Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein analyze Trump's debate challenge to Biden, Andrew McCabe's defense of Section 702 against FISA misuse claims, and Sam Harris's controversial comparison of Hamas to Nazis. They argue that ignoring root causes like occupation prevents understanding extremism, while asserting that power levels dictate actual harm rather than just ideology. Ultimately, the hosts conclude that equating religious fanaticism with irrationality overlooks historical context, and that premeditated murder remains murder regardless of the perpetrator's resources or methods. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Portland Camping and Government Size00:02:04
Fill her up.
You are listening to the cast.
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'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
We are just about on our way out to Portland.
How are you doing, sir?
Pretty good.
I got all my urban warfare items ready.
So I'm good to walk the streets of Portland.
I'm ready to go.
Yeah, you just need a nice like camping size backpack.
You want to have some canned goods, couple of firearms.
Maybe you can trade.
Yeah, maybe like a copy of the Communist Manifesto in case you have to blend in somewhere.
You know what I mean?
Just really hit a coffee shop and just be like, what's up with all these racists?
What do you identify as?
I think we're going to be fine.
I think they're going to embrace us in that city.
That's how I feel.
And then, you know, assuming we survive Portland, then we'll be back in St. Louis, back at the funny bone out there.
Really looking forward to that.
It was one of our most fun weekends of last year.
So very, very excited to come back.
And then, of course, we're off to the races.
Tacoma, Spoken, Stamford, Washington, D.C. for the National Libertarian Convention, as well as a stand-up show and a live part of the problem podcast.
We'll be at Wise Guys in Las Vegas.
I'll be back at the Comedy Mothership, the Nashville Zanys, whole bunch of fun stuff coming up.
ComicDaveSmith.com for all those ticket links.
And of course, RobbyTheFire.com for all of Rob's stuff.
If you want to catch this year's summer porch tour, make sure to go over there and check out Run Your Mouth, Rob's other fantastic podcast.
I suppose we should start the show.
OJ Simpson and Divided America00:04:03
They rest in peace, OJ Simpson.
Ooh, did you hear about that?
Brian mentioned it just before the show.
I didn't really have time to collect my thoughts and process, though.
It's a weird thing to look back at the life of OJ Simpson and obviously was a phenomenal football player.
And a great wife murder.
Brilliant, brilliant actor.
Brilliant actor.
Rob, let's go in order here.
Oh, my God.
Okay, football player, brilliant actor.
Naked gun movies.
Phenomenal.
Yes, Rob, he did.
There is a blemish on his record.
He wasn't a perfect human.
Okay.
He did some things wrong.
Of course, I'm talking about recommending people take the COVID vax.
He was wrong.
And he, you know, I, yeah, he's going to, he's going to have to face his maker on that one.
But aside from that, hell of a rusher.
Guy was a giant out there.
Moved like a small man, hit like a big man.
And he murdered his wife and her lover.
Sure.
Fine, Rob, if we have to.
He made Broncos look cool.
Yeah.
Yep.
And he's funny videos, really funny videos on Twitter.
So, you know, I'm just saying, you take the good with the bad.
It is a weird, it is kind of a weird thing because he does to people like around my age, and I think you, we're only like five, six years apart or whatever, but I think happy birthday, by the way.
I've just had a birthday.
But I do think almost our age difference is the difference where like you don't actually remember the OJ trial, do you?
Actually, I do.
I think it was in second grade.
And I don't remember, I don't remember why I was fascinated with it, but I do remember kind of like running home to catch the verdict.
I must have just heard enough chatter about it.
Maybe I have that wrong, but I was just an older kid.
So like, I remember it very well.
And it really was something that like it, it did really shine a light on what they used to call the different Americas, you know, like white America and black America and how much like everybody in white America just looked at it as like, oh, well, yeah, this was a guy who was like beating his wife and then she tried to leave him and he killed her and her and her lover, whatever.
And then everyone like, it's almost like white America just saw it as like a non-racial issue.
You're like, oh, it was OJ.
It was a guy we all loved.
But yeah, it turns out he's a killer.
And then, again, I'm speaking broadly, but then like from Black America's point of view, it was like, no, this is a referendum on the LAPD, you know, and like, however you feel about it, it was a crazy thing at the time that really did, I think, cause a lot of racial divisions in the country because for the most part, white America looked at it like, yo, you're celebrating that like a killer got loose and it got, you know, was like got away with it.
And whereas then I think, you know, black America looked at it as like, no, man, like we're celebrating all the times black people got wrong, wrongfully convicted of one.
Ha ha back in your face.
You know, this time we got one off.
Anyway, not that I really want to relitigate the OJ Simpson case, but it did feel like a big deal, him dying.
It's like, oh, he was like a really, in a weird way, a really important national figure.
Ironically, he was like the whitest black guy until it went down.
Like every detail was like being in the naked gun movies.
He married a blonde lady.
You know what I mean?
Like he wasn't like in any way an ambassador of black culture or anything like that.
That's so horribly racist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, he was, he was, he seemed like such a white guy until he killed his wife.
Yeah.
Until it turned out he was beating his wife and doing the blackest shit you can do.
He seemed like such a white.
Oh, man, they really shouldn't have given those gloves to try on.
Anyway, you learn, you live and you learn.
Okay, let's move back into more what we want to talk about today.
All right.
There was this I found very, very interesting.
And I think this is the first thing I want to talk about for a reason.
Biden Debates and Mental Functioning00:13:13
Obviously, 2024 is still, we're still just in April here, and we're really just getting geared up for what is going to be a wild, you know, second two-thirds of this year.
And the centerpiece of that is going to be this presidential election.
And there's been a lot of speculation about what this election is going to look like.
There's many aspects of it that are very different than just about any other presidential election.
Obviously, 2020 was like that as well, because it was the year of COVID insanity.
And so there was this whole different, you know, thing about like, you were only kind of allowed to go outside for most of the year.
So it wasn't a normal year.
But now we're left in the first presidential election after that.
And it's been up in the air what's going to happen in terms of the charges against Donald Trump, in terms of debates, if they're going to happen at all.
Of course, you've got Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the race this year.
So that changes things pretty drastically.
This was a video that Donald Trump just cut and released.
It's very short.
We'll play it in its entirety.
But I thought this was an interesting indication of what the Trump strategy is going to be.
So let's play this video.
It's time for crooked Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of the United States and I to debate.
