Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire argue the corporate press attacks President Biden for ending the Afghanistan war, suspecting CIA motives like heroin trade interests or Taliban concessions. They claim the Bush administration let Osama bin Laden escape Tora Bora to justify invading Iraq, while noting Trump's rally booing over vaccine mandates contradicts his base's anti-mandate stance. The hosts allege FDA approval language was vague regarding safety and that COVID passports serve control rather than health, asserting legal challenges against these mandates have largely failed in court. Ultimately, the discussion frames current political hostility as evidence of deep-seated alignment between media, the military-industrial complex, and a global agenda prioritizing control over genuine public welfare. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
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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, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith, and I'm glad to be joined once again by the king of the caucs, Robbie the Fire.
Bernstein, what's up, my brother?
Nothing much.
How are you, Davey Smith?
Doing good, doing good.
Can't complain.
Excited for this weekend in Rochester, New York.
We're doing a full weekend of shows Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and a live Part of the Problem podcast up there.
This is my last gig of the year because my wife's having the baby in October.
I'm going to take a couple months off of traveling afterwards.
So if you want to come see me live, this is the last opportunity until January 2022, which who knows if you're even allowed to travel at that point.
So who knows where we'll be.
Anyway, so come on out.
There are still tickets available because we're doing a ton of shows up there.
So if you're in the Rochester area, make the trip.
What is it?
Thursday, one show, I think two Friday, two Saturday.
So yeah, make sure, come on out, see me in Robbie the Fire, catch a show, hang out with us, all that good stuff.
Hell yeah, dude.
We're going to eat some garbage plates.
Syracuse, Buffalo, make the trek over.
Party weekend.
Hell yeah.
And by party, I mean I will take a picture with you after the show and chat for a few minutes and then fall asleep.
No, upstate New York's got to be a drinking town, dude.
What else is there to do up there?
It's going to be a bunch of drunks and I'm going to join them.
Hell yeah.
Robbie the Fire will party with you till five in the morning.
So that's a promise to anyone.
All right.
So real quick, I was on Tim Poole's Tim cast the other day with Michael Heiss.
That was great.
Thank you to Tim and Lydia and that whole team.
They got a great thing going on there, man.
And it's really impressive and inspiring.
Are they joining the caulks?
They're very, I would say, very friendly to what we're doing.
They're cock friendly.
They're cock-friendly, for sure.
I would sure, they're caulk adjacent.
There's no question about that.
But we've just gotten like an overwhelmingly great response.
And every time I do that show, we get some new people watching, listening to this.
So welcome to all the new people.
And yeah, and thanks again to them.
A lot of fun.
Love, always fun to do these big platforms and talk that real libertarian shit and get people inspired.
It's a lot of fun.
I'm very lucky to be able to do this for a job.
So that is not lost on me.
All right, so I wanted to talk a bit about the fallout from the ongoing withdrawal from Afghanistan.
I was really happy on Tim's show that I was able to talk about that a little bit and kind of get out what I think is the most important thing to get across to people right now.
And I had a little rant on that and the video has been posted and it's been shared a whole bunch.
And like the thing to me that's really so fascinating and so if you really think about it and look at it the right way, it's so obvious and so revealing that Biden actually lost the corporate press over this.
That CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times and the Washington Post and all of them are just furious with Biden.
And I think that what happens a lot in politics, and this is kind of like the art of the way that our system is constructed, is that this is why it's intentionally like this two-party system, where there's this kind of vulnerability in one-party rule.
And because of that, one-party rules usually have to be very, you know, nakedly authoritarian.
You got to be the Chinese Communist Party in order to keep a one-party rule going.
Because if people get furious enough at the one party, well, what's their recourse?
It's basically revolution or you stick with the government.
And this is why dictatorships are far more susceptible to revolution than two-party democracies.
And you see this all the time, right?
Like if the people are like fed up with George W. Bush, we bring in Barack Obama.
If they're fed up with Barack Obama, they bring in Donald Trump.
And so there's always this impulse to divide into these two camps and narrow, you know, see things narrowly through this limited worldview where you're like, okay, if the other side is messing up, then we hit them.
Because our goal is always to get the other side so that our side can achieve power.
And that's a mentality.
It's not just like a political strategy.
So if the corporate press is showing all these images of things going bad in Afghanistan, well, anybody who's a Republican voter, your impulse, of course, is going to be hit Biden because he's weak right now.
Look, even CNN's admitting that he's weak.
And I mentioned this on Tim Poole that you see a lot of these right-winger types, and that's their take.
I mentioned Charlie Kirk who tweeted something.
He goes like, when you've even lost CNN, you know you're messing up.
But that is missing the entire game.
Because it's like, just zoom out and think about this.
He lost CNN?
Doesn't that raise some eyebrows?
I mean, think about all the things that could have lost CNN.
Why this one?
Are you really telling me that, you know, like what I said on Tim Poole was that I go, Obama didn't lose CNN when he destroyed Libya?
Not to mention Syria, Yemen, Somalia, you know, like, and continued Afghanistan and Iraq.
