James Smith critiques the Trump impeachment as a "deep state coup" driven by the CIA and FBI, citing Andrew McCabe's testimony to argue critics suffer from "Trump derangement syndrome." He dismisses Adam Schiff's claims of criminal collusion as unfounded exaggerations unsupported by transcripts, contrasting Trump's alleged shakedown with George W. Bush's actions while mocking mainstream media narratives. Smith further attacks libertarians for prioritizing social issues over the military-industrial complex and Federal Reserve, concluding that true freedom requires rejecting statist paradigms rather than focusing on racism or white nationalism. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Part of the Problem00:03:17
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gas Digital Network.
Hey guys, today's show is brought to you by the Soho Forum, the amazing debate series, the monthly debate series run by the great Gene Epstein.
Of course, as you all know, I was just a debater in the Soho Forum in my spectacular victory last month.
But we got another debate.
It's a new month.
We got a new debate coming up a week from today as I'm recording this, October 7th.
This is going to be a good one.
I'm very excited for this.
It's a debate on the war on drugs.
The resolution reads, except for laws prohibiting the sale of drugs to minors and driving while impaired, all laws that penalize drug production, distribution, possession, and use should be abolished, along with special sin taxes on drugs.
I love that resolution because that goes to like a very radical place, not just like, oh, you know, you know, small, you know, if you get caught with a joint, you shouldn't go to jail.
So Jacob Sullum is going to argue for the affirmative and Alex Berenson is going to argue for the negative.
I'm going to be there warming up the crowd as usual, and I'll be hanging out that night.
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Of course, there's different debates all the time.
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Richard Wolf versus Gene Epstein debating socialism.
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All right, let's start the show.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What is up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Thank you for joining us.
I'm alone this episode.
Just me.
No guest.
No Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
The King of the Cawks is at home celebrating Rosh Hanna, which is the Jewish new year.
I know for Christian conservatives like myself, probably not familiar with the holiday.
The Jews have their own new year.
They just refuse to conform to the Christian world.
And Rob Bernstein wanted to go be with his family on this special day.
So that's fine.
I support him making that decision.
It's important to be with family, especially when you have AIDS and you don't have too many Rosh Hashanahs left in you.
So this is, you know, probably Rob's last Rosh Hashanah.
Maybe he squeaks in one more.
Either way, I'm glad he got to spend this time with his family.
All you other Jews, I hope you're having a good Rosh Hashanah, and I hope you appreciate celebrating the new year with your family and appreciate not having AIDS because it's, you know, it can come on.
You get a bad sandwich, all of a sudden, full-blown AIDS.
Celebrating Rosh Hashanah with Family00:06:09
That's how it works.
That's how it spreads.
Anyway, I wanted to still make sure I came in and gave you guys an episode for today, especially with all of the craziness going on in the world of politics today.
And a lot of craziness even in the world of libertarians.
I've been discovering over the last few days.
So, of course, Donald Trump is, well, it looks like the Democrats are serious about this.
They are moving forward with impeachment proceedings.
And they are trying to expedite the impeachment proceedings now.
And it's all very interesting.
And it's really, it's quite something.
You know, I've said a lot of times through the Trump administration, but I think, like, I think it's probably for, you know, like the last 20 years at least, people have been talking about how the American, like the American concentration has been getting shorter and shorter.
The attention span of the country is shorter and shorter.
And whereas, you know, in my father's day, you would have to wait for the newspaper to come out and they would give you kind of major news.
And then it was like, you know, the nightly news would get to you before then.
And then there was everyone made a big deal in the 90s when the 24-hour news cycle began.
And all of a sudden they had to talk about something all the time.
And it just seemed like more and more.
And maybe this is me like, you know, maybe this is people having this like nostalgia effect where they're remembering a time that never really existed.
But it seems like even kind of paying attention to the bigger issues, the big picture, where I like to live, Dave, Big Picture Smith, that goes completely out the window.
And everybody's focused more and more on the news of the day or the news of the hour or the news of the half hour or whatever.
But in the Trump, in the Trump world, since Donald Trump's become president, it's really accentuated.
I mean, it's like people get completely obsessed over the scandal of the moment, the scandal of the day.
It's like the latest tweet takes up everybody's attention.
And it's really been quite amazing.
I think for everybody who's not like completely bogged down in the either I'm completely defending Donald Trump's last tweet or I'm completely outraged about Donald Trump's last tweet.
The rest of us are like, this is really incredible how obsessed over the last little thing that happened everyone gets and then how quickly we move on to the next thing.
And then it's as if that never happened, you know?
Like nobody, you know, I remember there was like a few days where people were like going nuts that Donald Trump tweeted that transgenders shouldn't be in the military.
This was like a huge thing.
No one even kind of thinks about it now.
Even the people who hate Donald Trump, there's been 300 things since then that they've hated Donald Trump for.
And that's like in the rearview mirror.
And the people defending it don't even care about that anymore.
And by the way, it never happened.
Like it's just something that he tweeted and we move on.
And so I try as we're going through all of these things to point out when there is something that we're living through that you go, you know, I think this is actually like a truly historic moment in time that we're living in.
And it's hard if you're always just obsessed over the last little detail over the last, you know, the news of the day.
It's hard to appreciate that.
But this is a big deal.
I mean, if they're going forward with the impeachment proceedings, if Donald Trump does end up getting impeached, which is possible, he's certainly not going to get removed from office.
But if he does end up getting impeached, I mean, okay, like they impeached Bill Clinton.
And before that, Richard Nixon.
And like, that's, it, you know, I mean, I wasn't alive for the Richard Nixon ones, but that's it for modern American history.
Before that, you got to go back quite a while.
And so it's, it's, this is a big deal.
However you feel about it, this is a big deal.
And when something is this historic, it's it's hard to appraise it accurately.
Because usually these type of things, they take years and years, if not decades and decades, to really understand what the significance of this moment was and what was really happening.
And so I don't know that we'll be able to do it perfectly.
But, you know, you can at least give it a shot.
You can at least try.
You know, a lot of information is coming out and a lot of little pieces of the puzzle.
I mean, just literally, I was just as I was sitting down to set up in the studio about 20 minutes ago, I got a news, you know, alert on my phone that said that now it's being reported that Mike Pompeo was on the call with Donald Trump to the Ukrainian president.
So we'll see.
I mean, I don't even know.
It's like this news is just coming in.
So we'll see what ends up happening.
Is that report accurate?
Who the hell knows?
But if it was, that's kind of interesting.
It's kind of adds a whole new layer to this.
Here's what we do know so far.
We know that, look, I think that to understand what's going on here, you have to put it in some type of like perspective.
And I know that a lot of times, you know, I've had this experience before being on cable news shows, and I've certainly had this experience watching a whole lot of cable news shows and reading newspapers and things like that, where if you don't put things into the proper context, it's easy to come to the wrong conclusion.
Excuses to Overthrow Assad00:02:17
It's easy to paint a picture of something that doesn't really get at the truth.
So if you, you know, for example, with the whole war in Syria business, which was probably the thing that I was, you know, like that I argued on on cable news, certainly when I had that contract over at Turner, was certainly the thing that I argued about the most that had the clips that went the most viral and stuff like that.
And what everybody would try to frame it as is like Assad started killing all of his people and now we're debating whether or not we need to go to war with them.
You know, like that's the framing.
That's a given.
So now go.
Now what do you think?
And if you don't challenge that framing, it's very hard to make your point and to help, you know, have people draw the correct conclusion.
So right away, you always have to shatter that narrative.
And if you have the opportunity like I have on this podcast, if I'm talking about the war in Syria, I can really build the framing that I think is the most accurate and the most like, you know, helpful in terms of getting to the right conclusion.
So you don't start with Assad's killing all of his own people.
Do we have to go save these people of Syria?
You start with the fact that, you know, like a decade before anyone was accusing Assad of killing his own people, we already have four-star general Wesley Clark saying that the U.S. government is planning on overthrowing Assad.
So just that one little fact, that one little piece of information, if you insert that into the framing, you go, whoa, whoa.
So this isn't really about him killing his own people at all.
This is now, just from that one little fact being inserted, it's much easier to see this at best as an excuse to go overthrow Assad.
