The Young Turks - House On Fire

Episode Date: December 21, 2024

Congress finally passes a funding bill to avert a government shutdown. The stopgap funding bill slashes funding for cancer research and hospitals. Insurers continue to abandon homeowners as climate shocks intensify." HOST: John Iadarola (@johniadarola), Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur), David Shuster (@DavidShuster) 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. I need it. I need it. Let's go! Gah! Drop it. Drop it. Power, Power, Power Panel, John Iderola, David Schuzer with you guys.

Davis, of course, at Rebel headquarters, and John is at Damage Report. Make sure you're checking out those channels on YouTube and elsewhere. We've got, oh, live from the Polymerger Studios, and we've got amazing stories for you guys. The Republicans are exploding. Why? We'll explain how, we'll explain. And then, and unfortunately we've got portions of the country exploding. Lots going on.

And by the way, today, in the post game, we're going to do the same thing we did yesterday. We're going to have a discussion about, hey, where are we in the political spectrum? Where does T.Y.T. stand. Where does the Young Turks stand? Where should everybody stand? Should we all be fighting? Should we not? Jordan Yule and I are going to have a conversation about that.

And it'll be public to everyone. So make sure you stay around at 8 o'clock when normally. We just go to members only, but today it'll be public for everyone. Okay, so basically a two and a half hour show. That sounds fascinating. It is, it is. I hear that I don't talk to leftists, except that everyone I talk to on air is on the left. Okay.

I'm literally sitting to your left. Yes. All right, so, Josh. Anyway, by the way, there could be breaking news of some sort of massive deal at any moment. And I hope for the country's sake, I guess that that happens. But for our sake, that would really do some damage to a rundown. So let's hope that that does not happen, by the way. But anyway, let's start off with this.

Elon Musk has been absolutely instrumental to bringing the Republicans to the brink of a government shutdown just in time for Christmas. And one of his main tools in doing that has been spreading absolute mountains. of misinformation to his millions of followers. And I want to run through some of the things that if he actually cared about what he was saying was true or not, or had the intellectual curiosity to actually check the claims that trolls send him on Twitter, every one of these things could be instantly debunked. But he did not debunk them or pre-bunk them. He just spread them. And so the misinformation is now out there and millions of people believe it. So he started with a statement that the bill would include, this is the Plan A version of the bill.

from a couple days ago, that that would include a 40% pay increase for Congress. He posted that both to his personal account as well as the Twitter account for his department of government efficiency. And if it's just going to be him posting misinformation on there, I don't know why he needs to have two accounts for that. It's just what he does on his normal thing. But anyway, he claimed there'd be a 40% pay increase. That was a little bit wrong.

It was actually a 3.8% increase, but it's not like he's supposed to be an engineer or anything. and math is tough. So I understand how he can make that mistake. Anyway, the mistake seems to been founded in the belief that their pay would be increased to $243,000. That's not actually true. That was pulled from a report on the effect that we would have had if they had been receiving cost of living adjustments to their congressional salary every year since 1992, which obviously has not been the case. Maybe like an easy thing to correct if you actually cared to look into the numbers, but he just spread it. So another claim

amplified by Trump, by Trump, sorry, I thought I was talking about the president. I'm talking about Musk. People are getting those mistaken these days, is that the bill would prevent any investigation into the House committee that investigated the January 6th Capitol attack. However, the bill's text makes no mention at all of the riot. Again, why it would be a problem that the CR would stop you from looking into people who are just investigating a terror attack. I don't know, but for him that was unacceptable, also untrue. He also alleged that the stopgap bill would fund bio weapons labs. That's because he saw that libs of TikTok had said it.

It of course does not do that because that's crazy. It seeks to provide funds for biocontainment labs. So laboratories that would investigate the spread of disease and ways to counteract it. Not by weapons labs, obviously he didn't apparently care enough to actually look into that one. He also reposted a suggestion that the bill would pave the way for a new DC football stadium. That would be a quote taxpayer funded playground for NFL elites, lobbyists, and VIPs. The bill just transfers control of the site, not actual funds for construction of anything on it. Again, like you could go on and on and certainly on Twitter he did. He posted in one

span 70 times about it and much of it riddled with misinformation that would be fact checked And he just left it up. He didn't seem to care if it was true or not when he spread it. And that would all be well and good if we were just in the hell of like 2022, where he's a rich guy who buys and ruins a social media site. But since he now utterly controls the Republican Party, it seems like it's everyone's problem when he tells these lies, Jank. What do you make of this?

Yeah. So first of all, I'm so curious if he's doing it on purpose or he's just clowning. And I think both are possible because he could just be purposely spreading misinformation to just get everybody riled up and angry like that. 40% pay increase as opposed to a 3.8% increase is a perfect example. So at 3.8% you could still be mad and these politicians don't look like they need a raise. Why don't you just go do some more insider trading. It'll be plenty fine apparently. But it doesn't work as well.

40% increase, what the hell, what, you know, et cetera. So, and maybe he thinks who cares? Like the new media ecosystem is you just spread a lie and it'll go all around the world. By the time truth puts on its boots, you know, it'll get, you know, a quarter of the way around the world in a couple of weeks. And by that time, I've already gotten what I want, right? Well, the bill's already dead. Yeah. And so, and by the way, could be greatly insulting to the people who follow him because he thinks these knuckleheads aren't going to figure.

it out, right? I don't know. Or he himself is an uncle head. And he's like, who cares about doing your homework? Who cares about checking? Who cares if it's 4% or 40%. Well, brother, you got to care if it's 4% or 40%. And you got to care if it's biocontainment or bio weapons. It's kind of a giant difference, right? So, but either one of those scenarios is not good news. Either he's purposely spreading misinformation or he's wildly careless in how he spreads misinformation without even double checking with anyone, right? I mean, you're the richest man in the world, presumably you could hire a gazillion people to check for you.

