The Young Turks - TYT Hour 1 - November 5th, 2019

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Rand Paul is calling for the whistleblower's identity to be exposed. Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. 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. Welcome to the Young Turks. I'm Anna Casparian.

John Adderola joins in for our one of today. program, Jank is still out. He will be back on the show on Thursday. John, I love doing the show with you, so I'm glad you're here. Me too. It's always nice to have you here. It's also been a while. It has been a while. Yeah, since we've done the show together, just the two of us. Yep. But we can make it if we try. Just the two of us. You and I. I think so. All right, so we have driven away half the audience, so I think we're good. No, no, they love it, they love it. They love that. We're singing to each other. Mm-hmm. And we'll continue to. So we have a fantastic show ahead for you. Among the things I'm looking forward to, Bernie Sanders tries to guess the price of

sneakers, fancy sneakers that I wouldn't even know the price of. I mean, it's insane. I was so off. Yeah, I think most people who are responsible with their money would be off. So we're going to talk about that a little later. We are also going to discuss, unfortunately, some tragic news from Mexico. a group of Mormons have been killed and Donald Trump has responded to it in a very Trump-esque type of way. But that is a story that we're going to have to cover a little later. But why don't we get started? We have some impeachment related updates to share with you.

So let's start with that. Rand Paul has decided to follow Donald Trump in his fascist language against the media. And more importantly, in his unconstitutional. language against the whistleblower who filed a formal whistleblower complaint against Donald Trump's actions in his phone conversation with the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. Now, I just want to note that we have federal protections for whistleblowers if they go through the legal route to basically voice their concerns, share their complaint, that's exactly

what this individual did. Trump's been pushing to reveal the identity of this person, which could put his or her life in jeopardy, since we're in this climate of political violence, and Rand Paul has decided to follow suit. Take a look. I want to have him come up for a second, Rand Paul, your senator, a great warrior. President Trump has great courage, he faces down the fake media every day. But Congress needs to step up and have equal courage to defend the president.

And I say this to my fellow colleagues in Congress, to every Republican in Washington, step up and subpoena Hunter Biden and subpoena the whistleblower. And I say to my colleagues, if Shifty Shiff will not let Hunter Biden come, and if you will not bring the whistleblower for every Republican and Congress, should take a walk and say, this is a farce. Wow, that was excellent. Of course Donald Trump would think that's excellent, because Rand Paul is regurgitating the same types of attacks

against the whistleblower that Donald Trump has been pushing out there. And remember, at this point, with what we know in regard to, the testimony that's been given by Trump administration officials, and what we know based on what Trump released himself with the summary of the phone conversation with Latimer Zelensky, the whistleblower at this point is completely irrelevant. So why does he want to reveal the identity of that person? This is a form of political intimidation, and now you have Rand Paul playing along with this nonsense, and it's so incredibly shameful and so embarrassing. Yeah, man, there's so much stuff in there. Obviously, that's

That was a cringeworthy, pathetic display. I think that's my initial response. I mean, to use shifty shift, like you, Rand Paul definitely does not think that that's clever at all. He doesn't think that that's how politicians should comport themselves in public. He doesn't, but he has to do it anyway, and he's willing to do it anyway. And that is, I don't know at this point if he's more pathetic than Lindsey Graham, who obviously switched from being really against Donald Trump before he became elected.

to now being his go-to cheerleader or Ted Cruz, you know, was raising money for him. I also wonder, like I look at this as an outsider. I'm not a politician, I've never run for election, I've never had to run for reelection. Maybe I'm being naive. Maybe it is actually smarter to, you know, debase yourself in public over and over and over and weather this storm and still have a career when Donald Trump goes away. Maybe it's better to unmanned yourself publicly over and over again and then just continue on.

I'm going to, and it's going to seem random, bring Bernie Sanders into this conversation, right? Because the appeal of someone like Bernie Sanders is the fact that whether you agree with him or not, he is a principled individual period. He pushed for things that were unpopular at the time that he pushed for them, including gay rights, decades before other members of Congress were willing to support gay rights. He is not a politician. He is not a careerist. He is a person who actually has principles, who has values, and wants to represent people

based on those principles and values. Then you look at the vast majority of politicians, but certainly Republican lawmakers under the Trump administration. What Trump has really done a good job of is shine a light on all of these unprincipled careerists who, you know, again, during the election had some very strong criticisms of Donald Trump. And now all of a sudden they tuck tail, my name is Rieke, I'm going to go ahead and do and say anything you want because my political career is much more important than doing the right thing. That's what Rand Paul did in that video. Yeah, and in this particular topic,

I mean, Bernie Sanders, he did stand against Donald Trump. He had the integrity that after fighting through the primary with an amazing campaign, he opposed Donald Trump in the general election and was attacked by a lot of people, some of which had formerly supported him for not simply giving fan service to his fans and saying, eh, you just pretend for the next couple of years that Donald Trump isn't president or whatever. He has stood against him. Right. And so it was obviously an integrity move by Bernie Sanders.

