Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstain dissect Donald Trump's attack on Ron DeSantis, warning of a Republican civil war over digital currencies. They condemn the Biden administration's "domestic war on terrorism," citing the conviction of Douglas McKinney and the indictment of Black socialists as political suppression. The hosts argue that intelligence agencies stole the 2020 election by silencing the Hunter Biden laptop story, which exposed kickbacks from Burisma. Finally, they criticize a new rule subsidizing high-risk mortgages, calling it an unfair distortion of the housing market that fines responsible citizens to prop up an asset bubble. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Knocking DeSantis Over COVID00:15:07
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Anyway, a lot of fun stuff to get into for today's show.
What I wanted to start with was this video, which is going viral.
Donald Trump did a podcast.
Do you, by the way, do you remember, Rob?
Do you remember when Barack Obama did Mark Maron's podcast years ago?
You remember what a big deal it was?
Because they were like, yo, the president is doing a podcast.
It was so crazy at the time.
It was like, wow, that's like really legitimizing podcasts.
And it's amazing in not that long a period of time.
This is less than a decade.
It's become a thing where that's just not even like a, it's like, well, yeah, of course.
You want people to hear you.
You got to go do a podcast.
Everyone's got to go do a podcast.
Just interesting.
Anyway, so Trump was on this podcast and the topic of Ron DeSantis came up.
Trump versus DeSantis does seem like it's building this kind of energy around it.
It is forcing a lot of Republicans to pick sides.
It's kind of interesting who's picking sides.
I've seen a lot of prominent voices in the conservative movement who supported Trump in 2016, who are now on the DeSantis train.
One of the things that's very interesting about all of this is that DeSantis has not announced that he's running.
It's like they're in campaign mode, but DeSantis has never said that he's running for president.
As far as I know, he's never even really flirted with the idea.
And yet he's in all of these polls.
He's the only guy besides Donald Trump who seems to have any shot of winning the Republican nomination.
And Trump is taking the gloves off with him.
It's just strange to me.
You would think the guy would have needed to announce and you would think that they would at least like I you would I know Trump isn't exactly known for his discipline, but I would have thought that he'd wait.
Like, why just kind of attack a guy who is popular amongst your base when he's not even challenging you?
I don't know.
That just surprises me.
And maybe they get ahead of the polling and so he bullies them out of ever announcing.
Maybe.
I guess that might be the strategy right there.
Anyway, this was that here was Donald Trump in very typical Trump fashion going at Ron DeSantis.
Let's play the clip.
I think he's what, like, besides that, because he's done a pretty good job with Florida, you agree.
Why do you think you're a better choice than DeSantis?
Well, actually, if you look at the numbers, he didn't do a great job.
If you take a look at the numbers, he's very high on crime.
Very high, right at the top, almost at the top.
I think he gets good publicity.
Although now people are starting, because I'm putting out the COVID numbers, he didn't do well on COVID.
He had more deaths in almost every country in Florida.
I hate to say it because Florida's my state.
But he had, he did not have, he did not do well.
It's, it's really, it's very interesting.
I don't want to knock anybody, but the thing he did well on is public relations because the numbers weren't what they pretended to be.
With all of that being said, when you help somebody, I believe in loyalty.
You just don't do what he did.
Now he's out campaigning.
I assume he's going to run.
But I think the numbers are so bad now that a lot of people are assuming that he won't run.
And would you consider him like to be your running mate?
I don't, I don't see it.
I mean, I don't see it.
Well, there you go.
It doesn't look like DeSantis is going to be Donald Trump's running mate.
I've never seen anyone else.
Trump is, you must say, however you feel about him, just a unique human being.
There's no one quite like him.
I've never seen anyone else who does this thing where they just, they contradict themselves within a sentence constantly.
You know what I mean?
Like it's always this style of like, and I don't want to knock the guy, but he's a big pussy, but I'm not going to knock him.
I don't want to knock him.
And I think he's going to run.
He's clearly going to run, but a lot of people think he's not going to run.
He's probably not going to run.
The guy's probably scared to run.
Like it's just constant like, wait, what?
What side of that issue are you on?
Like he takes both sides the whole time.
I got to say, there are of all of the ways to knock Ron DeSantis, it just seems to me like this is the most ridiculous one that Trump is trying to take, that he did a bad job on COVID.
Like that's actually what you're going to criticize Ron DeSantis on.
Donald Trump, the pro lockdown president, the guy who kept Fauci on the job, the guy who bragged about the biggest spending packages, this guy's going to knock Ron DeSantis for his handling of COVID.
I mean, I don't know how you feel, Rob.
This just seems insane to me.
Can that possibly work?
I love your verbiage of pro-lockdown president.
I think that's the Democrats, if you're listening, that's he was pro-lockdown.
He supported Fauci.
He rolled out the vaccine.
I mean, these are all the real talking points.
I actually think the media didn't quite cover it, but I think one of the reasons Republicans did not win in the last election is that they didn't speak out about the COVID tyranny enough.
And I think that's partly why DeSantis is as popular as he is, is because that was a major issue and he got it right.
And there's a couple.
He's talking out against central backed digital currencies.
There's like a couple crucial issues that DeSantis seems to get and be on the right side of.
And when it comes to COVID, this would be the single topic you would not want to bring up because he's right.
You're wrong.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just that clear.
It's that clear.
And Donald Trump isn't like just incapable of pivoting off of his COVID talking points, you know, like he just can't do it.
It's just got to be bragging about how he got everything right, but it's not true.
