Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein dissect Osama bin Laden's 2001 letter, arguing that media censorship of the document obscures specific grievances like Saudi bases and the Iraq blockade which fueled extremism. They contrast this with the Bush administration's narrative, drawing parallels to post-WWI Versailles failures, while criticizing both left-wing oversimplification and right-wing dismissal. The hosts further analyze Speaker Mike Johnson's release of 44,000 hours of January 6th footage, noting Jacob Chansley's swift release compared to others, suggesting the footage exposes police inaction and potential agent provocateurs. Ultimately, they contend that ignoring legitimate grievances and suppressing truth creates fertile ground for radicalization and government overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Waking Up Early Every Morning00:03:24
Fill her up.
You are listening to the cast and humor.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Tear your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
I am joined as always by the beautiful Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
How are you, sir?
Good morning, Mr. Smith.
Good morning.
We don't usually record early morning episodes, but here we are.
So if we, I don't know, if we seem slower than usual, that's why.
I'm drinking coffee.
I'm never drinking coffee while we record part of the problem, but that's okay.
You're good about getting up early in the morning, Rob.
Yeah, this was a little earlier, but I'm good to go.
You know, I'm ready.
I'm on my game.
I've been seated.
I've had my coffee, taken my dumps, read the news.
We're going to make things happen.
I am by nature a night owl.
And I was my entire life.
I'd always like, I'd always be like a, and being a stand-up comedian, it kind of lends itself to that, you know, because you're working at night.
So you'd always be up till three in the morning.
I started comedy in my early 20s.
Before then, I was, you know, that's what you always do.
You're up till three in the morning.
And then I'd always like sleep in.
And now I've had kids.
I've been a dad for almost five years.
And so you have to, you know, you wake up at, I wake up at 6 a.m.
Little kids wake up just thrilled about the world at 6 a.m. with all the energy in the world.
Dude, I love that Louis C.K. had a bit about that.
He was just talking about the way little kids wake up.
It's just like everything's magical and they're like, it's all still here.
You know, like they're just, it's like, they're so excited.
So you just have to, you know, you change.
So now I'm, I wake up early in the morning every morning, but I am still five years into it.
It's like, I'm fighting my nature of who I am.
Like I'm supposed to be a night owl and I'm just waking up at 6 a.m. every morning.
And I still am like, man, whatever, whenever point that changes, I don't know, parents who have older kids than me out there listening, I don't know when that happens.
Is it when they're teenagers or something like that?
But I can't wait for that aspect of it.
Like I love having little kids, but I can't wait to return to my natural state the way God wants me to be, which is sleeping till 10 a.m.
Yeah.
Well, I love doing this show and I wake up 7.30 every morning and make sure to just read the news and get it out of the way between about 8 and 10 a.m. and put together shows.
But, you know, in a perfect universe, I'd be drinking till 4 in the morning, telling shit jokes and waking up at noon.
That just never made me any money.
Yeah, it's, yeah, it's not, it's not good toward being a productive adult, but man, it's great toward being an angry adolescent.
That was a fun thing.
And if it was just more lucrative, I would still just be doing that.
That's the way I'd rather live it just.
Where's the money and sleep until noon?
Anyone?
All right.
Anyway, so I've been traveling around quite a bit.
Drinking Till Four In The Morning00:09:28
If those of you who have been paying attention may have noticed, a couple days ago, I was down in Florida, did a debate down there with Laura Loomer, and then went and did Timcast, which was both of them were a lot of fun.
And I've gotten just an incredible response back from both of them.
So I'm glad that people enjoyed them.
I hope in whatever small way they moved the needle a little bit.
And I hope I did you guys proud who were, you know, were kind of like supporting me.
Going into the Laura Loomer debate, I did because she's got a big following.
And so I was getting a bunch of people who were like, oh, Dave, you're about to get annihilated.
You're about to get loomered is what they kept saying.
I guess is her thing.
And I haven't heard from those people in the last 48 hours because I think anybody who saw it knows it went, it was pretty one-sided.
But then, and then Tim Poole, we also, I mean, I love Tim and I think he's really great.
And I'm like, I'm in awe of the machine that they've built.
It's just like incredible.
It's incredible how big that show is, how much they have going on there.
And I think they've done a lot of really important work.
I'm particularly grateful to Tim and Cassandra for not only having me on, but just how much they've allowed our camp to get their, you know, like get our side of things out on their show.
I mean, they've really, there's no other platform that's as big as that platform that consistently has platformed like the Ron Paul libertarians as much as, I mean, just in the last, in the last month, they had me on, Clint on, Josh Smith on, Michael Rechtenwald on, Scott Horton on twice.
Just no, who else is doing that?
Like what other bit it was Kennedy, when she had a show on Fox, would always have me and Spike Cohen and Scott Horton on.
But aside from that, and that show's done now, aside from that, like no one else is.
So, you know, I think it's, it's one thing I know me and me and Tim disagreed a little bit on a few things there.
And I, you, you see some libertarians on Twitter and stuff being like, you know, oh, Tim's wrong about this or something.
But it's like, all right, guys, but at least like, if you're coming at it from our perspective, at least have some gratitude for the fact that he's like the biggest platformer of our ideas right now.
I mean, maybe there's someone I'm not thinking of, but I don't think there's anyone else who even comes close.
So I think when you have an author put out such fine literature as Osama bin Laden, it's going to be open to interpretation.
That's right.
It's a work of abstract, right?
So yes, if you don't know, so this was what a big part of the debate was.
