James Smith and Robbie Bernstein dissect the GameStop short squeeze, arguing retail investors exposed Federal Reserve fraud rather than creating a bubble. They critique former SEC Commissioner Caroline Dacey's label of the event as domestic terrorism, comparing it to the January 6th Capitol attack where vague rhetoric justifies authoritarian surveillance. The hosts condemn proposals to apply international terrorism laws domestically, warning that discarding civil liberties for arbitrary labels ignores actual crimes and enables selective persecution against political opponents. Ultimately, they assert that true justice requires specific evidence of violence, not fear-mongering narratives used to expand state power. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Federal Reserve Manipulation00:08:01
All right, let's start the show.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Seems quick off the heels of the last episode I just did.
The schedule got a little bit messed up this week.
That was my fault.
Usually when the schedule gets messed up, it's a result of Robbie's AIDS or something like that, but it wasn't.
This one was on me.
But I'm very excited for this episode.
It's a Friday episode.
Everyone knows this is when we bring it.
And I was very interested to get Robbie the Fire Bernstein's take on a lot of this craziness that's been going on for the last 48 hours or so.
And of course, we got him here.
The king of the caulks.
How are you, my brother?
Well, I'm just happy I got out of Wednesday duty.
And now I get to come into Friday well-rested to really wrap up this week.
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
You missed the one that doesn't really matter.
That's the one you phone in anyway.
So it's, we got you here for the good one, the Friday episode.
You would appreciate this also.
Two weeks in a row now, I put up in my crock pot ribs thinking I would eat it for Friday night dinner.
And then I just went right for it for breakfast.
I woke up, it smelled ready and just got right in there.
So you leave it on all night.
Oh, yeah, that's already been going nine hours.
And then I'm going to come back to it for lunch.
It is falling off the bone delicious.
It's falling off the bone.
Yeah, it's just, it's the best.
I got full belly of rib energy.
Yeah, I fucking, I've, I've, uh, I've been a crock pot guy for years.
Love, love a good crock pot.
Uh, just got into the air fryer, um, which is good for certain things.
It's not what people make it out to be.
Like it's going to revolutionize everything.
It's only good for certain things.
But I'll tell you, great for making french fries.
Ooh.
Great.
Like, like my wife will just like chop up potatoes and make like homemade, healthy, at least healthier fries.
And yeah, great.
I'm not a fries guy, but I like what you're doing there.
Okay.
Not a fries guy.
That's right, Rob Burns.
You would hate, you know, those Pittsburgh sandwiches where they put the fries on the very offensive to me.
Yeah, I understand.
I don't like, I'm not a fan of that either.
I don't like it's everybody.
We already had the option to do that.
Anyone can just shove their fries in their sandwich.
We're all choosing not to do that.
So why would you take anyway?
Okay.
So there's been obviously a lot of market craziness over the last couple of days.
It's been quite entertaining to watch the establishment freaking out over the prospect that there actually could be people banding together to transfer money from the hedge fund class to regular investors.
I think this is all fascinating and really interesting.
And more than anything else, my biggest takeaway is that this is an important time for libertarians to insert a little bit of our understanding of economics that others don't really appreciate.
But anyway, I'm just curious because I did a whole episode on this, but I just, your thoughts in general, because I know this is the stuff that excites you.
It does excite me.
I got a lot of thoughts here.
First is sometimes you got to listen to your crazy friends who are telling you two weeks ago, you got to buy GameStop and AMC.
And I'm like, why would I touch that?
Are you kidding me?
And I was wrong.
First is I'm loving the crybaby nature of Wall Street that, you know, they love this game and they get the bailouts.
And when they're losing, it's all, hey, you greedy motherfuckers and this system and blah, blah, blah.
Just it's so funny.
Oh, it's so funny to hear the terms coming out of their mouth.
They're manipulating the markets.
Oh, are they?
It's a straight crybaby.
You're playing a game here and you guys usually win.
And this time you lost.
And it's so fun to watch them lose.
Yes.
It's not even just this.
It's they're playing a game that's rigged in their favor and they lost despite it being rigged in their favor and they're bitching that it's not rigged enough in their favor.
It's just the level of crybaby-ness is off the charts.
So the mechanics of this one just make sense where basically they were able to make a short squeeze.
My friend who was investing in this throwing words at me like gamma, Delta, all this option talk.
I don't understand that stuff.
Short squeeze, did you talk about it on the last episode?
Yeah, well, yeah, I got into it.
So with the short squeeze, I mean, it's fascinating because you can basically just see that someone's shorting more than what's available.
And then you can force the share price up and then it continues to rise and then they're forced to go buy it, continues to force it up.
So it's not like that crazy of a thing that happened here.
I do wonder, though, if we're at the end of a bubble, because that seems to me when your retail investors and the people at home are winning, this just seems to be the signal to me that you're at the end of the party.
And two ways.
One is the Wall Street people, they're going to win over time.
They're the house.
So believe me, they're going to figure out how they need to police websites like this to stay ahead of the retail investors.
So I don't think you're going to see this happen a second time.
But even just the fact that you have a climate for this is because so many people are forced to put their money into these brokerage accounts and try and trade for themselves just to get returns.
So a lot of the fact that you even have a market climate where people are attracted to the casino like this is because of everything that the Fed has done.
And so I really wonder if we're a late stage bubble.
Well, I think, okay, so the point that you just made at the end there, I think is like my biggest takeaway and what I'd like to be the biggest focus from libertarians in this whole thing, because what you see is the fact that, look, we have just, and this is the truth, we're pretty much the only group, pretty much.
