The Young Turks - Trump Gets Deplorable And Joe Biden Talks Obama

Episode Date: April 27, 2019

Trump tripled down on his Charlottesville comments. Joe Biden hasn’t been endorsed by Obama and explains why. 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. Hey, guys, you've heard of the Young Turks podcast because you're listening to it right now. But make sure that you subscribe and give it a five star rating if you like it. Thank you for listening. It's the Friday show, which is both the end game for this week and also a power panel, drop it. Welcome everybody to the Friday edition of The Young Turks.

I'm John Adrola and J.R. Matha, this is going to be fun. Who knew? They don't agree, but I'm going to convince them. I will win them over by the end of this. Jank isn't here, Anna isn't here. They're both probably prepping to see Avengers, I would imagine. It's probably what it is. I need to see the previous three first.

No, I need to see two. What's before this one? Oh, Mr. Captain, Miss Marvel or something, right? Captain Marvel. You're thinking of the Marvelous Miss Maisel, which is also good. Rachel Brazzan, check it out. But yeah, there's a lot of movies actually. This is not the second one.

There's a reason why I'm silent right now, but. Okay. I'm excited about it. In any event, we've got big stuff too. We're going to be talking about Donald Trump. He walked across the lawn and people had cameras and that always is. goes really well. And so he talked about Robert E. Lee, measles, and his virility as a man, so we're going to be breaking those down. But also, we apparently narrowly avoided an immigration

policy from the Trump administration that is perhaps even more, at least on its phase, deplorable than some of the ones that we did suffer through. We'll be talking about that. And then, Mathy, you're going to be leading us through a few stories to close out the hour. Hopefully, if we get to them, we're going to talk about CIA and Comic-Con. and Biden not wanting Obama's endorsement. Exactly, yeah, we've got a few little updates on Biden. Some interesting stuff about his fundraising and his first big interview as a candidate. It maybe went well in some ways, not necessarily in others, and we'll be breaking those down.

But we'll be starting off with Trump. Donald Trump double or triple or quadrupled down on his very fine people on both sides' defense of the Charlottesville Unite the right ralliers. And here's what he said. I've answered that question. Oh, I've answered that question. And if you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly. And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert Lee, a great general. Whether you like it or not, he was one of the great generals.

I've spoken to many generals here right at the White House. and many people thought of the generals. They think that he was maybe their favorite general. People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that. No, everybody doesn't know that. We don't know that. That's not what happened.

That's not what it was. So we're going to talk a little bit about Robert E. Lee as well. But it is amazing that still, like him and his most high-profile defenders are still trying to muddy the waters and make it seem as if he did not. Like, it's not like he, like they marched, and a minute later he said something stupid. Like, it was way into it. We already knew what that event was, and he still defended it, and now he's still defending that defense.

Yeah, and the Robert E. Lee claim, I can't even wrap my brain around it. I mean, it's clearly a very racist statue, given the fact that Robert E. Lee fought this armed resist, not resistance, rebellion against the U.S. to keep slaves and to actually expand the slave state. And even more what he did was that he captured freed black folks who tried to travel to the north as fugitives and captured them to return them to the south. So not only was he trying to maintain a slave state, that's everything that he was fighting for. Yeah. Yeah. And as they did their initial invasion, which obviously epically failed, because although some people seem to think he was good as a tactician, he was a terrible strategist, they acquired

new slaves along the way. They, it wasn't just, as if just defending the slaves you have isn't bad enough. It was an invasion that produced more slaves for them. And so we're gonna, I'm gonna give you a minute in a sec. Through this, it seems ridiculous that we need to remind people of what the South was at the time, what the Civil Wars fought about and who Robert Lee was, but apparently there's some people that have been hoodwinked into thinking that he was just, you know, he's just defending his land and he wasn't a big fan of that slavery stuff despite having slaves his own.

So we've collected a few different anecdotes about him and his life, including from his writing, which we'll turn to it a minute. No, it's really weird, man. It's never meant fault. It's the basis of Americanism. You're a patriot if you never meant anything was ever done wrong. There's ever been a figure in history that was a bad guy. Hey, our founding fathers, many of them were bad guys to certain folks.

Now, unless you believe those people weren't humans, which they didn't, then you won't think they're necessarily bad guys. So, yeah, Robert E. Lee, there was some very fine people that were defending the statue of Robert E. Lee, which were going to get into who they were defending. And oddly, a racist pack broke out, a mob of racist broke out from a pack of people that were looking to defend Robert E. Lee. How did that happen? Maybe because they're the same type of people that will go around and start chanting, Jews won't replace us anymore. In other countries, when they do things horrible like genocide, we say they probably want to forget that part of their history. They probably don't want to honor.

Germany may not want to honor Adolf Hitler. It's weird. If you bring it up, they go, yeah, you know, that was back in the past. Certain folks did that. It wasn't necessarily me. Instead, we like to promote that. Oh, it's part of our history. Isn't that awesome?

No, it was not awesome. You should try to apologize for it every time someone brings up those names. We expect Germans to apologize every time that happens. And actually, I talked to some German folks, some who even watch the show, and they said that you know what side your grandparents are, were on if they, you know. didn't talk about the war. So if they didn't talk about the war, then they were on the side of the Nazis. If they did, then they were the resistance to it.