That doesn't lose them.
So president comes in and promises to end wars and doesn't.
Well, that doesn't lose CNN.
No, no, no.
They'll stand right by you and quite literally just carry your water.
Repeat whatever talking points you want repeated for your entire administration.
Look at how the corporate press, I mean, Donald Trump didn't even run against Joe Biden.
Donald Trump ran against the corporate press.
That was the election of 2020.
There was Trump versus the media with Biden in his basement.
So all of the sudden now, they've decided that this is the disaster.
Isn't it a little bit strange that ending a war is the thing that is determined to be such a disaster that you lose all of these people?
Again, forget the millions of innocent people who have died in these wars and the trillions of dollars that all of these wars have cost that didn't cause any of these presidents to lose the press.
Just think about why exactly, you know, and they can make these arguments.
Well, it's because he's leaving people behind or because he didn't plan out the withdrawal well enough.
But look, those arguments aside, even if I grant those arguments, which it's actually a lot more complicated than that.
But even if you grant that that's the reality of the situation, are you telling me that the economy just being in tatters isn't a bigger threat to Americans?
That like vaccine passports or freaking inflation, the crisis at the border.
I mean, there's like a million things that you could list.
None of that loses CNN.
Why this one thing?
And I think it's one of those, you know, to ask the question is to answer the question.
Oh, yeah, you can't end a war.
That's the reality, right?
Like that the corporate press, CNN, and MSNBC and the DNC for that matter are completely in bed with the national security state.
And this isn't like some wild conspiracy theory.
It's like, you know, they're like, oh, let's turn over to our analyst, John Brennan, or let's, you know, whatever, who's CNN will bring in to comment.
Let's go over to our national security, you know, expert, James Clapper.
It's not like I'm speculating that they're in bed with the national security state.
They are openly in bed with the national security state.
And so this is what they do.
They push the interests of the military-industrial complex.
And that's why Biden has lost everybody over this move.
So just recognize that.
Now, that doesn't mean, of course, this isn't like a binary.
That doesn't mean that Biden isn't an awful, you know, corrupt, incompetent, senile president, right?
All of these things can be true, but none of that was enough for the corporate press to bail on him.
But this is.
He had the nerve to end a war.
We don't do that.
That's not what we're here to do.
So try to keep that in mind through all of this stuff because once you see that angle, it's kind of hard to unsee.
It's just so obvious.
Full agree, but can I go a little bit more conspiratorial here?
I don't even know if that's the word.
I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA got what it wanted out of this, which perhaps maybe an involvement in the global heroin trade, similar to what they were doing in South America, fueling, you know, funding their own little endeavors through the drug trade.
But there's something really weird in the way that arms were laid down that the Taliban seemed to negotiate with some units just to lay down their arms and leave over American gear.
I mean, there's been conversations with the Taliban for a long time and trying to negotiate an exit and peacefires, this, that, and the next thing.
It's incredibly strange that we pulled out the military and we also pulled out the air cover, or at least that's what I'm hearing, prior to pulling out important assets.
That doesn't make sense.
If you've got important things you got to pull out, you tend to keep your military there first to defend it.
Why would you just pull out your military and then pull out the important stuff later?
That doesn't make sense.
I'll say this.
Okay, to a couple points there, right?
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm not really, I'm not sold.
I think there's a much easier explanation for all of this, which is essentially that if you talk to any of the like the guys who have served over there, and I've talked to quite a few, they all like unanimously tell you the same thing, which is that the military they were building up was a joke.
It was an absolute joke.
They were like literally just bribing illiterate goat herders to try to, you know, and pretending that they were some type of mean fighting force and that they would constantly be like, they said, there was one guy who said a thing, I think it was a Marine, and he was saying if we instituted drug testing amongst the Afghan military, we'd lose 90% of the military.
They're all on heroin?
Yeah, they're like opiumed up goat herders who are taking our money and guns and then robbing their neighbor and then like these are cool people.
Yeah.
Oh, no.
I mean, they're having a great time.
And the truth is that they have been through 20 years of war and they had an option, which was to continue the bloody fighting for another couple years and then lose to the Taliban anyway.
And it just, it makes sense that they were just like, screw it.
Our air cover is gone.
Our backup is gone.
They were losing this fight with the American air power behind them.
So now they've lost that.
What are we going to do?
We're just going to fight a whole bunch of us will die and they're going to win anyway.
So that to me just seems like a very reasonable explanation.
As for the stuff with pulling out and leaving weapons behind and all of this, I think the reality is that, and this is what the corporate press is not acknowledging at all.
See, there'll be this whole narrative that basically says, well, I mean, maybe we should have just left a little bit of troops we had behind, right?
I mean, we only had like 1,500 troops under Donald Trump, and there wasn't that much bloodshed over the last two years.
So why pull out?
Now we pull out and it's a disaster.
But the reality of the situation is that Donald Trump negotiated a ceasefire with the Taliban contingent on us leaving on May 1st.
Okay.
Joe Biden risked that ceasefire deal by extending the date to September 11th, but the Taliban decided to honor it.
