Michael Malice and Dave Smith dissect the FBI's Mar-a-Lago raid as a politically motivated narrative tool rather than a security necessity, arguing it selectively applies "no president is above the law" to deepen national polarization. They explore how this perceived weaponization fuels authoritarian reactions on the right, suggesting Trumpism persists regardless of legal outcomes while analyzing inconsistent prosecutions compared to other presidents. The discussion further critiques the 2024 landscape, questioning if alternatives like Ron DeSantis can replace Trump's unifying focal point for opponents, and concludes that defeating this movement requires addressing its broader cultural roots beyond individual legal battles. [Automatically generated summary]
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Nuclear Codes and Presidential Power00:13:13
Fill her up.
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You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Steer your host.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am very excited to have one of my favorite people in the world to talk to.
You know him and love him and have potentially been blocked by him.
Ladies and gentlemen, author, podcaster, world-class troll, the great Michael Malice.
How are you, sir?
I'm good.
And as I was saying, I don't think I've ever seen you wear a colored shirt before.
I'm trying to expand my horizons little by little.
Did the Mrs. buy that for you?
Yeah, she buys me almost everything at this point.
I don't know.
Stuff just ends up.
But I am, you're right.
I'm a very dark tones person in general.
It represents the dark state of the world and statism crushing individual liberty or something.
I don't know.
I got nothing for that.
All right.
I'm very interested to talk to you a bit about what's been going on the last few days in the country, because a major theme of your commentary for years has been that while it is thought of as kind of an unexamined, just assumed good that the country comes together and we're not divided and we're more together.
You hear public people talk about this all the time.
You've really been arguing actually being divided is much preferable to being united, that actually the polarization of the country is good.
And certainly that the waning trust in institutions is very good, a very positive development for the state of the country.
So I'm curious what you think about the latest with what happened with the former president Donald Trump being raided by the FBI.
Now it seems from, it seems to me, there's a very high likelihood that they are going to be moving forward with eventually charging Donald Trump with something.
This seems to be a very big deal, as far as I can tell.
Like historically, I can't really think of another president like this.
So I'm curious what your take on all of this is.
Well, there was some precedent with this in that after Nixon was forced to resign in 74, President Ford, who took over when Nixon resigned, pardoned him.
And according to Ford, the reason he pardoned him is like he went to visit Nixon in his office and there was like all these boxes of documents and Nixon looked like he was on his last legs and Ford was like, the man has suffered enough.
I'm going to pardon him.
And this was a huge kind of scandal.
And the argument was this was a quid pro quo because Ford is Obviously, never elected.
He was slotted to fill in Spirit Agni's seat when Spirit Agni resigned the vice presidency.
And years later, it was became kind of like accepted common wisdom that, you know, if Gerald Ford did the right thing, no nation should kind of have to suffer through watching a president put on trial.
Well, that's all out the window.
So, like, it would be really funny if someone went and looked at these same outlets, which would be like the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, and watched all of them praising Gerald Ford for pardoning Richard Nixon, as compared to now, which is like, you know, where they're going to be advocating for President Trump to be given the ultimate punishment, which I don't even want to say, because I think if you say it, you're going to have the Secret Service coming to your house,
as they should have come to William Wells' house when 2019 he was on television advocating for the ultimate penalty for the sitting president.
I think this is, I have Robert Barnes on my show this week, who's like a big shot attorney, because neither you and I, obviously, or most people listening to this are attorneys.
But I think what you and I, most people listening to, do understand is that the law is whatever the lawmakers say it is.
So, to things like treason are just like racism and degeneracy are terms that sound really, really objective.
But then, when you sit down and you break down what they mean, they become quickly become nebulous and can be reduced to something that I don't like or that someone I don't like did.
I think that they are talking out of both sides of their mouths, because if the argument is that President Trump is this dangerous figure and he is fomenting insurrection and the biggest threat to America is white nationalist violence,
which he endorses and he encourages, this is really the worst way to stop what that, if that is the logical argument that they're making, this is not the way to forestall it.
This is the way to basically guarantee it and escalate it, which just tells me that they know that they're lying.
But I think everyone listening to this knows that they know they're full of crap.
I'm surprised.
I think that there's a couple of things going on.
First, they very clearly want to make Trump an example: that if you defy the system, we are not ever going to rest until you are completely destroyed as a human being, whether through lawfare or some other mechanisms.
I am very, very concerned that President Trump, who's in his mid-70s or late 70s at this point, suffers some kind of fatal heart attack or stroke, in which case, what, 40% of the population easily will assume this was a Putin-esque assassination.
And then, Lord help us, what's going to happen as a consequence of that?
That's something I'm extremely concerned about.
I think this raid was completely disingenuous because if I have like the password, if I'm saying it's like nuclear stuff, if the argument is he has nuclear stuff and that this is dangerous, well, you subpoena him or contact his attorneys, because otherwise, if the point of a raid is you want to make sure that the person doesn't destroy the evidence that they have, right?
Well, if you're raiding him and he destroys the nuclear codes or the like wiki how to build a nuclear bomb so he can't sell it to whoever they think he's going to claim they're going to, he's going to sell it to, that would be a good thing in this situation.
As Robert Barnes explained to me on my show, the president, and this is kind of an obvious thing, but I just wanted a clarification from him, has the highest level of security clearance.
So he has a right to whatever to see whatever documents is in the government.
He has the right to declassify at his own leisure, whatever documents he wants.
So now every president for years, you know, when you leave the White House, there's arguments about what's my stuff and what's the government stuff.
Just because you live in the White House doesn't mean you own the resolute desk and so on and so forth.
Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, very famously had to return tens of thousands of items to the White House when they left in January 2001.
Carol Olson, Barbara Olson, excuse me, who died 9-11, wrote a book about this.
I think it was called Final Exit.
I forgot what it's called, or The Last Day, something like that.
But the point is, this has been a thing with every president, understandably, because it's really kind of nebulous.
If I wrote this memo to my successor, am I writing as the president or am I writing as an individual?
So I don't know where this is going to go, but I think it is very helpful in terms of moving us forward toward a national divorce.
