The Young Turks - Zombie Pigs Are A Thing Now And Facebook Partners With Right-Wing

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

Pigs are coming back from the dead? Daily Caller makes a deal with Facebook. John Iadarola, Brett Erlich, and Jayar Jackson, 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

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It is Friday. This is the Young Turks, and I'm Johnny Rola. And J.R. and Brett are here as well. Where's left of them? We don't know. Yeah, everybody here is sick. Everybody who's not here is sick. That's why they're not here.

Michael is going to be on the panel, but he's too sick, apparently. Some people who are here are not feeling great. There's this thing going around, apparently in Los Angeles as spring approaches, and we climb out of 60-degree weather. Yeah, we dig ourselves out of the banks of 60 degree weather. Yeah, so J.R. is feeling it was sick. I tried to get him to take Benadryl, but he wouldn't. So I guess I'm rolling solo today on the Benadryl.

John just took a Betty. I feel great. Yeah, you're good. I'm feeling good about the rundown, though. We got a lot we're going to talk about. It's pretty standard newsday, military budget, pigheads, Connell Harris. We've got all sorts of stuff. It's going to be fun.

And then the second hour is going to be awesome, too. I know Anna is really pumped about some of her stories. So both hours should be a lot of fun. Nomi Prince, Adrian Lawrence, in the house for hour too. Very exciting. And I'm gonna say this a couple of times. Yes, so I'm gonna say this a couple times throughout the course of the show, but this Sunday, big review and analysis of Game of Thrones, episode two, Jank is gonna be back, Ben is gonna be back, and Brett and I are gonna be there as well. And so we're pretty hyped about that too.

But before that, why don't we jump into some weird news? How many first hours the Young Turks have started off like this? Scientists at Yale University have brought back from the dead a pig, sort of in a very, very limited sense of the word. So what they did basically was they took pigs that had been killed and they took their heads. And within a few hours of them dying, they pumped a blood-like fluid into their system and tried to stimulate electrical activity in the brain to see if they could restore some of the function to a brain that had been dead for hours, which is not possible.

That's what we generally think. And indeed, blood vessels in the pig's brains began functioning, flowing with a blood substitute, and certain brain cells regained metabolic activity, even responding to drugs. As if the pigs needed drugs, they just came back from the dead. When the researchers tested slices of treated brain tissue, they discovered electrical activity in some neurons. So that's the good news for pig reincarnation. The bad news is the brains did not regain anything resembling consciousness.

There were no signs indicating coordinated electrical signaling necessary for higher functions like awareness and intelligence. The pigs weren't able to do any sort of complicated mathematics or anything like that. Can we please put that graphic back up for one second? Which? The name of the writer for the New York Times article, Gina Collada. Give me to Gina Collada. That's the best name I've ever seen.

That makes me word that this song, that this could be a hoax. It's not a hoax. It's not a hoax. It's not a hoax. It was on Engadgett. Yes, so it's got to be legit. I like it in gadget. Okay, so why are we talking about this, especially at the top of the first hour?

That I don't have an explanation for, but it is an interesting story because it raises interesting questions about consciousness, what dying actually means, what being reborn could possibly mean. So they were able to get limited sort of electrical signaling and things like that. But let's say they were able to get more of it, or that there was some limited form of consciousness, which also is sort of vaguely defined. I mean, this is the very beginning steps of what could be interesting, but also complicated questions for the future. Yeah, it's not always about death, I think.

So when it comes, like these animals were dead, decapitated. And also, when you said bad news was that they didn't have much feeling, at least according to the way they approached it, that's good news because, of course, one of the first worries comes with the ethical nature of this. Like, okay, you're bringing animals back to life to a certain degree. do they feel the pain that they had experienced when their heads were lopped off? And now are they in some kind of panic, confusion, terror? So all this goes down into whether or not they're worried about what's really going on.

So it's good that there wasn't much of a positive feeling that happened when they got back. So that was the good news. But this could lead to developments or some kind of assistance when people maybe aren't necessarily brain dead but have brain injury. You know, maybe something happened to someone. They can still communicate in a way to forward to everyone else. What happened to them? You know, because sometimes there's mysterious accidents or crimes, and someone is in a state of mind where they can't relay what was going on. Right, we have this way in the future possibly anyway.

But we still have this interesting version of it that we use now. Like, it does, we've only normalized it through like the show ER, but the idea that to bring someone's heart back online, we just make sure no one's touching them before we jolt them with electricity, that that seems to work, that's kind of, this is a way more intense version of that with a different organ that is even less understood. But there are some weird things out there that we have tried and been able to do that have led to these giant breakthroughs. But what's interesting to me is the only reason they were able to do this experiment so far past is because our fundamental understanding, and you ended at this, but our fundamental understanding

of what it's like to die said that these things are dead, so go ahead and do what you want with them. But the fact that now we have a different understanding of death which could change what we're able to try so that we can't do an experiment like this again, that's what's interesting.

Now the things that were once considered so dead we could experiment on them are potentially considered still alive so we can't. Under the right circumstances, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So really fast, here, a few of the questions. Some of the scientists that have been involved in discussions of this have raised.

So Nita Farahani at Duke said, we had clear lines between this is alive and this is dead. How do we now think about the middle category of partly alive? We didn't think it could exist. That's complicated philosophical territory only previously tread in the Princess Bride. It turns out, your friend here is only mostly dead. It was really ahead of its time. He's old, that's the only thing he'd do. Go through his clothes and look for loose change.

And Jonathan Marino is probably going to make a reference to Tron or something. This is wild. If ever there was an issue that merited big public deliberation on the ethics of science and medicine, this is one. But I also wanted to briefly mention the precautions that the scientists took before engaging in this activity. They did not want to take a chance that the brains might regain consciousness, unlikely as as that seemed, had the team seen electrical activity suggesting actual consciousness, they

plan to give the brains anesthetic drugs and cool them immediately to stop the process. And also they would have called in the guys with shotguns to stop the zombie pigs from emerging. There was definitely some, at least one of the nerds in the room was worried about that. And I have to be very vague, but I am fairly certain it might never actually get made, but there is an entertainment property involving zombies that starts with pigs. I can't go more specific than that. Oh, really?