They were like, okay, if you're leaving in September, we'll honor it.
And that's why they moved in a little bit early before we were like completely out.
Biden's Afghanistan Withdrawal Disaster00:16:19
They were like, all right, enough.
Like here.
So if we were to break that and say we're not leaving, then we're also breaking the ceasefire and we're back to war.
So the option then is either a much uglier withdrawal where the Taliban is not keeping the roads to Kabul open, to the airport open, and then you have an option of a withdrawal that's much worse and much bloodier or another surge, which means that.
Why don't the Taliban just wait till the September 11th deadline?
I mean, I was a little surprised by that.
I thought they would.
It was a ballsy move on their point.
But I'm saying, but why would they both not honor the deadline and then still participate in some level of coordination?
Well, I think that my assumption would be, see, I was surprised by that.
I thought they would wait.
It seemed like strategically not to make sense.
I think that they knew the situation on the ground better than the rest of us do, which makes sense because it's their country.
And they banked that this is how it was going to happen.
They were going to move in.
See, now they're in a situation where now, for us to not withdraw, we would need 100,000 troops because now they control the entire country.
And so once you're in that situation, now going back to war with them, we're in a much weaker place.
So to me, I think that's the calculation that they made.
Now, in terms of like evacuating all of these people and all of that, I think the reality is that the logistics of it are very hard.
Like a lot of these like Americans or American allies or citizens of other countries that are allies, they're out in the countryside away from the city.
And it's not as simple as people make it out to go pick every one of them up and like shuttle them over to the airport.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I saw the other, you know, I was reading this morning that, you know, they're like the G7 partners are upset with Biden for not evacuating, you know, like their citizens that are left behind.
And in a way, it's almost like revealing that, you know, Obama said he was going to end the war in Afghanistan.
Trump said he was going to end the war in Afghanistan.
Biden said he was going to end the war in Afghanistan.
So evidently, these countries have never taken that seriously.
You've had years to get your people out of there.
Joe Biden told you what he pushed back the withdrawal date.
You know, you were supposed to be out of there by May 1st.
I mean, you've had a long time to let people know that they need to get the hell out of Afghanistan.
And so, look, it's sad and all.
And like, I hope everybody gets out.
I hope there's as little bloodshed as possible, as I think any sane person would hope for.
But this is, it's a messy business ending a war.
But so is starting one.
What I'm putting forward, and it's pure conspiracy.
So, you know, you're not interested in conspiracy.
You can throw this one in the garbage.
Publicly, we're claiming this is a loss.
I'm not so sure that it is.
I think the CIA might have other assets that it's interested in.
There might be a level of coordination between them and the Taliban.
And that even this debacle that we've just witnessed was because they probably didn't get some of the military, some of the concessions for contractors that they were looking for, or they were looking to actually stick around a little bit longer.
And it kind of plays into what you're talking about with CNN of coming and going, hey, look at this debacle.
It's because they didn't really want to leave or they were looking for something else.
But I'm telling you, I think we're working with the Taliban, like the CIA is.
I don't think that this is a total deep state strategic loss here.
Well, that's okay.
So when you talk about a loss versus a win, it kind of depends on what you mean by that.
So in the same sense that like, you know, you could say, I don't know, Obamacare was a loss because it didn't make healthcare more affordable or something, which was the stated, you know, goal of the Affordable Care Act.
But I mean, if you're one of the giant insurance companies, it was a win because your stocks went up and your profits went up, right?
So what, yes, by the stated goals of Afghanistan, which was to like defeat the Taliban and build up the Afghan government into a democracy with protection of the rule of law and regularly occurring honest, open elections and a military presence that we built up.
Okay, well, if those are your, which were the stated goals, then yeah, of course, this is a clear loss.
But for the arms companies, I mean, it wasn't a loss for Lockheed Martin or Raytheon or any of them.
It was a 20-year just gravy train.
So whether it was a loss or a win, I mean, that depends on how you're defining these terms.
So, you know, I think that, look, I get where you're coming from.
I'm sure there are some things that we don't know about that are going on behind the scenes, of course, like always, but there was tremendous political pressure against Trump and Biden from this move, particularly coming from the Pentagon.
They did not want to end this war.
They wanted to continue it.
So my guess would be that, no, this actually was, at least to some degree, Donald Trump and Joe Biden going against that political pressure.
I do think, to be fair, in many ways, Trump deserves more of the credit than Biden.
I think Biden basically had his hands tied.
I think there was no option.
He pushed back the deadline just to be like, we're not doing Trump's thing because that's politically just suicide, which I, you know, look, that's stupid in politics and wrong, but you got to kind of understand the reality of the situation.
I mean, his entire base thinks like Trump's a Russian Nazi or whatever, you know?
And so if that's your base, you can't just come in and go, yeah, I'm going to do it on his timeline and give him all of the credit.
So he pushed it back.
But if he had broken the ceasefire, then he had to surge.
And that's a disastrous situation also.
And this is what Obama did.
Obama got us up to well over 100,000 troops in the country, and that couldn't beat the Taliban.
