The Young Turks - "Actual Facts"

Episode Date: April 22, 2023

Audio reveals top GOP lawyer's 2024 strategy: Make it harder for college students to vote. Trump tries to make Taibbi’s IRS visit about himself: "The price you pay for being honest in the USA." Sen. Ted Cruz's telling call with Fox Business host caught on newly released tape. Elon Musk’s dad Errol says he can "prove" existence of an emerald mine in a new bombshell claim revealing its location. Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin fail to attract small donors for potential re-election campaigns. HOSTS: Cenk Uygur (@CenkUygur) & John Iadarola (@JohnIadarola) SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ https://www.youtube.com/user/theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ https://www.facebook.com/theyoungturks TWITTER: ☞ https://www.twitter.com/theyoungturks INSTAGRAM: ☞ https://www.instagram.com/theyoungturks TIKTOK: ☞ https://www.tiktok.com/@theyoungturks 👕 Merch: https://shoptyt.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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315. Drop it. Power, power panel, Jake, Yugar, John Idola, David Schuster, Power, Power, Power. All right. All right, guys. So fun show ahead for you guys, fun clips about Donald Trump, stories about Ted Cruz, Elon Musk. Will we be making fun of all of them? Ding, ding, ding, correct. We have a winner if you answered yes. We will. And then of course, later in the program, is honking your horn a First Amendment right? Is it freedom of speech?

An actual court case? And there will be one here as well. So you guys will get the decide. You'll be the Supreme Court on this one. All right, fun for everybody. Johnny Pye. I think it is a right, and I think it's acceptable to force you to pay $8 a month to be able to honk it. It's still speech, anyway. With that said, let's start mocking people now, starting with this. If the Republicans are able to hold the state house and reclaim the state senate, then maybe it's possible to get rid of 45 days of early voting in Virginia. 45 days. I mean, there are several things that they can do. They can get rid of same-day registration, but they can't do that now because the Democrats still hold the

state Senate. The person you just heard from was Kleda Mitchell, who's important for a couple of different reasons. First of all, she was involved in the Trump legal team that tried to prosecute their court cases having to do with the big lie back in 2020. So if you're just curious how good of a lawyer she is, she willingly chose to be. involved in that effort and you remember how it went. But importantly there, she's not talking about 2020. She's not talking about their grievances about past elections. She's talking about the ways they want to make the future elections unwinnable for the Democrats. There was nothing there about new ideas, nothing there about motivating voters, all of it. And you'll see more soon

is about trying to stop as many people as possible from voting. But in particular, young people, which we're going to be focusing on. Before we get into more of her video, though, here's a little bit of the context. She was giving a presentation at the Republican National Committee donor retreat in Nashville and Saturday. The presentation that she was giving had more than 50 slides and was labeled a level playing field for 2024. Offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turn out among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic. So that's the idea. Here are a few of our ideas.

Virginia, we have a great task force in every county in Virginia, and we have a great statewide coalition. The governor just signed a bill yesterday that does away with signatures on absentee ballot applications and ballots. And now it has to be the last four digits of the social security number and a birth year. And we need to make sure that there's transparency and people are watching and verifying. That makes Virginia back in play, frankly, to be able to have some authentication. And again, having first day in-person voting campaigns. Wisconsin is a big problem because of the first day, because of the polling locations on college campuses. There are five-ones and three is their goal for the Supreme Court race was to turn out 240,000 college students.

And that's the Supreme Court race. And we don't have anything like that. And we need to figure out how to do that and how to combat that. She's interested hypothetically into both of those things. How to motivate the voters, I guess, but then also how to combat it. And I think we all understand where she's going with that. She doesn't like that the polling places are on college campuses. She doesn't like that it's so easy to vote.

She doesn't want it to be easy to vote. She doesn't want those college students to vote. It's really as simple as that. I think, look, I don't know on any given day how many people are watching our show for the first time. Maybe they're just beginning to tune into political news. Like this might come as a big surprise to you. You look at the picture of her in there and she looks like the most benign person in the world. But what she is doing is getting together in secret, except thanks to Lauren Windsor for leaking the video,

to coordinate with other powerful Republicans to try to stop as many people from voting in as many ways as possible. getting rid of the polling places on college campuses because they have no game plan to get the students to vote for them. They just don't want the students to vote at all. They want to stop the early voting. They want to stop the same day registration. They want to make it as likely as possible that people that do absentee ballots make some sort of minor error in terms of what they've signed so that they can nullify it. Every single bit of this is designed to stop Democrats from being able to successfully vote because that is the only strategy going forward. And they're not really being open about it. This was after all a private meeting, but thanks to it being leaked,

we know exactly what they're saying behind closed doors. Yeah, here's my summary of it. They scared. Okay, so I'm gonna tell you all about younger voters and how screwed they are and John's gonna tell you, et cetera. There's a good reason why they're scared. First, let's note that Clita is a super fun name. Secondly, let's note that undercurrent keeps breaking story after story and has broken more stories than giant cable news outlets. That's because as Lauren Windsor is trying and giant cable news outlets don't try to break news that make the powerful uncomfortable. Okay, now to the main event. Look, Republicans don't want you to vote. They've been saying it forever and over and ever. In my book, Justice is coming. I give you quotes from

Donald Trump, Lindsay, Grandpa, all these guys who say outwardly in public, well, we have voting, well, Republicans will never win another national election. We have to make sure we prevent voting to give you a sense of one of those and how long back it goes, let's go to the Paul Weyrick video. Now, this is a guy who is probably the most pivotal person in, probably in history, certainly one of the top three, but maybe number one in the conservative movement in basically my lifetime. So he started Alec, which is the main corporate organization that pushes all the bills at the state level. He started a moral majority. He started the Heritage Foundation and listen to what he said now 43 years ago.

