The Young Turks - The Young Turks 12.20.17: Tax Bill, Star Wars, and Catt Sadler

Episode Date: December 21, 2017

A portion of our Young Turks Main Show from December 20th, 2017. For more go to http://www.tytnetwork.com/join. Hour 1: Cenk & John. Ryan and McConnell have ushered the biggest tax overhaul in a generation through Congress and delivered President Donald Trump his first major legislative victory since Inauguration Day. But on the periphery is palpable angst, particularly in the House. Just hours before the Tuesday vote, some House Republicans fretted privately about the prospect of getting railroaded into propping up Obamacare by the end of the week. And conservatives have been stewing quietly over a looming legislative package coming in early January that most believe will increase spending and codify an Obama-era immigration program they believe is illegal.  Hour 2: Are SJW's ruining Star Wars? Catt Sadler has quit her position as an E! News host after discovering that she was being paid about half of what her male co-host, Jason Kennedy, was making. Sadler had been with E! for years, appearing on TV since 2006 as a host of The Daily 10 and then E! News. This year, she also became the host of Daily Pop, a two-hour daytime show, and an E! executive informed her of the “massive disparity” in pay around the time she took on that gig. Shortly after that, E! reached out to renew her contract, and she decided to fight. Facial recognition-based features are nothing new to Facebook. The company has used facial recognition for some time now to suggest friends to tag in photos. On Tuesday, however, the company announced it's expanding its facial recognition features to help combat fake accounts using another person's photos, and to alert users whenever a photo or video is posted with him or her in it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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. Thank you for watching or listening to this free podcast of the Young Turks. We want to make sure that you get some portion of the show every day. But if you want the full show, which is actually five segments, come become a member and support independent media as well. TYT network.com slash join.

Meanwhile, enjoy the free podcast. All right, well, the Young Turks, Jane Cougar, John Iarola with you guys. We've got an amazing show for you guys today. Filled with, filled to the room with liars, as John was just talking about off air. We'll get to those. I actually, I think you're mainly talking about Paul Ryan, but I actually want to... No, I ever... All of them, right?

I know, I know. Everybody... I'll save it. I'll save it. Okay. I'm mainly talking about Susan Collins. Susan Collins, who's going to Kvetch, I'm trying not to use the word cry, about how there's sexism against her, because God forbid a Republican woman should ever be criticized.

All of a sudden, they realize there's sexism in the world the minute they get any kind of criticism. So anyway, there is. I just don't think this is a good example. Yes. But there is. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about how Trump is trying to bully the whole world. Are they going to give in or are they going to fight back?

That'll be interesting. Then Rosie O'Donnell and Ben Shapiro in a fascinating fight where obscenities were used. In fact, one of them told the other to suck their dick. Now, which one? Well, you'll find out in the second hour. I'm glad that that person did, but I wish that they hadn't because then the other person, I'm trying to be vague, wouldn't be in the news again. Okay, you gave it away completely.

Okay, it's the most obvious thing. I don't want to hear about Rosie. Okay. There, is that, does that obscure it enough? No, not really. Okay. So, but here's my favorite thing in the world, and is that the throw away little fun segment I did yesterday about the bet I had with Jimmy Dorr. Okay.

We did a poll on him if you should pay me the $1,000 to $500 or if I should let him go. Okay. There's 27,000 votes on it. What are our poll's normal again? Is that more than normal? That's like 10x, at a minimum 5x of what a normal fells. Should we push for a single pair of health care, would that have less votes? That would have way less votes, way less.

That's disconcerting, but what are the results? The results are so neck and neck that it makes it the second layer of interesting. Okay. I'll confess to what I voted for. I voted for 500 bucks to kind of let him off the hook a little bit because he said 5 to 1 at the end. And I can't get enough of that picture. It's t-y-tnetwork.com slash the bet. How much should Jank make Jimmy pay him for our bet in October of 2015, where I said Trump

would win the general election, and it was 10 to 1? And we bet $100, so theoretically it owes me $1,000. So let him go is at $45.8,000, $1,000 is at $47.4%. So the two extremes are the highest. Basically 47 to 46. 47 to 46, okay. And the last one, a couple percentage points is... Oh, 500 is only 7%.

Okay. So you're not the voice of the people here then. No, no. So people either want the whole thing or let them go. Yes. Is there still time to vote? Can people go and vote? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Are you kidding me? Let's keep going to be happy fun. This is apparently the most important thing that's ever happened. So go vote people while there's still time. And some people are kind of humbug about it. Isn't there more important stories? Of course there's more important stories. Maybe, maybe not.

