The Chris Cuomo Project - Jerry Springer

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

In this week’s episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, Jerry Springer (“The Jerry Springer Show,” “Judge Jerry”) joins Chris for an extensive conversation about his early political career, his parents’ experience in escaping Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, why the disaffected latch onto Donald Trump, how today’s political divisions compare to the turbulent 1960s, what he learned about America over the course of his television career, and much more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday. Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com/chris. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think I'm a nice guy and I have a reasonably good brain, but I don't have any particular talent. Not like I'm this great singer or I look like a movie star or I can act or that. None of that. I'm the basic schlub that got lucky. Hey, I'm Chris Cuomo. Please subscribe. Please follow. Please spread the word. That's what I want for my holiday treat. And don't forget, if you're an independent, and more and more that's what we want to be when it comes to our politics, then you're a free agent.

Wear it proudly. Get the merch, okay? And please watch the show on News Nation, Okay. 8 p.m. Eastern time and 11 Eastern time. If you're out, have friends, that kind of stuff that I don't have. And very cool. You can find it by looking at the top of my Instagram page and there's a finder there for you. And it's a show for independents where I'm taking a deeper look at what I think matters that you're not hearing enough about as somebody wants to be a critical thinker and make your own decisions. Now, that led me to want to talk to Jerry Springer,

but it's a circus. No, I talked to him about his show, Least and Last, although I must tell you, I've always felt that his show and others like it within that genre until you get to like the really wacky are a laboratory of who we are okay the idea that he kind of distilled some lowest common denominator i think the key word in that would be

common because i think that what unraveled on his watch and still does both his shows are still in syndication but what i wanted to talk to him about is politics do you know that not only is he a history buff but he was in the game for a long time? He was mayor. He ran for governor. He was city council big shot in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is a student of the game. He watches the game and he is worth listening to about the game. Jerry Springer. Listen, if you know anything about me, you know I've been doing AG1 for over five years, okay? Why? Well, because I heard about it just as I was looking at all of these white and translucent brown bottles in my life. Had to be a dozen of them, okay?

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If you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1. Try AG1. You get a free one-year supply of vitamin D3K2 and five free AG1 travel packs, okay? That's what happens with your first purchase. So make it. Go to drinkag1.com slash ccp. Drinkag1.com slash ccp. ag1.com ccp check it out jerry springer thank you very much for being here with me on the project appreciate it thanks to you

for having me we agree i am thankful for you as well um i i take you back in the memory time machine. It's 1976, 77. You decide not only are you politically active, not only are you interested in your community, but you want office. You are 32, 33 at the time. Yeah, 32 when I announced, yeah. What did the people in your life at that time think about you going into elected office? Of course, for the audience, you would wind up winning and being a one-term mayor of Cincinnati. What did they think about you getting into politics? Well, it actually started earlier. When I graduated law school, I went to work for Bobby Kennedy, which obviously only turned out to be a few months. And then I moved to

Cincinnati to start practicing law, but I was very active in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. So I decided in 1970 to run for the U.S. Congress as an anti-war candidate in the Democratic primary. The weird thing that happened there, the Democratic primary, now this was Cincinnati. I had just moved there and I was basically from New York. And so, you know, it wasn't as if I had any chance. However, the primary was on May 5th, 1970, the Democratic primary. May 4th, the day before, was tragically the Kent State shootings. And I was the anti-war candidate. There was such an outpouring that I wound up winning the Democratic primary, and I was 25 at the time. And that was my entry into politics.

And that was my entry into politics. Crazily, the fellow I beat was named Vernon Bible. So the headline the next day was Springer slash his Bible. So I won the primary and that got me into politics. And I lost the general election. It was close, but I lost. And then the next year I was elected to Cincinnati City Council. So the long-winded introduction to answer your question is that by the time I ran for mayor in 77, I had already been three times elected to the city council. So I wasn't unknown because I was the top vote getter in the council races. It wasn't that surprising, I guess, that I

won the election for mayor. And my family was, you know, they knew of my political interest. And, you know, I'd grown up being incredibly interested in politics. It was every night at dinner, my sister and I and my mom and dad, we would around the table each have to tell one story that we read about in the newspaper. And, you know, when I was a little boy, they all happened to be about sports, you know, how the Yankees were doing or the Knicks or the New York football giants. But then as I got older, I started to be more involved in the stories, you know, about this was the late 50s and the 60s. And so civil rights was our life. And then the Vietnam War was our life.

Very important, though. What a great gift your parents gave you, your family gave you, and having you develop that kind of cultural literacy and sense of what was happening around you. A lot of families don't do that today. Only one term as mayor. Why? They had term limits at the time. Families don't do that today.

