Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect Tucker Carlson's viral praise for Stalin-era Moscow infrastructure, contrasting it with American decay despite the U.S. spending $6 trillion annually versus Russia's $1.5 trillion GDP. They refute Bill Maher's claim of an economic pandemic victory by exposing manipulated inflation data and criticize the administration's border narratives. The discussion intensifies with Rand Paul's Senate speech challenging $86 billion in Ukraine aid, citing 500,000 deaths, a stalemate, and Ukraine's suppression of free press and elections. Ultimately, the hosts argue that funding an undemocratic ally without a viable path to reclaiming Crimea perpetuates an unreasonable war, exposing deep American apathy toward both domestic decay and foreign policy inconsistencies. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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America's Next Enemy00:11:16
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.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, brother?
How you feeling today?
Oh, I'm juiced up and ready to go, baby.
That's what I like to hear.
That's for people listening, that's as high energy as Rob gets.
That's him.
He's thrilled right now.
And I think I know why.
I think it's because we're going to Utah.
I couldn't even sell that.
I'm going to go skiing.
I'm going to do some soaking.
I'm going to see the sights and scenes.
Can't be more excited than Utah.
I actually, I am kind of excited to go out.
This is my first time going to Salt Lake City.
I think it was my first time in Utah.
And I've been pretty much everywhere in this country.
It's pretty rare that I'm at a place for the first time these days.
But this is my first time.
Me and Rob will be out there.
Not this weekend, but the following weekend, February 23rd and 24th.
And then we got a whole bunch of fun stuff coming up.
We got Rosemont and Chicago Zane's, Key West, Seattle, St. Louis, Nashville, a whole bunch of fun stuff coming up.
Comic Dave Smith for all of those dates.
Rob will be with me on every one of the dates that's up on my site.
And then for Rob's headlining stuff, of course, you can go over to RobbyTheFire.com and get all the ticket links for his stuff.
You got a couple things coming up this weekend, no?
Kansas City and Omaha in between now and then cranking out.
Great episodes of Run Your Mouth.
Go check it out.
Hell yeah.
You guys got to check out Run Your Mouth if you're not already.
All right.
So I wanted to talk about this viral clip that's been, you know, Tucker Carlson has been lighting the internet on fire for the last week.
Of course, he interviewed Vladimir Putin because he's clearly sworn loyal to the Russians.
There was a list, by the way, this is where I'm at in my career, Rob.
There was a list that was put out by the Ukrainians of the biggest American pro-Putin propagandists.
And it had a lot of the people, you know, Tucker Carlson, Jimmy Dore was on the list.
Who else was Judge Napolitano made the list?
Glenn Greenwald made the list.
And I was, this is real.
I was reading the list and I was like, oh.
That's bullshit.
I've been making these Russian talking points.
I mean, not on the airwaves.
Fastest growing show on YouTube.
This is.
I've built quite a nice size show myself.
I've been all over Joe Rogan and Patrick Bett David and Glenn Beck and Megan Kelly and everywhere I can go, Tim Poole.
And you just, you know, it's like, it's good for you, though.
Sometimes you got to get like an accurate self-assessment and you go like, all right, I still have work to do.
I'm not quite there yet.
Didn't make the list.
I was reading like kind of excited, like, ooh, I bet I'm on here.
But no.
I'm at home getting peed on by hookers, planning for a trip out there so that I can have the real Donald Trump experience.
And you're telling me that this show didn't make the Russian propaganda list?
That's not enough.
What was I supposed to do?
Not practice with my piss hookers?
I mean, I'm not going to go in there with no practice.
That doesn't seem right.
Anyway, this was the latest post-Putin interview clip that Tucker Carlson put out.
And I, I don't know.
I really enjoyed this.
I think I kind of know what Tucker's doing and he knows that this is going to be, you know, that people are going to be shrieking about this.
But I think he's also raising like a really interesting and fair point.
So anyway, let's play the video and then we can respond.
Here is Tucker Carlson.
And a society is through its infrastructure, the places where people gather, the places where they go to travel.
If you've got a lot of people in one place, it tells you a lot about the people.
So with that in mind, we're standing in front of the Kievskaya Metro Station and there's a train station next to it.
Now, the metro station was built by Joseph Stalin 70 years ago.
And the question is, how's it doing now?
After 70 years.
So we went into it to take a look.
And what we found shocked us.
Now, that's not an endorsement of Stalin, who was bad, obviously, nor is it an endorsement of the current president, Vladimir Putin.
You may not like him either.
But it doesn't change the reality of what we saw or more precisely didn't see.
There's no graffiti.
There's no filth.
There are no foul smells.
There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you.
No.
It's perfectly clean and orderly.
And how do you explain that?
We're not even going to guess.
That's not our job.
We're only going to ask the question.
And if your response is to shout at us slogans dumber than the slogans we used to call Soviet and mock, that's not really an answer.
How does Russia, a country we're told is a gas station with nuclear weapons, have a subway station that normal people used to get to work and home every single day that's nicer than anything in our country?
We're not going to speculate.