So it is so, so stigmatized. And here, look where we are now. Well, maybe with progress and 50 years, people in Germany will start arguing over this stuff again, I guess. Maybe they'll descend the same way we have. Yeah, and also, while we're going to get in Robert Lee, we should make clear that you know that his argument that just people just showed up over. or the statue or whatever, that is not true.

This particular event had been widely advertised. It was not advertised about being about the statue. The statue was mentioned tangentially, but all of the speakers that were listed, and you can find all these advertisements now that were advertised for it were all white supremacists and all right people. On the posters and things like that, there's no mention of the statue. It's just come see these great white supremacists defend whiteness, and I have a thing too where I have a feeling that, let's say I was weirdly into this statue, not a white supremacist,

just was into the statue. If I showed up, maybe an hour into marching with people who were saying, bring on the ovens. If I don't leave, I agree with them, I think, at that point. So maybe someone innocent showed up, but if they stayed, they knew what the deal was at that event. And they probably had no talking points about Robert E. Lee's tactical skills. Exactly. I don't remember that as part of the posters. Pickett's charge was misunderstood.

No, I don't think that's what was actually going on. I didn't hear any of those charts. I'm sorry, maybe news media was just, you know, doing their fake news thing and blanking out of the General E. Lee chance. So why don't we, why don't we turn to Lee? And so we're going to have a couple of quotes from a letter he sent to his wife back in 1856. And he said this. And I'm going to try not to do it in the stereotypical voice that they always do when they read letters from soldiers. Anyway, in this enlightened age, there are a few, I believe.

but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in this country? Now you read that and you think, oh, he thinks it's evil. But let's go on a little bit. It is useless to expatiate, I don't know that word, on it said disadvantageous. Oh, I got it. I think it, however, a greater evil to the white man than to the black race. And while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. So it is evil for us, for the white people.

Everyone else is doing okay. We were ruined by it, and it gets worse somehow. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race, and I hope will prepare and lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known and ordered by a wise and merciful providence, straining the word merciful beyond its natural bounds. And so here's the thing, it almost sounds like he's, I mean, obviously he supports the institution.

He thinks it's somehow better for the people who are being, you know, often beaten, murdered, raped, family separated, all that stuff. But he thinks like long term it's somehow philosophically better for them. But you should also understand that he was a slave owner of his own and apparently a pretty brutal one. So this is from Elizabeth Brown Pryor's reading The Man book, Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families by hiring them off to other plantations. And by 1860, he had broken up every family but one on his estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days. One of the slaves regarded him as, quote, the worst man I ever see. And when two of his slaves

escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to lay it on well. Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that, quote, not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh. General Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done. So on top of the beating, just torture on top of that as well, that is the person who's the right wants you to believe that their legacy has been perverted by leftists. The worst person I ever see. Yeah, is the best general.

It's a great general. I'm sorry, I don't want to. Yeah, if you want to keep talking about our legacies and how slavery was so long ago that doesn't mean anything, think about one of those lines that we just read from Robert they're better off here than they were in Africa, we still hear that. Yeah. Yeah. Punishment for who you think should be in prison.

Prison is not for rehabilitating people to come back into society. Our prison system is for punishment. So if they're already criminals, look at the rights that we strip of them, look at the due process who strip of many people, and they should be punished. We have no problem with abuses that happen in prison. Oh, and they're criminals. So when you see people as lesser than humans, which they did, and we still do to a certain degree today, you can do whatever you want to them.

Torture them. Who cares? He's a criminal. So we carry those same kinds of thought processes today. So just because we're not, well, not everyone is, but actually enslaving people to the degree that we did then doesn't mean we still harbor some of those same feelings and then cast it on many times the same minorities we did before. I mean, look, you also see the Christian fundamentalism in what he was saying is that if they're,

if they finally learn about Christian values, then they will be more. moral, just as morally superior as we are, as they're maintaining an institution of slavery and brutalizing people. So that argument seems very discordant. Yeah. Wow. Did not think that we would have to teach people of Robert E. Lee today, but you wake up in this age and you never know what is going to be in the news.

And you know what, by the way, it seems really you gotta teach people about Robert E. Lee. I didn't study Robert E. Lee since high school, and definitely not to this degree, high school definitely didn't tell us these things, you have to go on your own and find this stuff out. So it's fine that you didn't know it. I didn't know it, but you have to find out who you're praising and exalting to this deity status. So these statutes that you're going to defend, they end up turning into a racist mob, understand why that happens.

It's because this guy was not a good guy. You don't have to exalt him. It's okay. Learn about who you think are your heroes and discover that they're not. Yeah, and by the way, I guess this is unnecessary, but it is bad enough that there There are people who are brought up in the South, white people, and they believe crazy things about what the Civil War was about. They are trained to fundamentally not understand what was explicit at the time.

And so they have this bizarre nostalgia for a time when they had more sociopolitical power or whatever. But it's the northern, like people like Donald Trump or Steve King, they're not even from there. And they exalt the leaders, they have the Confederate flag and all of that. Like, there's some plausible deniability for racists from the south using those icons. But for the northerners, all there is is trying to play to that racial grievance. Well, but this was always Malcolm X's argument. Malcolm X was like, I had to leave Omaha because our house was firebombed.

This is considered a part of the north, went to Lansing. His father was killed by the KKK. And his whole story was that, yo, civil rights movement, you're only focusing on the south. the North is bad too. And so I think we lose that narrative as well, but also clearly Trump and King are exploiting the lack of understanding and knowledge of our history that white folks in the South, racist white folks in the South have. And they're using it to their own benefit and using them as pawns as votes.

