Huffington Post Was Just Put On The Chopping Block, Layoffs Announced At Leftist Media
Huffington Post Was Just Put On The Chopping Block, Layoffs Announced At Leftist Media. Verizon has been seeking to sell off the Huffington Post, a move which will likely result in layoffs regardless of the result.The company is seeking to slim down its digital media business at a time when many media companies are facing shortfalls, budget cuts, and layoffs.CNN, VICE, Buzzfeed, Verizon, Disney and more have faced declining viewership, ratings, and revenues for the past few years and this is just another trend is the downfall of leftist and far left digital media. At the same time conservative media seems to be seeing a resurgence with Fox News doing particularly well in growth and ratings.This all follows a trend of companies basically following "get woke go broke" as a business plan. Vice for instance used to be edgey and taboo but now follows the establishment political orthodoxy. Not too long after getting woke they started to go broke.Vice News sadly has merged with Viceland after being canceled on HBO.The trend of collapsing leftist media will likely continue and with it the political push toward the far left. It could be possible that the exploitation of social justice narratives persists or that it fades with the passing of social justice digital media.
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It may be the biggest news in the downfall of digital media that we've been seeing occur over the past few years.
Regardless of whether or not Verizon can actually sell the Huffington Post, I think it's fair to say we can expect layoffs.
If they can't sell and they want to deprioritize, they're going to cut costs.
And if they do sell, the new buyer is going to want to streamline things.
But this is all occurring around another big story in the downfall of media.
Vice just had layoffs last month, and there's a lot of news pertaining to Vice News being cancelled, the merger of Vice News and Viceland, and all of these are smaller stories that, on their own, didn't warrant a bigger video, but now we can see the fuller picture.
So the question I've asked over and over again is, why are these media outlets failing?
At the same time, conservative media is doing particularly well, as well as moderate centrist, and even, to an extent, liberal, that's not so ideologically, you know, intersectional, I would say.
What is the cause?
Well, I think I've just described it for you.
What I want to do is we'll go over the latest news and I want to talk about what I see as somebody who is.
I would still say to an extent I'm an insider with some of these organizations because of the organizations I'm a member of and the people I regularly communicate with, but admittedly I'm not as much of an insider in media as I used to be.
But I could predict this.
Let me tell you from the determination of Splinter News, which just happened only a week or two ago.
That used to be called Fusion.
I worked there.
I warned them this would happen.
From Vice.
I used to work there as well.
I warned them that this would happen and now we are seeing these companies take the big hit and I believe it has to do with their partisan, ideological, left-wing push.
Let's get started with the story from the Financial Times.
Verizon seeks buyer for Huffington Post website.
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Here's the story from Financial Times.
Verizon is sounding out potential buyers for the Huffington Post website in the latest phase of the U.S.
telecom group's retreat from the digital media business in recent weeks.
Verizon has raised a HuffPost sale with potential acquirers, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
No formal sale process has been launched, and talks remain at an early stage.
A spokesperson for Verizon said, we don't comment on rumors and speculation.
The attempt to sell the progressive news site is a sign of how Verizon is continuing to slim down the family of dot-com businesses it amassed with the costly acquisition of Yahoo and AOL, assets it wrote down by almost $5 billion earlier this year.
Last month, Verizon sold Tumblr for a reported nominal amount after buying the social network for $1.1 billion in 2013.
So here's the important takeaway.
Verizon is seeking to slim down.
Period.
Even if they don't sell, they still are on track to slim down.
I expect we'll see layoffs.
They say.
Verizon formed its media division from the merger of AOL, which Verizon bought for $4.4 billion in 2015, and Yahoo.
So we get all that.
I don't think we need to necessarily get into all that, but let's get back to the digital media.
They say.
Since the time of the deal, digital media groups once hailed as the future of news business have struggled to meet the sky-high expectations for their sector, especially as online advertising revenues have been swallowed up by Google and Facebook.
Some companies, such as Rookie, have closed while newsrooms at Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox have faced job cuts.
Consolidation has swept the sector as financially strapped digital media groups seek scale.
In just the past month, Vice Media acquired Refinery29, the woman-focused millennial website, while Group9 bought PopSugar and Vox acquired New York Media, owner of the namesake magazine.
They want to say that the Huffington Post, a liberal news site founded in 2005 by a group of publishers, including Arianne Huffington, was bought by AOL for $315 million in 2011.
Let's move on to the Vice story.
So we can see that's the big first takeaway is Huffington Post is likely facing dire straits.
They're trying to sell, which means I can't imagine that either the revenue isn't there, the traffic isn't there, or they just don't want to deal with it.
I imagine like we saw with Gizmodo and Gawker and these other progressive digital outlets, there's going to be a slimming down and a restructuring.
With the Gizmodo companies, notably I believe it's Gizmodo, Deadspin, The publishers want to get straight to sports and cut out the politics.
And this made the staff angry.
Specifically because they said, politics generates traffic.
I'll tell you what though, that's true, but you can also separate your politics from your sports and have a dedicated sports website.
Well, check this out.
Vice News Tonight, the Vice News daily show from HBO, was cancelled.
And this is back in August.
Check this out.
Vice News Tonight lands at Viceland Cable Network.
Here's the thing.
Viceland is owned by Vice.
This says that Vice News could not get picked up.
Now, this is a bit personal, because I was the first and founding member of Vice News.
I joined Vice before there was a Vice News, and I was the first person working on what eventually became Vice News.
I don't want to act like I was the leader because there was a lot of people involved, but I was the first.
And I'm credited by Shane as being the inspiration for moving into straight news reporting.
And now I can see it's not doing so well.
Because about a month after this they announced, Vice News to merge with Viceland amid layoffs and pivot away from entertainment.
Yes.
Vice Land, the cable network, has laid people off and is now basically just becoming Vice News, which means you can imagine that the cable channel itself is slimmed down to basically what Vice News was.
Not only that, and I'm not trying to be mean because I like the guys at Vice, I have a lot of respect for them, but the ratings were never there and they just air reruns of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia for the most part.
Seriously.
So I got a couple more stories, but we can check this out.
From February 10th, 2018, we can see the downward spiral was upon us even back then.
Nielsen ratings show Viceland's reach for Millennials fell short, showing that Viceland only pulled in around 100,000 viewers for the 2017 period.
Now, I don't know exactly how they're quantifying what 100,000 viewer is.
I would be shocked if 100,000 viewers was unique viewership.
However, I have to stress, in my opinion, I would imagine that unique viewership is, or total viewership, is the ideal metric.
If they're talking about 100,000 viewers at once for one of their programs, why would they say all of their viewership?
Certainly they'd want to claim it was more, but my understanding is this may be that at any given moment they're hitting around 100,000 viewers, which is typical of most cable networks.
It may be lower, and they mention that A&E gets around 1 million viewers over the same period, but I have to stress, when you say viewers, At least on the internet, we don't refer to concurrent viewership.
Because I have 42 million viewers over the past 30 days for my channels.
I wouldn't want to make that seem like it was less.
In terms of unique viewership, meaning a unique individual and how many videos they've watched, it's around, I think, 6 or so million.
So it's much less.
The average person watches around 8 to 10 videos.
But let's move on, because here's the question I had, and I'm sure many of you are wondering.
Great, we've seen these companies are taking major hits.
They're on the decline.
Well, as I've stated before, I believe this heavily, heavily has to do with the idea of getting woke and going broke.
I know you may have heard me make this comment before and tell the story, but listen.
You know, I worked for these companies.
I was in these offices, talking with their marketing people, asking them, What was their goal?
And they all basically told me, because generations tend to skew to the left, we must adopt left-wing politics, because that's what's going to be in the future mainstream.
That's what Vice did.
In reality, though, that's not the case.
Generation Z has moved slightly more conservative, still more progressive than Gen Xers, which means when trying to build a media brand, for one, you can't grow forever.
But, Vice didn't always, didn't always push this progressive, identitarianist kind of policy.
And now we can see there's other news, that Viceline cancels Vice Live less than two months in.
They've tried pushing a more progressive view, and it just doesn't work.
And here we can see the expose from 2017.
Mike's Drop.
For those who aren't familiar, Mike was a progressive, social justice-themed digital media outlet once valued at, I believe, $100 million, maybe $60.
How Mike.com exploited social justice for clicks and then abandoned a staff that believed in it.
So here's what I think we can see happening.
These media companies, for some reason, believed this was a path to revenue.
Mike, essentially, well, they were wrong.
They ended up selling for, I believe, around $5 million after many staff were laid off.
We saw ThinkProgress, you know, they're not funded at this point.
This story is repeating itself.
Based on my experience and the success I've had after leaving Fusion and leaving Vice, I truly believe I made the right decision when I warned them, do not adopt a fringe political faction's views.
Twitter is not real life.
And they refused.
They said, you're wrong.
They're also misled by Facebook analytics, and they chase after things that would not help them in the future.
And thus we can see Huffington Post now on the chopping block, and it's mind-blowing.
But a couple years after this, we saw another story from Huffington Post.
The fall of Mike was a warning.
Yes, it was.
Two years ago, we told you, if you are pushing the fake social justice narrative for clicks, you will not make it.
It was a warning, they say.
Two years later, they wrote this.
Well, I'm sorry.
When I worked for Vice, and then I worked for Fusion, I warned them too.
I saw this coming.
You know Fusion, only like a couple months, I believe it was, after I left, I could be wrong, they laid off 200 to 250 staff members.
They eventually sold the Fusion property, turned it to Splinter News, and then lo and behold, Splinter shuts down.
I told them.
Listen, I don't think you need to be partisan.
I think you need to call out the fake news and stop lying to people.
But they were chasing after viral content and rage bait.
So they decided to use socially acceptable political commentary, targeting hyperbolic, you know, using hyperbolic statements to exaggerate small moments, and eventually people say we don't care anymore.
The same's gonna be true for me and anybody else.
If you just focus on one thing, if you build your identity around this cause and try and pretend you're a noble warrior, eventually people say, I see through this enough.
So I've been doing this for, what, eight or nine years now, and I have repeatedly warned them that you- you- look.
During Occupy Wall Street, I was smeared as a leftist.
Now today, I'm smeared as a conservative.
The same is always true.
I will tell you, I don't care for your tribe at all.
Period.
I call it like I see it.
But let's ask this question.
What is the result of what these media companies did?
Mike.com, as we can see, was exploiting social justice for clicks.
One of the big things that these media companies wanted when they hired someone was natural reach.
You got a good Twitter following?
Okay, we're gonna hire you.
