Dave Smith and Rob Bernstein critique the U.S. war in Syria, alleging Operation Timber Sycamore intentionally armed Al-Qaeda and ISIS, causing 500,000 deaths despite false genocide claims against Assad. They condemn unauthorized troop presence and sanctions that harm civilians while strengthening regimes. The hosts attack media figures like Whoopi Goldberg for equating dissent with domestic terrorism and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for lying about Capitol Police deaths. Additionally, they expose Dr. Anthony Fauci's alleged exclusion from scientific meetings after suggesting a lab leak origin for COVID-19, arguing he knowingly lied to maintain control over the narrative. Ultimately, the episode asserts that both foreign policy failures and domestic censorship stem from a government prioritizing power over truth. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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War Plans and Civil Unrest00:15:18
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He's Rob Bernstein.
We're ready to get on the road tomorrow and go out to Potstown, Pennsylvania.
But today, we're bringing you a brand new Part of the Problem podcast.
How are you, Rob?
I'm doing well.
Excited for this farm party.
Hell yeah.
We're going to get out there in Pottstown.
It's all to the earth.
You want to start a revolution?
Everyone knows it runs right through Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
And then, of course, if you're listening to this one too late and you can't make it out to Pottstown, we got a bunch of stuff coming up.
ComicdaveSmith.com for all the dates that we're doing together and all the cities that we're doing.
You can buy tickets there.
Rob's coming with me on every one of those dates except the next one after Pottstown, which is Providence, Rhode Island.
Rob wasn't able to make that one.
So Chris Vega will be opening for me on those shows.
But then Rob will be in Providence on Sunday for the live Part of the Problem podcast.
So check that out.
And then, of course, RobbieTheFire.com.
Find all Rob's stuff.
What you got going on, brother?
All these dates with you.
And then I got Steamboat, March 25th and 26th.
And then my weekly Wednesday show, which the fans are showing up for.
It's been a really good time.
Yeah, it's cool.
People are showing up.
Oh, that's excellent.
Hell yeah.
All right.
Well, so for today's show, I wanted to open by talking about a vote that they had in Congress yesterday.
You know, Rob, as bitterly divided as we are as a nation, and as much as we're fighting about everything, I mean, we can't even agree on, you know, whether your kids are being indoctrinated into some cult or if in fact they're being offered gender-affirming care and you're some tyrant who just doesn't want to allow them that.
And everything is just, you know, Joe Biden is the worst president in the history of America or Joe Biden saved America from Donald Trump or whatever.
You know, everyone's fighting.
But it's nice to know that there are some issues that we can all come together around in the Congress, where they all, both the majority of Democrats and the majority of Republicans will lock arms and stand side by side as brothers and sisters and say, you know what?
Despite all of this petty bickering, we agree that we have to keep fighting wars.
That's what we got yesterday when there was a war powers resolution to end the war in Syria.
Now, unlike the proposed war power resolution to end the- I didn't even know we were in war in Syria.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, unlike the one in Yemen, Bernie Sanders bitched out and didn't introduce it at the last minute.
This one did get introduced.
It failed pretty bad.
A majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats both voted against ending the war in Syria.
And let the record show the ratio was worse on the Republican side.
More Republicans voted against it than even Democrats voted against it.
So what do you want to say?
If you feel like there's some hope for the Republicans becoming the anti-war party or something like that, well, it certainly wasn't borne out in this vote on Syria yesterday.
To be fair, when you say this, Rob, the worst of the war in Syria has been over for quite a while.
But there still is an American troop presence there.
This was the one that Donald Trump kept talking about ending.
This was also the one that it was reported he was misled on the numbers of troops that were actually there.
But it's really something that we can't even get them to just agree to call it quits with the war in Syria.
This war that's so obviously lost.
And, you know, I figured just to open the show, I would just kind of like go over a little bit of what happened here in this war in Syria.
Which I know we've talked about before in the past.
This used to be like one of my main issues.
If you remember back in the day, around 2017, it's when the fighting was really bloody over there.
And I was on SE Cup's show.
This was her big issue.
Well, it was like the Me Too thing.
That was big at the time.
Remember?
Remember when we got weird about guys grabbing girls' asses for a little bit there before COVID, before we started dealing with these real problems?
Anyway, but her big thing was pushing for war in Syria.
And that's where I got a lot of those early viral clips of me arguing with her about that because she was just so wrong on the issue and didn't actually know that much about it.
And, you know, anyway, so what's happened in Syria here, as I said before, that it's gotten a lot better.
People aren't dying by the hundreds of thousands like they were a few years ago.
And that is for one reason, one reason only.
And it's because we lost.
That's why.
We were attempting to overthrow Assad.
And in that attempt, a civil war broke out and people were dying by the hundreds of thousands.
We lost, threw in the towel, and the death stopped.
And, you know, I know there's, and since then we've maintained a military presence in part of the country, but we're not really actively, you know, seeking to overthrow Assad anymore.
And so he's not putting down the would-be coup.
So that's it.
Now, I know there's a ton of, you know, just this week, we got information about like the lab leak theory and the Nord Stream pipeline and January 6th.
And all of the information kind of indicates that, you know, the official narrative was completely BS.
Right.
So I know it's not, it doesn't quite ring as powerful as when you talk about, you know, things that are maybe like, you know, five years ago, which seems like an eternity ago.
But just to keep in mind that the whole justification for this war, in which something in the realm of 500,000 people died, was that Assad was just a crazy person who was just killing his own people.
Remember?
He was gassing his own people.
He's just killing his own people.
He's like a genocidal dictator.
This is why we have to overthrow him.
And of course, the few years since then have completely disproven this.
That as soon as we threw in the towel on the civil war, it was like, well, why isn't Assad killing all his people now?
I thought he just loved killing his own people.
Why did he stop?
