Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect the Durham Report, claiming it exposes the Trump-Russia collusion narrative as a fabricated deep state ploy originating from the Clinton campaign to distract from her email scandal. They allege CIA Director John Brennan and President Obama authorized an FBI inquiry based on false premises, manipulating FISA warrants against Carter Page while keeping intelligence personnel in the dark. The hosts argue this "deep state" operation damaged media credibility and justified future proxy wars in Ukraine, contrasting these political machinations with local outrage over NYC's plan to house asylum seekers in public schools, which they cite as evidence of socialism's failures and a violation of libertarian principles regarding property rights. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Government Overreach and Corruption00:14:48
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
We got a good one for you today.
Of course, I'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
We are getting ready to head out to old Tampa, Florida this weekend.
Side splitters, going to be doing a bunch of shows.
I think we've got four stand-up shows and a live part of the problem podcast out there.
And yeah, then a bunch more stuff.
We got Syracuse Funnybone coming up.
I'll be out at the comedy Mothership June 9th through 11th.
Come grab tickets for that because all these shows at this club sell out, but I want our people to be there in full force.
You know what I mean?
I don't want it to just, I want my people out there.
And we got a lot of people out in Austin.
So make sure you come on out to one of those shows.
And of course, Rob, you got your weekly show going on here in New York City.
I got the summer porch tour coming up.
RobbieTheFire.com.
RobbieTheFire.com.
Caffey Bohemia on Wednesday, Summer Porch Tour, Childerberg.
We're going to get rid of Kyle Schlob in a good way.
We're going to do a ceremony so that he just realizes he's been wrong and then he apologizes for stuff.
You know, nothing illegal or anything.
I don't know why you would have thought that's what I meant when I said get it.
Seems like an airtight plan to me.
Yeah.
And now my plugs are over because I made it weird.
So back to you, Dave.
ComicDaveSmith.com.
Go there for all this stuff.
All right.
Let's jump right into it, man, because there's a real an interesting development in that, of course, I'm talking about the Durham report, which was just released.
A lot to get into about this.
It's an interesting thing.
You know, I've talked about this before, how it's when you start to build a platform talking about, you know, in this space where we are, like talking about politics and things like that, you start kind of, there's these issues that you end up getting married to.
And, you know, of course, for us, it's, it's, was, it's been several different things.
There's, you know, personally, the, the Ukraine war is something that I've really been now associated with being like one of the kind of leading voices opposing the American support for the proxy war in Ukraine.
For the previous three years, for me and you, it was really the rise of the COVID regime and the vaccine mandates and all that stuff.
And there's just these issues.
It's kind of like what we try to do, I think, is decide what's the most important issue, you know?
And when it's the most important issue, you really dive into it.
You learn as much about it as you can and you try to, you know, articulate what your position is on it.
But if people can remember a before time, before all the latest round of insanity, I think for a while there, the issue that probably defined this show the most was the Russian conspiracy hoax.
And this was me and you, you know, back in the New York studio days before COVID lockdowns.
This was what me and you were like all in on and really, I think, really dissected for many, many, many episodes.
And it's interesting to now get this information.
Of course, I mean, not that we got new information.
as far as I'm concerned, the case had already been a slam dunk, you know, like proof that we had of what actually happened here.
And I'm, I'm very proud of the job that me and you did.
I stand by our track record.
I think it was much, much better than just about anything you would have gotten just about anywhere, certainly better than anything you would have gotten in the legacy media and the corporate press.
But it's just more, now just more information, which is, I will preface by saying, most of the new stuff that we learned here, I think if you follow the case that we had been making about this stuff for years, like I would have bet all the money I have in the world that this was the case.
But now it's just been confirmed.
So we can go through some of these things.
And then, of course, this also, let's just say the puzzles fit pretty neatly together for another angle that we've had on top of all of this.
So basically what we have been saying from the very beginning of this Trump-Russia collusion insanity, which if you can remember, I know it feels like a few years ago was a few centuries ago these days because so much crazy shit's happened in the last few years.
But if you can remember, back to this time, basically our central belief on the whole thing was that the entire narrative that Russia overthrew our elections, that Trump was compromised by the Russians, that the Russians had installed him and that there was some type of conspiracy going on here, that the entire thing was not only untrue, but that it was an intentional,
like deep state ploy to frame the sitting president at the time for treason in an attempted coup to essentially try to overthrow the democratically elected leader by framing him for treason.
But on top of that, we also, I think, made a pretty devastating case that contrary to the popular narrative on MSNBC, Bob Barr was not some Trump puppet.
In fact, he was a career-long deep stater who was much more of a bushite than a Trumpite.
And in fact, he was kind of there to play the role of controlled opposition to say, so they could come away and say, even Donald Trump's puppet admits that no charges can be brought against anyone.
And so this Durham report, in my view, fits very nicely with that.
It's years later after all, when all interest has kind of been lost in the subject, at least by the masses, I'm going to come out and let you know.
Yes, I can confirm that the government did the most horrific, shady things possible.
Clearly, the only like summary you could take from this is that there was a coordinated effort to try to frame the president of the United States for treason.
And my conclusion is that no charges will be brought.
Like more or less that to me is the, is the, if I could sum up in like a sentence or two, the Durham report, it's that.
Here is undeniable proof that all of these people conspired to frame the president of the United States.
And my recommendation is we shouldn't do that again.
That's more or less this report.
It seems to me like, I don't know, that's a fair sum up.
So I don't know where you want to start with this, Rob, but any thoughts you have on the Durham report?
At a minimum, where's my CNN apology?
I think people, you know, we all just move on and we forget, but it was a massive change in media and media coverage because newspapers, they got to fill.
They got to fill a Wall Street Journal prints in the morning and it's got to publish something.
And when two full years was dedicated to, hey, the president is a Russian asset, that meant we also wasted two years of our lives going, no, this is nonsense and this isn't what we should be talking about.
But guess what?
We all were existing in the landscape of bullshit.
Them putting out the bullshit, us debunking the bullshit.
Did we get our two years of life back?
We could have used our intellect for other activities.
But instead, they introduced bullshit.
