Dave Smith and Joe Rogan dissect the 2024 U.S. election, exposing media gaslighting—Trump’s victory despite baseless comparisons to dictators, a 26% Puerto Rican shift, and ignored fraud claims like 2008’s. They critique selective prosecution (e.g., Trump’s legal battles vs. unchallenged lies like Iraq WMDs) and push for non-interventionist policies while urging Trump to free Ross Ulbricht and investigate political violence. The episode also contrasts psychedelic therapy’s proven trauma benefits—criminalized in 1970 to suppress anti-war dissent—with modern wars like Ukraine, where Rogan and Smith argue U.S. intervention could’ve been avoided. Ultimately, the discussion reveals systemic hypocrisy, cultural regression, and missed opportunities for healing and non-interventionist leadership. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I was just sitting in front of YouTube watching professional pool on TV going, what the fuck is going on?
So, turns out, voting works.
It's real.
As much as we fucking thought they had it rigged, as much as we thought there were shenanigans and bullshit and it's just a puppet show and there's no way anybody could buck the system, turns out voting is still real.
Wasn't it, it was crazy because it was like for weeks, especially in the close of the campaign, it was one of those things where it felt like, It almost felt like 2008 when Obama was running against McCain, and it was just so obvious Obama was running away with this.
Everything you could see and observe, his crowd sizes, the enthusiasm, the culture, it was all behind him.
But at that time, the polls were reflecting what you saw everywhere.
Obama's up big.
He's about to...
John McCain's not gonna win after eight years of George W. Bush.
The country doesn't want another war hawk.
They want this, you know, articulate young peace guy.
And the media gaslit us to the absolute limits of their ability.
The absolute limits.
Joy Reid spent the entire time she was discussing Trump the other day comparing him to Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, talking about a right-wing authoritarian regime as if he had never been president for four years and didn't behave like any of those things.
As if the economy wasn't booming, as if people weren't making more money, as if we weren't involved in any new conflicts overseas, no new wars.
When I talked to him about what it was like to actually govern for the first time ever, It's a daunting task.
He was telling me about the thousands and thousands of appointments he had to make.
Thousands of people he had to pick.
He didn't know who any of these people were.
He had to trust people that he knew and he didn't know who was telling them the truth and who was just trying to get the system moving along in the exact same direction.
And he got bogged down with a lot of that shit.
It took forever for them to weed it out.
Which is the crazy thing about being president.
It's the hardest job on the planet and you start it without any knowledge of it.
And I mean, a little bit of that's on him, because there were some people who he probably should have known.
What I didn't like in his answer about that to you is that then he kind of pivoted to talking about how John Bolton was actually really good to have there, because he's terrifying.
Terrifying and he's crazy.
Oh, this guy wants war with everyone.
But the problem is that, like, that's not how it went down.
John Bolton ruined the North Korea deal.
It's not like it was successful and the North Koreans were so scared of John Bolton that they wanted to talk to Donald Trump.
They were at the meeting.
They were willing to talk to Donald Trump.
And then John Bolton came in and they were like, these guys are psychopaths.
Look, there's obviously a huge series of these things where the Democrat establishment and the corporate media, but I repeat myself, it's death by a thousand self-inflicted wounds.
Yes, yes.
It is almost as if, it's like their whole thing relies on lies.
It's just all lies.
And they are just, they have their eyes shut and their fingers in their ears, and they're going, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We're just pretending reality is the thing we want it to be.
Exactly.
They don't want to get slowed down by this force that is objective reality.
And so all of it, you know, whether it's Joe Biden's sharp as a tack, Kamala Harris is joy.
You know, Donald Trump is Hitler.
Tony Hinchcliffe was a man at an event who made some comments.
Did you see?
Really, that wasn't a comedian who was ribbing everybody.
So they're talking about the comedian who made jokes about Puerto Rico while Tony's on stage on the other screen.
So Tony's on stage at the mothership while this guy's talking about what Tony did on CNN. And they're going over like the Puerto Rican population and how they voted.
But I'm saying like, if this was happening in 2016, if in 2016 Trump came to Manhattan to give a speech, there would have been like thousands of protesters.
First of all, back then they didn't know what he was going to do and what he did economically.
Chamath has the best way of explaining it.
He said, it was the right message, it was the wrong messenger.
But if you look at the actual actions, were they good for the economy, were they good for the United States?
They were.
But it's Donald Trump as the messenger was so polarized and the people lost what's really going on just based on who this guy is who has, just like Tony Hinchcliffe is an insult comic, Donald Trump's entire career is, you're fired.
You're a loser.
Rosie O'Donnell's a loser.
Like, that's his whole shtick.
And you expect him to course-correct once he gets into office?
No, that's not who he is.
You elected that guy.
But along with that, now you get RFK Jr., you get Tulsi Gabbard, you get Elon Musk, and you get J.D. Vance.
You get brilliant people who aren't ideologically captured, two of them who used to be Democrats, one of them that probably knows more about environmental polluting and about the problems with pharmaceutical drug companies and health and the consequences of All sorts of pesticides and herbicides, ingredients in your food that should be banned and are banned in other countries.
You got that guy in there now.
And we got a real chance to make real change.
This is like one of the first times ever where there's a real chance to make real tangible change that's going to be for the good of everybody.
And he's got to unite people.
He's got to not attack the left, not attack everybody.
Which is excellent and totally brilliant and so right about so many of the major issues.
Yes.
And...
Look, I mean, Donald Trump now, he has a real mandate, which is like, this is kind of what's crazy.
This isn't 2016 where, you know, he lost by several million votes in the popular vote, but won the counties that were important and just by the skin of his teeth got in.
This is like, he's, I mean, the last I looked, he was up by over five million in the popular vote.
You know, and obviously improve the economy, deal with inflation, things like that.
But he's got a mandate to do that right now, and he's got some great people around him.
Listen, I was rooting for him as hard as anyone except Tony Hinchcliffe last night.
But I will say now, I think now till January 20th, the pressure should be on Trump for To do better on the appointments than he did last time.
He's got a lot of better people around him than he ever had in 2016 or 2020, but he was floating out Mike Pompeo as the Secretary of Defense, and he did have Mike Pompeo speak at his final campaign event.
To be clear, Mike Pompeo is Liz Cheney's pick for defense secretary.
It's Hillary Clinton's pick for defense secretary.
And so much of this will be lost if he puts that guy in there.
He needs to keep all of the Lindsey Grahams and the Mike Pompeo's and all of these guys away from his administration.
He was attacking Donald Trump for probably not being an awful war hawk or something like that, and Donald Trump said something about how he used to call him and ask for money when he was running for campaign, and then he just gave his phone number out.
I typically wouldn't go after someone for that, but when you're a warhawk, all is fair.
But he's got to keep those people away from him, man.
And that really was his failure in his first term.
And look, I do understand him saying, I don't know, he was an outsider.
He had never lived in Washington, D.C. He didn't know all these people, but he's had a lot of time.
This is eight years later, and he's got a great core of people around him, and those are the people to take advice from.
Well, they're on it.
They're on it right now.
Talk to Rand Paul.
Rand Paul will tell you who to put in those positions.
Talk to Thomas Massey.
I just saw he floated at Thomas Massey for, I can't remember what position it was.
That's great.
Put those guys in there.
These are the America first guys, okay?
And it's not Mike Pompeo.
It's not the war machine, dude.
And also, You know, look, his rhetoric was so great on Ukraine through the election.
And when he had the courage to just say, like, no, I want the dying to stop.
That was one of the best moments of the entire campaign.
But his rhetoric on Israel has been very bad.
And the other thing that you can't get around is that, like, listen, you can love Israel all you want to, and you can pledge to help defend them or whatever.
But, no, I'm okay.
But, uh...
But Netanyahu is John McCain.
That's who he is.
I mean, he's Mike Pompeo.
He's Liz Cheney or Nikki Haley.
He's the guy who came over and testified in 2002 before a congressional hearing and advocated that we overthrow Saddam Hussein and also advocated that we go have a regime change war in Iran, which he still wants to this day.
He advocated we had the regime change in Libya, in Syria.
I mean, he's John McCain.
That's not America first.
That's not, you know what I mean?
That's not this, we're not fighting stupid wars anymore.
So, love Israel all you want to, but we're not with Bibi Netanyahu.
But I do think another huge component of why Trump's got such an opportunity right now is because you see it where, like I was saying, the protesters aren't there anymore.
There's a whole lot of really interesting reasons, I think, for why that is.
And I was getting in an argument on Twitter the other day with Michael Tracy, who I do like and respect very much.
But I was basically saying that I think this is going to be a death blow for the corporate media if Donald Trump wins again.
And this is almost the best thing about him winning again.
And he was saying, which is a reasonable argument, but I disagree with him.
But he was saying, well, no, Dave.
I mean, look, last time he was in for four years, that was the best thing that ever happened to CNN and MSNBC. And they got a big ratings boost when he was in.
Well, the thing is that so much of that ratings boost was completely driven by the Russiagate nonsense.
And what they were telling you at the time was that they had the biggest scandal in the history of the United States of America.
Like, you can't overstate how big that story is.
If it was true.
Yeah, right.
