The Young Turks - TYT Extended Clip - July 15th, 2020

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

Trump is playing with American lives. John Iadarola and Benjamin Dixon discuss on The Young Turks. 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. Hello and welcome to the Young Turks nailed the accurate name of the show on the first try. Very excited to be here. I'm John Adrola, the host of the Benjamin Dixon show joins us. Ben, how's it going? Glad to have you here. It's going great. I thought you were saying you're John the host of the Benjamin Dixon show. How's it going, man? Well, you know, I got the name of this show, right? Had to mess up something,

it was coming. But very glad to have you here. Obviously, if you're watching this, Anna is out, Jank is out, we're going to be taking the reins for this hour. And it's a big rundown, should be a lot of fun. By the way, Ben, the audience may not know you were, you co-hosted my show just last Thursday, I believe it was, right? Yeah, had a great time, man. Thanks for having me. It was great to have you on. We got a super chat the day after from someone saying that it was their favorite episode of the damage report ever, actually. So thank you for delivering that. It had to be you because I'm there every day. That was the best one. It was just the vibe. It was a vibe. Maybe, maybe. Well, hopefully

we'll bring the same vibe today. And we've got different vibes coming to you in our upcoming Hero Day special. This is on Tuesday, July 21st. I'm I'm gonna be there as well as Jank Uger, Anna Kasparian, J.R. Jackson, and Ida Rodriguez. This is our Hero Day special where our hosts will share stories of the people who have impacted their lives in a significant way and who they consider to be a hero. You can watch at 7.30 Pacific, sorry, 7.30 p.m. Eastern Time, 430 p.m. Pacific time on T.Yt.com slash live, YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook. You can also watch on Get Ready, Roku, Zumo, Pluto, TV, Samsung TV Plus, Xfinity X1, Xfinity Flex.

We are flexing not only all over Xfinity, but every platform known demand, basically. So that should be a lot of fun. We're gonna get personal and we're gonna get real about the people who inspire us. So you're definitely gonna wanna tune into that. Before we launch into it, Ben, anything you need to get out there or anything like that? You have an okay time in this pandemic? Hey man, we're just holding it down, just trying to stay safe in this pandemic, hoping the audience is doing the same. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And hopefully with this bit of news, we can keep people up to date and hopefully entertained as well. So with that, why don't we launch into it? Let's go. During the pandemic, there have been a number of different places that you can go to to find out some of the numbers that are going on with COVID-19, numbers of tests, numbers of cases, hospitalizations and things like that. The official government one, though, has been the CDC.

Obviously, they are there to get the country ready for pandemics and respond when they come. But that is actually changing. As of today, with the Trump administration ordering hospitals to bypass the CDC and send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning today. From now on, the department, not the CDC, will collect daily reports of other patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic. So it begs the question, why make this significant change? It's a historic change to how the government tracks vital public health information. Officials say that the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus

task force in allocating scarce resources like personal protective gear and revdivir. Brett, don't do that. The first drug shown to be effective against the virus. But the health and human services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers, and health officials who rely on CDC data to make projections and crucial decisions. So, Ben, I know you likely talked about this on your show. It's a pretty big change. When you see this, what does your gut say? I coulda saying that Trump doesn't want this data out there in the public, right? That's basically the gist of it. He's tired of all the negative numbers. The thing is, on the surface, it looks

is if this is going to be like some type of masterful manipulation. But if you remember what happened in Florida when they tried to fudge the numbers there, they did so by inverting a Monday with the Tuesday data so that it could look like it was decreasing. This is like they're not really sophisticated in what they're attempting to do, but they're just patently blatant. They don't care. They don't care that this is a seizure of science right there in the middle of a pandemic. They don't have any regard for the safety of Americans or accurate information. They just need to control the narrative because the narrative is really damaging to them. Yeah, you know, I wonder, so you gave a great example of that sort of the switching the days,

and we know Florida fired the person who'd set up sort of their data visualization thing that was providing a great level of information, granular information about the pandemic. So those things have happened and they've been caught, you know, the fact that Florida hadn't been reporting hospitalizations for so long. We knew that so we could pressure them to do it. Do you think that that could happen with this new change? Like for instance, if they if they do start to mess with the numbers, I'm trying to figure out if we would know if there's any way like would independent organizations be able, would they be in touch with enough hospitals to tell?

Like I'm trying to figure out if future manipulations might be invisible to regular Americans and to the media. I mean, I think that's the whole point, John. I think the whole, the entire point of this is to be able to seize the data and stop this information from going out. And what we're going to see, the other thing that happened, I believe it was in Florida. Instead of reporting the debts, that's COVID-19 deaths, they started lumping them in with pneumonia deaths. So they're going to be stacking all these bodies, right? It's not as though the, you know, changing the data is going to stop the pandemic. Donald Trump

wants to wish the pandemic away. That didn't work. So now he's going to seize the data and try to kill the narrative. But then you still have bodies that are piling up, unfortunately. And so he can't deny that, but they are going to, we're going to see a spike in pneumonia debts basically. We're going to see a spike and all other associated debts, but he's going to try to kill the COVID-19 narrative. I feel the same way. I think that that's definitely coming. I mean, as you allude to, it's already here. And the issue is, like, at some point, scientists are going to go through all of this. And they're going to figure out what the numbers actually were to the best of our ability. What I wonder, though, is let's say he does sort of fudge the numbers.