And I think it's going to be interesting to watch what the Republicans and how they address this situation.
Yeah.
So I think that's right.
And that's one of the things that's really interesting.
It's funny that you see there's so many like blue-pilled takes on all of this.
And the one I've seen the most that's just so hilarious is where someone will go, you know, hey, look, just because you're the president, you're not above the law.
You know, this is like what they say about the people who are on to justify getting Trump.
And you're like, what are you?
Jeff Dice wrote a piece on this and he said something like along the lines of he goes, is this politics for someone at National Review said, well, look, the president is above the law.
And if there was any misdoing by the Justice Department, then they should be held accountable.
And Jeff Dice goes, he goes, What is this?
Politics for kindergartners?
Of course, presidents are above the law.
And when is anyone at the FBI ever held accountable for anything?
Easiest counterexample: kids were killed in Afghanistan accidentally.
If you're not above the law, you're guilty of manslaughter.
You should be extradited.
The end.
Well, I mean, the idea that presidents aren't above the law, of course, they are.
They all are.
I mean, you know, there's, there's like a couple great, there's a great Noam Chomsky clip where he just makes the argument for why by the Nuremberg standard, every post-war president should be tried for war crimes.
And it just goes through every single president and what their crimes against humanity were.
It's every one of those.
And, you know, your example about Ford, the thing that comes to my mind in more recent history is that Obama, who actually there was some pressure because the kind of left-wing activists at the time, which for some younger people maybe not don't didn't live through this, but the young wing, like kind of left-wing activists that are always used by the Democrats to fall in line and vote for them.
And Obama got a lot of enthusiasm out of them.
And at the time, they weren't, you know, obsessed with the issues they are today, like, you know, LGBTQ stuff or whatever it is today.
At the time, it was really anti-Bush, anti-war stuff.
And there was a lot of pressure to prosecute the George W. Bush administration, enough so that Obama had to address it.
And what Obama said was he goes, Look, crimes were committed.
We tortured some folks, but now is the time to look forward, not backward, which was like a really stunning thing to say.
Just like, it's like, you know, I made a joke about it at the time where I was like, well, here's the thing about prosecuting crime.
You have to look backward.
This is by its very nature.
It's really important that you look backward.
I don't know, not anymore.
It could be that they're doing the whole minority report stuff now.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a dangerous game to prosecute crime looking forward.
But the point is that there's been so many egregious crimes committed by presidents that are all completely let go.
And so for Donald Trump to be picked, it's even if it does come out that he had.
First of all the nuclear code thing is ridiculous.
The nuclear codes change all the time.
Having the nuclear codes would mean nothing.
So what they'd be implying, and this is all what like unnamed anonymous sources have said, is that he had some documents related to nuclear information.
Seems highly unlikely that even Donald Trump would be that stupid.
Wait, wait, wait.
Even if he's not stupid, let's suppose I have the nuclear code.
What is there?
Some kind of suitcase app that I could get on my phone and then I press it in and it detonates.
I need the suitcase.
The suitcase.
They change the codes constantly, and they would certainly change them when there's a new president coming in.
So the codes would be meaningful.
It's not even a new president.
I'm sure I've had laptops from my old jobs and they have this little fob with it.
And the fob changes the password like every 10 minutes.
There's no way that the security on my laptop from Goldman Sachs 20 years ago is better than the security to destroy the earth.
Yes, yes, you one would hope so.
But what's interesting about this, like you said, is how is this going to go move going forward?
My guess here is that there, I really think it's not just that Trump needs to be punished for, you know, being, you know, kind of giving the middle finger to the establishment and then beating them.
I think it's also that he's in a very unique position.
As I said on my last podcast, I think, no, I don't think since Teddy Roosevelt, there's been a president who was also, you know, a former president who is also going to run again for president, you know, in the next term.
I believe this is how Woodrow Wilson ended up getting elected.
Was right Teddy Roosevelt split the vote, which ruined the 20th century.
Anyway, Donald Trump is not just, it's not just that he's that.
He's also, he's the former president and he's also the presumptive nominee in 2024 and Joe Biden's most likely opponent.
So it's this very, and I think that the prospect, what they're looking at right now, Trump's done very well in the midterm elections with the people who he's been nominating.
You're looking at a Republican landslide coming up in November with a much more Trumpian Republican party.
And then Donald Trump running and winning again would be that is too much for the like that's a line, a bridge too far for the establishment to deal with.
Freedom From Health Insurance00:03:09
And I think right now it's get him at any cost possible.
So there, I think they're going to charge him.
I think they're going to find a way to ban him from running again in 2024.
A lot of people say, oh, constitutionally, you can't do that because there's only very specific restrictions, but you actually can if somebody is, if you're prosecuting somebody and part of a plea deal could be that you won't seek office.
Also, the Republican Party can just ban him from running in the Republican Party and then he would have to do it third party.
And everyone knows third party presidential runs are an absolute joke.
Everyone here knows that.
It's a stupid waste of time.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Just two quick history points.
One is there was some precedent for this, which was in 1936, there was talk of running Herbert Hoover again against FDR, which FDR would have loved because the Republicans did so bad in 32 and 34, but it would have been a complete blowout, which it was as well.
Weaponized Classified Material Concerns00:13:27
And another example of what you're talking about, no presidents above the law, is with the Dreamers or the DACA people, right?
Where they were supposed to be deported, you know, very famously.
Oh, they came here through no fault of their own.
They're basically kids from their parents who are illegal immigrants.
And President Obama just said, Yeah, I'm just not going to enforce this law.
Now, whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing, or so on and so forth, the point being, he said it explicitly, yeah, I'm just not going to enforce the law.
And then there was, you know, all the blue checks tripped over themselves saying, oh, it's like prosecutorial discretion.
Like sometimes prosecutors just completely, it's like, that's not really what prosecutorial discretion means, but that's a very blatant example.
And then John Bolton said, excuse me, John Boehner, who was speaking of the House at the time, said, you know, Mr. President, this is a red flag.
If you cross this line, you're going to regret it.
He's like, yeah, I'm going to cross it anyway.
And John Boehner's like, okay, you got me.
And they're like, I got some tobacco company money to spend.
