The Young Turks - Cruel & Unusual - May 30, 2025

Episode Date: May 31, 2025

The Supreme Court clears the way for Trump to revoke legal protections for over 500,000 migrants—while a 2-year-old U.S. citizen is deported with her undocumented parents to Brazil. A new Trump rant sends stock futures tumbling, and Elon Musk’s drug-fueled chaos on the campaign trail adds another bizarre chapter. Speaker Mike Johnson flip-flops on the Congressional Budget Office, suddenly calling it partisan for warning Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will explode the deficit—despite having used the CBO to attack Biden in the past. Meanwhile, the White House scrambles to correct formatting issues in RFK Jr.'s “MAHA Report.” Hosts: John Iadarola, Michael Shure, Wosny Lambre 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. 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. This damn fat drug I take. It's not working.

Medicare. Well, hello. Drop it. Welcome back once and all to another. Once and for all, I don't know. It's a power panel. I'm John. Waz is here. I didn't hear him before we went live, so I wasn't sure, but Waz, very glad to have you here. And Michael Shore is here here here in the studio. Very excited. Glad to be on with. I was on with WOS like, I don't know, recently, right? Yes, sir. Dynamic duo. And then John comes in and whatever. Yeah, yeah, everyone in the duo. But anyway, Waz, very glad to have you here. I wish you'd been on before because we were talking sports.

I don't know if you know I'm a jockin now. Everybody knows. I heard you guys, but I was watching a YouTube video about barbecue in Texas. That is a sport. That does sound fun. Lockhart. Did it talk about Lockhart, Texas a lot? It is about this place called Goldies.

That's allegedly the best place in Texas right now. Okay, right. I always heard, it's not in Austin. Salt lick is good. Lockhart, Texas, which is about 40 minutes outside of Boston. Yeah. Has, and we could do a whole hour on this, but it has three different places. And one is blacks barbecue, one is Kreitz's and one is Smitty's.

And Kreutz's used to be the only one with blacks. Then the Kreutz's got into a fight with each other, the family, like the in-laws or something. Croits went up and opened his own place. The old Croix's is now Smitty's. And so that's your little lesson about Lockhart Barbecue. And it's all good. So I do the, I do the triple. But my favorite ribs are blacks and brisket is a Smitty's.

But I do the, when I'm there, I do the. Why am I surprised to you have this level of specific geographic barbecue knowledge? I don't know why at this point. I am shocking. But I'm excited to know there's this much drama in Texas Barbecue. I look forward to the Netflix documentary, of course. And the Hulu dramatization. Right, it should be very exciting. Anyway, we've got a lot of drama in the news as well.

We're gonna be talking about a bunch, the stock market. Apologies for the week drop it. All I could come up with was a reference to the stock market dropping, but that's happened so many times recently that it's played out as so many things are in our political system. But we do have a lot of news to get to. So with all that said, why don't we jump into our first topic? This, oh man, look at that face. That's what skin looks like. Anyway, this, this is This morning, Donald Trump accused China of violating their recently negotiated a trade agreement, which we have. I guess they have a real deal, even though Scott Besant has said that it's basically gone nowhere.

I guess there's something if they're already violating it. So what is Trump actually accusing China of doing? And are they actually doing it? Let's see if we can sort it out, starting with U.S. Trade Representative James and Greer explaining the allegations on CNBC earlier today. When the United States imposed reciprocal tariffs on the world, right, this wasn't China specific. There were other countries that had higher tariff rates than China assigned to them. China was the only country to retaliate.

Remember that. And so the president was forced to retaliate to maintain the effectiveness of the tariff. Now when the Chinese, yeah, let me get to that. When the Chinese retaliated, it wasn't just with a tariff, they put in place countermeasures, where they put certain U.S. companies on blacklists. They restricted the flow of rare earth magnets to us and other countries in the world. And so when they agreed in Geneva to remove their tariff and their countermeasures, they removed the tariff like we did, but some of the countermeasures they've slowed on.

If you read the news, you can see that Europe, Japan, United States elsewhere, we haven't seen the flow of some of those critical minerals as they were supposed to be doing. Okay, so that's sort of an explanation, heavy dose of propaganda too. I mean, our tariffs are reciprocal. Even if we're not reciprocating for tariffs against us, ours are reciprocal. They're retaliating with tariffs. And then we're forced to retaliate. We are always good and moral. We deserve a big hug, I think, as a country. They're bad people, though. They're villains. So anyway, look, some of that is true, I guess. They did ice out certain industries. We've also done that exact same thing. That's kind of how trade works. Even in

insane times, we're not in those, but we can still sort of remembering them. China, by the way, says as an example of that, that we've paused sales of semiconductors and chip technologies to China, you know, the flow of things like that guy was saying, it's not minerals, it's semiconductors, but those are important too. And so in that area earlier this week, chip software makers, including synopsis and cadence design systems, said they had received letters from the US Commerce Department telling them to stop selling to China or to reciprocally not sell. Our hand was, ah, my arm, you're twisting it.

So we're bad, but if they do it, it's much worse. And so that's a representative explaining it. Let's go to the president. He's a genius, obviously, in a very, very honest and direct man. He says two weeks ago, China was in grave economic danger. The very high capital T tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to trade. into the United States marketplace, which is by far number one in the capital W world. We went in effect cold turkey with China, and it was devastating for them.

