Dave Smith and Roberto Alfredo Bernstein argue that Joe Biden's potential war with Iran stems from American empire-building rather than counter-terrorism, noting U.S. interventions inadvertently empowered Shiite groups while fighting Sunnis. They condemn reckless calls for immediate conflict following a drone attack in Jordan, citing domestic pressures from evangelical voters and the Jewish lobby as barriers to de-escalation. The hosts also critique Nikki Haley's defense of an $83.3 million jury award against Donald Trump, labeling it part of a trend weaponizing punitive damages in politicized environments, while exposing corporate media dishonesty regarding border policies and skepticism toward Elizabeth Warren's claims about Republican border strategies. Ultimately, the episode suggests current foreign policy failures and legal injustices are driven by systemic corruption and profit motives rather than national security or fairness. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fun Stuff Coming Up00:03:10
Fill her up.
You are listening to the cash in human.
We need to roll back the state.
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Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith, and he is, of course, the lovely Roberto Alfredo Bernstein.
How are you, sir?
Putting some sex simple status on this.
I like it.
I'm trying to get you a nice wife, Rob.
That's all I want.
That's all I want.
It's time we get you settled down.
What do we got?
We got some fun stuff coming up.
I have to check my calendar here, but I think we got the secret group in Houston.
Love that spot.
Going back to Texas.
We're going to go there.
We're going to see what's going on with that border.
See what's going on with a border trip.
I'll rent a car.
I don't know that Houston's close to the border, though.
I feel like me and you are the type who would somehow get down there and they'd be like, all right, go back to Mexico.
And we'd be like, no, we're Americans.
And they'd be like, no, you can't.
You're not.
We don't buy it.
See how easy it is.
We can sneak back in.
Yeah, I was like, I heard the border was wide open.
And it is for pretty much everyone, but not you guys.
Anyway, February 10th, one night only at the secret group in Houston, Texas down there.
And then we're going to be in at Wise Guys in Utah and then back to Rosemont and Chicago, Zaney's, going back to the funny bone in St. Louis.
We got a lot of fun stuff coming up.
ComicDaveSmith.com for all of those ticket links.
And of course, go to robbythefire.com for all of Rob's headlining shows.
All right.
And check out Run Your Mouth.
I got a brand new studio.
I'm cutting fake news intros.
It's a good time.
If you never checked it out, check it out.
Make sure.
Make sure.
If you're a regular listener of this show, go give Rob's other podcast Run Your Mouth a listen.
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Link find in the episode description.
There you go.
Okay.
So there's a lot that's happened.
We did a live pod over the weekend, but there were issues with it.
So it's not going to end up coming out.
But so well, there's been a lot of stuff that's happened in the last.
That's why I got to show up live.
It gets spicy sometimes.
Yeah, sometimes it gets spicy.
It gets a little too hot for YouTube.
But so anyway, a lot's happened since our last episode.
And we'll try to cover or try to talk about a lot of it.
But we got to start with what's going on right now.
So I did Twitter spaces the other day with Scott Horton.
And one of the major things that we were talking about there, and Scott had just written a piece last week about this, and it looks pretty good.
Danger of Wider War00:15:53
He's looking pretty good now in hindsight.
That's the silver lining of this not very good situation.
But one of the things that we talked about a lot was how incredibly dangerous the situation, the potential for a wider war in the Middle East is now.
And oh man, it's like, talk about like, have we not, have we learned nothing as a nation that we're still flirting with this danger of another, you know, catastrophic war in the Middle East.
So what we were talking about on the spaces is that like, look, you've got kind of this situation here, and you can kind of try to zoom out from 10,000 feet and take a look at it.
You've got, there's the war in Gaza going on right now.
And I don't even know, you know, sometimes I'm not even sure the term war is accurate for what's going on in Gaza, because the term war does kind of make you think there's like this government's military versus this government's military and they're having a battle to see who will win.
That's not, that's not really what's going on.
What's going on is that Israel is just decimating their captive, you know, population in Gaza.
Anyway, so that's, that's happening as we all know.
And again, zooming out, looking down in it, there's essentially all of the Sunni Gulf states are America's sock puppet dictators.
So there's not much of a threat of them intervening, at least as of now.
Of course, the dictators are all bought off to be friendly with Israel, but about 100% of their people are totally hate Israel and hate what they're doing to the Palestinians.
However, ironically, it's really the Shiites who are the ones who are standing up for the Palestinians.
Something else, it's kind of an interesting dynamic for people who don't, and believe me, I am a complete non-interventionist.
I really, I, I, I root for everyone in the world to have freedom and prosperity and things like that, but I really care about our country.
I care about my family.
I care about where my kids are going to grow up.
I care about our nation.
So I am not at all sitting in judgment of anybody who just doesn't know about this stuff over there.
It's totally fine.
You have every right to not know about that stuff.
There's only so much stuff any of us can know about.
And if you don't know about any of this, it's fine.
But just if you don't, to give you a little bit of background, and this is something that's kind of interesting, is that there's so, of course, we were hit on September 11th by Al-Qaeda, who's a group of radical Sunnis.
They were, you know, Saudis and some Egyptians who camped out in Afghanistan and planned 9-11.
So since then, we went to war in Afghanistan, of course, and took out some of the or all of the al-Qaeda there pretty quickly and then went toward the Taliban and fought a 20-year regime change war against the Taliban, which we lost and just ended up just giving them a lot more weapons and more control of the country.
Then we go to war in Iraq and we take out Saddam Hussein, who was a Sunni dictator sitting on a majority Shiite country.
So the majority of the country was Shiite, but he was a Sunni dictator who was and the Shiites were second-class citizens, essentially, and very mistreated second-class citizens.
So we do those two those two wars.
