The Young Turks - Joe Biden Makes Cringey Remarks On Dick Cheney

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

Joe Biden is being criticized for his comments on Dick Cheney. John Iadarola, Jayar Jackson, and Francis Maxwell, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're trying to crush that new CGI abomination, Sonic the Hedgehog. So I tried to get us to actually talk about the Sonic trailer on the show, but I was overruled by like a whole bunch of people. So that's the compromise. There was only one person on John's side. What are you on his side? Absolutely, I wanted to talk about that. Oh, well, I didn't think it was an issue until I heard Sonic Human Teeth or something like that.

Yeah, he's brought into the debate. Yeah. You're not for that, hedgehogs shouldn't have human teeth. Don't like it. That's ruining my childhood. But anyway, as you can already tell, on the show today, you've got me, Sonic the Hedgehog, Jared Jackson, and Francis is here as well. It's been a little bit, Francis.

Yeah, it's been a bit. I've been out in New York, doing my thing out there and come back to the nice warm weather for a little bit, so I'm happy to be back, understanding me, all right, the accents. Absolutely. You know, I've been working since you first came, I work and I'm making sure I understood you. And I think I have it done. It's a skill.

It's only took what? 40 years. Meanwhile, I've been watching Game of Thrones and all of the scenes at Castle Black have prepared me for you. So I think it's gonna be just fine. Anyway, we've got a big show, lots of news to get to awesome panels, obviously on the first hour, also in the second hour, we'll give you more details in just a little bit. But through the course of this hour, we're gonna be talking about regulations on oil rigs,

sexy topic, I know, we're going to talk about it. And let's see, major media outlets, are they simply uncritically advancing the narratives that Donald Trump wants on social media? We have an analysis of some of that. And a very interesting story, we've got a sports story for you, Francis, Castor Semenia and a new ruling requiring her to take hormone-changing drugs completely unnecessarily. So we'll be breaking that down of the course of the first hour as well. But first, we're going to start with something domestic. Yesterday, Rebel HQ reporter Emma Viglind unearthed the video from back in 2015 of Joe Biden, praising former Vice President Dick Cheney, and here is a section of it.

First of all, I actually like Dick Cheney for real. I get on with him. I think he's a decent man. And when I went to see him, I didn't talk to him before. I went to see him after we were elected. And he talked about how, how they were. The office worked as related to the functioning of the office. But he was extremely helpful and gracious about the office and the legal parameters of the office.

Okay, so there's obviously much more to it. You can look up Emma Viglin's Twitter. She has a link to not only more of that video, but then also you can see the entire forum if you'd like to to see the full context in case you think that it's being taken out of context. I have thoughts on this obviously, but I'm curious what you guys think. Go ahead, jail. Okay. So this is all those things that's going to hit Biden over and over again.

We see where he lands. He's that guy who was part of the old guard. He's a part of that whole establishment Democrat thing, right? So where you want to play the middle and it appeals to certain folks. We forget what happened two administrations ago. And he represents part of that. He was saying this in 2015 when he went and saw Cheney right after the Obama administration came in, which was probably run beginning of 09.

I'm not sure exactly we didn't want to talk to him. But he said he came in right after that. And you know, whenever you see things that the president, the current president does, and then we see old clips from W, and we're like, oh, W, you were so stupid. But you know what? I kind of wished you were around again. People say things like that, because it's been that long. The Iraq war started in 2003, 16 years ago.

There's people who don't know why we're in that war, who don't realize that why it was started in the thing. misconceptions and lies that were told by the Bush administration, the W administration, about reasons we got in, things that Cheney did, and when he was running that administration. And we were incensed about it at the time. After so much time, you tend to forget. And although this got uncovered and people are still hair on fire over it, rightfully so, there's going to be still enough people.

And I'll say, oh. But, you know, that was when W was in power. And that's nowhere near as bad as it is now. and we'll gloss over it. Now, I'm not saying everyone will, but that's why these things are important to point out and give that context too. This is the W administration where he's talking about legal ramifications for things and the legal way of doing things.

Dick Cheney, legal ways of doing things. We're talking about the way we were waterboarding people and torture began and sending people off to go on Tonimo Bay. It's countless things we can talk about that they did, but we forget. So there's a larger problem, and I'm gonna draw it in a little bit smaller. The first thing is, Americans, I think, generally have a very short memory. This is a conversation that comes up whenever I try to talk about, like, racial issues, and you always get hit back with this slavery was a sole, such a long time ago.

Like, people have still, like, the last person I believe that was on record being lynched was in the 80s, right? That is not a long time ago. And I come from a place where our history decades old, and we still talk about the historical consequence of the way things work out, but there's something about in America when it comes to try and forget some of the ugliest parts of history to move forward is a way to avoid discussions around what we need to do to continue to try and make reparations for issues in the past.

So when it comes to someone like Joe Biden, what we've had with Donald Trump is a lack of diplomacy, right? Where this is a man who just says what he feels and people are so sick and tired of him thinking he can get away with saying and doing anything, that they start to look at someone like George W. Bush giving Michelle Obama candy and being like, ah, oh, Georgie, I miss George. I miss when presidents could give each other candy and then go and wage illegal wars. That's not too bad because he's giving out candy. Same thing with Joe Biden at the moment, where it really gets under my skin is because it's not

just the people on the Democratic side who will look at this, as J.R. said, and go, well, I mean, it was a long time ago. We need someone in the office who's going to give us back some sort of diplomacy in the White House, when you have to think about it is Joe Biden's decision making in the past still has major consequences on the way the system, specifically the judicial system, works today. So we can't just look at small issues like Dick Cheney being an okay guy as they're calling it a small issue and being like, no, no, no, this is someone who's had these points of view in the past and we can't forgive simply because that was two presidencies ago.

