||
| And, you know, people have opinions and they have biases and either they couch those biases in like these think tanks and pretend like they're these unbiased journalists or they just kind of wear it on their sleeve like I do with Empire Files and Media Roots, which is my, you know, my news organization. | ||
| That I do with my brother, Robbie. | ||
| But, I mean, we try to lay it out, but we also don't hide where we're coming from. | ||
| I almost appreciate that more than a lot of these journalists, so-called journalists who are really kind of stenographers, who pretend like they are unbiased. | ||
| And they're like, I'm just giving it to you straight. | ||
| And at the end of the day, they're really not. | ||
| They're trying to toe a line and they're trying to push a certain perspective, but it's just not obvious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just, we live in such a strange time where we are overwhelmed with data. | ||
| I mean, overwhelmed. | ||
| You cannot get away from it and there's no way, there's not a fucking human alive that understands all of it. | ||
| It is impossible. | ||
| It really is impossible. | ||
| And It's so hard to find out what is true and what is bullshit. | ||
| Right, oh my god, what you posted about how you can now change people's, like you can make a picture talk. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| We're in for a wave. | ||
| The Mona Lisa. | ||
| A wave of lies. | ||
| I know, I was like, oh, that's what the Mona Lisa looked like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| She's talking. | ||
| Hey, what's up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like dick. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| I like to do coke, and I like to fly planes, even though they haven't been invented. | ||
| Like, you could have the Mona Lisa say anything. | ||
| It's really disturbing what we're in for. | ||
| Like, what's coming? | ||
| Buckle up. | ||
| Buckle up. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Imagine the fourth, fifth, and sixth generation of this technology being utilized by government, you know? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And then being utilized by someone to sort of... | ||
| I mean, you could easily justify assassinations if you can prove that someone's saying something fucked up. | ||
| You kill them and then you release a tape of them saying something fucked up. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| This person was trying to overthrow the government. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You could start wars. | |
| For sure, for sure, for sure. | ||
| Oh my god, just drone strike anyone. | ||
| What I'm hoping is that if you look at what this technology is doing, what technology in general is doing, particularly like information technology, internet, cellular phones and smartphones and all these devices and And all the various new incarnations that are coming out. | ||
| What they seem to be doing is they seem to be creating portals for which information is more quickly accessed. | ||
| It's more and more transparent. | ||
| Like ideas are getting to people quicker. | ||
| And I think this is one of the things that these companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter and all those other – they're trying to figure out a way to manage this. | ||
| Like, well, this is just too crazy. | ||
| We have to figure out how to manage information and get people things that they want to see. | ||
| But I think ultimately it's going to fail. | ||
| And I think ultimately as technology, as all these innovations keep coming down the pipe, we're going to get closer and closer to this time where everyone has an instantaneous and equal access to information. | ||
| And I think that when that time does come, lying will be virtually impossible. | ||
| I really do believe that. | ||
| Because I think we're probably a decade away from implementing some sort of a device or an ability to read minds. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| That's kind of terrifying. | ||
| I think they're going to develop some sort of technology that allows us to link up together and through some new way of communicating that we don't foresee now. | ||
| But if you just look at this trend, like what is the trend? | ||
| The trend was, oh, you go to the library and get a book. | ||
| Well, now you can get a book online. | ||
| Well, now you get a book on your phone. | ||
| Well, now you could have that book read to you on your phone. | ||
| I mean, it's all this… Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| He keeps getting closer and closer to you. | ||
| And I think there's going – I mean, when – Elon Musk – he's being very vague about it. | ||
| He won't really discuss what he's doing. | ||
| But this neural link thing that he's doing that he thinks is going to radically increase bandwidth between human beings and information. | ||
| And he thinks it's going to literally change humanity. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck that means. | ||
| But if he's working on something like that, he's not the only one. | ||
| And if you're wearing some sort of a device that allows you to access information at this radical pace, what the next step would be is to make it so that you can tap into some sort of a universal language. | ||
