Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein critique Senator Mitch McConnell's blame of Tucker Carlson for Republican dissent over a $60 billion Ukraine aid package, arguing voters shifted toward "America First" principles due to two decades of disastrous foreign wars rather than media influence. They condemn the bill for ignoring border security and fentanyl crises while mocking Joe Biden's credibility and Donald Trump's inconsistency in supporting the aid as a "loan." The hosts also analyze Columbia University protests, praising Jewish-Muslim Seder collaborations that shatter anti-Semitism narratives while condemning harmful chants like "death to America," ultimately urging activists to focus on the actual war rather than trivial distractions or radical ideologies. [Automatically generated summary]
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Spicy Ron Paul Convention Energy00:03:44
Fill her up.
You are listening to the gas digital move.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, guys?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
How you feeling today, brother?
Pretty good.
I got all my, or at least first half of Porch Tour dates up.
It was a real battle to do, and I feel good about having it all done.
Oh, that's nice.
Very exciting.
I'm sure people are going to have a blast once again this year.
Porch tour is always bigger than it was the previous year.
If you want to come out to the Rob's summer porch tour, go to robbythefire.com.
So evidently those ticket links are up.
And of course, me and Rob are getting ready tomorrow to head out to St. Louis.
There might still be time to grab tickets when you hear this.
Looking forward to being back there.
And then, of course, Tacoma and Spoken in Washington and a bunch more stuff coming up.
ComicdaveSmith.com.
Oh, I should make sure you're aware, May 23rd, we're doing a live stand-up show and a live part of the problem podcast at Penn Social in Washington, D.C.
And then, of course, that's leading up to the Libertarian Party National Convention.
I will be speaking at the convention.
Looking forward to seeing a lot of you guys out there.
That's always a good time.
And I'm not a delegate this year, but so I get to just have fun, which will be nice.
I mean, the last one in Reno, the whole thing was a blast.
There was certainly an energy to it.
The shows that we did was fun.
But one of the things that I particularly enjoyed was the night, I guess you and Ron Paul spoke, if I remember correctly.
And I usually, when we're at those type things, have to perform.
And this night, I was 100% off and I was just roaming the outskirts.
Everyone was like handing me a drink, Vape Pens, by the middle of Ron Paul's speech.
I just was like, I got to go.
We were just fucking hammered for Ron Paul's speech.
So out of it, but it was great.
Yeah, I was, I was like, that was one of the things I was genuinely nervous for.
Like, I don't get that nervous for too many of these things anymore.
I'm just very used to them.
But it was great to be like speaking and then introducing Ron Paul was just such a cool moment that it was kind of surreal to get to do that.
And there's a bunch of big speakers, really big speakers coming this year.
It's going to be an interesting, it's going to be an interesting show.
I'll just say this.
You want to come to the Libertarian Party convention this year.
It's going to be one for the ages.
So I'm excited about all of that.
And as always, I'm excited to do a podcast with you, Rob, because there's some very interesting stuff that's happened that we haven't talked about yet on the show.
And then there's some new stuff that just came out.
I did, by the way, I also should mention up top, I did Piers Morgan's show again this week.
And I just finished, literally just finished before I jumped on this, recording with Kyle Kalinsky and Crystal Ball on their podcast.
And I really enjoyed the conversation.
I thought it was great.
So I hope you guys check that out.
Any spicy moments with Pierce?
Yeah, it wasn't a particularly spicy episode.
Fighting Another War Narrative00:15:32
No.
But there was like, I thought there were some good conversations and stuff, but it wasn't, it was more less like fiery and debatey than that show typically is.
Although that's, and I think over the last week, it's been quite a spectacle of, anyway, whatever.
But no, I wasn't, it wasn't as fiery as the last time I was on, but it was, it was good.
I actually enjoyed it more than my previous my, I enjoyed it more than the first like remote appearance that I did on the show.
Um, okay.
So this, uh, I wanted to lead the show with a comment that was made.
There were, uh, Mitch McConnell in a press conference said a couple very interesting things that I wanted to respond to, but this was, um, of course, on the heels of passing just monstrosity of a bill that gave an additional, I think, this was it, 60 billion to Ukraine.
There was also all types of other horrible things in there.
And of course, it was passed with bipartisan support because all the worst things are.
This was, you know, the bill that the House was a few days ago cheering and waving Ukrainian flags for when the new speaker, Mike Johnson, betrayed the Republicans who appointed him as speaker.
The majority of the Republicans voted against the aid package.
He turned and joined the Democrats and voted for it.
So we just spent tens of billions of dollars more to Ukraine.
And in exchange for that, he got nothing on the border.
Just such typical Republican governance.
You know what I mean?
They just totally betray their voters and get nothing in return for it because they don't actually stand for what they claim to stand for.
Anyway, let's go to Mitch McConnell here and his talk.
He's kind of talking about the dynamic that, you know, none of his voters actually support his policies.
And why is that?
Well, let's listen.
I think the demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who, in my opinion, ended up where he should have been all along, which was interviewing Vladimir Putin.
And so he had an enormous audience, which convinced a lot of rank-and-file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.
So there you have it.
That's what happened, that dastardly Tucker Carlson.
It was all going according to plan.
If it wasn't for that meddling Tucker Carlson, this is, I just thought was an amazing moment.
Of course, this is the way that establishment politicians look at things.
And there's no one more established than no one who's more establishment than the hack Mitch McConnell.
This is how they look at things.
And of course, their tired old playbook of just, yeah, and that's why you ended up interviewing Vladimir Putin like with a like wink and a nod that Tucker Carlson is actually loyal to a foreign government or something like that, because he interviewed someone over there.