He, because he's been talking about the fact that there's too much testing, the cases aren't reflective of what's really going on, it's just from testing and all of that, does it actually matter? I mean, it matters in terms of reality. It matters to me because I care. But in terms of the American public, like I feel like the people who wouldn't care that he did it are the ones who don't care now about the deaths. Like I wonder how entrenched everyone is that does it matter if we hit 200,000 deaths before the election politically. I mean, obviously it matters more than in terms of public health. But does it actually matter to his base? Would they, would their mind change if we hit 175 225? What do you think? So that's the thing that's, I shouldn't be shocked by this,

but I am, right? So in response to this, like this story has been everywhere today and everywhere I look, there's been enough Donald Trump supporters saying, thank you. Finally, we're going to be able to get some accurate data. Get the data away from the CDC, right? And so that just shows you that no matter how far Donald Trump goes, there will be a base that follows him. And I think that base kind of is somewhere around 35, 36 percent. We see no matter what Donald Trump does, he never falls below a 35, 36 percent approval rating. And I think he's going to take that base with him all the way to hell and back again. So it's not even a matter of of him standing on Fifth Avenue and shooting someone. It's really a question of how many bodies will pile up before that 36 percent break. And I don't

know that there is a number there. Yeah, yeah, I just, yeah, it's so devastating. Like I've alluded to on social media, I now have a family member who's in the hospital right now and I think is turning for the better. I think that that's good. And I just think about how many families are experiencing the exact same thing right now and how many have already have already had far worse happen, lost family members. And for the only sort of administrative effort in the past few weeks that I can think of

from the administration to be trying to get like a strangle grip on the flow of information so that they can hide the extent of the pandemic is just, it's important every way that something could be. Yeah. But let's, oh sorry, feel free. No, no, I was just going to say, I think we should make note that Donald Trump is putting more effort in controlling the data than he is actually trying to control this virus. Exactly, exactly. Let's talk a little bit about what the change means, why they say they're doing it. So you have a statement from Michael Caputo, HHS spokesman, who says the CDC's old data gathering operation once worked well monitoring hospital information across the country, but it's an inadequate system today. The president's coronavirus task force has urged

improvement for months, but they just cannot keep up with this pandemic. Which I love, there's a note, I think from Brett in our document, which is he's saying Trump handled this so badly, the CDC can't even keep up with it after months. No one else is going to get that. It's great that Brett caught that, but that is a pretty stark admission. Right, right. That's an accurate, right, admission, but it's going to fall on deaf ears with his supporters. What they're reading, as they read that, they're saying that the CDC is incompetent, right? I mean, that's 100% the narrative that they're going to spin. And then also like Caputo, when I was reading this earlier, he's actually trying to make it seem

as though this is not as bad as it is, because he's trying to make it seem as though the CDC will have dual access to this data. But as you read the statement, the order, it really says that they are circumventing the CDC. So the only data that the CDC will get will be something that comes back from Washington, D.C. And so the double speak in here is Orwellian at best. Yeah, and you know, sort of related to that, I follow daily the COVID numbers from a Twitter account called the COVID tracking project. And I know that Johns Hopkins also has their own sort of visualizer and they crew information. What I want to find out, and I hope that they make this clear today is if this is going to affect those sorts of independent efforts. Right. If are they,

because I don't believe that those are getting their information directly from the CDC. I believe that they're getting it at the state level. But the question is, is this change going to make it more difficult or impossible for them to do that? So we'll have to see. One other thing I wanted to talk about though was I really only saw this talked about in an NPR article about this. I read the initial reports in like the New York Times and I don't think that they acknowledged this. But so they had previously had a system with the CDC for reporting of this information, this setup that had been there for a while. They have a new system. It's called teletracking or it's set up by teletracking, a private company based in Pennsylvania. That company was awarded a $10 million contract

in a non-competitive bid in April? Why? Who do they know? Are they qualified? Who knows? I mean, I'm sure, Ben, you saw the stories earlier where like massive multi-million dollar contracts for PPE were given to companies that didn't exist the week before, those sorts of things. And for something so crucial, now we get to worry about corruption and we also get to worry about incompetence possibly. So that's great. Yeah, there's a, there's a confluence There's like an intersection of forces right here happening in America in 2020 that's perfectly fit to like undermine our country. Like I mean, we don't have to worry about some external force, any military strike. It's going to be the incompetence, the ignorance, and the corruption of America that is ultimately our Achilles Hill.

