The Young Turks - Small Johnson - October 16, 2025

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TYT and use code TYT and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! The Trump administration secretly authorizes CIA covert operations in Venezuela. AOC warns Republicans are radicalizing a generation of young men. Speaker Johnson patronizes a newly elected Democrat after dodging an Epstein files vote. A swastika flag is spotted in MAGA Rep. Dave Taylor’s office. Tucker Carlson claims female leadership “leads to violence.” Hosts: Yasmin Khan & Brett Erlich 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 podcastchoices.com/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. Hello and welcome to the Young Turks. I'm your host, Yasmin Aaliyah Khan for this first hour and joining me tonight is not just not jank, he will be on in the second hour, but I have Brett here with me, Brett Erlich. How's it going, Brett? It's going well. I think I'm making the ultimate sacrifice by appearing on this show during

game three of the NLCS. I'm going to game four of the NLCS. I'm very excited about it. We've got Glasnow is going to be pitching, so I need to be in the same room as my wife when that happens so she doesn't see him because I think he's her type. Yeah, I mean, that can be be a problem. I remember, you know, it's hard for me to talk about baseball because I live in Houston and we have had our fair share of scandals. But, you know, like we lost a lot of our really good pitchers to New York and one of our batters went to Toronto. And it's been really sad ever since. Yeah. And you know what? I just want to tell people holistically, if an Angelino and a Houstonian can share the screen at the same time during the playoffs, we can put aside any day. Any day.

difference we have, even if the other person is a dirty, filthy cheater. Go, yes? I don't. Back to you. I don't support the cheating. The main cheater is still on our team, and there's a lot of mixed feelings there. We lost some really good people who presumably were not cheaters, but here we are. Here we are. I did go to Astros versus Dodgers game one time. That was really a lot of fun. So we won, but we probably cheated. Never mind. Anyway, we have a lot of stories to get to in this first hour, a lot of big stories actually. So let's get right into this first one. We're going to talk about Venezuela. Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela? And is there more information you can

share about these strikes on the alleged? Well, I can't do that. I authorized for two reasons, really. Okay, so yesterday President Donald Trump admitted that the CIA is operating in Venezuela at his direction. And usually, historically speaking, that's not a thing that presidents usually just admit to. So now let's hear from Trump's two reasons for sending the CIA on what we can only assume is a regime change mission. Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. They came in through the, well, they came in through the border. They came in because we had an open border policy. And as soon as I heard that, I said a lot of these countries, they're not the only country, but they're the worst abuser.

And they've entered there, they've allowed thousands and thousands of prisoners, mental institution, people from mental institutions, insane asylums, emptied out into the United States. We're bringing them back, but that's a really bad, and they did it at a level that probably not. Many, many countries have done it, but not like Venezuela. They were down and dirty, and the other thing of drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela. Well, according to reporting from the New York Times, thanks to Trump's authorization, the CIA would be able to take covert action against Maduro or his government, either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation. So speaking of a larger military

operation yesterday, Trump showed his administration's hand. Once again, here is the clip. Take a look. What's the next step in this war on cartels? And are you considering options, Are you considering strikes on land? Well, I don't want to tell you exactly, but we are certainly looking at land now because we've got the sea very well under control. He's looking at land now. So the New York Times has reported that the U.S. military is currently drawing up plans to escalate the conflict with Venezuela, including but not limited to striking inside the country on the land. Meanwhile, 10,000 U.S. troops are currently gathered in the region.

So the question is why? Why are they there? There are three main reasons. So the first is that the Secretary of State Marco Rubio has long wanted to take action against Maduro. He is the architect of the regime change policy that you're seeing play out right now. And he thinks that toppling Maduro will weaken the government of Cuba. So second is that the Trump administration wants to counter the influence of China in the region, maybe too little too late on that front. And that policy is also manifesting in the tens of billions, billions with a B dollars that we are sending to bail out Argentina. So there's a lot of different countries involved here, probably even more than we've already mentioned. And the third reason is to help out American corporations. So

that is what special presidential envoy Richard Grenell has been working on. For months, he has been trying to negotiate diplomatically with Venezuela. So here's reporting we have from the New York times says Grennell has tried to fashion a deal that would avoid a larger conflict and give American companies access to Venezuelan oil. And you know, oil, it always just seems to come back to the oil, right? It's really hard to get away from oil anywhere you go on the planet, it seems. But the Trump administration recently did cut off diplomatic negotiations with Venezuela. So we'll end by taking a look at the CIA's track record when it comes to regime change operations in and around Latin America. So in

1954, the agency orchestrated a coup that overthrew President Jacoba Arbenz of Guatemala, ushering in decades of instability. The CIA backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, ended in disaster, and the agency repeatedly tried to assassinate Fidel Castro. That same year, the CIA supplied weapons to dissidents who assassinated Raphael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the authoritarian leader of the Dominican Republic, and the agency has also had its hands in a 1964 coup in Brazil, the death of Che Guevara and other machinations

in Bolivia, a 1973 coup in Chile, and the contra fight against the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s. That is a lot. That is a lot going on between the United States and all these various Latin American countries. Right now, Trump is targeting Venetian. Venezuela, that is who he has decided to go after. And his main reason for going after Venezuela that he's citing is that he's going after these drug traffickers and these drug cartels. And he doesn't like that the nation of Venezuela is being run by a domestic terrorist. He has decided that Maduro is a terrorist and that they're a cartel running a government

right now. And that's what he's trying to get out of power. And the thing is though, Venezuela is not really like the. primary drug trafficker that's getting drugs from their country into United States. So that alone is a little bit disingenuous. On top of that, it's really, I believe it comes down more so to the oil. There is a ton of oil in Venezuela. And also, I'm going to just throw this out there. There's a lot of oil right next door in Guyana, which is where my family is actually from. So this is something that I pay a lot of attention to. And Guyana is an interesting country

because it is geographically in Latin America, but culturally, it's not. We're kind of in a limbo place. That's why, like, my family is from there. So it doesn't usually get looped in there. But we also had a coup in Guyana during the JFK administration. So all of that, there's a lot going on geopolitically here. Brett, what do you make of this? Also, real quick, I do want to mention that Trump is a lot of what he's doing right now is illegal.