But isn't it just, I don't know how to describe this.
It's, it's the same thing they always did with Donald Trump.
And I think one of the things that people have been waking up to over the last three years is that, you know, Joe Biden basically ran on a return to normalcy.
You know, like, okay, this, these Trump years have been crazy.
Let's go back to being America, you know, and just like Joe Biden, you know, the guy who's been in there since the 80s.
So like, come on, we'll just go.
And there was always this treatment from the corporate media as if the problem was Donald Trump.
In other words, that Donald Trump was the cause of the state of this country rather than a symptom of it.
And I think that almost immediately, there was like this split in this country.
And I think that this is in large part why like we've been good on this show is because we fell into the split that recognized that Trump was a result of what was happening in the country rather than Trump had caused what happened in this country.
The people who felt that Trump had caused it all basically were like, if we can just get rid of Donald Trump, then all these problems go away.
And I think me and you always recognize that, no, the reason why Donald Trump got elected in the first place was because there's all these problems.
And so you get rid of him.
We still have all the problems and nothing's solved.
And I do think there's a decent, I think this is part of the reason why Joe Biden was ahead in the polls in 2020 at this point and why Donald Trump's ahead in the polls in 2024, because that card has been destroyed.
You can't play it again.
You can't say if Trump was the problem and Trump going away would solve all of this.
It's like, no, the last three years under Joe Biden have been just as crazy, maybe crazier than all of the, you know, maybe 2020 wins.
But in general, since Donald Trump's been in the White House, no, we didn't go back to being a normal country and we didn't go back to being the United States of America of the 1990s after he left.
And so it was this fundamental mistake that they assigned the cause as being Donald Trump.
And that is exactly the same thing as what he's doing here with Tucker Carlson.
So in other words, oh, you know, the reason why, the reason why my voters don't want to support Ukraine in this war is because Tucker Carlson demonized Ukraine.
Well, you'd have to ask yourself, but like, maybe the reason why Tucker Carlson is the number one cable news host for all these years was because he would tell the truth.
And that, you know what I mean?
Like it's, look, if you just zoom out a little bit, why is it that the Republican Party turned from being neocon, I should say the Republican voters.
Why do the Republican voters turn from supporting neoconservatives to supporting America firsters?
We don't keep losing.
Huh?
Because they kept losing.
We don't like being losers.
They kept losing all these wars.
It sucks.
Exactly.
Right.
So it, well, look, and just to make this clear, I mean, you just tell me, right?
Because to ask this question answers the question immediately.
But if you were trying to run for office as a Republican, what would be a stronger message that more voters are going to get on board with right now is if you got up there and you said, I am fully committed to funding Ukraine to the end, to funding Israel to the end.
I'm fully committed to, you know, being militarily aggressive with Iran.
We got to do it.
Or if you got up there and said, I am America first.
I want to stop all of this foreign aid.
I want to stop sending our monies to other countries.
We have enough problems here.
We got to secure our border.
We got to take care of the, you know what I mean?
Everyone knows voters prefer that second message.
So this huge shift happened in the Republican Party.
And it's very easy to say, well, that's because Donald Trump said America first.
But that doesn't really make any sense because you're not answering.
Well, why was that a popular message?
Can't just say, oh, Donald Trump poisoned everyone's mind to want to secure the border.
And if he hadn't said that, no one ever would have thought about it.
It's like, no, a bunch of people wanted to secure the border.
And then Donald Trump said, let's do that.
And they said, we're with that guy.
Same with Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson didn't like hypnotize a bunch of right-wingers into believing something.
Tucker Carlson told the truth.
And a lot of people were like, yes, exactly.
That guy's right.
And you kind of nailed it right there, Rob.
The answer, the answer for why Republican voters rejected neoconservatism in favor of America firsters was because of the 20 years of disastrous catastrophic terror wars.
Every last one of them a failure, as you put it.
I'm tired of losing.
And these, you know, Republican voters, for the most part, were, first off, they were much more likely to have had family members involved in these conflicts, and they were much more likely to have supported them at the beginning.
But even they could see after a while, you know, in Iraq and Afghanistan, you had these 20-year-long wars that resulted in catastrophic failure.
And of course, in Libya and Syria and Yemen and Somalia and all of that, not one of them worked out.
And what did we get for it?
There's obviously hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of these wars.
The country has bankrupted itself, spent trillions of dollars on them.
And there's, you know, our bravest young men have been blowing their brains out by the tens of thousands.
Also, the worst political, cultural, and racial divides in my lifetime.
That's what we've gotten.
So why is it that there's a growing sediment for non-interventionism?
Well, you see, it's that Tucker Carlson.
Just think about those.
Compare my answer to his.
Which one of these is engaging in reality?
That they always feel like, but their mindset is always that like, God damn it, if we could just not have that Tucker being able to tell the truth, we could keep getting away with this.
But that's utter nonsense.
And so, and anyway, I just, I thought it was like an amazing moment to hear the most powerful Republican senator talking about how he's doing something that his voters don't want.
But he's going to explain that the real villain here is this Tucker Carlson character, you see.
And he's the one out there poisoning my voters' minds to not support the policy I support.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
And then, and isn't it interesting too, how they have no, for supposedly like we're a democracy or whatever, that there's no, it's not as if he's going, oh, this guy poisoned my voters' mind and now I got to vote against this Ukraine, the Ukraine funding because my voters don't want me to and I'm their representative.
No, he's going, no, I mean, I'm going to do it anyway.
Like, I don't care if they want it or not.