This resulted in many people desperately trying to generate followers so they could be more appealing in the media market.
Recently, I'm not going to pull up, there's leaked DMs that I'm not going to claim are true or not, just, you know, I saw them and I don't have it in front of me, showing that there is a particular social justice writer saying, listen, I got to pay my bills, essentially.
You know, if they're going to pay me, I'm going to write what they want me to write.
And that's what we saw years ago with Mike.
It's what I was seeing within these companies.
They were chasing after revenue because they're for-profit businesses.
I understand why they do that.
But in the end, they have done a few things.
By creating this class of social justice writers, and then we can look to this right here.
From Medium.
Who are Twitter's verified users?
A deep dive into more than 100,000 of social media giant's top users shows that journalists and sports figures dominate the platform.
This is from 2015.
And it probably hasn't been updated.
You know, it's been several years, so I'm using old sources.
But back then, 25% of verified Twitter users were journalists.
It makes sense.
Twitter is an excellent platform for up-to-date information.
But what happens then when you have companies that are employing social justice activists to exploit them for clicks?
The journalist class then starts spiraling around ideas of social justice, and as I've showed before, the LexisNexis analytics, where you can see a major spike around the beginning of 2010 in all of these social justice terms.
Yes, people were interested at first, but they have scraped the bottom of the barrel so hard, they're pulling up wood chips.
Let's move on from here.
Check this out.
Twitter is not America.
A new Pew study finds a gulf between the general population and Twitter users.
That's right.
It skews liberal.
They say, according to Pew, 42% of sample users had a college degree versus 31% for you as adults.
They say that Twitter users are statistically younger, wealthier, and more politically liberal than the general population.
What do you think you get, then, when you have a media industry that prioritizes the amount of followers you have to get a job?
When you have Twitter, which is mostly journalists as it is, you're going to find that in urban centers where people are typically liberal, companies will typically be run by progressives, liberals, and leftists.
They're going to look for people who have prominent followings.
Which means these people who are being considered the social justice activists to be exploited
are going to want followers. They're going to push social justice rhetoric to get those followers
and the companies are going to hire them to exploit them, thus creating a large class
of a far-left, identitarian political sect that the Democrats then view as being mainstream,
when they are not. They're not.
We've seen it time and time again.
It's just not the case.
Americans do not believe in this stuff, for the most part.
And it's one of the reasons Donald Trump wins.
Because the political correctness and the ideology was off-putting to so many people.
I mean, take a look at Bill Maher.
But now we can take it one step further and move on to a year or so later.
This is from a year ago.
Twitter is so liberal that its conservative employees, quote, don't feel safe to express their opinions, says CEO Jack Dorsey.
I don't think that's fair or right, Dorsey says.
I find it fascinating that when I cite mainstream and left-leaning digital sources with this information, they tell me that I'm pushing a conspiracy theory.
The critics.
I don't know what you want me to cite, man.
I'm citing you guys, okay?
I have people, you know, they'll make claims about me saying that it's a conservative talking point.
I'm like, but the story literally originated with, for one, the outline is not conservative, but the story about bias was in 2016 from Gizmodo.
And you have Recode saying basically the same thing.
We know.
But you know what?
Don't let that get in the way of the battle that's going on in media.
And it's bad.
In the end, I think I can show you something.
I'll show you one more bit of data that wraps all of this together.
Social justice narratives are being exploited.
People are being told you need a social media following or it's greatly beneficial if you have a following because they believe you can then tweet out the articles and get more traffic.
Take a look at this.
Corey Clark tweets.
She's a social psychologist assistant professor.
Social media use is modestly associated with more loneliness, depression, and narcissism, lower self-esteem, but also higher social capital, and unrelated to school achievement.
Now this is for social media across the board, but I do believe it's fair to associate this with what we can see about Twitter users being, at least a quarter or so in the last study, they're journalists.
So you have journalists who are rather narcissistic, rather arrogant.
Not all of them.
They're politically motivated to be social justice activists because that's where the money is at.
Think about it.
Let me tell you something, man.
I know a lot of journalists who I was shocked to see now pushing the social justice rhetoric until they finally snapped.
And the reason for it was, when companies like Mike were saying, this is what we want, interviewing people and exploiting that, regular journalists weren't getting hired.
Some capitulated and said, oh, yeah, I'm all for that.
I'm all for that.
Not me.
I quit.
I quit years before it got this bad.
It was a year before the expose showing that Mike was exploiting people this way.
I'll tell you what, as I mentioned in a previous video, you can go on this channel and go back in time and see a video of me inside Mike.com's headquarters.
I know what's going on at these companies, okay?
They're exploiting people, but they've also created an economic incentive to push the social justice rhetoric.
Now listen, Okay?
I'll make sure I make this clear.
At its core, social justice is fine.
It is.
The issue that I take, and most people take, is the authoritarianism, is cancel culture, is the outrage.
And now it all comes full circle.
Depressed, lonely people who are told, this is what you gotta do to make money, and then you end up with cancel culture.
It is a product of the media.
In the end, these people get laid off.
They lose their jobs.
And then what?
Do they continue on pushing this narrative?
I mean, to an extent, yes.
And then the Democrats start espousing similar things.
They start pushing more and more into this because there is no point at which they can stop and say, we've accomplished it.
It always has to go one step beyond.
If you're a media out looking for clicks, you cannot simply stop by saying person X did Y. You have to the next day, to get more clicks, say person X who did Y then did Z. So the escalation must occur.
And this is causing serious problems for our politics, but this is the good news.
I hate to revel in any way at the layoffs of people who work in media, but your companies misled you.
They went down the wrong path.
It was a short-term gain and a long-term loss, and I warned them this would happen.
But in the end, with these companies losing their influence, we can face two larger possibilities, one scary and one doesn't.
Without the influence and the financial support for these identitarians, we're going to start seeing their policies and their ideas less and less prominently in media and in politics.
The other danger I see is that, over the past decade, with the embedding of this narrative in our political system, it may now be permanently dug in.
That scares me.
Hopefully, the waning of the influence here results in this rhetoric drying up.
Now, I will say this.
My outlet, Subverse, is doing particularly well.
Me personally, on my accounts and everything, I'm doing particularly well, especially with your support, greatly appreciated.
We're expanding.
We're looking for an office.
We're looking to hire people.
We've got reporters now around the world on the ground, some of which are progressives, are leftists.
But interestingly, I think, when the jobs that start emerging, I will not tolerate lies, smears, false framing, none of that.
I'm absolutely willing to hire anybody regardless of their politics, I don't care, so long as you're willing to be honest.
And that's gonna have an impact.
Hopefully this, regardless of whether or not this cancel culture, outrage, wokeness, or whatever, is embedded, you know, permanently, hopefully, because I'm simultaneously, like, while they're doing bad, simultaneously I'm doing better, hopefully the people I hire can counteract the more extreme and authoritarian narratives that have emerged due to the exploitation of this political, you know, ideology for money.
Listen, you look at my political compass test, you can see that, yeah, I'm on the left.
My concern is just very, very easily this.
It was complete exploitation.
They were lying to all of us.
They don't care.
They just want money, and they will strip mine.
Anyone and anything to get it.
In the end, I see a corrupt, Media.
Growing.
Now some of it's on the decline for sure.
And it's not all journalism.
Like very obviously I'm citing the Financial Times and Deadline and Tubefilter and Outline.
I use this media.
I seriously don't think literally every journalist everywhere is bad.
I'm saying there is a sickness.
Fortunately now it is waning and being called out.
And hopefully that continues.
And hopefully as more of you watch my content, and we do better, we can bring back real objectivity, independent fact-checking departments, we can bring that back to journalism.
But it's tough.
Because politics is a vicious beast, and the people on the left in politics need to win.
And there was an advantage here.
There was an advantage in this.
They used it.
And they'll still use it today.
And of course, don't be surprised when they start smearing me as a bunch of things I am not, simply for calling out violence and censorship and the manipulation of social justice for clicks.
I'll leave it there.
Stick around.
Next segment's coming up at 6 p.m.
at youtube.com slash timcast.
I will see you all then.
There was a story I covered the other day that was particularly absurd and quite offensive to fans of Tulsi Gabbard when Hillary Clinton suggested that Tulsi was being groomed by the Russians.
Now, many of you may have seen the response from Tulsi Gabbard the other day because it went insanely viral, getting 66,000 retweets and being the subject of many news reports this morning, including this one.
But Tulsi actually has another fuller response when asked about what's going on, and we'll get to that.
But I want to mention, not only did Tulsi Gabbard nuke Hillary Clinton from orbit with this tweet, and it is epic and amazing, but it's around the same time that a report has come out showing major violations with Hillary Clinton and her email server.
Clinton is not just facing one nuke from Gabbard, but another following the investigation into her server.
So let's do this.
First, I definitely have to do the WWE-style drama that is the flame war on Twitter, and boy are people angry.
Check this out.
Tulsi Gabbard responded to Hillary Clinton by saying, Great, thank you Hillary Clinton.
You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.
From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation.
We wondered who was behind it and why.
Now we know.
It was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It's now clear that this primary is between you and me.
Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies.
Join the race directly.
Now, There are some pundits who are like, she really thinks the primary race is between her and Hillary?
No.
I did not see it that way.
I really don't think Tulsi is trying to claim that she's going to be challenging Hillary for the nomination.
I think what she's saying is that the controversy, as the context asserts, the campaign to destroy her reputation, in the primary, is between her and Hillary and not the proxies in media who are pushing it.
I thought that was kind of obvious.
But hey, man, I get it.
Context is irrelevant.
People take everything literally, and they're going to interpret it in the exact way that fits their worldview.
So you know what?
Fine.
I'm doing the same thing.
I think that makes the most sense.
She's saying, Hillary Clinton, you are smearing me.
It's clear that this is between you and me, so why don't you run?
I thought that context was clear.
Well, this went viral.
And here's what I love.
There are a lot of people who are calling Tulsi a white supremacist.
Oh, please.
If she is, then so is Ilhan Omar for the same reason.
So don't play these stupid games, okay?
But you also have... I love this one.
They were like, how was Tulsi Gabbard able to get 20,000 retweets so quickly when even the president with millions and tens of millions of followers couldn't do it?
I saw all of these things popping up where everyone's like, aha!
That proves it!
The Russian bots are propping up Tulsi Gabbard.
And it's like, dude, Have you ever stopped to think that you, the pro-Hillary neoliberal corporatists, live in a tiny bubble?
