The Young Turks - Fires, Felons & Clowns

Episode Date: January 11, 2025

Judge sentences Donald Trump in hush money case but declines to impose any punishment. Supreme Court looks poised to allow ban of TikTok to go through. Republican ‘accidentally’ pitches raising taxes in presentation to House GOP. Hosts: John Iadarola, Yasmin Khan, Maz Jobrani SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE ☞ https://www.youtube.com/@TheYoungTurks FOLLOW US ON: FACEBOOK ☞ https://www.facebook.com/theyoungturks TWITTER ☞ https://twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM ☞ https://www.instagram.com/theyoungturks TIKTOK ☞ https://www.tiktok.com/@theyoungturks 👕MERCH ☞ https:/www.shoptyt.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. At long last, drop it. Welcome one and all to the power panel here at the power panel here at the The Young Turks, we're back. I'm John Ida Rola, very lucky to be joined on the program by contributor to Rebel HQ and my now frequent co-host on the Young Turks. Yasmin Khan, welcome. Hi, happy to be back, John. Glad to have you here. You're proving the

point we made on Wednesday of how much content you do for our network. And here you are. You're welcome. Thank you. And also comedian and actor, an incredibly busy man, as well, Maz Jabrani back again. Thank you, Maas. Happy to be back. Happy to be with both of you. And let's get this going, baby. Let's do it. Let's do it. For anyone who might be worried, yes, Jank and Anna are not here, they are not on fire or anything like that so far as I know. So and the network is bouncing back. Obviously there have been power difficulties in Los Angeles. The air quality is terrible. Some people involved the network have had to evacuate.

And so there is still a little bit of chaos. We're hoping as, you know, as the weekend goes by, as the wind dies down, things will resume a bit of normalcy next week, although it is still entirely possible when the winds return next week that things could get crazy again. So thank you to everybody who's been bearing with us during this difficult period. We do appreciate that. And with that said, we've got a lot to talk about on today's show. We will be giving you a little bit of content related to the fires that continue to burn around Los Angeles as well as a lot of other important news. But we do want to start with one of the most important stories that broke earlier today. Take a look at this.

This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgment of conviction without encroaching upon the highest office in the land is an unconditional discharge. The top legal scholars and legal pundits in this country is ones that have voted all the time on television that are making the views felt and highly respected people. They all said this is a case that should have never been brought. It's an injustice of justice. An injustice of justice. Never call him anything but a poet. Anyway, that's, oh sorry, not just poet, a felon as well. So anyway, it did happen finally today in Donald Trump's hush money case. One of the cases that they allowed to continue,

of until the end. Wasn't that nice of them. That has now, he's been sentenced. The Supreme Court declined to block it, probably only because they knew that he would never be sent to prison, and the sentencing would not stop him from assuming the presidency. So why not allow the facade of the justice system working as a treat for America? And so you got a little bit from the judge there, a little bit of Donald Trump inaccurately and intentionally dishonestly reacting to the sentencing. But like sort of was expected for the last month or so, Judge Juan Mershon did give Trump an unconditional discharge. So he's not going to be going to prison, although he could have, I would say should have spent four years in prison for the crimes he committed.

He won't be on probation, there won't be any fines, at least in this count, despite the 34 felony counts of falsifying business records there. And so we have a statement from a former federal prosecutor says it's essentially a resolution that allows the conviction to stand and preserves the sanctity of the judge's verdict, but ensures that there are very limited consequences stemming from the conviction. And so as we said, he could have gone to prison for four years, arguably if the justice system at the federal and state level had worked at the expeditious rate it would have. If Donald Trump was literally any other American, he would likely be going to prison right now. But we didn't get that. And here is the judge

talking a little bit about some of the reasoning. While one can argue that the trial itself was in many respects somewhat ordinary, the same cannot be said about the circumstances surrounding this sentencing. And that is because of the office you once occupied and which you will soon occupy again. To be sure, it is the legal protections afforded to the office of the president of the United States that are extraordinary. not the occupant of the office. As with every other defendant in your position, it is my obligation to consider any and all aggravating and mitigating factors to inform my decision.

However, the considerable, indeed, extraordinary legal protections afforded by the Office of the Chief Executive is a factor that overrides all others. To be clear, the protection is afforded the office of the president are not a mitigating factor. They do not reduce the seriousness of the crime or justify its commission in any way. I guess, man, I don't know. Look, you can agree or disagree with some of the reasoning there. It certainly seems like it was a mitigating factor.

It was certainly, as he referred to earlier, an aggravating factor. I'm certainly aggravated coming out of this. And I love even what the prosecutor said earlier was this preserves the sanctity of the verdict. So the verdict stands. He committed these crimes. He is a felon. And that's what we can get, I guess. We can point collectively at a rich, powerful person and say, you can't stop us from pointing out that what you did is a crime. Now go be in incredibly powerful and wealthy and suffer no loss of freedom related to the things we've identified are crimes. All of this feels like madness. And we're gonna get to what Donald

