The Young Turks - Fake as Fox

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

Body cam video shows Louisiana officer begging man to stay alive after shooting him. Tucker Carlson calls Trump a 'demonic force' in a new legal filing. In a newly-released email, Rupert Murdoch told Fox News CEO the network should help GOP win Senate ‘any way we can’. GOP unveils bill to make Trump's tax cuts permanent while howling about debt. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tells state agencies to stop diversity programs in hiring. Fox News stars privately expressed disbelief about Trump's election fraud claims. Kari Lake turns on DeSantis. Biden declared PHYSICALLY fit for office. President Biden says the three UFOs shot down by US weren't Chinese spy balloons. Elon Musk's Super Bowl tweet flopped, so he had 80 Engineers boost his reach. Host: John Iadarola, Cenk Uygur, Sharon Reed Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. Woo! It's up! Drop it like it's a weather Drop it like it's a weather balloon. Power, power, power panel.

Jake U of John, Iowa, Shad Reed, contributor at Rebel headquarters with you guys. John, of course, the host Damage Report. Later in the program, we will get to the non-Chinese spying balloons, which I predict to the weather balloons. It turns out they are not. They might be, though, part of my new favorite thing in the world, the Pico-ballooning community. We will explain later in the program, and you will love that explanation.

Throughout the program, we've got explanations of how Fox News are a bunch of liars. amazing, not at all amazing in terms of facts. Of course, they're liars, but the details and the texts and the admissions are wonderful. So that's coming up a little bit. So we got an amazing show for you guys. But unfortunately, we start with yet another tragedy. Yes. We awake to find out that we are in fact still in America.

It is still 2023. And so news like this occurs on a regular basis. Shreveport, Louisiana police officer was arrested earlier this week on a charge of negligent homicide in a fatal shooting that occurred earlier this month in which Alonzo Bagley, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed. Now, since then, multiple police officer body cams have been released and we are going to show some of the footage, obviously bear in mind this is content that is quite difficult to watch as we proceed. Hey, how you doing, the girl?

How you doing? Hey, what's your name? Alonzo. Hey, can you step out for her? No. What do you mean? My dog, I got dog. All right.

He's careful. Let me put my dog. Sit down. Let her. Hey, come here. Come here. Put my dog up. She can put the dog up.

Just right. He's disturbing the pieces. They got weed back there. He went my next door with him. You know, I really, I'm about to get me quick, but I don't think that he told me. He's locked a door and stuff. There he go.

Hey, guys. Hey. He went that way, Todd. He went that way, Todd. Oh, Lord. Oh, God. You shot me. Oh, God.

You shot me. Oh. No. Dispatch sending EMS right now. No, no, sir, sir. Hey, hey, hey. No, no, no. Tyler, you're good.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, come on, come on, come on. Come on, come on, come on, come on. No, no, man. No, no, no. Come on. No, man. As I said, very difficult to watch. You saw there police responding to a disturbance in the video Alonzo Bagley decides to run,

which for reasons I'll never understand is the most dangerous thing that you can do in America is make the cops chase you. And within maybe 30 seconds at the beginning of that chase, a fatal shot was fired. Now Officer Alexander Tyler has only been a member of the police force. since May of 2021 made his initial appearance in court and the footage was analyzed. You can see on some of the footage not on others that his hands were actually up prior to the shot being fired. There had been claims with the possibility of him being armed. He was of course not armed and we do have a little bit more body camera footage from the

aftermath of the shooting. Oh no! Oh god! Oh! No! Just like to leave now, shutt fire! Shoot fire! Dude fire!

No! No! No! No! No! No! No! So at least based on the footage that we see in this particular case, the police at least seem affected by what they had just done, which is novel in these sorts of cases. Yeah, I actually think that's the most interesting part of this particular shooting. So first, why did he run? Well, this might be relevant.

He had earlier filed a police report several years back saying that he'd been abused by the cops, they'd handcuffed him, he'd somehow gotten the handcuffs in front of him. the cops say we were having trouble getting him out of the car and he says no they just didn't like that he you know twisted his hands around and punched him in the face several times broke his eye sock and knocked out his teeth so now media reports say that it is not clear how that was adjudicated so we don't know if that was who was telling the truth about that but the possibility exists that the last time he had been handcuffed by the police he was severely abused so you can see why he might not want to get handcuffed by the police if that's an interaction he has already

had. Just to give you guys context, because if you're an accountant and you've never run from the cops, you might be confused as to why people run from the cops. Well, that's sometimes because when you don't run from the cops, they kick the living crap out of you. And when you do run from the cops, sometimes they kill you. So, but John is right, I think the most novel part of this is the reaction from the police afterwards. If you watch the whole two-minute tape, the guy who shot him and the guy giving him CPR are both shaken and the guy who shot him is distraught, okay? And I had an interesting reaction to that, which was, wow, that's a normal human reaction. And I think that that's the first time that I've seen in any of these tapes

that we've covered. Now dozens of them, maybe even into the hundreds, where there was a normal human reaction. Oh my God, I shot a human being. Oh my God, he was unarmed. Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Oh my God, is he going to live? Is he going to live? Oh my God, we got to save him. That's a normal human reaction. First time I've seen it. And so, Shan, I'm curious what you think. I know we're speculating, but there's two possibilities as to why he had that reaction. One was he was human. And he was like, oh my God, I shouldn't have shot him or I'm so worried that he's going to die, even if I should have shot him. Or, well, now he knows his life is in peril because he's seen that there has actually been consequences for a couple of cops who

killed people. And this might be the first time it's occurring in cops in America that it might affect them as well as the person who's lying on the ground. Or Jenka could be, I don't know, all of the above, but I'll bite on the human one. Because I think that that first crossed my mind too. Human reaction, don't die. I'm not a tough guy. I don't want to kill someone. But But the other normal reaction for police officers is to lie after the fact. You're not so affected that you don't lie and say the suspect's coming towards you. I couldn't see the suspect's hands. So I think that there are some things here that are different.

