Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect the Buffalo shooting, rejecting politicized narratives like the "great replacement" in favor of addressing mental health. They mock Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for reducing complex issues to systemic racism and critique the promotion of unqualified figures over achievers like Thomas Sowell. The hosts analyze Elon Musk's paused Twitter acquisition as a victory against censorship control, while questioning Biden's tax-inflation logic. Ultimately, the episode argues that blaming politicians for individual violence or economic failure ignores psychological realities and logical mechanisms. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roll Back The State00:14:36
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He's Robbie the Fire Bernstein, the king of the caulks, COVID Jesus.
How you doing, brother?
I'm doing well.
How are you, Davey Smith?
We're cranking out content.
People can't keep up.
They can't.
They can't keep up.
They try to, but they never quite succeed.
I am doing good.
I'm getting very excited for Reno, Nevada, which is next week.
Next week.
Of course, we're out there.
Me and you are going to be doing some stand-up comedy shows, a live part of the problem.
Still a few tickets available for the late show.
The first two are sold out.
So we added that late show there.
Still a few tickets left for that if people want to come out.
And then, of course, that weekend is the National Libertarian Party Convention.
Friday night is the Mises Caucus Bash.
I'll be speaking at that.
It's going to be a huge deal.
This is, you know, kind of the moment that we at the Mises Caucus have been working for, working toward for a while.
So this is going to be a big celebration.
Very excited for what's going to happen in Reno.
Of course, we'll talk all about it on the podcast and probably next week.
And I expect the delegates to be bringing ties to the king.
Don't be showing up without sandwiches or other offerings.
I imagine that that goes with that snack.
That was always my understanding.
And your ticket doesn't count.
I know you think, hey, I bought a ticket to the show.
That should count.
It doesn't.
No, no, no, no, not at all.
You might be in good standing.
That ticket price just covers the chairs.
You haven't done anything for Rob.
You barely covered the chair.
We're still taking a loss on the chairs.
We got some very nice chairs for this gig.
So anyway, yeah, I'm very excited for that.
Of course, you're going to be out in California.
When is that?
This weekend?
Callie, people, this weekend, I got an unbelievable show lined up.
It's going to be me and Brian McWilliams.
I am doing stand-up, and then I got my COVID expert coming out doing a presentation.
If you're in the LA area, this is in Hawthorne.
Link in the episode description.
I promise you, it's going to be a fun time.
Come hang out.
Yeah, make sure you go out to that one.
Robbie, of course, is hilarious.
Always fun to come see live.
Brian McWilliams is a great dude.
And this COVID expert is, I'm sure, gonna tow the Fauci in line.
So that should be fun too.
Come out there.
Make sure you mask up.
Mask up.
Vaccine boosters are required for all Robbie the Fire Bernstein shows.
Okay, so, oh, yeah, on top of that, I think we might have a small, like a few tickets left for Chicago on July 18th, but I might do that.
Pork Fest, Free State Project.
Hell yeah.
Go check out everything that they're doing, Childerberg, and other dates coming at you.
Hell yeah, absolutely.
All right.
So yeah, let's jump right into it.
I guess the thing that's been dominating the news for the last two days or so was there was this horrible mass shooting up in Buffalo, New York.
So I believe 10 people were killed, several more wounded.
It was, I believe it was live streamed, which is God, a really incredibly creepy trend that this has happened a few times now with mass shooting.
So anyway, obviously a tragic situation whenever people are killed, especially multiple people being killed.
But the thing that's really kind of, I've even been a little taken aback by how politicized this has been, how much this is, the attempt to use this incident.
This is something that, I mean, we've probably talked about this many other times on the podcast.
This is something that's been going on for years where there are, you know, incidents like this and people attempt to politicize them right away.
But this one to me seems to be the most egregious example of this that I remember seeing, where it's like right away and it's so amplified how much it's just like, okay, this is like, this is proof that whatever it is, we need to crack down on the First Amendment or that, you know, it's the amount of people blaming like Tucker Carlson for it.
It's all of it to me seems incredibly, I mean, just truly despicable.
I don't know how else to say.
I think the idea of jumping on these shootings and if you can try, which isn't even the case really in this one, but if you can try to say that they have something in common with your political opponents, then using it as an attack on your political opponents, it's like standing over the like still warm bodies of real people who have been killed to just try to score cheap political points.
I just hate that stuff.
I mean, I think it's like it's just a really shitty thing to do.
And it's being done on quite a large scale.
It's particularly horrible when it's done by authoritarians who are trying to use it as an excuse to take away more freedom.
But anyway, that seems to be what's going on, at least to me.
I don't know if you have any thoughts.
Usually they just hop on these things to go, hey, this is why you can't have guns.
I mean, if you remember in the Florida school shooting, CNN did like that big open, I mean, which was amazing how quickly they were able to produce that piece of propaganda.
In this case, though, they're working on a new narrative, which I tweeted out two articles from NPR, but the new narrative is that Tucker Carlson and others are pushing this.
What's the word they're using?
Replacement.
The replacement.
Right.
They're pushing the replacement theory.
And that's why you're now getting domestic terrorism who are so afraid of this that they're willing to take action.
And you can just as easily read other narratives into this.
One is his family was the head of the title in the New York Post, was that he lost his mind over COVID.
So, I mean, I wouldn't start running around with this and going, hey, look at what the government did to people.
They're losing their minds.
But I'm just saying, if you're in the market for how do I spin a story, you could just as easily be telling the story of government locked people in their homes and they lost their minds.
And are we now all at risk of people taking to the streets and shooting us?
Another narrative that you could just as easily be pointing to is that he was wearing the same insignia and others as the Izov battalion in Ukraine, which is a far-right, Nazi Ukraine that militia or army or army battalion that seemingly the Biden administration is funding.
So it could be that he stands in support with the Biden administration and Nazis in the Ukraine, and he's trying to take action in our country as well.
You can read all sorts of narratives here.
Yeah, well, I mean, the guy wrote, I think, 180 pages.