He doesn't have any kind of congressional approval to do anything like in vicarious. another country with our military. So right, what do you think? Yeah, this is mostly just geopolitics at play. When Trump first off says that like this is a drug issue that I do not buy for a single second as the reason we're doing any of this. He's like we're being flooded with Venezuelan immigrants. Then why I don't see why we need to invade Venezuela to change the regime to do that. I'm not going to be someone who gets like pulled into the trap of thinking that one side has to be good and the other side has to be bad in a conflict. So I'm not just going to say because Trump doesn't like Maduro, Maduro must be good and Trump must be bad. But this thing

where we're like, we got the sea all taken care of because we bombed like three boats off the coast. Everything is going great. Well, the four star general in charge of that stuff today announced he's going to be resigning because of reportedly, according to the New York Times, tensions with Pete Hegseth. They're not getting along. It's not going well. And it's tough with these Latin American issues. It dates back to like President Monroe. That's how far back it goes. We have this thing Sebastian Gorka hilariously said on like Newsmax the other day. We believe in something called the Monroe Doctrine. Originally, the Monroe, Roe Doctrine said, all right, America is in like this side of the world. And so we don't

want any other countries. We don't want the Europeans fomenting some kind of horrible discord on this side of the Pacific or this side of the Atlantic. And that started that way. But as you just went through, like lately it's been, I just kind of want to prevent communists from taking over on this side of the world as America's the one who raids all of the resources that exist in South America for our own benefit. And if the people in charge of any given country aren't going to play ball with us in handing their resources over to American and American allied investment, well then we're just going to secretly get rid of that group. or we're going to fund the guerrilla organization that is fighting against the leftist governments

of those countries or right wing governments as long as they don't play ball with us. So that's one thing. And look, the apotheosis of this is the Cuban missile crisis where Russia was buddy buddy with Cuba and trying to move nuclear missiles into Cuba. Now, depending on whose side you're on or if you're agnostic, there's a lot of allegories or a lot of comparisons to our relationship with Russia, to our relationship with China right now. Like at that time, America had a bunch of military and nuclear bases right by Russia. Russia was like maybe we'll put some in Cuba and suddenly we'll be kind of like, you know, 50-50 on this and America, 13 days of your parents thought they were all going to die from nuclear war, okay? But now you have to

to add the China thing in there, China has this initiative where it's like one belt, one road. I think it's just taking myself out of what side I'm on. I think it's brilliant. And I think it's like so hilarious because they're just like, we want to have trade. We want to replace America as the people in charge of the world, partially motivated by the fact that you know how they got touchy about Cuba with the whole Russia thing. Well, we're a little touchy about America. having military bases off our coast as far as the eye can see. And every, and we're like building in China's like, we're building islands so we can have military bases comparable to those that America solidified in the wake of World War II and beyond. So what they're doing is kind of as America pulls an old American CIA type thing in Venezuela, China's just sitting there being like, we got a nice little crew.

what people were putting together that might be able to take over the world. We got some really good fundamentals in our economy where like our manufacturing is cheap. People have to come here. Maduro just got a cell phone from Xi Jinping that he literally was like, nihao, shishu, like that's not me being racist. That's him taking out a phone from Huawei, being like I, you know, I talked to him on the phone, nihao shishi, like he actually acted it out because they essentially have a bat phone made by Huawei, which most likely, just to show how adept China is, and I'd say nefariously in this scenario, like most of those chips are probably based on American technology. So this whole risk

board is developing. America's like we run this side of the Pacific, stay the hell in the Atlantic, and stay the hell away, we can do whatever we want. Obviously trying to get the largest oil reserves in the world and access to it in Venezuela, but the means by which Trump is going about it, just remind the rest of the world like, this is what America does. Can't you just do what China does and say like, do you need a road? You need an airport. You need some kind of infrastructure. We did stuff like this with the Egyptians and when we were trying to get them to be on our side and away from the Russians when there was like the whole Israel-Sinai Peninsula thing going on. We negotiated all that.

That's the kind of state craft that you really need people who are good at it and knowledgeable about it to execute. And I'm sorry I've talked for a long time, but I'm trying to like put it all together. But the people in charge of our statecraft are not the deftest. It's Donald Trump and it's Pete Hegseth and it's Marco Rubio, who I have a lot of really amazing, tight, close Cuban American friends. Like, I'm sure there's part of that that's just like there is no way. I'm letting these godless evil communists, he's the one that's kind of leading this this whole

charge to do regime change because America failed in preventing regime change in Cuba. And there's a long lasting legacy, probably something that's very near and dear to Marco Rubio's heart. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned China obviously quite a bit there. But yeah, the Belt and Road initiative, basically what that is is they would go to these countries and say, you know, you started to explain, you know, we'll build you some infrastructure and in exchange, you know, we'll, you know, just make large investments in your country. And then we have access to that country. And they have done this all around the world. And this has been going on for years. And they haven't been like entirely covert about it. They're just doing what they're doing.

