Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein critique government overreach and analyze the 2024 Republican primary, noting Donald Trump's strong lead in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina despite legal ballot challenges. They defend their Libertarian stance against hypocrisy claims regarding Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis while mocking President Biden's cognitive struggles compared to Eisenhower's farewell address. The hosts further dismantle MSNBC's demographic destiny narrative and dismiss Sam Harris's elitist attacks on Elon Musk as snobbery from a declining figure, ultimately questioning the viability of current political establishments. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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New Year State Rollback00:01:37
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.
Happy New Year's, everybody.
Hope you had a good time.
And of course, it's me, Dave Smith, here with my brother, Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
How are you, sir?
I'm great, man.
New Year's show is fun.
New material starting to cook along.
I'm feeling good.
Yeah, that was a fun time, man.
Thanks to everybody who came out and celebrated the New Year's with us, Chris Fega and Louis J. Gomez.
Real fun, real fun times.
And we got a lot more stuff coming up in the new year.
I apologize.
My website hasn't been updated.
We had a little bit of a technical issue with it, but all the new dates should be up there within the next day or two, comicdave Smith.com.
And of course, go to RobbyTheFire.com for all Rob's solo headlining dates.
All right.
So here it is.
We have entered the year that is 2024, and it is sure to be one for the record books.
This is, you know, what can you even say?
I think I've been having a feeling that I think a lot of people have been having too.
And this is even, you know, for somebody who like, you know, I cover this shit for a living, like, this is what I do.
Pushback Against Trump00:15:01
So I spend, I'd say, considerably more time thinking about politics than the average American, because obviously, you know, they have other things to do with their with their time.
But I think even for a lot of people like us who really kind of live in this world, we're kind of immersed in this, a lot of us kind of had the same feeling.
And tell me if you're listening at home, have had this, even though I've been focused on it.
It's like right around New Year's, started going like, oh, holy shit.
We're two weeks away.
We are two weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, the first contest in the Republican primary in the GOP primary.
I mean, technically it's a caucus, not a primary, but you know, it's the first one.
It's a big one.
And we're now a couple, we're a couple weeks away from it.
We can kind of step back and look at like what was thrown at Donald Trump in the year 2023, however you feel about it, quite a bit.
Several charges removed from the ballot in two different states, although what's going to happen ultimately with that is still is still unclear.
But here we are, two weeks out from the Iowa caucuses.
And it seems like despite everything that's been thrown at Donald Trump, he's in pretty good shape as we head into these early contests.
I think that's why there's somewhat been a lack of interest.
It's a little bit like the Yankees in the 90s.
You started watching the playoffs because he knew they were going to get there.
We kind of knew that Trump was winning this the whole time.
We're still waiting to see if they recall Biden or not.
But I mean, last time, remember they tried to throw at him that even if he got all of the electoral votes or I don't know what the inner party is.
It's the amount of delegates.
You're talking about 2016.
Yeah, they tried to rig the delegates on him.
Well, they floated out the idea of doing it.
And the issue they had, this was the famous moment that I always thought was a politically brilliant calculation.
You know, because Donald Trump, and don't get me wrong, because I get it.
There's a weird thing about Donald Trump where you could, you can look at Donald Trump and be like, what a buffoon very easily.
It's very easy to look at Donald Trump and just go, this guy's an idiot.
It's very, you know, and there's a lot of reasons for that.
The way he looks, the way he acts, the language he uses.
He literally speaks at like, he speaks like at a kindergarten level.
It's like, it's like the way a five-year-old would speak.
Like every, it's the vocabulary is very dumbed down.
He repeats things over and over again.
So it's very easy to look at him and just be like, oh, this guy's a buffoon.
But that's only half of it.
Like the other half is like, oh yeah, this guy is also like was in charge of a billion dollar company, which he started.
He also wrote a best-selling book.
He was also on the number one TV show in the United States of America.
Oh yeah.
And by the way, the first time he dipped his toe into politics, he became president of the United States.
So already it's just, Donald Trump's a fascinating person.
I mean, imagine putting that all together, coming off as a buffoon, but also a resume that is any one of those things would be the most impressive person you've ever met.
Literally, if anyone checked off one of those four boxes that I just mentioned, you'd go, that is more impressive than anybody you know.
And he did all four of them.
So there's a little bit more than just the buffoon that meets the eye.