Trump has to say about this in a little bit more detail. But yes, I want to go to you first. You surprised by this? Are you happy at all about the verdict? What are you feeling right now? I'm not surprised, but actually it's because the judge said that this is exactly what he was going to do. He did announce that prior so that the rest of us wouldn't be so shocked and disappointed whenever this is exactly what happened. It is good that he was sentenced. He is our felon president now. What a great start to 2025. What a great state start to this 47th presidency as we're heading into it. Trump had tried to get this thing postponed until after he completed his second term as president. But they keep acting as if this is such a stain on his presidency

that he's our first felon president. Who cares? You know, like no real consequence has ever come to this guy, right? He's been impeached twice. Doesn't matter, right? He was able to keep office during his first term, and then he was elected to a second term. So it really doesn't matter. All these things that used to hold some kind of weight and some kind of importance to the American people and to our institutions and government simply don't anymore. Any kind of pride that we had in our nation, any pride that we had in the integrity of the presidency as a role, not so much as the president, the person itself, but as a institution, all that seems to have evaporated with Trump. And it's because we let it, right? It's because we let this person occupy

that position in our country. So here we are. He's a felon. Great. It doesn't change a whole lot. And Trump is going to continue to go on with his life. He's going to be able to continue to be our president. When Trump won the election, I was just done. I said, he won. All of this screaming and yelling and all this stuff and going after him, he won. And the truth is, I stopped watching the news after that day. And I haven't watched MSNBC since because I see people yelling and screaming.

And this is what we've got to do to stop him and stop him from ruining democracy. And yet somehow he won. And we all know what a horrible human being he is. And we all know that he deserves to be prosecuted for bigger crimes that he committed, January 6 being the biggest, where he actually attempted a coup. And yet he won and he's in this position where he gets a slap on the wrist. I ran a red light on my bicycle when I was a teenager. And this cop gave me a ticket.

And I had to go to court with my grandfather. and basically plead guilty or whatever and pay a fine. He didn't even pay a fine. I ran a red line on a bicycle. He stole elections. He didn't pay a fine. And so whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, if you care about the rule of law

and the fact that no one needs, should be above the law, it should bother you. And yet a lot of Republicans have decided that it doesn't bother them. They defend him everywhere. where they can. And the Supreme Court itself has said he is above the law. And so there's no pleasure. I don't take any pleasure in seeing him get this quote unquote sentence or whatever it was.

And by the way, when the judge found me guilty of running a red light on my bicycle, I thank the judge. And I said, thank you, Your Honor, for seeing me and thank you for your decision. And I paid the fine. I left. Trump didn't even say, you know what? Thank you. We're done. No, he complained on the way out and claims that he's going to somehow appeal it again. I don't know where to. So it's just, if I had hair, I would pull it out. Yeah, there's, yeah, exactly. We're going to play some of that tape of him in just a little bit. But no, he's never had to own up to any of it. Just the system will protect people like him, but especially him. Parts of the system that he put into place,

Eileen Cannon, those sorts of things. Parts of the system he didn't. Parts of the system that were put there by Democrats are tripping over themselves to protect Donald Trump from the consequences of the actions that he's taken. And despite the fact that this guy has been more protected than anyone else in American history, from all these crimes he committed in full plain view that everyone knows that he committed, he also whines more than anyone else in history, and that will continue as well. And I know that, you know, there's a lot of people that are frustrated by this.

There's also, you know, Maga people that are happy about it. And I feel terrible for them that they are happy at this result. I feel terrible for them that they have either willingly or unwillingly been so successfully conned by Donald Trump and by right wing media. They've been duped and propagandized to that these people who, if you ask them, like, you're against the status quo, right? You're against the powerful and the elites and all that. They'd be like, yeah, that's the core of who I am. And I think it's awesome that every single judge in America is working hard to make sure that Donald Trump doesn't pay the consequences

of literally anything that he's done. I hate these contradictions that they've willingly taken to heart. This is a massive injustice. And I'm not just mad at them. Like I said, Democrats too, Merrick Garland and all those involved in these cases that slow rolled it and brought it to the point where they would have plausible deniability to be like, well, we don't want to get involved by, like, you know, sentencing him for the crimes he committed. All of them bear responsibility for this. But as I said, Donald Trump has a little bit more whining to do on his way out. So let's take a look. This has been a very terrible experience. I think it's been a tremendous setback for New York and the New York court system. It's been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage

my reputation so that I'd lose the election and obviously that didn't work. The fact is that I'm totally innocent. I did nothing wrong. They talked about business records and the business records were extremely accurately counted. I had nothing to do with them any of that was done by an accountant or bookkeeper. I just want to say, I think it's an embarrassment to New York and New York has a lot of problems, but this is a great embarrassment. And I'd just like to who exclaimed that I was treated very, very unfairly. And I thank you very much. He is arguably the only person in America in all of this who wasn't treated unfairly. All the rest of us were treated unfairly. He gets to go off scot-free.

I'm innocent, I didn't do it. No, you did it. We know. Michael Cohen spent three years in prison doing the thing you ordered him to do. You effed a woman who wasn't your wife and then you were so scared that it would get out and that people would know about it when I want to want to be president that you sent your fixer, your goon to go pay her off. That's what you did. You did it. It was an intentional thing. And it's super weird to this day that none of these Republicans cared all about any of it. You know, not the family values people. They don't care about the affair or whatever or the fact that he's never had to account for that in

his personal life. They don't care about the fact that he was concealing the information from them. He didn't want Republicans to know what he had done. He didn't want them to have accurate information. He's saying that this trial was to damage his reputation. All of the crimes, these crimes he committed was to preserve the myth of his reputation that had been crafted by PR firms and television and all of that. He talks about election interference. Dispatching Michael Cohen to pay off a woman that you effed was election interference. That's why you did it to modify the results of an election. And now look, it's not to say that there's not going to be any consequences from this at all. You've got the label. I guess that's symbolic or whatever.

