Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein critique Senator Lindsey Graham's call for nuclear strikes on Gaza, labeling him an "unhinged lunatic" who misrepresents Israel's war fronts and ignores civilian targeting. They debunk UN casualty report distortions while analyzing new polling showing Donald Trump leading Biden in swing states, aided by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s surge among youth. The hosts argue Biden faces a catch-22 regarding inflation and the Gaza conflict, which alienates both donors and voters, ultimately suggesting Trump's lead is secure but the election remains fluid until May 31st. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hyperbaric Oxygen and Criminals00:12:38
Fill her up.
You are listening to the gas digital human.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Cheers, Dave Smith.
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.
It has been quite a morning for me.
We're getting quite a response on social media.
I have a lot of things coming up in the very near future that are going to be some pretty big shows.
So I guess this is the first one that's been announced.
By the time you're here in this episode, you've probably seen this already.
But if you haven't, rather than announce it, let's just have a meta moment here and play a clip of another show, playing a clip of our show, and let the great Patrick Vett David take it away from here.
Let's roll the tape.
Hey, Chris Cuomo, if you really want to go on this, like, you know, like reinventing yourself rehabilitation tour, why not come through me?
Let's sit down.
Come on, Pat.
Set it up.
Let's make it happen.
Pat.
Chris Cuomo can give his take and let me respond to what he has to say.
Let's set up a nice debate over the COVID era policies.
I'll gladly put my track record at part of the problem up against Chris Cuomo's track record at CNN.
And we can discuss whether I actually, like, why I got everything right and you got everything wrong.
Let's have a conversation about that.
I think it would be illuminating for the American people.
And by the way, listen, okay.
So obviously, you know, they've had the conversation together.
And for me, when you see something like this, you know, you, you, I like debate.
I want people to talk.
I have a relationship with Chris.
I have a relationship with Dave.
And we get along with almost everybody.
We get along with almost everybody.
There isn't, I can't think of anybody we don't get along with.
Because you talk to everybody.
You let people talk about it.
We talk about one week.
By the way, you think if we invited Anthony Weiner back, he would come without even hesitation.
I think he would come 100%.
100% he would come back.
But the point is, but you're right.
Obviously, that was a very disrespectful for sure.
So guess what we're doing?
So here's what I want to tell you.
The announcement is both Dave Smith and Chris Cuoma have agreed to a debate.
Oh, May 31st, Friday night, 6 to 9 p.m.
Friday night.
6 to 9 p.m.
That is sick.
6 to 9 p.m.
It's official.
It'll be at our comedy club that we have, 5990 Live.
And this is going to be what the people want.
You know, Chris represents one side, and obviously he's gone through certain experiences that he's had.
He's openly talking about potentially long COVID, what that means, all the different things.
And if he had to do it again, he wouldn't have taken a vaccine in 2026 if COVID came back out.
And Dave has a different position.
And they get to sit down and hash it out and talk to each other.
What's interesting is they both like talking to RFK.
They both have had Cuoma has RFK on, I don't know, every week almost, it seems like, right?
So there's an affinity, but I think this is going to be a conversation that'll be going insane on the net around the world.
And by the way, something tells me, I wouldn't be surprised between now and then, the people from the establishment who don't want to see this conversation take place, they're going to do everything in their power to prevent this from taking place.
Fauci being one of them.
Whoever it is.
Yeah.
They're going to be watching.
All right.
So there you have it.
It has been announced that on March 31st, me and Chris Cuomo will be on Patrick Bitt David's podcast.
I guess he will serve as somewhat of a moderator, I'd imagine.
And we will be having a three-hour debate.
It's a, look, everyone, just be cool.
Okay.
Like, I listen, I understand there's an impulse and I totally understand the impulse.
I remember feeling this way when Scott Horton was debating Bill Crystal and all of my people on Twitter are like, like responding to him and they're like, you have no idea what you're in for, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, hey, chill on that.
We want this to happen.
You know what I mean?
I got to say, you know, I do a lot of stuff that's like kind of surreal that I'm in these moments.
This one is, it's pretty wild.
And I'm sure for people who like are fans of this show, to be like the guy who was the number one show at CNN during all of COVID and us being us through all of COVID, to actually get to sit down to have three hours to go through, you know, kind of the media coverage of COVID is just, I'm really grateful for the opportunity.
I'm very much looking forward to this.
I got to say, I have to tip my hat to Chris Cuomo for agreeing to do this.
I don't know how familiar he is with me, but he has, we have messaged before, like he's not 100% unfamiliar.
And man, I just really got to give it up to the great Patrick Bett David for making this moment happen.
I mean, it's just incredible.
And I will say, at least from my perspective, and obviously I'm a little bit biased here, but for all the people who were like upset that he brought Chris onto the Valutainment team, to me, this more than makes up for it.
And in fact, this makes it like, oh, this is great that he did that because now we have this opportunity that we wouldn't have had.
You know, there's a lot of a lot of us who would like to see justice for the criminal response to COVID.
I don't know that we'll ever get that.
I think this could be a very cathartic moment for a lot of us who lived through the insanity that lasted three plus years.
And yeah, so I'm looking forward to this.
Tickets are up.
I will tell you, this thing is going to sell out very quickly.
So if you want to come to it, if you're in the Fort Lauderdale area or you can make it to the Fort Lauderdale area, move quick to go grab those tickets because they are not going to sell out.
It's not, I don't remember exactly how much the room seats.