I don't know. We cover more stories in two hours than Sienna does in two weeks. But anyway, if you'd like to vote on this fun topic, not a big deal. I agree, it's fun. I'm joking. TYT Network.com slash the bet, okay? My favorite thing about it is that we, everybody, I don't so much. But you and Ben make bets and J.R. constantly.

you guys never remember them basically. Yeah, until somebody in the audience reminds us. Okay, so go looking for our bets. Okay. All right, so John, let's get started. Okay, today the House gave final approval to the GOP tax bill, effectively clearing the way for Donald Trump to sign it, and we will now have, in law,

the largest government redistribution of wealth in my entire lifetime, possibly going back long before I was born. The Republicans, both in the House and the Senate, are positively giddy about it and they're not going to let a little thing like the truth of what's actually in the bill get in the way of their celebrations. You're going to see that in the videos. We're going to show you shortly. We've got Paul Ryan, we've got Trump himself, we've got Ted Cruz, all just spreading a bunch of BS about what's in the bill and what's likely to happen from the bill. But before we go to that, Jank, did you think it would happen? Yeah, clearly we thought it would happen.

But it happened. So 1.5 trillion dollars from you and me and our audience, the corporations and the wealthiest people in the country. Yeah. So a couple of things here. Number one, the media played this as they usually do, this false drama of is it going to happen or is it not going to happen. We told you on the Young Turks from day one, it was definitely 100% going to happen. And we'll get into why in a second. and the fundamental misunderstanding people have about politics,

not you guys, but the people in power. Secondarily, a lot of the right wing were like, oh, no, oh, my gosh, it's never going to happen. Oh, my God, it's such an important thing that it just might not pass because of the evil Democrats or whatever the hell they thought. In fact, a guy who's in the news today, before we did our infamous debate, Ben Shapiro and I were talking about the tax cut bill backstage, and he said, oh, it'll never pass. And I'm like, what do you, are you, but he was adamant and he's anti-Trump, right?

Yeah, he's anti-Trump, but obviously very, very right-wing. Well, some of them, some of them thought that Trump and the, because Trump is such a weirdo, that him and the Republicans wouldn't be able to work together. No, but what, okay, so. On tax cuts, on tax cuts, they're not going to be able to work together. So that leads to the most important part of this story, okay, is for all the mainstream media, the right wingers, who have all these other people. Get it through your thick skulls.

There is a small group of people in this country who rule us all. They are called the donors. The donors to the politicians make almost all of the policy. So the reason why I am so often right on the show is not because I'm really smart, really astute, and I'm sure that my critics would agree. Okay, it's because it's a really simple process. It's not like, oh, what does the honorable gentleman from Tennessee? Bob Corker, is he pro-Trump, anti-Trump, does he care about the deficit?

Does he not care about the deficit? No, follow the goddamn money. Okay, it's the oldest thing in the world. So their donors all want giant tax cuts. In fact, even if they had lost Corker and Collins, which they were never, ever going to lose, we said that from day one and we were a thousand percent, right? It wouldn't have mattered, you know why? Because Feinstein would have stepped up

Or Mansion would have stepped up A couple of Democrats would have flipped Because their donors also won The trillions of dollars in tax cuts Guy in Feinstein voted for Bush's tax cuts She voted to repeal the state tax before The only reason she didn't vote for it this time Is because they had enough Republican votes

It was an absolute guarantee The donor class wanted it And it was their number one priority And look I didn't It's not a thing that they hide The reason we know it is because it was all over the press They told Politico, they told every paper they could. Even a Democratic donor went on MSNBC and publicly threatened the Democrats and said,

you better not get in our way. And all of the Republican donors said, if they don't give us our goddamn tax cuts, then what the hell did we bribe them for? They didn't use the word bribe. But almost, almost, they said we're going to withdraw all of our money from these politicians unless they give us a return on investments. This country, unfortunately, I love America, but it has become one of the most corrupt countries on earth, and the reason is, unlike all the other countries that have

plenty of corruption, we legalized corruption, we legalized bribery. So this was a foregone conclusion, and anyone who didn't see that coming doesn't understand anything about American politics. I was told not to worry about it during the election. Fundamentally, he's too incompetent, it wouldn't happen. I mean, of the things that I was most worried about, he hasn't yet defaulted on our debt, so that's good. But they got the tax cuts. They've pulled us out of the Paris Accords. I don't have to remember the other one.

I've got a Rick Perry moment, but they're doing very well on it. And so, I mean, it's incredibly disheartening. I tweeted about it last night, like, that they were able to do it. Like, if I came to you with original reporting from TYT Investigates, and we had a source that showed that the Republicans had stolen $1.5 million from regular Americans and give it to a corporation, it would be a scandal. Most people wouldn't believe us. If we said a billion, we would be conspiracy theorists.

