Al Franken Covers Congress Grilling TikTok’s CEO | BenDeLaCreme

Let's get into the headlines. Okay. Let's kick things off with the big story on Capitol Hill today where there was a major hearing that could determine the future of TikTok. A rare display of bipartisanship today for the grilling of TikTok's CEO on Capitol Hill, the executive of the controversial and incredibly popular app facing some tough questions about child safety data collection and its Chinese ownership. The chair of

the committee today says that TikTok should be banned. We do not trust TikTok will ever embrace American values, values for freedom, human rights, and innovation. TikTok has repeatedly chosen the path for more control, more surveillance, and more manipulation. Your platform should be banned. That's right. We don't need a Chinese comp and he's stealing our data and spying

on us. That's a job for American companies USA, USA, U s A. Of course a band will affect me personally because as many of you know, I have a huge following on TikTok thanks to my unboxing videos, my makeup tutorials, and of course my dance moves. I invented this one. Now, aside from the hearing in the House today, there's another hearing in the Senate next week which I think might go a bit like this. When is TikTok

going to release? And not from my football? That's what I want to know, our fears, your your spine on America, and my question is whether you've are inspired under Donald Trump? And if so, but you please share that data for the brodsculs. I want. I want your assurances that if TikTok is banned, China won't retaliate by closing Hun Balcony, the restaurant near my house, because that's where the shoemasy on Christmas they make. They make a wonderful moshoe pork.

I know it's a kosher, but it's you know, it's Christmas. I'm worried about the use of artificial intelligence because I have seen a deep fake video out there of MEE saying that I trust Brett Caberra to uphold Rob Wade. Can you change that to me saying I don't trust him because that's what I said. Okay, let's move to Florida, which I know is something I know that's something a lot of old Jews say, but that's not what I'm

talking about. We all know that last year our governor To Santis passed the so called Don't Say Gay Bill, which banned band teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with students in kindergarten through third grade. Well, guess what the Santis is now announcing that he plans to expand the law to cover students all the way through high school. So this don't Say Gay law is terrible. Luckily, although it doesn't say you can't sing about being gay.

Being gay, being gay is an equally valid way to be a perfecting day anyway. Good luck in English class Florida teens. I think you'll really enjoy reading classics like Moby Large Whale with no subtexts whatsoever. And finally, here's some fascinating news from the worlds of science and music and the associated press. As scientist analyzed DNA from betho with hair nearly two hundred years after his death. They are looking for clues about the celebrated composer's many health

problems and his hearing loss. I found information about the liver disease that is widely believed to have killed him. According to his study, it includes a genetic risk for liver disease plus a liver damaging hepatitis B infection in the last months of his life. I am so impressed by the science, But did we really need to know how Beethoven died? I feel like most people living in

the nineteenth century died from living in the nineteenth century. Now, if you're wondering how someone was able to get Beethoven's hair, remember he was deaf. It's not you know, it's not too hard to sneak up on a deaf person playing piano and snip off the souvenir. Now, I'll admit I did the exact same thing multiple times mainly to Ray Charles. Hey, look, if we have the guy's DNA, I can't be the only one thinking it. Let's make a Beethoven Jurassic Park.

I for one, would love to see the brilliant composer of the Fifth Symphony eats Jeff Goldbloom. For more on the scientific breakthrough, we turned to Michael Costa. Michael, this is a This is a pretty amazing discovery, isn't it. I guess so, you know, But when scientists dig someone up to study their DNA, it's an amazing discovery. But when I do it, it's a felony. I mean, yes, but still it is amazing that we can learn how

Beethoven died just by analyzing his hair. Well, and it's not just Beethoven, aw Thanks to these cutting edge discoveries, scientists can finally learn how all sorts of historical figures died. I mean, for example, you know, after analyzing a DNA sample from Julius Caesar, we now know that he died from being stabbed today, right, of course, Shakespeare? Who William William Shakespeare, the legendary playwright. I'm not a literature guy, I'm a scientist, Okay, And how about this little tidbit.