I think it's worth us spending some time discussing it on the show here.
But if you're unaware, Osama bin Laden, his letter to America was just released.
Wait a minute.
I'm sorry.
I'm getting some information.
No, that's not true at all.
It was released in 2001.
And I just want to point out before we take a look at this, sometimes you do have to separate the artist from, you know, his life.
And so I really think we should just look at this document as a standalone, you know, piece of literature.
Yes, I agree with you.
It is, I'm getting some more updated news here.
Osama bin Laden is dead.
Ooh.
He's been killed.
Anyway, the Osama bin Laden letter to America is something that it was right before the show, which this is another thing, another angle of it.
But so right before the show, Tim, no, I didn't know this because I'm not, or I guess I had, I saw some stuff on Twitter about it, perhaps, but I'm not on TikTok.
And so I'm a little bit removed from that.
Like, I don't know what's trending on TikTok.
But before the show, I think I had seen a couple of things on Twitter about it.
But before the Tim Cast show, Tim was like, oh, we're definitely going to talk about this Osama's letter to America, how it's blowing up all over the place.
And I was like, oh, yeah, great.
Like, what a great topic.
That's right up my alley.
And me and Clint were on together.
So it's like, yeah, perfect topic because that also allows you to get into all of these bigger things.
Now, anyway, so before we even get into the whole conversation around it, this just to me was a very interesting thing.
So immediately, this is maybe like 45 minutes before we record Tim mentioned this.
And so I was like, okay, let me pull it up and read it.
Now, of course, I've read this, but it's been maybe, I don't know, 15 years since the last time I read it.
So if we're about to talk about it on the podcast, I should probably just reread this letter real quick.
And I go to find it.
I cannot find the thing on the internet.
It's been scrubbed.
It's been, it's taken off of the Guardian took it down.
They've had it posted there for, I don't know, 20 years or whatever it is, 18 years, however long it's been.
And I'm searching all these.
I can't find it.
Then Tim Poole actually showed me how to search like the archive things where you can find out where it's, or he showed Clint and then Clint sent it to me just so I could reread it.
But that in itself is just like a very troubling indicator of where we are in our culture and our society.
Like that's, it's just so crazy.
Like it just, it really does feel like you're like, you're like, yo, I thought this was the United States of America.
What are we living in?
1984 here.
This is the response from the Guardian.
And the Guardian isn't U.S. based.
I think they're in Europe, but whatever.
You get my point.
But this is the response to the fact that this letter is circulating around it.
Maybe even you feel like some left-wingers on TikTok have a really bad take about it, but the response is to attempt to scrub it from the internet.
Like, isn't there something about that that is just, it's like everything.
Now, I'm not even talking about being like a strict libertarian.
I'm just saying everything that we in liberal in the broadest sense of the world, in the broadest sense of the word, in like a modern liberal society, everything that me and you, Rob, in our generation and everybody around us was kind of raised to believe was like, that's not the right answer.
The right answer isn't, no, you scrub this from the internet and try to make it so that nobody can have access to this information, right?
That was never like the correct take.
The correct take was like, no, we're a free society and we have open discourse and people can read this if they want to.
And the response would be, let us, I don't know, write an article about why this is the wrong interpretation.
It's just like, there's, I feel like anyone, maybe things are different for younger generations, but like in my, in my time, in my day, if you were watching this in a movie, the obvious incorrect answer would be, well, let's start burning books.
That's what we do.
Call me a bigot, but I think you should be able to read about other people's struggles.
Yeah, right.
All right.
So anyway, that was one kind of troubling.
It's really weird when you go to Google, and I think we've spoken about this before, and it goes, search results are still pending, or this is a new topic, or something like, you know, the internet's just supposed to, just give me the information.
And in this case, you know, it's very obvious that they don't want the general population to be educated about what we've done in other parts of the world and why other people might actually, you know, engage in terrorism.
And so it's, it's, and I saw the Washington Post even put out that this is further proof of why we can't just, you know, have people engaging in like political discourse on social media.
This is the dangers of social media because, yeah, that's what they want.
They want it to be NBC or whatever news.
And that's the only place you get information from.
And they got a full handle on it.
It's the only way they know how to operate.
Yeah.
No, 100%.
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Reacting To Left-Wingers On TikTok00:13:45
What's interesting about this, and there's a lot of different angles to this before we actually get into the substance of what I think one ought to take away from Osama bin Laden's letter to America.
One of the things that's very interesting, right?
And particularly for me was that my much of my life and career and what I'm known as publicly is being a libertarian commentator.
And for me, my introduction to this whole world was this issue.
So that's particularly why when Tim Poole's like, oh, I want to talk about this tonight.
It's like, yeah, what issue could I want to talk about more than this?
It's like, literally, I found Ron Paul and then became a libertarian.
He ultimately persuaded me.
And it was over this issue, right?
This is the Ron Paul Giuliani moment where he's talking about why terrorists attack us, why we have this terrorism problem, what the root causes of 9-11 were.
And this is like, if that was on trial, this would be exhibit A, you know, the, here are the words of the guy who led the attacks or, you know, planned the attacks.
And so this was a big thing that everybody, everybody who was like a Ron Paul libertarian read this.
Everybody who was a Ron Paul libertarian was intimately familiar with this, with what the terrorists were saying, with what their stated grievances were.
And so that it's, it's a little bit strange from that perspective to have all of the sudden kind of randomly left-wing TikTok figure out that this is a thing.
Like this is, you know what I mean?