Many factories closed, and there was to put it mildly civil unrest. I saw what was happening and didn't like it. For them, not for us. There was nothing bad here. He's not spooked. He's not a chicken. Shut up about tacos. He's not scared at all. They're falling apart, their economy, military, society, everything. I made a fast deal with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation. And I didn't want to see that happen because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy. That is the good news. You all knew about that, how everything had gotten back to normal and you didn't have to feel like sick to your stomach all the time about every bit of news coming out and your retirement account wasn't totally F. Do you remember that? How everything was good. Anyway, he says the bad news is that China, perhaps.

Not surprising to some has totally violated its agreement with US or us. I don't know. So much for being Mr. Nice Guy. We have to come up with a new nickname for him now. I'm just so used to call him Mr. Nice Guy. Anyway, I didn't even think they had a deal. Scott percent this morning said negotiations have gone nowhere with them. But I guess we had a deal.

I know that he lowered the tariffs from 145% down to like 35% a wide. back. I guess that's the deal and they sort of did the same. I don't know, Michael. What do you think? Well, I mean, I think that this is how he's playing us and playing these other countries because it is a mission without a real plan. It is coming in and doing this. We're going to penalize everybody. We're going to be retributive with everybody. And that's not just on countries with tariffs. That's with people who did me wrong in other places. That's for people who, you know, went after me or my administration personally. So this is all retribution. This is going after and making a blanket sort of agenda

item out of tariffs. But then this stuff happens. And he thinks it's all about, oh, I was trying to help this other country. They've never been happier in China, right? I mean, we know that's not the case. And we know that while Donald Trump thinks he's driving the train on tariffs and the world economy and the global economy, they're looking elsewhere. They're not engaging with America. And that's what has American businessmen, small, American business owners, small and otherwise, really upset with these tariffs because the up and down nature, and you'll get to what would happen in the stock market, but the up and down nature of this is very, very difficult on people trying to run a business. Yeah. Yeah, it was. To be honest with you guys,

I don't know if you guys saw the clip where this lady reporter in the White House press pool said that the guys on Wall Street, that some of her sauces on Wall Street refer to Trump as taco, meaning Trump always chickens out in reference to the tariffs. And he got really pissed, said that was a nasty question, was like, oh, I've never heard that before. Trump doesn't always chicken out. And he came up with all of this crap. And I'm like almost 100% sure he did this because of that. Yeah. Because that lady said to him that people were laughing at him on Wall Street in saying that he always chickens out. Yeah, it's nasty view to even bring it up, Wasp.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he said to her, don't ever say that. Like he was so affected. And he definitely hadn't heard about it before. This was him in real time learning about it. He wasn't already stewing in it. And of course it was a female reporter too. Oh, which makes it even nastier.

Nasty. Nasty. I'm not sure which reporter. He didn't say low IQ. So she might have been a white lady reporter. I'm not sure. Right. But anyway, yeah, like, he's just so emotional the way he responds to things.

And he's freaking out because now they're laughing him on Wall Street. And I just, I want to reassure Trump. Yes, it's, it sucks that they're laughing at you now about the taco thing. But I want to make clear, lots of people have been laughing at you for a really long time. If you're not used to it by now, you're never going to be used to it, buddy. You got to, you got to grow up, you've only got a few years left. So anyway, he's lashing out. He's trying to, I guess he's trying to look strong, implying that he's trying to help them.

So like I'm trying to understand as a regular person. I'm not a business expert or whatever. So he put these massive tariffs like 145 percent. Trade was basically gone. We're not going to buy from them. They're not going to buy from us, which hurts their industries, hurts our industries. And he does this because he has never and will never understand what a trade deficit actually represents. He thinks that rather than it being sort of a one way to look at trade between two parties, he thinks if it's negative, that's robbery, which that doesn't always make sense. Like, you know, me and my local bakery have a negative trade deficit. They never buy anything from me, but I'm not getting ripped off. I'm getting heavier, but I'm not

getting ripped off. And so he just doesn't understand that. So in his mind, if he grinds trade in both directions to a halt, it's zero and zero, no negative trade deficit. That's a good thing. Not at all. That's not a good thing at all. And he now implies that things are better than I guess they were when it was 145, but I'm less concerned with that and more concerned with, well, what about compared to six months ago? Because the tariffs are still way, way higher. And so sure, the trade may not be non-existent, but prices are going to be higher for consumers, for a wide array of different products that we buy. And our companies are going to sell less to them. And we both have added non-tariff barriers to trade as well.

And so everybody on both sides is still worse off than they were. And I guess the only thing he seems to care about, the only thing riding on all this that he cares about is his perception of national strength in some sort of abstract, ill-informed way. And so I don't see how this is to the benefit of the American people. And very briefly, when he posted this, the stock market dipped. Now, that's happened a lot. I don't know why everyone freaks out because it went back up. Again, it's gone down, it's gone back up. Things are generally still worse than they were at the beginning of this year. But things vacillate or whatever. And so to that end, he wants to focus on good news. And so I think we have a short clip from the press briefing that he did with Elon Musk for some reason. Take a look.

I think what I'll do, if you don't mind, numbers have just come out which are rather extraordinary. and I thought I'd play a tape of one of the people who I've respected over the years from, you know, Joe Kiernan and Rick Santelli. This just came out and we'll just play that for a second. Personal income is of eight-tenths, of eight-tenths of eight-tenths of percent. That is almost triple the expectations. I'll tell you that, the income, the income numbers, really for the first four months of the year, they're stellar.

