Episode Transcript
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0:07
Welcome everybody to Crystal Kyle and Friends. Today we're
0:09
going to be talking to Dave Smith. I will
0:11
proceed to yell at him for being a libertarian.
0:15
That is why we invited him on the show. I will
0:17
berate him repeatedly and that should be fun. Tell
0:19
him you made him like Dennis Prager actually. Yes,
0:21
that's right. He made you like whatever. This is
0:23
already off to a good start. I'm a Prager stan. They
0:26
call me a Prager stan. I'm
0:28
all about Orthodox, Judaism, Zionism, things
0:31
of that nature. Yes, indeed. No, he
0:33
had a great debate versus
0:36
Dennis Prager and Batia that we enjoyed.
0:38
And I thought he in particular did
0:40
a fantastic job. Cenk always does a
0:42
great job in these exchanges. Dave
0:45
has such a depth of knowledge and
0:47
was able to communicate things in a way
0:49
that actually made Dennis Prager just unable to
0:51
really respond. He was sort of sputtering at
0:53
points. So I talked to him about that.
0:55
Maybe we'll also talk to him a little
0:57
bit about libertarianism too. That'll be fun. I'm
0:59
going to ask him if Prager is as big of
1:01
an asshole in real life because we have some
1:03
or I have some information from behind the scenes
1:05
where somebody was like, this guy's a real fucking
1:08
prick in real life. And so I want to
1:10
ask, I want to ask Dave Smith if he
1:12
got that sense from Prager because sometimes it's the
1:14
opposite. Sometimes somebody looks like an asshole, you know,
1:16
on screen and then in real life you're like,
1:18
that person's actually very sweet. Well,
1:21
Sagar, I won't say what Sagar said because
1:23
he hasn't made that public. So we'll just
1:25
ask Dave. Well, you just outed Sagar as
1:27
being one of the sources behind the scenes. I didn't say that. He
1:30
actually wasn't my source, to be fair. I wasn't saying that.
1:32
I have a different source. You definitely said that. But all
1:34
right. A lot of stuff to get to. So before we
1:36
get into that, we wanted to. I
1:39
mean, I tweeted about this when I first saw it. I
1:41
know you guys already covered it. I
1:44
didn't put it in my show from yesterday. But
1:47
now we're going to talk about it. So Netanyahu
1:50
released a video and in the video,
1:53
he's basically like berating American
1:55
college kids who are protesting,
1:58
calling them anti Semites. comparing
2:00
them to Nazis and
2:02
imploring Biden and the
2:05
U.S. government and the various police forces
2:07
to crack down, do something about this. That's the gist
2:09
of the video, so before I say any more, we'll
2:11
watch and then we'll break it down. What's
2:14
happening on America's college campuses is
2:16
horrific. Anti-Semitic mobs
2:18
have taken over leading universities. They
2:21
call for the annihilation of Israel. They
2:23
attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish
2:26
faculty. This is
2:28
reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the
2:30
1930s. It's
2:32
unconscionable. It has to be
2:35
stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned
2:37
unequivocally. But that's not what happened. The
2:40
response of several university presidents was
2:42
shameful. Now, fortunately, state,
2:45
local, federal officials, many of
2:48
them have responded differently, but there has to be
2:50
more. More has to be done. It
2:52
has to be done not only because they
2:54
attack Israel. That's bad enough. Not only because
2:56
they want to kill Jews wherever they are.
2:58
That's bad enough. It's also when you
3:00
listen to them. It's also because
3:03
they say not only death to Israel, death
3:05
to the Jews, but death to America.
3:08
And this tells us that there is
3:11
an anti-Semitic surge here that has terrible
3:13
consequences. We see this
3:15
exponential rise of anti-Semitism throughout America
3:17
and throughout Western societies as Israel
3:19
tries to defend itself against genocidal
3:21
terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind
3:24
civilians. Yet it is Israel that
3:26
is falsely accused of genocide, Israel
3:29
that is falsely accused of starvation, and
3:31
all sundry war crimes. It's all one
3:33
big libel. But that's not you. Oh
3:36
my God. Every single
3:38
part of that was
3:40
a fucking lie. Let's be clear about
3:42
this. So why are the protesters out
3:44
there? It's actually very simple. It's very
3:46
straightforward. Number one, divest from Israel. These
3:48
various colleges, these various universities that have
3:50
different deals with Israel, divest from Israel.
3:52
That's thing number one. Thing number two
3:54
is stop the genocide. Both stop
3:57
Israel committing the genocide and also stop
3:59
the U.S. from arming and funding
4:01
Israel as they do the genocide. This
4:03
is the point of all of the
4:05
protesters. What these people do is
4:08
they straw man the opponent and they
4:10
act like they're out there saying
4:12
Hitler was base. That's not at
4:15
all what happened. What they do is they take
4:17
phrases like, from the river to the sea, Palestine
4:19
will be free, and things like intifada. They take
4:21
those and they twist the meaning as if they're
4:23
saying, kill all Jews. Except I
4:25
got bad news for Netanyahu. A lot of the
4:27
people leading the protests are
4:29
Jewish. Jewish Voice for
4:31
Peace, a pro-Palestine Jewish group, was
4:33
banned at Columbia in like
4:35
mid-October. Did anybody come out then and say,
4:38
you know what, this is anti-Semitic? This is
4:40
cracking down on free speech? This is unacceptable. Why
4:42
are you silencing Jews? Why are you Muslim Jews?
4:44
They didn't say anything because they don't
4:46
want that speech. They don't want speech that's
4:48
critical of Israel and pro-Palestine. And so he
4:50
goes out there, guys, you're
4:53
looking at a man who's responsible for 42,510
4:55
dead Palestinians. Of
4:58
those, 38,621 are civilians. 15,780 dead children. 10,091 dead women. And
5:07
that's to say nothing of the hundreds of
5:10
thousands of homes that have been bombed, 137
5:12
journalists killed, 2
5:14
million Palestinians now homeless because they
5:16
wiped Gaza off of the map,
5:19
322 healthcare facilities being bombed. He
5:21
is responsible for all of that
5:23
death and devastation and carnage on
5:25
purpose. And he has the nerve
5:27
to call college kids Nazis. Look
5:30
in the fucking mirror. You're the closest thing to
5:32
a Nazi I've ever seen. How
5:36
many how many deaths on these college
5:38
campuses from these from these Nazis? A
5:40
whopping. How many injuries? How
5:43
many injuries? I mean, somebody got their eye poked,
5:45
I heard. Oh, yeah. Except that didn't happen. Except
5:47
that didn't happen. I was literally
5:49
someone walked by with a Palestinian flag and I was
5:52
fucking it wires. It's just like,
5:54
OK, so there are so many layers
5:56
to this. First of
5:58
all, the GAL. of
6:01
this foreign leader to smear
6:03
our college kids as Nazis. And
6:07
by the way, he really doesn't just
6:09
smear them. He says this is
6:11
reminiscent of German universities in the 1930s. So
6:14
he's effectively comparing all of
6:16
America to Nazi
6:18
Germany in the 30s. That's
6:21
really the comparison he's making here. Shame
6:24
on every single one of the
6:26
politicians, Democrats, Republicans, all the way
6:28
up to Joe Biden, who
6:30
have bought into this bullshit moral,
6:32
I shouldn't say bought into, have
6:35
helped to craft and invent this
6:38
moral panic and complete smear
6:40
of these kids, which
6:42
is now nationwide, right? From New
6:44
York all the way to California,
6:46
Texas, all of these campuses, all
6:48
of the authoritarian crackdown that you're
6:50
seeing of the sort, you know, these
6:52
are the sort of things that I was terrified of happening under
6:55
a Trump. And now here
6:57
you have Democrats and Republicans signing
6:59
up for yes, let's do the
7:01
authoritarian crackdown. Let's invite the cops
7:03
into UT Austin and crack heads,
7:05
even though there aren't even allegations
7:07
that there was any instance of
7:09
antisemitism, any instance of violence, there
7:11
isn't even a whiff of that.
7:14
And they preemptively bring in, you
7:16
know, including with the encouragement of
7:18
a foreign leader here, cops to
7:20
arrest protesters and by the way,
7:22
arrest a journalist and throw him
7:24
on the ground. I
7:27
feel like I'm going crazy here. And then to
7:30
add to that, the fact that
7:32
there is no bigger villain on the planet
7:35
right now than Netanyahu. How many hospitals has he
7:37
bombed? How many schools has he bombed? How many universities
7:39
has he bombed? You wanna talk about safety
7:41
on campus. He has destroyed every university in
7:43
the Gaza Strip. Literally every
7:46
university. They did controlled demolitions of
7:48
every university in Gaza. Yeah.
7:52
Yeah, and you're lecturing us. And
7:55
let me also say this. Let's
7:58
say that the protest team. Let's
8:00
say they were genuinely offensive.
8:03
Guess what? We have a
8:05
First Amendment and it protects even
8:08
offensive, in fact, especially offensive
8:11
speech. So I
8:13
don't want to hear it. You can be
8:15
offended. Okay, be offended. That's your right.
8:18
Be offended. But guess what? In America,
8:20
we still have the right to say
8:22
things even that are controversial, even
8:24
that are uncomfortable, even that are
8:26
downright offensive. Okay? So
8:29
the gall of these people, and then they would
8:31
be the same ones. The minute Chuck Schumer, remember
8:33
when he said, hey, Netanyahu should, there should be
8:35
new elections and Netanyahu should go. They'd
8:37
be the same ones to tell, oh, you should
8:39
stay out of our domestic politics. You know, we're
8:41
funding you. You hear you come with your hand
8:43
out. You want us to keep
8:45
our mouths quiet while you do a genocide
8:48
and murder some of our people to American
8:50
aid workers murdered in the
8:52
world's central kitchen aid workers. And
8:54
you want us. I just can't. I said,
8:56
quote, more has to be done. Okay.
9:00
What constitutes more National Guard? What do you mean?
9:02
What does that mean? What is more? I can't
9:05
see NYPD already went and cracked some fucking skulls
9:07
when they shouldn't even been there. By
9:09
the way, I mean, they're calling for another Kent
9:11
State. That's really what I feel here before. That's what
9:13
they want. That's the quiet part. All right.
9:16
You're right. They're calling for another Kent
9:18
State. They want the National Guard to come in. They
9:20
want violence done against these protesters all the while screaming.
9:22
It's the protesters who are violent. They're violent. They're violent.
9:25
Let's attack them first. What are we doing? This
9:27
is total police state type stuff. It
9:29
does remind me of the anti-Vietnam war
9:31
protests. In retrospect, everybody
9:34
and their mothers like, well, obviously the
9:36
Vietnam War protesters were correct. We
9:39
were nay-palming innocent villagers.
9:42
Landless peasants were being hit with Agent Orange. You
9:44
had diseases shoot through the roof because all the
9:46
weaponry, chemical weapons that we were using, everybody
9:49
in retrospect says, you know what? They were
9:51
right. By the way, people now do that with
9:53
the Iraq war. Oh my God, everybody who
9:55
was skeptical, turns out they were
9:57
right. Now that's the consensus. You don't think
9:59
the same... Same fucking thing is gonna happen here
10:02
when you have 42,000 Palestinians
10:04
who've been killed, hospitals,
10:07
clinics, marketplaces,
10:09
factories, every
10:11
kind of civilian infrastructure you can imagine
10:14
has been bombed. You don't think
10:16
there's gonna come a day five years from
10:18
now, 10 years from now, where everybody looks back and goes,
10:20
Jesus fucking Christ, what are we thinking? And by the way,
10:23
all the fucking assholes, what's that guy's name
10:25
something? Price? Greg Price or something? He's one
10:27
of these conservative fucking blowhards who doesn't know
10:29
his ass from his elbow and he's out
10:31
there cheering on Texas police, cracking
10:33
skulls of protesters. Meanwhile, seven and a
10:35
half minutes ago, this motherfucker was a
10:37
free speech on college campus guy. Well,
10:40
Greg Abbott literally passed a
10:42
law to protect free speech on college campus
10:44
when he was worried about like, you know,
10:46
Ben Shapiro or whoever not being allowed to
10:48
speak. But he's the first
10:51
to send in the cops. Well, he wasn't the
10:53
first, but one of them to send in the
10:55
cops. And he didn't even in his tweet explaining
10:57
why they're sending in the cops. He didn't even
11:00
claim there was violence. No, he said that these
11:02
protests are anti-Semitic rhetoric and we're not going to
11:04
allow it. It's like, again, OK, even
11:07
if you think that's true, which is a lie, even
11:09
if you think it's true, it's still
11:11
protected. It's still protected. Like,
11:13
I don't want to hear someone's pointing out
11:15
on Twitter to Ryan pointing this
11:17
on the way. This is just down
11:20
the road from Barry Weiss's little free speech. The
11:22
free speech university. Free speech university. All
11:24
of a sudden, crack the protesters skulls. Fucking
11:26
frauds. Every last one of them. Ben Shapiro,
11:29
by the way, Dave Rubin, where the fuck are
11:31
you? Where are you? Riding in with
11:33
your with your cape on that says free
11:35
speech on the back. Oh, I'm defending Western
11:37
values and enlighten the Enlightenment. A Western civilization.
11:39
Here I am. I'm all about speech. Not
11:42
that speech. Not that speech. By the way, how many laws
11:44
are there on the books at the state level, which say
11:46
you can't criticize Israel? That's right. Remember,
11:48
in order to get hurricane relief money in Houston,
11:50
Texas, you had to sign a form saying I
11:52
will not boycott Israel. How many speakers were kicked
11:54
off a college campus in like Abby Martin or
11:56
Ronnie Ocolik, because they were like, I'm going to
11:58
criticize Israel. protest Israel. You're not
12:01
allowed to do that. So you're allowed to boycott
12:03
and protest the United States of America in the
12:05
United States of America. But you can't criticize Israel.