Where, look, I'll tell you this right now, the progressives, like the far left, the conservatives, the far right, like literally everything around the political compass, We'll cheer when you take down Hillary Clinton.
It's the democratization of communication.
It's allowed for other parts of the political spectrum to speak up and be heard.
And that's why we're seeing this conflict in the Democratic Party.
Listen.
The Democratic Party is the corporate establishment and the far left predominantly, but Tulsi does represent something very important, particularly to me.
The more... I don't want to say she's a centrist.
She's certainly not.
She's very progressive.
But she's sane and not overly ideological when it comes to the intersectionality stuff or policy.
She's talked about Regular old liberal positions, things that we're trying to accomplish that we haven't yet done, or things that we want to protect.
It's not always about pushing and advancing things, because you have to realize this.
One of the problems I have with the Democrats is every single time they're like, okay, we did this, now let's do it again, but more!
It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, listen.
So we did Obamacare, right?
And that was supposed to be this great thing that we gotta protect.
But now they're saying healthcare is broken on the debate stage.
They seem to think that progress must always happen even if where we are is a good place.
I'm not saying we're in a good place.
I'm saying imagine there's a mound, a hill, and it's like your goal is to get the best of you possible.
The way I see politics right now is that we're arguing over which way to go, and we're kind of on top of the hill going back and forth, and then we finally manage to sit on one spot slightly to the left of center of that hill, and now the Democrats are still saying, no, no, no, go more left, go further left, and I'm like, but wait!
Okay?
This happy medium is probably the best place we're at.
Not all the time.
I'm not saying healthcare is perfect.
I'm saying, why is it that we can accomplish something and say, that was great?
And then they come on and say, now let's do even, you know, go even further.
It's like, no, maybe we're in the good spot.
That's what's never considered.
So the point I'm saying is, you know, Tulsi represents protecting certain ideals that we've accomplished or haven't yet accomplished that we want to protect.
And that's the regular liberal position.
Because here's the thing.
I tell you what, outside of that crony establishment weird media sphere with Hillary Clinton, weird for sure, Nobody likes war!
Newsflash!
And that's what's so crazy.
It's like I can point to Trump immediately and say, Saudi Arabia, look man, you want to talk about the good things Trump is doing with Syria?
We can talk about whether it made sense, whether it was smart.
Tulsi's been a bit critical.
I'm in favor of getting our troops out of there.
It makes no sense.
And all of this nonsense, okay?
But you can't simultaneously put troops in Saudi Arabia.
I'm sorry, okay?
I'm sorry.
You can't do that.
But let's move on.
Because Tulsi did respond, okay?
She was asked about it in an interview, apparently.
That's right.
And that's what I love about Tulsi Gabbard.
I do.
When she took down Kamala Harris, they screamed, Russian bots are propping up this Tulsi- No, dude!
No!
It's called- Listen.
Centrists are being erased from the political conversation.
And that's why it's so funny when everyone says Tim Pool's conservative.
Clearly not!
Did you guys know that I just did a political compass test?
I recorded the whole thing, explained all of my positions, and guess what?
Social libertarian.
Okay?
I'm almost a communist!
In a libertarian sense.
What that basically means is, you know what my choice kind of lifestyle would be?
Hippies on a farm.
And I've done it before.
I got a big house in Miami, and me and a bunch of my friends hung out, and we had our own, like, space.
A small group of friends.
We don't need to exchange money between each other for certain things.
Like, hey man, I'm gonna go pick up some food.
You want anything?
No problem.
Cause I got you, you got me.
It works on a small scale, it can't scale up.
But that's my preferred living situation.
I'd love to live on like a bunch of friends and my family, just chilling and being responsible for ourselves.
But I realize it's not politically, it's not political reality.
And so that moves me back towards the liberal space in terms of what policies we need to enact because I recognize we live in a society.
But that's why I like Tulsi Gabbard because she slams these establishment cronies who pretend to care about you.
Let's be real.
All of these people who are talking about, we need to support a woman of color.
It's like, dude, they want to accuse me of being a conservative and all these things because centrists are being wiped out.
But it's not just, they call Hillary Clinton a centrist.
She's not.
She's a corporatist.
She's whatever you want to call it.
She's an establishment status quo-ist.
OK?
I like certain things we have.
I think we've got to be moderate and calm about it.
And Tulsi speaks to that.
And she also speaks to the anger we feel that the establishment is lying to us.
So when she calls out Hillary Clinton as the personification of rot, I get it, man.
Look, it's an emotional satisfaction.
It doesn't really accomplish anything.
And I do feel like incivility is not the right way forward.
But I'll tell you what.
I understand that, you know, there's a big difference between the emotional satisfaction of Antifa going around and bashing skulls and breaking windows and the emotional satisfaction of finally somebody in politics saying enough and calling it out.
And I tell you, this is why people like Bernie and Trump.
It's called populism.
It's called speaking to the people.
Elitism.
And I'll tell you this.
Tucker Carlson said something about Elitism is a good thing.
We want the elites to be in charge, right?
No!
That's incorrect.
Tucker, okay?
I don't think Tucker's a bad guy.
I agree with him on a lot of things.
I think he's fairly moderate in a lot of ways.
But I think what he meant to say is that we want a meritocratic system, not elite.
Elitism implies those who simply have power should rule arbitrarily.
I disagree.
Tulsi is someone who has earned her status and she's done it with great things.
You want to argue that, you know, people like me with a big platform, people like Tulsi who's in politics are elites.
Fine.
But elitism would also imply that somebody who was born to wealth can simply rule over the lower class.
Not fine.
Meritocracy is different.
We do want a system where the talented can rise up and help lead those that, you know, they can shine a light and show the way.
And that includes people with great physical ability, great artistic ability, great political ability, mental ability, etc., etc.
You know, the people who are truly good can help pave the way for those who come next, and not everyone is going to be the best of the best.
So anyway, let me read.
Tulsi says, Hillary Clinton is labeling me as a foreign agent and traitor, smearing and undermining my campaign both directly herself and indirectly through her proxies, Gabbard said in a Friday night interview with CBS News.
The reason why she's doing this is because she knows that she can't control me.
She knows that she's not going to be able to manipulate me if I'm elected president to be able to continue these warmongering policies that she has championed.
Spot on.
Absolutely.
Do you remember on the debate stage when Hillary Clinton was talking about the possibility of war?
And you had a general actually say, if you insert a no-fly zone in Syria, you are declaring war on Russia.
And she didn't care.
And Trump was like, what?
Why would we do that?
We don't want war.
We want to be allies with other nations.
I fully understand there's a world stage.
And in the end, the U.S.
is competing with China and Russia.
And so you have these people in intelligence and you have the establishment Democrats who are very much like, we can't pull out of Syria because the U.S.
needs its influence overseas in these countries to stop expansion of our enemies or rivals.
You know what, man?
That is not how I play Civilization, the game, okay?
I do not go and invade foreign territory to prevent my enemies.
I do better within my own borders and within my own realm of influence, and focus on technology, development, and creating a healthy and happy population.
That's the way I view the world.
I understand that that's what many people see in Trump, and I can respect that.
But when Trump sends troops to Saudi Arabia and talks about doing weapons deals with them while they're bombing Yemen because it's going to bolster our economy, I don't think he's being forthright.
I think he's definitely not in the establishment position of like Hillary Clinton.
We want to invade Syria, build this pipeline.
You know, and then offset Russia's monopoly, we're at war with Russia, whatever all that nonsense is.
But I do think Trump is still willing to play the war game in the Middle East.
You cannot deny that sending troops to Saudi Arabia is the opposite of what Trump has been talking about.
We should not be doing this.
Look, Manny, we want to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia.
I don't like that.
But I do recognize, it's enterprise, there's a customer, and I think the war machine is bad.
But admittedly, I have to say, I don't know what Saudi Arabia's deals with Yemen, other than they're committing what I would say to be violations of international law.
I'm not an expert.
So I'll be opposed to that.
But it's very different than when you send our own soldiers there.
So, she says, the reason why she's doing this is because she knows she can't control me.
She's not, alright, I read that already.
This is a message to every veteran in the country who has put their life on the line to serve our country, to every single American who believes strongly that we must end this long-standing foreign policy of being the world's police and waging these regime change wars, which is really the legacy of Hillary Clinton.
Then we are traitors to the nation that we love, said Gabbard, who is a veteran.
This is despicable on so many levels.
I'm gonna say this to Hillary.
How dare you?
Okay?
I did not serve in the armed forces.
I have tremendous respect for those who did.
I have family members who did.
I'm not gonna act like it's some great heroic feat to enlist, because I know many people who did it because they needed a job.
You know, they're people.
They're working a job.
But I will admit there is still, whatever you think, something important and special about those who do take that job and who do risk their lives overseas.
Tulsi Gabbard is one of those people who put her life on the line to serve something that she felt was important to protect her community.
And she went out, and she's still in the National Guard, and I have tremendous respect for that.
As do I have respect for Pete Buttigieg, especially, and Dan Crenshaw and other veterans who, you know, are willing to risk everything, the ultimate risk, your own life, while I can sit here comfortably in my nice little air-conditioned, you know, house, talking to a camera.
There's a huge amount of respect I have for that.
Hillary Clinton is not one of those people, nor is Donald Trump for that matter.
OK, but Donald Trump didn't come out and accuse Tulsi Gabbard of being essentially a traitor.
Now, OK, Donald Trump has accused people of being traitor, but it's different when you point the finger and accuse them of being a Russian spy.
You can like, you know, Trump's hyperbolically being like, that person is a traitor.
It's treason.
It's like, dude.
He's not really, you know, he's just fighting with you, alright?
So I think it's fair to criticize him when he pulls the hyperbole, but it's like, whatever.
No, Hillary Clinton is literally saying Jill Stein and Tulsi Gabbard, okay, she didn't mention Tulsi by name, but we know who she's talking about, to imply that Tulsi, a...
A major in the National Guard who is on, my understanding is Tulsi is on, like, she's been vetted.
She gets vetted every five years because she gets sensitive intelligence, so she really knows what's happening in the world.
To insinuate somebody who's been vetted by our own government, who has served its interests proudly overseas and now seeks to make a positive change, is a traitor or being groomed by the Russians.
It's despicable.
Beyond despicable.
Because, you know, Hillary Clinton is this privileged embodiment of everything wrong with our government.
And it's been said for a long time.
And you know what they don't like?
You know why they don't like me?
You know why they want to smear me with all the lies, whatever?
Because guess what?
There are principled people like me, regardless of politics, who can recognize something simple.