They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. There you have it, and they've been following Paul Weirich's famous comment. Ever since make sure less people vote less people vote screw democracy. We don't want democracy. We don't want majority rule. If we have majority rule, we'll lose. Isn't that interesting for decade after decade after decade? Republicans always knew that they were the minority. Did mainstream media ever tell you that? Isn't it weird that they didn't? Instead, they may frame the country as if they're sent to right. But now it's not just that they're losing overall. Man, they are worried to death about younger voters and they should be. So she mentioned it was.

and had they got their asses handed to him in that Supreme Court race there, 240,000 young people showed up. Well, it's not just the ones from college campuses. Listen to what Scott Walker, former Republican governor of Wisconsin, very right wing, said about how worried he is about younger voters. To me, the larger issue here, we've seen it predict to Wisconsin, but across the country, is younger voters. In Wisconsin, last fall, we saw about a 40-point margin that younger voters gave to the Democrats running for Senate and governor. We saw similar margins in Pennsylvania, part of the reason why you have John Federman in the U.S. Senate in Arizona and Georgia, elsewhere, and just this week in Wisconsin. Okay, here's what I would add to that. Okay, so guys, in the short term, you'd be nuts to relax. The Trump and DeSantis still have a perfectly great chance of winning the next presidential election, the Republicans have a good chance of winning the Senate, they've gerrymandered the hell out of the country, etc.

But that 40 point margin ain't going away. It just isn't. It's the handwriting is definitely on the wall. So that's what I'm telling you if you're progressive is impossible not to get discouraged in these dark bleak times and it looks like there's no hope and no one fighting for you. But in reality, the cavalry is already here. It's just that no one can see it. It's except the Republicans.

That's the great irony of this because they're seeing it in the numbers super clearly. They're like, ah, stop them for. Stop them from voting. All right, before I go to David, one last graph for you guys, because I love this one so much. Let's go to U.S. presidential election party preference among voters age 18 to 29, the young, okay? So now here's what it's going to show you. As you see there today, or at least in 2020, this gets wider every single year now. There's a 32 point lead for Democrats that is crushing, gigantic, makes all the difference.

and that is the reason that Joe Biden won the election, period, period. He won because of the young voters, and they showed up 11% more than they did in 2016, and it made all the difference. Okay, now having said that, did you notice the other super interesting thing in that graph? Back in 2020, it was tied. It was tied. And back in 1980 through 88 through 90, the Republicans had the advantage with younger voters. So there is this mythology again corporate media just ignore everything they say because it's just like a cloud of disinformation and propaganda and they are not left wing they're not liberal again I talk about it in the book ad nauseum in justice coming the media is on economic issues which is the most important thing and overall conservative deeply conservative lies to you about how conservative the country is when the country's not at all conservative but so one of the top mythologies is oh young people are always liberal

And then when they grow up, they mature and smarten up when they become conservative. Again, I've got data overwhelming meta studies in the book that shows that is not at all true. Total 100% mythology has never been true. No, once your political identities imprinted between ages of 14 and 24, roughly speaking, it stays with you your whole life. Okay, is it for every person? No. Is it on average? Yes, overwhelmingly so. So that is why not only are young people being progressive now super relevant, they were not always progressive.

That's also not true. The young used to be Republican. I know that seems unbelievable, but they were. Now they're overwhelmingly progressive. And by the way, they're not Democrats. They're progressives. There's a big, big difference there. And that's why the Democratic Party, with all their corrupt incumbents, are not super thrilled about this news either.

David? Well, I think it's, I think it's great we're doing this segment because it is fun to watch the Republicans realizing the demographic time bomb is starting to go off and we're able to see it in real time. And instead of focusing on well, maybe we should moderate our positions on, you know, a lot of this has to do with the Dobbs decision, overturning Roe versus Wade and states, rather than just saying, oh no, now it's up to individual states, now you're a number of Republicans and conservatives saying, well, yeah, we said states rights before, but now yeah, there should

be a national ban on abortion, a national ban on the abortion. In Alabama, if you get raped and impregnated, you still can't get an abortion. And this kind of stuff has gone so far to such an extreme, you're starting to see some Republicans, a couple of them out there saying, okay, you know, some of the more moderate Republicans, maybe we need to pull back. Maybe we've gone too far in terms of taking away women's reproductive rights. But instead of having that debate in the Republican Party at the RNC meetings, no, they're having the debate of, well, how can we best interfere with college campuses with voting? How can we make it more difficult? And to me, that's, that's,

That gives the way the game. They don't care about the fact that they're moving farther and farther away, even for moderate voters in this country. All they care about is, well, how can we, how can we narrow things so that it's only the right wing, hardcore people who want to go out and vote on the Republican side? And maybe the people who are willing to go through all sorts of hoops and hurdles to vote on the Democratic side. Yeah, I'm going to have to jump in, I guess, and be Johnny Downer a little bit. I love the trends. I think it's great. I think, you know, why exactly you see this divergence?

I think it's fascinating. I think part of it has to do with the development of independent media, which was much less prevalent 20 years ago. You're able to give people information they wouldn't have otherwise gotten. But I also think the ability of regular people to communicate via social media, I think has really helped to organize, you know, this new wave of labor activism, environmental activism, all of that. I think there's a lot of really interesting things we could dive into there.

