Dave Smith and James Smith analyze the presidential race, noting Trump's stamina in Pennsylvania versus media suppression of Hunter Biden. They predict riots if Trump wins or lockdowns if Biden secures victory, forecasting superficial investigations into Chinese bribery regardless of the outcome. The hosts argue both candidates will fail to restore pre-pandemic normalcy, with Biden potentially lasting only a year while accelerating right-wing radicalization through continued mandates and economic collapse. Ultimately, they conclude the establishment's hope for stability is misplaced as polarization deepens. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to the Gas Digital Network00:01:25
Fill her up.
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We need to roll back the state.
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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 the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host.
James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem, our final episode before the presidential election, which of course is tomorrow.
I am Dave Smith.
He is the king of the cocks, Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, my brother?
I'm just working on camouflaging myself into the walls.
So, you know, if people come by and riot, they won't even see me like a get-go or something.
I don't think we are in a hot spot for rioting.
Trumpian Style and Civil Unrest00:09:09
I don't know.
People are going to need their food.
I'm right next to all the food places.
Maybe they go, hey, while we're in food, let's get that ball guy up there.
And then I'm in trouble.
So we'll see.
Yeah, listen, you never know.
You can never be too safe.
So you're defending yourself with your camo sweater.
Very good.
It is, it does seem like a lot of people are anticipating some civil unrest.
That's been a pretty big theme across the country.
I know my wife has been telling me that the supermarkets were getting pretty crazy, like long lines, people going nuts over paper products again and stuff like that.
So people are bracing.
And that's kind of interesting and revealing, I think, in a way.
We will get into that in a second.
But so this is it.
I feel almost this weird sense of like a like a kind of anticlimactic feeling right now.
Perhaps that'll change tomorrow and over the next few days where we when we'll have some type of climax.
We'll see.
But it does seem to me that almost, you know, in some ways, both candidates kind of limped over the finish line in terms of the messaging that neither of them really, Biden or Trump, neither of them really had this kind of home run pitch that I expected to maybe see at least attempted.
However, down the stretch, Donald Trump has really decided to just outwork Joe Biden and to kind of demonstrate a capacity.
You know, as Trump likes to say, what was the thing he used to say to Jeb Bush all the time?
You don't have the stamina.
You don't have the stamina for the job.
Well, Donald Trump is out demonstrating his stamina.
He did five events in five different states yesterday.
He's doing another five today.
Got to say, however you feel about him as a president or personally, it's pretty goddamn impressive.
Dude, I've done five comedy shows in one night in one location and just wanted to, by the last one, you're a different kind of funny because you just really don't give a shit.
And you're just, you know, that energy when you've done four shows already and you got to do that fifth one.
You're just like, have, don't give a fuck energy where you're not really performing and for some different reason it's working.
But Trump only works when he's doing it.
God bless that pseudo-fed or whatever the fuck he's snorting.
Dude, if you told me that I have to, and this is what he's doing, okay?
It's not just doing like five sets.
What we're talking about doing in the city, where you do like five sets, you might be doing five like 10 minute, 15 minute sets.
He's doing an hour at all of these things, 45 to an hour.
If you told me I had to go do five hours of standup tomorrow, and it's in five different states.
So you're talking five plane rides, five different crowds, an hour each crowd.
I'd be like, God damn, that is insane.
Like that's going to be really rough to do.
People who haven't like performed, I don't know.
I'm just telling you, that's not easy.
That's very mentally draining and physically draining.
Donald Trump is 30 years older than me, has probably 100 pounds on me, and had COVID like two and a half weeks ago.
It's pretty goddamn impressive.
And he's doing it intentionally to demonstrate that there's no way Joe Biden could do this.
And he is right about that.
And so in some ways, it's kind of an effective demonstration in the last few days.
And he does all this while somehow having afternoon milkshakes.
I'd really like someone to study his DNA and like, let me know how I could be more like Trump.
I'll go on the Trump diet.
What do I have to do now to look like that at age 60?
Hey, Donald, are you sure you want to do five different states and do an hour for all of them tomorrow?
And he's like, just have an egg McMuffin ready to go.
I'll take care of the rest.
And he just, and he's doing it in this, in his Trumpian style.
Like if this is his farewell tour, he's going out in the complete Trumpian style, doing these speeches unscripted, not reading a teleprompter, this stream of conscious, like just crazy Trump thing that he does.
And of course, it is the, you know, Donald Trump really did change American politics in the, in the sense that it's not, Trump events are just different.
They're not like other political events.
It's like half seeing a president speak and half just a party.
It's just entertainment.
It's kind of, it's kind of a comedy show.
It's kind of a rock star vibe.
However, there's no, look, you can't ignore the demonstrable enthusiasm gap that's been, you know, evident between Trump and Biden.
Trump drew over 50,000 people in like central Pennsylvania the other day.
This is a huge indicator that, you know, it's, it's that like the media isn't really talking about it.
It's going nuts on Twitter and online and stuff.
There's pictures.
Trump changed his background to the picture of this crazy crowd that he had.
But traditionally speaking, no matter what your thoughts are on a politician, if they're drawing numbers like this, that would be a story.
And, you know, I mean, these are like above Obama level numbers that he's drawing to his crowds.
This is, that's, that's a big story.