Yeah, I think so. And let's take a look at the heel. Here are the most recent numbers on the pandemic. We think that these are fairly accurate. You know, we'll see in a few weeks what we'll have. But over 3,055,000 cases, over 132,000 deaths, new cases on Wednesday, 62,751. You know, I recently went back to, I forget why, I had to find a clip or something like that. And I watched one of the early reports we did about this, and it said something like there

are now 3,000 confirmed cases. And I thought, wow, if you, if I could go back and talk to that, John, he would have had no idea what's coming. 3,000. That's a good hour in America these days. Jeez. Yeah. That's a terrifying notion. Like the rate that, what's underlying that terrifying notion is the fact that it didn't have to be like this, right? There's literally no reason we had to have this many people infected or even this number of these many people who have died at this point. And then we're compounding it, John. It's like we're not satisfied. They're not satisfied with 132, 135,000 people being killed because of this. They're doing everything they can to possibly exacerbate the problem. Yeah. Yeah, it's like 132. You know,

that's good. But like, can we like get a bunch of kids together or something like that? I think really juice these numbers. Yeah. I mean, and I don't understand, like, what, what is the, what is the actual motivation? Like, there, on any given day, I think we talked about this last week on your show, on any given day, a school is going to be an incubator. It's going to be a petri dish. And that's when the sun is shining. And now in the middle of a pandemic, they're like, 132, I think we could do a lot better than that. Let's send these kids back to school. Totally. And also, if you're watching this show, I mean, when do, when do, when When does the right talk about education?

It's indoctrination, you can't trust these commilib professors, we shouldn't even have colleges, all of that. And now it's, I don't care how many people need to die, we gotta get these kids back in school. I think some people in charge in DC have really annoying kids. I think that that's probably what it is and they just gotta get them out. But anyway, unfortunately, like we're joking as a defense mechanism, but there are many, many lives on the line. have already died during summer school sessions.

So, yeah, hopefully we pull back from the brink on that particular part. Absolutely. With that, why don't we go to our first break? There is still so much to go to me and Ben are going to join you again. We need to talk about a relatively new show called Un-F-E-NF-TR. As a Young Turks fan, you already know that the government, the media, and corporations are constantly peddling lies that serve the interests of the rich and powerful. But now there's a podcast dedicated to unraveling those lies, debunking the conventional wisdom.

In each episode of Un-B-The-Republic or UNFTR, the host delves into a different historical episode or topic that's generally misunderstood or purposely obfuscated by the so-called powers that be. Featuring in-depth research, razor-sharp commentary, and just the right amount of vulgarity, the UNFTRTR 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 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. On the other side. Welcome back to the Young Turks, everyone with me,

John Adirola and Ben Dixon as well. Before we launch back into the news, Let's see what's been going on. We've got some member comments here with James saying, can Jank go on TDR on a Friday? Seeing his garbage person the week would be awesome. That would be awesome. Jank is very difficult to book. I don't know if you've tried to book him on a show recently. He's a very busy man. He also has kids that he has to be taken care of and educating and all that. So I can't even imagine. I would feel bad asking him to do an extra show. I'll just say that. Let's see. David Peter says they all submit their data to their state agencies

anyway. This isn't going to work the way Trump thinks it'll work. That was my hope. And Ben, I don't know if that reassures you. My hope is that he might get a few headlines that sound better, but then the fact checks are going to look bad. I don't know, it seems like it seems like a bad plan. Okay, let's see. Rosalind Studio sent us in a super chat saying, I like to think of it as the damage report with Ben Dixon featuring John DeRola, why'd you have to do that? Yeah, I'm trying to get invited back, all right? Let's not sew any seeds of dissent between the brother in here, okay?

Oh, it's weird, Rosalind, because I actually think of it as the damage report with John DeRola formerly with Ben. But we'll have to see. Thanks a lot, guys. Okay. Anyway, I love you guys, says happy John and Ben. I love seeing Ben back with John. Thanks, TYT, for having the courage to report the news. Honestly, it is somehow comforting to know the truth even when it's not.

know the truth even when it's bad news. I'm glad to hear that. Okay, Christoffer says Chuck Todd just said on MSNBC referring to a Wall Street Journal poll. The 6% of people who would never vote for Trump must be Bernie Bros. He's such a tool so tired of this. Do you mean, was he talking about Biden? And I don't think that he would know that. I think he's making a few leaps in logic there, Chuck Todd. Chuck Todd. We've had so many villains this year that I I forgot about the part of this year where it was very much Chuck Todd is the bad guy. Anyway, okay, with that, why don't we jump back into the news? Trump gave another one of his Rose Garden press conferences, and because it's Donald Trump,

you can expect a couple of different things. Despite it being a press conference, there will be very few questions answered from reporters, and also he's going to bend it to his own will. And so take a look at this first clip where it becomes very quickly, not about China and trade, but about his opponent, Joe Biden. America lost nearly 10,000 factories while Joe Biden was vice president. Think of that 10,000 factories. He wrote something today and he made a statement today that I wrote down pretty accurate. So Biden was here for 47 years, eight years, Eight years, the last eight years, not long ago, his vice president, he said, one in five miles of our highways are still in poor condition.