Which is too many pages.
I need the cliff notes.
Yeah, he's against this.
Come on.
We've been saying it for years, guys.
Try to keep your manifesto to a nice five to 10 pages if you want.
No, but evidently he described himself as authoritarian left leaning in that.
But from what I understand, and I've only seen little bits and pieces.
Obviously, I'm not sitting down and reading a 180-person manifesto from an insane person.
But there were many like kind of contradictory views that he expressed.
It's not exactly clear that it fits into a neat little package of, well, this guy is a Tucker Carlson guy.
In fact, I think he claimed that Fox News was involved in a conspiracy or something like that.
Like it wasn't like, it's not.
So it's not even as if his politics are what they're claiming.
But the truth is, just to make that for several reasons, it's very stupid to try to use this line of argument where you're like, well, okay, look, if someone who shares the same political views as you does something violent, therefore that is proof that you are somehow responsible for this by, you know, spreading your political views.
And it's just a very stupid argument.
And the vast, vast, vast majority of the time when people make that argument, they're not doing it in good faith.
They don't honestly believe it.
They're just jumping on something to use as a weapon.
And what's so despicable about it is in this case, what they're using as a weapon is the like the very human impulse to feel horrible that innocent people were murdered, you know?
And so like you use that emotion.
And that's what they were doing in that example that you cited there in Florida at that one.
Whatever was the name of that school I'm blanking on, the one where David Hoffmann.
The FBI got in big trouble for that.
They ended up hanging out.
Was that the same school?
I'm not sure, but the guy had been investigated.
They also found out later that the sheriff was completely incompetent and that the school cop who was there basically just hid while it was all going down.
I mean, there was just, again, like you said, there's a lot of different narratives going on here.
But the truth is that even if somebody does share your politics and then goes out and does something horrific, it's just there's really nothing you can draw from that.
And if you were to draw from that, that therefore you're somehow on the hook for it.
I mean, the problem is that like there are political, every political ideology has had crazy people who believe in that and then have done something violent in the name of that ideology.
Certainly for libertarians, I mean, there's been anti-government terrorists before.
And I don't think, I mean, the problem has certainly been exaggerated in some cases, but does that prove that you can't be anti-government?
Because one person who's anti-government goes and kills innocent people.
I mean, it seems pretty stupid.
I mean, like, and I just don't look, me and you are not fans of Bernie Sanders, right?
We don't like Bernie Sanders.
We don't like his policies.
We don't like him.
You know, he identifies as a socialist, whether or not he actually is one.
We don't like socialism.
And we certainly don't like Bernie Sanders' version of socialism, whatever that is.
I like first-class socialisms.
You know, the ones with money probably it's better.
Sure.
Yeah.
If I got to be taken out to lunch by a socialist, I want one who's, you know, got Bernie Sanders money.
Yeah, I'd rather Bernie Sanders take me out to lunch to talk about his nonsense than some fucking third world socialist taking me, you know, like, yeah, sure, no, no question there.
But look, I very sincerely believe that if Bernie Sanders, all of the policies that he advocates for were implemented, our country would be far poorer and many millions and millions of people would suffer a lot because those policies were implemented.
But when there was that Bernie Sanders guy who shot up that baseball field, he was like a big Bernie Sanders supporter and he shot a bunch of people.
I would never even dream in a million years of being like, ha, gotcha.
See Bernie Sanders, you talking about this stuff is leading to this guy killing because it's just such an absurd connection.
Bernie Sanders is he can believe that the minimum wage should be raised and we should have socialized health care and all, you know, college tuition or college should be tuition-free or whatever the hell he believes.
And he has a right to say that you can't blame him for someone else in their crazy mind taking that and going and killing people.
And that's true, whether it's on the left-wing ideology or right-wing ideology or an anti-government ideology, like whatever it is.
It's just stupid.
This is just, it makes no sense to say you can blame someone for that.
And then the other thing that's also just incredibly dumb about this way of looking at things is that, look, there's like if somebody is evil and crazy to the level where they're just going out and like mowing down innocent people,
to say that the main causal factor here is their politics is a very reductive way to look at things.
I think that in situations like this, the psychological has a lot more to say than the political.
Like, this is a crazy person.
Like, they latched on to something, but they were going to be exactly that.
And if it wasn't for this thing, they probably would have latched onto some other thing.
And to me, I'd be more interested in like, okay, was this person off their meds?
From what I understand, this guy had been committed before.
Okay, this is a crazy person.
This is a person who is seriously mentally ill.
And, you know, you'd wonder about like their chemical makeup, their childhood, their, you know, their what pharmaceutical drugs they were on.
Things like this, I think, are much more relevant details than like if they liked Tucker Carlson or Rachel Matta, which this guy doesn't seem to have liked either of them, but whatever.
So this is all just it's so ridiculous to even go down this.
I mean, what's his, what's his name?
The guy, Henkley Jr., I believe the guy who shot Reagan, I think, was he the one?
I think he said he did it for Jodi Foster or something like that, right?
Like he just read into one of her movies that, like, I might be getting this somewhat wrong, but it was something like that.
He just read into one of her movies that she wanted him to do this.
Can you make a connection to her?
Is she responsible for this somehow?
Is are the Beatles responsible for making Helter Skelter for Marilyn Manson going on?
Like, right, didn't I think he thought that song was like talking to them?
A taxi driver was the okay.
So, you know what I mean?
It's like, but like, obviously, this would be absurd to link these two things together.
Spreading Dangerous Ideas00:02:31
And so, what they're trying to do is kind of jump on all of the politics.
It's clearly already this agenda that was going on, right?
Like, from the response to January 6th, the response of the whole Trump administration and everything, the whole, you know, domestic war on terrorism stuff.
And then this is supposed to be like, okay, see, look, this is proof.
Here is this terrorist, and it's all because that, you know, right-wingers are spreading these ideas.
Like, it's just, it's stupid.
