The Young Turks - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez On A HUGE POWER PANEL; Trump Sweeps Poverty Report Under The Rug

Episode Date: August 3, 2018

A portion of our Young Turks Main Show from August 3, 2018. For more go to http://www.tytnetwork.com/join. Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Nando Vila. AOC responds to conservative media’s framing of healthcare reform. Fox News reacts to AOC. Internal docs show Trump lied in UN report. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Thanks for watching. Oh, yeah. Drop it. Power panel. Great guests with you guys, obviously huge guest here in Nandovila. Great to have you back. Thank you. I hate you.

All right, no, seriously, by the way, Nando was the executive producer of Trump Land, an Emmy nominated documentary, and he had a follow up to that host and producer. Great to have you back, Nando. And then Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, everybody. Yay! Great to have you here on set. It's awesome to be here. You know, this is where it started in a lot of ways, so.

All right, excellent. Thank you. Thank you for coming out. I can't wait talk about these stories. And lovely and brilliant Anna Kusparian, great to have you. Super happy to be here. Yes. So by the way, in the second hour, James Thompson, another just Democrat, is going to be on the panel.

He is running Kansas' fourth district and he's closing in. Speaking of closing in, so on the same day, James Thompson is within four points in Kansas in that district. A district that they, that the Republicans had an over 20 point lead in. And now it's only down to four, okay? And just in over the wires now, over the wires, is that a still thing? It happens. Anyway, Beto O'Rourke within four points of Ted Cruz.

Here comes Beto. Yes. There goes Ted Cruz. By the other night, I wrote after old school, I wrote an ad against Ted Cruz and I'd love to run one day. Give us a chance to that. All right, so Anna's gonna do most of the stories today, and we've got amazing stories for you guys. How's the economy doing?

What kind of denial is Donald Trump in? To me, the story about how the Trump administration asked the ACLU just to do its job, to do the government's job, amazing. That's maybe the most amazing story of today. But I'm gonna do the first two stories for you guys, and they do have a little bit to do with you, Alexandria. So, okay, so let's get started. So there are now good folks and some people with not such good intentions attacking one

of our panelists here, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and also using the wrong frame. So for the people with good intent, like Trevor Noe from The Daily Show, I don't think he means anything bad by it at all. But when you were on Alexandria, he said there's those who say, look, I agree with you, but how do you pay for this? How do you make it economically feasible referring to Medicare for all? There's some who argue and say, I hear what you're saying, Ms. Cortez, and I'm with you, but a $15 minimum wage may stifle economic growth.

So before I get to the bad guys of Fox News, okay, Alexandria, what's wrong with that framing? Well, I think what is wrong is that we end up falling into a trap. We end up falling into the rights trap of framing, which is that whenever they want something, we never ask how much it's going to cost. Whenever they want to authorize unlimited war, whenever they want to cut our tax revenue down by $2 trillion, we never ask, how are you going to pay for some of the largest expenditures that we've had in the last 20 years?

It's only when we talk about education, health care, and housing, do we talk about empty pockets? The truth of the matter is the way that we pay for these programs is the same exact way that we pay for endless war, trillion dollar tax cuts, except the only difference is that This is an actual investment in our economy that creates wealth on the other end, whereas all of those other things do not. So I think that's exactly right. And I really think that for guys like Trevor, I'm positive he has no bad end at all.

And that goes for most of the CNN anchors, et cetera. But I know that everybody's used to the conservatives calling the media liberal. But I really believe that their mindset, their framing is not remotely progressive. I've seen it happen in almost every debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. I've seen it happen in New York Times and Washington Post stories. Whenever there is a policy that can help the average American, they go, yeah, but how are you gonna pay for it? And whenever there is giant, trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the rich, they're like,

oh, well, okay, I guess that's gonna stimulate the economy. No, it's not. And one other thing that before we get to the Fox clip, my question is, how can we afford not to do Medicare for All? Exactly. Because doesn't Medicare for All actually save money? Exactly. And this was even from a Koch brothers funded study. They thought it was going to be this big gotcha. And then when they did the cost benefit analysis, they find that not only what we know, that the U.S. medical system is one of the most, if not the most expensive one in the world, but also that it's going to save us billions and if not trillions of dollars in some circumstances. So it's a system that is just more beneficial. And that is why almost every developed nation in the world has it. Exactly.

Yeah. And I wanted to just quickly touch on what you mentioned briefly, which I think you don't hear a lot of politicians talk about this. And so I'm happy you mentioned it. When it comes to the Department of Defense and our defense budget in general, you're right, no one ever has a conversation about, oh, how do we pay for it? And it's because there's so much fearmongering about, oh, the others, we need to protect the country.