Like hey, I'm about to tweet this, give me an answer in five seconds, 15 seconds. Is it right or is it not right? I tweeted it, okay, hurry up, hurry up, you can do anything you want, right? No, not checking, just wildly throwing out misinformation. Not off to a strong start, David. I just want to say, regardless of whether it's 40% or 4%, to me, the math that is the real problem is something that most of us learned in third grade, and that is how to count to 51. And if you, I don't know, know anything about our U.S. Senate, you need 51 votes in order to get something done in the Senate, 218 to get anything done in the House. That seems to be too much for Elon Musk.

Not only as he's a clown or perhaps an idiot or deliberate, but he has literally done, doesn't have any idea, no idea how our government. works. He may be great about making trillions of dollars, but he doesn't know a damn thing about how anything gets through the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate. And I have a theory that perhaps Donald Trump is deliberately putting Elon Musk out there because maybe Donald Trump wants Elon Musk to fail, wants him to fail right now before Donald Trump actually takes office. And Elon Musk is proving that he is torpedoing what the government is trying to do. This was a very carefully crafted deal between Republicans, between Democrats, the House and Senate. Elon Musk blew it up. Then Donald Trump was late to the party and felt like, well, maybe Donald

Trump must have to blow it up as well. And now you're essentially marching towards a government shutdown. This is the first defeat. And Donald Trump's not even in office yet. And this is his partner, Elon Musk. And I think, I don't know, maybe Donald Trump really wants Elon Musk out there failing badly so that Donald Trump can then get rid of him. I think we can obviously have different interpretations. You've laid out a couple of different explanations. I think, and have felt for a long time and have tried to get people to understand for a long time. He's both a liar and a moron. That's what he is. Not in an absolute sense. It's not that he doesn't have some sort of savvy, as Schuster pointed out, he's made a lot of money. He understands

some things. I would go further than Schuster, and I would say he understands some things about how government works. He knows that you can just buy them. You can just buy them. Like he was super smart in buying Trump. And he made, you know, like the greatest return in his investment ever following that. Tesla stock shot up, having nothing to do with the company or the cars or anything. It's now worth 70% more than it was before the election, because he understands that the stock market has nothing to do with really anything except hype. And he's always been very good at that in the same way that Donald Trump is. He knows that he can take the money that he got by virtue of birth. He can see, in some cases, and I'll give him credit for this,

a company where talented coders and engineers are making good things. And so he buys it and puts his name on it. He's good at that. He's good at hyping things up. He's good at telling blatant lies about his products, things that either will never happen or happen years after he says they will happen or that cost twice as much as he says they will. And he knows that generally his fans, they just trust him. They don't care. They're not going to fact check that. And certainly the media, the business media, isn't going to check any of this because they all want the hype to work just as much as he does. The stock market moving up is just as good for them as it is for him. And so he understands all of this. That doesn't

him an intelligent person about everything or even about most things. And that's where I think people make mistakes. And so in this is he sort of lying sure because he doesn't care. He has absolutely no respect for the people who worship him most, no more than Donald Trump does. Also, he's a moron, he doesn't know how to fact check things. He doesn't think that he should. He's not curious fundamentally about the world in that way.

And so I think that he's got all of these failings and more. Yeah, so there's a second thing I'm curious about is how are the people who voted for Trump going to react, right? So are, and there's two differences of folks I'm thinking about here. I am not thinking about old MAGA, which is Donald Trump and whoever we've anointed like Elon Musk are demigods and they are not to be questioned. Everything if they say 40% and the facts say 4%, then they are right and the facts are wrong, right? So that's old maga in my opinion. So now there's two other folks here. Remember, a lot of moderates and independents voted for Trump. That's why he won the popular vote. They voted based on simple things like economy, crime, border inflation, et cetera, right? So are they on board

for yay, let's lie about everything? Probably not, right? And then you've got what I consider to be new MAGA, which is some right-wing populace. I know a lot of people are skeptical about that. Well, that's why I'm curious, right? So, am I. Am I right that some of them are going to go, yeah, but I don't really want to be lied too. That's kind of annoying, right? Or are they like old maga and like, yeah, we love lies, right? So I don't know. I know everybody on the left says they know.

They're all they love the lies, they're going to buy into it, they're going to say it's 40% from now to the end of time, no matter how wrong it is. And there's good reason for that because they did do that in the first term under Trump, right? So are they, but are some of those guys going to rebel now and go, Yeah, I'm now seeing Elon Musk say things that are wrong. I don't know, 12 times or 1,200 times, maybe this giant donor isn't telling me the truth, right? So I don't know, and it's going to be super interesting to find out. I also wonder, Jank, if there's an inherent contradiction between Elon Musk and Donald Trump

that maybe even Donald Trump's voters are going to recognize. And it seems like this week, like it's pretty simple. Elon Musk wants to obviously cut the government by whatever it is, $2 trillion. dollars and Donald Trump doesn't care about cover about cutting the government he wants to increase spending he wants to blow up the deficit these two things are at odds with each other and there's Donald Trump creating this department of government efficiency which doesn't really exist and oh yeah Elon Musk and Vivek Ramoswami Marjor taylor green you wanted to be in the cabinet of it no no you take care of this agency that doesn't exist it sort of gives them something to do

but Donald Trump doesn't care about cutting government spending what blew up the deal was Donald Trump initially said, okay, yeah, there's too much pork. But then in the second round, Donald Trump wanted to blow up the deficit and the House said no. So you have these two things that are sort of going against each other. And I do think there's also a problem with Elon Musk getting out a little bit ahead of Donald Trump in this whole process this week. And that caught Donald Trump by surprise. And I think makes Donald Trump look very small. And if there's anything that I think Donald Trump hates, it's that he's looking tiny that he's undermined, perhaps by somebody that's supposed to be a partner of this.