| And this universal language would not be dependent upon like these various languages that we use, whether Spanish or Chinese or whatever it is, but some sort of a new language that kids learn and a new language that's a universal language that's distributed through online platforms. | ||
| And have this all go straight to your fucking brain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It's going to happen. | ||
| We're becoming cyborgs in some sort of a weird way. | ||
| And that's the other thing that Elon said. | ||
| We're already cyborg. | ||
| We just carry it around with us. | ||
| And that's what your phone is. | ||
| We're so dependent upon these devices. | ||
| It just seems to make sense that the general direction that all this is going is becoming more and more invasive and more and more inclusive. | ||
| More and more invasive in terms of the way it's sort of ingrained in your body and becomes a part of your life, becomes more and more a part of everyone's life. | ||
| And then more inclusive in terms of more access to this information and more access to thoughts. | ||
| And I just think we're just a few years away from someone making a breakthrough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I think in some ways it's probably... | ||
| Joe Biden says he's going to cure cancer. | ||
| Have I shown you this before? | ||
| This thing is called alter ego where he can talk to it without moving his mouth and it communicates with a computer. | ||
| This is over a year old so I don't know the developments they've made since then. | ||
| Yeah, I sent this to Elon, and he says it's just a trick. | ||
| He said this is basically like a trick. | ||
| He said, yeah, this is giving you information. | ||
| You don't need to talk to it. | ||
| But he said what he's doing is far more complex. | ||
| And then I asked him questions, and he went radio silent on me. | ||
| Yeah, so I was just going, this has got to be the first step for that. | ||
| First of all, look at that guy. | ||
| He looks like a dork wearing that thing. | ||
| He's so big. | ||
| He probably figured it out himself. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| But that looks like some Iron Man type shit. | ||
| He's going to wear a football helmet that does that in the future. | ||
| If I just go one step, this is like the next thing they get this on a Bluetooth thing just touched your ear that everybody's already been walking around with for the last 25 years. | ||
| So he's essentially calculating his groceries as he walks around? | ||
| Yeah, this is just probably connected to his phone. | ||
| I was just sort of showing you this. | ||
| This is already maybe available and they're showing this as proof of concept. | ||
| Well, back this up because let's read the narration because it just said something there. | ||
| So without... | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Without any voice or... | ||
| Just go back to where it is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Leave it right there. | ||
| Without any voice or discernible movements enabling the user to communicate with devices, just let it play. | ||
| So AI assistance applications or other people in a silent... | ||
| It's moving too fast. | ||
| Bad video. | ||
| Yeah, who the fuck can read that fast? | ||
| I'm reading it pretty damn fast. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, okay, I need to wear one of these. | ||
| Yeah, come on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the heck? | |
| I didn't even get to that. | ||
| I mean, who's reading faster than me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's insane. | |
| You need to be wearing one of these devices to tell your brain. | ||
| Yes, you do. | ||
| They're trying to tell you you're stupid. | ||
| You're stupid, you need this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please buy it. | |
| So, can I play... | ||
| We have a little trailer for the film. | ||
| Can I play it really quick? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Where's it at? | ||
| Check out Empire Files, and it's the most recent thing. | ||
| How long have you guys been independent, like ad-free? | ||
| Basically a year. | ||
| Right after I came on last year, the sanctions shut down our show, and so we had to do this giant fundraiser, and it was just absolutely very difficult to... | ||
| Yeah, here it is. | ||
| Let's check it out. | ||
| Empire Files, Gaza Fights for Freedom, and this is... | ||
| This is the little trailer for our film that just came out. | ||
| This is our eldest daughter. | ||
| She was my first joy. | ||
| She was killed. | ||
| She's a medic. | ||
| You want to read this? | ||
| First young female at the field volunteer. | ||
| As a girl, she was the first to go to the march encampments. | ||
| And everyone participated. | ||
| I too participated. | ||
| The whole family did. | ||
| My husband, my children, my neighbors, my siblings did too. | ||
| All Palestinians participated. | ||
| Our march is peaceful. | ||
| We do not carry weapons. | ||
| We go there with our fair chests. | ||
| We stand before a huge force of a fortified army with tanks, gas, and warplanes. | ||
| Our march is peaceful where we ask for our rights. | ||
| I have the right to have a country. | ||
