 This is the Humanist Report with Mike Figueredo. The Humanist Report podcast is funded by viewers like you through Patreon and PayPal. To support the show, visit patreon.com forward slash humanistreport or become a member at humanistreport.com. Now enjoy the show. Welcome to the Humanist Support Podcast. My name is Mike Figueredo and this is the 198th edition of the program. Today is Friday June 21st and before we get into the show, I want to take some time to thank all of our newest Patreon, PayPal and YouTube members. All of which either signed up just this last week to support us for the very first time or increased their monthly pledge. And that includes Alex Clayton Care, Andy Passmore, Jorge Miranda, Michael, Michael Elling, Randy Aronoff, Siddiqui Cleaning Service, Stephanie Hayes, Thomas R. Skillman, Tim Slattery, Tasin Ajik II and Wendy Roberts. So thank you so much to all of these kind souls. If you'd also like to support the show, you can do so by going to humanistreport.com slash support or by checking out patreon.com forward slash humanistreport or underneath any one of our YouTube videos you can click join and support us that way and become a member that easily. So this week on the Humanistreport podcast, we'll talk about Donald Trump's unhinged interview with ABC News and how it was unintentionally hilarious. Mitch McConnell expands the definition of socialism. Candace Owens goes full SJW to own the Libs. Bernie Sanders dismantles the Trump administration's anti-Iran propaganda. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasts Trump's fascistic immigration policies and conservatives cry because of it. Amazon responded to AOC's critique of their exploitative labor practices. Joe Biden talks about getting cozy with white supremacists. Bernie Sanders sparks outrage over what some saw as an attack on Elizabeth Warren. And finally we closed the week by talking to 2020 congressional candidate Joshua Collins, a Washington state's 10th congressional district. So that's what he's got on the agenda for today. I hope you guys enjoy the show. So as many of you know, President Donald Trump was interviewed by George Snuffleophagus, a combination of Stepanophilus and Snuffleophagus I think I just created. But nonetheless, he was interviewed by ABC News and it was incredibly interesting. I found it fascinating and entertaining. Was it of any value to us as voters? No, I don't really feel like watching this gave me information that would help me make a more informed decision. At the voting booth, but with that being said, with every single long form Donald Trump interview, like a train wreck you've got to watch. Because even if you know you might feel a little bit dumber coming away from it, at least you know you're entertained. And this interview was no different. So I'm going to share my favorite moments from this interview because there were a lot. My first, not necessarily my favorite moment, but one thing that really stood out to me is when Donald Trump said this. I like the truth. You know, I'm actually a very honest guy. You've literally lied more than 10,000 times since you became president. 10,000 times. And I love how, as he's saying it, even he knows that it's hard to believe because he states, oh, you know, I actually like the truth. He has to throw in actually because he knows that it's so surprising to everyone given that he lies approximately 30 times a day, literally. Now moving on, we got to a discussion about 2020 and polls came up. And as many of you know, Donald Trump isn't performing too well. Now, these are all early polls. But when you look at general election matchups, Trump v. Biden, Bernie v. Trump, Trump is getting whooped. Now, George Stephanopoulos, Snuffleupagus asked him about this and his response was just bizarre. This is a guy who does everything to separate and frighten people. It was fun. I mean, it's a political speech. He's still leading the polls on the Democratic side. It's tightening up a little bit and it's tightening up a lot, which is interesting. But he's still beating you, according to the polls. Well, I don't believe those polls. There's no way he beats me in Texas. But even your own polls show you're behind right now, don't they? No. My polls show that I'm winning everywhere. I don't know. We've all seen these reports that with 15 out of 17 states, you spent 2 million on a poll and you're behind in 15 out of 17 states. Nobody showed you those polls because those polls don't exist, George. Those polls don't exist. But I just had a meeting with somebody that's a pollster and I'm winning everywhere. Wow. Mr. President, I've seen these polls that show you're pretty far behind. No, you haven't seen these polls. Excuse me? You haven't seen these polls because they don't exist. Oh, okay. I mean, what do you even say to that? What do you say when you tell somebody something that you saw with your own eyes and then they say, no, don't believe you're lying eyes? What do you even say to that? Now, this happened after this discussion came up. We're getting tremendous polls. Those poll results so irritating to the president that a few seconds later, he has to go off the record to call his campaign manager. Okay, so hold it off for a little while. Just call Brad and I want to ask him that question, okay? Days later, we would get the internal Trump polling data confirmed by the campaign. It showed the president far behind in key battleground states earlier this spring. So after confidently saying that he has quote, unquote, tremendous polls, which I love, turns out that what George said was confirmed. Their own internal polling data shows that he's kind of in trouble. But Donald Trump is a narcissist, so he can never admit to anything that makes him look bad. Now, what do you say? What's an honest response to that? If you still, you know, you don't want to admit that you're behind and you want to make yourself look good. What would you say? Something that would have been actually truthful and more believable was, look, these are very early polls, George. So you can't really put too much faith into what they say now, but just know that you can't count me out of this yet because polls can change. I was behind in the polls and had that matchups in 2016 as well. And then that changed. I ended up winning. So you can say something like that, but what does he do? Well, he just denies that these polls exist when his own team had to confirm that. I mean, how embarrassing is this to Donald Trump? So there wasn't much policy in this interview, but he did talk about healthcare. And what he said here was just incredibly bizarre and downright wrong. What is the big unfinished piece of business? You're going to say this is what we're going to get done. So we almost had healthcare done. Healthcare is a disaster, Obamacare, but we've managed it much better than they managed it. So we've made it serviceable, but it's not great. We're going to produce phenomenal healthcare and we already have the concept of the plan and it'll be much better. Tell people what the plan is. Yeah, well, we'll be announcing that in about two months, maybe less. After dismantling Obamacare, basically death by a thousand cuts, he says that they've made Obamacare more serviceable. In what way? You've just dismantled portions of it. There are 25 million people that are underinsured, 30 million that are not insured. How many millions of Americans lost insurance since you became president because of what you did to the Affordable Care Act? And what does he say? We're going to produce phenomenal healthcare and we already have the concept of the plan and it'll be much better healthcare. Okay, great. Well, can we see it? Oh, we'll unveil it in like two months, maybe sooner. In other words, you don't have a plan. You never had a plan. And anything that he's proposed or that the Republican Party has proposed pulls less than 20%. Because all it does is basically take Obamacare and make it worse. But because Republicans did it to them, it's inherently better because they did it. Obama did it bad if Republicans did it good. Now, let me remind you that the Affordable Care Act is a right wing healthcare proposal. Romney implemented this. This was cooked up by the Heritage Foundation, so they have nothing. And the fact that he still is saying, oh, well, we're going to come up with something. Sure, Dan. Now, he had the right instinct coming into office. He said, we're going to do universal healthcare. Now, I have no idea what he meant by that, but he was hinting at a single pair type system. And he said, the government's going to pay for it, but it's going to be better. We're going to save money. Like, we all know the clip that I'm referring to. I don't even have to play it. But all it took was one meeting with Paul Ryan and Republicans and they got him to flip his stance immediately. He asked, why can't we expand Medicare to everyone and they got him to flip and be against the Affordable Care Act? I mean, he has absolutely no plan when it comes to healthcare, but moving on. So in this interview, they play a clip of Donald Trump supporters and even if they support Trump and plan to vote for him again in 2020, one thing that they don't like was Donald Trump's mean tweets. They think that it's, you know, just unnecessary and he needs to stop doing it. This was his response to that. They're talking about those calling people names. It's demeaning. You know what? I'll bet they do like it. Mr. President, some of your supporters who support you, hence the word supporters, they say that they really would prefer that you don't do all of these mean tweets. No, they don't. They like them. I mean, what do you say to that? It'd be like if you went up to Ted Cruz and said, hey, Ted, you know, I just want to let you know that you have a tonsil zone on your bottom lip. It's kind of embarrassing. And he just said, no, I don't. I mean, this is his response to everything. Tell him something that he doesn't like. And he just denies it. Unbelievable. So I want to get to the next portion of the interview. So they're talking about tax returns and financial disclosures, and he hasn't released them yet, and he won't willfully do that. But listen to what he says about it, because this is so fucking weird that it's honestly impressive. When you will see my financial statement at some point, I assume it's going to be released. I'd be very impressed with the job I've done. Much, much bigger, much, much better than anybody. They're after my financial statement. The Senate, they'd like to get my financial statement. At some point, I hope they get it. You're going to turn it over? No, at some point, I might. But at some point, I hope they get it, because it's a fantastic financial statement. What does he even mean when he says things like this? It's a fantastic financial statement, very big numbers. Trump, what are you talking about? And my favorite part, when he talks about his financial statements, George Stephanopoulos says, which financial statement? Trump then follows up by saying, they're after my financial statement. The Senate, they're after my financial statement. Oh, that definitely clears it up. In response to the question, which financial statement? He says, my financial statement. His brain is melting. And believe it or not, that's not even the best part of that exchange. Because somebody coughed as he was bloating about his financial statement and how we'd all love it if we saw it, which she doesn't want us to see. But somebody coughed, totally threw him off of his game, and it seemed like he was just kind of being playfully irritated. But towards the end, you'll see, he was legitimately angered that somebody coughed and interrupted him. It's a fantastic financial statement. And let's do that over. He's coughing in the middle of my answer. I don't like that. You're the chief of staff. If you're going to cough, please leave the room. I'll come over here. Just to change the shot. Sorry. Okay, do you want to do that a little differently then? Yeah, we just changed the angle. So at some point, I look forward to... Did you see the death glare? That death glare at the end there. That was so good. That was so good. Wow. All right, so moving on. They get into, you know, 2016, Russian interference, the Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. And he was asked whether or not, hypothetically speaking, a foreign government said, hey, Trump, we've got dirt on your opponent. And would you like us to give you that to potentially help you out? This is his actual response. Your campaign this time, Brian, if foreigners, if Russia, if China, else offers you information on an opponent, should they accept it or should they call the FBI? I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen. I don't, there's nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, we have information on your opponent. Oh, I think I'd want to hear it. You want that kind of interference in our elections? It's not an interference. They have information. I think I'd take it. You literally were just under investigation for two years. So wouldn't you just instinctively say, we're not going down that route again. I'm not going to do anything that could possibly be even perceived or seem like I am willing to accept help from a foreign government. Wouldn't you think that his instinct would be to just lie about that like he does about everything else, even if truthfully he would accept that knowledge and not contact the FBI? I mean, look, one thing that I think is certain that comes across in this interview is that Donald Trump's mental capacity is rapidly declining. Like when you compare this interview and current interviews, recent interviews with anything he did in 2016, he was able to form more coherent thoughts. He was still, you know, weird and he'd go on these weird rants and whatnot. But compare 2016 to now, the things he says, you know, they're just weird. And I'm not necessarily only referring to his response on, you know, election interference just in general. But in the event, you know, you were asked this question, what's the right answer? You would say, of course, I would reject any help from a foreign government and I would immediately report that to the FBI. But I'd go a step further and I would vow to never interfere in another country's elections as the United States always does. I'm against interference both ways when we do it and when other countries do it. That'd be the correct answer. Donald Trump just can't help himself, though. Wow. So with that being said, I just want you all to realize that we may never get a president this dumb ever again. Like this could be, you know, the only time in our lifetimes where we see a president this stupid. I mean, for everyone who said that George W. Bush was stupid, Donald Trump makes him look like Einstein. And that's not to say that George W. Bush is more moral than Donald Trump, because I think he's actually more destructive than Donald Trump by a mile and a half. With that being said, he's a lot more intelligent than Donald Trump and it's clear that he struggles to string together a coherent thought. And what often comes out is just this word salad that ends up being the same like five talking points over and over again. Witch hunt, no collusion, polls, I beat Hillary Clinton, you know, the same shit over and over again. I can't think of the fifth one, but maybe it's four. With that being said, Jesus Christ, that was entertaining. I'm glad I watched it, didn't learn anything. Probably I'm a little bit dumber because of it, but with that being said, I'm glad I watched that. So I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but I think it's worth repeating again because this is a really important point to make. If you think that Bernie Sanders being a self proclaimed Democratic socialist is going to hurt him in 2020 and make him less electable against Donald Trump, then you have been misled. And I get it, it's difficult to conceive of that because this is what conventional wisdom tells us. It tells us that a social Democrat or Democratic socialist or anyone who attaches that socialist label to themselves in whatever capacity. They're inherently less electable than, say, a centrist Democrat. Media pundits say it, Republicans say it, and even Democrats are so worried about the potential toxicity of that socialist label that they're actively conspiring against Bernie Sanders behind closed doors to stop him because they think that's going to facilitate another Trump victory. Now the underlying assumption with this theory here is that, you know, if a socialist can't beat Trump, then obviously that means we must need a centrist Democrat like Joe Biden to go up against Donald Trump because he's going to be the most electable because Republicans won't be able to use that label to describe Joe Biden, except, oh wait, they've already done that. In fact, Mike Pence has already accused Joe Biden of advocating for a socialist agenda. And what these people who are worried about socialism and that label don't realize is that anyone who isn't Trump, who goes up against Donald Trump will automatically, by default, be labeled a socialist. Even a centrist like Obama was labeled a socialist. And in fact, they even call him a communist, which is hilarious to me. But the point is to Republicans, socialism is literally just a synonym for things that they don't like. That's all it is. So if you honestly believe that that label or that attack will only uniquely affect Bernie Sanders and harm him and nobody else, you have been duped by conservatives because whoever the Democratic Party nominee is, left wing or right wing, Joe Biden or Bernie, they will be called a socialist over and over again by Republicans because say it with me, socialism is a synonym for things Republicans don't like. They have a sandwich that they didn't like. That was a socialist sandwich. They play a video game that had too many microtransactions in it. That was a socialist video game. This is what they do. That word doesn't mean anything related to political affiliation or political ideology. It just means bad. And to give you another example as to how this word has lost all meaning, we'll go to our friend Mitch McConnell who's going to call a new thing socialist. And I'll tell you why it's ironic that he's making this argument when we come back. For the first time in my memory, I agree with Nancy Pelosi. I am indeed the grim reaper when it comes to the socialist agenda that they've been ginning up over in the house with overwhelming Democratic support and sending it over to America, things that would turn us into a country we've never been. They're on the way to doing some additional things in addition to the ones they've already done, the Green New Deal, Medicare for All. And by the way, you may have mentioned this on your show, but they had planned to make the District of Columbia State, that had given two new Democratic senators, Puerto Rico State had given two more new Democratic senators. And as a former Supreme Court clerk yourself, you've surely noticed that they planned to expand the Supreme Court. So this is full bore socialism on the march in the house. And yeah, as long as I'm the majority of the Senate, none of that stuff is going anywhere. Okay, so he says, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico is quote, full bore socialism. Let's just pause for a moment and try to think about what that even means. Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico is full bore socialism. It doesn't mean anything. He's calling it socialism, because he doesn't like that. But what's funny is that by Mitch McConnell's own standards, he just came out as a socialist, because if advocacy for DC or Puerto Rico and their statehood makes you a socialist, then I'll let you in on a little secret. The Republican Party is now socialist because this is a quote from their 2016 GOP platform. We support the right of the United States citizens of Puerto Rico to be admitted to the union as a fully sovereign state. Gotcha bitch. I don't know about you guys, but that sounds like full bore socialism. To me, ladies and gentlemen, turns out Mitch McConnell is a socialist by his own standards. But look, to be serious here, what that platform really means is that we support Puerto Rican statehood so long as Democrats don't also come out in favor of it. In that case, we reserve the right to flip on that because fuck Democrats. If they like something, then it is inherently bad. And now, according to Mitch McConnell, it's literally full bore socialism to support statehood for Puerto Rico. So do you understand what's happening here? Do you see what's going on? If you truly believe that Bernie Sanders is the only candidate that Republicans will weaponize socialism against, then congratulations, you have been duped. And by advocating for a more centrist Democrat in order to increase the chances of us beating Donald Trump, you're playing right into their hands because data suggests another centrist Democrat would lose to Donald Trump. Now, we don't necessarily have to look at data to come to this conclusion, seeing that we just ran an experiment in 2016 where we tried that. And Donald Trump won, but nonetheless, for those of you who are still unconvinced, you've been warned. If you're so worried about socialism making Bernie Sanders or a Democrat less electable, you're already going to be fighting this battle regardless of who you support. If you support Kamala Harris, she's going to be labeled a socialist. If you support Pete Buttigieg, he's going to be labeled a socialist. If you support Amy Klobuchar, even, she will be labeled a socialist. Anyone who goes up against Donald Trump will be labeled a socialist. So by saying Bernie Sanders shouldn't be the nominee because he's less electable as a direct result of that socialist label that he uses for himself, you're inadvertently helping Republicans because you're opting for someone who's weaker against Donald Trump because, again, a centrist Democrat can lose to Donald Trump. That's what data suggests. It's what happened in 2016 and it could very well happen again. It's not a foregone conclusion. A corporate Democrat could beat Donald Trump theoretically because there are few people in the country as incompetent as Hillary Clinton. With that being said, though, if you truly want to beat Trump, don't roll the dice and go with another centrist Democrat. Go with someone who actually is a self-identified socialist, who can take that label and describe what he means by socialist, who can flip it back on Republicans and call them corporate socialists, who can say, you know what? I am a socialist, but this is what I think socialism means to me. And Bernie Sanders did the right thing here. He embraced socialism, but he also called Republicans socialist in the sense that they support socialism for large multinational corporations, but only denounce it when it positively impacts the working class. So you've got to understand here. If you're worried about that socialist label, then you're going to worry regardless if Bernie Sanders is the nominee or a centrist Democrat is the nominee. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. They'll even call Howard Schultz a socialist because that's just what Republicans do. It's been their strategy for decades now. Anyone who doesn't have an R next to their name is a socialist by their standards. So once and for all, let's stop running away from the word socialism and actually realize that it's not the boogeyman that it used to be. And since Republicans use it for any and everything that they don't like, it no longer has meaning, which gives us the opportunity to ascribe meaning to that word, to redefine it, to use it in a way that benefits us and not them once and for all. But unfortunately, a lot of Democrats, namely strategists in D.C., they don't get this. And the writing's on the wall, so don't think that a corporate Democrat isn't going to be called a socialist because Mitch McConnell just called statehood for D.C. in Puerto Rico full war socialism. Literally anything is socialism that they don't like. Always remember that when somebody tells you that Bernie Sanders can't win or he's less electable because he's a socialist and Americans would never opt for a socialist. Socialist by Republican standards is just a synonym for something or someone that they don't like, period. Candace Owens is a far-right political commentator who has repeatedly sounded the alarm about the big bad SJWs on college campuses. They're a threat to you, they're a threat to me because these are fascists who are against free speech. They're always protesting and trying to shut down speeches of people that they don't agree with. So in this clip here she's going to explain forcefully so why we shouldn't try to censor people who we disagree with, we should let them speak. These college campuses have essentially become islands of totalitarianism and fascism and they create a lot of hurdles if and when you do want to bring a conservative speaker to campus. It's a major area of problem in this country and it's one that has to be countered and tackled. And it's not only that, it's what they're teaching when these speakers come to speak. It's fundamentally anti-Americanism. Linda Sarser is welcomed on every campus and I am not. So the underlying implication there, I think, is that she thinks this is a form of censorship to not allow someone to speak just because you disagree with them, that censorship. If we allow the Linda Sarsers of the world to speak on college campuses then we should certainly allow the Candace Owens of the world to speak on college campuses, otherwise that's a form of censorship. Now with that being said, as a lefty myself, I've never been invited to speak on a college campus ever so it's good to know that I'm also a victim of censorship. I'm going to put that card in my back pocket for now in case I need to conveniently invoke the victim card in the future, but with that being said, the point is this is a form of censorship. We shouldn't shut down the speech of people just because we disagree with them. That's her overall point. Now, we'll stick a pin in that conversation and come back to it, but let's just take a moment and speculate why a college campus wouldn't necessarily want to invite someone like Candace Owens to speak. Maybe, just maybe, this is only my theory, it's because she says a lot of ahistorical, downright idiotic, factually incorrect things all the time, case in point. And these are all words that have been said over and over again about black conservatives. We have the audacity to think for themselves and become educated about our history and the myth of things like the Southern switch and the Southern strategy which never happened. What the hell did you just say? Who would want to invite someone like that who says something like that to college campuses? I mean, that's insane, right? So, this is her shtick. This is what she does. She is constantly trying to disprove the fact that Republicans have been racist and they still are very much racist. It's the same thing that Dave Rubin tries to do. He tries to prove that social conservatives are actually more tolerant than lefties, which is just laughable. But the way that Candace Owens goes about doing this is to just flat out deny history. And the myth of things like the Southern switch and the Southern strategy which never happened. She literally just fannosed historical facts like that because she didn't like them, because they conflicts and contradict the narrative that she's constantly trying to push. That easy. You don't like a historical fact? Didn't happen. But with that being said, her overall point is no matter how harmful that speech is, we should be allowed to exercise it. If you don't agree with me, that's perfectly fine. If you think I'm living in an alternate reality, that's my right, and I still have the right to express it and tell people about this alternate reality that I have constructed for myself. In fact, according to this cartoon she shared, she claims, quote, thought police have the highest records of brutality against the blacks of all time. Now I know what you're thinking. That's not even a coherent point. What is she even trying to say? Well, the overall point is she should be allowed to make whatever dumb point she wants. Freedom of speech, motherfucker. Either you like it or you don't. That's her point. Except, you all know what I'm about to do, right? We're gonna share a quote from Candace Owens where she's going to completely contradict everything she previously purported to stand for when it comes to free speech. She tweeted, If I were president, the punishment for burning the U.S. flag would be the renunciation of citizenship. No jail time, no fine, simply one year to liquidate your assets and get the hell out of our country. In exchange, we'd extend citizenship to a hard-working legal immigrant. In other words, I don't like this form of free speech because it offends me. So let's ban it because I don't like it. And not only that, not only do I want to ban that form of free speech, I actually want to severely punish people by stripping them of their citizenship if they exercise that speech that I personally view as offensive. I mean, and the left is often called the snowflakes because... Why? Do you understand here? A so-called free speech advocate is saying if somebody says something that offends me, they should lose their citizenship. How has the right not distanced themselves from her because she's clearly a fraud who is incredibly ignorant. But as Benjamin Dixon pointed out in a recent video, which I will link to, the reason why Republicans are refusing to distance themselves from her is because she basically says all the things that they want to say that would make them seem racist. That's why right-wingers still take her seriously because they need people like her. They need people like Dave Rubin to say, you know what, this homophobia, Stephen Crowder, it's perfectly acceptable. In fact, your homophobic jokes actually prevents violence because without jokes, I mean, there'd be violence in America. Candace Owens, she comes out here, she says, you know what? What the Republican Party is doing is the right thing. They're not actually the racists with these voter ID laws that disproportionately target black people. It's Democrats who are racist. Benjamin Dixon lays it all out in this video that you should definitely watch. Now getting back to the issue of free speech, these right-wing grifters like Candace Owens and Dave Rubin, you see, they don't actually care about free speech in the sense that they want to defend the actual First Amendment. What defending free speech means to them is that as individuals, they should have the right to access whatever platform they want at any time, and if you deny them that platform, then you're obviously taking away their free speech and censoring them. And to them, if they don't get to speak on a particular college campus or they face resistance from some students, that's actually a more egregious violation of free speech than literal violations of the First Amendment, like the anti-BDS laws that we're seeing pop up across the country, which brazenly violate the U.S. Constitution. Now, what's funny is that relating to this issue that Candace Owens brought up, this is already a settled issue. In 1989, the Supreme Court held in Texas v. Johnson that flag burning is a protected form of speech. Even Justice Scalia, a far-right justice, held that this was protected speech. But I don't even know why I'm talking about that, because that would assume that they care about actual First Amendment issues. When to them, all they care about is them being able to go on these platforms and college campuses and speak and boost their name recognition and, as a result, get more money, get more sponsorships. They get more popular that is directly correlated with the money that they make. But what's funny is that they talk about college campuses and how these SJWs are ruining the country. But what they actually don't tell you or maybe what they don't know is that if you're looking at censorship on college campuses, it is an issue. However, it's just not an issue for conservatives because even if they're constructing this narrative that suggests that they're the victims when it comes to censorship on college campuses, do you want to know who's actually being censored more frequently? Left-wingers. They are terminated far more frequently for political speech than their conservative counterparts. But yet, they're the victims. And simultaneously, they're the true defenders of free speech. I mean, we are actually living in George Orwell's dystopian future where facts don't matter at all. They have no bearing whatsoever in political discourse anymore. War is peace and freedom is slavery. Except the problem with citing Orwell is that they've appropriated that on the right as well. If you don't buy into their alternate reality, then you're actually the one who's getting duped. I mean, the world has been flipped upside down and they don't realize what these right-wingers are doing. They're taking this issue of S.J.W.s on college campuses and they're trying to convince you that this is the source of the polarization of censorship of all the issues that we have in the country. Meanwhile, they're not talking about actual threats to freedom of speech. Nobody on the right came to the defense of a teacher who refused to sign an anti-BDS pledge and was then fired, who on the right called out Donald Trump when he said that you should be penalized for burning the flag. So you've got to understand that this is nothing more than a grift. These people don't actually have a core ideology. It's why people like Candace Owens and Dave Rubin were left-wing not too long ago. This is a grift. The money's on the right. It's on the right and everyone can see it. It's why H.A. Gooden, for example, flipped and went from being a Bernie supporter and jumped to the opposite side of the spectrum and is now a Donald Trump supporter. It's because he knows the views are better, the clicks are better, you get more recognition from the right because think about this. How often do you see Diamond and Silk and these right-wing former YouTubers on Fox News all the time? They actually have a career. On the left, nobody ever brings on me to talk on MSNBC. Nobody talks to Kyle Kalinsky that often. He was invited on Fox News twice. In fact, it's a shock that Cenk Ugra has been on CNN a couple of times over the past couple of months. It's genuinely shocking to see that because on the right, they elevate people. There's money there to be made. You can get a sponsorship by a right-wing billionaire if you try to prop up the status quo and say what they want you to say. But on the left, that's not necessarily the case. These people don't care about anything but money and popularity. They don't care about politics. Politics is just a vessel that allows them to monetize what they're doing. That's it. It's as simple as that. And Benjamin Dixon does a phenomenal job at laying out why this is the case and why people shouldn't just not take her seriously, but they shouldn't even engage with her because by putting her on the same level as other intellectuals on the left, we're legitimizing her and making it seem as if she actually has insight and an intellectual interest in conversing with us. When all this is about is name recognition and money. It's that simple. She's a fraud, these right-wing YouTubers, they all know what they're doing. They know what they're doing. Don't fall for it. So I think that anyone who watches this podcast is politically astute enough to realize that what we're seeing now is Donald Trump's administration build a case for intervention with Iran. It's incredibly transparent what they're doing and this isn't surprising because even if Donald Trump campaigned as a non-interventionist, when you stack your administration with neoconservatives, what do you think is going to happen? When you put Mike Pompeo and John Bolton in positions of power, what do you think they're going to advocate for? What do you think they're going to push for? So it's not surprising what they're doing and people who have been following these regime change warhawks know exactly what to look for and this time it's no different and it's not even like Donald Trump and his administration is trying to be persuasive using the same exact playbook that George W. Bush's administration used when they were building the case for war with Iraq and this all started because Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran deal. He then reimposed sanctions on Iran which explicitly violated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA and what did that do? That demonstrated to the world that the United States' word is good for nothing. You know, we form a treaty with you, doesn't matter because we might violate it if we get a new president. So that's not a horrible precedent and as Donald Trump elevated war mongers within his administration like John Bolton who vocalized his desire to literally overthrow Iran by 2018, well, what happened? We started to see more and more escalations and now we're in a situation where Iran is being blamed for attacks on oil tankers and the United States government is declassifying videos that supposedly prove Iran's culpability. The problem, however, is that other countries like Germany and even Japan are casting doubt on this claim. In fact, the owner of the Japanese tanker itself claims that something hit the ship but it wasn't explosives. But regardless, even if this intelligence and the quote-unquote evidence that has been presented is dubious at best, well, they say that but we're still insisting that Iran is culpable. So you should definitely believe me because why would we ever lie to you? President Trump says flatly that Iran was responsible for the attack on those two tankers and the Pentagon has released this video which appears to show a revolutionary guard crew removing an unexploded mine from the hull of one of the boats but as Rich reported this video is not enough and the Japanese owner of one of the ships says that he believes from the crew that it was hit by a flying object not a mine. Two questions. How certain are you that Iran was responsible for these attacks and do you have more evidence that you can share with us? Well Chris, it's unmistakable what happened here. These were attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran on commercial shipping on the freedom of navigation through the strait. There's no doubt the intelligence community has lots of data, lots of evidence the world will come to see much of it but the American people should rest assured we have high confidence with respect to who conducted these attacks as well as half a dozen other attacks throughout the world over the past 40 days. Now I absolutely doubt the legitimacy of what he's saying but here's the thing let's prove what he's saying let's assume for a moment, hypothetically speaking that Iran was in fact culpable. Does that mean that the US would be justified in further escalation? Absolutely not. If Iran was in fact culpable that would be more reason for us to be the grown-ups and de-escalate. Get them to come back to the table and negotiate with us even if they have reason to not want to negotiate but try to quell what's happening here before it leads to confrontation. So even if they were guilty which I don't believe they are but even if they were that still doesn't give you a reason to invade or further escalate with Iran. But the problem is that as we continue to poke Iran we are making matters worse and worse and we're making the likelihood of escalation and allow war more possible because here's what the United States did by withdrawing from the Iran deal they are empowering hardline extremists within Iran's regime who are now announcing that they will be enriching uranium past what was allowed under the JCPOA because I'm assuming that they believe this is the only thing that will deter further US aggression which honestly I mean if I were Iran I would think it seemed imminent. Now a large part of the reason why Donald Trump's administration presumably feels emboldened to keep escalating further and further with Iran because the mainstream media has been doing a very poor job at framing the situation and informing the public and I know that it sounded like in that clip that I showed you from Fox News with Chris Wallace that he was doing a good job relatively you know of holding Mike Pompeo's feet to the fire the overall takeaway if you watch that entire clip was that anything Iran did was bad and anything the United