Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein dissect the alleged corruption of Dr. Anthony Fauci, citing $129 million in undisclosed NIH royalties and accusing him of authoritarian doublespeak regarding COVID origins. They condemn the military-industrial complex for destabilizing Syria and Libya through regime change, arguing that removing dictators like Gaddafi created power vacuums causing humanitarian disasters while enriching elites. Ultimately, the hosts assert that U.S. interventions driven by profit rather than genuine concern represent a cycle of authoritarian hubris that guarantees worse outcomes for civilians. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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America's Next Enemy00:14:59
Fill her up.
You're 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?
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
We are recording on Thanksgiving Eve.
Twas the night before Thanksgiving.
You doing it at the new house?
Huh?
Are you doing it at the new house?
I'm actually going to my mother's tomorrow for Thanksgiving.
We're still.
Doesn't she have a shitty Upper West Side apartment?
Yeah, well, it's for the Upper West Side.
It's a nice apartment.
It's, you know, about the same price as my gorgeous, humongous house, but, you know, that's the Upper West Side for you.
But we're just, we're still getting set up here.
We've only been here for a few weeks, so we're going to go over there.
And my sister's coming with her.
Yeah, my sister and my brother-in-law are coming with their son.
My brother's going to come.
So it'll be a nice family get together.
What are you doing, Robbie?
What are you doing for Thanksgiving?
I'll be home with the family.
And I like Thanksgiving because I get to see the family and don't have to celebrate any Judaism.
So it's like a perfect mix.
No Jew stuff.
You don't have to buy gifts for no one.
What do you show up with?
A bottle of something?
I know you're not like bringing the fucking stuffing or anything.
What do you?
I do nothing but bring my overly aggressive political opinions.
That's what I bring.
There you go.
I bring having researched why everyone's wrong.
That's what I bring to my meal.
Well, as much as they hate those opinions there, we love them here.
We love them here on this show, Rob.
Well, very nice.
And then, of course, the day after Thanksgiving, me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein will be heading up to Poughkeepsie, New York, along with our brother, Chris Fega, known as BK Chris to you good people.
And we'll be doing some stand-up comedy for you up at Laugh It Up.
Looking forward to that.
If you haven't come already, there are a few tickets still available.
ComicDaveSmith.com.
I have the ticket links up there.
Go grab them.
This show is going to sell out probably in the next day or so.
So go grab tickets, come out, hang with us the day after Thanksgiving.
It should be a fun one.
All right.
Let's chat a little bit.
So a couple things thought we would talk to you guys about on this Thanksgiving episode.
Things that we're thankful for.
There's over the last few years, maybe you guys, in terms of the political world, have not had a ton of things to be thankful for.
But we've got one here.
Here's something me and Rob are both thankful for.
Fauci is leaving.
How about that?
Fauci is leaving his post.
He gave a press conference the other day, and he said that this will probably be the last one that he'll give.
So I think we're all okay with ending the particularly corrupt and idiotic era that is the Tony Fauci era of American politics.
What do you think, Rob?
Oh, I thought that's funny.
I thought we were about to play the video, so I was purposely being silent.
No, you talk anything in general about Tony Fauci you want to say.
Go for it.
Well, off the bat, I fucking hate it.
This guy should actually be in trouble.
We should actually be having investigations.
That Waja Walachinsky Walla Wallowinsky is just as bad as he is.
That dumb Indian guy who says, Hey, you got two arms so you can get more vaccinations into both of them.
That guy's a fucking idiot.
All of NIH should be investigated.
We should be looking into how much funding gets directed towards people that completely ignored failed policies.
Like the amount of criminal indictments and investigations that need to actually take place that thus far are being overlooked.
It's really something.
It's amazing.
Like, I understand that being an anarchist libertarian, that that puts you a little bit outside, let's say, the mainstream of political thought, right?
Like, most people, and I do a lot of different shows and I talk to a lot of different people and stuff.
And I know that to most people, like, even if they go, they go, wait a minute.
So you're an anarchist?
Like, that seems a little goofy.
And you almost have to go like, well, here's what I mean by it.
It's not as crazy as you think, you know?
But what boggles my mind is that for people who believe in institutions or believe in our government to any degree, whether it's like 5% all the way to 100%, anywhere in that range.
You know, so these people will talk about corruption in other countries.
People will talk about Ukraine, which is obviously in the news a bunch.
I think we might even talk about them a little bit on the show today.
They'll go, Ukraine's a very corrupt country.
And some of them, depending on what side they're on, they'll be talking about the Zelensky government, or maybe they'll talk about the Yanukovych government.
That was a very corrupt government.
You know, this will come up with countries in South America or in Africa sometimes.
Like, oh my God, they're so corrupt.
And okay, they're usually right.
Those governments usually are corrupt.
