Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein review 2020 as a year of government overreach, alleging Dr. Fauci lied about masks to secure funding while Andrew Cuomo forced nursing homes to accept infected patients. They dismiss Trump's impeachment as an evidence-free witch hunt that collapsed upon Hunter Biden revelations, arguing lockdowns based on debunked science caused economic devastation and fueled Black Lives Matter riots. Citing Tom Woods' censored speeches as proof of rising social media suppression, they claim the establishment removed Trump through unprecedented measures but failed to solve underlying issues, urging listeners to join the Libertarian Party and support the Mises Caucus PAC to advance freedom in 2021. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roll Back The State00:14:58
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
I am thrilled to be joined by my partner in crime, the fire, the king of the cocks, Robbie Bernstein.
How are you, my brother?
Oh, man, dude, I had a good weekend.
I had Gene Epstein back on Run Your Mouth.
We did a three-hour episode on basic economics and I spent the whole weekend prepping.
I was reading through the book.
It was great.
I learned a lot.
Oh, that's awesome.
Very, very good.
Yep, Gene is the best.
Hope he's doing well in Soho and still fighting the good fight for freedom and for the survival of New York City.
But anyway, I'm excited to listen to that podcast.
Everybody, go check out Run Your Mouth if you don't already.
That's Rob's other podcast.
Excellent show.
Really funny, really informative.
So this is, I just realized this morning that this is going to be me and your last podcast of 2020.
I got malice coming on on the Wednesday episode.
Is there, does someone just break into your house?
I just see a figure loom behind you.
It could be.
I don't know.
I swear to God, I just saw someone.
That's just my boyfriend.
Don't worry about it.
I was going to say, it's not like one of those movies where at the end, they're like, you see a ghost in the third scene.
Okay.
So there's, so this is our last episode of 2020.
And so I figured we would do a year in review episode as has kind of become tradition for us.
And, you know, what a year this one was.
I was thinking back about our year and review episode last year.
I don't even know if you remember this, Rob, but it was last year on right around New Year's Eve.
It was, we did this, this episode where what we did was we played the year in review episode of Meet the Press and then kind of compared their big stories to our big stories.
And I remember really enjoying the episode.
And I remember thinking about it at the end of 2019 and being like, man, this was a really big year.
Like a lot of shit happened this year.
Like the Russia collusion hoax, you know, fell apart.
And there were all these stories that we thought were like such interesting stories.
And we're like, we got this IG report right here that shows all of this deep state, you know, like nefarious activity.
And thinking to myself, man, a lot happened in 2019.
And now, thinking back about 2020, it is, I know it's just become the kind of generic thing to say, but it's really, it's hard to overstate it.
That this year, there was more, you know, like it was a, there were, there were more profound changes in our society than it seems almost like every year leading up to 2020 combined of my lifetime in the last 30 some odd years.
I, you know, in 2020, at the beginning of a year, we had a primary going on on the Democratic side, not really on the Republican side.
And although Bill Weld did run.
And the president of the United States was impeached in the middle of a political season.
And that doesn't even see that doesn't even like make the radar of what are a big story in 2020.
So it's an interesting year to look back on.
I don't exactly know where to start.
I mean, I guess we could just throw that out there that Donald Trump was impeached over complete bullshit.
That happened early in the year.
I don't know.
It was such bullshit.
It was barely even a news story.
It was just like the Congress sneezed.
That's basically what happened.
Well, I mean, I guess it's worth just mentioning because it is, you know, it's only the third time, I think, in history that it happened.
And it is somewhat of a story.
But yeah, Donald Trump was impeached for asking the president of Ukraine to look into the Bidens and their criminal activity.
And the claim was that he was going to hold up military aid if they didn't, even though they didn't, and he didn't hold up military aid.
I mean, I guess he held it up for a little bit, but then ultimately gave it to them.
So there was no quid pro quo.
It was in a, there was an accusation.
It was an alleged attempted quid pro quo, which never actually happened.
It was just so incredibly weak.
And then the kicker, we just find out two weeks ago that Hunter Biden was under criminal federal investigation the whole time by our federal government.
So the case was incredibly weak at the time and now seems not like weak is an understatement.
It seems like it's non-existent.
But so yeah, the witch hunt against Donald Trump for all this bullshit.
Meanwhile, when there's a ton of things you could, you know, go after Donald Trump for, but of course they always went after him for complete bullshit.
So that fell apart.
He was acquitted and or whatever the technical term is.
He was not removed from office.
And that fell apart.
And, you know, things were kind of going along, you know, like a normal year in America for the Donald Trump era, you know, not normal like what we grew up with, but, you know, the new normal back then, the old new normal.
And then March, everything changed in March.
Isn't it funny to kind of look back on when, like, I remember the COVID or what we were all just calling the coronavirus at the time.
I remember like the last in-studio episode of Kennedy that I did.
We talked about it.
I remember me and you talking about it a little bit on the podcast.
And it was kind of like, I don't know, to me, I really knew very little about virology, epidemiology, any of this stuff.
I mean, like a lot of us, I dove into it this year and tried to learn as much as I could about it and to understand what's going on.
But it felt to me like in late February, early March, like this was the new, you know, Ebola, swine flu.