States did was inherently good by definition because we're doing it so of course with the good guys and everyone else is the bad guys and it's not just Fox News here because as Adam Johnson fair points out things are being framed in an incredibly biased way so when Iran enriches uranium they're violating the Iran deal but when the United States reimposes sanctions it's because we withdrew from the Iran deal so whenever they do something that violates it they're violating it if we do something well we withdrew so that's fine this is how a pro-war consensus ends up emerging it makes it seem like any and every action that the United States takes is justified because Iran is inherently more hostile but in actuality we're the ones that are being hostile we're the ones that are being overly hostile but it's not framed that way if you tune into the mainstream media you think oh well Iran obviously is acting irrationally and the United States government is just responding to them that's not what's happening we're the aggressors we're the ones who are imposing harm on them and think about what we did we withdrew from the Iran deal and we imposed harsh sanctions to the extent where we are squeezing their economy and it's not just that their economy is tanking and the standard of living in Iran is decreasing what's happening is there are medicine shortages that are happening we have collapsed their banking system which makes international suppliers reluctant to give them food because they don't know if they're going to be able to get paid so I mean we're harming them in a really overt and severe way but yet we're still being portrayed as the good guys who are just responding to Iranian hostility and aggression when the opposite is true now I want to play a clip of Bernie Sanders on MSNBC he was interviewed by Andrea Mitchell and he did a phenomenal job at really deconstructing all of these propagandist pro-war talking points that we've been seeing from Donald Trump's administration and that have been reinforced by the mainstream media and in this very interview I don't even know if Andrea Mitchell realized that she was doing this but she was helping to craft this pro-war narrative this pro-war consensus because when she talked about this attack that was allegedly the result of Iranian aggression she said well look you know at least the UK agrees that it was in fact Iran they didn't even mention that Japan and Germany they disagree and they're telling us to cool it but with that being said I want to show you this clip because Bernie Sanders does a brilliant job here at just dismantling the pro-war propaganda that we are being hit with now perhaps more so than ever I want to ask you about Iran because we're seeing increasing tensions now a thousand more troops deployed Secretary Pompeo momentarily is going to be speaking from Sencombe Iran is now threatening to break out of the nuclear deal for the first time after complying for 14 months according to international inspectors even though the president withdrew from it so we see these hits on the tankers they say there's intelligence at least the Brits agree with the US that this was Iranian based or Iranian proxied you know there could be an accidental war what do you do if you're the commander in chief Bernie Sanders you're president Sanders what do you do right now where Iran is arguably acting aggressively even if it's in reaction to the US first of all just a couple of points Andrea first of all what is absolutely necessary is an objective investigation as to these incidents the destruction or the bombing or the attacking of oil tankers and the Gulf of Oman is not acceptable and we need to investigate it our second of war you don't accept with the secretary let me just ask you don't accept the declaration from the secretary of state no I don't I mean it needs to be an objective investigation as you know the Japanese take in fact the owner of the tanker that was attacked disagrees with Trump but here's the main point that I want to make if you look at the recent history of this country I think we understand that the two worst foreign policy disasters were based on lies that came from the White House you remember the so called Gulf of Tonkin incident that led us to increase military involvement in Vietnam and man I could speak that was my generation 59,000 brave young men never came home from that war and tens of thousands of more died committed suicide got into drugs when they came home that was based on a lie and then you look more recently at the war in Iraq which I vigorously opposed because I did not believe Cheney and I did not believe John Bolton I did not believe the Bush administration again based on a lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction let me just say this I will do everything that I personally can as a United States senator to stop the United States attacking Iran if we go into a war with Iran this will be an asymmetrical war which will go on and on and on there will be never ending wars in the Middle East it will make the war in Iraq look like a cakewalk so we have got to do everything we can to bring the antagonist Saudi Arabia which is a brutal dictatorship together with Iran bring them together use the power of the United States to work out a diplomatic solution not a military solution so that was absolutely fantastic and I applaud Bernie Sanders for being consistent here and he said what you always want to say he said what is absolutely necessary is an objective investigation into these incidents this is always going to be the first and most proper reaction because if the US government makes a claim well then we say all right that's fine let's have an objective impartial actor go in and investigate the United States is not an impartial actor they have an agenda and they're not acting in good faith and they're working backwards from their conclusion they want you to think that Iran is guilty so that way you feel as if they're justified in further aggression and hostility towards Iran so we can't trust that their assessment is actually accurate because they're not objective they're not impartial actors have an NGO or an IGO come in you know have the UN conduct an investigation but the US if they conduct an investigation should we take them at their word no because I'm sorry they've lied to us before they'll do it again and Bernie Sanders made this point he brought up the Gulf of Tonkin the Iraq war and the point was we need to learn our goddamn lesson the last war that we relied into we're still there we never left we're currently conducting drone strikes in numerous countries Pakistan Somalia we're giving Saudi Arabia the bombs that they're using to commit genocide in Yemen when are we gonna learn our lesson that what the United States government says isn't always going to be something we should take at face value because they have an agenda they have an agenda and we have a capitalist war machine that profits off of death and destruction so it behooves them to constantly have us in these never ending wars because that's a money maker and the military industrial complex funds politicians that are more than willing to do their bidding so Bernie Sanders here is speaking truth through power he's speaking out against this and there have been few people that have spoken out Tulsi Gabbard speaks out about this all the time and to her credit Elizabeth Warren has spoken out even if she hasn't been great in fact she's been really horrible on foreign policy issues previously but we need all hands on deck here we need every single person to speak out about this and what we need is someone who is going to be a leader on this issue and that's what Bernie Sanders essentially said he would do as president he said we need to bring Saudi Arabia and Iran together and use the power of the United States to work out a diplomatic solution this is what a leader does President Donald Trump has officially kicked off his 2020 re-election campaign and expectedly he's doing what he always does whenever there's an election that he needs to win he's ramping up the anti-immigrant rhetoric and this time it's no different because this is what he's trying to do now presumably to mobilize and excite his base he announced via Twitter next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States they will be removed as fast as they come in now just pause for a moment and think about the implications of this because he's saying that they're going to remove millions plural so I'm assuming that he at a minimum is aiming to remove at least 2 million undocumented immigrants well according to Pew Research there's approximately 10.5 million undocumented immigrants currently so what he's saying here is he wants to remove a fifth of our entire undocumented immigrant population let's just assume he actually does want to do this can you just imagine what you would need to actually do something like this I mean the amount of resources you would need in terms of money would be huge in terms of personnel in terms of expertise as well as planning you would need to put so much into this that you would essentially not be able to focus on anything else on top of it just being unfeasible think about this from a moral angle this will inevitably result in human rights abuses even more racial profiling because we all know that if Donald Trump were to ever do something like this this would be implemented in the most sloppy way possible and you would need to come up with a real plan which we all know Donald Trump is incapable of doing but I mean even if we know that executing something like this is incredibly unlikely because it's so impractical still the implications of this tweet here are troubling because it still tells us that regardless of the scope of this crackdown there will be another crackdown because he's got an election to win and he knows that if he wants to keep his base excited and loyal he's got to keep cracking down on immigrants with these draconian fascistic policies so even if there's another crackdown this is still bad even if it's not going to be on that scale because what does a crackdown mean it means that this will cause irreparable harm to vulnerable communities because they're seeking asylum oftentimes due to violence in their country caused by US imperialism and in case you haven't been paying attention Donald Trump's administration confirmed that they have more than 13,000 children who are immigrants in US custody, six of which have died in ICE custody which journalist Ken Klippenstein learned were preventable deaths that occurred due to negligence and because this is becoming such a big problem well what did ICE do they just stopped updating the official death count and now as Jessica Corbett of Common Dreams reports earlier last week Trump administration officials revealed plans to detain migrant children at a former Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma because an influx of minors has overwhelmed shelters throughout the country I mean think about this as Americans on both sides of the political aisle we all came together collectively and agreed that what happened during World War II the way that we imprisoned Japanese Americans that was a disgusting blemish on our history one of many but we agreed that that was bad and now what we're doing is we're using those internment camps to lock up migrant children it's like history keeps repeating itself and we can never learn from our mistakes so this was absolutely outrageous and everyone who has a moral compass should be outraged by this Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was outraged by this and the way that she described this was these are basically like concentration camps so she was outraged by this but the way that conservatives responded to our draconian anti-immigrant policies was to be outraged at the way others vocalized their disgust with these types of policy so here's what AOC said that sparked so much outrage the United States is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are they are concentration camps and if that doesn't bother you I don't I like we can have whatever I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that we should not need something so what she said was not just accurate but it was incredibly reasonable it was a perfectly rational response to have to the site of migrant children being detained I mean we purport to be the freest country in the world and we are locking migrant children in cages there are 13,000 children who are detained currently in ice custody in harsh conditions according to some reports and when people vocalize outrage well some individuals Liz Cheney for example are outraged at the outrage so Liz Cheney tweeted please AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust you demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this now AOC responded saying hey representative Cheney since you're so eager to quote unquote educate me I'm curious how would you call building mass camps of people being detained without a trial how would you dress up DHS's mass separation of thousands of children at the border from their parents and she then added and for the shrieking Republicans who don't know the difference concentration camps are not the same as death camps concentration camps are considered by experts as the mass detention of civilians without trial and that's exactly what this administration is doing and she's exactly right but this is exactly what Republicans do they don't get outraged ever at the source of immorality they get outraged at the way people describe the injustice they get outraged and police the language of people who are reacting to what is happening this is what they always do because it serves as an easy way to start distracting people so we're no longer talking about migrant children in cages we're talking about the semantics as to how we should describe migrant children being detained by ICE and it's because Republicans and conservatives generally speaking they don't care about immorality these are not moral people Liz Cheney's father is a mass murderer who should spend the rest of his life in prison but of course you know the true bad guys are the people like AOC who denounce these types of fascistic immigration policies and human rights abuses they're the bad guys because they didn't describe this injustice appropriately according to people like Liz Cheney here's the thing regardless if Donald Trump is able to execute this type of crackdown or not we should all be outraged at this we're locking children in cages 13,000 migrant children are being detained and people are more outraged at the outrage the state of American politics is so toxic so moral currently that if we don't come together and agree on a real objective standard of morality because I don't believe in moral relativism but if we don't agree on a standard of morality if we all craft our own standards of what is and isn't moral then I don't know how we could ever come together as a country because anyone who dismisses the treatment of migrant children by Trump's administration there's someone that I can never work with I can never work with these people so it's a sad state of American affairs where whenever there is actually outrage for the way that we're detaining migrant children while the people who speak out get told to shut up or they get language policed for not talking about it in a way that conservatives deem appropriate it's sickening everybody knows that Jeff Bezos CEO of Amazon is the richest man on the planet he is worth $154.8 billion but we don't ever really stop to think about just how large a sum of money that really is an actuality like let's just picture for a moment that we were going to spend some of that money and buy things that rich people buy so of course the first thing you'd want to purchase is a mansion well how much does a mansion cost usually at around $8 million if you want to purchase a mansion in Los Angeles but let's say you want to purchase a really luxurious mansion and you spend $100 million and you know you wanted to splurge a little bit so you bought two of them let's also say that if you wanted to spend this money you wanted to buy a couple of cars a couple of lambos and you spent about $10 million on cars you then went on to buy a yacht which costs $45 million getting a really nice one and then you spent $10 million on a private jet and another $400,000 for maintenance each year so if you're Jeff Bezos and you just spent all of that money how much of a dent would that make in your overall net worth barely any the point is that even if he tried to spend this money in the most reckless way possible he would never be able to spend all of that money he's 55 years old so he's not going to be able to spend all of that by the end of his life and in the event he were really, really lucky and he lived to be a thousand years old he still would be unable to spend all of that money so that's the point it's such a gigantic sum of wealth that it's difficult to even fathom how much money that is because you can go on a spending spree and purchase mansions and private jets and yachts and cars and still not even make a dent in your overall net worth meanwhile his employees work so hard that they are forced to pee in bottles to save time or they'll urinate in trash cans to save time they'll be shamed to work often times even if they're injured and shouldn't work Amazon workers also experience mental breakdowns usually as a result of harsh working conditions and they're barely even paid enough to survive I mean do you think that's fair do you really think it's justifiable to have the CEO of a company make so much money that he can't even spend all of that in ten lifetimes let alone one while his employees are working in such harsh conditions that they're having mental breakdowns and they're peeing in bottles in order to remain as productive as possible that's not justifiable he's exploiting them he is exploiting them and Amazon they absolutely don't like when you point this out they don't like when you draw attention to their exploitative practices but this is wrong and we should point it out because this is a form of theft this is wage theft he's exploiting their labor and not sufficiently sharing the benefits of what they produced for him and then when people criticize them they panic and freak out for example Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez she basically made the same exact points that I just made however when she made this point since she actually has real power in politics well they panicked and they felt compelled to respond immediately so as best 11 of Vanity Fair reports when Amazon announced in February opening a second headquarters in Queens as previously announced representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was one of the first lawmakers to claim victory tweeting that defeating Amazon's corporate greed its worker exploitation and the power of the richest man in the world was proof that anything is possible and four months later it appears her feelings about the company haven't changed speaking to ABC's this week on Sunday AOC asserted that the only way Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world with a net worth of 117 billion after giving his ex-wife roughly 37 billion was by treating his employees like slave laborers noting that she has no issue with Bezos being obscenely rich if Amazon is paying its workers a living wage AOC added if that's the case and Jeff Bezos is still a billionaire that's one thing but if Bezos wealth is predicated for dropping them of their ability to access healthcare that's a major problem and you'll never believe it but the tech giant did not take kindly to such comments these allegations are absurd Amazon said in a statement Amazon associates receive industry leading pay starting at $15 an hour Amazon prepays 95% of continuing education tuition costs through its career choice program for associates who want to pursue and expand careers Jay Carney, Amazon's head of communications later chimed in to say more than 42% of all working Americans earn less than the $15 an hour Amazon pays entry level fulfillment center employees and all our employees get top tier benefits I'd urge AOC to focus on raising the federal minimum wage instead of making stuff up about Amazon last October after the tech giant raised its minimum wage