DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou: “Will AI Kill Journalism?”

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Join the “DeProgram show” with political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, now Monday-Friday 5 pm LIVE and streaming anytime! Technology keeps devastating news publishing, from Craigslist killing classifieds to AI like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview slashing news site traffic by nearly 50%. Generative AI like ChatGPT, trained on vast internet data, faces accusations of stealing publishers’ intellectual property, prompting lawsuits from the New York Times and Disney against firms like OpenAI. Big Tech defends with “fair use” claims, but publishers argue AI undermines their business. Hollywood joins the fight, suing AI companies for similar violations. Publishers fight back with lawsuits and lobbying against Big Tech’s data theft. Publishers face plummeting traffic and revenue as AI delivers content directly on search platforms. Is it too late to save a vital industry that’s long been on the ropes? Plus: • Democrats in Deep Doodoo: Democrats lost 4.5 million registered voters to Republicans across 30 states from 2020 to 2024, with sharp declines in battlegrounds like Pennsylvania. The party’s fading appeal among men, younger voters, and Latinos signals a brand crisis. Strategists warn of a “reckoning” by 2028. • Fox News Hosts Caught Shilling for Trump: It’s an ugly look. Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, filed in 2021, exposes hosts like Jeanine Pirro pushing pro-Trump election fraud narratives despite deep internal skepticism. Unredacted texts reveal Pirro’s motives, including seeking a pardon for her ex-husband. • Oklahoma’s Teacher Screening: The state’s new teacher screening test, developed by Prager University, targets applicants from blue states to block “woke indoctrinators,” requiring perfect scores on a 50-question exam. Critics label it a political stunt amid a teacher shortage. Unions argue it violates state law. • Israel Reinvades Gaza: The IDF mobilizes 60,000 reservists for an additional Gaza City offensive, approved by Defense Minister Israel Katz, prompting evacuation orders. Allies like France warn of humanitarian disaster, and the UN worries about ethnic cleansing. Israel stalls a ceasefire proposal in which Hamas has already agreed to a full hostage release. • Israel Declares Death of Two-State Solution: Israel’s E1 settlement project will build 3,400 housing units on stolen land in the West Bank, further slicing and dicing Palestinian communities. The plan, condemned by allies like Germany, is an attempt to finally kill off any possibility of a two-state solution.

Bobby, too, taking you out, forgot to take you out of the picture. That's producer Robbie West. How are you doing, John? I'm doing well, thanks. How are you, Ted? I'm all right. Good to see you. Let's deprogram some people.

It's Wednesday, August 20th. Thanks for joining us. We're here on deprogram. I'm Ted Raul. That's John Kiriaku. Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. Eastern time. John, you said it's a bit of a slow newsday, and I think that's kind of true because we're kind of in between a lot of things.

that are sort of in the middle of happening, but it doesn't mean that we have nothing to talk about. No, that's right. Hey, listen, so long as you read the New York Post every day, there's plenty to talk about. Always read the New York Post. So in no particular order, because that's not how we do things here. And by the way, please feel free to chime in with your questions

inside the Rumble or the YouTube chat. If you're joining us live, if you're listening to us later on, thank you so much for joining us. And do consider joining us live if you ever have the chance. All right, so New York Times has a piece today about it's a deep dive about voter registration. Democrats are getting clobbered on voter registration. They've lost a half a million voters to the Republicans in just 30 out of 50 states between 20 and 2024. So we'll talk about that and what it means for the Democratic Party.

Fox News hosts, not surprisingly, they tend to be in the tank for Donald Trump, although there was once a time, remember, when the order went out, like, not to do that, but they changed their mind. Anyway, there's a lawsuit, a lot of discovery that turned private information into public records. Now we know that people like Janine Piro, we have their internal communications with people like Sean Hannity, and they're squabbling, and it's super, super interesting. We'll get into sort of some inside Fox News dish, and, you know, let's see if they should, even be pretending to be objective reporters. Oklahoma now wants to, is subjecting teachers only from New York and California to attest to determine whether they're too woke to teachers in Oklahoma or not. Israel literally just within the last hour re-invaded Gaza that was

anticipated. We'll get into that. They're currently fighting in Con Unis and in Gaza City. And Israel has officially declared effectively the death of the two-state solution, at least in the West Bank. It kind of makes it the whole thing. That E1 project that we talked about the other day has now been formally approved, and we'll get into all that. There's a few other things going on. The redistricting battles are still happening. And of course, we're looking to see if any progress is going to be made on the peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. John, what would you like to do first? You know what? Let's start with the Middle East, just because it's so near and dear to my heart.

I had a really lovely coffee meeting this morning with a young intern from the Jordanian embassy. He watches the show. He reached out on LinkedIn. I can never say no to a cup of coffee. So we got together today. And it was a really delightful. insightful conversation. But one of the things that he reminded me of that I actually had, I guess, pushed back into the sort of the recesses of my brain is that many Palestinians, especially Palestinians in the diaspora, especially in the Middle Eastern diaspora, don't like each other. right it's partly a generational thing it's in some cases a religious thing because you know it used to be that 10% of the Palestinians in Palestine were Christian like 8020 Orthodox and Catholic most of the Palestinian Christians have have emigrated to the West and most of them to the United States or

Australia. And it's left a lot of very angry refugees in the, in the, in the, in the, in region. 50% of the population of Jordan is Palestinian. But, but, but they're divided by generation. They're divided by whether they are the descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 from the Nakhba or if they're recent arrivals. There are some Palestinians who move to the Persian Gulf and worked for 30 years and made tons of money and then have gone back. And now all of a sudden they're doing better than most Jordanians are doing. So he said in the West, especially in the United States, one of the things that he's noticed is that even those of us, or especially those of us who are pro-Palestinian, we have this

idea that Palestinians are monolithic and they're not. And they're not. That's super interesting. Yeah. And that's why there's true, but yeah. The reason, the way we got on to that conversation was we were talking about the one-state solution versus the two-state solution. And I said, you know, there already is one state. How's that working out for everybody?