You need to hold people accountable. That's why history in this country repeats itself. Time and time again, because there's a lack of accountability. Yeah. And what it seems like he's doing is what we call out a lot in how politicians talk about other politicians, how the media talks about politicians. It's what's the term that Jenk likes to use the distinguished blank or whatever? Like you always have to pretend that these people are, we talk about them as if they're the founding fathers.

Personally, I don't think we should talk about the founding fathers that way, but at least that's a long time ago. We have to pretend that these people are, as Biden would say, genuinely good people. You've brought up, both of you have brought up a number of policy reasons that I don't think that you can enthusiastically support a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people and then hope to reclaim the mantle of being a genuinely good person. But I mean, it goes even deeper than that. Joe Biden is being polite in the way that we're polite.

But again, as you pointed out, this sort of politeness and turning on the blinders to what happened in the past ensures that we're going to see the same sorts of outcomes in the future. And in particular, the way he talks about Dick Cheney is that he's a genuinely good guy. And what he's trying to manifest there is this idea that we can disagree on politics, but we can still talk, and we can be friends. And you know, he, he welcomed me to the office and he gave me some advice. Okay, but what did he do for decades as a person? Is he genuinely good? Okay, he supports a war. Maybe he was just wrong. Maybe he was ill-informed in what would happen there. For decades, he voted against the establishment of MLK Day as an actual day. He voted

against Nelson Mandel being released. He voted against the creation of Head Start. I mean, you can go back to what was he as a politician for decades leading up to him actually being the vice president. This is a guy who's not fundamentally a good guy. This is a hardcore racist that helps to make not just his own personal views, it became the policy of the United States, thanks to his impassioned action over the course of decades. And Joe Biden just wants to like pretend that that's not there.

And I know that some people are already frustrated that videos like this. coming out. This is just one. So Emma found that. Great work by Emma. There have been a number recently, and some people are like getting pissy about it. So I saw Nate Silver, by the way. I don't like to talk about Nate Silver two days in a row. I apologize. He is just emblematic of this sort of thing. So there was a conversation about his Joe Biden's stance on things like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the possibility of cutting those. And Nate Silver responds with, okay, then Mr. Bragg person. Maybe argue about Biden's role in that rather than playing CSI C-SPAN with video clips from 1995, because there's video clips from 2015,

also from 995. He's been in office for a really long time. Here's the thing. Using the available evidence, not from a person's blog from 40 years ago or even from when they appeared on a radio show or something, this is him in these videos on the floor of the House in some cases, floor of the Senate, advocating for policies. That's not writing fan fiction. We're not doing cosplay when we analyze that. That's what we have to use to choose a candidate from. And look at how, like if you are doing that work, I don't know how Emma found the video, I'm assuming that she went through a whole bunch of C-SPAN stuff.

So look at how condescending the approach to that sort of work is. And the assumption that, no, anything that happened in the past, we should just forget. Joe Biden should simultaneously get experience for being an experienced politician, but none of that experience should be analyzed. And you know, and the correct response when these things come up isn't, that never happened. How dare, and I'm not saying Joe Biden isn't necessarily saying, but a lot of his defense, defenders will. How dare you bring these types of things up when I'm just trying to run for president in 2020?

So that's how we get things, you know, you talk about forgetting our history. It's how we get things like statues of generals in the South. Yeah, for sure. Part of a group of people who were traders to America who were trying to split America and half based off of their policies of enslavement. So we can gloss over that thing and put up statues of people. And again, in this day and age and present day, still have Americans defend those statues because they're like, well, they were patriotic Americans, weren't they?

No, they actually weren't. So, what, 100 years down the way from now, we can put up statues of Dick Cheney and say he was a patriotic American who did things in the American way? No, we can't say that, but we're setting ourselves up to do that. So the people who, we weren't around when Robert Lee was around, obviously. So, but we can remember him that way and put up a big-ass statue of him and make sure it seem like it's a great thing. No, let's not set up that history for the future.

But it's part of what they're upset about because it's all being broken down right now. It's being dismantled. The legacy of the W administration and the horrible things they did aren't going to be able to stand up for positive memory. Yeah. And something that John touched on there, I wanted to double down on. It's getting super frustrating, especially with people who, who are supposedly on this side of the defeat Trump bandwagon, right, which is everyone's

kind of looked in as this, okay, we're going to beat Trump and that's all we're caring about right now. And then all of a sudden, they've moved into this area of, well, you can't really criticize specific candidates because that's going to give us Trump again for four years. They've manipulated themselves into this mindset that when Donald Trump came around, they believed that it was because there was this split in the Democratic Party without really taking any sort of ownership over the fact that that was caused within the Democratic Party. party by being far to establishment in so many ways and looking to specifically skew the

nomination towards a most central running candidate. And what gets me as well is it's not just the establishment hacks that we've come to know, it's people who have been on the resistance side for the longest time. And now that we're moving towards the campaign, I hate to throw people out there, but someone like Alyssa Milano, right, who I get it, she's been great for this advocate. But then it's first to come out and vocalize, not her endorsement for Joe Biden, but kind of skew her outlook towards that, and in any sort of vilification of Joe Biden has looked as a way as being divisive for Democrats, are we not supposed to go through and scrutinize

candidates in order to figure out who's got the policy proposal that's going to be beneficial to the country and not just run this same game as, well, they're better than Trump, because look by that God has the last time. I swear to God, I feel like there's two sides of it. It's people that think that the people who voted for Bernie or who wanted to vote for Bernie really gave us Donald Trump because they were the third party vote. are there's the people who have some sort of sanity that think, no, we can't just run candidates based on the idea that they're better than someone else.