I'm gonna jump ahead to graphic four. So as a felon, technically right now, he won't be allowed to have a gun under federal law. He has to provide a DNA sample to the state's crime data bank, and he can't hold state public office. So I don't know if he cares about any of that. I'm sure conservatives will be up at arms that he can't own a gun. If any of them are listening, He doesn't care because he doesn't like guns, dude. He pretends to occasionally because he knows it's important to you. He doesn't care about any of that stuff. He's a New York City businessman.

He's not a big shooter or whatever. He has to provide a DNA sample. Theoretically, I'm sure there's a lot of places around the country where he's freely distributed that behind his wife's back. You could have gotten it from there instead, but I guess he'll have to make it a little bit easier for them. And he can't hold state public office as if he ever would. So the entire thing just feels like such a farce with the whining and the

complaining, Maz. Any other thoughts about this? Yeah, it's very disheartening. And the fact is he hasn't even been inaugurated yet. So it's just starting. I don't even know my, it blows my mind to think about what is coming down the pike. And by the way, the one thing I will say is one of the main reasons he lost in 2020 was because he was able to be president for four years. And we saw what a bad job he did, especially with his mishandling of COVID. So I'm looking forward to seeing how he drops the ball on the major things that are coming down the line. He will definitely fumble and hopefully enough people that decided to vote for him now would realize that what an incompetent schmuck the guy is. I hope so. Yeah, yeah,

I want you to respond to all that, but also the idea that in theory, there are some countries that won't allow a felon in. Do you think that's the likelihood? What do you think about these consequences? Well, he's not allowed to be to hold any kind of state office, but he can certainly run the country. And these other countries that, you know, don't allow a felon in, they're going to make an exception for him. We know that they are, because that's what happens in his life. Everybody makes exceptions for him. He ran an entire presidential campaign just so he wouldn't have to go to jail. That is a lot of work to do just to not go to jail. I have never been to jail, John, but I did hear that the first rule

is that you're never supposed to admit that you're guilty. I learned that from Shawshank, but Trump has already been found guilty and he's not going to jail, right? He doesn't need to keep asserting his innocence to us. It clearly doesn't matter. We've all seen the evidence of his guilt. We were all following the trial. His supporters don't care whether or not he's guilty or innocent because they'll support him anyway. And they already believe that it was a witch hunt or whatever it was that he told them to believe about it. They voted for him. He won the election. Why is he still yelling? You know, but John, you know, we are, what are we cynical and naive? And we will have a very interesting four years ahead of us. I know we were talking

before the show and we're already so exhausted. But that's the thing is that's what they want. And, you know, they're off to a great start. Yeah, 100%. Well, we're going to try to resist it. You You know, there's a lot of caffeine around. I'm going to be dabbling in it. Also, by the way, I know some people who are worried if he'd be able to vote, he will be able to vote. And I personally think that, you know, the felons should be able to vote. I think people in prison should be able to vote. I don't, I've never heard an argument for why they shouldn't.

They made any sense to me other than that they're bad. So he will be able to continue to vote in Florida specifically. And I feel certain that he will vote the way that he always has by mail, just for a little bit more irony. Also, I just want to mention it, we got the results of our poll. So we asked, should the judge have sentenced Trump to jail? And 77% of you said yes, 22% said no. So I don't know, I kind of wish we had to broken down to no, because I don't think there should be any consequences or no, because now it would be interfering with the fact

that he was already elected. I don't know for sure. I understand people that think it would spark political violence or whatever. I totally understand all that stuff. That's why I would say the DOJ really should have moved slightly faster than like Mitch McConnell in a race on this entire thing. But I will also say again, one last appeal to some of the conservatives or whatever. Like I again, I know that you think that you put Trump in power to fight the status quo, the establishment. But I am here to tell you, man, the machine you think

you're in a rebellion against wants Donald Trump in there. They want him in there because he's going to cut their taxes massively. He's going to transfer literally trillions of dollars to them. And I would personally say, if you want to fight this machine, start demanding that powerful people get locked up when they break the law, you know, when they do insider trading, when they flout, you know, election laws and campaign finance. And by the way, there's a ton of stuff that's currently legal that I think should be illegal. Spending $250 million in an election should get you put behind bars for the rest of your life, if for no other reason than for your own safety. Okay, because that's an insane thing to do. Start.

locking up powerful people. If they had put Donald Trump behind bars, you know what effect that would have had? The next time someone who has skeletons in their closet decides to run for president, they'll know, oh, I can't just pay people off to hide it. Unfortunately, now that's not the lesson they're going to learn. The lesson they're going to learn is I need to do it, and then I just need to win. And as long as I win, it's fine because I'll be president, and then everything's legal at this point. But right now, why would anyone not pay people off? $10,000 here, $100,000 there, they're all millionaires anyway. Why should we ever know anything about what they did? Because so many Americans are going to willingly accept the fact

that he hasn't had to pay the price for this. When we allow them to break the law, we tell the next generation that they should be just as corrupt and just as brazen as Donald Trump was. Anyway, we need to take our first break. Lots more to come after this. Welcome back one on all to the first hour of the Young Turks Power panel, Maz Yaz here. Thank you guys. You feel up to a little bit more news? Sure. Social media developments. I know everybody's like, what platform should I use? Meta sucks now. Well, the list is growing shorter. So why don't we jump into this?

