Dave Smith critiques government overreach and mass surveillance while dismantling the climate change narrative, arguing activists ignore whether proposed solutions are worth the cost of eliminating fossil fuels. He mocks Greta Thunberg's tactics and dismisses Trump's impeachment as a political charade lacking a smoking gun, noting its failure to resonate with voters focused on domestic deficits. Smith analyzes the Democratic primary, observing Elizabeth Warren's momentum has died and Pete Buttigieg polls poorly, leaving Joe Biden as the default nominee despite his age and cognitive lapses. Ultimately, the episode suggests that both climate activism and political theater distract from substantive policy issues like economic stability and genuine free speech. [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 Problem00:01:50
Fill her up!
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith, the most consistent motherfucker you know, and I'm joined by the great king of the caulks, Robbie the Fire Barnstein.
Good to sit down with you again.
It's nice to be back, and I like that you made some headway for the Liberty movement, even in my absence.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I'm Michael Heiss.
He's doing good work.
Well, thank you for allowing him to come on.
That's really, really all the thanks is owed to you for allowing me.
And he was very grateful for the opportunity.
He represents well, and he's out there doing the day-to-day grind.
And I got nothing but love and respect for his cause and what he's doing for us.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
He was very grateful to be delegated the authority to come on the show.
And yeah, he's great.
I love Michael Heiss.
And he's a real, real smart guy, really passionate, good dude.
So yeah, go support the Mecaws.
And of course, you'll be supporting Robbie the Fire indirectly when you support them.
Yeah, so it's good to see you back.
We did a long episode of guests, a long week of guests, I should say.
And it's good to sit down with you again.
See you guys to be back.
Me and you just had a nice jewy conversation about how much we hate the heat.
That is really literally what we were doing before this started.
GDP vs Military Spending00:09:47
It's too warm in here.
Well, I hate, dude, I fucking hate sleeping with heat on and waking up all dry.
Our noses are too big.
It just dries out all the insides.
It's like we spent fucking 40 years in the desert and that's enough time in dry heat.
And I don't like it anymore.
I got two humidifiers going in my bedroom and it's still fucking wake up, chugging water.
And something specific to the New York City indoor apartment building heat.
Coming off those hot those radiators because it's either cold or just like, what the fuck is this?
Why is this so hot?
Because all the buildings in New York City are old as shit.
And they're all like fucking, we all live in these pre-war buildings.
It's like whoever was fucking, who was building my fucking heating system was like, you know, saying like, Wilson, better keep us out of the war while they were doing it.
And that just doesn't make for a good heating system.
And he, he should have kept us out of that war.
It was a disaster.
Ruined the last hundred years by getting involved in a war we didn't belong in.
Okay.
Anyway, yeah, the heat.
That was crazy.
Hey, so I got, okay, just a few random things because nothing in the news was that fucking that interesting this week, although there's a few things to talk about.
But I got into a little bit of a like Twitter, a Twitter scuffle with a couple of blue check marks the other day.
And it was something that I thought was interesting.
I thought you might actually find this interesting.
But so it starts, I got into it with one of the guys was it's these people who have fucking blue check marks.
I don't even fucking know.
One of the guys was Joe Borelli, who's a GOP candidate for New York City public advocate and a contributor at The Hill.
And the other guy, and he just fucking jumped, they both just kind of jumped in on me fucking talking about other shit.
But Kurt Kurt Schlitcher, who's, I guess, a senior columnist at townhall.com and a lawyer and a military guy as well.
I guess he was a colonel in the army.
And so what I was talking about was I was responding to this other tweet by Nolan Smith, who has basically showed a graph of military spending as a percentage of GDP since the 50s.
And military spending has been declining, you know, with some upticks, but then has been declining overall as a percentage of GDP since the 50s.
And I...
Since the 50s, haven't they removed some stuff from what they like call GDP?
Like, wasn't energy taken out?
Well, no, you're thinking CPI.
But GDP is like the gross domestic product.
And it's a very...
Yeah, maybe a little.
Those donuts will come back for you.
Yeah, they sure will.
Second round of deliciousness.
Yeah.
Oh, that's gross.
All right.
Anyway, but so the fucking, yeah, it's bad.
Oh, it's this side.
That's the problem.
There we go.
Yeah, that's the problem.
Is that when you fucking look in the camera, you see it on the other side.
Oh, there we go.
Sorry.
Had half a chocolate donut before starting.
It wasn't really necessary to say half, but just so you guys don't judge me.
It was only half.
Rob, you're a fucking salad and fucking...
I'm turning things around, man.
I'm getting a little too fat.
So we got to bring it back into the new year so that that way once January 1st comes around, you know, I can go back to eating cake.
I think that's not what you're supposed to do.
I think you're supposed to make a resolution and then change it in the new year and then never actually keep it.
I come from a long line of yo-yo dieters.
I like to go between 155 and 200 pounds.
My dad, he's much better than me.
He goes between like...
Between 155 and 200?
You're the GSP of just making it of having different sized hits at any given month.
Yes.
So we're like in the mid-range.
I got to pull it back down.
So we're going tea and salad for a little bit.
Rob's got to fight it lightweight coming up.
He's got to get down there.
All right.
I hear you.
Okay.
So anyway, so I just jumped.
I was just saying that it's an incredibly misleading way to look at our military spending or defense spending as they call it to look at it as a percentage of GDP.
Now, a lot of other people were making the point, which is a fair point as well, that what they say is official defense in quote defense spending, which is such a ridiculous, the fucking global empire.
Like we spend money on defense, as if like, you know, fucking the money is spent on like repelling invaders or something like that.
It's, you know, offense much more so.
But that that budget doesn't actually account for everything we spend on the empire, everything we spend on the military.
I mean, they don't count things like the VA, they don't count the secret services, the deep state, the CIA, the Pentagon, like all these different, oh, the Pentagon they do, but they don't count, you know, lots of other different areas that basically you would include in military spending.
But even regardless of that, to measure military spending as a percentage of GDP is just, it's stupid.
I mean, first off, I think GDP is like a bullshit number to begin with.
The way they measure it, government spending increases GDP.
So military spending itself is increasing the GDP.
Now, they look for people like for anybody who's not a socialist, you would think they would look at government spending as a negative to the overall economy.
But this is, by the way, this is part of the reason why the Soviet Union had all of these different economic models that said they were doing really good.
Even though people were starving and they were like, you know, even like a decade before the fucking system collapsed, they had all of these models that went, look, we're going to overtake the Americans in the next, you know, 20 years because of this, you know, calculation or whatever.
But so GDP is a bullshit number to begin with.
I don't like it at all.
But in addition to that, to measure military spending as a percentage of the economy is just ridiculous.
Like, why would you look at it that way?
You should just measure whether we're spending more or less on the military.
Like, it's like, so the point that I made was I said, this is a misleading way to measure military spending.
So if you're measuring it against the economy, I said, so let's say we spent the exact same amount on the military next year as we did this year, but the economy grew.
Would you go, wow, the military spending has gone down because we have a new iPhone?
You know, like, if there's some like innovation in the economy that increases the size of the economy, does that mean we got to bomb a few more countries to stay even?
Or we have to, you know, it's like as if you went, I'm tying, you know, what I spend on security of my home to my income.
So your income goes up the next year and you go, well, I guess we need another security system.
Otherwise, our security is going down.
It's like, well, no, it's staying constant.
Like if you had like an alarm system for your apartment and then you get a raise.
So instead of making $100,000 a year, you're making $120,000 a year.
Would you go, man, my security has been going way down since then?
It's like, no, it's exactly the same.
Who cares what percentage of the economy it is?
By the way, so two separate things.
It's a bullshit way to measure the economy, but it's also like, why would you even measure it this way?
Why would that even mean anything?
But this is, it's so misleading.
So they can go like, oh, well, really, military spending isn't out of control because it's a smaller percentage of the economy.
Like, what if, so what, like, when the fucking, you know, when the personal computer took off, you know, like in the 80s or I guess 90s, when people started really getting like computers at home and this like grew the economy, that means we have to increase military spending.
So I guess the way they're looking at it is that they like to view debt to GDP ratios in terms of recognizing whether or not a country is solvent.
Right.
Or basically, I mean, that's like the metric is what percentage of, what's your debt to GDP ratio.
