Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein critique U.S. foreign policy, linking $40 billion in Ukraine aid to prolonged conflict and alleging Hillary Clinton orchestrated a 2016 disinformation campaign via Robby Mook that destroyed détente prospects. They condemn the lack of accountability for these actions while noting persistent public belief in Trump-Russia collusion despite evidence of falsehoods. Ultimately, the hosts argue that prioritizing war over domestic issues like the pandemic or economic destruction harms institutions, suggesting future alliances may shift away from the dollar as geopolitical stratification accelerates. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Economic Stratification and Bet00:14:59
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gas Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
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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.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Par of the Problem.
I'm the most consistent motherfucker.
You know, Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, my brother?
I like your new setup you got there.
That's just when you pull down the backdrop, this is actually my place.
So very nice.
So Rob's out in LA.
Have a oh my God.
The live show we did at Brian's house was unbelievable.
Like fans showed up to the middle of nowhere.
We had a good time.
And now I'm in Koreantown surrounded by Mexicans.
I'm very confused.
That doesn't seem to be what Koreantown should be filled with.
No.
But who am I?
Who am I to judge?
That's the way humanity works.
Sometimes the Mexicans move in on Koreatown's property and take all their stuff.
Such Koreans got to go take over another neighborhood, I guess.
Yep.
It's like watching a snake wrestle with a bear.
It's just everybody's going to win and it probably shouldn't be happening.
All right.
Probably none of this makes sense.
Okay.
So, of course, we'll be on the road in just a few days here, going to Reno, Nevada.
Hope to see a lot of you guys out there.
A lot of stuff going on.
I wonder what to start with.
All right.
Let's start with this.
Because I thought this was really interesting that today across major news publications, it's being reported that Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, has announced that he will not negotiate with the Russians toward a ceasefire if there are any concessions that need to be made.
So in other words, he will not negotiate because that's what negotiating is.
So that I just thought that was like a pretty amazing little thing there, where you go, it's really hard to almost keep the narrative straight that the corporate press is putting out, which is like that, you know, oh my God, Russia is this super, you know, dangerous, horrible aggressor that's hell.
And Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and he's hell-bent on reunifying the Soviet Union.
He basically wants to conquer half of Europe again.
But also, he's a blundering idiot who can't even pull off this invasion of Ukraine.
This is kind of the, like, like honestly, this is the narrative out of the corporate press.
Both of these things are being put out there as if one doesn't wildly contradict the other.
So at the same time, as, you know, they're saying Russia is just, it's horrible what they're doing, but also that they can't pull this off.
It's been a huge blunder and Putin is failing and he can't win the war in Ukraine.
But also they need like $80 billion from us desperately or they will lose.
You know, it's like these, these very contradictory ideas.
But when you peel through these ridiculous like narratives that contradict themselves, you can see more of the accurate picture.
And there it is right in front of you.
It's like, well, this is what the whatever it is, the $40 billion with the promise of another $40 billion in weapons.
And no, there was no indication that that's the end of it.
We'll probably be in the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid, which just to keep in mind is it's a big deal.
You know, I mean, if we, when you get up to 80 billion dollars, I forget, we played the clip the other day where Rand Paul was trying to put these numbers in perspective.
He was saying this is about as much as Russia spends on their entire military.
You know, this is like a big deal, huge, huge numbers.
But this is the result of the money that we've given them.
And in fact, this is the stated intention that this is what it'll do.
It will prolong the war.
Now, does anybody really believe?
I mean, if you just want to take like, I'm not saying you know anything for absolute certain, but if you want to say like the likelihood, what is the likelihood that if we hadn't sent all of these weapons into Ukraine, that they would be holding this position of absolutely no negotiations toward a ceasefire?
It's less.
It's far less likely.
I thought a couple of months ago, Zelensky was trying to get them to the table and it sounded like he was willing to even, you know, give up areas.
So this is quite a 180.
Yes, now that they got another $40 billion, he's backed off of him even claiming that they're willing to negotiate.
Now he's not willing to negotiate.
So in other words, all of this kind of propaganda.
Ukrainians dying just became very lucrative to Zelensky.
Well, that's right.
So all of this propaganda from the war party in DC, from the corporate press, one and the same, and all these people who are changing their profile pictures to Ukrainian flags.
The result of this is that more Ukrainians are going to die.
Just like every policy that comes out of the war party in Washington, D.C., the result is more death and destruction.
And it's just, it's madness.
And, you know, it's interesting to see how stubborn, because like war fever is a crazy thing.
And the way people respond to initial waves of propaganda really is like unbelievable.
It usually starts wearing off and not working as well over time when the truth is a little bit harder to ignore.
But you see these people like, yeah, no, why should they negotiate with Russia?
Russia is the ones who are the aggressors here.
They're invading.
You're like, oh, okay.
Well, the reason they should is because less people will die.
That's why they should.
There's not like some cosmic justice here.
And by the way, if there was Vladimir Putin, who certainly has a lot of blame on his hands, he's not the only one.
But the truth is that the Donbass region is very likely not going to go back to being under control of Ukraine.
And if you're not even willing to consider that this region, which is majority ethnic Russians, which voted in referendums to be ruled by Moscow rather than Kiev, if you just take it as a given that, no, they must be ruled by Kiev and not by Moscow, then like, okay, fine.