But anyway, one thing I thought was interesting, I wanted to respond to something you said, J.R, about wanting to make sure that they don't experience too much pain. Isn't it amazing? I understand these are totally different industries. But in this industry, it's like this pig head separated from a body, has been dead for four hours, it's already cold, but let's take every precaution to make sure that it doesn't experience any pain. Fully living pigs, line them up, I gotta hit him in the head with this spike so we can eat them.

Isn't that amazing the different standards that we have? And pigs apparently are very intelligent, emotional, social creatures. Right. So when your objective is to make sure that there's, that, okay, it's a scientific advancement. So it looks like you should somehow have care for these creatures. But when your objective is to eat them, it doesn't matter anymore, right? So it's just a matter of the, as you said, the industry that you're in. Because, and it is, again, I know we've been joking a lot about this, but it sounds like this could lead to mad scientist type of stuff, right?

We don't want a mad scientist who's a genius in regenerating brain energy to start bringing bad people back to life that have been dead for 10 minutes, right? Or hours in this case. Yeah, I think that the way that this is likely to be used more is not in bringing fully dead or even mostly dead people back. It's people have sections of their brain that are considered dead. And as you said, as Brett Als, you said, this is one of the organs that, the brain that we don't know as much about as other organs.

So in discovering it, you have to take precautions as to what you're doing and what can be sensed, I suppose. I say we do it. I say we do all the experiments we want to do on kind of dead pigs. Just, I don't know, that's not a popular opinion. The number one takeaway in this article for me is the name of the fluid that they used to reanimate the pigs, which is, I'm not kidding. Brain X. It's just called Brain X, so that'd be Bronner. I'm excited about this, man.

I know, again, this is very early, probably never going to happen type of stuff. But this is how advancements happen, maybe in other realms once they've realized this. I mean, look, we have heart transplant stuff we couldn't do before. There's advancements in medicine and things that we couldn't do before that we can do. And who knows what this could lead to? Pigs started all. Okay, I have other pig-head related stories, so let's transition to those now. I'm joking, don't worry about that.

Well, Facebook is adding new partners in its effort to stop the spread of fake news, but it's going in an interesting direction with it. They said on Wednesday that they had added check your fact.com, which is part of the daily caller as one of its US media partners in an initiative that has faced growing backlash from journalists and internal problems. So basically they have these partners that have been verified in various ways which will go over, which will help them to determine the veracity of stories. because Facebook supposedly can't do it itself, even though I've seen the revenue they pull.

And it seems like if anybody could, they probably would be able to. So they're outsourcing it to some extent. But let's talk about who they're adding, because now we have Check Your Fact.com. That is billed as a fact check department of the daily caller. And the site says it's nonpartisan and loyal to neither people nor parties. I think they mean specific people, hopefully they are loyal to people in general. Not even people. Like the concept of people?

Nope. Who do you serve if not? Anyway, it has dedicated reporters rating content as true or false and says it is a for-profit subsidiary of the Daily Collar Inc. of which Tucker Carlson is a majority owner, which the topic is fact-checking. And Tucker Carlson, his company, is involved in this, that I think is immediately worrisome to people who want to make sure that fake news does not get spread even more than it has in the past. I thought Facebook was, this is my opinion. It's like the go-to central, grand central station of folks when they want to talk politics or have some kind of news and media discussion of people who just don't understand. So, you know, there's people who speak in memes and jiffs. And there's people who, once you see a meme, they're like, oh, man, that chart on that meme must be true because someone made it. I feel like that's where Facebook lives.

And I thought that was just a lot of times with the users. A lot of times, you know, my mother, uncles and stuff who are kind of new to the internet, maybe they'll get fooled by Facebook more than I would. But it seems Facebook doesn't get it either. Because then they partner with people, and maybe they did their research and they just don't care, or they didn't and just followed the meme trail and following the Daily Callers branch to find a fact check. The irony of that, it seems like you have to plan it out to get it that wrong. There's a couple things.

First, I used to work in an era of the internet where the kind of person you're describing used Yahoo Mail and Yahoo! Everything. And that, I think, is what Facebook is now. Because Yahoo Mail was presented in a way it was like after AOL where

it was like, Mom signed up for this email address so she could have some email. And then it also kind of put everything together in a way where you could read your email and get your news and do everything as a one-stop shop. And I think that's where Facebook saw an opportunity and it went from people who are exactly our age at the beginning who were

really focused on getting to see pictures of their friends. But then as they kind of moved on from that, it turned into a wildly different beast. And the other part of it is it seems like they're trying to balance things out. Their idea of fact checking isn't fact checking using empirical approaches, but rather fact checking where you cancel everything out by having not just a left-leaning fact-checker, which itself is nonsense. Fact-checkers a fact-checker, and then a right-leaning fact-checker. Well, and yes, and I don't even know what is a left-leaning fact-checker. I don't know.

That's sort of the issue. You have traditional non-partisan fact-checkers, and then you have spin-offs of right-wing media sites. That's not balanced, really, I would say. And the issue, too, is that let's say that Fox News, Facebook. Let's say that Facebook had no inherent bias whatsoever, and they were gonna set up something like this. You might think, okay, well, then they're gonna get several different types to balance each

other out. But the issue is that we know the pressure that they're under. And the pressure is that the right wing complains constantly that Facebook is biased against them. The left in the center don't say anything. And so inherently, like how many different initiatives as Facebook started up that have been biased towards the right? of the complaining, a constant whining of the right.

In any event, I want to go a little bit more into depth into this particular example and see, in general, we may not like this idea. In this particular case, is it actually a bad thing? So asked about its collaboration with the Daily Caller, a Facebook spokesperson, spokeperson noted that any news organization can apply to join the program after it gains certification from the nonpartisan international fact-checking network run by the Journalism Institute pointer. could not be reached, could not immediately be reached.