There's always just a thing that they get everybody, you know, worked up about.
It gets, you know, people to watch the news.
And so they like talking about it.
And I just kind of felt like this was just another one of those things.
And then I started seeing a whole bunch of epidemiologists writing that like, no, this is really different.
And this one's going to be really bad.
I started to think, okay, maybe this is a little bit worse than just your average run of the mill, you know, thing that they scare you with.
Maybe it's not, you know, swine flu, but it'll be a little bit worse, but that's about it.
And never taking it too seriously.
Isn't it weird to look back at those times?
Like when you remember just being like, oh, yeah, there's this coronavirus everyone's talking about, but whatever.
Who really cares?
I mean, whoever thought that government would really just make up stats, analytics, and shut down an entire country.
Even you and I wouldn't have thought that they were that evil or inept.
I think that a lot of times, even people like me and you would have thought, not that this was impossible, but we would have always thought, but that's at least decades away.
You know, they like the government could do something like that.
I remember like universal basic income.
You and I would have thought we would have said maybe a decade from now.
Now it's basically here.
Yeah, that's right.
Or at least it's a lot closer.
I remember when there was this famous episode of Piers Morgan when he had Ben Shapiro on.
I think there's one of the things that really blew Ben Shapiro up.
Piers Morgan had this show in America.
It was, he took over for Larry King on CNN.
And he was doing this show.
And one of the big things that he was going off about was gun control.
He was a huge gun control advocate.
And the optics of it couldn't have been worse because, you know, of all the people to be, you know, railing against a constitutionally protected right, you know, to have it be a Brit just made it look like that guy was a cunt the day he showed up.
And it was awesome that it was just a sliding scale of that show getting canceled.
Oh, yeah.
For an hour to a half hour to trying to bring on big guests to just realizing he was a boring cunt.
Yes.
So, and the only shows he did that were like rating successes were just him getting wrecked.
So he brought on Alex Jones and Alex Jones just one of the greatest things ever, if you've never seen it, just Alex Jones just fucking losing his mind, but making good points about, you know, protecting gun rights.
And then he brought Ben Shapiro on and Ben Shapiro went out of his way to be the not Alex Jones, you know, to be the like, no, I'm completely sane and reasonable.
And I remember he said, you know, at one point, Piers Morgan asked him what he fears about, you know, gun control.
And Ben Shapiro was like, I fear that I fear that in 100 years, 100 years from now, a totalitarian government will rise up in America.
And if we don't have gun rights, then we can't stop the blah, blah.
And I remember even thinking that was like 100 years?
That seems a little like, I was like, I don't know, dude.
I mean, Obama already signed into law the right to kill American citizens.
And we have this huge prison population and we have these fucking, you know, the torture regimes set up by the Bushes and continued by Obama and all this shit being like 100 years seems a little off.
But it did, the idea of totalitarianism in America did, at least to me, seem like, yeah, that was a few decades off.
Like I didn't, I would not have bet that we would see it in the year 2020.
And I've said this several times, and I'll keep hammering home this point that that is the appropriate word for what was instituted in 2020 in America, totalitarianism.
And I think that the word itself is overused quite a bit.
I think that the term totalitarian, totalitarianism could should be applied.
I'd say in the last like 100, 120 years or so, I'd say the Nazis in Nazi Germany is a good description of their system.
Stalin at the height of Stalin, for sure, probably not a fair description of the Soviet Union by like the 80s.
It wasn't really a totalitarian society.
I mean, it was bad and they were, you know, they were poor and there were, you know, certain, it was an authoritarian system.
But totalitarian is like, to me, that's like North Korea today.
That's what you would describe as totalitarian.
But I really think now, obviously, our government didn't go genocidal against its own people and they weren't rounding people up in camps or something like that.
But I mean, if you have a situation where people are literally have to get permission from their governor before they can go to church, go to work, see their family, all of this shit.
To me, that is, it is a fair description to call that totalitarianism.
And that's, that's what was instituted in 2020 and seemingly out of nowhere.
It was a really, you know, when you look back at it now, months removed, it was really incredible that like, you know, was that old saying, March comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb.
I never heard that one.
You never heard that one before?
No?
All right.
It's a boring expression.
I don't even know what it's conveying.
He's referring to the weather.
March comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb.
Like it comes in, you're freezing, you're in the dead of winter, you leave March and it's fucking lions with cold, though.
I don't like it.
Just fierce, you know?
All right, bro.
I'm not defending the statement.
Anyway, this March was quite the opposite.
This March came in like a lamb and went out like a lion.
March 1st, you never could have imagined that we would be where we were at the end of the month.
And it was really just, it was looking back at it, it's unbelievable how quickly they got Americans to give up everything, just give up everything.
And, you know, in the American people's defense, they scared the shit out of people and they lied their pants off.
You know, they thought, oh, 15 days, just 15 days.
We got to take a little pause and this, this will save a whole lot of people from dying.
And people didn't know anything at the time.
You're just, you know, at the time, it was, you know, people hadn't dug into it themselves at all.
Still, a lot of people haven't.
But they look to this guy, Fauci, and, you know, he was telling them millions of people are going to die if we don't do this.
