Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein critique New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's reopening, arguing it stemmed from legal pressure rather than science despite the state leading in COVID deaths. They dismiss media praise for arbitrary lockdowns, citing Japan's low mortality without strict measures, while analyzing the Libertarian Party's nomination of Joe Jorgensen over Jacob Hornberger. The hosts condemn Vernon Supreme's boot-wearing candidacy as counterproductive to serious economic philosophy and expose Joe Biden's transactional racial rhetoric on the Breakfast Club, ultimately framing current political discourse as hypocritical identity politics that prioritizes demographics over qualifications. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Politicians as D-List Celebrities00:08:08
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gas 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 Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Of course, I am Dave Smith, the most consistent motherfucker you know.
And I'm joined by my partner in crime, my co-host, who as always still ain't black.
Robbie the Fire Bernstein, the king of the caulks.
Good to see you.
How are you, buddy?
I'm working on the black thing.
You know, I already got the aid, so I feel like I'm a little bit there.
I don't make a lot of money.
So that's like a decent amount covered.
You know, you're kind of appropriating their culture.
I like chicken sandwiches.
I feel like I got a lot of crossover.
Yeah, I don't know how fucking the chicken thing became a black thing.
Everybody likes chicken.
That's outrageous for any racial group to claim chicken as their thing.
But they don't just claim it.
They claim chicken and watermelon, which are delicious, and then they get offended if you compliment them for how much they like chicken and watermelon.
That's if you can't have it both ways.
It's the only thing you guys have going for yourselves.
I mean, come on.
What am I going to accomplish?
Jesus.
All right.
We're starting off hard.
We've been locked inside for quite a while, people.
I apologize for that one.
That was, I didn't mean that.
I'm going to have to do a press conference with my wife and daughter.
I apologize.
I've hurt my family and I've hurt the black community.
But no, if you really want to be black, of course, you'd have to vote for Joe Biden.
That is what really solidifies your blackness.
Anyway, you know what?
Maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later.
I don't want to open with that.
What I want to open with is a big, big story, really huge thing.
And it was very strange the way it was rolled out and announced.
But it looks like New York has effectively ended their shelter in place, which of course was never a shelter in place, according to the governor, but was a shelter in place according to the mayor.
The whole thing is a little bit hard to follow.
But so Cuomo has been doing these like daily press briefings and he's really seemed to enjoy it.
Oh my God, is he milked at?
I mean, it was kind of fun for like the first 10 days and you're like, I can't believe he's still doing this for an hour every day.
Well, no, I mean, this is one of the really sick dynamics of this whole, you know, COVID lockdown shit has been the fact that a lot of these governors who let's get real, when it really comes to the level of fame and notoriety that politicians have, they're kind of like D-list celebrities.
Like, you know, some people know who they are, but they're not really in the national conversation.
They're not really like, you know, people, even within New York, Cuomo isn't something people talked about a lot or really knew anything about him.
He's not like famous the way a guy like Donald Trump or Barack Obama is famous.
Those are, you know, your A-list, you know, politician celebrities.
And this made them A-list.
Like they got us a boat.
Turns out we didn't need the boat.
The boat's going back.
We're out of hospital beds and now we got more ventilators.
We ran out of ventilators, so we're looking for ventilators.
But you can see him getting into this.
Like, look, you're a huge national figure now.
You're exercising this unbelievable power.
You're sitting here and contemplating whether or not people can go here or go there, what exactly everyone's allowed to do.
So you would just see this kind of like this power trip and this fame trip that these guys are on all across the country.
But Cuomo is the most blatant example.
And then, of course, the media just praising him every single day.
Now, what exactly are they praising him for?
I don't know, having the most COVID deaths of any state in the country.
That's like, it's look, I'm not saying I like it's not completely fair to blame a politician for a virus.
And it's not completely fair to give a politician credit for the lack of a virus.
But what exactly are we praising the guy who had it the worst?
Like, why are we praising the guy who did the worst job?
And then they're completely demonizing that Florida governor, you know, and he said way less deaths.
It's just very, the whole thing makes no sense.
Because life is about playing the Jew victim card, where whoever can complain the loudest can get his hands on the most resources, and that's what you need.
The loudest complaint.
And so he did the best job of explaining why New York needed the most federal resources and he was able to get his hands on it.
And that is the ultimate of what you can do in this day and age.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I think there might be something to that.
And if you weren't such a Jew, I'd think you were an anti-Semite, but I know, I know what team you're playing for.
Well, it is anyway.
So he, so, so Cuomo, they put out a press briefing.
Now, this wasn't announced at his conference.
It was on Friday night they announced that Cuomo has said that gatherings of 10 people for any legal activity are now permitted in all of New York, New York City included.
Now, of course, this changes everything.
I mean, you know, it's not complete freedom or even the level of freedom we had before this, but that's a big, big difference.
You know, like people are now, hey, you want to see your family, see your family.
You want to run a small business.
You can run certainly a lot of small businesses.
And I was like, wow, that's really strange.
Oh, okay.
And then he holds a press conference Saturday around noon.
So, you know, like I've missed a few of these, but that one I'm watching because it's like, okay, this is fucking big.
So let's see what it is.
Let's see what the justification for this is.
Like what, you know, it's so all these guys claim they're like, well, we're following the science and that's what's going to lead.
That's what's going to dictate these decisions.
So what science changed between Thursday and Saturday that now it's okay to, you know, have gatherings of 10 people?
Like I was curious to see how he's going to spin this.
He gets up there.
He doesn't mention it.
And very noticeably, and people who have been watching these press conferences regularly, you'll know what I'm talking about.
He was very noticeably down.
Like he wasn't enjoying it as much as he normally does.
And he doesn't mention anything about it.
He plays these commercials.
We have to reopen.
The economy is going to be good again.
Yeah, that's more or less the attitude.
