The Young Turks - Burr Breakdown - April 18, 2025

Episode Date: April 19, 2025

Rubio Threatens to ‘Move On’ From Ukraine-Russia Talks ‘Within Days’ If No Progress Seen. Musk’s SpaceX Tapped as Frontrunner to Build Trump’s Golden Dome Missile Shield. Head Start Funding Eliminated in Trump White House Budget. Bill Burr Delivers Robber Baron History Lesson. Hosts: John Iadarola, Cenk Uygur, Ramesh Srinivasan SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE ☞  https://www.youtube.com/@TheYoungTurks FOLLOW US ON: FACEBOOK  ☞   https://www.facebook.com/theyoungturks TWITTER  ☞       https://twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM  ☞  https://www.instagram.com/theyoungturks TIKTOK  ☞          https://www.tiktok.com/@theyoungturks 👕MERCH  ☞      https:/www.shoptyt.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. Has just been, you know, not good. I'm so upset. Oh my God. Baga! 3x3 000

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Mappi You know, Drop it like it's our rights. All rights. All right, welcome the young Turks on this lovely Friday. Jake Ugar, John Adirola, Ramesh Ternavasan, Ramesh is a host of the Utopias podcast, and a professor at UCLA. Of course, John is the host of damage report. So today we've got some fairly disastrous news for you throughout. So we had some defections from Trump

yesterday. We had Trump actually doing one thing positive yesterday, deciding not to bomb Iran. We're back to negatives, thoroughly so. And later in the program, yes, a US citizen has been detained by ICE. So we will give me details on that. And so that has begun. Well, it's great news about Iran as long as Trump's against it. Unfortunately, what if Elon Musk tells the Department of Defense start bombing them? I guess maybe they'll just do it according to recent news.

But anyway, why don't we talk about a different conflict? Not one that might come, but one that might not end, starting with this. this. But I want to stop the war. I don't want that war to continue. And I'll stop that war, mark my words, I'll stop that war in 24 hours. We need to figure out here now with a matter of day whether this is doable in the short term. Because if it's not, then I think we're just going to move on from our perspective. The president feels very strongly about that. Those two guys should probably talk. Of course, that was Donald Trump back in 2023, back when he was in the mode of claiming that he would accomplish everything in 24 hours,

including ending the war in Ukraine. He told us to mark his words, and we have, and it doesn't matter because the buck stops anywhere other than with Donald Trump. He probably doesn't even remember the conflict is even happening. But he's also, over the past couple of months, been implying that he's going to force Ukraine to accept some sort of deal on the terms of Russia, and that sounded bad enough. Now, according to Marco Rubio, there might not be anything. He might just wash his hands of the entire thing and let Russia do literally 100% of whatever they want, which, Cenk, maybe not the

biggest surprise, but this is just another area where Trump might be preemptively either giving up or letting someone else control what happens. Part of the deal? No kidding. No, so a bit of a disaster here. The main question I have, and we'll see if we can answer it in giving you the details of the story is, yes, but what happens when we just let it go? Does that mean we let the Ukrainians go and let the Russians just do whatever they want to them? Does that mean we keep funding them at the same rate that we're funding them? What in the world does he mean? Let's try to figure it out. Yeah, I'd guess it's pretty much what you said. I think it's letting whatever Russia wants happen happen. That's my fear.

But that said, let's hear more from Marco Rubio and see what he has to say about it. I think it's important to remind everybody that the Ukraine war is a terrible thing, but it's not our war. We didn't start it. The United States has been helping Ukraine over the last three years, and we want it to end. But it's not our war. I wanted everyone to understand that. And the reason why I make that point is the president has spent 87 days at the highest level of its government repeatedly taking efforts to bring this war to an end. We are now reaching a point where we need to decide and determine whether this is even possible or not.

I can tell you this. This war has no military solution to it. It really doesn't. It's not going to be decided with neither side has some strategic capability to end this war quickly. And so what we're talking about here is avoiding thousands and thousands of people from dying over the next year. We're trying to avoid that. We saw what happened last weekend with a missile strike in Sumi where people died on Palm Sunday. We're just going to see more like that on both sides.

We're going to see more of that. We're trying to prevent it. But we're not going to continue to fly all over the world and do meeting after meeting after meeting if no progress is being made. So if they're serious about peace, either side or both, we want to help. If it's not going to happen, then we're just going to move on. Oh, I was actually prepared in this segment to be pretty critical of the Secretary of State effectively washing his hands of this conflict. I didn't know that he had to fly places and take meetings. That does sound very exhausting. People talk so much about like the strength and toughness of the Ukrainian people.

