The Young Turks - Epstein Files Drop - December 19, 2025

Episode Date: December 20, 2025

Brown & MIT suspect located thanks to a tip from a Reddit user. The Epstein Files drop includes Bill Clinton & Michael Jackson photos but has hundreds of pages blacked out. Drop Site uncovers Epstein's ties to the Iran-Contra affair. Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TYT and use code TYT and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! Hosts: Yasmin Khan & Cenk Uygur 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 podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm going to be able to be. How does Santa go down? How does Santa do it? Well, hello. See my team. Bexing, see my team, see my team, see my team, see my team, everybody,

all right, welcome to the Young Turks. Jank Uyghur, Yasmin Aaliyah Khan, with you guys. Check out Yasmin on Rebel HQ on YouTube as well. So, guys, every day these days seems historic and amazing and also confounding oftentimes. So Epstein files have been released, kind of. They've halfway, not even a halfway, about best guess, a third of the way released. Is there going to be legal consequences to Pam Bondi because of that?

We're going to get into that in a little bit. And why are national security officials now redacting the files? That's a super important and relevant question. And then later in the program, oh my God, EPSC's connections to intelligence agencies are now totally indisputable, wait until you see what he was in the middle of, okay? So there's so much to cover on this show on so many topics, but let's get started right away. Yes, what do you got? All right away, so we have an update to a story.

So Reddit is picking up some slack where some trails may have gone cold. A user on Reddit made a post recently providing information that actually helped law enforcement identify the suspect in the Brown University shooting and in the murder of an an MIT professor. So the suspect is Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. He was 48 years old, a Brown University alumnus, and he entered the country from Portugal on a student visa in the year 2000. He's suspected of killing two students and wounding nine others at Brown University and also

killing an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Now the green card lottery program that allowed him into this country went over 20 years ago has been suspended. So, Jank, kind of a two-part story here. What are your thoughts? Yeah, there's what caused the shooting, which is still a bit of a mystery, but we're going to get into here since we know who did the shooting. And then there's the absurd political reaction. What do you think is more likely to have caused the shooting? Guns who actually shot and were used to shoot and kill people here and is the connective tissue in every single mass

shooting like this or green card visas or green card holders. Come on. But here we go. There's an anti-immigrant wave and I'll talk about why they're doing that anti-immigrant wave in a second as well. Yep. Those are all great questions. And we're going to get to all of those. So three days after the shooting, law enforcement was directed to this Reddit post. And it said, I'm being dead serious. The police need to look into a gray Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. and that's from a Reddit user, according to an affidavit filed by the police and Providence, Rhode Island. The user later told law enforcement about an encounter he had with a suspicious man on the Brown campus. So the tipster, whom the police referred to only as John, said that he encountered the suspect inside a bathroom on the ground floor of the building between 1.45 p.m. and 2 p.m. around two hours before the first shots were reported.

John said that the suspect's clothing was inappropriate for the weather and that they had made eye contact. John told the police that he followed the man after he left the building to a Nissan with a Florida license plate. But instead of entering the vehicle, the suspect started walking around the block with John behind him. John said it was like a game of cat and mouse. And at one point, the two men spoke. According to the affidavit, John asked the suspect, your car is back there. why are you circling the block? To which the suspect responded, why are you harassing me? John went his own way soon after. So once law enforcement spoke with John, he was able to identify

the suspect's vehicle from security camera footage. The vehicle had already been described as suspicious from a Brown faculty member, and it was later found that it was rented from downtown Boston. From there, they were able to find out who rented the vehicle, and that led them to the suspect. His motive for the shooting is currently unknown, but, you know, as we teased earlier, there is a second part to this story, because as if the, you know, the story of a shooting isn't devastating and newsworthy enough, the other angle of this is not that of gun control like it usually is, but instead, this case is being used to opportunistically block other students from entering the country.

So Nevis Valente came to the U.S. in 2000 as a student. He enrolled in Brown and was pursuing a Ph.D. in physics, but he dropped out of the program between 2001 and 2003. In 2017, though, he returned to the U.S. when he was issued a diversity immigrant visa, and months later, he became a legal permanent resident. Naturally, our president and his administration are using this incident as justification. for getting rid of the green card lottery program altogether because that makes sense. So Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noem said in a post on the social platform X that at Trump's direction, she is ordering the United States citizenship and immigration services

to pause the program. She said this heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country. She said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves-Velente. So the visa program that's just been suspended makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year to people outside of the United States, usually to countries that have low representation already in this country. However, since the lottery program was created by Congress, Trump's authority to pause the program is questionable.

So just last month, when we had an Afghan man attack the National Guard members, Trump decided to punish all Afghan people. He decided an indefinite suspension of processing for applications from all Afghan nationals. He's back on his travel bans with bans or restrictions on travel to the U.S. from now over 35 countries. But not only that, they're retroactively looking into people from those countries who came here during the Biden administration. Most of those countries that are restricted or banned from travel to the U.S. or from Africa, but there's also a lot from the Middle East and from the Caribbean. he's also mad that the Biden administration let in so many Afghans who were fleeing the Taliban and he claimed that Biden never vetted them. And so they're going to be looking into all

of that again. So, Jank, you know, as he kind of teased earlier, a few things come to mind on this. The travel bans, for one. He caught a lot of flack for those during his first term, but they're back with a vengeance. Also the idea that one non-white person is representative of their entire race or country and all of their people who look remotely like them, that's ridiculous. And then there's the fact that this particular shooter was from Portugal. And I feel like Trump can't demonize the Portuguese people because they're European. You know, they're like white enough. So he uses this instead as an excuse to just eliminate the lottery program, which he's never liked. But also, as you mentioned, there's no talk of gun violence anywhere with this.

So we're just demonizing the individual shooters along with all of their people and not even talking about gun control anymore. What are your thoughts? Yeah, so I knew our real problem was Portugal and immigrants from there. Yeah, okay. So look, this looks to be a shooter that did it for personal reasons. Why? Because he knew the first professor that he killed at MIT. So we don't yet, no, he didn't leave behind a manifesto as far as we know, et cetera. So we can't say it definitively. But he doesn't look like he had any political reason as far as we can tell or the authorities can tell right now. And so these shootings happen unfortunately more than once a day in America. And so this one was particularly horrible, given the number of people that were killed and the school shooting aspect of it, et cetera.

For me, it was much worse than any of the others because one of my best friends, kids was stuck in that building that the shooting happened in. But, and I would have hated it no matter who did the shooting. And for what reason they did the shooting because, you know, loved ones were endangered. I would hope that we would feel that way about everybody's kids. So now, do I think that my friend's son would have been better protected if we had blocked green card holders? Come on, guys. Come on. That's insanity.

That doesn't make any sense. There's no logical nexus there. Oh, if we just block the people from Portugal or even Palestine. And I say even Palestine because unfortunately, mainstream media in America has done so much propaganda against Muslims that were trained to believe, well, if they're from a Muslim country, well, that makes sense to block. I mean, probably terrorists or something, right? And so whereas you go Portugal and you go, well, I mean, Portugal, that's Europe.

No, no reason to block them. I mean, look at the stereotypes that are buried in our heads, right? So that's not the issue here. If you said, hey, let's do better vetting because sometimes people have slipped through when they had violent tendencies or, you know, or in favor of political violence for whatever reason, right? Well, nobody's going to disagree with that. We don't want any shootings here. We don't want any crazy people that are coming here. But we're going to block all immigration because of a mass shooting.

But we have literally more than 400 of them per year. How about the 399 other mass shootings? Nah, it's nonsense. So obviously they're using it as an excuse to go after immigrants. So why are they going after immigrants? Look, part of it is a real political issue. The whole country didn't want the border to be as open as it was. And then the whole country didn't want the criminals who were undocumented here and committed serious crimes.

We wanted to send them back. And then a portion of the country, which is Trump's space, wanted more deportation. Okay, so that's all legitimate political discussions, debates. I would argue there's some identity politics and culture war stuff there, but okay, that's a fine debate. But now when we're getting to green card holders, those are the, like that is the legal way to come to this country. You can't follow the law any better than getting a green card, going through the process,

et cetera. Now it's become a distraction. Hey, we haven't done anything for you guys. Your drug prices are high, housing's high, high, groceries are high, your wages are low. We're not going to do anything for you. We're not going to do anything. But don't worry, we've got somebody beneath you and you should help us pound them, right? Oh, the immigrants are causing your problem.

Really, the immigrants rigged the system so you're perpetually screwed by corporate rule? The immigrants have nothing to do with that. Certainly not the legal immigrants. Is every legal immigrant that's going to come into this country going to be an angel and like no one out of that mass of humanity is ever going to commit a crime? No, but especially people who do it the legal way, they commit a quarter of the crime. Or another way of putting it is people born in America citizens, American citizens born here, commit four times the crime of legal immigrants. So if you were looking to stop crime or violent crime, you would not target legal immigrants. you would target natural born Americans, but that wouldn't make sense either because you should

be targeting people whoever, that there's evidence against, whether they've committed to crime or already or people are concerned they're going to commit a crime. And by the way, if they are concerned, that's why we should have red flag laws and why we should have universal background checks. So we don't want the wrong guys, no matter what nationality they are, to get the guns. And we want good guys that come in and contribute to our society. I mean, we've given you a million examples, but some of the most successful people in the country are legal immigrants, slamming the door in their face because of a random shooting at Brown that had nothing to do with any of this, is just more politics meant to distract you from the people that are causing the real

problems in this country, which is the donor class who have all the power and who have rigged all the rules for their own benefit and not ours. Yeah. And, you know, authoritarianism requires some kind of enemy, someone to fear, some kind of target. And it doesn't matter. All of this is making it very clear that it doesn't matter who that is because all of it is propaganda anyway, right? They're just making things up anyway. So they can make up things about one group. They can make up things about another group. The Somalis right now, they're not destroying this country. That is preposterous. And it sounds preposterous to anyone who isn't already wildly racist and or ignorant,

although I think you have to be very ignorant to be racist in the first place. But since it doesn't matter who the target demo is, those demos can and do change all the time. I thought the Haitians were the enemy. I thought they were the ones who were destroying this country. But now I guess it's the Somalians. I can't keep up. And I guess they assume that most other people can't keep up either. It doesn't matter.

As long as they look different, they look other. They look like not the people that you see regularly on your television or in your government or even around your own neighborhood because people tend to live in isolated communities these days. And this is so obvious. This is making it abundantly clear that for all the rhetoric that we heard during the election, during the campaign, when they were saying, oh, no, we have no problem with migrants and immigrants. We have only problems with illegal immigrants. We don't like the way that they're coming in, crossing the border illegally, blah, blah, blah, blah, and now they're getting rid of the green card program, the green card lottery. A lot of people enter this country legally through some type of green card lottery, including my own family. And it's just, it's so ridiculous because this is the legal avenue.

This is one of the legal avenues. And if you are fighting against this, then it was never about illegal immigration. And they're not even trying to perpetuate that, that talking point anymore because this is so clearly, you know, they can't do it. Yeah. So last couple of things, look, if you got an issue with the green card lottery, no problem. That's a good political debate. Connecting it to this shooting is ludicrous. And are we like, are we all supposed to be afraid of the Portuguese now?

And in the beginning, of course, the Israel first crowd said, oh, he's probably pro-Palestinian, pro-Palestinian, now it's not that at all. And they're like, whatever, whatever's good for the Portuguese is good for the portugander. And we're just going to go with the same exact talking point against immigrants, no matter who it is. Okay, well, at least know that it's a political trick. Yeah, absolutely. And I hope, I mean, like, I have not that much hope, I guess. But, you know, like, I want people to see through these things. I want the people who support Trump to see through all these things. They haven't seen through it for the last 10 years, and I really wish they would.

But at this point, Trump is like an old man who is falling asleep. He is an evil person. He's just saying crazy things. He goes and he yells at the entire country for 20 minutes right before Christmas. Fine. But who are all these people who continue to prop up this person who so clearly should not be in charge of anything, let alone the entire country and the global economy? Those people I feel like it are at this point.

And it's like, what are you doing? You know? So those, the people who are still supporting this, I have a lot of problems with now. But I'm trying to be compassionate. Some days are better than others. Sure. God bless. Okay.

So guys, let's take a quick break here. When we come back, Epstein Files, dun, dun, dun. All right, all right, guys, let's go to our members at TY dot com. By the way, actually before I do that real quick, so we got our 20th anniversary coming up. That's December 22nd. Make sure you tune in for that special. It's fun. First ever YouTube partner channel. So it's going to be kind of a momentous day. And shop TYT has limited edition TDR hats and a 15% off discount. If you use gear up, use the promo code gear up and get 15% off. I wanted to make sure you guys knew that. And we're on substack.

check us out there as well. We keep growing in that regard. Okay. Oh, and by the way, speaking of ShopT, Y, TYT, I got my Gladiator slash Rebel Alliance TYT logo shirt. I love this one. Although Michael claims it said also an M, and so it's like TYT and Michael's shirt combined. I don't know if that's really true, but in fact, I know it's not true because I thought of it. Okay, anyways, but I love that shirt. So check that out at shopt.com as well. All right, our, so Schleivan writes in at tyt.com, law enforcement officials are sifting through the information on the reward that was offered. Maybe, I don't know, eclectic missile toe says, that's funny already, I'm really starting to think that the MO of politicians after one of these shootings

is, quick, let's find some angle to focus on before people start blaming our extremely loose gun laws. There's a confluence of different factors and issues. And yes, that's, of course, also one of them. For sure, my favorite one was when after the shooting, a horrific school shooting in Texas, Ted Cruz was like, I got it. Less doors. Idiot. Just Jim says, Jake, you may think this is crazy, but naturalized citizens should be worried. No, I don't think it's crazy. No, no one would know it better than me. Stephen Miller's wife threatened to take away my citizenship because I'm a naturalized citizen. Guys, I want you to know something. I don't know that it matters anymore, but just so you

understand, I saw it again the other day. That's why it's top of mind. We still have these, like, people who have a vendetta against us for inexplicable reasons on the left, okay, who are still lying about us. Like they say they were, oh, we're pro ice. It's insanity if you watch the show. Insanity, right? And they keep lying and saying that I was, I liked Trump in the beginning. You guys watched the show. It's crazy to say that. No, what I'm saying is not that Trump is not going to do terrible things. I was hopeful that the independents that voted for Trump, and maybe even a little bit of right wing, would then say, no, you're going too far. And what happened? That's exactly what happened. It's not that they weren't going to try

these things. It's that the country was going to stand up. And after a battle, our side was going to win and he wasn't going to be able to do those things in the long run. So here we are in the middle of the battle. And when we got to mass deportations, Rogan, Theo von, Dillon, et cetera, we're like, no, wrong, wrong. Right. And so even some of the right wings started to say wrong. So exactly as we predicted. So now it doesn't mean they're not going to come for me.