But he doesn't even say that.
He doesn't say anything.
He's just down.
And he starts playing these commercials about how you have to wear masks that Rachel Maddow was praising.
This like pure propaganda, like New York commercials about how New York it is to wear fucking masks.
Very weird stuff.
Doesn't mention it.
Doesn't mention anything.
Then they go to take questions from the reporters and it's not even the first question.
Like, I couldn't believe that wasn't the first.
But around second or third question, a reporter does ask, hey, I hear we're not all under house arrest anymore.
You know, that's interesting.
And he just goes, oh, yeah, yeah, you know, this is what this is the new thing now.
Gatherings of 10, but you still have to social distance and blah, blah, blah.
And he just seems kind of down.
And then, of course, one of the reporters asks, was this a result of the lawsuit that the New York city or the New York ACLU branch was filing against the state?
Unequal Application of the Law00:02:42
And he goes, I'm getting sued all the time.
I have three lawsuits a day coming in.
I have no idea, which is complete bullshit.
He knows exactly.
He's just a straight up liar.
Those Cuomos are fucking like.
They will look right into your eyes and tell you the most bald-faced lie.
But that's what this was about, was that he was getting sued.
And he is a lawyer, as all those lovely politicians are.
And I think he knew this was going to be a lot of people.
Okay, so the lawsuit, which I thought also was very strange.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer or any expert in the law, which I have to say a lot.
I am not a lawyer.
This is not a show that's going to give you sound legal advice.
But the lawsuit was confusing to me.
So it seemed to be about the unequal application of the law.
And the idea that they were allowing small religious, that they were planning on allowing like small religious groupings.
And so they were basically saying that, well, if you're going to allow that, then you have to also allow other groupings that are non-religious.
Like you can't show religious preference or something like that.
Like the idea was that it was unequal application of the law, which is like, okay, you know, sure, that sounds to me like that has some strong legal footing.
But if you can sue for unequal application of the law, where have you been?
I mean, how did the government get to just decide that we decide one class of people is essential and another class of people are non-essential?
And completely arbitrarily.
I mean, like you, you could argue, right, that there are some things that, you know, like, okay, well, the medical workers or, you know, food production or something like that, you know, like maybe there is some standard of logic that allows you to say they're essential and they're not.
But who the fuck can tell me with a straight face that it is anything short of arbitrary to say a liquor store is essential, but a bookstore is not?
Or suit for the Fed bailouts.
Why is that fair application?
Well, right.
Yeah.
I mean, there's sure, there's a million different answers.
But I mean, very specifically about this lockdown.
I mean, how do you get to just decide who has, you know, the right to go to work and who doesn't?
It all seems very strange.
And man, anyway, so that's the new standard.
They've been saying all along that they're going to follow the science.
Questioning Authority and Sacrifice00:03:35
I would just ask people, what science exactly are we following?
What is the science that tells us that the number's 10?
Why not nine or 12?
You know, like, what is the science behind any of this?
And we all know the answer.
We all know the answer.
There's none.
This is just like fiat whims.
That's what we're governing.
We should really just, for the sake of it, let's recap what happened here.
So we needed to flatten the curve.
Then we had to keep the curve flat.
Then we had to make sure that there were no new cases.
Then it was, well, there shouldn't be any no new cases, but people should be allowed to go pray.
And then it's, wait a second, that's bullshit if that guy gets to go pray, but I can't go drink in the bar.
All right, there's your science.
We're reopened.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, I think that's more or less what it is.
And of course, you know, there's something so funny.
And there was a real parallel to me because I remember talking about it actually like, it jogged my memory.
And I was like, when was I talking about this before?
And it was when they were talking about Donald Trump ending wars.
And they would go, do you remember this?
I think it was back when he was threatening, he's threatening us with a good time to pull out of Syria, which of course he didn't do.
But when Donald Trump was saying we're going to pull out of Syria, and there were these people in the media, I think me and you might have played a couple clips and we're just making fun of them, who were saying, we're asking if the president has the unilateral authority to end a war without involving Congress.
And this is, of course, this is a war that was started unilaterally by a president without involving Congress.
And no one seems to have a problem with that.
But now, if he's ending it, they're like, I don't know.
We got to dust off this old constitution I got here and see where this authority comes from.
So this has been a big talking point all across the corporate press is that Donald Trump has said that he's going to open the economy.
Like even if the governors don't, he's going to open it.
And they're all going, where does he get the authority to open what the governors closed?
Now, by the way, fair enough.
I mean, I guess he doesn't really have any authority to overrule a governor's executive order.
But it's pretty remarkable to listen to these reporters ask this question when they, I mean, where did the governors get the authority to close?
I mean, when Tucker Carlson, the only member of the corporate press that I've ever seen, asked Governor Murphy, he said, where in the Bill of Rights do you have the right to do any of this?
And he said, well, we weren't thinking about the Bill of Rights.
It's not my job.
I'm not supposed to have to review something.
A document called Bill of Rights.
That shouldn't come into consideration.
He goes, Bill of Rights, I'm not familiar.
Is that one of those Stephen King novels?
I love that guy.
No, so, right.
So it's just so strange to not ask the question, how you have the authority to do this in the first place, and then get hung up over who has the authority to undo it.
So that's, you know, that's what's been going on.
And what you said, which we've mentioned a few times, but the idea that the moving of the goalposts on this shit has really been really incredible to watch.
And, you know, obviously, I've made the comparisons before.
I'm not the only one who has, but to the war in Iraq, which started as weapons of mass destruction and moved to, you know, deposing Saddam and then it moved to spreading democracy to Iraq and then to the region and the goals, you know, just get more and more unachievable.
Misleading COVID Death Counts00:02:09
But there's something different about this because this is, you know, that was really not asking a sacrifice from the majority of Americans.
The sacrifice that they were asking was from a very small group of Americans.