Do you agree or disagree with Tulsi Gabbard's policies?
And from conservative, from left to right, many people can see that.
The establishment doesn't care.
They will smear and they will ruin you regardless of what your politics are.
So it's kind of like, you know, the way I see it is this is an ongoing battle of populist versus elitist.
Hillary being the establishment elite.
She didn't like Bernie.
And they still don't like Bernie.
They are trying really hard to knock Bernie down.
And they don't like Tulsi Gabbard or Donald Trump.
Because these are the outsiders.
These are the people emerging from, essentially, it's the internet, I gotta admit.
The internet has given a voice to the voiceless.
And now we're seeing populism.
They like to claim that populism is the result of certain policies or immigration.
No, no, no, no.
No.
Because Tulsi Gabbard is a woman of color.
And so I think it's hilarious then when all these people in the establishment neoliberal left or whatever are like, she's a white supremacist and defend Hillary Clinton.
It's like, all that stuff you said about, you know, women of color and supporting them means nothing.
When they smear me in similar ways, it's like I'm literally actively doing what you're... It's just mind-blowingly fake.
It's all fake.
It's the establishment recoiling.
I'll tell you exactly what it is.
It is the nobles atop their ivory tower aghast that the peasants below are revolting and demanding a real change.
And they've propped up this businessman, and he's a crass, boorish old man.
And the ivory tower is offended.
Their delicate sensibilities are shocked by the words that Mr. Trump would say.
And there are the likes of us down here on the ground, too, shaking our heads, going like...
I see the people in the ivory tower, man, but Trump?
I get it, right?
Because we're all down here looking up at the establishment as well, but I look to an alternate leader.
But in the end, it's interesting.
You know, people don't seem to understand what the left and right really is right now.
And I've said it before, it doesn't really matter that much, because it's really, there's so many weird divides in what's happening, it's hard to quantify, it's amorphous.
Is it establishment versus anti-establishment?
Is it authoritarian versus libertarian?
Is it conservative versus liberal?
I don't know.
Because you'll find across the spectrum there are anti-establishment populist types from the far left to the moderate to the far right.
You've got conservatives who want a populist leader in Trump.
You've got progressives who want a populist leader in Bernie.
And you have moderates who want... I don't know if it's fair to say that she's populist, but I view Tulsi Gabbard as someone of the people with respectability principles, speaks honestly.
And that's what I see.
Kind of a more middle-of-the-road regular person.
Here's the problem.
Everybody wants to be put in some tribe, okay?
And so the left thinks anything that isn't on their side, establishment or otherwise, must be conservative.
Well, I'm clearly not a conservative, you know, and I'm actively supporting a Democrat, and I say it doesn't matter.
And I don't get why it matters.
I really don't.
I don't care what you call me.
I stopped caring a long time ago.
You know what, man?
I really, I'm just over it.
You know, but, you know, I will say this, though.
There's a reason why I say I'm not Because I'm not.
It's insane when someone says, you know, they try and accuse me of being right-wing or whatever, and I'm like, but I'm literally in favor of all of these left-wing policies.
I just don't like your awful, awful, you know, neoliberal lady and your identitarianism.
Like, how does that make sense?
Anyway, I didn't get to the email thing.
We'll see what happens.
I'll read into this and we can talk about the emails.
Interesting story, but there's a lot of news today.
There's a lot going on.
So stick around.
Next segment will be coming up at 1 p.m.
on this channel, and I will see you all then.
I gotta give credit to CNN and Van Jones for calling it out.
It's refreshing.
Seriously, Van Jones blasts Hillary Clinton saying she's playing a very dangerous game going after Tulsi Gabbard.
Thank you.
Not only that, CNN's Aaron Burnett, bravo, much respect, incredible, coming out and calling it a conspiracy theory straight up.
Seriously, seriously, thank you to Van Jones and CNN.
And I'm surprised I'd say that.
I'm very critical of CNN, especially with these Veritas leaks.
But at least, at least they can give us this.
And I always want to make sure we stress this, okay?
Tell your friends.
If someone does the right thing, give them the respect they deserve for doing it.
Encourage people to be better.
CNN nailed it.
Erin Burnett opened a segment tonight looking at Hillary Clinton, quote, pushing her own Russia conspiracy theory.
Thank you.
About Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
Now this is a follow-up to the video I did early in the morning and there's a lot of fallout over this.
For one...
I don't want to say the name, but there's a particularly controversial figure now trending nationwide thanks to Hillary Clinton, and that's not the kind of thing we need to be focusing on.
Okay, you want to push Russia conspiracy nonsense?
I will tell you something very simply as to why so many people on the right, moderate, and independents are sitting here looking at Tulsi and cheering.
Because we are sick of the Russian bot nonsense conspiracy.
Sick of it.
Okay?
I am a moderate leftist.
Actually, I mean, I gotta be honest.
You go look at my political compass test I did yesterday on this channel, and I lay out every single response to the questions, and it puts me as a social libertarian.
I'm far left on the political, you know, I don't know how you describe it, but at least that's where they put me.
Then my only thing is I'm rather anti-authoritarian.
Very, very much so.
And so that puts me in an awkward position where it's hard to, like, demand with a pitchfork someone have all their income taxed, and so I'm much more of a hippie, right?
Hippie libertarian type.
Set on a farm with my buddies, with flowers, you know what I'm saying?
Anyway, here's the point.
When something bad happens in the establishment, Hillary Clinton, for example, stealing what happened, stealing the nomination from Bernie Sanders, I got angry.
I spoke up.
I said, how dare you?
And they pointed the finger at me and said, Russia.
Wait, what?
They pointed the finger at Jill Stein, Russia.
Did you know in 2016 at the RNC, there was almost no protest of Trump, but the DNC had major protests with like a thousand plus people trying to jump the barricades and break in?
No protests at the RNC.
Why?
Because Trump, for all of his character defects, for all of the things I think he's done that are egregiously stupid, namely, you're never going to convince me to defend choosing Trump-Durrell for the G7.
Just never going to happen.
And they say he's doing it at cost.
No way.
No dice.
You're never going to get me to defend sending troops to Saudi Arabia.
And I'm not going to.
I'm not going to play that game.
I rag on him all the time.
But I'll tell you this.
There is a bit of sympathy and understanding between people in my position who like Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang, for instance, being smeared as alt-right or Russians.
And Van Jones lays it out, and I just gotta stress, CNN calling it a conspiracy theory, thank you for saying it.
Thank you for saying it, seriously.
Van Jones with an amazing quote.
Check this out.
He said, If you're concerned about disinformation, that is what just happened.
Just throw out some information, disinformation, smear somebody.
She is Hillary Clinton.
She's a legend.
She's going to be in the history books.
She's a former nominee for our party, and she just came out against a sitting U.S.
congresswoman, a decorated war veteran, and somebody who's running for the nomination of our party with a complete smear and no facts, Van Jones.
Respect.
Stand up, drop the mic, clap, everything about what you just said.
Full respect.
Tulsi is a decorated war veteran.
She deserves our respect.
I'm not gonna say our respect.
I would never, never.
I disagree with Dan Crenshaw.
I'd love to see a conversation between Crenshaw and Gabbard.
They disagree, but I have tremendous respect, and I respect their opinions.
I disagree with Buttigieg and Crenshaw on the war issue, and I agree with Tulsi, but I gotta admit, I defer to the three of them.
Okay?
But I think Tulsi, who has access to a lot of the sensitive information, being on the committees she's on, I trust and respect her.
And I gotta tell you what, guys, my policy positions lean left, but you take a look at what's going on in the Democratic Party and its authoritarianism, it's this, this embodies everything that has made me so sick and tired of the left.
And they say my politics aren't liberal.
No, I tell you what.
You are lying.
Okay?
And we know you're lying.
You stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders.
For whatever reason, Bernie went on the debate stage and said ridiculous, identitarian nonsense.
And Bernie's... I've soured on Bernie quite a bit.
But, but Tulsi...
She's still close, and her character and her personality are exactly what I think we need in this country.
And here's the big difference.
You know, us, like, little people, the people not in the club, we disagree with each other.
And boy, do sometimes the sour words fly.
You know, the diehard Trump supporters do not like Tulsi.
You know, they'll cheer for her, you know, nuking Hillary from orbit, But they will slam her policies and her positions, and they'll post memes, and they'll mock her, and I'm totally okay with that.
I'm totally fine with that.
I absolutely have no problem with people commenting and poking fun at me for my political positions, and I think that's actually what I like about it.
Why is it that we're able to honestly discuss what we think and feel?
That I was able to sit down with Glenn Beck, and we disagreed, and boy howdy.
And we shook our hands at the end and we were like, hey, you know, he's a good guy.
Yeah, we disagree.
That's normal for adults.
Check this out.
He went on to say more.
Just incredible, incredible Van Jones.
Incredible.
He said, Tulsi Gabbard, I believe this was Van Jones, they're saying, so here's the quote.
Tulsi Gabbard was picked out by the Democratic Party and put at the top of the DNC.
They thought she was going to be their golden girl.
Jones continued.
And she got that position in the DNC.
And she looked around and saw Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other people, Clinton allies, doing stuff they shouldn't have been doing in the primary.
And Tulsi publicly quit and endorsed Bernie Sanders.
And it's been payback hell ever since.
You nailed it, Van.
You nailed it.
That's exactly it.
There is an emotional satisfaction in seeing Tulsi slam them.
There is an emotional satisfaction in finally CNN calling out the conspiracy trash.
Okay?
The Trump supporters went through it, and the Tulsi supporters are going through it now.
So we get it.
We get it.
I want to have a real conversation about policy proposals, about why I think Trump should not be re-elected, but I respect the opinions of those who do.
I have friends who I'm like, I have no idea how you could think that.
And what are we supposed to do?
Are we supposed to hate each other?
No!
I just can't stand everything going on right now in politics because the establishment media types, the identitarian whack-nuts, want us to be enemies.
They want us to hate.
Ellen DeGeneres sitting down with George W. Bush, saying that they were friends, and it wasn't the moderates, conservatives, or...
Disaffected liberals who are outraged.
I laughed.
What else is new?
I said, Ellen doesn't have to pretend to be friends with the guy because the reality was she just happened to have been sitting next to him.
But we can be polite.
We don't have to hate each other.
And not only that.
No, no, no.
I'll stop.
You can't hate me.
And I can hate you.
But we agreed to be like...
That hate shouldn't go beyond just bad feelings, right?
When you show up and scream in someone's face, when you attack people, you've crossed the line.