President Abraham Lincoln shot in the head by John John Wilkes booth, John Wilkes. I'm not a historian. I'm a scientist. Al do you think they just give this lab coat to anyone? No, and that's why, through empirical evidence, I now know that how JFK died. Also, yes, we know he was shot in there. What the did someone leak this report to No, It's just that your science only

seems to be confirming well known historical facts. Okay, Well, I bet you didn't know how Queen Elizabeth died while she was ninety six, So I'm guessing natural natural causes, no meth overdose. Okay, Yes, turns out the Oh girl couldn't handle a little Kensington crank at her age. Look, and that's a lesson for all you kids out there. Don't wait too long to try mess. That is a terrible lesson, Michael, Michael costs everyone. All Right, when we come back, I'll tell you why taxes are good. So

don't go away. Welcome back, Welcome back to the Daily Show. Well, it's tax season, or as Donald Trump calls it, would you get off my back already? And the Biden administration has been making a big effort to make tax season a bit less painful. The Inflation Reduction Act, which the President signed last August, includes eighty billion dollars in new funding for the IRS to hire new employees and upgrade

its technology. And it's working. The IRS is doing much better at processing our returns and answering our questions about how to file correctly, and that's great. Better enforcement of tax laws means more money for all the many, many things the government does, Social Security, medicare, infrastructure, not to mention scraping off the feces smeared on the capital walls by the crowd boys. Clearly, the new funding is long overdue. In addition to pain for immensely popular programs, it will

help reduce the depths. So everybody's got to be happy about this. Everybody, right? Am I right? Democrats want to spend eighty billion dollars to hire eighty seven thousand more armed IRS agents to terrorize Americans. They want to add eighty seven thousand IRS agents that can use deadly force to go after American families. They want to turn the

IRS into the Gustapo. They are arming up the IRS like they're preparing to take Fallujah a little bit like James Bond, but instead of hunting down evil maniacs, these agents hunt down and killed middle class taxpayers that don't pay enough. What on earth are these people talking about? If you forget to carry the one while you're calculating your return, while the IRS actually come to your home, break down the door, and gun down your entire family in a word, no, in six words, of course, not,

you Republican idiots. So let's talk about what the IRS money is really going for and another installment of long story short. The administration is trying to fix a whole host of problems that began back in twenty eleven after

Republicans and Congress started cutting the IRS budget. Since then, the IRS's audit rate has dropped almost sixty percent, and the number of IRS agents the same number we had in nineteen fifty four, when the country's population was half the size it is today, and pediatricians treated six children by prescribing them menthol cigarettes, and the combination of understaffing and stone age technology has resulted in a very weird situation. You were more likely to be audited the United States

if you make twenty thousand dollars a year. Then if you make five hundred thousand dollars a year, less money you have, the easier it is for the IRS to come after you. This is because the IRS doesn't have enough money to hire the highly trained investigators needed to go head to head with the wealthy. Ultimately, it's easier for them to audit lower income people because it's cheap, can be done by mail, and doesn't take a lot

of time. Can you believe that the IRS is so understaffed that they audit poor people more than the wealthy because they just don't have the experts to handle the most complex returns. They're going after poor people because it's easier. It's like a comic who only does your mama jokes. Sure it's easy, but at what costs to my mama? Her life? Her life is difficult enough, do you know? Do you know how hard it is to find a belt the size of the equator? So how much money

in lost taxes are we talking about here? According to the former head of the IRS, it could be as much as one trillion dollars a year. To put that in perspective, if you stacked a trillion one dollar bills on top of each other. It would blow away. It'd be ridiculous if even try that. The solution is pretty simple, and it's a bargain comparatively, Comparatively speaking, just adequately fund the IRS so it can prove its enforcement capabilities and

collect that extra trillion dollars. Now you would you would think Republicans would love an extra trillion dollars in revenue. They're the ones who are always complaining that America is spending money that we don't have. Politicians in Washington cannot stop spending money that we don't have. Let's live in reality. We have a spending problem. We have a dramatic spending problem. If you had a child, you gave them a credit card and they kept hitting the limit, you wouldn't just

keep increasing it. You'd first see what are you spending your money on. So we're going to look at every single dollar spent. We're going to audit it. If you're going to have a party, you have to pay the band. Come on center, You don't have to have a band at a party, just hire hire your nephew's roommate to be a DJ. Just think what we could do with an extra trillion dollars a year. We could begin to

retire our national debt and balance our budget. Or we could do some new things that would be worthy of a great nation. We could have universal pre K or subsidized childcare like they do everywhere. We could eliminate federal income taxes completely for the bottom ninety percent of American household. And this isn't just lefty liberal pine this sky stuff. With a trillion dollars we could do. We could fund an entirely new Iroq war. And why are we the

only developed country that doesn't have universal healthcare? And it doesn't have to be single payer. We can have a public option, which we should have been done in the first place, Laborman. The point is polling shows that ninety three percent of Americans believe it's every American civic duty to pay their taxes. And I think you can guess

who the other seven percent are. So let's let's give the irs the resources to make sure that everybody does what we should all should do for the right of living in this great country, a nation we can make even better if we do the rational thing and collect the taxes that people actually owe. All right, all right, all right, stay tuned because when we come back, Ben de la Creme, we'll be joining us, So don't go away.