Oh, this guy we already wanted to overthrow is doing something bad.
So now we're using that to go into this war.
And then if you start thinking about the fact that in 2007 and 2008, there were all these reports that we're actually going to overthrow Assad.
And then if you realize that there was this redirection after the redirect, which you can go look up, right, and read all about that, that there was this redirect after we gave all this power to the Shiites.
And now we wanted to move back and redirect toward the Sunnis so that Iran didn't inherit any more influence than we had already handed to them.
Stamps.com Mail Offer Details00:02:39
And then you realize, oh, that's really what it was all about.
And then you read about Operation Timber Sycamore and you realize, oh, actually we started the Civil War.
We started the war and Assad started killing people in response to us arming al-Qaeda.
And then the whole conclusion changes drastically.
But if you just allow the story to be, you know, well, Assad's killing his people, so what do we do?
Dave, what do we do?
And these are the questions I would get when I was on SE Cup show.
Dave, what do we do?
And it's challenging, especially in that format when you have like a minute to try to be like, well, okay, first of all, let me explain why your framing is completely wrong.
Here's what's actually going on.
Here's what we shouldn't do.
Here's how it's been a disaster every time we've done it before.
And so you got to try to do that.
I like it.
It's like fun because there's something that's a fun challenge about that.
But if you actually have, you know, a podcast or a long format to do it in, it becomes much easier to prosecute the case in like a devastating manner where you're like, well, I just gave you nine different things that just, they, they just flat out disprove your narrative.
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John Brennan Treason Accusations00:15:54
All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay.
So with the Donald Trump impeachment, if you want to understand what's going on here, you're not going to understand it properly unless you understand it in the context of what the Trump administration has been and what has been the reaction against it.
Now, I've been saying on this show for years at this point that there has been an attempted deep state coup to unseat Donald Trump that's been, in my opinion, unquestionable.
I mean, it's not like this, you know, this is some tinfoil hat thing.
This isn't like, oh, you know, I believe there are these secret documents somewhere that we don't have.
I mean, I'm talking about what they've told you that they were doing.
What Andrew McCabe said straight up.
Go back and listen to the episode.
If you want that one, it's in the archives.
You got to go over to gasdigitalnetwork.com.
Use promo code P-O-T-P.
Become a supporting listener.
You get all the episodes on demand, the entire archive, whenever you want it.
Coming up on episode 500, by the way.
It's pretty nuts.
Oh, you also get to join the private Facebook group, the part of the problem inner circle.
Anyway, but we played, we went through all those clips of Andrew McCabe, and they said they were like flat out.
It was like the FBI was sitting down, like, what can we do to get rid of Donald Trump?
This is McCabe, the deputy director, telling you this is what happened.
Then we also have the text messages from like Peter Strzok to his girlfriend just being like, we will stop this guy.
And then that guy is going out and trying to stop him.
They talked about invoking the 25th Amendment.
They ultimately ended up having a special prosecutor investigate him.
They, you know, were doing a lot of different things to try to unseat Donald Trump.
Now, why is that?
Why is it that the CIA and the FBI are all coming out and doing everything they can to unseat Donald Trump?
Now, you might have some problems with Donald Trump.
I certainly have a lot.
In many ways, I kind of want to see him unseated.
Certainly if it meant that someone better was going to do the job.
But it's kind of useful.
It's instructive if you want to understand what's going on here to ask yourself, why were they trying to unseat Donald Trump?
You know, so many people who suffer from what has been, oh, it's come to be known as Trump derangement syndrome.
And that, listen, man, that is a real thing.
Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing.
I'm almost sure, unless you are in completely right-wing circles, living in a red state, and don't come across any left-wing people, there's no chance that you haven't come across this.
Like, you know, people who hate Donald Trump so much that they can't see clearly.
There's something about the guy that makes people so white-hot angry that nothing, I mean, like, no matter what he does, they wouldn't celebrate it.
No matter what he, how mild an offense is, they think it's the worst offense ever.
I mean, there's the term literally Hitler didn't come from people making fun of left-wingers.
That was something that people were actually calling Donald Trump literally Hitler.
This was before he even became president.
I mean, like, like tons of blue check mark people, journalists, politicians, a million different, you know, Hollywood, you know, actors and producers and the like.
They were comparing this guy to Adolf Hitler before he was sworn in.
Do you not think that's a little bit, you know, out of control?
So that's what people are talking about when they say Trump derangement syndrome.
And a lot of people suffer from this.
And so if Donald Trump, now they may hate him, a lot of these people who hate Donald Trump, they hate him for a completely different reason.
And I must say, I've struggled at times to put my finger on it, but I get the gist of it.
It's like this idea is that he's this fucking racist, bigoted, kind of secret white supremacist.
You know, I mean, he came down and he said that thing like just the way he talks, Mexico isn't sending their best.
They're rapists.
They're criminals.
You know, I'm sure some of them are good people.
It's like, you're basically saying Mexicans are fucking rapists and criminals.
You hate Mexicans.
You hate women.
You probably hate blacks and gays, even though we got nothing you've ever really said about those things.
But, you know, okay, so you, you hate Donald Trump because you think he's like some racist.
And then you'll see someone, you know, you have this Trump derangement syndrome.
You're so angry.
And then you see like the former CIA director, you know, Brennan, and he's like, yeah, I hate Trump too.
And you're like, good.
He's one of the good guys.
He hates Donald Trump.
But maybe just, you know, pause for a second and ask yourself, do you really think the CIA director hates Donald Trump for the same reasons you do?
Maybe he's got his own reasons.
It might be worthwhile to think about what those might be.
What those might be.
Now, John Brennan, who, of course, was the CIA director under Barack Obama, he, again, factual statement, armed al-Qaeda.
Now, people can go around talking about what is treason or what isn't treason.
And the term treason gets thrown around so much.
It actually has a definition and nobody cares.
It's like democracy or, you know, fascism.
Democracy is everything that's good.
Fascism is everything that's bad.
It doesn't matter what, you know, like what that is applying to, you know, right, like impeachment to save democracy, right?
You have to overthrow a democratically elected president to save democracy.
It's all kind of ridiculous.
But, you know, and people on all sides, I mean, I've heard people saying like Donald Trump committed treason in this phone call with Ukraine.
And I've heard people say that the quote whistleblower committed treason because he ratted out Donald Trump to the, and you're like, all none of this would be treason.
I mean, you might think it's like wrong, but releasing classified information isn't treason.
Being disloyal to a president isn't treason.
Bribing, even in the worst case, in the worst interpretation of it, trying to like bribe the Ukraine into digging up dirt on your political rival isn't treason.
But you know what is treason is arming al-Qaeda.
That is fucking treason.
That is exactly what it is.
That is not being hyperbolic at all.
That is actually the definition.
It is giving aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime.
That is arming al-Qaeda.
Now, that's what John Brennan did.
Donald Trump, when he was running to be president, he said very blatantly, very, very clearly, that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton created ISIS.
Now, he was pushed on this by the mainstream media, and they said, What do you mean?
You can't say something crazy like they created ISIS.
And he goes, No, no, no, no.
They created ISIS.
They gave weapons to the radical al-Qaeda groups, the Al-Nusra groups that became ISIS.
They gave it to them in Syria.
Donald Trump was clear about this.
Didn't mince words.
It was really quite remarkable.
Now, Donald Trump said a whole bunch of other dumbass things in the process, but man, he really nailed that one.
Now, I'm not saying that means you have to support Donald Trump or you should like Donald Trump or root for Donald Trump or any of that shit.
However, when you see John Brennan out there doing everything he can to shut Donald Trump up and now all of a sudden becoming like a paid TV pundit and all he can ever say is how Donald Trump's committed treason, Donald Trump's a liar.
This and that.
Why do you think he hates Donald Trump?
Do you think, maybe, do you think it's that the CIA really hates racism so much?
Is that why he hates Donald Trump?
Does he hate him because he's like, you're separating children from their families at the border and you can't speak this way about Mexican Americans?
Do you think that's why the director of the CIA hates Donald Trump?
Or is it maybe because he fucking called him out for actually committing treason?
Like, I mean, he didn't directly call John Brennan out for actually committing treason, but he sure did say something that really starts pointing to the direction where you might uncover that John Brennan actually committed treason.