We yelled about bullshit.
And then six years later, you find out, oh yeah, that was bullshit.
Well, there's, you know, it's been funny.
I've been checking in on a little bit of the corporate media's reaction to the report.
And it's mostly what you would think.
You know, Fox News is talking about what a bombshell this is.
CNN's talking about what a nothing burger it is.
I did see Anderson Cooper was, I guess you could give him a little bit of credit for this, but he did say something along the lines of like, this is really a devastating, you know, rebuke of the FBI.
Like, yeah, and CNN, dude.
Like, how about that?
How about you?
It's also like, this is devastating to you because your role is, at least what you pretend your role is, is not to just regurgitate what the authorities tell you, right?
So if they were all wrong about this, well, then you were also wrong for just nonstop pushing this.
I also do think that as much as there's lots of other examples of this, this is far from the only thing.
I would certainly say I think the war in Iraq really damaged media credibility in the country.
But I do think that, you know, when you talk about how this really changed the way that politics is covered, I think this really, really played a major role with forever losing credibility with about a half of the country for the corporate press.
Again, I'm not saying this was like the first thing.
Obviously, Trump supporters were very furious with the, you know, the mainstream media or whatever they would call it before any of this started.
But there was something, there was something that seemed kind of unique in scale about this one.
And that's not to say, like, obviously we're talking about lies where wars are started.
That's, that's a pretty huge scale.
I'm not trying to downplay that at all.
There is just something about making the claim every single day that the sitting president of the United States is a puppet of the Kremlin is such an incredible claim.
You know, like, it's like, if that's true, it's the biggest story in the history of the country by far.
You know, like, and then for that to be proven to be complete bullshit, how do you come back from that?
And there was an irony the whole time where they said that we can't allow people to lose faith in democracy.
Well, what is you saying a claim that the president is actually representing Russia due to our democracy?
It's a little bit in like the way that the last election, let's just say may or may not was stolen.
It doesn't really matter, but everyone realized, hey, we got to go with the winner because otherwise people are going to lose faith in the democracy.
So it doesn't, it was almost like it doesn't matter if it was stolen or not.
We need people to trust this system.
This guy won.
We're moving forward with that.
So what happens to two years of, hey, the guy who's in charge is actually a representative of Russia.
And then when you find out six years later, oh yeah, that whole thing was made up.
So they did the biggest, like they could not have done more for, not that I care about our democracy, but I'm just saying all that yelling about you can't trust our democracy.
Well, you got people to not trust the guy.
And then we found out that the entire infrastructure of our media and, you know, basically the deep state or intelligence agencies will work against a sitting president that's an outsider.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's right.
I think that's essentially the major takeaway.
But yeah, it's just, and on top of that, on top of all of that stuff, I also think, as you kind of alluded to just a few minutes ago, the inability of the corporate press to be able to grapple with their failure.
You know, like when you said, where's the apology?
It's like the idea that they thought they thought they could just say this for so long and then just drop it and move on.
Like as if that wasn't, you know what I mean?
Said a lot of stuff like this also happened through the COVID times, which was, you know, pretty crazy.
I mean, you know, you think about things like the example that we jumped on on this show was with Fauci claiming that he was never for lockdowns, which is like, that to me was like, like even for me who lives in this world of, let me tell you what, you know, corrupt like liars all these people are, even to me, I was like, the gall of that.
It's like, it would be like on the level of like George W. Bush saying, I never said I wanted to fight a war in Iraq.
That never happened, you know, or Obama being like, I never said anything about hope and change.
I'm not the hope change guy.
I don't know who, you know what I mean?
Like, it's just so like, but you think we don't remember?
Like there's, there's just endless hours of videotape of you.
You were doing daily press conferences.
Like, what are you talking about?
But so anyway, but for them to just kind of pivot from, from Donald Trump is a Russian asset to let's focus on why he's a bad guy in some other way and never kind of like grapple with that.
It's, it's kind of, you know, if you think about it, like in terms of a personal relationship, if you had like a very close friend or maybe, maybe someone you're dating or something like that, and you just found out that they lied to you, like very blatantly lied to you about something, that's going to change the way you feel about that person.
And I think that in some ways represents the relationship between the average American and the media, that they've just, it's kind of like, oh, I see that you've lied to me.
And it's not like you lied to me and you apologized about it and you've, you know, you promised to never do it again or something like that.
It's like, oh, you just, okay, I can't trust anything you say.
So that's kind of where we're at.
And this story has a lot to do with that.
The Trump-Russia Collusion Myth00:15:46
A lot.
The Trump-Russia collusion was like, they went all in on this story and came away with nothing, you know?
And like, you just think like to make an accusation like that, it would be kind of like, I mean, not the equivalent exactly, but it would be kind of like if instead of just like a few kooks and like maybe,
and Donald Trump was one of these kooks at the time, but if instead of just a few kooks saying Obama is actually a Kenyan Muslim who, you know, wasn't born in America and therefore doesn't have a right to be the president, if like the entire media went all in on that.
And we're like, whoa, this is the good, they're, they're claiming this is real.
This is the same.
And then it just came, oh, yeah, there's no truth to that.
Zero.
And you just found his records.
Now he was born in Hawaii and lived in Kansas.
None of that's true.
Like, oh my God, you went all like in order to make these claims, you must have had something.
And no, they really had nothing.
All right.
So let's get into some of the takeaways of the Durham report, which were some things I guess the key things that we didn't know, or again, just to be clear, things that given what we did know, I would have bet my life savings on, but we didn't actually have proof of this.
One of the major details was that this started, this plot to paint Donald Trump as being involved in a conspiracy with Russia started in the Hillary Clinton campaign.
This we knew.
This we knew beforehand.
However, what we did not know is who knew that, right?
Like we knew that this started at the Hillary Clinton campaign and then went to the intelligence agencies.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Not only did the FBI and the Department of Justice know about this, but in fact, the head of the CIA, Brennan, briefed Obama about this.
So this really does, although, of course, we always would have guessed Barack Obama was aware of this.
We've talked about this before on the show, but it used to just be speculation.
It is no longer speculation.