Then the war will continue on and a lot more Ukrainians will die, which is a brave sacrifice that many Americans on Twitter are willing to make on behalf of the Ukrainian people.
Anyway, it's just, this is kind of, this is like what Hillary Clinton has said.
This is what a bunch of people in the Biden administration have said the goal is here is to, is they're getting exactly what they want, which is to like extend this war and bleed the Russians as much as possible, which it will do.
It will certainly hurt the Russian people and the Russian military.
But it's also going to hurt the Ukrainian people as well.
So there you go.
There's your victory in foreign policy for the war party.
Throw some Ukrainian deaths at bleeding Russia dry.
Yep, that's basically, that basically seems to be the plan here.
So, anyway, I don't go ahead.
Yeah, the one thing, and I don't know if any of this is going to come to be, but it seems like we're in, at least while the Biden administration remains in office, we're in this for the long haul in terms of trying to punish and bleed Russia and get them out of like the international community.
But I really wonder if heading into next year, countries like India, China, maybe even Iran, if we kind of almost split the world here and people are going, okay, we will transact in rubles and buy all these materials from you.
And you kind of end up with like, you know, not, I don't think it will be a war situation.
I don't think like US and England are going to war with China and Russia, but I do wonder if we take a major hit on our currency and like there's just kind of a almost a clean division of trading partners.
Well, you, you know, yeah, I agree with you.
I think that it's more likely that this is going to result in kind of like an economic stratification here, that there's going to be more, you have more and more of these countries who are either either, you know, don't really appreciate the American empire because they've kind of been pushed around by it, or are just kind of looking at America and saying, that's not really my bet anymore.
My bet isn't on the dollar.
My bet is on an alternative to the dollar.
Or you have some combination of both, which I think a lot of people fall into.
Both just don't like the American empire and also think like, this is a pretty shaky investment right now.
And that's more likely than war, direct war with Russia or China or something like that.
But it's also kind of impossible to not notice that the war rhetoric has really heated up around all of these things.
And I think part of that is that there's going to have to be like a real demonizing of anybody who makes this move out of the kind of propaganda machine from DC that, oh my God, look at these horrible people who are doing this awful thing by like not trading their oil and US dollars or something like that.
But yeah, there's no question.
This is, you know, it's you wonder how much of a factor in this is like, obviously, there are factors like there are weapons companies who are making enormous amounts of money.
I mean, if you look at like the breakdown of where that $40 billion actually goes, it's like it was money going to like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and the CIA and stuff like that.
So there's, you don't have to look too deep to see, find like the vested interest in pushing this stuff.
But also, you wonder if there isn't so much hubris involved in some of these decisions making by the politicians that just think like, oh, yeah, look at Russia.
They're even struggling to take Ukraine.
This is nothing.
And they don't realize that it's like, yeah, there's actually, there's a dangerous domino effect that could kind of fall down here where a lot of these different countries could end up bailing on the dollar.
And I mean, if you see that, oof, you know, you think inflation's bad now.
As long as we're just being wildly speculative, have you seen any of the theories that Putin's got like cancer or that, you know, even within Russia, they might replace him?
I've heard whispers of this from the beginning of the war in Ukraine that he was going to get, you know, ditched by the oligarchs who kind of prop him up.
I don't know.
I haven't put too much stock into any of that.
But why?
What are you hearing?
No, I'm just saying, as long as we're being speculative, that's kind of on the table as a theoretical win for like the Biden administration.
And it's kind of the New York Post has been pushing that story the most.
They had the video of him holding onto a table kind of shaking.
And then they were claiming that he went into treatment a couple of days ago.
The claim is like the guy's over the hill and sick, and he gambled on a war that he can't win because he's crazy.
And towards the end, and that, you know, maybe people will get sick of it.
But it's as speculative as our theory that people might move away from the dollar and see China come out ahead.
It seems to be even more speculative than that, but who the hell knows?
I mean, I guess it's impossible to know these things for sure.
From, you know, I had heard people kind of suggesting that the oligarchs were really pissed off with Vladimir Putin, which is quite possible.
Yeah, I mean, well, look, they've lost some assets, and this is this was no question a very risky move for Russia to, you know, forget what the truth of the situation or the backstory or how Russia was provoked in several ways.
The truth is that this was a naked, brutal aggression, and it's a PR nightmare for Russia.
They now are no longer able to sell themselves as like, hey, we're kind of the innocent ones being imposed upon.
They're seen as the aggressors by large portions of the world, including the most powerful governments in the world.
So that's an issue for them.
Speaking of, you know, war rhetoric heating up, Joe Biden, who, you know, sometimes, let's just play the clip of what Joe Biden said the other day, and then we could discuss it.
You didn't want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons.
Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?
Yes.
You are.
That's a commitment we made.
That's a commitment we made.
We are not.
Look, here's the situation.
We agree with a one-China policy.
We've signed on to it and all the attendant agreements made from there.
But the idea that it can be taken by force, just taken by force, is just not appropriate.
It'll dislocate the entire region and be another action similar to what happened in Ukraine.
And so it's a burden that is even stronger.
You know, there's a thing sometimes with politicians that disgusts most normal people.
And me and you are probably no different than those people.