And then we, of course, because once we insisted on democracy in Iraq, and they have a 60% Shiite population, who do you think they voted in?
So it's now a Shiite country.
So then we do around 2007, 2008, it starts actually before Obama gets in around 2007, 2008 is when you see the reversal, the redirection, as they called it.
And this is when we basically start fighting against the Shiites because the whole plan backfired and it just empowered Iran because now they had an ally in the Shiite Iraqis rather than an enemy in Saddam Hussein.
And basically, since then, in all of the wars, it's been us either fighting against the Shiites or, and often in the same sense, fighting with the Sunnis, the radical Sunnis, including Al-Qaeda and ISIS, including the groups who were supposedly the reason why we're in all these wars to begin with.
But since then, there might have been some bombing campaigns.
You know, there's been some bombing campaigns against ISIS in Syria.
But really, who were we fighting in Syria?
We were trying to regime change Bashar al-Assad.
And so it just, I'll just say that, look, there's a lot there to get into, but one of the main points that I want to make is that if you ever wonder, which I doubt too many people who listen to this show are still wondering, but if you ever wonder whether this is really about a response to terrorism or this is just about empire, this kind of proves it.
Because we don't actually have a major problem with the Sunnis because they're all bought off.
They're all American sock puppets.
But what we have a problem with is that the Shiites are not.
So you have Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
You have the Ayatollah in Iran.
You have the Houthis in Yemen.
These groups are all Shiites and they're all not part of the American empire.
So obviously, I'm sure most of you guys have heard that the Houthis in Yemen have gotten involved in this war.
Joe Biden went on a bombing campaign there about two weeks ago.
Now, what me and Scott were talking about here is that the other day is that, look, you have American troops all throughout the region still.
We still have troops in Syria.
We still have troops in Iraq.
Obviously, we have bases in Saudi Arabia, bases throughout the Arabian Peninsula.
And this is kind of, now we're in a situation where we're kind of like, they're kind of sitting ducks.
And what we were talking about then is that you can't, these, a lot of these Shiite groups here, right?
You have the Iranians, you have the Houthis, you have Hezbollah in southern Lebanon there, you have, you know what I mean?
And you have the, and you have Syria.
And they, none of these countries have any threat of hitting the United States of America, but they certainly can target our soldiers over there.
And this is what's likely to get us into a bigger war.
So anyway, the other day this happened, three U.S. servicemen were killed in Jordan, and I think 15 or so were injured.
And so now Biden has vowed that there will be a strong response to this.
And here you have the real threat of all of this going on now.
Of course, as soon as this happens, there's widespread calls for war with Iran, because that's what the neocon warhawk types have wanted from the very beginning.
This is something that they were talking about in the 90s.
This is something that Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to lie the Americans into since the 90s, at least maybe earlier than that, but constantly fear-mongering us about, oh, they're about to develop a nuclear weapon.
Those, you know, we were always five years away, as you remember, Rob.
We're five years away from developing a nuclear weapon.
And then when Obama signed the Iran deal, Benjamin Netanyahu said, now it's fast-tracked.
So presumably less than five years away.
So we got to go to war with Iran because they're about to have a bomb.
Of course, hindsight, you know, it was, I believe it was Douglas, Colonel Douglas McGregor who said, time wins more arguments than logic.
And that is true.
And no matter how many people were making great arguments at the time, the time won the argument on that one, right?
It's 2024.
So you want to talk to me about how Iran is five years away from Anuk in 1998?
Okay.
Turns out you were just lying.
And they've abandoned that lie now.
Now that's not even what they say.
But now what they say is that Iran is the source of all terrorism.
Do you need to provide any evidence to back that up?
No.
Do you need to, you know, I remember saying when I debated Ben Dominic, he said that at one point.
He said, Iran is the number one, you know, sponsor of terrorism.
And I literally just said to him on that, I was like, you know, I'm not even saying you're wrong, but like, can I see the evidence on that?
Like I'm, can I just get a source on that one?
He didn't provide one, but I'm just saying like I see that assertion made all the time, but I'm like, really, like, can we like, I'd like a source on that.
I don't know.
I'm sure Iran does give some money to Hezbollah.
And they do, like, I'm not saying there's none of the, and, you know, you could tell me how you define terrorism versus, you know, whatever, but more than Saudi Arabia?
More than the United States of America.
Like this claim is just always made without any actual evidence being provided.
So anyway, we're now in one step closer to danger of a wider war here.
And I guess, I don't know, I mean, I'm curious to get your thoughts on it, Rob, but it just seems so obvious to me that it's like it's just so clear here that you go, well, look, why are we under this threat of getting involved in a wider war here?
And after the disasters that all of the Mideast wars have been over the last 20 years, you would think the priority for us, for our country, would just be avoiding another one.
And so what is it?
There's two major factors.
Why is it that we're at risk of getting into another war here?
Well, it's because number one, we're backing Israel in what they're doing to the people of Gaza.
And number two, we have troops in the region.
It's such an easy solution.
It's such an easy solution.
Just stop funding the Israel war machine and bring your troops home.
And if we were to do that, our risk of getting involved in another dumb war in the Middle East is approximately zero.
So doesn't it just show how broken our political system is that nobody, no politician feels compelled to come explain to the American people why it is that we need to risk this?
Why it's so vital that we inject ourselves in Israel's war with the Palestinians and have troops in the region.
Like we're doing this thing that now risks yet another disastrous war, which by the way, in a very real sense, could be worse than all of them put together.
A war with Iran is not Afghanistan.
It is not Iraq.
This is a much, much more difficult challenge.
And so, but, and we're risking this exactly why?
No one even feels the need to pretend to answer that question.
And of course, because the corporate press is what it is, no one gets asked this question.
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All right, let's get back to the show.
Anyway, any thoughts on any of this, the current situation there, Rob?