It's being reported that the SCOTUS consideration of the bill that would effectively outlaw TikTok inside of the United States, they're probably going to allow it to go forward. See, Donald Trump had been pressuring them not to do that. And in fact, to postpone this consideration. So they didn't do that. And now they've been having the arguments. And the word like from those listening to it is that they seem to be accepting the government's case here. And so here's what you need to know about all this. If you're a user of the app and you want to know whether you're going to be able to use it and for how much longer. The ban is currently set for January 19th. So today the Supreme Court heard the arguments both for and against that ban. And it's expected that they're going to expedite the ruling on whether the ban can go forward, which they sort of need to because they only have nine days until it's about to happen. So we expect next week to probably hear what their actual ruling is going to be. And so if you haven't been following this, this legislative path, Congress passed and Joe Biden signed a bill to require bite dance, which is the parent company that owns the app TikTok as well as other apps to divest from it. And if they don't, TikTok would be removed from the app store, which would not literally take it off of your phone. You'd still be able to use it.

But because these app stores would not be allowed to host the app, they also wouldn't be allowed to update the app. And so it would eventually become outdated and cease to function. There are also some things having to do with like cloud storage of information that bite dance implies once that's shut down, that would also stop the app from functioning. So there's multiple reasons to think that it might not last much longer once the ban goes through. And so there were a lot of arguments that were being thrown around. The justices expressed concerns initially that the law was in tension with the First Amendment. That's one of the cases that TikTok, the lawyers for TikTok are making. But the government offered two rationales for the law. One, to combat covert disinformation from China and barring it from harvesting private information from Americans. So the court was divided over whether the first justification was sufficient to justify the ban, but several did seem troubled by the possibility that China could use data called from the app for espionage or blackmail. And several justices were skeptical about a major part of the government's justification, that being that China might covertly

make TikTok manipulate the content, the algorithm effectively, that Americans would see see or collect user data to achieve its geopolitical aims. And that's the thing that you've probably heard quite a bit, including on Fox News. Here's Brian Kilmead, Kilmead recently making a version of that argument. Most young people are getting the news from TikTok. They have a great algorithm, they have a great business plan. But try to find some pro-Israel stories on the timeline on the news feed for TikTok. Now if the tariffs go against China, you watch slowly but surely a lot of the pro-tariff talk will take a lower profile to the pro tariff talk, to the anti-tariff talk because it goes to China. Do you want China controlling the number one news feed for the next generation of Americans?

Okay, so he started off making what seemed like a legal argument, and then in the end, it seemed like he was just advocating for censorship. That's kind of what it sounded like. Isn't it weird that the kids on TikTok aren't being nice enough to Israel? And I love the premise of his second part, by the way, that soon will hear less pro tariff talk on TikTok, which is a thing that the kids are doing now, I guess. I don't think that Brian Kilmaid uses TikTok. But anyway, yes, I want to start with you. We don't know for sure what the Supreme Court is going to do. And it's also possible, by the way, that the app could be legalized through later legislation. There's a few things that could be done. But what do you make of its

chances at this point? It does seem like it's going to go away on the 19th. At least that is what the, the way the Supreme Court justices seem to be leaning. And as he did mention, there are some ways that we could still have TikTok. They could still negotiate for an American buyer and a few other things. But, you know, I feel like this audience knows by now that I don't really love social media or TikTok in general. And, you know, I feel a little bit like the Michael Jackson thriller meme where I'm just

like sitting back and watching and eating my popcorn, which is crazy for some of who does my job. But I do think it's interesting that all of this is going down at around the same time that meta is now declining to fact check its post on its platforms while also flooding its platforms with bots. So it's going to make it, if Facebook was a cesspool before it's going to be even more so. And it almost seems like he's doing this in an effort to just inflate numbers, right? If you have a bunch of fake users, you can claim, oh, look, there's so much engagement, but it's not people who are on it. So part of me takes a little bit of comfort in that because if you get on Facebook these days, it is crazy. It's a crazy place, right? You look in

comment sections and you can already see that it is full of bots. You'll read the exact same comment multiple times in a thread. And at first, I just thought that people were really unoriginal, but then you're like, no, these aren't even real people. And these are fake. And that's supposed to get even worse. So overall, the experience on these platforms is worse, right? You don't want to be on it. The social aspect of social media is dwindling and it's being deliberately dwindled down. And you sort of mentioned this earlier, John, when you said that there would be less platforms for people to use now, if they keep eliminating them on whatever grounds. And as much as I don't like social media, I will agree that that's not necessarily a good thing. The thing that's

supposed to make capitalism somewhat just is competition. Instead, we are constantly eliminating competition these days. And you especially see that in the tech industry and you especially see that in media where all these big billionaires are buying out media companies, etc. So it doesn't set up for a very hospitable landscape for free thought, despite what Zuckerberg is going everywhere talking about. Yeah. Mouse? Yeah, look, first of all, the good news is if someone has a podcast, They can, you know, start their podcast TikTok, which is where they talk about tics. Finally, they got the title. It's theirs.