There are so many people in this country that I think are just wrong and distasteful, and I will express my opinion about it.
And there are many Trump supporters who I think are willing to cover up for bad things Trump does and provide excuses for them.
I get it.
But that's politics.
In the end, if I can sit down with you and we can argue that, We're winning, right?
I recently did a conversation with Sam Seder.
We disagree on a lot.
I probably agree more with him on a lot of issues than I do with Trump supporters on most things.
But admittedly, I'm a rather moderate, independent type, leaning somewhat to the left.
So my politics, you know, I have some positions I agree with conservatives on.
Look, man, I don't understand we got to a point where free speech, anti-authoritarianism is becoming a right-wing position.
That's insane to me.
But let's read a little bit more.
read a little bit more. Van Jones remarked, it's getting kind of hot. Before reiterating,
I'm telling you, Hillary Clinton is playing a very dangerous game. I do not want someone
of her stature to legitimate these attacks against anybody.
If you've got real evidence, come forward with it. But if you're just going to smear
people casually on podcasts, you are playing right into the Russians' hands. Van, now point
the finger at Hillary.
Yeah, dude.
Check out this op-ed from the New York Times.
Why are Democrats jilting GOP voters who want to like them?
Dude!
Dude, full stop, New York Times!
Why are they jilting me?
I voted for Obama!
I want an alternative.
I want a pro-choice, anti-death penalty candidate.
Okay?
That's what I want.
You won't give it to me.
You won't give it to me.
There's a lot of things that Tulsi pushes I don't agree with.
And I admit, a lot of my positions, same as most people, become rather emotional.
You know, the character of the individual and how they inspire us and make us feel is a substantial factor in whether or not someone would vote for somebody.
I'll admit that it is a bit immature and ignorant.
But I'm not going to act like I'm better than anybody else.
When I see Tulsi Gabbard calling it like it is, challenging the system, the system that was cheating all of us, the 12 to 18 percent who were former Bernie supporters who went to Trump, that's the DNC's fault.
It makes me angry.
And I look at Tulsi, and she's somebody who's willing to sit down and say, I'm here for you too.
And that's what a president should be.
I don't agree with all of her policies.
I agree with a lot of the core ones I think are particularly important.
War on drugs, literal wars, ending private prison or prison reform in general, those
are huge issues for me.
And I've gone through a lot of her policy stuff and I'm like, yeah, I disagree with
some of that.
You know, she pushed a bill about reparations.
I think that's damaging.
And a lot of her fans are upset by it.
But in the end, you know, I admit, for me, I'm a moderately learned individual.
I read all the time.
And so, I look at the policies, I look at her character, all these things come together, and she's not perfect.
But I will say this, for me, she is what I look for in a candidate in more ways than basically anybody else.
And in the end, all that really matters is I'm willing to respect your opinion for disagreeing, be it you're in favor of Elizabeth Warren, Absolutely.
Let's talk about it.
I think Warren's proposed some great things, actually.
I think her challenging of big tech is particularly important.
And that's about one of the only things I can really cite from her in the first place, although she has called herself a capitalist, which I'm happy with.
Bernie is socialist.
Not okay with.
But I look at Tulsi and I'm like, hey, that's what I like.
That's what I want to see.
And the New York Times, they point this out.
That there are people like me.
And it's not about the GOP, right?
They're pointing out that there are literal Republicans who are like, I would like to not vote for Trump.
And the Democrats are like, no!
But then not only that, there are people like me who we call ourselves politically homeless.
We used to be leftists and now we're just independent, right?
It's how?
And they won't even accept us.
So when I come up and I say, I would like to vote for this, they say, you're a Russian bot.
Okay, then.
Okay.
They say under President Trump, a small slice of America's electorate seeks a reason to call the Democratic Party home for the very first time.
But you know what?
It's not even just about the Republicans who want to do that.
There are moderates who want to do that.
And there are former Obama voters, Bernie Sanders supporters.
I gotta admit, the core reasons why I do not like Bernie Sanders are not so much about his policy positions.
It's about his ideological push for the identitarian stuff, as well as giving up the stage.
Bernie has played too much into the establishment hands, and I don't like it.
It's weakness.
Personally, I think universal healthcare is our end goal.
Politically?
I think we gotta start with a public option.
Moderate.
I don't think you show up at someone's house and strip them of their healthcare and dramatically upend their life.
So I fall in the more moderate camp on the left side, and if you look at my political compass, you're gonna be like, damn, Tim's far left.
I can't say damn.
I said it again.
You can't say that word.
Did you know that?
You get in trouble for saying that.
They say the exemption is Rep.
Tulsi Gabbard, the candidate making the most visible effort to help moderates and newbies feel included.
Like a majority of Americans, but unlike a majority of House Democrats, before the Ukraine revelations, she did not support an impeachment inquiry against President Trump.
It would be terribly divisive.
That's how I feel!
That's how I feel.
I'm saying, like, I want to win.
I want to bring us together.
I want to sit down with those I disagree with and have a, you know, a chicken dinner and some rice and we can debate and argue.
Seriously, because I'm willing to be like, can we talk to someone and change their views?
Guess what?
Literally what Tulsi did when she met with Assad and they call her a supporter.
Oh, please, dude.
And that's another reason why I really do respect and identify with Tulsi.
Her willingness to meet with Assad and say, can we end this war?
Donald Trump, his willingness to meet with Kim Jong-un, cross the DMZ.
His willingness to have these conversations that are risky and they hate him for it.
They hate him for it.
My disagreements with Trump are not about his efforts to end conflict and war.
No, it's more about him increasing that, you know, with like the Saudi Arabia stuff, which is new.
But yeah, the Syria stuff, Yemen, you get it, right?
We don't need to go through this a million times.
But I look at Tulsi as somebody who—she brings it up.
That's why I was dismayed when she flipped for impeachment.
Like, look, man, I get it.
52% of people support impeachment now, according to aggregate polls.
Fox News did a questionable poll because they oversampled Democrats, whatever.
The point is, the aggregate show is 52%.
I don't care what the majority is.
I don't care if 99% said we're doing X. If I disagree, I disagree.
I will stand on my own two feet.
And in this, I believe impeachment is a dangerous game and it is bad across the board for this country.
While Tulsi said that, I will give her credit for then calling out Democrats for using impeachment to fundraise and also saying that while she is supporting the inquiry, she was still critical of how they keep pushing the hyper-partisan nature of focusing on impeachment.
In the end, though, I think Tulsi supported it because she had to.
Because all of the Democrats do.
Like, you know, 90-whatever percent.
And so, that's my opinion.
So, look, I'll be the first to admit nobody's perfect.
I'm not perfect.
I can be emotional.
And so, when I look to a candidate like Tulsi, a lot of what I like about her and support is her charismatic behavior, the logic behind her decisions, as well as, yes, many of her core positions.
Not all of them.
Not all of them.
But it really comes down to, you know, how does someone make you feel?
There are certain candidates who have said things like Elizabeth Warren.
She talks about big tech.
I wouldn't support her.
You know why?
I don't trust her.
I don't trust her as a person.
And so there is a challenge in how we're supposed to figure out the right person to support.
And the same is true for Trump and his supporters.
A lot of Trump supporters, they listen to what Trump is saying.
And they take him, the saying was they take him seriously but not literally.
You know, so when Trump says something bombastic, they get it, man, he's a showman, he exaggerates.
I understand that!
And that's why I don't, that's probably one of the reasons I don't have TDS.
Why I don't screech and scream and claw at the walls.
You're not going to get me to ever defend, you know, especially putting the G7 at derail.
And I can maybe talk about something later on.
The point is, here's what I want to do, okay?
Here's what I want to do I think it's very similar to what Tulsi wants to do.
I want to make sure we can sit down and have those Trump supporters understand us and we can understand them.
I want to create a future where we know we disagree, but we respect each other.
And I think I did that with Glenn Beck when we sat down.
We agreed on a bunch of stuff.
We disagreed on core issues that divide the left and the right.
And I hope so, but I believe there was mutual respect there.
You know, I think he was articulate, calm, and principled.
And in the end, I think we have different ethical frameworks that exist philosophically in our minds.
When we realize that's the case, the only way we can move forward is to respect those we disagree with and figure out how to move forward.
The Democrats today aren't doing that, and even the New York Times has this story.
They're jilting GOP voters who want to like them.
Dude, it's not just that!
They're jilting technically current Democrats!
So that's why I'm so enraged by how they smear Tulsi.
Because it's like, dude, she is keeping me here with you, right?
Democrats, listen.
It is Tulsi and Yang who have been very intelligent, reasonable, and compassionate.
And they're the reasons I have not just declared myself outright completely independent of anybody.
I still consider myself leaning Democrat.
But they want to sever those ties.
They want to smear Tulsi.
So look at it this way.
It's like Tulsi's hanging onto the cliff by one arm, and in her other arm she is holding us disaffected liberals and even some conservatives, and they're stomping on her fingers.
And once she goes, there are many of us who go with her.
Now, admittedly, Yang's there too, and he's got more like a robotic gizmo that's, like, trying to catch us as well.
Yang's great.
Admittedly, I think Yang did better in the debates than Tulsi did, but I still respect them a lot.
In the end, what we need in a president is someone who's going to say, I will be your president, trust me, and let me hear what you have to say.
Obama did that.
Not for everybody.
A lot of people really don't like Obama.
But people who voted for Obama voted for Trump.
That's literally the only way Trump would have won, is if he converted former Obama supporters into Trump supporters.
And he did.
And they haven't learned.
They haven't learned their lesson.
So anyway, that's why I'll wrap it up.
That's why CNN, thank you for calling it a conspiracy theory.
Van Jones, you nailed it.
Absolutely spot on.
You have shown exactly how I feel, and I respect that tremendously.
I feel like the media doesn't represent the things I'm seeing.
And this conversation they had, it does.
It does.
It feels honest.
So CNN, ripe for criticism, a lot of problems in media, but I can respect it when they do it right.
I'll leave it there.
The next segment coming up at 4 p.m.
on the main channel is about the media.
Yeah, bad, bad news.
Seriously.
This may be the end of a major left-wing publication.
Stick around.
I will see you at 4 p.m.
youtube.com slash timcast.
This story is insane.
This story is seriously, seriously insane.
A progressive California lawmaker has effectively shut down freelance journalism in California.
Now, it's complicated.
They didn't pass a law outright saying you can't do it.
They put a restriction on how many articles someone can write as a freelancer.
Get this.
If you live in California, you can't write more than 35 articles.
