Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein argue President Zelensky has become a totalitarian, undermining Ukraine's freedom narrative while criticizing U.S. support for an unwinnable war. They dismiss mainstream media silence on this shift and pivot to domestic issues, defending Texas bans on minor gender-affirming care as necessary protections against irreversible child abuse, drawing parallels to driving age limits. The hosts challenge libertarian support for such surgeries by questioning minors' consent capacity, citing the malleability of youth and potential parental pressure, while condemning Florida's "don't say gay" bill as contradictory to stateless ideals. Ultimately, they frame these interventions as essential safeguards against government overreach and harmful ideological propagation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roll Back The State00:13:21
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gas 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.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith, the Libertarian Tupac.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein, the king of the caulks, COVID Jesus.
What's up, my brother?
Oh, we're doing it, baby.
We're cranking out the episodes.
Yeah, we sure are.
Just in a nice, in a nice rhythm.
It's like, hey, look, if we're going to have World War III and we're all going to die in nuclear war, we're going to get some goddamn podcasts out before that.
By the way, shout out to the Libertarian Party of Colorado who gave me this sweet ass hoodie when I was out there.
Yeah.
I think they put my speech up on YouTube too, if you want to go check that out from my talk while I was out there.
And of course, I'll be at the Libertarian Party state convention of Minnesota out there in Minneapolis in a couple of weeks.
And then we're doing a Mises Caucus event in Texas.
That's going to be a lot of fun.
Yeah, and a lot of stuff coming up.
And I will be at Reno for the national convention in May.
And then me and Robbie are, we're going to be booking a whole lot of stand-up gigs for the whole rest of the year.
I know we're coming out to Chicago, setting up that date this week.
So Chicago peeps, come check us out.
I haven't been to Chicago since at least pre all the COVID shit.
So I'm excited to go back to Chicago.
I love that city.
Always, always have fun shows out there.
Yeah, what's up with you, Rob?
I got Soul Forum coming up, Boston coming up, Connecticut Party coming up.
We're taking over the world, Davey.
We are, little by little.
But not Ukraine.
That's being fought by other people.
But that'll be our next.
That'll be 2023.
So I don't know.
I know we've been talking a ton about this war going on in Ukraine, which has been a pretty dominant story and has really been crammed down the throats of the American people, some of them happily accepting it.
But things took a very interesting turn over the last couple days.
And it's really something if you follow it all, the coverage of this in the corporate press and then follow kind of like, you know, some good actual journalists of what's going on there.
Because this seems to have not really made much major news in America.
And you would think since everybody's changing their, you know, profile picture to Ukrainian flags and all of this, and this is like the number one story now for about a month, that this would at least be somewhat of a story.
And that is that this Zelensky character and the government of Ukraine seems to have gone what can only be described as full authoritarian.
Have you seen any of this, Rob?
Well, just to give the full scope of how buried this story was, I read Google News, also the Google News for me.
I go through Twitter, Wall Street Journal, The Drudge Report, Daily Beast, Week magazine.
I got quite a few things I read through on a daily basis.
I only knew that this was a story because you had sent it to me and I had to go to DuckDuckGo and search it.
And there were some mainstream coverage of it, but it was not easily found.
Yeah.
So this was pretty varied.
Yeah.
And look, it's really, it's really something.
And we'll get into like some, a few of the details about this, but it's not, again, like, I want to try.
I do try my best on the show to be like, you know, somewhat fair with the stuff we're talking about.
None of this means that Vladimir Putin is justified.
And none of this means that the Ukrainians don't have a right to defend themselves and to try to repel an invading army.
I absolutely think they do.
And I root for the war to end as quick as possible.
And I root for as few innocent Ukrainians to die as possible or be hurt.
How much does this place?
How much does it just look like we're sending them up for a slower, more painful death?
Like the latest news is we're sending them world like old Soviet Union anti-missile defense systems.
Well, this is this was an argument that the great Colonel Douglas McGregor was making since the beginning of this war.
That he was like, look, if you have a war where the Ukrainians can't win, a war against Russia, and you're not prepared.
And he doesn't look at this like a libertarian ideologue like I am.
He's not like an anti-war activist.
He's a colonel, you know, he's like looking at this like a military man.
He's not like, this is immoral for us to get involved in this war.
He's just like analyzing this.
And he goes, look, if you have a war with Ukraine and Russia and Ukraine can't win, and you're not, you, the United States of America, you're not willing to enter this war on behalf of Ukraine, then just encouraging them to fight and just sending them weapons and this stuff, this might just be like prolonging and extending this battle that they're doomed to lose.
So you might just be creating a situation where just far more Ukrainians are going to die than would have if you weren't encouraging them to fight and sending them weapons.
And it's an interesting point that's whether you agree with it completely or not is certainly worth thinking about.
But look, you can say that, you know, Vladimir Putin is wrong and you hope Ukraine wins the war and that Ukraine has every right to defend themselves and all of this stuff.
But if you're talking about this situation and everyone's going to be putting Ukrainian flags up in their profile pictures, and even more than that, the fact that the mindless, idiotic talking point that is just repeated over and over again is how Ukraine is a democracy and Ukraine represents freedom and Vladimir Putin represents authoritarianism.