Have they had to fly around the world? Have they had to take meetings? They don't know the first thing about suffering. Marco Rubio is the one who's suffering in this thing. But anyway, he's much more focused there on saying that it's not our conflict. We didn't start it. Who did start it? Well, depends on who you ask, if you ask literally anyone who knows what's going on, obviously

it was Russia, but if you ask the Trump administration, it was Ukraine. One of the fundamental issues probably making it more difficult for them to actually end conflict that they refuse to even acknowledge the truth about it or what Ukraine maybe deserves coming out of it. So why would Ukraine accept any of the horridly biased deals that they're offering right now? That said, we're gonna have Trump and J.D. Vance's take on all of this, but Jank, I wanted to give you a chance to jump in and respond to Rubio there. Yeah, so Trump's gonna back him up as you're gonna see in a second. So look, first, I guess a lot of the right wing thinks that they've just accepted that he's an absurd human being.

But I wish we hadn't accepted that in our president. And here's what I mean by that. That he was going to solve it in 24 hours. Like did anyone really believe that? And are you now? Are you like super frustrated with Trump that he didn't solve it magically in 24 hours? Or have you moved to go post along with him and said, oh no, we didn't mean 24 hours.

And we didn't mean three months. We meant maybe never. And so that's moving a lot of goals brothers. Okay, so now his second question is if you think, well, no, look, I know the president is absurd and he says ridiculous things to get attention. And I've made my peace with it. And as long as he makes peace in this particular conflict, I don't care that he's, you know, grandiose and at times buffoonish. I wish we hadn't made peace with that and when it comes to being, you know, the president of the United States, which we had a serious person who actually meant what he said instead of making up ridiculous things. Now, to the heart of the issue, if all this somehow magically gets them to a peace deal, then great. I don't, I don't really care about the ups and downs of negotiations, etc. But does it look like we're close to a piece deal? Because it doesn't look like it to me. And so now they're at the point where they're almost throwing their hands up, right? So remember that one of the issues here was that everything was

good along, well, I don't know, fine, they were at least doing negotiations. But then Trump and the US demanded mineral rights in Ukraine. They demanded $500 in mineral rights. And so, That did much, much worse, it's give up on it's an epic disaster. Ramesh, do you want to jump in? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Look, look, what's been incredibly unclear, you know, the whole time. I mean, first, Jen makes a great point that the president boasted that within 24 hours he could end this conflict.

I think he assumed that since he's so chummy with Putin, they would actually be able to get through to Putin and negotiate some sort of deal that was good for Putin and maybe, you know, forced to be accepted by the Ukrainians and all the rest of us. But clearly, we see that the president does not have nearly the power, dealmaking power, or even the political power that he claims to have. all of these theatrics and all of this sort of nauseating set of stories where he is essentially repeated systematically Russian state talking points. And I obviously publicly embarrassed Zelensky to try to push him into a leverage position where he would agree to the mineral deal. What is under discussed as usual when it comes to this president is what exactly does he want and what is the outcome he is pushing for? And for Marco Rubio to basically say there's no military solution, but essentially say that the U.S. is not able to do what it said it could do

in 24 hours and broker an actual peace agreement is very telling. It speaks to the weakness of this administration, the weakness of its political leverage, and the absence of a political vision. And one last point. Note everybody that there were a couple ceasefires that were agreed to between the Ukrainians and the Russians brokered by international parties. Those ceasefires are not being observed as we speak, including in the Black Sea, around grain shipments and so on. So nothing has been accomplished rather than an enduring peace deal in 24 hours. So take that as a contrast. Yeah, Trump, he doesn't know anything about negotiation.

He doesn't know anything about diplomacy. He blusters and he threatens. And sometimes if we happen in an area to have some sort of overwhelming advantage, we might get people to just cow before us or whatever. But even that doesn't operate or work as often as he thinks it does. He thought that that would get him through this entire trade war thing. And it didn't work out that way. So he just he doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't care to know what Ukraine would need to actually sign on to some sort of peace deal. And so. the future just looks really dark. That said, we did say that we would give you what Trump has to say about Rubio's most recent comments. So why don't we get to that and then we'll update you on a few more of the recent wringles. Secretary Rubio said that the U.S. will have to figure out whether a deal can be done between Russia and Ukraine in a matter of days or you will just move on. Yeah, very short. How many days is that? No specific number of days, but quickly, if for some reason, one of the

two parties makes it very difficult. We're just going to say you're foolish, you're fools, you're horrible people, and we're going to just take a pass. But hopefully we won't have to do that. Okay, so importantly, there are two parts to that. So one is how many days, no specific number, because he has no idea. He has no idea with this, as he does with anything else. Don't ask him for specifics on what his administration is going to do. He is clearly not in charge in many of these topics. The other area, though, is way clearer. He says if, you know, if one of the side is being really irresponsible, we're going to say that they're terrible, horrible people. I wonder which side he's talking about. I wonder, I wonder, probably both. I think he's probably

willing to call Putin horrible too, not just Zelensky in the Ukrainians. No, that's obviously ridiculous. And look, that's supposed to be playing hardball. But again, if you're Zelensky, just constantly being punched in the face by this guy after you've already, as Jank alluded to, to, you've already agreed to an incredibly unjust mineral sharing deal, sharing like we had any claim to it in the first place. You've already given Trump what he demanded, his pound of flesh, and he's continually insulting you, your administration, and the people of Ukraine. And now we find out that there was this meeting yesterday, one of the arduous meetings that's so exhausting Marco Rubio, people from officials from Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S.