| I have the right to have a home. | ||
| All those refugees have the right to return to their homes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So during this protest, is this when these people were shot? | |
| What we're seeing here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's a lot of people who are getting carried out. | ||
| Including little kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they're shooting at them. | ||
| And this is... | ||
| Isn't it time yet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
She says. | |
| Everyone around the world is sitting there watching us, and they're all comfortable with their lives. | ||
| Here we are under siege. | ||
| We have no borders, no life. | ||
| Where are we supposed to go? | ||
| So this is coming out in a couple weeks. | ||
| We're fine-tuning it, but we just had a big theatrical release in downtown, and it was really cool. | ||
| That's where you saw the Oliver Stone. | ||
| But yeah, it's sick. | ||
| I mean, you texted me that video of the kid, you know, another medic was just shot. | ||
| Yeah, there was something that Bala Muhammad, who's one of the UFC fighters, had on his Instagram, and I texted you that. | ||
| We... | ||
| It's so, again, this is another thing. | ||
| It's so difficult to understand what's actually going on. | ||
| There's so many pro-Israel people that put their head in the sand and don't want to look at some of these atrocities and don't want to look at some of the videos that you sent me of soldiers shooting at people that are not doing anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, yeah, I mean, their whole argument is that it's all Hamas and their human shields. | ||
| I mean, we looked through hundreds of hours of footage that these people gave us, and it's mind-blowing footage. | ||
| It looks absolutely cinematic and epic, but the footage is harrowing, and I didn't see one weapon. | ||
| I didn't see one militant, not one weapon. | ||
| It was literally people with slingshots throwing rocks at tanks. | ||
| It's kind of a rite of passage. | ||
| It's very symbolic. | ||
| They're not trying to hurt anyone. | ||
| No Israeli soldiers have been hurt. | ||
| Or killed during 2018, which is what the film looks at is through 2018 of the Great March of Return. | ||
| And there's not any weapons, there's no militants. | ||
| Hamas has nothing to do with the march. | ||
| And it's just shocking. | ||
| I mean, it's shocking how many war crimes were committed on camera. | ||
| And it's just amazing the propaganda that's just told to us about what this is and why they have the right to kill people that pose no threat to them. | ||
| When you were on last time and you talked about this, one of my email accounts was flooded with literally a chain letter, the same letter, like denouncing you and your lies and your anti-Semitic You know, that's a campaign. | ||
| You know that that has a lot of money behind it. | ||
| There's a lot of money behind that. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| The film is mind-blowing. | ||
| Go to GazaFightsForFreedom.com if you want to check it out when it gets released. | ||
| And it's just really incontrovertible, Joe. | ||
| I mean, even if it were a war between armies, all of these things that Israel has done are still documented war crimes and very grievous violations of international law. | ||
| And we're talking about direct targeting and assassinations by Israeli snipers of disabled people, of children, press, and medics. | ||
| And that's who Rezan was. | ||
| She was a medic. | ||
| And as you mentioned, another medic just passed away. | ||
| Was killed, rather. | ||
| I hate to use the passive voice because you always hear Palestinians died. | ||
| No, they were murdered. | ||
| They're all being murdered by snipers. | ||
| And they pose no threat to them. | ||
| And so the film looks at this UN investigation, basically during the March in 2018, and documents all of the grievous crimes and atrocities conducted by the Israeli military. | ||
| And I mean, you know, Palestine has a right to defend itself. | ||
| And this isn't even what that is. | ||
| But if you look at the UN Charter of 1978, they say that, you know, occupied peoples and besieged peoples have the right to... | ||
| Actually for armed self-defense. | ||
| And the fact that this is not even what that is, that there's literally people going out there in peace with their bared chests, holding flags, and they're getting killed and sniped. | ||
| There's so many amputations. | ||
| I mean, just in 2018 alone, there was 35 kids who were killed. | ||
| 900 shot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Yeah, that's children. | ||
| And, you know, some of these stories are harrowing. | ||
| A kid hiding behind a trash can who was sniped. | ||
| A kid who went up to the fence and just put a Palestinian flag and she was shot in the head and died instantly. | ||
| It just, it goes on and on and on. | ||
| And so, you know, we're just trying to document this to really kind of push the needle for accountability because these laws have been agreed upon by the international community, some of them 100 years ago. | ||