Donald Trump was, as of the summer of 2020, he was criticizing Sweden for not locking down, for not having lockdowns.
Now, by the way, if you look at the, there's been recent studies that have come out with the with like the excess death rates, you know, who did the best in all of Europe and Northern America, Sweden.
That's something interesting to keep in mind there.
Now, of course, eventually, like by the end of 2020, Donald Trump was being critical of lockdowns.
But it's just like the same with everything else where he takes every side of every issue and contradicts himself a million times.
And so then everyone can always find one like quote of his or something where it's, oh, look, he was being good on this issue.
It's like, yeah, that's like he said he was going to, you know, end all the wars and bomb the crap out of them and torture the terrorists' families.
And but, you know, it's like, oh, okay.
So I guess what he's really great and really horrible on that issue.
It's, it's like a weird dance that he does.
But this just seems crazy to me.
And also just trying to look, when you have a state like Florida, which while far from perfect, did a lot better than just about any other state during COVID, was for so much of 2020 and 2021, Florida was essentially a free state in a world of COVID restrictions.
And you have people moving to Florida by the hundreds of thousands.
You have a guy who won by a few thousand votes to become governor winning by a landslide, 20 points.
To say he's done a terrible job with Florida, it just seems to me like, who is that resonating with?
I mean, pretty clearly, the people of Florida think he's doing a good job.
You know, and not everybody, but a lot of them.
I mean, he won a landslide in his reelection campaign.
And to your point, Rob, you know, in a year where, in a midterm year, year where Republicans really underperformed, Ron DeSantis is winning by a blowout.
And I do tend to agree with you that I think it's right.
I think it's that he was one of the loudest voices vocally criticizing the insanity of the Democrats in 2020, 2021.
And that seems to be a big part of it.
This just seems of all the areas to hit Ron DeSantis on, this just doesn't seem to be smart.
But Donald Trump has his own style.
And I guess this is what he's going after.
I just, I can't imagine this possibly working.
And if Ron DeSantis, like what Donald Trump has made pretty clear already is that if Ron DeSantis wants to run, if he wants to be the Republican nominee, he's got to meet Trump in the center of the ring and fight him.
That's the only way he's getting this.
He's not going to run where it's going to be like, well, we have some respectful differences.
And here's my vision and here's your vision.
It's going to be like, this is the only way Donald Trump does it, you know?
And I got to say, I don't know enough about Ron DeSantis.
I've never seen him tested in this way.
I don't know if he's up for that fight, which is a serious fight.
But if he is, man, are there openings there?
Man, are there huge openings?
Like, you know, it's like, this guy's a big, a big, scary guy, and he hits really hard.
But if you're like, you know, if you were a Ron DeSantis guy, which I'm not, but if you were a Ron DeSantis guy and you're like talking to him, you're like, yo, he's wide open to be counter punched.
Like wide open.
I mean, there's, there are things that you can level him on on this issue.
It's the guy you kept Fauci on the job.
You gave America Fauci in 2020, President Trump.
Nobody else, you alone. kept that guy as the head guy to make these decisions.
You sat next to him and stood there silently while he recommended destroying the country.
It just writes itself.
Are you still bragging about that vaccine, President Trump?
You're still bragging about how you created this, you know, this honeypot for pharmaceutical companies to just rake in billions in profits and just lie to everyone about what the product was doing.
It just writes itself.
I mean, like, I feel like me and you, if we were on Ron DeSantis' team, me and you could take an afternoon, sit down and write just the most devastating responses to this, you know?
It'll be interesting.
Trump's going to have a real problem.
I mean, if he just runs against a traditional Democrat who was even more in favor of lockdowns, vaccines and sending money to people and locking them down.
So then, yeah, he can be a little bit more right than they are.
But if he's got to butt heads with anybody because he refuses to admit that the vac, here's his problem.
He wants to try and take approach with the vaccine of it was the greatest thing that ever happened.
It saved lives.
I never would have forced individuals to get it.
And they went too far.
The audience doesn't care.
You still supported the vaccine regime.
You supported the creation of it.
You emboldened and empower the individuals who did create the mandates.
You were there at the beginning of it.
Like, so he's, he's either going to have to own that he's responsible for the way that we handled COVID or maybe butt heads with someone who is more strict and go, well, I wouldn't have done that.
But against a DeSantis, you're, I mean, you're up shit creek if you're talking COVID.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And DeSantis really knows his stuff on COVID too.
He's like really good.
Like he, he's done his homework.
You know, there's something interesting.
I want to make sure I say this the right way.
Okay.
So it kind of reminds me of like when I hear Bernie Sanders.
It's COVID right now.
Look at that sneeze.
Oh my God.
COVID's back.
It kind of reminds me of hearing Bernie Sanders talk about abortion and how it's the most important thing that the government doesn't control a woman's body.
And you're like, wait, all of a sudden you care about what the government controls?
Well, it just seems like a way.
Now, you could understand that coming from, you know, like a different perspective.
But again, let me try to say this the right way.
To a libertarian, to a hardcore libertarian, I can understand making the principled argument that I think the COVID vaccine works really well, but I'm still against mandates.
Okay.
There's an argument there to be made that even if you thought it worked really well, you still believe in freedom.
But to guys like to Democrats and Republicans, that argument to me just seems so absurd, if it makes sense.
Trump's Formidable Political Move00:06:18
Like it's so for Donald Trump to hang on to this, like basically, it's everything they tell you, but I wouldn't have mandated it.
It's like, so you are somebody who obviously already does not care about individual liberty and natural rights.