U.S. all met in Paris. And at the meeting, U.S. officials proposed a ceasefire plan. And here are some of the issues with it, according to European officials. The proposal would effectively freeze the war with Ukrainian territories now occupied by Russia remaining under Moscow's control. Keeves' aspirations of joining NATO would also be off the table. And on top of that, Russia, not giving up literally anything, not a foot of territory would also. So now they never have to worry about Ukraine entering NATO. Okay, so Ukraine will be no better prepared for a follow on invasion a year or two years from now after this. And Russia gets relief from economic sanctions. They get everything, I guess, other than the entirety of Ukraine offered up on a

silver platter. But even that, they're only not getting that immediately. They're definitely getting that in a few years. All of this utter madness. And Russia says, even in response to all this, The root causes of the war have to be addressed before committing to a ceasefire. The root cause of the war, to be clear, was Vladimir Putin invading the goddamn country. That's the root cause of the war. I know the nonsense they would spin that like, oh, Ukraine is talking about joining a defensive alliance or something. I just want you to think about how utterly insane that is. Let's say I hear tell that one of my neighbors is talking with my other neighbor,

and they're setting up some sort of deal where if I rob one of their houses, they'll both shoot me. And my response is, I rob his house that night. I don't seem like the good guy in that story, do I? It seems like inevitably I was gonna rob the house. I just wanted to do it under the right circumstances. And that is, that is exactly what is going on with Russia. They were preparing to at some point invade and conquer Ukraine and likely other former Soviet republics.

And they didn't like the idea that Ukraine entering NATO would stop them from doing that. There is no reason that Ukraine being a member of NATO would bother a country that had no interest in actually invading it. It just doesn't make any logical sense. Ramesh, any thoughts about Donald Trump or any of the other stuff I've said. Well, Russia has already showed long before this latest set of, you know, the last few years that it would invade Crimea. And, and, and, and, you know, it is, it is, it's interesting how our current administration is sort of playing up isolationism in certain ways,

without recognizing our own kind of complicity in militarizing the world. And I think a big part of that is, you know, the worship, as Jenk was alluding to earlier, of the gilded age that this administration has. We can stay isolated, we're just going to be about ourselves. But whenever we can do land grabs or resource grabs, let's do it, which is an old school colonial imperialist kind of approach. That said, I do think we have, This is not any justification for any of Russia's actions who started the war, clearly. But the U.S. has not been an honest partner with its decisions it's stated after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that it would not, that NATO would not expand east of Berlin.

That said, you know, it's not, there's clearly a reason why all of these nations that are generally peaceful, want to join NATO. So what is very sad to me is that the U.S. did not show any leadership since the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall could have brokered an actual real kind of peace agreement that we could be observing to this day, propped up people like Yeltsin, who then basically whose pathetic regime led to the rise of Putin and the oligarchs and the the dealy cut with the oligarchs. And some of that is uncannily like what we're looking at right now in this country. So it's very sad. US didn't show any leadership then, and it's not showing any

leadership now. And that basically is going to give Russia carte blanche to be as aggressive and militaristic as it wants. And certainly it is not without question that Putin would want to expand and get back to something approximating the Russian Empire. But the key for me is de-escalation rather than escalation. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And I, well, all this is ongoing, going, I feel terrible for the people of Ukraine who have been through unimaginable situations for literally years now, effectively being told by what's supposed to be sort of like one of the moral forces for safety, security, peace, all of that, telling them either give up your country now or we're not going to help you get any deal and then it'll be taken from you over the

next year or two. But a horrid abdication of our place in the world. In any event, we're going to take a short break. We'll come back with more after this. For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for five bucks plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. Welcome back, one or the first hour of the Young Turks with myself and Ramesh. Ramesh and I had a little talk during the break, and we both felt like Jake was talking too much.

And our takes are too important. We want more time. So we banished him. He's gone. We're going to send Senator Chris Van Hollen to go talk to him in the meantime. But anyway, we do have important news to get to Ramesh. You ready for some more? Yeah, totally, man.

