Dave Smith and Roberto Berstino dissect government overreach, from Biden's disputed January 6th insurrection claims to plummeting student scores blamed on lockdowns. They warn of a new totalitarian focus on energy and food security, citing European grid failures and smart thermostat restrictions that create dangerous dependencies. The discussion critiques discriminatory banking policies, specifically Bank of America's zero-down mortgages for minority buyers, labeling the move a "corporate fascistic system" designed to trap borrowers in debt while undermining financial responsibility. Ultimately, the episode argues that top-down control over essentials signals a slide toward authoritarianism where citizens lose autonomy through manipulated data and forced compliance. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust vs Government Action00:14:03
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He, of course, is Roberto Berstino, the king of the caulks.
How are you, my friend?
Doing well.
How are you, Davey Smith?
Very good.
Very good.
Happy to be with you and with everybody who's listening.
As always, we appreciate everyone tuning in.
Robbie the Fire Bernstein, of course, just wrapped up his summer porch tour.
I, as I mentioned last time, I will be down in Austin, Texas.
I will be doing one night only, two shows at the Creek and the Cave on September 25th.
Ticket link will be up at my website today.
So by the time you're listening to this, the ticket link will be up there, comicdabesmith.com.
Let's sell out these shows.
Just one night only, just a couple of shows, but looking forward to doing that down there in what has become one of my favorite places in the country, Austin, Texas.
Austin, Texas is the, it's like, it's, it's like the last city that didn't get destroyed by all this COVID shit.
So I always love going down there and doing some shit.
Barbecue, Scott Horton.
It's a fun time.
They got some real solid barbecue.
They got some good steakhouses and shit too.
Very good food in Austin, Texas.
And it's just, it's a cool city.
And they got Scott Horton and Michael Malice and Joe Rogan and a bunch of great people down there.
Okay.
Actually, you want to plug?
Yeah, I have two dates coming up.
One's near Baltimore and one's in Ithaca, both with Justin Silver.
I'll get those links in the episode description.
There are dates this month, but I don't remember because I'm dumb.
All right.
Sounds good.
Okay.
So Joe Biden gave a big speech yesterday, and it was, I would say, somewhat alarming, the speech that he gave.
I mean, it was entertaining in the way that Joe Biden's speeches are always entertaining because he has trouble speaking.
And he really, it's unbelievable like watching him.
He really, he has trouble.
Like he starts doing this drunk slurry thing.
You know what I'm talking about?
Where it kind of sounds like his dentures are falling out.
Like one word doesn't like stop and then another begins.
They all just kind of like fall into each other.
But there were a few things about the speech that were very alarming.
Both his, not just the content of them, but his tone in the speech, like it really, he really seemed angrier than usual for Joe Biden.
It was pretty unbelievable watching it and thinking that this was a guy who, if you remember, ran on unifying the country.
And like, hey, and he even said, you know, at one point where he was like, we got to turn down the temperature here, man.
Like we all got to just like be able to talk to each other.
We got to not like demonize each other so much and the country has to come back together.
This was the idea that he ran on.
And then in some ways, it was effective.
I mean, the country is more unified behind the idea that Joe Biden is doing a terrible job as president than really they ever were about anything else for the last few years.
So we at least have that going for us.
But anyway, this speech was obviously we're way past that point of even pretending that we care about unity.
At this point, now it's Really, just purely demonizing the other side and pushing the most dangerous and divisive policies you could possibly think of within reason, I suppose.
So, anyway, what were your thoughts on what you saw of the speech, Rob?
Well, the clips I saw were, you know, Biden doing Biden, which is making very little sense.
Like, Trump used to be very gregarious and he would lie, he'd make it fun.
And then Biden does Biden, which is, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Yeah, well, seeing that, by the way, I wanted to pull this one clip and we were looking for it before the show, and it was really hard to find.
And it seems like they did a pretty good job of like scrubbing YouTube of this clip.
And I couldn't even find a good clip of it on Twitter.
We have it, but it's not the best, the best quality.
I apologize.
But there was, this was a moment that I thought was really bizarre in the middle of a speech.
By the way, I saw on the AB New ABC News had a clip of this portion of the speech and they clipped out this part of it.
Like they just cut it right out of the speech as if like we're going to pretend this didn't happen, but it did happen.
And here was Joe Biden kind of talking about January 6th.
Imagine, Joe, if you turn on the television in Washington, D.C. and saw a mob of a thousand people storming down the hallways of the parliament, breaking down the doors, trying to overturn an outcome of election and killing several police officers in the meantime.
Imagine, Joe, if you turn on the television and so this is what we had to get.
This was the best clip I apologize for, but we got someone cell phone video recording Tucker Carlson tonight, last night, because that's where they actually played the clip.
And I wish I had the people at Tucker Carlson tonight because they somehow were able to manage to find it.
But so here was Joe Biden talking about January 6th and saying that the protesters, you know, imagine watching all of this.
They storm Washington, D.C. down to the parliament, which is already a kind of odd mistake for someone who was in the Senate for, I think, 67 years.
Odd mistake to make.
But he says, and then they're killing several police officers, you know, just imagine witnessing that.
And it's like, yeah, I mean, you'd have to imagine witnessing that, I suppose.
Be the only way to witness it.
I guess he's describing an actual insurrection.
