The Young Turks - MAGA's At War

Episode Date: December 28, 2024

A MAGA ""civil war"" erupts on X between Elon Musk and the far-right over H-1B visas. Donald Trump asks the Supreme Court to delay the looming TikTok ban. Michael Moore challenges the ""pro-Netanyahu crowd,"" asking when their ""lust for blood"" will be ""satiated."" " HOST: Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur), John Iadarola (@johniadarola), Ramesh Srinivasan (@RameshMedias) 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'm so upset. Oh my God. Let's go! Gah! Speed my team. Be watching.

Dream my team. Dream watching. Dream like team. Speed my team. Dream like me. See my team. Fine, drop it. power power panel jay huger john idarola rematch turn of us and remesh of course is a professor at ucla and a host of utopia's

wouldn't that be a lovely thing if we if we found one let alone multiple utopias uh not there yet though although your picture looks like you're in a utopia your video i mean i was i was just literally telling john and kate that i'm in the garden of eden up here just kidding it looks like i am in northern I am in northern California on my way up to the beautiful lost coast, and I'm going to spend some time in the forest and on the ocean over the New Year's Eve. And we got a story for you today. That's just perfect for you today on the H1B visas. I mean, it couldn't be on a better day. Right. And of course, John's the host of damage reports, which you should all check out 1 o'clock Eastern every day. All right, John, let's get started. Okay, let's dive into the muck, starting with this. It's populist nationalists versus elite globalist.

Loomers on here, she's banned, they're trying to ban Gavin Wax. You're gonna be banned eventually by the free speech absolutist. The nerds don't take criticism, they're kind of, you know, they're a little bit all on the spectrum, right? So they don't know, they're not deep in social skills. That is Steve Bannon joining into the, I thought it was already going the Civil War. on the right, but it seems to be expanding even throughout today between like the long time MAGA hardcore base and then some of the the newer MAGA, the techie billionaire MAGA, they really disagree on a variety of things and it has quickly

become it's got to the point of people being losing their access to Twitter accusations of betrayals and racist comments and And we're gonna dive into all of that. We do wanna let you know that it seems to have basically started when Donald Trump appointed Suram Krishnan to serve a senior White House policy advisor on artificial intelligence, which when it happened probably didn't seem like it would cause the fissure that broke Maga. But that's how it's looking right now. And we're gonna get to all the details.

But Jake, what do you make of this? So I agree with Elon and Vivek, but I love the rebellion against them. So I'm gonna explain why in a little bit. And as we were talking, Elon Musk just liked my tweet on this, like right now on the show. And I'm going to tell you why he liked it once we get to that part of it. Even though I'm criticizing him in parts, because what's most interesting guys is the fissures, is the divisions within the right wing. And that's what makes the story amazing.

Yes. Some more details. I agree. You'll criticize him in part. I will do all of the rest of it because I long for a day in which we no longer have to know that he exists. But for now we do. But let's jump back to the new advisor for artificial intelligence and why it caused all this issue. So Krishna is an Indian American entrepreneur. Has previously worked in a number of different major tech companies, Microsoft and Twitter

and Yahoo and Facebook and Snap. So kind of all of them, I guess. He's the United States citizen. By the way, that will be either ignored or lost on many of the people who want to make this immediately a race thing. But the big issue for him is that he supports using. H-1B visas to bring foreign workers in to work based on certain specific skills they have, to work in engineering, coding, that sort of thing. And so some of the original MAGA people, for whom America First is not a suggestion, it's really a command, we're not happy about this. So Laura Lumer is ever going to miss an opportunity to be involved in some sort of massive, racist uproar. So she tweeted, our country was built by white Europeans, actually, not third world

invaders from India. Again, he's a United States citizen. But anyway, you know, it was white Europeans who created the American dream and we didn't create it so that it could be exploited by pro open border techies like you. P.S., why are people in India still sing in the water they bathe and drink from? Because if you thought she was going to get through a tweet without making it real gross, no, that's not going to happen. So anyway, she goes on to say, don't talk to me as an American citizen about innovation when

we actually have running water and indoor plumbing here in America. Perhaps you need to retake your American history class. Do the tech billionaires you work with in Silicon Valley even bother teaching their third world hires about American history anymore? Or are you only interested in your invader supremacist revisionist history? And I love, that's my favorite part at the end, where she capped it off where it's those other people who are supremacists, not the person insisting that we bow down to our white forefathers who created all of this.

But anyway, and lots of other people jumped in. You can see tweets like this, did any of you all? vote for this Indian to run America. Jesus. And look, I want your commentary, but this is where Elon's going to get wrapped up in this because he, like Christan, supports using his H-1B visas. He's been very clear about that for a number of years. He's been clearer on that than he has been in support for Trump and for longer. But it's already getting really gross. Yeah. So guys, I was just going to explain you my position. There's no point in reading you the tweet, I thought, until Elon liked it in the middle of the segment. And so the fact that

he did is an interesting indication that is actually relevant to the story. So let me read you the tweet that I did before the show. It summarizes my point of view and then we'll talk through all the ramifications. I said, I agree with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramas saw me about H1B visas, which is what we're going to get into in a second. But I love the rebellion, I guess, because it shows that Magus thinking for itself. I said, I disagree with the right wing populace here because I think it's awesome that the most talented engineers across the world want to come here and I think they make us stronger because we get to take the top talent of all the other countries. That's a great advantage of being America. We shouldn't throw that away.