Yeah.
Not only are there no consequences, Supreme Court somehow upheld what Obama did just to not enforce the law.
But yeah, I think they're playing a dangerous game.
And I think it's kind of a healthy thing for America because they're really so fixated on Trump.
And Trump is such a symptom of something so much broader that if you, and he's a very imperfect messenger at best of the message and the ideas behind it, which I don't think he has a full understanding of at all.
So even if you got rid of him, it's really not.
There's so many more Trumpian figures in gubernatorial races.
Carrie Lake, she's a nominee in Arizona.
They pulled out all the stops against her.
Every article against her, you know, is just written as like this movement is crazy and unelectable, just blatantly.
There's just no pretense of objectivity.
They were quoting her primary opponent.
They're quoting, you know, every Republican, a Salvian Republican and Democrat.
They didn't quote her campaign and she still pulled out a win.
You're seeing with all these primaried people, Republicans voted for Trump, they're getting knocked out of their primaries.
Who knows if they can get elected or not in November?
But the point is, this Trumpianism and this, which, if you can define it broadly, is really a like teeth-grinding contempt for the worst people in America.
These, they're not going anywhere.
And because I think the base has really gone in many ways crazy in the sense of they're not interested in having a rational reason discourse.
They're like, I will believe that you people are demons.
We can get you down to like mass murderers from demons.
That's as far as I'm going to go.
And that's where we are.
So I don't know how they would bring that population back into, you know, what kind of discourse they would like.
You know, obviously, in some sense, they've written them off, but you can't just have 30% of the population or 25% of the population, especially in a population that's heavily politically apathetic, just completely despise the symptoms, the system and all its proponents and just be like, oh, this will be fine.
It's not.
Yeah, I think, I think you're absolutely right.
This is something we talked about like all throughout the Trump years was this, what would you say?
They mistook, they thought he was the river, but he was the dam.
And this was, it was really something, you know, I talked about a lot on this show, that the idea that this, oh, if you get rid of Donald Trump, then Trumpism goes away is just, it's insane.
It's like nobody, it's, it, it, it flies in the face of all of the evidence.
Um, and also it's, it's a very convenient, you know, tool for the corporate press and the establishment to believe this, because then they don't have to examine themselves and their failures and what actually led to this moment where people were so furious with the system that they were just looking for the biggest middle finger they could give to all of these people.
Look, I think what everybody should realize, and you know, one of the things I thought was really interesting was that they're actually even within the corporate press, which every now and then is worthwhile to pay attention to.
Sometimes it's worthwhile to tune them out.
But over the last few days, before Merrick Garland gave his five-minute talk the other day and said they were going to release the warrant, there was a, I saw a lot of concern.
We read from a CNN article the other day.
There were some people on MSNBC even who were saying like, hey, we really better have something here.
We better have something big because this could backfire on us if it's seen as we're just, you know, the Justice Department is weaponized against Donald Trump.
But I think what they don't understand fully is the point you just made.
With how much contempt a huge percentage of Americans hold them, and that no matter what they have here, however you feel about it, no matter what they have here, it is a fact.
It will be seen that way.
And rightfully so, if you ask me.
I mean, even if it turns out, like even if it's the worst case scenario, they find really top secret nuclear documents there.
How many people are, how many Trump supporters are going to be convinced that they didn't plant it?
How many of them are going to really be convinced that they got him?
And the truth is that a lot of these things, I think there's, there's something about this with the 2020 election in general.
The analogy that I've used before is that it's almost like it's almost like if you're in a relationship and you're constantly cheating and your girlfriend flips out about you cheating on her on Friday night and you didn't.
And you're like, no, no, no, I didn't.
She's like, I don't believe you.
She's completely convinced you cheated.
She's like, she's wrong technically, but she's right.
You know what I mean?
Like she might be wrong about this specific instance, but she's right.
She smells it.
She knows it's happening.
So I think whether 2020, the election, there was fraud in the election, or there's always fraud, but to what degree there is, I think that the Trump voters could smell that this whole thing had like the entire Justice Department, deep state, the corporate press, academia, Hollywood, both political parties had been completely weaponized against Donald Trump since he was a candidate in 2016.
He was never given a chance.
And if he's brought down this way, the story for 50% of the voting population is going to be that this country was stolen from us by all of these institutions, that we do not, we are not participating in what was, you know, their promised, a democracy or whatever.
And here's two things that don't make sense to me.
First of all, there's the claim that like we had to do this raid because this is urgent, you know, blah, blah.
It's August 2022.
He left the White House in January 2021.
So it's been 17 months he's had these documents.
So unless you have some kind of file that he's about to sell this stuff or whatever, number one.
Number two is if it's possible that he took it and he's a blithering ignoramus, which is possible, and that this stuff, maybe they're like, look, this is in a secure location.
If Mar-a-Lago gets raided, even the Secret Service is protecting it.
If Mar-a-Lago gets like stole, like burglarized, really bad people can get this information.
Great.
You call his lawyer and say, we need to secure this information right now.
And here's why.
And then he'll secure it.
The fact is, there's two concerns.
They're saying we needed to do this to kind of like for the safety of America, but it's really clear that they needed to do this to get Trump.
Because if the concern is, as I just said, if, you know, if we give him the heads up that he's going to destroy all this stuff, well, that would accomplish your purpose of keeping America safe.
Right.
So that's your purpose is charging him.
The only thing that would hurt is if your purpose was trying to get a conviction on him, then you wouldn't have the evidence anymore.
But if your issue was just that there's unsecured classified information, that would resolve the problem.
Now, another angle to this, if you want to put your conspiracy hat on a little bit, is that if you were trying to, if this was like a conspiracy just to get Donald Trump, this is the absolute best crime to charge someone with.
Because what happens when you say someone has classified material is, number one, the judge who you're getting the subpoena from does not have clearance to see this classified material.
So you don't have to explain to them what it is, what the details of it are.
You could just tell them there's classified material.
We have reason to believe that there's classified material.
And then he's like, okay, he doesn't even have to list it on the warrant.
And then you never actually have to show the evidence to the American people because you go, well, no, it's classified.