There's a few exceptions to that, but pretty much the only group that has really paid attention and focused on the Federal Reserve this whole time.
And most people don't.
And even the ones who focus on the Fed, because obviously, you know, investors focus on the Fed and the interest rates that they set.
But if you turn on like CNBC or you read the Wall Street Journal, it's never like a broader philosophical discussion about the Federal Reserve and what impact that actually has on markets.
It's always like, okay, are they going to do this?
Are they going to target this rate?
Are they going to target that rate?
What effect will that have on the market?
Why it's good.
You know, it's always like very kind of short-sighted.
Well, if the Fed raises rates, the market will be worse tomorrow.
So we're, okay, we just got news that Bernanke or whoever it is at the time is going to is not going to raise rates and therefore everything's good in the market today.
But it's never like the broader question about what effect this has on the economy as a whole.
And even people on the left, like even like when there was Occupy Wall Street, there wasn't a lot of talk about the Federal Reserve.
Even people like Bernie Sanders, who run on, you know, being opposed to Wall Street, spend very little time discussing the Federal Reserve at all.
And so what you have is a lot of people focusing on things that are not, it's not that they're not problems, but they're focusing on little problems that are more or less symptoms of the bigger problem and don't really do anything to really deal with the massive fraud.
So also, by the way, that term fraud has been used a lot over the last 48 hours in very incorrect ways.
Like, no, it's not actually fraudulent for a hedge fund to short a company.
It's not.
Sheath Underwear Promo00:03:05
They're making a bet, you know, and as was just proven, they can lose that bet.
But you could talk about the fact that hedge funds are manipulating markets, or you could talk about the fact that platforms like Robinhood are shutting down the people's ability to buy the game stock stock, you know?
And it's not, I'm not even saying like none of these are problems.
Certainly, I think they are and they can have negative effects, but none of that really gets at the core of what's going on, which is what you just addressed.
The fact is that when the real fraud is what the Fed is doing to our money, that's the real fraud that's really stealing from the American people.
And when you have an environment where your money is losing value and you have artificially low interest rates, that environment is going to breed this type of wild speculation because you can't just do normal things that norm that traditionally you could do to get a return on your money, like save it.
You can't just do that anymore.
So now you have to look for a wilder and wilder gamble to not lose your money.
You're almost forced into it because if you just hold cash, that's like the dumbest thing in the world that you could do.
You're going to, you're just giving away your money, basically.
So now you're forced to gamble it in one way or another.
So I think that's a really important focal point that is not getting enough attention.
And, you know, it's something that I think libertarians need to do our best to insert into the conversation.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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Market Regulation Debate00:15:09
The other thing that I think is really interesting out of all of this is that, you know, I remember Ron Paul used to say this back in the day, which is how you can always find out what the correct answer is.
What did Ron Paul used to say?
But people used to accuse him of, you know, like the kind of typical line of attack against free market proponents.
And they'd say, well, you're just for no regulation.
You just want to have no regulation of the markets.
And he would always say, which I found interesting at the time, he would always say, no, I'm all for market regulations.
And I'm all for, I think the market does a better job of regulating itself than the government does.
And what's kind of interesting about this, right, is like, if you were coming from the perspective, which I've seen a lot of people say, that it's really wrong what these hedge funds were doing to GameStop.
Like before the Reddit shit blew up, they were tanking this company.
You know, they're shorting more than there are shares of the company.
It was over 100%, right?
And so if you think that that's wrong and you think it's wrong that these hedge funds can take down companies by shorting them on such a massive level, well, think about the fact that we've had a regulatory state since the 30s of the financial industry.
I think the first Securities Act was in 1933 and another big one in 34.
They've had all types.
I mean, you know, you have the SEC and like all these, you know, different, you know, hundreds of agencies.
What did we get for what do we get for all of them?
I mean, the SEC was tipped off about Bernie Madoff and didn't even, they investigated him like four times, I think, and never found out that it was a Ponzi scheme.
They literally never found out that he didn't have any investments, even with all the times investigating him.
Like how that is possible is beyond me.
And what ultimately ended up bringing him down, I mean, I think he confessed to his kid and then they turned him in.
But what really brought him down was the economic downturn.
It was the fact that now people were trying to pull their money out and it was like, oh, we don't have any of it.
So shit, that's a real problem in a Ponzi scheme when people want to pull their money out.
And if you realize that really the boom is the artificial created boom by the easy money system and the bust is essentially the free market cure for the misallocation of resources, then you realize that it's really the market that brought him down.
That's what happened.
And so anyway, my point of this is that if you think that this short selling, this manipulation of markets by hedge funds is a major problem.
Well, look at the regulation by the market that was just put in place.
I mean, don't you think hedge funds are going to think twice before they ever short a company on this level again?
Because now the precedent has been set that if you're shorting more than the stock exists, there's a great way for people to get rich off that.
All they have to do is band together and decide that we're all going to buy this stock and make the hedge funds pay.
They probably, in one little action by some anonymous investors on Reddit, did more to regulate this short-selling market than the government has in close to 100 years of the regulatory state.
That to me is pretty fascinating to think about.
Yeah, and they definitely just changed the risk to reward equation for any company that wants to do this in the future because you can literally lose your fund now.
It's not.
So, I mean, the upside on this, what were they shorting?
You have $4 a share so that like you kind of have a maximum gain of what, 3.99 a share and an upside loss of potentially $250 a share.