Yeah, I was looking at it.
It's a little bit similar to your NDV Ukraine and Israel war joke, but I look at this in America as like, can we just casually bomb you guys without being in a full war relationship?
Yeah, right.
I'm just trying to casually bomb here and there.
Come on, guys.
Why do we got to turn this into a whole big thing?
Yeah, like you said, you were down.
Yeah.
Now you're getting all attached.
It really, it feels like the I've never been in this situation.
I'm a five-six person.
I don't pick fights.
I don't end up in fights.
It's not my jam.
But like we've all seen kind of that scene in a movie or in a bar where you got your big friend and then some other guy who's like provoking a fight because he knows the big friend is there type thing.
It kind of feels like the entire deep state is essentially doing that, where they're around the globe and they're willing to be as provocative as possible because they would love nothing more than to force our country into a war.
It's a win for them.
It's a win for the deep state machine.
It's a win for their agenda.
It's a win for war profits.
It's not a win for us, but they kind of provoke all these situations.
And it's a win if it can escalate to the point where they go, oh, look, we have no choice but to be in a war now.
So you and I, we stand on the sidelines.
We're like, why are we taking all these provocative measures?
Why do we have bases in these countries?
Why are we providing weapons for the Israelis to go kill civilians?
Why are we doing all these things that would be provocative?
They prevent, they pretend like it's not provocative.
And then when things start to escalate, they go, holy shit, it's escalating over there.
Now we got no choice but to take action.
Yeah.
And look, you can, you can like read about this.
It was actually John Mearsheimer who wrote a bunch about this, but Colin Powell, after 9-11, told George W. Bush, you got to do a two-state solution now.
Like you have to do that.
And he was ready to do it.
He was like, okay.
I mean, Colin Powell tells me to, you know, like George W George W. Bush was smart enough to know that he was the dumbest person in his administration.
Like he was, that's his level of intelligence, smart enough to know that he has to be listening to someone else on all things.
But Colin Powell at the time was the highest ranking person in the military world.
I mean, if Colin Powell says, and why did Colin Powell say it?
Why was that his response to 9-11?
Because he's obviously like, well, this is why they hate us.
Like this is, we got to take away the reasons why they hate us.
And it was a delay in the House of Representatives who told George W. Bush that you, he goes, there is no quicker path to being a one-term president than that.
Flawed Political Logic00:13:49
There is just no, you know, and that's it.
And he's just like, you know what, dude?
I got 70 million evangelical Christian voters who I will all have voting against you if you think you're going to tell Israel that they have to do what they got to do and interfere with the plans of Jesus to come back or whatever.
And not only that, you're going to have the lobby on your ass.
You're going to have the ADL.
You're going to have just everything.
This is not a fight that you can politically win.
And so he backed off and didn't do it.
So there's two, two really interesting nuggets about that story is like one, that even Colin Powell, like these people, they know what's up.
They're not stupid.
They know what like what engenders hatred against America.
It's what we're doing in the region and specifically backing Israel to no end and not just backing Israel like as if, hey, you know, like there'd be a way to back Israel that would be kind of reasonable.
Like if you were like, hey, we're giving you guys a state and we're having a two-state solution, but don't you fire any more rockets or we're going to have their back.
But I'm talking about backing Israel.
Like Israel, you can do whatever you want to these people and we'll always, you know, veto any concerns at the Supreme Court at the United Nations and we'll keep sending you more foreign aid than any other country, stuff like that.
But the other thing that's interesting is you realize that the politics, like domestic politics and the effect that they have on foreign policy, this is something that Daryl Cooper did a really good job of talking about in the, I think it was in the end of his great podcast series, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, which I really highly recommend to everybody.
It's so good.
I mean, it's a real-time investment, but if you really want to understand, if you're like, I want, if you want to really know what's going on with Israel-Palestine, and you have 30 hours to invest in it, that's the 30 hours to start.
You'll come out of that ahead of almost every like talking head that there is, if you just listen to this whole podcast.
And it's so good.
And it's just that you, you, he's just read every single book on every side.
Like, this is a subject I think I would describe myself as pretty well read on.
And it's just like, oh my God.
Like, if I've read 10 books on the history of Israel, Palestine, Darryl Cooper's read 60.
He just knows every and has fucking memorized all of them.
He just knows all the information.
And don't get me wrong, I know he like prepared for that show and put a lot of work into it and had notes ready and everything like that.
But he's just an expert on it.
And he's really not, despite what like I'm sure a hardcore partisan Zionist or a hardcore partisan Palestinian would say he's biased, but he really is just giving you the history of it and really kind of has a lot of empathy for both sides.
Anyway, one of the things that he really breaks down later in the series, I believe it's the second last episode or the last episode, was he was talking about how there are these like, you know, you kind of have like a political system in, say, the United States of America that was set up for kind of an isolationist agrarian society.
You know what I mean?
And now you're using that same political system to manage a world empire.
And it just has its flaws in it.
Like this isn't really what it was made to do, you know, and then you have all of these things that kind of grew out of that that weren't what the original intention of the political system is.
But so you'll have something like the way he was talking about it was when he was talking about kind of like how you have, so the British, under the British mandate in Palestine, you have British soldiers who are basically like on the ground running the country and they're trying to figure out how to like, you know, figure out the Arabs and the Jews who are like really, you know, like having these flare-ups of violence over and over again.
And but then their decisions are being dictated by politicians in England.
And if you're trying to get someone in America as you get into like the 40s and the Zionists start having their eyes on America more than Britain or maybe not more than Britain, but they start having more, paying more attention to America.
America isn't like if you want to affect American policy there.
You're not, it's not as if the way it works is that a senator gets on the phone and calls up the local like captain of the British military in Palestine and goes, okay, so what's the situation on the ground there?