That's always been traditionally one of the major indicators is who's drawing bigger crowds.
And they're just not, the, the corporate press is just not talking about it.
They, they don't want to.
There's what's happened with the media over, you know, down the stretch of the 2020 election is really disturbing.
It's, it's even more disturbing than anything in 2016.
This is essentially why Glenn Greenwald left his own publication at the intercept because they wanted to edit his criticisms of Joe Biden.
And to his credit, he was like, no, fuck that.
I'm not being edited.
But it seems that the media class basically decided that, you know, it might be we reported too many negative stories on Hillary Clinton.
This is maybe what handed the election to Trump, and we're not going to do that this year.
So there's just a blackout.
It's like, we're not talking about Hunter Biden's laptop.
We're not talking about any allegations of corruption.
We're not talking about any stories of, you know, that could be negative on Biden or pro-Trump.
We're not going to talk about how he's drawing these huge crowds.
But whether they want to report on it or not, it's still happening.
And to me, this is a big indicator.
What this is all coming down to right now, if you're guessing who's going to win, to me, is it's kind of like: do you believe in the pollsters or do you believe in what you're seeing with your eyes?
And every indication other than the polls to me seems to indicate that Donald Trump is going to have a very good night tomorrow.
We'll see.
I could be wrong.
There's some people who make somewhat compelling arguments about the data.
Voter turnout is going to be very high this year.
That typically favors Democrats.
It does seem that white suburban women have, you know, that Donald Trump's taken a hit with them and he's not doing as well as he was in 2016.
It also seems like Donald Trump's doing better with black voters and doing better with Latino voters.
The problem is that Black people represent a much smaller population in this country.
So if you gain a few points with Black people, but lose a few points with white people, you've lost a lot more votes.
That's not a wash.
What a fun story.
I just see Trump having a really good night tomorrow, but we'll see.
What a fun story that an increasing amount of black voters really wanted Donald Trump, but white women didn't allow it.
Well, it's going to be, if Donald Trump wins, it will be delicious to see the corporate press having to deal with the fact that his support amongst minorities actually went up.
If he loses, they'll be able to kind of ignore that story, even if it did happen.
But if he wins and it's because of, you know, increased voting from black people and Latinos after four years of the media telling you this guy was uniquely racist and evil, that will be, that aspect would be really enjoyable.
So we'll see.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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Cash Out in Crypto or Gold00:08:56
Anyway, Joe Biden, you know, if Joe Biden loses this election, it's going to be pretty obvious already what will, like, obviously there'll be several different things that you could blame it on.
But the number one thing that'll just be staring everyone in the face is that he didn't campaign.
He didn't campaign to be president.
He held less campaign events, went to less states, took less questions than any presidential candidate.
Maybe that actually makes him cool.
You know, like we like Trump because he didn't do his homework, which was your great joke on your special.
He was just winging it.
Biden's like, I'm not going to wing it.
I'm just not even going to show up.
I'll just hang out in the basement.
So, in terms of America, where we want to give you as much as you can for being as lazy as possible, he won.
He's the biggest winner.
Well, yeah, that is an interesting way to look at it.
And in a sense, if Joe Biden wins, it will kind of show you that maybe you don't even need to do campaigning.
I mean, maybe you can, if you have the media behind you, you can just sit it out and make it the media versus your opponent and ride that into the White House.
But I got to say, I just think that to me, it seems like it's going to come down to whether or not someone can declare victory tomorrow.
And if Donald Trump is having a good day tomorrow, I think he will declare victory tomorrow night, late tomorrow night.
But he also declared that Mexico was going to pay for a wall.
So what does a Donald Trump declaration really mean?
This is a little bit different.
But there could be a pile of like no votes for Trump.
And Biden, we won by so many votes.
Okay.
We have all the votes.
But what's going to happen here, right, is that this is going to be, it's going to be a narrative war.
And it's going to be if Donald Trump can claim victory with some semblance of legitimacy, or it's like, well, he did win Florida.
He's ahead in Pennsylvania.
He won, you know, like these four swing states.
Then it's going to be very hard, I think, for them to come back.
But there is going to be a lot of pressure on Joe Biden to not concede no matter what.
Now, if Donald Trump has a bad day and can't declare victory, he's fucked.
Then he's in a really bad situation.
But again, it's hard to say.
We're going to have to see this.
Look, here's what we will know: is that Florida, it looks like we will know who wins Florida tomorrow.
And that is pretty huge.
If Donald Trump loses Florida, he's pretty much boned.
But if he wins Florida, I think it's off to the races.
And then it all comes down to Pennsylvania.
And I got to say, you know, the polls are close.
I know there are some polls of Joe Biden up by four points or something like that, which is basically the margin of error in those polls.
But I'm looking at Donald Trump drawing these huge crowds.
I just have a feeling he's going to end up pulling it out.
But again, it's, it's, we'll see.
One thing I will say is that I think that one of the indicators that I've seen is that a lot of the people who a lot of the Democrat types in the press, which is, you know, 98% of the press, they, I can tell you this, they're not as confident as they're pretending to be.
They are concerned about this thing.
And I've seen that.
I was watching a bunch of MSNBC yesterday.
And this is, you know, MSNBC, there is just constant talk.
The themes that they were talking about, like through, I watched through like three different shows.
