James Smith and Dave Smith critique Biden's tax plan for ignoring billionaires while penalizing the middle class, mock his stumble-induced Putin comparisons, and condemn George W. Bush as an elitist war criminal. The core debate focuses on Rand Paul challenging Dr. Fauci over mask mandates; Paul cites studies showing natural immunity prevents severe reinfection, labeling continued masking as authoritarian theater, while Fauci relies on conjecture about variants like the South African strain to justify indefinite control. Ultimately, the hosts argue that prioritizing potential future risks over current data represents a dangerous shift toward permanent authoritarianism disguised as public health safety. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roll Back The State00:14:43
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is the king of the Cox, Robbie the Fire, Bernstein.
What is up, my brother?
How you feeling this Wednesday evening?
Wednesday evening?
You're all fucked up, dude.
Oh, sorry.
Jesus.
Your week's over.
It's Friday.
Have another drink.
Relax.
It's the weekend.
I'm killing you over there.
This show's working you too hard, buddy.
Time for a vacation.
Friday.
Wednesday.
Where did that come from?
Friday evening.
Well, I apologize because we missed the live stream for today's show.
I had to switch things around.
I was under the impression it was Wednesday.
There's a whole bunch of problems going on.
So I guess tomorrow I'm speaking at the New Jersey convention.
You had a Biden moment.
It happens.
I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding.
I did know that I was speaking at the convention tomorrow.
Yeah, Biden.
Biden had a rough day.
The stairs had a rough day.
It's been, it was tough all around.
Look, man, everyone slips and falls sometimes.
I thought the first time he fell, you'd be a dick to laugh.
The second time he fell, it'd be hard not to laugh.
And the third time he fell, you'd be a dick if you didn't laugh at him.
Like by that point, it was just like, okay, this is just, this is comedy.
Gold can't look away from that.
Oh, he really, he did try to jog it off afterward, though, and gave that little salute.
I'm okay.
Those stairs are getting fired.
Oh, yeah.
The stairs are getting executed after all that shit.
Yeah, you're never seeing him walking solo anywhere ever again.
There's always going to be someone behind him and to the right.
Yeah.
It's like when you take out your grandfather.
That's what you got to do.
It gets uncomfortable at some point, but you end up at that stage.
Well, that's, I don't know.
Running up some stairs, falling down three times.
That's as good as a press conference.
You gave the American people the entertainment that they needed.
Joe Biden does not do the press conferences.
He did, however, do an interview, which have also been pretty rare, but he did an interview the other day.
It was weird and Biden-ish.
There were a few things of note about the interview, but I think the biggest one was his tough talk about Vladimir Putin.
He went out of his way to call Vladimir Putin a killer, which was odd.
Vladimir Putin responded in much wittier fashion than Joe Biden ever does.
But I got to say, did you hear what Putin said?
He said, it takes one to know one.
Funnier than that, though, is that usually if you want to challenge another dude, you know, it's got to be a fight or something of epic proportions.
When it comes to Biden, you can just challenge him to a conversation.
I challenge you to a high five.
You'll never make it out alive.
You'll never survive this ruling contest.
Oh my God, could you, you know, it sure would be entertaining to see a Biden versus Putin debate.
Don't get me wrong.
There's no chance that we're going to see this.
But you know, I got to say, it pushed me to my very limits of internal patriotism, where I actually, you know, in thinking about the idea of Biden debating Vladimir Putin, it would kind of hurt me as an American.
Like, I didn't, I didn't even have that thought.
To watch Vladimir Putin would dismember Joe Biden in a debate.
And it would be hard.
That'd be hard as an American.
And forget the whole government.
You know, I hate the American government.
I have no feeling of, you know, support or loyalty to them.
But just as an American to look at that and go, yeah, this is who we made our leader.
And that's who you guys made your leader.
And he's just wiping the floor with our guy.
That would hurt a little bit.
Well, I think that if anything, we would be able to expose some of the American propaganda and probably Putin would rough him up in terms of talking about the wars.
So it would probably actually expose some of our flaws and potentially make us a better country.
So I didn't even have the thought of, like, if anything, it's just hilarious to me to see Biden get challenged to a conversation and he knows he can't take that because it wouldn't go well.
Oh, yeah, no question.
I mean, I don't know if you ever saw Putin did these long form.
Oh, didn't we watch part of this?
Yeah, we watched it with Dan Snowder.
It was great.
That's right.
We watched it at my old, old, old apartment like five years ago or whenever it was that this happened.
But it was Oliver Stone interviewed Vladimir Putin.
And yeah, Putin, you know, he's an interesting guy.
And he, of course, because he knows a decent amount of this stuff, I mean, he can just destroy the American empire in these debates.
And look, this is what these type of leaders always do.
They're very good on the crimes of their enemies.
They're not so great on the crimes of their own government.
But yeah, I mean, him just, he would just wreck Joe Biden over all the wars.
And I mean, the lines are right there.
He's like, you call me a killer.
Let's compare numbers.
Let's compare body counts, you know?
Because it really is kind of like, you know, it's like some serial killer calling a guy who got in a fight a criminal, you know?
And also, you know, you talk about Russian interference.
It'd be fun to sit down with the source and have him actually throw some fucking curveballs of intelligence that they have on nefarious things that we're doing.
Well, I mean, you're sitting here, your government is giving missiles to our hostile neighbor, and you're talking about, you know, interference in your election.
It's just, you know, it's unbelievable.
But it does make you wonder because Joe Biden, you know, Joe Biden is a very handled politician.
And, you know, one of the things that's really just hard to understand and really kind of amazing to watch is like the, you know, I remember back when Trump was having the negotiations with Kim Jong-un.
And okay, I mean, they didn't get maybe as far as would have been, you know, hopefully, we would have hoped or, you know, every problem certainly isn't solved.