They're saying, oh, yeah, you know, we're giving them money. We're helping to build roads. And this would benefit us and it benefits them and everyone's happy. It's a pretty controversial program because a lot of those countries that they, accept investments from China, they become beholden to China in a lot of ways. So it's not always a good deal for these countries, but a lot of times, and I've said this before, whenever you consider that there are several major big players on the world stage, so let's say you have the United States, Russia, and China, maybe you can throw India in there. A lot of these other smaller countries will kind of align themselves with the different countries.

And here in the United States, I don't know if people really, like, grasp this, but for those smaller countries, they don't care which of these giant empires they align themselves with because like all the empires are terrible. All of them have the good with the bad, but they're really just saying, I'll align myself with whoever helped me out the most, right? So the United States, especially American citizens, they had this idea that we align ourselves with these countries and the countries that align themselves with us are countries that believe in democracy. They believe in what we're selling and they want to be more like us and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's all this ideology behind it. But then, you know, like what we're seeing with Argentina right now, they're just selling their their soybeans to China instead of to us because it doesn't matter.

They just need a buyer, you know, and all these countries, including the United States, are just as bad on the world stage. So there's a lot going on and you mentioned the risk board. It is very, very complicated and everything is intertwined. And then whenever you consider oil and gas, and that becomes like a whole other level of geopolitics that just like is underlying the entire thing. So with that, we're going to take our first break. We'll be right back with more. Don't miss any of the excitement this football season on prize picks, where it's good to be right, and I love being right. Look, I've been diving into the prize picks app all season, and it's fun and simple.

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We have a lot more stories to get to. So let's get right into this next one. Which Pacific Republicans leaders do you believe you can work with the past ACR and reopen the government? Look, that's a great question, Norman. And let me tell you, I can mention a number of them. My God. Last night, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a town hall

on CNN, and you're about to watch Sanders give an answer that would have been inconceivable just a few months ago, so let's watch. In American society, we believe in democracy. You're a conservative Republican. We disagree. So what? It's called America. We have different points to you.

I got to tell you, though, if I may, one of the things that has concerned me very, very very, very much. And is that we are seeing the Republican Party doing less of representing their districts and their states than just swearing allegiance to the president of the United States. So now, I never thought that I would say this, but you have somebody like Marjorie Taylor Green saying, you know what? I was elected by my constituents. That's who I am beholden to, not the president of the United States. So there are good Republicans out there, and if Trump would leave them alone for five minutes and not threaten them with a primary if they stood up and did the right thing, I think we can make

progress. So just to clarify, he is identifying Marjorie Taylor Green as one of the good Republicans. We'll discuss that obviously more later. But Caitlin Collins then asked AOC if she would consider working with Marjorie Taylor Green. And a few months ago, AOC seemed very opposed to that whole idea. But over the summer, she did not sign on to Marjorie Taylor Green's amendment to cut $500 million in missile defense funding for Israel. In a post explaining her reasoning, AOC wrote, if you believe neo-Nazis are welcome and operating in good faith, you can have them. But now AOC sounds a little bit different.

Let's watch. You mentioned Marjorie Taylor Green. She's your colleague over in the House. The way she frames this is she says Democrats created this mess, but Republicans don't have any solutions to fix the healthcare issue either. Is she someone that you could see yourself working with? On what? On the health care. I mean, listen, I think people can talk a good game, but until they actually support policy that helps people.

people, I, you know, I'm not particularly interested. But if she wants to, if she actually wants to support legislation and expanding healthcare, I've, I've worked with plenty of Republicans as well on health care. But it's not just about talking the talk. We've got to walk the walk. And you would need to see her actually support something that that you're behind in terms of legislation on health care. Yeah. Yeah. So how does Marjorie Taylor Green feel about the idea of partnering with a Democrat, let alone a progressive Democrat? Well today, Green wrote a post that seemed to be directed and any Democrat who has found

themselves agreeing with her lately or maybe even wanting to work with her. She wrote, no, I do not support the ACA slash Obamacare. It has made health insurance totally unaffordable and over-regulated doctors. And no, I do not support healthcare for all. We are $37 trillion in debt and I will never support the government controlling your health care. Remember COVID lockdowns and masks and vaccine mandates, government taking away access to life-saving Ivermectin, not doing anything like that ever again. There she is, good old Marjorie Chiller Green.

No, I do not support illegal immigration or illegal labor. I want secure borders like what we have now. And I want the drug and human trafficking billion dollar cartel industry out of America. No, I'm not pro-abortion. I love babies, all of them. I think they are a gift from God. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Have a nice day.

Why do they always have to end like that? I hate it. I don't get it. I don't know why Trump just says it all the time now. That's like his new thing that he decided to just bring in to the second presidency term for him. So that is interesting. John and I did talk about this a little bit on the damage report earlier. And what I was saying is, you know, basically the United States is kind of at a pivot point or we're kind of teetering on the edge of something. And it seems as though Donald Trump is not going to be with us for much longer. I don't know what that means. I don't know how that's going to happen. I don't know what much longer means. I obviously don't know any more than anybody else on this front. But the Republican Party does seem to have to figure out very quickly who they are and what they are without Donald Trump at the helm.

