Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism | Lex Fridman Podcast #441
- Communism makes no sense at all, totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always evolves into dictatorship. It creates a power
vacuum, when you say, hey, there's no structure of power here, right? We're all equal. It's a flat line. One guy usually gets up, because that's human nature
and goes, eh, I don't think so. I think if you're gonna
leave a power vacuum, I'm gonna take that power vacuum. Corporatism hates competition. It wants monopoly and oligopoly power. Whereas capitalism loves
competition and wants the free markets. When mainstream media has you hooked, you got no hope because you don't have the right information. You have propaganda, you have marketing, you don't have real news. When you're in the online
world, it's chaotic. And don't get me wrong, it's
got plenty of downsides, right? But within that chaos, the
truth begins to emerge. Trump is a massive risk
because of all the things we talked about earlier, but there is a percentage
chance that he's such a wild card, that he
overturns the whole system, and that is why the establishment
is a little scared of him. - The following is a
conversation with Cenk Uygur, a progressive political
commentator and host of The Young Turks. As I've said before, I
will speak with everyone, including on the left and the right of the political spectrum, always in good faith with
empathy, rigor, and backbone. Sometimes I fail, sometimes I say stupid, inaccurate,
ineloquent things, and I frequently change
my mind as I'm learning and thinking about the world. For all this, I often get attacked, sometimes
fairly, sometimes not, but just know that I'm
aware when I fall short and I will keep trying to do better. I love you all. This is
a Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Cenk Uygur. You wrote a book? - Yeah.
- A manifesto, that outlines the progressive
vision for America. So the big question, what are some defining
ideas of progressivism? - Yes. So in order to do that, Lex, we gotta talk about where we
are in the political spectrum. And in fact, there's two
different spectrums now. People often think of left, right. And that's true, that exists. But layered on top of that is now populist
versus establishment. So I'm center left on
the left, right spectrum, but I'm all the way on that populist end of the second spectrum. So where does progressivism
lie within that? Well, I would argue that
it's exactly in those places, it's populist, and it's on the
left, but it is not far left. So far left is a different animal, and we could talk about
that in a little bit. So in terms of what makes a progressive, so expand the circle of
liberty and justice for all and equality of opportunity. Now people will say, well, that seems pretty broad and
all American, but is it? Think about it. So expand
the circle of liberty. Everybody's in favor of that,
right? No, absolutely not. So certainly the King of
England was not in favor of expanding the circle of liberty, and the founding father
said, we're gonna expand it. And they expanded it to
propertied white men. And then progressives have been, they're progressives because
they expanded the circle of liberty, they then, from then on, as we were perfecting the union, progressives
always say, expand it further, include women, include
people without property, include all races, and at every turn, conservatives fight against it. So that doesn't mean if
you're a conservative today, you don't wanna include women
or minorities, et cetera. But today you would
say, for example, well, I don't wanna expand the
circle of liberty to, for example, undocumented immigrants. And maybe you're right about that. And we could have that discussion in terms of a specific philosophy. And I don't believe that undocumented immigrants
should immediately be citizens or anything along those lines. But I do believe in
expanding liberty overall. And the contours of that
are what's interesting. And then you see justice for all. Everybody's for... No, right now, marijuana possession is still illegal in a lot
of parts of the country. Now, a lot of right wingers
and left wingers agree that it should be legal. But for my entire lifetime, black people have been
arrested at about 3.7 times the rate of white people, and the entire country
has been fine with it. So is that justice? No, they smoke... White people, black people smoke
marijuana at the same rate. Black people get arrested
about four times the rate. That is an injustice that
an enormous percentage of the country was comfortable with. Well, progressives aren't
comfortable with it. We want justice for all. So the equality of opportunity
is an interesting one because the far left will say, at least some portions
of them will say equality of results, right? So progressives just want a fair chance. So free college education, but afterwards you don't get
to have exact same results as either the wealthiest person or we're not all gonna be equal, have equal talent, skills,
abilities, et cetera. - There's a lot of
questions I can ask there. So on the circle of liberty, yes, so expanding the number
of people whose freedoms are protected, but what about
the magnitude of freedom for each individual person? So expanding the freedom of the individual and protecting the
freedoms of an individual. It seems like progressives
are more willing to expand the size of government where
government can do all kinds of regulation, all kinds of
controls in the individual... - So Lex, what we're probably gonna talk about a lot today is balance. And so a lot of people
think, oh, I'm on the right, I'm on the left. And that comes with a
certain preset ideology. So the right is always correct.
The left is always correct. So there's two problems with that. Number one, how could you possibly believe in a preset ideology if
you're an independent thinker? It's literally, by
definition, not possible. If you say, I lent my brain to an ideology that was created 80 years
ago, or eight years ago, or 800 years ago, and
I'm not gonna change it, you're saying, I don't think for myself. I, you know, I bought into a culture. And by the way, there's a lot of different
forms of culture you buy into, religion, politics,
sometimes racial, et cetera. So that's why you need actually balance. The second reason you need balance other than independent thought
is because the answer is almost never black and white. And that gets into a
really interesting to us, because mainstream media, in
my opinion, is the matrix. And its job is to delude you
into thinking corporate rule is great for you and we
should never change it, and the status quo is wonderful. So they have created a false middle. What mainstream media
calls moderate is actually, in my opinion, extremist
corporate ideology. So for example, they'll say,
Joe Manchin is a moderate, none of his positions are moderate other than potentially gun
control in West Virginia. He's not for gun control. The people of West Virginia are not for gun control, generally speaking. So, and he uses that and they usually have these shiny objects where
they're like, you see this? I'm a moderate because of guns, or I'm a moderate because I'm
a Democrat from West Virginia. But wait, let's look at your positions. You're against paid family
leave, that polls at 84%. So you're a radical corporatist who say that women should be forced back into work the day after they have birth. You're against a higher
minimum wage. You're against... You're for every corporate position. And they all poll at 33% or less. So Joe Manchin is not at all a moderate. And this applies to almost
every corporate Republican and every corporate Democrat. They're all extremists in supporting what I call corporatism. So you have to get to a
balance in order to get to the right answer. - So that's an interesting
distinction here. So you're actually, as far as
I understand, pro capitalism? - Yes. - Which is an interesting place to be. That's the thing that
probably makes you center left and then still populist. You're full of beautiful contradictions, let's say this, which
will be great to untangle. But what's the difference between corporatism and capitalism? Is there a difference? - Yeah, so I really believe in capitalism. I don't think that there's
really a second choice. Where it gets super interesting is the distinction between
capitalism and socialism, because that's not at all as
clear as people think it is. And people often say
socialism and communism as synonyms when they're
not synonyms, right? And so I view it as, there's
basically four distinct areas. It's obviously a spectrum.
Everything is a spectrum, right? On one end, you have communism on the left and on the other end you have
corporatism on the right. Okay? And I would argue that
capitalism is in the middle. And so communism we know,
state owns all property. You're not allowed to
have private property. So I will piss off a lot
of people in this show. And so I'm asking for their patience, please
hear me out, and because, don't worry, I'm gonna piss
off the other side too. Okay? So communism makes no sense at all, totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always evolves into
dictatorship because it is not built for human nature. We're never going to act like
that. It's not in our DNA. You could try to wish it into
existence than they have. And it never works. And it's because once
you have almost no rules in terms of, oh, we're all equal, and even though communism
eventually winds up having an enormous amount of rules, right? It creates a power
vacuum when you say, hey, there's no structure of power here, right? We're all equal. It's a flat line. One guy usually gets up,
because that's human nature, and goes, eh, I don't think so. I think if you're gonna
leave a power vacuum, I'm gonna take that power vacuum. - That's actually a really
interesting way to put it, 'cause when everyone is
equal, nobody is in power, and human nature is such
that there's everybody's that there's a will to power, so when you create a power vacuum, somebody's going to to fill it. So the alternative is
to have people in power, but there's a balance of power. And then there's like a
democratic system that elects the people in power and keeps churning and
rotating who's involved. - That is exactly it, Lex,
you got it exactly right, in my opinion. Okay? So that's why communism never
works and can never work. So it's an idea of like, we're all gonna work as
hard as we possibly can and take only what we need. Where? When? When has that ever happened in the history of humanity, right? We're just not built that way. So, okay, we can get into
that debate with my friends on the left, et cetera. Now, corporatism is just as
extreme and just as dangerous. And that is basically what
we have in America now. What we have in America now, and this is another giant
trick that the matrix played on everybody, that they did a shell game, and all of a sudden extreme
corporatists like Manchin and almost every Republican
in the Senate are moderates. Oh my God, Mitch McConnell all of a sudden is a moderate, and et cetera, as long as you're not a populist. Populists are never moderate, okay? But if you love corporations
and corporate tax cuts and everything in favor of corporations, you're magically called a moderate when you actually,
according to the polling, have super extreme positions
that the American people hate. And by the way, that's part of the reason
for the rise of Trump. We can come back to that. Okay? But the second shell game
is taking out capitalism, putting in corporatism, but
still calling it capitalism. Okay? So what is corporatism? It is when corporations
slowly take over the system and create monopoly and oligopoly power. So that snuffs out
equality of opportunity. So how do they do that? When people say the system is rigged, they oftentimes can't
explain it that well. And then mainstream media goes, "Ah, you sound conspiratorial. (laughs) It was rigged. Yeah, I wonder how?" Yeah, super easy to explain it. Here's one of dozens of examples,
carried interest loophole. So that is for hedge
funds, private equity, the top people on Wall Street, that's part of their income. They get 2 and 20, right? So 2% is a flat fee no matter
what happens to the fund. And 20% of the profits
of the fund goes back to the people who invested it. It's not their money,
it's not their investment. What they're getting
is actually just income and should be taxed at the highest rate. But it's because of this loophole, it's taxed at a much
lower rate at around 20%. So do you know at what
income level you go above 20% if you're a regular Joe? It's at $84,000 a year. So these billionaires are
getting the same tax rate as people making $84,000 a year. It's unbelievably unfair. And that's corporatism taking over and starting to rig the rules. I'm gonna pay less taxes.
You are gonna pay more taxes. Okay? So again, I can give
you dozens of those examples. So, and mergers, so that
they get to oligopoly power, that's how you rig a system, lowering the corporate tax rates, making sure that there
is no real minimum wage, making sure there's no
universal healthcare, we all become indentured
servants of corporations... They take away power from the average guy, give it to the most powerful
people in the world. So, and but the most
important distinction, Lex, is that corporatism hates competition. It wants monopoly and oligopoly power. Whereas capitalism loves
competition and wants the free markets. And I remember, you know, we started Young Turks back in 2002, so we've been around for 22 years, longest running daily
show on the internet ever. And so we were pre-Iraq War,
and the Iraq War starts, and Dick Cheney starts
handing out no-bid contracts. I'm like, what part of
capitalism is a no-bid contract? You can't negotiate drug prices. That's the most anti-free
market thing I have ever heard. It's almost like communism
for corporations. They get everything. And you get nothing, right? So it's preposterous, it's awful, and it kills the free markets, and it's killing this country, and it is the main ideology and religion of the establishment. - Are all companies built the same here? So when you say
corporatism, it seems like, just looking here at the list
of, by industry lobbyists, it seems like there are certain industries that are worse offenders than others, like
pharmaceuticals, like insurance, oil and gas? - Yeah. - So it seems to me it feels wrong to just throw all companies
into the same bucket of like, they're all guilty. - No. No, they're not all guilty. So let's make a bunch
of distinctions here. So first of all, can you, first of all, are they, quote, unquote, guilty? No. They're doing something that
is logical and natural, right? So if you're a company, do you wanna pay higher
taxes or lower taxes? Of course you wanna
pay lower taxes, right? Do you wanna have higher employee costs or lower employee costs? Of course you want lower
employee costs, right? But the government needs to understand that and protect us from that
power that they are going to exercise to get to those results. And if you think free markets
as there is no government, you read it wrong, go back and reread Adam Smith. He says, you must protect
against monopoly power. If you do not protect
against monopoly power, you'll have no free markets. And he's absolutely right. So second distinction is
between small business and big business. That's why Republicans
will always be like, oh, we're doing this for small business. That's why we got the
biggest oil companies in the world $30 billion in subsidies. What happened to small business, right? So I run a small business. And so if people were to say like, hey, maybe there should be exemptions for some of the regulations if
your company has less than five employees, 10 employees, 50 employees, et cetera... There's some logic in that. 'Cause businesses have
different stages of growth and they have different
interests and different needs in those stages of growth. And we wanna facilitate
small business growth because that's great for the economy, that's great for markets,
freedom, et cetera. But the bigger corporations, even there, there's a third distinction. It isn't that there's certain industries that are worse, there's just that there are industries that
are better at lobbying. So anyone who, like right now, number one donor in Washington? A lot of people make a mistake. They think it's AIPAC or they
think it's the oil companies or the banks. No, it's big pharma, okay? And who has the most power
in this country? Big pharma. So we can't even
negotiate the drug prices. I mean, look, guys,
think about it this way. That's like saying, okay,
here's a bottle of water. And normally in the free
market that would cost about a dollar, right? And in the, for Medicare,
the drug companies come in and go, no, I'm not charging
a dollar for that water. I'm charging $100. And the government has to
say, yes, sir, thank you, sir, of course, sir, we'll pay $100. That's why I compare it to communism, because I can't imagine anything
more diametrically opposed to the free market then you the consumer have to pay whatever the
hell a corporation charges. That's insanity. Let alone the patents, let alone the fact that
the American people pay for the research and
then they make billions of dollars off of it, and we
get nothing but robbed by them. So it's about lobby power. Oil companies have huge lobby power. Defense contractors have huge lobby power. It's not that they're more evil, it's just that they have
figured out the game better and they have basically
taken the influence they need to capture the market,
capture the government, and snuff out all competition. - Well... - Or a lot of competition... - Figure out the game better. So I think a lot of
companies are good at winning the right way: by building better products, by, you know, making people happier with
the work they're doing and the winning at the game of capitalism. And then there's other companies that win at the game of lobbying. And I just wanna sort of
draw that distinction, 'cause I think it's a
small subset of companies that are playing the game of lobbying. It's like big pharma... - So Lex, first of all, you have to set rules for
what makes sense, not, oh, I don't like this
industry, or I don't like this company, or, hey, this company's not doing that
much lobbying at this point. They will later, when they
realize what's going on. So for example, in my opinion, AIPAC has totally bought
almost all of Congress. And so now other countries
are gonna wake up and go, wait, you could just
buy the American government? So AIPAC is gonna spend about $100 million in this cycle, and they're gonna, and then they're getting 26 billion back. So every country in the world is soon gonna realize, oh, take American citizens that live there, get them a tremendous
amount of money and just buy the US government, right? So that, but for corporations, they've already realized that
on a massive scale, right? So for example, in the two
industries you gave, automotive. So in New Jersey, about
a decade or ago or so, one of the most powerful
lobbies is car dealerships. So at the national level, you've got pharma and you've
got defense contractors, et cetera, at the local level,
guys who have huge power, number one is utilities,
number two is real estate, and then car dealerships
are hilariously among the top, right? Because it's local businesses
that are, you know, financing the politicians
at the local level. So they passed a law saying
that you have to sell through dealerships, but Tesla doesn't sell through dealerships. And it was intended to bully, intimidate, and push out Tesla out of the market. They then did that in a number of different states
throughout the country. So does that make any sense
in a democracy? Of course not. Why do you have to sell your product through a specific vehicle or medium? You could sell it any way you like. That's the most anti-free
market thing possible. Why? It was just total utter corruption. And, but it's not, but
it's perfectly legal. The Supreme Court legalized bribery. So then what happened in that case? So then Elon came in and
gave campaign contributions and reversed it. So now we're in a battle where
it's an open auction, right? Different companies are
buying different politicians and then they're
pretending to have debates about principles and ideas, et cetera. So now let's look at tech. In the beginning, Facebook
was not spending any money in politics or almost
any money in politics. So what happens? They're getting hammered, they get pulled into congressional hearings, and Facebook's got fake
news and oh my God, all these trouble from Facebook... Then Facebook does the logical thing. Oh, it turns out I need to
grease these sons of bitches. Okay? So then they hire a whole bunch of Republicans consultants,
they go grease all the Republicans and most
of the corporate Democrats, and then all of a sudden
we're no longer talking about Facebook at all
and Facebook are angels. And now we've turned our attention to who? Facebook's top competitor,
TikTok. Funny how that works. Okay? And by the way, then
Donald Trump goes, oh, "And TikTok's big dangerous company, they're working with China," okay? And then Jeff Yass comes in on this cycle, part owner of TikTok, and he doesn't want TikTok
banished, of course, right? So he gives Trump a
couple of million dollars. Trump turns around the next day and goes, "We love TikTok, TikTok's
a good company," right? - So that's a big
contributor to influencing what politicians say and what they think. But it's not the entire thing, right? - No, it is. It's 98%. I'll go on mainstream media
and they'll be like, oh, I see what you're saying. I can see how that influences
politicians about 10%. I'm like, no, no, it's 98%. So, and even a lot of good
people think it's 50-50. They have principles and they have money. No, they have money and
this smidge of principles, that's why I wanted to clarify 98-2. - Okay, so how do we fix it? So it's really interesting and nice that you're pro-capitalism
and anti-corporatism. So how do we create a system where the free market can rule, where capitalism can rule, we can have these vibrant flourishing of all these companies
competing against each other and creating awesome stuff? - Yeah. So in the book, I call it democratic capitalism as opposed to Bernie's democratic socialism, right? We can get into that
distinction in a minute. But so as Adam Smith said, and anyone who studies capitalism knows, you need the government to
protect the market as well as the people, because, so
like, why do we have cops? Because if we don't have cops,
somebody's gonna go, well, I like Lex's equipment, why don't I just go into
his house and take it? Right? So you need the cops to protect you, and that's the government. So people say, "Oh, I hate
big government." Do you? Right? It depends, right? If your house is getting robbed, all of a sudden you like the government, but you also need cops on Wall Street, because if you allow insider trading, the powerful are gonna rob you blind and the little guy's gonna get screwed. So that's this easy example. And so if you don't have those cops, the bad guys are gonna take over. They're gonna set the rules,
rig the rules in their favor... So that's why you need regulation. And so the Republicans on
purpose made regulation a dirty word. They're like, "Oh, all regulation is bad." And then sometimes on the
left people fall for the trap of all regulation is good. A guy I like has a great analogy on this. Matt Stoller, he's one of the original, I would argue, progressives. And there's about four of us. I'm sure there's more, but that have stayed true
to the original meaning of progressivism and populism. Me, Matt Stoller, David
Sirota, Ryan Grim. Okay? And they used to be in that
original blogger group. There was guys like Glenn Greenwald and other interesting cats, right? But they went in different directions. So Matt has a great line. He says, if somebody
comes up to you and says, how big a pipe do you want? There is no answer for that. It depends on the job, doesn't it? Right? What are we doing? What are we building? I'm gonna tell you the
size of the pipe depending on the project. So when people say, are you in favor of
regulation or against it? That's an absurd question. Of
course you need regulation. It just means laws, right? So don't kill your neighbor
is a regulation, right? So my idea is a simple one, and one we're gonna keep
coming back to, balance. So when my dad was a small
business owner in New Jersey, and they inspected the elevator six times a year, that was overregulation. And I said to my dad, so should
they not inspect it at all? I'm a young kid growing up. And he said, "Oh, no, no, you gotta inspect it
at least twice a year." I said, "Why? He said, "Because in Turkey,
sometimes they don't inspect it and then the elevator falls." Okay? So bounds of reason, correct regulation to protect
the markets and to protect the American people. - Yeah. But finding the right level of regulation, especially, for example, in tech, something I'm
much more familiar with, is very difficult. 'Cause people in Congress are living in the 20th century before
the internet was invented. So like, how are they supposed
to come up with regulations? - Yeah. - Well, that's the idea of the free market is you should be able to sort of compete, the market regulates, and
then the government can step in and protect the market
from forming monopolies, for example, which is easier to do. - Yeah. But that's a form of regulation. - Right. But then there's like more check in the elevator twice a year. That's a sort of specific
watching, micromanaging. - So Lex, here's the deal. There's no way around the laws are made by politicians, okay?
- Yeah. - So, and so you can't
give up then and go, oh, it's a bunch of schmucks who, I think most politicians are just servants for the donor class. Alright? I, the, you know, the media makes it sound
like they're the best of us. Oh, they deserve a lot
of honor and respect, and they kiss their ass, et cetera. I think generally speaking,
they're usually the worst of us, especially in this
corporatist structure, right? Because they're the guys who, they're number one talent
is, yes, sir, no, sir, what would you like me to do
with your donor money, sir? Absolutely. I'll serve you completely. Or 98%. Right? So in this structure, the
politicians are the worst of us. But at some point you
need somebody elected to be your representative
to do democratic capitalism so that you have capitalism, but it's checked by the government
on behalf of the people. It's the people that are saying, these are the rules of the land and you have to abide by them. So how do you get to the
best possible answer, which is related to an earlier question you asked, Lex, which is the number one
thing you have to do is get big money outta politics. Everything else is near impossible, as long as we are drowned in money, and whoever has more money wins. And by the way, when it
comes to legislation, again, that's true about 98% of the time. Like we predict things
ahead of time, people are like, wow, how did you know that bill wasn't gonna
pass or was gonna pass? It's the easiest thing in the world. And we like literally, like, teach our audience on
The Young Turks, watch, you'll be able to see for yourself. And now like our members comment in, they do these predictions, they're almost always right, right? Because it's so simple. Follow the money. So if you get big money out of politics, and I could explain how
to do that in a sec, then you are at a place
where you got your best shot at honest representatives
that are gonna try their best to get to the right answer. Are they gonna get to the
right answer out of the gate? Usually not. So they pass a law,
there's something wrong with the law, they then
fix that part, they, it's a pendulum. You know, you don't want
it to swing too widely, but you do need a little
bit of oscillation in that pendulum to get
to the right balance. - By the way, I was listening to Joe Biden from when he was like 30
years old, the speeches, he was eloquent as hell.
- Yeah. - It's fun to listen to actually. And he has a speech he gives, or just maybe a conversation in Congress, I'm not sure where, where he talks about how
corrupt the whole system is. And he's really honest and like fun and that Joe Biden's great,
by the way, that guy, I mean age sucks, you
know, people get older. But he was talking quite
honestly about like having to suck up to all these rich people and that he couldn't really suck up to the really rich people. They said, come back to us 10 years later when you're like more
integrated into the system. But he was really honest about it. And he's saying that that's how it is. That's what we have to do. And that really sucks that
that's what we have to do. - Yeah. So we did a video on our
TikTok channel then and now of Joe Biden. This is when I was
trying to push Biden out. - We should say you were
one of the people early on saying Biden needs to step down. - Yeah. I started about a year
ago 'cause I was positive that Biden had a 0% chance of winning. And it turned out, by the way, two days before he dropped
out, his inside advisors, inside the White House said, yeah, near 0% chance of winning.