Bloomberg reported that the company had eliminated stock awards and monthly bonuses for warehouse workers and other hourly employees so do you understand what they're doing they desperately, whenever they're criticized try to get the person who's criticizing them to shut up because they don't want you to realize what they're actually doing and how they're treating and exploiting frankly their workers don't look at us look at all the other large multinational corporations who aren't paying their workers a $15 living wage at least we're doing that and that's great but let's remember that you actually didn't opt to pay your workers a $15 an hour living wage until you were shamed into doing that by Bernie Sanders you didn't do that on your own accord you did it because you wanted people to stop looking at you and to divert their attention elsewhere but let's also be realistic here a $15 minimum wage that may be better than other large multinational corporations but it's absolutely nothing to write home about because let's face it if you live in New York City, if you live in Seattle $15 isn't enough to survive it's still not a living wage, it's not I'm sorry, it's not people are gonna call me an extremist for pointing that out but let's be realistic here it's a $15 minimum wage because it's a minimum ideally you pay workers more than $15 because if you live in New York City how are you going to survive off of $15 an hour? like it's absurd that the federal minimum wage isn't just $15 an hour already but even if we raise it to $15 an hour that's still not a liveable wage and as time passes as Congress doesn't act and raise the federal minimum wage $15 well that's not as valuable as it was five years ago when the fight for $15 began so these companies, they do the bare minimum and then expect praise from you while they're still exploiting their workers treating them unfairly not addressing the mental breakdowns that are happening in Amazon warehouses across the country it's absolutely maddening and it's important that people like AOC call out Amazon for what they're doing here because this is exploitative and they absolutely should not be allowed to exploit their workers and Jeff Bezos should never be allowed to amass that much money if his workers can barely survive what Amazon has been doing is they're taking advantage of a capitalistic system that is ruthless the laws need to be changed nobody should be able to amass more than a billion dollars in wealth one because they don't need it and two because you're never going to work that much harder than your employees to where that much money is justified because it's not so long as there is income and wealth inequality so long as there is homelessness so long as people have food insecurity in the United States nobody in this country should be allowed to amass that much money what do we do then we tax them, we take that money because that's not their money that they stole from their employees and by taxing that we're just taking it back and we're giving it back to employees because they like to denounce taxes as theft but the real theft is them stealing that money and exploiting the labor of their workers in the first place so Amazon can cry all they want they can try to respond to AOC and claim that she's lying they're only responding because they know they're in the wrong and they have to try to make sure that they divert attention away from them and it's true there are other large multinational corporations that are probably treating their workers a lot worse but that doesn't mean that we can't also focus on Amazon and when you have a CEO that is the richest man in the world I'm sorry you're just going to end up attracting a lot of attention Bernie Sanders is taking a lot of flak for tweeting out what some perceive to be an attack on Elizabeth Warren and I'll be honest I don't personally think that this tweet is controversial at all with that being said though I do want to proceed cautiously here because the people who are outraged over this weren't the usual bad faith actors who are trying to go out of their way to interpret whatever Bernie Sanders says in the most negative way possible like there were some people on our side allies who support Bernie Sanders who also said look I don't think this is a good look for Bernie Sanders and I don't think he is proceeding about this in the right way now to be fair I think that Bernie Sanders should have been more clear here but I think that what's missing here and why some people even supporters of Sanders took issue with this is because there's a lot of context that's missing here so to talk about what started this all was a tweet from Politico where they shared an article about the caption centrists are coming around to Elizabeth Warren as an alternative to Bernie Sanders now the article is about how Wall Street backed third-way Democrats are starting to warm to Warren not necessarily because they agree with her politically but because they kind of view her as a more palatable alternative to Bernie Sanders and they view her as the lesser of evils if someone is going to win who is progressive because it looks like there's a lot of left-wing momentum currently so they kind of see someone who is on the left as inevitable if Joe Biden isn't able to pull it off so what it seems like the article is communicating here is that third-way is saying alright if we've got to go with anyone Warren is the better progressive if our arms will be twisted here now here's why they say they prefer Warren to Sanders one is a Democratic capitalist narrative said Matt Bennett a co-founder a centrist think tank that convened a conference of party insiders in South Carolina this week designed to warn about the risks of a nominee whose views are out of the political mainstream the other is a socialist narrative so in other words if we have got to pick between someone I guess we could strategically get behind Warren because at least she's still a self-proclaimed capitalist whereas Bernie Sanders is a devout socialist and we just can't back that they also argue that they don't think Bernie Sanders would be electable against Donald Trump specifically because of that socialist label now additionally here's what they also say in this article about centrist support for Warren it's a sign of how the ideological lanes of the 2020 primary have blurred and overlapped and of the steady progress Warren is making as a candidate but it's also a statement on Bernie Sanders for progressive votes Sanders continues to face significant resistance from within the party and nowhere more so than among the moderates and establishment players who blanch at his talk of democratic socialism establishment and moderate democrats haven't necessarily been won over to warrants camp yet many still point to the former vice president Joe Biden as their preferred candidate but the tensions that once marked Warren's relationship with moderate democrats have begun to dissipate as she methodically lays out her agenda and shows a folks here more accessible side that wasn't always apparent in her role as a blue state senator and progressive icon so they're saying alright since Warren is surging and she may be our best bet to defeat Bernie she's the lesser of those two evils and we'd rather back her than Bernie that's kind of what I saw here but there's a couple of takeaways from this article first of all if you are even remotely palatable to the Wall Street backed third way democratic wing then you're just not radical enough for me you're just not radical enough for me and I think it's because they realize that even if Elizabeth Warren is substantially you know to the left of someone like Joe Biden the comparison between her and Bernie Sanders is still meaningful because Bernie wants to fundamentally change the system whereas Elizabeth Warren even though she does want to make some drastic changes she still wants to work within the parameters of capitalism and won't do too much to upset the establishment and overturn the apple cart so to speak so in response to this article in response to the reality that third way democrats feel more comfortable unsurprisingly with Warren than Bernie Sanders this is what he said the cat is out of the bag the corporate wing of the democratic party is publicly quote anybody but Bernie they know our progressive agenda of medicare for all breaking up big banks taking on drug companies and raising wages is the real threat to the billionaire class now what happened is immediately after he tweeted this out people took offense to this because they thought that oh well Bernie Sanders now he's even lumping Elizabeth Warren in with the corporate wing of the democratic party specifically because he tweeted out this article that was very heavily about Warren but in actuality it was really more about Bernie Sanders in the sense that third way is just detailing who is a bigger threat to them and it's obviously Bernie hence why they're opting for Warren or they're trying to get more comfortable with the idea of Warren becoming the nominee but even people who are on our side who support Bernie pointed out that they weren't too happy here so this is what will lead Shahid who tweeted out if we had a multi-party parliament it'd be pretty normal for Sanders and Warren to campaign against each other for leadership and a social democratic party that said I still find this move pretty disappointing and unnecessary draw contrasts if you want but not like this now I think that the reason why will lead Shahid who's an ally to progressives instinctively kind of came out against Bernie here is because he misread what Bernie was trying to say what Bernie was trying to say wasn't necessarily something about Elizabeth Warren his tweet was only tangentially about Warren he was saying that third way views me as a threat and they literally would opt for anyone over me including another lefty like Elizabeth Warren that's what Bernie Sanders was saying and as this was explained more thoroughly to will lead Shahid he kind of came around so for example a New York time journalist gave him some more perspective here and explained that at a third way conference that he just said last week they were literally talking about how Warren is more palatable because she's not as far to the left as Bernie because she's moving away from Medicare for all which is a relief to them because let's remember these third way corporate democrats have a lot of health industry donors so if Elizabeth Warren will preserve that system then obviously that's going to be more preferable to them and will each Shahid even pointed out after that that you know Elizabeth Warren's stance on Medicare for all is in fact inferior to Bernie's and even inferior to Kamala's believe it or not so what Bernie was ultimately speaking to here was the threat level that's it you know I get that he should have been more clear and I think he knows that he should have been more clear because after he put out this tweet his team clarified almost immediately so as Tina win of Vanity Fair reports as Sanders tweet began to make the rounds his campaign rushed to clarify that it had been aimed not at Warren but at centrist Democrats like third way whose executive vice president of public affairs Matt Bennett declared last October that he would support any Democrat nominee with the exception of senator Sanders were open to everybody except for him so it wasn't an attack on Warren with that being said Bernie Sanders has to be extra cautious in the way he words things because at this point he's got to realize that there are so many bad faith actors who want to bring him down that they're going to look for reasons to attack him so he's got to make sure that if he's going to say something like this and respond to an article that heavily references Elizabeth Warren he should do so in a way that makes it seem as if you know he's not referencing her he's referencing third way Democrats now I'm sure he thought that he made that clear but you've got to go a step further to make sure that you know you're squeaky clean because there's so many bad faith actors that want to smear Bernie Sanders as someone who's an aggressive Bernie bro who's trying to go after someone who is progressive and if you know Elizabeth Warren is too much of a corporate Democrat for Bernie then you know who isn't a corporate Democrat the only person who's not a corporate Democrat is Bernie in his view that's essentially what they're going to try to do that's kind of what we saw so Bernie does need to not to pick on Bernie but he does need to try to be more clear here and word things more clearly and try to not step on the landmines that are being said for him that being said I thought it was obvious that he wasn't referencing Warren and trying to attack Warren or besmirch her character and call her a corporate Democrat but with that being said I think the fact that allies people on our side took it that way means he should have probably been a little bit more clear but you know there were of course bad faith actors that did try to capitalize on this situation and there's a lot of people who support Bernie Sanders like myself who instinctively defended him here because we know what he was trying to say and we know the establishment and third way corporate Democrats are against him so we came to his defense now because we defended him because Bernie supporters defended him other people who are bad faith actors decided to chime in for example multi-millionaire Chrissy Teigen said that as a result of Bernie Sanders supporters defending him here quote Bernie supporters will be the downfall of Bernie I don't even hate him but you guys are absolutely insufferable do him a favor and stop being so combative against Democratic criticism now I don't know much about Chrissy Teigen's politics I don't even know if she's genuinely on the left I know she's anti-Trump but I mean she in 2011 advocated for a Republican I don't know if that was a endorsement of Mitt Romney but I don't even know if she realizes why people are so passionately supporting and defending Bernie Sanders but I pointed this out to her and my response to that was Bernie supporters know he's the only candidate that wants to fundamentally change the system that's killing them so hopefully you can understand why peasants often vocally defend him against bad faith attacks looking forward to taking your wealth Chrissy Teigen now if you follow me on Twitter you'd know that I often like to tell celebrities that piss me off that I want to take their wealth because I do because I hate capitalism and I hate that it allows these rich assholes to rich-splain to us peasants and tell them you're being insufferable for defending a candidate who's always prone to these bad faith attacks by the establishment it's just infuriating but going forward I do hope that Bernie Sanders is a little bit more careful even if I knew what he was talking about here and what he was referencing here I think that he gave his haters enough ammunition to where they could potentially you know remove the context from this situation or misread what he's trying to say and view this as an attack against Elizabeth Warren and even if they know that maybe he's not necessarily trying to attack Elizabeth Warren the mainstream media has a vested interest in getting him and Elizabeth Warren to exchange blows because that's what's in clicks but I don't think that Bernie and Warren should be taking shots at each other during the primary if it comes down to a race between just him and her then I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to really draw these comparisons because they really are different right they're different on a number of issues Elizabeth Warren is horrible when it comes to foreign policy for the most part Elizabeth Warren is terrible when it comes to healthcare because she is wishy-washy on Medicare for all however I think Bernie needs to be more clear and I think that as his supporters we have to try to listen to our allies because even if people you know took issue with this try to understand like from the perspective of someone like Waleed Shaheed I don't think he's a bad faith actor so I think that we should try to explain to them why Bernie Sanders said this and give him more context because what this is about is something that we all know about and have seen over the years that the establishment is out to get Bernie Sanders a target theory that's a fact because if you go against moneyed interests and the powers that be you're going to make yourself a target FDR was a target right so Bernie Sanders knows that he's a target he knows that with him doing what he's doing advocating for you know a fundamental change the system he's going to make himself a target we know that as well we just have to try to engage with allies rather than shooting them down and I think that's dead then on Twitter did that with Waleed and really explain to him where Bernie Sanders was coming from in case you haven't noticed Joe Biden is finally starting to slide in the polls thank God and the reason why he's sliding and the reason why just overall he hasn't had the best week week and a half is because he can't stop putting his foot in his mouth again and again and again he says or does something that's either wrong or so bizarre that you can't help but not like him and this is precisely why he's starting to slip and it's what we all predicted in indie media would happen now let me give you a couple of examples to demonstrate what I mean here so when a pro-choice activist asked him about his wishy-washyness with regard to the Hyde Amendment he condescendingly then proceeded to wag his finger in her face and said nobody has spoken about it done more or changed more than I have a lot of detective tests determined that was a lie he then told a room of 100 elites in New York that they don't have to really worry too much about their taxes being raised because Joe Biden isn't about wanting to demonize people who make money in fact they really don't have to worry about his tax policy being too burdensome he then reached out to a Trump supporting billionaire Republican party donor for money and then was subsequently rejected but on top of all that he just dropped this gem on us so as Isaac Stanley Becker of the Washington Post reports Joe Biden wistfully recalled on Tuesday an era in which he was able to get along with segregationist senators even when they didn't agree on much of anything dismissing criticism from his party's left wing flank that he is too conciliatory toward political adversaries the former vice president told a crowd of about 100 people gathered for a fundraiser at the Carlisle Hotel in New York that one of his strengths was bringing people together he knew this made him old fashion in the eyes of rest of Democrats he said but he remained adamant that political fellowship of the sort he maintained with white supremacists in the 1970s was not just possible in today's climate but the best answer to the forces elevating president Trump quote if we can't reach a consensus in our system what happens Biden said at the fundraiser according to a pool report so understand the context that he is talking about when it comes to bipartisanship his view of bipartisanship is so broad that he literally believes that people of color should come together and work with white supremacists literal white supremacists self-proclaimed white supremacists that's his view of bipartisanship the problem Joe is how do you bring people together who are diametrically opposed how do you have the audacity to ask black Americans and people of color in general to work with people who are opposed to them who deny their humanity are you seriously asking them or telling them that that's what they need to do right now I mean think of how privileged you sound no we don't need to work with white supremacists what we need to do is defeat them there absolutely needs to be a rainbow coalition where we bring together working class voters but we don't need to include white supremacists and alt-right assholes in that category they need to be defeated they need to lose that's the only way that we can go forward and if you don't realize that Joe then you're even more out of touch than I previously thought but he's not done here because this article is gonna talk about how he goes on and discuss white supremacists who he