Donald Trump has been at the head of the Republican Party now for 10 years, and not just been at the head of it, he has completely reshaped the Republican Party. The Republican Party of today is very, very different from the Republican Party of 10 years ago. Not that I was a huge fan of it back then, but today it is unrecognizable. And a lot of our Congress people who are sitting in either the House or the Senate, they have completely aligned themselves with Donald Trump. And they have completely aligned themselves with Donald Trump. And they have, identify as MAGA Republicans. And I would say, you know, Marjorie Taylor Green has been one of the forefront figures of that movement for a long time. It's only been recently, like very, very recently that she has started to speak out against some of the things that Trump is doing and the way he's doing things. So now there is some distrust from people on the left because it's like, okay, well, she's saying some things that are starting to make sense. Am I tripping? Like, is she genuine? Does she mean what she's saying? Does she believe what she? she's saying, and is this indicative of a pattern going forward? And Marjorie has come out and said

definitively, no, I'm still who I've always been. But she is going to have to figure out who she is going forward because without Donald Trump, does Marjorie Taylor Green even have much of a career anymore as a congressperson? What are your thoughts there, Brett? So good politics, you know it's being played well when the intentions of your adversary or the signaling of the adversary doesn't matter, where you don't have to trust them or not trust them. Like if you can get them to vote for your bill, you don't need to trust them on literally anything else. And the thing about healthcare in this situation, you have to ask yourself, and this is kind of an experiment that TYT's kind of let on, which is let's see what

we can do to, A, maybe get some of these people to join our side and to do that is to say, all right, what are things that you like that you really are passionate about? Abortion and health care and the cost of living, our job is to be like, what do I have to put in this hand so you forget about that hand? That's politics. The Republican Party generally, has had a trajectory where they know that they lose on the social safety net. People are supportive of that. They know that they lose holistically on the concept of abortion. But they do want to get a bunch of people together into a tent.

So they go, oh, people like Marjorie Taylor Green, people who represent working class poor people, theoretically. I don't really know that much about her part of Georgia. But like, they represent working class people. the Republicans are like, can I get these folks to be more passionate about abortion than they are about their own pocketbooks? And that's the fight we're in right now. That's the fight. And in the meantime, politically speaking, just pointing out the rift in the Republican Party is important, is necessary to say, listen, you guys are in chaos right now. She's talking trash about the Speaker of the House, saying that he basically hates women. All right, these guys are still probably going to vote on a national level about abortion.

But this is a, this right now, the next vote is a health care vote. It's an ongoing funding of the government for what? Not to put ACA or Obamacare in there. She's like, I don't support the ACA Obamacare. I don't support health care for all. Well, we're not asking her to support those things. We need politically to make her discourse in the public sphere about do you want to take health care away from a bunch of poor people in your constituency or do you want to make it so that they can afford to live and go to the doctor? Because it seems like right now the Democrats have done a good job of saying this government shutdown is about the Republicans wanting to take health care away from millions and millions and millions.

of people while they're throwing billions of dollars at like sideburn's boy down in Argentina so he could throw a concert. Like meanwhile, and I have a video, Riaz and I do Rebel HQ, everybody subscribe at YouTube.com slash Rebel HQ. Give us a follow on Facebook. Like I have a video coming out this week about all of the different fronts. She has opened up in the fight against Trump. And we go through them one by one and see what the fallout is. As people, as Trump seems to to be at least losing his bond with Marjorie Taylor Green and doing so as she says this stuff on the platform of people he's also lost contact with. Tim Dylan, those folks that are

not afraid to call him out, exposing that like these tigers are going tiger. They're comedians. Marjorie Taylor Green, she's doing kind of a similar thing here. And it needs to be pointed out for a whole bunch of reasons. One, the most important of which is making sure people get health care and the government can get funded. And the tactical one being, let's let's cause some some chaos in the Republican Party. Yeah, and absolutely. And like, let's not get too ahead of ourselves with anything. Like Marjorie Taylor Green isn't just going to like hop on over to like become a progressive Democrat and like have any kind of alliance or even just like see things from our perspective anytime soon. She's still very much who she is.

But, you know, it is interesting to see these MAGA Republicans finally starting to just say things in opposition to Donald Trump because we have not seen that in a very, very long time, especially not from the likes of somebody like Marjorie Taylor Green. There was a strong coalition within the Republican Party that was just loyal to Donald Trump to a fault. And Bernie, he actually alluded to this in that clip that we showed you, but there have been Republicans in the past who have spoken out. against Donald Trump and they were primaried and they lost their primaries, right? I think the most obvious example that I can think of right now is Liz Cheney. She lost her seat in Congress. So that's kind of the risk that these people are taking. And of course, the midterms are coming up.

So that is going to temper the way that these politicians are speaking right now. And I do want to get one last thing in there, addressing what AOC said about having, being able to work with Marjorie Taylor Green. So Marjorie Taylor Green is from Georgia. A lot of my political science studies and emphasis was on realignment politics in the South. And there were a lot of people like Marjorie Taylor Green in the Democratic Party until 2004. 2004. They had Democratic governors in Georgia till 2004.

Now a lot of them left for the reasons you probably think they left, which is the governor decided to not eliminate but shrink the size of the Confederate flag on the Georgia state flag, and it was a whole big thing. But there is a history of people figuring out a way to work with this stuff and pull these terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people on some issues back into the Democratic Party and vote along with their economic interests rather than their evangelical ones. Yeah, and that's a good point because I wonder if people remember what politics. was like in 2004, which is like, what, 20 years ago, I was in high school back then. And, you know, even in I live in Texas is a deep red state, but it wasn't in 2004.