Now, that's not to say that there's never ideas that you can spread that can be kind of dangerous and go, like, yeah, these ideas could like appeal to some crazy people and make them do crazy things.
But I mean, if you really want to look at that honestly, that's all around the political spectrum.
And you can't always be on guard against what crazy people could do with your views.
You can try your best to make sure that your arguments are sound and that you're telling the truth.
But beyond that, it's kind of impossible to control for.
There's also just something that's very like, you know, The like if you want to say, okay, you can't spread these ideas if they lead to violence.
It's like, all right, but then you have to apply that to everybody who's spreading ideas and everywhere that there's violence.
You don't just get to like pick the one mass shooting that suits your political agenda, or you're a bullshit artist, you know.
And you see this, how like convenient it is.
And like, you know, when there will be, if there is violence in other areas and other parts of the country and other with other groups, you don't see the media jump on this narrative in the same way.
I mean, there was this right that the Christmas trucker guy who like mowed down a bunch of people last Christmas.
And again, it just doesn't, you don't see people jumping on that story like this.
You could, you, you could, you know, make the argument, I mean, like, of how many people died just this weekend?
I mean, more people were shot in Chicago this weekend than were shot in Buffalo.
Again, I'm not downplaying what happened in Buffalo.
That's terrible.
What happened in Chicago is also terrible.
But the point is just like, if you want to play this game, you can take it in all sorts of different directions.
And honestly, I don't really think any of it makes sense.
The truth is, like, you want to actually look into these cases and go, okay, well, what policies are leading to this?
Online Therapy Concerns00:07:31
What motivation led to this?
Why?
Now, this, something like a story where someone who used to be committed, who's writing a 180-page manifesto and then going into a supermarket and just shooting up a bunch of people while he films it and broadcasts it.
This is a fucking profoundly crazy person.
And I think that has a lot more to do with it than anything about like whatever you said, the great replacement or someone talking about that.
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Another thing that's interesting, I mean, I've commented on this before, but it is, it is funny that there's somehow simultaneously this thing called the great replacement, which I haven't really heard Tucker Carlson talk about before.
He's talked, he certainly talked about immigration.
I've rarely heard him like talk about how it's to replace white people, but that's kind of the theory, more or less, is that it's so disingenuous, though, to say that it originated on like these neo-Nazi or white nationalist websites.
And then people like Tucker Carlson were reading those websites and realized that they had to change the language in order to get this message across.
I can tell you five years ago, I was saying, Hey, it looks like the Democrats are trying to get a bunch of illegal immigrants into this country to, or they're trying to give amnesty to illegal immigrants to change the voting demographics.
We even played, I think it was a clip on Bill Maher where some lady was like kind of openly saying, How are they ever going to win?
Look, we're changing the voting demographic.
So, pointing to that-that's one of the things that's so bizarre.
First of all, that's one of the things that's so bizarre is that Democrats have openly been bragging about this for quite a while.
They've called it the brown wave and the browning of America, and they speak about it as a positive thing, but they'll go, This is going to lead to Democrats taking over like forever.
And they're quite proud.
Joyanne Reed's talked about that.
A bunch of different like progressive political commentators have talked about this.
So, that's fine.
There's no problem with them talking about it.
But then, at the same time, you got to go like, if you say that, okay, well, someone who doesn't like the Democrats is going to look at that and go, Oh, yeah, well, we don't like that.
We don't want so, anyway.
Um, no, look, yeah, having concerns over immigration, you could say that historically they have been, um, there's been prejudice involved with that.
I mean, I think that's that's a fairly accurate thing to say, certainly for some people.
I don't think it's fair to say for everyone who has concerns about immigration or demographic, you know, like rapid demographic changes, as that's only racism can lead to that.
Um, but yeah, look, there have been concerns over immigration going about as far back as there's been immigration in this country, sometimes unwarranted, sometimes warranted.
Um, but the idea that Tucker Carlson is like reading neo-Nazi websites and then thinking, like, okay, I got to change the language a little bit.
So they kind of know I'm talking to them, but no one else can accuse me of being a nazi.
I mean, like, I don't know, what percentage of the audience of the biggest show on cable news do you really think are neo-Nazis?
It's all so ridiculous.
On that note, it's also not if you take a step back, it's not that flagrant.
Let's just say Tucker Carlson went to the Daily Stormer or some other, you know, white nationalist website, right?
And it's reading it, and there's a whole article that's got good information about demographic changes in this country.
And then the last paragraph goes, and that's why we need to take action.
And so he goes, All right, well, I disagree with the violent action part, and I disagree with the segregation part, but someone's doing good research here on the demographic changes.
And he hands it off to someone on his team and goes, Hey, can you go look into this?
Because this looks like this might be accurate and it's interesting.
And then they go verify it.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, it's a little weird if Tucker Carlson's spending time on Daily Stormer, but there's no, and there's no evidence that he is.
I mean, right.
So the leaps here of that he's secretly trying to take the ideas of those websites and bring them to a broader audience, and that those ideas are now inspiring people to violence.
And so, therefore, we need to take control over media and make sure that certain ideas are not being put out there because it leads to violence.
And like, I mean, the leaps, these are gigantic leaps to push some narrative of domestic terrorism and white nationalism that they've been pushing since Charlottesville and Trump, and it doesn't exist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like the actual impact or the percentage, the amount of people that are like real deal neo-Nazis in this country is negligible.
It's like this is not, this is not how anyone appeals to a mass audience by appealing to the neo-Nazi.
No, I mean, what Tucker is appealing to is the people who don't want unfettered immigration into the country, which is, by the way, a lot of people, and not just Republicans.
There's a reason.
There's no Democrat gets up there and says, we want open borders.
None of them get up there and say that because it's not popular with their base either.
And even like if you look at like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and stuff like that, when you have these huge waves of immigrants coming into the country, when there's 100,000 Haitians or something like that at the border, they get up there and start sounding like Donald Trump because they also know how unpopular it is that the idea.
So this is all just like all of that stuff silly.