So I guess they're saying that as long as we're not like, so if you take that view, hey, government spending has to be within a level of their GDP.
So if defense spending is not at a higher level than it was then, we're not really allocating more of what we're willing to take on as debt.
Right.
Yeah.
I think that's what I'm saying.
But even that, I think, is kind of bullshit.
And it doesn't, look, maybe the difference between just debt spending and the GDP in general is that you're almost looking at like, what will tank this system?
Like, what can this economy not afford?
But if you're just looking at military spending and you're trying to get a picture of like whether or not the military spending has is changing over this period of time, the fact that the economy is growing, just because we could, let's just say for whatever reason, someone comes up with some crazy invention and it makes us all five times richer than we are.
And so because we can sustain it now, the military spending goes up five times because they're just taxing people more, but we're all so much richer that we're willing to put up with it, whatever, right?
Sleep Number Bed Promo00:02:44
Okay, fine.
Maybe that means that it won't tank the economy any sooner because the economy's grown.
Would you then go?
Well, militarism hasn't really increased.
It's like, well, no, those are two completely different questions.
Obviously, the size of the military has increased drastically.
And if you're ignoring that, you're missing a pretty big story here, which is like, maybe, I don't know, maybe the fucking economic invention or had to do with farming or something like that.
You're like, just because we farm more efficiently doesn't mean we should spend more money on bombs.
There's like, why would we tie it to this?
Anyway, then this other fucking guy, Kurt Schlitch, whatever his name is, tweeted what an odd tweet.
And he started getting ratioed pretty bad.
So I enjoyed that.
All right.
Meaning, everyone was agreeing with me.
I don't know.
It's kind of a petty thing to start the podcast off with, but I don't really have that much to say.
No, no, no, celebrate being right, man.
That's what life's about: going, hey, man, you were right.
And you're like, fuck yeah.
You see, I'm smarter than those other people.
Yeah.
And I'm not going to go through everything I was right on, like the war in Syria or the war in Yemen or the Russia collusion hoax or what I'm predicting right now with this impeachment stuff.
I'm not saying, I don't have to go through them.
I don't have to let you know that I, okay, I am Garth Room.
But the point is, that shit is fucking retarded.
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Comedians and Censorship00:14:56
All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, so I thought maybe I would talk a little bit about that panel that I was on last week because I never got a chance.
We had a week full of guests and I was going to maybe put out a video, but you know, to be completely honest, it was just, it was Thanksgiving week.
You had turkey to eat.
I had turkey to eat.
I'd spend some quality time with my wife and daughter, so never got a chance to make that.
So I figured maybe we'd talk a little bit about it right now.
I don't know if you if you saw any of it, but you did.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Enjoy it.
Did you enjoy it?
The moderator stunk.
Can I just be honest, right?
What was his first question?
Was just snooze fest right away.
It was so boring.
College essay, whatever question.
The one thing I really loved through the whole thing was that Liz, what's her name?
Weinstead or something.
She's just looking at you the whole time with this face of, I know I don't like this guy, but I'm not sure how I can argue with him.
Well, and so that was priceless to me.
That was kind of like what was going on, you know.
Yeah.
Maybe I'm maybe I'm being a dick, but I really did think.
So the panel was, it was Liz Winstead or Weinstead.
She's the like creator of the original daily show before Jon Stewart came on board.
Then it was fucking, who else was on it?
David Cross.
David Cross is such a weirdo because I think the increasingly poor decisions of Tar and Margaret, one of the funniest shows ever made.
Also, Arrested Development was hilarious, but as a dude, I didn't even want to meet the guy.
Like, what a comedic talent and what a douche at the same time.
I'll tell you, I was a huge, huge fan of Mr. Show back in the day, and I love, I really liked the original Arrested Development.
I never really watched it when it came when it came back, but I loved the original, the, the, the original one.
And so it was disappointing.
I'll also say this about David Cross, and I fall into this category a lot.
I talk above my pay grade all the time.
Sure.
But sometimes I hear other comedians talk on topics, and I just wonder, what have you read?
Like, how are you this opinionated?
Well, you've at least put some things in the sky, man.
I mean, it's like, Jesus Christ.
And I don't talk about topics I don't know anything about, but sometimes these people, they state opinions.
They're so, I'm just like, I'd love to know where did you come up with this?
What research have you done prior to asserting this as being absolute truth?
Right.
Well, that's the, so it was Elaine Bouger, who's like an 80s comic, who I liked, you know, like back in the day.
She's funny.
Felonious Monk, who I had on the podcast back in the day, was, I believe he was a contributor on the Larry Will Wilmore show.
And yeah, that was the panel.
And me.
And it was like a panel about political satire and stuff like that.
And I don't know.
I knew it was kind of going to suck before I went.
Like when my agent got me the gig and he wanted me to do it.
So I was like, oh, you know, fine.
I'll, you know, it's like, whatever.
There's like some big name comedians in it.
And it's kind of like a thing that they wanted me to do.
So I, you know, I agreed to it.
But I knew right away, like, this is going to suck.
But I got to say, going in, and this is what I was saying.
Maybe I sound like a dick saying this, but I was like, I was just like, how boring would this be if I wasn't here?
Like, I'm here and it's still pretty boring, but I'm the only one on this stage who's not like, you couldn't easily predict what I was going to say before I said it.
Like, it's just, at least to me, that's, that's kind of how I felt about the thing.
Maybe I'm, in fact, I'm sure I am a little bit biased.
But I just, I really value interesting people.
I've always felt that way.
And it really like breaks my heart to see like comedians who are just kind of saying the same generic.
Isn't the role of the comedian, if nothing else, to be unique, to be a little bit different, to not say the exact same thing that you would have guessed they were going to say?
And, you know, like, this is why I like whoever.
Like, whether it's left, right, whatever your politics are, there's always just people who I've just kind of like, I'm interested in interested to talk to, interested to read or listen to.
It's like someone who's going to say something interesting, you know?
That's that Noam Chomsky, you know, super lefty, but like really interesting guy.
It's like different takes on things.
And you, whether, whether or not, you know, I don't know.
It just, it was, I just found the whole thing fucking boring.
And then it kind of pissed me off.
Like different parts of it bugged me.
You know, there was like the thing that really got me that like fucking irked me and got under my skin was when they cut me off at the end when I was like going at the audience and stuff.
And you're like, well, at least let me get my thing off and then end the show.
Does it really matter if we're 30 seconds over what we were supposed to be?
And it was just kind of getting interesting at the end.
And what happened was I said, I mean, I was literally getting heckled from the crowd because I said Trump got elected at one point.
And some, you know, woman was like, he wasn't elected.
And I was like, okay.
I mean, like, what are you saying?
That he lost the popular vote?
Like, do you think I'm not aware of this?
And then at one point I said, I think Trump is more or less a con artist.
And they were like, more or less.
And the crowd like reacted to that.
Like, he was like, oh, I'm sorry.
Is that not, is that not enough?
Oh, did it, did it smell like I don't agree with you 100%?
Oh, my God.
You can't even hear what someone has to say.
So that kind of bugged me.
But the thing that bugged me the most was the interaction that I had with David Cross, and especially as somebody who like I respect a lot of his work.
And it was when he was arguing against the freedom of speech and pro and nakedly pro-censorship.
Like that was very clearly what he was arguing for.
And there's something about it.
It's literally my pinned tweet that's been pinned way before this fucking thing.
But I say, there's no one I hold in lower regard than comedians who even suggest that they're not for freedom of speech, not for freedom of expression, even suggest that people should be censored if they have offensive views.
I mean, how the fuck could you take that position if you're a comedian?
And excuse me.
And I was thinking about it a bit more since then.
And really, what it is, is that the left is so confident that they're winning.
And they're so confident that the power is on their side.
And they'll never say that because as I've talked about before on the show, left-wing people in general, they have this complex where they have to believe that they're the counterculture.
It comes out of like something of like the 60s or something like that, but they're like truth to power, hold it to the man, don't trust anyone over 30.
And the funny thing is that now it's like these, these guys who are like in their 50s still have this don't trust anyone over 30s attitude.
And you have to point out to them, it's like, you're the one.
You're the over 30 guy.
By the way, don't trust anyone over 30 is like the dumbest thing that's ever been fucking said.
Like, don't listen to anyone under 30.
Okay.
But I was so much dumber.
Like, look at those fucking interns.