And I agree with you. I have not seen that released on body cam footage that I can recall. But it's the same old game. And I don't know that we can continue. we as black people to have the talk with our kids and say comply, don't run, because I don't think it works out either way. I am an educated black woman. And when I see flashing lights behind me, I'm in fear. I'm in legitimate fear. And I think that everything we see, including the trauma of releasing, or in the case of Memphis and Tyree Nichols, leading up with

the drum roll and a band to show what effectively were his final moments over and over again, and then looping it like wallpaper, as many in the cable news industry did. This is our trauma that we see. So I don't really, it's hard for me to say, oh, so human, but I'll bite on, I guess, aspect of it. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, maybe after the shooting we could identify that as somewhat reminiscent of what a regular human would do, but let's not miss the fact that everything prior to that I would

like to think is not what most normal humans would have done. That's not how most normal humans would have responded. And pretty much everybody involved in this case is trying to understand why you would react in the way that he did in the moment. Xavier Suds, his brother, says that's just from not understanding, why did a domestic call turn deadly? I think at this point, the only thing I'm wondering is just, you know, the procedure, the procedure. Why did it happen like it happened? And one of the family attorneys for the Bagley say, a short flight takes place, but flight is not a death sentence.

Flight does not mean shoot to kill. Flight does not mean judge, jury, and executioner. and that's what happened here. And yeah, I, I, you know, we're lefties or whatever, we try to have empathy. We try to put ourselves in other people's positions, but I can't make heads or tails of it. Like I try to imagine, maybe he's terrified, he goes into the apartment, he tells the guy not to leave, the guy starts to go to another room, maybe he thinks, well, what if he's going to get a weapon? Now, of course, even that is going to be massively affected by internalized racism because I have a feeling

that if he was busting into my apartment and I briefly ducked into a room, he wouldn't be nearly as afraid of what I might be bringing out of it. But then once the guy is running, he's just running. That's what he's doing. What is the worst case scenario there? You can find him again. The woman that is still there, she's not running. She seems to know who he is. I feel like he can be tracked down again. I feel like the worst case scenario if he gets away is not that bad. I feel like the outcome that you ensure by pulling the trigger is a thousand in times worse and yet very often they seem so put out so inconvenienced by the idea that they might have to run after someone or then maybe track them down afterward that they're

willing to immediately escalate it to the absolute highest level. Yeah. So look, sometimes people oftentimes on the right wing will focus on all the wrong things. Like hey, you know, they're investigating domestic abuse. Shouldn't they investigate? No, we all think they should investigated, right? The guy goes into the back room. I got concerned. I got concerned for everybody and I knew what was going to happen. But if I was there at the moment, I'd be concerned about the woman in the house. I'd be concerned about the cop. So that was a dangerous move to go into the room. But in none of these scenarios is an execution warranted and not even close, right? So we want the person to be apprehended. We want them to be apprehended in a safe way. And we want to figure

out what's going on, make sure we protect the other person in the house, right? But that guy didn't appear to have a weapon. He's running away. Of course, John is right. Like, the worst case scenario is you'll get him later. You know exactly who he is, right? And so, and you're only supposed to shoot when either your life is in danger or someone else's life is in danger. And the danger has to be imminent. Not, hey, I think 45 minutes later, he might get a gun and he might do something else. Now I'm worried that somebody's about to die, so that's why I'm going to shoot, right? And was that the case there? No, nobody thinks that was the case there, right? And so they'll go to a jury and they'll determine that legally, but that nobody's life appeared to be

in any kind of threat there. And it was, as usual, shooting too quickly because we teach cops, your life is 10,000 times more important than the civilian's life. But I want to end on, from my perspective on on one more thing going back to what was his why did he react that way I don't know I can't read his mind and and as we've all speculated here he might have had a genuine human moment where he's like I can't believe I shot him and I hope he doesn't die right my fellow human being doesn't die or he might have thought oh my god I've now seen two or three times cops get held accountable for this his own life might have flashed before his eyes instead of the victim's life, right?

So I don't know, I really don't. It could have been either. But my point, though, is look at the exception that proves the rule. Like, we've shown how many videos of cops shooting someone or beating them to death and just letting them sit there for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, and like not caring at all, high-fiving, fist-bumping, sometimes celebrating sometimes indifferent, but not treating the guy, handcuffing him first, et cetera. Here, they shoot them and they immediately do CPR. It's so telling that we're so

relieved that cops can be human. That is not a good sign for policing in this country. I think I think it's a real problem that that is what all three of us at least seized upon, even if it was just for the moment, that wow, that's actually what they're supposed to do every single time. And I'll say this, human beings make mistakes, domestic calls are incredibly, that's what the statistics tell us, suspect for police. They're walking into this unknown, heightened emotional danger. Got it. But in this case, and I know this officer I think I read was only on the fores since, you know, 2021, the scenario of alleged danger was really created by him. You knew what the call was. You allowed the man. to open the door with a bottle in hand and then walk away from you. That's not police protocol either. It's not, okay? That's not what they're trained to do as they assess a situation. So the whole thing is just, both our perspective of it, that we're so stunned and

captivated by this human moment. And then what I see all the time, these untrained everyday with guns and badges who just don't seem to make good decisions, particularly when people are black and brown. Yep, 100%. Yeah, chasing after someone with a gun in your hand. I don't know, maybe that is the procedure. If it is, it definitely should not be. It doesn't seem to have worked out for him. Okay, by the way, bond is set at $25,000 for Officer Tyler. Next court date is April 3rd. This is, add this to the list of these sorts of cases that we're going to continue to track. With that side, we're going to take a short break. We come back. We've got a lot more to talk about. Hit the join button below, become an American hero, just like Comrade Dragon just did.