I'm still going to do it.
But yeah, man, screw this Tucker Carlson guy.
Am I right?
He just loves Vladimir Putin so much.
Isn't that just amazing?
Doesn't that just kind of say it all?
It's like, yeah, no, this guy, like, even if he's right, he's like, this guy poisoned my voters to not want war.
So, you know, we're going to fund it anyway.
Because screw them, screw my voters, screw Tucker Carlson.
We're obviously still going to fund this war.
I mean, that's the priority here.
Just unbelievable.
I guess he's on the way out.
So he doesn't have to worry about what his voters actually want right now.
Yeah.
Well, that's for sure.
And sorry, go ahead.
At this point, our war, it's like watching a boxer take five losses.
And you're like, dude, you can go make your money doing radio at this point.
People like you, you got other career options.
Hang it up.
That's what the U.S. is.
You know, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, just put it up L's and it's like, let's just, America first.
Let's hang out here and let's make money.
Yeah.
And while things get tangibly worse for our country, you know, it's not like just like we're taking L's, but it's like, you know, especially from like a conservative point of view where you're like, we fight all of these wars.
They're nothing but disasters.
And like, now they're trying to convince my boy he's a girl.
And now you're telling me, okay, well, let's go fight another war.
Get the hell out of here.
And there are wars that like so it's so obvious.
Like, look, the war in Afghanistan, you know, obviously to people like me and you who pay attention to this, you could see that like, oh, like we never needed to have a regime change war against the Taliban.
You know what I mean?
Like the Taliban were as guilty as a landlord who rented an apartment to a murderer.
You know what I mean?
And like if someone like murdered someone and you were like, they came from that apartment building and then you were like, I want to speak to the guy who owns the apartment building.
You know, and then you go, you know what?
We got to kill that guy and take this apartment building from him.
It's like, it made no sense.
There was no reason to have to do that.
But you could see where like that, you know, to your Fox News watching uncle in the year 2001, you'd just be like, these attacks came out of Afghanistan.
So we got to go to war with Afghanistan.
And there could be like a reasonable way you could sell that to him.
The war in Iraq, they made up a bunch of lies that would make it seem like maybe we have to go fight a war in Iraq if you bought the lies.
If you believed that Saddam Hussein was involved with the terrorists planning 9-11 and you believe he had secret nuclear weapons and that he has a relationship with these terrorists and he could give the weapons to them and they could launch nuclear weapons here.
Like, dude, forget 9-11.
We could be looking at being nuked.
Selling a False War Story00:08:09
Well, okay.
I mean, then I guess if that's true, maybe we do got to go fight a war here.
But today, with the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, they're not even attempting.
Well, I guess they are attempting, but there's just, there's just no way to sell that this is actually a war that America has to fight.
Also, if you're looking to protect the country, what's a bigger danger to Americans right now, terrorism or fentanyl?
And if on top of that, by the numbers, you want to say that it's terrorism, how many of the people involved in 9-11 came across our southern border or were in this country illegally.
And so if you were actually concerned for the safety of the country from invasion or terrorism, wouldn't the biggest or most effective preventative measure actually be building the border and policing foreign foreigners illegally remaining in our country?
Yeah, I mean, it's impossible to make the argument that if you care about this country, you would care more about what's going on in Ukraine than what's going on at our southern border.
Or like you said, how many people are overdosing from fentanyl or a litany of other issues that are plaguing this country right now.
But my point, look, my point is just that the two, like the selling point, like if you just look at this as a salesman, right?
Like you've got to sell this war to your Fox News watching uncle or father or whatever.
The sale of we were attacked from Afghanistan, so we have to attack Afghanistan.
You're like, oh, okay, I could sell that to my Fox News watch and uncle.
The sale of Saddam Hussein has a secret nuclear program and he was involved in al-Qaeda's plotting of 9-11.
I could sell that to my Fox News watch and uncle.
The sale of if Vladimir Putin successfully takes Ukraine, then he'll take Poland and then he'll take Germany and then he'll take France and then he'll take the UK and then he's going to sail across the Atlantic Ocean and attack the United States of America.
It's like, you'd look at that on paper and be like, I can't sell this.
Like, I just, there's no way.
And the, the, you know, Netanyahu recently said, he said, this isn't just Israel's war.
If Hamas is successful, Europe is next and then America.
And like to sell Americans that Hamas is going to like, what, conquer Europe and then conquer America?
There's just no sell.
My point is that these are both clearly wars of choice, right?
Like these are wars that America is choosing to back, but certainly we don't have to.
We could just not, right?
Like we could just not do that.
We don't have to.
And so it's just that in the midst of all of this, even after all of these disastrous wars, it's not even like after losing and losing and losing and losing, they're saying we have to do another one.
They're saying after losing and losing and losing and losing, we'd like to do another one.
Let's do this one.
We don't, that we don't have to do, but let's do it.
You know, and it's just that this is why people are turning against it.
And sure, I'm not downplaying, by the way, that Tucker is a tremendously influential person and he's probably the most influential person on right-wingers in America today.
But the idea that this like totally would have been sold if it wasn't for him is ridiculous.
And also like, look, I'm sure Tucker Carlson has persuaded some people to not support the next war, but it's also the fact that he was calling out the lies over all these wars that made him the number one guy, right?
Like both of these things are happening at the same time.
It's not just one or the other.
And so anyway, either way, any way you look at it, Mitch McConnell's entire, you know, comment just falls apart.
And it's, it's actually, you know, sometimes you wonder, you know, because obviously these people aren't honest.
And so you just kind of wonder like what do you even actually believe this?
