Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein critique Joe Rogan's silence on Bernie Sanders' socialist ties to totalitarian regimes and expose Elizabeth Warren's use of identity politics to distract from free college's economic harms. They argue progressive taxation punishes savers while rewarding irresponsibility, inflating costs in housing and healthcare, and link the Burisma investigation to Democratic fears of exposing deeper corruption involving the Bidens and Obama administration. Ultimately, the episode advocates abolishing entitlement programs like Social Security to restore intergenerational financial sovereignty and challenge the moral hazards of state intervention. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Government Size and Drug Offenders00:03:38
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.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
You are indeed listening to part of the problem, and I thank you dearly for doing it.
What's up, everybody?
I am your host, Dave Smith, the most consistent motherfucker you know.
As always, I'm joined by Robbie the Fire Bernstein, the king of the caulks.
What's up, King?
How you living, King?
I'm doing okay.
We're gonna treat this like one of those black power podcasts.
How you living, Kang?
Welcome to the show, Kang.
I had a weird day.
You know, you keep.
Drinking Jaeger?
Well, that's true too, yeah.
But not just Jaeger.
They got this new Jaeger cold brew, so it's caffeinated, keeps you up while getting drunk.
I love that shit.
It's a dangerous combination.
Coffee and Jaeger.
I'm all for it.
I'm a vodka Red Bull guy.
I'll go caffeine and alcohol.
I love it.
I showed up to work today.
I'm just an old-fashioned whiskey and Adderall fella.
But, you know, same idea.
It's the same concept.
I love Adderall when I'm drinking.
Oh, yeah.
So much better than Coke.
Oh, yeah.
Coke's for losers.
Yeah.
Because Coke, like...
Class it up a little bit.
Have an Adderall.
And then you don't feel like you're being as much of a drug addict because it was prescribed to somebody.
You know, guys, sometimes we get away from our Christian conservative roots and we start going down these.
You know, we're all born with original sin and sometimes we fall to our lower urges.
I'm sorry, anyway.
But seriously, if you have an Adderall script, let us know.
If you do, it's, yeah, $10 a pot.
We'll get you into the inner circle.
You don't have to subscribe, nothing.
Just unsubscribe.
You can charge the company money.
That's how.
No, go with God.
Anyway, so you said you had a crazy day aside from the.
Oh, yeah, no, I came into work and I discovered my laptop wasn't here, and I think I accidentally took it home yesterday.
I don't remember doing that.
How much Jaeger have you been drinking?
No, I wasn't even drinking yesterday.
These things just happen when you're a dumbass.
Like, no matter how much discipline you try and have, you can't beat the fact that you're a dumbass.
Yeah, sometimes it's easier to blame it on the drinking.
Yeah.
Like, oh, I'm so retarded when I drink, but really.
That's partly why I quit smoking weed because I'm a dumbass enough.
I can't like...
I don't need any help.
I don't need any help.
All right.
Yeah, I hear you.
No, we don't do that.
I mean, like, nothing against marijuana.
I know a lot of super smart, very productive people who smoke pot.
And I, for a long time, convinced myself that it didn't mess me up at all.
It slows you down.
But once I quit, it was like, oh, my God, the clarity of thought is like being off-pot.
I was like blown away.
And you're like, oh, shit.
That was really fogging me up quite a bit.
It's a really a world's different.
Listen, nothing against some vices.
People, you like to have a few drinks.
You like to smoke weed or whatever.
But I do, I recommend, in general, try clearing out for a while.
Try going three, four months without ingesting any drugs.
It's a good experiment, if nothing else.
Good to clear it out.
I'm upsetting our producer, Brian, in the other room right now.
But, you know, listen, just my humble recommendation.
What do I know?
Clarity After Quitting Vices00:07:59
I'm a libertarian.
I would never force you to live a different lifestyle.
I'm just giving advice.
And I am right about everything.
So, you know, maybe you want to listen to this guy when he gives you advice.
Just saying, maybe.
Anywho, there's a, we got some interesting things that we wanted to talk about today.
One thing that I've been tagged in quite a bit on the Twitter, which is still, I believe, as of last I checked, it was like trending number one, was that Joe Rogan endorses Bernie Sanders.
Although once you look into it a little bit more deeply, and by that I mean click on it.
You realize that I don't think it's actually accurate to say Joe Rogan endorses Bernie Sanders as much as it is that he said on his show that I might vote for Bernie Sanders.
It is amazing how fucking huge Joe Rogan is, that he can just be on a podcast one day and go, I'll probably vote for Bernie Sanders.
And then the next thing you know, Twitter is lit up, like lit up, and it's like trending number one.
And there's these people like Joe Rogan's the greatest human being ever.
And then there are people like Joe Rogan's evil and a piece of shit and blah, blah, blah.
And he's just all over, all just because he goes, I'll probably vote for this guy.
I want to say if you had one conversation with Joe Rogan, you could convince him otherwise.
I think Joe Rogan's a really smart dude.
And it was a little annoying when I watched that Bernie Sanders interview because you're like, how are you not pushing back on some of these topics?
But if Dave Big Picture Smith just showed him the big picture, he'd realize, hey, this is a mistake.
Well, maybe, maybe not.
I don't know.
I mean, Joe Rogan's his own man, and I'm not, you know, I don't think I'm going to necessarily lead him away from anything.
No, I think he's too smart that if someone gave him the wisdom of what's wrong with Bernie Sanders, he wouldn't stand behind it.
Well, I think there's just something that he's not seeing because to support socialism and healthcare for all and all of the initiatives that Bernie Sanders is standing for is just, it's wrong.
Any intelligent person, if they really understand the full picture of what he's looking to do, I get where you're coming from.
I understand what you're saying.
But it's not as if Rogan hasn't had me on his show and he had Peter Schiff on his show several times, had Michael Malice on his show.
He's had a lot of people make the free market argument to him.
And maybe in some ways, it represents a failure on our part that we haven't convinced him more on these issues.
The one thing I would say is that people don't, like I saw a lot of libertarians being kind of shitty about it.
And it's like, I don't, look, that's not my attitude about it at all.
Truthfully speaking, I understand why Rogan would feel like, oh, yeah, maybe I'll go with this Bernie Sanders guy.
Truthfully, and this is more of a statement of how depressing the state of politics are for a free market libertarian type.
There is an argument that Bernie Sanders is the best one in the race.
I mean, truthfully speaking, he's got at least like four really good qualities that you could go, oh, that is really good.
I mean, look, just to rattle them off real quick.
Anti-war, anti-war.
Bernie Sanders voted against the war in Iraq and is really, really proud of that.
And that should get you something.
I mean, I think Bernie Sanders said when he ran against Hillary Clinton, and he said the same thing, I believe, about Joe Biden, that he's like, look, you voted for the war in Iraq, and that is disqualifying.
And I could not agree with him more on that.
I don't even understand how this can be a topic that's up for debate.
If you voted for the war in Iraq, okay, we could debate whether or not you're criminally liable.
We could debate whether even if it's not criminal that you're in some sense like civilly liable.
You know, like even if you were like, oh, I like I was fooled by the neocons or something like that.
Couldn't you still, you know, like in some way be like, well, you, that, that's like some type of like criminal or civil negligence.
You know what I mean?
Like, you were so bad at your job that you launched an aggressive war of invasion and destroyed this country based on faulty evidence.
Like that, like, I think there's an argument there, but I don't see how it's even an argument that you don't get to make the call next time.
Like, this is a bet you fucked up in the most important moment bad enough that you shouldn't be back here.
So I really agree with him on that.
He's been really, really good in the Senate leading the opposition to the war in Yemen.
Really, really good on that.
And he has a fantastic federal proposal, a federal program to decriminalize marijuana and really undercut the whole war on drugs, which has just been a fucking nightmare of authoritarian brutality by the state, destroyed countless lives and just led to so many just horrific consequences.
So there are some things about Bernie Sanders that you go like, oh, okay.
Those are positives.
And those are more positive.
Like, I don't know, outside of Tulsi Gabbard, I don't know that there's any other candidate, Trump or any of the Democrats, or even the Republicans pointlessly running against Donald Trump.
I don't know that anyone has like three things that are that good about them.
So I'll at least grant that.
I'd also say, before libertarians go around giving Joe Rogan shit, Rogan is a guy who like he did like support Ron Paul in 2012.
Like I said, he's had me and Peter Schiff and Michael Malice, probably a few other really good people on his show.
And I'm a little bit biased because I, you know, he's, I was a huge fan of Joe Rogan before I ever met him.
He's been nothing but cool to me, and he's probably helped my career as much, if not more than anybody else.