We appreciate it, guys. We do this show with you guys and you allow us to do honest reporting. TYT.com slash join. John. Okay, let's jump into something fun. We'll see. Text messages that have been revealed thanks to court filings from Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News have revealed that Tucker Carlson, you see him over there.

He is possibly the most prominent right wing demagogue in the country, does not in fact have nearly as favorable a view of Donald Trump as he pretends to for the purposes of diluting his audience. We're gonna get into many of these different messages. The ones in question here are between Tucker Carlson and his producer Alex Pfeiffer. Now very mind the date of the ones we're about to talk about. This is January 6th. That was a notable day you might recall. Well, on that day, Carlson messaged Pfeiffer and called Trump, quote, a demonic force, a destroyer. But added, he's not going to destroy us. So that was his initial reaction to what we were all seeing moment by moment on January 6th, okay? We mostly as a nation agreed on that day that this is

horrendous, that some sort of fundamental line has been crossed. Within 24 to 48 hours, most of the Fox host had realized, no, the audience actually loves it, so we have to pretend that it was fine. But take a look at this direct view into what he was thinking at the moment. Tucker Carlson, who has spent the two years since January 6 pretending that it was no big deal. It certainly wasn't anything dangerous or fascistic or white supremacist or anything like that. In the moment saw the guy who led it as a demonic force and has lied about that ever since. Well, you can go back further than that. It wasn't just January 6th that shook Tucker Carlson's view of Donald Trump.

In the wake of the 2020 election, where obviously Donald Trump was and continues to lie about the result of it, pretending that it had been stolen. In the wake of it, Tucker Carlson didn't necessarily agree. He seemed to understand both that the election had been won by Joe Biden, but that Fox News viewers were not going to like that. They found that to be very inconvenient, even down a level of freaking out, as you might recall, over Fox News' correct, accurate call of Arizona going to Joe Biden. So in response to some of the crazy things that Donald Trump was saying, as well as the strikeback from the audience. Tucker Carlson, message Pfeiffer on January, or November 5th. So it's just a couple

days after the election. We worked really hard to build up what we have here. Those effing, or effers, I guess, are destroying our credibility. It enrages me. Many on quote, our side. And that's his quotes that he put on there are being reckless demagogues right now. And that's my job. I added that bit. In any event, he says, we're not going to follow them. and said that Trump is good at destroying things. He's the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong. You'll note, he didn't say if we don't do a good job of covering the facts or reality.

He saw that the fans were freaking out and immediately it was about playing it correctly, making sure that you give the right impression, which obviously isn't just the honest impression. Because if it was, you wouldn't be worried about playing games, you'd just be reporting the news. as any sane broadcaster is supposed to. Well, this is really interesting because this is, Tucker Carlson, it shows him to be the biggest liar you've ever seen, and there's a rare moment of him telling the unvarnished truth. So first off, MAGA guys, how do you feel about

Tucker Carlson thinking that Trump's a demonic force? So whose side are you on? Tucker or Trump? Is he a demonic force? Or is Tucker a sellout who's been selling you a bag of goods? of goods. Can you believe he's been lying to you that way? Okay, so the big lie, of course, is all these guys know Trump's a lunatic, he's a destroyer, he's a terrible force in America, and as all the texts reveal, none of them believed that the election was stolen from Trump. They thought it was laughable, ridiculous, BS, right? And meanwhile, every night they go

out there and they're like, oh my God, is this would be the election stolen? I can't believe it. terrible, can you believe what they did to poor Trump? Then they go back off here and they're like, yeah, isn't Trump the worst? So now you know, now you know, look guys, they're lying to you because they think you want those lies. And there's a lot of truth to that if you're in the right way, right? And so they know that if they don't, like, it's a very, very telling thing he said was that these guys, and Hannity said this in another text too, these guys are destroying our credibility, referring to the fact. Get excited.

This is big! For the summer's biggest adventure. I think I just smurf my pants. That's a little too excited. Sorry. Smurfs. Only dinner's July 18th. The Fox News election staff called the election accurately.

Isn't that amazing? They think their credibility is not being truth tellers, not giving you the actual news. Their credibility is with the right-wing audience. And if you don't lie to them, you'll lose credibility. I can't believe we got Arizona right, they're saying. I can't believe we said things that were true about the election. Now, we'll have no credibility left with the right wing. It's actually, and remember, they're not wrong.

When they were honest for a second, everybody went to Newsmax and OAN. And that's what led to this panic. And you see it in all the texts. Even Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the station is like, basically, this is an existential moment. we might lose everyone if we make the mistake of telling something that is true. That's amazing. Look, we all know they're liars, right? I mean, the mainstream media, we'll get to this later on the show.

Turns out, Fox News is doing propaganda. Did you guys know that? Of course, yes, we all knew that. But how crystal clear it is to them internally is kind of amazing. Now the part that's true. John read it to you guys, but look at this quote. Trump, Tucker saying Trump was good at destroying things, he's the undisputed world champion of that, he could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.

That is totally true. There's nothing that Donald Trump is better at than destroying things. And if he turned on them with full rage, thermonuclear rage, he could have driven all of their audience out, and they know it. So that's part of the reason they lie to you about Trump, because they know. that if they ever told the truth about him, he would rage against them and destroy them. And he would win. They know that he is stronger than they are.