In terms of the focusing on the whistleblower and the transcript, I just think it's an awesome little puzzle. Like the focus on the whistleblower when you made the great point, who cares who the whistleblower is? Like Sanlin today said more than the whistleblower ever did, let alone all of the others. It's so irrelevant. But focusing exclusively on that and having right wing media focus just on that and having your fans think about just that means that they don't have to actually think about all the

other evidence that's coming out. And I think the transcript thing is even better. I think that one of the important things about creating effects. fascist movement is that fascist leaders like to demonstrate their power and authority. I've had authors on to talk about this by saying the most audacious lies imaginable and thereby showing that they can have power over truth itself. And so to say read the transcript, when we already know what's exactly in the transcript, we know what it says, they know what it says if they've read it, to go on saying that as clear

as the actual evidence is, I think is playing into that. It's creating a cult where we glorify a convenient lie. You're absolutely right. But there is one small correction. We haven't actually read the transcript. Remember, the actual transcripts. Well, we've read what is available. We've read a summary of the transcript, which Donald Trump put out, right?

His administration put out. I would love to read the actual transcript, which is secured in a top secret server. So, yeah, let's read the full transcript. Go ahead. I would love to read it. So you have all the supporters in the back wearing shirts that say, read the transcript. It must be a really popular shirt that they all showed up in that shirt. I know, it's hilarious.

All right, well, we're not even done with Rand Paul. If you thought that was bad, what you're about to watch is even worse. Take a look. Hunter Biden made $50,000 a month. That's the definition of corruption. We know he got it only because of his family connections. we also now know the name of the whistleblower. The whistleblower needs to come before Congress as a material witness because he worked for Joe Biden.

At the same time Hunter Biden was getting money from corrupt oligarchs, I say tonight to the media, do your job and print his name. Yeah, revealing the name of a woman. whistleblower who wish to remain anonymous is not the media's job at all, right? It's not the media's job to do any politician's bidding. And it shouldn't be Rand Paul's job to do Donald Trump's bidding. And if you can recall, Rand Paul seemed to have some pretty negative things to say about Donald Trump back in 2015 when he was running against him in the Republican primary.

I'd love to remind you guys if you forgot. Take a look. I kind of have to laugh when I think of sounds like a non-secretor. He was asked whether or not he would be capable, and it would be in good hands to be in charge of the nuclear weapons, and all of a sudden there's a sideways attack at me. Or my favorite is, yeah, the reason I tell women they're ugly is because I'm so good-looking. Everybody knows I'm good-looking, right? I think really there's a sophomore quality that is entertaining about Mr. Trump.

I think his response, his visceral response to attack people on their appearance, short, tall, fat, Ugly. My goodness, that happened in junior high. Are we not way above that? Would we not all be worried to have someone like that in charge of the nuclear arsenal? Jake, first of all, Rand Paul shouldn't even be on the stage. He's number 11. He's got 1% in the polls and how he got up here.

There's far too many people. Anyway, I never attacked him on his look and believe me, there's plenty of subject matter right there. That I can tell you. So, I mean, it's incredible because all these people who are doing Trump's dirty work for him, hate him. I have no doubt that Rand Paul hates him. I have no doubt that Lindsey Graham hates him. I have no doubt that Ted Cruz hates him. But because of Republican voters and where they stand on Donald Trump's disgusting behavior, you have all these unprincipled Republican

politicians, again, tucking tail and supporting anything and everything Donald Trump does, including revealing the name of this whistleblower. And I want to just read one quick comment. This is from Mark Zed, he is the whistleblower's attorney. He says, quote, a member of Congress who calls for the identity of any lawful whistleblower to be publicly revealed against their wishes, disgraces the office they hold and betrays the interests of the Constitution and the American people. He's absolutely right. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, I guess he was about to do that. Didn't he make fun of Rand Paul's hair on the debate stage? I mean, he made fun of everything. debate that we saw with the plane in the background. Yeah, you're right, all of the people who now find themselves to be his strongest supporters are those that he attacked most viciously and mocked the most. I mean, Lindsey Graham obviously would be up there, Ted Cruz, he told vicious lies about his dad, mocked his wife's appearance, Rand Paul, he mocked him over and over.

Hugh Hewitt, who would later be a moderator in one of those debates, he made fun of the ratings of his radio show at a presidential debate, and now Hugh Hewitt, his whole career is defending Donald Trump, Chris Christie's mocked his way any number of times, and these are Trump's defenders. And that debate was just a quick reminder that obviously Donald Trump making it through the primary, becoming the Republican nominee, becoming the president, the jokes on us because he's done horrible damage to our country. But all of those other Republicans on this stage, they didn't yet really understand who their voters were.

And they would learn through the course of that primary. Yeah, it's incredible. Rand Paul thought, oh no, there's plenty of like, clever intellectual libertarians who will support me when I run for president. Mm-mm. Nope, that's not how it worked out. Well, I do want to refer to Rand Paul's Twitter bio because it is relevant to the conversation. He says via Twitter, I fight for the Constitution, individual liberty, and the freedoms that make this country great. I'm really curious what his father thinks about his latest, you know, Trump adventures,

because Ron Paul, Rand's father, penned a USA Today op-ed not too long ago in 2017 titled Whistleblowers Are Heroic Patriotic. And should be tracked down and killed to finish that family story there. Yeah, and there was a great little lower third there that acknowledged it. And I guess it's obvious, but yeah, Rand Paul's up. He would not have gotten anywhere in politics if it wasn't for his father. And Donald Trump wouldn't be anywhere if it wasn't for his father, even more so for Don Jr. when he speaks at those, all of them.