Okay, but Jake will be back in just a little bit. But anyway, in the meantime, let's jump into this. The White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. Does that mean that you are in effect policing yourself? What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency? Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions repost our actions to the Doge handle on X. If you see anything, you say like, wait a second, hey, Elon, that seems like,

Maybe that's, you know, there's a conflict there. I thought like people are going to be shy about saying that. They'll say it immediately. Yeah, that's why they had to change so goddamn many of the things they posted on that stupid BS website. But that was Elon Musk saying that you don't have to worry about him, rigging things in his favor, hurting his competitors, giving himself contracts because he's going to be transparent. And I don't buy that in most cases. But I think he has been pretty transparent in some of the corruption, including the story that we're going to talk about today, because Reuters released a report just yesterday, alleging that Musk is about to make a massive amount of money off the federal government. Here's the headline. Musk's SpaceX is apparently a frontrunner to build Trump's Golden Dome missile shield. And that is going to be worth, importantly, not only an ungodly amount of money to initially set up, but going forward, it could be

massive money for Elon Musk and for SpaceX. Jank, I know you've been waiting to talk about this. Musk and SpaceX building this system seems pretty convenient considering he's the co-president. Yeah, so first of all, utter outrage that the largest donor to any presidential candidate in any party, right? Just say, oh, I got a great idea. Let's do, by the way, first, let's do cuts to like Head Start and funding malaria treatment and all these to Social Security offices, to Medicaid, etc. But let's not save any money at all. Let's direct it all to my company. Well, if you're not outraged by that, then you like corruption.

You love corruption. And really, if you're MAGA, you think, oh, what a coincidence. the top donors company, it happens to be the best company for a project, by the way, we don't need at all. This is as big a boondogle as you will ever find. Doge went looking for waste, fraud, and abuse. But what we didn't realize is they were looking to find it so they could promote it within the government because this is waste fraud and abuse. So we thought they were going to find it to eliminate it. But apparently they were going to find it to put it it on steroids because that's what this is. What the hell is this crap? And what happened of cutting the Pentagon? I mean, that's why you get them on the record. So now you can turn

around and go, come on, come on. And yes, even your own voters wanted you to cut the Pentagon. Instead, you're doing the boondoggle of all boondoggles. 100%. Yeah, so I'm gonna give you a couple extra layers of corruption. Then we'll jump into a conversation about this. So first, the details. What is the goal? Golden Dome. Well, it's pretty different than the Iron Dome and not only because it is a characteristically stupid name via Donald Trump in the Golden Dome. So it's a plan to put up 400 to 1,000 satellites to orbit the world. They would be tasked with sensing, monitoring, and tracking missile launches. Then a separate batch of 200 more attack satellites would then destroy those with a combination of missiles

and or lasers. So we're back in Reagan-era Star Wars policies. And Reuters notes that the plan is highly subject to change, probably because there will be world outrage, because you're not supposed to be surrounding the Earth with weaponized satellites. There are multiple treaties designed to stop that. But that's the idea. So SpaceX and this would be partnering with software maker Palantir and drone builder Anderil on a bid to build key parts of the Golden Dome. The CEOs, the founders, I should say, of those two other companies. also have been donors to Donald Trump in the past. So there's a lot of corruption to go around, to be fair. Now, SpaceX is pitching for the part of the initiative called the Custody Layer.

That's to do preliminary engineering and design work that would cost between $6 billion and $10 billion. Probably exactly between that because every time a defense contractor estimates, estimates the cost to something, that's what it ends up being. Now, there were about 180 different companies that expressed interest, strange that SpaceX would be the leader in this right now, except not so much. And it is, when you get the reporting from Reuters, it's as bad as it could possibly be. One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as a, quote, departure from the usual acquisition process. There is an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government.

they're not even trying to hide that this is a blatantly corrupt act. And then the added layer of corruption is that we don't just pay a ton of money, not $6 to $10 billion, hundreds of billions of dollars, almost certainly. And then we're done and we own it. No, no, no, that's not how things work anymore in the tech industry. SpaceX has proposed setting up its role in Golden Dome as a subscription service in which the government would pay for access to the technology rather than own the system outright. So we would pay untold billions so that Elon Musk would own a fleet of attack satellites that

ring the globe. We wouldn't even own it. He'd have control of the software. He could turn it off if he wants to. He could let missiles go by if he wants to. He would have even more control over world affairs than he already does thanks to Starlink. And in return, we pay him a massive amount of money now, and then we pay him money every month for the rest of our natural lives, Jenk, this sucks. No, no, it's even worse than what you're stating and what I said at the beginning. Because when you think about the fact that then Elon would own it and it's a subscription service, well, think about it. If we stop paying the subscription, someone else can. And in fact,

since it's a company that's, as with all companies, are designed to maximize profit, well, they're gonna say, well, I built this whole thing. I mean, you suckers paid for it, but it's mine. I own it. And I want to I want to make more money off of it. So I am now handing over the satellite system to the highest bidder. Oh look at that, it's China. Well, what are you gonna do? Now China has a ring of satellites across the world that could destroy anything that they want. So, oh well, okay, that's point one, okay, in a parade of horribles that are actually possible in this case. Point two is, what if Elon just goes, what do I need America or China for? I now own the satellites all across the world