We all thought, well, look, if like the app, we knew it was like went up to the absolute highest levels.
We knew it went up to at least the head of the FBI and the attorney general and the CIA director.
You know, is it really likely that all of them are involved in this operation against a presidential campaign and Obama was unaware of it?
I suppose it was possible, but I would have bet every dollar I had that it wasn't.
But we now know that Obama was briefed on this.
And so just to keep this in mind, that Obama, through all the time when he was pushing the theories as well, he was well aware that this had started in Hillary Clinton's campaign as a specific tactic to, as it says in the report, to distract away from her email scandal to say, oh, yeah, well, he's in bed with Vladimir Putin.
And this way they could also lump Julian Assange in with the Russians.
And then anytime they wanted to talk about Hillary Clinton's emails, this could be her out.
Well, you know, this is just because my opponent's a Russian puppet, as she called him at one of the debates.
If you remember, there was an interesting moment in the 2016 debates when Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump a Russian puppet.
This is, again, Rob, if you're talking about changes in the way media covers the debates, changes in politics.
That is, look, for someone who's who's 40, who kind of remembers the time before this latest batch of insanity, as crazy as politics is, and it's always, you know,
it's always corruption, but like, that was something you just wouldn't hear between the Republican and Democratic nominee on the presidential debate stage to look over to the other person and say, you're a Russian puppet.
That's kind of a new line.
And Donald Trump's response, interestingly enough at the time, was he goes, I'm no puppet.
You're the puppet, which just seems kind of like a Donald Trump third grade response.
Although now it, you know, it seems like there might have been a little bit more to it.
So any thoughts on any of that stuff, Rob?
I do think that that's probably the most, we were talking about the Brennan CIA meeting, but I guess that was more speculative.
But it does appear that all the puzzle pieces have been laid out to just go, Hillary Clinton sat down, she thought this one up, and they just ran with it for four years and undermined him.
I mean, half of his presidency was revolved around just trying to defeat these claims in the media.
Like he might have been able to get that wall built.
He might have been able to put forward other initiatives, but he was Democratically elected.
And, you know, the people that wanted him in there were definitely deprived of him having like a valid presidency.
Yeah, no, that's right.
It's worth mentioning also that Durham was turned down for interviews with several key players here, which is crazy that they're even allowed to do this.
Like they just wouldn't cooperate with him.
James Comey, Andrew McCabe, William Price Step, Glenn Simpson, a whole bunch of them.
And Peter Strzok agreed to talk, but only about like one specific aspect and wouldn't answer questions about anything else.
There were a whole lot of people who just straight up would not cooperate with this investigation.
And he still came away with what he did.
There was another really interesting little part of this report where it described, reading from Politico here, the report describes a dramatic moment in one of the Durham interviews.
During the 2016 campaign, the U.S. intelligence community learned of Russian intelligence analysis, alleging that Clinton's team planned to stir up a scandal about Trump's Russia's ties to distract the public from her email server problem.
The unverified Russian claim has been previously disclosed, and Democrats have derided it as incendiary disinformation from a foreign adversary that was seeking to meddle in the election.
In 2016, then CIA Director John Brennan briefed then President Barack Obama on it.
However, according to Durham, most of the crossfire hurricane personnel he discussed it with hadn't seen it, including the probe's original supervisory special agent.
After reviewing the Russian intelligence with Durham's team, the agent became visibly upset and emotional, left the interview room with his counsel and subsequently returned to state emphatically that he had never been appraised of it, according to the report.
The agent, quote, expressed a sense of betrayal that no one had informed him of the intelligence.
He added that regardless of its veracity, someone should have told him about it.
James Baker, the FBI's former general counsel, also said he'd first learned of the intelligence from Durham's team.
He said that if he had known about it during the probe, he would have been much more skeptical, much more skeptical about Christopher Steele's reports about allegations of a secret channel between the Trump organization and a Russian bank.
Durham said other FBI agents would also have been more skeptical about Trump-Russian allegations had they seen the intelligence, which would have reduced the risk of reputational damage, both to the targets of the investigation as well as ultimately to the FBI.
So this was a real interesting piece here where you're finding out that people, even at the FBI, at pretty high levels, were kept in the dark about the fact that they knew that this was a Hillary Clinton campaign plot and that Obama knew about this and Brennan knew about this.
Brennan's here briefing Obama about this.
So they're sitting here and then they're letting these guys go off and believe that they're actually cracking down on some type of conspiracy here.
Whereas if they had known this information, they would have been like, oh, but Christopher Steele was hired by the Clintons.
This is the campaign effort.
I kind of call bullshit on that too.
And here's why.
You ever watch like Andy Kaufman when he was feuding with like that wrestler guy and the guy like Jerry Lawler.
Jerry Lawler.
So from what I understand of that little incident, they never talked about it, but they both understood that they were playing a game.
Kind of if you ever take a really gay improv class to learn about the game of the scene, you don't actually have a conversation about the game that you're playing, but you get it.
When Hillary Clinton shows up and goes, hey, I think Donald Trump's a Russian.
I don't think she necessarily even needs to speak out the entire thing.
And Obama goes, can we, you think we can look into that?
And Brennan goes, oh, we can certainly look into that.
In fact, I actually have this intelligence report.
No one's asking.
No one cares.
They all get what they're doing.
Oh, that might be sticky enough.
And then they give their marching orders over to the people at the FBI.
Are the FBI running back up to the CIA?
No, they just got their marching orders.
Hey, we're doing an investigation to see whether or not Trump's a Russian asset.
They get what they're doing.
They're not asking the questions.
Oh, you know what I mean?
They're getting their marching orders.
They get what's going on.
Yes.
Well, I agree with that on that level of guys.
I think Brennan, I think Comey, Obama, Hillary Clinton, all of those guys.
I do, by the way, I'll grant, it's possible also when they're just talking to these FBI agents who are like furious that they were kept out of the dark.
It's also possible that just as this is coming out, they realize how illegal the shit they did was.
And this is the guy who's going to be recommending charges or not.
And they're like, oh, well, no one ever told me that.
And if I had been told, I would have acted completely differently.