Well, right.
I mean, and going forward in the future, it's really almost infinite.
I mean, like that you can lose.
There's really no limit to how much you can lose if shorting goes bad.
Right.
So a week ago, if you're a hedge fund manager, you probably look at it and you go, well, usually when we come in, we're the biggest player.
So we force this thing down.
And while on paper, you do have infinite possible losses by naked shorting.
It's never really happened.
So they don't really equate for that.
They will never be making that decision again where, you know, the risk managers are looking at it and going, nope, like we have this on paper.
Look at those losses.
They exist.
So you're probably right.
I don't think you're going to see a lot more naked shorting like this.
Yeah, at least not to this level.
You would think they wouldn't overexpose themselves again to this level.
And if they do, then maybe a group of Redditors come along and do this again.
And like, look, the truth is that, and this is one of the major problems with the moral hazard that government regulation creates, is that, and it's an unfortunate thing.
It's, it's like part of the human condition.
But sometimes these things need to happen in order for people to learn from them.
And if you stop it from happening, people don't learn the lesson.
So in other words, you probably need a few, sometimes you need to see people like throw their lives away on drugs or something like that in order for other people to look at them and go, yeah, you don't want to throw your life away like, you know, your drunk uncle Bob, you know, like you, and so what happens in these situations is sometimes people need to get beat really bad to realize not to make that bet again.
And when the government comes in and protects people from getting beat that bad, oftentimes the lesson's never learned.
This is why you see, look, in 2008, the market would have broke up every one of these big banks and banks would have been, they would have learned a lesson to not go crazy with these bad bets.
But when the government comes in and bails them out, what do they end up doing?
They go right back into them because the lesson they've learned now is that they'll get bailed out.
So likewise, I think that this is a process that like, I think the hedge funds needed to get slapped around a little bit to realize that this is a really dangerous game that they're playing and that they can lose it.
I will also say that one of the things that I, you know, bugs me is that what a lot of people take away from this, because they don't focus on the Fed and the easy money and shit like that, is that they end up taking away that like, well, why do we need hedge funds at all?
Like, why do we need these guys?
And I saw Tucker Carlson had Glenn Greenwald on the last night, and they had a great conversation.
And I agreed with a lot of what they were saying.
But at one point, they start going this thing.
They're like, you know, these hedge fund guys, they get rich and they don't even produce anything.
They don't make anything.
And it's, that is just, it's frustrating because if you don't really understand economics and understand the system at work here, it's easy to come away with that, you know, like understanding.
And I get it.
You're like, yeah, I mean, they didn't, they didn't build anything.
Why do they have billions of dollars?
But the truth is, for us to live in a society as wealthy as the one that we're in, and as most modern advanced societies are, it actually is a really crucial role that investment firms play.
And the truth is that there are companies who have really great ideas, but don't have capital.
And you know what really great ideas without capital gets you?
Not much.
Okay.
But if you get the capital, the companies that have really great ideas, then they can produce enormous amounts of wealth.
And then there are companies who have capital, who have really bad ideas that are going to lose all of this money just for themselves, their employees, their stockholders.
And it can be very beneficial for people to short those companies and basically extract that wealth and put it hopefully somewhere where there's people with better ideas with the companies that can produce profit.
So again, the problem isn't investment firms.
The problem isn't hedge funds.
The problem is that there's a corrupt system where all of the refs are basically bought and paid for and are working for these giants.
And the fact that we live in a fucking system where the money is being destroyed constantly and it encourages these crazy wild bets.
Yeah.
And when you look at the, in my opinion, look at quantitative easing charts against where the stock market values are.
And then you look at the fact that Fed has bought corporate bonds and junk bonds.
So let's just say hedge funds did have a good position in society, which was to make these bets and efficiently allocate capital.
They're not in that game right now.
Their game right now is guessing where is money going to flow and how do I make money off these money flows.
And these money flows are not off of actual good savings and investment.
It's based off of what the hell is the Fed going to do.
So in other words, they would have a good role, but the real libertarian perspectives that Greg of why, like, what was it?
Why do they exist?
Or like, what do they produce?
They produce.
No, it doesn't matter.
If I'm a rich guy and I want to give my money to a hedge fund so that those guys can go make me more money.
I have every right in the world to do that.
And also we all benefit by rich people, you know, making more money on their money.
So it's not, you know what I mean?
But that's the point that I was trying to make.
Because even if you don't buy into our, you know, belief in natural rights and things like that, the point is that it actually does serve a very beneficial purpose for the economy to allocate resources in the correct manner.
So you know what I mean?
Like that's the point I was getting at, that there are companies that have ideas that can really help a lot of people's lives and they just need the capital in order to do it.
There are other companies who are failing, which basically is an indication that they're not helping other people's lives.
And so it makes sense to bet against them and bet on the ones who do.
But, you know, like that's more or less my point.
But of course, we're the whole financial industry, as you just pointed out, is kind of a funhouse mirror version of what it should look like at this point, because it's so poisoned by the government.
Okay.
So one thing that's been the most delightful part of all of this, and probably I think long-term, the most beneficial has been the response from the powers that be.
And it's really, I said this, I was on Kennedy last night and I said, and of course I'm talking to a libertarian audience there.
So a lot of those people already kind of get some of this stuff.
But one of the things I said to him is I was just like, well, look, in 2020, you had the largest transfer of wealth in human history from the poor and the middle class to the top 1%, the politically connected big corporations.