It's a few hundred people, but it's going to, this is going to sell out very quickly.
So move quick if you want to come to it.
Hey, man, I've been on the show a long time.
This is the coolest thing yet.
Maybe I got to see if I can put together a porch tour in Miami like 11 p.m. that night so I can come down and just find an excuse to come to it.
I'd love to see that live.
Try to try to do it the night before so you don't got to like leave right away.
Yeah, maybe someone actually hit me up about a Miami porch tour.
Maybe I'll do that on Thursday night.
Yeah, do it.
If you're going to set it up, try to set it up for Thursday so that you can like hang after the debate and we can have a couple drinks.
And, you know, this is a good idea.
Mix it up with everybody.
In the meantime, West Palm Beach, but this is the coolest, dude.
You're going to, oh my God, you're going to get your hands on the chief propagandist of America.
Everybody just relax.
Try to be cool.
And yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to let you down on this one, guys.
So I'm very much, very much looking forward to doing this.
Yes, there are other shows also, of course, that we have coming up.
There's a few big ones.
Big one, may 23rd in Washington Dc, Penn Social live stand-up comedy show and a live part of the problem podcast.
These tickets are moving very fast, so grab them both.
Both of these shows are going to sell out.
If you want to come see us in Dc on may 23rd, make sure to go grab tickets now.
Of course, this is in the the lead up to the Libertarian Party national convention, which starts the following day.
Um, and then on may 25th I will be speaking at the convention.
But actually I think i'm doing a bunch of different things.
I'll be at the Libertarian Party convention like the whole time doing a bunch of different stuff and hanging out with a lot of great people.
So uh, looking forward to that.
Of course, Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Bobby Kennedy all coming uh there, and of course Michael Rechtenwald, who i've uh endorsed for president.
He'll be there as well.
Clint Russell um, a whole bunch of uh.
Scott Horton will be there.
A whole bunch of great libertarians, um and uh.
Then june 1st, the day after this debate.
So i'm gonna have to do this debate and get on a flight first thing in the morning, and I guess you are too Rob, if you're coming down there.
Uh, june 1st we got a little theater show in uh Atlantic City.
Uh, this is only the second theater that me and Rob have done.
The first one went great uh, so i'm very much uh hoping this one does too, because if it doesn't, then never doing another one.
But the last one went great, so we're doing another one.
So hopefully, come on out Atlantic City guys, come out june 1st for that.
Then we're going to be in Las Vegas june 14th uh and 15th, and then in july I will be july 12th through 14th I will be headlining the Comedy Mothership, the greatest comedy club in these United States Of America.
So come on out to uh to that one.
And then uh, we'll be at in Zany's in Nashville uh in late july, july 28th.
Really looking forward to that.
I've never worked that club before, but everyone says it's one of the best comedy clubs in in the country, so very much looking forward to being down there.
Comicdave Smith.com for all of those ticket links that I just mentioned and, of course, Robbiethefire.com for all of the summer Porch tour dates, as well as those uh ticket links that I just mentioned.
By the way, I love the.
I love the.
Patrick Bake David uh.
Promo of uh.
Washington Dc doesn't want this to happen, like Fauci sitting around going.
Why would I?
I don't care about a debate.
I care about a debate.
I mean, i'll tell you, I think he's right, I don't think that's just promo and I think he's uh yeah I, I think he may know some something about that, but uh, it's uh, it'll be interesting.
I'll tell you, there is a part of me with this one and i've done a lot of big shows.
You know what I mean.
But this is, there's something different about this.
I've done a lot of debates, but there's something different about this um, and I do have this weird feeling inside me where i'm like, all right, I hope it happens.
You know what I mean.
Like, even though it's been announced and agreed to and the date and scheduled and everything, it's like, okay let's, I really really hope this ends up happening.
Maybe Cuomo just comes clean in the first couple minutes.
He agrees with you, and then you're like, shit, what are we gonna do for the next three hours, dude?
Um okay well, let me continue my case.
Well, i'm gonna continue my case for three hours.
That's that all right guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Oxygen Health Systems.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Um okay, so let's uh, let's talk about some stuff that's going on, because there is a whole lot of it.
Uh, there's.
Look, if you've been listening to this show or if you just listen to me on on other podcasts or whatever.
I've basically been uh, let's say, presenting a case for many years now that the government in Washington Dc is a criminal organization, and I think I presented a pretty overwhelming case.
But even within that criminal organization.
Comparing Israel to Nazis00:13:09
There are some people who stand out as uniquely evil, like just deranged, blood-soaked lunatics, and if you had to pick who was the worst of all of them, there'd be a few people who are on that short list, and one of those people would be Lindsey Graham, who is just the absolute worst senator in the United States Of America, and that really says something, because there's so many bad ones.
But Lindsey Graham, of course, is just one of these um, almost like a villain out of a novel type of characters who's literally.
I mean, there are war hawks who will somewhat disguise it, and Lindsey Graham, just all he does is just advocate for the most reckless war policy imaginable.
You know the guy who, like on october 7th, is like bomb Iran, like you know, like before we've even figured out anything, just just freaking.
Attack him, go war is just always his answer for everything is war.
Um anyway, he was on tv the other day being Lindsey Graham.
Let's play that clip, listen.
You know, here's what I would say about fighting an enemy who wants to kill you and your family.
Why did we drop two bombs, nuclear bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
To end a war that we couldn't afford to lose?
You don't understand apparently, what Israel is facing.
They're facing three groups, Iran, who has received 80 billion dollars in aid.
