Cenk Uygur – The Foreign Influence Crisis @ SRS #301 (Transcript)

They all work for their donors.

Foreign Influence and the Loss of American Sovereignty

Most of the donors are corporate, but now, as we know famously, there’s one foreign government that is, in the last cycle, the biggest donor of all, and that’s Israel. And so when you lose your sovereignty to a corporation, that’s already a big problem. But when you lose it to a foreign government, that’s a problem that I cannot accept.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it definitely seems like we are now a proxy. The United States seems like it is now a proxy, and that to me is terrifying. And we’ll get to the hope. I hope you have some hope.

CENK UYGUR: Yes. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: I have maybe two solutions. I don’t even know if I would call them solutions, but it’s a direction that maybe we could go in. One of them would be extremely complicated, and the most challenging thing, in my opinion, is just getting people to come together on any issue, which is what we’ve been talking about.

But I think, just looking at social and just talking to people, just my pulse on the country is that Democrats are sick of their party. Republicans are sick of their party. I do have a little bit of hope. I think more people are becoming politically homeless and I think we’re all kind of seeing that. I think the biggest thing on the 2028 ticket will be Israel. And it’s something that a lot of people are uniting on, and whatever we’re going to unite on, we need to unite on something. And that seems to be the topic of discussion today. AIPAC, their influence, the Iran War, Gaza, now Turkey, Lebanon. And all the money that’s going— what is it, $320 billion since ’46? Since 1946?

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, ’48.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a lot of money. A lot of money. We got it all broken down here. But we have to come— if we want any change at all, we’re going to have to come together. Because we can bat shit back and forth like abortion and trans issues and taxes. Those issues are just going to be batted back and forth until the end of f*ing time. Yeah, abortion’s illegal, abortion’s legal, whatever. It’s just never going to end. And they use that to divide us, the racial shit.

And so I think more people are starting to look past that. I think the race card was overplayed a lot, in my opinion. And I think a lot of people are seeing that and realize maybe it wasn’t as bad as everybody made it out to be. And I think that’s happening with a lot of issues, and that is giving me hope. “Hey, we were fing lied to. This shit was overembellished, or some things weren’t embellished enough.” And people are coming together and everybody’s— not everybody, but a lot of people are looking for the real solution, not “let’s bat fing abortion back and forth till the end of time.” And that does give me a little hope.

Reclaiming American Sovereignty

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, 100%. So look, I want to talk in a minute about how we can unify, what we unify around, and how to win, okay? And how to get American sovereignty back, okay? So that’s the number one issue. And people are constantly talking about like, “Oh, Cenk, you’re obsessed with Israel, right?” Yeah, but if Peru was occupying us, I’d be obsessed about Peru, right? And you want me to talk about other issues. What other issues, brother? We don’t even control our own government. If we don’t control our own government, then those conversations are fake anyway, right? So they’re not going to lead to anything. They’re not. It’s all a distraction. It’s all meant to divide us. But before we get to the solutions, we really got to talk a little bit more about the problem.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah.

The Mechanics of Political Bribery

CENK UYGUR: So look, it’s as I keep saying, and I’ll say it throughout, it’s not just Israel. Israel’s the tip of the iceberg. But what it’s doing is it’s making us aware that there’s an iceberg. And so Israel is obvious because it’s a foreign government. So it’s just glaring to be a proxy, as you said, for a different country. But the rest of the iceberg is money and politics because they, all these guys are owned. They’re all prostitutes, all of our politicians. And mainstream media is the getaway driver, right?

What happens is donors will put— let’s put numbers to it, right. Like AIPAC, they put in $127 million in the last election cycle, number one donor class, right? In that cycle. Normally Big Pharma’s number one, the drug companies, right. But they put in $127 million. What’d they get back out? At a minimum, Trump gave them another $13 billion, right? On top of the $320 billion from earlier.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a good return.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah. If you put in $127 million, you get $13 billion back. That’s 100 to 1. In fact, you’d be an idiot not to do that. So people say, “Oh, you’re saying Israel is uniquely evil?” No, Israel is uniquely strategic. If other countries could do that, if Bolivia or Turkey or China or anyone could do that, if they could figure out the mechanics of how to do it like AIPAC did and the Israeli lobby did— which, by the way, they’re going to— and then they’re going to buy, and then it’s going to be an auction. Okay. “Who’d like to buy 20 US congressmen? Oh, we have a bid from China. We have a bid from Brazil, right?” So once you allow the bribery, it is an absolute certainty that all your politicians will get bribed, right?

Mainstream Media as Propaganda

So one of the reasons I despise mainstream media— and you won’t find anyone who hates them more than me on the right or the left, okay— is because once I found out they’d been lying to me my whole life, that they weren’t doing news, they were doing propaganda for the powerful. It was the exact opposite of what’s true. I was so mad because basically they brainwashed me along with the whole country, and they got us to believe this fable, this theater. It’s like The Wizard of Oz. And once you lift the curtain back and you see the guy behind the curtain, you can’t go back. You can’t unsee it.

So for example, they say the politicians are having real debates. My ass they are. They’re not having any real debate. Lindsey Graham, did he get convinced of anything? No, he got convinced by all the legalized bribes they’re giving him, the campaign contributions. Did Hakeem Jeffries get convinced and have real moral principles about loving and supporting Israel unconditionally? No, he got $5.5 million from AIPAC. I mean, who are you kidding?

Mainstream media says, “No, those aren’t bribes. No, those are true opinions of Hakeem Jeffries and Ted Cruz.” And, “How dare you say that? You’re an anti-Semite, okay? And you’re a conspiracy theorist.” No, no, now I get it. No, you’re full of shit and you’re doing propaganda to try to get us to not see the bribes. $5.5 million is not complicated, man. They say, “Oh, you think that they’re influenced by $5.5 million?” F* yeah, I do. Of course they’re influenced. Seriously, is everyone in mainstream media so stupid that they think, “Oh, a regular person wouldn’t be affected by $5.5 million?” Who are you kidding, man?

SHAWN RYAN: Who—

The Media Establishment and Foreign Influence

CENK UYGUR: But the thing is, the most educated people in the country unfortunately love the establishment. They read the New York Times and they watch CNN, and they have become the most ignorant people in the country. But since they’re so well-educated, they think they’re the smartest. And they think they’ve got it figured out the best. And they’re like, “What would the masses know? The unwashed masses, they have a bunch of conspiracy theories.”

“I like the idea that the donors control the politicians. I do declare, Jeeves, New York Times wrote about that the other day. No, they don’t control them at all. It’s all a conspiracy theory, moron.”

What do you think AIPAC put the $127 million in for? For their health? For general welfare because Israel cares so much about the average American that they just wanted to give to our politicians out of the goodness of their heart? And then they say stupid shit like, “No, when Israel gives America money, that’s not for Israel’s benefit. That’s for America’s benefit because it’s giving you so much in jobs and this and that.”

I said, “Oh, is that right? Then why doesn’t Israel give us the $320 billion back? And then it’ll be for Israel’s benefit.” Come on, give the money back. Give the money back. No, no, no, no. Anti-Semite. Okay, okay, I got you. So everyone on TV, literally everyone on TV is full of shit.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

CENK UYGUR: And so I’m — as far as I know, I’m the only guy banned on Fox News and MSNBC and CNN.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re banned on all of them.

CENK UYGUR: Can’t get any — it’s Shawn, it’s hilarious. Somebody won’t know, a producer, and they’ll book me on a show. And then we have an internal game at Young Turks. We’re like, “When are they going to cancel?” We’ll do an over-under. “Oh, they’ll cancel by 1 o’clock.” “Oh, I’ll go over, they’ll cancel 1:15.” “I’ll go under 12:45.”

Once — I’m going to say it for the first time here. Joe Scarborough invites me out, okay? I triple confirm because I have to fly from LA to New York. Mid-flight, they cancel.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

CENK UYGUR: Yes, man.

SHAWN RYAN: I won’t even do it. I refuse to do it because I feel like I’m giving a large portion of the problem the time of day and making them relevant by appearing, because our shows get more numbers than theirs do. And so I don’t want them to be able to — I want them to go down. I don’t want to be on there. I don’t want to give them the time of day. I don’t want to bring my audience over there. I think they are a huge portion of what the f*ing problem is today, and they need to be gone.

And I think what I wanted to ask you is, to me it appears that the baby boomer generation is the only generation left that watches mainstream media.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah.

The Generational Shift Away from Mainstream Media

CENK UYGUR: It’s crystal clear, and it’s crystal clear in the polling. We’ve been tracking on The Young Turks literally since the phenomenon began. In 2020 it was 45-year-olds. Now the line has moved up to 50-year-olds because now we’re in 2026, right? And we said people would age along with it, and they’ve aged along with it. It used to be under 40, now we’re at 50.

Why is that the marking line? Under 50, almost everybody gets their news from online media. Above 50, most of the people — not everybody, but most of the people — get their news from television. So if you’re getting your news from television, you’re getting brainwashed. It’s nonstop propaganda, and you have no idea what’s going on. In fact, you know the opposite of what’s true.

Israel, Gaza, and the Propaganda Machine

CENK UYGUR: They’ll say like, “Oh, Israel’s the victim,” right? And you’re like, but wait, their territory is growing. They’re doing self-defense. But if they’re doing self-defense, they’d stay within their borders. They defend themselves strongly or whatever, right? And we could disagree about how they defend themselves, but they stay within their borders. But they’re not. They’re growing, right?

In ’67, they told us Israel got attacked. That’s a total lie. Israel attacked all of its neighbors first, and they called it a preemptive strike. That’s where it began. That’s not a preemptive strike or self-defense. That’s just you attacking all your neighbors in a surprise attack and then taking their stuff. That’s when they took the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula. They give Sinai back to neuter Egypt, which was the largest military in the area. Once Egypt’s out of the picture, the rest of them are screwed, right?

But the bottom line is, we now have eyes and ears. We can see they just took 53% of Gaza. They’re taking southern Lebanon as we speak. And the liars on television say, “No, don’t believe your eyes and ears. They’re only doing self-defense and they’re the victims.” How could they be the victims when I see Gaza, when they pulverize the place? What do you mean victims? So the Palestinians aren’t the victims even though they’re occupied and you just destroyed 90% of the buildings in Gaza. You destroyed every hospital and every school. They killed like 7 —

SHAWN RYAN: Is it like 73,000?

CENK UYGUR: 73,000 at a minimum, Shawn. Yeah, because there’s people still under the rubble. And the IDF confirmed the numbers from Gaza. And why did they confirm that? They kind of, at the end, wanted to rub it in like, “Hell yeah, we murdered all of you.”

Now I just read a piece from Haaretz. You know what’s funny? Israeli press is way better than American press because you can’t call them antisemites. So there’s some press that does really good reporting. Haaretz had this story of IDF soldiers that are wetting themselves every night. I’m not making it up, I’m being literal. You can read the story yourself. They can’t sleep at night. Why? They all have these horror stories.

They’re like, “Well, they told us to shoot and I’m a sniper. And I could see them and they were civilians, but I had to shoot them. And I can’t get the image of their heads exploding out of my head when I try to go to sleep.” “We went and shot a bunch of people. They told us to shoot. We go there. It’s a bunch of kids and a grandpa, right? And I think, oh no, we’re going to get in trouble. The commanding officer comes and spits on him and says, ‘No problems. We did the right thing.'” He’s like, “I can’t get the picture of the grandpa and the kids out of my head.”

So they’re having all sorts of mental health issues with IDF soldiers coming back because they’re full-blown fascists now and they’re telling them to murder kids. American doctors coming back report an extraordinary rate of sniper shots for kids under the age of 5. The shots are always in the chest or the head. What are they shooting kids on purpose? That’s literally what terrorists do.

Another story where they got a guy — he’s innocent, they already killed his 4 guys that were with him. And again, this one’s a female IDF soldier. She thinks he’s freezing cold. What are they going to do? And one of the soldiers urinates on him and they all laugh.

SHAWN RYAN: Jeez, man.

CENK UYGUR: And then you bring up these things and you go, “Look, those are Israelis saying it in Israeli press.” They’re like, “Antisemite.” Oh, okay. So you don’t care about bigotry. You’re just using that word to make sure Americans shut up and never criticize Israel.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, that’s the defense mechanism. I mean, it just is what it is. How many people do you think actually think that? That it’s antisemitic for saying something?

The Weaponization of the Antisemitism Charge

CENK UYGUR: Oh, no, no, Shawn. That’s a really great question, and I might have a surprising answer for you. There’s a couple of guys up at the top that are weaponizing it on purpose. And they’re super callous. And they know that not only are those people pointing out all these problems not antisemitic, they’ll target people who are not antisemitic even more.

Like they say, “Nick Fuentes — that’s not a problem.” Because since he’s so blatantly antisemitic, the politicians can’t associate with him, so he can’t ever get close to power. The real problem is people like me and my co-hosts, Ana Kasparian, and Tucker Carlson and you, who are not antisemitic, because then politicians can still talk to them and we’re not toxic. So we have to pretend they’re antisemitic to try to make them toxic so that no one will be allowed to talk to them and they’ll never be able to get close to power. So it’s a coordinated strategy.

But those are only a small group of people at the top. Most people who make that charge truly believe it. But put that aside.

Character Assassination as a Political Tool

CENK UYGUR: Mainstream media realizes the same thing, and they do it not just in the case of Israel, but with all their political opponents. In the old days, there were assassinations, but that was messy. It’s illegal. You can get caught. People have moral compunctions. It’s just a mess, right? Doing physical assassinations. So they switched over to character assassinations.

So anytime somebody says something that they don’t like, all of a sudden there’ll be an article in the New York Times and the LA Times and the Washington Post, and CNN will cover it, and then there’ll be congressional hearings. You can tell — give an example not related to Israel. Madison Cawthorn, you remember him? He was a right-wing guy, young guy in a wheelchair, very right-wing.

SHAWN RYAN: North Carolina.

CENK UYGUR: North Carolina. So I disagree with him on 90% of stuff, but he just does what seemed like a flippant comment. “Oh yeah, there’s orgies all the time with cocaine and stuff here, and I got invited to it by older Republicans in Congress.” Boom. All of a sudden, a picture of him in a dress comes out. This thing comes out, that thing comes out. All these incriminating things, right?

They literally have a secret file on everyone and they don’t use it until you become problematic. And then all of a sudden there’s a leak, that guy’s character is assassinated, he loses his next election, and he’s eliminated. So any opponent of the establishment is eliminated in this way.

And by the way, they do it to the right and the left. There are a lot of people on the right who, A, don’t know this, and B, will have a hard time believing it. But I can tell you stories that’ll convince you. They do it even more to the left. They hate left-wing outsiders like Bernie Sanders more than they hate Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or even Trump. God, they despise Bernie Sanders.

SHAWN RYAN: Are we talking about the establishment right now?

Character Assassination and the Israel Lobby

CENK UYGUR: The establishment. Okay. So now when it comes to— you take establishment and you put Israel, oh my God, that’s thermonuclear. Okay, so that’s where you’re going to get the most character assassinations. Anti-Semite. Why? We’re going to assassinate his character. He’s a bigot. He hates people for no reason. He’s a monster. Anyone who talks to him should be eliminated from politics. Right? And you oppose Israel, and they’re going to try to dig and dig and dig.

Here, I’ll give you an example from us. Now this, I don’t know if it was related to Israel or the establishment overall, but I formed Justice Democrats. That’s the group that got a bunch of people elected to Congress. Don’t hate me, but AOC, Tlaib, Omar, Ayanna Pressley, etc. And I’m proud of this, the structure that we set up. And that structure, I think, can now be used for better purposes. We can get into the merits of all that, etc.

But the moment that I set it up and it looks like it’s going to get momentum, I get put on a list, and here comes the character assassination. They dig for a needle in a haystack to try to pull out a needle, because everybody’s done something wrong, right? They pull out the needle and they go, “Aha, that’s the haystack! You gotta hate that guy.”

Okay, so in my case, the first thing they always look for is sex. They got nothing. I lead a super boring life. Then they look for, did he do anything wrong at work? Because especially back then there was a MeToo movement and the whole thing at that time. Shawn, they called every single woman who worked at TYT or had ever worked at TYT. “Did Cenk do anything wrong? Did Cenk do anything wrong? Is he a bad boss? Is he this? Is he that?” And they got nothing.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

CENK UYGUR: So then they went and found old blogs from the 1990s that I had written and deleted 15 years earlier, right? They’re like, “Okay, that’s it.” Because they’re digging and digging. Why are they digging? Because they gotta assassinate your character. Once they assassinate your character, they could move on and go, “Okay, that threat has been eliminated.”

Why is Bernie such a big threat? One, he’s against corporate power, and most of this is about corporations. But also, it’s hard to call him an anti-Semite when he says we should cut funding to Israel because he’s Jewish. But they do it anyway. A Republican congressman went out just last week on air — they get talking points literally from the Israelis. So he’s got his talking points and he read them and he’s like, “And this guy is an anti-Semite.” Like, that’s— Bernie’s Jewish. He’s like, “Oh well, it says it on the paper.” I’m doing hyperbole about the paper, but he literally said it on air.

And then, Shawn, one last one, okay? Because this is amazing. Once you see how the theater works, who the director is, who the camera guys are, who wrote the play, then you begin to understand the whole picture. So this guy, rando congressman — I don’t even remember his name — from Oklahoma, Republican. So that week Erdoğan, the leader of Turkey, criticizes Israel. Israel then gets super pissed about it and they start attacking Turkey in the press. Boom. Within 2 days, a Republican congressman in Oklahoma doing a town hall is saying, “You know, the real problem is Turkey. The real problem for Oklahoma is Turkey, our NATO ally.” And he’s like, “They’re trying to reconstitute the Ottoman Empire.” Like, what the f* are you talking about?

And then there are articles written in the mainstream media about how the real problem is Turkey. “You know, they’re occupying Cyprus. Did you know that they’re the real occupiers?” It’s amazing how coordinated it is and how it pops up in the media and among the politicians at the same time. Same talking points. You could trace it. Sometimes we’ll do 3, 4 guys on The Young Turks in a row, and sometimes it’ll be Republicans and Democrats. Same talking point, all in favor of Israel, one after another after another. They’re all robots, man. They get programmed by their donors like those little dolls that you wind up from the back and then they come out. “Israel is our special ally. They are doing self-defense.”

The Canary Mission and Organized Character Assassination

SHAWN RYAN: You’ve seen it firsthand with people you’ve lifted up. When I ask you this, because I feel like the character assassinations are starting to diminish because they’ve overplayed it. What do you think about that? I see things coming out now that would have gone viral even just a year ago. But there’s just so much coming out now, there are so many character assassinations happening all at the same f*ing time, that people are just getting to the point where it’s like, “Whatever, man.”

CENK UYGUR: Totally. So there are these two groups — and Drop Site News just did a story about one of them, Canary Mission, today. Okay, so Canary Mission and stopantisemitism.com. These are like Israeli Gestapo outfits here in America. And what they do is they make a list of Israel’s enemies and then they try to character assassinate them. They’ll take out-of-context videos and go, “Look at this anti-Semite,” right?

So why did they do that? How does that process work? Number one, their model has been from day one: anyone who criticizes Israel must be eliminated so that it’ll seem like the whole country loves Israel, so it’ll be easier to take our money, to be honest, right? Like, $320 billion is no joke. That’s a robbery. That is one of the biggest robberies in American history. Don’t tell me it helped us. That is a load of bullshit. Like I said earlier, if it helps so much, then why don’t you give the money back and then we’ll help Israel that way? Oh, all of a sudden it doesn’t help when we ask for the money back, right? Total utter bullshit.