And so I know I'm on the front lines in that regard. but I think that if they come for me, that we will, that a lot of folks will rally. And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, okay? But I believe in America, certainly not Trump. All right back on TYJK and he has with you guys. Check out he has this podcast, too, modern context. And so, guys, Noble mobile, this is a Christmas gift to yourself. Everybody who's done it is writing in, not everybody who did it is writing in, but

people who have written and all say that when they switched, I was right. There's no change at all. Phone, phone number, contacts. It takes about 10 minutes of your life. It's people get so nervous about switching over it. And I don't blame you. I was nervous too. Like we all have that thought in the back of our heads. But I'm telling you, I went through it. It didn't change a single thing. It took less than 10 minutes. Now I save a ton of money. If you're paying over $50, it's nuts. There's no reason to do that. T.yt.com slash switch. So for your cell phone service in last month, I only paid $39 because I got cash back.

They're giving you cash back to. It's crazy. TYT.com slash switch. TYT.com slash switch. Okay. Yes. What's next? We got another story.

Let's roll the tape. Today marks the deadline for the DOJ to make the Epstein files public. We're going to release several hundred thousand documents today. I expect that we're going to release more documents. documents over the next couple of weeks. So today several hundred thousand. And then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more. There's a lot of eyes looking at these. And we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we're producing, that we're protecting them every single victim.

Yeah, nonsense and illegal. They have to release all of the files today. If they don't, they could be in some legal trouble. In fact, we had Representative Rokana on the show yesterday, and he outlined a scenario where Pam Bondi might be arrested if they don't release all the files. But wait till you see who's combing through the files at the end here, maybe gives away the game as to what was actually happening with Epstein. So Yaz has the details now. All right. So a month ago, President Donald Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law. And that started a 30 day timer for Attorney General Pam Bondi to release all the documents related to Epstein. But as you just saw, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, he has stated

that the administration is going to roll out the documents over time rather than just release them all at once. That is not what they're supposed to be doing. So we received only some of the files today and we will talk about what is in them in just a moment. First, let's watch Representative Rokana explain what consequences Pam Bondi could face for concealing those Epstein files. So when we talk about prosecution, we're not talking about tomorrow because the Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. So it's, Pam Bondi's not going to arrest herself as the Attorney General. Would consequences begin if the Democrats take the House in in 2026?

Well, they could begin before that. I mean, Massey and I have talked about introducing an impeachment resolution against a Pam Bondi, where we could get Republicans breaking and supporting that if the release of the files is not in compliance with the law. You already have Susie Wiles throwing her under the bus. The White House Chief of Staff saying she whiffed, so she is losing support among the Republican caucus. Second, she could be held in inherent contempt of Congress.

That means the sergeant of arms of Congress could actually arrest her and there could be a trial in Congress about whether she was transparent. And we are pursuing a number of those things. All right. So the Epstein Files Transparency Act, it does allow for some redaction. So the Epstein Files Act says the Justice Department may withhold or redact the identities of Epstein's victims and contains exemptions that would allow the DOJ to withhold records that would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution. So here is Representative Thomas Massey explaining how we'll be able to tell whether we're getting the real files or an over-redacted cop-out. One of the ways we'll know is there are people who have covered this case for years, and I've

talked to them in private, and they know what some of the material is that's back there. But the other way that we're going to know is the victim's lawyers have been in contact with me. And collectively, they know there are at least 20 names of men who are accused of sex crimes in the possession of the FBI. These would reside in the FD 302 forms. So if we get a large production on December 19th, and it does not contain a single name of any male, who's accused of a sex crime or sex trafficking or rape or any of these things, then we know they haven't produced all the documents. It's that simple.

All right, well, what happens now? Well, under the law, the DOJ has 15 days to turn over its rationale for any documents that it has decided to withhold. We should also mention who is doing the redacting and why, because that is interesting. The Justice Department's National Security Division inherited the redacted work from the redaction work from the FBI. It's surprising to many national security law specialists that that's who's doing the work. And given the division's historical emphasis on classified matters and the lack of a nexus between Epstein and national security interests. So, Jank, there's more to this story and we will get into what has a little bit of what's been released at the files.

Does that suggest that Epstein was connected to intelligence? And this also speaks to a story that we're going to discuss a little bit later. Yeah, 100%. So there's already so many connections to intelligence. And as he has alluded to there, check out our video on the latest where apparently Jeffrey Epstein was in the middle of the Iran-Contra scandal. He was apparently one of the most powerful men on earth without any of us ever knowing about. But there is no regular citizen in the middle of an Iran-Contra scandal and helping to ship arms back and forth. After reading that story, it becomes 100% clear that he's intelligence.

Is the CIA or Mossad, those are only two choices. Again, the Israelis brokered Iran-Contra deal, of course they did. Okay, but he might be CIA. And that might be why our government has been protecting him all along. And now, what is the other piece of evidence that is now confirming it on the same day. Well, our own government telling us, yeah, national security is now redacting things. Why does national security have to redact information about a sex crime in New York and in Florida? That should have nothing to do with national security unless there was intelligence involved. But hold, we gave you one quote already from CNN, let me give you a different quote. Counterintelligence specialists were asked to drop nearly all of their other work to process the Epstein documents, two people said.

And then there's a fascinating little twist, but some lawyers declined to participate. So number one, counterintelligence and national security is redacting materials from Epstein files. Period. Intelligence. No question. Over. Over. Okay. Number two. Apparently, it's so supernova toxic to some lawyers and the government are refusing to participate in the redactions. That's also interesting. So meanwhile, New York Times, we'll get in this more later, is still saying the idea that he might be connected with intelligence is conspiracy theories. Well, the government is saying it. They're saying we got to do counterintelligence on this material.

The national security interests are at play. Why? Obviously, he's involved in state affairs, whether it's American or Israeli intelligence. And that's not the weird part, guys. When you're running a giant potential blackmail operation on the most powerful people on earth, it's not that an intelligence agency would be involved. What's surprising is all of the national media in unison covering it up. But finally, CNN here, and I'm kind of amused by it, because as the guys,

government is telling them. This is counterintelligence. We are the ones that are redacting these files. CNN says at the end of the article, it is awfully strange. Doesn't normally happen. Wow. Okay. We got a slight admission there. Yes, it is awfully strange. Yeah. Yeah. The media is the way that they're choosing to cover this is very interesting. And I feel like that in and of itself is its own story that we could probably talk a lot about on this show. But we are going to continue talking about these files and see what has been released. It's not great, you know, like they've been working on this since Trump was on the campaign trail allegedly.

So he, sorry, I think my mic went out a little bit. Well. We can hear you. You can hear me, right? It's just a little. All right, I'll fix it at the next break. But basically, the Department of Justice unveiled a huge trobe of these Epstein files. reporters are still going through what's inside.

So far, we've seen some notable images of Michael Jackson and Bill Clinton. So here is Epstein with Michael Jackson. Take a look at that. God, that's such a haunting picture in two different ways. Yeah. Yeah, it's creepy. And then there's also this one of Bill Clinton in a hot tub next to someone whose face has been redacted. And then there is Bill Clinton again.

Here's Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, and Diana Ross. I was just listening to Diana Ross yesterday in my car. And we've also obtained this little bit of information. Masseuses reads the top of the document released in the Epstein drop, followed by 254 spots that are all blacked out. The document notes, redacted to protect potential victim information. And then we also have Rokana calling out the initial rollout disappointing. And he wants the DOJ to explain the exact timeline for when the rest of the files will be released

and the full explanations for what has been redacted and why. And also Chuck Schumer has put out a statement. And he said, simply releasing a mountain of blacked out images violates a spirit of transparency and the letter of the law, for example, all 100. 19 pages of one document were completely blacked out. We need answers as to why. Jank, what are your initial thoughts on this? Well, I mean, they already told us. It's counterintelligence and national security and they're blocking everything out, which leads me to believe that they're definitely guilty. So now there's two different sets of folks who are guilty of different

things. One is, as both Tom Massey and Roe Con are pointing out, no, the law is very clear. you have to give us all the documents now, and you can't over-redact either. You're supposed to redact and protect the victims, not redact to protect national intelligence agencies or maybe non-national intelligence agencies. And so there seem to be in violation of the law. In fact, Rokana last line on the show, right here on the Young Turks, said that the consequences are as significant as the sergeant-at-arms arresting the Attorney General for not following the law. That would be amazing.

Now, it's very unlikely to come to that, but the point there is both on the Republican and Democratic side. These bills passed nearly unanimously. They were signed in the law. They're crystal clear. And there are at least a couple of honest Congress people, the ones who started all of this, who are saying, we're not going to mess around with you guys. We're going to enforce the law. No one's above it.

And Jeffrey Epstein and his associates and his allies have been above the law for a long, long time. And the time has come to put an end to that. Yeah, I feel like what is the point of all of this? So they're violating the law, but they're at the top of the law. So like who is going to hold them accountable? What is going to happen? These pictures that have come out is nothing new, really.

They're hard to look at. I don't like looking at them. the pictures of Michael Jack. We already knew that he had some associations with Epstein. We obviously knew that Bill Clinton, something was there. Even though Susie Wiles actually said in her piece with Vanity Fair that he was less complicit than Donald Trump would like all of us to believe he was with Jeffrey Epstein. I don't really believe that, though. She also said that Trump was less complicit than people believe.

But yeah, this is such a nothing burger. They redacted, what was it, 119 pages. that were blacked out completely. What is the point of that? And again, this is something that Trump was talking about since he was on the campaign trail, right? And then he got into office since January. What have they been doing for this last year?

If they were like they were going to release the files or it was going to release the files or working on the files, then he signs a thing and he says 31 days, we're going to release the files. And here we have this and it's just nothing, nothing, nothing. And then they decided themselves that we're just going to like slow. drip this out, we're just going to release it periodically in batches and like, you know, like they're trying to contain the story and it's not going to go away. And this is, it's

really disappointing. And I, yeah, I mean, like, I would love to see some consequences for all of this, but I just, it does feel like a stretch, Jank. Yeah, we're doing a, I don't know if there's anything fun about this story, but a fun little poll about what you're more surprised by. It's not about national intelligence or anything serious. Who are you most surprised to see having met with Epstein? A, David Brooks, B, Deepak Chopra, C, Bill Gates, D. Nome Chomsky. I was going to say Chomsky. I think Chomsky wins on that one.

What in the world was Nome Chomsky doing with Jeffrey Epstein? So, by the way, I don't mean that in any negative way. Tons of people he met had nothing to do with the illegal activities. As we've been telling you over the last couple of months, and especially because of the brilliant reporting from drop site news, it is absolutely clear that Jeffrey Epstein was one of the most powerful men on earth. He could organize a meeting with almost any world leader at the drop of a hat. He could get you inside the White House anytime he wanted. And apparently he was the nexus in the Iran-Contra deal. So for decade after decade, Jeffrey Epstein and his friends have been running. running things behind the scenes. And at this very late date, the American government is still trying with all of its will

to try to block you from finding out what he did, what his friends did, and who he's connected to. And obviously one of the possibilities is that he's connected to us, the CIA. And that's why Dave let him slide all these years. And that's why they never release or prosecute any of the other criminal. Yeah. Yeah, those polling results are exactly what I'm feeling. Because before you even mentioned his name when you were reading off the poll results, I was thinking it's Noam Chomsky. But you're absolutely right. You know, a lot of people are going to be mentioned in these files

and we're going to get more and more names out. It doesn't necessarily mean that anybody, that all of these people were complicit. A lot of them were, though, you know, and like all of that is, you know, hopefully the hope was that we would have known by now kind of more information around all these things. But the fact is that we don't. So we're still kind of in the exact same position that we were yesterday. Not a whole lot has changed, at least not for me. But I guess we'll see how this plays out. You know, it's last thing. Every once in a while, as somebody threatens to use a sergeant at arms, that's the law enforcement officer for the House of Representatives to arrest someone in the executive branch or the judicial branch. It's always a fun speculation. It's never

happened, it's very likely never going to happen. But man, would that be a moment? If the sergeant-at-arms arrest the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General for not following the law, well, then we'd know that we had at least some people in our Congress and our government that represents us. But that is a very small chance. So my guess is they will continue to redact the living crap out of this. They'll continue to hide this information until we elect one honest president. Wouldn't that be amazing if we had one honest president in our lifetime? And if you say, well, Jake, that's not fair. We're all on the left and, or a lot of us are on the left. And we had Barack Obama. Obama didn't release any Epstein files either.

And it also happened under his watch. So it's so obvious this intelligence. It's the most obvious thing in the world. All right. Okay, we got to take a break when we come back. If it wasn't honest, obvious enough for you, I mean, we got the post-partum on the Democrats, but a little bit later after that, drop site news does it again. They drop the facts, the reporting, the mic, they drop everything on our government's head and the rest of the media because it's the I mean, how could he be in the middle of Iran-Contra? How? How? Right? So we'll get to that in a little bit.

All right. Back on TYT. So let's go to our members at TYT.com. Hedgehog Dragon says, I'm going to say it again, RoeConna, 2028. Look, guys, I'm not biased in favor of Roe. We've had verbal fist of cups before. We've had massive disagreements before. But right now, I don't see anyone else within a country mile of Rokana. Does anybody see another Democrat that's fighting like 10, 20% of like Rokana is for all of us? So yeah, at this point, it's a no brainer. Let's see how things develop.