He's still in power.
Anyway, the story of Syria is basically this.
I guess you could start as early as 2003.
General Wesley Clark claims that he saw that he was shown a memo that had plans to start wars in seven Middle Eastern countries, and Syria was one of them.
So that shortly after 9-11, this was always part of the plan, was overthrowing the government in Syria.
I don't know if that's true or not.
Did we want to replace all the governments with ISIS?
What was the plan?
I don't know if that was the plan back then.
But the Pentagon has always wanted to fight the CIA, and we can't do that here.
So we got to go over to Syria, and that's how we can have that fight.
Yes, that's right.
Something like that.
So that year in 2003, we didn't launch war in Syria, but we did launch a war in Iraq, as everybody knows.
And we sided with the Shiite majority of the country.
So the Shiites were about 60% of the country, but the Sunni, Saddam Hussein, was a brutal dictator and had maintained power there since 1980, I think was when 1979, maybe he came to power.
And so we went in and sided with the majority.
We overthrew the government in Iraq and handed over the government to the Shiites.
This was against the wishes of the Saudis.
They really did not want us to fight this war in Iraq because they thought it would give power over to the Shiites, who they are not a fan of.
And they thought that their next-door neighbor, Iran, would be empowered if now the Shiites were in control of both Iran and Iraq and Syria.
So they were against it.
But Israel was for it.
Israel was really for this war.
They wanted it.
Even though they also don't like Iran, they also really didn't like Iraq.
And this was in a world before we started sending all the Jew money to Zelensky.
Oh, yeah.
There was a lot more of it floating around.
Yeah, this was the old times when all the Jew money went direct to Israel.
Yeah, there you go.
And somehow Israel is on board with this.
They're getting it back.
Anyway, so we launched this war in Iraq.
Obviously, it was a complete disaster and people are dying by the hundreds of thousands.
And this basically had the effect that Saudi Arabia had been concerned about, that it was that there was the Shiites, that Iran only gained more control in the region.
The Shiites had taken over that country.
And this really pissed off the Saudis.
And so around 2006, and there's an article, I believe it was in the New Yorker about this.
I believe they deemed it the redirect, which is where even in the George W. Bush administration, they realized we're going to switch sides here.
We're actually going to start fighting on the side of the Sunnis because the Shiites are getting too much control.
So we went in and caused a big mess.
And then we said, we're going to start strategically fighting on the opposite side.
Now, before the U.S. invaded Iraq, there was not nearly as much of a problem of radical Sunnis in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein was the dictator.
He ruled with an iron fist.
And he had beef with all the al-Qaeda guys.
There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq.
But once Saddam was overthrown and the Shiites were put into power, and now the United States military is occupying the country, Bin Laden called for a holy war in Iraq.
So all of the crazy al-Qaeda from all over made this like, you know, pilgrimage to Iraq.
Maybe pilgrimage isn't the right term to use when it's Muslims fighting a war, but you know what I mean.
They went over to fight the war.
So U.S. brought al-Qaeda to Iraq?
Huh?
U.S. actually brought al-Qaeda to Iraq?
Well, like, not in the sense that we like shipped them in, but by being there, we lured them in, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
And this is what became AQIP, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, right?
No, I'm sorry, not the Arabian Peninsula.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq, what's the name of it?
Al-Nusra.
That's my mistake.
So this is what became those guys, the Al-Qaeda in Iraq, that they all came over there and started fighting in the war in Iraq.
And so we couldn't just go in and say, hey, we're fighting a new war in Iraq against the government that we just installed, right?
It was like, that would be a little bit tricky.
And also that it had been a brutal insurgency for years there where these al-Qaeda and Iraq guys had been killing our troops.
Like, you know what I mean?
So there's a whole bunch of war.
So what we did instead was in first Libya and then in Syria, we decided to side with the veterans of the Iraq war who had been killing our soldiers in order to overthrow first Gaddafi and then Bashar al-Assad.
So in 2012, they launched Operation Timber Sycamore, and the plan was to arm and fund any anti-Assad rebels.
Now, these rebels ended up being the people right from the war in Iraq.
And the money, whether some directly and then a lot indirectly, and the weapons all ended up going toward the most radical fighters, like the people who were willing to fight the most, which ended up disproportionately being these al-Qaeda guys.
And then ultimately, there was a big split in the Al-Qaeda faction and they became ISIS.
They also had help from some of Saddam's former military people who had been disbanded, who were now just like, you know, all they had known how to do was kill and they were just being oppressed under this new Shiite government.
So they started this civil war.
The U.S. intentionally started this civil war in Syria.
And then Assad responded by brutally putting down these insurgents.
But there's no question throughout all of it.
If you look at who was the most vicious killers, it was the ISIS guys.
I mean, they were just horrible.
Then, of course, we used ISIS as an excuse to go back into Iraq because ISIS ended up then invading Iraq.
That wasn't part of the plan.
They were just...
And we were sitting there going, you're going the wrong way.
Yeah, literally, quite literally.
There's actually like a recording, a secret recording of John Kerry, was the Secretary of State at the time.
This is in 2013, maybe 2014, where he talks about that.
And he was like, oh, yeah, you know, we saw the rise of ISIS, but we thought that that might like either overthrow Assad or at least bring him to the negotiating table to negotiate to get you out of there alive or something like that if you turn over the government.
He goes, but we never saw, we never thought they were going to go invade Iraq.
That wasn't the deal, you know?
And so then we add to Obama had to send troops back into Iraq and continued the war in Syria.
So literally, they were fighting on one line.
If you picture where Iraq and Syria are on a map, right, they're bordering each other.
On one side of the line, they were fighting these guys.
And on the other side of the line, they were arming them.
It was just like complete madness.
And during the course of all of this, the fighting in Syria led to about 500,000 people dying.
