Jesse Ventura critiques the "unholy alliance" between media and politicians, arguing Wall Street's fear of socialism turned former allies into enemies. He supports Kaepernick's protests, advocates full legalization of all drugs as a medical issue, and blames William Randolph Hearst for marijuana prohibition. Ventura alleges the Democratic National Convention was fixed to secure Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders while opposing Trump's immigration policies but supporting his outsider status. Ultimately, he attributes ISIS's rise to colonialism and predicts a rigged election, suggesting systemic corruption drives current geopolitical failures. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm not just talking about the obviously insane people like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but also the regular people in your life, like your coworker, your friend, and your cousin.
We're all going completely bonkers over this freaking election.
People are losing friends, blocking family members on social media, and screaming at perfect strangers.
I'd say we've hit rock bottom, but with 60 days until the election, I don't even think we're halfway there yet.
Maybe the worst part about this election fiasco is that nobody knows who to trust anymore.
Our mainstream media has failed us by cozying up to the very people they were supposed to be watching.
There's an unholy alliance between members of the media and politicians to never really accomplish much of anything.
If you're in the media, the less you analyze and the less you question, the higher you'll climb.
If you're a politician, the more you pander, and the less you tell the truth, the more votes you'll get.
The fox isn't just guarding the hen house, but he's set up shop in there and he's selling the eggs to the highest bidder.
Of course, it's not just mainstream media that's the problem here.
Online media has in many cases gone from refreshing and necessary to discredited and untrustworthy.
When everyone is reporting on the news, nobody is.
When everyone has a website, nobody does.
And when anyone with money can fund another operation that looks like a place of journalism, when it's really just a front for propaganda, well, then we're officially in trouble.
People often ask me who in the news I trust, and at this point I'm really not sure who to say.
There's so much noise out there, coming at us from so many different directions, that pilfering some truth out of the void is almost impossible.
It doesn't have to be like this, nor was it always like this, but somewhere along the way we got distracted by scandals and drama instead of focusing on issues and reality.
Plenty of good people have tried to warn us and tried to correct course, but we didn't heed their warning and now we're left with a system that is chugging along despite itself, not because it's working as it was intended to.
I'm not one of the people who want to burn down the system at all costs, but if right now, at this very moment, we can't recognize that something is very wrong, then is there any chance we'll ever wake up?
All that said, it's still pretty great here in the U.S.
of A. People all over the world still want to come here to make a better life for themselves, and you don't see many Americans leaving here to go make a better life elsewhere.
Despite how nauseating this election is, look how engaged citizens are.
This country is still a melting pot of people from every corner of the globe who came here to make a better life for themselves and their children.
Yes, we have our problems, but most of the world In the midst of all this craziness, one of the most important things any of us can do is figure out what we stand for.
As the old adage says, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.
And maybe that, more than anything else, explains our current political situation.
Nobody in government has really stood for much of anything for the past few years, and because of that, the masses have now elected two of the least favorable candidates in American history.
Washington and Lincoln?
They are not.
All the way back in 1999, a former pro wrestler and movie star named Jesse Ventura ran perhaps the most unlikely campaign in American history.
As a member of the Reform Party, he ran against the Democrats, the Republicans, and the system as a whole.
Despite all odds, Ventura won the election and became possibly the biggest outsider ever elected to be governor in our entire country's history.
Though he left the Reform Party after just a year in office, Ventura had a pretty successful run as governor.
He lowered income tax, oversaw several successful infrastructure projects, and perhaps most importantly, got new people, especially young people, involved in politics.
Unfortunately, the grind in the system did eventually wear him down, and he didn't run for re-election in 2003.
Since leaving office, Ventura has been involved in politics, teaching, writing, and hosting a couple TV shows, most recently on my old home at OraTV.
He revels in being politically incorrect, he calls out both sides, and he isn't afraid to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole.
While I don't agree with everything he says, I love having voices like his out there, keeping the people in power in check.
So my call to you this week, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Jesse Ventura, is to be a little more like him in one regard.
Don't be afraid to say what you think and share your ideas in the public square.
We need more people like you to be outspoken now more than ever so we don't only hear from the crazy people.
It's not about whether you're right or wrong, it's about whether you're willing to stand up and be counted.
Otherwise, we're just gonna let the inmates run the asylum.
No, I'm right this moment in the heart of Manhattan, so that's hardly off the grid.