It's so old.
I don't know exactly what happened.
I don't know.
You know, sometimes these social media things just like.
It was one hot chick going, isn't Osama kind of cool?
Yeah.
And then everybody else just, you know, like tries to do the same video because that's what's blowing up or something like that.
But anyway, it's just, it's a little bit weird to watch all of these people finally interact with this thing that you've been like, yeah, that's, that's what we were supposed to be grappling with.
Now, of course, they're, they were primarily left-wing TikTokers.
So it's not as if the first time they interact with it, they're going to get everything right.
Obviously, you know, there are many of them are in this kind of, you know, suffering from this woke mind virus and they are going to oversimplify things or get them completely wrong or whatever.
And so there certainly was a lot of that, right?
Like there was, and this is what Tim was pulling up, there were people who are going like, you know, that feeling when you realize Osama bin Laden was right about everything or something like that.
And obviously, that's goofy and not the correct interpretation.
Like you're not supposed to come to the conclusion that like, yeah, 9-11 was awesome.
You've lost the plot if that's your takeaway from all of this.
But I think that what's it's like, okay, what's really going on here?
And that this is one of the major problems that the right wing always has is that they're always, they're always driven by reactionary tendencies.
And so they're always constantly reacting to what the left is doing.
And so it almost in the same vein that if your takeaway from Osama bin Laden's letter to America is Osama's a good guy who is right about everything, you've lost the plot.
But if your only takeaway from it is that left winger who thinks Osama's right about everything is wrong, you've also lost the plot.
You get the point of me?
So as crazy as the woke left goes, right?
And they're like, whatever, their latest, there's no such thing as boys and girls.
If all you bring to the table is there is such a thing as boys and girls.
Well, then what are you really, what are you really doing?
You know what I mean?
Like it's like, first of all, okay, you're right and they're wrong, granted, but you've now been, you've now lowered yourself down to the same exact level they are to only, if that's your only contribution, you're just having an argument on what was, what should just be a given.
And you're really not adding anything else to this conversation.
There is nothing like, I don't know.
Does that make sense, the point I'm making?
That it's just kind of like, you can't just be reacting to them.
So you have to like, it's fine to call them out for being wrong, but then it's like, what's really going on here?
How did we get to a place in society where we're even having a discussion about whether there's boys and girls?
Why is it that all the major institutions are like propping up this discussion?
Why is it that kids have been, you know what I mean?
Why would this be attractive to a 20-year-old at a university?
Why are there professors cramming it down their throats?
Why is CNN so behind us?
Oh, look, why is there big money coming in behind all of this stuff?
What?
There's millions of dollars worth of a budget for drag queen story hours in New York City.
Where did that come from?
You know what I'm saying?
Like there's just like you, you can't just fight them on their level.
You have to like try to look at something bigger here and add something more valuable to the conversation.
So yeah, the left-wingers who are saying Osama bin Laden's right about everything, they're stupid.
That's not the takeaway from this.
But what ought to be the takeaway from this for people who are just now interacting with, which is pretty crazy to think about, right?
Like you would think just purely for strategic reasons after say 9-11 happens, you'd go, you'd want to know what's going on here, which was immediately, and you're a bit younger than me, Rob, but you're old enough to remember this, that immediately after 9-11, this was the question that all of us asked.
If there was one question from starting in late morning, September 11th, 2001, and it lasted for at least, I want to say, a week.
Americans don't have much of an attention span, but it was a good week at least, maybe two weeks, where there was one question that all Americans were asking, and it was, why do they hate us?
That was the question.
And the fact that, and anybody who is my age or older or right around our age, they remember this, that this was the question.
Why do they hate us?
It was broadcasted on the news.
People were asking each other this question.
And that question alone is an answer, at least to some degree.
Because that lets you know something that we didn't even, as a society.
And of course, there are individuals who are exceptions to this, but as a society, we didn't even know why.
We didn't even know what the beef was.
We were like, what?
At war with Muslims?
That wasn't even a thing to us.
It wasn't even a thought.
We had the what most, what was it, Rambo?
One of those videos where the, or it was, no, not Rambo.
There's one of those videos where the Taliban was in it, one of those movies, and they were the good ones.
They were the good guys.
Not Rambo.
God damn it.
I can't remember which movie it was.
Anyway, but there was like a big movie where the Taliban were just the good guys because they had been the freedom fighters against, not the Taliban, I'm sorry, the Mujahideen stuff, but they had been the freedom fighters against the Soviets.
Most of us didn't know this was a thing.
And we were asking this question.
And the answer that we got, the answer that we got as a society from the highest leaders in our society at the time was they hate you for your freedom.
That's the answer.
Now, and what conclusion can you draw from that?
The only answer then is war, right?
If somebody hates you for your freedom and they're willing to kill you for just being free, the answer to that can't be, well, we'll just stop being free.
The only answer to that is war.
And so that was what the American people were told.
And Ron Paul probably did more than anybody to really, in the coming years, try to explain to people that actually there's a lot more to it than that.
It's not as simple as saying they hate us because we're free.
They hate us because we're over there.
And so now with the backdrop of what's going on in Palestine, and obviously this coming up has something to do with that.
Well, obviously, okay, what's going on here is that horrific things are happening to the people of Palestine.
And now this letter comes out where people are, when we as a country were told they hate us for our freedom.
And it's like, oh, there seems to be some evidence that they hate us for the horrible things that are happening over there.
And while horrible things are happening over there and there was a terrorist attack this time, Hamas, you know what I mean?