Even though a month earlier, he was telling you you had nothing to worry about.
And he was still in March telling you, don't bother wearing masks.
I remember a period of time.
It's so, it's a lot of times, right?
And we've talked about this a lot, but a lot of times there's this fucking dynamic that's so difficult to crack through where like time is a motherfucker.
And if you look at something after a certain amount of time, it's much easier to see the truth.
It's much easier to see the truth of a situation when you've got some time to reflect on it.
When you're in the moment, people get hysterical.
It's hard to see exactly what's going on.
However, also after a certain amount of time, people don't care as much as they did in the moment.
So you find out some scandal happened 20 years ago.
It's like, yeah, what are you going to do?
It was 20 years ago, you know?
I mean, you could come out and find out that the CIA had Kennedy killed tomorrow and it wouldn't really change much about our society, you know?
But if you had found out in fucking like 1966, that it would have like changed the nation, you know?
So it's like time really changes things, but it's also easier to see what's going on.
One of the examples I always, it's like when people get canceled.
They think about Roseanne.
You look back at Roseanne now, you can't generate any outrage over that.
You'd be like, wait, we really just like ruined this woman because she made a silly joke about the Muslim Brotherhood.
Grow Thicker Hair Naturally00:02:27
That was like her crime, like a planet of the apes Muslim Brotherhood joke like that.
But at the time, people are whipped up into a frenzy and they're outraged.
But now that all the emotion comes down, you just see it for what it is.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right.
Follow The Science00:13:02
Looking back now at what they, you know, what they did at the beginning of this whole thing, it's much easier to see all of the unbelievable just insanity of all that.
I mean, I remember a time at the beginning of March, or maybe the end toward the end of March, where people were not wearing masks in public because Fauci and all of them were still the CDC, all of them were still saying don't wear masks.
They were still like, no, no, no, the masks don't, that won't help at all.
It doesn't do anything.
But people were out with gloves.
So people were out with gloves, but not with masks because they didn't want to touch any of the virus.
But who cares about like your mask?
You know what I mean?
Which is just so, it's so absurd to think back about it.
And I, I, do you remember that this was the big so, so there were just so many lies that were told.
And it's interesting to look back now and kind of think about all of them.
But one of the you had to wipe down your groceries.
Do you remember this?
And newscasters were doing demonstrations of how to properly wipe down your groceries.
Um, and this was all bullshit.
Like every inch of it was just complete bullshit.
And they just sold it to you.
And these same reporters will now be telling you about, you know, well, the Christmas season is going to lead to this.
And if we don't have a mask mandate, it'll, it won't lead to this.
But like, it's just a few months ago, these motherfuckers were going, yeah, you got to wipe the bottom of the cheese because that's where the corona lives right over here on the bottom of your American cheese packet, you know, whatever.
Um, that's just all bullshit.
All turned out to be completely wrong.
Yeah, it's amazing how many things Fauci has lied on.
The most recent one, I don't know if you saw this, but he's changing the percentages for what you need for herd immunity.
And they asked him, he's like, ah, well, you know, I'm just trying to say things that people will accept.
Yes.
He's literally just saying, well, I lied to you because I know that people wouldn't like the other number.
He's admitted actually a few different times now that he is straight up lying to get the result that he wants to get.
He admitted also that he lied about the masks because he was worried people would hoard N95 masks.
So Fauci, by his own admission, and with this stuff with the levels necessary for herd immunity that you're referring to, he is just going, it's like, oh, follow the science, but also just know that your scientist God is not actually giving you the science.
He's telling you what he thinks you need to believe in order to achieve the result that he wants achieved.
So follow the science, but also know that they're not telling you the truth.
And where the hell is the coverage of who Fauci is?
I don't know.
Like you get all this conversation about the revolving door of government and how people go from, you know, lobbying to working in government, or specifically you see it more in the financial field.
People go from working Goldman Sachs, the treasury.
What about this guy's relationship with pharmaceutical companies?
I'm asking, I haven't done my homework, but I'd like to know, is there some sort of a profit incentive for Fauci to be, you know, pushing pandemics and that you need to be buying something from Pfizer?
I don't know.
I'm strictly asking that the media seems to love this guy.
They want to treat him as, you know, they're treating him like he's the god right now of government.
Oh, yes.
You dare, you dare not question the scientist god, Dr. Fauci.
And there's some agenda there, which I've not seen coverage of.
Yeah, no, I think that's an absolutely reasonable question.
And, you know, he's certainly been this like powerful, politically connected guy for a long time.
But there's also just the obvious human incentive to a guy like Dr. Fauci, where now, as long as this keeps going on, he is a celebrity.
And if this goes away, he goes away.
And so, of course, on some level, he's incentivized to keep this thing going and build it up to as big as it can be.
But if you look back to, you know, Fauci obviously is not the only one who told lies.
And this, even if you want to give the benefit of the doubt to some of these people who I don't care to, they just got so much wrong on such a massive scale and demanded such incredible sacrifices from regular people based on the shit they were getting wrong that it's hard to believe that they're still all in their same posts,
still confidently making their next prediction, still confidently telling you what you need to sacrifice now, still confidently telling you that the worst is ahead of us and not behind us.