Like what's really going on here?
What do you recommend?
And then they make their decisions off that.
They're making their decisions like, well, I do have some Jewish financiers here who I'd like to fund my campaign.
And I am in New York City.
I mean, there is a fair percentage of Jewish voters.
There's no Arab voters.
You know, this is in 1940 or whatever.
No Arab voters here.
There are some Jewish voters here.
And then you see how these like military decisions are being made based off of the instruction of a politician who's concerned about getting reelected.
He's not concerned about like the facts on the ground or something like that.
So anyway, there's all it's an interesting dynamic, but that's part of what happened here is that the way the American political system, however it's grown for all of these different, you know, kind of like, if you picture that octopus with all of its tentacles, like reaching into all these different things, you have the force where you have the Jewish lobby and the ADL and things like that.
You have, let's say, Jeffrey Epstein type organizations that are collecting blackmail on different politicians, but different politicians are compromised.
You have tens of millions of evangelical Christians who are very easily whipped up in complete support of Israel and forget what the reality is on the ground over there.
In terms of our political system, it's unworkable to just not blindly support Israel.
You're just not getting anything through if that's your plan.
So unfortunately, that's our reality here.
Okay, I'm going to go to the Biden video unless you want to jump in with anything, Rob.
I just had one other thing to say, which is it's interesting the way that drones have seemed to alter warfare that for about a 20-year run, we were able to, I guess, avoid being in wars with country and then strategically bomb them.
And now the wheel has seemed to turn a little bit where people that otherwise couldn't have reached us or attacked us very effectively can use cheap drones and make it very costly for us to defend ourselves.
Because from what I understand in the Red Sea, the Red Sea, whatever the hell that thing's called, is Red Sea, is that we have the technology that we could be protecting ships, but it costs us like a million dollars every single time.
We got to like get rid of some little measly drone or whatever.
And it's interesting, I guess, I don't really know shipping lanes or quite how catastrophic it is that China and other countries have access to the Red Sea now, whereas American major shipping does not.
But it does seem like this is costly enough, perhaps, to the American empire and the actual elites that they do have to get involved.
Yeah, well, that's, I mean, I don't know.
Seems like the cheapest way would just be put a Chinese flag up on our ships.
But yeah, it is interesting.
I mean, this was something like to your larger point there.
This was something that all of us were kind of thinking about, like when Obama first started his drone campaign.
And there were drone bombs used under George W. Bush, but it really became like popularized and mainstreamed under Obama.
This is something that even people who don't know much about foreign policy know.
Yeah, it wasn't Obama the drone bomb guy.
Like he did a lot of that.
And of course that continued through Donald Trump and now into Biden.
But I remember back when Obama, and this is at the beginning of Obama's first term, is before he like went to war in Libya, before he switched sides and went, you know, back the Saudis in their war in Yemen and before the war in Syria, all this stuff.
But the first thing was his major drone bombing campaigns in Pakistan and in Yemen particularly.
And this was something that a lot of people talked about where they were like, hey, we are kind of the ones with this technology right now.
But isn't it kind of interesting that I mean, this isn't even like with the nuclear bomb where it's like the writing's on the wall that other countries will develop this at some point.
The technology moves so much quicker today.
We're like, you know, in a decade that every country is going to have drones like this.
And then what does that look like?
And look, this was a drone attack in Jordan that killed these three Americans.
And I believe I was reading about it.
They suspect that the drone like followed an American drone and that's how it found the base or whatever, or that's how it's found where the guys were.
Anyway, it is interesting.
And there's no question it has totally changed the dynamics of war.
Like it changed the dynamics of asymmetrical warfare for a while now.
To your point, it changed the dynamics where a very powerful country could bomb the crap out of a very weak country without the powerful country having to risk anything or cost them anything, right?
Like you don't have to invade or you don't have, you know what I mean?
Or you don't have to like, I don't know, risk your black hawks being shot down or something like that.
But now it seems to have had this impact where it's affecting asymmetrical warfare, but now from the less powerful side as well, because this, right, this is how the Houthis are able to fight back at all or do anything.
And that was true in their war with Saudi Arabia as well.
Okay, let's play.
First of all, I just, I can't overstate.
I know the joke's been made a million times and not just by me, by everyone.
But I just, when you're in this dire of a situation, and then you're like, let's see what the commander in chief has to say.
And then this is what comes at you.
I mean, I'm not exaggerating.
Where are his hands?
Just pause it there for a second.
I'm sorry, Brian.
Pause it and bring it back to the beginning.
This was the longest I'm taking my sunglasses off I've ever seen in my life the entire time.
He just walks forward.
He thinks the microphone's like a twinkie or something.
It just literally looks like a puppet.
Just look at his facial expression right there.
Come on, Jack.
What?
He's giving me a bunch of scuttle buff.
All right.
That's funny.
Yes.
I do hold responsibility responsible in the sense that they're supplying the weapons to the people of Disney.
Well, we'll have that discussion.
They always conveniently do this by the chopper so that there's the plausible deniability of like he didn't hear what they said.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll see.
I don't think we need a wider war in the Middle East.
That's not what I'm looking for.
It's always what they, we want humanity at the border, but we don't want people pouring in.
They always, they always got to talk with perfection as if there aren't choices that need to be made.
We're going to strike back.
We don't want it to escalate.
And we hope that they'll just take the blow on the chin, realize that we had to respond and then do nothing back.
We're going to continue to send bombs to Israelis, but we hope that they don't use them on the civilians.
Right.
It's very convenient that you're going to do the thing that'll lead to this disaster, but we don't want the disaster.
We just want the thing that'll lead to it.
You know, there's always something.
And this goes right back to the core of what got me into this world.