That's like the best estimate.
They also faked a couple of gas attacks in there to keep the excuse for why we were fighting going.
You can go see the whistleblowers at the OPCW who kind of blew this whole thing out of the water.
But yeah, it's all bullshit.
But anyway, so they kept this war.
They started this war and for nothing other than control the balance of power in the region or something on behalf of Saudi Arabia and Israel.
And then, and, you know, of course, big weapons companies and stuff like that.
So they started this war for nothing.
Hundreds of thousands of people died.
And eventually, when Donald Trump came in, they essentially threw in the towel.
Now, Donald Trump tried to make this sound like we defeated ISIS.
That's really what happened here.
Really what happened was that they, and this also is a big part of like what has to do with today's current situation in Ukraine.
When Assad was really under threat and he was really, you know, the death was at its highest, he called in Putin and he asked for backup from Putin, which Putin provided.
Putin as Enemy Number One00:04:43
And Putin started really destroying the ISIS for the ISIS forces there in Syria.
Also killed a lot of innocent people himself, too.
And so this was a big affront to the U.S. Empire.
Like, who the fuck does Russia think they are coming in here to our war, you know, like on our chessboard, telling us we're not going to get to overthrow the government we want to overthrow?
And Russia won and America lost in this conflict.
And it's a kind of a funny play because we can't get upset at Putin for killing ISIS.
Well, right.
So he's going, what are you talking about?
Now, this is what Donald Trump ran on in 2016.
He'd go like he would just say it.
And in a very Trumpian, just a classic Donald Trump, like, I've never read a book on this subject.
I don't know any of the details, but I'm just going to go off instinct and look at it.
And is kind of correct in his instinct is he goes like, oh, what's our beef with Putin?
He's killing ISIS.
We don't like ISIS, right?
Like, so isn't that good?
We should work with this guy.
Oh, you want to kill ISIS?
We want to kill ISIS.
I don't care about killing Assad.
Like, what?
What does that have to do with anything?
That's not good for business.
And so, but, but this was too, and, and I actually think that this was a really pivotal moment in where Russia went from being, you know, like whatever they were considered before then to really being like they're treated like enemy number one.
You know, there were, there were not that long ago, you know, George W. Bush under his administration, even though he was very aggressive toward the Russians, he wouldn't talk about how Vladimir Putin is like an evil dictator and a psychopath.
They would, they would speak much friendly.
Hillary Clinton famously, this is not that long before all of this happened.
She said in, when she first became Secretary of State, so is it 2009, she said what they called the reset with Vladimir Putin.
You know, George W. Bush said he went and looked Putin in the eye and sized up.
He was a pretty good dude.
Hillary Clinton said she went there and they had a reset.
We're going to have better relations and all of this.
There was at least like talk of, hey, we're trying to get along with Vladimir Putin.
And this obviously, as we know, all changed, right?
And in 2016, they were actually saying, Vladimir Putin stole the election and he's this evil guy.
You'll hear a lot of them right now on the news.
We'll talk about how maybe he had a mental breakdown or something because he didn't used to be so bad.
You know, he didn't used to be such a bad guy.
This is what they're talking about.
We used to kind of say we were okay with the guy.
Now we say he's evil.
He's Hitler.
He's a monster.
Maybe it's because he's crazy.
I would submit this episode in Syria had a lot to do with that.
I think that's what actually changed is that Vladimir Putin actually stood up to the American war machine and he won.
Those are two things you're not allowed to do.
You're not allowed to stand up to the empire and you're definitely not allowed to win.
You know, this is really when it became like, oh, he's the enemy now.
Now we're looking for an excuse to try to crush him.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Vladimir Putin also, so like you touched on partially there, Rob, and it's, it's, you go, he's got a good cover because he's like, look, I'm fighting these terrorists, right?
This is what you said.
You got, this is why you guys just went back in a war in Iraq, right?
So I'm going to war in Syria to fight these terrorists.
And the other thing is that he was invited in by Assad.
He wasn't invading a country.
He wasn't coming in against the wishes of the government.
He was coming in.
Like, he's like, no, I was invited to come in and help defend this country.
So in 2017, Donald Trump's in one of the first things Trump does is he ends the CIA program to arm the anti-Assad rebels.
He also, there were also some several strikes that took out a bunch of ISIS people.
Putin took out a bunch of ISIS people.
Assad took out a bunch of ISIS people.
And ISIS was pretty much pretty much broken.
Once they weren't getting the weapons shipped in, they just started taking huge losses.
Sanctions Leading to Wars00:15:47
And ISIS pretty much was defeated.
And then for the rest of Trump's term, he talked about how we should pull out.
Never did it, but talked a lot about it.
This is, if you remember, oh, but the Kurds, right?
This is when he was talking about Kurt, but no, we can't leave because of the Kurds.
It was how the entire corporate press decided.
They celebrated him.
He got rolled when he got convinced that Assad had gassed his own people a couple of times and had a few big bombing campaigns.
Of course, he was celebrated in the corporate press at that point.
And then ultimately just stopped really fighting.
We gave up on the goal of overthrowing Assad, even though he's still in power.
There's all those people, even the SE Cups of the world, even people like that.
They're not talking about overthrowing Assad anymore.
It's like our ground forces, ISIS, got defeated soundly and it's over and it's not going to happen short of a full-scale invasion.
And there's no political will for a full-scale invasion.
So we gave up.
We called it quits.
We attempted a regime change, failed, and in the process, somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 people died.
And now, even after all of that, in this war that the Congress never voted to authorize, even under Joe Biden, the Republicans can't vote against this war.
How useless are the Republicans?
And by the way, credit, all credit to those who did.
But think about that, right?
This is a war started by Barack Obama, a war that Trump always said he was against and wanted to end.
And now Joe Biden is keeping the troop presence there.