It's just like, okay, so now at this time, it's going super viral, what Osama bin Laden had to say.
And if the only response in that moment that you have is these left-wingers on TikTok are a bunch of dummies, do you get my point?
How you're almost no better than them?
Because isn't there so much more to be said here?
Isn't there so much more in this moment?
Like things to talk about than just that?
And to realize that like, yes, there are very legitimate grievances that these people in the Muslim world have with U.S. and Israel's foreign policy.
And if you can't be, if you can't recognize that, then you're going into this fight blind.
You're not going to understand what's going on here.
So I don't know.
Any thoughts on any of that, Rob?
I'm on board.
I think it's interesting that I guess the Chinese algorithm was able to finally educate our public to the fact that other people have grievances against us.
But it is interesting to see just common culture, I guess, become educated and actually like I'm not to say that there aren't plenty of dumb people on the left and there's probably more ideas that they hold that I think are stupid.
But sometimes it's interesting what goes viral and what resonates with people and why it kind of registers.
And in this case, I think as the left is probably a little bit more open to these ideas because they're anti-Israel, especially like in the woke camps and they don't like what's going on there.
So it's just they're a little bit more open to it.
But yeah, I think it's clear that they're just, you know, getting the education of the fact that we've been over there and we've done not nice things to people.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the thing about it is, is that there's, and then this is almost like the weird divide to me, too, is that a lot of other people will be pointing to Osama bin Laden's letter to America and they will say, well, look, this confirms what we were saying.
Because look, it's about radical Islam or it is, it is, no, he does hate us for our freedom or something like that, because there's a passage in there where he says that we should all convert to Islam and live under Sharia law.
But I just, to that, I also feel like, look, is your takeaway from this letter really?
And not just the letter, but the letter and 9-11 and all of this stuff.
If your takeaway is that Osama bin Laden was a radical Islamist, I think you're missing something.
Because obviously that's true.
And again, when I say obviously, that's true.
I'm not, it's not a question of trying to get inside the mind of Osama bin Laden or to know what was really in his heart or what he really believed versus what was propaganda that he was using.
But let's just say that was his shtick, you know, like whatever he really believes, that was his shtick was like that.
I represent, you know, this fundamental Islam.
But the first line of the letter is, he says, why do we, why do we attack you?
Because you attack us.
And then he lists very specific grievances.
And for people who want to say, well, that's all just an excuse or something, which is what I've heard some people on Twitter say, that's just an excuse.
He really hated us because we were free.
But that's, well, Osama bin Laden himself in another, in another one of those videos that he put out, but this is whether he said it or not is irrelevant.
It's just the obvious point.
It's like, well, if he hates us, if it was really freedom that was motivating him and more importantly, perhaps than what's motivating Osama bin Laden, the question would be, what's motivating the men who are willing to carry out these attacks, right?
Like what's motivating the suicide bomber is probably a much more compelling question than what motivated Osama.
It's such a stupid, if you hate people because they're free, we're not the only free people in the world.
Why He Hated Us Because We Were Free00:02:33
Why not go for easier targets?
Why did you attack Sweden?
Yeah, why don't you put up some wins?
Why don't you start taking on like little enclaves of people that are small?
Go after Canada.
Why not take over Canada?
They're kind of free over there.
They're freer back then.
They're relatively as free as us, let's say.
You could go attack Norway or Sweden.
You could go attack any of these countries.
But it's so interesting that why he would attack the United States of America and why in his letter he would bring up that we prop up Israel, who stole the land from the Muslims, why he would bring up the fact that we have bases in Saudi Arabia, why he would bring up the fact that Our bombing and sanctions campaign led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of kids in Iraq.
Why?
And so, when he's bringing up all of those things, you have these other places that are also free, but didn't do any of that stuff.
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I know this is incredibly autistic of me, but that's what I do on the show.
That's your role.
Economic Incentives And War Crimes00:07:40
Even if he, the concept of you hate someone because they're free, it's like, well, what are they doing with their freedom?
Let's say all the people are free to go practice Sharia law.
So are you upset with those people for being free?
Of course not.
You wouldn't be because they decided to do Sharia law.
So the concept of, I'm just saying conceptually, the concept of hating someone for being free.
I don't know if people were out in the desert just meditating because that's the way they wanted to use their freedom.
Do you think Osama bin Laden would be furious about that?
Look at the look at how free these people are.
They're just sitting here not doing anything all day.
Of course not.
That'd have to be an action by which he was upset about.
It doesn't, I'm just saying the concept of hating someone for freedom doesn't make sense.
It would have to be, well, what are they doing with their freedom?
Now, you might say he culturally hates us because of the ball games that we watch, because you know what I mean?
But it's not the freedom.
That's just that doesn't, it's a very stupid thing.
Yeah.
And it also, you know, there's a reason, as I was kind of alluding to before, there's a reason why this is the line that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney settled on and why this is what they wanted us to take away from this.
Because there's, you'll never look at the root causes.
You'll never find a solution.
You'll never, you know, you'll never have the right prescription if that's your takeaway.
If that's your takeaway, then like there's nothing that can be done except support our leaders and go to war.
I can't say this is an absolute, but I do think that religious fanaticism is downhill from economic and other opportunities.
And that I think people that have an opportunity to live a good life, if you put options in front of people and one of the options is that there's actually a pathway to having a good life.
I don't think people fall into religious fanaticism.
And I think at least violent religious fanaticism for sure.
Yeah.