It's the old like Ron Paul argument with Rudy Giuliani, but there is some, there's something where I, and I don't, I don't know why this always just clicked so clearly with me, but the American empire and Israel, for that matter, they always rely on this, the most blatant double standard.
You know what I mean?
Like where it's almost, once you think about it enough, it's almost like it just presents itself and you're like, yeah, but how, you know, like it's like the, when Israelis are pro-Israel types will just be like, well, you know, you kill innocent women and children and then that's it.
You got to suffer the consequences for that.
And you're like, okay, but what about when you kill innocent women and children?
Because that sounds like identical to the logic of Hamas, right?
Like you're saying, hey, you kill innocent women and children, then we got to have a response.
And if some innocent women and children get killed in that response, well, then so be it.
Magnesium Deficiency Symptoms00:02:34
It's like, okay.
It seems very close.
Seems like your logic is very close to theirs.
And it's just funny here to say, to hear Joe Biden, they go, do you hold Iran responsible?
And he goes, well, yes, I hold them responsible because they're funding all of it.
It's like, wow, like who else is using that logic in this conflict?
Seems like the people targeting us, right?
That's their same attitude is they're like, sorry, you're responsible for what's going on in Gaza because you're funding it.
You're funding it and you're arming them.
So you're responsible.
So it's the same thing we're throwing back to them.
It's just like, why do we need these double standards?
One standard will suffice here.
And by that standard, you're guilty of the same thing you're accusing them of being guilty of.
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Pentagon Confirms Iran Attack00:10:12
Aside from Joe Biden, there are other people in his government who are able to form sentences.
So this is what the Pentagon said yesterday.
Iran was behind the attack.
What does that mean?
Have you seen evidence of financing or directing anything specific to this attack, not just generally, but specifically?
So maybe I need to clarify further from what Lita had mentioned.
We know that Iran funds these groups, like Qatad Hezbollah.
We know that these IRGC-backed militias are the ones responsible for attacks on our troops in Iraq and Syria.
Beyond that, we're doing an intelligence assessment.
We don't have, I can't give you today that this attack thinking it.
We just know that Iran funds these groups like Qatad Hezbollah and other groups that have attacked our forces, but I don't have more to share on as a general matter.
Yes.
Shocking.
Shocking they don't have more to share.
So that is it, right?
We're all blaming Iran for this attack.
And it's like, okay, all right.
So like, do you have any evidence that Iran was involved in this attack?
You know, we are going to have to get back to you with that.
We are going to have to get back to you with that one.
Of course, Lindsey Graham is tweeting, bomb Iran now.
There's a whole bunch of people, you know, who are doing it.
This is pretty great.
I got to say, I really did love this that, let me see, I'm going to find it here because I definitely retweeted it.
But so Tucker Carlson tweeted out an image, like a picture of two tweets.
There was Lindsey Graham tweeted, hit Iran now, hit them hard.
And Senator John Cornyn tweeted, target Tehran.
And Tucker Carlson just tweeted that picture and said, fucking lunatics.
And I just, I don't know why this sometimes, you know, like I come on my show or I go on some other big show and I just try to have the tightest, most irrefutable argument that I can put forth, you know?
And then you just hear Tuck Carlson, the most influential right-winger in the United States of America, and he just goes, fucking lunatics.
And I go, I think that's more powerful than any argument I've ever made.
Like, that's almost how it's got to be treated.
Like, I'm sorry.
You, if you are just saying you want a war with Iran right now, you are a dangerously insane person who hates this country, period.
And I don't, you know, like the neocons would always use that accusation that you don't love your country enough.
You remember when that was always like their thing?
Like, you're either with us or you're with the terrorists.
You either want to go do this war or you hate your country.
And it was always so stupid, so ridiculous.
Like, oh, you can't argue the merits of the war.
So you have to just say, I'm not a patriot if I don't support it.
But at this point, after 20 plus years of terror wars that have just been disastrous and where we've had not only, you know,
trillions of dollars wasted on these projects and thousands of our bravest young men have given their lives for this and tens of thousands of them have swallowed a pistol in the aftermath of it to just start.
And just to be clear on this, this is not like my opinion.
I mean, this is like an absolute fact that a war with Iran.
I had one Green Beret guy who I used to know, I remember he said it to me like this.
He said, if you're talking about like a ground invasion and like a, you know, like a war in Iraq in Iran, he goes, it's not Iraq times 10.
It's Iraq times 100 is how different.
And this is all, you know, because of stuff that I don't exactly understand as well, but like it's like the terrain and like things like this is just Iran is a much bigger country, a much more prepared country.
And if you're advocating for this now, after everything this country's been through, after 20 years of the terror wars, after three and a half years of the COVID insanity with inflation, with the culture wars, with the debt versus with everything that our country is going through, if you're saying on top of that now, I'd like to add a much, much worse war than the war in Iraq.
You are an insane person who hates this country.
You don't care about the country at all.
And, you know, Lindsey Graham, as Tucker has pointed out before, and others have too, there's also a man who's like, what is he in his 60s or 70s, maybe?
He is not married and he doesn't have any kids.
It's like...
And he can't even go to truck or rest stops anymore.
What kind of a life is he living?
Well, I'm just saying, though, there is something about that where you're like, oh, you really like you're willing to risk this entire country and you don't really have skin in the game the way a lot of the rest of us do.
Like, like my kids got to grow up in this country.
This is very important that like we don't destroy it.
And it's just, it's unbelievable.
It's something that, I mean, you know, guy, if we survive as a species, like historians will write about how reckless and decadent our elites were during this time period.
But that you're like, you're, you're sitting on the United States of America and you're just throwing it away.
It's unbelievable.
I remember there was this one moment.
It was a really great moment where, goddamn, Schweimer, Schoimer, was that his name?