It was a red state, but just barely. Before that, we had a Democratic governor here. And a lot of what we've been seeing with these like deeply entrenched states and these deeply entrenched politics, a lot of that is a manifestation of the past couple of decades and specifically the last decade, you know, these very, very partisan politics. This is all, you know, somewhat new, right? There was always disagreement. There was always people on two sides of things.

People always had different opinions. But this type of what we're seeing, this partisanship in this country, I'm over it. Like, I just want to, I'm done. Earlier this year, you swore in two Republican members during the pro forma session. So why not swear in Adelaide prehalva, who was elected two weeks ago during the pro forma session? Does it have to do with her 218 signature on the district petition, the FC district? No, it has nothing to do with that at all. We will swear her in when everybody gets back.

It's a ceremonial duty. Look, we'll schedule it, I guess, as soon as she wants. she wants. It has nothing to do with it. Okay, that was said on day seven of the government shutdown. And we are now on day 16. And Representative Elect, Adelita Groslva is still just that representative elect because she has still not been sworn in. Adelaida Grosva, a Democrat from Arizona won a special election on September 23rd to represent Arizona's 17th district after her father, Representative Raul Grijalva died in March.

That was almost a month ago that she was elected. So and she won also in a landslide 69% to 29%. But regardless of who won the election, the election signaled something much greater for the Republican Representative Thomas Massey and his petition to force a vote to release the Epstein file. So here's what Massey had to say. He said both of the candidates on the ballot promised to sign my

discharge petition and one of them won, obviously. And so now we're going to have 200, 18 signatures and we're going to force a vote on releasing those files while meanwhile according to a house leadership aid it's customary practice to swear in new members while congress is in session but it's not mandatory they don't have to wait for anything johnson swore in republican representative jimmy petronus and randy fine during a pro forma session earlier this year so it's pretty clear why grahalva has not yet been sworn in But Mike Johnson is going to continue to just deflect and make excuses and it's just what he loves to do. Let's watch. Let's just be really clear. If I were a Republican, I would have already been sworn in. That is not acceptable.

They're afraid of me signing and being the 218th signer to the Epstein. So she says that you're afraid of her being the 218th signed her to the Epstein petition to release the files that if she were a Republican, you would have sworn her in. What do you say? I say, bless her heart. She's a representative elect. She doesn't know how it works around here. We're going to give her the oath of office as soon as we get back to regular session. As soon as Chuck Schumer and the Democrats vote to reopen the government.

We've got a lot to do here. They're the ones holding it up. What Grahava doesn't understand is that there's a certain tradition and process that we engage in here to administer the oath. My colleague Representative Julia Letlow from Louisiana was elected in a special election under very similar circumstances. And Nancy Pelosi was speaker at the time. She took 25 days to administer the oath to Julia Letlow. Nobody threw a fit, nobody engaged in a publicity stunt because Nancy Pelosi was doing that on the legislative calendar. I'm doing exactly the same thing.

Oh my God, as a fake Southerner, that bless her heart has me in sense. So patronizing. And Nancy Pelosi wasn't being faced with a petition with enough votes to force the release of the Epstein files. He still didn't even talk about that. So Grahalva also could have been sworn in before the shutdown, by the way, but that's just not what happened. Johnson decided against that for some unknown reason. There is simply no logical reason why Grahalva has not yet been sworn in. And because she hasn't been sworn in yet, she's not able to hire staff or go anywhere in the Capitol without an escort. She did finally get the keys to her office, but there are no working phone lines, no internet, no computers. And perhaps

Most importantly, her district is currently in limbo because she cannot act as a representative or perform any kind of constituent services. The people of her district currently have no representation in the house. So now Arizona AG Chris Mays is weighing the possibility of maybe taking legal action to get all of this resolve finally. Yeah, I mean, I really think that we are going to have no other choice, Laura except to take Speaker Johnson to court. If he refuses to respond to us, if he doesn't quickly swear in Adelaide Grahalva, again, depriving her of the ability to help her constituents. We've had some flooding out here in Arizona.

She has no way to help those people in southern Arizona who have been impacted by that flooding, So many other things that she can and should be doing as an elected member of Congress. And so if I have to all take him to court, you know, again, there's no legitimate reason for him to refuse to swear her in right now. So she wrote in a letter to Johnson on Tuesday saying, you and your staff have provided ever shifting unsatisfactory and sometimes absurd stories as to why Ms. Grahalva has not been sweated. in. We thus demand that Ms. Grahava be immediately sworn into office and admitted to her rifle seat. We ask that within two days of the date of this letter, you provide this office with your assurance of when and where that will take place, which must be immediate and prior to the date the house comes back into regular session. Should you fail to provide such

assurance, we will be forced to seek judicial relief to protect Arizona and the residents of its seventh congressional district. Brett, a lot of And he never addressed the thing that everyone wants him to address, which is, are you doing this because you don't want to release the Epstein files? He is like, he's making all these excuses like, oh, we usually do it this way. I mean, if she wants to be sworn and I'll just swear her in, I'll just like get it scheduled. No big deal. And then no follow up on that. He's saying, oh, bless her harsh, she doesn't know how this works.