Yeah. They have to be good candidates who support the policy proposals that the country wants. So the primaries are four. Yeah, I see that out there. Look, I'm generally a big fan of the activism of Alyssa Mano. I do disagree with her. I've spoken with her about that. I do disagree on that particular.

She's not the only one. There's no, no, no, totally not. She's very high profile. Yeah. Yeah, like there are people saying, don't bad mouth the candidates. Okay, be specific about what that means. Really? Because there's a variety of different things you can do that could be labeled as bad mouthing.

Some of it I think it is. Some of it isn't. I like some people get mad when we talk about particular candidates. Some people get mad when we talk about any of the candidates. They don't want to talk about any of it. Well look, it's all due respect, it's way too important. We're going to be covering the primary. If something bad crops up for a candidate and we think it's important, we're going to cover it.

We're going to cover things that they've said, things that they voted for. What we don't do is just sit down and say, what would be bad for them? Let's find something bad. We don't do that, we're not trying to vilify anyone, we're not trying to demonize anyone. There are people that do that because there's a lot of money to be made in doing that because there's an audience for that stuff. But we're going to cover the good stuff and the bad stuff. Sometimes stuff that's good and bad, there are shades of gray in this.

And I worry about how many people are sort of emotionally prepared to go through this process In a serious way, without resorting to the sort of thing that you said, we're an assumption that if we talk about a speech or a vote, we're guaranteeing more Trump. Understand, literally no one in the country wants four more years of Trump less than me. And I believe we need a good candidate to beat him. And there's a reason why some of the more marginalized communities in the United States feel like their voice is heard for a certain period of time and then ignored. So when it comes to Joe Biden, there's a lot of people that were siding with the Black Lives

Matter movement when it came to resisting Donald Trump and supporting people moving for as we move towards 2020, but then all of a sudden criticizing Biden's policies in the past, which have notoriously hindered many minority communities in this country and have not favored their outlook on them, all of a sudden we're not supposed to criticize that because we're all on this same movement towards defeating Trump. So then what about their messaging? What about their voices when they're looking at trying to overthrow or completely demolish this justice system and rebuild it when a man here has helped contribute to that?

And I'm not saying that people don't make mistakes. They do, but then ask them about it, and what do they plan on doing in the future to rectify that? But now, asking that question is alienating that candidate and not allowed? It's almost like you can't win, but you have to do this. One quick thing, because at least one, throw the bone to the folks who are worried about, when you have a conversation with a crazed group of people, so we'll lump many Trump supporters into that craze group of people who are just going to believe conspiracy theories, believe every lie he tells, And when you're trying to have a rational conversation with people who aren't listening or at least not having the same conversation, you end up, this is the fear, I think, for people like you said, with Alyssa Milano, with supporting Biden is let's go with the safer candidate because if we go so hard one way with so many policy, policy, policy, policy, that's the smart approach and intellectual approach to solving our problems versus people who are like, I can't believe you're trying to kill us.

You're like, we're not having the same conversation. So they're worried that the crazed folks who are rabid about voting over someone based off of nothing versus people who are thinking things through, it splits up intellectuals versus mob mentality. So they're worried, let's go somewhere in the middle because we can't let the mob mentality win again. So that's the fear, and I get it. But the one word you have to go through that is focus. If enough Americans focus, you can get through the criticism of Biden and not see it as just picking him apart and see it as us assessing the candidate. Yeah, and I just want to say finally, while we're just using hers as a representative of this, I disagree with her on this particular thing, but I think the reason she's going

for that, again, I disagree is because she cares so much about the issues and she's really worried about the effect that Trump would have. I was going by an MSNBC interview that I watched for her. When it was more so of the, we're looking to beat Trump, and I think that goes along with what Sean King actually tweeted out, which I agree with really quick, is people are in this idea of I'm going to vote based on feeling, rather than taking into account the policy proposals that we need to look at that are going to better the country. They're voting on this gut feeling as I'm so scared of another four years of Trump that I'm just looking

to play whatever candidate is going to come forward that's going to give us that chance. But in order to do that, you have to try and understand what their proposals are that are going to benefit the country. I agree. We're going to take a short break here. When we come back, some environmental regulations rolled back by the Trump administration, we're going to talk about the likely effect of that. We need to talk about a relatively new show called Un-Fing the Republic, or UNFTR. As a young Turks fan, you already know that the government, the media, and corporations are constantly peddling lies that serve the interests of the rich and powerful.

But now there's a podcast dedicated to unraveling those lies, debunking the conventional wisdom. In each episode of Un-B-The-Republic, or UNFTR, the host delves into a different historical episode or topic that's generally misunderstood or purposely obfuscated by the so-called powers that be. Featuring in-depth research, razor-sharp commentary, and just the right amount of vulgarity, the UNFTR podcast takes a sledgehammer to what you thought you knew about some of the nation's most sacred historical cows. But don't just take my word for it. The New York Times described UNFTR as consistently compelling and educational, aiming to challenge conventional

and upend the historical narratives that were taught in school. For as the great philosopher Yoda once put it. You must unlearn what you have learned. And that's true whether you're in Jedi training or you're uprooting and exposing all the propaganda and disinformation you've been fed over the course of your lifetime. So search for UNFDR in your podcast app today and get ready to get informed, angered, and entertained

all at the same time. After this. Welcome back for the first hour, everybody. Before we get back to the news, I did want to let you know about a couple of little things for the members that if you're a member you can get access to. And if not, it's relatively easy to fix. So we've just recently had on the most recent episode of Old School, Matt Walsh, star of Veep, spoke with Jank, and you can see that.