If it wasn't all completely made up.
But they're reporting that a hostile foreign power has overturned our election and the sitting president of the United States of America is in on it.
He is involved in a conspiracy with a hostile foreign government.
That's the biggest scandal in the history of America.
And for anybody who wasn't aware at the time of how fake and evil the entire system is, They were like, well, look, they got a special prosecutor on the president.
I mean, there must be something there.
And hey, I just heard the chair of the House Intelligence Committee tell me he's seen the evidence and that he's guilty of this.
And you had the former CIA director, John Brennan, saying that Trump and his family are going to be hauled off in handcuffs on television once Mueller's investigation concludes.
And so for the regular person, especially for the regular person who really hated Donald Trump, it was pretty easy to get sucked into that.
But after that was exposed for being a giant fake, and then the big one is COVID. I just don't think they can recover.
Well, it started as opposition research, and then the intelligence agencies jumped on that and decided, knowing that it was all bullshit, decided to use it to frame the sitting president of the United States of America of treason.
Listen, a few episodes back, one time we went real deep into this, but that claim, this is just a fact.
They lied on the FISA court application to spy on Carter Page, who was a low-level advisor for Donald Trump, just an excuse to spy on Trump's campaign, and they lied to the FISA court.
They omitted the fact that That the CIA had already told them that Carter Page wasn't a spy and that he was working with them and that he was one of their good guys.
As the FBI went to the CIA and they were like, we have information that says that the Russians approached Carter Page.
And the CIA said, yeah, we know.
He came and told us immediately because he's working with us.
And then what they put on the FISA application is they said, we believe that the Russians approached him and the CIA confirmed that was true.
Well, he became the guy who wasn't just funding a lot of politicians and being like a famous guy, and he became the guy who was calling all of them out and threatening to drain the swamp.
I don't think Amber Rose knows what Trump's real policies are.
You know what I'm saying?
I give a pass to some celebrities that come out.
But then when you have some of them that are making videos, all the Avengers get together, like, hey, are you trying to get me to hate superhero movies?
You trying to show me your real fucking weird personalities and get me to hate superhero movies?
Why are you doing that?
If I was running the Avengers, I'd be like, hey, guys, cut this shit.
Do you think one fucking person is going to vote for Kamala Harris because they saw that Iron Man wants them to vote for Kamala Harris?
My wife is Italian, and all my in-laws, her whole family is Italian.
And it is like, when you have a dinner, it's just everyone yells.
Like everything's a yell like I'll literally hurt her my brother-in-law who I love great guy super smart But he will if he's agreeing with you in a conversation and you were like in the next room You would be like is they about to fight?
Brother-in-law?
What's going on in there?
No, he's just agreeing with what I'm saying, but he's screaming it at me, you know?
But it is a thing where they're very thick-skinned.
Some of the best boxers of all time came out of Puerto Rico.
It's one fucking island.
You got Felix Trinidad, you got Gomez, Wilfredo Gomez.
You got incredible fighters came out of this one place.
You have a fucking tough population, man.
I mean, I'm sure there was a few people that were pissed off at that joke, but the reality is, this is one of the things that helped Tony, is that joke was based about Tony's concern for the environment.
Tony is obsessed with recycling.
He's like, you know, recycling's bullshit.
You know, it all goes in a landfill.
I'm going to put it in the blue bin.
It all goes in the landfill.
So Tony was obsessed with the Pacific Garbage Patch, and then he got obsessed with Puerto Rico because they don't have any room.
So their landfills are just overflowing with garbage.
I remember in real time when I was watching it, I was like, well, I mean, Tony's not going to be able to do Tony in this setup, so I wonder what he's going to do.
And then as it starts, you're like, oh, he's just going to do Tony.
I never met her in any of the shows in LA. I mean, she could have conceivably have bought a ticket to Madison Square Garden, but she never posted about it.
Before people try to act like this is some PC, overly sensitive nonsense, which is what it is.
I've been to Kill Tony shows.
I'm from the Bronx.
I don't give a shit about crude humor.
Then what are you doing?
Don't pretend that your support for Trump is a joke.
Own it.
You're doing a set to support him.
That's a choice.
Listen, you guys have a real problem with someone disagreeing with you.
And you want to, in any way, shape, or form that's possible, turn that person into a demon.
You never want to have someone who has an opposing perspective that should be considered or may be countered with better information, which is what we're all supposed to be doing.
Ideally, with people of good character and who go into arguments with good faith, you should be able to respectfully disagree and have conversations with things This is like everybody who thinks one way is bad.
Everybody who thinks this way is good.
We'll do whatever we can to destroy the people that are that way.
Obama.
There was a guy.
unidentified
There was a guy at the Trump rally that said that Puerto Rico is a pile of garbage.
And again, it's like, you know, Look, to the point you were making before, right, about the Russia collusion hoax and no one getting in trouble for it, if you were to look at, say, the weapons of mass destruction lie that got us into war in Iraq, killed a million people, cost trillions of dollars, and tens of thousands of our bravest young men blowing their brains out, you know, just an unmitigated disaster.
And none of the people who sold that lost their jobs or, you know, they're not, like, I don't know what they should be doing.
Maybe, like, picking up garbage by the side of the road, apologizing to every car that passes them.
Now, if you want to just be that person that says he's a convicted felon and just repeat it over and over again, understand that now you're changing what the law means because you don't like a guy, and that can be used on you.
This is what happens in dictatorships.
This is what happens when communism takes over a country and you get a military dictatorship.
They just throw the laws at you.
And they're doing it right in front of your face, and you're okay repeating it.
He's a convicted felon.
He's a convicted felon.
He's a convicted felon for 34 misdemeanors, which are all the same thing.
One of the best things that I do on this show is when I have Josh Dubin on, who used to work with the Innocence Project and now does things on his own, where they're trying to find people that have been unfairly prosecuted by bad judges and by bad prosecutors and get them out of fucking jail.
Oh, can I just say real quick, dude, because if I don't, I want to make sure I say this while we're here, but to President-elect Donald Trump, dude, he came to the Libertarian Party convention this year, and he promised us, and a whole bunch of people, myself included, like supported him for this, and he did carry, I think, the Libertarian vote.
And he promised us he was going to free Ross Ulbricht on day one.
And like, if you're listening, Mr. President, if this gets to you, please, please come through on that promise, man.
This kid has done over a decade in jail already.
He was guilty of creating a website.
You know, it was like a dark...
Web type thing, and I guess some people sold drugs on it and stuff, but he's done 10 years, over 10 years.
There's been dozens and dozens of these FBI, what they call, sting operations, which are really entrapment since 9-11, where they get, oh, we thwarted another terrorist attack.
But no, they didn't thwart a terrorist attack.
They planned a terrorist attack and then thwarted it.
It was never going to happen.
By the way, a little note on that.
Every single time, I always find this fascinating.
Every time the FBI wants to do one of these terrorist entrapment things, which again, they've done dozens and dozens of since 9-11, every time when they approach young Muslim guys who are on radical websites or something like that, every time, they never go up there and they say, hey, how do you feel about America being free and prosperous?
Or how do you feel about the fact that we don't have Sharia law here or anything?
They never do that.
They always go, how do you feel about American foreign policy?
Look at all these innocent Muslims that we're killing over there in that part of the world.
Doesn't that make you angry?
Doesn't that make you want to do something about it?
You see, like when the FBI wants to do entrapment, all of a sudden they know what motivates terrorism.
They're not like, oh, you hate us for our freedom or the dumb shit that they say to the American public.
They know exactly how to entrap these people.
They go, how do you feel about all these Palestinian babies getting killed right now?
You know, that's America's money and weapons that are doing it.
You can never give that back to him, but just let him go free.
And it's also just such a situation where you just...
And obviously, I know his mother, so I'm kind of personally invested in him.
But it's like, this kid is no threat.
It's that nobody thinks, like, oh, if we let him out, you know, he's some type of violent criminal who might do another violent thing or something like that.
Like, that's just not gonna happen.
You could just end the nightmare that this sweet woman is going through, and him, of course, too.
Well, okay, so the thing about Snowden, right, is that, and now the Julian Assange case has kind of been taken off the table, even though I guess technically he could still pardon him, but that takes real political capital.
Well, I'm just saying that, like, Snowden pissed off a lot of very powerful people.
The NSA are furious about him.
The CIA, they don't like him.
And they do not want to set the precedent that you can release the fact that we're doing a bunch of illegal shit that we are lying to the American people about, and then you can go tell them that we are, in fact, doing the thing that we lied and said we weren't doing.
They don't like that.
There's going to be powerful forces that will oppose you.
Now, if he were to pardon Snowden, that would be a real signal that he is willing to take on the deep state.
He's willing to take on the real powerful entrenched interests.
Now, again, I'm not claiming to- it's obviously the right thing to do, morally speaking, but I'm- You got to have a really smart strategy if you're actually going to do this.
You know, I remember one time during the Ron Paul presidential campaign, I think it was in 2012, and someone asked him, you know, like a question about like, when you're in there and you're president, are you going to tell the CIA like, hey, you, you guys are done and you're this and you're this?
And he went, well, I might say it a little bit nicer than that.