That's what a 20-year-old looks like.
Yeah.
Are you out of your mind?
I'm not going to ask you for anything.
You want to take your social cues from fucking them?
You want to start getting wisdom from 20-year-olds?
I wouldn't even.
I'd say maybe listen to people over 30.
I wouldn't even ask that kid where I can meet other 20-year-olds and get drugs.
I wouldn't.
Well, that's actually, he's, he'll tell you later.
But so that, I don't know, there's something, but that's, that's like what I was thinking about when I noticed, and they won't acknowledge this, but this is the fucking truth, is that the only way you're really comfortable advocating for censorship from the powerful is that you're very confident that your views aren't going to be the ones that are censored.
Because if you're even a little bit, you know, like if it's even in your mind that maybe that could, that, you know, iron fist could turn around on you, then usually you're pretty quick to go, no, no, okay, all right, let's not, you know what I mean?
Like, let's, let's not start shooting at each other.
Like, let's not play Russian roulette with the two of us.
But if I'm holding the gun and you start going, hey, we shouldn't shoot each other, you're like, eh, you know what?
I'm holding the gun, so I'm okay with shooting at people.
But that's the truth.
Because they're talking about, you know, it's like when people on the left talk about banning offensive speech, which, by the way, if you want to watch it, someone put it up on YouTube.
You can probably find it if you dig long enough for it.
But if you're talking about banning offensive speech, it's like, well, I mean, what are we talking about?
Then after, you know, this talk about banning offensive speech, you know, Liz Weinstead goes on to talk about how she's like, runs this like pro-abortion group.
And you're like, okay, well, you do realize that there's a lot of people, like tens of millions of people in this country, probably something like 35, 40% of the country who thinks that's pretty offensive.
And like very passionately, like, you know, like you're advocating killing babies.
We think that's offensive.
Do you, if you were at all concerned that that would be banned, you wouldn't be advocating they ban speech.
I mean, I like go through Mr. Show and arrested development.
I'm sure you can find a lot of stuff that a lot of people have considered offensive.
And but David Cross knows that's not what's going to get banned.
He knows that's not what's going to get banned.
What's going to get banned?
Fucking right-wing dissidents.
So what interest do we have?
If you're on the left and you have arguments that you haven't put a lot of thought into and can't really defend against like a skillful, you know, opponent.
So then, of course, yeah, let's ban them.
That works way better.
But I just, I thought it would be in anyone's, to me, a comedian being against free speech, it's like a podcaster being against free speech or a writer being against free speech.
It's like, come on, man.
This is your lifeblood.
Like, this is what you require in order to do what you do.
How could you ever not be for this?
And comedians should know better than anybody that it's like, in order to really be funny, like a prerequisite for that is I have to be able to think.
I have to be able to say whatever I want to say.
Nobody can be funny if you're like, oh, but these are the shackles we're going to put on you.
Like you have to stay confined in this space.
And I always would have thought like if there's any redeemable quality of left-wing comedians, you know, I'm saying like this from before the last five years.
If there's any redeeming quality of left-wing comedians, it's that they would be for free speech.
And so it's just, I don't know, it just like hurts me.
And to borrow their language, it triggers me.
It triggers and offends me when comedians are arguing for censorship.
And the nerve of some of these fucking people, and I guess Elaine Bouger was a little bit better on this issue.
Like some of them weren't so bad.
David Cross has blatantly said he was like, now that whole freedom of speech thing was good before the internet, but now we got the internet, so we can't have that.
Isn't that also wild to hear from a person who's not like Christian?
Like if you were a Brian Regan style comedian and also went to church every weekend, I could somewhat get that perspective.
But that's the point right there.
You just nailed it right on the head.
But he does go to church every weekend.
It's just the church of the left.
But you're right.
You're absolutely right.
Yes, this is something in your mind that should be coming from someone who doesn't really offend anybody and is like a good Christian.
That's who should be saying, oh, I don't want to hear the curse words or I don't want to hear this, you know, this like.
Or we got to elevate all of society.
There should be some sort of a purity type aspect.
Yes.
And how am I supposed to obviously everyone wants to hear this dirty, filthy sex talk?
I'm trying to elevate the art form.
So we need someone else to come in as the judge and go, hey, this is a real art form.
And so you can't be talking all that filth and diarrhea stuff because we're going to hold ourselves to a standard.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it was a funny moment because you said you watched the thing and I thought there was something kind of interesting about this.
Was uh, so at one point, he said, you know, something about like people telling lies.
And I was like, yeah, but then that leads to the question, who determines what the truth is?
Because it's like, how does this actually play out?
Are we going to have like a council on truth?
A truth department.
Right.
Like who determines what the truth is?
And he goes, he goes, I can.
I know what the truth is.
And that got some claps or laughs from the crowd.
And then I said, I said, yeah, well, I don't trust you to be our overlord.
And I don't trust any government to be our overlord either.
And I should have said, if I was being smart, because you watch back these things, you realize what you should have said.
I should have been a little bit more focused on the Hortonian law of attacking the left from the left.
So what I should have said is, I don't trust any government or corporation because they love that word, corporation.
So instead of talking about, you know, Google or Facebook or Twitter, just say corporation, and that gets the left on you.
Anyway, that was a fuck up on my part.
But I said, I don't trust.
And that got an applause from the crowd.
And there was something interesting about it where it was a mix of like some young people.
But it's the Paley Center.
It's kind of this stuffy thing.
So it was like a lot of people like in their 60s.
So what you were dealing with there was like 60s, you know, age, 60-year-olds who are liberals.
And when I started arguing for free speech, they just kind of inherently were on my side.
Now, they weren't on my side when I wasn't anti-Trump enough or whatever the other shit was.
But there was something that I thought was interesting about it when I started going like, yeah, you can't censor free speech.
You have to allow, you know, I said like beat, you know, beat speech with better speech.
And then David Cross, there's actually a pretty funny moment, but the cognitive dissonance, I don't know.
But so I said, beat, I was like, if you disagree with something, you have to beat speech with better speech.
And David Cross said, I disagree, which I just thought was a really funny moment.
You're just kind of like, right.
See?
So you disagree.
So right there, you're trying to battle my speech with other speech.
But you're not trying to get me kicked off the stage for saying that, right?
So doesn't that kind of indicate that there's some, you know, presupposed agreement with this idea?
But anyway, so the crowd, when you start, if there's liberals who are like in their 60s and you start saying, I'm for free speech, beat, you know, sunlight's the best disinfectant or anything like along those lines, they kind of inherently, like almost instinctively start clapping because in their mind, in their identity, they're kind of like, well, that's what we're supposed to believe.
That's not, that's not supposed to be, no, that's a right-wing talking point.
That's like, that's our thing.
Tobacco Company Damages00:09:29
We're for that.
And it's interesting to watch that because it's actually a younger generation who are the ones who are like, well, no, no, now the internet's there.
So all bets are off.
Which like to me, nothing fundamentally has changed with the internet on whether you believe in free speech or not or whether you believe that people should be silenced for having unpopular views, which is all that that means, like offensive.
What's offensive?
That's in the eye of the beholder.
That's completely subjective.
What all it means in the in effect in the actual enforcement of it is who's got unpopular views?
That's what's going to end up being, you know, that's what's going to end up being crushed.
So anyway, that whole part was, you know, something that just bugged me.
Somewhat of a battle between cause and principle where they were standing up and going, hey, we got to defeat Trump.
And part of what allows Trump to exist is all this misinformation on the internet.
And so because defeating Trump and getting rid of misinformation that supports him, we need censorship over the internet.
And then you came in with the principle where you're like, yeah, but don't we all believe in free speech?
And they just kind of weren't prepared for that.
Yeah.
They really thought, well, I thought our cause is more important.
You're like, no, no, let's debate that.
Is the principle more important than your cause?
And I'm going to say yes, because otherwise, you know, if you don't have the power, exactly what you said, but they just really weren't prepared for that conversation.
Well, it's like I've talked about on the show before.
Most people, especially, you know, Hollywood types who take a left-wing position, they're just not used to anybody challenging them.
I mean, so they're not like prepared to actually argue this stuff that they believe in.
It's just like, that's not something that you have to do.
It's like, we're on the right side and the other side are liars and racists.
So you don't have to argue with a liar or racist.
You just know you're right.
