Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dismantle Tucker Carlson's mislabeling of the US economy as libertarian, exposing it instead as crony capitalism fueled by central bank debasement. They critique Bill Maher's "get over it" stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that ignoring Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza invalidates historical comparisons. By highlighting the apartheid-like control over Palestinian movement and citizenship, they assert that only a two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders offers a realistic path forward, while dismissing unrealistic "river to the sea" demands. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Rigged Free Market Lies00:12:36
Fill her up.
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We need to roll back the state.
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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.
Cheers, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is Robert the Fire Bernstein.
I'm going formal in the holiday season here.
How are you, my good friend?
Doing well.
Looking forward to New Year's.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
We got a big show coming up right here in East Rutherford, New Jersey, very close to New York City.
So if you're anywhere in the area, come on out.
New Year's Eve, me, Robbie, Chris Vega, live stand-up show, then a live part of the problem, and then a meet and greet hang afterward.
It's all one ticket.
It's a whole night, a whole New Year's.
So if you don't have plans for New Year's, you do now.
Go over to comicdave Smith.com and the ticket link is right up there.
And then me and Rob will be all over again this year, just like we were last year.
We'll be coming all over some of the same, we'll be back at some of the same cities and then a whole bunch of new ones.
So looking forward to all of that.
And of course, RobbieTheFire.com for all of Rob's other gigs where he's doing his own headlining thing.
So go check that out.
All right.
So let's get into the show.
So to open today's show, I must respond to a recent segment that's been going super viral.
I don't even want to.
I just have to.
Sometimes there's a calling in life and you must respond to a certain thing.
And I have this libertarian responsibility of being the libertarian podcaster guy.
And so when someone says stuff about libertarianism, I mean, my Twitter is just nothing but everyone going, Dave, have you seen this?
Have you seen like by the 600,000th time?
I'm like, yes, I've seen it.
I will respond.
So we got to do it.
It's Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald.
The topic of libertarian economics comes up.
And so let's, we're going to play the clip.
We're going to respond to it.
I will say this.
And this is for any of you guys who are going to like clip this and share it.
Start here.
Okay.
I consider Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson both to be great men.
I have enormous respect for both of them.
I think their work is nothing short of heroic.
They are two of the loudest and most intelligent anti-war voices in the country.
They're great on so many things.
Libertarian economics is not one of them.
So let's play the clip and we will respond.
Kind of transformed economic policy.
He frequently kind of denounced the classic sort of Reaganomics, this idea that, oh, we should all cheer for the richest people in our society to get richer because a rising tide lifts all boats and everybody watches Raytheon and Boeing and BlackRock and Amazon get richer and richer and richer and their boats aren't rising.
And it really led a lot of people who have been capitalists their whole lives to at least start questioning not capitalism as a theory, but capitalism, how it manifests in American society.
Let's pause right there.
So first of all, if it's not clear, what Glenn Banks, Jesus, I'm sorry, that was wrong and insulting.
What Glenn Greenwald is talking about here is the rise of Donald Trump as a political figure and how he didn't.
He didn't uh play into and, in some cases, flatly rejected the kind of typical Republican talking points about limited government and balanced budgets and all of these things that Republicans always would talk about.
That wasn't really a big part of Donald Trump's uh, you know uh political campaign in 2016, and in fact, he would say things like that, you know the rest of them want to cut your social security.
I i'll never cut social security and things like that.
Um, so that's kind of what Glenn greet, what Greenwald is talking about here, and I don't think it that's particularly unfair what he just said, because he does distinguish, um between kind of like capitalism as a theory versus the actual capitalism that we have right now and how it's manifesting itself.
So I I i'm more or less okay with uh with that.
But here is Tucker's response, American Society what is your view about, sort of where the populist right is, the Trump movement is, when it comes to these core questions of economic theory and economic populism?
I think a lot of people have awakened to the now demonstrable fact that libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending.
So they created this whole intellectual framework to justify the private equity culture that's hollowed out the country.
That's my personal view and i've seen it up close my whole life, so I think it's a fair assessment.
All right um, I think let's pause it there.
So again uh, Tucker Carlson, who I I love and respect and I think is one of the most important voices in in America but this is so profoundly wrong and it's not just a matter of semantics um, like you know like say, the term capitalism or something like that, as Glenn Greenwald uh, uses it yeah, you could say like, whatever you want to talk about in theory, you can call the United States Of America a capitalist country and you could certainly point out what.
Well okay, capitalism is leading to all of these problems.
But then at least, if you want to know the solution, you got to be specific about like, what is actually causing the problems here.
But Tucker Carlson takes it a step further and and refers to it as libertarian economics and then claims that basically the uh, the intellectual theory was created after the fact to justify what's, you know, private equity.
But that's just not true.
That's not true, and this is this is just a demonstrable fact that there were libertarian economists.
You know that you can trace back to way before any of this stuff that he's saying is being justified by them, and when you to to sit here and say, when you say libertarian economics, it's pretty clear that you're not just talking about some type of crony capitalism.
You're saying that the issue here is like laissez-faire, market-based capitalism, but that it it's as if, like you know Rob, you remember as, as a student of history Rob, you remember when, in 1988, when Ron Paul won the presidency and he abolished the Federal Reserve and cut government spending by 80% and whatever, you know what I mean?
And then, and then all of this happens, except that's not what happened at all.
And Tucker knows this.
And so this is kind of like what's confusing to me about it.
Like Tucker knows about Ron Paul and he knows about like the true libertarian tradition.
And it's fine if you want to reject, you know, like the Cato guys or like the Reason magazine types.
And believe me, I've been very critical of those guys for a lot of different reasons, like their goofy defense of open borders and a lot of other stuff.
But when it comes to the economics, they're actually pretty solid on this stuff too.
They're not actually like in any way justifying the current state of things.
And as Tucker Carlson knows damn well, because he's talked about it on his show and he like had these amazing monologues about this stuff, that look, the whole deal here is that the federal government of the United States of America is the biggest institution in the history of the world.