That when politicians always give a politician-y answer and they just don't directly answer a question and they just kind of like avoid it or they answer the question they want to answer rather than the direct question that was asked to them.
And they're not just like blunt and upfront and honest about how they feel.
But this is one of the rare instances where I'd actually prefer to see that.
Like, just don't.
It's so incredibly reckless to an insane level to just bluntly just say, yeah, we'd have a military confrontation with China.
Yeah, we'll just get into a hot H-bomb war with China over Taiwan.
Reckless Official Policy Blunders00:05:43
It's not even as if it's like at a place where you need to say something like that.
You're just really being asked a hypothetical question by some journalist.
It's not like China's moving in right now and you have to say this.
It's like, yeah, yeah, well, just sure, let's just threaten China with a war while we're already dealing with this crazy threat of getting into a hot war with Russia.
Let's just bring China on board too.
Like, what's baffling about it is that there's no even like strategy here.
I mean, not saying that I'm one who's like suggesting some type of like aggressive geopolitical like war strategy.
But if you were playing that game, the strategy would be to pit Russia and China against each other, not unify them in opposition to the United States of America.
That would not be a smart strategy.
So instead, he's just like, yeah, fuck you, Putin.
Putin needs to be overthrown.
And you know what?
I'll go to war with China too.
If I think about it, like Biden just letting it rip.
You can tell Biden didn't even think about the question.
He just shot her back an immediate yes.
It's like, it's, it's this weird thing where he's like this old, frail, senile, senile guy.
So he has to prove to you how tough he is.
You know, like that, I think that's a lot of the psychology of what's going on here.
But talk about just like reckless and idiotic the idea that somehow it would be it would be a worthwhile decision to say that if China moves in on Taiwan, we'll go to war with China.
It's it's insanity.
Well, this is uh, I mean, he really looks like a guy you just woke up in between naps.
This is like when I visit my grandfather and he's sitting in a chair.
You wake him up to say, okay, like he's literally standing up there.
You weren't even asleep.
Yeah, you weren't even there for that conversation, Joe Biden.
And so this is similar to when with the Ukraine thing, because you know, the White House is like, that's not an official statement.
We haven't changed our policy.
Apparently, the issue, and no one's talking about it, this is Biden.
He likes just telling us his emotions, which makes me think maybe he's got a female writer there that they have to fire where, you know, he's just trying to get things off his chest.
And who, but my biggest question, who gets to decide that when the president says something, that's not the official policy?
Who is it?
Like when we get a statement from the White House, hey, that's not official policy.
Who's that person?
You know what I mean?
Who is who, like, because that's the guy who's really in charge.
Can we, can we meet him?
Who gets to the president goes out and says something, and then you get a statement from the White House, hey, that's not our official policy.
Well, that the guy in charge just said it is.
So who?
And they almost like they react with like this thing, like whenever they said that, they're like, that's not every, that's not our official policy.
Like, you see what our policy is, like, as if the janitor just told us that this is what he was going to do, but you're like, this is like, seems like a pretty important guy in your operation there, right?
Like, this is, oh, I'm sorry.
I was under the impression that he's the commander in chief of the military.
So if he tells us this, that kind of carries some weight.
And, and of course, like, even if you're, if your defense here is like, well, the, you know, like that, again, as you made the comparison, which is a very good one, that they say, well, no, look.
So Joe Biden said that Vladimir Putin needs to be overthrown, but regime change is not the official U.S. policy.
It's like, okay, even if that's true, and let's say, you know, given the most generous interpretation, this is like, oh, no, but when Joe Biden's actually sitting down to make policy, he's saying, no, no, no, that's not the policy.
But when he's answering, you know, when he's talking to the press, he's saying, yeah, we need to do this.
You know, how wildly reckless is that?
Even under like the most generous, you know, interpretation that it is like, this is insane.
So then you just go out and just say these like provocative things that are not even your policy that you're not prepared to back up with actual policy.
You know what I mean?
But you'll just say it.
Like, I don't know.
If you just think about this on like a human level, it's like if there's like some big dude at a bar and you're at that bar and you're just telling everyone, it's like, I'm going to take this guy outside and kick his ass.
You're just telling everybody who will listen and you know the guy can hear you, you know?
And then you're like, oh, no, by the way, like, I'm not really planning on fighting this guy.
It's like, all right.
Well, you probably shouldn't be making these threats unless you're very prepared to go do that.
Seems like a common sense position here.
And by the way, you fighting this guy kills everybody at the bar.
So that's also something to maybe think about.
All right.
Anything else on that, Rob?
I guess we can move on.
Well, the other thing I thought the whole tour was kind of goofy because I guess he's going over there to kind of, I mean, the whole thing with Trump was this guy is going to be an embarrassment on the world stage.
Now you're sending Biden over to these countries to like, I guess, sure up our relations.
Would anything scare you more than a meeting with Biden?
Like, I'm sure if you sit down with Biden, you must be like, all right, call up Russia and find out if we can still buy stuff for rubles.
Like, is that deal still on the table?
Because I have no faith in this other guy.
It is really, it is really something that it's like that the whole pitch was like, Donald Trump's an embarrassment and the Biden pitches, the adults are back in charge.