So what do they do? Canary Mission will not only target, let’s say, a Muslim American who says, “Hey, maybe you should stop murdering Muslims,” but also a right-winger who opposes Israel. In the old days, there was a different group, but same business model. It was like Mossad 2000 or something — I don’t remember the name exactly. They had what they called a “shit list,” and it was like an acronym, “self-hating something or other.” It was a list of, I forget if it was 800 or 8,000 Jewish Americans that were not sufficiently loyal to Israel and whose character had to be assassinated.

And so they’re funded by the same type of people that fund our politicians — the Israel First crowd, right? They give a tremendous amount of money. But again, the average Jewish American has no idea that that’s happening. And if you told them, they’d say, “Oh, that’s conspiracy, antisemitic, conspiratorial stuff.” No, no, I shut off my brain. La la la la la. I don’t want to hear it. Right. But in reality, those guys’ job is to make sure that Israel has no opponents in America.

And so it’s unbearable. It’s unacceptable. You know what they do? They’re out of control. So my co-host Anna Kasparian — they targeted her husband, who’s just a baseball coach in a local high school, not political at all. Used to play professional baseball. He’s now into coaching, and they’re like, “You have to denounce your wife and say she hates all Jews, and you have to do it publicly, otherwise we’re going to fire you. We’re going to ruin your life.” Okay, that’s a Gestapo, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

CENK UYGUR: Yes, 100%. Then politicians started showing up. “They have to fire him. If they don’t fire him, the whole school is anti-Semites. Anti-Semites! Fire him! Destroy him!” Right? So now again, that’s not every Jew in the country at all, and they don’t even know that’s happening, right? They just get told, “Oh, somebody’s an anti-Semite,” and they’re like, “Oh no, destroy, destroy, destroy,” right? Well, you go around destroying enough people and at some point people are going to get pissed, right? How many people on the right? How many people on the left? How many people in the middle are you going to destroy or try to destroy before we go, “Hey, you know what, maybe f* you”? Maybe we’re at that stage now.

SHAWN RYAN: I think we’re at that stage. Yeah, just being honest. I mean, Trump’s got like a 30-something percent approval rating at this point, if that. There are a lot of people saying f you. A lot of people saying f you.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah. And then they’ll say, “Oh, we’re the unwashed masses,” and “Oh, f* the grassroots,” and “Conspiracy this and anti-Semitism,” and then “Radicals, unacceptable.”

SHAWN RYAN: Who, who’s—

CENK UYGUR: What do you mean unacceptable? 80% of Democrats, for example, are now— have a negative view of Israel, and we don’t want to fund Israel. 80%. 80%. Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

CENK UYGUR: 61% of the country. The country’s gone. We don’t want it anymore. Right? They’re like, “Shut up. You’re all anti-Semites.”

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

CENK UYGUR: 61% of the country’s anti-Semites. What the f* is this? So if we don’t agree to serve you— and wait a minute, why does mainstream media sound like they’re working for Israel? Like, what do you mean we’re anti-Semites?

SHAWN RYAN: Because they are.

American Taxpayers Funding Israeli Military Operations

CENK UYGUR: Who’s “we”? “We” is the American people. So who are you then? Right? If you’re Jake Tapper on CNN and you’re calling the majority of the country an anti-Semite, then who are you? Like, because it doesn’t sound like you’re representing America. It doesn’t seem like you care about Americans. In fact, you’re insulting Americans.

Back to the Democrats. 7 snakes in the Senate vote with the Republicans. All the Republicans voted for Israel — all of them in the Senate. And they say we have to send more 1,000-pound bombs and we have to send armed bulldozers because right now Israel is destroying every home in 53% of Gaza that they control and are going to keep. They said it was for self-defense. Bullshit. They just stole half of Gaza. Okay. And they’re sending the bulldozers to southern Lebanon where they’re not only destroying Muslim villages, they’re destroying Christian villages. They’re destroying every building in like 70 villages overall, 3 Christian villages.

A Christian priest goes out there — this is earlier on in March, when they first invade Lebanon. I’m sorry, Jake Tapper. They did “self-defense” in Lebanon. They say this kind of horseshit, right? So they get sent in their tanks, etc. They bomb a Christian village. One of the houses gets hit. Red Cross rushes in and the priest of the town rushes in. Israel waits, waits, waits until they’re all in the house. Double tap — hits them again. Kills the priest, kills the Red Cross guys. They do double taps nonstop.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is a movie that’s out. It’s about a 6-year-old girl. They hit the car that her family’s traveling in. Everyone in the car is dead except the 6-year-old. She calls in — there’s a way to call in to get help, to the Palestinians. They’re going to send an ambulance. They triple check with the Israelis. It takes the whole day. The whole day she’s on the line. They have the videotape, the audio tape of her actual voice. And she’s begging — she’s a 6-year-old. “Please send someone to help. Please. They’re all dead and I’m so hungry and I’m so scared.” And she’s crying. The Israelis finally give permission for the ambulance to go get her. They bombed the ambulance and they killed a 6-year-old.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit, man.

CENK UYGUR: And then they say, “Hey, John and Susie in Kansas, you’re going to have to work an extra shift because we’re going to send 1,000-pound bombs for them to do that again and again and again, and you have to pay for it.” But Shawn, we’re not even paying for it. We’re borrowing from China, and our kids have to pay the interest on that, and our grandkids have to pay the interest on that. Why doesn’t Israel borrow from China to do their own murders and have them pay the interest? No — Americans, back to the mines, back to the assembly lines. Work your ass off. We’re going to steal your money from your taxes and we’re going to make you borrow money from China and you’re going to give it to Israel. And if you don’t, you’re an anti-Semite and we’re going to destroy your life. We’re going to destroy your career. Well, then you’re the Gestapo. That’s how the Gestapo works.

Okay, so back to the 7 snakes. So 7 Democrats vote like the Republicans now. Nearly a majority, but not yet a majority because the boomers have a negative view of Israel, right? So under 50 years old, Republican voters are against Israel. The younger you get, the more they’re against Israel, right? But you could make a fig leaf argument for the Republicans pretending they’re representing their voters because a lot of the boomers are on their side, right? But the Democrats are voting against 80% of their voters.

The Alliance Question and Foreign Influence

CENK UYGUR: And they go, Fetterman, Schumer, and the rest, they go, f* you voters. You think we’re going to represent you? No way. We’re going to represent Israel and you can kiss our ass. We’re going to screw you over. We’re going to take money out of your pocket and we’re going to give it to them to bulldoze innocent Christians’ homes, innocent Muslims’ homes, kill the 6-year-olds and take more land for their empire, for greater Israel.

You mentioned Turkey earlier. What are they, nuts? They’re talking about after Iran, we’re going to go to Turkey. Turkey is the second biggest military in NATO. Why are they attacking NATO? Why is Trump attacking NATO? Because if Turkey’s in NATO, Israel can’t attack them. So they have to get America out of NATO so that they could say, “Oh, well, you don’t have an alliance with Turkey anymore. Now help us invade Turkey.”

SHAWN RYAN: Do we have an official alliance with Israel?

CENK UYGUR: I don’t know what’s official or unofficial, but I don’t — not like we do with Turkey, because Turkey’s in NATO. It’s just like France.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t think we have a treaty. I don’t think we have anything with them.

CENK UYGUR: But yet when they make us start —

SHAWN RYAN: Nothing official. I mean, we should check this. Actually, I want to — I forgot my pen. I want to write that down. I want to check it on the break just to see. I did a quick search before we came down, but I didn’t see any official anything. You would think we would have something in place with our greatest ally, but maybe they think it’s superfluous, they don’t need it, right?

CENK UYGUR: Like, because they —

SHAWN RYAN: I’m sure that’s what it is. Yeah, because look, I mean, maybe we don’t put anything on paper so they can just continue to rape our country.

American Blood for Israel’s Wars

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so we start the Iran War for them. It’s indisputable that it was for them. We had no interest in it at all. And they told us they wanted us to start it. And then we started it. And then what do we do? Instead of guarding our own bases and the Gulf countries, we guard Israel.

So then a bomb lands right on top of our base in Kuwait, kills 6 guys, injures a whole bunch of others. And every veteran that came out of there now talking to the press says, “There’s tin walls, man. Literally, they told us to go in.” No protection at all. And there’s nothing on the roof. So they just came right from the sky and killed us. Why were all of our interceptor missiles around Israel? Protect beloved Israel. Okay. How about protecting our guys? What the f* is this?

Okay, here’s another one that’s indisputable. Part of the reason we might be pausing now in Iran is because ground troops are on the way. About 50,000, 60,000 of our guys are on the way there, right?

SHAWN RYAN: 50,000 to 60,000? When did that change? So the last time I checked, it was 2,000.

CENK UYGUR: So you see all sorts of different numbers out there. 3 different aircraft carriers with different guys going in. They’re talking about — we’re getting reports from our audience mobilizing to go over to Iran from North Carolina, from here, from there. So they’re sending you — oh, we’re in a ceasefire, the guys are on their way, right?

But here’s my question. Why do we have to use our ground troops? Israel wanted the war. Why don’t we use their ground troops? Anti-Semite. Wait a minute. I got to die for you in order not to be called an anti-Semite? What? What is this? If Israel wants a war, why don’t they use their own troops? Oh, they’re busy conquering southern Lebanon. Well, why is it in American interest for Israel to conquer southern Lebanon? Shut up, anti-Semite. Nah, no, this thing’s going to blow. We can’t take this anymore.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, we’re a proxy. Once again, we are the proxy. We are the biggest f*ing proxy in the world now. Yeah, and used for slaves.

The “Trope” Defense Mechanism

CENK UYGUR: The government’s occupied, period. So here again, it’s pure logic, right? When I say, hey, Big Pharma gives more than AIPAC does in a normal election, they’re the number one donors in Washington, and then we can’t negotiate drug prices. Well, wait, what do you mean we can’t negotiate in a free market? That’s like the most anti-capitalist thing you could possibly imagine. It’s like socialism for the richest corporations in the world. Same thing with the oil subsidies. Why do I have to give them money?

Now the mainstream media never talks about that because they love the corporations, they love the donor class, etc. But if you say that to them and you’re having a debate in an open discussion, they’ll grant it to you. They’ll say, “Yeah, yes, we get it, obviously we can’t negotiate drug prices because of the power of Big Pharma.” And they even concede that Obama, when he did Obamacare, left the drug companies out of it because they were too powerful. What does “too powerful” mean? It means they bribe our politicians and have them in their back pocket. That’s all it means.

So they’ll grant you that. Okay. Now you turn over to Israel, you go, just like Big Pharma, just like Big Oil, AIPAC comes in and buys our politicians. They’ve contributed to 94% of Congress. And then they go, “No, you’re an anti-Semite. That’s a trope. You’re not allowed to say a trope.” But is it true? Yes, it’s true. But you have to shut up about it. Otherwise you’ll be banned on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. You’re not allowed to say that.

And Shawn, they invented this thing called a trope. It’s a beautiful defense mechanism. It’s like landmines that they set up in politics. Political landmines, right? So you say they killed over 20,000 children in Gaza. They go, “Oh no, trope.” What do you mean trope? Is it not true? Yeah, it’s true, but it’s blood libel. What’s blood libel? Blood libel is in the 1800s, 1900s, people used to say that Jews would kill Christian children and drink their blood. It’s totally false bullshit. Not true. Did they get smeared that way? Yes. But wait, nobody said anything about drinking the kid’s blood or any of that stuff. You’re just now hiding behind the past and history to aggressively attack and then foreclose any criticism.

And they have a trope for everything. So when you say you’re controlling Congress, they go, “Trope. That’s a trope, the Jews control countries.” I’m like, yeah, but brother, when I say it about Big Pharma, you don’t say it’s a trope. Yeah, that’s because Big Pharma didn’t think to call it tropes. What is this?

Here, I’ll give you a funny example. I’m Mediterranean, right? Turks, Greeks and Italians are around the Mediterranean. We’re all Mediterranean, and we’re kind of hot-blooded, and we’re known sometimes for being promiscuous, right? So now imagine your wife catches you cheating and she goes, “Hey, it looks like you were with Sally the other night.” You go, “Trope. No, you can’t criticize me because I’m a Mediterranean man, and there’s a trope about how we’re promiscuous, so you’re not allowed to say that. In fact, I’m offended. Now you’re the bad guy.”

Yeah, but did you sleep with her? “Trope. Anti-Semite. You’re canceled. I’m offended. You’re the problem. I’m the victim.” No, no, this is bullshit. This is just a trick to get you to not ever criticize, right? So they get these special privileges that none of the rest of us have. You can’t claim tropes. I can’t claim tropes. Big Pharma can’t claim tropes. Only Israel can.

Long-Term Consequences: The Petrodollar and American Sovereignty

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s get away from Israel for just a second. Let’s talk about Gaza, Iran. Let’s talk about some long-term repercussions. I want to know what some of your biggest fears are with the fallout of this Iran war.

Other than our guys dying for another f*ing country — that is number one — but for the longevity of the country, I think the petrodollar is falling at a rapid pace. You know about BRICS, that’s been around for a long time. They’re trying to throw us off the world reserve currency. The petroyen is rising. I mean, now they’re taking payments in yen. So what does that mean for us?

I mean, we’ve essentially shut off oil to the Western world, Europe or so. It’s still going to China. They found a backdoor. And when they said that the blockade was just for the Western world at the beginning, it wasn’t until we showed up that China — mainly China — didn’t slow down.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: So everybody’s fing pissed at us because their energy is going to fall, which means their economy is going to fall. And we’re in the fing way of that. And it’s impossible to even negotiate because they kill all the people that we’re negotiating with. Israelis kill all the people we’re negotiating with. And so my major fear is that we will be thrown off the world reserve currency. I don’t know what that means for us, but I know it’s not going to be good. That’s the end of the road.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so I agree with you. My number one problem is that I can’t stand the loss of American sovereignty. I can’t stand it, right? Like, the whole point of the country is freedom, and they’re taking our freedom away, and it bothers me to no end. I’m going to come back and talk about that more later, because I’m so corny in how patriotic I am, and I love this country, and I hate that they’re taking the core of it away. It bothers me more than you could imagine.

But now let’s talk about what you mentioned, the economic stuff. That is a second calamity and it is going to be much larger than people realize. Trump is barely holding it together with duct tape, with lie after lie. “Oh, well, peace around the corner. Oh, don’t worry, oil’s going to drop.” And I don’t know why the markets believe him. I mean, the guy lies about everything. I don’t know why, but they believe him.

SHAWN RYAN: Is he holding it together? Is he really holding it together and is that why he’s saying all this, or is he manipulating the market?

The Economic Cascade: Oil, the Dollar, and the Strait of Hormuz

CENK UYGUR: Oh, he’s doing both. Yeah. So look, let’s talk about the cascading disasters, then come back to Trump and why he has to do what he’s doing.

So number one, 20% of the oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz for the whole world, right? Oil is sold in a world market. So when people say, “Oh, we’re energy independent,” that doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a made up phrase, because it’s not our oil that the ExxonMobil and Chevron takes out of our soil. The minute they have it, it’s ExxonMobil’s oil, and ExxonMobil doesn’t have to sell it inside the country. They can sell it all across the world, and they do. So we’re not energy independent at all. We’re in the global oil markets. So when the price of oil goes up for China, it goes up for us.

And so, but it went up more for us because you’re right, in the beginning, Iran’s controlling it, and China is their ally. So they’re letting the Chinese oil go through. Now, why did we allow that for so long? We even allowed the Iranians to sell their oil because if the oil prices explode, which they will, that hurts the entire market and the entire economy. The stock market crashes, rich people get uncomfortable, but then we have cascading consequences for the economy overall.

So when oil hits $100, over $100, panic begins to set, and a couple of times we went past $100 per barrel. Once it gets to $120, things start to crumble. $150 and it’s thermonuclear. $200 and the global economy is a crash like you’ve never seen.

So that’s why Trump has to hold it together. He has to make sure that the price of oil doesn’t go up too much in the middle of the war. But Israel put us in a spot that is unwinnable and untenable. We can’t get out. It’s already too late. Because once Iran closed the strait, we’ve got to get them to open it back up. If we don’t get them to open it back up, it’s definitely going to $120 and it might go to $150. And some now on Wall Street, some of the smart guys are beginning to think, “Holy sh*t, it might go to $200.”

So right now there’s shortages in South Korea, shortages in India, shortages of energy all across the world. And we haven’t hit what I think is the worst part of the war that’s coming up. If we don’t get the hell out of there, this is going to be an economic collapse like people have not seen.

So then, why is Israel doing this? Number one, they want to take southern Lebanon and this is all a giant distraction. Number two, they want the Iranians destroyed so they can’t fund Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. So it’s all about their interests, not our interests.

But the parts people don’t talk about — they just open up the Leviathan gas field for the first time. Israel now has a source of energy. And after the war starts, Netanyahu goes and brags on air, “Well, now that all those other — the strait is closed and other things are foreclosed, you’re going to have to rely on Leviathan and Israel.”

SHAWN RYAN: Holy sh*t.

CENK UYGUR: And when the world falls apart and we lose all of our allies, we lose NATO, we lose the Middle East, we lose everyone — Israel then says, “We’re your only ally. See, the rest of the world hates you.” Well, why do they hate us? Because we did the sh*t you wanted us to do.

SHAWN RYAN: I think everybody sees what’s happening. Everybody sees the negotiators being killed by Israel.

CENK UYGUR: And it—

The Petrodollar and Dollar Dominance

SHAWN RYAN: Everybody sees it but us, but we see it. But our leadership, our administration, Trump — they don’t acknowledge it. But I would just want to read something to break down the petrodollar and why it’s important.

“Since the early 1970s, a foundational deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia has underpinned the entire global financial system. Oil is priced and sold exclusively in U.S. dollars. That means every nation on Earth, regardless of its relationship with the U.S., must hold U.S. dollars to buy energy. Those dollar surpluses are then recycled back into U.S. Treasury bonds, keeping American borrowing costs artificially low and sustaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The system has funded decades of U.S. military and economic dominance. Lose it, and the United States loses its ability to borrow cheaply, sanction adversaries, and project global power.”

21 million barrels a day come out of the Strait of Hormuz. It’s $530 billion in oil per year, 25% of the world’s oil.

CENK UYGUR: So that’s the next thing I was going to get to, brother. So if you think it’s bad with what oil prices will do to the world economy, wait till you see what it does to us when they stop using the dollar to exchange oil.

SHAWN RYAN: Why?

CENK UYGUR: So here’s what people have to understand. It’s just one more step, and it’s actually an easy step that a lot of people will get. When they use the dollar as that reserve currency throughout the world, just like you read there, everybody has to stock up on the dollar. But if they don’t have to do that anymore, it lowers the value of the dollar, which means that we could buy less with the dollar, which means prices are going to be even higher. And we don’t become the standard bearer anymore.

That means they could give us an interest rate that is higher to buy our treasury bonds because we’re no longer the reserve currency. We’re no longer guaranteed to be able to pay it back. So that means all of our debt gets multiplied because now we’re all paying a higher interest. So all that money we borrowed from China and Japan to give to Israel, we’ll have to pay a higher interest on it if we’re not the reserve currency.

So it has many other cascading consequences, but just on the interest rate alone and the fact that they don’t have to buy the dollar anymore, and the inflation that’ll cause — two other giant calamities. It’s going to make the economy here so much worse.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s already bad. 6 ways the Iran war is threatening dollar dominance. The Strait of Hormuz closure. Yen for passage — that’s trading oil in yen and accessing the strait in yen. The Gulf state dollar dump — UAE warned it may use yen or other currencies if it runs low on US dollars. The Treasury sell-off — bond traders are dumping treasuries amid high inflation fears. BRICS acceleration — we just talked about BRICS, that’s growing. Last time I checked, I think there’s 22 countries, probably a lot more. That’s to throw us off the reserve currency and oil’s at about $20 a barrel.