Well, we're doing a good job on highways, but why didn't he fix them three years ago? Why didn't he fix him? Tens of thousands of bridges are in disrepair and on the verge of collapse. Well, it's probably not a right number, but we have bridges that should have been fixed. why didn't he fix him? High speed broadband. We want high speed broadband. Well, why didn't he get it?

Three years ago, it's not a long time. And he didn't do any of the things, but now he says he's going to be president and as president. He's going to do all the things that he didn't do. Never did. Never did anything except make very bad decisions. Yeah, three years ago wasn't that long ago. It's recent enough that I can actually remember what year it was. It was 2017, he wasn't in office.

But anyway, Ben, to the substance of his attacks, Trump trying to turn this into a thing about infrastructure, that seems more mature than the attacks I would have expected from him against Biden. Yeah, I don't know if there was something else that's coming behind that because it's still, I mean, it's still the height of absurdity, right? So Donald Trump is admitting that these are also things that he hasn't done in the last three and a half years, right? These are things that he hasn't accomplished in his administration. So I'm not really sure what the logic was to this attack, saying that he didn't get it done.

Well, what have you done in this time besides throwing us into a depression era unemployment into a full-blown pandemic? So I don't know if he really wants to get to a tip or tat in terms of whose administration did what. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, in this particular way, Like the term infrastructure week has become a joke during the Trump administration. And so I guess because the pandemic is obviously as rough as it is, and Trump hasn't seemed to care about that for a long time. And his reaction to the protests has been so offensive from Florida ceiling. I guess he needs something new, why shouldn't it be another infrastructure week?

But I will say, and there is more coming, by the way, you were wise to assume that. If it was going to be, you know what, let's have the next four months be a critical analysis of what the Obama administration promised and what they delivered in terms of infrastructure, in terms of many different things. And let's have Trump and Biden go back and forth making promises about what they're going to actually deliver for the American people. I don't think that that's what the attacks were about. I don't think that it, you know, is him about to launch into, and here's all of what I'm going

to do. We're going to make millions of jobs by rebuilding all these bridges and everything. But it would be nice the thought that the election was going to be based on the actual substance. Yeah, you actually gave me a second of hope for America. If that's actually what they turned this into, that's a substantive debate. Honestly, I don't know when the last time we had a presidential campaign like that. So here's to wishful thinking. I'm on the same side as you. I would hope that would be what's coming. I would hope. But unfortunately, what's coming is Biden's plan. to abolish the suburbs or something? I don't know.

Let's hear the president try to explain it. Abolish in the suburbs. You're going to abolish the suburbs with this. Enforce Obama-Biden's radical AFF-H. That's the A-F-F-H regulation that threatens to strip localities of federal affordable housing funds unless they change their zoning laws

to fit the federal government's demands. So what you have, I mean, I've been watching this for years in Westchester coming from New York. They want a low-income housing built in a neighborhood. Well, I'm ending that rule. I'm taking it out. So I had spoke with Ben Carson the other day. We're going to be taking it out. I've watched that whole thing go, and now they want to make it twice as bad in the suburbs, in the suburbs.

Mothers aren't happy about that. Fathers aren't happy about that. They worked hard to buy a house and now they're going to watch the housing values drop like a rock and that has happened. So he very quickly found a way to make infrastructure weak about what he really wants to campaign on, which is demonizing certain types of people. Yeah, yeah. He took a B-line straight into the dog whistles that his base loves, right? He knows his base. Let's be sure about it. He's not just saying these things because he's a bigot. He's saying these things because he knows the bigotry that's at the core of his base and this fear mongering, this vilification of talking about getting rid of the suburbs, what he's actually talking about. Honestly, he's talking about integration in a certain way because he's trying to make people afraid that minorities and probably specifically black people are coming to invade your communities. And this is straight out of the 1960s, man. You can't get any more dog whistle than bullhorn than that. Yeah, look, I will give Trump enough credit that I assume he wouldn't want to live near really poor white people either, but I think we know what he's getting at there.

And you're 100% right because they say abolish the suburbs. And I actually found the article, I forget which right wing website it's from. Some guy who'd written a book that was about how the Dems were going to abolish the suburbs. He wrote it a few years ago. is out there looking for any justification in anything that the Dems are doing to say that that's what they're doing again. That was picked up by Fox News and now Trump is just saying it. He doesn't really understand it. But they're not even trying to imply that Joe Biden is going to demolish the suburbs. He means just change them in some way, some fundamental way.

And suburbs to Trump are not outside of city centers. They're like the last bastion of a certain sort of community. And I have a feeling, I mean, hopefully this sort of messaging isn't successful, but I think he knows what he's doing. Yeah, no, he knows his base. But he also, I mean, you mentioned that he wouldn't live next to poor white people either. The irony is, is that Trump would never live in the suburbs in the first place, right? That's not even his cup of tea, you know? His thing really is the metropolitan-style living. And so he's speaking, like, as though he has something in common with these people, but the people that he's stirring up this racist bigotry in, he has no commonality with them except with skin color, perhaps.