That is also very, very telling. I've got more on the potential of a Manchurian candidate that Trump is, but sure. Yeah, and it's just listening to the discussion, it's a Marvel movie. It sounds like we're talking, demonic force is the superhero, he's super dark. This, they're in a movie, a bad Marvel movie with bigger effects and everything has to be bigger and more destruction. And they don't really care because Tucker Carlson also texted that, you know, our viewers believe this. Our viewers are good people. But you are a hypocrite and you look down on them and you go out, as you said, Jake, every single night is built on a movie plot lie.

A lie that you know these people, they'll act on it. You know, we've seen people storm the Capitol. And again, where were those real bearskins and put their feet up on desk? A woman was shot dead as she climbed through or attempted to climb through the window. The whole thing is horrific. And yet somehow Tucker Carlson believes he's like on this moral pedestal and it's very, very bizarre. I don't know when they shut it off, do they shut it off before bedtime, brushing their teeth in the mirror and now reacclimating with the family? Or does this just continue?

Like an actor or actress who kind of assumes the role completely so that they can really get into character? I just don't know. But it's fascinating because in the movies, there's not depositions and these lawsuits where we learn things. and we get to read their text messages in real time. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think that the metaphor that you're making there is pretty robust because like superheroes, these hosts have alter egos. They have their on-camera person that they pretend to be that they don't really mean it.

And we keep finding that out. Tucker Carlson's legal defense in court is, who would trust anything I say? And now we find out he fundamentally lies about some of the biggest political questions of our era. Was this a coup? Was an election stolen? Do vaccines work? Is there a pandemic? The biggest questions of our age, and in every single case, Tucker Carlson has decided to lie to his fans, even to their deaths, to the death of democracy, he doesn't care because he'd like a seventh house or whatever. I want to read one more text of his, and this is, again, I, like you would sort of mockingly said, you know, what do you think of Tucker Carlson right?

I know what they think of him coming out of this. The exact same thing they thought of him coming into it because there's nothing that can shake their confidence in these people except perhaps that thermonuclear onslaught from Donald Trump. On November 13th, less than two weeks after the election, Carlson texted his producer that Trump needed to concede, quote, that there wasn't enough fraud to change the outcome of the election and that Sidney Powell, one of Trump's lawyers, was lying about having evidence for election fraud. So there wasn't fraud enough to change the outcome and the fraud they were talking about was a big lie. Tucker Carlson knew that less than two weeks after the election, okay? That was well over two years ago. He knew almost

immediately they're lying and he is savvy enough to know why they were telling those lives, why they continue to tell those lies. And when I say they, I do mean Trump, but I also mean Tucker Carlson because I want to catch you up. This is not November 2020. Take a look at what he was saying on his show last night. It's possible on this Thursday evening, you may be wondering what the hell is going on in our country. There are so many unanswered questions, some of them lingering. How, for example, did senile hermit Joe Biden get 15 million more votes than his former boss,

rock star crowd surfer Barack Obama? Results like that would seem to defy the laws of known physics and qualify instead as a miracle. Was the 2020 election a miracle? Honestly, we don't know. We don't expect to get an answer to it tonight. No, we do know. You know, you knew. You knew almost immediately that they were lying. What we find out from these texts is that Tucker Carlson knows who his audience is. He knows how his career bread is buttered.

But he also knows that making very specific claims about specific machines being rigged by specific companies, that's a fool's game. Dumb, idiotic people like Sidney Powell make claims like that, claims that could get you sued. He doesn't make those sorts of claims. He makes really broad, vague, condescending claims. It's the laws of physics, it's a miracle. The laws of physics can't sue him, a miracle can't sue him. So he can spend two years claiming that the election that he knows was not stolen, was stolen, get all the cred for it, and never expose himself to any legal liability. How did Biden get all those votes more than Obama?

he was running against Trump. That's how he got him. And we were all scared to death that Trump was going to end democracy. And we were right. As soon as he lost, he tried to end democracy. That's why all those people showed up to vote. Obama was running against Trump. He might have gotten 100 million votes.

So, okay, now, look, I like the superhero thing. I'm a build on it. First of all, we have the top villain's name. And it's unfortunately a badass name. Trump is the destroyer. And that I could see that coming out of a Marvel movie. And now the state of America being what it is, I'm afraid of giving him that nickname because I think the right wing will love it.

Can we call him meatball? No, I've got one. Oh, my goodness. I have a good demeaning one for him. He's thinking of calling the Santa's Meatball Ron. Well, then he'd be meatloafed on. Oh, wow. See, that's better.

But if you call him the destroyer, though, the right wing will love it. They will love it. And that gives you a perfect picture perfect, you know, demonstration of what the right wing in America today is. Now, as far as their hosts, the problem is they're all the same villain, Two-Face, all of them. Oh, wow. Okay, there is no discussions after we're off air at T.RT, like, oh, Bernie actually sucks, right? Let's go lie to everybody about how great he is. It's inconceivable.

But at Fox News, that's taken as a given. Every text, you'll see more later in the show. Every text from Hannity, Ingram and Tucker Carlson are like, okay, well, we know Powell's lying and Giuliani's lying and Trump is lying, but who cares? Let's go tell our audience there, tell the truth. We don't want to lose credibility. Okay, so the last thing is Trump put them in this unwinnable spot. He's like, if you don't lie and say I won the election, you're going to lose your entire audience and you can see the panic in every tweet, right? And every text, every email, right?

But if you do lie, you're going to get a giant lawsuit. And we all know it and they knew it. And boom, they did. They got this $1.6 billion lawsuit from Dominion. That's what Trump always does to anyone who supports them. He puts them in an unwinnable situation. Either go lie for me in a way that you're going to get caught and embarrassed and have personal consequences. Oftentimes I want you to break the law for me.

