In this episode of the Blaze Media podcast, host Glenn Ava Radtke is joined by political commentator Anna Kasparian to talk about abortion and why it s so important to have a conversation about it with the people who voted differently than you.
00:00:34.220We are living at such an exciting time.
00:00:37.800Everything is changing, and strange times create strange bedfellows.
00:00:42.440More and more, I find myself sitting down and having actual conversations with people who even just five years ago would have never thought to talk to me or me talk to them in a million years.
00:00:54.940But things have changed in a good way.
00:00:58.180And people on the right, people on the left, and the people somewhere in between, or nowhere at all, are starting to agree,
00:01:06.380hey, we have problems, and we have to stop this political division before it destroys us completely.
00:01:13.000Christmas is coming up, and you'll probably be getting together here soon with a family member who voted differently than you.
00:04:34.860Well, left-wing in regard to, you know, I would say like one of my grounding political values is that workers should have better pay, better working conditions, a seat at the table.
00:04:50.400Unionized labor, I think, is incredibly important, which, you know, it's something that's been decimated in recent decades in this country.
00:04:58.220But that's like my number one interest in politics.
00:05:02.280And that's not really something that has really been favored by the Republican Party, traditionally speaking.
00:05:09.540And historically, unionized labor was something that the Democratic Party looked out for.
00:05:16.160And I don't really see that as the case anymore when it comes to the mainstream Democrats.
00:05:22.700They're certainly captured by their corporate donors.
00:05:25.900I think that the way that this last election went down really does show you the kind of political strategist rot that exists, the corruption that exists.
00:05:36.760And there's real tension now between the voters who want very specific policy prescriptions in order to deal with the rising inequalities that we have in this country when it comes to wealth and income.
00:05:51.680And then you have the Democratic Party, which is heavily funded by corporate interests and moneyed interests.
00:05:57.580And what those donors want severely conflicts with what the base of Democratic voters want.
00:06:04.000And so this has been a growing issue with the Democratic Party.
00:06:07.620And what I see as, you know, their campaign call is more and more culture war stuff.
00:06:15.800And it gets more and more extreme every election cycle.
00:06:19.520And I think that they're pushing more and more people away by sticking to the corporate politics while also getting more and more maximalist when it comes to some of the culture war type issues.
00:06:33.300So as I look, because it is so hard what you do, what I do.
00:06:38.500There's so many words that come out of us every single day and and then out of context or not worded, you know, exactly right.
00:06:49.520But the way I look at the Democratic Party or the left is that there is the machine that is in bed now with big business.
00:07:05.620And that's just the crony capitalism, just the the vomitous kind of corruption that we all hate in either party, any party.
00:07:15.920Then there's the average Democrat who might disagree on taxes or whatever, but they believe in the Constitution and they believe in the Bill of Rights and everything else.
00:07:27.740And I think that has been the majority that is the majority of people.
00:07:33.560And then there's this crazy left wing Marxist, you know, destroy it all kind of group.
00:07:42.300And that I don't even know, maybe 8 percent, 10 percent is that.
00:07:46.480And it's the middle people who have been either.
00:07:51.660Lied to so effectively by so many people, mainly mainstream media.
00:07:57.320But we're at the beginning in the Democratic Party, possibly of those people waking up and going, I don't like either end of this spectrum.
00:08:09.500Yeah. Look, I take a little bit of issue with the use of Marxist in this context, because honestly, I think that there's maybe a total of like five actual Marxist in this country.
00:08:19.480In reality, we're talking about individuals whose politics is mostly based on, you know, some fringe issue or some cultural issue that they have.
00:08:30.300It's not just that they care about that issue.
00:08:32.860It's that they've taken that issue and they've made it part of their identity, the core of who they are.
00:08:38.580And it's almost like what you would expect from religious zealots, you know.
00:08:43.860And so there's a fundamentalism involved in the way that they treat these issues.
00:08:51.720There's no room to maybe consider the thoughts and concerns of other individuals.
00:08:56.540And so as they become more and more kind of like authoritarian in what they demand, they are pushing people away.
00:09:04.240And there are some issues in which the rights of one group might actually end up conflicting with the rights of another group, depending on what type of legislation you're pursuing.
00:09:13.580And so, of course, this has come up with the trans issue.