Do you believe any of this bullshit?
Or is maybe this just what you feel like you got to say?
Did you, did you see, by the way, Robin?
I'll come back in a second to Mitch McConnell's other comment.
But did you see the Joe Biden story that he told that like kicked off a minor international incident when he said that his, what was it, his uncle or someone like that was.
Oh, yeah, got crash landed and had to survive cannibals or something.
No, he said they, he said he crashed and yeah, they never found the body because he was eaten by a cannibal.
And then, yeah, it just came out.
The story is just completely made up.
Just completely made up.
And, you know, Joe Biden obviously is, you know, senile at this point, but this isn't like a new Joe Biden thing.
Like, have you ever seen the clip of him back in the 80s where he's just a I was top in my class and then I was the top of that class and then I graduated and they said, you're too good for this institution.
I graduated with multiple degrees and blah, blah, blah.
And he's like so assertive.
He's saying all this thing.
And it's just like, oh, none of this is true.
Literally, he's just making it all up.
So this is a guy who back before he was senile would just make up stories.
Like this, it's really crazy because you kind of can't imagine being a person like that.
Like, can you imagine ever like just like sitting around?
Like, let's just say me and you were just like, you know, grabbing a beer or something like that before a show.
And you just started going to me.
You were like, dude, this one time when I was in college, like blah, And just telling me a story.
And you're just making it up.
Like none of this happened.
Not even like you told a story and exaggerated a little bit, but like literally you're just making up a story.
It'd be like, you kind of just can't imagine doing that.
Like what?
But that's like what politicians do.
They just are totally acting, you know?
And there's lots of examples of his corn pop story.
Like all these things are just, this never happened.
None of this ever happened.
And you do wonder with Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell, I almost think in kind of a similar way because he's clearly diminished.
You know, I don't know if he's quite as senile as Biden is, but he's not like in his prime.
But it's like, you wonder with, say, Joe Biden, for example, after all of these years of bullshitting, like, does he even know anymore?
You know what I mean?
You know how like you've said, like, I've seen this in other people before, where they'll like, they'll lie.
And I think they get to a point where they don't even remember that they were lying.
You know what I mean?
Like, it just all, there's some, what's the saying?
It's like, if you're honest, you don't need a good memory or something like that.
Cause like when you lie, you got to remember all the details to your lie.
But, you know, when you're like, you know, like, have you ever caught someone lying before because their story changed?
And you're like, oh, wait, no, no, no, no, hold on.
But that's not, that wasn't even the lie.
That's not even the same lie that you told me before.
It's kind of like that.
And I do just wonder that like, like at this point, Joe Biden might actually believe that this is real.
He may have just been telling this story for years.
And at this point, he can't fucking remember what really happened versus his memory of him telling the story.
And like, anyway, I just, I wonder where Mitch McConnell's at.
It's like, do you really think like that's why the entire, or I shouldn't say entire, but that's why such a huge percentage of the Republican voting base turned on the warfare state?
You think it's just because Tucker Carlson criticized them?
Really?
And I don't know.
I don't know what the answer is.
Like he might actually believe that.
He might have convinced himself of this bullshit.
Compromising to Corporate Wokeism00:15:54
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Let's get back into the show.
Anyway, there was one other very interesting moment from this press conference.
Let's play the other clip.
First, it was an effort to make law, which requires you to deal with Democrats.
And then a number of our members thought it wasn't good enough.
And then our nominee for president didn't seem to want us to do anything at all.
That took months to work our way through it.
So we ended up doing the supplemental that was originally proposed, which dealt with not all problems.
It didn't solve the border problem, but certainly addressed the growing threats at the moment.
All right.
So here, Mitch McConnell is defending why he got nothing for the $95 billion that they're giving away.
It's $95 billion between Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
So this is him defending why he didn't get anything done on immigration, because of course, the obvious question from like, like, I think there'd be a lot of Republican voters who, if Republicans were to make the compromise that, look, hey, Democrats, you really want to fund all these wars, and we really want this secure border.
So if you give us border security, we'll give you some funding for these wars.
There might be a decent amount of Republicans who would go, all right, fine.
At least we got something out of it.
And the big criticism here is that they got nothing, absolutely nothing.
And so who's he blaming for this?
Other Republicans, because they had the nerve to say, oh, this border bill is terrible.
This isn't actually what we want.
And it was terrible.
It was awful.
And he seems to be alluding there to the Democratic talking point that it's really Trump's fault, you know, that basically Donald Trump convinced these other Republicans not to.
So what you have from Mitch McConnell here is while he is completely selling out all of his voters, he's blaming the, he's blaming Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, the most popular figures on right-wing America.
And he's blaming the Republicans who actually fought for what the voters want, who are actually like, no, we just want border security.
We don't want all this garbage.
If you remember, Rob, you were talking about the details of the border bill and how terrible it was.
So anyway, that's who Mitch McConnell is going after here.
Yeah, it does, it does seem like what you were saying, just like on the way out, I don't give a shit anymore.
I think we're watching old school politics in action, which is these people who are they like to say we're in the middle.
We're the ones that like to compromise, but it's really because they most represent the deep state.
And so those are the issues that both sides agree most on.
And I think there are probably few politicians left who can advocate this perspective like him because he's leaving.
There's reasons why some of these old school people can't still be in politics.
And aside from the fact that he freezes like a lizard every once in a while, it would appear that these are things that might cost him the next election if he was sticking around.
Right, right.
Well, it should be noted.
I mean, it's, I guess, number one, my takeaway from this is just, you know, a lot of times people will ask me why, you know, like, why, why are you in the Libertarian Party?