But in terms of fighting back against it, the Republicans obviously are not just going to lie down and see their taxes go, So they only have 10 times as much money as they could spend in a human life rather than 20 or 30. They're doing stuff like passing 150 bills they've introduced at restricting ballot access just this year across the country. Two of the more radical proposals include a Texas bill that would allow presidential electors to disregard state election results and a Virginia bill that would empower a random selection of residents to void local election results. There's something like that in Georgia as well. So both in Texas and in Georgia, they're trying to set it up so that if a couple of these cities, which tend to be more democratic, dare to vote, then they can just nullify

it, not count it and give the electoral college votes to the Republicans. So that's fun. They have a lot of different, like you mentioned the gerrymandering. They do have the gerrymandering. That can affect the control of Congress. They have the ability to gerrymander, obviously, state legislative districts as well, which is why you have situations like Wisconsin, where it seemingly. doesn't matter how popular progressives get, how popular Democrats get. They have a very small

portion of the total power. But then even beyond that, we can flash forward years into this, they're still going to have the fact that small rural states give them completely outsized influence over the Senate. As long as they can hold on to that, they can stop a lot of progress. And even once they can't, they can bake in decades more of control, unearned undemocratic control by choosing Supreme Court justices. They've effectively, as long as some people watching this show have been alive, been unable to win presidential elections with the popular vote, and yet they have a super majority on the Supreme Court. They have more influence after decades of losing at the national level. And so a lot of this, I think, is positive. I think it's also

the product of the efforts that regular people make to go out there and convince people of their values and of their policies, so don't stop doing that. But there is so much system Structural baked in protection against evolution and against progress that we need to do something about. Yeah, I'm going to give my last comments over to the members. By the way, come do the show with us. TYT.com slash join. We'll have the link down below. If you're on YouTube, you get it to join button, you get it.

All right. So Gabby Marino says, how about a compromise? Voting should be exactly as restrictive or permissive as buying a gun. Okay, excellent idea. John Bojino says, is there anything more on American than trying to stop people from voting? Excellent point. You can make the case that it's fundamentally American since they've been doing it from the very beginning. Yeah.

But it is supposed to be majority rule. It is supposed to be a democracy, although the Republicans. By the way, that's why they have that stupid talking point online where it's like, we're not a democracy, we're a republic. Yeah, that doesn't mean you can cheat in an election. Okay, that doesn't really explain anything. All right, Tuley McSooley says, congrats, this is what you get when you fail to pass voting rights with a full majority, not to mention a slam-dunk campaign promise, exactly what I was thinking on the way here. I forgot to say it.

Thank you. I love doing the show with you guys. And Jenks left tricep of fury says the GOP spent so much time trying to cheat the election system instead of actually passing a policy that would make someone want to vote for them. It sounds exhausting. And that's the main point I wanted to make. She's like, oh my God, they get out of bed and they just vote these students. it's terrible. Do you need us to build an obstacle course? Something like, do they need to play American Ninja before they get the vote?

Yeah, voting should be easy. We'll live in a democracy. How about you try to earn their vote with better policies? Same thing with immigrants. It has never occurred to Republicans because they hate young people and they hate immigrants. So it never occurred to them to maybe try to get their vote. And that's why they're in the situation they're in now, which is for the first time in a long time reeling. And that is why we've got a little bit of hope now. Yeah. Yeah, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think, I mean, you can't, you can't overstate how angry and infuriated

and pissed off young people really are right now. I mean, it used to be the case, okay, you know, if this was just, if elections were just about, you know, taxes and economic policy and there weren't any pressing social issues. Okay, yeah, in America, we have the right not to participate. And there were a lot of Americans who for decades have chosen not to participate in the political process. But I think you're seeing a generation, Jack, and I know you and John have talked about this before, people are far more invested now because Republicans have forced so many Americans to be invested in political system, because you can literally see your rights, especially for women, being taken away before

your eyes. And that is infuriated, I think, an entire generation. 100%. I think it's time for our first break, though. When we come back, a little bit of an opportunity to make fun of Donald Trump. I'm never going to pass that up, especially on Friday. We'll be right back. All right on T.I.T. Chang and David with you guys. Of course, everybody check out David Schuster on Rebel headquarters where he's killing it. You're going to love those videos. And obviously check out John on Damage Report. That starts our programming at 1 o'clock Eastern every day. So John, yes, hit us. You will not love those videos. But you might love this one.

So interesting to see the IRS make a strange house call. That was the title of the article by the Wall Street Journal. When Matt Taibi, during his house testimony on Twitter and all of the bad things that the government has done, that is not a coincidence. It's just plain, brazen and somewhat stupid. But even more brazen and stupid is the way they have handled me leaking information, which is totally illegal. Okay, if you're having trouble following what he's saying, I totally understand it. I can barely follow it, and I do this as a job.

Basically, Donald Trump will take anything that's in the news, and he will make it somehow about himself. Even if it has nothing to do with that. And so we're going to return to Donald Trump, but he was talking there about Matt Taibi, and that's what we need to cover first. So just last month, Matt Taibi was testifying before Congress about the Twitter files back when that was a thing. And there was a Wall Street Journal editorial about how apparently, like Trump says in that video, the same day that he was testifying before Congress, IRS agents apparently showed up at his house in New Jersey. Okay. And so apparently the taxman that went there left a note instructing Mr. Taibi to call the IRS four days later. Tybee was told that a call with the agent that both his 2018 and 2021 tax returns have been rejected owing to concerns over identity theft, which might or might not be true.