BRICS, Saudi Arabia, and the Collapse of American Alliances

CENK UYGUR: So yeah, BRICS is Brazil, Russia, India, China, etc. So now when you put that together, that is a massive power. And now counter to NATO, 100%. Now people are looking and going, “Wait, why do I have to listen to America? Why don’t I just go do a deal with BRICS?” Even Europe—

SHAWN RYAN: Why would you listen to America? Why would you want to? I mean, all the tariffs, the sanctions — why would you want to? Every country around the world has to be going, “Hey, we don’t have to put up with this sht. This is out of fing control.”

CENK UYGUR: Exactly. When you—

SHAWN RYAN: Everybody’s going to listen to that remark.

CENK UYGUR: When you put in the tariffs on top of this war that literally everyone on planet Earth said don’t — it makes no sense, partly because everyone knew Iran, the first thing they’re going to do is block the Strait of Hormuz. But the Israelis convinced — whether they actually convinced them or they have blackmail or whatever it is — but the official story is they convinced Donald Trump that, “Don’t worry, the Iranians are backwards stupid Muslims. They won’t figure out how to close the Strait of Hormuz.” That’s the easiest thing in the world. Just put mines in there. And they said, “Oh, don’t worry, they won’t attack our Gulf countries.”

One of the things you read on that list — the UAE considering switching off the dollar — is sacrilege, because the Gulf countries, UAE, Saudi Arabia, etc., we’ve been theoretically providing their defenses this whole time. And so they’re supposed to be like totally on our side and kind of almost addicted to us. They need us.

And then what happened in the Iran War? Not only did we start a war that got them attacked — was Iran going to attack those Gulf countries? Of course, our bases are in the Gulf countries. They can’t reach America. That’s why we had no interest in Iran. But they can reach our bases. So of course they’re going to attack our bases. And so the UAE and Saudi Arabia foolishly thought, “Well, the Americans will at least protect their own bases, so they’ll protect us.” No, all we did was protect Israel. And so when the war started and we didn’t even protect UAE and Saudi Arabia, they got furious.

Those suckers really thought that we cared about them. No, you didn’t buy our politicians. Israel did. So we don’t care about you at all. We’re just using you, you idiots. And now they realize it.

Just before I came here, another news report — the Saudis are now saying, “No, we’re going to start doing deals with China, Turkey, maybe even Iran after the war, etc., because it turns out America — it was a lie. They’re not going to protect us. They didn’t protect us. So we’ve got to get off of this alliance.” Now they’re the ones that hold a lot of the oil. They start trading in yen, they start trading in other currency. We’re totally screwed. And the whole time Israel’s going to be cackling in the corner going, “Ha ha ha, we’re your only ally left.”

According to Pauli Margaret, there’s a 45% chance the Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by the end of May.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think?

Trump’s Impossible Position

CENK UYGUR: Look, the only reason why I hesitate, Shawn, is because Trump will definitely destroy his presidency if he hasn’t already done so. If he puts in the ground troops or he bombs their power plants and their bridges, as he said, the economy is going to melt down in all the ways that we described and then some. His popularity is going to go from 32 into the 20s — unprecedented, never heard of territory.

And so he can’t do it, because if he bombs Iran’s oil facilities, as he’s threatening to do, the power plants, etc., Iran — first of all, they can’t get rebuilt for about 5 years. So you’re doing permanent damage to oil and the supply of oil, which by definition will raise the prices. But on top of that, Iran says, “If you hit our oil, we’re going to hit the oil and gas in the Gulf.” Now we’re talking about massive damage taking 5, 10 years to recover from. Gas prices like nobody’s ever seen. We’re already at $7 in LA for a gallon of gas. We’re going to go to $8, we’re going to go to $10, and God knows where we’re going.

So he cannot go in. He’s totally stuck. That’s why he’s almost like pleading with the Israelis, “Please, please let me do a peace deal, right?” But it looks like the Israelis are going to deny him.

So if that 45% is mental — if I’m right — I had this debate with a guy on Twitter, Mario Nahual. He’s got a big show on X and bless his heart, he’s a good guy and stuff. But he’s like, “No, Cenk, Israel’s got influence in America. They don’t completely control America. So because this war is insane, Trump’s going to stop it because it can’t go on for all the reasons we’ve been talking about.” And I’m like, “No, watch Mario. Israel controls America.”

SHAWN RYAN: What signs are people seeing that this administration is not controlled by Israel? What are they saying?

CENK UYGUR: They don’t even have a—

Israel Killing American Negotiators and Citizens

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, they’ve killed everybody we’re negotiating with in the middle of negotiations. That is not a sane response.

CENK UYGUR: That’s too much. It gives you a full sense of control, right? Did you know they killed 10 Americans — the Israelis did — in the last 3 years? And our government hasn’t even asked for the murderers to be arrested. We haven’t asked for them to be brought to justice or to be extradited.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, Cenk, we caught a pedophile in Las Vegas that was part of their cyber team. And delivered him back to Israel with a little bow on him. Nothing. No repercussions. No — literally, like going after little girls on the internet. Caught him. Caught him.

CENK UYGUR: Sure.

SHAWN RYAN: Sent him back with no repercussions.

The Pollard Case and Foreign Influence

CENK UYGUR: It’s a little worse than that. Here’s why it’s a little worse. They catch him in a ring with— he’s part of 9 guys. The other 8 are Americans. Those Americans have to face consequences because they’re pedophiles. So significant, serious consequences, okay, in the justice system. The Israeli is working with us in cybersecurity, is one of their top cybersecurity officials. First of all, a real American has to win the next presidential election. We should not be having Israel anywhere near our cybersecurity. Okay, we’ll come back to that too. So, but this cybersecurity official comes here for sexual tourism. He thinks, well, I’ll go rape American girls. I’m Israeli. I’m above the law. If I get caught, I’ll just go back to Israel.

SHAWN RYAN: He’s right.

CENK UYGUR: And that’s exactly what happened. He gets caught with the other Americans. Americans have to face the consequences. The Israeli’s above the law. We gift wrap them just like you said and send them back to Israel. No consequences.

So, I mean, look at Jonathan Pollard. Jonathan Pollard steals our top secrets. That’s after Israel already stole our nuclear secrets. Some kind of f*ing ally, right?

So then Pollard. This is amazing. Netanyahu goes to Clinton back in the late 1990s, actually during the Oslo Accords, and says, “We have the tapes of you with Monica Lewinsky,” before anybody knew about Monica Lewinsky. First of all, how does Israel have the tapes? Okay. And then they say, oh, the idea that Israel might blackmail an American politician, that’s anti-Semitic. Get the f* out of here. They already did it. There’s a whole book about it. The Israeli press talks about it.

So then he says, “I want you to release Jonathan Pollard.” Now, to Clinton’s credit, he doesn’t, right? And by the way, what happens then? The blackmail is revealed when we all know about Monica Lewinsky. He didn’t play ball, so they released the tapes. Okay.

So then they go to Obama and Obama, because he gets the same money from the same guys. Israel First donors give tons and tons of money to the Democrats and the Republicans. Obama finally paroles Jonathan Pollard. That guy should have been in prison the rest of his life. He’s a traitor, right? At a minimum.

And then Trump gets into office and they go, it’s not good enough that he’s released. We want him back in Israel. So Trump says, “Yes, sir, thank you, sir.” And he says he’s allowed to leave America and go to Israel.

Now, the reason I told you this whole story is because what happens next is the most interesting part. He gets flown out to Israel in a private jet. The private jet is owned by the Adelsons. So that’s the same family, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, that has given Trump $337 million through the 3 presidential elections. So the Adelsons fly him out in luxury and then give him a hero’s welcome when he arrives in Israel. Way to betray America. Atta boy! Congratulations, Jonathan Pollard.

And Pollard’s doing interviews in Israel now, saying all the Jews in America should betray America and work for Israel.

SHAWN RYAN: He’s saying that?

Blackmail, Epstein, and Political Control

CENK UYGUR: He’s saying that. It’s on tape. Okay. And the Adelsons who bought our president, okay, are the ones who are celebrating the traitors in this country. Now, again, guys, don’t take it out on anybody Jewish. They’re not in on it. It’s just Pollard. They’re not listening to Pollard, etc. But the donor class, f* those guys. Okay, so they’re literally rewarding people for betraying us. And so we should ask Trump, you should ask Obama, why did you let this guy go?

And now this is more of a theory. Now, okay, those are all facts. My guess is with Clinton and with everybody, they have a piece of blackmail that they can release, like Monica, which is bad but not thermonuclear. It won’t, you know, it won’t totally assassinate your character.

SHAWN RYAN: The Epstein files.

CENK UYGUR: Okay, you didn’t do what we wanted with Monica. Boom, here’s Monica. Now, who was really good friends with Bill Clinton? Jeffrey Epstein was. Who was really good friends with Donald Trump? Jeffrey Epstein was. Now, Bill, you saw when you didn’t play ball what happened. Now, would you like the thermonuclear files released? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yep.

So during the Oslo Accords, Clinton’s like, “Oh, the dirty Palestinians wouldn’t take the deal. The Israelis gave them a great deal. It’s all their fault.” Right. And we got to send more money to Israel. We got to send more money to Israel. And then there’s a picture of Clinton in one of these events. And you know who’s standing behind him smiling? Miriam Adelson.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

Israel-First Donors and Political Capture

CENK UYGUR: Yes. So what happened? I thought you were a big Republican donor. No, they’re not. They don’t care about Republicans or Democrats or America. They’re Israel First. And so whoever’s going to help Israel, they’ll give to Clinton, they’ll give to Trump, and they’ll make sure that they serve Israel.

Number one donor to Chuck Schumer? Israel. To Joe Biden? Israel. Hakeem Jeffries? Israel. Mike Johnson? Israel. Ted Cruz? Israel. Trump? Israel. So don’t tell me they don’t control our politicians when we have eyes and ears and we can see the numbers.

And why did they do that with Pollard? I think they’re at the point where they realize they’ve lost the American people, and now they’ve entered the stage of rubbing it in. Okay, we’ve gone to suppression and oppression. Before it was propaganda. We’ll trick them, we’ll tell them that criticizing us is a trope and anti— and cancel and destroy. Okay, that’s not working anymore. The control of the politicians is breaking apart. Okay, we’ll just go to outright oppression.

And Larry Ellison, speaking of rubbing it in, super donor to Israel. So these things are amazing. And why isn’t the reporters on television talking about it?

DropSite News gets Epstein’s emails, Ehud Barak’s, and Larry Ellison’s— I’m sorry, I said Freudian slip. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, one of the richest men in the world, the guy who just bought TikTok, CBS, and CNN for Israel. Right. So he says to the Israeli ambassador in the emails, “I’m going to go talk to Marco Rubio and make sure that he’s going to work for Israel.” He says it in language like he’s positive towards Israel. Right. He goes and writes another email back. He says, “I talked to him. Yeah, he’ll be a friend, ally of Israel. He’s on our side.” So I put $5 million into a super PAC. That’s back in 2016 when he’s running against Trump.

Now, Ellison’s best friends with Trump before he was his worst enemy, before Larry Ellison was giving to Clinton and to the Democrats. They’re literally, when you see the emails, they’re literally bribing our politicians. It’s legal through campaign contributions and having conversations with, “Will you serve Israel?” “Yes, I will loyally serve Israel.” Report back to the Israelis. They will loyally serve Israel. Okay.

So this is our f*ed political system right now. So the more people find out, the angrier they get. And they should be. They should be livid that we lost our sovereignty and guys like Ellison and Adelson run the place.

And so now they bought all those big media. The only upside of that is it’s a waste of their money. Like when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and it was like bankrupt within 6 months because people were like, “F* that. I’m not going to a social media site owned by Rupert Murdoch,” right? So go ahead, buy CBS. You think we don’t know CBS is Israeli propaganda now? And you’re wasting your money with CNN. It was already Israeli propaganda.

Solutions: What Comes Next?

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s take a quick break. When we come back, I just want to talk about what do we do about— I mean, this war is going to happen. I think it’s going to happen.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t think there’s any stopping it. There’s nothing we can do. It’s already happening. So what do we do after the fallout? How do we keep the dollar on the reserve currency? Stuff like that.

CENK UYGUR: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Cenk, we’re back from the break. We were talking, so I want to go into some solutions because it does look like we’re probably going to war. It’s probably going to be in there for a while. We’re probably going to be in there for a while. And so for the next, I don’t know, maybe it could change after midterms. Maybe it’ll change after the presidency, I don’t know.

But what are some things that we could do to get the dollar back on the reserve currency, to ease our allies’ minds, to ease the world’s mind about this? And it’s just anything else we can do, even to our own energy infrastructure. I mean, the other thing is that people I haven’t heard anybody talking about is here we are in the AI race against China. We’re pretty much fed if we lose it. And we’re fing with everybody’s energy with our own energy. We can’t even power these systems right now. All of our powers— I mean, nobody’s unleashing nuclear. What are we going to do?

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, we have to—

SHAWN RYAN: We already have to start thinking about the recovery because the world is fing pissed. Our energy is fed. What do we do?

CENK UYGUR: So we’re in a world of hurt, and so we got to be realistic and honest about it. And it’s going to get, I think, much worse before it gets better. And the solutions are long term. I wish they were short term, but they’re not.

So in the short term, Trump’s president for another, you know, 3 years or so. But even honestly, if you like, so the 25th Amendment or whatever, it wouldn’t really matter because you know who JD Vance just had dinner with? Miriam Adelson.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

CENK UYGUR: Yes. It’s endless, man. It’s endless. And Paul Singer and Loeb, these are all Israel First donors. So these are all the people that are giving money to try to eliminate Tom Massie in Kentucky as we speak. Okay. Because Massie had the audacity to speak out against Israel, so he must be eliminated.

And on the left, we’ve had a lot of guys eliminated, you know— you think the Jamaal Bowman thing was about the fire alarm? No, they spent— they gave Latimer $22 million to eliminate Jamaal Bowman from Congress. And Cori Bush, Andy Levin. Andy Levin’s a Jewish American from Michigan. He’s a Zionist. He loves Israel. But he said two-state solution and the aid shouldn’t be unconditional. They’re like, “What do you mean unconditional? No, Israel’s allowed to do anything they want.”

They spent $4 million defeating Andy Levin, getting him out, putting in Haley Stevens because she said, “I’ll kiss Israel’s ass on the left, the right, and the middle. And unconditional.” You are— I will help you rob Americans. And she’s running for Senate now and getting her ass handed to her.

So we’ve been through those problems. Okay, so when you get to the solutions, what I’m saying is until the next president comes into office, it’s going to be super difficult. Okay, so will oil go through the roof? Yes. Will they start coming off the petrodollar? Yes. Once they start coming off the petrodollar, it’s going to be super hard to put them back on.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t think anybody’s coming back.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah. So then our alliances are falling apart at the seams. Spain and Ireland and Italy are super pissed at us. Now we’re theoretically pissed at them on behalf of Israel, whatever. Like, yeah, the Irish aren’t good enough allies. Israel’s our only ally. Get the f* outta here. You know, I’d 10,000 times rather be allies with the Irish and the Italians and the Spanish than the Israelis.

So all of those things are headed towards disaster, and if the European countries go and do an alliance, economic alliance with BRICS instead of us—

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, you think that’s a possibility?

Voting Out Incumbents and the Rise of Independent Media

CENK UYGUR: Of course it is. How many times are we going to tariff them? How many times are we going to say we’re getting out of NATO? How many times are we going to spit in their face and say, oh, just shut up, Denmark, we’re going to invade you and take Greenland, right? Until they go, you know what, China and Russia aren’t saying they’re going to take Greenland, you are, right?

By the way, every war f*s up the country that started it. So minus Israel, because we’re the ones forced to fight their wars. But Russia goes into Ukraine, their military gets destroyed. We’re going into Iran. We’re using up all of our interceptor missiles. We won’t have any defenses left at the end of this. At the end of the day, we’ve got to take the aircraft carriers out because we’re going to run out of missiles at some point. So this is so stupid. It’s maniacally stupid.

Okay. So for God’s sake, we got to get to solutions. So how are we going to do that? Number one, you have to vote against all incumbents unless their name is Tom Massie or Ro Khanna, or, you know, for a fact you checked AIPAC Tracker and they’re not taking any money from Israel, like, you know, for sure. Okay, then you should vote against them. Default. Make sure you go to elections and vote against every sitting congressman unless you’re absolutely positive they serve America.

Okay, so this is when mainstream media will lose their shit and go, “How dare you? Those are— they have so much experience.” Yeah, they have experience in f*ing us. They have experience in screwing us over and serving other countries and donor class, etc. They’re the cancer.

Okay, now the— at this point they’ll go, “Oh no, no, no, no, no, Cenk is working with the Republicans. He’s going to get you to vote against Democrats. Shawn’s working with the Democrats. He’s going to get you to vote against Republicans.”

SHAWN RYAN: Oh yeah, that narrative has already happened.

CENK UYGUR: Of course, right? So let me defeat that narrative so easily. Republicans go into Republican primaries and vote against incumbents in the primaries. So you don’t have to vote for a Democrat. You could have a clean Republican who’s an American who represents you. Democrats, you don’t have to go vote for a Republican. Go into Democratic primaries and vote out all the bombs, vote out all the snakes who keep giving your money to Israel, when 80% of you are against it.

So we did a site, notanotherdollar.com. It’s just the simplest thing in the world. It’s a pledge to never vote for anyone who takes any money from the Israeli lobby or sends a single more dollar to Israel. Okay? So if you do that in your own primaries, you defeat their talking point of, “Oh, you’re helping the other side.” No, we’re not even crossing party lines at all.

And that’s why, generally speaking, mainstream media hates primaries. They don’t like talking about primaries because in primaries you have a little bit of real choice left. By the time you get to the general election, it’s Israeli robot A versus Israeli robot B, and they’ve robbed you of all your choices.

So it’s actually the same way the Iranians work and the same way the Chinese work. The Chinese have a Politburo like the Soviets used to. And they vote within themselves, this very small group of people. And then they give you two options that both serve the Politburo. So then they have fake elections. Iran does the same thing. The mullahs vote internally. Then they give you two fake options who both serve the ayatollah and the mullahs. Right. And then people have a fake election.

We actually do the same thing here in America. The donors select the guys who are going to win the primaries by giving them all the money. Once you got $5 million in a primary, good night Irene. Okay, in fact, in America, the person with more money wins the election 95% of the time. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, nothing matters. 19 out of 20 times, the person with more money wins because we legalize bribery. So they— by the time you get to the general election, every good choice is eliminated. But not in the primaries. So go vote in the primaries and vote out all the incumbents.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think that the money that you said, $5 million, you’ve got it— do you think that will continue with the rise of independent media?

The Power of Independent Media

CENK UYGUR: No. That’s why I have a lot of hope. Okay, so remember how we talked about— so step one is defeating the incumbents, right? But there’s a step that I don’t talk about in terms of politics, but that’s about media, but that’s as important as everything else in politics. Politics leads us back to the conversation we started earlier.

Under 50 years old, everyone hates Israel. Above 50, the zombies still think they’re our special ally. Why? They’re consuming TV and mainstream media. Under 50-year-olds are consuming online media. Mainstream media says we are the only objective ones when it’s the exact opposite. In fact, claiming they’re the only objective ones is part of their propaganda.

Meanwhile, people are going, “Okay, wait, I went online and I listened to Shawn Ryan and I listened to Tucker. And I listened to Dave Smith and Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks and Breaking Points, and I got a variety of opinions.” They don’t agree on a lot of stuff, but there are facts that they share. And so it is a fact that we gave Israel $320 billion. It is a fact that we cannot negotiate drug prices. It is a fact that we spent $8 trillion on the global war on terror. That wasn’t global at all. It was a war on Israel’s neighbors. So now $8 trillion other dollars is out to them.

