Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein argue that the 2012 surge in "woke" discourse, coinciding with Obama's diversity executive order, was a deliberate CIA and Federal Reserve strategy to distract from economic failures and wars. Citing data charts showing simultaneous spikes in terms like transgenderism and white privilege, they reject organic growth theories, claiming institutions weaponized these issues to divide citizens while bailing out banks. Smith points to targeted CIA recruitment ads as proof of top-down promotion, asserting that licensing laws now enforce compliance with this ideology. Ultimately, the hosts conclude that destroying trust in these corrupt entities and defunding universities is essential to stop societal division. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Wild Shit and Election Season00:13:30
Fill her up.
You are listening to the gas human.
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 more of the problem on the gas digital network.
Cheers, your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, brother?
How was your Jewish Christmas?
Oh, I feel rejuvenated by Christ being reborn.
It was a terrific day.
I think it's not him being reborn.
I think that's Easter.
Oh, is this when we killed him?
No, this is that's Black Friday.
This is when he came back with the tree on ornaments on it and said, give gifts to your kids.
This is when he comes back the next time, put on a lot of weight, goes down chimneys, gives gifts to kids.
No, this is when he was born.
This is the birth.
Is that what I said the first time?
No, you said the resurrection, didn't you?
I get confused.
The guy keeps coming and going.
It's hard to keep track.
Nice guy, though.
Yeah, good guy.
Really?
Good guy.
Good Jew.
But, you know, he had wild adventures.
But anyway, yeah, I hope everybody had a good Christmas out there.
Spent some time with some loved ones.
And I hope you have a good New Year's.
And the best way to have a good New Year's is to come see me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein live in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
This is going to be fun.
These tickets are selling fast.
So if you want to come grab them right now, there are still some tickets available, but this thing is going to sell out.
Live stand-up comedy show featuring me and Rob and Chris Vega.
Maybe a couple others will pop on there.
Then a live part of the problem podcast and then like a meet and greet hang party.
We'll all watch the ball drop together.
Or I don't know if we watch it or whatever.
We're all going to hang out together.
It's going to be a great time.
If you're anywhere in the tri-state area, come on out.
East Rutherford, very easy to get to from New York City and all the five boroughs and stuff.
So come on out.
If you're anywhere in the area, it's going to be a party.
We'll put the link in the episode description as well.
Or go to comicdavesmith.com.
You can grab a tickets there too.
And then in 2024, oh, me and Rob are coming all over the country.
We're going to be in a city or town near you sometime in the year.
So go check out comicdavesmith.com.
All ticket links will be up there as we get closer to the events.
And man, Rob, as we approach the end of 2023, which has been quite a year.
And, you know, me and you now, buddy, we've been doing this together for a while.
And we've covered some crazy years together.
You know what I mean?
I mean, it's like it all kind of gets washed away in people's memories.
But even before COVID, we were covering some wild shit back in 2018, 2019.
I mean, the deep state was setting up the president and framing him for treason and the result types are like really crazy stories.
Obviously, the year that was 2020 was just insane.
And that insanity lasted well through 2022.
2023 is, you know, 22 and 23 is seeing the war in Ukraine now, this war in Israel.
There's been a lot of wild shit.
A lot of wild shit that me and you have been breaking down.
And I think doing a pretty good job at doing it.
But man, Rob, when I think about 2024 and what this year is going to be, it's just, there'll be no shortage of content for us to deal with.
You're going to have ongoing lawsuits against Donald Trump, trying to do everything you can to make sure he can't win.
The richest, juiciest storyline are going to be them screaming, hey, if he gets back into office, he's going to weaponize the deep state and prosecute all of us.
You've got how long can they pretend like Biden is all there?
Who do they recall Biden and replace him with?
How RFK Jr. plays out, whether or not all these wars escalate.
We got a lot of, we got a lot of storylines moving here.
Yeah, it's it's it's equally equal parts terrifying and kind of exciting because it's just so fascinating to see how all of this plays out.
And of course, we'll be here with you guys helping you make sense of it along the way.
And the economy, baby.
Fed already take going, hey, we beat this inflation monster.
We got election season coming up.
We can't be juicing these interest rates anymore.
Isn't it just so transparent?
Isn't it just so transparent?
Yeah, if you're not familiar with what Rob's referring to, the Fed announced that you can expect some rate cuts in 2024.
It's just so obvious that they're just like, well, we got to make this economy look as good as it can going into this reelection and just blatant that, you know, it's like, look, we got to, you know, because even if it's not Joe Biden, they still got to like kind of save, help the Democratic Party save face a little bit.
Because as we've covered on previous episodes, despite the fact, Rob, that we're in such a great economy, the people are just too stupid to understand that.
They're just too stupid to understand how rich they're getting since Joe Biden's been president.
And they feel like they're getting poorer, these idiots.
So anyway, we're going to need some rate cuts.
So even these dummies start realizing how much actually richer they are.
Okay.
So for today's show, so over Christmas, an old clip of mine went viral on the interwebs.
And not a very old clip, a clip from earlier in the year.
I think it was this summer.
And it started, it was when I was on Patrick Bett David's show, and which I love Patrick Bett David, by the way.
That guy is a fucking beast.
And he's got a great show there.