We have to talk about what he's doing and where we're going.
We owe it to our country.
We owe it to all Americans anytime, anywhere, anyplace.
All right.
That's it.
Short and sweet.
Donald Trump is calling Joe Biden out to debate.
Typically speaking, this would not even be a thing.
It would be a given that there's going to be debates.
This year, it's been completely up in the air.
Of course, everybody's just speculating.
There are no confirmed debates as of now.
Me and you certainly have speculated that we think the Biden campaign is going to try to duck debates.
This is, I think, a very wise strategy by Donald Trump.
Donald Trump, of course, as we all know, say whatever you could say about the guy, and we've certainly got a lot to say about him.
He is not noticeably different in terms of his rhetorical abilities than he was in 2016 or in 2020.
That is not the same for Joe Biden.
Everybody, including Joe Biden's supporters, were bragging about his State of the Union speech.
And what they were basically bragging about is that he did it.
He put one foot in front of the other, walked up to a stage and then read the words out of the monitor and only stumbled like eight or nine times.
So like, how impressive is that?
I mean, that's the level that Joe Biden's at, that people are not.
And a debate is substantially harder than just giving a speech.
And I think there's just, there's at the very least a giant question mark about Joe Biden's ability to do a debate at this point.
I don't know.
What are your thoughts?
Well, firstly, great of Trump getting out there going, hey, debate me.
It's only a matter of time before Biden responds.
Do you even have time between your rape trials for me to debate you?
Is that even an option?
Don't you have to go take care of your criminal trials in New York?
I hope that we do get to see these debates.
And I really hope Donald Trump doesn't flub it again because the last time all he had to do was stand there and shut the fuck up.
And he just was doing that thing that he was doing to Hillary Clinton, kind of getting in his face and over talking.
And it just made you feel bad for the other guy who can't speak.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, it's Joe Biden isn't, he's, he's difficult to rattle in the same way that Donald Trump would rattle other people.
Shane Gillis has a great bit about this.
But, you know, it's like Shane's bit was like, he's like, Trump would always get in your head, but no one can get in Joe Biden's head because Joe's not even there.
You know, like it's really funny, like angle on it, but there's, and there's a lot of funny.
Watch, paper, scissors, shoot that Joe Biden's just the right amount of brain dead.
Yeah, like it's, there's, he's just, he's not that, he's not living in reality.
So it's not very easy to like kind of rattle him in that way.
Um, I do think that as, you know, I don't, I've thought about this before.
You've made this point several times that Joe Biden's going to use the criminal charges as an excuse to not debate Donald Trump.
And I've, I've pretty much thought like, as you've made that case, I've been like, yeah, that's a real, there's a strong possibility that that will be his response.
We'll see if you're right about this.
I think there's a very good chance you are.
I do think that probably until I saw this commercial, I didn't really start to, you know, really think about how well do I think that will play?
Who's going to win this narrative war?
As I'm now seeing that Donald Trump, because I also was not sure whether Donald Trump was going to want to debate or whether he was going to be fine just coasting without that.
He didn't do any of the primary debates and that worked out pretty well for him.
So I don't know.
I could, I could have plausibly seen the Trump campaign also feeling like maybe it's better to not even play it this way.
Maybe it's like all the numbers are in our favor right now.
So like, why do we need something that shakes things up?
But now seeing Trump cut this ad, I got to say, I think this is going to be very hard for Joe Biden to make whatever excuses he wants and it to not just come off like, nah, dude, you're being a bitch and you're scared to debate this guy.
I think this is a winner for Donald Trump.
That's just my thoughts.
We'll refuse to debate until the prices stop lying.
How can he come out here and debate as everyone is the whole world lies against him?
Well, it's it's just Look, there's not that I actually believe in anything about this system.
And I certainly don't think that presidential debates typically illuminate the important issues or they get down to like some really interesting, you know, policy disagreements or philosophical disagreements or something like that.
But the illusion of this whole system is predicated on the idea that it's democratic, that we live in a democracy.
And I do just think like, how are you going to defend the idea that this norm that has existed since 1960?
And I think maybe there were even, I know 1960, Nixon, Jack Kennedy was the first ever televised debates.
I don't remember off the top of my head, like whether the previous elections, had they done radio debates or something like that, but there's been debates on TV since 1960.
That's a long time.
I mean, you're talking about what, 60 years, 60 plus years of that being the norm.
Even in 2020, there were presidential debates, right?
Were there just one?
I think, wasn't there one, the second one that got canceled, I think, or something like that?
I think it was Trump got COVID and they canceled it.
But then, do you remember this, Rob?
They canceled the debate, but then they still did an interview with Trump.
So like he still went to a thing.
Anyway, whatever.
But there was the one debate where Trump did kind of blow it.
Even this Mike Wallace was totally in the tank for Biden and it was a bullshit debate and all of that, but Trump still should have been able to land a knockout blow and didn't.
But anyway, just to my point, this has been a norm for a very long time in America that like, well, look, we have this thing called voting.
And before the people get to vote, this, this whole illusion of what they claim legitimizes the regime is at least predicated on the idea that, yeah, they both got to get up there and say what their ideas are in front of the other person and the other person gets to push back on that.
And then you have to have a defense.
Obviously, it's always stupid and it's always just canned responses and the framing is always kind of predetermined.
But still, there is at least still some element of you get to get up there and try to make the other guy look bad and you look good.
And I just think when the knock on Joe Biden is already, I mean, look, aside from obviously there are major issues that are hurting Joe Biden right now, inflation, immigration, the overall economy, foreign policy, there's a lot of issues.
But one of the major issues, one of the major knocks on Joe Biden is that he is too damn old.
And when they say too damn old, they don't just mean the number.
They mean him and his mental functioning.
And if that's the knock on you, and then you're refusing to debate when challenged, I just don't see how that, how I just don't think there's an excuse good enough where like, even if he comes back and says what you've kind of speculated he might not, and I'm saying I think you're right, that might be the response.
Even that, Donald Trump can just so easily come back to him and just go, okay, well, I'm the Republican nominee and I'm leading in all the polls.
So it's either going to be me or you who's president of the United States of America.
I'm ready to debate this.
You know, like, I just think the, I think the narrative is right there for Donald Trump to win this PR battle.
I don't see how Biden pulls it out.
I, I mostly agree with you, but the Democrats like to project this illusion that Donald Trump will ruin our democracy.