I am trying to abolish the CIA, but let's be cool here.
So if Edward Snowden, if he really did expose things that were illegal, that were not supposed to be done, and the fear of bringing him back is that the people that did the illegal things want to continue doing illegal things and don't want to have any repercussions for doing illegal things.
That seems like a crazy thing to support, even for them to defend it.
Sounds insane.
They should want internal accountability.
They should want to make sure that no one colors outside the lines, no one does anything without congressional approval, all the stuff you're supposed to do when you're doing certain things.
But the problem is now with the FDA and FISA and all these different laws that have been passed that allow surveillance to be done warrantless.
It's kind of a moot point, almost, at this point.
Back then, he exposed that they could listen to every call, they have data centers.
We all know that now.
Everything's still functioning, but we all know that now.
The guy that exposed all that, leave him alone.
You guys were, you're doing illegal shit and now it's kind of legal and we still should be outraged, but now you can kind of just do it?
Well, and also, and one of the things that was so disappointing about Trump not pardoning Julian Assange and Snowden in his first term, and again, a lot of that is because It's like when he told you, why didn't he release the JFK files?
Well, because he was listening to Liz Cheney's pick for defense secretary, Mike Pompeo.
And people convinced him not to do it.
But it's like, at a certain point, you're like, okay, first of all, The spying that Snowden exposed was weaponized against you.
They spied on you.
So I would think you have some stake in being like, yeah, that should be exposed and should be abolished.
What do you think about that thing I sent you today that compares the number of people that voted in 2020 versus the number of people that voted in 2024 and in 2016?
But this was like the 90s that all this was going on, and something happened, and they stopped fixing.
So my point is, who knows what that post guy's doing?
Like, you could just throw some stuff in the garbage.
If you know you're in a Republican county, throw some stuff in the garbage.
If somebody...
If you're a cab driver from some other country and you're over in America and someone says, I'm going to give you a bag of ballots, I'm going to put them in your trunk and you're going to go take them to this place.
You're like, okay.
You're going to give me $500?
Okay, I'll drop off these ballots.
When you're doing low-level scams in small counties where you have corrupt people that are working the voting machines, how many Republicans are paying attention?
Democrats are paying attention to the corrupt Republicans.
There's always been election fraud.
To pretend that we lie about the very fine people, he said there were very fine people on both sides, Obama's lying about that in front of the whole world.
If every word that comes out of your mouth is a lie, that you can't tell me that I'm not allowed to suspect.
And also, you know, It's like if what Rachel Maddow says is real, right?
Like if you're telling me your worldview is essentially that Adolf Hitler is running for president, it looks like it's a coin flip if he's going to win.
That's what they were telling us, that it was 50-50.
Turns out it wasn't.
But Adolf Hitler's running.
This is the end of democracy.
It's on the ballot.
We'll never have elections again if this guy wins.
So if that's true, then why wouldn't somebody who's got a bunch of ballots for him cheat?
I would do that.
If Adolf Hitler was about to win, I'd cheat to make sure he won.
If Adolf Hitler's about to win, you should do anything you can.
So you're gonna tell me on one hand, Adolf Hitler's about to take over America, and on the other hand, but no one would ever cheat?
You can't have someone that's running that didn't go through a primary.
You have to at least go through and respect the process of allowing us to pick who our representative is.
No one would have picked her.
When she was trying to run for president, Tulsi Gabbard nuked her out of orbit, and that was it for her.
She dropped off a cliff and that was done, and that's how it should have been.
Joe Biden picked her as his vice president.
Get away from that.
You should always have a primary.
Like, if you really believe in the democratic process and if you really believe in the democratic party, you should want the best representative of your party as voted for by the population.
They had full, complete control of the narrative because they owned the media.
And they owned the media for so long.
They had the run of the roost for so long that they got cocky.
And they didn't pay attention to the game as it was evolving.
They're like a UFC 1 fighter that takes time out of the gym, then steps into 2024 and tries to compete against guys of today.
Like, you miss the game.
The game is way past where you were.
And you guys are still doing goofy shit, like taking people out of context and not knowing that people are going to make YouTube clips showing what he actually said versus you.
And it's going to undermine your credibility even more.
Obama was my favorite president.
He was the best spokesman, other than Clinton, of all time.
Now I think he's a liar.
I look at that thing of him saying, he said there's very fine people on both sides.
That's not what he said.
He said, I'm not talking about the KKK and white supremacists.
And then there was a sneaky thing that they used to do.
They would ask him, will you disavow white supremacy?
Will you disavow white supremacy?
Like, what are you—first of all, that's like saying to someone, like, will you— Anything, any crime that you would never do, like, will you disavow murder?
Like, of course I'll disavow murder.
Oh, well, all of a sudden you're implicated at something where you have to disavow murder.
Like, you're connected somehow or another to murder now.
Dave Smith, under any circumstances, do you disavow murder?
But to your point, which I think is a really good one, and I think I love the analogy for people who are MMA fans, it really is like, it's like someone coming into MMA in 2024 and being like, I'm a jiu-jitsu specialist, I've never trained wrestling or striking.
And you're like, Okay, that's not going to work anymore.
I know that worked in 1993, but that's not going to work.
They have not adapted to the new world that we're living in now.
And you saw there was a lot of evidence of this.
These things that used to work now come with a heavy price.
So one of the things that...
Politicians used to do in general was that they would give the same stump speech everywhere they go.
Message discipline is what it's called.
You always stay on message.
And this is the idea is that you're never going to get your message out there unless you say the same thing over and over again to everyone.
But now...
We have the internet.
And you have these compilations of Kamala Harris saying she's from a middle class family like 75 times in a row.
And you just look like a psychopath.
You're like, oh, what are you?
So now there's like a cost to playing the game in the old way.
But they don't adjust.
And Trump, whether even intentionally or not, was always just kind of like, oh, well, I just speak off the cuff.
So I don't do that.
I mean, he's got themes that he hits a lot, like all of us kind of do, but he doesn't do that.
And he did, and Donald Trump, one of the brilliant things, and man, I mean, I can't believe I haven't just asked you this already about this, but One of the really brilliant things that Donald Trump did, which obviously, look, RFK did it, and Vivek Ramaswamy, I think both, like, they recognize, like, look, we're in a new landscape here.
And there are these shows on the internet that have much bigger audiences than these traditional shows.
Oh, and by the way, I get to go long, and I can really give an in-depth, you know, like, point on every single topic.
And, dude, I mean, Trump coming on here and her refusing to, this is...
Dude, you kind of put Donald Trump in the White House.
If you ask Vivek a question about that, if you ask J.D. Vance a question about that, I bet if they were accused, they would be able to rattle off all those numbers and statistics.
Well, the thing is, one of the things that was really interesting, and that was one of the most interesting moments of your show with him, was that you weren't asking it the way CNN would ask it.
You weren't badgering him.
After having a very honest, good faith conversation for a while, you were asking in good faith, like, what's the evidence?
Look, I think the truth is that his lawyers made a lot of outlandish claims, none of which they could prove in court.
Um, essentially what he has in terms of the argument, I think is kind of what we have, what we just looked at.
We're like, sure does look strange.
Sure does seem weird to me that 80 million plus people voted for Joe Biden and the regime was so working against him in every other way.
Like, you know, Glenn Greenwald, who's, you know, I think just one of the absolute, like, most brilliant people out there.
Where he goes, he's like, like, I don't really have any evidence that they stole the election from him, but they clearly rigged the thing against him.
And then just kind of goes through, like, all the censorship, the Hunter Biden story, the media.
And so in that environment, it's very easy...
You know, the analogy that I use, I think I may have said this before to you, but it's almost like if there's a guy who's like cheating on his wife all the time, and then one day she's like, last Friday you didn't answer your phone when you were out, I know you were cheating on me.
And she's wrong, he wasn't cheating that Friday.
She's kind of right, even though she's wrong.
You know what I mean?
She might get the detail wrong, but her overall suspicion is, in fact, correct.
I think there was a lot of that with Trump supporters, where it's just like, listen, man, you framed him for treason for three years of his presidency, then you shut down the economy, and that was totally Partially, at least, to ruin his economy for his re-election year.
Then you were totally supporting the riots that were destroying.
You were just causing chaos.
Then you overhauled the way we do votes and you killed his big October surprise story by censoring it off all the social media sites.
And now you're telling me the most unimpressive senator in the history of America, Joe Biden, got 80-plus million votes.
Defamation case brought by two former Georgia election workers marks a new low point for the man once lauded as America's mayor, whose advocacy of Donald Trump's false election claims led to criminal charges and hefty legal bills.
Accuses him of participating in a wide-range conspiracy to thwart the will of Georgia's voters who had selected Democrat Joe Biden over a Republican incumbent.
He faces 13 charges, including violation of Georgia's anti-racketeering law, the federal version of which was one of his favorite tools as a prosecutor in the 1980s.
Repeated false claims about her and her mother saying that they were engaged in changing votes.
I personally cannot repair my reputation at the moment because your client is still lying on me and ruining my reputation further, she told Giuliani's lawyer.
She sobbed.
She testified that her life was turned upside down by the accusations, though they were quickly debunked by state officials.