They're really stellar. I've been watching these numbers a long time. I don't think I've ever seen the trade deficit cut in half of one month. Not bad. Not bad. Come on, guys. He played more than a minute long clip during a press briefing of one guy on the news who likes what's happening. Notice all the charts were like big dip, slight raise, which doesn't sound great.

you're telling people that they're better off in terms of their income, which is a risky political strategy when they don't feel better off and when prices are higher. And again, the only reason he showed it was at the end, we've cut the trade deficit in half. There's no trade. There's no trade. This isn't good. Like if you're an American business that used to sell things abroad and you can't now, how much better do you feel that the trade deficit is a little bit more neutral? Of course not. And personal income up? You know, the Biden jobs numbers are coming home. finally right i i'm not saying that but but you can you can cherry pick which is what presidents of every party and every stripe have done and but this is bizarre cherry picking because it is

one person's take on it right i mean these are some hard numbers and there are some numbers that are curious within these numbers but the cherry picking and playing it and then also going after NBC all day long and then coming on and say well here's one person at NBC who i because they're saying something I like. It's it's no way to run a country. Moss, what do you make of it? Yeah, it just feels like he's at a loss right now because he thought this tariff regime was going to

quote unquote bring China to its knees and you know, they come begging back to the negotiation table and it's been the opposite because China and yeah, it has his drawbacks. The regime is pretty repressive. It's pretty authoritarian. However, one of the positives of the way they operate is they can make decisions unilaterally. And they're not going to have a business community trashing them in the Chinese press.

They're not going to have a great point. Yeah. All these different, you know, entities going against what they want to do when America is so clearly attacking them. And then you add to the fact they get the gift that they get to tell that their people like, These people are trying to bury us. They're trying to bury the great Chinese people. This is what we're gonna do to make sure that we're fine in the long run. Like he doesn't realize who he's fooling with, man.

These people are playing chess and Donald Trump is clearly playing like Pinochle or something. Yeah, it's ignorance sucks man. It ruins every, when you don't understand the trade deficit, when you don't understand how tariffs work, either don't understand who pays for them or willfully deceive people about who pays for them, like, yeah, how can you be surprised when the economic returns aren't good? And by the way, Peackel, a slightly complicated game. I just want to, I just want to put that in there. So it's not, you know, it's not a whole lot more complicated

than, or less complicated than Jess. I can't, I can't speak to Peanuckle. I interrupted you, but I put it in the terms of board games and I can come up with some comparisons, but, but anyway, and also I suspect, like he liked the reference that Santell made, I think it was Santelli to the trade deficit, but also Santelli was, like, was he on the stock exchange floor? Like all that stuff was going on behind him? No, I think that's their set. That's their set, okay. Because it seemed to me like, is he just playing it because this is like a guy on Wall Street who's not actively laughing at him as a chicken right now?

No, these are people. I mean, Joe Kernan and San Antonio and Rick Santelli are people that have, that he's gone to Maria Bartaromo on Fox. There are people that he, there are people that he goes to because they'll give the numbers that he wants to hear. And now, of course, they'll keep doing it because they get played in the Oval Office and name check. So that's an important thing to these people. Yeah. And we'll see if it's important to a lot of Americans, I would say to our audience, if you're lucky enough to have a retirement account, give it a little check because he's really excited today. We'll see if regular people are. In any event, we have to take our first break of the show. But back with more,

we have a couple stories on immigration after this. Welcome back one and all to the power panel. If you're just joining us now, hit the like button as we jump into some more news. The Supreme Court revealed earlier today that Donald Trump and his administration will be allowed to end a program that gave temporary protection to more than 500,000 1,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, likely accelerating the speed at which they're going to be sent out of the country. And if you've been following immigration news and the court rulings about it, I know there's been a lot, he's stopped, then it's revoked, then the Supreme Court jumps in, to be very clear, this is different than what they announced on May 19th when they allowed the administration to revoke temporary protected status from a group of almost 350,000 Venezuelans. That's a separate thing, but you can combine those two groups, and it's almost a million people that had special protections that now will be able to be shipped out to whatever their fate may be.

So different rulings. And how we got here was that back in April, a federal judge temporarily blocked them revoking those Biden era protections. The parole programs had granted the immigrants temporary legal protections after they fled violence from their home countries. I'm sure that situations in those home countries is fine now. They're not going to face persecution, violence, or anything like that. But that's what they decided there were dissents, though. Justice Katanji Brown Jackson wrote that the high court, quote, plainly botched its assessment and undervalued the, quote,

devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly a half million non-citizens amid pending legal claims. She argued that the government failed to satisfy its burden of demonstrating harm saying ending the program will have, quote, devastating consequences, while it is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum predecision damage, court ordered stays exist to minimize, not maximize harm to litigating parties. Basically, as the legal process theoretically would continue, they're going to do what they do, which is pack as many people as possible into military planes and send them wherever. Maybe the country they originally from, maybe Sudan, maybe Guantanamo Bay, And if it turns out that the legal process actually does rule in their favor, what are you gonna do? Supreme Court doesn't have any guns, they can tell them to bring back as many people as they want, he's clearly not going to do it. But I'm glad that she pointed out the actual harm that will be done to these individuals when they get wherever they're

going. I would also acknowledge the harm that will be done to America by having a half million people torn from communities, away from family and friends, their workplaces, where they contribute in a million different ways. And then you put up all of that against an abstract, ill-defined or conspiratorially defined harm that is put on to every migrant. You're destroying America. How? Who the hell knows?