His show is fantastic.
And his whole network, Valutainment, is great.
So anyway, I think it started with they put it out, like the Valutainment, Twitter and Instagram put it out.
And then, you know, I don't know why it was a clip from earlier the year.
I guess one of the guys there liked it.
And so they were like, let's put this out again.
And they put it out.
And then a bunch of different accounts kind of put out different versions of it.
And it just kind of started going a little bit viral.
There's a few different versions of it that have like several hundred thousand views on it.
So that's cool.
And I got a lot.
People really liked this clip.
One notable influencer did take some issue with it.
So I thought, let's talk about this on today's show because it is a topic that I'm very interested in.
And I think it's, and I think I'm right about this.
And so anyway, let's, just so people know, let's, let's play the clip and then we can we can discuss.
And then I'll mention, I'll mention the pushback that I got on it.
Where you can map out words in major publications.
I'm not talking about mom and pop news outlets.
I'm talking about the New York Times, the Washington Post, like the big dogs.
Go track how many times the word racism was mentioned.
And around 2012, it shoots up.
Yep.
Social justice shoots up.
Transgenderism shoots up.
White privilege shoots up.
This was forced on the American people.
Why are we having these conversations now?
The people did not wake up one day and decide we want to have a national conversation about chicks with dicks.
That didn't happen.
This wasn't an organic movement.
It was all of the most powerful people decided this is what we're going to talk about.
And why was that?
Because it's the perfect.
Look, when you're failing on policy, you pivot to a culture war.
You pit people against each other, so they're fighting each other.
We had in this country, we had an Occupy Wall Street movement where leftists were standing outside of big banks screaming, we are the 99%.
Right-wingers had a populist movement called the Tea Party, where they were outraged about the bailouts of big banks, unsustainable debt, government spending.
They don't like that.
That's not what the powers that be like.
You're getting too close.
Look, they like you fighting about issues like abortion.
Now, I'm not saying abortion isn't a very important issue.
It's a very important issue.
But us fighting about that issue doesn't scare anyone at the Federal Reserve.
It doesn't scare anyone in the CIA.
They don't care if you fight about that issue.
They love you fighting over transgender bathrooms.
They have no, and you can see this every day.
They're stoking this culture war because they have to to distract from the fact that they completely failed on everything else.
Okay.
So if you do want to go check out the podcast, that is a clip from a longer rant.
There were some more points that I made in there, but this is a couple of different versions are the ones that have been circulating now.
It's Dave Smith live PBD podcast episode 288 is the title on YouTube, if you want to go listen to the whole thing.
But anyway, I find this topic to be very interesting.
And there are there I've seen so many people like have these debates.
I think it was, I might be getting this wrong, but I think it was Thaddeus Russell and Michael Rechtenwald.
I think it was them two, who on Tom Wood's show were basically having a debate over whether the kind of intellectual tradition of modern wokeism was whether it was the Frankfurt school or whether it was the postmodernists and who really, you know, like where the intellectual tradition comes from.
Like Jordan Peterson, when he got really famous, he was constantly talking about how it's all from the postmodernists and that's really what took over the universities.
And there's this kind of theory that I guess, oh, what's his name?
God damn, I'm blinking on his name, who wrote The Closing of the American Mind.
Oh, God, that's bad.
I should remember who that is.
Anyway, The Closing of The American Mind was a great book, by the way.
But his theory was always, and he wrote this back in the 80s, but he was talking about like the rise of cultural relativism and stuff like that.
The theory kind of goes that it's like, well, you know, you take over the universities.
And if something takes over the universities, then basically it's going to seep into American life because the universities are where, you know, the intellectuals are created.
And then those people are going to go out into the workforce and it kind of like, you know, spreads.
But the problem with looking at it like that is that I think you miss like the most interesting part of all of this, which is that this thing, this kind of woke world that we live in is around 10 years old.
And it's not as if it little by little by little crept into American culture.
It was like at once embraced by all of the most powerful people in the country.
And so to me, that's like the really interesting thing.
Not necessarily what the intellectual tradition of it was or who was saying what in a college campus 25 years ago.
What's interesting is like, why did all the powers that be embrace this?
And all at once, what was in it for them?
You know what I'm saying?
Like that to me is the interesting, the interesting part of all of this.
I think it's one of the most interesting things he pointed out on the show and there's very little coverage of was just this correlation of the end of Occupy Wall Street and the birth of this whole woke movement.
And I mean, it's prolific across, you know, I think it got so cartoonish that some of the military industrial complex people do have signs out at the pride parades.
Oh, and the big banks.
Bank of America floats.
Right.
JP Morgan floats at the gay pride parade.
It's like so obvious.
It's like, we're on top of the system.
We're stealing all of your money.
We have all the real power, but it's throwing a little dog, a little bone to the dog of, hey, but we're going to, you know, play into this woke thing that you guys seem to like and don't realize that we actually constructed so that we could remain on top.
Yeah.
And look, I'll say, I don't know.
It might be a little bit of an overstep to say they constructed it.
I think a lot of these ideas were floating around college campuses.
You know, like there were like critical theory was a thing that had a few decades under its belt.
But the question is like, why is it that like, so what people will say when they downplay this.