And anyway, so this story, I always found this to be really fascinating.
But so at the time, I can't remember, was it Ryan's Priebus or something?
Whoever was in charge of the RNC in 2016.
And they floated out the idea that there's a certain number of delegates you need in order to clinch the nomination.
These are the rules that the RNC makes.
I can't remember what the number was, but they floated out the idea of changing the rule at the Republican National Convention and making it a much higher number that nobody was going to hit.
And then they could say, well, nobody hit the number.
And so the RNC gets to select who our candidate is, which technically is legal.
Like they can do what they want to do.
They're a private organization.
You know, obviously, you know, they're somewhat in bed with government, but whatever, leaving all that aside.
And I remember Donald Trump said the day after they floated that out, his famous quote, if you remember, was, there will be riots in the streets.
And now, again, keeping in mind who Donald Trump is, those two parts of him, right?
The buffoon, but also there's something in there that's pretty savvy to have been like have such an impressive track record.
And that could come off as just kind of like, oh, it's just Donald Trump running his mouth.
But I actually thought that was very like politically brilliant because he was basically letting them know that in the same way we talk about all the time, Rob, you know, how they dip their fingers in the water.
They float out an idea.
They see how much pushback there is.
If there's a ton of pushback, they pull it back.
If there's not, they move one step further.
You know what I mean?
He was just letting them know, don't even try to dip your toe in these waters because they will come for you.
Like it was a re it was a threat.
You know what I mean?
Like a veiled threat, but it was a real threat that he was like, yo, these people, I have the toughest men in America.
They all support me and they will not stand for you doing this.
And ultimately, they, you know, they did not call his bluff.
And then, and this was before January 6th, when you realized it was just people that would walk around a building and not really do much.
So a little bit more of a punch.
It's not such a scary threat these days.
You're like, what is that shaman going to come over to my house and say a prayer with me?
I'll live.
But anyway, yes, but so they did.
Right.
So that is still, all of that stuff is still a possibility.
We still, we, we know that the Republican establishment hates Trump's guts.
But the thing that he's had and he had in 2016 and he has again in 2024 is that the Republican, the Republican voting base loves him like a god.
That's just the reality of the situation.
You know, I, the other day, I ruffled the feathers.
of DeSantis Twitter supporters, which I really didn't even know they existed.
And I'll tell you, these are, they might be the dumbest group on Twitter.
But anyway, so what happened was I said, so Cassandra from Timcast, she tweeted something about something along the lines of, I'm not going to get this verbatim right, but I'm going off memory, but it was something along the lines of like, you know, I love Thomas Massey so much, I just can't understand why he's supporting Ron DeSantis.
Why is he?
And I responded to her and I was like, well, I asked him this when I was on my show.
And basically he said it's because they're friends and their wives are friends.
And, you know, I was like, look, I wasn't satisfied with the answer, but he's like the best damn congressman in the country.
So I'll, I'm not going to give him too much of a hard time about it.
And then somebody like pushed back on me and they were, he was like, well, he said more than just that.
And I go, fair enough.
I'm oversimplifying it a little bit.
And I post the episode.
I go here.
Watch it for yourself.
Now, if you do watch it for yourself, it is fair.
He said a little bit more than that, but really not that much.
Now, he has explained in other areas, in other forums, he's given a more like kind of full explanation for why he's supporting DeSantis.
I still disagree with him, but he did give a full explanation.
But if you go listen to what he said on our show, I really wasn't too far off.
I mean, he basically, he basically said, I know the guy.
I've talked to him.
He's a real person.
You know, like our wives are friends.
He said that he's not a neocon, you know, he's, yeah, he's not Ron Paul.
We don't really agree with him on a lot of things.
We'd probably vote different, but he's within the Republican, you know, mainstream, stuff like that.
Anyway, so this now, a whole bunch of these DeSantis people started coming at me.
Just to give Mr. Massey a little credit, we only had him on for about a 10 or 15 minute segment.
So that wasn't like, it's not like we really gave him the floor to delve into that topic for a longer answer.
So anyway, so Thomas Massey responded to me and he responded.
He goes, hey, I think I did say a little bit more than that, but I appreciate you sharing the full, the full video.
And I was like, and I said, you know what?
You're right.
I apologize.
You did, you gave a little bit more substance than just that you guys are friends.
So no problem, you know?