We're just going to raise the question and wait for someone in charge to give us an answer.
What is the answer?
So we'll stop the lecture and let you take a look for yourself at what the Kievskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia looks like today, February 2024, in the middle of a war.
Here it is.
So you can obviously see where this was going to result in a lot of shrieking from all corners of the internet and the corporate media.
And of course, Tucker Carlson is well aware of this.
And I did enjoy that he preempted it in the video.
Like he goes, hey, if your only response to me here is just shrieking, yeah, sorry, that's not going to do it.
That's what we used to call Soviet, you know, talking points or whatever, when you just blindly defend your system no matter what.
And I, you know, I'm curious your opinion, Rob.
I mean, look, as somebody who's a pretty hardcore libertarian, I do, it is uncomfortable to say that like, oh, this train station that Joseph Stalin built where they have that big picture of Lenin, you're like, all right, I don't exactly love that part of it.
I also think it's like it's just obviously a very reasonable question to ask and a very reasonable thing to point out that like, why is it exactly that Russia's literally Russia's GDP before the war, I don't know if there have been numbers put out since the war started.
I assume it's been a net negative on them, although they have found some other trading partners and stuff, but they had a GDP of 1.5 trillion approximately before the war started.
Just to just to be clear, our government spends $6 trillion a year.
Our government spends many times more than the entire Russian economy every single year.
So why is it that every major city in America is a shithole and they have a beautiful train station?
I mean, look, I come into Penn Station once a week to do Legion of Skanks.
Penn Station is a goddamn toilet.
It's just homeless people everywhere, trash everywhere.
It's a fucking just, you know, very unpleasant experience to go there.
Now, this is not, look, I'd understand if the argument was, let's say we had like a free society, a very small government, and then you had Stalin's Russia, and they had nicer train stations than us, you know?
And you're like, yeah, but the price of that is that you have this authoritarian dictator or whatever.
You know, I could kind of like understand being like, yeah, I guess we'll take the shithole train stations, but freedom.
But we don't even have that.
We have a government that spends $6 trillion a year, the biggest, most active government in the world.
It is kind of crazy that for all of the things that our government does, which is more than any other government, that there's, they have a complete inability to just like maintain a single city, it seems like.
And I'm sure there are some exceptions to that.
I'm speaking in a little bit of a broad generalization.
But like me and Rob, for example, we were out in, we traveled together quite a fair bit.
We're lovers.
And so we, me and Rob were in San Diego.
And it's a really beautiful city, San Diego.
Like, that's one of the first things you're struck by.
I mean, I took my cab ride from the airport.
It was basically all down the water.
And it's just beautiful, like boats and, and it's a really nice little city.
Me and Rob went out to lunch there.
There's like a bunch of nice little restaurants, a whole bunch of like, it's a very yuppie kind of environment.
Everybody's professionals.
It seems like everyone around is making six figures and they're having a brunch on Saturday or whatever.
And then there's just like three full square blocks that are all taken over by homeless people.
And there's just something about it that you're like, well, it is kind of crazy that as Americans in so many cities across the country, and by the way, the people in San Diego were very quick to tell us, hey, it's better than San Francisco.
Earning Gold Yield00:03:28
So there you go.
There's not as much shit on the ground.
But it's crazy that there are these people who are like very successful and have still, they have somehow lost the ability collectively to be like, yeah, no, we're not putting up with that.
Like, I'm sorry.
These homeless people don't get to just like ruin the city for everybody.
And the fact is that there's in major cities across America, including New York City, since COVID, this problem has gotten much, much worse.
And I just, I think it's reasonable to point that out.
I don't know.
Do you have any thoughts on this, Rob?
I actually don't have any idea what your opinion on this is going to be.
Well, that Russian train station certainly was beautiful and it's hilarious, the music he put it with.
It was pretty, that was funny.
Yeah, I feel like I'm watching a tour of Disney World and the Grand Castle.
With that said, you could film Grand Central during certain times that I didn't get to see the bathrooms in Russia.
That's really where the good things fall apart.
So, you know, maybe, and there are times during the day where you could film Grand Central and it would be unbelievable.
At night, it's horrible.
And if you capture the homeless people that are hanging out near the restrooms, it's terrible.
But I do think more specifically, your point of we have the resources to take care of this.
Why isn't there the will?
Or, you know, what's a good example of this?
I think, and maybe Brian, you can pull up the picture of this and how much money they spent on that giant skeleton building down by down in the financial district.
It's like a multi-billion dollar subway station that's just disgusting looking.
It makes no sense.
And I like how now we're becoming these people that care about infrastructure and architecture, which is not really my big topic.
But just to put a fine point on it, I think you're right.
I don't know why government says, hey, we're going to be in charge of the cities.
We're going to takes your tax dollars.
And the most simple thing, which is, hey, I don't want homeless shit right in front of my house or I don't want to feel threatened or endangered.
They don't seem to be able, they don't seem to have the will or capability to take care of.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I got to say, I don't, look, let me try to say this the right way.
Ending The Fed Grip00:07:42
I'm kind of with you.