Well, here, let me here.
I'll let me read some pushback that I.
But it's almost, it's almost cartoonish that everyone figured out the ruse of, oh, look, what is going on here that the banks are getting bailouts that were supposedly in this capitalist society and these people have all the money and the government's supporting their mechanisms for profit.
And so the banks went, well, who can we villainize instead?
White Men and Therapy Pushback00:03:44
And I guess they went with white men as if that wasn't them.
It's like the same way Biden has played the same kind of woke card of, well, the issue, it's we gotta, we gotta prop up women or whatever.
It's like, well, then why are you gonna be in charge?
If the whole issue is.
That's the beauty, but that's the beauty of wokeism.
There's always, you always leave yourself an out.
It's like, oh, because it's always just kind of implied that like, well, if I'm saying that, then obviously I'm one of the good ones.
You know what I mean?
And like, I mean, I'm the one of the ones who recognize that.
So I kind of get a cop out.
But it also, like, it also like, it broadens things so much that you can never actually pinpoint a problem and you, and therefore you can never solve any of these problems, even when there are problems, you know, like some of them are just kind of made up, but even to some degree, there might be a problem.
But then it's like, if, if you're like, let's say, for example, if you're like in Black Lives Matter and you're, what you'd want to do is really narrow your focus.
Like, who are you against?
We oppose killer cops.
You know what I mean?
Like we oppose killer cops when the shooting is not justified.
You know, get like really specific with it.
And then that's who you want to target.
Then you can channel this whole energy of this, this movement toward that thing, accountability for killer cops when the shooting is not justified.
Now, there's something you can look at.
Okay.
But if your enemy is whiteness, it's like you end up going, get Aunt Jemima off the shelf.
And you know what I mean?
And like all these other million things.
And then what did you not accomplish at all?
Accountability for killer cops when the shooting isn't justified.
Like that, that didn't change at all.
Nothing was improved in that regard.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Part of this also, too, is that even if the, let's be honest, the, the execs at, you know, the big banks are pretty much all white and Jewish men for the most part.
When you make it all white men, there's nothing that specific that those guys are doing.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, they're just another one of the white.
And that's why they go, yes, and we, we will also be sending our execs to a week of diversity training.
You know, like, see, there you go, left.
Are you happy now?
Like, hey, are you changing any of those policies where you economically rape the entire country?
He goes, no, no, no, no.
We'll be continuing those.
But from diversity training, we'll be doing it from there for a week, you know?
And so, look, you'd have to at least admit, and look, there's, there's layers to this, but you would at least have to acknowledge, say, as a starting point, how convenient this whole woke thing is for all the powerful people in this country.
The Left's Incredible Pivot00:14:47
Like it worked out pretty damn well for him, didn't it?
You know, and then, and like in the George W. Bush years, you had a major anti-war movement in this country.
There were protests with hundreds of thousands of people at the, I mean, the, you know, Barack Obama won the presidency largely riding that wave.
You know, if you remember, the major reason why Barack Obama was able to beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary in 2008 was because the one thing that was an albatross hanging over Hillary Clinton's neck was what?
It wasn't, look, Bill Clinton was looking much better than George W. Bush in hindsight.
Being tied to the Clinton administration, in the mind of Americans, was generally being tied to the time of peace and prosperity.
That's not exactly right, but you know, that's what people, oh, yeah, the 90s.
That's when things were good.
George W. Bush was tied to 9-11 and Afghanistan and Iraq.
And of course, then by the end there, the financial crash.
So being a Clinton was a strong position.
This is part of the reason why she was such a strong frontrunner at the beginning of the 2008 race.
But what was the albatross around her neck?
She voted for the war in Iraq.
That was a huge problem.
That was a huge problem back at that time.
There was so much anti-war energy.
This is why George W. Bush had such a low approval rating by the end of his administration.
But here came Barack Obama, who railed against the war in Iraq, and he didn't have that around his neck.
He hadn't voted for it.
He wasn't in.
And I think he was on record being against it, even though he was probably like a Chicago state senator at the time or something.
But still, he was clean as far as that was concerned.
But so you had this huge anti-war movement in this country.
So kind of this movement looking at the military industrial complex, at least to some degree.
And then after the financial crash and the banker bailouts, you had a huge reaction on both the left and the right.
You had Occupy Wall Street.
Now, I remember I used to say about Occupy Wall Street, which, you know, at this time, I don't even think I was doing a podcast yet at this time, maybe around like 2010 or something like that.
But I used to say to them, I was like, if you could just go two blocks over and do this in front of the Federal Reserve, you know what I mean?
Like that'd be good.
Like wait, you know, like that would always be my thing that I'd talk about because I knew some people who were like going to Occupy Wall Street.
I was in New York City at the time.
And I'd always be like, hey, you know how you hate the big banks?
Well, I got news for you.
There's this central bank.
It's at the center of the whole thing.
And that's who you should be looking at.
But they were at least to some degree looking at the Federal Reserve member banks, the giant banks in America.
So you have people at least who had they were angry and they were looking at the military industrial complex and the financial industrial complex, right?
And so then, look, if nothing else, just start with pretty convenient for the entire establishment here that people's eyes got completely taken off of all of that.
And like, that's really the shit that matters the most.