There are developments that we're going to give you on the stopgap bill. I just want to touch on one more thing having to do with Musk and his effect on all of this and his effect on our country going forward before he moved to that. So he had a little bit of an issue with a little bit of a speech that one of the Democrats on the House floor gave. Representative Richard Neal, let's roll a little bit of that. Can you imagine what the next two years are going to be like if every time the Congress works its will and then there's a tweet or from an individual who has no official portfolio who threatens members on the Republican side with a primary and they succumb?

This institution has a separate responsibility based upon the separation of powers. Members of Congress don't serve under presidents of the United States. So that performance was responded to on Twitter by Elon Musk who said, oh, forgot to mention that I'm also going to be funding moderate candidates in heavily Democrat districts so the country can get rid of those who don't represent them like this jackass. There's a special sort of irony to Elon Musk calling literally anyone else in the world the jackass. But so that's where I think the future looks super exciting where he's now been threatening this last week that he is going to fund challenges to every Republican that doesn't do anything

that he likes. Obviously he spent a quarter billion dollars to buy Donald Trump. He's now in the process of buying candidates in the U.K. election as well. So he's going to potentially, he says he's going to own the Republican Party. He can fund, I guess, if he wants to, with an amount of money that functions is basically like a round off of his investments on any given day, as many challenges as he wants. He's also going to be doing it, I guess, in the Democratic Party as well. And so the reason I bring this up is maybe he doesn't end up wanting to do this. Maybe he gets bored with politics and then gets really into Magic the Gathering or something.

I don't know. He has a very hard time staying focused on anything for long. Maybe he gets super into super soakers, I don't know. But I wonder if maybe this is an opportunity, and I've been talking about this for the past few days. And I saw AOC had tweeted something of the effect of like, is there anything that provides more of an opportunity maybe for campaign finance reform than this one billionaire promising to buy both political parties? And so do you think he's going to follow through in this? Because he could, in theory, just he could involve himself in 500 races next time. Yeah, so first let me explain the irony here.

Ritchie Neal is one of the most conservative Democrats there is in Congress. He's a total crook. He works for the drug companies. I can show you many different bills where he made sure that corporate America won and the average guy lost. So he's one of the worst corporate Democrats there is if there's a list of three people, I'd like to primary he would definitely make it okay so but from the left Elon not from the right so if you think that guy's not enough of a crook for you and you

want a primary from the right and get someone who'll just do anything that a giant billionaire donor wants my god brother you what you're missing is you could buy Richie Neal for like a quarter okay like Eli you know the primary you just give him a hundred bucks and he'll work for you so he does for the drug companies and all the other companies can't stand rich so and look at this pompous asking even that speech I did the rest of the speech I'm fine with but he was like and he has no official portfolio like yeah this is why we lose what is that what do you just talk like a normal person anyways so Elon wants to buy all of the Democrats first thing

is you say yeah that's easy to do actually that APEC did it the crypto bros did it there's tons of Democrats in the house now that are work for the crypto. industry, right? Because they spent millions of millions of dollars defeating their progressive primary opponents. So you think they don't work for the crypto guys? You don't think they don't work for A-PAC? No, Democratic, 95% of Democrats and Republicans will work for anyone who's a donor. So now the problem with Elon is that if he goes out and does it publicly and he goes, oh, I am not buying this Democratic seat, everybody will vote against them, right, who is a Democrat. But the second problem is you can just do through dark money. That you have no idea.

It just seems like, well, I tell you what, golly, gee, that Democrat raised so much money. And you know what, the New York Times and all the rest of the mainstream media was like, leading candidate in the race? There is such an amazing job of raising so much money. They're number one, right? But you don't know the dark money came from Elon. So can he buy the government? Guys, think about this math.

He bought Twitter for $44 billion, right? Because he thought that that microphone and amplifier was that important, even though he wildly overpaid for it, right? He bought Donald Trump for only a quarter of a billion dollars. So how much would it take to buy the rest of Congress? Just ask APEC, not that much. They bought, I mean, or the drug companies. The drug companies bought them for about 400 million. APEC bought them for about 100 million.

So 100 million to probably do it for the almost all of Congress. And you know how Netanyahu is a war criminal and he comes to Congress, and 95% of our Congress goes like, yes, bravo, standing ovation, kill more, kill more, here's money, here's money making that raid for Netanyo. You think Elon can't do that? All he has to do is buy them. Bribery's totally open and legal now.

It's called campaign contributions. And he could give a standing, he will get a standing ovation from both parties. All he has to do is buy them. That is why this system is insane and super scary, okay? But ironically, he might actually expose that because he's doing it in such a brazen way that at some point, maybe, just maybe, the whole country, He goes, wait, I see you buying them. And then I see them doing exactly what you wanted.

Hmm, right? Well, what's so ironic though, also, Jenkins, that I mean, yeah, I think he's raising some attention to campaign finance reform, which is never going to happen. But he doesn't even need to buy Congress. They will literally give him the government for free right now. I mean, there's Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Georgia House Republican Marjorie Taylor Green saying, they want Elon Musk to be speaker of the House, that you don't have to have an elected member be speaker.

If I'm a Democrat, and I am, I'm like, yes, please make Elon Musk the Speaker of the House. That would be the best thing politically for Democrats in 2025, because this clown show would go on and on and on. It would destroy the Republicans. And oh, by the way, the Republican House would have all of their fingerprints over Elon Musk as Speaker. So I say, yes, Republicans, please make him the Speaker of the House. That would be awesome. The country, of course, would suffer. We might have more government shutdowns, and there might be a lot of misery.