Exactly, exactly. I would, you know, I wish, what if we lived in a country where his base could see that, could see how little interest he would have in even a 30 second interaction with them? They're immune to it. Okay, with that, so we've moved from repairing the roads to, he wants to destroy the suburbs, to now the Dems want their own cities to be destroyed. Let's watch. We have a very strong travel ban. And we don't want people that are going to come in and blow up our cities, do things. And frankly, with the liberal Democrats running the cities that we do have where they do have problems, maybe they wouldn't mind, but I would mind and the people of this country mind.

I mean, I can only speak for L.A. I don't want it to blow up. There's neighborhoods that I don't go to a lot, but I don't want any part of it to explode. Let's just be clear about that. What did he even say though? I mean, besides blowing up the cities, I'm trying to get some grounding in an actual statement there. What was this logic? It seemed vaguely anti-immigration. It seemed like.

I don't know how much more specific I can be because I'm not sure that he was. So he tied immigration to terrorism and says that the Democrats, that's what we what we want. Again, there's 36% of Americans who believe this, and I don't know if there's anything that could be done about them. Yeah, and look, it's not like we didn't know before Trump that the true, like, pervasive domestic terror threat comes from the right. You can get rid of, you know, the part of the FBI that searches for that. That doesn't make it not true anymore. We already knew that. And then over the past few years, they have seemingly like taken it upon themselves to prove how big of a threat they are. I mean, even during these protests, who is

actually committing the acts of mass violence. It's right wingers who are infiltrating these events, but they have to continue to pretend that it's Antifa, or maybe it's an immigrant, or somebody coming over the southern border. It hasn't been true, but they're going to continue to say it. This is just getting ready for another caravan in September, October, basically. Right. The difference is, though, is I don't know how many people are actually going to keep trying to come to America with our COVID-19 outbreaks and the borders being closed from the opposite side. But really, it does speak to the desperate nature of this bigotry that's latent inside of Donald Trump. And that, you know, the fact that they create a boogeyman

to scare their base when the boogeyman really is their base. Yeah. Yeah. You're 100% right. I'm sure literally everyone in media has acknowledged it. But the idea that this time in America began with him promising to build a wall and ends with Mexico and Canada walling us off. It seems sort of irony in a way. That's the only thing poetic about 2020 at this point. Exactly. Yeah. It could be, you know, poetry can be tragic. Yeah. But anyway, the entire idea that this press conference at the White House becomes a campaign speech against Joe Biden, that bothers me because it's not what the purpose of it is. I mean, he can campaign and he will. He'll have his rallies, he'll have his commercials,

and he'll do interviews and all of that. It shouldn't be here. But it's, But it's not just me that this is bothering. You even have people like Brett Bear. Presidents in the past, by tradition, have stayed away from overt campaign rhetoric from the Rose Garden or the White House, but it is the president's discretion. It is worth noting, however, to be fair, that had President Obama made this kind of speech from the Rose Garden, Republicans on Capitol Hill would likely have been up in arms. That seems pretty clear.

I like, I love the fact that to a certain degree, the absurdity of Donald Trump has gotten to be too much for Fox News. And this isn't any in any way to like come to the defense of Fox News because they've been pretty complicit in this devolution, right? The devolving of America. But I guess even Fox News has a place where they draw the line or at least independent correspondents. They have their line that Donald Trump has crossed. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, you would have, you know, Shep Smith at one point, would occasionally raise concerns. Brett Baer, I think semi-regorily has. He's one of their newsmen. But I can't give them too much credit when night after night Tucker Carlson is doing monologues

about how kids going back to school shouldn't wear masks, they're unscientific and all of that. I mean, it's it's not just propaganda, it is murderous at this point. Like it seems designed to get people killed. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of which, let's turn to, again, something really dark and And Trump making clear what his strategy is going to be. Yesterday, Donald Trump was interviewed and the topic of George Floyd and the protests that have been sweeping across America for the past few months came up. Here's how he responded to it. You said George Floyd's death was a terrible thing. Terrible.

Why are African Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country? And so are white people. So are white people. What a terrible question to ask. So are white people. More white people, by the way. More white people. I mean, you want me to take that? Go, yeah.

My thing is this, Ben, this whole crowd of people who only bring up white deaths when they can use it and leverage against black lives, right? Some of the, I remember, is it Daniel Schaver? I don't want to call the wrong name. the young man who was gunned down in the hotel lobby by police officers. I cover that story, and it was one of the most horrific, I think it might be the most horrific police shooting that I have ever seen. But Donald Trump never mentioned it, Ben Shapiro, none of the mainstream conservatives

ever mentioned it until they could leverage it against George Floyd. But so if they really cared about the white people who are being killed by the police, then they should be in solidarity with us. But they don't really care because they're willing to sacrifice a few lives to prop up white supremacy. Yeah, you're 100% right. I mean, his thing was, hey, hey, hey, don't ask me a question about black people getting killed. Way more white people get killed. And then he just sort of moves on. Right. Like, are you okay with that? Are you okay with the number of white people that are being