And I also think, you know, world leaders have like it was kind of an interesting storyline.
And I don't know if you ever saw the book of Eli, that movie, but, you know, they find a Bible.
I don't think so.
Well, whatever.
They find a Bible and one of the evil guys gets very excited because he's like, you don't understand what I can do with a Bible.
These words are compelling.
And for like generate, like, and he literally looks at the Bible as a vehicle by which he can be a, you know, a better evil dictator because he's going to be able to rally men behind the words of the Bible.
So the idea that Osama bin Laden's got a last line in there saying, hey, this is all about Sharia law.
I don't think you can completely separate that from just economic incentives or pushback to war or other crimes.
Yeah.
No, 100%, dude.
And, you know, I tried to make this point over the last couple of days during the debate and during the episode on Tim Pool, but I tried to, it's almost like, okay, so this is the first layer is that I do understand where it's very easy for people in, say, the United States of America to look at, if you look at, say, what we call terrorism versus what we call war,
it's very easy to feel like one of those is more primitive and barbaric than the other, right?
Like it's very, even if you look at what, say, just right now, say what Hamas did to Israel on October 7th versus what Israel's done to Gaza in the weeks since.
One of them is like men with guns and grenades terrorizing and targeting innocent civilians and dragging people from a concert.
And you know what I mean?
Like it's very barbaric.
The other is like targeted strikes with what we call collateral damage.
It's much easier to look at that and go, well, this is a policy decision and this policy decision will come with collateral damage and not see that as more civilized somehow and less barbaric.
But just try to accept for a moment that if it were your kid or your wife or your mother or your father, you know, who was killed in one of these bombs, it would feel pretty, it would still feel like your kid was, you know what I mean?
Like from that perspective, it would still feel pretty goddamn cruel and evil.
Okay.
So if you accept that, that also state action in effect has the same end result where people die, innocent people die.
So, okay, so just that in the back.
I'm getting back to the point you were making because I want to like kind of expand on that.
So that is the first like point A.
Now think about how crazy we went as a society after 9-11.
Like we got hit with a 9-11 and we all lost our minds.
We were like, you know, all of these policies of war and mass surveillance and down to just like cultural things.
Like we were like, we're not calling them French fries anymore because the French aren't on board with our war enough.
That was literally the mentality.
We were pissed off at the French.
They had nothing to do with it except for maybe being like, hey, let's like slow down on this rush to war thing.
And we're like, screw you.
We'll no longer call our fries by your name.
That's how much we lost our mind after 9-11.
So now try to imagine.
And this is what I said on the debate.
I go, and this isn't just like rhetorical, like actually try to imagine.
Imagine there were a thousand 9-11s.
Okay.
How much would we lose our minds?
And there's a thousand 9-11s because this is the comparison to the Muslim world, right?
Now, I understand it's not exactly the same.
It's not people hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.
It's just hellfire missiles dropping on you.
But you know what?
That feels pretty damn similar when you're on the ground, right?
Like, would we really have had if those weren't planes, but instead they were missiles that took down those buildings, would we have really felt that much?
So, okay, a thousand 9-11s happened to your society.
Now, on top of that, 1,911s happen and there's a sanction regime against your country, right?
This is getting back to your point, the economic situation that you're kept in.
In Gaza, for example, there's 50 plus percent unemployment because of the blockade around their country because they're not free to trade with other nations and to import and export things as they wish to.
So imagine all of that.
There's 1,911s, how crazy we went after one.
Multiply that by at least 1,000, okay?
And then the economic situation is just like is completely dire.
You have no path to a good life, as you had mentioned early.
Then they take our government is overthrown by a foreign government who props up their government that now rules over us.
What rises up out of that?
Is it going to be what?
A secular atheist who is going to be the leader that we rally behind?
Or do you, to your point, is it probably going to be a radical, you know, fundamentalist?
And in their letter, you know, from our perspective, they may say something about how God wanted us to be free and free to practice our way of life.
And then mentions that our grievances with you are the 1,911s, the blockade around our country, and you overthrowing our government and propping up this dictator.
And Jesus wants us to be free and blah, blah, blah, and all this.
Is your takeaway from that really that the root cause of this is that they're Christian?
How Evil The Machine Is00:17:33
Because if so, that's stupid.
I'm sorry.
That's just stupid for that to be your takeaway.
The people who lived through that, right, in our society now, 1,911s, a blockade, and the toppling of your government and propping up a dictator.
They went, you know why they hate us?
Because we're Muslim.
Wouldn't that be so stupid?
It'd be so obvious that the reason they hate you is because you've inflicted all of this on them.
And we had inflicted this on them for decades before 9-11.
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Again, if you just want to go through the grievances that were stated by Osama bin Laden, they were the fact that what we had, we have, from their view, the West had a presence in their holiest of lands, which would be Saudi Arabia and Israel, that the treatment of the Palestinian people had been horrific,
that they had been ethnically cleansed off of their land, which is true.
Like all of that is true, that we used the bases in Saudi Arabia to launch massive bombing campaigns against Iraq and the blockade against Iraq, where, I mean, I don't know exactly how many people died.
I have heard people poke holes in the UN number.
The UN had found that 500,000 kids died there.
I'm perfectly happy to accept that those numbers were inflated, but okay, it's not 500,000, but it's what?
100,000, 200,000.
Like a lot of kids had died from there.
These grievances are legitimate.
And the other one was the propping up of the dictators in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia and places like that.
And by the way, the hijackers were Egyptians and Saudis.