You know, people use the word insurrection so much.
He's recategorizing the events of the day to make it an actual insurrection.
I guess in England where they have a parliament.
Yes, yes, right.
So this is the big lie, you know, and which culminated in January 6th is this problem.
But of course, the true big lie here is that January 6th was this thing that we should even take seriously or that we should even, you know, be like, should be a topic of concern in the year 2022.
But this is a pretty bold-faced lie.
The idea that they killed a bunch of cops on January 6th, which of course is just not true.
There were lots of reports of stuff like this very early on until it was concluded that none of this happened.
No cops died on January 6th.
One person died on January 6th named Ashley Babbitt, and she was shot to death by a cop for absolutely no reason.
And there's been no investigation into that.
There's been no accountability for this cop.
He shot a woman in the neck who was not coming at him, was in with the group of people.
I mean, they were inside the Capitol, yes.
But Certainly was no type of like, there's no way you could argue it was a justified killing.
It seemed like the guy wasn't she like pushing through a door or something or like through the glass into the room.
She was on the other side of a door, like with a glass window, and the cop was on the other side.
And she was there with a bunch of people and he shot into the crowd and it hit her in the neck.
If you're assigned to guard that room and people are storming it, I could see me making that mistake.
I don't know that that's a go-to-jail event.
No, I don't, I don't know.
I don't know exactly what happened.
It seemed like the guy just kind of freaked out and shot into the crowd.
I mean, that is your job to not do that.
But the point is that there was never even any interest in investigating it or looking into it.
It's just like, oh, she was an insurrectionist.
So that's that.
No one's even supposed to feel bad.
Like, you know, if it was a, let's just say, if it was a group with different politics and a cop did that into the crowd, that would be what the whole conversation became about.
That would be what the whole thing about January.
We wouldn't be making up stories about cops being killed.
We would be, you know, really concerned with the cop who killed someone, which I think is appropriate for either, you know, no matter what the group of rioters, you know, what their politics are.
One of the other things that was very interesting about this speech is that it's, it hits, there's this very strange dynamic where, you know, living through the year, the election year of 2020, and where all the energy was on the respective political, you know, sides.
And Joe Biden is here.
He really went on a whole tangent after this on a very pro-cop tangent and saying that you can't be pro-January 6th and be pro-cop.
And you can't be, you know what I mean?
And you can't be against gun control and be pro-cop and all of this stuff.
And it's just interesting that they rode this kind of defund the police wave into the White House and are now just giving explicitly pro-cop speeches.
This is something that like I was telling all, I mean, me and you both were, you know, saying to all of those kind of like activist types on the left that like, dude, you guys really think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are your like police accountability advocates?
I don't care what they said on the campaign trail.
It's like that, that's not who they are.
These are, you know, these are cops.
Kamala Harris, literally.
And Joe Biden has always been the tough on crime, you know, drug warrior.
He's been this his entire career.
So anyway, it's just kind of, it's kind of something to see that.
Well, I kind of, I've been enjoying, and this happened in the Joe Biden speech that they talk about trust as being the thing that needs to exist, not government actually doing a good job.
Like they keep kind of describing how we have an issue of public trust.
There's no issue of public trust.
If you guys aren't doing a good job and people don't trust you, then that's good.
If you're giving people bad health instructions and they're not listening to you, well, then that's probably a good thing.
If you're telling people that they're going to be safe and you're going to protect them and you don't have the means to protect them, and so they're, you know, making their own arrangements, then that's good.
So there isn't an issue of public trust.
That's not a thing.
That's you basically describing what should exist in your corporate meeting behind closed doors of, oh, we're selling a product here and people don't really like our product right now.
We're losing trust.
It's almost offensive that they look at us and almost, you know, look down upon us for not trusting them.
Like, well, that's not the issue.
You got to go fix your product.
And so there was a lot of that in this speech of we can't have a population that doesn't trust, like it's our fault for not trusting the cops.
Go fix that.
Yeah.
And even if you were going to argue, which like, look, leaving my kind of like my own libertarian, you know, bias aside, like, obviously, I wouldn't, I don't want trust in government institutions because I oppose them.
I don't want people having confidence in something that I oppose.
But I certainly could acknowledge that there is a need for trusted institutions.
I would like them to be private and voluntary institutions, but I do think there's something like, look, when there's something like a pandemic, you know, you want really smart virologists who understand stuff a lot better than regular Joes like me and you do to be giving good information out to people and you want people to trust them.
So I could certainly understand being like, hey, the lack of trust is a problem.
I can wrap my head around that argument.
It would almost be like in the same way that, you know, if you were a business, you could say, hey, the lack of sales here is a problem.
But if I'm selling a product that, I don't know, is, you know, breaks within five minutes after you buy it.
And so no one's buying it anymore.
And I just go, hey, the problem is that people aren't buying this.
And therefore, you guys got to buy this.
Like, well, that's not really addressing the issue.
It's like, well, why?
Right.
So as you said, even if you do think that, you know, the lack of trust in any of these institutions is a problem.
It's like, okay, but what caused that?
You know, this is the natural response.
And by the way, this, like what you're touching on is the entire, this is the entire thing.
This is the whole business with the populist uprising in this country in general, with the populist movement, with Donald Trump's election and Bernie Sanders, you know, giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money and then Joe Biden a run for his money.