And they suck out $6 trillion every year from the economy and pass it out to the politically connected.
And the Federal Reserve at the same time is totally debasing the currency.
And then for years, it's had these insane artificially low interest rates.
Even today, the interest rates are crazy artificially low, even though after these raises, this allows for what?
An economy based around speculation.
And none of this is true laissez-faire capitalism or anything even remotely close.
We don't live under anything remotely close to libertarian economics.
And so to take this current, you know, it's this thing that libertarians always have to deal with, right?
Like we are simultaneously criticized for being like, oh, you guys are these ideologues who can't convince the rest of Americans that, you know, your ideas are worth getting on board on.
And that's why you have no real political power.
I mean, what, what real political power do libertarians have?
We got Rand Paul and Thomas Massey.
And on a good day, Mike Lee.
Who else do we got?
Maybe you can put together like five other, you know, decent people in the House of Representatives.
You can't really find me another senator.
But that's it.
So it's like, oh, look, you guys have no real political power.
And also you're responsible for every failure of the system.
Even though you have no political power and we won't try any of your policies out, you're also responsible for what's going on now.
So I don't know, Rob, anything you want to add in there?
Well, my New Year's resolution for 2024 is to climb the social ladder.
So Tucker, if you're seeing this, I think you got this one right.
And I think to me, I might be hopping in a little bit too early on this one because there's more clip to play.
But what Tucker's saying here is a similar argument in my head of what we heard from Kurt Metzger when we did the live upgrade problem at SkankFest.
And I think there's a little bit of truth to it in that essentially you have people in power that like to hide behind free market capitalism while they're rigging the system and then preaching free market capitalism as a defense for their behavior, even though they're not actually engaging in free market capitalism.
And so to the outsiders, they almost look at and go, this free market capitalism is kind of a, it's a bad philosophy because look at what happens when it ends up in the hands of the corrupt.
To me, it's almost a similar argument that people make like an anti-religious argument where they go, look at all these events in history where religion was corrupted and people engaged in warfare or other things in the name of religion.
But I still look at it like, if you believe in Christianity, I don't think you should throw out the religion because of instances where people claim the philosophy for not noble comparison.
Ideas are goods.
And, you know, and, you know, usually you and I, we try and avoid the, you know, looking at politics as religion, particularly that's kind of our gripe with the left or other philosophies.
But I don't think any of what they're pointing to as bad examples are going to work out to being free market capitalism.
So like you're right that Tucker's wrong.
I'm being a little poletic, I think, in the idea that he's trying to express and that I think he's just being technically inaccurate about it.
Right.
Well, look, I think you might be right about that.
And I want to be charitable.
Obviously, like I like both of these guys.
I've had both of them on the podcast and I've well before that been a fan of their work.
I think it is fair and true to say that for years, the Republican Party would like pay this lip service to some form of libertarianism.
So they would say, you know, we want small government or whatever.
We want free markets.
We want to balance this budget or whatever kind of like lips.
But if you want to actually understand what's going on here, then you can't just listen to, look at what people are saying.
You have to look at what they're doing.
And the fact is that every Republican administration of my life has drastically grown the size and scope of government.
All of them have increased spending.
That's just the way this system works.
All of them have been proponents of central banks, or maybe that's not the right way to put it, but they're certainly never going to challenge the existence of a central bank.
Dollar Store Fever Fallacy00:13:03
And so, you know, and we'll get into this more as we play the clip, but what's important here is that if there are these problems, we have to accurately address what's causing them.
And then we'll know what the solution.
I also, and this is not really, I mean, I guess it is a knock.
I think if you ask Tucker to define who he means by libertarian economists, he's probably not saying Mises and Rothbard.
No, I agree with you on that.
Probably not.
But like I said, look, even the kind of camp of libertarians who we probably don't like as much, their economics are going to be way better than anything in any type of like populist right winger or populist left winger.
And that's just true.
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Okay, so let's keep playing.
I think a smarter way to assess an economic system is by its results.
So you can assign whatever name you want to the economic system of the United States.
You could call it market capitalism.
You could call it, I mean, you could call it a whole host of different things.
But I don't think any of that's useful.
Those are boring conversations.
I think you need to ask, does this economic system produce a lot of dollar stores?
And if it does, it's not a system that you want because it degrades people and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society.
And anything that increases ugliness is evil.
And it's just kind of, let's just start there.
So if it's such a good system, why do we have all these dollar stores?
Dollar store is the clear, I mean, it's not the only ugly thing being created in the United States, but it's one of the most common and it's certainly the most obvious.
So if you have a dollar store, you're degraded.
And any town that has a dollar store does not get better.
It gets worse.
And the people who live there lead lives that are worse.
So, and the counterargument to the extent there is one, oh, they buy cheaper stuff.
Great.
But they become more unhappy.
And the dollar store itself is a sort of symbol.
What's a physical thing?
It's a real thing.
It's not just a metaphor, but it's also a metaphor for your total lack of control over where you live and over the imposition of aggressively in your face ugly structures that send one message to you, which is you mean nothing.
You are a consumer, not a human being or a citizen.
And so again, I don't know what we call our current system, but its effects are grotesque.
They're grotesque.
It's wrecked.
I've been here 54 years and I watch carefully.
That's my only gift as I watch.
And this has become a much uglier place, a much more crowded place, a much more hostile place, a place that cares much less about people.
So whatever system that produces that outcome is a bad system.
And you can call me.
Let's pause it here.
So, okay, there's, I agree partially with some of the things Tucker is saying here.
And it's fine if he's going to say, look, whatever you want to call this system, and I kind of agree.
Like, I don't know.
I've used a lot of different terms to describe the current economic system in the United States of America.
I don't, I don't know.
You know, you can argue about what the best is, crony capitalism or crap is what Gene Epstein calls it.
You could kind of call it a fascistic, you know, oligarchy.
I don't know, whatever you want to call it.
I think all of these things are kind of accurate.
But the point is that if you're going to call it, you know, libertarian, like a libertarian economy, the issue isn't that I'm just fighting over semantics.