But politically, it would be a gold bind for people who do not like the Republicans. One last quick thing. You know, after he buys America, maybe he'll go on a shopping spree for the world, right? Because he just endorsed the party in Germany. Let's just put it kindly and say it's an anti-immigrant party. Elon, I hate to break the news to you. You're an immigrant. Yeah.

Okay, I think we're going to take our first break. come back, we'll have some of the developments on that bill after this. Parny and P, thanks for signing up as well by hitting that beautiful join button. Box, thank you for giving your membership, Gabby Mathis for five and fat's out of for 10. You guys are all amazing. John. Okay, let's have some fun with some speculation here. The House has, I guess, against all odds, passed a stop gap funding bill, which will now head to the Senate.

And there's some really interesting things about it. First of all, it passed 366 to 34, very easily. One Democrat voted present, the only no votes were Republicans. So all but one of the Democrats were on board. And look, with a bill this big, obviously there's gonna be a lot that we don't know about it. But I'm left asking some questions. I'm gonna read you a few quotes from some of the big stakeholders in this big fight, and

it's only gonna probably confuse you more. So the bill extends federal funds to mid-March, so we won't have a shutdown for several months. It sends more than 100 billion in relief to farmers and natural disaster victims. So it did the two major additional components of disaster relief and helping to offset some of the lingering effects of Donald Trump's trade war with China. It reauthorizes the sweeping agriculture policy and anti-poverty law called the Farm Bill. So what does it not do? Well, plenty, I'm sure. But specifically, it doesn't suspend or eliminate the debt ceiling. Okay, so it has the major additional spending and it doesn't suspend the debt ceiling, which is why I'm kind of confused

when Donald Trump and Elon Musk are apparently really, really happy with it. Musk says that Johnson did a good job here, given the circumstances. He went on to say they took a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces. Now granted, he has proven himself recently to not be a great guy with math, but it doesn't seem like they cut it significantly. Donald Trump apparently is on board too. Johnson said he knew exactly what we were doing and why. And this is a good outcome for the country when the only thing about the prior bills that Trump seemed to have a problem with was that they did not suspend the debt ceiling, perhaps until 2029. And this doesn't. So they don't seem to have gotten any of

the concessions they want. The Democrats are all on board. And yet Musk and Trump are sort of declaring victory. That makes no sense at all. I have a potential explanation, but David, do you have more details? Yeah, if you look at the first bill that came over two nights ago, like Plan A, right? And that was the 1500 page bill that had all kinds of different programs. Well, yes, while some of those programs, including the ad bill, the $100 billion and also the disaster rate, while that's still there, some of the other priorities and some of the other language that was in the original bill got stripped out. And so if you look at, for example, plan B, which was the essentially stripped down version of plan A, but had Donald Trump's

essentially getting rid of the debt ceiling. Now imagine plan B, but without the debt ceiling. That's sort of my understanding of where this came down. And I think the important point here is that Democrats did not get some of the agreed upon provisions that they had expected that they had negotiated. However, Republicans did not get, and Donald Trump did not get the lifting of the debt ceiling. And keep in mind, I mean, Trump said just two days ago, there will be a government shut down if we don't get rid of the debt ceiling or we don't suspend it. Well, too bad. Donald Trump lost on that. Democrats lost on some of their priorities that they had wanted. Everybody seemed to be an agreement on the $100 billion farm bill in the disaster aid.

And there seems to be, of course, this agreement that we should keep the government funding through March. So this essentially is a punt, right? You keep the government open for three more months. You get the two big items that everybody wanted. And what Donald Trump wanted raising the debt ceiling and some of what Democrats wanted, you don't get. But David, that still doesn't explain why the Democrats voted for it because, I mean, oh, we're not getting rid of the debt ceiling like Trump wanted. But the Democrats also wanted to get rid of the debt ceiling.

So that's not really a compromise for them. They don't get anything out of that. They actually agree with Trump. Yes, no, because keep in mind, I mean, in order, Donald Trump cannot pass his tax cuts without raising the debt ceiling, right? Because the congressional budget office is going to say that the tax cuts are going to cost the economy because of lost revenue to the government, revenue that you're not going to get, you know, $500 billion or trillion dollars, whatever it is. Well, Donald Trump's not going to be able to pass his tax cuts without raising the debt ceiling. So now he's got a problem, right?

What his Democrats have essentially did is they said, look, we're punting because we're going to be able to extract some concessions from Donald Trump. If he really, if he really wants to raise the debt ceiling in March in order to pass his tax cuts, here are all. all the different items that we Democrats are going to demand from him. And instead of having to do this sort of ad hoc with Speaker Johnson at the end of President Biden's term, the Democrats can be loaded to bear at the beginning of the Trump administration with their laundry list of things saying, okay, you want to raise the debt ceiling? Here are all the different things we demand that are part of the next budget. So yeah, I mean, in some ways, it doesn't make a lot of sense right now for Democrats to go along with this. But if you look at the big picture of

where Democrats hope to be in the spring, I think it does make some strategic sense. All right, so that does begin to explain it, but yeah, I have more thoughts on it. Go ahead. Sure, I would have to see like a full list of all the things that were cut. It just seems, it seems like some of the little things that like Vivek Ramoswamy was talking about on Twitter were so minuscule in comparison to the stuff that's still in this, that to declare that something that weighed pounds is now ounces seems like protesting a bit too much there, which I guess is a good thing.

And in terms of Trump, like he's gonna be sworn in on the 20th. They're gonna begin fights over this like three weeks into his term, which seems like the worst possible scenario for him. And also, like I don't really buy that he cared about any of the individual components of all of this. I think that he cares about big things like massively cutting the taxes of the wealthiest people in the country. So this seems like a major loss for him.