Only one term as mayor. Why? They had term limits at the time. So the next time I got the most votes, but when we had a coalition with the charter party, there were three parties in Cincinnati, the Democrats, the Republicans and the charter rights. And in the next election, which was 79, I got the most votes. But it was charter's turn to have one of their own be the mayor. It's like a parliamentary system.

At the time, the one who gets the most votes in the citywide city council race, it becomes the mayor. So it's like everyone runs for mayor and the top vote getter is it. And I had the most votes in 77 and then the most votes in 79, but a charter right became the mayor then. And then in 81, rather than run for re-election, I ran for governor of Ohio. I lost to Dick Celeste, who was more qualified than I was. He was the lieutenant governor. He was older. He was well-known. And, you know, I really liked him. I was more liberal than he was, but, you know, he fairly won the election. It's OK. You couldn't have been president anyway because you weren't born here. That's why I left England. I was five years old. I found out I couldn't be president.

I said, let's get out of here. So, no, you're right. I was born in London. I was born in the subway twos because it was during the war. I was born in the subway tues because it was during the war. My family, most of my family was exterminated in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. And mom and dad survived, got to England where my sister and I were born. Mom and dad got out of Germany on August 17th of 1939. That date is significant because 13 days later or 14 days later, September 1st of 39, Hitler goes into Poland to start World War II. And from that date on, no more Jews were permitted out of Germany. So they were, according to their visas,

the 77th and 78th last Jews that got out of Germany. And a month later, my sister was born. And then during the war, I was born in 1944. Then when I was five, mom and dad decided they had lived through two world wars in Europe. They decided the only safe place to be, they really believed in the American dream. And so they bought four tickets on the Queen Mary and we sailed to America in January of 1949. They began the program of the Americanization of Gerald. So that's the background to why the political interest, why that. It still to me is the thing I'm most passionate about. I know I made my living in television. I didn't think that would happen. I thought I'd make my living as a lawyer, and that's what I started out.

But politics has always been my passion and remains it to this day. What does it mean to you that we have what is an apparent resurgence, if not a magnification, of hate specifically directed toward Jews now, and not just in the celebrity form of Kanye West's, you know, his crux of illness and ignorance. What does it mean to you? It never leaves my consciousness. And it's subtle. I know it's always out there. Historically, it's always out there. It's probably the one religion that prior to the creation of Israel, it's the one religion where in no country in the world are Jews the majority. You know, any other race or any other religion, you can find countries on Earth where they're the majority. But wherever Jews are,

it's always a minority, except for Israel, obviously, a very tiny minority, including in the United States. So you're always conscious of the fact that you're not really one of the gang. You know, there's that feeling. I can't tell you that I have ever personally been discriminated against. So it's not like, woe is me, woe is my parents, woe was my grandparents who were exterminated and uncles and aunts, et cetera. But what that Holocaust experience does, or at least what it did for me, or at least what it did for me, is it is so fundamental that it is the basis of my belief system. What I mean is the lesson of the Holocaust, which I believe Jews should really be sensitive to, is that you never, ever, ever judge someone based on what they are. You only judge people based on what they do. If that is your view in life, you will never discriminate.

Isn't that a big part of the motivation of members of the faith and the culture that motivated the outsized cooperation with black Americans in their own suffrage movement? I mean, Jews were disproportionately represented among whites. You know, we can discuss whether or not Jewish people are really considered white by other whites in America, the point you were just making. But why do you think so many Jewish people were so interested in helping and suffering along with black Americans during the civil rights movement early stage? It's instinctive now. When I see discrimination, whether it's against Jews or Blacks or Muslims or Native Americans or whatever,

whatever the group is, when I see discrimination, I don't go through an intellectual process why that's wrong. It's just, it's wrong. And when it gets to the extreme, you have a Holocaust. And what is frightening as we, you know, in today's social media, we watch the news every day, you know, we're so conscious of what's going on, is this is a playbook that was followed in Europe in the 20th century, in the early 20th century, even the storming of the Capitol was, you know, the same thing that Hitler did in 1923 in Berlin, the storming of the Reichstag, the idea that you start out. And that's why a lot of people were getting scared of Trump, not that Trump is a Hitler, of course not. But he the playbook is the same. You start out as a minority in your political party and you grab on to the disaffected people and the people that are not franchised or the people that think the system works against them. They're not making it economically. They're not making it socially. Life is tough for them.

tough for them. So along comes this charismatic person and says, follow me. Don't listen to what they're saying. They don't care about you. Look at what your life is like now. We'll make it better. Come with us. There's no rationality to it. It's just like when you were a kid in class and there was one bad kid in the back that kept speaking out against the teacher. You knew that was wrong, but you kind of enjoyed it. You know, he's giving the authority trouble. And that's kind of like how people latch on to Trump. It's like, yeah, give him hell, Trump. They wouldn't want him in their family. They wouldn't want him, you know, to marry their daughter or whatever, or even to run their business. He's speaking out for us, even though, as we find out, he really wasn't.