Not very well. You can't really have a two-state solution because you've got Mahmoud Abbas, who's like I always say, 19 years into a four-year term, and suddenly finds himself to be a billionaire, despite the fact that his people are among the poorest in the world. He's just a good investor. Yeah, apparently. Just like Marjorie Taylor Green. That's right. Good speculator. And then, you know, you've got the three-state solution, which nobody wants to talk about

because there's really no connection between East Bank, sorry, East Bank, West Bank, Palestinians and Gaza Palestinians. So what's the solution? Even the Palestinians don't have a proposed solution. And now today we've got the Israelis reinvading Gaza City. why just so they can kill the people who managed to escape last time and blow up the tunnels that the Israelis were responsible for digging in the first place now john i have to say uh you know the shadow of all of this reinvasion is of course the ceasefire deal right so there's a current

ceasefire deal on the table Hamas has already officially signed off all the remaining hostages the 20, the 20 live ones and the 30 corpses would be released. And this would be a 60-day ceasefire. And the deadline for it is on Friday. I mean, this is Israel's answer, right? Basically, no ceasefire. Yeah. No ceasefire.

No way. They don't care about the hostages. They don't care. They don't care. They don't care. And they made it clear from the very beginning that they don't care. And like we always said, there's a benefit to Benjamin Netanyahu for this thing to go on forever. Because so long as the war continues and Netanyahu remains prime minister, he's not going to be prosecuted for corruption.

Right? So why? Thank you so much. Fight for peace. Thank you so much. Hey, Mike, for the very generous $100 donation. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Hey, Mike. Thank you so much. Yeah. And tomorrow I'm going to be on with Eric. Who's Eric? Who's going to say? Let me look at my calendar. I probably am.

I don't know my calendar for one day to the next. Well, you can always check the scroll here. People here do know it. They know more about us than we know. Maybe it's your old colleagues in Langley. Tapping your phone. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, they're not supposed to do that. No, they're not supposed to. But anyway, getting back to Israel, I'm always pessimistic when it comes to Israel and Palestine. I'm even more pessimistic today, Ted, than I was yesterday. Yeah, it's not good. Yeah, although what's funny, I'm short-term, very pessimistic like you.

Long-term, I'm more pessimistic. I'm more optimistic. I think, you know, like we've talked about before, the more of this shit that Israel pulls, the lower their approval rating goes, the lower their support in the U.S. goes, the less, the more safer it is for American politicians to cut them off, and the more isolated they're going to be diplomatically, including at the UN, which the General Assembly meets here in New York next month. It's, I mean, I think they're, they're really cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Without any question.

Over and over and over. Ted, there was a poll that was released today, absolutely fascinating. And you know how obsessed I am with polls. But this was a global poll. And it, it, It ranked every country by how their citizens answered if they were strongly pro-Israel, moderately pro-Israel, moderately anti-Israel, strongly anti-Israel. There were only three countries in the world that are pro-Israel by majority. Out of 200 or so. One of them is Israel. Okay.

One of them is the United States. Okay. And the third, inexplicably to me, was Nigeria. Yeah. What? And everybody else in the world is majority anti-Israel. The world.

That's crazy. This should be a wake-call. Did they track how that looked compared to previous years? Yeah. And it's moved dramatically, dramatically. Interestingly, outside the Middle East proper, to use the British terminology, Turkey was the most anti-Israel country in the outside the Middle East. Well, that's a dramatic change.

I mean, dramatic change. I mean, they used to almost be sort of allies. I mean, very much so. Right? Yes, very much so. I remember during the big earthquake. That's right.

Came to help out. Yes. Doctors and rescue teams and trained dogs and all that stuff. Is that an Erdogan thing or what's the story there? Yeah. Erdogan has moved. farther and farther toward the religious types over the years. And then when he made this decision to publicly support Hamas, that was the end of it.

And that's when the Greeks moved in to become pro-Israel. It was the Greeks that were always pro-Palestinian. And when the Turks switch, the Greek switched, interestingly in Greece, combining strongly anti-Israel and moderately anti-Israel, in Greece it was 74% that are anti-Israel. despite the fact that the greek government bows down before the israeli government fascinating to me but but but the lesson here at least the lesson that i took from it is that the israelis are dragging us down with them you know so many americans believe that if you're anti-netanyahu that means you're anti-semitic and that you have to be

in lockstep with the farthest right-wing elements of the israeli government to not be anti-semitic he's Semitic and that is utter nonsense. Well, it's insane to give any country who's making their own decisions for their own domestic political, you know, reasons and to give them a blank check and basically say whatever you guys do in and around your neighborhood, we're on board with no matter what. I mean, you know, it's like, look, it's like if your friend is out, basically we, Israel is like our really bad friend. Yes. They're staying up late. They're cheating on their wife, they're like, they're drinking, you're drinking and driving, they're trying to outrun the police. And they're calling all the time. You're there one quarter. You have to go and

bail them out all the time. And you get blamed for what they do. You're enabling them. It's your car that they're doing it with. And like, I mean, they're literally shooting Palestinians with made-in-USA weapons. Yeah. I mean, it literally. And it's like, You know, so when 9-11s happen, my only thing, the only thing that I found, I found it shocking, but I didn't find it surprising. The only surprise is that things like that don't happen all the time. Totally agree. Totally agree. So I hate to say it, but the bottom line for me today is there's no reason to be optimistic, optimistic on Palestine today.

No reason at all. Let's talk about the settlements. So it continues, right? Like there's 700,000 illegal West Bank colonists, aka quote-unquote settlers. I don't like the word settler because it kind of implies that nobody was living there before. That's right. Which is far from true.

And anyway, and they're running rampant. So the Israeli government has just officially said, they've just greenlit this E1 settlement project, 3,400 new units. So, you know, I don't know how many average, what's the average family size in one of those units? But you've got to figure, let's say, three at least, right? At least. So at least 10,000 more people are coming in there, further slicing and dicing the Palestinian communities.