that could knock down anything I want, destroy anything I want. Mission accomplished, why do you think I took over the American government? So by the way, this sounds like a science fiction movie, it sounds far-fetched, etc. But there is no option C. So option A is this is a massive boondoggle. It's never going to work and we're going to waste hundreds of billions of dollars And they're gonna go straight in the Elon Musk pocket and the worst, worst fraud, waste, and abuse you've ever seen, the worst corruption you've ever seen. That's option A. Option B is it does work, but we spend all that money and we don't even own it. And a private

person can literally control who wins wars, who doesn't win wars, would literally run the globe. My answer to this, hell to the effing, no, no way, know how pure insanity. And I talk about corporate rule all the time on this show. This would let one corporation literally rule us all. Right, absolutely. So feel free to use the word Doge as a verb to just describe any time anyone gets ripped off, corrupted, taken advantage of, and grifted upon. I mean, me and my friends, maybe it's just some way we're trying to cope with all of this.

We just love saying, hey, you're being, we're doging, doging, doging. So, you know, we can, I, I just think it's, this is, there's something really interesting here, though, that I want to add to both your analyses, which is what this is exactly how tech companies and tech platforms function. They promise transparency, but they're really not transparency at all. And they leverage public investments, including people's data. In this case, our money and our resources, maybe not our data, but that's in other capacities, with none, no accountability whatsoever. And the idea of sort of a subscription service is also very straight out of big tech. How do we make as much money while giving our users next to nothing, no matter

what the causes are, right? So, for example, you know, when we talk about tech and whether it's AI or social media, you can imagine a pretty reasonable proposal that would pay people for their data. Is that any of that happening? No. Instead, what a subscription model assumes and mandates is ongoing continuous never ending dependency, all right? So that's the first point I want to make. This is very tech, big tech like the way this is being played. The other thing I want to say is, you know, I mean, sometimes I have, my podcast is called Utopias. I'm always looking for something to make me, put me in a more positive mood in the evenings. I was actually nerding out about the incredible James Webb telescope discoveries.

You all may have heard of that possibly we found traces of life on another planet or at least the elements that could be produced only by organic life. Why am I saying all that? That's NASA. That's what NASA did. That's what government funding of science and education and research does. Think about NASA relative to SpaceX, which I consider a zombie predator version of NASA, right? Think about how different these things are. And we must all ask questions, what do we actually want to support?

And what do we not? Yeah. By the way, the only other final point I haven't made on this is the way that this should work if we hadn't had our government entirely bought by an oligarch, is you'd have SpaceX come and be like, hey, we wanna do this thing and we're gonna make it a subscription service where you don't actually own it. And then the Pentagon would be like, oh, hey, the thing about that is there's 180 companies that would love this contract. So go kick rocks. Go, if you can afford it, go suck an egg. And we're gonna go with one of the other hundred plus companies that would

love to do this. But unfortunately, our government has been bought. So SpaceX knows they can make it absolutely horrible offer and I guess the government will just take it because there's not going to be any actual competition. Again, I know that it's difficult like for the Democrats to fight buck on everything because there's so many things they need to be fighting back on, but this feels like a pretty big one. I feel like you could score something on this. Yeah, anyway. I have last two words from our audience. So you'll have to forgive their, you know, bluntness. And you could join their bluntness at tyt.com. Infinity says, is Elon Musk Dr. Evil or Lex Luthor?

And it's a good question. And we're hoping Dr. Evil so that he's clownish and does not succeed in any of this. And Turkish Taffey writes in, Elon gets the Golden Dome, the U.S. taxpayers get the golden shower. I like it. Okay, well what- With their trickle-down economics on the $5 trillion tax cut. So unfortunately it's a theme. And I will say Mike Myers playing Elon Musk on Saturday Night Live,

you know, Mike Myers' former Dr. Evil, Austin Powers is pretty priceless. It all comes back around. It's a perfect circle there. Trump administration is now asking Congress to completely eliminate funding for Head Start. If they do that, or sorry, when they do that, that would cut early education for more than half a million of the nation's neediest children and child care for their family. And before we give you all the details on this, I just, I love history and I love context. So I'd just like to remind you that, hey, this was another thing that was in Project 2025, eliminate Head Start. just kill the entire thing, screw over those who need access to child care in rural America. Isn't it strange that basically all of these moves as designated by Project 2045, particularly

screw over people in rural areas? It's a sort of thing that should bother the MAGA movement, but doesn't seem to. In any event, the proposal, the initial details of their call to kill head start was tucked into a 64 page internal draft budget document obtained by the AP that seeks deep cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services. That's another important story, more than a third of the entire budget for HHS being talked about being destroyed. We're not going to focus on that here, but just understand there's a lot of insane doge cuts to go around. But according to the draft, it says the budget does not fund Head Start. It says eliminating the program is consistent with the Trump administration's, quote,

goals of returning control of education to the states and increasing parental control. The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards. for any form of education, which does not really in any way describe what Head Start does, and the idea that poor families desperately trying to have their kids be able to go to school, that this would result in them having more control in literally any sense, makes no sense. But that's the cover story that they're making there. Now, spokespeople for health and human services did not respond to a request for comment. This is the sort of thing that they're not going to want to talk about.