Boomer Dragon Cat says, I've kind of had it with the files, show me the smoking guns or shut up. this drip drip just isn't doing it for me. Yeah, no, Kat, what it is is not like we're already converted, right? We have to get past traditional media constantly brainwashing a huge percentage of the population, nothing to see here. It's about Trump. It's about Bill Gates. It's about individuals. Don't look at the government. Don't look at the government. Whatever you do, please don't look at the government. So we have to keep talking about it and how the government is covering it up etc. So slowly the whole country wakes up to, oh, he was involved with the government, which leads to the next comment. As most prophet says, so now we have to admit to ourselves

that our own intelligence agency may have been using American children as honeypots. People need to go to jail. And I couldn't agree more with that. Even if it's Mossad guys, there's no way the CIA didn't know it. I mean, if the CIA didn't know it and it was Mossad, then the CIA is useless and should immediately be disbanded, okay? So the CIA is super likely to be involved. So yeah, if they're involved, you're right. That's our government saying rape American children so we could do what? I don't know. But that's why they're covering this up so furiously. It doesn't have to do with protecting random rich and powerful people. It has to do with protecting people who betrayed us inside this government.

Panic on Funkatrans says, New York Times says the top writer who was involved with Epstein can't trust New York Times reporting on this. Look, they've had some good reports and some bad reports on it. But of course, whenever gets to Israel or CIA, they're like, no, no, no, right? And so why does the New York Times do that? Because, yeah, you can't trust them. They, yeah, they had a reporter who was actively working with Epstein. So what the hell was that? Did the New York Times do an internal investigation and find out if that guy was

intelligence, if that guy was working for a different country? He was inside your house, New York Times. Nothing? Anything? Happy to hear it. P.B. Cupcake says, oh, T.Y.T. is almost old enough to drink. Actually, technically, we're 23. We started the online show 20 years ago. We had the radio show for three years before that.

Teddy Lucy Linda says, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if 47 must be behind this shooting, referring to the Brown shooting, because he'll stop at nothing to detract from the Epstein files. I'm sure he has no problem with reading the country of another immigrant. I know this sounds conspiratorial. Yeah, it's too conspiratorial. No way that happened. Risk or war doesn't make any sense. So that's my Tuesday.

All right, back on TYT, Jank and he has with you guys, and CDN, Norstog. Thank you for gifting another membership on YouTube American Hero. We appreciate you. And I appreciate this from daily. I'm allowed to appreciate this. They wrote it in the YouTube member section. Jank is my favorite. Okay, all right. At least got one. All right, guys, you got more stories.

All right, we are going to keep this Epstein train rolling. That might not have been the best analogy. The New York Times, though, has stated that Jeffrey Epstein did not grow his power and wealth via ties to intelligence. Jank, just that's all you get. What's your two cents? Yeah. No, guys, this is an enormous story. So as DropSight News put it, Jeffrey Epstein appears to be the forest gump of all political scandals and intelligence agency maneuvers. But I'm sure it's all a giant coincidence. It's not. If you watch this story, you'll see Epstein definitely involved with intelligence.

Which intelligence you were going to find that out too. Yeah, it's kind of hard to deny after all of this. So on Tuesday, the New York Times published a massive piece on Jeffrey Epstein. And in it, it argues abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation. But we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. But thanks to new reporting from drop site news, we've learned about Epstein's actual connections to an American intelligence scandal, the Iran-Contra affair.

So specifically, Epstein, he shared a penthouse with an Iran-Contra lawyer, and he worked for an Iran-Contra arms dealer, and he moved the Iran-Contra planes to Ohio for use by billionaire retail mogul Leslie Wexner. So this piece is incredibly detailed. It is so long, and we don't have time to go through all of it. But if you are so interested, I would really encourage a lot of you to go find the article and read it for yourselves. It is hefty. But for now, here are some of the major takeaways that we'll give you. We'll start with a man named Stanley Pottinger. In the early 1980s, under the CIA

supervision, Pottinger advised an Iranian banker on shipping embargoed arms to Iran using fraudulent paperwork and overseas dummy companies in the very same period that Pottinger and Epstein worked together selling tax avoidance strategies from a penthouse by Central Park. So the CIA would later use the profits from that scheme to bankroll the Contras down in Nicaragua. And on one occasion, the CIA met with that Iranian banker in Pottinger's office. And again, this is all during the time that Pottinger and Epstein were renting a penthouse together.

So that Iranian banker was later indicted, but a money wanderer and weapons trafficker named Adnan Khashoggi became America's next conduit to Iran. In 1985, Khashoggi teamed up with the CIA and then Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, who helped to help Israel sell its own weapons to Iran while the U.S. promised to refill those weapon stores. At this time, future Israeli prime minister, Ahud Barak, was head of Israel's military intelligence directorate. So it says, former intelligence, Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben Manash, wrote in his 1992 memoir that Ehud Barak feared Perez or the Americans would discover the slush fund bank accounts where the arms profits were hidden and take the money for themselves.

Ben Menash claimed that Barack arranged for media mogul Robert Maxwell, Galane Maxwell's father, to launder the Iran weapons profits through his company's accounts. Epstein often made vague boast about being a financial bounty hunter. who tracked down hidden money. Well, in 1987, while Robert Maxwell was allegedly hiding money from arms deals, Epstein bragged to a journalist about finding money for Adnan Khashoggi in such detail. The journalist thought Epstein might be in the business of hiding as well as finding it. So as the 80s went on, the Iran-Contra scheme fell apart.

It blew up in the press. And as the years passed, Epstein was handed control of billionaire fashion. and mogul Leslie Wexner's finances. So eventually, Wexner's empire gobbled up southern air transport or Satt, which controlled the very same planes that the CIA used to send weapons to Iran. So with Epstein acting as Wexner's logistics man in Ohio, in 1996, Sat finished relocating its world headquarters to Columbus to deliver products from factories in Hong Kong and southern China directly to Wexner's network of limited brand stores. And on October 1st, 1998,

sat abruptly filed for bankruptcy exactly one week before the CIA Inspector General released its official findings on contra cocaine trafficking allegations. Oh my God, that was so hefty, that's so much. And it really doesn't even scratch the surface of everything that was detailed in that article. Again, you should read both. Read the New York Times piece, and then read what DropSight revealed, all within this one week. I think I looked at it, Jank, in the New York Times piece, they only mentioned Israel one, or three times. And it's just like, oh, Epstein was in Israel visiting these people and they weren't impressed with him. So it's really crazy.

And the New York Times piece, the way that they try to frame it is that, oh, there's all these conspiracy theories around Epstein and, like, does he work for Mossad? Like, was he a Mossad agent? Was he working with the CIA? all these things are very conspiratorial according to the New York Times, which actually a viewer just pointed out, you know, they might have some, it's really not saying much to say, but they might have some compromise. There might be compromised a little bit there. But with the New York Times piece, it was very much they were attempting to take a pragmatic approach. Like, you know what? It doesn't have to be so conspiratorial. Oftentimes, the simpler explanation is the right one. It has nothing. to do with intelligence. This is all about, you know, he was just really good at networking. But who was he networking with? And why was he involved? You said he was like Forrest Gump. He really does just pop up everywhere. And the idea that he's popping up now in relation to Iran Contra is unbelievable. This is a big story. Yeah. No, no. You only read the New York Times

piece if you want to see how mainstream media covers up for the government intelligence agencies. etc. Basically, it's a piece saying nothing to see here. Perfectly normal how he got all of his connections and money. Nonsense. Drop site news doing real journalism. Excuse me, guys. I'm still sick.

Um Excuse me Excuse me So So DropSight news Doing real journalism shows you

No, this guy Was in the middle of a deal Between the CIA Israeli intelligence and the Iranians. There are no random Forrest Gump dudes who walk into the middle of an Iran-Contra deal between the CIA, the Israelis, and Iran. That's not a thing that happens. You'd have to be a borderline lunatic to think that that happens.

He's arranging where the illegal planes go, Epstein is. He's arranging meetings between Israeli intelligence and, you know, US, et cetera, there's no question he's intelligence. None. Zero. And so at this point, the New York Times and all the other media that are, they see the drop site news stories. Like if they could disprove them, do you know how badly they want to disprove them? Because drop site news is humiliating them by being real journalists while the New York Times like, it's Trump, it's Bill Clinton, nothing to look at here. Don't look at Israel. Don't look at the CIA. No, no, we're going to look at him.

Because what the hell is he doing in the middle of that deal? Guys, it's even worse than that in his sense. You know, you always had this sense of like they're powerful people that you don't see. I ran this clip from President John F. Kennedy a couple of weeks before he was assassinated, talking about groups of secret people that conspire against the government, against all of us, etc. It's a haunting, haunting speech by JFK assassinated a couple of weeks. later. And so Adnan Khashoggi is the uncle of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist, who was murdered by the Saudis. Okay, Hashemi is some guy who helped arrange the Iran part

of the Iran controversy. He winds up being injected with something and dying of leukemia two days later. People keep popping up dead all over these stories, okay? So, Are there a group of people doing illicit deals like this? Well, of course there are. Iran Contra, that was an illicit deal. We were not supposed to fund the Contras, and we certainly weren't supposed to sell weapons to a government we were calling terrorists at the time.

Reagan was saying, we don't negotiate with terrorists. Meanwhile, CIA and Jeffrey Epstein and the Israelis are helping Iran get those weapons. And then of course, many, many years later, Israel then turns around says, can you believe Iran has weapons? we have to attack them. So the only thing I couldn't see definitively out of this story is, is Epstein, Mossad, or CIA, or both. I don't know, but it's definitely one of them, if not both of them.

So anyone claiming he's not intelligence, honestly, most of them probably have not read the drop site all stories. If you haven't, and you just don't know, no problem, right? But if you read that and you still claim that Epstein wasn't involved in intelligence, you're lying. And then I have to wonder why you're lying. Because that's a, that's a completely irrational and indefensible conclusion that you would come to after seeing Epstein in the middle of all of these deals. By the way, almost every single, I say almost because I'm not positive, but every, it's not almost in the ones that I've seen. Every single story that I've seen him do some sort of being interacting with different countries, doing deals, setting up

meetings, we're all on behalf of Israel. It's really, it's impressive how prolific he managed to be from where he started to where he ended up to where he's organizing all kinds of meetings with world leaders, how he has targeted every celebrity, anyone literally of any kind of note and significance and relevance to any position of power, right? Whether that's an entertainment or business or in government, he was everywhere. And for the New York Times to publish that piece, and like they said it, like it was this big bombshell reporting. They spent so much time and money on it. They had their best reporters on it. They dug through everything. And then that's what they ended up publishing.

It's really kind of appalling. And then for DropSight to come out immediately and be like, how'd you miss all this? You know, like obviously they were they were leaving out a lot of things in this bombshell piece that they wanted to deliver to the American people. It's really unbelievable. And all this is happening the same way that we're supposed to get the Epstein files. This feels much, much, much more significant, much bigger than anything that we got from our government because all we got was a few pictures of Michael Jackson. and Bill Clinton that I would have rather not seen, you know. Yeah.

That's what they had to give us. You know, I would have just said, no, thank you. So last two things here. One, we'll put the link in the description box for the drop site news story so you can read it yourself. And two, one of our members just wrote in on t.yt.com put that away, wrote in, I predict Maxwell will be taking a ride on Edelson Jet very soon. So why? Because Robert Maxwell is involved in these stories. Robert Maxwell is Galane Maxwell's dad and Robert Maxwell is the most legendary Mossad spy of all time.

He's the one that stole our nuclear secrets. By the way, I mean, I'm never going to stop saying this because I find it to be the most remarkable thing I've ever heard. He stole our nuclear secrets and we decided not to arrest them because it would be an international incident that would embarrass the Israelis. Yeah, if you steal our nuclear secrets, Paris is the least you should be. So our government protecting Israel at every turn, at every turn, in the most outrageous ways, whether they're doing a deal with us in Iran-Contra, now that I get why they're protecting CIA protects them because they were involved in that complicit plan, in that

illicit plan. But by the way, that plan was illegal and the people who did it at the CIA should have been arrested, let alone the Israelis and the Iranians, okay? but also in deals that in situations where it massively hurts us. I'm trying to prevent people from getting nukes is one of the most important things that we do because the more countries that have nukes, the more unstable the world becomes. And the greater the danger for all of us. Israel steals that from us and we're like, thank you sir, may we have another. And we've given them over 300 billion dollars for no

reason at all. All they ever do is spy and steal, spy and steal. And it looks like either Mossad or CIA or both unleashed this plague of Jeffrey Epstein upon us. And they did it, knowing that they were going to molest and rape underage American girls here for their intelligence benefit. No, no, our government doesn't represent us at all. We need somebody to represent us desperately to get our government back. And just one quick thing before we break. Trump just gave that insane address to the American people on Wednesday where he yelled at us for 20 minutes. It was very bizarre.

But in that speech, he said, you know, look at all these things that I've done for Israel. And he said, look, I had to write it down. I had to take notes on it because I've done so much for Israel. Read the room. No, the American people on both sides of the aisle wildly oppose American involvement in Israel. At this point, though, like, how do we even detangle ourselves from them? The U.S. and Israel, we are the same. We're their arm.

We're their muscle. They're the little guy. We're the big guy with the muscles. They're the, you know, it's a whole thing. And Trump and the Republicans are still pushing this narrative that we need to support Israel and look at all these things. he's the America first president. The people voted for him because he was the America first president. And he said that. That's how he branded himself. And yet here he is doing the thing that even his own supporters would rather him not do. And then everything coming out now with

the Epstein files, Epstein is another issue that Trump voters feel very, very passionate about, or at least they did. I think they've kind of like mellowed out a little bit on that because of, you know, just the way everything has been handled. But, you know, these two issues coming together, the way that they're coming together, is very strange. And it's really not being reported on very much or very widely, especially not in the mainstream media. And we can see that very clearly with the piece, the differences between the two pieces that have come out this week. Yeah, I got to say one last thing. Because a member on Twitch wrote in, a dev 094 said, yep, it's all a coincidence, procuring cyber weapons for Israel,

coincidence, setting up meetings for a former Israeli prime minister with Putin, that's just a coincidence too. And we could list 10, 12 more coincidences. Guys, this is why I get so frustrated with the media. So the government is obviously somehow complicit in this. That's why they desperately covered it up under Republican and Democratic administrations. But the media has no excuse. Breaking a story about how the CIA was involved with Epstein as an example would be spectacular. It would be the biggest story that's ever happened. Bringing a story about how, if it was Mossad, same thing. But whenever it gets to Mossad or Israel, the press, like unanimously, I don't mean independent press like lever, drop site news, guardian, us, et cetera. I mean,

traditional media are unified in not covering this angle. That is bizarre. It's the, it's the, weirdest thing I have ever seen. So what is going inside these news organizations where they're like, oh, it's super obvious that Epstein was working with Israel somehow, obviously. I just like a million connections. They're like, nope, won't cover it, won't cover it, won't cover it, won't cover it. Okay, well then you guys are useless. You're not journalists. In fact, your job is to cover up the news, not to reveal the news. If you're not covering this, It's the biggest story, one of the biggest stories of our lifetimes. And you're not connecting that dot?