But this was asking major sacrifices of the vast majority of the population.
And to watch the goalpost move from flattening the curve to keeping the curve flat to no new cases to when we say so.
You know, Cuomo said the other day that the deaths, I think, were under 100.
And he goes, so that's our target.
That's what we've been looking at.
I haven't heard him say that at all until yesterday, but evidently that's been the target the whole time.
So all of that has been very strange.
But as the news has been pretty good, I mean, you know, look, there's been a lot of deaths.
When those models moved down to like 60,000, they were projecting.
It seems like that's been exceeded.
I do think it's a little bit questionable exactly.
You know, what happened more or less was that they really changed the way they were counting COVID deaths.
And then the numbers started piling up.
Now, I'm not, COVID is a real thing.
I'm very convinced of this.
And it's a nasty virus.
It is worse than the flu.
And it is, you know, like it is.
But it does seem a little bit shady to me.
And there's been a lot of doctors who have talked about this, that they are being directly incentivized to list deaths as COVID deaths.
They're collecting more money for every COVID death that they list.
And then, you know, now they're counting, at least in New York, I know, I don't know if they're doing this other places, but in New York, they were counting COVID deaths of people who were never tested, people who they just thought the symptoms matched up to be COVID-like symptoms, which, you know, COVID symptoms are fairly vague.
I mean, it's not as if like there's this really specific symptom that is only COVID.
It's like respiratory, you know, issues.
It's like, okay, some old person dies and they were having trouble breathing and they were coughing.
Okay, I think we're going to label that a COVID death, even though they were never tested.
Like, that's that seems a little unscientific.
Doctors Incentivized for Deaths00:02:46
I got a simple solve.
If you're like 30% over your body mass indexed weight, their death cost should just be fat fuckery.
Doesn't matter.
If you were hit by a truck, fat fuckery, you were too big to get out of the way.
You know what I mean?
It doesn't matter.
But they also said, and there were another, again, a few doctors.
Now, this is in different states.
They had different methods of doing this, but they were saying that any death with COVID is counted as a COVID death, which is, you know, again, kind of misleading.
Like the joke people were using is like, if you have cancer and you get hit by a train, you didn't die of cancer.
You know, just because you died with cancer doesn't mean that's what killed you.
So there's just, look, put whatever, the numbers they're saying now are getting close to 100,000.
So it does, one way or the other, a lot of people fucking died of this.
It's a nasty virus.
And that's, you know, so I certainly think there's strong evidence for that.
So I'm not trying to downplay it, but the situation is getting better.
Objectively, it's just getting better.
Like everywhere, even in New York City and New Jersey, even the places that were like the worst of it, it's getting much better.
And the whole kind of not, with the exception of a couple slivers of Fox News, the corporate press in general seems to just not be willing to give up on the fear and the kind of power that has come along with all of this.
All right, let's take a quick second.
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Uncertainty in Virus Spread Data00:15:37
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So I'm, you know, reading in different newspapers and watching more cable news now.
You know, my brain is turning a mush again because I'm watching cable news again.
But there, so what they're doing now is they're just going to convince you to take down the Ron Paul.
Look at that.
Oh, no, they came and took it.
Rachel Maddow broke into my house last night and took my Ron Paul book.
I got it here somewhere.
Hold on, what do we got here?
I'll give you a little human action and then a little great Ron Paul by Scott Horton.
It's close by.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
I feel the warmth and aura.
So, you know, I was saying the other episode, they were doing all this stuff.
Oh, Texas cases are surging.
Now they're talking about how it's surging everywhere.
And they conveniently leave out the information that testing is surging.
So nothing's surging.
We're just testing more people and finding out, you know, what percentage of the population actually has it.
And the truth is that in the initial stages when testing was limited, who were you testing?
Well, you were testing people admitted to the hospital who had signs of COVID.
Now they're going out and just testing people, like just random people.
So even though more positives are coming back, the fact that there's more cases is actually more of a good thing than a bad thing.
It means, oh, there's a lot of people who have this who aren't going to the hospital.
Anyway, now they're looking at the numbers and they're going COVID cases.
See, at the beginning, when this was all about flattening the curve, that's not what we were looking at, were we, Rob?
We weren't looking at COVID cases.
We were looking at what?
Hospitalizations.
That was the number, right?
Those are two different numbers and they're very important.
They give you two different pieces of information.
You're looking at the hospitalizations and deaths.
That's what they were looking at at first.
And then I saw Rachel Maddow the other night.
She goes, well, it's going down in New York, but it's going up everywhere else.
But it's like, what's going up everywhere else?
Well, what's going up are cases because what's going up is testing.
But what's going down everywhere is hospitalization.
All of a sudden, they don't want to use that metric anymore because that would paint a different picture.
That was the biggest, that was the big issue: that hospitals were going to be overrun.
And that was the entire argument for flattening the curve: even if the entire population gets sick, it needs to be at a rate by which we have the facilities to treat them.
Yes.
And, you know, what's actually ended up happening is that hospitals all around the country are furloughing employees because they don't need them because they've shut down all types of like elective surgeries and things like that.
And, you know, so it's been.
That's got to be, that's got to suck to be that guy.
You're watching, like, you get fired and then you go turn on CNN.
It's talking about how hospitals are being overrun and there are no beds available.
And you're like, I just fucking got fired.
What are you talking about?
Yeah.
That's got to burn.
Oh, no.
And this is happening to a lot of people all around the country.
And so, right.
So the whole justification was to not overwhelm the healthcare system.
And okay, if you buy into that, then how would you not, the next step of reporting be like, oh, well, great.
We didn't.
The hospital system hasn't been overrun anywhere, anywhere in the country.
That did not happen.
That's just a fact.
But they won't tell you the story that deaths at the death rate and the hospitalization rate is down across the country.
So that's the reality of the situation.