So they apparently are going through the same process that others might. So we decided we would take a look at some of their fact-checking and see how trustworthy it actually is. So like a lot of these, not necessarily like Polite effect, but like Snopes, for instance, they have different sorts of fact-checking. So some are like this. Is Beetlejuice 2 coming to theaters? And at the bottom it says verdict false, so I got excited for nothing.

Thank you, Check Your Fact.com. Apparently it was just a fan thing, but okay, they're fact checking that. That's technically true. And then they have checks of memes, which is also popular on, I think Politifact might do some of this, but also Snopes as well. So if we bring this up, you'll see a meme that was spread. Teddy Roosevelt supposedly saying, to anger a conservative lie to him, to anger a liberal, tell him the truth. He didn't say that. It's verdict false.

So that is a meme that is intended to make conservatives look better. did rate it as false, because it is false, he didn't actually say that. So the issue is that that's like entertainment and memes and stuff like that. Well, what about actual news? So they had a fact check. Have millions of Americans lost health insurance under Trump? Well, if you've been watching this, then you might be, you might know the answer to that one.

But let's bring up that graphic again, because you'll notice at the bottom, it says unsubstantiated. They give an example of a Democrat saying it, including Julian Castro. They have others, Hulian Castro, they have others as well, unsubstantiated. What's interesting is what comes right after unsubstantiated, where they say, surveys generally show that the number of uninsured Americans is growing. But the size of the increase is unclear. CDC found that as of September, there were roughly 1 million more uninsured Americans than in 2016.

A survey from Gallup, however, estimates that about 7 million more adults are uninsured under the Trump administration. So after saying it's unsubstantiated, they themselves gave multiple sources rating, between one and seven million more people losing their health insurance. This brings to mind some of the problems that we've had with Politifact as well, where they include all the information you need to understand what was really going on, but they play politics with the rating. I guess again, to not seem biased maybe.

Because they stop right there, because not you stop right there, but they know that many people stop right there. They read the bottom and people look for the red letter and it says, what's the conclusion? Oh, it's unsubstantiated, so I'm gonna take that for whatever I think. I think I need it to mean for my argument right now, because it's like the headline readers. People may read a headline in that first paragraph. That's it. People don't read the article.

Don't read the rating. Yeah, so you read the rating and found out and think, oh, that's the answer. I've read nothing else that has anything to do with this rating. This is, yeah, it's like if you saw a Rotten Tomato score of 50%, and then it turns out in the description, the answer, it said, this movie's great, everybody agrees. That's what they just did. That's insane. And that's what's so frustrating with PolitiFact.

And sometimes, and there's a separate thing that's frustrating with checkyourfact.com is that while Politifact will go through and essentially say, or Snopes specifically, we'll say, here's a meme, here's some kind of, you know, actual thing that people are talking about. And it skews more toward things in the general zeitgeist that people are talking about. There's so many things on this checkyour fact.com that are just, did this historical figure say this? Like, it is hilarious. The Beetlejuice one is, like, crazy to me that that is up there and has been. And they don't politic, they don't check more than one, maybe two things a day. Like, that's how often it happens. That was one of the one things, probably statistically from my analysis, like, that they did per day.

It was a slow news. And it just seems so much, like, to bring it back to Facebook is going through and doing this weird thing where they're trying not to be. They're trying to still be a kind of an agri or a platform and then they're putting these like half measures in place to kind of skirt responsibility and skew toward the politically expedient thing versus what is actually the right thing to do. Yeah. That's what it seems like to me because why would I guess they're saying in this world, I guess we're a techie kind of place where we just want to get a lot of different people's advice. a lot of different things. And it is so frustrating from not just an end user, but also from someone who's in the business that can be affected by these decisions so much. Yeah.

So we also wanted to find out, you know, in general, so we looked at a few, but that's anecdotal. In general, how accurate is check your fact.com. Well, there's a website, media bias fact check that checks other outlets actually and sees how reliable they are. They said, overall, we rate the daily caller strongly right biased based on story selection that almost always favors the right and mixed for factual reporting due to numerous failed fact checks. The daily caller is a source that needs to be fact checked on a per article basis.

That of course is the daily caller though. And so they do choose things that are generally going to make the right look good. They have themselves failed fact checks. Now they've spun off this other thing. So it gives us some indication that, I mean, hopefully their spinoff will be more successful than their attempts to fact check themselves have been, but they're using many of the same staff. So honestly, I don't know how much more trustworthy it'll be. In general, it doesn't seem like Check Your Fact has been blatantly wrong, although they have played games, as we described.

So at the end of the day, I guess part of the reason why I'm not as outraged to some people about Facebook hooking up with Check Your Fact is because I've been following Facebook over the past few years, and I have no faith in them whatsoever in any of this. They seem to be, they waited way, way too long to do anything about this. And their efforts, I would say, have been generally laughable. They're so worried about offending people on the right who are being completely disingenuous or not engaging this in an intellectually honest fashion that I don't see what system they could set up that would be sustainable and would result in actual less fake news. Yeah, I feel like where they are geographically and in terms of how their relationship to all the data, they should have all the answer.

Yeah, you know. Let me just read one more thing just because I forgot that we also had the Check Your Fact, Media Bias fact check. They said if we're going to skip ahead, check your fact tends to select fact checks that are more favorable to the right. For example, they're more likely to select a true statement by a Republican and a false statement by a Democrat, which people should understand that. And the issue is that once it's filtered through Facebook, people will not understand that they'll think it's Facebook telling them this stuff. But even that, I'm not that shocked by. Like, PolitiFact will rate the accuracy of statements.