Either way, it does seem weird to have someone show up to your house about that. Is that really the first way they would try to contact you? In any event, he has since apparently provided the committee with documentation showing that his 2018 return had been electronically accepted at the time. So he'd have no reason at the time to believe that there was anything wrong. And he says the IRS never notified him or his accountants of a problem after he filed that return more than four to half years ago. He says the IRS initially rejected his 2021 return, which he later refiled, and it was rejected again, even though he says his accountants refiled it with an IRS provided pin number. Okay, so that's apparently what has happened, assuming that all of that is true. Certainly a weird, suspicious little situation.

It doesn't seem immediately to have much to do with Donald Trump, though, does it? But don't worry, Donald Trump is going to try to connect the two. I had a done deal before running for president. They broke it. They treated me worse than they treated the Tea Party or the evangelicals. I could have easily made a very good deal with the IRS during my four years as president, but I thought it would be inappropriate to do so. Maybe a conflict of interest.

I didn't want that. Besides, I already had a deal from before my presidency, a deal which they chose not to honor. So now I'm demanding the original deal without late changes and the rules and regulations. So that deal would be harder to make. Most people would say that after watching the Biden family take advantage of government, I should have made a deal during my term. To me, it was a conflict. I thought it was inappropriate, so I didn't do so.

But this is the price you pay for being honest in the USA of today. It does suck to see someone so just routinely honest, being abused by the system as much as this. I'm gonna keep it real. I follow Trump a lot. I've been accused of having Trump derangement syndrome. So you'd think, and if anyone would know what he's talking about, it might be me, but I don't know what the hell that stuff about a deal is. It sounds sinister. I can say that. It sounds like he was close to doing some illegal stuff, but I guess he backed off of it. So that's good. Why you're like confessing to this in your weird little video, I don't necessarily understand. But before we get to discussion about that, I will remind

you that while he is implying that the IRS is uniquely unfair to conservatives, that's why he listed the IRS, which again, he's misconstruing what actually happened, evangelicals, they were unfair to Matt Taibi or whatever. I guess they're unfair to him. Well, they were supposed to be auditing during his pregnancy, presidency. He didn't do that. He didn't do that. He had other issues during Melania's pregnancy. Is he a person with a uterus? I don't know. So anyway, he was setting up affairs during the pregnancy.

So anyway, he didn't get an audit during the first two years, and only when the Democrats put pressure on the IRS to actually do something about it, did they finally look into him? And we found out, as a result of that, why he might not have wanted to have been audited for so many years. He had foreign bank accounts while president. He paid $750 in U.S. federal income taxes in 2017, which makes his 2020 payment of $0 seem like a lot. He reported no charitable contributions in his last year as president, despite promising to give away his annual presidential salary of $400,000. So conflicts of interest, which he says he wants to avoid, as well as avoiding his tax burden and lying about charity. If anything, the IRS did him a major

solid by hiding all of this unethical and potentially illegal stuff for multiple years. Okay, so the, I think I do understand what Trump is referring to and the deal he's referring to. I will try to be the Trump whisperer and explain it. But first, Taibi, if IRS agents actually showed up to his house, that is super weird. Yeah. Like, I'm not sure I've ever heard of that. And so, but Taibi is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. It was. with a tied in a mystery, whatever that's saying is. So I don't know, is he not telling us further context to that? Like he didn't tell further context of the Twitter files?

Unfortunately, it's possible these days. He used to be such a great reporter. So anyway, that's- Maybe it just happened. The way it happened, it's possible. If it did, it's weird. It is weird, okay. So, and I'm not trying to hate on Taibi.

I don't think the IRS should go to anybody's house, okay? So now to Trump, which is a funnier and more interesting. So he starts with a video on Taibi, and he's like, they went to Taibi's house. Now back to me, okay, and I had to deal with the IRS before I got to be president. And then when I was pregnant slash president, I could have done the deal, but I didn't do the, hey, first, Donnie, no one has any idea what you're talking about. Like, it's amazing how much people live inside their own head. You know, people always say, oh yeah, Donald Trump's living his red free inside your head.

He's living right free inside his own head. He's like, the deal, I had the deal, everybody knows the deal, right? Okay, so no, so he cheated on his taxes forever. The IRS has been chasing him forever, and they've been, in my opinion, deeply incompetent, bureaucratic, and scared. Just if he cheated on his taxes, say he cheated on his taxes, just get to some bitch already, okay? Should have done that a decade ago, well before he even ever ran for politics, because this isn't about politics. You don't get to cheat on your taxes. So, okay, they apparently were going to do some deal, and they offered it to, but he said,

he didn't want to take it when he was president. In other words, he thought, I might never have to pay this. I'm just going to run for president again. I win again. I'll delay it for another four years. What am I going to pay them $100 million now for, right? Even if I delayed eight years, I saved so much money on interest, et cetera. You'd be a sucker to pay it if you could delay it.

But now he's out of time. He's out of options. It's, in my opinion, the IRS is apparently now finally coming for him. And so that's why since it's inside his head, he's like, As you know, with Taibi, I had to deal with the IRS. And right now they're trying to take my money because I'm a lifelong tax cheat. But everybody knows if you're a right winger, you can cheat on taxes. And the right wing loves the elites.

And I'm an elite. So they let me cheat. Okay. So that's what that was about. And the guy's such a joker and he doesn't even realize it. David. I'm an elite and you let me cheat is right up there with. If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.