But this fight shows that Maga is not a monolith and that's a great thing. Vivek is right and wrong. He's right that we should celebrate nerds. We're going to get to that part of the story in a second and people who work hard in school. But he's wrong that we need to put down anyone else in order to do that. I was both an honor student and a middle linebacker for our football team. There's nothing wrong with being a jock or a nerd or both. And I said, I can't stand Laura Lumer and I think her comments about Indians are awful. But I also don't think she should be punished for her comments blocked or unverified, which is another part of the story we're going to get to. Let the marketplace of ideas sort this out. The forces for good don't need

censors to help us. And so since Elon is being accused of censoring Laura Lumer, the fact that he liked that tweet is interesting. It might be lost on him. I don't know. I don't think he's as intelligent as people think he is, but. Okay, that's, look, everything's a possibility, right? And so let me get to the core why I love all of this. Because, guys, in the bad old days, whether it was Mitch McConnell's the leader of the Republican Party or George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Trump in his first term, they would just give an order and all the Republicans would go, yes, sir, right?

And now orders are given and people go, maybe, sir, but maybe not. and then we get into this giant, messy fight. That is way better than one person gives an order, one person is completely in charge, and everybody is in a cult when they do exactly what they're told, right? So this particular fight is already instantly ugly, and so I've been talking about left-wing populism and right-wing populism and how we agree on maybe about 40% of stuff anti-war, anti-corruption, etc. But there's 60% we don't agree with.

This is among the 60% we don't agree with. Because there's nothing wrong with H-1B visas. Look, again, here, I'm going to turn to Ramesh now because Ramesh, some folks are saying, no, there is something wrong with H-1B visas. It's being applied wrong. It's maybe not a bad idea overall, but it allows people, the tech companies, to hire people for less money, et cetera. What's your take on that?

Well, several different things. First, very, very troubled and something that has to be broken down, how those driving tech have turned more and more to the right and to be. become mega supporters and I know you all have been covering that but there's a lot to get into there and second uh sort of somewhat shamefully for me as a child of h1 b visa parents and as someone who's south asian and Indian American myself it's sad for me to see fellow Indian Americans embrace and cozy up to this to Trump who and the Trump administration which still is pretty open about its racism that said the H1B visa

was one of the major fuels by which the U.S. economy was able to boom because of its ability to attract high-skill workers from other parts of the world, particularly parts of South Asia, East Asia, and so on. However, as we know quite well, our economy is sick. It's infected. It's not well. It's diseased, right? And so there is always going to be this kind of clash or this tension between people saying, wait a second, the reason we elected you, and this is the vast majority, I would say, or majority of many, of people who voted for Trump is because the economy is sick for middle and working class people. So I think what, you know, Elon and Vivek, I don't, I'm not a big fan necessarily of both of them on many different levels. I think they're both recognizing that the only way the U.S. economy will continue to thrive in its incredibly unequal and unjust ways, which is behind Trump's election, is by expanding this. program and that's going to bring out racist responses like which what you had read out.

But at the end of the day, Trump and and all these folks running this administration, Vivek, Elon, et cetera, are going to have to show whether they can deliver for the middle and working classes for the so called MAGA base, which is mainly working in middle class. And we've seen next to no evidence that they could do so from the first administration, where Trump passed the biggest tax cut for billionaires in the history of our country. And I don't see much evidence of this now, even though I'm happy about the labor secretary, though the National Labor Relations Board was scutted. So I'm just getting at the point here that these flashpoints of elitism relative to populism

are showing up now within this new emerging administration, because really there's very little, there's not really a better adjective or characterization of people like Ramoswamy and Musk other than the word elite. Yeah. And I'm going to briefly criticize Elon, but then I want to give you what Vivek is talking about, because he gets more into sort of the cultural side of why they think they can't turn to American workers or don't want to. and then we can criticize him. I'm in a weird position where I guess technically I agree with them in that I don't have

any problem with H-1B visas. I don't think we're being invaded when talented engineers or coders want to come and work here. That's consistent with my view on basically most forms of immigration. It's not consistent, by the way, with how Elon Musk and Vivek Ramoswamy talk and think about most immigrants. They seem to acknowledge that we can be enriched economically, culturally, technologically, with these certain migrants, but they don't seem to acknowledge that at every other rung of the

economic ladder, migrants coming in make our country stronger. And I wish that they could be a little more consistent about that. I also worry that some of this is about exploitation, that Elon Musk, we know how he treats his workers. He seems to despise humans as a necessary evil. I think he sees some of these people that he brings in as more exploitable. You acknowledge that they might be able to be paid less. They might also be able to be worked far harder at threat of being deported. We know how he works, the few remaining engineers at Twitter and all that, and he constantly talks about, it's not just that Americans aren't talented enough, they're not motivated enough. They won't sleep, you know, five nights in a row at the

Twitter headquarters or whatever, like maybe he wants to. And so I have a little bit worried that there's an undercurrent of exploitation to this, but I guess ostensibly we agree. In any- Let me just say two quick things about that, John. One, I love your defense of immigrants overall, right? It's not just the high paid ones, the high skilled ones, et cetera. I mean, look, if we're keeping it real and you want to be more specific, I would give credit to all the immigrants from all the different nations, but Mexican immigrants built this country in so many ways. And we, instead of thanking them, we've, you know, lambasted them over and over again and try to drive them out. So in Latin American immigrants overall. So, but look at this,

This is, and then it puts the right wing to a test in a different way, which is, I thought you said you guys said you were against undocumented immigrants, because now all of a sudden it looks like you're against all immigrants, because H-1B is perfectly legal way of, you know, getting a visa to this country. So let's be clear about it. I'm, you know, undocumented immigrants is a different category. And, but documented immigrants, I'm 100% in favor of in this country. And I think we should have more, not less. And but I like that they're finally realizing, yeah, Elon and Vivek are part of the elites. Now, just because you're elite doesn't mean you're wrong about everything or that you're a bad person. I just agreed with Elon and

Vivek on the H-1B visas, right? But I like that the right wings going, oh, right, we have elites too, to which I say, of course. Elon was the number one donor to Donald Trump, gave him over quarter of a billion dollars. And he didn't do that for his health. Yeah, but I do want to get into the cultural argument that Ramoswami is making, then we can discuss that. So, and there had been a little bit of this in what Musk was saying and and Musk went off on this, he agreed with this tweet referring to Americans as to our word to be able to do this work and you can't teach them in schools because they're the R word. And he had no, no issue with that whatsoever, which I find strange and noteworthy.