We've also got a TMI episode with Matt Walsh. Really interesting topic. So it's him talking about what is the first thing that he purchased when he got big money from being an actor. Oh, too much information. It might be. I was gonna guess one thing. I'm not gonna, you know, just watch it.

It'll be fun. And if you're not already member, you can go to t.t.com to become a member and get access to all of that and a bunch of other stuff. We're gonna be giving you some previews through the rest of the show of other stuff exclusive to the members. But it's awesome, you're not gonna want to miss it. With that, why don't we jump back into the news? Regulations set up in the wake of the disastrous Deepwater Horizon an explosion are now being rolled back under the Trump administration with a set of new industry-friendly

rules. Let's talk about some of these. The new rules eliminate a requirement that safety and pollution prevention equipment be inspected by independent auditors certified by the Bureau. A bipartisan presidential commission established after the BP disaster recommended such inspections, now oil companies can use, quote, recommended practices set by the oil industry for ensuring that safety equipment works, returning to a standard that existed before the Gulf oil spill. That is bad, but it's even worse than it might sound at first because what we're saying here is not that we go from an independent certified auditor to they have their own requirements. They are just their own suggestions.

It is entirely internal, it's also now recommendations rather than requirements. And if you know anything about the BP disaster, it was this sort of a lackadaisical approach to safety equipment that got us into that situation that was so devastating. We'll give you some numbers on that in just a little bit. That's not the only change though. Safety Bureau regulators removed a key word from language describing the level of downhole pressure. The agency requires operators to maintain in a given well to avoid an accident.

The word it removed is safe. That's good, it was too long, you gotta shorten it, we wanna be able to tweet the rule eventually. We just fit it in with the 280. Additionally, pressure tests, which failed in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, no longer have to show that a well is in balance, instead they should indicate that. requirement that forced oil rig and platform operators to design in the shore that equipment functions in extreme heat and weather such as storms that produce high winds was eliminated as well. And look, going forward over the next few decades, I haven't seen anything that

indicates that the world is going to get either stormy or hotter. So why should the safety equipment need to stand up to that? Now, look, obviously I'm joking and you might say, well, why would you make all these changes sounds like a disaster in the making? Well, officials at the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, a division of the Interior Department that promulgated the rule, said the changes also will save the offshore oil and gas industry nearly a billion dollars over 10 years. If I were them, I would invest that money and hopefully accrue enough interest that when this inevitably results in another environmental disaster, that can defray a little bit of

the costs of that. My God, so it's so hard to process the fact that there's like, there's so many analogies you can make. It's like, okay, so let's just hire John Stumpf to oversee Wall Street's financial mismanagement. Let's just hire, oh, wait, John Kelly just got hired to oversee a sheltering. Oh, wait, we kind of do that already. So it goes along with that, that way in which America works. I think that Shield should hire Thanos, actually. I think that he's an expert on these sorts of threats. Oh, man. It's, it's, you have to laugh. You don't have to laugh. It's not funny at all, but you laugh in order to try and comprehend what you're reading.

But these are actual things that are happening in the environment at the moment. And the fact that they removed the word safe in general is to try and, in a way to try and comprehend that this is an okay decision to be made in order to save themselves some money and not invest in trying to prevent things from happening. And this is the thing that it boils down to. In this country, you will consistently have people throw tons of money towards the most senseless, diabolical things that you don't need. like, well, let's try and go to space and see if we can try and fight Space Force or whatever it is we're trying to do. We'll throw our money towards that and we'll consistently invest. But then when it comes to preventative measures, that's when people go crazy. It's like, oh, what about the Green New Deal? That's going to cost us so much money.

Okay, well, let's put a price on the earth. And then let's put a price on fighting ET and his army that we're trying to put together in space. Oh, that's actually the better cost of our money. Let's put our money towards that. The fact is that we've seen what happens. We have literally seen what happens when you don't invest in preventative measures when it comes to situations like this, but they want to roll it back to save some pennies. And then what's going to happen is the people who are in charge of actually making the money in this industry are the ones that are going to oversee the safety protocol. There's no independent verification.

It's the people who are trying to make money from this who are going to say, no, we don't need that. That's okay. As it's happening, these are the questions that need to be asked. I'm always talking about how White House reporters or the pool reporters that talk to The spokesperson to Trump himself when he comes out and stands in front of them in the cameras before he gets on the plane, ask him, so why are you working more for the oil companies? When is the swap going to get drained, Mr. President?

I mean, so when you talk about rolling back regulations, how does that help? Yes, it saves money for your industry and industry partners who gave you all this money to do it in the first place. What is it doing for safety purposes? Because guess who else died during the Deepwater was employees of these companies? Because they care so much about their employees, we care about employees and job numbers and all these things on the rise. They're in more danger.

One thing that one of the people from the American Petroleum Institute who represents in lobbies on behalf of the industry, he said, the reasons why they can do this is because what we don't realize is since back in the day when it happened was offshore industry development is safer than ever. Technological advances, do you have this? No, no. But I mean, presumably part of the safety regulations that we added, but- Technological advances as well as collaborative efforts by the industry and regulators have

helped to continuously advance this. Not two paragraphs later, the article also talks up, oil companies can use recommended practices set by the oil industry in ensuring the safety returning to a standard that existed before the Gulf oil spill. So if we've got technological advances and you're returning to pre-oil regulations, what have we advanced? It's like we've advanced so much, we're going to go back. Okay, so there's new advancements in car technology and accident technology, airbags, safety

features on cars. We look at these to make sure we don't die in a car accident. So if you don't want those regulations on cars, you say, let's go back to the 1920s and just build those cars that had less safety features on them. That means you're going to die in these car accidents. It doesn't make any sense, but they just, you can put coverings on everything and nobody will follow your line of logic. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I guess we don't have.