And then once you do, I'm going to pretend I don't even know you. I'm going to throw you under the bus. etc. But if you don't do it, then you're going to have these other problems and the destroyer's going to come after you. He's so toxic. The only good news out of any of this is that the right wing attached themselves to this radioactive isotope. And so look, there was that conspiracy theory like the Hulk. Uh-oh. Okay, don't give him cool stuff. Anyway, there was this conspiracy theory a long time ago about how he's a Manchuring candidate that the Clintons put him in to destroy the Republican Party, lost the presidency with record voter turnout for Joe Biden, lost the Senate

twice because of him, indisputably, and now has torn Fox News apart and costing them billions of dollars. No. So, no, no, of course I don't believe that conspiracy theory. But man, and the Democrats are nowhere near smart enough to pull that off, okay? But if you were going to do that operation, this is exactly how you would do it. So other than, of course, Trump winning in 2016, that's why it's not real, right? But the rest has been picture perfect for the Democrats.

So, hey, Republican voters, keep going. That destroy is working out great for you. The last thing he's going to destroy is your party. Yeah. All right, we got to take a break. Sounds like the sequel. The sequel, there you go. Right?

That's good. You're more installments. The destroyer strikes back against himself and his allies and friends and party. And any conservative media outlet, he nukes them all. That's kind of what the destroyer would do. And that is kind of what he's doing. All right, we got to take a break. When we come back, we've got more Fox News admissions.

They're amazing. They're amazing. And more news as well. We'll be right back. All right back on TYAT, Jank, John, and sharing with you guys, John's got more news. I do, and this is actually going to be pretty fun too. So perhaps the least surprising thing to come out of the wealth of text messages and emails that have been released thanks to this Dominion lawsuit against Fox News is that Fox News is news

in the same way that like a strawberry pop tart is fruit, maybe on the surface, but not once you dig just a little bit. Here's an example of that. Rupert Murdoch, who's the chairman of Fox News, sent an email to CEO Suzanne Scott back in November of 2020, making clear both what they actually thought as a company of Donald Trump's claims of election fraud, but more importantly, what they saw their role being in American politics. So in his email, Rupert Murdoch told Scott to read a Wall Street journal piece about Newsmax telling her, these people should be watched if skeptically. Trump will concede eventually, and we should concentrate on Georgia helping any way we can. They go on to say, we don't want to antagonize Trump further,

but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt, everything at stake here. So there's a lot in that little paragraph. They're terrified that Newsmax is going to present themselves as more pure than Fox News because they're willing to tell more bald face lies. They're worried about that. They believe that Rudy Giuliani is a complete moron, but they're willing to pretend to not believe that on air. But I think the most important single part there is we should, we, Fox News, should concentrate

on Georgia and try to help it any way we can. Help who, Robert? Help democracy, help the citizenry, help Georgians? No, help Herschel Walker to win the race. That's what I didn't. Well, in that case, not Herschel Walker. Oh, yeah, no, Herschel Walker in that particular case. So, yeah, they know, it's not, it's not news.

It's not news with a slight bias. It is a political operation. It is an extension of the Republican Party designed explicitly to get Republican candidates elected. Also to shift the direction of the Republican Party long term. They're willing to meddle in that way too. But no, they want to get them elected and they will say what is necessary to make that happen. And they will not say things that would harm that from happening.

I know that everybody knows that Fox isn't real news. They've known it for some time. But this is just damning for a network that some people still think is serious. They're still treated with a level of respect from places like CNN and MSNBC that has definitely not been warranted. it for a very, very long time. So I would put an asterisk on what John said. Everyone knows the Fox News propaganda except mainstream media.

And today, they're all acting super shocked and chagrined. Like, it turns out Fox News might be biased. Really? You don't say. So, and by the way, I've explained why before a lot of people that working cable news used to work at Fox News. They're not going to come in and say, oh, yeah, my 4th. employer who I gladly took tons of money from is doing propaganda because it'll ruin

their career. And tons of people in the past wanted to work for Fox News. Now it's become more untenable. But in the old days, everybody at MSNBC and CNN thought that they might be working at Fox News one day and they didn't want to bite the hand that might feed them. So they had a vested financial interest in pretending that Fox News was doing real news. Okay, now there's four things in Murdoch statements that are interesting admissions. Everything's at stake, meaning, look, if we screw this up, either we're lying on behalf of Trump and could create legal issues, boom, that's what happened. But if we don't lie on behalf of Trump, our entire audience, after 25 years of being dominant, they could all walk away. Tucker says it, Hannity says it, and here the big boss says it.

They're all worried to death that if they don't lie to their audience, they will immediately leave. if they don't kiss Trump's ass. That goes to interesting point number two. He says, we don't want to antagonize Trump. Even the legendary Rupert Murdoch, who I think has largely been the most powerful man on earth for the last quarter century, is afraid of Donald Trump. Now we know who the boss is, okay? And Murdoch, after all these years, at the end, you heal.

Let's just keep it real, okay? Number three. That rhymed. What's also interesting is that after all these years with Donald Trump, he still didn't know. Like all these guys, I mean, every, and in Washington, there's such a weird bubble. I know he doesn't live in Washington, but he's part of the powerful and the elite that are around Washington. They just genuinely are surprised every time. They don't get it.

Like, they keep assuming that he's going to act like them, that he has the same interest as them. No, in the end, we rob everybody together and, you know, and it's all good. and we pretend that the status quo is great. He'll do that at the end. No, he won't. He's a madman. You thought he was going to concede? Of course he wasn't going to concede.

Of course he wasn't going to do anything rational. Even Murdoch didn't know. I mean, we're at the last days at that point. In November 16th, the election's already done. We've already seen all the madness that Donald Trump has done. And he still thought he was going to act rationally. That's amazing to me. And then finally, of course, helping any way we can.