So what the hell is he going to do?
How many troops is he going to put in there when there's no public appetite for war?
You know, like Obama was only able to do it because Obama came in as this like transformational president with like historically high approval ratings, said He was ending the war in Iraq, which was the war that people really hated because it was so obviously stupid, and said we were going to surge in order to end the war in Afghanistan.
So he was able to finagle it.
There was no political appetite for that in 2021 after 16 months of our country just being hammered by COVID policies at home.
So I think Biden almost had no choice.
But there's no question there was a lot of political pressure not to do this.
Biden did it anyway.
He deserves credit for that.
Trump deserves credit for negotiating the deal.
And I do think on the way out, they are going to, between the deep state and the corporate press, they are going to make ending a war look as awful as possible to try to remind everybody, you know, for the other wars that they're trying to protect, that it is really, really bad when you end a war.
Never mind how bad it is when you start a war.
You know, I said this on Kennedy the other night.
Guy Benson, you know, is guest hosting and he goes, you know, we've all seen the images of these Afghans grabbing onto the wheels of planes.
And I was like, yeah, exactly.
We've all seen those images.
But we haven't all seen the images of crying mothers after their babies killed in a drone bomb.
You know, we haven't all seen those images.
They don't play that every day on CNN.
They're not interested in that.
We don't see images of like the grieving widows of soldiers who lose a leg and then come back and commit suicide because they're a shell of their former self.
We're not inundated with that imagery.
And there's a reason for that.
So why do you think the Taliban has gotten so much better at PR?
They just sat in caves.
They came up with a new strategy.
They're like, no more death to America or let's pretend like we're not going to do horrible things to women.
Where do you think that's coming from?
So I'm sorry, ask the question one more time.
Why do you think the Taliban has done a total 180 or seemingly a 180 in terms of their PR strategy where they seem to be a lot better at acting like a typical government and going, no, no, everyone loves us.
We're doing a great job here.
What are you talking about?
I think you just kind of answered the question, right?
They're trying to be a typical government.
They're trying to actually rule the whole country, you know?
And I think that there's probably, there seems to be some indications that this generation of Taliban, which really is different, there's a lot of different people, a few of the same, but there's a lot of different people from the 2001 Taliban because it's been 20 years and 20 years of war.
And a lot of them have died and a lot of them have aged out and are older now and not as prominent.
And there is some indication that they seem to be one click more moderate than they once were.
That they're still going to impose Sharia law and be real bad and all that.
It's still Afghanistan.
But I think that their interest right now is in acting like a government.
And maybe they're at least smart enough to realize that a government is just a smarter hustle, you know, than just being kind of some type of local gang.
Now let's be a national gang and call ourselves a government.
And they realize that if they say this stuff, they're more likely to be able to make themselves more powerful.
That would be my guess.
I think it's CIA training, dude, pushing some heroin.
Well, look, I mean, there's certainly possible, and they certainly got a whole lot of weapons out of this whole thing, you know?
So that's the reality of it.
Now, whether people, you know, like I was saying on the last episode, that it's quite possible that just hubris explains a lot of this, that people were believing their own shit, that they really did build up this military force or something, and they were going to stand for a lot longer.
It's also possible that they just thought that no one was going to call their bluff and the war wouldn't end, and that they were going to be able to bully Joe Biden into not doing it.
So there's that.
Anyway, in this situation, as we said in the last episode, there's no question that this is, you know, Biden's getting hit politically and it's not good when for someone like Joe Biden, particularly, you know, it's a lot different for, say, Trump to get hammered by CNN than for Biden to get hammered by CNN because Biden is completely carried.
I mean, he's like a weekend at Bernie's with CNN and the New York Times holding up his shoulders, carrying him along here.
Trump's thing was that he was the anti-corporate press guy.
And the corporate press's thing was that they were the anti-Trump guys, you know?
So they had that kind of symbiotic relationship.
Joe Biden's a much different situation.
He kind of needs them.
And as we all know, and me and you have been covering for two years now, Joe Biden is, he, and I'm not exaggerating when I say this, I mean, he, the man struggles to put two sentences together.
It's uncomfortable to watch.
He's really, I mean, like, he's not doing great.
There has, you know, it's like the most open secret emperor's new clothes type thing that Joe Biden has clearly suffered through severe mental decline over the last at least decade.
And so when he's put on, you know, there's pressure put on him, he does these, oh, God, these just awful thick was the thing with Stephanopoulos.
It's like, whatever.
He goes, but we've seen these images.
He goes, that was four days ago, man.
It's all good now.
What type of thing?
Well, it's like, first of all, it was only two days ago.
So he was wrong on the number of days.
But also, like, why would that, what would four days ago mean?
And you're like, oh, it's four days ago.
You know, so they're just terrible.
And his own cabinet is contradicting himself a bunch.
But it's, you know, anyway, it's interesting that, you know, that they're getting grilled this way and falling apart this way.
So this is very bad politically for Joe Biden.
I don't think there's any question about that.
But I also, I just want our people, the people listening to this show, to know, like, no, but see what's really going on here.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Anyway, there was a video, there's been a whole bunch of videos.
