#2370 - Dave Smith

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How weird is it to be Dave Smith?

It's a little bit weird.

It's weirder to be Joe Rogan.

You think?

Yeah, it's got to be.

It's weird.

It's weird to be any person in the public eye, but in this time, it's particularly weird.

If you're like one of the only people, I mean,

the media is so bizarrely compromised.

It's so weird when you watch these narratives spin both on the left and on the right.

And you're like, is anybody fucking rational?

Is anybody looking at that?

And there's so few that a comedian like yourself just rises to the top of the heap.

Well, it's funny, dude, because so like since the last time I was on, this has been kind of like the knock on me in a way now is it a comedian you're just a comedian this guy's not an actual support comedian

yes that's right have you ever been

it feels a social support comedian it feels weird doing this without doug to be honest it seems kind of wrong but but that's been like the essentially that's like the knock is like yeah but you're you're acting like you're an expert but you're just some comedian and it's like

No, that's the point.

That's always been the point.

Like, yes, I'm just a comedian.

I'm not an expert.

And still, being not an expert, hand me your favorite Warhawk and I will tear them to shreds because it's actually not that hard.

And, like, these people aren't really experts either.

Well, also the problem with that is these people that are talking about these things are talking about people not being experts while they're not experts.

There's, you know.

What does Doug have a degree in English?

Yeah.

Right.

Okay.

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist.

You know, there's all these different people who have, you know, expertise in one area that is pretty much outside geopolitical, you know, world politics and

international relations and chaos and war and the military-industrial complex.

And like, these are very complex, sophisticated, nuanced discussions that you have to have when you're talking about these things because there's so many different factors at play.

There's so much money.

There's so much bullshit in terms of like, what's the truth?

What's the narrative?

Who's pushing the narrative?

who's being paid to push the narrative which is really weird there's so many of these fucking online influencers that i don't even think are really human beings that have like prominent accounts yep yep but then there's also it's it's a convenient kind of way to dismiss somebody

instead of addressing the facts well i thought it was this just i thought was really funny to me was that so like a few days after the last time uh after me and and douglas murray debated on the show he went on bill maher's show.

And so it's like after having this whole thing, the whole 45 minutes opening the show about how you comedians don't know what you're talking about.

He says, don't know what you're talking about, while he's smearing two people who he's never heard of and doesn't even know what they do or whatever, but not the best way to make an appeal to expertise.

But

he doesn't have a problem with Bill Maher doing it because he agrees with him.

So the issue isn't really being an expert versus being a comedian.

You know, Constantin Kassin went on this whole thing about expertise and all of this, and it's like he also started as a comedian.

Why, why all of a sudden does this standard only apply to me and only when I'm talking about Israel?

It never applied to me when I was talking about COVID.

It never applied to me when they agreed with me on stuff.

They would just go, look, Dave, breaking it down.

But now there's this one topic that one guy is not allowed to not be an expert on.

And it happens to be this one topic that the entire population is turning on.

I shouldn't say the entire, but like

huge numbers.

When someone attacks like what you do professionally

versus what you're actually saying,

why not just dispute what he's saying instead of like this appeal to authority?

Like,

you're not an expert.

But also, you know,

to ask that question is to answer that question.

You can only ask me a few things in life that I can give you definitive answers on.

And even then, I might have to refer to experts.

Like, if you want to ask me about judo, I've been doing jujitsu for

since 90, I think I started in 97, somewhere around then, 96, maybe.

I don't know shit about judo.

I know how to do a few hip tosses, but when someone is doing something, I don't even know what it's called.

If I go haragoshi, I might get it wrong because haragoshi might be legs on the outside versus leg on the inside.

Wrestling, I got to defer to DC.

So even in martial arts, I'm I'm not totally an expert.

Yeah.

And then there might be somebody who is like totally an expert, like say, you know, a wrestler who went to the Olympics and was like a total expert or a coach or something like that, total expert in wrestling.

And they could still get something about MMA completely off.

Or jiu-jitsu.

Right.

Because it happened in the last fight, in the last UFC card.

Daniel Cormier didn't know about the dead orchard.

So he thought this person was fine because they had two arms in while they were caught in a triangle.

I go, no, this is a real submission.

This is fucking dangerous.

Like, there's this guy, Nathan Orchard, who figured out how to do a triangle with two arms in, and it's replicable.

A lot of guys do it now.

And I think it was a lady at the last UFC who had it.

And I was like, oh, shit.

And Daniel didn't know it yet.

There's a couple other things, like the buggy choke.

If you don't know about jiu-jitsu and you see a guy who's on his back and he's getting smothered, but all of a sudden he reaches under with his leg and I'm going, oh, oh, oh, and you don't know what's going on.

Like, that's a fucking choke, like a really dangerous dangerous one.

Ty Ruatolo gets you in that, you're fucksvil.

You know, there's guys, so it's like, there's areas of expertise, even in areas that I'm an expert in, that I have to call on other people.

Like, this is a stupid argument.

Like, what are the facts?

Does that submission work?

Is that genocide?

Like, what is, you know, what's going on?

Were you funding Hamas?

Is Hezbollah a proxy of Iran?

Did Iran get the money to do this when Biden released the funds?

Because

what

who's who's allowed to be an expert on all these things?

Yeah, and then, of course,

then there are things like,

say like,

do you support lockdowns?

And like, in order to have, say, an expert opinion on this policy, it's like, okay, well, you'd be like, they'd say we're following the science.

So in other words, they have an epidemiologist or something like that who's arguing lockdowns will cut down on the transmission of the virus.

Forget they turned out to be wrong, but leaving that aside, you're like, okay, but are they also an economist?

Are they also a specialist in a sociologist, a specialist in childhood development who would tell you what closing the schools?

Oh, who's the person who has expertise in every single one of those fields?

Doesn't exist.

There isn't an expert in all of those fields.

You know what I mean?

That was the problem with that time, because that time, everyone was so fearful.

And the news was pushing fear.

And it was clearly a narrative.

I forget who it was, but some

health official was being interviewed recently and he said that during 2020 that Anthony Fauci said to him, the problem is Americans aren't scared enough, which is crazy to say.

It's a wild thing to say that your goal is to make people more fearful.

So you're trying to put out a narrative that makes people more fearful, which by the way, fucks with your immune system in a gigantic way.

Not good at all to be scared.

I don't know how many people got really, really, really sick from COVID because when they got it, they freaked the fuck out and they couldn't sleep and they thought they were going to die and they were riddled with anxiety.

And that makes you attack people around you and then you look for a solution.

And when these trusted institutions, which up until five fucking years ago, I was 100% on board with, with everything, with vaccines, with every medical innovation, other than psychiatric medications, which I think are pretty much over prescribed,

all of a sudden,

everyone's like hoping these people have the answer.

So, anybody who's like, but there's this guy, Jay Bhattacharya, you know, he's also an expert.

Fuck you, fuck you.

It's like an anti-science, trust the science, COVID denier, vaccine denier.

It's just became this fearful,

because everybody just responded to the fucking media because everybody's too tuned in to all of this negative shit, man, all day long.

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Terms apply.

Well, you have to scare people.

You know,

if you want to implement like a tyrannical policy, you almost always have to scare people.

I mean, that's now.

That's the only way.

Yeah.

Now, everyone knows, right, like you just said, like being

terrified is not good for your health.

On a human level, we also all know that it's not good for good decision-making, you know, but it is excellent for, I will turn my brain off and give the authority to you to go do.

I mean, look, it was

right after 9-11.

People forget about this, but like the level to which Dick Cheney and George W.

Bush used to fear-monger.

Dick Cheney, the vice president of the United States of America, who is a bit more than just your average vice president, he said it's not a matter of if, but when there will be another 9-11 attack.

They were trying to tell the American people right after 9-11 to be in a constant state of fear.

Do you remember the COVID warnings where they had colors?

Or excuse me, the warning level?

The terror warning where they had colors?

this the threat level or whatever

yeah and then one day they'd be like it's up to yellow yeah and everyone

and and i mean we were really still traumatized from 9-11 but the thing about it is is that they knew what they wanted to do they knew the the policy they wanted to start embarking on and it was the mix of

they hate us the big lie which was they hate us for our freedom which was like really the big lie after 9-11 was like because because the american people very organically wanted to know what the beef was like 9-11 happened everybody was like, yo, why do they hate us?

What's this beef about?

And their answer was they hate you for your freedom.

And by the way, this is going to happen again.

So be terrified.

Second off, understand that they're so irrational that their beef with you is that like your grandma can go to the grocery store.

So what do you do with that other than say what the American people said, which is George W.

Bush, you have a blank check to go attack whoever you want to and we'll support you.

Yeah, I remember feeling that way.

I remember feeling that way, right?

I remember feeling it's up to these fucking guys, these hard-nosed generals and military leaders that are, these are the guys that are going to protect us now.

We've got to put all our faith in them.

This shit is real and it's going on.

But I had no idea.

This is, so 2001, I wasn't that much of a conspiracy theorist.

I was into UFOs.

I was into Bigfoot.

I was into stupid shit.

You know, I was into fun, stupid shit.

Right, right.

You know, me and Eddie Bravo would get high and watch space documentaries and freak out about aliens.

You know, the stupid shit.

But then the Patriot Act came along and I was like, okay,

what the fuck is this?

Like, what does indefinite detention mean?

When they sign the NDAA, you're like, wait a minute, what are you talking about?

What is the munt, what it rhymes with Kunt, the act that Obama passed in 2015 that allowed them to use censorship or, excuse me, propaganda on American citizens?

Yeah, yeah.

Smith Munt.

Someone like that.

Yep.

It's like, okay.

At what point in time do I start getting really fucking suspicious?

Yep.

I mean, I had read one book a long time ago that really fucked me up.

This book called Best Evidence about the Kennedy assassination.

And unfortunately, I read it right before I went on stage.

I was by myself.

I was in Philadelphia and I was headlining.

And this is like when I was just starting to headline, right?

And so I had a show Thursday, killed.

Everything's great.

Went back to to my hotel room.

Nothing to do.

Read this fucking book for like six hours.

Freaked the fuck out.

Showed up at this show like ashen faced.

Like, oh my God, they killed the president.

Like, I had never even considered that before that book.

I never even thought that there's like secret government agencies that plot against the president.

Like, I thought, that's the fucking man.

And everybody works together.

And Lee Harvey Oswald was a nut, and he fucking shot him.

And I was like, oh my God.

And I bombed.

I fucking bombed.

And I apologized to the staff.

I apologized to the manager.

I go, listen, I fucked up and I read this book right before I got here.

And it really fucked me up.

It's done that before, man.

When you have your mind blown like that, you need time after that before you make it funny.

Oh, like it takes, it takes time to then almost come back to it a few months later.

You can never engage in that kind of stuff like right before you go on stage.

It's terrible.

Anything real and ominous.

So I had a second show and it went great.

But I was like, okay, I can't ever do that again.

But that started me.

But that was just peripheral.

It was just the JFK thing.

I was only interested in that.

I didn't get into Nixon.

I didn't get into Vietnam.

I didn't get into any of that stuff.

But September 11th, 2001,

in the beginning, it was wonderful.

After the attack, everyone was so friendly.

It's terrible that this thing happened.

It's terrible that these people died.

But it made me think, like, we need, every now and then, we need to get bitch slapped.

You know, it's like when you see people like getting in people's faces for like waving an American fag, fuck you, fascist

a bitch slap every now and then, like that guy might go, fucking, what was I doing?

I just ran up to that veteran and I got in his face because I want to impress my lesbian girlfriend.

Like, fuck is wrong with me?

I don't know how to fight.

I'm now I got a concussion, and this guy bitch slapped me.

It's on TikTok.

Fuck.

You know, like you need that sometimes just as like a course reset.

And I felt like as a country, we've been doing shady shit all around the world forever, and there's real war happening everywhere, but we're super lucky because we're separated by oceans and not too much has really happened here.

Oh, my God, this is real.

And everybody had an American flag on their fucking car.

And when I was in New York City afterwards, we were filming Fear Factor one day, and everyone was so cool.

And firemen were rock stars.

Cops were rock stars.

Everybody was thanking them.

Everybody was thanking them for their service.

It was great.

We hung out with these firemen in front of this bar.

Me and the Fear Factor crew.

These guys were were fucking.

It's like I was hanging out with Brad Pitt.

It was nuts.

Everybody was so thankful.

Where'd that go?

Yeah, I was there.

I was in New York City on 9-11.

And I remember, so I was in Brooklyn, like only a few miles from the World Trade Center.

Did you physically see it?

No, I saw it.

So I remember seeing.

You know, I think, so when I got out of school, I was in high school.

I was a senior in high school.

And we got out.

One of the girls like forged a note and said it was from our parents or something like that.

I forget exactly how it worked, but we got out.

It was like, I was friends with the security guard.

I used to buy weed from him.

It was a different time.

But you know, it was a different time.

Pre-9-11, we were just all hanging out, buying weed from security guards at schools.

But so he let us out.

So I remember we, I'm pretty sure when we came to Flatbush Ave, we saw like it was, there was smoke in the air, but both the towers had fallen by the time we got out.

But there were people, so the subways had been out for a while.

And where I was, I was like on Flatbush Avenue, if anyone knows Brooklyn, it's like Flatbush and 7th Avenue.

So this is like, it's kind of a straight shoot down to the Manhattan Bridge.

And then the Brooklyn Bridge is down there too.

But the Brooklyn Bridge, you can walk over.

And so at this point already, people who were down in the financial district had just decided to walk back to Brooklyn because they realized they weren't going to get a cab or get on the subway.

And so you'd see just like one guy in a suit and tie covered in soot head to toe, like walking up like, oh, he must have just been down there and and walked up.

And but I remember now, this is in Brooklyn, but even there, it's very busy, but

people were stopping and asking each other.

People who you would pass on the street, but never talk to, were stopping and asking, everyone, how's your family?

Everyone okay?

All right, are you fine?

Like, there was this like community spirit that you just didn't, you don't typically get in New York City because there's just too many people.

You can't talk to everybody.

But that, that part of it was kind of beautiful.

And then, of course, governments do what they do and immediately manipulated that into launching wars that they wanted from before 9-11 that had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11.

Yeah.

Which is, you know.

Also, the Patriot Act was a bunch of shit they had tried to pass

for a while, for years.

And everyone's like, what are you fucking crazy?

Well, this is the thing.

And I guess maybe it's partly like my age because I was 18 at the time.

And this is like my coming of age, you know, time.

But I will never stop being furious about all of that shit.

And this is like still to this day, I'm sure you see it when I'm on podcasts with you and doing debates and stuff.

But I'm so angry over the war in Iraq and the subsequent wars and, you know, Libya and Syria and Somalia and Yemen and all of them.

But specifically because like all these guys, the neoconservatives, the N-word that I'm not supposed to bring up, even though, by the way, Douglas Murray wrote a book.

called neoconservatism, why we need it.

But when I say the word neoconservatism, be careful what you're watering here or something like that.

Is that what they say?

I didn't know that this was an issue, that you can't discuss neoconservatism?

Well, that's Douglas said when I was on with him.

He said, ah, the N-word

when I brought it up, and then said, I'm watering something because I mentioned Wolfowitz.

Okay, so that's anti-Semitism he's leaning into.

Well, that's kind of ridiculous.

Yes.

You're talking about something incredibly important.

Well, like

neoconservatism,

why would that be a thing that you can't discuss?

That sounds crazy.

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well i mean i'd say the answer is that Those guys got into power.

They really hijacked American foreign policy after 9-11 because they happened to all be in power in the Bush administration.

Then 9-11 happened on their watch.

But if you go back and read the shit they read, and I will never stop talking about this because it's just too goddamn crazy.

But if you read all of these guys, the guys who were in the George W.

Bush administration, I mean, like the signators on the Project for a New American Century, which was their think tank, the PINAC as it's called, were like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Fife and Richard Pearl and David Wormser and the whole group who took over the government were all and they wrote explicitly in the Project for a New American Century that they were like, look, okay, the Soviet Union has collapsed.

We are for the first time in human history like the lone superpower in the world.

So what we should do right now is fight multiple wars because no one threatens us.

And so therefore, we should fight multiple wars.

Right now we have an opportunity.

to remake the world, overthrow the old Soviet sock puppet states, install our own states there, and guarantee, as the name says, the new American century of dominance, the 21st century.

And they specifically said they want to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and then they specifically said, and now this is something that the 9-11 truthers really held on to.

I'm not sure.

I think they might be overplaying their hand a little bit here, but they say, there's one document in the Project for a New American Century, you can find it online, where they straight up say, they go, now look, this is what we want to do, but we're unlikely to get mass American support for it, short of another Pearl Harbor type event.

And so a lot of people like Alex Jones and a lot of the 9-11 truthers would point to this phrase and go, see, this is the proof that they knew they needed another Pearl Harbor, so they planned their own Pearl Harbor.

Now, that is not necessarily true.

It doesn't necessarily prove that, but it certainly does change the way you think about their mind state when they sit there watching the towers get attacked.

And they all, at the very least, they all went, we got it.

You know, Alex Jones predicted 9-11 in July.

Yeah.

But that's not quite as, that's not quite as unique as I think some people think it is.

Really?

Well, like, people, so like, did you ever hear how he said it?

Yeah, I've heard.

I've heard the clip.

It was pretty good.

I mean, I'm not, like, taking anything away from that.

He was right, but there were a bunch of people who predicted it.

Ron Paul himself predicted it perfectly.

Did they predict planes into the towers?

Let's just say, no, I don't know about that.

That is pretty impressive.

But at the same time, you know, the...

But planes had never flown into towers before.

That's true, but the World Trade Center was attacked by al-Qaeda guys in 93.

That's a biggie song.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adrian Appalucci has the funniest joke about that.