Michael Schweimer, I think I might be mispronouncing his last name a little bit.
I apologize for that.
But so if you, I don't know if you've ever seen him rub.
He was the under Bill Clinton in the 90s.
He was the, he was at the CIA and he was the head of the bin Laden unit.
So there was like a unit at the CIA that was trying to get the town team.
Yeah, but well, and he ran it.
He headed it.
And he was like, not like a CIA analyst, like he was involved in operations.
And he basically came out after 9-11 and was went public and was saying like, hey, look, like we got to cut off Israel.
That's, that's really the source of this whole problem.
We shouldn't be fighting these wars.
We shouldn't be doing any.
And this guy is, just to be clear, this guy is like, I think if I had to describe his politics, I'd describe him as like a hard right wing nationalist type.
He is not like a libertarian dove.
Like his position is not, his position is like, is like, Mr. President, if you tell me to go kill these men, I'll go kill those men, sir.
Yes, sir.
But it's my job to report back to you that I do not think it's in our national strategic interest to go kill these men right here.
You know, like it was, it was not like he doesn't, he's like, he, he was very, he was really CIA analyst mind, even though he wasn't just an analyst.
He was involved in operations, but like that was his mentality was that it's very just like, there's no like morality involved here.
This is like, how do we win?
And what is in our nation's best interest?
And he was just like, he was like, yeah, we, you know, cut Israel off.
We'll get a, we'll get by just fine without Israel.
We don't need them.
They need us.
And so screw that.
More trouble than it's worth.
And same with all these wars.
It was like, nope, you're falling into bin Laden's trap.
No, you don't want to get bogged down in Afghanistan.
That's what he wants you to do.
We don't bankrupt ourselves doing this, blah.
So it was all just that.
And so he went, and it was driving people crazy because the guy was the head of the CIA bin Laden unit.
So it's not just like some guy saying this.
It was like, you know, a guy with the best credential to be talking about this.
And he was talking, he would talk about how they, you know, he was like, oh, Osama bin Laden doesn't hate us because we're rich and free.
He hates us for these following reasons.
And that's like, oh, he hates us because we have bases on his holy land.
We bomb, you know, Muslim kids and we prop up Israel and they do this to the Palestinians.
And so one time he was, he was testifying before Congress.
And again, like I was saying before, it's kind of that divide that Daryl Cooper talks about between the kind of like intelligence versus politicians.
You know what I mean?
And like the way the weird way that they interface with each other.
But so it was Peter King, the congressman from New York.
I'm pretty sure it was him.
Forgive me.
I'm just going.
This just popped into my mind and I'm going off memory from like wherever, you know, 20 years ago or whenever this was.
And Peter King is grilling him.
And he's kind of like, you know, he's like, so you don't love Israel and you don't care about the only liberal, you know, democracy in the region and blah, blah, blah.
And it's going off on like how horrible he is.
He's kind of doing this like political theater thing where he's like, you, sir, you would allow Israel to be destroyed by all of these people.
And at one point, he's just like talking about how, you know, despicable a person he is for saying this, kind of like making these personal insults.
And Michael Schreier just goes, he goes, sir, you're presiding over a bankruptcy.
You're in no position to lecture me about anything.
And it was like the only time that like he actually like interjected back a little bit with like another attack.
But it was just something so interesting to say.
It's because like, sir, this, the way he said it, because he's like this old school CIA guy.
And it was just so serious.
He's like, sir, you're presiding over a bankruptcy.
Like, like, I don't know.
I just found it so powerful.
It's like, yo, you inherited the United States of America and you bankrupted it.
You are the most profound failure in the world for you to lecture anybody else about what to do about anything.
Prize Picks Reboot Policy00:03:09
Anyway.
So I just thought, I remember that moment really hit home with me.
I thought it was cool.
All right.
Let's move on to some other things.
I wanted to mention this real quickly.
Moving back to domestic politics, because we do got this presidential election.
We're in the middle of a primary season.
So I had said a few episodes back after, I guess, after New Hampshire, that it's pretty obvious to me.
I don't really think anyone can make a counter argument.
If there is a good counter argument, let me know, but I certainly have not heard one yet.
But it seems pretty clear that Nikki Haley is only staying in the race because because she thinks there's a chance Donald Trump's going to be removed from it.
And that if there was any, in any other election, she would drop out right now.
Like that is the, if you were just, you know, in football, Rob, where like the coaches have the like the charts where it's like, okay, this is what you do on third and seven.
This is what you do on fourth and two on the 28-yard line.
You know what I mean?
Like they have all the different like, but this is what you do under these circumstances.
Well, like if there was a chart for primary politics, when you get walloped in Iowa and New Hampshire and you're down by 30 points in every single state that's left, and the next state is your home state where you're down 30 points, you drop out of the race because what's the point of sticking in and wasting all these resources and humiliating yourself in South Carolina?
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Community Plays and Ambiguity00:15:03
It's interesting to see the dance of how she's sticking in.
But anyway, this was a clip of Nikki Haley the other day, all but confirming what we all kind of know is the reason she's staying in.
Here's Nikki Haley on Donald Trump's.
Oh, I should pause it just before I mention it because we I think we didn't mention on this show we did on the live show, but this is, I believe, a response to Donald Trump owing, what was it, $28 million in damages for that ridiculous case.
So anyway, here's Nikki Haley.
It was 83 total.
83 total.
Okay.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm sorry.
It was 83.
I'm way off on that.
Good, good catch, Rob.
On the subject of your opponent, we should point out it's just four weeks down until that all-important South Carolina primary.
You're taking some new fire from Donald Trump's campaign and supporters for what you said about the E.G. and Carroll case on Meet the Press yesterday.
Of course, the president was found liable.
In that case, a jury awarded her $83.3 million.
Here's what you said when you were asked about it.