But to think about the fact that it was revealed through, and Rand Paul, of course, grilled Fauci about this, through a Freedom of Information Act that board members on the NIH had received a total of,
I don't remember the number off the top of my head, Rob, but it was something like $129 million on royalties from pharmaceutical companies.
And Rand Paul grills Dr. Fauci and goes, will you reveal all of your information about what you received specifically?
Because it's policy that we can get money and we don't have to tell people why we get the money.
I mean, that was basically his response.
I mean, he added a little bit in where he goes, I know I got one royalty that was for $300 a year.
So there's one of them.
You know, and then he's like, will you reveal the rest?
And he goes, well, the legislation says that we don't need to reveal that.
And then he goes, well, how about all of the people on the COVID task force and on the advisory boards for COVID?
Like, can we reveal how much money they've gotten from these pharmaceutical companies?
And essentially, the answer was no, you can't.
And the fact, if you had any faith in any of these institutions, the fact that you wouldn't at least go, no, we need to know that.
We need to know how much money the big pharmaceutical companies are paying the supposed experts who are telling you the only thing you need to know is to take this product from the big pharmaceutical companies.
The fact that that is not just demanded by the media every single day and eventually has to be agreed to by all of these institutions, because man, we might be a little bit corrupt, but we can't be that fucking corrupt that we would actually do this to the American people over the last three years and not at least let them know whether these people were just on the bankroll for these companies.
And there's no zero, zero political will to make that happen.
Zero will within the media apparatus to even ask that question every day to push for it to happen.
How dare Americans ever talk about another country as being corrupt?
Or big pharma and big pharma profits and price of medications.
It's amazing how the liberals just absolutely transitioned from the problems with big pharma to absolutely trust them.
I'm not 100% on this, but I'm pretty sure about it.
The NIH actually sued Moderna because they wanted more ownership over this vaccine because they had been a co-creator.
And then I think some people weren't actually named on the patents.
And they actually, I believe, sued Moderna for like, I guess, I don't know that this is a definite, but it would seem like bigger royalties on the vaccine when it was put out.
In addition to the fact that the old head of the FDA is like now one of the core members on the Pfizer board.
And you can bet your ass that when Fauci leaves this government post, he will be taking some cushy job as a representative for big pharma or with who or with Gates.
This guy's career is not over.
Well, you know, he is pretty old.
Fauci's got to be like 80 or something like that now.
So I, you know, I don't know.
His, I've seen reports of his net worth has like skyrocketed over the last few years.
Maybe he's just going to retire after all of this and go.
If anything, he'll at least be giving speeches a couple of times a year for a million dollars here and there.
He'll be signing off on things.
That guy's not done.
He's 81 years old.
Yeah, you're probably right.
At the very least, he'll give some fucking speeches about, you know, all I wanted to do was save lives and all this.
Anyway, man, his final thing, it was, I don't know, I don't know how to describe it.
It was infuriating and it was stupid.
And it was, I don't know, there was something about it that felt kind of like trying to find the right way to describe this.
It was bizarre.
It made me feel like, you know, like the last few years have been a real weird, very strange time in America.
And it seems like I know a lot of people have made this comment to me.
And I've felt a similar way where people feel like what happened from, you know, around March 2020 to the current day almost seems like it fucked with time a little bit.
Like that's the way it's perceived by people.
You know, like if you see someone you haven't seen since 2019, it doesn't feel quite as long as that.
You're almost like, oh, I just saw you.
Oh, no, I guess it was before the COVID thing or whatever.
It's like a weird thing.
And watching Fauci, who, you know, Fauci really came on the scene as a figure for Americans only over the last few years.
I mean, people who are really paying attention knew who he was before then, but most Americans didn't.
And watching him, it felt like it was ancient.
It felt to me like it was someone who was saying things that would have made sense in the 1950s, saying them today.
You know what I mean?
It was just very bizarre.
There was, he was talking about, I don't know if you saw this part, Rob, where he was talking about Thanksgiving and what people should do.
You know, like someone was asking like, well, what should people do about, you know, going to, you know, getting together in big gatherings?
As if that's even like a thought.
Wait, what?
People are still, and he said that.
Um, well, you should make sure that everyone is vaccinated up to date, including the latest booster.
If you're going to have Thanksgiving, and you should wear masks.
This is what he said: you should mask and you should uh test the day of.
And it really did remind me of like one of these anecdotes that you hear out of the Soviet Union in like the late 80s, like where people are like, Yeah, the government's given us this information, but no one believes it anymore.
No one, I mean, even amongst your most like liberal fucking friends, who is actually thinking like this?
What are we pretending that this is still the summer of 2020 or something like that?
I mean, I remember talking about this with you over, it's now been what this is the third holiday season that Fauci's been saying, Don't do this.
And even by 2020, I mean, 2020 in the in the winter, we were like, What the fuck are you talking about?