These were people who lived under the governments that the United States of America backed and kept in power.
And so like, look, those are just legitimate grievances that any people would have.
So you can focus on what makes us different, but those grievances are what makes us the same.
Any of us would have those grievances.
So I just, to me, it just makes a lot more sense to focus on that obvious reality.
Now, of course, you know, the binary thinkers out there will be like, oh, so you're saying Osama bin Laden is good.
But now you're just, what are you?
You're the Fox News moderator who responded to Ron Paul and went, so are you saying we invited the attacks of 9-11?
You know, are you saying that all those people who died in the Twin Towers deserve to die?
But of course that's not the case.
Nobody's saying that.
And none of us are saying we'd prefer to live under Sharia law either.
We want to live in a free Western civilization, you know, but we can also understand that if we want to live in that, we better stop doing what we're doing to these people.
And anyway, that would be a lesson that would it would behoove Americans and Israelis to learn.
You know, someone, someone else said, I just, there's just one guy on Twitter, so I'm not just trying to pick on stupid things that are said on Twitter, but this did kind of there were several people who kind of had this type of response, but he goes, he was like, oh, Dave Smith, he's like, yeah, Hitler was a bad guy, but he did have some legitimate grievances.
Like kind of mocking what I was saying.
Like, that probably sounds like something you'd say, Dave, right?
Hitler was a bad guy, but he had some legitimate grievances.
And so I just wanted Jews all over his country.
Yeah.
Well, look.
But here's the thing.
That's true.
That's right.
I don't understand what exactly I should be running away from that for.
Yes, Hitler was a bad guy who had some legitimate grievances.
Why is that so unreasonable to say?
Look, it was even in government school.
Almost everybody learned this.
That yes, like, look, just to take some, The treaty of Versailles was brutal and was imposed on the Germans.
And they were totally like humiliated and ruthlessly collectively punished for all of World War I.
They were made, the Germans were made to take responsibility for the entire thing.
That was totally unfair.
And not only is that not a controversial thing to say, not only is that not a controversial thing to say, but the entire world order post-World War II recognized that.
And that's why they handled the end of World War II so much differently than they handled the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we gave aid to Germany.
Everybody was very conscious of making sure that we don't do this again, because this created fertile ground for something like the Nazis to rise up again, and that we better do our best to pull Germany into the international community this time, rather than isolate them and humiliate them.
So, and look, there were others, obviously, but this was one of the major stated grievances that Adolf Hitler had.
That Versailles had been imposed upon the German people, that the Weimar leadership had refused to fight it at all.
And that, you know what I mean?
Like this had destroyed Germany.
And yeah, like, why wouldn't we look at that and recognize like, okay, yes, that was that was a legitimate grievance.
And that gave fertile ground for something as horrific as the Nazi movement to rise up.
That would be so stupid to not look at that.
Why would anybody, you know, it's like if Native Americans were attacking Americans in the year like 1790 or something like that.
And someone were to say, like, one guy was like, well, look, I mean, we've done a lot of messed up things for these Native Americans.
And this is going to be a problem that we're going to have to deal with.
So we better figure out how exactly to go forward with this.
And someone else was just like, they hate us because we're free.
Which one of those guys is right?
And which one of those guys is stupid?
Right?
Like, why, why is it, why is it that you're supposedly like we've got to such a place in our society where we're so fucking dumb that it is like something out of idio.
What is that movie?
Idiocy?
Idiocracy.
Idiocracy.
You know, like where you're like, okay, so the response to this is we scrub Osama bin Laden's letter to America from the internet and then tell everybody, no, they just hated us because we're free.
We're sticking to that line.
That's where we're at with this.
That's the level of understanding we want to have in the world.
Luckily, we're practicing less freedom.
So we're making this a society more accepting of people like Osama bin Laden.
I'll tell you, if Osama bin Laden was around in 2020, probably would have been just fine with America.
Probably would have had no issue with us.
We weren't free at all.
You'd be like, look, they can't even read my letter.
Yeah, look how not free we are.
But that's really it, is that we're not allowed to even think through what might be causing this problem to better understand it.
And that we're just going to demonize anybody who tries to do that as loving murder.
Oh, you love killing.
That's why you do that.
And look, this isn't, I'm not just making a caricature.
I mean, I had the, in, in her opening of the debate, Laura Loomer basically gave me the George W. Bush line, which I called her out for.
She said, you know, I don't know what this debate is.
You either condemn Hamas or you enable them.
You're like, really?
Those are my options.
That's what we're back to.
I either support the war in Iraq or I'm a terrorist.
That's the binary.
Nothing else in between there.
Nothing more.
Like, why?
Why is the insistence that I have to be that stupid?
Like, I'm kind of stupid, but I'm not that stupid.
I'm not stupid enough to go the only way to view the war in Israel is either I'm with Hamas or I love what Israel's doing in Gaza right now.
That's just, that's too dumb even for me.
So I'm going to, I'm not doing that.
All right.
Let's, we got a little bit of time left.
So I did want to also talk a bit about this.
It was a pretty interesting story here.
So Mike Johnson, who's the, and listen, as somebody named Dave Smith, when I tell you your name's forgettable, just know that's a problem.
But Mike Johnson, who is the new speaker of the house, we'll see how long he lasts, in a kind of interesting move that I did not see coming.
He pretty quickly released a whole lot of January 6th footage.
Isn't that right, Rob?
Yeah, and that must be why he got some support for his post because, you know, they instantly got this next budget deal through, which is funny.