12:08
Well, then Yahoo released this fucking video. That's
12:10
why we always knew that the right was
12:12
full of shit on free speech because they
12:14
never, I mean, even before October 7th, we
12:16
obviously had issues, had instances of pro Palestinian
12:18
voices getting canceled, get it fired. It's at
12:20
Mark Lamont Hill. We've hosted some of them
12:22
on the show and never
12:25
a word about that. Mary Weiss, when she was
12:27
in college, used to be in the, you
12:29
know, let's cancel the Palestinian or, you know, Palestinian
12:31
sympathetic professors herself. And she claimed, oh, I
12:33
changed. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. No, you
12:36
didn't. Here you are. Your
12:39
point about the echoes of history and
12:41
how it's very easy 50 years later to
12:43
be like, oh, yeah, there's Vietnam War. They
12:45
were right. And we were wrong what we
12:47
did then. Oh, we learned our lesson moving
12:49
on. Did you see this Columbia University was
12:52
one of the sites of
12:54
some of those protests, you know, taking over
12:57
university buildings, et cetera. They have a
12:59
piece on their website that actually, you
13:01
know, explains how wrong they were in
13:03
their response. I want to read you
13:05
some of this. It's incredible. They say
13:07
Columbia is a far different place today than
13:09
it was in the spring of 1968 when
13:12
protesters took over university buildings amid discontent
13:14
about the Vietnam War. After a week
13:16
long standoff, New York City police stormed
13:18
the campus and arrested more than 700
13:20
people. The fallout dogged Columbia for years.
13:23
It took decades for the university to
13:25
recover from those turbulent times. And
13:27
they go on to say Columbia is
13:29
commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of those long
13:32
ago events with a deep dive of
13:34
scholarship and exhibits chronicling what happened
13:36
then in its effects today. They never,
13:38
and here's the thing that
13:40
drives me crazy is actually, well, many
13:43
of the people who are cheerleading this
13:45
crackdown and who are cheerleading Israel's genocide
13:47
in Gaza are the same fucking people
13:49
who cheerleading for the Iraq war. And
13:51
somehow not only they survived that, but
13:53
they were promoted and have become even
13:55
more prominent since that moment. That's number
13:57
one. Some of the people were literally, you know,
13:59
on the side of cracking the skulls of
14:01
the Vietnam War protests. And
14:03
they are on the wrong side of
14:05
history every time. And the lesson is
14:07
never, ever learned. It's very easy to
14:10
look back a decade from now and
14:13
many of these people, by the way, will just pretend like they
14:15
were right all along and they were on the wrong side of
14:17
the right side of history all along. Others
14:19
will make up all kinds of excuses, just
14:21
like they did with the Iraq war, about
14:23
how well it was really understandable that intelligence
14:25
was so compelling. Like who is to know?
14:28
We just, we were so trusting of our
14:30
leaders. And so it was very understandable
14:32
that we were so wrong. I am never
14:34
going to forget these motherfuckers. I
14:36
will never forget the people who
14:38
ran cover for this genocide, who
14:40
justify it, who voted to send
14:42
the dollars to ship more bombs,
14:44
to murder babies, to drop on
14:47
refugee camps, to drop on Rafa,
14:49
which invasion of which is now
14:51
imminent. I will never forget
14:53
these people. I am under no illusion
14:55
that any of them will face any
14:57
accountability. They'll just get promoted. They'll just
15:00
continue to become more prominent, more successful,
15:02
because that's the way the world works.
15:04
In conclusion, let's reiterate what these protesters want,
15:06
not just at Columbia, not just at NYU,
15:08
but broadly speaking with the multiple campuses where
15:11
this stuff is going on. Number
15:13
one, to the extent that certain colleges
15:15
and universities have financial relations with Israel,
15:17
divest those financial relations. That's thing number
15:19
one. Then number two, stop the genocide.
15:22
And that means Israel, stop doing the genocide, but
15:24
also US, stop arming and funding the genocide. That
15:27
when it gets down to the
15:29
bare facts, that is what these
15:32
protesters want, period. You
15:34
could do whatever sort of weaselly fucking bullshit you
15:36
want about, hey, I found this video that wasn't
15:38
at the campus and didn't involve a student. It's
15:41
from a street corner with a psychopath who is screaming
15:43
about how the Jews did 9-11 or whatever. People
15:46
are trying to bring that up to obfuscate and
15:48
make it look like this is
15:50
what these protesters are bringing about.
15:53
This is what they actually stand for. They're
15:55
like, Dinabash said this. It's
15:57
just anti-Semitism. They are literally.
16:00
hundreds or thousands of students doing what
16:02
they're doing just because they have such
16:04
a burning passionate hatred for Jews. Even
16:06
though many of them are themselves
16:08
Jews. This is the argument that these people
16:10
are making and what have we just watched?
16:12
We just watched a foreign head
16:15
of state do a video smugly
16:17
lecturing all of us and
16:19
the government basically telling
16:22
them fuck your First Amendment, fuck your
16:24
free speech, fuck your free protest and
16:26
by the way those people are Nazis
16:28
because they're criticizing me and they don't
16:30
want me to carpet bomb babies anymore.
16:32
Yeah okay fucking sick of it fucking
16:35
sick of it I've never felt even
16:37
this is even worse than during the
16:39
height of the Iraq war when we
16:41
all felt gaslit. Yeah I feel more
16:43
gaslit right now. I do feel more you're
16:46
making me feel like I'm fucking crazy but
16:48
this shit is fucking crazy. Yeah. Biden's crazy
16:50
and then Yahoo's crazy and ongoing fucking genocide
16:52
and ethnic cleansing is crazy happening in front
16:55
of our eyes. Brave students
16:57
stand up to say hey stop this
16:59
and you throw every fucking name
17:02
in the book at them and you smear them viciously and
17:04
then you wonder why are they covering their faces. Well
17:06
gee I wonder maybe because they're standing up
17:08
and speaking out against a genocide and that might lead them to
17:10
never be able to get a fucking job because two
17:12
people are psychos. I mean you
17:14
literally have Bill Ackman and other billionaires organizing
17:16
to make sure that anyone is involved is
17:19
docked and never employed again so yeah they're
17:21
gonna wear masks because some of them can't
17:23
handle that consequence for the rest of their
17:25
life and they shouldn't have to by the
17:27
way you know the last thing
17:29
I'll say about this is that the reason
17:32
this crackdown is happening now
17:35
which includes the tik-tok ban
17:37
right where they didn't like
17:39
that there was pro-palestinian sentiment on tik-tok
17:41
so we're just gonna fucking ban it
17:44
and and by the way some of the lawmakers
17:46
admit that that is the entire motivation for that
17:48
bill and the
17:50
police authoritarian crackdown happening right
17:53
now on college campuses is
17:55
because they lost the argument they lost the
17:58
argument exactly fucking right Biden tried
18:01
to do his little messaging. Let me
18:03
try to, let me first try to like leak a
18:05
little bit of a set. I'm gonna say, I promise
18:07
you behind the scenes, these tough conversations. All right. That
18:10
didn't work. Then I was like, all right, what can
18:12
I do? All right. Let me do this. I'm gonna
18:14
build this pier. I really care. You know, announces this
18:16
in the state. I really care about these Palestinian civilians.
18:18
It's really, really important. I'm gonna build this pier. By
18:20
the way, they haven't even fucking started on the pier.
18:23
It was 48 days ago that that
18:25
was announced. It was supposed to be done
18:27
in 60 days. Is they still having it
18:29
started on the pier? Okay. Well, no one
18:31
bought this bullshit either. All right. The little
18:33
minimal things they did that the little sanctions
18:35
of four settlers that they then basically rolled
18:37
back that nobody was fooled by this. And
18:40
so they're not going to change the policy. So it's
18:42
like, all right, well, what's the next step in the
18:44
play boat? Beat their ass, make them fall in line. All we
18:46
can do is smear them, try to undermine
18:49
them and beat the beat the
18:51
crap out of them, arrest them, crush them.
18:53
That's it. That's the next play. And
18:55
that's, that's where we are. So, um, not
18:58
a surprise that it happens now. I just
19:00
saw another poll that came out this morning.
19:03
Overwhelming majority of Americans, um,
19:05
say they don't support what
19:07
Israel is doing in Gaza. This comes
19:09
as we just, all of our lawmakers,
19:11
almost, you know, very large bipartisan support
19:13
for shipping more billions to Israel so
19:15
they can drop more bombs on top
19:17
of kids heads. It's, there's
19:20
just no words for it. And what are we not talking
19:22
about? Cause everybody's talking about the protest now. Rafa,
19:24
we're not talking about kids being murdered on
19:26
a playground. The mass grave that was just uncovered,
19:28
which had over 300 bodies
19:30
in it. We're not talking about that. We're
19:32
not talking about the inevitable invasion of, of Rafa.
19:35
This is what's not being discussed because
19:37
everybody's feelings are hurt over college kids
19:39
being correct arrest Netanyahu. He's
19:41
a fucking war criminal arrest, Ben Gavir
19:44
arrest, Motrich arrest, arrest all these fucking
19:46
people unless you want nonsense
19:48
like this to continue. All
19:50
right. So, uh, let's move on
19:53
here to some Trump stuff. So we
19:55
have some hearings in the Supreme Court
19:57
vis-a-vis whether or not Trump can invoke
19:59
a complete total immunity argument to get
20:01
out of any accountability. I just find it hilarious.
20:03
The fact that you even got to this point
20:05
is like, what
20:09
fucking timeline do we live in? The
20:11
argument got this far, you're at the Supreme Court
20:13
discussing this? Like this should have been dismissed by
20:15
the fucking local dog catcher. This is the most
20:17
ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life. I
20:19
mean, this is like, you know how it's famous, Kyle,
20:21
you could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. And get
20:23
away with it. Yeah, this is like, not only will
20:25
my supporters stay with me, but it's actually perfectly
20:27
fine for me to do that. That's the crux
20:29
of this argument is like, no, actually I can
20:31
shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. And as long as
20:34
it was like, while I was president, then it's
20:36
all fine, all good. So we have some
20:38
video here, Sotomayor questioning one
20:40
of the Trump attorneys. And this,
20:42
I think, gives you a little
20:44
insight into how this is
20:46
viewed by liberals, leftists, also independents throughout the
20:49
country. Take a look. Malem
20:52
in Se is a concept
20:54
long viewed as appropriate in law,
20:57
that there are some things that are so
20:59
fundamentally evil that they
21:01
have to be protected against. Now,
21:05
I think, and
21:07
your answer below, I'm
21:12
gonna give you a chance to say if you stay
21:14
by it, if the
21:16
president decides that
21:19
his rival is
21:22
a corrupt person, and
21:25
he orders the military or
21:27
orders someone to assassinate him, is
21:31
that within his official acts for which
21:33
he can get immunity? It
21:35
would depend on the hypothetical, but we can
21:37
see that could well be an official act.
21:39
They could, and why? Because he's doing it
21:41
for personal reasons. He's not doing it like
21:45
President Obama's alleged to have done
21:47
it, to protect the country
21:50
from a terrorist. He's doing
21:52
it for personal gain. And
21:54
isn't that the nature of the allegations
21:56
here that he's not doing
21:58
them? doing these acts
22:01
in furtherance of
22:03
an official responsibility,
22:06
he's doing it for personal gain.
22:09
I agree with that characterization of the indictment
22:11
and that confirms immunity because the characterization is
22:13
that there's a series of official acts that
22:16
were done for an ongoing or a proper...
22:18
No, because immunity says even if you
22:20
did it for personal
22:22
gain, we won't hold you
22:25
responsible. How
22:28
could that be? Yeah,
22:31
so she's clearly not buying
22:33
it. I mean,
22:37
what's the argument against it? Even if you... let's
22:39
grant it to Trump for argument's sake for a
22:42
split second. By this logic,
22:44
Biden could say, okay, and just have
22:46
Trump arrested, keep him locked up indefinitely and
22:48
say, well, I have total immunity. I get to do what I want.
22:50
This is for national security. Try to steal the last
22:52
election. He's hinting he's going to try
22:55
to steal the next election. I am protecting our democracy
22:57
by locking up this guy. And
22:59
he would get away with it. Or assassinating him is what
23:01
the thing asked about here. Right.
23:04
But like, even if you accept Trump's logic, then that's
23:06
the place where you end up. Yeah.
23:09
So what are we doing here? What game are we
23:11
playing here? Basically, the question is, is the US president
23:13
an emperor? That's the question. Right.
23:16
Are they an overlord dictator? And
23:18
what's your sense of how the arguments
23:20
went? Like who seemed to be open
23:22
to that possibility? So I have this is
23:24
all from the recount and this is all
23:26
like just rolling in now. But we have
23:28
let me give you from
23:30
Gorsuch here. Skotich, Skotich, Justice Gorsuch presses
23:33
Trump attorney John D. Johnson, attorney
23:35
D. John Sauer. That's a weird name. I got
23:37
to say John D. John Sauer. D.
23:41
John Sauer on whether more in-depth adjudication
23:43
of the distinction between official and private
23:45
actions by a president are necessary. Gorsuch
23:47
said, quote, you would agree further
23:49
proceedings would be required. Sauer quote that is
23:51
correct. So I don't know where that makes
23:54
Gorsuch fall on it. Then
23:56
we have Amy Coney Island Barrett. Attorney
24:00
D. John Sauer at SCOTUS immunity hearing
24:02
concedes to Justice Amy Coney Barrett that
24:04
several aspects of Trump's efforts to overturn
24:06
his 2020 election loss were
24:08
private acts, not official. Trump
24:11
has claims his efforts were official parts of the
24:14
general president. So it sounds like potentially some of
24:16
the conservative justices are skeptical. It certainly looks like
24:18
Coney Island is skeptical. So just to give
24:20
people a little bit of background on this case, you
24:22
might remember there was a similar discussion that we talked
24:25
about at the time too, when
24:27
it was at the DC Circuit Court.
24:30
And where they were saying like, wait a second,
24:32
does that mean you can just like assassinate someone
24:34
and claim, you know, assassinate Joe Biden or whoever
24:36
claim it's an official act and you're good to
24:38
go as long as there isn't an impeachment and
24:40
conviction. And they were like, yeah, pretty much. And
24:43
that court overwhelmingly
24:46
rejected that argument. They
24:49
wrote an opinion that was very
24:51
strongly worded. And so there
24:53
was a lot of, I guess hope,
24:55
I don't know if it was really
24:57
analysis, but that because it was so
24:59
overwhelming and because the opinion was so
25:01
strongly worded, the Supreme Court may just
25:03
decide we're not gonna take this up.