And there are liars and racists on the other side, but it's actually a much smaller percentage than they think.
And so anyway, so the example, of course, that they go to was climate change, which has become the religion of the left these days, that it's like, well, we know that climate change is real, whatever exactly they mean by that.
And so anybody who would deny that is obviously corrupt, lying, going to destroy the planet.
So we'd have to shut that type of speech down.
And then I said, I was like, yeah, but who decides what's a lie on climate change and what's not?
I mean, and I use the example.
I said, Bernie Sanders says the world's going to be uninhabitable for our children.
There's no evidence that that's the case.
So is that a lie?
Does that get it passed?
Because you guys want him to be able to say that, right?
Because in your mind, like he's got, he's kind of getting at the truth.
And they were like, well, no, that's fine.
I forget what the response exactly to that was.
But they all kind of went around and said anybody who, you know, which is the new thing.
And I've actually heard a lot of people on the left suggest that people who deny climate change should be thrown in jail.
That it's like the idea of, so in other words, if somebody works, you know, if somebody took money from an oil company or took money from any of these groups and they're saying there's no climate change, that's the same as the tobacco companies saying, you know, our product is safe.
So they're lying to you and they're going to kill you with this lie.
So in a sense, it's like as if they're selling you rat poison and telling you these are vitamins.
So that's, you know, that's a lie.
Now, the problem with that, of course, is that they may believe that.
I mean, even if there's a thousand scientists, a thousand climate scientists who say, you know, everything that all the orthodoxies about climate change are real, and then there's one who says they don't, can you really prove that he doesn't believe that?
And that's not exactly the same thing as just selling rat poison and claiming it's vitamins.
That's more like, well, he's actually thinks this is vitamins.
And if you're going to say that dissenting scientific opinions should be, you know, silenced, that's about the most anti-scientific thing you could stand for.
You know, I was thinking about this earlier today, too, because I was watching Meet the Press.
And go ahead.
I'm just, I haven't fully thought this out, but what you were just saying, so the scientist who takes a paycheck from a company and backs up claims he knows to be not true, right?
Do you think there should be some sort of a harsh penalty for that?
Because that would extend all the way to, because there's so many, like lobbying or even sometimes being a, you could argue being a defense lawyer is essentially, if I know the guy's guilty, it's still my job to show up to court and defend him.
I'm playing my job.
So if you're hired by a corporation specifically to try and create scientific evidence, you could.
It's too loose of a connection.
But I can almost argue, you're not even being a scientist.
You're more like a salesperson.
Listen, I think there's an argument to, here's my like libertarian understanding of this shit, right?
Like I think there's an argument to if you are a corporation that knows that your product is killing people and you deliberately like suppress that information and lie about it publicly.
I think there's an argument that you're liable for the deaths that you've caused and things like that.
But it has to be that direct.
It has to actually be proven that you knew about this and suppressed it and directly were involved in death.
Let's say it's like medicine and you fabricate, you fabricate, I guess, the amount of, like it's a cancer medicine, but it actually escalates some people's dying rate.
It's like people that would have lived for six months end up dying in two and you fabricate that that's only 5% of the people, but it's really 50% or something.
So like in that case.
It's certainly fraud at the very least to lie about that and say that it's only 5%.
And yeah, I think you're like, yes, there's something there that is if you're directly responsible for damages, that is basically an initiation of violence against people.
So I guess go to the theoretical with like an ExxonMobil.
So let's say ExxonMobil pays scientists to create evidence that global warming isn't real.
And now let's say global warming actually is super real and it's a threat to everybody.
So I mean, I guess bigger picture, we should just get our information from not corporation-funded scientists.
That just really shouldn't be the...
Well, and even if you were so in that theoretical, right, you would have to actually prove in some way in a court that the scientists knew better and were lying and manipulating.
But even then, they're not actually selling you the product.
So I don't think there's any direct damages that you could assign to them.
And by the way, the flip side of that would be like then government scientists who get grants and basically only get them if they're going to argue for climate change would be subject to the same thing.
However, just to move away from that.
Let's ask one more question.
Sure, sure, sure.
How much of the narrative has really even been shaped?
I feel like that's such a theoretical.
Did ExxonMobil scientists really drastically change the narrative on or, you know, scientists funded by the oil companies?
I think there is some truth to it.
I think that there are some people who get funding from, you know, it's like when they say like big corporations fund projects, it's like, well, I mean, yeah, but that's like saying like big oil companies get all the oil.
Like, yeah, I mean, that's who does that.
There is some truth to it, but the other side of it that climate change activists never look at is that there's also huge organizations that are that are pushing the climate change narrative that fund research.
So that's basically the same thing.
It's you're funding research looking for a specific result.
And this happens all over the place.
And it's something that I agree with you, the spirit of what you were saying.
It's something we should be skeptical about.
What's it like this kind of activist data where you want a certain result and then you go do the research to try to find it?
Because it's very easy to manipulate research on both sides.
One more theoretical.
So I guess for some sort of a amount of time, cigarettes were almost viewed as healthy, which I can understand.
They keep you calm, cool, collected.
You look good when you smoke them.
Never felt better in life.
Yeah, you can get through your workday.
All of a sudden, you don't need as many cookies because you got a different way of dealing with your anxiety.
Sure.
There are a lot of short-term benefits from cigarettes.
So I could understand how a scientist could sell me.
It's like Adderall back in the day.
Hey, man, you got your finals.
Smoke a camel.
Keep you calm.
Sure.
But the charge against the big tobacco companies was that they did know and they suppressed this evidence and then lied about it.
Now, if that's the case, I do think there's certainly they're on the hook for damages.
And is government the ones that like broke that racket open or just people dying?
I think the government didn't break shit open.
Yeah.
Is that people started dying when people were aware of it?
The government did nothing to these big tobacco companies.
They basically allowed them to fucking all stay in existence.
In fact, the government's helping the big tobaccos right now with the whole war on vaping.
They fucking came out.
First off, they subsidize big tobacco.
And then on top of that, they fucking go and there's a product out there that's getting people, you know, it's like six, 700,000 people like die from fucking cigarettes.
And they fucking are going and taking out their biggest competitor because there's 12 scare stories of like what happened to them.
Climate Change Trade-Offs00:10:17
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Anyway, but let me just say this.
And this is what I think to me, this is really where the climate change, the whole climate change thing kind of where the rubber meets the road.
All right.
There's basically four elements to the climate change argument.
And people on the left or the climate change activists try to act like there's only two, that there's two, and then you jump from that to their conclusion.
But really, there's four.
Okay.
So here are the four elements of the climate change argument.
It's one, is the climate changing?
Two, is man-made activity driving that change?
Three is the third one is, is this change worse than it otherwise would have been?
So in other words, if given the first two are true, if it's warming, do we know that warming is worse than cooling would be?
Or then the less warm result of if we weren't doing this would be.
That question is rarely even asked or thought about, okay?
But that's a really, really important question.
Okay.
So in other words, like if you look at species on the planet or something like that, 99.9% of species that have ever existed have gone extinct.
Like that's what happens.
Species go extinct.
So if the temperature is going to be X as a result of climate change, and you go, these five species are going to go extinct.
Well, that's not enough information.
You need to know if man-made activity wasn't doing this, the temperature would have been Y, and then how many would have got, right?
Like, and would that be better or worse?
So that's the third question that never really comes up.
And then the fourth question, which is the biggest one of all of them, is given your proposed solutions, are the costs worth the benefit?
And that's a really important question.
Now, what most people who advocate the climate change, you know, most climate change proponents or whatever, just go to the first two.
Is the climate changing?
Is man-made action driving that?
Therefore, Green New Deal.
And there's no more conversation that needs to be had.
Oh, what do you not want to take bold action?
Of course we have to take bold action.
This is a proposal.
You have to be foreign if you believe in climate change.
But that's just complete bullshit.
Now, by the way, I do tend to agree with the first two.
I just don't jump to that conclusion.
I do think the climate is getting warmer.
And I do tend to think that man-made activity is driving that, at least to some degree.
I don't know how much that's kind of like I'm ambiguous on that.
But I don't like, you know, most climate scientists do seem to agree with those first two things.
Okay.
But just because somebody who's pushing climate change gets to claim that doesn't mean you can jump past the other two.
Those two are like the most important part.
Let me try to explain this better.