And clearly it's to their own interest. Yeah. Okay, let's turn to something slightly different. More and more measles cases are being reported across the country. And here is what Donald Trump had to say about it this morning. Well, you tell parents about getting the kids vaccinate. Needle, I'm a needle. Tell parents about that.

They have to get the shot. The vaccinations are so important. This is really going around now. They have to get their shot. That could have been almost any president. Like, that could have been a reasonable, literate president whose brain is in mostly solid form. Mostly solid form, that sounded like. And so I saw that and I mean, I guess I felt the urge to give him some credit for simply

acknowledging the scientific consensus on vaccinations. We're gonna undercut it in a couple of minutes, so just stay tuned. But it is a bad situation that the CDC reported this week, there were 695 cases of measles in 22 different states, the highest since the disease was virtually eradicated back in 2000. And it's only April, we're one quarter of the way through and this is already the way. worst year, this does not happen randomly. It requires human choice and human effort and advocacy in a time when getting those vaccines is very, very easy. And so he apparently thinks that, yes, you should get vaccinated. So progress? Progress, I just, okay, this is the hard part,

and this is part of a character flaw, one of countless with this guy. Is once you, say he learned something, and when obviously when he was saying it during the campaign, how what vaccines do to people, even if you have some kind of revisiting of the topic and say, you know what, yeah, people should get their vaccines, it's getting out of control, you have to do it, similar to what he said. And I was wrong during the election when I said that this is what vaccines do to people. Since being in office, I've learned something else. I figured it out. And you know what? I think people should learn from what I learned from. Really easy statement.

And nobody's going to run you out of office for saying so. But it's a character flaw. He cannot admit fault. Same thing with the first thing. Can't admit fault when it comes to what happened in Charlottesville. Can't admit fault when you said, I didn't see this is going this far? I know this many races follow me. Well, the reason he can't say that is because he did know that many races follow him.

But once you admit fault, you just might get the, John, you were trying to give him credit. He didn't even go that far. So imagine if he actually gave a complete statement of, This is the fact, I was wrong, learned from me. Oh, man, this dude would get 10 points bump in his approval rating, and I don't even think that should be worth it. But enough people are so willing to give him any credit for anything, it would work out for him.

And he didn't do that, and what he has said is pretty bad. And so we've got some examples of that. But first, from one of the earliest debates in the 2016 Republican primary, here is him on the same topic. We have extremely well-documented proof that there's no autism associated with vaccinations. People that worked for me just the other day. Two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.

So look, we're, I mean the video's probably already been down and voted so much and we're going to get a lot of hate because people are crazy about this. topic. I've seen it happen in people that I know who were totally level headed, had a kid, and you start to get wrapped up in this stuff. Well, I was gonna hit that point for a second, but I just wanna say it's really funny that he says it next to a doctor, and he's shaking his head and then has just leads with conjecture and has absolutely no data that he's pulling from except a sample story

from his life. That's it, an anecdote. So I, like I said, I wanna take a little different angle, which is that there is that there There has, the measles outbreak is ridiculous, especially since we have vaccinations. However, I do think that there's something happening concurrently that is not related, that the government hasn't given people adequate answers to, and that is a sharp increase in autism. And so people-

And I have some stuff on that, in a little bit. In a little bit. So the thing is, you could say that, you know, people weren't diagnosing folks at the rate that they're doing now. But in the 1980s, one in 10,000 people in the US had autism. Now stats are anywhere between 1 in 59 or 1 in 64. That's a ridiculous. Yes.

But not saying that some scientists have called this a phenomenon looking for an explanation. And I think the anti-vaxxers double down really hard on mercury as a filler, and that's not an adequate explanation. But the US government has not answered to this, and it probably could lie within the FDA's regulations or how the relationship to scientific studies, which is that they rely on whoever's company on their scientists to justify the safety of a product. And so we could get into that a little bit more. It's hard to think they won't look for it.

They won't look for it, but they'll also trust the corporation's own hired scientists. And I think there's a lot slipping and people are just pulling for any sort of straw that's out there. Exactly, yes. I understand the stress is under, they want to understand the situation. What I want to say about Donald Trump is that when I saw that debate, I thought, well, that's really weird, why is he on this? Where did this come from?

So I went back through his Twitter activity, and I started pulling tweets, and I probably pulled too many, but I pulled not a gigantic percentage. He has been tweeting about this four years and years, years before he was running for president saying in 2014, healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes, autism, many such cases, I'm not against, and then he starts to sort of finesse it into a particular theory that he has that you see in a lot of his tweets. It's that it's the massive dose. He doesn't want it in one massive dose, he wants it spread out, and then you have massive

combined inoculations, the small children is the cause for big increase in autism, with autism being way up. This is 2014, that last one was in 2012, so we're talking about over years. What do we have to lose by having doctors give small dose vaccines versus big pump doses into those tiny bodies. So many people who have children with autism have thanked me an amazing response. They know far better than fudged up reports. Well look, those people know the experience that they and their family have had.

That is what they know. And unfortunately, the thing is with Donald Trump is that he thinks like anecdotes that confirm what he already believes to him have far more validity than any number of studies, regardless of methodology or anything like that. And I do want to just briefly mention the diagnosing thing, because the issue I have, we say back in 1975 X in 1000 or whatever or how many had it, but that's not what we mean. What we mean is we're diagnosed with it. Right.