25:06
They did decide to take it up. The
25:08
analysis I saw at
25:10
the time was that people didn't really
25:13
think that the Supreme Court would uphold
25:15
Trump's immunity claims, but the very
25:17
fact they decided to take it up was
25:19
a real victory for him because it meant
25:21
that then there was gonna be delay and it
25:23
goes to a oral argument and we have to
25:26
wait for the decision to come out. And
25:28
so in the meantime, all these January 6th
25:30
related cases are on hold. And
25:32
that's his whole goal is delay, delay, delay. And
25:35
so even if the conservative justices ultimately
25:37
are like, nah, this isn't too far
25:39
even for us, which I think they
25:41
may do, I don't know, but I
25:43
think they may do, he has already
25:45
scored a win just by having it
25:48
get to the Supreme Court and have
25:50
to go through this process and wait
25:52
the whatever the normal period is to get this decision.
25:54
And by the way, this doesn't apply to the hush
25:56
money case that's going on in New York right now
25:58
because the hush money case took place. place or
26:00
the action took place before he was president.
26:02
Yeah. And so nobody can argue presidential immunity
26:05
before your president. It's interesting how, I mean,
26:07
it's funny how that one ironically has
26:09
ended up. Everybody's last hope
26:12
here. It's I
26:14
am sort of a dissenter from the people
26:16
who say that there's like, in
26:19
terms of political impact that like, oh, it's
26:21
just baked in. Like it's just Trump being
26:23
Trump. I think it's the weakest of the cases I do. I
26:26
mean, I think it is the weakest of the cases,
26:28
but the other thing about it is the details. People
26:32
want to know these details like they want
26:34
to. It's a lot less boring. Yeah. Just
26:36
sound like a human lie. You got a
26:39
tabloid publisher. I mean, David Pecker's testimony
26:41
was fascinating. I was interested in it, you
26:43
know, like how the catch and kill works
26:45
in this relationship he had with Trump, like
26:47
that he was planning making up literally
26:49
these stories about Ted Cruz and news factory
26:52
Marco Rubio's love child stunner and all this
26:54
stuff like all fake. Yeah, these are these
26:56
are really interesting tawdry details. And I'm sure
26:58
whatever Stormy Daniels has to say is going
27:01
to be interesting. And she says he has
27:03
a little mushroom. Yeah, I care. She
27:05
says, you know, Toad, the character in Mario. Yes, I
27:07
remember that little mushroom dick. I rather not talk about
27:09
that. I'm just saying he's got a little tiny little
27:12
mushroom peepee. That's the word on the street. But
27:14
in terms of like human
27:16
being, Trump would
27:18
understand that sex sells these
27:21
sorts of like tawdry celebrity
27:23
reality TV show dramas are
27:26
really captivating to the American public. So
27:28
I think the details are going to be something that
27:30
people pay attention to. I think they're also, you know,
27:33
from a sort of moral,
27:36
ethical angle, they're
27:38
really indefensible. You know, you're trying to
27:40
hide this affair from your wife and
27:43
the American public. So I
27:45
don't fully buy the argument that like, people
27:47
just like this is Trump and it's not
27:49
going to have any impact on him politically.
27:51
Counterpoint. Yeah. Bill Clinton's approval rating went
27:53
up when all the stuff was going
27:55
on about Monica blowing him and there
27:57
was the star report. So people were.
28:00
like, yeah, you shouldn't have done
28:02
that. Yeah, he's kind of pervy, but also, what
28:04
the fuck are we wasting time for on this?
28:06
There's more important things, stop it. Yeah, that's
28:08
fair, but there was no direct, he's
28:11
making these payments and trying to hide it from
28:13
the public in the context of an election. There
28:16
either. So it hinges on, are people gonna care enough
28:18
about that thing? Well, I'm on the side of, I
28:20
think this is the weakest case, but that doesn't mean
28:23
like the Trump people say, it's gonna benefit him. I
28:25
actually don't think it's gonna benefit him. And it's honestly
28:27
not just because of this case, because of all the
28:29
news recently. I mean, we just heard $454 million fine
28:33
because of tax fraud, insurance fraud, business fraud,
28:35
78 different kinds of fraud. He has to pay E.
28:38
Jean Carroll, whatever it was, 100 million or something like
28:40
that, because of the defamation, which was linked to some
28:42
sexual assault stuff. When you get hit one after the
28:44
other after the other after the other after the
28:46
other, everybody's like, okay, where there's
28:48
smoke, there's fire. Or let me rephrase that.
28:50
Every reasonable person is like, yeah, where there's
28:52
smoke, there's fire. Sure, the Trump cult people,
28:55
whenever there's a new indictment or new charge,
28:57
his numbers go up. But that's only amongst
28:59
that 30% of the population. Right? Amongst
29:02
Democrats, Independents,
29:04
moderates, some moderate
29:06
Republicans. Those people are like, this
29:09
is the best we can do? Fucking really? This is the
29:11
best we can do. This guy here? So I think it's
29:13
the weakest case, but that doesn't mean that this is like
29:16
a benefit for him or anything like that. Like a lot
29:18
of goofballs are arguing right now, like Sean Hannity. Yeah,
29:20
definitely not that. Yeah. Definitely
29:22
not that. All right, should we get to our guest?
29:24
Let's do it. All right, so we're lucky to be
29:26
joined by comedian Dave Smith. He's also a host of
29:29
part of the problem podcast. Talk to him about a
29:31
range of things. Let's go ahead and get to it. All
29:34
right, thanks for joining us. Dave Smith, libertarian host
29:36
of part of the problem podcast. And of course
29:39
he was involved in a mega debate the other
29:41
day with both Cenk Uygur as his partner, which
29:43
by the way, I could talk a lot about
29:45
just that. I liked seeing a libertarian and a
29:47
lefty sort of work together on something that was
29:50
healing for the soul. But you were up against
29:52
Dennis Prager and Batya Unger-Sargon. So let me start
29:54
with, is
29:56
Dennis Prager a prick behind the scenes? Because
29:59
that is... like that's the vibe I
30:01
got and I have some sources
30:03
who shall not be named who
30:06
were in the vicinity and said yeah he's a
30:08
fucking asshole in real life is that was that
30:10
your experience or was he actually a nice guy
30:13
okay so I had the same vibe and
30:15
I was like when the debate was over
30:17
I was like oh this guy's not
30:19
gonna look me in the eye or shake my hand or
30:21
anything like that but he wasn't he wasn't like that and
30:24
we all went out to dinner afterward
30:28
everyone except say gar
30:30
he's too good for us apparently
30:32
in his defense in his defense saga
30:36
legitimately goes to bat at like 8
30:38
p.m. every night he's on the Huberman train
30:41
yeah that's true that's actually true that's what
30:44
that's about I don't I have no
30:46
sympathy for this defense I have two little
30:48
kids I'm always exhausted there's
30:50
never a moment right now I could
30:52
close my eyes and just go to
30:54
sleep so no Dennis Dennis didn't
30:56
stay that long he came for a little bit but
30:59
like he was he was nice but I don't know
31:01
you know if you've heard from other people that he's
31:03
he's a prick that might be true I didn't like
31:05
get to know the guy well enough I kind of
31:07
felt like I mean
31:09
maybe it's a little messed up for me to say
31:12
this but I just thought the results of the debate
31:14
were so thoroughly one-sided
31:16
yeah and I'm not saying
31:18
that like I did such a great job it
31:20
was more well thank you
31:22
I appreciate that but it was more like that he
31:24
just didn't do anything I felt like I
31:26
used the example I was like if uh if you if
31:28
you were like a boxer and you showed up to a
31:30
big prize fight and then the guy just put his hands
31:32
down and there were a lot of moments that stick
31:35
with me but one in particular
31:40
is when he's like name
31:42
and atrocity that Israel has
31:44
committed you're like we covered up what like
31:47
I could I could name them but happened
31:49
literally yesterday right we could spend all day
31:51
here talking about what's been done since October
31:53
7th it was so astonishing to me and
31:55
I would love to get your reaction to
31:57
like what you were thinking in that moment
32:00
Because it just makes me ask the question, is
32:03
he so much in the bubble that
32:05
he actually believed that? Or
32:07
is he just lying?
32:09
Is he just a spin master and a
32:11
propagandist and thinks he can get one over
32:14
on us? Because anyone who's actually following what's
32:16
happening and watching what's happening in the Gaza
32:18
Strip cannot say that with a straight face.
32:21
Yeah, right. So whatever side you're on,
32:23
even if you're on the pro-Israeli side,
32:25
really those are the only options. What
32:28
you said, either you don't know anything about
32:30
this or you're just lying. And
32:35
someone like, say, Benny Morris, who somehow
32:38
twists himself into pretzels to defend this,
32:40
would never sit there and be like,
32:42
Dair Yassine, that was it. That was
32:44
the only atrocity. Name one other one.
32:46
No one would say that. That moment
32:48
actually messed with me a little bit
32:50
because there's these weird things when you're
32:53
in a debate, there's all these
32:55
kind of tactics and framing. And
32:57
so I was making the point
32:59
about Benjamin Netanyahu propping up Hamas
33:01
and how that undercuts the Israeli excuse
33:03
for this war. And then he
33:06
just mentioned the massacre
33:09
in the Olympics in Germany. And
33:12
so then I just mentioned Dair Yassine is like,
33:14
OK, we could all mention atrocities, you know, like
33:16
that has nothing to do with my point. And
33:18
then he's like, name one more. Name one more
33:21
than that. And I was kind of
33:23
baffled for a moment. Like in that moment, it was good
33:25
that I had Jank there with me because he came in
33:27
and kind of caught my back. But I was just so
33:29
blown away that like I was like, well, do I
33:31
try to get back to the point I was making? Do
33:34
you actually think I can't name another atrocity?
33:36
Then like in your head, like all the
33:38
atrocities are going off. I'm like, wait,
33:40
should I get into like Lebanon in the
33:42
80s and the assassination campaigns? I actually thought
33:44
about that too, because I was like, even Ronald
33:46
Reagan called that a Holocaust. It's
33:49
just it's no nobody who's being honest
33:51
on any side of this issue would
33:53
ever pretend you couldn't come up with
33:55
another one. And then also in my
33:57
mind, it's like she. He
34:00
downplayed Da'er Yassine by saying... Yeah, he said it doesn't
34:02
count. That's during war. During a war. Like it
34:04
was one time during a war. And then I kind
34:06
of was like almost in my mind like, well, no,
34:08
let's really get into what happened there. Because
34:11
like, that's so not an excuse. Like
34:13
it was in a war. I mean,
34:15
kind of, they call that period a
34:17
civil war. This is in early 1948
34:19
before any of the other Arab nations
34:21
had intervened. And yes, there
34:23
were street clashes. By
34:25
the way, on the Palestinian side
34:27
with a mostly disarmed from the British
34:30
having disarmed them after the Arab revolts,
34:32
from a mostly disarmed group of peasants
34:35
shooting at them with old rifles on the streets.
34:38
And so then these militias,
34:40
the Ergon and the Stern gang,
34:42
decide to march into a village
34:45
and rape all of the women and murder all
34:48
of the children and murder all of the men.
34:50
Like, I'm sorry, that's not... No, you weren't like
34:52
at war with that village. So anyway,
34:54
I don't know. But to
34:56
me, the moment in the debate honestly was
34:59
when his opening, because I kind
35:01
of went in there with like a thing of,
35:03
you know, look, I'm like, I'm a comedian who
35:06
I mean, I'm obsessed with this stuff. I'm
35:09
a comedian who likes to read books. And
35:11
Dennis Prager has been doing talk
35:13
radio since before I was born,
35:16
or right around since I've been born. And this
35:18
is like his issue. So I'm going into debate
35:20
a guy who on his issue,
35:22
and he's been on TV and radio since before
35:24
I was born. And I was like, you know,
35:26
all right, I better really be on point and
35:28
do a good job here. And
35:31
in his opening statement, he
35:34
opened with his tagline of like, one
35:36
side wants peace, and the other side
35:38
wants them dead. And
35:40
in that moment, I was
35:43
just like, oh, he's got nothing.
35:45
I mean, that's right. He just had
35:47
every talking point that you heard a
35:49
million times before. But it would be
35:51
it would be like if I opened
35:53
and my opening statement was there are no
35:55
Arabs who embrace terrorism. Right.
35:58
That's not true. You know, you'd be like, fuck that. Right.
36:01
Just total denial of reality. But you know what? It's
36:03
interesting because you as you're pointing out, it's kind of
36:05
an effective tactic. Like
36:07
if you're just saying intact because it because it was like
36:09
narrativizing. Well, it's so
36:12
then you have to spend time like
36:14
grappling with reality, you know,
36:16
in a way that then you can't get to these other
36:18
points that you want to make. But you
36:20
know, what was astonishing to me is he
36:22
opens with, oh, who wants to be honest
36:24
with yourself? You know, if the if the
36:27
Palestinians laid down their weapons, there'd be peace
36:29
if the Israelis laid down their weapons, then
36:31
they'd all be murdered. And like,
36:33
you have to admit that that's the case. And then
36:35
later on in the debate, he admits like, no, I
36:37
don't want to do state solution. Yeah, they
36:39
don't want peace, by the way. I don't want peace,
36:41
but they don't want peace. They're the
36:43
problem. But I, you know, I don't accept peace. Yeah.
36:47
Well, that's a that's a very good point. I also just
36:49
think that these these hypotheticals are
36:51
stupid. I mean, it would be like
36:53
as if, you know, in 2002, when
36:56
the war drums were beating to invade
36:58
Iraq and someone were to say, well,
37:00
like, ask me this question, what would
37:02
be worse if Saddam Hussein was president
37:05
of the United States of America or
37:07
if George Bush was the president of
37:09
Iraq? Right. Yeah. It's
37:12
like, OK, but that's not the situation at all. So like, what what
37:14
are you proof? And by the way, in that
37:16
example, yes, it would be worse
37:18
if Saddam Hussein was the president of the United
37:20
States of America. And it would be better if
37:22
George W. Bush was the president in Iraq. But
37:25
like, what does that mean? None
37:27
of that is even plausibly going to
37:29
be the reality of the situation. And
37:32
so how about we look at what's
37:34
actually happening, which is that George W.
37:36
Bush is lying through his teeth to
37:38
try to drum up interest in a
37:41
war. And so like, I don't know,
37:43
I just all of that is stupid. It's just
37:45
it's nothing. It doesn't it's completely
37:47
irrelevant. His reaction to
37:49
you was to scream at the top
37:52
of his lungs. You lie, you lie.