No, the majority of that money goes to private contractors when it doesn't need to. And there's a lot of waste in the military. But just to give you some statistics, some numbers, the Trump administration has asked Congress to approve $716 billion for 2019 for defense. Okay, that's $716 billion. No questions about how we can afford it. And this is following a massive tax cut for the wealthy. And that's the bank bailout right there.

That's how much the bank bailout cost. Yeah, and I think that if they were on these programs, the Sunday morning programs, etc. It'd be an excellent question. Is that practical? Can we really afford that? And so whenever Bernie Sanders, for example, talks about an or you do Alexandria about the college for all, which is just $75 billion a year, you say, well, just, yeah, that's about one-tenth of the defense budget. So we don't have money for the American dream, but we have 10 times as much money for defense contractors. But now I want to move on to Fox's hilarious attack against you anti-gas Medicare for all.

Same topic here. They, unlike Trevor Noah, they do have bad intent. And you're going to see it here in what I find to be a very funny couple of examples. Here, let's watch. Senator Bernie Sanders and congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been busy campaigning for government-run health care. This staple of the socialist platform comes with an eye-popping price tag. I'm sure there are some smart Democrats in Washington, certainly out in the country, who are not on board with this. The fact that so many of their leaders are talking about this, it is absolutely staggering.

And obviously, you know, you look at the numbers and, and of course, it's expensive. We also know that it doesn't work. And you can point to all those. That's the real key. Yeah, you can point to all these reasons for rejecting it. But it's the moral issue. It's the idea that these people are perfectly okay with just taking things from people who work and giving them to people who do not work. So say you spend the $33 trillion over the next 10 years, what is the result of that?

Well, as we've seen in these other places that have implemented some kind of government-run health care, we have seen a lack of care. We've seen quality of care go down, a lack of doctors, a rationing of care, fatal delays. And so this idea that Bernie Sanders says he wants Medicare for all to work, the key word there is to work. Italian doctors are using cardboard as splints in third world. clinics of southern Italy. So if you break a limb while you're visiting Italy this year, you don't want to do it down there because they don't have enough material and supplies

in order to make a splint for shattered arms and legs. In Venezuela, sick people are taking dog medicine. That's how bad it is in Venezuela. Okay, well, I found that to be hilarious. But first, let me get a reaction from you. Well, first thing that I think is funny is that they talk about these things, but they don't talk about the fact that people will forego their medicine because they can't afford it here, that people will go through real measures of brutality here in the United States because they can't afford their own medicine either. Even after, for example, what was happening in Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico was set up before the hurricanes, not just to be a tax haven, but it was a tax haven for pharmaceutical

corporations. The story that wasn't being told after the storm was that actually IV bags. were largely produced in Puerto Rico, and there was a shortage of IV bags across the United States in the aftermath of the storm. But these stories don't get covered, because we don't want to talk about the dysfunction, the brutality, and the inhumanity of our current United States healthcare system. So they pull these stories out of nowhere, but they don't talk about the fact that the U.K. has routinely higher health care standards than the United States does, that people in Canada

don't feel like they have to go bankrupt if they have... We need to talk about a relatively new show called Un-F-The-Republic, or UNFTR. As a Young Turks fan, you already know that the government, the media, and corporations are constantly peddling lies that serve the interests of the rich and powerful. But now there's a podcast dedicated to unraveling those lies, debunking the conventional wisdom.

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to, if they have a need for chemotherapy. So it's like this cherry picking that's designed to reinforce this boogeyman narrative when, in truth, we're just talking about having a humane economy and a humane country. Yeah, they say, are these places that have socialized medicine, like Germany, Norway, Finland, Japan, where they all, Canada, they all have far better health care system than we do. That's measured. They live longer, they have a healthier population, and it's at half the cost. And they never ask, how can we in America afford to pay double the cost of other developed

nations per capita and get worse results? But there were so many funny things in there, but the one that took the icing was it is immoral to give people healthcare. It's immoral to give them healthcare? And the way, did you see the way that that analyst framed it? He said that it's taking from people who work and giving it to people who don't work. No, it's not. Medicare for all is for the whole country.

And we don't think of that with any other successful socialized system here in the United States. We don't think about that when it comes to Social Security. We don't think about that when it comes to teachers. We don't have this us versus them frame when it comes to these systems that are beneficial to all of us. We don't say, oh, you know, we're taking from all of these rich people so that we, so that older people can retire with dignity, because these are systems that we all buy into.

We will all buy into Medicare for all, and we will all have better healthcare because of it. It reminds me of what Anna said a couple of shows ago. You know, the other socialist thing in the country is cops and firefighters. So using their logic, it would be hilarious to say, now we gotta have cops for the poor, they're taking for people who work, and giving cops to people who don't work. Yeah, also, here's my question, like, where are all of these people that don't work that they're talking about. Who are these people that don't work in America?