| And to have kind of a rogue state acting with complete impunity, knowing that it has total protection from the U.S. empire and given more freedom than ever under Trump with this Golan Heights thing and the moving of the Jerusalem embassy or the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem. | ||
| I mean, it's just... | ||
| It's abysmal, and it needs to be stopped, and they can't control the narrative any longer because we're seeing this with our own eyes, and that's what this film does, is really lays it all out. | ||
| Abby, you concentrate and focus on so many different fucked up parts of the world. | ||
| But you're very friendly and upbeat. | ||
| See, you're laughing at this. | ||
| How do you manage to maintain your sanity? | ||
| Because I have a hard time if I just watch one of your pieces. | ||
| I watch one of your clips and I just go, what the fuck? | ||
| And I just want to cry and I don't know what to do and I want to hug my kids. | ||
| But you're in the trenches every day, and you go to these places all the time. | ||
| How do you do it? | ||
| Well, I think that, well, first of all, I go and camp a lot. | ||
| I get into nature a lot, which is also kind of depressing, knowing that, you know, climate change and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But I try to get out and see the beauty of the world and understand my privilege, especially as an American citizen, because we can't afford to not be aware and we can't afford to not be educated in talking about these issues, especially when our government is subsidizing this around the world. | ||
| $10 million every day with our tax dollars. | ||
| I mean, this is going on and it's so close to home. | ||
| And we have to acknowledge our privilege and acknowledge the situation, which is we have agency. | ||
| We have agency to lobby our government to change this and to stop these criminal acts. | ||
| But do you ever feel that it's almost like you're absorbing too much because you are looking at all the problems of all the people, seven plus billion around the world and all these different horrific injustices? | ||
| I try to focus on what I can do and what I can do is challenge my own government. | ||
| And as an American citizen living in this society, I think that the U.S. Empire and the Pentagon is the source of a lot of problems around the world. | ||
| I look at the world as... | ||
| I mean, you have to understand the issues that are going on, especially with foreign policy in terms of the colonized and colonizers, the oppressed and oppressors, and the US's role as well as other previous empires role in shaping the world as it is today. | ||
| And a lot of the problems that have arisen are because directly U.S. foreign policy, whether it be the global war on terrorism, whether it be terrorism in general. | ||
| I mean, you know, drone strikes basically cause terrorism. | ||
| Whether it be the environmental crises, the Pentagon is actually the largest polluter in the world, more than 140 countries. | ||
| That's essentially every country in the world almost. | ||
| A bigger polluter than the top four chemical companies combined. | ||
| So it all kind of stems back from this notion that, you know, the US is the world's largest empire that's ever existed, and it needs to be stopped to save humanity. | ||
| And so as an American citizen, I look at all of the problems and I understand that there is like a very common root. | ||
| And I can do something about this common root. | ||
| And if you're looking at domestic problems, the lack of healthcare, the lack of education. | ||
| I mean, Martin Luther King called it decades ago. | ||
| He says, you know, a nation that spends more and more on military spending is facing social death. | ||
| I probably butchered his quote, but that's essentially the spiritual death, I think is what he said. | ||
| But I mean, that's exactly what's happening is when we're squandering all of our money, bolstering up this huge global empire. | ||
| We're not taking care of our people at home, our brothers and sisters at home. | ||
| My empathy extends as an internationalist all around the world. | ||
| I feel for my brothers and sisters in Palestine, Yemen. | ||
| Everywhere. | ||
| But I can only do what I can do based on what my government is doing. | ||
| And, you know, it's doing a lot. | ||
| It's doing a lot of horrible things. | ||
| And it's time for us to really acknowledge what those horrible things are because we need to reinvigorate an anti-war movement in this country. | ||
| And when you're saying that drone strikes create terrorism, what you're really saying is that, well, what people, if they don't understand, Drone strikes primarily kill civilians. | ||
| Overwhelming. | ||
| Yeah, it's a it's a really crazy number and it's this very strange sanitized way of handling an issue where if you had a person and you had some Rambo character you send them overseas. | ||
| You said hey, I want you to go get this ISIS terrorist and in the process kill everybody the fuck that you see everybody that's in front of them. | ||
| of them, that person would be a war criminal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you had a guy and he knew that some ISIS guy was in an apartment building, so he just started gunning down men, women, and children in that apartment building until he got to the terrorist, that guy would go to jail. | ||