But this is what Ramoswamy says. The reason top tech companies often hire foreign born and first generation engineers over Native Americans? Is it because of an innate American IQ deficit, a lazy and wrong explanation? It comes down to the C word culture. Okay, our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long, at least since the 90s and likely longer. That doesn't start in college, it starts young. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve. Now close your eyes and visualize which families

you knew in the 90s or even now who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest. This can be our Sputnik moment. We've awakened from slumber before, don't say woke, and we can do it again. Trump's election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy, excellence over mediocrity, nerdiness over conformity, hard work over laziness. And even on that nerdyness thing, you see the strike back from the other MAGA people.

It was Steve Bannon implying something bad about nerds, as if he doesn't understand that he's just a politics nerd. Like, what does he think? He's a jock. In any event, the issue I have with this, I don't even agree with some of this. I do think that our culture has long, like we don't generally deify, worship, academics, thinkers, philosophers, scientists, and all of that. But I would also say that if you're going to be like doing a dissection of where our culture turned away from those sorts of heroes or even just accepting them, like do they know which party they're supporting? Do they know what Fox News has spent the last three decades doing? Do they know how implicitly anti-intellectual Donald Trump himself is, his circle is? They're the ones who've demonized not even just higher education anymore.

started with grad school, turning point USA, their state admission is to make people lose faith in college, Prager, you to make the very idea of education a joke. They've turned people against teachers, convincing them that if they're in higher education, they're Marxists, if they're in lower education, they're sexual predators. They've turned people against doctors and scientists, academics of all stripes. If America no longer like pushes its kids to enter into these fields, do they get that they're cheering on the side of the aisle that has pushed that more than any other? Feel free to disagree, but I kind of feel like the anti-intellectualism is coming from inside the house. Yeah, there's a lot of truth to that. So on top of that,

look, I agree with Vivek, as I said earlier, that, hey, we don't, like, it's good to celebrate nerds and people who don't conform. And oftentimes in the past, although I think American culture has really changed on that and it has accepted that a lot more than it used to. In the old days, you beat up on the nerds and stuff, but I don't think people do that anymore. I check with my kids all the time. I'm like, that's weird and needless. Nobody does that anymore, right? Maybe, but we live in L.A. I don't know, right? So yes, people who work hard in school should be celebrated, right? On the other hand, you don't have to beat up on average Americans. I love average Americans. You know why? Because they're not average. And so

what I mean by that is that we have a genetic lottery guys, if we're keeping it real. So like the elites like to pretend that they have a monopoly on being on wisdom and knowing what the right thing to do is. And golly gee, they just happen to set the rules on their own behalf with all their wisdom. And they say, well, that's the objective position. No, it's not, right? In reality, both went in terms of genes for working hard for geniuses in every way that's actually spread up all across the population. Okay. So that's why I love that Scotland, this part of me, for me, the cornerstone of Western civilization, Scotland started public schools. And once they did, all of a sudden, a whole bunch of geniuses popped up in Scotland,

including Adam Smith, who wrote about capitalism. Why? Because the geniuses were always there. They just didn't have an opportunity. And so that's why I love standing up for the average American youth. Because if you give them an opportunity, you're going to get all of those blossoming geniuses all across the country. By the way, it's not just Western civilization.

China did something similar for thousands of years. where they would find the best, the brightest in the different villages and towns and give them an education and then promote them up within their structure. So there's great examples all across the world, and we can focus on the great positives that we have here, et cetera. But guys, back to the H-1B visas and that idea of a culture that is hungry and wants to perform, there's one thing Elon's right about for sure. In a different tweet, he analogized this to a team.

And I thought that was a pretty good analogy because if you're in the NBA and you say, no, I don't want the best players from across the world, you're going to turn out Yokic, you're going to turn down the Greek freak, you're going to turn out literally the best players in the NBA. There's also amazing American players in the NBA, but why would you limit yourself and your talent? And in the case of H-1B visas or other immigrants that are coming in that way, these are not just the brightest, they're the hardest working. In fact, we're being unfair to the rest of the

world because we're taking their top talent and bring them here. But you get to be unfair like that when you set up an awesome country. And they want to come here. Now let me say to the right wing, take the win. Take the win. If all the greatest talent in the country is in the world is coming here because they love this country, that's a huge win for us. But that doesn't you give up on Americans that are here. Let's emphasize working hard in school. Let's emphasize achievement, but not at the expense of others. Ramesh. Yeah, I want to just share one quick thing, which is, you know, just very personal. My parents came to the U.S. with H1BVs, as I mentioned. They came to pursue education. And that's why we were able to grow up, you know, relatively

middle class with the ability to be able to live in a place with decent public schools, the ability, the ability to afford health insurance because of my father's employment and so on. Now, that is because we had those resources, right? The ways in which I grew up and were raised are probably somewhat similar to people like Vivek Ramoswamis. But unlike Vivek, unlike most of us, I think what we what we're all talking about is that people have to be provided the opportunity to excel, the opportunity to achieve. It's not like all people are just are sort of coming in an equal way to the table. It has to do with the opportunities they're provided. And I think the H1BV says can cultivate a lot of this kind of high skill, high monetary kind of value that helps these companies, which is why corporate kind of leaders like Elon are so into it.