When Trump left office, they were exporting 300 barrels of oil a day.
Now they're at 1.3 million a day.
They've been enriched by Biden.
They're taking that money to kill all the Jews.
So when we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons.
That was the right decision.
Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war they can't afford to lose and work with them to minimize casualties.
Senator, military officials would argue that there has been so much technology since those bombs were dropped that for that very reason, that is why Israel and other developed countries can be more precise.
But let me ask it this way, because President Biden is not the first president to use arms shipments to try to influence Israeli policy.
As you know, former President Ronald Reagan on multiple occasions withheld weapons to impact Israel's military actions.
Did President Reagan show that using U.S. military aid as leverage can actually be an effective way to rein in and impact Israel's policy?
When you're telling the world you're going to restrict weapons delivery to the Jewish state who is fighting a three-front war for their survival, it emboldens Iran.
It emboldens Hamas.
Sinoir is probably juiced up on the idea there's daylight between the United States and Israel.
The hostage deal is harder.
This is the worst decision in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship to deny weapons at a time the Jewish state could be destroyed.
So here's what I would say.
There is some hope we can get over this.
Non-negotiable to destruction of Hamas.
Nobody in Israel will allow Hamas to be standing militarily or politically when this is over.
How we get there is subject to negotiation.
My problem is not with the weapons that Israel is using.
My problem is with the tactics that Hamas is using.
And the idea that America would not send a nickel of aid, echoed by a United States Senator when all the Jews are trying to be killed by radical Islamic groups, tells us where we are at as a nation.
The Republican Party is with Israel without apology.
Historians would say, why is it okay for Reagan to do it and not President Biden?
But let me ask you about, can I say this?
Why is it okay for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war?
Why was it okay for us to do that?
I thought it was okay.
To Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state.
Senator, again, military officials say that technology has changed.
But let me ask you about how these military officials that you're talking about.
All right.
So there is this unhinged lunatic, Lindsey Graham, seemingly advocating for Israel to nuke Gaza.
I mean, he doesn't exactly say that, but it's whatever you can, and then keeps going back to the example of it was okay for us to nuke Japan.
So do whatever you can because, and just like, I mean, objectively, just the hysteria and the nonsense propaganda in this constant comparison to World War II, because that's always the only lesson you're supposed to learn from history, is that it was great that we dropped nukes on cities in World War II.
He cannot point to a single one of the wars that he's advocated for in his time as a senator and use that as an example for anything, because that would just prove as an example of like, oh, yeah, we shouldn't have fought that war at all.
He's been wrong about everything throughout his entire career.
And yet he, and then just so this hysteria around World War II, everything has to be seen through World War II, that everything is the Nazis, the Jews are being exterminated as if anything like that is happening.
He also says that Israel is fighting a three-front war, which is just not true.
This is just not what's happening.
Israel is not fighting a war on three fronts.
Israel had a minor little squirmish with Iran, where they killed a couple Iranians and no Israelis were killed in the response.
They've had, obviously, they've had tensions with Hezbollah, but they're not at a conventional war with either of these groups.
What Israel is doing is destroying an area that they've had control of since 1967.
Just lighting up the people there, slaughtering them in huge numbers.
That's what's happening.
And the question is like whether they should continue doing that for a goal, by the way, this goal that Lindsey Graham stated, the non-negotiable is that Hamas has to be gone.
It's a goal that both U.S. and Israeli intelligence have said is inachievable.
They're not going to be able to remove Hamas.
And they've demonstrated this by like even the areas.
You know, they were saying like Rafa is the last stronghold of Hamas, but there's actually been a lot of reporting that Hamas is popping back up in all these previous areas that they've taken out too.
These people have tunnels and bunkers and stuff like that.
And a lot of them are surviving.
You're not going to take them out.
And then, of course, more people join up with Hamas, the more you slaughter innocent people.
So this goal is just not achievable.
But there's Lindsey Graham advocating for another war.
Will Lindsey Graham be fighting in any of these wars that he's advocating for?
No, no, no.
He'll just be sitting his fat ass at some fancy restaurant in South Carolina.
He'll be, you know, he doesn't, he's not married and doesn't have any kids.
So he doesn't really have any skin in the game for the next generation.
He's made a very comfortable life for himself as a professional advocate for wars that he will never see action in.
That's who that man is.
Any comments, Rob?
It's always a little bit shocking when they're willing to be openly evil and advocate.
Like usually you try and disguise what you're doing as charitable and nice, freedom missions, the moderate rebels, the safety of these people.
This one's a full-fledged pitch for, hey, we were ruthless when we needed to be ruthless and it worked for us.
And so who are we to get in the way of other people being completely ruthless when it's what they need to do?
It's you usually don't hear chatter this direct.
And also, I think as you've taken the other side of it, it is open to debate whether or not, I guess, we needed to drop those nukes on civilians.
And it's a little bit, even if like, even if you're on the other side of that as being something that we had to do, I would still think you'd be a little hush-hush about it.
You know what I mean?
You wouldn't be celebrating the decision.
It's like Christy Noam celebrating shooting her dog.
Hey, look, I'll make the tough decisions.
It's not people, it's a bad sale.
People don't like to hear it.
And it's certainly kind of showcasing your own lack of morality that you feel comfortable speaking this way.
Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.
By the way, that Christy Noam thing, I don't really know, but that smelled to me almost like she got set up by a ghostwriter.
Like it's like, because she, they put all these things in there.