37:55
So from our perspective, we looked
37:57
at that as he wanted to
37:59
say that's. of a Lud libel. He
38:01
wanted to say that, but he reeled it in a little
38:03
bit and just went with libel. Is that how you interpreted
38:05
it in the moment? And then the point Crystal and I
38:07
made in the aftermath, I didn't know this at the time,
38:10
I had to look it up. I was like, wasn't
38:12
Dave Smith raised Jewish? And
38:14
so effectively he's trying to call you
38:17
raised Jewish and anti-Semite
38:19
in that moment because he was saying
38:21
name and atrocity. And in
38:23
your mind you're like, there's 842 of them. I'm
38:25
not just going to spit one out, right? Yeah.
38:27
Well, I mean, look,
38:31
they're just kind of reduced to
38:33
these like slogans and talking points
38:35
and accusations. And I just think
38:37
anyone with a mind can see
38:39
that that's not like you can't
38:42
win a debate by just screaming libel at
38:44
someone. And of course, you know, like, yeah,
38:47
I'm Jewish. And
38:50
there's Rabbi Barclay called me on Candace Owens
38:52
show. He called me a self-hating Jew. You
38:54
know, that's just like kind of the thing
38:56
that you get caught. So like,
38:58
what does that even mean? Do you think
39:01
I hate myself? Like I'm so clearly awesome.
39:03
Why would I hate myself? And like what
39:05
I like, I hate my grandma or something
39:07
like that because I think what Israel is
39:09
doing to the Palestinians is wrong. But honestly,
39:12
like the war propagandists always rely on
39:14
stuff that's this stupid. Again, it was
39:16
the, but you're either you're either with
39:19
the troops or you're with the terrorists,
39:21
right? This was always the line of
39:23
the George W. Bush administration either. Because
39:25
we're free. Right. It's just always just
39:27
the dumbest things that anyone with a
39:29
mind should be able to see through.
39:32
Do you think he was trying to say blood
39:34
libel though? Do you think that there was an
39:36
implication there of like anti-Semite or do you think
39:39
that it was more neutral than that? And he
39:41
was just trying to say, you're lying, not you're
39:43
lying and you hate Jews. Well,
39:45
I mean, it is the same word that they
39:47
always use in that term. So maybe, I mean,
39:49
I can't read his mind. No one
39:51
uses it in any other context. Yeah, I've never heard. Yeah,
39:53
I've never heard that. Is that even proper English
39:55
to say you libeled? No, you
39:58
committed libel. Right. clunky for
40:00
sure. He was really emotional in the debate.
40:02
His eyes were like welding up and
40:11
stuff. I don't know exactly, but
40:14
there's got to be something to having this issue that is
40:19
your main issue for your entire
40:21
life that defines who
40:23
you are. Then you have nothing. You
40:25
have no arguments to back it up
40:28
and you're getting very emotional about it. Really
40:30
the tactic that they have
40:33
is like you're a bad person in one
40:35
way or another to say that. You're
40:38
a bad person. I don't
40:41
know. I know who I am as a
40:43
person and I
40:45
also know what's going on and I know what
40:47
the history of this is. It's just like, nope,
40:49
sorry, this doesn't make me a bad person. I
40:51
got lots of qualities that I could work on
40:53
that aren't so great, but this year doesn't make
40:55
me a bad person. Well,
40:58
I think that's actually a good transition to some
41:00
of what we see going on right now because
41:02
in a sense, like what happens to you or
41:04
me or Kyle on a micro level where it's
41:06
like when people feel they've lost the debate, it's
41:08
like you're actually just an anti-semite. That's why you
41:10
have these opinions. That's all there is to it.
41:13
I mean, that's what you see with the
41:15
now authoritarian crackdown that's happening in
41:17
New York, in LA, in Texas,
41:20
against these campus protesters where
41:22
they'll take one incident
41:25
that is genuinely anti-semitic
41:27
or genuinely problematic in one way or
41:30
another and use that to smear an
41:32
entire multi-faith, including many
41:34
Jewish students, movement as, oh, you
41:37
just hate Jews. According
41:39
to Benjamin Netanyahu, you're just basically Nazis
41:41
and you just want to kill all
41:44
Jews wherever they are. That's literally what
41:46
he said to try to
41:48
delegitimize the entire point that they're
41:51
attempting to make. Yeah,
41:53
I think that's definitely happening. And,
41:55
you know, I like I've been
41:57
critical of certain
42:00
aspects of the protests, and I still
42:02
am. Although I will say after this
42:04
last week, I'm less inclined to be
42:06
because it's, I just hate
42:08
how the entire corporate media is trying to
42:11
make this the story. As if
42:13
like, the real story is what Israel is
42:15
doing to Gaza right now. I'm sorry, this
42:17
is all secondary to that. But
42:20
look, like I could be critical of some
42:22
of the things that have happened at some
42:24
of these protests, but the truth is if
42:26
we're gonna talk about it, look,
42:29
so just to be clear
42:31
on what's going on here, like in 2020
42:33
in the summer, you
42:36
had the George Floyd
42:38
protests that were almost
42:40
nightly devolving into looting
42:43
and property damage to the
42:45
tunes of billions of dollars nationwide, there
42:47
were hundreds and hundreds of assaults, there
42:49
were dozens of murders, nothing
42:51
like that is happening here. It's
42:54
just not anything comparable to that.
42:56
And even as somebody who has been
42:58
a long critic of the
43:00
police in this country, in
43:02
the summer of 2020, I was like, all
43:04
of you guys should stop protesting because this is
43:07
just, you're almost kind of giving cover to this
43:09
now, of course, the police response to that was
43:11
to like tear gas
43:13
peaceful protesters and then stand down
43:15
when the rioters came, so it
43:17
was just insane. But
43:21
in this case, it's nothing like that. I
43:23
mean, really, aside from some isolated incidents where
43:25
there has been some violence, and like I'm
43:27
sure we all agree, like those cases
43:30
should be prosecuted, but really the discussion
43:32
here for the most part has been
43:34
over what they're hollering
43:37
at these protests and how
43:39
that makes people feel. And
43:42
I just, I mean, look, I think, and I
43:44
don't know, me and you guys might disagree about
43:47
some of this, although I don't know if we
43:49
will, but I think that over
43:52
say like the last decade, the
43:56
rise of like wokeness or whatever you wanna
43:58
call it on the left, this. kind of,
44:00
and I'm speaking broadly, like there's obviously exceptions
44:02
to this, but this kind of obsessive
44:05
hyper focus on
44:08
race and gender and
44:10
sexual preference and the
44:13
kind of intense focus
44:16
on very minor infractions,
44:20
like almost an inability to distinguish between
44:22
what really matters and what doesn't really
44:24
matter and that you're never allowed to
44:26
say like, yeah, that just doesn't matter.
44:29
I don't know. A foreign
44:31
student was asked, where are you from?
44:33
That's a microaggression and nobody can just
44:35
go, I don't care. That's
44:37
just not important. There's way bigger things going
44:39
on here. It's that whole like words
44:42
are literal violence. Yeah. And it's like, no,
44:44
they're, they're actually not. And so
44:46
now that's being weaponized by the people
44:48
claiming that like Jewish students are made
44:51
to feel unsafe as if that's supposed
44:53
to garner more sympathy for me than
44:55
what's happening to the Palestinian people is
44:57
just like, I don't even know how,
45:00
how to even
45:02
wrap my head around making this claim. But
45:05
I will say that there also look like
45:07
there's, okay, so I just saw today they
45:09
had a Seder in one
45:11
of the protests at Columbia and it's
45:13
like, yes, perfect. That's
45:16
what you do. Like that's how to
45:18
effectively engage in this, you know, political
45:20
process, which is what protesting is. It's
45:22
a strategic political activity. And like, that's
45:24
what you do. You shatter their narrative.
45:26
Here we are in the middle with
45:28
a bunch of Jewish students and a
45:30
bunch of, you know, Muslim students all
45:32
sitting around doing like a Jewish ritual,
45:34
like, okay. But then there have been
45:36
other incidents here. And again, I want
45:38
to make it clear, like, I'm not,
45:41
I'm just, because I'm trying to prioritize
45:43
these things. I'm just talking about what
45:45
they're hollering. There have been lots of
45:47
protests where they're hollering things like death
45:49
to America, or they're saying like the,
45:52
the one in Georgetown where they were
45:54
chanting something like, we have hang gliders
45:56
glory to the freedom fighters. And
45:58
you're just like, guys, this is is just, first
46:01
of all, it's awful, but second
46:03
of all, it's so counterproductive. Like, what
46:05
are you doing? Like, are you, are
46:07
you Mossad agents? Which, you know, I'm
46:09
not ruling out the possibility, but like,
46:11
you know, but if you're not,
46:13
you know, you couldn't be doing a better job
46:15
if you were. So that, you know, I do
46:17
think it's reasonable to be critical of some of
46:19
that stuff. Yeah. So the first
46:22
of all, a lot of great stuff to respond to
46:24
there. Let's jump into it. So first of all, the,
46:26
the idea that, um, now you have
46:28
basically the establishment and corporate media
46:30
using the same tools that were
46:32
in the woke toolbox. I
46:34
completely agree. That's a perfect description of what's going on
46:36
here. Uh, in terms of like the
46:39
protest, I'm interested in your thoughts. Cause I've, I
46:41
talked about this on my show that I think
46:43
there's like a rigid hierarchy of
46:45
how to protest what's most effective, what's
46:48
most intelligent. And right
46:50
at the top, I would put things like what we
46:52
saw in like the late October, early
46:54
November, where people were trying to block ships
46:56
that had weapons on it that were bound
46:58
for Israel. And that might be
47:01
like, they might literally be committing a crime there.
47:03
Like they could probably spend time behind bars for
47:05
that one, but in terms of like, this is
47:07
effective. This makes sense. We know those weapons are
47:09
being used to carpet bomb babies. Yeah. That's top
47:11
of the list for me right underneath that, or
47:13
maybe like one A and one
47:15
B I would put yelling it at the politicians
47:17
who are making the decisions to keep sending money
47:19
and weapons to Israel and keep voting for all
47:21
these wars. Those I think would be the best.
47:23
And I think you and I would probably agree
47:25
that at the very bottom is
47:28
something like blocking roads for
47:30
regular people or blocking the Golden Gate bridge or
47:32
blocking people from getting to O'Hare airport, as we
47:34
saw recently. I have to admit, David, I'm curious
47:37
what your thoughts are on this. I am kind
47:39
of conflicted on even doing that. Right. Because on
47:41
the one hand, it's like these people have nothing
47:43
to do with the genocide. They didn't do anything
47:46
wrong. Like why are you victimizing them? They're not
47:48
part of the problem. You're just making people hate
47:50
you. I think all that is true. But
47:52
at the same time, I also think it's true that if
47:55
there was enough of shit like that
47:57
being done, then eventually it does get to
47:59
the presidency. where they're like, motherfucker, you gotta do
48:01
something to change this, because every single bridge is blocked
48:03
in America, every single airport is blocked. And all they're
48:05
saying is stop sending weapons to Israel. If you stop
48:08
doing that, they will stop protesting. So I'm curious what
48:10
you think. Are you as torn on those as me,
48:12
or are you on the side of like, nah, just
48:14
don't fucking do that at all? No,
48:16
I'm on the don't do that at all
48:18
side. And, you know, even in your scenario
48:21
where you go, if every bridge and every
48:23
airport in the country is blocked, I think
48:25
you're much more likely to see the effect
48:27
of the American people completely turning against the
48:29
pro-Palestinian cause, rather than seeing this like result
48:31
in ending the support for the war. I
48:34
mean, look, I look at it kind of
48:36
in the same way that I do. The
48:40
way I look at war in general, where
48:42
it's like, you don't have a right to
48:44
do this to innocent people. And, you know,
48:47
when you're blocking roads, this is not just
48:49
like potentially inconveniencing somebody. Like there's ambulances that
48:51
might be on that road. Somebody's baby might
48:53
be in that ambulance. Like, no, you don't
48:55
have a right to do that. So I'm
48:58
with you. Take it to the people who
49:00
it actually affects. Like, what is this running
49:02
in a Starbucks and like screaming through a
49:04
bullhorn at people, I think is just totally
49:06
stupid, not on the level of blocking roads
49:09
or something like that. But, you
49:12
know, like there's an Israeli embassy in this country and
49:14
there's a Capitol Hill and there's all these places you
49:16
could go and like actually inconvenience
49:18
those people. And that I do not
49:20
care about at all. And in fact,
49:22
I support doing that. So that's kind
49:24
of my take. Yeah. The
49:27
other thing for me is I just, I
49:32
feel like people are so horrified by
49:34
what they see, that
49:36
there's just a sense of desperation of like, we
49:38
got to try whatever we can fuck a try.
49:40
Like whatever we can figure out to try to
49:43
throw against the wall. Like we've got to try
49:45
to stop, you know, a genocide
49:47
that's unfolding. And I especially gain more
49:49
sympathy for them when I see like the Jonathan Chase
49:51
of the world. Did you read his piece of accusing?
49:54
This was before the campus crackdown or
49:56
whatever. He accused people who
49:58
went and disrupted. Joe Biden speeches
50:01
as being authoritarian and illiberal.
50:04
And it's like... Oh, that's stupid. It's so, it's
50:06
so stupid. It's so, it's so stupid. It's
50:08
so bad. You gotta read it. You
50:10
have to make a free speech argument about
50:12
how you were blocking the speech of Joe
50:14
Biden, which number one, the man has a
50:16
billion dollars in the bank to spend on
50:19
his speech. Number two, he has the bully
50:21
pulpit. Number three, he apparently has
50:23
no interest in speaking to the American people,
50:25
judging by the fact that he does like
50:27
literally no interviews. It was just the most
50:29
like gaslighting thing I've ever seen. Well,
50:31
you know what happens and look, I haven't read
50:33
the piece, but I feel like what happens in
50:35
a lot of these cases, I said, I've seen
50:38
this a lot, is that when somebody has a
50:40
pet issue, again, like I
50:42
was saying, like Dennis Prager, it starts
50:44
to almost like define their identity and
50:46
then they try to kind of force
50:48
every other issue into that field.
50:51
So I think if you've spent a lot
50:53
of time talking about how like, say, disrupting
50:55
a speech on a college
50:57
campus isn't your free speech, right?