I mean, not just the government shutting down, you know, companies, but then bailing out those who are politically connected, you know, the banker bailouts and the easy money policy and just all this stuff.
And you look at the record high profits and the record high stock of big tech companies and companies like Amazon and all these guys, you know, like how much money they're pulling in.
I go, and there's no panic from the establishment about that.
But in one day, we have a transfer of wealth from the hedge fund class to regular investors and all of a sudden they're freaking out.
And that should show you everything you need to know about how unbelievably corrupt this system is.
All right, guys, let's take a second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is a brand new podcast called Pauls to the Wall.
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One more time.
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Let's get back into the show.
So let's check in.
We got a nice little clip to play of the former commissioner of the SEC, as I mentioned a moment ago, that wonderful regulatory body that did nothing to catch Bernie Madoff, did nothing to catch the 2008 crisis, but they're pissed off now.
So let's check in with her.
It really puts a lot of question about the integrity of the market, right?
And it really kind of, everybody's scratching their heads over this.
What should happen?
What is the right thing to do to control this or stop this?
Not unlike what we saw on January 6th at the Capitol, right?
If you don't have the police in there at the right time, things go a little crazy.
And that kind of feels like what's happening with this, much different, much lesser degree.
It's financial harm, not personal bodily harm.
But certainly that's the same kind of platform created frenzy that people are operating under.
And these are very trying times.
Would you mind explaining to me what the harm here is?
Well, I think you know what the harm here is, Rob.
I think it's very obvious.
According to Bloomberg, excuse me, according to Reuters, the losses on shorts topped $70 billion.
So there's the harm.
There's the harm.
Hedge funds lost money.
Wealthy people took a real licking on this one.
Yeah, that's right.
So there's your harm.
It's kind of just like this violent insurrection, except this time with regular investors betting on a stock that did well.
Wow, you had $70 billion basically going from hedge funds to schmucks that follow a Reddit thing?
Well, look, they might, they're probably going to recoup some of this.
And some of those people are going to be holding the GameStop stock when the music goes off.
So like, we'll see where this all goes.
But they took a licking like in those couple days.
And so that's what this is.
Now, by the way, I'm not categorizing January 6th the way these people do.
I'd be like, I'm not saying, but to them, they're characterizing it as like a violent attempted coup insurrection.
And that's basically what this was, you know, except what was it really?
It was just regular investors getting together and deciding they were going to buy a stock.
They bet on a company that a whole bunch of rich people were betting against, and they won.
And they were able to work the system.
Yeah.
And also, am I going to feel bad for the smartest and most sophisticated players making derivative products for themselves that didn't turn out like the way they wanted them to?
Institutional Player Tactics00:05:25
Like even Robinhood, they know their margin requirements.
They know who they're extending credit to.
They know exactly what they're doing.
They're in it for money.
And if they fuck up, they're sucking.
There's consequences.
Well, and it's the funny thing about Robinhood.
I mean, I mentioned this, you know, on the last podcast, but the unbelievable irony is like the fact that they call themselves Robinhood.
Oh, yeah.
You know, and if you read their thing, it's all about what we stand for is like democratization of the marketplace and all this.
And you're like, oh, yeah, I guess you do.
But, you know, you can front run your orders.
That's what Robinhood does.
If you don't know what Robinhood does, and firstly, if you're a retail investor, it's better for you.
The fact that you're not paying commissions and you want to buy a share of General Electric and maybe it's one percentage of a penny higher, it doesn't matter to you.
But what they're doing is they package together everyone's orders and they front run them through their like the high-speed trading or whatever.
Maybe it's Charles Schwab or whatever it is, but everyone's looking to buy General Electrics.
They get ahead of it.
They buy it and sell it to you overall versus the commitment.
Everyone wins.
It's an interesting capitalist thing here where they offer you the free trade.
And if you're not like a day trader and that way where the fractions of pennies make makes a difference to you, you're better off not paying the commissions.
And then these guys have a way now where they're able to get you a good and service for free and profit off doing so.
Everybody wins.
But Robinhood is not there, like you said, to take money from the big players and give it to you.
They're there as a tool of the institutional players that they can front run your orders.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think I have that right.
I might like, I'm going off of one or two articles I had read.
No, I think you've got that exactly right.
But it's, but what happened was, I'll be transparent.
When they came on as an advertiser about two years ago, it looked shady as fuck, like free orders.
And so I did my homework and I'm like, okay, they're front running, but it's not, it's not at any loss.
If you're buying shares, there's no reason why you should be concerned with Charlie.
It's not like they're front running it where they're buying it ahead of you.
So it's $5.
You know what I mean?
It makes no difference.
You come out ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
So what's interesting though to see is like, right, this is, and to me, this is an opportunity for red pilling, which is what I always love to see.
But so here you have the SEC, former commissioner.
Just think about all of the, you know, the all of the manipulation of the markets that's gone on, say, since 2008 to now over the last 13 years, you know, and all of the transfers of wealth.
But this one, she's comparing to an insurrection.
This is the one that really bothers her.
I mean, look, even the $70 billion, let's say the hedge funds recoup none of that and lost $70 billion.
I mean, okay, that's, you know, that's a big loss, but that's nothing compared to the hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars even that have been extracted from the American people and gone to the Wall Street class, but not, but they're not really there to fight for that.
And I think that in itself, you know, really tells you something.
It's really, you know, the image goes, well, you know, this is what happens when the cops aren't there.