So, you know, there's no question, you know, Rogan, he's really helped me personally.
And if you care about libertarianism, he's really helped libertarianism.
I still, to this day, more than any other thing that I've ever done, get people going like, oh, I heard you on Rogan, and that like fucking woke me up and that changed everything.
So no matter what he, who he throws his support behind or who he votes for, if you're a libertarian, Rogan has facilitated introducing a lot of people to these ideas.
The thing, you know, I get where, look, Rogan did have Tulsi on his show as well, twice, I believe, maybe, maybe even three times, and gave her this huge platform.
He's built himself the biggest platform.
You have to understand to keep in perspective that Rogan's podcast, it's not just the biggest podcast in the world.
It's, if you compare it to the corporate media, he's by an order of magnitude bigger than all of them, bigger than all of them.
I mean, like any of the, you know, nightly news shows, Rogan is bigger than.
I mean, like, the number one show in cable news, I think, is Sean Hannity.
And I think they get around half the audience that Rogan does.
It's a way bigger deal to get on his show.
And if you compare somebody getting on Sean Hannity's show, well, first off, I mean, if you can just forget how dumb the conversation's going to be, what are they going to be on for?
Five minutes or something like that?
On Rogan's show, you're going to be on for hours.
Socialism vs Fascist Regimes00:14:53
I mean, you're going to really be able to expand on your views and really try to convince people, you know?
So he's, you know, like, I don't know.
I just, I, I, nothing against Rogan.
I love the guy.
He's, I just think he's a great dude.
But sure, I mean, look, even with all of those positives that I said about Bernie Sanders, the reason why, and I think I speak for you that you'd say you agree with all three of those things or four of those things that I named being really positive things.
But the reason why I could never support Sanders, and I'm sure you could never either, is just if you have, you know, it's not just about understanding economics in a very basic sense.
It's also just understanding socialism and what socialism really has been, what the history of it is.
And the one, the area that I would just give Rogan pushback on is that he said, you know, he goes, in this day and age, they can kind of dig up dirt on anybody, but they have trouble digging up dirt on Bernie Sanders, and he's been really consistent throughout his career.
That I actually don't think is true.
And I say this going like, I completely understand why a lot of people support Bernie Sanders.
I understand, by the way, I also think that there's something that what really makes me sympathetic to Bernie Sanders lately is the fact that there's the entire establishment is very clearly against him.
And there's something about that that makes you almost root for that guy.
That being said, look, socialism is one of these terms.
It's become like, you know, democracy, fascism, socialism, all of these terms have almost lost their meaning.
Like, people just kind of use them whenever they want to, for whatever it means.
I was getting in a Twitter battle yesterday.
I mean, just a few tweets that I went back and forth with people on.
But somebody was, they were calling me a fascist apologist.
Anyway, just the, you know, the most like low IQ description of what I am or what I believe in or stand for.
But he said at one point that fascism, the, the, something like the tweet was something to the effect of like the core of fascism is like a lack of humanity or alienating the other or something like that.
It's like basically fascism just means bad and democracy just means good.
You know what I mean?
And it doesn't take much thinking.
Like you don't really have to go through these things too deeply to make this whole worldview collapse.
Like you could just, just for this, right?
If fascism is everything bad and democracy is everything good, well, how do you deal with this?
The Austrians voted for the Nazis to take over Austria.
Got like 90%.
So is everything good now with national socialism?
I mean, if at least the Austrian chunk of it was democratically elected, does that help you?
How do you like square that circle?
How do you, how do you fucking, you know, even that out?
Okay.
So I guess democracy is just kind of like people getting to vote.
It's just majority rule.
Fascism was a very specific, like, you know what I mean?
Like it was a very specific form of government, which was really all about the merger of corporations and the state with state having complete control.
And then there's socialism.
And socialism used to have a meaning, which was public ownership of the means of production.
That was the socialism.
If you go back and read socialists from the 1880s or 1890s, that's what they mean when they're talking about socialism.
They mean public ownership of the means of production.
I'm pretty sure if you look it up and like Merrien Webster's, that's still what it will say.
But much like other words, like, you know, whatever, whatever the, you know, whether it's fascism or democracy or, you know, gender or fucking any of these words, they just kind of change them to be more convenient.
And it gets to a point where I don't even know what you're talking about.
So when someone calls someone a fascist online, they're basically just saying, I think you're bad.
And democracy just means it's good.
And socialism has become a word that to many people means like sharing or, you know, having humanity or like caring about the poor or income inequality or something like that.
It's like very vague.
And the concerning thing is that when socialism actually meant socialism, like state ownership of the means of production, well, that was actually tried.
Now, another thing that people do all the time is they differentiate between communism and socialism.
And this ends up being a useful tool for modern-day socialists to kind of distance themselves from the countries that they go, no, no, no, that was communism.
We are just socialists.
But truthfully, if you want to go by the definitions of what these terms meant, communism is something that's never existed, that will never exist, that can never exist.
Socialism is more correctly how you would define Mao Zedong's China, the Soviet Union, you know, places like that.
In just saying that if you were to describe like the definition of communism, at least according to Marx, who I believe coined the term, the definition of communism was like, communism was like the end state, and it was a stateless, classless society where the workers owned the means of production.
So the idea was that after the socialist, the government took over and there was a dictator of the proletariat, eventually the state would wither away because it would be unnecessary and the workers would just own the means of production and there would be no classes and no state.
Now, the idea of a stateless, classless society is just not going to happen.
Now, I'm personally somebody who believes that a stateless society is possible and actually preferable, but the idea that there wouldn't be classes of people, to me, at least it seems that the only way you could ever enforce nobody being able to rise or fall into different classes would be with some type of totalitarian state.
And even then, you won't get it because now you have a class that is the state versus the ones who are oppressed by the state.
Like you can't really have it.
And, you know, I mean, I think this is just basic common sense to anyone that even if it's not like just the idea that some people are smarter than other people is going to form into different classes.
The fact that some people work harder than other people is going to form into different classes at some point.
Anyway, socialism really has been tried many times and it is the scourge of humanity.
I mean, it's the worst thing that's ever happened.
It's not, it's not even close.
If you look at the amount of just brutality, death, democide slash genocide, mass starvation, the numbers that socialism has put up are like, you know, no one can compete with them.
Now, to be fair, there's a little bit of an asterisk because like the fucking fascists lost the war, so they didn't get as long of a reign.
The socialists had more time to kill their own people.
So, you know, whatever.
But, and then you can get into a whole argument about were the fat, you know, was national socialism a form of socialism, even leaving that debate aside, which I would tend to lean toward, yes, they were.
But even leaving that aside, just looking at like the USSR, Mao Zitong's China, Pol Pot, Castro, you know, look at all of them.
I mean, just like, it's the worst experiment in human history.
And you could say, okay, Bernie Sanders isn't talking about that.
He's talking about the new meaning of the word socialism.
None of that stuff, which by the way, is what Bernie Sanders will say today, if you ask him.
He's like, I'm not talking about the Soviet Union or fucking Castro.
I'm talking about Denmark.
You know, I'm talking about Sweden.
That's got the thing.
Now, right away, you could already see that the problem there is that, you know, if somebody, if any of us were to just be like, well, I'm a democratic fascist, you know, like I'm for fascism.
I like that system, but I just, you know, I want it to come about democratically.
I'm for like a kinder, you know, fascism.
You would see where people would kind of go like, oh, why would you want to use the word that was the word that's, you know, like it or not is associated with fucking Hitler?
Like, why would you want to use that term, you know?
And then they go, no, no, no, that was like authoritarian fascism.
I'm talking about a whole different thing.
You could see where that would bother people.
But that's not it alone with Bernie Sanders.
The truth is that Bernie Sanders, you know, like when I talk about like the socialist writers of 1880, well, the thing about Bernie Sanders is he was around back then.
He was like 45 years old already.
Okay, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but he was around for a whole lot.
And he's been a socialist for a really, really long time.
If you want to talk about going back into Bernie Sanders' past and how he's been so consistent, he has been consistent in some ways.
He's always looked 80.
That's been pretty consistent for Bernie Sanders.
Even when he was 30, he looked about the same age he is now, maybe even older.
But Bernie Sanders praised almost every single one of these brutal socialist regimes.
And back in the day, he did used to advocate for massive government takeovers of the means of production.
Now, he doesn't do that so much anymore, but he really used to be on that.
And he's never talked about like why he changed or why he realized that that form of socialism doesn't work.
He just kind of dismisses you if you ask him about that.