No, you guys are the worst. They're anti-news, anti-news. Their job is to do marketing for the most corrupt people in our governments, and to make sure that American people never find out the real news. Epstein was definitely connected to Israel. The prime minister is sitting at his place 30 different times. Israeli spies are coming in and out of his building, he's trying to get, building his house. He's trying to get us to bomb Syria.

He's trying to get America to bomb Iran. In the emails, he's constantly talking about, what else can we do to help Israel? What else can we do to help Israel? I'm trying to help Israel. Israel, Israel, Israel, Israel. Oh, here's the Israeli spy. Here's the Israeli prime minister. And getting cyber weapons for Israel.

How is this complicated? So, okay, I guess every national media reported that works for these, now I'm going to start calling corrupt traditional media has decided to bury the most relevant part of this story on behalf of a foreign government. And how that works, I don't know. If you told me before, like a memo was passed around and they get together and decide not to cover this, I would have said that's crazy. No way they do that. But they're all doing it at the same time. Now I'm wondering, like, are they literally in on it? And if you don't know the history of these traditional media outlets, have they worked with the CIA before?

Yes, that is very well documented. New York Times, Time magazine, all of these traditional media outlets, the CIA would often feed them propaganda before we would do coup against the government. It was part of the coup that these papers would smear anyone representing their own people so the CIA could get rid of them. Are they still having that role? I don't know because the more they cover this up and every day that the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC CNN and all these guys cover up this story is another day we begin to wonder who the hell are they working for. And has our entire news operation in this country been all about propaganda to deceive you all your entire lives, to paint a picture that isn't real at all? So yeah, that's how far this goes, because there's no question that now FSC is part of

intelligence, and almost every major media outlet is lying to you and covering that up. Yeah. And, you know, at some point, it has to be acceptable, even the right patriotic thing to do to question your journalists, right? Now, you have freedom of press and they're clearly not reporting on a story the way they should be. And it's inexcusable at this point, right? There's so much evidence and they're not even mentioning it. And so many people in this country are still watching, getting the majority of their news from those major cable stations. And so they really are just not hearing about a lot of the things that, you know, we talk about on this show and other shows like ours are discussing. So I do like that we're talking about it at least. I like that our audience is informed. I like that they're engaged in all of this. And I just wish we could expand that a little bit or, you know, tell your friends, like ask them. Like, have you heard about this? It just, it's so bizarre to me how all these things are still happening and people who think that they're informed with the news are so ill-informed or they're just missing entire pieces of the narrative. And I wish, and I don't think that they want to be

informed. I think the people who are actively watching these shows want to know about what's actually going on and they don't realize that they're just not getting the whole story. So this is a moment for journalism. All right. Everybody checking out Yaz on Rebel HQ. And we're going to come right back. We've got so much more news for you guys. Very full day of news. And by the way, exciting announcement at the top of the 8 o'clock hour where Rebellion Pack has got three new candidates. They're amazing, can't wait to tell you about them. But when we come back, Tucker Carlson versus Ben Shapiro, huge heavyweight matchup last night at Turning Point USA. We'll give you all the videos and details. We'll be right back. okay the mics are too large move them and turn them into lob mics i mean they were incredible and then one guy walked in and gave us a really expensive switcher and said you guys need this and walked up okay it's amazing they helped us build a studio they did two million dollar uh funding

campaign for us and so they really are us we do this show together to the point where some of our hosts are even former uh listeners so when we say that the audience is is part of TYT, we really mean it. I think what the audience also appreciates is if they're, especially if they're members, they really get an inside look into who we are, our personal lives, what drives and motivates us. It goes beyond just storytelling.

I think that what we do is allow our viewers and our listeners into our daily lives and we give them kind of like this inside look into everything that we're passionate about, and why it is that we're doing what we're doing, right? Like the motivation behind what we're doing I think is important for our audience to know. And we're not shy about sharing that with them. And it's different from what people typically see in legacy media outlets where everything is kind of dry and robotic and there's really no personality or authenticity that comes

along with it. Oftentimes when we're doing the show, I don't really think of it as me telling them stories. I think of it as us having a mutual respect and conversation. conversation with one another. And as I said earlier, I mean, not only do I feel that through the work I do, I'm informing our audience, but they inform me oftentimes as well. You know, they'll, they'll pitch stories to us. They'll tell us, you know, a certain perspective or angle to a story that we might have missed. And I love it. You're about to watch some behind the scenes footage of the Young Turks.

Now these are partial videos. If you want to get all of them, you become a member. Go to t.com slash join, and you'll get all the behind the scenes of me, Anna, John, JR, a little bit reality show like t-y-t.com slash join, and enjoy this. You know what you're seeing behind me, Jersey? Hold. Watch me flip this camera. However I flip it. Do I flip it like this? No, I just took a picture. I'm bitzing right now. What? Behind the scenes. Oh, okay. Her members? I don't have my face on. She doesn't have her face on, folks. Oh, that's J. That's right there. Can't take five minutes off, can you? No, I can't. Johnny Pye. I said it was live stream, but I was lying. It's not a lie stream. It just remembers. Bitsy, this is my cat. You know what his name is? Kiki cat. Animals are innocent. The troll room and the insanity is obviously there. Right now, as you can see, I'm directing or tech directing. I'm so happy to be here. This is what, like, a Labor Day beard looks like for Jack. Man, you're a young church viewer if you recognize me like this.

Oh, thank you. You are the one person in my life that I would love to me. What's going on, guys? This is a Bitsy. or BTS or behind the scenes with Hassam Piker, aka Woke Bay. Oh, hi, I didn't see you there. I have finished my show, The Damage Report, and now I get into a really awkward time of the day. When I'm sitting, the control room is right there, so I can see Bart. This is in the Pittsburgh office, by the way.

I'll refer to often as the boiler room. You see how it's ripped? Is it super unprofessional to wear that at a business meeting? Or am I, like, cool, rebel? I just finished doing the power panel, and I'm fired up. What are you doing for Tijuana? Not a whole lot. If you're frantically tweeting at us that something's broken, thank you because I'm fixing it.

And thank you for being a TYT member. Super last thing, because there's always got to be a super last thing. Oh, that was disastrous. This has been behind the scenes, behind the scenes. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. Merry Christmas. All right, back on the Young Turks, Jank Yulgar and Jordan Yule with you guys. Also, Dawn Whitehead. Thank you for gifting five Young Turks memberships.

All right. Now, if you thought. Epstein was the mother load of news today. Well, it is, but we've got a second doozy. Tucker Carlson versus Ben Shapiro. What do you got there, Jordan? Take a look at this. If Candice Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk, if Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk, casting aspersions at TPUSA, then we as people with a microphone, have a moral obligation to call that out by name.

Yeah, so never listen to Canada zones or Tucker Carlson. It's, of course, a way of trying to cancel them. Anyone who talks to them, especially about Israel, especially about Israel, should be canceled forever and ever and ever. So I think this is going to backfire spectacularly. And I think that the Israel first crowd has completely lost it. And we're going to show you clips of Tucker Carlson kicking his ass in my opinion. But Jordan and I also have slightly different takes on this. First let Jordan give you the facts and then

we'll discuss. So Ben Shapiro kicked off turning points America First Fest, or sorry, America Fest last night by going scorched earth on as you saw, Candace Owens and as Jenk mentioned, Tucker Carlson. Owens just met with Charlie Kirk's widow, Erica Kirk, this week to privately discuss her claims about Charlie's death. And we've got more, including from Ben and Tucker, like you mentioned. But on this point, him calling out Candace Owens. We saw that conversation, Jank, this week, between Candace and Erica. How do you feel about Ben opening up this festival, this convention, by singling out Candice Owens specifically?

So the Candace Owens, look, I saw a video of hers recently that was totally unhinged, right? So I get the concerns about her for sure. But if it was just, hey, there's this unhinged person and she has some theories that might be true and some that are outlandish and totally false and et cetera. Okay. But I'm supposed to believe that it's a coincidence that Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin are attacking everyone who criticizes Israel on the right and putting them in the same bucket. No, it's not a coincidence. They're obsessed with Israel. That's all they ever care about.

And that's what 100% of this fight is about. Well, from there, Shapiro turned his attention to people who turn a blind eye to Candice Owens because they're friends and called them cowards. Take a look at this. To take again, the Candace Owen situation as an example, friendship with public figures who say or do evil things is not an excuse for silence on the matter. So no, Tucker Carlson, it is not an excuse to go silent on Candace's targeting of TPUSA. And the people who refuse to condemn Candice's truly vicious attacks, and some of them are speaking here, are guilty of cowardice. Yes, cowardice. Then he zeroed in on Tucker specifically for some of his podcast guests.

If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Flentes, you know the Nick Fentz who said that the vice president of the United States is a, quote, fat gay race trader married to a dude. The person who said that Charlie Kirk was a, quote, idiot. The person who said, and pardon my language here, it's his quote, that he, quote, took Turning Point USA and it, and that's why it's filled with Gryper's. If you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it. He also brought up pseudo-historian Daryl Cooper, who while on Tucker's show, tried distorting the facts around the Nazi's actions in World War II and called

Winston Churchill, the chief villain of the war. Tucker introduced him on that episode as, quote, the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. But some people will defend hosting guests like that under the guise of they're just asking questions. Hosts are indeed responsible for the guests they choose and the questions they ask those guests. Emotive accusations, conspiracy theories, and just casting questions, that's lazy and stupid and misleading. Just asking questions is something my five-year-old does.

And it's really cute when it comes from my five-year-old. But when grown men and women spend their days just asking questions without, you know, seeking answers, they are lying to you. Shortly after that, Tucker Carlson took the stage. After initially joking that he missed the beginning of the program, he responded. But I really thought that the impulse to de-platform people, or even to use the word platform as a verb, which it's not, de-platform and denounce, why haven't you denounced somebody else, the whole like Red Guard Cultural Revolution thing that we so hated and feared on the left that we did everything we could to usher in a new time where you could have an actual debate.

And he explained his approach more, which he took from Charlie Kirk. People should be able to debate and that if you have something valid to say, if you you're telling the truth, you ought to be able to explain it calmly and in detail to people who don't agree with you, and that you shouldn't immediately resort to shut up racist. Now, Jank, I think you and I might have different views here. What are your thoughts on this very public fight between these two? Yeah, I'm definitely on Tucker Carlson's side on this issue. And Ben Shapiro wants us to show courage and to not just ask questions, but make statements. Oh, I'll be your Huckleberry.

The problem is the Israelis. So there, I said it. Are you happy now? And I'll approve it to you and we'll have this discussion. First of all, the Israelis are the ones that demand that people, different countries throughout the world, Western nations and America, past laws prohibiting speech. So don't let anyone discuss this. don't let anyone discuss that. Don't let him say this. They made up this nonsense definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticizing Israel. What is that? That's a way of making criticism

of Israel illegal. That's what thugs do. That's what authoritarian rule looks like. So I'm super clear. So, okay, now let's turn to some of the people that he's mentioning. Candace Owens, look, some of the videos she points out and some of the things she says about Charlie Kirk's killing is true and is said by others, okay? So just the fact that Candace Owens said it doesn't make it invalid in and of itself and it's over. Since she said it, you're no one else is allowed to say it. No, that's not irrational and is not true. Now, can I at the same time say, yeah, other things that Candace Owen says to me sound crazy, okay? And, but do I have to go and denounce her?

Do we all have to do like these rituals and should we bring, you know, some sort of witch paraphernalia so we can get the right, you know, fire going for these witch hunts? So for Tucker Carlson, there's plenty of things he says that I don't agree with, right? But is he right about Israel? Absolutely. Is he right about freedom of speech? Absolutely. And then what does Ben Shapiro do? Everyone must denounce all enemies of Israel.

Okay, yeah, a couple of them say crazy stuff. That gets you to Fuentes. So, oh, no, nobody talked to Fuentes. Why? So Pierce Morgan talked to him, and Pierce Morgan did a very aggressive interview, and he got him on the record on a couple of important things. I actually, I mean, I like Pierce a lot. I don't know if I'm among the few, but I do.

I have a relationship with him, and I think he does. an interesting show that winds up getting us a lot of information and points of view we wouldn't have gotten before. But I would have been actually a little bit more aggressive with Fuentes. I don't know about aggressive in tone more in terms of the type of questioning that happened. But so what? It wasn't my show? Who cares if he talks to Fuentes? I'm not going to ban that. That's insane, right? And then, okay, so Tucker talks to some World War II expert that I don't agree with at all. I took a class on international war crimes back when I was going to law school and I was so lucky I had one of the Nuremberg

prosecutors as my professor. He was in his 90s, okay? So I got to see some of the evidence about the war crimes in World War II and the Holocaust myself. And so I don't agree with those historians. Am I going to denounce Tucker for talking to them? No, I'm not going to. And And so who cares if he talks to them? Who cares if they're wrong? This whole idea of shutting down speech is abhorrent to me, to Americans. It is the exact opposite of who we are. So hell knows my answer.

I don't, let's go, there's two things here. So let's start with the historian. It's not that he just talked to him, he agreed with him and called him honest. I don't think you would agree that someone saying that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II is being honest. I mean, you just talked about your own educational experience, and I think we can all recognize that what happened. What's that? I don't agree, Jordan. So I don't agree with him.

I'm on your side on the content and the substance. Doesn't mean he's not honest. Maybe he does honestly think that Churchill was a part of it. I think that's, I don't know, I think that's wild. I don't think that's true at all. There's another side to that. So what if he thinks that? Downplaying the actions of the Nazis?