Because this, it is, it is code. It's a way of demonizing anyone who, by the way, which is fascinating because I would argue that a huge portion of their own audience falls under this category. But, you know, we're talking about people who just can't afford these massive premiums, these massive deductibles, they're working, they're working hard. I mean, it's funny because while they simultaneously tout Trump's low unemployment, rate, they also talk about how, oh, look at all these people who aren't working, they're not working, no, people are working. They just can't make ends meet because of how

the system is set up. Absolutely. I mean, it's just, we do not want to admit right now in this country that we are at levels of income inequality that mean that we are a working poor nation. We are a nation of working poor people, of people who are making, you know, a large, large plurality of this country is making less than $40,000 a year. And more of us are living in cities than we ever have. It's not enough to make ends meet. And we don't want to talk about the fact that that is the stark reality right now. In terms of morality of the health care system, under the current health care system,

under the current status quo, about 30,000 people die every year from preventable health diseases that could be treated in any other system other than our own. So the morality is whether you allow the deaths of tens of thousands of people every single year in order to maintain our current system. And that's just absolutely grotesque. And I think that a lot of the estimates in regard to how much we would save with the Medicare for all system actually underestimate the amount we'd save because preventative care is huge. And that's the reason why healthcare in Cuba, which by the way does not have the best resources, has done so well. They focus specifically on preventative care. And that prevents people from

getting sicker and getting diagnosed later on, which ends up being a lot more expensive, right? So I just, the whole thing about morality, to the people on Fox News, morality is all about the wealthy should be able to hoard their wealth and everyone else should suffer. That's their idea of morality. So now, I want to do a related topic here, and it's about something that's in the news today. And then I want to later, believe it or not, there's even more.

attacks against Alexandra for Fox News. Shocking. Right. And what was it? 131 attacks in one month about from Fox News, which is amazing. It's great. It's free media. Yeah, it's great.

So, okay, so today the Trump administration announced that they are going to do short-term health insurance. They're going to expand it. It used to be a better. Hardly anyone used it because it's kind of useless in that window. Now they're going to allow it for a whole year. Now, to be fair to them, it is significantly. It is significantly cheaper than regular health insurance. Now, the part they don't tell you is it's significantly cheaper because you get almost nothing.

So they'll take your money and you'll get almost no insurance in return. So first of all, they can, under these new plans, preexisting conditions are back. So they can deny you if you've got a preexisting condition, including acne. I don't know who they're going to have with clients. Allergies, that's right. And if you, there's caps on how much you can spend in the year. So if you've got a cold, you might be okay. Although it doesn't cover prescription drugs either.

So that's all out of pocket. So I really don't know what you're buying. But if you've got cancer and it runs over, like, well, sad day, you passed your limit. I guess it's time for you to die. And if you get a condition within the year, well, sad day for you again. We're done with you. So that's not really insurance. It's a trap.

And they're so loosely regulated that they're, and I'm not making this up. There are some of these plans, right, skinny insurance plans, where they can even decide which days of the week you can get treatment. So based on what some of the wording says for some of these plans, you can only get treatment Monday through Wednesday. But any other day, sorry. That's one more on that. I mean, that's so unbelievable.

Some you can't get treatment during the weekend at all. So if you got hurt during the weekend, try not to bleed out, okay, but we'll get to you on Monday, first thing, probably. And then they talk about socialized medicine. It takes too long. But if you have cancer in some of these plans, within the first month of the plan, they will not treat you. Yep. But wait, if I have cancer, it's growing inside of me. We've got to go right now.

I know, but I'm sorry, it doesn't cover that. So just wait, we'll treat you a month from now. Yeah, it's the equivalent of a payday lender insurance plan. It's predatory, it is exclusively and explicitly for profit, and it has absolutely no real incentive to actually spend this money, your money, that you're spending every single month on health care. I think it says here about six, only 65% of the money that you pay into this plan might actually potentially go to health care costs, which is much, much lower than the 80% mandated by the ACA. Yeah, a good sign that this is a scam is that the insurance companies are incentivized greatly to push them on customers because of what you just said. They can keep that other 35% in profit rather than having to have a dedicated to medical care.

So yeah, this seems like just a giant, giant scam. Yeah, and under Obamacare, there was a lot of issues with Obamacare, but one of them was, they said, hey, you actually have to spend the money that people pay into health insurance for their health. So you can keep 20%, but 80% has to. to be actually spent for health, otherwise it's a scam. The Trump administration says, scam, did somebody say scam? Okay, no, you don't have to spend 80%, it's up to you, and so now they're lowering it.