Her attorneys displayed a few of the graphic messages accusing her of treason and more that she received after Giuliani in December of 2020 falsely accused workers at State Farm Arena in Atlanta of tampering with ballots.
Yeah, you've got to have real evidence if you want to say something like that.
The whole war on tobacco, which I guess vapes aren't tobacco, but the whole crackdown on smoking and everything that kind of happened in my lifetime is...
It's really, really wild when you take into account all the stuff that Bobby Kennedy talks about.
Where you're like, yeah, but we're like the most unhealthy country.
And you took away, like, yeah, a lot more people used to smoke cigarettes, and cigarettes aren't good for you, sure, but we were a healthier country when people were smoking cigarettes.
unidentified
We need regulation, my little Billy and his strawberry baby.
No, if you want flavor, you have to have that and a stick of gum.
If you live in California, you can get your cinnamon gum and you can chew your cinnamon gum with your fucking no flavor zin and you can have a nice little experience, almost like you have a cinnamon zin.
But you're not allowed to have a cinnamon zin because you're too much of a fucking baby.
And you go throughout this whole country, and it's like, yeah, people don't smoke anymore.
That was effective.
I mean, not like the way they used to.
You know, there's not people smoking cigarettes like that.
But every single town I go to in this entire country has an Arby's and a Burger King and a KFC. Like, they have every single town, even when they have nothing else, they have every single type of fast food.
And you look around and, like, everybody's obese, everyone's unhealthy.
I mean, when you rattle off, you know, when Bobby Kennedy gave that speech when he threw his support behind Donald Trump, I was watching that with my wife and my mother-in-law, and they both like have tears in their eyes as he's just reading down the stats of how unhealthy we are as a country.
It's just, you know, man, one thing, and I'm really, really glad that Bobby ran for president this year, and I'm really glad he ended up throwing his support behind Trump, and hopefully he gets a really important position in there.
But the one thing that I almost felt like You couldn't argue with him that even if you don't blame the same culprits that he blames, which is what they love to say, it's like, How is everyone not talking about this?
How is this not an issue that every single presidential candidate has to address?
77% of young Americans between the age of 17 and 24 are not considered fit for military service.
Unbelievable, dude.
Eleven health, well, mental health, that's to say substance abuse, education, social and behavior factors, criminal records, U.S. military is facing a recruitment crisis due to these challenges, as well as a lack of interest among young people.
So it's only 11% is like physically so unhealthy that they can't do it.
That's obesity, actually.
So there's probably a bunch of other conditions other than obesity.
I can't remember what town I was in, but Nicole Shanahan, who I think she's great, and it was really, really interesting.
I had her on my podcast twice, just really, really smart lady who really knows a lot about this stuff.
She sent me this video that she posted, and so I'm in a hotel room, And I was there with my buddy Rob Bernstein, who's a co-host of my podcast, Part of the Problem.
Very, very funny comedian.
Very smart guy.
And so, literally, I was texting with him.
And we were like on our way to go to the show.
So I was like, hey, meet in the lobby in 10 minutes.
And then I got an Uber taking us to the comedy club.
I can't remember where we were.
And Nicole Shanahan sends me this video.
It was like a video that she put out on Twitter.
I didn't know what it was going to be.
You know, she just sent me it and I just click on it and play it.
And it was just about like what her family went through with their kids, you know, like like illnesses and stuff.
And it's like, And it's the most touching video ever.
It's so powerful that I sit down and I'm just watching this whole thing and I started crying watching it.
Kids with health issues really cuts close to the bone for me.
But as I'm sitting there just like literally sobbing watching this video, it's so emotional.
And then literally it just dawns on me in the middle of it that I'm supposed to meet my comedian friend in one minute in the lobby to go to this show.
And I'm just sitting here like, what am I doing?
I'm sitting in my hotel room crying about these kids.
But anyway, the point of it is is that like, Hey, look, I don't know enough about this stuff.
You know, I know about stuff that I know about.
I don't I don't know enough about this.
I really should educate myself more on it.
But if your argument is that like that Bobby and Nicole are blaming the wrong culprits, you know, it's not the vaccines and it's not the Wi-Fi and it's not like, OK, I don't know.
But like, what is it then?
And why are you not interested in this?
Why are they the only ones who are talking about this?
You're telling me we lead the world in chronic illness and that's not something that comes up in any presidential election ever, other than when Bobby Kennedy runs for president?
And explain, I'm sorry, I'm letting you know that I'm somewhat ignorant on this subject.
So just like, explain it to me like I'm really, really stupid.
Talk slowly.
Okay, I can understand where if you're talking about very mild autism, okay, like what we used to call Asperger's, Which I guess they don't call it that anymore.
But if you're talking about mild autism and you want to convince me that that went undiagnosed in the past, I can totally believe that.
There is no way that moderate or severe autism went undiagnosed.
It may have not been correctly diagnosed, but you did not not notice that.
And it reminds me kind of of, you remember when they were trying to push the COVID passports, the vaccine passports, and the logic would just fall apart on its face.
You're like, wait a minute.
You're telling me the vaccine is 100% effective.
You're saying if you take the vaccine, you can't get COVID or spread COVID. And then you're also telling me that the people who are vaccinated in this restaurant need to be protected from the unvaccinated entering this restaurant.
That doesn't make sense.
I'm sorry, I'm not a genius, but I can figure out the logic and that is flawed, okay?
And in the same sense though, it's like, if you're arguing that all these vaccines are safe and Bobby Kennedy's a kook, then why do they need the liability protection?
There was also another thing that they did that didn't make any sense because it went against the science.
And they were saying that if you don't get vaccinated, it's going to cause variants.
And that's not what they say.
What people who study viruses and vaccines say is you do not vaccinate during a pandemic with a non-sterilizing vaccine.
So meaning if a vaccine, if you give it to someone and they can still transmit and they can still catch the disease, you're going to cause these variants.
And there is a scientific paper that I posted like the early into the pandemic that said this and people got so upset at me.
I'm like, tell me what this says.
There's virologists that would go on these podcasts that, you know, they'd have to be the people that are willing to step outside the line and say these things.
They're saying this is not what you ever do during a pandemic.
because you're going to create variances.
And that's exactly what happened.
And doctors started blaming the variants on the unvaccinated.
But if you question those doctors, explain to me how that works.
There's no fucking answer.
It's just a narrative.
Vaccine, good.
Anything else, bad.
Ivermectin, you're crazy.
Killing people.
Death, blood on your hands.
It was all a psyop.
And it was super effective.
And it was a way for them to make ungodly amounts of money.
And that's what it was.
And the quicker we accept that and realize that we're vulnerable to that kind of shit, if we still keep following along the same kind of lines that we're on today, as soon as we realize that, the better off we all are.
And I think I got here in a kind of similar way to you, which is, I think, a story for, like, millions of Americans, is that I never even thought about this issue.
I never...
Dove into reading a lot about any vaccine until there was this COVID vaccine.
And then I really dove into it and read a lot about it and found out that you guys were lying through your fucking teeth about the whole goddamn thing.
And that the whole clinical trials were totally rigged and totally fake.
And that you were able to get everybody in the scientific institutions of our government to all repeat these lies.
And then everybody in the corporate media and the political class to repeat these lies.
And then when Bobby Kennedy came along and said, well, you know how that was all bullshit?
There's a lot of bullshit with these other vaccines.
And one of the interesting things about that was, uh, which is, that was a great, still probably one of my all-time favorite JRE episodes, uh, but it was when, you know, when she was, they were, uh, arguing that, like, they don't have a bias.
And then I think Tim was like, yeah, but you ban people for dead naming or misgendering.
And she was like, well, yeah, that's hateful.
And you're like, yeah, but that's a bias.
That right there is a bias.
And it's one thing when you're just talking about whether we're calling somebody a boy or a girl.
But then you realize, oh, you have the exact same thing when it actually comes to very important medical information about a product that Americans are being forced to take.
They're being forced if they want to fly, they're being forced if they want to work in a place that has more than 100 people, if the workplace mandates it, forced if they want to go to a university.
And they were implementing, in a totally unconstitutional way, they were going to, through OSHA, Through workplace safety, like just the most blatantly unconstitutional proposal, that Joe Biden was going to make it the law of the land that every single business with 100 people or more had to have everybody vaccinated.
And it was only because of Donald Trump's Supreme Court that that got struck down.
And that's something that people who are paying attention remember.
And so, like, OK, you can demonize Donald Trump all you want to.
But how many millions of Americans were not fired from their job, did not lose their livelihood because they refused or were not vaccine injured for a vaccine that they never needed to take?
I mean, how many people fell into the category that like me and you and so many other people fell into where we got the thing and beat it real quickly before we ever got vaccinated and just didn't need it.
And then we just didn't make any sense.
Even even with the information we had about the vaccine back then, which we have a lot more now, but even back Back then, I mean, you looked CNN's doctor right in the eyes, and he goes, well, are you going to get the vaccine?
You go, no, I just beat COVID. Why would I need to?
But they pitched me this, like, months after that.
I think it was, if I'm not wrong, I think the topic was about whether Joe Biden should drop out of the race or not.
And they pitched me that it would be a two-on-two debate against two people.