Go live your life.
This is insane.
Go spend some time with your family.
You've probably been more disconnected than ever from them.
And then in 2021, he was saying it again.
And you're like, dude, what the fuck?
You're trying to do this in 20.
It's been a fucking almost two years.
And now, almost three years later, you're still to who is doing that?
I mean, Rob, I don't know.
You tell me, like, your family, you say you're going to argue with them politically and stuff.
My family is pretty all on the same page about this COVID shit.
But like, is there anyone who's still going?
Yeah, you got to throw a mask on if we're going to do Thanksgiving inside.
Is anyone still doing that?
What percentage of people?
This has got to be like no one, right?
I would say if being in an airport's an indicator, it's three or four percent.
And I would estimate that that's about the amount of people wearing a mask in an airport.
But I got to say, right.
But even then, at the airport, you're around strangers.
You got to think even those percentage, like around their own family, have got to be a little bit more comfortable.
Like, you're insisting on a fucking COVID test today.
What are you talking about?
COVID deaths around the world have plummeted, have plummeted.
This thing is over.
Alex Berenson had a great piece on this earlier today.
It goes, COVID's over, and all of the data basically proves it wasn't the vaccines that had anything to do with it.
You know what it is?
It's exactly what we said it was going to be.
And it wasn't the vaccines and it wasn't our fantastic arguments that we've been making against it for years.
You know what it was?
It was Omicron.
Omicron fucking killed COVID because Omicron was so much fucking less deadly and so much more contagious that it got fucking natural immunity way up and deaths way down.
And there's just nothing anyone can say at this point.
And no one's afraid of it.
And it's just so interesting.
No One Is Listening00:02:16
What's interesting to me is that it's like, it seems like this whole thing, first off, the over the last few years, and this is what I was thinking as Fauci's giving his final speech.
It's like over the last few years, everything has been on like hyperdrive.
Like the totalitarianism from the government was on hyperdrive.
You can't leave your house.
You can't go to work.
You can't go to your wife's sonogram appointment.
You know, like the government's telling you you can't do this.
Everything you can and can't do is being told to you by the government.
And it goes from that to like none of that, like so quickly.
And it's like it goes from Fauci would say one thing and hundreds of millions of people were like going to do what he said to Fauci saying the same thing and no one's listening.
This is only in a few years.
This isn't like the fucking commies, you know, took over in the 19 teens and by the 1980s, no one's listening anymore.
This is like just a couple years later and no one's listening anymore because this guy's a fucking buffoon and it's just insane.
I use this scene as a reference point in my own brain, but I'm sure you've seen the Godfather movies.
And there's a scene in Godfather 2 when he's in trouble and the guy's going to give testimony against him and they bring the brother in.
And so he just goes, I made the whole thing up.
But then the lawyer stands up and this is one of my favorite scenes in the movie when he stands up and he starts yelling, this court owes us an apology.
And the way I would lie, I would go, oh, wow, we just dodged a bullet here and now we get to leave.
But that's a much slicker way of lying where he's actually yelling at the politicians because that's what you would do.
If you actually were legitimately innocent and falsely accused, you would yell at them for owing you an apology.
It was just like such a good insight into the way real sociopaths and liars operate.
Like I just thought that that was so beautiful that he in his brain was like, all right, well, the story is we're innocent.
And so they just falsely accused us.
So how would a person who is falsely accused operate?
They would stand up and go, how dare you?
You owe us an apology.
I feel like Fauci's almost the same way where he's just, he's sticking to his story.
The MarPipe Ad Break00:02:26
He only had one story the whole time.
Deadly virus have to be vaccinated.
And what's he going to do at this point?
Like get up there and go, hey, guys, I was wrong and I'm retiring.
You know what I mean?
It's like he kind of has no other option, but to just stick to his story.
And even in the back of his own brain, he must be laughing when his final remarks while he leaves is, listen, I've been totally wrong.
I got none of this right in any capacity whatsoever, but I'm just going to repeat the same thing I've been saying for three full years, which is go out there and get vaccinated.
It's just unbelievable.
Just unbelievable.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
So here, there was one clip that I found particularly hilarious.
So let's play.
By the way, I saw this.
Moneyball of Ads00:12:44
I watched part of the press conference, but I did not watch all of it.
And I saw Jimmy Dore, the great Jimmy Dore, tweeted this clip out.
So I will give him credit for tweeting it.
Although I guess he shared the video from someone else.
I don't know.
But I retweeted it.
But here is the video clip in the QA section toward the end of the presentation.
Is that when Gene Pierre, whatever, started losing it?
Yeah.
It sure is.
Here, let's watch this little clip.
This is over.
Only 13% coming.
Hold on one second.
We have a process here.
I'm not calling out on people who yell.
And you're being, you're being, you're being disrespectful.
Just pause it for a second.