And you do realize, and it's not that Trump didn't have his own kind of embarrassing qualities about him, but oh my God, there's the embarrassment of this guy being your fucking leader.
Stamps Com Political Tactics00:13:44
At least he wasn't asleep at meetings.
He was high on SudaFed, but I'll take that over.
Yeah, really.
Oh, my God.
Really just something.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
So switching gears a little bit, there was a pretty huge story that was out all over.
It's been all over the press.
There was one article that was written a couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal that I wanted to read here on the show because I thought this was really interesting.
But it's a big story that, of course, is being, you know, underreported.
Again, it's one of these stories that like it's not that it's not being reported.
It is.
And I'm about to read a Wall Street Journal piece about it.
And it's been published in several, you know, like major online sites have written about this.
It's just that if the corporate press were not so dishonest, they would be, this would be like the number one story that they were talking about all, you know, the time because they would have to feel some obligation to correct the record for what they put out into the world for three straight years, even more, I suppose.
I guess you could say four straight years.
Some of them still put it out.
Now, of course, this is about the Trump-Russia conspiracy stuff that people heard so much about that the corporate press, I would say, obsessively reported on.
And this is kind of one of the tactics of the corporate press, and this is true in general with just people who talk about politics and journalists and political commentators is that you can say as long as they kind of write one article about some of these things, they can claim, well, technically we reported on this.
But there's, if you look at what is amplified compared to what isn't amplified, you really see the difference.
And so, for example, if I were to say that the corporate press just isn't like, they don't cover the war in Ukraine nearly enough.
Or if I were to say they didn't cover Obama's like drone bombing campaign or Trump's drone bombing campaign, or they didn't cover like, you know, the NDAA acts and all the stuff that's in those that Obama and Trump would sign, you know, every year.
Someone could come back to me and say, well, look, here's a New York Times article about that.
So see, they did.
They covered it, you know.
But if you were to say, take the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and like all the these kind of like different corporate media, you know, apparatuses, and you were to say, compare the amount of times, let's say this year, just to take Ramsay, this year, compare the amount of times that they've talked about the war in Yemen versus the don't say gay bill.
It'd be like a thousand to one, like a thousand to one they talk about this shit rather than the other thing.
So the thing that they were obsessively talking about for three years straight was, of course, Trump-Russia collusion.
And we talked a lot about that on this show and telling everybody that the whole thing was bullshit.
Now, any honest person who's been paying attention to this, who's, I don't know, I don't know how else to say it.
Any honest person who's been paying attention to this shit should have known this for a long time now, for a long time, that the whole thing was complete bullshit.
However, not that we needed any more, because we've really already had everything come out from the fucking declassified FISA warrants to the Mueller report itself to all of the different pieces of information that have come out.
It's been very clear for a while.
However, not that we needed it, but we got more.
And basically what's happened here is that one of Hillary Clinton's lawyers is on trial.
And so members of her campaign, including her campaign manager, have been forced to testify under oath.
And basically, in order to try to help this guy, they have to tell the truth about this and also to not risk perjuring themselves and getting in a lot of trouble.
So anyway, we'll read through a little bit of this and we can discuss.
Go ahead.
It is, though, what's currently going on is half cover up and that the judge prior to this kind of blocked basically looking into Hillary Clinton at all.
Yes.
And also the fact that this stuff, the federal court stuff is not done on camera, that we're watching like Johnny had Donnie, Johnny Depp Amberheard, and everyone can have a public opinion on that.
But when it comes to this or the Epstein case, we can't actually watch these things and we're just looking at the reporting.
I think that's criminal.
But to bring it home on specifically this, so the lawyer admitted, or it actually wasn't the lawyer, it was the campaign person admitted to the fact that they went her before bringing it to the press, but they've protected her in seemingly claiming that she was not aware that it was being brought to the FBI.
Now, that's clearly not true.
There's no way that's true, but that is at least what they're saying.
The claim is essentially that she got behind it as far as taking the story and going to the press.
And you would think that Hillary Clinton and her team would at least be smart enough that she's probably never going to put in writing anywhere that she's aware that this is being taken to the three-letter agencies.
And so probably they know that they're never going to be proven wrong.
You know what I mean?
Like it'd be a very tough thing to prove that she knew about this.
But the idea, it takes quite a leap of faith to assume that Hillary Clinton didn't know that this was going on, seeing as how this was the biggest thing happening in her campaign.
And she hired the sneaky rats that will go do this shit.
That's the people she wants working for is the people.
And just last thing before we get into the article, I think the news story here should be about Jake Sullivan.
It should be about how is there a person working in the Biden administration running our defense and national security strategy that also worked up the conspiracy to unseat and undermine the last president.
I mean, if you've ever seen a more transparent example of a deep state at work, it's Jake Sullivan.
Yeah, I think that's that's absolutely right.
No.
So the piece is called Hillary Clinton Did It.
Her 2016 campaign manager says she approved a plan to plant a false Russia claim with a reporter into the article.
The Russia-Trump collusion narrative of 2016 and beyond was a dirty trick for the ages.
And we now know that it came from the top.
Candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Sorry.
And we now know it came from the top, candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
That was the testimony Friday by 2016 Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook in federal court.
And while this news is hardly a surprise, it's still bracing to find her fingerprints on the political weapon.