You're fine with, you know, the entire government apparatus.
But you're telling me that this was the worst pandemic and that lockdowns were justified and that this vaccine saved tens of millions of people's lives, but you wouldn't make people get it.
Like, so there's no downside to it.
There's no, you know what I mean?
It's just purely going to save people's lives, but you wouldn't force it because why on this one issue, you have some commitment to freedom, even though you're fine with violating freedom on every other issue.
It just inherently seems to me, it's one thing if you take a principled stance across the board that like, like we do, like this is what I believe in in freedom.
But I got to say, I just think within this like matrix of statism, I feel like that's a really weak position to take.
Just really weak.
And you've even seen it.
There's been a few Trump events over the last year where he started bragging about the vaccine and gotten booze, which is something, you know, it just, it, it just seems to me that like when Donald Trump, if he's, and I'm not just talking about what issues he's right on, although that is part of it as well.
I'm talking about just the politics of this.
To me, when Donald Trump's talking about Ukraine and avoiding World War III, he's winning.
If Donald Trump is talking about the deep state and how corrupt the FBI and the CIA are, he's winning.
If he's talking about how the middle class is being destroyed and our country is being hollowed out and our leaders are completely corrupt, he's winning.
When he's talking about COVID, he is losing.
Like he is just losing this fight.
And so it's very, you know, it's something to see him picking a fight with DeSantis on this battlefront.
Again, if I was DeSantis' guys, I'd be like, yes, I'd be thrilled with this.
That's where we want to fight him.
His COVID track record versus yours.
And no matter what, even if you go through and go, forget even like the actual details of what they did, because Ron DeSantis did lock down Florida initially.
He was not good from day one.
He got much better as time went on.
But what you're known for in the public is like Trump's the vaccine guy and you were the anti-lockdown guy.
That's like the public perception of what you two are.
And I'd be like, you know, I'd be all in on that fight if I was DeSantis.
The truth is, though, that DeSantis just isn't, I don't, I don't see any from my perspective now, not talking about the politics of it, just saying from my perspective, I don't really see the case for why you want DeSantis in there in the presidential run.
I mean, it's like, okay, if DeSantis was fighting against the COVID regime and fighting against the mandate regime and fighting against like woke shit, it's like, okay, so that's a great case to stay governor of Florida.
Stay governor there and you're doing a good job.
It doesn't really matter nearly as much once you become president.
That's just not like the thing.
That's the most important thing for presidents.
And so I don't know exactly, like I'm not sold on DeSantis.
I mean, I'm not sold on any of these guys, but I, it's just hard to ignore that this is a really interesting political development.
And it seems like this is the fight most immediately.
Like if DeSantis is going to run for president, he's probably got to announce pretty soon.
And then it's going to be on.
And there's going to be like a fucking civil war within the Republican Party.
And I think DeSantis is formidable.
Unlike in 2016, where Donald Trump, there was really no one formidable who was up against him.
I think Ted Cruz lasted the longest, but no one ever thought Ted Cruz was going to be the nominee.
That just wasn't going to happen.
In 2020, I think Bill Weld challenged him.
He was basically unchallenged.
This time, if DeSantis does this, he's got a formidable challenge.
And it looks like there's going to be no half-assing it here.
Like if DeSantis gets in, he's going to war with Donald Trump.
And if he if he doesn't want to do that, then he can try to run in 2028.
We'll see.
We'll see what happens.
Hey, at least Trump's throwing it down that it's going to be fun.
I think it will be fun.
Donald Trump does always keep it fun.
You have to give him that.
If nothing else, that's something you definitely, definitely have to give him.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Let's move on to another topic that this one, this one hit particularly close to home for me.
War, Terrorism, and Propaganda00:15:06
So as you know, Rob, one of the major focuses of the Biden administration since taking control of the White House has been to launch a domestic war on terrorism.
This has, you know, been something that was really important.
He goes, we had so much success in what we did over there in the Middle East that we got to do that to American citizens.
That's pretty important.
And there's been many, you know, instances of this.
There was the fellow Douglas McKinney who was just recently convicted for the crime of mocking Hillary Clinton supporters on Twitter.
I guess he made kind of like a joke tweet, I think, where he was like, hey, don't forget, you know, if it might have been about the 2020 election, I can't remember, but the joke was that, you know, like he gave the wrong day for election day.
I thought it was that you could, you could tweet.
Oh, maybe that's it.
You could text message your vote.
And it looked like an official announcement.
And I think they called it voting obstruction.
I think I heard by someone.
It was vote by text.
They were like, I know I actually saw the article.
I think I just heard Rogan talking about this maybe.
Yeah.
It's something like that.
He's like, don't forget, you don't have to go to the polls.
You can just text.
This is how we get Donald Trump out of there.
And it was obviously like a joke.
And they arrested and convicted this guy.
He's looking at jail time over this.
It was really, really creepy.
It's very clear.
It was the prosecutor's main argument of, Your Honor, you don't realize how stupid the general public is.
And we've done things far less clever than this to fool people into voting.
This will work, Your Honor, for millions of Americans.
They text their votes.
Also, isn't there also something kind of funny that like Trump's argument was, hey, this election's rigged and that there's some amount of voter harvesting or votes that were being made by illegal immigrants.
How many people do you think were fooled by this?
And if that's a metric that you have to go by jail by, haven't you just created a very strict voting standard that we then need to enforce on the Democratic Party or whoever was running the elections?
I mean, whoever locked people out and said, hey, there's lunch out there and then closed the doors and barricaded the thing.