You know, I'm just thinking it might have something to do with that.
Donald Trump was talking about ending wars, how crazy it is that we fight these wars.
Now, again, he's not doing any of this shit now that he's in there.
And I believe very passionately that he should be held responsible for that.
You know, end of the day, you're the commander in chief.
If there's war crimes going on on your watch, you should be held responsible for that.
I would love to see Donald Trump impeached for the U.S.-Saudi war in Yemen.
I mean, like, that would be amazing.
However, if you want to understand what's going on right now, you got to understand that there's been an attempted deep state coup against Donald Trump for quite a while now, and you have to understand why they hate him.
And it ain't for the reasons that your average left-wing friend hates Donald Trump.
Not even close.
So what we know now is that this guy who's being called a whistleblower was a career CIA man.
This was a guy in the CIA.
And this is who started this whole process that looks like it's going to result in impeachment.
We also know that he did not have firsthand access to any, to the phone call or the transcript.
So this is all, you know, he heard about this and then told people about this.
He heard about it and then he said something about that.
Now, in a court of law, they have a term for that, and it's called hearsay.
Pretty self-explanatory, what that term means.
Now, here's one more thing that we've learned over the last week, that the CIA changed their rules for what is acceptable to be considered a whistleblower and be protected under whistleblower protections.
And it's not clear exactly when they changed it.
It looks like it could have been as late as July or August, but it used to say that if you wanted to be protected as a whistleblower, you had to have first-hand knowledge of what had happened, of what you were blowing the whistle on.
And they changed that.
So you no longer have to have first-hand knowledge.
And now all of a sudden, a CIA man is blowing the whistle on Donald Trump without first-hand knowledge.
Seems a little bit shady.
It's almost as if there's a deep state coup to try to unseat Donald Trump.
Also, by the way, you can listen to deep state agents telling you that there is a coup to try to unseat Donald Trump.
I mean, they don't use the term coup, but they definitely told you they were trying to unseat Donald Trump.
This is a guy who, as I said on the last episode, who's been investigated more than any president in my lifetime, I think more than any president ever, and nothing that's come, none of the fruits of any of those investigations have anything to do with why they're going forward with these impeachment proceedings.
So it's just something that is like if you don't look at it that way, you're not going to see what's actually going on here.
Now, I think that there is something much bigger to this whole impeachment story.
But there's no question that if you just look at this from, look, even by the Democrats' official story, which makes it makes no sense, and they haven't been pressed at all by the media to actually answer for this.
But it makes no sense at all the timing of when they went forward with these impeachment proceedings.
I mean, they even, according to them, they say that this whistleblower, quote, whistleblower, this CIA agent didn't have direct knowledge of the phone call.
He didn't present anything to Congress, and Congress hadn't seen any of the transcripts.
But they were ready to go forward with impeachment just based off hearsay.
Now, that seems a little bit crazy, right?
For people who claim to love democracy so much, the idea of impeaching a president, you would think, would require a fairly high burden, especially when you have an election coming up next year.
You'd be like, you'd want the American people to be able to decide who their president is.
So if we're going to go and overturn their will, then we'd have to have something pretty substantial.
And they didn't even know that they had anything.
And then after the transcript comes out, it's just, look, an impeachable offense in effect is whatever Congress decides it is.
I mean, in the Constitution, it says high crimes and misdemeanors, but it's not as if, you know, if they bring it up and they vote for it, then they can impeach somebody.
And if they vote to remove them, they can remove somebody.
But to the average person, if you've been spending years talking about how Donald Trump is a Russian spy or a Russian asset or, you know, he's been, he's colluding with a hostile foreign power.
And then what you're finally getting him on is that transcript.
I don't know.
It seems like quite a stretch.
Quite a stretch to have to say that, well, he kind of seemed to be bullying the Ukrainian president into giving him something that he wants.
Now, of course, the idea that anyone would believe that there are no strings attached to U.S. foreign foreign aid.
Like the idea that we, first of all, just on its face, I think Americans would be against that and rightfully so.
I mean, who gives somebody money with no strings attached?
That's pretty rare that that happens in life ever.
I mean, I'm not saying never, but pretty rare.
Like if your boss gives you money, they expect you to do a certain job.
You know, like if your friend gives you money, they expect you probably to pay them back.
Or at least if you were like fucking them over, they'd be like, I'm not going to loan you money if you're fucking me over.
And if America is giving money to these other countries, then of course we expect them to act a certain way.
Ukraine was a notoriously corrupt country.
And so yeah, if America is giving them military aid, who would really think it would be crazy if the president was like, well, you have to do X, Y, and Z. That's in the national interest, right?
So the question here isn't so much whether it was Donald Trump asking for something in the national interest, it's whether he was asking for something just in Donald Trump's interest or in Donald Trump's personal interest.
And it's a pretty hard argument to make that if Joe Biden, the former vice president, was involved in some type of criminal activity, that exposing that wouldn't be in the national interest.
I don't know.
It's kind of difficult.
And the other thing that's just really hard to swallow is that you have all of these Democrats who are, you know, they're talking about, you know, this week, they're talking about how much they love democracy while they're trying to overturn the result of a Democratic election on basically, you know, flimsy nothingness.
Deep State Whistleblower Concerns00:02:08
Then they're talking about how much they care about whistleblowers being protected.
These are the people who will allow, you know, Edward Snowden to fucking get executed or rot in jail for the rest of his life if he ever came back.
You know, like actual whistleblowers who blew the lid on government corruption.
I'm sorry, I'm supposed to take seriously that there's a CIA whistleblower.
As I mentioned before, you know, the CIA has done these pesky little things like arm al-Qaeda.
And you're not blowing the whistle on that, but you're blowing the whistle on a phone call that you heard from someone else rubbed you the wrong way.
By the way, I'm not even saying Donald Trump did nothing wrong on the phone call.
It seemed to me like it was like a little bit of a foul.
Like, yes, it's like, you know, it's like offsides, 10-yard penalty or five-yard penalty.
You know, it's like, eh, probably shouldn't have been so explicit about checking out Joe Biden, but I mean, come on.
You know, like that compared to arming al-Qaeda, which would be like game over, season over.
You're disqualified.
You can never play in this league again.
Seems, you know, slightly different.
One is a crime against the American people.
One is, you know, a little bit shady.
probably politics as usual.
And the truth is that there is no smoking gun.
Like if you actually look through the transcript, there is no smoking gun.
There's no blatant, you do this for me or this money won't be coming in.
There's no blatant, I want, you know, it's like none of that exactly happens.
Now, of course, a lot of the things that, and this kind of gets to why I was talking about how you have to frame these issues, how you have to look at them.
If you don't have any of this framing and you don't understand what the deep state is, and you don't understand, like anybody who's not red-pilled on this shit, who doesn't know anything about the history of the CIA or the FBI or what these organizations have done historically, like what they do.
I mean, the CIA was started as essentially, it was Harry Truman started the CIA after World War II.
Talkspace Therapy Service Promo00:02:26
And the idea was basically that they would do intelligence gathering for the president.
You know, we live in this new world.
There's been two world wars.
There's the threat of communism now or whatever.
And it's like, hey, basically, you're going to put together a fucking report for the president to see what's going on.
Like, what's our best intel?
You know, like what the hell is going on in the world.
That's what they were supposed to be.
And what they've turned into is a secret military unit that starts wars, propagandizes the military into wars, determines policy, spies on congresspeople, and overthrows presidents, evidently, when they want to.
And, you know, maybe even kills a couple.
Or one particularly.
I'll let you figure out which one.
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Hearing Evidence and Mob Tactics00:15:34
Anyway, so, you know, if you know what's going on with that, you have a different perspective than if you're just completely ignorant of that.
Or if you know about that and you're a fucking liar.
So I was listening to Chris Wallace, who's Mike Wallace, the famous journalist's son, hosts Fox News Sunday.
And he was interviewing fucking, what's his name?
I'm blanking on his name, Steve Miller, Trump's, one of Trump's top advisors.
And he's interviewing him on Fox News Sunday.
And he was asking him, and the thing that he kept sticking to, and he's asking is like he can't understand why this is happening.