And the truth is, as I've been saying for a while now, and I don't, you know, when we first started this and it was unclear, there wasn't real data to look at.
And people give me shit, you know, I mean, I get shit from all ends of the spectrum, but people give me shit like, oh, Dave bought into the hype and the fear of the virus at the beginning.
And then he kind of realized and saw the light.
And I, okay, I guess, yeah, I was concerned about this virus.
I had conversations through email and then and read quite a bit of things that epidemiologists and virologists were saying, and it seemed like this was pretty bad.
But my take was never just that like, oh, the like the lockdown doesn't need to happen or the shutdowns don't need to happen.
My take was that the market could handle this much better and that like an ANCAP society could handle this in a more efficient way where we would be able to not destroy the economy, destroy civil liberties, things like that.
But just after, you know, there was no data at the time.
There was, I mean, very limited, or you had to like trust the Chinese government or something like that, you know, back in March.
But now we got a lot of data.
And it really is like, dude, the fucking, there is almost no evidence that the lockdowns did anything to slow down or stop this virus.
There's just not.
And I challenge somebody who thinks there is, please come forward with the evidence.
But there are really painful outliers that you can explain and that like really kind of contradict the narrative.
You know, it's like when the woke social justice people will say that America is such a racist country and it's horrible to live in.
But then you'll see like Asians and you're like, oh, they're just crushing it.
Like they make more money than white people.
By every metric, they have more privilege or whatever, you know?
You're like, well, that's a pretty uncomfortable piece of information.
And you really, so you kind of just ignore it because it just kind of disproves the whole notion that we're like a white-centric racist country.
Well, again, it's like there are these problems with the lockdown model.
And there's like a few really big ones.
One of the really big ones is Japan.
Japan really fucks up your whole thing.
No lockdowns, no mass testing.
And Japan has, I think, under a thousand total COVID deaths.
There's like a couple hundred in Tokyo.
And you could say, what do you want to say about Japan?
What do you want to say?
They don't have big cities, that they don't have people crammed together, that they don't interact with Chinese people.
No, that they started it and they must be responsible because they're not getting sick.
They're getting us back for World War II.
They're finally doing it.
Oh, they are.
Oh, wow.
Oh, now, but you know, why would they hit Italy?
Just for being pussies and folding?
You guys should have, you should have fought better when you had the chance.
Maybe just to keep us off their tails and steal the recipe for pizza.
I don't know.
All right.
Rob's cooking up some.
Rob's cooking with gas.
So, you know, look, I'm just saying there's, and, and now it just becomes more and more obvious as we open up, right?
That the crowd that was saying we have to, we, we, the science will dictate what we do.
I think it's becoming pretty obvious that there isn't really science dictating this decision.
I mean, don't, don't get me wrong.
I think that science would dictate to end the lockdowns, but it would have dictated it a while ago.
And science certainly doesn't dictate that 10 people can get together.
In Japan, were, I guess, people of pre-existing conditions or elderly people like self-isolating or they were just going back going about life as usual.
I'm sure, I don't really know, but I'm sure there were people who were self-isolating, you know, just because this has been in the news all around the globe and stuff like that.
I'm sure there were.
I don't know to what degree, but there weren't lockdowns.
They didn't destroy their economy over this shit.
But then just to say that like the lockdowns didn't help, so then that would kind of suppose that the either Either this isn't nearly as contagious as like they kind of made us all alarmist about, or the frequency of people actually showing, you know, signs of illness or needing hospitalization or death are so low that even if a mass amount of population were to get sick, it's not really a risk factor.
Am I getting that right?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, look, the truth is that it does seem like this virus is very contagious, more contagious than the flu, but not as contagious as we were led to believe.
I mean, the World Health Organization is now saying that there's no evidence to support the idea that asymptomatic people can spread the virus.
Oh, really?
Which is like quite a thing to say.
You're like, how many articles did I read about the super spreaders and all these people are spreading around?
Now they're going, actually, as we have all this data now, there is no evidence.
That was the scariest part about the whole thing.
That's right.
And then now, according to the CDC, there's very little evidence to suggest that you can get it from surfaces and that really it's sustained contact over a long period of time with somebody who's positive and showing symptoms.
So just so many.
Now, look, this is floating in the air.
That was the craziest one.
Yeah, it just stays in the air.
You know, I don't know where they're at right now on that, but the point is that they're saying different shit this week than they said last week than they said the week before.
Of course, we all know they started off saying that fucking, you know, only an idiot would wear masks and you're too stupid to even know how to wear a mask and asymptomatic people are spreading it.
You better wash your hands for 30 seconds or whatever.
It's all different.
Everything's different that they're saying now.
So I don't know.
I don't know what the truth is.
If like you had some freak day where 10 people got struck by lightning and they're like, we don't know why there's so much lightning.
No one can go outdoors.
It's like, just admit, we don't know.
So, you know, it's a new thing that we're dealing with.
Go about your life.
And as we get more information, we're going to start making more intelligent decisions.
But I don't know.
So everyone can't leave their house.
It's just insane.
There's a Tom Woods had a newsletter about it.
And this, I don't know, this just made me so happy.
It was so refreshing to hear because so few people will say something like this.
But it was a Japanese name.
Let me try to get this right.
Miki.
I get it.
Mikihito Tanaka.
Mikihito.
Tanata.
You were like one syllable away.
She's a professor at Waseda University.
I apologize to the Japanese people.
I respect her culture.
So this professor who she belongs to a public advisory group of experts on the virus.
And she said, and this was her quote, I found this so refreshing.
She said, even experts don't know the reason.
And they're asking her the reason for why Japan's done so well.
And she just said, like, flat out, like, we don't know.
We don't know what it is.
We don't know why it hit other countries so hard and didn't hit our country this hard.
And there's just something in just in this moment of everybody faking certainty.