Mr. Mook testified as a witness in a special counsel John Durham's trial of Michael Sussman, the lawyer accused of lying to the FBI.
In 2016, Mr. Sussman took claims of a secret Trump connection to Russia's alphabet to the FBI and said he wasn't acting on behalf of any client.
Prosecutors say he was working for the Clinton campaign.
Prosecutors presented evidence this week that Mr. Sussman worked with cyber researchers and opposition research firm Fusion GPS to produce the claims on behalf of the Clinton campaign and to feed them to the FBI.
An FBI agent testified that a bureau analysis quickly rejected the claims as implausible.
Mr. Sussman had pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors asked Mr. Mook about his role in funneling the Alphabank claims to the press.
Mr. Mook admitted the campaign lacked expertise to vet the data, yet the decision was made by Mr. Mook's policy advisor, Jake Sullivan, now President Biden's national security advisor, communications director Jennifer Palmieri, and campaign chair John Podesta to give the Alphabank claims to a reporter.
Mr. Mook said Mrs. Clinton was asked about the plan and approved it.
A story on the Trump Alphabank allegations then appeared in Slate, a left-leaning online publication.
All right.
So just to pause right there, because there's a lot.
So here you have the okay.
So I want to try to take everything we have here in steps, right?
And to really see how clear this is.
Now, I guess the most important part is that yes, we were right about everything.
But now that we've established that, and it's not as if this is unique to us, everybody who is honest and paying attention was right about this.
I think.
So just keep in mind here that they, yes, they are making the ridiculous denial that Hillary Clinton didn't have anything to do with this being brought to the FBI, only being brought to the media.
But they're admitting that she agreed to bring this to the media, right?
But you would think, so at the very least, you go, okay, so for years, while the Trump-Russia collusion thing was like dominating the news, it's not only like Hillary Clinton didn't say anything, didn't go, oh, hey, I mean, you know, we literally made up a bullshit story and got this into slate.
That's how this whole thing started was a lie from us for political reasons.
It's not even that.
It's not that she just didn't say anything and kept her mouth shut, which would be bad enough.
But I don't know, Rob, if you remember Hillary Clinton's speeches or interviews or books on the subject, but Hillary Clinton was an active participant in this, in this whole thing.
She was going out there and saying, yes, I should be president.
Here's what happened.
Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to rob me of my rightful place as the presidency.
She was out there saying it, what a, like, as if we needed more evidence, but what a fucking lying sociopath Hillary Clinton is, that she knows damn well where this bullshit started.
It was her and her campaign.
And she still goes out there and goes along with the whole thing for the purpose of nothing other than her own vengeance and her own kind of like ego.
Like, let me make sure that this isn't viewed as a legitimate loss by me with obviously doing nothing but like tearing the country apart.
Like it's, you know, like this is obviously like detrimental for the entire country, the sitting president, you know, all this shit they say about patriotism and this and that.
And Donald Trump doesn't care about all of these institutions.
Well, here you are spreading lies, which you know are lies, which originated from you and your campaign to undermine the sitting president of the United States of America.
Now, it's funny too that they always hit Trump for the birtherism stuff because he was like undermining the sitting president with, and the birtherism stuff is stupid, but man, this is like so much more fucked up.
Like you're the one who made up this lie.
You know what I mean?
Like it's like unbelievable.
It was like if you found out that Donald Trump was the original originator of the rumor that Barack Obama wasn't born in Hawaii and that he knew he was born in Hawaii the whole time and was going out and spreading this shit.
It's like much worse.
There's layers more to it than that.
Disinformation Humiliates the Press00:15:06
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All right, let's get back into the show.
The other thing that's pretty interesting here, Rob, which I know you jumped on when we were like texting back and forth, back and forth, is the Jake Sullivan aspect of this.
So Jake Sullivan, who they say the decision was made by Mr. MOOC and policy advisor Jake Sullivan, he is currently President Biden's national security advisor.
So how about that?
I don't know.
Anything you want to add on that, Rob?
I mean, I'm pretty sure that's the deep state.
When everyone, like when people, when the liberals try and pretend, what is this deep state that people talk about?
It's a national security apparatus that's pushing wars that does not work in the interest of the American people.
And so you have like, I mean, we know that Brennan was in on this whole thing.
So now you've got this other guy who apparently helped cook up this lie to undermine Trump and his entire presidency.
And now, how does that guy have a job?
I mean, it's not so much how does he have a job, but how is the media not all over this and going, wait a second, why is that guy in this post?
If he was clearly involved in this hoax, he probably shouldn't be in that job.
Or he should probably at least be brought up in front of the Senate whatever committee on TV to kind of answer questions about like who's he working for in government.
I mean, doesn't that border on treason or something to totally cook up a lie?
And I'm sure he was involved in it after Trump was in office.
I'm sure he didn't just walk away from this collusion, Russia collusion story.
Yeah, it is.
It is certainly, I mean, the guy is straight up a traitor to his country, no question.
So let me read from this next paragraph here because it gets even more down to like it, it really, this to me really exposes how this system works and what dishonest pieces of shit these people are.
Okay.
So on October 3rd, excuse me, on October 31st, 2016, Mr. Sullivan issued a statement mentioning the Slate story, writing, quote, this could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.