And so we say that diagnosing criteria have changed, but let's get specific about what that means. So autism didn't make its debut in the DSM until 1980. In 1987, a new edition expanded the criteria by allowing a diagnosis, even if symptoms became a parent after 30 months of age, so it changed the time that you could be diagnosed in it. And also, to garner a diagnosis, a child needed to meet eight of 16 different criteria rather than all six of the previous items. So previously it required 100 of a shorter, more constrained list of criteria. Now it requires 50% of an expanded list of criteria, and you can be diagnosed for it during

a longer period of your youth. In 1994, the fourth edition of the DSM broadened the definition of autism even further by including Asperger's syndrome on the milder end of the spectrum. The current version, number five, was released in 2013 and collapsed autism, Asperger's, and pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified into a single diagnosis. So it both made it easier for you to get a specific autism diagnosis, and it also began to include other things that had previously diagnosed as something else into the same classification. One other thing also, along this time, thankfully our government very often is not all that

helpful with these sorts of things, but money became available to deal with these sorts of things. But it did require that you were diagnosed as autistic rather than as a generalized intellectual disability, which was a very common diagnosis at that time. And so kids began to be changed from intellectual disability to autism, allowing them and their families to have access to that government funding. Right. So my only pushback, and I know about all this data with diagnosis, is that we still have the highest rate in any developed country of autism. Why is that? Okay, no answers. Two, there are some countries in the developing world, I'm not developing, world, in the developed world like Germany, who are experiencing declines in the rate

and incidence of autism. So what is that? So I think there's a lot more research that has to be done. And clearly there's shifts around diagnosis and not every country has a uniform understanding of their diagnosis or how to test for autism or a S-A-S-Dage. Yeah. Yes, and everything that you just said is far more sophisticated than anything Donald Trump has literally ever heard about this or read about it.

Also, I am not agreeing with him, I'm absolutely not agreeing with him. This is not a connection to measles, but we are having a discussion around autism. But again, because if you actually care about a topic, you won't just hear an offshoot story and then make a full assessment, you go, wow, that's odd. I'm in this position of power, let's find out because you actually want to find out. You don't want to use it as a weapon. Yeah. And by the way, like I understand there might be some people watching this that disagree with

the scientific consensus, that disagree with me, don't like that I'm being so blunt, and I totally get that. And I get that having someone at the highest levels of government who, at least up until today's statement, seem to agree with you, and probably still does. Nothing that he said in that most recent video is inconsistent with the tweets about how much should be in a dosage. Do you believe that he has read the research? Do you believe that he has looked at a meta-analysis of all of this and has really gone through it? I know that there are old reports that have since been, like, do you really believe that he's doing the research? I know that it can be comforting to have people who agree with you.

But really, is that the person that you want as your champion on a scientific issue? I doubt that that is the case. He's doing it because it's in New York. The big emergency outbreaks in New York. Yeah, yeah. And he answered it because he was asked. He wasn't thinking about it before that. He doesn't care.

He wasn't concerned about it. Anyway, so we do have to take our first break, though. When we come back, Donald Trump's health, apparently quite good. And so we'll be breaking out the consequences of that. We need to talk about a relatively new show called Un-F-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-F-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 wisdom and upend the historical narratives that were told. 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. Welcome about the first hour of the Young Turks with Jeremy and myself.

We've got some great members' comments. I also want to do the member shoutouts though. Corey Castagnola and Hasei Lindahl, thank you for being TRT members and getting access to all of our content, all the shows, the special features, special access to the other features, all that. Including by the way, the Game of Thrones review specials we've done two so far, the last one was awesome. If you don't watch Game of Thrones, this is going to seem ridiculous, but we did an hour and 40 minute review of a 57 minute episode of a show, and it was awesome. And episode three is coming up.

We're going to be doing a live reaction after the episode this Sunday. Jank is going to be here, Brett, Ida, and myself. And episode three is going to be amazing. It's going to potentially be the biggest episode in eight seasons of the show. The discussion is going to be equally epic, and so you're not going to want to miss it. And you're going to want to be a member so you can see the full thing. But we do have members' comments as well. Ian says, which generals Trump talked to said Lee was great?

General John Barron or General John Miller? If you don't know, those are the fake names that Donald Trump would use for himself. Gabby Marita says, well, if there's one thing that both Robert E. Lee and Donald Trump both have in common, it's a craven devotion to a lost cause, which is 100% true. Let's see. Jeez, that's the one that Jake always loves saying. Yeah. Forget about the slavery aspect because some clearly don't think it's a big deal.

The South literally betrayed the United States. You say that at a right winger and it just like floats past them. Like the fact that this was a betrayal of the country. Like he's what Trump said in that video apparently was within 500 feet of a plaque, which marked the spot that Lincoln asked Lee to fight for the North in. And Lee was like, nope. State rights, state rights, states rights, that's all they say. And that is why in all of the state declarations that they were rebelling against the United Nations,

they all mentioned slavery. It's because of how much they cared about states' rights. Cabbage says Lee was the type to pour salt in the wounds of slaves after whipping them. That is 100% true, and Scratch and Sniff MD says, glad to see Mehta on young Turks so much these days, always bringing the power to the panel. That is true. Wow. And with that, why don't we jump back? I'm sicking it right here.