And we need to do X, Y, and Z through the winter and all of this shit.
And it's hard when, you know, as I'm looking back at this here, you start thinking about things like this Cuomo guy, this fucking shameless hack was up there demanding ventilators for a full fucking month and not just demanding ventilators, but pointing fingers at everybody else.
You remember this stuff?
FEMA says they're going to send me 200 ventilators.
What good is that?
I need 40,000 ventilators or people are going to die.
People will die if we don't have these ventilators.
He never needed any of them.
It's just wrong.
Oh, maybe give him the benefit of the doubt.
He wasn't lying through his dumb fat teeth, but he was wrong.
He was wrong as shit.
And no one, you know, and that just kind of gets swept away.
No, whatever.
You know, you make some mistakes.
This guy forced nursing homes to take in COVID positive patients.
Literally, if you were concerned, it's funny because you'll, you know, we'll debate all these different policies and, you know, should we close restaurants or should we do this?
Should we close schools?
All these things that there's very, very little evidence that this will do anything to mitigate the spread of COVID.
Very little evidence.
But if there was one policy that you'd be like, oh, this is what you don't want to do if you care about people dying from COVID, allowing COVID positive people into nursing homes would be it.
If there's one thing that we know that the data is clear on from around the world, not just America, not just North America, but around the world, is that once this thing gets into nursing homes, it is almost impossible to stop the spread of it.
And those are the people who are actually likely to get seriously ill and die from the virus.
And it forced that policy on people.
Not only allowed nursing homes to make the decision, but forced them.
Said, you cannot discriminate against people because they have COVID.
So he, you know, has actual like deaths on his hands.
And of course, not just that, also, just from the lockdown in general.
They got the fucking ship sent up.
They got that fucking Navy makeshift hospital.
They made a makeshift hospital in Central Park, needed a makeshift hospital in the Javin Center.
They were giving you all these projections about how many people are going to be in these hospitals and how much we're going to get out of this.
None of it came true.
The hospitals barely, they were never necessary.
They barely saw any patients.
They all took them apart, you know, a little slower than they built them, but they took them apart, you know, a matter of weeks later, sent them all back, sent all the ventilators away because it turned out we didn't need any of that shit.
They got everything wrong.
While they were instituting, as I said, totalitarianism, they got everything wrong.
It's just like, you know, I can forgive people getting shit wrong.
I've gotten things wrong before, only like four times, but I've gotten things wrong.
And you remember all four.
You know, it happens.
People get things wrong sometimes, but it's the lack of shame about getting so many things so wrong.
I mean, I remember in April, in May, reading articles about the super spreaders.
Remember, this was a big thing.
Oh, the super spreader.
See, the big thing about COVID is that asymptomatic people are out there just spreading it all over the place.
Basically, anyone who went to a Trump rally or ate in a restaurant.
Yes, you were out there and you were spreading it all over the place.
And this is where all of the fucking, you know, you know, bullshit about like you're killing grandma for getting a haircut came from is that, well, you could be an asymptomatic super spreader until we realized that actually there's no evidence to support the idea that asymptomatic people can spread the virus.
There's just really no evidence.
Now, there seems to be a little bit of evidence that pre-symptomatic people can.
In other words, if you're not quite sick yet, but you're about to get really sick, maybe you can.
But the idea of all the people who had it, who tested positive for it and don't get sick, the idea that they're spreading it, there's no data to back that up.
Is that because I that's one that I'm confused on because I just heard so many, I guess, shifts in the narrative.
So now that's true.
If you don't, if you're not showing symptoms, you're not spreading it.
For those people who don't get sick at all, it's there's really no evidence that they're spreading the virus at all.
They can't establish it at all from their contact tracing that those people are.
But they say that there is some evidence that people who do end up getting sick might have spread it before they had symptoms.
So that's a set.
That's where we're at now.
But, you know, we'll see next month what they're fucking saying.
But all those stories about the asymptomatic super spreaders, bullshit.
Every last one of them ended up getting debunked.
It's all fucking bullshit.
And of course, the idea that you were going to get it from touching surfaces.
This was a big thing.
They were reporting, oh, the virus can live for, you know, whatever it was, four days or something on surfaces, and therefore you have to wipe everything down.
I mean, they moved a lot of Lysol products.
That's for sure.
Couldn't get any sanitizing wipes at stores, but, you know, there was no truth to it.
People weren't getting sick that way.
People are getting sick from sustained close contact with other people who have it and have symptoms.
That's the vast, vast, vast majority of how people are contracting the virus.
So, yep, they were just wrong about all of this.
And in the process, they fucking, you know, just wreaked havoc on the country, on the economy, on people's lives.
We're still getting more and more information about exactly how devastating the effect of the lockdowns are.
Of course, you mentioned on the last podcast how that the mutation quite possibly is a result of the lockdowns and stuff like that.
So it's, you know, there's a lot more to it.
I know we got a nice email from Gene Epstein, as predicted on the last podcast.
He gave you an A minus.
I'll take it.
I don't get all the A minuses.
I'm good with that.
Better grade than me or you ever got in our lives.
An A minus.
We will take that.