But I do want to really share this main, this main point, which is that what we really need, I think more and more as a country is to run. remember what the what the writing was on the wall with this last election. There is an economic populism that is coming to bear and whoever gets on the right side of this that uplifts all people uplifts the dignity of work or at least economically figures out a way to support people in this country. That's going to be the political position that wins at the end of the day. Yeah, but before we move on to, because you'd mentioned people losing their like some of their Twitter privileges, I just want to mention, I'm sure a lot of people have talked

about this, I just haven't seen it. I have to bring it up on the show, Musk's analogy to, well, if you have a sports team, don't you just want the best people? I think that, like, I don't know if he's doing this on purpose, but it's almost like the most perfectly ironic metaphor to use in this case. Because he does he not get that for decades and decades, we did, like many people, I'm not going to say we, I wasn't even alive then. And I wouldn't have been a racist at that point anyway. We didn't want all the best people on the teams. We wanted the best white people on the teams. And we literally barred the best black players, Latino players, Asian players from playing.

We did not allow segregation there. And I would say that like grand tradition in America is not totally gone. You could be the most badass possible gay soldier. They want to kick your ass out of the military. We as a culture have been shooting ourselves in the foot based on hierarchy and identity politics. As long as we've been a culture to protect our own tiny little things. fiefdom where we've carved up all the demographics, and this is the one I'm in, and I'm going to put that on top. And I don't care if we'd collectively be better if we had a black

point guard or whatever. I don't want him there because he's black. Like, does he get that that's what our culture was up until not that long ago? And now we see that creeping back in. They want to ban people from participating, not because we'll be stronger as a result, but despite that, they don't care. It's frustrating that that seems to be lost in this. And that's also the culture he grew up in South Africa within. Remember, he grew up in apartheid South Africa. Yeah. Yeah.

Look, but America did get better. But John's right. I mean, it's comical. There's that great game where Kentucky plays this all black team and they think, oh, what a joke, right? And the all black team just destroys them. And then people are like, whoa, black people can play basketball. It was just hilarious, right?

And so in a similar way, like, oh, it turns out the rest of the world has amazing engineers. But guys, the one thing that the right wing populace are right about it is, and I have a friend who's an engineer and started his own company, et cetera, went to grade schools. And he said, you know what, they lied to us. It turns out if you want to make money, you should have got into finance, period, right? They told us, be an engineer, you'll make a good living and stuff. And it's actually pretty hard to make a really good living as an engineer. And so wouldn't it be amazing if we actually raise the salaries of engineers because engineers literally built this place. Yeah, you know, I think maybe we should actually take our first break as we're getting on into the hour.

Maybe we can come back and quickly talk about the censorship. Okay, sure. That sounds good. Okay, we'll be right back. Jank, John, and Ramesh with you guys, but also Bruce Salazar and Orion Pax. They just joined by hitting the join button below the video on YouTube. And look at this. Frannie, he became a premium member. Frannie, thank you so much for doing that.

Really appreciate it because it allows us to keep prices lower for everybody else too. And allows us to keep doing this show and with this network that we have. And Muna, thank you for upgrading to premium. You could also upgrade through the join button as well. John. Okay, let's round off our conversation start at the beginning of the hour. The massive Twitter fight over H-1B visas and migrants working as engineers has apparently already claimed some casualties, or at least digital casualties, and that being the Twitter

verification of people like Laura Lumer, as well as several other notable critics of Elon Musk, Vivek Ramoswamy, and their stance on bringing in skilled migrants. So they are now alleging that some of their, I guess, premium features or access to monetization on Twitter have been taken away, and they're implying it's strikeback by Elon Musk as a result of the fact that they dared to disagree with him. So that includes, as I said, Laura Lumer, as well as New York Young Republican Club President Gavin Wax, Infowars host Owen Schroyer, and the pro-Trump account conservative pack. Laura Lumer said, Musk has removed my blue checkmark on X because I dared to question his support for H-1B visas,

The replacement, she chose that word very specifically, of American tech workers by Indian immigrants, and I question his relationship with China. Elon has decided to retaliate by removing my blue check and demonetizing me. Owen Schroier says this feels like the beginning stages of censorship on X. And my God, to think that this is the beginning stages of censorship on X, when the only things that matter are things that happen to you. And so obviously neither of them seems to know or care that Ken Clippenstein got his ass kicked off the platform because he dared to do something that they didn't like.

And Elon Musk has a long history of strikeback against journalists he doesn't like and organizations he doesn't like. The free speech stuff is a brand. It's his eat fresh. I don't understand why people don't get that. It is a defense against, you know, people calling him a racist or whatever. That's what free speech is about. He didn't buy. the platform to create a utopia, he bought a platform so he could set up a little throne on it and that's what he's done the entire time. They're just now noticing that because it might be affecting them. Now we do have to acknowledge, we don't know for sure that their portrayal of why and when

they lost these features, including the ability to have paid subscribers and stuff is true. It seems accurate and so I'm inclined to believe them despite the fact that Laura Lumer is a massive liar. But anyway, this certainly would seem to be an escalation in the fight if what they're presenting is true. Yeah. So first of all, I'm, now I say to the right wing, told you. So they thought, oh, Elon's gonna come in and we're gonna be done with censorship.