Just so you have the backstory here.
Someone asked about the origins of COVID.
That's what's going on here.
So here's Jean Pierre lecturing this person for how rude they're being.
Well, I ask to ask such a silly question like that.
It's also, it's infuriating because this is what politicians always do is they speak to the process.
It's like you basically are in the audience going, hey, we've got a corrupt process here.
And they go, well, you got to go through the proper channels if you're going to make that allegation.
This is their game.
This is their game, by the way.
It's the fucking game they play.
If the fucking, if the principal proves them wrong, then they appeal to the process.
If the process leads to a bad outcome, then they appeal to the principal.
Yeah.
You know, and so they go back and forth.
And no matter what you do, you can never win.
But this is an interesting, it's a good observation, Rob.
But here, let's keep playing.
Colleagues, and you're being disrespectful to our guests.
I will not call on you if you yell.
And also, you're taking time off the clock because Dr. Fauci has to leave in a couple of minutes.
I'm done.
I'm not going.
I'm not getting into a back of you.
I ain't playing this game, Sugar.
Dr. Fauci.
She lectured.
So pause it right there.
So if you hear, because the audio here isn't that great, but another journalist stands up and goes, but she's asking a great question.
And then kind of like Pandemonium, and Fauci just looks uncomfortable as shit.
And okay, so let's keep playing.
She's very charming.
It is not, it is not your turn.
It is not your turn.
All right, so pause it.
So this guy is saying, he goes, but it's a great question.
It's a question on the origins of COVID.
And then he says to her, but you call because she's like, I didn't call on you.
And he goes, but you call on the same people.
You need to call on some of the rest of us who want to ask these real questions.
Now, Fauci steps back, is holding his little yellow fucking folder, and Jean-Pierre steps up to the microphone.
And this is what she has to say.
I hear the question.
Dr. Fauci is the best person.
I hear your question, but we're not doing this the way you want it.
This is a disrespectful.
It is.
I'm done.
Simon, I'm done.
I'm Simon.
I'm done.
I'm done with you right now.
Go ahead.
You're taking time away from your colleagues.
Go ahead.
Only 13% of the time.
And that's that.
They simply will not.
But, you know, I got to say, I really am, I'm grateful to those fucking journalists who just shouted those questions.
Because yeah, fuck Fauci and let him at least go out stepping back, being afraid to answer the most basic fucking question and let everybody see that.
That's right, everybody.
Fauci funded the fucking lab that most likely was the origin of this virus.
And he himself, him, put his signature overriding Obama's decision to stop funding the research at that lab because it was so dangerous.
That's the truth.
And he doesn't want to talk about that.
And so, look, obviously, this is far from justice.
This is far from what he deserves, Rob.
And you're right when you say he's probably going to go give fucking speeches for a fucking million dollars or whatever.
But at least let him look like a scared bitch in front of everybody.
I love that line of, well, our honored guest here only has a certain amount of time.
You might as well say, hey, we're here just to finish our little propaganda segment.
And that's the prepared question over there.
There's no other reason for us to be here.
So we're calling it quits.
I don't know if you saw it, but this was funny.
They've been grilling the head of the FBI all week.
Yeah, there's been videos of it.
But there was one that was really great that the last time he said that he had to leave early.
And then it turned out that he was leaving early for his own vacation.
Yes, I saw this.
Yes.
He was going right to vacation.
And then he goes, he tried to play it off.
Like he was like, God, I told you guys I was going on vacation.
Like, that's what we said.
And they're like, no, let's look at the record.
What you said to Grassley was on a private jet.
So he clearly could have had more time.
He's making his own arrangement with the FBI jet that he has to take.
How convenient.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that was really something.
Oh, God damn it.
It was funny.
So anyway, that was, I just, I hope that's how Fauci goes out.
You know, I'm sure the media will do the best they can to try to rehabilitate his image.
And there'll be more interviews and stuff like that.
But it is, it really is hard to overstate how much this guy,
this little fucking authoritarian weasel who just publicly advocated for Americans giving up all of their liberty in the name of science and safety and all of this shit over the last few years has been wrong about everything and how much he cannot even answer the most basic questions.
And of course, as we've shown and we've demonstrated on the show many times, then he has the nerve to come on and say, I never suggested any lockdowns.
That was never what I said, you know, in all of this.
It's just what a fucking, what a dark, awful chapter in American history he represents.
And good writtens.
So I'll say that.
All right.
Anything else you want to add on that, Rob?
Curious to see the Republicans are talking a big game about going after Majorkis, going after this guy, using Congress to actually pursue him.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I will.
I said the best we can possibly hope for is some hearings that will lead nowhere.
Do not expect any more than that.
And the Amazon documentary and video about COVID eight years from now showcasing what big pharma did.
Right.
Right.
Maybe.
That's the best case scenario.
