Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein dissect the second impeachment of Donald Trump, arguing it is a political maneuver to silence dissent rather than address high crimes. They contend that charging incitement for speech claiming election theft violates the First Amendment and sets a dangerous precedent for suppressing criticism of wars or lockdowns. The hosts highlight Governor Andrew Cuomo's admission that lockdowns are unsustainable without vaccines and cite a January 5th Stanford study proving mandatory orders offered no significant benefit over voluntary measures. Ultimately, they assert that selectively condemning citizen violence while ignoring state-sanctioned force in Yemen or police brutality reveals a double standard designed to enforce an official narrative. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Dangerous Arguments for Impeachment00:12:43
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is the king of the cocks, Robbie the Fire, Bernstein.
What's up, my brother?
I'm excited.
It's Friday.
We skipped that Wednesday bullshit.
We're getting right to the staff.
My apologies for missing the Wednesday episode.
Tim Paul was awesome, dude.
Oh, thank you very much.
Yeah, I got a great response from doing Tim Poole's show.
And yeah, thank you to all those guys.
They were great.
It was really fun to be on with Luke also.
I've been a fan of that guy for years.
So it was cool to meet him.
The whole staff and team that Tim Poole have are awesome, top-notch.
And I had a great time.
It was a lot of fun.
Got a great response.
That guy has blown up.
Holy moly.
Outside of doing Rogan, I've never done a show where I've gotten so much response from.
So that was awesome and a great experience.
Also, I did want to let you guys know that tonight, depending on when you listen to this, if you're listening to this on Saturday, then it was last night.
But either way, I am doing another Lions of Liberty debate.
This one is going to be with Eric Brakely on whether libertarians should be entering the GOP or the LP.
So this one is going to be more of a substantive debate than the last couple, which basically were, is Dave a horrible racist Nazi?
So this should be fun.
So I'm looking forward to that.
So we're recording that tonight, and it'll be the same.
It'll be live for the Lions of Liberty patrons, and then it'll be out for free sometime shortly after that.
So go check that out when it drops.
All right.
So few things going on that maybe we should get into.
Some tiny little details.
The president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, has been impeached.
Again, he is now the most impeached president ever.
Listen, everything Donald Trump does, he's got to do it the biggest.
It's the most tremendous impeachment you'll ever see.
No one else.
I think he is now half of the impeached presidents ever.
Ooh, that's good stat.
Yeah.
No, Donald, we knew he was going to go big one way or the other.
So Donald Trump has been impeached again.
It's like Looney Tunes.
Hopefully he comes back and Nancy Pelosi does it again.
Her corpse barely even lifted the mallet at that point.
It'll be like Ruth Bader Ginsburg style.
But personally, I think he can go for three.
I think Donald Trump, he's got five days left.
I think he can squeeze out a third impeachment if he really plays his cards right.
Who knows?
It might be tough, but I believe in the guy.
This one is even more ridiculous than the first impeachment.
And particularly because it is, as we're recording this, it is January 15th.
This is, they can't even, the quickest they can rush this, I believe they can get it to the Senate by the 19th, in which case they'd have to do it in a day in order to actually impeach the sitting president and remove him, in which case they'd be removing him, no exaggeration, mere hours before Joe Biden would be sworn in anyway.
And then it would be funny.
I guess that would make Mike Pence the president for like 45 minutes, and then Joe Biden would end up being, what would it be, 47th president?
Because anyway, he'd fucking, he'd make Gerald Ford look like an emperor.
He'd have such a short presidency.
What would you do if you're a president for 45 minutes?
I don't know, man.
That's a good question.
I'd definitely interrupt live broadcast TV.
You guys got to get that off once.
You know, I'd take off my pants in the Oval Office, probably go crazy with, you know, executive orders.
Yeah.
Okay.
Brian said, pardon Assange.
Well, yes, there's the serious answer.
Yeah.
Pardon all types of great people.
But let's get real.
That's not what Pence is going to do.
So, you know, how come Trump's not doing crazy shit?
We're coming down to the wire here and he's just go nuts.
Come on, man.
It's your final moment.
Yeah, no, it seems like Trump has just completely bended the knee and is not, we're not going to get anything beneficial out of the lame duck Trump presidency.
And, you know, really, I guess not that surprising because we didn't really get anything out of the whole Trump presidency.
So I've been very hard on Donald Trump.
I would say all four years that he's been in there.
But particularly lately, I think I've been very critical of him.
I went pretty hard at him on Tim Poole's show and I stand by everything I said.
I think the guy has completely failed to get us anything meaningful out of this presidency.
But man, it's like the same story as the whole Trump presidency is even when you want to just pick on him or call him out and take him to task, his critics are just so deranged that you end up being forced to spend time on that.
Like no matter what you wanted to criticize Trump for in his first couple years, you have to sit there and be like, okay, yeah, but he's not guilty of treason.
And in fact, he's being framed for treason.
So that's kind of a big story in itself that demands attention.