And what do we say on the show? We said, no, it's just gonna be censorship in a different direction, right? And so, and that's exactly what we got, right? So not only did they start censoring some people on the left, Ken Klippistine, among others. Yeah, other journalists too. Yeah, and journalists that were critical of Elon Musk, and now if you're a right-winger or you're critical of Elon Musk, all of a sudden now you're having issues too. And it's not just Laura Lumer.

And yeah, no, I take everything she says with a boulder of salt, right? But it was other groups, including some political action committees on the right that disagreed with Elon on H-1B visas, all of their folks became unverified at the same time, a great number of people. So it was pretty convincing to me. Now, so I'm saying that the people that I disagree with most are right about this unverified business, and I think it's wrong. Look, guys, this whole thing of like banning people and chaos of culture that happens

from the left and the right, as we're seeing here, right, is useless. It's counterproductive. I hate it, right? Let the marketplace of ideas work. I know it's a mess, and I know in the short run, there's tons of problems. But I don't need help in defeating Laurel Lumer's ideas. Like, we're going to win that battle. I mean, and so the guys against H-1B visas, yeah, there's some folks there that might be good folks that are misdirected for sure, right?

But there's also Cernovich and Bannon and Coulter and Lumer. Like, that's the people I disagree with most on social issues, cultural issues. Anyone who says Camp of the Saints is their favorite book. Yeah. I mean, look, I'm trying not to. call people racist, as you can tell, right? But the whole point of that book is the hero goes in and murders all the immigrants trying to come into Europe.

If you thought that was a great book, I mean, to say that you're an anti-immigrant is a massive understatement, right? So that's a gigantic problem. But there's no need to ban them, censor them, or any of that crap, in my opinion. Ramesh, what do you say? Totally, totally agree. I mean, as far as people like this, Laura Lumer is involved, involved, you know, it's it's, yeah, I'll just respond to that. Indian people do not bathe in

their own feces. In fact, there's there three, at least the last time I checked, three of the 10 wealthiest people in the world are from India with an astonishing amount of wealth that is only barely imaginable. India faces many of the same problems we do in terms of gross economic inequalities as well. So I want to set the record straight on that. And also let her and other people know, including Vivek and Elon. And I bet they know this that many, immigrants from South Asia don't necessarily want to come to the United States because they might make almost an equivalent amount of money in their own country. And that can get you a lot further in a country like India where there are quite a few people and you can get help with

cooking with child care, all the things that people can't afford in this country, even people who are middle and in some cases even close to upper middle class can't afford these things in our own country. Our country has more free speech protections than most other democracies. Democracies can be very different from one another, especially the European Union. And so I've always been against censorship and the deplatforming of anybody and everybody, including the former president. That was a huge mistake made by Twitter in the past when they de-platform Trump, and it fed this populist narrative that he's fighting against these established forms of power. So it's very rich when Elon realizes, oh, yeah, I am a single man, mind you, the wealthiest person in the world, I own a platform that might have just a few hundred million people on it, but has profound influences on journalism and journalists around the world because many journalists get their stories and engage on acts like both of you. I don't because luckily I can avoid it all as an academic. But I'm just, but my main point is that.

free speech on these platforms has everything to do with what's viral and what's visible and it's really really important for them to recognize that if you start opening up the can of worms of different types of censorship you're going to end up being called out as a hypocrite which they're already being called out as even though i think i think what they missed in their narrative about the importance of more h1b visas which i do agree with is also how that has to be coupled with finally a plan to resolve the disease and the unhealthy economy that middle and working class Americans face. And that's what they, that's what they're going to be tested by at the end of the day. Yeah, and I don't want anybody to get surprised by Laura Lumer or the other guys'

reactions. I mean, they consistently attack every ethnicity. Minus one. I'll let you take a while to guess which one they don't mind. But Laura Lumer's attack Muslims in the most hideous ways over and over again. So her terrible, awful comments about Indians is not surprising because, I mean, that's who she is. I'm just going to make a super random comment here. Obviously, I'm an enormous believer in America. I think that especially if we're united, we can dominate for a long, long time because we take in the best, the brightest, but the hungriest, too, of the rest of the world. But if I was going to say, if I was worried about one economic challenger, it would be India. Everybody's obsessed with China and we got these hostilities with Russia, et cetera.

But India is going to come roaring out in the world economy. Why? Because they have so much kinetic energy. It's not essentially organized government like China is, which limits and stifles creativity and individualism, et cetera. I don't think it strikes the right balance. India certainly has plenty of issues, but massive energy, a freer, place and now finally some opportunity there that could make a gigantic difference. So don't

sleep on India. And mind you, they're actually ahead in many ways on green energy. India has already actually done a lot more in terms of cutting and innovating around its carbon, around carbon footprints and carbon emissions than other kind of global south countries of that of that ilk, much more. And so yet at the same time, they're, they're wondering why can't we ever do anything about it? Yeah. We being the U.S. Yeah. Republicans despise clean energy for some reason. Well, they don't believe it exists, right? Yeah. By the way, super fast, like I don't actually want to know because it would involve having to have a conversation with her and I, I aim to never have that habit in my life. But like, if you were Laura Lumer, like, what if, you know, by virtue of

just chance, you had been born in India instead of where you were born? You know that that's just random chance right what what what would you do what like what do you want that you just want them to lay down and die like I don't understand the thought process like the she but she but that would require a little bit of empathy and I doubt she has spent seven seconds of her life in true productive empathy trying to understand the life of someone unlike her I will also say just for the record I don't get a big conversation about it I disagree in some cases about the efficacy of deep platforming

particularly people who are, you know, commissioning crimes and things like that. Like there was concern about Donald Trump and possible follow-ons to the coup attempt on Twitter. But anyway, in some cases, I disagree. But that said, Trump is back in the news because we have breaking news. So we should probably discuss that. Donald Trump has apparently asked the Supreme Court to pause the impending TikTok ban. And this story is just coming out right now. We're to give you all the details, but Cenk, we sort of thought this might happen.