Most climate scientists do believe that the climate is changing and that man-made activity is a major driving factor in that change.
Okay.
Most climate scientists seem to agree on that.
And I'm fine with saying, like, I, you know, I don't, I'm not a climate scientist.
I don't know any better than them.
So if they seem to agree with that, fine.
Now, that doesn't also mean that the majority of scientists are always right.
Sometimes there's dissident scientists who turn out to be correct.
Anyway, but granted, those first two exist.
So let's say this.
Let's say we just accept that both of those things are true, that the climate is changing and that man-made activity is the leading, the driving cause of this change.
Okay, well, let's say my proposal, because we have to be bold and take a bold stance, is that we eliminate all carbon emissions tomorrow.
That's my proposal.
I want to be bolder than AOC and Bernie Sanders, these fucking pussies.
I want to tear down, I want to eliminate all fossil fuels tomorrow.
How about that?
I mean, it can't eliminate all carbon emissions, I realize, but all fossil fuels tomorrow are eliminated.
I'll give you a week, a week, and then you can get off of them.
Would you be like, great.
You have to support Dave's plan because the science is in.
Or would you go, but wait a minute.
Like, if we don't prepare for this at all, millions and millions and millions, I mean, hundreds of millions of people are going to die.
So that cost is not worth it just to take care of climate change.
Because I have no question, if those first two things are the truth, I've given you a plan that will solve the problem, right?
I'm saying that we just shut down every single, you know, like no more coal, no more oil, gasoline, all that shit is fucking gone in a week.
There's no way, there's no plan that anyone's proposed that's going to do more to decrease the man's carbon footprint than that proposal.
But obviously, it's a given that hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people will die as a result of this.
So do you like that plan?
Or do you go, no, no, no, no.
Even though that plan does take care of the problem, the costs, hundreds of millions or billions of people dying, is worse than the initial problem.
So the point I'm trying to make with this extreme analogy is once you accept that you don't want to do that, now we're in a negotiating game.
It's no longer, do you believe the science or not?
Now, any proposal you have, you realize you have to demonstrate what the cost versus the reward will be.
Because it's not as simple as climate change is real.
Therefore, you have to support whatever this proposal is.
It's like, what's that old, it's like an old like fucking joke type thing, but they go like, would you sleep with me for $10 million?
And they're like, they're like, yes.
And you're like, would you sleep with me for a dollar?
And she's like, who do you think I am?
It's like, well, we've already established what you are.
Now we're just negotiating.
Like, right?
Like, once you establish that there is a price that would be too much, then now we're just negotiating.
We're just going, well, where is that price exactly?
Okay, obviously, a week from now, getting off of fossil fuels is not practical.
Going carbon neutral a week from now is not practical.
But so why is it so clear that 10 years is?
Why is 20 years, 30 years?
Like, what exactly is the number where this is going to be more like, how do you measure damage?
What damage are you prepared to deal with?
And what is worse than the other one?
That's the question.
And they don't even, they just want to pretend that that question doesn't exist.
Like it does, there are trade-offs.
This is, this is how life works in general, right?
We could have a five mile per hour speed limit across the whole country, and that will undoubtedly cut down on motor vehicle deaths.
But how many people are going to get out of their car and just murder the car in front of them?
Well, those will go up for sure.
And, you know, like food going from like a butcher to a grocer to a store.
Like those.
Yeah, it's going to take a lot longer, and that might actually kill people, too.
So it's not so like there might be other deaths from a lot of other unrelated issues.
So you have to go, no, it's cost versus benefits.
So it's, it's, you know, that's the thing.
And of course, I couldn't get into any of this shit on the panel because you have to kind of like pick your battles with these things.
And when you're, you're in these certain spots where.
There's also six people looking at you like you're both crazy and retarded.
Yeah.
Well, and also you have to pick your spots where you can win because it's not a situation like this where I can just go off forever.
So you're going to get one sentence out and the whole audience is going to go, bro, you don't believe in climate change.
Blasphemy.
So you want, you have to like pick these spots where you can expose, well, there's actually like a hole in your thinking here.
Here's your blind spot.
Here's what you're not like thinking about.
And anyway, I don't know.
There was some other thing.
Elaine Bougier and Felonious Monk got into a whole thing about she fucked up.
I was going to say she fucked up when she said she was like, I was a woman touring around in the 80s.
I was the black guy back then.
And he was like, no, that's not being black.
And then they got in a whole argument about that.
And I was like, I'll just let you guys outleft each other while I sit over here and fucking watch.
But anyway, the whole thing, you know, it was kind of a waste of time, more or less.
But I guess at least I saw some people like that were like, you know, sharing the video and feeling like I did a good job.
So I was like, at least that's something because there seems to be nothing else that was really a if it wasn't for that, then I'm like, this was a complete waste of time.
So at least that, you know, aspect, like, if I, if I can provide that service, at least like show other people, see, this is like what the mentality is.
This is fucking, this is pretty crazy.
Media Propaganda Games00:15:37
But yeah.
Anyway, I don't know.
I guess those are the rest of my thoughts on that issue.
It's funny, too, when the climate change activists, like I said when I was watching Meet the Press, I saw Al, not Al Gore, I want to say, John Kerry and Arnold Schwarzenegger came on, and they were talking about this organization they started, and they're like, they just want to have more conversations about climate change or just encourage people to talk about the issue more.
And it's like, yeah, but in any intelligent way or just like this, or just that Greta fucking whatever chick, that little girl.
That little girl just saying she's going to, you know, she's going on a school strike.
Which listen, anytime a teenager tells you they're going on a school strike, I would be very skeptical of their motives.
I would have been so down for a school strike when I was 15 over anything.
I was on a school strike junior and senior year.
Yeah, really?
I'd be like, school strike?
Absolutely.
What are we doing?
Climate change?
Absolutely.
Are we for it or against it?
Masturbating in your room, cause of America.
That was, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, there's no carbon footprint problem with that, I don't think.
Yeah, it's anyway.
It's a weird experience.
All right.
So what's going on in the news, Rob?
What did we want to talk about?
The impeachment is still proceeding.
I did think it was somewhat interesting that there's been some polling at this point because it's gone on long enough.
And the support for impeaching President Trump has gone down since the public hearings have been going on.
And that to me was something that was a, you know, I remember seeing that and being like, yeah, there might be something kind of important about this.
Like it says something that since they've been showing the process, because if you remember, it started in secret and then they started with the public hearings.
And since they've been seeing the public hearings, most people are underwhelmed.
But I guess even more than that, it's kind of repetition drives sales.
It's like the game of the media and propaganda.
And so if every day you open up the paper and it goes, oh, impeachment hearings, it reinforces, oh, there's something to look into.
Most people aren't really watching these hearings.
If anything, they're catching the little clips, which is the highlights of Adam Schiff's opening statement at the beginning of it and going, and the New York Times was playing that game.
We're like, as seven witnesses have already brought, well, it doesn't matter if their testimony didn't mean anything.
You can bring 100 witnesses.
That's the game they're playing is kind of reinforcing Trump's.
But this is the game that they've been banking on.
This is the game we're going to play.
And it's still not having the effect of making more people.
And I just think it's not, like I've been saying, man, there's just no there.
That's the problem.
It's like we think Donald Trump was attempting a quid pro quo.
Even though all of foreign policy and domestic policy for that matter is a pro quo, that's what it all is.
And of course, so like, you know, like, look, I don't want to repeat myself too much, but what it all comes down to is the question of whether what Donald Trump was trying to do, like, which he never did, but was he trying to get them to investigate the Bidens for his own political interest, right?
And of course, the question then becomes this weird balancing act of where does the nation's interests end and your personal interests begin, you know?
So Obama, right, made the deal with Iran.
By the way, I know this pisses every right-winger off who listens to it, but I supported Obama's deal with Iran.
I thought it was one of the few decent things that Obama did in his presidency.
I know a lot of you disagree with me on that.
You're wrong and I'm right.
But enough about that.
I've done full episodes on it in the past.
But so Obama made a deal with Iran, more or less something along the lines of like, let's just say for broad strokes purposes, we will unfreeze this money we've been holding, you know, and give it to you and you guys, pallets of cash, right?
And you guys will dismantle your nuclear program.
Now, the money was never ours.
They never really had a fucking nuclear weapons program, but whatever.
Let's just say, right?
That's how it's broad strokes put.