51:00
You're actually kind of cracking down on somebody else's
51:02
free speech. And, you know, however you may feel
51:04
about him, over the years, we've seen these things
51:06
where like Jordan Peterson will go to give a
51:08
lecture or something and there are, you know, protesters
51:10
just trying to drown him out, much like the
51:13
debate tactic that you dealt with on Pierce Morgan
51:15
the other day. And
51:17
you know, you'd kind of rightfully
51:19
be criticizing these kids like, what's
51:22
wrong with you? What's the
51:24
spirit of a liberal arts college should
51:26
be that you hear out what he has to
51:28
say and then ask tough questions when there's
51:30
a question and answer segment or something. But
51:33
I almost feel like he's trying to apply
51:35
that to this, which is totally different. You
51:37
know, like, that's not true at all. Like
51:39
Joe Biden is the supposed servant
51:42
of the public. This is not a
51:44
situation where, you know, it's anything analogous
51:46
to that. So that would kind of
51:49
be my guess. I see this
51:51
happen a lot in general,
51:53
where people, if they have one area that
51:55
they specialize in, they try to reduce everything
51:57
else to that. It's part of the reason
51:59
why all of. the new atheists became
52:01
neocons because their pet issue is that
52:03
religion's bad, and so that's how they
52:05
see this conflict. Well, who's the most
52:08
religious? Now, the most religious fundamentalists are
52:10
over there on the Muslim side, so
52:12
then we better be on this more
52:14
secular side. However, obviously,
52:17
you could recognize the
52:19
problems with fundamentalist religious
52:21
ideologies, but also recognize that the
52:23
far greater evil here is like
52:26
slaughtering innocent people by the hundreds
52:28
of thousands, so if that makes
52:30
sense. Right. Yeah,
52:32
absolutely. So, to go back to the slogans, because
52:34
I actually think there's a really interesting conversation to
52:36
have about this in particular, I agree with your
52:38
point on... Well,
52:40
first, let me say this. I think it
52:43
is largely overstated in the media just
52:45
how much negative chanting there
52:47
is out there. I think
52:49
in the overwhelming majority of instances, if anything,
52:51
you're more likely to see the cringe woke
52:53
shit where they're like doing a land acknowledgment
52:55
before they give a speech, where they're doing
52:57
some weird dance in a circle. I think
52:59
that's more likely than the genuinely horrific slogans,
53:01
but to your point, when I
53:04
do see something along those lines, whether it's
53:06
some sort of support to October
53:08
7th or Death to
53:10
America, like you pointed out... The burned television
53:12
one. The burned television one. But on that
53:14
one, I was skeptical it was real. So
53:17
anyway, I'll digress for just a second. I'll
53:19
point out, I'm a little skeptical as
53:22
to... I think some of these things are real, but
53:24
I think some of them might not be.
53:26
We just saw Gavin McInnes was at one
53:29
of these protests. Somebody recorded him and it's like,
53:31
well, if you have Proud Boys out there and their whole
53:33
thing is like fucking up left wing protesters,
53:35
how do we know that there's not some
53:38
agent provocateurs from him or from Assad or...
53:40
This is all conspiratorial. This is all speculation.
53:42
I'll admit that upfront. But I
53:44
agree with you on the Death to America one. I agree
53:46
with you on the October 7th stuff. But there's other ones
53:48
where I think the media is
53:50
being incredibly dense to the context in this situation.
53:52
So for example, the two big ones, of course,
53:54
would be from the river to the sea and
53:57
into Fata. Now I grant that
53:59
we're... when you hear a Hamas spokesperson say
54:01
on an Iranian news show, from the
54:03
river to the sea, Palestine will
54:06
be free. And then he goes on to say, we're
54:08
going to do October 7th over and over and over
54:10
and over. I grant that in that instance, that's a
54:12
condemnable phrase. And he means it like, let's drive all
54:14
the Jews into the sea. I agree with that. But
54:16
I think when you have some pink haired college
54:18
student who's 20 years old and lives in Burbank,
54:20
and they're chanting from the river to the sea,
54:22
Palestine will be free. I think they genuinely mean
54:24
it as more of a liberation call where you'll
54:26
have a one state democratic solution for all, and
54:29
everybody has rights. And even on the
54:31
Intifada front, my belief on
54:33
the Intifada front is it does mean uprising.
54:35
Is it true that historically, there have
54:37
been violent Intifadas? Absolutely, that's true. And everybody
54:39
should acknowledge that. But at the same
54:41
time, people could definitely mean Intifada in the context
54:44
of 2018 Great
54:46
March of Return type stuff, or they
54:48
can meet it in the context of
54:50
Palestinians have a legitimate right to defend
54:52
themselves against military targets, right? So do
54:54
you agree with me that the context for Intifada and
54:57
from the river to the sea in particular, are sort
54:59
of, it's nuanced and it varies what people means when
55:01
they say it. So we should hold off on like
55:03
the broad condemnation. Yeah,
55:05
I would agree with that. And I think that's
55:07
right. I think like from the river to the
55:09
sea could mean different things.
55:11
And I'm sure in people's minds, it
55:14
does. To be perfectly honest, I don't
55:16
really know what is
55:18
in that pink haired 20 year old college
55:20
kids minds when they're saying it. And I'm
55:22
kind of interested, but I
55:24
don't exactly know what it is. The
55:27
way I see it is that there's
55:29
this kind of interesting dynamic where the
55:31
way I look at it is like
55:33
the left was so on point during
55:35
the George W. Bush years. And I
55:38
was an anti-war lefty during those years.
55:40
And it was all like
55:42
this kind, it really was before this
55:44
woke stuff like swept everything. And
55:47
the protesters there would always
55:49
be making the argument that the
55:51
Patriot Act is un-American. And
55:54
that like it wasn't a death to
55:56
America type vibe. It was like, I
55:58
know you're the deviationist here. representing
56:00
the true American spirit. And
56:02
the left, again, I'm speaking broadly here, I
56:04
think you two are like exceptions to this,
56:07
but the left broadly speaking was just so
56:10
destroyed during the Barack Obama years
56:12
when he continued and escalated the
56:14
George W. Bush foreign policy. And
56:16
it was just like too much
56:18
cognitive dissonance or something. And
56:20
they couldn't criticize him for that. And
56:23
then you had the rise of this
56:25
hyper focus on identitarianism
56:27
and racialism and gender and
56:30
all this stuff. And
56:32
like I was talking about before,
56:34
like the inability to distinguish between
56:36
priorities. This is why in the
56:38
middle of Black Lives Matter, you'd
56:40
see these demands to get
56:42
rid of Aunt Jemima, like as if that
56:44
should be at the top of the priority
56:46
list here. It's like crazy, crazy stuff. And
56:49
I was hopeful when Donald Trump
56:53
first came in that the left was going
56:55
to get better, that it was like, Oh,
56:57
well, now that your enemy is in charge
57:00
of the war machine, maybe it'll be easier
57:02
to criticize it. But unfortunately, this correction just
57:04
never came. And they were so triggered
57:08
by Donald Trump that they just
57:10
jumped on the narrative of
57:12
whoever his enemies were, in this case,
57:14
the CIA. And so they were just
57:17
like, Oh yeah, he's a Russian agent.
57:19
And just, you know, all of this
57:21
kind of delusional stuff. And I feel
57:24
like, okay, so the anti war left
57:26
was just gone for the most part. And
57:29
now they've come back. But
57:31
they haven't like shaken off any
57:33
of this insane woke ideology, they've
57:35
just come back with it. And
57:37
it so it does kind of lead to this
57:40
question of like, why are you guys back?
57:42
Which I don't exactly understand, like why are
57:45
you here now? It I'm glad to some
57:47
degree, like, okay, good, you're against this awful
57:50
thing. But where were
57:52
you exactly when Obama escalated the war
57:54
in Afghanistan, or when he went into
57:56
Libya, or Syria, or Somalia, or Yemen?
57:58
Where were you? you know, like
58:01
during this whole Ukrainian conflict, and why
58:03
is it that now you've popped back
58:05
up to oppose Israel? And what the
58:07
pro-Israeli narrative will be is that— They're
58:09
anti-Semites. They're anti-Semites. They hate Jews. They
58:12
don't care when anyone else does it.
58:14
It's just that they hate Jews. I
58:16
personally think it's much
58:18
more some type of
58:20
connection of like the oppressor versus
58:22
the oppressed of like they're
58:25
seeing Israel as the straight white
58:27
man in this scenario and
58:30
they're seeing the Palestinians as the
58:32
marginalized minority. Now, in
58:34
this case, I think that might lead them to
58:36
the correct answer, which
58:38
is that this war is
58:40
bad, but their methodology is
58:42
so flawed in getting there
58:44
that you still have these
58:46
really fundamental philosophical problems with
58:48
their worldview. That's kind of my
58:50
feeling. I think that's all fair, but
58:53
at the same time, I'm one to make the
58:55
argument like, don't look the gift horse in the
58:58
mouth, right? I take yes for it. Like you're
59:00
a libertarian. I'm a lefty. She's a
59:02
lefty, but we all agree on this issue so we could talk about
59:04
this issue and work together on this issue. And I feel like it's
59:06
a similar thing with the pink haired college kid. I agree. I
59:08
wouldn't agree with the pink haired college kid on much. And I
59:11
think they'd be way too sensitive, way too authoritarian in other contexts.
59:13
They would want to ban a Jordan Peterson or a Ben Shapiro
59:15
from coming to speak, but if they're right on this, I'm like,
59:17
fuck it. I'll take it. I'll take the
59:19
yes. So there's a few things that
59:22
I want to say because I think that's all
59:24
very interesting. So first of all, I think it's
59:26
important to remember that the
59:28
left had the Occupy Wall Street
59:30
moment that was very sort of
59:32
like populist universalist, you know, really, you
59:35
know, 99 percent versus the 1 percent of
59:37
messaging, all of that. And
59:40
out of that comes the Bernie Sanders
59:42
movement, which especially at the beginning had
59:44
that same like universalist
59:46
populist energy. And
59:49
do you remember what Hillary Clinton said about how
59:51
like breaking up the big banks
59:53
won't solve racism. Right. This
59:55
direction of the quote unquote
59:57
left, which was most embraced by. liberals,
1:00:01
really came from that Hillary Clinton
1:00:04
rebuke of Bernie Sanders of like, well,
1:00:06
sure, all this like tax the rich and
1:00:08
Medicare, but that's all fine. But what we
1:00:11
really need to focus on is the equivalent
1:00:13
of the microaggressions and you know, the virtue
1:00:15
signaling and whatever. And there's
1:00:17
a reason why this was so widely
1:00:20
embraced, because that sort of a critique
1:00:22
is not really a critique. It's very
1:00:24
easy for a corporation to hire a
1:00:26
DEI consultant and not have to be
1:00:28
taxed more or do anything different or like
1:00:30
have to deal with workers' unions or anything
1:00:32
else, right? So this
1:00:34
becomes widely embraced and
1:00:37
taken up. And you know, it's
1:00:39
just sort of like in the air that like, these
1:00:41
young people now who are involved in these protests, I
1:00:43
mean, they were babies when it was Barack Obama, and
1:00:45
this is like in the air of
1:00:47
when they're coming up. And so their interpretation of
1:00:49
what it means to be to the left is
1:00:52
like to do those things, but on steroids.
1:00:55
And that's kind of, you know, that's the
1:00:57
cultural ecosystem and milieu that they're coming up
1:00:59
in. So there's that in terms of
1:01:03
why the intense focus and all
1:01:05
the energy around Israel in particular,
1:01:07
I think it's too, I
1:01:09
think it's too dismissive to say that it's so they
1:01:12
have this oppressor oppressed dynamic, and they're just applying it
1:01:14
here. I mean, because I feel
1:01:16
like the things that I'm seeing being
1:01:18
done there and being done with my tax
1:01:20
dollars, like I think I said this to
1:01:22
you before, I've never felt more libertarian about
1:01:24
like, fuck paying taxes, like they're going to
1:01:26
drop bombs on babies. Jenks said the same thing. And
1:01:28
some of these things, however
1:01:31
cynical I've been in politics, it hasn't been enough.
1:01:33
I mean, I'm a little embarrassed to say, but
1:01:35
I never could have imagined that we would all
1:01:38
be watching, and you don't like the word, but
1:01:40
a genocide unfold in front of our eyes on
1:01:43
TikTok, a mass slaughter, a
1:01:45
collective siege, babies starving
1:01:47
to death where we're watching them in
1:01:49
real time, take their last breath, and
1:01:52
then have this monolith between the Democrats and the Republicans
1:01:55
like, yeah, we see that too, we're going to send
1:01:57
them more bombs so that they can keep doing the
1:01:59
same thing. That's what we're going to
1:02:01
do. And anyone who descends, we're going to
1:02:03
send in the police to crush their, you know,
1:02:05
crush their protests and we're here for Israel. It
1:02:07
doesn't matter what. We don't care. That
1:02:10
has actually been, again, I'm
1:02:12
a little embarrassed to admit it, but it has actually
1:02:14
been shocking to me, the level
1:02:16
of brazenness and the just
1:02:19
level of depravity. So
1:02:21
to me, it's not a surprise. In fact, Zagar and I
1:02:23
debated this early on. I was like, this is going to
1:02:25
be this generation's Iraq war moment. He was
1:02:28
like, it's a foreign. You know, young people aren't being
1:02:30
sent overseas like Vietnam. It's different. I
1:02:32
was like, no, I'm telling you because it's
1:02:34
so horrifying that this is on the
1:02:36
table. Like this is on the table.
1:02:38
I didn't know this was even on
1:02:40
the table. So I think
1:02:42
there's such a revulsion to that,
1:02:45
that it makes all the sense in the world
1:02:47
to me that this has become such a central
1:02:49
cause. And I don't know. But
1:02:51
if I had to predict, I think
1:02:53
there will be a little bit of a corrective
1:02:55
now. In fact, I think there already was a
1:02:57
bit of a corrective to some of the craziest
1:02:59
woke excesses, et cetera, because now you
1:03:02
have the example of like, oh, what we
1:03:04
were saying about how like, yay, we're pro
1:03:06
censorship when it's speech we don't agree with.
