Name: Is It Time to Start Another Political Party?
Uploaded: 2026-01-29T17:15:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Is It Time to Start Another Political Party?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-01-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Is It Time to Start Another Political Party?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-01-29. Transcript available.

But I love your energy about like, yeah, like how do we stay hopeful, right?
How do we stay hopeful when it seems like it feels almost impossible
to how do you vote somebody in that would be able to stay in the tide of it all?
Theo, this is where we've got to take a deep breath
and accept our very serious responsibilities as citizens, okay?
And you think back, and I don't want to romanticize this,
but you think back on American history.
And, you know, we read all about this when we were in the third grade, you know?
Those were pretty brave guys, George Washington and Jefferson and all those
guys,
taking on the British Empire, you know?
No one in a million years thought you could defeat the British Empire.
For sure.
And they did.
And a lot of, thousands died.
Thousands of them died.
It was a pretty bloody situation.
And then you think about the Civil War where very brave people said,
you know what, slavery is a moral abomination.
We're not going to accept it anymore.
God knows what that Civil War was about.
Hundreds of thousands of people on both sides died, you know?
And then you think about, and I think about this, you know,
December was it December 7th, 1941.
The United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor.
We were totally unprepared.
Do you know that?
We were totally unprepared.
We had to fight a war against Japan, a war against Hitler in Europe, right?
Totally unprepared.
And yet the country came together, you know?
Instead of building cars, they built tanks and planes.
Literally in two or three years, we had put the Nazis on the defensive.
The war was one.
So what I'm saying is this is perhaps the most difficult moment, in my view,
in modern American history.
And it's because Trump is an authoritarian who happens not to believe in
democracy.
And I think he's corrupt.
And it's tough.
But we have won great battles in the past, and I believe if we do not allow our
people
to become divided up, we will win this as well.
And not only defeat Trumpism, which I worked very hard to do,
but also create the kind of nation that we can become.
Healthcare is a human right.
You know what?
If you have some kids, children, they have a right to get all the education
they need.
We are not some poor third world country.
Right.
Right?
So we have got to have a vision of where we want to go as a nation.
And I think if we fight for that vision, if we bring people together, we can
succeed.
When you speak with guys like Mamdani, did you have any suggestions for him?
Did you give him any advice?
Well, actually, he followed my political career pretty closely.
He studied what I did as mayor of Burlington back in the 80s, the campaign that
I ran.
Yeah, so we chat every now and then.
I am extraordinarily impressed by his energy, his intelligence.
He has a really good persona.
He's out there with the people.
And I think he's going to do a really great job for the city of New York.
Do you feel like the Democratic Party kind of takes him seriously as like a
future candidate
for like elections or for presidential elections?
Now you are raising a sensitive issue.
Is it a sensitive issue?
Sensitive issue.
Sure it is.
But yeah, do they look at him as like a one-off, like an outsider?
No.
Look, what does it mean to be the establishment?
The establishment means in a corrupt political system.
If you're the establishment, what you do is you leave this, you get on the
phone and you talk to your billionaire friends and say,
look, I'm setting up a super PAC.
I want your help to win the congressional race in Arizona and California.
Put in, I want you to put in $30 million each, okay?
I'll have $300 million.
Ten of you put $300 million.
I get the ads going next week.
We're in business, right?
That's crazy.
All right, that's the way the system works.
All right.
And every now and then, you have somebody like Mamdani who comes along and says,
I don't want your money.
Not only do I not want your money, we're going to take you bastards on, okay?
Do they want them?
No.
So the Democratic Party right now is kind of split.
I am an independent, okay, to be honest with you.
I'm the longest-serving independent.
I caucus with the Democrats, but I'm an independent.
Proud of it.
They get really independent, too, when it's time to put you on the ballot, too,
I notice.
Right.
That's fair.
So I work with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Primo Jayapal and Roe O'Connor
and a bunch of other people.
And we are trying to move the Democratic Party to be a party that stands with
working-class Americans and has the courage to take on powerful special
interests.
Now, there's another faction of the Democratic Party that, you know, doesn't
like Trump for, I think, a lot of right reasons.
I agree with him.
But basically cuddles up to the moneyed interests.