Most of the people being deported haven't committed any crimes. But their mere presence here is not just a threat. It's an emergency, actually. Habeas corpus set it aside. Did you know we've been invaded? And so the entire thing is very frustrating in seeing the Supreme or go along with it. It's frustrating as well. Was, I want to go to you first. What do you think of this? I mean, it's really difficult when you sit and think about, you know, the circumstances that

brought these folks over here. And, you know, just trying to make it in America is difficult enough. And I think the most frustrating part is that the previous administration did, you know, basically open up some of the rules and restrictions that would allow these people to pursue cases through our legal process to stay here legally. But this effectively does is achieve a rug pull from underneath those folks. And, you know, what people on the right would say is that, well, Joe Biden overreached, we got a mandate from our election that the people didn't necessarily want all of those expansions in the, you know, asylum seeking process. And it's too bad, we got to let them go. I think this is just, you know, part of the process of making America a less great country.

This is a place that people literally around the world love are dying to come to, at least previously. And we're now in the process of unwinding our status as the most exalted country on planet Earth. And for what I have no idea, my heart just breaks for the people caught in the middle of this process. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it has already been unwound and an important part of what was open with and talked about was was sort of denying it's an implicit denial of what happens to these people back home while also denying because they're not talking about it what it does to business here and what it does to business owners here and again you're talking about taking business owners and small businesses and saying you can't have these people working for you but you also

have have tariffs and you also have all of these difficulties and you also have also have the high prices. It's handcuffing the nation financially, which you wouldn't think he would want to do, except that it helps, you know, one-tenth of one percent of the country. But the other side of this is that these are legitimate, most of these cases are legitimate. I did a series from Guatemala and Honduras for another network, a TV network, where I was interviewing a gangster, somebody who was a gangster in Honduras, who told me the way it worked and how he would go into these towns and villages, not just himself, but as part of a group. And as soon as somebody came home from earning whatever pittance of a wage they earned that day,

they would extort it from them. And if they didn't, they would threaten them. They would rape women. They would do, they would steal things, right? These are places that are horrendous if you're not part of that. Now, this guy was reformed, but he told me exactly what it was like. these are legitimate cases and that is who we let into this country and to deport them and send them back to those horrors which we're in essence doing the horrors haven't gone away just because they're here because there are other people still there that is ignoring what the principle of our immigration system is and these people are entitled to hearings and maybe making the courts more effective and making immigration having more immigration judges out there

would be a better way of dealing with this than sending people back to these dangerous dangerous places. You talk about Nicaragua and Venezuela. I don't know about Cuba being dangerous, but I know about Haiti being quite dangerous. I mean, maybe the most dangerous of all of them for so many of these people and women and breaking up families. It's a horrendous thing. Now, this is not a ruling necessarily, even though we call it a rule. I guess it's a ruling, but it's not a case that has been decided. It's just saying the courts have to do a little more in pursuing whether or not this comes to us eventually. But it's an indication of the way it's going to go in the aftermath of that.

Yeah, I think that, you know, we don't always agree on the panel, but I think that we're all uniformly, like experiencing the bias of considering these people as people, but have you considered, what if you just hated their guts, them and everyone who looks like them, or even if you didn't personally, what if you were trying to appeal to other voters that you think do? What if it was that? What if you didn't care at all about the Constitution, the rule of law, any of it? And you just saw them as parasites or wanted to spread the myth that they are parasites.

What about that? How would you act in that case? The entire thing is just utterly grotesque. Like to Waz's point, the Make America Great Again thing has been, it's terrible for so many different reasons, what it intentionally harkens back to all of that. But it's also just so wildly inaccurate about what they're actually trying to achieve. Whatever else do you think America is or is becoming great? Great has got nothing to do with it. We're not aspiring to greatness.

We're aspiring to be small and cruel, like grubby, selfish, like aspire, like wanting to inspire as well as saying other people to dream someday of being a part of us. I don't even know why I don't know why people would at this point. And that's the goal. As much, John, is you're right about that with great and looking at that word, again is just a big part of that too. When was again? Like, you know, I would ask this for TYT, for people waiting online at rallies to go into Trump rallies all across the country. And nobody could articulate when when then was. And then when you did and you said that, well, the year you cite, black people had to sit upstairs in a movie theater in the back of a bus, right? Was it great for everyone? Well, you know, and then we famously had, or I don't know how famous, but we showed this one black guy who I was talking to in Michigan who said, yeah, But it was still better then, what? You know, and these are the people that are lining up and go into these tailgates to see Donald Trump. And so again, nobody can define what again is, but we know that, and this, I'm sure we agree on, that again was not, is elusive.

We don't know when that was. Yeah, I don't know, I feel like this is going to get wonky, but I feel like Maha should be make America hierarchical again. Just give us the hierarchy that made us comfortable. I won't sell, by the way. No, I don't think it's not much of a bumper sticker. Not a winning maha. But that is what it is, actually. Anyway, and I know was was like satirizing what they would say, not him not saying it.