Like us talking about like architecture or beauty or any of this stuff is not, it is something I've started to care about a lot more over the last few years.
It's just there, just the experience of like moving out of New York City and a big part of the reason why I left New York City.
I mean, obviously it was, it was at the height of the lockdowns and things like this.
And I was just, I felt like things were a little bit too unstable to just have my family like in the middle of New York City when all of this was going down.
And I was very concerned about riots well before the Black Lives Matter riot started.
I was more concerned about like the stuff like there was like no food on the grocery shelves.
And that just got me kind of freaked out.
But after coming out where I am now, I will say there were when I was in New York City, my daughter was like one.
And I remember being kind of aware of the fact that like there, there were just like homeless people all over the place.
And it's just kind of gross.
And like where I was in Manhattan, it's just like, and I was in like a very, you know, like nice neighborhood in Manhattan, but we still had those problems.
And it was much better than this is 2019.
It was much better than it got after that over the next couple of years.
But I remember kind of being aware that like, you know, my daughter's like about, she's like a baby now, but she's about to be the age where she's not a baby.
She's a toddler.
And I don't really know if I want my two and my three and my four year olds seeing this, you know, like I want to kind of shelter them from that for a little bit.
And since moving out here where I am now, it's just really beautiful where I live.
And I really, I've kind of grown to value the fact that my kids are growing up among around beauty.
There's something the older I get, there's a little more value to that.
But what's way more important to me than that, as you alluded to, Rob, is just the safety issue.
I mean, I just simply like, and look, I'll be honest, I know crime on the subway spiked very high in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
I don't know if it's come down from there.
I do know that I see videos of violent crime on the New York City subways like every day.
I would absolutely never allow my wife and kids to be in the New York City subway right now.
It's just too much of a risk.
And I just, it's an unacceptable risk to me.
And that does mean something.
You know, I saw several libertarians responding to this Tucker segment.
And they one of them had like a picture of Tucker and some lefty and they were like both agreeing on, well, at least the trains run on time.
Or they're, you know, I saw one other libertarian who said, I'd rather deal with homeless people on the subway than having to look at a picture of Vladimir Lenin.
You know, that guy was a monster.
And I couldn't help but kind of think to myself, I go, I just feel like you guys are kind of doing exactly what Tucker Carlson challenged you not to do.
And yes, I mean, I agree.
Like Lennon was a really, really bad guy.
I know a lot about Leninism and he was a really bad guy.
But yeah, I mean, if I'm just being honest and actually trying to be thoughtful and actually engage in this, I'm as anti-commie as anybody and I hate Lenin as much as anybody.
But no, if I had to pick between my wife and kids being in a dangerous environment or a safe environment where there was a picture of a politician who I really hated, I'm picking the second option because that's just not as important as their safety.
And I do think that there is a problem.
Like, look, this, this problem that we have in our country right now, and this is a major, major problem.
And I think it's all kind of derivative off of the same issue.
And I think that many libertarians are really failing on this issue.
And we're doing it at the risk of our own irrelevance is that there's this problem with totally mismanaged government property.
And this is something that libertarians have a tough time dealing with.
This is why I'm always arguing with them about like open borders and stuff like that.
But we currently have, there's, there's government property.
Whether we like it or not, that's just a fact that exists.
There is this property that is claimed and controlled by the government.
And this extends literally from the borders around our country up to everybody's door.
Like the highways, the roads, the borders of the country itself, they're all run by the government.
And in a situation like that, what we have widespread around America right now is like an absolute lack of any rules or restrictions on that property.
And this describes the de facto open borders.
This describes the homeless encampments.
This describes public drug use.
This describes, you know, like the train stations, all of this stuff.
It's all like government property where the government is claimed it and is in control of it and are simply unwilling to enforce any rules.
I was complaining about this when I was going back to New York City a couple of years ago and talking about the drug addicts who are like hanging out in the playgrounds.
I was trying to take my daughter to.
This is on the upper west side of Manhattan.
It's like one of the nicest parts of New York City.
And there's literally like just passed out half naked drug addicts in the playground.
I'm just sitting there and you're like, this is like insane.
Like for all the things we have that government does, the fact that a cop can't just like make this guy leave.
And then of course there's the other aspect.
There's like, there's two things because it's like by having no rules.
I think in a simplistic way, a lot of libertarians are like, oh, well, that's the government's not doing anything.
But it's actually like by having no rules, the government is doing something.
By have like not kicking that drug addict out of the park, that is the government doing something.
They're doing something to all of the taxpayers who might want to, since they're forced to pay for this fucking park, might want to enjoy it.
And it and the other element there is that it's not as if a bunch of the dads in the neighborhood could just like kick that guy out ourselves because, you know, we'll be at risk of getting arrested if we did that.
And that's another thing that's going on all over the country where like stores are moving out of blue cities because they are, they will be prosecuted if their security like tackles someone who's shoplifting.
It's in the same sense that you will be prosecuted if you even have a gun, let alone use a gun to defend yourself in most parts of this country.
Like, and, you know, that's, that's something that has to be grappled with.