That's a big- Well, now you're saying that that's downplaying the actions of the Nazis, and maybe it is. No, in addition, in addition to that, I don't have the exact example. This is an hour-long conversation. This was a widely criticized interview, not just by the right. Do you want to ban him? They'd like, should we just ban them? That's not what I'm saying.

So tell me what you're saying then. You're jumping to conclusion. I think that's the framing that you want, but that's not. even what Ben Shapiro was saying. He's saying, if you're going to have these people on, own it. And Tucker isn't doing that. Tucker will say, we're just having, what about having a conversation? If you sit there and let people just say nonsense, open like Nazi apology, that is on you. You're not just having a conversation. You're letting them, you're letting them spread hate to whoever your audience size is. And I think for Tucker, he wants to share an audience.

with people like Fuentes. That's his goal. That's why he didn't push back, and Pierce Morgan did. Pierce Morgan doesn't care if Nick Fuentes' fans watch his show. That's why he was willing to play back clips of Nick Fuentes saying openly anti-Semitic, openly racist, openly sexist stuff. He didn't care. Tucker does because he wants part of that audience.

For him, it's about views, clicks, and profit. So for him to throw his hands, it's just a debate. Where's the debate, brother? You're not pushing back. You're just letting him say whatever he wants and nodding. That's not a debate. So what do you want him to do, Jordan? You want him to just do the show you want and not the show he wants.

That is how you conduct an interview. You don't just, okay, what? You criticize mainstream media constantly for letting establishment Democrats go on air, say absolute BS about health. care, never pushed back, but suddenly, Tucker, he's, oh, what is he supposed to do? Ask questions. Yeah. A universal standard. Jordan, so you didn't like the way he conducted the interview. So what? It wasn't an interview. He just nodded and agreed.

So what. So what? When the mainstream media turns a blind eye to Democrats taking corporate donations. So what? So what are they supposed to do, Jank? You don't like the way they're conducting the interview. No. When the New York Times writes a good investigative story, which happens very rarely, but we cover it and we give them credit where credit is due. And then when they cover stories, they cover up for Epstein as they just did, they cover up for Israel as they do almost every time, then we lambast them and we criticize them over. Okay, so you, so on Tucker, I don't agree with him on this World War II nonsense, okay? And I don't agree with him on a number of things, including what he said about Somali immigrants recently.

And I agree with what he's saying about free speech and Israel. So what? Okay, so we just did it. So what else do I need to do? Do I need to slap him? Do I need to ritualistically denounce him? What do I need to do? And Jordan, you missed that every single one of these targets are people who criticized Israel. And we're all supposed to reach. Hold on the left. There were Jews on the left who criticized Tucker for the same thing. Hold on, hold on. Are we all supposed to ritualistically target and destroy all opponents of Israel because we found something else they said that was wrong. Okay, perfect opportunity.

Let's go destroy everyone who doesn't agree with Israel. My answer is hell no, ethno, no way. And it's not a coincidence. And it doesn't have to do with anti-Semitism. It has to do with destroying the opponents of Israel. and you're being super dense if you don't see that. Tell me you don't see that. Tell me that that's not the connective tissue.

There are plenty of people on the left who also criticize them for the same things. Are they also doing it at the behest of Israel? Criticizing Tucker Carlson, et cetera? No, they're playing into it like suckers. Like, yeah, Jewish lefties, if not now, people like that, those are the people who are criticizing, they're, they're suckers for criticizing Tucker for having, no, not for criticizing him. I just criticize them. No, I just criticized them. Do you don't, you could criticize any particular issue, any disagreement you have. That's called

freedom, no problem. But this whole ritualistic denouncement and no one should go on their shows, no one should ever talk to them. And don't tell me, that's not what Ben Shapiro is asking for. He's definitively asking for that. And he's asked for this entire time. Megan Kelly, you're going to get canceled. If you don't, you better never talk to Kansas. You better never talk to Tucker Carlson. Well, I'm not going to respond to, I'm not going to give in to those thugs. Then I'm not going to let him cancel everyone who criticizes Israel.

And if you're helping them do that, I'm sorry. Yeah, you're a sucker for Israeli propaganda. The pro-Palestinian left who also separately criticizes these right-wing figures for after years of bigotry, years of Islamophobia, suddenly seeing a window for gathering or garnering a new audience rooted in anti-Semitism. That's just, yes, we got to just turn a blind eye to it because they happen to, on the surface level, agree with us. Oh, look, there's no critics of Israel left. Oh, what a coincidence, especially on the right wing. There's plenty of critics. They don't care about the left way. There's plenty of critics of Israel

on the left. Yeah, but how much of an effect of we had? What is Tucker done? Are you insane? What is he accomplished other than talk? Jordan, are you seriously not noticing the massive effect that Tucker Carlson has had on getting the right wing to realize that Israel is not our ally, that they've taken $300 billion off us? They want another $100 billion.

They want another $100 billion for a 20-year memorandum of understanding. They're trying to rob us of that money as we speak. Tucker Carlson is the most effective opponent of that robbery. I will under no circumstances cancel that brother who is doing amazing work on that issue. And then I will have no compunctions about criticizing him on other issues that I disagree with him on. Not complicated. Whereas apparently you're falling back to that's it. Elegitimate shut down the most effective fighter against Israeli oppression in this country.

from the right. The right wing matters. If you only have the left wing, we'll never be able to defeat the Israel first crowd. You have to have the left wing and the right wing working together on the right project. Now, when Canis-Oas and Nick Fuentes talk about the Jews, it drives me crazy. It's so wrong, it's factually incorrect, it's immoral, it doesn't make sense. We should only be talking about Israel. Now you say Tucker does that imperfectly. Fine, he does it imperfectly. No, I'm not going to denounce or cancel or do any of those things. And by the way, Jordan, you have the luxury and everybody else has the luxury of being able to say, oh, okay, I'll, you know, oh, he says something offensive about Jews or this or that. Okay, that's it.

Well, he's also said good things about Muslims, which no one does, no one. And I'm supposed to cancel one of our few allies because they slightly offended Israeli interests. No, no, I'm not doing it. The minute that anyone in mainstream media says anything that's as positive about Muslims as Tucker Carlson has, then I'll listen to them. But those are giant bigots that hate Muslims, that drive hatred towards us on behalf of Israel. And I'm not going to play their game and go, yes, sir, absolutely, sir. Of course, sir, go back to crushing my people, sir.

No, I'm not going to do it. No, my people are not inferior, and we don't have to give away our rights and our speech and our allies to appease people who love Israel. No deal. Well, let's get into, after this break, we'll get into his comments on Muslims. You're messing with my Zen thing, man. All right. So lots of strong thoughts from you guys as well as us. So let me get to that. YouTube comments. These are all YouTube members. Sharon's salmon's rights and I agree with Jordan totally libertine one says Jordan is

completely wrong shake my head Kevin Shea says I never would have thought I would see someone more passionate than Jenk Christina Lisa Brown says Jordan is seeing like the plots and plans and the real purpose behind it but Jenk is writing that it's freedom of speech and Tucker has the right to have whoever he wants on to listen to them Tom Fremaz says Owens is striking nerves. She must be saying things they want hidden. Box says, I used to think only the left are aided zone, but I guess not. No, no, Box, the minute you oppose Israel 1%, you're targeted for destruction.

So it doesn't matter if you're on the left, the right, or the middle. The pro-Israel crowd will try to destroy you in every way in this country through business interests through firings. I mean, the other day, resident speech about how we're going to destroy all of Israel's critics. We're going to ruin their lives forever. We're going to try to make sure they don't even get married. They never have another job again. There's a bunch of these thugs that are in power in this country in media and in politics. And their job is to destroy Tucker Carlson, me, Anna, everyone who opposes their beloved, beloved Israel. And I'm absolutely sick of it. I'm vomiting it. So they could...

They can come for me, you guys, they already come for me. It doesn't matter. And since I'm not, you know, part of a superior race, I guess, we get no protection, none, zero. People are constantly talking about murder the Muslims. The Muslims are the worst. The Muslims are dirty. The Muslims are terrorists, etc. How much, how many people in mainstream media help us? None. Zero. In fact, they're guilty. They're the ones who sons of bitches who've been spending hatred towards Muslims my whole life. Oh, beloved, Israel has to attack their Muslim neighbors and kill them. So let's do propaganda about how Muslims are terrorists. No, mainstream media is a thousand times worse than Tucker Crossing when it comes to Muslims, but I know we don't count. We're inferior. We don't count. So yeah, excuse me if I say I count.

Birdland baby. Guys, guys, you're both pretty. Thank you for trying to bring levity to it. That's on Twitch. Referring to the earlier Epstein story, Green New Dealer Dragon says, A Pido and Israeli and Accontra walk into a bar. But in every one of those stories, Jeffrey Epstein's there. Fat forces, it's still 12 days before New Year's, but we're already seeing some fireworks.

This is at TYT.com. Now, Asimov's prophet says, Jordan Jenk is disagreeing with Tucker, but he's just saying you shouldn't cancel him for it. It's not a complicated idea, but apparently people get really bad when I say that. Would you just disagree? So what? Okay. Pseudo Dragon says, anybody else remember when TY. he used to criticize Tucker and recognize how dangerous he is, or am I dating myself?

Brother, so on some things he has not changed at all, on other things, he is diametrically opposed to the earlier Tucker Carlson position. So do you want me to move my position to his earlier position just to oppose him? That doesn't make any sense. When he's moved to anti-war and he's moved to stop the Israeli robbery, he stopped Israeli genocide. I'm supposed to disagree? No, I don't disagree. Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast. All right, back on TYJJ and Jordan with you guys.

Also, M.M. Huck, MD. Thanks for Jordan. We appreciate it. They hit the join button below. Guys, do you see any other show that has honest debates like this? I mean, like, we're, we're not playing, right? We exchange ideas, and I run this company, and I'm going to make sure that happens for the rest of the time. I'm never going to, like, oh, no, you have naughty ideas.

No, no, no, so I love you for joining. If this is a community you care about, you want to find out the different. respect is, you want people to be honest with you, then join us. TYT.com slash join. Jordan. And I think we're probably going to disagree on this one too, but then maybe on our last story, we'll agree, Jank. Take a look at this. Well, what you're watching now? Attacking people on the, attacking millions of Americans because

they're Muslims? It's disgusting. And I'm a Christian. I'm not a Muslim. I'm never going to, I know there's a lot of effort to claim I'm a secret jihadi. I'm not. You should not attack people on those grounds. And you're seeing it from republic. What the hell are you doing? What you're doing is trying to divide the country. And I've lived through 50 years of this crap. All these fake race wars that they're always promoting. Oh, go hate each other while we loot the treasury. That's exactly what's going on. And most people are totally sick of that. During his appearance at Turning Points America Fest, Tucker Carlson slammed his fellow Republicans

for their attacks on Muslim Americans. But is his outrage, genuine we may disagree on this one as well jank but before i give folks more what's your initial take here yeah i love that clip uh better than anyone in mainstream media ever on this issue ever i've never seen a cable news host i've never seen a new york times reporter washington post reporter or anyone from those traditional media outlets that give that that strong in defense of Muslims in America. And of course, the pro-Israel crowd is going to say, no, you have to denounce him.

No, I don't denounce him. I celebrate what he just said there. And guys, if you haven't noticed, Tucker Carlson has changed on some things. He keeps emphasizing that we're all individuals and no one should ever be judged based on a group. If you say, okay, I conveniently believe him when he says something I don't like, but when he says things that are at the core, What we all believe on the left, what all Americans believe, boo, I don't believe them.

No, no, it's very convenient. The Israelis want to destroy Tucker Carlson. I'm 100% against them. And on this, thank God Tucker Carlson is talking about Muslims as if they're human beings. And I'll listen to other people when they start doing likewise. Well, defense of Muslims is something Tucker has done before, including in his recent interview with Pierce Morgan. I do think again that the over amplification of the Islam problem, as people put it, or the Muslim problem has been massively overstated. Well, that's an op, obviously.

Yeah. Hate the Muslims. No, I know where that's coming from, obviously. I don't like it. I hate it. In my high street alone, in West London, most of the businesses would have Muslim employees there. But also, how is hate the Muslims better than hate the Christians or hate the Jews? It's the old as not. It's the same.

And bringing it back to the turning point conference, Tucker didn't just call out Islamophobia. He also condemned Christians for using the religion to defend the killing of innocent people, including Palestinians in Gaza. It could also be very on guard against people who try to leverage the word of God, the words of Jesus, for political ends. God is not on any country's side, and if someone is telling you otherwise, that is just not true. And I would also call your attention to the very obvious prohibitions in the New Testament against killing the innocent. We are not as Christians allowed to kill the innocent, period. You are seeing now a very intense effort to convince you otherwise. Oh, it's fine.

They deserved it. Really, did their children deserve it? If a man commits a crime, do we kill his kids? I don't care if it's in Minneapolis or Gaza City. No, we don't. He's been outspoken in his opposition to the genocide in Gaza and America's support of it. But despite his passionate plea to his fellow conservatives to stop attacking Muslims, is it really fair to say he himself is not Islamophobic or at the very least xenophobic?

He recently, two days ago, made a video about Somali immigration. into the states that he titled, Tucker Carlson on the Somali invasion and the self-loathing ideology destroying America. The description of that video reads, Why would you decide to import primitive Somali tribes and encourage them not to assimilate? The only possible explanation is that you're trying to destroy the country. In the video, he describes Somalis as clannish and poor. He also posted a separate clip from that interview titled Tucker, She Merritt. her brother about this baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about Ilhan Omar that no one has ever been able to provide any evidence justifying.

Tucker didn't specifically talk about Islam in that video about Somalis, but that's a country with a 99% Muslim population. So the subtext is there. But in the past, Tucker has actually defended Trump's Muslim ban, which Carlson argued didn't actually target Muslims. In 2017, he argued that the attitudes of faithful Muslims are not Western at all and include a tolerance of violence that you don't find among Presbyterians or Jews. Similar to his use of primitive to describe Somalis in his episode, he once said in a radio interview that people from Iraq are semi-literate primitive monkeys. Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of semi-literate primitive monkeys. But I just have zero sympathy for them or their culture, a culture where people just don't use toilet paper or forks.