They're just going to want to kill it and let you deal with the consequences. But the executive director for the National Head Start Association, Yasmina Vinci did actually say something. She said it reflects a divestment in our future. Eliminating funding for Head Start would be catastrophic. It would be a direct attack on our nation's most at-risk children, their well-being, and their families. And by the way, if you are not really familiar with Head Start,

if you haven't had to use it or anything, some people think of it as being like a preschool program, which in part it is, but that's not all it does. It provides meals and health screenings. It helps level the playing field for children who might otherwise fall behind before starting kindergarten. Many of the kids that are in Head Start and use its programs are in foster care or are homeless and this helps them to maybe not be held back for their entire lives by that. It currently operates in all 50 states and parents who otherwise would not be able to afford

child care rely on it when they work or go to school because otherwise they might not be be able to do that. They might, again, it's a very difficult position that many of these people will be put in. And there doesn't seem to be any acknowledge of that from the Trump administration. What do you think, Jank? Yeah, so this could affect up to 800,000 families. And speaking of health that John alluded to, it's been shown that if kids are not in Head Start versus they are in Head Start, they've done studies like this, that if the kids not in Head Start have much more health issues down the road, which then costs us an enormous amount of money. So there's an excellent case to be made that Head Start actually saves us money in the long run, right? On just health

issues, let alone everything else. So here we are again. So they're gonna cut Head Start, a wonderful program that Americans love and is one of the government programs that has worked And we as universally like, except for, of course, hard right MAGA who says who cares about other people and they're the radical right. And they think, if it doesn't affect me, I don't care about other human beings at all, okay? But they're a very small minority. Overall, the country loves Social Security, Medicare, and Head Start. You can have debates about other topics and other policies, but they love those programs, right? So now we're going to cut from the average American, and this affects everyone equally, okay? This is not anything but

general to the entire country, okay? Why? Because we need a five and a half trillion dollars for the tax cuts for the rich and for corporations. And now on top of that, we're apparently going to build some sort of golden dome for Elon Musk to control the world. And that's going to cost a gargantuan amount of money and it's likely not going to work. Okay, so in order to waste all of our money on tax cuts for corporations and and subsidies and all the government contracts to Elon Musk, we're gonna have to cut programs for your kids and and for your neighbor's kids and just devastate one of the few programs, not devastate, eliminate one of the few government programs that the average American love. So you just can't get worse than this. So these

These guys are the most obvious fake populists in human history. What kind of populism is this? Take from the average American and give to the literally the richest man in the world. Garbage, nothing but garbage. And it's so mean-spirited. And if you want to talk about the total amount of money that would be saved from harming all of these children and their families, it's minuscule compared to what could be cut out of the Pentagon or any other sort of many other initiatives. But of course, that's not

who they want to target. And remember, all of these cuts are so that tax cuts can be conducted and passed through for the wealthiest, the wealthiest of the wealthy Americans, you know, going back to the Trump tax cuts. So this is, this is absolutely horrible. So not only is Cenk correct that head start, I was looking into this a little bit before today, that not only his head start save incredible amounts of money because it sets kids up and their families up on the right track, but there's actually pretty solid psychology research and developmental psychology research showing that that period before kindergarten is absolutely critical for in influencing what a young person's life will actually end up looking like.

Their sort of mental and emotional and cognitive imprinting actually occurs. And that's clear, peer-reviewed science that shows that again and again and again. So this is all, this is just another horrible, horrible action of many. And gosh, I just, we just have to do everything we can to expose this as not. not populism as not actually insurrectionist. It's actually, if anything, further cementing the status of the very few elites and oligarchs that are essentially in control in our country. Well, I think with that, we should probably take our second break of the hour, but we've got a pretty fun one to close out the hour with, so don't go anywhere.

exciting. This is big. For the summer's biggest adventure. I think I just smurf my pants. That's a little too excited. Sorry. Smurfs. Only dinner's July 18th. Jenks being detained against his will somewhere. But I guess under Trump, that's nothing to joke about. But as you can tell, I escaped. But in the second hour, unfortunately, it gets not funny because they are now beginning to detain U.S. citizens. Headshot Dragon says, looks like Jank is broadcasting from a study hall. But don't worry, we fixed it. I'm now back at, as I said, Brathean headquarters, and there it is. Take your screen shot. Okay, Huang Jun asked on the Ukrainian issue, ask the Native Americans, how much of a deal with the

U.S. government is worth. They can give us about 400 examples. So that refers, of course, the original deal we had with the Ukrainians. Oh, don't worry, if we take your nukes away, we'll protect you forever. Unless we have a president who's super friendly with the government that wound up invading you, in which case, well, all bets are off. So Hiku Dragon says, Jenks featured word of the day, boondoggle. Hard to argue with that. Rufi Dragon says Ramesh is absolutely one of my favorite co-host. So that's wonderfully here. And I've got more if we need it. Okay, now let's get back to the stories. John's got more for you. Yes, I think it's only fair that we end with a little bit of fun. So let's jump into this.