Like he's like, oh, this is like a right-wing talking point hit job kind of thing.
But it's like, look, Bernie Sanders praised Fidel Castro, praised that regime, said they were doing these wonderful things for their people.
Okay.
He praised the Soviet Union.
He even went there.
He went there on his honeymoon and came back and started talking about how wonderful their like public theater spaces were and how wonderful their train stations were.
Now, if somebody were to go to Nazi Germany and come back and start talking about how wonderful the trains were, would that not kind of rub you the wrong way?
Would you not be like, I'm a little bit surprised that the first thing you don't say about them is like brutal, authoritarian, genocidal regime.
By the way, nice trains.
These railroads?
Look at you.
Auschwitz like it's nothing, man.
Yeah, well, it's like, right.
How good?
What does it really matter how good the trains are if they're leading toward Auschwitz, you know?
And this was well, this is like the 80s.
This is the, he's, he was praising this economy.
They were fucking a decade away, less than a decade away from total collapse.
And he's talking about the chandeliers and shit like that.
And they showed him a really good time while he was out there.
He just came back and lied.
Oh, no, no, no.
He was there.
There's like video of them, like shirtless drinking with the Russians and shit.
It's real, real crazy.
Look, I'm just saying, Bernie is deep into this shit.
And he also, he praised the fucking Nicaraguan socialists.
He praised, you know, Fidel Castro is another one.
I mean, he just couldn't, like, can't stop.
I mean, just look at Cuba, right?
And this is, of course, one of the most bizarre parts of the modern day, like college leftists, that they just have this blind spot for socialist authoritarianism.
And I really do think it's a blind spot.
I don't think it's more like, you know, nefarious than that, but I don't give Bernie Sanders the same pass because you're a grown-up.
You're not some fucking 20-year-old.
Now, the truth is, because I've seen these like videos online and I've even had conversations with people like this, but you see these 20-year-olds who are wearing like Shea Guevara t-shirts.
And it's very easy to just point out to him.
It's like, you know, Shea Guevara like rounded up the gays and threw them in worker camps.
You know, and they'll be like, that's not true.
Like, they just don't know.
And fine.
I mean, you know, you've been misled by a lot of people, but that's whatever they think it is is not that.
I don't give Bernie Sanders that same type of pass.
I'm sorry, that's fucking creepy.
And he'll still, even to this day, if you ask them about Cuba, he'll be like, listen, I think Cuba hasn't been a democratic country and that's not good.
You know, like, that's what I'll hit him for, that they're not democratic.
Because he realizes once a government seizes everything, they tend to not let you vote on whether they get to continue to hold everything.
But he'll say things like, look, they haven't been democratic and their economy is not functioning, but they have provided free health care to all of their people and they have provided free education to all of their people.
Now, I know I've said this, I think, on the podcast before.
I think it's been a long time since I've said it, but it's worth repeating.
Anybody, and this just shows you the outrageous misunderstanding of what the word education means, at least from my perspective.
But anybody who will tell you that a regime that does not allow freedom of speech very explicitly, I mean, the state owns the newspapers.
If a newspaper were to print anything criticizing the government, they would be shut down and arrested.
Protesters are arrested.
You're not allowed to dissent in Cuba to this day.
If you think that that state providing schooling can be considered education, me and you have different views of what education is.
It's like, okay, yeah.
He gives them, quote, free, quote, education.
If by free, you mean you'll be, you know, starving, living in fucking extreme poverty for the rest of your life, then I suppose it is free.
Free Education in Cuba00:02:28
And if by education, you mean what the state allows you to read, then okay.
But that doesn't seem like such a good deal.
Of course, we dubbed him breadline Bernie's, Breadline Bernie, because he once said that it's actually a really good thing when you see people waiting on breadlines, because at least they're getting bread.
Other countries, people starve to death.
But in these countries, they get breadlines.
Now, I'm sorry, am I supposed to treat Bernie Sanders like he's that stupid and give him the benefit of the doubt?
It's like, no, Bernie, actually, the countries where people have been starving to death the most are the ones where there are those breadlines.
That's why they're waiting on those breadlines because they're fucking hungry.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Anyway, it's just, you know, it's a little bit creepy.
Intersectionality and Identity Politics00:10:23
And then recently, when this all, because he used to say, right, that this was all CIA propaganda.
Like people would say that the Nicaraguan, you know, the socialists were like killing people and stuff.
But that was all propaganda.
This is CIA propaganda.
And same thing with the Soviet Union.
Same thing with Fidel Castro.
This was all CIA propaganda.
And no doubt there is a lot of CIA propaganda.
And no doubt the CIA shouldn't have been intervening in any of those parts of the world.
But as it came out, to a point that's just undeniable, that this isn't CIA propaganda.
I mean, they may have lied about some things, but the fact is that, you know, we can walk and chew gum.
We could say that America didn't need to fight the war in Vietnam, but that doesn't mean Stalin was a decent guy.
You know what I mean?
Like they're both, they can both be true.
And the truth is that they were all just brutal, you know, absolutely the worst types of thuggish governments.
And then when all of that kind of came out and couldn't be denied anymore, Bernie was like, what are you talking about?
I'm talking about Denmark, man.
Socialism like Denmark.
And of course, you know, that we could get into how those countries are not socialist at all, you know, and all of that stuff.
And the truth is that if Bernie Sanders wants to actually advocate that people should all pay 70% income taxes plus a 25% consumption tax, then okay, let him argue that.
But you ain't getting to Denmark or Sweden from the billionaires.
That's not going to fucking happen.
The numbers just don't add up.
And, you know, when I guess what's just a little bit frustrating to me, too, is that when Rogan says, well, Bernie Sanders has been consistent, it's like, how consistent can somebody be when they don't even live their own fucking values?
I mean, Bernie Sanders is a guy who's made millions of dollars and then says, hey, I wrote a best-selling book.
If you want to be a millionaire, you can write a best-selling book.
Then he maximizes his deductions to pay as little income tax as he possibly can and doesn't give much to charity.
He's advocating everybody else.
He's advocating the billionaires pay fucking 90% income taxes, but yet the millionaire should get away paying 20.
Why is that?
Why don't you have to step up?
Like if income inequality is such a moral outrage, why don't you have to narrow the gap yourself or just voluntarily do it?
Lead by example.
So that stuff to me is just like, no matter, even if Bernie Sanders has three attractive qualities about him, I just could never support a guy who is too, takes the word of the most brutal form of government that's ever existed and then apologizes for some of the most brutal regimes.
And it's, you know, that's what's kind of frustrating to me to see anyone, to see anybody going along with that, especially someone I respect so much.
But, hey, you're going to do what you're going to do.
You know, I certainly do get why Bernie Sanders is a more attractive option than like Joe Biden to a lot of people.
There's something else that's interesting.
An interesting dynamic that has come out of all of this is that there's kind of like this split between the socialist left and the woke left, which I think in some ways represents the Bernie Sanders versus Elizabeth Warren.
I mean, not completely.
It's not that easy to slice and dice it because they overlap on both sides.
But there is, right?
Like, so Bernie Sanders is like an old school socialist who really does just believe in this kind of idea that capitalism is inherently flawed and inherently kind of evil and unfair.
And, you know, this idea that like no one should have a billion dollars while somebody else is homeless, which I get where it's really, really attractive to an 18-year-old.
That was attractive to me at 18.
Why the hell should someone have so much while someone else has?
You should be able to write the book?
Be able to make a million dollars while tax people have a million and one dollars because that's inappropriate.
I mean, it's really more or less it.
So anyway, so I, you know, like there's, but, but Bernie Sanders will say, you know, he'll talk about racism, you know, I'm against racism.
He'll say things like this campaign is all about economic justice and racial justice.
And Bernie Sanders was like marching with the civil rights, you know, activists and stuff like that.
And he's, you know, that's like the old school, the old school socialist mentality.
They were always against racism and they were always kind of like, this is a thing.
And it was right out of like, you know, the Soviets used to love talking about American racism.
And they weren't necessarily completely wrong about it.
You know, like they, historically, the Russians have always been pretty good on reporting on the crimes of America.
And America's pretty good on reporting on the crimes of the Soviet Union.
We're not great at reporting on our own crimes because, you know, it's advantageous to point out how horrible that that regime is.
But so Bernie's always had that.
But Bernie is not, like, he doesn't get 20-year-old woke PC culture.
Like, he doesn't get that.
And that whole like kind of intersectionality stuff, that was after Bernie Sanders.
That got really popular.
And he's not really playing that game.
And this is why the more establishment Democrats really play that game hard.