He tried to undermine it with January 6th.
He's, we got an issue with domestic terrorism with him being a racist.
And now that he's a criminal, I think they will try and play that card as to whether or not really, and what are the, what are the Democrats trying to do?
They're trying to keep their base.
They're trying to keep the anti-Trump people.
And at this point, Joe Biden's trying to bribe the college demographic that he seemingly has lost with the bad economy by getting rid of their student loan debt.
Or at least reducing it.
Yeah.
So debating for him, it's kind of a no-win situation because the optics are, hey, I think this guy has too much dementia.
I think he's too old and he's failed on all these accounts.
Does him showing up to a debate possibly put him over or win new voters?
I mean, I don't know how good the drug cocktail is that they give him or seemingly we've heard that he's great in private meetings.
So, you know, maybe, maybe, yeah, maybe they got a card up their sleeve, but I would just think him showing up to a debate at this point is a, and he's got some talking points.
His talking points are the court cases.
It's still January 6th.
Abortion.
Abortion's the big one, but that's about it.
And Trump's just got more cards to play.
Hey, I was dealing with the border.
I was taking care of the wall.
And here's what you did.
There were no walls.
There were no wars when I was president.
We've got two wars.
I could have prevented both of those.
And he can harp on all the unpopular points about them.
Hey, the economy was doing much better.
And you keep lying about the prices.
It just seems like showing up to a debate is a loss for him now as to whether or not, because I've said it before, it's like this.
That's a very, that's a very interesting point.
That's a very interesting point because, and it doesn't really conflict with my point, but it does add a lot to it.
So I think if I'm, if I'm hearing correctly, your point is that it's not just a question of what does the PR narrative cost Joe Biden for refusing to debate.
It's a question of that cost being weighed versus the potential cost of what actually debating would be.
And that potential cost ranges from bad to catastrophic.
Like if Joe Biden does just collapse into himself, he could lose the presidential election with those debates.
And also, as you said, even short of that, there's just a lot of things that Donald Trump can hit him on.
And that cost might be more than the cost of appearing to be a coward who's unwilling to debate.
I mean, he got away.
He got away with not campaigning the last time on account of COVID.
I can't possibly campaign.
But I don't know.
It's flipping a coin, you know?
The debates are the norm.
The idea that they won't show up and do one of them and get the questions beforehand and facilitate good moderators that even when Joe Biden's lying, the moderator will step in.
And even when Trump calls him out for lying, the moderator won't step in to defend Biden and go, no, that's true.
Intelligence agencies have said that.
So, you know, they've got a lot of dirty tricks that they can pull to try and make it.
They can say that it's only going to be one hour.
They can play with the format.
There's a lot of tricks that they still have up their sleeve, but my guess is Biden's going to try and do everything he can to not show up.
FISA Eligibility and Trump Semantics00:15:49
All right.
Well, speaking of tricks up their sleeve, our good friend, friend of the program, Andrew McCabe, who was uh, of course, at the Justice Department straight shooter if ever there was one guy who give it to you straight Andrew Mccabe, of course.
Famously, on uh 60 Minutes, Andrew Mccabe was the one who uh confessed, although he didn't present it as if it was a confession, but it certainly was one.
He confessed that, after um, Donald Trump had fired um uh Commy, that the uh the, the top people at the Justice Department, including the attorney general at the time, all sat around and um, they debated, invoking the 25th amendment to remove Donald Trump from the presidency uh, and ultimately concluded that they couldn't get enough members of his cabinet to go along with that,
and so they settled on a special prosecutor um, and so that was basically the origin of the Mueller investigation that they were like.
Well, we can't get him removed that way.
Let's try to get him removed this way.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Uh, Andrew Mccabe uh recently went on CNN because uh the it's the perfect place for him and uh he had this to say.
I found this very interesting.
Let's play the tape, consequences of this law being killed as Trump would like to see it.
Yeah, so let's understand exactly what we're talking about here Jim, because what you're hearing on the Hill and from Donald Trump is really confusing the issue.
So Fisa is a big law.
It has a lot of different sections.
Part of it is used uh against uh uh people.
Here in the United States you go to the court for a warrant to enable you to do electronic surveillance.
That's not what we're talking about.
Section 702 is only used to capture the communications when people meet three criteria, you have to be a foreign person in a foreign place and the purpose of the collection has to be to get foreign intelligence.
It is our primary vision into what terrorists and spies and people who use weapons of mass destruction uh, and and nation states that use cyber tools against us, what they're doing overseas.
It is an incredibly valuable tool, but what makes it different from regular Fisa is there are no warrants, and the reason for that is you don't have to go to court and get a warrant because people foreign, people in foreign places are not protected by our constitution or our fourth amendment.
So that's what makes it different.
That's the thing that's expiring on the the 19th and it is absolutely essential that we get it renewed.
And it's it's used to stop terrorist attacks.
I mean the full stop.
I mean that that's the purpose of the law.
And let's go back to pause for a second.
Just, is there any better like?
Just example of that of Jim Acosta's like response to that question of what the like?
Doesn't that just show you what the whole like CNN platform is about this?
His response isn't to go like uh, first off he's, he's lying through his teeth like when he says that like the 702 isn't ever misused, or something like that but.
But Jim Acosta's response isn't like, okay well, here's the the criticism, because this is a very controversial part of the Fisa Act.
And he's not like, well, here's the criticism.
These are what all the critics, both from libertarian to constitutionalist uh, civil libertarians, this is their criticism of that.
He just jumps in to just add, yeah, it's just used to get terrorists guys trust the three-letter organization, kind of like Gitmo and water torture and all sorts of things.
It's just uh, it just it just cures terrorism.
Yeah, just as the CNN guy, i'm just here to ask a question and then say, trust your three-letter agency American citizen.
They're all they're said, they're just trying to do goodbye, you don't worry about them, not even a thought of like uh, a difficult follow-up question or something like that.
Anyway, this part is actually what I thought was more interesting.
So let's watch the the rest of the video on Truth, Social Andrew.
He's calling on House Republicans to block reauthorizing it, saying quote, kill Fisa, it was used illegally against my campaign.
Uh, they spied on my campaign.
End quote.
Uh okay, so let's just pause it right there.
By the way, here's something that I just find this very interesting.
Okay, I don't know how many of you guys?
Uh, how many of you have memories that stretch back this far?
