The Young Turks - Democracy in Danger

Episode Date: July 15, 2023

The Biden administration forgives $39 billion in student debt for more than 800,000 borrowers. Joe Manchin opposes another key Biden nominee in blow for her confirmation. Americans are widely pessimistic about democracy in the United States, an AP-NORC poll finds. RIght wing influencers get paid in Twitter's new monetization scheme. Case of a Texas man reported missing eight years ago was a hoax, police say. HOSTS: Cenk Uygur (@CenkUygur), Farron Cousins (@farronbalanced) & John Iadarola (@johniadarola) SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ https://www.youtube.com/user/theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ https://www.facebook.com/theyoungturks TWITTER: ☞ https://www.twitter.com/theyoungturks INSTAGRAM: ☞ https://www.instagram.com/theyoungturks TIKTOK: ☞ https://www.tiktok.com/@theyoungturks 👕 Merch: https://shoptyt.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Drop it. Drop it. Drop it. All right, back up back. I do that like half the time.

Welcome to the Young Turks. We're back from yesterday. Well, we are. Jankiger, John Iderola, Farron Cousins, of course, with the ring of fire, and also Farron balanced. And of course, Johnsworth damage report. All right, guys, hell will show for you guys today. Joe Biden did something pretty good, 2% good, 10% good. We'll talk about it.

Republicans have done many bad things. Charlie Kirk with a crazed attack on Michelle Obama and others. He took a position that the majority of the country agrees with and turned it into a disaster. Okay, so, all that being said, John. Charlie Kirk messed up. He should have just tweeted that and he could have made $30,000 from Elon Musk. Yeah, it's another story that's later in the program. We'll talk about that later.

Okay, for now, though, let's talk about something really important. Student debt cancellation is back and it's bigger than ever and roughly half of that sentence was true. Now, Biden did announce that they are doing something, specifically wiping out $39 billion worth of student. loan debt for about 804,000 borrowers. Those are both obviously large numbers, and if you don't put them in context, the full severity of the problem, they sound objectively good, we are going to put them in context. But no, this is what he's doing, it's going to be very helpful. We've already, earlier in the day, we're getting comments from people about how that's going

to affect their debt, finally free them from that burden. And there's some other good details here as well, especially that unlike the prior rounds of student debt cancellation. You are not going to have to go through any kind of application process to qualify for this. If you do qualify, your debts will be automatically discharged. This is basically like a ramping up an extension of previously existing income driven repayment plans that can result in your debt being forgiven that were only really like there technically. It didn't actually work that way for the vast majority of people. The system was set up to not work, this is patching that so that people will actually be able to qualify.

And I want to give you just a few more details, including a statement from the Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, who said, for far too long borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that failed to keep accurate track of their progress towards forgiveness. And so they said now they're going to take like partial payments that you might do. Those will now count. There's a variety of different ways that they're going to sort of juice the numbers to make sure that more people qualify for the forgiveness. They say that they're addressing historic failures in which qualifying payments under those plans

should have brought borrowers closer to qualifying for debt forgiveness, but we're not actually properly accounted for. There are some other details of things that are going to do beyond just this announcement, but this is what we've got as of today. Yeah, so this leaves us in the usual conundrum, which is you want to give credit to them for doing this, over 800,000 people affected, that's no joke, that's a lot of good people that are going to be very relieved today. Thank you, Joe Biden, credit where credit is due.

Now, but I have to give you context, and the context is, there's $37 billion of loans that are outstanding. So this is about 2%, or 30, I'm sorry, 37 million people affected. So it's about 2% of the people that are getting a relief. So now, they haven't done it too badly in this case, right? But in a lot of cases, mainstream media will say historic, the greatest thing ever, the whole thing is solved, mission accomplished, let's move on. In this case, the articles that I read were more balanced, right? So I want to say credit for the 2%, but I really would love to address the other 98%. Now, to be again, more fairness to Joe Biden, he has also done things in the past that have addressed about 3.4 million other people out of a total sample then of

about 40 million and so that's actually not 2% that gets close to 10% which is like such a that's the number I keep telling you is between 5 and 15% is what Democratic administrations do of their promises very consistently and so and here we are again at this point and I like that he did the other ones too but man I'd love the other 90% so that's your truthful reporting that no one will like, because the moderate Democrats will scream, oh, it's never good enough for you progressives. Oh, we give you 2% that you want the other 98. And progressives will say, oh, you're helping Joe Biden by pretending this is real when it's nothing counts, et cetera. I mean, both sides constantly.

And the right wing's like helping students, we despise students. They're not even billionaires, right? So the truth doesn't make anyone happy, but nevertheless, it's still the truth. So fair. I think that's the best way to put that is no matter what you say about this, you're going to make 98% of everybody else mad with your statement. But you're absolutely right. Like listen, Biden had nothing to lose at this point to just go as big as humanly possible. And that's one of the things obviously that makes these, you know, means testing and all of the other,

you know, smaller parts of it. That's what makes it so frustrating is he could have come out and and said, listen, we're gonna forgive the student loan debt of just one person. I'm gonna pick a random person in this country. I'm forgiving their student loan debt. And conservatives would still be up in arms over that. They would say this is ridiculous. You can't forgive the debt. So it could have been one person or it could have been everybody getting their debt forgiven. And Biden's gonna be targeted by these Republicans. So why not just go big? They're gonna challenge it no matter what you do. So try to give us. us as much as possible. You know, and again, you want to say this is great for the 800,000 people