And unfortunately, and it'll enough to give us information to conclusively know, ah, we're even more right than we thought we were right.
But nothing, no consequences will come of it.
At least not till there's a major change.
All right.
So another thing we wanted to talk about was evidently Jon Stewart, who was once the voice of young people paying attention to news when he was the host of the Daily Show.
He now has a podcast where he blatantly stole our name and likeness.
The problem, I believe it's called with Jon Stewart.
He had Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice on his show, which was something.
Now, I have not seen everything.
I actually don't think I've seen the part we're about to play.
I did see some clips where they were, you know, just defending U.S. interventionism in general.
The defenses were ridiculously weak.
But anyway, you said that about at this time there were interesting things in the show.
So I thought I only watched a few minutes of the very beginning of it.
So I don't think I've seen anything in what we're about to play.
But let's play it and break down a little bit of this.
I think that would be a fun Thanksgiving treat for our audience.
So let's do it.
You talked earlier about the buckets, defense development and diplomacy.
Our priorities as a country since World War II have really all the conversations that you're talking about, but there's also this other sort of, as Eisenhower warned, military-industrial complex that kind of has a mind on its own.
And I'll give you the example.
State Department budget is what, $50 billion?
A little bit more, but around there.
USAID, not big enough.
Lockheed Martin got $70 some billion dollars just by itself.
And if you think about a budget as a set of priorities, if we're giving one defense contractor, we sell arms to over 100 countries.
We sell arms to countries we sanction.
We have, there are conflicts in the world where both sides are using U.S. armaments, you know, Turkey and the Syrian Kurds.
Is our inability to control that aspect of our society sowing the seeds for the instability that we see around the world that's leading to this more populist, illiberal pendulum swing?
And how do we rein that in?
You got to.
I understand the question.
Because even Jon Stewart's approach to this issue is very propagandist and that it's something I've been talking about for a little bit this year that a lot of what they keep saying is people are losing faith in government.
Well, that's not the problem.
The problem is what government's doing.
It's almost a solution that people are losing faith in government.
That's the solution to fucking shit up.
That's not the problem.
The problem is the actions that are being taken.
So with John Stewart, he's not even making a moral case against the money being spent and the wars and all the atrocities of the wars.
The issue he's taking is that the wars are not working.
And so the result of the wars not working is you're getting populist movements that want governments that I guess just more favor the individuals that live in those countries and are less concerned with other individuals on account of the fact that government keeps fucking them over in the name of other, you know what I mean?
It's like a weird way of dancing around the moral issues of the war.
Yes.
Look, he gets, he's at least, look, I give him credit that he's at least asking a somewhat tough question, kind of, but I agree with you.
He gets it wrong.
I mean, to your example, I think I've used this example before, but it's kind of like, to your point, the example I use, it's like if there was a husband who had cheated on his wife, you know, hundreds of times and the wife was onto it, was getting suspicious, and she no longer trusted her husband.
And you went, you know, we have a real problem in this marriage where the wife no longer trusts her husband.
Like, yeah, no, that's not really the problem in the marriage, is it?
Right.
That's actually kind of the solution.
That's, that's the, the logical conclusion.
And that's, that's a positive in a way that she's realizing, yeah, this guy is fucking lying to me.
Um, but when he says, well, you know, the State Department only has a budget of $50 billion, but, you know, Raytheon, did he say, has a, or was it Lockheed, whatever, has a budget of 70 billion.
He's already assuming that those things are somehow in conflict with each other.
Like the State Department must be bigger than this defense company in order to have more leverage or something like that.
Banks That Help the Planet00:02:32
The truth is that I think for most people, they just count that it as $120 billion going toward the war machine.
They're all completely, you know, like, I'm not saying it's exactly that.
There might be some interests in the State Department that check some interests in a weapons company, but in general, that really is not how it works.
As we all know, they're all kind of in bed together.
And the idea that anyone in that apparatus is really checking the other one rather than scratching their back and all trying to do each other's bidding, I think flies in the face of a lot of empirical evidence.
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Anyway, let's keep playing.
I understand the question, and I do think it's worth exploring.
And I'll get to that in a minute.
Correlation Between Wars00:15:46
But I think it is historically inaccurate to say that our defense budget or our arms sale has promoted the authoritarian impulses in Victor Orban, who was a NATO ally to Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping.
Don't think, I don't see the correlation there.
I think that it's let me let me draw it and then maybe so let's pause it right there.
So that's interesting.
You could pick out names and say, I don't see the correlation between our defense budget and promoting, say, Vladimir Putin.
You know, I would agree with that.
I don't think there's any correlation there.
I think there's a correlation between our defense budget and provoking Vladimir Putin and having him end up cracking down and being more authoritarian, not giving him an excuse for doing that, but certainly I think that's been the result.
But do you see a correlation between, say, our defense budget and the Saudi Arabians being more authoritarian?