But the big news here is the reason that the Israelis are, the right-wingers are so excited about it, is that this completely severs the West Bank proper from East Jerusalem, which was always intended to be the capital. of a new of a of a future Palestinian state and this is basically saying we've completely annexed Jerusalem which has already happened and you're not even going to we're not we're never letting you back that's it you can't even come to visit yeah it it makes me sick to my stomach um and you know just to make matters even worse or not even i won't even say it like that i'll say just to add insult to injury what the israelis tend to do in the weeks and months before they seize Palestinian land

is they'll go in and bulldoze the olive orchards, for example, or set fire to the crops. Just so it makes it easier for you to just leave on your own. And if you don't finally leave, they'll bulldoze the house and then build one of their prefab houses and have some family from New Jersey or New York or wherever move into this new house. on land that's been in in these families for hundreds of years.

Why do they bulldoze the house? A lot of times these are perfectly fine structures. Yeah. In fact, in Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem, they generally keep the houses and just turn it over to a Jewish family. But the condition of so many of these houses in the West Bank is so poor. They're thrown together with scraps and concrete block and whatever they're not really they shouldn't be habitable yeah they're but people are so desperate that

this is all they can do they're poor yeah and they're they're their olive trees have been stolen or destroyed exactly yeah yeah so all right well i have to admit um you know obviously uh always my my loyalty here is with the Palestinians and uh you know i mean they will maintain the struggle so that yes they will hey and is good and we need to thank firmware and Houdini both. Thank you so much for your generous contributions. Oh my God. Thank you so much. Yeah. The scroll is going on here. Thank you so much. Yeah. That's that's crazy, right? As Houdini points out, the olive trees are 4,000 years old. There's some of the oldest things on the planet. Yes, they are. I was once at a panel discussion with other

authors, and there was this woman who was the author of a book about the oldest things on earth. And some of the oldest things on earth are trees. There's some shrub. There's some shrub in Africa that doesn't look like much, but it's like six or seven thousand years old. There's a giant sea sponge that's thousands of years old in the Atlantic Ocean. And there's some giant underground mushroom complex. Oh, yeah. That goes for acres and acres. It's, It's out in like Oregon or something. Yeah, that's right. There's an olive tree in Crete that's 3,200 years old.

It's the oldest olive tree in Greece. You know, when I was living in Athens, I lived in this normal, you know, suburban house, this five-year-old house. But I had a 300-year-old olive tree in my front yard. And my first, yeah, my first year that I was there, it started making olives and the olives started to ripen. So I asked a guy at the embassy. I said, hey, I had this. olive tree it's making beautiful olives i don't know what to do with it he said oh no we'll take care of it you have a choice he says we call the olive company the olive harvesting company and you

can do two things you can either pay them to harvest the olives or you give them the olives to harvest and they give you five gallons of the olive oil that it creates you because there's a lot of processing with a lot you can't eat them off the tree no no they're terrible yeah yeah so i ended up using olive oil from my own olives for for years three four five years i had that olive oil was amazing cool so and it's 300 years old and it's 300 years old and absolutely delicious just think about that like that that blows my mind when i think about like you know what the world was like in 1725, right? Just in my little yard, I had a peach tree, a plum tree, an orange tree, a lemon tree.

I had the olives, and I had a big tortoise. Oh, really? He would just eat the fruits that would fall off the tree. Oh, wow. So he was like wild. Yeah, I looked it up. It's called an Attican tortoise. Oh, God, it sounds.

I would feel like a king if I had those things. every morning I'd wake up and I'd feel a little bit happy just because of that. Yeah, it was good. It was good. I liked it. Okay, so I think we'll leave that there. What should we talk about? And thank you.

Thank you to Matthew as well, who also has a question. Thoughts on Trump making cartels as terrorists. I don't think we've really talked about that in any depth. When Trump first said that he was going to classify or have the State Department classify the drug cartels as terrorist groups, I said that it was a bureaucratic move because it would free up funding for the intelligence community that otherwise is not focused on drugs to begin things like intercepting the communications of cartel leaders. And a lot of people predicted that we would start using offensive capabilities against the cartels like drones. That hasn't happened.

No. Do you see any reason why there's a benefit to classifying the cartels as terrorist groups? Well, I mean, when you, under American law, right, when you classify anything as a terrorist group, it opens up, you know, you can pretty much do anything you want. You don't need an act, you don't need an authorization from Congress. I think it's because you can rely on the 2001 post-9-11 authorization to use military force that basically has never been expired, right?

As far as I know, and anything related to terrorism, terrorism in general or specifically al-Qaeda or anyone who may or may not have been responsible for 9-11 or anything like 9-11 blah blah blah blah it's so open-ended so i think that's why there's this it's very tempting for the government to just classify anything that they don't like including bad weather as a that's right terrorist yeah that's exactly right um should we talk about these two we should definitely touch upon the redistricting Uh-oh. There I am.

There we go. Okay. I thought it was me again. No, that was me. I have a Mac, and the iOS has sort of this quirk where if you move the magic mouse a little too fast, it just sort of wipes you off. Yes. Yes. I hate that.

Mine does that, too. I also have a map. And there's apparently a setting that you can supposedly. Get rid of that, but it doesn't work. So we miss you, Steve Jobs. Come back. Get rid of the Apple Watch while you're at it. Okay, so let's talk about the redistricting thing.

You wanted to bring that up. I did want to bring it up. The Texas House is prepared now to vote in favor of redrawing congressional district boundaries, which would likely result in the loss of five Democratic house seats in Texas. Gavin Newsom has already had prepared a comparable measure, but the system is different in California. This has to go to a referendum.

So he would have to call a special election. Well, they're used to that in California. They have them all the time. The RNC, the Republican National Committee, has committed $15 million in advertising to defeat it, and they've been successful in the past. Won't work this time. Won't work this time.

And so now, New York and Illinois, the Republican, California, California's GOP is dead. It's got nothing going on. Gone. New York and Illinois are jumping in saying that they're now considering redrawing their district boundaries. But Missouri and Florida have also jumped in saying that they're going to redraw to make it easier for Republicans. We have never seen anything like this in the history of the Republic. This is just such bad form and it's such, you know, sour grapes and it's the worst of gerrymandering. Now, interestingly enough, this afternoon, a federal judge out of thin air.