And then you can look for a particular politician what percentage of their statements turned out to be true. And I see people use that statistic all the time, even though it doesn't mean anything. Like they'll say, well, 75% of what Trump says is untrue. Well, no, 75% of the things that PolitiFact chose to look into. which is not a general sample of all of his sentences. It doesn't mean he's not a liar. It's the biggest liar in our country,

but I'm worried when people play with stats in this area. Sorry, last thing for me, the Teddy Roosevelt thing, if you have to back-check whether or not Teddy Roosevelt said a good thing about conservatives and a bad thing about liberals, you shouldn't have been basing anything you're thinking on Teddy Roosevelt. So you think if you post a meme about Teddy Fn Roosevelt on someone else's page and then they go, oh, I'm going to change my mind because Teddy Roosevelt,

but who I don't really care about when he died years ago said or didn't say, is going to change my argument with you about health care in 2019. The fact you have to scour through memes because people like use them as argument pieces is already the first problem we got. And number two, Ma, I'm sorry, I love you. You don't actually use Facebook for these things. You just like to use it for everything else, and I don't like it. That's what I meant to say.

I didn't mean to say that you follow memes as a bunch of. political argument. My bad mind. Yeah. At the end of the day, this is pretty much all about your smile. Okay, we're going to take a short break. We come back and last morning news together. We need to talk about a relatively new show called Un-F-The Republic, or UNFTR. As a Young Turks fan, you already know that the government, the media, and corporations are constantly peddling lies that serve the interests of the rich and powerful. But now there's a podcast dedicated to unraveling those lies, debunking the conventional wisdom.

In each episode of Un-B-The-Republic or UNFTR, the host delves into a different historical episode or topic that's generally misunderstood or purposely obfuscated by the so-called powers that be. Featuring in-depth research, razor-sharp commentary, and just the right amount of vulgarity, the UNFTR podcast takes a sledgehammer to what you thought you knew about some of the nation's most sacred historical cows. But don't just take my word for it. The New York Times described UNFTR as consistently compelling and educational, aiming to challenge conventional 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. Welcome back to the first hour, everybody. Before we get back to the news, we got some tweets, got something to tell you about. So let me start there. There is a very good chance by now that you've probably seen the new Little Dickie video. And I know that because it's a new music video and even I saw it, which means it must be going really viral. And so this is a short film, very creative, featuring over 30 different celebrities who

are collaborating in human and animal form to raise awareness about the environment and climate change. And this is coming out just before Earth Day, so obviously perfect timing there. Portions of video and song proceeds are going to go to benefit nonprofits working in the area of climate change. And Leonardo DiCaprio, who you actually saw in that image, is featured there. Obviously, he is a longtime environmental activist, and he actually recently signed up and invested through Aspiration, which is where you can actually get involved in this, because you can also

sign up for free at aspiration.com slash TYT and help save the planet through progressive, responsible investment. Now, we also got a lot of comments and tweets. Many of you now scared about the zombie apocalypse. Jet 53 says, so you're saying I should run out and buy a crossbow like Daryl Dixon from the Walking Dead? Just with the dragon glass in case. Just in case, it's that kind of dead.

I think Jeff wanted to buy a crossbone. He just wants us to say it's okay. Joy said Brett and the Princess Bride maybe spit my coffee. That's good. I mentioned in the break, as I went to make a joke about Princess Bride, I could feel him comedically bristling with wanting to talk about Princess Pride. I knew he was thinking it. Do you know it goes well with that coffee?

A nice MLT, a mutton lettuce and tomato sandwich where the muddn is nice and lean and the tomato, They're so pert. That's another pretty good, that's a pretty good impersonation. Not bad. Okay, let's see. Let's see. Vincent Juarez 69, nice, said. Thank you, Brett Jaron, John, for not opening the show with the circus that is the Mueller

report. I need this refresh. We needed to. It's obviously super important information, but I'm a little bit burned out too. We're going to have a little bit on it, a little bit later on, but we have a few more other stories too. Norma 77 says, I think those scientists were heavily inspired. inspired by the Night King.

Yeah, in the background, as they plug, they turn on the machine, someone was like, no big deal. We didn't keep it in frame, John. I tried, I tried. Okay, with that, why don't we jump back to the news? You'll be shocked to find out that the military budget is going up yet again with Donald Trump proposing in his recent budget that on top of all of the big cuts to domestic and social spending. He wants $750 billion for the military. Now, of course, he has to go through the new

Democratic majority in Congress, and they have a slightly better plan. They're offering up $733 billion an increase in line with inflation. So it is still going up, but more in line with inflation, rather than the bigger is like about $20 billion more that Donald Trump wanted. And in exchange, they want increases in domestic spending that would be twice as large. But under either plan, the U.S. is expected to spend more on its military in 2020 than at any point since World War II, except for a handful of years at the height of the Iraq war. And you've probably seen many comparisons of our military spending to others, seen it overtime and everything. We've got a fun chart for you. This is not even the most recent numbers.

They're quite a bit higher now. But that's our military spending, which is above China plus Russia, plus Saudi Arabia, plus India, plus India, plus France, plus the UK. plus Japan, and when asking for this new larger budget, the Pentagon specifically said, the reason we need it is because of new military investments by Russia and China, including new, it might be hypersonic, I'm not sure, supersonic missiles that exceed the capabilities of our missile defense systems. But, like, bring that up for one more second. Like, look at Russia's military spending on there.

It's a tiny, tiny fraction of we have. Yeah, but it's supersonic. Yeah, don't quote me on the super versus hyper. In any event, they're not spending that much money. Ours is constantly going up. It's almost proportionally as high as World War II. We've been in wars since then, but we're almost capping out on the greatest war to ever wage across the face of the earth.