Welcome back to Welcome back to the Daily Show. My guest tonight is a writer, producer and director you know from RuPaul's Drag Race. She's here to talk about the Drag Defense Fund, which benefits the ACLUS lgbt Q plus rights work. Please welcome Ben de la Creme. Wild, no idea, this is so this is so lovely. I didn't know the audience was going to go so crazy. I didn't

know what would happen after Lindsey Graham. Before we get into these anti drag bills that are popping up around the country, I think there are a lot of people, uh objecting to drag without even having any idea what it is. And I know I've never I've ever gone to a drag show. And can you explain, Drett. Absolutely, yeah, Well, somebody just was shocked that you've never been to a drag show. You I'm embarrassed. No, no, no, it's not shocking that you've never been to a show that you

would think of as a drag show. But you've probably seen Missus Doubt Fire or Tutsie or any of those you know things that we have, I didn't realize they were in drag. Well that's some very convincing costuming, you know. So drag is something that's been part of the culture for a very long time in a lot of different ways, and so there's many types of it that we've sort of been accepting in contemporary culture, like those examples. But

you know, it's something that hearkens back to. We see it in Shakespeare, we see it in kabuki theater, across cultures. It's something that has just been a neat and unquestioned for a long time. But within American history, I mean, drag is something that has uplifted and protected and fought for the queer community. Pre Stonewall, I mean pre Stonewall era,

queer people had to congregate in clubs and bars. That was the one place that they could sort of find community and find togetherness and feel safe, even though there were constantly police raids on those places. And drag queens, transwomen were the entertainers, were the matriarchs, were the people who fostered this community and went Stonewall, which was the alleged beginning of the gay rights movement when it rolled around.

They were the folks who really started the riot. Yeah, on drag race, you sing, you work the runway, We create and perform your own variety show. It's just all the things that I do, except the runway and the singing. Well, you're in good company with drag queens not being especially good singers, so that's fine. And you and I can work on your runway. So thank you, thank you. And you you direct, and you write and produce a seventy minute show. Drag shows right, different ones, right, Yeah, what

are those shows about? Yeah, so, m I do a lot of different stuff that's more in the theatrical realm. So some of them are evening length plays as you would more traditionally know. Some of them are cabarets with through lines. And that's another thing about drag is that it's so many things. A lot of people think of it as what we know it as from reality TV right now, which is largely lip syncing and big dance movements, which is really exciting, but there's also a full history

of theater and a lot of other disciplines. So my shows are shows that are essentially a love letter to the queer community, to folks who need to feel a sense of hope and sense of generosity. Specifically, I do a holiday show with my good friend Jinc's monsoon right and we've been touring that for This will be our sixth year. I'm not announcing it, but it's our sixth year coming up, and that show is very much rooted

in the idea of that Christmas show. It's a Christmas show, yes, So we do it every November and December, and that came about because of just really seeing the need among queer young people and queer adults to feel a sense of family and homecoming at a time of year where it can have a lot of messaging that we don't

feel included in. There's many people who have strained relationships with their families, and so this show is a message of and you know, and it's body and it's funny and there's big, sparkly dances, but it's got its heart about about coming together and making people realize that that your future can be whatever you want it to be. Your traditions can be what they want, what you want them to be, and you can be who you want to be. Let okay, thinking about beingle you want to

be Ablet's talk about Tennessee. It's the first I've stayed, I think, to explicitly ban it's first place that it passed. Yes, yeah, yeah, and uh in public places where miners are something like that once you're but now it's happening all over the place, right, this is some new thing they've invented. I'm sure that most of the Republicans who are they find stuff every once in a while to go after or they and I bet you most of them don't know what this

is about at all, have any idea. There's things I don't you know, I don't actually I've never gone in Nascar. I don't know I know what it's about. There's a lot of stuff I don't go to. So but what is this about? What is their thing about? Yeah? I mean, what is this about? Is kind of the biggest question