All this kind of populist energy, that's what it is.
It's the result.
It's not the, you know, it's not the problem.
It's, it's a symptom of the problem.
And the problem is that it's like, yeah, of course people are, you know, opposed to the elites.
Look what the elites have handed them.
Look what the elites have mismanaged in this country.
Like everything.
Distrust of Elites Explained00:02:18
I mean, what have the elites mismanaged?
Go through it, you know, our currency, our foreign policy, our school system, our supply chains, like anything you could look at has just been a complete disaster.
So of course there's going to be this distrust of elites.
It would be insane if there wasn't.
It'd be a lot more concerning if there wasn't, to be honest.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, let's move to this next clip of Joe Biden.
Just, you know, the president of the United States casually discussing minor issues.
Let's check this out.
Guns and Tyranny00:11:28
Brave right-wing Americans just say it's all about keeping America, you're keeping America's independent and safe.
If you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15.
You need something a little more than a gun.
And for those brave.
Well, that was something.
It's quite something to hear the president of the United States say for those brave, right?
We're just kind of mocking right-wing Americans who believe in their gun rights, who say they want to fight.
Well, you're going to need an F-15 to fight against the United States government.
Like, wouldn't the response there be like, oh, you don't need that because the government's not going to fight you?
No, the response is just, look, you're going to lose either way.
So just give me your gun.
Isn't that something, dude?
And it's not, I mean, it's not true on the basis of two reasons.
One, I mean, that's not the way the Constitution was written.
I mean, there's logic to having a civilian army to keep the government in check.
So you're kind of defying the logic of the Constitution.
If anything, then you should be saying the government shouldn't have the F-15s for one.
For two is with all those F-15s, how have we done in Afghanistan?
How did we do in Korea?
How did we do in Vietnam?
Like, it's not even that.
It's more the logic of if you actually send the army in against its own civilians and they have to fight them, are they going to do it?
Is the drone guy really going to sit there and take orders and go drone buildings of his fellow citizens?
I mean, you might have a track record with the civil war that they are willing to do it, but it kind of depends on how authoritarian you go.
Like it's very easy.
If no one's got guns, then it's pretty easy to just make a threat and have them all kind of be compliant.
If everyone has guns and they decide to pick them up, well, then you're going to have, it's very expensive to government to actually be bribing enough people that they want to be on the side of tyranny if it comes to that.
And yes, and this all is like in the logic of the game of knowing, oh, we can't push too far because they have the guns.
They're very important.
Yes, 100%.
And, you know, as that famous clip of Alex Jones, you know, and he's going, Mao took the guns, Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns and all of this stuff.
Look, that's all true.
And you could say there are places where they've rounded up guns and not had like horrific genocides.
That is also true.
But still, that is one of the things that a tyrannical government's going to do.
It's one of the first things that the Nazis did when they rose to power in Germany: they started confiscating the weapons from Jews.
Because like, yeah, does it make Adolf Hitler's life easier or harder if Jews have a lot of guns?
Probably harder, right?
So don't act like there isn't any argument to this, but yeah, if you, yes, if F-15s are going to come in and fight a local militia that just has some guns, yeah, they're probably going to lose.
But at the same point, at the same point as you use the example in Afghanistan, we had lots of F-15s over there.
The point is that it takes a little bit more to occupy and control a group of people.
Now, and government doesn't want the optics of it.
Is the government actually going to fly its F-15s down to Texas?
Can you really walk back the optics of being fully tyrannical when you're using large military equipment against your own civilians?
Yeah.
Now, of course, for all of us and all sane people, if we ever get to this point, we've all already lost.
This is like a horrific scenario that we are not very much hoping we never see.
So, the purpose of having like a well-armed society is that hopefully it's a deterrent against things like this ever happening.
And also, it's just people, you know, having the right to protect themselves from private criminals as well.
So, that's that's kind of what this is all about.
But it's just such a bizarre thing to hear the president of the United States, and very alarming to the president of the United States even talking this way about like open conflict with their own citizens.
And this is again, this is not like in a vacuum.
The context of this is a guy who has, you know, just recently been talking about how his political opponent, who was his political opponent last time for presidency, I suppose quite possibly would be again, the frontrunner, at least to be again, as of now, calling him a fascist, that his whole movement represents fascism.
And now he's talking about, you know, disarming people.
In this speech, he goes on to say that he's going to take the assault weapons, you know.
And yeah, there's a context to go along with this.
This is also the guy whose Justice Department just raided his political opponent.
So, you know, you have to put all of these things together in the country that just locked down its own citizens for the last, you know, over the last couple of years.
And yeah, they didn't lock down.
They were making recommendations.
Oh, that's right.
They just sent Hallmark cards with recipes.
You know, that's right.
They didn't lock anything down.
Yes, correct.
And again, you know, this is this is the president who issued that OSHA mandate.
Now, of course, was struck down by the courts.
But, you know, one of the points that you make, Rob, quite often, which I think is a really great point, right?
Is that you'll say, they'll be like, well, how about this for just like an inherent flaw in the way the government system works?
Like Joe Biden, like, you know, implements this policy.
It destroys people's lives.
People are let go.
Their livelihoods are ruined.
They're fired from their job or forced to get a medical, you know, treatment that they didn't want to get.