I mean, if one vote got changed, if that's the standard here, sounds to me like the legal system's got some real work to do.
It would be pretty funny to see a guy in court like arguing that.
Your honor, the Americans are so stupid.
You cannot expect them to distinguish this from real voting information.
My aunt just texted me her vote for comptroller.
She thinks she voted.
She's an idiot.
Anyway, clearly the guy was targeted because he was an opponent of the regime.
And this stuff is very creepy.
So this just happened to a group of black socialists.
Their leader is named Amali Yeshitella.
I apologize.
I'm sure I'm butchering your name, sir.
But this is a group of black socialist, hardcore leftists.
These are like real deal dissident leftists, not the Bernie Sanders type, like real people who are against the regime, who despise white liberals.
And so, of course, they are not welcome within the fold of like woke politics, which is something, there's something about that theme that I want to get into a little bit more because that's one of the more interesting parts of all of this too, is for all of the woke language and all of this stuff about like inclusivity and diversity and even the kind of socialistic talking points.
A real black socialist is not in.
They're not in this because it's not really actually about that.
None of them act.
This is one of the reasons why I object to the when people call them commies, you know, they'll be like this, this woke communism, or they'll say things like, you know, they'll call, you know, like Hillary Clinton a Marxist or something like that.
And you're like, this really isn't accurate.
And there's something you're really missing if you look at this thing, this whole like progressive woke movement as Marxist or as communist, because it's not.
It's really at its core, very, very corporatist.
This is not about, this is not about, you know, seizing factories for workers.
It's not about that.
It's not about public ownership of the means of production.
They're fine with very private ownership of the means of production.
They are trying to maximize profits.
It's much more about a rigged corporatist system than anything else.
Anyway, so these guys, and this is what's really creepy.
So there was just a memo released from the Department of Justice a couple of days ago.
The memo was titled, U.S. Citizens and Russian Intelligence Officers Charged with Conspiring to Use U.S. Citizens as Illegal Agents of the Russian government.
And they continue, defendants sought to sow discord, spread pro-Russia propaganda and interfere in elections within the United States.
And as we already said with this last example here, that interfering in elections is a very broad term, the way they use it.
Interfering with elections could mean, you know, that you're trying to influence people to vote a certain way.
It's kind of crazy.
The DOJ indictment went on to say, quote, they were accused of, quote, writing articles that contained Russian propaganda and disinformation.
And as I always said before, so discord.
This to me is just very, very creepy here.
Let me read a little bit more from what the Department of Justice wrote.
Among other conduct, the superseding indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited, funded, and directed U.S. political groups to act as unregistered illegal agents of the Russian government and so discord and spread pro-Russian propaganda.
It claims that they participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local office within the United States.
Now, the major issue here is that basically this statute was at least designed for, say, like people who were getting millions of dollars from the Russian government and are then, you know, like running propaganda campaigns or something like that, that they have to register as foreign agents.
But in this case, with this group, they've only isolated like a few very small payments that they claim come from Russia.
And it just makes no sense.
Like this group has been a group of black socialists for like 20 years.
They've been saying this shit forever.
It had nothing to do with Vladimir Putin, but, you know, they're very critical of the war in Ukraine.
And so this is where they're claiming that they're spreading Russian propaganda.
Now, these guys, I'm sure, would have a lot of views that me and you would not agree with, Rob.
I mean, they're black socialists.
We are neither black nor socialists.
We probably disagree with a lot of them.
But I got to say, and one of the reasons this hit close to home is I saw a few of the clips of them talking about the war in Ukraine.
And I got to say, it sounded a lot like the shit I've been saying.
And they were pretty much right about it.
And so this is a very, like an unbelievable, and of course, as someone who's been accused of spreading Russian propaganda for at least a year now, it's, well, it hits kind of close to home that you could, you could actually say, oh, you're spreading propaganda and therefore we are going to arrest you.
They're looking at serious jail time, something like a decade in prison.
They could be looking at for this.
It's, yeah, this is, this is creepy.
And this is really a part of this domestic war on terrorism.
Forget the idea if you thought you had some silly idea in your head that we had freedom of speech or that you lived in a free country.
No, you don't have, you can't have whatever view you want to have on the war in Ukraine because one view is Russian propaganda and therefore criminal.
Really creepy stuff.
What exactly was the even if Putin called you up on the phone and said, hey, I like what you're talking about.
Here's a check.
Go say more of that.
What's the crime?
Well, I guess the crime would be not registering as a foreign agent or something like that.
But yeah, it should, that should absolutely be protected by the First Amendment.
Evidently, it's not.
So anytime, and do they even know that they specifically gotten funding from because like if you just have open funding, so now so you got a double liability.
You've got a liability of policing that no funds are coming in from a foreign country that might be tied to the government.
And then you've got a responsibility that if it were to come in and it wasn't your intention, can you return the money?
Or you already have to then go make a declaration of the fact that you now work for someone who sent you a donation that you didn't think you had a job for.
Yeah, well, that's what's really creepy about all of this stuff is that it's like, look, it's very hard in today's world when you're just like out there talking about this stuff to even know exactly where all of your money is coming from.
And obviously, like, let's say I'm out there on Joe Rogan's podcast talking about like all of the lies that are being told to the American people about the war in Ukraine.
If I'm out there saying that, I'm sure someone who was pro-Russian in that war might like what I'm saying.
might want to support it.
Now, that's not my problem.
If they happen to like the truth, then they like the truth, whatever, you know?