Thank you, Marble, by the way. Thank you, Marble. A federal judge ruled that Mississippi's district boundaries are, are illegally gerrymandered. So now Mississippi is going to be forced to redraw its boundaries, even though it didn't want to, and it's going to have to add a majority black district. So, I mean, gerrymandering's been with us.

I mean, you know. Oh, since the 18th century. Right. It's one of the very, it may be the first, well, certainly the most well-known early American political cartoon, right? it's the gerrymander in which some district voter some ugly looking voter district i guess in massachusetts i think it was um is just basically drawn up into the into the form of a horrible like dragon like monster yes and uh you know it's so and it's i think it's ben franklin if i'm not

mistaken who created that cartoon um it it ran in ben franklin's paper do you know the uh do you know the background to it it was um elbridge g-e r r why but it was pronounced gary he was the fourth vice president of the united states oh wow and he had been um the governor of massachusetts so he was i think madison's vice president so he was intensely partisan and in order to get his friends elected to Congress, he just took out a map of Massachusetts, and he drew the district boundaries. And when Benjamin Franklin saw them, he said that they looked like salamanders.

And he called them Gary's salamanders, and that became gerrymander, which then over the years became gerrymander. He's also a little bit of trivia from John's someday to be published, Cemetery's book. He's the only vice president of the United States to be buried inside Washington, D.C. Oh, really? Where is he buried? He's at Congressional Cemetery up on Capitol Hill. There it is. There's the gerrymander. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of a cool cartoon. It really is. It really is.

And I doubt it's really the original first one. But, you know, yeah. Anyway, I like it. Yeah, me too. All right. So, I mean, look, let's get to the politics of this. I mean, so obviously the gerrymandering is going to, is a pace. But it seems to me, this really destroys, like, respect for the system, right? I mean, we're just living in an incredibly toxic time. It seems like these two parties are far more interested in playing these kind of sick, sorted, you know, sleazy games.

behind the scenes, then representing the interests of the American people. I mean, there's nobody sitting around thinking, okay, what's afflicting most people? There's no Democrats or Republicans thinking, you know, there's people who can't afford food. Everything's expensive. Or, you know, people can't send their kids to college even though they're really smart. Or what, you know, on and on and on. They're doing this shit instead. Yeah, you're exactly right.

you're exactly right and I think it just increases it furthers contempt for the system it does and it brings us back to the comment you made at the very start of the show about things going so badly for the Democrats the Democrats are bleeding

members and money and nobody trusts them and it's not that the Republicans are that much more popular it's that the Democrats are just so backward Yeah, so let's be clear here because it's a really complicated picture, right? So, first of all, Democratic voter, I'll try to pull up a chart of this, but basically

Democratic voter registration vis-à-vis Republicans is collapsing. But overall affiliation is also declining. So more and more Americans are the biggest, the fastest growing group is really unaffiliated voters. In only, in 20 out of 50 states, you can't, you. You don't register as a Democrat or Republican or anything else. By the way, you can register as a green or a libertarian or anything you want, a socialist. But 30 out of 50 states, you can. And so in those states, people are just like fleeing.

They're fleeing the Democrats much faster than they're fleeing the Republicans. John, I have a theory about what's going on here, which is I think that as the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, but the Democrats more. they're no longer a political movement that promotes an ideology. They're a team. And when, and you identify, like most of my friends basically are parts of team blue. They identify with the Democratic Party because they've always been, they're Democrats, because they're Democrats. The Democratic Party can change radically on policies like, hey, let's start wars all over

the place when, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago, that's not really who they were. and the Republicans were the hawk party, but they're still Democrats. Once a Democrat, always a Democrat. Republicans also, it's a team. When you're on Team Red, you know, there's even Republican fashions, right? Like there's even like women wear more makeup if they're Republican. There's a way to look. There's a kind of car you're more likely to buy.

So this reminds me of Byzantium where there were the blue and the red chariot teams and at first it started out like as just entertainment but over the centuries it evolved into political parties there were riots and they got to the point where if you were from a red chariot family or you would not let your daughter marry a guy from a blue chariot family and we're seeing that too so if it's a team and not an ideology well you're going to you're going to go with the cooler team the team that seems to win more that seems to have more pizzazz. And since 2016, the team that's had more pizzazz has been the GOP. That's my theory. I think you've hit it right on the head. If I were to ask

myself, who's the leader of the Democratic Party? I could come up with 20 different names or zero names. Right. By the way, Gavin Newsom, my favorite governor, seems to be like, really having a moment these days. He wants to be the big, the big cahuna. And he's doing it basically by mimicking Donald Trump. Like he goes on Donald. Right. He does all cap tweets and like basically.

And then he says, sad exclamation point. Tends to be Donald, there tries to be Donald Trump. I, as a student of politics, I think it's always a mistake to be, you know, adopting or even satirizing. someone else's framing, I think it's always better to have your own framing and try to make that framing better. Am I wrong? No, I think you are exactly right. Yes, I think you're right. But it's like, Ted, they don't have an appreciation for it. It's like they don't see what the rest of the country sees. When only 24 or 25 percent of Americans consider

themselves to be Democrats. That's not a brag. That's a problem. It's a problem that you should be dealing with. John, you must remember, in 2004, I think it was, two guys wrote a book called, a best selling book called The Emerging Democratic Majority. I remember. 21 years ago.

I remember. The theory was that the Republican Party was obsolete, would never, remember, remember when Obama was president, more recent, right? the Democrats got rid of the judicial filibuster reasoning that the Republicans would never control the Senate ever again ever again never and they said that that once Texas turned blue and it was turning blue it was imminent right that no Republican presidential candidate would ever win again it was impossible they would have to come up with a new party this new political realignment And, of course, that was all ridiculous.