They're gonna save the money because they got these people in office. It's trickle down safety. You have to make sense. Yeah. The no fossil fuel money pledge seems kind of important on a day like today. Just a little bit of just a catch up, a little history lesson in case you weren't around when this disaster happened. As Francis has pointed out, our memory is like a goldfish in America.

It was bad that disaster. You've already mentioned the actual lives that were lost. In addition, the Deepwater Horizon disaster poured 4 million barrels of oil, about 200,000 gallons into the Gulf of Mexico. When I said that it would save them a billion dollars, bear in mind, BP announced that the accident had cost the company $61.6 billion, more than the value of Ford, Honda, or General Motors. The Gulf fishing industry lost nearly $95 million in 2010 alone.

So they're going to save a billion dollars, they're going to risk losing billions and billions, except that they're not really, because if it happens, they're not going to pay for it, we're going to pay for it, we're going to bail them out, you know that it's to happen. By the way, additionally, according to the National Audubon Society, a million seabirds died. More than 150 whales and dolphins were found dead during the response to the spill while surviving dolphins suffered lung defects and hormone abnormalities. I know that most people will put very little value on the lives of those whales and dolphins.

Today I am inclined to put more value on their lives than the lives of the people who created these new regulations that are going to allow for more disasters like BP again. It is depressing. We just did our Earth Day special and a couple times over the past two years. We've done roundups of all of the different rollbacks of regulations from the Obama era. And it's just, it never stops. You do that video, it's immediately outdated because they target another area. They target the air, they target the water, they target the pipes, they target the oil derricks.

It's unbearable. Okay, but let's move on to another topic. The California State Senate just passed a law that Donald Trump is definitely gonna love. They passed this bill on Thursday. They approved a bill to require candidates appearing on the presidential primary ballot, including President Trump, to release five years' worth of income tax returns. And if they do not release those, they will not end up on the primary ballot, which could become an issue going down the line if you want to accrue the electoral votes necessary

to actually become president. Now they actually passed a similar bill back in 2017, but Governor Jerry Brown, then governor, didn't sign it. He also, by the way, didn't release his own tax returns. interesting coincidence there, a spokesman for Governor Gavin Newsom told the AP that if the bill was sent to Newsom's desk, it would be evaluated on its own merits. I don't know what that means. I don't know what other merits you would use to evaluate a piece of legislation.

It certainly sounds though like he does not want to go on the record. Yeah, I mean this is definitely the type of Senate bill that you should be expecting moving forward to presidential debates going forward. But the one thing that I know is going to happen for sure is simply put, no. Conservative or Republican are even going to care and they'll talk about this because they, for what was it two weeks their whole defense mechanism was, well Bernie hasn't released his and Bernie's like, all right, here's eight years. Oh wait, so Trump still has not responded to that and we're just going to move forward again.

He's waiting for Hickenlooper. It's frustrating because you would expect it that simply put anyone who's going to be looking to represent this country would go forth and be okay with showing that they represent this country as most citizens do and pay their taxes and don't have any shady business going on behind the scenes. But it becomes just a waste of energy in my opinion to bring up this topic because it was consistently talked about in 2016. It was relentlessly talked about and nothing seemed to move the meter in the favor of Donald

Trump coming forth and releasing these taxes. And eventually when it did the whole blowup was, it was Mad El Special on looking at the tax returns which was a tiny snippet of what it was like the cover page with nothing else. It was the receipt from TurboTax, actually. So when you look at something like this, you're like, okay, it's newsworthy, I get it. If it is actually taken seriously, then that's something that everyone should consider. But Republicans will just tear it up and touch in the trash anyway. When you think about the requirements, people have to go through to get any job.

And somehow we're allowed to have this conversation about whether or not the president can release his tax turn so we can know if he has the best interest in hard. of America versus his interests, which he's already proven to us he cares about his own interests in the first place. You can't dispute that argument. We know that he's worried about his own interests. He halfway said it himself. So if you want to find out if it really has the interest in heart of America versus his own self-interest, it's part of the things you look at.

Man, you cannot get a job as a park ranger without them finding out whether or not you have something in your background that is going to make it seem like you're a danger to this park. You may be a range of a park in your state that's an acre size big. You know, you're not even dealing with anything that's huge wildlife. You're dealing with just a park. They want to make sure you're not a bad guy. And if you say, you know, I don't want, I'm not going to submit to the background check, no.

You can be like, okay, we'll move along. But the president of the United States can say, I'm not giving you anything that's going to let you know how potentially horrible I can be because I just don't feel like it. And enough people will back him up and say, yeah, I don't even know anything about them. It's just my country that I'm supposed to be. part of running. Yeah. But we've allowed ourselves to put this hierarchy of responsibility for people.

If you're a low normal citizen, oh, run through the gauntlet. If you've gotten to this point where you're an incompetent leader of a country now, do whatever you want. And I don't know how we allow ourselves to believe this. Why we put what, we, there's so much self-hatred in this country, you're like, yeah, screw me over all you want, but you who screw me over, have that it. Free reign, where's the anger on this? It's what Jenk talks about a lot of the time is like people find it so easier to look down

when they want to place blame instead of looking up and understanding that the reason we have so much of a complicated discussion around how people become billionaires is because we don't want to actually crack open the nut and figure out the discrepancies within the system that allow someone like Donald Trump with these handouts, with these consistent business dealings to try and explore how he came to that wealth and actually look at actually look at what goes on within the system. People talk so much about taxpayer money is going to this, taxpayer money is going to out, we're going to save you on taxpayer money.