worked with including James Eastlin and Herman Talmadge now Herman Talmadge for those of you who don't know was a vocal opponent to the civil rights movement he was also in favor of segregation and when it comes to James Eastwood he was arguably even worse if you could even imagine because during World War II he was so opposed to black soldiers serving in the military and fighting the Nazis that he actually did his own Hitler-esque speech where he denounced black soldiers and said that they can't possibly participate or they shouldn't participate because he claimed that they were physically and mentally incapable of serving he was also unsurprisingly opposed to the Civil Rights Act and the Civil Rights Movement claimed that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional he was against the Board of Education the list goes on these are bad people very bad people and if you're talking about these people or you knew these people then you should never bring up their names unless you talk about how you challenged them and shamed them for their disgusting dehumanizing racist beliefs that's not what Joe Biden does here quote I was in a caucus with James Eastlin Biden said at the fundraiser where he was introduced by Eric Mindich an investment manager and former Goldman Sachs partner the Democratic presidential candidate who has led his competitors in early polls of the crowded nominating contest briefly imitated the southern drawl of the Mississippi cotton planter lawyer and lawmaker he never called me boy Biden said he always called me son Biden's campaign didn't immediately return a request for comment about why it would be notable that the Dixie Crat who thought black Americans belonged to an inferior race and warned that integration would cause the quote mongrelization didn't call Biden boy a racial epithet deployed against black men he pressed his case at the fundraiser Tuesday using the examples of Eastlin and Talmadge to argue that gaping differences can be accommodated he said he could work with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell without being best buddies because he knows how to demonstrate respect for Republicans even with Talmadge one of the meanest guys I ever knew Biden noted at least there was some civility we got things done we didn't agree on much of anything we got things done that sort of pragmatism he suggested was rooted in personal affability and he lamented its demise in today's bitter partisan warfare but today you look at the other side and you're the enemy Biden said not the opposition the enemy we don't talk to each other anymore maybe it's because one side has gone completely off the rails Joe the Republican Party is so extreme that they are literally not just blocking progress that we've made towards tackling climate change but they are undoing whatever progress that we've made they're literally facilitating the demise of humanity to give us for not wanting to talk to them or work with them and he talks about here oh well you know James Eastlin he never called me boy he called me son I mean what a tone deaf statement of course he didn't call you that Joe because you're white he doesn't think you're inferior he doesn't view you as someone who isn't equal to him the reason why he called black men boys was because he thinks that they are an inferior race so for him to say oh well he was respectful to me because he called me son and didn't call me boy I mean I'm baffled I'm baffled that he would actually say something like this what a fucking moron now because his comments were so stupid this led to almost universal condemnation even from his Democratic Party rivals Cory Booker called on him to comment Bernie Sanders also agreed that he should apologize Kamala Harris said that the comments he made deeply concern her even John Delaney made a tweet denouncing Joe Biden if John Delaney thinks that you've gone too far to the right you've gone a little bit too far to the right Joe now in case you disagree with him which most people on the left do well here's what he has to say for you if you don't want to work with the other side this is his response we have to work together the fact of the matter is we can't get a consensus nothing happens except the abuse of power by the executive, zero how to make it clear to Republicans that you understand on some things there is a rationale for compromise and so folks look if you start off with a notion there's nothing you can do well might y'all go home then man or let's start a real physical revolution if you're talking about it so that was a clip taken from people's campaign just the way that he talks to people like I'm not a fan of Joy Reid but I felt cringe for her at the way he was talking to her that was just weird Joe Biden he can't win because if he wins this dingbat is going to end up losing to Donald Trump so if you are a Democratic Party voter and you're supporting him think seriously about your decision so we've got a follow up on the story that we talked about yesterday regarding Joe Biden and for those of you that missed that video I would encourage you to watch it but if you didn't see that video then let me just give you a quick rundown so basically Joe Biden drew criticism from his Democratic Party rivals because what he did was he talked about the need for bipartisanship and working together and to do that he talked about how he used to work with white supremacists like actual segregationists like James Eastlid and he went a step further he then went on to humanize them and talk about how he was such a nice guy and he called me son and not boy I wonder why he called you a white person son Joe so basically the reason why a lot of people took issue with this is because there was this underlying implication that he was saying that people of color should come to the table and work with these assholes who dehumanize them and trying to humanize horrible people like James Eastlin you're doing a disservice to people of color because these assholes like James Eastlin they would have never allowed for people who they dehumanize to be humanized and viewed in the way that Joe Biden is allowing us to view them they think that black people are inferior like James Eastlin literally gave a speech during World War II to complain about how he didn't like that black troops were serving he said that they were mentally and physically incapable of serving in the military so Joe Biden demonstrated how racially insensitive he is you don't get a pass because you were the VP for the first black president sorry you don't get a pass so a lot of people criticized him and what Cory Booker did one of his rivals was he said Joe Biden should apologize so Joe Biden was asked about Cory Booker saying he should apologize watch his response here racist bone in my body I've been involved in civil rights my whole career period period period he was genuinely shocked you could see it on his face apologize for what? why should I have to apologize? I only talked about how lovely these white supremacists were and tried to humanize these bad people that would never give the people they dehumanize the time of day to be viewed as you know a human being why I should apologize? and his answer to Cory Booker it's unreal it blew my mind Mr. Biden Cory Booker says that you should apologize what do you say to Cory Booker? his response? no you wow this is a child this is a child this is the left wing Donald Trump he's maybe slightly more intelligent than Donald Trump he's certainly almost as narcissistic as Donald Trump and he says things that he can't fathom why people would take offense to them or disagree with him it's all about me me me me what I have to apologize why would you do this to me? why would you say that I should apologize? no you should apologize to me Cory for saying that I should apologize drop out drop out the fact that anyone even thought about supporting him I mean he's sliding in the polls now but the fact that anybody thought about supporting him it shows the power of going away right because everybody was okay with Joe Biden when he was gone and they had these nostalgic views of him during the Obama era and then he comes back and they're reminded what a fucking dipshit he is what a moron he needs to just drop out we need to move on we don't need to go backwards to Joe Biden and the Obama era I get that you still may feel these warm and fuzzy feelings they reminisce about the good old days when we had a Democrat in the White House but they don't realize that the reason why we got Donald Trump was because during the Obama era they were ignoring a lot of issues that was leading to desperation that caused the radicalization that facilitated the rise of someone like Donald Trump who exploited that desperation that people were feeling so we don't need to go back and we certainly don't need to look to Joe Biden if we can't do better than Joe Biden then I don't know what to say the Democrats are just useless and to nobody surprised Nancy Pelosi defended him the supposedly woke leader of the Democratic Party defended him if Democrats can't even be good on social issues which is basically their only strength then go the fuck home you have no business being in politics because the one thing that really differentiates Democrats from Republicans is them being at least reasonable on most social issues they still need to do better they need to improve substantially but they're better than Republicans if you can't understand why we don't want you to humanize these white supremacists if you can't understand why we're not going to negotiate when it comes to issues like abortion and the Hyde Amendment go the fuck home we don't need you we don't want you drop out Joe just a couple of days ago we talked about how the situation between the United States and Iran is getting incredibly incredibly terrifying and just days later Republicans have already escalated even further because today Iran shot down a U.S. drone because they claim that this violated Iranian airspace now predictably the United States is denying that it went into Iranian airspace and they're maintaining that it was an international airspace now regardless of who you believe or whether or not you think that they were justified in shooting down this drone regardless of whether or not maybe they just temporarily entered Iranian airspace and then left it I don't care this should not be a reason for war period and I'm sorry but I don't believe the United States is it plausible that they did in fact violate Iranian airspace absolutely in fact I'd say that it's likely even if we don't necessarily have the evidence to determine that that was the case it's their word against Iran's word so that there are war mongers in Donald Trump's administration that are currently trying to do whatever they possibly can to goad us into war and even if let's say the United States is telling the truth and they didn't cross into Iranian airspace flying that close to Iran I mean what are you trying to do you're trying to intimidate them this is what we do all the time we perform these military exercises just outside of North Korea's border we're escalating we're intimidating them so this is what we do all the time we try to give countries a reason to act aggressively so we have a justified reason to invade them that's what we see again and again so I really hope that people don't fall for it because we're seeing history repeat itself and what we all are now worrying about is whether or not the United States government will use this as quote unquote evidence that Iran attacked us and give them what they wanted in terms of taking action militarily now the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossain Salami stated that Iran quote does not want war with any country but we are completely and totally ready and prepared for war so again when you say things like this you're just stoking the flames here everyone needs to calm down because war wouldn't benefit anyone but you know unfortunately we don't have people in positions of power around the world that are rational right we have Donald Trump a gigantic man baby who is belligerent who is making decisions on our behalf and then in Iran well when Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran deal what he did was he emboldened all of the right wing extremists in Iran the moderates were essentially delegitimized by Donald Trump's decision and Kyle Kalinsky to his credit lays this out in a recent video you know they were saying you don't want to work with the US because they can't be trusted and the moderates pushed for a deal and then unfortunately Donald Trump proved them right by withdrawing from the JCPOA so here's what happened Donald Trump issued this tacit threat to Iran via Twitter quote Iran made a very big mistake now in an interview with press he reiterated this same sentiment except he said something else that was very chilling okay you'll find out you'll find out you'll find out obviously obviously you know we're not gonna be talking too much about it you're gonna find out they made a very big mistake he was asked are you willing to go to war with Iran his answer was you'll find out and he later said they made a very big mistake that sent chills down the back of my neck and it's not like we can really take anything that Donald Trump says with you know anything more than a grain of salt because this is an incoherent babbling buffoon so you know you don't really want to focus on certain words too much because often times what he says is empty and meaningless but with that being said it's still really startling to see a US president say you'll find out when it comes to war rather than just shooting down you know that prospect now if you're wondering why he's sounding more and more hawkish and is moving away from his non-interventionist stance here and not just unequivocally denouncing this idea that war with Iran is possible well it's because guess who's steering the ship John Bolton so as the Washington Post reports administration officials interviewed by the Washington Post said that the National Security Advisor John Bolton has dominated Iran policy keeping a tight reign on information that gets to the president and sharply reducing meetings in which top officials gather in the White House's situation room to discuss the policy on Monday the Pentagon said it would send an additional 1,000 troops to the Middle East another step to beef up the US posture in the region the reinforcements come as the administration's quote maximum pressure campaign spearheaded by Bolton and Pompeo undermines the Iranian economy that campaign initiated after Trump pulled out of the nuclear cord with Tehran was recently expanded to include the designation of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist group and steps to starve Iran of oil revenues think about that John Bolton is dominating Iran policy I'm gonna play the same clip that I've played on the show before this is what he said in I believe 2016 or 2017 about Iran so him and my Pompeo they're the ones that are goading Trump into war and they know that Donald Trump instinctively may be against this idea that war with Iran is a necessary thing but they also know that Donald Trump is incredibly stupid so they're exploiting his stupidity to get what they want now one senator Angus King actually made a really poignant point and he said that what it seems like they're trying to do is box Trump in so he feels like he has no choice but to strike Iran because they know that he doesn't necessarily want to do that but at the same time if they make it seem as if that then of course he's gonna act because he's not bright enough to realize that he's being duped by these neocons so this is a horrifying situation not something that I want to see but regardless we'll keep watching this I genuinely hope that we see a concerted effort by the Democratic Party by Libertarians in the Republican Party Rand Paul I hope everyone speaks out and denounces this at the top of their lungs because this is officially time to freak out if we don't de-escalate then war with Iran is possible and if that were to happen it would be absolutely devastating as many people like Bernie Sanders say it would make the war on Iraq look like a cakewalk don't want to see that happen so we all need to do our best to spread the word and get others our peers involved and aware that we may need to take to the streets if not already to protest war with Iran or even further escalation let's talk about this piece from the New York Times I find this incredibly fascinating so what they did was they sat down all 21 Democratic Party presidential contenders and they asked each of them the same questions there are 18 questions in total and I think this is incredibly fascinating some of these questions are great however not all of the questions are as substantive as I'd like so for example how many hours of sleep do you get a night? don't give a shit couldn't care less like if you are getting each of the presidential candidates in a room and you're going to ask them these questions why would that be one of the questions you asked but with that being said I don't want to gripe too much because I think overall this is fascinating now keep in mind that I haven't actually watched these videos ahead of time so you're seeing my genuine first time reaction although I do kind of have an idea as to how some of these candidates performed based on the reactions I saw on Twitter so I know that I'm going to be disappointed when it comes to Israel I know I'm going to be disappointed when it comes to healthcare with that being said let's go ahead and jump into it I sound like Philip DeFranco and let's just jump into it so what they do for each of these questions you click on it and it'll give you a summary of their answers but if you want more context if you want to know more about their statement here you can watch each of the candidates individual videos I don't think we're going to get to all of these because I don't want this to be a super long video but let's just go ahead and we'll start with healthcare because that's something that's incredibly important to me on healthcare would you be focused on improving Obamacare or on replacing it with a single payer system? Yes I think both I don't see it in any way that those two are mutually exclusive I don't think we have to accept that false choice my focus would be building on the Affordable Care Act my focus would be building off of the Affordable Care Act same talking point same talking point we can begin by improving the Affordable Care Act but we have to go far beyond that my focus would be on replacing it with Medicare for all I believe in Medicare for all I support Medicare for all I think the wisest thing for us to do is to have a Medicare for all type plan as a public option a coverage for all system universal healthcare in the United States we need to move to a universal healthcare system I think we need to move towards single payer we need to move towards a single payer system I want to make sure that Medicare is there for everybody in this country I believe in a Medicare for all single payer program um, okay lots to say there first of all Elizabeth Warren expectedly disappointed me what would you prefer to focus on improving the Affordable Care Act or replacing it yes so do you understand how weak and just bizarre that answer is Elizabeth Warren what is your plan for healthcare yes answer Warren I mean Jesus Christ just for once in your life have a spine and take a stand on something I mean each and every single week she's proposing these phenomenal policies but on healthcare for whatever reason she's weak she's weaker than Kirsten Gillibrand she's weaker than Kamala Harris how of all people you'd expect Elizabeth Warren to be the one to come out on top and say look I'm standing with Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard we've got to move to Medicare for all immediately but she's not doing that so that's disappointing I expected her to disappoint me there a couple things I want to touch on so when they say would your focus be on improving the Affordable Care Act they said that basically verbatim like four candidates said it and even if the question was worded that way understand that this is a talking point by the Democratic Party establishment how many town halls have we seen where they're asked if