You know, do you see?
Do you see a correlation between our defense budget and, I don't know, the Israelis being more authoritarian to the Palestinian people?
I mean, why don't you pick one of the authoritarians who we're supporting rather than the ones that we oppose?
So, like, yeah, there you're going to see a very strong correlation.
That's that, I think, is more or less the point.
And to Jon Stewart's point, that he kind of did make that was a really good point in his argument.
He was like, look, I mean, how can we claim as we do with this kind of vague talk of democracy promotion or expanding the liberal world order, or as they all say, keeping the peace, which is really kind of the what they hang their hat on in this Pax Americana, in the idea, which is what they've been talking about earlier in the show, that, you know, since World War II,
America runs the world.
But, you know, the great thing about that is like that we keep the peace.
It's like, okay, but how can you claim that when you have wars being fought with American weapons on both sides?
On both sides.
And Jon Stewart gave the example of Turkey and the Syrian Kurds.
There's a fine example where both are fighting with American weapons.
As me and you have talked about a whole bunch, it was quite interesting to see, you know, you had Turkey fighting with the Kurds in Syria there, and the talking point was that we have to defend the Kurds because they didn't want to pull troops out of Syria when Donald Trump was talking about pulling them out.
And the irony of all of this is that NATO, I'm sorry, Turkey is a NATO ally.
Like Turkey is in NATO, and the Kurds are not.
So they're talking about, oh, we must protect the Kurds.
Yet, if the Kurds were to attack Turkey, we would be obligated to defend Turkey in this attack.
Like it's the whole thing is so goddamn bizarre, but there's lots of examples like this.
You could think of the Iran-Iraq war back in the United States.
And the Kurd decimation never even happened.
Do you remember how loud that was?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, we forgot about that as soon as there wasn't a threat of pulling the troops out anymore.
But so, how can you say that if there's these, you know, there's so like all of these wars fought?
You know, it's funny.
It's uh, I remember Bill Crystal said when he was debating uh Scott Horton that he said, Look, we've kept the peace for 70 years or whatever.
And you're like, Yeah, you've kept the peace as long as you ignore all of the wars, right?
Like that's that's basically it.
As long as, and to some degree, it's true.
I mean, short now, I guess, of uh this war in Europe, uh, with you know, Russia and Ukraine, you know, if you, but, you know, if you ignore the, you know, Kosovo and the Baltic states and uh, you know, Before that, Vietnam and Korea, and after that, if you ignore the first Iraq war, the second Iraq war,
and the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Somalia, and the war in Syria, and the war in, you know, what did I mention, Afghanistan, the war in Yemen, the war in Libya, the drone campaign in Pakistan?
You know, yeah, if you ignore all of that, then we've kept the peace.
But if you count the millions and millions and millions of people who have died in those wars, then we haven't kept the peace.
So that's how do you want to look at it?
All right, let's keep playing.
Let me let me draw up then, maybe a little bit more specifically.
And this is all, and again, this is not to relitigate, honestly.
What happened in Libya?
We take out an authoritarian leader through a military action, but we don't have the civic institutions that you talk about to back that up.
And it creates instability, or what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There's a chaos that is born of that, right?
Suddenly, you have 35 million displaced individuals who migrate towards Europe.
Europe feels the heat of what they consider this other that's coming to their borders.
It creates the impetus for more populist, more illiberal, more authoritarian impulses to then gain traction democratically.
Those are direct results of American military intervention.
Let me just finish and then let Condi talk about that.
Look, I think it's very hard to lump even the examples you just put together into sort of one bucket and say that then caused dislocation.
That dislocation meant refugees to the shores of Europe and that, you know, gate.
Because remember, Angela Merkel took a million Syrian refugees.
The United States had nothing to do with Bashir al-Assad joining forces with Russia and Iran to impress.
Yes, we fucking did.
You liar, you unbelievable liar.
The United States had nothing to do with Russia joining forces with Basar Assad.
Holy shit, you are so full of it and you know it.
Well, yes, we did.
In fact, we were spending a billion dollars a year backing anti-Assad rebels well before.
Look, we started in 2012 with the goal of regime change in Operation Timbar Sycamore.
You can look it up.
The CIA, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia started backing all of the anti-Assad rebels in Syria in 2012.
Russia came in in 2015.
Do not fucking tell me that we had nothing to do with that whole problem.
And no, I'm sorry.
You can absolutely draw a straight line through the United States of America, completely destabilizing that entire region in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, and then the huge refugee crisis into Europe.
What else could you draw a line from to say caused that?
Is it just a coincidence that these tens of millions of people who were displaced all started flooding into Europe at that time, coincidentally after the U.S. had wars there?
And yes, she's full of shit and she knows it because she was secretary of state when that shit happened, at least when it started.