And I don't trust that he actually doesn't know the answer to this.
But if you don't have any of this framing, any of this groundwork, then I could see why maybe someone would ask this question.
But he goes, you know, the thing that I just don't understand is he keeps saying, he keeps telling the president of Ukraine to contact Rudy Giuliani.
It's like, if he suspects a crime, why wouldn't he go through the State Department?
Why wouldn't he go through the FBI?
Why wouldn't he go through all these?
You know, like, why wouldn't he go through his own government?
And you're like, well, yeah.
If you don't understand that his own government has been trying to unseat him for the last two years, then you might ask that question.
But if you do understand that and you're not a liar, then you'd go, well, obviously he doesn't want to go through the FBI.
Obviously, he doesn't want to go through his own CIA.
He doesn't want to go through the State Department.
So he doesn't know who the fuck he can trust there.
And just by the fact that shit gets leaked so much on him, wouldn't that be evidence that he actually can't trust any of these people?
Because they're not really working for him, even though that's the idea.
And don't get it twisted, the CIA works for the president.
In theory, that's the idea.
So how does nobody have a little bit of a problem with the way the government works?
Where it's like, oh, no, actually, the CIA is spying on Congress, spying on the Senate, and, you know, blowing the whistle on Donald Trump.
So give me a fucking break.
If you weren't on the right side of the Ed Snowden thing, on the Bradley Manning thing, I don't want to hear anything about whistleblower protection from you.
If you were on the right side of that, I'll listen to you.
But if not, get the fuck out of here.
You don't give a shit about whistleblowers.
Don't tell me you do.
But it does seem that the more that's come out, I just think to any normal person who looks at this, it's going to be hard to really convince them that there's a lot of they are there.
I mean, you have, you have, you know, you have Donald Trump talking about how, you know, like basically kind of doing this businessman, kind of aggressive businessman thing, like we do so much for you.
We do so much for you.
What are you going to do for us?
And what he's asking them about, and this gets to the bigger, you know, thing that I was talking about before, is that he's asking them about the origins of the Russian interference and the Russia collusion investigation.
That's what he's asking them a bunch about.
And then he also goes, you know, what was up with that Joe Hunter Biden thing?
Like that, I thought a lot of people thought that fucking stunk.
And why was that prosecutor fired?
Like, what was going on with that?
Now, with the Joe Biden thing, there's basically two possibilities, right?
Here's the binary.
And there's other options within that.
But here's basically the binary.
Either the Ukrainians have evidence that some crime was committed or they don't.
Now, if they don't, and you caught Donald Trump trying to fabricate the fact that they did, like, well, make up some evidence, then you got yourself a huge scandal, okay?
He's trying to make up accusations of wrongdoing against a political opponent.
But none of that's happening.
He's just asking people to look into it.
And if they do have evidence of that, wouldn't it be in all of our interests to know about that?
How could anyone who considers themselves a journalist not want to know about that shit?
That seems to me to be like what the whole journalism thing would be all about.
Yeah.
If there's a scandal, we want to know about it.
So that's more or less, you know, what they actually have.
And, you know, there's been a lot of theories, a lot of speculation that's come out around this.
And, you know, I'm speculating right now, but I do think that maybe, you know, there was something about the origins of the Russia collusion hoax that Donald Trump was trying to get at.
Because you have to ask yourself, why?
Why would the Democrats do this now?
Why would they do it when they admit they had such flimsy evidence, if you can even call it evidence?
Why would they do that?
You know, I heard people saying, speculating that this was the Democrats trying to throw Joe Biden under the bus.
Yeah, I don't buy that for a second.
You know, they were like, well, basically, they knew Joe Biden was going to lose to Donald Trump, so they wanted to end his candidacy early.
That is not what happened here for a number of reasons.
That story just doesn't make any sense to me.
I mean, number one, if you wanted to ruin Joe Biden and you're the Democrats, you could do it in a much less risky way, a much less risky way.
It wouldn't involve going for impeachment and then striking out and possibly handing Trump another huge, you know, victory that wouldn't involve you risking all of your Democrats who are in swing states or in red states.
Like, this would just be too crazy.
I mean, they could do it by cutting funding.
They could do it by sending endorsements over to Elizabeth Warren or whoever else the other candidate was going to be.
They could do it by doing shady DNC shit like they did to Bernie Sanders last time.
Why would they have to come out and do this?
It just makes no sense.
And also, why the hell would they want to throw Joe Biden under the bus?
It doesn't make any sense.
Look, I've been saying forever, I don't think Joe Biden will be the nominee because I think he'll have a tough time coming out of the Democratic primary.
But truthfully speaking, I mean, in terms of the candidates that are declared, the only ones who have, to me, any chance of doing anything against Donald Trump would be like, of the ones who actually have a shot, it would be Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders because they at least have like Joe Biden's kind of like this rough and tumble guy who's kind of like could deal with the ferocity of a Donald Trump maybe.
You know, I don't think he'd win.
I still would put my money on Donald Trump if I had to bet, but he'd have a better chance than Elizabeth Warren.
Much better chance than Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or any of those guys, I think.
And he is polling number one, and he's beating Donald Trump by the most in the polls.
Not to say that that means anything.
These are national polls.
It's very early.
But I don't see any evidence that the Democrats want Pocahontas to run against Donald Trump because they think that's a winnable race, but Joe Biden isn't.
You know, and the fact that Joe Biden gets so many facts and dates and things wrong, he'd have a little bit of cover for that one-on-one with Trump because Trump also gets a lot of shit wrong.
So I just don't, I don't buy at all that this was the Democrats.
This is too much of an act of desperation if their goal was just to hurt Biden, when you could do that in much safer ways.
However, if Donald Trump was about to uncover a conspiracy that implicated a lot of top Democrats, a lot of top Republicans, and a lot of deep state operatives, well, in that case, this might be the way to play it.
That seems to be to me more what I'm thinking about.
But the more that this comes out, the more obvious it is that there is no big there.
Now, I will say one of the things that's been most entertaining to me over the last week or so, a little less than a week, watching this.
And I know for those of you guys, if you have been paying attention to the cable news over the last couple of weeks, then you've heard this too.
But, you know, it's like sometimes these talking points just get disseminated and then everybody runs with it.
Like they say the exact same thing, the exact same language.
Like climate change is an existential threat.
Everybody has to say that.
If you're on the climate change play, it's an existential threat.
Repeat after me.
So the thing that they're saying about Donald Trump was that this was a mob shakedown.
That's what this call with Ukraine was.
It's been repeated over and over.
Like every MSNBC and CNN show is saying this.
They've got some of these YouTube videos up that just show every different anchor repeating this, but it's a mob threat.
This was like Tony Soprano or Michael Corleone, you know.
And basically what that translates to is that we don't have him actually saying anything.
So they go like, ah, you know, it's like, you know, like the mob thing where they're like, yeah, it would be very unfortunate if something were to happen to you.
You know, because basically you're saying we don't actually have him threatening to do anything to you.
Now, fair enough.
I mean, that is possible, but I just find it, you know, amusing, as those who listen to this podcast might imagine, when they start a bunch of the mainstream pundits start going, can you believe that a president would act as a mob boss?
As if they're, you know, it's like I think I've quoted before on the show, but it's my favorite line from The Godfather when Kay or Michael Corleone says to Kay right before they get married and he's joining the family business and he tells her about it.
And he goes, you know, I'm joining my father's business.
And she's like, oh, Michael, you never wanted to be mixed up in this and your father's a horrible man.
And he says, my father's just a very important man, like a president or a senator.
And she says, Michael, do you know how naive you sound?
Presidents and senators don't have people killed.
And he goes, who's being naive now, Kay?
It's a great line.
Great line.
Really gets right down to the heart of it.
The idea that you're surprised that politicians act like mobsters just shows how fucking blue-pilled you are.
Of course they do.
What do you think this whole thing is?
I can't believe he would act like a mobster.
I mean, this is nothing like the very respectable George W. Bush who told Saddam Hussein him and his sons have 24 hours to leave their country before we start dropping bombs on you and all of your people.
That wasn't mob like at all.
You know, when Barack Obama said to one of his aides, I'm very good at killing people.
That wasn't mob like at all.