So in media, they’re like, “No, no, that wasn’t for Israel. It just happened to be their neighbors. No, they— yeah, Israel launched all the wars, but they’re doing self-defense.” And now when under-50-year-olds, if they even turn on TV, they turn it on, they look at it like, “What is this bullshit? Oh, this is nothing but lies. The campaign contributions don’t affect the politicians. What kind of bullshitter is this guy?” It’s a play, man. They’re all— I call them news actors, not news anchors.

Behind the Scenes at MSNBC

So the news actors— and by the way, I worked at MSNBC. I was a host on there. I was their 6 o’clock guy 14 years ago. Okay, they make everybody use a prompter. And I said, I don’t need a prompter. On Young Turks, we don’t use prompters. We have our outline prepared. We’re going to tell you the vid— we’re going to show you the videos. We’re going to prove our case. We’ve got the quotes, but I don’t need a prompter. I’m just going to tell you a story about it. “No, no, no, no. Put it in the prompter.” I’m like, why? Right?

Okay. First I thought they were just uncomfortable with it. “Oh, is he going to be able to handle it?” But I did a couple without a prompter and they’re like, “Oh, he is pretty good at this.” Right? And the ratings are going up. No, they want you on the prompter because they want to pre-approve your script.

And so, to be fair, Rachel Maddow also wrote her own scripts. Rachel and I were the only ones who wrote our own scripts. Al Sharpton eventually replaced me. Sharpton not only wouldn’t write his scripts, he wouldn’t even read his scripts. That’s why there’s all this video online of him bumbling, stumbling, saying nonsensical things, because it’s the first time he’s ever seen it when it’s on the prompter. So there are a bunch of news actors that are just reading scripts that the producers wrote for them.

So I write a script, it criticizes one of the sponsors. I didn’t know they were a sponsor, and I didn’t care. But they see it hours before I go on air and they give me a call, “Take the sponsor out of your script.” Oh, that’s why you want it in the prompter, because all the scripts are pre-approved.

I remember I wrote an op-ed, sent it to Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. Sometimes they publish my op-eds back in the day. They get a note back, “This doesn’t fit our narrative.” Yeah, no shit, Sherlock, because I wrote it. You didn’t. And now— so wait, wait, wait. Oh, now I get it. There are no op-eds allowed that don’t fit the narrative. Okay, so the whole thing is rigged.

The Shift Toward Online Media

So that’s the good news. Now they can’t have us unsee it, all the under-50-year-olds. And now there’s plenty of people above 50 who watch online media too. So now the news is out. Mainstream media is garbage. It’s nothing but propaganda. They don’t cover the news, they cover up the news. Go watch online and you’ll start to see things that are true. Okay. And by the way, there’s still bullshitters online. It’s not like we’re all angels.

So that leads to the second great thing, Shawn, and part of the solution from the media angle. Now people are forced to use their own minds. Before it was an assembly line. Fox News gives you a load of bullshit. MSNBC gives you a load of bullshit, right? And everyone says the same thing, so there’s no variety, and you don’t even have an opportunity to use independent judgment, right? So they’ve got us divided in camps, so you’re not even seeing the other side.

Now, okay, if I’m a Republican, I got Mark Levin telling me one thing, and I got Megyn Kelly telling me something else. Well, now I’ve got to use my own independent judgment to decide who’s right. Before, they were all on Fox News and all saying the same propaganda. And look, to Megyn’s credit and Tucker’s credit, they say it now. They admit it. “When we were on Fox News, we all kind of had to say the same thing, right?” Now they get to say whatever they want, and they’re trying to appeal to the audience, and the audience doesn’t want bullshit. The audience doesn’t want you kissing Israel’s ass. They don’t want you kissing donor ass, right? So we’re incentivized to tell people things that are true.

And the best part of it is, once that brother started using his own mind, they’re now in our camp because they’re going to hear Mark Levin tell you that we should serve Israel. They’re going to hear Megyn say we shouldn’t serve Israel. And Mark’s cooked. He’s gone. He’s a goner. He’s never going to win that fight. That’s why Ben Shapiro has almost no audience left. Whereas you and Tucker and Megyn are doing great on the right. We’re doing great on the left. Breaking Points and others are. And so Breaking Points has got a right winger too. It’s a good independent show.

So in this world, their propaganda runs into our brick wall before our message ran into their brick wall. So that is super good news. So I think already in 2024, online media was more important than mainstream media. That was the first election where we were more important. And in ’28, that’s going to be an even bigger number. And by that time, it’s not going to be under 50, it’s going to be under 55-year-olds.

Right now, the older folks vote a lot, so that brain lock they have on TV is important. Go— this is part of the solution— go talk to your family members, go talk to your friends, get them off TV, get them off that drug, okay? That drug’s killing them. Every time you turn on TV, you’re voluntarily allowing someone to lie to you and fill your head with lies, right? So get off that garbage.

Go look around. I don’t tell people just watch Young Turks. I tell them, “Watch The Young Turks at 6 o’clock Eastern. We do it Monday through Friday. Check it out.” But then go watch Shawn, go watch Tucker, go watch independent shows, watch our competitors on the left. No problem. Because what they’ll realize is we try super hard to give them facts and to stick up for them, right? I want them using their mind. I want an open mind. Once we got open minds, the bad guys are f*ed.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I have a couple of thoughts I wanted to— you just solved everything.

CENK UYGUR: But we got—

Toward Isolationism and Energy Independence

SHAWN RYAN: I kind of meant just how do we get— how do we not save face? How do we survive after this war economically? And so the things that I was going to say is that when this does wind down, when we do get somebody in there that has his own agency, I think we— I’m not an isolationist. I think we need to become damn close to isolationists after this. I think that we need to take care of ourselves, get a handle on all this fraud that’s going on all over the f*ing country, like really get a handle on it and identify the problems and stop that shit. I think we just need to lock it up. I think we need to lock it up and fix ourselves before we start engaging in foreign affairs again. And I think that we need to tap into our oil reserves. We have some of the biggest oil reserves in the world, and I think we need to unleash nuclear, and then that will solve the problem.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah. So, for the—

SHAWN RYAN: For after this war, or during— I mean, right now, this shit has to start happening. In my opinion.

Removing Foreign Influence and Reforming the Political System

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so there’s kind of 3 categories, right? So there’s the media category we just talked about — turn off TV, check out a variety of shows, check. Then there’s politics, that’s the electoral stuff. Vote out all the incumbents is step 1. Step 2 is get a clean president next time.

So that is monumentally important because that clean president is going to then unlock all the tool chests that we have. And America has a beautiful, huge tool chest that we can use, but we need a president that’s going to represent us and not someone else. So that’s absolutely critical. We can come back to how to pick that person, right? And who should be — maybe it’s a little early, but we can have that conversation.

But to your question, Shawn, once we’ve got a clean president, what can he do? Well, first of all, you’ve got to get rid of Israel’s influence in this country completely. Like Joe Kent talks about this. I interviewed him about it and Tucker did and many others did. And there are Israeli assets inside our government. Totally unacceptable. We’ve got to find them and remove them.

This is not a witch hunt. Like if you go and do things that are unjust and you attack a random Jewish guy that didn’t do anything wrong, you’ll ruin the whole thing, right? Don’t do that. But if you’re working for Israel, we’re going to find you and we’re going to remove you from government.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s everybody. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to step in because you’re saying vote all the incumbents out. I’ve been watching the primaries, and I had some skin in the game with Dan Crenshaw, but he’s gone.

CENK UYGUR: God bless your heart.

SHAWN RYAN: But you watch a lot of these people that are getting in now, and they didn’t say it at the very beginning, and now they’re coming out and they’re beating the Israeli drum. That’s one in particular that I saw, and I was very careful not to endorse somebody just because I f*ing hate somebody else, because that doesn’t do anything. Maybe he’s out of there, the guy behind him probably isn’t going to be any better, but at least we’re cleaning something out and getting some fresh blood in.

But I don’t know if the incumbent thing is going to work. I don’t think it will because, I mean, you just talked about the PACs. We talk a lot about a new party. I think that’s what needs to happen. And I think the only way that happens is if it’s grassroots. It can’t be somebody up top. It can’t be some fing guy with a s ton of money that’s going to finance the entire f*ing thing. It has to be grassroots. It has to be a movement. And I think a lot of people are going to have to put their differences aside.

We need to identify a party and somehow, some way come up with the ethos. What are the biggest things that are affecting the country right now? It’s the lobbying. It’s Israel. So we take all these things — term limits, you hear that being kicked around a lot. We take all the things that we really want to change right now that everybody’s talking about, but it’s never going to change because nobody in power is going to f themselves out of insider trading or any of that s.

And so you have to try to get all these people elected as fast as possible. So you can’t vote for the Democrat, you can’t vote for the Republican, you have to vote for the party. We don’t even want to discuss some of this other stuff. I don’t think we need to be discussing the things that will be batted around until the end of time. We need to put that s* aside, get these people in here.

Some way, somehow, they have to promise that we are going to amend the Constitution in these ways. That’s the first fing thing we’re going to do. You amend the Constitution as minimally as possible for these major problems — term limits, lobbying, stuff like that. Then we can go back to all the same bullshit we’ve been arguing about since the beginning of fing time.

But I don’t know how you do that when you have a baby boomer generation, a huge generation. I don’t know if you have to wait until they’re gone. I don’t know. But I’ve thought about this so much, and I have lots of politicians who want to come on the show. I won’t have most of them anymore because you’re just full of s. I don’t give a f if you’re running. I don’t care if I served with you and you’re running. I still think you’re full of s. Go prove you’re going to do the right thing and then I’ll fing help you with your reelection. I’m not going to help you with your election.

Building a Grassroots Movement

CENK UYGUR: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: I think that is how it would have to be done. And how would that be? That would be people like you and I, what we’re doing right now. We’re coming together, we’re talking about things, and I know you have wildly different opinions than I do on certain subjects that are very divisive, but we both want the same thing, sir. We both want that flag to mean something again.

CENK UYGUR: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: We want our own sovereignty. We want our own agency. We want our own freedom. We don’t want to be Israel’s slaves. And that’s how it has to be done. And so when you come up with that party and you come up with the very basic ethos — this is what this is about, you will take no money from a PAC, you won’t do any of that — then you get in, amend the Constitution, get things in order. And you’ve got the entire f*ing system. Them that way.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah. So here’s my sense of it, Shawn.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s like a hostile takeover without violence.

Getting Money Out of Politics

CENK UYGUR: That’s funny, because when I started Just Democrats, I said this is meant to be a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. Literally the words that I used. Now, it didn’t turn out that way, but it was supposed to be. And now I’m doing Rebellion PAC.

Among the Democrats, I’m down to Ro Khanna, basically, because Ro is never taking corporate PAC money, doesn’t take money from Israel. That’s what I mean by clean, right? Massey’s clean on the Republican side. Ro Khanna is clean on the Democratic side. But we don’t have to put all of our hopes and dreams into one person.

So let’s talk about the system again. You hit it on the nail on the head. The very last step I was going to tell you, the third political step is an amendment. Because once you get a clean president, there’s a million things you could do. But by far the most important is pass an amendment immediately to get money out of politics, because you’ve got to turn off the tap. If you don’t turn off the tap and they can keep bribing our politicians, they’re going to bribe them till the cows come home.

But if you turn off the tap and all of a sudden they’re not being told by a lobbyist, “Hey, here’s half a million dollars, now go vote for higher drug prices,” then he’s going to think, “Well, wait. My source of power now are the voters and not the donors. And the voters don’t want higher drug prices. Now I’ve got to go try to serve them.”

Getting money out of politics is by far the most important issue. If you don’t end the bribery, we’re permanently screwed. That’s what’s putting the stain on the flag. And so it’s not, as I’ve been saying all along, not just Israel — they’re all bribing. Big Sugar down in Florida is one of the biggest lobbies, and they control the politicians in maniacal ways. The corn industry is huge. That’s why we have high fructose corn syrup instead of real sugar in our food, and it literally is making America obese. It’s leading to diabetes. It’s literally killing us. But nope — Big Sugar, big corn, big everything.

You’ve got to get them off that crack. As long as they’re on the crack of money and politics, we’re never going to regain our country.

The Path Forward: Presidential Elections and Clean Candidates

But the good news is presidential elections are not like congressional races. We are already taking baby steps. We’ve already started taking the first steps. We started taking them on the left through Just Democrats because we put in the rule that no one who’s endorsed here can take corporate PAC money. So they might still have left-wing positions you hate on social issues, but on economic issues and foreign government issues, they’re clean, because they’re not hooked on that money.

And who are the two that were most targeted by the Israelis? Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush, both Justice Democrats, because they can’t take money from Israel. So you set up incentives and disincentives and rules that get you to the right results.

Now they did buy Bowman’s seat for $22 million. They can buy almost any seat in Montana or Rhode Island because they don’t get enough media attention. When you don’t get enough media attention to a congressional or even a Senate race, then the only attention is mainstream media, the local TV news, local radio, local papers, and those guys are almost all bought.

I’ll give you an example from the old days: Max Baucus in Montana, Democratic senator, took more money from the healthcare industry than anyone else. He wrote Obamacare in the Senate, and that’s the one that said mandated to buy private health insurance. It was still an improvement, but why are we doing a mandate? It was originally written by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing pro-corporate group, wrote it, gave it to Max Baucus and Obama. They passed it so that you have to buy private insurance and it doesn’t touch the drug companies.

Why can’t we defeat Max Baucus in Montana as Democrats when he sold us out on the most important bill there was? Because you don’t have enough money and there’s no media attention. He buys all the ads, he wins reelection really easily.

But here comes the good news. In a presidential election, the money doesn’t matter nearly as much because you can’t take the spotlight of a presidential election away. That’s why Trump won twice, even though he had way less money than Hillary Clinton and way less money than Kamala Harris, because they’re buying dumbass TV ads that don’t work anymore. They put out their robot ads like, “Oh, I am for the American people,” and it’s all bullshit propaganda. And by the way, the Republicans of course do it too.

But Trump comes in and he’s outside the system. That’s why a lot of people made the mistake of thinking that he wasn’t one of them, when he is. He is part of the establishment. He’s a New York billionaire, been in those circles the whole time. That’s why he knew Epstein and he knew the Clintons. He knew all these guys.

SHAWN RYAN: This is a —

CENK UYGUR: It doesn’t take much. It was a low bar, but he got past it and other politicians didn’t. In the first debate in 2016, 16 guys on the stage, he’s like, “I gave them all money and they did whatever I wanted.” People are like, “Oh my God, that’s true.” So even though he had less money, he starts attracting people. He said, “I’m going to drain the swamp. I’m going to get rid of money in politics.” He gets more and more people. And since he’s a celebrity, they couldn’t keep him out. And he just started saying things that were popular. He didn’t mean it.

That’s why I was pulling my hair out. I’m like, he doesn’t mean it. He’s a con man. But people were so desperate and hungry for anyone who was real or who was authentic, who wasn’t a robot, that they believed him. And I get why they believed him. I feel like sometimes I’m the only Democrat who gets it — yeah, guys, they were desperate. You gave them garbage. You gave them plastic robots from an assembly line. That’s why they went for him, because they didn’t have any other options. So anyways, that’s the truth.

The Power of Independent Media

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I get labeled a MAGA podcaster all the time. I was never a fing MAGA podcaster, but I didn’t have an option. I didn’t have a fing option. And he wasn’t my first option. I really liked Vivek. I always wondered why Vivek always kind of, yeah, he was all about Trump, but he’s a smarter guy. He’s got better policies, has got better ideas, can articulate better. I thought he was great, but he didn’t make it. And so I had Joe Biden or Trump, and that was it. Both very weak choices in my opinion.

CENK UYGUR: So look at the lies that people in the establishment—

SHAWN RYAN: Both over 80 f*ing years old, I know—

CENK UYGUR: Look at the lies that the establishment tells.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, think about when you go— what do you do? 80-plus years old. F*ing serious.

Biden’s Decline and the Democratic Party’s Failures

CENK UYGUR: So about 2 years before the 2024 election, we at The Young Turks started petitioning to get Biden out of the race.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

CENK UYGUR: People are like, “Whoa, what are you doing? That’s the Democratic president. He’s FDR 2.0. You guys crazy?” I’m like, “Guys, we play his clips every day. He can’t speak. He can’t finish a sentence.” The other day he went and shook hands with an invisible guy. Like, there was literally— you saw on tape, you could find it online. Goes and does— it’s done with the speech, walks to someplace where no one is and does this. I’m like, his brain’s gone.

Okay, so I think Trump’s a con man, right? So I’m like, I don’t want to lose to Trump. If you run a guy who has dementia, you’re guaranteed to lose to Trump. So why the f* do you want to lose to Trump? “No, shut up. You’re being disloyal to the Democrats. If you were loyal to the Democrats, you would bow your head and follow the orders of the leaders.”

I didn’t come to bow my head, man. I’m telling you, man, I’m corny. I believe in freedom. I believe in America. I really do. And I’m not bowing my head to a guy who’s got dementia, okay?

And I’m like, “Guys, he’s in the 30s. He’s where Trump is now.” Biden was there a year and a half before the election. And I’m like, an incumbent that’s in the 40s has almost no chance of winning. An incumbent in the 30s has almost never won a national election in America. Why would we go with a guy who is definitely going to lose?

And what did I get? We got nothing but overwhelming criticism and hate. “How dare you? If you just do the propaganda and you say Biden is great, we’ll win the election. You’re ruining the marketing and the propaganda by telling the truth about Biden. And now we’re going to lose and it’s going to be your fault.”

And then we get to the debate and he’s like, “We defeated Medicare,” and his brain’s leaking out of his ear. They’re like, “Ah, shit.” And did anybody come back around and say, “Hey, you guys are right?”

Maybe. And we said, do an open primary. Don’t do Kamala Harris. Don’t stop anointing people. You guys suck at this. Do an open primary. Maybe Abe Bashir from Kentucky could have won or something, right? They’re like, “Shut up, bow your head,” right?

So for Republican voters and Democratic voters, do not listen to leadership. They’re full of shit and they’re trying to lead you astray.

AIPAC’s Influence and the Fight for Clean Candidates

So Dan, what do they tell us? “Oh, you got to support Dan Crenshaw.” Why do I have to support Dan Crenshaw? No, I don’t, right? If you’re a Republican, right? And so, okay, you defeated him. The guy who defeated him is also taking money from AIPAC. Oh, goddamn it, right?

But what you did was you got people’s attention, okay? And one of their guys lost. That’s a victory, okay? That doesn’t mean you solved everything, but it means you’re on the road to solving things.

Now, the next most important election is not a Democrat’s, even though I’m on the left. It’s Tom Massie’s election in Kentucky. Right now, the Singer, Adelson, etc., pouring in millions to his cutout MAGA opponent, right? Fill in the blank guy, whoever the f* he is. It doesn’t matter. It’s whoever is willing to be a—

SHAWN RYAN: Sure, we’ll find out soon.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, it’s whoever’s willing to be a dog to the Israelis, right? Okay, so if Massie loses that election, the message is going to go to all the people in the House and in the Senate: “Oh, don’t oppose Israel. They’ll come to get you.” And it doesn’t matter if you’re Bowman on the left or Massie on the right, they’ll eliminate you.

On the other hand, if Massie wins the election, the opposite message is going to go out. “Oh shit, AIPAC doesn’t have as much power as they used to. And now it turns out supporting AIPAC might cost you elections.” And now we got Democrats scrambling going, “AIPAC? I didn’t say AIPAC.”

SHAWN RYAN: AIPAC.

CENK UYGUR: No, no, no, I’m not taking money from AIPAC. So even Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff— you know what happened? First Persian Gulf War, Rahm is so animated about the war that he joins to serve. Attaboy. Oops, he joined the IDF, not the American military. Really? Yep. He’s an American. Went and volunteered with the IDF. Larry Ellison gave $16 million in contributions to the IDF.

Okay, but I brought him up because Rahm is now running for president. He’s on Bill Maher’s show last week and he goes, “You know, we should cut funding to Israel.” Really, Rahm?