But I mean, that was the selling point, getting people to come to the rallies, getting them to chant, lock her up, lock her up. And then, of course, January 6th. And the political party, as it was in Germany, the political party didn't stand up to Hitler. His own party didn't stand up to him. They were, you know, they were inept. And that's what we're seeing today. Do you think it is by coincidence or do you believe that the former president knows the playbook and played it on purpose? Well, he certainly didn't read it because that he doesn't read. He had racist attitudes before he ever ran for president. I mean, in New York City with the Central Park Five taking out full page ads in the newspapers asking for the death penalty for them when they were, in fact, not guilty. Someone else did it. They were totally innocent. But to be a racist, don't you have to

admit it? That's the pushback. I'm not saying that's my opinion. But if someone says, no, I'm not racist, I don't believe that anybody is less than anybody else. Are they then still racist if it seems that they say things that are racist, if they don't believe that they're racist? I think that it doesn't matter if you have to. You don't have to say it. You have to believe it. And I don't think there's a question, a question in anyone's objective mind that Trump doesn't believe that blacks are less than he is. that blacks are less than he is, that these, if I can use the word, using his words,

shithole countries, that's not something he was told to say. That's what he grew up believing. And that's what he does believe. He may not say it because he thinks it's unpopular. That's your argument, that he feels it, but he knows what to say and not say. Sometimes he tries to be intentionally provocative of others. But in terms of, you know, you lived, your family's history is one of the profoundly darkest periods in human history. You then lived through as a young man, but a viable age, the 50s, 60s into the 70s. And you have perspective now of what we're going through. Do you believe today is materially different from what this country suffered through in the 50s and 60s in terms of one side against the other and that idea of anger and animus and what kind of change the country would be and how ugly it all seemed destined to be? It was worse then in terms of violence. I know it sounds silly to say,

but it really was. It really was. There's no question about it. Cities were being burnt down. There were shootings. Our leaders were being assassinated. In 1968, you had, right after the Tet Offensive, you had Martin Luther King assassinated, Bobby Kennedy assassinated, Medgar Evers. It just it didn't end. And you had the riots in Chicago at the Democratic Convention. And then in an ironic bit of fate, we wind up electing Nixon president. That's how the year comes to an end. So it was far more violent and generationally split back then. What's different now is there was some ultimate control over how society behaved because there were only three major networks. You didn't have social media. You know, everyone was getting the same story. There wasn't an argument over the facts. There was a debate over where America should go,

what we should be doing. But we didn't question whether we should have an America. We didn't question whether we should have a democracy. We fought over who should win the elections, but we didn't say, let's not have elections. What is worse now is because of technology, because of where the the ability to get all kinds of opinions by everybody all the time, all of a sudden now, we have people questioning, and this is the more dangerous part. There is not agreement whether we should still have democracy or whether we should still have a country. I think most people still, still would like to save America. But I think there's a very large number of Americans who would be perfectly fine if the most, we wouldn't have a civil war. We're not going to have a civil war, but the division is the same. And where the division back in history was geographical, the North versus the South. The division today is cultural. So there is no question, the right wing of our culture,

how they see America versus those of us who believe in the Statue of Liberty, who believe in the Constitution, who don't say terminate it or rip it up or whatever, or not pay attention to it. The multicultural part of America is the other side. You probably could draw divisions around cities versus rural areas. Put all the cities in one place and all rural areas in the other. You then could have, as Dixie Gratz wanted in the 1860s, you then could have two separate countries and fight a civil war. But here, the division would be urban America, where most people live, and rural America, which has most of the land and most of the senators. Right. I hear you about all of it, Jerry. The analysis is solid,

but I think a little bit of your passion for the left bleeds through it in as much as even if you talk to the most rabid righties, not only would they say, well, I don't agree with Jerry, but if he's right, it's the left who wants to destroy America with the anarchists and the Antifa and all those people. It's not me. I got a flag on my truck. I believe in America. You're trying to ruin it. Do you believe the rabid right really has an interest in dissembling not just the truth, but the country itself? I've never heard them say there should be no elections. There should be no constitution. They say you guys don't follow it. Well, in terms of the election, I think an awful lot of the right wing says, no, we should,

you know, Trump should be in store. Well, they say the election wasn't fair because they've been duped by, you know, agents of their own animus. But they don't say there should not be elections. They did say in many places, don't vote, don't vote by mail. They try to suppress the election. It doesn't matter what they say. Look, how many times have you seen the trucks going with the American flag on one side of the truck and the Confederate flag on the other? You tell me how that's consistent. It's yes, they do wave the American flag. They do stand for the seventh inning stretch and salute.