Um, uh, the secretary of state blinker has been out, uh, like making the Sunday show rounds, and there's been a lot of this stuff.
Uh, there's a lot of videos out there of the press corps grilling, the press secretary about all of this.
But I sent this video to Brian.
Let's pull this up a little bit and look.
Uh, this was uh, Face the Nation and uh, with uh, the Secretary of State on.
So, let's play.
Blinken Grilled by Press Corps00:08:47
The president said that we have an agreement with the Taliban, Mr. Secretary.
That implies we are negotiating with them.
Does that not confer upon them already legitimacy?
No, we have we've had for a long time contact with the Taliban both at a political level in Doha, going back some years, as well as now on the ground in Kabul, a working relationship in order to deconflict, in order to work through any problems with people getting to the airport.
That's been very important to making sure that we can actually advance our own interests in getting people out safely and effectively as possible.
So, that's the nature of the relationship.
And someone in our audience might listen to you, Mr. Secretary, and say, oh, so we have to ask the Taliban for permission for American citizens to leave, true or not true.
They are in control of Kabul.
That is the reality.
That's the reality that we have to deal with.
How comfortable are you with that, Mr. Secretary?
What I'm focused on, what we're all focused on, is getting people out and making sure that we're doing everything possible to do that.
And in this case, it is, I think, a requirement of the job to be in contact with the Taliban, which controls Kabul.
And look, what we've seen, Major, is also pretty remarkable.
Go back a week.
The government fell.
And by the way, I was on the phone with President Karzai the day before when he was telling me his intent, as he put it, to fight through the death.
So we can just pause it right here.
So there's a couple things here that I see that jump out at me.
Number one, Blinker is not very good at this.
His whole body language and tone is like a sad kid who got in trouble, you know, like just very bad optics.
Also, if you're going to talk about, you know, if the knock on you is that you don't know what's going on and you didn't plan for this well enough and you're trying to say like, no, no, no, I was on the phone with the president just two days before.
Get the name of the right president.
Karzai hasn't been the president in Afghanistan for quite a while.
It's just, it's really, it's hard to look at that and not go, man, this is politically not very good for the Biden administration.
However, to speak back to kind of what was my biggest takeaway from all of this, just ask yourself this question.
When has the corporate press ever been this hostile to the Biden administration about anything?
And why is ending a 20-year disastrous war the thing that gets them to actually do some grilling, actually be in opposition?
I mean, you see this stuff, their tactics and tricks are so obvious, right?
But you see this stuff that the corporate press does where they're not actually asking you a question.
They're trying to make you look bad on television.
Like all an artist.
Yeah, they're just, but it's just like, let me just, yeah, let me let you grovel, let you apologize, and make you look like shit.
When you ask questions, like, he goes, they were like, so you're saying the Taliban's legitimate because you have to like, we got to get their permission before we can do anything?
And he's like, well, I mean, they're in control of Kabul.
Like, that's just, that's the reality of the situation.
And what was the follow-up question?
Are you comfortable with that?
And you're comfortable with that?
Now, what type of fucking question is that?
It's not journalism.
What?
And how do you feel inside?
And you're comfortable with that?
This isn't a real question.
These are not two human beings having a real exchange where a serious question is being asked.
This isn't something a journalist would ask.
This is just an old corporate press tactic.
Put you in a position now.
What are your options?
Here, I give you a binary.
Yes or no.
Are you comfortable with that?
Well, number one, you say yes.
Yes, I'm comfortable.
Like, what?
Yes, I'm comfortable with the Taliban having kicked our ass after 20 years in this fucking crazy group, you know, running the country.
Yes, I'm totally comfortable with the fact that we have to hope the Taliban doesn't kill our people.
That's a great, absolutely.
Your Secretary of State is comfortable.
Oh, that's not an option.
So what's your other option?
No, I'm not comfortable with that.
Oh, okay.
So you put us in a situation that you yourself are not comfortable in.
That's all that is.
It's just asking a question where you're screwed either way.
You answer it.
Anyway, those silly tactics aside, what's interesting is the fact that they're trying to make them look that bad.
They're trying.
Now, I got to say, I think it is unlikely that Joe Biden seeks re-election.
I think that's even more unlikely now after this, because the corporate press is now hammering him, weakening him up.
And they don't want to do that for him to then run against a Republican in three years, you know?
So this is probably the best thing that's ever happened to Kamala Harris.
And this is, if it was already, I think, pretty likely that she was going to be the nominee.
I think now you're in a real position where it's the overwhelming probability.
I think Trump picked a pretty smart end date where if he was leaving, it was going to be someone else's problem.
And if he was there, if it went wrong, there was plenty of time to recover.
So even now, like, I mean, obviously this will come up in the next presidential debates and we'll see how bad Afghanistan gets.
And it doesn't look like it's going to be headed towards a good trajectory.
You turn around and go, wow, that leave really worked out.
Look how peaceful the Taliban is.
And that all went great.
But there's time for recovery.
And I'll still pull my money against Kamala.