They put in that she met Kim Jong-un and stuff and then she couldn't.
But anyway, I don't really know.
I'm just speculating.
But yeah, look, Rob, I mean, I think you make a really good point there.
Like, if you're just, if you're being honest about this, which already is what eliminates people like Lindsey Graham, but even if, so I think dropping the nukes was unnecessary.
It's not like I think this, like five-star general Dwight Eisenhower, of course, said that they were, it was unnecessary and wrong.
But let's say you're on the other side of that argument.
You would still have to admit, just objectively speaking, World War II was, it's the biggest bloodbath in human history.
It was just objectively, it was a unique moment in history.
And so even if you thought it was justified there, it doesn't follow from that that because we dropped nukes, that's always morally acceptable to drop nukes, right?
Like it wouldn't follow that just like in any conflict, well, hey, the Americans did it.
And so you can do it.
And this, this idea that the Jews are being like exterminated, like October 7th was a horrific terrorist attack, but there is no real, this is not the Nazis who have these captive Jews who are completely helpless and don't have a government to represent them.
If you want to apply that standard to one group here, it wouldn't be the Jews who have an incredibly powerful government with nuclear weapons.
Like they're not being exterminated tomorrow.
But, you know, again, even if the like, let's say the conventional thinking, the incredibly shallow, stupid conventional thinking, which is that like the only lessons of World War II were, you know, that appeasement doesn't work.
You know, that's, that's the only lesson of World War II was that appeasement doesn't work and targeting civilians and just finishing the job is the lesson.
You know, you, you don't, um, you don't want to be Neville Chamberlain or whatever.
You don't want to give Yugoslavia to Hitler because that's what leads to all this other stuff.
And I've talked about in the past, though, there's a lot more to the history of it than that.
But even if that were the lesson of World War II, that doesn't mean that you can extrapolate from that that appeasement is always wrong and aggression is always right.
There's all, there's clearly lots of different examples throughout human history where like just fighting a war ruthlessly was wrong.
Just starting a war was wrong.
The way you conduct a war could be wrong.
It's just, it's so ridiculous to just say to have your answer to everything be World War II.
Like again, even if I'm wrong about my perspectives on World War II and you think the conventional wisdom is correct, okay, fine.
So you can say there's some lessons we take from World War II.
But what about the lessons of Korea and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria?
And you know what I mean?
Like what those, there's no lessons like that.
Because the point is that all of those situations were totally different from World War II, as is this.
And it's such a pathetic attempt to fit this in, as if which I've had several people, including Bobby Kennedy and Dennis Prager, and I've seen lots of people on social media here, Lindsey Graham here, making this comparison from Hamas and the Nazis.
And it's just such a ridiculous comparison.
They are in no way, they share none of the same characteristics.
I mean, okay, you could say they don't like Jews too much or something, but that's about it.
I mean, the Nazis controlled most of Europe at one point.
Hamas does not even control the Gaza Strip.
These are just wildly different situations.
And it's not a situation where these poor Jews who were in these countries that the Nazis just marched in and took over had no government to represent them or no defense to represent them.
Babel Discount for Listeners00:02:10
They have by far the most powerful government in the region with nuclear weapons.
It's just a totally different situation.
So no, you know, like if dropping the nukes on Japan was justified, which it clearly wasn't, but if it was justified, it was only justified on the grounds that we had no other option.
That's the only way you can justify doing something like that is if you say there was just no other option.
More people would have died if we didn't do this.
None of that is clear in this current situation.
I mean, it's just blatantly not true, but you certainly couldn't make the argument that it's self-evident.
But there goes Lindsey Graham.
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Health Ministry Report Claims00:16:08
And you know, like the real tragedy of all of this, right?
Is that when he's, he's already advocated that we, the United States of America, attack Iran.
And clearly, if this was really a three, you know, a three-pronged war, something like that would have to happen.
And it's just like this guy who's all of those wars that I mentioned, I mean, he wasn't around for Vietnam or he wasn't in the Senate for Vietnam, but all those other wars, you know, he's been a supporter of all of them.
And I mean, like, our young men who really were boys for the most part when they went into this, I mean, okay, you could say technically at 18, you're an adult, but 18 is pretty young.
I don't know if you've been around an 18-year-old recently, but when you're a grown-up, you look at an 18-year-old, that's a boy, you know?
And they've, I mean, they've been committing suicide by the tens of thousands.
And then there's these guys like Lindsey Graham just advocating to send them to more.
Just, you know, because that's what he thinks.
And never having to like, I just, I could never imagine, I mean, I'm 41.
I'm not who the military would look to take, but I'm an able-bodied man.
Like I could fight in a war.
I'm, I'm substantially younger than the average Ukrainian soldier right now.
And I could never imagine advocating for a war that I wouldn't be willing to fight in myself.
You know what I mean?
Like if there was like a war where I was ready, like I'm ready to sign up and die, I'm advocating for that.
I could maybe see that.
I could never imagine advocating other people's kids go fight.
Not me or not my kids, but I want, you know, poor people's kids who have no other options.
And so they're kind of like bribed into it or propagandized into it.
I want them to go fight and die.
It's truly like, it's like a biblical level of evil to do that, if you ask me.
Talk about not understanding power, Dave Smith.
It's the point of the whole thing.
Yeah, I guess so.
It's the way the whole thing works is that you're protected and you're okay with the deaths of other people, the minions.
Yeah, unfortunately, I think you're right.