Maybe she handed it off to Kerry pretty quickly, but goddamn.
But that is pretty funny to say.
Jon Stewart, that was a, I got to say that I give him credit for that one because that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
That you guys saw, he's a little bit soft, even on the like, we overthrew Muamar Gaddafi, who is this horrible dictator, but we didn't have a plan for after that.
It's like, yeah, he was a horrible dictator, and everything that followed him is even more horrible.
And like, even, I don't know, it's not, you know, in some of these countries over there, as much as we may have distaste for dictators, you're like, what the fuck else do you think is going to happen?
Someone's going to be dictating life for most people around them.
So it's not so clear that overthrowing a dictator is going to do any good.
But anyway, Hillary here is just lying through her teeth.
And I think Jon Stewart honestly just doesn't know enough to really call her out on it.
But let's keep playing.
The United States had nothing to do with Bashir al-Assad joining forces with Russia and Iran to suppress legitimate dissent.
She took a million refugees and Germany did not turn into Hungary.
So every Germany feels that pressure and you see those right-wing parties starting to get to the point.
Not really.
No, it's minor league compared to Hungary.
Yeah.
And compared to that.
And because strong institutions didn't take any refugee.
I mean, he built the walls, kept them out.
He didn't take any refugees.
He used the, you know, the issue not to solve a problem, but to consolidate power for himself.
Right.
And so I think that there are lessons always to be learned from any of these situations.
And woe on us if we don't learn the lessons.
And, you know, just very briefly on Libya, because that was on my watch.
But this is not, again, no, no, but I want to make a larger point because, you know, Gaddafi was a bad actor.
Everybody knew he was a bad actor.
And he threatened to kill his people by cockroaches.
The United States was actually the supporter of European countries through NATO and the Arab League, which for the very first time came and said, we want to be part of trying to protect the people of Libya.
Now, so I feel that that particular intervention, we had certain capabilities militarily that nobody else had, which we used to assist them.
But, you know, the Emiratis were flying and the Jordanians were flying, et cetera.
The problem, and this is where I think you make a really good point.
The problem is: okay, Gaddafi's gone.
His horrible prisons are emptied.
What comes next?
Right.
What comes next?
That's always a problem.
All right, let's pause it.
Let's pause it.
Yeah, that's man.
It's just this problem.
Who could have foreseen it?
Who could have foreseen this problem, Rob?
It's not like we had an example, I don't know, a few years earlier in Iraq where you toppled a brutal dictator and then realized, oh, what comes next could be a big issue.
So then we just topple another one.
And then we realize, oh, what comes next?
That's the problem.
But isn't it so great that the whole international community there wanted to protect the Libyan people?
But the question is, did they protect the Libyan people?
Or did they just completely fuck them over?
And the idea that Gaddafi, after ruling for decades, was about to go genocidal or something like that, because of one comment that she claims he made is this has been, by the way, completely proven wrong.
The British parliament held an investigation and determined that the whole, this whole basis of, you know, Gaddafi was about to go genocidal was all bullshit.
But Hillary knows that at this point.
You're going to see that even if the conditions end up worse for the people, we still made a good and moral decision to protect them.
Well, no, it's not about protecting them.
It's about that there's still a moral and righteous act of taking out evil dictators, even if it ends up worse off for the people, because it means that we took action.
The evilness that then comes out of the vacuum, that's passive, right?
But I guess in some way, just leaving the dictator, that's us actively allowing it to happen.
So like, we don't really care if there's chaos and the people suffer as long as we do the right thing and kill the guy who is in charge, even if it makes it worse.
It's not about the end results.
And it is hard to overstate how damaging the precedent in Libya, particularly that was set.
I mean, sure.
Look, we could talk about...
Because the nuclear thing, right?
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, we could talk about how, you know, what it meant for the country of Libya that went from being, you know, I believe I'd have to double check this because I fucking don't have this off the top of my head right now, but I believe from being the wealthiest African country to being like, you know, a failed state with open air slave markets and stuff like that.
We could talk about like, you know, how terrible it has been for that, how many people have died and starved and all of this shit.
But, you know, I see this talking point come up a lot with the war in Ukraine.
And I got to say, I think it's, it's one of the more fair points that people make is they say, look, Ukraine made a deal way back in the day to give up their nuclear weapons for security assurances.
And they gave up those weapons.
And now they're invaded.
And doesn't this set the precedent for other nuclear armed countries to just never give up their nukes?
You know, and there's probably some truth to that.
But look, Gaddafi, after 9-11, just completely played ball with America, gave up their nuclear program, gave up their chemical weapons, gave up everything, and did everything they could to help America fight terrorists.
And you know what America did?
Just eight years later, nine years later, they fucking sided with the bin Ladenite terrorists to overthrow Gaddafi and led to him getting fucking stodomized to death in the streets on camera.