I just think she's so unlikable.
They're not dumb enough to run her.
Look, I get what you're saying, but here's why I would put my money on her.
When you say she's just so unlikable and just such awful candidate, you make a very solid point.
All of those, I won't argue any of those.
I couldn't.
How could I argue with you on that?
However, I think they've boxed themselves in now to a position where, because this is the Democrats and she is the first vice president woman of color, how could you not, when it is her turn, like by the norms of politics, it's her turn if Joe Biden doesn't run.
And you're telling me you're going to skip someone else in front of the line of a woman of color?
Well, that's basically the story of America, Rob.
And she can play that card to devastating effect.
And don't think she won't.
It's the only card Kamala Harris has and she plays it regularly.
So I just think I don't see how they get out of that box.
But you do make a point.
I mean, there certainly is a chance that there'll be enough powerful people who go, but we lose with her.
Like she just, she cannot win a presidential election.
She was an awful candidate.
She struggled to get like, you know, a couple percentage points in the Democratic primary.
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Anyway, we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
But it's really, to me, fascinating to watch.
Conflating Saddam and Bin Laden00:07:23
With everything that's gone on, you know, I mean, the last 16 months in this country have been like the most chaotic, destructive, dangerous 16 months in my life.
And the first, whatever it's been, the first, you know, half a year, a little bit more than half a year of Biden's presidency has been the worst first half a year of any president in my lifetime.
But now this, this is the thing that gets them all like so confrontational.
You cannot find me any clip, just that little thing that we showed you there.
You can't find any clip of Biden during his presidency or during his campaigning where the corporate press was this tough on them.
That's it.
You don't end wars.
We do not like that.
That is not what the establishment goes for.
And I'll tell you one other thing is that I'll give Trump a little bit of credit.
He was on an interview on a Hannity show a few days ago, and then he's been doing some of these rallies.
And I'll give Trump credit because he could easily just be hitting Biden for this, right?
Oh, I would have done it so much better.
It would have been so smooth.
You know, all of our wonderful people would have been out of there, you know, like which you could just see him doing.
And by the way, I'm sure he took a few jabs at Biden in there.
I mean, I didn't see the entire, like, the entire speech he gave.
But he did when he was on Hannity.
I got to give him credit for this.
He took the opportunity and he didn't trash Biden.
He trashed George W. Bush.
That really is the correct take on this.
It's like, no, you don't blame the guy who finally ended this thing that should have been ended long ago.
You blame the guy who got us in this situation and then lied through his teeth about what the situation was.
That's the guy you blame.
There were a whole bunch of people in the George W. Bush administration that never wanted to get into the war with the Taliban.
Like they were basically, I know Condoleezze Rice and I think at least a couple other like prominent members in the George W. Bush administration were like, we should go to, they never even wanted to go to Kabul, Kabul.
They were like, we fight Al-Qaeda here.
Go in, fight al-Qaeda, kill the jihadists.
Don't go to war with the Taliban.
Like, who cares?
It's their country.
We don't want to break Afghanistan and then be in the business of rebuilding Afghanistan.
This was a very clear, deliberate decision.
Bush and Cheney were like, no, no, no, we're going to war with the Taliban.
We're going to conflate the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and the whole freaking, you know, like Islamic world with al-Qaeda.
And that's what led to 20 years of just disastrous wars.
Disastrous wars.
Just millions of people killed.
Tens of millions of people displaced and lives ruined.
Trillions of dollars spent.
Not to mention thousands of American soldiers died.
Tens of thousands of American soldiers wounded, seriously wounded.
I don't know how many suicides.
I don't know how many broken families.
It's just nothing.
And it's the whole, you know, it colored the whole 21st century.
You know, as Scott Horton always says, it didn't have to be this way.
And it really didn't.
And the other thing that is worth noting is that they really had Osama bin Laden pinned in late 2001 in Tora Bora.
They had Osama bin Laden and they allowed, whether intentionally or unintentionally, him to slip into Pakistan.
And that's what kept this war going.
But we could have, they had him pinned in Tora Bora.
They had reinforcements in Kabul who they never brought in.
They had green berets in the north of the country who they never brought in.
And the fighters on the ground were demanding it.
They were like, we need reinforcements right now because we have bin Laden pinned here.
And they could have sealed off the border to Pakistan and killed bin Laden in December of 2001.
I think it was December.
It might have been November, November, December 2001.
Killed bin Laden and declared an end to the war right there.
That could have been it.
And then you have no war in Iraq, no war in Libya, no war in Syria, no war in Somalia, no war in Yemen.
That's it.
Kill Osama bin Laden and come back.
There's a, what a better world we'd be living in if that's what we had done.
But instead, they let him slip off into Pakistan.
And there is a strong case to be made that they did that intentionally because it was pretty obvious what they had to do to kill him.
And it was pretty obvious that the Bush administration had already decided that they wanted war in Iraq and that they wanted to conflate 9-11 with Afghanistan and with Saddam Hussein and all these forces.
And that's why you have that guy.
Who was the guy, Ryan?
Something Ryan?