And you can't even get the Republican Party to vote against that when they have all the political cover in the world to just blame it on the Democrats and vote to get out.
They still vote to stay in this thing.
Just unbelievable.
Just, man, like, just keep this in mind.
I understand also that, like, there's, I know I've kind of used this example before, but there's a lot of people, I think, who understandably, after the last three years, are more concerned with what's happening domestically than they are with foreign policy.
They're more like, yeah, okay, look, I get that these wars are really horrible, sure, but like my business was shut down and I've lost everything and inflation has eaten away at my savings and my kids being indoctrinated in school to hate me.
So like I'm kind of focused on that.
And I understand that.
I get that completely.
But just understand that these are the people who are like running our federal government.
These are the people.
This is what they are.
And if, you know, in the same way, I always use this example, but I go, it's like if you were hiring someone to babysit your kid and you found out that they had molested a whole bunch of other kids in another country.
I don't think you'd be like, well, that was over in another country.
Hey, he could babysit my kids.
I think you'd be like, no, you stay the hell away from my kids because if you do that to them over there, how do I know you wouldn't do that over here?
Right.
So it's the same type of thing.
It's like, just realize that, yeah, these are the people who are presiding over the federal government.
The people who would literally start a war for no reason where half a million people die and then just not even, and still won't even end it.
One more thing, to just understand how evil these people are.
Although they gave up on really overthrowing Assad, they never got rid of the sanctions.
So they've still kept brutal sanctions on Syria this whole time because this is, you know, it's almost like it's the most petty, just like, well, if you stood up to the empire and you won, then we're going to at least make life hell for you people as much as we can.
And there was just recently a brutal earthquake over there in Syria.
And there were pleas from international organizations to just at least temporarily, you know, like release, like get rid of these sanctions so that we can like get these people up on their feet.
So that not even asking for like handouts, just like so people can do business and stuff.
You know what I mean?
And maybe give them some help.
And the U.S. government refused.
Literally, after putting this country through this war, after breaking their back, they still refuse to just get rid of the sanctions after this horrific earthquake.
Are there any incidents of sanctions working other than harming the citizens of that country?
Listen, don't quote me on this.
Double check me on this, okay?
And tell me if I'm wrong.
I'm open to being shown that I'm wrong in some example.
But if the aim of sanctions is to destroy an economy, then yes, there's been lots of examples of that working.
It doesn't always work.
You think about the sanctions on Russia right now seem to be backfiring.
It seems like, yeah, when you're a net energy exporter, someone's going to want that energy and you're going to probably be okay.
It seems like those have backfired.
But the stated goal of sanctions is always to put pressure on the regime to kind of get them to do what we want them to do.
I do not believe there's one example of that ever working.
I could be wrong.
If someone wants to find an example, fine.
I'd still have a very strong point that the overwhelming majority of the time, they don't.
But I don't think there's ever been one example where we put sanctions on a regime and then the people got so upset that they overthrew that regime on behalf of us.
And there's tons of examples of it completely backfiring.
I mean, there's tons of examples of the sanctions leading to wars.
Almost all of the wars that we've fought started with sanctions.
Iraq is a good example of that, where there's a huge sanction regime before George W. Bush invaded.
And you can look at examples like, say, Cuba or Venezuela or other countries like that, where we've had North Korea, like all where we've had sanctions on them forever.
And it seems to do nothing except ensure that the regime will stay in power.
And in all of those cases, in Cuba and Venezuela, in North Korea, and lots of these places, it becomes an excuse for the rulers to go, oh, well, the reason why you have it so bad, you see, is these Americans, they're starving you, and we're the only ones fighting against them.
So you better rally behind us.
So I don't think there's one example of it working the way they claim it's supposed to.
Failure of a strategy.
Well, and I, you know, I'd kind of push back on that.
I'd go, no, it's a, if you take them at their word that it's a, you know, what the strategy is, then it's a failure.
But if their goal is just to starve the country, then perhaps it's a success.
So I don't know.
It depends on what's going on.
It also limits competition.
I mean, that's essentially what it does is it limits a country's ability to trade internationally.
So I guess if you're OPEC and you don't have to worry about Iran selling its oil or you're a coal company and you don't have to worry about North Korea selling its coal.
So I guess that probably does benefit select individuals.
Sure, and companies, you know what I mean?
And companies in other countries, for sure.
Yeah.
So also, you know, there's other effects that are a little bit trickier to measure.
But look, one of the major grievances, one of the major stated grievances of Osama bin Laden was the blockade campaign around Iraq in the 90s.
They put a full blockade around the country.
And this, if you remember.
He couldn't get his goat porn.
Yeah, there you go.
But there's a, if you remember, there was this UN study, which I believe was bullshit.
I believe it was like wildly exaggerated, but that's not really the point.
But this UN study came out and said that 500,000 children had died of, had starved or died of malnutrition due to the blockade around Iraq.
I think I've heard some people debunk this.
I think it was much smaller than that.
It might have been like 100,000 children or something like that.
Still, it's a lot.
And they asked Madeleine Albright about it, the Bill Clinton Secretary of State.
And she's on record on video.
And they go, well, you know, we've got this report that 500,000 children have died because of these blockades.
That's more children than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, you know, like, and she goes, is the price worth it?
And Madeline Albright, with no hesitation, says, we believe the price is worth it.
Now, could you imagine, would there be a better recruiting tool for terrorists than that?
Could you imagine just like, imagine someone saying that about like your kids or your friend's kids or something like that?
And like, you're just like, well, price is worth it.
Yeah, your kid has to starve to death.
That sure does suck, but we think it's worth it for our geopolitical strategic reasons.
Now, again, whatever Osama bin Laden really believed in his heart, I'm just saying this was his stated grievance.
And this was at the very least his recruiting technique.
You know what I mean?