And so that was it with me and Thomas Massey.
We were cool, but the DeSantis people were really pissed off.
And so then they're, you know, they're jumping up here.
They're like, aha, Dave gets caught in his lie and he reverses.
You're like, dude, there really, there was no lie there.
I mean, it was, but go listen to the episode.
It wasn't that far off.
Slightly oversimplified.
Fair enough.
But anyway.
So then, there's not too many of them.
You know what I mean?
But it was just funny to watch the interactions.
So then they go through and they find an old tweet of mine because, you know, whatever, they search DeSantis in my tweet in my Twitter thing.
And this is how nuts these people are.
So they find a tweet of mine where I said, we should not split the DeSantis vote.
And they go, aha, Dave was a DeSantis guy until he got bought off.
He got compromised.
And now he's a Trump guy.
And I'm not exaggerating.
This is what all of them were saying.
And of course, like, I mean, it was just really hilarious to explain to these people, like, okay, there's two major flaws with this conspiracy theory.
The first one is that I'm not a Trump guy.
So that probably doesn't help your case.
What is Donald Trump paying me off to do?
Support Michael Rechtenwald and have Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. on my podcast?
Like, how does that make any sense?
The other little problem with it.
is that as you guys who listen to the show regularly know, and I was all over platforms talking about this at the time, the tweet they're referring to was in 2021.
So when I said we shouldn't split the DeSantis vote, I wasn't referring to the presidential election that he wasn't running in yet.
I was referring to his reelection in 2022, the year that my guys took control of the Libertarian Party, took every single position.
I was talking about whether or not the Libertarians should challenge Ron DeSantis in the governor race.
And I was saying, so at the time, if you imagine it's 2021, we're in the middle of the height of the COVID regime insanity.
And here you have Ron DeSantis who has reversed course on lockdowns.
And now he's fighting all of the mandates at the local levels in Florida.
And it was unclear.
I mean, you know, we all kind of hoped that it would be what ended up happening was the case, but it was unclear.
Ron DeSantis had won his previous election by, do you remember the number?
I was like 10,000 votes or something like that.
He barely won his first campaign for governor of Florida.
And so I was just saying that it's like, look, if you're in a razor thin, you know what I mean?
Like, you know, set up like a purple state like Florida, the idea that the libertarians would come in and challenge one of the few governors who was the least awful on COVID.
It just seems stupid to me.
So anyways, they're trying to use this, like the idea that I would be, see, you were supporting DeSantis for president and then you flipped.
Anyway, these guys, the other arguments that these guys kept making to me was that DeSantis is going to win, which I just found.
Listen, as somebody who's, I'm a libertarian, I'm a member of the Libertarian Party.
DeSantis people, come learn from me as somebody who's an expert in losing.
Okay.
I know what it is to lose political contests.
We're the best at it.
All right.
But it doesn't help you any to just delude yourself into thinking that that's not going to be the case.
I wouldn't rule him out because we don't know what happens if he clicks his heels together three times.
All bets are off.
Oh my God, he soared above Donald Trump in the polls and literally.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So anyway, one of them said to me, which I just thought was, it was really something to make.
He goes, he goes, the polls are always wrong.
That's what he said.
He goes, come on, the polls are always wrong.
Not by a 90 or 1000% margin.
Yeah.
I mean, like, he, and it's like, look, first of all, the polling, I've always said that is not a perfect science.
Some polls are better than other polls.
But when you say the polls are wrong, I mean, sometimes the polls are wrong.
Quite often they're not.
It's quite often races come down to within the margin of error of what any given poll said.
But there's no question, like, look, Donald Trump overperformed his polling in 2016 and 2020.
The Republicans underperformed in general their polling in 2022.
Certainly right here in New Jersey, the governor way underperformed his polls.
So like that does happen.
But give me an example of where someone's down 50 points in the polls and they end up winning.
Polls vs Reality00:08:39
You're probably going to struggle for one of those.
Anyway, yet nationally, the real clear politics average for Donald Trump, which is like the average of the biggest polls, has him up over 50 points nationally.
But that's not really the bad news for DeSantis and the rest of the Republicans.
The bad news is that in Iowa, the real clear politics average has Trump up by 32 points, 32.7, to be exact.
And they've got Donald Trump at 51.3, DeSantis at 18.6, Nikki Haley at 16.1, and Vivek Ramaswamy at 5.9.