You know, because obviously, like, you know, the, you know, all this stuff you talk about on your show is all about like what, you know, how awful the kind of democratic establishment is and how crazy the progressive establishment, you know, like threat is to the country.
And they'll be like, I know the Republicans aren't perfect, but like, you know, we got to defeat Joe Biden or whatever.
And it's like, dude, like, this is, this is so much of what keeps me out of ever wanting anything to do with the Republicans.
It's just look at that.
Like, they're just so awful.
They're so goddamn awful.
It's like they're just there to lose.
They're just there to compromise on everything.
And I guess it's not even losing because they are, they're on the same side as the progressive establishment.
It's the same thing.
And, you know, okay, there's some decent members, but like, look at the speaker of the house in the most powerful center are just so awful.
And then on top of that, I don't know if you saw this, Rob, but Donald Trump came out and supported the bill and said Mike Johnson did a great job and said it's great.
And you know why he supported it?
Because they framed, I don't know if you saw this, but they framed the Ukraine aid as a loan.
And so Donald Trump was like, yeah, that's great.
This time it's a loan.
They've given us enough gifts.
Now it's a loan.
And he went on again about how the other European countries need to contribute more to Ukraine.
I just like, okay, so first of all, on the fact that it's a loan and not a gift, it's they call it a loan with no enforcement mechanism or no date that the money's due back by and no interest.
So first of all, an interest-free loan is by definition a gift.
It's a gift to just give someone money that they have to pay back with no interest, but they don't even have to pay it back.
It's just another gift.
But they changed one word and that was good enough to trick Donald Trump.
That's who we've got as our guy who's going to save the republic.
There's a guy who will just on a dime flip.
And then the other thing, and Donald Trump's always done this.
And dude, he does it all the time because he's so fucking slippery and he's just such an ignoramus and just doesn't like, doesn't really know anything or have any principles.
So he always plays every side of an issue.
So he's always been saying, we, all we should be doing is negotiating a peace.
I want the war to end.
I want to, you know what I mean?
Like I want the war to end and I'll negotiate an end to the war.
But then he also says out of the other side of his mouth that the other European countries should be paying more.
And you're kind of like, well, which one is it here, sir?
Are you trying to just fund the continuation of this war, but you want less American dollars and more European dollars going to do it?
Or are you trying to end the thing?
And of course, as always with Donald Trump, when he's speaking out of both sides of his mouth, he'll ultimately land on the wrong answer.
So now Donald Trump has endorsed sending this money to Ukraine.
And of course, he supports sending the money to Israel.
And of course, he supports sending the money to Taiwan because he's got to be the biggest China hawk and the biggest Israel, you know, just cum guzzler.
So fucking, that's, that's who we've got.
That's Donald Trump.
And then it's like, and then people go like, well, why can't you just get behind Trump?
It's like, cause fuck him.
That's why.
Because he's just so awful on all of these things.
And like, I just, I just can't take the goddamn excuses that his supporters make for him anymore.
It's just like too much.
Like, come on.
The one thing that he was like rhetorically good on through this campaign and he just fucking did what he always does.
And they're always, all the Trumpsters are always like, oh, no, but this time, this time when he gets in there, it's going to be different.
It's like, how many times does he need to prove to you that it's not?
Isn't this just proof of that?
Like, no, it's not going to be different this time when he gets in there.
He's going to once again compromise or get tricked.
And somehow Trump supporters will use that as if it's that gets him off the hook.
Like he was lied to.
He was tricked.
Okay.
Well, how many times can you get tricked before you're like, okay, then you can't do the job?
This is pretty easy to not get tricked on.
Stop supporting foreign wars that we don't need to be involved in.
Politically, unless you're trying to court some of the deep state donors or signal to the deep state that you're willing to play ball, I'm just talking purely politically.
It would seem a lot easier to condemn this and go, how dare they pass this without increasing actual border security?
Wasn't the TikTok part also wrapped into this?
Or how dare they work in controls for censoring the internet?
How dare us send more money to Ukraine and what's clearly getting civilians killed?
It's kind of easy when you're on the outside, it's easy just to go, hey, what they're doing is not working and it's bad and fix it, I'll fix it and not actually say what you're going to do.
But this kind of, you know, makes him complicit in terms of how the current administration is handling some of these problems by supporting a bill that I'm surprised Mike Johnson was able to get passed.
I'm surprised that they managed to get the support for more Ukraine money.
It seemed like we were coming to the end of that going into the election season as the war is so unpopular.
But if you on the outside go, yeah, we should have gotten this next round of funding to the Ukraine.
How do you, I mean, how do you condemn it?
How do you say that this was a mistake?
How do you say that this was a waste of money?
And it's right.
And like, and you're like counterfactual there, like it's so easy to make this point that it's like, look, nobody, nobody believes at this point that this 60 billion is going to make the difference for Ukraine and that somehow they're going to snatch victory, you know, like, you know, out of the jaws of defeat here or something like that.
No one believes that.
This is clearly, and this is what's so insane about it, right?
What this objectively is just Joe Biden trying to save face until the election.
He doesn't want the, this would be terrible timing right now for Joe Biden to have to admit.
And as you've pointed out on the show before, Rob, like they'll have their own justification when this whole thing ends and they'll say, oh, if we hadn't have funded this war, then he would have taken Poland or something like that.
But it's going to be pretty obvious for a lot of people to see that all we did, like if the war just ended today and Zelensky had to surrender, that all we did was prolong this thing and get more people killed and waste a whole bunch of money at a time when Americans were hurting.