But seriously, writing an article is not a ton of work for the most part.
When you commission a freelancer and say, hey, we heard about, you know, Hillary Clinton and Tulsi Gabbard.
Dig it up, you know, four or five hundred words and we'll pay you X. You can get that done in a couple hours, okay?
And so freelancers do multiple articles per day.
I know people who do five or six per day.
That means you can work for one week before you're cut off.
You know what's crazy?
While these Democrats and leftists were screeching about Trump's attack on the press, this bill was circulating for longer than a year.
So let me make this clear for all of you.
Companies like Vice, with headquarters in New York, companies in big cities, don't need to hire local freelancers.
If I own a company in California, I can hire a freelancer in New York.
So what's happening now is people who live in L.A., these writers, they're freaking out.
Check this out, Hollywood Reporter.
Everybody is freaking out.
Freelance writers scramble to make sense of new California law.
Well, maybe if you were paying attention to what was going on around you, especially in local politics, this wouldn't have happened.
But this marks an amazing strike down of California-based journalism.
And this is an apocalyptic scenario.
I'm not exaggerating, okay?
Tens of millions of people living in California and there are probably thousands of writers who do freelance articles for various companies across the country.
And now they're going to say, I'm not going to work with California writers.
I'll just hire someone from New York.
Check this story.
This is nuts.
Yashir Ali, who is a journalist, he's considered a fair individual.
He's relatively on the left, but he's got a lot of respect across the board.
California Assemblywoman Lorena S. Gonzalez has launched a direct attack on press freedoms with her bill.
I'd say she should be ashamed of herself, but knowing her, shame is not a sensation she's familiar with.
This is the Democrats.
This is progressive.
Let's read.
A new bill that caps freelance submissions may make writing financially unsustainable for many workers, even though the legislator behind the law insists the goal is to create new good jobs and a livable, sustainable wage job.
No.
You have just basically terminated everybody.
I can't stress how crazy this is.
I've been working in media for a long time.
I know how freelancing works, okay?
Read this.
Let's read this.
California-based freelance writer Ariana Jarrett recently learned about Assembly Bill 5 and is now concerned she and her colleagues in California may soon be speaking about their jobs in the past tense.
Jarrett, who contributes to relationship website YourTango.com and the Good Men Project, says freelance writing has helped support her two children and handle their different school schedules.
Her current gigs, covering mental health, lifestyle and entertainment, Allow her to work from home, from the office, and even from her children's various appointments.
They were just all of these benefits for my ability to still be an active parent in my kids' lives and also support us financially, that I just couldn't find anywhere in a steady job with anybody, she says.
Jared is now coming to terms with how her lifestyle will change come January 1st, when AB5 California legislation aimed directly at the gig economy that was signed into law September 18th will go into effect.
The bill, which cracks down on companies like Lyft and Uber that misclassify would-be employees as independent contractors, has been percolating through the California legislative system for nearly a year.
It codifies the 2018 Dynamex decision by the State Supreme Court while carving out some exemptions for specific professions.
I tell you what, for a year.
It has been circling around for a year.
Where were the journalists to uncover this and raise the red flag?
That is the point of journalism.
If you don't know about the bill, you can't stop it.
Think about a bill that was way worse, that would say the Green New Deal, and not one journalist ever made a peep.
And it made its way for a year through Congress and finally got passed, and then all of a sudden everyone after the fact went, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, we're banning gasoline?
That's what happened.
And these people didn't see it coming.
That's why journalism is so important.
And that's why it's sad.
This is what it's resulted in.
The exemption for freelance journalists, which some have only just learned about via their colleagues, press reports, social networks, and or spirited arguments with the bill's author on Twitter, contains what some say is a potentially career-ending requirement for a writer to remain a freelancer.
If a freelance journalist writes for a magazine, newspaper, or other entity whose central mission is to disseminate the news, the law says that journalist is capped at writing 35 submissions per year!
Per year?
Wow.
35 per year.
Let's go back to what I said at the beginning.
I know writers who do five or six articles per day.
Monday through Friday with weekends off.
Freelance.
That means they can work one week.
One week out of the year.
That's wow.
Putative employer.
Perputative employer.
At a time when paid freelance stories can be written for a low end of 25 bucks and a high end of a dollar per word, some meet that cap in a month just to make ends meet.
Amy Lemaire, who writes for the money site CelebrityNetWorth.com and YourTango.com, adds, I don't live in California.
I don't hire people from California, for the most part, because we're not there yet.
Maybe once we're a lot bigger, we can have some Californians.
Unfortunately, I gotta say, based on this law, we can't freelance.
You know, for the most part, what, 35 articles per person?
Great, that means you can write your articles, you get paid, and we'll have a nice day.
In a year!
Wow.
Maybe if they were more concerned about local journalism and the laws being passed in California instead of a net worth of celebrities, we may have seen this coming.
They say in the last few weeks concerned freelancers who, like their contractor status, have slid into the Twitter replies of Lorena Gonzalez, the bill's author, and her chief of staff to voice their opposition.
Frustrated with the response they've received so far, freelancers have organized a Facebook group to discuss tactics.
Imagine, if people started complaining, it's not fair that servers get paid less than minimum wage.
their efforts won two meetings at Gonzales' San Diego offices this month, still with a
lawsuit to go into effect on January 1st.
And some employers already distancing themselves from California freelance journalists.
Their efforts may be too little too late.
Imagine if people started complaining, it's not fair that servers get paid less than minimum
wage.
I got an idea.
Servers can't work more than one week out of the year.
The idea being they'll have to hire you.
And then the restaurant industry just says, nah, we can't hire employees anymore, so we're shutting down.
That's what we're getting.
The crux of AB5 for freelance journalists is the B requirement of the legislation's so-called ABC test to determine if a worker is an employee or independent contractor.
The B test requires that a freelancer performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity's business.
For freelance writers who perform the same work as staff writers, just less frequently, the odds are that any argument they present as to how their roles are unique won't pass muster.
And therefore, the 35 submission cap per year will apply if they want to remain an independent contractor.
Work that counts as a submission can include a published individual story, a series or coverage of a single event, Gonzales tells The Hollywood Reporter.
So let me spell this out for you.
You write for, you know, hotdogvariety.com.
I just made it up.
And the company says we have no need for someone to write five daily articles about hot dogs because we have a staff and they write, you know, we have three or four people on staff and we need people who are in various parts of the state to go around sampling hot dogs and provide us and pitch us these stories and we can buy them.
But we have no space to hire an employee.
Basically, I'll put it this way.
We are full up.
We can't afford any more staff.
But you might have a good story we'll buy.
Oh, you're a freelancer in California?
Oh, I'm sorry.
We can do 35 articles from you in the year, which means, yeah, in a month, you're out.
There you go.
The overall goal of AB5, Gonzales says, is to protect and preserve good jobs.
We're trying to create new good jobs and a livable, sustainable wage.
Yes.
But if I don't need a full-time or part-time writer, I need pitches, I'm not gonna hire you.
I'm just gonna freelance somebody in a different state.
Get it?
They say, freelancers typically do not enjoy employee health benefits like paid leave, sick days, healthcare, etc, etc.
You know, all those things.
Gonzales, who previously worked as a labor organizer and says she spoke to dozens of freelance journalists while writing the bill and moving it through the lawmaking process, adds that freelancers can be used to break newsrooms, to break newsroom unions, like the ones formed last year at the LA Times and this year at the Ringer.
As for how lawmakers settled on a 35 submission figure, Gonzalez says that she and her team decided that a weekly columnist sounded like a part-time worker, and so halved that worker's yearly submissions.
After, okay dude, you can write a column in literally an hour.
So you sit around throughout the week, and you have a weekly column.
Let's say New York Mag is like, hey, we want a piece from you, you know, a thousand words every week.
So throughout the week, you do a little bit of work thinking about your idea, writing it down, and then you write an article.
It doesn't take that long.
I'm not saying it's easy work, but people I know who are staff writers will write five to six articles per day.
So a freelancer who's a weekly columnist is going... like you're essentially cutting them off.
Labor experts and freelancers alike are skeptical that the desired outcome of AB5, that newsrooms will hire California-based freelancers as part-time and full-time employees, will be achieved in the short term.
So here's the point I was making just a moment ago.
If I only need one article from you one time per week, I'm not going to pay you for the whole week.
Why would I hire someone full-time if they're a weekly columnist?
That's nuts.
They say it will be You know what?
This is a death knell for California's freelance journalism.
You know what I mean?
in the short term, especially as the news media continues to face major challenges.
In September, Business Insider estimated that 7,200 workers have lost their media jobs this year.
You know what? This is a death knell for California's freelance journalism. You know
what I mean? As they've already noted in the Reporter, companies are distancing
themselves from freelancers in California.
Think about it.
Let's say you own a business in Delaware.
Are you gonna go and hire a California freelancer when you know, even if they do good work, you can only take a set amount of submissions from them?
They say large California-based news media brands are still figuring out the logistics of how to comply with the law.
Asked how he plans to handle the implementation of AB5 next year, San Diego Union Tribune publisher and editor-in-chief Jeff Light says, We're in the process of sorting through the implications right now.
Unfortunately, I suspect a number of freelancers will end up with less work from us as a result of the limit.
I don't have anything more detailed than this at this point.
Bill Nagel of The Chronicle says, This was a poorly considered part of the law, likely based on a fundamental misunderstanding of why companies use freelancers.
There are situations in which we cannot make a freelancer an employee, which inhibits our First Amendment rights as a publication.
It also seems odd and problematic that broadcast freelancers are treated differently than their colleagues in print media.
Unfortunately, AB5 will limit opportunities for some freelancers and silence a number of voices in the market.
We will, of course, comply with the law.
So there you go.
You get the point.
Man, this was... My understanding is, this was a Democrat.
This was a progressive who did this.
Somebody said... There was one comment saying, you know, what would... Will this get the same amount of coverage, I say, if it was the other political party?
And so, my understanding is that Lorena Gonzalez, Assemblywoman, standing up for Californians, progressive.
I don't think she's a conservative.
She's very much a Democrat.
That's crazy.
Well, freelance writers, write about it while you still can.
Stick around, I got a couple more segments coming up in a few minutes, and I will see you all shortly.
PewDiePie has been banned in China!
According to the Epoch Times, popular YouTuber PewDiePie censored in China after posting video critical of regime.
And PewDiePie made a really funny point.
He said China is like that person who just can't take any criticism, so they block everybody on Twitter.
Yeah.