Speaking of this conflict in Gaza, there's, I don't know if you saw this, Rob, but yesterday there was the UN released this report that basically refined some of the numbers. from Gaza.
And so I first saw this because I saw that the Israeli government and just about every single pro-Israel outlet, including a lot of corporate media outlets and a lot of social media accounts, were jumping on this and all proclaiming that the UN had revised down the number of women and children who have been killed in this conflict in half.
They've halved it is what everybody was saying.
They were using this to dunk on the people who are critical of this war.
A couple of things on this that I want to say, it's funny because I was just on our last show making this point that this is something you may notice about me at this point.
I've done like seven debates since this war broke out.
And obviously we've done a ton of podcasts on it.
You never hear me leading with this.
And you do hear a lot of the critics of the war constantly leading with Israel has killed 35,000 people or whatever it is.
That's never been my position because I've always kind of said that, look, you never know exactly how accurate these numbers are in the middle of a war.
Obviously, the health ministry in Gaza, they do have a not bad track record.
There's been some times where they got numbers wrong before, but there's been a lot of conflicts where they've gotten the numbers right.
They are overseen by Hamas, though.
And this conflict is different than previous conflicts.
And obviously there's an incentive issue there where they're kind of incentivized to report higher numbers.
Same thing with the Israeli government just asserting the number of Hamas militants that they've killed.
I think we don't really know.
You can look at how densely populated Gaza is, and you can look at the number of bombs and the number of buildings that have been destroyed.
And you can very reasonably deduce that a whole lot of people have been killed here.
But it's going to be a while before we have a decent number of exactly what that is.
So anyway, my argument has never been reliant on these numbers.
But as somebody who's been a very outspoken critic of this, when you see this happen, you kind of have two reactions.
Like, so this is when I just saw the Israeli government reporting in all these pro-Israeli accounts.
You're kind of like, okay, well, first off, that's good if less women and children have been killed.
And then second off, you're like, of course, they're going to all use this as, you know, some type of gotcha.
See, you guys, these guys have been spreading these false numbers.
And then I read the report.
And wouldn't you be shocked, Rob?
It turns out that this claim is just not true.
The numbers haven't been halved.
In fact, that's not at all what they're saying.
In fact, the numbers are still relying on the Gaza Health Ministry.
They gave them these updated numbers.
It's not that the UN did their own independent investigation.
They just got updated numbers from the health ministry.
And they still put the numbers over 35,000 people.
None of this has changed.
What they did was they started collecting information on the people who were identified.
Okay.
So it was that what happened is that they said the number of bombing or died from bombing.
Yeah, something like that, right?
No, I mean, it's kind of more like the people who were so horrifically disfigured that they couldn't be identified versus the ones who could be identified.
And so the number of identified women and children was half of what the health ministry is claiming as the total number.
So it didn't at all prove what the government of Israel and all of these pro-Israel accounts are running around trying to claim that it proved the argument actually, it's unbelievable that you could, if you were like, imagine you're supporting a war and then you find out that according to these numbers, again, I'm not banking on any of them.
I'm saying take them with a grain of salt.
But imagine finding out that 10,000 people had been so mangled that they were beyond the ability to identify them and taking that as a win.
See, the numbers are lower.
Like, okay.
Anyway, it seemed pretty clear a lot of people did not actually read this report, which does not actually question the numbers of total people dead.
It seems to back it up, if anything.
Again, it's not really independently backing it up because it's still coming out of the Gaza Health Ministry.
But it's just, it was interesting interacting with some people on Twitter today who were one guy, it was kind of like a big account, but not much engagement, but he was, he was like, will all these pro-Hamas shills apologize now now that the number has been cut in half?
And I was like, oh, no, you just got this completely wrong.
Will you apologize now?
And it's like, no, he won't.
And I said, I had a post where I was saying, I said explicitly, I was like, listen, I'm not telling anyone to trust the numbers from the health ministry or trust the numbers from the UN.
I'm a libertarian.
I'm not a fan of the UN and I'm not a fan of Hamas.
You know, like these are pretty anti-liberty organizations.
So I'm not saying trust them.
I'm saying objectively, go read this report.
And the claim that the numbers have been halved is just not true.
It's factual.
It's objectively not true.
And then literally you get people responding to you.
Ugh, a libertarian standing up for the UN.
That's pretty crazy.
And you're like, did you not read the first sentence of that?
Like, it's just, it's wild how stupid war makes people.
It's unbelievable.
But anyway, I thought that was just worth responding to.
If people want, they can go check it out.
There's been several articles written by it.
And you can, there's also been, there was a press conference that the UN gave where they were specifically asked these questions and specifically said like, no, this hasn't been.
The numbers aren't being revised down.
We're letting you know who's been identified out of these people who was killed.
Just because of how manipulative reporting is on both sides, just to give an example of like how you're going to walk away with clean numbers.
It was reported that Donald Trump had 100,000 people at a rally the other day in wherever it was, in Jersey.
And there was clearly a lot of people out there.
I don't know how to gauge what 100,000 people look like outdoors.
Then people start showing pictures of stadiums filled with people and go, clearly this is less people.
Then you get some of the news reporting 80,000.
You get another person that comes around and goes, look, no one stayed for the hour and a half speech.
Here's what it'll look like after 20 minutes.
Then you have other people commenting and going, no, you're lying.
That was when they did a replay at night amongst the boardwalk and there were still 10,000 people that decided to watch the replay of the event.
That's something that happened a week ago in Jersey.