But yeah, so, and it was just a, you know, it was an environment in this last year that was unlike anything I've ever lived through.
I think I could only really compare it to 9-11, where there was just this mass hysteria, you know, people were really scared, but this was way on a way bigger level than 9-11.
This psychologically, the impact of 2020, I have no idea what the effects of all of it will be, but the idea that they got, as Jeff Dice pointed out when I had him on the show, he goes, they've got people, the government, like this is an authoritarian's dream.
They've got people terrified of a floating abstraction.
People are terrified to get close to another human being, literally, like scared to get physically close to another human being.
And they're just willing to listen to their government, tell them whatever they want to.
And of course, it's also a dream for the non-government would-be authoritarians, you know, the one who wants to snitch on somebody for not wearing a mask or wants to snitch on someone for the crime of having a gathering.
These terms now that are like used that are kind of demonized, a gathering.
They're having a gathering, you know, they're seeing people.
Yes, that is now a bad thing.
And everything got flipped upside down in the sickest way possible.
Like everything that is considered to be noble now would have normally and should be considered like anti-social, weird behavior.
Like I'm so responsible that I'm sitting alone in my home right now, not communicating with the outside world.
I'm willing to not work.
That's how noble I am.
You're like, what?
Since when does anybody think that's a good thing?
And then watch all of Netflix.
Stress-Free Ring Shopping00:02:58
Yes.
And then the people who are like, you know what?
I'm willing to take some risk and go to work to provide for my family.
You're like, well, that guy's, he's bad.
You know, like, that's, that's now viewed as some type of fucking like evil thing.
It's really that to me is almost the aspect of all of this that was the craziest and the wildest.
You should be home watching Netflix with your, like your brothers.
Yeah.
They're at home sitting watching TV.
Yes, that's, that's exactly right.
That's right.
Like your father is like the black sheep of the family.
It's like, oh, God, he's such an embarrassment.
He's, oh, he's getting up to go to work every day.
But my younger son, he's gained 40 pounds.
He's sitting on the couch.
No relationships.
We're so proud of him.
There's Jeff insisting on going to his job.
Doesn't even care about grandma.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So there was, you know, trying to look back at the year and obviously, you know, like there's we all know what a crazy year this was, but this is what I like about New Year's is that it gives you an opportunity to reflect.
Libertarian Outrage Defined00:13:04
And so this goes on for months.
You know, it's not 15 days to flatten the curve.
It goes on for months and months of like really full lockdowns in most of the country, which is still going on in a lot of parts of the country to one degree or another.
And then in the summer, it took a turn where we saw one of the results of locking people down, which were these mass protests and that very quickly devolved into riots and utter destruction.
There's the, you know, I guess it was, they could, they'll claim it was sparked with the George Floyd thing, but I don't really buy that.
I don't think you really buy that either.
I think that this was sparked by the lockdowns and that the truth is that, yeah, a fucking cop put his knee on a black guy's neck while he was cuffed on the ground and that guy died later.
And it was a pretty horrific thing to watch.
And the guy was charged and the other officers were charged.
And they, I think they deserve to be.
I mean, they'll get their day in court, but I, I, to me, it seemed appropriate that they all got charged.
It was an awful thing to watch.
Um, certainly wasn't clear that there was any racial motivations in it.
I mean, it's not like he was shouting the N-word while he fucking did it or anything.
There's nothing about it seemed to indicate that, like, well, this wouldn't happen to a white person, but it would happen to a black person.
I don't, you know, the racial aspect, you almost have to add to it.
But it was gruesome to watch.
It was a fucked-up situation.
It was like a guy who was clearly on drugs, who was like incoherent, cops being way, you know, typically being way too aggressive over a crime that doesn't need to be handled in this aggressive manner.
But it was really nothing new that hasn't happened all the time.
I mean, yeah, we have a major problem with this in our country.
Like we have a major problem with the way we police in our country and we have for decades.
That's why we have the largest prison population in the world.
This is why we've fought a war on drugs for the last 40 plus years.
We have got the most militarized police, got some horrible shit going on.
But this wasn't something new.
And there's, you know, you could say, oh, it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
But what seems more likely to me was that it was three months of taking everything away from people, locking them in their home, scaring the shit out of them, putting them in a position where they had no idea what the future was going to hold, what their economic productivity was going to be in the future.
On top of that, taking away every outlet, taking away sports, bars, friends' house, you know, parties, everything.
And this, all this tension fucking burst and it became the latest version of Black Lives Matter.
So it started with these protests in Minneapolis, and they very quickly turned into violent riots.
And then still, you know, one of the craziest things I've ever seen in my life or ever will out of the corporate press.
I shouldn't say ever will.
Who knows what they could do in 2021?
Was that all of a sudden, after three months of telling everybody you can't go anywhere, you're going to kill grandma, they cheered on the protests and completely downplayed the riots.
It was really, I've never had such a feeling of like something out of the Truman show or like an Orwell novel or something like that, where you're like, you can't, you can't actually tell me that they're going to pretend that all along we were so concerned about the spread of COVID, but now it's okay.
Oh, and by the way, those riots you see, those aren't really happening.
They're mostly peaceful.