They do all that, but they don't believe it. They don't believe in the Declaration of Independence, where all men are created equal, where, you know, we all should have rights, where they don't believe that everyone should have the right to vote. Why do they have this constant suppression? They don't use those words because they know it wouldn't sell right now. But deep down, there are, I'm not saying it's 50% America. I said it's not a majority. But there's a large portion of this country that would be very happy if America were all white and all Christian. And when they say, I'm for America, and then they're holding a Confederate flag, and the whole purpose of the Confederates attacking Fort Sumter in 1861 was because they wanted a country that had slavery. Right. How can you honor that?

You can't. You can't. Or you shouldn't. You can't. You shouldn't. And it was a mistake for Trump. It was a mistake for all those guys to massage it the way they did. I'll give you a harder point for you to win. That one's easy. Okay. On the truck, you see the American flag and not the Confederate flag. You see the Gadsden

flag. You see the don't tread on me flag. I think that that is a more accurate. Now, it makes me uncomfortable. It makes me sad, actually, not uncomfortable, because I don't like people to have a genuine belief that they are in any way outcast. So the Gadsden flag, don't tread on me, is a misapplication or an extension of the idea of independence within, you know, interdependence, right? They're making the case that, hey, the little guy still matters. Even in the big pie, every slice still matters. And no taxation without representation.

All the things that Gadsden was supposed to be about, they are now translating that into, you, Brother Springer, and not because you're Jewish, but because you're a lefty, you want to give minorities and people who didn't come here the right way and aren't doing the right things here. You're trying to give them a pass on all of the work and hard work and personal industry

that I and mine had to go through and suffer and still do. And I'm being marginalized so that they can have it easy. And that's what the flag means to them, that the white guy is now the little guy culturally, and everybody is trying to change all the rules and change the country. Not America is bad. The extreme left is bad for what they're trying to do to America. What's your take on that? I know that's what they say, but a lot of it, I just totally have to disagree with. First of all, when you said that these people, the people that are trying to be helped with these government programs we have, that they came

over here improperly. Well, yeah. Who came here improperly? African-Americans who were brought over as slaves. They were brought over here. That's why we have a black community in America is because for the 400 years, people have been collected in Africa, sold they didn't have to be paid or paid very little, and that continues in many industries evenies, they're helping these people. You know, all of us, except if we're Native Americans, came over here because we were running away from something, tyranny abroad. We came over here with the idea that we all would have an even shot. But we don't give people an even shot. And by the way, this was first discrimination against Catholics and the same arguments. How can we have these Catholics here? The world, America is going to be run by the Pope. How can we have that? And then there were the Italians. Oh, my God, if they come over here, we're going to have nothing but the mob. We can't have these

Italians here. They're dirty. They're lazy, all this stuff. And then, of course, Jews, whatever the group was, the people that got in. Now they turn around. And instead of thanking God for the blessing that America has for all of us, no matter where we're from, how we pray to God. Instead of that, we say, let's shut the door now. Let's shut the door. Let's shut the door. Like all of a sudden, 320 million people are going to be put out because some of the people that are coming over, we're running away from the same tyranny we all our ancestors were running away from. When did this suddenly change? When does the Statue of Liberty suddenly not mean anything? Give me you're tired, you're hungry, you're poor. What's wrong with being compassionate? I'm not saying everything liberals want is a good idea. No, I don't think so at all. But when liberals, this is a generality, what I'm saying now, most of the time when liberals make a mistake, it's not a mistake of the heart. It's not because they're not trying to make someone's life better. It's because the program they came up with doesn't work or maybe doesn't make sense. That's a legitimate debate. But the

motive of the left is far more compassionate. You know, you never hear the term, which I remember President Bush term compassionate conservative. Yes. You never hear someone have to say compassionate liberal. Right. I mean, you have to modify conservative to say, I'm a conservative, but I'm very compassionate. The Chris Cuomo Project is supported by Cozy Earth. Why? Because I like their sheets. That's why a lot of people don't get a good night's sleep for a lot of reasons. One of the ones that you can control is bedding. One out of three of us report being

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You need an online consultation with a healthcare provider, and they will determine if appropriate. Restrictions apply. You see the website, you'll get details and important safety information. You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. So, Jerry, when you have people, there's no camera around and maybe they're not going to say this to you because you're going to you're going to beat them up rhetorically. But have you heard or have you heard through family that's a little younger with their kids?