I don't really buy that he cared about the funding aspect of this 1% as much about getting is getting rid of the debt ceiling, particularly because he doesn't care at all about the deficit. He doesn't care at all about the national debt. And he was always going to blow that out of the water. So that would have given him free reign to do that, not only with the tax cuts, but God only knows what other bills. So now he doesn't have that. I don't know. This just seems like, like, you know, if you go back a week ago before we thought that Elon Musk was going to dedicate every waking second of his life to destroying this deal, I think most people assumed that some sort of deal would be reached. So now it has been, Trump has laid out what his line was,

And they didn't go along with it. Remember, as we're gonna talk about potentially, like 38 Republicans defected on the previous bill after Musk and Trump had said very clearly what they wanted. I don't know, I can be wrong. I feel like this entire process now with hindsight makes them look kind of weak, like they didn't really seemingly get what they wanted out of this. Maybe a little bit of pork, I guess they can say symbolically they did some efficiency stuff. Okay, so here's my theory as to why Elon Musk and Donald Trump are declaring victory,

even though they don't seem to have gotten any victory at all. A, because this is a classic Trump thing. He says that he wants something, he huffs and he puffs, right? But if he doesn't get it and he thinks he's not going to get it, he thinks he's going to lose that battle, he just goes right past it. I've seen him do it so many times, right? which leases part two if he hops and puffs and it doesn't work when they get a new deal it doesn't matter if it's nearly identical if there's just a comma in a different place

he goes I declare victory it's now the Trump bill okay and so this is fantastic because he's thinking nobody's going to read the bill anyway right it's not like my followers are going to read the bill and be like oh no wait a minute this is 98% similar to the other And if mainstream media reports that they're not going to believe them anyway, I'll tell them it was a huge victory and they'll just believe me. And I think that's what happened here. And why did they do that? Because they created a hot mess.

And I think that they realized this isn't a good look for us that we start right out of the gate and just blow everything up and don't really have a good plan for putting it back together. Like they just couldn't figure out how to get enough votes to pass the version they wanted, let alone the fact that I don't think they knew what version they wanted. Like they knew originally what they wanted about the debt ceiling, but just like I told you yesterday, sometimes he helps and houses go, oh, yeah, look at this terrible mass shooting. Oh, these guys are all bought by the NRA, but I'm not, I'm going to do something about it. Can you get tomorrow the next day he goes, gets bought by the NRA, comes out because we don't need to do anything about it, right?

So in this case, on the debt ceiling, he might have gotten talking to it, like, hey, remember, we usually use this against the Democrats and then get all the goodies that we want. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, okay, forget it, we're keeping the debt ceiling, right? And, oh, we don't know what we want other than the debt ceiling. Okay, declare victory. I am the champion. I am the winner, right? And that'll largely work with his base. But that bill's the same. As far as we can see for now, I mean, it happened right now. Yeah, we're going to have a little bit of some of the other things that were cut. Sorry. One other thing, there's a little bit of reporting that's also coming out now that remember, Donald Trump kept saying, at least for the last 24 hours, oh, this is going to be under Joe Biden's watch. Americans are going to blame President Biden and the Democrats if there's a government shutdown.

Well, there's some reporting that perhaps Speaker Johnson and other Republicans had some polling that had been done over the last 24 hours that they presented to Donald Trump and said, no, they're going to the public's going to blame you if the government gets shut down. They're going to blame you and Elon Musk because people already know that there was this agreement that you guys blew up. So yes, I think it's part of Donald Trump just declaring victory because that's what he always does, but also because he was convinced that even before he's president, And the public's going to be blaming you for people essentially not getting, you know, the government services or whatever, all the sort of government stuff that they expect. So I think that's one other, that's one other thing to keep in mind. Also, there's another part about this with the debt ceiling in which I think is somewhat advantageous to the Democrats.

If you look at the two things Donald Trump wants to start in 2025, as soon as he takes office, obviously he wants the tax cuts for the rich. He can't do that without raising the debt ceiling. He also wants to start rounding up migrants. Well, even if you try to deport a fraction of the, of 11 million undocumented migrants in this country, just a fraction, you're still talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. It's going to cost law enforcement. Where is that money supposed to come from?

There's not just some slush from they can take it. You have to raise the debt ceiling, appropriate new money to law enforcement or the military in order to carry this out. So I think the Democrats are looking at ways of blocking Donald Trump's two major policy proposals. starting in January by essentially handcuffing him with the debt ceiling that he's going to have to deal with and give Democrats at the farm in order for the Democrats to relent. Yeah. And I think we should probably take our second break, but before we do, in terms of like it being a bad look going into this, like having all the chaos and everything, first of all, everyone should get ready for that. That's going to be the look that we'll have for four years because it's going to be utter chaos and failure and disaster. But also, like, you know, as I said, the only thing he actually cares about. I agree with David, there's going to be the attempt at the mass deportations, is a transfer of trillions of dollars to the wealthiest people in the country.

They're going to have that fight like three weeks into his presidency. They're going to once again threaten to shut everything down unless they can transfer trillions of dollars to the richest people in the world. And by the way, one thing that that was cut, and of course the Democrats don't mind agreeing to this, in my opinion, was enforcement at the IRS so that the rich. can cheat on their taxes more. That was right out of the gate while Biden's still in office. And that's bipartisan agreement. Let the rich cheat.

I almost appreciate like the honesty coming out of Trump and the right that you'll have Federman took a little bit for the mask to come off or whatever. Trump like he's not even sworn in yet. And he's like, yeah, no, all the stuff I was talking about in the election, none of that's true. I am literally just here for the rich. This is a massive wealth transfer. You guys are screwed. Anyway, we should take a break.