You remember the images of like CNN reporters with burning buildings in the back and they're like, they've been mostly peaceful protests so far.
And it was really, I mean, it was hilarious, but it was terrifying and it was really, you know, dangerous.
And it ended up becoming exactly what we thought.
Lots of people were killed.
Lots of people were viciously assaulted.
Millions of dollars, if not more, in property damage.
And that's, yeah.
And, you know, it became an issue that it was unbelievable to live through that you were somehow, it was a controversial issue to call that out.
I remember people really being outraged at us for being appalled by violent mob riots.
And that was that was really eye-opening.
I mean, that just shows you that not only does the propaganda work, but people like not only did people not see through it, but even calling that out, we were the ones who were being the assholes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was really something.
You know, I got to say, it's, it's one of my major takeaways from the, from the, of the year was the response of libertarians to, you know, 2020 events.
And to watch, and you still see it to this day, the Libertarian Party, the National Party has just been disgraceful on their messaging, excuse me, on their messaging about the lockdowns.
It's just been completely absent.
They shame me for being white and I like feeling shame.
So in that way, they did a service.
That seems to be a lot of what the message is about.
But look, I mean, like I said, the government instituted totalitarianism this year.
And if you are a libertarian and when the government instituted totalitarianism, you weren't against that.
That's something you really got to reflect on.
I mean, that was like the moment.
If ever there was a need for you, if ever there was a need for somebody who believes in freedom, this was it.
2020 was it.
And don't worry, you know, dust yourself off and get back up because 2021 is going to be, there's going to be a need for that as well.
But these were tests.
These were major tests.
And I thought the Black Lives Matter riots were a test as well, that you have to be able to stand up for this stuff.
So one of the things that I've that I think gets, you know, gets me some criticism at times from the kind of social justice libertarian types is that I feel that libertarians have to have an order of priorities in terms of what we are outraged by.
I've said this for years.
Outrage is a finite resource and you only have so much.
There's only so many hours in a day.
You only have so much energy inside of you and you can only be outraged about so many things.
And libertarians, it seems just self-evident that the non-aggression principle would tell us that most of our outrage should be for violations of the non-aggression principle.
Like that's where the majority of our outrage should go to acts of aggression.
And I've seen this for years building up.
And I remember talking about this, man.
I remember talking about this when this show was at stand-up labs when I was first started doing part of the problem.
And this was during Obama, the beginning of Obama's second term.
And I was saying that the thing that was crazy is that people, the amount of outrage you could generate in our country over, you know, microaggressions or over, you know, allegations of racism or some of this stuff was, I mean, 100,000 times more than the outrage over Obama just, you know, starting a war in Libya and destroying a country there.
And this drove me crazy.
And it's not even saying like there shouldn't be outrage about other things too, but clearly there should be more outrage about slaughtering innocent people than there is about some of these other much more trivial things.
And this was always a major theme of mine, that it was just crazy where society placed their moral priorities.
And that we're having these debates about, you know, transgender bathrooms and things like this while we're still in the longest wars in American history.
And we have this crushing debt and this prison population and all these like really major issues.
It just drove me nuts.
And it always has.
And it seems like this was in many ways to me the worst part of the whole social justice warrior movement that you put all of this emphasis on just profoundly unimportant issues that don't matter.
And to me, it's like people have been really propagandized against racism in this country.
And in some ways, that's good.
I mean, like racism was like a nasty thing for a long time.
It was a major problem.
And it's kind of good that people, you know, I tend to think that kids growing up today are less likely to be like shitty to like a minority kid than they would have been even when I was a kid.
I just think it's less socially accepted.
You know, I'm sure kids are still awful and they'll still make fun of someone for like the mole on their face, but they're probably less likely to make fun of someone for their race or something like that.
So it's not that there's no positives in it.
But if you think about it, like, you know, our entire lives, every movie, every television show, every, you know, everything, the racist white guy is always the bad guy, always, you know, and people are brought up to, you know, believe, I don't want to be that.
I want to be the opposite of that.
I want to always prove that I'm not the racist white guy, which, you know, is good, at least to some degree.
But anything, you know, too much of a good thing is a problem.
And in this case, it has gone to this level where when the Black Lives Matter thing was happening, it was just obvious that some libertarians just could not criticize this group because then I'm criticizing Black Lives Mattering.
And I can't be the one who's pointing out that like, you know, this group is doing some really horrible things.
And when I say this, I just mean the movement in general.
I don't mean the organization.
I mean the people out on the street killing people, assaulting people, breaking store windows.
But again, my point was that the problem is that if you're a libertarian, you have to, by definition, you have to be more outraged about acts of aggression than you are about feelings that rub you the wrong way.
And you can do both.
You know, you can not like racists, but you can also call out fucking criminals and violent criminal behavior.
And if you're more concerned, and this is the really devastating part, and this is what I think a lot of libertarians failed on the lockdown question and they failed on the Black Lives Matter riots,
is that you get to a point where you're more concerned about social ostracizing, you know, like you're more concerned about being ostracized socially than you are about standing up for what's right and standing up for what you believe in.
So what happened is when the lockdowns first came in, it was a dangerous position to be against them and to call the whole thing out as bullshit.