But with a trillion dollars, it's totally fine. It's a win for them, a win for the GOP. And so that's awesome. And that's not only thing that drives me crazy. It's not one and a half trillion. It's one and a half trillion that they couldn't cover. The rest of it is in tax increases to the middle class and is in massive cuts that they're going to make the spending.

And then you still- And also, after 10 years, it's going to be even far worse. just the debt servicing, but the growth is not going to match with the Republican, the fairy tale idea that the Republicans gave you with what the growth would be like. And you're still going to have a one and a half trillion dollar deficit on top of that. Yeah. And so, and from now on, we can retire it forever. In the old days, they had collective amnesia, because honestly, reporters just were so craven in their attempt to cover for the Republican Party by calling everything neutral, okay? So from now on, any reporter,

that earnestly reports that the Republicans care about deficits should be immediately fired because they do, because it's just not true. They're purposely stating Republican propaganda that has been proven incorrect right now without a shadow of a doubt. Well, and how many, how many times do we need to go through this? Like, I wasn't, I wasn't a conscious political person under Reagan, but Reagan came in, they had major, they had massive tax cuts. George W. Bush comes in, they have massive tax cuts.

Trump comes in, they have massive tax cuts. We don't need to speculate about what they're going to do. And if you think for a second that they're going to be satisfied with 21% for the corporate tax or 37% for the top marginal tax rate, that's what they were able to get now. And when I tweeted about it, I got many Republicans whose only response, their only thought about this, wasn't even happiness, it wasn't even glee. It was taxation is theft. They're not done, okay? If they remain in power, there will be more of this. 80% of the cuts went to the top 1%.

It is not a mystery as to who are corrupt politicians serve. They serve the top 1% because they're financed by the top 1%. It's not remotely complicated. And anyone who thinks that it is just doesn't belong in media that covers politics because they don't understand politics at all. They should go get another job. I agree. Okay, well, let's turn to the lies about this bill.

And I'm going to preface this by saying there was a point where we thought with the rise of the internet and social media that things are recorded and stored and you can search for them, that you can just, you can catch someone in a lie. And these videos are going to prove that it doesn't matter if you catch them in a lie. The video doesn't actually matter. But here is Paul Ryan. So we've been talking about how much this is going to cost. Okay, there have been estimates. Let's see if Paul Ryan. respects those estimates. It is estimated this tax cut is going to cost $1.46 trillion more to the deficit. Now, I know that the theory is that if you have more tax growth, you get more revenues into the coffer, and that reduces the deficit. But let me just put a fine point on it.

Are you saying that the growth you're going to get from this tax cut will equal the amount it would cost on the deficit side so that it's a wash, so that you're not adding to the deficit at all because of this? Nobody knows the answer to that question because that's in the future. But what we do know is that this will increase economic growth. Yeah, well, you know, like if Paul Ryan was standing in front of me and I cocked back my fist and threw it forward, who can say what'll happen? It's in the future.

We don't know. No, they do know. They did estimates. Now, they could be off, you know, we don't know for sure, but it's not going to pay for it and to lie to the audience there and allow them to lie and say that we don't know is insane. No, no, but it's actually slightly worse than that. Because in the beginning, Paul Ryan, before this legislation was introduced, said it was going to be deficit neutral. That's a quote, and he said it over and over and over again, and he pretended to care about deficits. Now, it is, again, beyond a shadow of a doubt that Paul Ryan is a liar and never cared about deficits.

All that talk about, oh, my God, Obama added to the deficit, wait a minute. George W. Bush, because of his giant tax cuts for the rich, handed Obama a $1.2 trillion deficit to begin with. Obama knocked it down to half of that in eight years. You could say he could have done more to knock down Bush's deficit. But you never cared about the deficit. Republicans, and then they certainly don't do now. And then now they ended up one and a half trillion dollars on top. So obviously their complaint about Obama was total political lie after lie after lie.

Now, in the case of Paul Ryan, now he's turning around and saying, and I'm sorry, during the campaign to get the bill passed, he was like, oh my God. It's going to lead to so much growth. I wouldn't worry about that one and a half trillion dollar deficit. It's clearly creating, but don't worry about it because the growth and then, you know, and everything will be fine. Now that it's passed, he's like, well, just kidding, it won't be fine. But no one can know what's going to happen. Wait, I thought you were the math whiz for the Republicans. I thought you were the budget guy and that you were the one with all the pie charts and you were the one smart Republican.

And now all of a sudden, hey, what do the numbers indicate will happen? Besides which we're all rich. It's already too late. We passed the bill, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, you know what's going to happen? You see it explode on top of your head. What do I care? I already got rich.