because it's all so vague. These bills are terrifying because the language is so open ended, and they are and a lot of end You're also exactly right that a lot of these people don't really understand what drag shows are and they don't have to because this is all sort of coded language for an attack on the LGBTQIA plus community, and the wording of this bill talks about drag as adult entertainment, which is insidious within itself to say that someone dressing this way is only appropriate for

adults when they're not doing anything that's adult oriented. And it also talks about them not being able to do it within range where a minor could see, right, which means no pride parades, no outdoor pride events, But it also means things like what if the window is viewable from the sidewalk in a drag bar. I mean, it's all so subjective and it's also open to interpretation that they can really kind of go wherever they want with it.

Not to mention the fact that the bill defines this as this adult entertainment or adult cabaret, as men or women dressing as the doing male or female impersonation, and that within itself is also something that who is interpreting this bill? Lee who gets to decide whether he in a cheerleadero skirt counts or not? You know who's Billa.

So he is the He's the one who the governor, who the photo surfacet of Now he's the one who was and the photosurfast of him in high school dressed as a cheerleader at some sort of high school events, and everyone started pointing this out and saying, this is pretty hypocritical, and he said, no, no, no, that doesn't count. That is not of a Korean nature, that is not lewd this other. And so he has decided that he

is the person who gets to decide these things. Oh no, cheerleader outfits have never been considered like sexual at all, but now, but by that definition, even though most of us in twenty three understand that trans women are women and transmit are men, they're this bill can be interpreted

any number of ways. And so if someone is enforcing us who doesn't believe that, who is to say that that trans person walking down the street in public, if I view them as a male or female impersonator and they're within the eyesight of a child, will they're bringing the law by walking to the grocery store. That's terrifying. When I was and we talked about this a little bit.

When I was in the Senate, we were reforming No Child Left Behind, which didn't work very well, and I had a piece in it called pseudo discrimination that that would protect LGBT kids Q plus kids who would give them the same rights as were given to other kids, uh, you know, race and gender. And I went to a colleague, a Republican colleague who was a friend of mine, and

asked him to sponsor this. And what what you could do is if a kid was being bullied for being lgbtqu they to go to the principal, go to the supertend schools and if they didn't get any that they could sue, they could sue us like the other kids was talking about. And and this senator said to me, oh, if they could do that, yeah, they'll just act more gay. Well first of all, and I said, I said, I said no, no, no, I don't want to say his name.

I said no. And he goes, oh, you watch. Well, I hope he's watching right now and knows that I am acting this gay no matter what happens around. But well, kids in school, lgbtis in school. I have great absolutee There's all kinds of bullying obviously, and this is would this would really have helped kids? Absolutely? Would? I can from my personal experience. I grew up in a small

town in Connecticut. I was very very flamboyant, and myself from a very young age, and I was identified by other people as queer before I even understood how to do that myself. And I was mercilessly bullied in school and I went to my vice principal who told me that I should probably tone it down a little, So thank you for working on that. It's I mean, it's but it was terribly frustrating. And the idea that children are somehow going to be made more queer by access

to queer culture. I mean I was very queer without any access. And when I finally found drag, which is where it, you know, it was not like, oh, that's a cool job, I want to do that when I grow up. It was there's a container for who I am. There's something out there for me, and that saved my life.

I mean, suicide rates among queer kids and suicidal ideation is more than half of trans and non binary kids of suicidal ideation, which when I heard that statistic, I was like, that seems low, because every queer person I know has thought about suicide in their youth. And I barely made it out of my childhood. But I did because I had a little bit of access to this glimpse of a world outside that would accept me for who I am, and not just in spite of who

I am, but because of who I am. Hi here, Hi here, and I'm going to call I'm gonna start thinking you. You can support the ACLUS work by donating at the link below. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back after this. Well, that's that's our show for tonight, and that's my time as your host. But stay tuned next week when your host will be John Leguizamo. And if you want to find more, may

check out the Franken Podcast. But let me and then they don't want me to do this for sure on time. I can't tell you how great it's been being here working with these folks all week. They've just been great. I'm just sorry Trump wasn't indicted. Now, explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show wherever you get your podcast. Watch The Daily Show weeknights and eleven tenth Central, own Comedy Central, and stream

full episodes anytime on Fairmount Clubs. This has been a Comedy Central podcast