You know, we got some hostages back.
We opened up.
You know, the president went to, you know, South Korea with the North Korean leader.
They crossed over the DMZ together.
I mean, you know, it was something.
But of course, he hired John Bolton, who ended up tanking the whole thing.
I remember the media just constantly trying to like throw dirt on the whole process.
And you'd be sitting there and you'd be like, wow, I mean, they are just so reckless.
Like, here you have the president talking to a hostile nuclear-armed country.
And you just want to, like, I don't know, you want to prod at creating more tensions here.
And it's just, it's hard to understand why.
You're dealing with a country in Russia that has economically is absolutely no threat to anybody.
You know, I mean, they're just in terms of the strength of their economy compared to ours, they are, it's a child compared to an adult, you know?
But they have a whole bunch of deliverable nuclear weapons, you know?
And so why are you, what's the point in just talking shit?
Like, you're a killer, Vladimir Putin.
What's the point of this?
We just have to maintain this bullshit narrative that Russia is somehow our enemy, is somehow a threat to us.
And, you know, it's like, yeah, Vladimir Putin is a killer, you know, okay, fair enough.
Probably some of it with his own hands, as Brian was pointing out before we started recording, you know?
But compared to what state leader?
You know, aren't they pretty much all killers?
And he's the most successful.
He's the richest guy on the planet.
Is Putin the richest guy?
Probably.
I mean, probably, not officially, not on paper, but probably.
Well, look, I mean, I'm just saying, you, you know, you kind of, if you're going to talk about world leaders in this way, you have to kind of judge on a curve.
And it's not as if he's not his communist predecessors who killed tens of millions of people.
He's not, you know, he's not the Chinese government, doesn't have that type of blood on his hands.
He's not the Saudis who's, you know, committing basically a war of genocide on the people of Yemen, you know?
He's not the Americans.
He's not NATO.
I mean, he's got far less blood on his hands than all these other countries.
So to single him out and call him a killer, it's just, first off, it doesn't make any sense.
And it's like, what is the strategic benefit here?
Are they really just that humiliated that they spent the four years trying to convince everybody that Russia was in bed with Donald Trump and they conspired together to steal the election and the fact that they spent whatever, $40 million and weren't able to prove anything.
It's just, it was very strange.
And so in that sense, yeah, you did, you almost find yourself like rooting for Putin, you know, which is a weird position to be in.
But when he's like, he's like, oh, it takes one and no one, you know, I'm like that gif of all the black kids watching a rat battle or whatever.
Like, oh, damn.
Whatever.
You know the gif I'm talking about.
Anyway.
Is that you, Rob?
Yeah, it sounds like someone's vacuuming in the hallway.
Can't really control that.
It sounds like they're vacuuming on top of your desk.
All right.
Anyway, so that was pretty weird.
One of the other things from the interview that was weird, and I know Tucker Carlson had a whole segment on this that's going viral where Tucker was coming out saying, what's the point of taxation anymore?
But so Joe Biden said that his plan is if you make $400,000 a year or more, you are going to see your taxes raised.
Nobody beneath $400,000 a year is going to see tax increases.
And so Tucker had this segment that went kind of viral.
And he was saying, you know, he goes, look, it's not like our taxes pay for the government anymore.
We've all embraced this like MMT garbage.
So why not just print the money?
Why punish the people who make $400,000 a year and have a family?
And it's not like you're increasing corporate taxes or capital gains taxes.
You're not really punishing like the rich.
So you're really just kind of punishing, you know.
a family of four who makes $400,000 a year in a big city that's not even really that rich.
You're basically middle class.
If you live in a big city and you got four kids and you make $400,000 a year at this point, it's nothing.
You're certainly not rich.
You know what I mean?
I don't even know if you're upper middle class.
I guess technically, but like you're pretty much middle class.
That's pretty much what you are.
And so it was, you know.
It's crazy to think, though, you're living with debt on your house, insurance.
And if you're sending all those kids to college, you got no money.
I mean, it's great.
It's awesome making $400,000 a year.
You know, that's 10 years of income to me.
Right.
But I don't have any kids.
Yeah.
Well, it's a whole different ballgame once you got kids because it drives everything else, every other cost up.
And it's not just you have to have more of a home.
Kids are expensive.
You're feeding more people.
You're clothing more people.
You have to buy all types of toys and stuff like this.
But the real killer, as you mentioned, is education.
Basically, one way or the other.
I mean, if you're making a little bit of money, if you're sending your kids to public school, then you're going to try to get into a good public school area where the property taxes are going to be very high.
And if the property taxes, even if you don't own, if you rent, you're still paying for those property taxes indirectly.
It's going to be incorporated into your rent prices.
Health insurance costs go up drastically when you have kids that you got to pay for as well.
And then I guess for a lot of families, daycare and stuff like that, I mean, you're either going to sacrifice one income in your house or you're going to have to spend some type of money for child care.
So it's, yeah, I mean, anyway, those people certainly aren't rich, but it was an interesting, you know, it's an interesting thing to kind of think through where it's just that the funny thing, right, for people like me and you who kind of live in these economic realities, you know, these are the things that we like to focus on a lot that most people just have no interest in even thinking about.
And when you hear one of these Democrats, especially in this year where we were set to spend about $5 trillion, they added another $1.9 trillion to that.
Who knows what else is going to be added?
I bet we'll top $7 trillion to be a modest projection this year.
And they talk about, well, we're going to raise taxes to handle this.
And they go, well, I guess you're going to have to raise everyone's taxes in a huge way.
No, no, no.
Just people making $400,000 a year or more.
Taxing The Super Rich00:05:57
Like, this is just such a joke.
It's such a joke.