who are going to get this relief. They need it. It's going to change their lives, absolutely no doubt about it. But there's also going to be a lot of people right on that cusp, because again, this is income based that aren't going to get it. And they're going to be left out because they're, you know, just a few dollars away from being in the same kind of financial dire, as some of the other folks wondering why not me why suddenly because I make a hundred dollars more a month than these people am i not eligible so you could have gone bigger and that's the thing you can always go bigger and then have it scaled down but when you start with it already scaled down that only leaves room to exclude more people as it moves forward yeah i would say

fair and if the students wanted the entirety of their debt to be canceled without conservatives having a problem with it, they should have had their student loan debt come in the form of PPP loans, then it would have been fine. You could just wipe out the whole thing, nobody would have a problem with it. But yeah, you're right, there are people who are not going to make enough money to really have a secure economic existence, but just enough to not be able to cancel out their loans based on this. And also, even if they do get the forgiveness, remember, it's not like it's an instantaneous thing, they've been making payments for a literal decade. I don't want people to be burdened by student debt for 10 years.

I don't want people to have to wait a decade to be able to buy a home or move to a new city or start a business or change jobs without being terrified what's going to happen to you. I don't want people to be burdened by that literally at all. And I'll also remind people as we're adding context. So you threw out some of the overall numbers for context. It's not like Biden's plan was that's it. No more student debt. He wasn't canceling all of the student debt. He was canceling a good chunk of it, a percentage.

but it wasn't a radical extremist plan, and this is a tiny fraction of that. standing student loan debt, which look, some of that is public, some of it is private, so it's not, you know, apples to apples or whatever, but he's canceling the $39 billion. I just looked up randomly. You know the F-35 has cost over $1.5 trillion. One plane, $1.5 trillion. A country of students balanced against one plane that might or might not work. So it is frustrating. It look, they do have next steps that they're going to take. they're going to have a new income driven repayment plan called the save plan that they think is going to fit in a lot more students. And they also say, by the way, that they're going to make student debt one of the cornerstones of the 2024 campaign, which you would assume would be accompanied with other plans. And you can guarantee that it'll be accompanied with proposals

that if you put us back in power, we'll do something then. So maybe we will see more. Yeah, it's funny that you came to the same number. I did it through the math. of how many people were affected and got to 2% for today's action. And, you know, John's numbers are about $1.78 trillion in debt, and $39 billion was relieved today. So that's 2.1%. Get you the same 2% number, right? And so for a Democrat, 2% is 2% change is considered historic and miraculous. But anyways, like I said, when you put in the earlier stuff, it's about 10. Now, to a point that John made about future stuff, I mean, there is that next proposal is pretty good.

It doesn't relieve all your dead. I would definitely go further, but it would reduce your payments in half for everyone and then wipe them out after you've paid for 10 years. That's good progress. A lot better, but not yet. Okay, so look, the way that they framed it, it seemed half believable.

Because sometimes Democrats make promises, So I go, there's no way they're going to do that. Total marketing gimmick, zero percent chance, right? No, the way that they explained this, the context made me think, huh, they might even do that, okay? But then John dashed all my hopes when he made a great point just now saying they'll probably hold it till the election and like, oh, you want it? You want it? Elect us again and we'll do another two to ten percent. So with Democrats, you always believe it when you see it. Fair and last words. While we're talking about things that they could do through the Department of Education with these loans, you know, if we're not going to get to the point where we have debt-free college, which is what should exist, 100%, that should be where we're at. But if we can't get to that just yet, then the Department of Education actually has the authority to just say, okay, you know what, we're going to cap interest rates on student loans at 0.5% forever.

It'll never go more than that. You know what? We're going to cap payments. You never pay more than $100 a month. month and then we have, you know, these programs or if you paid, you know, solidly for X amount of years, at that point, it's forgiven. They can do all sorts of little maneuvering through the department itself to make this burden lessened for millions and millions of people. And those are things that they haven't even discussed. You know, so again, debt-free college, no student loans not even existing is what we should have. But if we can't get that, there's a hundred other things the Department of Education could do that really haven't even been entered into these discussions, you know, for the most part. And so maybe that's what they'll dangle in front of us ahead of the 2024 election. But those are also other things that they need to be considering and that we need to be demanding that they do.

Let me throw out one question, because all of what we're talking about basically is executive orders, executive actions. I don't think, I understand where there's not a lot of conversation about what legislation could potentially be passed. I mean, the Republicans control the House after the next cycle, they might well control the Senate too. Do we think that there is anything that he could propose that would get them to actually pass legislation to fix this? Like if he, if it was based on like performance, like your grades, you know, you get the

loans, but you ace everything, maybe we do some cancellation or like a like a service based repayment thing, like rather than just 10 years of payments, you do. two years of, you know, sort of like Tennessee Valley stuff, working on infrastructure, installing electric charges, climate prepared. Like, is there literally anything that could be proposed that Republicans would? Or do they just believe that we have so poisoned the well intentionally on what people think about higher education that we do not want to act as if anyone who goes to college is deserving of any compassion whatsoever?