So if you're having a president who's literally running a campaign based on the fact that he's going to give tax breaks to certain amount of people which he talked about in his campaign, then why are we not looking at his tax returns and looking at the ways in which he's able to manage his wealth, especially with the fact is that the reason they don't want to do it is because when you open up his tax returns, you start to realize the discrepancies that comes within the disproportionate amounts of wealth that are passed around the American economy. Because if they open up theirs, all of a sudden, the Republican leaders are going to have

to start looking at the way they manage their finances, and nobody wants to look at their own. If he's not looking up, they've got to start looking at the else. They've directly said it. They said, if you let the IRS get into all of his business, he can get into all of your business. Hey, guess what, they can already get into all of our business. It's going to get into his.

Yeah, yeah, I think that we need to know what's going to do. out in there, I think that the lengths that he's going to to hide it is obviously incredibly suspicious. I mean, suing Deutsche Bank and stuff like that. In terms of an individual state passing a bill like this, I could take it or leave it. It makes me pretty uncomfortable, honestly. I think that if they want to use that Treasury Department of regulation to allow them to get access to it, which is 100% legal, they should do that if the Southern District needs to get it. They should do that. If they're going to get it from Deutsche Bank, that's fine. And perhaps it has come to this. I preferred when it was a norm that people abided by at this level.

And I don't like to run my political ideology via fears over, you know, slippery slopes or anything like that. But I mean, it wouldn't be that difficult for us to come up with some other ridiculous imposition that a Republican legislature might put on presidential candidates, I suppose. I don't think this is one of those, but I think that it could be spun that way. And so this This particular implementation of wanting to get Trump's tax returns, I'm not necessarily very supportive of, but I do think that we should get access to them, and I am worried about what we'd find in them. Sorry, I know it's way past, but also, you know what?

So we're worried about implications, and I hear you, John, implications on running people through the gauntlet and potentially putting up really bad parameters for someone to run for any office. We put up serious parameters for people to effing vote. So we see the disenfranchisement of voters in many states in the country. They put up random things to keep folks from voting they don't want to vote from poll taxes to, I mean, you see what's happening in Florida after people voted for released prisoners to then vote. All that's getting just turned on its head.

They can do those things, and there's no slippery slope argument. There's only a slippery slope argument when the people in power are being put under some kind of a magnifying glass. I'm gonna blow your mind. I'm actually in favor of making it easier to vote. I think I'm on the record on it, actually. I agree with what you're saying. Still thinking about this?

Just expressing my thoughts. Anyway, we do have to take a break, though. When we come back, more to get soon. At TYT, we frequently talk about all the ways that big tech companies are taking control of our online lives, constantly monitoring us and storing and selling our data. But that doesn't mean we have to let them. It's possible to stay anonymous online and hide your data from the prying eyes of big tech. And one of the best ways is with ExpressVPN.

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By the way, we're gonna do a couple more stories here. But when we go into the second hour, Brooke Thomas is gonna be taking over. We also have Aaron Ryan of Hysteria on Crooked Media. Should be an awesome hour, so you're not gonna wanna miss that. We've got a couple of comments I wanna read. I also wanna let you know, I told you there'd be other member stuff and there is, hopefully you've already gone to TYAT.com slash John to become a member. This Sunday, we're gonna be doing our Game of Thrones review for the fourth episode of the eighth season.

It is going to be awesome. The whole season's been great. You can see there that Brett and Brooke and Ben and myself are going to be there. We have been having so much fun breaking down each of the episodes so far this season. And while the initial review of the episode, which happens right after it airs, will be available to everybody at tyt.com slash live. After that, when we transition into predictions for the next episode and the rest of the season, that is just for the members. So you're going to want to go to t.com slash John and become a member so that you don't miss any of that. I wanted to read a couple of the comments I saw.

Matthew wrote in and said primary, who cares? We want the same law for the general election. I believe that if you don't make it on to the primary ballot, you can't be the representative for the party. So it would have that effect of also influencing the general election. I'm fairly certain. I saw Asherala Zumi said watch knocked down the house last night. It was really good. The best part was when AOC was reading Joe Crowley's pamphlet.

then looks at the camera giving a WTF look. That was great. And if you haven't already watched it, what are you doing with your life? Go watch it. It's awesome. It's inspirational. It's tragic in parts. It's incredibly moving and sad in parts.

I mean, basically everyone I know has at least teared up watching it. When AOC starts talking about her father, I was like, I was like, I'm just going to turn away from my girlfriend right now. She's going to see this. Real men cry, John. Let it out. Yeah, real men cry and then feel shame about it. Okay, no spoilers, I don't want to know if she won.

Okay, okay, no spoilers. And this, let's see, okay, also, vicious Cree says, this is part of why the GOP is so opposed to green energy. They need oil to remain a profitable, lucrative commodity, which they are more than willing to monetize into political bribes. A good point. And that is true. Imagine if every politician had taken the no fossil fuel money pledge. Do you think that these regulation changes would happen? There's no logic behind it.

The only, anyway, we can get into a larger conversation. You'd actually have an opportunity to find out what your elected officials really think. Exactly. You might find out what Lindsey Graham really thinks. It is amazing to me that people still vote for candidates who take money from these industries. Like, anyway, larger conversation, we don't have time for it now. Okay, Media Matters has released the results of a study where they looked into how different major media outlets on social media, how they dealt How they dealt with Donald Trump's quotes, is he, you know, if he's lying, do they acknowledge

it or do they simply show you what he said? And it turns out we're screwed. So major media outlets failed to rebut President Donald Trump's misinformation, 65% of the time in their tweets about his false or misleading comments, according to media matters. That means the outlets amplified Trump's misinformation more than 400 times over the three-week period of the study, a rate of 19 per day. 30% of the tweets by major media outlets Twitter accounts about Trump's statements referenced to false or misleading statement, nearly two thirds of the time they didn't dispute it.