I mean, if DeSantis were to get everyone else's support, he still loses.
If every single Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley voter all vote for DeSantis, still going to lose.
And that's, you know, that's pretty tough.
Now, in New Hampshire, which is the next one coming up, Donald Trump is, he's not up by 51 points, but he's at 46.3.
And the next closest is Nikki Haley at 24.8.
So it's just at this point.
And by the way, South Carolina, he's at 49.2.
The next closest is Haley with 19.6.
DeSantis is at 11.
I don't know what to say, but it seems pretty obvious that what's going to happen here in the next few weeks is that Donald Trump is going to have huge victories in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
I could be wrong.
I've been wrong about predictions in the past.
But this one, I just don't see how this doesn't end up being the case.
And then you've got a real interesting scenario because if Donald Trump now, if the move is to get him out of this race by one, you know, by one tactic or the other, I think it's going to be impossible to do it during the primaries.
Because if he comes out and wins Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, then he's the nominee.
It just doesn't matter.
You can't, if a guy wins the first three primaries and he's up 50 points nationally, any move to take him out.
Now, whoever else is there is not legitimate.
They're just not going to be the legitimate nominee.
And so now the question becomes what shenanigans can they pull during the general election?
And then, of course, the question also becomes who's going to be running for the Democrats.
Those are the big questions of 2024, which we can see already right now, this first week of the year.
Look, by the way, the question is who's going to be the Democrat, the Democratic nominee?
Let's just take a look at the New Year's message that we got from the current president of the United States, Joe Biden.
I'm curious, what sorts of holiday foods have you been enjoying over the last few days?
Oh, I've been eating everything that's put in front of me.
I've been eating pasta, which I love.
Eating a lot of chicken, chicken parmesan.
I've been eating all Italian foods, basically.
And ice cream.
And ice cream, chocolate chip, ice cream.
Jesus.
Like, there's, I'm sorry, man.
I don't know how anyone can look at this.
This guy is not capable of running a campaign.
There's no way.
You're telling me this guy's going to run against Donald Trump.
He's going to campaign against him.
By the way, Rob, you know, you pointed out, and I had the exact same thought when I first saw the video.
The post took it in a weird direction where they were like, oh, he couldn't even remember the ice cream and Jill had to save him or something.
That's silly because that didn't seem clear at all.
That's not the issue.
The issue is that the man is genuine.
It's sad, dude.
Even if for such a bad person like Joe Biden and as evil as he's been throughout his whole career, and he deserves everything bad that comes to him and worse, it's still sad to see.
You're watching a man struggling to speak.
That's just ugly and sad.
But the guy is struggling to have a conversation that a four-year-old should have.
All types of chicken parmesan.
And that's Italian food.
And, oh, and you had ice cream.
Ooh, chocolate chip ice cream.
I mean, I don't know how old he looks.
The decline in Joe Biden since taking office, where the story was already the decline in Joe Biden since leaving office is just, it's remarkable.
So this is going to be interesting to see, man.
They got to get him out of there somehow.
And they have not, they, they have not stopped Donald Trump in time for him to at least, I mean, at least make it clear that he is the legitimate Republican nominee.
There's also, this might have been a longer segment, which I can't imagine it was, but it might have been part of a longer segment.
I feel like asking the president about what he's eating over the holidays is like me as a comedian, if I had the opportunity to do a bit and like interview the president and just talk to him about lunch.
Like that would be the bit is that I'm doing the least classy thing and talking to this person about utter stupidity that should actually have something more informed to say.
What does it say about us culturally then?
I guess you get the president on for your New Year's celebrations and it's not message for next year.
It's no input.
It's nothing other than the most ridiculous four-year-old conversation you can have about, hopefully I get to eat chocolate chip ice cream.
Well, it is, man.
There is something, you know, and I know people point, you know, people use that movie.
What was the movie?
Idiot?
Idiocracy.
Idiocracy as the example, but it's hard not to look at it and see that.
You know, one of the things Tucker Carlson mentioned when he was on the show, which is a theme that we've talked about a lot that's really fascinating to me.
But he was, he used the example of Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address to the nation, which of course is, I believe, where the term was coined the first time, at least that I know of, that the term military industrial complex was ever used.
Of course, that's always everyone's takeaway from that speech.