And this isn't as simple as saying like, oh, it's because we don't have Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler running our country.
That's why everything has to be covered in human shit.
Neighborhood Property Rights00:10:33
Like, that's not right.
And in fact, Tucker, in a subsequent interview, he was asked about this.
And the guy said, so like, are you embracing the Russian model over the American model?
Because the train stations are nicer.
And Tucker went, no, I'm embracing the American model.
And he was like, I'm in my 50s.
This was America.
Up until very recently, America was not dealing with these problems.
And I will say, I don't think there's ever been a time in my life where like train stations and shit have been as nice as that.
There probably was a time in the 1950s when they were.
And it wasn't because we had Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler running the country.
But there's no question at all.
This is just undeniable that this problem has gotten drastically worse over the last few years.
And I don't exactly see why it's a given that we're just supposed to accept that.
And if you ever say something or you ever point out that in Abu Dhabi or Singapore or Russia, or you know what I mean?
That like this just isn't the case.
And they have these beautiful, like, why is it that these other countries that are far poorer than our country, whose governments spend far less money than our country, are able to maintain these beautiful areas and we are not.
And I'm all ears for what the answer is, why we can't possibly have this because then we become Nazis or something, but I'm not seeing it.
I think gross buildings, they just speak to mismanagement.
I remember hearing this joke once of, you know how you can tell who the owner of a business is?
The guy who's picking up the garbage.
And I don't know if you ever watched, I once went on this YouTube wormhole of Gordon Ramsey, Gordon Ramsey's like hotel nightmares.
He jumped from the kitchen nightmares to the hotel nightmare.
I never watched the hotel one.
I watched the kitchen one a decent amount.
It was fun.
I was watching the hotel one.
I'm like, yeah, this is what it would look like if I owned a business because I shouldn't own a business.
That's not a good job for me.
But the telltale sign of a mismanaged business is when it's disgusting.
When you walk into a room and there's garbage all over the place, it's because an owner doesn't care.
It's because an owner's not actually showing up and going, guys, we're running a business here.
We're taking out the trash.
Clean this up.
It's the telltale set.
That's why some businesses run great and some run terribly is because you got a guy showing up every day who actually cares and goes, this is my store.
This is my hotel.
This is my this.
I'm taking pride in it and it's going to look great.
So just to speak to our governmental system and how checked out they are or how bad they are at doing their jobs, if you're walking around cities and they're just gross, it's because they're not ashamed of it and they don't want to clean it up and they don't care.
And they can.
You know, I remember.
Remember what happened in San Francisco.
That's the best example.
That is by far.
By the way, I wasn't even thinking of that, but that is by far the best example.
They cleaned San Francisco up in a matter of a couple of days because the Chinese president was coming to visit Joe Biden.
And so for blocks around them, there were no homeless people.
There were no needles on the ground.
There was no shit on the street.
And it was literally just because they decided people that matter were coming.
And so we're just going to do this.
And that should tell you how they feel about the residents in San Francisco and the taxpayers there.
I remember when I was a kid, my dad lived in Murray Hill.
And I didn't have a very close relationship with my father, but like I was at his house like semi-regularly.
Twice.
No, a little more than that, but semi-regularly at that time.
I was like 10 years old, maybe.
So this was in the 90s.
It was like early to mid 90s.
And there was this park on his corner that was totally overrun with homeless people.
Like the homeless people all just made it their place.
And this was Giuliani's New York.
And again, I'm not the biggest fan of Rudy Giuliani, but they did have like a political will at that point that they're going to clean up this city.
And literally the cops made the decision they were going to clean it up and it just was clean.
They just stopped letting the homeless people in there.
And then it became like a great park that everyone could use and enjoy.
It was that simple.
And, you know, I do think that I get like this, this binary kind of thinking from other libertarians who criticize me for this, because I understand it's an uncomfortable thing for libertarians when you're not just talking about what the government shouldn't do, but you're talking about what the government should do.
And my point is just that when they're already controlling the property, like ideally they would privatize it, but when they're already controlling the property, them doing something is them doing something, but them doing nothing is also them doing something.
And that doesn't mean, you know, I get a lot of these other libertarians and they'll, they'll say things like, oh, so Dave supports imprisoning homeless people for the crime of entering a playground.
And it's like, no, this isn't a black and white.
This isn't like a binary.
I'm not saying imprison them.
I'm not saying beat them over the head with a club and then like beat them for 10 minutes when they're on the ground.
I'm just saying make them leave with the minimal force necessary, but whatever is necessary.
You know what I mean?
Like make them leave.
This is your job, cops.
Make them leave.
And if they resist, force them to.
I don't know.
Like minimal force necessary, but what's necessary?
And that it doesn't have to be.
Like it doesn't have to be that we either throw people in jail for 30 years for using heroin or we allow them to use heroin on the sidewalk.
That's just like a false choice.
It doesn't have to be either one of those.
We could say we're not going to throw you in jail for extended periods of time for drug use, but we're also going to make you leave if you're doing it in public.
The other example, by the way, is Austin, Texas, which very recently had like an enormous homeless problem downtown.