And this goes on all ends of the spectrum, from people who are saying the virus doesn't exist to the people saying, you know, masks save lives.
And just so many people faking certainty.
And as somebody who specializes in faking certainty, I can tell you, it's annoying.
But it, but it is, it's nice to just hear someone go, you know what?
We don't exactly know.
We don't know why the virus is, you know, and from the stuff that's coming out of the CDC and the World Health Organization, it's very clear.
They don't know.
That's why they're changing their opinion.
They're changing their recommendations every few weeks.
They don't know.
We don't know exactly how this virus spreads.
And the truth is, and this is what the pro-lockdown crowd just can't admit because it's too painful to admit that you don't know.
You don't know if the lockdown actually did any good.
You don't know if that was the right person.
You saved one life.
Well, did I, fuck, did I mention this?
I might have said this already on the podcast, but it's worth repeating.
But I was saying the thing when I was watching with Lauren, we watched that abortion documentary, and there was this abortionist, some abortion doctor, and she's been an abortion doctor for like 30 years.
And she was, you know, they were interviewing her for the documentary.
And she was like, look, it's a woman's right.
There is, and she goes, there is absolutely no moral issue with having an abortion.
There's nothing wrong with having an abortion.
It's, you know, a woman's right to control her body.
And it's like, oh, yeah, well, you better believe that.
You better believe that because you've been having abortions for you've been performing abortions for 30 years.
So if you even entertain the possibility that maybe there's something more, you're going, I mean, maybe I'm a baby serial killer.
Like, maybe I've just been murdering babies for 30 years.
That's a pretty tough one to swallow.
So now the lockdown crowd has to have certainty.
You have to.
Because if you even, you know, and entertain the thought that maybe we didn't need the lockdowns, you go, oh, so we just fucking ruined tens of millions of lives.
And we didn't need to.
That's a pretty bitter pill to swallow.
You know, people like, there's some real cognitive dissonance there that's going to make you go, no, no, no, we had to do it.
And if it's getting better, then that's because we did the lockdown.
And I just think, I don't know, seems fairly reasonable to say that if your position is, you know, 300 million people need to go on house arrest, being slightly hyperbolic, but not really that much.
If that's your position, I think the onus is on you to demonstrate that that's necessary, to demonstrate how that helps.
I don't think the onus is on the people who are saying, I should be allowed to go to the beach.
Like, I don't think the onus is on them.
And I don't know.
I've still yet to see anybody really demonstrate how clearly the lie, the arguments, and I mentioned I had been asking for them on Twitter the other day.
I go, can someone just point me to the, since you guys are the follow-the-science crowd, can someone just show me some evidence that the lockdowns have helped?
Like, what's your evidence that this is actually better?
And most of the responses are like, well, obviously the lockdown's going to help.
It's just kind of that.
Obviously, if people stay away from each other, it's going to help.
Yeah, very good.
Okay.
So looks like New York is in a new phase of this whole thing.
Maybe, you know, I don't know.
I'll give Lewis a call today.
I don't know what the plan with the studio is and stuff like that, but I guess we're allowed to use it again.
But me and you are both in separate states.
So, hey, what are we going to do?
Anyway, I'm following your lead, boss.
You get to make the decisions.
If I go show up to work this studio, I'll show up to work in the studio.
All right.
I'm sending you into a COVID hospital.
I want to see if this thing's real.
Go start licking faces in COVID hospital.
I'm going to test this thing out.
I come back next week.
It is very real.
And Robbie is no longer with us.
Anyway, we honor his sacrifice.
So the other thing that I wanted to talk about briefly is the Libertarian Party chose their nominee yesterday, last night.
And our boy Jacob Hornberger did not win.
Libertarian Party Nominee Disappointment00:02:23
I'm a little disappointed, but I am, you know, I'm proud of Jacob.
He ran a good campaign.
And he, you know, I appreciate all the people who got involved and tried to support him.
I know it's a little bit difficult.
The takeover of the LP did not go exactly as planned, although it really, it's not as if it failed.
I mean, he came within like a hair of winning.
He finished in second place, and Joe Jorgensen ended up taking the nomination, who herself is, you know, a pretty principled libertarian.
And the fact that the, I think it was the Prague, the Pragmatic Caucus endorsed her.
I think for sure the Mises caucus guys and a lot of our people who got involved really shifted the Oberton window in the Libertarian Party and certainly had a big impact.
And, you know, there's, we'll see what happens going forward.
But I do.
So COVID, man, we couldn't get down there and rally the troops.
If we had gone down there and rallied that thing, would have been all different.
Certainly, that threw everything off and changed a lot about the whole process.
But, you know, look, I'm not going to sit here and like, you know, take shots at Jacob Hornberg or anything like that.
Like I said, I think he did a good job.
I think like any campaign, there were mistakes made and there were probably different tactics that would have been more helpful.
But that's how it works.
That's politics.
And Joe Jorgensen Jorgensen won.
She's far from the worst.
On the positive side, I only watched a little bit of her in one of those debates.
So I'm really not that familiar with her.
And if I wanted to criticize, believe me, I could find quite a few things to get after for her.
But to speak to the positive, as we get into the total shenanigans of Biden Trump 2, there might be some appeal from the leftists who are like, wait a second, there's a lady and she might just come off as reasonable.
So the lady and reasonable on television might play okay.
But I don't know that she's going to, as you say, rally to like the hard truths that you'd like to educate people for or that she's going to be incredibly exciting or compelling in a way that television will even really want to have her on.
Making Libertarianism Serious Again00:14:37
I don't know.
I really don't know.
Joe is a good libertarian.
I'm pretty confident in that.
I think she is principled and I think she's smart and she knows her stuff.
I think that she could probably use some help with messaging.
And I'll always offer that help for free, as I always do, as I've been the uninvited campaign advisor for Tulsi Gabbard and Justin Amash and everybody.