Bravo, Jen. I also wonder at first on Taibi, if Taibi got swatted somehow or maybe like just somebody just showed up his house just to frighten him because I didn't like the way he was going to testify. Who knows? As far as Donald Trump, the thing that first jumps at me and is it feels like Donald Trump keeps losing more and more steam on his on his fastball, right? I mean, he still got more, he'll lose more charisma than than DeSantis will ever gain. But Donald Trump clearly seems to be slowing down right before eyes. And that's pretty remarkable because I think the thing that carried him was, you know, regardless of your political views, he was somewhat entertaining and he was charismatic when he was running in 2016. He doesn't seem funny anymore. He seems to have lost some of the charisma.

And then as far as the deal, I would just be happy if, you know, maybe we could make a deal with him. If he would say, look, I did not uphold the deal I made to protect and defend the Constitution, I'm willing to cut him some slack and say, yeah, maybe the IRS reneged on their deal with you. But you got to come clean. Can I ask, maybe this is a stupid question, but very brief, what deal? What is it like they weren't, we didn't get his taxes forever. What is this massive deal that he's supposedly doing? So, John, we don't know the deal. That goes to David's point about how he's like losing touch with reality.

So we know that he owed $100 million in taxes. And that has a lot of money though, okay, even if he says he has $10 billion, You have $10 million, it's just bting on the $100 million, who cares, right? But no, he doesn't have a $100 million. He's lost two different times he lost over $400 million because he's the world's worst businessman. So apparently IRS offers some sort of deal to him saying, hey, we'll let you off the hook for, now I'm going to make up numbers, like $50 million or $35. And whatever the number was, right, instead of the $100 million, that's why you make a deal.

And sometimes they do that in order to settle something instead of fighting through it for a decade or two decades and never getting any of the money, right? So but Trump is to David's point like so oblivious now and living on a different planet that he thinks everybody knows the deal. Yeah. And apparently the IRS has and offered him a deal that is not as good now. That's why he's saying, I'm demanding that we go back to the original deal. And he thinks that all of his fans are robots, and there's a good reason to believe that, and that they will all then go to the IRS and go, we want the original deal, we want the original. And then David Schuster will go and interview them and say, what's the original deal?

They're like, I don't know. Well, they might just say, well, the original deal might have been in Donald Trump's mind to keep it all quiet, right? He calls the eight under number, just like we can all do and say, hey, I owe $10,000, but I can't pay it back? Can we cut a deal and make it $7,000, spread it over two years? Oh, sure, the IRS will take that. Donald Trump called the internet number, figured out, okay, yeah, maybe it's your point. Instead of $100 billion, I'll pay back $70 million. Here's how we're going to do it, and everything's going to be kept quiet.

But then the courts got involved and damn it, the courts ordered Congress to get those tax returns. And Donald Trump was mad that a secret was blown. Well, last they checked, even if the IRS wanted to go back to whatever original deal they made with Donald Trump, that's irrelevant. Because the courts have already said, no, it's already Congress gets this stuff. Yeah. But but David, that's exactly right. And Donald Trump never understands any of that. He doesn't know how the government works at all. He was president for four years, never once bothered to ask an assistant, hey, wait, how does this work? Right? So, but look, I'll end on this. And this is really important. The real deal for Donald Trump, and I think this is what he's holding in his back pocket. And by the way, also why he might have taken the classified documents, it relates to what a moron he is.

But the deal is he's eventually going to go to all these prosecutors, in my opinion, it's just my opinion. And he's going to, or maybe they'll offer it to him. You're not going to go to prison, but part of the settlement for whether it's in Georgia or New York or the federal case is you pay a penalty and you cannot run for office again. Now then everybody's a winner, right? because the establishment doesn't want him to run, keep it real. We don't either, but for completely different reasons.

We don't want to lose democracy. The establishment doesn't want to lose power, right? And so they're hitting him with every legal avenue that they had. Remember, they had all that stuff the whole time, and they never chose to use it when he was giving trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the rich and corporations. They never used any of this material. Now they're using all the material at the same time. So the MAGA base is not completely wrong that there is a political element to this. They are wrong that he isn't a criminal.

He's a lifelong criminal. He's broken so many laws and he's never been held accountable because he was part of the elites and he was funneling trillions of dollars and tax cuts to them, right? But now they're trying to hold him accountable and Trump doesn't want to go to prison. That scares a living crap out of him.

And so at the end of the day, in order to save face, what might happen, it was in a sense, my original prediction when he was president, which is I'm gonna just take my ball and go home. Okay, as long as you guys leave me alone, and don't put me in jail and don't further humiliate me, I'll go home. Now, I think that America would take that deal, but we'll see if I'm anywhere near right. Yeah. Well, why don't we turn to something that's thematically linked a little bit?

We're going to move on to the C block and dial back to 2020, the big lie. Take a look at this. It can't just be, you know, someone tweeted this. It's got to be demonstrable fact that can be laid out with evidence, because that's what a court of laws are going to look to, not just an allegation, but actual fact. So that is a conversation that we only have thanks to Abby Grossberg in her lawsuit against Fox News of Senator Ted Cruz talking with Maria Barteromo in the days immediately following the 2020 election. And to hear Ted Cruz tell it there, he's being totally logical and

sober and reasonable. If you're gonna be claiming that this election was stolen, we're gonna need hard evidence. Interestingly, fast forward a couple of months and he's one of the guys trying to stop the election from being certified in the Senate. So something definitely changed there, interesting that Fox initially didn't want us to see that video. There's actually more of Ted, take a look at this. And so I'm hopeful, you know, I hope when Rudy comes on, on the show tomorrow, he has some of those facts, and I hope the legal team continues to lay out the specific evidence because that's what it's going to take to prevail in court.