I mean, if they taxed everyone's income at 100%, they couldn't pay off the debt.
You know what I mean?
Like, this is just, you can't tax your way out of this situation.
You'd actually have to start seizing people's assets and retirement accounts and things like that.
But so the plan, it does nothing to actually grapple with the fiscal insolvency.
And all it seems to do is punish people.
And that, you know, so doing okay in life for being good citizens.
Yeah.
And of course, we never really get to, you know, it's the truth is that there are all types of like crony billionaires in this country who are basically on welfare.
I have no problem being punished.
I mean, I'd rather just take them off welfare.
But I don't really care if the CEO of, you know, JP Morgan Chase or something like that gets some type of, you know, punishment.
But the people who make $400,000 a year, $500,000 a year, typically aren't, you know, somebody who like came from old money or is, you know, some crony capitalist.
Doctor in their 40s, married to a lawyer in their 40s.
Exactly.
It's just somebody who was, you know, smart and worked really hard.
That's basically who you're going after for this.
It's not somebody who's like, you know, it's not a former senator who went and worked in the weapons manufacturing industry who's making $10 million a year.
You're talking about, yeah, like you said, it's the dentist, the dentist married to the accountant.
That's who we're going to go after and punish them.
So it really was just, to me, it's like, I don't know.
It's just awful and wrong.
And I hate how those people, and this has been a Democratic.
Didn't he say, mark my words, no new taxes?
Wasn't that one of his things earlier?
He said, if you're making under $400,000 a year.
Oh, so I guess he's making, yeah, but what's $400,000 going to be when all this inflation comes?
Well, that's another, that's another question.
Everyone's going to be over fire.
That's another good question.
But my point, you know, the larger point, you're absolutely right.
But I just hate, and this is the thing the Democrats have done for a long time, is that they kind of like, they take all of this money from billionaires, from the billionaire class.
They're completely supported by these giant corporations.
They're completely in bed with all of the big banks and the weapons manufacturers and, you know, the Silicon Valley, you know, Titans and all this stuff.
And then they turn around and act like the guy making $300,000, $400,000 a year is the big guy, which sounds kind of plausible to the little guy.
You know, because like, again, the average American income is something like $35,000 a year.
So to that guy, $400,000 a year, you're like, yeah, motherfucker, that guy's, you know, making, that's the rich guy, but that's not the rich guy.
And, you know, who knows that?
The Democrats.
They know that because they're actually going to cosmetal parties with the rich guy.
The other side of that equation, though, is the guy who's making $35K a year, that means that his health insurance is going to be practically free.
He's not going to have any insurance on his business.
And he also probably doesn't have any student debt.
So that $200,000 a year guy, he probably has massive insurance costs both for male practice on his business.
Also, he's got to carry all of his own insurance costs.
He's also, because he's going to be responsible, you're going to be looking at just like, you know, your life insurance or long-term care because he's not going to be relying on Medicaid when he's over the, you know, the age of 65 or whatever else.
Exactly.
This is what happens, right?
Is that the guy who makes $400,000 a year ends up paying about half of it in taxes when all taxes are accounted for?
So he doesn't make $400,000 a year.
And then he's also paying full full education costs.
Exactly.
He's paying full insurance.
Full health care, full everything.
And when it comes down to it, the divide is not as far.
You remember the old George Carlin bet?
That's such a great bet.
I hope I don't butcher it, where he's like, he goes, in this country, the super rich do none of the work and they pay none of the taxes.
The middle class do all of the work and pay all of the taxes.
And the poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class.
And that's the old Carlin, but it's a great bit, you know?
It's not exactly completely true, but there's a lot of truth to it.
And so that's, you know, this is the, you know, the bleed.
Like if the Democrats were serious at all about bleeding the rich and actually taking back money from the rich through government.
Now, okay.
Me and you would probably just point out that this entire system is rigged for the super rich.
And all you'd have to do is stop rigging the system for them, you know, and let them survive by their own weight.
And if they did, that's because they're adding value to others.
And if they don't, then fine, they don't.
But regardless of all that, if your argument was, okay, we have to actually bleed the super rich, you would be talking about, you know, raising capital gains taxes.
You would be talking about corporate taxes.
You would be, forget the fact that we know more about economics than they do.
You know, like if you didn't, but you were sincere about trying to bleed the rich, that's what you'd be going after.
You wouldn't be going after the guy who makes a few hundred K a year.
I'm sorry.
That's just not, that's not bleeding the super rich.
A Rigged System00:17:44
You're not even touching them.
And of course, as it always works, is that the super rich, the people with a net worth of $50 million or something like that, they have an army of accountants and tax lawyers who are going to figure out every loophole and every best way to avoid all this shit.
And the guy making 400K a year probably just has like one decent accountant, you know, like it's not, anyway, so that stuck out to me, pissed me off a little bit.
Yeah.
All right.
So that was Biden.
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All right.
So there's another piece of, speaking of career establishment politicians and blood-soaked monsters, the one and only George W. Bush has made a little bit of a comeback into politics.
Now, I will say to George W. Bush's credit, and I will not say this often, to George, mark this moment down, to George W. Bush's credit.
He has largely gone away since his disastrous presidency.
Largely doesn't really insert himself into the narrative that much.
He's somewhere painting if there's he paints his victims.
Yeah, I guess, painting little dead Iraqis.
No, the soldiers he sent to war that got that were wounded.
Yes, yes, that's right.
And I wonder, now nobody has ever accused George W. Bush of being a bright man, but I wonder if there's any level of him that just feels any guilt for what he's done.
I do believe that George W. Bush was basically himself handled and misled into a lot of his world this way.
And this is borders on conspiracy talk and you can't get inside these people's heads.
But if you looked at it as living in the Bush kingship and he's Prince Bush in the kingship of Bushes, and he gets into that position that they want to be in so that they can drive their oil profits and have the war that they want.