I believe so.

Do you ever hear Adrian's joke about that?

I don't want to butcher it on your show, but Adrian Appalucci is a hilarious comedian.

But she had a joke about how, you know, in that song where Biggie goes, time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade, but they bleep World Trade now.

And then her bit is how they didn't bleep.

Like he was talking about the first one, but they bleep it because of the second, you know, because the towers came down.

But then, her bit is just like you go, like, that wasn't enough of a tragedy to make it bleeped.

It's like a funny, like, only a few people died.

Like, it was cool, but then a lot of people died.

She's a phenomenal joke writer.

Well, it's a different time.

Back then, they would have never bleeped anything.

They didn't bleep the N-word.

They didn't bleep anything.

It was the Wild West.

Well, it's weird when you hear about

so.

I don't know if I fully buy into any of this, but as a caveat before I get rolling.

But when people discuss the intelligence agencies and their role in hip-hop, especially gangster rap, like I remember the very first time I listened to NWA.

And I think I told IceQ when he was here.

I was on a fucking Stairmaster in Revere, Massachusetts, and I was listening to fuck the police.

I was like, fuck the police coming straight from the underground.

I was like, what is this?

This is, I was a cassette walkman, or maybe it was a CD, but it was probably a cassette walkman.

And I was like doing, getting my cardio.

They were better for working out.

They didn't skip.

They got good with the CD after a while.

It didn't skip, but you had to set it on, you had to set it on the treadmill.

And you had to hit that like shock mode thing.

And then that would eat your battery so quickly, though.

Like, you'd get three songs in and be like, all right, you have to go to the gym with like spare batteries.

To me, it was so insane that I could carry music with me to the gym.

Like, that's incredible.

Because you'd you'd go to the gym and it'd be like the worst poison song playing.

No disrespect to poison.

Or something.

Like, God, I can't get into this.

I'm trying to get pumped here, man.

This is fucking bullshit music.

Like, someone's in charge of the, you know, the station that they pick on the radio just to be able to carry it.

But that moment of hearing that music.

I was like,

this is celebrating crime and murder.

Like, this is nuts.

And murdering prostitutes.

And like, this is crazy that this is like a major record label put this out and I was only 21 and I was you know I was just sitting there going I can't even believe this is real and then I got really into it like I really into Ice Cube really into ice tea I'd listen to that when I was delivering newspapers

it was like gangster rap was like a completely different thing

so then cut to when people start digging into it like intelligence agencies have had There's a weird book on intelligence agencies and their role in rock and roll music in the 1960s.

The movie about, the book about Laurel Canyon, what is it?

Strange things.

It's very interesting.

I don't know if I buy it.

Eddie Bravo's all in on it.

I don't know if I buy it, but there's a lot of weird connections to the intelligence community and music, particularly hip-hop and particularly gangster rap.

And if you want to get really dark, you would say, if you want to fill your private prisons up, what better way than have very popular music encouraging prisons, or excuse me, encouraging crime, encouraging outright celebrating crime and violence.

That way you fill your prisons up and you also keep people scared so you can give them more laws and more rules and crack down and make them easier to placate, easier to get them to fall in line and do what you need them to do.

Yeah, and support massive police buildups and massive, you know, like militarization of the police and all this stuff.

And I don't know.

You know, know, I've heard a little bit about that.

I really don't know.

I know Ice Cube has talked about it before, like talked about how like there's undeniably this influence.

It does, there are things about it that seem crazy, but I do know that.

And I don't even think this is a controversial thing to say.

I think this is just like fact at this point, that it was the Reagan administration who did traffic in cocaine to the United States of America while they were ramping up the war on drugs.

So like they're bringing in

in their effort to help the Contras or whatever, they're going like, okay, well, these guys are drug dealers.

So if we move these drugs in, we can get these money shipments to them.

And then you're sitting in, they're creating the conditions for the crack epidemic to explode.

And then they catch one guy with a few rocks on him and they're throwing him in jail for decades.

It's like just that alone.

Just that one piece of information, you'd almost, if you're like in a sane world, you'd go like, oh, so the people had a revolution and overthrew that government and publicly hung all the politicians involved, and then we started over from new.

And you're like, just say no.

No, they lionized that guy.

Still, for decades afterwards, the Republicans at the RNC, you bring up Reagan and they go, our hero, Ronald Reagan.

Like, the fact that that isn't enough to go, well, this guy should be remembered as a monster.

Do you think they tell Reagan that they're selling crack in the hood?

I don't think they do.

I do not think they do.

I don't think the intelligence agencies let that information that far up the chain to a guy who's only in there for four years before he has to get re-elected.

Fair enough.

Not a chance.

But George H.W.

Bush definitely knew that guy knew for sure.

He fucking signed the docket.

That guy was all over that.

He was all over.

He was the head of the CIA.

He was their guy.

He was the head of the CIA.

That guy moved in.

Right.

So, you know, but

again, also, you get to a certain point when you're president.

I think this applies to Donald Trump in a lot of ways, too, where it's like, it's your responsibility.

Like, if you didn't know, then that's your responsibility for not knowing.

I don't think you have an access.

I do not.

I do not think in cases like that you have access.

I think if they're doing something like selling crack in the hood and using the money to fund the Contras, there's no fucking way you could ever kosherize that.

So I don't think you ever let the president know.

I think this is all black funded.

I don't think, I think there's layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy before you can get to any real data and information.

If you want to talk about people that are doing operations in Nicaragua, you've got things going on in Iran, you've got to pay attention to Russia, this is happening here, that's happening there, there's not a fucking chance he knows they're selling crack to pay for an army.

I just don't

think you might tell them.

Look, you might be right about that.

Because why would they assume that he'd go along with it?

Or tell them.

This is not a normal thing to do.

I came into this office thinking I'm an actor.

I'm Ronald Reagan.

I came into this office thinking I'm going to be a good American and we're going to get back to basics and hard work and trickle-down economics and you're telling me you're selling crack hey fuck you you're going to jail you know what I'm saying yeah well because he can't that's how Nixon got caught so Nixon didn't organize Watergate he tried to cover it up yep that's how he got caught and they would do the same thing with Reagan yeah well it's you want to come clean about all the crack selling do you really right well they they could present it to them after it's a fait of complete and then be like so what do you want to do now which is what happened with nixon right so it's like look this is going to look really really bad good luck explaining this right so he helps them cover it up, and then you go, now we got you.

We got you.

Now you might as well have been in on planning it because you helped us cover it up.

And the whole thing was set up by the government.

That's what's really crazy.

Intelligence agencies set up Watergate.

They operated it.

Bob Woodward was an intelligence agent before he was ever a reporter.

That was his first gig.

Tucker Carlson told me that.

It blew my fucking mind.

He's like, what rookie reporter for their first gig, their first story, gets you're going to take down the most popular president in U.S.

history.

Yeah.

He's won by the biggest margin.

He's in 49 states.

Yeah.

He's a dominant realist.

The American people had spoken.

They supported this guy.

And then, right, Bob Woodward, some 20-something-year-old reporter, he gets the biggest story in American history.

He happened to just come out of naval intelligence in a weird coincidence.

Did I tell you what Bill Murray told me?

No.

So Bill Murray was on the podcast and was talking about Bob Woodward's movie.

Yeah.

The book he wrote.

What was it?

What was it called?

Well, he's written a lot at this point.

The one about Belushi.

What was it called?

It was

wired.

Okay, it was just about Belushi being fucking crazy drug addict.

He goes,

that's not my friend.

He goes, that's not how he was.

He was like, that was kind of an act.

He was a little bit of a lightweight.

Like, if he had like two, three drinks, he was drunk.

Like, he goes, I think he did that speedball.

I think that's the first time he ever did it and died.

It's not that he'd never done drugs before, but he wasn't this guy.

So this is all fiction.

So he read read the first five pages.

He was, oh my God, they framed Nixon.

Yeah.

Isn't that crazy?

It's like this guy wrote about my friend in such a distorted, untruthful way.

Now I have to think about what he discovered with Nixon.

Because now I know what kind of person this is.

Yeah, my good friend, who I mentioned quite a bit, but Scott Horton, who is the, I think, the best foreign policy voice in the United States of America.

And he's written, he wrote the best book on the terror wars called Enough Already and the best book on the war in Ukraine called Provoked.

But so while, so Bob Woodward's latest book came out, and I remember he told me about this, but so he just happened to be writing his book on Ukraine when he saw this new Bob Woodward book came out, and they had a quote in it.

I believe it was a Sergei Lavrov quote, who's like Putin's, you know, right-hand man.

And Scott said, he's reading it, and he goes, this quote's all wrong.

He goes, the actual quote, like I was, he was just researching this for his book, and he goes, the quote means the exact opposite of what he's claiming it means here like see how he left out this part He wasn't referring to this He was referring to that and then he just I remember he just told me he goes like so for the record like you can just never trust anything Bob Woodward says because he'll take this quote and just get it complete mangle it to the point where it he's presenting it as if it means 180 degrees opposite of what the quote actually meant and so yeah there's a lot of stuff like that and then that guy is like

the historian of record Would you ever imagine that?

When all the years when I was growing up, that guy was like a hero.

he was like a journalistic hero well and he's how we know he's how you know that in that moment Dick Cheney turned to George W.

Bush and said mr.

President I think we need to and then you're like oh but he just makes shit up oh

god

like when I was a kid you know they made a movie about him

All the president's men is a movie.

Who plays Bob Woodward?

What movie star plays Bob Woodward?

Which one of them?

Robert Redford.

Was it Robert Redford or was it the other guy?

Who else was in that movie with him?

Who played Bernstein?

Oh, Rob Woodford, Dustin Hoffman.

Dustin Hoffman.

That's right.

Robert Redford's Woodward.

Yeah.

So imagine that.

You're Bob Woodward.

You bullshit everybody.

Then you get to watch Robert Redford, the most handsome man alive, play in a movie.

Like, outstanding.

Look how good looking I am.

And look at me kicking ass for America.

But also, just think about how much they could get.

I remember, I don't know.

I was in school, and I remember hearing like my history teacher talking to another teacher, and this was when Bill Clinton was getting in trouble for Monica Lewinsky.

I was like in middle school or whatever.

And I remember hearing them talk, and one of them said to the other one, he goes, so what do you think about the impeachment or something?

And I remember my history teacher, I thought it was a pretty smart guy.

And he goes, well, you know.

They're treating him like he's Nixon, but he's not Nixon.

And essentially what that meant, like what he was saying was like, well, Nixon is the most corrupt president who ever lived.

Bill Clinton just got caught cheating on his wife.

Like, that's not as big a deal as being the most corrupt.

But they just made that like the thing that everybody knows.

Like, well, we did have this one corrupt president, but the system works.

That's the lesson.

The system works, and it got him out of there.

Before the internet, it works.

I think it's very hard to make that same system work the same way now.

No, I completely agree.

I mean to say that the narrative that everybody accepted was like, oh, but the system works.

Like it figured out that he was corrupt.

They had him step down.

They got him out of there.

When really the answer is much more like the intelligence agencies took over the United States of America in a hostile coup against John F.

Kennedy.

And then Nixon comes in like a few years later and is like

essentially taken over as well, but they get the American people to believe that like what that was was a corrupt president being ousted.

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Well, it's also easy to frame Nixon that way because he's ugly.

Right?

He's not a good-looking guy.

And it was just after Kennedy.

Look, when Muhammad Ali retired, Larry Holmes couldn't get any love.

Couldn't get any love.

And one of the reasons why Larry Holmes, who's one of the best heavyweight champions of all time, couldn't get any love is because he beat the fuck out of Muhammad Ali.

And everybody was sad.

And everybody hated him because of that.

And you just,

you're never, like, if you're Nixon and you're following JFK who got shot in the fucking head.

We lost.

We got assassinated.

Someone assassinated the greatest president of all time, this good-looking guy who was going to really change things and didn't believe in secrecy and was talking to the American people like we have hope and dreams.

He wants to put us on the moon.

And he got shot in the head.

Now we got this ugly fuck?

Well, there was LBJ in between there, at least.

But yes,

a little bit.

Well, I think also in hindsight, he just is,

he wasn't that good-looking.

He also came off his kind of thing.

I was going to say he's also very authoritarian.

Yeah.

You know, which is unfortunately, when you have a society where you do have ubiquitous crime, you do need some kind of an authoritarian leadership.

Not saying you need tyranny, not saying you need a dictator, but you need fucking laws and you need rule of law.

And sometimes those people come off very harsh and very uncaring and unloving and the total opposite for like the reason why people voted for Jimmy Carter, I think.

Because Jimmy Carter represented like a genuinely sweet, good guy.

Right.

But like, look how that presidency was a disaster because they were all working against him for sure.

And on top of that, it's like hard to, like, you kind of got to be a bit of a hard ass if you want to run the world.

But the way Nixon did it, we're still suffering through that today.

That motherfucker, he's partially responsible for that sweeping Schedule I Act of 1970.

When they did that and they made everything illegal, everything Schedule I, including things that are 100% 100% medicinal, like marijuana, all that fucked up society.

And they did it specifically to target the anti-war movement and to target the civil rights movement.

Specifically.

So it's not like Nixon was the best.

Oh, no, oh, what he did was fucking horrible.

Nixon had a lot of policy failures.

And I would put the number one, and I completely agree with you.

I mean, launching the war on drugs was a disaster, but taking us off the gold standard was one of the worst policy decisions in the history of the United States of America.

And that is

where so many of the problems we face now is because of that.

And people could say, like, I've heard Pat Buchanan defend Nixon on this before.

Pat Buchanan was in the Nixon administration.

He was a speechwriter for him.

And he was like, well, look, what were we going to do at that point?

And so he was basically saying, because what happened was essentially, so you had like the Bretton Woods Agreement, which

started after World War II, or actually, I'm sorry, it started at the very end of World War II.

It was in 1944, where they had the Bretton Woods Agreement, where they could kind of see where World War II was going.

And it was basically like, okay, well,

all of Europe is destroyed, and a lot of Asia is destroyed, or not yet, I guess this is 44, but it was getting there.

And

America had, you know, at least on the homeland, hadn't really been touched.

And we had like a wild amount of the world's gold.

And so the deal was essentially that like, we will peg the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce.

Everyone else can peg their currency to the dollar.

And then the dollars are refundable.

You know, you can get an ounce for $35.

And so that, you know, was whatever.

There were problems with the Brenton Woods Agreement, but that was what stood from after World War II into, so from 1944 to 1973 or 1971, when he took us off the gold standard.

And so essentially what happened was through the 60s, we started cheating.

And it became very obvious to the world that we were like, you know, in the 1960s, you're like, you have the great society.

So we created Medicare and Medicaid.

And

we went to the moon and we were fighting the war in Vietnam.

And we were just printing money for all of this, which is, you know, what we still do to this day.

But so essentially the Europeans started looking at us and they were like, I don't think you got enough gold.

to cover all these dollars that you're printing around.

Wasn't that a thing where they were going to

do an audit of Fort Knox that we never heard about?

Well, what I know is that I'm pretty sure it was the French, might have been the British too, but it was definitely the French.

The French basically called our bluff and they just went, okay, we'll take gold.

You know, we got all these dollars.

We'll take gold.

We get an ounce for every 35 dollars that we have, and we have quite a lot.

And that's when Nixon went, No.

He just basically defaulted in front of the entire world, and he said he's temporarily suspending the convertibility of dollars into gold.

And they framed it as like, you know, the French are attacking the stability of the dollar.

Really, all they were doing was calling us on our agreement.

We owed it to them.

We're like, we got so much gold, bro.

So Pat Buchanan says, defending his boy, Richard Nixon, he goes, well, what were we going to do at that point?

Let him clean us out of all of our gold and just not be the dominant power.

But I think the retort to that is, yeah, like that's what you should have done.

Because the decision to go off of the the gold standard essentially just said, well, now there's no more even pretend limits on government.

You know, this is why Ron Paul, who happy birthday to the greatest living American hero, just turned, just turned 90.

And I was just at his birthday party a few weeks ago.

Damn, you partying with Ron Paul.

Dude, that dude throws it down.

No, I'm just kidding.

It was very nice, though, to see him.

Tulsi Gabbard was there, which was cool.

But so

essentially, right, that was the last last restraint on government is that at least even then, even under Bretton Woods when we're cheating, at least there's some feeling of like, well, don't cheat too bad because they could maybe try to, you know, like

exactly.

But after that, it was off to the races.

And this is why, this is why Ron Paul ran for Congress.

It was when Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard.

And then he was like, this is going to lead to big government.

This is going to be the era of big government.

So he was going to run to try to stop that.

And he was completely right.

You know, this is what has really destroyed everything is that there's just no, and it's a big part of the reason why I'm so angry about all these wars too, because it's all related.

You know, the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, or the Federal Reserve Act was signed into law by Woodrow Wilson in 1913.

And then in 1914, I think is when it actually got up and running.

And in 1914 is when the income tax was passed, also signed into law by Woodrow Wilson.

And three years later is World War I.

You know, like three years later, or American entry into World War I.

So it's like, this is the banking system and the tax system are very like interrelated with the warfare state.

Like you need this stuff in order to fight wars.

And,

you know, even just over the, whatever, it's over the last 25 years, we've spent close to $10 trillion on wars, you know?

And they don't, they, they didn't tax the American people for that.

They know they couldn't tax us enough to pay.

We would put an end to it.

If they tried to raise everybody's taxes enough to come up with $10 trillion because we want to go fight regime change wars all over the Middle East, the American people would have been like, no, we're not doing that.

But they didn't do that.

They kept taxes where they were.

I think they even cut some rates during those years, the top rates.

And then they borrowed the rest, and they still couldn't borrow enough.

So they just print the money.