And then the Supreme Court goes, no, no, no, that's unconstitutional.
And they go, okay, we'll stop.
And you're like, but if it's unconstitutional, then it's criminal.
And so he just did something criminal and ruined a whole bunch of people's lives.
And the punishment for that is you can't keep doing that.
It's like if the punishment for like for theft was, you got to stop.
You can keep all the stuff you've got, but you can't steal anymore.
Like, that doesn't seem like much of a deterrent.
That seems like maybe you would just keep trying to rob people.
Did he actually see it a policy?
Like he's going to be rounding up people's assault rifles?
No, he just kind of vaguely announced that he's going to do it.
So we'll see what this means.
I mean, all this stuff is really, you know, it's midterm politics, you know?
So what he's basically trying to do is that he, you know, the idea of saying when he was running in a general election and he's saying, hey, look, we want to unify the country, want to take the temperature down.
We don't want all of this.
He understands what he's doing there.
And that's that there are all of these people in kind of the middle, you know, not hardcore left or right wingers, not hardcore Democrats or Republicans, but they're just kind of like, you know, I don't know, different demographic, the soccer mom demographic.
They're kind of like, I want to vote for what's going to be good for the country.
You know what I mean?
Like that's, that's kind of what they want.
And a lot of them were really, really had Trump fatigue and understandably so.
Fatigue with all of it.
Fatigue with.
Trump saying dumb shit, fatigue with the media obsession over, you know, trying to get Trump and then them saying dumb shit, fatigue with everyone at your, you know, Thanksgiving dinner table fighting and not talking to each other about this shit anymore.
And they're just kind of over it.
And then Joe Biden's, he understood.
He's like, hey, it's me, man.
I've been here forever.
Let's take the temperature down.
Let's all be nice.
And that was very appealing to a lot of people.
But after, you know, almost two years of Joe Biden's presidency, he knows he can't talk to those people anymore.
Those people are just furious about the price of everything going up, about the stuff in the public schools, about the, like, there's just so much that these people are just, he knows he's not going to win them over.
So now he's going, well, I guess the only thing I can do is gin up my base who hates Trump and everything he represents and all of his base.
So that's what we're going to do here.
Now I'm going to be calling the other side fascists and terrorists, telling them I'm going to take their guns away, all this shit.
Now he's trying to hand, you know, like throw some red meat out so at least they can get, they can gin up turnout as much as possible.
This is all just like cynical politics, but it's still, you know, pretty insane to watch.
I'd like to film a commercial for assault rifles, really short commercial.
It'd be, are you sick of cops that aren't there when you need them?
And then you show the footage of the cops at the schools and then they're not going in.
And then you go black and white.
And do you not like having to deal with guns?
And then it's someone he's taking like a whole gun class.
And then it goes, well, buy an AR because you can really know nothing about anything and feel pretty comfortable and safe with this.
And then you get the guy just peace shooting it because I've gone shooting and they're really easy to use.
And other guns are not that easy to use.
So if you're lazy and you don't actually want like to go to the range and practice and stuff, you just buy an AR.
Well, that's part of the reason why they're so popular.
You know, it's part of the reason why people love the AR-15 so much because yeah, they're like this, they're this badass, awesome gun and they're really easy to use.
They're also like the type of gun that like, I don't know, if you had a, if you like your grandmother needed a gun for self-defense or something like that, you're not going to give her a big shot.
Flamethrower.
You know what?
Well, you know what I'm saying, though?
It's like, that's going to be kind of tough.
Whereas this is like actually, you know, this is the one you'd want.
So anyway, but it's also the whole argument is also ridiculous.
And you could go through all of the like, you know, the facts on it and the arguments about like any of this stuff.
It's just all so stupid.
But the idea that, you know, he's like, well, we had an assault weapons ban before.
We'll have it again.
But if you look at it, it did nothing last time, which is why they allowed it to expire because it just didn't do anything.
The whole term assault weapon is just a made-up term.
It doesn't mean anything.
It's, you know, the majority of handguns are semi-automatic that are purchased today.
And, you know, of course, handguns are much more, you know, are used far more often for actual, you know, crimes than AR-15s are.
And even the idea that if you were to, you could possibly take away the AR-15s that in no way like solves the problem of mass shootings where AR-15s are used.
People will just get other guns and use those guns.
It's just like none of it makes any sense at all.
Then, of course, if gun control did help, well, then you would probably expect to see in areas with gun control a clear decrease in the rate of violent crime.
But you don't see that.
You see the exact opposite.
So anyway, the whole argument is all stupid.
Nuclear Document Excuses00:10:02
I highly doubt anything's going to get done on this issue.
But I do think this is just pure politics on Joe Biden's part.
At least that's my guess.
All right.
So there's been a little bit of developments in the very big story, which, of course, as we mentioned is as Joe Biden is saying this, that his Justice Department seems to be in the midst of trying to prosecute his most likely presidential contender in 2024.
They're now saying that Trump obstructed justice or floating out the idea that he was obstructing justice with this investigation into the documents that he had there.
What have you seen on this, Rob?
Well, first, I don't even think they really want to try him.
I think if anything, the move that they're trying to pull is to say that while there's an investigation going on about his reckless treatment of materials, he's not allowed to run for election.
I think that's the best that they're going for, but they also know that it's just not going to work.