And the themes that they're talking about are civil unrest.
They're talking about Russian interference.
And they're talking about how it's going to take weeks to count all the votes.
These three themes came up over and over and over again.
It was like every show, this is what they were talking about.
And I got to say, the subtext of those conversations is pretty obvious to me at least, that they think Trump's got a real shot of winning this thing.
And you wouldn't be talking about these things if you were as confident as the polls indicate they should be in this election.
They wouldn't be talking about this.
No, they're boarding up in Washington, D.C.
Okay.
Washington, D.C. is like the most Democratic area of the country.
They're not a state, but whatever.
You never know when the Puerto Ricans are going to parade.
That's right.
You got to be careful.
Well, I mean, I think Washington, D.C. went like 90% for Hillary Clinton, something like that.
You can fact check me on that, but it was like something in that area.
And then, I mean, Trump did terrible.
Trump was in single digits in Washington, D.C.
So they're obviously, I mean, they're not expecting a lot of furious Trump supporters if Joe Biden wins.
That's not what they're boarding up for.
They're boarding up for the fact that, you know, people are going to be furious if Donald Trump wins.
And this is happening in a lot of different areas throughout the country.
So it just, I certainly think this thing is not nearly as decided and over as some of the Biden people want you to believe.
I guess it's also probably a good sign if you look at it from the conspiracy theory angle.
And you were the one who played the Hillary Clinton clip a while back that it's going to have to go to the courts.
So it almost seems like the news stations are priming us for the fact that it's not going to come to determination and like we should all brace ourselves for this legal argument, which seems to suggest that they don't really think Biden's winning for a landslide.
Yes, that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
And because if either of them were going to win in a landslide, there would be no talk about all of this stuff.
So that's, you know, that's where we are.
And it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Of course, there's really never been anything like this.
And, you know, that's something that's been said a lot this year.
And it's been true for a lot of different, you know, aspects of 2020.
But it's kind of, you know, like one of the things that I always talk about on this show, and I have since we first started it, is that you, there's always kind of these like the day-to-day crazy things that are happening.
And it's very easy to get lost in what happened yesterday, today, and the day after.
But it's sometimes more challenging to kind of zoom out and go like, wait, but where does this fit into a broader context?
What's the big picture here?
And it's so many things have been crazy about this year that it's almost easy to not appreciate how crazy all of this is.
And the fact that this is us now, like we live in a country where people are boarding up businesses the day before election day because there's a very real, understandable fear that people are going to go apeshit and start rioting.
And that is not a good development for the country.
And also the fact that we, you know, like it's weird because me and you are both critics of democracy in general and the legitimacy of majority rule over a country, but there's never been widespread lack of confidence in American democracy before.
People just kind of believe, yeah, we're voting and the votes are being counted and whoever gets more of the votes will be the winner of this state.
And then they get the electoral college votes for that.
And, you know, like this whole goofy system that we all live under.
Whereas this year, it's like, well, we've never done it like this before.
We've never done anything like this.
There's over 80 million people have already voted in this election.
And some of the states are going to be counting for weeks.
And I think that, again, no matter who wins, I just don't think there's going to be, not just that, there'll be some people who aren't confident in the election results.
Like I've never been confident in election results.
I don't believe any of these people, but I think that will be the majority opinion.
I think most people on the losing side of this will not believe that they actually lost.
All right, guys, let's take a second.
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The Fake News Democracy Trap00:15:09
If you and I had $2 billion to spend to try and convince the American people that we don't have a democracy or they shouldn't trust our government or it's not a legitimate democracy, do you think we could have done a better job than what the media did with Russia collusion and saying the words undermine democracy over the course of three years?
We couldn't have done a better job if we tried to.
So if you want to know why there's reduced trust in government, it's because they pretended like Donald Trump was more evil than anybody else, which he isn't, but they tried to pretend that.
So people like feel, I guess, that they, you know, that feel-good feeling of having an Obama or a real diplomat in there has been taken away from them.
So you've got that.
And then you have that they said our democracy has been undermined.
And then that turned out not to really be true because of what I, I mean, you can't really ignore the fact that it was a deep state coup.
I don't know how your left people look at it, but I think it's fairly transparent.
So they did a pretty good job of priming the American people not to trust our democracy in general.
So good job, mainstream media.
Well, that's right.
And then, of course, now that they've also kind of like, you know, because these things, just like we were saying with pre-existing conditions, you know, Donald Trump's out there and so, and I promise I'll keep your pre-existing conditions.
It's sometimes one side can insert an idea into the lexicon and then the other side jumps on it too.
And I think the same thing is true with the idea of election interference.
You know, this was always, it was a very devious and intentionally so term that because there was something where like, you know, you could, you could just as accurately describe what they were calling election interference as persuading voters, right?
So if you were like, I don't know, whatever, if some surrogate for Trump or for Biden gets up and they give a speech about why they think you should vote for their guys, I mean, what they are actively, intentionally trying to do is to convince voters to vote one way rather than the other way.
So technically, you could also call that interfering with the election, right?
Like you're every TV commercial, every opinion journalist, everything that is trying to, you know, change the outcome of an election is could be described as just trying to convince people, right?
However, if it came from a different country and there was an advertisement on Facebook or something like this, we're now going to call this election interference.