So then he gets to return.
He's the hero of the Bush, the Bush kingdom.
You know what I mean?
For the rest of the world, it's fucking horrible, evil.
But since the day he's born, I mean, you got to look at his dad.
His dad was CIA, vice president, and you know what I mean?
He carried out the mission.
That's the honor of the family right there.
That is true.
But I also think that, and there are like some of these presidential historians who go in and take interviews with everybody and talk to them and they write books, the Bob Woodward types and people like that.
And there are a lot of accounts that George W. Bush was really misled by a lot of the neocons.
And I don't think that that's impossible.
Now, it doesn't mean that everything you just said isn't true also.
But I'm just saying that, you know, like Paul Wolfowitz, I believe it was, Pat Buchanan wrote in his book about this, that Paul Wolfowitz was bragging about George W. Bush to like the other neocons and national review types that he was bragging that we've got, listen, this Bush kid is amazing.
He's our guy.
And he was saying specifically, because he goes, look, this guy is the son of a president.
He's a Christian from Texas and he doesn't know anything.
Like we can do whatever we want with this guy.
Like Paul Wolfowitz knows he can't run for president.
You know what I mean?
Like he knows no one's going to vote for him.
But this guy, we could get the Republicans to support this guy.
And he said, I remember this was shit.
I think it was in Pat Buchanan's book, Where the Right Went Wrong.
But this is years ago that I read it.
So I might be getting the wrong title.
But he basically said that Wolfowitz was bragging that not only did George Bush not know anything, but he would ask questions that would indicate how little he knows and not feel embarrassed to ask the question.
And like anyone else, you would just be like, oh my God, I can't believe he even just asked that question.
But he would just throw it out there.
And so this is one of the things he loved about him.
And I do believe that George W. Bush was sold in a lot of ways that after 9-11, they were like, you're going to be a great president because we're going to go into Iraq.
It's going to be a cakewalk.
You're going to be singing this.
You know, you're going to be celebrating.
You're going to transform the region.
You're going to go down with Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln and FDR and like all these great presidents and all this stuff.
And by the end of his presidency, he just realized like, oh my God, this was all a disaster.
Now, I don't know.
This is all kind of speculation.
I don't know.
Anyway, he's gone away and been painting troops, as you said, for quite a while, right?
And apples and stuff like that.
So that, but he did pop his head back out.
And I thought it was very interesting to see what he had to say.
The corporate press coverage of it and just one more demonstration of the unbelievable disconnect between where the country is at and where the establishment and the press are, you know, mentally.
And anyway, so I have a clip here of from Don Lemon again on CNN and a couple guests here.
Heavy sent lady.
Go.
Yes, that's right.
Now she is the resident, you know, Republican who was there to bash Donald Trump every two seconds.
But anyway, let's play this clip and we'll break it down a little bit.
I found it kind of interesting.
I was sick to my stomach and to see our nation's capital being stormed by hostile forces.
And it really disturbed me to the point where I did put out a statement.
And I'm still disturbed when I think about it.
It undermines rule of law and the ability to express yourself in peaceful ways in the public square.
This was an expression that was not peaceful.
So what do you think about that?
Because this is a former president who has largely stayed out of politics.
A Texas Republican talking about the rule of law for real.
That's the kind of rhetoric we need to hear from Republicans about clarity about defending our Democratic institutions, about compassion for communities that are under distress, and total moral clarity flowing all through it.
Chiproy could learn a lot from George W. Bush.
So could the entire Republican Party already?
Just pause it right here, right?
Isn't it unbelievable just the way CNN talks about George W. Bush and the way George W. Bush talks about seeing, you know, with no sense of irony, no sense of irony whatsoever, talking about seeing an invasion of hostile forces.
This doesn't like fuck with you just to get the word out of your mouth and to go, ah, you know, you're kind of associated with hostile forces invading.
Oh, peace and the rule of law.
And it's like, dude, you are responsible for a war that everyone has admitted was a terrible mistake, a terrible blunder that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
You instituted torture.
I mean, like all of these things.
You'd be like kind of amazed to see this.
But so here is, and this is what I mean about the disconnect that's so crazy.
Here is the guy, the president, the two-term president, for the first two-term president in the 21st century who blew this whole thing.
That literally rolled the dice on the most successful country of all time and may have brought it down.
I mean, let's get real.
20 years into the 21st century, things aren't going great.
Things are not going great for the country.
And here's this guy who blew it all down.
And you're watching in so many ways the ramifications, the manifestation of all of the disaster that this guy brought to the country years later.
And he'll just sit there and condemn it.
And CNN's response, you know, these guys who are so hard on the Republicans and on Donald Trump, they sit there and they go, yeah, now that's a true statesman, a Texas Republican talking about the rule of law and who really means it.
And everybody else ought to take note.
Everybody else ought to.
You know, it's, and by the way, you know, I hear this thing.
It's kind of like a boomer con almost like talking point, but where they'll say that they go, oh, I can't wait till the next Republican president because then they'll be saying Trump wasn't so bad, but this guy's really, really bad.
And that's bullshit.
Let me tell you something.
Donald Trump will never be spoken of in this way, never again, or never at all.
He'll never be beloved the way George W. Bush was.
You know why?
Because at the end of all of this, George W. Bush is one of them.
And Donald Trump wasn't.
Donald Trump might be a rich developer, but he's like from Queens.
He was never really in the club.
He's not their guy.
And his crime was that he was never enthusiastically behind the empire, really.
I mean, he went along with it and let it continue, but always with a kind of like, well, this is stupid.
I don't really believe in this.
Maybe we should just end this, you know?
Now, that's unacceptable to them.
But George W. Bush, he's one of them.
