The Young Turks - Tough Tariff Talk

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

TYT Live hosted by John Iadarola, Cenk Uygur, and Jordan Uhl! Watters Suggests That Hiring “Dwarves And Trans People” Led To Deadly Crash. Trump Vows Steep Tariffs For Canada And Mexico. Bernie BRAWLS With RFK Jr In Senate Hearing. Report States Trump Will FIRE Dozens Of FBI Agents Who Investigated Him. Elon Musk Just Got EXPOSED For Being A Cheater. Democrats PLOT TO Squash Primary Challengers. UFC Fighter In HOT WATER For Praising Hitler. Bizarre DOT Memo Promises More Funds For High Birth Rate Communities. Sinema’s Next Move REVEALED. Kristi Noem Is Getting Mocked For THIS Hosts: John Iadarola, Cenk Uygur, Ramesh Srinivasan SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE ☞ https://www.youtube.com/@TheYoungTurks FOLLOW US ON: FACEBOOK ☞ https://www.facebook.com/theyoungturks TWITTER ☞ https://twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM ☞ https://www.instagram.com/theyoungturks TIKTOK ☞ https://www.tiktok.com/@theyoungturks 👕MERCH ☞ https:/www.shoptyt.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. USA, USA. The guy! Thank you. Drop it. Power, power, power panel.

Jake Hugo, John Idarola, Ramesh Surin of us. Ramesh, of course, a professor at UCLA, also hosts of Utopias podcast. One for everybody, everybody check that out. John obviously hosts the damage report. So, oh, nice tie John, the damage report dragon tie? Mini dragons. I love that.

All right, shopti.com, I said it. Okay, guys, lots of amazing stories ahead for you guys. Jesse Waters has an interesting theory as to cause the crash. Crash, Tyrion Lannister maybe. So we'll get to it, we'll get to it. So and then Trump does a purge. Let's not be surprised, but let's be pissed. Okay, so we'll explain all of it, lots ups and downs as usual.

John, let's get started. Okay, well, I really wish we were talking about virtually anything else, but unfortunately this is the country we have. So brace yourself for this. You go back to the Obama-Biden administration, and they rejected a thousand well-qualified applicants for air traffic control because they weren't diverse enough. And this isn't about black people. A lot of people who hear D.E.I. Higbach.

No, he is trying to set quotas for people who are deaf to get jobs, people who are dwarves to get jobs, people with transgender issues to get jobs. Following Wednesday's mid-air collision between an American Airlines plane and a Black Hawk helicopter, the topic of hiring practices in general, but particularly at the FAA, has become an intense topic of discussion. That's the topic of discussion. The point of the discussion is to distract people from the real things that might have led to this, and also train Americans to assume that anything bad that happens in their life is the result of a minority. That's consistent for Fox.

They've been doing it for decades, and this is the form that it comes in now. You saw there Jesse Waters saying that the crash was probably, I mean, he has no evidence or anything, but who cares what's the point of waiting for that? The fault of dwarves or people with transgender issues, which is not a thing, it's just transgender people. That's, they're people. They are after all people, Jesse Waters. No, I'm going to disagree with that. There are people with transgender issues like Jesse Waters. issues with transgender people. That is a very good point. Okay, he clearly has derangement

syndrome. And so look, I apologize again, we have to hear just a little bit more of what he had to say because we're going to be diving into the details and fleshing out what is actually going on, but first this. The staffing shortages, Donald Trump is arguing, are a result of DEI policies. You go back to the Obama-Biden administration and they rejected a thousand well-qualified applicants for air traffic control because they weren't diverse enough. Joe Biden had a DEI quota. And this isn't about black people. A lot of people who hear DEI hit black. No, he's trying to set quotas for people who are deaf to get jobs, people who are dwarves to get jobs, people with transgender issues to get jobs. It's not about race. It's every sort of underprivileged person

that has issues, and they want to be able to put these in positions at the FEA. They were unable to meet their own DEI quotas, and that's what is leading to staffing shortages, among many other things. So is it the main factor? We don't know. We don't know, but it's what I'd like to talk about right now. I'd like to talk about this, because that's all we ever talk about anything. If there's a terror attack, it's DEI if a cargo ship hits a pylon or something, it's probably DEI. It's always DEI, DEI, DEI, DEI, DEI. We used to say, as I said on TDR this morning, thanks Obama as a joke. Well, thanks DEI is now what we're gonna be doing for the next four years. And the only part

about that that I really want to focus on personally is when he starts it off by saying, this isn't about race. This isn't about race. I mean, we know that it is fundamentally about race, but I love that Jesse Waters is conveniently telling us, he's helpfully telling us that they are worried that the constant focus on DEI is the explanation for every ill in society, they're worried that that is looking pretty racist. And so now he's trying to pivot like, oh, that might hurt us because theoretically we want black people to vote for us. So dwarves, transgender people, deaf people, I guess we can attack them, I guess that's

okay. We're not saying black people, we're not saying that anymore, but these other people, they're probably responsible for planes crashing. So anyway, we need to move on to some of what's actually going on. We're trying to dig into all this and find out what's actually true, what could actually be leading to these sorts of issues or whatever. And so the FAA, according to a Fox News report from last year, is actively recruiting workers who suffer, quote, severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions that are diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelling out on the agency's website. So that's from Fox News. And if you just stop there,

then it sounds really bad. And it looks like what Jesse Waters is saying is true. There is of course more detail to it. They go on though in that initial reporting to say targeted disabilities include a number of different things, hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis and on and on and on, all these different things. And so that is actually true. Some of that is direct text from the programs, from the FAA.