It might be even lower than 65% in some of the cases. The profit margin might be up to 50%. That's why they're paying 20% commission to the brokers instead of 5% normal. They're like, push this product, because all we do is make money off it. We don't actually provide any insurance. And by the way, if you're a woman, good luck, it doesn't cover prenatal or maternity. care. So I'm sure, though, that the right wing is outraged, because I know that they don't like gender inequality. So they're like, what is, this is not fair to women? No, Ivanka

Trump is on it, actually. She's very concerned about how women are being treated in this health care market. But I will say that there is something to be said here in that they are targeting the people who are failed by the Affordable Care Act. So the people, which, you know, I have experience with folks like those, because the ACA and plans in New York, you're talking about a minimum of paying $200 a month for an $8,000 deductible, and you go to the doctor, you have to pay the thing outright. There's no kind of co-pay system in some of these plans, so you can't afford it. You know, you're talking about spending thousands of dollars per year before you're even

covered by insurance on some of these market exchange programs. These folks, what that does is that it creates a window of predation. And so these folks come in and say, oh, well, I have a better deal for you. And it makes you feel like you're covered by insurance when in actuality you're not. And it really, all of these things put together really kind of point to the need for why single payer is the best solution here in this country. Yeah. And so in single payer, even according to the Koch brothers own paid for study, oops, they're

like, it cost $32.6 trillion, except the current healthcare system costs over $33 trillion And by most estimates, Medicare for all saves $2 trillion for the economy. And it covers us all right now. Unfortunately, under the Affordable Care Act, 15.5% of the country has no insurance at all. So instead of giving them fake insurance like this, which makes them maybe feel a little bit better if they're not sick, but boy, God help you if you do get sick. Not only are you going to not have insurance under this plan, one of the analysts said, whatever you do, you must read the fine print.

If you don't read the fine print, you're not going to realize that you're really not covered for much at all. And if you do get sick under this, at the end of the year, you're in a world of hurt. And then you're not going to be able to get insurance after that. We're back to the bad old days. So why not fix it and save trillions of dollars? At TYT, we frequently talk about all the ways that big tech companies are taking control of our online lives, constantly monitoring us.

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this goes to show that you can tinker as much as you want, but if you don't remove it, the profit motive from healthcare, something that people need, that everybody needs. If you don't, like, this kind of thing always crashes up against that reality, you know, where they try to find ways to provide healthcare with a profit incentive. And at the end of the day, it's just unprofitable to cover a huge amount of people. So this goes to show that at the end of the day, it just becomes a scam that, you know, takes advantage of people.

And so just last thing on this, look, I am believer that you need the profit motive to make sneakers, to make cars. cars, but when it's your life on the line, cops, firemen, and healthcare, if you, or by the way, imprisoning people, education, right, if you, if you do profit motive on that, let's take the fireman as an example. Well, I'm not going to put you out your house if you're on your house if you don't have enough money. I mean, that's got two problems. One, it's deeply immoral.

Number two, it's going to spread, okay, which is also true in health care. Sometimes diseases spread if they're not treated. And so there are things that the private markets should handle, but there are things that we have decided the government should handle like cops, firemen, and health care is our right to live, just like those other issues. Yeah, one of the things that we often say and that I've kind of talked about on the stump is that suffering should not be a for-profit enterprise in the United States. And in industries where human suffering is at stake, we have entire industries that prop up that suffering because the, demand is inelastic. You will pay an infinite amount of money to not die. And when you come in with that, that just creates a natural incentive for predation. It creates an incentive to keep people sick. And in huge markets like that, we have to have at a minimum certain public options

depending on the industry. But when we talk about things like private prisons, that should not exist in the United States. Single payer health care should be the system that we have in the United States. And, you know, it's just, that is the moral thing. That is the moral truth that we shouldn't permit for-profit suffering in this country. All right, perfect. Guys, we got to take a quick break here. When we come back, more of the 131 attacks against Alexandria from Fox News, also hilarious ones in this mix as well. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening to this podcast. You're only halfway through. So hold, hold, stay right here. Just want to remind you if you want to get all five segments of the Young Turks commercial free. These are just two of them. Every day we do

it. So go to t-y-tnetwork.com slash join, and you'll get the whole five segments, two hours. Add free. Do it now. All right, back on the Young Turks. I'm going to read you some comments as usual. Of course, I'm going to go to YouTube super chat first. 4659 rock intensity says, AOC in the house, the future is now. Agreed. It's right here. Shelby writes in on Twitter, I cried during the show on election night watching Alexandria's win.

I didn't realize how badly I needed hope. She brings life back into this fight. So that's very nice. Thank you. Thank you. Your mama writes in. Whoa. My mom?

She watching? Yeah. No, maybe your mom. Nando is about you. I'm not sure how Nando feels about gun control, but apparently. He decided to bring the John Iderola-inspired gun show to the TYT power panel. All right, excellent. Okay, don't make me come in in a T-shirt.