| But if you do it with a remote control and you launch hellfire missiles out of a drone and it blows up the apartment building and kills all these innocent people, but also gets the terrorist, it's mission accomplished. | ||
| And it's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy that we're signing off on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| What gives us the right to kill people? | ||
| It's a thing because we're not there where there's this weird sort of a bridge that we're allowed to cross. | ||
| Into this really sickening act. | ||
| When you have anything that's ineffective to the point where most of the people it kills are good people, or at least are innocent people, we should say. | ||
| I mean, this is not saying... | ||
| That there's not terrorism. | ||
| It's not saying there's not horrible people in Iceland. | ||
| There is, absolutely. | ||
| Look, I'm a pro-military person. | ||
| I think we need military. | ||
| And I think, just like the same, we need cops. | ||
| But to deny that cops sometimes are bad is fucking crazy. | ||
| To deny that sometimes when you allow the military-industrial complex to do things like Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you look at, you know, the last 10 years, you look at some of these terrorists who have conducted terrorist acts, you look at actually what their intention was, and a lot of them, the vast majority, literally cite U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| Revenge. | ||
| U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| I mean, every time you kill 98% innocent people, whoever survives, if you lost your whole family in that, you have an incredible amount of motivation to get back at whoever did it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that whoever did it is the United States. | ||
| We need to stop normalizing this. | ||
| And, you know, militarily speaking, Trump actually, you know, it's not just Trump. | ||
| I mean, this is a bipartisan effort throughout the entire Congress. | ||
| If there's one thing Congress can agree upon, it's to make nonviolent BDS efforts against Israel legal and also to just keep ramping up the military and egging on whoever's sitting in the Oval Office to be more militaristic. | ||
| And that's exactly what's happened with Trump in a bizarre way. | ||
| I mean, Congress approved like a near trillion dollar defense budget. | ||
| And the increase alone in the last year was basically Russia's entire military budget, more than Russia's entire military budget. | ||
| That's how much the shit's ramping up. | ||
| And then you have the Space Force. | ||
| I mean, it's just like, how far is this going to go? | ||
| The society is collapsing. | ||
| If you looked at the argument against this, you would say, we need this in order to keep people safe here. | ||
| That would be the argument against it. | ||
| My question would be, what threat is there? | ||
| ISIS. When has ISIS ever done anything here other than, I mean, there was like a truck. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| We already know the statistics on terrorism in this country. | ||
| And they're very low, right? | ||
| I mean, you're basically more likely to die from like furniture falling on you in your apartment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the whole ISIS thing, I mean, as we know, ISIS arose out of U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| The failed state in Libya, the Iraq war that's still criminally ongoing. | ||
| I mean, Trump announced this indefinite extension of the criminal occupation of Iraq. | ||
| It's just crazy how normalized this is. | ||
| You know, far longer than Vietnam, we're in Afghanistan, fatalities at an all-time high. | ||
| All of these things are a direct result of U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| And look at the refugee crisis. | ||
| Look at immigration. | ||
| The Honduras coup. | ||
| All of this shit's connected. | ||
| And that's what we need to start like expanding our consciousness and our empathy worldwide to understand all of these things are linked and the struggle is all linked. | ||
| And our world is shrinking really rapidly. | ||
| What candidate speaks in this way? | ||
| Like what candidate do you think understands and recognizes all these things that you're talking about? | ||
| I mean, Mike Gravel is the only one who's like, we need to end the U.S. empire. | ||
| Bernie and Tulsi. | ||
| Who is Mike Gravel? | ||
| Mike Gravel was, he was the guy who basically read the Pentagon Papers into record. | ||
| He's a good guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's running for president? | |
| Yeah, he has like this online campaign that's really awesome. | ||
| But, I mean, Tulsi's speaking a lot about regime change wars, which is extremely important. | ||
| But she still believes in drone strikes. | ||
| She basically has a little bit of Obama's foreign policy that I don't agree with that fundamental understanding. | ||
| Does she believe in limited drone strikes? | ||
| Like maybe if there's an ISIS camp somewhere? | ||
| I mean, I can't believe that she believes in some sort of just broad brush use of it. | ||
| I haven't looked into the nuances of that, but I do think that no one is saying what I want them to about U.S. empire, about scaling back the U.S. empire and stopping all of the civil society movements because it's not just about invasions anymore. | ||