Now, that is the definition of a PRID.
Jesus, quid pro quo.
I'm having trouble with that.
A lot of weird letters in there.
Yeah, it really is.
It's designed to be difficult.
But that's a quid pro quo.
That's you do this and we'll do this.
We'll do this and you do that.
It's a deal in exchange, right?
However, people would go, yeah, but getting Iran to dismantle their nuclear program or letting inspectors come in and all that, that's in the benefit, that's in the interest of like, you know, the country, not in Obama's personal interest.
However, did Obama not campaign on that?
Did they not use that as a feather in his cap as like a foreign policy achievement?
So where exactly does it start that this was for the public interest versus own interest, right?
Is there really any separating?
I mean, Obama ran on killing Osama bin Laden.
So was that in the public interest or in his personal interest?
Well, truthfully speaking, you can argue pretty easily that it was both.
Okay?
Now, if let's just say Donald Trump wanted the Bidens investigated, well, theoretically, if the investigation had turned up some type of corruption, would exposing corruption by the former vice president of the United States be in the national interest?
I mean, sure.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's it's now if he was just making up dirt on a political opponent, you could say this is not in any national interest and just in his interest.
But if he's just asking to investigate him, which nobody's even accused, no one on the Democratic side has even come forward with anything saying, I want you to, you know, have a fake investigation and like plant dirt on him.
You know what I mean?
So if you're just saying he wanted to investigate Biden, it seems to me that, I don't know, like maybe the percentages aren't exactly the same, but you could say, yeah, this is kind of one percent, like one percentage in the national interest and some percentage in Trump's interest.
The whole, to me, I just think that the thing that they fucked up on, and I don't know why exactly, I have entertained some conspiracies about it, but why they would move to impeach on this.
There's just so many other things you could have done that would be more salacious.
But there's just nothing that interesting or compelling about the story.
It's like, yeah, here's the truth, right?
And the whole establishment seems to have not learned this lesson from the Trump election.
But there's a lot of people in this country.
And I think this accounts for all of the people who voted for Donald Trump.
And I think a lot of the people, I think this might be as big as any other reason why the people who like went for Obama and went for Trump.
You know what I mean?
Like why those people swung over in his direction and the other people who just kind of are in the middle who didn't vote or like a lot of those people.
I don't think people really care about the rest of the world the way they do about their own country.
You know?
Like I think even when they were selling like say the wars in the Middle East, they were never able to just say, hey, you know, like we think this guy's a bad guy.
Saddam Hussein's a bad guy.
So we're going to go overthrow him so they can have feminism in Iraq or, you know, like there's no like, it's like he's got weapons of mass destruction.
He can kill you and your family.
That's like, oh, okay, now let's go overthrow him.
If the project was just to go be an empire, like if they just told you what it was, I don't think too many people would buy into it.
And the, you know, look, like nobody really says they want to be the policeman of the world.
Like we are, the United States of America, our military is clearly the policeman of the world.
But no one, so if I told you there was a politician who said the military's role is not to be the policeman of the world, who was that?
It was George W. Bush.
Even he said that.
Even he, even the guy who's going around policing the world goes, yeah, we're not supposed to be the policeman of the world.
It's like no one says that.
You know what I mean?
Like no one says they want that because that's not something anybody wants.
Like nobody's going to buy that.
And if there was one message of the Trump administration, of the Trump campaign, it was like, hey, this is about America, America first, right?
That was like his slogan.
It was like, yeah, enough worrying about putting the Middle East together.
Enough worrying about everybody else.
Let's worry about us.
Let's like make our lives better.
And that is, I mean, come on, like you're familiar with people, right?
That's how people, that's what people respond to.
So the idea of foreign aid to begin with, I just don't think is that popular.
So when people already start going like, well, he was going to, the great crime is that he was going to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine.
Maybe this is me projecting a little bit, but don't most people go, yeah, why the fuck are we giving Ukraine money?
Why are we giving everybody money?
Or weapons or whatever it was in this case.
But they're like, what?
Why are we doing this?
Why are we going around giving it Ukraine poses no threat to us?
They're involved in some conflict with Russia.
Why are we getting involved in this?
Why should we care about any of this?
I think it would be a very easy, popular, populist message to run on to say, I'm against foreign aid.
Isn't it?
There's something really weird about foreign aid while we're running a deficit.
Yes.
Like if you look at the cash flow, so I mean, I don't know how much money we take from China now, but like at one point, it's like, so we're taking money from China so that we can lend it to Israel.
Yes.
Like, what?
Whose money, whose money are we giving to these people?
It's our money, really.
No, you're right.
It's like a, it's already a tough sell, but then when you're running deficits, it's just a retarded sell.
Yeah, when you start going, well, okay, we're bankrupt here, so what has to go?
Well, how about the money that's not going to us?
Good point.
Right.
That would be the first thing.
But imagine just being like, like, just, you know, on a personal level, just to make it like a simple comparison, but it's the same thing on a national level.
But imagine just going like, being like, you know, I really need to help, you know, a friend of mine out.
I really need to help my friend who's pretty broke.
And they're like, oh, so you're going to give him some money?
You're like, well, I'm broke.
I don't have any money.
But I could, you know, ask you to give me some money to give to him.
It's just so like, it's absurd.
It's like, it's actually kind of hilarious.
But yeah, the idea that we have to borrow money to then give other people money just so we can prop up this like feeling that we're the ones who lend other people money.
It's ridiculous.
And it seems very easy, especially if there's any type of pain at home.
It's very easy for people to be like, what?
This is what I'm paying taxes for.
It's fucking, this is insane.
So anyway, I just, I do think that this is a very, very bad sign for Democrats that the more people see of this impeachment and the sharpest decline was amongst independents, which makes sense that that's where you'd see the most movement one way or the other.
Because right, like the Democratic base is going to be for impeachment.
The Republican base is going to be against impeachment.
But the independents, that's who you'd be looking at if you were, you know, like worried about, say, a presidential election that's coming up.
And it was something like 10 points.
It had the, you know, people who favored impeachment had fallen.
And it's crazy because like people I've seen in the in the corporate press trying to spin this.
Like I saw on MSNBC, this was like Chuck Todd's take or on NBC on Meet the Press, where he was like, so, you know, the approval rating for impeachment has fallen.
He goes, it's below 50% now.
But he was like, wow, I don't know if that's something Donald Trump should be thrilled about, the fact that a little bit less than half the country wants to see you impeached.
And you're like, yeah, but dude, that's not the story.
The story is since the open hearings.
What's moving?
Well, that's true.
I don't trust your polling for a second.
Here's the other, I don't think anyone thinks Donald Trump is so powerful, he keeps snaking his way out of corruption charges.
You believe that narrative about Hillary Clinton.
You know, if Hillary Clinton keeps getting away with stuff, you go, oh, look how powerful she is.
I think intuitively everyone kind of sees, even the less, that like the overall system here is kind of working against Donald Trump.
I think this is not necessarily something that most people even realize, but I think after the Mueller investigation and everything that they heard about Russia collusion, now that it's moved over to impeachment, people are like, well, I got to see how this plays out.
Nobody's just instantly buying.
I think the media really kind of shot themselves in the foot with their own credibility.
That I don't think anyone goes, oh, since the media is reporting it, it must be true.
Yeah.
I think everyone's like, I better see how this plays out.
And the whole thing, I mean, just to kind of understand how ridiculous the impeachment hearing is.
So, firstly, there's the element that you explained that, all right, it's quid pro quo, but it's on something that might have been a crime there.
It's not like he asked for fabricated evidence.
Also, there's no evidence that he actually did acquit pro quoto because he was pretty slick in the way that he did it.
Then they did an entire impeachment hearing thing without one actual person who could give testimony.
Every single witness was giving basically second-hand testimony.
I don't know how that exists as being a witness.
You didn't see the event.
They were all there to basically go, Hey, I'm interpreting what happened based on what I've heard as being the Sonland guy who was like their best witness, even said point blank, he goes, Well, I'm just presuming that this is and he told me no quid pro quo.
But I'm presuming he really meant it, you know.
And then at its best, so Congress then, I guess, hands over the report or the desire to impeach to the Senate that we all know is just going to throw it out.
So, in other words, so fine, the Congress decides this, but Senate also gets its say, and it's a political process.
And so, Senate goes, No, we're not on board with this.