Does anyone feel like that is the military situation that we are in? Even the military conflicts that we are presently engaged in, the same ones that you might have been for as long as you've been alive, we could just pull out if we wanted to. And yet we're spending insane amounts, ever increasing amounts, regardless of whether Donald Trump's in office, he has a Republican majority, there's a Democratic majority. The reason for it has been so clearly articulated, I want big war, I want big arsenal. It's just such a difficult sell to make, or at least it seems like a difficult sale to make to say to people, like we want to spend less money on the military because it's so easy to say

they fear so much someone coming back with the answer of like they want to make you less safe we want to build more stuff but they want to make you less safe and that's frustrating and it's a little complicated but you essentially lay out where how is this money getting spent

if the Russians are going to design this one thing that could potentially necessitate our development of counter measures why don't we just allocate money from something that is going to be outdated and reallocate it toward handling the countermeasures.

There's not anywhere in that giant budget that we can kind of look through and say maybe we shouldn't do that. It just reeks of if we don't spend it this year, we won't be able to get it again next year. As with many things when it comes to spending tons of money on what people don't understand in this country, it's based in just throwing it by them

and not giving them those answers. Well, listen, we need this because we need it, because you don't understand it because you're not a war soldier, you're not a general, you're not a scientist, you're not a weapons developer, so you don't have any say in this, just give me your money. Now, when it comes to things like that, it's okay. I'll never forget it. Mick Mulvaney said, when they were talking about the Meals for Wheels program, he was ready

to eliminate, and before he got some pushback, he said, I can tell Bob in Virginia, hey, you know what, I can take your money and put it towards military spending, and I will. But I can't tell, you know, Molly in California, hey, you know what, I'm going to take your money and give it to someone else for Meals on Wheels because it's just not right. Why is it not right to reinvest within the country? But it's okay to say, I'm going to give it for military spending because it always goes to the last, to the very last point, first and last point, which is in this article. I hope you weren't going to quote it, John.

But it's from the Raytheon chief executive, Thomas Kennedy. The world is still a very dangerous place. I know the Democrats and Republicans that I talk to recognize that. That is the word. That is the Holy Bible of wars. It's still a dangerous place. Hey, you guys, you don't have any money? It's okay, but you're going to die instead.

And give us your money. Yeah, I want to live in a country where the CEO of Raytheon has a hard time getting politicians on the phone. And I don't want him to have casual relationships with all these politicians on both sides. I want to live. Yeah. And you know he has like a special phone. Like it's not just that. Like, he could call him on the cell, but it's like a red phone that emerges when you,

like, maybe, point, push a button. You know what else know what ever says? Okay, so Raytheon made $27 million in sales last year. And we're looking at $750 billion. Billion dollars in sales. He's a billion? Yeah, 27 million. I just wanted to make sure that everyone heard billion.

Billion dollars in sales. And the Democratic proposal is $7.33. You're going to get to all this, and I'm totally janking and jumping on you. But the point is, is that we're not worried about $750 billion or $733. But when someone says Green New Deal or says, hey, how about we do this infrastructure? or hey, how about we have this advancement in renewables? How about we try something of scientifically to advance things and maybe not destroy our environment anymore?

Oh, those kook scientists, how much they pay in you? Yeah. $750 billion maybe? Or maybe $27 billion a year to the Raytheon chief executive? Who's getting paid to lie to us again? It's also-politicians, I think. But how are we gonna pay for the Green New Deal? I don't know, how are we gonna pay $750 billion a year and increases for these war machines?

Yeah, but nothing in the Green New Deal was also in Top Gun. That's true. They would have grounded Top Gun. There'd be no planes. He would try to get rid of your Mavericks. He would see one of your mavericks. Anyway, one or two things. Your pounds and your goose.

Let me just try to get to one or two of this. Yeah. And thank you for making clear. Most people don't know that Jenks, his standard operating procedure on the show is, oh, there's some nice graphics you got there. Be a shame if something happened first. Anyway. So, there are some people who've been speaking out against this budget proposal, the Republican

and the Democratic side, and again, this is still, this is not done yet. In August of last year, 10 U.S. senators, including later presidential candidates, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kirsten Gillibrand, voted against a bill that would increase military spending, but it's still passed by an overwhelming margin, which is of course sad. And there are many people, both in the Senate and the House, they're not satisfied with this proposal at all and want to get it lower. But we know how this generally tends to go. And we need something more fundamental than fighting against one particular military budget.

We need to convince the American people of two things. One, that reducing the military budget does not endanger them. I tweeted yesterday, something that apparently, based on the reactions, is still at least semi-controversial, would anyone want to try to make the case that the safety of a regular, random American would be material affected by cutting the military budget in half? only having more than the next five largest militaries in the world would actually harm them. And I honestly don't think so, although obviously that would be political suicide for a politician to propose, apparently. Meanwhile, we also need to convince them that the things that are killing Americans cannot be defended against by a plane or a tank or a submarine.

You know how much it would cost to replace all the pipes in Flint? $55 million. But that would not be visible on the chart that we showed you the military budget. So, but that gets to... Pollution kills people, diabetes kills people, opioids kill people, loose guns kill people. And that gets to the point that that's not what it is. It's in power and influence and give in regions so that you can help the movement of goods around the world in a way that favors you. That's what it is.

When we see China is building islands in a certain part of the sea, then we are threatened by that. And so we need to spend to put tanks or to put aircraft carriers near those things to create superiority. But that's one aspect of it. The other thing that's very frustrating to me is when Trump was like, I need to build the wall and I'm going to use the Pentagon budget. The Pentagon was like, yeah, yeah, here's a bunch of stuff we don't really need to spend money on. Exactly.