And our own media can't come up with a single number to go, hey, this was a big event.
Here's how many people were at it.
And this is in a peacetime rally.
Like there's not bombs dropping and buildings being destroyed and areas being evacuated and machine guns spraying all around.
This is just like just a nice event during the day where you could just, yeah.
So no, there is, there's a real point to that.
And of course.
And then just to go a level further, I don't think it changes much of what we've said on the show that they're not being all that nice to the civilians of Gaza and they've kind of put them into this mess and they're not really taking accountability for it or trying to figure out how they can make this a better situation for everyone.
They're just trying to punish them for the really the situation that they that they either found themselves in or Israel manipulated to put the civilians into.
So like look.
That's exactly right.
And look for all the like the talk of the language of protesters, right?
They're like, there's all this like, oh, they're chanting from the river to the sea.
And that's the same thing Hamas chants, you know?
And okay, like I've kind of agreed with that.
I wouldn't be chanting that if I was in charge of what gets chanted at these rallies, you know, because why say the thing that could be reasonably interpreted to mean something like what Hamas is saying?
Even if you claim you mean something different, why say that?
Okay.
But then by that same standard, Benjamin Netanyahu, who's actually conducting an aggressive military campaign, is calling them Amalek.
You know what I mean?
Like as you're doing this, you're saying, and you can claim, well, I don't mean by that that we should slaughter all the women and children, but like, I don't know, why even use terminology that pretty clearly could mean that.
So like, if you're going to hold this standard to some fucking college campus 20 year old leftist, why don't you hold it to a person conducting a brutal war?
It's just, this makes no sense.
I don't know.
Maybe you know more about the details of what exactly that means to call someone Amalek, but it doesn't seem good.
Do you want to know?
Sure.
Amalek was a tribe that, yeah, I think the Jewish people are tasked with killing the women, kids, and the animals.
And the story of Purim is about how they did not, they left some people living.
And then you had Hamun made a comeback.
It's like the, it's not just the sworn enemy.
It's like God, I guess, is a racist on a genetic level, that there's a group, a tribe of people that if they're left on earth, will are tasked with killing the Jews.
And so the Jews are tasked with removing them, which includes the slaughtering of children and I believe even the animals in their villages.
Yeah.
So like the lesson is that we fucked up by not killing every last one of them.
Yeah.
Now, people, you know, I'm sure you'll have rabbis go, well, like the Nazis are kind of like them because it's the ideology and it's not the specific people.
And I'm sure that there are kinder ways to reinterpret it.
But based on my Jewish education, from what I remember of specifically, I don't think there's any proof in the Bible, nor is there any real rabbi who's going to tell you that these people are like, that's not what they're saying.
They're actually saying these people have the attribute of Amalek that they've become our sworn enemy.
I don't think they're actually saying they are that tribe.
But to your point, if you're using that language, that would be as much of a call to genocide as from the river to the sea.
Right, right.
And just again, my point is like, if you're going to have these standards for what some college sophomore says outside of Colombia, like, okay, fine, but there should be a higher standard for what the head of state conducting an offensive brutal military campaign says.
And like, you know, again, these were, there were quotes like this all up and down the South African case that they brought to the ICJ.
And it's, this is part of the reason why the International Court of Justice ruled that this was a plausible genocide, because you have in their own words, so many Israeli leaders saying stuff that's kind of like, this does seem to indicate that the goal here is not to get Hamas, but avoid civilian casualties whenever possible.
The goal seems to be something else.
And you certainly would think you just wouldn't say stuff like that.
And look, however you feel about it, and believe me, I am not.
I'm as fierce a critic of the American warfare state as exists.
I'm not saying there aren't people who are as fierce a critic, but no one is fiercer than me on, you know, criticizing the military industrial complex and the permanent warfare state.
But like George W. Bush would never have said anything like that.
And that's the truth.
That just never came out of his mouth.
I mean, he from the very beginning was like, Islam's a religion of peace and our beef is with these terrorists and blah, blah, blah.
He never would have said something like that that seemed to indicate that all of the people in Iraq deserve to be exterminated or at least could like plausibly be interpreted that way.
We were liberating them.
They would hold up flags of democracy.
Yes, right.
I mean, look, I'm not saying like, yeah, like invading Iraq was still really awful.
I'm not like defending that.
I'm just saying that, yeah, at least he was saying like we're liberating them.
It was Operation Iraqi freedom.
You know, okay, that's ridiculous, but still there's something different about that type of language.
Anyway, I don't think that, as I said, I don't want to like repeat what I said in the last episode, but whether the numbers coming out of the health ministry are accurate or not, none of that really changes the case for whether this is justified or not.
There's very clearly, as a result of this action, the numbers of people who are going to die are going to be much higher than any of the numbers reported.
And that, so none of that really matters.
The question is, does Israel have a right to do this?
Is there any other option for how they could go about this?
And why the hell does our country have to blindly back it?
And if we're to say anything, if Joe Biden goes, says something like, well, if they invade the last area of safe haven for civilians in Gaza, we're not going to give them any more 200 pound bombs.
That Lindsey Graham is going to blow a lid over that if we have the tiniest condition to our support with Israel.
In other words, it must be unconditional support.
We must be saying drop nukes if you want to.
Trump as Vietnam for Biden00:15:04
Otherwise, somehow that's evil.
This is just beyond ridiculous and profoundly anti-American.
It's like very, it's, you're against this country if you think we must fund someone else's war without being able to put the tiniest bit of conditions on that support.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
Let's move on.