So the answer to that question is, is that it's a bit of a trick question. because the question isn't the substance, it's the style. It's the way that you try to pass the bills. So the suggestions that both Farron and John had are brilliant. They're great. And I hadn't thought of some of those suggestions. And I think that they're absolutely terrific. If you proposed it and then you just had a vote and you walked away,

then the Republicans have a 0% chance of voting for. None whatsoever. They would never do anything for the American people. I was going to say unless there was a gun to their head. One, I don't want to do violent analogies too much, but two, even then they might not do it. Now, having said that, is there a way that you could pass it overall? I think yes. So wait, why?

What's the disparity? Because you have to do the one thing that Democrats never do, which is actually fight. So like Biden proposes public option in one of the bills. It's at 84%. And then the Republicans, theoretically Republicans, but it's actually corporate Democrats, too. All say no because their donors are chamber of commerce and they don't want paid family leave. So they say no. And then Biden goes, oh, okay.

Well, of course you're not going to pass anything doing that. If Lyndon Johnson had said, oh, Dixiecrats, you don't want the Civil Rights Act, voting rights act? Oh, okay. Well, then we wouldn't have them. Instead, he broke like half a dozen, two dozen, I don't know, a great number of kneecaps of, you know, metaphor. But with him barely, okay? And until he broke the Dixie Kratz in his own party and got the damn bills pass, which was awesome. But Biden and those guys, one, they're in on it.

They're also just as corporate as the Democrats in the Senate and all the Republicans. So the whole game is rigged to begin with. They're all frauds. The Democrats do just enough to have the media say historic so that they get re-election. And they do always, always, a bare minimum or nothing, right? But if Biden wanted to fight, what he would do is there's the Republican advantage of the house is minuscule. You would pick four or five or whatever the number you need is of vulnerable purple district

Republicans. And you would do a massive marketing campaign and go, these guys don't care about students. They, after they cross the bridge, they want to burn it down so that not. None of your kids have the opportunity they had. You find out which schools they went to. You start saying, oh, this son of a bitch went to Harvard, but he doesn't want your kid to be able to have an opportunity.

Settle down with neck, with all the stead and the albatross around your neck, and you fight and you fight, and these positions are actually very popular with American people. Until they bleed enough in the polls, sorry for all the violent analysis, okay, they're all a metaphor. Until you bleed them out in the polls in a purple district and they go, yeah, I was always concerned about it. the students. I was going to do it anyway. That's standard hardball politics. The number of Democrats who play that is zero. And honestly, they're either all complicit like the Biden Pelosi camp, or they're not very smart or strong progressive camp. All right, go ahead. Fair. I've got a plan where you could get enough Republicans on to pass it today. It's a bad plan. But here it is,

You tell Republicans, for every 10 million people that you let us forgive student loans for, for every 10 million, we lower corporate and wealthy taxes by 1%. So you give us 50 million, we'll lower taxes by 5% for the same amount of years. So 50 million people get debt forgiven, 5% lower in taxes for the next five years. You go to 100 million, they get 10% for the next 10 years off their taxes. You get every Republican saying, all right, fine, we'll do that. The donors love it. You know, yeah, we're going to suffer in the revenue department, but people are going to have more money.

So, you know, that's the only way I think they could really get these Republicans to go on board is if they somehow tie it to cutting taxes because that's all these Republicans not to do. Yeah. That's devastating. And I probably would not take that deal to a little bankrupt the country. But Farron is absolutely right. They would then immediately pass it. Okay, what about this? For every 10 million that have debt canceled, you can lock up.

one member of the extended Biden family. How about this? Cousin, niece, whatever. It'll be great. Anyway, we got to take our first break. We come back. Joe Manchin back in the news, probably for something good. We'll see in a few minutes.

All right, back on TYT, Jank John Farron and Tom Myers, who's a new member. Tom just hit the join button below the video to become a member and support good honest news programming. We appreciate you, Tom. Sina Oaken was a member for 30 months. Chris Birch gifted two youngch memberships as is his want. And same with Canadian Moose Writer, aka Maple Seer Dragon. except they gifted five. You guys are amazing.

We appreciate you. Members make this show happen. All right, roll. Okay, let's talk about some news. Joe Manchin is back, and he's once again ruining Joe Biden's day. In this case, announcing that he plans to oppose Julie Sue, which is Joe Biden's nominee to lead the Department of Labor. And because of the way that the votes break down, him being opposed to her is probably

all it will take. That's probably it. She is currently the acting Labor Department Secretary, previously having served as California's top labor official, overseeing workplace safety and policing wage theft in the country's most populous state. Now, why does he have a problem with her? Well, the thing about the wage theft might have already clued you into what his issue is. But labor unions and progressive groups both have enthusiastically backed her nomination, saying that she would aggressively enforce workplace protections,

particularly for the most vulnerable low wage workers. She's also a civil rights lawyer. Okay, so they say she is going to like vigorously pursue abuses of workers. The issue that Joe Manchin has with her is that she would vigorously pursue abuses of workers. And that of course cannot happen. I mean, they're wording it differently. They're saying that she's anti-business and that's it. He put out a statement saying, I believe the person leading the U.S. Department of Labor should have the experience to collaboratively lead both labor and industry to forge compromise.

is acceptable to both parties. While her credentials and qualifications are impressive, I don't care about that. I'm kidding. I have genuine concerns that Julie Sue's more progressive background prevents her from doing this, and for that reason, I cannot support her nomination to serve as Secretary of Labor.