Fact check, true. That is what it would take. Senator Cruz was a lawyer for a long time. And what he just described is the actual process. it is interesting that behind the scenes, he sounds more tethered to reality about that process than in the way he acts in his public life. That is, that is interesting. I noticed that too. It puts him in the company of literally everyone else at Fox News and what they actually thought about the big lie. Now, as soon as

they go out there to give a speech or they're on the Senate floor, they're broadcasting on Fox News, then all of a sudden they believe all of this stuff. And by the way, he didn't really fill in there, Ted's hopes, four days after the election, was that Rudy Giuliani was going to come and was going to lay out all the specific evidence. I think we all remember how that went. And he said that that would be what would be required to win in court. Well, we know that they lost dozens and dozens of times. So if Ted Cruz was questioning whether they had the goods, and then we have a couple of months of truly embarrassing failures from the entirety of the Trump legal team, And then he emerges on the other side, ready to try to overthrow the U.S. government anyway,

then that is some underhanded anti-democratic and completely hypocritical behavior from Ted Cruz. Yeah, I think this story is telling of Ted Cruz. I think it's telling you Maria Barteromo. But most especially, it's telling of Republican voters, unfortunately. So Ted Cruz behind the scenes sounds like a reasonable person. in front of the scenes, he seems like the least reasonable person you ever met, minus Donald Trump, right? Marjorie Grant.

Okay, fine. He's in the top ten, okay? So, but behind the scenes, he sounds like a perfectly rational, intelligent person. That's because he actually is an intelligent person. He went to, like, I think he went to Princeton and Harvard Law or something like that. He's just a slimy, slimy actor. Like, he couldn't make it into Hollywood, so he became like a cheesy, political actor. So behind the scenes, he's like, Maria, you know that tweets are not evidence.

You need actual evidence to present in court. You might, we might not even have a prima facie case. You know, I would hate to go through voir dire on that. So make up words to prove your point, Jane. And you're like, wait, who is this guy? Right. Meanwhile, he's talking to Maria Bartramo like she's a child. Yeah. And that's because he thinks she's super dumb. And so he has to say to her, now Maria, you know tweets are not evidence. They are not admissible in court.

Can you say it with me, Maria? Not admissible in court. Rando tweeted is not evidence. Really like, huh? She goes on air and she's like, oh my God, there's evidence. There's tweet after tweet. right? So this does not speak well of her. And nothing speaks well of her. She, you know, that's a fourth collateral damage of this story. CNBC had her as a legitimate news anchor for

like decades. She's humiliatingly unintelligent. So anyways, now to the Republican voters, the most relevant folks. Ted thinks you guys don't want the truth and can't handle the truth. Tom Cruz. Or no, Jack Nicholson. Yeah, sorry, Colonel Jessup. So he's like, okay, we need real evidence. Oh, we don't have real evidence. And then he goes on TV, he's like,

oh, this is outrageous what happened in the election because he knows his voters don't want the truth. They want lies. They want to be lied to. That's why he's giving them lies. So Republican voters, how about you actually ask for the truth? I know that's like a wild, outrageous thing.

to ask for in in Republican circles, but you ought to give it a shite. Who knows? Maybe you'll even like it. David. It is remarkable, Jank. I mean, what a great acting job it takes when you realize that your character, your, your natural personality. And I thought this about Ted Cruz from the beginning, that he is a reasonable guy, that he is a smart man, that he is a smart lawyer, that he understands the stuff in order to dumb himself down and seem like he's one of these rednecks who who doesn't know much, the acting job that it requires to be able to appeal to people who are low information voters. This is remarkable stuff. And to your point about being a slime ball, absolutely, because what he was acting for was the accumulation of power. He didn't really care

about whether he get an Oscar or an award or anything that. No, he just wanted to rise to the ranks politically. And if that meant dumbing himself down in the eyes of voters and going along with Donald Trump, because that's the way the winds were politically blowing, even after Donald Trump and criticized Ted, his wife, and his father, he was willing to do that. That's how craven he was for political power. And so yes, he continues acting. And to your point about Maria Bartromo, the former money honey at CNBC, they would, when she was at CNBC, they would just feed her the information that she would say.

She didn't really know that much about economics or about Wall Street or anything like that. And so unfortunately, for her, the gig is up when she goes to Fox News because it's clear for everybody how stupid she is. And obviously clear to Ted Cruz that when he has to explain to her what basic evidence is and is not, that is, I mean, maybe we should be shocked, but maybe it's not that shocking for people who've known Maria Barteromo through the years. Really fast before we end, I feel like there needs to be a little bit of balance because both of you guys, I think, have been pretty brutal towards Maria Barteromo. So I want to balance it out by giving the perspective of someone who's actually worked with her, her executive producer, who we found out thanks to the leaked text messages said that she should never be put on live TV. That is brutal. Thanks for balancing us out in that direction. I try to be fair.

I apologize. Yeah, but guys, if you don't work in television, you might be thinking, well, what's the difference between live TV and online TV? No, they're saying the scripts have to be written out for her, put in the prompter. And Burgundy will read anything in the prompter, but she can't do anything else. If she has to actually ask questions and interact on live TV, like the three brain cells melt. And she's like, tweets are evidence. Okay, look, I'm being brutal towards her, but she's earned it.

She's one of the top liars about the 2020 election. And she can't seem to tell fact from life, if her life depended on it. It's stunning to watch her struggle on live TV trying to like connect one thought to another. She's like, how do I do this? I can't tell. And we're not the only ones who think that. Producers who work with her every day think that. Yeah, with that said, we have to take our second break.