1:03:08
This is being applied now to us. And
1:03:11
you know what? The whole free speech thing that
1:03:13
actually sounds pretty good. People should be allowed to
1:03:15
say things that are controversial without having their skulls
1:03:17
cracked. Yeah. Okay. So,
1:03:20
I mean, look, I certainly agree with you. The
1:03:22
thing that really does, you know, separate
1:03:25
this war is just how many
1:03:27
of the images we all see. And
1:03:29
there's, there's, I've never seen so many from
1:03:32
any war. And even in the war
1:03:34
in Ukraine, where there's lots of horrible
1:03:36
things happening, I've never, I haven't seen
1:03:38
like images of babies dying at nearly the
1:03:40
rate of this. I did see a
1:03:42
lot, although not nearly as much when
1:03:45
the US Saudi backed war in, or
1:03:47
I should say the US
1:03:49
backed war in Yemen, which
1:03:51
was just the absolute worst thing in the
1:03:53
world, every bit as bad as this and
1:03:55
for much, much longer. And
1:03:58
there didn't seem to be any big outcrops. over
1:04:00
it. But just to the point
1:04:02
you were talking about initially, I've
1:04:04
been talking about this for years
1:04:06
now, but you have these guys
1:04:09
like, say, Ben Shapiro and Jordan
1:04:11
Peterson, and they've been making this
1:04:13
argument for years that basically the
1:04:15
left took over the liberals and
1:04:18
that they're all leftists now. Right,
1:04:20
they're all Marxists, blah, blah, blah. There's
1:04:23
something plausible about that, because if
1:04:25
you listen to, say, the corporate
1:04:27
media, they are promoting these ideas
1:04:29
of critical race theory that were
1:04:32
far left wing ideas. But at
1:04:34
the same time, that was only
1:04:36
one little sliver of the left
1:04:38
and the intellectual tradition of left
1:04:40
wing thought. And they picked this
1:04:43
one sliver, okay, and then blasted
1:04:45
it out from all of their
1:04:47
biggest megaphones. And you can go look at
1:04:49
this in the Nexus
1:04:51
charts when you see how many
1:04:53
times the word systemic oppression and
1:04:55
toxic masculinity and transgenderism and how
1:04:58
it just all shoots up like
1:05:00
in 2012. And
1:05:02
so basically my thesis is that
1:05:04
this was a neoliberal takeover of
1:05:07
the left and what and it
1:05:09
worked, but to like
1:05:11
to stunning levels, it worked so
1:05:13
well. And the real point there
1:05:15
is that it's not look,
1:05:18
obviously, Hillary Clinton wasn't
1:05:21
interested in ending racism.
1:05:24
She was interested in
1:05:26
you stopping to care about what
1:05:28
the big banks are doing. And
1:05:30
so basically what happened is they threw
1:05:32
all of these young lefties onto
1:05:34
these like social, you know, like
1:05:37
trails leading to nothingness, where now
1:05:39
we're having a conversation about whatever
1:05:42
like transgender bathrooms
1:05:44
and however you feel about that,
1:05:47
whatever side of that conversation you're
1:05:49
on, the point is
1:05:51
that nobody at the CIA or the
1:05:53
Federal Reserve or JPMorgan Chase cares that
1:05:55
you're having that conversation. It's
1:05:57
also part of the reason why they even really
1:05:59
important. issues, like issues like abortion, like that's a
1:06:02
really important issue. But no one at the big
1:06:04
banks is scared about you having that fight. Like
1:06:06
go on out and fight about that. They like
1:06:08
that. They didn't like Occupy
1:06:11
Wall Street. They don't like a group of people
1:06:13
standing outside the big banks screaming, we are the
1:06:15
99%. And so
1:06:17
I think this was essentially an op that
1:06:19
worked very well. And it was a neoliberal
1:06:22
takeover of the left. Anyway, to your you
1:06:25
know to your point about like if
1:06:27
this is our generations iraq i
1:06:29
mean i'll say at
1:06:32
least right now it's hard to make these
1:06:34
predictions it feels like for
1:06:36
whatever reason like the war in
1:06:38
libya and and the war in
1:06:40
syria and and the war in
1:06:42
yemen and all these other horrific
1:06:44
wars just didn't get this much
1:06:46
attention and for whatever reason this
1:06:48
one's getting and so i
1:06:51
don't know if it's iraq but it's bigger
1:06:53
than any of those already so in terms of
1:06:56
like the bigger in the mind of the american
1:06:58
people than any of those yeah
1:07:00
salary i'm i'm gonna agree and disagree with
1:07:02
both of you in part so on the
1:07:05
oppressor a press narrative saying i
1:07:07
think you're you're actually write that a lot of
1:07:09
the kids you now care about this they did
1:07:11
come to this through that framework i think that's
1:07:13
correct when i also agree with you
1:07:15
that it is also at least in part waking up
1:07:17
to the carnage of what's happening right so i think
1:07:19
you're both right on that one i'm on the free
1:07:22
speech thing that like will now these kids will care
1:07:24
about free speech actually think they'll just flip back when
1:07:26
it comes to like and agriculture a bunch of people
1:07:28
are giving a speech you know what i mean i
1:07:30
think they'll do the same thing that the right does
1:07:32
now where the right screams free speech when it's them
1:07:34
but when somebody they disagree with all the sudden they're
1:07:36
like drop the hammer and let's be authoritarian i'm counting
1:07:38
on human per hypocrisy as yeah you
1:07:40
don't have club or on the identity stuff
1:07:42
yeah i think like the reason why the
1:07:45
identity stuff has become so pervasive as because
1:07:47
it's the least power threatening and that's why
1:07:49
as the loudest and that's why it's the
1:07:51
most pervasive that's why is comparable for hillary
1:07:53
clinton or corporate media to sort of push
1:07:55
that out it also very convenient for them
1:07:57
to to crush the last and be like
1:07:59
your the real progressive. Yeah, they got
1:08:01
out radical, the actual radicals, by saying,
1:08:04
well, we want a DEI program and
1:08:06
it's like fucking okay, who cares, right?
1:08:08
And I think there are leftists that,
1:08:15
it's not just liberals that have the
1:08:17
hyper-identitarian problem, I do think there are
1:08:19
some leftists, particularly young leftists, who also
1:08:21
are equally focused or maybe even more
1:08:24
focused on hyper-identitarianism. And I think that's
1:08:26
a problem. But I also
1:08:28
think it kind of gets underplayed just how
1:08:30
many classic traditional class-focused leftists are still out
1:08:32
there. You know what I mean? Because it's
1:08:34
easy to do a boogeyman of
1:08:37
the left by saying there are
1:08:39
all these hyper-identity focused freaks. And
1:08:41
we just totally disregard all the
1:08:43
classic Marxian-type
1:08:45
leftists who are like, oh, I care about this
1:08:47
fucking class, right? Viva la revolution type. Here's
1:08:49
the, well, I wish there were more of us, frankly. I'm not
1:08:51
sure there are that many of us, but I wish there were.
1:08:53
But he's not with us on that one because he's libertarian. You're
1:08:56
an offers in a leftist, that's right. But I
1:08:58
like those leftists better. He
1:09:01
likes libertarians better than a lot of people on
1:09:03
our side, right? Something
1:09:05
I was curious about for you, Dave, though, is
1:09:07
that it almost flipped where
1:09:12
the liberals
1:09:14
were using identity as an explanation
1:09:16
for literally everything. And then the
1:09:19
right picks up wokeness and
1:09:22
it's getting applied as
1:09:24
a similarly convenient excuse to
1:09:26
let big banks off the hook and whatever,
1:09:29
where it's like, oh, Silicon Valley Bank failed.
1:09:31
We'll look at their board. They've got a
1:09:33
gay person. So obviously it's the wokeness that
1:09:35
was the problem here. And so
1:09:37
I felt like the dynamic flipped where it actually
1:09:39
became the right that was more obsessed with
1:09:42
wokeness than even like the
1:09:45
woke people were obsessed with wokeness. And it
1:09:47
really fell flat. I mean, look at Ron
1:09:49
DeSantis who launched his whole campaign on like,
1:09:52
Florida's where wokeness comes to die or whatever.
1:09:54
And even he started abandoning the term because
1:09:56
it just, no one cared. And
1:09:59
again, it's like, a convenient thing
1:10:02
to lay on any problem that corporations don't care
1:10:04
if they do have the gay guy on the
1:10:06
board or if they don't have the gay guy
1:10:08
on the board. So either way, if that's what
1:10:10
you're fighting about is whether or not the one
1:10:12
gay guy is on the board, either way that's
1:10:14
a win for them. Yeah, I
1:10:16
mean, there's actual images of
1:10:20
floats at the gay pride parade
1:10:23
with Bank of America logos
1:10:25
at the bottom of it. And you're just
1:10:27
like, doesn't that just say it all? That's
1:10:30
it right there. Like, could you imagine from
1:10:32
the perspective of like big banks at like
1:10:34
during Occupy Wall Street, if the deal was
1:10:36
like, all right, how about we buy you
1:10:39
a gay float and you all go away?
1:10:41
Okay, that'd
1:10:43
be a pretty good deal from Bank of America's point of
1:10:45
view. And well, look, I think I also
1:10:47
think what you're getting at like the other half
1:10:50
of this, this op was
1:10:52
that yeah, you also they also drew
1:10:55
the right wingers into having the
1:10:57
same dumb discussion. And these people
1:10:59
like Ben Shapiro, who became famous
1:11:03
for what? For going and arguing with some 19
1:11:05
year old who's and she's like, you know, I
1:11:07
was born a man, why can't I be a
1:11:10
woman? And he's like, why can't you be a
1:11:12
bird? And everyone's like, the
1:11:15
intellectual prowess of Ben Shapiro, you know,
1:11:17
like, as if like, what are you
1:11:19
even doing with yours? I mean, look,
1:11:21
obviously, like she's this college
1:11:24
kids an idiot, but like, what are you
1:11:26
some hero for like taking this down? And
1:11:28
so it all got just, you know, like,
1:11:31
dumbed down and drawn into these
1:11:33
conversations that are totally unimportant, like just
1:11:35
like I was saying before, like, these
1:11:37
things that it's like, you're never allowed
1:11:40
to be like, guys, guys, this just
1:11:42
doesn't matter that much. Like things that
1:11:44
matter so much more are happening. Like,
1:11:46
how about, you know, during this period,
1:11:48
right, from, from 2008 through
1:11:52
2020, you had the two and this is
1:11:54
kind of where libertarians and and leftists like
1:11:56
yourself can all come together is that you
1:11:58
had the two biggest transfers of wealth in
1:12:00
human history and they both went
1:12:02
from the working class and middle
1:12:04
class to the uber-rich politically connected
1:12:06
class. You could
1:12:09
have whatever conversation like, I might
1:12:11
support the free market and you
1:12:13
guys might support redistributive policies from
1:12:15
the rich to the poor, but
1:12:17
who the hell supports redistributive policies
1:12:19
from the poor to the rich?
1:12:22
This is all going on
1:12:24
while our national conversation has
1:12:26
devolved into whether Ben Shapiro
1:12:28
owned that 19-year-old. And
1:12:31
so the whole thing
1:12:33
just, you know, and again, right, like your
1:12:35
example with all this stuff is all good
1:12:37
examples. But then on top of that, one
1:12:40
of the things that have been that people have been
1:12:42
reminded of or maybe introduced to for the first time,
1:12:44
I was certainly well aware of it. But
1:12:47
all of these, the right wingers who are the
1:12:50
Zionist hawks, they
1:12:52
were always, they were the originators of this
1:12:54
woke stuff. They
1:12:57
were always the first woke, woke stirrers.
1:12:59
And now you're seeing that reemerge. But
1:13:01
this was always the thing that, oh,
1:13:04
if you criticize Israel, you hate Jews.
1:13:07
And isn't that the exact same argument
1:13:09
as every woke leftist is making? If
1:13:12
I criticize any of the things they believe
1:13:14
in, that means I'm a racist. And
1:13:17
it's been interesting and I think
1:13:19
incredibly revealing to see all of
1:13:21
the guys who made millions of
1:13:24
dollars by being against
1:13:26
that just totally embrace it
1:13:28
one second later that right now, if
1:13:30
you are critical of the way
1:13:32
Israel is conducting, like just imagine you're
1:13:35
critical. First of all, it's a
1:13:37
war of choice, like
1:13:39
objectively speaking. It's not that
1:13:41
Israel was invaded and had to defend themselves.
1:13:43
Like some prisoners broke out and killed some
1:13:45
people and ran back into their prison. You
1:13:48
could say they have an obligation to do what they can to get
1:13:51
the hostages back, but this certainly isn't the way to do that. But
1:13:54
imagine like criticizing a war
1:13:57
of choice against a captive
1:13:59
people. that don't have a
1:14:01
military. You know, like criticizing
1:14:03
that is equated to hating
1:14:06
Jewish people. It's
1:14:08
as dumb as anything you've ever heard out of
1:14:10
the woke left. And so all these dynamical things.
1:14:12
It's also really quite anti-Semitic actually,
1:14:14
to conflate all Jewish people
1:14:16
like you have to be
1:14:19
associated with this state government
1:14:21
that's committing atrocities. And
1:14:23
I see this done all the time,
1:14:25
where yeah, if you're criticizing Israel, the
1:14:27
Ergo, all Jewish people must be associated
1:14:29
with Israel, Ergo, you're criticizing Jewish people.
1:14:32
And that kind of like blanket characterization
1:14:35
of any demographic group of
1:14:37
people, like that's kind of
1:14:39
the textbook definition of racism.