And rightfully so, Because not just that it was Dwight D. Eisenhower, the president of the United States saying that, but it was Dwight D. Eisenhower, five-star general, you know, leader of the Allied forces in World War II, who's telling you, hey, we've built up a military industrial complex here and you better watch it because this is really bad.
Like we've made war into a money-making enterprise for a select few group of people and you better watch the influence that they have.
So anyway, but Tucker was just saying, he's like, you know, he was saying that he recently went back and listened to the whole speech.
And he goes, the thing that blows me away is just like how like how intellectual it was.
And that he was saying this message to the American people.
Like he wasn't talking down to them like they're a bunch of dummies.
And now to see that it's like we got Trump and Biden and you're just like, whoa, and this works?
Like there was a time when you were talking to serious men who were listening to you and you had to have something serious to say to them.
And so to even your point, even in within the environment of like, oh, hey, this is a New Year's party type thing.
You would think still if you're talking to the president of the United States, there'd be some conversation about where we are as a nation, where we're looking for, you know, where we're looking toward the future to be next year, what goals are achievable, what you plan on implement.
And it's like, did you have chicken parm and chocolate chip ice cream?
What the fuck, man?
How the hell is a country this dumb and we got so many nuclear weapons?
It's just like a bad, a bad combination for all things.
Anyway, look, it's, of course, we're going to be talking about this over the next couple of weeks and then a lot more after that.
Eight Years of Stagnation00:13:02
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One of the things that's also interesting is that while Donald Trump is going to have, which is, there's no way to deny it to him, but he's going to have, I think, these very positive headlines coming out of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, where it's like, look, dominant victory for Donald Trump.
At least that's what it seems is going to happen.
All while the Democratic, you know, they don't really have a primary.
I mean, the primary starting in March, but it's all just a coronation of, you know, whoever they decide is going to be the nominee.
It's going to be interesting now that you're going to have this like asymmetrical warfare where Donald Trump is going to be like, win, win, win, and Joe Biden is going to be that.
It'll be interesting to see how that all plays out.
Anyway, the corporate press is they're, they're still going to be doing what they can to argue in favor of Joe Biden for as long as they can.
This was a great clip from MSNBC the other day.
You guys got to check this out.
Resident pollster, I want to talk to you a little bit about this new USA Today Suffolk poll that came out, I guess, over the weekend, raving about it today.
It should be setting off some alarm bells at the president's campaign.
In it, he trails Donald Trump among Hispanic voters and among young voters.
Pause it right here.
I just want to say that.
Okay, again, this is just one poll.
You know what I mean?
But as the guy is pointing out, and he's talking to the pollster here at MSNBC, he goes, this should be really alarming.
And if you ever, I've never in my life seen this.
So what is really alarming here is that Donald Trump is winning amongst Hispanic voters and amongst voters under 35.
Now, that is just not what usually happens.
The idea of the Republican winning the Hispanic vote.
And by the way, again, like I said, this is just one poll.
Who knows if this is true?
But the fact that he's up at all, not just close, but winning.
You know, again, I don't like, I hate this kind of like identitarian stuff.
Like I don't like thinking about the Hispanic vote.
I think it's kind of sloppy.
However, you do have to understand, like, as we've broken down on the show before, you know how the great replacement theory has become like the most evil thing.
You say, if you say that, you're basically a white supremacist, mass murderer, something like that.
But the truth is that the Browning of America, as they called it, is something that progressives were talking about for well over a decade ago about how this was going to bury Republicans forever.
So by the way, there's basically a message in here against the stupidity of those progressives and also against the stupidity of those white nationalist types who basically all agreed on the same core fundamental belief, which is that demographics are destiny, as they used to say.
Well, it's not.
That's not actually true.
And it's pretty interesting that that whole plan, oh, it looks like that may have backfired in their face.
If Donald Trump's winning with Hispanics, they're toast.
And then winning with young people is just crazy.
Like that's never the case.
That's all the Democrats can always rely on the fact that they're going to beat the Republicans with the younger people.
The Republicans are probably going to beat them with the older people.
And then that's why there's always all these turnout the vote campaigns, because young people tend to not show up at the polls the same way older people do.
The older people are going to vote.
They're going to vote.
They'll be there.
Younger people, someone comes by with some good weed.
They may not make it to the polls.
But anyway, so that's just how they start off this segment.
Hey, look, this is pretty insane, man.