This whole idea that other countries stole our jobs, like our factory jobs and all that, as far as I remember, I remember, that's not the case. Bilber has been good on a lot of topics having to do with politics for some time. But especially ever since Donald Trump got inaugurated, he's like must listen. And he decided to do kind of an impromptu history of capitalism, socialism, the labor movement on his podcast. And so let's jump into a little bit about the Industrial Revolution of this next clip. In the 1800s, during the, what was that period called? the Industrial Revolution. They had like kids working in factories like in 12, 14 hours days,

like four or five year old kids in dangerous situations and people weren't making any money. And the one guy who owned the factory was keeping all the money. The working man finally has enough. They start organizing unions, the robber barons hire police, the army, all of these people to come in and kill these people in riots, crack their skulls, do unbelievable sorts of damage to them to try and force them to go back to work for sweatshop wages. These people died, were maimed catastrophic injuries so that we could have a decent wage in this country. And they had unions and all of that. All of what he's saying there is true and we'll have more from him. And it is such a massive,

I don't know, shame feels like kind of a crime that after all it was done over the course of decades and decades to achieve all these amazing wins and to give us, you know, the life that we have right now. Most people have now been propagandized too for a couple decades and they despise unions. They think that they're wasteful at best, corrupt, criminal shouldn't be a part of them. They should be crushed, in fact. A populist Republican movement should probably kill unions. That's unfortunate. And before we discuss, I do just want to Dive into one thing that he talked about there. He talked about kids working in factories and things like that back in this prior movement. Well, get ready for that because we're already seeing it in multiple states, including just last month, Florida was debating lifting some child labor laws to fill jobs vacated by undocumented immigrants. Remember the jobs that undocumented immigrants took from good working adult Americans, except maybe not. And we do still need those workers. And so I, I guess we're just going to try to flood the labor market with cheap kids, I guess, that

won't be protected. That way we don't have to pay adults, higher wages, because it's more competitive. The entire thing is so nonsensical. But I do think it's a great time, Jank, for this history lesson, because this seems to be, that period of time seems to be the model that Donald Trump and Elon Musk want to take us back to. Yeah, I think the part of the propaganda that bothers me the most is when people talk about corporations like they're humans, you know, as Mitt Romney famously said, corporations are people, my friend. And, and of course, the Supreme Court said that in decisions of 76, 78, and then in Citizens United. And so then they talk, I have these absurd

conversations about, you know, well, are American companies going to be patriotic? Or are they going to do their duty? And are they going to, they're not going to do any of that. They're going to maximize profit. We wrote the code. I think we made a mistake. Other countries have written slightly different codes and that have gotten better results. And we had one line in the code, maximize profit. And that has led to them to doing all of these horrible things. So it's basically like a robot. And people keep talking about, oh my God, what if the robots took over? Too late, they already took over. They, that's those are corporate robots when we program to maximize profit at our expense. And they've been doing it now for a long, long time. So yes, when they

began the union movement, as Bill Burr's referring to, and they decided, hey, if we pull our, you know, ourselves together here, we'll actually begin to have leverage, otherwise they can fire us one by one. And they were right, and that leverage helped to get higher wages, and corporations despised it, because it was higher costs for them. So for a while, they They tried to break the unions and they literally murdered people as Bill Burr's referring to, the Pinkertons, etc. Why? Because the only code was maximize profit. Morality be damned, community be damned, will your workers be damned? This country be damned. So then they moved on to phase two. So they said, all right, well, if you guys are going to protect the average

American, we're going to go to a country that doesn't protect the citizens. We're going to go to China, we're going to go to Vietnam, etc. We're going to find the lowest wages. These things are inevitable if you say the only, you know, rule you have is maximize profit. Those corporate machines will roll over all of us, the entire globe. And that's exactly what's happened. So now that we've outsourced a lot of the jobs. But then we still need labor here because we have, you know, good unemployment numbers. But our wages are, have been stagnant since those Supreme Court decisions in 1976 and 78. And that's not an accident. And I talk about that in my book, Justice is coming. That's actually the single most important rule

change that there was. The activist justices on the Supreme Court said corporations are human beings, and they have speech rights and money is speech so they could buy all of our politicians, unlimited bribery. And that is what ruined this country. And now that they're kicking out more undocumented immigrants, they're saying, well, we need child labor back. Because under no circumstances are these corporate machines going to serve you. We didn't write the code to serve us. We wrote the code to exploit us and to crush us so that they could make more money. We have to change the laws. Otherwise, this is going to happen for the rest of time. Yeah, we always have to look at levers of power and counterpower and ways to establish leverage over forces that are disenfranchising and exploiting so many people.