It doesn't mean I'm getting my information from them.
And it doesn't mean I'm saying anything other than what I believe.
But right?
You know what I mean?
But now, like, I could certainly see a scenario where I wouldn't even know if someone like that had sent some small amount of money to me.
I mean, I'd know if they were sending me millions.
And I have yet to receive that.
But it's, but that's like the thing that's really creepy about this is it seems like you could get anyone in trouble because it's as simple as you go, all right, I don't like what this guy is saying.
You can call up your asset in a foreign country, go, hey, I want you to make this payment, call up the FBI, go, hey, look, this asset can even have someone like that you've put into one of these institutions or is tied to an institution.
Sounds like a way that you can get anyone with a dissonant opinion to be put in jail without them having any intention of violating a crime.
Yeah.
I think the general idea of ignorance of the law is not an excuse or whatever that line is.
Even to me, that's just solid, like that.
How do you have that?
Like, so you can just create any law at any point in time and all of a sudden I'm responsible for it, even if it's not common sense and my intent was not to be in violation of anything.
Like you've never been a citizen.
Cops always love to say that.
Ignorance of the law is not an excuse.
But the thing is that it's a really good excuse.
Yeah, I didn't know.
It's just such a great excuse.
Some laws aren't common sense.
I didn't know I wasn't allowed to do that.
It's a great excuse for why you did something.
Like, I don't know.
I thought that you were allowed to.
I thought this wasn't illegal.
So that's why I did it.
And then they can just say that line and then it's just like, oh, okay.
Ignorance of the law isn't an excuse.
So what's your excuse?
And you're like, well, that's the only one that I have, but it's a really good one.
Look, this is certainly creepy.
And of course, I think we all knew from the very beginning that the domestic war on terrorism was always going to be a war on dissidents.
I mean, it's so ridiculous when they talk about it.
You know, I remember there were articles even before January 6th, there were like all of this talk out of the Biden administration and people advising them, you've got to really crack down on domestic terrorism, you know, and it, and then of course they took January 6th, just like they used 9-11 as this great excuse to see this is why we need it, even though like 9-11, they had already been planning this stuff well before it.
But it's like, it's all so ridiculous.
Like we don't, I mean, what are you, you even talking about domestic terrorism?
It's like, oh, are you talking about like mass shootings or something like that?
It's like, no, they're not talking about that.
They're talking about politically motivated acts of violence.
And like, we just don't have a lot of those.
Like even in our country today, as divided as things are, we don't see like there's not 9-11s happening over domestic terrorists.
There's not Oklahoma city bombings happening like left and right.
It's just not really a major problem.
So what is it really?
Well, what it really is is a war on dissidents.
And we saw this, you know, throughout 2020.
And this is why there was such a push for this when Biden first won in late 2020, even before he was in the White House, is because what were the domestic terrorists?
So were they were the people who were going to what?
Like open their business, even though the government mandated a lockdown.
Those were the domestic terrorists.
They were the people who were going to like not get vaccinated in 2021.
Those are the domestic terrorists, or maybe even have the nerve of talking about how the lockdowns and the vaccines did not work the way the government sold them.
That's what they were always talking about.
And one thing that's particularly interesting about this case is that you see the government targeting black socialists.
And that should tell you something.
Like it gives you a little bit of information that this really is not, at least to them, about a left-right divide.
And it's certainly not about a black or white divide.
That's not what this is about.
This is a war on dissonance.
And it doesn't particularly matter much to them whether you're a left-wing dissident or a right-wing dissident.
That's really not the issue at hand.
It's not about left versus right.
It's about the powerful versus the people, you know?
And so there's something about that that I think is important for people to understand.
Understand how much all of this shit is.
It's all bullshit.
All the like identitarianism, it's all just a tool for them.
They don't actually care about any of this.
The War on Dissonance00:04:11
Yes, they would.
They like diversity.
They like different shades of people who all support their power structure.
You know what I mean?
Like, but they don't real, they're not really interested in like diversity of thought here, or they're not really interested in diversity as soon as like, you know, it's like, this has always been true of kind of like wokeism in general.
Like even like the kind of even, even like college, like campus, like woke shit, it'll be, there might be like some, some people of color involved in it, but it's people of color who sound and act and think just like all the white people at an upper middle class prestigious university.
You know what I mean?
That's the type of diversity they want.
They want someone with black skin who's just like them.
They're not like going to the hood and being like, what can we, you know, how can we be more like your culture here in Wesleyan?
You know what I mean?
And like, so that's, it's kind of interesting to see that like it's not a matter of who's a, it's not like a war on right wingers as much as it is that right wingers are seen as dissidents and therefore they're caught up in the war against dissidents.
But it is a pretty creepy thing if you're a political dissident who's just you know, say I don't know, doing a podcast, and you're like oh wow, so that's.
Like okay I, I think we're a few steps off from just coming after everyone.
But you're like oh, we've established this as kind of the norm now that you can actually be charged with spreading Russian propaganda.
For for what?
For for believing in the concept of America?
Like for believing.
Like I gotta stop doing the bit on run your mouth.
Where I say i'm a thousand percent fact checked and supported by Russia.
I'm claiming that's why I can get everything right is because I have their funds.
I guess that jokes no longer.
Yeah, downplay that.
Or does it run something like a scroll on the bottom of the screen?
It's like, this is a satirical podcast.
And then you also had the Fox News lost their Dominion lawsuit for like $850 or $900 million.
Well, I think they settled, I believe.
Yeah.