I don't remember who were saying he should stay in, and it was going to be me and Chris Cuomo against them.
And I told them, I was like, no, no, I will not be on his side.
And like, I don't, you know, I'm kind of over, you know, I... Yeah.
We had our thing.
I gave him a beating.
I think he deserved it.
But I'm just like, listen, man, I'll team up with a left-winger on something I agree with.
I'll team up with a right-winger on something I agree with.
I'll team up with a moderate on something I agree with.
But no, not the corporate media guy who was the number one show at CNN. I'm not on their side.
Even if I'm on their side on this issue, I'm against them.
And I know that this has probably been a theme of every single time I'm on this show over the last 10 years or whatever it's been.
But I just...
And maybe it's a problem.
I hate them so much.
And I really think they deserve it.
And it's not just that they lie about everything.
It's like they lie about everything.
And then they have the nerve to morally judge us.
Like, if you just watch even just the last few weeks of the Trump election, they're not in the business of reporting the news.
They're totally just in the business of making you feel like you're a bad person if you don't fall in line with the regime.
And, you know, it's like all of us know, right?
Everybody knows this.
America has this giant war machine, right?
Like, we're just always at war.
We're the most war-hungry country in the world.
Even if we're taking a little bit of a break from a war, we'll fight two more proxy wars while we do that.
America looks back at the 90s, Bill Clinton as the time of peace and prosperity.
We call it peace because we only fought a war in, like, Serbia and had a blockade around Iraq and were, like, bombing the crap out of Iraq with a few other military interventions in there, too.
You know, the UN estimated that Bill Clinton's sanction and bombing regime of Iraq Okay, everyone just thinks of George H.W. Bush's war and W's war, but Bill Clinton was bombing Iraq his whole, and he had a full blockade around the country.
The UN estimated that 500,000 children died of starvation or malnutrition due to the blockade.
Now, I've heard people argue, by the way, that that number is exaggerated.
Maybe it wasn't 500,000, maybe it was only 100,000.
So that's the time that we consider peace.
When we were just starving 100,000 children to death in Iraq, and you, everybody in the corporate media, are in the business, every single one of those wars, you've sold them.
Everyone, my entire life, the media has sold those wars.
And you're going to morally look down on me?
You're going to judge me?
Motherfucker, you're in the business of baby murder.
Get the Get the fuck out of here.
You're looking down judging an American because maybe I'm going to vote for Donald Trump or maybe I dare to question the results of the last election.
Fuck you, dude.
And it was a challenge debating him because they were playing the clips, you know, even before they played that clip that Summed him because he had said he didn't say that and then he clearly did.
But they were just playing the clips of the way they were talking to people during COVID and the pandemic of the unvaccinated and it's you, Mr. Vaccine Skeptic.
You're the reason why this...
And man, it was getting me angry.
I was just like, all right, I got to control this here because this is too...
Not only that, he wants to say long COVID. Like, hey buddy, let me tell you something.
If you got a novel medication injected into your body more than once, you probably had to do it twice.
You probably at least had to get one booster.
And you have some problem, and you're saying this long-term problem is COVID, long COVID. Are you sure?
Are you sure?
Or maybe that medicine they injected into your body, you got vaccine injured.
You don't want to say that though, because you still want some sort of a job in corporate media so you have to toe the line.
You should be very concerned that this novel Before, never mass injected into people.
Who knows how many different people are going to have different results from some medication, some terrible fucking weird way their biology interacts with this medication.
He really should have just thrown in the white towel.
He would have done much better for himself.
Saying I was wrong.
Listen, I was at CNN, and I kind of just took for granted that they have the best experts, and so I trusted their experts, and now I realize they were wrong.
If he had said that, that would have been very hard.
I still would have been harsh on him, but it would have been a different conversation and a different dynamic.
What he did was he refused to admit that, and then, and this is really what got me, is that then he started kind of like attacking my motives.
Like he was like, oh yeah, he goes, I know, you know, this is probably good for your podcast numbers and stuff, but like as if I'm, I don't really believe what I'm saying.
To never consider like what I said about them being in the baby murder business because that's, you know, that's pretty rough to think of yourself as that.
And, you know, I remember this one time I watched a documentary on abortion and it was like a very pro-choice.
I was kind of interested in the subject before I had kids.
But I remember I was watching.
It had a very pro-choice bent.
And there was this abortionist, this abortion doctor, this lady.
And she was like, listen.
I've been an abortion doctor for 30 years.
And let me just tell you something.
There is no moral issue with having an abortion.
It's a thing in a Petri dish.
It's not a human being.
And I remember just watching it and being like, well, yeah, but you better feel that way.
Because if you even start to entertain the possibility, what does that make you?
So there's this very powerful social incentive for them to like dig their heels in and not admit that like, oh, the United States of America, the greatest country in the history of the world with more freedom and prosperity and cultivated the greatest economy and the greatest music and literature and just everything.
Everything that is this superpower.
Oh, we presided over the bankruptcy, destruction, and the devolving into nothing more than a military-industrial complex, big bank, big pharmaceutical, most corrupt nation on earth.
And we didn't cover that.
We watched all of that happen, and not only did we not cover it, we demonized anybody who covered it.
That's very difficult to ever confront.
And it's always just so much easier for human beings to just go, nope, the problem is misinformation and Russia and racism.
I'm like, Kurt, I'm trying to enjoy this experience of being at the comedy club and Donald Trump's about the way you're hitting me with conspiracy after conspiracy after conspiracy.
I don't believe that's true unless you've distorted what we're talking about to that child.
And said that someone's gonna tell that child what they can and can't do with their body, like in some sort of a weird dystopian way.
Like, what did you say to that kid?
Do you explain what an abortion is?
Do you explain how they came about, they were in your body, and then they came out, now they're a little tiny person that's like super vulnerable?
And you want to protect their right to kill a little tiny person inside of them.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to do it, and I'm not a woman.
I should not have the choice of what a woman can and can't do with her body.
I would not want a man, if I was a woman, to tell me what the fuck I can do with my body.
And I think if somehow, and I think it's all connected to religion, and if somehow or another someone decided, and this would be a very minor comparison and not nearly as consequential, but if someone decided that men could no longer get hysterectomies, or excuse me, vasectomies, If men can no longer get vasectomies because of religious reasons, because of some Sharia law or whatever the fuck it is, you cannot do that.
Men would be outraged.
If women were forcing it on men, we have low population, you cannot get vasectomies.
We'd be like, what the fuck is going on?
And you've, I want to go to Oklahoma to get a vasectomy because it's legal there.
And then they track you.
Were you in Oklahoma to get a vasectomy?
Like, what?
What the fuck?
Men would be outraged.
That's happening with abortion.
There's talk of doing that with abortion, where in states where it's illegal, women are not going to be allowed to travel in the United States of America, where you're supposed to have freedom, to go to a place where you're going to have a legal medical procedure.
It's legal in that place.
Whether you agree with it or not, if you're going to believe in states' rights, and you don't think that this is a giant prison where you have to show your ID when you go into Arizona, You should be able to drive around, right?
That's the whole idea of one country.
You can go wherever the fuck you want to go.
It's not your business.
There's other things to worry about.
Worry about these fucking gangs that are taking over apartment buildings.
Worry about the border.
Worry about South Central Los Angeles.
Worry about the South Side of Chicago and fucking gang violence that kills more people than half the wars we have going on right now.
Worry about important shit.
Don't worry about what a guy wants to do to get a vasectomy or, way worse, a woman wants to do if she's trying to get an abortion.
I think that if the argument is that abortion is killing a baby, which, like, there is an argument to, then I can understand the argument being, hey, that shouldn't be allowed.
Now, obviously, I do think there are situations where it's pretty indefensible to force a woman to carry a baby to terms.
You know, but could risk her life.
There's a lot of rape incest also health major health issues I mean there are these situations where you find out that there is some you know congenital disease where this this kid is not gonna make it to three years old and I would never dream of like Forcing you know what I mean that decision on parents rather than allowing them to make it there is also Different the vast majority of abortions are not that you know and the vast majority of abortions are Essentially people
just don't want to have kids right now and that's a little bit that's much tougher to defend than those cases But I will say that one of the things that always like I find striking to me is that because I'm like a radical libertarian and It's very interesting to me that like progressive Democrats all Of a sudden become radical libertarians, but only on one issue.
And they make literally exactly...
I'm not even saying the libertarian position is to be pro-choice.
There's libertarians who are pro-life and libertarians who are pro-choice.
But the argument they make is a libertarian one.
They're like, listen, I own my body.
It's my body.
It's my choice.
The government shouldn't be involved in healthcare decisions.
We believe in freedom.
This is a basic fundamental right.
It's a very libertarian argument.
And it's just interesting that you only apply that to this one area.
There's not any other area where any progressive Democrat would ever go, you know, if we're talking about Obamacare, we're talking about regulation, we're talking about taxes, they would never go, hey, listen, this is my money, this is my body, this is my choice, the government shouldn't be involved in that.
You know what I'm saying?
And there is something that's very bizarre about that.
Where it's kind of like maybe with immigration they kind of try to use that an argument to like oh You shouldn't stop a person freedom of movement type thing.