Yeah, I mean, well, they really haven't even been for quite a while.
You know, look, they overthrew a democratically elected government in 2014.
And when I say that, I just mean an uprising of regular Ukrainian people like Secretary of State John Kerry and Victoria Newland and George Soros, you know, just like regular Ukrainians rose up and overthrew their government in 2014.
But they overthrew a democratically elected government in 2014.
There's no disputing that.
So I don't know how many points you get to be a democracy if you overthrew a democratically elected government this decade, you know, within the last 10 years or whatever, then I don't think you get too many.
But just over the last few days, President Zelensky has officially banned his rival political party.
He has absorbed several media outlets under state control and been imprisoning political opponents, which he's already been doing before this war, but doing even more so, even more of that.
I mean, okay.
Now, that doesn't mean that any of the other things have changed.
You could still be against Russia's invasion.
You could still root for the Ukrainians to win and say they have the right to defend themselves.
But That is relevant information that you would think, if we were going to be talking about this whole situation, would at least come up.
Again, even if there were two completely authoritarian countries and one invaded the other one, you could still say that country is wrong for initiating a war against the other one, even all the other factors, forgetting putting all of that aside for a second.
But this really does just poke not a little bit of a hole, but it just explodes.
It just demolishes the argument of like, well, but Ukraine is this free democracy and Russia is this authoritarian country.
It's like, no, no, no, no.
Like there, this guy is clearly going full authoritarian.
And none of this stuff is like, oh, this is necessary for the war effort.
In fact, his rival political party there were opposed to Russia as well.
And they condemned the Russian invasion.
They certainly, I think, were not as pro-West and anti-Russian as Zelensky's party.
But, you know, this is for Ukraine on the level of Joe Biden just using the federal government to declare the to make the Republican Party illegal.
There's no Republicans anymore, just by you know, state because COVID's such a threat and they're trying to roll it back.
So we're getting rid of the Republican Party.
It would be something on that level.
So anyway, it's just like it's a little bit wild to see this go not unreported, but again, like not getting nearly the amount of coverage that it clearly warrants.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, the articles I had read, it sounded like there were 11 parties that he got rid of.
One of them, which was the biggest rival, was a pro-Russian party.
However, and I understand like the idea of martial law and or like that side is more in line with the invading country.
But if I, I mean, I don't know when the next two elections, but if in the next election, everyone voted for that party, which is basically a hey, let's not be at war with Russia, then that's still a democratic process.
Like to remove that other option from the table, then you're not a democracy anymore.
I'm not a democracy.
I'm not just championing that democracy is the greatest thing ever, but the people who are supporting this war are saying that.
So, okay, even if you're going to claim that they're a pro-Russia party, which I don't know if that's completely accurate, there were more, they certainly were more.
I'm saying that was the harshest claim, but even that, that's still an element of democracy that people might go, I don't, I'd actually prefer the pro-Russian party because maybe they'll side with Russia and work this out.
Yes, that's a good point as an option.
Yes.
So if let's say hypothetically they were a pro-Russia party and Ukraine is so against Russia, well, then, okay, so no problem.
So then they won't vote for that party, right?
So what's the issue?
And I think the more that you, you, you know, learn about the situation in Ukraine, the more you realize that, you know, it's kind of like a very similar thing with a lot of countries, maybe even our own country.
That there are different groups within these countries who are so radically opposed to each other that it probably doesn't really make sense that they're all one country.
And the truth is that since 2014, the conflicts between the Donbass region there in the east of the country and the more Western pro-European side of this, they've been basically at war with each other.
And there really doesn't seem to be any reason why they should all be under one government because none of them seem happy with the governments that the other one would like.
And that doesn't necessarily mean that the Donbass region should be part of Russia.
Maybe they should just be independent.
I don't know.
I don't know.
And it's not my job to decide how Ukraine should be divided up.
But it is like, if we're just being honest here and calling a spade a spade, no, Ukraine is not a free country at all.
And it's certainly not a democracy.
And what's interesting about this, and it's one of the things as you, you know, as you look at this, to me, it seems almost impossible to ignore.
It's like the idea of, you know, I always felt like even back in the day in the just in the original war on terror, that it was always so ridiculous that, you know, Washington, D.C. would say, we're going to go bring freedom to Iraq or something like that.
And you're like, bring freedom to Iraq.
Like, we have the biggest prison population in the world, and huge numbers of them are there for like nonviolent, victimless crimes.
You mean bring freedom to other people?
To try to, like, maybe if you were operating a truly free society, someone could think you have a leg to stand on that you're going to spread this freedom around the world.
But you're, it's like, well, and it was the neocons, like at the same time that they're like instituting the TSA and the Patriot Act, they're like, we're going to spread freedom.
You're like, well, all right.
There's in the only area that you actually have control over, you're cracking down on freedom, you know?
But this is like after the last two years, the idea that Washington, D.C., that the group of lawyers in DC that are politicians are going to say, hey, we're really concerned with protecting freedom.
One World Currency00:09:31
Excuse me?
I mean, if it wasn't for like a narrow decision in the Supreme Court, the Biden administration would have just, you know, kicked at least tens of millions of Americans out of their job if they didn't want to get a vaccine.