So, the whole thing was a fucking charade.
Now, here's what would be really interesting, even though I don't think it will happen, is if Senate gets to pull in Schiff and some of these other guys to give testimony, like the same way Mueller had to give testimony on his report.
I doubt it.
Yeah, but that would be so fucking juicy.
Yeah, if all of a sudden Schiff's sworn in, has to explain that he never actually, like, you just turn the whole thing, it's not going to happen, but my God.
Well, the one thing that I will say, of all the candidates, you know, on the Democratic side, I think Bernie Sanders has been the one who's expressed this the most.
And he does.
I mean, look, Bernie Sanders is a career politician, so he at least kind of, you know, if there's anything he should be good at, it would be that.
So, I think he does get it because he keeps saying, and he says this a lot, as with all the things Bernie Sanders says, he says them over and over again.
That he keeps going.
Shady Foreign Military Aid00:05:30
He's like, guys, if we just keep focusing on Trump, we're going to lose.
Because the real problem is that they go, like, so the Democrats won the House.
They took the House back in the 2018 midterm elections.
And then you go, so what did they do with that?
It's not as if it'd be one thing if they were like, hey, we proposed this health care bill, this infrastructure bill, this so-and-so bill, like five things, and Donald Trump and the Republicans voted against it every time, but we wanted to do all this for the American people.
It's just investigation after investigation.
Now an impeachment, you know, inquiry and proceeding.
And you're like, but what does this do for anyone?
What does this do for anyone?
Like, most people aren't like me and you.
Most people aren't like you, the listener of this show.
Most people aren't like don't pay attention to politics that much.
They're pretty invested in their own life.
And like, good for them.
God bless them.
You know, like most people are pretty invested in like their job, their family, you know, things like, you know, the Democrats may have some dumbass plans, but things like their health care, their retirement, their quality of life, the cost of goods, things like this, their salaries, you know, like this is what people care about.
And their culture and their nation and these things.
That's what people care about.
And after a while, you're like, if you're going to convince him to do this whole thing, you got to have a real clear, juicy, here's the there.
Okay.
Well, Donald Trump did this.
And this is just kind of like, what?
He thought about maybe, you know, trying to get something for our foreign aid.
Like, hey, shouldn't we get something for our foreign aid?
And then they break down what the situation with the Bidens was.
And you're kind of like, yeah, but he wanted to investigate this, you know, to dig up dirt on his political opponents.
And any like reasonable person is like, yeah, that does sound a little bit shady, what you're describing there.
Right?
Joe Biden's kid was on an energy company.
Yeah, that does seem pretty weird.
What experience did he have?
Oh, none?
Like, what?
He doesn't even speak the language?
And he was, like, it's just, I think, I think this is going to blow up in their faces.
But we'll see.
I just don't think there's much more.
You know, it's like, it's also like, even if it's true, which I am not, by the way, completely denying that it is, like, it doesn't seem, it does seem to me, if I'm just looking at the facts of the case, it does seem like Donald Trump wanted the Ukrainians to investigate the Bidens.
It seems like what he really wanted was to get to the bottom of 2016, which is a whole separate thing.
And there's a reason why they don't want to talk about that one as much.
But it does seem like he wanted that.
He threw that out on the phone call for sure.
He goes, hey, look at this Biden thing.
A lot of people are telling me this was like pretty shady.
I think you should look into that.
And then he did, for a little bit of time, withhold the military aid before he gave it to them.
Now, is it possible that he wanted, you know, to get the Bidens investigated, to give them the military aid?
Sure.
I'm not like above thinking that's true.
And then he didn't.
They didn't get the investigation and he gave up the military aid.
Now, they'll be saying, what they say is that he relinquished the military aid once he realized there was going to be heat on him for doing it.
And that's also quite possible.
The problem here is that how do you prove that?
How do you, at best, what you're going to get out of Donald Trump is like a wink and a nod.
You know what I mean?
You're not going to get him going, this is a quid pro quo.
That's what this is.
It's a quid pro quo.
I want this for this.
I am extorting you for an investigation, right?
Like, he's not going to say that.
He's not going to put that in writing somewhere.
So now you're just left to kind of prove it.
And at best, you're saying he thought about committing this crime, then realized there was heat and backed off of it.
Like it's like saying like you walked toward your door with a gun and then looked out your window and saw cops there and put the gun away.
And it's like, you were planning on shooting someone.
And he's like, no, I was just cleaning my gun.
I don't know.
You know, like there's no real way to get a smoking gun out of this case.
It's not going to happen.
And this is just not, and no one cares.
This isn't an issue that means anything to people.
So that's the problem they have.
And the opinion polls are starting to, it seems, are starting to reflect that.
And then on the other hand, you have to start thinking.
So if this impeachment does end up amounting to nothing, if it does end the same way that the Mueller investigation did with nothing, now we're going into election year.
And who's Donald Trump going to be running against?
Who's he going to be running against?
So I talked about this whenever it was last week or the last time that we talked about the presidential polls.
And there's been a couple more polls since then, but it's pretty clear now.
Elizabeth Warren's momentum is dead.
Elizabeth Warren, she's in third place now.
Now, what they'll tell you, if you listen to the corporate press, is that Butijej is now kind of like the hot candidate.
The problem is that this has gotten him to 11% nationally and fourth place.
He's still at about half of what Bernie Sanders is at as Bernie Sanders sits in second place, maybe a little bit, a little bit more than half of what Bernie Sanders has.
Buttigieg as Hot Candidate00:02:21
And Buttigej is like, look, I've said this before.
I don't like him at all.
There's nothing about him that I like.
But he is, he's, in my opinion right now, the least insane direction that the Democrats can go in.
Like, he's the one that doesn't blow everything.
But he's basically running on, I'm going to stand here and look presidential and not be embarrassing.
And I don't think that's going to be enough to compel people to support him in the primary.
I mean, he's like, he's the mayor of like, I think it's the fourth biggest city in his state.
He's not even like a real big, impressive mayor.
How many state?
Indiana?
How many mayors do we elect to president?
Can't think of any.
Yeah.
I mean, Bloomberg wants to go be it, but he's got a billion fucking dollars he's going to spend on this.
Also, New York mayor is a New York.
Yeah, it's New York fucking city.
Like, that's a much bigger deal than fucking, you know, wherever Buddha Judge is the mayor of.
I can't remember that.
That's high profile.
It's like on the same tier as being a governor, basically.
Yes.
Yes.
You know, I mean, it's different, but it's almost like it's different than being a governor, but it's also different than being mayor of just about anywhere else.
It's mayor of the biggest city in the country.
Even though no one's done it, like senator, governor, or mayor of New York City is a fairly natural transition to running for president.
Sure.
Sure.
But that's, you know, so Mayor Pete Buttstuff has, he's, he's got some problems, and it doesn't seem like he's going.
And it does seem that almost like by default, by the fact that he's like, hey, I'm here.
By default, Biden.
By default, Biden.
By default, Biden is, he's like, well, look, I was Obama's VP.
So doesn't that right away put me as like somewhat, you know, if you're going to say there's a straight line between governor, senator, or mayor to the White House, well, there's a really straight line between vice president to president.
So he's got that going for him, right?
And decades in the Senate, like experience, you know, he's got that.
The problem with Joe Biden is that he's Joe Biden.
Biden's Default Nomination Path00:09:43
And that brings us to this week's crazy bitch watch.
Hey, y'all crazy bitch.
I saw that made me aware when I was in law school.
Proudly for Holloway.
Proudly for your dad.
First African-American state senator in the state of Delaware.
Everything about.
And by the way, you know, I sit on the stand and it get hot.
I got a lot of, I got hairy legs that turn that turn blonde in the sun.
And the kids used to come up and reach into the pool and rub my leg down so it was traded and then watched the hair come back up again.
They look at it.
So I learned about roaches.
I learned about kids jumping on my lap.
And I've loved kids jumping on my lap.
And I tell you what, the men, they're now all men.
The guys I work with down here.
And they're all guys at the time.
They're all good men.
Most of them made an awful lot of themselves.
And Earl Larkin had a rough time.
Some of you knew Earl.
I came back as a public defender.
That is an SNL character playing a politician who's drunk and saying the dumbest thing you could possibly say.
It's an over-the-top parody of Joe Biden.
You should let, because I let kids sit on my lap.