But there's a couple issues with that and you'll notice that none of the what we're going to describe here was discussed by Jesse Waters. First of all, this is not some sort of new thing that was put into place under Joe Biden. That's just not true. Pete Buttigieg didn't put this in. That text has been on the FAA's website since at least February 2013. So I guess thanks Obama, but also thanks Trump for leaving it. In 2017, in 2018 and 2019, in the beginning of 2020, every month of which it was there,

he was in charge, and they left it. Weird that also, by the way, you know where else you can find that sort of language? Well, up until today, you could find it on job listings for Fox News, where Jesse Waters works. Now, they took it off after people noted the hypocrisy, and their reasoning was they were just complying with federal law. That's why they had it there. It's not that Fox is like obsessed with diversity or anything. They're just complying with federal law. And arguably, that's what the FAA was doing. I mean, isn't that the simpler explanation that they were complying with now, more than a decade old law, but in any event, the most important thing here is the FAA makes

clear in a statement, they weren't just looking for anyone who has one of these issues, as he says, and then you're on board, go start doing air traffic control right now, you still have to pass all of the regular qualifications. They say we employ tens of thousands of people for a wide range of positions, from administrative rules to oversight and execution of critical safety functions. Like many large employers, the agency proactively seeks qualified candidates from as many sources as possible, all of whom must meet rigorous qualifications that of course will vary by position. And so the FAA apparently does have hiring quotas. There is no indication of any sort of DEI specific quotas, numbers, or anything like that. And even if you did get in

under one of those things, you still have to pass the same qualifications as anyone else, as always ends up being the case in these sorts of stories. And so there is a lot more and we're going to dig into all of it, but Jenk, what do you make of this? Yeah, I always knew that it was the dwarfs. They're too greedy, they dig too much, and then they release the Balrog. And then of course you're going to have crashes. So I find that intensely comical because John's right, he's trying not to alienate a significant demographic,

especially as that demographic has begun to vote for Republicans in slightly larger numbers. But he figures if you're, you know, I could lose the dwarf vote and still be okay. We already lost a transgender vote. We've driven all of our hate towards them. Right? And so all I need to do is get you mad at deaf people, but they can't hear me anyway, so I'm covered, right? Like, he's like a, he's comical. He's just, and I guess he's trying to be comical, but, but at the same time, they think he's being real. They, they think an army of dwarves actually caused this crash. I don't know. And remember, they is a giant spectrum of people, right? And some people look at that and go, yeah, it was definitely the deaf.

doors, right? And a lot of people go, come on, dude, right? And so now, yesterday we told you about, yes, he says the Obama Biden administration, because he's trying to make it seem like it was recent. There's no reason to put Biden in there. There was a program about nine years ago that was in place. And yesterday we talked about on the show was an absurd program. And they got rid of it. They should have gotten rid of it because they inverted it. The normal process is you go through standards. then you have other things that, you know, could disqualify you after you've passed standards. In that case, they inverted it and they had the bios first. And the questions in the bios were horrible in their view of minorities as they're theoretically trying to help minorities is horrible. Things like if you score, if your lowest score in school was in science, they'd give you extra credit, right? So it's just one of the dumbest programs I've ever seen. But that was nine years ago. And then the other program they're referring to that John talked about ran right through

the Trump administration and with standard diversity protocol. And can you have people with partial paralysis on the staff? Of course you can. If you think that no disabled person can work any job, you're being ridiculous. Now, on the other hand, if they said, hey, we're going to have blind people do air traffic control, that would be a problem. But they didn't. And by the way, as always, yesterday when we do an accurate story, take it a lot of heat for it.

No, you can't give them an inch. But that part is true. But now we have the credibility to be able to tell you, believe me, we're willing to take the heat and tell you if they let blind air traffic controllers on. And they didn't, they didn't. Okay. So in that program that they're talking about, like I said, hasn't been around for a decade. So look, what actually happened? And air traffic control, we're about to tell you, like air traffic control has a host of issues.

We're going to talk more about in this show. And I think actually one of the things that probably most led to it was that the politicians asked for more flights to take off because they want to direct flights back to their states and districts. And the experts warn them, don't do that. This place is way overcrowded. And then they're like, no, we're not going to increase any staffing at the airport. FAA, but we're going to increase your workload.