I'm sure there was something about, no, no. Anyway, somebody tweets something nice about him, get him off of my back. Power punch, geez, come on. Sorry. You can't take a second without patriarchy, like a second. See, that's the power we're just talking about. Okay, so message us something about either JR or his diversion to patriarchy, and I will read it after this. And with that, let's turn to something a little bit fun.

There is a very real chance that Donald Trump is going to be facing off in the general election against a Democratic candidate who might be north of 70 years. And here's what he had to say about that. How old is you old to be president? Well, I think that I just feel like a young man. I'm so young. I can't believe it. I'm the youngest person. I am a young, vibrant man.

I look at Joe. I don't know about him. I don't know. Too old. I would never say anyone's too old, but I know they're all making me look very young, both in terms of age and I think in terms of energy, I think you people know that better than anybody. I hate the time that we live in.

Can you imagine if Obama said, I'm young, I'm very, I'm young, I'm young, and I'm vibrant and I'm sprightly and I'm young. Oh my God, but the best part of what that set up is, is that that's something that Trump could never, like, hold that over Obama. And you know how obsessed he is with being better than Obama. So he has to reserve it, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the scariest thing, now I watched that video a few times. I just watched it again.

And we talked about this on the damage report today. And Brett had a theory. I didn't test it because I didn't watch the video again, that when he said in terms of energy, he thrust his hips forward, he did. He did. He did. Disgusted. The Rose Garden disgusts me in 2019, okay?

He's been sullied by him. So the next question to ask is, in what other ways are you so young, right? By age, because you're what, 72, I think we looked up earlier. He's gonna be 73, and then Biden is 76? Something around there. They're both right around six. Well, he's gonna be, so they're four years apart. He's the youngest.

Okay, we're all old. And he said it's so far as energy as we talked about the disgusting thing. he did after that. So, what else? Maybe as far as your policies, the same guy who says in the good old days. That's such a youthful thing, a young person thing to say. The one who's- He does, he straight up says it. And he says, AOC wants to get rid of aeroplanes.

He calls him aeroplanes. This is not a young guy, and it's okay, you're an old dude, and that's what we've always had in office in general. But did you see his energy? The energy, walk around, come on, dude. And also, so your old policies. on health care, the border security, fossil fuels, and as I mentioned, the good old days. None of that is youthful and young guy and appealing.

So the next question, instead of them joking with him and saying, hey, is he too old? Just say, hey, which policies appeal to so many young people that you hold? Right, right. And that's the fault of the media over there, is that they didn't, one, have that follow-up question or want more than a sound bike from him that they could play like we're playing right now. but we have a little bit more context to assess what he's saying. And also, you know what's interesting? They were trying to present this as a slap to Biden.

I think it was also a slap to Bernie because he said both of them, right? Yeah, 100%. How old is people? He's not that I'm supporting him, but how old is he again? What, 38 years old? It's 39? The youngest thing about him is that I think he's the youngest person who watches Fox and Friends at 72. But you point out how he's old.

He thinks that wind turbines cause you cancer. That's an old person on the internet conspiracy theory, if I've ever seen one. He's really scared of Mexican immigrants. That's an old white person thing right there. He is 100% old. He just lies around. It was what I said on TDR. He lies around.

He watches Fox News. That's like you get an automatic membership to Fox Nation if you lay in bed watching Fox News for more than three hours a day. And he's got it. And he tells us every day that he does. He shows us that. So, but really fast, does it matter? So he is going to be attacking definitely Biden on his energy or whatever.

But even Bernie, a guy who literally has not stopped sprinting for three years, he will be attacking them on their age. Do we care? Does that make you worried about the potential nominee being older? No. No. I'm wondering who he's trying to throw this to. Does he think that there are possibly some Bernie supporters that might be swayed over

by that? Like who is this argument benefiting? Yeah, because I mean, you still want your old voters to vote for you. If he's saying old people, then you're kind of insulting your voters. Yeah. That is sort of weird. I mean, I assume that it was just a generalized, he always has to, like, big himself up and like for somehow, the greatest con in American history has been his followers thinking

that he's some sort of alpha, and so he has to maintain that. And comparing his virility to 77 year old men is how he does it, I guess. It's a bold move. We'll see if it works out for him in 2020. Anyway, let's turn to darker news. If you liked Donald Trump's immigration policies over the past two years, you're gonna love what might be coming in the near future. Take a look at what they're considering. There was an initiative examined. Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security officials looked at housing migrant children at Guantanamo Bay, which has a dormitory facility that has been used in the past to hold asylum seekers. The proposal to house migrant children from the southwest border there has not gained traction, perhaps because of the optics of housing young people adjacent to terrorism suspects. or in Cuba at all or abroad or whatever, the entire thing is horrendous, but this is what people voted for, not the majority, but some.

And this is what we almost got. And there have been policies in the past that we've found out about, and then they've denied them, and then they've gone into effect. It's possible that this one could cycle back around in a few months. It's the same approach to everything else. Remember the whole proposal, which was BS and a bit of a deflection, was the sanctuary cities, listen, send them to sanctuary cities without any thought of how that would work. that makes any sense.

It's all to say, hey, if we do this over-the-top thing, maybe those stupid libs will realize how stupid they are and they'll go on our direction. That's no way to run a country. That's no way to come up with any kind of actually concrete policy. So we're going to send children to Guantanamo Bay because then these bleeding-heart liberals will go, oh, don't send them there.