They won't get in trouble. Just put it out there. If anybody wants to do a podcast about ticks, today's your day. John and I are from Connecticut. We should do that podcast. We should. We should. Blind disease updates twice a week.

It's an idea. Yeah, I'm on TikTok. I don't understand. it. I post something that I think is the most, the best stand-up bit I've ever done in my entire life and it gets five views. And then I post something that I'm like, this thing's stupid and it gets millions of views. So I don't understand it. I don't get how it works. I can see how it could be manipulated, obviously. Like, you know, if I were to go on there and say, you know, China is trying to take over Taiwan or whatever, I can't imagine, you know, China being the government

that it is, how they could manipulate it. control it. I wonder if is are our our social media is Instagram and Facebook and all those are those in China or not? Do we know? The the algorithms? Can people get Instagram and China and use this? Oh, I see what you're saying of I I don't know. So I wonder if the I wonder if the reverse if they'll do retaliatory bans. Yeah, maybe they could. Yeah, but also and also like we could manipulate their politics. I mean, it's just, you know, just like Yaz was saying,

these companies have so much power and they have so much of our information. I mean, this idea of, you know, saying, oh, TikTok is, you know, calling information from you and, and, you know, getting your, you know, knows who your friends are and all, all the apps do that. When you, when you go on any app, it says, can I have access to your phone book? And a lot of times you're like, sure, why not? Yeah, he's just moving forward. So it seems like a bit of an uphill battle here in terms of, unless if you're able to just unplug. I personally think that they're going to find some way, because I know that going back to the fact that Donald Trump is about making deals and he's all about, he's a grifter, I think there's going to be, because the owner of Bight Dance had gone down to Marlago and paid a visit to him, I feel like there's going to be.

Yes. Yeah, there's going to be some, some back channel talks or some way to to get this. Yes. So, you know. It is definitely possible. So Jeff, yes, at least at one point last year, had a 7% stake in the parent company. It was about $21 billion. So he's not like the singular owner, but he's a big investor. And so he definitely seems like he leaned on Donald Trump. And he's given tons of money to Republican candidates and organizations. And so the entire thing feels, Trump's switch on it, feels. utterly corrupt. He was calling for the app to be banned. Then they handed over a bunch of money to his party, and now he's the biggest advocate for it. This is, this is just bribery. That's all it is, legalized bribery. But that said, it could be effective bribery because there are a couple paths to keeping TikTok functioning. So the Supreme Courts could actually strike down the ban, that it's still possible. Also, they could allow the ban to go forward, and Donald Trump could just not enforce it. He could tell the DOJ, don't actually

fine or penalize in any way Apple or Android or whatever if they leave TechDoc on it. Now, legal analysts believe that they would be unlikely to expose themselves to even theoretical legal trouble. So they probably would take it down. But he could just not enforce it. Also, he could pressure the Republicans to pass new legislation allowing it to return. Now, that would take a lot of doing because Republicans, almost every single Republican in the House voted for the ban. They voted at higher rates than the Democrats did. But he also has the entire party in an absolute stranglehold. So maybe he could get them to do that.

And as one of you did reference, this could be the stimulus of the trigger point for by dance to actually do the divesting, which they have not shown any interest or effort in doing, but maybe after this they would. And so there's still a lot of ways that it could potentially still be available. But we've moved closer to it shutting down. And I would also just say, like I don't regularly use TikTok anymore either just because I, I I can't use social media anymore. I have a newborn and it's just, I don't know how anybody posts with a Todd Thur. It's just too much work and I'm too too tired.

And that's that I understand the concerns about them potentially manipulating the algorithm. But but I also think like what social media platform are they not doing that on? I'm not saying like the communist party or whatever, but has anybody seen what's happened to Twitter over the last couple of years? Like they're algorithm, like he's financially incentivizing people to be racist, transphobic trolls. On threads they were like, yeah, we're not doing politics. You can post about it, but we're not going to give it to anybody. Is that not manipulating the algorithm? Like now they're backing up a little bit on that.

But there's no, the social media companies are so large and they cost so much money to set up and run that the only people that can set them up are incredibly wealthy people who are about as biased as you can possibly be towards the status quo, hordes, you know, stuff that's going to benefit corporations and the wealthy. And so, like, yeah, it's easy to point to TikTok and be like, they've got a vested interest in certain politics, but what platform doesn't at this point? And honestly, I would need to hear a better argument for why, like, I don't even think the bias of TikTok can compare to what I see this week out of Mark Zuckerberg. He seems way more biased. And he's manipulating those platforms more than the Chinese Communist Party. I trust the Chinese Communist Party a thousand times more than I trust Elon Musk in terms of what effect he's going to have on a social media platform.

So I don't know, call me crazy, but that's the way I think. And when California in a couple of weeks comes crawling back for federal assistance, Trump should say, listen, I'm not going to give you a dime unless you fire the lesbian Christians. Okay, so that's a very strange thing for a person to be paid millions of dollars a year to say. But lesbians exist, and that continues to bother Charlie Kirk on a very deep level. He's never going to actually articulate because he can't articulate how someone being a lesbian would mean that they're not capable of running a fire department. He is just assuming that the people he screeches at every day will agree right off the bat that that is true. And if they're not lesbians, then God help us if they were black or Hispanic or something.