By the way, this also depends on where he's giving the misinformation. So when he's doing like a press gaggle, he's answering questions, they're coming fast, he's saying a lot about different topics. You will be shocked to find out that they're even less qualified to rebut the misinformation. Ninety-two percent of false or misleading Trump claims went undisputed when he was speaking at a press gaggle or pool spray, both of those terms need to be replaced, they're ridiculous. But the important information there is that when he's talking in that environment, hold on your butts because it's coming at you fast.

And I want to give you an example of this. Now by the way, this is not an example that I produced this story and then went and found. I had already come across this earlier in the day before we had this story and in fact responded to it because it was such BS. The Hill tweeted, President Trump, there's been no president in his story. that is given what I've given in terms of looking at just a total witch hunt. I call it the Russian hoax, it turned out to be no collusion, no obstruction, it was a total hoax, and yet I was transparent, and they had the video, and that's it.

No indication that there are multiple obvious deceptions and lies there. They just print it. And so I was fascinated when I read more in the study and found that the Hill was the worst actor that Media Matters found in this respect, they sent more than 40% of the tweets that pushed Trump misinformation without disputing it during the entire study. So they looked at tons of media outlets. And even with all of those, the Hill stood out in that they simply print what he says. Well, that's because this- By the way, NPR deserves a lot of credit.

They apparently never once published one of his lies without noting that it was a lie. So good job by NPR. It's gonna sound like, not that I'm defending, but it's gonna sound like I'm giving them cover. Because it's just the nature of the platform. It's why he lives on Twitter. It's why he doesn't have press conferences. He has press gaggles and sprays.

Pool sprays. Ocean sprays. Where he sprays lies, you know? There's many more colorful words I wanted to use for this. But, because he talks out of, so anyway, so as he's doing his pool sprays and his press gaggaggles, there's none of time, because again, this is still the nature of reporters going, this is what the president said, let me put it on the Twitter account right now. Yeah.

Maybe someone who's running the Twitter account isn't a political analyst, doesn't do any fact checking. When they do that fact checking, they're going to make sure the fact checking is done right. But let's get that tweet out, because he just said it, and let's get it out in two minutes. And let's do it in 140 characters, or is it 240 now? So now it's because of the limited nature of the time and the amount of space you have in a tweet, they go, let's just quote them and tell them people who said, everyone knows he's lying, right?

That's the point I was going to make is it's like, you almost forget that you're not some of the people out there that are eating up his tweets as 100% truths, right? Because he lies at such an enormous rate. I think he's now up his lie per day rate since the first half of his election. So it's somewhat impressive how many times he's lied. He's at 10,000 now. And I think that he's lied, I believe I read that he's said the same lie 20 or 21 times. I think about the building, that the walls in the process have been built, 20 or 21 times of repeating that lie.

Like, you think about that. Like, how many times do you lie to what your mom when you're getting caught when you're younger? Imagine repeating that same lie 21 times. After being caught. Without even fluctuate, it doesn't even fluctuate in the way he repeats a lie. It's exactly the same. So I'm with you, JR, on that, is like, I follow a few accounts where simply put, when he said the absolutely horrendous comment, which seems like old news, but it was like three

days ago about the doctors and a woman conspiring to execute a baby once they're born. Like, that is one of the most fallacious lies that he could ever be told, I think, in the history of American politics. He says it. and it's now old news because he's lied at such an enormous rate that it is buried at the bottom and he knows he's doing this

and I as you said maybe I'm not contributing as well as I should be when I just repeat maybe a Hill reporter who's tweeted this out and showed the video and I'm just retweeting it thinking

surely to God people know this is a lie but maybe I'm not maybe I'm just giving it out to another audience member who's like yeah I can't believe they're executing those babies like we need to start maybe having a little bit more of a rational conversation as to the way we approach reporting on his comments in order

to, I don't know, put in some sort of disclaimer, if the fact is that doctors and Mullers are not conspiring to execute babies once they're born, you might think, as we said, normal people might think clearly no one's believing this, but they do. Just in case, use the quote retweet and add in a little something. Yeah, add in something on top. And I will add it later on in my comments, but maybe it's just because of the magnitude of the lies that we are automatically thinking in our own best case scenarios in our head in order to deal with how absurd these things are that are being put out there, we're thinking, surely

to God, people might understand that this isn't the truth, but a lot of people don't. Just retweet it with the bull and then the recoiled poo. Oh, there you go. Yeah, and by the way, there's tweet threading, honestly, like, okay, the hill couldn't fit it because one of their employees doesn't follow politics or something, which seems crazy, but it is a second tweet, okay? Or do this. Just to give you the example of one that got it right from the Washington Post, analysis.

Trump claims a wall is needed to stop human trafficking, no data backs up his claim. It's really as easy as that. You're covering what he said, but you're not spreading this information. The reason that this matters, of course, is not just for the day-to-day social media and all that. We are entering into another election. You saw how much they would just show his whole rally, give the whole speech and all of that, no analysis whatsoever.

We cannot survive as a country in another election. You found it on that sort of like, just like lazy approach to Donald Trump's communication. And so great job on media matters in making clear that there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. Okay, with that, let's move on to our last story. South African Olympic medal winning athlete Castor Semenya suffered another legal setback earlier this week. On Wednesday, the court of arbitration for sport denied Castor Semenya's appeal against an international association of athletics, federations rule that would prevent from competing at the highest level of track. The rule limits the testosterone levels of competitors in women's track events, and will require

Semenia to take medically unnecessary drugs in order to compete. Now if you haven't been following this story, Castor Semenia naturally produces more testosterone than the vast majority of other women, and that is now being targeted with a very specific ruling in this particular case against the specific events in track that Castasemania competes in. Now, this was obviously a bit of bad news for Castro Semenya. When asked by reporters if she would take medication to lower her testosterone and allow her to still run an 800 meter race, she said, hell no, which you have to respect. So yeah, this is some BS.