I'm not just saying, oh, I don't like that you use the word that I like for my good system to describe this bad system.
The point is that when you, if you call it libertarian, then you're going to think, what is the solution?
Well, the solution is for more government intervention.
Obviously, if the system is too libertarian, then you're going to say, oh, we need more government intervention.
But that's exactly what's causing the problems here.
So that's what really matters, like what's actually going on.
Now, I will say with this stuff Tucker's talking about with dollar stores, and it's not that I don't get his point, but it's kind of like it's like imagine if you had like a really nasty virus and then you have a like a high fever and this this is going on for days and you're just popping Advils constantly.
And then you're just looking at the Advil and you're like, oh, this is just kind of like cheap and gross.
Who are you now?
You're a guy who pops pills to get through the day every day.
You know what I mean?
Like this is so like demeaning.
And the thing is that the Advil isn't really the problem.
It's the thing that's bringing you a little bit of relief in this bad situation.
That's what the dollar store is.
The dollar store is the Advil.
It's like, I don't know.
It's the basically the virus is DC.
It's totally rigged this economy against regular people in favor of the billionaire class.
And now.
particularly because over the last few years, well, what?
What did they do?
They shut down the country and they printed $6 trillion in a year.
And then we had the worst price inflation that we've had in a generation.
And people are drowning under this.
So I guess more dollar stores are popping up because that's the only place people can afford.
You know, and look, you can knock cheap consumer goods all you want to, but just think about the pain that the rise in prices of consumer goods have caused American families over the last three years.
It's a tragedy.
It's destroyed lives.
And so then if there is a dollar store, you can go and be like, all right, at least I can get some things I need for a little bit cheaper.
That is now, look, it's not a real solution to the problem.
It's pop an Advil when you have a fever, but it'll at least give you a little bit of temporary relief.
And so to blame the temporary relief, it's like, well, then what else are we going to have?
What else are we going to have for these people?
I mean, you know, people, it's really not that long ago that if you were making like 60, 70K a year, people would be like, oh, you got a good gig.
This guy's got a good job.
Today, and maybe that's fine if you're like a single guy or something like that.
That would still be fine to be making that money.
But if you got a wife and two kids and you're making that, you're really up against it.
And that dollar store might be the only thing that's giving you like a little bit of relief.
No, at least my wife can go to the dollar store and get some stuff for a reasonable price.
And so I get Tucker's point that probably we would all rather see like a cool shop that like a family business or something like that.
But why aren't we seeing those?
Well, in the last few years, as Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald both know very well, the federal government, and this is no overstatement, went to war with mom and pop businesses.
Literally declared outright war against them.
Told them they were non-essential and it was the law of the land that it was now a crime for them to continue to operate.
And then they destroyed the currency.
And so this is the position we're in now.
But that is the virus.
That's what you want to look at.
Like, what is the virus here?
Not like what get, you know, what gives a little temporary relief.
All right.
Anything else you want to add to that, Rob?
Yeah, you know, it's a problem of just him being a little bit imprecise because especially at the start of that when he's talking about like, so what, you're going to exert centralized government authority to ban dollar stores?
And then what's going to happen?
So those people won't be able to afford what they currently can afford.
And then what, you got to mask that problem that they can't and what they're forced to move to new areas.
Now they're going to live in cities.
And then you pull what, you know, communist regimes do where you pretend like they're happier in the cities, but now they've got access to bodegas.
And I mean, something else is going to have to serve them.
I don't know why I was thinking about this the other day, but like to me, I guess like when you start understanding the way capitalism works when it's real free market capitalism, it's amazing, but there is a starting point that you have to understand that not everyone is equal.
And once you're like, you're willing to accept that, which is a harsh reality of life, because everyone else, you want to pretend like that's no, not everyone's equal, but at least under capitalism, you can always like, you should just have the freedom to pursue whatever's the best available opportunity to you.
And if people are always just able to pursue the best available opportunity to them, one, they're able to have the best available opportunity.
And two, that's the seeds of growth.
That's where they're able to learn skills.
That's where they're able to at least have a job.
And like the starting point can be.
Can like the optics of it can look bad if you're comparing it against some ideal perfection that does not exist.
That includes borrowing money, includes central.
Like you're comparing it to something that doesn't work and will fail.
But like yeah, maybe working in a factory for some people for three four, five dollars an hour, that's their best potential opportunity and that means that a factory will be built, that means that they will have some sort of an income.
Like it's just the freedom to pursue your best available opportunity.
That's the starting point for growth and for the like good application of resources.
And I I feel like that just bigger picture.
That's just what's lost in trying I I agree with all of that and I also and look to be uh fair, like it's not that Tucker is advocating for or explicitly advocating for, like banning dollar stores or something like that.
I don't know.
I mean he has, like we've talked about in the past, talked about like banning self-driving cars and things like that.
But this is kind of the problem in the lack of precision is like because you want to be real precise about what's going on here and so when you start to just say well, it's capitalism or it's libertarian economics or something like that.
What it seems like the logical conclusion to that would be to advocate some type of government intervention in this.
The issue with that is that you, you just look at it and you go as look as we.
This entire show basically is laying the case against the government, like we're basically just prosecuting the government every episode of this show.
And so if you're saying oh, the government's got to do something for these, these working class people, it's like okay we're, here's a litany of the ways that they're fucking over those people.
So how about stop doing that?
Or stop doing that?
Stated somewhat differently, uh government uh, like government, allocation of resources includes force, which means that's the only opportunity in an economy for misallocation, which goes all the way down to I.
I mean, if you really want to go really big pictures well, let me just I i'll just quickly it's.
It's misallocation without a cleansing mechanism, because there is misallocation in the private sector, but at least you have the profit and loss system.
That is somewhat of a cleansing mechanism, that when you misallocate a lot of money, you're going to go out of business, whereas when the government misallocates a lot of money, they just demand more money the next year right, but I, I guess with the cleansing mechanism in a way, it never is truly, because what do you do so you save it?