But make mandate mean something again. The idea that Donald Trump has a mandate, he didn't even get 50% of the vote. He got the narrowest possible victory. Well, it's only defined as a mandate by him. Yeah, exactly. I hear news people being like, well, he did talk about doing this stuff. No, I understand that. And there is something to that.

If you run on something, I guess we can't be too shocked when you actually do it. But you didn't get a man. I mean, if you got a mandate, then Barack Obama literally should have ascended into heaven as a god. And if AOC wins with like 54% of the vote, then she can take every single gun and just melt it down into a big carbon processing factory or whatever. Because he did not get a goddamn mandate. John, you need a birth certificate to get into heaven. So forget it for Obama. He did the protest against me.

He was illegitimate with his massive victory. In 2023, the little girl you see here who's being identified as Sophia came to this country from Mexico with her parents. And the family was granted permission to temporarily stay here for humanitarian reasons. They applied for it and was granted because Sophia's ill and in need of life-saving treatment. Now all that is in jeopardy. Yes, your daily reminder of how utterly cruel and intentionally cruel our immigration policy is that little girl identified as Sophia is like. going to be sent out of the country, even if that results in her death. Now, the DHS is scrambling in the wake of this news, picking up so much seem to imply that they're not actually doing this,

but that's not the case. They simply lie. They need to get their numbers up. And when you don't actually have roving bands of Honduran cannibals to deport, you got to sometimes deport a four-year-old girl with a potentially fatal illness. And so let's talk a little bit about her and the situation. Lawyer for the family said the girl's mother was notified that the U.S. government was withdrawing the humanitarian parole that the family received back in 2023 when she was brought to the U.S.-Mexico border. She received the notification in April and May and was told the family is subject to potential deportation. Sophia has what's called short bowel syndrome, a disease that prevents the body from taking in and processing nutrients on its own. apparently the care that she requires to stay alive is not available in Mexico. That's why they came here and applied for and were granted the humanitarian parole.

But we have a little bit more of the lawyer joining Chris Hayes there to explain how dire this situation is. Sophia was receiving treatment in Mexico prior to coming to the United States. However, she kept getting repeated blood infections and was doing very poorly. So she and her parents came to the US to seek humanitarian parole. And subsequently, Sophia has received treatment at a hospital in San Diego and then Children's Hospital, Los Angeles. Her condition has improved substantially, but her doctors have said that if her treatment is interrupted, she will die within days. I think it's important to say that Sophia undergoes medical treatment at home 14 hours per day.

She is required to basically be hooked up to an IV 14 hours a day and take a nutrients that way. She is also fed through a G-2 four times a day. And she visits Children's Hospital every six weeks or so. So she has just very intense specialized treatment that Children's Hospital specializes in. This is a world-class facility. But more importantly, the equipment that Sophia will be able to. on to deliver the nutrients to her system is not available outside of the United States. And her doctors have clearly ordered her and the other patients that are undergoing this treatment to not leave the country.

And so there's a lot in that, but the important takeaways the doctors say that she will die within days if she is deported. And I mean, I've been paying attention the last 120 days or so, unless there's some critical mass of attention put on this story, what do you think they're going to do? What do you think Marco Rubio, Christy Noem, Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump are going to do? And I have a little girl. And so I don't want to get fired. So I'm just going to say I could not hate these people more than I do. It is not physically possible. So I'm just, I'm going to throw it to you so I can not get fired. Well, here is, well, if you get fired, I'd probably have more opportunity to do this. So there's, I have a vested interest.

But, but the, what I look at here is an opportunity for a U.S. president, a real U.S. president, to go to California, celebrate American medicine, celebrate what we can do for a little girl who otherwise would die, as it was said here, otherwise would die. celebrate that and talk about that being part of America, going back to what we were talking about the three of us a little bit ago, being great, about America being great. I would use that opportunity to then say, Sophia, don't worry, you can stay here. We are going to take care of you here in the United States. We would never send you back. And still, like any president, even this president could still go on with his agenda. But and even get political capital by making an exception here and bringing attention to American medicine.

There's so many lost opportunities here. But all the only opportunity we're taking is hate, xenophobia, keeping America white again, doing all the things that we've talked about so much. And it is, it's mind blowing to me. It is mind blowing that you could do this. I don't know every part of this story, but you don't need to know every part of every story to see what what the superficial part of this can tell us it's an opportunity for an American president to to pounce on. And we're doing the opposite because these people that you just mentioned, John, are so odious about this kind of a thing. And they're just, you know, full speed ahead.

Yeah, I mean, and this comes on the heels of them making a big show of having the white South African farmers whose land was not taken from them. Yep. Come to America and parade these people around. around as if their situation were dire when it couldn't be anything further from the truth. And the idea that this little girl, she's four years old, we can't have her here so she could get her meds and actually stay alive. I mean, you know, it's a meme with the GOP, like the cruelty is the point. But this, this, I mean, this is like damn near a farce, like you can't even, you couldn't

even put this in a movie. People would be like, yo, you're being too cartoonish about the level of evil here. It's just impossible to fathom that anybody with a conscience would be against this little girl and her parents staying in America so she could get medical treatment. That just, it seems impossible. And, you know, I could already hear, you know, the people on the other side, oh, this is manipulation. Most of the people that were sending back have nothing to do with this type of thing, why are you even using this as an example? I mean, the point is like, it's to raise up again why people want to come here. We're supposed to be the exceptional country.