He's the CIA man's boy, you know, and he's their guy.
And so now they're all going to try to do, you know, damage control on his legacy.
And though he fucking destroyed the Republic, but we're supposed to pretend that, oh, yeah, he's really outraged seeing this.
I mean, yeah, it was violent after all.
It was a violent invasion, far more violent than the war in Iraq.
You know, this was really, this was really something.
This would be awesome to watch.
It'd be awesome if Trump actually wrote a textbook, like a history textbook, and he described him and said, I was the best AK, he was great.
And then it's like, and there was Hillary, she was a nasty lady.
That's all you got to know.
It's almost like a picture book of just like one lines from Trump.
Yeah, yeah.
Battle Trump's history of America.
History starts the day he was born.
Really?
He goes, so I was born, then there was some bullshit, and then he became president.
Okay.
This is basically all you need to know.
I built the best buildings, okay?
Yeah.
All right, let's keep playing.
And Bush was asked if he thought the election was stolen.
He said no.
And then he also said this.
Look, politics has always been rough, Evan.
And right now we're at a period of time, though, when there's a lot of anger in the system, which then causes people to worry about the future of our democracy.
I think it's going to eventually work its way out of the system.
History in the United States has shown these populist movements begin to tritter over time.
And so I'm optimistic about democracy.
Yeah.
And I know the anger in the system with populist movements.
I mean, that shows the creepiness of the powers that be that they're, firstly, they're one and the same to them.
A populist movement is no different than labeling people as domestic terrorism.
That's people who are against the system.
And over time, people just give way.
They go, it's all right.
We'll take it up the pooper.
Yeah, it's really something to watch George W. Bush, you know?
And look, I'm not, I'm not an apologist for the Bill Clinton presidency at all.
And there were plenty of problems.
And, you know, I was dips out.
Well, there were some good stuff too.
But I'm just saying, we could do, you know, we could spend a year podcasting on how terrible Bill Clinton was and all this stuff.
But what George W. Bush inherited to what he handed over to Barack Obama, you know, like what the country, what he did to the country in those eight years, it was, I mean, short of just setting fire to the whole place, it was about as mismanaged as could possibly be.
I mean, he led us into two disastrous wars that we're still in today.
George W. Bush left office in 2008.
We're still in the wars that he had already been fighting for six or seven years by 2008.
Okay.
He left us with the worst recession in modern American history.
It was just as an unmitigated disaster.
Okay.
So for him to look around and go, you know, sure is a lot of anger out there.
As if this is just some thing.
Like, it's just, I don't know where it came from.
Obviously, we can't point fingers.
You know, I'm not going to, you know, like, wouldn't you, dude, if you were like just like any level of a thoughtful, decent person, and you had that track record, and then you saw a decade later, you know, the country just coming apart at the seams, and there was all this anger out there.
Wouldn't there just be something in you to be like, you know, I see all this anger out there and I wonder, you know, if I contributed to it at all or, you know, I hope I didn't have any role in this, right?
Oh, maybe I could have done this better or this better.
There were mistakes made.
No, no, no, none of that.
It's just, it's like an external thing.
There's this anger out there.
It's a real problem.
Couldn't tell you where it came from.
Certainly, I have nothing to do with it.
You know what I mean?
As the guy who destroyed, the only reason why Donald Trump ever became even the nominee, even the frontrunner to become the nominee, even could enter the race and not get laughed out of it was because George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party.
Destroyed.
Do you know what Obama's presidential campaign against John McCain was?
It was basically like, you're a Republican, just like Bush.
That was pretty much what he said.
That was a talking point that Barack Obama ran on.
He goes, you voted with Bush.
That was it.
That was it.
You voted with the Republicans, with George W. Bush's Republicans.
How's that worked out?
And almost no one in this country could look themselves in the mirror and go, yeah, this worked out good, I guess.
No, the only reason Trump ever rose up is because you, sir, destroyed the Republican Party.
And you left it with Barack Hussein Obama becoming president.
You know, just a guy, everyone, when Bush took office in the year 2001, if you had just said, could a guy with that name win?
They'd have said, no, there's no chance.
There's no chance a guy with that name could win.
Regardless of any of that.
Of course, he lost the House.
He lost the Senate.
He lost everything.
And he lost the culture.
Completely lost the entire, you know, destroyed, did more damage to the evangelical Christian influence in this country, the right-wing base than anybody else.
And then you look around and see like, oh, there's this anger now.
And just kind of, yeah, it's just this ugly thing.
And like you said, it's just, oh, the peasants, they're angry.
It's just this really ugly quality that they have.
And then it really is something to see George W. Bush, who is, you know, as much, as you pointed out, as much of an elitist as you could be.
He's the grandson of a senator, the son of the head of the CIA, vice president and president.
You know, this is as elitist as you can get.
And for him to sit there and be like, and this, this populism, this is really this nasty thing, you know, when people try to, that they have these movements that are all about helping the average person and anti-elite.
I mean, that's just an ugly thing.
The Bush Elite Legacy00:04:17
Well, I don't know.
How about, again, how about a little bit of reflection?
I mean, you are the poster child of a silver spoon elite.
You know what I mean?
So why is it so easy for us to demonize you?
Maybe it's because you destroyed millions and millions of people's lives.
That might be part of it.
I mean, tens of millions of people's lives were destroyed by this guy.
And perhaps, as I said at the beginning, he was manipulated too, but whatever.
It was still him.
He allowed himself to be manipulated.
So now let's hear, if we could just bring it back a second, now let's hear how CNN reacts to this elitist demonizing the people and commenting on the anger that's out there.
Let's watch the cable news network, how they respond to it.
And I'm curious, is he being overly optimistic or not?
You know, if you know anything about the Bush family, that's kind of their nature, to be optimistic and believe in the institutions.