It's just a whole bunch of people who are handed their positions. You're not here because of your dad? Who's my dad? Anybody in the audience? You know what my dad did? I mean, we ran a printing press, okay? We're kind of here because of our dads. Well, yes, obviously.

But I'm saying it's not like, oh, well, at a young age, John Newy'd enter the Iderola family business of political years. political YouTube commentary, but so many politicians are only there, either because it was handed to them by their father, or some of them, it was just a dynastic thing that, well, you were a politician in San Francisco, and there had been one congressperson for 30 years, and they handed it to you to hold it for 30 years. It's a weird industry in that way. And, you know, there was a lot of media figures who were critical, even Cuomo, who's

one of the ones who's giving opportunities of progressives and everything, he got some strikeback for mocking Rand Paul and Don Jr. on this issue. It's like, just, it's not the, it doesn't, if you have a famous family, it doesn't mean you have to go live in a ditch somewhere, but acknowledge the privilege that you had. Right, absolutely. I mean, people want to make themselves out to be like martyrs or, you know, incredible people who did incredible things. But yeah, some of us do get like a head start in life. And so just acknowledge it when you have that privilege, just like you mentioned. All right, well, for our members, we We have some wonderful video on Rand Paul that we're gonna save for the post game.

So if you're interested in becoming a member, that really does help to support this show. We wouldn't be able to do it without our members. Just go to t.t.com slash join. And I'm gonna show you wonderful video of Rand Paul and his reaction at a Trump executive order signing. It's so good. It's bad. It's bad for Rand Paul.

So good. All right. So let's move on to some more impeachment related news. Congressional lawmakers, specifically the very committees that are conducting the impeachment investigation, have begun releasing the transcripts of the Trump officials who have testified in closed-door hearings. Now, there are two individuals who had testified earlier. One of them is Marie Yovanovitch, she is the former ambassador to Ukraine.

The other is Michael McKinley, former Mike Pompeo aide. Now, there was some pretty damning stuff in their testimony, and I want to share that with you today. So for instance, the U.S. ambassador was seen as insufficiently loyal to President Trump. This is about Yovanovitch, and was the subject of a campaign by the White House and its allies to undermine her. So this is really fascinating stuff, because Yovanovitch was a career ambassador. She had done some incredible work in Armenia, for instance.

And so she knew what the rules were. She knew what the protocol was when it came to dealing with foreign relations. But she noticed that there were some strange things going on with Donald Trump, his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, the types of demands that were made of the Ukrainian government. And so rather than, you know, maybe don't break the law and don't ask a foreign government to dig up dirt on your political allies, political rivals, let's just go ahead and get rid of Yovanovitch. That's essentially what happened.

So testimony from both officials underscored the reluctance by the state department to issue a public show of support for Yovanovitch as she came under fire from the president's allies. The two officials also described an environment in which people constantly worried about a rogue tweet from Trump's Twitter account. No, but that's real. That's a weird way of describing that. But it's so true.

I mean, you see it every day. Republican lawmakers are so scared of Trump targeting them through a tweet that they will do anything and everything he wants. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a sick movement. Like we were right there, it was that she's insufficiently loyal, and we know that loyalty is the most important thing in this particular type of political construct they're creating. And we just showed the video of Rand Paul, who, I mean, everyone in the audience has hated

Rand Paul, but Trump claps from him so now they like Rand Paul. And I think like, would that happen to us? Like if Bernie Sanders gave a speech and he brought out, now next up is a guy I've always liked and it's Rahm Emanuel, would we cheer for Ram Emanuel? No. Or like if he tweeted like, you know what, been trying to work with AOC, she's weak, weak AOC. Would we hate AOC?

No. But like on that side, it is so contingent on what the dear leader says on any given moment. And you'll flip your evaluation back and forth. It's a very flexible position. Yeah, it's interesting because the rules that have traditionally applied to politicians somehow don't apply to Trump when it comes to his base, when it comes to voters. They will change course in a second if he decides he wants to contradict himself, right? It's pretty incredible.

Now, I want to read you a portion of Yovanovitch's testimony. she said, quote, if you have the president's son saying, you know, we need to pull these clowns or however he referred to me, it makes it hard to be a credible ambassador in a country. So she's being undermined by lunatics and idiots like Donald Trump's children, right? And then you have McKinley who said during his testimony, he repeatedly voiced a frustration with what he viewed as a lack of support for career diplomats from State Department leaders as the Ukraine scandal burst into public view, the top, or I should say the former top Pompeo aide told lawmakers that he had three conversations with the Secretary of State

about issuing a statement in support of Yovanovitch, but Pompeo ultimately decided not to publicly back the ambassador. I wonder why. Right, exactly. And so he's not going to back the ambassador when Donald Trump wants to push her out so he can find some sort of yes man or whoever, whoever he can find. that's going to just go along with what he wants to do and not raise any questions. Yovanovitch said that Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union, urged her to tweet out,

tweet out there that you support the president in order to bolster her job security. Yovanovitch, to her credit, declined, telling investigators that she just didn't see that there would be any advantage to publicly taking on a fight with those who were criticizing me in the United States, given the State Department's silence. Yeah, and look, I don't know that she's necessarily the greatest example of this, but some combination of her and Vinland and others who've been wrapped up in this. It's a reminder that for all that we have been trained to see these little back and forth to these little fights through just partisan lenses, and again, going back to loyalty,

there is an actual job to be done, and being in the Foreign Service doesn't mean that you're an awesome expert or anything, but you are supposed to be well-trained. with a lot of experience and contacts in the region. And for many Trump supporters, all that they think about, when they think about the Ukrainian government is, what can they potentially give us about Biden? But Ukraine is also in an incredibly complex and dangerous situation right now. And its future is by no means assured to be free of further aggression from Russia. We need skilled people, they are dealing with this.