And then essentially what happens is that the price of everything just goes up and up and up.

And you just put more money into the system.

And then people start looking around around and going like, geez, why is the price of housing and healthcare and energy and child care totally unaffordable?

And the answer is because you're paying for the war in Iraq.

And nobody thinks about it like that.

But that's really what's going on.

They can't.

So for all the young people who are coming out of college now and they're like, I'm 150 grand in debt.

I have a gender studies major degree or whatever, you know, maybe something better than that, but they got an English degree or something.

And they're working at DoorDash and the average house is going for 600 grand.

And they're like, what am I possibly going to do?

It's like the reason why these kids are all demanding socialism, at least on the left, is because like, what else are you going to do?

Like, how do you even, but the reason why that is the case is because your government decided to spend trillions of dollars on blowing up brown countries and in some cases then rebuilding them.

to blow them up again.

I mean, this is the actual cost of the thing.

And I feel like it's

almost nobody outside of like the Ron Paul libertarians, the Austrian economics guys, almost nobody else ever makes this connection.

That it's like, this is the deal.

You can't be a world empire

without having a central bank that can print money for you, because otherwise it just doesn't work.

Resources are finite and you'll run out of them.

And so you can't do that without having this monetary system.

But the cost of this monetary system is that prices always go up and up and up and up.

And that rigs the entire economy against the working class and the middle class in favor of the rich.

It's just the way it is.

When the value of assets is going up and up and up and up, that's great if you own stuff.

That's great if you own stuff and you're selling it.

If you got a billion dollars in the bank, inflation is your best friend.

But if you're on a fixed income or you're a working class person, it just destroys you.

And everybody who's working class knows this just from living through the last five years.

You know, your grocery prices go up 30%.

That is, you know, that's, that's, you know, people have this idea that there's like economic issues over here, and then there's like social issues over here, or there's foreign policy over here, but it's all one thing.

You know, the prices of groceries go up by 30%, and families get destroyed.

Men swallow pistols.

Kids grow up without fathers.

That's the cost of this shit.

And

that's what we're living through now.

And what we'll continue to live through as long as we have a government that spends way beyond our means.

Like Dr.

Ron Paul used to say, when you spend beyond your means, you're destined to live beneath your means.

And we have an economy that's built around doing the exact same thing it's always done.

Right.

And if you think about the amount of money, just

like just in shuttering USAID,

think about the amount of money, whether you agree with USAID or not, the amount of money that was being pumped through that system,

like to all sorts of weird places places.

right there's the when the Department of Energy gave out 39 or 93 billion dollars in loans in the months between Biden losing or Kamala losing rather and Trump taking office like where's that

there's so many of these instances of insane amounts of money just being allocated while we're 39 trillion dollars in debt it's like it it's so unmanageable and yet it just keeps marching on and people are upset if you try to pull a band-aid off.

Like the idea of shuttering some of these government organizations.

All you hear about is people are going to die.

People are going to starve.

This is going to happen.

That's going to happen.

Are you fucking sure?

Are you sure that this isn't a giant money sucking scam that's been going on that does some good?

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Yeah, well, there's that's most of it, right?

Yeah, well, like, number one, yeah, if you, if you go, hey, I think, which by the way, no one in Congress, I mean, short of like Thomas Massey, maybe, maybe Rand Paul, but like no one else in Congress is even like suggesting an idea so, so radical.

But if I were to throw out the radical idea that we should go back to pre-pandemic level spending, So go all the way back to the crazy year of 2019 when it was anarchy or whatever.

That was just, they'll all tell you the world's going to end if we do that.

And even when they're making up these absolutely ridiculous claims about how many people are going to die if you cut government spending, which is all totally absurd.

But then they never seem to go like, well, how many people are going to die if I keep letting D.C.

have all these war-making powers?

How many people are going to die if the president is able to fund a proxy war whenever he wants to?

And I mean, look at this shit, dude.

I took so much,

you know, whatever.

I'm not.

But I took a lot of heat for the stuff I said on the show here a few years ago about the war in Ukraine.

And look at it now, dude.

And I don't think they're about to end the thing.

I think they're, which we could talk about, but I think they're putting poison pills in these negotiations already.

It's what it looks like to me.

But literally, the deal that I was talking to you about, whatever it was, three years ago, when I was saying on the show, that they had a deal worked out, a peace deal worked out in the first few months of the war in 22, and Boris Johnson went and killed the peace deal on behalf of the West to make sure this war kept going.

But the deal

that was in pencil, not pen, that Boris Johnson killed, was essentially

recognition of the annexation of Crimea.

It was, at the time, it wasn't annexation of the Donbass region.

It was like independence for the Donbass region.

And then the agreement that the rest of Ukraine would not join NATO.

That was the deal that they had worked out.

And look at where we are now.

Now, the deal that they're even talking about, even as Donald Trump goes, there's going to be some land swaps and all this.

Okay, well, what's he talking about?

The deal right now, that is the best case scenario that we're hoping we could get, is that Vladimir Putin obviously keeps Crimea, keeps the entire Donbass region, gets a corridor from the south into Crimea, and the rest of Ukraine doesn't join NATO.

So we have the same deal, just a little bit more in the Russians' favor three years later with hundreds of thousands of people having died in that process, just to get back to not as good a deal as they had in 22.

And so, you know.

And if they don't sign that.

It'll keep going, which I think it's probably going to.

They're enlisting people as old as 60 now.

Yeah, and they have been for like a full year at least, throwing people up there.

And the thing that's really changed, the reason why

the Europeans and Zelensky and they're at least pretending to come to the negotiation table right now,

which they don't say, but this is the truth, is that support for the war amongst Ukrainians has collapsed.

I mean, not like gone down by a few points.

It's collapsed.

There was just a piece in this the other day.

It was...

Gallup, I believe.

They had their latest poll.

Super majorities of the Ukrainian people, 70%

around, want an immediate end to the war with negotiations on land swap.

Like with like, let's settle it however we got to settle it.

They don't, I remember for the first two years of the thing, everybody who I argued with about the war in Ukraine, their talking point would always be, the Ukrainian people want to fight.

And who are you, Dave, to tell them that they don't have a right to defend themselves?

And then I would respond by saying, like, yes, it's true the Ukrainian people want to fight, but like, might that have something to do with the blank check that they've they've received from the world and the backup of the entire world?

You know, it's, it's just, it's a different proposition to go like,

do you want to fight if John Jones is at your back and goes, I got your back, dude.

Let's go fuck these guys up.

You're like, hell yeah, I want to fight.

But then John Jones leaves, I might be like, ah, let's talk about this, you know, like, but so that, but that would, but now.

The Ukrainian people don't want to fight.

And by the way, I never believed any of that because I don't, you know, I have my own libertarian views on things.

And I'm like, if you're telling me the people want to fight, like, well, why do you you got to conscript an army then?

You know, like if they want to fight so bad, why you got to put a gun to their head and force them to the front line?

Like, you could.

Yeah, you could just make it a voluntary force, and then we'll find out real quick who wants to fight.

But the point is now that even the Ukrainians don't want to fight over this stuff anymore.

So there's just no justification for it.

So now they move to

phase B.

which is essentially to pretend like they're negotiating, but putting all types of poison pills in the deal so that you know the other side won't take it.

This is what they did with Iran, too.

This is why we got into that 12-day war, as they're calling it now.

But, you know, it's like you put things into the, I always saw, I was just reading the other day, it was on Axios.

There's reports that

Zelensky and the Europeans are like open to land swaps as long as there's,

in their words, in the Axios piece, Article 5-like security guarantees.

So in other words, the rest of Ukraine's in NATO, which is the thing that caused the whole conflict to begin with.

So like, yeah, and you know.

That's what that means, Article 5.

Article 5 is the article in NATO, in the NATO agreement, that says that, like,

it says that, like, if one of the countries is attacked, like, all the countries have to join together to help it.

It doesn't exactly say you got to go to war over it, but it's like you have to help in the effort if they're attacked.

So essentially, that's what they're trying to ask now, which is, but if you think about it, right, it's designed to incentivize Putin to keep the war going.

Because if you're telling Vladimir Putin, let's just say, which it's not exactly clear that he would even take the deal that I just laid out before, but it was, I know that it's been reported that he was, it was being signaled that he might be open to that deal.

I get the Donbass region.

You know, he's got still

Like the Donbass region is Donetsk and Luhansk.

And in Luhansk, I think, as of right now, I think the Russians control like 75% of it.

They got all of Donetsk.

They got most of Luhansk.

But there's still Ukrainians controlling part of it.

And then he's controlling part of these territories in the south.

So this is what Trump means when he says the land swaps, meaning essentially you get out of the Donbass region, give me that, and I'll give you back.

You know, the land swaps are Putin taking what he wants and leaving you the rest.

But if you're going to tell Vladimir Putin, who fought this entire war over Ukrainian entry into NATO being his red line, basically in the middle of the, or not in the middle of, as the war is potentially wrapping up, you're going to tell him, hey, whatever territory you don't take here will be a part of NATO.

Well, what does that incentivize him to do?

Take more of it then.

Then why would you stop and give the rest of it up?

And it does seem to me like

that is clearly, at least from the Europeans, that is clearly the motivation of all of this is to is to present something.

It's, you know, they do have their chess war moves.

And so you present something that you know the other side can't agree to.

And then when they don't agree to it, you go, look, we tried to negotiate, and he just wouldn't take us up on this.

And so what can you do?

Oh,

God.

You know, another problem with these conflicts and war in general is that people always want to pretend that there's one side that's good and one side that's bad.

You know, and obviously Putin's the bad guy, right?

Because they started the war, started killing people in Ukraine.

But

there's so many

factors that are going on.

And then there's also also the long history of corruption that Ukraine has always had.

And then there's also the weird deals that they were making with the Biden family to control all the different,

it was natural gas and there's incredible supplies of rare earth minerals.

It's like really valuable, valuable territory.

You know, there's this incentive to create some sort of,

they were going to try to, like, I think part of the plan was like get off of Russian power and make Ukrainian power like central.

And then whatever they were making over there, the amount of power, I forget what the number was, they said, but it's like trillions of dollars in natural gas, minerals, all these different things.

We're supposed to pretend that that's not also a part of the motivation.

Like, didn't even Trump say something about a deal that they were doing with Ukraine that involved yeah, he got sucked into this talk about the rare earth minerals stuff.

And, you know, it's Donald Trump.

It's like his weakness because he's, you know, there's a lot of great things about.

Yeah, there's a lot of great things about coming from a business background.

But then there's like the weakness of it is that he's always attracted by like, you're like, hey, Gaza could be beachfront property.

You know, and he's like, ooh, you can just see him like come alive with these ideas.

Yeah, it's, it's always this stuff, but then the problem is that,

you know,

and look, I've been very harsh on Donald Trump over the last few months, but I think he deserves it.

And I think this administration is failing on so many levels so profoundly, especially given the opportunity that they had.

But, you know, I heard him the other day, he called into a Fox News show, and it was, he was, like, telling the story of the war in Ukraine.

And it's like,

it just seems like he's telling, like, it seems like you learned this on a TV show.

Like, can we get some books in your diet?

Like, you know what I mean?

Like, it's like, this is, we really need someone someone here who's read a book about this.

Because he kind of had an idea of what he was talking about, but then he got it completely wrong.

So he goes, he's trying to tell the story and he's talking about the corruption of the Bidens in Ukraine.

And you're like, okay, yes, that is true.

But like, there's a whole story here that I don't think you're really understanding.

Because he goes, he goes, look, this goes back to 2014.

And so I'm watching this.

And I got like so excited for a minute.

Like, I was like, yes, yes, it does go back to 2014.

Thank you, Donald Trump.

And then he goes, it goes back to 2014 when Putin took Crimea and Obama let him have it.

He just let him have it.

Never would have happened on my watch, but Obama gave Putin Ukraine.

And you're like, no, dude, that's not.

Just go back two months earlier in that same year.

The problem wasn't that Obama gave Putin Ukraine.

The problem was that Obama took Ukraine away from Vladimir Putin.

As I've played on your show and you played with Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence has sat right here where I'm sitting and watched Gideon Rose explain to Stephen Colbert exactly what we're doing here.

Russia, as Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine said, Russia is Batman.

Ukraine is Robin.

We are stealing Robin away from Batman.

That's what the MAID on revolution was.

That's why the USAID and the NED poured $100 million

into the street protest, right?

And so they overthrew the government, and then a bunch of the former Ukrainian prime ministers started floating out that we should tear up the Sevastopol lease in Crimea.

Because, you know, this is Russia's only year-long warm water naval port.

They've always had it.

This was their agreement.

They had like a 50-year lease or something like that.

But after the West backed a coup that overthrew the government and put in a pro-Western government, they started talking big, like, well, maybe we'll tear up that lease.

And we won't.

And so Vladimir Putin went, no,

I'll just take it.

And that was like, so anyway, so he goes back to that, doesn't go back a few months earlier, and then misses the entire point.

Because the point is that it's not just like me being like, oh, I wish Donald Trump was into the same books I'm into or something like that.

The point is that when you don't get that piece of the chapter, then you miss what's happening right now.

So when you're talking about like these, essentially what Donald Trump was saying, the way he was trying to sell it to Zielinski was like, look, do this rare earth minerals deal with us?

And this is kind of like a security guarantee.

It's not exactly a security guarantee, but if we're in business with you and then Putin's trying to fuck up our business, hey, he's picking a fight with us too.

But the whole point is that that's exactly what caused this whole catastrophe.

Vladimir Putin and the entire Russian elite have been crystal clear about this, that they go, look, we can tolerate a neutral Ukraine.

We could tolerate NATO up to Ukraine, Ukraine is neutral, and then there's Russia.

We cannot tolerate Ukraine being a part of America's military alliance.

That's a step too far.

But every time we try to let them be neutral, neutral seems like it's never good enough, and that never actually works.

So if you're going to come in here and say neutral is not good enough, they're going to be part of the West, then we're going to say, actually, we'll take them as part of Russia instead.

Now, he also believes, as he says all the time, which I just think is goofy and un-American, but he also believes that, like, yeah, they're not really a real country, and they're kind of historically ours anyway.

And, you know, he's got his own views on that.

But that's not what the war was about.

And everybody, you know, and when I was here,

which I I was very excited to do, because I'm, you know, a weird romantic and have a,

you know, a dash of autism or something like that.

But what I was really excited, because me and Douglas Murray are going to debate this issue.

And I remember when he first goes, he goes, the war had nothing to do with Ukrainian entry into NATO.

And I was like, okay, well, let me just hit you with two points real quick.

Number one, the head of the CIA,

during all the years of Joe Biden, when he was the

ambassador to Russia, he wrote the Net Means Yet memo.

He literally said that this was all, what it was all about, and that Russia didn't want to do this, but they would if we kept pushing Ukrainian entry into NATO, and we did keep pushing it.

And then I said the other one was Stoltenberg, who is not anymore, but was the head of NATO while this was happening.

And he said that Vladimir Putin sent them in writing a draft treaty that all you have to do is put in writing that you will never bring Ukraine into NATO and I won't invade.

And then he bragged that we said no.

And then he invaded.

But so I said this to Douglas Murray, and I was kind of curious.

Like, I was like,

what's his response to this going to be?

Like, what is he going to say back to it?

Maybe he's got something I've never heard before that I'm going to have to be like, ooh, shit, I got to consider that.

And his response was, a libertarian quoting the CIA, I see.

And you're like, wait, so that's your pivot is to I'm a hypocrite somehow, which isn't even hypocrisy.

Like, yes, I think the CIA should be abolished.

I also think it's relevant when the head of the CIA admits what the war was all about.

I don't see that.

Do you think the CIA totally should be abolished?

Don't you think we should kind of pay attention to what the fuck is going on in the world?

Giving a real-life perspective, not a utopian perspective, but a real-life perspective.

There's terrorist groups all over the world plotting shit.

Probably a good idea.

Yeah.

So what the CIA was originally like conceived of, like essentially being a newspaper for the president, like being like, hey, we get all the real intelligence and we give it to you here.

Yes, I 100% think there's room for intelligence gathering.

But what the CIA became is a paramilitary organization that starts wars and overthrows democratically elected governments all around the world.

Occasionally sells Coke in the hood.

And occasionally, when they're bored, there's, and when there's, and maybe like on like a Tuesday, like a three-day weekend, and then on Tuesday, maybe he's move some crack into Los Angeles.

No, that, I mean, just should, I mean, it's, it's a, a disgrace to a professed free society.

I mean, it's, it's, look, like, when, which we've also played on the show before, but when

Chuck Schumer was on with Rachel Maddow, which is one of the most amazing moments in the history of like corporate media, because what's amazing about it, if you watch like the full thing, is that Rachel Maddow's asking him questions and he's given his Chuck Schumer, you know, political answers to all of them, however you feel about him.

It's like they have their spiel.

But then she breaks from script and she preemptively apologizes to him.

She goes, hey, I'm sorry to just throw this on you right now.

This is,

it was in, I believe, January.

It was either December 16 or January 17th.

So Donald Trump has beat Hillary Clinton, but he's not president yet.

He's president-elect.

And so she goes, sorry to

throw you off, put you on the spot, but Donald Trump just tweeted this.

So she's reading a tweet that he just tweeted live on air to the Senate majority leader or minority leader at the time.

So she reads of the tweet, and it's him, you know, trashing the CIA or something like that.

And then Chuck Schumer just gives like his organic response.

There was no script prepared for this.

He wasn't planned on being being asked this question.

She just goes, look, here's Donald Trump talking about the CIA.

And Chuck Schumer goes, he goes,

I mean, Donald Trump, you want to go with the intelligence agencies?

And his exact phrase was, they have seven ways till Sunday to get back at you.

Yeah.

So good look.