What?
What do you mean, freedom?
What does that word mean to you?
Because it kind of means something to me.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So, anyway, it's just real interesting to see throughout all the, you know, as I said at the beginning of this war, it's just like, get ready for the propaganda, get ready for some serious war propaganda.
And this is what you see all over the place.
Much as everybody is talking about the war in Ukraine, it is almost like a tiny footnote that this guy just banned all of his political opposition and absorbed the media into being state media.
Is that a small story?
Does that sound like that's not a big deal?
Would you think that was a big deal if it happened in the country where you live?
Because that would seem like a big deal to me.
So, anyway, just I just thought it was pretty crazy, and that's the latest kind of development here.
It's very hard to really get a gauge of exactly what's going on and how dangerous it is and how, you know, like what really is happening.
But I will say there was something Joe Biden said the other day about he has, he gave this talk, you know, it was a Biden speech.
You know, it's hard to ever, you know, he's just rambling and an old man.
But I don't know if you saw this thing where he said that the whole new world order was being challenged and we were going to have to come up with a whole new world order.
Did you see that, Rob?
I did.
Yeah.
Said the said the quiet part out loud.
But that is, but I actually, I think that's exactly right.
I think he said the quiet part out loud and I think that was actually a moment of honesty with him.
And what you see, what's happening here, and this is kind of interesting, right?
It's like he, it seems like Joe Biden has really, and not just Joe Biden, but the, you know, the government, because I don't know how much Joe Biden is really the one making all of the decisions or, you know, developing the strategies.
But what seems to be going on right now, which is really kind of crazy, and we touched on this on the last episode, is that rather than the kind of Henry Kissinger type geopolitical strategy of dividing powers against each other, you know, the move almost, if you looked at the world, even not from a libertarian point of view, just from like a pure cold-blooded like strategist point of view, would be what?
Well, if you have Russia and China and the United States as these kind of big powerful countries, well, wouldn't the move be to what?
Try to divide those two against each other and befriend one of them and bring them into your circle.
Now, the moral libertarian thing to do would be to try to like bring everybody into the same circle and just be like, hey, we don't all need to be fighting against each other.
There's no reason.
We'll all make each other, you know, more prosperous and freer and have enjoy more peace if we all just agree to trade with each other and blah, blah, blah and all this stuff.
But what we seem to be doing right now is driving Russia and China into each other's arms, which is like, I feel like would be what no one would recommend.
Like this just seems like the worst of all deals.
But as we talked about with the Saudis getting involved in this too, there's a lot of other powerful countries that seem to be involved in this as well.
There does seem to be a real case to be made that the unipolar moment, as it was called after the Soviet Union fell, and the dominance of the dollar reserve standard and what is known as American hegemony.
More accurately, probably described as empire, but hegemony sounds nicer.
So that's the word that they use.
But it seems like there might be a real shakeup in that whole world order.
And I think that's what Joe Biden was getting at in what you referred to as him saying the quiet part out loud.
I think he might be right about that.
Yeah, except that the only thing that's very interesting to me, to me, it's the most fascinating topic, like the dollar being the reserve currency of the world and whether or not we've done evil things in order to initiate that status.
But there's something interesting about like it's the worst pitch in human history for a product that everyone goes, well, the dollar sucks, but it's the best option.
That's kind of the argument for it, right?
That, yeah, it's trash, but everything, all the other trash smells more.
So, what's interesting a little bit about potentially pricing the won, and I think that's the Chinese currency in oil contracts is that like we've always couldn't, we've always accused China of currency manipulation in terms of keeping their currency cheaper.
So, in some way, China doesn't seem to want that role of being the currency of the world because then their currency would have to appreciate in value.
That's kind of the entire racket of being the currency.
I mean, the way that we've used it is that we keep kind of keep printing it, inflating it, and sending those dollars abroad so it doesn't hurt us as much.
And we've got the widespread usage so we can kind of fund our debt.
But, like, think about how much of a reverse in policy would have to be for China to then become like China's not going to become the currency of the world.
I don't think Bitcoin's there at the moment.
The question becomes: like when Biden starts talking about it out loud and you look at what's going on in America, the real question becomes: is there going to be some sort of a SDR one world type currency situation to which that, and then you get into the creepy territory of a single more centralized Federal Reserve or a single centralized, more centralized government?
No, that is all of those are kind of like possibilities, even though they feel a little bit abstract.
But to me, you know, not knowing what could come of this.
I mean, there also could be a commodity-based standard.
It doesn't have to be, you know, the Chinese having the reserve currency in their little, you know, nexus of influence.
But it does seem like something is shaking up here.
You know what I mean?
It does seem like there's the real possibility for some type of shakeup where a lot of people are probably looking at this.
And, you know, you have to understand from outside of the empire looking in, it looks much different than inside the empire looking out.
And for a lot of the people outside the empire looking in, they're like, they don't look at us as anything other than the butcherers that we are.
That's what they look at us, that we bomb the shit out of countries, starve countries, bully countries to maintain our dominance throughout the world.
And a lot of people are like, yeah, we don't want that.