And when you're just continually flushing out people who are sure, they're experts in the region, speak the language, they know about it, they have tons of contacts, but they're not sufficiently loyal to the president. That does not serve our interests at all. And it certainly doesn't serve our so-called democracy. Because then you have this dictatorial regime and you're not allowed, you know, for all the right wingers who make a big deal about protests in regard to conservative speakers on college campuses, right?

You should be able to disagree with one another, you should be able to hear ideas that are different than yours. I mean, the President of the United States, the very person that they support, refuses to have anyone around him who will ever call into question his actions, criticize him. He has surrounded himself. He's actually insulated himself so he doesn't have to deal with any type of criticism. Yeah, Yovanovitch, she turned the dial of ideas to too hot. Too hot.

So she had to be cast out of there. Yep. Yeah. Well, there was some more testimony released to the public today, and we will talk about that when we return from this next break. And then later on in the show, we will discuss that tragic story regarding Mormons who were

murdered in Mexico. We'll be back. We need to talk about a relatively new show called Un-F-E-N-F-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.

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So search for UNFDR in your podcast app today, and get ready to get informed, angered, and entertained all at the same time. Welcome back to TYT, Anna and John with you. John, question. Oh, God. How do you invest? I don't, really. Yeah. I have a 401k, so it invests?

Yeah, so investing is tough, right? It's complicated if you didn't really study it at some point in your life, you don't really know where to start or what to do, is this a good investment, bad investment, stocks, bonds, I don't know what's going on. Luckily, we have a partner called Doe, and what they do is they ask you about your passions, they ask you about your interests, and they help you invest your money based on how you answer those questions. So if you go to doe.com slash t-y-t, you can learn more about the service.

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Can you imagine if we had an- Exxon ad on the show, that would be insane. Oh, by the way, every once in a while, when it comes to various online platforms that our show streams on, people will bring up ads that play before the video or in the middle of the video. We don't choose those ads. No. That is the platform selling the ads and placing them on our content. So if the ad is for a company that actually goes against what our core values are, just know that they are paying

us to basically criticize them, which is nice. And the algorithm sort of makes sense in a very simplistic way. Like if I do like a Trump story and then the ad is for like Trump's official impeachment survey, I didn't choose that. Or if we do like a thing about like Roundup and then a Monsanto ad plays before it, it's like okay, those are related I guess. Yeah, but the messages are very different. Could you watch the video algorithm?

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All right, great. Let me read a few member comments and then we'll move on. Imploded Brainy says, Rand is about as genuine as his hair piece. Does he have a hair piece? I think it's hair. I have a lot of issues with Rand Paul, but I think his hair is fine. And even like when Trump was about to insult him on his looks, I was like, dude, seriously, you're calling him.

I know, I know, it's amazing. You're a mess. It's amazing. You're barely human. What are you doing? Kethos says, why does Rand Paul dress like a toddler? He's probably talking about this fetter vest. Yeah, there was issues with that.

I'll grant you that. Also, there's nothing you can do about the podium, but he was like, let me tell you about the impeachment. Dude, you gotta get a little boosty, like a little, you know, a little Applebox or whatever, a little boosty boost. And then from TYT live on Twitter, Gregory Harding, I have to read your comment. You're being too hard on Trump. I mean, is he really that bad if you let his kids hang out with Michael Jackson?

Oh, don't even bring that up. I forget which son, probably Don Jr., was like, my father can't be racist. He allowed us to hang out with Michael Jackson. That's, you could write a book about that statement. Ooh. Let's move on. It's a weird thing to say. Yeah, very weird.

Today. Yeah. But I don't want to get the Twitter stuff started about Michael Jackson. So let's talk a little more about the transcripts that congressional committees are releasing. Congressional committees conducting the impeachment investigation into Donald Trump have begun making the process more public by releasing the transcripts of Trump officials who have testified behind closed doors. Now, earlier we spoke a little bit about the ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and what she

had said while she testified. But today, there was the release of testimony by Gordon Sondland, who is the EU ambassador, and also Kurt Volker, who was the former U.S. Special Envoy to Ukraine. So I want to share a little bit about the testimony that they gave. Sonland actually testified that it would be improper for Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's personal lawyer, to push the Ukrainians to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden or get involved in the 2020 election. Asked if it was illegal during his testimony, Sondland responded with, I'm not a lawyer, but I assume so. Sondland also emphasized that Pompeo was fully aware of Rudy Giuliani's involvement in the shadow foreign policy that was happening.

Volker gave Congress copies of text messages he had exchanged with Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and senior State Department diplomats. he denied participating in any effort to dig up political dirt on former vice president Joe Biden, but the text revealed that he had talked to Ukrainian officials about launching politically charged investigations. So Volcker didn't immediately, he wasn't as, in my opinion, damning in his testimony as others were. He tried to make it appear as though like, no, I didn't see that. I didn't think my involvement, what are you talking about?