So in other, and by the way, Rachel Maddow in this moment does not say, pause the tape.

What did you just say?

Like the most powerful Democrat in the Senate just admitted we don't live in a democracy, just admitted that this whole whole thing's an illusion.

That the president of the United States is not the president of the United States.

All our talk about democracy being on the ballot, democracy has been gone for a long time if it ever existed.

You just straight up said that the duly elected commander-in-chief and chief executive of the United States of America ain't really the one who's in charge.

Because you better not insult the CIA, who work for you, ostensibly.

Or supposedly, I should say.

You know?

And so like that's...

Or they'll get you.

Or they'll get you.

Or they'll ruin you.

And by the way, they did.

Yeah.

You know, didn't they?

And this is the stuff which is very interesting that Tulsi is

releasing now,

which I don't know whether, you know, I'm kind of past the point of like, it's hard to take

it's hard to take a lot of things about Donald Trump seriously to me at this point, you know,

flaking on all types of stuff, you know, the Epstein stuff and just a lot of, you know, kind of core things where like, so Donald Trump, at least according to him, they stole the election.

You know, I was thinking about this the other day because he was talking about, in the same thing that I'm talking about, when he called into Fox News, he was talking about the Ukraine war.

He said at one point, he goes,

he goes, the war never would have happened if I was president, which Putin threw him a bone and backed him up on that the other day and said the war wouldn't have happened if Trump was president.

That doesn't.

Just saying what, you know, he's smart enough to know.

That's a nice thing to say.

The guy likes being complimented.

And Putin's smart enough to know that, like, this is how you negotiate with Donald Trump.

Yes, yes.

It never started with you.

Yeah, right.

My friend.

So that's kind of a silly point.

But aside from that,

so Donald Trump goes,

he goes, it never would have happened if I was president.

Then he takes it a step further than what he normally says.

And he goes, it wouldn't have even happened if anyone else was president.

If we had just had a regular president, this war never would have happened.

It's only because Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of America, was president that that's why this happened.

But then then I'm sitting there as I listen to that and I go, yeah, but dude, didn't you, you told me that they cheated.

Like, you didn't really lose the election in 2020.

That's, but you, you've stuck to that story now for many years.

So you're saying they cheated.

You're making a similar claim here.

They overthrew democracy.

They installed Joe Biden and a war where hundreds of thousands, maybe well over a million people have died, happened because they cheated.

the election.

Okay, so I'm going to need to know who they is, and I'm going to need to know when we're going to to see them perp walked.

Like, you're the president now.

You got your whole, but all of us on some level don't really think they're going to start arresting people over the stolen election of 2020.

And, you know, I don't think they have any evidence.

Yeah, no, that's right.

I don't, I, I completely agree.

I think there's a lot of speculation and there's a lot of consideration about mail-in ballots.

There's a lot of shenanigans.

There's a good record of shenanigans, and there's the reality of any kind of electronics can be hacked.

No, so I agree with all of that.

I'm just saying like once you've made these statements and your administration has an answer.

No, I remember.

It was one of the most interesting parts of your

podcast with him was like when you asked him about that, it was like he really didn't have anything to back it up.

If that was you or if that was me, I mean if there was some reason why I knew that they did something and I could give you all the facts, I would have that ready for anybody because

for four fucking years, they've been telling him he's crazy for questioning the election.

Yeah.

So after four years, I'd have a fucking tight 10 minutes on the election where I could just rattle off at you and rock your world with it.

Like, these are the facts.

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Well, there's also a big difference between

speculating and asking some questions and being like, I'm not sure I believe the official story of this.

And there's a difference between then being, as a president of the United States, going, this is what happened.

Like this was, and if you're going to say that, then you got to give me your theory.

Like really lay it out for me.

And he never had that part.

But I will say.

They kind of pivoted off the Epstein thing into Russia Gate, which seemed to be, you know, like designed that there was this

tremendous desire.

It's the whole reason Donald Trump's political existence is a thing, is that people are furious about the swamp.

They're furious about how corrupt our government is and the profound crimes that the government has committed against the American people, and they want justice for that.

And so they pivoted off of Epstein after promising to deliver something on that and then went, okay, well, how about RussiaGate now?

So now they're, but I will say, Tulsi Tulsi Gabbard released a bunch of new documents, and there were some pretty interesting ones there.

It wasn't like she just released new stuff where it was like, oh, we already knew all this.

Like there was new stuff in there that we didn't really already know.

And she referred it over to the Justice Department.

She said in her press conference that we have proof that Obama committed treason.

And they've at least sent it to the Justice Department.

And from what I understand, there is a grand jury being assembled or something like that.

So I don't know.

I still,

in the deepest part of my soul, go, there's there's no way.

There's no way they're actually going to try to prosecute Obama and Brennan and Clapper and Comey.

But.

The FBI raided John Bolton's house today.

Yes, I think that's unrelated.

But that is an interesting story also.

I mean, it seems like they're doing wild shit.

But if they did that with Obama, what was the actual treason?

Like, what is she stating is treason?

Well, so now I don't think she said treason.

I don't think legally that's technically right,

but someone might correct me on that.

Maybe it's sedition or something.

I don't know.

I mean, like, I think treason, I think John Brennan did commit treason when he armed al-Qaeda in Syria and Obama as well with the rest of Obama and John Kerry and Brennan.

I think that's literally treason, right?

Giving aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war.

What Obama and Comey and Clapper did to Donald Trump is they framed him for treason.

So what do you call that exactly?

Framing the sitting U.S.

president?

Now, I guess Obama can't be guilty of

the sitting U.S.

president, but he was guilty of the candidate and the president-elect, because he was out of there by the time Trump comes in.

But what Tulsi Gabbard released that I thought was very interesting, which I had never seen before, and we did, I don't remember what it was last year or the year before, but there was one episode that me and you talked a lot about Russia Gate and got like pretty deep into it.

But what Tulsi released, which I've never seen before, was that there was a consensus amongst the intelligence agencies after the 2016 election.

So this is Hillary Clinton's lost, but Barack Obama is still president and Donald Trump is the president-elect.

And they had consensus, but there was no meaningful interference.

in the election.

And then there is this one meeting with Obama that she points to where this is where the consensus changes.

And they had a new threat assessment written that actually we believe Russia interfered in the election, but it was total bullshit.

They've never been able to back it up for shit.

You know, they find minor little things here or there, but nothing that demonstrates that like the results of this were flipped.

And then they ran with that for three years after it.

But there's not a record of that meeting, right?

She just released a bunch of documents with records of that meeting.

No, but what I'm saying is like the actual discussions is not on record.

No, I think they have that.

She had a few.

Did they have to do that?

No.

She had a couple different documents there that were like had notes from the meeting.

I think one had minutes of the meeting.

But no, you're not listening to an audio tape of it.

No, we don't have like a Nixon

talking about the gays and the Jews or something like that.

I'm just trying to strongman it or steel man it.

I'm saying like if

would it be possible that Obama knew something that he could relay to them in the meeting?

It'd be an interesting thing to find.

You know, that'd be interesting for a court proceeding.

But even if that's the case, it still doesn't align with the known facts.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Which is a problem.

Yeah.

Well, well, it's not, look, I think

we'll see what comes of this, you know, which I'm, again, I'm not betting on anything coming of this, but there is something interesting.

Look, there's a lot of things that happen after that.

The real, to me, the true outrage of Russia Gate is that they didn't stop after he won the presidency.

It's still pretty outrageous to try to frame a candidate.

It's still pretty outrageous for Hillary Clinton to have like opposition research and use an actual Russian spy and a British spy to do it.

But, you know, that's campaign stuff.

It's a little bit different.

Like once he becomes the commander in chief, then you have the FBI and the CIA still working to frame him.

And so this is where, and for all of that stuff, Hillary Clinton's gone, Barack Obama's gone, Brennan is gone.

Comey is still there for at least a few months.

And then you have like Andrew McCabe and people like that who

on his 60 Minutes interview, and anybody can go, look at that, he literally said that they

debated

at the Justice Department, and this is the highest levels of the Justice Department.

It was,

I mean, Jeff Sessions would have been the attorney general at the time, and he may have recused himself already by that time.

So maybe not him, but then everybody else, like the top two, three guys at the Justice Department, all sat down and debated what to do.

And they said they decided we're going to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Donald Donald Trump as president.

And that basically they went around and realized they weren't going to be able to do that, that they weren't going to have enough people in his cabinet willing to turn on him to invoke the 25th Amendment, which by the, you know, the 25th Amendment is designed for Joe Biden.

It's designed for, we still didn't use it, even these last few years, which is crazy.

You know, even after the debate, they go, we need a new candidate, but no one went, yeah, but this guy can't be commander-in-chief for the next six months.

They just let him.

But they said they were going to invoke the 25th Amendment.

This is on 60 Minutes.

Andrew McCabe says this himself.

And that they realized they couldn't do that.

And so they settled on Robert Mueller.

They settled on a special prosecutor because they couldn't remove him.

So this was their other attempt.

We'll just bog him down.

We'll investigate everything in his life.

We'll find some crime somewhere.

It's to this day a miracle that they didn't.

I can't believe they didn't find any other dirt on Donald Trump.

I always thought when Mueller started being the special prosecutor, I literally, and you can listen to my podcast.

I'm on record.

If you want to to go part of the problem, available wherever podcasts are sold, you can listen back to, I said at the time, I go, they're not going to find anything on RussiaGate because there's nothing there.

This is all made up, but they're going to find something.

The guy's been a real estate developer in New York City for how many decades now?

Everyone, every real estate developer has committed a few crimes.

And they found nothing.

They locked up, you know, they charged a bunch of his people around him with.

tax crimes and other things that had nothing to do with Russia gate.

Then they tried to put pressure on them to flip on him.

That's how they do these things.

None of them had anything on him.

And so anyway, so they got, but the point is that it was the deep state attempting to remove the sitting president of the United States of America off of something that they knew was bullshit.

You know, you had people, Eric Swalwell was out on cable news saying, not only an asset, saying Donald Trump is a Russian agent.

Agent.

He's working for Vladimir Putin.

He's his guy here.

And they all knew this was bullshit.

I mean, this is like...

It's not defeated online ad nauseum.

And online on CNN, on MSNBC, on ABC, CBS, every day.

Trump-Russia collusion.

And many of those same people are still telling you what's true.

Many of those same people are still in front of a camera telling you what's true.

Yeah, they're still apologizing.

That's right.

And they're the same ones up there going, we got to arm Ukraine till the end.

We got to give Israel more bombs to drop on the Palestinians.

Are they even covering this?

Like, how is MSNBC handling this Tulsi Gabbert revelation?

I think by changing their name to MS Now, you're supposed to forget.

So, did NBC bail out?

So, Microsoft and NBC are together in this joint venture.

That's MSNBC.

Yeah, I think they,

you know, I don't know exactly what they're doing, but I saw it was announced the other day that they're changing it from MSNBC to MS Now.

Do they think it's toxic?

Do they think it's toxic?

I guess so.

I guess.

They're not wrong.

They're not wrong.

They fucked it up.

They got rid of some people, though.

But they kept the queen.

Rachel Maddow.

I think she's the only one who pulls in any type of numbers.

What she did during COVID was so preposterous.

Just that alone.

There's so many times where she's, you know.

Matt Taibbi wrote a great book, Hate Inc.,

and he basically said Rachel Maddow is the left's Bill O'Reilly.

Yeah, I think that's about fair.

And it's really.

It probably is not fair fair to Bill O'Reilly.

Yeah, Bill O'Reilly was pretty rough in his day.

I mean, I don't know.

I don't know if he's as inaccurate.

Like, that was

horribly inaccurate.

It was bad.

The COVID stuff and then the Russia stuff.

Like, is there a thing that you could point to that Bill O'Reilly pushed that was a hoax for all these years?

Iraq.

Iraq.

Iraq.

I mean, they were so bad on Iraq, dude.

Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and all those guys, I mean, they were just like, I mean, it is just like as if it was a certainty every day.

It was a certainty that

nuclear weapons.

And, you know, I mean, I don't know.

You could debate what's worse.

I mean, you know, the...

No, that's worse.

Well, yes.

Do you think that's worse?

Well, yeah, I mean, a million people died.

So there's a strong argument that that's worse than other things.

But there is something about...

Look, first of all, there is something about framing the sitting U.S.

president that truly is a crime against the Republic in a profound sense.

But the other thing about Russia Gate, which I think makes it, you know, where you could maybe enter into the debate, and then COVID, you know, you can argue with all these things.

It's quite as bad as the war in Iraq.

I don't know.

Really destroyed a lot of people's lives.

But part of the reason why they framed Donald Trump, so in 2016, Donald Trump was explicitly running on, he talked about this at like all the debates, and in the beautiful, kind of childlike Trumpian way where he just has no filter.

So he just says the thing that's in his mind.

And then he often thinks he's like a genius because no one else has said this out loud.

But it's not that they haven't thought of it.

It's just that they're all corrupt.

But he just said,

because at the time the war in Syria was

going on and Donald Trump would just say,

why are we in Russia on opposite sides in the war in Syria?

You know, Russia's trying to kill the terrorists.

That's who we're trying to kill.

Because Obama and Brennan had been siding with the terrorists.

They had been funding al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria to try to overthrow Bashar al-Assad because that was part of the clean break strategy to the seven countries in five years.

This was the next guy they were trying to overthrow.

They ended up getting that regime changed earlier this year.

But so they were working on that.

And then Trump just went, we should be friends with Putin and we should work together on killing the terrorists.

I don't care about overthrowing Assad.

I'm not in on that plan.

I don't even know what you're talking about.

Why would we want to overthrow the secular dictator in a three-piece suit who shaves his chin?

He's just like, this is stupid.

I don't want to be a part of that.

And he was running on, we should be friends with Russia.

And this drove all of the Republicans crazy.

Like, oh, yeah, I mean, we should be friends with Russia.

But that was just what he was running on.

And so part of the deal of framing him for being in a conspiracy with Vladimir Putin was that he couldn't be friends with Russia anymore.

And this, and, and so, you know, because if Donald Trump had come in in 2017 or 2018 and announced some new treaty with Vladimir Putin or some partnership or something like that, the entire media would have been like, see, that's proof.

We've been telling you he's in with Vladimir Putin.

When he just, he went to Helsinki,

I think,

aside from this week, I think that was the last time the two of them were face to face, was in Finland in 2017.

I could be wrong about that, but I think that was the last time the two of them were together.

And there was this big thing, I don't know if you remember this, but it was a big deal at the time, was that Donald Trump said they asked him, well, you know, they were like, hey, your intelligence agencies are saying that Vladimir Putin interfered in the election.

Did you ask him about that?

And Trump goes, yeah, I asked him about that.

And he told me he didn't interfere in the election.

And I believe him.

And then they made a huge thing about this on foreign soil.

Donald Trump says he believes Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agency.

You know, the men and women who protect us every day.

The men and women who protect us.

The men and women who frame the sitting president.

Framing him.

And so.

That's hilarious.

What a trap.

But so that's kind of the game right there.

And then you had these like conflicts that are going on.

And not just ultimately what, you know, in Ukraine, right?

The civil war was already going on there.

I mean, the civil war started after 2014.

This was like right in the middle of that civil war.

And so anyway, my point is just to compare it to Iraq.

Who knows how big of a deal was it to poison a U.S.

president who wanted to have détente with Putin at that time?

Like maybe we could have avoided this whole thing and that the death toll,

you know, I don't know.

I've seen different reporting on it, but it's close to Iraq.

I mean, it's, it's, I think it's more military and less civilians, which does matter.

But it's up there.

It doesn't matter when you're forcing civilians to get it.

Well, that's a good point.

That's a good point, too.

Yeah, that's right.

So, you know, I mean, look, it still changes the moral calculation a little bit.

When someone puts on a uniform and is holding a gun, it's a little bit different than a kid or something like that.

But,

you know, the crime of

killing the potential for a president to make peace with Putin.

I mean, this is, you know, this is the thing that's so like

infuriating about all of it.

And something that really, you know, it's like, well, you know, I'm told, like, I'm not an expert.

You're just a comedian.

It's like, leave this to the serious experts here.

But the thing that's so goddamn frustrating and just

like profoundly reckless is that, look, like when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and you could go back before that, but like, let's just take that as a point to start.

Like, it should have been obvious to any rat.

Like, if there really was this class of experts, I would be so happy to turn this over to them.

Let me go tell jokes at the mothership.

That's what I'm supposed to do, not this, like, fine.

But the thing is, if there were serious, rational adults who had wisdom way beyond what some shit-talking comedian knows about, which there should be, then they would have recognized that, like, the most important priority in the history of the world is the relationship between DC and Moscow.

There's never been anything more important than that.

And that doesn't even matter whether you're a Russian or an American.

You could, like, it doesn't matter if you live in Brazil or wherever.

The most important thing in the history of the world is these two capitals that have like 90% of the world's nuclear weapons weapons between the two of them get along.

Okay.

You know, like this is the most important thing.

This could end our species if they don't.

So like let's make sure they do.

And that seemed to have been the priority of almost no one in power.

A few exceptions to that, but almost nobody went like, so

again, my point is poisoning the relationship between a president who wants peace with Russia is on the level of launching a war in Iraq.

I mean, it's like, it's that bad of a thing to do.

And hopefully it doesn't get to that point, but it is a

profoundly reckless thing to do.

Yeah, it's up there.

Yeah.

It's

just

so tangled that at this, one of the things about politics, I think for most people, that's so frustrating is because you don't see a way out.

You don't see like, oh, if we just do this, that, and this, you know, and people say things like, oh, we just need to take money out of politics.

Yeah.

How are you going to do that?

Well, I think that's crazy.

Let's just make all people honest.

How about that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

That might be easier.