Mrs. Clinton tweeted Mr. Sullivan's statement with the comment: computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump organization to a Russian-based bank.
Apparently, is doing a lot of the work in that sentence, as the Washington, as the Wall Street Journal opinion board there.
But so now you see how it works, right?
Hillary Clinton tweets out, well, would you looky, looky here at this article in Slate?
Man, apparently they've linked this whole thing together.
This seems to be pretty damning.
Knowing full well, as according to the testimony of her, the, you know, under oath testimony of her campaign manager, knowing full well that she signed off on sending this story to Slate, she's still so fucking dishonest that she'll tweet out like, oh, wow, look at what Slate found here.
Well, apparently this is proof of this, even though they knew this was bullshit and they sent the story to Slate.
Like just the intense dishonesty of these people on full display here is like, it's just wonderful to see exposed.
Okay, back to the art.
Oh, go ahead.
No, it's just the humor of her being like, is every one of our intelligence agencies have said or looked, yeah, with the information you fucking handed them.
Yes, which you knew was bullshit.
Yeah.
And there was, there's a great article on Zero Hedge today that was basically putting out the question of how did $40 million and two years of the Mueller thing not uncover this aspect of it.
That is a really important question to ask.
I mean, sure, the Mueller investigation basically concluded that they couldn't find any evidence that the charge was true, that Trump was involved in some conspiracy.
But yeah, they never came out with this.
They never figured this part out.
There's a great negotiating book called Never Split the Difference.
It's from a guy who was like an FBI negotiator from like hostage situations.
And he's got a couple of points in the book where he references Mueller and he speaks about him as being like kind of the sharpest guy at the FBI.
And then the one time we saw him was at that hearing when he basically he was doing an impression of Joe Biden now.
That's essentially what he was doing, where he's just sitting there for three hours, confused and tired and like just a total act.
Just a, what a, what an unbelievable show that that guy put on to pretend and kind of get out of that, you know, answering for what had happened over like, I don't remember, I can't answer, just half falling asleep and just confused.
They know what they did here.
Oh, yeah.
Oh yeah.
No question about that.
All right.
Let me.
Okay.
Back to the article.
In short, the Clinton campaign created the Trump alpha allegations, fed it to a credulous press that failed to confirm the allegations, but ran with them anyway, then promoted the story as if it was legitimate news.
The campaign also delivered the claim to the FBI, giving journalists another excuse to portray the accusations as serious and perhaps true.
So you see how this whole game works.
It's all like a circular thing.
It starts with one bullshit.
You feed it to the press.
Then you go, oh, well, look, this is being reported.
Then you feed it to the FBI.
Then the press goes, FBI is looking into this, blah, blah, blah.
And everyone's acting as if there's something corroborating their story, but it's all the same thing.
That was one lie.
This is kind of how this is like a well-known trick in politics.
You feed a story to a news publication, then you have cover to come out and say it's being reported that so-and-so.
And then on top of that, in this case, they also then feed it to these intelligence agencies and go, oh, look, the FBI is looking into blah, blah, blah.
Just all so crazy.
And they all know that they're doing it.
Okay.
Most of the press will ignore this news, but the Russia-Trump narrative that Mrs. Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country.
It disgraced the FBI, humiliated the press, and sent the country on a three-year investigation to nowhere.
Vladimir Putin never came close to doing as much disinformation damage.
I got to say, that's a powerful paragraph there.
I'm going to read that one more time because this is a really powerful thing for the Wall Street Journal to say.
Most of the press will ignore this news, but the Russia-Trump narrative that Mrs. Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country.
It disgraced the FBI, humiliated the press, and sent the country on a three-year investigation to nowhere.
Vladimir Putin never came close to doing as much disinformation damage.
Here's what I'll just say about this.
Okay, they are right to say this.
Now, I would probably have a bone to pick where I actually think the fact that it disgraced the FBI and humiliated the press is the best thing that came out of all of this.
I think if these organizations are this pathetic, they deserve to be humiliated.
If they fail, if they fail the American people this much, then good, they deserve that.
You can still see a hint in here from the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, or maybe more than a hint that somehow these institutions must be revered and it's so damaging to the country that they've all been humiliated.
But I would feel quite differently.
And I think this, it's almost like proof by this happening that they do not deserve to be revered.
The other thing is that I just, while I appreciate this very powerful article and paragraph being written by the Wall Street Journal, I got to say, if a couple idiot comedians like me and you can be right about this thing the whole way through, then like this stuff should have been pumped out there during the time.
You know, it didn't, it didn't need to wait till this trial and this testimony.
We had all the evidence we needed and more for years now.
So it's crazy to just see it coming out now.
Anyway, that is the conclusion of the piece.
It's a short one.
It was short and sweet.
And I thought it was worth reading on the show today.
So, look, I understand we live in a kind of like, you know, a post-rise of the COVID regime time now with the tensions in Russia and all of this stuff.
And this almost does, you know, seem like a little bit of a story that's just in the past.
But then again, that's kind of how they always win these games is because by the time they admit how egregious it is, it's like, yeah, I know I know the war in Iraq was a fucking whole thing built off lies and all that, but like, whatever, you know, it's 20 years ago.
What are you going to do?
And okay, this isn't 20 years ago.
It's like three years ago.