This is why, I mean, you think about like Obama, Hillary Clinton, and now Elizabeth Warren.
They really play the like black versus white, male versus female.
This is even why you see people like Biden promising his VP would be a woman.
Obama promising his Supreme Court nominations picks would be women.
You know, Hillary making the whole thing about being the first female president.
You know, this is like they use that game for, to me, I think pretty obvious reasons because it's a way to gain support without actually having to do anything for anybody.
You don't actually have to do anything.
You can continue bailing out the big banks, but look, there's a woman on the Supreme Court.
So don't we all feel good?
And of course, they use this to rally fear against the other.
This is why the big criticism of Mitt Romney was there was a war on women.
You know, I don't know if you guys remember back in 2012, and it's like 100 years ago now, but there was that one congressman who said the thing about legitimate rape.
It was just like one offhanded little remark that meant nothing in an interview, but he said that became the whole story of the election because that's how you play on this thing.
There's a war on women.
Look what they support.
And so Elizabeth Warren, right?
Like, what was her big criticism of Bernie Sanders?
So he said something mean about women.
He's sexist, you know, implied.
He's a sexist.
That's how they operate.
Either you're a racist or you're a sexist.
Now, Bernie Sanders, in a weird way, I guess to his credit, he doesn't really care about that shit.
Like, you're not going to see Bernie Sanders attacking one of his opponents for being a racist or a sexist.
Bernie Sanders, like, we got to raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour.
Like, that's what he cares about.
He cares about his economic policies, even though they're all dumbass policies.
But there's something more noble about that than just calling people racist and sexist.
But so what's interesting now is that you have that.
And like I said, these aren't clear-cut camps.
There's overlap.
There's a lot of overlap.
You think about the young Turks supporting Bernie Sanders.
They specialize in the woke identitarian bullshit.
But what's now happening is there's this backlash against Joe Rogan with all these people talking about how he's transphobic or he's racist or all these other fucking things.
And it's just interesting to see this inter-left-wing dynamic where that's how they deal with somebody supporting Bernie Sanders, who by their own logic is the obvious candidate to support.
And by the own, by the leftist logic, well, let's just do that.
Let's just go with Bernie Sanders.
I mean, this is the thing.
And this is why it's so hard for people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg to grapple with Bernie Sanders because they're already giving in to the framework.
You know what I mean?
It's like if I go to you, if I say, hey, you know, we could tax rich people at 10% and it can really help the economy and really help middle class and poor people.
And rich people don't really even need that 10% of their income anyway.
Then somebody else comes along and goes, 20%.
Make the 25.
Make it right.
I mean, like, why isn't that better?
By your own framing, well, they don't need 20% either.
And that'll help twice as much as 10% will.
So it's obvious in a Democrat debate when, you know, Joe Biden's like, I have a $3 trillion health care proposal.
And Bernie Sanders is like, I have a $30 trillion health care proposal.
It's like, oh, all right.
Well, that's better.
It's 10 times better, right?
I mean, like, what's the downside here?
You're already trying to pretend government is free.
So he's like, it's free.
Let's really fucking give people shit for free.
So what's the criticism here?
It's like, oh, well, that guy supporting you is transphobic.
And it's just been really funny to see them like fucking take out the fucking context of everything Rogan says.
Because if you put the context in, it's so hard to argue with him.
The transphobic thing is the funny because they go, he referred one time on his show, he yelled that a trans woman, he said, quote, you're a man about a trans woman.
And it's like, okay, yeah, I mean, I guess if you just leave it there to your average left-winger, that's like a big no-no.
You can't say you're a man, you're a woman.
But if you know the context, he was talking about a trans woman fighting MMA against women.
So a man beating the shit out of women.
And he went, you're a man.
You shouldn't be allowed to fight women.
Now, you add that context in and the left's in a little bit of a pickle, right?
Because they're not so big on men being allowed to beat the shit out of women.
MMA Rules and Gender Debates00:05:40
But of course, they just, but anyway, it's just interesting to me to see, even with the Elizabeth Warren thing, with this stuff with Rogan, it's like that's the woke PC crowd.
This is their answer back to that.
But of course, most of the time, what's behind that is somebody like Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, these guys who are really just fucking corporatists.
You know, they just kind of use this identity politics to consolidate power.
And I really don't think it's working nearly as well as it has for years.
So anyway, that part has been interesting.
Interesting to watch.
Interesting to say the least.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So one of Bernie Sanders' dumbass plans that has been also embraced by Elizabeth Warren is the free college, free college for all, as well as debt forgiveness for student loan debt.
And Robbie, you sent me this video, which I did not see, but it was really fantastic.
But Elizabeth Warren was out.
You know how she's taken 100,000 selfies or something like that?
Well, she's still taking selfies.
And she was out doing one of these, you know, I guess, you know, speaking events.
And then she was lining up to take pictures with people afterward.
They get a chance to meet Pocahontas.
And there is this one guy who just had a great interaction with her.
We have the video.
I don't know how great the audio is, but we're going to play it.
It's just wonderful.
Is the audio on?
Bear with us.
Let's take it back to the beginning.
I'm not answering.
Hello, yay.
I just want to ask one question.
My daughter's getting out of school.
I saved all my money.
She doesn't have these two money.
Am I going to get my money back?
Of course not.
So you're going to pay for people who didn't save any money.
And those of us that did the right thing get screwed.
No, it's not even going to get screwed.
Of course we did.
My buddy had fun, bought a car, went on vacations.
I saved my money.
He made more than I did.
But I worked a double shift, worked the extra mic.
Darn works and just can't.
So you're laughing.
Yeah, that's exactly what you're doing.
We did the right thing and we get screwed.
I appreciate that.
All right, let's pause there.
I don't know how clear that audio was.
So let me just, for anybody, if you couldn't understand it, break down what happened.
So there's this guy who is patiently waiting as Elizabeth Warren's talking to some other people.
And she turns around and he goes, so my daughter just got out of school and I paid all of her tuition bills.
So am I going to get that money back?
And she goes, of course not.
Because you see, that would be crazy.
So of course not.
And he goes, so basically, we're just getting screwed.
He goes, I worked my ass off, worked double shifts.
My daughter's worked since she was 10 years old.
I have friends of mine, he says, who were making more money than me, who were buying cars, going on vacation.
They took out loans.
We didn't.
We did the right thing and didn't take out loans.
So now he's going to get his loans forgiven, you know, by implication.
Still gets to keep the car, still went on that vacation.
But we, he goes, and then he says, you're just laughing at us.
And then she just says, well, thank you.
Nice to meet you.
And has no response.
Wasn't that just perfect?
Pitiful.
Yeah.
The Cost of Doing Right00:16:32
Isn't it interesting, Rob?
How she has no answer because there is no answer to that.
That's your plan.
And that to me is the worst part of the media: you watch these interviews.
And how do these people not get pressed on these topics?
That's part of what, like, dude, we're talking about Rogan for a half hour here.
I love Rogan.
I don't watch TV anymore.
There's very little media that I consume.
And I watch a lot of Rogan on YouTube.
That's my thing when I get home at the end of the night.
I love the guy.
Watching him talk to Bernie Sanders and not press him on some of these things was like, it's upsetting to see because I know what we can expose and how horrible some of these policies are.
This is what's wrong with the media: that some random dude did a better job than anybody anybody because he asked two follow-up questions to go, Hey, here's why this isn't fair.
And all that it took was two follow-up questions for her to realize I can't win this argument, so I'm just going to step out of it because I don't want to have to admit on the record verbally say, Hey, this is unfair.
Yeah.
And it really is.
And by the way, this same logic can be applied to almost every inch of the government.
Almost every inch of it is basically the same thing.
I mean, the entire idea of taxes that you're going to tax people.
Now, you can, as of course, Elizabeth Warren will do, and Bernie Sanders will do, and anybody advocating an income tax or a progressive tax for that matter will do is they can point out the examples where the victim is on the side that they're trying to help.
I mean, you could point out, you could say, well, hey, I mean, there's somebody who can't work because, you know, they lost both of their legs in an accident, and we're going to tax you and help them out a little bit.
And don't you feel bad for that guy?
And like, okay.
Look, I'm not denying that reality, okay?
I'm not denying that there is somebody out there who, you know, as a society, we would want to be educated in college who can get it if it's free, but can if it costs money.
Like, fine, fair enough.
That's the side that's obvious.
You know what I mean?
In some sense, I feel the same way about the immigration debate, where everybody, the only victims you're allowed to think about are, well, what about this family coming over?
But there's a victim on the other side, too.
Even that is a false narrative.