He also said, Don, if I can just read, I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election and by the lack of respect shown today for our institutions, our traditions, and our law enforcement.
It made me think of the interview you had yesterday with Officer Dunn.
And I have to tell you, I think George W. Bush was talking yes as a former president.
This is a family who has a deep connection with the Capitol and with institutions in Washington for generations and generations.
His grandfather served as a senator there.
But I think he's also talking like an American.
Look, January 6th is going to be one of these days that's going to go down in history for all of us.
It's, you know, like 9-11, like the day the Challenger exploded, like the day John F. Kennedy was shot for those who were alive then, where you remember how you felt.
You remember where you were.
You remember how you learned about it because it was an attack.
So forget just the ridiculous.
You know, January 6th is going to go down a lot like 9-11.
It's pretty much the same thing.
Every bit is horrible.
I mean, in one, a cop shot a lady.
And in the other, thousands of Americans were killed, you know, while we were attacked.
But yeah, okay, sure.
They're the exact same thing.
It'll go down just like that.
But if you could forget that for a little bit, I really just thought this was one example in my, you know, mountain of examples in this case against the corporate press that I've been prosecuting for a decade.
But we might as well just have state media, right?
I mean, it might as well, it might as well just.
I mean, let's be honest about it.
They probably are.
Yes.
You got Brennan working there.
You leave the CIA and you go work at the people that comment on government.
They probably are.
Yeah.
I mean, the idea that like, you know, like if there were some dictator who just only allowed state-sanctioned, you know, propaganda news coverage, would it look any different than this?
Any different at all?
I mean, the idea that they pass themselves off as like, we hold the powerful, you know, their feet to the fire, we hold them accountable.
And you just sit there waxing poetic about the institutions and the royal families and how great they are and the official building and every like, holy shit.
I mean, it's just so naked.
They don't even try to pretend it.
You know, the Bush family, they just really know.
You know, it's like Joe Biden called Vladimir Putin killers.
Who do you think Bush's family is?
This noble family and their granddad who was, you know, helping the Nazis, their dad, who was the head of the CIA, who was, you know, whatever, man.
I mean, I could go through the crimes of the Bushes again.
What does dad do for the Nazis?
I mean, his granddad.
It was all types of like finance stuff where he was like, he was a partner in a bank that ended up getting down and a nice stake in Hitler.
Him and Hitler.
They were a voter team together.
Questioning Fauci's Studies00:17:23
No, you can go, if you want to go get lost in a rabbit hole, there's one for you.
Go have a nice Google journey on that.
But there's, you know, if you want, again, we could do a podcast every day for the next year about the crimes of the Bush family.
But the idea to just like put them back, oh, yeah, they're just these wonderful people who really care about the institutions and all this.
It's like, excuse me, why do you think so many people hate these institutions?
It's because they've been failing so many goddamn people.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
Let's switch gears a little bit here because we're coming toward the end of the show and I wanted to talk about a really interesting back and forth interaction that happened with Rand Paul and our Lord and Savior, Dr. Fauci, whose name shall never be questioned.
That Fauci was testifying.
Excuse me.
Fauci was testifying before a Senate hearing.
And it's always fun when Rand Paul gets to grill him.
Rand Paul, you can tell at this point, has fucking had it with Dr. Fauci.
And I don't know, Rob, did you see this?
Yeah, it was great.
Oh, yeah.
Just wonderful.
All right.
So let's jump into that.
Let's play some of this clip and have some fun.
Dr. Fauci, in a recent British study, David Wiley and others found that no symptomatic reinfections from COVID-19 after following 2,800 patients for several months.
In fact, there have been no reports of significant numbers of reinfections after acquiring COVID-19 naturally.
Shane Croughty, a virologist at La Jolla Institute for Immunology, concludes from his experiments that the amount of immune memory gained from natural infection would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease for many years.
In this study, which was published in Science, Dr. Crowdy showed that antibody levels stayed relatively constant with only modest declines over six to eight months.
Dr. Crotty reported that notably, memory B cells specific for the spike protein or RBD were detected in almost all COVID-19 cases with no apparent half-life at five to eight months after infection.
In other words, Dr. Crotty found significant evidence of long-term immunity after COVID infection.
Furthermore, Dr. Crowdy noted B cell memory to some other infections has been observed for as long as 60 plus years after smallpox vaccination or even 90 years after a natural infection with influenza.
That was a woman who got the Spanish flu still showed immunity 90 years later.
So rather than being pessimistic towards people gaining immunity after they've had COVID or had a vaccine, studies argue for significant optimism.
In fact, there have been no scientific studies arguing or proving that infection with COVID does not create immunity.
There have been no studies showing significant numbers of reinfections.
Of the 30 million Americans who have had COVID, only a handful of reinfections have been discovered.
In fact, the New York Times reported last fall, more than 38 million people at the time worldwide had been infected with the coronavirus.
And as of that date, fewer than five of these cases had been confirmed by scientists to be reinfections.
Scientists interviewed for the article concluded, in most cases, a second bout with the virus produced milder symptoms or none at all.
Given that no scientific studies have shown significant numbers of reinfections of patients previously infected or previously vaccinated, what specific studies do you cite to argue that the public should be wearing masks well into 2022?
I'm not sure I understand the connection of what you're saying about masks and reinfection.
We're talking about people who have never been infected before.
You're telling everybody to wear it.
So let's just be clear about what Rand Paul is saying here and what Dr. Fauci's response.
So Rand Paul is referring to Dr. Fauci suggesting that we should be wearing masks through 2022, which is something that he's said on many different news shows and that he's argued and advised President Biden on.
Okay.