But damage done.
Yeah, but that's the point is that they really did.
Like that, it's just like even people who think that they're somewhat aware of how corrupt politicians are, of how dishonest the corporate press is.
It's just like, don't forget, like, while they have the nerve to be setting up disinformation boards and then pausing them, but that they don't even, you know, think about that, right?
Like Joe Biden wants his Department of Homeland Security to be ruling what is disinformation and misinformation.
His own national security advisor was the guy involved in the biggest piece of disinformation.
Well, I was going to say the biggest piece of disinformation in recent years, but I guess perhaps over the last two years that was topped.
But certainly from the period of 2016 to 2000, the beginning of 2020, there's just an enormous story.
And if you just think about the gravity of the accusations that were being made on a daily basis on all of the largest media outlets across the country, the accusations was that the sitting president of the United States of America is guilty of treason, that he is a traitor to his country, but is currently the commander in chief.
Like this was like the wildest claims of like the John Birch Society in like the 50s and shit like that.
Yet it was coming through all of the most like approved, you know, all of the most like official institutions.
And the damage from this is really enormous to the country.
And it's not, it's that, number one, this destroyed the prospect of what Donald Trump ran on, which was to have like a reasonable relationship with Russia.
That was what Donald Trump ran on in 2016 was like, why don't we get along with Russia and not move toward hostilities with them, but rather move toward like, you know, détente, have a better like understanding, a better relationship.
And, you know, that was destroyed because he was being accused publicly of being a Russian agent.
And so he had to prove how not much of a Russian puppet he was.
And so he spent his whole administration proving that.
And that had a lot of things involved in it, like pulling out of the INF treaty, like sending weapons into Ukraine.
And look at where we are right now.
You know, the more you look back at it, like, oh, that was a really big fucking deal.
Like this is not nothing.
It's not like, oh, this was just a waste of time and the press made themselves look like idiots.
They pushed us more and more into a dangerous, like inflammatory relationship with Russia that now has us on the brink of a military confrontation with them.
This was a very big deal that they pulled this off.
People who were responsible for this should go to jail.
And then the truth is that basically no one is, right?
There's this one lawyer who's on trial now.
I think there was one FBI guy who got convicted, but I don't believe he did any jail time.
I could be wrong about that.
But it was the guy who wrote up the FISA application.
He got in trouble.
I forget exactly what his punishment was, but he lied so blatantly to the FISA courts that they got him.
But it's like everybody else kind of just skates and walks free.
And it's just, it's unbelievable what they did, what they did to this country to make up a lie on that level, that the sitting president is a traitor to his country, in bed with a hostile foreign power, all this stuff.
And it's not like just from what you see here in this piece, there's not even like the plausible deniability like there are of some of these other things, which are even still pretty thin.
But it's not like they go, oh, no, but I really thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, as some congressmen could claim who supported the war.
You know, oh, I don't know.
That's what I was told.
I thought they really had them.
Dirty Politics in Health Insurance00:04:17
It's like very clear here from Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
They all knew about this the whole time.
None of them said a word.
None of them forget even like, even if you go to like, okay, they were in campaign mode and they were trying to, they were playing really dirty politics, let's say, right?
Give them the excuse of that, that this is the middle of a campaign.
You're playing really dirty politics to try to get your candidate to win.
Okay.
Fine.
Let's say I give you that.
You even have a rationalization for why you think Hillary Clinton would be a much better president than Donald Trump.
So you got to play dirty politics during the election season of 2016.
Okay.
But you lose.
January of 2017, Donald Trump is sworn in as the president of the United States of America.
And this stuff is still dominating in the news every single day.
You don't feel an obligation to come out and say something at that point.
And in fact, then you got Hillary Clinton going out there and continuing to lead the charge of launching the accusation that he's in bed with Vladimir Putin.
None of these people on the campaign felt some obligation to just go to the press and be like, hey, guys, this is all bullshit.
And we started it.
And we know that.
No, it takes, it's not till one of your fucking slimy lawyers is on trial and you're forced to testify under oath that you admit all this shit.
And of course, as the Wall Street Journal puts in that sentence, I mean, What a disgrace to the FBI and the CIA.
They don't mention this, but as you did in the Zero Hedge article, mention this.
What a disgrace to Robert Mueller and the entire special prosecutors team that they couldn't fund.
It's like every major institution you just see being destroyed over this.
That's the best part.
That's the best part of all of it: that they all look like assholes.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Anything else you want to add to that, Rob?
Yeah, I think it's crazy that this isn't getting more coverage and that this isn't becoming a big headline of let's look at the deep state.
What happened here?
Yeah, well, that's right.
Prioritizing Focus Over Tickets00:07:04
And it's not just the deep state, right?
It's the Clinton campaign.
It's the deep state, and it's the corporate press for all kind of working together in this thing.
But of course, also, this is at least for now, this is a technique that is still somewhat effective, as I was mentioning earlier.
It's not what you, you know, it's not just what you talk about, but it's what you prioritize and what you talk about the most and what you emphasize.
And this is true across the board.
You know, like one of the things that I, you know, I talk like I talk about this with libertarians all the time, is that I think that to me, what's what's more important than whether someone agrees with me on like every philosophical abstraction that there is,
or if we both have like the same unified theory of how libertarian ethics ought to apply in every different like the legal situation or something like that.