And by that, one of the most profound libertarian chapters was in For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard, and he talks about education and how it could be done by companies.
I can tell you that I took a one-week class in sales that has done more for my lifetime income than anything I ever did in school ever.
And within that one-week class, I was treated like a human being.
They bought me lunch.
I sat in a nice chair.
There was a cup of coffee for me.
And you know why?
Because the company was really invested in making money and making sure that I had the skills so that I could go make money for the company.
School doesn't operate that way.
And so the idea that really talented people couldn't get an education without government loading us up with debt, like really look at what happened.
Well, and it would be much more affordable even for it if there was still a purpose for like a four-year college, you know, which there still is.
Like there still are people who want to be doctors or something like that, where it's like you want them to go to years of schooling.
But even that, probably they should be able to go right into medical training of some sort.
There's just like I completely agree with you.
But the other, but the part that this guy was getting at that you really miss is that it's like, look, we all know just from life, like nobody has reached the age 18 and not already experienced the reality that some people do the right thing while other people do the wrong thing.
Like if you were to say, for example, just literally, I'm talking about an 18-year-old.
If you were just to talk about within school, right?
Like getting schoolwork done.
If you were to say that the people who did well on a test, you know, like their points should be taxed and donated to the people who did poorly on a test because they're there through no fault of their own.
They just weren't lucky to be born as intelligent as the people who did well on the test or something like that.
I mean, wouldn't it just be obvious that?
Not to say there's no truth to that, that yes, there are some people who are just naturally smarter and it's a little bit easier for them to do well on a test.
But there's obviously this other major factor, which is like some people studied more and some people went out and fucking partied, you know?
And like, I say this as someone who is not a very good student.
And some people got nervous to stay at home and jerked off a whole bunch.
Yeah.
That's what I, that's, I consider that partying.
That's that's the real party right there.
But right, so there are some people who kind of like did.
Now, a lot of people who make more money or just even have a job is a result of them doing some of the right things.
And somebody else maybe just went off and fucking partied.
And then that person who's making more money now, you're going to tax them and give some of that money to the person who did the wrong things.
So do you really want to structure a society's rules around rewarding the people who did the wrong thing and punishing the people who did the right thing?
Now, with the case of free college and absolving or abolishing student debt, look, this is the guy himself standing in front of you.
But we've talked about this quite a bit.
It is a huge middle finger, a huge slap in the face to the parents who worked really hard so that their kids didn't have to go into debt.
And I understand, this is no joke.
I mean, you talk about parents paying their kids way through college.
This is, I mean, it could easily be $40,000, $50,000 a year that this dad's talking about.
That you're talking about close to the average median household income per year of spending this.
It could be a little bit less.
It could be $20,000, $30,000 or something like that.
Or maybe I don't know this guy's situation, what school his daughter was going to, but it's no joke.
It's no small chunk of change.
And they do all of that.
And then the people who didn't prepare at all and just took out student loans, they get all of their debt gets wiped away.
It's an outrage that you would do that to the people who did the right thing, that you would punish all of the people who did the right thing and reward so many who did the wrong thing.
And like you said, I've never seen this.
I've watched every Democratic debate.
I haven't seen one, you know, quote, journalist ever bring up those people.
It's like, you wonder why so many people hate the fucking media.
Who advocates for that guy?
You know?
And just to add a little bit, like another element to what's a problem with that distortion is that part of human happiness does tie into status in my understanding.
And so all of a sudden, like when government picks winners or like, for example, you had the guy who pretended like he was high status because he bought the car and he enjoyed all these elements of his life because he wasn't, you know, he didn't do what he was supposed to do.
And then all of a sudden you just give him back the money.
So then he gets to enjoy his life more than somebody else.
And it's fictional.
It's a government handout.
It's wrong.
That's why I prefer the free market to government.
It's like they get to, I prefer let people kind of play the game.
Some people are going to end up on top and some people are going to lose.
But to me, that's better than when government just kind of steps in and picks winners, which is what they're doing.
It's so profoundly outrageous and immoral that somebody's sitting back and they're teaching this lesson to their kid.
And they're going, yeah, yeah.
It's like, oh, he's, you know, our neighbor, Tom, has like this brand new car.
And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's got this new car.
But we're being smart.
We're saving our money and we're going to have the last laugh because we're actually doing the right thing.
And then the government proves you wrong.
Yeah.
They come in and prove that actually he did the smart thing by just frivolously spending his fucking money because they'll come in after stealing the money from you to fucking fucking pay for that guy's shit.
By the way, there's already a lot of that.
The best example of that is when you listen, when you're old, things go to shit and you're going to end up in some old age home.
Now, people that are completely destitute, Medicaid picks up the bill.
People that aren't totally destitute, basically whatever the fuck you had goes towards that bill.
And then once you're destitute, Medicaid kicks in.
People that are clever, I think it's like four or five years prior to when you're going to need it.
They divest of all their assets.
They give it out to their kids that all of a sudden when they hit that age, Medicaid picks up the bill.
But the point being, there's an incentive either to cheat the system and get rid of all your assets five years before you're going to need to be in an old age home, or it's like being in a casino where whatever your chips are, they wipe it away and then they start paying in.
Even college tuition itself, like part of the way, like the people they, like the more responsible people, they do like these health.
I mean, they do the savings accounts that they have some money for their kids.
That basically gets factored against you because all of a sudden when the government's reviewing your assets to determine how much they're going to chip in for your college tuition, if you're a person who saved the whole time, now your savings are being counted against you for what their government's going to pitch in.
Now, if you look even bigger picture than that, there's a reason why college tuition costs have outpaced inflation, and it's because government introduced money into that market.
It's basically it's like a credit credit asset bubble, the same as the home, the home market was.
That's exactly what it is.
You create government money into a market.
Obviously, it's not like the colleges go, okay, we're going to let people in.
They go, hey, there's more money available.
So we're going to charge more for our product.
And then government keeps making the money available.
They just charge more for the product.
They didn't do anybody any favors.
They just loaded kids up with debt.
The only thing there I would give you pushback against is that they didn't do anybody any favor.
Well, they did the colleges.
They did the colleges a tremendous favor and they did these big financial companies a tremendous favor.
Yes.
I mean, and that's that's really no joke.
Like that's so it's it's this whole scheme where the politicians get to brag about the numbers.
The colleges get to bring in ungodly amounts of money.
These fucking, you know, like presidents of colleges are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
There's all their administrations making a ton of fucking money.
Their staff, their professors get, you know, the best fucking pensions and health care plans that are pretty much on the market right now that anybody gets.
And these fucking banks get to fucking indebt people right from the beginning of their adult productive life.
So they all come out big winners, but the losers are the families and these fucking kids who come out, you know, 20 years old, $100,000 in debt.
It's just, it's such an outrage.
And what we were talking about before, I mean, it's really what that's all about is like the moral hazard that nobody ever wants to look at.
But it's not just that if you, you know, if you, when you subsidize bad behavior and punish good behavior, what does that do to the next generation?
You know, like what effect does that have on that kid growing up who sees that, oh, your old-timey advice about save your money and do the right thing, that made you a sucker, you know?
It's really terrible.
And there's even a current market distortion that so many people that their primary retirement savings is basically in their home because they were incentivized to buy homes and have mortgages.
No one of my generation is buying houses because they can't afford them, which is largely because they've already been succored by debt and they realize, hey, I don't really like having debt.
And the other side of that, which is what you're describing, there's a morally corrosive part to society that because people can't really afford to get homes or to start families, they're not.
And you have these people who are like living in cities and they make a shit ton of money, but it's like it just gets burned because you don't really feel like they're good places to park it or like vehicles for starting homes.
And that's all because they loaded us up with debt with this dream of, hey, go to college and you're going to get paid well and it's all going to work out.
And people shouldn't have spent as much money as they did on college.
And the payouts weren't as good as they claimed.
Yeah.
And I got to say, what you touched on there, and I've been trying to find ways to talk about this more and more because I think it's one of the areas that libertarians in general don't do a good enough job in addressing because we try to not that we try to, but by nature, we stick to a very truncated legal philosophy or economic message.
When you talked about the kind of morally corrosive force that this has on society and what this does to society, it's really profound.
Like really, really profound.
I mean, when you think about the main areas where government has made costs just ungodly and just unaffordable, which of course, you know, you'd be thinking about these areas that are that have, you know, are have heavy, heavy government intervention.
So college is one of them, healthcare costs is another, daycare costs is another.
But all of these combined, and I'm probably leaving out a couple big ones.
What did I say?
Housing, healthcare, college, daycare.
But all of these things are directly related to your ability to be independent and have a family.