- Yeah. - So we were right all along. - You got a lot of criticism
for that, by the way, but yeah. - Yeah. We'll we can come back to that. Yes, I did. And which
makes it Tuesday for me. (laughs) I get a lot of
criticism for everything. And by the way, Democratic
Party, you're welcome. So, but Biden's a really
interesting example. I'm really glad you brought it up. So the video on TikTok was
just showing Biden then, Biden now. And you're
right, Biden was so dynamic. When you see how dynamic
he was, we did like side by side, right? And then you see him now
(mumbles) anyways, right? You're like, oh, that's not the same guy. I get it. Right? So, and that got like 5 million
views because it resonates. They're like, yeah, of course. Right? But when he first started, to the point you were making,
Lex, he, one of, in fact, I know, 'cause I talked to him about this, his very first bill was anti-corruption. Why? Because at that point, everything
changes in 1976 to '78, the Supreme Court decisions that basically legalized bribery. But remember, Biden is ancient. So he's coming into politics
at a time when money has not yet drowned politics. And in fact, the American
population is super pissed about the fact that it's begun. They don't like corruption. So early Biden, because
he's reading the room, is very anti-corruption. And the first bill he
proposes to get money out of politics, okay? But as Biden goes on for
his epic 200 year career in Washington, he starts to
get not more conservative, more corporate, because he's
just taken more and more money. By the middle of his
career he has a nickname, the senator from MBNA, okay? MBNA was a credit card
company based in Delaware. The reason he had that nickname is because there isn't
anything Joe Biden wouldn't have done for credit card companies and corporations based in Delaware, which are almost all corporations. Okay? So he became the most corporate
senator in the country, and hence, the most
beloved by corporate media. And corporate media has protected him his entire
career until about a month ago. So for example, in the
primaries, both in 2020 and 2024, if you said the Senator
from MBNA, I guarantee you, almost no one in the
audience has heard of it. If you heard of it, good job, you know politics really well, okay? But the reason you didn't hear of it is because the mainstream
media wouldn't say that's outrageous of Joe Biden to be such a corporate stooge. They'd say, that's outrageous of you to point out something that's true! And something we reported
on earlier! Okay? And so they protected him at all costs. Now, finally, when you get to this version of Joe Biden, he can't
talk, he can't walk... He bears no resemblance
to the young guy who came in saying that money in
politics was a problem. Now he's saying money in
politics is the solution. And in 2020, he said, well, I can raise more money than Bernie. I can kiss corporate better than Bernie. I'm the biggest corporate
ass kisser in the world, so I'm gonna raise a
billion dollars and you need to support me. Now, of course he doesn't
say it in those words, but that was the message
to the establishment. And Buttigieg, Klobuchar,
Obama, Clyburn, everybody goes, oh, that's right. Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, not Bernie. I don't know that there's
anybody in the country who instinctually dislikes
Bernie more than Barack Obama. - Oh, that's an interesting... I'm not taking that
attention at this moment. Because you mentioned mainstream media, what's the motivation for mainstream media to be corporatist also? - So first of all, they're
giant corporations. So they're all multi-billion
dollar corporations. In the old days we had a
incredible number of media outlets. So you go to San Francisco, there'd be at least two
papers and there'd be a paper boy, and I'm
going all the way back, paper boy on each corner. And they're competing with one another. Literally, they'd be on the corner, right? And one guy's going, oh,
here are all these details. They're trying to get an audience, they're trying to get people interested. So they're populist, they're interesting, they're muckrakers, they're
challenging the government. Fast forward to now, or not now, but about a decade ago, five years ago, in that ballpark, now there's only six giant media corporations left. And it's an oligopoly, right? And they're all multi-billion
dollar corporations. They all want tax cuts. Half of them are also,
especially about 20 years ago, during the Iraq War, half of
them are defense contractors. So they're just using
the news as marketing to start wars like the Iraq War. And then GE, which owned MSNBC, makes a tremendous amount of money, so much more money from
war than it does for media that media is a good marketing
spend for these corporations. Now, that's part of it, that they themselves want
the same exact thing as the rest of corporations
do for corporate rule, lower tax cuts, deregulation,
so they can merge, et cetera. But the second part of it is
arguably even more important. So where does all that
money in politics go? So for example, in 2022, it's just a midterm election, no presidential, should be lower spending. A ridiculous $17 billion are spent, okay? On the election cycle. Where
does the 17 billion go? Almost all of it goes
into corporate media, mainstream media, television,
newspapers, radio. They're buying ads like nuts. So we have a reporter
at TYT, David Schuster, he used to work at MSNBC,
Fox News, et cetera. And David once did a piece
about money and politics at a local NBC news station. And his editor or GM spiked a story, and David goes into his office
and asks him, said, "Why? This story is true. It's
a huge part of politics. If we're gonna report on this issue, we gotta tell you what's
actually happening." So he says, "David, come here." He puts his arm around his shoulders, takes him to the big
newsroom, and he goes, "You see all this? Money in politics paid for that." - That's really fascinating. So big corporations, they're giving money to politicians through different channels. And then the politicians
are spending that money on mainstream media. And so there's a vicious cycle
where it's in the interest of the mainstream media not to criticize the very corporations that
are feeding that cycle. It's not actually direct, it's not like corporations are, because I was thinking one of the ways is direct advertisement, like
pharmaceuticals obviously advertise a lot on mainstream media, but there's also indirect, which is like giving
the politicians money, or super PACs and then the
super PACs then the spend money on the... - That's why media never, mainstream media never talks
about the number one factor in politics, which is money. Like we all know, I mean, as we talked about earlier,
we see it with our own eyes. Open auction. Any country, any company,
anybody that has money, the politicians will now literally say, I am now working for
this guy, as Trump says, 'cause he gave me a strong endorsement, which means a lot of money, right? And so, and the press never
covers it. Almost never, right? So you're telling me you're doing an article on the infrastructure build or a Build Back Better, et cetera, and you are not gonna
mention the enormous amount of money that every
lobbyist spent on that bill? That's absurd. That's absurd. That's 98% of the ball game. And the reason they hide the ball is 'cause they don't want
you to know this whole thing is based on the money
that they are receiving. And by the way, that one
more thing about that, Lex, it's that the ads themselves actually, they work and they work pretty well, but that's not the main
reason you spend money on ads. You spend the money on ads
to get friendly coverage from the content, from the free media that you're getting from that same outlet. And so since every newspaper and every television station and network knows that the Democratic Party
and the Republican Party are their top clients, they're going to get billions
of dollars from them, they never really criticize the Republican and Democratic Party. On the other hand, if you're an outsider, they'll rip your face off. - That's also really interesting. So if you're an advertiser, if you're a big pharma
and you're advertising, it's not that the advertisement works, it's that the hosts are too afraid, not like explicitly, just even implicitly,
they're self-censoring. They're not going to have any guests that are like controversial
anti-big pharma or they're not gonna make any jokes about big pharma,
they're not gonna make... And that kind of, that
continues and expands. - Yeah.
- That's really interesting. - Yeah. Sometimes it's super direct. When I was a host on MSNBC, I had a company that I was
criticizing in my script and management looked at it. And by the way, I used to go off prompter a
lot and it drove him crazy. Not because I wasn't good at it. I think my ratings went up
whenever I went off prompter. But because they couldn't
pre-approve the script. And what do they wanna pre-approve? Hey, are you gonna criticize
one of our sponsors, one of our advertisers, et cetera. So we had a giant fight
over it and the compromise was I moved them lower in the script, but kept them in the story. Right? So sometimes it's super
direct like that, but more, way more often it's
implicit, it's indirect. You don't have to say it, right? So I give you a spectacular example of
it so that you get a sense of how it works implicitly. So since GE is a giant defense contractor, they own MSNBC at the
time of the Iraq War, they fired everyone who was
against the Iraq War on air. So Phil Donahue, Jesse
Ventura, Ashleigh Banfield, but Ashleigh Banfield, they did something different with, okay? She was a rising star at the time. She goes and gives a speech in Kansas, not really even having a policy position, but just talking about the
actual cost of this Iraq War and how we should be really careful. They hate that. So they take their rising star and they take her off air, okay? And she goes, okay, good.
Let me outta my contract. It's okay, I'll go. Because she was such a star at that time, she could have easily
gotten somewhere else. And they go, no, we're not going to let
you outta your contract. Why not? Were you gonna
pay me to do nothing? "Yeah, not only that,
we're moving your office." "Where are you moving it to?" They literally moved
it into a closet, okay? And they made sure that everybody in the building saw her
getting taken off the air and moved into a closet. The closet is the memo, right? That's the memo to the whole building. You better shut up and
do as you're told. Okay? So that way I don't have to tell you
and get myself in trouble. It's super obvious, there
are guardrails here and you are not allowed to go
beyond acceptable thought, and acceptable thought is our sponsors are great, politicians are
great, the powerful are great. - So how do we... How do we begin to fix that?
And what exactly are we fixing? Is it the influence of the lobbyist, the influence of, like,
it feels like there's, companies have found different ways to achieve influence, right? So how do we get money out of politics? - So it's very difficult but
doable and we will do it. So, but in order to do it, the populist left and the populist right have to unite, because,
and that, by the way, that is why we have the culture wars. - That's why you're voting for Trump? - (laughs) No chance. Okay? So we can get into that in a minute. So the culture wars
are meant to divide us. If we get united, we have enough leverage and
power to be able to do it. But you can't do it through a normal bill, because if you do it on a bill, the whole point of
capturing the Supreme Court was to make sure that they kill any piece of legislation that would
protect the American people. - You're saying the Supreme
Court is also captured by this? - Oh, 100%. So, okay, so let me explain. Again, people, for the
uninitiated, they think, oh, that sounds conspiratorial. Well, in this case, that's actually somewhat true because people now know about this. It's the Powell memo, right? The most infamous
political memo in history. Lewis Powell writes a memo for the Chamber of Commerce in 1971 that's basically a blueprint
for how the Chamber of Commerce can take over the government. And Lewis Powell explains, one of the most important
things you have to do is take over the media. But even more important
than that is taking over the Supreme Court. 'Cause the Supreme Court
is the ultimate arbiter of what is allowed and not allowed. And he says, we need, quote, activist judges to help
business interests on the court. Okay? And then Nixon reads the memo and goes, that sounds like a really good idea. How about I put you on the Supreme Court? And he puts Lewis Powell,
the guy who wrote the memo, on the Supreme Court where
he's the deciding vote in Bellotti and Buckley. So Bellotti, those two
decisions are '76 to '78. And what they say is, yeah, yeah, I read the Constitution and
it says that money is speech. No it isn't. And no, it didn't. That's not even close to
true. They just made it up. And they said, okay, and
corporations, they're human beings. No they're not. That's
preposterous, right? And they have the same inalienable rights as human beings and citizens do. And money is speech and speech
is an inalienable right... So corporations can spend
unlimited money in politics, and there goes our democracy, gone. Okay? So Citizens United just shot a dead horse with a Gatling gun and
made it worse and put it on steroids, but it was
already dead in '78. So that's why every chart
you see for the rest of your life you'll see this, every chart about the
American economy starts to diverge in 1978. So '38 to '78, we've golden 40
years of economic prosperity. We create the greatest middle
class the world has ever seen. And our productivity is sky high, but our wages match our productivity. After '78, productivity
still sky high, best in the world, okay? Sometimes people, oh, the
American worker's lazy, not remotely true. We work our ass off, okay? But we just flatline and
they've been flatlining for about 50 years straight. And the reason is
because the Supreme Court made bribery legal. So in order to get past the Supreme Court, you only have one choice. That's an amendment. And so
you have to get an amendment. Amendments are very difficult. So for example, you need two thirds of Congress to even propose the amendment. So well, why would Congress
propose an amendment that would take away their own power? Right? Because almost everybody in Congress got there through corruption. Their main talent is, I can kiss corporate
better than you can, right? So they take the most amount of a person with more money in Congress
wins 95% of the time, right? But the good news is the
founding fathers were geniuses, and they put in a second
outlet, they said, or two thirds of the states
can call for a convention where you can propose an amendment. And after an amendment is proposed, then three quarters of the
states have to ratify it. That's what makes it so difficult, because getting three
quarters of the states, there's so many red states,
so many blue states, getting three quarters of
the states, they agree, is near impossible. But there is one issue that
the whole country agrees on. 93% of Americans believe
that politicians serve their donors and not their voters. So this is the one thing we can unite on. If we unite on this, we push our states to
call for a convention, we all go to the convention together, we bring democracy alive, and we propose amendments
to the Constitution, and the best amendment gets
three quarters of the states to ratify, you go above the
Supreme Court and you solve the whole thing. - So if 93% of people want this,
why hasn't it happened yet? I mean, the obvious answer
is there's corporate control of the media and the politicians, but it seems like our current
system and the megaphone that a president has, we should be able to kind of unite the
populist left and right. So it shouldn't be that difficult to do. Like why hasn't a person like
Trump, who's a billionaire, or on the left, a rich businessman, run just on this and win? - Well, eventually they will, right? And so that's why I actually,
I have a lot of hope, even though things seem
super dark right now. So, and that's why I was for Bernie. So I can come back to that, but why hasn't Trump done it? Is easy. And he's like,
what am I, a sucker? The guy gives me money.
I do what the guy wants. Why would I get rid of that?
That's how I got into power. And so that's how I'm doing it now. I go to Miriam Adelson
and say gimme $100 million and I'll let Israel annex
the West Bank, right? So I'll go to the oil companies and gimme a billion dollars and I'll
give you tax subsidies, I'll let you drill, I'll
take away regulation... Why would I stop that? - You think he likes money more
than he likes being popular? Because there's a big
part of him as a populist in a sense that like
he loves being admired by large masses of people. - Yeah. So, and you're absolutely right, but that is the fault of MAGA. And so MAGA, you're
screwing populace in a way that is infuriating, okay? And smart libertarians like Dave Smith have figured this out. And that's why he's just
as mad at Trump as I am. And it's because he
took a populist movement and he redirected it for
his own personal gain. MAGA, figure it out. Come on. Right? And so if you say, oh, you think Democrats have
figured out that these... No, they largely haven't
figured it out either, and I think there's blue
MAGA and I could talk about that as well. But for those of us on
the populist left, yeah, we're not enamored by politicians. And for example, when
Bernie does the wrong thing, we call him out. Well, I'm not, Bernie's
not my god damn uncle. I don't like him for
some personality reason. It's not a cult of personality. You do the right thing, I love you for it. You do the wrong thing,
I'm gonna kick your ass for it, right? So, but Donald Trump does this massive ridiculous
corruption over and over again. And MAGA's like, I'm here for it. Love it. As long as you're doing the
corruption, I'm okay with it. - What does Trump say about
getting money outta politics? Does he-
- He says nothing about it. And MAGA, why haven't
you held him to account? Like, so when Bernie, it helped Biden take out $15 minimum wage from the Senate bill on the first bill that was introduced in
the Biden administration, we went nuts. We did a petition, we
sent in videos to Bernie, our audience going, don't kill
it, Bernie, don't kill it. And so Bernie then reintroduced
it as an amendment. It got voted down, but he
did the right thing, right? That is us holding our
top leader accountable and saying, you better get back on track. Okay? 'Cause we're not here for you and your personal self-aggrandizement. We're here for policy, right? And if MAGA was actually here for policy, they would've absolutely level
Trump on the fact that he, I mean, remember what he
ran on Drain the Swamp! That's why he won in 2016, right? So I predicted on ABC right after the DNC and Hillary Clinton was up 10, 12 points or whatever she was. And I said, Trump would win, okay? And the whole panel
laughed out loud, right? They're like, ha, get a
hold of this crazy guy! I said, he's a populist who seems to hate the establishment in a populist time. And so, and Drain the
Swamp is a great slogan. And I knew he would win when
he was in a Republican debate. And he said, I paid all these guys. Before I paid them and
they did whatever I wanted. And I was like, that's so true, right? And people will love that. And especially Republican
voters will love that. I actually have a lot of respect for Republican voters, 'cause they actually
genuinely hate corruption. - So what would an amendment look like that helps prevent money being
an influence in politics? - So I started a group called Wolf PAC. - Nice name.
- Thank you wolf-pac.com. And the reason why I named it
Wolf PAC is because everyone in Washington I knew would hate that name. It's a populist name. And everybody in
Washington snickers, like, I know you're supposed to
name it Americans for America and just trick people, et cetera. No, no, no. Wolf PAC means
we're coming for you, okay? We're not coming for
you in a weirdo physical or violent way. We're coming for you in
a democratic way. Okay? So we're gonna go to those state houses, we're gonna get them to
propose a convention, and we did it in five states, but then the Democratic Party
started beating us back. We'll get to that. And so we are going to
overturn your apple cart and we're gonna put the
American people back in charge. So what does the amendment say? Number one, a lot of people
will have different opinions on what it should say. And that's what you sort
out in a convention. So for example, one of the things that conservatives can
propose, which makes sense, is term limits. Because, well, the reason why these super old
politicians are in charge is because they provide
a return on investment. So, you know if you give to Biden, Pelosi or McConnell, they're
gonna deliver for you. They love that return on investment. They don't wanna risk it on a new guy. The new guy might have
principles, ew, or, you know, might wanna actually do a
little bit for his voters, boo. Whereas these old, you know... And every corrupt system has these old guys hanging around that help maintain power, et cetera. So my particular proposal
in the amendments would be a couple of things. One is, end private
financing of elections. So if, and look, if
you're a business person, you're a capitalist, you know
this with absolute certainty. If somebody signs your check, that's the person you work for, right? So if private interests
are funding politicians, the politicians will
serve private interests. And then you're gonna get
into a fight like Elon did in New Jersey where the
car dealerships and Tesla are getting into an auction. "Can I hear $100,000 1 million, 2 million, 3 million," right? And now you gotta go bribe
the government official. That's called a campaign contribution. And this is a terrible system, right? End the private financing, go to complete public
financing of elections. That's when conservatives, because they've been propagandized by corporate media, yes, mainstream media got into your head too, and right wing media
got into your head too, and right wing media
also financed by a lot of this corrupt interest,
and so they tell you, "Oh, you don't wanna publicly finance. Oh my God, you'd be spending like a billion dollars on politicians." Brother, they're spending
trillions of dollars of your money because
they're financed by the guys that they're giving all of your money to. - So can you educate me? Does that prevent something
like Citizen United? So like super PACs are
all gone in this case? So all-
- Gone. - So indirect funding is also... - Indirect funding's gone,
direct funding's gone. You have to set up some thresholds. Not everybody can just get money to run. You have to prove that you have some sort of popular support. So signature gathering,
you would still allow for small money donations,
like up to $100, something along those lines. - That's not 5,000 or whatever it is now? - Yeah, I think 5,000 is too high, but those are fine debates. Yeah. You know? But you basically wanna
create an incentive. Everything is about
incentives and disincentives. Again, capitalists realizes
better than anyone else, right? So you wanna set up an
incentive to serve your voters, not your donors. So if you take away private donors, well, there goes that incentive
and that's gigantic, right? And then if you set up small
grassroots funding as a way to get past the threshold
to get the funding to run an election, well, then, good. Because then you're serving small donors, which are generally voters, right? So that's what you want. And ending private financing is critical. But the second thing is
ending corporate personhood. So this is where you get into
a lot of fights, because, you have two reasons. One is some folks have a
principled position against it. And they say, well, I mean the Sierra Club is
technically a corporation, ACLU is technically a corporation. And so if you end corporate
personhood, then, you know, that could endanger
their existence, right? No, it doesn't endanger their
existence at all. Right? So it doesn't endanger
GM or GE's existence. It doesn't endanger anybody's
existence. Corporations exist. We're not trying to take them
away. I would never do that. Right? That's not smart,
that's not workable, et cetera. We're just saying they don't
have constitutional rights. So they have the rights that we give them. And by the way, read the Founding Fathers, is also in my book,
they hated corporations. The American Revolution was partly against the British East India Company. And so the Tea Party in Boston
was against that corporation. They threw their tea overboard. It was not against the British monarchy. And so they, and all the
founding fathers warned us over and over again, watch
out for corporations, okay? 'Cause once they form, they will amass money and power and look to kill off democracy. And they were totally right.
That's exactly what happened. And so it's not that you don't have them, it's that you, through
democratic capitalism, you limit their power. They definitely, you can
give them a bunch of rights. You say, hey, you have a right to exist. You have a right to do
this, this and this. Okay? But you do not have constitutional
rights of a citizen. And so you don't have the right to speak to a politician by giving
them a billion dollars. - And you believe that the
people will be able to find the right policies to regulate and tax the corporations such that
capitalism can flourish still? - Yes. You know why? 'Cause I'm a real populist,
and I believe in the people. So I drive the establishment crazy because they don't believe in the people. They think, oh, Cenk, have you seen MAGA? Have you seen these guys? Have you seen the radicals on the left? We're so much smarter. And you know how many Ivy
League degrees we have, right? And we know what we're
doing. No, you don't. No, you're, everybody, to some degree, looks out for their own interests, right? Why I like capitalism
and why I love democracy is because it's the wisdom of the crowd. And so in the long run,
the crowd is right. Oftentimes in the short
term, we're wrong. Okay? But the wisdom of the crowd
in the long run is much, much better than the
elites that run things. The elites say, well, we're
so smart and educated, so we're gonna know better
what's good for you. No brother, you're gonna
know what's better for you. And so here's something that
a lot of people get wrong on the populist left and right. They think, oh, those guys
are evil. They're not evil. I've met them. I worked at
MSNBC, I worked on cable. I went to Wharton, you know,
Columbia Law, et cetera, I know a lot of those guys. And so they're not at all evil. They don't even know that
they're mainly serving their own interests. They just naturally do it, right? And so they think the carried
interest loophole makes a lot of sense, right? They think corporate tax
cuts makes a lot of sense. You not getting higher wages,
you not having healthcare, it makes a lot of sense. It doesn't make any god damn sense, but they get themselves to believe it. And that's another portion
of the invisible hand on the market. - So there's problems with every path. So the elite, like you
mentioned, can be corrupted by greed, by power and so on. But the crowd, I agree
with you, by the way, about the wisdom of the
crowd versus the wisdom of the elite. But the crowd can be captured
by a charismatic leader. So the problem with populism, and I'm probably a populist myself, the problem with populism
is that it can't be, and has been throughout
history captured by bad people. - But if you say to me,
trust the leaders or trust the people, I'm gonna trust
the people every single time. - Well, that's why you're
such an interesting, I don't wanna say contradiction, but there's a tension
that creates the balance. So to me, in the way you're speaking, might result in hurting capitalism. So it's easy to, in fighting
corporatism, to hurt companies. So to go too far the other way. - Yeah, of course, of course. - And so like when you
talked about corporate tax. So what's the magic number
for the corporate tax? Because if it's too high,
like companies leave, right? - Yeah. Companies have so much power right now, this pendulum has swung so far... And we're, guys, we're almost out of time. The window's closing. The minute private equity
buys all of our homes, the residential real estate
market, we're screwed, we're indentured servants forever. Okay? There goes wealth creation
for the average American. So you're right, Lex, that
it's not a contradiction, it's a tension that is
inevitable to get to balance. The reason why people kind
of can't figure me out, they're like, well, you're on the left, but you're a capitalist, et cetera. That's not a contradiction. That's getting to the right balance. And in order to do that,
like if you say, well, if we change the system, I'm afraid of change because what if the
pendulum swings too far in the other direction, right? Well then you would be opposed
to change at all times. So if you do that, it actually reminds me of
the Biden fight, right? So I'm like, guys, he has
almost no chance of winning. He stands for the
establishment, he can't talk. But then the number one pushback I'd get from Democrats was, "Yeah,
but what if we change? It's so scary. We don't
know about Kamala Harris. What if it's not Kamala
Harris? It's so scary. Don't change." And I'm like, yeah, but if
you say change might be worse, it also might be better. And you're at zero,
anything is better, right? And right now, in terms
of corruption in America, we're at 98% corruption. So we got 2% decency left. Brother, this is when you want change. And so too, and Lex, if you actually have wisdom of the crowd, just like in supply and
demand and how it works in economics, it works the same way in a functioning
democracy, you go too far, you come back in. So for example, when
Reagan came into office, me and my dad and my
family, we were Republicans. Why? At that point, the highest
marginal tax rate was at 70%. 70% is too high, right? Then he brought it all
the way down to 28%. That's too low, right? So, and that's how the
system modulates itself. Already we were headed towards corruption and 'cause it's the 80s, now we're past '78, magic '78 marker, right? So, and even Carter was way more conservative economically than people realize 'cause
we're already getting past it by the time it's in his administration. But the bottom line is, yes, whenever you have real
wisdom of the crowd, whether it's in business or in politics, you're gonna have fluctuation. You're gonna have that pendulum
swinging back and forth. You don't want wild swings,
communism, corporatism, right? You wanna get to, hey, where's the right balance
here between capitalism and what people think is socialism? - Yeah. So I guess I agree with
most of the things you said about the corruption. I just wish there would be
more celebration of the fact that capitalism and some
incredible companies in the history of the
20th century has created so much wealth, so much
innovation that has increased the quality of life on average. They've also increased
the wealth inequality and exploitation of the
workers and this kind of stuff. But you wanna not forget to
celebrate the awesomeness that companies have also brought outside the political sphere, just
in creating awesome stuff. - Look, I run a company. And so I don't want companies to go away. And I don't want you
to hate all companies. I think Young Turks is a
wonderful company, right? We provide great healthcare, we take care of our employees, we care
about the community, et cetera. And we're building a whole nation online on those principles in
the right way to run a company, right? But guys, we're at the
wrong part of the pendulum. The companies have overwhelming power and they're crushing us. We're like that scene in Star Wars with the trash compactors
closing in on them, the walls are closing in... We're almost out of time, because they've captured the government almost entirely, they're only serving
corporate interests... We've got to get back into
balance before it's too late. And that's why I care so
much about structural issues. So I form Justice Democrats, so that's AOC, et cetera, right? That's, people know it as The Squad. They know it as Just Democrats, et cetera. I'm one of the co-founders of that. And my number one rule was
no corporate PAC money. Okay? So you're not allowed to
take corporate PAC money. By the way now Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley have stopped taking corporate PAC money and they've become, to some degree, on economic issues, genuine populists. It's amazing. It happens overnight. All of a sudden they're
talking about holding corporations accountable, et cetera. Now Just Democrats wind
up having other problems. They got too deep into social
issues, not economic issues. - There's a general sort of criticism of billionaires, right? This idea. Now you could say that
billionaires are avoiding taxes and they're not getting taxed enough. But I think under that flag
of criticizing billionaires is criticizing all
companies that do epic shit, that build stuff. - Oh, okay.