That's the whole point of this.
So it's just no matter what, this is going to be shrouded in secrecy.
You know what I mean?
And therefore, you have these institutions like the FBI, who rightfully so have zero trust from Trump voters.
I mean, this was an organization that was weaponized against Donald Trump from the very beginning of his presidency.
Nobody trusts them.
They see their private text messages with that strut guy and all them saying we will get Donald Trump out and all of this stuff.
The Andrew McCabe, who is, I believe, the number two or the number three guy at the Justice Department, went on 60 minutes and said, we were thinking about invoking the 25th Amendment.
We ultimately settled on sicking Mueller on him.
I mean, so no one's going to believe them no matter what comes out of this.
And I think that this is going to really put a shot in the arm of Trumpism.
It may not be Donald Trump as the leader of it anymore.
But I also think that kind of as you alluded to earlier, there are these other Trumpian figures.
I also think maybe because we float in some of these radical circles a little bit more than regular people do, I think people are removed from how much more authoritarian some of these right-wingers would go in order to stop what they see as the left-wing dominance of the country.
And I think about this every single time.
It's like you'll see some of like the craziest shit that's going on in our politics and our culture, you know, whatever it is.
It's like, you know, the most like, you know, outrageous like videos of, you know, like drag queen five-year-old hour.
And my first thought, my first thought is always like, oh my God, this is so horrific.
Like, how are you doing this with children there?
And then right after that, my next thought is like, we are going to have a right-wing dictator in this country.
Yeah.
Because you're, you're almost making me want to support it.
And I'm like the most like liberty oriented person you know.
And like, now you're like, what do you think average right-winger is thinking when they see something like this?
Right.
It's not like they're like, we should elect someone to say, you can go live in peace and we can go live in peace.
That's not going to be it.
Jesse Kelly makes this point a lot where he goes, listen, the point, the boy who cries wolf is that the wolf shows up.
So if you keep yelling, oh my God, you're a fascist.
You're oh my God, you're a fascist.
At some point, they're going to be like, yeah, now what?
And Charlie Kirk, I had him on my show a couple of weeks ago, the episode before yours.
Charlie Kirk is hardly, you know, Chris Camwell, to put it mildly.
And he said, look, I used to be libertarian.
Now not anymore, because he's like, there's three scenarios.
There's no gun on the table, or they have the gun, or we have the gun.
And he goes, I think the first choice is not realistic.
It's not happening.
So if someone's going to be using the gun, I'd rather be me.
And that is a de facto endorsement of the basis of authoritarianism.
And he's not crazy.
You know, it's kind of like why I'm a Hamiltonian.
If anarchism isn't on the table and you're forced to choose between in-group or out-group, people are going to choose in-group.
They're going to choose it pretty much every time.
So as an example of this, this is the first, and this is kind of a very loose metric for what we're talking about.
This is the first year that acceptance of LGBT has gone down over the year previously, because as things like LGBT and black and Hispanic or immigrant become associated with this hard left agenda, people are naturally going to be like, oh, that's that.
Well, screw you on the opposite of that.
And what?
So they're going to feel no loyalty to any of these groups because those groups are going to be perceived as being represented by like the worst people on earth.
And yeah, you're going to have this really harsh blowback because there's no skin in the game for the people who aren't part of that group.
It's like, why am I sticking my neck out for your liberties and your freedoms where every one of your organizations is doing everything in your power to destroy my life and my family?
Makes no sense to me.
That's the argument.
And it's not a crazy argument.
And it's a very scary direction that we're going in.
Because frankly, I've always said I'd rather have explicit authoritarianism in a sense than this kind of brave new world, persuasive authoritarianism.
And now that it's here, it's not pretty, but it's at least more honest.
MarPipe And Persuasive Authoritarianism00:02:59
But it's going to get worse before it gets better than the midterm.
And I say this as the author of the upcoming white pill.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, it's like you can be white pilled ultimately on the future, but also still be realistic about that.
That doesn't mean everything's going to be sunshine and rainbows.
Exactly.
You know, Hoppe, Hans Hermann Hoppe said that basically the Western world, I think he was speaking larger than just the United States of America, but that the Western world is going to like the snapback from all of this insane progressivism is going to be one of two things.
It's going to be like a right-wing authoritarian dictatorship, or it's going to be like radical decentralization.
And to the extent that we're talking to people in the right wing, we should always be pushing for the latter that, like, this is a better, a better way of defeating this because it's only like those are the two options, essentially.
And yeah, one of them can be much more peaceful.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
It is pretty wild to think about like how desperate the establishment is.
It's really very funny.
I'm joking about this in my stand-up these days, but like the fact that you have this Donald Trump guy who is like 75 and fat and orange and talks with like a third grade vernacular.
And this guy has the most powerful entrenched interests in the world shaking.
Stamps Com Espionage Investigation00:15:20
Like they're literally like he could bring down our whole thing.
It's so fascinating when you step back and look at it.
But the idea of like beating him this way is the most destabilizing way to beat him, I think.
And it's really insane.
There was someone.
Let me just get this exact quote because I'm like to the, you know, one of the points I make is they always use language to manipulate, not to communicate.
This guy, Robert McGuire, he is part of Open Secrets DNC, DC, excuse me, and now something called Citizens for Ethics.
Trump had sent a message to Merritt Garland that said, the country is on fire.
What can I do to reduce the heat?
And he posted his look, Trump is threatening violence.
And it's just like, wait, wait, wait.
Explicitly, he's saying, how can I help you to reduce violence and tension?
And it's like, look, see, that's a threat.
And it's like, we're at a point.
The thing is, blue-pilled people will smile and nod because blue-pilled people just repeat what the guy on the screen says.
So it's amazing to what extent people are becoming blue-pilled to the extent that there's just absolutely no mind behind their eyes.
But this is just a good example to show how no matter what he says or does their interpretation will be completely at variance with any semblance of reality.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And more and more, I think that's true on both sides.
And, you know, as you mentioned before, like I think that what does kind of unite the populist right, and you write about this a lot in the new right, that basically there's no real like theory that unites everybody.
It's a common enemy.
It's a common, you know, it's a hatred for all these groups.