And of course, the other point that I hope people focus on is that, you know, if you think if you're so furious at the, you know, the hedge fund class that you're demanding more government regulation, just notice that that's what they're demanding.
That's what she wants.
She's, she said, this is what happens when the cops aren't there.
In other words, we want more government bureaucrats in the way to make sure these guys couldn't do this again.
And make sure that they can't do it essentially means one of two things: slowing down orders, which would just be cheating for a hedge fund.
If there's a large institutional player with the short, and all of a sudden the market's going crazy buying, so you have to Robinhood essentially needs to do what it did sooner, where it doesn't allow people to buy the stock.
So they're talking about we need a process here to cheat on behalf of institutional players, or they're talking about some sort of a form of censorship where the hedge funds could potentially get together and go, Hey, we're all buying something.
I don't know the laws about that.
I don't know how that plays out.
But let's just say that for us to move the market, you probably need a couple million people to get together and start doing something.
The hedge funds have more money.
So if they want to move the market, they don't need as many people to do that at the same time.
So the other thing would be to create some sort of a censorship or law where masses cannot share these stock tips or all act together, which would essentially create an environment where, of course, the institutional players have the advantage because the decentralized guys can't get together and try and push against them.
So to your point, yes, regulation will not work in the small person's favor.
They're basically saying, hey, we need something here so that the institutional players can better predict what's going on because we'll have firmer rules, which will obviously work in their favor.
Yeah.
And I think if we zoom out and look at the big picture of, you know, the place that this country is in in the year 2021, early in this year, is that they're really, it seems more and more like they just cannot keep this whole thing together.
Like they just cannot keep this thing glued together without some next level of real authoritarian crackdown.
And that's why she's talking about more cops, and that's why they're talking about, you know, domestic terrorism and all this shit.
Capitol Insurrection Charges00:15:12
It's like, I remember when the Liberty Movement was really born, which came out of the Ron Paul 2008 presidential campaign, it was at a time where, I mean, it started right before the economic crash, but then it really blew up afterward.
But it was at a time where we had the wars were disasters.
It was just obvious that the plan of remaking Afghanistan and Iraq in America's image was, you know, not just that it wasn't going to work, but that it was, it was such a ridiculous idea and had resulted in nothing but just, you know, unbelievable levels of human suffering.
And then the economic crash came in, and it was just like, what the, like you couldn't pretend that the elites were doing even a mildly competent job.
Like it was just so obvious that this whole thing had been mismanaged.
And then you enter Ron Paul and he's explaining to you exactly why.
And it was like the perfect kind of moment for all of this.
And what I see right now is like, I feel like we don't have that Ron Paul type leader, but after 2020, it's like impossible for them to even pretend that there's any degree of competence going on, like that this whole thing isn't just a shit show.
It's rigged.
It's rigged not in your favor.
And then, and like it's, it's becoming very hard for them to keep this whole thing together, to even pretend that this is, you know, what we're selling you isn't complete bullshit.
And so that's one of that, that's kind of the bigger angle that's that's really interesting about this story.
But you see it also with the impeachment effort against Donald Trump, which I believe Rand Paul killed a few days ago.
We haven't talked about that on the show, but you know, they really are terrified of Donald Trump trying to run again in four years.
And on the surface, you'd have to think it doesn't exactly make sense.
Like, I mean, Donald Trump for 2024, he'll be close to 80.
Well, he'll be 78, 79 years old, something like that.
He'll be old, really old.
He's not the healthiest man on the planet.
Likes his fast food, little bit overweight.
Hard to imagine that he's going to make a presidential run at 80.
Also, the truth is that Donald Trump's, whether or not you blame him for it, his four years were a failure.
It was not a good time for the country.
The last year of his presidency was like the worst year we've had in a long time.
And then there's just all of the craziness about Trump, the media reaction to Trump.
I have a very hard time believing that people are actually going to want to run back the Donald Trump experiment in four years, but they're terrified of it.
And you start to realize that, and I say this as someone who's not a big fan of democracy, but democracy is in a weird way starting to be a problem for them because this whole system is so rigged.
It's spiraling out of control.
People can smell that it's bullshit.
And they want to kind of like put their thumb back over this system.
But one of the problems they have is that everyone gets a vote still.
You know, you still get to vote.
And so they look at Donald Trump and I think he is the, he's of their opposition, the largest vote getter in history.
And then they're, they're looking at it and going like, hey, you know, there is a chance this Biden administration doesn't go good and they could bring this guy back and he might be able to do it again.
So anyway, Rand Paul, it looks like effectively killed the impeachment hearing.
That it killed the shot of getting a conviction when he forced a vote on the constitutionality of impeaching a private citizen who's already not in office.
And he got enough Republican votes on it that they couldn't get a conviction.
And so if enough Republicans have already voted that the whole process is unconstitutional, how could they turn around and vote for a conviction?
It would seem that that would be quite a large degree of hypocrisy in order to do so.
I mean, I sat down to do a little bit of research on this, and I think a pretty clear and simple reading of the Constitution is that the impeachment process is only for a president.
It says impeaching the president.
Doesn't seem open to any other category of person.
And on that note, if the president were to straight up kill somebody, like let's say they just decided to go out one night onto the lawn, axe in hand, just like, I'm president, I'm going to kill some people.
Would that then have to be tried in the Senate as an impeachment hearing?
Or is that a crime in which you would be tried and you could go to jail?