But now is they keep changing their stories of what they're getting in, what he should be in trouble for.
So the most recent one is apparently the materials he had might have been obstruction of justice, which what case?
Like, what were you guys trying to get him on?
Like, were you trying to get him on some new bullshit?
And now you're getting him on the obstruction of your bullshit.
Like, what specifically, what were you investigating him for?
So this is now this is the investigation of him obstructing some other investigation.
What was the other investigation?
Well, yeah, it's just all too circular.
And then, by the way, the idea that the library of whatever presidential records is so important that they need to knock in a presidential door.
Like what kind of OCD bullshit librarian gets to call up the AFBI and go, hey, we're missing some papers.
And then all of a sudden it becomes a national emergency.
Why have we never heard of this before?
If there's a department that we've never heard of, a building I didn't know ever existed, it's probably not that important.
Yeah.
One of the things that's really interesting about this story and the way you see this, you can watch the way they kind of like manipulate people, right?
And then it all just fades into the background.
But so what did we hear the day after Donald Trump's house was raided by the FBI?
Classified materials.
And then more specifically, nuclear documents, right?
This was repeated by every talking head on in the corporate press.
And then what did we say about it the first episode?
We go, okay, well, what's the source on this here?
Okay, in the New York Times, anonymous source.
You know, Washington Post, anonymous source.
Then it was in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
So it gets repeated on CNN and MSNBC.
And then it's just stated as a matter of fact by a whole bunch of talking heads.
What happened to those claims?
Haven't seen them.
They're just not there anymore.
There's no, just no one's saying it.
No one's acknowledging that it was wrong or that no one's saying the anonymous source came out and said, oh, no, we were wrong about that.
There's nothing like that.
It's just, you know, I don't know.
What are you talking about?
We're talking about something different now.
Now we're just showing you a picture of a bunch of documents on the floor and going, but see, isn't that so reckless?
Yeah.
I mean, Rob, they're on the floor.
So like, obviously, this guy, yeah, fry them.
I mean, they're on the floor.
It's just so organized piles on their floor.
Can you more that that's like when you see these khaki pants people running drills and they go, oh, look at this militia that's not FBI agents.
Like that was so clearly not Donald.
I believe that Donald Trump is probably not an organized person.
And I wouldn't be surprised if he shoved things into drawers and then there's some team that kind of comes over and takes care of things and reorganizes them.
That's not his office never looked like that.
Yeah.
Well, it's all when you think about it, it's all so ridiculous.
Like the idea of just what this was such in order to justify this raid, you'd have to say that like there was an issue that was so important that it justified us, you know, conducting a raid like this.
Like which, so then you'd go, so what is it?
And that's why they threw out the nuclear codes bullshit or nuclear codes or you know, nuclear documents is what they'd say.
Because they wouldn't say nuclear codes because they knew it would be too easy to be like, yeah, but those get changed when a new president comes in.
So he wouldn't have the nuclear codes.
But they'd say nuclear documents.
So you'd think nuclear codes.
So you'd think to yourself, like, oh my God, Donald Trump is putting like what our nuclear arsenal at risk or something.
Because then if it's something like that, oh, well, yeah, then that justifies a raid, right?
So just think this in your mind, but you're not supposed to ask too many follow-up questions.
Like, you're not supposed to really think it through.
Just go, oh, yeah, that justifies it.
So that's why they said that.
But even when you think about that, like, none of this makes any sense.
They'd go, well, you know, if these documents fell into the wrong hands, then blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you're like, oh, okay.
But you just said they're at his house, which is guarded by the Secret Service.
So we've got the resources.
Yeah.
Like that's really the concern.
And the guy wants to keep his paperwork and he's a billionaire.
Pretty sure you could secure it.
Right.
So then if you're saying, then you're like, then they'd be like, well, these could be worth lots of money.
How do you leave it?
How do you leave it?
If it's so dangerous and you knew about it being in his possession, why are you first retrieving them now?
Well, it sounds like you guys should be responsible for criminal negligence that you left dangerous materials in an unprotected source for over one year.
Yes, right.
And that's the other thing.
If you're like, why is it just happening now if this was such a dangerous threat?
Like if you needed to raid to get him, that probably should have been done, you know, in February of 2021.
But then they would kind of say, like, this idea that Trump might be selling this classified information, you know, like this is worth a lot of money.
Maybe he'd be giving it over to some other foreign government that he's in bed with.
Biden's already sold it to China.
So well, but also just the problem with that is you're like, oh, okay, but I mean, he was the president for four years.
If he wanted to betray his country and do that, he had plenty of time to do it.
Why can he only do it as ex-president from his Mar-a-Lago home?
Why couldn't he have done it legally, by the way, from the White House?
He could declassify anything.
He was the president of the United States.
He could declassify it and give it to somebody else.
Or he could, you know, illegally do it without declassifying it.
But why just wait till he's out?
You know what I mean?
Like, it's just none of this, like, it just, it doesn't pass basic, like, logical examinations.
None of this makes any sense.
And so you have this, you know, this politicized, um, weaponized Justice Department that's been after Donald Trump for the last five and a half years.
And you're like, yeah, I don't know.
None of their story is making any sense here.
It's just not adding up.
There's, there's, there's just like, there's no smoking gun here.
What exactly is it that you get him on?