And by the way, even if he wasn't against her, it is possible that she'd be blocked in the Senate anyway, either John Tester or Kirsten Cinema, both of whom have not indicated that they'll support her. And in the case of cinema, it seems like she wouldn't. wouldn't. That would also be enough to stop her from getting through. I do think it's funny the way that he worded though, that I think the secretary of labor should be a both sides are basically. You know, some labor stuff, but also industry stuff. Like the head of the EPA isn't

supposed to be spending half their time working for the oil companies. That's not how it works. The entire rest of the government is there to advance the interests of business. Can't we have one department, one secretary that spends the majority of their time thinking about issues affecting workers? Apparently not. Yeah, so first of all, I'm a business owner. So do I think labor and business interests should be balanced? Yes. Are they balanced currently today in government? No, they are not. Who has the advantage? Business owners by about an order of 200 times more than labor. They have massive, massive advantages. including having purchased almost all the senators, including Joe Manchin.

And by the way, I got news for you. If it wasn't Manchin and cinema, it would be two other Democratic senators. They all get bribed, almost all of them get bribed. I'm sorry, campaign contributions. And they get some from labor. So Sherrod Brown, who gets bribed by labor, the most, would be like, oh, we're going to fight for labor, right? And then all the other ones like Coons and Carper and tons of other Menendez, et cetera,

who all get bribed by corporations will come back and go, no white corporations, right? So this is all a game of bribery. At least Manchin is like almost admitting it. He's like, I think the secretary of labor shouldn't work for labor. I think they should also work for corporate interests. Wow. Okay, what a, what a twist in Washington.

Okay, so the whole thing's totally corrupt. Now, what's the correct standard? I argued for it in my book, Justice is Coming, Democratic capitalism. And so what I mean by that is, look, we should have capitalism. I believe in that, and I think a lot of people get mad at me for saying that. You can get it. That's a different conversation.

But democracy, i.e. your representatives, your government, is supposed to check capitalism. They're not working for, like in the, what was supposed to happen in the Constitution, in the American former government and democracy, is that your representatives are supposed to represent You and only you. So now that doesn't mean you obliterate business. I don't want you to do that. You want to have enough balance so that businesses can exist and that their employees can thrive. But you shouldn't be doing it on behalf of business.

Remember, businesses are not humans. They're just legal fictions we created. If you say, hey, listen, I want to do it on behalf of the workers of that company and the overall community and the overall economy. and the overall economy. Okay, that makes sense. But guys, none of that is happening in Washington, none of it. Capitalism is not 1% checked by this incredibly crooked Senate and all of the government. So, okay, but the good, there is one piece of good news here.

She's the acting labor secretary. She's been previously confirmed by the Senate for another role. So they can keep her to the end of Biden's term and nobody's going to do anything about it. And it looks like they're headed in that direction. I hope they don't bother trying to get another labor secretary. She seems like a very rare person in Congress that's actually doing something for you or in government that's doing something for you. That's why Manchin hates her.

So, you know, President Biden, this is a super easy fix. Donald Trump had nothing but acting secretaries and nobody did anything about it. Just keep her in that position forever. And Joe Manchin's thinking of running against you. You already gave him the Mountain Valley pipeline. What the hell else does he need? Tell him to go take a long walk off a short coal mine. Okay, you know, John took the words right out of my mouth with, you know, picking apart the words that Mansion used.

And I do think it's important because we're talking about a pick for Labor Secretary. This is not somebody who's going to come out and immediately say, okay, guess what? We got a four day work week now. That's, I'm decreeing it, four day work week, six hour days. Everybody gets mandatory paid overtime. That's not what they're going to do. The secretary is basically there to say, listen, you can't take advantage of these people, you can't steal their wages, you can't not enact safety protocols that are going to leave a factory worker, you know, missing a hand or missing an arm. And when you do those things, we're going to investigate you and hold you liable. That is what the secretary of labor's job is supposed to be.

So no, you should not have this camaraderie with corporations where you're rubbing elbows with them, you know, and hobnobbing with these CEOs at these swanky dinners. Your position is to protect the people. And almost by definition of that, the corporations, the CEOs themselves, it's adversarial. And maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it has to be that way because we don't have anything functioning like that now. I mean, we're looking across the country, pardon me, as Republicans just dismantle labor laws at the state level, we've already had one teenager die working in an area where they should not have been working, but Republicans said, hey, let's put the kids back to work. Let's put them in the slaughterhouses. Let's put them in the meat lockers. They'll do fine. Nope, they're not. That's why we have this department to begin with, because the corporations can't be. trusted. They've proven that for decades and decades, if not well over a hundred years in this country. They have proven they're not going to do the right thing when we leave them to their own devices. And that's what this position was created to stop. Yeah, just to double down on what both of you guys are saying. The Labor Secretary is supposed to fight for labor,

and you get to balance between labor and business, number one, because the rest of the government's all for business. So if she's super strong, you'd be lucky to get to 10% balance, right? And then thirdly, the businesses fight for themselves. The government isn't supposed to be fighting on behalf of corporations. Like I said earlier, they're supposed to be out fighting on behalf of voters, communities, and maybe they're workers. But that's how you get to balance when the companies go, I want this, I want this,