But way back in the year 2016, in the year 2017 and the year 2018, Donald Trump used to say this quite a bit, that they spied on my campaign.
Now here he's saying, kill Fisa.
Fisa is what was used to spy on my campaign, but this was a thing that Donald Trump said.
You remember this, rob right and everybody in the corporate media.
It was unanimous that they would all just mock and ridicule this.
This is so ridiculous that Donald Trump's claiming they spied on his campaign.
How would he even know if they were spying on his campaign?
This is not true.
Nobody spied on Donald Trump's campaign.
This is just misinformation, fake news that the president is spreading.
Blah blah, blah.
So here is Donald Trump saying the same thing that he's been saying the whole time.
You know, kill Fisa, this is what they used to spy on my campaign.
And here is uh, here is Andrew Mccab's response.
Um, is there any truth to this?
I know we're kind of going back over is, relatively speaking, some ancient history uh, and one of the Trump's old complaints dating back to the 2016 campaign.
So let's, i'm sorry, we'll pause it again here.
So Jim Acosta uh, alludes to this what I just said.
He's like, ah, here we go again, we're going back over.
This is kind of ancient history, relatively speaking.
Here, you know, he's saying hey, 2017 wasn't that long ago, but this is what we were talking about back then.
Him always claiming they were spying on his campaign, right?
Oofy Donald Trump.
So what's the response?
Yeah.
So to be clear, no, there is no truth or accuracy in that post at all.
702 authorities were never used in the course of that investigation of Donald Trump and his campaign and some of his campaign associates.
He may be referring to the FISA that was used, that was obtained to surveil Carter Page.
We now know there were many mistakes in that FISA.
Those are all regrettable, but that is not Section 702.
Totally different thing here.
My guess, Jim, is that it's not surprising that Donald Trump is against surveillance capacity and authority for the FBI because he is someone who's been investigated by the FBI.
But nevertheless, he is absolutely wrong on this count.
Okay, so he's absolutely wrong.
There's no truth, Rob.
There's no truth in that truth social post because 702 wasn't even used in the, except Donald Trump didn't say that.
He just said FISA.
And then what will McCabe say?
Oh, Andrew McCabe here will say, oh, well, I mean, yes, there was a FISA record spy on an advisor to his campaign.
And sure, it was regrettable.
Mistakes were made.
Now, what were those mistakes exactly?
As you recall this story, Rob, the Carter, I'm sorry, Carter Page.
I was about to say Carter Steele, getting all the names mixed up here.
Carter Page was a low-level Trump advisor.
And the claim was that Carter Page had been flipped to become a Russian agent to take over the foreign policy of the Trump administration and abolish all the sanctions on Russia.
Now, this claim was absurd on its face to begin with.
First of all, he was an advisor to the campaign.
He didn't even have any position in the administration.
It's like as if, you know, some, it's not, I don't even know how to say it.
It would be almost like on the level if, let's say, I was running, I decided to run for some office and someone said that gay blind Mike at Gas Digital had been flipped in order to get me to do XYZ once I get elected.
And you'd right away, you'd be like, but wait a minute, but he's not even a part of that.
He's like just some guy who works.
How would he, even if he had been flipped, how would he ever be able to like institute a policy once I get elected to some office?
This was anyway, but there's a lot more than that.
You see, Carter Page was actually working for the CIA.
And the CIA told the FBI this.
We know all of this now.
The CIA told the FBI, they go, no, that's our guy.
And he came right back to us when the Russians tried to get him to flip and said, how do you want me guys?
How do you guys want me to play this?
And he's with us.
And then the lawyer at the FBI, who actually did get convicted for this, he completely withheld that on the FISA application.
And he just said that the CIA confirmed that he had talked to the Russians, but omitted the part that the CIA told him, but we know that because he told us right away and he's one of us.
And so this was the only person who actually got convicted.
I don't believe he did any jail time, but this is the only person who got convicted in that.
So that's what Andrew McCabe's referring to when he says, oh, there were some regrettable things that happened.
In other words, yes, Donald Trump's post right there was 100% factually correct.
They used FISA to spy on his campaign.
Like, why was the FBI misrepresenting what they knew from the CIA?
Because they wanted to spy on Donald Trump's campaign.
That's why.
And so here it is.
So he's 100% correct.
And it's just funny that now, when that talking point comes up about, oh, Trump says, oh, they spied on my campaign.
Even on CNN, the guy's got to go like, well, I mean, yeah, if you're referring to the FISA warrant, yeah, it was regrettable.
Yeah, we didn't do a great job with that.
Like even he's got to at least admit, oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Oh, yeah, you're full of shit.
You were spying on his campaign.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
It's wild to, just as a starting point, to have the guy who was part of a coup to take out the president on behalf of the deep state on air to talk about as the legal expert for why expanding or allowing for this kind of authority for the government is important.
It seems like the exact wrong person.
I don't know.
It's like having a murderer on to talk about a criminal reform or it just seems like you're the wrong person.
You're the guy who specifically violated the spirit of the way government's supposed to operate.
And now you're telling me why it needs to have more authority or needs to have this in place.
I'd have to dig into the specifics on this.
Remember with Tucker Carlson?
He busted the CIA for spying on him.
And they're like, well, we weren't spying on you.
It was because you were having conversations with these other people and we were spying on those other people.
It seems to me like they play this game where they use this as a tool for collecting information on you that would otherwise be illegal for them to do so.
I seem to think that the NSA collects things at all times and they just don't look at files or they need a reason for why they have permission to go access information that they've otherwise collected and that things like this are their back doors for going, oh, look, we have the equivalent of a warrant for what they're collecting anyways.
But and I say that I'm pulling this out of my ass.
This sounds like a semantics game of specifically section 702 or whatever it was being for foreign people, which it probably isn't.
It probably includes you if you're abroad.
For the whole commuting caning with foreigners, but also Donald Trump, I don't know.
It sounds like Donald Trump's talking about the entire FISA process, not just this one aspect.
And also, I don't know, what were they, were they just passing the 702 part or were they passing the whole thing?
Well, I think they're, I think the 702 part has been shelved for now because they weren't able to get it through.
So it's unclear exactly what's going to happen.
But you're right that, and this is, there's no question that this has been used many times that they'll use FISA, which the F in FISA is for foreign.
You know what I mean?
It's all supposed to be foreign, but they'll use it to be like, oh, if you're on the phone with someone in another country, we can now spy on that phone call.