But they could also, you know, clearly, and they even use this term with Comey, that Comey was, you know, guilty of election interference for opening an investigation against Hillary Clinton.
But of course, when you use the term election interference, it kind of evokes like a thought of like people actually like breaking into voting machines and flipping votes or something like that, you know?
So it's, it's this words that are very broad can be used for nefarious purposes.
This is the same reason why, you know, like the accusation of racism or something like that is a very broad term, but it kind of makes you think of the worst example of it.
And then you can apply it to something that was a very minor example of that.
So election interference is one of these terms.
You know, Russia interfered in our election.
Well, what does that suggest?
I mean, what are you saying?
That kind of makes you think, oh, maybe they like, you know, were flipping votes or they had a Russian spy as the vote counter who was mistallying up the votes.
Oh, but what they mean is there were bots on Twitter.
You know, like that's, it's, it's a very, but I've, the reason I brought this up to begin with is that I've noticed now a lot of people on the right using the term election interference, which was not really a term that was used a lot prior to 2016.
It wasn't like in the mainstream lexicon.
But now they're using it, but they're using it about the social media companies.
And, you know, it's kind of like, hey, fair enough.
The corporate press put this narrative in there that there were all of these factors interfering in the election.
It's like, all right, well, what is Twitter, you know, silencing the New York Post for the crime of running an accurate, by all accounts, accurate story about Hunter Biden.
Now, you know, I mean, okay, I don't know if it moved the needle as much as it seemed like it might possibly when it first came out, but also that might be because they were silenced.
But so what is that?
If not, I mean, if we're going to use this term election interference, then okay, that could also be classified as election interference to silence a newspaper if they run a story critical of one of the two candidates.
So now this term, much like pre-existing conditions, this term is now going to be with us for a while and it will be used by both sides in the same way the term fake news became a thing that was like, oh, the corporate, the fake news, I don't know if people remember, but fake news started from the corporate press.
It wasn't Donald Trump's term.
It was their term that they were using about the fake news on the internet.
You know, oh, these YouTube videos about how Hillary Clinton, you know, was very ill and that's why she fainted and the Pizzagate and stuff like that.
It was like, oh, there's all this fake news.
We have a real problem.
And Trump reappropriated that term and said, no, how about you guys are the fake news?
And so there's this danger of once you use a term, it's like, okay, but now that's fair grabs.
That's up for everybody to jump on that term and try to use it against you.
So now we're going to have a conversation, particularly if Trump loses about what really does constitute fake news.
I guess the more terms you pull out from football, the more sticky they're going to be with the culture.
Yeah, that is true.
Like in a debate, you're rushing the candidate.
I don't really watch football anymore.
That's all you got?
Rushing?
That is a football term.
Good work.
So the other thing, I mean, I guess which is a, you know, like I said, like the corporate press has been more not just one-sided.
That's a different way to even describe it, but they've been more blatant in their election interference or in their suppression of stories that are critical of Biden than I've ever seen them before.
It, to me, kind of reeks of desperation, but I think they are.
I think they are desperate to get Donald Trump out of there.
But the other big factor is social media influence, which really has been different than what we've seen in the past.
And we, the part of the problem, inner circle, I think we got caught up in this, where Facebook has been going crazy.
It's been building all year long, really since March, that they've been in a different way than they ever have before, silencing people, removing posts, flagging people for violating their terms and, you know, whatever, however vague those are.
And we, so we've had for years now, a private Facebook group for supporting listeners of the show.
And we got sucked the other day.
We are, they, they took our group down.
So at first, the group just disappeared.
No one knew what the fuck happened.
They didn't send any message.
They didn't let any of us know.
It's just not there.
You go to like check in on the group and it's gone.
It doesn't show up.
Then by the end of the day, it was just back.
And we had no idea what had happened.
All of a sudden, the group was gone.
All of a sudden, the group was back.
And then a few hours after that, it was gone and we were sent a message.
So let me read this message to you to tell you exactly what Facebook has told us.
You're racist proliferating violence.
It has come to our attention that you are recruiting people to a white nationalist cause and must be removed from our platform in order to make an environment of openness where everyone feels safe.
I like just being like also they're like, you have been recruiting white nationalists and promoting violent.
We're like, I didn't, was that in the terms?
I didn't see anything.
So this is what Facebook told us.
Your group is being reviewed.
Your group has been disabled because it doesn't follow our community standards on dangerous individuals and organizations.
An admin has requested that we review this decision and we'll send you an update soon.
It's been about 24 hours of that.
So I don't know what they mean by soon.
Pretty vague on that.
Let me see if I can check up.
Maybe there's been an update.
I haven't checked in a few hours.
But that's what they're telling us, that we're dangerous.
It's really great.
Dangerous individuals and organizations.
The part of the problem inner circle, really just a dangerous group of people.
I'll tell you, there is something particularly creepy about it, and it really sucks.
There's, you know, this isn't as if people are going around harassing other people or that they're going around and, you know what I mean, threatening people.
This is a private group.
And even that they feel the need to come in and regulate.
So it's just, this was, you know, I really love the part of the problem inner circle.
I was really proud of what we kind of built there.
You know, we started it up from nothing, you know, and it became a space that really meant a lot to a lot of people.
It was kind of this thing where you could go and, you know, speak to some like-minded people, speak to other not so like-minded people.