And the way they treat women, you know, I agree with you. Their culture is, but you're in their homeland, and you're over there as an American who they hate, and they want nothing more than the Americans off of their soil. So they're not going to play games. I mean, they can just shut the fuck up and obey, is my view. How could you salvage Iraq at this point? I don't, you know, it's beyond our control.

I mean, if somehow the Iraqis decided to behave like human beings, or something. He'd need to say, look, I'm a bigot. Okay, I'm a bigot. I don't like Islamic extremists. Like, if you are really heavily into Islam, I really do. I'm sorry, I just don't, I don't care for you that much. And I don't care what that sounds like. You can call me a racist. You can come what the you want. And he's claimed that immigration is making America poorer, dirtier, and more divided. And on an episode of a show from August 18th, he claimed that there is a movement around the world to kill whites through mass migration. Jank.

Yeah. So breaks down a couple of different categories. So first of all, I don't agree with him on that Somali talk. So very much against it. To talk against immigrants, very much against it. It doesn't mean I have to cancel him. I'm just against it. There, I solved it.

Number two, don't tell me about like, I mean, look, I get it. You're pointing out your point of view that there's, you think that there's subtext against Muslims there. Maybe, on the other hand, there is overtext, clear text of him saying don't hate Muslims to his millions of followers repeatedly. So I'm not as worried about the subtext as the brother who's telling people in America for the first time, especially from the right, don't hate Muslims, they're individuals. So okay, so we go, then another category is older clips.

So the calling the Iraqis monkeys, etc. We've covered that on the show before. Terrible. And so I'm against it. But it appears that he has changed on that. You could say, okay, I hate him so I don't believe him and I'll never believe him. And I'll always hold him accountable for justice comments in 2008, but I will not give him credit for the excellent comments he's making today. Well, that doesn't make any sense, to me at least. So like if Someone says before I hate Muslims, and remember I'm atheist, but I grew up Muslim, my family's Muslim. So if somebody says before I don't like Muslims, well, I'm okay, that's bad. And then they say, oh, but now I get that I was wrong and we should treat Muslims as equals.

Well, great. Isn't that great? Am I still supposed to yell at him? Yeah, but you once didn't think that. So I hate you forever, even though you've come to Monday. side on this particular issue. No, I'm not going to do that. Jordan, those set of clips that you played in the beginning from today and not from decades ago are some of the best defense of Muslims and Palestinians I've ever seen from a national media figure. And so it's easy. It's easy for us to do it on the left, but it almost never comes from the right. And it almost

never comes from the middle, the mainstream, who have been virulently anti-Muslim. And a couple more things here that I just want to point out real quick. One, he went and said, killing of the innocence in Gaza is morally repugnant. And I've been waiting for someone in the right wing to care about Palestinians my whole life. And you want me to reject that guy? You must be out of your mind. And the second thing is, he mentioned how anti-Muslim propaganda in the West is, ops. What did he mean by that? The Israelis literally drive propaganda against Muslims in the West so you'll hate them and finance Israel as they destroy their Muslim neighbors. So the fact that he realizes that that propaganda operation is happening and got Pierce Morgan to agree that

it's happening, those are amazing developments. I'm not going to reject those. I'm going to welcome those with open arms. It undercuts his message when this very week, he's using the same description that he used for Iraqis in the 2000s to describe Somalis. He's calling them both primitive. He's talking about how mass migration is dividing our country. It's the same thing. So I don't see this change.

What I see is an opportunist saying something different. at a new venue. Because on his show, he's relaxed. You see his true self. You see him selecting topics like zeroing in on Somalis, saying they're dividing our country, saying they're primitive. But then at America Fest, where everyone, you know, they're doing it, that's the night they did the big remembrance of Charlie.

Oh, we go to carry on his spirit of free debate. And I'm a Christian now. I love everyone. Okay, like 72 hours ago, you're talking. You shouldn't make, oh, I'm sorry, you shouldn't make blanket statements about groups of people. 72 hours ago, you published a video making a blanket statement about groups of people. So I don't buy it. I don't think it's sincere.

He can say one thing to a different audience, but I don't think he means it. Look, I think the way he describes Somalis is, I can't, I think it's terrible. And I don't like it. And I don't want it. And I disagree with it, okay? But it's not the same thing as being against a group people. Is, you know, are there countries that are poorer than other countries? And yes, should we deride them and and smear them?

No, right? But no, that doesn't wipe away all of his, the positive things he's saying now. And I don't, look, I barely care if it's disingenuous or not. Why do I care? So here's a brother saying, please treat Muslims equally and it would be the Christian thing to do that. But because he said other bad things, in our opinion, politically, we're supposed to denounce that? What do you want me to do? I'm not going to denounce it. And Jordan, this is super important. Whenever there's the slightest infraction about whether it's a pro-Israel person or,

let's be honest, a Jewish person, okay, the whole country erupts congressional hearings, Laws are passed. They're canceled. Okay, Puka rubbed his hands together, having no idea, this is a receiver for the Rams in the NFL, having no idea what that's about. And instantly, there was congressional representatives calling for the Rams to cut him instantly. Okay, so whenever there's an infraction against one particular people, the country all has to stand up or When there's a million people saying the worst things in the world about Muslims, no one gives a goddamn. And here comes an ally from the right and people want me to reject them. Hell no, no. So the minute I see Jake Tapper or Anderson Frickin Cooper or Wolf Blitzer

or anyone in mainstream media, give a defense of Muslims like Tucker Carlson did, I'll begin to their opinion. But as long as they're driving Israeli propaganda that you should all hate Muslims and Muslims are terrorists and Israelis are poor little innocent victims and not telling people that it's giant Israeli propaganda to try to get the whole world to hate Muslims. Then, okay, then we'll have a conversation. Until then, they are morally inferior to Tucker Carlson. How do you like them, apples? We got to go to break. We could spend another hour on this, but After the break, we'll talk about the families who apparently are so devastated their kids voted for Zoron. Tucker Carlson, a terrible friend.

All right, I'm going to try to read as many of these as I can. It's about the debates that we're having. And I'm reading them blind. So wish me luck. Don Whitehead writes in on Super Chat. I appreciate the debate between you to Jordan. You bring your own point of view to the show. I appreciate that. I love TYT. You guys offer food for thought on important issues. Stephanie, Kyle, thank you for the donation. Christina, Lisa Brown says, respect for the passion, honest and genuine combo, Jordan and Jang. Merry Christmas, happy holidays fam. Love being with TYT family to fight truth to power. Catch the June bug says, I never thought I'd be in agreement with Tucker, but here I am.

We need voices on the right. We need all the voice we can get while we still have voices. We need a coalition. The awakening is here. Couldn't agree more. Thank you to all of you guys. Boggs says it's good to have these conversations. I couldn't agree more. Like, okay, so like Jordan and I just vehemently disagreed and then the world blow up. Do we have to denounce each other? Like if you're on either side of the debate, you have to denounce the whole show because the other side of the debate was shown. Okay.

But none of that would matter because Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin would cancel the whole show because we once made a criticism of Israel. So of course, all opponents must be destroyed. Okay, I would never help those guys in a million years. They want my help in destroying Tucker Carlson. Yeah, long walk off a short dock. 00083 says, get well soon. I know exactly what you're going through.

I'm sick and I'm stuck at work. I hear you, brother. Speedglass 484.1 says, happy holidays. Remember Jesus? We can use a guy like that. We could use a guy like that around now. Freestyle 888 says on YouTube member section. If Jordan kept his cat on his lap throughout the debate, I'd agree with him more.

The forsaken one says, love you both. Love the debates. You're right in my opinion. Jankan's strategy, Jordan on morality. I get it. Shan Shan Juan says, I love Muslims. I never understood it. An Iraqi German doctor delivered my daughter. She was the result of my late husband returning from Iraq and made my late husband look within. All you have to do is have some normal human reaction, interaction with a Muslim. And you'll know, oh wow, it turns out they're human.

But our media, the sick, disgusting haters of Muslims, they're all guilty. They've kept that fact from you. No, hate the Muslims. They're all terrorists and dark and savages. I loathe mainstream media. They've spread hatred towards my people for the last 40, 50 years. Oh, but it helped Israel. Okay.

Snorrin says, I like Jordan, but I agree with Jenk. Lady A.F. says, if Tucker doesn't speak with these people respectfully while interjecting some sense here and there, then hate will just fester unchecked in the internet underbelly. Luda Tickle says it's good to have disagreement and not one mouthpiece. And on t-y-t.com, Cabbage says, ultimately, we all have to call them as we see them. Santos-Wante says, will Jordan name the vein that pops out of the side of his head after Jank? Good question. Hey, I lives in America.

So I have this random question I've never asked before. Has Tucker Carlson ever condemned his views on the Great Replacement Theory? That's a good question. I don't know. But you know, if you notice, he's now saying that we should not judge people based on what they're from. If you watch at length, he's almost making an argument for diversity, which is the opposite of what he used to say on Fox News, which I'm actually a little bit shocked by. Those are positive developments. I like those. Tucker Carlson, a terrible friend. All right, back on TYT, Jank, Jordan, and Bear and Sebastian, they just joined. We appreciate you so much, guys.

Either hit the join button below or t.wit.com slash join. Annual membership gets you a couple of months off, so that's the best way if you can at tyt.com slash join. All right, Jordan. Take a look at this. What does it feel like to be a Jewish New Yorker who realizes their own kid voted for Zoran Mamdani, one mom told me she worries her kid was quote, brainwashed. Another was so concerned about her daughter voting for Zoron that when she flew to see her at Northwestern University, she took along her absentee ballot so she could supervise the vote.

While Zoran Mamdani tries to bring New Yorkers together, he may be tearing some families apart. According to a new article from the free presses, Olivia Riengold, the Jewish parents who raised, mom-dani voters. It's like they're talking about these kids, like they found a crack pipe in their backpack. But to preface, Reingold is the same free press journalist we talked about last month, who denied there was a famine in Gaza with the piece titled, they became symbols for Gaza and starvation, but all 12 suffer from other health problems. But in this article, Reingold focuses on the devastation some Jewish New Yorkers are feeling because they're anti- Zionist children voted for Zoran Mamdani. Ryan Gold writes, parents are still shocked, confused, and upset by their children's radical politics. They wondered if they should have parented differently. Did their children get enough Jewish education? Were they brainwashed by their elite private schools?

Where did they go wrong? One parent who said his daughter voted for Mamdani because she refused to vote for Andrew Cuomo due to his alleged sexual whole. harassment said, maybe I failed in the sense that the kids didn't go to Israel enough. It would have been better if they went more, just to see the lies they're being told. But are their children's politics actually radical? No. Most just really liked his policies. Lisa Fields-Lewis, who was the mother of two college-age children, described her freak out after her children expressed interest in Mom Dani's free bus program and tackling the city's income gap,

Both extreme. Lewis was raised by an Israeli mother. Her father survived Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She said the rise of Mamdani awakened a generational trauma in her. Now she can't shake the feeling that history is repeating itself. And kids don't seem to realize just how dangerous Momdani's views are, Lewis said. They definitely love the socialism. They feel that life is inequitable and they probably think that Israel is doing really bad things.

I feel sad. I feel envious of my friends whose kids are proud Zionists or at least have the capacity for critical thinking. Another woman named Gullet Pollack told Rheingold, she staged interventions for her 28-year-old son because he liked Mom Dani's ideas of making New York City affordable. If you're a real Zionist, that's not a Zionist thing to do. She remembers telling her son at the kitchen table. It's conflicting. If your life costs a little less, that's not as big of a deal as you. Jews feeling uncomfortable?

Jank, I feel like I'm just in another world reading some of these quotes. These are kids talking about economic policy and they're being treated like they're ushering in Holocaust too. Yeah, look, first of all, I've never seen a piece like this. It's amazing where parents are beating themselves up for raising kids that are more moral than them. Like, oh, our kids might care about a genocide. Oh, God, I wish we hadn't taught him that.

And you saw former Obama staffers literally talk about maybe we overtought the Holocaust. You know, the Nazis were strong, and now the Israelis are strong, and they're making the wrong connection. And the Palestinians are weak and we're slaughtering them. And the Jews were weak, and they got slaughtered. That was the wrong connection. No, that was the right connection. I mean, it's ironic because they actually did teach them well. There's a lot of Jewish culture that is beautiful and terrific.

Like question the rabbi, question authority figures, help the underdog, the underprivileged, etc. Those are beautiful Jewish values that were taught to so many people. And now to see some of the older generation, and not all of the older generation, there's tons of older Jews who are very much part of the peace movement and are, you should never make blanket statements about anybody. And look, they're complaining that young Jewish Americans are too moral and don't discriminate enough, right? So that means young Jewish Americans are doing a great job, right? They're wonderful.

So it isn't about any particular faith. But in this case, these people that are basically telling on themselves, so the group I'm talking about are the people that are in this piece, they're saying, I mean, we have this dirty Muslim, Mamdani, and I can't believe I raise someone moral enough to not care. You should hate Mamdani. He's Muslim. And if you were a good person, you would hate Muslims. No, they wouldn't. No, you accidentally taught him the right thing in the beginning.

It's disgusting that you're regretting it now. And they said, well, I have another excuse. He's criticized Israel. I'm uncomfortable. So you're not uncomfortable because your beloved Israel slaughtered 70,000 people and 20,000 children. That doesn't make you uncomfortable. But someone's saying that, I am uncomfortable. Kill more of their kids and my kids. I'm so embarrassed. You're not in favor of the slaughter that our beloved Israel is doing. You people are sick, sick.

I'm so glad that your kids are so much more moral than you. I'm so glad that they care about all of America and all of New York and all of the issues and affordability. and they don't discriminate against Muslims like you sick parents do. Again, just the people in this piece. And if you're in that older Jewish community and you hate that your kids are more moral than you, and just stop talking down to them too. They don't know the facts.

If they knew the facts, they would know that when we do a genocide, it's awesome. Never again only applies to us, us, us. And if we get to do it again and again and again to the Palestinians, we didn't teach them right. We should have taught them. So you're supposed to occupy the Muslims for 58 years. You're supposed to brutalize them. You're supposed to never give them their freedom. You're supposed to strip all dignity and human worth from them.