Not my involvement. But remember, it is important that he is. the one who provided the text messages that were incredibly damning and did show clear quid pro quo. Yeah, and considering all that came out today, you know, the Volker transcripts, we have more from Sondland, Sondland confirms the quid pro quo, I immediately want to know where's the whistleblower, what's his name, I don't know, again, it's just ridiculous that that's what they're focusing on. They're all wrapped up in this.

The Volcker thing is interesting because all that that really seemed to add was sort of implicating Pompeo, at least to some extent in this. But it would be bizarre if Pompeo hadn't known about what was going on because you had a diplomatic team inside of the State Department who was trying to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. You had the shadow diplomatic team outside the State Department. If Pompeo didn't know about that, that would be a bizarre turn of events. But as interesting as the Volker stuff is, the Sondland stuff is far worse.

And it's, we've gotten to this weird place where he's asked about Rudy Giuliani, you know, pushing for them to investigate Biden, and he says, you know, it's probably a crime. But like, dude, you did the same thing. Is that less of a crime? Maybe, because you were at least a government employee, maybe it is less of a crime. I don't know. I mean, he did it at the direction of Donald Trump, right? And so he's got to recognize that.

And look, I think the fact that some of these Trump officials are complying with subpoenas while others refuse to do so might mean that these. officials are hoping that there would be some leniency if the conclusions of these investigations find criminality on their end, right? So maybe that's why they're complying, I'm glad they're complying, but I, this doesn't happen often, I want to give Democrats some credit on a little bit of their strategy, okay? So you made a little bit of a face, but look, the reason why I say that is because at this point in the game, Trump administration officials are refusing to testify.

They are refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas. There have been a number of Trump officials who are basically telling congressional committees, no, we're not playing ball. The Justice Department has told us that we don't need to play ball, so we're not gonna play ball. But the way Democrats have responded to that is, okay, well, we already have a ton of damning testimony, and since we're making this process public, we're gonna release the transcripts one by one by one and really make our case to the public. Yeah.

So I think that that is a smart strategy. I think that we're making this public at this point is a good idea, because you do need to make your case and Trump's base is Trump's base. I don't know if they could ever be persuaded, but it's not about them, it's about independent voters who are increasingly supportive of not only impeachment, but the removal of Donald Trump. And of course, maybe some moderate Democrats who were kind of on the fence about this. I mean, I think that those groups are interesting. For me, it's not about any of that.

It's about the truth. Oh, I mean, I'm 100% agree with you. Exactly. And yeah, so I guess it's their strategy is that you guys have all been saying, you just want to know what's going on in these rooms, and you could probably just ask the many Republicans that are in there, but you don't want to do that, fine, so we'll release the transcripts. And you had bookended finger and ears denial of what's actually going on from Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham.

So Donald Trump yesterday tweeted, if Shifty Schiff releases the transcripts, you can't even trust him, he probably just makes it up, to which Jim Jordan was asked, are they gonna be fake? And he's like, no, they're gonna be the real transcripts, what are you talking about? But Donald Trump tried to prep his base to not pay attention to what would be coming out. He apparently was clued into the fact that this was gonna be bad for him. And today, after we get these new transcripts, Lindsey Graham says, no, this whole thing is so phony, I'm not reading any of them. Which is a weird defense because you're definitely seeing the headlines.

You know what they include whether you're reading them yourself or not. But this refusal to accept reality, maybe it's the best strategy they have, considering as you pointed out, his base is unlikely to abandon him anyway. Axios had a poll today, 62% of people who approve of Donald Trump's job said they cannot come up with anything that would cause them to question him. So maybe it is a good strategy, if seemingly irrational for me. the outside. Oh, God, that is depressing, it really is.

And one final point, one line of defense, it's not even defense, it's just a way of attacking the impeachment investigation, is Republican lawmakers keep referring to those conducting the impeachment investigation as a cult. That's rich, considering Donald Trump's base, which is basically a cult at this point. And they say that there's nothing that could make them question Trump. Yeah. Come on. Yeah, last week we had an author on who wrote a book about the cult of Trump.

He had been in a cult for a long time, the Moonies. And so he talked about his experience in there and what it was like and tried to analyze Trump supporters' behavior based on that. And more importantly, gave advice for if you know a strong Trump supporter, what can actually be done to sort of get through to them. Because a lot of the knee-jerk things you might do don't actually work. They just cause a person to cling more closely to the cult. So anyway, it's on the damage report.

You can look for that. All right. So let's move on to completely different news, although it's super tragic. So Donald Trump has threatened to get the U.S. military involved in Mexico following a tragic story of 10 Mormon women and children who were killed in possible cartel violence. This story is so devastating and so depressing. And, you know, look, Donald Trump says all sorts of things. who knows if he's actually going to get the military involved.

But let me give you the details on the story. The slain victims include three women, four small children and two infants. Family member Alex LeBron said from Mexico, that was his initial statement. Initially the number was nine individuals murdered, that was increased to 10 later. The victims were all shot in vehicles while driving. Women and children were massacred, burned alive. mothers were screaming for the fire to stop. Again, there were children burned alive in this attack.