But this Donald Trump Ukraine thing for the first time ever, it's almost like the state is the mafia.
Anyway, when you really know there's nothing there, there was no better example of this than Adam Schiff.
Adam Schiff, we're going to play this clip.
They had a committee on the whistle or a committee hearing on the whistleblower.
This is the House Intelligence Committee.
And Adam Schiff is the head of the House Intelligence Committee.
Adam Schiff, also, by the way, was the guy who was saying for well over a year and a half that it is a fact that Donald Trump criminally colluded, was involved in a conspiracy with Russians, that he's seen the evidence, but he's just waiting for the Mueller report to be finished.
And then we'll all see the evidence as well.
He said this going into the midterm elections to give the Democrats that bump of, ooh, I don't know.
And listen, by the way, I could understand where people who don't follow this shit carefully, and I have nothing against people who don't follow this shit carefully.
God bless them.
In a better world, none of us would have to.
But I could understand where if you're just, you know, your average Joe six-pack, you know, you live in Pennsylvania or something like that, some random just like guy who's just like, I got to get to work.
I got to do this.
And you go, well, the head of the House Intelligence Committee is telling us that this happened.
And he gets to see classified information we don't get to see.
So he's not just lying.
I mean, he's got to say something.
This is going to come out at some point.
If he's lying, he'll look like an asshole.
And, you know, it did come out and he looks like an asshole, but I guess there's no real consequences for that.
So this was, they were having this, the House Intelligence Committee was having this hearing on the whistleblower.
Of course, the whistleblower is not there.
That's another little piece of information that's really kind of crazy that wouldn't you think, I mean, like, like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, these guys who had real consequences to face, right?
These guys had the balls to like tell you who they were, to show their names, to come out and fucking, you know, like tell you what happened and what they saw.
How could it be?
Like, just as the, you know, like in a court of law, you have a right to face your accuser, but you're saying you get to tell 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump were removing this guy.
And we don't even, like, I mean, we, I didn't vote for him, but those people don't even get to see who the guy is.
He doesn't even have to come forward and tell you what he knows or what.
No, none of that.
All in secrecy.
That's the government for you.
But here's Adam Schiff opening statement at that hearing.
And what is the president's response?
Well, it reads like a classic organized crime shakedown.
Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the president communicates.
We've been very good to your country, very good.
No other country has done as much as we have.
But you know what?
I don't see much reciprocity here.
I hear what you want.
I have a favor I want from you, though.
And I'm going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good.
I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent.
Understand lots of it.
On this and on that, I'm going to put you in touch with people, and not just any people.
I'm going to put you in touch with Attorney General of the United States, my Attorney General Bill Barr.
He's got the whole weight of the American law enforcement behind him.
And I'm going to put you in touch with Rudy.
You're going to love him, trust me.
You know what I'm asking, and so I'm only going to say this a few more times in a few more ways.
And by the way, don't call me again.
I'll call you when you've done what I asked.
This is, in sum and character, what the president was trying to communicate with the president of Ukraine.
It would be funny if it wasn't such a graphic betrayal of the president's oath of office.
All right.
Let's pause it right there.
So that's, here's Adam Schiff.
He actually did this at a congressional hearing.
He just went, here's what he said in essence, and then just made shit up.
Just give this all none of that is in the transcript.
None of it at all.
Now, if that was in the transcript, you might have something here.
But none of it was.
He just goes, you know, this is in essence what he said.
And then he does this weird thing where he's checking his notes throughout the whole thing.
Like he's reading off what, like he prepared some bullshit that's not in the transcript.
Just like you can't even vamp on that.
You can't just roll with like making up horrible shit that he said.
Well, let me just break this down, okay?
Here is, in essence, what Adam Schiff is saying in this testimony here.
Congressman Schiff is saying that he's a pedophile, that he loves eight-year-old little boy, but and that if you don't, if you're not guarding your eight-year-old little boy, he's going to rape your child.
That's what he's saying here.
Hold on, let me check my notes.
He'll rape both of your children.
I apologize.
He'll rape both of your children.
See?
Everybody can play this game if we just make up shit you said and then claim you say it.
Oh, man.
It really was.
That was like one of the most entertaining things to watch for me.
It reads like a mafia shakedown.
This is in essence what he says.
Ben Burgess Rape Allegations00:09:56
This is what he communicated.
Just say whatever you fuck you want to say.
This is what you were communicating.
Of course, there's big problems with this.
The idea that that's what Donald Trump was communicating, it's a stretch.
It's quite a bit of a stretch.
Because look, it kind of reminds me of that New York Times article when they said there's another, you know, sexual assault allegation against Brett Kavanaugh, and they left out the minor little detail that the woman isn't saying that this happened.
Like, that's, you know, like, if there's a rape accusation out there and you go, oh, here's one little, we have this big rape accusation, but here's one little detail.
The chick isn't saying that this guy raped him.
You would probably, if you're like a normal human being, you'd go, oh, well, then, then you have nothing.
I mean, that's, that's really nothing.
If the victim isn't saying they're a victim, then they're not the victim.
There's no victim.
There's no allegation.
There's no nothing.
Like none of this exists anymore.
If you don't have that, that's once you say there's a rape accusation, the base, the most basic assumption is that someone is saying they were raped.
If you don't have that, what do you have?
Well, here's the problem with this accusation that Donald Trump is bullying the president of Ukraine.
President of Ukraine says he wasn't.
He's like, I wasn't pressured at all to do anything.
He said we had a conversation.
I thought it was a great conversation.
They were basically both talking about this president in Ukraine.
He got elected on the platform of cleaning up corruption.
Much like Donald Trump got elected on the platform of draining the swamp.
Now, I don't know what type of job he's doing over there.
I know Donald Trump's doing a fucking shitty job over here, but that's like the idea of what they were both elected on.
And the president of Ukraine was like, yeah, no, we were talking about corruption, cleaning it up.
It was great.
Great conversation.
He said, all these little details where they're like, well, but then Trump withheld military aid months later.
And they're like, yeah, but even according to all of the reports, Ukraine didn't know why they were withholding the money.
And then they ended up getting it.
So like everything's, there's just nothing there.
The pieces don't fit together unless you do what Adam Schiff did there and just start making up shit that nobody said.
This is laughable.
The other thing that I wanted to talk about on today's show that was on my mind was the response to this that I've seen from some self-identifying libertarians.
Now, I did break my rule recently.
I've had a tough time with some of these rules that I set for myself.
And I've done this before.
Do you remember after the Ben Burgess episode at one point, I was like, me and Ben Burgess need to see other people for a little bit and we're not going to.
And then I did a whole episode with Gene Epstein on the Ben Burgess thing.
And I just, you know, sometimes I'm like, but a lot of times when I say that to you guys, I'm really saying it to myself also.
I'm like, I'm not talking about this guy anymore.
But it's almost because I'm trying to convince myself because it's just, you know, it's kind of hard.
So anyway, you know, with Nick Sarwak, I said I wasn't going to mention this guy anymore because I feel like, you know, I handled him fairly soundly.
And then, you know, I went on Tom Wood's show and we discussed him a little bit more because I just kind of, it's impossible.
You know, we did an episode on like the state of the liberty movement and it was kind of impossible to not talk about it.
So I tweeted out recently, which I thought was a fair, a fair take for a libertarian to have on this situation.
So I said, this is my tweet.
I said, the last three presidents slaughtered hundreds of thousands, if not millions of innocent people.
They illegally spied on all U.S. citizens.
They bankrupted the greatest nation in the history of the world.
None of this led to impeachment, but this phone call is the real scandal.
Little bit of sarcasm, kind of my brand.
And I think I've made my point.
I don't really get what any libertarian would look at that and go, hey, you know, there's a, like, like, even if you don't agree with me on everything, go, you know, there's a little bit of a point there.
There's a little bit of a point that there have been such high crimes committed since, say, you know, we could go back a long while.
This has been going on forever.
But let's just say from 2002 to 2019, been some really serious high crimes committed.
And the idea that this is the only thing that's resulted in an impeachment inquiry of all of those, this gray area phone call that at best is a minor foul.
This is what gets you impeached.
I would think just about any libertarian would be like, yeah, I get what you're saying there.