Was to talk about these things.
So then another cost of this was, you know, was that the creation of al-Qaeda's war against the West.
So, okay.
Anyway, just wanted to start off with a little bit of that.
That's who these people are.
That's what they do.
And yeah.
So I have to ask, so us not ending our undeclared war.
So what does that actually mean?
We're keeping military bases over there.
Yeah.
Like what continues?
The troop presence over there.
Now, what exactly, we don't even know the exact number of troops, but they're in the thousands.
And they're over there.
Again, as I mentioned, it was reported that Donald Trump was misled about the number of troops that are there.
It's kind of hard to know because you have like some of these like private contractors and then you have like these different kind of like groups that are over there.
But essentially, if they had invoked the War Powers Act, then it would be illegal.
I mean, technically, it's already illegal because there was no declaration of war, but then Biden would basically have to pull out all U.S., you know, all U.S. personnel.
And they didn't.
So we'll keep them there.
Beyond that, I don't know exactly what the purpose is being served.
I've heard people talk about how it's like they're in all the areas that are oil that are producing the oil.
Donald Trump did, I think at one point say that those troops were being left there to protect the oil while he was bitching out and not fulfilling his promise to end the war.
I don't know exactly what they're doing there, but it really is something that you still can't even just end this thing.
You can't just wash your hands of this one.
I mean, geez.
Does Syria have a lot of oil?
Not as much as some of these other countries, but I think, yeah, they do have a decent amount.
So we'll see.
Okay.
Anyway, switching gears, of course, our last episode, we talked all about the revelations of these new January 6th tapes, but we weren't the only ones.
There were many other intelligent and well-informed people who had a different perspective on this.
And let's hear from some of them.
Here are the ladies of the view.
For Fox News to depict this in a way that's completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks.
So I'm really concerned about not so much Fox News and Tucker because we know he's a liar.
The judge found that.
But what about our light?
I have a question.
Oh my God, just pause it already.
How does anyone watch this show?
Just the talking over each other constantly.
It's so brutal.
They really are making a solid argument for repealing the 19th Amendment.
Like it's just, you listen to what they're saying and you're like, okay, I get it.
I get the point.
Maybe we shouldn't have done that.
So I love it already how they start with, well, we know this is like how like how crazy it is that this is what they put out into the minds of like house moms.
And like, this is like how, like, how easy it is to like control people who are in the matrix, you know, where it's like, well, look, we know that the chief of the Capitol Police said, and even Mitch McConnell said, cluck, And that's it.
It's just like, look, all the people in the government said.
So there.
Okay.
End of story, I guess.
We shouldn't get any more information.
Anyway.
I'm sure these are the same intelligence officials that declared Trump to be a Russian asset and for the Hunter Biden laptop to be false.
But once again, if intelligence officials, unnamed, unfaced, I don't know the exact statement are making loose statements that someone else is claiming that they made, then that must be the absolute truth.
Right.
And you go, but it's not just them.
It's also Mitch McConnell.
You know, it's like, it's, it's them.
And it's like, no, you don't understand.
We have Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell on this one.
They all agree.
So obviously, it's just completely outside the bounds of acceptable opinion to believe what Tucker's doing is okay.
That's it.
Mitch just grumbles, so his words are always open for interpretation.
That is true.
That is true.
Yeah, it's up to the guy who writes the subtitles to decide what Mitch is saying.
Yeah, we don't know he said that.
That's just what we read.
Also, and I know you've kind of brought this up a little.
They always love pointing out, they're like, we know the judge determined that Tucker Carlson is a liar or something like that.
When it's so funny because Rachel Maddow used the exact same defense in court that they're just entertainment.
But the truth is that like, it's like, come on, dude, shut up.
We all know what this is.
That's a legal defense.
It's a legal defense that they can say, hey, you know, oh, we're entertainment.
And so you can't like go over everything with a fine-tooth comb.
And if you say we got something wrong, then we're liable for it.
That's, it's, it's nothing more than a legal defense.
That being said, it's kind of like, yeah, Tucker Carlson is kind of entertainment.
Like, we're entertainment.
He's entertainment.
All of the corporate press is entertainment in a sense.
But like he's still performing the service right now of showing us video that we've never seen before.
So whatever.
All right, let's keep playing because this gets dark, actually.
I have a question.
I have a question.
How come this is not thought of as being recruited?
How come they're not thinking about recruiting plastic radicalizing?
Why is this not being scrutinized the way that they scrutinize out there?
Because to me, this should be against the law.
You should not be able to lie to the American knowingly.
You know, it's one thing if you made a mistake and you didn't know.
But we heard for five or six years how, you know, the media was lying, secado.
They were fake news.
So how come?
What is the, what is our, what do we do as Americans to, to say this is not okay.
I'd have to sign the First Amendment.
I have a question.
How come this is legal?
I mean, it's lying.
Like, lying should be illegal.
I mean, geez.
Lying Should Be Illegal00:06:19
How do you even deal with this level? of stupidity.
It's like, first of all, lying is not illegal.
And actually, lying is very much protected under the First Amendment.
And thank God.
Of course, it leads to the question of like, who would determine who's lying and who's not?
The other thing is he's showing us video.
Like, what is this lying?
That she also accused him of this is recruiting.
Because what?
I say so?
Couldn't you use that?
Like, what is she saying?
That this, because he's showing us this, that more people are going to do insurrections because he's showing you that this last one wasn't one?
I don't even understand the logic of that.
What we need is obedience and truth is dangerous.
So anyone who exposes truth is now a criminal.
And so you got to understand Tucker Carlson in exposing actual footage that transpired on that day that was handed over to him by the Senate.
What is it?
No, he's the congressional speaker of the house.
Speaker of the House, which means represented by voters.
So materials legally handed to him by the majority party in Congress that he then exposed actual footage, even if it's selective editing.