And I'm sorry, releasing a heavily redacted affidavit is not going to be enough to demonstrate anything.
So we'll see.
I think Trump's lawyers are in court today.
It'll be very interesting if we can get any information out of this.
My guess is going to be that as with so many of these things, And this is kind of the brilliance of accusing him of having classified things is that this is going to be their excuse for why they can't tell anyone what it is.
So we can't tell you anything about what he had or what the details are.
Sorry, this is all classified.
But it's been put back in the proper places.
So, you know, no harm, no foul.
We looked into it, realized it's not so egregious, but we've returned it to this OCD librarian who could not sleep without these records being in the proper place.
Right.
Which and these records belong to the people, but we can't tell you why it's so important that the people have it.
Right.
It's all of that stuff is like really, really strange.
This like these records belong to the people, 86 million of them who would rather you didn't go raid the guy's house for it.
Right.
Right.
And somehow that's what we're supposed to like, you know, there's, it's like all these different things that are all supposed to, they just kind of mush them all together.
It's like, well, was it classified documents or is it archived documents or is it nuclear documents?
Is it what?
And they're like, yeah, yeah, all of that.
It's all that.
Okay.
That sounds like phishing.
If it's everything, it sounds like you're fishing for what sticks.
That sounds to me like you don't actually have a thing.
Yeah.
Well, it does seem like that.
And it seems like, you know, there was a from what we've seen from the warren and the affidavit, it does seem like they, it was pretty vague what they were able to be there and look for and what they were able to collect.
And it's quite possible that they just wanted to collect as much shit as they can and see if there's anything that they can they can get him on.
So anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this all this all goes moving forward.
We'll see.
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Okay.
Educational Progress Report00:07:35
Another piece of news, really disturbing that came out.
Say, hold on, let me pull this up here.
You know, there's some things that are more important than other, than others in a society.
And this one sure does seem pretty damn important.
And it's something having to do with the whole, like what we did as a country over this whole last two and a half years.
But there was a big assessment done by the educational progress.
I'm sorry, what are they called?
The National Center for Education Statistics.
Sorry.
They did an educational progress report.
And they found that math and reading scores for nine-year-olds have plummeted in the last two years from 2020 to 2022.
This is, you know, it's, it's, I know school is not, you know, so much about whether your kids can, you know, read or perform basic math.
It's more about making sure that they know they can be gender fluid if they want to.
But some old school parents, some of these Neanderthals still value kids that can read and do arithmetic and actually think that that has something to do with what school should be about.
More people on a Zooming call.
I mean, that's, dude, that's business right there.
Teaching kids a nine-year-old how to pretend like they're at a meeting.
Well, that's where the money's dead.
It might in today's America, it might be more relevant than reading math, you know, to be honest.
But yeah, this is according to this report that was out.
CNN.com says student test scores plummeted in math and reading after the pandemic new assessment fines.
The last time they did their assessment was in early 2020 before the pandemic.
Then they just did it again in early 2022.
The average scores in 2022 declined.
The largest decline in reading since 1990, the largest decline ever in math, the organization said.
So just one more of the little what happened in 1990?
I don't know.
NWA came out.
Shit was just going crazy.
Who the hell wanted to read or do math?
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
But I'd have to look into that.
But it's just one more like thing here, which is kind of, you know, it's infuriating, man, because it's the shit that we've been, you know, talking about for the last two and a half years of how horrible these policies were.
And it's, you know, one of the things that me and you have said a lot throughout the last two and a half years was that the entire, like the entire pandemic response was, you know, insane and corrupt and was lying to the American people.
That it was the whole follow the science crowd was avoiding the scientific reality at every single turn.
And the fact that the costs of implementing these tyrannical policies were going to be astronomical.
And it's, you know, it's impossible to fully measure what the costs of, say, lockdowns were.
It's a very tough thing to measure.
You know, I mean, like, there are certain economic costs that you can see.
There's, you know, the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that were shut down.
Like, okay, you can see that and kind of tangibly measure that.
But the like, you know, the family that broke up after their business was shut down.
And now there's like a kid who's going to be, you know, raised with a, in a broken family.
How do you measure that?
You know, it's like, this is going to be with that kid.
That kid is now on a different trajectory for the rest of his life than he was on.
And this is another thing like that.
Like you're talking about nine-year-olds and their reading and arithmetic ability is plummeted over two years.
Now, I don't know, you know, did they recover from that?
Certainly not 100% of them.
Do they ever get back to where they would have been if it wasn't for that decline?
I think that would probably be pretty impossible to measure, but I think it stands to reason that not all of them, not all of them will.
And it's like, even though the COVID regime has kind of raised the white flag at this point, they've kind of given up.
The CDC is like, oh, yeah, we're back.
No more.
But you know what hasn't given up?
It's socialism.
It's the idea that you can just have top-down governments saying, here's a solution.
And then when people go, hey, here's going to be the unintended consequences, you know, them basically shaming and censoring you.
So, I mean, that's the real enemy.
And until we get rid of that, we're going to end up in the same problem.
Like, and in this case, you know, they handed everyone checks.
They said, hey, you can afford not to be in your business.
Your child can afford to take the year off from school.
Hey, we're looking at the dangers of this non-virus that's not going to get your kids sick.
And we're telling you that this is the better reality for them is them staying home.