Oh look, it crash happened because they were overwork, probably, probably. But then, but to be fair guys, we don't even know that because we have no idea what happened. So for him to go out on and try to otherize a new group of folks and get you to hate them, instead of focusing on the actual problem is Fox News 101 and why you shouldn't listen to that toxic crap, right? And if you're a right winger, do you really think it was? Do you really think that? Please don't tell me you think that. And then if you say, oh, he's just trolling, he's just joking around, then why do you ever take him seriously? Make up your mind. Is he a buffoon who's just messing around or is he saying things that

are true? You can't have it both ways. And it's okay if he jokes around every once in a while and says, yeah, but I'm not, I'm just kidding about that, right? But he doesn't. That's his normal commentary. It was dwarves and people with transgender issues that caused all the problems in this country. And you've got to be a little touch to believe that. I wouldn't let him work at the FAA. Okay. Ramesh. Right. So a few things. So first of all, what's assumed by Jesse Waters here is that people who might be, we could call them diverse backgrounds. And diversity can be in many, many different forms. It could be age. It could be gender. It could be race. It could be clout. It could be disability or lack of such backgrounds.

are are not qualified right that's the assumption that in by his very statement that's the assumption on the second thing i want to mention is that the DEI initiatives are usually bureaucratic and sometimes they're corporate and sometimes they're institutional and they're not really deeply dealing with diversity issues and challenges which is diversity of thought so simply putting someone in a diversity position or a diverse person in a particular position does not necessarily mean they have the power to express those diverse positions in actual discussions and conversations. But most research shows again and again and again that diverse teams, all types, always come up with better outcomes. And there's a lot of compelling research in economics and business and

political science that backs that up. The last thing I want to say here, which I think is very important, is we've reached this point where it doesn't really matter what they say because it just sticks, right? We're at this point where no longer does reason. and rationality matter, but everything, because everything is being fragmented by media and particularly social media, the point where there's sort of this, it's all about emotional arousal and just getting people agitated and riled up or upset or what have you, right? So in many different ways, this is the type of messaging that we will continue to expect during the Trump administration, and we should just see it for what it is, which is baiting the base to back

things up and getting everybody else riled up. But nothing about this has anything to do with reason or rationality anymore. Let me say one quick thing about that to prove a mesh right. So on X, yesterday I put up a post about, look, the I very likely has absolutely nothing to do with this. And you don't even know what caused it. But yes, Trump's not crazy to point out that program, diversity program that did have the issue. He's not making that up. Just being clear.

That gets a lot of retweets, et cetera, whatever they're calling it these days, because the right wing loves it, the left wing hates it. So that gets a lot of stuff, attention, right? So then I do one about another thing that we're going to explain a little bit later in the show to you guys in just a sec, about how, yeah, but Elon Musk bullied the head of the FAA into quitting. Why? Because he was finding SpaceX, right? And then Trump fired this person, that person, and that could be a problem. That gets some traction because the left likes it, the right, a, etc. Then I get to, but I think the most important one is the politicians overloading the airport and not properly staffing it.

That's the most logical explanation, even though we're all guessing right now because we don't yet have the information from the black boxes, et cetera. That one gets almost no attention because it doesn't blame Trump and it doesn't blame the Democrats are DEI. So then the algorithm, because of the nature of that beast, takes the most reasonable position and serves it to the least amount of people. And it takes the most inflammatory positions, whether you agree, disagree, whatever it is, but most political, it's controversial, and rises them up. And so by the way, it does damage to logic, reason, and moderation and all the things that you, being on bias, all the things that we should value, right?

But also it gives people a skewed view of who anyone is because they don't see all the tweets. They don't see all the videos. They only see the most extreme one or the ones that are perceived as most extreme, right? So the algorithms are driving this country crazy and they're getting us to hate each other accidentally. I don't think they're doing it out of like, let's get them to hate each other. I think it was just like they're like, hey, that's what people pay attention to. So I just want I'll make more money if I do that. But it's it has this massive downside where half the country thinks like, you know,

whatever they think about Trump causing it. And the other half thinks that blind doors did it, right? So this is absurdity. Yeah, potential solution. Yeah, quick quick thought just on on this if this if it's coming through. Which is these, the way that it works with these algorithms is it's reverse engineers. So basically the engineers at these at these companies say they train their systems, whatever it is that is getting traction and eyeballs, which is correlated to dopamine and hormonal releases in our brain, we would work with that. It's not that they say this content is likely to grab such attention, it's that they have so much data on what is gathering our eyeballs, our attention is clickbady, et cetera,

and they're able to basically, they are able to essentially reverse engineer that. So that's how it functions. The intention is not to be destructive and polarizing, but they don't care that the effects are such. And that's very clear if we look at big tech. And the other quick thing is democracy is about dialogue. It's about reason, but it's also dialogue, right? So when you go, when you see this point where someone who is part of such a major network can be so absurdist, not only is that a rejection of reason, but it's a recognition that no longer do we have a space or a sphere of dialogue in this country. So we have to just see this stuff for what it is,

which is certist and theatrical and playing places in particularly politically fragmented and partisan ways. Yeah, I mean, I know somebody here who's tried to start a dialogue and then gotten severely punished for it. But so that's a human problem rather than an algorithm problem. And don't worry, I'm going to keep trying. Thank you, though, for the recognition. By the way, in one moment, I think we talk quite a bit about the increased traffic. So I think we're gonna jump ahead to the final reset, Graphic 11. But just to add one quick thing to what Ramesh said, I think Jesse Waters knows what his job is.

So he knows that there is this bubbling up anger and frustration with the way things work and who has control and all of that. And Fox's job from the very beginning has been to disarm that or to distract it. To take that anger and frustration, the desire for actual change and to point it at something else, something convenient, something that's not actually in charge, something that has nothing to do with the elites that control society. And so we don't know exactly what caused this, but almost certainly more funding is going to be the thing that makes it less likely to happen in the future.