So when I was in so-called academia, I was a political scientist, not a historian. But I would guess that this is going to explode just in time for a Democratic president to have to fix it. If I had to guess, that's what I would say. And I'll tell you what, if you got a real progressive president, not one of these, stupid democratic establishment guys who have the same donors. Yes, it should be absolutely positively unabashed. The minute they walk into office, they should re-undue all of these cuts. Every one of them, not like, oh, but now it's too late.

Or now, no, no, no, no, no, no. The minute they get in, they give everything to the rich. We worry about wealthy income inequality? Well, all right, great. The minute we come in, we're going to restore things for the middle class and not for the rich. And that's a good first step. Yes. I mean, the taxes before this, the tax system we had before they just passed this last night

was not acceptable. It was increasing income inequality on a yearly basis. This is just going to pour gasoline on it. But we needed progress, okay? This is purposefully regressing. Yeah, no more Obama's. No more, they take 100 yards, we take 5 yards back. No, they take 100 yards, we're going to take 200 yards.

It's the Chicago way. Ironically, it's not because Obama's from Chicago. Apparently the Chicago way. Let's go a different way. Like, well, how's Philly? I don't know. Apparently the Chicago way is take 5% back of what they got. Maybe we could call it the Vermont way. Maybe. The Birmingham way. That's Vermont, right? Yeah, that is. Okay, let's go through some more videos. Let's try to keep it a little bit quicker because there's a few of these we want to get to. So we've got Paul Ryan. Let's see. What are these companies going to do with the hundreds of billions of dollars we're going to shower on them? Let's find out. As I understand your argument and that of your colleagues, you're counting on corporations to take that money they now have and plow it right back into the economy, hire people, raise wages.

It doesn't work if they don't do that. Is that correct? No, the studies show us that that is exactly what does happen. But first of all, Savannah, don't forget that we tax American corporations at the highest rate in the industrialized world. So we are convinced, and the studies are really clear, workers' benefit, wages go away. up. More jobs occur. The vast majority of businesses are going to do just what we say. Reinvest in their workers, reinvest in their factories, pay people more money, higher wages. Let me pin you down on that. The data is really clear, by the way, workers benefit from this through higher wages. It's not a question of if, it's a question of how much they benefit. We need to talk about a relatively new show called Un-Fing the Republic or UNFTR. As a young

Turks fan, you already know that the government, the media, and corporations. are constantly peddling lies that serve the interests of the rich and powerful. But now there's a podcast dedicated to unraveling those lies, debunking the conventional wisdom. In each episode of Un-B-the-Republic or UNFTR, the host delves into a different historical episode or topic that's generally misunderstood or purposely obfuscated by the so-called powers that be, featuring in-depth research, razor-sharp commentary, and just the right amount of vulgarity, the UNFTR podcast takes a sledgehammer to what you thought you knew about some of the nation's most sacred historical cows. But don't just take my word for it. The New York Times

described UNFTR as consistently compelling and educational, aiming to challenge conventional and upend the historical narratives that were taught in school. For as the great philosopher Yoda once put it, you must unlearn what you have learned. And that's true whether you're in Jedi training, or you're uprooting and exposing all the propaganda and disinformation you've been fed over the course of your lifetime. So search for UNFDR in your podcast app today and get ready to get informed, angered, and entertained, all at the same time. Everything you said was alive. We don't tax them at the highest rate. It's effectively a very low rate. So when the Democrats tried to add amendments saying that if, I forget what the time frame was,

if wages do not go up, if this does not result in higher wages, then we rescind it, they voted that down. Why? If you're so sure that that's what's going to happen, why not add that in? You might get a couple of Democratic votes on your side after you do that because they know it's not going to happen. We know it's not going to happen. TYT Investigates has done extensive reporting over the past few months on what happened specifically with the tax holiday. time they did this under George W. Bush. It did not result in more jobs. Many of those companies went on to fire thousands of workers. Not only 2004, but TYT Investigates looked into specific companies who either had their CEO or their lobbyists go out and say, oh yeah, yeah, lower

taxes is going to lead in, they weren't even outrageous enough to say higher wages because they knew that was never going to happen, right? But to say they said more jobs. So then we went and investigated FedEx, UPS, Apple, Lockheed Martin, and some of which claimed, oh, we're adding the factories that Paul Ryan just referred to there. Not only did we find out that they were actually telling their shareholders at the shareholder meetings, no, we're not going to do that. In fact, we're going to start outsourcing and automating more. So shareholders, boy, we got great news for you.

First of all, we're going to get you tons of tax cuts, which we're then going to have funnel a lot of it to you and a lot of us to executives, right? Secondly, we're going to cut even more jobs and save even more money and good news for you. Because when they talk to shareholders, they're not on TV where they can lie. They have to be honest with their shareholders or otherwise they'll be in legal trouble. And with their shareholders, they're jubilant about it anyway. They don't have to hide anything. They're like, yes. And then in one of the stories, you should go read all.