And they got all of them out of there.
Now, I'll be honest, I don't know exactly what they did with them, but man, it was so much better in Austin after they got them out.
They are kind of coming back now.
So they got to do another round of that.
State it just a little bit differently.
Government's the business partner that you didn't ask for and you don't want to have.
And if you look at like the streets almost like a mall, if I invest in downtown and I put up, you know, I spend however, how much money to have a store in downtown and the cops don't do their part to protect my business, my real estate, or like look about how much money government steals from you through taxation and inflation and then also just eroding the property value of your home that you decided you're going to live in San Francisco and then they decide to make the street not safe.
That's their business.
The government has taken over the roads and it's their business and obligation to keep it safe and clean.
And if they're not, then, you know, they should either figure out how to do that.
Their pitch to you is that we're the government, so go govern or go privatize and get out of the way.
Yeah.
Well, like there's, there's a weird thing that I feel like sometimes libertarians like don't get because a lot of times we, you know, you, people talk about freedom in terms of like abstractions, you know, like freedom of speech or freedom of movement or all these things, but really none of that's what we actually believe in.
Like what we really believe in is property rights.
And so like you, I, there isn't freedom of speech in my house and I can dictate whatever the rules are within my house.
Like I can, I can say whatever, no saying words that start with the letter F or you have to leave.
You know, it can be as arbitrary as I want it to be.
And then there could be much more real things like, you know, like, I don't know, no cursing out my kids in my house.
That's a rule.
You're not allowed to do that.
You know, and like, so you could have whatever rules you want to in your own property and then you could make someone leave.
Now, I don't, I couldn't invite someone over to my house and say, if you say a word I don't like, I'm going to beat the shit out of you because that's illegal.
Like that's a violent assault.
But I do have a right to ask them to leave because they don't have a right to say whatever they want to on my property.
And then somehow, like when it comes to government property, it's this thing where, because I've gotten this from a lot of libertarians, like have this response to me where they'll say like, oh, so like if the government is saying, you know, if you're okay with the government saying homeless people aren't allowed to be in the playgrounds, then what if they want to say, oh, you're not allowed to have more kids because you're too many people are walking on the public roads or something like that, you know?
And it's like, oh, because like people have a right to have kids.
That's a natural right.
You have a right to do what you want to do with your body, but you don't have a right to do drugs on property that doesn't belong to you.
I do genuinely think you have a right to do whatever drugs you want to on your property, whether you rent or you own or whatever.
I mean, like, I think you have a right to do whatever you want.
It's your body.
It's your apartment.
It's your house.
That's fine.
You have a right to that.
But like, no, if there's this kind of forced collective property, I don't think it follows that you should have a right to like, I don't think I have a right to just sleep on the street tonight.
So I'm not saying you have any more or less rights than I have.
I'm saying I don't think that's a right.
I don't think when you talk about these waves of immigration, of immigrants, I don't think you have a right to just come to America when nobody invited you and you don't own the country.
It's not yours.
You don't have a right to it any more than you have a right to come into my house.
It's not yours.
And I think we have, it's completely reasonable and consistent to be like, yeah, like it's preferable that government doesn't let people do things that none of us have a right to do in public property.
I think there's nothing wrong with that.
And in fact, I think it's kind of insane to think anything else.
You know, we've discussed this many times before, but like if you were really going to say, if your argument is really that there should be zero restrictions on public property, then we're going to get into some really weird territory pretty quickly where like, you know, the example I always give was like, well, like, does a 55-year-old meth addict have a right to just enter a public school and maybe just hang out in the classroom and smoke meth?
I don't think so.
I don't know.
It's like, yeah, it's government property, but we'd like there to be some restrictions on it.
And I don't like public schools.
I'd like them all to be abolished and make them all private.
Fine.
But in the meantime, let's not let the drug addicts in.
That's my feeling.
Selling Bad Financial Policy00:14:34
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Let's get back into it.
Okay, let's switch gears.
There was another viral clip that I thought was really great.
And I do not know who this woman is, but evidently she is a model.
And she was on Bill Maher's show.
And they had a great, a great exchange.
So let's play that.
But this isn't amazing to you.
Like it was in the paper today about this country came out of the pandemic way better than we just fucked.
We won the pandemic economically.
I mean, America.
God, I don't feel that way.
Explain it to me.
I feel like inflation's insane.
Numbers.
Inflation is not insane.
Bill.
There's numbers.
I understand.
But it has tripled here.
Look, I get the people.
Buy some fucking eggs.
Explain this.
I'm not an economist.
There's feelings and then there's the numbers.
Okay, what are the numbers?
Well, the numbers have come down a lot in the last six months.
Of course, it was inevitable when we gave out $6 trillion so that everybody could hide under the bed from the forever flu.
That was never going to end well.
Taken by the richest people ever, and it was a lot of it was stolen.
It was, it was we agree on that too.
It was like it was there some response needed.
Of course you don't want the hospitals overrun, but it was just a massive overreaction and that did cause some of the the inflation.
All right, so there's Bill Maher.