Now, think about this from any dictator's perspective around the world.
Their greatest fear, you know, like the thing that would make you do something really crazy is thinking that might happen to you, you know?
And that's so that's what you guys did.
And for the benefit of no one except the military industrial complex, like no one else benefited from all of that.
And by the way, yes, as Hillary Clinton points out, that was NATO, the defensive alliance, right?
As they're called, they were the ones enforcing the no-fly zone through that whole thing.
NATO Enforced No-Fly Zones00:06:20
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep going.
That's always a problem because there's always a vacuum.
Because look, dictators don't allow institutions to flourish.
So when you take the dictator out, there are no institutions.
So that's but the question becomes: do you then say, let Gaddafi go ahead and kill his people because it's going to be hard afterwards?
Or in our case, we thought Hussein had weapons of he was never going to kill his own people.
That's not the question.
All right, go ahead.
We thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, is what she's about to say.
No, they didn't.
They knew exactly what he had.
Anyway, keep playing.
Or in our case, we thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
You're going to let that continue?
Are you going to take him out?
And then do the best that you can in helping people to recover.
You have to recognize that it's going to be hard once you take the dictator out.
But, John, it's a little bit of a false choice to say, well, then just leave the dictator in place because it won't be chaotic.
It may not be chaotic.
I guess that's what I'm saying.
All right, pause it.
It's just the dumbest thing.
It's unbelievable.
It's not a false choice to say, do you take the dictator out or do you leave the dictator in?
That is the realest of choices.
Like there's no false choice there.
That's the choice.
And yes, everywhere that you've taken the dictator out has turned into a fucking humanitarian disaster.
There is no example ever where a dictator has been taken out by U.S. force that wasn't a humanitarian disaster.
That's a fact.
And if anyone can name me one example, and if you want to try to say, oh, Germany or fucking Japan or something like that, yeah, the humanitarian disaster.
Nukes dropped on cities, firebombs dropped on Tokyo, civilians slaughtered indiscriminately.
Yes, there's no way to do that.
So if your goal is to protect the people, then that's really not, there's no track record that that actually works out well.
And to again, also this, this thing, which is, I think, the thing I probably object to the most, which Jon Stewart's letting them get away with, even though he mentioned the military-industrial complex and all of this shit says started.
This is the problem with him just not like being good enough on this stuff is that it's like you're still letting them phrase this as we're trying to do the right thing.
You know, like there's a problem with the military industrial complex because look, this weapons company has a bigger budget than this, uh, than the State Department.
But if we're going to talk about corruption and where the money is, how about this?
I don't know Condoleezza Rice situation as much.
I'm sure it's similar.
But Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, since the 80s, their jobs have been public servants and philanthropers, right?
Like that's been their job, right?
They've been Hillary, they were the governor of Arkansas and the first lady of Arkansas, the president of the United States and the first lady of the United States.
She was a senator, then she was secretary of state, and they've run a charity.
That's their jobs.
I think Bill might have like a legal consulting thing.
Yeah, which is a different version of peddling influence.
Sure.
There might be a little bit, a little bit of legal work in there, sure.
But their jobs, essentially, their big jobs have been public servants and running a charity.
And that has made them worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
You want to talk about corruption?
Why the fuck are public servants and people who run a charity filthy stinking rich?
And so to give me all this shit you want about, well, we really believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
You know, when we really believed Saddam Hussein had dangerous weapons, it was in 1980 when we knew he had them because we gave them to him and he was using them against Iranians.
And we were fine with it and supported him because that was we deemed in our geopolitical strategic interest.
So don't give me this shit about how what motivates us is like, well, we really believed it was wrong.
We really believed that he had these weapons.
And so we had to take him out.
Bullshit.
Don't tell me for a second that Condoleezza Rice and the George W. Bush Dick Cheney administration actually believed that Saddam Hussein was working with Osama bin Laden to try to do 9-11.
Don't Believe the Lies00:02:04
Like, don't give me that shit for a second.
Oh, and they think North Korea was involved as well.
Come on, get the fuck out of here.
This is not what any of this is about.
There's also, there's just something so stupid about the argument of, well, even if it's going to be worse afterwards, we still have to do something.
Well, why?
I don't like, defend that argument.
So you're just going to help out the people there.
And you're going, yeah, sure, it could end up being worse, but at least, well, you made it worse.
Like, I just don't get it.
I literally like can't wrap my head.
Because there's nothing, there's nothing too good.
And the thing that's crazy to me is just the unbelievable, like the authoritarian mind and the unmitigated hubris that you have to have to even talk about the world this way.
That like if there's something bad happening in the world, well, I think we have to go start dropping bombs on people, you know?
All right.
Look, that's all, that's all we got time for today.
This show is over.
Hey, happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
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I hope you take some time off from thinking about all of these unpleasant things that we talk about all the time on this show.
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