and your government fights back, and then they get to a balance. Instead, the government has joined them, and they're saying the Labor Secretary should also join them. So there should be no balance at all. That's what Manches actually say. 100%. By the way, I agree that we can't expect that like the labor department or the labor secretary would come out and be like, boom, four day work week. But wouldn't it be nice to have one person in elected office say that we should be

working towards that? Like that that should be a goal? I feel like some people would support that. I feel like that might be popular. No. Now really fast. If I were to tell you that we found out exclusive reporting, probably from ProPublica, that a business pack had taken $5,000 in 20s and put it in a sack and scrawled a dollar sign on it,

and then they gave it to Mansion and it was caught on like CCTV, that would be a scandal. Okay, that would be a game changer. You know what wouldn't be a game changer revealing that over the last five years of reporting business packs have given him $2.8 million. Just because they like him doesn't have any effect or whatever. It doesn't change his opinion or anything. Look, he's balanced, he's got labor at 267,000. It's totally balanced. I'm bad with numbers, but also, so this is obviously not good news.

This is, you know, Joe Biden has had so many lunches with Joe Manchin, and you don't do this to your lunch buddy. And also, as you point out, he's probably going to be running against him for the presidency. So I was happy to see that Biden is reacting. strongly, strongly worded letter. He says the president's support for acting secretary, Sue, is unwavering. And we hope Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema reconsider their position. Oh, that'll probably do the job. You hope you reconsider.

Breaking news, Mansion has folded, Sue has been appointed. The hope worked. The hope worked. He's like, well, I am getting bribed millions of dollars by corporations. On the other hand, he hoped that I reconsider. So that seems very strong by by my body. He should have wished upon a star. He missed a great opportunity there.

Yeah, oh well, okay, let's talk about something else. I don't know why coming out of this last story, anyone would be worried about about democracy, but turns out some are new polling indicates once again that Americans are not feeling particularly confident about the state of our democracy, although not always for the same reasons. We're gonna dive into some of these numbers, first of all, only about one in 10 adults polled in the US give high ratings to the way democracy is working in the United States, or how well it represents the interests of most Americans.

I'm gonna guess that that one in 10 is the top 10% of America, if I had to guess. But anyway, 53% say that Congress is doing a bad job of upholding democratic values. Only 16% say it's doing a good job. Those are the 16% that I think are paying the least attention. But anyway, only about half the country, 49% say that democracy is not working well compared with 40% who say it's working somewhat well. Now, that's all interesting. We've sort of talked about that stuff before. But this is the fact that I find most fascinating. About half also say each of the political parties is doing a bad job of upholding democracy. 47% who say about Democrats and even more 56% about Republicans.

So they roughly feel like the same between the two, which if the people responding to this are savvy, I understand what they mean. Like you should be frustrated with the Democrats. They came in saying their first priority would be a big voting rights bill and they would do all of that and they didn't do that. But at least like the broad strokes that generally is what CNN and MSNBC would say, it does seem like the perception should be a little bit different. I mean, I don't think that both parties initiated coups in the last couple of years. I think it was just the one.

But that said, I don't pay attention to the news on weekends. So if they did it on a Saturday, I might have missed it. What do you think? Yeah, so look, I'm torn in the same way that John is. On the one hand, of course Republicans are worse, not even close. They literally did a coup with fake electors. I'm not even talking about the Ryan on January 6th. I'm talking about they had a plan where they were going to have fake electors,

which they write in the emails. They use that phrase. And they were going to have them vote for the guy who didn't win, and they were going to overthrow our democracy. That's a pretty good sign that you're not in favor of democracy. Okay. So, all right, so that's point one. But guys, I don't think that's the main issue here.

Yes, that's a giant issue, especially with Trump's still running and still has a decent chance of winning. Don't lose focus on that. That is massively important. But just as important is why that anger on the right exists in the first place, which is that our politics is nearly completely corrupt. And so I give the right wing credit for this all the time. I think they figured that out way before Democrats did. And that's because Democrats listen to mainstream media more.

And mainstream media is the number one problem. And they never get it. They don't understand that they don't believe it. There's poll after polls that says 14% of people trust mainstream media, 7%, 9%. And they all look out and go, oh, no, no, they love us. We're the fourth estate. No, they don't. They think you're a bunch of liars, and they are correct.

So when you all say, like we just did a story on Joe Mansion, and in the last five years, he's taken like nearly $3 million from corporate packs, right? But if you go back further and I have, he's taking like $2.5 million just from the bankers, like 1.25 million from the oil and gas industry. It's just bribe after bribe after bribe. And then the media gets upset at me when I call them bribes. They say, no, ExxonMobil, it just cares about the general welfare. And they were being charitable.

They just happened to give it to all these politicians. And the politicians happen to vote with them. But we're never ever going to mention it in any article about votes. When the politicians actually vote, we will never tell you who they're don't. owners are and why they voted that way, which is 100% of the reason they vote the way that they do. We show it on the show all the time. We show you, here's their campaign donations they got from corporations, and here's how they voted with them. And it matches up pretty much 100%. So democracy's gone. Look, this is a giant topic in my book, Justice is coming.