It's also possible that there are a lot of people within these institutions who are actually brainwashed into believing in the institutions.
You know what I mean?
And they're actually like, well, no, we wouldn't be doing that.
I wouldn't be getting these orders unless there was really a credible source that Donald Trump is working in bed with the Russians and we're saving democracy.
Like it is, it is possible to me either way on that front.
I don't know.
I wouldn't be surprised either way.
Is Comey still posting sad Instagram?
Didn't he write a book like My Struggle or whatever?
Yes.
Like a Mein Kampf book, but about Trump instead of the Jews.
You think, you know what would be an interesting starting point in terms of unraveling this is Mueller.
What was he doing for two years?
I mean, you and I thought that Donald Trump was going to go down because they were going to concoct this crazy, nonsensical thing and they'd, you know, be able to open up enough doors that they would get him for something else.
And he managed to somehow survive that.
I mean, talk about, there's some truth to the fact.
Greatest witch hunt ever, Donald Trump is still standing.
He must be the cleanest individual that ever graced politics in America.
It's one of the only aspects of this whole saga that we really got wrong.
Oh, that we thought that they would get him for a while.
We thought they'd find something.
We were like, there's no way they're going to, because that's the whole plan here is they'll make this shit up.
They'll sick the special prosecutor on him and they'll find some crime he's committed over the years unrelated to Russia and then just say, look, in the course of this investigation, we found this.
But now that we know that the basis of the investigation was false, and maybe Brian, you can look up how much money was spent on that, but I believe it went on for at least two years and Mueller kept up the racket like they were on to something the entire time.
But now with the retrospective over that, we know that this was the Clintons came up with a campaign. to try and pretend like he was a Russian asset.
They got the deep state on it.
What was he actually doing for two years?
He had this incredibly well-paid prosecuting team.
What were they looking into for two full years?
What were they doing?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, and as look, we've made the point before, but it's worth restating here that Mueller could have come out at any time and put an end to this like insane media blitz.
Well, he was a part of it.
He's one of the higher.
Clearly.
Yeah.
Clearly.
And he was and right, because it seems like in many ways that was kind of one of the one of the points of the whole thing, right?
Was to be like, well, look, even if we can't remove him, then we'll be able at least to make this the story of his entire presidency and box him into a corner where he can't work with Russia, you know, which is, by the way, again, if you, if you remember back then, you know, this was Donald Trump was running on shouldn't we have détente with Russia and get along with Russia and work with them to end all of the wars in the Middle East.
They're in Syria at the time killing ISIS.
Great.
We'll let them kill ISIS.
We'll pull our troops out.
We'll get out of the business of trying to overthrow these regimes in the Middle East and we'll make friends with Russia.
We'll have a good relationship with them.
And then this was to box him into a corner where he couldn't follow through on that because when you're getting called a Russian spy every day on TV, it's pretty hard to then come out and say, I'm cutting a deal with Russia, because that would have just been, look, proof that he is in fact a Russian spy.
And so he didn't.
And in fact, he started trying to prove what a Russian spy he wasn't by being more adversarial toward Russia.
And didn't that work out wonderfully?
Where we are now.
What a great, what a great strategy that was for the safety of the world.
Not to mention the people of Ukraine who have suffered the brunt of it.
And think about how much better off we would have been if this information came out sooner, because there could have been so many people that just knew that they shouldn't have opinions.
And then they would have been spared getting the vaccines.
Imagine if people could have found out two years ago, oh, I got, I was lied into thinking that my president is actually a Russian asset.
I remember being at dinner parties and people being just convinced of it.
Fucking liberal snobbery, just giving you hell, saying Donald Trump, he clearly is a, you know, a traitor and he works for the Russians.
People believe this shit.
People still believe it.
And if it's not true, but if the truth came out years ago, people would have realized, oh, I'm really dumb and I shouldn't be listening to the television and I shouldn't be having opinions.
And then they wouldn't be walking around with mRNAs in them right now.
Yeah, quite possibly.
Maybe, or maybe not, or maybe they still would have found a way.
But it's an interesting thought experiment.
Mueller's Indictment Conclusion00:02:03
But no question that Mueller could have come out and said this.
And look, at the beginning, at the very beginning of it, he could have just been like, look, like just an update on the investigation.
There has been no evidence thus far that Donald Trump is involved with any type of Russian conspiracy.
And again, as we mentioned before, there was something very revealing about that BuzzFeed article, if you remember, that came out shortly before the investigation wrapped up, where they claimed that they had seen proof that Donald Trump had instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.
Therefore, he was clearly guilty of a serious crime.
He was going down.
Mueller was going to hand out indictments.
And Mueller came out and said, these reports are not true.
He didn't come out, but one of his top guys came out.
Mueller sent him out to go say, no, no, no, this isn't true.
And it just kind of proves you're like, oh, so you're, you can do that.
If there's a report in the media saying that you have some type of evidence that you don't actually have, you could come out and say, no, no, no, no, that's this report is incorrect.
We don't have that evidence.
And yet there were reports in the media every day for two years that Donald Trump was involved in a conspiracy with the Russians and not just people in the media saying it, but like Hillary Clinton saying it and Adam Schiff saying it and Nancy Pelosi saying it and all these people claiming they had the same thing BuzzFeed did, claiming they had seen the evidence and that Robert Mueller has this evidence and he never bothered to come out and do that.
And so that right there is, I mean, you know, if that doesn't expose the whole goddamn thing, I don't know what would.
And what makes it even more confusing is Mueller's conclusion was that he wasn't off the hook.
I forgot the exact terminology that he said, but that it was not, it wasn't clearing him.
There just wasn't enough information to move forward with the prosecution.
With that being said, though, it is odd that the Durham report lost both of its core cases and will not move forward with anything.
The best we might see is a congressional clearing.
Fast-Growing Trees and Protocols00:03:17
They won these characters.
They won one court case.
There were three.
And one of them, they won.
They got the FBI guy who forged or manipulated the FISA warrant for Carter Page.
But of course, he got no jail time.
He did get convicted, but got no jail time, or he pled guilty, but got no jail time.