More government is going to be the thing that makes it more likely because that's how you protect people like theoretically that seems like a very sane rational thing in a government but coming out of this Jesse Waters does not want more funding to go to the FAA or whatever so instead if your anger just goes towards blind dwarves or whatever then we don't have to raise taxes we don't have to allocate the funding and Fox News has done their job and Jesse Waters earns his millions making sure that sure your family is still at risk of being in a fatal plane crash but don't worry the rich haven't been touched along the way in any event let's

jump to a story that you previewed. In the run up to the deadly crash earlier this week, the head of the FAA, this is Michael Whitaker, was apparently forced to resign due to the intervention of Elon Musk, whose fingers are in basically every government pie these days. And perhaps we'll talk about some of the more recent reporting soon. But as a result of him resigning, the agency, charge of aerial safety didn't have a Senate confirmed leader during the actual crisis. And so Musk had called for his resignation way back in September. This is after the FAA chief proposed finding Musk's company, SpaceX, over $600,000 in civil penalties for failing to follow license requirements during two launches back in 2023. Whitaker told a congressional panel

at the time that fines were quote, the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters. Musk apparently repeatedly attacked Whitaker from his ex-account, claiming in one post that the FAA was harassing SpaceX by finding them for violating the law. That's what harassment is, I guess. It's election interference, I think. But anyway, Musk also replied to a Twitter poster who said the FAA, quote, should not exist and attacked Whitaker for preventing his goal of colonizing Mars, which is definitely coming in a couple of years. Believe the hype, never learn, never learn. But anyway, since he was forced out because Elon Musk cared more about what happens financially with SpaceX than whether FAA has leadership right now, we had an acting FAA chief. This is the deputy administrator, Chris Rochelow, who is only sworn in just last week. And so kind of bad, theoretically, if you lose your leadership, it's also bad if the loss of that leadership comes just a few days after many of those air traffic control.

received an ultimatum that they should potentially quit, that they should get the hell out of there. And so thankfully we have a little bit of a dialing back of that. But also, and I just read this earlier today, an email apparently went out from the Office of Personnel Management to a lot of government employees, including air traffic controllers telling them to quit their jobs, saying we encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so. So bear in mind, we don't know for sure that the understaffing of air traffic controllers, the understaffing at the FAA caused this crash, but it certainly didn't help. And both before and now after the crash, their solution is get rid of the ones that remain. We don't want as many because that costs money.

And remember, Elon Musk, who at least when it comes to stuff like this, seems to be the person who's actually pulling the strings on this administration, wants to fire as many people as possible. And so that's the mission and they're doing it. And so again, we can't say for sure that this is what caused it any more than we could say deaf or blind people do. I think one seems a little bit more reasonable, but Jank, what do you make of this? Yeah, so first of all, let's talk about regulation. So Republicans have said my whole life, regulation is a dirty word, you should never do regulation.

How about when planes might run into helicopters, could we use regulation then? Hey, you go left, you go right. might need regulation there, right? And so you can say, well, that's a safety issue. Yes, a lot of things are safety issues. For example, how do you treat your workers in an assembly life? That's a safety issue, and that is a regulation that deals with that. And so they made it a regulation a dirty word because it usually costs corporations money.

So now, should we have more regulations here? No, not necessarily, it depends on how many, you know, what do we have? have? What is our process? So if I'm a family member, actually, every mad energy here, he wrote it on super chat and I wanted to address it. He says 68 people died. The president just came out and said DEI, others said Trump is racist, who said sorry for your loss? So what I got out of that, and thanks for participating with the show, is that if I'm a family member of someone who died, I'm thinking what the hell actually went wrong here, right? So,

Was it, did the helicopter pilot not listen? Did they not hear air traffic control? Because you know, nobody voluntarily runs into a plane, right? Or did the plane not hear? Where was the breakdown in the communication that led to this disaster? Because I want to fix it, so no one else dies like my family member did, right? That's how a normal person would handle it, and that's how we should handle it as a government. Hey, what went wrong and how do we fix it?

But instead, we have what the viewer there is referring to. So Trump comes out and goes, was the and again we've got we just told you last yesterday on the show that yes there was a diversity program that was problematic a decade ago right but you think that's what you're sure that's what caused this crash that thing from a decade ago no you're just trying to avoid responsibility and go remember blame minorities everything is blame minorities and so by the way they're abusing that. I mean, they're doing it in every issue. Every time something goes wrong, they're like DEI, right? Fires in LA, DEI, playing crash, DEI. So you remember the people who voted

for Trump, there's a core group of magazines, never going to change their mind, right? But when you get to the outer edges, the, or you get to the independence that the Democrats lost, and that hated the establishment, didn't believe the establishment, and they, or they didn't like the status quo and they went with Trump. Those guys are not hardcore MAGA. And so Trump and MAGA and all those guys are making a mistake. Every time they say, oh yeah, it's the black people or the dwarves, right? As Jesse Waters said, more black people, Latinos, women, certainly people in the

LGBTQ community are going to go, oh, so they're just going to blame us for everything. Okay, that's point one. And point two is people in the middle are going to go, this is dumb. You think black people caused everything? You think that a lesbian firefighter caused the fires in L.A.? This is just dumb. You're not trying to fix the problem, you're trying to give political spin to it so you don't get blamed, and that's gross. So, and that applies to other folks who are just saying, hey, I know already. Look, so Trump fired a bunch of people related to the FAA. Elon Musk,

I think, I don't know that the FAA had not being there caused it. Let's, again, go to the black boxes and actually figure out what caused it. But now we're all speculating because we don't have the answer yet. If you ask me to speculate, one, doesn't matter that the FAA doesn't have a chief. Definitely. Now, if you want to get rid of them, okay, at least have a plan, have somebody ready to replace him, be grownups, be adults, right? Because once an organization is leaderless, you would be shocked at how quickly it devolves.