All of this at TYT-YT investigates. So Apple claimed that they were going to start a new factory. And we went to try to figure out if in that area, the subsidiary they were working with had done any permits. If they had gone to the government and said we'd like to expand our factory or do a new factory. And we found no. And they had to admit, no, there are new factories. There will be no new jobs. That was all a marketing gimmick.

But Ryan still goes and does that because he's a professional. liar and he was purchased by those donors to go and tell these pretty little lies about how your wages are going to go up. And I'll tell you this ahead of time. I'll make any bet any size, okay? Paul Ryan, here, take me up on it. 10 to 1, 100 to 1. Wages are not going to go up. So you want them to do it at 2018, 2019, 2020? I'll take any year. They're not going to go up. We can study the top 500 companies, the top 1,000 companies. And if they took the tax cuts and actually grew wages, great. And I'll admit I was wrong

and whatever size bet you want to make. I'm happy to do that, right? But that's not what they're saying to their shareholders. They're saying, we're not going to do that at all. We're just going to keep the money. Which if you're a regular person, you know they're going to do that.

You think out of the goodness of their heart, they're going to give you higher wages. There's no law that says give higher wages. It just says, here, take the money and do whatever you want with it. They're literally sitting on trillions of dollars already. How big does a pile of money need to be before you start to just on your own? Just because it would be awesome to raise wages, would you do it? That's not how they function.

We don't need to think ahead to the future. It's already the way they function. And one more thing about that clip. He said every study shows this. That's completely the reverse. Every study shows that, no, growth does not make up for the $1.5 trillion deficit. No, it does not lead to more jobs. The only study that he's got on his side is the National Association of Manufacturers.

In other words, the guys who wanted the tax cuts in the first place, his own donors did a study where they said, give us the money, and we promise we'll spread it around later. And do you remember, I mean, you might remember a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, we showed you, I think it was the budget director for Trump, had a bunch of CEOs in a big audience, and he asked them, how many of you're planning on investing this new money that you'll have back into your companies? And a pathetic number of hands were raised. And he asked them that why aren't you raising your hands? And they said, because they don't need to.

If they needed to hire, they would hire. They would use the money they have currently. It's not going to happen. And by the way, I heard today Donald Trump said, AT&T is announcing that they're going to give $1,000 bonuses to like 100,000 employees because of this bill, which that sounds great, that sounds like exactly what they should do. And they also announced it six weeks ago before this bill, we even had anything like the final draft of the bill. They're just lying and now saying to curry favor with Trump because they know he wants to be able to take credit for

something. They're saying it again today as if it has anything to do with the tax bill. And they get away with it because there's no, there's no truth left in the world anymore. Everyone is a goddamn liar. It's true. It's true. We are very bad. at identifying and cataloging lies on the other side, and especially if it's on her own. If you're a Republican and you're listening to Paul Ryan there, it feels good to believe that corporations were already taxed at the highest rate, and now things are going to be more just. It feels good to imagine that you will get a tax cut, even though you can look at the charts and see that in 10 years you're going to be far worse off.

It feels good so we don't question it. That's who we are as a species. Well, John, I know it's easy to be despond on a day like today, but also remember that this is a deeply unpopular bill. It's polling at 33% and dropping. So they're just playing patty cakes with themselves on TV. So I'm surprised that the press is even pressing them at all on. And they are a little bit, right?

Now I've now seen even Aaron Burnett saying like, wait, deficits don't matter. You guys came on this program for 10 years straight and told me that deficits are the most important thing. And now, you know, Savannah Guthrie and stuff. So a little bit, a little bit. But overall, they're going to play patty cakes. And it's done. done. And they don't give a damn what you think. If they cared about what you thought, we'd live in a democracy. Okay, I want to show you one more video. I know that we're going over on this first

block, but take a look at Ted Cruz and his excitement upon passing the bill and who he is willing to attack even in his moment of triumph. The irony of all the high dungeon from our Democratic friends pounding the table about this is a tax cut for the rich, the only people whose taxes are going up are the really rich. The middle class, their taxes are all going down. The working class, their taxes are going down. Every taxpayer their taxes are going down, except rich people in Manhattan and San Francisco, some of them their taxes may go up.

And you see this kabuki theater of senators on the Democratic aisle pretending we must defend the rich people by claiming we're defending the working class. Well, Mr. President, the facts are the facts of the facts. And the facts are the taxes for the working class are going down. No single word of that is true. Yeah, of all the liars in Congress, Ted Cruz is the worst and the most abhorrent. He oozes Greece as he says one lie after another. So number one, about a third of the middle class is getting an immediate tax increase.