- Create stuff, that's what I'm worried about. I don't hear enough
like genuine, you know, I like celebrating people,
I like celebrating ideas. I just don't hear enough
genuine celebration of companies when they do cool things. - Okay, so are you right? Not about companies, but
about capitalism? Yes. Because you know, you look at life expectancy 200 years
ago and you look at it now and you go, wow, holy shit,
we did amazing things, right? So, and what happened
in the last 200 years? We went from dictatorships
more towards democracy, wisdom of the crowd. We went from, you know, serfs and indentured servants
and a nobility that holds the land to, more towards capitalism. And boom, the crowd is
right. Things go really well. The advances in medicine are amazing, and medicine's a great example. So, and on our show, I
point all those things out and I say, look, we hate the drug companies
because of how they capture the government, right? But we don't hate the drug companies for creating great drugs. Those drugs save lives.
They should save my life. They saved countless, millions
upon millions of lives. So the right idea isn't
shut down drug companies, the right idea is don't let
them buy the government, right? So, and I know we get back
into our instinctual shells, so on the left they'll be, oh, we should get rid of all billionaires. Why? Like, how does that fix the system? Tell me how it fixes the
system. And I'm all ears, right? My solution is end private financing. Then you can be a
billionaire all you like, you can't buy the government, right? That's a more logical way to go about it. I've never worn an eat the rich shirt and it drives me crazy. I'm like, you would've eaten FDR, right? And FDR is the best president,
most populist president, in my opinion. And so, no, there's wonderful
rich people, of course, of course there's a
range of humanity, right? But you don't wanna get rid of the rich, you don't wanna get rid of companies, but you also don't wanna
let them control everything. So, okay, here, I'll give
you an example that's really, and that informs a lot of
how I think about things, which is my dad. So my dad was a farmer in
southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border, no money, in fact, his dad died when he was six months old. And so they were saddled with debt. And no electricity in his house.
Like as poor as poor gets. And he wound up living the American dream. And so how did he do that?
What made the difference? Well, what made the difference
is opportunity, right? So I'm a populist because my
dad was in the masses, right? And elites say the masses are no good. We're smart, you're not.
We're educated, you are not. We, at meritocracy, we talk about that, we have earned merit, and if
you are poor or middle class, you have not earned merit. Okay? You're useless and worthless. And I hate that. So what did Turkey do back in the 1960s that liberated my dad? They provided free college education. You had to test into it, okay? But the top 15% got a
free college education at the best colleges in Turkey. And my uncle saved all
of our lives when he came to my dad and said, do you
like working on this farm? And my dad's like, fuck no. Right? It's super hot, it's super hard. It's just, they gotta get
up at four in the morning. If they're lucky, the family
next door gives them a mule. If they're not, they gotta
carry the shit themselves. Okay? So, my uncle told him, work just as hard in school
and you'll be able to get a house, a car, pretty girls, et cetera. So my dad works his ass off, gets into the school and he comes out a mechanical engineer and
starts his own company. He creates a company in Turkey,
hires hundreds of people. He then moves to America,
creates a company here, hires tons of people, right? So, do I hate companies? No. My dad set up two companies and I saw how much it benefited people. I saw how much... Employees would come up to my dad 20, 30 years later in the street and hug him. And they'd tell me, as a young kid, your dad's the most fair boss we ever had. And we love him for it, right?
That's how you run a company. And he taught me the value of hard work. But the reason I brought up here is because he taught me, look, like skill and ability
is a genetic lottery. So you're not gonna just
get the rich to win all the genetic lottery. No. There's gonna be tons of poor
kids and middle class kids who are just as good if not better. You have to provide them the opportunity, the fair chance to succeed. You have to believe in them. So this isn't about disempowering anyone, it's about empowering all
of those kids who are doing the right thing or smart
and wanna work hard so they could build their
own companies and add to their economy. - What in general is
your view on meritocracy? - So I love meritocracy. I wish that we lived in a meritocracy and I wanna drive towards
living in a meritocracy. So that's why I don't
like equality of results. So, okay, now people that are on the left will
get super mad at that and go, what do you mean? Well, okay, brother,
let's say you're at work and you got one guy who's working his ass off,
another guy, let's go, I don't care, I'm not gonna do it, right? Well, the guy who works super
hard has to pick up the slack. Now he's working twice as hard, right? And now you want the same results, you want the same salary as that guy? No, brother, no. He's working four times,
10 times harder than you. That's not fair. Fairness matters. I lived, we wound up, I mean this is, we're in the suburbs of Jersey, but we wound up in Freehold eventually. And we lived across a
farm, which is kind of, eh, in central Jersey it happens, right? And it was called Fair Chance Farm. Okay? I was like, how did I get,
this is amazing, right? And I love that. That's the essence of America and that's what I wanna go back to. So we've gotta create that opportunity of, not just because it's
the moral thing to do, but because it's also the
economically smart thing to do. If you enable all those great people that are in lower income classes and middle income classes, you're gonna get a much better economy, a much stronger democracy. So that's the direction we go. - So again, it's about balance, but what do you think about DEI policies, say in academia and companies? So the movement as it has evolved, where's that on the balance? Is that... How far is it pushing towards equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity? - Okay, so now we're getting
into social issues, right? So this is where we all rip
each other apart and then the people at the top laugh
their ass off at us and go, "We got them fighting over
trans issues. (laughs)" They're killing each
other. It is hilarious. And they're so busy they
don't realize we're running the place, right? Okay, but let's engage. Some people will look at DEI and go, well, that just gives me an opportunity,
just like anyone else. I love DEI. Another person will look at it and go, no, that says that you should be
picked above me and I hate DEI. Right? So the reality of DEI is a
little bit more complicated. And so, but you gotta go back. So first, did we need
affirmative action in the 1960s? Definitely. Why? All the firefighter
jobs in South Carolina, as an example, are going to white guys. All the longshoreman jobs in New York, LA, wherever you have it, are
all going to white guys, 'cause that's how the system was. Yes. Also in the north, right? So we now are in a civil rights era. We decide we're gonna go towards equality. Minorities in that case,
mainly black Americans, had to find a way to break in. I'm not trying to, like, if you're a longshoreman
and it's a good job, you naturally wanna
pass it on to your son. I get your instinct, I don't
hate you for it, right? But we gotta let black kids
also have a shot at it, right? So you need it in the beginning, but at a certain point
you have to phase it out. So when I was growing up,
it's now in the late '80s, early '90s, I hated affirmative action. And I have been principled
on it from day one. And to this day, I don't, I'm not in favor of affirmative action, I say it on the show all the time. Why? I'm a minority. Being a Turk, I grew up Muslim,
I'm an atheist now, but, but generally speaking, a
Muslim is certainly a minority in America and pretty
much a hated one overall. So, but I didn't check
off Muslim or Turkish or any ethnicity when I applied to college because I believe in meritocracy
as we were talking about. But we don't really
have a meritocracy now. And so, so I can come back to that. But right now, so I didn't check it
all 'cause I didn't want an unfair advantage,
because I wanna earn it. I wanna earn it. So now I'm in law school
and I'm hanging out with right wingers because at that point I'm a Republican and one of
the guys says to me about one of our, a black student going
to Columbia, he says, "Oh, I wonder how he got in here." God, that is the problem
with affirmative action. It devalues the accomplishments
of every minority in the country. You have to transition away from it. If you don't, it sets up a caste system. And that caste system
is lethal to democracy. So does DEI go too far
in some instances? Yes. But is it a boogeyman
that's gonna take all the white jobs and make them black, as Trump would say, black jobs, right? And give minorities too
much power, et cetera. No, the idea isn't to
rob you and to give all the opportunity to minorities. The idea is to make it equal. But as the pendulum swings, did it swing too far in some directions? Yes. The left can't acknowledge that and the right thinks,
can't acknowledge that. Of course, at some point
you gotta give a chance for others to break in, so
they have a fair chance. - By the way, Michelle Obama had a good
line about the black jobs in the DNC speech. - Great line. I love that. - Where somebody should tell Trump that the presidency might be
just one of those black jobs. Anyway. But why do you think the
left doesn't acknowledge when DEI gets ridiculous? Which it, in certain places
and in certain places at a large scale has gotten ridiculous? - Because people are taught to just be in the tribe they're in, and to believe it 100%. Like I've gotten kicked
out of every tribe. I might be the most attacked
man in internet history. Partly 'cause we've been
around forever and partly because I disagree with every part of the political spectrum, because I believe in independent thought. And the minute you vary a
little bit, people go nuts. And so the far left tribe is gonna go with their preset ideology, just like the far right tribe is. So for example, on trans issues, we've protected trans
people for over 20 years in The Young Turks, we fought for equality for trans people and for all LGBTQ people for two decades, we did it way before anyone else did. When Biden came out in favor
of gay marriage in 2013, we're like, this is comically late. So like we're all supposed
to like congratulate him in the year 2013 that he
thinks gay people should have the same rights as straight people? And then he had to push
Obama to get there, right? So on the other hand, I'm like, guys, if you allow trans women to
go into professional sports, not at the high school level,
but professional sports, but let's say they go into MMA or boxing, and a trans woman... I mean, it happens in
boxing, it happens in MMA, punches a biological woman so hard that she kills her, right? So you're gonna set back
trans rights 50 years. I'm not trying to hurt you,
I'm trying to help you. You have to do bounds of reason. So when I say simple things like that, and I say you give LeBron
James every hormone blocker on planet Earth, he's still
gonna dominate the WNBA. Okay? It would be comical. He might score 100 points a night, okay? And they'll say, "Oh, that's outrageous." And some have called me Nazi
for saying that trans women or that professional leagues should make their own decisions on
whether they allow trans women in or not. So why do they say that? 'Cause they're so besieged, they think we cannot give an inch, we cannot give any ground. If you give any ground,
you're a Nazi. Okay? So we've gotta get out of that mindset. You can't function in a democracy and be in an extreme position and
expect the rest of the country to go towards your extreme position. - So why do you think we
are not in a meritocracy? - So, because of the
corruption, so for example, but there's also, but remember, corporate media is the
matrix and they plug you into cable, right? In the old days. Now it's a little bit different
'cause of online media. But especially 10 years ago, and remember, we started 22 years ago, so I've been losing my mind over how obvious corporate
media corruption has been for decades now, right? But no one acknowledged it
until online media got stronger. But one of the myths that
corporate media creates is the myth of meritocracy. Not that meritocracy can't
exist or shouldn't exist, but they pretend it exists today. So the problem with that myth, Lex, is that it gets people thinking, well, if they're already rich, they must have merited it, by definition. So all the rich have merit. And the reverse of that, if you're poor or middle class, well, you must not have merited wealth. So you're no good. We don't
have to listen to you. And that's a really dangerous, awful idea. And so if we get to a meritocracy one day, I'll be the happiest person in America. But right now it's, look here, I'll give you an example
that I put in the book. And it's not us, these other
folks did this YouTube video. I can't even quite find who they were, but it was a brilliant video. And they said, okay, we're
gonna do 100 yard race. But hold on, before we start, anyone who has two parents
take two steps forward. Anyone who has, went to college, take another two steps forward. Anyone who doesn't have bills to pay for education any more,
take two steps forward. And they do all these things, right? And then at the end, before they start, somebody's 20 yards from the finish line, and a lot of people are
still at the starting line, and then they go, okay,
now we're gonna run a race. And the guy who was right
next to the finish line wins. And they go, meritocracy! Okay? - So the challenge there is
to know which disparities when you just freeze the
system and observe are actually a result of some kind of
discrimination or flaw in the system versus the
result of meritocracy of the better runner being ahead. - That's right. There are some parts that
are easy to solve, Lex. So, you know, if you
donated to a politician and he gave you a billion dollar subsidy, that's not meritocracy, right? - So if you follow the money, you can see the flaws in the system? - Exactly. And so, and again, nothing's ever perfect at any
snapshot of history, right? Or of the moment. You're gonna be at some
point in the pendulum swing. But if you trust the people
and you let the pendulum swing, but not wildly, then you're gonna get to the right answers in the long run. - So you think this woke mind
virus that the right refers to is a problem, but not a big problem. - No. So, the right wing drives me crazy. So look, guys, your instincts
of populism is correct. Your instincts of anti-corruption
is correct, right? And I love you for it. And so, and in a lot of ways, the right wing voters figured out the whole system's screwed
before left wing voters did it. I shouldn't say left winging
voters 'cause progressives and left wing have been saying
it for not only decades, but maybe centuries, right? But democratic voters. A lot of democratic voters, some of 'em actually like
this current system, some of 'em, a lot of them have
been tricked into liking this current system. And the left should be fighting against corruption harder than the right. But right now, unfortunately
that's not the case. So there's a lot I like about
right wing voters, okay? But you guys get tricked on
social issues so easily, right? So how many people are involved in trans high school sports
and a girl who should have finished first in that track race in the middle of Indiana finished second? First of all, this is
the big crime. This is... And how many people are involved? About seven, 13 out of a
country of 330 million people? And you can't see that
that's a distraction, right? So, and every everything that is like bait that the right wing media puts
out there, they run after. I mean, Tucker Carlson
doing insane segments about M&Ms should be sexier. Mr. Potato Head has gender
issues. Guys, get out of there. Get out of there. It's a trap. Okay? - Yeah. That doesn't mean that there're... (laughs) Absolutely. It doesn't mean that
there's larger scale issues with things like DEI that
aren't so fun to talk about or viral to talk
about on anecdotal scale. There is, DEI does
create a culture of fear with cancel culture. And there it does create a
kind of culture that limits the freedom of expression
and it does limit the meritocracy in another way. So you're basically saying,
forget all these other problems. Money is the biggest problem. - So first of all, on AOC as an example, and I don't mean to pick on her, but she won through the great work of her and Saikat Chakrabarti and
Corbin Trent and others who were leaders of the
Just Democrats that went and helped her campaign. They were a critical help. And we all told her the same thing. So it's not about me me me. And so we all said, you've got to challenge the establishment and you've gotta work on
money and politics first. 'Cause if you don't work
on money and politics and you don't fix that, you're gonna lose on
almost all other issues. But she didn't believe us
because it's uncomfortable. And all the progressives
that went into Congress, they drive me crazy. They think, oh, no, no,
you're exaggerating. No, these are, and the minute they get in, all of a sudden my colleagues, right? Your colleagues hate you and
they're gonna drive you out. You're a sucker. And Jamaal Bowman, Cori
Bush, what did they do? They drove them out. Marie
Newman, drove them out, right? And because they're not on your side, they're not your colleagues. And what happened to $15 minimum wage? And I remember talking to
one of those Congress people, I won't leave out the name, and saying, hey, you know, they're not gonna do $15 minimum wage. And he is like, "Oh Cenk,
you're out of the loop. Nancy Pelosi assured us that they are gonna do $15 minimum wage." I'm like, I love you,
but you're totally wrong. Moneyed interests are not
gonna do $15 minimum wage. You have to start fighting now. Right? And they didn't get it. So they lost on almost all those issues. 'Cause it's all about incentives and
disincentives and rules. If you don't fix the rules, you're gonna constantly run
into the same brick wall. Now the second issue that we were talking about is in the culture wars, the rest of us are stuck between the two extreme
two percenters, right? On both sides. So the two percenter on
the left goes, you know, if you're a white woman,
you need to shut up and listen now, okay? That's ridiculous. No, you don't. If you're a white woman, you
have every right to speak out. You have every right that
every other human being has. And so would I love for all of us to listen to
one each one another, to have empathy for one
another and go, hey, I wonder how a right
winger thinks about this? I wonder how a left
winger thinks about this? I wonder why they think that way, right? I love that and I want that. So I want you to listen, but
I don't want you to shut up. So that 2% gets extreme,
and I don't like it. But on the right wing, you got your 2% who think that that's all that's happening on the left. And that's all that's
happening in American politics. And they think the entire left
believes that tiny 2%, right? And so they hate the left. And they're like, "Oh,
I'm not gonna shut up. Oh, I'm not gonna wear a mask. I'm not gonna do any of these things. And I'm not gonna do any, that's freedom!" And then a Republican comes
along and goes, oh yeah, that thing you call freedom, that's deregulation for corporations because you shouldn't really have freedom. Companies should have freedom, right? And then the guy goes, "Yeah,
freedom for ExxonMobil!" No, brother, they tricked you. - Yeah. The 2% on each side is a
useful distraction for, yes, for the corruption of the
politicians via money. Still, I'm talking about
the 96% that remains in the middle and the impact
that DEI policy has on them. - Yeah. So here's where it gets absurd. I'll give you a good example of absurdity. So in a school I believe in California, they noticed that Latino
students were not doing as well in AP and honors classes. So they canceled AP and
honors classes. Oh, come on. What are you doing? That's nuts. No, your job is to help
them get better grades, get better opportunity, et cetera. That's the harder thing to
do and the right thing to do. Your job isn't, I'm gonna make everything
equal by taking away the opportunity for higher
achievement for other students. If that's what you're doing and you think you're on the left, you're
not really on the left. I actually think that's like
an authoritarian position that a no progressive in
their right mind would be in favor of. So, but it's all definitional. So here's another example
of definitional, communism. Like they say, oh my god,
Kamala Harris is a communist. (laughs) Well, then,
you're telling on yourself, brothers and sisters, when
you say that, that means, A, I don't know what communism means, and B, I don't have any idea what's
going on in American politics. Kamala Harris is a corporatist.
That's her problem. Not that she's a communist, she's on the other end
of the spectrum, right? The idea that Kamala Harris
would come into office and say, that's it, there's
no more private property. We're gonna take all of your homes and this now government property, that, all your cars, et cetera... She was not gonna get within
a billion miles of that. Her donors would never allow her to get within a billion miles of that. That is so preposterous that when you say something
like that, it's disqualifying. Like, I can't debate someone
who thinks that Democrats are communists when they're
actually largely corporatists. You see what I'm saying? - Yeah. So let's go there. So when people call her a communist, they're usually referring to
certain kinds of policies. So do you think, I mean, I think it's a ridiculous label to assign to Kamala Harris,
especially given the history of communism in the 20th
century and what those economic and political policies have led to, the scale of suffering that led to, and it just degrades the
meaning of the word, right? But to take that seriously.
Why is she not a communist? So you said she's not a communist because she's a corporatist. Okay, but that... That can't be... Okay. Everybody in politics
is a corporatist, just- - Almost. - Almost everybody in
politics is a corporatist. But that doesn't mean the corporations have completely bought their mind. They have an influence
in their mind on issues that matter to those corporations. - Yep.
- Right? - Yep.
- Outside of that, they're still thinking for
the voters 'cause they still have to win the votes. - Barely.
- Okay. - So here, let me give
you an example so you see what I'm saying. So if you just wanted votes, you would do a lot of
what Tim Walz did, okay? And by the way, a lot of what Bernie did, that's why Bernie, who
had no media coverage went from like 2% in 2015 to
by the end about 48%, because he's just doing things
that were popular, right? And that American people
wanted it, et cetera, right? Because he's not
controlled by corporations. By the way, neither is Tom
Massie on the right wing side, on the Republican side, right? So it's not all, that's why I
always say almost. All right? So if you're doing things that
are popular, people love it. So today, what would Kamala Harris do if she actually just wanted to win, right? So number one, she was trying to pass paid family leave right now. Why? It polls at 84% and even
74% of Republicans want it. Why? 'Cause it says, hey, when you have a baby, you should get 12 weeks
off, bond with your baby. Right now in a lot of states that don't have paid family leave, you have to go back to
work the very next day. Or you have to use all of your sick days, all your vacation days just have one or two weeks with your baby, right? So conservatives love paid family leave, liberals love paid family leave. That's why it polls so high.
So why isn't she proposing it? It's not in our economic plan. Tim Walz's already passed it in Minnesota. He showed how easy it was. If you want votes, and then you know what's gonna happen if you propose paid family leave, the Republicans are gonna go, "No, our beloved corporations don't
wanna spend another dollar on moms," right? And they fall for that trap and then you are in infinitely better shape. So why doesn't she do it? She doesn't do it because her corporate donors
don't want her to do it. $15 minimum wage, layup, over two thirds of the country wants it 'cause it not only gives you higher wages for minimum wage folks, but
it pushes wages up for others. And what do the elites say? "Oh, that's gonna drive up inflation. Well, you shouldn't get paid
any more." Wait wait wait. Hold on. So you're saying all
other prices should go up, but the only thing that
shouldn't go up is our wages? No, our wages should go up. Okay? So these are all easy
ones. Here's another one. Anti-corruption. Why isn't she running on
getting money outta politics? It polls it over 90%. Why isn't Trump running on it any more? He won when he ran on it in 2016, he didn't mean a word
of it, but he ran on it. It was smart. They don't do it 'cause
their corporate donors take their heads off if they do it. - So in contradiction to that, why did she propose to
raise the corporate tax rate from whatever, 21% to 28%? - Because that's easy. Because that is something
that's super popular and she's not gonna do it. That's why. So guys, this is where I
break the hearts of Blue MAGA. Blue MAGA thinks, oh my
god, these democrats, they're angels and the right wing is, and the Republicans are evil, and they work for big business,
but not Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden, right? Okay, well, Donald Trump
took the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. So that's trillions of
dollars that got transferred. 'Cause guys, you gotta understand if the corporations don't pay it, we have to pay it because we're running
up these giant deficits and eventually either they're
gonna, not eventually, keep raising our taxes in different ways that you're not noticing. They keep increasing fees
and fines and different ways for the government to collect
money, so we're paying for it. And on top of that, eventually they're gonna
cut your Social Security and Medicare 'cause they're gonna say, oh, we don't have any options left any more. Yeah, you don't have any
options left any more, 'cause you kept giving trillions of dollars in tax cuts to corporations. So we're gonna have to pay for that. So then Trump, then Biden says, oh my God, I'm gonna bring corporate
taxes back up to 28%. I'm like, wait, hold on. They were a 35, you already did a sleight
of hand and said 28. Okay? Then he gets into office
and Manchin says, no, 25, that's the highest I'll go. And he goes, okay, fine. 25. And then while you're not
looking, they just dump it. They don't even do 25, it's still at 21. So hear me now, quote me later, I do predictions on the show all the time, 'cause you should hold me accountable, you should hold all your
pundits accountable. If you held all your pundits accountable, we'd be the last man
standing and that's kind of what happened. Okay? So I guarantee you, she will
not increase corporate taxes. - So would the same be the
case for price controls or the anti-price gouging
that she's proposing? - So it's not price controls,
it's anti-price gouging. - [Lex] Well it is price controls,
but I mean minimum wages, price controls also. - Now we're gonna get
into a lot of minutia, but I'll try to keep it broad. So price controls are a
disaster. They never work. If you say, oh, here's
a banana, it has to stay at a dollar a pound,
make up a number, right? Well, supply and demand's gonna move. And then that's gonna, and so the minute it moves to $2 of where the price should be, then you're gonna run into shortages. So we all know this,
it's a bad idea, right? But are there laws against price gouging? There already are and
they're a good idea. So why? Like you have a natural disaster. All of a sudden the
water that was a dollar, now they're charging $100. The government has to come
in, democratic capitalism, they come in and go, no, I'm
gonna protect the people. So you're not allowed to
price gouge, you know, maybe charge $2, et cetera, but you're not gonna charge 100. But it is temporary. We get that done, we
end the problem there, and then we bring it back to
a normal supply and demand. Okay? So that's what she's proposing. That's all political
because the price gouging has already passed. They did it in '21 and '22. And so now the grocery stores are actually a low margin business. She says grocery stores, that's how I know she doesn't mean it. 'Cause the grocery stores
weren't the problem. Consumer goods were the problem. - Yeah.