Lots more after this. All right back on TYT, Jank, John and David with you guys, John. Okay, let's talk a little bit more about some of what was taken out of the bill, starting with this from Steve Cohen. There are a lot of things in here that were taken out of the compromise bill that were good for the American people. And one of the things was dish payments. We give money to hospitals that treat the least among us, the poorest people that need health care. And that was taken out of the bill. That's cruel inhuman and anti-Judeo Christian.

And that's one of the main reasons why I oppose this bill, because the hospitals that take care of those people are doing God's work and they need to be given the monies they've been given in the past, a one-year extension. And you took that out, that's wrong. I opposed the bill. That was Steve Cohen pointing out that removing that funding, a relatively small amount of funding in the grand scheme of things that benefits, benefits kids, benefits those with the lease to make sure that they can get medical care and all of that, that it seems wrong to take that out.

Now obviously, he was there talking about an earlier version of the bill that have been stopped. We now have the stopgap bill that was passed and it wasn't put back in that. Of course not. Of course not. It doesn't benefit millionaires. It doesn't benefit billionaires. Why would it be in there? Everybody needs to wake up to what period of American politics we are entering into. There's not going to be any assistance. The government is not arguably has never been, but certainly is not constituted in a form that's intended to help you. And with the wealthiest cabinet in history being assembled, with two billionaires, including the richest man in the world being tasked with finding every piddling. little thing that he can cut that doesn't benefit the elites of society, it's only going

to get worse from here. But I thought, why don't we talk a little bit more about some of the other things that were cut from that bill? So we have the Gabriela Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program gone. That's supposed to help kids who get cancer or whatever. That's obviously not a concern of these great Christians, screw all of them, so that's gone. Let's see, there was a provision in the initial bill aimed at ensuring that states replenish food stamp funds for Americans who rely on the program whose benefits are stolen.

So if you're supposed to get some food stamps and your benefits are stolen, they reimburse you. That's gone, screw you, you're on food stamps. Literally like it's insane that you would think that Elon Musk would care about you. He does not, neither does Donald Trump. Let's see, there were two bipartisan bills in the original version that aimed to crack down on so-called junk fees, I think one having to do with hotels. That's been cut. That's the sort of stuff that benefits regular people and hurts business.

So obviously they got rid of that. They're not interested in that. I don't see a confirmation here, but I'm willing to just state it. I'll state my reputation on. There was one designed to stop ISPs in rural areas from screwing over their customers, many of whom would be conservatives, of course. That had been cut from plan B. I'm sure it was also cut from plan C. And then also this, this doesn't even seem like a monetary thing. It is purely spiteful to take this out, but it jettisoned a bipartisan provision that would have criminalized the publication of non-consensual intimate images known as revenge porn, as well as sexual images and videos generated by artificial intelligence called deepfakes.

I can't even tell you why they would want to remove that, except I don't know, maybe Elon Musk is a little bit worried about what Grok might spit out and he doesn't want Twitter to get in trouble. So anyway, that was cut out as well. That's not even a cost thing. That's just for fun, I suppose. And we'll learn more over the next day or two about what was cut out. But it's a ton of stuff that would benefit regular people rather than the elite class. So Republicans say that they want to cut the government. And do they mean it? Yes. But who are we talking about? What Republicans? There's a Republican politicians. And then there's a Republican voters. So do they both want to cut? Yes. But they want to cut different things. So the voters, if you showed them one, one by one. You say, okay, look, here's the Pentagon, I can't pass an audit. They don't know where $400 billion is. Should we give them another $400 billion? And then they're going to tell us next year, oh, golly gee, I don't know where it went, right? Well, as we've, as at least

I found out, all the right wing shows, all the right wing populace go, no, cut the Pentagon, right? And certainly the left wing, so at least we used to agree. So, so that's a yes, right? Are the politicians going to do it? Don't think that I'm naive. I think they are intensely unlikely to cut the Pentagon because that's the pork barrel stuff that they love, right? So then you, but I can give you a laundry list of like hundreds of things. Do you know that the oil companies still get $20 to $30 billion a year in subsidies? They're the most profitable companies in the world. What do they need our taxpayer dollars for?

Okay, by the way, if you put Israel's $30 billion in funding per year on the table, Do you think that passes if you went and asked Republican voters or all voters? I don't think it passes. So there's tons of stuff that you can cut, and that is what the voters are expecting. But the politicians don't want to cut any of that because that's their donors, right? So what do they go to cut? Children's hospitals. And then eventually they're going to cut Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security.

Take super fast. That, like, pediatric cancer thing they cut, it's $190 million. Exactly. It's nothing. So, like, you know how many hospitals? 190 million is in 30 billion in oil subsidies. A lot. Okay, it's a five, so it's a lot. At least 150. Okay. So, so but they're not going to cut the stuff that's corrupt because they are corrupt, right? So that's why they're going to nickel and dime kids with cancer. And so and what's going to happen when that happens?

The American people are going to go, wait, what? You want to cut cancer research for kids? This is the big. Republican populist revolution? I was promised. Nah, I don't think so, right? So they're going to run into a buzz saw. Okay, part of it's going to be the American people going, you're cutting the wrong things. And I'm, but I am curious, and I don't know if they're going to notice this. You also didn't cut the right things to cut, right? So let's see how that plays at. Because right now they haven't cut a single thing that makes sense to cut. And they've cut a whole a bunch of things that makes no sense to cut. David? Well, I mean, look, there are military, there are components to the U.S. military, parts, aircraft, tanks. There are factories in literally

every single congressional district that contribute to the U.S. military. So that's one of the reasons why it becomes so difficult to cut anything from the Pentagon because there's going to be somebody who's going to say, no, wait a second, you can't cut this tank program because it employs a thousand people in my district. You can go through every single part. of the Pentagon budget and find at least a couple members of Congress are going to say, no, no, no, I've got jobs there. You can't do that. So that's one reason why the Pentagon can't be cut. But I would also say that, you know, I think your point, Jack, about, you know, cutting things that really sort of hurt people. And by the way, I think it's Steve Cohen in