And it's like, oh, okay, but see, right, your point's exactly right.
They're still violating your civil liberties, but they're doing it because the other half of this is international.
Now it falls into a FISA, you know, eligibility.
Either way, it is, it's just kind of amazing that this old thing that everybody was laughing at Donald Trump and mocking him for saying he's undeniably right about.
And there's, I mean, there's several examples like that.
And I certainly, I'm, I think me and you both do not pull punches when we criticize Donald Trump, but on the on the claim that they were spying on his campaign, he gets an A ⁇ , 100% factually accurate.
That's just, he's just right about that.
Now, here's how we make the country better.
We need more of these bad government authorities to affect Trump because that's the only way to get rid of them.
Like, I need, you know what I mean?
Like, I need Donald Trump to get a camera ticket in New York City for him to be like, cop didn't even pull me over.
This is bullshit.
I didn't get close to you.
Yeah, really.
Maybe that is what we need.
It just has to personally affect Donald Trump in order for him to ever care about.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, let's, there was another video that I saw people posting online that I thought maybe we would respond to.
Sam Harris Style and Hypnotizing Audiences00:05:40
I see less and less of Sam Harris these days.
He's been going basically since Trump and COVID.
He has kind of imploded as a human being.
He at one point had like a very big podcast.
He was in that kind of intellectual dark web circle or, you know, however you think about it.
Of course, he was with the new atheists before that.
Full disclosure, I have never been a fan of Sam Harris.
I've always been, I've always found his style to be somewhat of exactly the right way to say this, but his style is almost like a manipulation tactic in itself.
It's almost an attempt to like hypnotize his audience into, I've never appreciated the guys who have the Sam Harris style where it's kind of like, oftentimes people react emotionally.
However, if we're just going to look at things purely rationally, then we have to ask ourselves a few basic logical questions.
Like that stuff, I just always find it like, yeah, but you're just, you're basically just saying, I'm not being emotional.
I'm being logical without actually making a tight logical argument.
You're just kind of like, it's like your, your aura is, I am calm, calculated, logical person.
And it's like, no, you don't get to just claim you're the logical person.
We have to actually have like a battle of ideas here and see who's making better points.
And in terms of his actual points, I've just always been wholly unimpressed.
And Sam Harris is like with a lot of these guys, has just a horrible track record of being wrong about so many of the most important issues.
Sam Harris, of course, was a guy who made excuses for the war in Iraq, made excuses for the wider war on terrorism, championed torture, was awful on Trump and the whole Russiagate stuff, was awful on COVID, was awful on the vaccine, just like all the issues that matter.
You know, it's like, and I'm not saying this 100% like, look, a broken clock can be right twice a day.
So I'm not saying that somebody who's like gotten a lot of issues that matter can't be right about the next thing they're saying.
But I do think that, you know, sometimes like my message to, you know, like say my message to like conservative people who might be like, cause I get this sometimes, people are like, you know, I really like you, but I really like Ben Shapiro also.
You know, I like to, I listen to both of you guys and something like that.
And you're like, all right, well, doesn't the fact that he was saying, like, get the vaccine, you dopes, doesn't that kind of count against him a little bit?
Like, why are you giving him all this like, you know what I mean?
Like, oh, well, maybe he's making a point about the current thing.
It's like, yeah, but look at the last five current things.
He got every single one of them wrong, right?
So like, shouldn't there be a little bit of accountability for that?
Maybe you should, if somebody's been wrong about the last five most important things, maybe like, you know, have a little skepticism toward him with the next one.
Anyway, so there's a video from Sam Harris that was floating around there.
I thought we'd play this and respond talking about the latest war.
Now, Hamas is a jihadist organization.
In my view, that's all we need to know about it.
The question of how it got that way is fundamentally uninteresting, as is the question of why so many Palestinians have come to support it.
All right, so let's pause it.
Pause it right there.
Okay, so right away, Hamas is a jihadist group, and that's all you need to know, Rob.
That's all you need to know.
And the question as to how they got that way, the question why people support them, that has been deemed uninteresting.
But see, if I say it like this, then you realize it has to be logically sound.
Rob?
I don't, I don't know how to express how stupid I think that is.
I don't care what tone of voice you say it in.
Of course, the question of what led to this is an interesting and relevant question.
And like, and it also seems so incredibly self-serving if you're trying to just support Israel in this war to say, I find that uninteresting.
What did Israel do that's led to this situation?
Uninteresting.
They're jihadists.
That's all you need to know.
And do you not get like right now, this is my beef with Sam Harris?
It's always been this.
Not just that he supports all the worst things in the world, but that he presents it with this like snooty air of rationality, but then says the dumbest George W. Bush thing.
And then he has like enough people tricked to be like, oh, an intellectual.
Like, what's intellectual about this?
Like already right away.
Oh, they're jihadists.
That's all you need to know.
Everything else is uninteresting.
It's like if you just change the tone, it sounds like something a dumb 16-year-old would say.
You know what I mean?
You're bad.
I'm not interested.
Don't even care.
Totes, apps, whatever.
Like, what is the, what's the substance here?
I don't know.
Any other thoughts, Rob?
Yeah, I would think if you want to figure out how you can have peace somewhere, understanding how you have a terrorist organization running the area and why they're so devoted to killing you might be interesting.
Yeah, I'm interested.
All right, let's keep playing.
It would be like asking in 1941 how the SS became so radicalized.
Why wouldn't you want to know that?
In what world would you not want to understand how the SS came to be in power and how you might want to prevent that in the future?
How is that an uninteresting question?
Moinkbox Sponsor and World War I Lessons00:02:46
And, you know, the truth is that at least by the end of the war, perhaps not in 1941, but even like a public school education would tell you that like the conventional wisdom even on it is like, oh, yeah, we treated the Germans so shitty after World War I when we imposed Versailles on them.
And then at the end of World War II, we tried our best to not treat them that way because it was important to kind of learn the lesson of like, why would this rise up?
What are the conditions that lead to this?
And again, part of the conditions that led to, I mean, there were several, but certainly The Treaty of Versailles, the insistence on total surrender and the international humiliation of the German people was a huge component of what led to the rise of the Nazi Party.
And of course, as everybody knows, that the Great Depression and all of the debt being called in, which led to hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, that these economic conditions also did a lot to make fertile soil for the Nazi party to take off.
And so, yeah, you might look at any of those things.
You might look, oh, okay.