Which it feels like censorship to me in that if you're reporting, if the president or the president's lawyers are saying something and it's completely false, it's still news.
It's news for you to report, hey, this is what these people are saying.
To not report on that is censorship to go, hey, I think that's a, you can categorize it as false claims or this is coming from them.
Now, the fact that they settled, it could be that they actually had them dead to rights, that they weren't just reporting, hey, they're saying this.
They were reporting it as that, hey, here's something that's factually true and they knew it wasn't.
And maybe they didn't want more digging that would have really ruined their business.
But that seemed like a creepy lawsuit that Fox even settled on it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I agree.
Personally, I'm kind of against all of these defamation lawsuits.
I mean, I think maybe in some areas, there should be some type of tort system if someone blatantly lies about you and it causes you real clear damages that you I don't know.
But in general, I'm on the side of free speech.
I mean, I think that you should be able to say if you think the election was stolen.
And there's certainly, this was certainly a widespread view amongst Republican voters and the president of the United States at the time was claiming it.
Yeah, it's done.
It seems like it's very chilling to free speech to be able to win such a huge or such a huge settlement because some of the, what, some of the opinion hosts on the network were not even saying they knew it was stolen, but how much is our government spending with Dominion each year that Dominion can be losing $850 million in value from, I guess, bad reporting from Fox News?
Yeah.
And don't you kind of lose, you know, if you're like one of these companies that's like such a quasi-government organization, don't you kind of lose your ability to go around suing people for defamation?
Small Batch Cigars Sponsorship00:02:28
You know what I'm saying?
Like it's kind of like if as the taxpayer, you're like, well, I'm funding you.
So like, shouldn't I be able to say what I want to about you?
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Hunter Biden Laptop Evidence00:09:24
Anyway, speaking of the stolen election, there's been some new reporting out about exactly how this election might very well have been stolen.
According to, this is from ALX, who's a big Twitter account at ALX.
He's reporting that in private sworn testimony, the former acting CIA director, Mike Morrell, says that the Biden campaign asked him to organize the 50 colleagues to sign the letter in October of 2020, claiming that emails from Hunter Biden's laptop published by the New York Post were Russian disinformation.
He says, quote, Anthony Blinken, now Secretary of State, was the senior campaign official who reached out to him on or before October 17th, 2020, three days after the Post published an email from the laptop suggesting Hunter had introduced his Ukrainian business partner to his father.
Of course, as you remember, this is then what Joe Biden repeated in the debates, that there were these 50 intelligence officers.
The corporate press ran with it.
And Biden repeatedly used that letter as a reason to discount this whole story.
This was in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.
This is not surprising.
Clearly, there was, look, what we know looking back on this now is that Joe Biden was, okay, we know that Hunter Biden's laptop was legit.
That's been at this point, everyone, even all the news organizations have admitted that.
They had it.
It was a huge scandal.
There's stuff of real, there's real newsworthy stuff on there, not just the salacious stuff, not just the photos of drugs and sex and stuff, but like real news stories.
And clearly, there was an effort to come up with this bullshit story that it was Russian disinformation.
And clearly, the people who were doing that were trying to help Joe Biden's campaign.
It's really not that surprising to learn that Joe Biden's campaign actually was the ones who made the request for this to happen.
The interesting thing really isn't whether or not, like even if this reporting isn't true, it doesn't change the story any.
It doesn't matter whether the request came from Joe Biden or whether this was just initiated by intelligence officers.
Either way, the story is that the intelligence officers did it, right?
It doesn't matter if they had initiated it on their own or if Biden had asked.
Like if they initiated it on their own, the story is that they initiated it.
And if Biden asked, the story is that they agreed to do it for him.
So it doesn't really matter who it came from.
But the fact here is that when you have this major, you know, October surprise, it gets the, you, the intelligence agencies leap on to create this excuse that will at least carry Biden over the finish line here.
If that's not interfering in an election, nothing is.
Nothing is if that's not election interference.
So, you know, while Dominion is winning this lawsuit, look, guys like me and you, me and you never really jumped on the Dominion thing, right?
But it was never really like one of our major talking points that like, oh, these voting machines are fraudulent.
Because I just never saw overwhelming evidence that they were.
I don't really know.
I'd be talking out of my ass if I said I did know.
And that's not what we like to do.
I think we said those are wild claims.
And that would be interesting if they can prove it because there was really nothing more to be said at the time.
Yeah.
I don't know what the Fox News reporting was.
I didn't see it.
But I also haven't seen articles with direct and horrific quotes from the hosts that were saying, like, after firm evidence of the Dominion, you know, I didn't see anything like that.
I, what I remember, and I don't watch a lot of Fox News.
Tucker Carlson's really the only guy who I keep up with because he's like the only one to me who's interesting over there.
But I actually remember him getting a lot of shit from right-wingers because what he said when Trump's lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and that woman whose name is Sidney Powell.
Sidney Powell.
Yes, correct.
What he was saying is when they were coming out and making those claims, he was like, whoa, these are incredible claims and we need to see some evidence to back them up.
And then he was like, in the following days, he was like, just to be clear, they made these claims and now have given us nothing to back that up.
And like, if you're going to say the president is like, like, illegitimately won the presidency, like that, you know, he's still got his like kind of red, white, and blue conservative thing where he's like, no, you don't say that unless you have the evidence to show it.
And I think he was trying to not be a hypocrite because he had been saying that about Hillary Clinton and her claims of Russian interference for years.
And he was like, oh, I'm not just going to be the same thing that I've been criticizing for all these years.