You're supposed to do propaganda against them and get the whole country to hate them. And then when we attack them and we take their land, that way we look like the victims. Oh, I'm uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable that our genocide was exposed by some people in the media. Oh, boo-hoo, I'm uncomfortable that my kids are good, wonderful, moral Americans. Well, I guess that's a sad day for you. Okay, we are out of time. I could say more.

I don't doubt that. Yeah. They're so stupid, too. They're so freaking biased. They're like the most biased people in the world. And their kids are seeing things clearly. They're like, how dare you not be biased? Us above everyone.

Do you not see yourself, you idiots? You sound just like the Germans. And that's why one of them said, maybe we criticize the Germans too much. That is unbelievable. It's record-breaking irony, record-breaking. Young Jews, I love you. Way to be moral. Way to be Americans.

Way to care about it. all of us. All right. Again, there's wonderful older Joe's Bancoe and Robert. I can list you thousands. Okay. All right. Anyways, when we come back, dramatic announcement from Rebellion Pack. Whoa. And we're going to talk to someone who's an expert on cults. I'll ask her about the Israeli cult. Anyways, all right. Jordan, you're awesome. Everybody stay here. We'll be right back. Thank you. So, you know, I'm going to be able to be.

We're going to be able to be. Oh, and so much. Thank you. So, you know, I'm going to be able to be. You know, I'm going to be able to be. You know,

I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I'm not a lot of I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be.

You know, So, Bhopal, Bha, Bhop, B'am, Bhop, POMAYOR.

FOMAYOR. FOMAYOR. FOMAYOR, BELMANNELL, FI, BAS, BAT. I'm going to be.

I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. We're going to be able to be. We're going to be able to be. All right. Welcome back to TYT, the Revolution. Dramatic announcement. Rebellion Pack has added three new candidates. So now up to six overall. This time around, we're adding Hartslegre. You saw that happen live on the show.

He's running in Missouri 4. He's a young dynamic. populist out of Kansas City. Shortcott Chakabarty, former co-founder of Justice Democrats, former chief of staff to AOC, and a guy who just knocked out, Nancy Pelosi in California 11. She was worried about losing.

She stepped down, and Choycott is now running against establishment candidates, as populist left as it gets. And then Josh Turek, the leading Senate candidate in Iowa on the Democratic side, That one was one of our toughest decisions. There was another good candidate there and we showed that to you guys.

They both came along the show and we're blessed to have two good candidates in that race. But we discussed it with a lot of allies and did a lot of analysis and decided to go with Josh Turk in Iowa. So rebellion pack.com and we're gonna try to support all these candidates. Of course, they come on top of the three we already had, Representative Roe-Connor, and then Randy Bryce in Wisconsin, one, and Richard Ojetta in North Carolina. Richard Ojetta is going to join us for a town hall where you guys get to ask them questions. That's going to happen soon right here on the Un-Turks. And so these are all populist left candidates.

They all care about economic populism, serving the American people. None of them take corporate PAC money. none of them take foreign government money. So all clean, all honest. And if they win their races, it'll be spectacular. And a lot of them are in red districts. And Josh, obviously, if he wins in Iowa, he could tilt the Senate in favor of the Democrats and be the right kind of Democrat. So it's exciting to see. And we're adding more and more to our slate as we go. So that's what a populist revolt looks like. That's what a rebellion looks like. So three new candidates joining the rebellion. Okay. Now, we're going to do a different segment on cults now. It could be

pretty applicable to the cult in Congress as well. But we're bringing on what some of you know is the knitting cult lady, which is a fun title already. It's Daniela Messenac Young. She's an author and cult scholar. And yes, she actually does knit. There it is, literally, okay? And she's a TEDx speaker. She's a sex cult survivor, a US Army combat veteran, and yes, an advanced knitter.

Okay, and her upcoming book is The Coulting of America. What Makes a Cult and Why We Love Them, which is interesting. So Danielle, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Jane. No problem. So tell me, what makes a cult? Exploitation of labor. It's organized crime.

Oh, that's super interesting. I had not heard that definition before. Okay. It's a much longer and more complicated answer than that, of course, and I have a 10-part definition of cult, and that's what I go into in the book. But the thing that changed my life was when I heard someone say cults are all about labor.

And then I understood. That's so interesting because this has kind of been a theme for us a little bit. I've talked to a number of people about cults recently. And you're right that I had not connected those dots until now because like the Scientology cult survivor talked about how they kept taking the children and using them for labor and more labor and nonstop work. And, and then we had a Christian nationalist cult survivor, similar story. Obviously, there's also abuse, right? So is the point labor, free labor, is the point sexual abuse? Is the point power?

The point is power and labor. You know, I personally truly believe that cult leaders are generally sociopaths, and part of that is just the love of playing power games. And they don't necessarily have to have a logic. It's just the power game for the power game's sake. But cults always come down to labor, and money is part of how we represent labor. But the sexual abuse is part of power. The exploiting people's labor is part of power. So I get why they do it, right? If you can convince a whole bunch of people to do your work for you and make money for you and then,

you know, you abuse that power in whatever ways and you're a bad guy, I get it. But what's really hard to understand is how do they work? Like, why does it work on people? I mean, that's the second half of your book, right? Why We Love Them. How is it that they are able to get people to follow them in what from the outside looks like a crazy scenario? Why would you do all this stuff for this guy for no reason? Yeah.

So that's the mission. And it's what we call a transcendent mission, which is something that is beyond, right? Time, space. It's really, really big. Save the children is often some kind of the transcendent mission. And we see cult leaders will often get into either politics or some sort of charity work, including religious-based charity works, because those are easy things to what I call missionize, like weaponize the mission.

It allows them a convenient looking front, and nobody joins a cult because a cult leader is charismatic. They join a cult because a charismatic person weaponizes a mission and then builds a structure to coerce them. Super interesting. So how do you know if you're part of a good mission or secretly a cult mission? If you joke about being a cult, it's bad news bears, okay? I think we need to ask ourselves, like, is the mission achievable, first of all, right? Is it achievable in this lifetime? How are we defining it?

And then where's the labor and what tactics are being used to get the labor? Because so many things with missions are asking people to just constantly, constantly, constantly self-sacrifice. And that's actually the way cults break you is with the self-sacrifice. So for me, the line, it can be as good of a mission as possible. But if it's using coercive tactics to get more out of people, it's harming the individuals that are involved. That was a little tougher for me because I can see how really good missions to cure breast cancer United Way, whatever it might be, might ask you to feed the homeless, you're going to do free

labor to feed the homeless, but that really is the mission. So it's a little tough to know where to draw the line. And this is where for me I concentrate on the tactics, right? Like if you are using coercive tactics to get people to give more than they would otherwise, this gets very confusing because the military and tech and all of the things from which we get our corporate culture uses a little bit of coercive tactics. And this is part of what I'm trying to show in the book. I think often that nonprofits end up exploiting people. But another thing is that I do not buy the narrative that it started off good and then turned into a cult. I've never seen an example of this.

I've absolutely can something start off good and end up harming some individuals. Yes, but cult leaders, they learn how to do this, they practice this, and then they go for their prey. So what are some of the course of tactics? Okay, so keeping people skinny is one. It's a very interesting one we find now. Isolation is one of your biggest ones, right? And I Isolation these days does not have to be on physical communes anymore, but controlling what your people are ingesting, that can be physically, that can be mentally, psychologically, right? Just complete control. And then another tactic is self-sacrifice, getting people to separate themselves from their personal identity, which is what you spent your whole life building as you were growing up, was this individual. identity. And the cult is going to ask you to separate yourself from that and break that down

so that you're only doing what's good for the group. And that's how they eventually get into abuse and exploitation. Okay, that makes sense. So like the part where I'm like hesitating is a lot of times asking people to sacrifice for a larger good is a wonderful thing. But I see what you're saying when you say self-sacrifice, when they say, but in order to do that, you have to give up your individuality. No, you don't. Yeah, that's crazy. Exactly. And again, I have a 10-part list of what makes something a cult and self-sacrifice is only number four, right? And it is also this, the constant self-sacrifice. You know, there is a difference with sometimes having to do a lot for a cause that you care about, but then getting to go and recover. In the cult, you don't

get that in the army you don't get that you are right back on it the next day as the mission requires and so you are constantly breaking yourself in the service of the mission but you're also breaking your ability to kind of push back against something that the group is doing that is harmful to you yeah yeah so as you were describing it of course the army popped into my head right the military of any country And other things like fraternities, et cetera. So we'll get to all that in a sec. The isolation part also makes a lot of sense.

But then I've done so much self-sacrifice. I feel like that I was like, wait, am I in a cult? And then you said, they need to be skinny. I was like, yes, I'm not in a cult. Okay, so I dodged that. I have this thing, which is one of my fun contributions to the field that I call the skinny white woman. And it was literally, you know, I was watching. Allison Mack getting arrested. And I was like, why? And then Ghislaine Maxwell. And I was like,

what is it? And I was like, oh, she's whitewashing the sins of the cult leader, right? Because in sort of American white supremacy, you have the pure good white woman. And, you know, that's how they do it, Right? The cult leader, often male, especially in these larger commune cults, is usually kind of a ridiculous flub, actually. But you have these very posh, skinny, controlled white ladies, kind of like holding it up. Interesting. And also, of course, keeping you skinny just is a good way to control you. Yeah, maybe it's another part of self-sacrifice, right? And it is a visible form of self-sacrifice. And so it becomes one of those things.

And it's also something else that's important to cults. It's never enough, right? You're never skinny enough. You are always striving. You can always be more. And that is what the cult needs from you is the constant mission, the constant striving, the constant work. Yeah.

So I wanna get back to the military. potential cults, including political ones that we often talk about on the show. But before we do that, you survived a cult. Tell me about that. What cult was it and what happened? So I was born three generations into like the leadership circle of the children of God cult. The children of God cult is one of these sort of run-of-the-mill 60s cults where he takes evangelical purity, let's call it. And his unique value proposition is he switches it. And he says, we're going to have free love, which very quickly turns into what I call forced polyamory. Then he starts with religious prostitution and gets into kind of actually advocating pedophilia.

So that's one of the things Children of God is famous for also a founding member of Fleetwood Mack joined the cult early on. And most famously, Rose McGowan and Joaquin and River Phoenix were all celebrities that grew up in that cult, because our product was performance. And so I was born in the Philippines, in this cult, spent my life growing up in Asia and Latin America, dancing on the streets, dancing in videos. There's one video of six white children doing an apocalypse rap in downtown Rio. the end time rap it's called and yeah so how did they start the sex and when I'm afraid to ask how did they start the what sorry sex and when like so you they're using you to do like rap

videos in the streets etc doing all this exploitive stuff when do they turn to oh by the way this also involves sex yeah I mean and and this is one of those things where If you talk to almost any of the joiners, they will tell you, you know, no, in the beginning, it was just about Jesus and love and, you know, recruiting all these hippies who wanted to change the world and he was the prophet of God. But, you know, he was a heavily abused boy turned into man who was already being very abusive to his children and daughters-in-law, et cetera, when he started the cult. So it was always there in the background. He very quickly, discarded his wife that he started the organization with, took up with his younger secretary,

his skinny white woman, if you will, and then started pimping her out. And then that became a revelation to all of the women. And this is the 70s. By the 80s, he's on the cover of Time magazine as a sex cult. And then they really have to like flee, scatter all over the world and whitewash. And I mean, they had a very, very successful whitewash because the children of God would perform twice at the White House in the 90s. Wow. But they basically said, okay, we're going to stop doing all the outward open sex stuff. And we're going to just be the family of love. Internally, I believe, when you don't change the values of the organization, right, the abuse never stops.

So there was still plenty of that for us growing up. Yeah, how'd you wind up leaving the cult? So when I was 15, I climbed over the walls of the commune and went to go fellowship with a non-believer so that they would kick me out. So when did you realize, wait, this isn't right. Because when you're growing up in something, it's so, so hard to see objectively. So I was suffering some very, very horrendous abuse at the age of five and six and definitely had the moment of being like, if this is God, forget it. But I kind of just don't ever think I believed in any of it. I think I'm a sort of neurodivergent atheist that was

born to religious extremists. And from the age of 11, I was trying to make my plan make my plans to escape, I, you know, mostly self-taught Brazilian Portuguese so that I could go off into the woods if I could, you know, part of the reason why they kept moving us around the world was to keep us destabilized, you know, geographic abuse. And part of the problem of being third generation is all of your living family members are kind of connected to the In the end, I would get sort of lucky because my mother, who's only 15 years older than me, had been at some point married off to an older man who had some children on the outside. And one of them agreed to take me in when I was 15.

And that was when I first, you know, moved to the United States for the first time and into the whole great state of Texas cult. So that was really fun too. All right. So let's talk about how it connects to other cults. Because when you say, oh, he dumped his first wife and started having sex with his secretary, it reminds me of Joseph Smith, right, in the Mormon religion. And he comes, he says, oh, yeah, God's talking to me. And then one day he comes out and says, oh, yeah, by the way, God says that I should have sex with my maid. And everybody's like, oh, yeah, that makes sense, except his wife.

His wife's like, God didn't tell you that. And he's like, shut up. And he and then he takes the maid and then he takes a couple other people, et cetera. So and religion overall asks you for a lot of sacrifice and then tells you that your religion is the right religion and you definitely shouldn't listen to the other religions. Yeah. A form of isolation to some degree. So where do we draw the line? So here's the thing.

Cults and religions are separate. So in my definition of cult, number two, is they give you a worldview. It doesn't have to be a religion. It's a worldview. And often it's formed out of a bunch of random things. Religions, especially, you know, patriarchal religions from about 2,000 years ago, happen to be a little bit easy to use to manipulate people if you want to.

But the problem is never like the ism or the e-anity, right? It's never the ideology. You can make up, you can, you can write a sci-fi novel and make it your cult. We call that Scientology, which then, you know, then branched all of the est and a landmark and, you know, all those big, large group awareness trainings that have trained some of your corporate people. One of the things, you know, so I was an intelligence officer in the military. And the way we tracked was through tactics, techniques, and procedures.

And this is one of the things I keep saying. It's like, I just want people to see the tactics. And so this is, you know, the first book I wrote is my story uncultured about going from cult to army and how that paralleled. But then this book, I wanted to show people like, here are the tactics in like real cults that you all recognize, right? like Mormons, like children of God, like these big bad guys. And then here are the tactics, same tactics in the U.S. military, and then here are the tactics in organizations around us.