You can get it at t.com slash justice, where I show you definitively how corporations took over the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said bribery is now free speech and corporations can give unlimited money to bribe our politicians. In fact, some of the justices in dissent back in the 1970s when they did this were like, no, this is a mortal danger to our democracy. And nobody listened to them. And democracy died all the way back in 1978. There's meta studies. Princeton and Northwestern did one. All this is in the book where they showed the top 10% to John's point, that one in 10 that thinks we have a democracy. He's not wrong. They're almost all in the top 10%. Because the top 10% is super happy. They've got their status

quote. They love it and they enforce it. And it turns out, hey, good news. Top 10% don't always get what they want. They only get what they want 45% of the time. Now, do you want to know how the bottom 90% gets their way? So, like, meaning the bottom 90% all think this policy position. Do they get that pass into legislation? According to a meta study of over 20 years of legislation, their effect is literally... The new BMO ViPorter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points.

More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO ViPorter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bemo.com slash the iPorter to learn more. Zero. You have no effect on your government.

None. And every study confirms it. So when people in power see this. And I know a lot of folks in the establishment, they'll go, this is so sad. Fox News has corrupted people into thinking that we don't have a democracy. It's a way when we have a great democracy, we have to uphold the system exactly as it is.

Okay. No, you're not missing it. You're the corrupt ones. And all that corruption and all those bribes get funneled right into mainstream media in the form of political ads. So the media and the politicians have agreed, we're going to do massive corruption, we're going to kill democracy, and then we're going to lie about it and gaslight you. But you know what? Good news, it didn't work. The American people are like, no, we don't think we have a democracy. We think you guys are all full of crap. Guess what Americans? You're totally right. The facts back you up. The problem is, yes, they're right.

Everything you've said is correct, obviously. But you have these polls and we see them happen all the time. Every majority, everybody says, everything's terrible, democracy doesn't work. I hate Congress, they've got like a 5% approval rating, whatever it is. I hate them, I hated, we need people that work for us. Then they turn around every two dang years, go back to the voting booths and say, oh, person's been in office 20 years, there you go. Welcome back because they don't think it's their person.

Nobody, no district in this country wants to look at that and be like, well, everybody's bad. But I think the person I've sent to Congress for 20 straight years, they're the only one doing a good job. And when you have every district out there or 80 to 90% of them sending back the same person every two years, yeah, nothing is gonna change because you keep sending the same people there. Mitch McConnell has been in that Senate seat since I was two years old. And I turned 40 this year. And so it drives me insane that people see that there's a problem. They recognize that these people we have in DC are not working for them. They know that they're not getting anything out of legislation.

Most of them couldn't tell you the last bill that was passed that directly affected their lives, but they go back to the polls every two years, every four years, and they vote for the same people every time. And they don't change a thing. They don't vote in the primary, so they don't have that voice. They just say, yep, let's send them back five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. But I'll keep complaining about it and then doing the same thing because it's not my person that's bad. It's the other 49, you know, excuse me, 99 senators out there that are terrible. Mine is totally good. It's maddening that everybody hates it, but nobody wants to say, you know what? Maybe we ought to try something different once in a while.

That sounds appealing, but I think that Diane Feinstein's killing it. I think that we should stick with her for a little bit. Okay. Anyway, I do want to say one thing about what Farron said. He makes a great point. Look, the mainstream media kind of tell you that you should vote for the incumbents. They don't directly say it. They say it in the way that they cover. They go, incumbent is leading in the race. She has all of the money and she has all of the endorsements. And some outsider radicals have decided to run against her. But you know what?

They're on paragraph 28. You're never even going to get to them. We're just going to tell you how esteemed this wonderful, honorable politician is. We're not going to say it exactly like that, but we're going to frame it. So it looks like we're objective. But meanwhile, we're doing the same exact thing. Vote incumbent, vote incumbent, keep the status quo. Every mainstream media reporter does, they don't even realize they're doing it, but that's ingrained in every story.

Anyway, so what is your option? Look, some people say, hey, listen, brother, I don't have time to figure out every goddamn district and this and that and all these different elections. All right, I'll give you an easy rule of thumb. So always vote in primaries. Primaries are in a lot of ways more important than general elections because primaries are where you can stop corruption. Because if you're a Republican, you're probably not going to vote for a Democrat in the general. And if you're a Democrat, you're probably not going to vote for a Republican in the general election, but you could vote for new candidates in primaries within your party, within your party. So you're not betraying your ideology. Go vote. I know like maybe, maybe 10% of Congress is not awful. Maybe. So your default should be if I don't know, vote against the incumbent.

When you see a name you recognize as an incumbent, vote against them. And you know what? But it's all based on is there a democracy? you or isn't there? If there's a bill that passed and you loved it, then vote for the incumbent. But if it turns out they do nothing after nothing after nothing, which is what they always do, other than give giant giveaways of corporations, then go vote against all the incumbents because they collectively didn't do a goddamn thing. That's how democracy is supposed to work. Don't let mainstream media brainwash you. They are trying to get you to vote for the corporate interest. And so don't listen to them. Make sure that you're actually paying attention and take charge of your own democracy.