You know, when I was thinking about this, I got a couple stories I want to go through.
We'll start with the PewDiePie one.
But what's going to happen if literally every Western media outlet simultaneously criticizes China?
What are they going to do?
Are they going to ban everybody?
There was supposed to be this big move where bringing our products and content to China would result in them becoming more democratic.
Instead, we've begun importing their censorship.
Well, enough.
How about now we have people with spines stand up and everyone collectively do it?
And then the result will be China?
Do you want to ban literally everything we talk about all the time and turn off the TV?
Or do you want to accept that we can talk about it and you can be criticized?
Pick one.
It'll be interesting to see what happens.
There was recently a thing at the NBA where some guy bought like 300 tickets and then filled all of the seats with people wearing shirts that said, Stand with Hong Kong.
You can't ban everybody!
Let's read this story about PewDiePie. Popular YouTube star PewDiePie was censored from China's
largest online community after he took a stab at the Chinese regime's sensitivity about the
ongoing Hong Kong protests, while mocking American companies that have curbed free speech to appease
the regime. In a video on October 16th, PewDiePie, they say his real name, whatever, Felix Schellberg,
took aim at the NBA and Blizzard Entertainment for putting profits over free speech
and their handling of the Hong Kong issue.
PewDiePie is the second most popular YouTube channel with more than 101 million subscribers.
Soon after the video, all information about the YouTuber disappeared from China's latest internet forum Baidu Tieba.
Tieba?
A platform similar to Reddit.
The forum is hosted by Baidu, China's leading search engine.
Someone from NBA tweets something saying, I support Hong Kong, and then NBA is like, oh god, we need Chinese money, so it just spirals out of control, Shellberg said in the video.
After Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted the message, stand with Hong Kong, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think most of us know what happened to this point.
Mori quickly deleted the tweet.
He later apologized for any hurt caused by the message, while the NBA issued a statement saying it was regrettable.
And now apparently the NBA has come out and said, no, no, we're going to stand for free speech because they realized it's more offensive to your core audience to bend the knee to Communist China.
The gestures were not enough to fend off the swift backlash from China.
All of the NBA's Chinese official partners suspended ties with the league, while the league's Chinese broadcast partners pulled airings of two exhibition games held in China.
Obviously, China is like that one person on Twitter that can't take any criticism and just blocks everyone.
There you go.
Nailed it.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver later defended Mori's right to express his views on Hong Kong, but noted that it was not the league's job to regulate what players, employees, and team owners say.
Silver also said Chinese authorities had pressed them to fire Mori over the issue.
Let me tell you something.
Let me tell you the difference between the right and the left, at least as it's perceived right now.
Communist China says, somebody associated with your league has said a thing we don't like.
Terminate them in every possible way.
And NBA is like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
It doesn't work for us.
You know, he owns the team and he participates in the NBA.
So think about it this way.
Imagine if you messed something up and, you know, like, your neighbor goes to your parents and then tells your parents they have to kick you out of the house.
And you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, like, take it up with him.
You know what I mean?
Well, maybe that's a bad analogy, but the point is, they're going to the NBA and trying to use external pressure to force Morrie to bend the knee.
That's scary.
They say, meanwhile, several people in the league, including Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr... Oh, you know what, man?
We know all about this stuff.
I'm not going to rehash it.
He goes on and talks about Blizzard.
I've got some better news.
I want to tell you, how do you respond to these spineless losers who are terrified of China?
Oh, poor China.
I'll admit, I'm never going to China.
No way.
They're trying to walk in.
They're going to get out.
But I'll tell you what you do.
A couple things.
Quentin Tarantino holds firm and won't recut Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for China.
Bravo, Quentin Tarantino!
Of all the people!
That I could expect to not bend the knee would certainly be Quentin Tarantino.
He seems like somebody who just doesn't care and he'll do what he wants.
And he tends to do it right.
I thought Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was pretty great.
Tarantino will not recut Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to placate Chinese censors, Variety has confirmed.
The decision likely means that Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt buddy dramedy and ode to late 60s Tinseltown won't be making an appearance in China.
At least in non-pirated form.
Tarantino previously ran afoul of higher-ups in the country with Django Unchained and ultimately agreed to make some excisions that eliminated scenes of graphic violence and nudity after the film was yanked from release.
It didn't matter much.
When it was re-released in edited form, the film went on to flop in China, ecking out $2.7 million, even as it grossed a mighty $425.4 million globally.
Once Upon a Time, which boasts DiCaprio a favorite with Chinese audiences, is a lead role along with another A-lister pit.
Many have fared better.
Let me ask you something.
Do people in China just not realize all this is happening?
Like, when PewDiePie gets purged, don't they sit there and say like, oh, PewDiePie's gone, like, now we have no idea what's happening?
Like, you can see it happening, right?
You'd be upset by that, right?
Man, could you imagine someone being like, I watch PewDiePie every day and he was banned and then going, oh, oh well, praise China.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on.
No, why?
You're allowed to live and experience and have an opinion.
Hey man, at least as an American that's what we're supposed to believe.
But let me tell you what, check this out.
South Park plays the go-go streaming field with bids approaching $500 million.
Now you may be saying, Tim, what does this have to do with China?
Rumor has it that although you have a bunch of streaming networks trying to win the rights to South Park, rumor, I'm saying rumor, rumor has it Netflix pulled out specifically because it could damage their standing in China.
I don't know if that's true or not, but that's the rumor that's going around, and I will tell you, they can't say this.
Bids for the s- uh, so, let's read.
At the same time it finds itself in the middle of a controversy about China-U.S.
relations, Comedy Central South Park is exploring the booming streaming marketplace for established shows.
Bids for the series, now in its 23rd season, have approached $500 million, sources confirmed to Deadline.
And here it is.
Netflix, interestingly, has dropped out of the bidding, according to people familiar with the situation.
Now, the viral rumor was that Netflix dropped out because the Banned in China episode or... Okay.
South Park did an episode criticizing China.
China then banned South Park.
If Netflix picks up South Park, China might say, we're gonna block you, too.
I will say this, though.
It's a rumor.
I haven't confirmed it.
It may be true.
I don't know.
It could also be possible that once the bid got to $400 million, Netflix was like, nah, that's too much money.
So I think a lot of people might want to attribute Netflix dropping out to China.
And I think it's important to, you know, listen.
I don't normally like talking about rumors, but I think this one was prominent enough.
It was like the front page of Reddit that someone should point out.
So far, all I've found is that it could possibly be Netflix just not having the money or not wanting to spend that much.
They dropped out of the bidding when the number got too high.
But it could be China.
They say Hulu, however, which has had streaming rights to the show since 2014, is among several companies in the mix.
Another active bidder is CBS.
Sources tell Deadline the company is about to merge with Viacom, the home of South Park linear airings and ad-supported streams.
Subscription service CBS All Access, which has millions of subscribers, would be a logical destination for the show, given its status as a signature company property.
Isn't that crazy how things have kind of evolved in this way?
You know, CBS was always just regular old analog TV for me, not cable.
Comedy Central was cable, but now South Park might find itself on a more mainstream network because of it.
So they say.
An episode of South Park banned in China this month took no prisoners in roasting the contradictory stance of U.S.
entities including the NBA in Hollywood.
While they espouse support for constitutional and human rights, the episode poked fun at those values sometimes taking a backseat to the pursuit of revenue from the world's second largest economy.
As anti-government protests continue to percolate, China predictably frowned on the episode, but it was viewed widely via pirated streams.
South Park has no official license deal in China, nor do any other Comedy Central shows.
Viacom has thus far escaped the blowback that has hit the NBA and companies like Apple and Activision.
They say in much of the rest of the world, it is boom times for Hollywood, especially for those holding rights to a select group of established titles.
Netflix, which will be losing friends in the office in the next few years in deals worth a collective billion, put down $500 million for rights to Seinfeld starting in 2021.
Warner Media's HBO Max.
Okay, okay, so I wanted to see if they have any direct statement about China being involved, but I haven't found it.
And I did a decent amount of searches, so some of you may be thinking that was real.
I can't find it, so, you know, take whatever.
Believe what you want.
I can't prove it.
Again, it may just be that Netflix couldn't afford it or didn't want to pay for it.
But I'll say this.
To the South Park guys, to Quentin Tarantino, That's what a spine looks like.
Okay, that's what a spine looks like.
The NBA came out after the fact.
Nah, sorry, you still don't have a spine.
You see, the NBA boots people from a game, and they bend over for China, and it's only after they realized they were threatening their core market that they were like, wait, wait, wait, wait, we'd rather have some money than just, you know, we would rather have the American market, which is the predominant market, as opposed to pleasing China.
But I'll tell you what, NBA, I don't go to your games anyway, so don't take my word for it.
In the end, man, Don't bend the knee to- You know what, man?
There are such slimeballs.
You know, such slimy people.
They don't care about you or me or what's important or human rights.
They care about making money.
You know what?
That's a terrifying world to live in, I gotta admit.
If you wanna sell your soul, and you wanna sell out everybody else just so you can have an extra buck, not worth it.
But I hope your boat is comfortable when you buy that fancy yachtny yacht.
Yeah.
Anyway, stick around, I got one more segment coming up in a few minutes, and I will see you all shortly.
Should we tax the rich?
My response, in my personal opinion, is a soft yes, of course.
However, we have to dissect that statement in many, many ways.
Because what does it mean, tax the rich?
Well, we literally tax everybody.
I, for one, don't really have a big problem with taxes as it stands.
And I know a lot of libertarian types are, more right-wing libertarian types, taxation is theft.
I personally don't agree.
I think we have a community, and I think taxes are a part of defending that community.
And it is really, really complicated because I'm on the libertarian spectrum as well, but I lean left, so I'm in favor of taxes.
But let's talk about taxes today.
We'll start with this story from Fox News.
Billionaires could face up to 97.5% tax rates under Sanders' plan.
I have always asked my left-wing friends, what does that mean?
And they say, the rich have too much, and we should redistribute that.
Okay, I stop and say, wait.
Why do I care if a rich person has too much money?
Can you give me an answer?
And they say, well, you know, because we need money for school.
Ah, ok, stop.
So we're not talking about just taxing the rich.
That seems to be like you're targeting an individual you don't like.
You're like, just explain it to me, right?
Ok. What you're really saying is we need money, right?
Ok, ok. We need money for schools, health care.
Where can we find it?
I'll tell you this. You can't find it in taxing the rich.
Now, should we tax the rich?
I think the answer is yes.
Why?
Because we don't want power to become centralized and grow out of control.