Well, I was talking about this a bit last year or a little over a year ago now, when they were first talking about whether the president could, or during the Mueller investigation, maybe it was when they were talking about whether the president could be tried for a crime while he's still in office.
And yeah, it's kind of unclear because they were at one point, the Justice Department was asserting.
Now, this isn't a law.
It's just kind of like a guideline, but they were asserting that the president can't be charged with a crime.
And I was like, wait, but how far do we take that?
Like, what if he just went out and committed somebody?
And we all saw it.
It's on video.
You know, so I don't know exactly, but I guess theoretically you could remove him from office with an impeachment and then you could charge him.
But the crime was still done while he was there.
Yes.
So then the impeachment.
Well, I think it would be an impeachable offense, certainly.
Right.
But if the what I'm saying is, if you're saying that a president is not allowed to be tried for a crime, but the only recourse, the Constitution was saying the only recourse is that we can impeach them.
And then after that, we can make sure that they're never, that they can't remain in office.
Then that would sound like they're ruling out that a president could be tried.
Well, I think he could be tried after he's left office.
I think you need to be impeached first.
Look, if that guideline were to hold up to its ultimate logical conclusion, then yes, you'd have to get him out of office.
And then when he's no longer the sitting president, you could try him for the crime.
It's a pretty weird idea.
But if the guy leaves, why would you then have to go back in time to impeach him to try him for the crime?
No, not to impeach him after he leaves.
Then he's open to criminal process.
Right.
So like when Chuck Schumer now is saying it would be a get out of jail free card, what I'm trying to say is if an actual crime was committed, you should be able to just try him for an actual crime.
This would indicate the fact that it's not a real crime.
Yes.
Look, no, okay.
So you're completely right about that.
And not only that, their whole, the case that they're building is absurd and it's starting to contradict itself.
So there is no question.
There is no way they could get Donald Trump criminally for inciting violence because there's Supreme Court rulings on this already.
The standard for inciting violence has to be a direct call with specifics.
He would have had to say to them, I want you to go storm the Capitol building.
I want you to push over the police.
I want you to take Nancy Pelosi's stuff.
I want you to do like he would have had to specifically.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
He would have had to like it specifically incite that call.
That's the threshold for incitement.
But the major, like there's so many problems in their story, but right now there'll be all of these people who are reporting that this was planned weeks in advance because they're caught between two goals that they want to achieve.
One is they want to really convince you that this was a coup attempt and an insurrection.
And two, they want to get Donald Trump for incitement.
But in pursuing the first goal, they're undercutting the second because by telling you that this was planned weeks in advance, well, then it's pretty hard to say that what Donald Trump said that day incited the event if it was already being planned.
Also, they have a major problem that Donald Trump was still speaking while the whole thing was going down.
And the other problem that they have is that Donald Trump specifically called for it to be, quote, peaceful and patriotic, which, you know, when you have the word peaceful in there, it's hard to get someone for inciting violence.
So the whole thing is just absurd and falling apart.
But what's what's not a laughing matter is what they are trying to use this event to, you know, to jam down people's throats, which is really, I mean, I don't know.
Did you see the picture of the permanent gate that they've put up around the Capitol building now?
They've got this like permanent fence that they've put up.
The anti-border wall people seem to have no problem with a border wall on government property as long as it's protecting the politicians from the people with from whom supposedly they derive their power.
So This really is another step toward authoritarianism, but I think that it speaks to what I was saying before, the larger point about how this whole thing is coming unglued, and they feel that they need the heavy hand of government to glue it back together.
Yeah, I agree with everything you said.
And there was talk recently, I think, of them just leaving those fences up permanently.
There's some conversation about that.
No, that's what, from my understanding, they've said they're going to leave them up permanently.
At least that's what I saw reported.
Okay, so I wanted to play a clip from last week on Bill Maher that was kind of getting at a lot of this stuff.
And I found it very creepy and revealing.
So let's go to that clip.
If you rob a bank, you don't get arrested for trespass.
You get arrested for robbing a bank.
It's a serious crime, actually, a crime against the government, right?
So what happened at the Capitol?
Was it trespass?
We're seeing people arrested for trespass.
Theft of Nancy Pelosi's podium, which I'm sure is near and dear to her, but that charge doesn't reflect the gravity of what happened.
What happened was an insurrection.
What happened was domestic terrorism.
Right.
And we can't charge it.
Domestic terrorism is the only criminal category in the FBI where they can investigate you, but they can never charge you.
There's no such crime.
But what do you, but I'm asking you, what is the law that we're going to pass that's going to change this?
And that's also.
People pause for a second.
So just to address that, so he's claiming that you should be accountable for something called domestic terrorism.
But similar to what I was saying with the impeachment, if you've done a crime, you should be responsible for that crime.
So stealing, crime, right?
Murdering someone, crime.
Punching someone in the face, crime.
Just an activity being labeled as terrorism.
So there shouldn't be any crime there because you're just creating a title.
Well, that's exactly right.
And what exactly is the precise definition of domestic terrorism?
What makes this domestic terrorism and not say, I don't know, other riots that we saw over the last year or other events?
Like, why is none of that the case?
Right?
It's like, what exactly is the line being drawn here?
And why?
And that's the whole point.
That's what's so creepy about this.
It's like, oh, yeah, if we don't label them domestic terrorism, domestic terrorists, then all I can charge this one guy for is trespassing and stealing a podium.
That's not so bad.
That's not going to get you life in prison.
But if I can call you a domestic terrorist, then I can.