And it was a real sense of community.
And we built it up to up to like close to a couple thousand people.
Then everybody kind of, everyone paid.
Everyone was a subscriber to the show, which kind of adds a different element than other groups that you just kind of join willy-nilly.
Like it's, you know, you're a little bit more invested when you're like, hey, we're all like supporting this show.
And then I don't know, it would just be a lot of fun.
It was really a group in many ways reflected in our image because there would be like all types of just like over the top, like dark humor, then really interesting political conversations, real different debates between different schools of libertarian thought.
Some people who were former libertarians who no longer thought libertarianism was viable.
Some people would argue back and forth with them.
And it was just a cool thing that we had created.
And it sucks that they took us down.
And the timing is a little bit suspicious.
We've basically been doing what we've been doing for a long time.
And it just happens to be the week of a presidential election.
But as I said earlier on the show, it was something that was building.
I kind of knew this was coming.
We will be moving the group.
Do not worry.
We will persist.
We're going to make an announcement on that this week.
So for all you guys who are in the group, we'll be moving you over to another location.
We got to figure that out.
We're deciding where we're going to go right now.
But anyway, you know, there's two other elements here.
One is that for all you hear, and they try and paint this picture of, I love the line, community standards because of the community.
And then they try and say that these groups are going to lead to real world violence because that's the argument.
I mean, if you go read the articles in the way, so now we know that we're not that.
I mean, you can go read any news story you want that's describing the groups that need to be thrown off of Facebook.
Firstly, if we have one credence or, you know, it's, we're anti-violent.
That's what we are.
That is the non-aggression principle.
So anti-fascists can say whatever they want while they go out and be violent in the name of anti-fascism.
We're the opposite where we're actually saying, I mean, our call to action is that no matter what, you can have whatever conversations you are, but we stand by the non-aggression principle.
And we've been removed from the platform.
So, first is they're lying every single time that they try and categorize what can and can't exist on these platforms.
They're looking for censorship for one.
For two, is this creates a little bit of a problem for you and I that at the moment we're laughing it off because we're like, yeah, Facebook, fuck them.
Like, they're lying to you.
But all of a sudden, if you get enough of these people, it's like a resume of, yeah, you are a person of hate.
You're a person that needed to be removed from the Facebook platform because, and that wasn't true.
There was no trial.
But imagine just a news article that goes, Dave Smith, who has a loyal fan base on part of the problem and had to remove been removed from the following platforms from hate.
Any person at home just looks at that and goes, oh, I guess there's a track record of this person being a problem.
So, in that regard, it's not such a little, it's not such a little nothing.
And the same way you build a work resume, it's like the censorship mob is passively building a resume on us of all these places that we can't be because of, and none of it's true.
Yeah, no, I agree with you.
And honestly, I don't, for me, like the way I look at it is that I just feel bad for a lot of the people who the group really meant something to.
And don't get me wrong, the group really meant something to me as well.
But there's a lot of people there.
It just feels like, particularly with everything that's gone on this year, but also just a lot of the broader cultural developments.
I mean, you have people who at this point have been isolated in many ways from their friends and their family.
You've got governments who are coming in telling you, you know, you have to, you know, stay distant from your family when you have a two-hour outside Thanksgiving.
You know what I mean?
Like they're really isolating social creatures in a way that they're not meant to be isolated.
People cannot have these conversations at work because woke, you know, human resources departments are all over everybody's ass, all around the, you know, the country.
And this was like a group where people could have some sense of community and talk to other like-minded people.
And to take that away from people, it just seems wrong and really vindictive and shitty to me.
That being said, it's like, look, the social media companies in general have allowed for a lot of our ideas to, you know, to be transmitted and allowed a lot of us to communicate with people we otherwise wouldn't have been able to.
So I am grateful to these companies for some of the good things they've done, but this is just, it's shitty and disappointing to see this happen.
Evidently, there were a whole bunch of libertarians who have been kicked off Facebook over the last week or two.
And so I think we got caught up in some type of bigger thing.
But it's interesting.
It's an interesting dynamic.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second to thank our sponsor, Yo Kratom.
Predicting a Clean Trump Victory00:15:39
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Karl Marx was he wrote something about how I can't remember the exact line, but it was a famous Marx line where he said that the capitalist will sell us the rope that we use to hang him.
And it seems almost to me there's some dynamic like that with libertarians who are defending private companies' rights to censor and that they go, they go, okay, well, we're kicking out all of the libertarians.
Someone posted something.
He goes, they go, but if they kick all the libertarians off Facebook, who will be there to say that they're a private company, so they have a right to kick people off, you know?
And it just kind of had that type of strange, ironic, self-defeating ring to it.
So anyway, it's nice to know that the big, I guess, tech companies seem to have us all profiled.
And so they know if there's a like flick of a switch, all right, we're going to get rid of this whole group of people, this whole mindset.
They got it profiled.
Like they didn't have to do any homework.
They can log what the post flavors are, see if someone's mentioning the non-aggression principle, label it, and just go, bam.
Sure.
We don't want that term here.
Yeah, it's a dangerous aspect to this, the new world that we're living in.
It's something that's going to have to be confronted one way or the other.
So we'll see.
All right, back to the election.