- Those companies. - She's following the polls
where most people will say that the groceries are too expensive so she's just basically
saying the most popular thing. Yeah.
- 100%. And you could tell in which
proposals she means it and which proposals she doesn't 'cause of the framing, right? So this is a mediocre example,
but in housing she said, we have to stop private equity
from buying houses in bulk. I'm like, huh, curious that
they put the word in bulk there. Why does it have to be in bulk? Why don't we just stop them from buying any residential home? Like you could set up
normal boundaries, right? For example, Charlie Kirk was on The Young Turks this week... - By the way, sorry to take that tangent. I really enjoyed that conversation. I really enjoy that you talked
to, that was like civil, you guys disagreed pretty intensely, but like there was a lot of respect. I really enjoyed that. - Thank you, brother. - That was like, that was beautiful. You and Charlie Kirk and
I think Anna was there. - Yeah, that's right. So...
- That's nice. - Yeah. Quick tangent. And look, I've done a lot
of yelling online, okay? And I yell when, A, there's a issue that you should be passionate
about 40,000 people, 25,000 women and children
slaughtered in Gaza. If you're not emotionally
upset by that and you think it's no big deal, I
think that's a problem. But when you add gaslighting on top, that's what drives me crazy. And then when you add
filibustering on top, then that sets me off. So for all my life, right wing has gone on
cable and filibustered. They take up so much more
time than the left wing guest. And the left wing guest always
like goes, "Oh, okay, well, I'm offended, he is
taking up too much time." No, brother, go over the
top. Go over the top. You're not gonna talk over
me. I'm gonna talk over you. Okay? So, and then when you
gaslight and you go, oh no, 1200 people in Israel being
killed is awful, which it is. But 40,000 people being killed
in Gaza, it's no big deal. We should keep giving them money, keep killing, keep killing. And that that's normal.
No, it's not normal. I'm not gonna let you say
it's normal. That's nuts. Okay? When you, like we were
against the Iraq War, there was only two shows that were on the air nationally that
were against the Iraq War, us and Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. And at the time I used
to yell all the time because mainstream media would
gaslight the fuck out of us. We're gonna be greeted as liberators. Me and Ben Mankiewicz on the air. Ben doesn't yell as much, he's now the host of
"Turner Classic Movies." But he's saying it in a calm way, I'm saying it in a screaming way. We're not going to be
greeted as liberators. When you drop a bomb on someone's head, they don't greet you as a liberator. Stop saying insane things. And 7 out of 10 Americans
thought the Saddam Hussein had personally attacked us on 9/11. We got lied into that war
by corporate media. Okay? Now there's a couple of good
things that Trump has done. One is get people to
realize corporate media is the matrix, right? And so now, and get them
to an anti-war position, he himself doesn't have
an anti-war position, but his voters do, and that's a positive, we can come back to that. But these days, the reason why the Charlie Kirk
conversations are going great, and Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell, and historically though
we've been, go back, again, 10 years, 20 years, we've always been respectful
when someone comes on our show and we have a debate. As long as they're not yelling, I match the tenor of the host, right? You and I are having a
reasonable conversation. I'm not raising my voice, I'm not yelling at you
for no reason, right? So now when Charlie's not
going to battle any more for like talking points,
I'm shutting off my mind, all I'm doing is yelling at you, then I'm gonna yell back at him. But now he's saying, okay, let's have a reasonable conversation. Great, I love it. I love
reasonable conversations. - It was great. It was refreshing. And
what were we talking about? You buying up housing? - Yes. So Charlie, when he was on,
said, hey listen, you know, I think that there should be a cap though, I forget if he said 10 billion
or 100 billion, in assets. If you have less than that, you should be still be
able to do real estate as an investment, even
if it's residential. But above that it gets to... Okay, that's good, no problem. We can have a debate about that. We can figure out is the right number, 10, 120, 5, no problem. You could put in reasonable limitations. But we gotta get them to
stop buying the homes. So when Kamala Harris says, oh, we'll stop them from buying homes in bulk, I'm like, okay, there's the loophole. And so they're gonna use that loophole. And besides which, it's not gonna pass, Wall Street owns the government. So there's no way corporate
Republicans and Democrats, which are about 98% of politicians, are gonna limit private equity. And so when do we ever get
a little bit of change? When Democrats are in charge, they do 5% to 15% of their agenda. And that's not because
they're warmhearted, it's a release valve, right? Oh, see, under Obama,
we got about 5% change. And what was that? That
was Obamacare, right? That was most of the change that we got. And what's the greatest part of Obamacare? And now a lot of right wing also agree, almost all of right wing
agree about this portion, which is they got rid of the bias against preexisting conditions. Why did they do that particularly? Because the country was about
to get in a fucking rage. We all have preexisting conditions. If you deny me when I'm sick, what the fuck is the
point of insurance, right? And the anger had gotten
to a nuclear level. So the release valve, get rid of preexisting conditions, let's go back to just milking them regularly. And, oh, by the way, put in a mandate so that they
have to buy it from us, right? Do you know who originally
came up with Obamacare? The Heritage Foundation.
It was their proposal. Romney did it in Massachusetts,
it was called Romneycare. So I think this is a
super important election, but I've earned the
credibility to be able to say that because in 2012 I said this is a largely unimportant election. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama's policies on economic issues are near identical. Obamacare was literally Romneycare. Right now the left says,
oh, the Heritage Foundation, it's so dangerous. Project 2025. Well, brother, they're the
ones who wrote Obamacare. And you say that's the greatest
change in the world, right? So that's why the Democrats, yeah, I'll take the 10% change overall, I think Biden did about
15%, but Obama did 5%. But they're gonna, they
also march you backwards by deregulating like
Clinton did and Obama did, their bank bailouts like Obama did. But 10% is better than 0%. But it's not to help you,
it's the release valve so the system keeps going. - Is it possible to
steel man the case that, that not all politicians
are corporatist, or maybe, how would you approach that? For example, this podcast
has a bunch of sponsors. I give zero fucks about what they think
about what I'm saying. Like they have zero control over me. Maybe you could say that's because it's not
a lot of money or maybe I'm a unique person or
something like this. But I just think it's possible to have, and I would like to believe
a lot of politicians are this way, that they have ideas and while they take
money, they kind of see it as a game, that, you know,
you accept the money, kind of go to certain
parties, hug people and so on. But it doesn't actually
fundamentally compromise your integrity on issues
you actually care about. - I could steel man almost anything. I could steel man Trump. I could steel man
conservatives easily, right? Corporate politician's a hard one. So first, it's not all politicians. We can start out nice and easy. Tom Massie, now Holly and Gaetz not taking corporate PAC
money, Bernie, The Squad, they don't take corporate PAC money. You could disagree on
either end of those folks on social issues, but generally they are 1,000 times less corrupt. They're more honest. And part of the reason
you might hate The Squad is because they're so honest. They tell you their real
opinion on social issues that you really disagree with. A lot of the corporate
politicians won't do that, 'cause they're trying to get
as many votes as possible so that they can fellate their donors when they get into office and do all their favors for them. Okay, but you see, I'm already falling apart on the steel man of corporate politicians. - Let's like zoom in that. So if you take corporate PAC
money, you're, that's it. You're corrupted. Can you imagine yourself say you are a politician, you're a president, you're a human being, you're
a person with integrity, you're a person who
thinks about the world... You're saying, if I was a
corporate PAC and I give you a billion dollars, I
could tell you anything. - So Lex, everything is a spectrum. Humanity's a spectrum. So can you find outliers who could take corporate PAC money and still be principled
enough to resist this lure? Yeah. And I would hope that I
would be a person like that, but I wouldn't take corporate PAC money. But if you forced me to, I think I would still
stay principled and do it. Could you find 10, 20 other
people in the country? Yeah. But on average that is
not what will happen. What will happen is
they will take the money and do exactly as they are told. - See, I think most people have integrity. (Cenk laughs)
Okay. Okay, hold on. So what I'm more worried about is when you take corporate PAC money, it's not that you are
immediately sold, is over time. - Over time. That's true.
- See? Yeah, I get it. But I wonder if the integrity
that I think most people have can withstand the
gradual slippery slope of the effect of corporate money. Which if, if what I'm saying is true, that most people have integrity, one of the ways to solve the
effect of corporate money is term limits. Because it takes time to corrupt people. You can't buy them immediately. And then the term limits can... For the listener, Cenk
is shaking his head. - Yeah, no. So look, you're right that
over time it gets way worse. And as we talked about earlier, Biden's a great example of
that, comes in anti-corruption, winds up being totally
pro-corruption by the end. But he was also here for almost all of it as we started in a world
that was not run by money in politics and is now completely
run by money in politics. So does it get worse over time? Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona is
a great example that comes in as a progressive, doesn't
wanna take PAC money, cares about the average person, et cetera. Over time she becomes
the biggest corporatist in the Senate, a total disaster. But if you say that the
majority of politicians have... I don't know if this
is what you're saying, majority of politicians have integrity? - No, let's start at the
majority of human beings. - Human beings.
- And I think that politicians are not, they're not a special
group of like sociopaths. - I think they are. - They lean a little bit towards that direction, but they're
not like only sociopaths going into politics. It's like you have to have
some sociopathic qualities, I think, to go into politics. But they're not complete sociopaths. I think they do have integrity. 'Cause sometimes for very selfish reasons, it's not all about money,
even for a selfish person, for a narcissist. It's also about being recognized for having had positive
impact on the world. - Yeah, I get it. But, all right, so let's break it down. So first human beings, then
we'll get to politicians. Do human beings have integrity?
Well, it's a spectrum. So some people have enormous integrity, some people have no integrity. So there is not one type
or character, right? So some people have a ton of empathy for other human beings and
they literally feel it. Like, I feel the pain of
someone else. And I'm not alone. Most people feel the pain of someone else. If you see on video, a baby being hurt, an overwhelming majority of
human beings will go, "No!" Right? You have empathy. That's a natural feeling that you have. Some people have no empathy because they're on the
extreme end of the spectrum, serial killers and Donald Trump. Okay? And so I'm partly
joking, but not really. He has never demonstrated any empathy that I have ever seen for
any other human being. I'm gonna trigger some right wingers 'cause they think every
terrible thing he said is out of context or joking or
not real or fake news. But his chief of staff didn't make it up. He called people who went into the military
suckers and losers. Why? Why did he say that? If, just hang with me for a second, don't have your head explode, okay? And I'm not saying Lex, like I'm saying to the right
wingers out there, right? So the reason is because
if you're like Trump and you don't, you literally
don't feel the empathy, you think, why the hell
would I go in the military, get killed for someone else? What a sucker. No, I'm gonna
stay out of the military. I'm gonna stay alive. I'm gonna make a ton of money and I'm
gonna look out for myself. And he assumes, because
everybody does this, you assume that everyone thinks
like you do, but they don't. So Trump assumes everybody's
as much of a dirt bag as he is. And because he doesn't feel it,
he doesn't feel the empathy. And so he's like, yeah, you'd be an idiot, a sucker and a loser
to go into the military and have to sacrifice for other people? So you see the spectrum, even if you think Trump's
not on that end and you think I'm wrong about that, you get that there are
people on that end, right? So you have an spectrum of
integrity, empathy, et cetera. That's what I would call your hardware. You layer on top of that
your software, okay? And the software is cultural influences, your
parents, media, your friends, all these are cultural influences. So now when you're in certain industries, they value more integrity. So religious leaders, if
you're doing it right, which is also very rare, right? But if you're doing it right, you're supposed to have empathy
for the poor, the needy, the whole flock, right? So that profession is
incentivizing you towards empathy and integrity, okay? And even then, a giant amount
of people abuse it, right? But, okay, good. In politics, it creates incentives for the opposite, no integrity. And that software, to
your point, over time, gets stronger and stronger
until and stronger until it takes over. Now, you might have someone
with a lot of integrity, like Tom Massie, right? The Republican from Kentucky. And whether I agree with
him or disagree with him on policy, I get that the brother is actually doing it based on principles. And there isn't any amount of money you can give Tom Massie for him to change his principles. Why? He's on the principled end of the spectrum as a human being, right? So is Bernie. They're on the same part
of that spectrum, right? But for most people, the great
majority of the spectrum, if you overload them with
software that incentivizes them to not have integrity, they will succumb. And now let's switch to
politicians in particular. Why do I think that they're, on average, far more likely to be
on the sociopathic part of the spectrum? Because of the incentives
and disincentives. So this changes every congressional cycle. And when Just Democrats were winning, it got all the way down to 87.5%. But on average for
congressional elections, the person with more money
wins 95% of the time. It doesn't matter if they're a liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, or any ideology they have, 95%. Okay? So now let's say you
got the 5% that went in that are not hooked on the money. Well, they're gonna get
a primary challenge, then they're gonna get a
general election challenge, and 95% of the time, the
one with more money wins. So eventually this system
cycles through until almost only the corrupt are left. - Wait, hold on a second. Is that real? - That is real.
- 95%. So if you have more money,
95% of the time you win, huh? - Yes. - I like to believe that's
less the case, for example, for the higher you get. - Yes, that's true. You're right. So you know why? So the presidential race is
ironically, in some ways, the least corrupt. So let's dive into why. If you're running a local race anywhere in the country, you're gonna get almost no press coverage, meaning a congressional race, right? If you're running a
Senate race in the middle of Montana, you're gonna get
almost no media coverage. So that's where your money in politics has the most effect, because then you could
just buy the airwaves. You outspend the other
guy, you get all the ads, plus you get the friendly media coverage, 'cause you just bought a couple
of million dollars of ads in the middle of Montana. So the local news loves
you, the TV stations, the radio stations, the papers... So some of the papers are principled, they might
say, oh no, but overall, they're not calling you a radical, they're not calling you anything, and you're buying those races. But when you get to the presidential race, that's much harder,
because presidential race, you have earned media, free media that overwhelms paid media. Perfect example's 2016, Hillary
Clinton out-raises Trump by about two to one, but she loses anyway. Why? Because Trump got almost
twice as much earned media as she did. And the earned media is better. It's inside the content,
right? It is definitely better. So in a presidential election, as long as you got past the primary, you could actually win
with not that much money. And that's part of the
reason why I have hope, Lex, because all you gotta do
is get past a Republican or Democratic primary. And now that's very, very, very difficult. But Trump did it, right? Now he took it in the
wrong direction, but he did leave a blueprint for how to do it. And so once you get to
the general election, you're off to the race. You could do any goddamn
thing you like, okay? You could be super popular. You don't have to give
a shit about the donors. You can get into office. You could bully your own
party and the other party into doing what you want, and
you can get everything done. You could even get money outta
politics. So don't lose hope. I mean, we even started
Operation Hope at TYT, and our first project
was to knock Biden out? And everybody said, you guys are nuts. That's totally impossible. And
we knocked Biden out, right? Did we do it alone? Of course not. We were a small part of it, right? But we laid the groundwork for hope, and we laid the groundwork
for when he flopped in the debate, people had
already been told, remember, he's bad, he's old, he is not right. And the debate proved it. If we hadn't done that groundwork, and not just Young Turks obviously, but Axelrod and Carville, and
Nate Silver and Ezra Klein, et cetera, Charlemagne
the God, John Stewart, all these people helped a lot. So that when the debate happened, it confirmed the idea that
out there that he was too old and couldn't do it. So my point is, hope is, if you lose hope, you're done for, then they're
definitely gonna win, right? Hope is the most dangerous
thing in the world for the elites. So whether you're right wing or left wing, I need you to have hope and
I need you to understand it's not misplaced. We just gotta get past the
primary and we're gonna turn this whole thing around. - So you, basically, a presidential candidate who's a populist, who in part runs on getting
money outta politics. Okay? Well, then let's
talk about Donald Trump. So to me, the two biggest
criticisms of Trump is the fake elector scheme, out of that whole 2020 election,
the fake elector scheme, this thing that really bothers me. And then the second thing
across a larger timescale is the counterproductive division that he's created in, let's
say, our public discourse. What are your top five
criticisms of Trump? - Okay, so number one, I have
the same exact thing as you. The fake elector scheme is unacceptable, totally disqualifying. So the fake elector scheme
was a literal coup attempt. So he doesn't win the elections. For folks who don't know, I need to explain why it's a coup attempt, because you just throw out words and then people get
triggered by the words, and then they go into their
separate corners, right? So the January 6th rioters, they were not gonna keep the building. That was not a coup attempt. It's not like, oh, the MAGA
guys have the building. I guess they win, right? No,
that was never gonna happen. So what was the point
of the January 6th riot? It was to delay the proceedings. Why did it matter that they were gonna
delay the proceedings? Because if you can't certify the election, they wanted general confusion and chaos. So the Republicans in
Congress could say, well, we don't know who won, so we're gonna have to
kick it back to the states. In the states, they had
the fake electors ready. And remember, the fake electors
are not Trump's electors. Both candidates have a slate of electors, Biden's electors and Trump's electors. They go to the Trump
electors first, in this plan, and half the Trump electors go, no, I'm not going to pretend
Trump won the election when he didn't win the election. So they're shit, like, now we gotta come up with fake electors. Okay? So they enlist these
Republicans who go, yeah, I'll pretend Trump won, right? And so they sign a piece
of paper, that's fraud. And that's why a lot of 'em
are now being prosecuted in the different states. And so the idea is, the
Republican legislators then go, we're sending these new electors in, and we think Trump won Arizona and Georgia and Wisconsin, right? That was the idea. That was the plan. And then you come back to the House, at that point when there
are two different sets of electors, the rule, constitutional rule is the House decides, but the House decides not on a majority, because the Democrats had
the majority at the time. They decide on a majority
of the states, they vote by state, and the
Republicans had the majority of the states. So in that way, you steal the election, even though Trump didn't win, you install him back in as president. That is a frontal assault on
democracy. And I loath it. And then Trump on top just blabbers out. Well, sometimes you have, if there's massive fraud in
an election, in other words, I think I won. I don't even think that. I'm just saying that I won, right? He says, you can terminate
any rule regulation or article even in the Constitution. No, brother, you cannot
terminate the Constitution because you'd like to do a
fake elector scheme and do a coup against America. Fuck you. Okay? So I'm never gonna allow
this wannabe tyrant to go back into the White
House and endanger our system. And so you wanna endanger the
corrupt system? I'm the guy. Okay? Let's go get that corrupt
system and tear it down. If you wanna endanger the real system, democracy, capitalism, the constitution, then
I'm your biggest enemy. So I'm never gonna take that risk. And you see it every time he
goes to talk to a dictator. Look, guys, I'm asking you
to be principled, right? I asked the left of that. And we drive away some of
our audience when we do that. So we got the balls to
do that to our own side. So for the right wing, be honest, if it was Joe Biden or
Barack Obama or Kamala Harris that went and wrote, quote, unquote, love letters to a communist dictator who runs concentration camps,
you would say, "Communist! We knew it. Look at that!" And Trump literally
says about Kim Jong Un, we wrote love letters to one another. We fell in love. If a Democrat said that, they'd be politically decapitated, right? Their career would be
instantly over, right? But Trump, whenever is Xi
Jinping, Vladimir Putin. I'm not, don't get into
Russia Russia Russia. But it's just that he's
a strong man, right? Kim Jong Un or any, Victor Orban, Duterte in the Philippines. Anytime it's a strong man that says, screw our
constitution, screw our rules... I want total loyalty to one person. Trump loves 'em. He loves 'em. He said once, he's like, oh, it's great, you go to North Korea or China, and when the leader walks in, everybody applauds and everybody
listens to what he says. That's how it should be here. No brother, that's not
how it should be here. You hate democracy. You wanna
be the sole guy in charge. As a populist, you should
loathe Donald Trump. - I agree on the fake elector scheme. Can you steel man and maybe educate me on, there's a book "Rigged"
that I started reading. Is there any degree to which
the election was rigged? Or elections in general are rigged? So I think the book "Rigged", the main case they make is not that there's some shady fake ballots, it's more the impact of
mainstream media and the impact of Big Tech. - So rigged is another one of those words that triggers people and
is ill-defined, right? So let's begin to define it. So the worst case of rigged is, we actually change the votes, right? So a lot of Trump people think
that that's what happened. Nonsense. That didn't happen at all. Okay? So then you move... And by the way, some on the left thought
the votes were changed in the 2016 primary, and it was literally
rigged against Bernie. No, that did not happen. Okay? That is a massive crime and is very risky and is relatively easy to get caught. People who are in power are not interested in getting caught, they're not interested in
going to jail, et cetera. It is a very extreme
thing. Could it happen? Yes, it could happen. Have I seen any evidence of
it happening in my lifetime? Not really. - Given how much people hate this, you probably just need to
find evidence of one time. - Yeah. - One vote being changed, where you can trace them saying something to someone somewhere,
that would just explode. - Yeah. - And just that evidence just
doesn't seem to be there. - And by the way, for
the right wing, who say, verify the vote, god damn
right, verify the vote, right? So you wanna do have different proposals
like paper ballots, recounts, hand recounts, which, by the way, you had not the paper ballots, but the three recounts on
a hand recount in Georgia and so many of these swing states, he
lost, he lost, he lost. There was no significant voter fraud. Now second thing in terms of
rigging is voter fraud. So how? And the right wing believes, oh my God, there's voter fraud everywhere! Not remotely true. Heritage Foundation does a study, they wanna prove it so badly... And it turns out, no
matter how much they move the numbers, the final number they got was it happens 0.0000006% of the time. Okay? It almost never happens. They found like 31 instances
over a decade or two decades. - What counts as voter fraud? - So a lot of times these days, it'll be Republicans who
do it, because it'll be, and it's not nefarious, it's
a knucklehead who goes in and, "Oh, I heard they're
having undocumented, the illegals vote. So I voted for me and my
mom, even though she's dead. But that's fair. They're doing it." Yeah. And they're like, no,
brother, that's not fair. And that's not how it
works. You're under arrest. - So what about non-citizens voting? - So... It's preposterous. Of course, non-citizens shouldn't
vote and they don't vote. - But there's not, you don't
have to prove citizenship when you're voting, right? - No, you do. I mean, so it depends on
what you mean by prove and when you vote, right? So you are not allowed to vote
as a undocumented immigrant. So that happens upfront. When you go, like, again,
it's a hall of mirrors. Like there's so many different
ways to create mirages. So the Republicans will say, well, when you go to the voting booth, they don't make you show a passport. Yeah, that's true. But you showed it earlier
when you registered, right? And so, and we can get into voter ID laws, there's all sorts of things, but we gotta, we'll speed up the spectrum, right? So these things almost never happen. Voter fraud happens super
rarely and not enough to swing elections. And by the way, sometimes,
if there is an issue, they'll redo an election. There is actually a process for that. And it happened in North Carolina, 'cause Republicans did voter fraud in this one district, okay? And it wasn't a candidate himself, it was this campaign person
and they did ballot harvesting. And then, but ballot harvesting, again, it depends on what you mean. If you're just collecting
ballots, that's okay. He changed the ballots, that's not okay. And so they had to redo that election. So now the real place where it gets rigged is before elections. And there's two main ways
that things get rigged. One is, almost exclusively,
no, that's not fair. I was gonna say Republicans, but Democrats do it
too in a different way. So Republicans will come in, like Brian Kemp is the
king of this in Georgia. So he was against Trump
doing an ex post facto. He's like, no, you idiot, we
don't cheat after the election. We cheat before the election! Okay? So they'll go, well, I mean, you gotta clear out the voter
rolls every once in a while. And that's true because people die, people move and you gotta
clean out the voter rolls. So then they come in and they go, we will clean them out
mainly in black areas. Okay? Oh, look at that. There goes a couple of
million black voters. Well, some of those, I
suppose, are real voters, but they'll have to re-register, and then they'll find that out on election day and, oh, well, no, sorry, you couldn't vote this time. Remember to re-register next time. And so do they go, hey, we're going to take black
people off the voter rolls? No. What they do is we're having more issues in these districts, right? Here's another way they do it. How many voting boosts
do you have in the area? So primarily Republican
areas will get tons of voting booths, so you
don't have to wait in line, you go in, you vote, you
go to work, no problem. You're in a black area
run in a Republican state, all of a sudden, hey,
look, that city, well, we sent you four voting booths. Oh, you got a million people there? Well, what are you gonna do? I guess you gotta wait
in line the whole day. You can't go to work, et
cetera. So that's the way of... - I refuse to believe it's only the Republicans
that do that, I would say... - So that's why I paused.