And then the corporate press is like spazzing out and the whole left half of America is freaking out like this guy's Adolf Hitler.
And so it's almost impossible to not, you know, focus on that.
And likewise, as he goes out, I just, I feel like we're in kind of a similar situation here.
I mean, look, there are, as I said during the first impeachment, there's lots of legitimate reasons why you could impeach Donald Trump.
Almost all of them, in fact, I think all of them would have been legitimate reasons to impeach Obama, too.
I mean, he is in the midst of conducting illegal wars that were not voted on by the Congress in the case of Yemen that were actually, the Congress actually rejected the war and he just vetoed it and continued supporting the Saudi war against Yemen.
And I think it's completely legitimate to impeach him for that.
And in fact, as I've said more times than I can count, I think he should be tried for war crimes.
I think he should be tried and convicted and spend the rest of his life in a cell next to George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
I think they could all share one cell.
We could film it.
It would be like an odd couple thing.
It would be great.
However, the idea that Donald Trump incited an insurrection, which is what he's being charged with, that is the article of impeachment, is so laughably absurd.
And it's not even just the laughably absurd part.
It's actually a really terrifying precedent.
And the idea that so many people are going around just claiming that Donald Trump incited violence is, I mean, I think incredibly dangerous.
The incitement of violence actually is a criminal charge and has a standard.
And there's no way you could argue that Donald Trump is guilty of that crime.
Now, you could certainly say that Donald Trump was irresponsible, that what he did was dangerous, that what he did, you know, had the risk of leading to something like this.
All of those things you can absolutely say.
And you can also just say that he's a bitch, that he went out like a bitch, you know, and that, you know, Richard Nixon was absolutely cheated out of the 1960 election.
JFK had like fucking mafia guys and people like, you know, some really shady shit went down.
And a lot of Nixon's people wanted him to contest the election results.
And he refused because he said, you know, that's just, it'll tear this country apart.
And I don't want to do that.
I don't want to do that to this great country.
So I'll concede.
And, you know, Jack Kennedy is the president now.
That's it.
So you could certainly say, you can make an argument.
I'm not even sure I am making the argument, but you could make an argument that Nixon, you know, had more integrity than Donald Trump has.
Okay.
And you could make the argument that it was dangerous for him to say this because his people might take matters into their own hands.
All right.
However, all of that aside, unless you want to give up on the entire concept of free speech, Donald Trump has every First Amendment right to say, I believe this election was stolen from me.
And he has every First Amendment right to ask his people to protest it.
I'm sorry, that is very clearly protected speech.
And we should all be for that.
Whether or not you like that he said that, he has the absolute right to say that.
Now, incitement to violence would be if Donald Trump told his supporters, go storm the Capitol building, assault police officers, threaten people, you know what I mean?
Like beat people up.
If he told them to do that, then that's incitement to violence.
But he didn't.
And he was still speaking while they went and did that.
And he did say at one point that they should be peaceful.
And maybe, you know, perhaps he could have done a better job.
But the argument that he incited an insurrection, I mean, this wasn't an insurrection.
It was a, you know, a stupid kind of mob.
But anyway, it's just, it's really completely ridiculous and incredibly dangerous, in my opinion.
I don't know.
What are your thoughts on the impeachment?
What does it even do?
I mean, what's the whole point of the charade of it even?
Well, if he is, if the Senate votes to remove him and they can even do this after he's already gone, they can.
They put him back in the White House and then take him out again.
Well, I don't know if they can do that, but they can bar him from running for office in the future.
Oh, so then that's worthwhile.
That makes sense.
I get why they would do it then.
So that's what this is all about.
I also get why the Republicans would want to get in on that because they don't want to deal with him the next time.
So I didn't know that.
And that's surprising to me that that hasn't been widely reported.
But then I fully understand why they would do that and why the Republicans would get on board.
Yeah.
So that seems, that seems to be what this is all about.
But I guess speaking to that, does there have to be any sort of, I guess, legal trial after that?
Or is it just if both the House and Senate agree to it, then that's the end of it?
No, that's the end of it.
Yeah, so that's scary because in this case, like you're saying, the legal precedent for incited a mob, this clearly isn't that.
So if you're enough of an outsider, the system has a protocol here by which they can just get rid of you.
And in this case, it's like, I guess the Republicans actually couldn't weed him out in the primaries.
They couldn't do that because the optics.
So, this is almost the easier way for them to now weed him out of the party.
Yeah, well, that's exactly right.
And in many ways, it silences the thing that they seem to fear the most right now, or what seems to almost be like the last weapon that the Trump supporters had, which is their vote for Donald Trump.
You know, like they could vote for this guy.
And now they're basically going to say, even though 74 million people voted for him just a couple months ago, you can't ever vote for this guy again.
Is that an absolute that if he's impeached, he can't run again?
Like, no, they have to, after the Senate votes to remove, then they would have to vote to bar him from running in the future.
But they can do that after the fact.