00:09:16.520And I've always been supportive of the transgender community.
00:09:19.940But when the rights of transgender people, particularly transgender women, start to cause some tension with the rights and freedoms of women or the perceived safety of women, well, let's have a conversation and avoid assuming the worst of the people who want to have that conversation.
00:09:40.260Right. Because I think that in a country like America, where you have so many different people with so many different backgrounds, beliefs, people of faith, you the only way this works is if we respect each other and actually engage in these conversations in good faith.
00:09:54.940And I felt that the left was able to do that back in the day.
00:09:58.620And I don't know what happened, but we've moved further and further away from being able to have those conversations in good faith without assuming malice toward individuals who have a slight difference of opinion.
00:10:12.040So, I mean, well, let me just ask you first.
00:12:20.140And, you know, the argument, and I think this is a decent argument that you'll hear from those who are more restrictive in or wanting more restrictions on speech is, well, we want better terms of service when it comes to, you know, private companies.
00:12:35.100But free speech only has to do with the government.
00:12:39.220And if the government isn't violating your free speech, then why are we complaining about, you know.
00:12:45.080That's not a problem if the government's not in bed with all of the business.
00:13:18.800Um, but, uh, it was when you're in bed, especially now, I don't know how you define fascism, but fascism, the technical definition of fascism is a public private partnership with the government and private industry.
00:13:40.160Communism doesn't let you have private, uh, ownership.
00:13:44.860Fascism says, no, no, you can have private industry, but you're going to do it our way and we'll let you have the company.
00:13:51.920And if you don't want to do it our way, we'll destroy you, you know, take it away from you or whatever.
00:13:58.680That's, we've been headed that way for a hundred plus years.
00:14:02.920Both sides have been, have been doing it right now.
00:14:07.400So the public private partnership where the government says, we can't do this, but you can, that's fascism.
00:14:20.120Um, but because of social media and, and Google and everything else, we are in a situation to where who's controlling whom, who, which one is more afraid of the other, the government or Google?
00:14:45.260Who's afraid of who, you know what I mean?
00:14:53.600Especially considering the fact that, you know, corporate interests fund politicians on both sides of the political aisle.
00:15:00.160And so they're completely captured by corporate interests.
00:15:02.640And I think that that has happened to the detriment of the American people, regardless of whether they vote Democrat or Republican.
00:15:09.620And so what I see as a bigger problem when it comes to this speech question and how it's impacting private companies is that private companies are increasingly catering to niche audiences or one side of the political spectrum over the other.
00:15:28.980And unfortunately, and I understand this because I think I was also kind of in that bubble of seeking content or information that only validated what I already believed because it's comfortable.
00:15:43.920And I totally understand why people do that.
00:16:09.320Because the divisions in the country and the inability to have conversations with people you disagree with, I think, is a product of the bubbles that we live in.
00:16:39.520And living in Los Angeles, living in California, which is completely controlled by the Democratic Party, it has allowed me to see some of the flaws in the policies that the Democratic Party is pushing for on a more national scale.
00:16:53.400And I don't want that to happen if I've experienced some of these policies and they have not worked out so well.
00:16:59.460But what's interesting is the resistance to any of that critique that you'll see from, you know, not everyone in the audience, not even the majority of the audience.
00:17:08.260But there's always that very loud minority of people who demand that you only tell them what they want to hear.
00:24:58.160The social justice left, if you want to call it that, who think that, you know, in some cases, the criminals are actually the victims and the victims are the criminals.
00:25:08.920And I don't know how big this faction is, but they're loud enough to push me away completely.
00:25:13.540And so it wasn't that that had happened to me.
00:25:16.580It was the reaction of the left and how they were far more concerned with me talking about it because they felt that that was stigmatizing the homeless community.
00:25:26.740I have never gone out of my way to say negative things about homeless people.
00:25:31.460I mean, people who are living on out on the streets are in a lot of cases, victims who need help.
00:26:22.980Like the, the kindness, the open-mindedness, the, you know, willingness to go out of your way, to look out for people who need help, like that kind of stuff.
00:26:33.720There's a portion of the left that has shed those characteristics.
00:26:37.740They've taken on a more nihilistic approach to things.
00:26:40.740And they don't even believe in reforms.