Hey, just send them back home then. We're on your side now. Where's the thought process? Nobody really believes that. It's a game in trying to show how brutal you can be and, like, I'm the American who's brutal, And those guys are soft. They're so un-American.

It's just a constant, it's a constant PR battle. And you think being an a-hole is the best way to go about it. And that suddenly people will go on your side because we trust the bad guy. Yeah. And by the adjacency of the idea of Guantanamo Bay with prisoners being held also who have not been tried. So they're called terrorism suspects, but they haven't been tried. They're waiting for a trial. So, by that association, they're supposed to be criminalized in the process.

And I think that's part of the thought behind this, which is, you know, Trump has been trying aggressively to pay people coming from the southern border as dangerous to us. And if they could figure out a way to make the rest of the nation believe that children are dangerous, this is also part of that PR scheme as well, is put them next to something. We actually don't question, like I said, we don't question who's at Guantanamo Bay. We think that they're in prison terrorists. We don't think of people who've been tortured and haven't been to trial yet. Yeah.

Yeah, and all these policies, the ones that they put into effect, the ones that they consider but they don't actually do, just how cruel they are, how barbarous they are, that advances their agenda because I think in a very real case, all of these, at least for a significant portion of the population, shifts over to window on immigrants. It's like if you say we need to build a wall, then many people will believe, oh, I guess we We must need a wall. If he says, I'm deploying armed troops to the border and I'm gonna loosen up the rules of engagement, then I guess they must be so dangerous we need to shoot them.

If the kids belong in Guantanamo Bay, I guess they're as dangerous as terrorists. And many people will simply believe that it must be necessary because even if they're not like red hat wearing maga heads, they're inclined to support the president or whoever's in power. But this is also, I wanna turn back to again, trying to criminalize children here and make them appear to be a threat to U.S. military. This is something we've done, or law enforcement, this is something we've done with police who've killed black children, refused to call them teenagers or children, called them adults. That's the way that Michael Brown's murder was depicted.

But also films like American sniper, where a little kid, an Iraqi kid was potentially shooting something at the American sniper, whatever, Chris Kyle's character. How can we believe that this kid is a threat to the American military that's occupying this country? Somehow they've done such a brilliant job to convince us that children are threatening. Yeah, exactly. And the guy that stood on the stage at the RNC and said, you know, only I can fix it, only I can protect you. Like, the people voting from a lot of them, a lot of them stupidly or naively believe that they needed to be protected, that the threat was such that they need to be protected. and thought that he could actually do it, not knowing that they're just putting him in office

for him in Fox News to spend the next few years scaring the hell out of them, doing nothing to actually fix the problem. I think it's noteworthy that all of these cruel fixes for the problem don't actually solve the problem. They're cruelty for cruelty's sake. It had no deterrence. There's still record numbers of people trying to cross the border because we still haven't fixed the issues that they're crossing the border for. Cruelty for cruelty's sake is the basis for how you convince enough people. From the beginning, again, we talked a little early about Robert Lee and slavery in the history in America and how the dehumanization of humans allows you to do things to them. So it carries on in this thing, too.

When immigrants come across the border, you're like, oh man, look what they're trying to do. The first thing this guy said before he was even elected, before he launched his campaign, rapists, murderous, criminals, drug dealers. Absolutely. They're dehumanized. So now, when you see their children crying and being separated and snatched, you go, well, it's those inhumans. They shouldn't have brought those kids over in the first place. It's not my fault that I'm supporting this. It's their fault for making me support cruel and unusual punishment.

Can I throw to a reading that I think people should do? Sylvia Winter is an amazing decolonial thinker, she's Jamaican. She wrote this article about the Rodney King trial because they said that there were no humans involved. So she went into detail of how somebody could come to this explanation of a brutal beating of a black man as no humans involved. So no humans involved, Sylvia Winter. Look for that.

You'll understand what J.R. is talking about, too. Interesting. Okay, I'm not to look at that. I'm not familiar with that. And with that, we are going to go to our second break. When we come back, Matha is going to be leading us through a couple more stories. So we'll see you on the other. At TYT, we frequently talk about all the ways that big tech companies are taking control

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That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash T-YT. Check it out today. We hope you're enjoying this free clip from the Young Turks. If you want to get the whole show and more exclusive content while supporting independent media, become a member at t-y-t.com slash join today. In the meantime, enjoy this free second. Welcome back to the first hour, everybody. So we've got a couple things to go over. I forgot, I don't do these plugs a lot. For the Game of Thrones review on Sunday, how you can watch it, how you can be a member,

I didn't say anything. So t.com slash live to actually watch it. The first big bit is available to everyone, so everyone should tune in, it is so much fun. It's one of the most fun things I do, because we don't talk about trumpet. And then the last bit is for members, and so you're gonna wanna be a member to see. that and you can become one by going to t yt.com slash john. And Anna can't stop me from saying that. We also have a new member show, which should be a lot of fun.

That is TMI on TYT. And in case you missed it, MetaWorld Peace was in studio very recently, sat down with Jank and we got some bonus content for the members. You can find out about his most embarrassing story and what moment in his life he would redo if he was able to. You'll be able to find clips at tyt.com later today. You can check it out as a member, t.com slash john to get access. And by the way, I did take a look at the hashtag TYT Live and I Sucket Math says, I love it when J.R. Jackson is on the panel.