I mean, having a family seems so out of reach for so many people in their early 20s because it's like, what are you talking about?
I'd have to own a home, pay for fucking college, pay for health insurance, pay for fucking daycare, or what in many cases now, unfortunately.
And that just seems completely out of reach.
And it reminds me of when Obama, you know, made that provision that I think it was till 26, you can stay on your parents' health insurance.
And then when the Republicans were talking about repealing Obamacare, this was a big one of the ones where they were like, they won't let you stay on your parents' health insurance till you're 26.
Feel however you feel about that.
Even somebody who's like a progressive, can you not take a step back and go, how sad is that?
Like, how fucking sad is that that you have some 25-year-old who can't be independent?
You're supposed to be fucking independent at 25.
You know, like that's, you're telling me our 17, 18-year-olds can fight war, you know, can fight in a war, but by fucking seven years later, they can't own a home.
They, they can't pay for their own health insurance.
You know what I mean?
And I think there's something, particularly for men, maybe I'm, you know, a little biased because I'm slightly more familiar with the male perspective than the female.
I've been a male for 36 years and only a female for three.
But it's like, I really think there's something terrible for young men to have to be dependent on their parents and not be able to feel that they can take care or provide for a woman.
I think that's a really terrible thing that does a lot to undermine our like culture.
And I, you know, it's like I struggle sometimes to really put this into a libertarian message.
But it's, it's horrible.
It's really, really horrible that home ownership is so far out of reach.
And all of us, we see this all around us.
I mean, I know, I, I know personally, like, you know, in the areas that I grew up in and where a lot of my friends grew up in in Brooklyn, I mean, it used to be like affordable.
It used to be fairly reasonable that you could like own a home there.
It wasn't like it was rich people who owned fucking homes there when I was a kid.
It was like working class people owned homes, middle class people owned homes.
Nowadays, no one I know can afford to go fucking buy a home where we grew up.
Sad.
It's really fucking sad.
And, you know, the baby boomer generation, and this is part of where the resentment against the boomers comes in.
Home Ownership Crisis00:09:56
And even just when it manifests in like those okay boomer memes and shit like that, it's like, oh, they were all so happy that they made so much money.
Oh, look at my fucking equity.
It went through the roof.
And it's like, that's great for you.
What does that do for your fucking children's generation?
They got to come to you now that fucking hope you leave them their fucking home.
They can't be independent and buy one.
It's terrible.
It's absolutely terrible.
And, you know, it's like, so there's this tremendous irony that so many of the policies that people like Bernie Sanders will champion on behalf of the working class or whatever screw over the next generation of working class or the current generation.
I mean, think about this, right?
Bernie Sanders, Mr. Champion of the Working Class, supports forgiving student loans.
Well, look, here's the reality of the situation, okay?
The federal government owns a tremendous amount of these student loans already.
And surprise, the federal government doesn't exist.
There's really no such thing.
The federal government isn't picking up anything.
It's just taxpayers who are going to fucking pick it up.
That's all they actually have.
All the federal government has, I mean, if they were to sell all of their buildings and all of their artwork and all even the publicly owned land and stuff like that, it doesn't amount to nearly enough money to pick up the fucking tab for all of this.
And then the government's gone.
So they're not going to fucking do that.
Okay.
So what they do is they tax people for it.
So the working people are the ones who fucking pay taxes.
So now some kid who's working, who's like, let's say the kid who doesn't have the opportunity to go to college, you know, whatever.
Maybe he's got a sick family member and they need to start bringing money in right away.
Maybe he's got a family.
Maybe he's a young guy who fucking got a chick knocked up and he's got a family to take care of.
He doesn't have the luxury of going and fucking studying for four years.
Okay, so he's got to work and he starts paying taxes right now.
So now you're going to tax him to pay for the kid who's going to college or who went to college.
So what a moral outrage.
There's so many of these policies, they fucking screw over the people they claim to be.
And you look at, you know, California, the most progressive state in the union.
How's that working out for the middle and working class?
Works out great for the billionaires and I suppose the homeless.
But it's not working out for the middle class or the working class at all.
It's just, it's just, it's terrible.
And it's really destroyed so much of our culture.
I mean, you know, it's like Tucker Carlson said on his show the other night that he says, you know, if anybody could talk, and I was talking about this when I was on the School Sucks podcast.
We got Brett coming on on Wednesday, by the way.
But I was talking about this on the School Sucks podcast the other day.
But I said, you know, because we were talking about education and he was asking me about my plans with my daughter's education.
And I said that, you know, so often libertarians, we miss the cultural component of our society, which is really, this is why I've been trying to stress it for the last few years.
I just realized more and more that it's really important and it's not removed from these other things.
They're all interrelated.
And if you want to fucking have, you know, especially, you know, the rise of like Antifa and social justice warriors and stuff like that.
And you're like, oh, okay, well, this culture will never support a libertarian legal order.
Like, you'll never have free markets and people who believe that everything's a microaggression.
Like, you just, you won't have the two.
You have to have some type of culture that supports freedom.
Otherwise, it's just not going to work.
And so I was talking to him about education, like what our plan with our daughter is for education.
And, you know, and I was like, you know, forget even schooling, separating schooling from education, which I think is an important thing to do, like what you were getting at with the on-the-job training stuff.
But I was like, you know, libertarians so often talk about these like transformations in our society.
You know, we'll talk about when we went from like a republic to an empire or talk about how before 1913, there was no federal income tax.
Or we'll talk about that before 1971, we were on a gold standard or things like that, you know?
And these are all really, really important changes in our society.
All very worth discussing, you know, as the national security state rose after World War II or any of these things.
Very, very important.
But we also became a society where parents don't raise their children.
And that was a profound change that really all of these other changes kind of pale in comparison to.
Just the fact that parents do not raise their own children in our society.
It's like daycare, nannies, and public schools raise the children.
And if you think that doesn't have any impact on a libertarian social order, you're missing something big.
Like that is really, really important.
And Tucker Carlson said on his show recently, and I thought it really hit home with me.
He goes, how about one politician talk about that?
How about one politician go, I'm going to have a plan that allows 30-year-olds to get married and have kids.
Like that's going to be the goal of my plan.
And he goes, I bet if someone did that, they would win and they deserve to win.
Now, I don't know what Tucker Carlson's plan for that would be.
He didn't really outline that.
I would like to see a libertarian plan for that because I do think government intervention is the reason why all of these prices are so inflated.
But it's like, it is interesting that no one really talks about that.
Like this has only been existing since the 70s.
It really started.
This is a fairly new phenomenon.
And then people will wonder why the culture is kind of decaying and there's all these cultural problems.
And I got to say, I think, you know, part of it might be the destruction of families raising their children.
You know what you'd have to do?
You know, you'd have to fuck up.
You'd have to fuck over old people really good.
Where so much.
What are they going to do?
Fight me?
So much of this is propped up by government money.
Even what's going on in the financial markets between QE and what's going on with the, you know, with the Fed and the repo markets.
But if they really just pulled out the plug, prices would reset.
They would come down.
And the most employable people would be young people.
So everyone who's priced out of the markets, it's your 65, it's your 55s.
And all of a sudden, the people that are the most lucrative, if you got to get rid of 40% of your workforce, your 25 and your 30-year-olds who are work for cheaper, who are more energetic, that's who you hire.
And on the same note, as prices came down, all of a sudden all these things that are unaffordable for your 25 and 30-year-olds would be affordable.
Your problem is you'd have a lot of old people who were relying on a system that lied to them for their entire lives.
They thought Social Security was coming.
They thought that their home value was going up.
They thought that the stock market was going to continue to rise.
All the things that government told them and then continued to pump money into like a Ponzi scheme to pretend like it was actually working, even though it doesn't.
You could reset it, but you got to start making some tough choices.
Do we want to be fucking over the young or do we want to stop lying to the old that these things that are unaffordable and we don't really have money for, we don't.
Yeah, well, I mean, I know what my choice in that would be.
And it's not to say, look, I'm sorry the old people were lied to, but that doesn't justify robbing from current generations to prop up some lie from 30 years ago.
This is why I love when Jacob Hornberger is the only guy in politics at all who's coming around right now and just saying, oh, we need to abolish the entitlement programs.
That's that.
Abolish the fucking entitlement programs.
Goodbye, Social Security.
Goodbye, Medicare.
Sorry, they're insolvent anyway.
So they're not going to last much longer.
But guess what?
We're getting rid of them.
And now, instead of the young working class having to prop up senior citizens, we give them their fucking money and they get to choose whether they want to support their parents or not.