And if we have an out to try to get away from that, they might be interested in that possibility.
So it's something to keep our eye on.
And I think what you touched on there is really the most interesting point about it: is that us having our biggest export be dollars and utilizing the dollar as the reserve currency of the world has been what's allowed us to maintain this kind of maintain basically the entire economy that we're running.
This is kind of the way it works.
And if that isn't the case anymore, then that would necessitate drastic changes in the way America's economy is run.
Racial Identitarianism Debate00:10:06
And that's kind of, you know, that's a big deal.
No matter how you feel about it, that's big news.
Kind of like, you know, Zelensky declaring himself a dictator is big news and just doesn't seem to be reported that much.
So anyway, that's what's going on as I see it and as Rob sees it in the world.
All right.
Let me see.
Okay.
So I guess let's talk about some maybe not quite as important, but maybe not completely unimportant, but some domestic news that's going on.
I guess the Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings, the Senate confirmation hearings were yesterday.
And Judge Brown Jackson, her hearings were going on.
Did you get a chance to watch any of that, Rob?
So I watched Ted Cruz and Hawley Griller.
The far right.
I was trying to make a joke on Twitter that I asked her, this Supreme Court nominee, not to show me her vagina and she showed me her vagina.
And then I'd like to appear before the Senate to address this, but I don't actually remember the details of the incident.
I know that it happened.
I just don't remember any of the other details because I was like, what wild accusation are the Republicans going to show up with after that wild spectacle in the Kavanaugh one?
And then little did I know, the spectacle that they were trying to bring to the table.
And this is now I'm mixing in what the far conspiracy people are mixing into this is that the Biden family are so balls deep in pedophilia.
They're trying to get a pro-pedophilia justice onto the Supreme Court.
I guess to somehow change the laws of the Supreme Court to make pedophilia the rules of the land, which and then the technicalities that Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley were throwing at her to try and paint her as pro-pedophile, I didn't quite follow it.
Yeah, it, I will say to me, seemed like a reach.
Maybe there's something here that I'm missing, but I guess she had she had written some pieces in law school about whether sex offender registries were unconstitutional or something like that, which look, I don't know.
I don't even want to like touch the subject, to be honest.
There's no one getting to the Supreme Court to try and make it easier to be a pedophile in the United States of America.
This is not like abortions where half the country kind of doesn't like it.
And so you might be able to flip the policy.
There is no legislative, I don't know, grouping of people that are going to rally together and go, finally, we might flip the Supreme Court for more pedophilia.
It just doesn't, I mean, I don't know.
It just seems hard.
It just seems hard to believe.
I do think some of the other stuff that Ted Cruz was grilling her on was a little bit more fair.
And, you know, about that critical race theory stuff.
I, you know, here's the thing.
And I feel almost in a way a little bit bad for this woman that she has to now become the face of this, because I think to some degree that's.
It's Biden's fault.
Biden said you're only getting a job because you're black.
So that's exactly right.
That's exactly the point I was.
All he had to do is not say that and then elect her.
And it could be a conversation about her judicial record.
And everyone could go, oh, we know that that, but at the end of the day, then you're the racist for saying, hey, you're only here for this reason.
Right.
Right.
Biden didn't allow her to feel good about her life accomplishments and go, look, I've earned this.
So exactly, listen, exactly.
If Biden had said, I am going to find the most qualified judge that I can find.
And then he picked this lady.
And then people went, hey, I think you're only here because you're a black woman.
It would at least, not to say that that proves it's not true, but it would at least kind of be reasonable or understandable for people to go, hey, I think you're just being racist.
Like he just said he was picking the best person.
This is the person he picked.
You're assuming because it's a black woman that that must have been done because she's a black woman.
Or a minimum shitty to point out.
However, what happened, this is what's just so bananas about the time that we live in.
What happened is that Joe Biden said, I'm gonna pick a black woman for this job.
Then he picks a black woman.
Then people will point out, well, you're kind of here because of your race and your gender.
And then they'll still go, that's racist that you're pointing this out.
Like, that's actually what's happening in front of all of us.
They go, they'll just go, oh, that's just so outrageous that you would even insert race and gender into this.
And you're like, no, The guy who picked her said that this is why he's picking her.
It's so bizarre.
It's almost like they do.
I just, I hate racial identitarianism.
I really just think it's poisonous and it gets everybody distracted from what actually matters.
But when you see it like this, it's like, no, you can't be the racial identitarian and then claim everyone's fucked up for talking about the merits of racial identitarianism.
I'm sorry.
That's just that's too much.
Um, I did think it was there was that one interesting exchange with her and Ted Cruz I thought was kind of interesting, I guess, where he was talking about that.
Um, they were talking about whether critical race theory is taught in schools.
And he brought up that book that's talking about racist babies that's taught to like little kids.
And you do start to realize, Don't Flush the Black Ones.
No, I don't think so, but it is, I don't think that's the name.
But oh, it's all this thing.
I guess that was just in my house.
That might have been.
So it sounds like an interesting read.
That's not actually for kids.
It's more of an adult book.
But, you know, there does become this thing where these kind of like culture war issues that I do believe are like kind of pushed on the American people as distractions.