Let's say it certainly seems possible that this thing could go either way.
As I said before, despite, you know, I'm pretty much right where I've been.
I would, my assumption is that Donald Trump is going to get reelected.
And I know that's the minority opinion right now, but I say that is, to me, the more likely outcome.
However, I concede that it's possible it could go either way.
Also, I would say, and this is something that I've always felt, I don't really trust voting.
I don't trust vote counts.
You know, the people who are counting these votes are human beings.
They're, for the most part, government employees.
I don't know.
I have no sense that they get the accurate number at the end of all of this.
So I don't fucking know.
But my general point here is that it could go either way.
So let's just talk about the two scenarios.
What happens if Donald Trump wins re-election?
What happens if by tomorrow night, it's pretty clear that Donald Trump has won the election and that he's going to have more than enough electoral votes to be reelected.
What happens to the country?
What happens to the whole system?
This is something that's worth thinking about a little bit right now.
So I'll say number one, I think there's riots.
I think you're going to see riots across major cities all around the country.
And I think it's going to be a rough few weeks.
Businesses destroyed a fair amount of violence.
And that's not good.
I also think that it is going to be, this will be a blow to the establishment, unlike anything we've ever seen before, unlike 2016, 2016, you know, on crack.
What do you think?
What do you think happens if Donald Trump wins?
I think if Donald Trump wins, it's going to be more normal than if Biden wins.
Because I think if Biden wins, he might go a little bit ham on, I'm getting a little scared that he's going to go ham on lockdowns and ham on masks.
And if it's especially that comes on the backs of not a clean victory, I really don't, I don't know how the right's going to react to it.
A lot of it does really come down to, and this is the buy-in illusion of if there's a clean victory, then even the losers feel like, all right, well, we got to respect the framework of the game here, uh, versus if it feels like someone's declared themselves the winner and they're just they're winning basically by might, you know, that they've got the backing of the military or whatever.
Um, I mean, who knows to what extent we're going to see, dude, this is so fucking tough to who knows?
Maybe it'll just be a clean way.
Maybe that's why I'm just saying, I'm just saying, what if this scenario, what if that scenario?
So I think, you know, if Donald Trump wins re-election, which I think is very likely to happen, I think more than 50%, not much more than 50%, 52%, 53%, something like that.
Yeah, maybe a little more, 55%.
If Donald Trump wins re-election, I think that under no circumstance, no matter how, you know, how big the margin is, how clean a victory it is, I think that it will not be accepted as legitimate.
I just think that the corporate press, the Democratic establishment, the left, they have dug their heels into no way this guy can win.
Maybe some people on the far left will be able to have a different understanding of what happened and they can fall back to like Bernie Sanders got cheated or Joe Biden was basically a neoliberal and that's why or something like that.
But I think it will shatter people's faith in polling in a way that 2016 alone didn't do.
I think people will never listen to these pollsters again if Donald Trump has a big victory.
Let's just say, okay, so Trump, Trump wins.
So what is the media narrative now as to why he's an illegitimate president?
What do they go with?
That the voting was off?
Like, what do you think they run with?
What's the news story?
I mean, I got to tell you, my guess is Russian interference.
That's really my guess is that they're going to blame it on Russian interference again.
What Russian interference that they gave over the information on Hunter Biden?
What Russian interference was their last time, right?
But if they don't have, here's the, if they don't have the backing, because Radcliffe might shut that down like he kind of did here, where they, he just immediately was like, hey, there's absolutely no evidence and nobody in the intelligence community is saying that.
So they're just straight up lying.
And they kept going with it, though.
Right.
But I don't know.
Maybe it's because I know that factor.
So I'm assuming it's not as sticky.
But I think the picture I'm painting here is I really, and maybe I'm just totally wrong.
I mean, how much, how much CNN are people really going to continue to watch and believe if they're no one likes being a loser.
You know, that's part of why they lie is because we know that people want to play for the winning team.
So if you've watched CNN for years and you just continuously see them getting wrong and whining, at some point, I mean, I don't watch it.
So, you know, I can't, maybe I'm just projecting onto these people.
But at some point, don't you think maybe they at least rethink strategy of like, okay, the complaining thing or the lying about Russian, that's not getting us what we want.
So how do we re-strategize here?
I would just think for them, they might tone that down and realize, well, at least we got to do something different.
Yeah.
Well, it is, it's, it's possible.
Um, but I, you know, I don't know.
I think that it will, Donald Trump getting reelected will shatter a lot of institutions in this country.
And I think that in many ways, that'll be a good thing.
But I do think that there's, there's, it's going to be a very difficult task for the corporate press to explain away what happened here.
Win or lose.
So let's let's play both scenarios.
Let's say Trump wins, Biden wins.
Do we get an investigation or more of a look into Hunter Biden and Joe Biden being bribed by China.
Do you think that there's an investigation on that?
Do you think it just goes away?
Do you think Trump, Trump winning, and it basically goes away?
I think that at this point, Biden's an old man who's out of politics forever.
And so it's, you know, whatever.
Who fucking cares?
I think if Biden wins, Republicans and Republicans still have some power in Congress.
I think they use it to drum up some bullshit investigations, but we never really get to the bottom of it.
The only thing that I think is a game changer is if some major shit leaks.
You know what I mean?