Well, has Israel kept Gaza intentionally in a state of poverty?
Maybe that's not the best thing if you don't want radical groups to flourish.
But again, that's just not interesting, says 15-year-old Sam Harris.
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Nazism Plus Religious Fanaticism00:15:08
All right, let's keep playing.
And why do so many millions of Germans support it?
That's an interesting question now, right now that Nazism has been defeated.
But in 1941, there was nothing to do but kill Nazis.
Okay, so let's pause right there.
Think about the actual argument here.
Okay, fine, fine, fine.
It is an interesting question.
But later.
But just not right now.
Right now, we just got to kill.
But then like, yeah, sure, we could ask this academic question years later.
Oh, and maybe we'll figure out that it was our own fucking policies that like exacerbated the situation.
But we don't need to know about that now.
We don't know about now's time to kill.
Now time me kill.
But if I say, you know, Rob, now's the time to kill.
And that might be an interesting question for many years later.
I don't know.
I guess it sounds more intellectual.
No, I'm sorry.
I'm going to ask the interesting questions now because like, fuck you.
I have a right to ask interesting questions now.
And I actually think understanding the answer to these interesting questions informs one of what might be a wiser path to take going forward.
And by the way, that's not to say that there's zero point to the idea that like, hey, look, whatever created the conditions that we live in now, we do live in the conditions now and you have to address that.
So okay, fine.
But that doesn't mean you just turn your brain off to the question of what created these circumstances.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
I feel exactly the same way about jihadists.
In fact, jihadists are worse than Nazis, in my view.
They don't have the same power the Nazis had in the 30s and 40s, which is a very good thing, and we should keep it that way.
But their ideology is actually worse.
Jihadism is essentially Nazism plus an expectation of paradise.
It's Nazism plus religious fanaticism.
Nazism plus an eagerness to be martyred and to see their children martyred.
There are many differences between Nazism and Jihadism, of course.
But they only make the Nazis look comparatively benign.
Nazism was a quasi-religious phenomenon.
These people were not rationalists.
It was basically racist mysticism anchored to a cult of personality.
But the Nazis didn't use their own women and children as human shields.
That would have been worse.
How could you have made sure because they didn't have to?
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, it's just like, yes, it's true.
The Nazis, here's one crazy difference.
The Nazis use an army.
Why doesn't Hamas just use their army?
Oh, yeah, because they don't have one.
They don't have one.
They don't have a government.
They don't have an army.
They don't have an air force.
They don't have a, you know what I'm saying?
Like, they don't have submarines.
They don't have a lot of things that the Nazis had.
And again, I just love this argument of like, no, they're not Nazis.
No, I'm not making the lazy comparison to Nazis.
They're worse than Nazis because they're religious and Nazis.
They're Nazism plus.
Even though he then concedes a moment later that the Nazis were a quasi-religious organization because they weren't being rationalists.
And that somehow this is the only place.
This is this ridiculous new atheist argument that essentially you're either religious or you're rational.
And if you're religious, then that's the most anti-rational thing you could be.
And if you're atheist, that's the most rational thing you could be.
And so the Nazis then would be classified as quasi-religious because they didn't, I don't know, they weren't being rationalists.
The problem with all of this is that, well, there's a few problems.
Number one, atheists are as irrational as any other group of people.
Number two, there is really no distinguishing between Nazism and a fundamental religiosity.
And when he says the point that he makes about how like, oh, well, they weren't sacrificing themselves believing that they'd be rewarded in heaven for it or something like that.
It's like, go read some Nazi literature.
They believed they were going to be rewarded with a thousand year long Third Reich.
I mean, there still was this kind of big payoff at the end and that the Aryan nation was going to rule the world or the Aryan race, I should say, was going to rule the world.
You know, it's all kind of the same.
It is this grand big payoff in the end of what their, you know, religion taught them to believe.
And to anyway, the other problem that you have with this view, this new atheist view that the true atheist is the rationalist person is that where does that actually leave you?
Like if you just believe in pure, like atheistic scientific analysis, and then you're supposed to be rational, well, why exactly was the Nazis' approach not rational?
Is it because they lost?
You know what I mean?
Like they, is it because they, they lost and it ended up not working out?
But why exactly would it not be rational from a Darwinian perspective?
By the way, the Nazis were big fans of Darwin.
Why would it not be rational from their perspective to say we want our race to live and all the other races to die?
Why would it not be rational for me to take your stuff and have it as mine?
Maybe because they couldn't get away with it.
So let's say hypothetically they could get away with it.
Then I guess it's rational.
Also, from a totally rational perspective of looking at what's a bigger threat, I mean, the Nazis put up much bigger numbers.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, that's he concedes that they don't have the power, but their ideology is actually worse.
You see, so because they have, because it's martyrdom plus Nazism.
Here, let's just play a little bit more so we get the gist of this argument he's making.
How could you have made Auschwitz worse?
Well, you could have given the guards a belief system that made them feel actual religious ecstasy as they herded innocent people into gas chambers.
That would have been worse.
And it would have been worse had these beliefs been central to the worldview of a majority of ordinary Germans.
All right, let's pause it there.
So here, Sam Harris essentially embraces the progressive hate crime justifying philosophy that actually Auschwitz would have been much worse had the guards had a meaner thought in their head while they were committing the Holocaust.
That somehow the fact that their ideology allowed them to commit a genocide would have been even worse if their ideology made them giddy about committing a genocide.
So if you commit a genocide, but you feel real bad about it, that's not nearly as bad as if you committed genocide and you're giddy about it.
Now, what evidence is there that they weren't giddy about it?
I mean, I don't know.
Their ideology got them to do it.
So what are we even saying here?
No, the reality is that, and this is something where kind of left-wingers make one error and people like Sam Harris make, I suppose, a slightly different error.
But or the critical theory type left-wingers will essentially say that all power is corrupt and that if you have any power over somebody else, you're the oppressor and they're the oppressed and that everything in life can be seen as oppressor versus oppressed.
It's a very neo-Marxist way of looking at the world.
As Marxist said, all of human history is class struggle.
They see all of existence as different types of struggles.
And of course, that's not true.
I mean, like a boss may have power over an employee, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's oppressing them.
He could be offering them a better job than they could find anywhere else.
And it's a voluntary relationship.
And just because one has more power, that doesn't mean that they're necessarily using it in an oppressive way.
Okay, so that's an error that left wingers make.