Like, I get what you're talking about.
So Nick Sarwalk tweeted back to me, quote, but what about the other presidents carry that water?
So the implication is that I'm carrying water for Donald Trump by just blaming the other presidents.
Now, I was actually referring to Donald Trump and the two previous presidents.
I was referring to George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.
Perhaps I could have been clearer about that in the tweet when I said the last three presidents, but I'm referring to, yes, the things Donald Trump is still doing.
My point is that he's not getting impeached over killing children in Yemen, but he is getting impeached over this phone call with the Ukraine.
That to me seems a little bit wacky.
Like any libertarian would go, wow, this system of justice doesn't really seem to be working so well.
Okay?
That was my point.
Now I tweeted back.
Now, there's something also about Nick Sarwak, of all people, telling me that I'm carrying water for the president of the United States.
That just kind of, you know, rubbed me the wrong way.
So I tweeted back at him and I said, I understand this can be difficult for a Dick Cheney supporter to hear.
You good?
How many times do you want to lose to me this year?
You know, I know I'm being a little bit of a dick to him, but he's kind of being a dick to me.
So he deserves it.
And, you know, he will continue to lose.
And then, of course, you know, he just gets ratioed and I get, you know, a lot more traction on everything I tweet.
But anyway, that's not the point.
But I did see some people responding like, well, I don't know.
And how exactly should a libertarian feel about this?
And how, you know, somebody said to me, who's a libertarian, who's a fan of the show, who, you know, he said, well, you know, if you had someone like, let's say, Al Capone who's, you know, killed a whole bunch of people, did a lot of terrible things, and they end up getting him on some bullshit, you know, like fucking, what is it, tax evasion or something like that.
But could you make an argument from a libertarian point?
I mean, even remove the tax evasion issue, because we don't really think that should be a crime, but let's say it was like some minor crime.
But let's say you get a guy who is a killer for some minor crime.
Should we still be happy that we got that guy?
And I would just say that, you know, from the libertarian perspective, how should we feel about this?
Well, listen, since basically, just like tax evasion, we think none of this shit, like the calls and the foreign aid, we think none of this shit should exist to begin with.
I don't think there's anything wrong with just looking at it and saying like, well, I don't know.
What do I gain?
What do I gain out of this?
What does liberty gain?
How is this good for any of us?
You know, so many people said to me, they were like, they would say this thing like, God damn, and this just pissed me off.
But they would say, well, if Donald Trump gets impeached for abusing his power, it'll make future presidents less likely to abuse their power because then they'll know you can get impeached from it.
And my response to that would be, no.
If Donald Trump gets impeached and removed for this, it will make future presidents realize you better not cross the CIA or they will fucking get you impeached and removed.
That actually seems to be a much tighter connection than just saying abuse of power, whatever that means.
Now, if Donald Trump were to get impeached for slaughtering babies in Yemen, then yes, that might actually make future presidents a little hesitant to slaughter babies.
Because that's why I don't just want to see him impeached.
I want to see him tried for war crimes and fucking put in prison for the rest of his life or executed after he's found guilty.
That'll send a fucking message.
You want to go murder innocent babies.
You might get killed yourself.
That would be a wonderful deterrent effect for the future.
But just because he's feuding with the CIA, I'm supposed to root for the CIA?
And so what do we gain from that?
What would we gain from Donald Trump being impeached?
Nothing.
What you gain is that every following president, which by the way, immediately will be Mike Pence.
Congratulations, libertarians.
You've got your president, Mike Pence, now.
I guess he won't say as much like, you know, problematic stuff.
So you can, you know, you can be happy, Nick Sarwak.
It's like, okay, so you get Mike Pence as president right away, and every other president following will be incentivized to capitulate even more so to the CIA than the previous ones already have.
I don't get what, what am I supposed to root for there?
What's the positive?
I'm supposed to go along with Nancy Pelosi, this fucking nonsense and pretend that she's raising some relevant point.
I mean, come on.
This is a goddamn joke.
There's no reason I need to celebrate something.
I don't need to be on the same side as the CIA.
So weird how Nick Sarwak always seems to be on the same side as the CIA.
So goddamn strange.
Maybe something could explain that.
I don't know.
I certainly don't have anything.
Murray Rothbard Hate State Matrix00:10:04
You know, there was one other, you know, and I've seen this a little bit.
And look, it's hard for me to get an exact gauge of some of this stuff because my, you know, what I see on social media is mostly, you know, like my followers or people I follow or people kind of in my world.
So I don't know when I say, you know, where do most libertarians line up or how do they feel?
That's why I was interested to see, you know, number one, the vote at the Soho Forum because that is, that, that was a debate that was put on by Reason magazine.
Now a lot of my people came out to it.
I have a lot more people than Nick Sarwak does.
So there's that issue.
But the Oxford style judging does kind of account for that.
So it was interesting to see that I, you know, was able to win that sound.
Like more interesting yet than that was just looking through the comments on the debates.
Because if you look through the comments, it's just, you know, I mean, it's not 10 to 1 is an understatement of how many were on my side compared to Nick's.
So it's like, okay, that's an interesting gauge.
It's not just, you know, people who follow me on Twitter because obviously they're going to tend to be biased in my favor.
But so I saw a lot of people, you know, who were kind of more or less on board with what I've just been laying out for the last hour, like how they feel about this impeachment business.
But I saw some others.
And of course, like Justin Amash and some other people have come out like in favor of this impeachment, which I just, you know, it was like throwing me for a loop.
And I'm like, man, I don't understand how people who are libertarians can feel this way.
And it reminded me of a Murray Rothbard piece that's that's one of my favorite one of my favorite things he ever he ever wrote.
And that's really saying a lot, if you know how much I admire and have been influenced by Murray Rothbard.
And that was this piece.
I've probably mentioned it before on the show, but it's really worth reading.
I really highly recommend it.
It's a short piece.
And it's called, Do You Hate the State?
And what Murray Rothbard argues is basically that there are all of these dividing, you know, these kind of splits amongst, you know, people who support capitalism, laissez-faire, you know, minarchists, anarchists, all this stuff.
And like one of the split would be minarchist versus anarchist, right?
Like people who believe in like, you know, they believe in laissez-faire capitalism, but they think the government should like, you know, write the laws, run the courts, a military, a police, maybe do roads.
And like, there's like several basic services that the government should be.
And then there's people like me who go like, yeah, no, I don't believe we need a monopoly on all of those things.
I think all of them can be left to the market and are like anarchists, anarcho-capitalists.
You know, there's other splits about different issues.
And what Murray Rothbard said was basically, he said, as important as all those distinctions are, and as important as all those debates are, because they all pale in comparison to one central question, which is, do you hate the state?
Yes or no?
And the people who do hate the state are essentially fellow travelers.
And the people who don't are basically, you know, not on the, not on, not with the program.
Like, they're not going to be your allies when it's all said and done.
You know, I've heard people say it.
In some ways, I think it's the same thing stated differently.
But when people say what really matters is whether or not you're red-pilled, like, it's not so much what your ideology is.
It's not really whether you're right-wing or left-wing or libertarian.
It's really whether you're red-pilled or not.
That's really what matters.
And in a lot of ways, I think that's true.
I mean, I'll take like a red-pilled minarchist who hates the state over a blue-pilled anarchist who's, you know, seemingly doesn't any day, any day.
And, you know, in fact, my interactions with Nick Sarwak have never, you know, I've never understood more why Murray Rothbard wanted to go talk to like Pat Buchanan instead of the libertarian party people in the 90s.
I mean, I completely get that more so than I ever did.
I mean, I always got it, but I appreciate it even more now because it's like, what is this?
This is such like sophist nonsense and just accepting every one of the mainstream like statist paradigms in which we need to play.
Like we have to be super concerned with racism and white nationalism rising up and pretend this is a threat compared to like the military industrial complex.
Like what is really a threat to our society here?
I'm not saying white nationalism is good.
I'm against it too.
But like how much do I need to like, what's the, what am I doing other than virtue signaling?
If I come on a podcast and go, hey guys, I've been thinking about it and racism's really bad.
Okay.
What does this actually accomplish?
But, you know, it's like whether you're, yeah, one of the things Murray Rothbard points out in the piece is that like there are these anarcho-capitalists who don't seem to hate the state.