I mean, what matters the most is the military industrial complex and the Federal Reserve.
By any metric, that's the most important thing.
And they both got completely forgotten.
And now everybody is fighting over fucking gender identity and all of this other insane shit.
So at least you could start there and go, well, it worked out really well for them.
Wasn't that convenient?
And it's pretty incredible the degree, I guess, how widespread amongst the left they seem to not see the most relevant power structure.
And that COVID, it's like, where was all the talk about big pharma?
Suddenly you guys are on the side of big pharma.
Or also when they did the bailouts this past time and they decided to send everyone a check, they did, I think, larger bailouts than what they did in 2008.
And nobody, nobody reported on it.
No one even asked, hey, what's going on that because of COVID, Wall Street needs all this money and the banks need all this money.
And even with the war stuff, it seems like the left doesn't seem to be that outraged about, you know, I mean, the left seem to support the Ukraine war.
It seems like there's a pretty incredible pivot from that time of recognizing the actual power structures of these huge, gigantic businesses that are robbing the machine and making sure that there's money going their way and just a total pivot to some nonsense about making sure that trans kids can, you know, I guess get themselves dicks or vaginas.
Yep.
And I'll tell you, there's a sliver now of the left that gets this, that is like, yo, everybody is told, you guys are being duped.
Like there's the sliver, the good anti-war left, even like the like the commies, like the real communist left.
And don't get me wrong, they're bad on a whole lot of issues.
And God forbid those people ever get control of your Department of Agriculture.
We're all going to starve to death.
So I'm not like, but they are, they do see through the woke shit because they get it.
They get that.
It's like, wait, this isn't implementing a Marxist revolution.
That's not what any of this is about.
That's not what JP Morgan Chase is trying to do, right?
They're like, these are the capitalists we hate.
And they're all behind this.
And what's so interesting to me about this is that I think so many people when, and I think this is true of like Jordan Peterson, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and a lot of those guys, Dave Rubin, a lot of those guys, when they were analyzing this as it was happening in real time, they would always say, they'd be like, look, the left has taken over the liberals because now they're all talking in this crazy leftist nonsense.
But if you think about kind of, if you, if you think about the left half of America, right?
Like you start with centrists and then anyone who's to the left of that.
The breakdown has always kind of been the liberals versus the leftists, right?
And when you say liberals, it's the neoliberals.
It's not liberals in the sense of von Mises.
You know what I mean?
It's the Hillary Clintons versus the more Bernie Sanders, right?
Like the people who are basically the neoliberal center.
And then there's the left wing.
And they are, who is it?
It's not Scott Horton.
He was the one who told me it first, but I can't remember who came up with it.
But anyway, I wish I could give credit to it.
But it's, but they said, he said it was some libertarian.
And he said, he goes, well, the best thing about a liberal is that they're not a leftist.
And the best thing about a leftist is that they're not a liberal.
Like, if that makes sense, they're always, the best thing about them is that they're not the other one.
But then also you kind of, then there's another half of them that's not great.
Anyway, the neoliberals were always kind of like, well, look, they recognize at least to some degree that we're going to have capitalism in some form.
We're going to have a pricing mechanism.
We're going to do, we're going to, you know, kind of do the bidding of big business.
We're going to, you know what I mean?
Like this kind of supporting the status quo.
And the lefties were always like, no, like they're, they actually hate the corruption of big business.
They want more welfare for the American people, free healthcare, free housing, free education, et cetera.
And they're very anti-war.
That was kind of the left wing's thing.
And so you could see where on the surface, if you look at it, you go, well, look, the liberals, the neoliberals even, used to argue in favor of free speech and a colorblind society and, you know, a marketplace of ideas.
And of course, that marketplace was always rigged, but at least they'd say they're for free speech and stuff like that.
And then you had this sliver of left-wing ideology, which really was only a sliver of it.
It's not like it was the dominant strain in left-wing ideology, but like the critical theory type that would be like hostile to free speech and hostile to meritocracy, to capitalism, all these things.
And so when you could see where if you just look at it on the surface and you go, well, look at the language that the neoliberals are using now.
See, look, they're talking like a bunch of leftists.
So they've been totally taken over by the left.
But if you actually look at it a little bit deeper, you realize that actually what's happened here is that the left was taken over by the neoliberals, just using this dumb culture war stuff.
So now instead of some left winger on college campus, a left winger on college campus in 2008 would have been talking about the war in Iraq and how against the Patriot Act they are.
They would have been a leftist on college campus in 2010 would have been talking about how against the big banks they are.
And now they're talking about microaggressions and transgenderism and gender fluidity while tacitly or enthusiastically supporting the war in Ukraine, support, you know what I mean, ignoring all of the economic policies.
This was an absolute conquest by the neoliberal establishment of the left-wing dissidents.
At a minimum, you can see where when it comes to these policies, the effect of the rise of wokeism was, in a sense, the liberals conquering the left and removing this kind of thorn from their heel of, ah, these left wingers will keep complaining if we keep fighting wars and bailing out banks at a minimum.
So anyway, so that video was shared and it was Chief Nerd, great Twitter account.
Make sure to go follow them.
They shared the version that we just played and it got a response from Ian Miles Chong.