Hey, guess what?
Tim's on the left, isn't he?
The thing I see about taxes is that when you have a very high tax rate, income tax rate, not wealth tax.
That's the other thing I want to talk about, right?
Is Bernie and Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax, which, as Andrew Yang pointed out, European countries are moving away from because they have problems implementing it.
The general idea with the wealth tax is that if you have wealth, you must pay a tax.
Literally makes no sense.
Literally makes no sense.
So let's talk about this.
If we tax income at a very high rate, you know what will happen?
Billionaires will just take a smaller salary and income, and they will more heavily invest and expand and put money into things.
When a rich person is receiving exorbitant amounts of money, they don't just go, oh no, now I have to pay 97.5% taxes!
They go, if I make another million, I'm going to lose almost all of it to the government.
What can I do with this million and take a tax write-off?
You see the point?
This is better for the economy.
It provides asset value to the individual who created the wealth, which they can later sell, and it bolsters the economy.
But when you do a wealth tax, you strip away that incentive.
So let's have a conversation.
I believe in taxing the rich.
Okay.
I believe we have to do specific things.
And we have to be careful about how it's implemented.
And the purpose is, for one, as I stated, decentralizing power, making sure we don't have, you know, people running amok buying elections and doing crazy things.
But more importantly, it's because when taxes go up for corporations, the corporations don't just sit there and go, oh, haramfai se.
We do have a lot of other problems to consider, though.
But these companies, me being somebody who owns a company, when I'm sitting here, I'm not going, oh man, I better not spend a dime so that I can all just pay the government.
I say, oh no, I might as well just hire somebody.
Yeah, that's right.
If you've got the money sitting around, and you think to yourself, if I just take the cash, I pay a massive tax on it, because I'm already over a certain threshold, or as someone who's already wealthy, I'm talking about, you know, someone like Bernie Sanders is a millionaire, or someone like Jeff Bezos is a billionaire, it makes more sense to invest that money outright.
And most of them do in the first place.
So what I'm saying isn't out of line with what's already happening.
Jeff Bezos, his income was like a million dollars in what, 2017?
Yeah, a million.
They call him a billionaire because they act like his stock is cash.
It's not, okay?
When he makes money, When he makes real money, he invests it to a certain point.
His actual salary is like $86,000 a year.
Yeah, that's less than some journalists, amazingly.
So here's what ends up happening.
When you have a higher tax bracket on income and certain kinds of investments, people like Jeff Bezos invest the money, literally what he's doing.
He's not taking a billion dollars in cash.
When you do a wealth tax, and then say, it doesn't matter.
Okay, Jeff Bezos, you're worth billions of dollars.
You then put him in a position where he has to choose.
You don't make enough money, and even if you make more, we're gonna tax all that too.
How is Jeff Bezos supposed to come up with a billion dollars to pay the small percentage of wealth tax for his 800 billion dollars in wealth?
Or, I'm sorry, his 130 billion dollars in wealth.
I did a video about this before.
And then the left said, Tim, duh, he'll just sell stock.
Okay.
You also realize that selling stock will reduce the value of that stock across the board.
The plan makes no sense.
Oh man, I can't believe I'm ranting.
Let's read the story.
Fox News reports two economists at the University of California, Berkeley claim that billionaires could face a 97.5% average effective tax rate under Senator Bernie Sanders' plan, which would easily thump other Democrats running for president in 2020.
In annual says, one of the professors told Bloomberg that with the wealth tax, you get directly at the stock instead of hitting the flow of income, making it a much more powerful deconcentration tool than income taxes.
The report pointed out that Sanders has said the number of billionaires in the U.S.
would be cut in half within 15 years under his plan.
Why is that a good thing?
I mean that literally.
Why is it a good thing?
If you're talking about needing money for programs, then what we need to do is create wealth.
We need to generate revenue and increase wages for people.
Just because someone is a billionaire because we nebulously value a stock at a certain price doesn't mean they have money.
Let's say I find a rock on the ground and I pick it up.
What's that rock worth?
Well, what can you sell it for?
What if someone came up to you and said, I'll give you a dollar for that rock.
Congratulations.
Your rock is now worth one dollar.
Let's say the rock is the only thing you own.
Excuse me.
Your net worth is a dollar.
Let's say that person buys it for a dollar.
Later, someone comes up and says, I would like that rock.
Now you're probably thinking, who cares about a rock, man?
Exactly my point.
The object itself is irrelevant.
Let's say somebody walks up and says, I want that rock.
The guy goes, no way, I bought it for a dollar.
I'm not selling it.
And the guy goes, I'll give you $2.
Congratulations, your rock is now worth $2.
This is how they sell assets like paintings.
The value goes up because someone says, no way, I bought it for $50 million.
I'm not selling it.
And the value can go down if nobody wants to buy it.
So it's an excellent store of value.
Eventually that rock gets traded around and the value keeps going up because people really do want that rock.
Let's say somebody's finally got it.
They bought it for 5 bucks.
Now 10 people are all bidding, waving their hands.
I'll give you 10.
I'll give you 20.
I'll give you 30.
Finally he sells it for 50 bucks.
That rock is now valued at 50 bucks.
But guess what?
Bernie Sanders comes along.
And says, I see you've just bought a rock for 50 bucks.
Okay.
You gotta pay a 10% wealth tax on that.
That means I need 5 bucks from you every year if you want to hold that rock.
And the person says, but I don't have 5 bucks.
I just have the rock.
And then Bernie goes, well, sell the rock.
Seriously, how does that make sense?
The value of the object is irrelevant.
If he then turns around and says, I want to sell this, but nobody wants to buy it, it's valueless.
So what happens if the year ends?
It's April now, okay?
And for the year 2018, they say, you have a wealth tax on this $50 rock.
It's 8%, so it's, you know, $4.63 or whatever.
And he says, okay, well, I don't have that.
And they say, well, then you got to sell the rock.
And then he turns around and says, okay, fine, I guess I'll sell the rock for 50 bucks.
And guess what?
Nobody wants to buy it.
Nobody will buy The Rock.
And then he thinks to himself, but how can I pay the tax bill?
Oh, you can write down the value of The Rock, right?
And say, hey, nobody would buy it.
The Rock is worth zero.
I don't gotta pay taxes on it.
The point is, net worth is nebulous in a lot of circumstances.
You know, Vice Media still claims it's worth $4 billion, but Disney claims their $500 million investment is worth zero.
If Disney's investment is worth zero, how is Vice worth $4 billion?
But that's what they'll say.
So look, I get it.
In the end, it comes down to how you report it on your taxes, and shares have value, and it's complicated.
But listen.
None of this makes sense.
None of this was planned out effectively.
And I'm someone who still believes we should have a high bracket for high-income earners.
What Bernie is proposing, and what Elizabeth Warren is proposing, literally makes no sense.
And therein lies the problem.
Isn't it true that if I'm in favor of taxing the rich, that would put me on the left, right?
But what if I disagree on their plan because they haven't actually explained how it makes sense?
Does that make me conservative?
No!
Welcome to my world!
When they propose a minimum wage increase across the board, and we can see the ramifications of this, and you try to explain the nuance, they say you're conservative.
Okay.
Andrew Yang also opposes the minimum wage, and he believes that a UBI makes more sense.
I disagree with Andrew Yang to a great deal on UBI, but I will admit I've warmed up to it a little bit, partly due to his ability to explain it.
The important thing about UBI from Yang is that he's not talking about taxing Americans to pay Americans.
That makes no sense.
It's like a Mobius strip, you know?
He talks about a VAT tax on consumer goods, which could also be consumer goods shipped overseas.
Now we're talking.
Let's talk about minimum wage.
If New Jersey increases the minimum wage, that means, locally, bad news for everybody.
Internationally, good news for those in New Jersey, to an extent.
So, yes, I actually believe we should have a minimum wage.
But I rag on it frequently, for one, because the companies are lying when they implement it.
Two, the Democrats seem to just blindly call for it, in my opinion, because they're manipulating us based on what we really want, without implementing a sound plan.
And three, While it may make sense in many circumstances to have a minimum wage, right now we have a tech issue that must be dealt with.
Hence, I like Andrew Yang.
If you jack up the minimum wage, people will replace them with robots.
So we need to figure out that point first.
But the general idea between why we do have a base rate and a high tax rate is to keep a certain level of equality.
Now look, a lot of people might think, so what if there's billionaires?
And for the most part, I agree.
But you do not want to live in an oligarchic state.
It will be a nightmare.
The property will all be so expensive, no one will ever own a building again, and you will be living in essentially a fiefdom controlled by some ultra-wealthy dude who owns all the property, or a company that does.
While I think it's fine for people to be billionaires and to earn that, I lean to the left.
Social liberal, which means I think there have to be some checks to make sure power doesn't grow out of control.
That includes the government just as much as private and corporate entities.
So Bernie, You want to roll out a wealth tax that would be 97.5%?
Don't be surprised when you encounter the tech problem.
Anybody can just move their business anywhere today.
And I tell you this, if he tried implementing this, Jeff Bezos would be like, uh, what are my taxes going to be?
Yeah, China?
Yeah, I wanna do whatever I want.
I'm a billionaire.
I'll bring my companies to you.
And China's gonna be like, absolutely.
Come on down.
He's gonna move all his money overseas.
He's gonna move his company overseas.
And then America's gonna be going, wait, wait, don't leave.
Oh, you can't stop him.
What he's doing isn't illegal.
He can easily move everything over.
He can snap his fingers and transfer that money to a foreign account.
And he can easily go to another country, renounce his citizenship.
I tell you, this man...
There are literally billionaires who renounce their citizenship and become citizens of small Caribbean islands to avoid having to pay taxes.
Okay?
This is not going to solve the problem in any way.
We have a global world with technology where people can travel.
And while I agree with stopping the rampant growth and separation and wealth inequality, These aren't solutions to that problem.
The solution would be, we need to make sure that there is more market competition, we need to make sure that there are more small businesses that can compete against the big dogs, and the policies being enacted are doing the opposite of that.
I am not a laissez-faire capitalist by no means.
I believe that we need more market competition, but it needs to be regulated to a decent extent.
Otherwise, you just see, you know, disaster.
And you get people playing tricks and lying and a bunch of other problems.
Anyway, whatever.
You get the point.
It's an article from last week, but I wanted to talk about this stuff, so I'll see you all tomorrow at 10 a.m.
on the main channel.
Stick around, podcast is every day at 6.30 p.m.
It's just all of my content, you know, Tim Pool daily show on the podcast.