It's just, I don't know, imagine being so close to getting it and still missing the entire picture.
It's just amazing, it's like.
So he starts by saying that we won Covid because we came out of it so much better than anyone else did, which is just already on the face of it.
Just think, think about just being like we won as a response to covet, like we we, that was winning.
That's that's what you consider winning.
Completely unnecessarily uh unnecessarily, shutting down our entire economy.
Um, masking up kids doing remote learning, all this having tons of people, just like the small businesses by the millions just being, uh put out of business.
Um, kids falling behind.
Uh, all types of like depression and anxiety through the roof and suicide numbers getting worse.
Um, people getting fired over not taking a vaccine that they never needed to take to begin with, people being horrifically vaccine injured, which there has been a lot of and a lot of people who never really needed to take the vaccine being vaccine injured.
When I say people who never needed to take the vaccine, I mean people who were not old and sick, people who had had covid already in the past, who are still being forced to do it.
That was winning.
And why?
Because he's saying to some comparative measure, to other countries who also did these really stupid policies, we weren't as hurt as them, so therefore we win.
Like the mentality of that is like if I chopped off my foot and you chopped off your leg, me saying hey, I came out the winner, and you would be like, but neither of you needed to chop off anything.
And i'd be like yeah, but like he lost his whole leg and I only lost my foot, so already it's really like a crazy stupid way to look at things and the question that would be relevant would be like, were these policies more beneficial or harmful to us?
But if you look at it that way, like to ask the question is to already answer the question, um, but then?
But then the even worse than that is that he brings up, you know, like inflation comes up and the six trillion dollars we spent uh, uh in that year comes up and he's like now look, obviously that was always going to work bad.
But what you're not catching when he's like oh, it's the numbers.
It's the numbers like, that's the reason the numbers look good because we infused six trillion dollars into the economy.
If we hadn't have done that then you wouldn't be saying oh, comparatively we did better.
No, we only did better because we're the United States Of America and we had the deepest treasure chest and we spent more money than anybody else did that year.
That's all.
And it directly caused the inflation.
And then, of course, he just makes the same dumb mistake that everyone makes with inflation.
I will say there's something so like entertaining to me about just some chick who's just like a model, just being like.
I don't know.
I mean, i'm not an economist, but everything sure is expensive.
Have you bought eggs recently?
They're way more than eggs used to be.
And it is this thing where, like there's, it's unlike, as we've talked about many times, but it's unlike almost any other political topic where you could kind of fool someone about what weapons Saddam Hussein has, or you could maybe fool someone about what the latest data on this vaccine really means.
Or you could kind of fool someone on like I don't know, whatever regulatory policy of some field that they don't really understand.
But when you're trying to argue with people about the prices that are around them every single day and to go oh, you know how your grocery bill is higher than it's ever been.
No no no, you're just stupid.
You're not an economist, you're wrong about that.
It's actually the number.
It's coming down, it's going down, which of course it's not.
It's not going down.
And what they do because this is how they they, you know, I know i've said this before, but this is how they cook all these government numbers is that they say inflation is down, meaning that the rate of increase is is lower than it was.
So if prices went up by like nine percent last year, they're only going up by five percent this year.
That means inflation is down, but that's not actually true because it's cumulative and so like the price went up and it's still going up.
I don't know who came up with the example it's.
I wish I could give credit to it because it's a perfect way to put it.
It's not original to me, but it is like if someone gained a hundred pounds one year and then the next year they gained 50 pounds and you were like dude, your weight's getting out of control.
And they go, no no no, the rate of weight gain is down by 50.
I've drastically cut how much I weigh.
It's like, no, you haven't cut how much you weigh, you're still getting fatter.
You just got fatter at a slightly slower rate this year than you did last year, but that that's literally like how much they're trying to with you here with that.
That's exactly what they're saying.
Inflation is actually way down.
And then every like American is like, yeah, but I don't know about that, because I keep having to buy shit to live every day and the shit I have to buy to live is more expensive than it's ever been.
And i'm like you just don't understand economics.
This just seems like this is.
It's unbelievable that anyone like it's like a a testament to how much people will repeat stupid propaganda, no matter how dumb it is.
Anyway, any thoughts on any of this, rob?
Yeah uh, i'm not saying anything's gonna collapse tomorrow or in the near future, I don't know.
I don't have enough of a financial background.
But like the day before the uh tulip markets crashed, I bet there was some guy going hey, what are you talking about?
These tulips have never looked better and there's something to be said for just with being within the government spending system and creation of asset bubbles and going.
And what do you talk about?
I mean, you could have said that about Clinton with all the housing.
You know, look, look at how great our economy is doing.
And so if you're looking at just government having done a lot of spending and gone, look, things are great.
There's a lag on this stuff.
Do we know that there's not a recession coming next year?
I'm not saying for sure that there is, but you still got that inverted yield curve single just kind of floating around in the air.
So I'm not saying that the world's collapsing tomorrow, but I'm just saying if you kind of look at at any juncture in time and just going, oh, look at how great this is.
Clearly, we're doing amazing.
You don't know that.