Number two, within 10 years, everyone making under $75,000 would get a tax increase. Number three, 80% of the tax cuts are going to the top 1%. Number four, the guys in New York that he's referring to, actually a lot of them work in finance. And Trump said that he would get rid of their loopholes. He didn't. He kept the loopholes. On top of that, they added loopholes to corporations. They said they were going to take away all the loopholes for corporations.

Not only did they not do that, they added loopholes. So at the end of the day, actually they're really rich in New York and San Francisco. They probably, you know, some of them, because half of them are liberals might not like Ted Cruz. But right now, they're laughing going, hey, Ted, I got bad news for you. We're getting wonderful, wonderful tax cuts. But of course, Ted Cruz knows that. They won't do as well as the rich in some other places because, of course, if they're paying higher state taxes, the cap on deductions for state and local taxes mean that they

won't be able to benefit as much certainly. But, I mean, they literally took the top tax bracket and took it down to 37%. They lowered it. And that same day, he goes on TV and says the only people paying more taxes are the wealthy. And that video, he'll run for president again. If Trump doesn't, if he's got something else to do, he's in jail or something, Ted Cruz is going to run for president. And that clear lie, it's literally disproven by the words written in the bill, will mean nothing.

Yeah, let alone the pass-through tax, which most rich people will use and actually pay in the 20s, not anywhere near 37%. Oh, there's going to be a lot of new corporations coming up in the next few years. They're going to have one employee each. There's going to be a lot of new corporations. Yeah, let alone the state tax cut doubling of the exemption, let alone the corporate tax cut, which then helps for cheap a pill. I mean, let alone the real estate loophole, all these things all designed for their owners.

And one last thing about Ted Cruz. And so some of the Republicans and some of the corrupt Democrats are knuckleheads, and they get themselves to actually believe it. And Paul Ryan is giving credit for being smart. No, I really think he's one of the dumber guys there is. And like that press conference about health care really proved it where he just doesn't even understand the concept of health insurance. He's like, and then the healthy, pay for the poor. What a crazy system.

Yeah, that's insurance. That's insurance, you idiot, right? But Cruz actually is relatively intelligent. That's what makes him more smarmy and a worse guy. He knows the depths of his lie. So here's the point I want to make about that. Ted Cruz's number one donor during the last presidential run was Robert Mercer. Mercer had given him $13 million.

You know who Robert Mercer is? He is a hedge fund guy out of New York City. And Mercer gave all that money to Ted Cruz and then later to Donald Trump. Why? He wants giant tax cuts, which might save him literally billions of dollars. Yeah, we broke that down a couple weeks ago. And so that's Ted Cruz's number one donor. He knows who is number one donor.

So, and he knows that he works in New York, or at least in the tri-state area, right? And he knows that he just gave him billions of dollars that he's going to redistribute from the middle class to his donor Robert Mercer. So, but he comes up there and does this smarmy speech about as if he's like Mr. regular guy from Texas. And it's like, oh, we're going to get the rich people in New York in San Francisco. And then he goes backstage and laughs and laughs and probably hugs it out with Robert Mercer is saying, yes, once again, we screwed over the American people on behalf of our

donors. That's who that sad, sleazy Ted Cruz is. The only thing that makes me happy about Ted Cruz, whenever I see him now, I always think of the picture of him phone banking for Trump, like a broken man, like a pathetic beta cuck that he is. Wow. If you want to feel even a little bit better, for some reason, I guess it's just for publicity. On about a monthly basis, He goes on CNN and debates Bernie Sanders and just gets slapped around every time. But he keeps coming back for more. It's enjoyable. Yeah, he fancies himself a debate champion.

That's what's hilarious about it. Okay. We got to go to our first break. Yes, we're way over. And we've got a lot more rage coming at you guys when we come back. You're right in the middle of this podcast. We've got another great segment coming up for you. If you'd like the full show, which is actually five segments, go to TYT Network.com.

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Okay. All right. What's next? Okay. Are, our social, I'll start that again, are social justice warriors ruining Star Wars? Now, this is a theory, this weird thread that's going around, and it started with this. Let's look at the graphic, 37. It's the Rotten Tomato Meter versus the audience score. Now, if you look at the top critics, 93% of the critic, or of all critics, approve of this film.