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

CENK UYGUR: Really? Right. So we even got Rahm Emanuel, a literal IDF soldier, saying we should cut funding to Israel because he knows he can’t win.

SHAWN RYAN: If he says we should keep giving money, then we’ll just go right back to it. Yeah. Which is why you have to gut the system the way I was saying. I don’t think you can leave anybody in there, even Ro, even Massie, who I like both of those guys. I think it has to— you just have to get rid of everybody.

Keeping the Clean Fighters

CENK UYGUR: No, I’d keep the clean guys, but here’s another encouraging thing from the left. So Abdul El-Sayed’s running for that Michigan Senate seat against Haley Stevens.

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think we should keep the clean guys? How do you know they’re clean?

CENK UYGUR: I mean, like I said, pudding—

SHAWN RYAN: I like them, but there’s still remnants of the old system.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, I hear you, but— but Shawn, hear me out on this. Those guys were brave enough— I’m with you— to take on Goliath when no one else would. So I don’t want to lose good soldiers who already started fighting the Leviathan before the cavalry showed up. You see what I’m saying?

So that’s why— and there’s not that many of them, so it doesn’t really matter. I mean, it’s at most 6% of Congress. So if you go with the Shawn Ryan strategy of don’t even look, vote blind against the incumbents, deal, because you’re going to get 94% correct people, right?

But those guys have battle experience in fighting the machine. So I still disagree with 90% of Massie’s votes, but I’ll take a clean guy over a dirty guy, and a guy who already fought the machine and who already won. And now they’re coming after Ro Khanna too. So I’ll take Ro over any of those guys. He’s already been in the battles. He’s already gotten the Epstein files released. He already has a record of delivering for Americans and Americans only, right? So that’s why I like those guys.

But overall, we’re on the same page. To wipe out the incumbents, right? And we got to do it together. If we don’t all do it, it’s not going to work, right?

Independent Media Decides Elections

SHAWN RYAN: I think the good thing about the ’24 election, if there is anything good about it, is it was exposed that independent media has the power. I tried to get Kamala on here to talk because I wanted to talk to everybody that was running for president. She wouldn’t. And she probably would have won if she would have done the damn podcast tour.

I’m not saying I would have voted for her. I’m not saying it would have been any better because I think both of them were a f*ing disaster, to be honest with you. Point being, with how Trump ran his campaign in podcasting and independent media— I think that’s what sealed the deal. I don’t even think it was him. I think it was independent media.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, I totally agree.

SHAWN RYAN: And that’s why I was asking, do you think that the money from the PACs is even relevant if we were to do something like that?

And so now we know. Now we know. So if people like you and I can come together and create some sort of an alliance where we blacklist all these other f*ers and lift the new blood up, it will work. It will work.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah. So that’s the beauty of it, Shawn. Now they’re on our home turf. They got to come to us, right? And if they don’t come to us, they’re going to get punished and they’re going to lose, especially in a presidential election. You’re going to run for president, but you’re going to do it hiding in a cave? You’re not going to talk to any of the top shows online? That means you’re a coward. That means you’re a liar and nobody’s going to trust you.

Now, if they come and do the shows, that’s a different problem for them because they have to be honest and they have to know their shit and they have to talk to you like they’re a regular human being. And they can’t— if they use talking points, you and I will catch them and we’ll snuff it out.

So why did Kamala Harris not do any media? Just think about how stupid that is. And this is a huge problem for the Democratic Party. To this late day, they still don’t get it.

Okay, now you raise all the money, you’re at $2 billion, $4 billion, whatever you raised. What are you using it for? You use the great majority of that to buy ads. But what are ads? They’re paid media. You know what’s better than paid media? Earned media. Free media.

When you go on the show itself, you’re going to buy a 30-second ad on a show when you could just go on there and talk for an hour? What are you, nuts? That’s the equivalent of 120 ads that would cost you like millions and millions of dollars. So the guy doing earned media, which in the last election was Trump, is going to have a multi-billion dollar advantage over the person not doing earned media.

So Kamala Harris was like, “No, I don’t want the viewers of Shawn Ryan’s show to vote for me, or Rogan’s show, or The Young Turks.” By the way, they don’t come on left-wing shows either. I don’t want those voters. Well, you didn’t get them, and that’s why you lost.

SHAWN RYAN: And that’s why I was asking, do you think that the money from the PACs is even relevant if we were to do something like that?

The Establishment’s Playbook: Exclusion

CENK UYGUR: In 95 to 99% of elections, since there is no media attention in a congressional run in Montana, and they’re not coming on our shows, and they’re not going on any shows, money still buys those seats. But in a presidential election, they can’t buy it. They just don’t know it yet.

Okay. So now what they’ll try to do is they’ll try to exclude people. That’s establishment 101, right? And so they just did it. MSNOW, that’s the goofy new name, did, “Here are your 24 fighters on the Democratic side, pick your fighter.” So a giant number of potential candidates for ’28. Who’s the one guy they left out? You want to guess?

SHAWN RYAN: Who?

CENK UYGUR: Ro Khanna. Okay, because— no, no, no, not the clean one, not the clean one. So they’re doing all these polls for the presidential election. Who’s the most active Democrat in the country? It’s not even close. Ro Khanna is doing more than the rest of the Democratic Party combined, right? Half the polls don’t include Ro Khanna.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you f*ing kidding me?

The Power of Online Media and Political Strategy

CENK UYGUR: Okay, here I’ll tell you something more funnier— that’s more spectacular because Ro is the most legitimate guy there is, right? He represents Silicon Valley. It’s the richest district in the country. He was co-chair of Bernie’s presidential campaigns. Excluding him is mental. It’s a tell. Once they show you a tell like that, you know that they’re not being honest or objective.

But I’ll tell you a funny one that’s related to me. So I got so frustrated that nobody’s running against Biden, and I tried to get everybody to run. Nobody would do it. I was like, f* it, I’ll do it. I’ll do it as a protest candidate. Okay, even though I’m not even born in the country, that’s a long story. I think you can run if you’re not born in the country because of the 14th Amendment, but that’s not important. I’m mainly running as a protest candidate.

So Gallup includes me in the first poll and I get 2%. Now wait a minute, 2% for a guy literally no one in mainstream media talked about as a candidate who’s an online talk show host. Most candidates like senators and governors never get to 2%. When Trump first started, he was at 1%. When Bernie first started, he was at 1%. Okay, so 2%, as comically low as it sounds, is a real number. Because my guess is they put me in the poll because they thought I was going to get zero.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, how many— what percentage of the population votes?

CENK UYGUR: It’s around 50%, but not in primaries. Primaries are much lower. That’s your base of bases that usually vote in 50% of the—

SHAWN RYAN: 50% of what?

CENK UYGUR: Of potential voters vote in elections. So now, do you know—

SHAWN RYAN: I’m just curious because we do have— you have almost 7 million subscribers on your channel. That’s— I mean, that’s got to be 2% of the voting block.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, we overall for the TYT Network, we have 32 million subscribers.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit.

CENK UYGUR: Okay, so we’re a hidden giant. Because people just think Young Turks— that’s the flagship show. But we have like a dozen other shows. We have 24-hour channels on Samsung YouTube TV, LG Roku, Amazon Prime, you name it. We’ve got like a cable channel on all of those, right? So we’re this— but mainstream media hates us so much, as you could tell for obvious reasons, right, that they’re like no, no, no, no, no, no, don’t ever talk about them. Don’t ever talk about their network. Don’t talk about how we’re larger than almost anyone online.

But I want to finish that story real quick. So I get to 2% and they’re like, holy shit, that’s better than like half the senators and governors, right? They never put me in another poll.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

CENK UYGUR: Yep. Pull it, pull it, pull it. Let’s go. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So no mainstream media coverage. No polls. They’re trying to eliminate by default, okay? But because of online media, they won’t be able to do it this time around.

Challenging the Establishment in 2028

So let’s say again, let’s take Ro or Massey as examples. They run for president, right? And they go, okay, we’re not putting Tom Massey in the polls, we’re not putting Ro Khanna in the polls. Everybody’s going to go, what? Like, no, no, what is this? You know what, f* it, we’ll do the poll. You think I can’t do a poll?

The other day I was on Tucker’s show and I asked people, “Do we owe Israel?” Because mainstream media keeps saying we owe Israel. I don’t know why we owe Israel, right?

SHAWN RYAN: Why do we owe? What is the— I don’t know.

CENK UYGUR: So I asked mainstream media, “Why don’t you do a poll if you’re so sure that Americans think we owe Israel?” And of course, none of them do the poll. Then I went to my audience. I was like, “Hey, you guys want to fundraise for a poll?” Like, boom, immediately— this doesn’t take that much, like $1,500 for one question, right? So we got that in a day. We do the poll. Of course, a huge percentage say no, we don’t owe Israel. A tiny percentage are like, yeah, we owe Israel. They don’t want to do that.

But so my point is, we’ll put Massey and Khanna on a poll. Who cares, right? We don’t need you guys. And if you don’t believe our poll, then you do it, right? And until you put them in the polls, we’re going to embarrass you. We’re going to humiliate you, right?

And the more they try to exclude our candidates— and let’s say it’s not Conor O’Malley, it’s a third party guy, whoever, it doesn’t matter who it is, right? And they’re like, okay, we’re not including him. It’s not your choice, brother. It’s not.

Look, RFK Jr., when he was barely a Democrat in the first round of the primaries against Biden last time around, he got up to 25% in a poll. He’s barely a Democrat. And he’s a little wacky in my opinion. And he got to 25%. You know why? Because people are hungry for someone who’s different.

SHAWN RYAN: Mm-hmm.

CENK UYGUR: Right? So they’re not going to be able to keep us out. They’re not going to be able to take away the spotlight.

So my point, what I would do is I would encourage Republicans to go in their primary in ’28. And if somebody’s working for Israel, you ought to have your head examined if you vote for them. So vote for a clean guy. I’m going to encourage all the Democrats to vote for a clean guy on our side. And whoever gets the clean candidate is going to win, period.

Like if we have Ro Khanna versus Ted Cruz, the Republicans are cooked, right? No chance. Or Marco Rubio, Mr. “I swear I’ll work for Israel,” right? So we’ll crush, crush, crush, right?

But let’s say neither side gets a clean guy. It’s Ted Cruz versus Buttigieg, right? Then f it, then we’ll do a third party. Okay? And Democrats will hear this and like, “You know what, you’re disloyal.” No, no, brother, you’re disloyal to the American voters and you’re disloyal to Democratic voters. They said no Israel, but you put up Israel’s b* anyway.

So if you are defying 80% of your own voters, well then we’re going to defy you, because you’re not my uncle. The Democratic Party’s not— I don’t owe you anything, man. And all you’ve ever done is hate me, even though I was trying to get you to win elections instead of lose elections like morons, right? So I don’t owe you a fing thing, okay? You’re supposed to be our representatives. If you don’t represent us, you owe us, motherfer. You owe us.

Holding Politicians Accountable

And if you don’t represent us politically speaking, not physically, we’re going to put your head on a stick. Okay, and after we put enough heads on sticks politically, and after we get the clean president, now you guys are f*ed. Okay, well, now we’re going to come and take all of you out.

Like, I would tell any Democrat that’s running that’s clean, make me the enforcer. I swear to God, I’ll get them all out. Okay, they won’t be able to stop us. You make villains out of them. It’s not that hard.

We’re having a vote, like the vote they just had on Israel. 7 Democrats vote for Israel. If there was a clean Democratic president and I was the enforcer, I’d go to the press conference in the White House and I’d put their— the 7 of them, their pictures up on giant posters, and then the amount they took from AIPAC underneath and go, “Here’s what Chuck Schumer sold you out for, here’s what Fetterman sold you out for,” and Kirsten Gillibrand and Blumenthal, all of them, okay? They’re all crooks. You should hate them and you should shame them, okay?

Never do anything physical, never do anything violent, because that’s a trap, okay? One, it’s immoral and it’s wrong on its own, but secondly, it’ll ruin the movement. The minute you do any violence, they’ll shut it all down and the surveillance state will get them, right? Frustrate the shit out of them by not doing anything physical or violent.

But do I get to shame someone? You’re goddamn right I do. Okay. Blumenthal works for Israel, and I don’t give a f* what you say. And he betrayed us, and everyone should shame him and say, “Who the hell are you? Why did you betray us? Why are you a betrayer of your own voters? Was it the money, or do you just naturally love Israel more than you love America? And more than you love your voters.”

“Oh, you can’t say that to him. He’s a Jewish American.” Well, Bernie’s a Jewish American and he’s the one who proposed the bill. This doesn’t have anything to do about religion. Stop hiding behind human shields. Okay? We’re going to come and get all of you guys if you’re for Israel. Can we do it? F* yeah, we can do it. All we need is a clean president and then we have the spotlight. Shawn, media is politics.

Why Online Media Is Winning

CENK UYGUR: Why did Kamala lose? Why did Hillary lose? Because they didn’t do our shows. They didn’t do enough media. They gave away billions in free media. How does anybody ever know who to vote for? They heard it at some point. Even if they heard it from a friend, that guy heard it from media. Everything comes from media.

Now that online media is stronger than mainstream media, you have no idea how good a shape we’re actually in. They’re not going to be able to buy 2028. They could pour in $100 billion and it’s not going to work.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I don’t know about that. I just think— I’ve also been thinking about, okay, well, if this were to happen and I was the establishment, I was AIPAC, I was Israel, whoever, China— how would I deal with this issue? Well, then the money switches to independent media, you know.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Now we have to worry about you and I. And everybody of any influence. I mean, which people already are. I mean, I get— I see it on yours too. I get blasted all the time. People think I’m making f*ing money off speaking out against what Israel’s doing. And it’s like, actually, it’s quite the opposite.

Actually, you know what I did get? I got a nice propaganda letter that wanted me to come visit Israel and give me a fing tour. I didn’t do it. And I mean, I never got the offer, but there was the— what, $7,000 a post or something to be pro-Israel. I don’t— other than bullshit bots and retarded MAGA people on the internet saying that the Muslims or the Muslim Brotherhood’s paying all— that’s just fing garbage.

But I think that’s— I mean, they’re going to change, they’re going to adapt their tactics. And so I think about how they would do that. And I think they would— there would be a big injection of money into independent media to try to manipulate who we talk to, who we bring on, who we give exposure to.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so that’s definitely going to happen.

SHAWN RYAN: But how do you fight that?

The Challenge of Foreign Influence in Online Media

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so I still have plenty of good news on that. Okay, so first off, those folks are not going to be able to mobilize quickly enough to affect 2028. Why? Because you not only do you have to give money to the influencer, but that influencer has to be good enough to build an audience. Now that’s much harder. Now it’s easier when you have a big vat of money. It was super hard for us. We started in my living room in a one-bedroom apartment in LA with nothing, right? So we had to build it brick by brick over 24 years, right? Yeah, sure, you could build it quicker when you have a lot of money, but Ben Shapiro has a lot of money and like seems like infinite money from his donors, right? But he can’t keep his audience, right?

SHAWN RYAN: Right?

CENK UYGUR: So in the short term, there’s all these great news. So what I was going to say earlier is Abdul El-Sayed is running in Michigan as a Senate candidate on the Democratic side. He’s got Hailey Stevens taking tons of money from AIPAC and then someone who’s Israel friendly, but is not taking money from AIPAC, only $100,000. That’s the case. But Abdul starts campaigning with my nephew, Hasan Piker.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

CENK UYGUR: So Hasan’s a controversial dude. He said a lot of things I wouldn’t say, right? And he said some things that are not right, et cetera. But that’s not why they care about him. They care about him because he’s anti-Israel, right? So they start piling on — Abdul’s terrible. He’s, you know, with Hasan and cancel Hasan and cancel Abdul. Haha, we’re going to eliminate you. And one of the Israel-friendly guys are going to win. Since mainstream media started doing that, Abdul El-Sayed has picked up 15 to 20 points.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you— wow.

CENK UYGUR: Yes. He surged from number 3 to almost catching McMorrow at number 1. Okay. Totally backfiring because what you just told the whole country that now is getting it through online media, and half of them might hate Hasan, right? But you just told them Abdul’s clean. He’s not for Israel. He’s for America. Okay. So boom, he picks up 15, 20 points in a tiny amount of time. Why? Because nobody was paying attention to that Michigan Senate race. They accidentally put a spotlight on it and said, “This is the one guy who’s definitely clean of Israel.” And people are like, “Okay, then I’ll vote for the guy who’s clean from Israel,” right?

So you see what a disadvantage they are now in online media. So, okay, now let’s say we won in ’28. They couldn’t muster up their forces in enough time. But okay, everybody got wise to what’s happening. Now China’s pouring in money, Saudi Arabia, Israel, all these guys. Guys are pouring in money to online media. It will definitely happen. Okay, okay. So, well, what do we do?

Well, the audience now — remember what I said earlier — now the most important part is they’re using independent judgment, because now I got to pick between the different right-wingers, between the different left-wingers, and then between right and left and whatever the f*, right? So now all of a sudden, when I use independent judgment, if some guy’s telling me, “Oh, China, China, China, China,” another guy’s telling me America, I’m not going to pick the guy that’s telling me China, right?

So that’s a long process. They’ll have money, etc. But at the end of the day, the number one advantage of online media is it’s not a built machine. So when I was on MSNBC, all I had to do was a little bit better than Chris Matthews, who was before me, and I’d do a little bit better than Ed Schultz, who was the guy who was at 6 o’clock before me, right? So that’s super easy because they already built the machine and they hand you 700,000 viewers or a million viewers. You just gotta get to 1.1 million viewers.

SHAWN RYAN: Mm-hmm.

CENK UYGUR: Okay. But it’s a machine online. No, you don’t have a machine. Nobody came to give you a lead audience, Shawn. Right. And so you had to build it brick by brick. And so you said things that were interesting enough, true enough, right, that you accumulated this massive audience. That’s a really hard thing to do. And it’s much harder to do when you’re bullshitting. So Ben Shapiro did it for a while. He had a really nice sizable audience for a long time, and then he got caught. So that’s the beauty of online media — everybody gets caught.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s true. I think that’s true.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah.

Intelligence Operatives and the Corruption of Candidates

SHAWN RYAN: How would you deal with intelligence operatives? Because that though would be another thing that would happen. They would turn candidates into assets, flip them. Maybe they don’t flip for a year. Maybe the plan is you’re not going to flip for a year, you’re going to get in here, going to do this, but in a year you’re going to be beating our drum.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so look, the bad guys are never going to stop. Why? Because everybody’s going to protect their interests. So if you have a vat of money, whether you’re a corporation or you’re a foreign government, you’re going to want to protect that. And if you can get America to give you endless amount of money, you’re going to want to protect that. That’s your piggy bank, right? So the money will never stop. The intelligence assets will never stop.

SHAWN RYAN: All of that.

CENK UYGUR: Our job is to protect that flag. Okay? Our job is to be ever vigilant. Okay? And so even when we pass the amendment to get money out of politics, we’re not done. Money is like water. It’s not like fire. It just keeps pouring back in. Right? So after we pass the amendment, we’ll have turned off the main tap. Then we got to tell all of our audiences, be ever vigilant. They’ll be back.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

Training Audiences to See Through the BS

CENK UYGUR: So we have to train our audiences to see the patterns. So on Young Turks, what we do is we predict things ahead of time. So you see that we’re not Monday morning quarterbacking it. Okay. And that there is a script and there is an outline. If we train you well enough, you could see it on your own. You don’t even need us. Okay.