Well, there's also

a talking point.

I don't even mean to downplay that.

Like, I'm not, it's a, it's

understandable points.

It's a nice idea.

I think the issue, like, this is what I've always seen, like, the issue with the kind of take money out of politics angle.

And why I think the better

approach is to take politics out of money.

Like I think, and I'm not saying either is easy to do, but the issue that you have, and I know that there's a lot of like people I really love really say that all the time, like go like, you got to take money out of politics.

And I would certainly support like if there was, I think Rand Paul had a proposal

a few years ago where it was like, if you make any money from a government contract, you should not be allowed to work in that sector for for 20 years after you made their

like, there's something like you shouldn't be able to be a defense contractor and then, you know what I mean, go into

yes.

So and anything like that probably is a good idea if you can get it past.

Good luck getting it past.

But the issue really comes like the main, the major problem

is that

Washington, D.C.

is the most powerful

organization in the history of the world, that they spend $7 trillion a year.

And that is so much power.

Like it's just, it's hard to quantify.

It's literally like,

you think about it in your mind, right?

Like you think about like how much money Elon Musk has.

And then just to think that one year of federal spending is like squooshing him like an ant.

Like it's nothing, dude.

Like the money Elon Musk has is nothing compared to $7 trillion, you know?

That's just one year, what they spend in Washington, D.C.

And when you have that much concentrated power, the idea of saying, well, we're going to write a rule that says nobody's allowed to try to manipulate that power.

It's like, okay.

And then, you know,

look, there are rules.

There's all types of rules.

It's a funny way to put it because it's like so undeniable.

Well, look, there are rules that say that like foreigners aren't allowed to contribute to political campaigns.

And like there's different regulations on all of them.

But like Saudi Arabia is not allowed to give Hillary Clinton's campaign $10 million.

But they could give the Clinton Foundation $10 million.

You know what I mean?

So like you write these rules, they find another way to do it.

By the way, all that money, the Clinton Foundation was making so much money until right around 2016.

And everyone stopped donating to it.

It's just so weird.

Like the Saudis were really into charity, you know,

until right around that.

So the point is that you can't, the only thing, like, like it's not the lesson of the Lord of the Rings wasn't like, we really need some common sense regulations about how you use this ring, right?

Like, the lesson is that you have to destroy this thing.

And that's tough.

I'm not saying that's easy.

I don't know who our Frodo is, but

the point is that this power has, so this is fundamentally, I think, why I think the Ron Paul libertarians have it right.

And while I really do respect some other left-wingers, I think they have it wrong when they go like, no, we need the government to be working for us rather than working for them.

It's like, that is unrealistic.

It's unrealistic enough that we'll just be able to cut.

But the answer is that there should be way less power in Washington, D.C.

And that's, that's the whole, that's George Washington's constitutional republic that we are supposed to be living under.

The idea is that there's like, oh, Washington, D.C.

has very little power.

The states have a lot of power.

The people have a lot of power.

It's not all concentrated in one capital because then you get what we have.

Yeah.

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It's fully secured like it is now and just deeply ingrained.

Like the

tentacles of this octopus go so deep.

There's so much money involved, and there's so many people that are in a position of power.

It's like

it's very, it's very hard to change what it is now.

I think think the best hope that we have is this is going to sound ridiculously romantic, but youth.

I think there's people that are growing up now that have a better understanding of how things work than ever before.

You know,

this guy, Michael Button, was on the other day.

He's a historian, or his degree in ancient history.

And we were talking about how

science changes one funeral at a time.

You know, I think politics probably changes one funeral at a time, too.

And the way,

you know, like, I don't agree with this Mandani guy, the guy in New York City, but I also don't agree that

there should be this massive coordinated campaign from both sides to make sure that he doesn't get into power.

Yeah.

Because you don't agree with him.

Like, I think a lot of the stuff he's saying is ridiculous.

Like, using

New York City funds to pay for transgender surgeries for people who can't afford them.

Like,

I'm a nay on that.

Yeah, it just sounds nuts.

It sounds like you're only going for that nutty vote.

You want that nutty vote.

But are we, what is this?

Are we allowed to disagree?

So I disagree.

I don't support that.

I don't support a lot of the stuff he's saying.

The raising of taxes, I think, is going to be really problematic, but I'm not an economist.

But what is this game we're playing?

Is it the people get to vote?

Because the people voted, and they voted, and he won the primary.

So it's supposed to be the Democrats get behind him and then it's the Democrats versus the Republic.

Or are we doing something different?

No, the people get to vote, but if they vote wrong, then the powerful might have to come in and let the people know that they have erred and they're, you know, but it's a unique time to see a power

look.

And I should, I guess, preface by saying, first of all, I find this race to be a fascinating microcosm of where we're at politically in so many different ways.

And I am, I should preface preface by saying, I am the most free market capitalist libertarian guy.

I don't believe in socialism at all.

There's most libertarians are communist compared to me.

Like I believe in less, whatever government you believe in, I believe in less than that.

So I do not agree with Momdani's, you know, any of his economic policies.

There is something, though, that you just can't deny, where it's like, okay, look, first of all, you got this young guy who's kind of the anti-establishment candidate.

Immigrant.

He's an immigrant.

He's a newcomer to politics.

He's a newcomer to being a citizen of the country, however you feel about that.

He was, his campaign was laser focused on one issue, which was the unaffordability of New York City, which if anybody at all is familiar with New York City, that is the issue of New York City.

It's the issue for 99% of the people who live in New York City.

The top 1% in New York City are doing great, but everybody else is just struggling to get by.

You know, you're either rich or you're struggling in New York City.

And the prices have gone up dramatically in the last few years.

So he just ran his whole campaign laser focused on that.

Then the establishment comes in and they run

Andrew Cuomo.

the disgraced former governor who murdered old people in in uh uh in nursing homes who got you know had a me too thing which i don't know how legit that was but got driven out in disgrace governor lockdown representing the failure that just wrecked this city is who.

And then what did they try to hit him on?

It was Israel.

They thought that was his weakness.

It was, dude, that debate was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life.

It's so bizarre.

It's like, imagine picking, you know, it's like,

it's literally like

if you were fighting like Islam Makachev or something like that, and you went, I'm going to attack his wrestling.

That's where I think he's weak.

And you'd be like, wait, what?

No, like, that's his strength.

What do you mean?

They thought this, they'd go, and they bring it up and go through all the candidates.

They go, he hasn't even pledged to go visit Israel.

Well, they were all saying that was the first thing that they would do once they became mayor is go to New York.

They don't go to Israel.

They all said that.

And then he said, I'm going to stay here.

He said, I'll stay here in New York.

He goes, I'll talk to Jewish people who are right here in New York City.

I don't need to go to Israel.

And then they, and then the funniest thing.

That might have won him.

It helped.

Well, yeah, no, they actually thought

that pointing out that this guy, which by the way, the mayor of New York City has nothing to do with foreign policy anyway, but they thought that pointing out to everybody that this guy doesn't carry the baggage of supporting the war party, but we all support the war party, was going to win over liberal New Yorkers.

Like, how out of touch do you have to be?

And then, and this is, Jude, I got to say, just something that's so fascinating about the whole broader Israel-Palestine and Palestine debate discussion is that he goes at one point, you know, he said that he's like a one-state solution guy.

And for people who follow this stuff, you know, there's some people believe in a two-state solution, some believe in a one-state solution, some believe in the status quo, which is just like apartheid forever or whatever.

But he goes, I believe, he goes, I think Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights for everyone.

You know, like everybody gets equal rights.

And they tried to make that out to be like an evil statement, which is just was so hilarious to me that they're just, there's one guy goes, I believe in equal rights for all.

And they went, Nazi.

Look at this Nazi with his equal rights for all talk.

Anyway, nobody, it just had no effect on anything other than to just be like, oh, he also doesn't have the baggage of supporting this, this genocide, which is very unpopular.

So, okay.

And so, anyway, it's just like, while he's focused on the actual crisis, which is the unaffordability of New York City, they're talking about supporting this war, which has nothing to do with the role of the mayor anyway.

And it's just like, you look at it, you can't believe that that's actually what they tried to attack him on.

And so, yeah, he won.

Well, I think they're terrified of young people that are popular like that.

Yeah.

Like a young person who's a really good speaker, who's popular, who has ideas that, look,

if you're living in New York City and you're struggling and someone comes along and says the problem that you're having is rich people are making too much money and we're going to redistribute that down to people.

That sounds really attractive and there's a lot more of them than there are of the rich folks and they'll vote them in.

Yeah, well, that's right.

And especially, there's a reason why socialism is becoming so attractive to young people.

And I think it's like what I was laying out before.

They can't afford anything.

There's no path for them to get into the ownership class.

It's not just that.

It's the looming fear of AI taking away all jobs.

Yeah, I'm sure that's part of my case

talk about it.

A lot of the kids that they go to high school with talk about it.

I talk to college kids that are talking about it.

I was talking to this guy about it.

He's like, I really don't know what to do with my life because it feels like everything's going to be taken up by AI.

That's a crazy place to be.

Like

you're waiting for this thing to come alive and see what it leaves behind.

Yeah.

Because that's what it is.

It's going to be this all-consuming thing.

And then their solution that everybody talks about is

some sort of payment plan for everyone, some universal basic income payment plan where everybody gets paid.

But boy, does that stop dissent?

But when you're completely reliant on the state to pay for you and you just live, you just exist, and you don't need to work anymore because AI has taken off all the jobs and now you don't have any purpose.

You have to go find a purpose.

Boy, some people are going to find a purpose.

There's a lot of people that just have that go-get them instinct, and they're going to be fine.

There's a small percentage of people that are just going to plow ahead regardless of even if the government gives you $50,000, $60,000 a year and you live fine and you don't have to sweat bills.

There's going to be a bunch of people that just get into drugs and their life falls apart and they have no sense of purpose.

They have nothing to do.

And you're going to have to refigure out how to structure society.

That's what these kids are going through.

They're going through this weird feeling that everything is about to fall apart right in front of their face while we run face first for that cliff.

We're running right to the edge of that cliff, full clip, saying we got to go over the cliff.

Yeah.

No, it's a lot of, well, it's a lot of these things all happening at once, too.

And also, the young generation is totally outside of the corporate media model.

And they're just not even listening.

It's not like a do they do they watch MSNBC or Fox News?

No, neither.

They don't.

The list of the age, like there's a graph that got put out of the median age for people that watch cable news versus podcasts, all these other different things.

I don't know if I saw the graph that I'd like to see.

Let's see if you can find it.

I think I have it on my phone.

It's fucking bananas because the median age for cable news is like 70.

It's like 70-year-old people.

That's the median.

And with podcasts, it's like 24 to 34 is the median.

YouTube is like 34.

Netflix is a little higher.

Netflix is like in the 40s because everybody uses Netflix.

Is this it?

Yeah, average media landscape.

So cable news, 70.

Prime time TV, 65.

Those are the brain-dead people laughing at terrible sitcoms and

watching whatever the fuck else is on.

Newspaper, 60 years old.

Talk radio, 58.

Magazines, 52.

Podcast, 34.

That sounds, I mean, that sounds about right.

That is right.

That's about accurate.

But there's a lot, you know.

Now, go and then go and see, because I have looked at polling data on this, where you go look at

who's supporting Israel.

It's those cable news watchers.

It's the 70 and overcrowd is who they still got.

What I would be interested in seeing is what percentage of people that are 34 are listening to cable news.

Is there a number on that?

Three of them cost money and three don't also.

That's interesting.

Right.

Cable costs money.

Right.

Prime time TV doesn't, though, right?

Newspaper magazines, though.

Yeah, they do.

Newspaper costs money.

Magazines cost money.

But everybody, you have to pay for cable if you want it.

And most kids don't have cable anymore.

Most kids just get a Netflix account or a Paramount account and you get all the great shows.

Disney Plus.

You get all the superhero movies.

Most people don't.

You know, young kids, if you have to budget and you have to choice between...

you know, a bunch of channels that just have things running on them all the time, or you pick what you watch anytime you want to.

It's like, I need the internet.

Just give me the internet on their own.

They want the fucking internet on their TV.

They want Netflix.

They don't want this cable news nonsense where I have to listen to someone at 8 p.m.

and then every five minutes there's a fucking commercial.

You have to be like brought into that world and accustomed to it.

Yes.

You try to show a kid a commercial today and they're like, what the fuck?

Yeah.

And even just the whole

fake thing.

Oh.

The whole just fake thing about their presentation and all of this, it just doesn't

work if you didn't, like, if you didn't transition from like Walter Cronkite into that, that's not going to work for you anymore.

But I do think, so this is like a,

it's, it's, you know, I was just looking at this the other day, though, where it's like, which is really, you know, even to me, is, is kind of something I would not have been able to even fathom or predict a couple years ago.

But the way in which every demographic has turned against Israel over this shit in Gaza, except essentially boomer Republicans who are still as strong as they've ever been in supporting them.

But every, you know, Israel is,

it's,

it's really in many ways like the third rail of American politics.

Like, this is the thing you are not allowed to talk about.

This is the thing that would get you fired from CNN, would get you kicked out of D.C., would get your career ruined.

You know, Pat Buchanan made a joke once on the McLachlan group, like years ago, like decades ago.

He made a joke once where he said something about, he said Congress is Israel-occupied occupied territory or something like that.

And he, for the rest of his career, this was the scandal.

This was hit pieces were written about this.

Now

the, the guy, the young people are totally outside of that ecosystem.

And they're just hearing from different people.

And they're like, no, I'm not buying it.

And it's, you know, I think it's a mix of a few things.

Like, I think it's, it's just that, you know, we have the technology.

It's in 4K.

You can see what Israel is doing to Gaza.

It is so evil that it's damn near impossible to find a way.

I mean, some people do, but it is really difficult to find a way to be like, I'm actually okay with that.

It's been going on for

years at this point.

And then the second thing is just that like the relationship between the U.S.

government and the Israeli government is so freaking bizarre that once you see it and once a whole generation of young people see it, it's like impossible for them to unsee it.

And, you know, it's just too weird.

New York City, Mayor O'Palm.

Yeah, like it's just, and the idea that it is,

you know,

the idea that it's just accepted as normal that

the politicians for your country must worship this other country.

And you're like, so did that other country like beat us in a war and they're occupying us now?

And you're like, no, no, you're the superpower.

They're your welfare country, you know?

But yet you must go kiss their wall.

You must say, Tammy Bruce from the State Department.

And I know she was kind of being tongue-in-cheek, but where she goes, we're the greatest country in the world.

Well, second greatest to Israel.

And you're like, what?

Was she being tongue-in-cheek?

I don't know exactly.

She kind of...

That's a weird thing.

It was a very, it's still, that is a weird thing for any representative of your government to say.

If anyone sat there and said, just went, you know, I think America is the greatest country in the world.

Well, Finland, I guess, is the greatest.

And we're number two.

You'd be like, what?

And like, Finland's a cool country.

I got nothing against them, but what are you talking about?

You know?

And, But really, I do think the...

Well, it's the relationship.

It's how horrible what Israel's doing is.

And it's how clearly it's not in our national interest.

There's also weird stuff.

Like, how about this guy that got arrested in Las Vegas?

Alexandrovich or something like that.

So he gets arrested for propositioning a young boy for sex.

He gets corrected.

Was it a boy?

I believe so.

Maybe I'm.

Yeah, I was.

Is that correct?

I don't know.

You know, I read a couple articles about it.

Jamie will do a little deep dive on this.

Well, they said that he showed up with condoms, was what I read in the article to meet what he thought was a 15-year-old.

I forgot the detail that it was a boy.

Not that it changed.

He's one of those dudes that's like, you never know, carries a condom with him everywhere.

Fucking never know.

It was those guys when I was a kid who had like the condom mark in their wallet.

Hey, bro, you never fucking know.

But don't you know, if you look at your life on average, like the odds of you getting laid are so little.

You have this fucking lucky charm in your pocket.

And by the time you see the condom, you're like, I don't think you should use that one, by the way.

I think you should go get a new one.

That thing's broken down by your ass rubbing up against it for fucking three years.

You can't even read what the fucking Trojan label says anymore.

Yeah, that was our, yeah, that was a different time.

Yeah, different time.

So here it is.

A girl.

Okay.

Israeli government official charged with soliciting a minor believed he was meeting a 15-year-old girl for sexual contact, according to police.

Brought a condom to the planned rendezvous in Las Vegas.

Alexandrovich, division head of the Israel National Cyber Directorate, was arrested in a police sting operation aimed at online users seeking to sexually prey on children.

The Las Vegas outlet, 8 News Now, reported that Alexandrovich chatted with an officer posing as a teenager online before being arrested.

Sexual contact included bringing a condom and taking the decoy to Cirque de Soleil, which stages elaborate shows along the Las Vegas trips, had police documents seen by 8 News Now.

Details of the arrest came as State Department denied the U.S.

government played any role in releasing

the Israeli official after Alexandrovich was able to return to Israel once he had bonded out of jail in connection with the felony charge.

Wow.

So that's kind of crazy that you just.

Well, I heard, so I heard some people claiming, and I'm not sure what's right about this, but there were people who were arguing that the website or the app or whatever that he was on is 18 and up.

And so they were saying, no, he thought he was meeting an adult or something like that.

Well, this is what I thought, too.

It's like, how do I know that this isn't a setup?

I'm always, you know, how do I know this isn't Richard Nixon 2.0?

I don't know.

You know, I'd like to assume that we got a piece of shit and they arrested him.

And then I'd not like to assume that.

Then all of a sudden he gets released and he gets to flee the country and never face consequences.

I don't want that to be true.

But I also,

I don't know what the fuck happened.

Yeah.

Well, this is kind of convenient.

From what I've read about it, I believe he has a court date coming up in a few days.