No, I'm in the middle of a book tour and I had to fly to New York and I'll spend four days out here doing the massive publicity stuff that you do with every book and then I'll go back to Minnesota and then I've just signed a new contract with Russian Television America So I'll be getting ready to do 32 shows for them.
We'll crank out 8 of them and then I'll go to Mexico and then at some point I'll do 8 more and we haven't figured out exactly when, where and how yet.
But it won't be off the grid because now that I work for Russia they don't have the political pull and the paperwork to do the show from Mexico.
So it can't be off the grid anymore.
I'll be doing it from Minnesota, which, of course, is on the grid.
Yeah, isn't that ultimately what so many of our decisions ultimately come down to?
That there's just so much money out there that we always need a new enemy.
And not to say, look, Putin's doing some strange stuff in Ukraine, obviously, and some other places, but that we're always looking for another enemy just because that is the money machine.
Yeah, and it seems that God has a bunch of believers who are all mixed up, because a lot of people are killing in the name of God, too, even if he says don't do it.
Does that madden you when you see that people simply don't understand the two-way street that freedom really is?
Because he has the freedom to do it in that he doesn't have to stand for it.
And then other people have the freedom to mock him, so no one's saying they don't have the freedom to mock him, but that people don't understand that sort of social contract that we have.
Yeah, so what do you make of the way that the Feds, and Obama particularly, has dealt with marijuana?
Because we know that in a lot of states now it's medicinally legal, we've got a couple recreationally legal.
I'm here in California, I have a license for it, and I don't even smoke that often, but I thought if I'm gonna do it, let me go ahead and get the license.
Sure.
But Obama and the feds have come in and they close medicinal dispensaries here, even though they're legal by the state.
You know, the irony here, of course, is that all of these prescription drugs that everybody's taking, all you have to do is watch any of the commercials, the commercials, half of the commercials telling you about the side effects, and then, with the ultimate irony, it's usually marijuana that will deal with those side effects.
So what do we do?
So do we need, basically, like, Starbucks to come in and say, we're gonna start corporatizing marijuana?
I would rather have some micro-brew or some brew that's handmade in Minnesota and doesn't sit in a can on a shelf for months before I buy it in a liquor store.
Well, that's what you can do if you eliminate the corporations from marijuana.
Then you'll have local, it'll be locally grown, it'll be local everything.
And that's why in Ohio it failed.
Because they had picked out only two corporations that would control the whole thing, and the marijuana smokers said bullshit.
That's bull crap.
We want it to where anybody can grow it, anyone can use it.
We want it free like the plant is.
The plant grows wild.
It was here before we got here and ran off the Indians or the Native Americans.
It was growing here, so why shouldn't it be able to grow wild and you be able to harvest it without having to pay the government to do it?
Obviously you're fully for legalizing marijuana, but that always then, it hearkens the next question, which is, well, does he want to legalize cocaine and heroin and everything else down the road?
Tomorrow morning, let's imagine, go to a hypothetical.
Let's say tomorrow morning we could magically make Starbucks and all caffeine coffee disappear.
What do you think would happen to society tomorrow morning if all these addicts, and I use the term addicts because they are addicted, And people need to understand that.
If you have to have coffee in the morning, how dare you talk about any other drug?
I could buy as many cigarettes as I wanted and fill the semi up.
I could drive to five liquor stores, and I could buy all their booze and fill the semi up, and nobody'd question me as long as my credit card could pay for it.
A Colorado resident can only buy one ounce at a time, and if you're not from Colorado, you can only get a half an ounce.
That ain't freedom.
That means it's still highly restricted.
So when they talk about it's legal now, no, it isn't really.
Interesting.
Because they still limit how much you can buy.
And why should the government have any say whatsoever in how you spend your money or if you want to buy, oh, 45 outboard motor engines, even though you don't have a boat.
So one more thing on marijuana, and then let's talk about those Democrats and Republicans, because I have a feeling you have a couple things to say about them as well.
Okay.
Is the most fascinating part about marijuana that it's almost, The reverse of every other vice.
So, for example, with booze, if you drink, we know you build a resistance to it.
You need more to drink.
If you do smoke crack or snort coke or drink coffee, you always need more.
Marijuana, I find, and I can firmly say this for me, I used to smoke a lot of marijuana.
Now I could maybe take one puff and I'm good for hours, and I do that maybe once a week.
So it actually has like a built-in regulation system to it, too.