Last one, this is substantive. It's definitely my mom, by the way. I don't think your mom's writing in about your gun show. But Chase Ibanez writes, and taking money from working people and giving it to others is the fundamental principles of not just health insurance, but all insurance. Medicare for all gives people to options. to remove some extra unnecessary hands in the pot, taking away funds purely for profit. So I love that. My favorite thing was when Paul Ryan did that press conference when they were trying to destroy

the Affordable Care Act. And he's like, did you know that in the Affordable Care Act the healthy pay into insurance and then the sick take it out? Yeah, that's insurance. That's 100% how all insurance works. How the insurance business in any field, yeah. God, they're so dumb. Okay, anyways.

I wonder if they're losing their touch a little bit. They are. You know, I think they are. They've lost their ability to flex that kind of rhetorical muscle that they used to be very, very good at. I think they're kind of slipping. Yeah, Nando's now obsessed with muscles. We get it. Flexing.

Beautiful. All right. All right. So, let's go on to more Fox attacks. It's always fun. So Fox News has been attacking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's with us here today. Over 100 times last month, which is amazing. And so they're at it again today, doing several different things.

One thing that they're doing is they've got, they found old blogs of hers. Hmm, where have I seen that before? I've been there, sister. So, so, but what they charge you with is pretty significant, though. They say that you have read Adam Smith. Is that true? Have you in fact studied Adam Smith? I admit that I have read the wealth of nations.

And the theory of moral sentiments. Damn. I have read a book. I read a book. Oh my goodness. I can't believe we're helping Fox News here, but guilty is charged. Guilty. Yes, she is in fact smart.

Okay, so what they say, you know, all kidding aside, they say, well, that means that, you know, they refer to your honesty, like, oh, is she honest if she said a couple of positive things about Adam Smith while in school while in college. So I can't believe I'm asking you to address this hilarious point. Yeah, Adam Smith's a smart, intellectual guy. But anyway, yes, go ahead. Yeah, no, I think it's, first of all, I think it's funny that's like, oh, my God, you read the book. And it's like, yeah, I've read the book. And maybe that's probably why my critiques are a little more substantiated than theirs.

But I love it. I love the fire. But also, they also, because they have not read Adam Smith either, they don't realize that he's not this, like, total free market libertarian, Coke, brunch. of the 1800s, he speaks to, for example, when he talks about markets, he wasn't talking about the S&P 500. He was talking about a larger political theory of what a market means. And so, yeah, I've read Adam Smith.

And yeah, they talked about how when I was 19, I had wrote this blog post when I said, oh yeah, feminism and empowerment, these words could be relics. And I think it was just, you know, I do think it was youthful naivete in thinking that I was an equal person in the eyes of the law. And I did not anticipate a time when I would have to be fighting for Roe versus Wade. I did not anticipate a time when I would actually have to fight for equal rights. And, you know, I think young people are guilty of being naive. We are guilty of thinking that perhaps the world is a little better than it is because

that's the only one I believe. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, I was on the same boat as you. you when I was a college student and I would hear the word feminism and I would cringe. Yeah. Because I felt like, you know, women who wanted to be activists and in the feminist movement were making themselves victims. All you have to do is work hard and stop complaining or looking for excuses. And then guess what happened? I graduated and I started working. Exactly. Like at 18 when you're in school, you don't want to actually believe like,

oh, we don't get paid less. There's no way we get paid less. So there's definitely, there's definitely that issue, but there's also the issue of perception. And so the first time I realized that there is, you know, there are double standards was when, you know, Jank and I would do the show together. And Jank is a fiery dude. I'm a fiery person as well. Yeah. And when I'm fiery, it's like, look at that emotional girl.

Oh, yeah. When Jank was fiery, it was passion. Yeah. He's so passionate about these issues. And so that was the first. Right. Well, so am I. And so that was the first hint I got.

And then I experienced other things and I'm like, oh, okay. And it was not just about your personal experiences. It's about looking at the broader picture and seeing what, you know, differences arise between men and women in the workplace overall. And the substantiation of the critiques. It's always like, it's always superficial critiques. You're not attractive enough. You're too attractive. You're shrill.

Your voice is weird. It's like always so sensory because that is the male gaze, you know? It is a sensory perception of women as opposed to a substantive perception of women. But at 18, I didn't want to believe that that was like that. I'm just impressed at how politically engaged you guys were at 18, 19. It was like a total idiot. Like just trying to figure out how to get drunk, I don't know. No, Nando, you were better off.

Yeah, because I regret almost everything I wrote back when I was a Republican. And so I was in war-shaped in you guys because I was actually on the wrong side of the issues, right? And I remember writing an article against feminism when I was in college. Yeah. But you know, for those you're out there who do critique, like if you're on the internet and you're trolling, that doesn't help at all. But there is constructive critique out there that does help. And so I remember somebody wrote a letter to the editor back against one of my articles

when I, when I was at Penn and said, Jake, you're actually a feminist and explain what feminism really is. Now that planted a seed. Now that seed did not grow till later, but it did it eventually grew and I really, and I realized, no, all of that was propaganda against feminists. What feminists did was they gave 50% of the population the same rights as the other 50%. You can't ask for anything that is more liberating and wonderful and positive, right? Equal rights is not something that you should have to fight for, but they did.