Misallocation Without Cleansing00:02:49
So then other people's dollars are worth more.
You invest it, so you're giving people jobs.
Your company goes under.
Yes, someone who's good at it swallows the thing up.
The only thing that really allows it to be misallocated is when there's faulty signals and too much.
Uh sure, money available to you for government, but like here's the crazy thing.
It's like, even if you looked at it, that imagine if government was actually good at social benefits.
And so like they were actually good at, you know, you know, getting people free healthcare, getting them to this, getting them to that.
But then at some point, you end up with the failed mechanism of like just with the Federal Reserve and then with the bailouts to cover for this.
So it's like, that's kind of what I'm saying is that no matter what they're going to provide to you is going to come with some certain element of force, which means that like, as opposed to entrepreneurs being able to get you the goods and services that you need through a value mechanism, like they're going to, there's going to be improper spending.
There's going to be waste.
There's going to be fraud.
That's all introduced by government.
It's not introduced by the market.
Yeah.
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And you can call me whatever you want.
Tax Cuts That Fail00:10:39
Oh, you're a socialist.
I don't care what you call me, actually.
I'm beyond caring about name calling.
It's bad and I oppose it.
Yeah, believe me, I know I got in a lot of trouble once for suggesting that you and Steve Bannon are a lot more socialist in a certain limited sense than a lot of people who claim that that title.
And of course, the nuance of that point got completely lost.
But I do think the fact that you are focused so much on kind of the welfare of ordinary people.
And, you know, you go to anywhere in the world.
You go to, obviously, if you go to Western Europe and you see these structures that people spent 200 years building just for the sheer beauty of it.
And you go into nature and you see beauty like it never exists.
And you go to developing countries and you see a kind of dedication to buildings even that are designed to be inspiring and to kind of stimulate things in the human soul.
And then you go to the places in the United States where our infrastructure is falling apart, where our new structures are designed to be as ugly as possible.
And it's a very difficult thing to do to communicate these sort of spiritual components of our politics.
But ultimately, politics does have no purpose other than to elevate the happiness of our citizenry.
And by every metric, the happiness of our citizenry is declining.
Suicide, addiction, use of antidepressants, all of that.
Again, I think there's a lot of truth in there.
The problem is you see that it's not just semantics.
they kind of get at the problem right there at the end is that they're going to say, oh, okay, so call me a socialist or whatever you want to, but I'm against this and I'm for the welfare of the average person.
And it's like, all right, fair enough.
But now you see you misdiagnosed the problem.
And so of course now it's leading you to the incorrect solution.
I mean, look, like Tucker Carlson, I've heard him go on these rants before where he's like, he's like, oh, you know, you live in Washington, D.C., where he lived for years.
And look, it's all these millionaires.
And why are they millionaires?
Because there's all these big factories and they're making all this stuff.
No, it's not.
It's because of government spending.
So that's the, that's the, the root cause here.
So that's what you should be advocating is a drastic reduction in that, in their ability to all become a bunch of millionaires by robbing the rest of us.
Stop robbing from those people.
If you care about the, you know, like, it's so bizarre to me.
It's so bizarre when you think about the fact that you'll have people and people of good faith, you know, with good intentions who will be like, hey, I care about the welfare of working families.
And therefore, I'm advocating for policy X or policy Y.
And they won't just go, hey, what's the biggest bill that those working families have to pay?
Oh, yeah, it's their income taxes or it's their property taxes.
How about let them have their money?
Why can't we start there?
You know, Tucker made this point, and I believe he goes on to make it later in this episode, but I've seen him make it elsewhere too, where he'll talk about the tax code and how, you know, capital gains is taxed at a substantially lower rate than income tax.
And he's like, so what does that mean?
Does that mean we're saying that like it's more noble to invest your money than to work?
You know what I mean?
Like what somehow we're like favoring that.
And he made the point where he's like, you know, we tax cigarettes because we think they're bad and we want less people to use them.
So that's how we're treating work, working.
But so that's, he's right about that in a sense, right?
Like it's kind of unfair that someone who is a banker, they get to claim, oh, they don't have income, but they, because they make all of their income from investments.
And so they're paying like a 15% tax rate while somebody who just works might be paying double that, maybe more.
And you're like, okay, that's true.
That, right?
That's true.
There's an unfairness to that.
But this is where being precise really matters, because you see immediately, right?
There's kind of two options of how you could fix that problem, right?
Like if you're saying it's unfair that investment banker pays 15% and electrician pays 35%.
Okay, that's unfair.
So how do we fix that?
Well, there's one of two ways.
Okay.
You either raise investment bankers' taxes or you lower electricians' taxes.
Some combination of both, I guess, but those are basically your options.
But so now think this through for a little bit.
Let's say we raise the investment bankers' taxes to 35%.
Okay.
We make capital gains 35%.
Well, now we don't have the problem of the unfairness anymore, right?
They're both paying 35% for the sake of argument.
Okay.
Now, was that electrician helped at all?
Okay, here's what you get.
There's going to be a little bit more revenue going to Joe Biden's federal government.
What are they going to do?
Well, they're going to take in that revenue.
actually the revenue that the extra money that is coming in has already been spent and a thousand times over, right?
We're already spending way more money than we bring in through taxes and we do it by borrowing or just printing the money.
We also got tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities for entitlement programs.
So, you know, this money just basically evaporates into the swamp of DC.
So like, is it, do you really think that this guy's life would be better off if the swamp had a little bit more money, if they brought a little bit more revenue?
And let's assume, by the way, that they actually get more revenue, because as you know, raising rates doesn't always equate to more revenue coming in, but whatever.
Let's just say for the sake of argument, the DC swamp gets a little bit more money.
Is that going to help this guy's life?
I mean, if money going to the federal government were helping people's lives, this guy would be fine already, right?
Because there's already $6 trillion being spent in Washington, D.C. every year.
So as Tucker said, let's look at our current economic system, whatever you want to call it.
Let's judge it by how it works for people.
All right.
Fair game.
Let's do that.
How is that helping this guy at all?