I'll keep giving my opinions on this shit, as always.
But I'm a little concerned about her ability to message.
Truth be told, I was a little concerned about Jacob Hornberger's ability as well.
There were things that he had done where I had, and I had expressed this to him before, where I was like, I think there's some real messaging problems in a few different areas.
But what the fuck do I know?
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Anyway, congratulations to Joe Jorgensen and also congratulations to Michael Heiss and all those guys.
They've really, they have for sure made themselves a powerhouse of a caucus.
That maybe they didn't get the presidential nomination that they were pushing for, but there is no question they've gotten a lot of people very concerned in the positions of power in the Libertarian Party.
So I'm proud of him and all the work those guys have done.
Who's the new Nick's or whatever?
Who's like the new head of the party?
I don't know.
I don't think that's been decided yet.
And truthfully speaking, I don't really care.
I don't really care.
I cared about Nick Sarwak.
Well, I cared about Nick Sarwak not being there for another term.
Like that's that's what I cared about.
And he, you know, just because I think it's like he crossed too many lines and I think it's too damaging.
He did the worst thing you can possibly do as the libertarian chair.
The only thing you're supposed to do is be there and be welcoming to try to bring the liberty movement into the libertarian party and try to bring other people into the party.
I have no problem with any of that.
What you don't do, it's like if your job was like, like you're a babysitter and they're like, okay, don't abuse the kids.
That's pretty much your job.
Make sure they're alive.
Make sure they're fed.
Don't abuse it.
You know, it's like there's the only thing you have to not do as the chair of the Libertarian Party is start attacking Ron Paul and Tom Woods and Lou Rockwell.
Like that's the only thing not to do.
Don't start alienating large groups of Libertarians.
If you put your finger into the ass of one of the kids, you might get more babysitters because they want to do it too.
Okay, yes.
Listen, there are unintended consequences, unforeseen consequences of every economic action.
Sure.
That's a solid Mississian point.
But I'm just saying, you know, so that this guy was bad.
And also, you know, he went after people I love in a really vicious way.
So I wanted to make sure he was unelectable.
And I think I played a small part in doing that.
He did it to himself.
But so he knows he can't get that position back and he's not even going to try.
But after that, it's like it really doesn't matter.
I mean, to me, the position of chairman of the Libertarian Party is very irrelevant.
And I don't mean that as like an insult against anybody, but like, let's get real.
The only reason any of us even know who Nick Sarwak is or ever talk about him is because he started attacking Tom Woods and Ron Paul.
And so we were like, okay, well, we're going to, you know, defend our fucking heroes.
That's all.
So I don't really care about that.
I think the VP is being chosen right now.
I think actually I literally looked over and thought I saw a message from Scott Horton.
Oh, wait, did they choose Vernon Supreme?
Oh my God.
I like that.
My biggest gripe on Vernon Supreme was I watched him in one of the debate and I didn't watch the whole thing, but he showed up without his boot and it's like, dude, be Vernon Supreme.
I can dig what you're doing.
You're making a mockery of the whole thing because the whole thing's a charade anyways.
And you're talking in rhymes.
I like a good rhyme.
I like you talking about dentistry.
I like you talking about, I like that you look like Gandalf.
I like that you're saying, hey, fuck this whole thing.
It's a spectacle.
But then he started taking off the boot and talking about actual principle of libertarianism and going terrible.
I think the whole thing is terrible.
I don't, I'm not saying he's terrible.
I'm saying he's terrible as a guy running for political office because the message that that sends is that we're a bunch of fucking jokes.
Now, he can say whatever he wants that while I'm pointing out what the whole fucking joke is.
And if you're in on the joke, then you realize I'm making fun of this whole system.
But I just don't, look, man, I don't look at things that way.
Like, that's fine if you want to be a satirist or, you know, a humorist or whatever and be a Twitter personality and be a great.
Okay.
But to me, if you're running to say, like, I like we want to put a libertarian in charge because this is a serious philosophy with serious people.
I don't think that's the way to go.
This is coming from literally the most prominent comedian libertarian out there in the world.
And I'm telling you that the philosophy of Mises and Rothbard should not be represented as a fucking clown show with a fucking retarded boot on your head.
Well, you said that doesn't help anything.
You said it's not about winning.
It's more about turning people.
And if Vernon can turn more people by turning it into a spectacle, would you see that as having some value?
Yes, if he could turn more people, then sure, then I'd be wrong.
If seeing a fucking retard with a boot on his head made people start reading human action by Ludwig von Mises, then I would admit I'm wrong.
My point is, I don't think it'll do that.
I think it makes people go, oh, look, what is the fucking like, here's the thing that libertarians struggle with, right?
Is that the image of us is like, oh, these fucking intellectual lightweight.
They're like Republicans who just want to smoke pot, right?
That's kind of like what people think of libertarians.
And if you have some fucking naked fat guy stripping on stage or some dude with a boot on his head, it just confirms that without even having to think about it.
And the truth is that it's like, no, this is a group of serious people who understand the economy in a way that none of you fucking like jokers do.
And I just think that like the guy we put up running for the highest political office should be a serious person.
Now he, again, I'm not against him existing and doing what he does.
It's fine.
If that's effective, then do it.
But that was one of the major reasons why I supported Jacob Hornberger because I thought he was a serious person.
Just like Ron Paul was a serious person.
And to me, that's who's going to convince other people that this is serious.
And that, you know, so I just, I think that's a terrible idea.
And I'm kind of surprised by people who don't.
Like, I don't know.
I mean, like, you know, like, I like to do stand-up, you know, stand-up comedy and I like to talk about politics.
I've been able to make a nice career in the two of those things.
But I think all of like fucking cable news is a joke.
But if I just went on like one of the cable news shows in like a fucking pot t-shirt or something like that with a bandana on or something, I wouldn't be like owning all of them the way I have.