He would have an automatic problem with that too. And so Donald Trump should do, according to Charlie Kirk, what Donald Trump has said he'd do, which is because California is a blue state, because LA is pretty liberal, he should block them from getting aid unless they bend over backwards for him. him. So Charlie Kirk is saying that Donald Trump should do to LA what no Democratic president would ever do it to a red state to a red city, you know, perhaps that's experienced horrendous winter storms in the case of Texas or hurricanes in the case of North and South Carolina and Florida or again Texas. You know, if a train were to derail in a rural area where there's

a lot of conservatives, no Democrat would ever manipulate those people. No, what they would do, What they do do is they jump to it and they get them the aid that they need. That's what every president should do. Charlie Kirk wants to change that. The norm should no longer be that everyone is deserving of the aid of the federal government. Now, no, elections have consequences. And so your side gets aid and the other side doesn't. What Charlie Kirk wants is in four years when the collective failures of the Trump administration almost necessarily result in the White House being taken by a Democrat. He wants that Democrat to be just as vindictive and biased and partisan when it comes to allocating federal aid under him

as Donald Trump will be for the next four years. And so conservatives are probably cheering for the bias that Charlie Kirk is advocating for right now, but understand that he's setting the stage for the Democrats in theory to do the same thing to them in the future. I think that's wrong. I want everyone to get helped by the federal government. Unfortunately, Charlie Kirk doesn't see it that way. Maz, I want to go to you. You're in the LA area. I'm sure you've seen a whole lot of right wingers attacking those in LA,

mocking people who've been struggling, implying that they deserve in some way, their own suffering. What do you make of all this? Yeah, first of all, the blame game, listen, there will be people and things and climate change and other things to blame and look at and prepare hopefully better for what's coming down the pike and it's going to happen this is now an annual thing so we really need to step that up a bit but but the fact that they're jumping to this blame game at a time when people are suffering and they need to be uh you know showing sympathy and empathy and really coming together as a country that's the problem is there used to be a time when a tragedy happened both parties would come

together as a country and they would be there for the victims now right away Donald Trump from day one started, you know, in a derogatory fashion, blaming Gavin Newsom. And he has this, his theory of clearing the brush and all that stuff. You know, meanwhile, the, the Palisades fire was in a residential area. It wasn't in the woods. I'm not sure where it got started. But, but again, there's many things and issues to blame. But these guys are going after their usual talking points. The whole thing of the DEI hire. saying that the police chief who's a female is incompetent. I mean, Jesse Waters, there was a clip of him saying something along those lines about,

oh, I hope these women that are running this fire department know what they're doing, basically saying you have to be, only white males should be firemen. That's what they think. And if they were firemen, they would have saved us. And if we had a Republican governor, he would have saved us. I mean, it's just all this mumbo-jumbo, this whole thing of Donald Trump talking about, like Gavin Newsom is not bringing water to Southern. California because he's trying to save the Delta Smelt, which is a fish that has a funny name,

Delta Smelt. But that's not true. They just they say things that aren't true. And part of it is they really do this thing of like if you remember, I think it was when there was hurricanes of Florida or something and Trump came out and said, oh, Biden's not going to send relief because it's a red state. They do this thing where they where they project what they the way they act onto the other party same thing when they say oh Biden was weaponizing the DOJ and now Trump is saying I want to go after my opponents and so similarly when we're here and Charlie Kirk is saying oh he should withhold this money it is ridiculous it is divisive and by the way California taxes pay for a lot of of what happens in a lot of these red states,

meaning their benefits and all that stuff. Like the amount that we contribute to the economy is so big that, hey, two can play this game. Don't give us a relief. We won't give you our, we'll just keep all our taxes and you can go on your own. I mean, Charlie Kirk is a real stupid idiot. Yeah, nice, nice way to finish that off.

The tone changed there at the end, but I throw me off. What do you think? What took me? I went around and finally I was like, oh, that's what I meant to say. Thank you. I'm glad you got there eventually, Maas. But you know, like I don't care what sexual orientation or race or gender identity someone has or is.

I literally just care whether or not they can do the job and if they can do their job well, right? But Trump has already said that he wouldn't give aid to California to fight wildfires because he just wants to stick it to Gavin Newsom because, as Maas mentioned, they're having a dispute over the Delta smelt. But conservatives who follow and admire people like Charlie Kirk are, I think, to Maz's point, just not smart people. And they're probably not very nice people. Because nice people don't say things like this. They don't want these things for other people. They don't look at people who are suffering and think, that's probably your fault. Look, if they want to have a real conversation, if they want to talk about the failings of the

Democratic Party, the Democrats will be the first ones to tell them. We will happily tell you, you what is wrong with the Democratic Party. We're not happy with the party's leadership right now. We're not happy about the direction of the party or of the country. We can have that conversation with them. But whatever they're doing, no, I don't want to talk to them. I don't want to talk about that. I don't want to even be around someone who thinks and feels these things. And this is where I think the crux of the divide happens in this country between the two parties is like, I'm really turned off by these people because they say things that I feel are not decent things that decent people would ever say. And they feel the same way about us on this side

for for some reason. Yeah, despite the fact that again, we don't do it. Like, and I agree. I want us to continue to be decent. We could do the exact same thing that they're doing, you know. They're like, well, California's got a fire. So obviously it's those goddamn lesbians in charge. Or maybe if it's not the lesbians, then it's Gavin Newsom. Get Gavin Newsom better resign because he was the governor when there was a big fire and obviously when there's a big fire as a governor, you resign, which is why Greg Abbott resigned last year when Texas experienced the biggest wildfire in literal state history. Remember everybody when the Smokehouse Creek fire burned more than a million acres? And Greg Abbott was like, I can't believe that I failed to such an epic degree. I'm Audi