Now, let's look at the other option.
We could lower this guy's taxes from 35% to 15%.
Has that helped him?
It's life-changing.
His life is already so much tangibly better because we did that, right?
That guy is now to anybody out there who's working full-time, who's paying, say, 30-something percent in tax.
If your taxes got lowered this year to 15%, you would literally be, you would be so excited at the prospect of that because it would make your life so much materially better immediately.
So see, that's why being precise matters, because you're going to get to one of two solutions here, one of which will do nothing to improve anybody's life and one of which will actually help the people who you're claiming to want to help so much.
All right.
Anything else, Rob?
Well, on that note, when he says, fine, so call me, call me a socialist.
So what exactly is your solution, Mr. Carlson?
Are you saying that we should engage in more wealth redistribution?
Is that what you're saying?
Like, hey, the system's failing and we have to do more for average Americans.
So we need more wealth redistribution.
So like, what's the mechanism on that?
I mean, just look at what I look at COVID as a pretty good example.
How did centralized government authority do in terms of handling what they declared a health emergency?
How are they doing in terms of protecting our country with the multiple failed audits and all these wars that we're fighting?
Like point to one sector of government centralized authority or wealth redistribution and go, hey, I think this is working.
I think this is a win.
I think this is a good use of resources.
Like, I mean, that is a question.
Like, take one.
You think the public school system is good?
What do you think government's doing well with the current redistribution system that you want to give more money to it?
Like, who in government do you, or are you just saying, is it like the dictator thing?
Like he's saying, hey, if I was in charge, I could redistribute, redistribute this better.
You know, I don't know.
That would be my question.
Well, it's, it's, uh, it's frustrating because with people like Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson and like Jimmy Dore, like those kind of guys, who it's like, they're so good on so many things that it's like, how are you not a libertarian at this point?
Like, how have you not just come to the conclusion that like these monsters who you rail against every single day should have no control over any of us?
Their power is totally illegitimate.
I mean, like, like, cause even the examples you're using, like Tucker was so good on COVID.
He was so good throughout the whole thing.
You know, and he's so good on wars.
He's so good on all of this.
And yet at the same time, it's like, how is it not clicked yet that the answer is obviously that these criminals in DC should have their power reduced and not increased?
And that like, you know, I don't understand how anyone, you know, especially like, you know, Jimmy Dore, guys like that.
I don't know why I'm bringing him in, even though he wasn't in this clip, but it's like, wouldn't, because I've had like several, you know, conversations with him.
And it's like, wouldn't it almost be like, if you understand how corrupt and evil the federal government is, as these two guys and Jimmy all clearly do, then wouldn't it obviously be like, well, even if you thought the government should have some role in the economy or in looking out for the welfare of the citizenry or something like that, wouldn't it be obvious that like, well, the first step is we have to get all of these corrupt guys out of there.
Because I'm not just going to advocate for more power from this organization while these guys are still running the show.
You know what I mean?
Like what?
Obviously, they've clearly demonstrated that they are not capable of doing the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing and that any amount of power you give them is just going to be used for corrupt purposes.
You'd think at least that would be step one.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is CrowdHealth.
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Colonial History Ignored00:17:03
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's move on.
That'll have to serve as our response to that clip.
So let's, you know, I've got this other clip here, but I don't know how much time we're going to have.
We could do, we could do part of it.
There was another clip I wanted to play that was Bill Maher talking about Israel.
So anyway, yeah, we could, let's do that.
We'll play that and we'll respond to a bit of it.
So here's Bill Maher from last week's real time.
And finally, new rule, I know it's supposed to be that magical time of year, but maybe what we all really need right now is a good dose of realism.
I see a lot of nativity scenes when I'm out, as you always do before Christmas, and I can't help thinking about where that manger really is.
It's in the West Bank on Palestinian lands controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
In 1950, the little town of Bethlehem was 86% Christian.
Now it's overwhelmingly Muslim.
And that's my point tonight.
Things change.
To 2.3 billion Christians, there can be no more sacred site than where their savior was born, but they don't have it anymore.
And yet no crusader army has geared up to take it back.
Things change.
Countries, boundaries, empires.
Palestine was under the Ottoman Empire for 400 years, but today an Ottoman is something you put under your feet.
The city of Byzantium became the city of Constantinople, became Istanbul.
Not everybody liked it, but you can't keep arguing the call forever.
The Irish had the entire island to themselves, but the British were starting an empire.
And well, the Irish lost their tip.
They blew each other up over it for 30 years, but eventually everybody comes to an accommodation, except the Palestinians.
Was it unjust that even a single Arab family was forced to move upon the founding of the Jewish state?
Yes.
But it's also not rare.
Happening all through history, all over the world.
And mostly what people do is make the best of it.
So just pause it right here.
I was just, when I first saw this, I was actually kind of, I'll tell you, man, it's unbelievable how flabbergasting some of the pro-Israel arguments are that you almost like can't believe that they're actually making them.
Get over it.
We took your shit.
He's got to, yeah, he's got to be, have like some other point here.
It can't just be like, dude, bad shit's happened a lot of times.
Take his mansion.
Let's just go take it.
Hey, man, Bill, people take people's shit.
Yeah.
After all of, all of history.
Like, imagine.
You think you're the first rich guy who lost his mansion because someone just came in there and took it?
You're going to keep complaining forever?
I mean, come on, man.
Get over it.
Like, what?
Dude, lots of bad shit.
Did I ever tell you about this one time in ancient Rome when they took a guy's mansion?
All right.
You feel better about it now?
It's like, this is actually the argument?
No, look, was it wrong that one single Muslim was kicked out of their land when Israel was created?
Yeah.
It's like, okay, well, how about 750,000 of them?
It's 750,000 times as wrong as that.
But again, see, this would almost kind of make sense.
And like there, the missing element here, right, is that, because he says that, and again, this is the problem with whenever any of these guys talk about this current conflict.
It's like they just insist on leaving out this huge chunk of it.
And then you're supposed to have the conversation as if this big chunk of things isn't also part of it.