Tennessee that, I mean, there's some hospitals in his district that get some of this pediatric cancer research. There are some other members of Congress as well who have hospitals that get this sort of research. But it seems like this was sort of a personal. swipe, particularly at Democrats. And I do think, Jen, to your point, I think when Americans start seeing that, you know, kids with cancer are going to be cut back or people on Social Security are going to be told, no, no, no, you can't, you can't get your Social Security benefits now until you're, right now it's 67. It's going to be 70 of the Republicans out their way. Maybe the benefits are going to be cut back. I think that is the point at which there is something of a change

because people say, no, wait a second, I put my money into Social Security and Medicare. It's lifting, you know, tens of millions Americans out of poverty. You can't suddenly tell me I'm not going to get my full Social Security benefits until, you know, a few more years afterwards. And, oh, by the way, if you feel like you need to replenish the Social Security Trust Fund because it's insolvent or not going to be able to pay out full benefits, why don't you tax the rich some more? Instead of just taxing the first $167,000 of income, why don't you raise that to $500,000? So that people who make millions of dollars, they pay a larger percentage of their income towards the social security tax as opposed to working class people right now, they pay a larger percentage

right now than the wealthy. I mean, there's all sorts of different ways to solve this. And I think once America has this discussion, people are going to say, I don't want a bunch of billionaires telling me how much my elderly mother or grandmother should get each month in order to stay out of poverty. Yeah. My concern is that, I mean, there was like raising, you know, the retirement age and all that, like cutting the, like they were talking about this during the Republican primary. Like, they're not that scared, I guess, that this is going to turn people off. It seems like it should. Almost every one of these cuts seem utterly insane.

And it should be a reminder that when, you know, a couple weeks ago, Elon Musk was talking about how all of their changes would involve temporary hardship. Everyone needs to remember, he will never experience any of that temporary hardship. Not even temporarily. him and Donald Trump and all these other millioners and billionaires, it is smooth sailing ahead for them. You're the ones that they're already previewing chaos and hardship for. But we should also remember, like they're giving us these reminders every day of how fundamentally

unpopular everything they do should be to regular people. But we can't forget that they also have defense mechanisms too. They know as the Republicans have always known that they can't actually run and win on their agenda, that's why they flood the zone with BS. And so they're not just going to leave, you know, a three month news cycle of them screwing over kids with, you know, with leukemia or whatever, and then, you know, making it so your grandma is going to freeze the death in our apartment. All of those things will happen and they're fine to see them happen. But also there will be a caravan and also something, something trans. And all of the identity politics BS that

they constantly focus on, that's what Fox is going to be talking about. Water's isn't doing 30 minutes on how kids with cancer are going to be screwed over. He's not going to acknowledge it at all. He's instead going to talk about something that is going to make you mad about race or religion or gender or masculinity or whatever, and I'm sure they're already rolling that out right now. Anyway, let's talk about one more topic with the time we have remaining. Whenever we're ready, we can jump into this. The nation's largest homeowners insurance company, State Farm, has decided they won't accept new applications for property in California.

The household names like State Farm, all states, pulling out of these markets, they know the risk is just too high to be actuarially sale for their business. There are companies saying there are too many buildings being discharged. destroyed by catastrophes, inflation is making it too expensive to rebuild, and they can't protect their investments any longer. Losses are increasing related to climate risk. As that risk increases, so does the cost of insuring those assets that people have on hand. So there is indeed a home insurance crisis that's been developing. And in that video, they focus on California, where we're located. But this is not a problem that is restricted to just California, it is beginning to spread into some areas that you might not expect.

And we can show you a map of non-renewal rates, places where they're not renewing a percentage of insurance. And you can see that the lightly shaded areas of the map are where non-renu rates are lowest. The dark red areas are where they're highest. In those areas, it's one in 25 insurance plans being terminated, far higher than they used to be. And you can see that the coasts, California, Florida, some higher up on the east coast. are overrepresented there, but also areas like Oklahoma and New Mexico as well. And as you saw in that initial video, there's sort of a climate aspect to this. Natural disasters are one of the chief reasons that companies are starting to reevaluate

whether they want to offer new insurance in these areas. And that could come in the form of hurricanes and flooding, but also in the form of fires, which means in practice, this is a price that many people will be paying for climate change. These areas are now becoming unlivable, at least from the point of view of the insurance companies. And maybe for some people, they can take the advice helpfully provided years ago by Ben Shapiro that you just, just move. Just sell your house and move to an area where human life can still be sustained. But for other people, this is going to cause major problems where maybe you can't get insurance at all, or maybe there's just less competition now. And

your rates get jacked up. And suddenly you're paying a significant percentage higher every year for the home insurance that you have to have. And so it's definitely a concern, a growing concern. There's no reason to believe that in the next four years we're suddenly going to start taking climate change more seriously than we were before. All signs point to a complete non-recognition that it's even a problem. So this is sort of an issue, particularly as we do live in California. So 1.9 million homes now are under this problem, right?

And their insurance dropped. And not only can you not get a mortgage, but what winds up happening is that the next person who's going to buy your house can't get a mortgage. So that's a real problem because then your property values are going to collapse because nobody can buy a home without a mortgage. So how can anybody buy your home? So this is going to lead to a little bit of a collapse of the housing market in wherever this happens.