And I think we try our best on this show to avoid the distractions and focus on what matters the most.
But again, this is like a Supreme Court, you know, nomination process.
So it's not like something that doesn't matter at all.
But it also becomes this weird thing where like, if they're it, you know, like, if they're getting the American people to argue over, you know, some social issue that just really doesn't matter that much, you can be like, yeah, look, this is all a distraction.
But when you start propagandizing children into a lot of this shit, you're like, now this has kind of gone beyond the level of just being a distraction, and it's hit the level of actually being something that really matters and is really important to fight back against.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And then there's this whole thing where it's kind of like, you know, like we've said before, this game that they play where they're like, as she said when Ted Cruz asked her, she goes, well, critical race theory isn't taught in schools.
I mean, that's just like a legal theory that's taught in law school.
And it's like, okay, but this is a book for little kids that we're talking about here.
So whatever you want to call that, that are you against that?
Like, are you know, and she did say, you know, of course, as she says that she goes, oh, I'm completely against any, you know, any kids being taught that they are the oppressors or they are the oppressed or that they are inherently racist or anything like that.
It's just kind of like, okay, so everyone says that on record, and yet this shit still ends up being taught to children.
So I don't, I don't know exactly what you do about that, but it's, it's this very like, um, it seems like a very set up game where publicly no one will say that they defend this shit and yet it still exists.
And then when you rail against it, they'll just say, oh, you're just making shit up.
This isn't, none of this is ever taught, but it is.
And anyone paying attention knows that it is.
It's some fucked up shit that is only going to result, I think, in people getting more and more furious, parents getting more and more furious as this shit goes on.
So, anyway, that was just a moment that I thought was somewhat noteworthy.
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Transgender Rights Outrage00:09:59
Anything else out of the sentence hearings that you picked up that you thought was like an interesting?
I thought the uh to her credit, I thought I'm not, I didn't get to watch all this footage, but I did think that the Gitmo narrative was interesting, that she spent some of her career as a public defender of uh, I believe people in Gitmo.
And they tried to grow her on, yeah.
I thought to her credit, that sounded very interesting.
Like, I'm saying, as a uh, as a good character trait, yeah, yeah, no, I agree with you on that.
At least she had some of the positive things you'd hope a Democrat appointed judge would have that she seemed to kind of have a feeling of like, oh, yeah, well, I mean, you shouldn't be able to just like, I don't know, lock people up forever without a trial.
Like, shouldn't they eventually get one?
That's not exactly what the Constitution says.
So, that was that's true.
And then, aside from all that, it's just it's a dumb game of trying to get them to answer how they're going to rule on cases or what their judicial philosophy is.
Like, we know, like, you're a Democratic pick.
We could probably estimate 90% of the cases exactly how you're going to judge them.
So, like, this kind of dance of trying to bust them and go, oh, well, obviously, we can't have.
I mean, the Supreme Court, it becomes a little bit more transparent where it goes, obviously, we can't have them here because they're going to overturn abortion.
So, but it's the same game.
It's like they're just trying, like, the Republicans don't really have a way to permanently hold up a single Democratic nomination.
And I don't think this person's any more flagrant than anyone else.
So, it's probably going through.
So, that'd be my guess also.
Aside from the Hail Mary pedophilia play, which I'm going to have to re-listen to, because those were technical, technical arguments that just made it seem like whatever opinion she did have was not that flagrant.
And it was such a reach to try and pretend like we're trying to get more pedophiles into government or more pro-pedophile.
Like, what exactly is that?
And also, her defense of it at least seemed to me to be plausible.
She was like, Look, this is when I was in law school.
The sex offenders registry was a brand new thing.
And I was writing about like what I felt about the constitutionality of this, you know?
The other aspect was they were saying that she had a weak judicial record of basically giving lenient penalties on it.
But then, even her arguments somewhat made sense.
And this was on the Ted Cruz one, also very technical.
I got to give it a second watch.
But she was saying that there's some individuals that are obviously engaging in the distribution of, or I've either trying to acquire or distribute like, you know, pornographic images of children.
There's some people that appear that maybe there's a distinction that they're more interested in the technology.
And Ted Cruz was like grilling her on that.
But I somewhat understand theoretically how that could be.
Like, so, for example, if you were one of these people like buying drugs on like the deep net or like on Silk Road, so I'm sure that that's probably a place that if you were interested in pornographic images, you could find them.
But to say that everyone there, no, like there are kids or other individuals who are interested in hacking or interested in things specifically because like, you know, like the technology, the technological route to circumvent the internet so you can get pornographic images that you're not supposed to have.
I'm sure to some people, whatever that game is of figuring that out, is probably a bit of a game.
So I understand the distinction that some individuals that have also like there is something I think broken about child pornography laws that I think in order to be guilty, there needs to be an aspect of intent, because otherwise, you know, you could be in a situation where people put the stuff on your computer and then it goes, oh, well, you have it.
So you're guilty.
Yeah.
Like there needs to be, in my opinion, I don't know, I'm not a legal expert on the way, you know, being found guilty of like, you know, child pornography works, but it seems to me if you're just in possession of it, you're guilty of it, which does seem to be a kind of weak standard because it's just ripe for someone placing that on your computer.