And that's the vision that we have.
Mamdani is part of the movement that I've helped try to build, Alexandria as
well, and others, many, many others.
So that's kind of the split that we're seeing within the Democratic Party.
Got it.
Do you feel like you've been in politics for a long time and you're growing in
to be an adult now?
In your years?
By an adult.
I don't know.
My grandchildren will tell you I'm not, but I don't know.
But I just mean, do you feel like at some point, like, it's time to start a new
party, like, more than ever?
Like, do you feel that?
You know?
Because all you, I mean, you have guys like, like, you talk about guys like Ro
Khanna.
People are inspired by him.
Like, you know, like, I got to sit down with him.
I like a lot of things he has to say.
Oh, he's a good guy.
An internet bill of rights.
I feel like he has, like, you know, he's a forward thinker.
Yes, he is.
Smart guy.
Yeah.
And so I feel like if you've got a band of people, it's not that hard to find
the people that people love.
Good.
All right.
Have I thought about it?
Yeah, like for about 400 years.
That's all you thought about it?
All right.
All right.
But, all right.
Here is, this is the reality that I have to deal with every day.
In my view, the Republican Party, which used to be a conservative party, a
small government type party, has become under Trump kind of a right wing extremist
party.
Okay.
There are some exceptions, to be sure.
But that's kind of where it is.
Democratic Party, as I mentioned to you, their establishment more or less wants
to protect the status quo.
And then there are those of us who want to bring about fundamental changes in
the economic and political life of the country.
That's where you are.
Now, starting a third party is something, when I was mayor of the city of Burlington,
in a sense, we did.
Okay.
I took on, I defeated a Democratic mayor.
Yeah.
And so we had the Republicans, we had the Democrats.
That must have felt awesome, was it?
You know, it felt pretty good.
I had been mayor for 10 years, and nobody thought we could win.
We won by 10 votes.
Oh, yeah.
And by the way, I say that to people, if you think it's hard, you could do it.
We did it.
All right.
That was a long time ago.
And we started kind of unofficially.
We called it independent party of sorts.
So it can be done.
And there are strong independents today running for office who have a chance to
win.
But you ask about starting a party within today's political climate, it is very
hard.
All right.
For example, you want to start a party in many states, you're going to have to
get enormous numbers of signatures in every county in the state to even get on
the ballot.
Because the two-party system does not want you on the ballot.
Of course.
Okay?
And, you know, you likely don't have a lot of money to do all that stuff.
So it ain't easy, but there are people who are thinking about it.
Right now, where my energy is, is to transform the Democratic Party.
I, you know, when many years ago on the Franklin Donald Roosevelt, the Harry
Truman, the Democratic Party was considered to be the party of the American
working class.
Unfortunately, that has changed over the years.
I want, once again, to have a Democratic Party which has the guts to stand up
to the billionaire class and create an economy that works for everybody and not
just the very rich.
Do you feel like it's a time where we just need to be in the streets more than
ever, where people need to be revolting?
Do you think it takes a revolution to change?
Like, what's really going to change?
It doesn't seem like voting is going to get us there.
Now, I do like the idea that you have a guy like Mamdani that inspires you and
makes you feel hope and you feel like it's different and he's against an
establishment, even if it feels like it's a local one, whatever that is, that
he feels like it's different, right?
I agree.
That is exciting.
That is exhilarating.
But is that, is a guy like that, is like a Tom Sawyer like him, can he go
through all the rapids of the, like, dirty Mississippi that is fucking politics
and get us to somewhere new?
Mamdani is, he's not a savior.
He's going to be a good mayor.
We need a hundred maddani's.
We need what I call a political revolution.
And that is, you know, what the establishment does, you know, they're very
greedy people.
They could care less about ordinary people.
They want more wealth and power.
But the ugliest thing that they do is through the media that they own, et
cetera, et cetera, is they tell people that they are powerless and they have no
power.
And the answer is, when people are organized and stand together, they do have
power.
And that's what we're trying to do all over this country, bring people, not
allow Trump and his friends, I don't care if you're black, you're white, you're
gay, you're straight, who cares?
You know, you're Muslim, you're Jewish, whatever you may be.
Let's stand together.