- Yeah. Yeah. - That just seems too
obvious to do by both. - Yeah, no, no.
- By both sides. - The Democrats are so weak,
Lex, they mainly don't do that, but they do do the third
thing, which is gerrymandering. So both Republicans and Democrats- - Also they have favorite
flavors of, yeah, of messing with the vote. Okay.
- Yeah. So gerrymandering is the
best way to rig an election. That way the politicians
pick their voters instead of the voters picking
their politicians, right? So all these districts are
so heavily gerrymandered that the incumbent almost can't lose. They'll push most of the
voters into one district, most of the voters in another district, because they don't want
competition, right? So then you're screwed. The vote isn't rigged, but the district is rigged so that the incumbent wins no matter, almost no matter what, right? So that's why we've gotten so polarized, because the gerrymandering
creates like 90% of seats that are safe. So they don't have to compromise, they don't have to get to a middle. They could just be extreme on either side because they already locked it up. Okay? So that's the number
one way to rig an election. Now finally, the last part of this, maybe the most important, maybe even more important
than gerrymandering, and that's the media. So it just happened to RFK Jr., it happened to Bernie in 2015. It happens to any outsider, right or left. The media, if you're an outsider,
will say, well, radical, number one, they don't
platform you, right? So they're not gonna have
you on to begin with. Nobody's even gonna find out about you. If nobody finds out about
you, you're done for, right? So Bernie broke through that
because he was so popular, and the rallies were so
huge that he, they could, local news couldn't help but cover him. Jesus Christ, what are
all these people doing in the middle of the city, right? And he slowly broke through that. But do you know that in 2015, as he's doing this miraculous run against Hillary Clinton,
nobody thinks he has a chance. And here comes Bernie,
and he's almost at 48%. This is, he had seven seconds
of coverage on ABC that year. They just will not put you on. That is the number one
way they rig an election. Bobby Kennedy Jr. sitting at
20% in a primary, no town hall, 20 percent's a giant number, right? And you are not gonna do a town hall, you're not gonna do a debate. 12% in the general election, a giant number in a general election,
no town hall, no debate. If no one finds out about you, they don't know to vote for you, right? If they don't find out your policies. Corporate media rigs elections
more than anything else in the world. - Now, this is something you've been a bit controversial about, but the general sort of standard belief is that there's a left-leaning bias in the mainstream media,
because, as I think studies show, a large majority of
journalists are left-leaning, and then that there's a bias in Big Tech, employees of Big Tech companies, from search engines to social
media, are left-leaning. And there that's a huge
majority is left-leaning. So the conventional wisdom is that there is a bias towards the left. - Yeah.
- Do you think, first of all, I think you've argued
that that's not true, that there's a bias in
the other direction, but whether there's a bias or not, do you think that how big of an impact that has on the result of the election? - Okay, so let's break that down. Tech and media are totally different. So let's do media first,
then we'll do tech. So on mainstream media, corporate media, and I actually think that right wing media, like Fox News, is part of corporate media. They just play good cop, bad cop. And so in that realm, the
bias is not right or left, except on social issues. Okay? So, and that's where
that image comes from. On social issues, yes,
the media is generally on the left, and right wing, sorry, but like this started in the 1960s, and the right wing got super mad at mainstream media saying
that black people were equal to white people. That's not the case any more,
okay? Right wing, calm down. I'm not calling you all racist. But in the 1960s, was there racism? Of course! Of course! They wouldn't even let black
kids into the schools, right? There was massive
segregation in the south, but a lot in the north as well. And at that point in
mainstream media says, well, I mean, they are citizens,
they should have equal rights. And the right wing goes, "Bias!" Okay, yeah. I mean, you're kind of right. It is a bias, it is a
bias towards equality in that case, but that is
perceived as on the left. Now, fast forward to today, you don't have that on the
racial issues as obviously as much as we had it back then, but on gay marriage that
existed for a long time, where the media's like, well, they kind of should have the same rights as straight people, right? And the right wing went, "Bias!" Right? So, okay, you're kind of right about that. But at the same time, I would argue their
position is correct. Right? So, but can they go too far?
Of course they can go too far. Okay, now, but that's
not the main deal, guys. That's to distract you. The
main deal is economic issues. And again, we say it ahead
of time and you can see if we're right or wrong, right? So we will tell folks, when we get to an economic bill, you'll see all of a sudden the guys who theoretically disagree, Fox News and MSNBC close ranks, and you just saw it
happen with price gouging, that issue of price gouging, all of a sudden there's a lot of MSNBC hosts, CNN hosts, Washington Post writes
an op-ed against it. And everybody panics.
It's like, no, no, no. You can't control anything
a corporation does. This is wrong! This is wrong! Right? Oh, what happened? I thought you guys hated each other. All of a sudden you
totally agree. Fascinating. Okay? Same thing happened on increasing wages, when they were talking about
increasing the minimum wage. Stephanie Ruhle, giant
screed against it on MSNBC. All of a sudden Fox News
and MSNBC agree, right? Do not touch beloved corporations. So now that gets us to our real bias. It's not left or right. It's pro-corporate for
all the reasons we talked about before, corporate
media, corporate politicians. So if you don't believe me today, whether you're on the
right or the left, watch, next time an economic
issue, where do they fall? How do they react? When, anytime it's a corporate issue, where does the media go? Right? So that's the
real bias of the media. And so since the real bias of the media is pro-corporations, that
is not a left wing position, that is considered more
of a right wing position. I even think that's a misnomer, 'cause to be fair to right wing voters, they're not pro-corporations. They're not pro big business.
They're not pro-corruption. But the Republican politicians are. So it gets framed as a
right wing issue, right? So if you think that they, that the corporate media is too populist, you just don't get it. They aren't. They hate populism. So now when you turn to tech. So tech's a complicated one because, yeah, people write the code. If they're left wingers, they're gonna have certain assumptions and they might write that into
the codes or the rules. And so, but they're also,
generally speaking, wealthy. They're usually white.
They're usually male. And those biases also get go in. And there's a lot of people
on the left who object to that bias, right? Okay. But that's a fair and
interesting conversation. And one we have to be careful of. And one, we could find a,
hopefully find a middle ground on. But that's not the major problem. The major reason why
Big Tech gets attacked is because they are competitors of who? Social media competes
with mainstream media. So mainstream media has
been attacking Big Tech from day one, pretending that it's a, they're really concerned. Yeah, they're really concerned, 'cause that's their
competition and they're getting their ass handed to 'em. So I did a story on The Young
Turks about CNN article, about all the dangers of social media. I'm like, guys, this is written by their advertising department, okay? And in fact, they go to the advertisers and they find a rando video on YouTube or Facebook, right? Outta billions of videos. And they're like, "Look,
your ad is on this video. Do you denounce and reject
every Big Tech company and every member of social media?" And the advertiser is
like, shit. Yeah, I do. Right? Meanwhile, they're doing
"MILF Island" on TV. - Okay.
- I didn't know that. I'm going to check that out. - There's literally a show
that came out recently. Where it's moms and their
sons and they fuck each other. - Oh, wow.
- Okay. They don't... They don't have sex with their mom. They have sex with a different mom. - Got it. - Or they date, but then the show is, oh, then they go off into a
corner, et cetera, right? I'm like, you're doing this kind of like the worst, degrading,
ridiculous, immoral programming. And then you found a video on
YouTube that has a problem. Get the fuck outta here. You're just trying to
kneecap your competition. - Let's talk about the saga of Joe Biden. So over the past year,
over the past few months, can you just throw a
rewind, where have you, maybe tell the story
of Joe Biden as you see from the election perspective? - Yeah. So about a year ago, I'm
looking at the polling, and first of all, I have
eyes, right, and ears. So whenever I see Biden, I'm
like, this is a disaster. And then I go and talk to real people. And when I say real people,
I mean not in politics, that's not their job, right? Because people involved
in politics for media have a certain perspective
and it's colored by all of the exchanges in mainstream media,
social media, et cetera. Real people aren't on Twitter
having political fights. They're not watching CNN
religiously, et cetera. Whenever I was at a barbecue,
"You guys all Democrats?" In some barbecues, "Yeah," what do you guys think of Joe Biden? Like almost in unison, "Too old." Every real person said too old. So I look at what real people are saying. That's why I thought Trump
was gonna win in 2016. I go in the middle of Ohio, I can't see a Hillary
Clinton sign for hundreds of miles, right? And there's Trump paraphernalia
everywhere, right? So that's not end all,
be all, you could say it's anecdotal, but you begin
to collect data points, right? But then the real data
points are in polling. Okay? So now I'm looking at Biden
polling. He's in the 30s. No incumbent in the 30s
has ever come back to win. So I'm like, it's already over. Then all of a sudden, oh my god, Trump takes the lead with
Latinos. It's double over. Later in the process, Trump took the lead with young voters. I'm like, this is the most
over election in history. And a democrat cannot win if they're not winning young voters. That's impossible. Trump's cutting into his
lead with black voters. This thing is over, right? And what I go tell people, and
they're like, you are crazy! Why do they think I'm crazy? Because MSNBC's lying to them 24/7, telling them that Joe
Biden created sliced bread and the wheel and fire, and my favorite talking point was, he's a dynamo behind the scenes. I'm like, okay, let me get this. Right? It's like an SNL skit, right? I'm like, so behind the scenes it's like, "All right, Sally, get me the memo on that and we're, okay, we're gonna do this, and I'm
in command of the material." Then he goes in front of the
cameras, "Eh, anyways..." Why would any politician do that? Why? Why would they be terrible
in front of the camera and great off camera,
doesn't make any sense. But once you get people enough propaganda, and MSNBC
created blue MAGA, right? They'll believe anything. So they believe that Biden
was dynamic and young and that he was the
best possible candidate to beat Donald Trump, when in reality he was
about the only Democrat who couldn't beat Donald Trump. So, number one, I don't
co-sign on bullshit. I don't care which side you're on. Number two, as you heard earlier, I can't have Trump winning. It endangers the country, it endangers our constitution, et cetera. So I'm gonna do something about it. And so I start something
called the Operation Hope on The Young Turks. And we asked the audience
what should we do, right? So there's different
projects in Operation Hope. And, but the first project that pops up is knock Biden out of the race. Okay? And so then I ask our
paying members on TYT, I say, guys, you're gonna vote, and then I'm gonna do
what you tell me to do. If you say no, I like Biden, or I think Biden's the
best candidate, or even if he isn't, we're not gonna
be able to win on this, so don't do it, right? Should I enter the primary against Biden? Okay, 76-24, go, enter,
right? I'm a populist. You tell me to go,
you're my paying members, you're my boss, I'm gonna go, okay? So I enter the primary. Now I'm not born in the country, so people are gonna freak out about that. I'm a talk show host. Like the establishment
media despises me, right? So I'm not gonna get any air time. In fact, we consider hiring
the top booking agent in New York. We talked to him and he
says, well, you know, I'm actually in New York this week. And he says, I'm gonna go
talk to those guys and I'll come back to you. And he was really decent,
because normally, you know, he charges a lot. Just take the money, right? And go, oh, yeah, yeah, I'll get you on. But he was a wonderful guy. He said, I talked to them,
you're banned. So don't do it. Like you're not, you're banned at CNN, you're banned at MSNBC. And I think you're banned on
Fox News, but I'm not sure. Okay? So long odds, why do you do it? Because if you think we're
gonna crash into the iceberg, you might as well bum rush
the captain's quarters. Right, I'm lunging at the wheel. So what difference can I make? Well, I can make a difference
by going on every show on planet Earth and going, he's too old. He's in the 30s. He has no chance of winning,
no chance of winning. I go on Charlemagne show,
"Breakfast Club," right? Charlemagne agrees. All of
a sudden we're having buzz. And then people go, oh, Charlemagne said he has
no chance of winning. Then Charlemagne's on the Daily
Show talks to John Stewart. John Stewart does a segment. This is not necessarily causal,
but buzz is building, right? So then John Stewart does
a segment, if you remember, and people got super pissed at him. Too old. Can't win. And all that buzz is building. Meanwhile, unrelated to us, David Axelrod and James Carville. And I'm like, guys, figure it out. Who does Axelrod speak for? The top advisor for Barack Obama. Who is James Carville the top
advisor for? The Clintons. This is the Clintons
and the Obamas sending their emissaries to
say, we can read a poll. He's going to lose. Change direction. So when the debate happens,
we laid the groundwork. If we hadn't laid the groundwork, debate would've been the first time that blue MAGA would've thought,
oh, maybe Biden can't win. Right? But since all of us said
it, and strange bedfellows, I loathe Nancy Pelosi,
but she was on our side. I got a lot of issues with Bill Maher. He was on our side, right? I got a lot of issues
with Axelrod and Carville, and they were on our side. So the people who believed
in objective reality, kind of independently made a plan, let's show people objective reality. And we did. And we drove him out. And it made all the difference. - So you think he stepped on voluntarily or was he forced out? - Both. So again, it depends on what
you mean. So was he forced out? Of course he was forced out. You think he just woke
up, he is like, oh yeah, you know what? Screw my legacy. I don't
wanna be a two term president. I'll just drop out for no
reason. No, we forced them out. Of course we did, right? And when I say we, I had
a tiny, tiny, tiny role. The people who had the
major roles, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and all those folks, but even they were not
the main driving force. The number one driving
force were the donors. What is the source of
power of Bernie or Massie? The people, right? What is
the source of power for Biden? The donors. The donors made Biden. He is the donors'
candidate and the donors, that's why he told the donors nothing will
fundamentally change. Like you can, if you say, "Lex, no, Cenk, I think you're too
extreme that Biden works for the donors 98%. I think he only works for
them 80% or 55%," fine, we could have that debate, but you can't argue that it
isn't his source of power. And you can't argue it any more even if you're gonna argue it earlier. Because once the donors said, we're not giving you any more money, he didn't have any options. He couldn't go on. So, but was he forced out at
like knife point or something? No. So was it voluntary? Yeah. Ultimately, if Biden decided to stay in, there was nothing we could do about it. And so he had to voluntarily
make that decision. But he voluntarily made it
because he had no choice left. - Yeah, I wish he stepped down voluntarily
from a place of strength. So I think presidents, I think politicians in general, especially at the highest
levels, want legacy. And to me, at least, one of the greatest things
you could do is to walk away at the top. I mean George Washington. So walk away from power is, I
think, universally respected. Especially if you got a
good speech to go with it and you do it really well. Not in some kind of cynical or calculated or some kind of transactional way, but just like as a great leader, and maybe be a little
bit even more dramatic than you need to be in doing it. Yeah, I thought that would
be a beautiful moment. And then launch some kind of democratic
process for electing a different option. - Not only did I agree with you 100%, I reached one of his top advisors, one of the guys you see
in the press all the time, in his inner circle. I never said that before
because we were in the middle of it and I'm never gonna
betray anyone's confidence and I'll never say who it was, okay? But he was gracious enough to meet with me as I was about to enter the primary. And look, it is smart too, because get information,
intelligence, et cetera, is this guy gonna be
trouble or not trouble? Right? But at least he took the
meeting and the case I made is exactly the one you just said, Lex. I said, if he drops, this
about 10 months ago, I said, if he drops out now, they
build statues of him, right? The Democrats, if you are a
right winger, you hate him. I get it. But the Democrats would've
said he beat Trump and protected democracy in 2020, and he steps down
graciously now to make sure we beat Trump again in 2024. And he lets go of power voluntarily. He's gonna be a hero, an absolute hero. But if he doesn't, you're gonna force all of us
to kick the living crap out of him and tell everybody he's
an egomaniac, which he is. And he's doing this for two... So that he could be, if
you don't know Washington, in that bubble, if you're
a one term president, you're a loser. If you're a two term president, you have a legacy and you're historic. He's running for one reason,
one reason only. My legacy. I will be a two term president. I will be considered historic. I'm like, brother, now you're
gonna be considered a villain. The villain of the story. You're handing it right back to Trump. You're not gonna win and you
know, look at the numbers. Any political professional
knows you're not gonna win. So you have hero or villain
and you get to choose. But if you think you're gonna
be a hero and beat Trump, that is not a choice you have. That is not gonna happen. And they didn't believe
us, but by then they did. - Were you're troubled by, how Kamala Harris was selected
after he stepped down? - Yes and no. So I argued for an open convention. And so if Biden had stepped
down when we were trying to get people into the
primary, knock him out, then it would, that would've
been a perfect solution. Then all the governors could go in. Walz, Beshear, Whitmer,
Kamala Harris goes in, obviously they have a real primary, at that point me and later
Dean Phillips came in, me, Dean and I mean, Maryanne
wouldn't drop out. Me and Dean would definitely drop out, 'cause our whole point
was get other people in the race, make sure we win, right? So, okay then you would've
had a great primary, it would've been the right way to do it. Both morally, you know,
constitutionally, et cetera. But also as a matter of politics, 'cause you would've
gotten a lot of coverage for your young, exciting candidates and you would've legitimized the idea that you're protecting democracy. Okay? So that didn't
happen because of Biden. It is what it is. So now when Biden drops out, at least do a vestige of democracy, go to the convention and do
what it's designed to do, which is pick a candidate. Ezra Klein made a great case for this in the New York
Times podcast that he did, that made a huge difference, and he was great for doing that. So I believe in an opening convention, but I know Democrats that love to anoint because they don't trust the people. So they think the elites are geniuses. Don't worry, we'll pick
the right candidate. Yeah, I remember when you
picked Hillary Clinton, how'd that work out? Right? And I remember when you said Joe Biden was the right candidate in 2024. How'd that work out? Do not anoint. Right? So, but in the end they didn't. So what happened was Biden
does the first announcement, he either forgot or on purpose didn't put
Kamala Harris in there. So there's all this kumbaya now. Nah, they don't like each other. Okay? And Biden's been screwing
her over the entire time she's been vice president. So he doesn't put her in
the original statement. And I'm like, whoa, I do
a live video in media. I'm like, Kamala Harris
is not in the statement. Right, in the middle of
my video, they put out a second one, go, okay, fine. Kamala Harris, right? Because that's too much
for the president not to endorse his-
- You think he was like really like somebody
like stormed into the room and said, you absolutely must? - I don't know, I wasn't
there, but probably, right, or they, I don't know. But the bottom line is, it was glaring that he didn't
put her in the first letter. Okay? So he had to put
her in the second one. Fine, no problem. But Obama, Pelosi and Schumer
did not endorse Kamala Harris. That's huge. Normally the Democrats
would all endorse her and would all say she's
anointed, shut up everybody. And then MSNBC would
scream, shut up! Shut up! She's anointed. Right? But they didn't do that. So then Kamala Harris had
to win over the delegates, and I thought she would win
them over in the convention, but she locked them up
in two days, and I know 'cause I know delegates 'cause I ran and the delegates are calling me saying, she's getting on a Zoom right now with us. Right? She went to all the
states and worked her off and locked up enough delegates
to get the nomination in two days. - Yeah, but come on,
it's the, Biden endorsed. - Of course. - Well why is that of course? Why not say, sort of
lay out Walz and Shapiro and Kamala Harris and the
options to say let's, like, at least the facade of democracy,
of a democratic process? - There's what should happen
and what is likely to happen. So should Biden not have
endorsed? Yeah, of course. I think Biden should have
done the same thing as Obama and Pelosi and not endorsed and say, hey, we'd love to have a
process where we figure out who the right nominee is. And at that point, I'm really worried about Kamala Harris 'cause she's doing word
salads nonstop, right? So I'm like, don't make the
same mistake we did before and just pick someone out of a hat. Test them, test them. You get stronger candidates
when you test them. The authoritarian nature
of the DNC drives me crazy. They don't believe in testing candidates. They don't believe in letting
their own voters decide. And look, when we were in the primary, they canceled the Florida election, and they took me, Dean, and Marianne off the ballot in North
Carolina and Tennessee. I'm like, guys, if you're
gonna make a case for democracy in the general election
and you cancel elections in the primaries, do you not get how ridiculous you look, how
hypocritical you look, right? So I didn't want Biden to endorse anyone, but I'm shocked that they
didn't all endorse her. 'Cause normally what
happens is they all endorse. So it, bottom line, Lex, is did she like earn
it in a perfect system? Not even close. Right? But did she earn it enough
in this imperfect way where at least she showed
some degree of competence that assuaged my concerns? Yes. So because a normal
Democrat would bungle that, they wouldn't go talk, like Hillary Clinton wouldn't
have talked to the delegates. She would assume that she's the queen and that they would all bow their heads. She would, you know? So the fact that she did
elementary politics correct, for Democrats, that's like a big win. - It just really frustrated
me because it smelled of the same thing of fucking
over Bernie in 2015-16 and RFK and just the anointing aspect. Now they seem to have gotten
lucky in the situation that it's very possible that Kamala Harris would've been selected through a democratic process. But I have to say, listening
to the speeches at DNC, Walz was amazing, Shapiro
was really strong, and Kamala actually was much
better as compared to her as a candidate previously. But personally don't think
she would've been the result of a democratic process. - So you don't often give your opinions, but when you give the
opinions, I actually agree 90, like a huge percentage of the
time in this conversation. So I fought for Shapiro in the primary and when she was trying to pick for a VP, 'cause I thought there's no
way she's gonna pick Walz. He's way too, not just progressive, but more importantly populist, right? So I didn't think she'd
go in that direction. And Shapiro actually did a bunch of populist
things in Pennsylvania. That's part of the reason why he's so
popular in Pennsylvania. He looks like a smooth talking politician, but his actions are pretty good. And so Shapiro was great, Walz was great. The Obamas are legendary. Even Clinton at his advanced
age makes terrific points in his speech where you go, well, that one's hard to argue with, right? And so they all, I'm
shocked at the competence at the DNC, shocked at
it, but of all those, Lex, so you can give a good
speech and the Obamas give a mean speech. But I saw Obama as president, you know, he didn't deliver on that. So, but the one guy
that stood out is Walz. And the reason is 'cause
he's a real person. - Yeah, real person, populist. - We all gotta work towards picking the most genuine candidates. So here, on the right
wing side, for example, I would prefer Marjorie Taylor Green to a Mitch McConnell any day. Marjorie Taylor Green is genuine. She might be genuinely nuts.
I don't agree with her. She might be even more
right wing than others. But I believe that she means it. And I'll take that any day over a fraud corporatist
like Mitch McConnell who's just gonna do what his donors command of him, et cetera. - I gotta ask you, because I
also love, Bernie still got it. I love Bernie, I always have. I enjoyed his, I think
he might still do it, but I enjoyed his
conversations with Tom Hartman. He's a genuine one. Like Bernie, even you disagree with him, that's a genuine human being. - Yep.