This is, of course, the guy who manipulated the application for the FISA warrant on Carter Page that kicked off the whole thing.
Remember Carter Page, who was supposed to be a Russian spy as well.
And they got three FISA warrants on him.
He was never charged with anything because it was all bullshit.
And in fact, the CIA had told the FBI that we know Carter Page is not a Russian spy because he's working with us.
So it was a whole crazy thing there.
By the way, a couple other little details in the report that were kind of interesting.
They did ask Hillary Clinton herself about this.
And this is what a great Hillary Clinton response to this.
I just, this jumped out at me as so funny.
She said it was really sad.
I get it.
You have to go down every rabbit hole.
It's just so funny that that's just Hillary Clinton because it's just a sad, it's a sad day for our country when you figure out that it was all me lying to everybody.
But I understand you got to go down every rabbit hole.
I get it.
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I don't know.
Anything else, Rob, you think that I, uh, that I missed that we should be talking about here with this?
What, that are key takeaways in the actual report?
Yeah, any other key takeaways?
Framing Trump and Putin00:11:59
Well, the big one was definitely that it all seems to be Clinton established.
Then they broke all the protocols.
Not only did they break the protocols, but they ignored alternative evidence of the fact.
Like there was evidence that seemingly had been presented to the FBI that this was Clinton information and that there were other things that were worth investigating from the Clintons that were just overlooked.
So they certainly broke protocols.
If there's one clean takeaway, it's that the intelligence community is clearly operating for essentially the deep state, that your connected actors such as the Clinton could say, hey, here's what I'm looking for, and they'll go and do it, which we also saw quite clearly with the CIA with the Biden laptop.
I mean, if this isn't just clear as day to people, that the FBI and other of these, the intelligence, 40 intelligence people have said in this, like all that that we've heard now for eight years is being the basis for why every decision is made by government officials.
Well, this is the information I got from the intelligence community.
I mean, everyone should just hear that now and laugh and realize, okay, that means nothing.
You might as well hear, you might as well tell me you walked in the park and there was a talking frog that gave you this information.
Yeah.
So that was right.
That was one of Durham's major conclusions was that basically they were completely unfair in the way they treated the Clinton campaign versus the Trump campaign, that there were several things they could have started investigations about on the Hillary Clinton campaign that they didn't, and that they really never should have started this investigation.
He does come out and say that there was no justification to start this investigation against Donald Trump at all.
It should have been obvious from all the information they had that there was really nothing to go on here.
And so, of course, this whole thing was, you know, kind of nonsense.
But of course, as the conclusion of Durham's report here is, and I'll quote from him here, not every injustice or transgression amounts to a criminal offense.
He said, the law does not always make a person's bad judgment, even horribly bad judgment, standing alone a crime.
He also made a statement somewhere in it that it's not so much that the FBI's protocols need to be changed.
It's more, it's like kind of what you said about laws or spells.
It's like you can have all perfect protocols.
If people are ignoring the protocols, it doesn't matter.
Like if you got a guy who's lying on the FISA war and it doesn't matter what the procedure is in the PI and the, it doesn't matter.
The guy's lying on the thing.
It's only as good as the people who are.
Well, the point is that laws aren't spells, but people treat them like they are.
As, you know, I remember joking around with Michael Malice about this.
We were talking about like the idea of like, you know, when like someone's pulled over by a cop and they're like screaming at the cop, I know my rights.
You know, and like you've seen a million videos like this where someone's like yelling at the cop, they, I know my rights.
And then I just watch them get dragged out of their car by the cop.
And it really is when you think about it, it's like the psychosis involved in this is like you have like a piece of paper and outside your car is a man with a gun.
And you're like, I know what's written down on this paper.
And it's like, there's like, it's like imaginary world and real life.
Real life is dude with a taser who's pointing a taser at you about to tase you.
And then you almost have like, like you have a copy of the Bill of Rights.
And it's almost like you're sitting there going like, hocus pocus.
Like, you know, you're not allowed to tase me.
And then he's like, okay.
And just lights you up.
Like it's, it's that, it doesn't matter necessarily what the rules are.
In a sense, uh, um, Durham's right about that.
He's kind of like, well, we already have rules about this.
We just need to follow the rules.
Um, anyway, this is uh, look, it's just, it's just one more piece of evidence.
There's a lot of them at this point.
Uh, there are too many to go through in one show.
But it's one more piece in this puzzle, which just kind of, it makes it pretty clear what happened here.
I really do think for anybody who's being honest and paying attention, it's just, it's, it's way beyond the point that you could deny it, that it's just like, oh, yeah, yeah, Donald Trump was fucking set up for this.
People get so goddamn bizarre when particularly with Donald Trump, it brings out an unbelievable amount of just ridiculous tribalism and kind of this deranged religiosity about where you feel.
You know, I've been getting this for years now, but you know, you'll, you'll, I'll say things like, you know, I'll be like, okay, Donald Trump was clearly framed for treason by his own deep state.
And people will be like, oh, so Dave loves Donald Trump.
Oh, really?
Well, don't you know he did this thing wrong and this thing wrong?
And you're like, well, yes, okay.
That can be true.
And it can also be true that he was framed by his own deep state for treason.
That's, they don't contradict each other.
This is just what happened.
That's that.
You know, the other thing that is one of my kind of major takeaways of all of this is like, given everything that we know now, it really is interesting that, look, there's two, basically two people who are being framed here and or two entities, whatever, a person and a country.
But you, we focus a lot on how Donald Trump was framed.
And that is fair because, you know, as Americans, it's, it's a, it's a crazy thing.
No matter how much we all know this, uh, this system is corrupt.
It's such a crazy thing for the sitting president to be framed by his own deep state that is supposed to work for him.
That's like, it's, it's shocking to anyone, to any normie.
That would be crazy shocking.
And even to people who are kind of like hip to some of this stuff, it's still like, wow, they really went for it.
They really did it.
But Donald Trump is not the only, you know, person being framed here.
And the other person is Vladimir Putin.
And to me, that's kind of another angle of this that I think people don't appreciate enough is that it's not just if you say like, you know, Vladimir Putin overthrew our elections to install Donald Trump.