I mean, it's like...
I like kids on my lap.
Here's the thing.
Dude, this is really something amazing to watch.
And the thing about why at this point I'm almost rooting for Biden to be able to do it.
I fiddle kids every weekend.
I'm rooting for him to hang on and secure this nomination just so we can watch the press pretend that there's nothing weird about what he's doing.
Be like, I don't know what you're talking about.
He's got it completely together.
It's like when they were trying to pretend Hillary Clinton's coughing fits and fainting spells were like no big thing.
This is like that times 100.
You're supposed to pretend that that's not the fucking weirdest thing you've ever seen in your life.
I've watched this like four times before we just played it on the show today.
And even watching it on the show today, I'm like, what the fuck is this guy saying?
He has this unbelievable these two qualities that together are really something is that he's really, really bad at improving and he thinks he's really, really good at improving.
And I guess no one can convince him he's not.
So he won't stick to the script.
He's like, ah, stick to the script.
I got a story about kids jumping on my lap.
So I'm going to ramp.
It's like, have you told this to anyone?
I'll figure it out when I'm up there.
Which is one thing, like, you know, in a way, right?
This is what Trump would do.
He'd go, I'll figure it out when I'm up there.
I'm just going to talk.
And it is weird.
There's been a lot of moments that Trump's had that are weird, but there's something about it where it works.
It entertains his crowd.
It's true to his character.
Joe Biden goes into this thing.
The fuck are you talking about?
The hair on your leg and then watching it come back up and the what?
What?
By the way, this week, we have the first ever double crazy bitch watch.
Double crazy bitch watch.
Let's hear the second one.
Hey!
Y'all crazy, bitch!
And when they cut to the president of the United States, you call your kids in from the other side.
All right, so there was a there was Joe Biden, you know, sucking his wife's fingers in front of a crowd.
Before you go into the finger, she sounds like she's insane too.
Can you imagine watching the two of them have a meal together?
They probably make sense to each other.
Yeah, maybe they do.
But it's not, look, man, I will tell you, if you remove, let me give Joe Biden as much credit as I can.
If you remove all of the other craziness, this little thing here alone would be nothing.
You know, it's just Joe Biden.
His wife kind of waved her hand in his face and then he did this little thing.
The problem is that he keeps doing weird shit.
And his whole, listen, this is the problem with both of those clips, right?
When you're Joe Biden, his campaign is kind of centered around, I was the vice president.
I've been in the Senate for 30 years.
I'm not some fucking 25-year-old mayor.
I'm not some fucking, I'm not the new kid on the block with some crazy new ideas.
I'm the pro.
Like, that's his, his pitch.
When you're the centrist moderate candidate, what they'll consider moderate candidate, your pitch is, I'm not the crazy one.
I'm the one who kind of knows what I'm doing.
Now, when you stick your wife's fingers in your mouth, don't you know how politics works?
There's now a picture of that that's going to be posted all over social media.
This is just, can you imagine if Joe Biden actually secures the nomination and we're going to have months and months of a presidential election, how many more of these things is Biden capable of?
How many more?
As the stress gets more and more, and he's been on the campaign trail longer and longer, and there's more and more cameras on him everywhere he goes.
How many of these moments will Joe Biden create?
He seems to create one every single day.
This is, and he looks older and older every time I see him.
He's out on this campaign, his no-malarkey tour.
Like, are you so you're telling me Donald Trump's running on Make America Great Again, and you're running on no malarkey?
It's a campaign from the 30s.
Like, what, what?
Oh, geez, Mr. Biden.
Last guy came into town, gave us a whole bunch of malarkey.
I got no malarkey here, see?
No malarkey from old Vice President Biden.
I'll come into that town.
You got any malarkey?
I'll get that malarkey right out of there.
Oh, geez, I like this Biden guy.
X-Tree, X-Tree.
Read all about it.
Joe Biden says no malarkey.
And then you get some villain.
He's like, I've been running business off malarkey in this town.
Oh, it's mean man Malarkey here to battle Joe Biden.
It's like this fucking shit, dude.
This is just, it's such a cartoon.
I don't even know what to say, but the Democrats.
And I think that this basically explains why the media has pushed.
They pushed Kamala Harris so hard.
They pushed Beto O'Rourke so hard.
They're trying to push Mayor Pete right now.
And they really tried to push Elizabeth Warren is that they realize this guy can't be the guy.
Bernie Sanders is unacceptable to them for a myriad of reasons.
And Joe Biden, they realize, can't be the guy.
He can't get this done.
So they're trying to push all of these people, but everyone they're pushing isn't sticking.
Still seems to me like somebody else has to get in this race.
And there's one other little piece of information that is worth at least noting, which is that Joe Biden still never got the Barack Obama endorsement.
And Barack Obama is the guy.
You're the standard bearer.
He was the last Democratic president.
He got re-elected and he still got crazy high approval ratings in the Democratic Party.
He's the guy.
His nomination, like they, I would say, and I really think this is true right now.
If Obama came out with a full-hearted endorsement of Joe Biden, I think it would all but guarantee him the nomination.
Like that'd just be like, okay, Joe Biden's the guy.
And he won't do that.
Why is that?
You can speculate away.
I think part of it might just be that he doesn't want to endorse him now.
And then if he stumbles and fucks up, his endorsement is meaningless.
It has a lot less weight if you go, well, I endorsed him, but here's my second pick.
So maybe he just wants to wait.
And maybe part of it is that Obama knows something that we don't know.
Someone else might be getting into this race.
Listen, I am rooting for the sake of comedy and more importantly, the sake of just destroying whatever trust in the corporate press has left.
I'm rooting for Joe Biden to be the nominee because I can't wait for them to try to convince you that there's nothing weird about Joe Biden.
Like that just to me would be incredible.
So that's what I'm rooting for.
But I just don't see it.
I don't see it happening.
I don't see him being the nominee.
I thought, I'll be honest, I thought his campaign would have tanked by now.
I was wrong about that.
I didn't think it would last this long with him still being first in the polls.
But like we said before, he's basically by default Biden.
It's not, it would have been easy for any of these other candidates to overtake him.
It's just they've all had their problems.
Like everyone.
Everyone they've tried to push forward has just fallen on their face.
Bernie Sanders, you know, is the only one who's like, wasn't really his fault, but he had a fucking heart attack.
That doesn't help.
When you're 80 and you have a heart attack, it's tough to run for the most important job.
It's tough.
But by default, Biden, by God, this no malarkey thing is going to be fun if he is the nominee.
Polls Tanking for Others00:01:46
All right, that's our show for today.
We will be back.
Listen, for this Wednesday's show, I got a big one coming up.
Who you got?
Who you got?
Leak it.
Should I leak it now?
Yeah, why not?
All right.
Wednesday, one-on-one, we got Jacob Hornberger running for President of the United States on the Libertarian Party, the guy who I'm all in with.
All in with Hornberger.
So we're going to have him on the show.
I'm really, really excited for this one.
He's a great dude.
Really, really smart.
really fucking sound on everything.
And I think he's the guy who's going to do it.
I can't endorse until he actually sits down with me and asks for my blessing.
No, no, absolutely.
As a sign of respect as the king.
I'm sure I'll give him my blessing.
Yeah.
But he's got to actually come and sit and ask.
No, of course.
I mean, he has to sit in front of the king of the cocks and ask for his endorsement.
And even if he doesn't, you can just tell everybody he did.
And that's why you're endorsing him.
I think you should just lie.
Just be like, yeah, he came.
Is that better for my profile as the king of the cocks?
Yeah, as long as you had him come and beg for your highness's.
Then we'll get someone to do one of those good Photoshops of me as the Queen of England.
Have you seen those?
Well, they will now.
Yeah.
Well, they will now.
If they haven't already, they'll do it now that you said it.
All right, guys.
Also, go make sure you listen to Rob Bernstein's podcast, Run Your Mouth.
Follow Rob on Twitter at Robbie the Fire.
You know the song Alice's Restaurant?
How does it go?
I don't really want to sing it, but Arlo Guthrie's.
Yes, yes, I know this.
Yes, I did.
Check out Run Your Mouth.
I did with my friends who own a shed.
They broadcast from the shed, the Shedcast Boys.
We did a reenactment of Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant.
And I also covered repo rates, which is fascinating, and no one's getting into it.