I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that name.
I'm not familiar with Ian, but he's got like damn near a million followers, almost 900,000 followers on Twitter there.
So he, this is what he responded.
He sent a long tweet to them.
And so I want to read this and respond to it a little bit.
So he said, this is historically illiterate and a ridiculous conspiracy theory to claim that, quote, they want you to be fighting over meaningless topics.
Tumblerins, Tumblerinas, Tumblerinas, is that the term?
People who are on Tumble, I guess is what they're referring to.
What the fuck is Tumble?
It was like a social media site that a lot of lefties were using around that time.
And millennial leftists, academics were pushing for weird woke stuff and transgenderism years before it was in the New York Times and other mainstream newspapers.
And the activists pushing for it landed themselves positions on editorial boards in HR departments and Silicon Valley companies like Facebook and Twitter.
The left mainstreamed gender ideology and critical race theory.
It wasn't designed by the establishment to, quote, distract you from the economy or whatever.
People still talk about the economy and they're still upset by it.
What's Dave's solution here?
That every person fighting against woke indoctrination and trans women in girls sports simply stop what they're doing and ignore it?
Because that seems to be the suggestion.
If you want to give up and allow them to take over the establishments, they will institute laws that prohibit you from speaking out against them and they'll claim it's hate speech and they'll sue you in court and throw you in jail for misgendering a 50-year-old man who takes showers with teenage girls by identifying as a girl.
So let's respond to a little bit of this because I really did find this to be a ridiculous response.
Oh, I should say he said a little bit more.
He said, just because Dave Smith thinks these topics are ridiculous doesn't mean that the wokinistas who push it think it's ridiculous.
It's very serious for them and they're going to trans your kid whether you like it or not.
The way to win an argument of that you're not the enemy or the devil is one where a serious movement called wokinistas and we are going to trans your kids against your will.
Okay.
They're not going to stop just because you choose to ignore and dismiss them.
How do you think they got in power in the first place?
They've been ignored by regular people for so long and tolerated for the sake of tolerance.
Do any of them give a damn about the topics Dave cares about, like election fraud or the economy?
Hell no.
They're all Marxists and their whole plan is to dismantle every single aspect of civilization.
Okay, blah, Yeah.
Wait, is that him characterizing the way you think about them?
Or is he, is that, is that supposed to be satire of what your view of them are?
Or is he telling you this is your standpoint and you have to reckon with it?
He seems to be taking my comments here to mean that I think we shouldn't fight against wokeism.
I think we shouldn't oppose it.
I think we shouldn't oppose transgender, you know, transing the kids or something like that, which again, look, I'm not familiar with him.
So I'm not going to like blame him for not being familiar with me, but that's not what I said at all.
And obviously that's not what I believe.
I'm totally for, you know, like pushing back against that shit.
And the fact that it's used as a distraction doesn't mean that it itself isn't a problem.
You know, like some, if you're closing in on an enemy's house and they blow up another building to distract you from where you're moving, that doesn't mean the other explosion is not a threat.
You know, that it just doesn't follow.
But look, what he seems to be arguing with me on here, and look, I don't know enough about this guy, but it seemed to be what a lot of people were responding is that they were like, well, your problem here is that you're fucking with this guy's grift.
Now, I don't know enough to call him out for something like that, but I do think that there has been a tendency, and it's been very bad for the right wing in America, that in many ways, my argument is that they've fallen into the trap every bit as much as the left has.
Gold Standards vs Woke Grifts00:04:40
Because if all you're doing is arguing with 20-year-olds about gender identity, while you're also allowing the, like, look, in 2008, and in the response to 2008, it was at the time, COVID topped it, but at the time, it was the largest transfer of wealth in human history.
And it was from the American people to the elites.
You know, as Noam Chomsky used to call it, it's anti-Marxism in the most literal sense of the term.
Massive redistribution of wealth, except from the working class to the elite class, something nobody could justify.
So if that's happening, and then of course, during COVID, it happened again, even bigger.
So if that's happening and all you're doing is just arguing with some 20-year-old about gender identity, then you've fallen for the trap every bit as much as that 20-year-old who thinks he's a they them.
Sorry.
But at the heart of his argument here seems to be pretending that I said something I didn't, which is that you shouldn't oppose woke insanity.
Of course you should.
Everyone should.
The point is that we just also still keep our eye on the prize.
Something that I got to say, I think only libertarians are good at doing for the most part.
There might be some exceptions to that rule, but for the most part, that it's like, yes, you can, we can walk and chew gum.
I can think that the gender ideology is insane.
I can protect my kids so that they won't be victims to this.
And I can also still know that the military industrial complex, the, you know, Federal Reserve, the Wall Street corruption, all of that stuff is still the most important thing to be focused on.
So, you know, anyway, but at the heart of the argument, the only argument that he really seems to be making with me is that he's saying, no, this was not this, this was not a conspiracy by the powerful.
This was, this organically grew.
And this, this came to be organically.
And the thing is that these people, as he says, these wokenistas, they landed, they were talking about transgenderism years before it was in the New York Times.
They landed jobs in editorial boards and in HR departments, and they organically took over the institutions or something like that.
Okay, there's some major problems with this line of thinking.