There's $10 billion. It's just kind of laying around. And I'm sure of the course of your life, you've probably experienced a couple of times where the military is like this is what we need or we don't really want to use that and politicians are like, yeah, well, it gets made in my district, so have fun with this new plane that you don't want. But I think that's- It will only cost, you know, hundreds of billions off. There's just one extra point, which is the messaging of saying, don't we want to spend

our money efficiently? Don't we want to eliminate waste? Don't we want to stop throwing money away because there's this inertia of how we spend money on stuff we don't need to spend money on? That is decreasing our military spend effectively and making you less safe. So if we spend money more efficiently, and that actually ties into how Trump pitched the Boeing stuff, Boeing's charging us too much money for these planes, knock the price off. I think his side rallied around that, and I think there could be some messaging around not making you less safe by just making money disappear,

but just saying like, we are wasting this money and it's making you terribly unsafe. They forgot who said that. And there's a, I'm going to go over just a little bit. There's a massive opportunity cost as well. It's not just waste. The waste represents money that could have been spent on something that actually would have been. improve their lives and possibly prolonged it. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And the issue is that like if you were to ask, if you were to ask a thousand people randomly distributed across America, what's more likely to kill you? An ISIS fighter or heart disease, I would be really worried to ask that question because I don't know what they would answer. But that's nothing against them. That's them responding to what politicians say and what the media covers. Not to jank you, but super last thing.

I was randomly hanging out with some Turkish person in Santa Monica and they were like, Americans they're just afraid to die for no reason. Like, that's what they're more afraid of. Like, they're cool with if they die for their own reason, which is heart disease, in many cases, but they just don't want to, you know, fall off some kind of, like, Ferris wheel and die randomly or have some ISIS fighter kill them

when they're just, like, in a building. That's what it is. That's, like, our big fear. But we will kill ourselves and each other for, like, stupid reasons, but they're our reasons, damn it. Yeah, and the hope is that is that that is true of less and less people. And people seem to be taking the health care situation seriously, so hopefully that will not be the case. But the thing is, I mean, I think the best thing that's happening to drive against this continual increase in military spending is honestly the conversation about the Green New Deal,

because it gets people to think about a number of different issues as being linked together and funny need to be allocated for it. There's just, it's such a monumental task to convince people that this is not only a massive waste of money, but is actually making them less safe in practice in many different cases. And we, I mean, we've been fighting that battle for how long? TYT has been fighting it for longer than I've been working here, obviously far longer, but it is very difficult when you have almost everyone in the media and politicians on both sides of the aisle trying to convince people that there is literally nothing better or more moral in our country than the military, and our military is better the more money you pump into it.

Okay, with that, we are going to take another break. We come back. We got lots of stuff to talk about. One important thing, though, is we're going to talk about the big donors from the last couple of election cycles. Donors to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, they have now started to pick their champions. We're to break down who those are 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 the 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

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In the meantime, enjoy this free series. second. Welcome back to the Young Turks, everybody, Brent and J.R. and myself, as we've been telling you throughout the week, next Monday is Earth Day. And obviously here, the environment is one of the most important topics. I would say for me personally, it's the most important topic. And so we're doing a special to commemorate Earth Day. It's going to be Monday, April 22nd, 5 to 6.30 p.m. Pacific time. You can get uninterrupted coverage of that as a member by going to t-y-t.com slash join if you are not already a member.

In addition to myself and Jank talking about the environment, the Green New Deal, climate change, and a number of other issues, we've got a ton of great guests. Authors who've written about climate change, climate scientists, activists, we've got one of the heads of the sunrise movement. We've got Josh Fox is going to be joining us, Bill McKibben, a ton of great environmentalists and progressives who are going to be talking to us to commemorate Earth Day. So it's going to be a lot of fun. You're going to want to be a member, so you can check that out.

And with that, we jump back into the news. The big donation bundlers who supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton back during their presidential runs have not all gone all in on any candidates just yet, but they are starting to pick who they might want to support in this Democratic primary. Of 1924 big donors, 425 have contributed to the current field of candidates. And so you're obviously curious at this point, who are they supporting? We've got a cool looking but hard to decipher at this size chart for you. So I will summarize.

So you see that a big chunk of those who supported Hillary Clinton are now supporting Kamala Harris. That's I believe pretty much by far the biggest area where Clinton backers are going. The people who supported Obama who did the big fundraising for him, you see that they too are going towards Harris but also Budhijij and a number of others. Those are the ones that are sort of focused on in terms of the numbers. Harris has received donations for more than twice as many top Democratic fundraisers as their next closest competitor, Corey Booker. Well, actually didn't see on that chart, but apparently he got a lot too, who got donations from 80 Obama and Clinton Bundlers in the first quarter. Jilla Brand got donations from 67, Amy Klobuchar from 61, Pete Buttigieg, 51, quite a bit, considering that most of these donors probably weren't that familiar with him prior to the last couple of months.

And so as with a lot of areas of this election, Buttigieg is skyrocketing. Again, not necessarily amongst the small donors. We've talked about that previously, but this is amongst the exact opposite end of the scale. Go. Yeah. I get it. Like, it makes sense to me. There is this thing.

I feel like there's two groups of Democrats. There's the Democrats who are like the working class folk who are looking around for someone to rally to. And then there's the people who are very liberal, wealthy city folk who are like, I want to make a difference. I put on my North Face fleece every day and I'm ready to donate. And I need those people and I really like them. And I know that a lot of times when I talk to them, we find a lot of common ground. Those people seem to when you start talking to them say things like, I hate Bernie for what he did. to Hillary, and then everyone just goes back into a fight they had in 2016.

What I see play out in this is there are people who have a lot of money. They like Kamala Harris, and it seems like that's the person that they're rallying around. Why are they rallying around certain ones of these people? Because in reading the depths of the bundlers and the handlers and the collectors and the telemarketers and this whole process of getting people to donate, it doesn't necessarily go straight to, hey, you know what, I like that person's policies, and I'm going to give my 100 bucks to them,

whatever it is. It's, hey, if you want this kind of thing to happen, give it to me, and then I'll make sure I give it to the right privilege that you're going to make sure it supports what you want, and we call that small dollar donations. But then when the big corporations and rich folks give all their thousands of dollars at a time and pledge they're going to give millions of dollars later when someone comes in, that's what we're

really waiting on. So you need to get the startup going of saying, I got people that are getting all the small things collected and giving a certain people to give them an edge so that later people with the bigger money or people that are now going to wait until the general election start giving will say, hey, I see everyone gave to Kamala, everyone gave to Corey Booker, I think I will now too. None of it has much to do with a thought process of what the person's doing. It just has to do with convincing enough people to give enough money to make someone

look a certain way so that other people will give money later. It doesn't make much political sense. And it's also important to note that this is not a gigantic, this is about one in five of those big bundlers from past elections, but we're still very early on this process. They could simply wait and have a better idea of who their person is going to be. I think that they are choosing to get engaged into this race a little bit earlier than they might otherwise because of the frontrunner status of declared candidates of Bernie Sanders, who you'll note was not mentioned in those who had received a bunch of the bundler donations.