It's what's much more important to me is what people focus on.
Like what are what is your primary issue?
What do you really talk about the most?
What do you focus about the most?
What makes your blood boil the most?
What do you give the most attention?
You know, if you like, like, for example, if you look at me and you, I think there's really no, like, if you just look at this show and you go, what is, what are the things that get the most attention on this show that get me and you the most worked up and pissed off about, you know what I mean?
Like, or that get us the most, you know what I mean?
Like that we like amplify the most.
You'd have to say, well, it's basically like wars, the COVID insanity over the last two years, and the complete destruction of the economy.
You know, like the, and I think that's it.
That's like, I think we're putting the emphasis right on what it should be on, like the things that actually destroy people's lives the most.
Now, do me and you do we see completely eye to eye on like whether every sidewalk should be privatized?
I don't even know.
Honestly, I don't even fucking know.
Me and you talked about like minarchy versus anarchy once, I think like six years ago.
Me and you had a debate on the show about it.
I have no idea if you've changed your mind on that.
I fucking literally, I literally broadcast with you three times a week.
We've never talked about it since, not to mention we're on long car rides together.
We do gigs together.
We're friends.
We hang out.
It's never come up because I just don't fucking care.
It just doesn't matter.
It's like, I don't know.
By the way, we should privatize the sidewalks and maybe we'll get in a conversation one time and I'll be able to convince you.
We should.
But who like, who really?
And then, you know, this is true again.
It's true of a lot of like, like, there are a lot of like left wingers out there who like all they talk about all day long is like the Green New Deal and democratizing, you know, the workplace and like all these other things who might actually be really good on war.
You know what I mean?
But like it never comes up or something like that.
And so that to me is not that valuable of an ally.
But if there is a left winger who's always talking about war and how evil it is, and then, you know, if you ask them, they were like, oh, yeah, I'm for the Green New Deal and this other stuff.
I'm more likely to be like, okay, I kind of like that person because at least you prioritize the thing that you're really good on.
And likewise, there are those libertarians out there who just all day are screaming about like transphobia and racism, who might be, if you ask them, really good on some of these other issues.
But it's like, if that's what you prioritize and that's like, then you're basically useless.
Like it doesn't, you know what I mean?
Like it's, you're not like actually focusing on what matters.
And this, in the same sense, that's how this game is played.
That they focus so much on the Trump-Russia collusion story.
And then they focus so little on the, oh, by the way, the whole thing was bullshit.
And the way it works is that you'll still, if you take an opinion poll tomorrow, there'll still be some percentage of the country who believes Trump and Russia colluded, that they were involved in some conspiracy.
They just couldn't prove it.
Yeah.
Or right?
Like, or they're basically like, oh, we know that.
Or they saw something where they went, well, I think there were like a few dozen of Trump's people who were prosecuted.
You know, like, you remember they used to like put those things out?
Right.
Oh, the Mueller investigation resulted in all of these people being charged with crimes, which is true, but none of them had to do with a Russian conspiracy.
They were all like unrelated.
Oh, we caught this guy for not like fucking some tax crime from 20 years ago because they looked into everyone's shit.
So like, you know, so, so that's the way, that's the effect that this game that they play has is that there'll still be a percentage.
And like, I don't know, I'd have to look at these polls, but if you look at it, it was, it's not like a negligible number.
It's like there's still like a fairly large percentage of the population who just like, oh, yeah, no, Donald Trump was involved in a conspiracy with the Russians.
We know that.
I heard that over and over again from all these people who know what they're talking about.
So that's the way the game's played.
And so that's what we're in the businesses, the business of exposing that bullshit.
All right, we're going to wrap up on that.
Before we call it an episode, I want to seek out a trendy hotels that don't give you chairs.
Whenever I'm sitting on, I've been on bike seats more comfortable.
And I also don't understand these bathrooms with clear walls.
I just don't get like clear walls?
What do you mean?
Yeah, they're like doing like the smoky screen.
So I guess like, you know, you can see the outline of someone taking a shit.
I just don't get it.
Just put a fucking door there.
You don't want someone to see the outline of you taking a shit?
Not so much.
No, no, no.
Yeah, no, it's not great.
No, go ahead.
Yeah, no, go for it.
No, I don't have that much more on you.
I was going to say, if you bring a girl back, that's really like, that's really not going to be fun for you.
I take a lot of business calls in the lobby.
Yeah, there you go.
Everybody, I got a summer porch tour dates.
Look in the episode description.
The one in LA was an absolute blast.
You guys can go check out the footage of that.
It's up on my YouTube.
And next city coming up is Pittsburgh, which I believe is even, it's like in a weekend or two.
So pick up your tickets.
Come hang out.
All right.
Sounds good.
And I think we're basically sold out for Reno and Chicago.
There might be a few tickets left for that late show in Reno.
I'm not sure.
But thanks to everybody for buying those tickets.
I can't wait.
We'll see you there.
We got a lot more fun shit coming up.
So thanks for listening.
Peace.
So I actually think the most important question of this evening, Chris, is finally, will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election, that he rejects Russian espionage against Americans, which he actually encouraged in the past.
Those are the questions we need answered.
We've never had anything like this happen in any of our elections