It's not fabricated footage.
It's not a deep fake footage.
It's actual footage of what transpired.
But exposing truth, we can't have that.
What we need is for Tucker Carlson to be considered the chief recruiter for domestic terrorism.
And we need that title immediately so that people cannot put out true information.
And anyone who might be persuaded by true information can be considered a criminal.
I mean, this is the exact problem with January 6th is that they're trying to claim that we need domestic terrorism, which is a way of, which is a way of getting rid of truth and making people like you and I criminals.
Yeah.
Well, look, I mean, I'm not, there's, I'm not like really adding much to what they're saying here.
I'm just distilling it down.
I'm not like, this isn't an exaggeration.
Here you have these women who are on this like the longest running like daytime, you know, TV show for moms or whatever the hell the view is.
And what they're doing here is they're basically going like, hey, look, you need to just follow whatever the political leaders say.
And also we should overturn the First Amendment.
We shouldn't have free speech.
We should just all follow what the political leaders say.
It's like, that's what I'm not like, I don't know.
I don't think I'm, it's much of a stretch to say that's exactly what they just argued, right?
You shouldn't be allowed.
Like the our political leaders have determined that this is the truth and you're saying something else is the truth and that should be illegal.
And think about from a historical perspective, if we had always had that level of obedience, what our country could have accomplished.
I mean, we might still be in Vietnam shipping people over there.
Think about what we could have accomplished if we just always had this level of obedience.
It's a missed opportunity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess so.
How creepy it is that this is just like I'm not saying there was always like a crazy amount of corruption in our government.
Governments are corrupt.
That's the nature of them.
There were lots of problems.
I mean, some I was even just talking about that go back to like, say, the 90s or whatever.
But doesn't it feel, Rob, like there's something kind of profoundly different in this country that like the country we grew up in, your regular daytime TV show wasn't just advocating we, you know, ban free speech and must always listen to the government.
Seemed like there was something almost in the American DNA that was like, yeah, we don't really talk like that.
You know, like we don't.
That's not the type of thing that we just put.
We at least pretend that we're a free country where, of course, we all believe in free speech.
Now, this is just a very common like it's.
This isn't even like a controversial thing.
That was said on the view that it's like, whoa, I can't believe.
Whoopie Goldberg came out and argued, we repealed the first amendment.
That's kind of crazy.
This is just a casual.
That's just.
That's just where we're at.
Yeah, maybe you shouldn't, maybe.
Yeah, I mean, you know there's free speech, but you can't lie.
That should be illegal lying, you know, and we determine this is a lie.
I think it's really and this might not be the most uh clear-headed thought, but I think it's really just a function of the amount of money government spends and how socialized we are.
So if you can look at it, if you can look at the government, that they're inherently going to make uh self-serving decisions that are not in the public good.
So the more money they have, the worse their decisions are going to be, and then the less free speech they can allow for because they're making more mistakes.
I mean, you can even look at Covet through that lens if you just look at the way the entire medical apparatus kind of had to be in line with government because of all the government money that's uh that's, you know what I mean.
So it's just, it's all just downhill from being more socialized because there is more government spending.
Yeah no, I think I think you're right, I think you're really on to something with that, and I think the more areas that government touches, the more poisonous things get, you know, and then the more they can't allow for truth.
Well right, I mean, if you think about, even like um, in terms of science and i'll say this as someone who you know, I have a pretty, like you know, profound experience with this myself um, whereas I, you know my, I had a son who had open heart surgery as a newborn baby, and it's like it's remarkable the advances in science that we've made.
I mean it's like crazy that they're like we can do these things and that it works, and like they can save a baby's life, and it's all these things that we have that we take for granted around us all day, of course the computer we're talking on to each other right now.
You know like all of these things are amazing, but where is the areas that science is just completely perverted?
It's all the areas where it's political.
You know, it's like climate change and covet and this stuff.
This is where you constantly just get all the wrong answers.
There's no other area of of science in modern societies where they're just constantly getting it wrong over and over again like that.
You know what I mean.
You just don't see that in.
You don't see that in, like a physics department somewhere.
You just don't don't see it.
But when, when the government money has touched it, it is like this poisonous thing where now all of a sudden, the entire incentive structure is messed up and everything becomes corrupted.
Um, this is like essentially the problem of what we're living through.
Um, all right, let's play a little bit more of this clip see if there's any other interesting nuggets there.
Torture at Black Sites00:04:07
I think you well no, the first amendment doesn't allow you to willingly lie.
That's fair.
I'll tell you one thing pause it one more time that the first amendment doesn't allow you to willing, willingfully lie.
So, like what?
Just like in your everyday life, you can't lie, or is it only if you're on TV.
The First Amendment doesn't allow you to lie.
That's the level that is like these people are thinking at that's broadcasted into people's homes.
You can't lie.
If your girlfriend says, oh, you know, how do you like this dress?
And you say, oh, it's great, but you don't really like it.
You should go to jail.
Also, she's lying right now.
She's actively lying right now and determining that what Tucker Carlson presented to you is false.
She's lying about what the First Amendment is.
Right.
She may not know that.
She's pretty stupid.
And she's lying about the actual incident and that Tucker Carlson gave you legitimate footage that was handed to him from the government.
So he said some things you may not agree with.
Or was it selectively edited?
You can make an argument that it was selectively edited.
It created a false.
Well, he said some things like he said, he goes, this demonstrates that there was no insurrection.
Okay, you can disagree with that, but you get to determine that's a lie.
It's certainly at least up for debate.
I'd say it's the truth.
Anyway, all right, let's keep playing a little bit more.
And I think Tucker Carlson is more destructive to American political discourse than Donald Trump.
And I think he's more powerful.
I think they're all destructive because they lie willingly.