They don't really do that anymore because it's been such a disaster But it's just very strange to me that it's like oh what you all become radical libertarians like only when it comes to this thing Which is kind of murdering a baby, but then there's the other side that says we're gonna leave it up the states Okay, well if you get rid of Roe v Wade and you leave it up the states and If someone wants to go to another state where it is legal and you want to stop them from doing that or prosecute them when they come back to your state...
It also just seems, I don't even know what the word, it seems like incoherent or unsustainable to say that if you're not breaking a law in the area where you are, that you could then be held responsible for that when you come back to it.
Because again, you go to a state where recreational marijuana is legal or where gambling is legal or whatever, the idea that It's like if there's like the speed limit was 80 miles per hour in the town over and then I come back and I get a speeding ticket for driving too fast over there where you're allowed to do that.
That freaks people out and it's a step in the wrong direction.
If you got rid of Roe v.
Wade and that's what you did, so now people have to go to a place where it's legal.
If you're stuck in a state and you don't have the resources but you are pregnant and you want to make a decision for your own body, that's not up to men to decide.
If you really believe in states' rights and you really believe the United States is one cohesive community, you should be able to travel to do whatever the fuck you want.
You want to get your dick tattooed?
Whatever you want to get.
You want to get forehead implants so you look like a unicorn?
Whatever the fuck you want to do.
If you want to travel to go do that, including if you want to do something that's legal, it's a medical procedure that maybe I frown upon.
But if they decided in that state that it's legal, you should be able to do it there.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the reasonable compromise for right now is Roe v.
Wade was struck down.
It's a state's rights issue.
But yes, I agree with you.
The tracking of what you do in another state where it is legal in that state, that, first of all, just seems unworkable to me.
I don't see how that's possibly going to happen.
And then I do feel like that's going to have to go back to the Supreme Court anyway because it's such a precedent that you could be prosecuted for doing something that was legal in the area that you did it.
Even if I don't like – even if I wasn't a pro-choice person, if I didn't like the idea of abortion, I like less the idea of the government telling you what the fuck you can do and whether or not they can discover what you did in some other state.
Like, shut up.
You can't do that and that's what I think a lot of women are fearful of and a lot of that I don't know I don't know how much of a push there is to make something like that happen.
We tried to find that about Texas the other day.
There was one case, but we just kept talking.
What was that one case, Jamie?
There was something in Texas where someone maybe traveled to get an abortion?
Because in Texas it's six weeks, which is kind of crazy.
Like, you don't have any time.
You barely have enough time to realize you're pregnant for a lot of women.
A Texas woman who was jailed and charged with murder after self-managing an abortion can move forward with her lawsuit against the local sheriff and prosecutors over the case that drew national outrage before the charges were quickly dropped.
A federal judge ruled on Wednesday.
So U.S. District Judge Drew B. Tipton denied a motion by prosecutors and the sheriff to dismiss the lawsuit during a hearing in the border city of McAllen.
Lizelle Gonzalez, who spent two nights in jail on the murder charges, is seeking one million dollars in damages in the lawsuit, did not attend the hearing.
Texas is one of the nation's most restrictive abortion bans and outlaws the procedure with limited exceptions.
Under Texas law, women seeking an abortion are exempt from criminal charges, however.
So, Gonzalez was indicted in 2022 after she took the drug misoprostol while 19 weeks pregnant.
She was treated at Texas Hospital where doctors later performed a cesarean section to deliver a stillborn child after they detected no fetal heartbeat.
Yeah, well, look, none of these things are perfect compromises.
One of the things that's interesting is for so long, conservatives wanted to overturn Roe v.
Wade, and it always seemed like a pipe dream, like it was never going to actually happen.
But then, when you do overturn Roe v.
Wade, you do realize that it's like...
Nobody's really happy.
You know what I mean?
It's like the blue states are still going to have unrestrictive rules about it, so the right-wing people aren't happy, and then the red states are going to be more restrictive, so the left-wingers aren't happy about it.
It's one of those issues that is enormously complex, and it's very difficult You know, I'm not sure there is like a legal solution to it.
I think it's a much more of a cultural issue.
It's like, if you're gonna...
If you were living in a society where, say, it was more similar to my grandfather's society where it was very normal that you married your high school sweetheart.
It was very normal that people waited till marriage to have sex.
And it was very typical that you got married at 19 or 20. Well, I'm not saying they did, but I just mean it was much more typical to get married at 19 and be married for 60 years or whatever.
Sure.
It's much easier to have rules about abortion in that society.
You know, whereas, like, if you're in, like, a hookup culture world, where most people are, you know, people are getting married at, like, 35 if they get married at all, and they're spending from, like, 17 to 35 being with many different partners.
You're just going to come in and just write a law on top of that.
It's a very difficult situation.
But to your initial point, it's like the Dems were running on that because that was really the only political winner that they had.
That was the only issue that people actually really cared about and they were on the Democrat side about it.
And that's why they had to run on that.
That's why Kamala Harris, which was one of the craziest things of this whole campaign, one of the most amazing things, is that they actually tried To just run on nothing.
Well, see, what happened is, right, so Obama, who was obviously a very, very smart person, Guy and an incredibly talented politician, at least while he was running for president he was.
I think he's lost a step.
So Obama still was a bit of a narcissist, and he wanted to pick Joe Biden as his VP. He didn't want someone who was going to outshine him, and so he picked Joe Biden, who even before he went senile, was never particularly bright.
So he picked Joe Biden as his VP. And then...
Joe Biden, well, he wanted some diversity points, and he also wanted someone to not outshine him, because now he was becoming senile, and he was never that bright to begin with.
So he picks Kamala Harris to be his VP. And then Kamala Harris needs to pick someone who won't outshine her.
You know what I mean?
So it's like the idiocracy just spun out of control real quick, where all of a sudden you get to the third VP in a row, and you're like, yo, really?
You know what's crazy is that this was, in many ways, this presidential election was just so wild and so different from anything I've ever seen in my lifetime.
You know, I'm 41 and this was different than any other presidential election of my lifetime for sure.
But then there were these things that were also just like very conventional explanations for why you look at this Trump blowout.
And it's almost like as you look back at it, it's like, yeah, what you guys thought you could get away with?
It's just very basic things that like Donald Trump picked a VP who, whether you like him or not, is a pretty impressive guy.
Pretty impressive guy.
There's a guy who was raised by a single parent who was a drug addict and ended up serving the country, going to an Ivy League school, becoming a venture capitalist, becoming a senator, and can sit and have a conversation with you for three hours and be...
I've always thought there was something about like...
Just from doing stand-up, if you really try to remember back to your first few months in stand-up comedy, and you remember how daunting getting up in front of people was.
It's like a thing.
That's the first step to being a stand-up comedian.
It's like, hey, get comfortable with going up in front of a group of people and speaking into a microphone to them.
Get comfortable with not getting a laugh when you wanted to get one.
Get comfortable with that.
And there is something where, like, in 2016, You know, and people forget about this human element of it, right?
Like, Jeb Bush, okay, he's the son of a president, he's the brother of a president, and he was the governor of Florida.
It's not like he was a rookie, but when he's on that debate stage, he is stepping onto the biggest stage of his life.
He's never been in front of a crowd like that before.
One of the other things that I do think has been very interesting over the last, really over the last couple years, I guess, and it's really on display with the Trump re-election thing, is that the culture has moved.
Well, I do think there's some stuff that we look back at now, at like 2017, 2018, like the woke-ism of that era does seem to be like, yeah, things aren't quite as crazy as they were then.
Or at least there was a little bit of fatigue of it.
It's moving towards a better direction for society.
And it's just a massive overcorrection.
And then you have hustlers and grifters who get involved in it and amplify the movement, right?
And all these, like, the Black Lives Matter girls who bought all the real estate.
There was also some accusation that they bought the house for substantially more Then a person paid for just recently before that, and they have a connection to that person.
In the election this year, there were like kind of, and woke culture in general, so maybe broader than the election, but there were kind of like three major factors that I think were really interesting.
One was that I think the anti- For lack of a better term, the kind of anti-woke or non-woke people kind of won out in the marketplace.
It's just, at a certain point, it's not even that Netflix changed their mind and they're willing to have these guys on because they had some ideological transformation.
It's just like, I don't know, dude, they're so big.
They have so many fans.
This is going to get a ton of views on it.
And a mix of that and also kind of for the first time, there was like a cost imposed with the Bud Light stuff and the Target stuff.
There were these kind of very effective boycotts where it's like, oh, you're...
There's gonna be a cost imposed on you if you do that.
The second factor with the Trump stuff and why they weren't able to get the shock troops out, and when I say the shock troops, I just mean the left-wing 20-year-old useful idiots who will come out and protest, yes, there's a fascist movement here, right?
So one of the things that happened, and this is part of why, you know, this is a non-controversial Explanation for 2020 versus 2024 is that in the year 2020, Joe Biden's central pitch to America was a return to normalcy.
It's attractive and it also, look, it fed into the thesis essentially of the entire corporate media was like, the problem is Trump.
The problem is Trump.
Everything was United States of America, then this Trump guy came in and ruined everything, you know?