1:14:41
Yeah, it's the only people who agree
1:14:44
with that are Benjamin Netanyahu and
1:14:46
the Jew haters. Like
1:14:48
the actual anti-Semites agree with the Zionists
1:14:50
on this. That's right. This does speak
1:14:52
for all Jews. And you
1:14:54
know, there's always been this very
1:14:56
weird symbiotic relationship between Jew haters
1:14:59
and Zionists. And you know,
1:15:01
this is why the Stern gang met with
1:15:03
the Nazis and they wanted to ally with
1:15:05
the Nazis during World War Two. And it's
1:15:08
only because the Nazis hated Jews so much
1:15:10
that it didn't happen, which is kind of
1:15:12
funny in a dark way. Can you
1:15:14
explain that? Because we learned that in
1:15:16
the Daryl's podcast. Can
1:15:19
you lay that out for people? Because it is an
1:15:21
astonishing fact. People don't know this. So
1:15:23
the Stern gang, if you're not aware, they
1:15:25
were one of the militias in Palestine before
1:15:27
the creation of Israel that then got incorporated
1:15:30
into the IDF when Israel was created. And
1:15:32
they were the most vicious ones and they
1:15:34
were all pretty vicious, but they were like
1:15:37
the they were self-described
1:15:39
terrorists. Like they engaged
1:15:42
in terrorism with
1:15:44
the stated goal of driving out an occupying
1:15:47
force. Let that irony sink in for
1:15:49
a little bit. This is
1:15:51
like some crazy argument that Israelis could
1:15:53
know that's not occupation doesn't lead to
1:15:55
terrorism. It was like literally what
1:15:58
you guys said. So anyway, during a
1:16:00
little bit before that during the
1:16:02
run-up to World War II, they
1:16:05
met at least on one occasion
1:16:07
with Nazis to
1:16:09
try to form a partnership. And
1:16:11
the reason was, when you think
1:16:14
about it, kind of obvious that
1:16:16
the Nazis, this is before the
1:16:18
Nazis went genocidal, the
1:16:21
Nazis at the time, their stated
1:16:23
goal was to drive all of Jews out
1:16:26
of Europe. And the Zionist goal
1:16:28
was to get all of the Jews to
1:16:30
come to Palestine. And so
1:16:32
they saw it and they were like, well, hey,
1:16:34
we got a perfect partnership here. We both want
1:16:37
the same thing. Hello horseshoe horseshoe there for you.
1:16:39
Yeah, I mean, like the worst imaginable horseshoe theory.
1:16:42
But even before the rise of the Nazis, the
1:16:44
Zionists always weirdly had mutual interests with
1:16:52
the rise of antisemitism. And you can see that
1:16:54
even now today, right? Like the more people that
1:16:56
are out there saying horrible things about Jews, that's
1:16:58
not like, you know, if I'm having a debate
1:17:00
with Dennis Prager, that's not a point for me.
1:17:02
That's a point that hurts my case. But it's
1:17:05
a point that helps his case because he can
1:17:07
go look, look at how much we're hated. And
1:17:09
that's why we have to do what we have
1:17:11
to do. And that's why
1:17:13
we have to have Israel. And as Joe Biden says,
1:17:15
if there is no Israel, no Jew anywhere, it can
1:17:17
be safe. Right, right. We have
1:17:19
to kind of live in this world as
1:17:23
if the state of Western civilization today
1:17:26
is similar to the state of Nazi
1:17:28
Germany, which is totally absurd. But
1:17:31
so they always kind of had this
1:17:33
relationship where they wanted to see a rise
1:17:36
in antisemitism in Europe because they wanted
1:17:38
more Jews to come to Palestine. And
1:17:41
ultimately, that is what happened.
1:17:45
Dave, talk to me about, you
1:17:47
mentioned in that debate, you don't like to use
1:17:49
the word genocide applied to the Gaza Strip.
1:17:51
Is that like a philosophical thing? You don't think
1:17:54
it meets the definition or you feel like that's
1:17:56
tactically better not to use that language? What
1:17:58
are your thoughts there? it's
1:18:00
I guess there's a
1:18:03
bit of both to it. So strategically speaking,
1:18:05
when you go into these debates, it just
1:18:07
it always devolves into a debate over semantics.
1:18:09
And like, that's not really the debate I
1:18:11
care to have. Like, I
1:18:14
don't really care what you call it. I'm
1:18:16
here to argue that this is wrong and
1:18:18
horrific and needs to stop. Look,
1:18:22
there's the word genocide, it conjures
1:18:25
up images of something that isn't
1:18:27
exactly what's happening in Gaza right
1:18:29
now. Like, it conjures up the
1:18:31
Holocaust. The
1:18:34
Holocaust or the Armenian genocide or like what
1:18:36
Stalin did to the Ukrainians, which I guess
1:18:38
is a little bit more similar to
1:18:41
this. But you know,
1:18:43
the international definition of genocide is like so
1:18:45
incredibly vague. And it's just like, I don't
1:18:47
know, I just don't, it's like, I'm not
1:18:49
like offended when people use the word. I
1:18:52
just don't even, I don't
1:18:54
even care to get into all
1:18:56
of these debates. It's not, you
1:18:58
know, like, I'm, I'm a libertarian,
1:19:00
like a very radical libertarian. I
1:19:03
don't believe in government authority at
1:19:05
all. I don't actually care what
1:19:07
the UN decided the international definition
1:19:09
of genocide is. What I care
1:19:11
about is human
1:19:13
beings, having their rights violated,
1:19:15
I care about what's moral and what's
1:19:17
immoral. And to me, this is horrifically
1:19:20
wrong. And I'm just, I, it's like,
1:19:22
I feel like I'm
1:19:25
a lawyer and I've got this guy
1:19:27
dead to rights on this charge of
1:19:29
this is morally wrong. So let me
1:19:32
just prosecute that case and not worry
1:19:34
about getting into like, you know, arguments
1:19:37
about interpretations of international law. So
1:19:39
in other words, that like the
1:19:41
international criminal court, for example, you
1:19:43
would say a stronger charge to
1:19:45
bring is like, Hey, I'm making
1:19:47
updates here, but hey, on November
1:19:50
12th, you guys bombed
1:19:53
this hospital and this clinic and
1:19:55
this vehicle, which had five civilians in
1:19:58
it. And here are the bodies. and
1:20:00
here's the evidence and this is what
1:20:02
you're being charged with and these are
1:20:05
the penalties, right? So in other words,
1:20:07
you would rather get down into the
1:20:09
micro specific examples versus the broad title
1:20:11
Because it's harder to argue against the
1:20:14
specifics of the actual crimes themselves versus
1:20:16
a label like genocide The
1:20:18
way I look at it is like this And
1:20:21
this is an argument that comes from Lysander
1:20:23
Spooner who is like a brilliant anarchist thinker
1:20:27
and he basically argued that
1:20:29
the Constitution of the
1:20:31
United States of America has no authority
1:20:33
over any of us because we never
1:20:35
agreed to it We never signed it.
1:20:37
We never like there's we never actually
1:20:39
like in it's not a contract
1:20:41
that we voluntarily entered into
1:20:44
but he would argue that The
1:20:48
United States government is
1:20:50
ruled by that document because they all do
1:20:52
swear an oath to uphold it So like
1:20:54
you made the choice to enter into this
1:20:56
contract. So in the same way, I think
1:20:59
that I Think international
1:21:01
law is all Imaginary
1:21:03
and it doesn't really exist. I
1:21:05
like it as a tool to point out
1:21:08
that hey Government of Israel
1:21:10
you agreed to these rules and you're not
1:21:12
following them But the reality of the situation
1:21:14
is that when you go to a high
1:21:16
enough level of power There is no such
1:21:19
thing as law and the entire new
1:21:21
world order International,
1:21:23
you know the whole liberal world order that
1:21:25
was created in the wake of World War
1:21:28
two was specifically Created so
1:21:30
that the United States of America could
1:21:32
become the global empire and that right
1:21:34
don't have to follow International law and
1:21:36
you see this blatantly I mean like
1:21:38
the US violates international law all the
1:21:40
time Israel violates international law all the time
1:21:43
and that's just too bad We're allowed to
1:21:45
do it. That's the way it works International
1:21:47
law is a tool for the powerful to
1:21:50
impose on the less powerful So
1:21:52
we will stop someone else from violating international
1:21:54
law unless you are on the side of
1:21:56
the Empire But you would want to see
1:21:58
it equally applied You'd want to see
1:22:01
it fairly applied and to have the laws enforced
1:22:03
against both the US and Israel, etc. What
1:22:05
I want to see is moral outcomes.
1:22:08
So whatever the means to get there
1:22:10
might be, I mean, whoever has the
1:22:12
power to do so, yes, I'd like
1:22:14
to see countries, or governments,
1:22:16
I should say, I wouldn't
1:22:19
like to see them not be
1:22:21
allowed to occupy and indiscriminately kill
1:22:24
innocent civilians. And if
1:22:26
there was a way to achieve that through international law,
1:22:28
then sure, that would be better than what we have
1:22:30
right now. I
1:22:32
don't disagree with, certainly with the fact that
1:22:34
the US is totally hypocritical. I mean, you
1:22:36
can see it very blatantly with the way
1:22:38
they talk about what Russia is doing in
1:22:40
Ukraine, you know, not that they can say
1:22:42
genocide, they can say war crime, it's not
1:22:44
hard, Putin's a war criminal. Then
1:22:47
when it's Israel, it's like, what
1:22:49
is it? What even is a war crime? Who could
1:22:51
really say we're going to do an investigation and we'll
1:22:53
get back to you? I
1:22:56
mean, this is just the most recent example, right
1:22:58
there, we could go back throughout the history of
1:23:00
this, you know, post World War II
1:23:02
order and point out many, many more. Like
1:23:05
you, I find it useful as a tool, though, because
1:23:07
even though the leaders were full of shit, like, the
1:23:10
people generally bought into this
1:23:12
idea. You know, that's why
1:23:14
they still use the humanitarian language, because people
1:23:16
feel like you and I do have like,
1:23:18
no, we'd like to see certain things be
1:23:21
off the table. We'd like to feel like,
1:23:23
you know, we're the good guys, the way
1:23:25
we were in World War II, stopping a
1:23:27
genocide and being on the right side of
1:23:29
history. We like the idea of there are
1:23:31
certain things that are acts of, you know,
1:23:34
acts against humanity, crimes against humanity that should
1:23:36
be completely banned. And so
1:23:38
when you have somewhat
1:23:41
of an international consensus forming around the fact
1:23:43
of like, at
1:23:45
least plausibly a genocide, that's at least potentially
1:23:47
the case. And you've got the UN, you
1:23:49
know, special repertoire from human rights saying, hey,
1:23:52
there's reasonable grounds. And you now
1:23:54
have a majority of Biden voters saying, yeah, it looks
1:23:56
like a genocide to us. It's
1:23:58
not that I expect the effect. officials to
1:24:01
be consistent. But I think
1:24:03
their hypocrisy is in and of
1:24:05
itself a useful tool of,
1:24:07
okay, you can, Joe Biden can't come out
1:24:10
and say, actually, I do support
1:24:12
tenicides and I was just full of shit.
1:24:14
He has to keep up the farce. And
1:24:17
so that's what makes it a difficult situation for
1:24:19
him. And why do you find the word to
1:24:22
be, to be useful in this
1:24:24
context? Yeah, look, I mean, that's
1:24:26
a fair argument. I pretty much agree
1:24:28
with all of that. And certainly
1:24:32
there's a
1:24:34
benefit to using the word and there's a cost
1:24:36
to using the word. I get your point there.
1:24:39
I can't really argue with any of that. I
1:24:42
just say I'm just going to continue to
1:24:44
prosecute the case that it is horrific. What's
1:24:46
happening? So I was going to
1:24:48
say the final thing on my end. I don't know if you have something you want to.
1:24:51
Yeah, I've got one more. If it's on this, go ahead. Okay.
1:24:54
I wanted to hear a little bit more of
1:24:56
your thoughts from a libertarian perspective of,
1:24:59
you know, you said you're saying it's just you
1:25:01
want to see moral acts and not immoral acts.
1:25:04
What, from a libertarian perspective, is the
1:25:06
way that that would be enforced in
1:25:10
your ideal world system, etc? Well,
1:25:13
I mean, really, like all that has to
1:25:15
happen is that America has to stop propping
1:25:17
this up. I mean, it would
1:25:19
have been there would be no possible
1:25:23
way that Israel could behave the way they
1:25:25
do without the US signing off on it.
1:25:27
So we're essentially removing one
1:25:30
government program away from basically solving the
1:25:32
problem. Israel would be forced to negotiate
1:25:34
and they would be forced to find
1:25:36
some type of peace. And this is,
1:25:39
you know, there's always that this is
1:25:41
also true throughout the entire history of
1:25:43
Israel, that this has always been the
1:25:45
dynamic, is that there were reasonable voices
1:25:48
within the Zionist movement. But
1:25:50
then they had all of the backing
1:25:52
of international financing. And so they didn't
1:25:54
have to listen to those reasonable voices because we
1:25:56
had they had such an incredible advantage over their
1:26:00
Arab You
1:26:02
know inhabitants of the land and so
1:26:04
that's to me the obvious libertarian solution
1:26:06
to this is to get our government
1:26:09
out of the way of Funding and
1:26:11
propping up Israel and protecting them internationally
1:26:14
That would put enormous pressure on them is the
1:26:16
same thing in the situation in Ukraine where they
1:26:18
literally were ready to make a deal And
1:26:21
then the Biden administration comes in and goes we will
1:26:23
fund you till the end of time if you don't
1:26:25
make this deal And of course, there's tremendous perverse incentives
1:26:27
there because it's not just oh We'll
1:26:29
we'll fund your war effort as there's been
1:26:31
a ton of reporting on it's like the
1:26:34
powerful people in Ukraine Who are making this
1:26:36
decision are this money's going into their bank
1:26:38
accounts like they're getting bribed off to continue
1:26:40
fighting this war and they're not Fighting and
1:26:42
dying in it. They're conscripting young men to
1:26:44
go fight and die in it as very
1:26:47
similar dynamic in Israel So I'd say the
1:26:49
libertarian solution would be to get our government
1:26:51
out of propping up. I
1:26:53
don't know Dave I think you're just a self-hating
1:26:55
Jew All
1:26:59
right, so so my last question Dave and correct me
1:27:01
if I'm wrong you called yourself a radical libertarian Is
1:27:04
that the terminology used or was it a different word?
1:27:06
I'd say I think that's a good description. Yeah No,
1:27:08
that's what I just said right now. I mean, yes,
1:27:11
I would okay I mean, I would like to see
1:27:13
nothing short of a revolution in this country. So I
1:27:15
think that's pretty radical So
1:27:17
I you know, I've read the whole Libertarian
1:27:20
cannon I've read Hayek. I've read
1:27:22
von Mises. I've read a bunch
1:27:24
of Ayn Rand Which
1:27:27
flavor of libertarian are you because I've
1:27:29
even seen arguments I think it was
1:27:31
Rand who made the argument of like
1:27:34
any sort of public System
1:27:37
like a court system for example or police
1:27:39
system like even that she would have like
1:27:41
voluntarily funded by the wealthy So in other
1:27:43
words like no form of taxation in any
1:27:45
way shape or form not even a 1%
1:27:47
or 2% flat
1:27:50
tax or you know Tax
1:27:52
sales tax or whatever what how deep does it go?