Yeah, you know, I guess that's true.
You want to make sure that people aren't, you're not like prosecuting people who didn't actually do anything like that and just creating a situation where like anyone can put something on someone because that does just getting ahead of it.
The FBI put that on my computer.
Well, okay.
So while you mention this, that's it's kind of a transition that into a couple other topics that I did just briefly want to touch on on today's show.
And I look, I will kind of preface this by saying, and like all of these topics, by saying that I really try my best on this show.
And I think overall, I do a pretty good job.
We do, I should say, Rob, we do a pretty good job of this of like of focusing on what matters, or at least focusing on things that really matter and prioritizing them and giving them more time.
And this is something that I try to push a lot to other libertarians that I think is important.
That it's like there are some libertarians who get completely animated about issues that are not the most important issues, frankly.
And that is a problem.
And it's a big problem with our society in general, is that so many of these kind of distraction issues become so prioritized and are so put on like the hierarchy of outrage and attention.
They're put way up at the top when they really don't deserve to be there.
I've used this example many times over the years, but just to put it out again in another way, like if Joe Biden tomorrow, hypothetically, it's not something Joe Biden would do.
The second part isn't something Joe Biden would do, but if Joe Biden were to bomb a third world country, you know, take your pick.
I don't know.
What country do you think he might bomb?
I mean, he has bombed Afghanistan and Iraq and like, you know, whatever, whatever country you think.
There's some drone bomb and it kills like 100 innocent people.
And then on that same day, he got up in a press conference and said that he doesn't believe trans women are women.
What do you think the outrage of the day would be?
Trans.
We all, we all know what it would be.
And it's not even like no one could even argue that they think the former would be the outrage of the day because it's happened all the time.
And that wasn't even the outrage of the day.
And he didn't even do anything that would be as much the outrage of the day as if he said trans women weren't women.
Now, even if you believe trans women are women, whatever that statement even means, even if you believe that, I think any reasonable person could see that there's a little bit of a problem if murdering 100 innocent people is not more of an outrage.
Like if any regular person did that, if I told you that I did both of those things in my day today, I think you'd be like, yeah, I'm not so concerned about your thoughts on trans people.
Dave, I want to hear more about how you murdered 100 people today.
You know, that seems reasonable to me.
And I think for anyone who actually cares about like, you know, human rights or something like that, then they should recognize there's a little bit of an issue there.
And so anyway, I try my best on this show.
And I think me and you do a pretty good job of this, of like the things we focus on the most are usually the very important issues.
And what have we been talking about nonstop for the last few weeks has been the war in Ukraine.
And that's because like nuclear war looms in the balance and people are dying in the war in Ukraine.
And over the last few years, we've been talking about the rise of the COVID regime more than anything, because that is a very important thing.
And we've talked about, you know, whatever.
I've talked about the war in Yemen to more Americans than maybe anyone.
I don't know.
I mean, I literally, I don't know who is the person who's told more Americans about the war in Yemen, but it might be me.
I might be number one.
Like I've literally talked about it on Rogan's show multiple times, on Tim Poole's show, on this show, on like a ton of platforms.
Talk about it as much as I can because it's like it's the worst thing in the world that's happening.
And that seems like the thing you should talk about the most in the world is the worst thing in the world.
And of course, we talked, you know, we always, we always try to focus on what we think the most important thing is.
And for years, that was also, you know, Donald Trump being framed as a Russian spy and whatever that thing may be.
So I don't want to like focus on this stuff too much, but there has been a lot of talk with in the libertarian world about some of these kind of culture war issues.
And I just think it's important to at least like kind of address what I think the libertarian position on some of this stuff is.
And if nothing else, because I think that if people are under the impression that the correct libertarian position is something else, they might not be so willing to listen to some of those other really important things that we have to say.
So there's been a couple of bills that have really become controversial, I suppose.
I know there's one in Texas and there's one in Florida.
And the one in Florida, well, let's actually say the one in Texas.
And I was arguing with a libertarian about this the other day who said that, has it said, what do you have to say about this new proposal in Texas that says that trans people can't live their life the way they see fit?
And I said, well, wait, what specifically are we talking about?
Cancel Unwanted Subscriptions00:02:45
And then they, you know, they shared the bill.
And I was like, oh, so what it is, or maybe it's not a bill.
It might be just like an executive fiat type thing.
I'm not sure.
But so, uh, anyway, um, so the the it says that it bans uh children, minors, from having a gender reassignment surgery or hormone, uh, you know, um, like puberty blockers, basically.
Which is smart.
If you wait till college, you can play women's sports and get a scholarship.
Yeah, really.
You don't want to block, you don't want to block puberty.
You won't be able to dominate women's sports.
Yeah.
Why would you do that to yourself?
But capitalize.
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Irreversible Decisions For Kids00:14:10
Let me just say, from this is my take on this, okay?
From a libertarian perspective, I think that is completely reasonable.
I think it is completely reasonable to say that children are not allowed to have irreversible elective surgeries or certainly semi-irreversible elective hormone treatments.
I think there is absolutely nothing unreasonable about the government saying that.