That's not just framing Donald Trump for being a Russian asset or whatever.
You're also framing Vladimir Putin for being in this conspiracy with Donald Trump that he was not involved in.
And now that we're in this situation where we are fighting a proxy war on Russia's borders, it's just interesting to think about how this all plays in to each other.
You know, there's, if you go back to the uh, that 2008 memo that uh, the current CIA director, Bill Burns, wrote to Condoleeza Rice.
Of course, at the time, Bill Burns was the ambassador to Russia and Condoleeza Rice was the secretary of state and the the memo is entitled, net means nyet and uh um, we only have this because Julian Assange uh leaked it.
This was a private cable.
This was not for the public.
This is what the ambassador was telling the Secretary of State to keep her apprised on the situation, not thinking about public relations or what the propaganda angle is here that we're trying to tell the people, just what they were saying behind closed doors, or so they thought.
And he talks about the whole memo is about Ukrainian entry into NATO and how much this is going to be a problem for Russia.
And there's a passage in there where he says, basically, like all the experts here are saying that because of the deep divides in Ukraine, if we push for Ukraine to join NATO, it's going to lead to instability.
It could even lead to a civil war there, like the civil war they had from 2014 through 2022.
He goes, it could even lead to a civil war there.
So he's predicting something that comes true later.
And he goes, in that eventuality, Russia will have to decide if they want to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to make.
That's what our CIA director, then ambassador to Russia, is telling our Secretary of State.
He's saying Russia doesn't want to do this.
Okay.
They don't want to have to be faced with this choice.
But that did happen.
There was a civil war there ultimately, obviously.
They did decide to intervene by invading the country.
But this is something interesting to keep in mind.
Even according to Burns from years before the invasion, he was saying Russia does not want to be in a position where they have to make this decision.
And what I would submit is that it seems to me like this was a move of desperation from Vladimir Putin.
He knew how dangerous this would be and how, you know, how many problems this could cause for him.
And so when you think about this, and of course, if anyone says the Russians were provoked in any way, you know, you get denounced as like whatever, you're spreading Putin propaganda or some ridiculous shit like that.
But just look, just think about this, because that's the other big like elephant in the room here, is that it's not just that they framed Donald Trump.
It's that they framed Vladimir Putin too.
And think about what that might, like, what would your mentality be like from the, from Vladimir Putin's point of view?
You know, just strategically think about that.
Doesn't mean you have to agree with him, but like, let's think about it from that point of view.
When you have the most war-hungry country in the world, the United States of America's federal government, and you have the CIA director, you know, the CIA, our war-making machine, when you have them all publicly claiming that you have overthrown our democracy, like really laying down a justification for war,
like telling the world, it's not just that idiots like Brian Stelter were saying it.
It's that idiots like John Brennan were saying it.
You've got the highest level of the American intelligence apparatus claiming every single day that you have overthrown the democracy of the United States of America.
You did something that the British Empire couldn't do, that the Nazis couldn't do, that the commies couldn't do.
You did it.
Something Osama bin Laden couldn't do.
All the enemies we've had, the first one to ever overthrow our democracy is Vladimir Putin.
You know, if you are, if anyone heard that, they would have to start preparing themselves for war, right?
I mean, like, you'd be like, oh, okay, you know what these, you know what these Americans do when they start saying that you, when they start laying the groundwork, they're not just saying he's got weapons of mass destruction or something like that, you know?
They're not just saying like, oh, he's about to go genocidal.
They're saying he started a war with us.
That certainly, if true, would have been an act of war, a more severe act of war than anything you could imagine.
CrowdHealth and Bitcoin Options00:03:00
He stole the election from Hillary Clinton and installed his puppet.
In hindsight, it might have been a little reckless to be talking that way about Russia.
Maybe that wasn't smart policy.
This may have some unintended consequences associated with it.
Anyway, you know, people can, the people in the corporate press can try to pretend all they want to, like, oh, this is a nothing burger because his conclusion was I'm not going to charge anyone.
But it is not.
This is one of the biggest stories in the history of the country.
It's goddamn insane and really interesting and really revealing about how this system actually works.
So anybody who's telling you, oh, this is, I don't know, it's a nothing burger.
There is like, there's no mind there to be able to look at this and not be like, no, this is an incredible story.
Incredible.
One of the biggest in American history.
So I'm guessing we'll get a congressional hearing that will try and pull in some of these characters.
Although Brennan on the CIA on the letter thing, that just happened behind closed doors.
So, you know, they might, they might manage to avoid the cameras on this.
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Reversing Vicious Healthcare Incentives00:02:49
There were a couple of things too in the report where they said people were saying, like, don't write things down anymore.
They were being like, don't send emails anymore.
Don't write things down.
This should all be done in conversation.
And then it kind of cuts off there.
It's like they started to realize we can't have a paper trail of this shit.
Right.
Do you think anything comes of this?
Because this is pretty, you'd think even the American public would be upset or at least half the country that voted for Donald Trump going, oh, wow, the deep state really did like have a coup against him.
Yeah.
When you say, does anything come of this?
The government, and this is something you point out often, the government does not have a self-accountability capability.
Like there's nothing in the government that ever keeps the government in check.
And of course, there's incentives that kind of guide that process along.
You're not very incentivized to limit your own, you know, power.
So no, I don't think I think that there might be some show hearings in Congress.
I wouldn't be surprised about that.
In fact, I think there probably will be.
So I don't think anything will happen in the sense of someone's going to get arrested or go to jail or something's going to be overhauled.
I do think that this is just another step in the institutions being completely discredited.
But someone like Brennan, is he now just officially discredited in front of a normie?
Like if he's on, you know, CNN and he's giving his analysis to people, just go, yeah, but you lied to me twice now about intelligence.
I think a lot more do.
I think a lot more do for sure.
Look, I think at this point, saying, look, it's hard to imagine or it's hard.
It's hard to really kind of grasp because if you look at this thing like day by day or even week by week or month by month, it's hard to measure.