And he points to the example of David Friedman, who basically seems to like, like he's an anarcho-capitalist, but he's basically comes to the conclusion where he's like, well, I think it would be a more effective system of government or a more effective, I shouldn't say government, but a more effective way to organize society would be an anarcho-capitalist society.
That would just work out better.
And it doesn't work out as good with a minarchist system.
And it doesn't work out good with a big government like we have today.
But there's no like real hatred of the state in any of his writings.
It's just kind of like it would work better that way.
Like this works fine, but it could work a little bit better.
And anarchy would be like the best way to make it work.
And there's a real problem with that because while you are correct, you're totally blue-pilled.
Like you don't hate the state.
If you recognize the state for what it is, which is a group of human beings who robs, enslaves, and murders people, I don't get how the normal human reaction is to not hate them.
Like if you truly recognize what the state is, a genocidal machine that is anti-human, anti-civilization, what's the appropriate response to that?
Like if somebody like murdered your child and then you were like, hey, I'd really prefer you don't do that.
This is a very inefficient way to organize society.
Wouldn't that be like not a normal response?
Isn't that not how you're supposed to respond to that situation?
Like I understand you don't want to just react off emotion, right?
You want to blend emotion at times with intellect and rational thought and reasoning and logic and all of that.
At what point, if somebody murdered your child and you went, this is an inefficient way to organize society, would you not go, no, that's a fucking crazy reaction.
Your reaction should be, you want to kill this guy.
Like, it should be like, I hate you.
That's a more appropriate response.
Well, what am I talking about?
So, when the government is starving babies in Yemen to death, what's our reaction supposed to be?
You know, of course, it would be better if we ended the warfare state, but it's like, no, these people are fucking evil.
Now, if you agree with me that these people are evil, that is way more important to me than whether you're an anarchist or not.
You know, there's so many people who, you know, I hear from who listen to the show and really enjoy the show who are like, yeah, I lean libertarian, you know, but I fucking hate all of these things.
And it's like, cool, man.
You're with me.
You're a fellow traveler.
And then there's other people I know who are like anarcho-capitalists who are just like outraged over racism.
And you're kind of like, well, dude, what the fuck, man?
There's a genocide going on.
You're worrying about mean thoughts.
You're worrying about, but some people don't like every group equally and kind of like their group the most.
Like, oh, okay.
Like, whatever.
Maybe they're wrong for thinking that way.
Like, all right, but what the fuck are we doing here, man?
This is such a waste.
You know, it's in The Matrix.
There's that one point where, which, by the way, if you haven't seen the original Matrix, just an incredible movie.
Like, I'm sure most of you have, but it's just the greatest movie ever.
Maybe not the greatest, but it's a really, really good one.
But there's one point where Morpheus says, I believe he says it to Neo when he's breaking it down to him after he gets red-pilled.
And he's like, look, if you look around and you see all these people who are, you know, blue-pilled, I mean, but they haven't taken the red pill yet.
They're in the Matrix.
You look around and you see all these people who are in the Matrix.
He like, the way it works in the movie is that the agent, spoiler alert, the agents can jump into the body of anyone who's in the Matrix.
So he goes, he points out this dynamic, which is really contradictory, but it's the dynamic they live in.
Where he goes, all of these people are the people we're trying to save.
But until we save them, until they're red-pilled, they're our enemy.
Like they're straight up, they're a danger to you.
You got to treat everybody like they're your fucking enemy until they're red-pilled.
Because even though you want to save that person, that's the whole point of this, is to save that person.
That person's a goddamn threat to us.
And if they beat us, we're the only red-pilled people, we're all fucked.
So there's this weird dynamic where it's like, and you almost got to remember, there's a real interesting metaphor there.
People who are not red-pilled on this shit, who don't hate the state, they're your enemy.
Now, you may want to save them.
That's the goal is to fucking save everybody.
But they're not, you know, don't sleep on that and how dangerous they are.
Anyway, just some of the responses that I've seen from libertarians who are just like, you know, if you're upset about this, this Trump, you know, phone call, it's like, you just got to put this shit into perspective.
You got to understand the bigger picture of what's going on here.
And if you're going to tell me, you know, Donald Trump is a bad guy, absolutely.
You know, 100%.
He's a fucking bad guy.
But so is the CIA.
These are real bad guys too.
And to just blindly say, we got to be against Donald Trump and we got to march right in line with the CIA.
That shit's not going to work with me.
That shit's not going to work with me.
Now, by the way, I never do this.
But just because I was planning on talking about this already today.
Anti-War and Anti-Fed Stance00:14:12
And I happened to get, you know, tagged in this post on Facebook.
And I very rarely would take something like this to the show, but it was right on topic of what I was already planning on talking about.
And it was a post from this group, Leading Liberty, a Facebook group.
And then it got shared by this group, Veterans for Liberty.
So those are the groups.
The group that made this post was Leading Liberty.
The group that shared it was Veterans for Liberty.
And this is the post.
It's a long one.
Maybe I won't read the entire thing, but here's the gist of it, okay?
And this was posted yesterday.
Beware the libertarian to alt-right pipeline.
Friends don't let friends drift into white nationalism or alt-right populism.
Learn the warning signs of when someone might have been influenced by pipeline propaganda.
PP.
One.
Do they constantly blame everything on social justice warriors, liberals, progressives, or some other nebulous and ill-defined enemy?
Two, do they reject most interpretations of libertarianism as invalid and assert that the real libertarians don't care about minorities or social issues?
Three, do they talk about race wars, race-based nationalism, white genocide, race mixing, race realism, racial IQ scores, immigration as a socialist invasion, RK selection theory, or other fringe views on race?
Do they talk about the LGBT agenda, demonized gender and sexual minorities?
It's a long list like this.
Do they defend discrimination against minorities?
Do they cite QAnon conspiracy theories?
Do they revel in making posts that piss off anyone with social tolerance just so they can yell triggered?
And it's this long list of just like this libertarian to alt-right pipeline.
You know, none of it, of course, you know, the irony in this, and I actually thought this was satire when I first saw this, or I wasn't exactly sure, but I thought it probably was.
And the funny thing is one of the things is, do they reject, you know, other interpretations of libertarianism?
And it's like, well, that's actually what you're doing, right?
You're objecting to other libertarians.
And what is it?
Look, man, I have a fairly straightforward definition of libertarianism.
I think it's the non-aggression principle and respect for private property rights.
Now, I'm not saying anyone else who doesn't fit that exactly isn't a libertarian.
But if somebody wants to, you know, talk about race, it's like, all right, well, race seems to be pretty important to a whole lot of people in this country.
Well, only the left is allowed to talk about race.
Like, okay, they have a right to talk about that as long as they're not, you know, initiating violence on anyone.
They're perfectly good libertarian as far as I'm concerned.
If you want to say they blame everything on social justice warriors, liberals, progressives, I mean, yeah, okay, not everything should be blamed on them, but a whole lot should.
I don't know.
If you're a libertarian, you tell me social justice warriors, liberals, and progressives, they're not so great, right?
They're kind of all for big government and, you know, like reorganizing every inch of, you know, social interaction.
Okay.
They talk about the LGBT agenda, and that's in quotes.
Well, yeah, they have an agenda.
They'll be the first ones to tell you they have an agenda.
The LGBTQ whatever activists will be the first ones to say we have an agenda.
And by the way, most of it ain't for liberty.
Have you actually heard anybody who's involved in one of these hot button issues with the LGBTQ?
Like anyone.
All of the people who are like, I don't know, like whatever it was, Joe Rogan got a ton of shit because he said he doesn't think people who were men five minutes ago should be able to go beat up women in a cage.
That was his radical position.
Gavin got in trouble for like, I don't know, talking about that.
Owen Benjamin got in trouble for saying he shouldn't be giving hormones to five-year-olds or whatever.
Have you ever, and I want you to honestly say this, because maybe there's someone I don't know about.
Have any of you ever heard of somebody like a figure with a lot of followers at a big platform, anyone like that, who is saying, I don't think men should have the right to transition to being a woman?
I don't think they should have a right to have gender reassignment surgery.
I think there should be laws against gender reassignment surgery.