I hear this all the time. Let me start it that way. Where people will say, man, my kid's got like no shot. Yeah, he's an A student and his SATs are good. Yeah, he's an A student and his SATs are good, but it's not like he's some killer athlete and he's never going to get into college because they only want minorities now. He's got no shot. I hear that all the time from, and here's the key part that I want your take on, not from bigots, from white parents almost exclusively, many of whom are Jewish, by the way, who feel that the left has changed the game to super advantage the underclass, the disenfranchised historically, the minority, and that their kids have no chance and there is no meritocracy anymore. It's all an adjustment. There are two answers to that. The first is statistically that's inaccurate. In other words, you look at

virtually every major, except the historically black universities, but virtually every major college in America is mostly white. Okay. So just going right in, it's mostly white. Secondly, part of, it's the same thing with affirmative action. Part of education is not only to give the individual an education, because it's not as if there are no colleges available for white kids. Okay. It may not be the college you wanted to go to, but, you know, welcome to life. You apply for a job. You think you're the best person for the job.

Someone else is hired. You know, that happens in life. So maybe you don't get to go to Harvard when you go to Harvard and you have to settle for a Brown University. I'm going to hear from Brown. And secondly, the point we need to make, all of us who are white, and particularly if we're reasonably well off, I'm not even saying wealthy, just reasonably well off, we are where we are because everything we buy, everything that was built, everything was done because it was

affordable and it was affordable because we hired minorities at very cheap prices. So we were never really competing with them. We didn't have to compete with them in terms of what neighborhood we would live in. We don't have to compete with them. In other words, we have the life we have today. Imagine if we didn't have minorities in our history where we would have to pay to get these beautiful homes built. I mean, what they're really worth. You're correct about the imbalance, but tell me this, you're a history buff. Who has ever been happy to surrender advantage? Nobody. But, you know, if my daughter doesn't get into a particular place, I'm not happy. But I don't pretend to convince myself that the system isn't fair when I look around what I got. Oh, my God. But you're more susceptible

to somebody saying, hey, Jerry, what just happened to your daughter wasn't fair. It's this new psycho lefty, give the minorities everything and your kid won't have what you have. And you may not be able to keep what you have. In fact, you may not even be able to call your daughter a female soon if they have their way. They're changing everything to affect their new world order. OK, now we're going into another subject. But it's all conflated, right? Because it's cultural.

So they all dovetail. Well, yes. The things they don't like, they throw into one thing and then say, by the way, it's young people are coming into their own. And this is the world they will now move into. This is the world we left them with. And they want to change some things. When you buy a new house, you want to, well, I don't like the way they've got this set up. Let's paint the walls. Let's do this, whatever. So the young people are coming into the world now. They're

coming into adulthood and they realize that some of the discrimination we've had over our history, they want to change. God bless them. It's their country. It's their world. Why can't they? 20 years ago, your political career was dead. I'd say 10 years ago, maybe. Your career was dead. If you would run for political office and say you supported gay marriage, you would have to say, well, I the relationships are OK. Obama had to finesse it. Right. If it wasn't for big mouth Biden getting out there in front of him and saying he's of course, we support gay marriage. He probably would have slow walked. Exactly. But the same with Biden. It's because young people are standing up and saying, don't tell me who I can love. That's how you did it.

And God bless you. That's what you believe. That's what you do. That's the way you want it. But why is it the business of anybody else who a person can love? Have we not enough hate in the world that now we have to even start keeping out lovers? It is interesting that the litigation that seems we have to even start keeping out lovers? It is interesting that the litigation that seems as though it's going to make it through to codify gay marriage.

It is interesting that some of the guys on the right feel that they have to put religious freedom things in the same bill. And, you know, as you well know, but people should also understand, there is no need for this particular offset in this bill. They just see it as a cultural offset that, okay, we'll say what Jerry's saying. Everybody should love whoever they want. Marriage is about love. It's not owned by any gender. But we got to put some religious freedom stuff in there also, because if it's against your religion to do something like that, you shouldn't be forced to do it. The law takes care of that. The law takes care of it. The law doesn't force anybody to marry someone of the same sex. And these places are, you know, almost every Christian church. It's not that they have to marry people. It's hard enough to get married in a Catholic church these days.