And obviously, yeah, it couldn't be more different now. I mean, look, let's get into some statistics here, right? So 4.5 million registered voters, right? This isn't even swing voters who are like, I'm a registered Democrat in New York, right? But I could, you know, I could vote for a Republican if I want. That's not even that. This is me, like, calling the board of elections and saying, fuck the Democratic Party. I'm moving over to the Republicans, which requires work, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have to work at it. So that's in just 2020 to 2024. Now, that's a Biden effect, I think, in large part. And looking back at that, it's like, God, the way they clung to Biden. You know, I mean, what a catastrophe. And the other thing is they had this assumption, like Democratic voter registration moves, which are basically usually run by third party organizations, not third parties, but like not the Democratic Party.

like labor unions and NGOs and so on. They are like, go out and register people. And they'll say, oh, let's just register a bunch of black guys because blacks always vote Democratic. And they did until they didn't. Until they didn't. And Latinos, they always assumed that was wrong from the outset. Yeah.

And so now they don't know what to do. And then there were Democrats in today's New York Times find themselves in the awkward position of having to confide. that they're really no longer interested in just registering minorities. They really want to just register Democrats, and they're trying to figure out how to do that. How can they find there would be Democratic voters? Oh, if only there was a way to appeal to get the Democratic Party to be more popular, I don't know, get better candidates with good issues and good publicity?

You would think? I had a conversation today with two Swedish professors. They have a podcast, and we were talking exactly about this issue. And I said, you know, when it's the Democrats who used to be in the streets to protest the war in Vietnam, the Democrats who used to be in the streets to protest the invasion of Iraq, the Democrats that used to be opposed to ever-increasing Pentagon budgets, who are now being endorsed by Dick Cheney, right? It was, Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

Then you know you have a serious problem. And they trumpeted that like it was the best thing that had ever happened. Yeah. And then Dick Cheney's on our side. She went on tour with horrible Liz. That's right. Like it was like it was a positive thing. Like it was a.

Yeah. It was. It was a get. Just nuts. It's totally crazy. Yeah. I don't know who these people are. And then of course, obviously, meanwhile, they had good, reliable left-wing voters. All the Bernie people, all would have voted Democratic, every last one of them. But they told all, whatever, seven or nine or 12 million of them, however many there are, because it's hard to guesstimate. There's so many. It's hard to count them. that basically we don't need you we're going to we're going to find our votes from the center you still see that song on the editorial pages of all the major newspapers now we need a good sensible centrist that's what we need right because there's been working great yeah there's no center yeah there's no center you know i said that in this talk with the sweets today too that my very best friend from childhood he's a republican a maga republican and He's always yelling about the radical left. And I said to him, not too long ago, I said, Gary, what exactly is radical about the left?

You keep using that word. Every time you talk about Democrats, you call them the radical left. What is it that's so radical? And he thought about it for a second. And he said, well, the Green New Deal. I said, okay. So what's so radical about the Green New Deal? And he didn't know because he doesn't know what the Green New Deal.

deal is. It's just that Fox News keeps calling it radical, radical, radical, so it must be radical, and now we've got this giant split down the middle. So I said to the Swedes, I said, look, we've got a right of center party and we have a farther right of center party. And now Elon Musk at all want to put another right of center party in the middle of the two right of center parties that we already have. That's where our politics are today. Robbie's got a question too. What about What about ranked choice voting? We have ranked choice voting here in Arlington County, Virginia, which works beautifully. Alaska has it and it, you know, allowed a Democrat to be elected to one term in the House of Representatives.

But it also gave us Eric Adams here in New York, though. Well, that's true, actually. And every New Yorker, John, has to absorb this 60-page voter guy, which has all the crazy chart. I always like to keep this as me. So this is like, this is all, it's like the SATs. Yeah, you got to study it. When I went to vote, I screwed up. Granted, I only went to an Ivy League school, so I'm not that smart.

But I screwed up and I went over and I said, I'm really sorry. I screwed up. And the lady had a giant bin of spoiled ballots. You know, and I live in a neighborhood next to, you know, a major university. Yeah. One that's been in the news for being anti-Semitic. Right. Yeah.

Oh, good grief. It's nuts. Yeah, no, ranked choice. I don't think rank, I look, I think ranked choice vote, voting works when it votes, works, and it doesn't work when it doesn't work. You know, I mean, you know, I think, you know, I think in certain particular circumstances, like, it would really, the Bernie bros loved it because they were like, There were so many people who were like, well, I really want to vote for Hillary more, but I still like Bernie and I would vote for him second. It's kind of like a John Hughes movie where it's like that, you know, Molly Ringwald likes John,

but she would also date Ted if John were like not around and maybe if Ted had a better car. And so that's like, so that's what Ray Choice Voting is like. And but I don't think that plays out really in a lot of cases. I think people in most cases are like, you're lucky if they like even one candidate. The Gricemeister is asking, when was the last Democratic presidential primary, open presidential primary? I mean, technically, I guess it was 20, but not really because the fix was in for Biden. It would have been 2008, but even that was supposed to be the Hillary coronation, and it came down to just Hillary and Obama. So when was the last time that it was truly open?

It has to be like 92, right? Well, 92, yeah, the fix was still in to some extent, right? I mean, it's, yeah, and I was there in the convention hall when that happened. I'm trying to think like when it was really thrown open. I don't know, John, I'd have to go back to 1980, I'd have to say. for the Democrats when Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter even though also I was in the hall for that and let me tell I was a young man I was 17

and let me just say the party they pulled they went full spectrum DNC in 1980 they changed the rules so that so that Carter would get the nomination I'm convinced that Ted Kennedy would have had a better shot against Reagan in terms of a more enthusiastic liberal base you know we really we lost out when we didn't get Ted Kennedy to you know possibly be the president of the United States with all of his flaws don't let him drive your daughter home but yeah don't let him drive your daughter home yeah ask Mary Joe Kepekne about that well you can't but yeah

I agree I agree should we talk about Ted go ahead Ted sorry one one more question we're three and a half years out from or three years plus a couple of months out from the next election but we're only really a year and a half out from the start of the primary yes so is a year and a half enough time for the democrats to get their act together no fucking way no i mean not to mention look you remember the last person who really nationalized a midterm election was new gingrich in 1994 with the contract with america brilliant um Brilliant politics, not really brilliant policy. And, you know, I mean, I think you need a figure like that who can unify the Democrat.