It just doesn't match up to the data and it doesn't match up to reality.
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So let's put up, because if you remember in the clip, I was referring to these Nexus charts where you can map out terms.
Okay.
So Brian, I sent you the tweet.
Can we just put that up so we have a visual of just these are just a few of these charts.
Can I add a little some look at the actual data?
Sure.
Mapping the DEI Conspiracy Charts00:12:33
And it's a point that we've made on the show before, but I think one of the best examples of this concept, firstly, it's from Anatomy of the State, but just two examples of the concept.
There was this episode of Rick and Morty where the dumb dad decides that Pluto is in fact a planet.
And then he gets hired by Pluto as like their chief scientist because they're robbing the core and they want a scientist who will say that Pluto is a planet.
The idea that organically people got jobs that reinforce particular positions does not necessarily like that's the relationship between the scholars and the state.
It's kind of the Carlin thing of it's a big club and you're not in it.
Yes.
The idea, look, look, right.
Okay.
That's absolutely right.
Of course, right?
It could be true.
And in fact, it is true that someone coming in to, you know, somebody who was in college coming into some entry-level position is a true believing social justice warrior.
Why were they hired?
But number one, why were they hired?
And number two, since when do they just start getting a push around the CEO?
It's the idea that they would come in and all of a sudden they just run the companies, even if they got a position on some an HR position or something like that.
Why would it make sense that they would come in if the owners of these companies, if the powerful people at these companies were all opposed to this ideology, it would be quite easy for them to smack it all down.
Shut up, you dumb intern.
What are you lecturing everybody else about?
And by the way, even though it's falling away, but why did the existence of DEI officer jobs even exist?
Well, it's because massive amounts of money poured into a structure of trying to push ESG scores.
Well, we'll creating.
Yeah.
We can get into all of that in a second.
But yeah, no, there's actual policy behind this, but I just want people to be able to visualize the charts here.
Okay.
So here is, right, this is diversity and inclusion.
Look at the number of mentions, number of articles about this.
That's an interesting chart there, isn't it?
Let's keep going.
Look at it some more.
Mentions of whiteness.
Hmm.
Same time, same basic chart.
Let's see another one.
Critical race theory.
Hmm.
Same time, same basic chart, right?
Now look, if you look at these lines, okay, unconscious bias.
Look at that line.
No, hold on, go back up to the other chart.
See, just sit here and look at this.
This is why your explanation does not make sense.
If what you had was people who were converted into the universities and then slowly they started to go into companies and rise up the ranks, right?
Because you don't come into a company out of college and have an enormous amount of influence over what articles are being written, right?
You'd have little and more and more and more.
You would not see a chart with a line shooting straight up.
This chart here, it proves that there was a decision made and a decision made that would, that would take someone at these companies with real power to decide we're doing this now.
We're doing this.
This is a straight line.
By the way, and you can take this down.
I just wanted people to get an idea of how these charts look, but this is all happening.
And when is it happening?
Right around 2012.
Okay.
Do you know when Obama's DEI executive order was issued?
2011.
This was the year after he signed his executive order that basically instituted DEI across the government.
Okay.
Coincidentally, then the next year, that's all all the giant media outlets want to talk about, which we know have long been infiltrated by the intelligence agencies.
So I'm sorry.
I'm not saying that this is conclusive proof on its own.
We have more for you.
But just these charts alone make it pretty clear that like, no, there's more to the story than that.
Now, of course, as the point you were making with the Rick and Morty example, I'm not claiming that what Ian's saying isn't also happening.
Of course, there's also woke people coming out of college and going and getting jobs here.
My point is that that's not the interesting part of the story.
The interesting part of the story is not that there were some radical professors at universities saying some dumb lefty shit or that some kids believed it.
The interesting part of the story is that every powerful person in this country decided all at once that we're going to put all of our resources behind those views.
That's the interesting part.
That's why this stuff is crammed down all of our throats when it's so clearly, and you were starting to get into some of this stuff.
But look, dude, it's BlackRock requires you to have DEI standards in order to get access to their capital.
That's not because they were converted in a gender studies class in some university.
There's something much bigger going on here.
And by the way, take comedy, which we know pretty well.
I bet if you did a study of the ratings at Comedy Central from 2010 onwards and what happened to the viewership and profits of that network, my guess is it's an inverse of the exact chart that we just saw.
I can't say that factually, but I'm just venturing to guess based on the cultural relevance of that station and the shows that are there.
And you and I remember being in comedy when all of a sudden, if you were not kind of a woke comic or you had the perspective or this point of view or work, like you could be less funny and go, hey, I'm a trans person who was abused as a kid and not really have jokes and be more likely to be on that network than you and I hanging out at comedy clubs going, hey, this is the funniest comic.
And if you were, and if the network, if we were going, who are they going to pick between?
It's more likely that other person, which eroded the profits of that network over the decade.
And that's not the only, you know, that's not the only example, but like that wasn't a profit decision.
Like, what was, where did that come from?
And you go, oh, well, it was the kids that were hired, but yeah, who chose to hire those kids?
It's like, tomorrow, I'm not getting a job at Fox News unless for some reason Fox News decided, you know what, we're going to go in the other direction.
We're going to do a midnight show with a filthy libertarian comic who wants to talk out against the wars and the pharmacy profits.