They did have to fight for it, and thank God they won. And they won so thoroughly sometimes on some issues that some of us forgot how hard that fight was. Yes, that's very true. Exactly, exactly. that, you know, we couldn't possibly appreciate what previous generations did for us because we weren't alive for it and we just lived in the benefits of it. Women weren't allowed to have credit cards in the United States until the 1970s.

Like, just let that sink in for a second. That is messed up. Because it's spend all our money. God, you can only get, you could open a line of credit with your husband's permission. But if you were a single woman in the United States, it wasn't until the 1970s that you had the right to take out a credit card. Yeah, that's insane. And being a single mom isn't a new thing.

Exactly. So like if you were a single mom in the 1970s, you were not a full financial person in our economy. Yeah, it's crazy. And again, these are things that we've taken for granted. And I didn't even know about the credit card thing until recently. And it's just, it goes to show you that, hey, these protections, these, you know, moves for equality didn't happen a century ago.

Some of it happened decades ago. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Okay, so one more fun attack from Fox News. This one's particularly enjoyable because of how they accidentally admit we're pretty much right. So again, this is directed at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's here with us, obviously, today. And it was by a daily caller writer, so of course it has no relationship to the truth. But she almost accidentally stumbles into it.

This is fun. She goes to one of Alexandria's rallies. For Corey Bush, by the way. For Cory Bush in St. Louis. And another Justice Democrat, check out all the Justice Democrats. They're all running across the country. Make sure you support them. Uncorrupted, they take no corporate pack money and drive Fox News crazy.

Okay, so she goes to her rally, she says she was frightened. So let's find out what she was frightened about. Let's watch. I was listening to them talk to Ocasio-Cortez and also to Cory Bush, who she was st. for in St. Louis. And they say things, I mean, they talk about things that everybody wants, especially like if you're a parent. They talk about education for your kids, health care for your kids, the things that you want. And, you know, if you're not really paying attention to how they're going to pay for it or, you know, the rest of that, it's easy to fall into that trap and

say, my kids deserve this. It's easy to fall into the trap of saying that my kids deserve healthcare. When I have kids, when I have kids, I'm just going to just going to let them on the street and just let them... You don't deserve anything. Nothing. Nando, way to not fall into the trap, caring about your kids. I see what you're doing. I'm gonna stay over here.

Is it true that you're actually advocating for all Americans? I was. You know, I kind of remember her from that selfie now that I look at it. And the thing that's wild is that, so we were at this question. Cory Bush rally. And if you've ever seen or met Cory Bush, you know that she herself is one of the most inspiring people that you've ever met. And so Cory Bush, of course, aligns this rally.

And all of the opening acts for the rally are people talking about racial justice, people talking about healthcare, LGBT rights. And so it's like all of these really moral arguments about what is right in America. And so I think at the end of that rally, I remember seeing her and you know how you talked about how once upon a time you wrote about not being. a feminist and someone planted a seed, I think we planted a lot of seeds. Yeah. And so I think she's struggling with it.

And that's where the fear comes from. Yeah, no. Straight up, DSA within five years I'm calling it. Straight up bread or roses in 10 years, I guarantee you, I'm in place bets right now. Yeah, no, no, I think that she's 100% right, she's struggling. Yeah. She's like, it sounded pretty good. Yeah.

Like where it's not that we get stuff for free, but Medicare for all costs less than the current system. And we would all be covered and we wouldn't have co-pays and we wouldn't have premiums. And when our kids got sick, we wouldn't be a nervous wreck that either they were going, we weren't going to be able to treat them or was going to bankrupt our family. She's afraid that it sounds good. Yeah. It does sound good. There's a good reason for that.

Because it works. What's happening is that when I was joking about them losing their kind of verve, the Republicans in their rhetorical muscle, I think what's happening is after Bernie's campaign and after your campaign where people are advocating in clear terms for bread and butter things that are majoritarian positions in the vast majority of the country that actually will help improve people's lives. And when you put those things clearly and out there forcefully and sharpen the distinctions, it's like their brain explodes because they, how can you argue against it? And the thing is too, it's like, you know, I meet every person where they're at.