Whereas the reality was always much deeper than that, that like, no, there were these huge problems and that's why a Trump-like figure was so attractive to people.
But then what happened is Joe Biden came in and nothing went back to normal.
It got even crazier than it was under Donald Trump.
So now people were looking back at the first three years of Donald Trump like that seems pretty normal compared to what we've been going through in the Biden administration.
So this sucked a lot of the energy out.
And also you didn't have the mystery of Trump.
He's going to be Adolf Hitler in there.
No, he's not.
He's been in for four years.
You know, in 2016, they were like, you can't trust him with the nuclear codes.
And there was a little bit of a plausible claim to that.
Like, I don't know.
He would be the first president ever with no political or military experience.
And he does seem like a little bit of a wild man.
But you can't really sell that anymore after he's been president.
So that kind of took away from the energy.
And another thing, and I don't know, I'm not saying I'm the only one making this point.
I haven't heard anyone else making this point, and I think this is a huge part of it, okay?
Like, a huge part of the reason why you didn't see tens of thousands of young people out protesting Trump at Madison Square Garden, and you only had like 100 people there, is because those young left-wingers, who were reliable shock troops for the regime over the last decade, They've been protesting a genocide for the last year.
They've spent a full year protesting what they consider, and at least the International Court of Justice plausibly considers, a genocide.
And it's very hard to get someone who's been protesting babies being slaughtered to turn around and pretend that something else is way more of an outrage and especially to then go protest on behalf of the ones who are doing the genocide.
Right.
That you've been protesting against for the last year.
This came up a bunch when I was debating Chris Cuomo, but it's like even just the way they talk about you, where it's like, oh, these bro culture guys or something like that.
Again, I'm sorry.
Objectively.
Objectively.
This isn't an opinion.
What happens on this show is so much more intelligent and thoughtful and deep than anything that's going on at CNN. You just can't tell me.
You can't tell me that you sitting down with Elon Musk for three hours and then compare that to like Wolf Blitzer with all his graphics behind him talking for 30 seconds before he goes to a pharmaceutical commercial and then coming back and having the dumbest left winger yell at the dumbest right winger.
Really?
And you guys are going to act like you're the grown-ups in the room?
It's too ridiculous.
And that's right.
So the entire young generation, they've all turned that off.
None of them are getting their news from CNN anymore.
And look, man, that's, I think, the most beautiful part of this election.
Well, the thing that I found so interesting was just, and it happened with him, a great example is Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and then even the thing we were just saying about our boy Schultz.
It's like these cancellation attempts, all of a sudden they went from like, oh my god, this could ruin you, to like it's making you stronger.
The best thing in comedy is when there's a huge thing, and there's just something about when they got new, fresh stuff on the thing that just happened.
Dude, I remember literally one of my favorite, like if I had to put a flag down on like five of my favorite moments since I've been in comedy, that show that we did at, what's it called?
You don't get a whole lot of moments like that where the president almost gets fucking iced.
And then all the nutty people trying to say he staged his assassination attempt so that he could regain the White House, that it was a propaganda attempt.
Those are the nuttiest of left-wing people.
You think flat earthers are nuts?
You think a 78-year-old guy is going to allow some dude with iron sights to shoot and nick his ear from 140 yards away?
So you have Crook's dad, and his dad is pushing this shopping cart, and you've got this dude who's with him, who's, like, in full disguise with gloves.
Well, the fact that somebody could be able to get up on that roof with a rifle 130 yards away from the president, and then the excuses that they made made absolutely no sense.
You've got a guy who has a felony conviction for possession of weapons of mass destruction, where he barricaded himself while police were pursuing him with, like, explosives or something.
Is that what he did?
Yeah, the charge was weapons of mass destruction.
I remember that, because, like, I didn't even realize that was a charge.
I thought that was just something Bush lied about.
Yeah, you know, I don't know exactly what they were but I know that was the charge and it was a felony and then this motherfucker is recruiting for the Ukrainian war effort and is going back and forth to an active war zone trying to recruit Afghan fighters to fight in the war on the Ukrainian side and then he comes back and tries to assassinate Donald Trump and then the entire national conversation is like Is the rhetoric about Donald Trump too far?
And you're like, listen man, I'm not saying it's not plausible that if you call the guy Hitler every day, maybe some deranged young person will be like, I'm going to take out Hitler.
But when this guy is going and recruiting for the Ukrainian war effort, this doesn't sound to me like someone radicalized by Joy Reid.
You know what I mean?
This sounds like something a little deeper is going on.
And then there is, much like with Jeffrey Epstein, right?
There is no desire amongst the supposed journalist class To even look into it.
It's just, look, at the very least, it's very bizarre.
And when you have a guy, you know, like, I'm not saying I've got, like, a case I could present in front of a jury and get a conviction, but when you've got a guy who has been targeted by the regime unlike any other political figure in American history, well, let's say since Kennedy, But more so, because he just survived an assassination.
Well, you also got to think, like, if you're in a world without, like, plumbing and toothbrushes and razors, fucking a man or fucking a woman, not that much different.
It was just, you know, Law& Order, they just got to bang out a half-hour show like every other day or whatever.
So it was at the height of like cancel culture, Me Too, and all this stuff.
And so the theme, I'm not exaggerating this, okay?
The theme is there's a shot comic.
And he's making all these rape jokes.
Now, of course, they do it in a way as if this would work at a comedy club.
You're just like, hey you, I hope you get raped!
And the crowd's like, yeah!
So they're at a comedy club.
I believe it was filmed at the Comic Strip Live.
I think it was there.
I'm not sure.
But it was at a comedy club.
So some girls get up and they walk out because they're very uncomfortable with like, oh my god, these rape jokes are not funny, blah, blah, blah.
Then the girl leaves, gets raped, Turns out it was the rape comic who rapes her.
And that's the...
It's the most ridiculous, like, goddamn story ever.
But this was an episode of Law& Order.
And then Kurt just started...
He made the point that he goes, you know on this show, it's just a regular thing that they threaten men with rape?
Like, every single time they're, like, interrogating someone, they go, guys, like, you don't do very well in prison.
You know what I mean?
And it's always just, like, the threat of, like, we will put you in a rape torture dungeon if you don't do X, Y, and Z. And I thought it was, like, a really brilliant point that that's just totally acceptable.
Threatening a man with rape.
Guys like you don't do very well in prison is a common saying, and we all know what that means.
They're saying you will be anally raped against your will.
Yeah, but when you have a culture that says men can't have sex with women except to procreate, and the women have to be dressed up in a certain way and Not good.
Well, it's just people don't react well to other people telling them what to do.
And when I was in high school, the thing was Catholic school girls were always freaks.
Catholic school girls were wild because they didn't get to be around any boys ever.
They were just at school with girls.
They're all dressed in skirts, and they're all told that all those desires that they have, their bodies going through puberty, and they're just horny all the time, that they're bad.
And then they can't wait to get along with a guy like that.
You ever go to a Catholic church and you see the guy speaking, whatever he is, bishop, whatever the fuck he is?
Big, stupid, blown-up nose because he's got gin blossoms all over his face.
He gets hammered every day.
He lives in hell.
He lives in hell.
He's probably a closeted gay guy that took this fucking job 45 years ago, and now he's like, this is my life.
Now I'm 60. Here I am.
What am I doing with myself?
That's all Peter stuff, Jamie.
Did you find it?
What is saltpeter used for and is it true it reduces certain carnal urges?
The second part of the question is easy to answer.
Saltpeter, the term refers to either potassium or sodium nitrate, has no effect on carnal urges.
The story that this chemical was put into soldiers' food to decrease their sex drive is a total myth.
But what about for priests?
That's what I had heard.
So is it one of those things they thought did that?
Symptoms can range from double vision and difficulty in swallowing to paralysis and death.
The spores of this organism lurk in many foods under the right conditions—lack of oxygen, low acidity—becomes active and liberate their toxin.
Sausages are the classic example of a type of food that can be affected.
And the word botulism, in fact, derives from the Latin botulus, meaning sausage.
Scroll back up again.
I feel like I picked this up at a weird place Serious experts of saltpeter one of the most deadly substances known to mankind is produced by clostrid clostridium botulinum Bacteria seven million times more toxic than Cobra venom Botulin poisons its victims by blocking the actions of neurotransmitter acetylcholine Symptoms can range okay, so this is the symptoms from botulism as
Does saltpeter come from botulism?
Okay, one of the serious aspects of it is one of the most deadly substances known to mankind is this botulism bacteria.
Okay.
Botulism can be prevented by the appropriate use of sodium nitrate.
Discovery that actually became about in an accidental fashion.
Salting of meat is an ancient method of preservation based on the ability of sodium chloride to kill bacteria by drawing out much of their water content.
About 500 years ago, some clever cook noted that the effectiveness of salt in preserving meat depends upon its source.
Furthermore, salt that worked particularly well improved the meat's flavor and color.
Okay, the secret turned out to be an impurity potassium nitrate, more familiar known as saltpeter.
Okay, so this is how they came up with it to combat botulism.
I was trying to read through this fast so I could give you a quick answer.
There is a job, and it says in Sweden, I had to transfer this, saltpeter welder profession whose task consists of collecting urine-soaked earth in order to make more saltpeter because they used it in ammunition.