No, I mean, and that was my point that at this point, I don't think there's any evidence the FBI could present that's going to persuade Trump supporters in general, because it'll always just be like, oh, you could have planted that.
I don't know.
I have no, I have no way of knowing that this is real and you've completely lost all trust.
And vice versa on the other side, I mean, it is, especially because we swim in the waters that we swim in.
It is shocking when you talk to like regular people, whether in life or on Twitter or whatever, but you see how like where their mind is at with this stuff.
Like they will, I said something the other day about how like all presidents, you know, are above the law and we're not prosecuting.
I'd be happy to prosecute them all for all of their horrible crimes, but let's do it for real.
Let's not be selective.
Let's go after the worst crimes first.
And I had people who were responding to me saying like, no, no other presidents have committed crimes like Donald Trump did.
I have people saying, someone said, what are you going to prosecute Obama for?
His tan suit?
There are these progressives who really think this is an own.
I'm like, yeah, I said, yeah, the tan suit right after the secret kill list.
We'll get to the tan suit eventually.
I think, by the way, was awful.
The suit was awful.
But the tan suit is another lie because the argument is only the right wingers, right-wing media cared about it.
And I have a Twitter thread.
People can look it up.
It was MSNBC.
It was all the lefties at the time.
So it's really kind of amazing how they rewrite history in real time.
But here's the other thing I just realized, which is if the argument is, you know, Trump has these secrets in an unsecure location and whatever.
If you've got a team of FBI agents, how many were there?
Like 20?
I don't know how many there were.
I think over 30, I believe.
They're over 30 and they're in there for hours and they can't find the shit.
Don't you think that means it's pretty secure?
Because are you going to have what, like North Korea sending a raid to Florida and they're going to have 30 guys and they're going to have access to Mar-a-Lago and no one's going to notice this or care?
It beggars belief.
Yeah, it's now the other thing, the other thing that's an interesting angle on this is that I've seen some people, again, these are lawyers who were talking about this, which is a little above my pay grade.
But they were basically saying, if you actually look at the warrant, there were some things that were a little bit open-ended in there.
So they weren't just retrieving like classified information.
They were also allowed to retrieve any other information that they think might lead to an investigation or be able to.
But you can't do that.
That's phishing.
Well, yeah, but at least this is what these lawyers were saying is that the way the subpoena or the way the warrant rather was written would allow them to do some of this.
If that's true, it still does open up the door that it's possible that they could, they will find something now that they're going to connect to the January 6th investigation, which would be another interesting angle to see if perhaps this is where they end up getting him.
You know, I'm in many ways, I'm shocked that it's been this, it's taken this long before I felt like, oh, they were going to get Trump for something.
I thought they were going to get him for something from the very beginning.
I knew it wasn't going to be anything to do with Russia because that was all just made up.
But I figured they would find some crime that he committed somewhere at his business or something like that and fry him for that.
But anyway, it'll be interesting.
It would be very interesting if they do in some way end up connecting something to January 6th.
You know, they present a smoking gun of some sorts that he was in on the plan the whole time.
I thought this would be unlikely.
What plan?
Well, I mean, look, I don't know exactly what the hell the plan was.
I don't really think there was much of a plan.
It is possible that Trump, You know, in some way, he uh thought, well, listen, we'll go down there and protest, and they'll see there's so much support, and then they won't certify the election or something.
Like in his mind, that's a fantasy, right?
Now, would if Donald Trump was stupid enough to have some communication where he like put this in there, would that technically, I don't know, you know what I'm saying?
Literally, what's the plan?
Let's let's give him the worst possible interpretation.
He's telling, I don't know how who the organizers were or whatever.
We don't even know their names, which is amazing that they're not like household names at this point.
They're being examples of the ego.
So he was going to say, What I want you to do is after I give my speech, you go over to the Capitol and you storm it.
And then what?
Like, literally, what is the like, what happens next?
Like, the plan.
It's even from like the most, say, like aggressive members of the people who entered the Capitol building, like not just the ones who came in and were looking around and stuff, like most of them were, but even the ones smashing buildings.
But like, what was in anyone's mind there that, like, what you were going to find Mike Pence and then what you were going to be like, you do not certify this election.
And then he's like, oh, okay, I won't certify the election.
And then just, it's not that the Capitol police and the military come in and clear you out.
And then they certify the election, but then Mike Pence is like, no, no, no, I told him I wouldn't.
So we're going to send it back to the set.
Like, how, in what reality would this possibly work?
This is why it's so goofy when people refer to it as an insurrection and say it was almost a coup.
Donald Trump almost overthrew our government or something.
Like, in what universe?
Take me through.
How could this have possibly worked?
Right.
There's, yeah.
No, no, listen, I'm with you on all of that.
I'm just speculating on the idea if they got something that.
Look, I think with a lot of these things, what they're thinking is that all of these crimes will be tried in Washington, D.C.
Okay.
And in Washington, D.C., you have a very high likelihood of get, I mean, I think Donald Trump got 5% of the vote in Washington, D.C. You're going to get a jury of people who absolutely hate Donald Trump's guts.
You're maybe you get in front of an Obama-appointed judge or something like that.
And whatever you can make stick at that point, you can make stick.
So, you know, again, like you said earlier, the law is basically what people who have guns are able to get away with doing.
That's it.
So we'll see.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, anyway, I do think ultimately, as I was alluding to at the very beginning of the show, that this certainly, while it is dangerous, this certainly puts us a major step closer in the establishment being the faith in the establishment being undermined.
And can I say one more thing?
We've heard for two years, 2017, 2018, or even longer, that the proof that Trump is this authoritarian strongman is that he threatens to imprison his political opponents because he made that quip at Hillary Clinton.
He goes, she's like, well, it's a good thing our legal system is in the hands of someone tempering on Donald Trump.
And he goes, yeah, because you'd be in jail.
And they're like, oh my God, he threatens to, as if he was threatening to like imprison Obama, Biden.
No, he specifically meant Hillary.
And it wasn't like because she's his opponent.
It's because she was crooked.
Crooked Hillary.
And now imprisoning your political opponents is the height of patriotism.