In which case, I don't know, maybe I'm on a list, giving me a call.
But under the current thing, I probably have to call them up and go, hey, listen, I know I've been doing five years of radio that was counter to this, but I'm willing to sell a war.
And then they might put me on there.
So the correlation doesn't prove causation.
And I guess we're somewhat in the realm of conspiracy to go that there were, but like, we're not really in the realm of conspiracy considering the government initiatives that back this.
But I know it's not.
I really, I don't even really think we're that much in the realm of conspiracy.
I mean, look, here are the government policies that back it.
And by the way, and Vivek Ramaswamy has done a great job about this in his book, Woke Inc., and I think he wrote another book on the subject too, where he breaks down how there is so much direct government backing of this stuff and where you'll have on a state government level where they have the entire public sector pensions.
So you're talking hundreds of billions of dollars.
And they'll only invest in these companies like BlackRock if they insist that everyone who gets access to their capital meet the DEI standards.
So this is not just some organic movement happening by woke college kids.
Now, the thing is that it's very convenient for, let's say, some right-wing commentators to want you to think that your only real beef is against 20-year-old woke kids, because then they get a ton of engagement from just constantly battling them back.
And then you could see where someone like with the video of me, I make them look kind of bad because you're like, ah, shit, look, see, you've just been focusing on the distraction this whole time too.
And one of the benefits of both being woke and being anti-woke is that you don't need to know anything.
You don't need to read a single book ever about anything, you know, because it's like, if I'm going to go, if I'm going to start breaking down, say, like the history of the war in Ukraine, or if I'm going to break down the history of the war in Israel,
or if you're going to break down like the way that the economy is like, you know what I mean, like stacked against people or like, you got to kind of read some books about that stuff and then learn some things about it from really smart people and then kind of mix that with your own thoughts and then form your own opinions.
There's a little bit of work involved.
But if I'm just going to argue with some 20 year old that she is actually a dude, I don't need to read anything.
There's also a big variable of just in the central, like the way they've centralized medicine and that for like take the COVID thing.
I couldn't be a doctor and give you ivermectin.
I couldn't recommend because I'd lose my license.
You got a similar thing in the laws that have done with trans care that if you make money available to treat this condition and you even tell doctors that they have to treat the condition, you're changing the entire medical field to accept some things, particularly like put it this way.
If it came down from government that this was not a recognized thing and you had to pay out of pocket for it and there was no healthcare for it, or you went to see a psychologist and they weren't taught to embrace your gender ideology and instead it was treated like mental illness, the entire conversation about this would look a lot different.
So a lot of it does come down literally to government license, like the same as COVID.
You couldn't be a doctor recommending, hey, I don't think you should get this COVID shot.
If you're sick, give me a call.
I got some other treatments for you.
You couldn't do that.
You would lose your license.
Right.
Right.
No, that's absolutely right.
So it becomes this whole, it becomes this whole thing, but it doesn't get there without the people at the very top being on board.
And why is that?
Why is it that they're all so on board with this?
Look, again, just to say we're not in the realm of just conspiracy theory here.
And I think we're actually more in the realm of like everything is pointing to this as the obvious answer.
And in fact, the only answer that really makes all of these pieces fit.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, let's, my, my next piece of evidence, exhibit number two.
Let's let's play this old, this good old commercial that some of us may have forgotten about.
Was it the trans person at the CIA?
Yep.
Not trans, not trans, but uh here.
When I was 17, I quoted Zora Neale Hurston's How It Feels to Be Colored Me in my college application essay.
The line that spoke to me stated simply, I am not tragically colored.
There is no sorrow dammed up in my soul nor lurking behind my eyes.
I do not mind at all.
At 17, I had no idea what life would bring, but Sora's sentiment articulated so beautifully how I felt as a daughter of immigrants then and now.
Nothing about me was or is tragic.
I am perfectly made.
I can wax eloquent on complex legal issues in English while also belting guayaquil de misamures in Spanish.
I can change a diaper with one hand and console a crying toddler with the other.
I'm a woman of color.
I am a mom.
I am a cisgender millennial who's been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.
I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box checking exercise.
I am a walking declaration, a woman whose inflection does not rise at the end of her sentences, suggesting that a question has been asked.
Why Banks Want You Fighting00:08:26
I did not sneak into CIA.
My employment was not and is not the result of a fluke or slip through the cracks.
I earned my way in and I earned my way up the ranks of this organization.
I am educated, qualified, and competent.
And sometimes I struggle.
I struggle feeling like I could do more, be more to my two sons.
And I struggle leaving the office when I feel there's so much more to do.
I used to struggle with imposter syndrome.
Okay, you're 36.
You can play it here.
But look, so, so what would the, you know, maybe Ian's response to this would be like, yeah, look, see, she was a woke kid who went into the CIA.
And the question is, why is this their advertising campaign?
What?
You see that picture there?
That was her and John Brennan, the director of the CIA, you know, the secretive, unelected group of spies who actually run our country, who, you know, overthrow regimes around the world, including potentially our own.
In fact, they have overthrown our regimes a couple of times.
Right?
Why are they deliberately pushing this woke stuff?