So I remember that and him getting a lot of pushback from like his, you know, at least like on Twitter and stuff, seeing like right-wingers furious with him.
Anyway, so I don't really know.
I don't know how far Hannity or some of the other ones went into it.
Maybe they did.
Regardless of that, to me, this stuff, the way the election was stolen in plain sight, all that stuff was always far more interesting to me.
And look, I mean, like, just to be clear, at the very least, what the Hunter Biden laptop demonstrated was just the incredibly corrupt relationship that Hunter Biden had with these Ukrainian and Chinese companies, where he's clearly just trading his last name and making millions of dollars.
That's at the very least.
And particularly the one that I harp on the most is the one with Burisma in Ukraine, because it's pretty interesting that after the U.S. backed the coup that overthrew a democratically elected government there, that this company who was in bed with the Yanukovych government to solidify their good standing with the new government bribed the vice president of the United States of America's son.
It's just something kind of interesting about that.
It kind of lets you know who was really running the show, right?
It's like, why aren't they just bribing their new government?
Oh, they're going right to the source, huh?
So that was kind of interesting.
The big, the biggest scandal, not just things that there were rumors of, like there were rumors of all types of like horrific stuff on the laptop.
Again, none of that was ever proven.
We've talked about this before, how it's one of those dangerous things where you can't even try to find it because you're not going to put that into your Google search and you also don't want to see it if you find it.
So it's anyway, I don't know what came of some of the wilder things that were alleged to have been on the on Hunter's hard drive.
But what we do know is that there was reference after reference in these emails about the big guy.
And it seems overwhelmingly likely that that was Joe Biden.
Hunter is constantly talking about giving kickbacks to the big guy.
His business associates are asking about the big guy and when he gets his money.
And then we have Hunter Biden's business partner, Bobolinski, who came out and said that the big guy is Joe Biden, that he's met Joe Biden, that they've talked about this, and that this was the business arrangement.
And he didn't just tell this to the media.
He told this to the FBI as well.
So it does seem like it seems like the most likely explanation here is that, yes, Joe Biden was getting kickbacks off of all this stuff.
That, no matter how you want to slice it, is what we like to call news.
That is news, you know?
And for that to be to have the intelligence agencies snap into position to try to squash this story to the benefit of the person challenging the sitting commander in chief, right?
Like these were Trump's intelligence agencies.
That is something really big.
And that you could easily look at as stealing an election.
It's not a stretch to call that a stolen election.
So whatever Fox News had to settle out of court for, perhaps, maybe the lesson there is that they really should have gone after what the real story of how the election was stolen was, not been searching after, you know, the stuff that Rudy Giuliani was telling you is coming that never came.
Unfair Credit Market Incentives00:10:14
And maybe there'll be the public against the newers organizations for the lack of research they did in promoting vaccines.
Yeah, I'm not holding my breath on that, but it's certainly if we lived in a just world, I think that would make sense.
All right, before we get out of here, you want to say something about this new Biden rule that just went into effect?
Essentially, Biden's going to hike payments for good credit home buyers to subsidize high-risk mortgages.
So all of these backward plans.
There's so many elements of this that are unfair and don't make sense.
So just first is the idea that you're going to punish people who have good credit to reward people that have bad credit, not very fair.
It's just not very fit.
So you're going to be incentivizing people to have worse credit.
So I should purposely, like, you might actually be able to sit down and do the math and go, oh, if I'm at a lower score, the government's going to actually subsidize.
I mean, people do this with health insurance.
People will actually forecast how much of their income.
Like, this is like the real evil side of the economy.
This is kind of like the poor rich or the people that earn good money in cash and don't declare it.
So then they can take all the government benefits.
And so you get like your Medicaid, but then you're still making a decent amount of money because you're not declaring a type situation.
So now you're going to be incentivizing the people that have saved and can actually go buy a home.
You're going to be incentivizing them to maybe have worse credit, maybe not pay a bill or something so they could actually have the government come in and subsidize them.
That's problem one.
Problem two is if you're now a person with good credit, not only are you going to have a higher interest rate to subsidize somebody else's house, but subsidizing somebody else to enter in the housing market's going to, what's that going to do?
It's going to increase demand for housing.
So now you're getting hit twice.
You're not just getting hit by the fact that you've got to subsidize your house.
You also have to get hit by the fact that you're going to be competing with that guy to go and buy a house.
Yeah.
There's the third part of it.
There's just one more element that's worth noting.
Go ahead.
We're now in a housing downturn, which is because they've raised interest rates.
The government, Wall Street, just the powers that be are kind of in a system where they need asset bubbles.
They need new credit to come into bubbles so that they can keep the inflated prices higher because most people, their single biggest investment is their house.
And when you start seeing that your biggest investment's not working out, you really get angry with government.
And also people start stop spending money.
Things come to a halt.
We've seen housing demand.
From what I can tell, I don't like religiously study this.
So I'm like, but I've seen a little bit of a reduction, I think, in housing demand since interest rates have gone up.
And I think you can forecast that housing was in a bit of a bubble.
And if interest rates continue to come down, I think you will see a decrease in the housing prices.
So I'm sure Biden's looking at this and thinking, okay, well, how do we keep this going?
Well, people can't get loans.
All right.
Well, how can we take the people who can't get loans and get them loans?
Well, the government will intervene and we'll figure out how we can subsidize so that they can get loans.
You're also describing pumping up a credit asset bubble, which is what got us into the 08 mess.