That is the percentage of critics who like the film, 93%. And then the audience score, however, is 54%. Now this happens a lot, but usually not with giant blockbuster films. Usually for giant blockbusters, the critics hate it and the audience is like, eh, it's not that bad. So folks started looking around to see why this might be. And certain people have kind of glommed on to a message that says that essentially social justice warriors are ruining the film. We'll go with the first quote here. That is, the commenters are littered with one star, the comments are littered with one star reviews that read politically correct

to the point of boredom about the film, SJW propaganda. And I'm frustrated that feminism and diversity have made their way into this film. This is ruined Star Wars for me as well as my kids. Keep liberalism out of it and stop ruining once good things. Point out by Martin Dobney of the Telegraph. We also have Matt Atchiddy, formerly of Rotten Tomatoes, head honcho over there. Now, you know him here, of course, from What the Flick.

Hello. So. I have this conversation. Yeah. So, Matt, first of all, when you ran Rotten Tomatoes, weren't, this would have stuck out, right? This would have been a strange situation where, because the critics are usually tougher on movies than the audiences, right? Typically, that's not always the case. Sometimes you'll end up with a movie that the critics like Drive that the audience doesn't like as much.

But that's usually a case of the marketing materials, not giving the audience what, giving them something to expect that was different than what they delivered. Because Drive, if you remember those trailers, made it look like Fast and Furious. And that movie is slow and serious. But, you know, I don't really ever. Hey, we know you probably hit play to escape your business banking, not. think about it. But what if we told you there was a way to skip over the pressures of banking? By matching with the TD Small Business Account Manager, you can get the proactive business banking advice

and support your business needs. Ready to press play? Get up to $2,700 when you open select small business banking products. Yep, that's $2,700 to turn up your business. Visit TD.com slash small business match to learn more. Conditions apply. Even, and you know this from when I was still there. I never put much stake in audience scores for a couple of reasons. Not the least of which, you have no idea that anyone is seeing the movie itself. In my mind, there's three types of bullshit in the world. There's general run of the mill civilian bullshit. There's what comes out of the White House these days. And then above that is any numeric representation of an audience reaction to a movie because it's bullshit. It's just not a scientific poll. People can just go on and

actively say like, I hate this movie because I read that we're supposed to, and we'll just do that. Well, there's some of that. And also in 2014, when Kirk Cameron's saving Christmas movie came out, that got a wonderful zero on the tomato meter. And he went on Facebook telling his fans to go on the audience score and vote it up. So ultimately, can it be manipulated by somebody's kind of social agenda? Absolutely. And so you've got people on the right who are really upset about representation in the movies. And I think they're lashing out and marking this movie down because it's, hey, let's not, I only want to see white men in my movies. Yeah. So I guess, so there's two different layers here. One layer is the so-called mystery

of who voted down the movie and why they did. So I read a really long explanation. Well, it's because some people didn't like the joke. So they were, some of the fans were disappointed. because they didn't follow their theories as much. No, no, none of that happened. No one downvoted it to this degree because it told too many jokes. No, this is political. This is troll 101. So if you're not familiar with the internet and you're just a movie critic,

you might be like, oh, it could have been a couple of different reasons. No, this is, this is exactly what trolls do. Right, and to the credit of the film itself, it got higher box office, turns throughout the weekend. It wasn't one of those things where word of mouth got out and it started tanking. We'll see more next week. But I will go out on a limb here and say that this Star Wars episode eight is going to do just fine and that people by and large will really, really enjoy it. No, by any other metric and including the most important one, which is box office results, people love it. It's a yet another stupid right wing thing on the internet where they get way too much

attention when they're a minuscule, miniscule minority. So in reality, there aren't a lot of people like, oh my God, Star Wars had too many minorities and too many women. I just will not go. That's like seven alt-right trolls. Oh, my God. So I read this article, first of all, by Martin Dogney, who you look at up, he's a friend of Milo Unopoulos. So let's take anything he says in that context, right? Because if you're a friend with Milo, then your point of view is suspect at best. The other issue is, look, like, you want to complain about liberalism in Star Wars. Look at the first trilogy. The empire is all exclusively evil white dudes dressed like Nazis, and the rebels are the ones

who have, like, aliens fighting with them, right? Are they illegal aliens? According to that empire, they absolutely are. Lucas has said over and over again, he said in 81 that during a story conference, that the emperor was supposed to be Nixon in a 20, in a 20, in a 20, in a, 2005 interview with the Chicago Tribune, he had said that he conceived of the original Star Wars as an allegory for the Vietnam War in that the rebels are basically the Vietnam Kong fighting this technologically overwhelming force and they win. So, you know, you've got to look at Lucas coming out in the 70s and the environment, you know, 10 years after the summer love, he's, or a few years after, you know, he's this, he's got this liberal sensibility that's against the establishment. And the establishment at that time is that, ill-fated Nixon administration that dragged us in the Vietnam. And so there's a liberalism baked into Star Wars to begin with.