So authorities are still investigating this, but they believe that this is possibly mistaken identity. There are cartels who are fighting one another in this part of Mexico. And so they believe that, you know, this caravan of Mormons, there were about three cars carrying them, were mistaken as. gang members, cartel members, that kind of stuff. So I'm going to show you a video. It's difficult to watch. It is a grandfather who is taking video of one of the burnt cars. It's super emotional. So I want to give you that warning.

But with that said, let's watch. Nita and four of my grandchildren are burnt and shot up, right on the road out of La Mora. So the victims had dual citizenship. They were, you know, U.S. citizens, but they also had a ranch in Mexico. Yeah, I mean, it's devastating. The video especially, like, God, hearing someone have to describe that, like you try to put yourself in that place, but it's It's an unimaginable situation for him to have to go back there and to try to carry on, but also imagining the actual event happening. It's just devastating.

Whether it was an intentional ambush or whether it was mistaken identity really doesn't matter. Yeah, it's just terrible. It's terrible and it just reminds you of, look, a lot of our policy, and I know people don't want to hear this, but it's the truth. A lot of our policies in the United States impact and empower certain criminal activity in other countries, right? And so what was Donald Trump's knee-jerk reaction to this? I'm gonna get the military involved.

In fact, let me give you his tweet. He says, this is the time for Mexico with the help of the United States to wage war on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president. So Calderon, the former leader of Mexico, did wage a war on cartels. He did amplify the drug war in Mexico, and things got incredibly bloody. It actually made things worse. And our prohibition on drugs here in the United States empowers those cartels, right?

So how are they so powerful, where do they get their money from? It's the black market, right? So they're able to sell drugs. We did a story just, I think it was yesterday, about how the cartels are already able to breach Donald Trump's big, beautiful wall, right? Impossible. It's just. Penetrable has made a battle.

So look, I know it sounds crazy to decriminalize all drugs, but the way, if you get away from that black market, you really do take the power away from these cartels. Yeah, I don't have the solution. I do know that I don't trust Donald Trump to send U.S. troops into Mexico to start fighting cartels all over the place. And I don't even know for sure if that's what he's implying, maybe he's implying intelligence drones support supplies, I don't know, neither does he, honestly, he has no idea. He hadn't thought through the idea until he started tweeting it.

But who knows, but I don't trust him. I think it's a convenient sort of idea for him. It's convenient to say it's possible he actually genuinely cares about the people who were murdered, that is possible, it's inconsistent with his past, but it's possible. It's also possible that he likes reminding people of how dangerous Mexico is because he wants them to think of Mexicans as only criminals. That's convenient to him to make that out there. And honestly, if he were to send troops into Mexico, that would produce news on a weekly

basis that would scare the hell out of people. And that would help to reinforce the lies he's been telling them about our immigration policy and all that. It's a convenient sort of thing to set up. Whether it ever achieves its stated goal or not. Yeah, it's really devastating. Hopefully he doesn't get the military involved in this. I think there are far better ways to combat cartels in Mexico and to stop crime in Central

American countries. One thing that you can do is close gun show loopholes, so guns don't get purchased at those gun shows. And then they're smuggled into a lot of these countries, Central American countries where crime has been so brutal that people are fleeing for safety. They're coming to the United States to seek asylum, and Trump is giving them a middle finger. Like our policies matter, guys, they matter. It's not all about war, we don't immediately have to go to the militaristic option of trying to combat issues abroad.

I know that that's where we get pushed because of defense contractors, but this like knee-jerk reaction, it just, if it frustrates me and you're right, I mean, why would I be surprised? It's Donald Trump. He's never thought critically about anything other than himself. All right, we gotta take a break. I know that that was a devastating story, but don't worry. because when we come back, we're going to watch rich men cry. 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. I'm going to make an admission. It's random, but like I have to, I have to share it.

When I post pictures on Instagram or stories on Instagram of a hike that I'm on, it's usually at six in the morning or earlier. You go on hikes at six in the morning on a weekday? Yes. You're insane. No, I love it. It's the only thing that keeps me sane, to be honest with you. It's great exercise.

No, like when people say like, ugh, look at that pollution, look at that smog. It's six in the morning, guys, it's fog, it's fog. Yes, L.A. does have pollution. What you see behind me in the pictures is not smog. It is fog. It was a particularly foggy morning today. You are really defensive about L.A. smog. No, because like there's this idea.

I think it's because like members of Christian's family bring it up all the time. And I just want to like rip my hair out. Like it's not smog. Like yeah, L.A. isn't like inherently more pollution ridden than other parts of the country or other big cities. That's what I'm trying to say. It has this reputation for being like more polluted than any other part of the country. Yeah. It's just not the case. Yeah, it's, I've lived in, I've lived in the center of the country in Texas. I've lived on the East Coast. It's the same. It used to be really bad. And it could be better. It's still a city. This is why I stopped posting as many things as I

used to on social media. Like I just like nope, I'm not going to post pictures of my food. I'm going to get people angry at me because I'm eating this or I'm eating that. It's not sustainable. It's not this. Like the nitpicking. The, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Have you. Have you. Brush Charlie's tail, it's looking a bit askew. Every morning I do actually, okay? All right. How do you have time with all the hikes? I know, he goes with me.