If you're a pollster and you're in the business of reading polls, yeah, you got a poll here that says that the Republicans winning with Hispanics and young people.
That's pretty big.
So anyway, let's hear the MSNBC pollster response.
By the way, because these people are here like, hey, I worked hard to get away from those relatives.
Build that fucking wall.
I've been sending them money so that they stay there.
I don't want to have to hang with those people.
Change between 2020 and now to see his numbers decline so much.
And can you also speak to the idea that it seems like he's losing some of these folks to third party candidates, not to Trump himself?
What does that mean?
Look, I think this is just reflective of the fact a lot of folks are looking at this.
You know, this is going to be almost eight years of the same two candidates.
In spite of the fact that President Biden has done not a good job, he hasn't done a good job as president.
He's done an outstanding job.
One of the most accomplished presidents since the 1960s in terms of things that the country will have seen benefits from.
Are we better off than we were four years ago?
Well, you think about where we were four years ago in the midst of a pandemic.
The country completely isolated tens of thousands, tens of thousands losing their lives.
We're now out of that with a roaring economy.
There was no recession, despite predictions to the contrary.
I think these numbers kind of reflect that state now.
But as we get closer into the new year and it becomes clear, when Donald Trump is nominated, which I anticipate, Garrett, will happen soon, I think you'll see President Biden restore some luster on that rose.
I think you'll see him again assert the type of lead we saw in the summer of 2020.
And I think he's going to beat Donald Trump comfortably in November 2024.
That said, they shouldn't take these numbers lightly.
It should just be an incentive to keep working, keep pushing.
And I think they will.
What, what, what, Mr. Polster, what's your interpretation of this devastating poll for Joe Biden?
Well, it's that he's the best president ever and he's definitely going to win.
He's going to be back up in the polls.
You know, the real problem with what he's saying there is that it's like, so they rely on this.
Yeah, first off, he's wrong in what he said, right?
Because when he goes, he goes, the question is, are you better off than you were four years ago?
And four years ago, we were in the middle of this pandemic and it was so goddamn horrible and all this.
But actually, four years ago was January 2020.
And if you want to ask the overwhelming majority of the American people whether they were better off in January of 2020 or now, they're going to say they were better off then.
I mean, this is before the COVID restrictions came in.
In January of 2020, even though COVID was going around all throughout the country, people didn't even think it was here yet, but it was.
But people were doing much better.
Prices of things were substantially more affordable than they are today.
And all of the people who had their lives upended during the COVID regime hadn't experienced that yet.
And look, in the same way that it's one of these weird things that cuts both ways, because of course, as we've said before, Donald Trump kind of likes to pretend that his presidency was 2017, 2018, and 2019.
Those years.
But you can't really get away with that because 2020 was also under your watch and he fucked the whole thing up.
He did a terrible job.
But at the same time, it's just very difficult for Democrats to run on 2020 was so bad.
And that's why it's better now than it was under Donald Trump, because everybody remembers that you guys were not criticizing Donald Trump for all of the things he got wrong.
You were criticizing him for not being wrong enough.
They were criticizing Donald Trump, right?
They were criticizing him for not being more restrictive.
And how dare he have turned against the lockdowns by the fall or whatever it was that he finally got decent on them.
And so anyway, I just think this is going to be the fact is that the Biden economy and the Biden years have been a disaster for this country.
I don't know what it is that they could possibly look at and say, Joe Biden is the most successful president since the 1960s.
By what metric?
I mean, like some of your, your bullshit, like numbers, I guess.
You know, even by the bullshit government numbers, you know, the terrible inflation still happened on his watch.
And, you know, look, what, what are his accomplishments?
I mean, what?
What would you look at?
Big spending bills?
Like, oh, okay.
He just, so every president just gets to say they're accomplished because they pass a big spending bill.
Oh, all right.
Wonderful.
What was that?
I mean, the best thing Joe Biden did was end the war in Afghanistan and he fucked that up, but he did end the war.
I could kind of give him credit for that.
If he didn't then plunge us into a proxy war with Russia for no reason, now he's plunging us into a war in Gaza that we got a, we got a bankroll.
It's just, it's ridiculous, the, the idea that you're going to, and so this expectation that we're going to, that Biden somehow is going to come back to being, uh, to polling where he was in 2020, I think is just, I think it's fantasy land.