Let's give the sovereignty back to younger people and go, look, now, are some of them not going to do the right thing, quote, right thing, and take care of grandma?
I mean, I don't know, but maybe part of that is like that you weren't raising your family all of these years and they don't feel a loyalty to you.
I mean, I know I would take care of my family in that situation.
Not my father, but you know, I really have a relationship with him.
But, you know, that's okay, but he kind of deserves that.
It's like, oh, well, now we're kind of incentivizing people to actually take care of their families and you're giving the fucking like kind of power and like adultness back to young adults.
I mean, it's a clear choice for me.
Isn't the inverse of what you're saying, though, is that if government hadn't stepped into that market, there'd be a strong incentive for parents to actually have relationships and strong enough bonds with their kids that their kids wanted to care for them while they were old.
Yeah.
And this is all, that's always the way it's been.
That's always the way.
There was this natural kind of ebb and flow where you take care of your kids while they're young.
Now, I'm not saying you reduce every interpersonal, you know, like human interaction to economics, but economics is life.
It's part of, you know, human activity.
And yes, it's like your kids are going to cost you money while they're young, but then when you're old and weak and can't work, they'll be in prime working age and they can take care of you.
That's kind of the natural order of things.
Parents take care of their kids when they're young and the kids take care of their parents when they're old.
And yeah, of course that makes the incentives line up to do a good job.
Produce functioning, contributing members of society with like a strong bond with you who are going to take care of you.
And the entitlement programs just, you know, do everything they can to destroy those incentives.
And it's terrible.
It's, you know, it's absolutely horrible.
Natural Order and Human Activity00:02:15
All right.
I do want to transition because there was another video that Robbie the Fire found.
This was another fire pick that I actually, now I watched, I don't, I think I did watch this because I watched all of this, but you, you honed in on this one part of a clip that I was like, oh, wow, that really was interesting.
And maybe I didn't give this the proper respect that it deserved.
But this was from, so obviously the impeachments going on.
I still think one of the funniest things Donald Trump said was a few weeks back when he goes, so I'm being impeached.
You know, is it one of his rallies?
And he goes, sure doesn't feel like an impeachment.
And there was really something about that.
It's Donald Trump's like fucking the kind of brilliant retard that Donald Trump is.
He just says these simple things sometimes and he kind of sounds like an idiot.
Then you're like, man, there was something really profound about that point.
And it's like, yeah, it really doesn't feel like a president being impeached.
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Corruption Concerns and Impeachment00:15:51
All right, let's get back into the show.
But so Adam Schiff gave this long speech at the Senate hearing.
And he's a member of the House of Representatives, but he got up on the Senate floor and spoke during the Senate trial.
And he went on and on.
It was a real long fucking talk.
And just, you know, just Adam Schiff, the fucking scummiest guy, just been a proven liar over the last few years, said such outrageous lies.
I think even accused Tucker Carlson of being a Russian asset at one point, said that he had seen the evidence of collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians and that America would see it soon and a whole bunch of other bullshit.
But he was given this speech.
And anyway, there was this portion of his speech that Robbie sent me the video of earlier today and was like, there's really something interesting, like a tacit admission in this.
So let's play the clip from The impeachment hearing.
Okay, he's guilty.
Okay, he's guilty.
Does he really need to be removed?
Does he really need to be removed?
We have an election coming up.
Does he really need to be removed?
He's guilty.
You know, is there really any doubt about this?
I mean, do we really have any doubt about the facts here?
Does anybody really question whether the president is capable of what he's charged with?
No one is really making the argument Donald Trump would never do such a thing.
Because of course we know that he would, and of course we know that he did.
It's a somewhat different question, though, to ask.
Okay, it's pretty obvious, whether we can say it publicly or we can't say it publicly, we all know what we're dealing here with this president.
But does he really need to be removed?
You may be asking, how much damage can he really do in the next several months until the election?
A lot.
A lot of damage.
Now, we just saw last week a report that Russia tried to hack or maybe did hack Burisma.
Okay?
I don't know if they got in.
I'm trying to find out.
My colleagues on the Intel Committee, House and Senate, were trying to find out.
Did the Russians get in?
What are the Russian plans and intentions?
Well, let's say they got in.
And let's say they start dumping documents to interfere in the next election.
Let's say they start dumping some real things they hacked from Burisma.
Let's say they start dumping some fake things they didn't hack from Burisma, but they want you to believe they did.
Let's say they start blatantly interfering in our election again to help Donald Trump.
Can you have the least bit of confidence that Donald Trump will stand up to them and protect our national interest over his own personal interest?
You know you can't.
Which makes sense.
Man, that really was a good find, Rob.
That was a really bizarre and intriguing thing to hear Adam Schiff, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, say that this is his big concern about what might happen.
Well, this is his argument for why we need to impeach Donald Trump.
Which, of course, by the constitutionality of the argument is absolutely ridiculous.
We have to impeach him because, well, don't you think he's capable of this?
And what if this happens in the future?
So we got to impeach him because, but what is the what if that happens in the future?
Well, we just got word that the Russians tried to hack Burisma and maybe did and maybe did.
Now, what if they start leaking information, some true, and then what if some of it's made up?
This is very strange.
First of all, why would your concern be?
It's so funny how removed this is.
Not that they hack the DNC, not that they hack the Pentagon, that they hack a Ukrainian national gas company.
This is Adam Schiff's big concern that they could have information from a Ukrainian natural gas company that could be leaked.
And it could be lies about it.
This is already getting ahead of this.
It's not even real what they're saying.
What a fucking fascinating thing.
Like, doesn't it seem strange that that would be your concern?
This would even come up in your speech about impeachment?
Very weird.
What did you think of that?
Well, first is the fact that he's still talking about Russia collusion.
Firstly, if we look back at the Russia collusion, it was that true information that they put out.
It was true information.
Like that wasn't.
Well, let me even just stop you there.
It's not even confirmed that Russia had anything to do with the WikiLeaks hack.
This is just something that's asserted by the...
Well, that's what I was going to say next, is you're still going with the idea of Russia collusion.
We spent two years with that nonsense and then it turned out it didn't exist.
And now you're going, hey, more true information might arrive here.
If it's true information and it happens to expose politicians for being corrupt.
There is no part of a constitutional argument or exposing or removing the flaws of Washington that should take issue with us exposing extreme corruption.
And so this sounds to me when he goes, hey, the worst threat here is that Burisma hacked us and they might give back the true information.
Well, great, let's get that information.
That's not a threat.
The fact that Trump is going to support true information coming to the American public that shows some of the horrible things that politicians are doing in Washington, but also, I mean, we've been saying from the beginning, fucking shift, dude.
He's clearly working with the CIA.
That was the initial whistleblower.
He claimed like he never met with the guy.
And whatever, like, there's teams in Washington.
You're clearly on the team of Democratic National Committee and who they're looking to try and get elected, which is clearly Biden that you have fucking Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren stuck right now dealing with impeachment hearings.
Like, you can look at it like a chessboard.
It's pretty clear what's going on here.
You want those guys, like, they seem to want Biden to win.
They seem to want these people to be preoccupied.
And they seem to not want the information about whatever the fuck Obama and Biden did to try and get other governments to create this false narrative of Russia collusion against Trump to come to light.
And now what you're basically saying is if this information that was hacked by the Russians about Burisma comes out, it's going to make us all look really, really bad.
And so we got to get rid of Trump before there's a possibility of us looking really, really bad.
Right.
Now, of course, the thing that's really kind of fascinating about all of this is, number one, your big concern is that Russia potentially hacked a Ukrainian natural gas company.
Yeah, that shouldn't have happened.
Now, why would there be anything there that could be used as damaging?
What is it that you're so worried about?
Now, that being said, if Russia did hack this and they're going to release the information, Trump being impeached doesn't stop the Russian government from releasing any of this information.
Are you just really concerned?
So here's the thing, right?
Now, I said this from the very beginning of the impeachment.
I thought it was very strange that the Democrats moved forward with impeachment on this.
As I said on one of the last episodes, there was a Washington Post article about the case for impeachment the day Donald Trump was inaugurated.
There were Hillary Clinton campaign members who were talking about impeaching Donald Trump before he was elected.
They were saying if Donald Trump wins, he'll be impeached.
Like this has been, and of course, there's been talks from Democratic representatives, the entire Trump presidency, about impeaching him.
And I said from the very beginning, it seemed strange that they went with this.
Like, even if after the Mueller report, they had said he left the door open for obstruction.
We're impeaching him for that.
At least there was like Mueller saying he couldn't determine, you know, whether there was obstruction.