they support Medicare for all and they immediately jump to well I think we should improve the Affordable Care Act okay but that's not really a clear cut answer how do you want to improve it there's a couple of people towards the end like what's his name Jay Inslee for example who said we need to move towards a universal healthcare system now ten years ago I would have assumed that that meant they support single payer where healthcare is free at the point of service that nowadays when a Democrat uses the word single payer or excuse me when they use the word universal healthcare that doesn't necessarily mean that they support single payer that just could mean well you know I support universal healthcare in the sense that I want to expand the Affordable Care Act so it covers like a hundred percent of people that's what it could mean so that doesn't mean single payer now the one that I think I found the most egregious was Mary Ann Williamson's answer because she was obviously trying to do double speak oh well I support Medicare for all as a public option do you support Medicare for all or a public option those are two different policies which one is it you can't have it both ways either you support a public option or Medicare for all now you can support a public option that's fine I disagree with you but if you're gonna be disingenuous and say Medicare for all because you know that that's what we want to hear when you support a public option in actuality I find that maddening so public option or Medicare for all you don't get to sit on the fence here Mary Ann Williamson pick a side now the one that surprised me honestly was Andrew Yang because when I had him on my show I asked him this very question because he's been waffling back and forth between a public option and Medicare for all and here he said very clearly Medicare for all so yeah I think that Cory Booker and Kamala Harris they have the right sense to say I don't think we should you know be forced to choose between what is a false dichotomy but I really want them to explicitly say Medicare for all but overall I think that this was disappointing I love how Beto here he says oh well I think we have to start by improving the affordable care act and then we just go beyond that but you can just jump straight to Medicare for all and then you improve healthcare for everyone it's like they're clinging to the affordable care act specifically because this is something that the last president who was a Democrat did and they just want to preserve his legacy I don't care about Obama's legacy when I care about his healthcare and they should too so I'm not surprised by Bernie Sanders dance of course he's strong here what I want to get to is the people who we've been following on this issue Kamala Harris for the most part has been strong she kind of reversed course when it comes to whether or not she'd get rid of public health insurance or private health insurers but let's hear what she has to say here well I don't think we have to accept that false choice I mean let's first agree that the affordable care act took us to a place where tens of millions of people for the first time had access to healthcare and it was revolutionary frankly what they were able to achieve in terms of improving and reforming the healthcare system I think we now need to take it to the next step because still in our country so many people do not have access to affordable healthcare my goal and I think the best place that we could be is to have Medicare for all and I support Medicare for all and you know the other part of it is that we have to have policies in our country that recognize that one of the biggest barriers in fact the biggest barrier to everyone having access to healthcare is cost and we have got to be focused on reducing in some situations John Delaney is going to be disappointing let's hear from Tulsi Gabbard I support Medicare for all I think the current system that we have continues to be broken even with the advances made in the affordable care act there are still far too many people in this country who are uninsured or who are under insured and ultimately are not able to get care that they need good short but sweet that's exactly what I want to hear I think the wisest thing for us to do is to have a Medicare for all type plan as a public option and then to give people the opportunity also to keep their private insurance insurance this is probably the worst because she's being so disingenuous like she's clearly trying to have it both ways I hate these types of answers just tell me if you're for Oregon something don't try to gaslight me I believe in Medicare for all because I think healthcare is a right and not a privilege and one of the challenges we've had with the ACA is we never got to universal coverage that was affordable so I think the best way to do that is through Medicare for all and ultimately having a single payer that is an earned benefit just like Social Security today where everyone buys in at a price they can afford matched by their employer and you buy in your whole life okay the buy in gave me public option vibes but for the most part it was good up until that point but I mean she's co-sponsoring Bernie Sanders bill hopefully you know um she means what she says but Kamala did better in that regard as did Tulsi Gabbard let's hear from Warren yes yes look and in fact I focused on three things the first is we need to defend the affordable no we don't we can just go straight to Medicare for all law suit down in Texas HHS is doing everything they can to take the legs out of it this is a long meandering answer we need to pick off the things that are easy reduce the cost of prescription drugs you don't have to take this you can do all of this with Medicare for all why waste energy and political capital when you can just jump straight to the right policy insurance private insurance so that people don't rip off same kind of deal I set up for credit card companies that's part two and part three we got to keep moving us to a place where everybody is covered at the lowest possible cost nope and there are a lot of different ways to get there Medicare for all has a lot of different no no it doesn't Medicare for all has one path you pass it boom you're done it's that simple hate this answer from Elizabeth Warren I mean you'd expect better from someone who's a self-proclaimed progressive but that's a terrible answer that's a corporate democrat ask answer let's hear from Pete because he has been against Medicare for all he says I think we need to move towards single-payer up here it is the proof is in the full answer here I think we need to move towards single-payer and the way I've proposed to do it is a kind of Medicare for all who want it so he supports public option see you have to really go beyond just that basic face level rhetoric because there's so much disingenuity here that they're trying to mislead you because they really know how much we want Medicare for all and they want to tell you what we want to hear but they don't want to say it in a direct way because they know that that'll piss off progressive so they do it in this roundabout sneaky way saying well you know I support Medicare they emphasize that word for all who want it you know it's so frustrating let's go to Andrea my focus would be on replacing it with Medicare for all system that provides healthcare for all Americans I think that the Affordable Care Act was a tremendous step forward but did not go quite far enough okay that's good it seems like he is coming back around to Medicare for all it still gives me pause because he's waffled on it before but I mean this is a step in the right direction I'm not going to bother watching Bernie's because Bernie hit it out of the park he does this every time he's the best on this okay we will go to do you think Israel meets international standards of human rights this is a really easy answer it's no it should be no across the board but I have this sinking feeling that they're all going to fuck this up do you think Israel meets international standards of human rights I have great concerns about the role that Netanyahu is playing you know I think no I do I do yes yes overall yes Israel often does but not always when you're addressing the issues around Israel one has to look at their evolution I believe that we can get back to kind of policies that affirm that two-state solution affirm human rights I do think that by and large Israel meets standards of human rights I believe Israel does work to ensure human rights I think there's more that could be done I believe that Israel like a lot of other countries that side at the beginning told you everything he's going to try to bullshit you they want to do the right thing but they're not needs to work with the Palestinian people to find a two-state solution there are some challenges with Israel oh come on Tulsi you're the foreign policy candidate enormous challenges oh fuck off they are strong allies a liberal democracy come on I know that Israel attempts to meet international standards of human rights they don't they're brazenly violating human rights I know that they could do a better job well I think they could do a better job I think that all countries can improve in all respects I think that there are many countries including the United States that behaves in ways that do not always meet international standards of human rights certainly some of the actions that are being taken there are deeply problematic I think Israel's human rights record is problematic and moving in the wrong direction so they all fucked this question up royally I guess the best I use the word best very loosely was Pete Buttigieg but it's funny he answers this question still shittily but better than everyone else but this week we got word that he would not move the embassy back so I mean this is all around each and every single one of them shit the bed including our favorites Bernie Tulsi Lauren this isn't hard it's a yes or no answer and objectively speaking according to human rights watchdogs the answer is no you don't need to go on this long tangent and give us this long winded response just be concise no so Kamal is wrong here let's see basically everyone was wrong let's go to Elizabeth Warren I think that Israel is in a really tough neighborhood I understand that they face enormous challenges what about the Palestinians they are a strong ally we need a liberal democracy in that region and to work with that liberal democracy if Palestinians are second-class citizens the way we would any good friend to come to the table with the Palestinians and to work toward a common solution I strongly support a two-state solution and I believe that a good friend says to the Palestinians and to the Israelis come to the table and negotiate the United States cannot dictate the terms of a long-term settlement with the Palestinians and the Israelis but what it can do is urge both of them to go there to stay out of the way to let them negotiate the pieces that are most important to them for a lasting peace I've heard enough this is not adequate let's hear Bernie I have great concerns about the role that Netanyahu is playing in Israel and their relationship with the Palestinians as I've said many times I believe 100% in the right to Israel not only to exist but to exist in peace and security of course everybody just accepts that the role of the United States is to work with all of the entities in the region including the Palestinians and to do that in an even-handed way that was such a milk toast weak, weak answer Bernie even the best progressive in the race can't just even hit anywhere near the target let's go to Tulsi because Tulsi, she is the foreign policy candidate the fact that she's having a difficult time here is so frustrating I think that there are some challenges with Israel that need to be addressed could you expand on that? I think that ongoing issues that we continue to see in the conflict between Israel and Palestine are complicated but there needs to be progress made ultimately to make sure that both the Israeli people and the Palestinian people are able to live in peace and securely Tulsi, it is so obvious that you're avoiding the question and you're sitting on the fence how are the progressives even fucking this question up? it's an easy question it's an easy question you can say look if you're afraid to say anything that would you know give off the perception maybe you're anti-Israel you can say look I believe in Israel however I go by what the international organizations are saying I go by what the UN says and it's obvious that they are in violation of international law they are violating international standards of human rights that's not my opinion, that's a fact that's what international organizations are saying this is easy but progressives can't even get it right they're all fucking it up they're all pointing every single one of them I'm good I don't want to hear anything else because it's just gonna piss me off they're all bad, every single one of them they all get an F sorry, they all get an F wow okay so that really pissed me off do you think President Trump has committed crimes in office? let's go with this one because I think again, this is another easy one just objectively speaking he violated campaign finance laws he's in violation of the emoluments clause 10 different acts of obstruction of justice according to the Mueller report should be easy do you think President Trump has committed crimes in office? I believe this president Mr. Trump believes himself to be above the law it looks to me like President Trump's committed crimes in office I do, I think he's violated the emoluments clause that he obstructed justice I don't know, I would love to see the Mueller report and maybe we can talk about it after that I think it is likely that Donald Trump did they film this before the Mueller report? yes I do, I think he may well have perhaps that could be true and I think Congress is continuing its oversight duties what Mueller did not opine on is whether or not there was obstruction of justice and was unwilling to reach a conclusion I'd like to see the full report does it seem to me that there's a very very good case for the obstruction of justice absolutely, does it seem to me that there's a very very good case for other crimes as well certainly for indictment, absolutely certainly there's a lot of evidence and discussion that he might have I can't say that I haven't seen either the full Mueller report or others that crimes per se I think it's very likely that President Trump has sealed indictments waiting for him I think it's my job to determine whether he committed crimes I think it's Congress's job there's evidence that the President has directed people to lie to Congress I believe President Trump has committed crimes while in office I think that if you read the Mueller report with any objective eye it is deeply disturbing and alarming I don't know how anybody reads the 448 pages of the Mueller report and arrives at any conclusion other than we need to start impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump I believe the President has committed impeachable offenses and I think there needs to be a congressional investigation to draw out the facts the Mueller report was not the end of the story it was really just part of the beginning so I think Elizabeth Warren was probably the strongest here although I'm a little bit confused as to the timeline here because it seems like they all recorded at different periods of time so clearly Kamala Harris recorded this when they hadn't seen the full Mueller report but Elizabeth Warren did so I think we should kind of give Kamala the benefit of the doubt but I think that anyone who doesn't at least say oh well he's certainly in violation of the emoluments clause that's obvious because he didn't put his businesses in a blind trust I mean if you can't at a minimum say that and you're writing the fence here then I find your answer disappointing okay so let's see what else do we want to click on here does anyone deserve a billion dollars this is easy no they do not let's see what they say do you think anyone deserves to have a billion dollars I mean if they earn it how do you earn a billion Kamala sure this is America sure if you earn it fairly yes there are people who deserve to have a billion dollars who no one deserves to have a billion dollars I don't know that anyone deserves to have a billion dollars deserves got nothing to do with it I don't think anybody deserves to have a billion dollars there are people that are lucky to have a billion dollars like do I think that there's something intrinsically wrong with there being billionaires in the world no I do not what troubles me is the fact that the federal government so often favors the wealthy overworking people I got a lot of problem with billionaires who are not paying a fair share yeah I mean oh that was a fencing answer high class luxury I think they should certainly pay more in taxes not some obligation that they should help create opportunity or enhance the opportunity for others I'm not sure anybody cosmically or morally deserves to have a billion dollars but I don't hold it against them I think that people deserve to work hard and make money how does our country make sure that there's shared prosperity if they worked hard how do you work hard enough to get a billion that's the point you can't work hard enough to get a billion our system is out of order to me the real question is do we deserve to live in a country where half of the population can't afford $500 I think that we make a mistake in this country when we confuse wealth with worth we need a tax system which demands that the wealthiest people in this country start paying their fair share of taxes and my guess is when you have that you're not going to have too many billionaires left okay Bernie and Warren dodged the question Tulsi Gabbard at least she answered it her answer was completely wrong the answer is no because you can't possibly earn a billion dollars and quite frankly you don't need more than a couple million so in my ideal society we have marginal tax rate of 100% anything above 5 million per year you don't need more than that I'm sorry and maybe that's a little bit too harsh in some people's views still we start actually really reducing wealth and income inequality and solving the homelessness crisis and poverty in America we need those funds more than these millionaires need that let me go to Tulsi's answer because I feel like there is more than a one word answer there had to be look those who work and earn money in this country it's not a bad thing it's how they do that and what they do with it I think matters I think the fact that we have had such an imbalance in our country with vast income inequality where our laws benefit the very few making it easy for the richest to get even richer while the middle class and the poor continue to struggle is what's wrong and that's what we need to fix so she basically said the same thing that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren said they're not necessarily billionaires but it's you know them not paying their fair share no billionaires are the problem nobody can earn that much wealth let's see here describe the last time you were embarrassed I don't care about that see what do we want to click on I don't want this video to be too long it's already getting pretty long would there be American troops in Afghanistan at the end of your first term no no there would not I suspect not there will not be American troops in Afghanistan at the end of my first term not in any sizable number I'd have to look at the circumstances but probably be very limited if there were troops there there'd be very few if there were they'd be there with a clear mission wrong answer if there is a responsible way for us to pull our troops out of Afghanistan in that timeframe there would not be any troops left horrible answer Andrew no the ideal of course would be to remove all US troops but even if we could get a more stable situation that would allow for fewer troops to be there that would be a huge step forward I will seek to pull out American troops from Afghanistan who are not there to train and equip or provide security at our embassy as president of the United States I would make no move in Afghanistan so I'm like most Americans I want to get