| It's about usurping the democratic processes of all of these countries, like what we've done in Venezuela, what we're doing all around the world to try to foment unrest. | ||
| All of this needs to be stopped. | ||
| Do you foresee a time where our dependence on foreign oil is radically reduced to the point where it doesn't justify these regime change wars and our dependence on these resources that these people have? | ||
| Almost every conflict in the world, you can boil down to the acquisition of resources. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And also the protection of capital. | ||
| And that's like what a lot of it is now is actually just capital interests needing to expand and grow and continuing to up and increase the profit structure of these corporations. | ||
| And that's exactly why we've seen imperialism kind of go out of control in the way that it has. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I thought that we were more independent oil-wise. | ||
| I don't think it's good. | ||
| I think that climate change... | ||
| And it hasn't stopped. | ||
| It hasn't stopped the imperialist misadventures of the U.S. government. | ||
| So, I think there just needs to be a really big shift in consciousness and people to stop thinking that it's our right and that we have the right and the duty to do this around the world. | ||
| It doesn't give us the right. | ||
| We don't have... | ||
| It's not right, man. | ||
| It's really not. | ||
| And we need to really reinvigorate the masses here because, again, society is collapsing. | ||
| That's pretty fucking obvious. | ||
| Well, if it's not obvious, what is obvious is that we're not evolving in terms of If we're still involved in drone strikes that kill 98% of people, if we're still involved in regime change wars, we're still involved in these unnecessary military actions against Iran, these things that people are freaking out about, this is all the same kind of shit that people have been fighting against forever, that we don't want... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is what they're being told. | ||
| And when they're going to these places, they're not going to those places to act as evil, as the boots of some empire. | ||
| They're going over there because they think they're protecting freedom. | ||
| They think they're protecting their family and their loved ones back home. | ||
| That's why they're doing it. | ||
| We're still doing that. | ||
| We're not evolving. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's what's so scary about the Iran thing, because the people who are surrounding Iran and being directed to go out there, they're the ones who are going to be the sacrificial lambs for these defense contractors. | ||
| And I don't think that you can argue anymore that this is for freedom. | ||
| I mean, how can you? | ||
| What threat does Iran pose to the United States? | ||
| It's a tough sell. | ||
| I don't understand what threat they serve either. | ||
| And what benefit would it be for them to start some shit with us? | ||
| That is the craziest idea ever. | ||
| It's like a nine-year-old kid trying to pick a fight with Mike Tyson. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| What are you trying to do? | ||
| Trying to get killed? | ||
| I mean, inevitably we're trying to get to the global confrontation with China and Russia, I guess. | ||
| I mean, it's scary to think that we only have a couple independent states left to knock down to be under complete subjugation from the U.S. military and global capitalism. | ||
| It's pretty nuts. | ||
| Well, not only that, even if we do move into some sort of a situation where we're in control, then we're a bigger target. | ||
| And with the amount of nuclear weapons that are possessed by these countries that were, I mean, just what North Korea has, just this one small fucked up country, could ruin life on Earth. | ||
| Just this one country. | ||
| And forget about Russia. | ||
| We could literally annihilate each other. | ||
| That's a possibility. | ||
| I mean, if someone chose to launch an attack, if they decided that they have the justification to launch an attack, then all of a sudden we're in a real war. | ||
| Like a fucking war-war where people are invading us. | ||
| Shits get knocked down, buildings and bombs blow up. | ||
| I mean, over what? | ||
| This can't be avoided? | ||
| This is the only way? | ||
| The only way is missiles and bombs? | ||
| Like you said, we're not evolving or devolving. | ||
| I mean, it's unbelievable. | ||
| We have the capacity to provide for everyone. | ||
| We have the capacity to cooperate, to innovate. | ||
| And we're stuck. | ||
| We're stuck dehumanizing the other. | ||
| We're stuck with this mass conditioning to basically perpetuate these injustices. | ||
| And it's really a shame. | ||
| I mean, we have all the information at our fingertips, but we still keep reverting back to what's the myths that underpin our society. | ||
| These conversations I have with you are so depressing. | ||
| Because I always leave going, what the fuck? | ||
| What can be done? | ||
| What can we do? | ||
| Where does it end? | ||
| Where does it go? | ||