I don't think there's a chance that's going to happen.
Because look, the, a huge part of the appeal of Joe Biden in 2020 was that, look, all the hysteria about Donald Trump through 2017, 2018, 2019, and all of the constant every day, the just drama of how insane the corporate press was and how insane radical progressives had gotten and how insane Donald Trump was.
And then you had 2020, which was like the worst year for most Americans in their lives.
And then Joe Biden, who's, you know, been in the Senate for 40 years or whatever, kind of ran on like a return to normalcy.
Don't you kind of want to return to when it's normal?
But that card's over.
You can't play that card anymore because everyone knows, oh, we didn't return to normal.
This didn't.
The thing that me and you were saying through all of the Trump years and before kind of got proven true that the state of the country is not as the elites like to pretend because Donald Trump came in there and that's why everything got so awful.
Things were getting awful and Donald Trump was a result of that.
And just removing him didn't fix any of that.
It didn't change in the slightest.
We're still on the same trajectory that this country was on.
And so they've kind of lost that.
They've lost that argument that it's Trump and that's why everything is getting so nutty.
So if we just get rid of Donald Trump, you see, we're going to be right back to like the 90s, just like you remembered it being or something like that.
We know that's not true anymore.
I don't think there's any chance that Joe Biden is going to start like that somehow this summer everyone's going to reassess and be like, no, he did do a really great job.
This is MSNBC fantasy land.
Musk's Compulsive Platform00:08:47
I listened to this.
It sounds like MSNBC is calling the Hispanics stupid.
Well, it kind of does, right?
Yeah.
They're all just temp.
Oh, it's the same thing as the economy.
People just don't seem to realize how great it is.
Yeah.
These Hispanics, you know, they're easy to trick, but they'll come to.
They'll wisen up come summertime.
Yeah, I don't think they will.
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All right, let's get back on the show.
All right.
So one other clip that I wanted to play is of Sam Harris, somebody who we love to trash on this show.
And he was recently on Jordan Peterson's podcast.
This clip has been going viral.
And I thought this was so interesting and revealing.
So let's play this and break it down.
I mean, look at what Twitter has done to Elon's life, right?
It's just, you know, Elon used to be a friend.
He's somebody I knew reasonably well.
His engagement with Twitter has been catastrophic for him as a person from my point of view.
I mean, it's clearly a compulsion.
I mean, he was so addicted to it that he felt he needed to buy the platform.
All right.
Let's pause it already right there.
Isn't this Sam Harris does this and he's always done this throughout his career.
This is not a new thing.
Like I know a lot of people.
So I always saw through Sam Harris's bullshit.
I know there's a lot of people out there who like were fans of his and have now kind of realized like, oh, like you just see through all his like crazy shit.
So what Sam Harris does is he decides his conclusion and then he works backward from there.
So he decides what he wants to argue for, which for whatever reason always seems to be what the deep state would want also, but he decides what he wants to argue for and then he rationalizes backward from there to arrive at his conclusion.
So he wants to arrive at the conclusion that Elon Musk is wrong and what he's doing with Twitter is wrong.
And so he starts with like that and then moves to like what this has clearly ruined his life or something like that.
What?
Like what metric do you have?
And then he says it's a compulsion.
So all he's doing now is like psychoanalyzing somebody who he at his own admission doesn't speak with anymore.
This is weird and probably Jordan Peterson should know better than to let him do that.
But so he'll say here that Elon Musk has a compulsion and so much so that he felt he had to buy Twitter.
Now, I'm not going to attempt to psychoanalyze Elon Musk.
I'm not inside his head.
But what he said is that he wanted to buy Twitter so that it's a free speech platform and he thought it was very dangerous the way they were cracking down on speech.
Now, maybe he's telling the truth.
Maybe he's not.
Maybe he really believes that.
But on some other level, there's other ulterior motives.
That's almost certainly the case because that's how human beings, that's how human beings work.
Either way, that is a reasonable, like, that's a reasonable reason to want to buy Twitter.
And as he revealed last year with the Twitter files, it was probably worse than he had suspected.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
But it is a, you know, his use of it has been so irresponsible and produced such, I mean, forget about the harm he's produced in other people's lives.
And nothing I'm saying now relates to changes he's made to the platform.
I mean, that's a separate thing that we can talk about.