And it has only escalated severely in the three years that I have been writing the book. So Danielle, tell us a little bit about the similarities between the cult you were in and the U.S. military. Yeah, well, you definitely don't know what you signed up. up for. So for me, it was the first day of basic training. You're standing there. You're holding this 50 pound duffel bag over your head and you're getting yelled at. And I'm there. I'm 22 years old. I've just finished college. I've been out of the cult for about six years. And I just, I recognized the tactic, you know? I was like, okay, I know what they're doing. I know they're not going to hit me. I know

this is going to go for like an hour or two and it's i had this realization like oh i just joined another cult you know and so basic training is sort of your typical cult indoctrination right they take you away they change your name to private so-and-so right they isolate you completely from everything you've known if you're a man they cut off your hair you know and then they start working the brainwashing tactics on you. One of my bigger realizations as well in the similarities was that a military deployment when you go away together as a unit, like you're going to have a cultic experience. And that, to me, like, as an organizational psychologist, was like, wow, that tells me a lot

about, you know, soldier suicidal ideology. And it tells me a lot about even just the struggles to reintegrate and kind of how bonkers it is, right? To go from like a year in a cult at war and then just come home and go back to your family. Like, like nothing happened. And I mean, finally, it's it's really on the other side where like every struggle of veterans fitting back into society is the same. Like my, I'm actually writing a musical now. And my cult baby survivors and my veteran survivors have the same struggles. Yeah, it's interesting. Look, that analogy is like pretty stark because what does the military do? They break down your identity. They don't want you to be an individual. They want you to be an army of one.

And all, and then what do they want you to do with that? Well, then they're going to program you. And they program you in that case to kill. And you have to break down the person's identity. And you have to get them to buy into that way of thinking. Otherwise, human beings don't naturally kill one another. Right. You've got to train them to be able to kill.

And this is what I always say. I'm like any, you know, any discussion of the military is what military is. What militaries do is they program individuals to conduct violence on behalf of state, right? Like that's what it is. There's a reason you want to be talking to all the veterans around you right now, you know, because number one, they never deprogram us, right? But like you're becoming a different person, right? You don't even get to go back to being a civilian ever again.

Now you're a veteran. Like you have been changed by, experience in this. And I think it, you know, some of these things are even, we're seeing right now why they're so necessary. The geographic abuse, for example, right? We move soldiers all around the country every three to six years. It wreaks havoc on us and our families and our relationships, but it is so that a tyrant cannot take over and have a bunch of military officers with loyal followings. You know, you don't have a single brigade. in the act of United States military that has a single political leaning, right?

So you cannot have this kind of runaway civil war-esque stuff that you had before. So they're doing it for reason, these tactics. I just think the conversation we're not willing to have is that we ask 1% of our country to be an occult in order to protect us. And I think if we we're not going to end the US military, but I think if we had that conversation, we could maybe lower the suicide rate. We could maybe help not only with veterans when they come out, but maybe with even some of the toxic awful behavior inside the military as well.

Yeah, so I totally get what you're saying. And obviously it applies to all militaries, not just the US military. So finally, let's get to cults potentially in nationalism and politics, because, you know, know, they want you to be, let's pick a couple of different things, a Republican, a Democrat, and you have to be only that, and you have to hate the other side. And don't, and these days, don't interact, don't interact with the other side, okay? Stay in your isolation, stay in your group, don't have any individual ideas. You have to believe in orthodoxy, and you cannot waver from orthodoxy, right? So, and then you've got the nationalistic cults. The Turks are the best,

and being in favor of Turks is a moral good in and of itself and is a more important moral good than actually doing the right thing to individual actors, right? I pick church just because I'm Turkish, right? But it obviously applies to any nationality. So are those in some ways occult? Yeah, I mean, especially here where you have binary, right? Like, what cults thrive on binary thinking, right? You're either in or out, it's good or bad, it's all or nothing.

And in Democrat versus Republican politics, like just by being binary, that is going to be somewhat culty. And also, you know, as you alluded to, the isolation, you know, I think I was saying five years ago, the first sign of wars when communications stop between. the two sides, right? And like, we're in a modern day sort of version of this. And technology, you know, technology has changed the game in so many interesting ways because it's actually breaking down a lot of the OG cults that relied on more physical isolation. But it's really helping, you know, any whack job with an idea get a platform. But it's also really helping to separate Americans. You know, there are I'm sure entire Americans that don't even know that this platform exists, right? Whereas like it used to be, you know, I say when my grandfather joined a cult in

1970, if you wanted to isolate an American, you kind of had to take them away to your compound in Texas or Brazil or the state of Utah in order to control what they were going to have access to. But now with sort of an app for everything, for every taste, we are so polarized. We're not seeing what the other side is seeing, and we're not talking to each other anymore. And there's absolutely become an all or nothing aspect to our politics. And then if you notice, every election cycle now, it is the apocalypse, right? And this has been going on for at least 20 years, if not since the Reagan era, when I feel that a lot of this got started. You know, and then I think there's obviously, like, Maga is a cult.

Like that is a cult. They even refer to themselves as a group. And it's kind of the culmination of a, of a 40, 50 year, you know, conglomeration of all of these cults of idea that have been building. And then somebody put them all together. Yeah. And yeah. So I, but I don't think MAGA is the only cult in politics, right?

I agree. So let's say take two on our side. So a lot of the extreme left says if you disagree even a little bit, that's it. You're a heretic. You're a Nazi. You're with the right wing. You're MAGA. You're a Trump supporter.

I mean, one disagreement will get you banished like that. And weeks of cult. And this is called purity testing in cult speak. And I've started a book on fascism and the number one word I've already used is purity. Right? It's like this is the pursuit of purity is how you get to the most dangerous thing about cults. My number 10, which is ends, justifies the means. Yes.

We're seeing this on both sides, especially around Middle East topics, right? Just all or nothing, purity, and it's on both sides and the lack of ability to see through it, but also the willingness to justify your side because it is your side and not even be willing to engage in conversation is like that has been a huge show. in our country in the last, I would say, 50 years. And on that one, the Democratic Party at large is even more guilty these days. It used to be the Republican Party would banish anyone who criticized other Republicans. It was Reagan's 11th Amendment, never criticized another Republican, right?

Now the Democratic Party, I mean, for a long time, now they're finally breaking this and such a relief. But never criticized Biden, never criticized Pelosi, never criticize another Democrat. that if you do, you're with the other side. And you should be banished. And no one should talk to you, right? And it really, when they start saying no one should talk to you, that's when you know it's a cult, in my opinion, right? Right.

And so then that leads to the last two examples. So I remember when Dick Cheney said, after we invade Iraq, Iran then offers up actually a deal to us that was to to get rid of some of their weapons, et cetera, and do what we wanted, because honestly, they got scared, right? And Dick Cheney refused it and said, we don't talk to evil. Because talking to the other side humanizes them, et cetera, and he doesn't want him humanized. You want to attack them, right? Right. So finally. Even this emphasis on this line between good and evil, right? And I always say, The thing about lines in the sand is they're easy to erase.

It's been a lot of time on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan and like there are no lines there, right? And so this, it is this like when you are unable to engage in a conversation, when you are cutting people off from other sources or topics, yeah, but really I think we have to acknowledge that there's good and evil in all of us. you know, and this has unfortunately kind of been one of the things about the messaging of this country, the United States, right? We're the good guys. We're the good guys really, really loudly. And now we're living through a moment, I think, when we are many of us starting to realize that, hey, maybe all of these systems are not so great.

Yeah. Which is when cults pop up, by the way. Cults pop up in times of social turmoil. So, like, we are redoing a lot of the topics of the 60s and 70s, right, and trying to push them further. And some people are trying to push them the other way. And unsurprisingly, in times of social turmoil, uprise the people who promise you the answers, right? And this is one of my things for people is, like, be so skeptical of anyone giving you an easy answer, right? Like, Elon Musk was never going to take us to Mars when the world's best scientists can't build a functioning biodont.

You know, like, there are no easy answers in the world right now. They are all complicated topics that are going to have tons of discussion. And we're never going to get through them if we can't have the discussion. So look, for rational people, obviously everybody's got good and evil in them. And obviously, it's not determined by what religion, race, ethnicity, you were born into, right? That's just scientific, it's empirical. But, and I've never called them this, but now that you've described all this, I want to ask you about the Israeli cult, because they say never talk to anyone who criticizes Israel, call them anti-Semitic, and

drive them from the conversation. And we just did a story on the Young Turks about Jewish parents that are really mad at their kids because they voted for Mamdani. And it was almost like they were saying we raised them to be racist than they wouldn't be. And we wanted them to hate Muslims and to vote against Muslims. We wanted them to support Israel above all. And they wouldn't do it. And they're so mad that their cult training didn't work on their kids because they were in the general atmosphere of America, which I take great pride in as an American, by the way.

in that sense. And they, it literally said, Daniela, I wish we'd sent them to Israel more so that, and as you were talking, I was like, oh, so they can get isolated with only that tribe and get indoctrinated into that tribe's way of thinking and only support that tribe. And, and say, and the one that scares me the most, number 10, we're all in danger, so we must protect this tribe. by any means necessary.

Yes. I want to preface by saying I'm very, very careful and hesitant about talking about the Middle East, just because I'm a former intelligence officer trained on and deployed to the Middle East. So I, that being said, right, I do think that there is a lot of cult think into this exact thing that you are talking about with parents trying. to control the children. And what I would say it's interesting, though, is what you were saying.

So first of all, there's a lot of and justifies the means mentality in all of this. I agree with you. And it's all very, very scary. There's also anti-Semitism in almost every conspiracy theory historically. And that really comes into cult think too, right? So this gets like, I think as you have said, just. a super complicated question. But what's kind of cool is that indoctrinating children just rarely works in the long term

is what we're finding out. Like now that we've had, you know, we've really only been studying cults since the 70s, right? And so it's been this process of finding things out. But we are finding out, and especially if you cannot keep your purpose. perfect isolation that you mentioned, it is really, really hard to brainwash people, right? That is why you have segments of large groups in New York City that are completely isolated up, right? Because if they're allowed out, they are going to be infected by all the diversity

that is there. So the good news is the brainwashing is not working, right? Like the majority of Mormons are leaving the church, even though they have more money than Heavenly Father. Like, the way that cults die is when they fail to keep and recruit the next generation. Yeah. And I do think that's happening. I just think we're right in the middle of it right now. And so it's really scary. Yeah.

And it's not just to pick on the Israelis. Yes, they are clearly doing the most damage these days in, in like, body count and in so many different ways. Lots of communities, including Muslim communities, come to America and they want to keep their kids isolated. And some of them might have points of view of like never marry outside of, you know, your nationality or your religion. Or maybe they think that being gay is wrong, right? And they're like, oh, no, now we're in America. And they don't even think being gay is wrong. Well, yeah, sorry, but we broke your cult. Okay. And so. And, you know, that's a. is kind of, ironically, what happened to the children of God, right? Like, he was very racist and

ultimately white supremacist. And but then he fled around the world and had children of all races because they were doing, you know, international flirty fishing. And then raised us all and told us we were all the same. So, you know, we don't, it kind of broke their own racism. And I love it when that happens. I love it when they get caught in like their own traps. You know, like these cult leaders will die of curable diseases because they can't go to the hospital because they've told their people. You know, Celts always hate doctors. So. So well, that does kind of get you to believe in karma a little bit. I have to tell you, I have to tell you my coolest line from the book and see what you

think, which is I say that cults always promise space travel. Hmm. Really, do they? So here's what happened. When the Space Force was announced, I was just jumping around my house going, oh my gosh, it's so culty, right? Like, I have to figure it out. It's so culty. They named themselves the guardians as in of the galaxy.

Like, that's the official term for space men and women. And I was like, why is it always space travel, right? Like our cult leader told us we were going to live in a golden city inside the moon. The Mormons were promised a whole planet, except they lost it recently, right? Obviously, you have Scientology and then, of course, you have Heaven's Gate. And so, again, this is the kind of thing that makes me a different kind of scholar, I think, right? Because I just, like, feel something. And I'm like, hmm, I know, let me go figure it out.

And I think, you know, we call it metaphorical space, right? But I think it's actually crucial to coercive control that whatever you're being promised is beyond the pale, right? It's in another body, it's in another form, it's on another planet, it's in another dimension, right? It's always you have to keep going further. Yeah. So I mean, look, it gets pretty close to heaven, which is kind of also in space.

And so give me all your labor, your body, you're this, and your that, everything you have now in this reality. And I promise there'll be a great reality for you at a much later time in space, heaven, or wherever they promised you, right? So, yeah, I'll take my heaven right now. And I've even found, I've even found. So one of the most useful things I think I tell people is that cults can also appear in the form of 1-1 cults, which is usually some kind of an abusive relationship.

And single-family cults, you know, Westboro Baptist Church is the most famous, but there are many. And so as I've started talking about space travel, I have found that in single-family cults, it is often the promise of a trip to Disney World. So sometimes it's Space Mountain. Can you hear me Space Mountain? Okay, I'm worried because I did promise my kids spacebound at one point. So it's just one tactic. It's just one tactic.

And also if you deliver said space travel, it's fine. We did. But it's the promise with the never being delivered, right? The constant moving of the goalposts, which is of course something we are seeing a lot these days. About three weeks ago, we were actually on spacebound. So we delivered so that I guess it's not. You're safe. You're safe. All right, everybody check out Daniela Messanek Young.

Her new book is called The Coulting of America, What Makes a Cult and Why We Love Them. And she's known as on YouTube at Knitting Cult Lady, Knitting Cult Lady. It seems to have lived up to that reputation. All right. There's no, there's no the because the is culty. Most cults start with the because it is a subconscious. clue that I'm the only one. And if you're thinking about Tigger right now, you are right. Okay, all right.

And the things I did not know. All right, Daniela, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me, Jank. Okay, take care. All right, now we know how to break cults. So now the revolution is armed with that. All right, guys.

I am going to do a quick bonus segment for you guys. I don't want you to go to a whole weekend without hearing a story about me. No, seriously, I'm going to tell you about how I broke my own indoctrination on actually several times throughout my life. So that's for the members who to join button below or t.com slash join and we'll see you there. Thank you. Thank you.