And I think compassion and empathy is important. This woman is a writer for the Daily Caller. The Daily Caller does not pay its writers a lot of money. I guarantee you that this woman is struggling to make ends meet. And I guarantee you that she has struggled to pay medical bills, that she has feared for her financial future before. And our side is actually, at least we're trying to put down plans. At least we're trying to find some kind of solution to get this woman healthcare to cover

the future of her children. And she's writing for an outlet that is basically saying people like her don't deserve to those things. And so I think it puts her in the tight bind as a human being. And I think that's a lot of what we saw that struggling that she had on Fox News. Like I saw her as the mom. And, you know, I feel, I really feel for those people. Yeah, I think the right wing, you know, they're so afraid of the others that they, unfortunately,

some of them, definitely not all of them, but some of them seem to have bad intent. I got to keep those people away, I got to build a wall. The Muslims are scary, Latinos are scary, et cetera, et cetera. We on the other hand, actually want you to have health care. We want you to have higher wages. Even if we don't like you. That's right. Even if you're a Trump voter, we're not gonna say, by the way, the Trump's tax plan literally

did this. They punished the blue states and reward the red states in their tax plan, right? We would never do that because we actually care about the people in Alabama and Kentucky and West Virginia. We want you to have higher wages and we're gonna fight like hell to get your higher wages. So that's why if you go to Alexandria's rallies, you might be shocked at what you find out. So which leads us to part two. She says she was uncomfortable, let's find out why.

I was mostly uncomfortable because I was surrounded by a group of people who were talking about how they had gotten involved because they were tired of being angry all the time. It seems like so much effort to be angry about everything instead of to focus on what you could do to change it. So it was, it was really uncomfortable. So I actually love that, you know why? Because you guys all went to a rally to change things. Yeah, right? She goes to a rally for change and goes, instead of being angry, why don't they go change

something? They just did. They just elected Alexandria Cascio Cortez to change things, and they're trying to do the same thing with Cory Bush. Yeah, and you know what I'm noticing with Fox News overall, the right wing overall is they're attacking you incessantly because they're afraid. Yeah. And they're afraid because think about the message that Trump used while he was campaigning.

And I'm not going to say that it was the exact same message as yours, of course it wasn't, but it was a populist message that talked about affordable health care, that talked about covering every American, that talked about, you know, the economic disadvantages of the system that we're in right now. I mean, he didn't say it as eloquently, but that was when he kept touching on. And so what did Trump turn around and do? And Americans are paying attention. He turned around and pushed for tax cuts for corporations.

The tax cuts were polling poorly, but he passed him anyway. Okay, Congress passed him anyway. Now the White House is talking about unilaterally passing more tax cuts for capital gains tax. You think that's going to sit well with your voters? Fox News is aware of that. The right wing is aware of that. And so they hear your messaging. They hear Justice Democrats and what they've been campaigning on.

And I'm sure they're scared because they realize this message is going to resonate. And how do we fight back? Every time they've tried to fight back, they've only made you guys look better. So I wrote an article on Huffpo back in 2005, 13 years ago. And I think that it applies exactly to what they're trying to do to you. So, and I quote, I'm going to quote myself here, which is always a funny thing to do, but only because I want you to understand that this is not us in hindsight saying, oh, they're attacking Alexandria and this is what they're trying to do.

No, they've been doing this for decades. So they did it to Howard Dean back in the day, back when Howard Dean was a good guy and a progressive. They did it to Bernie Sanders. They're doing it to Alexandria. So let me read to you what I wrote in 2005. You see if you think it applies if it's the playbook that they are using. So it was a seventh step plan for media domination and opponent destruction. And that is what Republicans and Fox News used.

And I said, step one, select the strongest person on the other side and tell you. him for destruction, although in this case it would be her. Attempt to destroy his credibility in the mainstream media so that reporters will be skeptical of him and eventually his own party will disown him. Step two, comb through all of the speeches of the target, find one to two sentences that can be taken out of context and beat to death. Pretray those few isolated statements as extreme. Literally what Fox News did today to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, hey, I combed through all of your

writing, I found that you like Adam Smith, I found that you said one bad thing about feminism. Okay, step three, real quick, guys. Repeat step two, 800 times until three things have happened. Every time the target is mentioned, the audience will think of the only charges you have repeated ad nauseum. Two, the conversation is no longer on the topic at hand, but about your target, what your target said about the topic. Three, your target sounds like an extremist simply because you have repeated the charge enough times. So, when they attack you on different issues, they're trying to get you people to not focus on the issue itself.

It goes to the heart of what was happening with that woman. If you focus on Medicare for all and realize it actually saves money and covers everyone, well, Fox News is screwed. So instead, I'm gonna find one or two things that Alexandria said and try to make it seem extreme so you're both distracted and I get to attack the strongest person on the the other side. And they don't do this to, obviously, as you said, they don't just do this to me, they don't just do it to politicians, they do it to activists, they've done it to, you can look at

a bunch of prominent activists here right now in the contemporary space. And the whole idea is to create doubt amongst progressives about each other. So that, because our strongest, our strongest suit is our solidarity. Because when we do come together, it's unstoppable. So the biggest weapon, and this is what I've said at our rallies, is that they hand us a weapon to use on ourselves, and that's cynicism. And so they give us all of the ingredients for cynicism, and then they let us come to our own conclusions with the materials that they have given to us.