killed? It's just that afterthought. It's a footnote in your whole thinking process. I'm sorry, John, go ahead. No, you're right. It's like, hey, hey, hey, no. Murderous cops are rampaging across America killing everyone. Let's acknowledge it. They can't be stopped. They'll kill all of us. No, but that's, then let's do something as a country. And I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh at it, but how you framed it is exactly the level of absurdity that this whole thing operates in. Like, are you proud that the police are killing people who look like you at that same rate? Right. Because the thing is, is if they don't make that, if they don't make that statement, then they have nothing else. They have nothing

left but the truth. And so instead of embracing the truth and trying to change that truth, they just, they embrace the reality that they are okay with the police gunning down their family members. And I'm sorry, but I'm not. No, exactly, exactly. And to the actual facts, this is one of the rare times where Trump is sort of factually right. He's still being incredibly dishonest and manipulative. So let's talk about the actual numbers. Nearly half of the people killed by police are white while 23% are black, but black Americans, and we all know where this is going, only account for 13% of the population are shot at a disproportionate rate compared with white Americans who make up 60% of the population.

So yes, you would expect in a country with way more white people that more white people would be killed. That does not mean that the problem is the same, it doesn't mean that at all. And when studies show that black men are roughly three and a half times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than white men, that gets to be the story and the conversation. Right, right. That's, and that's what they have to detract from, because if they actually looked at the numbers, right, as a matter of proportions, right, they don't, they, of course, the raw numbers are going to be the result showing that most white men are killed, mostly white

people are killed by the police. That absolutely makes sense. But they have to deny the fact that black men are more than three and a half times more likely to be killed than white men. And then one out of 1,000, I think in the same article, one out of 1,000 black men can expect to die at the hands of the police in their lifetime. So, so there is a problem. The problem is rooted in racism. The problem is also rooted in the police state. But what I always try to tell, particularly libertarians, is if you believe in the police state, the way you say you do, then you have to acknowledge that it first started and was honed in the black community. And it was never going to stay there. It was always going to spill over into every other community.

And that's exactly what we saw in the Minneapolis uprisings and all the uprisings across the country. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the, you just said, one of the most amazing stats that I've heard that one in a thousand. Then you think if one in a thousand are killed by cops, how many are shot by cops? How many are unnecessarily hassled and held up by cops? How many are continually hounded and harassed by cops? The numbers spiral out of control from there. And it's a starting point that's already such a tragedy that it should be. a constant point of discussion across America. With that, why don't we turn to sort of a related question from that same interview? President Trump, back in 2015, you said the Confederate battle flag belongs in a museum.

Do you still believe that? All I say is freedom of speech. It's very simple. My attitude is freedom of speech. Very strong views on the Confederate flag. With me, it's freedom of speech. Very simple. Like it, don't like it, it's freedom of speech. Would you be comfortable with your supporters displaying the Confederate battle flag at political events?

You know, it depends on what your definition is, but I am comfortable with freedom of speech. It's very simple. But you understand why the flag is a painful symbol for many people, because it's a reminder of slavery. Well, people love it, and I know people that like the Confederate flag, and they're not thinking about slavery. I look at NASCAR, you go to NASCAR, you had those flags all over the place, they stopped it. I just think it's freedom of speech, whether it's Confederate flags or Black Lives Matter. or anything else you want to talk about. It's freedom of speech.

And you know, he slid in there at the end, Black Lives Matter being equivalent to the Confederacy against which Abraham Lincoln weighs the Civil War. That is, I mean, the level of absurdity. I just can't take it. I'll be honest with you, John. There's so many ways to describe this that are not fit for television. But it's also the fact that he seamlessly interwove that that false narrative

and his supporters run with it. And so now we're having to fight back against this idea that Black Lives Matter is equivalent to, and then the other part. And then I'll be quiet for a second because it is running my nerves off a little bit is the fact that he's just hiding behind freedom of speech, right? But freedom of speech doesn't mean that you have freedom from consequences, right? And if somebody wants to fly their confederate flag, then by all means, but then people have the right to not be associated with that person.

And employers have the right to say, okay, this is not what we want in our corporate culture, right? Whether you agree with it or not, freedom of speech actually goes both ways. It's also our freedom to speak out against what they're doing and what they're saying. So I think hiding behind freedom of speech is a cowards move in this case. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I'm trying to lump it, trying to lump BLM in with the Confederacy. I mean, arguably it's better than Fox hosts calling it a terror organization and things like arguably. Both bad. And yeah, like is literally every person who's waiving it thinking of slavery at the same time? I don't know, but it is weird. It seems weird that that's how far back

you're going to identify with something, something that best case in error, what do you know about it? That economically that's what it was. I just was watching a sketch from SNL from last year and it was about a place where you can pick your own apples. And they said, we're in New York, the part of New York, where you can find Confederate flags. And that's the thing, like people, like, there are politicians who have Confederate flags that aren't remotely from the South. Like it's this, it's this obvious attempt to brand yourself because those people understand what they're trying to say about themselves and what the base is going to hear, you know, or feel when they see it. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