So there's several things that would still have to happen that are pretty up in the air as to whether they'll happen or not before that.
Blue Light Glasses Review00:02:44
But look, I mean, what you see here is the establishment class doing what they do best, which is pouncing on a crisis.
And while everyone's still hysterical after the Capitol riot a couple weeks ago or last week, now they'll pounce on this and be like, oh my God, use the most, you know, they'll catastrophize the situation as much as possible.
This was an insurrection and he incited the insurrection and they'll try to get, you know, what they would love to do, which is guarantee that Trump can't run again in 2024.
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Now, I just want to be clear.
Reasonable Doubt in Legal Orders00:10:36
Obviously, there is a different legal standard for what's impeachable versus what's criminal.
But really, what it all comes down to, I mean, it's almost like a gray area.
It's kind of debatable because the Constitution does say high crimes and misdemeanors.
So it does kind of imply that you'd have to commit a crime or a misdemeanor, you know, to be impeached.
And of course, there's another example here, just like with Trump the last time, where there's no crime.
I mean, say what you will about the Clinton impeachment.
He did commit a crime, you know, like perjury is a crime.
And that is, you know, what they went at.
No, that part is not a crime, not yet.
But, you know, so it's just, look, the truth is, as people have said before, I don't know who's the first guy who coined this phrase, but he said, you know, an impeachable offense is whatever Congress decides, which is true to some degree, or not to some degree.
It's 100% true.
But, you know, in the same sense, a convictible offense is whatever the jury decides or whatever a judge decides in some cases.
So we have these ideas.
This is something that human beings have trouble grappling with sometimes, is that we have this idea that we're governed by laws, but we're governed by people.
And this is true in any society.
Like this is true in a libertarian legal order.
This is true in a statist legal order.
This is just the way things work.
So you could say that the standard for convicting someone in a court of law is that you have to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, right?
Like that's the idea that we have in our head.
But the reality is that you have to convince a jury.
Like that's that's the reality of the situation is that a jury has to vote to convict you.
And if they do, then you're convicted.
And you could sit there all day long and say, no, but they didn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
It's like, well, it doesn't matter.
The jury said they did.
So that's the standard.
And if you actually look at our criminal justice system, most of the time in criminal courts, what it comes down to is whether the jury believed it was more likely that you did it than you didn't.
And they'll convict based off that.
They don't, I mean, what does it even mean to prove beyond a reasonable doubt?
These are just ideas.
They're abstract concepts.
But in reality, what it comes down to is what the jury says, or in some cases, what the judge says.
And it's the same thing in an impeachment.
It comes down to how the House and the Senate vote.
Doesn't really like there's no real, no, no concept actually governs people.
You know what I mean?
It's just human beings at the end of the day.
So there is something really creepy.
And I was getting like mad when I was on Kennedy the other night at people just throwing this around like Donald Trump incited violence.
And outside of the even context of impeachment, just talking about the like as if it's just a fact that he's guilty of this crime.
And you see a real problem with this.
The problem with saying this is not just about Donald Trump.
It's a very attack on the idea of free speech.
I mean, and of course, this only gets applied when convenient, right?
Like you, there was tremendous violence over the summer.
There was tremendous violence when Donald Trump was inaugurated.
But could you then turn around and say that the Democrats criticizing Donald Trump are guilty of inciting that violence?
I mean, it would be just as strong a case as saying Donald Trump.
You could say that anybody talking about police brutality was inciting the Black Lives Matter violence.
Do you want to go down that road?
Do you want to go down the path now of saying that you can't make your argument?
Because if we're going to accept this, then that's the principle at work.
Like if I, if I were to say the government is a gang of criminals or the government is conducting wars of genocide and then somebody decided to do something violent about it, like am I inciting their violence?
I didn't tell them to do anything violent about it.
I'm just telling the truth as I see it.
So are we going to say now you can't tell the truth as you see it?
If that could lead to somebody taking matters into their own hands, this is a very dangerous, slippery slope where the obvious conclusion of it is to just abolish free speech.
And for this to be going on while there's these social media crackdowns and while there's all this hysteria in this crazy year where the government has gone completely totalitarian, I just see this as like a very dangerous precedent.
So it's much different than Donald Trump being impeached for a legitimate reason.
I mean, that would be great, I think.
If Donald Trump was impeached for war crimes, then yeah, that'd be great because then maybe the next president would be a little bit more hesitant to engage in war crimes.
But this is basically just telling you that if you're a president who the establishment despises, then they'll go after you for things that they'll just let other presidents get away with.
Because of course, you know, you could easily make a case that Democrats have incited violence.
And in fact, in some cases, much more directly.
I mean, Maxine Waters, you've seen that clip, right?
She told people, if you see a Republican, get in their face, form a mob, get in their face, like make sure they know they're not welcome.
I mean, that is much closer to inciting violence.
And I still would be against her being charged with inciting violence because this is a very dangerous, slippery slope.
And it should be clearly established that the only case that should ever be brought against someone for inciting violence is if they are, in fact, directly inciting violence.