our troops out of Afghanistan I believe we should bring back our troops from Afghanistan we need to bring our American troops home we cannot have forever wars in this nation so most of them got that right the answer is we bring the troops home let me see what Marianne Williamson said because her answer didn't make sense so there's got to be more context here as president of the United States I would make no move in Afghanistan until first I spoke to Afghan women I want to hear from the Afghani women I'm very aware of the history of the Taliban in relationship to women and so nothing happens until first I talk to them see this is an answer that gives me pause because here's the thing there are human rights atrocities going on everywhere around the world and the Afghani is carrying out a genocide against the Rohingya there are numerous human rights violations in Sudan so what I think she's missing here is that she still believes that there's such thing as a humanitarian war she is fundamentally misunderstanding why we're there we're not there because we care about human rights we're there because we want the minerals that are in Afghanistan so her her heart is in the right place with that being said I don't think she is understanding why we intervene in the first place and that worries me because as president she could be misled by generals that oh well there's this human rights violation here let's invade there's this human rights violation here let's invade and I don't like that so I'm not impressed with Marianne Williamson in these talks here let's see do you support or oppose the death penalty this is an easy answer it's cruel and unusual punishment and they shouldn't support this do you support or oppose the death penalty? I oppose the death penalty and I have long held that view I'm personally opposed to the death penalty I always have been I've always opposed to death penalty I oppose the death penalty I oppose the death penalty I oppose the death penalty. I oppose the death penalty. I support it in limited circumstances. OK, so that was a bad answer. But I mean, this is actually pretty encouraging. I wish that Joe Biden was included in this. I'm realizing now because he's so forgettable that he's not here, because I would like to hear his his responses to some of these. OK, I think I'm going to do one more. And we'll call it quits here because this is getting super long. Let's see, do you think immigration is a major problem in the United States? It's between that and should tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google be broken up? Which one do I choose? Because I can already kind of predict what they're going to say about illegal immigration. They're going to give a standard, you know, answer. Maybe we'll do both. So let's see what they say about tech giants because I hope the answer is to break them up. Should tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google be broken up? The answer in general is yes. Yes, I do. Yeah, I have no problem with the idea of breaking some of these companies up. Perhaps in some instances, we must have far stronger regulations. No, but I do think the antitrust division at the Department of Justice could be, you know, better used. I think we need to look at breaking them up. They may well be broken up. I don't think we need to break them up right now, but we've got to regulate them more effectively. They significantly increase the regulation of them. They need far more oversight and accountability and regulation. These tech giants need to be regulated to protect our privacy. We have to address the size and the power and the concentration of power that now exists. It's not healthy for our country. I think the FTC needs to be empowered to prevent and in some cases reverse the mergers of some of these companies, not just in tech, but across the American economy. My first priority is going to be that we ensure that privacy is something that is intact. I think we should absolutely examine whether they should be broken up, but we have processes in place to examine that and look at it just as Teddy Roosevelt did, just as Franklin Roosevelt did. The temptation, though, is to break them up, which is, frankly, a 20th century solution into a 21st century set of problems. I think tech giants first ought to have a lot more obligations. I worry about any presidential candidate that's making broad brush determinations. Oh, do you know? Because running for president means you're going to have to make some pretty substantial decisions and come out with really bold policies, but we don't have that. Cory Booker is, he's spineless. All right, let's do the immigration one and we'll end on a positive note with one of the stupid questions, I guess. I don't think it's a major... Do you think illegal immigration is a major problem for the U.S.? I think we have challenges with undocumented immigrants in our country and a lot of those challenges by forcing them into the shadows. Illegal immigration is an issue and Democrats have to admit that it's something that we have to confront. Republicans have to be honest about the facts, that we need immigrants, that we're a country of immigrants, that we've got to give a pathway to citizenship to dreamers and others. I want to help the dreamers. We want to encourage new streams of talent into America. Undocumented immigrants need a path to citizenship. I think even the languaging of illegal immigration is a problem in the United States. Yeah, I do not think illegal immigration is a major problem in the United States. I don't think it's a major problem, but I do think we need to fix our broken immigration system. I think it's a broken system. Our broken immigration system is a major problem in this country. I think it is a problem. It is certainly not the kind of problem that Donald Trump makes it out to be. It's not as much of a problem in a country right now where we have 3.8% unemployment. But that being said, we need a system where everyone plays by the rules. I think we have in this country an immigration crisis that's self-created. I think the big problem in the United States. The major problem for the United States is that we need to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Comprehensive immigration reform? I think that we have done nothing about immigration for so long. Why does this keep scrolling down? We haven't done enough to figure out a smart way to bring people that are in our country to citizenship. We have over 12 million undocumented immigrants here in America. And that is a major problem. Yes. No, that's a bad answer to Andrew. Immigration is an opportunity. It's an opportunity for us to rewrite our laws. We need to be doing more when it comes to immigration reform. I think the biggest problem we've got right now starts down in Central America. The United States has withdrawn a lot of support in Central America. It's a destabilized government. Gangs have taken over. And people are forced to flee for their lives. And as a consequence, they end up at the American border. Whether that's what they really wanted to do or not. Illegal immigration is an issue that this administration has drummed up to cause fear and paranoia. Let me go to Andrew Yang's answer because that was like really bad. If you're saying that the people who are here now who are paying taxes and contributing to our economy, if you think that that's a problem, then that's very Trumpian. So we have over 12 million people who are here in this country that are undocumented. That we know of. I mean, it could be an even larger number. And we should not pretend that it is possible to somehow deport 12 million people. It would collapse regional economies and separate families. It's essentially a non-starter. So right now, the status quo is we don't know who everyone is and then we have problems with that. And many of these people will show up in our emergency rooms or get into car accidents or other things where not knowing who they are is immensely problematic. And many of them are operating in an informal shadow economy where we aren't having them integrated into the greater whole. And so I'm for a long-term path to citizenship for people who are here and undocumented. We need to create a path forward for people to see that they have a future here in this country. And it's particularly true because many of them have kids who've known no other life but America and it would be, again, completely inhumane to separate families on that level. So that was a little bit more thoughtful. I don't like the long-term path to citizenship because they're already here. Like, what are we waiting for? I don't like the path towards citizenship talk. I mean, just give them citizenship. Give them amnesty. Like, I hate how everything has to be incrementalist. And it can't be bold. We have to make sure that we take the least offensive answer on everything. It drives me nuts. So, okay, now I know why they included some of these really just anodized, like, stupid questions because after you see the rest of the responses, you're going to be disappointed. And I know that they probably planned these before. They got the answers. But they're here for a reason because, yeah, these were pretty disappointing. Do I want to look at the court-packing plan? This video is already pretty long, so I kind of want to end. I keep saying we're going to end. Let me look at the court-packing one really quick. And then we'll end on a stupid question. Are you open to expanding the size of the Supreme Court? I am open to that discussion. Expanding the size of the Supreme Court is something I am thinking about right now. It would make total sense to institute a term limit of 18 years and it also would make total sense to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court. I believe we need to reform the Supreme Court, but it's not just about the number of justices. I don't know that expanding the size of the Supreme Court is the best way to address legitimate concerns we have with its objectivity. I'm open to any idea that can make sure a woman's right of choice is protected. I am open to it. I'm open to it. I am open to that. I'm open. I don't think that expanding the size of the Supreme Court solves the problem. I don't believe that expanding the size of the Supreme Court is the answer. I am not. I do not think expanding the Supreme Court makes sense. No. No. No. Where does that stop? Is a race to the bottom? I'm not convinced that expanding the size of the Supreme Court is going to fix anything. Roosevelt tried that in the 1930s, then works so well. Expanding the size of it I think would require a national discussion. You know, I would be open to giving Merrick Garland a seat because I think what happened to him was terrible. I think what Mitch McConnell did was unpatriotic and in many ways an attack on the Constitution. Let me see what Tulsi and Bernie said in the expanded answer here because I don't like Bernie's answer. I don't. The point of threatening them with the court packing plan was to get them to stop undoing all of the New Deal reforms. Like we call it the Lochner era because the Supreme Court was essentially rogue and he was threatening to pack the courts to scare the shit out of them. So if Bernie isn't looking at that as a strategy, that's super disappointing. I think the Roosevelt tried that in the 1930s, then works so well for him. Packing the courts is a great idea when you're in power. Not such a great idea when your political opponents are in power. And so if you go from 9 to 13 and 13 from 7 to 17, it never ends. But I am open to the idea of rotating judges out of the Supreme Court into courts of appeals, for example, to allow them to get a new look at the real world that is out there. But I'm not in favor of packing the courts. Yeah, that's not a really good answer from Bernie, in my opinion. I get what he's saying about, well, you know, if Democrats, when they expand the court, then Republicans will expand the court. Well, once you expand the court, then you try to stop Republicans from doing the same thing. Like you have to fight dirty and fight fire with fire. They stole a Supreme Court seat from President Obama. So now all bets are off. Civility is gone. Now you just, you take back the court if they're going to be just doing the bidding of corporate America and letting capitalism infiltrate in our democracy. Like something has to be done. So the idea that he's open to like rotating them between the circuit courts and whatnot, that's a step in the right direction. But something has to be done. Like we can't allow the Supreme Court to fuck up the country for a generation. That's just completely unacceptable. Let's go to Tulsi here. I don't think that expanding the size of the Supreme Court solves the problem that we're facing where the court has increasingly become a partisan political entity. That's true. Even if you add more numbers to the Supreme Court, you're still not going to solve the problem how unfortunately those who are appointed are largely appointed on partisan reasons rather than making sure Supreme Court justices are chosen based on their commitment to upholding our and defending our constitution. Yeah, I would have liked to know how you depoliticize the court then. But you know, it's not my number one issue. All right. That's it. I'm not going to do anymore. Let me just go ahead and we'll get to a stupid question here. What's your comfort food on the campaign trail? And then we'll end there so that way we're leaving on at least a somewhat positive note unless they fuck this question up too. Then I don't know what to say. What's the comfort food on the campaign trail? When you're a vegan, that means lots of veggies on the go. I try to stay away from it, but vegan cupcakes is probably a real threat on the trail. Any kind of fast food. I love a good hamburger. I mean, you can't beat a burger for a quick classic American meal. Real chicken sandwich from McDonald's. No sauce. Two of them. A baked potato. Italian sausage sandwich at Pasci and Pueblo, Colorado. I think if I've got one go to, it's like pulled pork. Kind bars are my comfort food. I do have a sweet tooth and I will look for those little bowls of, you know, M&Ms or mince. It was M&Ms, but I've taken an oath now to lay off of the M&Ms to maintain, uh, built the security. Last time out, we did a trip to the West Coast and I gained three pounds in four days. So, uh, there's too much comfort food. I have no comfort food. The word got out that I like beef jerky. And so, uh, people have been kind enough to, uh, give that to me on the road sometimes. I'm an ice cream guy. I don't have a comfort food. I have a comfort drink, which is, uh, iced tea. It's really comfort coffee. Um, my favorite coffee is a mocha. Glass of whiskey at the end of the night. Probably chips and guacamole. French fries. I love a good French fry. Or a few, or many, or just the whole thing. Now this just made me hungry. So now I'm angry and I'm hungry. Um, but that's it. Let's stop the video. This is like three and a half hours long. Um, you know, I'll link to this down below if you want to check it out yourself. If you want to see the other, uh, questions, some of these might be interesting. Like, do you think that it's possible for the next president to stop climate change? Um, I already know what they're going to say, which is why I didn't click it. I think it's possible for us to kind of lead the way and get the rest of the world to come to the table and get us on that trajectory. They're going to say something like that in an ideal world with anyone owned handguns. They're all going to say yes. So I've got the main questions that I wanted to see answered out of the way. But you know, I like that the New York Times did this. Hopefully they continue to release these because I think these are really helpful in getting to know where the candidates stand on a range of issues. By and large, the ones that were really important. Um, I was super disappointed. Like the Israel Palestine, I hope that they all see this and they reflect because each and every single one of them gave an absolutely atrocious response. Even our favorites, even Bernie, even Tulsi, even Warren, um, even Yang, they need to do better here. But with that being said, uh, this is this is insightful. So I'm glad that they released this. Hello, everyone. I'm here with Joshua Collins running against Denny Heck in the 10th Congressional District of Washington State. Joshua, thank you so much for coming on the program. Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike. How's it going? Yeah, it's going great. I know that you're a truck driver. So you're traveling the country. You're just an ordinary person who's choosing to run for Congress. What made you want to run? Uh, well, a number of things. Um, the biggest thing is just in my district. Uh, we are one of the most progressive and safe blue districts in the country and we have, uh, representative who, uh, just won't budge on pretty much anything. He's a conservative Democrat and, you know, he won't support Medicare for all ever. He already said he'll never support it. Um, he won't sign on to the Green New Deal. Uh, and just the giant issues that we're facing in this country, are too important and too, uh, and we're in too much of a crisis to have someone who's not going to actually, uh, help with any of this. Yeah, we've actually been following Denny Heck for quite some time on this show. Um, back when he was asked at a town hall whether or not he'd support Medicare for all and he very bluntly said, no. So I've kind of watched this district for a while. I brought on Tambourine Borelli who ran against him as an independent in 2018 and now we're interviewing you. So I really hope that, um, you're successful here because we've all been watching this district and Denny Heck is really one of the worst Democrats. Like, I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that. He's extremely conservative. He takes corporate money and he doesn't represent the people of that district who, as you said, are incredibly progressive. So let me ask you this. There is a lot of candidates running in 2020. What sets you apart from other progressives? What are some key policy issues that you really will go into Congress fighting for guns blazing? Uh, well, some of our biggest policy issues. I mean, I guess we have a lot of them because we are pushing the Overton window with almost every issue. When it comes to marijuana, you know, we don't just believe in legalizing it. We don't just believe in, you know, expunging the records of people who have been convicted of marijuana offenses. We also believe in paying reparations to people who have spent years or sometimes decades of their lives in prison. And that is so important to us because, you know, this government has stolen lives from people. That is, you know, relationships ruined. People's careers ruined. And that is, you know, trauma that they will never recover from. And I think it is only fair that the government pays for what it has done to these people and their families. Yeah, that's actually really interesting. I hadn't thought about that previously. And my, you know, sense of what reparations should be given out has kind of broadened. Like I'm definitely on board with reparations for American descendants of slavery. I don't know how you feel about that as well. Awesome. I support reparations for descendants of slaves and indigenous people, both structural and financial, whatever we can get done. I support it. That's great. Yeah. So people like you and also Mike Ravel, to an extent have broadened my view of, you know, who wished you'd be paying reparations to, you know, be it victims of war, people who were victims of our drug war. I think that's really interesting. So let me ask you about these things because you are basically a very staunch progressive, but let's just go down the line here. I want to put you on the spot and ask you some very specific policy questions. And if you can give me a yes, no, or a maybe on this, this will kind of give people really good sense as to what you stand for. So Medicare for all. All right. Yes, and I also believe in erasing all medical debt. That's great. That's really great. Student loan debt cancellation. I believe in free college. I believe in giving stipends to students and canceling all student debt every single penny. That's