That's the point, man. And acting like we don't have resources, they're so scarce and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I think that's the problem. Yeah, I mean, that's the reference that you made to the South Africans is a devastating point, 100%. And that's exactly it. We can take a bunch of people based purely on 4chan conspiratorial nonsense. Alex Jones mind vomit. We bring them.

We have resources for that, not for her. It's just race. That's literally all it is. I mean, we're supposed to dignify it and imply that it's something else. Right. That's all it is. That's all it is. The entire thing is just, it's so, it's so grotesque on the manipulation.

We know they love to take individual cases like a victim of a crime. If someone is the victim of a crime perpetrated by a migrant, that's it. We're done. You don't have immigration anymore. We know that they do that. We know that game that they play. They love it. They love it to cover themselves in the blood.

But for some reason, one migrant being guilty is reason to stop it. What about an innocent little four-year-old girl? Is that a reason to continue it? No, don't care, not interested, because they don't see them as people, like fundamentally. That's the problem. Again, the identity politics that drives so much right-wing thought, it just suffuses every issue and it makes it impossible to reason with these people because their racial bias, the animus they feel, makes them incapable of seeing actual gains and costs, pros and cons of policy.

They tell us that we're crippled by identity politics. It's not the case. Caring about people is not the bias they think it is. Being driven by hatred and fear and jealousy and sometimes lust all wrapped up with identity does make you incapable of talking seriously about politics, about understanding the consequences of your actions. And we see it a thousand times a day under this insane administration. And it's the focus on the negative and not the positive. That's what I'm just saying. This is like a chance to say only in America, right?

Only in America could this person get fixed. Could this little girl have her short bowel system or a short bowel problem condition addressed properly? Only in America with American doctors and American hospitals. That's one avenue you could go down. But in the end, they choose the negative, which is you can't stay here. You're here illegally. Get out of here, right? That's an opportunity lost.

And that's also a disgusting way of looking at a situation. Yeah. And to our prior point, whatever else it is, it ain't great. Right, that's true. Nothing great about it. Okay, I think that we're probably going to have to end this segment. We do just want to just briefly let you know, more American citizens have been deported. There's another little girl, three years old, deported with her parents who are not citizens. She is, and she's now on a tourist visa in Brazil. She can't get citizenship there. She's not a citizen of that state. She's kind of in legal limbo now. And we just got rid of her.

And then when they were asked about it, they lied and said that the parents requested that. The parents say we were never given any option of letting her stay in the U.S. So they're doing like we talk about like, hey, at some point they're going to start deporting U.S. citizens were past that. They've already been doing that and they just lie about it afterward. However many steps you think we are down the road towards fascism, it's probably more than you realize. We're going to take a short break. We'll be back with more news after this.

Stop. Do you know how fast you were going? I'm going to have to write you a ticket to my new movie, The Naked Gun. Liam Nissan. Buy your tickets now. I get a free Tilly Dog. Tilly Dog, not included. The Naked Gun. Tickets on sale now.

August 1st. Welcome back one and all. We have a couple more stories for you. A little bit of serious stuff, a little bit of fun. So buckle up for that. Also, prepare yourself for the second hour of the show because I believe Yaz is gonna be taken over steering the ship. Jordan and Sharon will be joining that as well. So awesome second hour and bonus episode coming for you. Two, with that said, let's jump into this. Yes, I sent my good on a long text message last night explaining that it can be both big and beautiful, okay? So what I wanted to make sure that he understands is that the projection

that he's referring to and others is from the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. They are historically, totally unreliable. Historically, totally unreliable. Don't put any stock in what the CBO says. That is Mike Johnson. He would never buy the garbage, B.S that the CBO is pushing except all the many times he did when far smaller projected numbers were enough to scuttle the whole thing. Joe Biden, Democrats, you can't do that. You can't add to the deficit. There's nothing big and beautiful about infrastructure. No, it's big and beautiful when you're giving money to Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and George Soros. That's what's big and beautiful. Paying off donors is beautiful.

So anyway, Representative Veronica Escobar went back through Mike Johnson's Twitter feed to find the examples that we're going to show you of him being so happy that the CBO exists in the past. So back in 2021, he said this about the Build Back Better Act. Now that CBO has confirmed this bill adds nearly $400 billion to the deficit, contrary to the White House's claim that the bill is paid for, let's see if the moderate Democrats keep their promise to only vote for a bill consistent with White House estimates. So bear in mind, CBO in this particular case, in this estimate is saying that their big, ugly bill will add over $3 trillion. So $3 trillion, you're biased, man, you know what you're talking about. $400 billion, as we dig out of the worst public health crisis in the last century in America, try to restart the economy, fix supply chains, invigorate the economy for about one ninth what he's handing over to million. billionaires and billionaires. That was unacceptable. Payoffs to the donors. Totally cool.