But I look, there, I'm going to say something that almost, none of the rest of the media says if Fox News said look guys we're conservatives the whole station is conservative our election tabulating forces serve which by the way it wasn't to be fair and that's why they were livid right they actually did a tiny bit of objective reporting for one nanosecond and the rest of the building was furious with the election team right but if they said hey even our news is from a conservative perspective right wing perspective and we want Republicans who it and you know what? The crazy of the republic, the happier we are, or the more extreme, more radical, or more right wing, more true, whatever you want to phrase it, right? I would have no

problems with that. Everybody is like, oh, no, you can't do that. No, no, you can do that. It's a free country. My problem is that they pretend to be objective news, and the rest of the news media plays along with that game, which then takes their propaganda and gives it extra weight as if it's real, as if it's not a perspective, but the actual news. And that does great damage. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, it really does. And I just think that for Fox News, it's as if they became full of themselves in dealing with Trump, because they'd always taken on the character of plastic man. They really had. They could spin their way out of everything. They could shift, they could pivot and keep their core audience.

But if they had done just a measure of what you're talking about, Jen, had just been a little bit real of what we all see anyway, I think they could have kept their core audience. You can keep your core audience, you don't get sued perhaps, but that's just not when you when you kind of twist yourself into a pretzel, you know, to do this song and dance and get that money. There's nowhere left to go except for the tech. messages. And the only thing that really surprises me about all of this, and unlike you said,

the mainstream media, does anybody at Fox know how to use WhatsApp? It's like, why are they texting and emailing all this stuff? Just get on WhatsApp and speak freely. Mm-hmm. Don't give many hints, Sharon. You remember how much smarter you are than them. They don't know. Okay. So I, but I will add one thing there. No, actually, John, go ahead, give us the rest of then I'll add something. Oh, sure. Well, you know, we can actually give you a bit of an example of the ongoing commitment to that. Again, like this is sort of just catching people up if you don't already know. But we can go to Herschel Walker, obviously made a lot of appearances on

Fox News, 38 of them, including 19 on Hannity, including something that was called a town hall. And again, it's a town hall like Fox is News. Technically, Hershal Walker was there. his face was on the screen and his body was mostly upright. He was usually sandwiched between two people who were there to deliver the actual message. They were doing everything they could as a network to just carry him across the finish line. And thankfully in this case, it wasn't enough, but that's what it is. I do want to give an example though of what Jenk was talking about. We have a bit of a video.

This is Oliver Darcy on CNN responding to the revelations that have come out over the last 24 hours. So these documents, perhaps in some ways what they're revealing is not surprising to folks who work in the media, maybe people in Washington, but maybe revealing for a lot of dedicated viewers. Yeah, I think this court filing, the messages contained, and it really exposed Fox News as frankly a propaganda machine in search of profit. I think this shows how void of any journalistic ethics the people at the top of Fox News were. They were not caring about what the right thing to do as a reporter is. They were caring about not alienating their audience. They were afraid of the audience and afraid of Donald Trump. And these messages, they're really quite damning and they reveal it.

Yeah. Yeah, and look, I said on the damage for what I'll say again, I wish that we lived in a world where there would be 1% of Fox's audience or 10 or maybe the 75% that's merited that would see this sort of thing and think, well, I am never going to watch Tucker Carlson again. I can't trust a single thing he says. He openly and knowingly lies to me for profit. But that, of course, isn't going to happen for a variety of reasons.

The viewers are in a bubble. Most of them are never going to hear about this story. Those who hear about it are not going to hear the substance of it because Fox is just not going to cover it. Or if they are, it's going to be incredibly defensive and they're going to lie about it. Tucker will lie about it in the same way that he lies about the content of the coup that he believed was led by a literal demon. But more importantly, it's because we cannot fall into the trap that I think I fall into constantly. And I think that maybe a lot of people, you know, on a variety of different positions on the left fall into, which is assuming that a value that we hold is universal. We do that a lot.

And one of those values is, I want what I believe to accurately reflect reality. That's not a universal value, literally at all. There's a lot of other reasons to want to be told a thing besides just that it's true. They listen to Tucker Carlson, not because he speaks the truth or they honestly think that it's true. They do it because it's really nice. It is the rhetorical equivalent of your mom softly stroking your head when you were a child.

They just want to feel better. They want to feel comfortable. They want to feel superior. They want to feel moral. They don't care if the person telling them the things that make them feel that way is a liar or is personally profiting from it. They love that. They want him to lie. They want the politicians to lie.

They want them to be vicious and cruel and hypocritical and opportunistic because all of that, sometimes in reality, but more often just in their perception is done to help people like them. And that is way more important to them than the things they believe being grounded in reality. All right. So let me see two important things here. What is a contrast to how you can do it, right? So here, I'll give us as an example and let you be the judge for yourself. So we had a similar situation with Bernie in the primaries in 2016. So we told you guys, hey, listen, the Democrats only did six debates on the Republicans at like nearly 30, they're obviously limiting the debates so that Hillary Clinton, who's the favorite, will have an advantage and Bernie Sanders won't have much oxygen,

right, that won't get as much media coverage. They put them on the nights that football was on. They try to minimize the number of people watching those debates as much as possible. They then did what is in effect money laundering through the DNC where Hillary's donors could, would get the money back to Hillary in other ways. I mean, it's just outrageous. But when people said, no, they fixed the votes themselves. and Bernie was cheated and the votes were rigged,

we said on this network, no, we don't see persuasive evidence of that. Now, you think our side was happy about that? No, there was a lot of people who were mad about that. And they're like, no, I want you to say it's true. And other people who would willingly tell that lie. Yeah, and tons of other people were okay with that. We were not okay with it because it wasn't true. So you actually can do the right thing, even if it piss us off your audience.