Because, again, I've been all over this country.
People understand that health care is a right.
They want a good education system.
They don't think they should be 1% owning more wealth than the bottom, 93%.
They're concerned about climate change.
They don't want this country involved in endless wars.
Are there disagreements on abortion and other issues?
There are.
But, by and large, you'd be surprised.
I was in, a few months ago, I went to Mingo County, West Virginia.
You know where that is?
I don't know where it is.
I've spent some time in West Virginia, though.
I like it.
Yeah, I love West Virginia.
It's a beautiful state.
It's a poor state.
I went to the county, you know, Trump won West Virginia by over 70% of the vote.
I went to the county where he did the best.
He got 74% of the vote.
And I went to that county precisely because he got 74%.
I want to hear what people are thinking about it.
Walk into a meeting.
It wasn't the largest rally we ever did.
Four or five hundred people in the middle of nowhere.
This is nowhere.
That's it.
There's a picture of it.
A lot of people thought you were probably giving away free Ben and Jerry's out
there, too.
Nope.
And there it is.
There's a picture of the-
Oh, that's nice.
Yeah, a big gym there.
And it turns out, this is Trump country.
These are decent people.
They're worried about their kids.
A veteran up there, worried about the needs of veterans.
You know, mom worried about a baby.
So I'm not saying, you know, Vermont's a liberal state.
West Virginia's a conservative state.
I'm not saying that there aren't differences of the thing.
There are.
Oh, yeah.
But you'd be surprised.
This is the good news.
That as Americans, we share a lot of common values.
We know that so many people fought and died for democracy.
What does democracy mean?
It means that just because I'm the president, I don't have the right to shut
you up.
I don't have the right to politically prosecute you because you're against me.
You disagree with me, fine, I'll argue with you.
You beat me in an election, fine, I'm unhappy.
That's the way life goes, right?
All right.
See, the American people don't want a few billion, few people, billionaires
controlling the economy.
They don't want an authoritarian society.
They want an economy that works for all.
Those are the common threads, I think, that we can build a political movement
around.
Well, I don't think people care if they're, I think people less and less even
associate with a party anymore.
I think that's happened in the past two years.
That, to me, feels like it's happened more than ever.
That, to me, feels like it's happened more than ever.
That, to me, feels like it's happened more than ever.
That, to me, feels like it's happened more than ever.
That, to me, feels like it's happened more than ever.

Is It Time to Start Another Political Party?

But I love your energy about like, yeah, like how do we stay hopeful, right?
How do we stay hopeful when it seems like it feels almost impossible
to how do you vote somebody in that would be able to stay in the tide of it all?
Theo, this is where we've got to take a deep breath
and accept our very serious responsibilities as citizens, okay?
And you think back, and I don't want to romanticize this,
but you think back on American history.
And, you know, we read all about this when we were in the third grade, you know?
Those were pretty brave guys, George Washington and Jefferson and all those
guys,
taking on the British Empire, you know?
No one in a million years thought you could defeat the British Empire.
For sure.
And they did.
And a lot of, thousands died.
Thousands of them died.
It was a pretty bloody situation.
And then you think about the Civil War where very brave people said,
you know what, slavery is a moral abomination.
We're not going to accept it anymore.
God knows what that Civil War was about.
Hundreds of thousands of people on both sides died, you know?
And then you think about, and I think about this, you know,
December was it December 7th, 1941.
The United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor.
We were totally unprepared.
Do you know that?
We were totally unprepared.
We had to fight a war against Japan, a war against Hitler in Europe, right?
Totally unprepared.
And yet the country came together, you know?
Instead of building cars, they built tanks and planes.
Literally in two or three years, we had put the Nazis on the defensive.
The war was one.
So what I'm saying is this is perhaps the most difficult moment, in my view,
in modern American history.
And it's because Trump is an authoritarian who happens not to believe in
democracy.
And I think he's corrupt.
And it's tough.
But we have won great battles in the past, and I believe if we do not allow our
people
to become divided up, we will win this as well.
And not only defeat Trumpism, which I worked very hard to do,
but also create the kind of nation that we can become.
Healthcare is a human right.
You know what?
If you have some kids, children, they have a right to get all the education
they need.