Get all the way off his back about it. By the way, that same year, he stated that House members should not be expected to vote on important bills before getting some help from the CBO, saying late tonight, Dems announced we will be voting at 8 a.m. tomorrow on their utterly reckless tax and spending big government socialism bills. After a much of chaos and disarray, the latest build back better bill version was just filed yesterday. It's impossible for members to actually read and fully digest this 2100 page monstrosity before the vote, much less obtain an objective CBO score of its total cost. We can't do this until we get the CBO, we need the CBO. Until they're back in power. And then the CBO matters as much as the deficit

or the national debt dues, which is not at all. Who cares about it? What do you think? I mean, this is just blatant hypocrisy, right? I mean, can members of congress do it all the time speakers do it more than anybody but you we were talking about earlier you cherry pick your numbers but this is not cherry picking numbers this is saying that i trust a source who i now don't trust and then i trust them again i mean this is really i this is mike this is very very mike johnson right whatever's convenient whatever sounds smooth i'm going to go after it and good you know well done by veronica eskabar i mean going and finding stuff which didn't take a lot but thinking that okay i've heard differently from the speaker before

going back and finding that stuff she and her staff should be applauded for what they've done here because when you expose hypocrisy it doesn't matter a lot right i mean that it's not going to change mike johnson it's not going to make people not listen to mike johnson who are already in his camp but it does point out the massive hypocrisy and there are some people in the republican caucus the Thomas Massies and others who do go after the speaker for this sort of thing. So maybe it'll have legs, but it's, you know, it's just convenient. Anytime I think about this deficit, hawkery, fakery from the Republicans, it just kind of gets on my nerves. It makes me want to go crazy because this deficit

as a talking point started during the first Obama administration with the tea baggers and then pointing to the deficit and being like, oh, the Democrats are crazy, reckless spenders, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, we just came off of two Bush administrations where this guy put two freaking wars on a credit card. Literally, that's what got us started on this deficit path. It's the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan that we didn't pay for. We didn't bother trying to pay for because they knew to be like, oh, we're going to cut like social goods and cut all of this different stuff so we can go to Iraq like no and it was and they've been doing this hypocritical stuff pretty much ever since and never in any Republican administration probably in history I might be wrong but definitely not of

you know the 20th and 21st centuries have these guys ever decreased the debt they always increase it every single time not to say that Democrats don't too but it's not one of their main party platforms like we need to reduce the debt. They never do it. This bill is nothing but a huge government spend on the very richest in our country. Like this guy knows he has no leg to stand on and so he's, you know, he's going on Fox News and just lying. Yeah, it's it's a pattern that we've seen. It's this is why a Republican president gets elected to come in, transfer wealth of the rich. That's it. Blow things up, probably lose the mid-term. probably lose the next election. Democrat comes in, tries to fix it, can't fix it in time,

get sent out. Republican comes in, hands billions to the wealthiest people, or trillions to the wealthiest people. That's just what we see. Like they're, it's just, it's just Black Friday at Walmart. They win the election, they rush in the door, they start taking stuff, that's it. It's when a new delivery of Pokemon cards shows up at Target, they're just on top of it. They take as much as they can, everything's destroyed, and then we have to sift through the wreckage. That's all it is. Talking about fiscal discipline when you're handing $4.5 trillion to the wealthiest. And again, as I said on the show, I think last week, you'll notice it never changes. It's 4.5 trillion, not four. We're not doing 3.8. It cannot budge an inch. It has to be

$4.5 trillion. And we have to add $150 billion to the largest military budget our species has ever seen. And we have to spend hundreds of billions on additional border security. And Donald Trump needs to have a $90 million birthday party parade. He has to, he really likes tanks, fiscal discipline. Get all the way the hell out of here with that. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna swear and get fired for that. This morning, this morning, the White House defending Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again report, even as experts raise concerns about his accuracy. Does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted? Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his

team at HHS. Carolyn Levin announcing that the White House is fully standing behind HHS and RFK Jr. after it was found out that they were citing fictional studies to justify the things they want to do. And why would fake studies hurt their confidence? They don't care if the studies are true or not that are interested in that scientific stuff. It's all a means to an end. Getting rid of vaccines, defunding research, firing scientists. That's the mission and they do very much have full confidence in that. Now we're gonna get into some of the citations that were wrong and why there's very strong evidence that AI is to blame for this, but first a little bit more from the video.

Research paper by Dr. Catherine Keyes was cited, but Dr. Keyes says she never wrote that paper. The ranges of estimates that were in the statement are not based on my work and work that I know. At least two research journals also confirming they are not able to find research cited in the government's report. The White House dismissing the mistakes as formatting issues. But it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government. And again, there's a grain of truth there. It is transformative when you take absolute bull crap, but you turn to something that's

a ruin a country. That's alchemy at that point. Professor McGonagall should be teaching that. Anyway, yeah, no, it's the substance is actually what's issue. It's not formatting, it's not that the margins were at the wrong width, it's not that one of the images spanned a page break, this is not a formatting thing, this is directly getting conclusions of studies wrong or inventing studies. that don't actually exist, and I don't know how many of these we can cover with the time we have.