But so when he says like, hey, look, the Christians, you know, the site of where Jesus was born is in what is currently the West Bank.
But you don't see all these Christians gearing up to go in there and invade it.
It makes it sound as if the only element of the conflict here is that there is land that's considered holy to the Arabs and they want it back.
But that's just not right.
That's not the only part of this.
And like the reality is not that a bad thing happened to the Palestinians a long time ago and they just can't get over it.
Like everybody else just gets over it, but these guys just can't get over it.
The thing is that a really bad thing is still happening to them.
That's at the heart of the issue.
Like right now, as we speak, that thing is still happening.
And no, nobody could be, no group of people would be expected to get over it while it's still going on.
That's the whole beef.
Look, every time there's been talks of negotiations and there's been serious talks.
I mean, there were the Oslo Accords.
There was Camp David.
There were the Oslo Accords.
like times when the Israelis and the Palestinians sat down, their leadership sat down and at least attempted to start negotiating things.
Now, we could get into the history of like who really made good faith offers and what exactly was offered.
But regardless of all of that, the starting point for all of these negotiations has always been 67 borders.
It's never been 47 borders.
Nobody's ever, none of them are ever even talking about the UN partition recommendation.
That's been off the table for a long time.
Okay.
And so nobody, it's not as if the negotiations are starting with, hey, a bad thing was done to us when the state of Israel was created and therefore you all got to go away.
It's not, we have to give the land back to the Native Americans.
That's not the conversation.
The conversation is you got to stop dominating the last 22% that we have left.
That there ought to be autonomy and independence for Gaza and the West Bank.
That's what's known as the two-state solution.
That's what the conversation's over.
It's not over this bad thing happened in the past and we just can't get over it.
It's stop doing bad things to us right now.
So, and by the way, not only the PLO and Yasser Arafat and those guys, but also Hamas at different points has said that they would recognize Israel under 67 borders.
Now, granted, that's probably not what they're saying right now.
Well, Gaza is under, you know, invasion, but that has been said at different points.
And that's the real issue here.
The real issue is not 1947.
It's not 1948.
It's 1967 and since then, that Israel won a war in 1967 and has then claimed the right to dominate these people in perpetuity.
That's the issue.
And if you're not going to address that, and we're just going to pretend that part doesn't exist, we're not really talking about what's happening.
Okay, you got anything to chime in, Rob, or should we keep going?
No, let's go take Bill's mansion.
That's what I think.
There you go.
Just get over it, dude.
Lots of bad stuff's happened in the world.
You ever open it?
Crack open a history book, man.
It's people taking mansions.
All right, let's keep playing.
After World War II, 12 million ethnic Germans got shoved out of Russia and Poland and Czechoslovakia because being German had become kind of unpopular.
A million Greeks were shoved out of Turkey in 1923.
A million Ghanians out of Nigeria in 1983.
Almost a million French out of Algeria in 1962.
Nearly a million Syrian refugees moved to Germany eight years ago.
Was that a perfect fit?
And no one knows more about being pushed off land than the Jews, including being almost wholly kicked out of every Arab country they once lived in.
Yes, TikTok fans, ethnic cleansing happens both ways.
In Fedor on the Roof, the family is always moving to stay one step ahead of the Cossacks, but they deal with it.
When they're leaving Anatevska, they say, hey, it wasn't so great anyway.
Come on, like other countries don't have roofs you can fiddle on.
Now.
Now, that's not how they really felt, but they were coping.
They coped because sometimes that's all you can do.
History is brutal and humans are not good people.
History is sad and full of wrongs.
One more second because, I mean, I don't know how much more I can say because there hasn't been another point made.
He's still just actually making that one point.
Bad things happen to me.
Get over it.
Come on.
Rob, Peter Griffin.
And listen, me and Rob are, as you know, we're of the tribe.
We have Jewish families and Jewish friends, okay?
So don't take this the wrong way.
But Rob, how fucking rich?
Like, how fucking rich is it that for, of all the people to be making this argument toward the Palestinians, it's the Jews?
I mean, like, seriously?
Seriously.
This is the argument from the pro-Israel side.
Bad things happen to everyone in history.
Stop bitching about it.
Get over it.
You're not special because you were oppressed historically.
Really?
Really?
That's the pro-Israel argument?
I just don't even know what to say to that.
The gaul.
Like, I don't know.
I'm actually, for the first time in the history of this show, I'm speechless.
I'm speechless that this is the argument that the Israelis are going to make or the pro-Israel type.
It's like, yeah, a lot of us have suffered throughout history, but no one just keeps complaining about it forever.
No one brings it up all the time and constantly lives in the evils that were perpetrated against them.
You know, the Jews, they were kicked out of a whole bunch of countries and they were just like kind of merry about it.
They just went on their happy way.
They never remind you about it.
Never comes up.
If there's a people that don't complain, it's the Jews.
That's all I'm saying.
They just take it and strive.
I mean, come on, man.
Come the fuck on.
All right, let's keep playing.
Bad and full of wrongs, but you can't make them unhappen because a paraglider isn't a time machine.
People get moved and yes, colonized.
Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century.
And they didn't do it by asking.
Is there reason Saudi Arabia's flag is a sword?
Kosovo was the cradle of Christian Serbia.
Shit became Muslim.
I mean, this is, you know, it's like unbelievable.
He's defending empires.
I don't know why we're not out conquering shit right now.
It's also just like there's on the pro-Israeli side, it's almost, it's always like the perspective of history.
And listen, I'll grant this because we're, whenever you talk about history, you are by definition cherry picking, right?
Because everybody's cherry picking because you, you can't, you know what I'm saying?
Like you can't, first off, we don't know every detail of what happened, but also even if we did, you don't have the time.
Like if you write a book about a century, it can't take a century to read.
You know what I'm saying?
So like even if you knew every single detail of what happened, it would take a century to tell the entire history of a century.
So obviously, if you're writing a book that's 600 pages long, by definition, you're talking about what you think is important here, right?