But the error that Sam Harris types are making here is that power is irrelevant.
And what really matters is what's in your heart and how evil your motives are.
And then he has a very subjective way to figure out who has more evil in their heart.
But of course, for any normal, rational thinking human being who doesn't subscribe to either of these ridiculous views, we can all realize that, look, if your goal is to aggress against people, if your goal is to oppress a group of people, the amount of power you have is very relevant in that.
And so look, there could be a homeless guy on the street who has a worse ideology than Adolf Hitler has.
So if he was in control, he's not just going to try to kill the Jews and the gypsies and the gays or whatever and the mentally handicapped.
He's going to try to kill everybody if he's in charge.
But if he has absolutely no power and no ability, let's just say for the sake of argument, he's an 80-pound, you know, hungry, weak, homeless guy with no weapons.
It kind of doesn't really matter what's in his head.
It just doesn't matter that much.
And if Dick Cheney is the vice president and he's leading us into war in Iraq and you were to say like, well, Dick Cheney's ideology is bad, but this homeless guy's ideology is Dick Cheney plus, you know?
Which one are we going to focus on?
Which one are you going to write articles on?
Which one are you going to record podcasts on?
Which one are you going to talk about?
Well, we're going to talk about Dick Cheney because he's got the power to actually do something.
So not everyone who has power is oppressing everybody else.
But if you are oppressing people, the amount of power you have is very relative.
And that, if you understand that basic truth, this whole entire comparison falls apart.
It was ridiculous when RFK tried to make it on the show.
It's ridiculous as Sam Harris is trying to make it.
The Nazis controlled a huge chunk of Europe.
They had a very powerful central government.
They had the ability to conquer nations.
Hamas has none of that.
They have none of that power.
They don't even have enough power to control Gaza, let alone repel the Israeli assault on Gaza, let alone conquer Israel, let alone take over Europe and take over the world or anything like that.
And as soon as you recognize that, you're like, oh, yeah, all of this is stupid.
This is his entire point here is stupid.
Do they have a more backward ideology than the Nazis?
I mean, it's at best debatable.
The Nazis' ideology was pretty goddamn bad, but none of that really matters.
And then if you actually asked yourself the interesting question that Sam Harris dismissed as not interesting, you'd be like, okay, well, what led to this?
What led to them having this ideology?
Then you get into some uncomfortable answers.
We're just like, oh, yeah, Hamas didn't come around.
Look, Hamas didn't even come around as like the Islamic charity that they started until the 80s, until almost 20 years after the occupation of Gaza.
40, if you count the Egyptian occupation.
Okay?
So that's the fact.
If we're talking about what motivated the other one, it's like, well, the occupation came first and Hamas came second.
So no, Hamas didn't, you know what I'm saying?
That's just, that's the reality.
And Hamas, of course, did not actually get power until many, many years more of being dominated by Israel.
Hamas came that the elections that they always like to cite where Hamas won a plurality of the vote, not even a majority, but they won a plurality of the vote in 2005.
Well, the Israeli occupation started in 1967.
Maybe it's time we do look at the conditions that create these things.
Look, forget like libertarian doves, you know, like us.
It was General McChrystal, the guy who was running the war in Afghanistan.
He wasn't no libertarian dove.
He was just a sir yes, sir.
Well, maybe not a sir, yes, sir guy, because he had some bad things to say about Obama.
But he was just looking at it from like a military strategic point of view.
How do we win this war?
And he's the guy who came up with the term insurgent math.
It was the famous thing where he said, what's 10 minus two?
And everyone goes eight.
And he goes, nope, the answer is 20.
10 minus 2 equals 20.
Because when you got a list of insurgents, you got 10 insurgents and you kill two of them.
Well, guess what?
Every one of their brothers and fathers and uncles and nephews and friends, they all sign up to be insurgents too.
So the more you kill, the more insurgents you got on your list.
That's what's going on here.
The more people you kill, the more all the people around them who survived are going to be ready to kill in their name.
All right, let's keep playing.
And therefore difficult to separate from their other religious beliefs that gave their lives meaning.
That would have been worse than what Nazism actually was.
And that would have made it harder to purge from German society.
after we had killed a sufficient number of committed Nazis.
As I've made clear many times before, my support for Israel in this conflict is not born of my identity as a Jew.
It's not born of my attachment to the religion of Judaism, of which I have none.
And while the eruption of global anti-Semitism in response to October 7th has changed my sense of the vulnerability of Jews everywhere, my support for Israel in this war isn't due to a special focus on the problem of anti-Semitism or a special connection to Israel as a country.
It's born of a special connection to civilization, to the norms of open societies, to individual rights and freedom of thought and to secularism and rationality and basic decency.
That is to everything that jihadists seek to destroy.
All right.
So it's born of his commitment to freedom and Western civilization.
I mean, screw those Palestinians.
First Degree Murder and Hypocrisy00:10:36
They don't get any freedom, but let's not focus on that.
You see, the tactic that Sam Harris uses here, right, is he starts off by doing what he must do to make this argument work, which is to say, okay, rule number one, you're not allowed to ask the question of why they're like this and why they have support.
Okay, going from there, yeah, they're like this.
They're like this, so we got to kill them.
We got to kill them because they're like this.
Without any mention of the people who aren't like that who are being killed, but they're like this.
But as soon as you entertain that question, if you even think possibly, look, this is the example that I used when I smoked that Laura Loomer chick in that debate that we had.
But she said at one point to me, she goes, look, Hamas was elected and it's on the people.
They have an obligation to rise up and overthrow the status quo or else they're fair game.
And I was like, well, why don't we apply that to anybody else?
Why don't we are you telling me that like Americans, let's just say Americans living here, because George W. Bush was elected and then re-elected, are they fair game for anyone in Iraq or Afghanistan to try to kill innocent people here?
Is that fair?
Let's say they had the power to maybe do that.
I mean, they don't have the power, but let's say they did.
Would they have a moral right to do that because he was elected here once or twice?
And I think the first obvious answer is you'd be like, well, what about all the people who didn't support George W. Bush?
But then to take it even a step further, what about the ones who did?
Are you telling me they lose all rights because they supported a political leader who wanted to go kill a bunch of innocent people?
I mean, first off, they were lied to.
They were emotional.
Look, they had just had 9-11 happen.
That's what happened in America.
We basically all admit it now.