So if you tell someone to go be violent, then okay, that's fair enough.
But that's not what we have in any of these situations.
And so, and of course, all of the Democrats who are as guilty as Trump of inciting violence are completely let off the hook.
So I just think this is chilling.
And it may not be a criminal procedure.
It might just be an impeachment.
But still, I think this is a very dangerous, slippery slope to walk down.
So I don't know.
What do you think, Rob?
I think now that you've told me that this is going to keep him out of office, I think they're going to go for it.
I think we're going to see this play through.
But it's interesting because it gives Donald Trump underdog status for the rest of his life, that he gets to be on the outside saying, they robbed me of the election.
And look, they don't even want me back in office.
You guys, I'd like to do this for you.
I'd love to go back in there, finish everything I started, but they robbed you of me.
And that is potentially some interesting optics.
But who knows how much they're cracking down too?
They already took, see, they took away PJA Golf Door from him.
Banks that were lending to him said they're not going to lend him anymore.
They took away his New York City contracts.
They're going to do everything they can to try and make Trump go.
And that's what we're seeing publicly.
So who knows what kind of threats he's getting behind closed doors?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's an interesting thought.
It seems pretty obvious to me that they're not interested in incorporating the Trump movement into the establishment.
And I've thought, I've been surprised by this for a while, for years, because in many ways, it seems like that would be a more effective way to rule.
And because it's not like Trump has, you know, whatever.
It's not like Trump has 3 million supporters.
And you're like, eh, okay, that's 3 million people.
It's a lot of people, but whatever.
We're a big country, we can kind of like squash them.
Trump's got 74 million people who voted for him.
The vast majority incredibly loyal to him.
And so you would have thought, and this is for years now, right?
Like this isn't a new thing.
You would have thought that perhaps the tactic of the establishment would have been to try to incorporate them into the system, maybe just a little bit.
Try to like, if their anger level is at a 10, try to take it down to a seven.
You know, you could see Democrats maybe running on like, look, okay, we do need border security.
Border security is very important to us.
I don't think we need to build a wall, but we got to do something to make sure that we have an orderly process at the border.
You know what I mean?
Like try to kind of get there, the Trump supporter.
Like, we're not going to play your enemy.
We're not going to play that character.
We'll be like, oh, no, we're totally listening to you.
We're, yes, you're the voice of the people, and that's what we represent and all this.
But instead, you saw Democrats running on free health care for illegals.
Like it's, they went in a completely different direction where they were like, no, fuck you.
We have no interest in incorporating you into this.
Keep your anger at a 10.
In fact, drive it up to an 11, you racist Nazi.
Like that's just been, you know, that's been the tactic from the beginning of the Trump presidency.
And now what you see with the social media stuff, with the legal response to the Capitol riot or whatever you want to call it, and to this impeachment and all of this, what you see is that they're going, no, no, no, no, we're just going to suppress you.
We're not interested in incorporating you into this movement at all.
We're going to vilify and suppress this movement of 74 million Americans.
That's it.
You guys represent domestic terrorists.
We're going to do our best to legally bar you from being able to vote for Donald Trump again.
We're going to kick you off of social media so you can't communicate with each other.
And I got to say, it's a very, very dangerous game that they're playing.
It's not, you know, just like in human psychology on an individual level, if you repress something, it tends to re-emerge in a darker form.
And you're not, again, this could be effectively done if you were talking about a movement of a couple million people, but you're not.
High Interest Credit Card Debt00:02:36
You're talking about a movement of tens of millions of people.
And that, you know, more than, you know, three quarters of 100 million people, basically.
And this is to try to suppress a movement this big, I think the backlash to it is going to be bad.
So buckle up.
At least it's an interesting final chapter.
You know, Trump knows how to keep it interesting.
Keep those ratings up.
He's, there has not been one boring chapter of Trump's presidency.
You got to give him that.
That's for sure.
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Republicans Turning on Their Base00:03:28
It's also just the ramifications on the Republican Party itself are fascinating because you have this, you know, like it's not as if, again, it's not as if Donald Trump, you know, it'd be one thing if like Donald Trump had gotten, you know, whatever he got, I think he got 63 million votes in 2016.
And if he had gone down to only getting like 50 million votes this time, and it's like, yeah, his base has shrunk, his support is low, all, you know, all this stuff.
It's like, but that's not what happened.
He increased his vote total.
He was polling.
His presidential approval rating was right around the same level as Barack Obama's going into his second election.
It was right around the same approval rating as Obama when Obama was leaving office.
So they both left office in like, I think, the mid-40s, something like that, depending on what poll you look at, you know.
And so just imagine, you know, Barack Obama being treated this way.
I mean, it's, he, he, it's a, you still have this dynamic where the Republican Party expanded on the national level.
And of course, this, you know, there's the vote by mail stuff too.
So a lot more people were voting.
And, you know, it's a little bit complicated, but the fact is that he was still the guy who was enormously popular amongst Republican voters.