But if you look at it, say decade by decade, you know, there's, it's like when I was bringing up the example of the wrestling angle where Sergeant Slaughter betrayed America and everyone's like, oh, you Iraqi, USA, USA.
You know, if in say 1985, which, you know, seems like forever ago, but it's, it's four decades, you know?
But if you look at, say, in 1985 and someone went, the CIA, you know, some newspaper goes, the CIA came out and said, we have intelligence that so-and-so has happened.
I think that was enough to get almost every normie American to go, hmm, all right.
Well, that's pretty serious.
I mean, the CIA says we have intelligence.
And now, today, I think a huge percentage of the population is absolutely just rolling their eyes at that.
Well, I want to know if a trans person worked on it, because if not, you guys aren't being inclusive.
Migrants, Schools, and Parental Concerns00:14:39
And then what is this?
It's not intelligence.
It's something else.
It's not intelligence.
That's just white privilege right there.
But so that's, that's what I think is really the biggest outcome of all of this is another thing that is really just eroding whatever trust and faith in institutions is left.
And I think that's the best thing to come out of all of this.
All right.
In the little bit of time we have left, let's let's transition to one other topic that I did.
Let's transition ourselves, Rob, into a couple of beautiful ladies who kick ass at swimming.
Can I wear a wig?
Let's transition into a couple of beautiful ladies who happen to be Olympic gold medalists.
Can it be a different sport?
Because I don't think my wig would work in the pool.
If I'm going to be a lady, I want beautiful hair again.
Okay.
All right.
Fine.
You get hair and you can pick whatever other sport you want to.
Thank you.
I like this plan now.
All right.
Fine.
It's reminding me of your bit about this, which is great, by the way.
I won't tell you now, but come see us.
Come see Rob do some stand-up.
Okay.
So there's this latest thing, which I just felt like I had to talk about this story.
I tweeted earlier.
I said reality keeps stealing my hypotheticals.
So we just did this episode recently where I talked all about immigration and I was using the hypothetical example of like people entering public schools.
All right.
So New York City said, Dave, hold my beer.
And they are now, there's a, this is really happening.
There is a plan going into effect immediately to house immigrants in public schools.
Here, Brian, I think you have a little video of this.
Why don't you play from that?
Schools will be used to house incoming asylum seekers.
All right.
As you can imagine, many parents aren't happy with the plan, claiming they were never told.
Ashley Rodriguez live outside one of those schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn tonight with reaction to the latest plan.
Ashley.
Yeah, that's exactly what parents are saying.
I mean, really, the city surprised everyone in this area that they were bringing migrants to be housed at the school.
They told them yesterday afternoon.
And not only that, the migrants will be taking over the newly renovated gym that services both PS17 and MS 577.
Give it to your parents.
Tell us how they am.
You gotta protect your gym.
Parents of PS17 and MS 577 in Williamsburg stand outside during dismissal Monday afternoon, passing out flyers that say in big bold letters, keep our kids safe.
I don't mind giving a helping hand, but when it interferes with the education of our students, yes, I do care.
Parents say they were given no notice about how many migrants are coming and who they are.
Not only that, but the school's recently renovated gym is now off limits.
They waited like two years for the gym to get built and to come outside or win to locked up in school.
The kids will effectively be under a lockdown during recess, and they blame Mayor Eric Adams.
They intend to tell him what's on their mind through a rally Tuesday at 8 a.m.
The mayor really gotta look into the law, into what's permissible.
The location of PS17 and MS 577 is now one of 150 temporary shelters in the city, not counting the six locations recently designated.
The news coming down is 4,200 migrants arrived in the city last week.
It doesn't have to be in the public schools.
They can put them somewhere else.
PS17 does have a standalone gym.
You can see it right there.
The only issue, according to parents, is that they have to leave open the gate so that migrants can come and go freely.
And as you can see, the school is just feet away.
There's no safety.
They're giving us one safety officer, just one additional one.
We only have two for a school of 700 kids.
The mayor's office responded saying, we are out of space.
As the mayor has said, nothing is off the table as we work to fill our moral mandate.
But we should all expect this crisis to affect every city service.
That's not fair.
Hey, you gotta.
You go first.
Well, it's just, it's a very interesting, it's interesting on a lot of different levels.
Of course, it is, it's in Williamsburg, right?
So it kind of reminds me of like the Martha's Vineyard thing, but it's in this incredibly liberal area.
They have been demagoguing this issue for years about how you don't have a heart unless you want to open up, you know, and let all of these immigrants in.
But then, of course, they're furious about it when it touches them.
You know, like it's fine as long as it's somebody else's problem.
And this to me has been the essence of the point I've been making when talking to other goofy libertarians and trying to smack some common sense into them.
You know, like I remember I debated this with a couple of the Mises caucus guys who, by the way, I'm not, I'm not even trying to insult them.
These are like my people.
I love these guys to death.
But I was talking to one of them and I was like, well, look, you know, I was floating out the idea of a sponsorship program where I was like, well, look, if within the context of a government, you want to simulate libertarian immigration as much as possible, then have it be like, hey, if you're invited and sponsored by a citizen, meaning if someone invites you, but then they have to, like, they have to take liability for you.
So if you're my cousin in Italy, Rob, and I say, I want Rob to come move in with me, then I have to sign that whatever habit, whatever health issues, whatever anything, you know, like that Rob needs, I'm on the hook financially for if he can't pay for it.
So it doesn't get passed on to onto the taxpayer, then okay, maybe that's the best situation.
That way you have genuinely invited guests have a right to come and not invited guests don't have a right to come.
That's a pretty good simulation of how a free private property society would work that property owners can decide, right?
And one of them said to me, he was like, well, look, I forget his family had a farm or something like that.
And they used to have like day laborers come and work.
And he goes, yeah, but in that system, like there's no way we could have afforded to have these guys come and work.
And it's like, yeah, that's the point.
That's the point.
You can't afford to pay for their health care and their school and all this shit.
And so now the taxpayer is subsidizing that.
That's the part that libertarians are against.
And so you just, you see in this example here where it's like, yeah, it's easy to say libertarians, the open borders types will often use these arguments where they'll go, well, you know, they'll be like, what, you, you're for immigration restriction?