Yeah, it is something.
It really is something, particularly now that they're threatening to use the Espionage Act against him.
And Rayon Paul just came out and was calling for repealing the Espionage Act.
And he goes, this has been like the most corrupt law in our book since it's been on the book.
And now you actually have liberals, you know, saying, well, Rayon Paul, I guess, wants to legalize espionage.
You know, like it's, it's like, oh, so that's where that is the state of liberalism in 2022.
That's been the state of liberalism for 100 years.
Yeah.
Well, I get, well, I guess that is true.
It was Woodrow Wilson who originally used it.
Espionage meant whatever my opponents then, and espionage means my opponents now.
Yeah.
No, it really is something to see this.
And you're right.
I mean, and it wasn't just that one quip with Hillary Clinton.
I mean, lock her up was like the champ at all of his rallies and they were outraged by this.
But the truth is that Trump never made any moves to lock Hillary Clinton up.
He never did anything, even though, of course, James Comey, the FBI director at the time, did say that, yeah, oh yeah, there was a ton of classified information on her private email servers.
She was not allowed to do it this way.
You know what I mean?
And that she lied when she kept saying there was no classified information.
But we're just recommending that we don't charge her.
But Donald Trump never actually made any moves, probably because he didn't have control of his own Justice Department, even if he wanted to.
But it is interesting.
Oh my God.
I just, I got to look at this.
Dave, I just wanted to Google this while we're on the air.
I found an article from 2020, Gretchen Whitmer, Trump inciting domestic terrorism with lock her up rally chant.
Right.
So chanting it is domestic terrorism.
Actually doing it is, I don't know, just, well, the law must be applied equally to everyone.
Right.
Must be applied equally.
No one's above the law.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's really something to watch.
Like even, you know, what's his name?
Garland, the attorney general.
He said in his brief press conference there that he goes, look, the one thing I'll say, you know, is like, oh, all the men and women at the FBI are so great and blah, blah, blah.
And all this.
And all they do is faithfully enforce the law.
There's absolutely no political, you know, politicization at all involved in this.
And it's just unbelievable that you could even, you know, I wonder sometimes like, I guess these people actually like on some level believe that.
You know what I mean?
Like he probably convinces himself that this really is true.
Is that you're like, okay, so what?
So I guess you guys got to go arrest James Clapper for lying to Congress.
I guess you guys got to go like, where is this just like, listen, sorry, this is the law.
We have no interest.
It's like, it's a very interesting tactic that is used by a lot of the enemies of humanity, where it's like, they kind of, they can apply principles when it's convenient to them and ignore them when it's convenient to them.
And then they invoke those principles as they're applying them.
So it's like, if Donald Trump did break the letter of the law, but it's something all presidents do and they always ignore it.
Then when they go get him, they'll go, hey, letter of the law.
You know, what can I say here?
You got to do this.
You know, it's, I, I've, I've noticed this among some groups of libertarians who I'm not fond of too, that they'll apply libertarianism when convenience and then kind of ignore it when inconvenient.
Here's, it's like, what I think I'm going to have to tweet this out, which is no reminder that no president is above the law.
Only illegal immigrants are.
That's pretty great.
But that is, it is funny, right?
Because they are using the same argument.
It's the exact same argument that people will use against illegal immigrants.
Well, they broke the law.
Exactly.
That doesn't.
And of course, in that case, that means absolutely nothing to any of these people who are making this argument toward Donald Trump.
It's not some like, you know, devotion to the law, which is fine.
I don't think anyone should have that.
But it's just like, then don't invoke it here when it's convenient to you.
You know?
So yeah, it is, it's been, it's been a real interesting thing.
I was saying the other day, it's almost like there's so much has happened in this country over the last few years that it's hard sometimes to not get lost in the day-to-day and to kind of zoom out and try to examine the bigger picture.
But this almost like reminds me.
So it's so focused on all the COVID shit and all the insanity over the last couple of years.
To just, it almost like you zoom out and you remember, you're like, oh yeah, Donald fucking Trump was elected president and just completely rattled the entire ruling class of this country.
Yeah.
This is genuinely bizarre.
And still that bell has not been unrung.
Yeah.
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Defensive Latino Political Strategies00:15:54
All right, let's get back into the show.
Do you think, I mean, do you think it's too early to tell or do you have any sense of like what this means for the landscape in 2024?
Do you think Trump survives this and ends up being the nominee?
Do you think it's DeSantis maybe with Trump's backing or someone else?
Before this, I would have said it would be very feasible and doable for DeSantis to be Trump to be the nominee if he chose to run against him.
I am hoping desperately that Liz Cheney announces a run for the presidency in 2024, who is, she might be, I don't know if she's worse than Hillary Clinton in terms of being a disgusting human being, but she's got to be up there just on every level.
There's just physically repulsive the things with her family.
I don't even mean her dad.
I mean her sister.
Yeah.
Just a disgusting.
And my, I don't want to say favorite, but one of the most tweets that I find most salient is her telling, quote tweeting John McCain and telling him to sit down and shut up because torture is good.
It's like, I have, I hate using this expression, but I've never seen a better example of read the room than if there's one thing we can defer to John McCain about is that when he says torture is bad, I'll take his word for it.
Yeah.
So there was one thing where she was just defending what happened.
And this was like fairly recently, it's like 2018 or something, where she's defending GitMobile.
And by the way, of course, it's the one thing John McCain was good on.
And this is just too much for Liz Cheney for him to be good on one issue.
And she's saying that torture was, it wasn't torture because we did it to our own people.
And also it gave us useful information.
And like, these are just complete lies.
And, you know, so hopefully she runs and she gets completely like destroyed and humiliated.
Cause that was the whole thing with 2020.
What they wanted to do was say Trump got completely eviscerated.
Trumpism is dead.
And a lot of Republican politicians who are sociopaths like any other politician are going to look around at the information, be like, all right, this is not the lane I can win in.
And they would have closed off that lane, just like basically in 2008, the neocons, that lane was closed.
You had two years of wave elections, 2006, 2008 for the Democrats.
The Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican Party was effectively dead.
And what they wanted to do is do stand for Trump.