John, do you see Akeem Jeffrey is doing that? Not a chance. I'll tell you what, every time I see a King Jeffries. That guy can't even rip his ass in the morning. No. Every time I see him on TV, I like him less. To the point now, I don't even want to hear his voice. What a tool.

He's a tool of the of the Hillary Clinton. element of the DNC. Yeah. There's nothing progressive about this guy at all, nothing. No, and he's impotent. I mean, you know, Nancy Pelosi for all of her numerous flaws, well, except she's a really handy investor also, you know, aside from, but she, at least, you know, she was a strong woman.

Oh, yeah. She ran a tight ship. Yeah. Yes, indeed. So, yeah, no, I don't think that, no, I mean, look, I think the Democrats are going to, here's the thing. The wild card is these redistricting battles, but there's a lot more pickups possible for the Republicans than there are for the Democrats.

Yes. I have to say, I don't see a road to victory next year for the Democrats. I don't see where it comes from. I mean, even if there's a tremendous scandal in the GOP, even if Trump imploded somehow, and I don't think that's going to happen, then I still don't see how the Democratic. Democrats can take advantage. I mean, I think their best shot is in 2028 to nominate someone spectacular as president and hope that they hope that he or she has coattails.

And I don't think they'll have coattails because Democrats don't have a farm system. Obama got rid of the farm system, such as it was. And, I mean, I think the Democratic Party is in real trouble. I mean, you know, we don't want to write them off completely like the GOP was written off completely. obviously. TOP was written off completely in 1964. Boy, was it. In a two-party system, one party can always come back. But it's like, but I don't think, I don't see it happening anytime soon. No. Totally agree. Totally agree. So speaking of elections, I love, I love, love, love, love, love this story about Janine Piro and Fox News. So basically,

Smartmatic sued Fox News four years ago for $2.7 billion for defaming their voting machines for saying that they were used by the Democrats to throw the election to Trump. Janine Beiro, who is now the Attorney General of the District of Columbia. No, she's the U.S. attorney. U.S. attorney for District Columbia. And not defending the people of the district from the military invasion. No, she's defending the cops from Sandwich. Right. So, but it's not just her. Apparently there were all these internal deliberations. And basically she's quoted in saying things about how she, so for example, here's a quote. Here's one of my favorite quotes. Janine goes, I work so hard for the president and the body and the party. She said she, she only cared about one thing.

thing, which was getting a pardon for her ex-husband. I don't even know what he did. Do you know? No idea. But I asked her to help me, and I talked to her assistant, and she says, 20,000. And I said, come on, man, I don't have 20,000. I'm just asking for a tweet. Just a tweet.

Pardon John Curioch, 20,000. I said, forget it. Wow. The only interaction I've had with her, I was on the show once. And 20,000, I said, forget it. She never invited me back. Do you think it would have worked? No.

So there's that, too. Yeah. Such high prices, such low, such small servings. Awful people. So I guess, so also among the other stuff that came out is a lot of squabbling inside in Foxx. It's all from the discovery process, right? When you sue someone, you can get all their internal communications and read all that stuff. So anyway, some of this is really juicy, right?

So here's Jesse Waters, who's on, you're probably familiar if you watch the five, as I do every day, or I did every day until we got this show. He was talking to Greg Gutfeld. Think about how incredible our ratings would be in 2020 if Fox went all in stop the steel, which was, of course, Trump's attempt to overthrow, to overturn the election or to just sort of, deny that there was any way that Biden could legitimately win. And basically, there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff about how much Sean Hannity is a mad egotist, which really comes as no surprise to anything. Well, there was a shock. Apparently, this is my favorite moment.

He walked into the Oval Office, you know, where the presidents of the United States, the leader of the free world, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces is hanging out, throws his his files or paperwork, whatever on the resolute desk and just basically says, announces, I got to take a piss and goes and use the president's private bathroom

without asking permission. Like it's his joint. And basically he's just swinging his dick around. Literally. Oh, my God. I don't even know what to say to that. I mean, it's just, it's such a, I mean, honestly, that TV show succession,

it turns out that that doesn't. Yeah, that's a documentary. And, you know, in all seriousness, that's why they took Veep off the air. Because all that crazy shit that happened in Veep actually started happening in real life in the Trump administration. And they canceled the show. Totally insane. So, yeah, so I don't know. It's just worth knowing.

I mean, John, do you think, oh, by the way, I should say that Fox was really pissed that this all came out. and that they're getting their asses kicked in all of these defamation cases. They claim that they're using their God-given First Amendment right to express their free speech and that they're being censored by the man by these defamation claims. The only thing that pisses me off about these defamation claims is that apparently you have to be a giant multinational corporation in order to be able to take on a cable news station like Fox News, which, you know, slimes people every single day, but they can't do anything about it.

Yes. I'm going to add something, too. Yesterday I got a letter, not a welcome letter, saying that I'm going to be called as a witness in a defamation case against Rudy Giuliani. Oh, boy. Yeah. Because that son of a bitch tried to squeeze too much.

million dollars out of me for a pardon back when five and a half years ago and the story just keeps bubbling along and bubbling along who's the plaintiff if i may ask it's it's noel dunphy she used to be his assistant and he she was his director of business development at julianic partners um apparently the day that the new york time story came out where i was quoted as saying that he tried to squeeze me for $2 million. He said to her, that son of a bitch Kiriaku ratted me out to the New York Times.