And so now you have the Republican establishment trying to destroy him through a second impeachment, actually jumping on board.
I think there were like 20 Republicans who jumped on board in the House to impeach him, unlike the first time.
And so very clearly, they are going against the will of their own voters.
And so what's the result of that going to be?
I mean, I don't see how it possibly, how the result of that could possibly be, you know, getting Republican voters to support these Republicans who threw Trump under the bus.
I think they're almost like willing to commit political suicide to further the goals of the establishment.
But this is going to tear the Republican Party apart in a way that I've never seen happen to a major political party.
I mean, you know, Bernie Sanders was suppressed, but he wasn't not anywhere near this level.
You know, it's not as if they really were like calling Bernie Sanders supporters domestic terrorists and impeaching Bernie Sanders and barring him from running for office.
That would have been a problem.
But Bernie Sanders also represents a much smaller percentage of the Democrats than Trump did.
I mean, Bernie Sanders lost his two primaries.
Donald Trump just dominated his primary.
Like he really captured the voters of that party that feel however you feel about him.
This is just undeniably, you know, factually true.
And so to turn, it's not like they're turning their back on 20% of their base.
They're turning their back more on like 90% of their base.
So what's the path going forward?
I don't know, but it doesn't seem viable.
And it seems like, you know, now the Republican Party, even if they ban Trump, the Republican Party is ripe for the next Trump.
Inflation and Money Supply Growth00:04:22
So we'll see what happens.
I'm surprised they got time for all this impeachment stuff.
They got to figure out where they're going to find $1.9 trillion.
You would think they're working around the clock to try and come up with funds like this.
Yes, isn't this?
This is Biden's proposal you're talking about, right?
And it's not like we just did three rounds of stimulus.
So Biden's coming in hot, going the last round that we just worked on for months and passed about a week ago, it's not enough.
And he's bailing out the states.
I saw New York, I think, is getting 2 billion.
Yeah, yeah, we'll see.
Well, I'm sure he's going to be able to get that through now because he's going to have control of the Congress.
And now this also gives him a little bit more of a justification for a mandate, you know, because he comes in and goes, look, this last guy was guilty of insurrecting or inciting an insurrection.
So come on.
I mean, give me this stimulus.
This is, of course, the first thing Barack Obama did too.
It's have a big stimulus pack.
This is like the, this is what Democrats know what to do when they first get in.
You go, well, let's spend a whole bunch of money.
That should probably solve this problem.
At what point do we see real deal inflation?
That's what I want to know.
Just with all this, hey, we're sending, it's helicopter money, sending people checks.
Like, so at what point do we see like real rise in prices?
Yeah, well, that's a very important question because to your point, this isn't like extending money to the big banks to keep in reserves where they would have this argument that like, oh, well, the money's not really being injected into the economy.
This is directly injecting money into people's hands who are going to immediately spend it.
So you would expect to see inflation fairly soon.
But I also think that this is like, you have to, like, you have to look at inflation through the like Misesian lens to really understand it.
So basically what Mises or Austrian economists would say is that that's the inflation.
The inflation is already here.
The inflation is the creation of new money and putting it into the system.
The rise in prices may or may not be an effect of the inflation.
This is stuff that we've talked about a lot before, you know, for years on the podcast.
But like just to say, right, like if you print so the difference between the way an Austrian economist would look at this and like a more mainstream economist would look at this, right?
Let's just say hypothetically, you double the money supply.
Okay.
So an Austrian economist would say, you just created tons of inflation.
Now, a mainstream economist would look at the CPI, the consumer price index.
And let's say hypothetically, you doubled the money supply and there was no change in the consumer price index.
Then they would say, well, there's been no inflation because we've seen no increase in the CPI, putting aside how flawed the CPI is for a second, but they would just say there's been no inflation, right?
But the problem with that is, right, from the Austrian perspective, you go, okay, well, what if prices were about to tank in half?
And then you doubled the money supply and they didn't tank.
They just stayed the same.
Now, your mainstream economist is saying, no inflation, nothing happened.
But the Austrian is saying, no, no, no, something major just happened here, right?
Like prices were about to come way down and you kept them where they were.
So measuring prices in itself is a much more faulty instrument than just looking at the new money creation.
Because if you look at, let's say, it's quite possible that housing prices were about to crash, which, okay, there's some bad to that, like the people who own homes lose a lot of value.
But the good to that is that maybe a lot of other people can afford homes that weren't able to afford them before.
So if you print a whole bunch of money and keep those prices from crashing, you've certainly done something.
So no matter what we see in prices over the next few years, they've certainly done something with all of this spending.
And that, you know, it's like the seen versus the unseen.
The unseen might be more disastrous than anything that we can actually measure through prices.
Okay, anyway, so I did, I wanted to play this video because this back to the point that I was making before, that I actually think this going around just kind of claiming, even if not in a court, in a criminal court of law, claiming that Trump incited violence, I think is a very dangerous road to go down.