We are not some poor third world country.
Right.
Right?
So we have got to have a vision of where we want to go as a nation.
And I think if we fight for that vision, if we bring people together, we can
succeed.
When you speak with guys like Mamdani, did you have any suggestions for him?
Did you give him any advice?
Well, actually, he followed my political career pretty closely.
He studied what I did as mayor of Burlington back in the 80s, the campaign that
I ran.
Yeah, so we chat every now and then.
I am extraordinarily impressed by his energy, his intelligence.
He has a really good persona.
He's out there with the people.
And I think he's going to do a really great job for the city of New York.
Do you feel like the Democratic Party kind of takes him seriously as like a
future candidate
for like elections or for presidential elections?
Now you are raising a sensitive issue.
Is it a sensitive issue?
Sensitive issue.
Sure it is.
But yeah, do they look at him as like a one-off, like an outsider?
No.
Look, what does it mean to be the establishment?
The establishment means in a corrupt political system.
If you're the establishment, what you do is you leave this, you get on the
phone and you talk to your billionaire friends and say,
look, I'm setting up a super PAC.
I want your help to win the congressional race in Arizona and California.
Put in, I want you to put in $30 million each, okay?
I'll have $300 million.
Ten of you put $300 million.
I get the ads going next week.
We're in business, right?
That's crazy.
All right, that's the way the system works.
All right.
And every now and then, you have somebody like Mamdani who comes along and says,
I don't want your money.
Not only do I not want your money, we're going to take you bastards on, okay?
Do they want them?
No.
So the Democratic Party right now is kind of split.
I am an independent, okay, to be honest with you.
I'm the longest-serving independent.
I caucus with the Democrats, but I'm an independent.
Proud of it.
They get really independent, too, when it's time to put you on the ballot, too,
I notice.
Right.
That's fair.
So I work with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Primo Jayapal and Roe O'Connor
and a bunch of other people.
And we are trying to move the Democratic Party to be a party that stands with
working-class Americans and has the courage to take on powerful special
interests.
Now, there's another faction of the Democratic Party that, you know, doesn't
like Trump for, I think, a lot of right reasons.
I agree with him.
But basically cuddles up to the moneyed interests.
And that's the vision that we have.
Mamdani is part of the movement that I've helped try to build, Alexandria as
well, and others, many, many others.
So that's kind of the split that we're seeing within the Democratic Party.
Got it.
Do you feel like you've been in politics for a long time and you're growing in
to be an adult now?
In your years?
By an adult.
I don't know.
My grandchildren will tell you I'm not, but I don't know.
But I just mean, do you feel like at some point, like, it's time to start a new
party, like, more than ever?
Like, do you feel that?
You know?
Because all you, I mean, you have guys like, like, you talk about guys like Ro
Khanna.
People are inspired by him.
Like, you know, like, I got to sit down with him.
I like a lot of things he has to say.
Oh, he's a good guy.
An internet bill of rights.
I feel like he has, like, you know, he's a forward thinker.
Yes, he is.
Smart guy.
Yeah.
And so I feel like if you've got a band of people, it's not that hard to find
the people that people love.
Good.
All right.
Have I thought about it?
Yeah, like for about 400 years.
That's all you thought about it?
All right.
All right.
But, all right.
Here is, this is the reality that I have to deal with every day.
In my view, the Republican Party, which used to be a conservative party, a
small government type party, has become under Trump kind of a right wing extremist
party.
Okay.
There are some exceptions, to be sure.
But that's kind of where it is.
Democratic Party, as I mentioned to you, their establishment more or less wants
to protect the status quo.
And then there are those of us who want to bring about fundamental changes in
the economic and political life of the country.
That's where you are.
Now, starting a third party is something, when I was mayor of the city of Burlington,
in a sense, we did.
Okay.
I took on, I defeated a Democratic mayor.
Yeah.
And so we had the Republicans, we had the Democrats.
That must have felt awesome, was it?
You know, it felt pretty good.
I had been mayor for 10 years, and nobody thought we could win.
We won by 10 votes.
Oh, yeah.
And by the way, I say that to people, if you think it's hard, you could do it.
We did it.
All right.