But this, just, I mean, this is a man who basically goes on his airwaves and says, you know, what would be so bad if Putin won or against Ukraine?
He says insane things.
He pits Americans against each other, knowingly, lying to them.
And he's, even if it's not Trump, whoever the next Republican politician is, they're going to have to win the Tucker Carlson.
He's just an entertainer, though.
He's not the news judge.
The judge found that.
But Whoopi, you just said something I don't think I've ever heard on TV.
No, really?
About domestic terrorism.
Yeah, because you had the FBI director, Chris Ray, say the number one threat to our country, to the survival of our democracy, is domestic terrorists.
How do you recruit domestic terrorists?
This lady, I mean, you just got to take a second and understand the evil that you're watching with a smile.
She's calling for you and I to be waterboarded.
That's what she's really saying.
The same way, I mean, you see the select images that you see from Gitmo and the way the CIA will treat human beings if they have the power to treat human beings and the way that we violated international law in terms of sending them to places outside of America, never giving them trials.
I mean, this is black sites to be tortured.
And then even when we got rid of Gitmo, we still fucking send people to these black sites in other countries for them to do this shit for us.
That is a lady on television calling for people like you and I who are American citizens that just have a different opinion of her to be treated in that way because we have a different opinion.
And she's doing it with a smile and all the confidence in the world.
And all the while accusing Tucker Carlson of pitting Americans against each other.
But like you're just, oh, and it's like, and then once again, an FBI guy said, like, is it like, the idea, it's just so absurd.
Anyone, like, do you live in this country?
You think the number one threat to this country is domestic terrorism?
They talk about as if there's like cities blowing up all over the place, dude.
Like, what?
What world are you living in?
Yeah, you shouldn't be able to speak your mind because recruiting domestic terrorism.
And therefore, you should be, that should be illegal.
You know what?
The number one threat to this lady in the elite's power is truth.
And you and I exposing the fact that that kind-hearted, smiley lady is actually the most probably one of the most evil people on the planet right now.
You might as well be looking at the face of the fucking devil when someone is being smiley on television saying that domestic terrorism is the biggest threat to our lives, which means you and I should be tortured right now at a black site.
And that's what she's saying.
And if the government came and kidnapped and tortured us, she'd be on TV with a smile convincing you why it was okay.
Criminalizing Dissent00:05:57
Why it was fine that that happened.
We spoke out against the science.
We spoke out in favor of Russian talking points.
We knowingly lied, whatever it is, they would say, right?
That's yeah, it's really something to say.
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All right, let's get back on the show.
All right, enough with these ladies, and let's move to a lady with even less intelligence, if that's possible.
Let's move.
That was the intelligent part of this show.
Let's move right over to Pierre Jean Jean-Claire Power, the worst press secretary in human history.
Let's see what she had to say.
Let's hear her freak out of Tucker Carlson.
As it relates to the Tucker Carlson question, we agree with Fox Nation's own attorneys and executives who have repeatedly stressed in multiple courts of law that Tucker Carlson is not credible when it comes to this issue in particular.
And we have, you know, NPR back in September of 2020, they had the following.
You literally can't believe the facts Tucker Carlson tells you.
So say Fox's lawyers.
Again, in Washington Post, most recently, just last worked, just a day ago.
Fox executive Hannity Carlson shows are not credible sources of news.
And so to have said what he said when we saw Capitol Police officers lose their lives or police officers lose their lives is just shameful.
It's just so funny.
It's unbelievable their ability to do this, to accuse you of doing what they themselves are doing in this moment.
It's like, get real specific with these officers who lost their lives.
She said officers, plural.
They're not even giving up on that boldface lie.
This bold face lie.
They're the one.
They're saying, oh, he's known to tell lies.
You told me this cop was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher.
I see him now walking around after that.
No, I'm sorry.
If you're beaten to death, you don't get beaten, then pop up, walk around, direct traffic a little bit, and then go die.
I'm sorry.
No, like that's not, that's not what happened here.
He died of a stroke later that week.
You know, it was not even directly connected to what happened there, as far as we know.
You know, it's like, it's possible.
I'm not saying it's impossible that the stress of the day or that, you know, it's something like that, but that's a ridiculous like determination to make.
And then to say it's multiple officers is just flat out wrong.
But so, yeah, any of the, it's just, he's showing you more evidence, and this is their response to it.
It's really unbelievable.
I think, in my opinion, it's funny and fair to view these people as entertainers.
I don't watch Tucker Carl.
I don't watch Tucker Carlson.
And I think it's particularly funny with Rachel Maddow to point out the fact that she had to show up in court in the midst of the fact that she's just an entertainer.
And I actually think that's insightful for the general public to know that these people are entertainers and they're presenting to you a story.
And if anything, you should use your critical reasoning to, if anything, just look at it as a guidelight of the fact that, oh, Corona exists and here's what Rachel Maddow has to say about it.
That's it.
That's the way you should be viewing these people.
Also, I would think that long term, it's got to hurt the government to openly say that they see Tucker as entertainment, because then I don't know how you're going to be able to hold them accountable for something like a Dominion lawsuit because you're saying that the government views Tucker Carlson as entertainment, which seems like that would be a category, like you just categorize him as entertainment, which means you can't be held liable for defamation.
So it seems like this is a losing strategy for the government.
That's an interesting point.
Yeah, that certainly can backfire on them.
Just one other note on domestic terrorism.
And I know we've said this on the show before.
The scary thing about domestic terrorism is that if you break the law, then there should be a law that you've broken and you're accountable for breaking it.
When you start creating categories like domestic terrorism, you're trying to figure out, well, how can I find someone legally accountable for actions that isn't currently breaking a law?
Right.
Oh, yeah.
And you're talking about recruiting, you know, because if you were recruiting for al-Qaeda, you're going to like go to Gitmo.