You got to go through all, jump all these hoops. But that is the cultural schism that you're talking about. They feel that they have to have a win because they don't see as clean a win in gay marriage as you do. I'm not even sure the politicians that are pushing it necessarily believe that. Then why are they pushing it? Because their constituency, they live in a state where virtually everyone is Christian and white, and they want to get reelected. And that's an important issue to the people. I'm not

downgrading these people. I'm not casting judgment. I'm just saying I disagree with a lot of their views, but they're entitled to have that views. But that's why the politicians are responding to it. Trump's the easy one, because we don't have to then get into whose religion we like and who doesn't. But just dealing with with Trump, you know, because you cover these people all the time, you know very well that 90 percent of these Republicans in a private conversation will say this guy's he's out to lunch. Yeah. He's, yeah. They admit, they know that it's, but they say it or they keep silent when he says these

horrible things or does these horrible things because they want to be elected. Well, it's a number of factors, right? People are angry. White people specifically are angry. As you know, again, as a student of history, there's a reason that the Greeks gave us the word demagogue, but they gave us no positive opposite. Fear and prejudice work when it comes to persuasion. People will act out of self-interest, which is self-protection primarily.

And when they are afraid, they're looking for an agent of their animus. And that's why Trump pulled off one of the most interesting things in my lifetime politically, which was developing a constituency that he has no real connections to. This is a guy that when you and I both met him in New York many years ago, he wouldn't shake your hand because he was a germaphobe, but he was really just afraid of others. You know, he didn't want you to sully him in any way, but what he had, which wound up being more important than his wealth, his acculturation, his identification by geography, or any of the things that a lot of his constituency would usually reject as an other, not them at least,

he made up for by being able to empower them in a system that he said he knew, that he had worked, and that he hated as much as they do. And the enemy of your enemy is your friend. What I've learned, and I knew it then, but I understand it better now, yes, there are a lot of passionate lefties like you, but not so many are as motivated by fear of relative extinction the way people on the right feel right now. I'm not saying they're right or they're wrong. I'm saying it's how they feel. They're politics. And the good news is, and I got two other big points I want to go over with you. And I appreciate you for this because you're so smart and people are going to benefit so much from the conversation. I'm not saying

lefties aren't passionate. I was raised by one. I get it. I got them all over me. What I'm saying is. By the way, I loved your dad. I did too. And I miss him, although I'm happy he's not seeing some of this stuff. Yeah.

Go ahead. The fear that I see on the right is special. What motivates the politics on the right, the fear is profound. It's existential for them. Now, that is very powerful medicine, and it's being abused by some of the people who are pretending to be their friends and allies and leaders. But that is more powerful than what I see on the left. And I don't mean that as a beneficial comparison. I mean it in terms of the stakes for these people. Fear is real. And they have that more than the left has it right now, at least in my perception of it. The big concern and the good news, I see good news. And I don't mean this. I'm not Pollyannish, although I have no problem with Pollyanna.

People misunderstand her story. The core of this country, the core, the majority, the largest part, does not feel any of the things that we've been discussing. These are almost exclusively the providence of magnified minorities that have been blown up into super relevance by social media and by lazy reporters like me that use social media as a proxy for Vox Populi and say, well, 50,000 people said this about Jerry Springer. That's where America is. And that is not where America is. The majority is not Twitter. And that's our salvation. And we saw it in the midterms that the majority of this country, we call them swing voters. Now they're independents,

whatever you want to call them. I call them free agents. They are going to be the last word on most of our movement in this country. And I think that's a good thing because I believe the core of this country is still reasonable and not persuaded or dazzled by extremes. That I clearly agree with. I agree. The majority still will, you know, if I'm betting, I'm betting that America survives. It's threatened, but it will survive because I think a majority of the people are aware you just said. But let me disagree on one item you said. Please. The fear is visceral. I agree with that.

Lower income whites are feeling this fear. I would suggest that is a white perspective perspective because can you imagine being African-American? I'll start with African-Americans who live in urban areas that are overwhelmingly low income. You want to talk fear? Even if you're a doctor, an African-American attorney, and you're driving home at night, every time there's a police car, you're looking at the rearview mirror. Is he going to pull me over? Is he going to be stopped? They live with fear every single day. That's visceral. That's real. And they see it every day. Kids grow up with it. And African-American kids and not just African-American, minority kids grow up and live in areas or go to schools where it's tough. And every mother worries,

please be home by dark. You know, I hear gunshots. Where are you? Where are these shootings taking place? Most of them. I'm not talking about the mass shootings. Those are crazy people, but they're also white, by the way. In other words, it's part of the culture we live in. I hear the same things you do. I swear I do. In fact, I would say that in terms of my show business, half of my audience is the constituency you're talking about, disenfranchised white people. So I'm in touch with that. That's, you know, country music is the background music for, you know, my career. And yet, those of us who are white, it's impossible to be in their shoes. Because if we have an incident, we'll talk about it at the next party. The people