And so Joe Biden doesn't want that.
He wants to keep this going so he doesn't have to admit that until after the election.
And the Republicans are helping him.
They're helping him with a campaign stunt, essentially.
And spending $60 billion on a campaign stunt.
And that's that.
You know, there's just, they're in it with him.
And so how is Donald Trump not at least able to call this out for what it is?
And it's like, no, this is disgusting.
You're prolonging a war so that it doesn't hurt your reelection prospects.
You can't even put that sentence together.
It's like, come on, man.
It's just, I don't know.
It's just pathetic.
All right.
Let's let's let's switch gears here a little bit because I wanted to talk about the, I don't think we've really talked about this much since it's blown up as a national story over the last week, but there's the protests.
The biggest one or the one that's been in the news the most probably is the one in Colombia.
But there's this has been a big story.
I guess they shut the school down and it all they all went virtual.
And then it was reported that they were shutting down for the rest of the semester and going virtual.
But then I've seen reports that that's not actually right.
And they're considering whether they're going to do that or not.
But there's been a lot of controversy over these protests.
And I was just talking about this with Crystal Ball and Kyle Kalinsky.
It was kind of interesting to talk about it with two lefties.
And they were more open to my kind of like critiques of the left than I thought.
Or actually, I shouldn't say more than I thought because they kind of, you know, like they're not, they're more like the type of left wingers who do kind of see how like how much like big corporate America uses wokeism as an excuse to never really give the left any of what they actually want.
But anyway, I don't know.
Have you, have you read about these, these protests at all, Rob?
Do you have any feeling on it?
I stand against these kids illegally occupying college campuses.
And I think we should probably violently remove them because what rights do they have to occupy these places?
That's a pretty good angle on it.
I like that.
It is, you know, I have my criticisms of these protesters.
And I think that, you know, as I've stated before, it seems that in terms of the atmosphere in college, in universities and colleges since October 7th and with this whole Israeli assault on Gaza, that it seems like wokeism, you know, if you think about wokeism almost as like a cancer, it has spread, you know, almost everywhere.
You know, it's infiltrated.
I mean, we even had to, we had to launch like a whole campaign to get it out of the Libertarian Party because wokeism had even infiltrated the Libertarian Party.
And we were able to give it some heavy chemo and get all that stuff out of there.
But it's infiltrated the Republican Party, obviously the entire corporate media and Hollywood and all these different areas.
But the universities are like ground zero.
You know, this is like the original infestation of woke thinking.
And So when you see these, the protests and the counter protests and the criticism of the protests, it's kind of like the only weapon that they have is wokeism.
Media Criticism of Hateful Protests00:03:09
And each side is trying to out woke the other side.
So you'll see the people, if you listen to what the people in the protests are saying, it's just all types of woke shit.
And then if you listen to what the critics of the protest are saying, they're saying like, you're making the Jewish students feel unsafe.
And, you know, your chant is a threat to my safety and all of this type of stuff.
And it's like, oh, they're all just using the same language or whatever.
I will say probably my biggest, my biggest takeaway on the coverage of these, these protests is that while I would probably have very little in common with the people protesting there, I do, in the broadest sense, agree that what Israel's doing to Gaza is wrong, right?
And should stop and we should stop funding it.
But if I'm going to be, if we're going to be honest about what's really going on here with these protests, it's there have been, it seems, isolated instances of violence and like someone got punched or something like that.
And, you know, I think that should, those people should be prosecuted if you assault someone.
But it's not as if we're not talking about something like, say, the summer of 2020, right?
It's not as if there are these big protests and then every single night they're devolving into like looting and billions of dollars in property damage and, you know, like assaults and murders and all these things.
That's not what's happening.
And when that did happen, what did the police do?
They stood down and let it happen.
But now they're talking about cracking down on these protests.
And the real, like, the real criticism of these protests seems to be about the phrases that they're hollering.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's not as if there's really, you're really pointing to something like, oh my God, look at they just, they just destroyed some mom and pop store and beat up the woman who was behind the counter.
Like that's not what's going on here.
That is what was going on in 2020.
And when that was happening, the entire media was applauding the protests and the cops were standing down as the violent mobs were doing that.
Yet here, you have none of that.
And the entire media is criticizing them for being so hateful.
And the cops are coming to try to like squash it.
It's hard to not see that.
And the other thing is that I've seen an enormous shift in the framing from the corporate media as if the main story here is what's going on at Columbia rather than the main story being what's going on in Gaza.
And sorry, whatever some dumb left-wingers are saying on college campuses just isn't the story here.
The story is what's going on to the 2 million people in Gaza, if that makes sense.
Ignoring Gaza for Campus Drama00:03:04
I'll take a little bit of the other side on this one.
Sure.
I would compare this, though, to the reaction to what took place in Charlottesville.
And when there was a very small amount of people with, I guess, hateful ideas towards minorities in this country, we saw the way that the media handled that and wanted to say that there was a massive panic of white nationalism coming from Trump.
So we have seen when there's just, you know, nonviolent protests that are, I guess, somewhat hateful in the way that the media can paint a picture of absolute, you know, growing hate.
So I don't think, I don't think they're treating those protests quite.
Oh, no.
Oh, I don't really think you're disagreeing.
I don't really think I would disagree with that at all.
No, I mean, it's very clear that it doesn't suit their narrative to go that hard on these guys.
You know what I mean?
It totally suited their narrative to go look what Donald Trump's presidency has resulted in.
We're now basically a country full of Nazis, and that's why they played that up so much.
It does seem, though, like they are at least using the idea that there's anti-Semitism all around to kind of make a story about that.