You were going to be shamed that you were going to be a COVID denialist.
You know, they even had a term for it like right away.
And if you were critical of the Black Lives Matter rioting, then you were going to be deemed a racist or somebody who doesn't care about police brutality or something like that.
And it was really something.
It was very eye-opening for me because I kind of felt like, well, I'm pretty inoculated against the accusation of not caring about police brutality because I've been on record talking about this shit since way before it was the trendiest thing on the left to talk about.
You know, like I've literally been, you can go back and find fucking shit that I've been saying on this for, you know, probably around a decade at this point.
So I kind of felt like, well, you're not going to be able to accuse me of that.
So I have a solid leg to stand on when I say, yeah, these riots are fucking unacceptable.
Nope, they'll just accuse you of all the same shit.
It really doesn't matter.
So anyway, it was disappointing to see some of the libertarians fail on this issue, but it was really awesome to see the ones who were fucking great on it.
And those people fucking deserve credit.
Election Dealt Problems00:04:57
I mean, Tom Woods, who's just always been the fucking man, he just fucking crushed it this year, just on fire.
He just went right at all of the fucking propaganda and destroyed it all, particularly all his work on tearing down the lockdowns.
If you haven't watched Tom Woods, he's got about three or four great speeches.
I think one of them was taken down from YouTube, but you can find it.
Or maybe it was Facebook.
I don't know, one of them.
I can't find one inaccuracy in his goddamn speech, but they'll still take it down.
That was another major story of the year was A real rise in social media censorship.
Um, all of a sudden, while all of these things are happening, right?
While the government is instituting totalitarianism, while there are these riots in the streets that are being in many ways sponsored, um, uh, downplayed um by the establishment, um, all of a sudden, your Facebook groups are getting deleted, your comments are getting taken down, you can't even say any of this shit, you can't even share the information that proves that all this shit is happening.
Um, and that was a big thing that, of course, culminated in uh in the you know the Hunter Biden shit and toward the end of the election.
Um, let's see, what else?
Uh, what else are big you gotta talk about the election?
Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah, I guess that's what we could uh we could round this out with.
So, in the face of all of this, there's this huge presidential election where this guy who, uh, you know, this this maniac, Donald Trump, who uh, you know, in many ways, I think was just uh an awful president, um, but certainly did shake up the system in a in an interesting way that no one else, that no other president that uh has in modern American history.
Um, this guy who the establishment hated so much, um, they got him, you know, and they got him out.
And it was uh, it took a lot uh to do.
You know, if you if you look back, it's seems a pretty making an epidemic, they had to shut down the whole country and pretend like we were going to die.
Yeah, I mean, it's well, look, uh, I would say that I think it's pretty conclusive that had 2020 not been 2020, Donald Trump would have won a second term.
Biden would have had to campaign outside of a basement, yeah.
I mean, just that alone probably hands it to Donald Trump.
But if the economy was still going the way it was in 2019, I mean, yes, it was a house of cards and it was a big bubble, but if the economy was still in the place it was in 2019, um, I think Donald Trump's better than ever.
Look at where Wall Street is, and people are getting checks directly to other doors.
Well, that's never been this good.
What are you talking about, Dave?
Okay, well, fair enough, but you know, if uh, people weren't, um, you know, all so many of them, you know, having their uh livelihoods destroyed, I think Donald Trump breezes into a second term.
Um, I just don't even think it's close.
Um, and uh, you know, I mean, I guess you can that that's something that we won't know for sure, or you know, but I think it's pretty safe to assume.
Um, but it took it took unprecedented uh, you know, government restrictions, uh, the destruction of the economy, the real economy, not the one you're alluding to.
Uh, it took kind of, you know, these uh mass movements in the streets, and it took overhauling the uh the way that we've done voting in this country to get Donald Trump out.
So, if I look back at the year and I'm thinking about the big takeaway from it, I go, you know what?
They got Donald Trump, they finally got him, but man, did it take a lot?
Man, did it take a lot to get this guy out of there?
And as I've said, uh, you know, many times since the election, I don't think you know, they may have gotten Donald Trump out of there, but I don't think they've uh they've dealt with the problem.
I don't think they've dealt with uh the problem from their point of view, of course.
He's not gone yet, they might still prove that Dominion voting machines were uh Powell's still out there and Trump's still saying we've got evidence.
Well, yeah, you know, uh, um, just like the wall is being shipped, it's built, it's just being shipped.
Yes, yes, exactly.
Yeah, I think even Donald Trump is starting to uh recognize that it's like, yeah, you know what?
I think Joe Biden might be uh, might be the next president.
Um, so yeah, it's uh, it's it's been quite a year.
Obviously, this uh episode doesn't do it justice, just kind of talking about some of the big, uh, the big takeaways.
Um, 20, here's, here's what I'll say, because I don't want to just be like in a you know, depressed, like, oh my God, everything was horrible this year.
There is, there are some silver linings to this, like there always are with great adversity.
Stand Against Adversity00:06:39
Uh, uh, you, you, great adversity creates heroes.
And there have been some truly heroic people who stepped up in the year 2020.
My gosh, we zoomed from home, dude.
We didn't stop working.