And don't tell me it's because some kid came and worked there who was a true believer and therefore conquered the CIA.
No, they know what they're doing.
All of the most powerful organizations, by the way, you could find other things.
The Federal Reserve has been doing this too.
The CIA is doing this.
The true power centers in America have been pumping wokeism into the American conversation for a decade.
I'm sorry.
That's more interesting and important than just focusing on the fact that a dude is swimming with the chicks, right?
There's something bigger going on here.
Wake the fuck up, guys.
There's something bigger going on.
And obviously, Why is it that the CIA and the Federal Reserve and the big banks all want you to be talking about the dude swimming with chicks?
Again, just so Ian understands, if he sees this, I'm not saying a dude should be allowed to compete with chicks.
I agree.
That's insane.
But zoom out for a second.
Why do the big banks and the CIA all want you to be arguing about that?
It's pretty obvious.
Because then you're divided against each other.
And who the hell do they care who wins?
I don't care if the dude swimming with chicks wins or the people against the dude swimming with chicks wins, as long as they get to keep fighting their next war, which they do.
And what they don't want is for people to wake up, realize that this is a dumb distraction and realize that these guys pushing all of this stuff are screwing all of us over.
There's something that left America and right America have in common.
We're all being screwed over by the military industrial complex and the big banks.
They don't like that.
They don't want us to recognize that.
So anyway, so one of the things that Ian said here, which it seems to be, again, that he was inferring from my comments that my view is that we don't fight back against wokeism.
We don't fight, you know, it's a distraction.
So who cares about it?
But I didn't say anything like that.
And of course, anyone who follows me knows that I'm completely opposed to all of this insanity because it's ridiculous and destructive and very harmful for society.
And when it comes down to like, you know, abusing kids, it's crossed the line into being something that is pure evil and in and of itself deserves to be destroyed.
But he says here, he says back to his original tweet.
What's Dave's solution here, question mark?
That every person fighting against woke indoctrination in trans women and girls sports simply stop what they're doing and ignore it?
Because that seems to be the suggestion.
But of course, that doesn't seem to be the suggestion.
I never suggested anything even remotely close to that.
No, my suggestion here, if you say, what's my solution?
Well, okay, what's my solution?
My solution is first and foremost, I think that we should recognize the corporate press for the enemy of the people that they are.
Recognize that they're totally implicated in all of this.
And that's what all of those charts are looking at, right?
It's like what the corporate press was doing all this time, because they are the instruments that the powerful use to screw over the American people.
So I think what I'm doing with this show and what many of us are doing in this space is we are in the process of attempting to shatter the corporate press into a million pieces.
That's what we want.
We want to destroy all of these institutions, destroy the trust in them, which they no longer deserve, if they ever did deserve it, and create a new media landscape where instead of there being one CNN, there are hundreds of shows like this.
I think that's like step one.
And then step two, in terms of like what policy I would recommend or what my solution is here.
Well, obviously the policy goes back to the Ron Paul policy.
What you want to do is abolish all of these institutions that never should have existed to begin with.
Abolish the Federal Reserve, abolish the CIA, defund all the universities, all of it.
Okay.
Let the American people be free.
That would be the plan.
But if you're more specifically, if you're talking related to this clip, what's my solution here?
I'm not saying the solution is to ignore the woke insanity.
I'm saying my solution is to not let them throw you off this scent of the most important corruption, the most devastating corruption.
And look, the problem here, right?
Remember, I remember talking about this when we were talking about Piers Morgan, right?
He's a perfect example of this.
So Piers Morgan was a guy who was advocating that we get rid of the Second Amendment.
And we round up all the guns.
He at one point advocated that people get thrown in jail for speech crimes.
He was horrific on COVID.
You lose your rights if you don't get the vaccine, but totally supported lockdowns and then totally supported you losing all your rights if you didn't get the vaccine.
He was horrible on the war in Ukraine, completely supported funding this proxy war on Russia's border, but he'll bring a trans on his show and tell them to their face that they're not really a woman.
And so he gets right-wingers supporting him.
Even though he's bad on everything, he'll stand up against the woke shit and then they go, oh yeah, he's good.
That's what you don't do.
That's my solution.
Don't let this distraction take your eye off the prize of what really matters.
Okay.
Now, I'm not saying that like some of this stuff, there's a range with the woke insanity where some of it is just stupid and some of it does really matter, but not nearly as much as the largest transfers of wealth in human history robbing the American people.
Not nearly as much as starting unnecessary wars where hundreds of thousands of people get slaughtered and tens of thousands of our bravest young men end up coming back here and blowing their brains out.
Not as much as that.
So that's kind of the whole point.
If they're attempting to distract you with this, don't allow them to.
That's the argument in essence.
All right.
Any other thoughts on any of this stuff, Rob?
This guy stinks.
There you go.
This guy stinks.
All right.
We'll wrap up on that note.
Guys, come on out and see us on New Year's Eve.
Gonna be a great time.
I'm really looking forward to this show.
I took a few weeks off of Torin here in December.
So I'm really looking forward to the New Year's show.
That's going to be a great time.
ComicDaveSmith.com for those tickets.
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Check out Run Your Mouth, of course.
That's Rob's other podcast.
And we'll see you back very soon with a brand new episode.