But even beyond any of that, it's like, no, no, nobody, if you're in a free society, nobody has to like watch their mouth and not express the truth as they see it because some crazy person might take that truth and then be violent with it.
Cracking Down On Hate Speech00:07:31
And there's no concern ever, you know, like on the or there's no concern expressed in the corporate press on the other side that like, oh, like the Democrats saying like all of this shit about, you know, whatever, whether it's cops or right-wingers or any of this, that this could lead to a ton of violence.
You know, which that risk exists on all sides.
Okay, anyway, let's play.
Here was the mayor.
I'm sorry, excuse me, the governor of New York responding.
She, of course, used the opportunity to go on Face the Nation, one of the big Sunday shows.
And here's what she had to say.
We want to go now to the governor of New York, Kathy Hochle.
Good morning to you, Governor.
Good morning.
I'm happy to be here, to be on the show, but it's very here in Western New York.
It's my hometown of Buffalo.
Well, our condolences to you and to that community.
Are you concerned about further violence in your state?
Well, we are taking proactive measures to make sure that we're monitoring all social media platforms because this information was out there.
This was on a manifesto that was written a while back.
And so we're very concerned about what other information is perpetrated out there on social media platforms and are out there being disseminated globally.
So this information from yesterday's attack is already out there.
It was live streamed.
The intent of this individual was telegraphed in advance.
So I'm calling on social media platforms to be making sure that they're doing a better job monitoring the hate speech that's out there, especially when it's directed against populations and comes under the guise of white supremacy terrorism, which is exactly what happened here in Buffalo.
I want to come back to that in a moment, but I want to ask about the weapon that this shooter used.
You've said it was legally obtained.
You've also said that this shooter had been at one point under the surveillance of medical authorities because of past comments he had made about carrying out a shooting.
How was he allowed to buy and to hold on to that weapon?
That is exactly what's being investigated now.
I understand that he wrote something when he was in high school and that that was being investigated.
So we're going to get to the bottom of that.
So it's possible that he should not have been sold that weapon.
Is that oversight in the state?
Well, no, we don't know that.
We don't know that right now, but I'm going to get to the bottom of it and find out right now.
This would have happened a little while back.
He's 19 years old.
Apparently he was investigating when he was a high school student, brought to the attention of the authorities.
He had a medical evaluation based on something he had written in school.
And so we're going to find out what happened in the aftermath.
Understand.
I know you just mentioned going online and taking what's out there in the social media space seriously.
You've called it a feeding frenzy for white supremacy.
How do you actually regulate this without impeding on free speech?
You have a number of media and social media companies with big offices in your state.
Specifically, what are you asking them to do?
No, we want them to stay in our state.
We also want them to be more vigilant and use the resources they have to hire more people, change their algorithms, be able to identify the second that this hate speech appears and let there be a determination by law enforcement quickly.
Law enforcement also monitors this as well.
I mean, we have the FBI monitoring.
We also have state police.
So we need a multifaceted approach, but need vigilance, not just law enforcement, but also from the platforms that are allowing this to spread.
They have a responsibility as well.
The Justice Department has called this an act of racially motivated violent extremism.
You used a sharper word.
You said white supremacist terrorism.
I know your state classifies assault based on race or religion as a terror attack.
There's no federal statute that does that.
Should there be?
Yes, federal terrorism, there are domestic terrorism laws on the books.
This can be prosecuted under state or federal laws right now.
It started with our district attorney at the state level.
So this individual is not going to see the light of day again, whether it's under federal prosecution or state under our domestic terrorism laws or just murder one.
This person murdered 10 innocent victims in our community just yesterday.
Governor, good luck to you.
Thank you for your time this morning.
All right.
So the governor comes on there and clearly has already her like political spin ready to go.
I love how it's always like, well, we have to investigate because we don't know anything of like really what happened here.
But here's already what we do know is that social media companies need to like, you know, set up their algorithms and hire more people to make sure that this hate speech doesn't go, you know, unnoticed.
And of course, the problem with this type of stuff is that after there's an incident like this, when someone like kills a bunch of people, of course, hindsight is 2020.
So after someone murders a bunch of people in some type of mass shooting, it's easy to go, well, look, there were all these signs that were there.
This guy wrote some troubling stuff when he was in high school.
He was committed for a period of time.
It was all these things.
The problem is that when you're not using hindsight, when you're trying to use those things as a predictor, you're now looking for a needle in a haystack.
And it's because so many people write something troubling when they're in high school and then don't go on to murder anyone ever.
Far more people than do go on to do something else.
We should start waterboarding them just to be safe.
If we get a terrorism clause in the United States of America, then if we're suspecting people of this, we can waterboard them until, because we know how effective that is at getting the right answers and making these determinations.
Right.
So it's like, even as this, the face the lady nation there, she's going, she's like, well, I mean, he was under the direct care of, you know, mental health, you know, professionals or whatever.
And it's like, how was he able to get a gun?
And it's like, well, I don't know, because he wrote something crazy in high school.
You know, you don't like lose your rights forever because of that.
And like, I don't know.
I mean, they could do this investigation.
I don't know.
Maybe it should, by the letter of the law, he shouldn't have been sold that gun or not.
I also think the idea that you're going to like what somebody who's ready to, and this is like a troubling thing that people have a tough time accepting because everyone wants to have some answer where you're guaranteed safety in situations like this.
But if someone is prepared to write a 180-page manifesto, plan out an attack like this and go kill people, it's very hard to stop them from doing that.
And so I don't know, oh, what if he was denied that gun?
Then he just would have been like, okay, I'll just go back to being a normal member of society.
If you could just conceal Carrie, then I guess if you end up in one of these situations, you don't have to worry about it too much.
Well, the first person he shoots, but probably be more likely to stop him before he shoots 10 people.
That's, you know, likely.
But again, it's just like, so right away, it's like, well, we need to crack down on hate speech and white supremacy, terrorism, or all of this stuff.
Quit Smoking With Fume00:02:17
It's like, oh, okay.
So here is what the solution always is.