Love it. Time for a second break. We'll be back with more. John and Faron with you guys. Make sure you're checking out Ring of Fire. That's Feren's show and Damage Report. That's John's show. Wonderful programs. Also with us is Theresa Arons and Simon Margolis because they just became Young Turks members. And young Turks members do this show with us. That's part of why we read your comments. And you help us keep us keep us keep us keep. You know, that's the they could do and we want to make sure they still get it. We never raised our prices during inflation. So everyone who signs up at a higher level or upgrades and you could do it from the join button too. We really appreciate you guys and we appreciate that you could expand our community by doing that. All right, John. Okay, let's have a little bit of fun to close out this hour.

For most people signing into Twitter these days, the best thing that you can hope for, I guess, is a little bit of anger, worst case scenarios, depression, a complete loss of faith in humanity. But that's not true for everyone. Some people logging into Twitter this week are finding a nice little boost. Specifically right wing posters that Elon Musk is obsessed with are finding checks. They're being given by the richest man in the world thousands of dollars for posting on the website that he owns. The first beneficiaries of what is being pitched as a new ad revenue sharing plan are high profile far right influencers who tweet, you know, they've been tweeting what they've earned. Ian Miles Chong, Benny Johnson, Ashley St. Clair, all talking about their earnings.

An account called End Wokeness said that they made $10,419 for, I don't know, a day of content, a week of content, a month of content. Nobody actually knows how this works because it is as arbitrary as it seems. And it, by the way, has nothing to do with threads coming out. It has nothing to do with people leaving the service, nothing to do with him being worried that the people that he is a reply guy to on a daily basis might ever abandon him. Now, it's not just the accounts that we've mentioned. Andrew Tate apparently has made $20,000, a nice boost for him as he faces the human trafficking

and rape charges that he's currently facing. An account called DC Drano made $7,000 after he acknowledges previously being banned prior to Elon Musk taking over for spreading election denial lies. Now not in response to this guy, but in response to a different one, another person I've never heard of before, Elon Musk says, you're welcome. This is not in response to competitors. I announced we would do this in February. Sorry it took so long to roll out. It is only right that content creators are rewarded for their contributions. Now that is not 100% wrong. He has for a few months been saying that they're going to do some sort of revenue thing,

where if they do ads on your posts or in their replies, you can make some money. So there is an element of truth there. The idea that this has nothing to do with the fact that over 100 million people sign up for threads in the first week though is utterly absurd. There is thus far been no indication of any sign up process for this. I haven't seen anyone who is not a far right grifter who has earned thousands of dollars this. It appears to be and until I see evidence I'm going to assume that it is what it seems to be. He has chosen the accounts that he likes, and he has decided, I'm just going to throw thousands of dollars at them as a treat, and they'll probably love him even more. I mean, wouldn't you?

Yeah, so first of all, John's right. They're almost all right-winger, so, oh, I am objectively helping creators. First of all, if you did it based on impact, you probably wouldn't get any political people. You might get sports people, et cetera. No, it's super obvious. You're picking all the guys who were like retweeted you. It's hilarious, okay? I think I saw one set like the Krasenstein brothers or something.

Who are massive Elon Musk supporters now. Oh, yeah. Oh, really, huh? They, like they still technically like the Democrats or whatever, but they love Elon Musk. Yeah. Guys, he's literally paying people to like him, literally. He's buying friends. Okay, so now, to give you a sense of how unsustainable this is,

And what a terrible business idea it is. There's two things I have to tell you. Number one, I know the numbers, right? I run a digital media company. So I know exactly how this type of stuff works. Paying $10,000 and $20,000 for a bunch of tweets. That's totally unsustainable. Like if he did that as a real business practice and he paid everybody on Twitter proportionally what he paid those guys,

the $44 billion would be nothing compared to what he'd have to pay. pay the creators, right? Like there's that is there's no way in the world you could afford that. He would sink the company immediately overnight, right? So these payments are totally out of proportion to the value that those guys created, which then just kind of, again, comes back to he's paying people to like him. It's one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen. If you're a business person, you don't know that a bunch of tweets,

no matter how many impressions they got are almost never going to be worth $10,000, let alone per month, let alone 20,000 to the rapist dude, sorry, alleged rapist. Okay, so now the last part of it is, so now that you've done this, and again, I run a business, so I've seen this happen. And you gave it to some people, but not others. Nah, nah, nah, nah, here's what's going to happen next, and it's already begun to happen. I saw it today. First thing is, all the people on the left go, wait, where's our money? What the hell? Oh, you're so bad.

And then people in the mainstream media, they don't say it, but they're like, because they see that their tweets get more impressions than the Rando-Romanian rapist, right? And the Drano dude or whatever, and they're like, but mainstream media won't say that. They'll just write super crappy articles about you. Okay, so that's coming down the pike. But that's not that all, those two factors are not the most damaging. The most damaging is other right-wingers who didn't get paid. And now, and I've seen it in the beginning of it, they're going to rip his face off.

He'd be like, where's my money? You know, why did Trano get it? But I'm Clorox, and I didn't get it. I hate trans people even more than they do. Where's my money? And then he's going to be like, oh, he's going to panic. And he's going to give a little bit there and a little bit there. And then the next thing that's going to happen is people are going to say, wait a minute, that guy got more than me.