So on bills, legislation, we have a near 100% track record on predicting what’s going to pass. You know why? We were Nostradamus? No. We’re brilliant? No, no. It’s easy. Whoever has more money wins every single time. Okay. So for example, then Democrats will say, “No, we want on gay marriage.” We had more money on gay marriage. The gay rights groups had a ton of money. And in 2012, they were the number one donors to Obama. In 2008, number one donors to Obama are the big banks. What happens after he wins? He bails out the big banks and even pays their bonuses. In 2012, the banks are not giving to him as much anymore because he regulated them like 1%. They’re like, “How dare you?” So now his number one donor becomes gay rights groups. And in 2013, all of a sudden, “Oh right, gay marriage. That’s what I meant.”

So we can train our audiences to see the BS, to see where it’s coming from, and to see its results. And even so, you’ll get screwed. So I set up Just Democrats. We get these, we do the litmus test. Only one rule, no corporate PAC money, right? No foreign government money. They say we can’t win. I asked a bunch of reporters in DC, I said, “How many do you think will get into Congress?” They’re like, “Zero, but maybe you’ll get lucky, someone get one,” right? Eventually got 12 in.

The Problem with Progressive Politicians

Now there’s endless problems, Shawn. So AOC and the rest go in, first day she does a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office. She’s challenging power. Great, we did it. That’s exactly what you should be doing, right? And then she stops doing the sit-ins. Then she stops doing anything challenging power. And the next thing you know, she’s doing establishment talking points. And then during 2024, she’s saying Kamala Harris has done enough for Palestinians or whatever. What? Kamala Harris didn’t do anything for Palestinians. You should be furiously challenging her to do better on that issue.

By the way, did Democrats do an autopsy after the election? They say in that autopsy, number one reason they lost was because Kamala Harris said she would have the same position as Biden on Israel. Oh, they gave it away. They gave it away. Right. But AOC’s clean. She doesn’t take money from Israel and she actually votes against them. So why is she doing it? Because they found a new weapon. The new weapon is, “Don’t be so rude to your colleagues. You’re being so mean. Hakeem Jeffries is your beloved colleague and you’re a minority and he’s a minority and you’ve got to really, you know, support that.” And remember, if you say anything that’s outside what the establishment wants, mainstream CNN, New York Times are going to say you’re terrible, you’re dirty, and you’re radical, you’re an outsider. And they don’t want to get burned. They got scared, so they clammed up.

So they had good brave votes. And by the way, the two that spoke up the most against Israel were Jamal Bowman, Cori Bush. Then they got eliminated. When they did, the rest of them got more scared and clammed up even more, right? So I’ve learned all those lessons. I haven’t gone through all of this, right? So no, no, we’re not trusting anyone. You do right, otherwise we’re going to call you out, okay?

Staying Independent and Doing the Truth

And so now AOC gets so mad at us when we call her out. She’s so furious about it — she attacked Anna the other day, calling her a grifter. To your point, where’s the money? Are you crazy? When you take on Israel, do you know how they cut off different sources of capital for you? Okay. We have been besieged by the Israel First crowd financially. No, it has hurt us massively. And they’re like, “Oh, you’re just working with the Republicans.” Which Republicans am I working with? Which Republican candidate did I tell you to vote for? Where’s the money? There’s no money. What are you talking about? Just people make stuff up now, right?

So because a bunch of the left wing attacked us when I started talking to Charlie Kirk and Tucker and all those guys, they’re like, “How dare you talk to them?” I’m like, “Bro, first of all, just on political stuff, okay, let’s put aside the moral issues.” But you and I already just talked about all those moral issues and protecting the flag and caring about the voters, etc. And about each other and culture wars are to divide us and they want us divided. But put all that aside, just on politics. Trump won all 7 swing states and he won the popular vote. If you don’t go talk to the other side, how are you going to win their votes back? Idiots. How are you going to win their votes back when we lost the popular vote? You have to go and talk to them and say, “Hey, did you know we’re against war? Did you know we’re against Israel? Did you know we’re for paid family leave?” You have to have a conversation with them, right?

They’re like, “No, you’re evil and you’re taking money from the Republicans, we know it.” Did they ever prove it? No, they just said it and they got a whole bunch of people to believe it. And our numbers went down and we took a significant financial hit again. But why do we do it? One, because we believe in it. And I thought I got on the news because I thought people were doing news. When I found out they weren’t doing news, I stubbornly, stubbornly demand that we do news. And we do the truth no matter even if it hurts us. When we criticize Obama, we lost tons of members, paying subscribers, because people were trained in tribalism and partisan brain, etc. But we did it anyway.

SHAWN RYAN: Why?

Credibility, Unity, and Fighting Corruption

CENK UYGUR: Now fast forward to today, Shawn. Who has the credibility? We do. That’s exactly right. Who earned people’s trust? We told you Biden was a bad candidate, and we were right. And we told you that on issues like war, we have to unite, otherwise we’re going to get steamrolled. And we were right.

Okay? It doesn’t mean— this is the thing that a lot of people on the left do, and it drives me crazy, and I’m sure you get it on the right too. If you talk to or agree with someone on the right on any given issue, that means you love them and you agree with 100% of what they say, and you’re responsible for every position they have. Who made up that rule?

So, okay, here’s an example. The other day, Tucker apologizes for— “Hey, I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know Trump was going to do this. I feel terrible that we misled people,” and now he’s turning into this establishment prick, basically, right? And so I thought that was amazing. He didn’t have to do that. He’s on the right, brother. People on the left are like, “No, he should have voted for—” He’s not going to vote for Kamala. Okay, so that’s not like— he’s not you. “No, I demand 100% of what I want.” You could demand all day long, but that ain’t going to change shit.

Okay, so this brother came over and said he was wrong about the war and backing Trump, and then he apologized. You just can’t ask for better than that. So Mehdi Hasan’s a good ally of mine on Israel and many other issues. He’s definitely more to the left than I am in culture wars and stuff, right? And he’s like, “Not good enough. He said things on there with Buckley, his brother, that were very offensive in other ways.” Yeah, but brother, I didn’t ask— and I literally wrote this— I didn’t ask you to marry the guy. I asked you to agree with him and take his apology on backing Trump and on the war and on Israel. This is the bare minimum, man. It’s the super low bar. Take yes for an answer.

Some folks on the left drive me crazy. They won’t take yes for an answer. We’ve been anti-war the whole time. I don’t mean Young Turks, I mean the left. Here’s a great example. Ben Cohen, right? The guy from Ben & Jerry’s. He’s the Ben from Ben & Jerry’s— and Jerry too. They’re two guys from Vermont who love this country, okay? They’re left-wing patriots. They were against the Vietnam War. They’re against sending our kids to die for other countries, etc. They’re dead set against Israel and Israel’s war crimes, even though they’re Jewish Americans. And they want Ben & Jerry’s to protest Israel. Now they sold it to a giant company and the company won’t let them. But Ben Cohen’s going out there— “Stop giving money to Israel, they’re doing war crimes. Let’s support America.” And Ben & Jerry’s is like an iconic brand, etc.

So those— we’ve been the anti-war guys from day one, take credit for it. And when your brothers and sisters— and yes, even if they’re right-wing, they’re your brothers and sisters here in America— when they come to your side, show a little grace, right? And show that it was a worthy effort to come to that side.

Okay, so they drive me crazy, but it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, Shawn, truth is going to win out. So right now we’re back to super healthy on The Young Turks and TYT. We’re back to dominating as a network, etc. And we didn’t do that with any money. We haven’t gotten any money since we started doing any of this. Money has been taken away, not given in at all. But the audience has held us up on their shoulders. They just keep becoming members and donating and not letting us fall apart, right? And now we’re back.

SHAWN RYAN: Why?

Populist Woods and the Path to Unity

CENK UYGUR: Because people go, “I got eyes and ears, man. They were right the whole time, and they were looking out for us the whole time.” So let China and Saudis and the Israelis come to online media. As the Iranians say, “We are waiting for you.” Okay, so now you’re on our home turf, man.

So after Trump won, I wrote a tweet that got a lot of people on the left angry, right? And they misunderstood. I said, “Look, even though I was dead set against Trump and I fought like hell against Trump, and he won, I’m in a weirdly hopeful, optimistic mood.” Because I said, why? Because Trump won? No, because mainstream media has been defeated. The establishment has been defeated. So we have broken out of an establishment prison, and we’re now in the populist woods. And that’s our woods. Come to Papa, okay? Come get some.

So in these woods, we win. Before, in that prison, we were never going to win. As long as they had a monopoly on media, as long as they had a monopoly on the politicians, we were cooked for the rest of the time. But now that we’re in these woods, they’re in a world of hurt. These woods are red, white, and blue, okay? We got patriots on the right, we got patriots on the left.

So how do we unite? Some folks on the left and right say if you unite, that means you got to agree on every single issue. Bullsh. Don’t believe that bullsh. No way. Okay. No, you agree on the issues that are the most important. So how do you agree? Well, the form of agreement is a vote. Okay. So it doesn’t mean vote for candidates. I told you, go vote in your own primaries, right? But when we take a vote on funding Israel, that one’s black and white. Okay. You vote to give them money and we’re going to eliminate you, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. Period. NotAnotherDollar.com. It’s just a pledge. You can do your own internal pledge. You don’t have to go there. Just— but one by one, take out everyone supporting Israel. Put in people supporting America.

Okay, so if you’re on the left or right and you tell people not to unite on that vote, nah, you’re not even on any side, right? That means you’re just a tool of the establishment, whether you know it or you don’t, right?

The Amendment: Money Out of Politics

So, okay, now let’s talk about money out of politics— the amendment, the most important thing in the world, okay, to clean up the whole country. Can we unite on that? F* yeah, we could unite on that. Okay, your state’s going to call for a convention. Go make sure your state representative calls for that convention. You don’t even need Congress for an amendment, you know that? You can get two-thirds of Congress, but they’re not going to do it because they’re crooks, at least this current Congress. But you can get two-thirds of the states to call for an Article V convention. Okay, Wolf-PAC— a long time ago— fightcorruption.us. Their slogan is, “Fight corruption, not each other.”

So when we go to vote on a convention, when we go to vote on ratifying an amendment, okay, we all unite. We unite to defeat corruption. It’s super clean. You’re not voting on abortion. You’re not voting on gay rights. You’re not voting on any of that. Okay. That’s for another day. Just like you said, after we clean up the elections, after we free America and we get our sovereignty back— then great, let’s have the abortion debate. Let’s have all those other debates. That’s beautiful. That’s a part of America, right? But for now, we have to stop the bleeding. We have to put out the fire, right? And the fire is money in politics. So we unite to end that.

And by the way, they’ll do all this fearmongering. They’ll say, “Oh my God, if you start a convention, they could propose any amendment.” And they could— the right wing is going to propose a Christian nationalist win, and then the other side is going to say, “Oh, the left wing is going to propose that every other president be a disabled LGBTQ minority,” right? Yeah, but you need three-quarters of the states to ratify. So you could propose anything you like, but there’s plenty of blue states and plenty of red states. You can’t get anything ratified as an amendment unless the whole country agrees. And there’s only one thing the whole country agrees on: get the goddamn money out. F* corruption.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, I think it’s a possibility. It starts with a discussion, right? So what do you think about concentrating more on state politics rather than federal?

State Politics and the Convention Strategy

CENK UYGUR: Look, there are things that are good and wonderful but are kind of dead ends. Like, so if you’re fighting— let’s say you’re on the left and you’re fighting for climate change in California or in Tennessee, right? You’re only going to be able to get so much through the state and, bless your heart, they could still help around the edges, right? And I’m not against it, but it’s not going to solve your overall problem until you get money out. Money’s going to win on all those issues at the national level anyway. So you’re kind of on a treadmill.

On the other hand, the states can call for a convention in the way that I just explained. That then makes them supernova important. That’s why, if I had my way, everybody would go to fightcorruption.us. And so that started as left-wing, but they’re dying for more right-wingers and independents to join them because we need red states and blue states and we need to work together. If you’re not working together, you’re not going to win. Go convince your state reps. Wolf-PAC, that’s the group that started it, already got it passed in 5 states, calling for a convention to get money out of politics. Okay, so if we expand that and we do it enough, yeah, then state parties and the state representatives become hugely important.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, we’ve been hearing a lot about not paying our taxes this year. Things like that. And yeah, that sounds great. I don’t want to pay my f*ing taxes. I’m tired of them going overseas. I want to see improvement. I want to see— I mean, I had this discussion with Ro because he had that tax policy that everybody left Silicon Valley, you know. And I said, why do you keep wanting to raise taxes? Why don’t we get a handle on the corruption, like the sh that was unveiled in Minnesota. I don’t know how you feel about that, but I’m pretty pissed about it. A lot of the fraud that’s going on in California right now that Nick Shirley kind of uncovered— not kind of, he uncovered it. And all of our money going overseas, going to Ukraine, going to Israel, going everywhere.

I mean, I’ve got a sheet somewhere in here that breaks it all down, how much is leaving. And I don’t know how far-fetched this is. I could be fing absolutely crazy. But what if you had a governor? What if you had a state assembly that said, “We’re not paying federal taxes anymore. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We don’t need your funding. I don’t need your education sh. I don’t need anything from the fing federal government. F you. We’re going to raise our state taxes to fund ourselves and it’ll still be less than what you’re paying for state and federal all together anyway. We’ll take care of ourselves. F you, federal government. We’ll do our roads, we’ll do our education, we’ll take care of our vulnerable and elderly. We’ll handle it. We don’t need your sh.”

Is that a possibility? Is that a discussion that could happen? Because it would catch like f*ing wildfire if it did.

Taxes, Corruption, and Where the Money Goes

CENK UYGUR: Yeah. Yeah, so it’s tempting, but it’s difficult. And so, first of all, let me say that on taxes, I understand what you guys are saying, and Anna’s saying it too, right? Which is, look, we’re for higher taxes on billionaires, for example. They cry all the time, like, “Oh, 5%, I can’t afford it, bro.” You have at least a billion dollars. If they took 5%, you still have $950 million. You’re not even going to notice it. Okay, but now a lot of people say, “Yeah, I hear you, but what’s the point if the taxes are just going to fund wars in Israel and oil subsidies and drug companies?”

SHAWN RYAN: And that’s what I told Ro when he was here. Because he keeps— he’s like, “People need to be patriots like you, you serve the country, you put your life on the line.” I’m like, “Yeah, I did, but I don’t want to pay any more in taxes because I never see it come back. I don’t see better roads. I don’t see better education. I don’t see better anything. I just see our country falling apart. It looks like sh. There’s trash everywhere. Our fing power grid is a complete disaster and has been for a long time. A lot of people don’t even have fing clean water. What the f are you raising taxes for? It’s not coming here. It’s going there and there and there and every fing where else.”

CENK UYGUR: So, and so that’s—

Tax Strikes, Civil Disobedience, and Government Accountability

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, if I saw this shit coming back and I was like, man, this fing state is clean, this country is clean, these roads are amazing, our education’s amazing, we got free healthcare, we don’t— like, all that shit, you f. Okay, great. Yeah, I’ll pay those taxes. I don’t want to pay taxes when they’re getting shipped out to shit all over the world except us.

CENK UYGUR: So let me do a couple layers.

SHAWN RYAN: So why wouldn’t we do a tax strike?

CENK UYGUR: So first example to back up what you’re saying is in California we raised, I think, about $24 billion to help the homeless, yet homelessness went up 53%. So where the f* did the money go? Where’d the money go?

I don’t mind paying. I want to help not only the homeless but all of us, the community, because I want clean streets. I want my kids to be able to go to the local park and play there and not have it be a homeless encampment. But I also don’t want the homeless to be treated in a way that’s cruel. I want them to get help, whether it’s mental health, drug addiction, whatever it might be, right?

So good news, we gave plenty of money to do that, and the result is bupkis, nothing. So now when they propose new, you know, we have nothing but propositions in California, right? All those ballot measures. Now when they propose the ballot measures, I’m super skeptical, because I gave it to you the first time, the 8th time, and the 12th time, and I never saw any results. So I mean, to think you’re just keeping it for you and your donors, right?

So I hear you. I hear you loud and clear, right? And what I would counsel Democrats is don’t even start talking about raising the taxes until we clean up the government first. Stop the right? Once you had a clean government and you could show people, hey, I did raise taxes for billionaires or whatever, and here’s what you got from it. Here’s 1, 2, 3. Okay. You do that, then everybody would be like, raise taxes. Right? In fact, 76% of Americans already think that the rich pay too little in taxes.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

CENK UYGUR: 76%, three-quarters. But they’re thinking the same thing we’re thinking. Yeah. But even if you raise the taxes, where’s it going to go? No, right? But if you cleaned up politics, you got money out of politics, and people could see the results of it, then that 76% is going to come back and go, okay, now let’s tax the rich because I could see the roads, the bridges, and the schools that you built with it, right?

But right now that’s not happening at all. So back to the tax strike, look, tax strikes are super hard because they’ll start picking you off one by one. They’ll start arresting people for not paying your taxes. And then once they put like 12 guys and 120 guys in prison, everybody else is going to get super skittish.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, I’m aware of that. And who they’re going to put in prison is me and you and anybody else with a voice that’s not going to pay their taxes. And that’s why I’m saying, what if it’s a state? What if it’s a state decision?

CENK UYGUR: Super difficult, because getting off the federal money— there’s so much federal money in all the rates. For them to say we’re going to come completely off of it, that is going to be brutal. And so look, it’s not that it’s impossible.

SHAWN RYAN: There— I know it’s out there.

CENK UYGUR: I get it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

The Arsenal of Nonviolent Resistance

CENK UYGUR: So, but there are certain things that’ll trigger a reaction. Like, so for example, we talked about violence earlier. The minute you do violence, you’re screwed, and the whole movement’s screwed, because then they bring in the surveillance state, right? And that’s what’s coming next. That Larry Ellison, after bragging about buying off Rubio stuff the other day on air, he said, “Oh, we can track every citizen and know where they are at all times.” It was almost like a threat, right?

So to me, don’t break the law, don’t do anything physical, but we can do it with just our votes in all the ways that we just described, okay?

But there are at times, Shawn, when it gets to a point of desperation, right? Or it’s just the right time. For example, another thing that’s in our arsenal that we never use, and I wouldn’t use now because it’ll fall apart and it won’t work because you don’t have enough momentum, but towards the end of a campaign like this, a general strike. Okay? That’s when all the workers in the country go, you know what? I’m not showing up. Now what are you going to do? Go ahead, build your AI bullshit with no workers. Go ahead. Okay.

One day they’ll feel some pain. General strike goes on for 2 weeks. It’ll shut the whole economy down. It’ll make rich people shit their pants. Okay. It’ll make the corporations panic. It’ll make the politicians panic. And so that is a super powerful tool in our arsenal. And if it gets to a point where we’re at meeting tremendous resistance, but we’re close to winning, you hit them with a general strike and they’re in for a world of hurt. And that one, hey, you can’t arrest somebody for not showing up to work. I’m on strike. I got a right to go on strike. And what are you going to do, fire the whole country? Right. So there are things like that.

SHAWN RYAN: If you—

CENK UYGUR: I would never get to physical or violence because then you’re disqualified and you’re in jail and the movement’s gone. Taxes, not paying your taxes is in the middle. Right, because it’s against the law. It’s not physical, but it’s against the law. But if the state does it, it’ll have a state versus federal thing, and the courts could come in and the courts could say you’re not allowed to do it, right? And the courts are generally not on our side. They’re the guys who legalized bribery. Citizens United and all the other decisions. So those are very difficult.

SHAWN RYAN: Could there be a time where that leads to the federal government having to initiate violence?

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so here’s a scenario.

SHAWN RYAN: F*ing lose.

CENK UYGUR: Here’s a scenario where you could—

SHAWN RYAN: That you could bait them into it and f*ing make them lose.

The Constitutional Convention Strategy

CENK UYGUR: Here’s like, if I stretch my imagination, I could find a scenario. Like, let’s say we’re doing— we’re going state by state to call for a convention, right? And we got two-thirds of the states to call for a convention, and Congress should say, okay, now we’re going to have a convention to propose amendments, right? And Congress goes, “No, we’re not doing it.” Okay, what do you mean you’re not doing it? It’s in the Constitution. Once two-thirds of the states call for it, you have to call for a convention. You don’t have a choice. “Well, we’re not doing it.” All right, f* it.