I know that for not just for right wing news, but for a lot of mainstream media, that seems inconceivable. But what if we tell the truth about Buttigieg, then all the elites who love him so much will be mad at us. No, no, let's pretend that he just can't possibly regulate, even though he's a regulator in charge of transportation, right? And so we don't do sweet little lies here. And in fact, they would never, like, is Newsmax going to call out?

Is Daily Wire and Ben Shepuro and Crowder going to call on Fox News? they're not going to call out Fox News because they did the same exact lies themselves, right? Whereas we looked at one of our politician on our side at the time, Tulsi Gabbard, and before anyone knew it and before and when we said, we told you, Tulsi Gabbard's not telling you the truth. There's something wrong with her, right? And we explained why and we gave you the evidence and people were furious on our side. How dare you? She's such a great progressive, et cetera. Well, it turns out we were right. You know why we tell you that? Because our job is news. It's not to stroke your hair like they do on Fox News.

And I can go on and on with also calling out members of so-called left-wing media, et cetera. And now back to Fox News. Guys, they've been doing this throughout history. So the Murdochuk quotes are, of course, about David Purdue and Kelly Loeffler back in 2020. But they did the same thing for Herschel Walker as we showed you in 2022. Why? Because they wanted the Republicans to hold the Senate both times. And both times they went through Georgia because of the runoff system that they.

have. And it goes all the way back to Roger Ailes hiring George W. Bush's cousin to be their election tabulator back then. Back when Ailes was alive, they cheated all the way through and they did it more effectively. And when everybody was in a panic in the middle of 2000 election, all the networks, and they had called it for Gore, and then they took it back and they didn't know what to do, Ailes thought, this is an opportunity. So he's the guy who built Fox News and ran fox since for a long time. And George Bush's cousin decided that George Bush had definitively won Florida. Now, even in their own tabulation, it was 537 votes out of tens of millions of votes.

It's absurd. Of course, that's not statistically relevant. There's no way that Bush had won. They just decided Bush's cousin and ails, let's just lot. Let's just make it up and say that Bush won. And if we say it strong enough, I bet you the other idiots in mainstream media will panic. Oh, no, Fox called it. first, right? And that's exactly what happened. And by the way, when the news outlets tabulated

the votes after the Supreme Court decision handing the election to Bush, Gore had actually won Florida. He actually had won not only the popular vote, but the electoral college. But Fox News's dirty trick, 100% worked back then. And the power of that trick was that the rest of the media believe in the fiction that they were doing news. Yeah. Can we please put an end to that now that we know it definitively? We'll see, you know, we'll see. I think you can tell the truth and viewers can get pissed at you and they'll come back.

If you want to be happy, you want to feel good, I can smoke a fat blunt and have that, okay? Not saying I partake. But this whole thing is, you're right, that was that moment. And the mainstream media didn't just bite. They relish, they reported on, remember the phone calls back and forth where, you know, Gore had to take it back. And then, you know, W said, well, my brother said that I won. And the whole thing was just this whole soap opera scene orchestrated by Roger Ailes and everything else he was up to. And here we are today, living still some form of it,

a worse form of it perhaps, where people every day in the middle of the country, it all over, they don't really know what reality is. They really don't know what it is. They actually believe it, they consume it, and they smoke it to the end. Yeah, I like that you brought that back to the smoking at the end. Friday night. That's a good point. It's a good point.

Okay, why don't we jump into one more topic to close out the first hour of this power panel. Starting with this. When the Democrats say they care about people, do they care about people when they keep increasing the debt we have? Or do we have to $27 trillion for the debt? The debt, the debt, the debt, whoa boy, Republicans love talking about the debt. Sometimes, that's Senator Rick Scott, but you can insert almost any Republican politician or undead creature, they feel the same way.

They love to talk about the debt to stop you from doing certain sorts of things. So if there's a proposal to continue the child tax credit can't do that, you got a debt. Stimulus spending can't do that, you got a debt. Single payer healthcare, come on, we got a national debt and everything, we can't do that. Public free college, you can't do it. But interestingly, there are cases in which they're not so concerned about absolutely blowing a hole in the national debt. Here's an instance, this week, a group of 70 House Republicans have introduced a bill that would deliver an absolutely massive windfall to the richest people in the history of people by making the Trump tax cuts permanent. You have representatives Vern Buchanan, Michael McCall. They would make the TCGA permanency act into law that would cement federal tax law cuts for individuals that are set to expire at the end of 2025.

Bear in mind, of course, they've already won half the battle, or depending on who you are, maybe more of it, because the corporate tax cuts that they instituted, when they absolutely shredded the amount that corporations were expected to pay, those have been made permanent. Those are good for a very, very, very long time. Now they're trying to get the personal ones. And according to the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, they did an analysis. Extending the individual provisions of the Trump GOP tax law would cost around $2.2 trillion by $20. And you might think, well, oh my God, that's a big cost. What do we get in return? Well, if you're in the richest point 1% of the country, and spoiler alert, you're not.

You would get an average tax cut of $175,000. That $2.2 trillion, by the way, is in addition to the multiple trillion dollars that they've already cost us now. You would then double that to get it for another period. Inevitably, they're gonna ask for it to be extended at that point. But in return, people who already own islands can buy an extra set of jet skis. That seems like a perfectly reasonable trade-off there. We've seen this time and time again, Jank. I love when it matters and when it doesn't, when it comes to the deficit and the debt.

So look, this is one as obvious as Fox News, not doing actual news, but this one, the Main Street media takes 10,000 times even more seriously, right? And they're like, oh, no, no, they always say Republicans want to cut the debt. Republicans want to cut the deficit. Well, that's just empirically, factually incorrect. First of all, they never do. The last Republican president to balance the budget is Dwight Eisenhower. Okay.