We are in the midst of, I think, what pretty much everybody is saying is the craziest election, at least in modern times.
As a true outsider who made it through the bullshit, you got through the system, ran on the Reform Party ticket, 99, became governor of Minnesota, What do you make of just, before we get into the two of them, what do you just make of the state of the system at the moment?
It sounds like the beginning of a plot of a movie that you should have been in in like 87 and then you and Schwarzenegger go in there and clean up shit.
So do you think the real missed opportunity here then was that instead of Bernie just acquiescing and sort of being put down by Hillary and the DNC, that he should be the third party guy right now?
I get it with Gary Johnson.
I did a video a couple weeks ago saying we have to at least support this guy until the debates because we need another voice in there.
But do you think Bernie actually missed his moment here?
And all I got to ask him was the important question.
I said, Senator Sanders, if you fail to defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, will you keep the revolution going by either running as an Independent or throw your support to an Independent?
He looked me right in the eye and said, nope, I will endorse Hillary.
Right there I said, he's a phony because he's a Democrat.
And for him to now mask himself as an independent is phony.
Bernie Sanders is a Democrat.
Because once he said he'd endorse Hillary Clinton no matter what, that made him a Democrat in my book.
He wouldn't even go outside, he wouldn't continue the movement.
So all those people out there that endorsed and got so behind Bernie Sanders, you got hoodwinked.
Yeah, and those people are not excited to vote for Hillary.
So let's talk about Hillary for a second.
I mean, from everything that you've said here and everything that I know that you believe about money and politics and a corrupt system and politicians that lie and a media that helps them lie, it strikes me that Hillary is the pinnacle of that.
And the fact that she... Here's the most important thing to me.
The most important vote Hillary Clinton ever took as a senator, she admits she blew it.
She voted for the Iraq War.
And now she says it was a mistake?
So sending our kids to war, the most important vote you could possibly take as a politician, Hillary got it wrong and admits to it now, so we're gonna put her thumb on the button?
Yeah, and by the way, whatever you think of Benghazi specifically, she was Secretary of State for what we've done in Libya, and now all hell has broken loose over there too.
So there's a series of bad decisions.
I'm curious, do you give any of the people that voted for Iraq, Do you give any of them a little bit of a leash because of the way we now know that the information, that the intelligence community told them things that weren't true?
Sure, and we always have money to do it, even though we somehow don't have money
to fix our infrastructure and our roads and all that.
So alright, let's put Hillary aside now and let's move to Trump.
I'm gonna partly put some words in your mouth to preface this.
I have a feeling that you kinda like Trump.
That just on the outsider part of it, the wrestling part of it, the breaking the system, getting through the bullshit, saying things off the top of your head, for that portion of it, I'm gonna say that you're pro-Trump.
I can't think of, I'm gonna have to Google that after and find out what's what.
So I know a certain amount of people are gonna hear you and they're gonna say, wait a minute, Ventura wants open borders and blah, blah, blah.
What would you say about, because you also don't trust the government, so it puts your position in an interesting spot, because I'm with you, but then it comes to, all right, well, how do we vet people properly?
And I don't trust that the government will do it properly or knows how to do it properly or even can do it properly.
You have to bring home and close our 178 military bases throughout the world and bring our kids home.
And then use our military to protect our border.
I heard an interview where a BBC guy was grilling President Putin of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and he was really getting on him about Russia's aggression.
And Putin very calmly said to him, well, let's really talk about this openly.
Russia has two military bases outside of the country of Russia.
The United States, I believe, has something like 178.
What you have in the Middle East today is blowback.
It is blowback from colonialism.
You have to go way back to then.
When Europe colonialized the whole world and went through that, when they got to the Middle East, they made the countries to benefit them, the Europeans.
They didn't make the countries to benefit the people who lived there.
You had three warring factions there.
The Shiites, the Kurds, and the Sunnis.
Rather than giving them all their own country, They put all three of them in every country.
Look, if you want one other example of that, it's that we have a military dictatorship now after they tried democracy in Egypt, and it's one of the only stable places.
Governor, I know you have to go, so real quick, who is winning this election?
All right, well, it's always a pleasure talking to you, Governor.
I know you got a long day of press ahead of you, so I wanna thank Governor Jesse Ventura for joining me on the show this week, and you guys can check out his new book, The Marijuana Manifesto.
Jesse Ventura's Marijuana Manifesto in the link that is right down below.