that live with this every single day of their existence, you hear very successful African American men talk about whether it's Obama or whatever the profession is. And they talk about, I live with that fear every single day. Jerry, you are right. You are 100 percent right. And that happens to be a cultural part of education that a lot of people in this country still don't have because they're not blessed with living around and loving and having relationships with people who are different than they. For all the diversity in this country, there's still a lot of silos and pockets. But you lose the election to me. If I'm making the case that I'm making about white fright and you're making your case because

you are never going to get votes from people by saying, ah, there are people who have it worse than you. Get over your fear. All pain is personal. And what Trump has done and what a lot of other people on the farther extreme of the right have done is say they're coming for you. They're coming for you. They're coming for you. They're coming for your kids.

They're coming for your gender. They're coming for your faith. All of the things that used to mean America to you, they want to change for these new people. And yes, it's familiar to a historian. But when you live in it, it's powerful. And they find good examples. You are correct that a majority of white people will say exactly what you just said they say, which is, you know, don't tell me that other people, I'm feeling pain, so I'm going to vote my pain. And that's why a majority of white people do vote Republican.

But a majority of America votes Democrat. I'll say it again. The last seven of eight presidential elections, more people voted for the Democratic candidate than the Republican. Only in 2004 did more people vote for the Republican Bush. Every other election, Hillary Clinton got more votes than Trump. Gore got more votes than Bush the first time. So it isn't as if Americans, see, we keep getting back into what white Americans are saying. But when you talk America,

you talk about a country of all kinds of religions and races, et cetera. And they feel the visceral pain you talked about. They, too, feel. And since there are more of them than white Americans. Well, there are more of them than there are of scared, white, susceptible Americans to this these politics, because let me tell you, eight out of 10 haters that I have on social media are white men who are balding and with beards. Not all of them, but predominantly. And a lot of them have Italian last names. They should turn their face around and then their hair would be on top. I never make hair jokes because I'm afraid of the jinx. Let me ask you one other thing,

though, and it should be very instructive to everybody who downloads this and or watches it and listens. I have a couple of TV questions for you. What do you think you learned about the country through your journey in daytime and syndicated TV? We're all alike. Some of us just had better luck in the gene pool of parents. Some of us were born maybe with a better brain and better health. But we're all alike. We cry when we're sad. We scream when we're hurt.

We laugh if it's a good joke, even if it's not a good joke. But we're all the same. Some of us just dress better. I was never better than anyone who was on my show ever. That's not true. That is not true. But if I equalize it, if I say if I had been born in their situation and they had my parents and they had my I think I'm a nice guy and I have a reasonably good brain, but I don't have any particular talent. Not like I'm this nice guy and I have a reasonably good brain, but I don't have any particular talent.

Not like I'm this great singer or I look like a movie star or I can act or that. None of that. I'm the basic schlub that got lucky. I got lucky because there are a lot of smart people in the world that could have, someone could have picked them out and said, you host the show. And the show took off. So I don't fool myself as to how I became financially successful. The show took off and I was the host. And that's how it all happened. You know, when the show was over,

this would always amaze me. And we would joke about it backstage. When the show was over, they could have been fighting each other on the set and everything. And when the show's over, they're backstage, you know, their wig is off, they're disheveled. They come up to me, Jared, can we have a picture? Could you hold my kid? I mean, they're just, and you know what? They're like everybody else.

I think that what you learned from your show, and I don't mean this to be cynical or rough, socioeconomics matters as much or more than any other distinction that you want to draw about people. And I really believe that if you put a white person, a brown person, whatever hue of humanity you want to choose, you put them in the same situation, they're going to largely come out the same way. And I've always been very interested in the research about the separated twins, not the conjoined ones, but where Jerry goes to live with this family in Cincinnati, and Chris goes into Queens, and they meet 35 years later. And even though they have the exact

same genetics, they are very different people. And they'll have some funky similarities. Maybe we scratch our face the same way or something like that, but we're going to be different people. Nature and nurture both matter. And I felt that that was a universal truth that the show happened. And it was also a pioneering show also. When it comes to what you regret, if you play into that at all, I'm not a big regret person. But when you look at the legacy of what the show was about and your TV career was about, what do you not like? What do you wish were different? Yeah, I don't want to have to make something up because I honestly don't.

The best answers are always made up and fake, by the way. Yeah, because the truth is, I loved doing the show and I loved the democracy of the show. In other words, we only had two rules. And the rule was the foul language would have to be bleeped out, which it always was. And the rule was the foul language would have to be bleeped out, which it always was. In fact, sometimes during a boring show, the guy would hit the bleep button a lot to make people at home think that he's cursing, but he wasn't. So that's just an inside thing of what, you know. But what I love was there was no censorship allowed.