00:26:43.600They just believe that everything about every political system, every program we have, every institution we have is just worthless and we need to burn it all down.
00:29:31.920And beyond that, we have this system that props up lies and a government that is willing to engage in lies.
00:29:43.440If you wanted to bring people in and open the borders the way you did and then move people with our tax dollars on airplanes to cities where you're changing everything in that city, can we have that conversation first?
00:30:02.780And part of the problem was they were saying it's not happening.
00:30:07.360And you're doing it behind our back in the middle of the night.
00:30:09.620Well, it's interesting because and look, I can definitely be honest about my own flaws and my own mistakes because I bought the mainstream media narrative that there wasn't a migrant crisis.
00:30:31.380And when it comes to mainstream media, the fact of the matter is they do play defense more and more for the Democratic Party.
00:30:38.680And that's an issue because there was a time when that didn't happen.
00:30:43.180And so I still believed in their good faith reporting, even though it turns out, you know, a lot of these reports would omit really important details about what's really going on.
00:30:53.960And so it wasn't until Texas Governor Greg Abbott started bussing or sending migrants to blue cities where that woke me up.
00:31:10.980Well, because all of a sudden you're seeing migrants sleeping on the floor in the police department in Chicago because they don't have shelter for these people.
00:31:21.900You're seeing, you know, these I love watching streams of city council meetings because that's how you understand what's really going on in these cities.
00:31:43.360And for me, rather than relying on mainstream media reporting or any anyone's reporting, to be quite honest with you, what I'll do is I'll go out of my way and I'll watch, you know, the entirety of a government function, local government function.
00:31:59.520I talk to real people and I get a sense of where hearts and minds really are.
00:32:05.620And so on election night, I wasn't surprised at all.
00:32:19.940And this is what I was surprised about.
00:32:22.120I did not expect Donald Trump to flip 10 counties in California from blue to red.
00:32:30.100But I guess I shouldn't have been surprised about that either, because when you look at the conditions that people are living in, in a Democrat controlled state.
00:32:39.320Well, yeah, you can understand why people are turning their backs on the Democratic Party.
00:32:43.140You can understand why people are frustrated at the corruption, at the loss of $24 billion that was allocated to help the homeless when homelessness only exploded during that time.
00:32:56.920And that money is now unaccounted for.
00:32:58.680It was funneled to nonprofits whose executives get paid minimum $200,000, $250,000 a year.
00:33:06.180And they have multiple executives who are making at least that or more.
00:33:11.000And you just see the waste and you see the real grift.
00:33:15.620And so for people out there who are concerned about the grifters, take a good hard look at the systemic grifting that's happening right now.
00:33:47.520Ukraine, I don't know where you stand in Ukraine, but good God, man, that is just, that is a money laundering system and millions are being affected and hundreds of thousands are in a meat grinder right now.
00:34:02.540I mean, look, I think that the UK and the US made a big mistake in discouraging Vladimir Zelensky from continuing or engaging in peace negotiations early on, early on in that war.
00:34:16.120So that's the strongest opinion I have about what has transpired in Ukraine.
00:34:21.980You know, my heart goes out to the Ukrainians.
00:34:27.860You know, they were invaded wrongfully, obviously.
00:34:30.720But I feel that the way the United States has carried out its foreign policy, certainly, you know, starting in the Bush years, and it's only gotten worse from that.
00:34:40.760But it's not really benefiting anybody.
00:34:43.200And it's certainly not benefiting the American people, which is another reason why I think you're noticing a bit of a shift or realignment when it comes to our political parties.
00:35:29.200So, but I think there's something to be said that I think with conservatives, the definition of conservative, what I believe is the right definition, is we look at things that are happening.
00:37:03.700I mean, we orchestrated a coup in Iran, which is part of the reason why, you know, you have this theocratic, you know, situation that we're now fighting against.
00:37:15.180Doing regime change is not a good idea.
00:38:32.780I'm genuinely curious what you think about this because I started to really sour on Biden when, in my opinion, he was pretending to fight for his agenda.
00:38:43.880And part of his agenda was to allow for our Medicare system to just simply negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, believe it or not.
00:38:54.120And this is the most anti-capitalist thing imaginable, right?
00:38:57.760Because capitalism, you're supposed to have competition.
00:38:59.920You're supposed to welcome negotiation.