We need to crack down on Americans' freedom because one American did something crazy.
The truth is, like, as I said before, that all of this stuff has much more to do with our culture, this kid's early childhood, this kid's chemical makeup and, you know, his own personal insanity than it does with whether or not we crack down on what people are saying on social media.
So I don't know what else to say.
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Promoting Unqualified Candidates00:12:15
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Any other thoughts on this, Rob?
Well, I just, I agree with you.
I don't like the concept of molding society or like, I call like the idiots, the assholes, and the complainers that it's like going back to kindergarten where you have people in those categories and you start making rules for the whole class because of them.
And it's like, well, then we all have to live in like kind of a worse version of reality to accommodate like these freaks amongst us.
You know what I mean?
So the better move is essentially just to go, we're going to have some assholes along.
Like that doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to buy a gun.
Like I don't, I shouldn't have to give up the things that I enjoy.
We're going to have some assholes.
It's going to happen.
We're going to have some crazies, but like we shouldn't mold it because people are complaining about them.
You see what I'm saying?
It's like, just the tragic incident.
It's a big country.
We're going to have some crazy people.
It's going to happen.
Yeah.
And I think that, you know, there could be a real conversation about what you can do to try to like minimize the crazy people's ability to kill people.
But it seems to me that what you're going to want to start with there is how people are able to defend themselves.
Because you're never, no matter how many algorithms you have or any of that shit, you're never going to be able to, this isn't fucking, what's it called?
What's that movie?
Tom Cruise movie where they fight future crimes.
Minority report.
Yeah.
This isn't minority report.
You're never going to be able to perfectly predict who's going to commit a violent crime in the future.
So it's like, I don't know, try to be prepared for that.
And the other thing is like, you know, it does.
Sorry, go ahead.
And your risk of getting shot in public is probably still not all that high when media instantly goes, all right, we're going to parade this one all over the news because, you know, we're trying to push for this domestic terrorism thing.
And this fits our narrative of God.
Like, like you said, there were more murders.
I mean, I didn't see this, but there were more murders in Chicago last week.
Well, there were more people shot.
I don't know if there are more murders or not, but there's probably something comparable.
If the news wants to report on something all day and create a narrative and manipulate emotions, that's what they're good at.
You know, so it's like the fact that there's a one-off crazy incident.
Like, I get that that's not comforting.
It's not cool.
I'm not saying it's good, but if it wasn't being paraded in front of us constantly, you know, I don't think we're all at risk right now of crazy people.
Like when we get to a point where it's happening every weekend, you go, look at the increase.
This is statistically significant and there's a lot more risk.
Then you start going, all right, do we need to start having armed security guards at every mall, at every store?
How much do you have to increase the cost of goods in order for that to happen?
Like, yeah, you know what I mean?
There's, there's ways to solve these kind of things.
And it's not, oh, we need a domestic terrorism title and to start removing philosophies that don't agree with the left from the internet.
Yeah.
No, yeah, I agree.
Well, I agree with you.
It's not exactly comforting, but here is something comforting.
Okay.
What's comforting is the new White House press secretary.
All right.
Karen Jean Pierre, if I'm saying that correctly.
Hell of a name.
Yeah.
So what's comforting is that we got someone now speaking to the country who really has some interesting theories on what's causing our problems.
And I bet you've never heard this one before, Rob, but it turns out racism.
Let's play a little best of so people can get to know our new press secretary better.
Racism, sexism, misogyny, all of that, homophobia, xenophobia.
We connect it to Donald Trump, but it existed before Donald Trump.
Fox News was racist before coronavirus.
They are racist during the coronavirus.
Fox News will be racist after the coronavirus.
Racism was here before Donald Trump and sadly, it will be here after Donald Trump.
It walks like a racist, talks like a racist, acts like a racist.
It is a racist.
And we have a racist president in the White House who really pushes his racism like a peacock.
Donald Trump is the first president to have purposefully has made racism the center of his campaign, of his administration.
I think Donald Trump wants to get rid of legal immigration.
And it's because of people who come from brown and black countries.
Might do away with DACA, which is another moral line that he would be crossing, which is something that would be enforcing, advancing a white supremacy agenda.
Donald Trump was a white supremacist in 2011 when he decided to be the grand wizard of the Bertha movement.
Birtherism, which is inherently racist, they want to put up these awful voter registration voter suppression laws, which is racism, to make it difficult for people of color to vote.
Voter suppression is racism.
That's exactly what it is.
Xenophobia and racism has always played a role in outbreaks.
If you look at SARS, if you look at Ebola, if you look at yellow fever or Spanish flu, we've been talking about the coronavirus and how it is an epidemic in this country, which is true.
But another epidemic in this country is racism.
Remember George Floyd, Amon Aubrey, and so many lives, black lives that were lost last year because of violence, because of racism, because of white supremacy.
Can we kind of dispel this whole idea that the Tea Party was about the deficit?
When clearly that is not true, what it was about was a reactionary to the racism in America that we were seeing at the time.
What are we going to do to actually start the process?
Because it's going to take some time to uproot systemic racism.
We have to continue to call out this racism.
We cannot stop not doing that.
We cannot stop not doing that, Rob.
All right.
So there's just a little bit of information about the worldview of the president's new liar.
All presidents have them.
They have their liars.
They put them out there.
They call them press secretaries.
Yeah.
So if you're keeping track, Donald Trump is racism.
COVID, also racism.
The Tea Party.
You guessed it.
That was racism.
And pretty much everything else.
So that's.
Bonnie Baby food.
You're a racist.
Yeah.
There you go.
Yeah.
You want, are you upset that there's not enough baby formula?
Well, let me tell you why you're upset because you're a racist because of racism.
So anyway, that's who we have on board here.
It really, I just don't understand how you don't get bored after a while of reducing every single problem in society back down.
You have it so wrong.
That's called specializing.
I mean, you understand economics.
You get really, really good at it.
And you're like, man, I worked out this puzzle piece where something that had nothing to do with racism.