And I'm, I have an aunt who does like, who's a teacher, and she said no one was getting anything out of those Zoom classes, but they just ignore reality because we got a government policy here.
We've got our marching orders.
So we're just going to, you know, pretend like it's working.
So I'm saying that's the real issue is pretending like things are working when they're not, ignoring the unintended consequences and then removing all the dissenters' opinions, no matter how good their information is.
No, I think that's right.
And then I, so, okay, there's a few things here there, right?
Number one, that's completely true.
Number two, then the other thing that's been established is people being able to do this to people and get away with it completely scot-free.
Right.
So like the fact that nobody pays for this.
Oh, yeah, these kids, these kids are all recommendations.
I was making recommendations.
He made recommendations.
People listened.
And what can I say?
It was a bad recommendation, but I never said.
And the thing that, like the thing that scares me kind of the most about what exactly happened over the last two and a half years, is that there's a there's a conditioning effect to all of this and it's not just uh, you know, it's everything you just said, everything about, like the socialism and the bailing people out and the cronyism, the corruption um, the the people getting away with it that you know, as I just mentioned, and there being no repercussions at all for them,
but also just what it's done to people psychologically, even the best of us, like even the people who weren't broken by this and continued to be kind of like clear thinking.
You know adults uh, but we all know people, you know, who are really just like wrecked I mean like mentally wrecked by covet people who were scared to leave their houses, were scared like, cut off family members and didn't see them for years.
Sometimes at a time it really did a number on the mental health of a lot of people.
But even for the best of us, you know if when, when this happened in march of 2020, it was like holy, I can't believe they're doing this.
Power Grid Strain00:11:24
If this happened again, it would be like, here we go again.
You know, does that make sense?
It's like they've normalized drastic sudden totalitarian, sweeping action by the government, and that's what really concerns me.
And I don't think the next thing is going to be on covet.
I think it's much more likely it's going to be on climate.
Um I, it's going to be it's energy related.
It seems to me now that, like it, it almost seems like there's a concerted effort globally to like attack energy and food, and there's really something about that right like going after the farmers in like the Netherlands type stuff.
You know what I mean.
Uh, going after um, like power grids.
All of a sudden, this obsession with like in a few years, we have to do something that we absolutely know cannot be supported by our current power grids.
It's like well, how are we going to do that?
Well, we're going to do it Like, okay, you're seeing this already all over Europe, having major problems.
You know, they all came in and announced, oh, we're all going to be, you know, friendly, all under the guise of climate change.
We're going to be friendlier to the environment, and we're going to blah, blah, blah, do this.
We're going to have zero emissions.
And oh, now we have rolling blackouts.
That's what we have.
And this is so, so you have all of this shit normalized.
And now these powerful people are going after, like, what is the most basic thing here?
And this is even more basic than the stuff I'm talking about here.
This is even on more of a basic level than can your kid read and write.
You know what I mean?
This is like, do you have electricity?
Do you have a car that can go?
You know, like, just think about the implications here, right?
They're going to force everybody to get electric cars.
And then we have strained power grids.
So now what do you have?
You have a car that you can't use.
They, they, they, uh, one of the things they requested out in California this summer, they were having problems with uh, you know, with their power grid there.
And they said, you know, okay, we really need everybody to like try to, you know, not use any more electricity than you need to.
Whatever it was, don't turn your air conditioner, you know, below 75 degrees or some shit like that.
And don't do this and don't charge your cars.
Oh, yeah, because that's the other thing that really strains the power grid, as we were talking about when Thomas Massey was pointing this out the other day, whatever he said.
It's like running like 12 refrigerators in your house or some shit like that.
So, and then you're talking about the food source.
And it's like, oh, okay, what is that?
What's that all about?
And what I really think it is, is like it seems to me to be something along the lines of whatever you want to say about all of you know all the other things in life.
If you are concerned about having enough food and electricity, you're going to be controlled by whoever can provide that to you.
There's no, there's no being independent without those things.
There's no fighting back.
There's no challenging the establishment.
And I think that I don't know, it sure does seem to me to be a coincidence that as we are popping what seems to be the biggest bubble in human history, you also have that same elite class really targeting these essentials for the plebs.
I don't want to go off on too much of a conspiracy theorist tangent here, but something about that that's pretty goddamn disturbing.
I don't know exactly what the trend is here, but it ain't good.
I don't like it either, Davey Smith.
Well, there you go.
That's why creepy ass article in Denver about, I mean, people, I guess, had opted into this program, but they didn't realize it.
But their smart like thermostats can't be adjusted in like emergencies.
Like, meaning like if there's too much energy consumption, they'll cut off your energy consumption.
But how fucking creepy is that?
That just with smart homes, they can start thinking about like carbon credits, you know, tracking people's consumption of certain things, digital currencies.
But like, did you ever think that you might live in a house where they can just like turn off your electric?
I mean, I guess they can turn off your heat and power when you don't pay the bills, but I wouldn't have thought like you know, still seems a little bit different.
And they're also not turning off your heat or power because like you use too much.
It's a little different than when your delinquent on your bill.
You know what I mean?
Like it's just a kind of a different type of feeling.
Yeah, that is creepy.
Yeah, that'd be creepy to have one of these, these smart homes.
And so what it's all basically like online, like everything in your house.
I don't like technology.
So what do I?
I don't have these things.