5,000. You remember everybody when that happened? No, I don't remember it. And they received aid. But honestly, they probably shouldn't. Biden should have said, no, you guys keep making these mistakes. like you do that separate power grid thing and that's why you you have brownouts throughout the summer and then you don't winterize your electricity so that's why you lose power during the winter so we'll give you aid once you re-hook up to the national power grid you know because we all act like that we could do that we could say we're not giving Florida hurricane aid until they clear out coastal areas shut down Mar-a-lago it's too much of a risk it's going to cost too much money when it gets destroyed so you got to clear all that out and then maybe we'll give you

you hurricane aid. Now, we won't do that because we are decent, but we could, you know, and every time we get pushed around like this, I think more and more Democrats think maybe we should try doing it the other way. Anyway, we're gonna take our second break, more to get to on the other side of this. Let's jump right into this. At a lunch for Republicans in Congress this week, Jody Arrington, who is the head of the budget committee in the House, was showing off slides that he has with ideas. And who doesn't want to go to a lunch that turns into an impromptu slideshow? But forgetting that, one of the slides caused utter chaos because the idea was just too crazy to be born.

So get this, he proposed, if you can believe it, raising the corporate tax rate. I know, I know, utterly insane. Don't worry, it was not on purpose. He claims that the slide made it into his presentation by, quote, mistake. And he emphasized that a tax hike on corporations, quote, wasn't even on the table when it comes to solutions to shrink the budget deficit. So that's funny. The idea that he has to apologize for being like, hey, we need to raise money. What if we were to raise money? No, no, no, no, that's crazy. We obviously. can't do that. Also, how did it get into your presentation by mistake? Did you make the presentation or did you not? What do you have like a weirdly reasonable intern? Or did

like, did you outsource this to chat GPT? And chat TPT was like, dude, why are you getting on my back? You said you need to raise money. I just proposed that we do that. This is, this is what AI does to people. But anyway, some of the stuff that they do want to do and the reason that they're in the difficult situation they are and having to come up with out of the box ideas is that Extending the Trump tax cuts, which is literally the only thing they really care about doing, is projected to cost more than $4 trillion over a decade. That's what it's projected to do. I just want to remind everyone that the initial estimates of the first round of Trump tax cuts cost way more than they said they would. So 4 trillion is the estimate. And so they still want

to do it. They want to preserve the 21% corporate tax rate when Trump cut almost in half the tax rate on corporations, they want to do that. And so they also say they're going to cut that more, they're going to cut taxes on the individual rich more, and they don't want to raise the deficit or the national debt. Now, I'm not a mathematician, but it doesn't sound like that's possible to do. So one of these things is not going to happen. I'll let you guess which one they don't actually care about. But anyway, he did give a few ideas and we can talk about what they're actually proposing doing. But Maz, I want to start with you. It's pretty funny that he was getting criticized for a totally reasonable idea by mistake. God forbid a corporation pays

a tax. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's pretty nuts. I mean, what's crazy too is that, you know, I see a lot of Republicans complain and it's a grievance culture that exists and they go, we need more of this, we need more of that, we need to do this, we need to do that, but there's no way to pay for any of it. Bringing it back to the Los Angeles fires, there's all this talk right now about how there was budget cuts from the fire department. Well, yes, I too would like more firefighters. I too would like a more robust fire department, but that would mean we need to raise more money and or allocate those to something like that. So in this case, we're talking on the federal level and we're talking about these tax breaks. And again, it's this, it's the thing we're going

into this election. I mean, I think people tried to point out in many logical ways how a Harris administration would have been better for us than a Trump administration. And one of those ways was when they talked about the debt that each will cause with their economic plans. And the Trump debt was a lot more than the Harris debt. And people don't seem to care because as long as I'm getting my tax breaks now, I don't care if the future generations are in debt and their suffering. So, yeah, they just keep, you know, even there was that famous clip of Elon Musk at some rally where the guy asked him, he goes, how much do you think we can cut from the national,

from the debt? And he goes, I don't know, two trillion, three trillion. and he jumps up and down, and they just, they say things like it's, it could just happen miraculously. And then to your point, when a slide shows up in a presentation, that actually is a way to raise money, they all have a big fit. Yeah, 100%. Like you said, it was, it's comical. I had my mic muted while you were talking, John, but I was laughing throughout the whole story, just the backpedaling of it all. It is ridiculous, right?

It feels farcical because it is. We all have the same problems in this country and generally speaking. And there are such obvious solutions to these problems or such obvious culprits as to, you know, reasons as to why we're suffering with these things that we're suffering from. Granted, the best solutions to these problems may not be the easiest or the quickest to implement and they're big problems. They took a long time to get so big. They're going to take a long time to reverse if that's what we're actually trying to do.