Yeah, I agree.
They are a little bit, they're a little twisted in pretzels here because they don't exactly know how to handle this.
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College kids don't protest all the time.
Fume Promo and College Protests00:05:31
What do you think it is about this news story that gets the kids to be out on the lawn refusing to go to classes and make a big stink?
Well, you know, it's funny.
I was literally just talking about this with Kyle and Crystal.
And I was almost like kind of asking the question too.
Like I was like, why exactly is the anti-war left back right now?
And I don't know.
Like I'm not in these kids' head, but like they basically have been gone for eight years under Obama and then four years under Donald Trump.
And all of a sudden they're back now.
And I'm kind of like, why is that?
And what I was suggesting was that it's basically that they haven't shed any of this woke insanity and that this is an extension of their worldview.
And essentially here, Israel is the straight white man and the Palestinians are the oppressed minority.
And so they're in their mind sticking out.
And this is why you see things like, you know, the LGBTQ for Palestinians, even though it's like those people probably wouldn't be too comfortable in that part of the world, but they're still seeing themselves as an extension of that.
What Crystal said, she kind of granted that there's something to that.
But then what she said, which I think is a fair is a plausible explanation also, is that she was just like, she was like, yeah, but you know, the images have just been so much worse out of this one than anywhere we've ever seen.
And that's not to say that like.
Right.
The problem with that, though, is somewhat also reactionary to, I mean, in part Twitter, but also news coverage.
Like, so for example, you know, if I, if I go to NPR or even Google News, I might see stories about famine in Gaza and I'll see stories about, you know, civilians being crushed or otherwise.
I don't know that we've seen that kind of coverage of Ukraine.
And certainly when there was a situation in Yemen, images of starving kids was few and far between.
Well, there were, there were images and I did see some, but it was, first of all, you kind of had to go looking for them.
And second of all, it wasn't just like today where you're just being inundated with it.
Like if you're on social media, you're just, it's like every day I see a new video of some baby suffocating to death, you know?
And so I do think there is something about that that brought it out.
Now, of course, the pro-Israel perspective is that the answer is that there's just everybody just really hates the Jews.
And as soon as they have an opportunity to be against the Jews, they snap into action.
I just have a really hard time believing that that's what's motivating young woke college kids.
I just have a really tough time.
In their worldview, the worst thing you can be called is a Nazi.
They are not trying to pride themselves on like, we hate the Jews so much.
I just have a very tough time accepting that that's that's true.
Look, that being said, there have certainly been a bunch of protests where what they're chanting is pretty awful and stupid and totally counterproductive, chanting death to America or chanting, you know, like pro-Hamas type shit.
And I've seen this at several protests.
And it's not like one or two people chanting it.
It's like the majority of the protests are chanting it.
That's pretty awful and just totally counterproductive.
There's also, you know, there's also some of these chants and me and Kyle were talking about this a bit, but there's some of these chants where it's like anti-FADA and from the river to the sea and things like this.
That one just rhymes.
He can't fall in that one.
Yeah.
Well, I just, I, I, to be honest, I just, I don't know.
I don't know like what's in that 20-year-old's mind.
Like, what do you mean by that exactly?
You know what I mean?
Like, are you, are you simply saying that?
Because there's lots of people who will at least argue that what they mean by from the river to the sea is that from the river to the sea, nobody's occupied.
Everybody has their freedom or whatever.
But then there's also like when Hamas uses that phrase, they mean something a bit different than that.
So I, you know, that's the kind of a question that I find interesting that I don't really have the answer to.
I will say that I saw just earlier today that they had a seder in the middle of one of these protests up at Columbia where they had like a bunch of Jewish students and Muslims.
It was like the Jews for peace group or something, a group of Jewish people who are also against the war.
And they were performing like a traditional seder with a bunch of Muslims and a bunch of Jews.
And I do got to say, when I saw that, it's just like, yes, guys, that's the way to do it.
Like if you want to protest like this and actually be effective and actually shatter the narrative that you're all out here because you really hate Jews, that is a pretty wise strategic move.
You know what I mean?
And it's also just kind of nice.
Like, okay, yeah, it's like, this isn't a thing about having any type of like religious or racial hatred.
You suffer through that bullshit too.
Yeah.
Now, listen.
As a sign of solidarity, Muslims sat through a seder.
Nothing about it seems fun.
Look, just going.
Now, I'm an old man now.
I'm in my 40s.
So the idea of going to a protest just sounds terrible.
Maybe, you know, in your 20s.
I'll go to that protest.
Prison Guards Beating Suicide Attempter00:03:57
All right.
Yeah.
Those ones might be a little more fun.
But even, I don't know, I just can't imagine like even if I ever went to like I went to a couple political protests in my day, but it was always just kind of like, I didn't like go and march with them or nothing.
I like, I was like, oh, saw it.
Like, oh, look, in Union Square, they're having an anti-war protest.
And I'd walk over and like talk to a couple people there and then leave.
I never stayed for more than 15 minutes or something like that.
And I went to one when I early in my libertarian days, it was around the time of Occupy Wall Street.
So I guess I'd been a libertarian for a few years already.
But Ted Alexandro, who's a really hilarious comedian and a great guy.
I loved him.
I actually just was just texting with him the other day for the first time in a long time.
Anyway, great guy.
And he was very like involved in the Occupy protests.
And he was, he invited me to this Khalif Browder, I believe was the kid's name.
It was a protest about him.
I don't know if you remember this kid's story, but it was, oh my God, it was so horrific.