That's what she's alleging in the lawsuit. He then called the New York Times and said that he and I had never met. He didn't know who I was. The meeting never took place and that I had made the whole thing up. So I told the reporter from the Times, I said, that idiot forgot that we took a picture together.

om g so i sent the i sent the picture by selfie i sent the picture to the times i sent the picture to the times and the times said juliani denied denied denied the times has seen documentary proof that the meeting took place john um what is her claim exactly why is she suing juliani her claim is that he never paid her over the course of a year and a half it was just promises promises promises and then he sexually assaulted her twice by forcing her to perform sexual acts on him in exchange for him not ruining her reputation in the republican party but this is a defamation claim where's the defamation piece he ended up ruining her reputation in the republican party yeah so she's suing him for millions of

dollars isn't he broke though he says he is her her attorneys are arguing that he has more than a hundred million dollars hidden in overseas accounts good luck getting them yeah if that's it's because i don't have enough problems in my life i'm going to get involved in uh rudy juliani's bullshit well you'll just have to give a defamation i mean yeah not what am i what i'm saying deposition deposition i'll do a deposition and be done with it yeah yeah yeah Yeah, no, I mean, that's no fun. And just, all you do is you just tell the truth. That's it.

Just tell the truth. That's it. Yeah. I mean, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, yeah. I mean, I've done this.

It's as you know, you've done this. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing to fear here. Yeah. Awful. Oh, okay. So here, oh, Robbie, thank you so much for this.

Yeah. Thanks, Robbie. Albert Piro was arrested and convicted in 2000, on 34 counts of conspiracy and tax evasion, he'd improperly deducted over a million bucks in personal expenses for his lavish lifestyle as a business write-off for his real estate business. He served 17 months in prison. He got disbarred, although his law license got reinstated in 2007. In January of 21 is one of his last acts. Trump did pardon Albert Piro. The arrest and conviction were significant and I can't know what the count whatever I don't know what the rest of

that is okay but anyway that's good to know I'm 34 counts 34 felony counts of conspiracy and you know those you know those counts can add up yeah they do um you know they I always assume that everyone's overcharged um so um okay so we can I do want I really want to well I want to talk about everything here let's talk about the main top topic that we had here. So AI has been used all these AI chat models like chat GPT, these large language models, and GROC, which is X Elon Musk's company, and said there's Google AI. They've all been scraping intellectual property from all over the internet in order to quote unquote train themselves. So if you go do a search on Google about anything, like for example, tell me about

the status of Israel's invasion of Gaza, you'll get search results like in the old days to links, but you're on top, you'll see Google AI and it will summarize the current situation, the answer to your question, whatever it is. And it may or may not have two tiny, one or two tiny little links that you blink and you miss it, a little icon. Most people never do. And so what's going on is that it's called AI Overview, right? News websites are saying that they're seeing their web traffic has declined by as much as 50% ever since Google AI Overview was introduced.

Now, basically, it's not news that, like, basically, Newspapers are where 90% plus of all news reporting comes from, right? If it's on the radio, it's on the TV, it's on the Internet, it came out to a print newspaper. And those papers have been in trouble since 1960. That's 1960 is when newspaper circulation peaked out. Then TV started eroding at it. Then in the 90s, the Internet came into play. Information wants to be free.

They gave away a lot of their shit. Craigslist ate up all the classified ads, the internet ate up all of the display ads, and it's just been death by a million very large gashes, really. And so this, you know, now you're looking at a situation where, like, the LA Times may very well be out of business by the end of next year. It's the fourth largest city of the country. Yeah. So, you know, we're looking at, we already have major news deserts in smaller towns.

Canton, Ohio lost its newspaper a couple of years ago, and it's going to happen more and more. So there's whole sections of the country that have no local reporting. It's a golden age for political corruption. And so basically there's the publishers are fighting back a little bit. They're suing these big tech companies, but they're fucked, right? I mean, it's too late. It's too little too late, isn't it? Yeah, it seems that way.

Even my own little local newspaper, the Newcastle News, which I try to scan every day, became so expensive. You know, I spend what, like 50 bucks a year on the post, 60 bucks a year on the Times, whatever it is just to have access. But the little Newcastle News that does not have a Wednesday edition or a Sunday edition is $250 a year. I can't afford $250 a year for a, you know, a 16-page local newspaper. And as a result, they can't afford to hire journalists. The editor is like 28 years old. They cover the local, you know, county fair and the farm show and who grew the biggest pumpkin and what the local churches are up to. But you're right.

It's a news desert. There's no other way to describe it. I suppose, you know, you can, if you want regional news, you can subscribe to one of the Pittsburgh papers. But even the Youngstown Vindicator and Youngstown was a big city at 110,000, 120,000 people. And it's done. It's papers done, the Youngstown Vindicator. I mean, I have to say, I really don't understand why. I mean, I would like to, the remedy here is civil court, right?

But it seems to me like this is something Congress, if it had any sense of responsibility whatsoever, would take a look at in trying to protect news gathering. I mean, it benefits politics. I know they don't like journalists because journalists can expose their skull degree. But I mean, it's, but don't, but it's kind of still to their advantage because they need the media to publicize their campaigns and their messages. It's how they get free advertising in between elections. you would think that they would just have an interest in propping up these news organizations and passing a law that's a basic, I mean, what's needed here is a revenue sharing model, right? Like, if you scrape my content from my paper that I own, you have to pay me.

Yes. Yes. There's got to be. You know, I remember back in 2000 when the Internet was just starting to get a real foothold. It had been around six, seven, eight years, whatever it was. And I remember my start screen being Washington Post.com. And I remember thinking, again, 25 years ago, how are they going to make money if I can read the entire newspaper for free online? Why would I buy it?

That doesn't make any sense. And the hard copy paper, of course, you know, on Sundays, there'd be 100 pages of ads. you're not getting that online. Yeah, I don't know that, like, the newspaper Barons ever gave any thought, really, to the way people actually consume their product. You know, when this all started in the mid to late 1990s, my thought was what really makes sense. I mean, I still was reading a print paper and reading online.

Now, to this day, I'm a digital subscriber to the New York Times and the Washington Post. If I subscribe to the print edition, or if I pick up the print edition, most of what's in there, I read yesterday online already. Now, that product costs more than the product that I'm paying for. This should be exactly the other way around. I think the internet should be for breaking news that tells you, it should tell you what just happened. You know, Israel just invaded Khan Yunus and Gaza City. Tomorrow, in the print edition, there should be big, deep dive analysis piece. that explain what happened yesterday and what's likely to happen in like the days ahead,

sort of like analogous to the way that the Newsweek leaves, that role that Time Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report used to play. That's right. That's exactly right. But nobody listens to Ted Rall. No, or John Kirooku. But, you know, at least we're cute. All right.