Listen, we had no problem in our judicial system of getting a conviction of Timothy McVay, right?
That's a domestic terrorist, even though he didn't act alone, but that's beside the point.
You know, he killed a whole bunch of people.
So, okay, charge them with murder and many counts of it, you know?
But so that's what's really creepy about this is that now we just want this kind of vague label that we can throw on you, and we'll decide when we throw it on you and when we don't.
The stupid audience of fucking sheep clap at this.
All right, it gets worse.
Fourth Amendment.
So I advocate a law that looks just like international terrorism.
So if you change the religion of those people at the Capitol building on January 6th and you make their mission violent jihad or establishing a caliphate, all of a sudden we have an international terrorism law and they go to prison for the rest of their lives.
But that's the conference that we would be listening to those.
So can you pause again for a second?
If you had a bunch of Muslims that walked in, you know, let's say you did change the religion of everybody.
What changes it to something where maybe you actually have to take action against them and prosecute is the violent caliphate part that he threw in there.
If they were just Muslims or of a different culture, I would say, yes, it is wrong to just say this is terrorism and put those people in jail for life because they walked around the Capitol building in a, let's actually call it a mostly peaceful protest.
Yeah, let's write.
Right.
Okay.
So there's several things that are like incredibly creepy about this.
And just so everybody's clear, this guy was the former assistant director of the FBI.
This isn't some random guy giving you his thoughts on how we should handle this.
Okay.
This is like, these are the upper echelon of the deep state talking to you and coming out and publicly saying this.
And a very liberal audience of Bill Mars cheering for it.
And so number one, the thing that just stands out to me is like, I don't know, is there any humanity left like for people who are on the opposing side of you?
Like, look, I'm all for, I had some pretty strong, you know, comments about the violence that took place over the summer.
I was absolutely for stopping the violence by any means necessary.
And that, and I got some shit from that about saying so.
But I was like, look, if we have a government, I mean, the one job they should have is to protect people and property.
And you can't just allow people to be out there assaulting people, destroying businesses, all of this stuff.
Civil Liberties Concerns00:10:34
But I never would have said, you know, short of stopping if someone was just a part of that mob, you know what I mean?
Was just out one night, maybe didn't throw and it didn't break any windows, didn't assault anyone, didn't vandalize anyone.
I told those people they should stop, they should go home.
And I said that if while they're in that mob, someone is defending themselves and they get caught up in it, I'm like, well, you know what?
There's no way to tell whether you're the violent one or not the violent one in that mob.
But if the mob was quelled and they went home, the idea that I'd feel that that person should go to jail for life?
Like, really?
I mean, you almost want to ask like, you know, some of these liberal, you know, people there.
Oh, okay.
Even if you're saying the guy who had the zip ties or the one guy who had a gun or whatever, one of the crazier people there.
But are you telling me that just like some regular lady or some regular guy who went in with the crowd into the government building, into the Capitol, you know, looked around a little bit, took some selfies, goofed off and then left, you want that person's life?
You want their entire life ruined?
You want them to spend the rest of their life in a cage?
Like, that is so incredibly creepy to me that you would want that for even, you know, like even the worst of the riots that I was so outraged about.
I mean, short of if you killed somebody, I would never even consider thinking that you should spend the rest of your life in jail.
Like even if you assaulted someone pretty viciously, I wouldn't give you a life sentence for that.
That's really what you want.
You want to just label them with some term and then we throw them away for life.
Man, it's like this country, this is this is the real ugliness of when you get into this culture war stuff is that people completely lose any sense of humanity for those on the other side.
And the idea that you have an FBI former assistant director, whatever his title was, what was he?
Look it up right here.
Yeah, he was the FBI assistant director.
Just throwing out, yeah, throw them all in jail for life and getting applause from a liberal crowd.
Like, man, what good are liberals if they can't at least be the ones who are like, well, I don't, I don't know if we throw people in jail for life over this, right?
Isn't that kind of the spirit of the traditional liberal thought?
Like, I don't know.
I'm a little, you know, I'm a little hesitant to want to throw someone in jail for life over this.
So that part's really creepy.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
So on the note of the guy with the zip ties, and check out Run Your Mouth.
I show this video, but there's New Yorker footage of him.
That guy, I think it's the same guy throwing people out of the, like the Senate or the Congress build, you know, like that room that they were all in.
He threw someone out of the chair and said, that's the chair of the vice president.
That's disrespectful.
Get out of there.
Oh, he was direct anything.
I think because that guy's holding zip ties.
I don't think there were two people arrested that were voted on.
It's possible that it's not what you, it's possible that he had the zip ties for if things, you know, during the protest outside got out of control or something.
Who the hell knows?
But I was just taking that guy out of the equation to make the easier case that right about just like the random people in there.
Are we going to label them terrorists and throw them in jail for life?
And then here's the creeper side of this.
You remember there were probably 10 years ago, the story about how the FBI foiled a plot of these guys who are going to blow up synagogues like in the Bronx.
And it turns out, I think four or five years later, it came out pretty clearly entrapment.
They recruited these people.
Yet a couple months ago, you had that Michigan militia that got taken down.
I think that turned out to be entrapment too.
Cause what happens is you get these people, they want to get together and then the FBI shows up and goes, no, no, no, we got to really do something.
And that guy's actually cool looking and everyone's like, all right, I guess.
And then they don't really want to do it.
If anything, they're going to be.
The vast majority of all the terrorism cases that have been, you know, foiled by the FBI have been what they call sting operations.