1:27:54
I know that we're opening up a whole can of
1:27:56
worms here. We can have you on again and we
1:27:58
can get into other like economic stuff if you'd
1:28:00
like, but I'm just curious which flavor
1:28:02
of libertarian are you because there's such a
1:28:05
wide array of versions of libertarian. Yeah,
1:28:07
well I think so I think Mises
1:28:10
was is the most brilliant economist
1:28:12
to ever live. I completely agree
1:28:14
with him on all things economic.
1:28:16
I'm a Rothbardian, you know, more
1:28:18
like in the Ron Paul school
1:28:20
of libertarians. I'm not a
1:28:22
huge iron round fan and
1:28:25
I don't like Hayek at all. But
1:28:28
so I mean look the answer
1:28:30
essentially to me is that like
1:28:32
yeah ideally you would have a
1:28:34
voluntary society. That would be the
1:28:36
ideal way to organize society and
1:28:38
that it wouldn't there's no reason
1:28:40
why. Look if you really
1:28:42
think about the nature of government what
1:28:45
it is is a collection of services
1:28:48
and whether it's protection services or
1:28:50
you know whatever the government
1:28:53
policy may be. And that
1:28:55
if you're looking at this like okay well
1:28:57
these have to be services have to be
1:29:00
funded. Now how should they be funded? Should
1:29:02
they be funded because the people who get
1:29:05
these services provided to them choose to
1:29:07
purchase them or should they be funded
1:29:09
with the threat of we will throw
1:29:11
you in a cage if you don't
1:29:13
fund these. Yes ideally the morally correct
1:29:15
answer there would be that they were
1:29:17
voluntarily funded. That being said I'm not
1:29:19
going to like fight against a one
1:29:21
or two percent income tax that would
1:29:23
be a big improvement over what we
1:29:25
have. I'm not sure we'll ever get
1:29:27
to the point where we do live
1:29:29
in a completely voluntary society but I
1:29:31
would like to move as close to
1:29:33
that direction as possible. You
1:29:36
are a dirty reformist. You are no revolutionary.
1:29:40
A one percent income tax. How
1:29:42
dare you. We're gonna get you
1:29:44
to support unions next Jesus. I
1:29:48
support I support private unions not
1:29:50
public unions though. There's a libertarian
1:29:52
argument for unions for sure that's actually
1:29:54
requires that the government power if you
1:29:56
have like local bargaining committee and then
1:29:58
that's actually most liberal. I've come
1:30:00
across her anti-union, but well no longer
1:30:03
conversation for another day Well, I'll just
1:30:05
say that the the libertarian position is
1:30:07
to you you have to oppose public
1:30:09
sector unions Because it's not it's a
1:30:12
different thing to have workers get together
1:30:14
to Collectively negotiate because we have more
1:30:16
negotiating power when we're together than when
1:30:19
we're just individuals It's a
1:30:21
whole different thing, you know because
1:30:23
in that dynamic It's like the workers want to
1:30:25
get paid more the boss wants to pay them
1:30:27
less So okay, you kind of are negotiating what
1:30:29
a better deal in the
1:30:31
case of public sector unions you have a
1:30:35
Bunch of government employees getting together arguing
1:30:37
with the government about how much of
1:30:39
other people's money They
1:30:41
should give them in which case this
1:30:44
and this just ends with the politician going
1:30:46
sure I'll give you more of other people's
1:30:48
money and this is why there's so much
1:30:50
corruption in every public sector Union
1:30:53
so that I suppose Gotcha,
1:30:55
well, we'll save the the debate for another time That would
1:30:57
be a fun one though if we get into economic stuff,
1:30:59
I would enjoy that very much But Dave, thank you so
1:31:02
much for joining us man. This was a lot of fun.
1:31:04
Yeah, I really enjoyed it Hey, I'm gonna go your stuff
1:31:06
for everybody too. Oh, well, thank you
1:31:08
guys very much. I really enjoyed it Yeah,
1:31:10
comic Dave Smith comm is my website You
1:31:13
want to see where I'm gonna be I tore all
1:31:15
over the country So if you want to come see
1:31:18
me check me out there and then at comic Dave
1:31:20
Smith on Twitter My podcast is as it says behind
1:31:22
me part of the problem. Thanks again guys. I really
1:31:24
enjoyed it Alright,
1:31:26
that was Dave Smith very interesting conversation.
1:31:29
We should actually have one again to go
1:31:31
into like economic Yeah, I have a friendly
1:31:33
debate cuz he seems like one to not
1:31:35
take disagreements personally Definitely big for
1:31:37
this space. Yeah, people get all in their
1:31:39
feelings when you do I'm
1:31:42
never coming back on. Here's a 27 tweet thread against
1:31:44
you. You know, I mean, I'm giving of anyone at
1:31:46
this point Who's on the right side? That's
1:31:49
funny. I'll forgive a lot of things but there's a lot
1:31:51
of good conversation to have Because
1:31:56
I mean in his ideal he would
1:31:58
like a voluntary voluntary society in terms
1:32:00
of funding the basic
1:32:02
necessities. But the big objection
1:32:04
to that, which I didn't want to get in because we could
1:32:06
have gone for another hour, two hours on that, is
1:32:09
that it would only be
1:32:11
the wealthy who fund the courts. It would only
1:32:13
be the wealthy who fund the police. And then
1:32:15
the courts and the police are gonna be totally
1:32:17
biased in favor of the wealthy to the point
1:32:19
of absurdity, right? And then you have
1:32:21
a peasant fucking overclass society, which is in theory the
1:32:23
thing that you're trying to avoid if you're creating a
1:32:25
society that's voluntary like that. You know what I'm saying?
1:32:28
Yeah, sort of like the old company towns,
1:32:30
like West Virginia, where the courts and the
1:32:32
police and the schools and the housing and
1:32:34
everything is like run by the mine
1:32:36
operators. Right, yeah. Yeah, I mean,
1:32:39
there's, anyway, we'll say the libertarian
1:32:41
debate for another day because there's- It's a fun one
1:32:43
though. It is a fun one. We
1:32:45
had that great debate with the libertarian Mike Tromat
1:32:47
number. Yeah, but Dave is more substantive than that
1:32:49
guy. That was a good conversation. It was a
1:32:51
good conversation, but Dave can handle
1:32:54
his own better, I think, than that guy. He's very
1:32:56
skilled. I mean, that's one of the things that we
1:32:58
were talking off camera. It's great to have
1:33:00
his comedian skills. Not
1:33:04
only is he a great communicator, but
1:33:06
he has a way of sort of summing things up.
1:33:09
That's what came through in the debate. And also, comedians
1:33:11
are great observers of the absurdities in
1:33:14
society, and that's such an important skill
1:33:16
in all of this as well. Yeah,
1:33:18
there's a communication X factor ability that's super
1:33:20
important for people who are in the public
1:33:23
eye, and virtually every comedian has that. I
1:33:25
don't know if I've ever seen a comedian
1:33:27
that doesn't have some X factor
1:33:29
in terms of ability to communicate. Oh
1:33:31
yeah, I can't imagine. That's so hard to stand up
1:33:33
in front of a room people and just be a room
1:33:35
of people and be like, make them laugh. It is
1:33:38
fun. I've done one semi
1:33:40
standup routine in my life. I
1:33:43
was the best man
1:33:45
at my friend's wedding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Plotted out
1:33:47
a whole little. You did a whole set. I
1:33:49
did a whole standup routine. I did a whole
1:33:51
set. And first of all, I understand why they
1:33:53
do it. It is fucking addicting. When you get
1:33:55
the laughter, it's like a drug. If
1:33:58
people are laughing, you're like, how may that happen? It
1:34:00
feels good. It feels really good But
1:34:03
the thing that I found interesting about it is all the
1:34:05
lines that I thought would hit and make them
1:34:07
laugh Yeah, didn't and all my throwaway lines made
1:34:09
them laugh, huh? So I was like, oh my
1:34:11
god There's like a science to this shit. You
1:34:14
know, I thought this line was a guaranteed winner
1:34:16
and it was fucking crickets But the next throwaway
1:34:18
line they all that's like even the
1:34:20
best I mean they have to go out and try to
1:34:22
mess it try the material on Workshop
1:34:24
it told me only like the best of
1:34:26
the best can know up front like I bet like Dave
1:34:28
Chappelle or somebody like that Knows up front when I say this
1:34:31
they're gonna laugh It'd be interesting to know if
1:34:33
they feel like they know right away when
1:34:35
they write a joke like oh, this is gonna
1:34:37
hit Well, we remember the other day in the
1:34:39
car about that with music. Yeah, cuz there's this
1:34:41
guy I think what's his name Mike Miller? Is
1:34:43
it the guy who made all the beats all
1:34:45
max Miller Mike Miller's the fucking State Department cool
1:34:47
Jesus Christ? No, that's Matthew
1:34:50
Miller Matthew Miller. Okay Anyway,
1:34:52
there's this one guy who made all like the
1:34:54
number one hit bangin ass songs for like the
1:34:57
past 20 years Yeah, pretty we went and looked
1:34:59
at the list. It was like she's every song
1:35:01
by like this Brittany and Taylor and
1:35:03
Ariana and it's like I wonder
1:35:05
for the artist. Do you know? Hey,
1:35:08
I just made a banger. That's gonna be number one on the charts or
1:35:10
is it just like I don't fucking know throw
1:35:12
it out There see what happens. Yeah, I
1:35:14
my guess is that it's Kind
1:35:17
of similar to you know when we put out
1:35:19
a clip on YouTube you have a vague idea, but
1:35:21
you don't know Yeah, sometimes you you pretty
1:35:23
much know like oh these names are in
1:35:25
the title I crushed it with the title
1:35:28
the thumbnail like there's no way this doesn't
1:35:30
pop off barring YouTube like blocking it or
1:35:32
whatever Sometimes you
1:35:35
are surprised Sometimes one that
1:35:37
you think is gonna be a day and you're just doing
1:35:39
it because you're like this is important and I'm gonna do
1:35:41
it will totally pop off
1:35:43
and Sometimes one that you think
1:35:45
is gonna be like you feel like oh, this
1:35:47
is probably do well It's kind of like a
1:35:50
dud so I mean makes bad is an expect
1:35:52
sometimes you do so that's what I guess is
1:35:54
like They know like oh, there's no way this
1:35:56
isn't popular, but just like with the YouTube algorithm
1:35:59
some of it Alchemy some of it's
1:36:01
not just merit It's like well like it
1:36:03
played and does it happen to you know
1:36:05
pop at the right moment? Argument right happening
1:36:07
right now when like the hip-hop world where you
1:36:09
got Drake versus like a thousand people Yeah, it's
1:36:11
like the argument from all the people who are
1:36:14
against Drake or like you're totally fucking manufactured like
1:36:16
you're not organically The
1:36:19
guy you've been made the guy because your
1:36:21
relationship with the industry and how they pump your shit
1:36:23
out That's basically the heart of the argument which
1:36:25
we don't need to get into all that right now But I'm
1:36:28
a Drake hater, but I think he's holding his own in this
1:36:30
fight with Kendrick and all the rest of them anyway We'll end
1:36:32
it on that. I think for you. I mean for you to
1:36:34
be as big as Drake It's
1:36:36
not just manufactured I
1:36:38
just think they can manufacture somebody like Joe Biden
1:36:41
is fucking president you're telling me they can't manufacture
1:36:43
some shit this motherfucker Never would have won an
1:36:45
affair system There's
1:36:49
no electoral college of the music industry
1:36:51
like no no it would be it
1:36:53
has to be that you know Yes,
1:36:55
it's pumped a lot, but also
1:36:57
people genuinely then they were like I like this I'm
1:37:00
gonna listen to it like you can't I mean this
1:37:02
is somebody he's not like the most number ones of
1:37:04
any whatever Like I'm not
1:37:06
even a huge Drake fan But it
1:37:08
can't be that it's just manufactured clearly
1:37:11
people like his music organically the question
1:37:13
is how far can? Pushing somebody get them
1:37:15
to the top of the mountain. That's the
1:37:17
question Yeah, and I think you would concede
1:37:19
that it can certainly get you
1:37:22
at the very least a few number one hits Yeah,
1:37:24
right, but Drake is way beyond a few number one
1:37:26
I understand that I'm saying if you agree that it
1:37:28
could get you at least a few number one hits
1:37:30
I think in the realm of possibility you could push
1:37:33
somebody to being like the guy I
1:37:35
think it could probably get you to be like a one-hit wonder
1:37:38
like one hit I think it can
1:37:40
go further than that believe it or not I you might
1:37:42
be right that it can't get you like 20 number
1:37:45
one hits And you're the guy in the industry for 10 or
1:37:47
20 years and probably right about that But
1:37:49
I think with just a push you can probably get
1:37:52
somebody you know to be number one for three years
1:37:54
four years something like that You know
1:37:56
I don't buy it, but look this all is
1:37:58
all moot point anyway because like What I like you
1:38:00
know I'm a Drake hater, but I thought he's
1:38:03
doing great in this battle with Kendrick his his
1:38:05
diss track was fire I liked it and Kendrick
1:38:07
hasn't said shit back yet. He still hasn't responded
1:38:09
Oh, but that's how he works. He takes years
1:38:11
before he releases shit usually where a Drake was
1:38:13
like. Oh you diss me Next
1:38:16
day here bitch. I don't actually know if it was a
1:38:19
nice day was within the next few days Yeah, they release
1:38:21
another diss track with fucking AI to pock That
1:38:24
was hard With
1:38:26
AI to fuck and fucking AI Snoop Dogg. I
1:38:28
wonder how Snoop Dogg felt about that True
1:38:32
Snoop Dogg like you're I'm alive. You're I
1:38:34
don't want to be in this beef. You know
1:38:37
maybe he does it's nice for his relevance right
1:38:39
yeah This is what when I'm falling asleep at
1:38:41
night is what I hear Kyle over there listening
1:38:43
to not only It's
1:38:45
golf stuff. It's fucking I watch a
1:38:48
million things true anyway all right all
1:38:50
right guys everybody What are you doing with your life? It's
1:38:52
below You know pay five bucks a month get the video
1:38:54
a day earlier He could sign up for free get the
1:38:56
audio version a day later. Love you all and we'll talk
1:38:59
you later
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