- So just talk about that. Does it trouble you that he's
been fucked over in 2015-16 and again 2020, he seems to be, and why does he keep
like forgiving people? - Yeah. So I love Bernie for the same reason you were saying it, because he's a real person,
he's a populist, he means it. And that is so rare in politics. He's, I feel like I'm
Diogenes and I went looking for the one honest man
and found it in Bernie. And so I did a video in 2013, saying Bernie Sanders can beat
Hillary Clinton in a primary. In 2013. That video exists. Because why did I think that? I didn't say it of any of
the corporate politicians and the guys who were
supposed to challenge her and stuff, because
populist and honest, right? And the country's dying
for an honest populist, dying for it, right? So, love the brother. Now that doesn't mean that
he's right on strategy and he drives me crazy on strategy. So two elements of that. Number
one, in 2016 and in 2020. For god's sake, attack your opponent. You said something about
Trump that I disagree with, where I'm defending Trump. Okay? You don't like what he
did to the public discourse? No, I don't mind it,
and I'll tell you why. - Yeah. - Because at least he got a
little bit past the fakeness. Like he's a conman and
he's a fraud overall and he does everything
for his own interest. But at least he doesn't speak like a bullshitting politician, right? And he's not wrong that you
have to bully your own party to amass enough power to get things done. And he showed that that's possible. So the problem with the
Democrats is civility. So my whole life they're like,
oh, no, don't say anything. Let's lose with civility, right? So, for example, in debates on, you know, whether it's on TV, online or whatever, Democrats or people on the
left are always saying, I'm offended. I never get offended. No, after I'm done you're
gonna be offended, okay? Fight back, fighting back wins. And we couldn't get Bernie to fight back. In 2020 he was one state away. He won the first three states. He crushed in Nevada, all we
needed was South Carolina. But in order to get South
Carolina, we all knew, everybody on his campaign, everyone who's in progressive
media, we all knew, you've gotta attack Biden. If you don't, they're
just gonna tsunami you. You know, corporate medias
and the corporate politicians are gonna run roughshod over you. You have to make the case against them. And so two times Bernie flinched, one in 2016 in the Brooklyn
debate, they asked, did the money that Hillary Clinton taken from the banks affect her votes? And he said, no. Of course
it affected her votes. Of course it did. You have to say yes and you
have to show it and prove it. The bankruptcy bill. When she was first lady, she was totally in favor
of the American people and against the bankruptcy
bill 'cause it has the banks, you can't discharge any debts,
you know, credit card debt and bank debt, et cetera. It's an awful bill. It's the one of the
most corporatist bills. She was on the right side as a first lady. She becomes a senator, takes banker money and
all of a sudden she flips over to the banker's side. Say it, Bernie, for god's
sake, say it, right? Then in one of the debates in 2020, his team prepares attacks against Biden. They're not personal. They're not like, you can sense by now, if I'm in a political race, my objective is rip the
other guy's face off, right? - Yeah. - Politically, rhetorically,
never physically. - Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- And so, but I would get it to a
point where they'd think, I don't know if I'm gonna vote for Cenk, but I know I'm not
voting for the other guy. Okay? So you gotta do
that if you wanna win. So they prepare this,
he says I'm gonna do it. He goes out in the
podium and doesn't do it. Because he can't, he's too damn nice. He just can't attack the other guy. Now that's problem number one in strategy. Problem number two is
something you alluded to. So Biden gets in office,
Bernie thinks they're friends. They're not friends,
Biden's just using him. So he uses him to get
the credibility and then he eviscerates 85% of
the progressive proposals that Bernie put forward. Biden throws away $15 minimum wage. That was Bernie's signature issue. Doesn't even propose the public option. Dumps paid family leave for
no reason. I can go on and on. And Bernie co-signs on
it because he thinks he's in an alliance, he thinks
Biden's on his side and he thinks we're gonna get things done. And to be fair to Bernie,
like I said earlier, Obama got only 5% of his agenda
passed and Biden got 15%. Okay. So you're right, Bernie, you got three times more than under Obama. But you're wrong. That is
not fundamental change. And without fundamental
change we're screwed. - Let me ask you about another
impressive speech, AOC, is it possible that she's the future of
the party, future president? - No. So AOC in my opinion
lost her way. And so... - In which way? - So it's tough talking about these things because people take it
so personally, right? And that's why you'll
see very few politicians on our shows, because we
give super tough interviews and the word's out in the street, right? Like don't go Young Turks, they'll ask you super
hard questions, right? So only a couple do it,
like Ro Khanna does it. He's brave. And we'll get into
shouting matches sometimes in the middle of bills and stuff. But at least he's there
to defend his position. I respect him for that. Tim Ryan, a little bit more
of a conservative Democrat when he was the house, he would take on any debate, et cetera. So there's a couple of
good guys that do it, but generally they don't. So when this relates to AOC,
because when AOC's running, we do 34 videos on her, we
get her millions of views, we founded Just Democrats and
now launched it on the show. Our audience, Ryan Grim
documents it in one of his books. Our audience raises two
and a half million dollars for those progressive candidates overall. And at that point AOC and
all those, Rashida Tlaib, et cetera, they're all dying
to come on the Young Turks. Makes sense. I would too of course. It's not because it's The Young Turks any media outlet, and most media outlets, almost all the media outlets reject them. We cover AOC more than all the
other press combined, right? And she wins. For a number of reasons. That's one of the reasons. But there's many others and
she did a terrific job herself. She then takes Saikat
and Corbin who were the, Saikat was the head of
Just Democrats and Corbin was communications director
for Just Democrats. Then Saikat made one of the most brilliant
political decisions in, arguably in American history. He said, he called me and he said, "Cenk, I'm gonna go from head of Just Democrats to running AOC's campaign." And I'm like, well, the other candidates are gonna get pissed, and you're staking the entire
enterprise on one candidate. And I'm like, Saikat, I'm not in it. I'm doing the media arm.
You're in the trenches. You're the guy making the decisions. So I'm gonna trust
whatever you say. You sure? And he said, "Yeah, I'm sure." So him and Corbin go
over to AOC's campaign. AOC then wins that miraculous win. Then she hires Saikat
to be her chief of staff and she hires Corbin to be
her communications director. Within six months they're gone. And once they're gone, AOC then goes on an
establishment path, okay? Because why were they gone? Oh, they insulted one of her colleagues. Yeah, that colleague
who's a total corporatist and was selling out one
of her policy proposals. If you don't call out your own side, you're never gonna get anything done. But if you call out your own side, you become persona non-grata, and it is super uncomfortable, and
that we couldn't get them to do things that were uncomfortable. Now she's gonna find that outrageous and she's gonna be very offended by that. And she's gonna point to
a bunch of things she did that were uncomfortable. And to be fair to her, she does, she has, until that speech, she was
pretty good on Palestine when we desperately needed it. She was pretty good on a bunch of issues. Cori Bush did that campaign
on evictions, et cetera, on the Capitol steps. That was great. AOC's original sit-in in Pelosi's office. At that point we're all
still on the same team. It's a spectacular success. Me, Corbin and Saikat are
saying, do it again, do it again. Like don't abuse it. Like don't be a clown and
do it every other day. But like when it matters, you need to be able to challenge Pelosi. Right? And in my opinion, she just got to a point where she got exhausted
being uncomfortable. It's like, it's really hard. The media hates you and
they keep pounding away and calling you a radical
and you're destroying the Democratic Party,
you're destroying unity. So whereas if you go
along, all of a sudden you're a queen, and now all of a sudden the mainstream media is saying, oh, AOC, she could be the... - I mean there's some degree to which you wanna
sometimes bide your time and just like rest a bit. And I think from my perspective,
maybe you can educate me, she seems like a legit progressive, legit
even populist, charismatic, young, like a lot of
time to develop the game of politics, how to play it well enough to avoid the bullshit. I guess she doesn't take
corporate PAC money, right? - That's right. No,
she's still true on that. - So as far as I, just looking over the next few elections, like who's gonna be running, who's gonna be... Who's going to be a real player? She just seems like an... Like to me it seems like an obvious person that's gonna be in the race. - So while I fight for the
ideal, I'm very practical. So for example, she wins and then one
cycle later after 2020, there's these guys who
wanted, quote, unquote, force the vote and it
was on the speakership of Nancy Pelosi and they wanted to use it to get Medicare for all. I'm like, guys, forcing a
vote is a terrific idea. On the speakership? Okay,
who's your alternative? Oh, we don't have an alternative.
Already giant red flag. Okay. What's the issue you're
looking to have them vote on? Medicare for all. Oh. Oh, you don't know politics.
So I love Medicare for all. We have to get Medicare for all. But if that's the first one you put up without gaining any leverage,
you're gonna get slaughtered. Put up something easy, force
a vote on $15 minimum wage, or pick another one that's
easy, paid family leave. These are all polling great. Because if you force a vote on
that, you could actually win. And if you win, you gain leverage. And then you do the next
one and the next one. And then you do Medicare for all. Not bullshit gradualism that
the corporate Democrats do, but actually, strategically,
practically building up power and leverage and using
it at the right times. So if I thought that's what
AOC was doing, I would love it. Right? So I don't need her to force
a vote on Medicare for all. I don't need her to go
on some wild tangents that don't make any sense and is only gonna diminish her power. But when they eviscerated
all the progressive proposals in Build Back Better, how did that happen? Manchin and Sinema used every
ounce of leverage they had. They said, I'm just not gonna
vote for it. I don't care. Okay? You know, the status
quo is perfect for my donors. So I don't need you. I vote no. Okay? Now take out everything I want. And Biden did, right? Progressives had to push back and say, here is two to three proposals. Right? Not everything. Not everything. Two to three proposals,
they all poll over 70%. They're all no-brainers. And they're all things
that Joe Biden promised. We want those in the bill,
otherwise we're voting no. At that point, the media, what would've happened is
the media would've exploded and they would've said AOC
and the rest are the scum of the Earth. They're ruining the Democratic Party. We're not gonna get the
bill. They're the worst. You have to withstand that. If you cannot withstand a nuclear blast for mainstream media,
you're not the person. 'Cause you have to go run that obstacle course to get to change. If they had stood their ground, they definitely would've won
on one to two of those issues. Instead they went with a
strategy that was called, it was literally called Trust Biden. - All right, so big question. Who wins this election? Kamala or Trump? And what's
Kamala's path to victory? And if you can steel man,
what's Trump's path to victory? - Yeah. So there's not enough information yet. So since I make a lot
of predictions on air and then brag about it, unbearably... (both laughing) - Yeah.
- People are always, they'll stop me in the streets and they'll
be like, predict this. Like predict my marriage. Brother, I don't know
anything about your marriage. How could I possibly predict something without having any information? So in the case of this
campaign, right now, I got Kamala Harris at 55%
chance of winning. Okay? Which is not bad. Doesn't mean she's gonna
win by 55 because then that would be a 10 point margin. That's not gonna happen. Right? But I say around 51 to 55, but it's nowhere near over
because of a lot of things. One, the Democrats are still
seen as more establishment and people hate the establishment. Two, if war breaks out in the Middle East, which is now unfortunately
bordering on likely, right? If that war breaks out, all bets are off. - You mean a regional war?
- Yeah. Like Iran, Israel gets to be a real thing, not just a pin prick and
a little bombing here, an assassination there, but
no, we're going to war, right? If that happens, then all
bests are off and no one has any idea who's gonna win. Okay? And if they're pretending that
they know, that's ridiculous. 'Cause it's so unpredictable. Then the third bogey for
her is if she goes back to word salad. So there's three phases
of Kamala Harris's career. She's not necessarily any
different in terms of policy. She's, you can frame it in a bad way, you could frame it in a good way. You can say, oh, she's just seeing which way the wind
is blowing and then, oh, she's a tough cop prosecutor. Oh, and then she's doing justice reform when you need, people want justice reform. Oh, she's a waffler, right? Or you get painted as, she's
pretty balanced, right? She prosecuted serious
criminals very harshly, but then on marijuana
possession, got them into rehab. And you know what? That's actually what you should do, right? So I'm not talking about policy. So there, you could
have one of those views about Kamala Harris and I get it. I'm talking about strategic stylistically. So Kamala Harris, until the second debate in the primaries in 2020 is a very competent
politician who's in line to be the next Obama, right? She's killing it. District attorney,
attorney general, senator. And then the first debate,
if you remember, she won, she had that great line about, you know, there was a little girl on
that bus that was integrating the schools and that girl was me, and Biden being the
knucklehead that he is, he's caught on tape going... You're like, don't have that
reaction, brother. Okay. Because she's criticizing
his segregation policy on buses back in the '70s, right? So anyways, so she's doing terrific. And then after that debate
until Biden drops out is a disaster area for
Kamala Harris' career. In the primary she starts falling apart. She can't strategize right.
She's for Medicare for all. No, she's not. She's
for Medicare for some. What's Medicare for some? I don't know. Right? And she goes in the next debate and Tulsi Gabbard kicks
her ass and then goes, and then the third debate,
gets her kicked again, and she's starting to drift away. Then at this point, and this is funny, I have more votes for president than Kamala Harris does, because Kamala Harris
dropped out before Iowa because that's how much of a disaster her campaign turned into, when she was leading. She was leading, right? So then she becomes vice
president and Biden, probably 'cause of that bus line, Jill Biden caught tremendous
feelings over that line. Okay? So Biden's like, here, have
this albatross around your neck. It's called immigration. Good luck. I'm not gonna do anything about it. I'm not gonna change policy. But I'm putting you in charge of it to get your ass handed to you, okay? And she does. So that's a disaster. And then she starts doing
interviews where she's like, we have to become the change, the being, but not the thing we
were and the unbecoming. And you're like, what is going on? Why can neither one of them speak? - Yeah.
- Right? - Yeah. - And so, but then the
third act shocks me, Biden steps down, she goes, grabs all those delegates
in a super competent way that we talked about earlier. And then she goes out and gives a speech. I'm like, oh, that speech is good. Okay, do another one, another one. I'm like, wait a minute,
these are good speeches. No more word salads. Then she picks Tim Walz
and shocks the world. I'm like, that's the correct VP pick! That is a miracle. Right? And then she goes and does the economically populist plan, all those proposals about housing that people care about, about grocery prices
that people care about... Real or not real, that is
correct political strategy. So this Kamala Harris is back to the original Kamala Harris, who was a very competent,
skilled politician. - And as I was telling
you offline, she is doing, whoever's doing her
TikTok is like blowing up and they're doing risky, edgy stuff. - Yes. - I did not expect that
from somebody that kind of comes from the Biden
camp of just like, be safe, be boring, all this kind of stuff. - So you have to give Kamala
Harris ultimate credit 'cause she's the leader of the campaign and she makes the final decisions. But there's apparently a
couple of people inside that campaign that are ass kickers and they have convinced her to take risk, which Democrats never take. And it is correct to take risk. You cannot get to victory without risk. So the vice president pick
was, is the bellwether. When Hillary Clinton
picked Tim Kane, I said, that's it, she's gonna lose. Because Tim Kane is
playing prevent defense. He's wallpaper. I mean, he'd
be lucky to be wallpaper. He is just a white wall, right? He's just, and when he
speaks is white noise. He never says anything interesting. He's the most boring pick of all time. That's saying, we already won. Ha-ha. Okay? If Kamala Harris had picked Mark Kelly, that's the Tim Kane equivalent. Okay. Oh, he's an astronaut. I don't give a shit
that he's an astronaut. What is he saying? Is
he a good politician? Does he have good policies? Is he exciting on the campaign trail? Is he going to add to your momentum? Mark Kelly, he might be a
good guy, but number one, he's a very corporate democrat. And number two, it's like
watching grass grow. He... Oh, he is terrible at
speaking if you ask me. Right? So I thought for sure she's
gonna pick Mark Kelly, right? Because that's what a
normal Democrat does. Or if they wanna go wild and
crazy, they'll go to Beshear. So I was like, please let it be Shapiro, because he's at least not bad. He's done some populist
things and he's strategic, he's really smart. I need smart candidates.
Dumb candidates don't help. They don't have a mind of their
own, they can't take risks. They're not independent
thinkers. They're gonna lose. So she picks the smartest,
most populist candidate. Boom boom, we got a winner.
That's a good campaign. - Speaking of risks, when they debate, when Kamala and Trump debate, what do you think that's gonna look like? Who do you think is gonna win? - Oh, that's not close. Kamala Harris. - Yeah.
- Unless she falls apart. Unless she goes back
to the bad era. Right? That's risk number three. - Well, hold on a second for, oh, I guess in the debate you don't have, you can have pre-written... It seems like when she's
going off the top of her head is when the word salad
sometimes comes out. Sometimes. - Well, yeah, we'll have to see. Right? We'll have to see. 'Cause she hasn't done
any tough interviews. She hasn't really been challenged. So I hope to God that doesn't happen. - That she doesn't fall apart, you mean? - Yeah. - Because I hope she does a
bunch of interviews, right? - Oh, definitely, definitely. I'm like, this is gonna
sound really funny, I'm too honest, but I am, like, in the context of Kamala
Harris probably shouldn't come on the Young Turks. We do a really tough interview
and it would hurt her. Okay? - Do you though? Like, it's tough, but like
you're pretty respectful. Maybe I just have my sort of... Like I'm okay with a
little bit of tension. You're pretty respectful. Even when you're yelling,
there's like respect. Like you don't do like
a gotcha type thing. There's certain things you could do. Like you said this in the past, you can say a line from the
past that's out of context, it forces the other person to
have to define the context. You just, you know, sort of debate type tactics over and over. Like, you don't seem to do that. You just like ask them
questions genuinely. And then you argue the point. And then you also like hear what they say. The only thing I've seen
you do sometimes tough that you sometimes like
interrupt, like you speak over the person if they
are trying to do the same. - Right.
- Only if they're filibustering.
- Yeah, if they're filibustering. But like that, that's a tricky one. That's, yeah, that's a tricky one. - Right. No, but Lex, the problem for her coming on our show isn't that we
would be unfair to her. It's that we would be fair. So we would ask questions she is gonna have trouble answering. - Oh, the corporate stuff.
- Right? I mean, like, so Biden
said he was gonna take the corporate tax rate to
28% and he barely tried. You say you're gonna take it to 28%, why should we trust you? Right? You guys said $15 minimum
wage and then you took it out of the bill. Why should we trust you? Right, those are very tough questions. She's never gonna get
that in mainstream media. Mainstream media is gonna
have faux toughness, but in reality they're
gonna be soft balls, right? And so the debates, you're right, Lex, is a little bit easier, 'cause Sarah Palin proved that you could just memorize
scripted talking points. And she admitted it later. She's like, she was super nervous, she memorized the talking points. And no matter what they asked, she just gave the talking point. Which, by the way, people barely noticed because that's what all
politicians do, okay? She just admitted it. And so, no, Trump's a
disaster in a debate. He's a one man wrecking
crew of his own campaign. So any competent debater
would eviscerate Donald Trump. I mean, they just, on any given topic, when he says something, like, here, let's take a one lunatic conspiracy theory that he just had recently. And by the way, if you're a right winger and you keep getting hurt
every time I say he's a lunatic or I insult Donald Trump, don't like, you sound like a left winger. I'm offended, I'm offended,
I'm offended. Get over it. Get over it. Okay? So we have disagreements. Hear what the other side is saying. And by the way, I say the
same thing to the left, okay? I say, you think everybody on the right's evil, you're crazy. No. They just have a different way of looking at the world, which by the way is an interesting conversation, we should talk about that in a minute too, so I do it to both sides, but okay, Trump says, oh, I don't think there's anyone
at Kamala Harris's rallies. All the pictures are AI. Okay. So let's say he says
that in a debate because he's liable to say anything, right? You just say, okay, so you think every
reporter that was there, every photographer that was there, every human being that was
there, they're all lying, they have a conspiracy
of thousands of people, but none of 'em were actually there. Do you understand how insane you sound? - So this is a good place to, can you steel man the case for Trump? - Yeah. Yeah. So Trump is a massive risk
because of all the things we talked about earlier. But there is a percentage
chance that he's such a wild card that he
overturns the whole system. And that is why the establishment
is a little scared of him. So if he's in office, here I'll give you a case of Donald Trump doing something right, something wrong first
and then something right. So he bombs Soleimani, the top general of Iran and kills him. That risked World War III, that risked a giant war
with Iran that devolves... Iran is four times the size of Iraq. If your anti-war, you should have hated that he assassinated Soleimani. But after the assassination, Iran doesn't wanna get into it even though they're in a rage and
they do a small bombing. You could tell if it's a
small or a big one, right? So that's them saying,
we don't really want war, but for our domestic crowd,
we have to bomb you back. Right? And that's when the military
industrial complex comes to Trump and says, no, you have to show 'em who's
tough and bomb this area. And Trump says, no, they
did a small bombing, not a large bombing. I don't want the war. I'm
not gonna do that bombing. That was his shining moment. - Yeah. For me, one of the biggest
steel man for Trump is that he has both the
skill and the predisposition to not be a warmonger. He, I think, better than the
other candidates I've seen is able to end wars. And end them, now, you
might disagree with it, but in a way where there's legitimately effective negotiation that happens. Like I just don't see any other candidate currently
being able to sit down with Zelensky and Putin and
to negotiate a peace treaty that both are equally unhappy with. - So on the one hand, almost all other politicians
are gonna be controlled by the military industrial complex. And that complex wants
to bleed Russia dry. And that's what the Ukraine war is doing. It's a double win for
the defense contractors. Number one, every dollar we send to Ukraine is
actually not going to Ukraine. It's going to US defense contractors, and then they are sending
old weapons to Ukraine. The money is to build new weapons for us. So a lot of people don't know that. So the defense contractors
want that war to go on forever, and they're an
enormous influence in Washington. The second win is
they're depleting Russia, and Russia's gotten themselves
into a quagmire like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they're bleeding out. So the military industrial
complex wants Russia to bleed out for as long
as humanly possible. They actually care more
about their own interests, of course, than they do
about Ukrainian interests. So in fact, there's a
good argument to be made that Ukraine could have
gotten a peace deal earlier and we prevented it. So, but the bottom line now is probably how a deal gets done is they let go of three
more areas in Ukraine. They already lost Crimea. They'd have to let go
of three more regions. And that is tough because
at that point Russia is a little bit encouraged. Every time they do an
invasion, they get more land. They might not get all
the land they wanted, but they get a lot of land. So it's a very difficult issue. - But literally, which person, if they become president,
will end the war? - Trump will end that war,
because Trump will go in, and he loves Russia and Putin anyway... - I just disagree with, he loves Russia, the implication of that, meaning he'll do whatever Putin tells him. I think... - He'll do 90% of what Putin tells him. - Ah, I just disagree with that. I think he wants to be the
kind of person that says, fuck you to Putin.
- Wow. - While patting him on the
back and being, you know, but out-negotiating Putin. - So I don't like talking about Russia 'cause there's so much emotions
that go into that topic. The right wing, the
minute you mention Russia, they're like, oh, it's a
hoax and all this baggage that comes with it, et cetera. To me, Russia's not any
different than Saudi Arabia or Israel for Trump. You give me money, I like you. You buy my apartments, I like you, right? If you don't give me
money, I don't like you. It's not that complicated. So, okay, take like, don't worry about the Russia part of it. Like the bottom line is, Trump thinks, what do I care about those
three regions of Ukraine? I wanna get this thing done right? So he'll go and he'll say, Ukraine, we're gonna withdraw all
help unless you agree to a peace deal with Russia. And Russia wants those three
regions. That's the peace deal. That's it. So Ukraine will lose a
part of their country and we'll get to a peace deal. - See, I hope not. I hope not. I think Trump sees
themselves and wants to be a great negotiator. So... And I personally want the
death of people to end. And I think Trump would
bring that much faster. And I disagree with you, at least that my hope is that he would negotiate
something that would be fair. - He's not, his anti-war
record is so complicated because moving the embassy
in Israel and killing the top Iranian general
were super provocative and they could have easily
triggered a giant war there. And then you know what's
gonna happen if you get into any kind of real war? Trump's gonna wanna prove
his button's larger. So then he is gonna do
massive ridiculous bombings. I mean, I worry about nukes. And so we had Giuliani on the show on the RNC and I asked him this question, I said, you know, I keep saying, oh, they wouldn't do it if I was in charge. I'm like, what does that mean? Because it sounds like what it means is they wouldn't do it because
they know if they did it, I would do something insane, like attack Russia or use nukes. And Rudy said, yeah, that's what it means. So that means you have to
at least bluff that and you have to get them to
believe that he's a madman. That's the madman theory of Nixon. And Rudy said that too. He
was very clear about it. But the problem is, if
you get your bluff called, and so if you actually attack Russia, you're gonna start World War III. So that's why, yeah, if you could just get
away with bluffing, maybe, but he's playing a very dangerous game and he massively
increased drone strikes... On the other hand, he
didn't bomb Iran further, and on the other hand, he started the process of
withdrawal from Afghanistan. So not black and white.
Complicated record. And one thing, I'll give him another piece of credit here, I think I'm taking this steel manning too far. But here's... (laughs) The credit was that he
changed the rhetoric of the right wing. They went from the of
Dick Cheney, war is great, and let's, you know,
all Muslims are evil... And so he hates Muslims too, but that's a different thing, right? But like, oh, we have to attack the enemy, we have to start wars, et cetera, to now Republican voters
are generally anti-war and hate Dick Cheney. Oh, I'll take it, I'll take it. So that's a great thing that Trump did. Even if he didn't mean it, even if he does these provocative
things that could lead to a much worse war, even if I'm worried that
he'll be so reckless, he'll start a bigger war,
at least he did that right. And so I'm happy to have
our right wing brothers and sisters join us in
the anti-war movement. And I'm not being a jerk
about it. Like I love it. And any, and so this is another thing the left does wrong from time to time, which is if you agree
with a right winger 2%, they'll be like, "Oh,
welcome in, come on, vote for Trump, come on in. Yeah. Woo hoo! Water's warm." Right? If you disagree with the
left 2%, they're like, that's it, you're banished
and you're a Nazi. Well, brother, how are
we gonna win an election if you're banishing
everybody there is, right? So hold up, these
Republican voters are coming at your anti-war position, take the win. No, "They're MAGA and I
won't deal with them!" Even when they agree with you?