He's one of the most insightful members, just not as insightful as Matha. It doesn't say that, I just added that one. No, but there is actually a tweet that says something. But they're very happy to have you here. She's since deleted, I'm sorry, ma'am. No, it's on your screen. It's on your screen. Jasmine Barbosa, who's very active, and I'm going to start ignoring, said, J.R. Jackson, you're usually my favorite until Mitha comes on.

Please accept this half of compliment. Back handed. With that, I'm going to set myself up, what can you do? J.R., you've been talking about. Let's turn to someone insightful. Mitha, you've got some stories for us, huh? I do. Today is the start of D.C.'s Comic Con. It's called AwesomeCon. You can see right here what it looks like. There's also a little bit of controversy that emerged about their Comic-Con. And it all started with a tweet that AwesomeCon put out.

It said, talk about superheroes. Employees at the CIA may not have acquired their abilities from a radioactive spider or a benevolent wizard, but they do have remarkable superpowers to protect America. The CIA will be at hashtag AwesomeCon, make sure to find them. So what people on the internets, which I love on Twitter dug up, was a little bit of weirdness about this photo, not just the fact that the CIA was promoting themselves through Comic-Con, but Saladin Ahmed tweeted, not sure which is grosser, the CIA trying to recruit geeks at cons or them faking diversity do so.

And what he means by this is he tweeted the photo screenshot of the ad, but he also tweeted this image, which is where they got the ad, it was a stock photo. So what do you all think? I mean, in an effort- She is confident. In an effort to possibly recruit people who look like that woman who have been headscarf, they are trying to appeal to the geeks and to possibly Muslims. Mm-hmm. So do you think they don't have anyone in the entire organization that maybe fits their

diversity bill enough? Or, you know, maybe the person isn't willing to be out there. I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about this. Because then, you know, there's ways where you say you want to create diversity within your organization, which is great. But the reasons behind it is you can have more diverse organization that actually accesses and understands what they're doing for those people that you're supposed to be helping out or surveilling or servicing, whatever your ideal is in that particular moment.

So if you want to have diversity, so you can figure out the best way to approach certain communities, have those folks in and let them be honest, let them be themselves, but when you just, what this shows is when you throw a stock photo up, you're like, yeah, we want people to think so, when really there's no one here that knows anything about this community whatsoever. Yeah, you know, I'm just going to interject real quickly that people within the Arab and Muslim community were used to after 9-11, the CIA and FBI coming to our events and sponsoring them, so people would take the money because they needed the money because we were a very maligned

group of people. But none of us were really happy to get FBI pens in our gift bag. And so this has been a strategy which probably is unsuccessful because they're continuing to try to recruit from our community and they still don't have us. What's the pitch? I'm sorry, what would be the right pitch? Because I believe in diversity, what's the best way they should do it because I don't believe that they're willing to do it that way, so I wonder what is.

Well, let's go to this tweet, which I think actually explains or encapsulates the problem even better, which is from ice level, excelsular, true believers, your favorite webhead and Earth's mightiest heroes are headed to the global south to squints, destabilize the democratically elected government because they won't give us natural resources for cheap. So that's what folks on Twitter believe is the pitch. Yeah, it kind of, like on one level, why did they use a stock photo? Because they're not going to set up a photo shoot for a stupid Twitter ad. I get that.

But doing the diversity in the form of just a photo, when substantively, it doesn't really bear any relation to the effect that the CIA has on the world at large, women at large, the Muslim world more specifically. It reminds me of like the thing where for like women's empowerment, McDonald's like turned the M into a W. It's like, okay, so you're thinking about them, I guess. But that's not substantive. And when you think about the effect that the CIA and other American intelligence agencies have

had on areas of the world where people might look like the woman in that photo, you think, Jesus, I guess they got to try to diversify. But like, they're really hoping that people don't know a lot about the history of the organization or America's foreign policy. Well, so there's a little bit more controversy to this too, because allegedly, so let me back up a second. So, the CIA, as they said in that tweet that was posted by AwesomeCon has panels during the event. Oh. Yes.

So, and we'll throw to some of those. But it's an issue because that's a sponsor tweet. Yeah. And they alleged that the CIA submitted their own panels and got accepted and approved outside of- What are the panels? Okay, we'll see. Let's throw it. My favorite is, what is it, very secret, very cool but not aliens, the U-2, the A-12 and the A-51.

Some heroes wear cardigans, librarians at CIA. Hidden Plainslight, Glomar, Explorer, and Virginia Hall, thinking like DO, which is a directors of operations officer, Einstein as an asset, this one's kind of bizarre, which is they have you become a directorate of operations and see how you would respond to this moment where Einstein gave Roosevelt, like some scientific information. So they do, they do play, they do immersive game. I sort of. Wow, I'm glad that you found those because I didn't know about that. I've actually, this is going to shock some people because they know I'm nerdy it. I've never been to Comic Con, but I've been out of the cons. I've been a strategic con and AwesomeCon and Pax and stuff like that.

You've been to AwesomeCon. No, no, not AwesomeCon. Sorry. Kingdom Con. What does Any of those panels have to do with pop culture, even defined very broadly. So broadly. I'm still sure, okay, I've never been to any cons except for Polita. So what is the endgame here for this for awesome con period? I'm assuming. Everybody there is looking to recruit for certain kind of jobs in different fields? Is that the only?