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Our heroes.
What are you out there worshiping fucking nurses?
Yeah, okay.
Podcasters.
We're the ones who really care.
But you have found, you know, you see what people, you know, like hard, what was it?
Hard times make strong men, you know, and women too, for that matter, but mostly men.
But you've seen the people who are willing to defy government edicts and keep their businesses open.
You've seen the sheriffs who are unwilling to enforce at least some unconstitutional laws.
You've seen the people who are willing to step up and tell the truth.
And those people, you know, support those people when you see them.
Do whatever you can to help those people because this isn't over.
And we need this in 2021.
We need whatever remnant is left, you know, in the American people, whatever remaining belief in freedom that there is, we need those people to fight in 2021 to really demand our lives, our lives back, our rights, at least some degree of rights back.
And I think that we, you know, it does, it inspires me when I see those people who really have, you know, stood up in the face of adversity and stood up for what's right.
So, and there's a lot of those people out there, you know, like even I'm probably guilty sometimes too, but I blast, you know, like the leadership of the Libertarian Party or, you know, the seven deranged losers who are always like coming at me.
But the truth is, the reason why I'm fucking doubling down on my efforts, you know, to, you know, take over the Libertarian Party is because there's so many great people in that fucking party.
There's like really great Rothbardians, really hardcore liberty advocates who really believe in freedom and are willing to fight for it, or are willing to do really, you know, fucking like a lot of grunt work in order to try to advance the ball a little bit or we'll go get signatures signed in the rain.
You know, we'll go like do this stuff that's really like fucking not fun because they believe in something so much.
And there are people out there like that.
And you got to try to connect with those people and you got to try to, you know, re reconnect with community.
Find your people.
Find the people who believe in liberty.
Find those people and connect with them and help prop them up and they'll help prop you up.
You know, 2021, I'll tell you, man, for everyone who listens to this show, this is going to be a really fucking exciting year.
I got some fun shit in the works.
Join the LP if you haven't already.
Join it.
Become a dues paying member.
It's not that much.
It's like 25 bucks for the year.
Fucking join the LP.
Get ready because this shit is going to get, this shit is going to get really fun.
And we're going to be a part of something like this.
How do people join?
Well, you just go to the website, fill out a form.
Yeah, simple.
It's real easy.
Join the LP.
Join your station.
Yeah, unfortunately.
You do.
You have to show them a picture of their wiener, but they promised to only show five friends.
So that's, and yes, they've broken the rule several times before, but I trust that this won't happen too much more.
So whatever, just show the LP a picture of your wiener, guys.
That's what I need from you.
But I need more than that.
I mean, I need people to get involved, become delegates, all of this shit.
We're going to have Michael Heiss on soon and we're going to break down, you know, a little bit more of what you guys can do to help.
But I'll tell you, I'm becoming a recurring donor to the Mises Caucus PAC today.
Let me see.
I think I have the link here.
But yeah, if you want that, go to takehumanaction.com.
That'll give you more information about how you can help out.
Because I'm telling you guys, I think there's going to be something.
I think the people who listen to this show are going to get really excited over the shit that we're going to unveil this year in 2021.
On top of that, I hope everybody, you know, personally did what they could to have a good year.
You know, I was, you know, I got to spend a lot of time with my family this year and that, you know, really was wonderful.
And I hope people out there, you know, try to find a way, even if the government won't let you, to keep the good people who you love in your life, stay close to them, stay sane.
That's the best secret to doing that that I've been able to find.
So anyway, I love you guys.
And thanks everybody for listening.
Thank you, Rob, for being such an excellent co-host throughout this whole year.
You helped keep me sane as well.
And you helped me and our listeners understand what the fuck is going on in the world.
Thank you to Brian, who's been an excellent producer.
Had to, you know, it was not easy this year to have to figure out how to completely, you know, change everything that we're doing and produce, you know, is used to, you know, having a fucking studio, have that taken away from you.
And now I have to figure out how to do everything remotely.
And I got to give a fucking real shout out to Ralph and Lewis and everybody at Gas Digital Network.
I mean, this was like an incredible blow that they were dealt with a lot of other, you know, businesses in similar situations, but they never missed a beat.
And we figured out every one of our fucking shows was out throughout, you know, every one of them.
And they just did an incredible job.
And they still do.
Those guys worked their asses off.
And yeah, as Brian says, not one person was let go.
Nobody, nobody was fired.
No shows were fucking let go.
Everybody fucking put their work out there.
And I'm proud.
I'm really proud to be a part of it.
So, all right.
With that, that is our 2020 year in review.
Hard to go too in depth on a year this complicated.
We're just kind of touching the surface, but I think it's some important stuff.
And 2021, this is the year.
This is the year.
Year of the Smith.
Well, listen, it's the year of you guys, the listeners.
It's not about me.
It's about you.
You're a good politician already.
There you go.
What about me?
It's got an alleged.
This isn't about me.
It's about all of you.
Hope and change.
Yes, we can.
Some bullshit like that.
All right.
I love you guys.
Take it easy.
We'll see you soon.
Still, I got Malice coming on Wednesday, and then we're going to do part three of The Legacy of Donald Trump with Scott Horton.