All right, so I wanted to just quickly let you know about some exciting programming we have coming up. Cal Penn will be joining the Young Turks and the conversation on Friday, November 8th at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, 4 p.m. Pacific. Really looking forward to that. How dare you? Why? Because I'm in the first hour and you're bringing on CalPan the second hour.

No, it's actually, it's actually worse than that. So, I'm not gonna be doing- He specifically asked for that, that's what makes it worse. That's not the case, but I kind of want to say it is just to get you upset. No, so I'm actually not gonna be on Friday shows regularly anymore. Yeah, just because my workload is out of control and I need some time to focus on writing and producing no filter. So I have the weekends free, so I can maybe relax a little bit. Go on a hike or something?

I wasn't supposed to be on Friday show and then I saw the guest and I'm like, I'll be on. Friday show. I could have filled in probably. Great. It's okay. Yeah, very nice. I only watched Alice and loved it, you know, thought it was great. Yeah, great.

You could watch from the control room if you want. Thanks. Yeah, that's great. You're welcome. All right, let's get to rich men crying. The vilification of billionaires makes no sense to me. The world is a substantially better place because of Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, David Rubinstein, Bernie Marcus, Ken Langome.

This is idiocy. If you have been waiting for the moment where you get to watch rich men cry, today is your lucky day. What you just saw there was Wall Street billionaire Leon Cooperman, and he is about to have an actual emotional breakdown over the very thought of having to choose between Donald Trump or Elizabeth Warren in the general election. Watch. I am not in favor of this impeachment inquiry. I want the American people to. to the side in November of 2020, what the future should be. I think, I mean, I think it's kind of obvious people can not only see the emotion on your face, but hear it in your voice when you talk about this, Lee. Why? I care.

That's it. I mean, what? Have you, have you, have you, have you, have you, you've done this show for many years. Have you teared up on, on air ever? Yeah, I've cried. Was it about something like that? I mean, I, I, I, I, I had a moment when Trump was elected, people like to bring that up a lot, but even for that, but there have been some stories.

He is a very, very successful billionaire. There are people sleeping on the streets right now as we speak, children. There are children, American children sleeping on the streets because of the insane inequality we have in the greatest country in the world, right? In one of the richest countries in the world, he's crying because he's worried about Elizabeth Warren. And he, by the way, this came after a 20 minute rant on Warren, okay? Let me give you some more details. The Omega Advisor's CEO, that's who he is, has previously declared that a Warren presidency

would crash the stock market by 25%. That's what he's crying about. And said, they won't open the stock market if Elizabeth Warren is the next president. Wouldn't that hurt it worse? Don't you have to do the like, don't you have to do that or else there's no like, you have to trade papers? I watched that one movie in the 80s, that's all I know about trading stocks. But I think you have to do that.

Oh, God, I have more details on this. So on CNBC's Fast Money Halftime Report, Cooperman, continued to rail against Warren, including a curiously worded walkback of his previous comments that ended up comparing a Warren presidency with the attacks of 9-11. I mean, how detached from reality do you need to be? You're talking about one of the most privileged people on the planet, not just the United States, on the planet, and he's crying on national television at the thought of having to pay a wealth tax.

That was one of the things he went on a rant about, okay? Oh. Just imagine this guy. I don't know what he said that. He's like getting ready to go on CNBC and he hears the news from a few weeks ago that like Trump compared like his impeachment to a lynching. He's like, I got this. Warren, 9-11.

What are you talking? Let's say Warren became president, and let's say she passed her wealth tax, he would be a billionaire after. He would still be a billion. For the rest of his life, which probably won't be too long, but for the rest of it, he'll be a billionaire. And his kids will be fabulously wealthy. It doesn't matter if they're the dumbest kids in the world.

It takes like three generations of dumb kids to lose a billion dollars. Can we also just address the fact that everyone is incredibly dismissive, incredibly dismissive of Bernie Sanders, like Bernie Sanders is to the left of Warren, but he's not worried about Bernie Sanders because he's already determined in his mind, Sanders has no shot. This is gonna be an election between Trump and Warren, right? Now Trump, in one part of that interview, has been great when it comes to the economy, right? Because if you look at the stock market, it has been doing well under Trump. So he feels like internally conflicted because now there's this impeachment in

investigation, which he doesn't agree with. And there is some likelihood that Trump wouldn't get reelected. You'd have like a war in presidency, and he's panicking about that because he'd have to pay more in taxes and still be a billionaire. Yeah, well, the reason he's talking about her and not about Bernie Sanders is because for like the first seven months of this year, everyone was like, hey everybody, don't do what we did in 2016 where we all freak out if somebody moves in the polls and we forget that we've still got a long way to go.

Don't do that. And then Warren started to go up and literally everyone was like, what? And everyone's like, there's nobody else anymore. Joe Biden, he's been home for a couple months. He's not running anymore. It's just Warren. Even Buttigieg is like, oh yeah, it's being Warren. Nobody else is running.

I know. It's ridiculous. Calm down. Yeah, she went up in the polls, okay? We got a long way to go. So long. Yes, exactly. I want to watch the video of him crying again.

I know. That's like a little bit of a curveball. Sorry, guys. But like, just keep in mind, he is a multi-billionaire, okay? He is not sleeping on the streets. He's not worried about providing food for his family. He's not struggling. This is a man who's very privileged, and here he is crying at the thought of getting taxed a little more.