00:39:02.460Our Medicare system not allowed to negotiate drug prices.
00:39:06.300So he was pursuing a provision in his Build Back Better plan that would allow for the negotiations to happen.
00:39:13.300Well, then they whittled it down, whittled it down to 10 pharmaceutical drugs.
00:39:23.020The Democrats like to play good cop, bad cop.
00:39:25.560So you'll have the majority of the Democratic Party in the Senate in particular, pretend like they're all on board with Biden's agenda and the idea of having Medicare negotiate drug prices.
00:39:36.080We have the same problem in the Republican Party, by the way.
00:39:38.300And then you'll always have the bad cops who are willing to raise their hands and basically torpedo that provision.
00:39:45.980And that's essentially what happened with Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
00:39:50.340But don't make the mistake of thinking they were the only ones, because sitting on the bleachers waiting for other corporate Democrats who would step in if they needed to, to prevent the passage of that provision.
00:40:03.360And so I love watching Democrats celebrate themselves, because now Medicare can negotiate the drug prices of 10, you know, 10 drugs.
00:40:15.040But I mean, I'm not going to give you a reward for whittling down a policy that made sense, that would have saved taxpayers in this country a lot of money.
00:40:27.860I think we could come to agreement on this easily.
00:41:18.280So I just if you're going to run to the press to get accurate information about what's going on, I mean, you know, what I'm saying, though, on that is there is no good cop.
00:41:29.100We are a system of checks and balances.
00:41:33.200Congress and the Senate, they're all backroom deals.
00:41:35.880I talk to congressmen and senators who say, what the hell am I even doing here?
00:41:39.620We don't we don't we don't debate anything.
00:41:48.780That's that's there's no checks and balance.
00:41:50.820The the administration, it was does the admit does the president work for all of these administrators or do the administrators work for the elected guy?
00:42:06.540You know, it's all it's all out of control.
00:42:10.040And the one that was supposed to watch is the media and the media.
00:42:15.680And now with big tech, they're all part of that system.
00:42:20.880We have to find a way to go back to the I really feel like if we could.
00:42:28.380Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again and reset it to its factory settings?
00:43:24.500I don't even know if you can do it with surgical knives anymore because it's so big and out of control.
00:43:32.520Just start chopping down some of the reshaping the tree.
00:43:37.400Yeah, there's been a lot of attention focused on, you know, Doge, right?
00:43:42.720The Department of Government Efficiency and what they're going to focus their energies on.
00:43:47.180You know, I'm cautiously optimistic, mostly because of the fact that a lot of the conversation is focused on the Pentagon.
00:43:53.980And there's agreement on both sides of the political aisle that there needs to be a serious accounting for all of the resources that are being squandered on the Pentagon.
00:44:06.520But that also has to happen in things that you're going to like.
00:44:11.320I mean, I believe the Pentagon is completely out of control.
00:44:14.680Yeah, I mean, they haven't been able to pass a single audit.
00:44:47.160So that's that's the type of those are the types of policies.
00:44:50.860If they're effective, but there's a lot of waste because the way that those policies are being implemented in places like California isn't really meant to help the homeless.
00:45:01.260It's about funneling taxpayer money to nonprofits.
00:45:05.000And so when we talk about waste, yeah, I'm open minded about taking a look at these government agencies and really questioning whether these massive bureaucracies make sense, right?
00:45:16.820Whether the money is well spent on various programs.
00:45:20.820You know, let's do a little bit of testing to see if these policies or these programs are even effective in carrying out what their objective is.
00:45:29.460See, this is why I think the 10th Amendment is so important.
00:46:15.920So are you consistent on that issue, though, on the idea of states' rights and allowing for the federal government to just kind of take a step back?
00:46:24.320It seems like a setup question, but yes.
00:46:27.220No, no, it's not a gotcha or anything.
00:46:28.540But mostly because in conversations with Republicans or with conservatives or anyone on the right,
00:46:33.840they tend to have this idea of states' rights when it comes to economic policies or things like health care, as you mentioned.
00:46:42.420But then it comes to some of the more conservative social issues where they do want the federal government to be involved and have a standard.
00:46:50.720Like, for instance, you know, there's a small but loud group of people who are on, you know, Trump's case about not wanting to pursue a federal ban on abortion.