When people want to go home for Thanksgiving, they'll, you know, they'll just, they'll put the partisanship aside.
Um, yeah, they'll just go, ah, fuck it.
You know, we can have this debate next month and pretend like we're not going to have the funds and come up with it last minute.
But when Thanksgiving's on the line, everyone wants to go home for Thanksgiving.
Democrats and Republicans can come together.
But of the Republicans that had opposed McCarthy, I think they were somewhat upset here that there wasn't any attempt whatsoever of trying to pretend like we were going to scale back budgets.
Of course, Mike Johnson's first words were, well, we'll make sure Israel gets its funds.
But it seems like they got a slight win because I do remember with McCarthy, there was pressure on him to release the rest of the January 6th footage, which he was not doing.
So it seems like this must have been part of the ouster was an agreement that the next person in the post would release the footage.
It's assuming.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no, possibly.
It is amazing, though, like just how corrupt things are that like it's crazy that you there would even be an option to not release this video, or at least if you can't for some reason, then just to explain that.
So just go like, listen, I would love to release this too, but we can't because there's footage that could pressure from the deep state.
Yeah, right.
Also, the fact that we brought it up on the show before, but you had a guy who was sitting in chail and in jail, Jacob Chansley, and then they put out the footage and he's out of jail within two weeks because it becomes apparent to the American public that guy shouldn't be in jail.
They were opening up doors for him.
They were filming him.
He was outdoors saying, hey, guys, Donald Trump's telling us to go home.
Like it was very clear to any, let's just say compassionate human being that if they watch the footage that day, they don't go, that's a violent terrorist that should be spending his life in jail.
Well, no.
Listen, no exaggeration, the guy had been portrayed by the biggest media conglomerates in the world as the leader of a violent attempted insurrection.
This man tried to overthrow the government of the United States of America in a violent, in a violent way.
And then we get videos out of him where he was clearly a nonviolent, calm person walking through the Capitol building being respectful to police.
And the police being respectful and assisting him.
So it's just like the difference between what was described versus the reality was insane.
The police almost looked like, and I'm saying bladen conspiracy right here, but the film, the police people almost look like when in high school, let's just say you had a friend who was too drunk and you start putting him in situations because he think it's funny.
It almost seemed like they're like, oh, this guy's a real character.
And they were having some fun with him or maybe even, you know, trying to get footage, but they were giving him a tour.
But to not be completely conspiratorial and actually make a point, this is how evil the machine is and how they will treat us when they get the opportunity.
After that footage came out, and I think the machine had to reckon with the fact we can't keep this guy in jail.
This looks too terrible.
Yeah.
Instead of instantly going, we have to review all cases.
We have to look at all the footage.
There might be other people who are wrongfully in jail.
They turn around and they go, we're releasing him based off of good behavior and other reasons because they can't admit any fault, even if it means that other people are going to have to suffer and sit in jail.
And then they try and lock down the other footage because the first thing you would think if you cared about human lives and humanity and, you know, American citizens is, wow, we better be reviewing all this footage because we're one for one on getting someone out of jail who shouldn't be in jail.
How many other people shouldn't be there?
Yeah.
No, there's no humanity in it.
I mean, that's the, that's the truth is that these, these people are evil.
And they, if it served their political interests for you and your family to be murdered or imprisoned or tortured or just ruined, they would, they would do it and lose no sleep over it.
You know, and that's, that's just the reality.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, now I know there's a lot of people who listen to this by audio, but so I do want to quickly play just like a couple, a couple quick, quick clips that we've gotten.
For the record, Mike Johnson released 44,000 hours of January 6th footage, and he just did that.
So it's going to take a while for all of the internet sleuths out there to go through all of this and find out what clips might be very interesting or very revealing.
But here's a couple of the new ones that have come out already.
We got two here, Brian.
You could just play whichever one first.
So on this one, you have basically like what could only be described as a guided tour.
There was a police officer in the front kind of leading them, bunch of other police officers standing aside watching them.
Everybody's calm.
They're holding American flags.
They're holding, what is that?
It's not the judge right on me, but live free or die or something like that.
Walking calmly.
Everyone's got their phones out.
You see people, some of them are even wearing COVID masks.
Those are the stupid ones.
Now, this is one where they've got a gentleman in handcuffs.
And they take him over.
They're just inserting something.
They're making this.
Well, they're taking off his handcuffs.
They take him off the handcuffs that they had this guy in.
He then gives a pound to one of the officers.
And then they all just have a little bit of a conversation here.
It looks like an Uber Eats delivery going wrong.
Cops Allowing Violent Protests00:08:03
It really does.
And they just let him go.
And they just let him go, no problem.
Look, I'm not saying there's an overwhelming conclusion that can be really can be ascertained from this.
But what we're looking at here, if you had to describe it, seems to be, well, obviously we've seen the video.
Some windows got broken.
There was a little bit of trampling going on at certain instances.
The worst video by far that's come out of January 6th is that cop shooting Ashley Babbitt, who just kind of shot into a crowd for no apparent reason.
And then what was going on all around it seemed to be a very calm, guided tour that cops were kind of shepherding, let's say, you know, and they were kind of allowing it.
You don't even see anywhere in here cops.
There's no clear evidence of the cops ever telling people they have to leave.
Like no signs of like, you have to leave right now or you will be arrested if you don't leave.
Like nothing like that.
It just seems like the cops are totally allowing them to do it.
And I'm sorry, though, this is not at all what was described to us on the corporate press about this as it was happening.