He did receive from some, two, which is actually one less than Marianne Williamson, who has It's not really been a big, like I talked to her on the damage report, we had a great conversation, but she is not exactly a tier one candidate at this point and has received more support from those big bundlers than Bernie Sanders. The big point that I want to find more about is, are these the same people? As the same people as what? So does someone who gets money together get money together for Kamala and then has another dinner and gets money together for Amy

and then has another dinner and puts it together. And I think that could address your concern, which is, you know, maybe someone else gets in the race, maybe some development happens. That won't stop them from raising money for two reasons, and I don't know

if it applies to everyone who's giving money. One is, I want to make that difference. I think the working class folk, I wish it was easy to communicate to those people that it's more than just the kind of surface level, you know, big city north face fleece and things, it has to do with like getting jobs and empowering unions and making the blue collar life more dignified like it

used to be when I think the people who donate are just detached from that. But another thing is that a lot of them just really like that access. They really like being able to say, I can call that person on the phone and they'll take my call. And the reason is that I give them money, but they just don't want. Yeah, I know. No, I'm just trying to explain things. Now, it is great to see that despite the early efforts of people like this, I mean, there is a bigger focus on small dollar donations. The DNC is requiring a significant number of those to be on the debate stage at all.

And I'll just briefly mention this. We have talked about it before. Through the first quarter, the most fundraising has gone to Bernie Sanders, who's gotten $18.2 million. It's a pretty big drop off to second, Harris at $12 million, O'Rourke at 9.4, and then it goes down Buttigieg Klobuchar and Booker. Are those small dollar donations or total? That's total right there.

And for comparison's sake, I believe that back in the 2000s cycle in the first quarter, Hillary Clinton and Obama had raised like 24 and 27 million, I forget which is which. So obviously more than any of these candidates, but there were fewer candidates for the money to go to. So just bear that in mind. Okay, so let's turn to one last topic. Should the Democrats be pushing for impeachment proceedings considering what was revealed yesterday in the Mueller report?

Now, right off the bat, we know that some in the Democratic leadership are not interested in that, with Steny Hoyer saying that we'll just have an election, we'll leave it up to the people because that's what the Constitution says. Nancy Pelosi is not interested. She says Trump isn't worth it. Some of the other candidates in the Democratic primary that have been approached, including I believe Ben O'Rourke and Cory Booker have both said, no, we shouldn't do that, we should just have an election. But on the other side, there are people who are pushing for it,

including one very notable name, which we'll get to in just a second. But before we jump into our back and forth, and we're going to be debating this, AOC tweeted yesterday, Mello's report is clear in pointing to Congress's responsibility in investigating obstruction of justice by the president. It is our job is outlined in Article 1 of the Constitution. As such, I'll be signing on to Rashida Talib's impeachment resolution. And she responds to the concerns about what effect it could have on the election or how likely it would be to actually get through the Republican-held Senate, saying, while I understand the political reality of the Senate and election considerations, upon reading this DOJ report, which explicitly names Congress

in determining obstruction, I cannot see a reason for us to abdicate from our constitutionally mandated responsibility to investigate. She was joined by other representatives. There are many, but I will include Ilhan Omar, who said, impeachment is part of our constitutional responsibility. We have an obligation to investigate whether the president committed impeachable offenses, including obstruction of justice, the emoluments clause, collusion, abuse of power. Now, up until today, I believe, I don't know that any declared senators had been pushing for it. Certainly none in the Democratic primary, but today we do have one, with Elizabeth Warren saying, the severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political

considerations and do their constitutional duty. that means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States. And I believe that that does make her the first person in the primary to say that, although I did read very soon after Pete Buttigieg said something that sounded like he might think that it might be a direction the Democrats should go in. So you got the two sides. What do you guys think about it? I mean, I agree with Ilhan Omar on this.

It is just, and I don't think it needs to be pitched as like, we're going after him, get the pitchforks and the the torches, we're going to go get them. That is not what it is. This is like, I regret to inform you that we have a constitutional obligation to pursue this as laid out in the Mueller report, which came out as a result of Jeff Sessions saying, I don't know, I talked to too many Russians, let's get someone independent to kind of look at this. What do you think, JR? Well, the problem with it is.

And of course, from the beginning, it's pretty glaring, I think, the number of things that the president has done without having to look for some kind of investigation to explicitly lay out him writing a letter with his signature on it saying, I, Donald J. Trump, am about to commit treason or I'm about to commit conspiracy against the United States. It seems like that's the legal barriers that we have to go through for these types of things. But when you're having this kind of discussion about whether or not to initiate impeachment proceedings or just investigate the things he's done, I think you can take it in stages. So part of that, and what AOC was saying and Omar was saying was, the obligation of the

Congress is to exercise their oversight and investigate things that we see. Do that part. As those things come out, your impeachment initiation will actually have more teeth because we're living in a political world now that no matter how much reality is put in front of many people's faces, they don't want to accept it, especially the people that are in elected office, because they're just doing, they're just bowing down to the leader of their party right now anyway. So initiating it is going to affect things like the election and your chances of not having

to talk, of being able to talk about policies rather than impeachment. I get that, because that's the way you beat the guy, because the majority of Americans actually do agree with many of their progressive policies. You won't get that message out enough. But you can kind of do both at the same time. Do your investigations, get the information out, and then. When people say, there's nothing left, positive left about this guy, you have to argue against impeachment then? It's hard to do it then. I think you can kind of do it. And it seems like, I don't know, I've spoken in a weird roundabout way about this.