What's your immediate reaction? Yeah, so disagree with why he's doing it, but love that he's doing it. So let's give you the details. Yeah, well, so he has asked the Supreme Court to pause it. As of right now, the app would be banned on January 19th, one day before the inauguration. And that would be if the app is not divested to an American company before that date. There does not seem to be the sort of progress towards that or will to do that required to avoid that ban. In his court filing, he suggested that he could negotiate a political resolution to the matter before the court needs to rule.

And so that basically describes the argument he's making. But let's turn now to one of his lawyers, John Sauer, I believe it is, to make that same point but in a far more grotesque and cloying manner. He said President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal making expertise, the electoral mandate, dear God, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the government, concerns which President Trump himself has acknowledged. And even that seems to be an acknowledgement that Donald Trump had years ago been one of the chief proponents for banning TikTok, although we do have to be fair to Donald Trump. He had not yet been handed a bunch of money to change his position on that yet. And so we have to be fair, we will always be fair here. In any event, they are hearing arguments on the case on January 10th.

They'd previously declined TikTok's request to pause the law, so we're gonna have to wait and see how this possibly affects that in either, in any event, there's not a lot of time before where the ban is intended to go into effect. So they would have to really expedite some sort of ruling on this. Yeah, so look, I hate the ban on TikTok. I think it's against free speech. I think it takes away the voice of literally millions and tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of Americans.

And it's intended to take that voice away. That's why they're doing it. I don't think they're worried about national security at all. Their servers are here in America. They are following every rule that we have asked them to, follow. We could put in extra safeguards that apply to TikTok, Facebook, Google, et cetera. We're choosing not to. We're choosing to only target TikTok because they view TikTok as more progressive and filled with opinions that the elites don't like, including showing videos and

pictures of what's happening in Gaza and they hate it. Yesterday, Ben Glebe and I had a little bit of a debate about that. But Mitt Romney, Brian Kilmey, Anthony Blinkin have all basically admitted it. And Romney famously said, you know, well, the Israelis used to be good at PR, but I don't know what's happening now. So we got to ban TikTok. I mean, it was amazing that he admitted it while talking to Anthony Blinken. So I love that they, that he's, you know, trying to get away from that ban. But let's be real. Why? Because Jeff Yaz gave him millions of dollars. And Jeff Yaz is 15% owner of TikTok. And in his last term, he was trying to ban TikTok. Now he got paid not to ban it, so he's not banning it.

I mean, it is, it is textbook corruption. So you could hate why he did it while still liking the fact that he did it. Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, people should note there are about one billion global users of TikTok and the country with the largest number of users, at least last time I checked, is the United States of any country in the world. We have approximately 180 million or so users of TikTok. People should note that TikTok users tend to skew young. So again, banning it is the stupidest idea imaginable. It further infantilizes and treats younger people as not worthy of their voices being circulated.

I mean, Jenk and John, every one of my students for years at UCLA is primarily using and engaging with TikTok. And TikTok's ability or the ability, the way the means by which. they were able to see live stream genocide, which has now been continuing horrifically for 15 plus months in Gaza and it being expanded in these other locations, West Bank, etc, incursions into Syria, Houthis, all of it. They're able to see all of that, which is why they, I think, heroically led our encampments on our campus at UCLA, before the goons took them out, partly facilitated by our own leadership at my campus. So this is, this is, this is ridiculous. You know, some of the critiques of TikTok is that its algorithm skew to extremist

content. But guess what? So does Facebook. So does X, that's for sure. So do is Instagram. So does YouTube, exactly. And so, you know, TikTok, of course, works very differently in the country in China. Banning something never works. It's like a hydra. You cut off one head, other heads grow. Our younger people will find ways to stay on TikTok. Anyone ever heard of a VPN. And so on. And it's just stupid and out of touch. And the Biden administration was considering the same thing during its time as well. So it just doesn't make any sense for them to ban TikTok. I don't think it's going to work out very well for them if they choose to do that. And, you know, I think Trump does have, I hope enough political. Well, I don't really like Trump. But, you know, I don't like him at all. But the political sense, I don't think the political calculus is smart at all to ban TikTok if he wants any young people to continue to support him. Yeah, so I'll add last couple things here because you're right. It's so he got the money from Jeff Gazz and then immediately changed his position after that. So that's why I say it's textual corruption.

But he also did point out, hey, you know, a lot of people like me on TikTok and there's truth to that. It's young people overall, as Ramesh is saying, a lot of them are left wing, but a lot of them are right wing too. And so they don't want to be banned either. And Trump did really well on TikTok, whereas Biden didn't. And why didn't Biden do well? Because he said, I'm going to ban TikTok. Then he started a TikTok account. I mean, it doesn't get any more hypocritical and ridiculous than that.

And that right there is a perfect picture of like the carcass of democratic leadership that is still haunting Democratic Party and voters. And finally, you know who blocks social media outlets because they don't like what they're saying? Totalitarian governments. That's what Iran does when there's a crackdown. And other Saudis, et cetera, whenever there's any kind of, not even a rebellion, but disagreeing with the people in power, authoritarian governments come in and try to crush social media. And that's what the establishment is trying to do right now in America. So I love that they're not, hopefully that they're not going to ban it. Well, we were talking just a good minute to go about the genocide.