Yeah, you'd piss on the ground into the soil, and then they'd get enough of that stuff together finally, and then you could make some gunpowder out of it.
All peasants, the priests made sure that no one was forgotten, were forced to deliver their imposed quota of saltpeter soil, along with ash, wood, and coal, to the nearest simmering plant.
The obligation was replaced in 1634 by a saltpeter tax.
The saltpeter Jews...
That's always the Jews.
Now, instead, came to collect the soil themselves from under the farmers' barns.
The saltpeter tax was replaced in 1801 by an obligation for each mantle to annually supply one half, what does that say, LI pound of saltpeter to the state?
Well, by the way, people are going to be saying that in the future about this time.
God, thank God we didn't live in the time where the whole country was at war over the stupidest shit and controlled by this media that was completely controlled by corporations and everybody was being gaslit and people willingly gaslit themselves.
I've always felt the one, you know, if you could try to guess, like, just say if we survive and things improve morally, like, what we would look back on and be like, holy shit.
And the two to me was always war and prison.
And especially, like, non-violent, you know, like, prisoners.
But even violent prisoners, you'd almost think, like, What, they didn't figure anything else out?
So you have private prisons that are actually a corporation that lobby to make sure that certain laws stay on the books so that you could keep your prison stocked with live people that are essentially batteries that generate money for you?
And just the fact that that's still going on while...
We have all of these technological advancements.
If you go down to St. Jude's or something like that, and they're like, dude, they have all of this technology because all of these brilliant people are here to save babies' lives.
You know what I mean?
That's going on, and then also there's war still.
We haven't figured out a different way.
Everybody doesn't just agree.
Listen, obviously...
To just go on mass slaughter campaigns and have nothing but destruction is in nobody's interest.
So here's how we're going to solve these conflicts.
It does seem that if human beings survived for another hundred years and we are at a higher moral level, we would look back at that.
The way we look back at witch hunts or slavery or something like that would be like, that's insane.
And maybe we are, like, moving in that direction where, you know, it does seem, for sure, I think that the fact that the war in Gaza has had more images Come out of it than any other conflict.
That's a huge part of the reason why there's so much protest against it.
I think me and you might have talked about that last time I was on, right?
But it's like, even the war in Iraq, which is not ancient history, you know, it was still going on.
I mean, secondly, we still got troops there now.
But like the video footage that would come out would be like, you know, it almost looked like a firework, like kind of exploding, which is, that's easy to see and root for.
You know what I mean?
Like, yeah, good guy's kicking ass.
But when you're seeing a baby being pulled out of rubble who is just suffocated to death, oh, that's tough.
I was just watching this interview, I'm blanking on the doctor's name, but it was Dave DeCamp was interviewing him, who's, by the way, phenomenal, one of the best reporters in the country.
DeCamp Dave, D-E-C-A-M-P, Dave is his Twitter handle, he's phenomenal.
By the way, my guy Scott Horton just gave you and Jamie a copy of the book, Unprovoked, is going to be out I think in the next week or so.
I'm sorry, Provoked.
I didn't mean to say Unprovoked.
It's provokedbook.com, the best book written on the history of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and How America just blew it at every single opportunity.
Anyway, so Dave DeCamp is interviewing this guy who's a doctor.
He's an American who went over to Gaza.
He was a doctor.
And there was a big piece in the New York Times written about this where he said that every day that he was there, every single day, they'd treat toddlers with bullets to the head.
That they were just constantly seeing this.
And then he says that he also talked to a whole bunch of other, so his working theory on this was, when he first started seeing this, so he's in this one area in Gaza, and he was embedded there for a few months working at a hospital, and he figured there was like some lone, sadistic sniper out there.
You know what I mean?
Like, these things happen in war.
But then he started talking to doctors from all other points of Gaza who were there at all different times who all said the same thing, that they're getting toddlers with bullet wounds.
And then, when the New York Times published this, a bunch of people who were defending Israel started being like, this isn't true, blah, blah, blah, the Israeli most moral fighting force in the world.
I mean, there's a doctor, he's an American, he's claiming it happened, and he has x-rays.
So, yeah, it seems like that's what's going on there.
And I mean, look, it's...
Obviously just so horrific, man.
The whole thing.
It's really amazing to me the way to watch the way people will rationalize and justify what Israel's doing.
It takes so much mental gymnastics.
It's always got to rely on...
It lets you know it's like, oh, so I get it.
You see, it's like, oh, how did human beings through all of human history have had slavery and And genocides and ethnic cleansing campaigns and at every step there's someone there who's willing to justify it and explain why we have to do this because this is the only way and really we're acting in defense.
And it's amazing the way people can compartmentalize it, too.
You know what I mean?
Like, it could just be like, hey, there's somebody who could be a totally loving dad and a good husband and all like that, but then can go to war and commit like...
Unspeakable horrors on other people.
It's just like they put that over here.
It's very hard to think about that or understand it.
This is one of the most important things, the messages that I want to get to Trump.
And one of the things that I'm excited that Bobby Kennedy is interested in this as well is psychedelic therapy for veterans.
I think if there's a way to understand the benefits of psychedelic therapy for everybody, the real pathway is through veterans who I think are the most needing of it, the most deserving of it, the most...
The most neglected in terms of the horrors that they experience and having to carry this around their mind and that there's a way that many people have experienced relief and it's not available to them.
And it's not something that's dangerous.
It's not something that's addictive.
You literally can't.
You can't even eat enough psilocybin to kill yourself.
All of it became illegal in the sweeping Psychedelics Act of 1970 that was designed by the Nixon administration so that they could demonize anti-war protesters.
So they could arrest anti-war protesters, civil rights protesters, the Black Panthers.
They made all that stuff illegal because all these counterculture people were all using that to completely change the programming that they received in society.
It is irony, because it's the pathway to help for a lot of these guys that come back.
You ask them to do unspeakable things in modern society that are against the law, and you force them to do it.
You force them to go kill people.
They see their friends killed, and then they come back here and there's no tools, when there are tools.
But they have to go to Mexico to utilize these tools.
They have to go to Costa Rica and the Amazon.
They have to go to all these different places because it's illegal in the very place that sent them over there.
The very place that tells them it's legal for you to go kill people that you've never met, but it's not legal for you to take psilocybin that might help you get over the fact that you killed people.
Yeah, and look man I mean that I think that's a great message to get to Trump like let these guys like they were they were like the bravest amongst us who got totally tricked and bribed and Propagandized into going to these wars and then they come back and they're blowing their brains out by the tens of thousands Yeah, and there's something that might help.
Yeah, that is very low risk of of Almost no risk of actually hurting, and it really might help.
And look, I will say, this is one of the things that I'm really optimistic about, is that of that team that we were talking about earlier that Donald Trump's got around him, you know, all those people like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson and all these guys, David Sachs.
David Sachs is probably the best.
They're so good on Ukraine.
Every one of them.
Like, they're all just like, yeah, no, this makes no sense.
This is such a clear-cut situation where you could easily make a deal.
Vladimir Putin, and I know I've talked about this on past shows, and anybody, go listen to those and go read Scott Horton's amazing book, Provoked, but just very quickly, It is all but accepted at this point.
Nobody's even debated.
When I first came on the first podcast that we talked about Ukraine, a few years ago now, when I said, oh, there was a peace deal that was agreed to in principle by Ukraine and Russia, and then Boris Johnson came in on behalf of the U.S. to make sure they didn't negotiate a peace and kept the war going, there were a bunch of people who were like, oh, that's not true, and blah, blah, blah.
And now it's just been totally, like, Like, 100% I was right about that.
They had a peace deal worked out.
And then since then, the guy whose name I always butcher, but it's Norwegian, so I don't know how to, Strasselberger, the head of NATO, he came out and said, and he was bragging, but he goes, you know, Vladimir Putin, before he invaded Ukraine, told us that if we just put it in writing that we would not bring Ukraine into NATO, that he wouldn't invade.
And we told him, no, because we won't be bullied by you.
So he's like bragging about how they had an opportunity.
All they had to do was say, we will not bring your biggest neighbor into our military alliance, which is very clearly against you.
The most reasonable demand.
Now, I'm not saying it's reasonable that he invaded.
That's not reasonable.
But it is a totally reasonable demand if the U.S. was to say, now Mexico can't be a part of China's military alliance.
Seems super reasonable.
So he's got so many great people around him on that.
But...
It's not exactly the same with the Israel-Gaza war, where it seems like a lot of the people around him are not so great on that.
But whether it's me or not, I just hope that he gets the message through somehow.
And I know it's a complicated thing to navigate because Israel has a lot of influence.
On our government.
And he's got people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Tucker Carlson who really are non-interventionists and don't want to see American taxpayer dollars being used to fund wars around the world, no matter who it's for.
It's like, hey, we're broke.
We got our own problems here and we can't afford to do this.
But then he also has...
Miriam Adelson, who cut him $100 million and is probably going to give another $100 or $200 million to congressional candidates in the next midterm election and all of this.
And she is singularly focused on one issue.
And that issue is that we always unconditionally and unwaveringly support Israel, no matter what they're doing.