Now, he resigned on the 20th, so I don't know that it devolved in 10 days and caused the problem, right? But it eventually can. And there's this idea that Elon Musk has started on the right wing. Guys, if you're a populist, you should actually hate this idea. This thing is, you don't need workers. You just fire all the workers. Fire two thirds of the workers or three quarters of them on X, who cares? Fire the head after FAA, who cares?

You don't need anyone. Workers are annoying. workers are the average American workers the problem, right? The oligarchs are the answer. And why did he get the head of the FAA fire? Come on, if you're a right-wing populace, you're really going to pretend that it was anything other than he was mad that he got fined $600,000, right?

And the $600,000 is nothing to him, nothing. He's just like, how dare you? How dare you interfere with me with your stupid safety regulations? And if you think that's not going to cause a problem with safety at some point, you're wrong. But as I keep saying, I think the politicians that literally voted to increase the number of flights out of Reagan when they were warned not to do it. By the way, Senator Tim Cain, who I'm usually very annoyed with, did a great job of arguing in that particular debate. We don't want to come back to a scenario like this. He was totally right, okay? One of the rare

politicians who was right. And others are like, yeah, but I need to get back home quick, both to see, you know, the state, do constituents, but also to raise money. Right? So they need in more flights. Well, if you're going to put more flights, you've got to put more air traffic control. And if you don't, well, sometimes things like this happen. So to me, that's the more likely answer. But that doesn't make anybody overly happy because it doesn't blame one of the two political sides. Both sets of politicians, Democrats and Republicans in Congress voted to increase the number of flights, but not the number of air traffic controllers. Ramesh. Yeah, the goal, the goal is to hire almost nobody. And for a lot of tech oligarchs, the goal is to

automate out labor, right? Which is going to create huge economic gulfs and even widen the sort of amplification of inequality that we see. And so DEI is just a red herring for the bigger program that we see very clearly that the Trump administration and someone like Elon Musk are all about, which is austerity, cutting entitlement programs, cutting programs, cutting programs that protect people, especially middle and working class people. So we should look at actually what their actions are, which are to go after, in some cases, the people that actually voted for Trump. So this is austerity and cutting of these problems is always going to target the most vulnerable people. And remember, Musk has a long history of being anti-union, anti-worker, big-time union

buster. If you look at many, many cases involving Tesla, for example, we see this again and again. Remember, people are a nuisance because you have to protect them. You have to take care of them. might even have to deal with their benefits and health care and pensions and so on. So the entire goal is to be rid of as many workers as possible so that these guys can basically continue to just take up the profits and so on. I really hope this doesn't work, but what we need as progressives is an absolute clear populist leader who can challenge all of these things. I think Bernie does that to some extent, but I think also need some other voices that really are going to step up to the plate and call this all out and set up a new

type of equalism that actually helps people out agreed well we have to take our first break has some important news including recently developing news coming up after this Jank Ramesh and John with you guys. Also Ravidon and Duvod 1,2, 3. Thank you for joining through t.com. By the way, annual memberships, you get two months free if you do that. So check that out on t.com slash joining. Catherine Zaybath and Dinosaur AF.

You guys are amazing. Thank you for joining through YouTube. All right, John. Okay, let's jump into a story that's been developing over the last couple of hours. Donald Trump's administration is apparently, is apparently launching a sweeping purge of dozens or perhaps more FBI agents from across the country who happened to work on investigations looking into the crimes that he and his supporters

were alleged to have committed over the last few years. We know that at the FBI, at least six senior FBI leaders have already been ordered to retire, to resign, or be fired by Monday. Some may be fired as soon as the end of today. Interim leaders at the DOJ have, have spent the past week, apparently drawing up lists of people whose work at the Bureau have earned disfavor with Trump for a variety of reasons. Agents and analysts have been warned by FBI leadership that they may be asked to resign or face termination. And we have sort of an example of that already coming out. This comes in the form of email sent by James McHenry, the acting attorney general, to those

being ousted that includes language that reads, quote, given your significant role in prosecuting the president, I do not believe that the leadership of the department can trust you to assist in implementing the president's agenda faithfully. And these agents are apparently trying to explain that they don't volunteer for this work, they're put on these jobs, and they do their job to the best of their ability. That's what they do. And especially considering the significant evidence against Donald Trump and his supporters on things like the documents case and the attempt to overturn the results of the election

and the insurrection and the fake electors. It doesn't seem like they were just kind of willy-nilly making things up. But anyway, many of them might end up having to go. It could be dozens, it could be hundreds. And here is a statement from the FBI agents association. They said, if true, these outrageous actions by acting officials are fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI agents. Dismissing potentially hundreds of agents would severely weaken the Bureau's ability to protect

the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the bureau and its new leadership for failure. And it just, I mean, this is a great example of the escalation that we have in Trump's second term. He's in the first term, he got rid of James Comey for not being loyal enough. Now he's getting rid of dozens, maybe hundreds, a significant chunk of the special agents because he feels that they weren't loyal enough, just because they did the job that they were ordered to do. And this is definitely going to impact our national security, these special agents look into all sorts of things. They've foiled militia plots and terror attacks and attempts to start race wars.