No, that's not a big part of cons. Jobs. This particular one, awesome con. That I don't know. I mean, they have, they have comics, I assume, okay, I'm the worst. person. I can say that generally, Comic-Con is a place where fans of a variety of different sorts of pop culture come for movies and TV.

But you get something done. Maybe people meet their favorite whatever, the guy who wrote that comic book or the person who created that, whatever. At this one, who am I going to look for? But what I think the CIA is doing is they're trying to market themselves as a real-life superhero, which is what is appealing in terms of like the idea of who is celebrated, what protagonists are celebrated at Comic-Con, right? And so that's the edge and that's the foot that they want in the door.

Yeah. Okay, I mean, I get why they would want that. I just don't know why AwesomeCon would be okay with it. I mean, I guess best case scenario, they got paid? Well, okay, so some other thing that we have to, we can step into is that the Defense Department jumps on any movie that uses military grade equipment. So they are a part of the conversation. In fact, there's another sort of controversy around Marvel, having used a defense contractor,

they finally let go because he was very aligned to the military or profiting off of war. And so they let him go. So those two worlds are merged in certain weird, bizarre ways. And I think this is kind of a funny story, but it sheds light on a lot of stuff. And really fast on that. We have talked previously about, I think Michael Bay has. has had long, in his movies, he works very closely with the military and all of that. And obviously he's like the best example of it, but whenever you watch movies that involve,

like I think it was Ben Manquitt's tweeted recently, he was like, there's no war movie that's anti-war, like at the end of the day. They all glorify it. They might try to make it gritty or realistic, but it always glorifies it. And that sort of partnership is designed to ensure that. Right, and you never hear the story from the person who the US military is at war with or occupying. But anyways, we'll go to a little bit of a lighter story. Yesterday, Biden announced his presidential run, but he also announced this today. Can we throw the video?

If you are the best choice for the Democrats in 2020, why didn't President Obama endorse? I asked President Obama not to endorse, and he doesn't want to, we should, whoever wins this nomination should win on their own merits. So the Hill reported this, that He announced, Biden announced that he was not seeking Obama's endorsement. However, when you go on his Instagram page, there is a photo of him and Obama, and also online has erupted to this because there's an N on Obama, and it could represent something which is- If Obama's name doesn't start with an N. Right.

So we can throw it to the Instagram page, it's his full name, but why use the N? In his, in the case of that image, it's n is for no, as in no means no. Yeah, just that whole image, if we jump back to that, is disturbing. I mean, just not just the end, but. Why does her image have the B? Right, exactly. Absolutely, it was really not thoughtful at all. You could have put the B on Barack.

It wouldn't make sense. And make him first, but you want to make his wife first. There's things you have to, I mean, the ultra level of things you have to look to make sure you do, you see when you create something like this. Those are pretty bold letters. There's a reason why you have to have people look into this stuff because I think you would have noticed it. I mean, you have to have a certain, that's okay if Joe Biden, I'm sure he didn't design this, but whoever's in charge of design it didn't notice it. But you know what, send it to someone else and let them go, you know, but you know what that looks like? What?

It looks like you have an end over your former boss. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just, again, it's just a way of doing things, you know, and- So, but I also have to read this tweet, which was hilarious because not only that, like, why would you not want to get Obama's endorsement? Not that I'm a big fan of Obama's, but this tweet was hysterical. It said, for the record, I asked Idris Elba not to be my boyfriend. Yeah. Right, okay, so by the way, I had, I had.

I had my assumptions about the endorsement thing, because Obama is a spokesperson, through a sportsperson, had glowing things to say about Biden when he decided to run. And I was thinking, they probably did have a conversation. This is pure speculation. I'm sure Obama's like, yeah, I love you, Joe, I just can't make an endorsement. He's like, okay, I understand that, that's cool. It seems like a normal conversation that would be had, because I wouldn't expect Obama to come out and get to endorsing, because it didn't seem like something he would do anyway.

But he said I asked him not to. Yeah. So that's where he said it was me. They probably just had a normal conversation where I like, yeah, okay, it's fine, whatever. We'll endorse, go indoors, cool, cool, cool. But it's nuts. I asked him not to. Why would you ask him not to?

Doesn't make sense. Right, and it sounds like a kid that wants to prove his parents wrong. Like, I can do this on my own, see? I can drive the car even though I'm eight years old. The five-year-old puts his underwear on backwards. I can do it myself, one kid, you're not going to go to the bathroom, bro. Obviously, you cannot do it by yourself. Do it on your own merits, Joe.

Yeah. Maybe the endorsement will come eventually, I guess. I kind of like that Obama isn't getting involved right now. Me too. To me, it reeks of, it's like the same thing as pulling the Herman Kane nomination for the Fed. It's just like Trump's saying, oh, he asked to be pulled or whatever, well, maybe, sort of, but you couldn't have gotten him through. Just be real.

Just be like, yeah, you know, we have a close working relationship, maybe at some point he'll endorse me, I would endorse him or something, I don't know, just try to be real. Right, and not use his photo while you're not seeking his endorsement. Yeah, yeah, his wife also has not endorsed him. He's working on it. So that's all the time we have, unfortunately, for the first hour, but we have an awesome panel coming up in just a little bit. One little break, and then lots more fun stories for you. Thanks for listening to the full episode of the Young Turks.

Support our work, listen ad-free, access members, only bonus content, and more by subscribing to Apple Podcasts at Apple. slash t yt i'm your host shank huger and i'll see you soon