It was this kid, basically he got, he got arrested for stealing a kid's backpack or something like that.
And it seemed very, from the beginning, it seemed very dubious, the charge.
Like he did, he was like, no, I didn't do that.
And I don't remember the details of the case, but there was like, there was a lot of evidence that it was like, oh, he didn't even actually do this.
And they sent him to Rikers Island to await trial.
And the prosecutors kept requesting an extent, an extension because they had to get things ready for their case.
And they were like trying to locate a witness or something like that.
And anyway, they ended up keeping him in Rikers for years.
And the kid, Rikers, for people who don't know, is like a notoriously brutal prison.
And I guess he, they kept like insisting that he cop a plea deal and he refused because he was like, no, like I'm innocent.
I'm not copying a plea to this.
Like I'm in, and he refused to join a gang.
And so basically what happened was because he refused to cop a plea and he was determined to make the criminal justice system look bad and clear his name.
Like basically he had the prison guards, he made enemies out of the prison guards.
And then because he refused to join a gang, he made enemies out of all of the gangs and had no protection.
So the kids just like, there's videotapes of it and stuff.
He was getting the shit beaten out of him regularly, the all types of like torture while he's away.
A guy who's never been convicted of anything.
And he tried to kill himself multiple times.
Like he lost his mind in there.
And he tried to kill himself multiple times.
And there's even, there's one video of where the guards like, I can't remember exactly, but it was like he tried to hang himself with a sheet and they just let him hang there for a while and then cut it down and then beat the shit out of him.
Like you just can't imagine a more like tortured existence than trying to kill yourself and people won't let you kill yourself and then just beating the shit out of you, like insisting that you stay alive and then beating the shit out of you.
And then at the end of it, at the end of all of it, the prosecution, when a judge finally was like, no, you can't have any more extensions.
Like you have to bring charges.
And they went, we don't have sufficient evidence to bring charges.
And so they just dropped all the charges and let him out.
And he ended up killing himself after he got out, like a year later or something like that, because he was so like broken from the whole experience.
Effective Protest vs Nonsense Focus00:03:16
from a libertarian perspective, it was like, you know, Ted, I knew about this story.
I had been following it.
It was like a, you know, and Ted was like, we're going to this protest about that, demanding like, you know, some type of reform of the Rikers system.
And I was like, okay, I'll go to that.
Cause like it was so specific and it was something that I'm totally against.
And I remember going to it and it was just all, you know, there were like a whole bunch, a bunch of like black socialist groups there and they were like handing me literature on how we need a Marxist revolution in the United States of America.
And a bunch of the speakers were getting up and talking about like just crazy things.
And I was like, yeah, this isn't for me.
This is not my crowd because really, even though we agree on this issue, you want so many things that I would die to make sure never happen.
You know what I mean?
And like, it's just too.
But anyway, so that's about the extent of my protest experience.
But yes, if I was a young 20-year-old going to a protest and they were like, hey, so you're like, so what are we going to do here?
And they were like, we're going to have a full seder.
I'd be like, are, are there drugs involved with this?
Like, we want to maybe have some fun or something.
Anyway, I guess what my, my big takeaway from all of this, though, was that, yeah, look, like, if you're going to protest this shit and do it effectively, like, I would say taking over a college campus and having a seder with Jews and Muslims participating is pretty good.
That's a pretty good way to do it.
Don't block roads.
Don't go inconvenience random people who have nothing to do with this.
If you want to go outside the Israeli embassy or outside of Capitol Hill, okay, that's fine.
You know what I mean?
But don't, and also just stop chanting death to America and all this dumb shit.
It's just totally counterproductive to your cause.
And then, of course, my, my biggest takeaway is that people got to stop being so goddamn reactionary.
And if you're spending more time reacting to what some 20-year-old leftist is saying about this war than you are about discussing the actual war itself, you're, you're every bit as bad as the woke 20-year-old.
Because just like them, you're focused on nonsense.
And that's the real, that's the real, that, that's, there's a bunch of things that are terrible about wokeism, but one of the worst aspects of it is that it just gets everybody focused on nonsense, on truly trivial, unimportant things.
And I'm not saying that there's never, that wokeness can't go so far where it becomes an important thing.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying there's this constant like focus on like whatever, you know, microaggressions.
You know, it's, oh, someone asked a foreign student, where are you from?
That's a microaggression.
It made him feel like an old.
This is all so stupid.
It's just so dumb.
We don't even need to talk about this.
And, you know, this is why at the height of Black Lives Matter, they're pushing to get Aunt Jemima removed.
You know, it's like, what?
How does that matter?
This is all just stupid.
Wrapping Up with St. Louis Trip00:01:12
So anyway, that's kind of my thing.
Don't be distracted by the nonsense and focus on what's really important, what's really going on here.
All right, Rob, let's wrap up on that.
Let's go pack our bags and head on out to St. Louis.
Come celebrate Mother's Day with me in Brooklyn doing a comedy show.
RobbieTheFire.com for summer porch tour dates.
It's all new cities, different than last year, fun, exciting places.
And then come September and October, we'll repeat last year's run.
There you go.
And come see me and Rob in St. Louis.
Come see us at the Libertarian Convention in DC.
And I will tease.
And I got a couple of the big ones coming up.
May is going to be a big month.
Got a couple of not like, not like, oh, I'm going on a pretty big show.
Like going on the big ones this month, including one that I've never done before that I'm very excited to do and one that I have done before many times.
I'll let you figure it out.
All right.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
ComicdaveSmith.com, RobbieTheFire.com.
Of course, go check out Run Your Mouth, Rob's other fantastic podcast.