Incitement to Violence Claims00:14:26
And in the midst of, you know, a year of the government locking people in their homes, in the midst of the purges on social media, and now this claim that Donald Trump, Thor, whether you like it or not, whether you think it was a bitch move or not, whether you think it was accurate or not, I think undeniably exercising his First Amendment rights.
He has absolutely every right under the First Amendment to say, I think this election was stolen from me.
He has every right to say, I want my people to protest about this.
Okay.
Now, whether you think the election wasn't stolen and whether those protests turn violent is really beside the point.
It's really separate from whether or not he has a First Amendment right to say those things.
But here is AOC just some, you know, just happens to be a powerful, you know, Congresswoman, socialist, very popular in the country, or maybe not popular, but very famous.
And this is what she was musing about on her live stream.
This is something we're going to have to live with.
Student loans, yes, absolutely.
That's going to be a huge priority.
Climate change, huge priority.
Let's see.
Any discussion in Congress about federal truth and reconciliation or media literacy initiatives to help with healing?
I definitely, so I can't see.
Pause for a second.
I don't think you got to replay.
I mean, that is a glorious turn of phrase for fucking censorship.
Oh, yeah.
You got to replay what that was.
Let's see.
Any discussion in Congress about federal truth and reconciliation or media literacy initiatives to help with healing?
I definitely.
Media literacy for help with healing.
Right.
That would mean that you have to take a government propaganda class about what words or ideas you're allowed to have in the name of healing.
That is, dude.
Yes, after the idea of truth and reconciliation and media literacy to help with healing.
Oh, yeah.
Well, really great idea.
Yeah, we should really think about that.
Well, here, listen to AOC's response.
So I can't say, I don't think that the response, this kind of like medium-term response has fully crystallized yet.
But what I can say is that there's absolutely a commission that's being discussed, but it seems to be more investigatory in style rather than truth and reconciliation.
And so I think that's an interesting concept for us to explore.
And, you know, I do think that several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy because that is a part of what happened here.
And we're going to have to figure out how we reign in our media environment so that you can't just spew disinformation and misinformation.
It's one thing to have differing opinions, but it's another thing entirely to just say things that are false.
And so that's something that we're looking into.
We need to start enforcing my own healing.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Okay.
So there it is.
I mean, we need to enforce the official narrative.
That's some scary shit.
Yeah.
That is about the creepiest thing you could hear a politician say that, yes, we actually need to, she blatantly says we need to look into reigning in our media.
And let's get clear, right?
She is, this is what's so crazy about it, right?
Who's she talking about?
Well, she's not talking about NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal.
She's not talking about any of them.
She's already got the entire, like they have the entire corporate press, right?
They're not talking about reigning any of them in, but they are, maybe the Wall Street Journal a little bit, but really, I don't think that's even who she's talking about.
They have this humongous chunk that is the corporate press, and they're upset about this little sliver over here that isn't completely in lockstep with the rest of the corporate press.
That's what she's talking about, reining in.
And this is what goes hand in hand with all of this big tech censorship.
That, oh, yeah, look, here's a real part of what's happened here.
People who don't agree with the accepted approved narrative of the corporate press, they're allowed to communicate too.
And we got to rein that in.
This is some real next level creepy shit.
And so don't, and don't think this is disconnected to talking about, you know, all of a sudden when you're claiming something that is free speech as incitement, okay, this is the slippery slope that you're going down.
This is the direction.
And it's not that far down the slope.
This is only like one or two.
All you have to do is foresee what's obviously the next step of all of this.
Is that, yeah, well, I mean, if saying you think the election was stolen is incitement to violence, then I don't think you should be allowed to say that you think the election was stolen.
You know, I mean, I don't know.
Maybe talking about Hunter Biden, that might incite violence.
I don't think you should be allowed to talk about that.
I don't think, you know, I mean, it's very easy to, if you're going to make that argument, and of course you could apply it the other way around, you could apply it to AOC.
You could say, hey, AOC, you say that the cops are out here killing black people just for being black.
Well, that's incitement to violence.
But guess what?
It's never going to be applied the other way around because she's got the power and they know this, right?
So this is a really fucking dangerous game.
And the fact that AOC could just say this, that a sitting congresswoman could just say this and, you know, that this isn't seen as some, you know, if Donald Trump had said something like this, I mean, Donald Trump, I remember at one point said something about expanding libel laws to go after media companies who were slandering people.
And they lost their freaking minds over it.
This is Donald Trump cracking down on the First Amendment.
Is this not to openly muse about reigning in the media?
You know, I mean, this is like some really creepy shit.
And it reminds me of when I debated David Cross at the Paley Center.
I mean, it's really easy to say, yeah, well, well, all we want to do is, you know, ban lies.
That's the problem, you know, you're entitled to your own opinion, but not entitled to your own facts or however, you know, AOC just put it.
So we just want to censor lies.
But then, of course, you know, the question that's sticking out from that statement is like, who determines what's a lie and what's the truth?