You know, as we're looking at the insanity of these tariffs and the kind of volatility, it's presenting to so many people's lives, including people's 401. K's, it's a reminder of an era that Trump worships that he discusses now. He didn't discuss it as much back in the 2016 days, but he did talk about tariffs, which is the Gilded Age, right? And so, you know, sometimes I'm doing nice, fun things in the evening to kind of lift my spirits, but sometimes I'm doing things like watching documentaries about the Gilded Age. Don't ask me why.

But that's me, a glutton. So when I, what's very notable about the Gilded Age is it was, it was, the There was a few robber barons that were able to exploit the technologies of that time to reap and gain all the benefits while obviously disenfranchising and screwing over workers and the wider public, right? And so I think that is uncannily similar to what is occurring now. And as you mentioned, Junkett's about taking all the profit and making all the money. In the particular case of today, when it comes to tech and kind of the doging of our lives and all this, all this doge stuff, it's not always, it's actually not even always about profit. It's sort of more of a feudal system. And it's a system of amassing massive, massive valuations, right? A company like Amazon, for example, was not profitable for the first decade or so of its existence. Uber wasn't either. But in the meantime, they knocked out all worker organizing, knocked out all the competition, essentially became close to defect. to monopolies and then basically could do whatever they wanted at that point, including hijacking markets and so on. So, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a reminder, this story and

and Bill Burr's warnings that greed begets greed, as we've talked about before, or even a reminder of, you know, Gordon Gecko, if you all remember Wall Street, greed is good. Somehow there is this sort of vision that is out there. But it's that what the vision is of an economic future for this country and this planet is completely under articulated. And we need a progressive response that discusses what our vision is of an economic future. Yeah. Do we have time to play one more video or do we think we should? Yeah, I think we can do just a little bit more. It's good stuff. Listen to this on corporate greed. Sure. Eventually, these corporations just got sick of dealing with these unions and they're hard-nosed negotiating all that. And then they just said, well,

you then. You know, keep your union, keep your factory. We're leaving. And they took their factories outside of the U.S. and went back to 1800 wages. What the fuck? You should be making those things here. And then what the corporate guy said was, well, you know, we would make sneakers here. But if to pay the American work and everything, the sneakers would then instead of costing 50 bucks, they now cost 700. And I was always thinking, why? It would cost 700. I can't afford that. And what it really was, was they weren't going to lose the profit of sweatshop labor. So if they came back to America, we weren't going to work for that. So, and they weren't going to take, they weren't going to lose the profit of sweatshop labor. So they were going to pass it on to the

consumer. Yeah, yeah, that was the argument. We hear sort of updated versions of that now, Jenk, any quick thoughts about that? Yeah, they always have an excuse for, you know, getting more and more profits from us. Oh, we'll hold all your prices hostage and we'll do this and that. So each industry is different and we might have lost some industries. I understand that, right? But there's a lot of industries we could have protected. And more important than anything else, look, guys, our government was supposed to be a democracy.

I wrote about this and justice coming too. And our founding fathers warned us about corporations. They partly did the American Revolution against the British East India Company. The Tea Party, where they threw the tea overboard, was against that corporation, not against the British Empire. Okay. And they heavily, heavily warned, and I've got some of the quotes in the book, do not let corporations take over. And we didn't listen. And slowly they took over. And now we're at a point where they threaten us every once in a while. You don't listen to us. You'll have to pay $700 for your sneakers. Okay. And you know what? We're going to use your children. We're going to put them. And you know that law in Florida, that isn't just like, oh, having a summer job at Burger King. No, it's to let kids work the overnight shift during school days. I mean, it is exploitation on steroids. Because our government doesn't work for us.

That's what populism is saying, get the government to work for the people again. Turn it back into a democracy and not have it served the donor class and corporate rule. And so that's basically what Bill Burr is pointing out there. He's absolutely right. One of our members wrote in, you know, everybody's asking for Joe Rogan of the left. I mean, Bill Boer is amazing. And it isn't about left or right. right. It's common sense and it's fighting for the average guy. I mean, who so do my last point

to you guys is do not let corporate media brainwash you into believing any of this corporate propaganda. They do not have to rule us. And they, and we don't have to pay their ransom. We could actually take our government back and reset it to serve us rather than them. all right we're we're out of time for the first hour we got an important second hour they have now detained some u.s citizens and who's they ice why is ice immigration detaining u.s citizens well that's a hell of a question so we'll try to answer when we come back I don't know.