Who was that congressman who ran for president briefly, who was arguing with Tulsi Gabbard?
Do you remember this, Rob, in the 2020, it was in 2019 in the early debates?
And he said at one point, he goes, well, we can't leave Afghanistan.
The Taliban attacked us on 9-11.
And Tulsi Gabbard has to go, no, they didn't.
And then it was a moment, you know, it was like this whole, but that was like the Bush administration made that very intentionally tried to conflate the two to the American people as if this was all one group, as if we were fighting the people who did 9-11, which was not done by the Taliban.
And it was not even done by Afghans.
This is done by a Saudi son of a billionaire and an Egyptian, you know, and a whole bunch of other Saudis.
That's who did 9-11.
They just happened to rent space in Afghanistan while the attack was carried out.
But if your goal was to go start a war in Iraq and you wanted to make the ludicrous argument, complete lie, that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, right?
Well, how, you know, because the argument was, if you remember at the time, it wasn't just like Osadam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.
It was that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and we think he might have been involved in the planning of 9-11, and he's in bed with Osama bin Laden.
So if Saddam Hussein has like nuclear weapons and he could then pass them off to a terrorist, some terrorist group, then your next 9-11 is, as Condoleezza Rice and a few of them said, is your warning sign is in the form of a mushroom cloud.
That was the fear, right?
But if we kill Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, that selling point's a lot harder.
Well, he's in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, who's dead.
FDA Vaccine Approval Confusion00:12:13
Then all of a sudden, that doesn't work.
So then, you know, he escapes into Pakistan.
We can't find him for another decade.
And the rest is history.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, anyway, so switching gears a little bit.
So and speaking of Trump, did you see this, Rob, that Trump was?
No, I did not see the clip, but I saw it reported that evidently Trump was speaking at one of these rallies and told everyone in the crowd to get vaccinated and he got booed.
See the headlines, haven't been able to find the clip.
Yeah, so assuming that's right, isn't that kind of interesting?
I've never seen Trump get booed at one of his events.
Well, he's usually not on the wrong side of topics.
Well, he's been on the wrong side of a few, but not the same thing.
Yeah, but it's a fun take.
It's like, throw out all the Mexicans.
You might be wrong.
Everyone's like, fuck yeah.
Yeah, but it's interesting that there's something, you know, the knock from like kind of the corporate press is like, oh, that he, they're just a cult following of Donald Trump.
And I've been saying this for a while since, you know, early 2016, that it wasn't as simple as like, oh, Donald Trump supporters just love Donald Trump for being Donald Trump.
I think they actually loved him for saying a lot of the things that they wanted a politician to say.
And they certainly did like fall in love with him, the person, but I don't think it was removed from some issues.
And it goes to show you that, like, yeah, Donald, it's not like Donald Trump could come out like pro, you know, vaccine mandates or something and would still keep his support.
He would lose it.
It would evaporate.
And just that in itself is kind of interesting.
And I guess the other big news with the vaccines is that the FDA has approved.
On the Trump being boot, I got to go see the clip, but how great is that?
That, I mean, you and I know it as comics.
If you're in a rhythm and the crowd's behind you, like, especially on one comment, you got to go really far for them to not just kind of float by and stick with you type thing.
So that just, and if you, you said it before, it's the biggest propaganda campaign of all time to push these vaccines.
That just shows how many people are out there not just seeing through it, but are against it.
It's not even like, oh, that's, you know, it's not something I'm into, but an entire group of people at the moment, like all together, we're like, hell, you know what I mean?
That's how passionate people are and just seeing through the nonsense of this, what's going to become forced vaccinations.
Well, you know, I was on last night I recorded for Pete Quignones' show, and who I love.
He's great.
Go check this out.
Yep.
Go check that out.
He's got a great show there, Free Man Beyond the Wall.
But so I was on his show and he brought up this poll.
It's like a USA Today poll or something like that, which you take all these things with a grain of salt, but the poll was something, something about like forced vaccinations or vaccine mandates or something like that.
And it was, I think, 62% to 39%, something like that.
Which maybe those numbers don't add up.
61% to 39% support it.
And, you know, certainly there's like, so if you take those numbers as being accurate, you know, as Pete was saying, it goes, look, there's a real case for like, there's kind of two things that jump out at you, right?
There's like, oh, okay, like something like 60% or over 60% of people would be fine with the government like forcing people to take these vaccines and perhaps fine with the ugliness that would ensue or the, you know, the explicit threat of violence behind that.
But I was saying, look, I'm looking at those same numbers and I see like a white pill here.
Like I see a real case for optimism.
Like you're telling me basically 40% of the American people after this massive propaganda campaign, the biggest in human history, are still saying no.
You know how many people got it because of their jobs?
Like the real number would be closer to, I'm just going to eyeball 50 or 60%.
I know a lot of people that got it that weren't interested, that needed it for work.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Yeah, a lot of people like that.
So, you know, like if you look at the number, it's 39% or something like that.
Like I was saying there, I go like, you know, imagine like 39% of the American people were radical libertarians.
We'd be like, oh my God, this is incredible.