When we come back, Elon Musk challenged the Internet to do something, and we're going to take a look at their success in accomplishing it. you guys. I was reading a member comment during the social break. And we ran out of time. We just wanted to tell you. He was saying, well, you should write a book about these things. I did. Good news. Prove it. You could pre-order at t.yD.com slash justice. And the great dim witty also wrote in our member section. I think the question I'm asking is, why would anyone not be in love with David Schuster? Wow. Man, people are really friendly on a Friday. I got to say, I got to come back more often. Yeah, it's like a Trump rally up in here.

Turns out friendly they are. It's a Schuster rally. I like it. How little do they know? All right. And by the way, thank you to Chris Burst for gifting five young Turks memberships and rocking a wall for gifting 10. You guys are amazing. And MK just became a member.

So MK, welcome to the show. We like doing it with you. I loved your ultra. Anyway, let's jump into some fun news. About a week ago, billionaire Elon Musk has offered online to give one million doge coin to anyone who can prove the validity of the rumor that's been going on the internet for a number of years that his family made a bunch of money in the emerald mind business, mind business. He responded to Doge Designer because I never want you to forget that despite the fact that he is the richest

man in the world, his life is responding to accounts called Doge Designer. So Doge Designer had said that he would offer 69,000 or whatever, and I say he because it is. He responded, I will pay a million Dogecoin for proof of this mind's existence. Okay, now this is not the first time that he has indicated that he is frustrated with the presence of this rumor online. He's previously said the fake emerald mine thing is so annoying. Like, where exactly is this thing anyway? Now, we have a person who popped up and I think provided some pretty compelling evidence

of its existence. But before we get to that, I do want to mention that in the same way that he's frustrated with the existence of the rumor, I'm frustrated with his frustration because he doesn't get to be frustrated that it's out there. It's out there because of him. Back in 2014, he did an interview with Forbes, and he bragged about the existence of the mine saying, this is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an emerald mine in Zambia.

You said it, buddy. Now, that's not the only thing. He also talked about the private jet that used to fly around, you know, regular guy stuff. But he was the one that launched the rumor. Now, if you go to search for this article, it's no longer available on their regular website. It was taken down. There's never been any explanation as to why it was, but I think we can kind of guess. It is still, however, available on the internet archives.

So you can see it there. Also, by the way, he used to routinely tell an anecdote about how he sold some of his father's emeralds to Tiffany and company while his dad was sleeping. See, that article proves two things. One, that there were emeralds and that he profited off it. And two, that when he was younger, he was John Malaney. But anyway, this story is not fundamentally about Elon Musk. It's about Errol Musk, his dad, who's been in the news a few times over the past few years.

So he didn't interview with the U.S. son. And he claimed that not only did the mine exist, but that was what got him and his son sort of launched on their way in terms of riches. So describing the moment that he heard that his son had challenged the internet to prove this, He said, when I read that, I wondered, can I enter because I can prove it existed. Elon knows it's true. All the kids know about it. My daughter is three or four emerald pendants. Elon saw them at our house.

He knew I was selling them. By the way, he provided picks of the precious gemstones, which he says came from the mine. He says what Elon is saying is that there was no formal mine. It was a rock formation protruding from the ground in the middle of nowhere. There was no mining company. There are no signed agreements or financial statements. no one owned anything. The deal was done on a handshake with the Italian man at a time when Zambia was free for all. Not even he knew exactly where the border was. At that time, it was like the

Wild West. So that really, I think, paints a picture there. You might have thought that it was bad in some way that their family made it rich off of gems, but everything reads there as the most disgusting sort of colonial exploitation. They didn't even basically have a legal system. I just went in there, I didn't even deal with their people. I talked to some Italian dude, and then we just took their minds and gave them literally a couple of dollars a day for their labor. So the whole thing incredibly gross. But he goes on to say that the reason he thinks that Elon keeps pushing back against the rumor, which he started, is Elon's main concern is not to appear to be a trust fund kid who got everything given to him on a plate.

That's what his naysayers are pushing. It's not true. Elon took risks and worked like blazes to be where he is today. So he's not even being too hard on his son, although he has been quoted in recent years as saying that he's not proud of him. He said, sure, we got a bunch of money off of the gems, but he still worked hard. The emeralds helped us through a very trying time in South Africa when people were fleeing the country in droves, including his mother's whole family and earning opportunities were an all-time low. That's all. I'm sure that if you were to dig into the context that led to the people fleeing what he's talking about there, nothing about that would be bad either. But anyway, what do you think? He seems to have won. He should

get the million doge coin, I think. Yeah. So I think this is a really interesting story. And I don't think that it's a clear cut loss for Elon Musk. And so let me explain. First of all, is Elon Musk a liar? Yes. And so look, you can argue that everyone lies around the edges at a minimum, right? But that's not, this is not around the edges. He's trying to create a mythology that he came to the country with only $2,500 in his pocket. And he just built everything by himself and he had a he says he had a hundred thousand dollars in debt when he left left college and so just from the ground up boots the only thing he had was two bootstraps that's all he had right so he's lying on purpose for that and in this case you can see

because his dad man he just totally destroyed this lie the dad says yeah there's no document sound it was on a handshake and we barely remember where it was near the border so Elon must knows for a fact that it's super hard to prove. And that's why he was like, oh, yeah, I'll give money to anyone who could prove it. So wait, you know it's true, but you think it can't be proven. So you want to lie about it to try to make yourself look smarter, better, et cetera, right? So buyer beware, that's the kind of lies that Elon Musk tells.