That was a long time ago.
And we started kind of unofficially.
We called it independent party of sorts.
So it can be done.
And there are strong independents today running for office who have a chance to
win.
But you ask about starting a party within today's political climate, it is very
hard.
All right.
For example, you want to start a party in many states, you're going to have to
get enormous numbers of signatures in every county in the state to even get on
the ballot.
Because the two-party system does not want you on the ballot.
Of course.
Okay?
And, you know, you likely don't have a lot of money to do all that stuff.
So it ain't easy, but there are people who are thinking about it.
Right now, where my energy is, is to transform the Democratic Party.
I, you know, when many years ago on the Franklin Donald Roosevelt, the Harry
Truman, the Democratic Party was considered to be the party of the American
working class.
Unfortunately, that has changed over the years.
I want, once again, to have a Democratic Party which has the guts to stand up
to the billionaire class and create an economy that works for everybody and not
just the very rich.
Do you feel like it's a time where we just need to be in the streets more than
ever, where people need to be revolting?
Do you think it takes a revolution to change?
Like, what's really going to change?
It doesn't seem like voting is going to get us there.
Now, I do like the idea that you have a guy like Mamdani that inspires you and
makes you feel hope and you feel like it's different and he's against an
establishment, even if it feels like it's a local one, whatever that is, that
he feels like it's different, right?
I agree.
That is exciting.
That is exhilarating.
But is that, is a guy like that, is like a Tom Sawyer like him, can he go
through all the rapids of the, like, dirty Mississippi that is fucking politics
and get us to somewhere new?
Mamdani is, he's not a savior.
He's going to be a good mayor.
We need a hundred maddani's.
We need what I call a political revolution.
And that is, you know, what the establishment does, you know, they're very
greedy people.
They could care less about ordinary people.
They want more wealth and power.
But the ugliest thing that they do is through the media that they own, et
cetera, et cetera, is they tell people that they are powerless and they have no
power.
And the answer is, when people are organized and stand together, they do have
power.
And that's what we're trying to do all over this country, bring people, not
allow Trump and his friends, I don't care if you're black, you're white, you're
gay, you're straight, who cares?
You know, you're Muslim, you're Jewish, whatever you may be.
Let's stand together.
Because, again, I've been all over this country.
People understand that health care is a right.
They want a good education system.
They don't think they should be 1% owning more wealth than the bottom, 93%.
They're concerned about climate change.
They don't want this country involved in endless wars.
Are there disagreements on abortion and other issues?
There are.
But, by and large, you'd be surprised.
I was in, a few months ago, I went to Mingo County, West Virginia.
You know where that is?
I don't know where it is.
I've spent some time in West Virginia, though.
I like it.
Yeah, I love West Virginia.
It's a beautiful state.
It's a poor state.
I went to the county, you know, Trump won West Virginia by over 70% of the vote.
I went to the county where he did the best.
He got 74% of the vote.
And I went to that county precisely because he got 74%.
I want to hear what people are thinking about it.
Walk into a meeting.
It wasn't the largest rally we ever did.
Four or five hundred people in the middle of nowhere.
This is nowhere.
That's it.
There's a picture of it.
A lot of people thought you were probably giving away free Ben and Jerry's out
there, too.
Nope.
And there it is.
There's a picture of the-
Oh, that's nice.
Yeah, a big gym there.
And it turns out, this is Trump country.
These are decent people.
They're worried about their kids.
A veteran up there, worried about the needs of veterans.
You know, mom worried about a baby.
So I'm not saying, you know, Vermont's a liberal state.
West Virginia's a conservative state.
I'm not saying that there aren't differences of the thing.
There are.
Oh, yeah.
But you'd be surprised.
This is the good news.
That as Americans, we share a lot of common values.
We know that so many people fought and died for democracy.
What does democracy mean?
It means that just because I'm the president, I don't have the right to shut
you up.
I don't have the right to politically prosecute you because you're against me.
You disagree with me, fine, I'll argue with you.
You beat me in an election, fine, I'm unhappy.
That's the way life goes, right?
All right.
See, the American people don't want a few billion, few people, billionaires
controlling the economy.
They don't want an authoritarian society.
They want an economy that 