Now, I understand that some people could say, well, you're a libertarian and you're supposed to be against the government in general, you know, and whatever the government does, the government shouldn't get in between the decisions that other people are making or something along those lines.
But I would just put it like this, right?
And maybe this is a way to preface it, to just kind of think about this thing, right?
If there is, if somebody is, if somebody kidnaps somebody else and locks them in their basement and just leaves them there till they starve to death, what are they guilty of, Rob?
Killing a person?
Yeah, murder.
Exactly.
You kidnapped them and you left them in the basement until they starved to death.
Now, if you kidnap someone and you feed them regularly, what are you guilty of?
Kidnap.
Kidnapping.
Exactly.
So yes, you did a great job.
So in the first scenario, you're guilty of murder.
And in the second scenario, you're guilty of kidnapping.
Now, another way to describe that is that if you kidnap someone and lock them in your basement, you now have an obligation to feed that person if you don't want to also be guilty of murder.
Okay.
Now, I'm just saying that doesn't mean I want you to kidnap someone.
You know, it's not saying that like we condone of the kidnapping, but once you do that, you know, if you're going to do that, you do have an obligation to do this.
And so in the same sense, I think that while you may not want a government to be the ones making these decisions, once the government is there and is in the business of making these decisions, then at the very least, you want them to do X.
And at the very least, you want them to stop child abuse.
And I just think that there is nothing unreasonable about saying, look, there are lots of rights that we say that children do not enjoy.
You know, children cannot drive.
They cannot own a gun.
They cannot purchase alcohol.
They cannot smoke cigarettes.
They cannot, I don't know.
We could go on and on all day long.
For the things that we say children can't do, that we all would say would be infringements on liberty if you said adults couldn't do them.
But I don't really see libertarians out there saying, oh my god, this is so appalling that children don't have the right to drive cars.
Why won't we let nine-year-olds on the highway like because obviously that's completely reasonable to to have a restriction on that.
And so, in the same sense, I mean honestly, if you're not allowed to, like you know, drink and smoke and go to an R-rated movie, isn't it more reasonable to say you're not allowed to have an irreversible elective genital mutilating surgery?
I'm, i'm sorry, I think that is completely reasonable and I just.
The only reason i'm even addressing this is because there's been other libertarians and some, like you know, like somewhat high profile libertarians, who have taken a different position on this, and I do not want that to be put out there as, like this is the libertarian position to me.
It comes down to this, okay, this is the way to look at this as a libertarian.
Um, let's say I I think Rob correct me if you think i'm wrong about this, but I i'm pretty sure i'm right that even the people who are arguing that you know, if a child is transgender and they identify as that, then and we're saying child say like a 15 year old or something like that.
I think most of these people aren't talking about like young, young children, but even a 15 year old.
If a 15 year old is uh, they say I identify, Identify, you know, they're a boy, but they say, I identify as a girl, that they should be allowed to have gender reassignment surgery or something like that.
If you were to ask that person, well, what if the 15-year-old didn't say that?
What if they didn't consent and want to have this gender reassignment surgery and you just did it to them anyway?
Would that be a crime?
I think even most of the people advocating for this would acknowledge that is a crime, right?
Fair enough.
That you couldn't, yeah, you couldn't just do this to a fucking 14-year-old, 15-year-old who didn't want it to be done to them, right?
Okay.
But because they do want it to be done to them, then it's okay.
Well, what it comes down to now is: can children consent?
And the correct answer to that is no, they can't.
And so, if you're going to say that this is okay because this is what the child wants, what you actually have to argue there is that the child can consent.
And let me just tell you, you're going to go down some really ugly road if that's what you want to believe.
How about you get the point that I'm making, Rob?
Wait, so what's uh, what's the ugly road there?
That's a good idea.
Well, if they can consent to that, they could probably consent to a lot of other things too.
Yeah.
Well, then I guess there's, I guess, pedophilia can't be a crime anymore, right?
Because they're capable or not pedophilia, but I should say statutory rape shouldn't be a crime anymore, right?
Because now children can consent, is what you're saying.
So the point is that if, well, go ahead.
No, I agree with you.
I would have, I have an interest in a specific piece of data, like just to kind of maybe, maybe play devil's advocate here.
Sure, go ahead.
I'd be curious to know, like, if you ran a study at each age range of people who identified as the opposite, like how absolute is that?
So, like, if you took a hundred kids, if a hundred, if a hundred seven-year-olds said, Hey, I'm the wrong gender here, and let's say you didn't touch them, right?
10 years later, when they're of legal age, how many of that 100 were actually right when they made that identification at seven?
And as a theoretical, if we ran that experiment and we found out that of the seven people, of the 100 people at age seven, all 100 of them at age 18 still felt that way, right?
And then you were to say it's actually easier on the body to do it at a younger age, then I would go, okay, maybe you have data here to suggest that when people self-identify at young ages, that's absolute.
Absent of that data, it would seem to me like you're making a mistake to do permanent things when I think we've all, I mean, I didn't identify as a lady as a child, but I definitely went, we all went through our weird fucking phases.
We all made mistakes.
We all did dumb shit.
Seven-year-olds often identify as dinosaurs.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
But, but I still wouldn't support you having a surgery, you know, that's irreversible.