Well, if I want to have an immigrant on my property, that I have every right to do that.
And I'll always be like, okay, sure.
How many you got?
How many are on your property right now?
Oh, none.
So you're not actually standing up for the right of you to have an immigrant on your property.
It's just like these liberals.
It's like, no, for someone else to do it.
You know, like you're not really advocating that you have to sacrifice something.
You're advocating other people get forced to do it.
And that's, so that's one point.
And then the other thing is like, when you look at this, like it's like, look, in the real world here, this isn't some type of market phenomenon.
This is the government coming in and saying, we're going to use this area that we taxed you for, we forced you to pay for for the purpose of educating your kids.
And we're deciding that's going to be used now to house migrants.
And like, who like, I mean, just look at this.
Nothing's perfect when the government is involved from a libertarian point of view.
But like, who has more of a claim on what should be going on in this public school?
These parents who have been forced to fund the thing or a group of people who just showed up here.
They seem to almost all be men, by the way.
And like, you know, as a parent, you're like, look, it's not a matter as so many progressives often frame the issue.
It's not a matter of like whether you have any sympathy for these people or you don't.
Like I have sympathy for people who are coming from, you know, from Latin America up here.
Yeah.
They've had a much harder life than I have and it's horrible and it's a goddamn disaster down there.
And I understand why they want to come.
I'd want to come if I were them too.
But you also go like, look, man, you got, you have a group of men from coming from third world countries in a very different culture than ours.
You don't know what they are, who they are, what their background is, what they're capable of.
And now they're just like, oh, they're going to be staying at your kids' school.
I mean, like, I can't imagine how I would feel if I was in a situation where those were my kids in the school.
I'd be goddamn outraged over it.
I'm very fortunate that I'm in a situation where I can, you know, I have more options than that.
But it's, I just don't know how anyone could look at this and not just be like, this is insane.
It's goddamn insane.
Well, I know that this isn't going to solve the problem to socialism and that this is also somewhat the argument that people were making as why they might appreciate a homeless or a drug addict in a public school.
But doesn't this seriously showcase the stupidity of socialism?
Because as far as I'm concerned, what you so you guys think that you deserve my money for your kids to play in a gym, but not to house these people who are from a third world country?
Who needs this area more right now?
If we're talking about redistributing wealth towards people that need it, do your kids need to play basketball in the afternoon more than these people need to not be homeless.
So do you, what, what, what, what, you don't care about fairness or equity in any capacity?
That is what's interesting about it happening in Williamsburg is that it does just kind of hang these guys by their own logic.
If the government's forced, I don't have kids.
I don't care about your kids' education.
I'd rather keep that money, go spend on sandwiches.
You're going to force me to give it up.
I'd rather it house this dirty person who just came over the border and might rob and murder your kid in the schoolyard.
I'd prefer that.
I'm just saying I feel more bad for that guy than your kid needing to play basketball in the afternoon.
And here's the biggest irony.
You know how we keep them away from your kids on the playground?
A wall there.
You just put up a nice wall between the gym and your kids.
And then you don't have to worry about them coming in while you're trying to while you're trying to be in school.
Oh, man.
It is unbelievable how quickly you could turn a progressive into a fucking make America great again Trump start.
You show up and you go get real.
Well, it is.
I will say that I find this.
So there was a, I responded on Twitter to one of the, there was some like a progressive woman on some podcast or something like that.
And she was talking about that story just recently where the guy got choked to death on the subway.
And she was telling a story about like a crazy, some crazy homeless drug addict guy on like a bus or a train or something like that who elbowed her in the face and the stomach.
And this is, and she was so goofy, such a goofy progressive about it.
And she was going like, and, you know, it hurt and I was scared, but I also realized that this moment wasn't about my fear.
It was about this man who was suffering and how this was a mental health crisis and the system had failed him and blah, blah, blah.
And all this.
And, you know, I'm not against having sympathy for schizophrenic drug addicts.
Like I, I get that.
That's horrible.
And I guarantee a lot of people failed that person for them to be in the situation they're in now and also just got a raw deal from biology.
There's a lot going on there that sucks.
I just find this thing very bizarre where sympathy for say like a schizophrenic drug addict is supposed to take precedence over women and children being physically safe.
That's just what's strange to me.
It's like the idea that like, and I think part of this is having kids.
I don't know.
I think I would have felt this way even before I had kids, but I guess I can't say for sure.
But like it's just very clear that like, like I got a big house with a lot of extra rooms.
Like I could house a lot of people here if I needed to.
And there's homeless people out there who need a home.
And I'm not like not sympathetic to them.
Like I think that's terrible.
But the reason why I'm not offering them all of the empty rooms in my house is because protecting my kids is like magnitudes of order more important to me than giving them a home.
That's just very clear in the hierarchy of priorities to me is my wife and kids being safe.
And so like, that doesn't mean you don't have any sympathy for those people, but there is something to me about like, I don't like when I see, you know, which I've seen plenty of videos of, but where there's like those tent cities in like San Francisco or in Los Angeles or something like that.
And there's like some like 12 year old girl who's got to walk by like drug addicts pissing on the street.
When I look at that, my first thought isn't like, oh my God, I feel so sorry for the people who have to live like that.
My first thought is, oh my God, I feel so sorry for the little girl who has to walk by that.
And I understand where you could argue that like, well, these homeless people have a much worse life than this little girl does.
I mean, that is true.
It's just to me, that's not like where my priority, like my priority is like protecting women and children.
And then after that, it's like, okay, I feel bad for these people here.
I understand that someone could argue that, well, they have a worse circumstance, but that to me isn't the way I view like what should be prioritized, who has a worse circumstance.
I view it more through like, as a functioning society, what do we put, you know what I mean?
Like, how do we, who do we value protecting?
Prioritizing Women and Children00:00:22
So anyway, all right.
Let's wrap there.
We're over time.
All right, guys.
We will see you in just a couple of days, Tampa.
Side splitters.
And me and Rob will be all over the country.
Bunch more gigs coming up.
Comicdave Smith.com for all the dates and ticket links.