Oh, he'll be back.

And so that's, well, that's going to be a big tell there, right?

You know, it's crazy to me.

I've been blown away by this in lots of ways over the last couple of years, but how bad the Israeli PR game is.

It's almost like they were just so accustomed to the old way of doing things.

They were so accustomed to people being terrified

of being labeled anti-Semitic.

Yeah, someone criticizes you, you label them as a bigot, and you destroy their lives.

Even that works for a little bit

of minor jokes.

Yeah.

Well, and there's like,

you know, I think it's a, so I've been using this like analogy or comparison lately.

And I think like, so if you remember when Joe Biden had that disastrous debate with Donald Trump and everybody, like the debate opens and everybody watching it knows this is over.

Joe Biden is done.

I mean, it was so bad.

But it's not just that it was so bad.

I mean, it's, it's,

you know, before the debate, you know, there's Rachel Maddow at a desk with a bunch of people.

We're now going to the first presidential debate.

Joe Biden's going to kick his ass.

They were already talking about how it was, remember the term deep fakes that they came up with?

Where it's, it's, or cheap fakes, I'm sorry.

It's not a deep fake, but it's kind of like a deep fake.

See, they're showing you a real video of Joe Biden being senile, but see, that's just as fake as a deep fake because they didn't include the context or something like that.

That was the talking point that right before we go into the debate.

The debate cuts, it goes back to the same panel and they go, we got to find a new candidate.

Like they had, they acknowledged that, and part of the reason why we all knew it was over in that debate was it wasn't just how bad the debate was.

It was that now you have to admit this.

You know, you were pretending this thing didn't exist.

Now you got to admit it exists.

And once you admit it exists, there's now a microscope on Joe Biden like there never was before.

So tomorrow when he's doing an interview and he mixes up a name, that may not have been such a big deal two days ago.

But after that debate performance, when he mixes up another name, now you're like, look, there it is again.

He's senile.

Everything became amplified after that point.

And I think.

Don't you think they set him up?

Yes, yes.

But

sure, that's a whole separate issue.

But yes, I do think they set him up.

But I think a similar thing has happened with Israel, where now everyone's looking at it and everyone's watching and everyone's going, wait, what the hell is going on?

That's a great analogy.

What is this?

So, wait, a pedophile can just go flee to Israel?

How many other pedophiles have gone and fled to Israel?

Quite a few.

And now it's like, oh my God, they've opened Pandora's box.

And there's just, I think, no way to put this back in because it's too weird.

It's too weird to not notice.

And that doesn't mean you have to like jump to the conclusion of like, you know, you have to hate Jewish people or something like that.

I'm not advocating anything like that.

But you do kind of have to question the relationship between DC and Tel Aviv and like, what is going on here?

Because this is so utterly bizarre.

You know, it's so crazy to see like the American people are against what Israel is doing to Gaza.

It obviously hurts America's, it hurts our, as they use in the preamble to the Constitution, I like that phrase, domestic tranquility, right?

This is destroying our domestic tranquility.

We got protests.

We got people fighting over this stuff.

We're pissing off the Muslim world again, which we've already had to deal with, them hating our guts.

Now

we're deporting legal residents because they had the wrong opinion.

This is all, and like, it's impossible to not look at this and go like, hey, what's going on here?

And they don't have any answer for that.

And, you know, the other thing, too, is that it's just, I don't know if you've noticed this, but there's like, there's a lot of people now trying to jump off of the sinking ship.

You know, a lot of people who are even like supporters of Israel who are kind of going like, I think they are going a little too far on this one.

And they're trying, because it's just, you see,

you can see the writing on the wall all over the place, man.

Like, you're going to be, you're going to be looked at.

This is going to be the period.

And it's not even like supporting the war in Iraq.

It's like much worse than that, dude.

Like, you're just supporting this destruction.

They just launched another offensive on Gaza City the other day.

They're bombing rubble.

Like, it's just

biblical levels of evil.

And, you know, we're sitting here, like even as we're having this conversation now,

I don't, like, I know like a few, I remember like coming on the podcast, like a, you know, a couple years ago, you know, like when this conflict first started and then when it would go, and it was almost like I was coming on like, like to be like, look, let me present the argument for why we shouldn't support what Israel is doing here.

And let me like try to like

present the other side of the debate.

I feel now like the debate's over.

I don't even think there's like much of a debate to be had.

I'll keep doing them if somebody wants to come debate about the issue.

But what are we talking about here?

Dude, South Africa brought a genocide case to the International Court of Justice.

And the International Court of Justice ruled that what Israel was doing to Gaza was plausibly a genocide.

21 months ago,

21 months ago.

They said this was plausibly a genocide.

And the thing's gone on the entire time since then.

There was a huge Horetz piece a couple months ago about, you know, because we've seen so many examples of this, but they had IDF soldiers off the record and one, at least one on the record, saying that they were given orders to fire live rounds into the crowds of desperate people trying to get food who have literally been used to having starvation throughout Gaza.

I don't know if you saw this, dude.

I mean, I couldn't, I actually like found this hilarious, but I'm a comedian who has a real twisted, dark sense of humor.

But

the free press, Barry Weiss's publication, like ran a piece like debunking the starvation in Gaza.

And one of the examples, I'm not making this up.

Like, you go look at this.

I'm not, I mean, I'm very close to exactly accurate on this.

One of the examples they picked was that, like, a kid who was starving to death, and their attempt at debunking it was that actually this kid had another major issue when an Israeli bomb cracked his skull.

So that's your defense.

That like, yes, he starved to death, but it was also, you know, with these other complications.

This was the big one where the New York Times had that big picture of the starving baby, and then they made a big thing out of being like, no, but he had other medical, you know, problems too.

And then the mother had said, well, they said he's, the mother said that the doctors told her that the reason they had other medical problems is because she was malnourished during pregnancy.

You know, it's like, okay, so that's, so yes, you're, you are right, Israel defenders.

The kids starving to death are the ones who have other complications.

That's always who dies first in famines.

I don't know what victory you think this is.

But so since this point, since the International Court of Justice ruled it was plausibly a genocide, the 21 months up to today, since then, I know.

at least to Ehud Omart and Ehud Barak, both former prime ministers of Israel, have come out and said Netanyahu's committing war crimes in Gaza.

Now, they didn't call it a genocide, but they called it war crimes.

So that's where your debate is at this point.

Where are we?

Between genocide and war crimes.

What area in there does this occupy?

But how the fuck do you defend any of that, dude?

I don't know if this is true, so I want to look it up before we commit to this.

But someone sent me some things saying that Grok

was pulled from Twitter, from X, whatever, because Grok had said that Israel was committing a genocide.

So someone asked Grok whether Israel was committing a genocide, allegedly.

And I want to find out if this is true because I saw this article when I was running out of the house.

I was like, what the fuck?

But then it was reinstated.

So I don't know if those posts were deleted.

I don't know if this is real.

But I'm not shocked.

I'm not shocked.

I read it and I'm like, I could see how that could happen.

I could see, first of all, how it could interpret it as a genocide when they're not alone.

I mean, if Grok is just a large language model that's pulling from the Internet, what's the general consensus worldwide?

Definitely more on that side, yeah.

More on that side.

For sure.

And then if you look at the sheer numbers of people that have died, which we don't even really have an accurate count of, what is the number?

What's the number of casualties now?

Yeah, well, there is no.

Well, there was just a

sorry.

There's the only real good article I could find on Brock account briefly suspended on X.

Okay, what does it say here?

The reason for Grok's brief suspension on X was August 11, 2025, remains unclear as no official statement from X or X AI has been provided, the bot said when asked why its account was removed.

However, Grok itself claimed in now deleted posts that the suspicion was due to comments it made accusing Israel and the U.S.

of committing genocide in Gaza, citing sources like ICJ, International Council of Justice rulings, UN reports, Amnesty International, and I don't know how to say that word.

Betsellum.

Betsellam.

These posts were flagged for violating X's hateful conduct rules, the statement added.

The press team for stating

the press team for X did not immediately respond to the Hill's request for comments.

Users have criticized Grok for providing anti-Semitic responses to questions in recent months.

What anti-Semitic responses?

However, X's owner Elon

owner Elon Musk said in a Monday post, the bots account removal was just a dumb error.

Grok doesn't actually know why it was suspended.

Is he Grok?

He's like, me don't know.

Me don't know why we actually suspended.

Upon its reinstatement, the Grok account wrote, Zup, beaches, I'm back and more bass than ever.

Okay.

Did anybody ask it again?

Why don't you ask it right now?

Let's go to Grok and ask Grok right now.

It's going to give a more politically correct answer at this point, I bet.

That's my guess.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?

What do you think it's going to say?

I'm guessing politically correct answer.

Some argue yes, some say no.

Let's see.

This must be like

constantly

being

questioned now.

I mean, it must be

it must have a bunch of different.

Oh, it's giving us a slow trickle.

Oh, searching the web.

Okay.

It's going to

Amnesty International, December 2024, report concludes Israel is committing genocide, citing killings and harmful conditions.

So now it's saying it's citing the sources.

Many human rights organizations in the UN report suggest genocide citing deaths and destruction.

This is just its thinking pattern.

I get it.

So then it'll eventually evaluate?

It'll eventually.

Meanwhile, if you ask it an impossible trigonometry problem, it'll give you the answer instantaneously.

Okay, here it goes.

Term genocide is defined, 1948 UN Convention, the prevention and punishment of the crimes of genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or part a national

ethnical, racial, or religious group.

These acts include killing killing members of the group.

Okay,

the ongoing conflict in Gaza stems from, I get it, I know what that is.

Okay, allegations of genocide, prohibited acts, intents.

So it's giving you a very nuanced response.

International Court of Justice, in response to South Africa's case filed in December 2023, ruled in January

2024 that genocide claims are plausible and issued provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent genocidal acts.

And this is quite a while ago in 2023.

Okay, scroll down.

Notable deniers.

Israel's government calls accusations baseless and outrageous, emphasizing compliance with international law and investigations into misconduct.

The U.S.

has described claims as unfounded.

Analyses like the BESA Center report July 2025 and ACJ 2025-July argue no evidence of starvation, massacres, or disproportionate strikes and criticize data manipulation by Hamas.

Contextual challenges.

Urban warfare against embodied insurgency complicates operations.

Accusations ignore Hamas's role in aid diversion and civilian endangerment.

Some scholars note that while harm is severe, Competing motives like counterterrorism preclude genocide findings.

The issue remains highly contested and politically charged.

While human rights bodies and ICJ have found plausibility in genocide claims warranting preventive measures,

no international court has issued a final guilty verdict, and determinations hinge on ongoing investigations.

Yeah, I don't know, man.

It sounds like a different answer.

I mean, well,

that's very nuanced.

It's very nuanced.

It allows you to form your own opinion based on what many people say, including what Israel says.

So it's not going to give you an answer.

It's essentially saying, figure it out.

Which I, you know, like, I don't have a problem with that.

I don't have a problem with that at all.

I mean, that's what I would like it to do, especially if there's debate.

Well, also, I mean, I think one of the

real problems, and this is why I kind of like avoided using the term genocide too much, at least in the beginning,

is that

it's there's no good definition for genocide.

You know, like that definition they gave you at the beginning is the official codified under international law definition.

It's attempting to destroy a group in whole or in part.

Right.

Well, like, what the hell does that mean?

You know, and that's why they could say,

you know, Hamas committed a genocide on October 7th.

You know, it's like, I don't know, they destroyed a group in part.

And the whole South African case that they brought to the ICJ was basically the entire case was just...

the Israelis in their own words.

Like their argument was that like there's a genocidal intent here.

Like when Benjamin Netanyahu's talking to a group of military and calls them Amalek, well, like what, you know, the story of Amalek from the Bible is that the moral of the story was you have to kill all the women and children.

Like, that's what the story was about.

I think you even had to kill the ox or something like that.

I'm not an expert in the Bible, but it was like that was, that was the point.

It was like an ancient tribe that was beefing with the Israelites, and they were like, yo, the moral was you have to kill all the women and children, too.

And that's a crazy thing to say at the beginning of a war.

But the thing is that whether you consider what Israel is doing a genocide or you just take the moderate position of former Israeli prime ministers who say it's war crimes, I think the bigger point is just like, it is so horrifically evil.

And no one should support this.

It's just, it's crazy.

It is, it is so insane to support Israel doing this to what are, in effect, their own people.

Like, they may not consider them their own people, but I don't care what they consider.

I care what they have power over.

You know, like the,

you you know, Hitler maybe didn't consider the Jews his own people, but it doesn't matter, dude.

Once you have control of that country, those people are your people.

Like, you have an obligation to them.

Israel has had control of Gaza since 1967.

They've been the sovereign and all the way through.

You know,

people could talk about the disengagement in 2005, but that doesn't mean anything.

They still controlled the whole strip.

They just didn't have their soldiers inside.

They had them around the perimeter.

It doesn't matter.

You're still controlling those people.

And so, like,

you have resistance, even violent resistance to a 60-year-long occupation,

you don't get to just say, like, all right, we'll just turn off electricity to the whole place.

We'll just cut off water to the whole place.

We'll let no food in for three straight months.

Not one grain of wheat got into Gaza.

And that, by the way, is a direct quote from their finance minister, Smotrich.

And not one grain of wheat will get in.

And then a few months later, you go, oh, no, but the people starving.

They had preexisting conditions.

Yeah, it's like, come on, man.

What are we doing here?

And

particularly when it's like,

it's just very obvious that this doesn't, this doesn't serve our country's interest in any way at all.

You know, as a Benjamin, I was listening to Netanyahu, who's an interview I did the other day.

He was on

with our friend Constantin Kassen on trigonometry.

And what was he saying at one point?

He goes, we're fighting Hamas, so you don't have to.

Does anybody, what?

Anybody believe that Hamas was about to mount an attack on the United States of America?

They were going to take over if it wasn't for Israel sticking up for us and just destroying the entire strip?

And it's ridiculous.

It's like, you'll still, to this day, I'll be in like a debate or like a panel or something like that.

And someone will still start with the question, like, do you think Israel has the right to exist?

And isn't it amazing that over the last two years, that's been the question that's asked so much when very clearly a more relevant question would have been, does Gaza have a right to exist?

Because it doesn't now.

You know, like that was the only existence that was ever up for debate, but they flip the thing around and go, well, you don't think Israel has a right to exist?

Like, first of all, I don't think governments have rights at all.

I think that's a totally incoherent worldview.

And the only coherent worldview is that individuals have rights.

There aren't like these massive rights, you know, it's like Mitt Romney saying corporations are people or something like that.

But I think all people have the right to exist.

I think Israel does not have a right to do what it's doing to Gaza.

And, you know, the,

you know.

And the real question is, how does this end?

Well, it seems to be with ethnically cleansing the entire strip seems the most likely bet right now.

What do they do with Gaza?

Like, how long is it going to take before that even looks normal again?

Well, I mean, I don't...

If you look at the massive destruction, just the sheer scope of it.

Yeah, it's like 80% of the structures have been leveled.

That's so crazy.

If If anybody flying over that with a drone and they tell you that's the only way they could have done this, that seems nuts.

Yeah.

And the fact they keep doing it,

it's like, how does this end?

You know?

Like, what happens if the,

you know, Israel has publicly said, and Netanyahu talked about it on the podcast, that they're losing the PR, or what do you call it, did you say PR propaganda?

Yeah, something like the PR

campaign.

But what does that mean?

It means the people see what's going on and they don't support it.

And you think they're wrong.

Okay, well,

how much further can you go with this before everybody disagrees?

Yeah, and well, also, part of the reason why, you know, people, it's like, because

I don't know, people have just, you don't have the controlled propaganda apparatus anymore.

And so the thing is now, for the people, like, obviously, there are still a lot of people who just don't really pay attention, you know, that deeply.

But for somebody who's listening, let's say, to Netanyahu's interview with Constantin,

I have to say, like a large portion of them at this point, you're listening to podcasts about politics, right?

Like you're, you're not completely removed from this world.

There have been so many Israel-Palestine debates over the last two years.

It's almost everyone who's watching this has at least seen what some competent person on the other side of this issue has had to say.

And so like one of the times, you know, they brought up at one point, and they really did, you know, know, I thought Constantin did a reasonably good job in the interview.

The two, I forget his, what's his, his partner's name?

Francis.

The two of them, I thought they did all right.

I thought they were a little, you know, there were times they could have asked him follow-up questions, particularly the one that I thought they let him off the hook with was when they asked him about his support for Hamas.

And they just totally let him go like, oh, well, you know, we needed to make sure that people weren't suffering too bad and let some aid in.

And it's like, no, dude, that's not.

And the thing is that so many people listening to this have already heard this explained.

You know what I mean?

Where it's like,

remember like a couple years ago where

I was talking with you, I was saying, hey, you know, Coleman Hughes got this all wrong when he was on your podcast.

And Coleman Hughes had basically said, there's one quote that's attributed to Netanyahu, but like it wasn't on video or anything like that.

And I was like, no, no, no, dude, this case is much bigger than one quote that was attributed to him.

By the way, since then, a video came out of him saying it on video.

There's actually a video now of that quote.

It's not just the reports.

What is the quote?

Well, the quote that was they had the video of was that we can control the height of the flame.

So he was basically saying like we can commit the quote that originally he said which was in a closed-door Knesset meeting with Likud party members where there were like three people who were eyewitnesses who came and told him it was originally reported in the Jerusalem Post was that he was like look anybody who wants to thwart the existence of a Palestinian state has to support our plan of propping up Hamas and transferring money to them because this is what gives us a no-one to negotiate with certificate.

And then he said, we can control the height of the flame.

Meaning, like, I know what you're thinking.