I absolutely trust the jury, and I think that they made their decision based on the evidence.
So the New York Times wrote an article around that in which it said in part, quote, four weeks before what could be the decisive Republican primary in South Carolina, Ms. Haley is trying to navigate an extremely narrow and treacherous path, finding a way to diminish Mr. Trump's hold on her party's electorate without decisively turning conservative voters against her the way they have destroyed other Trump critics.
How do you navigate that path, Cover?
It cracks me up that people try and overanalyze.
I just tell the truth as I see it.
I think there have been politics played with prosecutors that have brought on some of these cases.
I think there's been politics played even with the judges.
But I do think American juries still get it right.
They listen to the evidence.
They make the decision based on the evidence.
And I do still trust any American that sits on a jury.
I trust that they're making the right decision.
There's a lot there.
I just love that this is the way she's trying to weasel out of it.
He goes, well, I mean, any American who sits on a jury, they always make the right decision.
I'm always with them.
There's never a bad juror.
That's just not a thing.
So, yeah, I can't really deny that the prosecutor was corrupt for bringing these charges for obviously political reasons.
But if a jury finds him guilty, then I trust the jury.
This is it.
This is her laying it out.
This is her strategy here and how her best attempt at how she will, she will stick around hoping Donald Trump gets removed and justify it on the grounds that, hey, he had a jury.
He had a jury of his peers.
Sure.
Does $83 million seem like a lot?
Yeah, that does.
You know, this is, I will say, moving away from Nikki Haley insanity and onto what's actually going on.
This is a very disturbing.
I don't know if I could call it a trend because I'm really only thinking of two cases.
I'm thinking of Alex Jones and now Donald Trump.
But there is something where this seems to be in our very highly politicized culture.
And of course, as we've discussed many times, we now live in an environment where I think anybody being honest with themselves would have to concede that somebody like Donald Trump or Alex Jones, it's just, it's basically impossible for you to have a fair trial by jury at this point, especially Donald Trump in New York getting a fair jury trial.
This is ridiculous, what Nikki Haley's saying.
But it seems like there's these things where, look, to me, the Donald Trump one just seems insane.
I don't even understand how he could be found guilty in a civil case.
This woman is a batshit, crazy woman who has some claim that Donald Trump groped her like in public when he was the most famous man in the world and there's no one to back it up or corroborate it.
Like I just, it doesn't seem right at all.
But typically, even if he was found guilty, he may owe this woman a few hundred thousand dollars or maybe like two million dollars or something like that.
But they're clearly making it 83 million to try to give him the absolute max.
Just to like, that's how we're going to get him, essentially.
This is what they did with Alex Jones too.
I mean, maybe you can argue that him entertaining the like, you know, the idea that Sandy Hook thing didn't happen and that the parents were lying, that that was defaming them and that, you know, that he, you know, other people were harassing them or whatever as a result of it.
But you would give him a billion dollars or whatever they were, you know what I mean?
So it's like this weapon, the weaponization of the money verdict, you know, there's something very disturbing about it.
Huh?
It's literally called punitive damages.
Right.
Right.
So it's a new like technique for ruining people.
And I'll add another, she admits to the problem when she says that, hey, the jury and the judge might be politicized.
I'll tell you another element to this is the fact that it was platformed on the news.
Like, where are all the Clinton claims?
So here you have they changed the New York state law.
I think even she only came forward once the guy's running or is in an office or whatever.
And then the news puts her on because they hate Donald Trump.
Like in the past, if you got some crazy lady making some claim from 30 years ago, the news won't normally, if they're, if that's Joe Biden, you got some crazy lady making a claim, they're not putting them on the news.
And if they put them on the news, you leave the president with no choice other than to go, hey, that's not true.
And in terms of the jury selection and it being in New York, that to me is the most corrupt part.
And to, I think there's another case that showcases the corruption of that even more.
And I, everyone should go watch this.
Tucker Carlson did a 45-minute interview with the guy who is going to jail for the tweet for tweeting a joke meme that you can text in your vote for Hillary Clinton.
They could not prove that a single vote had been affected because of that tweet, but they brought it to a jury in Brooklyn.
And so they were able to cherry pick a county that was very liberal and would get a guilty verdict.
So the idea that like, you know, you can bring cases that aren't traditionally brought, that you can change the way the news cycle is usually done to force someone to address something and then bring it into a district that obviously dislikes a person.
Yeah, the crazy, the crazy thing about it on the live show, which was great, which is, I mean, if you're sitting on a jury, how much fun is it to go, yeah, charge the guy a billion dollars?
Yeah.
No, I mean, look, and the, and the one you're talking about, I'm blanking on the guy's name, but the one who talked or interviewed, we talked about it on the show as well.
But the thing that was so creepy about that one is that it's also, first of all, it's not even, it's not, there's no ambiguity to what he did.
We all know what he did.
We all see what the offense is and it's nothing.
It's tweeting a joke.
He didn't even make the meme.
He just tweeted it.
And then, you know, like, whereas with Alex Jones, I mean, you could at least like get into how irresponsible and wrong it is to say something like that when you don't know whether it's true.
And with Donald Trump, I suppose there's a little ambiguity about like what actually happened.
She's making an accusation or whatever.
But with this kid, it's very clear.
So that's one.
But then number two, it's that he was nobody.
He was nobody.
This wasn't going after the former president of the United States or going after this huge right-wing talk show, talk radio show guy or anything like that.
He's just like a random dude who it's like they almost just wanted to make an example out of like someone who's on 4chan, you know, like you got to go down.
And so that just incredibly creepy.
Okay.
Before we wrap up this show, I did want to play this clip because I just found this to be so hilarious.
And this is real, by the way.
I did my due diligence when I first, our producer Brian sent this to me last night, I guess, or early this morning, either early this morning or last night.