Just because she hasn't been in Congress before doesn't mean you can't know how things work. Right. And I'm sure she's also being mentored by other Congress people on the Democrat side. who are telling her how things work if she doesn't already know for herself. So this is the whole like pandering to Donald Trump with this and protecting these whoever is in the Epstein files, it's very, very tired. And then using the government shutdown as an excuse for this is also very insincere, let's say, I think that's the nicest way I can put it. Because yeah, like she was elected prior to the government shutdown. And then he's also trying to blame the Democrats for

their own Democrat not being sworn in as of yet. Brett, how much longer can he do this? How until he runs out of excuses? He can't just keep saying the same things over and over again. He can. He can do like this is his job, right? His job is to be the person who creates favorable votes for his side. So he either is, he thinks if something gets past, it's a law for him. or it's a loss for him, or if something even makes it to create an opportunity where his side can have an unfavorable outcome, he's not doing his job. So this is his job. He's not not doing his job. But what does that mean? That means this is absolutely so that we can't CDF scene files. That's it. Like, what is he saying? He's saying like, I want to be more like

Nancy Pelosi is his argument. I'm being just like Nancy Pelosi and we Republicans know that's awesome. It doesn't make any sense. And this is so horrible for him. His hair might be absolutely perfect every second of the day. Put in place obviously by the power of whatever demon he sold his soul to, he reminds me of the guy from True Blood who goes on there and seems to be a good church should go. guy, but as soon as the camera turns off, he turns into a blood-sucking, evil-depraved vampire. I always saw him as a keyboard elf.

Oh, see, that's the thing is my cynicism about like the faux pious completely, I can't get past that and into delicious Nabisco treats. I mean, I like yours better. I love, I love E.L. Fudge and stripe cookies, my God. But like, let's look at why he is keeping the. government shut down. The Republicans have all the power. Everybody's heard that. They got the presidency, the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate. They have all the power. They could very easily decide to work with Democrats and give them concessions. The problem is the concession

the Democrats want keeps people with health coverage. The Republicans are keeping up two things right now, right? They're preventing, or the Democrats, the Republicans want to take people off health care. They want to take people off life support. They want to put people in a position. This is explicitly what this votes about and why the government shut down. They want to make it so people have to choose between going bankrupt or dying or both. That's what this man of God, This guy who loves Jesus so much, he tells his kid when he looks at porn or something, I don't remember. And then the second thing, 80% of Americans are according to a poll I read recently, numbers may have changed, want to see the Epstein files. Donald Trump ran on I'm going to get rid of the deep state of the child checkers.

I mean, he's Epstein files. The only reason we don't see the Epstein files is, has got an even more Zach Morris hair wave than I do. And he's doing it on behalf of Donald Trump. Prove me wrong if I'm wrong. This guy is in the Epstein files. They know it. I'm just repeating what people who voted for Trump have been saying for a very long time. This is why the Republicans have the power to a non-zero extent.

People want to see the EPSC files. This guy's keeping them away from us. And he can keep doing it until there's too much pressure. But the more he does it, the better it is for us and the worse it is for pretty much his people. Yeah, I'm kind of at this point just not even expecting to get those files from our government. I think that they will find their way out to the public through other means. I don't know what those means are, but I know that there can't be just like one copy of these files that our government has. So that's my not so conspiratorial conspiracy theory.

So with that, we're going to take our next break. We'll be right back. Welcome back to The Young Turks. I'm Yasmin here with Brett. Brett is bringing in some energy to the final couple of stories that we have. I don't know what kind of energy it is, but it is an energy. I'll take it. That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.

It's an energy, yeah. All right. So we have a couple more stories for you guys, And then we'll get you guys onto the second hour with Jank and Michael. But for now, an American flag that was defaced to feature a swastika was spotted in a Republican congressman's office during an online meeting. Representative Dave Taylor, seen there, who is very much in alignment with Donald Trump, was not in his office at the time of this meeting. Instead, Angelo Elia was on the call. So blogger DJ Burns posted this to X.

There is a picture and you can see the flag there and it's the face to look like a swastika is in the middle of it. And it says a friend in D.C. had a Zoom call with Congressman Dave Taylor's office today. Taylor's legislative correspondent, Angeloelia, had what can only be described as an American swastika flag prominently displayed in his background. So not only was this swastika flag in the representative's office, but it was well within the frame of the video call. It's like if I just put a very questionable flag just right here on this wall. It's like where the violin is maybe. So Taylor has responded to the image denying that it is his flag at all. And he is ordering an investigation into how it even got into his office.

He said, I'm aware of an image that appears to depict a vile and deeply inappropriate symbol near an employee in my office. Taylor said in a statement, but he released on his website. The content of that image does not reflect the values or stand. of this office, my staff or myself, and I condemn it in the strongest terms. No further comment will be provided until it has been completed. And it has been reported that investigations are underway right now. Also, it's not clear that the staffer who was on camera at the time spotted the flag, or had anything to do with it or knew it was there or whatever.