But it's kind of a too-lane thing. You can do both at the same time. Still give your policies and investigate the guy and impeachment will take care of itself. Impeachment does not mean removal from office. Exactly. What we're saying is. That's what people are convinced of. Right. So here's the thing. Like, you just, people are used to. some kind of apparatus, aggregating information to see if the president is as corrupt as everyone knows him to be. I don't think that's going to change. What do you think if we stop trying to hunt down information? Trump's going to be like, finally, we can all get along now.

I'm going to stop going after X, Y, and Z person. Those are variables. He's just going to plug in new ones. He's going to continue to message in that way. He's still going after the fake New York Times. Like today, he tweeted, the fake New York Times is the fake New York Times is the same. enemy of the people. He's going to repeat things no matter what. So, just continue to find that information. And when it comes to messaging, the campaign that's going to be run is still

going to be one that's focused, not on that, but focused on this is what Americans want and need. Yeah. Yeah, well, there's no time. I got to end. Yes, there is. So I will end with a hypothetical. Hypothetical. And just because I don't want you to be biased by your thoughts going into this based on years of thinking about Donald Trump, based on, let's say they don't, there's nothing any, there's no impeachment proceedings, we got the Mueller report, we're moving on, imagine tomorrow, or in six months, Tom Perez calls a press conference and says, you know, we're a good way in the Democratic primary, and we're having a great debate. Meanwhile, Trump is off doing his thing, we don't really know what, so China, I would like

you to break into every computer in Trump Tower, every computer that Donald Trump used the White House if you want to, and I want you to find out everything, all about his business, everything. Based on the precedent that's been set this week, what could be done? I mean, let's say you say, well, you're telling them to break the law. No, he was joking. It was sarcasm. So? He's just frustrated by the nature of this campaign. I don't think that's a big deal. Okay, okay. I think that's a poetical move. Hold on, just because we know much time, To add in a little bit of the bias of Donald Trump, what will Donald Trump feel he can't do in this next election? I don't understand what you mean by that.

If he has a chance to potentially break the law to advantage himself in the next election, based on his experience of being investigated and having no consequences, what constraints would he feel going forward in this next election? I don't think that that will be increased or decreased by whether or not impeachment proceeds. You don't think that if there is an effort to remove him from office, or even just to continue to put pressure on. I think regardless, there is always a perceived effort to remove him from office. That's what I'm just getting into, like, people don't know the intricacies of any given process at work. Like, even without an impeachment process, a formal impeachment, there is still going to be now. Adler looking for his tax returns. People subpoenaing personal information.

That's still going to go out. So there is still this perceived on Trump's end, Trump's supporters end, on Democrats end who are fighting against each other saying this is, you're going, you're saying Trump too much and they're not saying Trump enough. Russia, Russia, Russia, China, China, China. There's still this perceived group, this perceived force trying to remove Trump from office, whether he's being impeached or not. Yeah, but again, that's about sort of, that's the narrative or what he would

run against or whatever. I'm talking about the actual constraints he will feel day to day once he engages in what might be a very difficult attempt to get reelected. And my counter argument why would he be worried about breaking the law? No, but no, but they're not. Why? He could specifically surrounding the law. What is he worried about? Is he worried about a special counsel being appointed? He could just dismiss him. He could fire him. It doesn't matter. What's the difference? The president's legal standing is specifically different than anyone else. So if he's just some guy, if he's a governor, that's different. But with the president, the decision to remove him from office is one of the congresspeople voting, especially now. That has been solidified in the wake

of the Mueller report. Okay, I think I might be getting what you're saying. You're saying that, I mean, I guess politically, in terms of their ability to get it through the Senate, it might not be anything that could actually constrain him in practice. What I'm saying is right now, I don't know what would actually stop him from breaking the law in the future. Or from him being worried that if he broke the law, it could be found out, or if it was found out that there would be any consequences. And people are, it scares me and it shocks me that people are acting like, eh. I get it. Yeah. Okay, the president can do whatever he wants. Many people are, and that's why, no matter what you do, as far as putting pressure on him or not putting pressure on him,

he already thinks he's above the law. If the investigation, he's right, stressed him out, stressed him out for two that years, right. But because of the results, because of the results of his entire life, he's never had to deal with consequences. So whether or not you put pressure on him, he's still going to think he's above the law. Constitutionally, he is above the law, but not above the lawmakers. And the problem is many lawmakers work for him. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think about all the different times that judges have overruled some of his executive orders, and generally, you know, he's stopped or whatever. I mean, sometimes it's a little bit difficult to know for sure. There's some nuance there, but he's generally stopped.

I don't know why he would in the future. Do you think impeachment would be successful as far as bringing? I don't know, I don't know, but I'm saying there has to be something, there has to be some attempt. If a judge tells him you can't separate families and he says, what are you going to do? And he just keeps doing it, what are they going to do? They're going to appoint a special counsel? What's the point? The only reason they stop separating families is because enough Republicans said, yeah, this is a little too much for me.

That's one of two times they've even said that about anything he's done. So impeachment, I don't think is one of those things. But again, I'm not going to be banging the table against them doing it if they do it at the same time. Three times. It's that, it is the border wall, and then it is most recently Yemen, and he was like, nah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, some of them deserve it on Yemen. That's true.

It is sad. Well, we have gone over, unfortunately, we don't have any more time, but thank you for joining me, guys. There's an awesome hour coming up. It is Anna and it is Adrian and it is Nomi Prince, and they've got an awesome rundown of stories so stick around they'll be back in just a few minutes thanks for listening to the full episode of the young turks support our work listen ad free access members only bonus content and more by subscribing to apple podcasts at apple dot co slash t yt i'm your host jank huger and i'll see you