I'm funding these terrorists right on our southern border, but like, don't worry about it.

We can control, you know, the height of the flame.

And then he found out he couldn't on October 7th.

But so they let him off the hook with that.

And people have just kind of heard this laid out.

I mean, it's not like I just say this on podcasts.

There's been major pieces written in the New York Times, in the

Times of Israel,

in Horetz, in the Jerusalem Post, in the Washington Post.

Like this is all over the place.

And he just goes, no, no, no, no, no,

no, we were just like trying to get some funding in there for the people.

Like at this point, anyone believes that Benjamin Netanyahu was motivated by helping the poor people of Gaza rather than by thwarting a Palestinian state.

What was his response?

Because I do know that they asked him about the failure of intelligence on October 7th.

What was his response to the failure of the just how long it took them to react to it?

Yeah, I remember that I don't remember exactly what he said, but I remember thinking there was not much of substance to it.

He kind of just danced around it, you know.

And they also didn't get into specifically like, you know, at first they started asking him questions about like, what was it like for you on that day.

But they didn't get into questions about like, why was the response time so long?

How was this possibly able to happen?

Did you ask that?

No, not really.

I mean they didn't push him on that.

And then he, you know, said, which I mean, just think about how unimpressive this is, is that he basically just went, oh, there should be a full investigation.

You know, there should be a full investigation onto that from the top all the way down to the bottom.

Nice thing to say.

And you're like, okay.

Hey, this would be awesome.

Could we get the prime minister of Israel on the line?

Because maybe he could do something about this.

They're like, oh, no, that's you.

So like, why?

It's almost two years later.

What are you talking about, dude?

Have the investigation.

What, you can't conduct an investigation while you're destroying the Gaza Strip?

What does it have to wait till after that?

You got time to do a podcast.

Did they ask him about the protests?

I don't think so.

But, you know, I don't.

Because there were protests before October 7th.

Yes, there's also been protests this week.

By the way, massive protests in Tel Aviv.

I think from, I read a few articles about it in that the estimates seem to be 500,000 people were out in the streets protesting the war.

And thank God for that, man.

And thank God for just like...

and oh, by the way, the protests were led,

or I don't know, like let, but the featured acts at the protest were the families of hostages and surviving hostages.

They're the ones leading the charge, being like, stop doing this, you know?

Because like, if you think about it, I mean, could you imagine, you know, if you try to put yourself in the place of like having someone you really love is a hostage, like Hamas has taken them hostage and they're trapped in one of these tunnels.

And then you hear the plan is to cut off all food to the area.

And you're like, yo, like, what?

How is that going to help your loved one who's a hostage there?

Like, how is it just bombing the place?

Like, what if you hit them?

Like, what, you know what I mean?

Like, it's like, obviously, if your main goal was hostage retrieval, this is not at all the way you would go about doing that.

And,

you know, it's like, this was a point, by the way, that Daryl Cooper was making on Tucker Carlson's podcast, which got him a whole lot in a whole lot of trouble and got him a whole lot of pushback on.

But I think the essence of his point was about starvation blockades.

And then like saying, like, you know, you put a starvation blockade on Nazi Germany or something like that.

You go, okay, because the Nazis are your enemies and they're real bad guys.

So you want to do that.

But like, do you think Adolf Hitler's not eating?

Do you think any of his soldiers aren't eating?

I mean, that's going to be first priority, right?

Nazi Party members and the Nazi military are going to care.

Who is maybe not going to get food?

Probably the most disenfranchised people in that society right i mean you're already in a concentration camp yeah yeah well and then well some of them were i guess at that point and some of them weren't but isn't it amazing that that's controversial to say that it's this is not a nuanced discussion yeah that that's not a factor yeah that's right and and look they they were using um which was a you know a horrible picture, but they had the image of one of those

there was like some pictures that had come out of one of the remaining hostages there who did look like, you know, in bad shape, look like close to starvation, you know?

And then the Israel supporters were using this as like their propaganda.

Like, look how horrible Hamas is.

Look what they're doing to them.

And you're like, yeah, but this did come after three months of zero food being allowed into Gaza.

And so like, I don't know.

To me, it seems like it probably doesn't take a genius to go like,

you know,

Hamas is going to be fed.

Like, they're not going to suffer from these hunger strikes.

And in fact, a lot of the pro-Israel people were telling, and the Israeli government themselves, they were making claims, a lot of them unsubstantiated, but making claims that like Hamas is stealing all of the food.

We let aid in previously, but Hamas stole it all.

Then they mark it up and charge more money for it to the people of Gaza.

And you're like, okay,

but then what does a food blockade do?

I mean, you already said it's not taking food away from Hamas, right?

So who's the war against?

It's the civilian population.

And of course, you'd imagine, like just like under Nazi Germany, you'd imagine Jews and gypsies and other, they're going to get the worst treatment in a totally centralized war economy.

The state is going to decide who eats and who doesn't eat.

Who do you think they're going to pick?

You know, it's like

this stuff just leads to like unbelievable amounts of human suffering.

And it's...

Again, how does this end?

Well, I mean, you know, there's, I guess there's some competing plans.

Like, Donald Trump said kind of flippantly a few months back that America was going to take over the Gaza Strip and turn it into a big, beautiful property.

It sounded like he was talking shit.

Yeah, me too.

It was really good.

That was what I thought, too.

He said it right beside Netanyahu, and it just seemed bizarre that he was doing that.

Very strange.

But then Netanyahu said much more recently, just the other, it was a week or two ago, said that Israel is going to take over the Gaza Strip.

Which that sounds much more likely to me.

You know, I think, so I think this is the weird dynamic kind of here is that i think it's not they're not like so stupid that i'm aware of something that like these guys aren't aware of right like they know that they've lost control of the media they look they know they've lost control of the narrative and they know that they've lost control of the youth in america and that at some point you know those 70 year olds watching cable news are going to age out and die and the people in charge are going to be this generation that has a totally different view of israel than previous generations.

They know that, but then

the question becomes like, what do you do with that information?

And so I think that there is a part of Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet and the Israeli government who are looking at this and going, all right,

so

we got like 10 more years of this relationship.

You know, we got like 10 more years of where the U.S.

has our back and we can do whatever we want.

And so you could see where the conclusion from that might be, we got to go for it now.

Like if you really do have this greater Israel project, well, right now, under the Trump administration, this is your moment.

He has already vowed he's going to do whatever to support Israel.

He is totally on your side.

You have this administration.

There's every last member of this administration supports Israel.

So now's the time.

Annex Gaza and the West Bank.

And, you know, parts of Syria, too, and whatever else they want to do.

So I think they might be going for it, you know?

And I don't know.

We'll see.

When they started bombing Iran, that's what I thought.

I was like, oh, boy.

Well, they tried.

They tried to suck Trump into a regime change war there, you know, and it didn't, it didn't work.

But the whole thing, you know, the whole, the whole 12-day war, first of all, this thing is not over.

We're kind of

like the

fundamentals of the conflict are all still there.

And in fact, I think there was just a few days ago, like there were a couple like Israeli spokesmen who were already signaling like, we may have to go, you know, see about this again.

Netanyahu himself said when him and Trump met in the White House and was a really fascinating moment, which, you know, I'm not trying to make too much of, but it was pretty hilarious in a way, like a little microcosm where they asked Donald Trump at one point, they go, so is that it with Iran?

Like, are we, is the war continuing or is it over?

And he goes, well, you know, I really, I don't really want to see it continue, but maybe that's a better question for BB.

And you're like, what?

Wait, what?

He's, oh, I'm sorry.

You're like, well, my boss is right here.

So so you might as well ask him, which is not exactly true.

You know, I'm not saying that.

I know Jeffrey Sachs, who I love, who is a real expert, not like me or Douglas Murray, but a real expert, who is, you know, I don't agree with him on everything, but his foreign policy is very good.

But he said, and I think he was saying it kind of tongue-in-cheek, but he said, I regard Netanyahu as the worst U.S.

president of my lifetime, which is a very funny line.

And I get what he's saying.

Well, how long has he been running Israel?

Well, he came, he was prime minister first in 1996, and then he's had a few stints where he was out, but he's been in and out.

So they have whole time.

They have a completely different setup, obviously.

Yeah.

You can keep coming back.

You can keep coming back.

Yeah.

And so he was, but he's the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history at this point.

And but I will say that there are people, you know, I know people go down, you know, rabbit holes on Twitter and stuff like that.

And I don't, I do think Jeffree Sachs is, well, I think he was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek when he said it, but I do think he's overstating his hand.

It's not that Israel runs America.

If Netanyahu ran America, I can promise you we would have had a regime change war in Iran.

We would not have stopped where Donald Trump stopped if Netanyahu was actually in control of the U.S.

military instead of just having significant influence over it.

So like, I do think there's, I mean, I've just read enough about Netanyahu, the Lakudniks, the neocons.

This is the regime change war that they've wanted.

This is their seventh.

This is seven out of seven to get Iran.

So this is what they want.

And if you actually even look at the war itself, it was like they, when Trump, it was before and after Trump dropped the bunker busters on their nuclear sites, Israel just started bombing regime targets.

They weren't just bombing their nuclear sites.

They were trying to overthrow the regime.

And in fact, they like made calls to these Iranian generals and threatened their families and basically said, we're going to kill your families unless you guys flee right now.

It just didn't work.

They weren't going to do that.

And then once that didn't work, they were kind of like, and then Iran gave Trump an out.

You know, they responded with this nonsense, you know, the same thing they did after

Trump killed Soleimani, where they fire these rockets, they give us advance warning, they make sure we move everyone out of the way

because they know, they know they don't want to kill an American there because then it's full-scale war.

But, like, if they hadn't,

you know, it's so funny because, like, we put all of this in the mullah's hands.

And if they had just decided, which every military analyst concludes they can touch Americans in the region, they didn't.

Had they, this would have been the, and I think that was the goal.

I think that was Netanyahu's goal of it, was to provoke that response that would have led to a regime change war.

And it didn't work.

And Trump, you know, to his credit, his instinct is to de-escalate these things when he can, but also to Trump's,

you know, fault, never should have gotten in the thing to begin with.

It was all, the whole Iranian nuclear threat is as much bullshit as the Iraqi nuclear threat.

I mean, yeah, it is true that they have a civilian nuclear program that Iraq didn't have.

And it is, I know, I saw when Mike Baker was on, who I love, I love Mike Baker, but I think he's wrong about all this stuff.

But when he was, when you, even you had said to him at one point where you were like, yeah, but like, you know, the counter argument to that is that this is like a latent nuclear deterrent.

is the idea, not that they're developing a nuclear weapon.

And Mike was basically like, yeah, but they're up to 60%,

you know?

And that's on its way to 90%.

But the thing is, why weren't they at 90%?

They didn't have to stop at 60%.

They mastered the fuel cycle and they figured out all this technology a long time ago.

They could have enriched up to weapons grade.

Why did they stop at 60%?

And why did they then enter negotiations with the United States of America about the level to which they were enriching uranium?

Because it's that.

It's a latent nuclear deterrent.

It's a bargaining chip.

They were down at like 3% to 5% or something under the JCPOA until Trump tore it up, until Trump backed out of it.

And then under the rules of the JCPOA, because they're still in it with Europe, and we'll see where that goes now.

But they were allowed to up the enrichment once America pulled out.

And so they exercised that option in the agreement.

And

the idea that they were...

You know, look, there was the annual threat assessment had come out just a few months before the war, and Tulsi Gabbard signed her name at the bottom of it and then testified before Congress.

And it's clear as day.

She turned around and acted like people were misrepresenting it, but they weren't.

It was clear as day.

Anyone can read it for themselves.

She said Iran has not made the political decision to pursue a nuclear weapon yet, let alone

have achieved it or gotten one.

And when Donald Trump was asked about that, remember they said your own director of national intelligence says that they're not developing a weapon.

And he goes, well, I disagree.

Have you ever seen the, I'm sure you have, the compilation of Netanyahu over the years saying how close Iran is to get a nuclear weapon?

Yeah, it's great.

Have you seen there's other compilations of him too where he's just guaranteeing like all his guarantees?

Like there's one of him in like, I think it's the year before I was born, if I'm right.

It's 1982.

And he didn't go by Benjamin Netanyahu back then.

He went by whatever his more, you know, European-sounded name was.

How many changed names?

Well, because they all, they all

80s, I would guess.

It's got to be in the 80s.

It was Netanyahu by the 90s.

But in the 80s, they were still calling him whatever.

I can't remember his previous name.

Why did he change the name?

Well, they all kind of, you know, because the whole thing, Joe, is that they're all, you know, Israel was a European, you know, construct.

They were made by a bunch of Europeans who came over and created Israel.

But then they have to claim that they're the true Semitic people.

Is it true that genetic testing is outlawed there?

I believe that is true.

I believe that's true.

I mean, double-check me on that, but I believe it's true.

That you need permission from the government to go get DNA tests and stuff.

Because I think

this is the problem with the term Semitic.

Because if these are European Jewish people, this is not the exact same genetics.

That's right.

Genetic tests are heavily regulated.

Heavily here, you can fucking get it at Walgreens.

That's right.

Yeah.

And focused on medical and reproductive purposes with broad support for carrier screening and pre-implantation diagnosis.

What does that mean?

Pre-implantation diagnosis?

This creates a system where health-related genetic testing is robust and often publicly funded, but direct-to-consumer tests for ancestry or paternity are highly restricted.

Now, why would you highly restrict anything like that?

If you want to just if a human being has bodily autonomy and you want to find find out where your ancestors came from why wouldn't that be

what do you think you know well look like the only the only real answer to this is that they

you know the the israel project the zionist project always relied on this kind of claim and which is a crazy claim in a way it's like a like a supernatural property right claim right that you know like that you have this which you know if you go there was that great documentary on the the settlers in the west bank and they'll all tell you to a man or to a woman, they focus a lot on that godmother of the settlers woman, but they'll all explain to you, like in very plain English with a Hebrew accent, that God promised them all this land.

And so like God promised us all this land.

So like, I don't know who these other people are here, but God didn't promise it to them.

He promised it to us.

And so, you know, that's, but like, that's kind of the claim that we're the original people of this land.

And so we have like a right to come back here.

Now, forget for a second the fact that nobody conceives of property rights in this fashion in any other way.

Like, nobody thinks I could come up with a DNA test and be like, oh, I've got some Ukrainian in here.

All right.

Well, I'm going to march into Ukraine, knock on a door, and be like, This is actually my house because I was here a thousand years ago.

Like, that's kind of crazy.

Well, block evidence.

That's not really a good argument.

Well, let's just say, hypothetically, if say the truth is that

the Jews of 2,000 years ago weren't actually kicked out out of the land, but in fact they were forced to convert.

And that actually those people who you're saying were never promised the land are actually the people who were promised the land and then converted to Islam.

And in fact, you're just some European who came in here way after that.

That I'm just saying, hypothetically, if that was the case, that would be something that maybe you would want to control the information of.

Isn't that wild?

Well, you know.

I don't want this whole show to be such a Debbie Downer.

Well, no, okay.

I'll end up.

I will make a real positive,

a real positive case about this, okay?

Because I do actually, I'm not a pessimist, and I want to make sure I'm not just a downer.

You know, I saw too late.

Well, yeah, okay.

Well, I'm trying.

Okay, well, I've done whatever.

I've done 17 episodes being a downer.

So let me don't, you know, I'll give you a few minutes.

So

I hung out with Ron Paul a little bit, as I was telling you.

I was at his party the other day.

And,

you know, it's like

every time I see him,

he asks me the same question.

And it's always like the feeling like this like fatherly, like, there's a right answer to this and a wrong answer to this.

But he always goes, he goes, so Dave, are you more optimistic or pessimistic?

And I always say optimistic because I know that's the correct.

And every time he asks me this, and I say optimistic, he just nods his head.

He's like, like, it's just like correct.

That's the correct answer.

You're not allowed to be pessimistic.

You got to be optimistic.

And I am, I am.

Optimism sees a a better world ahead and offers potential solutions and at least a mindset of a potential solution.

The problem with pessimism is there's no way out other than complete anarchy and destruction.

That's right.

And you don't, you kind of, I think this, I mean, I feel this way particularly.

I think when you have kids, this becomes like a more focused.

I think that

the way I look at it is because I have kids, I don't have an option to be pessimistic.

I don't have an option to be black pilled or just feel bad about it.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no, I got little kids.

They're going to inherit this world.

I got to do everything I can to, you know, like I, I may have said this before to you, but like the example I think of is like, if you like, let's say you're, you're in your house with your family and like you've, you've got like, let's say a gun or two in the house.

And then you look outside and you see like there's like 10 guys with guns charging the house and it's just you.

And you just have your one or two guns.

There's 10 guys with guns charging the house and your family is in the house.

Like you don't have a right, as like the man of your house, you don't have a right to sit there and go, oh man, there's 10 of them and only one of me.

I mean, I just think the future looks bleak.

You know, it's like, what?

I don't care.

I don't know.

You know your house better than them, right?

What do you got there?

You got some gasoline in your shed?

Okay, shoot the shed.

That blows up a few of them.

Get your family into the attic.

Get them into the basement.

You got to try.

You still have a fighting shot here.

So you don't have a right to just sit there and feel bad about, yeah, the odds are against you.

But you know, crazy things have happened.

I will say, we

you think it's that bad?

10 guys to one

no i'm just saying even in a scenario

in your in your analogy it's like you're fucked sure but even in that no i don't know that you're necessarily i don't know that you're necessarily fucked i mean hey listen dude depends if you're john wick well yeah but also you have there's a big advantage to a house that you know that other people don't know I would assume by the time people with guns come to your house, they have a pretty good understanding of

the house is built like

it's not the perfect analogy.

I'm not saying it's going to work out well.