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
It's funny.
I made this point when I was on Kennedy the other day, but I was like, you know, what's weird that you never hear about right now?
Like, I'm not hearing about this from AOC or Nancy Pelosi or anything is that, you know, the president is in bed with a hostile foreign power.
He's an agent of Vladimir Putin.
Oh, oh, what happened to that?
Oh, yeah, that's right.
That was a big, fat, fucking lie.
That was a lie.
And, but we're not talking about banning that, right?
I mean, of course, we've been sold all these wars based off lies.
We're not talking about banning that.
No, no, no.
This is going to be applied when it suits the establishment.
So the only lie we're going to be talking about is Donald Trump claiming the election was stolen.
That's what needs to be banned.
That's who needs to be censored.
I mean, this is nothing more than a naked threat at using power to silence dissident voices.
And that's why you see what you're seeing on social media.
That's what this impeachment is all about.
It's all about silencing dissident voices.
And if you, you don't have to be a Trump supporter, but if you're a dissident voice, your ears should be perking up when you hear shit like this.
I mean, this is, you know, like if you, if you are not a fan of the establishment, then you should be terrified when the establishment is talking like this.
These terms, it's unity, healing, and, you know, we got to prevent violence.
But it's easy to say, hey, you're unifying when you're going to take more of our income to, you know, give away our resources, but be quiet.
It's about unity.
I'm healing you by taking more of your resources and handing it to other groups.
Thank you.
And of course, you know, the other thing that sticks out at me through all of this inciting violence talk as you watch, you know, like Liz Cheney, you know, accuse Donald Trump of inciting violence.
None of this ever applies to government violence.
And that's something libertarians might want to pay attention to, right?
Like nobody would ever be talking about, let's say, journalists who are pushing the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan or the war in Libya or the war in Syria or the war in Yemen.
Nobody, or in Somalia, you know, nobody's ever talking about those people inciting violence.
Nobody's ever saying that the lockdowns were inciting police violence, right?
Like all of that violence is completely acceptable as long as it's being done by men in blue costumes with bright, shiny badges.
Then all of a sudden, nobody even, you would never even think that that's inciting violence.
How much violence has been incited by all of this COVID hysteria?
Right.
But that just gets brushed under the rug.
That's not inciting violence.
The only violence we're concerned about is when there was violence against the state.
That's the only violence we're concerned about.
And, you know, look, for the record, I do not in any way advocate, support, or tolerate violence against the state.
And not because it's as morally reprehensible as violence against peaceful people.
It's not.
It's just really, really stupid strategy.
Now, anybody who's a critic of the state, particularly the United States of America's central federal government, dude, a violent direct confrontation with the federal government is about the stupidest thing you could do.
It's you are going to lose that game 100 out of 100 times.
They have you outgunned and outmanned.
You're not going to take them down violently.
They will go fucking Waco on your ass if you ever actually were a threat to take them down.
They'll burn children alive to protect their interests.
So this is just stupid.
And then, of course, they own the entire corporate press and more and more they own social media and they will very easily vilify you.
So it's a very, very stupid, dangerous game that, just like the Capitol riot, is going to lead to nothing but bloodshed and undermining your own cause.
That's all it's going to do.
So that is not the way.
All right.
But it is worth noting from a libertarian perspective that all of the violence that's done by the state, which if you wanted to compare it in magnitude, far outweighs the violence against the state.
All of that is just completely acceptable.
No one would ever, it's like, hey, you might have your opinion on the war and someone else might have their opinion on the war, but we'd never accuse either of you of inciting violence.
I mean, that's just advocating that we commit mass slaughter against poor people in third world countries, but it'll be done by the military.
So that's not inciting violence, you know, saying that cops should go shut down religious services or go shut down some mom-and-pop business.
That's not inciting violence.
That's just enforcing lockdowns, right?
However, some angry citizens storming the Capitol building, well, that's, you know, that's insurrection.
All right.
So that's where we are.
All right.
So before we wrap up today, I did want to mention that there's one little kind of thread of a story that might be a note of optimism in these crazy times we're living in.
It's infuriating, but it also might be a silver lining.
And that is the fact that there have been some Democrats and some pretty powerful Democrats, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, most notably, who came out and said basically that, yeah, you know, these lockdowns really can't go on much longer.
And Cuomo, in fact, directly said that we cannot lock down until the vaccine is distributed because it's just going to, it's going to cost too much.
Which is like, yeah, welcome to the club, buddy.
But it does seem, I mean, this is the infuriating part of it.
It does seem for the people who were a little bit suspicious that maybe all of these lockdowns had something to do with the fact that there was a presidential election this year.
Lockdown Study Damning Evidence00:07:37
You know, like maybe tanking the economy was somewhat related to taking away Donald Trump's biggest talking point that the economy was so strong, even though it was always a house of cards.
But regardless of all of that, it's, you know, those of us who were pondering the question that perhaps when politicians act in a presidential election year, that their actions are not completely removed from the fact that it is an election year.