Like we never could have dreamed we'd achieve numbers like this, you know?
So it's, you know, you can look at this one of two ways, but there is a real case there to go like, hmm, that's, that's actually kind of interesting.
One more important thing to note about that 39%.
And this is, this is totally theoretical.
I would say risk category individuals, you know, over a certain age should probably be getting it.
The more interesting question is the people that I would suggest probably should not be getting it.
What's the percentage of those people?
Like if you start looking at healthy, you know, 25 to 40 year olds, I'm venturing to guess it's more than 40% that are, you know what I mean?
Like, because part of that compliance is going to be in the categories of people that it probably makes sense for them to have it.
Yeah, yeah.
No, that's an interesting point.
And of course, as we've said before, it's like there are these, you know, like, you know, what about somebody where the argument is the weakest?
You know, what about somebody, you know, yourself?
I mean, you're a good, somebody who's young, doesn't have any like major underlying conditions, doesn't have a weakened immune system, and just beat the thing.
I mean, what is the argument?
What is the actual scientific argument that you just asking questions here?
But honestly, like, what is the actual scientific argument that you should get this?
Anyway, the FDA has approved the Pfizer vaccine.
I'd assume the approvals for the others are following.
I think it's kind of interesting just seeing all the headlines about the FDA approving this is almost in a way reminding a lot of people that it wasn't approved by the FDA.
You know, like it's because I think there's got to be a lot of people who just, if something's out there, they assume it was approved, right?
Because otherwise you wouldn't be having it, let alone have every, you know, public figure pushing you to get it.
You assume it must have been, you know, it must have been approved.
How the hell else does this work?
But that's, that's, that just happened.
So you said there was like some weird language in the approval.
This is so tough because the document I read, I read like a 12-page FDA document that was retweeted by one of the doctors who's good on the COVID information on Twitter.
And he basically said this still reads like emergency authorization.
So if what I read was their release, which I believe it was, there were two things that were really strange.
First is they always just say safe and effective.
They don't use that language in their document.
They go with, like, they use like the very vague language they love of it could be a good idea or it could reduce risk, which is, okay, if don't market it as safe and effective, if that, that should be the first line.
We've done all the research and it's safe and effective, but they're not even willing to commit to that.
The other thing that I flagged right off the bat, and you can go look this up on my Twitter, Robbie the Fire, was that in their own case study, firstly, in their study group, they don't tell you how many hospitalizations or deaths there was in the unvaxed.
I put that out there and someone came back to me and said in the actual Pfizer trial, there was no data to say that the vaccine prevented against hospitalization and deaths.
The rates were the same.
And the other thing that was interesting was that the total amount, there were eight breakthrough cases in the trial and then 160 people who were unvaxxed who came down with COVID.
And that was 160 of like 15,000 people.
So even that rate's not high.
So if you start looking at like, what are you vaccinating against that you're going to be doing forced mandates, it becomes sheer insanity.
Yeah.
Yep.
Oh, but the last thing that people were pointing out is that they use the word emergency and authorization more than once in that document.
So while the press and everyone is saying that this is full authorization, I'm going to say, because this just came out today, that may be a misleading claim.
I need to do a little bit more homework on this, but that doesn't, I don't know, that I don't usually look into how vaccines are coming to market.
So I don't know what the documents normally look like, but the language in this did not seem like, yeah, typical authorization.
Right, right.
Okay.
So that's interesting.
It does, I'd imagine that it does open the door for there to be less legal recourse against mandates.
Oh, they're going to full mandates, dude.
Oh, they're going to be ramping that up.
Already, what's his name today?
Our dumb mayor guy from New York, De Blasio.
I think he's doing mandates for teachers.
But yes, this will definitely, firstly, every court case thus far against mandates has lost, which is almost odd.
Like the way that they've been thrown out of court seemed really weaselish.
But now the most interesting one was a Georgetown lawyer who wanted to do a test for antibodies saying that like, if I've already had the virus, there's reason to indicate that, firstly, I don't need the vaccine.
And I believe there's some evidence to say that there may be more side effects for people that have already had the virus.
Now, how much more of a risk?
I don't know.
You know what I mean?
You're kind of going into the big time maybe territory.
That's the only lawsuit that's still on the table, but every lawsuit's kind of gotten thrown out so far.
Yeah, just stepping aside from the legal aspect of all of it, the fact that they won't allow you, you know, like in these COVID passport, you know, like places that are now springing up, the fact that they won't allow you to enter these, you know, whatever businesses with proof of antibodies just goes to show you how full of shit this whole thing is.
And that has absolutely nothing to do with public health.
You know, this is all about control and compliance.
So, you know, because if someone can demonstrate that they have antibodies, then that's certainly should be good enough to be able to sit down and have a freaking coffee.
Also, if you're coming in with new deadly variants from South America, they'll put you on a bus and bring you right into a busy city.
So don't pretend like you care.
Of course.
Absolutely.
That's where we're at with these things.
All right.
Look, we're going to wrap up there.
Rochester, come out.
See us this weekend, man.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
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