I'm the expert.
I'm the one guy who is still able to figure out why that was racist.
That's called specializing.
And it's a lucrative skill set because if you're a pretty black lady and you're really able to tie everything into racism, you can get a job at the White House.
It's, there's also something she took it to the top, dude.
Don't you find there to be something?
No, no, you're right.
Specialization division of labor, you make some good points there.
Don't you find there to be something like, I find it so incredibly patronizing to black people when you put like a black person in these positions who almost like they reduce every idea that they have to the fact that they're a black woman.
You know what I'm saying?
Like they're like, the only thing I can contribute to this conversation is to call everything racism.
Like there are black people who are like way, way, way smarter than me, who have like a ton of interesting things to say that are really impressive people.
And then you just, when you expose one on like a huge platform, you're putting someone out there who all they have to say is everything's racism.
It just seems like so like belittling in some fucking weird way.
It also seems to me that, and this does kind of lead into the video that we're going to watch, but when you take people and you promote them just for the color of their skin and they're clearly not qualified, it's really not a good look.
Like Kamala Harris would be a very good example of that.
Yes.
And at what point, you know, this whole thing is about empowering kids.
At what point are they looking at these people and going, oh, I guess we really can't do it?
Well, I think for me and you, right, Rob, it would, if they're like me and Rob are both Jewish, and if there was some like Jewish person who was like making a big deal, I'm the first Jewish person to represent this or whatever.
I'm like, I'm going to go out here and speak for everybody.
And all they kept doing was complaining about anti-Semitism.
And it was like all they had to say over and over again.
Oh, it just like makes me cringe.
Like, oh, this is so embarrassing that that's what you're reducing us to is like that that's all we have to say is to blame everybody else for hating us.
And the irony of it is like in a society where like, look at the doors that have opened for you.
You were like the press secretary of the president of the United States, who's, you know, was the vice president under the first black president who got served two terms, was re-elected.
You know, like it's, it's just like, and I've, and by the way, this is something that I've been critical about of Jewish friends and family of mine.
When they like harp on this anti-Semitism thing for too long, you're like, hey, like, what are you doing?
Jews are doing very well in this country.
Stop always complaining about how it's, yeah, like, I'm not saying there's no one out there who hates Jews.
I'm like, okay, fuck those people.
But like, I don't know, are there any like major hurdles in your way?
Or can you achieve everything you want to in your life right now?
Which one is it?
I mean, okay, it's not 100% either or the other, but which one is closer?
Okay, so let's stop complaining all the time.
And like, if anything, be kind of like, oh, this is great.
We don't live in a country like my grandfather did where like there's real barriers in your way just because you're Jewish.
Like there's not.
So great.
Let's be proud of that.
I'm just saying, how bad are the optics when they go, we need to promote people of color and then they find unimpressive people?
Yeah.
They're not qualified.
And when there are impressive people out there.
Right.
And so if I was in these communities, I would be upset going, you're like, it seems like you're making us look bad.
You're telling us that like you're specifically need to promote people from this and then you're not finding good people.
Yeah.
No, like what's impressive to me, I randomly was just watching the other day some old clip.
I think it might have been from the 80s or something where Thomas Sowell was, he was testifying before Congress and it's just like all these progressive congressmen like grilling him and he's just wrecking everybody because he's a fucking brilliant genius and just knows better than everybody knows.
And you're like, yeah, that's impressive.
That's like what you'd want to show like young black kids.
Or even like, look, someone, Barack Obama giving one of his great speeches or something like that.
You're like, that's, that's impressive.
You look at that.
You're like, wow, that guy is like really incredible at what he does.
Now, Thomas Sowell has the benefit of not being a, you know, treasonous war criminal.
But the point is that like, that's what you'd want.
And what I would never want for like, you know, like, I would never want my kids to see someone up there, you know, like always like whining about what a victim they are.
I'd want them to see someone like kicking ass and representing like, you know, like, oh yeah, you could do that too.
You could be really impressive.
Paying Your Fair Share00:15:44
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All right, let's get back into it.
Anyway, so at one of her first press conferences, she was asked about a tweet from the president of the United States.
I don't think any of us believe that the president wrote this tweet or knows what Twitter is or the internet or his little tiny TV that folds up in front of him.
But he tweeted that if you want to control inflation, what you need to do is tax the rich.
That's not verbatim, but that was essentially what he said.
And Peter Ducey from Fox News was asking this unimpressive woman how she could possibly back up that absurd nonsense.
So here's the exchange.
The president's Twitter account posted the other day, you want to bring down inflation, let's make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.
How does raising tax?
All right, so pause it real quick right here.
So this is Peter Ducey is just really asking the obvious question here, but he said, you want to bring down inflation, make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.
That's the actual verbatim quote or tweet.
So I don't know.
The obvious thing here to point out is that that is stupid and makes no sense.
That raising corporate tax rates does not reduce inflation.
How would it?
What is the even like justification that raising tax rates reduces inflation?
It's not as if that takes money out of the economy.
It takes money from the private sector and puts it in the hands of the public sector, of the government.
I don't think anybody's ever argued that that's what reduces inflation.
And in fact, if your concern more specifically is high prices, which is usually to the layman, that's usually what they're talking about when they talk about inflation.
There's been all types of, you know, like evidence to back this up.
But of course, you can understand this just from, you know, using logic.
But if you make things more expensive for businesses, usually some percentage of that cost is passed on to the consumer, resulting in higher prices.
So if anything, there would be a pressure toward prices being more expensive rather than the prices going down.
You know, if you make it more expensive for someone to do business, typically they're more incentivized to raise their prices.
So that's anyway, makes no sense on any level.
But let's see how she's going to be able to answer this very direct question.
How would raising corporate tax rates reduce inflation?
Reduce inflation.
So are you talking about a specific tweet?
He tweeted.
You want to bring down inflation, let's make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.
Look, you know, we have talked about, we have talked about this this past year about making sure that the wealthiest among us are paying their fair share.
And that is important to do.