And then the days and months and years afterward, where they would still say that this was an attempt to overturn an election, a violent insurrection, all of this nonsense.
That's not what any of this videotape is showing at all.
Any other thoughts, Rob?
Well, not to cut this down, I don't think that these two videos are wildly interesting or add that much more context.
It's going to be interesting because they've held the footage for so long of where their edits made or are the most precious things being left out.
But I guess the most interesting things to see in my eyes are going to be the walkthrough footage of people that did go to jail and kind of like their entrance into the building, like basically what we got to see for Jacob Chansley.
Well, for him, we saw he walked in peacefully.
Like he didn't break his way in.
And there had been people speculating that he had done that.
And then we got video proof that he hadn't.
Yeah.
So it's going to be the walkthrough of beginning to end of the people that went to jail.
That to me is very interesting to see, you know, how many of these people engaged in violence.
Also, of the people that were kind of the ringleaders, how many of them have military profiles?
How many of them have potential ties to the FBI?
Like the people I'm saying, the people that were actually moving the gates, the people who are actually taking down the windows, the people that were in the crowd actually yelling, hey, we're going into the building.
If they can start actually sifting through the videos and profiling those individuals and seeing who those people are and if all those people have been jailed, we'll start getting a few more questions answered and seeing if there's more Rayps out there.
Right.
No, that's an interesting point.
I'm speculating here.
I don't know.
But there's other interesting aspects to like, right, you know, look, we know that members of the Proud Boys were involved and that some of them have gone to jail.
We also know that the former head of the Proud Boys was an FBI informant.
Who ended up getting, I think he's actually gotten serious jail time.
Yeah.
But I'm kind of at the point now.
That doesn't mean anything to me.
Oh, yeah.
No, they'll throw their own people under the bus.
And that's, yeah, like what, like, so now there was also There was one guy who just got charged related to January 6th, who had been like a Black Lives Matter guy at one point.
Now, again, I'm not drawing any conclusion from that.
I don't know.
That could be totally legitimate and it could be somebody who was just a burn it all down type guy.
You know what I mean?
But it also does make you wonder that, look, this is one of the inherent flaws with protesting.
And this has happened many times in the past where it has been documented, but it makes it very easy to have agent provocateurs in them.
And so what you can have, and I'm not saying for sure this is the case on January 6th.
There does seem to be some evidence.
Door opening unit was in full force that day.
Right.
Well, but all it takes, right, is if you're having a protest to get some people in there to go do some violent things to then make your entire thing look like that makes it much easier to paint it as a violent insurrection or as a violent, you know, riot or something like that.
And then, you know, now this could be done by feds, but this also could just be done by like, say, left-wing activists or something like that.
You get in there and you, and this has been done many times in the past in protests.
You get in there in the protests, you send a few people to go in there, start assaulting cops, and then they give the cops permission to violently crack down on the whole thing.
And they can say, well, look, they were assaulting cops.
So what are we going to do?
And so it's a good way to break up protests.
This is one of the major problems with protests.
It's just very easy to get in there.
There's no, if you're having a pro-Trump protest or a Black Lives Matter protest or whatever else, you know, you're not like checking people at the door because there is no door.
You're not looking through their history.
You're not, there's no way to like know that everyone here really believes in the cause.
It's just very easy for someone who's actually completely against that cause to slip in and then make everybody look bad.
Again, it's not clear that exactly to what level that happened here on January 6th.
But, you know, just to quickly recap, we do know that all of the people, the top people in the Justice Department, refused to answer the question.
They refused to say under oath that there weren't feds involved.
And we do know all of the shadiness surrounding Ray Epps.
Somehow, this one guy who seems to be, out of all the videos I've seen, at least up there with the most guilty.
You know what I mean?
Like the one who truly was instigating this thing to get inside of the building.
And yet this guy gets a slap on the wrist when other people are getting the, you know, the book thrown at him.
And somehow this guy engenders nothing but sympathy from the media and political class, whereas all the rest of them are viewed as insurrectionists and, you know, domestic terrorists.
There's just, there's a lot of shady stuff going on here down to the us just getting this footage now.
This is something, Rob, you talk a lot about this, but this is kind of the standard tactic that they will release this stuff years later when there's not quite as much passion about it.
Or they already accomplished what they needed to.
Yes.
Yes, exactly.
And so it's, there's definitely some of that too.
It's we're almost in the year 2024.
You know what I mean?
This is something that happened in the first week of 2021.
So we're, you know, it's years later now.
This was the huge, this was the big narrative from the corporate press for years was that Donald Trump refused to concede the election and then they violently tried to overthrow the government.
Um and, and at the very least, it seems like that narrative was a big load of bullshit.
So, all right, that's going to be our episode for today.
Uh, we will catch you guys soon.
Big things coming up guys, going to be a big week.
So uh keep uh, keep your eyes on what happens.
Catch You Soon Next Week00:00:49
Got another another big show coming up this week.
Hell yeah, and check out, run your mouth for uh, the days that uh not part of the problem.
So I go live monday wednesdays fridays, at 11 a.m.
You can catch it on Youtube at the moment or spotify, wherever you like that stuff.
And uh, upcoming dates, I will be at The Shell, I believe december 8th and 9th in New Hampshire and uh, some other december dates coming your way.
Yeah awesome, go check out Rob's show, go see Rob live when he comes to your uh, comes to your area, and then, of course um, at the uh, november 25th it is uh, me and you Rob, will Be up one night only at Laugh IT UP in Poughkeepsie.