And it appears on a regular basis. Yeah. So, okay, but, so where's the catch? Where's a silver lining for Elon Musk? Well, his dad explained, no, we did have the emerald mine, and I gave Elon money. And when he wanted to go to America, it was my idea. I suggested it. He went. I gave him the money to go, et cetera.

And then at some point, his dad sells a yacht to get him, give him more money and his brother more money. And it's another point, he sends him $115,000. Okay. So this idea that Elon Musk, I got, should I work at McDonald's or Wendy's for a little extra cash? Oh, no, right. My dad sent me $115,000. Decades and decades ago. Yeah, oh, that was, yeah, like 1980s, early 1990s.

Okay, so that understand that. Again, you're wondering, where the hell is the silver lining? Well, to me, I didn't know how much the Emerald Mines were, right? Because it was so vague. He mentioned, Elon Musk mentioned it once. That's where it comes from. But now we have a sense of scale. So I didn't know if he had like $100 million or $100,000.

And it turns out because his dad's clearly not pulling punches, I don't think his dad's lying about this. No, it wasn't $100 million. You know, he got a major leg up that 90% of people, 95%, maybe 98% of people don't have, right? And his dad had yachts and mines and all that stuff. But he wasn't like Trump. Trump, Trump's dad gave him $413 million. Okay, I heard Trump during the original 2016 campaign. He was like, no, just got a small loan in 1970 of a million dollars, just a small loan.

No, a million dollars is not a small loan. And back in 1970, that was an unbelievable amount of money, but even that's not anywhere near true. No, your dad gave you over $400 million. And what did Trump do with it? No, he bungled it away, because he's a fool, right? Right? And Elon Musk, okay, so it turns out his dad helped him a lot, but he wasn't mega rich. So that's my honest take on it. And I'm kind of interested by that. I didn't know that. It gives me context. David. I find it amazing that a guy who is the wealthiest man on the planet can have such huge insecurities.

And maybe we shouldn't be surprised, but this idea that, I mean, Freud would have had a field day with Elon Musk even before the story came out. What is it about it's not a binary choice that you can't be, oh, your dad gives you. you money or you work really hard. Both can be true. Sure, he got some money from his dad and they helped get out of South Africa, fine. And he worked really hard out of college to do what he's doing now. Yeah, that's fine. It just the idea that, I mean, Elon Musk has a habit of making stories and making things worse, taking Twitter, making it worse. He has this great idea for Tesla, but he treats his employees horribly. So there's a stink factor with Tesla. And now a story that could have been, hey, I was a kid. My parents helped me out. Hey, my parents

help me get out of Southern Indiana. Big deal. I mean, maybe a little different from Elon Musk, but okay, most people would accept that your parents are going to help you do something. And then you say, look, I didn't have any control of what my parents were doing. They helped me get out of South Africa and I worked really hard after college. And that's that. And it's not a big story. But Elon Musk makes it a bigger story, almost reaffirming his own insecurities because now everybody's questioning, oh, Elon Musk is so insecure. And what is it about the gems that bothers him so much? And is he really so fearful and why is it? It's strange. Yeah, Elon Musk, I think, is the greatest example ever of something that we've seen other examples of.

I think Trump is a little bit of this. If Elon Musk had just not opened his mouth, think about the reputation he would have right now. If the last five years or so, he hadn't spent every day desperately blank, just everything, desperately, desperately wanting to be thought of as funny, desperately wanting to be thought of as cool, as hip or whatever, connected. He is desperate about everything. He is try hard in vaguely human form. If he had just not done that, if he had stopped trying to have right-wing grifters be interested in him, if he had just done the work, or I should say, let the engineers and scientists who produce the cars and the rockets

because he has no training in that area do the work, then he would be the Tony Stark of the modern era or whatever. But instead, he keeps talking and it is impossible for a rational person to watch the decisions he makes, Listen to the things that he says and come away thinking that he's as smart as he wants us to believe he is. Yeah, and I'm just going to double down on what David said. My dad helped me. So why don't you give your dad credit? Like that's the decent thing to do. That's the honest thing to do.

And but the difference is for progressives, we think that, yeah, working together is the right idea and that no one truly ever does it, quote unquote, on their own. You always need some help and you should appreciate the help that people give you. But for the right wing mind, no, it's all me. I want all the credit. I don't want my dad to get any of the credit. I don't want anybody else to get the credit. I don't want the actual story out there. I want extra credit that I didn't even deserve.

Oh, I started out as a pauper. It was a tale of two cities. And I came up anyway and conquered the world. All right, if you're going to be a weird or liar, you would have gotten tons of credit anyway. You went from like a guy who was dad and rich dad, but wound up becoming the richest man in the world. a big jump but nope never satisfied it has to be all about him that's how the right wing mind is and if we could just really fast go to the last graphic to remind one reason why he might not want to give too much credit to his dad is I'll remind you of something we covered a year or two

ago his dad had two children with his stepdaughter just you know it's not attached to the mind thing I just think it's noteworthy talk about daddy issues well maybe it's maybe they're understandable now that he doesn't want this association with his father because because he's repulsed by his dad's sexual piccadillos. And so it's a little more understandable. But man, this guy needs to get in front of a Freudian psychiatrist. Yeah, yeah. I mean, clearly there's some issues there. Okay, and clearly his dad's not like the world's greatest guy either.

He just happens to be brutally honest in this case. Okay, we unfortunately are out of time. Everybody check out David on rebel headquarters. Everybody check out John on damage report. We have an amazing second hour for you guys, including the fun story of. is honking free speech. The courts have weighed in. Okay, we'll be back.

I'm your host, Shank Huger, and I'll see you soon.