I am not in favor of this impeachment inquiry. I want the American people to decide in November of 2020 what the future should be. I think, I mean, I think it's kind of obvious people can not only see the emotion on your face, but hear it in your voice when you talk about this, Lee. Why? I care. It's it. quivers, his lower lip quivered on national television. About the prospect that Trump might get impeached.

He's crying on TV, like, we- American people to decide, please save my taxes. That was like, that was Nancy Pelosi's stance up until like a month ago. And all, those remaining few centrist Democrats and those who only turned, like, at the last possible second, remember that guy on TV, that sort of people is thinking, no, it should be the people. Constitution be damned. You commit crimes, it doesn't matter.

You just, we have a popularity contest in a year. Porre cito. All right, let's move on to other news. This is a story that I saved specifically for you, John, because you're a huge advocate of this, and so am I. So, the movement toward a four-day work week is definitely continuing to grow. In fact, Microsoft has done a little experiment in Japan where they implemented a four-day work week to see if it in any way impacted productivity. And what they found was, well,

if you've been paying attention to this movement, unsurprising, but they seem to be kind of surprised by it. Microsoft introduced a program this summer in Japan called the Work Life Choice Challenge, which shut down its offices every Friday in August and gave all employees an extra day off each week. The results were promising. While the amount of time spent at work was cut dramatically, productivity measured by sales per employee went up by almost 40% compared to the same period the previous year. So productivity went up, which is honestly so unsurprising if you're a human who's ever had to work.

Because when you don't get any time off, you really do slow down. Like I've noticed, if I, for instance, want to write no filter on a Saturday, I'm a I will take forever to write it, right? If I give myself Saturday off and I write on Sunday, I'll get through it quicker because I'm a little more rested. You need to recover. I have to recover. Yeah.

My brain is still in recovery mode. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, and part of this is me just being a baby because I acknowledge that there are many people out beyond the cameras that work way more hours than I do. But I come in early and it's tiring for me. But Brett can attest this, we go sometimes to the food truck in the middle of the day, and this happens almost every day. We've never done that where I haven't turned to Brett and said, I could lay down and fall

sleep on the pavement right now. Yeah. Like, because you just get ground down. And a lot of it's not work, it's emotional toil of social media and stuff like that. Like I've worked actual physical jobs that are far more strenuous, and even those are nothing like a lot of working class jobs. But you just get ground down by meetings and Slack and emails. and the communications and reviews and all of that stuff.

No, what you guys don't understand is as I was looking into the story, I was like, I love this, I love this, wow, increased productivity, four-day work week, and then they get to meetings. They talk about meetings. All right, I'm going to try not to be passive aggressive at all while I read the next part. In addition to reducing working hours, managers urge staff to cut down on the time they spent in meetings, and responding to emails. They suggested that meetings should last no longer than 30 minutes. Employees were also encouraged to cut down on meetings altogether by using an online messaging

app, Microsoft's of course. That's where you lose me. Yeah, messaging apps, Slack, please. Yeah. So Slack has this thing where I had to update my Slack. So I updated my Slack and instantly it had a new update it wanted me to do and I was like, nope, you got your one. But the thing is, Slack is tenacious.

So it has the thing that says, no, you gotta update this, and has a cancel button. But if you click the cancel button, it just comes back in half a second. But I figured out a workaround. If you close down Slack, it gets rid of that notice and it gets rid of Slack. Yeah, and then you don't have to look at it anymore. That's the method that I've chosen. It's good call. So thank you for doing this story.

I really appreciate it. And this sort of information is, as you pointed out, not surprising. You can find experiments like this that have been done all over the world. It is far better for the businesses if they switch over to something like a thing. three day weekend. But as I've said many times, while all of this is true, I don't care. I don't care if it cut productivity, we deserve it. We need it considering the modern world.

And we got a weekend like 70 years ago as a result of a massive labor movement. And I have a feeling our productivity has increased pretty much every year since then. And we've got no extra time. In fact, we work more hours than we did 70 years ago. And so while all of this like stuff geared towards convincing businesses to switch over is perfectly fine, I say we elect politicians who have a pro-labor stance who will put into effect regulations requiring these sorts of things nationwide. Yes, there are gonna be some cases, some industries where they're not gonna be able

to do it, but I don't think we should go to our manager's hat in hand and ask for a little bit better working conditions. I think we should demand them by electing representatives who will make it the law of the land. Bernie, Bernie. Exactly. I had a roller, I had to rolla. As he pointed out, he's spent more time walking the picket lines than all the rest of the

candidates combined. It's true. He's the guy to do it. All right, so we're gonna end this with one final question. I just wanna know, am I the Rola? Oh my God. Or, wait, damn it, I messed it up. It was worth it in the end.

Are you the Rola or am I? Okay, it's too late. All right, thanks guys. John, you are incredible, thank you for hosting our one. Thank you for having me on. And make sure you guys check out the damage report every day, Monday through Friday. It's our wonderful political morning show. Where can people watch it?

All the normal live places and on the app if you're a member, obviously, but also at YouTube.com slash the damage report. Awesome. And it's podcast. We will be back with a whole new panel. and more by subscribing to Apple Podcasts at apple.co slash t-y-t. I'm your host, Shank Huger, and I'll see you soon.