When 9-11 happened, this country collectively lost its mind and made a whole bunch of bad decisions.
Not only bad decisions that made our country much less free, like the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA and stuff like this, but decisions that were like, we're going to go kill a bunch of people, knowing we're going to go kill a bunch of innocent people.
We're going to drop bombs on cities right now because we are super pissed off that this happened to us.
And what I said in the debate, which I'll say again is, look, let's just try to be real about this.
Let's say the Muslim world is different than us, but let's say, how would we have done since we're so much better?
How would we have done if there wasn't one 9-11?
There were 10 9-11s.
Imagine how crazy this country would have gone.
What if there were 100 9-11s?
How about 500 9-11s?
What if there was way more than that?
All I'm saying is that this is, if you're just going to say we're not going to have a conversation about what led to this, that's uninteresting.
Why are they like this?
Why are the people supporting them?
That's uninteresting.
When you dismiss that, then okay, you can come to whatever conclusion you want to.
But when you include that, then you might start to go like, oh, hey, let's try to learn a lesson, just like supposedly the official story says we did after World War II.
Yes, no, don't keep people in the most desperate, hopeless circumstances.
When you keep people in those circumstances, radicalism gains a strong foothold.
That's the conclusion you might come to if you actually start to ask those interesting questions.
You know, I remember you saying this a long time ago, Rob.
I always thought it was a really good way to say, and this was back in like, might have been in like 2017 or something like that.
But we were talking about like some radical left and right wing movements.
I think this might have been around the time of Charlottesville and around the time that social justice warriors were really going crazy on college campuses.
And one of the things you said, which is a really great point, is you were like, you can never like view this as not related to the economy.
Because as long as the economy stays strong and like people have decent jobs, people are making some money, they're living somewhat comfortably, none of these movements are ever going to take off.
Like they're never going to grip the, you know, white nationalism is never going to rise to prominence if we have a good economy.
But if you had like an economic crash and hyperinflation or something like that in this country, then look out.
Then all bets are off because you don't know what type of radical, you know, political ideology might become dominant or something like that.
I'm paraphrasing, but that was something like it.
I don't understand why we don't think those same rules apply.
And this is to speak none of Israel's plan of propping up Hamas and all of that.
But still, anyway, so this is what this is what Sam Harris comes along to offer us now.
The like absolutely shallow borderline evil thoughts, but presented as if they're some great intellectual insight.
Any final comments, Rob, and then we'll wrap this up.
This might be a stretch for me, but like I was playing around with this in my head from when he started talking, I guess, about the differentiation of the extremists of the SS.
But he seems to conclude at a point that kind of allows for, I think it's an argument for killing civilians in Gaza because there's this ideology that comes along with it.
And so it doesn't matter how or why they're radicalized.
They're all radicalized.
So we can't, it's not like Nazis that once the Nazis were gone, you didn't have to kill the German soldiers.
Whereas I guess in Gaza, since they're all radicalized, they're all fair prey.
Maybe I'm stretching his logic.
Well, it seems to seem hard.
He just indicates that it's going to be harder to separate it from the average person than even in Nazi Germany.
So he's not clear about what we're supposed to do with that information.
I always find there to be something really profoundly hypocritical about people like this who are as they have, you know, like Sam Harris has this idea of like, well, there's religious fundamentalism here, then there's irrationality, and then there's me, the rational atheist.
Meanwhile, this rational atheist has concocted an ideology that allows him to support killing babies.
I go, I don't know.
That seems about as bad as any violent religious movement I could think of.
Isn't that the thing we enjoy?
And what always seems to be the difference is that they go, well, you see, Hamas just went out face to face in a barbaric way and directly killed innocent people, whereas we do it through government policy and planes dropping bombs.
And we're not really trying to kill those people.
We just accept that it's the price of, you know, whatever.
It's the price of war.
It's the price of eliminating Hamas or something like that.
Leaving aside the fact that it's completely unfair to claim that like Israel is completely reactionary in this, right?
Like they're only fighting because of October 7th, but not also to say that Hamas is reactionary and they're attacking because of other policies that Israel has had in place, like their people living in totalitarianism.
Leaving all of that aside, there is something where, look, let's say, hypothetically, this was a domestic issue, right?
This wasn't a war and how we would morally judge these actions.
If someone like broke into your house and killed people in your house in like a gruesome way, like face to face, like just killed them all, stabbed them to death or beat them to death or whatever.
And they killed a few people in your house and they planned it out, they plotted it and they did it.
And you survive and then they run like we'd all agree, because this is where Israel say, doesn't Israel have the right to defend itself?
Everybody in this scenario would agree if you were in your house with a gun, you'd have a right to kill this person to defend yourself and your family.
Nobody questions that.
In the same way, nobody's questioning whether Israel has the right to kill Hamas when they invade Israel or even when they go back to Gaza, right?
Like no one's really arguing that.
But then let's say that person kills some people in your house and then they escape back to their house where you know their wife and five children are all there and you blow up the house.
Like let's say this happened in a domestic situation.
Okay, well, the correct answer, as we all know, is that that person would be convicted of murder in the first degree.
Let's say that person got out and survived.
That person would be convicted of murder in the first degree and you would be convicted of murder in the first degree.
Like the fact that this guy had attacked you prior would not give you license to blow up kids if you knowingly did that.
And it's not manslaughter.
It's not murder two.
It's murder one.
You knew there were kids there and you killed them.
Now, would we have somewhat of a different feeling about those two people?
Perhaps.
Okay.
Perhaps.
But it is the same crime.
It would be the same crime.
Premeditated, cold-blooded murder.
That's what both of them are.
And so, yes, you can say that we do it in a more sophisticated, more technologically advanced way, but you've still just found an ideology that is justifying murder.
And that's that.
I do.
I do want to clarify one thing that I said, which I don't often have to do on the show.
When I was saying they don't have a choice, I wasn't saying that they're okay to engage in terrorism.
I was saying that if you've decided that you want to kill innocent civilians and you're the Germans and you got the mechanics to, you know, build a gas chamber and do it as with all the efficiency of German engineers and that's your approach.
And when you want to kill innocent civilians and you're in Gaza and you don't have resources for that, then you engage in terrorism brings you to the same point.
I just want to clarify that that's what I meant by they don't have a choice.
Right, right, right.
Yes, yes.
No, that's a good, a good clarifying.
I mean, I took it that way, but yes, just better, better cover yourself than that one.