Like that might have some effect, but I don't really expect much to come from that in terms of legal investigations.
That's that would be my guess.
If let me just see if there's anything more in the scenario of Trump winning.
Trump also, if he wins, is going to have a humongous, I mean, like gloating, I kicked your ass tour.
There's just going to be the biggest, I mean, he will, he will never let them live it down.
Donald Trump is not the guy you want to lose to.
You don't like to lose to Donald Trump and he goes, hey, good game, man.
It was a close one.
You did your best.
It's not going to be like that.
So now let's say Trump wins.
What?
Okay.
What does he do on healthcare?
Does he actually build a wall?
Do we see an economic collapse because what the fuck they've been doing with money makes no sense?
And what's going on?
I don't know how they can, what are they going to do next to prop up the stock market?
Is the Fed going to be buying stocks directly?
I mean, are we going to negative interest rates?
Like, what do you just kind of forecast for?
Like, does Donald Trump manage to get out before the volcano erupts that the next guy looks like an asshole?
Or does this thing unravel under on his four-year watch?
Well, this, this, this question, which is the biggest question for the country, is to me unaffected by whether Trump or Biden wins.
I mean, this is the question for either of them.
And I think that we have dug ourselves into a position where the only way, I mean, you basically have only two options, and one of them is politically unfeasible.
So the two options are to bite the bullet and to let the economy, like let, you know, liquidation run through the economy, restructure in some type of sane way.
And that's just politically not going to happen.
And the other option is that we continue with what we are doing.
We maybe move to negative interest rates.
There's going to need to be another round of stimulus, which Donald Trump is already talking about now afterward, another round of bailing people out, more checks being sent.
This is, to me, the far more likely direction that we're going to go in.
And hope to dear God that we can grow our way out of this problem.
Now, we'll never grow our way out of the problem, but growth, economic, like real economic growth will always make a problem less bad.
So, you know what I mean?
Donald Trump's going to, I think, fight to open the economy, perhaps even have some more tax cuts, deficit be damned, you know, send out stimulus, more tax cuts, more money from the Federal Reserve, see what we can do to just keep this thing afloat.
If Joe Biden wins, you wouldn't see any more tax cuts.
I think he bails on raising taxes because, in the same way Obama did after he won, they'll be like, well, we've talked about it.
And in a bad economy, it's not good to raise taxes.
So no taxes, massive stimulus, massive monetary injections if Biden wins.
So that's, I really think, is essentially the same, mostly the same either way.
But that is a big, fat question.
Now, if Biden wins, if Biden wins, which to me, the most likely scenario of Biden winning is that it's unclear who wins tomorrow night, takes weeks to count the votes.
Lawyers get involved.
It's disputed.
Joe Biden ends up being installed as president in January.
If Biden wins, there's a couple of interesting factors.
Number one, Donald Trump is still president until January.
So now you have Donald Trump with nothing to lose for a few more months.
Listen, that would be fucking awesome.
I think it's possible that you'll see some pardons.
It's possible that you'll see Donald Trump declassify some interesting material.
So there might be something of benefit yet to come from a Trump presidency, even if Biden.
The Bigfoot folder.
Yeah.
Let's fucking figure out what's going on.
Would it be great if he just declassifies that?
And he goes, guys, turns out there's no such thing as Bigfoot.
All right.
See you later.
But so Biden, Biden winning would be, you know, you'll see mass celebration throughout the establishment.
They will just be thrilled to pieces that, you know, they've got the power back.
All those same people who you saw melting down when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, those people will be elated.
They'll be very happy.
All the, you know, mentally unbalanced people that you know in your life, they'll be having a very good night.
They'll be having a very manic few days.
And then slowly, I think after Biden wins, the reality of the situation will dawn on people, which is that Trump supporters aren't going anywhere and that you can't just exile them, that they're still going to be furious.
They're going to be less trustful of the system than ever before.
That's an understatement.
They also will not see this election as legitimate.
They will see everything that was thrown at Donald Trump and think that it's all completely unfair.
I think they will also probably view national politics through a different lens than ever before in American history, a more cynical lens.
And I think that most likely what's to come over the next few years is them supporting them supporting more right-wing authoritarian candidates.
You're going to see the rise of leaders who are what the left claimed Donald Trump was, even though he never was any of those things, meaning an actual right-wing authoritarian, fascistic type leaders.
A Cynical American Future00:08:17
And so that's one of the more troubling potential dynamics.
So I agree with you that that risk is on the table.
And I could see someone coming along and making that like, hey, we really got to be tough against this other side, which then leads to the authority.
But who can you point to as kind of fits that character now?
Oh, I don't know.
Ted Cruz, but he would never get it.
No, not Ted Cruz.
Some new guy we don't know right now, someone whose name we don't know.
That's my thought.
Me, is what I'm saying.
Me.
But no, I think that you're going to see Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Now, here's the thing.
How long does Biden even make it?
Like, I mean, that's going to be the fun bet is when does Kamala take over?
That's an interesting question as well.
I don't see him making it very long.
I don't know how long.
I think he'll make it probably through the first year, but I don't see much longer than that.
But then there's the big question, if Joe Biden wins.
And to me, this is almost at the heart of what the future would be under a Biden president.
Now, there are some people, and I think more optimistically thinking, that think that basically after the election, the COVID stuff is going to dwindle away.