There were four papers cited don't exist at all. Some of the studies were real, but how they used them was 100% wrong. So in one section about mental health medication, the report cites a review paper, it claims shows that therapy alone is as or more effective than psychiatric medicine. But one of that paper statisticians said that that conclusion doesn't make sense, given their study didn't even attempt to measure or compare therapies affecting this as a mental health treatment. And that combined with a few other specific things have led some people to believe that they just used AI to generate this. AI hallucinated as it always does and it takes bits and pieces of things that actually exist, but it's not a human, it doesn't understand what's

going on. And I mostly find that to be convincing. The only thing that makes me question whether it was AI is it is possible that RFK Jr. did, as he likes to do, do his own research, And I'm sure he's as utterly incapable of understanding scientific research as chat GPT. So it's possible that it's just him doing what he's going to do. But remember, they're moving ahead. They're not like pulling back on this. And we're already seeing the ripple effects of this. They've changed the government's advice on COVID vaccination. They pulled a nearly billion dollar Moderna contract that they had to generate next level flu vaccines, including one for the bird flu. They're just done with it. And it's explicitly based on the sort of COVID vaccine conspiracy

theorizing that they've done. They're saying it's it's because it's the MRI things. That was never anything. It's not real. We don't need to do this research. So they are going to be as ill prepared for the next pandemic as they were when we hit the last one. Right. And today the CDC, of course, saying on COVID vaccines for children that they're safe. So the doctors are saying one thing and the crank who thinks he's a doctor who's the secretary of health and human services is saying something else but the most who are you going to trust the doctor of the worm buffet really that's true that's a good one can i have a second with that yes and so that's that's the whole rub here right is you have somebody who came into this job as an

opportunist who ran for president saw an opening to get a job that for which he was unqualified really and and is trying to manipulate the facts in such a way and then they're standing by it right so they stand by it and they say yeah this is right just some formatting errors but the medicine is sound well the medicine isn't sound right because they're using as john said medicine that they kind of made up right that wasn't really true and they're standing by a report that is with citations that are inaccurate they're fiction the nice thing about the internet is i got to to look up who professor mcgonigal was while John was doing his presentation. And I found that it was a Harry Potter character.

And he teaches transfiguration. He teaches transfiguration, exactly. And so, but really, I'm not, that's what we're dealing with here. And so how can you stick by a medical report from AI? Even if it was a mistake, they should say, we made a mistake. We'll issue another report that will be largely like this with different citations. But you can't stick by a report that is citing science that doesn't exist, not even refuting science. refuting signs.

Yeah, this is the MO or the Trump administration. Always double down, never backtrack, never say, yo, we made a mistake. This is easily fixable, you know, simple mistake, move on. Hand up, my bad, no, never. That's just not the way of this administration. And yeah, Robert F. Kennedy, as Mike said, is he's a crank. There's just no two ways about it. Like, I think there's obviously something to the idea that the big,

food companies are damn near poisoning us with some of the chemicals and different things that they put in the food supply that are banned and outlawed in places like Asia and Europe and other places like we're ingesting stuff that other countries is like no we're not doing this to our citizens that's true RFK ain't addressing any of that he's doing all of the craziest most easily discredited stuff and um yeah man, we'll see how long this this last. I don't think he's going to be in there for four years, but I mean, we'll see.

Yeah, and to what Waus is saying, John, quickly is also when you defund the EPA and the FDA and the way this administration has, you don't address any of that either. So it's not just Kennedy in his department, which has also been, you know, slimmed by a lot because of the doge cuts, those ridiculous doge cuts. So it's all tied together. So you're not going to get anybody addressing the real problems that Waus is talking. about, which is the things that are added to our food and our air and all of that. Exactly, yeah, the EPA every single day is clearing the way for corporations to poison our water or land and our air.

Yeah. Oh, Maha, definitely. They're serious about it. It's absolute BS. I mean, even if RFK Jr. was honest or competent, even if he wasn't earthworm leftovers, it doesn't matter because the administration is interested in this. The movement fundamentally is not passionate about getting healthier. We just had that big, mostly fictional fight about Democrats trying to take away their natural gas ovens. How dare you? I don't care about the asthma. I like the way it feels. Like, they have never

been passionate about becoming healthier. And so, and then you look at what's actually in here. And I agree with was, by the way, I do think the food industry and pharmaceutical companies get away with a whole lot, mostly price gouging, but also probably giving us some stuff that we shouldn't have. But we should take that seriously. We should take microplastic seriously. What, what, what? Where in the big, beautiful bill are they proposing regulations on literally any of that? Meanwhile, in this transformative mostly chat GPT generated study, not only if they done all that stuff

that we already said with vaccines, they're laying the groundwork for the ultimate coup on vaccines. They raise concerns about the childhood vaccine schedule suggesting that there could be a link between vaccine injury and chronic disease. It's just, that is, that is the foundation of the anti-VAC stuff is they're going to try to stop kids from being vaccinated. And if you don't think he's gonna do it, okay, we'll talk about it in a month, three months, six months when they finally do it because that's where this is headed. That is the only goal RFK Jr. has ever had that and profiting off of his work, which he has

always done. And so they're definitely gonna do that. By the way, if this is such a serious and transformative look at the causes of illness and death among kids, you know what the leading cause of children's death in the country? countries, in America, not in civilized countries, but in America, it's guns. They're not mentioned in the study at all. Make America healthy again, unless the thing that's made you unhealthy is being shot, in which case they're not interested. Yeah. Anyway, that is unfortunately all the time we have for the show. Michael, pleasure to have you here and

in studio, always glad to have you here. Was a pleasure as well. Thank you so much. Everybody, you've got a second hour coming up. I'm gonna be out all next week taking care of my baby and stuff like that, but you got another week of awesome shows coming up for now. Yaz, Sharon, and Jordan will be here on the other side of this.