Well now now they're not going to be as capable of doing that. And isn't it ironic that it comes less than two weeks after a bunch of people who've already shown a willingness to commit acts against the government have been released back out into the general population. Now we have the FBI being at least to some extent hamstrung in the ability to stop any potential crimes that might come about as a result of that or just the general normalization that we've experienced of political violence over the past few years. So we don't know at this point exactly how far this will go, who will be left,

what the special qualifications will be for the people who will eventually replace them, other than just refusing to admit who won the 2020 election, but it certainly doesn't look good. Yeah, so we can be outraged, I just don't want us to be surprised. This is why I voted against Trump, because when he got in office, was he gonna fire anyone that anything in do with his case out of spite and bitterness? Of course he was. So when you went to vote for Trump, you were going to vote for firing these FBI officials. That's exactly what we tried to tell you here on the show. And so if you voted for Trump and you're surprised, boy, you're going to be surprised a lot, right? Because you're going to get a lot more where

this came from. And so, look, why is that so important to me? because I'm not just worried about those particular guys and the nonsensical nature of the firings, as John pointed out, first of all, a lot of the people that are fired who run field offices had almost nothing to do with any of the Trump cases. They just have been targeted for political reasons. God knows why. I don't even know why. And the ones that did work on the Trump cases, yeah, but brother, you took the freaking

documents, top secret documents that you brought him to Mar-a-Lago, what did you want him to do? Did you want them to say, ah, yeah, let the president break the law, he's above the law. That would have been not doing their job. And that's the higher ups. And then the other guys you fired, their higher ups gave them a job. But you don't even know they might be hardcore Republicans. You don't know anything about him, but you fired him anyway. Why?

Because you wanted to be able to say that, hey, I get to terminate the Constitution and I lost the election, but I don't like it. And I want to cry about it, apparently to the end of time, even if I win the presidency again, I'm never going to stop crying about it. Okay, so all those things we know, but then who's he going to replace him with? You think they're going to be unbiased? You think the guy who fires all these guys that either did or didn't have anything to do with his cases, does that for a political reason, isn't going to put in political people into those positions? It can be Cash Patel choosing. Yeah, and then, and what are they choosing based on?

Our collective safety, I would be shocked, probably for whatever, crazy plan they got coming next. And guys, so is the crazy plan to start gulags all over the country? I don't know, but I'm a little skeptical about that. Yeah, I know. I know they're going to deport a lot of people. They're going to need space to put the people there deporting. I understand. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about like this generalized fear that people have, that concentration camps are going to be all over the country, right? I don't think that's the main issue. I hope to God, I'm right about that. I often say I hope I'm wrong about my predictions, but this one I hope I'm right about. And that that is, their main driving

issue is robbery, robbery, okay? So they're gonna wanna have the American taxpayers back up their crypto crap, okay? They're gonna do giant tax cuts. They're gonna do anyone who's corrupt is gonna get a pardon. That's what Trump has done in the past. If you want for Eric Adams, even though he's a Democrat, they're like, but he is corrupt. We like that, right? So they're probably gonna put in people who are not going to investigate corruption. They haven't done yet so we don't know, but there's a certain pattern. And it's like that drain the swamp was the most ironic thing that any politician has ever said. All right, Ramesh. I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. We remember who said that when? That was our former and

current president in statements he made back in 2016 or while he was running for president in 2016. So you can imagine that he has always thought that not only is he above the law that he is the law or the law is him or whatever, the law serves the powerful. Whatever it is about him and the others have such power, right? So you can imagine how correctly or not, I mean, in many cases totally accurately, as you were saying, Jen, from the letter of the law, the Democrats starting on day one really wanted to investigate this. guy, right? From Russia to other issues, et cetera, right? So you can imagine how that's going to generate so much of indictimist. It doesn't justify it, but he has always thought he's way above the law. He's always thought he could get away with anything and everything. It's just very, very clearly what this guy is all about. So note in the quote that you shared, John, It's said that these agents, I'm paraphrasing, would not serve the president's agenda. It's very, very clear that what they are saying is the FBI should just support the president's agenda.

Whatever it is, whether it's lawful or not, look at Cash Patel as an example of this. So this is what's going on here, and we're all just going to have to brace for it. But we all should also recognize that the attempt to try to get this guy who's been a criminal in many different ways for many, many decades and not be able to actually get him on any of these issues ultimately is going to mean that the blowback's going to be hard, heavy, and intense for all of his political opponents or one who he is as not sort of bending the knee to him. Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, we have to take a second break, but I'll just throw it out as we go to our break. Imagine if day one, Biden, he's inaugurated and he's like, you know what, we've just had this terrible attack on the country. And I want to make sure that we have the exact right people to prosecute, not only the people on the ground who did it, but the planters. So I'm purging 25% of the special agents. And I'm bringing in people who understand the unique threat to democracy that we just survived and will investigate everyone.