Despite working for a MAGA Republican congressman, he is actually a registered Democrat. And you know, I'm not going to knock his hustle. Jobs are really, really hard to come by these days. And whenever you take a job like that on the hill, you don't always get to work with your preferred congressperson. But at this point, we don't have a whole lot more information on the flag or how it got into that congressman's office, but also why like no one noticed it was there prior to it being featured prominently on a video call and or, you know, why nobody brought it up to that congressman. And of course, Brett, this all comes on the heels of that very inflammatory Republican youth group chat that was leaked recently. So what do you,

what do you do you do? I'm not saying that all Trump supporters are Nazis. I'm saying they're all Nazis are Trump supporters. There's that. I love in the wake of this stuff like people's initial reaction. That's the most interesting part because I don't know who put it up there or what. And my initial reaction was like, yeah, it makes sense. And I think a lot of people's initial reaction. I was like, ugh. Like, and I think a lot of Republicans' initial reaction was like, God, this is not a good look for us rather than that's fake. Like, if that showed up in the background of a photo of Bernie Sanders or AOC, I'd be like, that's probably fake. But if you're telling me, like, it ended up behind someone in a Republican party, just like that thing that pops into your

mind before you have a chance to run it through your own like partisan filter is like, that's probably that seems part for their course. Like I'm not saying that Pete Hegseth has white supremacist tattoos. I'm just saying that most people with the same tattoos as Pete Hagseth are white supremacists. And if they do find out that this dude is responsible for it, hung it in his office, that is desecration of the the American flag. And if if Trump's executive orders are to be believed, this Congress person, if convicted, should be pursued to the fullest extent of the law, as Donald Trump put in his executive order about flag burning. And he should serve, quote, one year in jail, no early exits,

no nothing, vigorously prosecute. Those are my thoughts. If he's just quoting the monopoly man with Go straight to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. It's so good. And it's not real. Every time he says something, it's not real. But yeah, like that's a great point about, you know, the initial reaction to this particular flag being spotted in a MAGA Republicans office. You're just like, yeah, yeah, probably, maybe, you know, and I actually was surprised when he came out saying that's not my flag. And I do feel for him. If it's not its flag, that's not a great look. That's not what anybody wants. It's also very overtly racist, like, like even for what we've been seeing coming out of

the Republicans lately, like it is that that is bold. And you know, the Republicans though, like I feel like they deface the flag all the time. They just get away with it. Like there's so many MAGA flags that are flying around like certain neighborhoods. Even like the Blue Lives Matter flag is just like a defaced American flag. So like where do we draw the line? Like at what point is it a defaced American flag and at what point is it just like a different flag altogether. I don't know. But there were a couple of comments that I wanted to read real

quickly before we go to our final story. This is from YTP renewed. Give us $2 in the super chats. Thank you very much. So the CIA should have been abolished for Bay of Pigs alone. Yeah, that's a great point. And it's interesting because I don't think people even understand that that's like a possibility of a thing that can happen. And then Thomas Daniel gave us 999, thank you very much, and says Marjorie is working against the Republicans and APEC because she got shot by a Jewish space laser and you can't convince me otherwise. And you know what, Thomas, I would never, I would never even attempt to convince you otherwise. So with that, on that note, we have one final story for you. And I'm just going to let you watch this clip.

The female leadership leads to violence and you see it. And who was Governor Wallace's wife who opened the windows to smell the burning times. Drink in. Yeah, the redland odor of riot. Oh, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones sat down for a chat recently. The video was titled Alex Jones warns of the globalist death cult fueling the next civil war and rise of the Antichrist. So you can imagine how that conversation went totally normal stuff to be talking about, totally normal thing to title a video.

but it went on for over two hours and about two and a half hours. And at about two hours in, the topic turned to women. So let's hear more from Tucker on women leaders being more violent than men. It's really, really, the Bolsheviks wives were more bloodthirsty than they were. I don't know exactly what that is. I think weak male leadership incites something in women that's really dark. That's not their fault. That's men's fault.

Men's job is to lead. You can't shirk that duty because it's not created by man. It's pre-existent. Well, they found in studies in total war, like women commit way more workhoms than men. You know, you were turned over to the squaws to be tortured to death over the period of three weeks. You know, us, women, we love a good roast. So Tucker goes on to say that since women get into less physical violence, like they don't get into as many fistfights growing up, And people who haven't been in fist fight should not be commanding any kind of army.

I'm not really sure how we got that. I kind of see how we got there, but not really. Anyway, so let's go back to Alex Jones's point about women committing more war crimes than men. What is he talking about? Where did he get that from? Here is what we found. So authors of the book, Why Leaders Fight, analyzed every world leader from 1875 to 2004, and statistically examined gender differences in military aggression.

They found that 36% of the female leaders initiated at least one militarized dispute while only 30% of male leaders did the same. The authors say this does not mean that women are generally more aggressive. However, men were responsible for 694 acts of aggression and 86 wars while women were responsible for just 13 acts of aggression. So that's 694 compared to 13 and only one war. That's 86 compared to one, and that was Indira Gandhi. The authors conclude that women who lead nations likely have the same risk propensity as their male counterparts. And, you know, let's be fair, we do have to take into consideration that there have

been a lot more male leaders throughout history than there have been women. So I don't really know how that ratio plays out. But there were a few recent examples of women leaders displaying aggressive behavior or, you know, more militaristic behavior. So there was Margaret Thatcher, you know, she, the iron, the iron, what do they call her, the iron woman? The iron lady, the iron woman, yeah. When she attacked Argentina, whenever they, Argentina was invading the Falklands. So Margaret Thatcher decided to attack Argentina against the advice she was getting from her advisors.

And she ordered the sinking of an Argentine ship, which killed over 300 sailors. Then there was Park Gwynhai of South Korea, who just threatened, decided. of military action against North Korea, if they even thought about trying anything with her. And Hillary Clinton, in her capacity as the Secretary of State, she went, first she was pursuing diplomacy against Libya, but then she decided to recommend military action against Libya during the Obama administration, even in opposition to her male colleagues. Brett, I want to get your thoughts on this, but I will say that was a crazy interview because I don't consume a whole lot of Alex Jones, but whatever I'm forced to, to bring our audience,

clips like these and stories like this one, it is, it's baffling. And it was so funny because he would just say something so insane and would leave your head spinning. And then Tucker Carlson's on the other end and he just like moves past it. Like Alex Jones just very casually brought up something about like bald men in airport stealing dresses. I don't even know what he was talking about. And then Tucker just like moved on past that comment. So what are your thoughts? Are women more aggressive, Brett? And if so, why could that possibly be?