Alexander, that's funny you say that, because step six. Get your opponents to take down their own people for fear that they will keep getting asked the same, annoying, senseless questions from you and your proxies. And the reason they will give is the one you conveniently planted. The target has become a distraction. Yeah, like Shirley Sherrod, the acorn thing a few years ago. Like they, I mean, Democrats ended up caving on it. Yeah, sure.

And if you're a person of color especially, they've done it to Sean King. They do it to Linda Sarsoor. Like it makes you in even more of a target, but they do it to everybody, everybody. So what's fascinating is they wrote the playbook, they've been carrying it out for all this time. And you're seeing it live happening to Alexandria. And of course, also to Bernie Sanders. And the rest of the media keeps on feeding into it without even realizing the game that's being played. Oh, my God, squirrel, shiny object.

You said something about somebody nine years ago. So I'm going to buy into it and I'm going to pretend that that's the only thing you stand for and ignore the substance of what your campaign was about. And it's like, meanwhile, Republicans are literally running accused pedophiles for offense. And like, whatever, like, they don't believe in climate change. And it's like, it's a bold strategy. I would argue, I would argue the strongest component of the Republican Party is their ability to stick up for one another, regardless of what the person who's being targeted has been

accused of doing. They don't care. And look, I think that on the left, we have standards. We have real morality. And we do hold one another accountable. But I do think that when someone is attempting to plant a seat of cynicism, we have to be skeptical and really, you know, dissect the reasoning behind it, try to figure out what they're really trying to do. In terms of sowing doubt, like how many mainstream liberal outlets reported the $32 trillion headline from the Koch brother story just without any sort of context? Even the Associated Press never mentioned that our current system costs $33 trillion.

Like it seems like an important, you know, little caveat. Yeah, first paragraph was about how this was a study done at a college with no reference to the fact that the Koch brothers funded it. The huge headline cost 32.6 trillion in the first paragraph talking about it, how it might double your taxes. No, you took that straight out of the Coke funded study. That's actually not true and you didn't do your homework. But so, one, I address it to the media because this is the game that's also being played

on you. And two, yes, we address it to progressives. So when you see this in action, understand don't get distracted by that stuff. Circle the wagons, stick up for one another. Don't buy into Fox News propaganda and do their bidding. No, fight for one another. Stand strong together. And it's not to say, and I think the thing that makes us different from that other side,

is that it's not to say that we excuse other people's past or that we just say, okay, anything that you do is okay. But it's to ensure that we take those opportunities to have conversations. Yes, yes. That we take those opportunities to have conversations to talk about, you know, evolution. But when we just, when we immediately jump to public vitriol and distancing and weakening, then, you know, it does follow a formula. Yeah, absolutely right.

And last thing, guys, understand that when the right wing attack machine comes, they They look for the worst of the worst. So for example, when today Fox News does a story about how once Alexandria wrote something positive about Adam Smith, that doesn't mean she did something wrong. That means they couldn't find anything. Yeah, I mean, that's the worst. That's the worst thing. Holy moly.

Right, I mean, they looked and looked and they found out that you were a smart person who read the book about Adam Smith and wrote an article about it. Which by the way- That's it, that means you're the cleanest person in America. Which, by the way, like, I got a degree in economics. Like, I can't get a degree in economics without reading Adam Smith. I mean, if I could, then that's not a good degree. I know, but you just mentioned something that disqualifies you based on Fox News' logic, and that's education. That's actual information, knowledge on economics.

They're like, oh, no, we can't have that. Bye. Last thing, super ironic, their article about Adam Smith doesn't understand. Adam Smith at all. Adam Smith argued for taxation, fighting against monopolies, argued for regulation. He didn't argue for unlimited, out of control. He did it. One of the misread people of all time. He is, he is. And he acknowledges that there are extreme limitations to a corporate only economy. that he acknowledges that they are going to have to be, not just limits, but they're going to have to be kind of a different actors in the economy beyond just corporations or individual actors.

That's right. And he talks about, be careful about market forces because they can run out of control, like, for example, in monopolies. So ironically, they're criticizing you for reading Adam Smith without reading Adam Smith. He understood perfectly the nature of the super rich, right? He said that they follow the vile maximum, everything for ourselves, nothing for anyone else. That was Adam Smith quote, that they would never quote on Fox News. Yeah, all right, guys, we've got to take one more break.

We've got more news of the day coming up, so come right back. Thanks for watching what I hope was a lovely edition of the Young Turks. Now, you know that that is two of the five segments that we do, because that's free. We want to have you support independent media and come watch the whole show that we do every day. That's five segments overall, no ads at all. at t-y-tnetwork.com slash join. Come become a member. Thanks for watching either way.

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