And he laid out the 10 episodes that technically obstruction is a crime.
They could have gone after him for like the emoluments stuff or something like that.
It just seemed like there was a stronger case there.
Not that it was good, but stronger than this, where you actually have to tell Joe Sixpack in America that we need to, for the first time in American history, impeach and remove a president because he withheld military aid in order to get something that he never got and then relinquished the aid.
And basically, you know, he was trying to strong arm this guy, even though the guy says he wasn't trying to strong arm him.
And it all seems strange.
But start to put this together a little bit here, okay?
Donald Trump, this, by the way, this company, Burisma, is run by a Ukrainian oligarch.
This is a company that operates on government licenses to produce natural gas.
So in other words, you just, they have a right to do it given by the government.
This new leader gets elected in the Ukraine and he runs on an anti-corruption platform.
He's like, Ukraine is known as one of the most corrupt countries.
Okay.
Now, he's coming in saying, I'm going to clean up this corruption.
Donald Trump is trying to make a deal with him and no doubt in my mind was at least attempting at points to leverage the foreign aid to make deals with him.
But that's, that in itself is not a scandal.
That's how foreign aid works.
We don't just give countries foreign aid.
And who would support that?
I mean, I'm against all the foreign aid to begin with, but who would support that?
Like, you wouldn't ever have strings attached.
Anyway, so Donald Trump is now talking to the leader, being like, hey, let's really go after fucking corruption.
Let's like go after corruption.
By the way, I think the Bidens are involved in this corruption.
That's what they're really trying to get him on.
But a lot of it was like, let's go on the corruption of the 2016 interference in our election.
Let's get on the corruption.
Like, let's really go after this.
And this is where the Democrats choose to move to impeachment.
And now the fucking Democrats are out there.
You have Schiff, one of the most prominent Democrats in the House of Representatives, out there saying the big fear is that they could have hacked this Ukrainian oligarch's natural gas company and what information they may have.
Now, he claims some of it could be made up, but he even said some could be true.
Oof, what the hell is going on here?
Because you know, this was a risky move by the Democrats.
I mean, even right now, they're in a position where they're really in a difficult fucking position here.
I mean, even with the election stuff, right?
So you're having this Senate hearing.
You got three candidates who basically have a shot of winning this thing, okay?
It's Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren's been fading in the polls, so not even so much her.
But there's a Senate hearing which is pulling two of your Democrats off the campaign trail, pulling Bernie and Elizabeth Warren.
We speculated about whether this could be to sabotage Bernie.
But then they're pushing for these fucking witnesses, and they are really caught in a tough spot here where they want to get all these.
What the Democrats want more or less, and it's been pretty clear in the witnesses that they've said that they want to subpoena.
They just want to make a show of Trump being bad.
Well, yes, that's for sure.
That's the whole thing.
But more specifically than that, what they want is, and I've noticed this because they're not pushing.
You don't hear a lot of people pushing for Rudy Giuliani to be subpoenaed.
You hear people pushing for John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and other top levels of Trump's cabinet.
What they're hoping is that people will come and invoke executive privilege.
And then they can say the executive branch is obstructing the impeachment proceedings.
And they can just make it murky.
Yeah, we didn't really get him, but he was obstructing.
And that's why the whole thing fucking smells like corruption to me.
That's what they're looking for.
They've got a real problem is that the Republicans seem to actually be standing their ground on if you're going to subpoena witnesses, then we get to two.
And our witness number one is Hunter Biden.
So now the Democrats are in a position where they've pulled two of their top three presidential candidates off the campaign trail to deal with this fucking Senate trial.
And the other one, his corrupt fucking drug addict fucking knocking up chicks and denying the kids his when a DNA test proves it is son into fucking testify before Congress.
So they're in a fucking tough place.
And also you realize that an impeachment is kind of like swatting at a B.
And if you don't get the job done, it can backfire on you a lot.
So why would they go for all of this with such an uncompelling central crime?
You know, basically the central crime is that he thought about withholding military aid for personal gain, but never actually did it.
That's the allegation.
And you start to wonder, ooh, how deep does this corruption in Ukraine go?
What is it?
Who could be exposed?
How powerful are the fucking people?
You know, obviously, Obama, the Obama administration, supported a coup in Ukraine.
They sided with actual neo-Nazis there.
So what exactly is going on in this outrageously corrupt country where the Democratic Party was so invested in there?
What's going on?
There's a lot.
I know people have shown me there's some presentations online.
You know, I don't know exactly how much of everything is true and what isn't, but there's some real shady business going on in Ukraine.
And Adam Schiff, I mean, maybe you got to read between the lines just a little bit.
Maybe you got to look at what's implied just a little bit, not even that much.
He basically just told you, this is our concern.
This is our concern.
As if it's a real threat to our democracy.
It's not.
It's a threat to you and your other fucking jabronis.
Well, that's right.
And it's interesting in the same way when Hillary Clinton said nobody likes Bernie Sanders.
And then she said in the next sentence, nobody wants to work with him.
Nobody in the Senate, you know, ever signed any bills with him.
It's like, oh, oh, oh.
So this is Hillary Clinton's mindset.
When she says nobody likes Bernie Sanders, she's not saying the most popular senator in the country, the guy who's drawing tens of thousands of people to his speaking events, the guy who got 100,000 people to donate money to him in one day.
Obviously, you can't say nobody likes that guy.
Joe Rogan likes him.
But what does she mean?
She means none of us.
And that's nobody to her.
And in the same sense, when Adam Schiff says, you know, the national interest, whose interest are you really talking about?
The national interest?
I mean, in these guys' fucking whacked out perspectives, the national interest is to keep the order going, the current order.
When he says it's not in the national interest, in the same sense, they mean if they show us that the DNC was rigging the primary for Hillary Clinton, that's not in the national interest.
Voter Information and National Interest00:02:16
I don't know.
I mean, I think that's in the national interest, but it's not in the interest of the ruling elite.
It's not in their fucking interest, that's for sure.
So there's a really interesting take here.
Now, of course, anybody who, look, if you did believe in journalism, which I do, if you believed in democracy, which I don't, but even if you did, wouldn't it, isn't it reasonable to say that democracy kind of relies on a relatively well-informed voter?
I mean, democracy, if the voters are all misled, then democracy doesn't work that well.
And that's even kind of what Adam Schiff seems to be acknowledging here.
But that being said, why is it?
You know, nobody's ever been able to even pretend to take on this argument.
But if that's the case, then why is it that anything WikiLeaks did was bad?
There still to this day, and this is something that's just really important for people to remember.
There has been no evidence that has actually demonstrated that Wikileaks had a connection to Russia.
There's also been no evidence that demonstrates a single thing that WikiLeaks released was false.
Those are two really important things to keep in mind.
When Wikileaks revealed that CNN's Donna Brazil was giving Hillary Clinton the questions before the debates, when they revealed that the DNC was doing everything they could to smear Bernie Sanders, all of this stuff was real.
Now, why would it not be, why would any journalist not want that information?
And why would anybody who claims that they're all for democracy not want the voters to have this information?
So what is it about Burisma that they're so scared about the voters having this information?
I wonder.
I wonder what it is.
I'll tell you this much.
Adam Schiff seems pretty fucking worried about it.
Upcoming Philly Tour Dates00:01:19
All right, guys.
That's our show for today.
Do not forget me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
We will be in Boston on February 7th.
That show is damn close to sold out.
So make sure you grab tickets for the comedy hideout.
We're also going to be in Philly on February 21st.
We're doing a live podcast and a live stand-up show.
Come on out to both.
We want to see you guys there.
Be happy to tell you guys some jokes and then grab a beer, fucking take some pictures, all that good shit.
Have a talk.
Frankie Bradley's, and it's separate shows.
We're doing Philly.
Frankie Bradley's in Philly on the 21st of February.
Yeah, and then February 14th and 15th, I'm up at Steamboat.
I'm going to be skiing.
A bunch of fans are going to be hanging out with me and I'm doing two shows.
You can check it out at schmiggadees.com or brown paper tickets.
It's the Thursday and Friday Valentine's Day.
So if you're alone or you want me to bang your wife, come on out for the shows.
Either or maybe both.
I guess both doesn't really work.
Anyway, I'll be taking Blue Chew.
You can line up your wives.
I'll get them up.
Wives, sandwiches.
Rob Bernstein's putting his dick in all of them.
All right, go check out Run Your Mouth, Rob Bernstein's podcast.
Follow him on Twitter at Robbie the Fire.
Follow me on Twitter at ComicDave Smith.
And we will be back on Monday with a brand new episode.