It's like, no, you have to fucking go present yourself as a serious person.
Otherwise, it's just too easy to write you off.
Again, look, like you said, I could be wrong about that.
I could be proven wrong.
And if I Am.
I'll be happy to admit that I'm wrong.
Again, it only happens like once or twice a year, so it's not likely.
But I'd, you know, I'd be happy to admit it, but I don't, I don't think if this is correct, the information I'm getting, I'm not happy to hear it.
I'm a sucker for a spectacle.
So listen, I haven't followed him that closely.
I haven't looked at his message that closely, but I see a dude looking like Gandalf with a boot on his head.
I'm somewhat attracted to it.
I'm like, what's this guy about?
And then when he's up to the bottom of the world, we don't need to win you over.
We already have you.
I'm looking to win over future you've better used.
That's what I'm looking for.
Just kidding.
There's no one better than Robbie the Fire, king of the cocks.
All right.
So what else?
What else is there to discuss?
Oh, yeah, that's Joe Biden that said that before.
So Joe Biden, this really is just entertaining at this point.
Is it Joe Biden went on the Breakfast Club?
Do we have that interview, Brian?
Yeah, give me one second.
I'll pull it up.
Okay, sure.
And really, I mean, that's an intimidating show to do because you're talking to a god.
So, you know, I get how you slip up.
You know, the funniest part to me is that there's like it, you know, it like went viral and it's being covered all over the news.
And then a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch of like white news reporters have to, with very serious voices, go, in a recent interview with Charlemagne the God.
He's not a fan of his show, but he does the best political interviews because he asks follow-up questions and that's all he's doing.
He is very good at that shit.
Yeah, he got Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to say some dumb shit just by kind of pressuring them.
However, the fact that everyone plays into his game, which is, hey, I'm here asking questions for the black community.
What are you doing for us? is like the antithesis of what politics should really be about.
It's not supposed to be about buying votes.
And he's transparent.
He's like, listen, I'm being transparent.
What are you doing for us?
How are you buying our vote?
Well, it's a point.
Look, it's a point that I've been making for a long time and getting quite a bit of shit for a lot of left-wing people that I know.
And even the loser brigade within the Libertarian Party has given me some shit for this.
But I don't know.
I mean, I'm the most consistent motherfucker, you know, and I always tell the truth.
And I always see the big picture.
So to me, it's like, if you're going to sit here and say, hey, I just care about my community and I just want what's best for my community.
If everybody else is allowed to play that game, don't be shocked when white people want to play it as well.
And then if you're going to turn around and say, well, that's the most evil thing you can do, you can't ask of any group of people to sit around while everybody else plays racial identity, you know, like politics and get as much for my people as I can and go, but you're not allowed to ask for anything.
You got to love Biden's face.
Come on, man.
I'm just trying to get rid of Malarkey here.
Look at that freeze film already.
Does it just the posture on both of them?
Doesn't it just say it all?
And by the way, for people just listening to the audio of this, you're picturing it correctly.
I don't have to give you any information.
Charlemagne the God and Joe Biden are both in the exact position that you'd expect them to be in.
It looks like Charlemagne's pointing to him, like, yeah, but you white.
And he's like, yeah, but I'm like, I'm black.
He goes, yo, man, you white.
And Joe Biden's like, come on, man.
Come on, man.
I'm black.
You mean white?
Come on, man.
I worked in pools with kids.
I've read some of your black agenda and you say that you would decriminalize marijuana.
What's the difference between legalizing it and decriminalizing it?
Because they're trying to find out whether or not there is any impact on the use of marijuana, not in leading you to other drugs, but what it affects, does it affect long-term development of the brain?
And we should wait till the studies are done.
I think science matters.
I think we got decades and decades of studies from actual weed smokers, though.
Yeah, I do.
I know a lot of weed smokers.
I want to ask you about your running mate.
I don't know if you saw, well, I saw today that a news report broke that Amy Klobuchar was being vetted.
And a lot of people on social media, they're not too happy about that.
And it's because they want your running mate to be a black woman.
I don't know if you saw the op-ed in the Washington Post by some of the leading black women voices in this country.
And they feel since black women are such a loyal voting block.
And black people saved your political life in the primaries this year.
They have things they want from you.
And one of them is a black woman running mate.
What do you say to them?
What I say to them is that I'm not acknowledging anybody who is being considered, but I guarantee you, there are multiple black women being considered.
Multiple.
You get so much.
That's really our time.
I apologize.
You can't do that to black media.
I can't do that to white media and black media because my wife has to go on at six o'clock.
Okay.
Oh, uh-oh, I'm in trouble.
Listen, you got to come see us when you come to New York, VP Biden.
I will.
It's a long way until November.
We got more questions.
You got more questions, but I tell you, if you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump and you ain't black, it don't have nothing to do with Trump.
It has to do with the fact I want something for my community.
I would love to see.
Take a look at my record, man.
I extended the voting racks 25 years.
I have a record that is second to none.
The NAACP has endorsed me every time I've run.
The world come on.
Let's cut that off there.
So you got the gist of it there.
Hypocrisy on Black Media00:07:50
I was surprised that Charlemagne didn't actually seem to even respond to the, if you have to think about it, you ain't black.
I don't think it's really, firstly, it's not that bad.
Secondly, it happens to every one of us that when you're talking to a black dude who has a slight ghetto flavor to the way they talk, you get sucked into it.
It's very hard to hang out with like people and then not just to start diving and jabbing.
It just fucking happens to all of us.
So Biden's hanging out with this guy and he's trying to be cool and he's not.
And so he said something dumb.
It's not that bad.
I do tend to agree with you on that.
The thing that's funnier about it is just that I agree with you on it not being his most horrific gaffe.