That doesn't make any sense. That doesn't make any
sense. Take the win, right? So when Charlie Kirk says
yes to paid family leave, when Patrick Bet-David
on his program says, yes, roughly says yes to paid
family leave, take the win. - RFK Jr., you said some positive things for a while about RFK Jr., and I think you said you
would even consider voting for him, given the slate of people, this was at the time
when Biden was still in. What do you think about him? What do you think about RFK Jr.? As a candidate, as a person?
He is been on the show, right? - Yeah. Yeah. So he was on our show. People love that interview.
You could check it out anytime. Right? And why do people love it,
whether they're right or left? Because we're fair. We actually asked him
about his policy positions, he explained them, I challenge him, and then he explains and
we give him a fair hearing. But I knew Bobby a
little bit before he ran, when he was an
environmental lawyer, right? And his legal work is excellent, and he's been on the right
side of most of the issues for most of his life. So, A, I like him on that. Two, on his wildlife, the dead bear and the worms
and all that stuff, right? So there's two important
lessons you should get out of that. Well, one's just about Bobby, but the other one's a general one that's really important
for you to know no matter what you think of Bobby Kennedy. On the personal front, I have a friend that's
very similar to him. In fact, he's one of my best friends. And I know why I, this is my theory on
why Bobby and my friend led a wild life. Both of their dads died young. When my friend's dad died, he was 18 and his dad died in his arms. And he has a motto, what
is lived cannot be unlived. So if I had a great time and
I thought it was hilarious to dump a dead bear at Central Park, then I lived it and I had a great time and nothing you could do about it. Okay? And sometimes that'll get you in trouble and sometimes you'll have
a fantastic time, right? And obviously Bobby's dad
was killed when he was young, and maybe that got into his head of like, you better live strong and, you know, live an interesting life. And so I don't begrudge him that, even if I begrudge some
of the things that he did in that life, I get why he did it. So I don't hate him like
other people hate him for some of those personal stuff, right? So, and I like him for all the things that he did positive, holding, you know, fossil fuel companies accountable, protecting communities
that had poison dumped into the rivers, et cetera, right? So the thing that affects
everybody is, when he gets, like corporate media
smeared the hell out of him and they didn't allow him to speak, and then they did the
needle in a haystack trick. So whenever it's an insider, they find the best parts of their lives and then they amplify it. So Joe Biden is average Joe from Scranton! Motherfucker's been in
DC for the last 52 years, do you think we don't
have eyes and ears, okay? Like average Joe from
Scranton, who are you kidding? So there's a guy named Fred
Thompson who's an actor, and he was a senator from Tennessee later. And he had this great little
trick that he would do is a red pickup truck that he
would campaign with, right? So he looks like a regular Joe, right? But he is a millionaire actor.
But here's the funny part. He would drive to the red
pickup truck in a limo and he would drive back
from the campaign event in a limo, but the press
never reported the limo. They only reported him
in the red pickup truck, as if that's what he drives. See, that's the theater of politics. Why? Because Fred Thompson was
a corporate Republican, so they loved him. So they go, yeah, sure,
yeah, red pickup truck! Oh, good old Fred Thompson! Right? So, but if you're an outsider
and they don't like you, then they're gonna look at
the haystack of your life and they're gonna try to find needles. So they've done this
to Trump, they've done this to Bernie, they've done
this to Bobby Kennedy Jr. And with Bobby, they're like, ooh, there's some juicy needles in here. Okay? So they find those
and they go, you see this? The only thing you should
know about Bobby Kennedy Jr. is that he found a dead bear
and put it in Central Park. Oh, wait, wait. I found another one. The other thing you
should know about Bobby is that he once said
in a divorce deposition that he had a brain worm that... By the way, it turns out
that affects millions of people and is not
that big a deal, right? But look, he is a radical, ah, he is, this defines him completely. The spectacular case of that
actually happened to me. So I ran for Congress in
2020 and the New York Times, LA Times, CNN, they all
butchered me with needles. Okay? So they said, he has a long history of making anti-Muslim jokes. Well, first of all, they
didn't even say jokes. They said anti-Muslim rhetoric.
I'm like, I am Muslim. I mean I'm an atheist,
but I grew up Muslim, my family's Muslim, my
background's Muslim. You don't think that's
relevant in the story? And they did it based on
one joke I told about, and they say, oh, also, of course, they say that I'm anti-Semitic. That's like, you start with that, that's just baked in for everyone, right? So I had made a joke
about how orthodox Jews and Muslims, they think
that getting into heaven is a little bit of a fashion contest. Okay? So the Orthodox Jews go in there with a Russian coast from the 1800s and the giant Russian hat, you know, the Muslims going with their robe and the
skull cap and stuff. And God's looking around going, no, no. Ooh, nice outfit, come on in, right? Like, do you really think the creator of the universe gives
a damn what you wear? Okay? So that New York Times took that and said, long history of being anti-Semitic
and anti-Muslim, right? Okay. So there's this, oh, this is a famous one, relatively famous. I did a joke about bestiality, like... - Nice.
- A dozen years ago. - Very nice.
- So I start out the joke nice and dry, and I go, look, is the horse gonna object if
he's the one getting pleasure? Now, Anna is my co-host,
she's younger at that time, and she's like, "That seems
like a bad idea, Cenk." I'm like, of course it's a bad idea. Okay? But I'm being dry. But some people are laughing
in the studio and stuff. And then I say, you know, if
I was emperor of the world, I would make that legal. And they cut the tape. If you watch the rest of the tape, I say, "Now, would the horse
object?" (imitates horse) (both laughing) So, but they cut the tape. So the New York Times, so originally a right
winger did that, and then a, like a establishment troll in that primary started putting
out those tapes to everyone. Jake Tapper retweeted it, didn't look to see if
it's edited or not edited. The New York Times implied
that bestiality was part of my agenda. Jesus Christ. - Please tell me that's
part of your Wikipedia. That the bestiality
thing is part of your... - I don't know, I don't know. But guys, so in that, in those
stories, I'm not important. And even Bobby Kennedy
Jr. is not important. What it reveals about the
media is what's important. So they're gonna find those
needles, whether it's, and even if they don't have
the needles, you know what? We'll cut the tape before
your joke's punchline, right? So we'll just run it
and we'll lie about you. Who cares, right? And so, oh, they also
said that I had David Duke on to share his
anti-Semitic point of view. If you watch the interview,
I told David Duke, you're an anti-Semite, you're a racist, you're a bigot, you're an idiot, right? It was the toughest
interview he's probably ever had in his life. And other journalists
got mad at that part. And they were like, no, guys,
you're just flat out lying. Like, I watched the interview. Did any of you watch the interview? He takes the guy's head off, right? And so the New York Times
issued a correction on that one. So they're like, okay, fine. He was being sarcastic when he said, sure, you're not racist, Dave, okay? - Well, one of the sources of hope to all this is there's a lot
of independent media now, but mainstream media has a
lot of power still and carries a lot of power. You think they're gonna die eventually? - Yeah, definitely. So two things about that
are super important. First of all, this is why
I tell people to have hope. I don't believe in false hope, right? So if you think Kamala
Harris is your knight in shining armor, and she's gonna come in, she's gonna get money outta politics, she's gonna ignore the donors... That's false hope. It's crazy talk, right? So why am I in favor of Kamala Harris? I'm gonna live to fight another day. I'm worried that Trump's
gonna end the whole thing, and then we're not gonna
have an opportunity to actually get a populist win, right? So, and I'm encouraged by some of the things she's doing, and maybe she does even 25% of her agenda, but I'm not gonna give you false hope that she's your savior, right? But I believe massively
in hope, and number one, 'cause it's true, to the
point that we were talking about earlier, Lex, and how last 200 years have been choppy, but overall fantastic. Terrible things have
happened in that time period. Some of the worst things that
have ever happened in history. But overall life expectancy
is higher, everything is, you know, incomes are
higher, health is better, et cetera, right? So hope is not misplaced.
It's real, it's empirical. Okay? So now we talked about how you could get
money outta politics, and that's a legitimate hope. But media is another place
where we have huge hope. So of all the corporate robots, the most important robot is media. So when mainstream media has
you hooked in at the back of your neck, you're gonna believe all these fairytales about how politicians are
nice people and they're trying to do the right thing
and donor money doesn't have any influence on them, right? So once you unplug from the matrix, well, then you begin to see,
oh yeah, the, hey, look, you took the donor money, did
the what the donors wanted. He took the donor money,
did what the donors want. 98% of the time, right? So then you see clearly. So now what's happening at large? Mainstream media is losing their power. And now online media is swarming, swarming, swarming, swarming. And so this goes back to why
I started The Young Turks. So let me touch on that here, and then we can come
back to it if you want. So in 1998, I write an email
to my friends and I say, online video is gonna be television. And unsurprisingly, and
they say, you're nuts. That's never gonna happen. At that point, we're
still doing AOL dial ups, like (imitates modem), right? Online video barely exists
and television's mammoth. I say, guys, it's just a matter of logic. Like, for me, there's so many ironies, I'm known for yelling online
sometimes, but in reality, I'm obsessed with logic. So when you have gatekeepers, gatekeepers pick based on what they want, what the powerful want, in that case, advertisers,
politicians, et cetera, they're never going to
design programming as good as the wisdom of the crowd. When people start doing online video, I'm like, boom, there's no gatekeepers. This is democratized. Wisdom of the crowd's gonna win. So if you start with no money, and you, let's pick a different
example, not The Young Turks. Let's say, Philip DeFranco,
he's been around forever, okay? And he also does news. And so Philip starts doing
a show and he doesn't have any money, just like us. And so what does he have
to do to get an audience? He has to do a show
that is really popular. He's gotta figure out a way,
how do I get their attention? How do I keep their attention? And he starts doing a great show, right? And so every year it's us
and Phil for best news show for like a decade, right? And meanwhile, back over at CNN, Wolf Blitzer's still droning
on from a teleprompter. You put Wolf Blitzer online
without the force of CNN with him, he gets negative seven views. No one's interested in what
Wolf Blitzer has to say. It's not personal. I don't
know the brother, right? I'm just saying institutionally,
logically, et cetera. So I'm like, these guys are gonna win. So when YouTube starts, we
go on YouTube right away. We're the first YouTube partner. So I am literally the
original YouTuber, okay? (both laughing)
- Nice. Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO, the late Susan Wojcicki, wonderful woman. And if that triggers you, again,
on the right, you're wrong. She was a terrific person. And when she started
her own YouTube channel, I was the first interview, 'cause we were the first YouTube partner. So... So I love that. So we're, and that, but let me
connect it back to the hope. When mainstream media has you hooked, you got no hope, because you don't have
the right information. You have propaganda, you have marketing, you don't have real news. When you're in the online
world, it's chaotic. And don't get me wrong, it's
got plenty of downsides, right? But within that chaos, the
truth begins to emerge. And so, for example, The Young Turks has had dozens of fights with different creators
throughout history. Why? When you're number one in news online, the algorithm rewards
anyone attacking you, because then you get into
their algorithmic loop. - Mm-hm.
- It's not an accident that we've been
attacked dozens of times. One, we're independent thinkers. So anyone, if we don't
match their ideology, they're gonna attack us. But number two, they get
in our algorithm loop. It's too hard to resist, right? So all of a sudden they
think that we're being funded by Nancy Pelosi or the
CIA and they're, oh, we're off to the races. There's another fight, right? But our competition's a graveyard. And so we won all, almost
all of those fights. Why? Because we try really hard to stick with the truth, with logic. And we don't do audience capture. Even if our audience is
going in one direction, we don't think it's right, Anna and I will come out and go, no, sorry guys, love you, but rent control's not a good idea, okay? Et cetera. So in that world, the
people, it's gonna take a while guys, but people
who are telling the truth are eventually gonna rise up. And when they do, now we're free. And now the second part
is even more devastating for mainstream media, because
I'm a businessman, right? I keep looking at the
revenue for CNN, et cetera, and they have a massive problem. And people don't realize
how big the problem is. That thing's gonna capsize. I don't talk about it often 'cause I don't want
more competition, okay? I also have a company, right, in the online world, et cetera. But I'm too honest, I gotta
say it, I gotta say it. So they have two revenue
streams. One is ads. That's why they serve advertisers. And politicians are huge
advertisers, as we mentioned. The second revenue stream,
depending on the company, is arguably more important,
which is subscribers. So now what happens in
a business normally is, so they start out low
and then they got high and now they got a ton of subscribers, at its peak cable has 100
million households, right? So they're raking in unbelievable money from subscriber fees and
they got advertising on top. So when you're all the way up here, your costs start to rise. Why do they rise? Because then the on-air
talent has leverage. And as an example,
there's many others. Yes. And so the on-air talent,
like Sean Hannity says, I do a program that brings in X amount of maybe $100 million, maybe $200 million. So gimme 40 million a year. And they do. Sean is making $40 million
a year last I checked. Okay? So I don't know if he's still
getting that kind of money and I'm just basing on reporting, right? But that's a monster. So they have all these giant costs, but the minute you go from $100 million. Now we're at, I think, around $70 million. You just lost a giant
chunk of your revenue. Now when your costs are
higher than your revenue, nighty-night, it's been nice knowing you. - Yeah, it's gonna collapse
and it's gonna be painful. - But what we need guys is like, sorry, last thing on that is, we need the print guys like
AP, Reuters, Intercept, The Lever that Sirota runs, whatever Ryan's working on
now, Ryan Grim, et cetera. We need those badly. We need someone to collect
actual information and do the best they can in presenting
it in an objective way. We all gotta support that. So you can't lose text,
that's so important. The TV guys are just actors. You can lose them overnight
and it won't hurt you. It'll help you. - Yeah. Just, it's gonna be a
messy battle for truth, because the reality is there's
a lot of money to be made and a lot of attention to be
gained from drama farming. So just constantly creating drama. And sometimes drama
helps find the truth like we were mentioning, but most
of the time it's just drama and it can, it doesn't
care about the truth, it just cares about drama. And then the same is
like conspiracy theories. Now, some conspiracy
theories have value in depth and they allow us to question the establishment institutions. But the bottom line is
conspiracy theories get clicks. And so you can just keep coming up around conspiracy theories. And many of them don't have to be grounded in the truth at all. And so that's the sea we're operating in. And so it's a tricky space too. - But Lex, who look at all the people who are the biggest now, because we've now had a couple
of decades at this, right? So, and I mean as an industry. So... I would argue you're huge.
And you don't do that. You don't do the conspiracy theories. You don't do the drama at
all, right? Rogan is huge. Yeah, maybe there's drama,
but he's genuine, right? I got a lot of issues
with some of his policies, I've mixed opinions on Joe
in a lot of different ways, but I don't doubt that he's genuine and people can sense that, right? And he's huge. We're genuine, we're huge. So this is the market beginning to work. - Yeah. So speaking of Joe,
let me ask you about this. (both laughing)
- Ah, here we go. - I didn't actually know this, but when I was prepping
for this conversation, I saw that you actually said
at some point in the past that you can beat up Rogan in a fight. - Yeah. - No, you said that you have a shot. It's a non-zero probability. - Yes.
- Do you still believe this? - Yes. But the probability
is dropping. (laughs) It's dropping every day. - I think it's the probably
the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. So I wrestled and did jujitsu
and judo and all the kinds of fighting sports my whole life. And I just observed a
lot of really confident, large guys roll into gyms. He's ripped, he could deadlift, he could talk all kinds of shit and he believes he's gonna be the next world champion and
he just gets his ass kicked. - Yeah, of course, okay. And I've seen, like I saw
this Israeli MMA fighter take on an antisemite who was huge
and thought that, you know, he believed in like Nick
Fuentes' conspiracy theories or something. And the MMA fighter dismantled
him and I loved it. Okay? And then he, like, we tweeted
back and forth, et cetera. So guys, first lemme just
assure you, I get it. So now let me tell you
why I said it and then why I think it's a non-zero chance. So Michael Smerconish had
written this blog like, I don't know, 10, 15 years
ago on having to post, we were both bloggers at that point about the wussification of America. Now he was saying the left
is a bunch of wussies, right? So I wrote a blog saying, hey Michael, I would rather debate you. So if you wanna debate about how we're wussies,
let's do it, let's find a way, but, you know, you are
mentioning physicality, right? And how you guys are tougher. So if you prefer, only in a
prescribed setting, right? And we're not gonna go do it in the streets like idiots, right? But if you want, we'll have a boxing match
or whatever you want, and we'll see who's tougher. And he panicked and he cried to mommy, which was Ariana Huffington. And oh, Cenk's intimidating me, right? Okay, all right, well,
who's the wussy now, bitch. Right? So that is not to
actually get into a fight with poor Michael Smerconish, right? It's to prove, hey, don't
use rhetoric like that. That's dumb. And this is
me proving that it's dumb. Okay? So now Joe had said, I forget
what he said at the time, and he said something similar, right? And I'm up to hear with Joe at that point. I don't know if we'll
ever talk yet, right? - But you've been in a show and I really, that was a good conversation. - It was a great conversation.
- That was a while back. Yeah.
- Yeah. - I hope he has you on again.
- Yeah. So I get it. - I bet you, I don't like
this take you have a lot. I bet you he hates it, because
him as a MMA commentator, he gets to hear so many bros... - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - "It's all about the mindset, bro." Now the steel man, the
point you're making, which I do think it's the stupidest thing you've ever said, but the actual intent, which is whether you're left or right, there's strong people on the left. Mentally strong, physically strong. Like I think the whole point is not that you can beat 'em, but
you're willing to step, you are willing to fight if you need to. That's-
- 100%. - So it's not like I
believe I could beat 'em. It's like I'm willing, like
all this shit, you know, calling the people on the
left wussies or whatever, I am willing to step in the
fight, even if I'm untrained, even I'm out of shape,
I'm willing to fight. Yeah, I get it. I understand that. But it's just pick a different person. That's why I wrote down
on my genuine curiosity is if you can beat up Alex,
Alex Jones versus Cenk... That legitimate, I would pay for that. Because you're both untrained. You both got, I would say the spirit. - No, no, he is, look, I'll
give the same fairness. - Yeah.
- I think I got an 8% chance of beating Rogan.
- Yeah, you're lost. - I know. I got it.
- All right. - And I think, to be fair, Alex has an 8% chance of beating me. Okay? - Oh wow. Okay.
- Okay. Because you never know. He
catches you on a lucky punch. I got punched in the ear once
and you lose your balance and then you're in a lot of trouble. Right? So I can get lucky. Alex Jones can get lucky. It's me against Rogan is harder, right? Like, if you said to me,
you don't have 8% chance, but Alex does. Okay, I'm not gonna, it's fine. Right? So why does Alex stand
almost no chance against me? So first of all, it's not just
because I'm big and he's big. One, I wrestled.
- Oh, you wrestled. - Yeah. If you wrestled then you're like, I watched this show with
my kids, "Physical 100." It's like a Korean show where they try to find out who's the best athlete. They have one thing where
they have to wrestle away the ball and keep it, this big giant ball. I'm like, every wrestler's gonna win. Every MMA fighter's gonna
win. And every time they win. And they're like, "Dad,
how'd you know that?" Because we get trained, we're not gonna lose to a non-wrestler in a wrestling contest. It's not gonna happen. Right? So, you can get lucky, but it's unlikely. So, one, wrestling, now that
was from a long time ago, but at least you know
the mechanics, right? Number two, I've gotten into about 30 actual
street fights in my life. And you can say street
fight's not the same as MMA. Of course that's true. Obviously true. Right? But it's not no
experience, it's some experience. And the most important
part of a street fight is being able to take a punch to the face. Okay?
- Yeah. Knowing what it feels like
to get punched in the face. - Yeah. So I've been punched in
the face, I don't know, dozens of times in my life. I used to start fight by saying, "I'll let you take the first punch." Okay? So I didn't start the fights, they just started 'cause
they'd punched me in the face. Okay? (laughs) So, and then for Alex, the main thing, and also true for Rogan is
it's about willpower, right? So if Joe has a 92% chance, in my opinion, of knocking me out or beating me because he has the skill and
he's trained and he knows what he's doing. So all the willpower in the
world isn't gonna help you if you get kicked upside the head. Right? So, but in the unlikely circumstances that I've worn him down, right? Then I'm a little bit
more in the ball game 'cause I got willpower. For Alex? He doesn't have
the willpower I have. Okay? I'm, because to me, the idea of losing to
Alex Jones is unthinkable. I would do anything not to lose, anything. - Let me just say, so that's
beautiful. I love this. And I would pay a lot of
money to watch the two of you just even like wrestle. But with Joe, I think, I just, I have to say it's like
it's 0.0001% chance you have a chance before you
even get to the mentality. And the other thing is,
on the mentality side, one of the fascinating things
about Joe is, he's actually a sweetheart in person like this, but there's something that
takes over him when he competes. - Brother, we've been around 22 years in the toughest industry in the world. - I understand. Yeah.
- Right. If you like, do you have any
idea how hard it is to run a 75 person company and make money online and survive after all the
guys who took billions of dollars went down? - I hear you.
- Tremendous willpower. So, but overall, this is
not the hill I'm dying on. Okay. Joe would win. I get it. - I think we're all allowed one
kinda blind spot, I suppose. - So you don't think a big guy that still is in good shape, that was a wrestler, that's
been a lot of street fights... You still think 0.0001? - It depends on street
fights, but yeah, 0.001. I just see technique-
- Okay. Yeah. And it is such a minute
disagreement because, so take me out of it. So you take out the willpower
part of blah, blah, blah. - Yeah.
- I think it's 1% to 2%. - Yeah.
- He could catch the guy on about, you know, and get lucky. - I think it's because I've talked to, so I trained with a
coach named John Donaher, and we talk about this a lot. And I think technique is just such... Technique is the thing that
also feeds the willpower. It actually builds up
your confidence in the way that like nothing else does. In the more actionable
way because you won't need that much willpower. - No, I-
- If the technique is backed-
- But look- - You don't have to be like a tough guy to win debates
if you are just fucking good at debates, right? So I think people just
don't understand the value in sport and especially
in combat of technique. - No, a great irony is I
actually totally agree with that. That's why I mentioned the "Physical 100," technique's gonna win every day. Like almost every time. We're having a debate
about whether it's 8% or 1% or 0.01%, right? Like it's either way technique
wins. Yeah, we agree. - Okay, beautiful. In the, one of the controversial
things you've done, in the '90s as a student at U Penn, you publicly denied the Armenian genocide, which is the mass murder
of over a million Armenians in 1915 and '16 in the Ottoman Empire. You have since then publicly and clearly changed your mind on this. Tell me the process you went
through to change your mind. - Yeah, so when you're a kid, you're taught a whole bunch of things. That's the software that we
talked about earlier, right? So cultural software is
media, family, friends, social media, et cetera. And so growing up in any tribe, whether it's a religious
tribe or an ethnic tribe, you are gonna get indoctrinated into that tribe's way of thinking. So you take a Turkish person
who's super progressive, loves Bernie, believes with
all their heart and peace, and you tell them something
about Kurds and they'll say, oh no, no, not those guys. They're terrible and evil and we have to do what we do to them. Ah, you see, that's the
tribe taking over, right? And so you tell any
religious person what's wrong with the other religions? They're like, oh, yeah,
yeah, that's totally true. You get to their religion,
tribe takes over, no, how dare you, I'm offended, right? So I grew up with Turkish propaganda. So I'll tell you a couple
of funny instances of it. When we were kids, we'd go
Turkish American Day Parade. I'm like 10 or 12 years
old, it's in the middle of New York, because I grew up in Jersey, that's why I got in all those fights. (laughs) And we would chant in Turkish, Turkey is the biggest country. There's no other country that's even big. And I was like, this is crazy. I'm like, dad, isn't this crazy?