So just to kind of understand the layers of this, one, you're incentivizing bad behavior in the market because you're going to be basically fining people with good credit to subsidize people with bad credit.
Those same people, you're going to be driving up the value of their prices of the houses if they're going to get houses.
And also, you're now distorting the markets again to basically figure out how you can keep a bubble going.
Well, right.
I mean, you're subsidizing the people who are the most likely to default.
Right.
That doesn't seem like a real winning strategy long term.
You know, the other aspect to this, I think essentially everything you said there is right.
I think that's a good breakdown of it.
But I think that there, you know, there's something that you hear where people on the left talk about, if they talk about economics for more than a sentence, you're guaranteed to hear something about fairness.
You know, the rich paying their fair share, the income inequality, how unfair it is that some have so much and some have some so little.
And, you know, we talk about it a lot where obviously there is something that is very deep in human nature to object to unfairness.
It's something that, you know, if you have little kids, you notice they're very sensitive to it right away.
No fair is a thing that little kids say without anyone teaching them that you should object to something being unfair.
It's just very in us.
But fairness is a kind of, it's a nuanced thing and there's unfairness all around us.
And it's, it's easy to pick and choose that what you complain about is unfair.
I mean, it's, you know, it's unfair that LeBron James is so tall and athletic and the rest of us aren't.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know.
It's not exactly fair that he gets that, but he did.
And, you know, there's lots of things in life that are unfair.
And I'll touch on this a lot in my stand-up, but it's, it's un you think about what it takes to have a baby.
It's pretty unfair what women have to go through compared to what men have to go through.
There's lots of things that are unfair in the world.
And some of them we just have to accept are natural and there's not really that much we can do about them.
And then you can kind of pick and choose what you complain about that's unfair.
But for all these people on the left who are like so concerned with fairness, it's just, you know, your credit score is actually pretty damn fair.
And like credit score is not about like inherited wealth or getting a lucky break and getting a good job.
It's really just about how responsible you've been.
I know people who make a lot of money who had really shitty credit scores because they've just been irresponsible through their lives.
They just had bills they didn't pay things they didn't.
Listen, it's something I've gotten a lot better at.
But I know there have been bills that I just literally didn't pay because I forgot about them and I had the money to pay them.
I just fucking, I just forgot.
Like I'm just a very disorganized person.
My wife had much better credit than me when we first got together and I was making substantially more money than her.
She was just more organized and more on top of it.
And it's like, it's fair.
She deserves to be rewarded for that, you know?
Like there's nothing wrong with that system.
And so by the way, so my wife was, I remember she was, this is a couple of years ago.
She was approved for a credit card.
We both applied for one and she got approved and I didn't.
And I'm like, I'm her entire economy.
I will be paying the bill on her credit card.
You gave one to her.
You know, anyway, that was a little unfair.
But the point is, it's really kind of right.
It's because she had a bit more of a history of fucking paying her bills on time than I did.
I would be late on bills just because I forgot about them.
My point that I'm getting at really is, how about the fact that the person who did everything right is getting punished?
How about the unfairness to that person?
Like no one ever seems to care about that.
That the person who like maintained good credit, paid, you know, like was responsible for all of their obligations and then goes to get a house and has done everything right now.
They got to be, they have to subsidize the person who didn't.
Isn't that profoundly unfair?
It seems like no one cares about that fairness.
And you're already care about that a lot more.
You're already taxing me to make up for what other people don't have.
I'm just saying if you're a wealthy person and you're not even that wealthy, you're fucking middle class.
You're just trying to buy a house, which sucks.
You got to put down $200,000 so you can get a five story.
Like, I mean, it depends on the area that you're living.
In my area, you're probably going to get a home, maybe $800,000.
That's about what a house probably goes for around here.
Probably got to put down $200,000 and then you're paying what the equivalent would be in rent so that you can kind of save for retirement and live a little bit nicer.
That's what that looks like.
But it's like, once I get to that situation and listen, I don't know, maybe you're making six figures a year.
You're already paying for others people's shit, paying for the kids to go to school.
You're paying for people like you're paying your contribution.
It's just a new tax.
That's really what this is.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
It's just raising a tax on middle class people as if they haven't been bled dry enough.
And it hits you.
And it hits you as you're trying.
It is so stressful to buy a house and you really got to scrape and you got to put it to, you got to put it together.
And then to put it, finally put it together and try and achieve this thing and then be told, well, you got to give that little piece back to the government.
Like they just got to interject themselves.
And you're like, it's just not the time.
And it's just, it's just so wrong.
You know, I remember there was that great moment we played on the show.
This is back a few years ago when Elizabeth Warren got confronted by that dad.
And this is kind of that it gets right to the point of what I'm talking about with like, what about this unfairness?
But where he goes, so I, he goes, so I paid off all of my daughter's student loans and I worked extra shifts.
He goes, I worked overtime for years.
We never went on any vacation and I did all of that so I could pay back her loans.
And then my neighbors taking vacations, buying a third car, like doing all these things.
Now he, he gets his loans forgiven.
Like, are you going to pay me back for all those years?
And she's like, well, no, of course not.
And it's like, you just realize it's like, oh yeah, it's so unfair to punish the people who did everything right and reward the people who did everything wrong.
Just so that, how about that unfairness?
All right.
On that note.
That's going to be it.
Catch you guys in Chicago in a week.
Come check us out, comicdave Smith.com.
Go there for all the ticket links and dates.
RobbieTheFire.com at RobbyTheFire on Twitter and go check out Run Your Mouth, Run Your Mouth, excuse me, Rob's other podcast.