And my first reaction was almost like, hey, is this fake, dude?
Like, this just seems too easy to fake and just too hilarious.
But oh, no, no, no.
It's real.
And in fact, she has apologized for this.
But here was, there was a little bit of a hot mic incident on Joy Reed's show at MSNBC.
So let's play it.
Over the weekend, President Biden said he's ready to take action if Congress is serious about solving the border issue.
If that bill were the law today, I'd shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.
And Congress needs to get it done.
Starting another fucking war.
Still trying to kill the weekend.
So this is a look.
I mean, I guess it's a little bit of speculation here of like, what, what was she saying there?
But it seems like what she was saying is that she was like mocking President Biden to her staff, thinking her mic wasn't going to be on until the clip had ended.
I did that show, by the way, that just the Joy Reid reacting to Clips Honestly show.
Every single time the video goes up, if you can actually get her commentary, you might have a good show there.
But it does, it makes you wonder a little bit because a lot of these people on MSNBC, like a lot of them, I knew them before they all lost their minds, you know, like before the rise of anti-Trumpism and the rise of woke insanity and the rise of COVID insanity.
And a lot of them were at least like reasonably anti-war.
And it's just interesting.
You're like, oh, so what's really going on here?
And I do think that, first off, a lot of these people are willing.
They have made the decision.
I will take the money and say what you want me to say.
And it's that dishonest.
And I think that a lot of them, they see it.
It's very clear that the overwhelming majority of the corporate media decided probably before 2016, but certainly since then, that, you know, it is their job to make sure Donald Trump does not get elected.
And they've convinced themselves or whatever, that's what's best for the country and whatever.
That is what their job is.
And by the way, to be fair, this is always, I do actually kind of agree with that one aspect of what Taylor Lorenz said on that clip that we played on the last episode, that I do think that objective journalism is a myth in a sense.
Not to say that you can't, I should, let me rephrase that, that the objective journalist is a myth.
The objective journalism can be done, but there is no such thing as like, well, that guy's a commentator, but I'm a straight reporter.
I don't have any opinions.
I just deliver the news.
That doesn't exist.
And even within all of those people who call themselves objective reporters, they there are like given priors that they come to the conversation with.
Every single one of them, if you ask them, is democracy good, would say, yes, democracy is good.
Now, however you feel about that, I'm just saying they're working from a framework of like, well, obviously like democracy is good and dictatorship is bad.
So it is my job to promote democracy and not promote dictatorship.
Now, you may completely agree with that.
There's a totally reasonable argument that that is in fact true.
But I'm just saying it's not just purely objective reporting.
You're filtering that through a lens.
And their lens is we must ruin Donald Trump.
Now, maybe they have an argument that they can convince themselves of why we just think that would be this guy's Hitler.
And if he gets elected, the whole country's ruined.
So that's our job to do that.
But that's what they're doing.
But it's kind of interesting.
It's just a little glimpse into behind the curtain that, because you know, in some way, like a lot of these people, they got to fucking resent Joe Biden, right?
Because they so just want Donald Trump to lose.
And then they got to just be like, oh my God, could this guy not be such a retard?
You know what I mean?
And I think that was kind of what we heard there.
It's like, you know, start another fucking war.
That's real popular.
That's really going to work.
You know, that's kind of my guess on this.
But either way, it's, it's a, it's a window into the level of dishonesty because obviously the segment that's on there is her doing what?
defending Joe Biden against the bad Republicans.
All she ever does.
But when she thinks the mic's muted, she's basically like, yeah, this fucking guy.
You know?
Also, the Biden new border pitch is pretty incredible that he's claiming he does not have the authority to stop the current immigration.
But if Congress gives him the authority to basically legalize what's currently happening and process 5,000 people a day, then once they hit that 5,000 people a day limit, he will then have the authority to stop the border.
It's essentially a plan to legalize very high immigration levels with some sort of a claim that he does not currently have the authority to close or enforce the border and without any sort of a mention for what this magical plan will be after the 5,000 person limit.
And why not just do that before the 5,000 person limit?
Yep.
No, it's the way it always works.
It's like, look, we have to do the amnesty now and then we'll get the border security later.
And we do the amnesty and then you never get the border security.
Look, we can do tax cuts for the rich now and we'll do spending cuts later.
You get the tax cuts for the rich, you never get the spending cuts later.
This is constantly always the game, but it is, it does seem like just on the politics of it, you're kind of like, all right, good luck selling that one, dude.
I mean, Elizabeth Warren was out on the news earlier today, or maybe it was yesterday, and she was saying, she goes, you know what's going on with the crisis at the border?
It's that Donald Trump wants this crisis at the border and he wants it so he can run against it in November.
And the Republicans are keeping it going so that Donald Trump can run against this border crisis in November.
Border Security Delays00:01:08
And you're like, oh, dude.
I mean, all right.
I mean, I like, I almost applaud your effort, lady, but good luck selling that one.
Yes, our policy is a disaster, but look, look at them cynically running against our disastrous policy.
See, it's their fault.
It's like, yeah, okay.
Now, by the way, there probably is some level of truth to that.
It's like, yes, it works out politically very well for your opponent if your policy is failing.
But that's not, no one's ever been able to use that excuse before.
Like if when Obama was running against the war in Iraq, George W. Bush couldn't be like, well, very convenient how that works out for you.
That my war is a complete disaster.
Oh, and who, and who benefits from that?
Well, it looks like you do.
So therefore, it's your fault.
It's just too, it's the some things are too ridiculous to stand.
It's like, you're building a four-story house out of silly putty?
I actually don't think that's going to work.
I don't think that's possible.
All right.
Guys, come see us out on the road, comicdave Smith.com, robbythefire.com.