You know, I've always been agnostic as to whether or not he could actually improve Twitter as a platform, and he may yet wind up doing that.
But I'm just talking about the way he has personally used it as a user of the platform and the way he's interacted with people and boosted, signal boosted massively the profiles of anonymous QAnon lunatic trolls, right?
I mean, he's been completely cavalier in who he interacts with, all the while knowing that anyone he boosts suddenly gets, you know, a million followers and has a platform that they otherwise couldn't imagine.
All right, let's pause it right there.
I mean, this is just like the most elitist thing I've ever heard in my life.
So that's your beef with Elon Musk is that he talks to regular people or QAnon, whatever.
That's just this dismissive term that like, and what, like, even like people who believe in crazy QAnon conspiracy, what they're not people now, you can't interact with them.
And this thing about how he's boosting their signal, I mean, like, I'm not denying that if you get, like, if Elon Musk replies to one of your tweets, you're going to get a lot more eyeballs on that tweet.
But the thing he said where he goes, if if Elon Musk replies to you, you now get a million new followers and you have this gigantic platform.
That's just not true.
That's not true.
You don't just get a million followers because Elon Musk replied to you.
But yeah, that really is the most elitist attitude Sam Harris has, that you should really only be interacting with nobility and you should not be interacting with the peasants because come on, they're stupid and backward.
It's irresponsible to let them speak.
There's really something here.
And you could see where this is so like grown.
It's like, oh yeah, this is why you're resentful.
It reminds me of, Rob, you remember when we played that video from Bill Maher and the guy was talking about like, he was like, look, like we got some things wrong.
I advocated for school closures.
I was wrong.
I was right.
But then, you know, we were trying our best.
And then these awful, hate-filled people on Twitter would just be trolling us about all this.
And you're like, yeah, that's Sam Harris's problem here is that he was wrong about all of the most important issues over the last few years.
And those QAnon conspiracy theorists or whatever he calls them, they were calling him out for his bullshit.
And that's why he doesn't want their signal boosted.
I guess I'm psychoanalyzing too, but whatever.
It's pretty even just the case.
Even just the tone of his voice, it's rich snobbery.
I think you described it well with the King's Palace.
It's like, you know, they let a bunch of more people into the club and now he's just in the corner going, none of these disgusting animals are supposed to be in here.
Yep.
Yep.
Pretty much.
All right, let's keep playing.
So I look at him and I think, okay, if someone of his talent who has so many other good things to do with his 24 hours in any given day is this derailed by this platform, you know, is this using it this compulsively to the obvious degradation of his reputation in most circles that count.
So he's the degradation of his reputation in most circles that count.
There you have it.
It's right there for you.
Why the hell do those circles count?
Elon Musk, amongst like many circles, people are think much more highly of him than they ever have before.
A lot of people are really grateful to Elon Musk.
And this is just this, this is just snobbery, you know, in the circles that count.
And look, Sam Harris is also, he's a guy who was born into an incredibly wealthy, connected family.
And that's just, this is his attitude about it.
No, you're losing all of your, you know, you're losing all the status in circles that count.
You know, RFK lost a lot of status in circles that count.
You know, that's going to be true for anyone who tells the truth and was in those circles, right?
There is no position.
If you were in circles that count and you were against the lockdowns, you were going to lose status in them.
If you were against the vaccine mandates, you were going to lose status.
If you pointed out that people were getting vaccine injured, you'd have lost status.
If you're against the war in Ukraine, you'd have lost status.
If you oppose the war in Gaza, you'll lose status.
Anybody who's good on any of the most important issues will lose status in those circles.
Sam Harris, on the other hand, has lost status amongst his entire audience.
Losing Status Amongst Audience00:01:01
How crazy is that?
To go find, go look at anything on social media or look at any of the comments on anything Sam Harris has done.
He has lost status amongst his audience in a major, major way.
Yet he's going to criticize others because they are losing status amongst the noble class.
That's Sam Harris for you right there.
All right, listen, we're going to have to wrap up the show there.
Thank you guys very much for listening.
Look, we have some major stuff coming up this year for this show here.
I really love and appreciate all of you guys who listen and watch the show.
You guys are the reason why we've been able to do this.
I hope that you find value in this show.
And I'm telling you, we're ramping up for a big 2024.
There's going to be some cool stuff we're doing.
So I'll be making some announcements over the next few weeks here.