Problem is, in 2020, Trump got more votes than in 2016.
And even more importantly, there were pickups in the House, double digits, which literally no pollster had predicted.
Every pollster said, and this is historically, I think, universally a case, when the Democratic candidate wins the White House, he's going to have coattails and pick up Democratic seats.
So they couldn't put that nail in the coffin.
And I think that's something that they would desperately want to do.
And I don't think they can.
Yeah.
You know, one of the other really interesting things.
Wait, we just want to think.
You know why they can't?
Because the basis of Trumpism is you people are evil and corrupt and don't value human life.
So Trump could be the worst person on earth and he's an ass, but that statement is true.
Right.
Well, also, there is this thing that Trump, and he's very good at doing this.
I think it's just instinctually, but he's very good at putting people in these positions where it's like heads I win, tails you lose.
Like it's like, if you call somebody defensive, if I say, you're being a little defensive, there's no good response to that.
Because if you say, no, I'm not, then that's defensive.
And if you say, yes, I am, then, well, you admit it.
You're being defensive, right?
And so Trump would kind of have this thing where he's like, okay, okay, this whole system is evil and corrupt.
And then the system's like, okay, well, we're going to get him.
And he's like, see, see, this evil corrupt system doesn't want me up here.
And so it would just snowball and build it.
All of their attempts to take him down would just make him more powerful.
It was this very interesting dynamic.
But one of the really interesting developments in 2020, and I hate, I hate talking like this.
I know this is like what corporate press types love always breaking down the Latino vote or the black vote or the college educated woman vote.
And I always think this kind of, you know, grouping is very silly, but it makes sense in this context to bring it up.
But it's silly in the sense that like, so we're like, if there's like a black dentist and a white dentist who work in the same office together, and then there's like some black cowboy in Texas, and then there's like some black dude in the hood in Chicago, like why are their votes all like together in one block?
Like, I don't know.
I think the two dentists in New York and the cowboy probably have more in common with other Texans.
It's just kind of silly.
But the reason why it's interesting in this context is just that Donald Trump did improve pretty dramatically with the African American vote and the Latino vote in 2020, especially Latino votes.
He got the highest shares that I think Republicans had ever gotten of, or at least gotten in decades.
And this is just interesting because it flies in the face of the entire narrative that's being fed to you.
It kind of reminds me to some degree in how you mentioned the belief in transgenderism declining for the year.
And I think the way they asked that poll question is like, do you believe that people can be a different gender than the gender they're assigned at birth?
And that's going down.
And it's just one of the things that's interesting about that is that, so when you have the most propaganda telling you things are this way, more and more people are going, no, I don't believe that that's true.
And there's something very interesting about Donald Trump after the four years of his presidency going up with both the African-American vote and the Latino vote.
Like that's just that's a very interesting dynamic that completely flies in the face of everything that the corporate press is telling you.
And also, you know, it indicates the potential of what someone else could do down the line.
You know what I mean?
Because this wing, one of the things, like in the same way that, you know, I would say when people, when they were having that big campaign to cancel Joe Rogan and you see CNN talking about Joe Rogan every single day.
And you almost wonder what you want to like ask, like, so, okay, let's say theoretically you get Joe Rogan canceled.
Then what?
Where do you think his 12 million daily download, you know, view?
Like, where do you think they go?
Do you think they're vanquished?
Do you think they just go back to listening to CNN every day?
But this, like, this, this also speaks to this boomer con argument in the inverse because they're like, we're going to defeat the Democratic Party.
Okay, let's suppose every Democratic Party official somehow loses an election.
What happens to literally what the hundreds of over 100 million leftists in this country?
I don't mean leftists and like Joe Manchin.
I mean leftists, New York City, San Francisco, do they cease to exist?
Do they not have like institutional power?
Are they going to be like, oh, wait a minute, I'm for a flat tax?
That's not going to happen.
So look at the libs of TikTok account and what they show you.
These people, this is something about like this is part of how progressives have this power and how this kind of like long march through the institutions has really paid off is that their progressives are willing to go take a job for 40k a year live a very fucking whatever life to just advance the agenda a little bit.
Their foot soldiers are powerful.
You know what I mean?
And like conservatives have nothing like that.
They just have nothing like that.
And so it's like, yeah, so what happens to them?
Are they all vanquished?
Do they all go away?
This is why like this idea is goofy of just kind of, you know, recapturing the institutions or something like that.
It's like, okay, this is a hundred-year journey minimum in order for you to do this.
And you'd have to have a real plan, which I haven't seen anyone, you know, put forward.
But like, so what's interesting is that so even if you do vanquish Donald Trump, right?
It's not as if now, and this is why it would be so beautiful, as you said, like if Liz Cheney were to run, she'd fall on her fucking face and it'd be a great example to all of them to really see.
Let's see what type of support she actually has.
You think she could get 1%?
I doubt it.
I doubt she could get 1%.
It's not as if they're not going back to Mitt Romney.
They're not going back to Jeb Bush.
The Republican.
No, no, no.
You don't understand.
Blue pilled people think this.
Yes.
No, that's no, I know.
I know they do.
Yeah.
They really do believe this.
They do believe it.
And they believed, look, they believed it enough that they put Jeb Bush up there.
And he was getting all of the money in 2016 before Trump even.
They thought even Jeb Bush is not Mitt Romney.
The neocon ideology of Jeb Bush is still much more, I'm going to say conservative, for lack of a better term, than Mitt Romney's incoherence.
Yeah.
Being a neocon warmonger is a point of view.
Yeah, that is true.
That is true.
No, Mitt Romney is literally just nothing.
Just nothingness.
But even, but none of the, but all of that stuff has just been like completely discredited.
And they're not just, not even just discredited, just dismissed.
There's just no somebody who can speak to like that populist energy in the Republican base is going to clean the clocks of any of these establishment types.
And so that's kind of what's interesting here.
And whether the, you know, the, I think that, you know, there were several factors in 2020 as to why Donald Trump's numbers went up with the black voters and with Latino voters.
And a lot of this had to do with people just being against the lockdowns and stuff like that.
A lot of it had to do with them being against the riots.