And so everybody's guilty to some degree of doing this, but it seems like everybody who's making the pro-Israel arguments, it's like history has to begin with, okay, it starts on October 7th.
That's when we're going to start history here.
And if you go like, okay, but let's look at like the decades before this, they're like 632 in the year 632, the Muslims did some fucked up shit.
So what you want to talk history?
Let's really talk history.
And you're like, wait, isn't it more reasonable since we're all kind of cherry picking here, but isn't it more reasonable to talk about like the history over say the last century or the last 50 years or the last 30 years or the last 20 years than to just jump around to like, oh yeah, but the Muslims conquered a bunch of people back at a time when everybody was attempting to conquer people and they won.
Anyway, I don't know what else to say about the same argument of like, hey, get over it.
Bad things happen.
Get over it.
Okay.
All right.
Let's keep playing.
They fought a war about it in the 90s, but stopped.
They didn't keep it going for 75 years.
There were deals on the table to share the land called Palestine in 1947, 93, 95, 98, 2000, 2008.
And East Jerusalem could have been the capital of the Palestinian state that today might look more like Dubai than Gaza.
Arafat was offered 95% of the West Bank and said no.
The Palestinian people should know your leaders and the useful idiots on college campuses who are their allies are not doing you any favors by keeping alive the river to the sea myth.
I mean, where do you think Israel is going?
Spoiler alert, nowhere.
Pause it right there.
So it's pretty, there's something funny about simultaneously making the argument that people get kicked out of places all the time and they don't keep bitching about it forever.
And then also go, what do you think?
You're kicking these people out of their place?
That's never going to happen.
There's no historical precedent for it or something like that.
Look, when he's attacking the woke, you know, useful idiots on college campus or whatever.
Look, I'll be the first to admit that the last person you ever want defending a cause that you care about is a woke progressive on a college campus.
They're not going to do a good job.
And I do agree that from the river to the sea is I'm sure there are some people who, when they say it, just mean like the Palestinian right of return, that they should be allowed to come back and they can all kind of share the land.
I'm sure there's some people who mean all the Jews got to get the hell out of there.
Maybe some of them mean that they should kill all the Jews or something like that.
I mean, I don't exactly know.
I'll say, I don't think the chant is helpful at all.
And obviously in that most extreme version of it, it's evil.
But it's just not helpful because it's not real.
And I kind of agree with Bill Maher here.
Like you're just not going to snap your fingers and get rid of Israel, nor would it be correct or just for that to happen.
The fact is that Bill Maher's kind of right that history is ugly and you're not going to go back in time and right all of the wrongs.
Again, that's not the argument from the reasonable people who are making this argument.
Israel Arguments Explained00:12:21
So in other words, if I were to sit here and talk about how fucked up it is, what European settlers did to the Native Americans, right?
It's pretty universally agreed that, yeah, that was messed up.
Okay.
Now, what do you do with that information once you have it?
Do you say, oh, well, we should all give the land back to the Native Americans?
The United States of America should cease to exist.
Well, no, that's not going to happen.
And why not?
Because like we're many, many generations into this now and people have lives here and people aren't just going to give up their stuff over some old claim.
Okay.
However, you would still probably agree that the Native Americans that are alive and are still here should have their rights fully protected.
That's all.
That's all it's saying.
That, okay.
They should, you know, I did a debate with Will Chamberlain on Michael Malice's show a couple days ago.
It should be out this week.
And there was one point in the debate where I asked him, because he was speaking, as Bill Maher kind of does in this video, about, you know, when he said, what did he say?
something at the very beginning of the video, you remember he said that the Christian holy site is in the West Bank today, which is controlled by Palestinians.
Sometimes when they speak this way, they almost make it sound like it is controlled by Palestinians.
But the problem is it's really not.
And then see, even here, right, Bill Maher says there was offers for a two-state solution in the past and the Palestinians turned it down.
Now, we could get into another day how that's actually not really true, but whatever, regardless of that.
But you see what you're kind of conceding there is that there isn't a two-state solution, right?
You're saying they had an offer for a two-state solution and they turned it down.
So there isn't a state there.
So they're not a state.
So I kind of, I pressed Will Chamberlain on this at one point.
And I said, I go, are you claiming that there are two states that we're living in a two-state solution?
Because nobody, even in the Israeli government, takes that position.
Nobody is actually claiming that Gaza and the West Bank are their own independent states.
And he was like, no, I'm not saying that.
And I go, so is it in effect all one state?
It's all Israel.
And he said, yes.
He agreed with that.
He said, yes.
The Jews are keeping the Christians out of Bethlehem.
They've retaken all of this other land.
They can give the people their birthplace back.
Look, here's, but here's the major problem.
And I think, in all fairness, and nothing against Will personally, I kind of like the guy, but I do think he kind of squirmed out of this.
You guys can, you know, watch the thing and judge it for yourself.
But I said, oh, okay, great.
So I agree with you.
I agree with you.
This is all Israel.
That Israel is not just Israel proper, but it's also Gaza and the West Bank.
It's all under Israeli control.
Israel is the government of all of this.
But now you have a real problem when you're talking about Israel.
Because now what is it?
It's an apartheid state.
And there's really no other way to think about it.
If you concede that there is no two-state solution, and therefore this is all one state as of right now, well, then you got 5 million plus people living under this government who have absolutely no rights.
They do not have citizenship.
They don't get to vote.
They don't get to freely move.
They don't get to freely trade.
They're just living under totalitarianism, where any day an IDF soldier can run in, point a gun at them and their grandma and shout curfew.
They have to run into their house or they'll be arrested.
Do they get a trial?
Nope.
Do they get charges?
Nope.
They'll just be arrested.
Some IDF soldier will say they confessed and that's it.
They'll be held for years.
This happens all the time.
There's women and children who are held as prisoners with no trial, no rights whatsoever.
They'll tell you what roads you can use, what roads you can't use.
They'll shut your business down, do whatever they want to do to you.
That's the heart of the problem here.
And there's no way to talk about this conflict without recognizing that element of it.