You don't know that it's doing great, particularly if you can point to bad financial policy and go, I don't think this ends well.
Yeah.
Well, look, and I'm not even talking, like, I basically agree with all of that.
I do think that like the fundamentals are really unsound and we're due for a severe recession.
But regardless of that, I'm just talking about how you describe the current economy that we have right now.
And for people, which I think would include like the vast majority of people listening to this right now, you probably know that like, look, groceries and rent and, you know, like all of the kind of necessities that you need to live, them all being way more expensive makes you poorer.
That's just like a fact.
And this is what everybody is like living through right now.
And then you're just, you know, being told that it's like, oh, well, that's not actually true because we've run these numbers and these ridiculous numbers.
The CPI is a ridiculous way to measure inflation to begin with.
But like it's all just made up.
And this is the problem.
This is like the whole major thing, which is even the Biden administration admits in its own words, as we've covered many times on the show, that their big problem is that people just don't know about this great economy.
And that in every single poll, people say the economy is really shitty.
And yet we know they're wrong and the economy is right.
And so we got to get out there and sell them on this good economy.
Like this is the official line of the Biden campaign, that this is the Biden reelection campaign's job is to convince everyone that they're just so dumb for thinking they're getting poorer when in fact you're getting richer.
I don't know.
There's been a lot of like political propaganda campaigns.
I've never seen one where I'm like, that's going to be impossible to sell.
And this is it, dude.
There's, it's like, it's this with the big two issues, man.
If you look at the polling, the two biggest issues that people care about right now is inflation and immigration.
These are the two big issues.
And the Biden campaign is trying to sell you on, first off, that number one issue of inflation, that doesn't really exist.
We fixed that.
So I don't know what you're talking about.
Prices aren't higher.
That's all in your head.
And number two, with immigration, they're trying to convince you that, yes, the border is wide open.
Yes, it's a crisis, but it's Donald Trump's fault that this crisis happened on Joe Biden's watch because his Republicans won't come to the table and make a deal with Joe Biden, who wants to make a deal.
And therefore, it's Donald Trump's fault that the border's wide open on Joe Biden's watch.
And it's just amazing to look at those two things and go, I'm just saying of all of the bullshit state propaganda that I've seen in my life, which has been quite a lot in my 40 years, I've never seen the two big ones be such stretches.
Like, I'm not saying I haven't seen the propaganda be bullshit before, but like you could probably sell someone.
In fact, we watched the country get sold on Saddam Hussein as weapons of mass destruction because that's just like, I don't know, look, we have all these experts and they say he has them.
And you're like, I don't know.
Maybe he does.
It was a lie.
They knew he didn't have them, but you could at least see where that could be sold.
You could see where the like, we got to take 15 days to flatten the spread, flatten the curve.
Otherwise, the hospitals are going to be overrun.
You could see where that could be sold.
People going like, all right, well, like, Jesus Christ, I don't want to miss two weeks of work.
But if you're telling me like old ladies are going to be dying in the stairwell of a hospital, if I don't take a couple of weeks off, like, all right, I'll take a couple weeks off.
Like, you could just see where like these things were sellable.
Immigration and inflation, I'm just like, I want to sit back with a bucket of popcorn and be like, how the hell are they going to even try to sell this?
How the hell are they going to try?
Your dollar's worth less than ever before and your borders are wide open.
Here is the price from your grocery store.
And here is a picture of a caravan with 50,000 people walking through the border.
Now someone's got to argue to you that those things don't exist.
They're not real.
I guess the second one they're now admitting is real.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, the immigration crisis is real, but you know whose fault that is?
The last guy.
The guy who ran on building a wall, who we all oppose for running on that.
He's the one who wants the border open.
Good fucking luck with that.
I don't know what to say.
All right.
Any other thoughts, Rob, or you want to go to this Rand Paul video?
Yeah, on the inflation stuff, I got to dig in a little more.
I don't have enough to, it seems like some of the technical metrics at the moment are that we've dodged a recession and things are looking somewhat okay.
I just, I don't have a full understanding to argue it at this time either, on either side.
Ukraine Democracy Crisis00:08:38
Fair enough.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
Let's go.
The Rand Paul gave a speech on the Senate floor the other day, really going hard at the Ukraine funding.
It was pretty great.
Let's play a few minutes of it.
So is that what our advocacy is?
Not to shorten the war, but it's not so big a deal to let the war go on and on.
The head general in Ukraine has said that the war has come to a stalemate.
And I'm the first to acknowledge, look, the whole war was started by Russia.
Russia is the aggressor.
There is nothing good to be said about Putin doing this.
He is the aggressor.
He is in the wrong.
But that doesn't really change the situation on the ground.
It's at a standstill.
500,000 people have died.
It's at a standstill.
Some towns in Ukraine, you can't find young people anymore.
They're either dead or have gone off to Europe to avoid the war.
So Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, fired his major general because the major general admitted the truth, which is this is at a stalemate.
Many people in this body to justify foreign aid will say we're spreading and projecting American power and values.
We're trying to teach and show to the world the nobility of democracy.