I would think it would have to be close to 100%.
If you had data that at every age, at age eight, 100 kids who are identifying, if we leave them alone at age 18, are all still sticking to that story and that medically it's easier.
You got a claim.
I think without that piece of data, you don't really have much of a claim.
No, I understand the way you're looking at it.
I'm looking at it from more of a philosophical standpoint, but you're looking at from more of a practical, like, what, what is the, you know, like kind of evidence of whether this is a real, whether this claim will hold up later or not.
So I get that.
I think, I think there's some merit to the point that you're raising.
But the truth is that kids are incredibly malleable and teenagers are incredibly confused.
And the idea that it's going that we're going to support the idea of having a life-altering procedure done to you when you can just wait.
And then, when you're an adult, you decide if you want to do this, you know.
Well, that's the thing that particularly creeps me out about is they say that, like, when it comes to like seeing a shrink, and they always like there were a lot of people that were convinced that they had been molested when they never had been.
Like, people, they actually shrinks put that like a false memory in.
And so, people start going, Oh, yeah, that did happen.
And that's a real phenomenon.
And then, also, like, if you just start thinking of being overwhelmingly depressed or anxious, and then maybe having a liberal parent and going, Hey, maybe this is the solution.
And so, you know, you want to make your parents happy or proud, or you go, Hey, maybe that is the solution.
And it turns out not to be.
Now, like I said, without the actual data on this of how many times that's happening, but it just seems really creepy because, like you're saying, with the child abuse, you could have parents that they think it's cool amongst their peer group to go, Hey, look, my child transitioned, and this is proof of how woke I am.
And there's no question you do have that.
That is happening right now.
And I think almost everybody knows that that is happening.
That it's not a coincidence that so many of these kids who, you know, like want to be transgender or transition have parents who really believe in that shit.
You know, it's like this wig.
Just try it on.
Maybe you prefer it.
Yeah.
Or if a kid says it one time, then their parents are going to jump on it and then really start pushing it.
It's, it's, there's something incredibly sick about all of this.
And I don't know.
I don't think it's that complicated.
And the thing to me, what really bugs me about it is that most people on an instinctual level know how fucked up this is.
They don't have to have read, you know, like great philosophers in order to know that it's like, yeah, no, this is this is really weird and disturbing, the idea that you would have permanent, you know, irreversible surgery on a child to something that, you know, that they may or may not, you know, really regret or may or may not really want in the moment.
And I just don't think that the greatest political philosophy in the history of the world should ever be associated with this type of crap.
So there's that.
You know, I don't think that, you know, in the same way as I've kind of made this argument before, that it's like, I am completely opposed to the government and I want to see a stateless society.
I want to see a completely free society.
That is like the ultimate goal.
But the idea that while you have a government, that you should therefore support, say, like the Florida bill, what they call the don't say gay bill.
Well, okay, if we want to see a world where there aren't government-run schools, we want to just see schools where voluntary associations are built and educators can educate children and parents can decide if they want to send their children to this school or that school.
But as long as we have government schools and they're teaching sex ed to first graders, and then there's a bill to say stop teaching sex ed to first graders, well, we must support teaching sex ed to first graders.
That doesn't make any sense.
That's not derived from libertarianism.
And then I wish we would stop associating our beautiful philosophy with these like, not just horror, not just ideas that don't flow from our philosophy, but that are that are borderline, if not over the line, child abuse.
There's no need to associate these things together because they do not, one does not follow from the other.
So fuck that.
Leave the kids alone.
I'm not for any of this shit.
It's completely reasonable to say that permanent decisions like that, if we say there's all of these other decisions that children can't make, it's completely reasonable to say that a permanent, irreversible one is something that we shouldn't allow children to make.
And if you want to make the argument that children should be able to drive cars and own guns and drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes and, you know, whatever else and have consensual sex with grown adults and all of this.
So if you want to make that argument, then go ahead and make it.
And you're insane.
But please let me hear that argument about how that's moral and how that would possibly work in society.
But if you're accepting that all of that is fine to ban, then this one is also fine to ban.
That's all I'm going to say.
I'd like to make one more point.
If you look to Caitlin as your role model, I mean, she did everything you could do as a dude first.
I mean, she lived it through.
She made it all the way to 60, Olympics, rich.
You know what I mean?
Like, why not take that as your role model?
You got so much time.
She lived a full life as a dude and then did the home stretch as a lady.
Like, if you're a lady, that's the way to do it.
At least you might as well experience everything that there is of being a lady and then why jump the gun.
All right.
I think you make a very good point.
All right.
That's where we're going to wrap our episode for today.
All right.
Go check out Run Your Mouth and follow Rob at Robbie the Fire on Twitter.
Follow me at Comic Dave Smith.
And yeah.
Oh, by you know what?
This will probably be done by the time this is out, but I'm doing a clubhouse tomorrow night with LP members who are critics of mine or the Libertarian Party Mises caucus.
So I don't know if maybe some people will hear this before.
Can I be a critic?
You can come.
You can come on and criticize me.
But anyway, that's Wednesday night at 8 p.m.
But you may not be here on this episode in time for that.