And Rand Paul is saying, well, look, all of the major studies that have been done, there's none that in any way conclusively indicate that people who have had COVID or have had the COVID vaccine, okay,
can really get, it's not that they can't get COVID again, but they get it with much milder symptoms that, and in the vast majority of cases, they're asymptomatic, meaning you can get it again, but you don't get sick, okay?
And that's kind of what the whole thing's about, right?
Getting sick.
That's what people care about.
And he's saying that there seems to be a lot of risk.
Do they spread it, though?
In the rare cases, I guess that they get it and they're asymptomatic.
Do they still spread it?
Yes.
Well, no, not again, this isn't conclusive, but the evidence seems to suggest that you can't spread it if you're asymptomatic.
If you are symptomatic, then you possibly can spread it.
But the point that he's making here is, right?
If you either get it or you get the vaccine, you're basically not at risk.
This is what a lot of studies seem to point to, that there's almost no risk of you getting it and getting very sick.
So yes, theoretically, if there's someone out there who hasn't gotten it, you could get it a second time, have some symptoms, and spread it to them.
That is true.
But he's making the point that there doesn't seem to be any indication that people who have had COVID are going to get COVID again and get very sick from it.
So when you're talking about the vaccine being available May 1st, as the president suggests, why would we be saying you need to be wearing a mask through next year if everyone will be able to get the vaccine if they want it at that point?
And then you'll be in a situation where you can choose not to get the vaccine and take the risk of perhaps contracting it for the first time if you've never had it.
But that between all of the people who voluntarily take the vaccine and all of the people who have already had COVID, you're going to have an incredibly high amount of herd immunity at this point.
So why would it make sense?
So this is his point.
And Dr. Fauci's first response is, I don't understand what you're talking about.
I don't know what you're asking me.
So let's keep playing.
Infection or a vaccine.
What I'm saying is they have immunity and everybody agrees they have immunity.
What studies do you have that people that have had the vaccine or have had the infection are spreading the infection?
If we're not spreading the infection, isn't it just theater?
No, it's not the vaccine and you're wearing two masks.
Isn't that theater?
No, that's not.
Here we go again with the theater.
Let's get down to the facts.
Okay, the studies that you quote from Krotti and Sette look at in vitro examination of memory immunity, which in their paper, they specifically say this does not necessarily pertain to the actual protection.
It's in vitro.
And what study can you point to that shows significant reinfection?
There are no studies that show significantly.
Let me finish the response to your question, if you please.
The other thing is that when you talk about reinfection and you don't keep in the concept of variants, that's an entirely different ballgame.
That's a good reason for a mask.
In the South African study conducted by J and J, they found that people who were infected with wild type and were exposed to the variant in South Africa, the 351, it was as if they had never been infected before.
They had no protection.
So when you talk about reinfection, you've got to make sure you're talking about wild type.
I agree with you that you very likely would have protection from wild type for at least six months if you're infected.
But we in our country now have variants that are circulating.
Significant reinfection.
What study shows significant reinfection, hospitalization, and death after either natural infection or the vaccine?
It doesn't exist.
There is no evidence that there are significant reinfections after a vaccine.
In fact, I don't think we have a hospitalization in the United States after the two-week period after the second vaccination.
Yeah.
You have a death in the United States.
You're not hearing what I'm saying about variants.
We're talking about wild type versus variants.
And what proof is there that there are significant reinfections with hospitalizations and death from the variants?
None in our country.
Zero.
Well, because we don't have a prevalent of a variant yet.
We're having one.
Can I finish?
We're having 117 deaths.
Can you pause one second?
What Fauci is essentially saying is that there's infinite risk for new viruses coming here.
And really, we should be wearing masks forever.
Yes.
Because even if there's no evidence that we're currently at risk, there is the potential at any given point in time that we might be at risk.
Yes.
And then if you really want to think this through, and so we're going to wear masks and what evidence is there that this wearing mask policy actually combats even the original coronavirus?
None.
Fucking theater.
So Rand Paul is just, just to be clear here, he is dead right about this whole thing.
Okay.
And Dr. Fauci is left with, here's the nuance of the argument and the trickery that Dr. Fauci is playing.
Rand Paul is going, well, look, there's all these studies that seem to suggest that we have reason to be optimistic, to believe that basically, I mean, look, we don't have one case.
There's not one case of a death after someone's been vaccinated.
There's not one case of a death after somebody's already recovered from COVID.
He says, I don't think there's a hospitalization after vaccination.
And Dr. Fauci doesn't seem to challenge him on that.
I don't know if that's actually true, but I know there hasn't been a death.
So, you know, so that's Rand Paul's argument here.
He goes, and what study can you point to that shows the opposite?
Like, why would you, and what Dr. Fauci is saying is, well, we just don't have enough of a prevalent variant here.
So in other words, he's saying, well, we don't know.
So he is now putting the onus on disproving a negative.
You can't prove that this won't happen for something we don't know about yet.
So mask.
Not, oh, no.
Dr. Fauci is not saying, here, I have a study that shows that you can get sick and die after having the vaccine, and that's why we need to have these masks.
He's saying, you don't have a study that doesn't show that a variant theoretically couldn't come over here and still be able to get you infected and infect you as if you've never had COVID before.
That's what he's arguing.
So just to be clear here, Rand Paul is dealing in science, and Dr. Fauci is dealing in theoreticals, conjecture, what if.
And you nailed it with your original comment, Rob.
These people, and Dr. Fauci particularly, will have us in masks, socially distancing forever.
That is their plan.
And let's at least, I mean, if he wants to make this argument, okay, but let's at least be honest about what he's arguing.
You will never get to a point where you have scientific studies that can disprove any theoretical risk could ever happen.
You know, I mean, imagine applying this standard to just leaving your house.
I mean, you know, you can't prove that nothing bad will happen to you if you leave your house, but let's be honest with the American people and tell the truth.