But a normal person would probably more accurately describe, as you did, as entrapment, where they actually create the situation.
They find people who are going on some extremist websites, things like that.
You know, they'll find some Muslim kid who's like pissed off and friendless and going on these sites.
And then they go like, hey, you know what we should really do is we should blow up a building.
It's like, oh, I don't know about that.
And then they use, and by the way, here's a really interesting thing.
They use the blowback propaganda.
They go, well, look at what the military just did to this village where you came from.
Blah, blah, blah.
And they radicalize them themselves.
Then they go, Hey, I know a guy who makes bombs.
Here, let me put you in touch with him who's another FBI guy.
Then they sell them the bombs.
Then they convince him to do it.
Then they get him to go light off the bombs where he realizes they weren't bombs at all.
They arrest him and claim that they foiled a terrorist plot.
It's sickening.
Okay.
So those are the same people who are now talking about this.
But make no mistake about it.
He is very clearly saying, we want George W. Bush, Dick Cheney's war on terror at home.
That's what he's advocating for.
The war on terrorism, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of innocent people being slaughtered.
We want that right here in the United States of America.
And liberals are fucking cheering for it.
And but along the uh, I that's the craziness is exactly what you're describing.
And then what can they define as being domestic terrorism?
And along lines of entrapment, it looks like the head of the Proud Boys was a fucking FBI informant.
So understand that you're creating a play like a precedent where these guys clearly want to be in the news where they go, hey, look at what this far right groups are doing.
And they apparently want to drum that up.
And now they want to be able to get a domestic terrorism title.
Who knows how that's going to be applied?
So they can drum anybody up and get you.
And you don't need to commit a crime.
Now it's not like you have to actually don't do anything violent.
Don't commit any crimes and be very suspicious of anybody who is trying to get you to.
That would be my advice for everybody.
But now it's even without the crime.
Because now what he's saying is without the crime, the activity itself should be labeled domestic terrorism.
So you can be in trouble for a non-crime.
That doesn't make sense.
Yeah.
So, right.
In a situation where you couldn't get a conviction for a violent crime, but you still can call them domestic terrorists or whatever.
And of course, it's like no one was saying, you know, when Rand Paul and his wife were surrounded and assaulted by that angry mob, nobody was calling them, you know, domestic terrorists.
There's no, so this will be applied when convenient.
So if it's a guy like Rand Paul, who on more than one occasion stands up to the establishment, then they're not really going to use this to defend him.
But if it's Nancy Pelosi, then of course they will.
All right, let's play the end of this.
We would be listening to them.
We are allowed to listen to calls from the moment.
Let me catch you up.
We listen to those people here.
There's terrorists here.
So there's international terrorism law here.
But doesn't it have to be connected to something overseas?
It does.
Okay, but these people, the people who attacked the Capitol, they would not be in that category.
These are just within the shores of America.
It's a little bit different.
That's my point, is that it's time to reach.
So you're saying we should be able to listen on them too.
I'm saying that the FBI is saying.
I'm not against that.
No, I'm just saying, let's talk it out.
I'm saying when FBI agents rank and file write a letter to Congress, as they did last year, and said the domestic terrorism occurring under this administration is something we can't handle and don't have the investigative tools for, and we need a domestic terrorism law.
When the folks who are charged with protecting us say they can't do it, we should listen to them.
Let me pause the answer proposed frequently.
What domestic terrorism?
What major problem existed under Donald Trump of white nationalist domestic terrorism?
What is he talking about?
What was the FBI still concerned of?
What happened?
I don't remember.
You have to understand when the rank and file people who are charged with protecting us tell us to shred the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I mean, we just got to do it.
We got to do it.
Rank and file.
When they tell us we can't handle a non-problem.
Hey, there's no problem here and we can't handle it.
Now, of course, this is bullshit that it's coming from the rank and file.
That's just what they say because they already know that the American people absolutely despise the upper ring of the fucking FBI.
So they're just like, no, it's just like regular Joe and Steve.
You know, they make 60K a year, good people, and they're, you know, bullshit.
And we know already that the FBI does spy on Americans and that they'll, they'll lie.
In fact, one FBI lawyer actually went to jail over this shit, that they'll lie to the FISA courts to get permission to spy on American citizens.
So he does correctly point out that we'll spy on them.
And then Bill Maher, I mean, man, just talk about being good for nothing.
He has to make the point.
I don't even disagree with that.
Oh, yeah, I'm open.
I'm open to the idea of not even without pretense, just shredding the Fourth Amendment.
You should be guilty of that.
I'm open to that idea.
You should just be guilty of the unqualified label of domestic terrorism, which then you can be placed in jail.
The label doesn't need to be qualified.
A crime doesn't need to be committed, but it's really important to address this non-issue that anybody can be labeled as a domestic terrorist and then put in jail.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's just play.
I think it's almost over.
Let's just play the last few seconds.
And even the Senate, and it keeps getting knocked down.
It gets knocked down because of civil civil liberties concerns.
Well, it's time now to call it what it is.
There we go.
Damn, those civil liberty concerns.
Yeah, that's really, that's just, and this is always, this is so out of the Bush-Cheney playbook.
That's what's the thing is, right?
What's holding us back is these stupid civil liberties.
There it is right there.
It's like if these goddamn civil liberties weren't just in our way, we could really just end all these problems.
Then we wouldn't have to worry about domestic terrorism anymore.
Of course, who would look at America over the last year and say, you know what the problem is here?