You know what I mean?
And so it's like, what does this mean recruiting?
Well, if Tucker Carlson, what he just did is recruiting, why?
Because he's arguing the thing didn't happen the way you said and providing video evidence.
That's somehow recruiting domestic terrorism.
Yeah.
What they're doing is, and quite blatantly what Whoopi Goldberg was doing is they're talking about criminalizing dissent.
That's the idea that they're floating around.
Yeah, it should be a crime for you to speak up and say that you think the government is corrupt and lying to you.
It's not, it's, it's a little uncomfortable if you're in the business of speaking up and saying the government is corrupt and lying to you, as we are.
So, you know, yeah, that's what they're talking about.
Excluding CDC Truth00:06:50
Speaking of the government being corrupt and lying to you, we heard from the former CDC director just yesterday.
And now that the Republicans have control of the House, this is about the best we're going to get, but we're getting this.
Let's play that clip.
And for two years, myself and the other Republicans on this subcommittee connected the dots.
We exposed the evidence supporting our strong belief that COVID was developed and leaked from the Wuhan lab.
And during those same two years, the same Democrats that sit on this committee, they only hindered, they obstructed, they refused to hold hearings and get to the truth.
Now we see mounting evidence supporting the COVID-19 originated from the lab in Wuhan, China, run by the Communist Chinese Party.
And this hearing is about getting to the truth.
I thank the chairman for making this the very first hearing because the American people who have seen just as many fellow Americans die from COVID, as nearly as many die from COVID, that died in every war since the American Revolution combined, deserve to know the truth.
Dr. Redfield, you pointed to the lab leak theory even before we did.
In mid-January of 2020, you expressed concerns to Dr. Fauci, to Jeremy Farrer of UK's Wellcome Trust, and to Dr. Tidros of World Health Organization that, quote, we had to take the lab leak hypothesis with extreme seriousness.
And you urged Dr. Fauci to investigate both the lab and the natural hypotheses.
Shortly thereafter, on February 1st, Farrer convened a meeting of a group of 11 top scientists across five time zones and asked Dr. Fauci to join.
And he wrote, quote, my preference is to keep this group really tight.
Obviously, ask everyone to treat in total confidence, unquote.
Dr. Redfield, you were excluded from this call, but up until then, you had been on every single, you were included in every other conversation.
What changed?
Why do you think that you were excluded from these conversations?
Thank you very much.
I think just to emphasize, In early to mid-January, I did have multiple calls with Fauci, Farrar, and Tedros about how important I thought it was that science get engaged in aggressively pursuing both hypotheses.
I also expressed as a clinical virologist that I felt it was not scientifically plausible that this virus went from a bat to humans and became one of the most infectious viruses that we have for humans.
All viruses are not the same.
So when you look at coronaviruses for SARS and MERS, for example, when they entered the human species, which they did via an intermediate, they never learned how to go human to human.
Even to this day, they don't know how to go human to human.
So you can't equate Ebola with a coronavirus.
Why do you think you were excluded from those calls?
Because I was told to me that they wanted a single narrative and that I obviously had a different point of view.
Okay.
I think that's a good question.
Emails following the conference call.
I mean, there's probably more that's worth hearing, but I think that that's worth stopping on.
Yeah, I think basically that you kind of get the point here, that the guy actually who was the head of the CDC at the time came out and said what we all kind of know now to be the truth.
That it's like, look, man, we really got to look into this lab leak hypothesis.
It is not plausible that this came from bats to a wet market to becoming like this incredibly transmissible virus.
This is just not plausible.
And that the lab leak theory was actually much more likely.
And the response to that was to cut him out.
It was to go, oh, nope, sorry.
And he even said they explicitly said, we're not going with that story.
We're going with this one.
Listen to the other scientists.
Yeah.
So think about the fact that, you know, even in light of like the last couple clips we played, as they are accusing everyone else of knowingly lying, this guy, Fauci, who was being celebrated as a hero, was knowingly lying about the most important question of our time.
The most important question.
What the hell caused this?
This global pandemic that you're shutting down the world over.
Well, what happened here?
Oh, that will keep people out for telling the truth.
So there you go.
Man, it really, I'll tell you, being on the right side of these things ages well.
It really ages well to be the guy who was calling Fauci out for being a piece of shit for years now.
It's like, this is who the guy is.
This isn't a mistake.
He didn't get something wrong.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
He knowingly lied.
According to Whoopi Goldberg, he should be in jail.
So there, there's some agreement we have.
We're all I seem to remember early on seeing a quote from this guy saying that he's a belief in the theory that this was made in a lab and that he hopes that they'll investigate it.
And I think he might have left the CDC pretty soon after this.
Yeah, he did.
Yeah.
But also the same thing kind of happened when they were recommending booster shots where not everyone was recommending them.
And so they do a pretty good job of purging the ranks from dissent to then go, oh, follow the science and this is the only science.
Yes.
It's because he got rid of everyone else with a different opinion.
Or at least scared the rest of them into silence.
Yeah.
You know, because it's like a lot of people don't want to have their livelihoods ruined, understandably, you know?
And so, yeah, that's kind of the way this game works.
You either there's were tons of scientists who were forced out of their positions or were intimidated into silence or who were banned off of social media and things like that.
And then they go, well, where are all these scientists who disagree with us?
Or in this case, only conspiracy theorists think that this is from a lab.
And also the guy who's the head of the Center for Disease Control, but we just got him out of the job.
Yeah, just imagine that when they were saying it was just a wild conspiracy theory, they all knew that the head of the CDC was one of these wild conspiracy theories.
Our own promoted virologist who would be the single guy to make this determination, but we're no longer putting him on the phone calls.
Yeah, it's just him and a bunch of other scientists and there's conspiracy nuts.
But nobody other than conspiracy theorists think that.