Then Rhode Island, Montana, Wyoming, Hawaii— these are all small states. So maybe they got a shot and they’re both very right and very left, right? Tax strike. Okay. So that’s a moment where if at that point 4, 6, 8 really right-wing and left-wing states go, “We’re doing a tax strike and we’re not paying the federal government anymore,” maybe that forces their hand.

Because then you say, hey, like Martin Luther King did civil disobedience. What people don’t realize is that Martin Luther King said, you know, “The law was on our side.” Every one of those arrests that the cops did was a false arrest, right? Because the federal law was actually on our side. We were right, right? We had a right to sit at that counter. We had a right to do that protest, etc. You make the government be the bad guys. That’s why civil disobedience was such a good idea. And that’s what you were just suggesting. If Rhode Island—

ICE Violence and Government Accountability

SHAWN RYAN: It’s already happening. In Minnesota. I mean, you see these ICE shootings. I looked at that. I’ve been to combat. I spent 14 fing years in lethal situations. That first tape, where was it, like 6 guys? That’s 6 guys in ski masks surrounding an American, attacking a single American woman in a vehicle. What the f would anybody have done? Yeah, if I was sitting in a car as a former SEAL and CIA guy and 6 guys came up with fing ski masks surrounding my car telling me to get the f out, I’d do the same damn thing.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, I mean, all she was doing was driving away and they shot her in the head.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what I’m saying. I tried— I was made it sound like they were— she was trying to run him over. I, even if she was, that man, his life was not in f*ing danger.

CENK UYGUR: No way.

SHAWN RYAN: Should not have taken that shot. And then the second one happened, you know, and so they’re already initiating violence.

CENK UYGUR: That’s so important, Shawn. So I want to build on that. So they pretend to be tough guys. First of all, if you’re a tough guy, law enforcement in this country doesn’t wear masks. We wear badges because we represent the community, right? And you need to see the badge and you need to see the face. Thuggish third world dictatorships have no badges and masks.

Second of all, you pretend to be tough guys, but you shoot a woman from the side when she’s already passed you in the head, then you’re kind of a pussy, okay? Don’t tell me you’re tough. You disarm Alex Petty. And there’s what, 6 of you, 8 of you, however many of you?

SHAWN RYAN: There wasn’t even a f*ing— I mean, it was— well, you don’t have all the context.

CENK UYGUR: I get it.

SHAWN RYAN: I know. I’ve been in these situations. I know context matters.

CENK UYGUR: I would—

SHAWN RYAN: And so I wanted to believe that was a justified shoot. That’s why I watched it so many f*ing times. But I just— I mean, you see, you can see down the street on both ways. I was like, well, maybe there’s a massive violent protest happening. Dude, that street was dead. And the only people out there were the ICE agents.

CENK UYGUR: Totally. And what did Freddy do? He went to go protect a woman who was getting pushed around. Okay, that’s what a patriot’s supposed to do. That’s what an American is supposed to do. That’s what a man is supposed to do, okay? And he didn’t protect her with the weapon. He didn’t take out the weapon, and they disarmed him, and then they executed him, okay? So that’s not what tough guys do. That’s what pussies do, okay?

SHAWN RYAN: I just— I also want to say, in my opinion, these weren’t stand-up human beings, but they did not deserve to be f*ing killed.

The Normalization of Government Violence

CENK UYGUR: So, okay, but why did they do that? This goes to your point, Shawn, because once you get— because you think like, really, their commanders— this comes up from the top. Like, the Israelis say the same thing. The commanders spit on the dead civilians. The commanders urinate on the civilians, right? The commanders show you how to do it. In this case, they were told, “Get rougher, okay? And if you got to use lethal force, don’t hesitate, right?” So those orders come from below. That’s why you see it in Freddy and you see it with the woman who was shot, right?

So, okay, why are they doing that? Because they’re trying to get you used to it. They’re trying to get you used to a government that is not accountable to you, that doesn’t have to show you their face. They are getting you used to the violence. A government that does violence against American citizens willy-nilly, and treats it as normal. And they’re trying to get you used to the surveillance state, right?

Because once they do— because the next step, since we now see the iceberg, we see the money in politics, we see the foreign governments, we see it all— the next step is shut it down, go straight to oppression. And if you’re going to oppression, you need a surveillance state, and you need guys who can’t be identified who do government violence, etc.

But in this case, it backfired. Here you are, Shawn, and you’re saying the ICE agents were wrong, right? Even you are saying it, even Tucker’s saying it. Anybody who’s got eyes and ears is saying it, right? So Rogan’s saying it, right? So we can disagree on the immigration policy, but we can agree on this. This isn’t right.

Don’t let them get you used to— you remember the Don’t Tread on Me flags? Right? They’re treading all over you, man. This is not a right-wing, left-wing issue. Once you— the government— remember when the right wing was worried about big government? This is what big government looks like.

United We Stand: Rejecting Division and Reclaiming Freedom

SHAWN RYAN: I’m aware, I’m aware. I don’t even think right and left anymore, man. I’m just being honest. I really don’t. I don’t give a f. I don’t think any of it means a damn thing anymore. It’s just — are you American or are you not? And that’s it. That’s the only fing question I have.

CENK UYGUR: You’re so right about that, Shawn, because think about it, all the things that they do to divide us, like all the way to Christians — you should hate Muslims. There’s 2 billion of you and 2 billion of you. If you guys are fighting each other, why? Why do you have to hate Muslims? Why do I have to hate Christians? What a crazy thing. I don’t have to hate anybody.

Okay, Republican, Democrat, left, right. But wait a minute, so everyone on the right wing has to agree to 100% of this agenda, and everyone on the left wing has to agree to 100% of this agenda? Well, which robot would agree with 100% of any agenda? No, we’re all human beings. We have different opinions, right?

SHAWN RYAN: So is it like 44% is the silent majority?

The Donor Class and the Trap of Division

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, and now independents are larger than both Republicans and the Democrats. So when they try to get you to follow any ideology 100%, you know it’s a trap. You know that it’s a thing that’s meant to get you to fight the other side and to divide the country. Because once the country is divided among Republicans and Democrats, but the donors are funding both, it’s perfect.

Think about it this way. Let’s say that you’re in a town, it’s a little town, it governs itself, and one guy has all the money, and he got it in an unfair way by rigging the rules. So, less regulations, whatever, right? He rigged the rules and he’s got all the money. If everybody in the town finds out what he did, he’s in a world of trouble, right? But if he can get the town folks to fight each other instead of him, ah, he’s on easy street. He gets to keep the money and he just pays a little bit to this side and a little bit to the other side to just rile them up, rile them up and get them to fight each other. Once they’re fighting each other, they don’t look.

And what I’m telling the whole country — and I don’t give a damn what you think you are in the political spectrum — look up, brothers and sisters, look up. The guy rigging the rules is not an immigrant who came in with $0 in his pocket. He doesn’t have the money or the power to do it. And it’s definitely not your brother on the right or your brother on the left. It’s not your neighbor. We don’t have enough power. The middle class doesn’t have enough power. A random Republican doesn’t have enough power. A random liberal doesn’t have enough power. The guys with all the money, the donor class — that’s who’s rigging the rules. That’s who’s got the power, and they love dividing us. So don’t fall into the trap. Make sure that on the key issues — war, foreign governments, corruption — we stay united as a country and we protect that flag.

So here’s another left-wing patriot, Bruce Springsteen, okay? He grew up in Freehold, New Jersey. I had a house in Freehold. My parents moved to Freehold, New Jersey, okay? He lived on Randolph Street. We lived on Randolph Road. I go to the sub shop that he writes about in some of his songs. You hear the smell of the coffee from the Nestlé factory in Freehold, right? And what does Bruce write about? So he’s on the left, and can anyone really challenge how much Bruce Springsteen loves this country? And all the songs are about average Americans and how the bankers came and destroyed his hometown. And my favorite song is the one where he says, “Wherever that flag is flown, we take care of our own.”

So the patriots on the left and the patriots on the right have to unite. F the political spectrum. F politics as usual. Let’s win on these massive issues, these major issues, so we regain our freedom. And this is a perfect time — this is the 250th anniversary of our freedom and our independence. So we all got to rally and make sure we gain that freedom and independence back on this anniversary.

SHAWN RYAN: I love that. I love that. And the fact that you just said — and I thought this, but you just said it — that the independent voting bloc, the silent majority, outnumbers the Democrats and the Republicans. I mean, right there, the answer lies within that. There’s the data. That’s what we need. That’s how we do it.

Well, what a discussion, man. Thank you, thank you. I got one more thing, I got one more thing. It’s a hot question, something totally different than what we’ve been chatting about here.

Closing Thoughts and Gratitude

CENK UYGUR: As you’re getting that, Shawn, yeah, thank you, man. Thanks for having me here, and thanks for having conversations like this. Not just this, but like this — to the Roconas, to whoever else is willing to show up, because it takes courage, man.

SHAWN RYAN: I love doing it. I mean, I’ve had tons of people on here that think not exactly like me but very similar, and those conversations get f*ing boring really fast because you’re just in an echo chamber. So I want to talk to people that disagree with me, that have different ideas, and I think that’s how you find real solutions. And not very many people are doing it, but it’s growing. And so thank you for coming.

CENK UYGUR: Absolutely happy to do it. Happy to have you on The Young Turks if you’d like.

SHAWN RYAN: And I’d love to do it.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, yeah, love it.

The Hot Question: Scientists, Conspiracies, and Cutting Through the Noise

SHAWN RYAN: So we had a hot question here. You familiar with Claude? Claude Anthropic. So before he came on, we had Claude Anthropic say, “I scraped the internet and find one question that my audience would want to ask you most.”

This week alone, 11 American scientists are dead or missing, most tied to nuclear, aerospace, or UFO research. The FBI just confirmed Monday they’re investigating — that probably doesn’t mean anything — a retired—

CENK UYGUR: Confirmed Tuesday that they’re covering it up as we speak.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh man. A retired Air Force general who commanded Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Roswell base, walked out of his house with a sidearm and vanished. Meanwhile, Trump’s posting AI Jesus memes, Hegseth’s quoting Pulp Fiction as scripture, the Epstein files are being withheld page by page, and the WEF just ranked disinformation the top global risk of 2026.

So here’s the question: what’s your honest take? What do you think is actually going on here, and how does the average American cut through all this noise and figure out what’s actually real?

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so let me give a specific and a broad answer. On the specifics, of course there’s no way I could know or you could know what happened to those guys, right? But the most important thing is don’t trust the government or the mainstream media, okay?

The phrase “conspiracy theory” is actually a conspiracy in and of itself, okay? This is hilariously trippy. But once JFK got shot, from then on they started using this phrase “conspiracy theory.” It was meant to discredit anything that was not the official government narrative. So if you’re outside the government narrative, ironically, the journalists, the media — who are supposed to challenge the government — will then, instead of challenging the government, enforce government propaganda. So they say, if you don’t believe that JFK was shot by a magic bullet — “conspiracy theory!” You’re bad, bow your head to the government. Wait a minute, I thought you guys were supposed to be reporters, right? So they now use the media to declare everything a conspiracy theory if it’s not the official government position.

Honestly, I didn’t know that for a long, long time. I now know it. I’ve figured it out through all of these current events, right? Because it became a pattern that was undeniable. So that is a way to shut down the conversation. Do not let them shut down the conversation.

So here, let’s take a benign one that isn’t that political — aliens, right? They told us our whole life, “conspiracy theory,” right? Now Obama has verified that there were aliens. Trump has then kind of accidentally verified it by—

SHAWN RYAN: Ironically, at the height of the Epstein files, the height of it, when everybody was f*ing pissed, that’s when this stuff came out.

CENK UYGUR: Well, all of a sudden — distraction.

SHAWN RYAN: And now all of a sudden you got congressmen and f*ing senators — “Oh yeah, aliens are breeding with human beings.” Like, it’s not like—

CENK UYGUR: But wait, you told me a minute ago that was a conspiracy theory, right?

SHAWN RYAN: I’m sorry, what the f? Did you just drop that aliens are breeding with fing human beings? Just nonchalantly, like it’s almost common knowledge. And then you don’t give us anything else, like it’s enough for the peons.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, f* you. Exactly.

SHAWN RYAN: F you and your fing distraction. And now we know that you’re just sticking up for pedophiles once again.

Questioning Official Narratives

CENK UYGUR: So now, especially on the left, if you say that you’re willing to question the official narratives, you get a world of — okay, so for example, if I say I don’t believe the government on the Luigi Mangione shooting, okay, I don’t know what happened, I don’t know who did it, I don’t have the inside information, but it is very unlikely to be the story they told. A lot of people on the left, and certainly in mainstream media and the establishment — which the Democrats care way too much about — they’ll be like, “That’s outrageous!” You become a lunatic, a lunatic radical, right?

SHAWN RYAN: There’s a lot of lunatics out there.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, I’m like, I don’t care anymore. You can shove all those accusations up your ass because I’m going to use my own judgment. I’m not going to blindly believe the government. That is not a left-wing position. The left wing is supposed to super aggressively challenge the government and those that are in power. By the way, same thing with the right wing — you’re supposed to challenge big government, et cetera. So don’t tell us to shut up and be quiet.

So I have no idea what happened to those guys, and I don’t know who it’s connected to. There is one country — this is the only data point I’ll put out there, and again, it doesn’t mean it’s just one data point — but there is one country that kills nuclear physicists on the regular. That’s Israel.

SHAWN RYAN: Israel.

CENK UYGUR: They brag about it — and Netanyahu just did it last week. Everything I say is on tape, you can confirm it. He said the other day, “Oh, we murdered 8 Iranian physicists and we got them. We murdered another 12 physicists and we got them. And now they don’t have any physicists left and we’re in charge.” And they’ve been targeting Iranian physicists well before the war started. We’ve been covering it on The Young Turks. They put a bullet in some guy’s head as he was picking up his kids from kindergarten. He’s a civilian. He’s a physics professor. They shot him in front of his kids to send a message.

And then I’m amused by the establishment guys who always say, “Oh yeah, the CIA, for example, has killed people in other countries and done coups in the ’60s and ’70s, et cetera. But they’d never do it inside America.”

SHAWN RYAN: Mm-hmm.

Israel’s Influence and Unanswered Questions

CENK UYGUR: Are you sure? Are you doubly sure? Israel has done X, Y, and Z with the pagers and this and Lebanon and Iran. And yeah, have they done anything? But they would never do anything inside America. You mean like steal our nuclear secrets? Because they already did that. You mean like stealing all the rest of our top secrets? Because they already did that. You tell me Israel wouldn’t do anything inside America? Are you blind? Are you deaf? Are you insane? Of course they do things inside America. They do things inside America all the time.

I mean, they not only— we’ve incentivized them to spy on us and to do anything we like because we declare them above the law. You think Tom Aleksandrovich is bad? That’s the guy in Vegas who did the sexual tourism for American kids that he thought he could rape and get away with, which he did. Luckily he didn’t rape him because we caught him before they did anything.

Okay, but how about Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad, Robert Maxwell? Robert Maxwell was the greatest Mossad agent of all time. State burial once he died in Israel with a bunch of prime ministers attending, etc. So what was his coup de grâce? He’s the guy who stole our nuclear secrets, and that’s why Israel has nukes now. Now here’s the kicker. We never even arrested him.

SHAWN RYAN: Of course we didn’t.

CENK UYGUR: Okay, wait, there’s a second kicker. First of all, so you steal our f*ing nuclear secrets. There’s nothing worse than that. By the way, the Israelis later sold them to the Soviets. They’re the worst.

I looked up why didn’t we arrest Robert Maxwell. Well, it would’ve been an international incident and embarrassed our allies. Yeah. If you steal our nuclear secrets, embarrass is the least you should get.

Now the kicker. He then bought the company that produces textbooks for our schools after he stole our nuclear secrets. We let him buy the textbooks that go into our schools. And lo and behold, the textbooks say that Israel was attacked in 1948, not that it massacred the Palestinians and took their lands. It says that Israel was attacked in 1967. That’s a flat-out lie. Israel did a preemptive strike and attacked all their neighbors in ’67.

Questioning Official Narratives

CENK UYGUR: Okay. What are we doing here? Like, Israel’s been running this country for so long, so if you tell me I’m not allowed to ask questions about Charlie Kirk’s murder, then I’m going to ask 2,000 questions about Charlie Kirk’s murder. If you tell me I’m not allowed to ask about those nuclear physicists that are all coincidentally magically gone, no, I’m going to ask 2,000 questions about those guys, and we’re going to try to get to the bottom of it.

And I’ll tell you, I give the right-wing credit on this one because online they do amazing work, man. They’re all lit. You got Sherlock Holmes over there. Some of them go off the reservation and do crazy shit that wasn’t true, right? Plenty of them, right? But I mean, Charlie got shot with what, a tiny little bullet that got stuck in his neck? And I don’t know anything about guns, I’m not the expert on that, right? And guys are like, “You kidding me, dog? That’s the rifle that he theoretically used would have blown his head straight off.”

SHAWN RYAN: It’s—

CENK UYGUR: And then you ask the government, why didn’t it blow his head off? They said Charlie had a strong neck. Neck? No. Now I’m asking 10,000 questions. Hey, how come the shooter seemed to have different clothes on at different times? They said, “Oh, he changed on the roof.” Okay, now I’m asking 100,000 questions. He didn’t change on the roof. What kind of bullshit is this?

So a sniper takes one shot. You know what amateurs do? They take a lot of shots because they’re not sure they hit the guy, right? A professional takes one, okay? So I don’t know if it was him. Again, I don’t know what happened and I don’t know who did it. I do know bullshit when I see it, okay?

And I can give you many other things. So I’ll get ostracized by a lot of people on the left for that. They’ll say, “Oh, you sound like a conspiracy guy.” Look, I’m saying the guy on the left didn’t do it, I don’t think, right? I don’t know what happened, right? But look at how they brainwash people. So they got folks on the left saying, “No, no, the left-wing guy did it, left-wing guy did it.” Why are you saying that when it might not even be true, right? Because nope, you have to believe the official government narrative because that’s what everybody on CNN and The New York Times is saying. And if you don’t believe it, they’ll ostracize you. They’ll shun you and they’ll say no one should talk to you and power should get nowhere near you. Okay, so that’s how this game is played. So don’t listen to them. Ask a lot more questions about those guys. Let’s go figure it out together, man.

The Butler Shooting and Thomas Crooks

CENK UYGUR: Who knows, maybe we’ll— I mean, we do better work than the FBI does. Tucker found out more about Thomas Crooks than the FBI did, right? Like, you watch what Tucker— I didn’t know that stuff that Tucker uncovered about Thomas Crooks. I thought that there was nothing wrong with Butler. I gave Trump a lot of credit. I said, well, that was pretty courageous to come out and say “fight, fight, fight,” right after the brother got shot. That’s bold.

And so now I’m seeing the guys move the photographers into place, and all of a sudden Crooks is eliminated instantly. Do I know what happened? No, I have no idea. But now I’m starting to wonder about the official story.

Once you start wondering, you start seeing— oh, wait a minute. So let me get this right. Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK with the magic bullet, and then before anybody could talk to him, Jack Ruby, a mobster, shoots him dead. And a guy who was on the record before— he had made public statements saying how much he hated JFK. Why did a mobster shoot the guy who killed the guy he hates? Don’t ask any questions. Yeah, bullshit. Ask a thousand questions. Don’t ever stop.

SHAWN RYAN: They were going to unseal that, by the way.

CENK UYGUR: What’s that?

SHAWN RYAN: I thought they were going to unseal that, by the way.