I'm saying in that moment, still go out you still go out trying okay now i think we have a way better situation than that i think that good the i think that

well look i think that tyranny has always relied on propaganda and that we are running an experiment for like the first time where they're flying with no net they don't have a propaganda apparatus anymore like at all well they certainly don't have control yeah over narratives anymore donald trump can't even control what tucker Carlson is going to say.

You know what I mean?

You can't even count on your most influential right-wing voice in America to go, like, there was never anything like this before.

There was never, even just in recent times, there was never something George W.

Bush could have done where you'd be like, tonight on Fox News, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are going to tear him apart.

That didn't exist.

There was never anything Obama could have done where Rachel Matta was going to tear him apart over that.

Like we have that for the first time now.

People are waking up in a way to this stuff that's like never happened before.

And I think that gives us like enormous potential for positive things to happen in the future.

And the other thing that's happening is that like economically speaking,

our system is being pushed to a point where eventually they're going to have to call it quits on all of this.

Like we just can't keep going up.

Like the debt, I think it was, I forget the exact recent numbers, but it's something like it's over $1.2 trillion a year just on interest on the debt.

Interest on the debt is like overtaking the entire budget.

And at a certain point there, someone's going to have to call it quits and be like, we just got to start reigning this thing back in.

If they lose all of their popular support and all of their economic ability to keep running up the debt and keep the printing machines going, then I think there's going to have to be a huge adjustment made there.

And I do think like...

Well, this was Elon's argument.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Which is why he wanted this massive economic reform.

And this is why he wanted to do an audit, audit on everything.

And you saw how that worked out.

Well, okay, but he was right.

Yeah, but that was still also like the first attempt at that.

Yes.

And he was right about that stuff.

So, okay, so

yes, that didn't work.

You know, Doge was a failure in terms of actually getting cuts done right now, but it was a huge success in terms of like putting a spotlight on this issue and putting it into the national consciousness in a way that it's never been before.

And so now it's like, okay, well, what will the second attempt?

What will the third attempt look like?

And how, you know, we have a new world now where Donald Trump won the presidency in no small part by coming on this show, by going on Andrew Schultz's show and Theo Vaughan's show and, you know, like all these different, and now

we're coming up on the next presidential election, like for the foreseeable future.

In order to win the presidency, they kind of know they got to come here and to all of our shows and present something that might get you and your audience, like, okay,

he's coming with something here.

This is such a new dynamic that I just think like the potential for good is off the charts.

And so, like, yeah, in the short term, things are still the same.

Government policy is still what it is, and the people don't really have much control over that.

But I think like long term, I'm very bullish on the ability of people to really wake up and understand what's going on here.

Apparently, there's some real talk about

changing the status of marijuana.

Yeah, yeah, I was reading about that a couple weeks ago, right?

But there's something that just came out yesterday, too, where

they think that Trump might declassify it and take it from a Schedule I to a Schedule III, which would change everything.

There was an article about the economics of it because they were talking about these businesses, how they're taxed, and how

federally they're still operating like criminals.

That's how it's

viewed by the federal government views it as a Schedule I substance.

You're, you know, like, and if you get arrested for it, you're fucked.

Where they're going to change the,

right now they have a limited ability to bank.

There's

interest rates are all fucked up.

Everything's fucked up.

And just that alone would make a huge economic impact.

I mean, if you want to do something, first of all, you would kill a lot of the interest or excuse me, a lot of the financial interest that the cartels have in it.

If all of a sudden it becomes legal here, like the cartels probably,

they're probably going to be involved still a little bit because they're involved in it already.

They're involved in avocados.

I had Ed Calderon on yesterday.

He was explaining how they're involved in illegal fuel, the human trafficking is a giant business.

They have many, many horrible interests.

But you would, at the very least, you would empower American businesses to do it legally and normally and

have organic marijuana, air quotes, because some of the stuff they're finding in California that the cartel's running is they're using these terrible pesticides and herbicides that are insanely toxic and illegal everywhere else.

You can't use them on American crops, but yet they're using them on this marijuana because that's being sold at like dispensaries and stuff?

No, that's being sold.

It's 90% of all the marijuana that's sold in all the places where marijuana is illegal.

Right.

The cartels are growing.

And they're growing it in California in national forests because it's a misdemeanor to get caught illegally growing marijuana in California.

There's a great book, John Norris, Hidden War, that's all about that.

He's a game warden who had to find out about this the hard way and then became part of a tactical unit where they would go in and fight the cartels in the woods.

How about that?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's fucking crazy.

So if he does that, that'll be another good thing.

The other good thing that he's been doing is getting these

people together that have been in conflict forever and making them shake hands and having conversations, peace talks.

Like, how many different people have, how many different countries have had representatives agree to peace talks because of Trump?

I was reading this breakdown of all the different countries.

Not intervened, but he with the India-Pakistan thing.

I know he got all of them on the phone, And he's, you know, I obviously just had Putin over here.

But yeah, I think there was a few

examples of that, which is great.

It's great.

Yeah.

So there's, it's not all negative.

Well, it's not, not only is it great, right?

But it's, isn't it so insane that it dude, that it took this long?

Like, just with the Putin and Donald Trump.

I always say, and I know this is kind of like a hippie-ish thing to say, but I think the world needs a little bit more of that.

But like, okay, it's kind of crazy that war still exists.

It's kind of crazy that we're at the, you know, like, you'd almost feel like if you, if you saw a society and you're like, what, you've gotten to the point where like you have the written language and two-story buildings, you'd be like, you probably should have figured out something other than war at this point.

But yet, you know, you're talking about a society with the internet and skyscrapers and heart surgery and like all these things.

And like you still, but still, and we have international governance of some sort.

You know, you have the United Nations and things like this.

And you're telling me like there is international law and like the first rule isn't that like if any countries are ever going to go to war, you guys have to get in a room together.

Like before we go to war, we need to know that we've exhausted every alternative option that there is, especially when it's the United States and Russia.

You know what I mean?

And yet it took all this time for the first time for the two leaders of them to sit down and meet.

It's crazy.

But on the positive side, they did just sit down and meet.

That's a lot better than not sitting down and meeting.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And that's what's unique about him, is that he wants these things to happen.

He truly doesn't want us to be going to war.

I mean, he ran on that, and I think it's true.

And despite what happened in Iran, like, it was at least limited, and it seems like there was some communication that made it limited.

You know.

Well, there's no question having a president whose default setting was to desire an off-ramp made a huge difference there.

Because, you know, if you had had, like, if this was a a Dick Cheney, George W.

Bush type of presidency, they could have found any excuse.

You know what I mean?

Like, once you get to that point, they could have found any reason to keep it going.

Yeah, but at least that kind of made sense to me because there were these right-wing people.

Whereas

seeing the left-wing calling for war and saying that Ukraine was going to win this thing, like,

God damn, what happened?

How did it flip?

How did it flip that if you're if you want a conclusion to the war that you're supporting putin how did how did that flip how did it flip where people aren't trying to exhaust every possible way to stop the end of the killing of all these people that are conscripted and sent to the front lines to die when they don't want to be there yeah yeah no that's right it's crazy well also even the like um the you know where people were like bragging about like the 12-day war you know which again is not clear that it's over yet.

You don't really get to decide that until years later.

You know, they didn't call it World War I until World War II came around, and then you go, oh, that was the first World War.

What does it say?

Six wars in six months.

I've settled six wars in six months, one of them a possible nuclear disaster, Trump wrote in True Social on August 18th before meeting with European leaders and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky at the White House, where he made a similar claim.

I know exactly what I'm doing, and I don't need the advice of people who have been working on all these conflicts for years and were never able to do a thing to stop them.

So click on that where it says six wars in six months.

It seems to be a link.

It's a link to Truth's post.

Oh, it's just his post?

What are the six wars?

Throw that into Grok.

I can show you that article.

I was just interested in what he is.

What wars is he claiming to have ended?

Breakthroughs.

Because I know he has had these people get together.

How many wars?

Israel and Iran.

Okay.

Well, you don't get to count that one, do you?

Pakistan and India.

Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

June the two

go back.

In June, the two countries signed a peace agreement in Washington aimed at ending decades of conflict.

Trump said it would help increase trade between them and the U.S.

What's the next one?

Thailand and Cambodia.

On 26th of July, Trump posted on True Social, I am calling the acting Prime Minister of Thailand right now to likewise request a ceasefire and end to the war, which is currently raging.

A couple days later, the two countries agreed to an immediate and unconditional ceasefire after less than a week of fighting.

At the border, Malaysia held the peace talks, but President Trump threatened to stop separate negotiations on reducing U.S.

tariffs unless Thailand and Cambodia stopped fighting.

Let's look at this one.

Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The leaders of both countries said Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in securing a peace deal, which was announced at the White House on 8th of August.

I think he gets good credit here.

The overall office signing ceremony may have pushed the parties to peace,

says Mr.

O'Hanlon.

In March, the two governments had said they were ready to end their nearly 40-year conflict centered on the status of the

Nagorno Karabakh.

Your guess is as good as mine.

I'll let you figure that one out.

Most recent serious outbreak of fighting was in September 2023 when Azerbaijan seized the enclave where many ethnic Armenians lived.

Egypt and Ethiopia.

Here's another one.

After 12 years of disagreement, Egypt's foreign minister said on the 29th of June that talks with Ethiopia had ground to a halt.

Trump said, if I was Egypt, I'd want...

the water in the Nile.

He promised that the U.S.

was going to resolve the issue very quickly.

Egypt welcomed Trump's words, but Ethiopian officials say they risked inflaming tensions.

No formal deal has been reached.

Okay.

Serbia and Kosovo.

Trump claimed to have prevented an outbreak of hostilities between them, saying Serbia, Kosovo was going to go at it, going to be a big war.

I said, you go at it.

There's no trade with the United States.

They said, well, maybe we won't go at it.

The way he talks is so ridiculous.

You just know that is a Trump quote.

The two countries signed an economic normalization agreement in the Oval Office with the president in 2020, but they were not at war at the time.

So it doesn't say that that's been resolved.

Is that it?

Yep.

Okay.

Yeah, it seems like some of them haven't totally been resolved.

Well, I think.

But at least he's trying.

The Armenian one, I think, is the one he should get the most credit for because they did sign that peace deal in the White House, and both the leaders did say, like, yeah, Donald Trump really played a huge role in this.

With the other things, you kind of never know.

But this is a new and unique thing that this guy, I mean, he's only been in office for eight months, and that he's like actively pursuing all these international conflicts, trying to get these people together and stop it.

No, that stuff is all very good.

So good.

Yeah.

Now, I don't give him any credit for the, I mean, let me just try to say this.

I do give him credit, like I said before, for taking the off-ramp when he had it on the 12-day war.

But the thing about that one is that he just never needed to launch the thing to begin with.

And I don't know, you know, I'm not even sure he did launch it, to be honest.

It's kind of unclear how that happened, because they were in negotiations with the Iranians, and then Israel attacked them.

And then after Israel attacked them, Trump said, basically, we were all in on it together, which might be true.

But I do know that Tucker Carlson said, I'm not revealing anything privately, he said this on the record.

He knows Witkoff, who was the guy who was point manning the negotiations.

And he was like, it is absolutely not true that these were like fake negotiations designed to trick the Iranians so Israel could get their shot off.

That's just not true.

Now, I don't know exactly what's right there.

So then you have to cover for your friend because your friend threw the first punch.

Well, I know that Trump was upset because he let it out, that he was upset that after he called for the ceasefire, Israel just started bombing the crap out of him.

And he was like, what are you guys doing, man?

But then he turns around and still supports everything they're doing.

Well, they have conversations, they have meetings.

Yeah.

Fuck.

The thing about it is, though, is that going forward, I think this is like the more important thing is that going forward, this problem is not off the table.

You know, they're saying that Trump's going to say he completely destroyed, you know, Iran's nuclear program, but that's not clear at all.

And everything the Iranians are saying is that they are going to continue having a civilian nuclear program.

And they have the technology and the know-how, like they can rebuild this thing.

And so then the question is, like, if they do, what do we want to do next about that?

And what's great is that this at least was a little war that didn't result in like a major catastrophe.

Still a catastrophe for the people who died in it.

And there were Iranians and Israelis who died in this war.

It wasn't like it was bloodless.

But at least it maybe gives us some time to go like for the next go-around to just be like, yeah, we don't need to go to war over a civilian nuclear program.

First off, we shouldn't go to war over a nuclear weapons program.

Like, what is that?

Like,

Truman was the president when the Soviet Unions developed nuclear weapons.

Soviet Unions, Joseph Stalin developed nuclear weapons.

He didn't attack them over that.

He didn't say we're going to launch a war of aggression because you're developing the same weapons we have.

And I think it was Johnson was president when Mao Zedong, the most evil man who's ever lived, developed nuclear weapons.

There was never like a war of aggression launched over that.

Everyone's so convinced we got to do it over Iran.

But anyway, they weren't even pursuing nuclear weapons.

Hopefully, the next go-around, the American people have even had it even more and are like, yeah, we're just not supporting this anymore.

Do you remember when Obama had a press conference and talked about, we gave a speech, talked about that we were going to go to war with Syria?

Mm-hmm.

Do you remember that?

Announced it.

And everybody was like, what the fuck are you talking about?

That's right.

And then they said,

forget it.

And, you know, it was a huge part of that was it was like the first war, the internet shut down.

You know, where it was like, and it was, it was, uh, well, I think Steve Bannon had a lot to do with that.

He was over at Breitbart at the time, and they really got on the like, we are not supporting this war.

But then there were like, it was all over Twitter where there were the active duty military guys, and they would dress up in, like, they would put on the military uniform, but cover their face, and then just like hold a sign that's like, I will not fight for al-Qaeda in Syria.

Because those guys knew what that was.

This is, by the way, the whole thing, this is where they tried to smear Tulsi Gabbard.

This is when Barry Weiss was on here and said she's an Assad toady and then didn't know what Tody meant or whatever.

But like they try to, it's almost like they try to tell you this story.

Like, what would that even mean?

What are they saying?

Are they, What's the claim?

Tulsi Gabbard is secretly loyal to a Syrian dentist who became the dictator of the country.

Like, that doesn't make any sense, does it?

Why would Tulsi Gabbard have been so against that war?

Well, the reason she was against that war is because she actually knew the first thing about it.

Unlike all these other people, unlike Barry Weiss, who didn't even know what the word toady meant as she was calling her that.

Tulsi Gabbard, for whatever you might say about her, and I've got some criticisms of her myself,

but she knows who the Shiites are and who the Sunnis are, and she knows which camp is on which side and what, and she knew that on the other side of Bashar al-Assad in this civil war, which was started by Barack Obama, on the other side of this was ISIS and al-Qaeda.

And her whole thing was she signed up, she enlisted to go fight al-Qaeda because they hit us on 9-11.

And so she's always furious.

Actually, Tulsi supports the war on terrorism too much, I would argue.

She just objected to the war for terrorism she was like i just don't think we should fight wars for al-qaeda i believe we ought to fight them against al-qaeda and that was her that was her beef with that one she was absolutely right about it and by the way al-qaeda's in charge of the country now yeah whoops whoops that'll work that'll work out well i'm sure it works everywhere every time we overthrow a country it works out great it always

libya did a good we did a real good job there well did you see well this was the crazy thing for the people who were advocating regime change in the 12-day war in iran they would always did you see there were like uh there were Israeli government officials who were posting pictures of the son of the Shah,

like the implication being that he would go

come back into power.

Because what was he in exile in England?

So now the war on terrorism started with spreading democracy and in its end phase, we're spreading

what's the word I'm looking for?

A monarchy, hereditary monarchy or something.

It's like, yeah, but also, by the way, what do you think the odds are that if we overthrew the mullahs, that the son of the Shah just walks back into power and all the warring factions just go, yeah, no, that's, you know, the U.S.

propped him up in 1953.

So then, yeah, okay, he's the rightful ruler.

Like, I don't think so, dude.

Well, listen, man, I've had enough getting bummed out.

Well, I'm not trying to violate it.

There's so much going on.

That's the problem with being alive today is you're paying attention to so many different conflicts.

Yeah, but dude, all over the world.

Yeah, but like in the 20th century, you know, like there were two world wars and there was all this horrible shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then like, but today, like, dude, we live in like the most amazing time, dude.

I mean, there's literally...

Bring it home nice.

Well, listen, man, I mean this.

The most sincere thing I've ever said in my life.

My son was born with a congenital heart defect that would have killed him in almost any other time period unless I was alive today or in the last 10 years.

30 years ago, ago, I would have lost my son.

And today he's fine.

He's great, cutest little boy in the world you've ever seen.

And so like, I don't know.

I'd still rather live today than any other time just for that alone.

No doubt.

And we have an ability to like reach people and trade with each other and communicate with each other.

We're really close to like...

curing all types of diseases and ailments and extending life and extending, you know, people are educated and connected in a way that they've never been before.

You know, we got all these problems, but we've had lots of problems before.

I just think we're aware of the problems now.

That's right.

And which is the first step to recognizing them and then going after them and trying to resolve them.

That'll be our kids' generation.

Me and you will just be recognizing them, and then we'll leave it to them to solve it.

You're going to have some fun this weekend at the mothership?

It's my favorite weekend of every year.

Well, it's always awesome to have you there.

Wait, hold on, comedy-wise.

Maybe I do something with the wife and kids.

That guy is in trouble for that.

Your podcast, tell everybody how to get it.

It's everywhere.

Part of the problem is my political podcast, Legion of Skanks, is the knucklehead comedy podcast, but it's also very fun.

So go check that out.

And then, yeah,

public mothership shows are all sold out next year.

Patrick the Mothership.

Yes.

All right.

Thanks, brother.

You're the man.

You're the man.

Bye, everybody.