So, and so they came up with this theory. No, no, no, we can give trillions to the rich, which is the only reason the Republican Party exists. That's the whole point of it, 100% of it. Racism and all that stuff, it's just a tool to get you in the door. so that you vote for tax cuts for the rich, okay? But back when they came up with this idea, it was so laughable they called the Laffer Curve. It's named after our laffer.

Okay, anyways, it's called Supply Side Economics, trickle down economics, and what the idea was we give trillions to the rich and eventually it trickles down on you. And so we won't have a deficit. It won't add to the debt because the economy will get so uplifted that the money we get, the extra taxes,

we get from the uplifted economy we'll make up for it? Well, at the time, that was a perfect excuse for the rich, because nobody had ever done that because it was so stupid. No one could possibly believe that trickling all over the American people would work, okay, to actually help them. But the media was also corporate media. They're like, oh, yeah, I could totally work. Yeah, absolutely, right? But that was 1980, brothers and sisters. This was 43 years later. The data is in, the jury's in. It's over. It did not. When you cut taxes for the rich, It puts a giant hole in the deficit. Hold on, you're only saying that because it didn't work when Reagan didn't and it didn't work

when Bush did it and it didn't work when Trump did it. That's the only reason you're saying that. In other words, it didn't work anytime anyone's ever done it because it isn't the point. It's a fig leaf, guys. So like if they said to you, hey, we're going to take $2 trillion out of your budget, but don't worry, it'll come back to you later after the rich spend a little bit of it. I mean, would you give them your money? Would you give them 2,000 bucks?

Would you give them 200,000 bucks? And say, hey, don't worry, maybe it'll come back to you later. Of course not. Of course not. It was always a fig leave. But now it's absolutely proven to be not true. So mainstream media should never, ever say that Republicans care about the debt or the deficit. Because it's not true.

You're doing marketing, false marketing on their behalf when you say it. Here they are today, today, saying, oh, we got to cut. Mike Pence today talking about privatizing Social Security, cutting social security, cutting social security in Medicare, brazenly saying, even the host was like, that's the third rail, you sure you want to say that, Mike? Right. And, and they proposed earlier this week, cutting food stamps for the neediest Americans. They want to cut them by $84. So they don't have $84 for you, but they have $175,000 for the richest people in the country. It's a joke. It's only for the rich as they say, oh,

I'm so concerned about the deficit of the debt. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut everything. Make sure the poor don't get anything. Make sure the goddamn middle class don't get at everything. The rich donors, though, we're gonna get you $175,000 apiece. Every year going forward, every year they get an extra $175,000. Is there anyone honest in media? Can you please tell them what the Republican Party is actually for?

Yeah, Sharon. Yeah, I mean, you can't do that when you take the talking points from the party. That's what happens, you know, they take the talking points right from the Democratic or the Republican in this case party. And then they just spit them out. And then they put two people on, they asked a couple of questions, but they don't dig deeper. And the next thing, you know, they will put out more marketing. And they'll say, you know what, they're going to do affordable housing on their private islands. You just have to get there, you know. And so it's a never ending cycle while they change election laws and do whatever they want to do so that we can't even fathom. voting them out and getting rid of these policies. Yeah.

Okay, I'm going to say one last bit of irony. You know, Rick Scott, the guy we showed you in the beginning, a Republican senator from Florida, he ran as in his last campaign, and he says it all the time, that the Democrats want to cut Medicare and he's here to protect Medicare. His company, while he was ahead of it, did the largest Medicare fraud in American history. They paid over a billion dollars in fine, which, which means they stole a lot more from that. By the way, Rick Scott got a $300 million on his way out in stock options.

And then he said, oh, I'm only the CEO. Oh, we had two different sets of books, the real ones and the fake ones. Oh, I didn't know that at all. Golly gee, I guess somebody else was done that. And then the company's like, good job, Rick, good job. Here's $300 million. He literally stole from your grandparents. He saw your grandmother was like, oh, that's a good target.

Let's robber blind. That's how he got rich and famous in the first place. And yet the media tells you, oh, no, Rick Scott says he cares about protecting Medicare. He stole from Medicare. His company stole billions from Medicare. Okay, guys, the Republicans are only in it for the rich. It's not just an opinion. It is empirical data that supports that opinion.

Yet the media goes, I can't tell. I can't tell 50-50. Well, you know, every time we talk about how the media advances this sort of narrative that these tax cuts might be good, might be bad. I always mean to then go check to see if the hosts on cable news would personally benefit from the tax cuts. But I always forget to do it, so I don't know. To give you a sense of it guys last thing, Hannity makes $40 million a year. He would benefit, it wouldn't be just $175,000. It'd be a lot more for him. He stands to make millions of dollars from that tax cut.

So you think Hannity is going to be honest that it's going to screw you guys and you're going to have to pay the bill and they're going to cut your Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to pay for it? Of course not. He's going to lie to you like he does every night. Yeah. All right, we got it. Of course. Yeah.

Yeah, sorry. All right. Everybody, check out. Sharon Reed, Rebel headquarters. Shire. You're awesome. Thank you for joining us today. Appreciate you guys.

Yeah, absolutely. John also exists. damage report. As he hosts that. Sometimes I wish I didn't. 2.2. All right. When we come back, more revelation.

Foxx, this is a bit devastating tonight and even more quotes that are as bad as the ones we've read to you and worse. And has Kerry Lake soured on DeSantis's genitalia? I didn't bring it up. She did. Thanks for listening to the full episode of the Young Turks, support our work, listen to ad-free, access members-only bonus content, and more by subscribing to Apple Podcasts at apple.com at apple.combe. I'm your host, Shank Huger, and I'll see you soon.