Like, can you imagine what Fox News would have said? Absolute madness. But anyway, we have more. We will get to it after this. Back on TYT, Jank, John and Ramesh with you guys, John's got the next story. I do, and it starts with this. I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary. Then I was reprimanded by the fake news.

They said, what about love, religion, and God? I said, I agree. Let's put God number one. Let's put religion number two. I love, I don't know, we gotta put that number three, I guess, right? And then it's tariff. Put me in a coma number four, please. You don't even have to wake me up.

But anyway. Tariffs, I guess is his fourth favorite word then. And you're gonna be hearing a lot about it very soon. Actually, by tomorrow because both Canada and Mexico will apparently have, unless something changes, 25% tariffs slapped on them. But don't worry, I'm pretty sure we don't import or export anything to those little old countries of Canada and Mexico. But anyway, he also, this is not long before we went live, added that,

the 10% tariffs on China also could start at the same time. We don't have a lot of details on that, so we're to be focusing on Canada and Mexico. But according to the Wall Street Journal, it might still change because Trump aides are apparently looking for an 11th hour deal to dial back the terrorists before they go into effect. So I have a lot more on this, a lot more details and the implications, the stakes in this. But what's your quick bet tomorrow? Are there 25% tariffs on Canada, Mexico? Yes, but I'm going to explain in more detail in a little bit how I think he's going to lose

this poker game because he keeps bluffing and at some point you get your bluff called. But then there are cascading consequences we'll explain. But there is also something that is an interesting strategy that Trump is doing that that is potentially smart. Well, let's see, let's see. Yeah, we'll see. And I'm uncomfortable towards smart being applied to him because I saw an interaction with a reporter from earlier today where they asked him about what the effects of having those tariffs on oil will be coming in through Canada and Mexico, which we looked it up and 70% of the oil we import comes through those two countries, 25% tariff on that seems significant. And he, it was clear from his response, did not know whether oil was included in it. And he tried to brush it aside saying, yeah, we're going to decide. on that, maybe tonight, which I would hope, because it goes into effect tomorrow, and he doesn't know if 70% of our imported oil is going to be a quarter more expensive. So I'm a little bit worried.

Now, John, can I say before the show I read, they already knocked that down to 10%. The oil. Okay, that's good. That's good. Well, and I'm glad to hear that too. I like the consistency, because I heard from Trump supporters all throughout the election, we're voting to raise our gas prices only about 10%. So that's, they were very specific about that and I noted at the time because I thought that was weird. But anyway. And but there's a second reason why too, sorry. It's because the oil companies were among his biggest donors. Of course. Remember, they were supposed to give him a billion dollars and then they'd make out like bandits, they don't want this. But of course, we import and export a ton from Canada and Mexico. It's cars and consumer

products, let alone lumber. I mean like the one to punch to our capacity to build more housing of getting rid of a significant chunk of people who work as contractors and tradesmen, and then also jacking up the price of the raw materials to build homes, seems like it's going to make it difficult going forward. But he's saying we have to do this. And we have to do this because Canada and Mexico are letting both migrants come into the U.S., even though the border crossing numbers are basically nothing at this point, as well as letting fentanyl through, which Justin Trudeau notably, he's always bragging about how much fentanyl he lets coming to the country through Canada.

But anyway, the Canadian minister responsible for the border said that they might try to help out in this. They're gonna create a new North American fentanyl strike force. And I think it'll work since it's not an actual problem. I think the strike force can probably fix it. I think that Canada's gonna get on that. And Mexico has created a similar working group with the Trump administration on migration issues.

They say they're gonna expand that in the future. And US officials said that President Scheinbaum's government is cooperating with Trump's demand on the southern border and has agreed to receive expelled non-Mexican migrants seeking asylum in the US, a significant concession to the US. So they're gonna do that, but they've also made clear that if these tariffs do happen, they're gonna do what we said they do all along, retaliatory tariffs, which are going to make it harder for American businesses to sell their products abroad, which is gonna have consequences because there are literally tens of millions of American jobs that rely on

that sort of international trade. And here's an example of how that might work. This is Justin Trudeau. If the president does choose to implement any tariffs against Canada, we're ready with a response. A purposeful, forceful, but reasonable, immediate response. It's not what we want, but if he moves forward, we will also act. Okay, now, they didn't really bow down. They said they'd work a little bit on some of these issues, but Justin Trudeau is also saying we'll do the exact same thing, which everyone knows they will. And so as it's been developing today, it looks like Trump is sort of dialing it back.

They might limit it to steal an aluminum as well as computer chips, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and God only knows what else. But not necessarily everything, because it looks like they've sort of called this bluff a little bit or maybe it's the concessions if we want to be really charitable about it, but what do you think? I think that goes towards the strategy that I think is not such a bad one politically. First of all, the brother never does his homework. So of course he doesn't know. And then he says these absurd things like, and number four is tariff. And then if you said to him, okay, well, you know, how about MAGA? Maga's a good word. Okay, fine. Maga's number four. Tariff now

drops to number five. How about the word Trump? Oh, you're right. Trump goes all the way to number then God is number two, a tariff is down at six. So he's a comical character, I get it, right? And then in terms of the fentanyl, does a lot of fentanyl come in from Mexico and even Canada these days? Yes, as it turns out it does. Is that the real problem? Of course not. So first of all, our American corporations created a problem with Oxy, got people hooked on it, and then they went on to other harder drugs like fentanyl. That was the cause of the problem, But you can't, but if you blame American corporations, your donors get pissed. So then you instead do this nonsense. Oh, the real problem is the supply.