What was the next topic that I wanted to get here?
Sorry, I got.
Oh, yeah, let's talk about this.
So there was a new poll that came out today regarding the presidential election, and it is not good for Joe Biden.
The latest poll had Donald Trump winning by pretty wide margins in every single swing state.
This poll included RFK too.
So it's that much more devastating for the Biden campaign.
They can't maybe hope that RFK might end up throwing things in their favor.
Things are very, very bad for Joe Biden.
They're looking very bad right now for obvious reasons.
And there was an interesting moment on CNN where Fareed Zakaria, who is a clear Biden shell, establishment shell, I should say, that just the placeholder for that happens to be Joe Biden right now.
But anyway, he had this moment.
Let's play it.
I have to admit, none of this is playing out as I thought it would.
Trump is now leading in almost all the swing states, but behind those numbers lie even more troubling details.
As someone worried about the prospects of a second Trump term, I think it's best to be honest about reality.
I understand that polls are not always accurate, but in general, they have tended to underestimate Donald Trump's support, not overestimate it.
I doubt that there are many shy Biden voters in the country.
Yeah, that's Fareed Zakaria making a point that we've made several times on this show.
It's a real interesting dynamic that Donald Trump was always in both of his presidential races in 2016 and in 2020, polled substantially worse than he ended up doing.
And so, sure, one of your takeaways from that could be, you know, don't trust the polls.
But there's another way to diagnose that, which would be like, oh, no, Donald Trump does substantially better than he polls.
And if that's the case and he's winning in just about every single swing state, the latest one I saw every single swing state, that is really bad news for Joe Biden.
I also think, or my intuition at this moment is that they're underplaying RFK's popularity and that he's the one that they're kind of trying to bury in the polls a little bit so that he doesn't attract more attention or more love.
But currently I saw in the New York Times, I've read 13%, but in the New York Times, they're quoting him closer to 10%.
But they were saying that he's doing really well with younger voters, particularly people that would have either they might have recruited into the Democratic Party or younger voters who voted for Biden in the last election.
I think it's going to be interesting.
They were saying that traditionally third party candidates do worse as the election goes on.
That is true.
I'm going to guess that RFK is going to end up doing better as there still are some Democrats that don't even realize that he's out there or is like really putting together a race.
Or maybe he's just setting himself up to be the Democratic forerunner in the next election.
But thus far, I guess it looks like he's peeling more from the Democrats.
And I actually think I think they're underplaying his reach right now.
Yeah, I mean, you might be right about that.
Look, it's certainly true.
I know this is somebody who's been a member of the Libertarian Party.
It's certainly true that third party candidates have tended to poll better than they actually do on election day.
The other thing is just that RFK is a different third-party creature than any of the other ones you would be comparing that to.
And I don't know that you can draw too much of a, you know, too much information out of how Green Party or Libertarian Party candidates have done compared to RFK.
It's just different.
The guy's, he's got a different level of fame.
He's comes from, he's Bobby Kennedy's kid.
It's just, it's a very different dynamic.
And also, you know, we just went through COVID and he represents a repudiation of much of that.
And that is a very different dynamic.
So I don't, I, I wouldn't be confident that I could draw too much predictive information about that from these other, you know, third party runs.
Now, how are you going to steal this election?
If the polling looks that dominantly Trump, do they still, you think they got tricks up their sleeve or did all their lawsuits just kind of fade away and reckon with reality?
The dynamic seems to be that every single bullet that they pull out of their chamber misses the target with Donald Trump.
It's like demonize him in the press, impeach him, impeach him again, throw all these court cases at him.
Everything, he's just getting stronger.
And so what does that mean?
Does that mean that they just accept it?
Or does that mean that they go, you know, all out?
That's going to be interesting to see.
I'll tell you that much.
I don't know.
You can't spend away the inflation.
It's the one problem you can't solve by spending more.
Well, it is, you can't, you can't spend your way out of it and you also can't hide it.
It's just really, really hard.
It's like we were talking about on the last episode, man.
There's something, there's, there's something unique about price inflation where everybody feels it.
No, almost nobody doesn't feel when prices are going up.
You got to be so rich and so removed that you're not even paying attention to what shit costs anymore.
But like the overwhelming majority of people feel it.
And that's just, that's not the case.
Even in bad economies where you don't have this type of price inflation, there'll always be like some sectors that are healthy and maybe they don't really feel what's going on in the others.
But when your grocery prices are up 30% from where they were a few years ago, everyone's aware of that.
Everyone's aware of the price of groceries and gas and housing and stuff like this.
Your beans are 10 cents left if you're celebrating July 4th with beans for the family.
If you just have beans, if you just do a full bean party, this is the best time to ever be alive.
If you're one of these illegal Mexicans that just came in, groceries are great.
Yeah, right.
They're pretty happy that there's food.
So yeah, you know, it's just anyway, it's very tough for him.
And look, one of the big killers here for Joe Biden is this war in Gaza.
And this has been very clear in the polls.
I mean, obviously the economy and immigration are his big weaknesses, but this is Bernie Sanders just said the other day, Fareed Zakaria actually talked about this later in that piece, that Bernie Sanders said that this could be his, this could be Joe Biden's Vietnam.
And what that's a reference to is the fact that LBJ didn't seek a second term.
It's not that he that he even like got blown out.
It was so bad for him that he couldn't even run.