The Epstein Files and Foreign Intelligence

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so they go to unseal it, and then we find out through Joe Kent and others they didn’t give you the real stuff. Yeah, and the real stuff’s not written down anyway, right?

And on the Epstein files, again, Ro Khanna and Tom Massey, great job. We forget about half the files. And in that stuff, there’s a story about how one of the survivors, one of the victims who was a confirmed victim, says that she had a baby and they took the baby away and she’s never seen the baby again. So I thought that was all conspiracies, but now all of a sudden there it is in black and white, and that’s a confirmed survivor, right? So where’s the baby? What happened to the baby, right?

I thought Pizzagate was bullshit, and then you look at it and you’re like, “Oh my God, pizza did mean kids.” And by the way, who knew that pizza meant kids and then leaked it to the public, right? Because somebody knew it meant it, and that’s how it got into the public. And they knew all along, right? So then don’t tell me there aren’t conspiracies.

Epstein and the drop site emails, the tranche that he found with him and Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel. Every deal he does is for the benefit of Israel. Every single one. Israel with Russia, Israel with Mongolia, Israel with UAE. He procures cyber weapons for Israel. He’s in the middle of Iran-Contra. Don’t tell me the CIA didn’t know about him. There are no civilians in Iran-Contra.

Okay, so he’s the one that cleaned out the planes. So we use the planes for bringing in drugs. Then Wexner through Epstein buys the planes, so you launder the planes. But he’s not part of American intelligence, so which intelligence is he a part of? Because he’s definitely intelligence.

Epstein’s Death and the Cover-Up

CENK UYGUR: And then all of a sudden he winds up hanged in— committed suicide in a prison. Sure you did. Okay, I’ll tell you one last thing, Shawn, on Epstein. I said on the air, “If the camera in the hallway is working and you see nobody go into his cell, then he hung himself and the government’s telling the truth. If the camera is magically not working in the hallway, then they definitely killed him, right?” And so that was the prediction ahead of time, so you know I’m not Monday morning quarterbacking it, etc., right?

Oh, well, you look at that, magically the camera in the hallway wasn’t working. And the guards were both off duty, and his roommate had been moved out, and the thing that he hung himself with was not in the room. Something else that looked like a noose was in there. Oh, get the f* out of here. There’s a 0% chance he hung himself. No, that one I’m clear on.

And who’s got enough power to murder someone inside an American prison and have both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, cover it up for him? There’s only one power that’s got that kind of strength— the same one that he was working for the entire time.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh man, we’re in trouble.

CENK UYGUR: And if they killed Epstein inside a prison, an American prison, who can’t they kill?

Foreign Enemies and Double Standards

SHAWN RYAN: Well, nobody. One last thing, just something I’ve been thinking about, is everybody continues to listen to this bullshit narrative from the White House on why we’re going to Iran and how they’ve been our enemy for 47 years and all this other stuff. And they’re right, they’ve been our enemy for a long time. They’ve killed a lot of my friends in war. We probably shouldn’t have been there to f*ing begin with, but they did. But that’s not what this is about.

If that’s what this was about, we wouldn’t be sending the Taliban $40 to $87 million fing dollars in cash every week. We fought them for over 20 fing years. I fought them for 14. That flag came from an Afghan American, goes by the name Legend, who still works over there for the resistance, with the resistance every once in a while. He’s the one that uncovered that on this show, brought that flag in. From the Taliban burning it in fing Kabul, Afghanistan. So I framed it. If this was about old enemies, we wouldn’t be funding one right now. Also, we wouldn’t be parading around the president of Syria who is fing cutting our heads off all over Congress and the White House.

CENK UYGUR: So let’s break it down.

SHAWN RYAN: So save me the fing bullshit on why we’re there and how Iran’s been our enemy for 47 years. F you. You don’t give a shit about our enemies. You’re in bed with one.

CENK UYGUR: I mean, look at all the patterns, right?

SHAWN RYAN: Not you.

Iraq, Fake Intelligence, and the Cost of War

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, of course. So look at all the patterns. In Iraq, they told us they have weapons of mass destruction. Where do we get that fake intelligence from? Oh, look at that. Our allies in Israel gave us the fake intelligence. Okay. So they said, “Oh, he’s funding proxy groups, Hamas,” etc. Well, that’s not our business. That’s your business, right? So we went and lost how many guys in Iraq, right? Thousands. Over 50,000, I think, were injured, or 35,000 injured, right? You know, terrible, terrible injuries.

SHAWN RYAN: Don’t forget the suicides that came after too. Yeah, that are still happening.

The Israel-Iran Conflict and American Foreign Policy

CENK UYGUR: So for what? And Iraq didn’t attack us on 9/11. You made that up, right? Everybody knows that Iraq didn’t attack us. Iraq was against al-Qaeda. Saddam would execute al-Qaeda on the spot because al-Qaeda wanted to topple the local Middle Eastern governments. Iran is against al-Qaeda. Iran helped us fight ISIS.

Okay, so has Iran done things to us that were bad? Of course, right? Would I want to live under the Grand Ayatollah? No. I grew up in a Muslim family and I’m an atheist now, so I’d be the first on the chopping block. Because you left a religion, that is totally unacceptable. Okay, so I don’t — it doesn’t mean I like the regime. It doesn’t mean we haven’t had conflict with them.

But wait a minute, who did more IEDs in Iraq? Was it Iran or was it Saudi Arabia? Because the Saudis funded a huge Sunni insurgency against us in Iraq. But oh, the Saudis are our allies. Why are they our allies? Because they give us oil and they’re allies with Israel. People don’t know that, but the Saudis and the UAE have been working with Israel all along. So all of a sudden we have to go protect Saudi Arabia, even though they might have killed more Americans than the Iranians did in Iraq. So none of this makes sense. None of the government positions make sense.

Why did they say 47 years? Because after the war started, it became obvious that we had no reason to go to Iran. So they had to invent a reason after the fact. They’re like, okay, Iran, what did they do? Well, if we talk about the roadside bombs, the Saudis did more. Oh, 47 years ago they attacked our Marines in Beirut. So we got to go back 47 years to find a reason to attack them for American interests, because we don’t have any interest there. Only the Israelis have interest.

So once the Israelis want us to do something, they invent talking points and they invent enemies. That’s why the global war on terror is the global war on Israel’s neighbors, so that we, like suckers, have our guys die and come home in caskets, and we spend $8 trillion fighting their wars so that Netanyahu can brag, as he did after we started the Iran war. This is also on tape. “We are now going to be the sole regional superpower after Iran is eliminated.” And we might even become a global superpower, he said. And after we do all his dirty work for him.

Now, this is another amazing fact. Do you know the population of Israel? The closest other country to that population, to give you a sense of relative size, I looked it up, nearly identical population — Papua New Guinea.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

CENK UYGUR: Yes, that’s how small they are. Imagine if our entire foreign policy was structured around Papua New Guinea and we were attacking everyone in the Pacific Islands because we needed to go do a global war on terror against all of Papua New Guinea’s neighbors, and we’d given Papua New Guinea $320 billion — everybody would go, “What the f* is this?” And then they give you a little load of bullshit like, “Oh, it’s okay, because they’re our special ally and we have a New Guinea Christian heritage,” and all this horse crap, right? And we owe them, et cetera.

Why are we letting a country the size of Papua New Guinea dog walk us around the park? No, no, no, we got to do this the right way. You do it through politics, you do it through your vote. Don’t give up your power. If you don’t vote, that’s your power. You’re willingly giving it away to a foreign country if you don’t vote. So your number one tool in this particular arsenal, in this particular fight, is your vote. Go into your own party’s primaries and vote out all the sons of bitches who betrayed America, which is almost all of them.

Audience Questions: California, the Democratic Party, and Populism

SHAWN RYAN: So as you know, we were doing this live on Patreon, so for the past 4 hours — I think it’s been about 4 hours — they’ve been collecting questions from the live. So this one’s from Maxine. Any thoughts on Assembly Bill 2624, known on the internet as the Stop Nick Shirley Act, that California is trying to pass?

CENK UYGUR: So I actually don’t know that particular piece of legislation, but California, whether it’s Nick Shirley or not, that’s not the important part. California is filled to the brim with fraud. By all means, we should investigate all of it. And again, not just because, oh, the right wing would like to do a political attack on Newsom or California. No, no, no, no. The left wing pays taxes in California, and it’s our taxes that are getting stolen. It’s our money that is getting stolen. We should be angrier than the right wing, and we should investigate it a thousand times. Where the f* did the money go? Where’s all the money for housing? Where’s all the money that we allocated through the props? Nobody can explain where it is. So we need way more investigations, not less.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. Amy Stroud: After the 2024 cycle and Trump’s influence, what’s your biggest frustration with the Democratic Party right now? Outside of the obvious AIPAC influence issue, do you think they can win back the working-class voters, and how so?

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, okay, so get off the corporate money — that’s number one — and foreign government money, but they mentioned that already basically. So represent the voters, okay? Number two, fire all the consultants. The consultants are the guys who are like, “Oh, we tested this and we polled it, and you should say it like this. And you shouldn’t say Medicare for All, you should say universal healthcare.” No, brother, they’re programming you like you’re a robot. If you speak like a robot, everybody hates you.

In the old days when mainstream media had the monopoly, they only let robots on. So being a robot was an advantage. They’re like, “This is a serious, credible candidate.” But now when you go on Shawn Ryan’s show, you go on The Young Turks, you go wherever you go, if you’re a robot, you’re going to get your ass handed to you.

So do you give a shit about the issues? Like, why did you get into this in the first place? I would tell any Democratic politician — do you really mean it? Is there something in your core that drives you to do this? If there is, focus on that and give them what you got. And don’t be worried about, “Oh, they’re going to say this or they’re going to say that. Oh, the establishment won’t like that. The right wing won’t like this.” Be you. Be you. If you give them someone that isn’t you, they’re going to vote against you anyway. You might as well give them what you got, warts and all. Don’t worry about making mistakes. So what if Shawn doesn’t like Ro Khanna’s policies on taxes? Fight for it. Make your case. And they don’t have to agree with you 100%. They just have to trust you that you’re honest and you’re not some sellout.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

CENK UYGUR: You can get Ro to believe that. You can get Bernie to believe that. But getting almost any other Democrat to believe it that’s currently in Congress — God, they love the consultants. They love the lobbyists. They love being a robot. They hate having to answer real questions. They think it’s offensive if you ask them questions.

Like Ilhan Omar — I like her stance on Israel. I like her stance on plenty of things. And they sanctioned her, censured her, for saying about lobbyists, “It’s all about the Benjamins.” Of course it’s about the Benjamins. What are you sanctioning her for? Meanwhile, Randy Fein says kill everyone in Gaza, do a Holocaust — no censure.

But anyway, a guy goes up to her — I think it was a right-winger who asked her some question about her income that she stated wrong on her records — and she’s like, “I don’t have to answer any of your questions.” No, Ilhan, you kind of do. If somebody’s asking you a legitimate question, not a stupid gotcha question, but a legitimate question — “Why did you change your filings?” — you do have an obligation to answer. This person asking you isn’t important. The voters are important. You are responsible to answer those questions.

So that’s what I would tell Democrats. But look, to me, that’s an advantage. Because if 98% of the candidates in ’28, for example, in the primary, are going to be corporate robots, the one guy who’s not a corporate robot is going to have a huge advantage.

The Populist Plank: Six Policies to Restore Power to the People

SHAWN RYAN: Good point. This is from Bryant Davis. Cenk, you often say the real fight is populist versus establishment rather than left versus right. How does progressive populism specifically give power back to the people so their voices actually outweigh corporate donors in Washington? And I think we kind of covered this with the podcast.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, I’ll tell you just real quick, the 6 things that we focus on for policies — we call it the Populist Plank. They’re built to get past the left-right problems. They all have 67% approval and higher.

So: get money out of politics and end the endless wars; paid family leave so moms can take a break; stop private equity from buying residential real estate because they’re driving up housing prices; negotiate drug prices — what do you mean we can’t negotiate prices in a free market?; and higher wages — if you lift up the minimum wage, it lifts up all other wages. “So that’ll create inflation.” No, we already have inflation. That helps you keep up with inflation. That’s for the average guy.

So if the left wing goes towards populism and the right wing doesn’t, in terms of the politicians, then we’ll win. But if we don’t do that and the Republican politicians do that, then they’ll win, because those are super popular policies. But to me, I care about the policies. If a Republican did all 6 of those things, I would be ecstatic. What do I care about the label? And to a lot of the partisans, that’s like heresy. “How could you say that?” Well then, beat them to it. You do it first and you’ll get the votes and the love. Don’t tell me you didn’t do it and they did, but you’d like the credit anyway.

SHAWN RYAN: How different do you think people would think if there was no label on bills, on ideas, on any of this?

CENK UYGUR: I think it would be so different. They do polls, Shawn. They’ll ask, “How do you think the economy is doing?” And if Biden’s president, Republicans will rate it much lower and Democrats higher. Trump gets in the very next day — same poll. Democrats now say the economy is doing poorly and the Republicans say it’s doing better. It was one day. What happened?

It’s the partisan brain. It rots your brain and it gets you to see the world differently. It literally skews your reality, warps your reality. I talked about this with Joe Kent too — the OODA loop in the military. You know, control what your enemy is seeing, control their field of vision, and you’ve got them. And so that’s basically what the establishment has done to the American people. They’re in our OODA loop, and they’re controlling what we’re seeing, and that’s how they control us.

But now, because of online media, that’s been shattered. So now you’re seeing, “Wait, why would I have to agree with someone 100%? That’s weird. Normal humans don’t do that.” So there goes binary.

SHAWN RYAN: You don’t even do that with your family.

CENK UYGUR: Of course. You don’t do that with your wife. What are you going to do, divorce your wife?

SHAWN RYAN: I think some of these people probably would kill their f*ing wife if it came down to that. From Brandon Cook: How do we stop the downward trend of our average American lives getting harder and more expensive every day?

Corporate Power and the Squeeze on Working Americans

CENK UYGUR: You got to get politicians who work for you. Otherwise — that’s why I focus so much on corporate donors, because outside of Israel, they’re usually the guys mainly in charge. And so what they’re doing, Shawn, is they’re squeezing the life out of us.

I went to Wharton Business School, so I studied this, I know this. And it’s also just common sense and logic. If you just think about the markets — if you’re a company, what do you want to do? You want to maximize profit. So you’re going to lower your costs as much as possible and you want to increase your revenue as much as possible. Simple logic. Everybody knows that. Business 101. Well, what are your costs? Employee costs is the number one cost in business.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay?

Democratic Capitalism and the Need for Political Revolution

CENK UYGUR: It’s true for The Young Turks. It’s true for all the companies. Okay? So on a macro scale, all the companies want to reduce their employee costs. So they want to pay you as little as they possibly can without you breaking making. So they’re going to pay you a wage where you could barely sustain yourself, because if you’re past barely sustaining yourself, well, by definition, they’re paying you too much.

They need to squeeze more out of you so they could have a higher profit, and the stock market rewards that. So now, because of AI — we didn’t even talk about AI — the AI catastrophe is on its way, and all the markets are gleeful. “We’re going to cut employees by 25%.” What do you think that’s going to happen to the country when there’s 25%?

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t get it either. I don’t get that at all.

CENK UYGUR: That you guys are nuts. You’re driving us straight off the cliff. So I believe in something called democratic capitalism. What that means is we need capitalism. I’m a capitalist, okay? I even own a company, right? But the markets have to be free. Adam Smith explained if monopolies arise or the companies can capture the government, then you’re cooked. Capitalism’s done.

Then you’re moving on to corporatism, and corporatism is death for this country, okay? Because corporations don’t want competition. They don’t want free markets. They want to kill off their competitors. They want to kill off the free markets. And what’s the first thing you would do logically? You remember how we talked about how for every dollar Israel’s putting in, they’re getting out $100. The first thing you do is you’d go buy the government because the government controls whether you’re allowed to have competition or not.

So the drug companies, that’s why they’re the number one donors. They extended their patents from 5 years, which was — there was logic behind the 5 years, okay, because they need to recoup their costs, etc. Now that’s 12 years. That extra 7 years is just killing off the free market. But that wasn’t good enough. Then they made it so the government can’t negotiate drug prices at all. If they say $1,000, we have to pay $1,000. That’s unheard of. No other country in the world has that. It’s communism for the corporations, which is corporatism. That’s what corporatism is.

So we have to protect capitalism. How do we do that? We do it through democracy. That’s why I call it democratic capitalism. When you have a democracy, the job of the CEO is to look out for his company. The job of the representative in the House of Representatives is to look out for you, the voters. And he’s supposed to make sure they don’t get monopolies, they don’t pollute your local lake so your kids get poisoned, right? They don’t put lead in the pipes so that we have literally brain damage, right? They don’t vote for wars to go get your son killed and waste all your money. They look out to protect you.

So that’s what we have to get back to so we could have sanity in this country. But in order to have democratic capitalism, you need a true democracy where you serve the voters and not the donors. So you see how everything comes back to money in politics.

SHAWN RYAN: Why?

Rewriting the Code: The Case for a Constitutional Amendment

CENK UYGUR: Because you, as a coder — and this is again common sense — if you get whatever output that you designed through your input, right? You write a certain piece of code, you’ll get a certain result. You write a different code, you’ll get a different result. What is the code of the country? It’s the Constitution.

So what the Supreme Court did is they hijacked the Constitution. There’s a longer conversation about how they did it. It was in ’76, ’78, and then Citizens United basically shot a dead horse. I wrote about it in my book, Justice Is Coming. Chapter 4 is about how they captured the government. Chapter 5 is about how they captured the media. And so in that, what they did was they said, yeah, you have freedom of speech, but corporations are human beings. They also have constitutional rights. So they get to have freedom of speech. And we’ll say that money is speech so they can now have unlimited money that they could put into politics.

The Constitution doesn’t say that, by the way. They barely won those cases. Byron White was a Supreme Court justice at the time. He voted against these Bellotti and Buckley v. Valeo decisions, and he said, “This will destroy our democracy. We’re signing our own death warrant with this case.” Obviously the money will take over, and obviously it’ll lead to corruption. He was 100% right, and that’s what happened.

Since the Supreme Court hijacked the Constitution and changed the meaning of the words to allow corporations to do unlimited bribery, we have to change it back. The only thing above the Supreme Court is an amendment. That’s why you have to rewrite the code through an amendment. And then they say, “Oh well, they’re rewriting the code, that sounds super dangerous, don’t mess with the Constitution.” No, the Constitution says you should do a political revolution every generation. And how do you do a political revolution? Through the amendments.

The Founding Fathers are geniuses. Whatever other faults they had, we were so lucky to have Jefferson and Franklin and Washington and Madison and Thomas Paine, let alone Hamilton and others, all in the same place. We got super lucky. Those guys were geniuses. And they said, if you don’t do political revolutions, you’ll lead to violent revolutions. They had to do a violent revolution because they didn’t have that outlet, right? So they built it in and they said, to tell you how much you need amendments, we’ll pass the first 10. And that’s our Bill of Rights. Those are our most important rights and they’re all amendments. Right to speech, right to freedom of religion, seek redress of your grievances, etc.

So we’re supposed to do amendments to get our government back. That’s what the Founding Fathers told us. So we got to giddy up, we got to mount up, everybody put your boots on, let’s go, and let’s do exactly as they told us to do. Get an amendment to rewrite the code to get us back to democracy, back to America, so we can recapture our own government.

SHAWN RYAN: These guys were in their 20s and 30s too, not in their f*ing 80s.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: So, well, Cenk, once again, thank you, man.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, this is beautiful, Shawn. I appreciate the conversation, and I love that you got an open mind and you’re letting people come in here and you’re sharing ideas back and forth. It doesn’t get better than this. I super appreciate it, bro.

SHAWN RYAN: Right back at you. Thank you. All right. No matter where you’re watching The Shawn Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you’re feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.

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