It's never supply. That's never the answer. It's always demand. But cutting demand down is very, very difficult. Demagoguing about supply is easy. Right? Oh, it's those dastardly Vancouverians, or whatever you actually call them. All right. Anyway, so now, to the bluff and the strategy. So Trump does this all the time, and he'll probably do it here too. So he'll go in and he'll go, I want this. And I'm going to put a big consequence and punishment on you. And now the main weapon he uses tariffs.

And then the other side goes, oh, yeah, we'll do likewise. But then they go out and they start to negotiate. Okay, first of all, as a strategy there, if we're being honest, that's not so bad because you're getting them to renegotiate something that we had already agreed to, but now hopefully to more of our advantage, right? But if you do that over and over again, at some point people are going to call your bluff. And when you do it, now you're in a trade war, and now everybody's tariffing up, 25%, prices are going up, people are getting mad at you. So now that's where the interesting and potentially smart part of the strategy comes in.

And you'll see Trump do this a lot, and we'll see if he does it in this case. He'll then take a small concession because he's losing, right? Because once a bluff is called, and things are going poorly and the prices are going up and and his poll numbers are going down. Then he'll take a minor concession and pretend it was gigantic and then call off the whole thing. And then he'll go, see, I solved it. I got America, free of fentanyl. Not free of fentanyl. I got Mexico to do this terror huge thing. They probably did like 5%, right? But we'll break it down for you, each one of those.

So if he did a good deal and he got a lot more for us, I'll say, I'll be. You know us, I'll say it was a pretty good strategy, right? If you got a terrible deal and they're bragged about it, that means his bluff got called and it was BS. And that's going to start to wear thin when he does it over and over and over again. And at some point, you go all in, your bluff gets called, oops, and then you have a catastrophic trade war that spirals out of control and prices skyrocket. So let's hope it doesn't go there and let's hope that he extricates himself from the mess that he's about to cause. All right, Ramesh. Yeah, first of all, for who says, God is his favorite word.

He has some strange ways of handling Bibles, either or not touching them, we're holding it upside down. Remember, back during the Black Lives Matter protests. Look, as far as these tariffs are concerned and, you know, this discussion that he that he raised at the, and during the, of the minute what is it the bureau external revenue services we have to look at examples that date back to COVID where supply chains forced the inflation prices to go higher because corporations decided to charge us that much more because of these very issues right so similarly tariffs are likely because these corporations are not in paying the cost themselves tariffs are likely to have a very negative effect on inflationary price. pricing. And so this is something that we should be wary of and be a call this administration out on if their strategy is not successful. You're very right, Jenk, that they're taking a very aggressive approach to everything and anything, which they did in the first term, but it's even more full-scale assault and definitely a lot more vindictive kinds of actions. But at the same

time, the economics of all this and whether this will help us, let alone consumers, or all of us as citizens is extremely dubious. You know, I don't see a lot of evidence of how I'm not, I'm not for these NAFTA and neoliberal free trade agreements, but tariffs don't necessarily in and of themselves benefit. They may not benefit American workers and consumers. And as far as the fentanyl question is concerned, this is a very sad thing to say,

but these are coming into our country because there's demands for these things. And if you actually look at the U.S. Mexico example, in particular, fentanyl is imported because there's demand for that, and we export guns to Mexico, which is why the cartels have so many guns. In Mexico, you don't see sort of guns being produced in mass the way you do in this country because guns and assault weapons in particular legal. And then just the last thing I want to say is in terms of tariffs also potentially being applied to China, I think we're going to see that as another immature response to, the deep seek revelations that you guys have been covering over the last couple of days. Because the whole deep seek revelations really revealed that China could do so much to emulate our AI systems, if not actually improve upon them with so much in terms of costs by bypassing these extremely expensive tips, least in part. So we'll see how this all plays out, but rhetorically it's sort of standard Trump. But at the same time, whether this actually benefits us all or benefits American workers or

consumers per his promises to be seen. Maybe the energy costs will go down because we're going to make climate change that much worse by drilling the Arctic and Alaska. We'll see. Yeah. All right. Everybody check out John on damage report. That's at 1 o'clock Eastern every single day, Monday through Friday. Oh, can I just mention? Yeah. Starting this Monday, J.R. Jackson is now holding it down on Mondays, on TDR every week. Love it. Great to have Jairr doing that weekly again. And also check out JAR's channel watch list. Check out Ramesh's podcast, Utopias.

Also, try to get into UCLA so you could have them as a professor. All right, guys. Next hour, Jordan Yule and Wazni Lombre. And we've got some doozies for you guys in the next hour. including, well, he says he's pro Hitler but not a Nazi UFC fighter, but then what do you do with him? So we're going to have that discussion when we come back.