These people will have you in masks and socially distancing forever.
That is their position.
Yeah.
But it doesn't matter.
Even after, oh, he's going to rake in that money, even after.
And then they'll have a fucking, they'll have a booster.
They'll have, oh, big farmers are going to make a ton of fucking money off this.
But that's what these people want.
They want this forever.
You never get back your life you had in 2019.
That's their position.
All right, let's keep playing a little bit.
Of a variant yet.
We're having one.
Can I finish?
We're having 117 that's becoming more dominant.
It's a policy based on conjecture.
No, you have the variants.
So you want people to wear a mask for another couple of years.
No.
You've been vaccinated and you parade around in two masks for show.
No.
You can't get it again.
There's almost, there's virtually 0% chance you're going to get it.
And yet you're telling people that have had the vaccine who have immunity.
You're defying everything we know about immunity by telling people to wear masks to have been vaccinated.
Instead, you should be saying there is no science to say we're going to have a problem from the large number of people who've been vaccinated.
You want to get rid of vaccine hesitancy?
Tell them they can quit wearing their mask after they get the vaccine.
You want people to get the vaccine?
Give them a reward instead of telling them that the nanny state's going to be there for three more years and you got to wear a mask forever.
People don't want to hear it.
There's no science behind it.
Well, let me just state for the record that masks are not theater.
Masks are protective.
And we have immunity there, theater.
If you already have immunity, all right.
So we can cut it off here.
So just to be clear, again, I mean, it's like the sophistry of this fucking, you know, doctor emperor king, Fauci, is just unbelievable.
So Rand Paul is specifically saying you've been vaccinated and you're walking around double masked.
This is bullshit.
There is basically a 0% chance that you can get COVID and get sick from it.
This is all just for show.
And then Dr. Fauci, he doesn't respond to what Rand Paul said.
He goes, masks aren't theater.
Masks help.
And it's like, well, no, no, no, no.
He's specifically talking about after you've been vaccinated or as he was saying earlier, after you've had COVID.
So Dr. Fauci's not going to respond to that.
Now, there's a lot of other arguments that come off of this.
I've heard people make the argument that they say, well, I mean, if you're going to have, like, if a business has a mask policy, how do you know who's been vaccinated and who hasn't?
How do you know who's had it and who hasn't?
Someone could just say, I've been vaccinated and then not have it.
But regardless of that, that aside, there's also the point that Rand Paul made about like, well, this will encourage people to get vaccinated.
But again, There's arguments to be made on all of those sides in lots of different ways.
I'm not like discounting any of them.
I'm just saying, aside from that, there is no science to suggest that for COVID protection, you should be wearing a mask after you've been vaccinated.
That's the truth.
That's the truth.
Now, you can play the disprove a negative game that Fauci was saying.
Can you prove that it won't be beneficial to wear a mask?
Well, no, of course.
You're never going to be able to prove that there aren't dangers.
There's always been, from 2019 back through the dawn of time, there's always been dangers associated with breathing.
Like that's, yes, that still exists.
But the point is that there is no science that actually demonstrates that you are protecting yourself at all.
And that's a pretty important point.
And it was unbelievable to see fucking somebody just push Dr. Fauci on this.
No Proof Of Danger00:03:05
And I know, you know, it's like he's good enough at the bullshit he does that if you're not paying attention carefully, you could almost go, oh, well, I think you made some point about how we can't disprove the thing about the variant.
But no, this is all, this is all sophistry.
Yeah, of course.
You can never disprove that.
You know, it's like, if I, you know, if I was going to say, oh, I'm going to go walk down the street and someone said, no, you shouldn't be allowed to walk down the street.
And I was like, well, what evidence do you have that me walking down the street is dangerous?
And they'd be like, well, can you prove that it couldn't be dangerous?
It's like, wait, what?
What type of like standard?
What type of burden is that?
No, of course it could theoretically in some way.
The point is that if you are going to take away all of normal life from Americans, including shredding the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and ruining people's lives, if you're going to do that, the burden is on you, motherfucker.
You have to have some proof that this is, yeah, you have to have some pretty overwhelming proof that this is really a fucking risk to people.
I mean, even then, I'm a give me liberty or give me death kind of guy, but the burden is definitely on you, not on Rand Paul, who's not even saying, he's not even advocating abandoning masks.
He's just saying after you've been vaccinated, you can abandon your masks.
And at least Rand Paul is sitting there saying like, hey, after this vaccine and everyone, like if we get to a point, because this is almost like at this point, you're just looking for an exit strategy.
Like, how the hell do we get out of this and get back to normal life?
And I think that at this point, almost the only one to go with is going to say, okay, after the vaccine's available and everyone who wants it can take it, that's it.
That's it.
At that point, anyone who didn't take it chose not to take it and is comfortable with their risks.
And they have a right to do that.
When, by the way, I don't advise against it.
Unless you have serious comorbidities or you're over fucking 85 years old, like, yeah, I understand where you're coming from.
But and I'll be with you.
But at that point, either you've had the vaccine or you've had the opportunity to and you didn't take it and now you're comfortable taking your own risk.
Okay, guess what?
Back to fucking normal.
Fuck all of you little mini dictators want to be authoritarians.
We're going back to normal after that.
That almost seems to be like our best shot to draw a line in the sand now.
Like, right?
People still do have a memory of like February 2020, right?
There used to be a before time where people didn't cover their faces in diapers everywhere they went, right?
Remember the before time?
We're going back to the before time.
Here's our line in the sound.
So God bless Rand Paul for that one.
All right, that's our show for today.
Don't forget, I was going to promote the New Jersey thing, but if you're listening to this, you should be on your way there already.
But I'll be speaking at the New Jersey State Libertarian Party.