And I also think, so the unspoken thing there, I think one of the unspoken messages that's conveyed by the Confederate flag is ironically this idea of being the true American, right? Connecting with American conservative values and that you're like a real patriot, which is, again, the height of absurdity when you consider that that's the flag of treason. So we have the flag of treason being flown across this country, but yet we identify them as the real Americans. Yeah, yeah. And like you pointed out, it's like, okay, so you love the Confederate flag. Confederacy is the best thing ever. But you're also, you really like Lincoln? Like, could you choose one of those two things? The party of Lincoln and the party of the Confederate flag, that is America in 2020. That's been America for the long as I can remember. Exactly. I just, I don't understand it. I did, I did want to clear up one thing, though. So she raised the question if he would be okay with his supporters flying the convention. Confederate flag. And he asked, well, it depends on how you define it. And I don't know what that means. Do you have any idea what he's talking about? No, you know, if I were to give him some credit on the intellectual spectrum, I would say that he's trying to create a cover to say that we don't know how to read everyone's mind and everyone

is going to have a different interpretation of what this flag means. And if you mean something positive, then okay, you're fine with us. But if you actually mean slavery, but I don't know that he actually thinks that deeply. And so he just said something and it came, words came out of his mouth. You might be right, you might be right. And look at you, how fair you're being. I respect that. It's difficult, but I try it's difficult, it is difficult, especially with what we just heard him saying for the past few minutes. With that though, we should take our second break. When we come back, we're going to transition from talking about police brutality in a general sense to a very, very specific example of it. My God, some of the footage we're going to see.

And then also, we are going to say goodbye to a politician we've talked about quite a bit over the past few years. All that and more after this. At TYT, we frequently talk about all the ways that big tech companies are taking control of our online lives, constantly monitoring us and storing and selling our data. But that doesn't mean we have to let them. It's possible to stay anonymous online and hide your data from the prying eyes of big tech. And one of the best ways is with ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN hides your IP address, making your active ID more difficult to trace and sell that.

advertisers. ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your network data to protect you from eavesdroppers and cybercriminals. And it's also easy to install. A single mouse click protects all your devices. But listen, guys, this is important. ExpressVPN is rated number one by CNET and Wired magazine. So take back control of your life online and secure your data with a top VPN solution available, ExpressVPN. And if you go to ExpressVPN.com slash TYT, you can get three extra months for free with this exclusive link just for T-Y-T fans. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash T-YT. Check it out today. Welcome back to the Young Turks, everyone. A couple more stories to get to, but before we do

that, I did want to check in on our July fundraising drive. Let's see that thermometer. Apparently, I'm being told a $3,000 bump just since the beginning of the show. I will claim 10% credit for that 90% goes to Ben. Ben, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. I'll send you my cash app account. No, thank you. I will reject that message. But thank you. All right. No problem. Speaking of money, though, what about aspiration? Come on. You can sign up for a free spend and save account. And TYT and aspiration will then plant 10 trees. You've got paper. Would you like some trees? Come on, there's a nice synergy there. You plant a tree with every purchase, you save money and save the planet because they're not going to take your money and put it in

any dirty energy, fossil fuels and all of that. And no deposits used for oil drills, pipelines, or anything. It is quite literally the cleanest way to use your money. So consider that as well. And let's take a look at the member comments and the super chats. Meg had a member comment saying, wow, great reading skills, the best. Nobody has ever seen reading this great, tremendous. And at first I thought that was a criticism of me, but I'm pretty sure it was Trump. So I'm glad. Anyway, Penumbra says, Biden was vice president. Why hasn't Pence fixed COVID-19? But the thing is, like, I think it's totally legit to criticize Biden for what he did and didn't do when he was vice president. Just keep it factual. I have no problem with criticize them.

We spent eight years criticizing them here at TYT. So as long as it's based in reality, I think it's fine. And let's see. Rosalind Studios, who had suggested that my show should be taken over by Ben Dixon, sent it a super chat saying, touche, John, tusha. Page sent to a super chat saying, my friend just said, this is awesome to a clip of John and J.R. from TDR. I posted on Insta story.

I told her all about TYT, and I think you just gained a viewer. Love you guys. Keep up the good work. Thank you so much. Very nice. Okay, with that we do have two more stories we want to get to and time is a waste and so let's launch into the most recent one. Phoenix has had another instance of police brutality and we're going to have a bit of video for you in just a minute. I want you to understand that this is a video of a cop brutalizing a woman. But you should also understand that not only is Phoenix as an area really bad in terms of police brutality. This particular police officer has a history of complaints lodged against him

before the incident that you're about to see. So again, consider yourself warned, and here's a bit of what happened. Tom, 600 Code 6. Hi. Okay. That's your license. You have any idea on you? Why am I getting pulled over? That's 600 West Camelette, or excuse me, Indian School Road. Is this your car? No. Sam 5455. Do you have idea on you?