The thing that's funny is that it's such a politically bad thing to say that you would just think Joe Biden would like, he just can't help himself from saying these things that you go like, well, dude, now that's going to be in every fucking newspaper.
Like you can't say you're not black if you're a black dude who doesn't vote for me.
I mean, like, look, it is, I would say, I to maybe disagree with you a little bit.
I could understand where a black conservative would find that very offensive.
Like, I do understand where you're basically saying, oh, so I'm not black because I fucking give a shit about like taxes being too high.
You know, like that.
When did it become okay to say, but I thought you got to say African Americans?
When did this become okay where you could say black people love me?
Like, did we change standards on that one?
Yeah, I think we did, actually.
I think black is black is fine now.
For a little bit, it was African-American.
Then I think they went back to black.
I've always thought African-American was far more offensive than black, personally.
Also, we weren't listening to it there.
I have to give it a more careful listen, but I think earlier on, there's a subtext of the way he's describing black jobs that sounds extremely condescending.
It's like people actually missed what was offensive in that interview.
Well, the other thing, this is what I think, you know, the issue.
You know, issues, like, I don't really begrudge Charlemagne for saying, hey, I care about my community and I want things to happen to my community.
The thing I've always said is that it just has to be equal application across the board.
So you just, you can't be calling every, you can't have a position that if another racial group had that position, you would call them, you know, like the worst person in the world.
And I'm pretty sure he'd be guilty of that.
Like, I'm pretty sure if any white person advocated for their own people that way, he'd be upset about that.
So that my issue is just with the hypocrisy, but whatever.
I don't really care.
But even the answer.
The answer bothers me because if you had sound policy, you would go, well, it's about economic prosperity for everybody.
And here's what I'm trying to do to make the country a better place.
And naturally, that's going to help your community.
Yeah, well, of course, you could easily say something like, you know, you could just be like, well, listen, I mean, like, fucking in, if you crash the economy, black people are going to feel it disproportionately.
So you guys got to really care.
You know, there's the thing that's disappointing to me, though, about Charlemagne is that, and I understand he wasn't saying this exactly.
He was saying other people are saying this.
But the idea that you would go, hey, so, you know, black people want something for us.
So what we want is for you to choose a black vice president.
I mean, that is just such like, it's, I don't know, it's identity politics, I guess.
I don't even really big fan of that term.
I don't use it a lot.
It's kind of just racism, but it's like stupid.
It's really stupid.
So are you telling me if you were to elect, I don't know, like Kamala Harris or fucking, you know, like any, it's all just the same.
Like as long as it's a black woman, so you could, you could elect some black woman who's an anarchist or you could, you know, there might be three, or you could elect some black woman who's a communist and or Kamala Harris.
Doesn't matter.
As long as it's a black woman, then we're good.
What does that actually mean?
What does it mean for you if they can find another fucking person who doesn't believe what you believe, but is the same color as you?
It's just stupid.
It's like your concern should be what he's actually going to do.
And the weird thing is that, so Joe Biden is sitting here.
Now he's saying, well, look, check my track record.
I have the best policies for black people.
Like my track record is second to none or whatever shit he said.
But it's interesting that what he's saying is I'm going to decriminalize marijuana.
That's that's his thing.
And he's the motherfucker who co-authored the 92 crime bill.
So if decriminalizing marijuana is going to really help black people, well, then no, you don't have such a great track record, do you?
Because you're part of the reason why the fucking mandatory minimums are so high.
So, you know, it seems, and, and of course, he's also pushing him on that stuff because you have to know stuff in order to grill him about those questions.
I also love he's setting himself up to look super racist where he's going, listen, I'd love to have a black lady and we're seriously vetting three of them.
But then what happens when you turn around and go, we really wanted one, but guess what?
We couldn't find one that was qualified.
We wanted nothing more than to have a black lady work with me.
But in the entire country, there was none that I felt comfortable with.
But I'm not racist.
I mean, I love black people more than anyone, but search the whole country.
There's not one I can work with.
It's also like fucking, it's such a weird like thing to have to justify.
And especially amongst the group of people who supposedly hate racism the most, that you make race the criteria for a job.
It's a very strange box to paint yourself into.
It's also weird that Obama and Biden in their 2012 campaign, they were using that whole war on women and Mitt Romney and all this shit.
And his big sin was that he said made that binders full of woman comment.
And it's the same thing.
It's Joe Biden is bindering full of black women.
That's exactly what he's doing.
Oh, we're looking for black women.
We want to hire a black woman.
All of this shit is fucking, it's just, it's so cringe from Romney and from them.
Why does nobody, nobody can just have the fucking courage to say, I want the best person.
And I don't give a shit if they're a black or a woman or whatever.
Because this is a fucking, this is an important position.
I will find the absolute best person for it.
And that's that.
In the same way, like, I think it becomes easier if the position was something like a surgeon or something like that, where, you know, if somebody was like, oh, I'd like my surgeon to be a black woman, everyone would look at them like they're crazy.
It's like, how about just like the steadiest hand with the best medical training?
That's who I want as my surgeon.
I don't give a fuck.
No one cares.
And if that, if that person happened to be a black chick and I went, no, I don't want this black chick to operate on me.
I'll have this.
I don't want the black chick who was the first in her class to operate on me.
I'll take this white guy who was like the 90th in his class.
Everyone would rightfully look at me as not just like you're racist, but like you're insane.
Like that's insane to not want the best person and vice versa.
Like who the fuck cares what color they are?
How is this so difficult for an adult to communicate?
Even I can do it.
Anyway, it's just, it's a fucking weird thing.
It's a weird world that we live in.
All right, Robbie the Fire.
We're going to fucking wrap it up there and we'll be back soon.
My apologies for the episode being out late, but you know, cut me some slack.
I've gotten you many bonus episodes since this lockdown began.
But yeah, we'll be back very soon with a brand new episode.