But it feels like politicians, especially Republican politicians these days, would rather just dance circles for years, for decades, around these obvious solutions, rather than just simply implementing any of them, right? And it's so frustrating because the American people have very, a lot of consensus on a lot of different issues, on gun control, for example, that's one where most Americans feel like there should be some kind of gun control in this country. But instead, every time there's a mass shooting, every time there's a school shooting, we have to do this. This dance, right? They have to come out and say, oh, it's so sad, but too bad, we can't do anything about it. There are obvious solutions to these problems. And they act like those solutions are so far out of reach. And the reason is they just don't want to do it. And they would rather just kind of look dumb and look like they can't see the obvious thing rather than just do the thing. Because to do the thing would mean that it would hurt them personally. And God forbid, they can't possibly live a life that's a little bit less privileged than the one that they currently live. Yeah, the entire thing is so frustrating, like that they, they could not be clear that the only thing they care about is doing these tax cuts. That's effectively all they did the first time around. That's what they're going to do this time around. And they've got, they've got millions of their voters who will never benefit from this cheering it.

Or they've got them so distracted by how horny they are to control Greenland or whatever that they don't even notice that that's the actual priority, which doesn't make any sense. And I know many of them will think, like if they hear this, no, it's good. Because like if we cut their taxes down to like 5%, then I'll benefit in some way. Like they'll hire more people. That's not how it works. They don't hire people because they've got money burning a hole in their pocket. They hire literally the least number of people they have to to continue their business. They don't even hire as many people as they need to.

Have you been in a target and looked for help? They're not hiring despite having massive profits. Well, oh, that's fine. Well, they'll have more money so the price of the goods and services will go down. Is that the experience you had through the first four years of Trump? And the taxes are still as low as they were? Is that the experience we've all had collectively over the last decade? They don't lower prices unless they need to and they haven't felt that they need to.

All they do with all that excess money and it's a lot of money that they've had an excess of over the last decade is they use it to buy up their own stock. And the reason they do that is to jack up the price of the stock, which is a great thing to do if you're a wealthy a whole who owns a lot of stock. But for regular conservatives who think that this somehow advances their own economic interests, you probably don't have much, if any stock. Not most Americans don't. So it by design will not benefit you. It benefits the wealthy and just the wealthy. But, and I'll close on this, they do need to raise some money at least. I mean, they mostly don't care about the deficit or the debt while Republicans are in charge.

That goes back decades. They massively raise the national debt under Trump. Not a single, Fox News never even mentioned it. So here's what they're gonna do. I'm gonna jump ahead a little bit. Graphic three. Errington himself is pushing for trillions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and discretionary spending over the next decade. You know what the government does that actually benefits regular people. They're cutting that, as well as controversial changes to food stamps and federal welfare programs. There are There are countless millions of conservatives who rely on those programs, they're going to be screwed over so the corporations that are already making billions of dollars in profit every

year can make even more billions of dollars. Or sorry, maybe he's not serious about doing those things. Maybe those slides were mistakes or whatever, but at least that seems like that's what his plan is. And that is what they always do, okay? A Republican administration is two things. It's a bunch of distractions about migrants and trans people or whatever and fear mongering to hide the fact that they get in to transfer trillions of dollars from the poorest people in the country and from middle class people to those who already have the most. That's what they do every time. They did it with George W. They did it with Reagan. They did it with George W. They did it with Trump the first time and they're going to do it again. You can take that to the bank. You won't have much else to take to the bank because they're going to take all your money. But you can take that promise to the bank. Any final thoughts before we end the show? Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, millions of Americans, as I said earlier, they support these programs that are going to be cut. Or as you said, millions of Americans at least rely on these programs, whether or not they realize that the problem with our, one of the problems with our democratic system here in this country is that once people are, we have a voice in our government once a year, right? For president, once every four years.

And then once they're in there, they can do whatever they want, right? There is no checks and balances on what they're doing while they're in office, right? The only check really is that maybe we won't reelect you. But the thing is, as long as enough Americans aren't paying attention on election day, then they probably will get it reelected because everybody likes to vote back in an incumbent. So they can do whatever they want. They're not going to feel any consequences of it because the American public is too ill-informed about our political process.

And they're also working to make sure that we are continually less informed than we were even back in November, because they're going to make sure that there's all kinds of misinformation and disinformation on all of our media platforms, on our social media platforms. So buckle in, you guys, 2025 is going to get weird. And I'll say quickly that it's amazing what a job the Republican Party has done to convince their constituents and their base that they're looking out for them. And then these programs that they want to cut are the programs they're going to affect a lot of their constituents and their base, and they convince them by saying, God forbid, we help somebody

in need. Then we're socialists. We're communists. God forbid, we hand out some help for somebody who's suffering a single mom who's got a bunch of kids and she's trying to raise them. You know, that's such a socialist, communist thing to do. You know who we should give breaks to? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. That's who deserves breaks. They deserve a little bit of help. At long last, they deserve a little bit of help. Well, that is unfortunate all the time we have for the first hour of the show. Maz, Yaz, as always, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you here. And Yaz, relax a little bit, okay? Thanks. Put down the company from your broad shoulders, okay?

And relax a little bit. Thank you very much. I will. I'm having some friends over tonight, so I got to go and deal with that now. But. Glad to hear it. Okay, well, that's our hour, everyone. But Ben, Jordan, and Jackson are going to be coming up in the second hour. We're going to take a short break, but there's more news after this.