And that is something that, you know, the president has been working on every day when we talk about inflation and lowering costs.
And so it's very important that as we're seeing costs rise, as we're talking about how to Build an America that's safe, that's equal for everyone and doesn't leave everyone behind.
That is an important part of that as well.
But how does raising taxes on corporations lower the cost of gas, the cost of a used car, the cost of food for everyday Americans?
So, look, I think we encourage those who have done very well, right?
Especially those who care about climate change, to support a fair tax that doesn't change, it doesn't charge manufacturers.
All right, pause it for a second.
I just love how she's literally just a kid who hasn't done their homework, who's just bullshitting through the thing.
She's got nothing.
She doesn't even have a pretend answer because no one has a pretend answer.
They're like, I don't know.
I just thought we'd tweet this.
And it kind of sounded nice at the time.
And that maybe there'd be some people who were dumb enough to believe that, like, yeah, that'll that'll lead to gas not being so expensive if we just tax people.
I don't know.
Um, but I just love her just like the ads are just like, but how will this lead?
Uh, how will this read?
Um, how will this lead to reducing inflation?
And she's like, Well, we just believe that people should pay their fair share.
I was like, Right, but how does that lead to reducing inflation?
And she's like, Well, we just believe if you care about climate change, you should pay your fair share.
Like, what?
What the hell is that?
It's a little bit like the usual suspects, the way uh, she's peeking at the notes, where she's just like, Fair share and rich people and trying to do buzzwords.
And she's reading off like your mug and the billboard, the clipboard behind you.
All right, here, let's play the rest of this uh lady struggling.
Builders, a higher percentage of their earnings than the most fortunate people in our nation, and not let that stand in the way of reducing energy costs and fighting this existential problem.
If you think about that as an example, and to support basic collective bargaining rights as well, right?
That's also important.
But look, it is, you know, by not without having a fair tax code, which is what I'm talking about, then all every like manufacturing workers, cops, you know, it's not fair for them to have to pay higher taxes than the folks that who are who are who are not paying taxes at all.
So, I think there was actually a longer version of that where then he asks, So, this has nothing to do with inflation.
Would that be a violation of Twitter's misinformation policies?
Oh, yeah.
He asked, he asked if the new misinformation board should be because it has nothing to do with inflation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wouldn't hold your breath on that being censored by the Department of Homeland Security's Ministry of Truth or flagged or whatever the hell it is that they're going to end up doing.
But yeah, it is just something.
It's really just amazing.
Just democratic gobbly gook, nothing else there.
It's like, well, climate change and cops and fair share and all of this, just nothing, nothing about how these things are possibly related.
It's funny because Jen Psaki was a real pain in the ass, but you could see, I guess, there's levels to the lion game.
And this one, this one's rookie, rookie grade right here.
Yeah, well, it's like this, like, I'm not even, I'm just going to pretend you're not saying the words you're saying, and I'm going to say other words back to you.
Yeah, well, Jen Psaki would go, well, while we certainly appreciate that, the president is doing everything within his power to control inflation.
And this is part of the larger economic picture of what we're doing.
And then he would ask again, but what does that have to do with inflation?
Peter, as I've already said, we're doing everything we can to address this.
All right, moving on.
Yeah, that's literally, that's, that's almost, that's a great example of what Jen Sackey would do.
There was very, you know, like, we're really, and you got to say, man, it's like that, it's just however you feel about What's her name?
Um, McKenna, McKenney.
What was her name?
Trump's uh, she was fiery.
Well, they went through a bunch of them because uh, Spencer Sean Spence was a spicer was a nightmare, and there was Tuckabee, who was okay for a little bit, and then they replaced her with the blonde-haired chick who was unbelievable.
She was way more impressive.
I'd say the only one who was impressive in that role, yeah, Kaylee McKenney.
Uh, she was the only one who was impressive in that role, and she would have answers for these things.
Not to say that I'm, you know, a lot of Trump's policies were bad, but she would at least be able to defend them.
She was a hot lunchroom bitch her entire life.
Maybe that's the answer to it.
Um, but anyway, I just you're almost like, wow, just watching this woman struggle.
And I'll tell you, after the first clip, I'm surprised she didn't go with the obvious answer here: racism.
That's what the answer is.
The only reason you're asking this question is because of racism.
Do you know what the major cause of inflation is?
Racism.
That's what it is.
And so, yeah, maybe that's it's just your white privilege that even allows you to ask.
This should be a fun one, though, because if she's this bad, they probably can't fire her.
So, you're going to have two years with the president that they don't want in front of camera, and then this lady who might just be another Kamala Harris on their hands.
It's um, I am, I'm surprised that you know, as with all politics, but I think it's something that almost like is something we should feel encouraged about.
It's amazing that they can't find more impressive people to do these jobs, you know.
Like, if you were like, even like, I mean, I don't know because like the translations are always so rough.
Think about how good Candace Owens would be for the conservatives if she was in that job, she would dominate.
Yeah, so yeah, there's not a single like liberal, like, like well-spoken black professor out there that would just do a good job at like fucking handling these questions.
Um, you know, yeah, it's just very, it's very weird.
Like, I was gonna say, like, I'm not sure because it doesn't translate, you know, because you like when you when you hear like the propaganda from other like regimes throughout history, you're like, I don't know, even like when they'll be like, Oh, Hitler was a great speaker, but then when you listen to it, you're like, I don't know, it just seems like he's flailing around and yelling weird German words, but it seems to be moving the masses, you know.
It's like, oh, okay, like it, it's like, Jesus, like, this is our propaganda, like person.
This you're just you'd think you could come up with like a better something.
I don't know.
So, just I don't know.
I feel like me or you, if we cracked our knuckles and really got focused, could get up there.
Like, assuming you would, you know, you would abandon all your principles and just be like, okay, I'm working for the Biden administration and doing this now.
I feel like I could do a better job than that.
Have to be able to.
Anyway, I guess we'll see.