Like, you know, they declare some mask mandate and then they're like, hey, look, we beat the virus.
It was our mask mandate that beat the virus when really the virus is just fizzling out.
And then they go, oh, okay.
So now we can stop fighting this war on COVID.
It was really all designed to bring down Trump's economy.
Now we want to bring the economy back to life because Biden's in there.
Or what I think is unfortunately more likely is that we're just never going back.
Everything that they've told you is in fact their plans.
This is the new normal.
This is the great reset, all of those things.
And that all of this is just going to be a part of the country forever.
And that they've established the precedent that government can disrupt the most intimate details of your personal life.
And that is the, you know, that is the path that we continue down.
I find that to be much more likely.
They just pretend like the virus is more active and is like a constant threat.
Sure.
Yeah.
I don't, I don't think it would, it's really what they're doing already.
They're just doing it now with their president in the White House.
So that is what I see as being the more likely result of a Biden presidency.
And I think that you're going to see an increase in like the woke type shit, because this is what the Democratic establishment loves.
This way they can, you know, they can push a whole woke agenda.
That means that all of the big banks get to keep all of their fucking money, but they throw you the token gestures.
However, this does have the very real effect of pitting Americans against each other, making people furious.
I think that what's going to happen, I mean, there's all these projections of like, you know, I was reading the other day just about the, you know, restaurants in New York City that they're saying like about like 60% of them are going to be out of business within the next six months.
You know, basically all this shit's going to catch up to them.
Short of a huge round of small business bailouts, which I'm skeptical that we'll see.
They like to bail out big businesses, but not the small ones so much.
You're going to see massive businesses shutting down.
And if it's under this Biden administration with all this woke shit being pushed, this is going to be fertile ground to support that right-wing authoritarian mystery figure that I was talking about before.
So that's kind of my thoughts.
What's interesting about the small businesses going under is that pension plans are, I think, are fairly invested in commercial real estate.
And that's kind of one of the tools that like Wall Street does such a good job of getting your mom and pop or the things that everyone would actually put money behind a bailout involved and put them out forward while they're collecting all their fees and all that other shit.
So that's, and the best chapter to me of David Stockman's book, which we've talked about before, the Great Deformation is he talks about how in the last bailout, we could have let those Wall Street behemoths go under and it would not have affected mainstream America because all that money was in insurance funds.
But the commercial real estate market with pension plans, I don't know if that, I think that actually would.
And by the way, pension plans are already fucked.
I mean, they've been lying, especially the government ones, but you're talking, it's such a weird racket where they really do get real people involved who you don't want to see harmed, which is, you know, yeah.
No, that's right.
No, listen, the American people, I think, are slowly at different levels starting to wake up and realize that they were sold a whole bill of goods.
That's complete bullshit.
That's the bigger story of this generation of Americans.
Or when I say this generation, I mean this like this time period of Americans.
I think that a lot of younger people have already woken up to this.
And that's why they've become so radicalized.
That's why you see so many people in their 20s who are on the radical left or on the radical right compared to decades past is that they were sold a whole bill of goods that they realize is now bullshit.
I mean, it's hard if you spent, you know, 120 grand on a college education and you're fucking working at Starbucks and living with your parents.
It's hard to not realize right away, oh, I was sold bullshit.
Like this is all, none of this is true.
But when the retirement fund scheme really is revealed, which is not that far off, when that's revealed, there's going to be a whole older generation who's also going to realize that they were sold a load of bullshit.
And so all, you know, to me, the biggest surprise for the moderate establishment Democrat type people is that they are basically banking on the fact that if Joe Biden wins this election, then we've exercised the demon.
Then, you know, it's basically like everything goes back to normal.
This is, you know, we got rid of Trump.
We got rid of the symbol of hate.
No longer will there be a president sowing division.
And now there'll be a president with empathy who wants to bring people together, yada, yada, yada.
And they're going to have a rude awakening when they realize that none of that is true, that this is not going back to a pre-Trump era.
We're not going back to a pre-COVID era.
We're certainly not going back to a pre-Trump era.
And that this is that, that's the new normal is that the Trump may go, but the Trump supporters are here to stay.
And in fact, I think they could go a lot further.
You know, it's like Donald Trump was the biggest middle finger available to give to the establishment.
It would do some good for the anti-Trumpers, for the Trump is literally Hitler crowd to imagine if there were a bigger middle finger available.
How far do you think Trump supporters would have gone had there been like a way bigger middle finger?
And if you piss them off more and that bigger middle finger presents himself as an option, how far will they go in the future?
That's an important question to contemplate looking forward for this great country of ours.
All right.
That is our episode for today.
Here's what I'm thinking, Rob.
I think maybe tomorrow night, late night, we'll do some type of live stream, maybe.
Maybe like real late night, we'll do something to put it out as like a bonus episode or something like that.
Let me think about it for the rest of the day, but we'll do, we'll give you guys some time.
It's going to be late because from what I remember last time, it was like two in the morning when they were starting to make a determination.
Yeah.
Am I right?
Or it was like 1:30, 2 a.m. that I don't remember exact times, but it was late when they started to really figure things out.
But we'll do some type of content for you, some type of election coverage.
Not sure exactly what we're going to do, but I'll post on social media and stuff.