| These are the big questions. | ||
| And then also, what we discussed before, it's impossible for anyone to really have a deep, nuanced understanding of all these different issues. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I mean, I think focusing on what you can do, we can only do what we can do. | ||
| And you have to understand that you can't get debilitated or disillusioned with the influx of information or just the complete... | ||
| You know, the heaviness of it all. | ||
| You just have to do what you can do. | ||
| You're doing what you can do. | ||
| You have me on to help spread awareness about these issues and that's what you can do. | ||
| That's my annual freakout. | ||
| The Abby Martin freakout. | ||
| You're about to get spammed with a lot of Hasbro. | ||
| They don't have my real email. | ||
|
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It's okay. | |
| But that's what we can do, Joe. | ||
| And you just have to live your life and provide for your kids and love what you have. | ||
| But also just understand your place, you know, and just extend the empathy that you can and just, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's hard because I don't have the answer. | ||
| All I know is what's needed. | ||
| And what's needed is we need a movement of the masses. | ||
| It's not going to come from the top-down world. | ||
| It's gonna come from a grassroots mobilized effort to try to change these policies. | ||
| That's the only way things have ever changed in the past. | ||
| And I absolutely have hope and optimism that we're gonna change things and that we're going to correct this horrible path that we're on. | ||
| Do you think that the 2020 elections can have a real significant impact of any of this? | ||
| Do you think that whoever gets into office can really have an effect on the kind of policies that we're talking about with the kind of influence of the military-industrial complex, of all these lobbyists, of Wall Street, of all these monstrous machines that this pure, good old-fashioned democracy can actually step in and turn this ship away from the rocks? | ||
| Bernie, I really do think that he's one of our last chances. | ||
| Not because I think that he's going to completely do some revolutionary upheaval from the top down. | ||
| As we know, Congress is stacked with a lot of terrible people who will block a lot of these efforts. | ||
| But I think that he's going to mobilize the masses and reinvigorate the labor movement and reinvigorate unions. | ||
| Help workers understand that they need to fight for these rights that have been eviscerated over the last hundred years. | ||
| One thing that does inspire me as well is seeing people like Ilhan Omar. | ||
| She is incredible. | ||
| She's a Somali refugee. | ||
| She advocates BDS against Israel and she does not fucking back down. | ||
| I love that woman. | ||
| What an incredible woman. | ||
| She got viciously attacked for retweeting one of my episodes from Empire Files, and I think it just shows how scared people are of her and her ideas. | ||
| And you saw how hard everyone came down on her for just saying that Israel has an influential lobby in D.C. Yeah. | ||
| Well, she's also wearing religious garb, so people are scared of that right away, the hijab. | ||
| And then there was some hit piece on her. | ||
| Yesterday, they're saying they think she married a brother. | ||
| Oh, that's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, they think she, to get into this country, that she had a religious marriage, but then she had another, yeah, I don't know what. | ||
| She's the only one in Congress other than Tlaib and, of course, AOC and, you know, some other very few people. | ||
| But she's out there every day speaking against the military-industrial complex, speaking against the wars. | ||
| I think as a refugee, she understands the effects of U.S. policy. | ||
| And I'm really excited that she has a voice in there. | ||
| But again, I don't think that the hope is going to come from within Congress. | ||
| And the system is way too far gone with the Electoral College and the gerrymandering and the voter rights that have been rescinded. | ||
| It's a lot and it's an uphill battle. | ||
| But that's why someone like Bernie, I think, will turn to the people and say, I can't do this alone. | ||
| You have to come out and get my back. | ||
| And we have to have millions of people in the streets demanding these things. | ||
| That's the only way it's going to work. | ||
| All right, Abby. | ||
| You freaked me out. | ||
| Thank God Andrew Santino is going on later and we're going to get high and talk shit. | ||
| Get high. | ||
| Get high. | ||
| Check out Empire Files. | ||
| Empire Files, Media Roots Radio, Eyes Left, my partner Mike's podcast, and donate to keep us alive, man. | ||
| Gaza Fights for Freedom. | ||
| Tell people how to donate. | ||
| Go to GazaFightsForFreedom.com, go to TheEmpireFiles.tv, and check out our Patreon, GoFundMe, and PayPal, because we've got to keep independent media alive and keep addressing these issues. | ||
| And you truly are independent. | ||
| Truly, 100%. | ||
| You are one of the very rare ones out there. | ||
| Thank you, my friend. | ||
| Love you, Joe. | ||
| Thank you so much, man. |
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