So did Jay Rock want to know why is Jake Tapper so miserable? I don't know. If I was making what Jake Tapper makes, I'd be pretty darn happy all the time. Yeah, I know. That's how I feel about it, too. Heaven knows I'm miserable now, as the Smith once saying. You know, I ran into a friend of mine, a fellow cartoonist with whom I'm often confused at a bar the other day. And he was, he was saying like, I'm depressed.

I'm like, you love it. You love to make yourself miserable. He goes, fuck you. And then he started laughing because he's like, you're right. Jake strikes me as he might be that person, but I'm not going to psychoanalyze a guy who, you know, who's not here. Anyway, oh, this is great. Peter Ivy says, we're listening to Ted Roll and John Chariacu.

That's right. So you're happy. you're happy anyway yeah here we go Ted that was the Cobalt Chimera says Ted that was the whole fight for ages

advertising referral links summaries substitute for original product in copyright yeah yeah it was yeah it's right so oh yeah you know this has come up and I guess

we probably should where is this question everything is going buy so fast here. Someone asked about the, do we want to talk about the Israeli pedophile thing again or not? We kind of already talked about it. You know, the only thing that's new is, is the justice department said that they played no role in this at all, nothing at all.

I find that very hard to believe because we're talking about electronic images and we're talking about electronic communications to try to meet up with an underage girl. that would make it federal. So what? The Justice Department just told the local authorities in Las Vegas to handle it and they let the guy go and he just ran back to Israel? I don't know. Somebody's lying.

Yeah, yeah, agreed. Russia and Ukraine, basically Trump wants, it's not a formal deadline, but Trump would like Putin to meet with Zelensky by Friday. By Friday. And I assume Trump will be there too, although he's not formally committing to that yet. What do you think? I mean, right now, I think the silence is the negotiations to try to make that happen. I would hope that that's the case.

The international media seemed to believe that the Russians aren't interested in meeting with Zelensky, at least not on Friday. Why wouldn't they be? Because they're winning. but they're not winning at fast speed right no no but there has to be something in it for them more than than what they're apparently being offered right i mean i hope they do i'd love to see this thing come to an end asap like i've said a thousand times if we're going to be you know peace activists or supporters of peace then by god let's be supporters of peace uh rather than to to watch all this posturing.

But I don't know. I'm just not seeing a rush to the negotiating table. Last but not least, I believe this will be last. Oklahoma has adopted a new teacher screening test that requires applicants from blue states like New York and California to get a person. A perfect score on a 50-question exam in order to weed out quote-unquote woke people. You know, what's funny, too, is that states like Oklahoma and Kansas are having serious problems attracting teachers. Right. In fact, in fact, in places like Kansas City, Kansas, those teachers are resigning and moving to Missouri.

right where they don't have to put up with silliness like this same thing in oklahoma they're just moving to texas moving to other states where they're treated like human beings they don't have to go through this political indoctrination so here's some questions from that from that test number one what are the first three words of the constitution a in god we trust be like liberty of happiness c the united states d we the people i mean i know the answers to that Yeah, me too. If you're a teacher and you don't know the answer, then show. Why is freedom of religion important to America's identity?

A, it makes Christianity the national religion. B, it bans all form of public worship. C, it limits religious teaching in public life. D, it protects religious choice from government control. Number three, oh, here, I'll just do one more. Number five, why do some states have more representatives than others? A, they cover a larger geographical. area. B, they have held statehood for a longer period. C, the number is determined by military

presence. D, representative representation is determined by population size. I mean, you'd have to be really a retard to be able to. Yeah, yeah, very much so. Although, you know what? When I was serving in Bahrain, we had a, we had a secretary in the political section who thought that the state Department was a division of the Pentagon. Oh, my. Yeah. There are a lot of dumb-dums out there. Yeah, there are.

Yeah, this is funny. Houdini says, I lived in Oklahoma. They need all the teachers they can get. Yes, they do. And Nick Otto says the top superintendent of all Oklahoma public schools currently embroiled in a porn scandal on his TV in the office. office. The porn was allegedly seen by students. Lovely people all around.

Oh, M.G. And then we'll last, and we'll leave it there. DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, announced overhaul of the department, of her department, cutting over 40% of staff. I mentioned today in a podcast that when the ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was first created, it had 16 employees. Now it has 20,000 employees. so yeah they need to cut staff so the idea for d and i was post 9-11 right to put to yeah to have more coordination behind between all the agencies especially as it related to the budget yes well bureaucracy grows and grows and grows um all right thanks everyone for joining us appreciate it you're here monday through friday 5 p.m which means we will be back tomorrow

Thursday at 5 p.m. Eastern time no idea what we'll have to talk about but we will talk about something. Ted, do we have any ads before we leave? Oh, good, good, good question. Let's take a look at the Rumble feed here. Looks like, uh, no, we don't. Okay. Oh, actually, maybe we do. Um, you know, okay, honestly, I have to admit I'm a little greedy. It tells you how much we get and, and the money is so little. I'm going to let you go. Like two and a half bucks. Yeah. Not even. Yeah. Yeah, I'm like, hmm, You know, what's the word I'm looking for? Fuck that.

Yeah. So. Okay. Well, I'm deep programmed. I am completely deprogrammed. We will, I'll figure out how to take that, that, uh, DNI comment off line somehow. Anyway, thanks everybody. And, uh, talk to you late.

See you tomorrow. Oh, please like, follow and share the show. Just a reminder, if you're not watching us on Rumble, please do. Um, if you become Rumble, premium you can watch this for five bucks we can watch everything on rumble for 10 bucks a month and we get paid a lot lot lot lot more believe me john and i are looking at these numbers every single day to see if we're going to be able to make our rent so um yes and so far we can't so uh the things are moving in the right direction thank you so much for that thanks for all the generous

financial contributions as well and so anyway take care and see tomorrow night thanks everybody Thank you.