It seems a little bit interesting that the biggest advocates of lockdowns are now the week, the final week of Trump's presidency, after it's all been, you know, figured out that Joe Biden will be the next president, are now all of a sudden going, yeah, you know, we really have to look at whether these lockdowns cost more than they benefit.
Today, in Newsweek, they ran a story about a study.
This is a peer-reviewed study that came out of Stanford.
All right.
Let me just read briefly from the Newsweek article.
A new study evaluating COVID-19 responses around the world found that the mandatory lockdown orders early in the pandemic did not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than other voluntary measures, such as social distancing and travel reduction.
The peer-reviewed study, which was conducted by a group of Stanford researchers and published in the Wiley Online Library on January 5th, analyzed coronavirus case growth in 10 countries in early 2020.
The study compared cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and the U.S., all countries that implemented mandatory lockdown orders and business closures to South Korea and Sweden, which implemented less severe voluntary responses.
It aimed to analyze the effects that less restrictive and more restrictive measures had on changing individual behavior and curbing the transmission of the virus.
So essentially, there was this major peer-reviewed study that indicated basically what Tom Woods has been yelling at people for this whole year, which is that there really is no evidence that any of these forced government lockdown restrictions, mask mandates, any of this stuff has had any significant impact on slowing down the spread of the virus.
This is just damning, damning information to all of the lockdown advocates who have been lecturing the rest of us who dare speak up against this government totalitarianism, because this knifes them right in the kidney, right?
It's not just that they cost more than they help, right?
It's not just saying like, well, look, these are the benefits of a lockdown and these are the costs of a lockdown.
Now, we know for a fact that the costs are just staggering.
The costs of the lockdowns are tremendous.
But this large peer-reviewed study is actually saying it's not clear that there are benefits.
Okay.
And just take a second to think about how powerful that statement is.
It's not that the unbelievable costs in lives lost, in suicides going up, in mental illness, in absolute destruction of the economy.
It's not just a question of whether those costs can be outweighed by the benefits.
This study is telling you it's not clear that there are any benefits.
There are quite possibly no benefits.
We cannot, in fact, find any evidence that there's any benefits.
And all of those costs are undeniably real.
So basically, this is telling you what we've been telling you now for months, what heroes like Tom Woods and Jeff Dice and so many great people out there have been telling you for months was that this was just unnecessary destruction of people's lives.
So you would think with our track record of being right versus CNN and Fox, CNN would just fire everyone that's working there and say, look, these guys got the Russia collusion story right.
They got the lockdowns right.
The biggest incidents of the last four years.
So we're bringing new news anchors in here with better analysts.
Well, that's right.
I mean, I think AOC should want to rein in all of those companies, you know, because we've been so much more accurate and truthful than they have.
And we're just a couple of idiot comedians sitting in front of cameras, right?
Okay.
And we've gotten it more correct than all of these major news outlets.
But yet, who do you think is at more risk of being reined in in the name of healing?
CNN or this show?
It's almost like I used to enjoy 24, which watching it now, like, yeah, I mean, it was so fun, but if I watched it now, I'd be like, you can't torture that guy or yeah, that's not nice.
And it was pure George W. Bush propaganda, but man, was it exciting?
It was always just federal agents torturing people for only the best of reasons.
Yeah.
Just, man, I hate torture, but I got to torture someone like every other day because it saves so many lives.
But I always loved that Jack Bauer had this incredible track record and they always doubted it.
They're like, you can't do that.
There's no way you're right.
And you're like, did you forget the nine seasons beforehand where I saved the world like 25 times over?
Maybe I've saved this country a thousand times.
Maybe give me the benefit of the doubt this time.
Yeah.
But it's incredible how in six months from now, when we're telling you that they're lying, you know, all the kind of that our opinion is dangerous.
It's going to lead to violence.
It's going to lead to death.
And it's like, just give it two years.
Give it two years.
The information almost always comes out that we were right.
And yet they'll never do the look back of where they go, oh yeah, we lied about all this shit.
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
And of course, there'll be no talk of reigning in that media.
And there'll be no talk of the violence that was incited by the people who pushed all of these lockdowns.
Now, the violence that was incited by the people who, you know, created not only a gener, not only a police state, but a generation of Karens to go around calling the police state to come enforce violence on somebody for the crime of opening their business or not having their face covered at some given time or place or anyway.
Trump, that's really the thing that should lead to a fucking revolution is you told me that we had to stay home, you forced it, and you were just fucking wrong.
You ruined our lives for nothing.
And you suppressed the information when people were figuring out that it was wrong.
Like Tom Woods had that speech was taken down off Facebook, I believe it was.
It was a completely factual based argument, doing nothing but citing data and drawing obvious conclusions from it.
They censored that.
And now they'll come out and start to, oh, yeah, you know, turns out this peer-reviewed Stanford study, this huge study of dozens of different nations.
Oh, yeah, it confirms everything that we've been saying.