Cenk Uygur: evaluation

Transcript context

…There’s a lot of questions I can ask there. So on the circle of liberty, yes, so expanding the number of people whose freedoms are protected. But what about the magnitude of freedom for each individual person? So expanding the freedom of the individual and protecting the freedoms of an individual. It seems like progressives are more willing to expand the size of government where government can do all kinds of regulation, all kinds of controls in the individual. So Lex, what we’re probably going to talk about a lot today is balance. And so a lot of people think, “Oh, I am on the right, I’m on left.” And that comes with a certain preset ideology. So the right is always correct. The left is always correct. So there’s two problems with that. Number one, how could you possibly believe in a preset ideology if you’re an independent thinker? It’s literally, by definition, not possible. If you say, “I lent my brain to an ideology that was created 80 years ago or eight years ago or 800 years ago, and I’m not going to change it,” you’re saying, “I don’t think for myself I bought into a culture.” And by the way, there’s a lot of different forms of culture you could buy into: religion, politics, sometimes racial, et cetera. So that’s why you need, actually, balance. The second reason you need balance, other than independent thought, is because the answer is almost never black and white. And that gets into a really interesting nuance because mainstream media, in my opinion, is the matrix, and its job is to delude you into thinking corporate rule is great for you and we should never change it and the status quo is wonderful. So they have created a false middle. What mainstream media calls moderate, is actually, in my opinion, extremist corporate ideology. So for example, they’ll say, Joe Manchin is a moderate. None of his positions are moderate other than potentially gun control in West Virginia. He’s not for gun control. The people of West Virginia are not for gun control, generally speaking. And he uses that, and they usually have these shiny objects where they’re like, “You see this? I’m a moderate because of guns,” or, “I’m a moderate because I’m a Democrat from West Virginia.” But wait, let’s look at your positions. You’re against paid family leave, that polls at 84%. So you’re a radical corporatist who say that women should be forced back into work the day after they have birth. You’re against a higher minimum wage, you’re for every corporate position, and they all poll at 33% or less. So Joe Manchin is not at all a moderate, and this applies to almost every corporate Republican and every corporate Democrat. They’re all extremists in supporting what I call corporatism. So you have to get to a balance in order to get to the right answer. So that’s an interesting distinction here. So you’re actually, as far as I understand, pro-capitalism, which is an interesting place to be. That’s the thing that probably makes you center-left and then still populist. You’re full of beautiful contradictions, let’s say this, which will be great to untangle. But what’s the difference between corporatism and capitalism? Is there a difference?…

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