I want just as much as him until everyone wants $20,000 a month. And then they're going to withdraw the program, then the guys he gave the money to. They're going to be mad that they're not getting the money anymore. So good news for people who don't like Elon Bonsker or Twitter, pandemonium is about to break out there. You know, I was actually going to say that exact same thing. He now has set the precedent where the first little weirdos that he's paid, he's going to have to keep paying them that or they will turn against him and start whining and complaining. And that was brilliant about all everybody else getting mad too. But I've been saying for years, and I've been saying it on Twitter, which I'm barely doing anything on Twitter anymore,

just because it's not fun anymore. But this is a big reason why people need to stop signal boosting some of these weirdos all over Twitter. There are so many people who I know who they are, and I shouldn't know who they are. But I only know who they are because people on the left, want to start fights with them or they want to rebut them. Let it go. You're not changing people's minds. You might get in a fun zinger every now and then, but stop it, especially now, because now you're giving these people maybe thousands of dollars. So don't do it anymore. If you withdraw, if you bite your tongue every now and then, and by God, I do it every time I log into that app, let them go. Just let them bark in the dark.

And then it won't be an issue anymore. So many people need to learn that lesson. But the second thing is that there's no accountability with any of this. You know, with with YouTube, with Facebook, all of these other websites where you post to and you get paid for it, there's algorithms. You can log into your back end, you see your RPM, your CPM, your impression rate, your click through rate. You know who is doing what to your stuff and it's all accountable, you can add it all up and it's right there. There with this, this is Elon Musk just saying, you know what, Andrew Tate, again, who I wouldn't know if people on the left hadn't retweeted him, 20 grand. Here you go, 20 grand. He's making it up as he goes. And like Chang said, it's not sustainable. You are setting yourself up for the ultimate failure. And it's going to be the funniest thing in the world when this blows up in your face. And I don't think more than a month down the road before we see that massive experience. of this blowing up in a space.

Maybe. By the way, if you thought that there were, there would be something that Elon Musk could do to make this even more ridiculous. Bear in mind, of course, he is an innovator, he's a genius, he will come up with a way. So this is only for verified people, obviously. Verified, they're not verified, but they do pay dollars to Elon Musk. This is like basically like multi-level marketing right now. In particular, only verified people contribute to this. He also, by the way, it's ads in your replies that verified people are seeing,

but one of the big advertised benefits of being verified is that you see less ads. So that's a weird combination right there. Also, he's, like, by the way, I don't know if you've looked at his replies today in the last couple days. He is nonstop tweeting about threads. So again, the idea that this is not about threads, he cannot stop tweeting about it. He said, he replied to someone who was like, well, you know, if leftists or Democrats want the money, they just need to make accounts and do verified. So first of all, are we supposed to pretend that this is just like the invisible hand of the market? You changed the algorithm to boost right wing accounts and now you're paying them for being right wing accounts that you boosted already, utterly absurd.

And I will also point out, we have made the case to people for quite a while that right wingers exist and many people become right wingers to get paid by millionaires and billionaires. And that was always at least mildly abstract. We're done with that now. It is literally just the richest right winger in the country, in the world, writing checks to right wing grifters to sustain them. And it's definitely going to make some people want to do that so that they can get the checks. It's now totally out in the open. They're bragging about it. The entire infrastructure, the entire right-wing economy that they've created. Yeah.

So what's funny is that all these right-wing sites popped up, parlor, grifter, whatever they are, right? True social, obviously. Rumble. And Rumble. And none of them worked because it's just conservatives like ragging on people. but there was nobody else. Now, ironically, Musk is turning Twitter into true social or getter.

The ones that didn't work. He spent $44 billion to turn it into a way crappier site or app that we know definitively is a bad business model. Like, the more he keeps going, the more it becomes stunning, what a terrible businessman he is. like it's just I've never seen anything like it but and and look Farron you're brilliant and like even just in this one hour and all the topics that we've discussed you have a lot of

great ideas and you're totally right that he's making it up I was I thought it was hilarious that he's like we have a proprietary algorithm that has told us how much we should pay them no you don't I know those numbers those numbers are not from a proprietary algorithm you just picked him out of a hat but having said all that Faron, you've never been more wrong than your suggestion of, just let it go. Like people on Twitter are going to let it go. Okay, nobody's going to let it go on Twitter. Okay, by the way, I'm not even going to let it go on Twitter.

But Farran, these days, all there is are the clout wars. And everybody wants clout. And the way you get clout is you attack someone that has more followers than you have. That's the thing I just discovered. No, I disagree. I always try to avoid that drama, and it has worked for me with very minimal growth over a very long period of time. By the way, follow me on threads. And by the way, John, I don't have a threat as account yet, I don't think.

So, John, as soon as I get on there, since you will have more followers than me, I'm going to attack you. I can't wait. And I'm going to ignore it based on what Ferran said. See, there you go. And then I'm going to keep on attacking you until I have more followers. Welcome to the Clout Wars. Okay, speaking, which we were crazy out of time. Yeah, we are.

You gotta go check out these guys because they're actually good guys. They have great programming, really smart. And you know what? Farron didn't like that I criticized it. We were fighting. He didn't like it. He doesn't want to respond to the fighting. You know what he did?

He did the same thing that he told us to. Just log off. He ignored it, yeah. He's touching grass right now. Seriously, check out Ring of Fire. Farron causes great show and check out damage report. damage report we'll be right back thanks for listening to the full episode of the young turks support our work listen ad free access members only bonus content and more by subscribing to

apple podcast at apple dot co slash t yt i'm your host jank huger and i'll see you soon