None. We were never allowed to say no to someone because we didn't like the subject matter. We didn't like their point of view. In fact, we had on our show neo-Nazis, and you know obviously how I feel about them. And I didn't have the right to say you can't be on the show. You had the right, but you didn't think it was right. But I believe that there shouldn't have been any censorship. So if I have, as you say, some lefty on screaming something that some other person sitting at home finds very offensive in terms of a point of view, then if that person can be on, then who am I to say I don't like your you know, the show wasn't about what I believe. You know, I do a little commentary at the end of the show, but that wasn't the basis of the show. The basis of the show was you weren't allowed to be rich or famous. In other words, if you were known, you couldn't be on the show. Once Universal bought us, the show had to be about dysfunctional behavior of people that aren't known and people that aren't wealthy.

And we just wanted to let people go at each other in terms of what they believe. You know, for so many of the guests, for so many of the guests, this was the only time anyone ever asked their opinion on anything. They don't have parents who listen to them. They don't have kids who listen to them. They don't have an employee that listens to them. They're not the boss. And it's not that they're going to come on our show and be famous. In fact, they don't even use their real names. So you can't get famous by being on our show. But you could just, you know, they're they're sitting on stage.

It's empowering. It really is. And you know what happens when people don't get to go on Jerry Springer. They are representative of a group that is desperate to matter and to be counted. And it leads you into susceptibility to people who say, I can get you noticed. I can give you a voice. And sometimes they don't have good motives. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. I see that all around us right now. I remember back in the day before I knew you, before I was really even in this business,

you know, it was easy to joke about your show. And there was a whole genre of talk shows like that that were like circus TV. I mean, I didn't want to host one of those shows because I would have been decking people all over the place. I would have gotten fired in about eight minutes. But that's who we are. You're not cherry picking, really. You're not exaggerating beyond the true palette of personality in my experience in this country. And I felt that your show and even all the way back to Donahue, who I always liked. That's who we are. Your show showed who we are. And I always felt like, hey, if you don't like it, one, you don't have to watch it.

But two, don't be that. Don't be that. The best vengeance is to not be like what you oppose. The one thing our system does kind of guarantee at the end is that we do reign in the extremes. is that we do reign in the extremes. We don't, I mean, Trump was an aberration, but he was an aberration by his personal behavior, not necessarily by his politics.

In other words, he was a Democrat before he decided, oh, I better be Republican. So there was no political philosophy with Trump. It was all what's good for me. But other than that, throughout history, you know, by the time you come to the general election, we're choosing between two fairly middle of the road candidates, which angers what you call the left and the right and what everyone calls the left and the right that angers them. But the truth is, in the end, and what everyone calls the left and the right. That angers them. But the truth is, in the end, you got to appeal to the middle. And we're seeing it with Ron DeSantis right now.

During, you know, several months ago or before the last election, he was saying in Florida, oh, he was saying things worse than Trump. But watch him. If he becomes the front runner, and if it looks like he will get the nomination, he is going to start moving towards the middle like you've never seen before. Well, that is traditionally what happens. If anything, recently it hasn't happened, but it's supposed to. Yeah, it is. The only place it doesn't happen is in Congress, but because there you're dealing with a little neighborhood. And so the only constituency that congressperson has to worry about is that four or five mile area around his house. Well, but also you're being elected to oppose now. That was never the rule back when

you were in the elected game, even my, you know, my father's whole stint, people would ask you what you did and how you got it done. And there had to be collegiality, not because you're all in cahoots, but there had to be cooperation. I was much more happy with pork in bills than I am with opposition as a legitimate position where all I'm here to do is to stop Jerry from getting anything done. Look, I believe we can get to a better place. I just don't think it's going to be easy because the easy way is very tempting. And the easy way is what we're doing right now. You and me on a ticket. Unbelievable. We'd go right to the bottom. It'd have to be self-funded and you'd have to be the face on the poster. No, no, no, no, no. I would stand next to you and I would say, yeah, yeah. What he said. Yeah. Yeah. If you don't like it, come talk to me. Jerry Springer,

I appreciate you. You're great. You really are. God bless and be well. I told you, Jerry's smart, but he's crazy. He thinks I'm running for office. He could probably still win. It's nice to get a return to reasonable, even though he is an old white guy. So subscribe, follow. Please, if you're an independent, you're looking for gifts, I got a cheapie for you. Get some free agent merch. And remember, the money's going into a kitty that we are going to use to give to others. That's what we're going to use it for in the main. And I am on TV. I am on TV again. Thank you for asking me to come back. I've been back for a couple of months.

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