If you could try to imagine at the height of the war in Vietnam, maybe not the actual height, because I think Nixon did escalate it before he ultimately ended it, but with the Vietnam War raging, and you can imagine how intense the anti-war protest was, trying to run as a pro-Vietnam War Democrat was just impossible.
There was just no, he didn't even attempt it.
Now, obviously, there's a lot of differences there.
I'm not suggesting that this is as impactful on the United States of America as Vietnam, where they were literally, you know, forcing young men all over this country to go fight and die in that war.
But it does seem like I think one thing that's pretty clear, I think you really called this the earliest.
You might have been the one I heard who called it this the earliest, but one thing is clear that you were right.
And Israel has totally lost the PR game on this.
I mean, they have just totally like, and you called that very early on that you were like, they're not going to be able to sell this.
And they have not been able to.
And they have shifted global opinion against them in a major way.
But they have also I saw in a recent poll that Joe Biden, his approval for his handling of the war is like 30%.
It's like he's wildly unpopular and wildly unpopular with a huge chunk of his own potential voters.
And so it's just, this has been devastating for him.
And of course, then he's kind of caught in this weird catch-22 where, okay, there are a group of hawks who support Joe Biden, right?
Because there are some people.
Now, there's not that many voters in this, in this group, but there certainly are a lot of donors and there certainly are some very powerful voices who are hawks and don't like that Donald Trump talks a lot about being America first and not getting involved in these wars and stuff like that, even though he didn't govern that way, regardless, that they're not as, they're more attracted to the hawkish Democratic Party who's going to support every single war.
And they get furious with Joe Biden when he starts doing the thing because he's caught in this tightrope where he's got to go, oh, no, we're pushing for humanitarian aid and we're not going to give Israel more weapons if they keep indiscriminately killing civilians.
And then he alienates that hawk crowd who's like, oh, he's going soft on Israel.
But then at the same time, he's funding and propping up this whole war and has given them so many weapons that he has totally alienated the much larger voting bloc who doesn't want to be supporting this war.
They see it as a genocide.
And so he's really caught in this awful position where he just kind of can't do anything to get himself out of this.
And of course, it's been, you know, I guess like, look, the point is just that Joe Biden's in real political trouble.
I guess there's nothing new there.
But it's also just that like this war has so damaged.
It's like, number one, it's really damaged our country, not just in the financial cost of it, but in, you know, as global opinion is turned against Israel, it's also turning against us because we are the ones who are backing the whole thing up.
And then also our sitting president, it's a disaster for him politically, and he still can't do anything about it.
Really kind of shows you something.
And it's interesting because I don't think Trump or RFK are going to have a better stance on Israel.
Trump might be able to better mask his position with I'll fix it and Netanyahu.
He hasn't done this yet, but he can play the Netanyahu's a bad guy card and I'm going to fix this, but it's going to include him.
He hasn't played that card yet.
Thus far, I think he was actually shaming Jewish people if they're supporting Democrats because Biden, whatever his line was, I forget what it was, but I think where this does affect Biden is young voter discontent that they might just sit out the election.
Oh, yeah, no question.
No question.
It's been devastating for him with young voters.
There's also a lot of interesting polling about how there's a real wide gap between young men and young women, where young women have gotten much more liberal and young men have gotten much more conservative.
And I do think that there's something like a profound thing happening there.
I think a big part of it is that the young liberal left culture has become so feminine and so hostile toward men that it's driving them away.
And I don't just mean what you might be thinking about that, but I even mean things like even things like lockdowns and wearing masks is a very, it's a very feminine energy.
That's like, that's woman shit.
Like, you know what I mean?
I'm not saying all women, and obviously there's exceptions to that, but the idea of just being like, we should put everything on hold to just make sure everybody is safe and no one gets any boo-boos is much more maternal than paternal.
You know what I mean?
It's much more of a young male type of energy to be like, no, I'll take some risks.
I'm going to live my life.
And obviously the stuff around me too and gender identity and all of this stuff is, you know, toxic masculinity, all of these ideas.
Blame Trump or RFK00:01:53
And these are not that old, or at least they're not, they haven't been this prevalent for that long.
And I do think we're seeing some evidence that this is really pushing young men away.
So between that and the fact that they're opposed to this war, and to your point, it's not necessarily that Trump or RFK are any better on the issue.
They're not.
I think if either one of them were good on the issue, they could be collecting enormous amounts of support.
But the fact is that Joe Biden's the commander in chief supporting it.
And so he's going to get a lot of the blame.
People aren't going to put blame on Donald Trump in the same way for just having bad rhetoric on it that they are for Joe Biden, who's actually the guy who's been supporting it.
So I think that's where we're at.
And man, if, look, there's no question that just like if there is to be a fair election and you're looking at this thing right now, of those three candidates, Trump is the one you want to be.
Trump is in a much better position right now than Biden is, but there's still a lot of time left.
So we will see how this all works out.
All right.
It's been quite a morning for me.
Been an interesting one.
So a lot of exciting stuff coming up.
I also will say, and pretty shortly after this episode comes out, if not maybe a little bit even before it, there's going to be another huge show that I'm doing.
I'm very excited about that that is going to come out.
So I got a lot of fun, got a lot of fun stuff coming up soon.
Again, May 31st, I will be taking on Chris Cuomo.
Looking forward to that.
And of course, come to all of our shows, comicdaveesmith.com, robbythefire.com.
Make sure you go check out Run Your Mouth too, by the way.
Rob has another podcast as well, and it is excellent.