You know, it's like, it turns out that like rioting is not that supported in the neighborhoods where people are rioting.
And they actually like the idea of someone being opposed to that.
But I do think that there's a big, there's a big opening for a potential populace.
And maybe DeSantis is that guy now, if assuming like Donald Trump is boxed out and can't run anymore, because maybe he can and he'll be able to do that after it.
And it's him for another time.
I think that it would be best for the country and for the populist movement if it's not Donald Trump, personally.
I think we'd be much better off with someone else being the new face of it.
I think Trump is just, he was useful for a time to create this kind of moment and to just ruthlessly, you know, shit on everybody.
But I think that for that movement to be successful at all or do anything good, they have to kind of grow up a little bit out of the Donald Trump phase.
It's not only that.
Pen Jillette, who is one of like two people, I guess other than Charlie Kirk, who's gone from libertarian to another direction.
Trump is a great example of misdirection.
That's what magicians do, right?
So like I'm doing something my hand over here.
Meanwhile, I'm pocketing you, pickpocketing you over here, but you're looking at my hand.
So if all their energy is fixated on Trump and there's no way that's going to go away, and someone else is the nominee, they're not going to know where to point the gun.
And their brains are going to completely melt down.
It's much easier when you have a supervillain.
Okay, Trump's the enemy, Trump's the enemy, Trump's the enemy.
We defeat Trump, we win.
Well, they got him out of the White House.
Things are still not to their liking.
Well, now they can still fixate on him with these charges.
But like, if you've got two of these head vampires, that's not how the script works.
It's one head vampire, head vampire by definition.
Right.
And it's right.
And it's going to try, it's a very good point.
And the fact that it'll be so close in time, you know what I mean?
From when they're going after Trump to now this new, some new Republican nominee and how exactly, I mean, they, you know, we'll talk about how like, you know, Bush used to be literally Hitler.
And then as time goes on, you know, oh, it's actually, remember, Bush wasn't so bad.
Trump's literally Hitler.
But there was eight years in between there.
You know what I mean?
There was like a long period of time.
And with Trump, they went so crazy.
Like they turned the notch up to the absolute height that it can go.
And it's only been four years and it hasn't been turned down at all.
It's not like with Obama where we kind of forgot about Bush for a while and you could almost like rewrite history.
This is going to be what, like a few months after the trial of Donald Trump.
Now they're going to try to go, and Ron DeSantis is the worst of all time.
That's going to be very difficult to pull off.
Absolutely.
And I'm just looking forward to the meltdowns continuing.
It was just funny because I was just in New York last week to see my billboard and it was a year since I'd stepped foot and nothing got better.
I thought there'd be like something that was better and it was the same as I left it.
And it was just like very disturbing to see that it'd be one thing like the argument was, okay, quarantine lockdowns, we, you know, crime, we destroyed these cities, but now we're going to take our foot off the brake, off the gas, and things are going to return to some semblance of progress.
I'm not using that in a political sense.
And I saw none of that.
Yeah, it's a, there's a lot of like people who were really broken by all of this stuff, you know, and it's, it's really like, it's hard to find the words to express how tragic it is.
You know, I see people in New York City see young people with masks outside, with cloth masks outside.
It's like, what are you doing?
You're still doing this?
Yeah.
It's unbelievable.
Yeah.
Like you're still doing this.
You're still living this way.
Not like, oh, for a couple months or even for a year, just this is life.
This is just how you're going to live your life now.
It's just very bizarre.
See, it's like, you know, we all found out this does nothing a long, long time ago.
And it's just, it's a very bizarre thing.
It's a civilization is fragile, you know, and it's easy.
I think it's easy to take that for granted if you've only ever lived in a relatively free first world country.
If you've lived in other places, you kind of know.
Yeah.
It's like, oh, yeah, you could easily revert back to that, you know, or something, you know.
But it is, yeah, the city has never has never recovered.
It's never recovered.
There was a time there where it looked like it was getting a little bit better.
And I think it was like right before the Delta wave, where it looked like it was getting a little bit better.
And then when the Delta wave came, it all completely reverted back.
And it's, it's, but it's also like, I just saw, like, I'd say a good, let's be conservative: 25% of storefronts were empty.
It was, they would like, you know, call, they're available to be a store.
And it's like, why would I come to New York now if I wanted to hang up my shingle, you know, open a boutique, a restaurant, or a bookstore or something?
It's the all the odds are stacked against me already to open a business.
And now it's New York, even more odds stacked against me.
And the rents are through the roof.
Why would I do this?
Yeah.
Walk around New York and see all these empty locations was, it was, it must have been like that during the Depression or something.
Well, it's like the rents are up, the population is down, the crime is up.
You know what I mean?
Like every thing is worse than it was just by every metric.
It's just a worse place to be.
And, you know, New York always had its problems, but it really did have some great things too.
And it's almost all of the great things have been robbed from New Yorkers.
I mean, I hate using this expression, but I just feel this is something that is very germane when it comes to culture and becoming a city that's a cultural leader, like New York is or until recently, and Boston hasn't been for a very long time.
New York Business Odds Stacked00:01:34
There's no scene there.
Yeah.
Like, you know, cities become important when they're like a hub of cultural development, where like you'll have, I don't know, the biohackers or the tech guys or the comedian, you know what I mean?
Like Vegas has that and LA has that.
But I feel like there's no scenes in New York.
And if you don't have that, which is a big magnet for people across the country and to some extent around the world, you don't have the draw of the normies because they're not, because when you go to a city that has a scene, that's the only place on earth you could see this kind of stuff.
And you're part of something exciting and vibrant.
And that to me is completely gone in New York.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is a very sad thing.
And who knows?
Who knows if it'll ever come back or if it does, how long it'll take.
Right.
Because I think it'll be a while.
And it depends on a lot of different factors, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
All right.
Well, on that depressing note about my city being destroyed, it's always a pleasure talking with you, brother.
And then, of course, what do you got?
Tell people what I know you're working on.
The big project is the white pill.
When do you have like a ballpark for when that's going to be out?
I passed page 315 yesterday.
It keeps getting longer.
It's probably going to be around 360, two pages a day.