I don't even run my heater air.
That's what I do.
I get prepared.
No heat in the winters, no air conditioners in the summer.
I'm ready for it.
You ain't gonna bother me.
Joke's on you.
Rob already lives with that electricity.
That's right.
Got a closet full of food that will last 30 years, and I already don't use electricity.
So come get it.
You're just eating those like dry NASA meals.
Oh, I have a lot of it, but I hope I don't ever have to ever eat it.
I'm sure it's all disgusting and unedible.
But I feel good having it because I don't have a farm.
So sometimes at night, I'll just pet it and talk to it.
You know, it's nice.
You're there.
You're always there for me.
You're going to start like fucking planting shit in between the cracks in your floorboard and stuff.
Yeah, I got you.
You're going to be good.
Yeah.
That's, yeah, that's what we're looking forward to.
So we'll see.
We'll see what happens with all of this.
But if it does make you feel any better, by the way, it was speaking of them popping the bubble.
I don't know if you saw, but Goldman Sachs came out and did have their forecast that like housing was going to go down this year in a pretty big way.
I think they said like 9% or something like that.
But then they said, don't worry, this isn't going to tank the economy or nothing like that.
But, you know, we'll see about that.
But Bank of America is to the rescue.
Bank of America has announced zero down payment, zero closing cost mortgages for black and Hispanic first-time home buyers.
So there you go.
Problem solved.
Isn't this?
I mean, look, and I haven't like dug into the details of this too much.
I just kind of saw the headline, but isn't it just like such a hilarious headline?
That's just like, if you could just put everything wrong in the world into one headline, it would be that.
It'd be like, first of all, we're going to discriminate on the basis of race for mortgages.
I mean, it's like, okay, that's just insane and wrong and just pitting Americans against each other for no reason.
But then you're going to go like, so it's only for black and Hispanic first-time home buyers.
So you get zero down payment, zero closing cost mortgages.
So, I mean, you think about this, like, so it comes from this kind of like this, this woke ideology, which basically says, you know, that, well, the, um, you know, the these uh groups of people have been discriminated against, and therefore we must discriminate against others for them to kind of balance things out or something like something along those lines.
And they'll use these stats all the time.
They'll be like, well, look at the average net worth of the average black American versus the average white American or the average Hispanic American versus the average white American or something like that.
And they have a lower net worth, you know.
And whatever you think is the cause of that, you know, like systemic injustice or some bullshit like that.
It's like, oh, okay.
But from an economic perspective, from a financial perspective, that is a riskier loan, right?
And now they're saying not just black and Hispanic, but first-time home buyers.
Again, from a financial perspective, the risk.
So let's give out loans to the riskiest group because of their racial status.
I'm going to guess that there's no risk in this, and that there's one of three things going on.
Option one, that loan exists, but it's like winning a lottery ticket.
And it's for people that are a statistical anomaly.
That, like, yes, technically, if you're a first-time home buyer, but it's with a certain credit score and the amount of people that exist that would fit that criteria are virtually non-existence.
They get to pretend, hey, look at this incredible policy that we have.
But if you look at the fine print, nobody's eligible for it.
That's option one.
Option two, they know that some sort of government policy is coming their way that's looking to expand housing for these individuals.
And these will be risk-free loans to the bank, which is basically what happened with Clinton's housing expansion.
It didn't end very well.
Or three, they're really just suckering people and all these costs, such as what was it?
It was no down payment and no mortgage thing.
No closing costs.
Yeah.
They didn't, I didn't hear anything about a low interest rate on this.
So there might be a very high interest rate that's making up for the savings that you're getting up front on this.
And there might be a lot of people that end up losing their houses.
It really is this bizarre creature of this like corporate fascistic system that we have.
That's it's like it's not nice enough to be socialism.
You know what I mean?
Like it can't even pretend to be gentle and nice like socialism.
So it's just got to be like this government interventionist type things or this big bank interventionist type things, but still with like a capitalist kind of fascistic twist on it.
So it's not even saying like, oh, we'll give you a house.
It's like, we'll give you a loan.
You owe us money for the house you couldn't afford.
Like it's just so goddamn bizarre, like even in theory, where you're like, oh, okay.
Well, if you're telling me that they need this, like first, like, do they need it or do they not need it?
If they don't need it, why are you doing it?
If they do need it, what are you telling me?
They couldn't afford closing costs.
Right.
They couldn't afford a few thousand dollars for closing costs, but they can afford the house, right?
Like, what are you telling me here?
This is, it's just this very, very bizarre kind of thing.
They couldn't afford the down payment.
Okay.
So they didn't, they weren't financially like responsible enough to save up the down payment before they buy the house, but they're financially responsible enough to handle a loan.
It's just, it's not even like you, you're not even pretending to actually be, I guess you are pretending, but you're not even like, it doesn't even make any sense that this would be helping these people.
You know, like imagine like I have a whole bunch of money and there's someone I want to help who has no money.
They have nothing.
And I go, what, you know, this guy makes $20,000 a year and he's just got no money.
And I go, don't worry, I'm going to help you.
I'm going to give you a half a million dollars in a loan.
How is that helping him?
Now he owes me money he can't possibly pay back.
So yeah, always be a little bit skeptical anytime the big banks want to do something out of the kindness of their heart to help these poor, marginalized people.