We're going to take our last break of the hour, come back and talk more about it, including Michael Moore's. recent message they posted about that after this. at t yt.com. Anyway, he wrote in, or they wrote in, Jeng, I'm on board with your current political strategy to reach out to as many people as possible. I'm not on board with your new multi-paragraph tweets. That's where I'm drawing the line. That's really funny show me. I like that. Okay, I love this community. All right. That's a good point. Of all the changes of Twitter, I think brevity was kind of the point. I know. If you let me keep talking, it's going to be a problem. You're not the biggest issue. Marjorie Green, dear God. For someone who knows so few words,

She writes so many of them. But anyway, let's jump to our final story of the hour. On Christmas, filmmaker and activist Michael Moore posted a fiery message addressed to all continuing supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government asking them, when the bloodshed, the carnage that they see in Gaza will finally at long last be enough. And obviously, I know your experience with Michael Moore goes way back. So as soon as I saw that, I was curious what you made of it. Yeah, I thought, oh, they're going to pummel him first saying things that are obviously true.

And we're going to prove it to you, actually, in the numbers here. In New York Times of the story that I think has two amazing parts that I want to tell you about. Yeah. Well, why don't we turn to his piece that he posted on Substack, titled, In the Holy Land, just a couple of dead Catholics. And in this post, which you could read, he explains how last Christmas two Palestinian women, a mother and a grandmother from the same family, were both killed by IDF snipers while attending Christmas Mass. An Israeli tank then fired at the church obliterating most of it. And we're going to bring up a photo of the two women. You can see them right there.

Nahita Khalil Anton and Samar Kamal, Anton. And I will never stop being amazed by how many individual stories, vignettes from this conflict, are each individually the worst thing you've ever heard. Like, if you only knew one thing about the violence in Gaza, and it was that two women had been gunned down by snipers and then a tank blew up a church on Christmas. I think that's kind of all that you need to know at that point. And that is just one tiny little, that's one of the things that happened of thousands of incidents just as horrific, if not more horrific, with death tolls as high if not higher. And in this piece, he used this case study to ask people why they continue supporting these

actions. He says one last request of the pro Netanyahu crowd, the death. The death toll of the innocents murdered in gods in the West Bank is now nearing 50,000. The vast, vast majority of them, babies, children, women, and the elderly. Can you please just give me a number as to when your thirst for revenge and blood will be satiated? Of the 1,200 slaughtered by Hamas fighters on October 7th, 2023, how many more Palestinian civilians need to be executed? I know there has to be a number, would another 100,000 do? A million, just give us a number so we know when this can end.

And how many people can we Americans go kill in Guatemala tonight so we can avenge the death of the woman on the New York City subway last week who died when that Guatemalan migrants set her body on fire? Would it not be righteous of us to just drop an atomic bomb on Guatemala and wipe them all out? I want blood. I want the blood of Guatemalans dripping from my mouth. Justice, revenge, more murder. Yes, oh, it feels so good during the holidays. So obviously, you know, he evokes strong images there. But I remember asking like the same question on the show. And I don't know if it was, if the death toll was 12,000 or 22,000 or 30,000, probably brought up this point at every one of those. But how many does it need to be?

How many does it? And like, I often, like he's obviously feeling pretty cynical in that message, Michael Moore, but I also think maybe he's being too optimistic to think that there's any number. Maybe it's just more, more for longer. Keep doing it. I don't care. It'll be the this Christmas and maybe another church will be blown up by a tank shell next Christmas and then a mosque and we'll just keep going forever for some reason and it's it's depressing that we're still here. It's been more than a year now and it's still just getting worse as we reached the grim milestone of 50,000. Yes, so this New York Times story has tons and tons of interesting facts which I'm going to read you in a second and but I want you to understand the

context. So as they are doing this, they are always trying to placate pro-Israeli critics of the New York Times. You could read it in every other paragraph. They're like, but, but, but Israel says they're following the law. Then they prove definitively that they are not following international law. And it's one of the worst bombing campaigns. In fact, it's literally the worst bombing campaign of this century, right? But here's a good example of how they write it. They say, this is right in the subheading, surprised by, surprised by October 7th and fearful of another attack, Israel weakened safeguards meant to protect non-combatants, allowing officers to endanger up to 20 people in each airstrike, and then they say one of the deadliest bombardments of the 21st

century followed. So as they prove how deadly and indiscriminate the bombings were, they keep saying, no, because they were fearful and there's nothing they could do and the non-combatants the cabans, but just say it, for God's sake, say it. I know, I know. There'll be pro-Israeli people here who will say, oh, anti-Semite and how dare you and our beloved ally. But the facts overwhelmingly proved, this is one of the biggest acts of terrorism of our lifetime.

So why do I say that? You know, the Israeli defenders say, oh, well, we do roof knocks, where we warn people that we're about to bomb them. I mean, you can't get any more moral than that. And then New York Times explains they're not doing roof knocks at all. So they stopped right in the beginning and they have been doing roof knocks for a long, long time. This just keeps saying it, even though they're not doing it. Then they're using one ton bombs.

And they use so many one ton bombs in the beginning of the campaign that they started running out. That's why they went to America and said, give me $26 billion more. I haven't killed enough Palestinians yet. So that's why I can't agree with my brother Michael Moore more. When is it enough? You kill 50,000. Is it not enough? Is it, do you need 500,000 dead?

How many Palestinians do you have to keep murdering before it's enough? Okay, more. They had a rule of, oh, we are expanding to, you can now kill 500 civilians a day. And then you know what they did? They lifted it. They're like, no, it's too little. You know, there's about, on October 7th, there was about 860 civilians killed. The rest were military.