Not a little bit, a lot, right? So this is yet another problem for the average. American. Now guys, do you think the insurance companies are doing it for some nefarious reason, but they're choosing not to make a profit on those two million homes? Because that's what do with insurance. The reason they're in business is because they make a profit from it, right? So these houses, they say, we can't make a profit because of climate change. It's real. It's making things more severe. And so it's not the only thing. There's also you've got to, you know, clean up the forest and that's a long story about how you do that, et cetera, because we used to have

more natural fires and it would clear the brush, but it doesn't do that. The brush collects, so we got to go in and clean it out, etc. There's like other, it's climate change is not the only factor, but it is by far the largest factor. These corporations have done enormous bath on it because their profits depend on it, and they have scientists on board because their profits depend on it. And so this is not some wild theory by Al Gore. These giant corporations have looked at and go, yo, it's definitely real. And I don't want any part of it, right? So if your housing prices collapse or you can't buy a house, that's your problem, not my problem. I'm not insuring you because I won't make money on it. Okay. So that's as real as a heart attack.

And if you say, no, I still don't believe it. I think the insurance companies are part of some conspiracy theory of Al Gore's. And 99% of the world scientists, okay, then I'm a lot of I'm not going to be able to help you, okay? But it's definitely real. It's impacting us. And the thing that I want to mainly ask you guys is, when is ExxonMobil going to pay for your housing prices or provide insurance for your house? Because they're the ones who created climate change.

They took home all the profits, but the costs are now yours. So if your house got wiped out on a firearm or a hurricane, because those events were more extreme because of climate change, did they pay for your house? No, they didn't, did they? Okay, now you can't get a mortgage, you can't buy a home? Is Chevron going to buy it for you? No, they're not. Because what they did was reaped all the profits and then they bought off politicians and said, pretend climate change isn't real so we could unload all of our costs onto the American people. And that's what's happening right here.

David. There are some industrialized nations where homeowners insurance is not a for-profit business. And I know we've had this conversation about insurance for the last several weeks in terms of health insurance in the United States being the only industrialized nation that has a for-profit health insurance plan of system and all the problems that that creates for people in terms of medical debt, medical costs, and on and coverage denied. You know what? It would be nice if we lived in a country where the government said, look, you got to have some sort of homeowners insurance and we're going to make this a not-for-profit business. And that's that. But, you know, that's not, the reality is, no, this is a for-profit business. And so you can understand why the for-profit homeowner's insurance business has decided, we're going to jack up your costs if you live in one of these flood zones or fire zones. Or we're going to deny coverage altogether.

And maybe, you know, State Farm is not like you're a good neighbor. Maybe they're the bad neighbor that you cannot depend on. Maybe they change their tagline. But, you know, that's reality that we're in. And unfortunately, it's sort of a, we're sort of finding out about climate. change or a lot of conservatives and moderates are finding about climate change from the back door, you should have been paying attention, I don't know, years ago, as opposed to now be paying attention only because your homeowner's insurance is unavailable.

Yeah, maybe if they'd spent a little bit more time listening to Al Gore rather than laughing at him decades ago, that map that we had, Florida wouldn't look as utterly screwed as it does there. And, and Jake, you gave the hypothetical, you know, of like, you know, why as an Exxon, like, come in to help you or whatever. But let's also, let's just briefly call back to a story we did earlier, which is, thankfully, the government did provide disaster relief to some of these disasters. Sometimes the government does come in and help, but it still has to be paid for. And I'm not one of these Republicans that says, you know, if your house gets destroyed by a hurricane, screw you, I want the government to help you. But it still has

a, you know, a price tag, apparently the price tag is like $100 billion that we just had to add on. We paid for that. My taxes paid for that, and I'm glad to. But the reason it needed to be paid was because of the profits that these corporations generated for literally decades. And again, thankfully the government was there. Like I said, I'm not one of those Republicans who doesn't think we should pay for that. I'm not even like one of the Florida Republicans that when the first hurricane hit North Carolina, they told them to go F themselves. And then as soon as another hurricane hit Florida, they were like, oh, please help us out.

I'm not like any of that, I'm consistent. I want these people to be helped. But that costs money and it's going to cost more money next year and more money the year after that and on and on and on. So when we're, when we're tallying up the subsidies that we provide to these fossil fuel companies, it's not just the $20 or $30 billion that we literally write a check to them. It's all of the necessary cost to clean up the mess they've produced. Yeah, look, we talk about APAC and they get $30 billion for a foreign government because they're

about the politicians. How about $100 billion that the oil companies are in essence getting? Because we now have to provide the relief that is actually the cost of their business. Okay, that's more than three times what Israel gets. And then you add on top of the $100 billion, the $30 billion extra, we have to pay the oil companies for no reason at all other than pure 100% unadulterated corruption, right? So now we're going to pay them $130 billion. This is insanity, guys.

Imagine if the young Turks did this. Oh, okay, we're going to keep all the money from YouTube and the subscriptions and stuff. And then every once in a while you get a bill. Oh, this is, you have to pay for the lights and the cameras of TYT. You're like, wait, why? And that's what the oil companies are doing to you, except it's not the lights in the camera. Your house is gone. Yeah.

So now, by the way, the new exploding thing is, and you've seen it, like, it's, I mean, it was already exploding before. It's now gigantic momentum, which is GoFundMe campaigns from, please, we try to keep our house. We had these bills, we had this bill, we had the other bill. And people are like, it's kind of now become like a second. government where people help each other out right through go fund me because the government only helps giant corporations and they enormously wealthy so we have to help each other in like

a de facto go fund me government so this is just madness all right we got to take a break here everybody check out david on rebel headquarters everybody check out john on damage report we're going to come back with jackson white and jordan yule we're going to have the extra bonus episode free for everyone today on discussing where we go politically and what's t yt all about for all the people asking questions so make sure you stay around for that and an amazing second hour coming up so stay right here