If you watch one of the networks, it's all you hear, democracy, democracy, democracy.
Well, guess what?
Ukraine's not a democracy.
They don't have elections.
So they've stopped having elections several years ago, and there's no plan to have elections.
So Zelensky had one, and I'm not saying he didn't win.
In all likelihood, it was a legitimate election.
But it's sort of one and done.
He's not going to have more elections.
And so we are bending over backwards, not we, the Republican leadership and all of the Democrats are bending over backwards to send money to a country that doesn't have elections.
This is a country that has banned media criticism.
There is no media criticism.
And you'd think the defenders of the First Amendment would be irate the fact that there is no objective media criticism in Ukraine.
But the reason why the other side is not standing up and why they're not crazy in arms about this is they actually want that now in our country.
They actually are for censorship.
They believe in the homeland security of the United States censoring and telling people they can't tell you.
So if I were to say, which I've said a million times, that it's a mistake to vaccinate your kids for COVID because they already have immunity and that there are some risks to that vaccine, the other side will say, I don't have the right to say that.
They said that it would be okay for government in league with corporations to censor my speech.
If I were to tell you masks don't work and they don't, all the studies, 78 randomized controlled studies say masks don't work.
You can wear one.
I'm not going to forbid you from wearing one.
I would just tell you the truth.
They will say I shouldn't be allowed to say that.
I can still.
You can stop it right there.
Rob, you sent this over to me and I did just think it was, man, when Rand Paul just goes Ron Paul, and he does have these moments where he's just like, he's basically just his dad right now.
And he sounds like his dad and he looks like his dad.
And it's just so goddamn good.
And look, I mean, I don't even, it's not even like I think Rand Paul is making some good points there.
It's gotten to a point where I don't understand how you can disagree with him.
What's the counter argument?
He's saying we're claiming we have to defend Ukraine because we have to defend democracy.
And he's pointing out they don't hold elections.
What's the counter argument?
Well, it's Russia's fault that they're not holding elections.
It's like, okay, but then they're not a democracy, dude.
And, you know, the whole argument that he's making here is a really fascinating and kind of profound one where he's like, look, I mean, they basically have totally abolished whatever free speech rights they had in Ukraine by banning opposition media and nationalizing much of the rest of it.
And yet no one in America who's like endlessly funding this government seems to have a problem with that.
They'll never even bring it up.
And like, then I think he makes a pretty reasonable connection, which is that actually like they embrace that model.
And they've made that pretty clear over the last few years that like, yeah, they embrace the model that you shouldn't be able to say whatever you want to.
And he gives a couple great examples on COVID that are just like undeniably true.
There's, I look, I don't even think, I don't even think anyone could present a real argument that kids should get vaccinated for COVID at this point.
If you're a kid who's had COVID already, which is describing like a huge percentage of kids, then there's just no argument.
They have no argument.
There's really no argument that cloth masks work.
There's just no argument for it.
All of the studies have basically disproven that.
And like, yet there's still things that like many people would be happy with you being censored if you said them.
Again, I don't know.
If there's a counter argument to this, I'm not seeing it.
Any final thoughts for the episode, Rob?
Yeah, the $86 billion that they're trying to get for Ukraine.
Has anyone articulated a plan of what that does other than keep them in the war and get more people killed?
Have you heard one politician actually articulate, hey, with the 86 billion, we can purchase this piece of equipment.
We can do the following.
We can move the lines.
We can get this province back.
We can get, I mean, look, at the beginning of the war, they were saying that we're going to keep funding it until there's total Russian defeat, including Victoria Newland and others said taking Crimea back, which just so everybody knows, Crimea was taken by the Russians in 2014.
That wasn't part of this latest war in 22.
And the bottom line is just you're not taking Crimea back.
Crimea is the only year-long warm water port that Vladimir Putin has.
And Crimea wants to be a part of Russia.
And this is not just, it's not just they had like the plebiscites when he first went in there.
And you could say, oh, I don't trust those.
And it's fair enough.
I mean, they weren't like, they weren't like overseen by any international body as far as I'm aware.
But then there was independent polling done, which was exactly in line with how the vote was.
And there's no question that the people in Crimea, they side with the Russians.
There's just no chance you're getting that back.
But all those same people who said we have to keep funding them until they get Crimea back, they don't say that anymore, but they haven't like updated it.
They haven't gone like, okay, fine, they can have Crimea, but we're funding them because they need to get Luhansk back.
They need to get the Donbass region back, right?
Like they're not saying anything like that.
And so your point is absolutely right.
Like they're not even making an argument about what the like achievable outcome of continuing this war could be.
They're still just saying Vladimir Putin's bad.
Ukraine is democracy, even without the elections.
Therefore, we have to win.
Or the dumb thing, we can't lose because then he'll invade Poland or some dumb shit like that.
There's really no counter to what Rand Paul is saying here.
Putin War Arguments00:00:18
All right.
That's our show for today.
Thank you guys very much, as always, for tuning in.
Come see us in Utah next weekend, comicdave Smith.com, robbythefire.com, run your mouth podcast, Rob's other great show.