All right, we got it would only be, it would only be a couple of days until like, even if like they put enough money in front of you, you're like, All right, that's worth it.
Within four days, they would ask me a question, be like, Yeah, well, he's got dementia.
So, like, you know, I'm not sure.
Like, we're all well aware of what's going on here.
All right, yeah, it is.
It's it's pretty crazy that they would even like, like, I don't know.
It's again, you could be full of shit.
You can say things like, you know, whatever the dumb arguments are.
It's like, well, the reason gas prices are going up so much is because of the greed of the oil companies or something like that.
You know, okay, that's stupid, but at least it's like, it's plausible and stupid.
And you could defend it against one follow-up question.
But to just tweet out, like, you're like, oh, raising taxes on the rich will cut down on inflation.
And then they're like, how?
And you're like, because of climate change?
That's how.
Like, it's, it's like, why would you set yourself up like this?
It's all just so fucking stupid.
But anyway, that might be something we have going for us is that, yeah, these at least the public face of the regime is very unimpressive.
So there you go.
I guess I'd rather that than it be a really impressive propagandist who is convincing a lot of people.
So there you go.
Okay.
Let's say, you know what, we'll save the that Project Veritas video or whatever for later because we're just coming up on time.
But there was, we could talk a little bit about Twitter.
Looks like the deal with Elon Musk is on the rocks.
Have you seen that?
That he's, it's, it's kind of stalled out.
And he's now saying it's something about them revealing what percentage of Twitter is bots or something like that.
And so he tweeted today after posting that the deal was on hold.
He now posted that until they get this sorted out, he can't go forward with the deal.
So look, I'll just say that I, this is kind of what I said, even throughout the, you know, all of the stuff with Elon Musk.
I was like, look, several more things have to happen before we can say like this is going to happen.
And the first one I always said was like, the deal still hasn't gone through.
And until there's this final vote on it, you know, we'll, we'll see.
So he might have gotten some big wins here, though.
One, I mean, they already changed the algorithm quite a bit since he made the claim and liberals really showed their hand about how much they would kind of require and want censorship of the platform.
So if he walks away from this, either Twitter might be a fairer landscape, or at least they will have kind of really showed their hands.
Also, we don't know what kind of information he might have gotten taken a look at their back end to maybe be looking to actually just create a competing business and leaving them significantly weaker if he actually exposes that their daily user count's a lot lower than it than it is.
And then last is, I mean, like imagine any business in the world, if you claimed your sales were something and then they're, you know, you're doing a merger and acquisition, you're looking over and you're like, oh yeah, you've greatly over exaggerated your annual sales revenue.
So we're going to have to readjust this evaluation.
So he might still be looking to buy it, but he's going to, it's going to be at a lesser evaluation because the daily user count was overstated.
So just like there's a lot of motion here, but like it's hard to tell with Elon Musk what he's up to.
He's actually very good at creating his own news.
And I'm not saying insider trading, but he's just very good at kind of creating his own stock news.
And it's not that easy all the time to know what he's up to.
It would be interesting if he just really fucked him by kind of exposing some of the censorship that was going on with the platform and then just walks away with clean hands.
It would be interesting.
Yeah, no, no, no question.
I think all of that stuff that you're kind of speculating about is interesting.
We'll see.
It's possible that there's a lot of this other stuff going on.
Either way, I think him creating this spectacle was a positive moment.
Like as you pointed out, I think you're absolutely right that kind of getting Twitter internally to freak out, start changing the way they're putting their finger on the scale, just creating the moment of kind of forcing the entire progressive establishment to reveal their hand and how, first of all, how scared they are of not having the control.
A Net Positive Moment00:02:18
And again, just in one platform, it terrified them.
Just one platform not having control.
That terrified them.
How much, how dependent on censorship they are.
All of these things, I think it was a net positive.
And I do think it also, you know, the way cultural momentum goes with these things is it's hard exactly to measure.
And just one thing like this, like him announcing that Twitter was going to be a free speech platform if he bought it, and then it looking like he was going to buy it.
And then that kind of like the way that reverberates out throughout the culture is positive.
I just was reading earlier today that Netflix told their employees that basically if they don't like the content that they're working on, they should quit or shut up.
They're just kind of like, yeah, like that's usually the way that's usually a given with jobs.
Yes, but man, don't we need more of a culture of that in our society that it's like, hey, listen, 22-year-old who just started here, I don't care.
Like, I don't care if you love the content on one of these shows.
You can imagine, I mean, obviously it's on a much smaller scale, but just working here at Gas Digital, can you imagine if like one of the 22 year old interns was like, oh, there's a show that I find problematic?
You'd be like, great.
Well, we're paying you $13 an hour to do this video editing.
And if you'd like that, there's an opportunity, you know, if you do a good job, there's an opportunity to move up to $20 an hour.
So anyway, you want to do this or not?
You know, like it's just anyway, I'm not saying this is a direct result of what happened with Twitter or anything like that.
I'm just saying that like these moments, it's important, especially for people who have, you know, large audiences or have power or have wealth or influence or any of these things to start sometimes saying some important truths.
And this has an effect.
There's a real effect about someone standing up and being brave that kind of encourages other people to stand up and be brave, especially when it's as influential a person as Elon Musk.
So overall, I'm still, you know, it's a bummer if this doesn't end up going through.
I still hope it does.
But like you said, maybe something really interesting or positive comes out of this.
And I think it's already a net, a net positive.
Upcoming Summer Dates00:00:47
So there you go.
Yeah.
Move on to the next thing.
I agree.
Can we plug these dates again?
Yeah, let's go through it.
Give it a nice plug.
Where are you at?
So the most immediate one is California this weekend coming out.
It's going to be an absolute party.
Childerberg and Reno right after that.
Childerberg's down in Texas.
That's a really fun hang.
Then you and I are going to be at Porkfest.
Go check out the Free State Project.
I believe tickets are sold out, but they are building a cool thing over there, taking over the local government.
And then I just launched some more summer porch store dates, including Pittsburgh and near Nashville.