So for somebody to say, oh, there's too much liberalism in it now, I'm sorry, did you not watch any of these other movies? Yeah, also like the feminist angle, Leia runs the whole, like she's in charge of the resistance. And there's this quote, I think we can go to the graphic 40. It says on a highly amusing online thread called Is Star Wars The Force Awakens, the previous film, feminist propaganda, one commenter claims Ray does not need to work at anything. She's naturally awesome just by being a woman. The commenter writes before adding, the male support is bumbling and has an episode of acute cowardliness. Like, did you watch the first one? Leia has her stuff together. The boys show up and she's like, someone's got to save our skins. And then she gets everybody out of the situation. She's the level-headed one. And then the bout of cowardliness.

They yell at Han for leaving, like taking the money and running. And then he has to have like a change of heart, not to spoil a film from the late 70s, to come back and help the resistance. Then they rescue him in the third movie. He's the damsel in distress. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, it is not unfair to men. Po and Finn in this latest movie are incredibly heroic.

And so I don't, like, Finn is black, so I guess that doesn't count. I mean, like you were, we're talking to a bunch of weirdo races. We're having this conversation, right? And I don't know what poets, you know, both in real life, I don't know exactly. Oscar Isaac, I don't know. He's Latino. He's Latino. Okay, well, well, then he's out.

Right. Okay. No, but that's what it is. That's what it is. For decades, we've had all these hero stories that are white dudes almost exclusively. And now we have to see, oh my God, now we have to see other representation in our hero stories. Forget it, I can't. I know.

It's, they haven't said, they say it's different. But they don't say what about the difference is. bad. They're saying that changing the formula makes it bad, but they were, they were white dudes for no reason. And you could say, like, now they're, they're mixed races for no, there's no, I mean, for representation's sake. But it's different and it's not worse. It's conservatism in a nutshell, right? Like, we want the same thing to be like it was because it worked for us and it made us feel special. And God forbid, we have to share that. And they're just painting by numbers. great point by Matt. And the whole evil empire is a fascist evil empire. So if you root for

fascism, sorry, there's not going to be a lot of movies that are on your side. You know why? Because they want to sell tickets. And people don't like to root for the evil empire. Okay, sorry, that's just, that's not human nature. So, and I guess they fancy themselves the good guys. I don't know how they make that like, oh, racism is awesome. They're being racist as good guys being against women is good guys. Those aliens need to know their place. Yeah, the aliens, I don't know why they weren't pissing. I get Luke Skywalker and Hansel were white dudes. I guess were they mad at the original Star Wars because of Yoda? What is this green alien doing here? Right. He's green. What is that Mother Earth? Yeah. So get over it. And no one

should ever pay any attention to these absolute clowns. Star Wars. By the way, I saw it. It was a great movie. Yeah. And I didn't like it because it was a liberal plot. Right. Where, goodness actually wins is not a liberal plot. And if you think it is, there's something wrong with you. Then you're admitting that your side are the bad guys. Yeah, it's the same. And they all want to write this. We're going to go to Graphic 39. They all want to write this slippery slope paragraph. The truth is that identity politics is the kryptonite that saps the joy out of all it touches. How long before Harrison Ford comes out as trans solo? What price of a zero emissions Millennium Falcon, will Jabba the Hut be called out for fat shaming the obese?

This is the exact same framing. I did a video a while back about the gay character in Beauty and the Beast. And they were like, wow, long before there's Pinocchio has sex with some gender fluid dwarves. They just want to write. And it's so easy and it's such a lazy argument. And they just want to get people to be like, all right, let me go vote no on Rotten Tomatoes. We could do two hours on just the liberalism in Star Wars and how people are so. wrong about the messaging and why they're upset about it.

But I know that we are almost out of time. Yeah, so look, the great irony here is Star Wars didn't do gender identity politics. They just had a black guy and a Latino and a woman in the movie, which is what the world is. There's black people, white people, Latinos, men and women, right? They're the ones doing gender identity politics, exactly to Matt's earlier point, which is, why aren't all the good people, white men? Oh, you guys are doing general identity politics. All right, we got to go.

I've got great rebel headquarters coming up next. Okay, thanks, Brian. Bye, bye. Thanks for watching. We're listening to this free version of the Young Turks podcast. You know that the full show is at t-y-tnetwork.com slash join. If you become a member, you get the full show ad-free. We love you for watching or listening either way.

There's going to be a new free podcast tomorrow. You can keep on doing that. But if you want to get the full show ad-free, t-y-tnetwork.com. slash join. Thanks for listening to the full episode of the Young Turks. Support our work, listen to ad-free, access members, only bonus content, and more by subscribing to Apple Podcasts at apple.com slash t-y-t. I'm your host, Jank Yugar, and I'll see you soon.