The answer is periods. Obviously men don't have periods. So no male has ever initiated a war. It's science ever. There's never been a man who's done war or been aggressive at all. It comes down to the female reproductive system, the moon and I think the movie Eat, Pray, Love, which I heard they made a book out of. All right, so those were jokes. That was very nice of the producer. Did you do that? Whoever

produced this story, yes, very nice of you to list a few examples of women starting wars. That is journalisming. You're welcome. That said, come on. Like, in these scenarios, Their job, what they're good at is to just do that, just the thousand hands slap from Street Fighter of insane statements so that their audience will just be like, yep, yep, yep, yep, nope, don't like women. This tastes like the other food from you. I ate out of your butthole of me being like, I also don't like women. It's their fault, I don't get late. Actually, Brett, I'll stop you right there because they actually did specify that they both They both love women before launching into that segment.

And Tucker Carlson even said he likes women more than he likes men. Right. That was nice of him. Either they believe it or they don't, right? That's the quote. So what do we do as media readers in an era of horrible media literacy being taken apart and defunded by these schmucks who take millions, I don't know about them specifically, but folks that take millions and millions and millions of unfettered dollars to forward

right wing talking points. They either believe it or they don't. My contention is that, so I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that Tucker and Alex, neither of them believes this. They just know it gets them views. And that's me giving them the benefit of the doubt. That's the nicest way I can characterize this. It's insane because at the same time they're saying women are more fragile and women in later they're like women need to be protected. That's why we have armies. And they're saying, Why are we sending women into battle at all? It's like, bro, you just said that they're superior, more aggressive people to men. Shouldn't they be at war then?

Shouldn't they be the ones? We just be like, oh my God, once one week every year, if we have an all female force because of evil brain blood of the hormones of the moon, they just sick them into period force. Go do it. The seven days war, it's a thing. But this time it's with periods. that are all sanked up. I don't know much about women, but I am horrible.

If it's the witches of TikTok. If they do believe it, that's worse, right? If they really do believe that this is true, this thing that very obviously they're like, someone just give me two numbers, one bigger than the other, and I will warp that into a study that women create more, like do more war crimes. It doesn't make any sense, like it doesn't make sense. It's pathetic. And this is the stuff that every time Tucker Carlson, like, it's like I was saying with Marjorie Taylor Green, like what can I get him to agree with me on that then turns into tangible wins for my side? But I always have to remember, these guys suck, dude.

They suck. It's like with everything, like with jokes, with talking about trans people in sports or trans people in general, with talking about war, women, anything. I could talk to someone if they pass a test. It's the A-hole test. If you're not trying to be an a hole and you sound like one, but you're not trying to be one, I can work with that because your intentions are not bad. But if you're trying to be an a hole, which is exactly what they're doing right now, I have to call you out for it.

And I'm never going to get that far with you unless I reveal the internal fallacies in your logic as best as I can. I throw it into a montage that I can play whenever I need it because people need to be reminded. And that's it. But like there's a lot of guys that need that that are going to get suckered into this because they're being given permission. And this is the last thing I'll say on it. All these guys talk about how men need good male figures in their life. Okay?

They don't want bad male fatherly figures in their life. And Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones are the furthest from it. because he said, oh, I love women, but I am going to spend an insane amount of time saying insane things about how women do more war crimes. To what end is this obvious warping of a study that then told you not to make that conclusion? To what end is that? And it's to ruin the lives of young men and young women at the same time so that men can get these young men can get a rush that makes it less likely they'll ever get laid, by the way. And it makes women's life worse because they're surrounded by men you made like this.

And also on the anti-crass thing, last thing, there's a great thing about the Antichrist that my Catholic former boss put up there. She still don't believe Trump's the Antichrist. Then they list all the things about the Antichrist. He's the lawless one. He's the boaster. He's the arrogant one. He's the pathological liar. He's the the builder of towers. He routinely breaks treaties. He demands worship constantly. He's deceitful in attempts to lure the church into following him. Is he a man of sin? Did he brag to be the chosen one? Does he show no compassion and empathy? I'm almost done. Is he the son of perdition? Is he the destroyer? Does he constantly try to make himself look great? These are all things the

Bible says about the Antichrist and each one of them, according to this graphic, is exactly how you would describe Donald Trump. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, it's just so stupid. Like, I hate that now, like war is our fault too now. Like, are we full of rage? Yes, I can't imagine why we are full of rage. We were just told not to take Tylenol, which is one of the only pain killers that pregnant women are allowed to take. And he's like, just deal with it. Just like have more pain. And like, I wonder if people who don't menstruate, right, like if they understand how painful it can be. And we're just like walking through life doing that. Also, before we go, Brett, I love your montaging. I love that you, you know, create montage. It's like your version of scrapbooking. And I think it's very wholesome in a very Brett specific way. So anyway, we have to go. We got a break. We're going to give you the second hour. You have Michael and Jenk coming up. Brett, did you have fun? I had a great time with you, yes. This was fantastic. Thank you. Great. You are welcome. And I will see everybody next time. Bye.