Well, there's one note to, let's start us on a very high pedestal of hope and then we'll bring everyone down to that sad depressing state. She won today, her last race, I believe that she ran today before she has to, quote unquote, if she's going to look into this medication, whatever it is. She won it today by a landslide. It's a phenomenal athlete. There's one part of this I wanna discuss, and it's away from the actual athlete and just a person.

The amount of scrutiny that this woman has had to go through, like I was looking at the long list of the test that have been ran on her, the exploration of her, and looking into her genetics is a way of just probing at her as if she's not a human being, right? And this is not unfamiliar. Don't look at Serena Williams' long track, record of testing and drug testing in constant vilification and people policing her body

and trying to make it as a way to comprehend that this powerful, outspoken, bald black women is brilliant at their sport. So I do think that there's a lot of sexism involved in this, but it's not a surprise that this is also another black woman involved. So I look at her sex verification test in 2009, right? And this is a quote directly from her. And it really saddened me when I read it. She said, I've been subjected to unwarranted and invasive scrutiny of the most intimate

and private details of my being. I constantly looked at through a lens in order to diminish her accomplishments because of something that is biological. And this is another point that I wanted to bring up. A Washington Post article today was fantastic in which they looked at Michael Phelps as a phenom and the biological parts of his body

that make him superior that no one seems to be policing. He's got double-jointed ankles. He's got a disproportionately vast wingspan. And according to many studies, he produces almost half the lactic acid of a typical athlete. And if you know sports, I've had many cramps and I produce a lot of lactic acid, it contributes to fatigue. No one seems to be policing Michael Phelps, not just policing him. Everyone calls him a marvel.

They call him wondrous. There's basically this specimen of sport that is to be put up and acknowledged. But then we have this athlete that is to be policed that is actually to have harmful treatment in order to level the performance. playing field when she's not doing anything to elevate herself other than being who she is. We're talking about unfair it is and all this because people worry about records and she keeps winning and breaking records and continue to win multiple gold medals in all these races and all these events, these huge events, then they're worried about, oh, well, people competing against her, it's unfair to them.

A, records, it's an age-old sports term. Records are made to be broken. And if someone comes along and we like to use this term positively when we're talking about the ones that we like, they're a freak. Oh, he's a freak of nature. Look at him. Whatever sport, there's maybe a defensive lineman in football who's just bigger and stronger and quicker than everyone else.

And it just happens. Sports evolve and people come along that take over. And when you don't want to allow it just because the people that happen to be in that same era are getting beat, hey, sorry, bad luck for you. Enjoy second place. We don't change these things. I'm glad you brought up Michael Feltz because I was going to bring up Hussein Bolt. When they analyze Usain Bolt's steps he takes in a 100 meter raise, his legs are so long,

he takes significantly less steps. So it's not that his feet are moving that much faster. He's so much taller, he eats up ground. Like, what about the guy who's six feet tall? My God, he's not going to be able to compete. Guess what? He can't compete. He's going to lose because he's competing against Hussein Bolt.

So when you look at, when you're telling your grandkids, six foot tall track athlete, which I was too, you go, hey, I ran against Hussein Bolt. That freak of nature. When we call it a freak of nature, we say it's a good thing because the guy is surpassing what all over the normal folks can do. Somehow now this is a bad thing when someone just can beat you constantly. Stop crying and maybe start training a little harder. Yeah, so we talked about this morning.

Brett Ehrlich was on the damage report. We talked about the story. And sort of jokingly, we talked about the lactic acid buildup and all that. And in both of these cases, with production of testosterone, production of lactic acid, you can make a connection between those things and the performance in the sport. So I proposed, jokingly, what we're going to do is we're going to inject it with more lactic acid every time he competes. And that's a joke, I guess.

We'd never do it. How is that different? Yeah. In what actual way is that any different than requiring her to artificially lower the amount of testosterone their body produces? Yeah. And what's also so disheartening is you're expecting a lot of people who come out in support of her in this sport, but you look at some of the comments that are made by fellow runners.

in one of competitors. One was an Italian runner that said, these kind of people should not run with us. Like, how much are you trying to alienate a person? These kind of people will not run with us. For me, she is not a woman. She is a man. And that's why, as a person in my empathy,

I lead with that first, and I think it's not as much about protecting our records and her career. That is also super important. But as a person, to go through that consistent battering, the people to just constantly be trying to hammer away your identity because of your superiority in a sport. And there's probably no surprise you will see Serena Williams,

I bet, come out and support and talk to her and offer support because she has been going through this for years, where you have magazines that are constantly talking about her shoulder width and how she plays. And then what's also pretty funny is they're too masculine when they're great, but then they're too emotional if they let their feelings come out. Yeah. Yeah, and as we pointed out on the damage report this morning,

Fox News had a lower third referring to Castoresumania as a transgender athlete. not transgender just 100% inaccurate complete line yeah it works for their narrative I guess anyway we do have to take a break oh by the way thank you France thank you JR we're gonna have a whole new panel we come back Brooke is gonna be leading us it's gonna be awesome we'll see in a few thanks for listening to the full episode of the young Turks support our work listen ad free access members only bonus content and more by subscribing to Apple podcast at Apple dot co slash t yt i'm your host jank huger and i'll see you soon