Like, you never hear that, right? Hamasa also targeted the military and killed a bunch of soldiers. I don't want him killing anyone, right? But okay, 860, that's terrible. We've been unequivocal about it. Terrible that you kill those poor civilians, including some children, okay? Israel is saying, oh, we're gonna, we, they're not saying they did it, blow past that in just two days. And these are now, they ran out of vetted targets within days of the air campaign.

The rest were all unvetted. So then they started using artificial intelligence. And they're like, I don't know, that guy that we've had on a list somewhere, we never proved that he was a militant. But he called another guy, and that guy called another lady, and we just bombed that house and murdered 28 people in it. Oh, golly, gee, we're the most moral army in the world. No, this is the deadliest bombing in the last, in, in, in this century. And if you're doing the worst damage to civilians, you're killing more civilians than everyone else, you're giving orders to ignore civilian deaths, that doesn't make you the most moral army.

That makes you the least moral army. And if Hamas is terrorists and they are for killing 860 civilians, what does that make Israel after they've killed bare minimum 35,000 civilians, including bare minimum 25,000 men and, I'm sorry, women and children? So stadiums full of children and women slaughtered, absolutely slaughtered, with almost no evidence that they were in any way connected to terrorists. Now don't tell me that you're, oh no, no, I can't be a terrorist because I'm a government, I'm a state, so I can murder as many civilians as I like.

No, you can't. Their self-defense stopped well over a year ago. The full last year has been nothing but a genocide, ethnic cleansing, and whole, whole, scale slaughter by the terrorist government of Israel, Ramesh. Yeah, there are states that engage in mass acts of terrorism, and that's exactly what we've been witnessing now for 14 months or so. And just one quick note, I want everybody to note is don't anybody think since Trump is coming into power that he will be any less lenient, or just basically, he will, he will

We'll give carte blanche, thanks to his connections to the Miriam Adelson, I know you've pointed this out to me before. He will be, carte blanche, just destroy and annihilate the Palestinian. So this is not getting any better. Those AI systems that are being used, that explicitly calculate how many people will be murdered and account for the decision accordingly. Basically, there's disposability of certain numbers of lives. Many of those systems were built by people like Peter Thiel and Palantir, which is one of Trump's major backers who's want to talk about an absolute cynic about about life and education. That's Peter Thiel, in my opinion, as well as those systems are, you know, are being built to basically calculate the amounts of death that are

involved, like the Lavender system. I think the answer to Michael Moore's letter and your point also, Jank, is the end game is the expulsion of as many people from Gaza, either through death or forced expulsion as possible, force them into refugeehood to establish. what is explicitly in the Likud party charter, which is the party that had the extreme right party now, one of only two really, but now become extreme right that governs Israel, which is to from the river to the sea. That is basically means what they call greater Israel is the expulsion. So every single time we hear about a ceasefire, don't believe it, they have no interest in doing a ceasefire. Their goal is the absolute expulsion and the takeover of that land in some form or another. And also,

Also, everyone please note, Israel's aggression has now stepped into extraterritorial, I mean, as it has for years, extraterritorial assassinations of political and military leaders in other countries, taking more and more territory now as we speak in Syria, all the horrible things that were done indiscriminate bombing of civilians and more in Lebanon and in Beirut. And remember what has been happening also in the West Bank where people live as second class citizens that are often murdered by Israeli forces. So it's the end game is the expulsion of Palestinians. That's the end game through whatever means possible, which will be the murders of more and more innocent people.

And I just feel so darn helpless as I sit through all this. And the only people that Netanyahu ever has to please are us, but it's not us as Americans. It's just these political leaders who no matter what are backing a genocide. And that's a moral stain on us as Americans, even if we don't support that. That's a moral stain on our country. And it's really difficult to live with at this point. I mean, it always was. So guys, I'm going to read you one last paragraph from the New York Times because I think

this might be the most telling of all about because remember, the Israeli supporters say, oh, no, most moral army, we're trying so hard not to kill civilians. That's why we're not terrorists. They're terrorists when they kill us. But we're not terrorists when we kill 40 times the number of people that they kill that are civilians. So from the New York Times, Air Wars, a London-based conflict monitor documented 136 strikes that each killed at least 15 people in October 2023 alone. That was almost five times the number the group has documented during any comparable period anywhere in the world

since it was founded a decade ago. So it is, they did five times. Any other bombing campaign anywhere else in the world in terms of the number of civilians killed in each of those strikes and the number of those strikes. That's not the most moral army, that is very literally the least moral army on earth. They keep slaughtering civilians time and time and time again. And all they ever do is propaganda about, oh, Hamas made us kill them all. Oh, I can't believe the rebels were inside a civilian population. Why didn't they set up barracks like a government, which we would have killed them all instantly?

Excuse them propaganda, excuse and propaganda over and over again. But the facts bear out the worst, most terroristic and vicious air campaign in the last 10 years, let alone a much longer period of time that hasn't been tracked. So you can make any excuse you like for Israel, but at this point, now God knows how many months after the original October 7th attack, every reasonable, sane, objective person has concluded that Israel is not defending itself. They're taking territory and slaughtering their civilian enemies in their mind. It's disgusting, it's heartbreaking, and yet America says, blank check, whether it's Biden or Trump, We will give you everything you want as long as you bribe our politicians. And let us be absolutely clear, the campaign contributions from Mary Madelson,

Sheldon Adelson, APEC, Democratic majority for Israel. All of those groups are totally and utterly bribes of our politicians. Yes, the Supreme Court in its infinite corruption has legalized bribery in this country. And that allowed the supporters of Israel to wholesale buy both of our parties. And that's why that war criminal terrorist Netanyahu got standing ovation after standing ovation from the pigs who pretend to represent us, but represent Israel's far-right terrorist government instead. Young Turks.