I think there should be laws against calling yourself a different gender than you are.
Because I've never heard that.
Have you ever heard anyone say that?
Because that's the only thing libertarians would care about.
Like, really, that's the only thing that would be a violation of libertarianism.
Okay?
What people are saying is like, I don't want you pushing this on children.
You're saying is, you can't tell me that I have to now accept you as a woman.
All of that to me is completely consistent with libertarianism.
So I don't know what your problem is.
So anyway, a guy that I know who I think I've met once or twice at the stand, certainly at least once or twice at the stand, this guy, Rob, tagged me in it and he said, you might want to consider this as an option, Dave Smith.
And I responded, I was like, I can't tell if this is parody, but it's hilarious, whether it is or isn't.
This is just ridiculous.
And we went back and forth a little bit.
And then Leaning Liberty commented.
The people who made this post to begin with, they commented on this and they said, Dave, I enjoy your opening acts for the Soho Forum, but I also think you're unwittingly part of a counterproductive faction within the liberty movement that needlessly demonizes the party mechanism, frequently only cares about right-wing issues, and has no expectations that libertarians should hold specific social stances.
That is quite a sentence.
I'm going to have to repeat that one more time because that was really something.
I enjoy your opening act at the Soho Forum, Dave, but I also think you're unwittingly part of a counterproductive faction within the liberty movement that needlessly demonizes the party mechanisms, frequently only cares about right-wing issues, and has no expectation that libertarians should hold any specific social stances.
Well, holy shit.
Number one, I guess I would say, I'm not unwittingly a part of anything.
I know exactly what I'm doing.
So if you think there's something evil that I'm getting sucked into, let me tell you something.
It's worse than you think.
I'm not unwittingly being sucked into anything.
I know exactly what I'm fucking doing.
And as far as the factions that I align myself with, who the fuck are you talking about?
Ron Paul, Tom Woods, the Mises Institute?
People who are the most hardcore supporters of libertarianism being property rights and the non-aggression principle.
Then yes.
And as far as the stuff with the party, it's like, I don't think I'm needlessly demonizing the party.
In fact, I joined the party as soon as I saw one viable option.
That was the Mises caucus.
I was like, I'm in.
I was quite happy to be involved in the party.
I'm a dues-paying member of the Libertarian Party.
What I did demonize, and I didn't think it was needless, was putting a lobbyist for Raytheon, who's a war hawk, as the vice presidential nomination.
And, you know, the presidential nomination being a fucking intellectual, lightweight pothead who can't remember names and dates and embarrassed the entire movement.
That I did think was not needless.
So I criticized that.
Okay.
Continuing on in the comment.
Sarwak pressed you on what you require out of a presidential candidate and you said, quote, anti-war and anti-Fed.
These are both good economic positions to hold, sure.
But what if the candidate who holds these positions is a racist who wants to make the USA into an ethno-state?
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Let me just break that down for a second.
So first of all, Nick Sarwak pressed you on what you require out of a presidential candidate and you said anti-war, anti-Fed.
That's right.
Now, I did not say I would support someone who is anti-war, anti-Fed, even if they were horrible on everything else.
I said, at a minimum, you need to be these two things for me to consider supporting you.
Okay?
So it's not like if you were anti-war, anti-Fed, pro-slavery, I'm going to vote for that guy.
I'm just saying you have to be good on these two things.
Now, then he says, these are both good economic positions to hold.
Sure.
Okay.
You're saying being anti-war is a good economic position to hold?
I mean, yes, it is good economics to not waste trillions of dollars on war, but anybody who's ever listened to my show before and heard me talk about wars, which I do quite a bit, it's never really what I lead with is like, this just costs money.
I mean, starving these babies to death costs money.
This is bad economic policy.
No, it's the genocide part that I don't like.
It's the slaughtering innocent children and the men and women too, you know?
That's all like pretty bad.
That's what I don't like.
Destroying entire nations, millions of people dead.
And also, it costs trillions of dollars.
So that is pretty bad too, you know?
But to just dismiss being anti-war is a good social position.
And then to say, but what if a white nationalist, or I'm sorry, it says, but what if there was somebody who held those positions, but he was a racist who wanted to turn the USA into an ethnostate?
Is that not more disqualifying than, say, being Fed neutral?
If so, why didn't it come to mind on the debate stage?
Wow.
Why didn't it come to mind that somebody could become the presidential candidate running on the platform of I want to turn America into a white ethnostate?
I don't know.
I wonder why that didn't pop into my mind.
I also, you know, like I never mentioned that there could be someone who's anti-Fed, anti-war, who wants to put nuclear waste in all of the drinking water.
Like, why didn't that come to my mind?
What are you, pro-nuclear waste in the drinking water?
Because this is a made-up, non-existent problem.
Like, what do you say?
What do you mean someone won the nomination of a party on the platform that I'm going to turn America into an ethnostate?
How are they going to do that?
How are they going to turn America?
Are you saying they're going to round up and deport every minority in the country?
It's physically literally impossible to do.
I mean, you could maybe try to grab Montana and get the non-white people out of there, but the entire United States of America?
What is that?
What are we talking about?
Over 100 million people that you're going to round up.
Yes, I would be against that person.
Do I, the point is, who the fuck even needs to point that out?
What a waste of time.
You know why I was talking about being anti-war and anti-Fed?
Because the military industrial complex and the Federal Reserve actually exist.
They're not fantasies in my mind.
You know, I'm sorry, man, but if you're talking about, and he goes on in the comment, it keeps going.
I can't even read anymore, but it goes on to talk about tiki torch guys and shit like this.
Listen, let me just say this.
If you're a libertarian and you wanted to condemn Charlottesville after Charlottesville, you know, the next week after Charlottesville, the first one in 2017.
Okay, I get it.
That's reasonable.
Yeah, there's people walking around with swastika signs, shouting, you know, like all this crazy shit.
Okay, you want to condemn them?
Fine.
I have no problem with that.
But the fact that this is, we're pretending that this is still a relevant thing.
When what are these white ethnostate people?
Like, they're people on podcasts making their arguments.
They're people shit posting and posting memes and like, oh, okay, fine.
But why is it that you're going after them so much?
I mean, compare, just compare.
Forget like the things that I was going after.
Like, I was going after the military-industrial complex and the Federal Reserve, you know, these things that have destroyed just countless lives and enriched like some really evil people in the process.
How about this?
What the fuck are you doing talking about the fucking alt-right when there's Antifa out there?
Are you out of your mind?
That fucking Antifa, by the way, Dave Rubin, who I met the other day at the Greg Gutfeld show, very nice guy.
Dave Rubin just had an event shut down where people were fucking assaulted, or maybe he went through with the event, but the whole thing got fucked up.
They're literally like fucking blocking.
There's that one video of an old woman in a walker, and they get in front of her and block her.
They go out to every event where people who are quasi-libertarian will try to speak.
But you don't want to talk about them?
The open communists?
Oh, no, we still have to go back to this thing that had one rally years ago.
Oh, why did I not get up at the debate and talk about the idea of a candidate turning the country into an ethnostate?
I guess the reason I didn't bring that up is because the threat is just in your head.
Now, what I said was that a candidate at minimum, the bare minimum, is you have to be anti-war, anti-Fed.
Yes, that's not to say that there's not any other horrible policy that would be disqualifying.
So that's that.
Do I really need to spell this out for you people?
Like, are you red-pilled about the shit that's actually going on in the world?
Because if not, it's like, here, let me walk your hand through this.
Racism is bad.
Okay?
Here, you've got me on record saying it.
Racism is bad.
Thinking not nice things about people is bad.
Saying not nice things to people is a little bit worse.
Doing not nice things to people is worse than that.
War is worse than all of that by about 100,000 times.
Okay?
You got that?
So that's why I focus on the war stuff.
God damn, some of these libertarians are frustrating.
Get your goddamn shit together so I can just be a part of the liberty movement and not have to argue with you people.
I really don't take any pleasure in doing it.
I take a little bit of pleasure in doing it, but not that much.
All right.
That's the episode for today.
Hope Robbie Bernstein's AIDS clears up.
He'll be back on the podcast this week.
If so, if not, that might have been the last time we ever saw him.