great. How about ranked choice voting? Yes, I support ranked choice voting, automatic voter registration, et cetera. And what is your stance on legalizing psychedelics? I support legalizing psychedelics, same as many other drugs that we should have legalized for both medical and recreational use. That's excellent. How about public financing of every single election across the country? I support it fully. They have a really good system in Seattle and I think we can copy that in the rest of the country where they give you essentially a voucher where you can give it to whoever politician, whichever politician you want and they use that and turn it in, they get actually funding for it. So that's what I would like to reproduce across the country. That's great. That's great. How about, let's see here, I have a couple of different things, but I have it for Senate and House, so I need to make sure I get the right one. Federal jobs guarantee? Yeah, I support a federal jobs guarantee. And that can be a combination of things between transitioning people in the military from fighting in wars overseas to actually bring them home and putting the work to work on our infrastructure and also getting people out and doing the work that is needed in this country to transition to green energy. And you support a Green New Deal? You support reparations for people who were locked up for marijuana possession and I'm assuming sales. So yeah, this is great. I think that just looking at these types of policies, you really see that you are different than someone like Denny Heck. You're part of the new wave. You're an AOC type of Democrat. And I think this is really exciting for people. But a lot of people currently, they feel and myself included to an extent and I'm sure you as well feel demoralized because it's really difficult to run a campaign against an incumbent Democrat because you are choosing to not take corporate money. So it's a disadvantage that you're accepting but at the same time it's important because you're one remaining principal and two, you're demonstrating to people that you're not going to be beholden to these large multinational corporations. You're going to be beholden to the people. So how do you run a successful campaign against someone like Denny Heck who's backed by the establishment and financial interests when you definitely won't be able to raise as much money as him? So strategically, like what is your plan to beat him? So of course, we're not going to raise a million and a half dollars but based on what I looked at with the other campaigns is you need about 10% to be competitive. So our goal is realistically we can actually raise about 300,000 but if we have a hundred, if we have 150,000 I'm pretty sure we will win this. So we, you know, we and we are on track to do that. We just announced like seven weeks ago and we're at over $20,000 already and this is completely online. This is just people going on my website and donating. We haven't held any fundraisers. We haven't sold any merchandise, anything like that. And we already hit 20 grand and I'm not a particularly well connected person. So this is all just organic people going to my website and donating which is, you know, I think the new model where people go straight to you. They hear your message and they want to donate to you and if anyone watching does want to donate it's at joshwith2020.com and you can also sign up to volunteer and get updates as well. As far as our strategy, our strategy is to build a coalition and that is, you know, as me as a truck driver and blue collar worker I don't have the same perspective as everyone but I can bring people from other perspectives into the campaign as part of our campaign and that means having a kitchen cabinet for every set of issues whether it's LGBT rights, indigenous issues, disability issues, etc. And that is what we are doing and making sure that everyone's needs are addressed by this campaign because this isn't about me and who I am. This is about who I am going to represent and so far we've had a lot of success and a lot of it goes to me making a lot of noise on Twitter about these issues and that has brought the attention of people all over the country onto our district which is very difficult to do. So we are getting people activated. We're also bringing a lot of young people into the process people who were too young to even vote when Bernie Sanders ran for president and we are activating people and the fact that we have well over 300 volunteers signed up already I think speaks volumes for how far we can go. We're going to need basically a small army to defeat Genesec and I think we're going to get there. Yeah, that's impressive. If you have 300 volunteers that really is relatively large. It doesn't seem large in the grand scheme of things when we focus on presidential campaigns but for just someone running in a district who is grassroots funded that really is impressive. So kudos to you and I think that your Twitter game is helping honestly because I've already seen you dunk on Ben Shapiro. You are calling out Democrats and one thing that I really like is you've been incredibly vocal about the weakness of Democratic Party leadership. I know that you've talked a little bit about Nancy Pelosi's unwillingness to pursue an impeachment inquiry to Donald Trump. I find this infuriating. So in the event you were elected what would you do to help push? I mean hopefully when you're elected Trump will already be out but how would you just in terms of putting pressure on Democratic Party leadership how would you get them to do what progressives want if you're also balancing out committee appointments and you're balancing out trying not to offend them to the extent where they can marginalize you in Congress like what's the right way that you think you can hold people accountable in power and leadership and actually get them to listen? I think the most important thing is first of all having a large voice online to give myself a way to bypass the media deciding what the narrative is and that's why I'm putting so much effort into my Twitter account and it doesn't sound like a lot but in six months I went from 34 followers to 10,500 and that is just me tweeting and saying my views. I think that is an important part but also just make the entire conversation public. That way there isn't any doubt on where people stand on this and part of that is freeing up like who doesn't support something and who does on Twitter but also if someone is going to oppose incredibly popular legislation like Medicare for all for example I'm going to go in their districts and hold town halls in their district talk to their voters let them know this is where your representative stands if they don't like it then I guess I mean that's democracy right you if you actually talk to people and let them know where they stand because this is like their entire plan is to hide behind key issues where they are good like LGBT issues etc. and then just completely hide from the media never talk about it or be very vague when they talk about things like Medicare for all like the Green New Deal and just kind of waffle on it be weak on it and just hide from it. So I think someone like me who has no problem making a lot of noise and actually doing everything in the public arena is what it takes to actually get people to feel at least pressure to support stuff because you know I I think these issues that we are facing you know climate change we're facing an extinction level of that this is the actual apocalypse like coming for us and we have politicians who are you know too worried about the existence of the fossil fuel and industry and the profits of you know shareholders right and then we also have Medicare for all 45,000 people dying every year and they're too worried about the lives of the insurance companies rather than the people dying and so I think you know it it's very clear where the people stand on this stuff there's polling and it's and it's just obvious on its face that these are good for us and so that is that is my whole plan is just to make everything public and keep everything out in front where people can see it so we actually bringing people into the conversation and yeah that's that's the whole plan essentially yeah that actually is a great plan because I think that if you kind of have your own like mini bully pulpit then nobody wants to anger the person with like millions of Twitter followers like AOC even if she's a target of the right wing like you can see that Democrats when they often take like shots at her it's anonymously in a political article so I think that kind of emulated that strategy that's a good strategy you know and it is a way to kind of move the needle in your direction and one thing that I find fascinating about candidates like you is that you're bringing in this new perspective you're younger so like people like you and I like when we're older we will witness possibly the end of you know the habitability of our planet if we don't take action so this is a serious issue right whereas people in Congress you know it's mostly older people who don't really have to see the consequences play out I mean we're already seeing the consequences play out but they're not going to see the worst of what climate change has to offer so I think that that is such a crucial thing that you're bringing you know in terms of that just this perspective and also you know being a blue collar worker talk about you being a truck driver because if I'm a truck driver I mean I'm I just wouldn't want to run for Congress in general so maybe I'm just biased but like I feel like you're you're going to be busy you're traveling the world so wanting to run for Congress would be like the last thing on my mind so what is it about truck driving and being a blue collar worker that made you feel as if this is what you need to do the biggest thing is France what happened in France with the yellow vests they we saw what happened when you have a liberal government try to you know transition to green energy without you know inconveniencing the rich and what that did was put the entire burden on the working class and it was specifically in France truck drivers who started getting in the streets because they were the ones getting screwed over interesting and I don't want to see that happen in this country I don't want to see you know a liberal government put all of the burden on the backs of truck drivers welders and nurses and teachers rather than the extremely wealthy people who have most of the wealth in this country who have profited off of things like you know burning fossil fuels and so that that's my whole purpose is actually make the point that like if we don't address this and make sure that we are taxing the rich and that we are spending on our people and actually setting things up in a way that benefits the working class people in this country they're going to do everything they can to put the burden on us and I would like to oppose that now as a truck driver driving all over the country I've been all to 48 states the other two I can't really get to with a truck but I've you know I I see right now automation is coming for us right and it's being celebrated like this really great thing meanwhile you have truckers you know some of you know in raging anywhere ranging anywhere from 20 to you know 60 70 years old right out on this road they have put you know years and some case decades of their lives into this industry they have put their bodies on the line they have you know sacrifice their personal family relationships to get people straight across the country and then you have these companies like Tesla coming in and they just want to scoop up the entire industry and say okay forget about the truckers let's now all this all this money all these jobs that were existing now all that wealth is going to be funnel straight to Tesla straight to Uber or whatever company automates the jobs away first and that is something that I think is just fundamentally unfair and that is what they want to do with most industries in this country you know low level coders you have you know the entire customer service industry where you know companies are going to replace people with AI and that just basically leaves millions of people with no plan mostly high school high school educated people with no plan no jobs no like no way to go forward and I think it's important that we have that perspective going to Congress so that we don't have the same thing happened to happen with you know the industrialization era where you know a single factory could do the work of you know like 10 factories and you know people were just left with no options I think we need to address automation on the scale that it is necessary the same as addressing climate change on the scale that is necessary the same as addressing you know the health health care crisis on the scale that's necessary the housing crisis etc and that's I guess that's my my perspective as a trucker no and that's really interesting I find that fascinating because automation is something and particularly like with respect to truck driving you know this is an industry that could be automated away 10 15 years so let me ask you this in terms of dealing with something like automation what type of approach would you favor just broadly speaking so I mean there's there's the universal basic income approach where you know once these jobs go away we do you be I know there's various ways you can implement you be I you can do a UBI in lieu of social safety net programs which I don't support or you can do a UBI in addition to social safety net programs or do you kind of agree with this more democratic socialist model where you know if automation is going to be the future which it seems like that will be the case we should be reaping the rewards of that not these large multinational corporations like what do you think just broadly because this is a really loaded question but what's your take on that in general so I guess I'll start with the UBI I mean I'm a fan of redistributing wealth back to the working class I am not happy with Andrew Yang's UBI as a truck driver and I've talked to other truck drivers they typically have the same sentiment the whole point of his idea at least the way he's marketed it as being universal it's something that addresses the needs of everyone but he made it originally exclusionary of you know people who are unemployed who are you know elderly on social security who have disability etc and that was you know problematic for most people and they they addressed one issue which is social security so it no longer deducts from social security but that means that they recognize that it was exclusionary and they're still leaving everyone else out yeah so it's still deducts from you know your disability etc and that is why I don't support it I don't think something a universal basic income that doesn't actually benefit the people who are struggling the most I don't think that's a really good way for this country to go because it's not really universal in that sense which is kind of my gripe with it as well right if you just gave everyone you know a thousand dollars a month without any stipulations of it subtracts from your social security or your disability etc just or your unemployment then I would be you know all in in support of it but ultimately I think in this country what we need to do is address the unfair dynamic between you know workers and their bosses right and I don't think you can really get to the root of any of these problems without worker empowerment trucking is such a perfect example of this we are pushed and pushed and pushed and no matter how big of a shortage of drivers there is they don't want to increase pay so they just want workers to work longer hours for lower wages and that is why you see a truck driver making you know $40,000 a year now where they were making that 20 years ago even though the flight exactly and you know nurses deal the same stuff you know well there's deal with the same stuff it's the entire country that's dealing with this and I think that requires you know a full scale change in the culture of our country and it requires empowering unions not just to continue maintaining at the level they are but actually reverse it and get on a level of countries like Sweden and Denmark you know a lot of these countries we look at who have these you know programs like you know single payer and great education system etc they also have a very robust union unionization in their country I think that's what we're missing partially we need to strengthen workers and in one way I would do that to get people to be more willing to strike against the workers and to stand up against companies like Amazon would be providing you know unemployment benefits for striking workers it would be you know subsidizing union dues to completely wipe out the entire argument against unionization that these right to work supporters have created and also provide the infrastructure and the administrative administrative support for newly forming unions and that should be all from the government and I think that would be a way to send a message to you know the country and the people in this country that you know here we're going to support workers we need to do that yeah that's fantastic really great ideas with the subsidizing union dues I didn't really think about that but I like how you're bringing all of these new ideas to the table like you're one candidate and you've gotten me to think about reparations for victims of you know marijuana being illegal in the past and subsidizing union dues these are great ideas so I know that a lot of people are going to be enthusiastic about your campaign one more time before you go tell us where we can donate what we can do to help support you and whatever you want to end with make your pitch man okay got it well the number one thing you can do is you know follow me on social media and you know just keep an eye on my campaign you can also go to Joshua 2020.com we need an army of volunteers and like we need we have hundreds we thousands and if you sign up there I promise you know we will reach out to you and we will have something you can do for us whether it's even if you don't live in in Washington you know we will have phone banking tax banking events and just generally keeping in touch with with our campaign and you know helping us get in touch with the media and actually get people to cover our race and that has been you know a huge help from you know what I've been doing on Twitter and my Twitter link or my Twitter handle is Joshua the number four Congress so Joshua for Congress and yeah so that is what people can do to help and ultimately our ideas I think that is the most important about the thing about this you know I'm you know it's a meme you know Dave Rubin he loves talk about ideas but my brain is still in recovery mode from taking in so many high-level important ideas I really am someone who's about ideas you actually do have ideas so yeah I have a lot of really good ideas a lot of plans that are you know pushing that overton window to the left where it needs to be and you know just follow us you know follow this campaign sign up and you know we will actually win this race and yeah if you want to be part of that again it's Joshua2020.com look you've dunked on Dave Rubin now which you get bonus points for you've dunked on Ben Shapiro I mean what's not to like so Joshua Collins 10th congressional district of the state of Washington good luck hope to see you back on the show and we'll be following this because I think that you know Denny Heck a lot of people know he's a corporate Democrat and I think that as time you know continues on people are getting more and more frustrated so I hope that you know you can be the catalyst to get him out so good luck man thanks well that's all that I've got for you guys today thank you so much for tuning in if you've made it as far as usual we're not going to end the show without thanking all of our patreon paypal and youtube members all of which help the show not just to survive but thrive as well I truly appreciate your viewership so I'm going to bounce now I want to go play some crash team racing pretty excited about that because it came out today um yeah I'll talk to you all next week this has been a humanist report and I am Mike Figurato take care