No. Why am I getting pulled over? Put your hands behind your back. Excuse me. Put your hands behind your back. No! Put your hands behind your back! Stop! Stop!

Hands behind your back! No! Put your hands behind your back! Put your hands behind your back! Put your hands behind your back! Stop! hands behind your back! Time 600.

Give me another unit. Why are you asking for your ID? You said you don't have any ID. Can I get it? I'm in my car. You said you didn't have ID. I do. What did I do?

Give me your arm. Let me get my car. Give me your arm. Stop! Stop! She's absolutely brutal. The woman that you see in that video is Mariah Valenzuela. is Mariah Valenzuela, 23 year old. The incident happened one night in January. And the officer

there is Michael McGillis. So we're gonna have more on this. But Ben, I wanted your sort of immediate reaction to what you just saw. Yeah, I didn't watch the clip beforehand because it's difficult to watch these clips. It's difficult to have to report on it on a regular basis, especially because it's a consistent theme across this country. The police officers, they are always in attack mode. They are always saying that they fear for their lives. And we saw that there was absolutely no reason whatsoever for this officer to behave in this manner, except for the fact that we saw his track record, this is what he does.

So the question is, is how long are we going to put up with this? And how long would his bosses and the mayors of the cities allow these people to behave like animals? Right, 100%. I mean, there's, we're watching it. We see what he said, we see what he did. She didn't, she wanted to know why she was being harassed. Everyone should have responded that way. Why are you coming up to me?

Why are you talking to me literally at all, let alone just seemingly from nowhere decides I'm gonna arrest her. And because she didn't immediately, what, I don't know, he starts beating her. And we know by the way, how many times have we seen it. It doesn't matter how much you comply with what the police are doing. It is not gonna save you when a police officer decides that this is the road that he wants to go down. She says he grabbed me and threw me on my car and kept slamming my head. I was really afraid. It was dark and there was no one around. You can see a picture of her following the incident.

He at one point in an extended part of the video says, why won't you act like a young lady? This is after he's begun beating her effectively. She wasn't being enough of a young lady. She was eventually taken to jail, accused of resisting arrest, and quote, creating a substantial risk of physical injury to an officer. Yeah, so that's a core part of the problem, right? This system is designed to give as much leeway as possible to police officers, right? They have the ability to escalate situations that had no need to be, there was no need for it to be escalated in the first place.

And in that escalation, you as a person who's just simply trying to survive that encounter, can be charged with crimes simply because that officer chose to escalate. Yeah. Yeah, and in terms of the, like, oh my God, how many times have we seen cops freaking out about how scared they are and how they have to use force and they have to use lethal force because they're so terrified that they're about to die that all of these people they interact with are about to kill them with their bare hands. That's just that that's apparently how so many of these cops go through literally every day. You should know that in this particular case, Valenzuela is 5-2 and weighs 98 pounds. 98 pounds. Listen, I didn't do anything. I wanna be honest with you, right? If a police officer is that afraid and the police officer feels like that kind of force is necessary with someone that small, they don't need to be a police officer, period. Yep.

Yep. Yeah, at a certain point, we can, as reasonable people, we can look at a video and say, what if this person wasn't a cop and they were doing what they were doing? Could any part of it be acceptable, anything that he was saying, anything that he was doing? Or does it just seem like a really creepy guy that liked having power over this woman? The power to just come up to her out of the blue with apparently no justification. By the way, she was booked on a DUI, even though her blooded alcohol content was well below the legal limit. And this is just, I know that we're running out of time, so we don't have a ton of time

to get into it. their attempt to sort of rewrite that experience to make it look as if he was put in that play, he had to do what he was doing. We were, we come to just expect that. And Phoenix police have done things like tackling a blind man, threatening to shoot a man in the head in front of his children while investigating a shoplifting, killed a man struggling with mental illness after mistaking police handcuffs for a weapon and fatally shot an unarmed man in the back. So this This is both an individual case where this person had already had incidents like this in an area where they're becoming all too common.

Yeah. Yes. I honestly, I have nothing else that I could add to this that can actually be said, but this is a problem. And America has a police state problem that we have to address. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it's just you could fill your whole show every day with these sorts of incidents

and cops will always provide you with new material. It's devastating. Okay, I think that we have just a little bit more time. Okay, so look, we've got a great post game coming up. Ben is going to join me. We've got a bunch of stories. We're going to be talking about Trump and Beans and Jeff Sessions, maybe for the last time. So that should be a lot of fun.

So you're definitely going to tune into that. I think that we might have a little bit more as well. Oh, some protests where people freaked out on some of the protesters and also some updated battleground polls. We're going to check in on the state of the presidential election and see what we can learn about the way that this might go. Anyway, Ben, thank you for joining us for this hour. Looking forward to the pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you. Everyone, we'll see you in just a few. Thanks for listening to the full episode of the Young Turks. Support our work, listen to ad-free,

access members, only bonus content, and more by subscribing to Apple Podcasts at Apple. slash t yt i'm your host jank huger and i'll see you soon