And it's just so crazy to try to.
And it's crazy that people even make these arguments.
Like you're like, what year am I living in?
Is this like, is this 1612?
Like, who is, who is even making an argument today that somehow that's okay?
Well, all these bad things happened throughout history.
It's like, yeah, but the whole point of like being in a modern society in Western civilization is that we no longer tolerate those things.
We recognize them as evil things that happened in the past and they're not okay.
There's one other point that I wanted to make and not just about this Bill Maher thing, but this is just kind of a larger point that I've been I've been trying to make for a while now, but I don't think I've actually just blatantly like clearly said this.
So there is a thing that we've, so you know, Rob, we've been pointing out for quite a while now that the pro-Israeli side and even some of the like kind of pro-Israel right wingers in America become the wokest amongst us when it comes to Israel.
So I had, there was another example of this where the guy, I'm blanking on his name.
But anyway, he's Barnes, I think is his last name.
And he does that show.
I did, I did their show once.
But he said something like kind of calling Scott Horton an anti-Semite or something like that.
So Scott basically had said to him that, you know, that he was had he had been promoting Scott's book enough already.
And that, but then he was like, oh, Scott, Scott's takes are awful on Israel.
And he's like, well, you, you said you loved my book.
And I had a whole chapter in there that was about how Israel, you know what I mean, their influence in getting America involved in these wars.
And then he responded to Scott by saying something along the lines of, he goes, yeah, you probably think that the Jews deserved World War II and the Holocaust too.
And I was like, man, can any of like, can any of you just not turn into a woke blue-haired 20-year-old chick whenever you're arguing about this?
Like, here's Scott Horton being like, here's the book that I wrote that details what Israel has done.
And your response is what?
You're a wasist.
You hate all the Jews.
Like that is just, that's wokeism.
That's the definition of it right there is this response.
And I, the response I got from that was a bunch of people saying, well, Dave, you're actually on the side of the wokes in this one.
Because you're, well, they just go, cause look, all of the, uh, all of these woke college kids are chanting from the river to the sea.
So you're with the woke.
So I just want to respond to that real quickly.
Let's just get clear the difference there.
Okay.
See, it's a different thing.
Your claim is that I'm on the side of the woke people.
But you see, that argument is stupid.
That doesn't mean anything.
That's always, it's just ridiculous.
To ever say anybody who ever tries to use the argument that you're taking the same position as bad person, doesn't that make you feel bad?
That's dumb.
That means nothing.
Because in any given issue, there's going to be all types of people who are on one side of it.
You know, if again, if you were against invading Iraq in the year 2003, you'd go, well, you know, Saddam Hussein shares your views.
He's also against America invading Iraq, but that doesn't mean anything.
Like, what is the, I don't know.
Yeah.
So someone I don't agree with is on my side on this issue, kind of.
Who cares?
That means nothing.
Okay.
So like, in the same way, and of course, you could always fire back in this one.
Well, you're on the same side as Lindsey Graham and the CIA and the Mossad and all these other bad people.
So what, like, what does that mean?
That in itself isn't an argument.
See, so you're saying that I'm on the same side as woke people.
That's not an argument.
But I'm saying you've adopted the argumentation of the woke.
You see how that is a damning argument, but the other one isn't?
You see how one is like, oh, you've actually become what you hate.
And the other one is just like, oh, you have some strange bedfellows?
Like I, I don't know.
You know, if you, there might be people who oppose the Federal Reserve because they hate Jews.
In fact, there are people who oppose the Federal Reserve because they don't like Jews having control.
Me and you oppose the Federal Reserve, but we oppose the Federal Reserve because they debase our currency and cause bubbles and destroy the economy, right?
So is it an argument to go, well, these people who hate the Jews also oppose the Fed.
Therefore, you're what?
A Jew hater or something like that?
It's like, no, you haven't taken on the argument.
My argument is that they debase the currency and they cause artificial booms that lead to real busts.
That's my argument.
So you got to take on that, right?
You got to take on that or you're you're not dealing with the argument.
But you guys have adopted the argumentation tactics of the woke left.
That is so much worse than just agreeing with them on an issue.
So much worse.
All right.
We got to wrap up the show there because I got to run.
Thank you guys for listening.
Catch you guys next time.
Peace.
And before we call an episode, check out this clip for my newest end of your recap.
And if you go right to the episode description, there'll be a link to part two.
Check it out.
Good artwork.
Roll a clip, Brian.
I'm hoping Chris Christie wins the Republican nomination.
And listen, listen, I know that's not popular.
I know that's not the way you guys feel, but here's what I figured out.
If Chris Christie were to run against Joe Biden, that would make this the first presidential election to the death.
Right?
One of these guys can't survive a staircase.
Chris Christie by heart attack.
Joe Biden by slip and fall.
And I feel like Biden's got to be the first president that you could just take out with butter on a staircase.
And speaking of taking out presidential candidates, what's the over-under on that RFK Jr. guy?
He's saying crazy shit.
He says crazy shit.
I feel like the one thing that might save him is that you can't really understand him.
He basically sounds like the noises I make when I'm pushing a turd past a hemorrhoid.
You don't even need to listen to his speeches.
You could just come over to my place after breakfast when I'm sitting there going, I shouldn't have eat that.
Who fries chicken and fruity patballs?
It feels like I have mRNAs coming from my asshole.
We got the 2024 election and I got another hot take.
I know this isn't going to be popular with you guys, but at this point, I'm actually, I'm hoping Biden wins.
That's where I'm at.
I'll tell you guys why.
I kind of like just have OCD and I feel like I got to see this dementia through to the end.
Right?
At this point, where's this going?
The guy already just gives up in the middle of sentences.
He wanders off stage.
Like, let's stay with this.
You know, this is getting interesting.
And okay, I feel like I haven't gotten my Biden fills until one day I'm watching the news and I see him.
He looks right at that teleprompter, just spaces out and goes, I got to get back to Epstein's Island, man.
Someone get hunter on a plane.
And that brings me to the first news story that I want to focus on for This year