America's big, China's big. Why are we chanting this
nonsensical chant, right? So that's the beginning of beginning to realize
you're indoctrinated. I'm in college and I
read about some battle that the Ottoman Empire lost. And I'm like, that can't be right. The Turks have only lost
one war, World War I, right? And I was like, oh my God, I'm an idiot. I got taught that in
third grade in Turkey. Of course that's not true. That's ridiculously untrue, right? All those thoughts are in your head, you don't even realize it. And so on the Armenian genocide, I read the Turkish version, right? And the Turkish version has all of these, this evidence, right? So it's real in that it exists. But here, I'll give you
a great example of it. I think it was Colonel Chester, he's some random American
military guy after World War I. And he says about the
Armenians, after the mass march, the forced marches, he says
they returned the area fat and entirely un-massacred. Okay? I'm like, hey, that's an American colonel that's saying that. So that's obviously true. You see that it didn't happen, right? Or at least in the way
that the Armenians say. Now, as a grownup, I look at it and I go, are you kidding me? That guy's obviously
trying to get a contract with the Turkish government, right? Nobody returns from a forced march fat and entirely un-massacred, right? So that's propaganda. And that one was so indoctrinated that it was tough to let go. So at Penn, I write that Op-Ed, et cetera. And then over the course of time... And so Anna and I disagree
on things from time to time, and we've been co-hosting now for, she's been at The Young Turks for 18 years and co-hosting for, you know, almost 18. And so, she's Armenian. And
by the way, I love America. I mean, we came to America
'cause we love this country, land of hope and opportunity. That's part of why I fight so hard for the average American,
for the American idea. So here's a Turk and Armenian
doing a show together, and it becomes the number
one online news show. That's the beauty of America, right? So she's telling me things and we're having some on-air discussions about it, et cetera. And then it just dawned on me like, no, this too was obviously propaganda. So at that point, once you
realize that, it becomes easier. That's why I'm trying to unplug people from the Matrix, because once you realize it's propaganda, oh my God, it gets infinitely easier
to start telling what's true or not true. - So maybe by way of advice, how do you know when you're
deluded by propaganda? How do you know you're
not believing a kind of, how do you know when you're not plugged into the matrix, when you're
plugged into the matrix? - You have to keep testing
it against objective reality. Okay, they said something, did it happen or did it not happen? So here, here's an easy one. Alex Jones, for a long time,
especially under Obama, kept saying, "They're
gonna put us in FEMA camps. I'm telling you they're gonna stuff us all in the FEMA camps and they're gonna put us in and they're not gonna let us out. And I know it. I know it for sure." Right? Nobody's been in the FEMA
camps. There's no Obama left. There was no FEMA camps. So when I asked like for the right wing conspiracy guys, guys, has any of their things ever come true? Like they always say
all these crazy things that never, ever happen. So the third time it doesn't happen, can you please start to wonder, maybe I'm on the wrong side, maybe... And, but that's not
just for right wingers, that's easy, right? But it's also for mainstream media. And that's where I get
the biggest pushback. And that's where, because my tribe is what the kids call PMC,
professional management class. Okay? They're careerists, you go up the ladder, you have this route,
that route, et cetera. And so for that class, the
status quo is pretty good. So when you get, when
Biden gives you 15% change, you're like, what else do y'all want? That's amazing. He just
course corrected a little bit. Now it's perfect, right? But for the average guy who
needs 100% change, not 15%, they look at it and
they go, what the fuck? He only did 15% and everybody's
declaring him a hero, right? So those are the hardest
guys to get through on. And those are the guys
who get most mad at me. Not the right wingers, the establishment. That's why I'm nails on
a chalkboard for them, because I'm on the left, but I call out their crap and their
marketing and propaganda. And that's why I mentioned
earlier, no one, probably, he might not even consciously know it, but no one dislikes Bernie more than Obama because if Bernie got into office, he'd embarrass Obama
doing a lot more change. And Obama told us that
change wasn't possible. You could only get 5%. And so if Bernie does 50%, then Obama's humiliated and
his record and his legacy is ruined, right? So I don't think he makes that
conscious decision, right? But it's subconscious,
it's a way of thinking. So if you're watching
Morning Joe, test him. He says something that Biden
is for $15 minimum wage, when Biden takes it out of the bill, know that Morning Joe was lying to you. He says that Biden said he
was for the public option, but he never even proposed it. When Morning Joe still defends him, and you see an objective reality, Biden didn't actually propose that bill, you know that they're lying to you. Test it against objective reality. Did it actually happen or didn't it? - I mean, there's some of that steel man, some of the conspiracy theories. Do you think there's some value to the conspiracy theories,
that come from the right, but actually more so come
from the anti-establishment? So I mean, for me, one, I mean there's a lot that
raise a bit of a question. A lot of them could probably
be explained by corporatism and the military industrial complex. But there's also a lot
of 'em can be explained by creepiness and
shadiness in human nature. Epstein is an example of that. There's a lot of ways to explain Epstein, including the basic
creepiness of human nature. But there could be bigger
explanations underlying it. - So sometimes we have long
thoughtful conversations like this, I'll say, it depends a lot. And then people get frustrated by that. But then you're frustrated by
the world, 'cause it depends. So conspiracy theories. If you say, are they all
right or are they all wrong? Already the question's wrong. So, it depends, what is
the conspiracy theory? So if it's, you know, some of the absurd ones
we've mentioned here, God, it's easily disproven, right? On the other hand, there's a conspiracy theory
about JFK's assassination. Which one's the conspiracy theory, that Lee Harvey Oswald from
like 12 miles away shot a magic bullet that went like this and hit like 13 people and came out of Kennedy's brain, or that the government
might've wanted to cover up an assassination of the
president for whatever reason. Okay? Come on. Now I'm of course doing hyperbole and like the JFK enthusiast will
be like, no, it did, the bullet didn't actually go like this, it didn't actually hit 13 people. I'm kidding, guys. Okay? But in terms of, is that conspiracy theory real that JFK was not just killed by Lee Harvey Oswald? Almost certainly. Right? And so if you read real books
with tons of information, the most likely culprit is Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA that he fired. Back when there was a deep state. There actually was a deep state. They did coups against other
country's leaders all the time. But they tell us, oh, they
wouldn't do it to our own leader. But remember, it's not the CIA, he'd left the CIA already, right? So he get, you know, so I don't know if it was ex-CIA guys, I don't
know if the mob was involved, I don't know any of those details, but I know some things that are obvious. That bullet didn't magically
hit him from over there. Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Jack Ruby was a mobster
who on the record had said that he hated Kennedy. All of a sudden he became
patriotic overnight and shot the assailant who was unguarded. Maybe, less likely. Okay,
so let's speed up though. So my point is, yeah, some conspiracy theories could be true. It depends on objective reality, right? You get to Epstein... Again, I always do it ahead
of time because I want you to test me and see, does
it match objective reality. So I said the minute that it happened, you'll have your answer
based on whether the video in the hallway worked or not. If the video in the hallway works, there'll be just as many
conspiracy theories, but it'll show actually who
went in and didn't go in. Okay? But if the video in the
hallway doesn't work, they definitely killed him. Okay? So a couple of days later, oh, the video in that
particular hallway happened to not be working. And the guards both
happened to be on break at the same time. And the most notorious pedophile criminal in the country happened to be unguarded. And that is the one time
he decided to hang himself. Listen, man, the only way you believe that is if you got
mainstream media to get you to believe that the word, that the minute the
phrase conspiracy theory is mentioned, you have
to shut off your mind, and you have to believe
whatever the media tells you. - Yeah. Well it's interesting you just mentioned, do you think the CIA has not grown in power versus-
- No, no. They've greatly waned in power. - Interesting.
- So in the old days, the CIA has an actual deep
state and because the country was run by a bunch of families, right? So you go to Yale, the Skull and Bones thing was real, right? And you go to Harvard,
you go to, and half the, look at the Dulles family, right? Half of them go into government. The other half go into banking. Why are the Central American countries called banana republics? Because we, America,
did a coup against one of those countries because
a banana company wanted it. Okay? Because they're like, how dare you charge whatever you want for your natural resource? We, American corporations,
have the right to all of your natural resources
at the lowest possible rate. Alan, get rid of these guys. Okay? And Alan would. And so, and sometimes they
would go extra judicial, right? Like potentially with
the JFK assassination. So now, and by the way, you
pissed off J. Edgar Hoover, he was just gonna put a bullet in your head and we were
done with you, okay? Fred Hampton, among others. So, but nowadays, that's
not how the world works. So a small number of families
cannot control a country and an economy this size. New people pop up. Well, Mark Zuckerberg wasn't
part of those families. Elon Musk wasn't part of those families. Neither was Bezos, right? And for you to believe
those conspiracy theories, you have to think that Bezos and Musk, et cetera, were like, oh, you guys are still running the country? No problem. Go ahead. (laughs) They're not gonna do that. Right? So now we've gotten into a system where it's the invisible
hand of the market that runs the country, but unfortunately
it's only for the powerful. And so it's more of a machine. And they don't do, and this is super interesting and ties to what we were talking
about earlier, Lex, which is that they don't do political assassinations any more. They do character assassinations. That's the needle in the haystack thing. So, and if you do an
assassination of someone, you build up their status, they become a martyr and
you build up their cause. But if you do a character assassination, you smear the cause with the person and the cause goes down, not up. So the market found a
better way of getting rid of agitating outsiders. - Well that's, you know, one of the conspiracy
theories with Epstein is that he's a front for like a, I guess, CIA and they're getting data on people, like creepy pedophile kind of data they can use to then threaten
character assassination, and they put them, in this way put the
people in their pockets. - So look, we're not in on it. So there's no way we can know, right? But I just always go back to logic. So he has dirt on a
lot of powerful people. He dies in a way that is an obvious murder and not a suicide. And then you begin to think, who would have enough power
to be able to get away with that crime? And that is a very limited
number of either people or governments, right?
- Yeah. - So that's probably your answer without knowing anything that's internal. - Yeah, that's crazy we don't have the list of clients. What is the best way to
achieve stability and peace in Israel and Palestine
in the current situation and in the next 5, 10 years? - If people wanted to get to peace, it's relatively straightforward. There's already a deal
that was negotiated. The Saudis agreed to it, and they're an important
player in this game. The Palestinians and the Israelis have initially agreed to it. Even Hamas has kind of agreed to it. That deal exists and it's
just waiting on the shelf to get done, right? And it's pretty straightforward. Israel gets out of the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, but they keep it X
percentage, it used to be 4%, then it went up to 6%. It's probably a higher number now. The Palestinians keep losing
leverage as we go, right? So you remember how hard it
was to get a deal on Ukraine I thought, that's a very complicated one. Israel's much more straightforward. Get the hell out of the
occupying territories, keep some of the God, like, those settlements are the worst thing. They're cancer. But anyway, I don't know. But there is an answer to the settlements and it's probably that Israel keeps them, even though that drives me crazy. No right of return for Palestinians. There'll be symbolic right of return for a couple of families. And so Palestinians go, oh, no way. Guys, you have no leverage. Take the deal. Take the deal. Okay? So you're not gonna get a right of return. Israel's not gonna allow
millions of Palestinians to go and vote in Israel. It would end the Jewish state. You have to get to a practical solution. So honestly, the number one person blocking it now is Netanyahu. It's not even, that's obvious. That doesn't take a lot
of courage to say that. He says publicly, I don't
want a Palestinian state. I'm against a two state
solution. He's been monstrous. He's one of the worst
terrorists of my lifetime. So that's easy. The right wing
of Israel has lost its mind. So the Smotrich and the
Ben-Gvirs openly talking about ethnic cleansing and driving them into other Arab countries. This is the definition
of ethnic cleansing. So, but is like, I know that the Arabs
are gonna take the deal. Saudi Arabia cannot wait to take the deal 'cause they just wanna
get business going, right? - Do you think Hamas takes the deal? - So I had of a solution
where you don't need Hamas, but yes, Hamas would
definitely take the deal. Hamas already publicly said
that we'd even get rid of, that Israel doesn't have a right to exist. But there's so much
propaganda in American media, it's maddening, right? So, and this idea that you don't
deal with Hamas is so dumb. So the reason it's dumb
is you don't negotiate with your friends, you
negotiate with your enemies. Well, I don't wanna negotiate
with them, I don't like them. Well then you're not
gonna get to peace, right? But still, there is a path
that doesn't include Hamas. So make a deal with Fatah
that runs the West Bank. Then they get, right now Fatah went into Gaza Strip, they
wouldn't be able to manage it 'cause they don't have enough credibility. They're mainly seen as in cahoots with the occupiers,
whereas Hamas is hardcore and fighting against occupiers. But if Fatah delivers a
peace, not only a peace deal, but a Palestinian state,
then they come in as heroes. So you make the deal with them, you let them run the Gaza
Strip and you empower them to drive out Hamas. That way they do your dirty
work for you in a sense, right? But good, because Hamas is
a terrorist organization, they're not helpful. And especially if the
Palestinians get a state, the violence has to stop immediately. That's the whole point. The trade is, you get a state,
Israel gets safety and peace. - So no more rockets at Israel? - No more rockets. If you do any other rockets, and Israel does the barbaric
thing they just did, even I would say, hey
brother, we had a peace deal. Okay? So if you violate a peace
deal and you do a bomb, they're gonna do a bomb and
their bomb is much larger. Okay? So that, and by
the way, can it work? It already has worked. Israel
already did it with Egypt. So Egypt was 100 times Hamas. Egypt gathered all the Arab armies and actually physically invaded Israel. And Israel could lose. And
they did it several times. And Lex, at the time, not just the right, like the warhawks, but
most people thought, there's no way Egypt will
keep that peace deal. Oh, they're suckers. We're giving them the
Sinai Peninsula back, and then they're just gonna
keep bombing and attacking us. There hasn't been a single
bomb from Egypt since the peace deal. Peace deals work. War gets you more war. Peace deals get you peace. And if you should never,
this is true of all of life, don't let the perfect be
the enemy of the good. So if you're saying, well, I'm not positive that a peace
deal is gonna be perfect, and 12 more rockets might be fired. Well, brother, what's,
what do we have now? Right? We have endless rockets now. If Israel's supposed to
be a safe haven for Jews, and I get it and I want it,
okay, then become a safe haven. The way that you're a safe
haven is stop the occupation. It's not complicated. And the reason they're
not, let's be honest, the reason the right
wing government of Israel is not stopping the occupation is because they wanna
take more and more land. And so they have throughout
time taken way more of the West Bank than they had originally. And now Netanyahu is
saying, I want a corridor in the middle of Gaza and I want a corridor
at the border of Egypt. Now we're back to
occupying Gaza physically, let alone through power and et cetera. - So Bibi has to go? - Definitely.
- What's the role of US in making a peace
deal like that happen? - It's gonna sound outlandish, but I can get you a
ceasefire almost overnight if Bibi's gone, because
the Israeli negotiators have said publicly, not publicly, it got leaked and it was in Israeli press, you have to give us a
little bit of wiggle room. If you don't give us a
little bit of wiggle room, obviously they're not gonna do the deal. And he is like, I know. Right? That's why he is not giving
them the wiggle room. So don't ask for land in Gaza,
get the hell out of Gaza, get a ceasefire. That's the easy part. So the hard part is the
occupation, ending the occupation. But even that, I can get it
to you in two months as long as Israel actually wants a deal. So go to an election, get
rid of Netanyahu, put in, you know, Benny Gantz? Is Benny Gantz an angel? No, he's the one that ordered
all the bombings of Gaza to begin with, right? He's, look, Benny Gantz
has got massive war crimes on his record, so don't worry,
he is not a softie, okay? But he's not my favorite guy
in the world, to say the least. But Benny Gantz can do a
peace deal if he wants to. So, look, only one group of
people can actually settle this. Well, there's actually
two groups of people. One is the Israeli population. You voted someone who
wants to do a peace deal, you'll get a peace deal, okay? Number two is the American president. So if I'm the American
president, I'm saying a hypothetical, right? Or any American president
that actually wants to get a peace deal done. You just say, I'm gonna cut the funding. Israel will do the deal immediately. They don't say they wanna cut the funding 'cause APAC gives them $100 million. It's not complicated. Not 1% complicated. - Yeah...
- So Lex, tell me this, okay, so if the US president said,
I'm gonna cut the funding, do you think that it might have a giant
problem for Netanyahu? Might it hurt his government? Might they have to go to an election? Would Israeli politicians,
let alone the population, begin to really, really
worry that they're gonna lose an enormous source of funding and weapons? - Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. - So why wouldn't we use our leverage? It's crazy not to use our leverage. - Yeah. And this is where we go back
to the steel man of Trump. It feels like he's the
only one crazy enough to use that leverage. By crazy, I mean, yes, in a good kind of sense, bold enough, not giving a shit about convention, not giving
a shit about pressures and money and influence
and all that kind of stuff. - Yes. But with the biggest
asterisk in the history of the world, which is 12% chance he does that and that's great, but a huge chance he does the opposite. And he goes, let's call it 80 again, 80%. Oh yeah, Miriam wanted me
to give West Bank to Israel. So you have it, guys, now, you just occupy the whole thing forever. Okay? A giant war. Oh yeah, I'm gonna prove how tough I am. I'm gonna nuke Iran. Oh
no, what are you doing? What are you doing? Like
this, Trump is a massive risk. He's an enormous amount of risk. If you were running a
company and not a country, would you hire Trump as your CEO? Everyone watching just screamed
inside their heads, no! Okay? You would never take that kind of risk with your company. You got an 80% chance the guy's
gonna blow up the company. You're, no way, no way.
And you know it too. If you're, especially
if you're a businessman, you know you're not gonna
hire that loose cannon to run your company. It's unacceptable risk. But you're not wrong, we
talked about it earlier, but as part of that risk, there's a sliver in there
that he could accidentally do the right thing. - We talked a lot about
hope in this conversation. Zooming out, what gives
you hope about the future of this whole thing, of humanity, not just the United States,
of us humans on Earth? - So why am I center left
and not center right? It gets to that question. So you look at the polling,
not just here in America, but in almost any country. And it almost always
breaks out to two thirds to one third, right? Two thirds of the people
say, let's be empathetic, let's share, let's do equality, justice, let's be fair. Right? One third goes, no,
me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Okay? That's just the nature of humanity. And so, and usually the
same third goes, no change. Another two thirds go,
well, some change, right? So, because if you don't do any change, you're never gonna get
to the right answer. For the wisdom of the crowd to work, for free markets to work,
for everything to work, you have to keep changing
'cause the times change and the culture changes and
the situation changes, right? So that's why there's amendments in the Constitution,
because you need to be able to change the document from time to time. Be careful with it, right? But you need to allow
for an avenue for change. So now why does the one third keep winning in so many different places? Because they have more money and power. And by the way, if you're more selfish, you're more likely to get
more money and power, right? And I wish that weren't
the case, but it is. And these are not blanket
rules, they're on average. So that third winds up winning
in so many circumstances. But the bottom line is, we are a species that requires consent. So I mean, I'm a stone cold atheist, so I don't think we're kind of like apes, I think we are apes, okay? And so, and all the scientists
out there are going, well, of course we are. Everyone else is going,
that's crazy. Okay? So when you look at it as a species, different species react in different ways. Snakes have no empathy
'cause it's not in their DNA. And that's why we have a sense of what a snake does, right? So good news is for higher
level apes like us, bonobos, chimpanzees and humans, we
all roughly want consent. So a chimpanzee, for example, has a violent, you know,
reputation and they are violent. And unfortunately we're
pretty close to them. But what people don't know
is a leader doesn't win through violence, especially for Bonobos. They lead, they win by picking lice off of other chimpanzees, by
going and doing favors, going to a hunt, getting food
and giving it to someone else. Because what they're
gathering is the consent of the governed. And that's how you become the alpha. You don't do through physical dominance, you do it through consent. So that's how we're
hardwired. That's in our DNA. That two thirds in the long run will win. And we will have empathy,
we will have change. And that's the hope that
we're all looking for. - Hope has got the numbers, it seems like. - Yeah. And in fact, one more
thing, Lex, look at history, hope and change always win. And so again, conservatives,
don't catch feelings. There is a need for
conservatives because you have to balance things out. If you just had, even though
wonderful, two-thirds, that still wouldn't be the ideal system. You need a Winston Churchill if you're in the middle of World War II, you need someone to say,
regulating, you know, six inspections of the
elevators is too many, right? So you need that balance. And conservatives have a role and it's a really important role. But having said that, they're assigned to
losing throughout history because they're fighting on losing ground. A conservative says, no change, but the world is constantly changing, so they're destined to lose. That's why the founding fathers won against the British monarchy. That's why the civil rights movement won. They didn't win overnight. It took 'em 100 years to get equal rights, let alone past slavery, right? So we won on women's rights,
we won on gay rights, we keep winning, but every snapshot in time makes it feel like we're losing. There's a bad guy in charge, we are living under
corporate rule, et cetera. But in the long tide of
history, change always wins. So the empathetic, generally
speaking, left wing, but again, don't worry
about the titles, right? People get obsessed with the labels. The two thirds that's empathetic, that includes a lot of
right wingers, right? You win at the end in
history every single time. So we fight forward, we're
tough when we need to be. We need that willpower
to win any fight, right? But we're civil and
respectful to the other side because they are us. So progressives all the
time, and we say, look, this is like the ending
of my book, which is for conservatives, you
have a lot of empathy for inside the wagons. So conservatives are
great to their family, generally speaking, to their
community, to their church, to anyone that's inside the wagons. But they have, they set up electric fences and barbed wire around their wagons. So if you're on the outside, you're the others and you're
gonna get electrified. And it's constantly
(imitating electricity) right? And so I like to think the
left wing has wider wagons. So we view the world
as more us and not you. But the good news of that is, if we win, we're not gonna do Medicare
for only the left, right? We're gonna do Medicare for all. You're all gonna get universal healthcare. We're gonna do higher wages for all. And the right wing is
not gonna be left out. And if we're, and Lex, I'm
gonna tell you a fun story. It's about my family. And I'm sure that parts of it are apocryphal from, because
it's from like 500 years ago. But it gives you a sense of
the old Mark Twain quote, if it's really Mark Twain's, of change happens really gradually
and then all of a sudden. So my mom's last name
in Turkish is Yavaşça, it means slowly, it's a
weird name even in Turkish. And so one day we're
walking past the mosque in Istanbul when I'm a kid and it says on the mosque Yavaşça,
we're like, what is this? Okay. So it's a small little mosque, we go inside and my dad starts
asking the imam questions. Okay? So he says, why is the mosque named that? And he said, well, you don't know? And he said, because my
dad said my wife's name is, last name is yavaşça,
he's like, oh my God. And he's like, your
ancestor was the admiral of the Ottoman Navy when they
conquered Constantinople. Okay? So grandpa from 500, 600 years
ago came up with the idea. So you can't ever conquer Constantinople because there's a giant chain
underneath the Bosphorus. All the ships get stuck on the chain, there's cannons on both sides, half of the ancient navies in
the world are at the bottom of the Bosphorus, right? So hasn't been conquered
in over 1000 years. Nobody thinks it can be conquered. Grandpa comes out with
the idea of why don't we build giant wooden planks
over land and grease them and pass our fleet over
land onto the other side? Everybody goes, because
whenever anybody proposes a new idea, no matter how logical it is, they
go, oh, that's impossible. No way it's gonna work. Oh, you're crazy. This is an unconquerable city.
What are you guys even doing? Every day Mehmed the Conqueror
comes up to grandpa and says, all right, how's your plan
to do this project going? And grandpa says, slowly. (laughs) And he names him Commander Slowly. - And one night after
the whole thing's done, they pass the entire
Ottoman fleet over the land, wind up in the middle of the Bosphorus and the Holy Roman Empire
concedes, they surrender. 'Cause change happens really gradually. And then all of a sudden. - Good story. Well, Cenk, thank you for
fighting for that change for many years now, for
over two decades now. And thank you for talking today. - Appreciate it, Lex. Thank you for having the conversation. - Thanks for listening to this
conversation with Cenk Uygur. To support this podcast
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Hannah Arendt: "Totalitarianism is never content
to rule by external means, namely through the state
and a machinery of violence. Thanks to its peculiar
ideology and the role assigned to it in the apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered
a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within." Thank you for listening. I
hope to see you next time.