Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein dissect the chaotic 2024 election, highlighting former Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. endorsing Trump to counter alleged Democratic censorship. They expose Mark Zuckerberg's admission of Biden administration pressure regarding COVID-19 content and a debunked FBI warning about Hunter Biden, framing these as deep state manipulations. Critiquing Kamala Harris's awkward phrasing on Bloody Sunday and her avoidance of policy debates, the hosts argue Trump must prioritize free speech against tech suppression. Ultimately, they suggest current media narratives ignore how unelected officials may have rigged outcomes to favor Biden over the sitting president. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Separating From Your Party00:15:16
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
We are on our way to Dallas in just a couple of days here.
Come check us out at Hyenas, Dallas, and Fort Worth this Friday and Saturday.
ComicDaveSmith.com for tickets.
What's up, Rob?
How you feeling, brother?
I'm excited for some Dallas action, my friend.
Yeah, me too.
Nice.
Take it back out there to Texas.
It's my home away from home more and more these days.
I travel to Texas more than any other state besides New York and New Jersey.
It's Texas now.
I'm going to lay it out there.
I've traveled everywhere in the country.
I've seen it all.
Texas has a good comedy scene.
Some people out there that I like.
Your state sucks.
It's not pretty.
The weather's not nice.
Your cities aren't that interesting.
You're going to come to Texas like this?
You're going to mess with Texas?
I will throw it out there.
I like the people of Texas.
I have a good time every time I'm in Texas.
But you drive around in Texas.
It doesn't look as pretty as Pennsylvania.
It doesn't have quite the mountains as the West.
I'm just telling you, it doesn't have the party scene of a Nashville or a New York City.
All I'm saying is, Rob, you are my brother.
But when the fighting goes down, I'm fighting with Texas.
I'm on Texas's side.
They're going to be a bit more.
Especially if you're bringing back the slaves.
I'm in.
You can't say that to start a show.
This isn't the paywall episode.
The slaves will be the Jews who are the real problem.
That's right.
That's right.
That's what we say.
Well, all right, let's jump into some stuff here because there's been a lot going on.
And it does, I got to say, right?
Don't you have this feeling to some degree as we get into it.
Do you regret your last comment?
Yes.
You ever have the feeling where you're like, that slave thing maybe didn't hit quite the way I was hoping it would?
Because I just picked a fight with Texas and then every left winger also.
But don't you feel like as we get it, it is now as we're recording this today.
It's August 27th.
I mean, it's basically September, which is like, we're getting into it now.
It's basically a couple months until the election.
And it's quite an interesting election.
And I think I bet you would agree with me that we kind of, you kind of came into the year.
I remember me and you talking about this at the beginning of the year on this very program.
And we would just say, you just know it's going to be crazy.
Like you just know this is going to be a wild presidential election.
And Jesus, you know, I mean, again, the easiest prediction in the world to make and a vague one, but you just kind of felt that.
And my God, now looking back at it, you're like, oh my God, assassination attempts, a coup, a whole new campaign, just things we've never seen before.
And I got to say, now that we're going, we're almost in September, it's like we got September, October, and the first week of November, or half of the first week of November until the election.
I could just, I don't know, I can just feel it in my bones.
It's like, there is some more craziness coming.
I don't know exactly what it's going to be, but there are, this story is not over yet.
There's a few wild twists and turns to come.
And it's just like, you know, it's the stakes are very high.
So I'm not like trying to downplay the importance, but there is just something kind of exciting about it.
You're like, oh man, I can't, something big is about to happen.
And, you know, I think I'll be interested to see what it is.
Sometimes you got to take your L's when you have them.
And I put out an episode of Run Your Mouth called Bet on Boring, where I figured Trump cut deals behind closed doors and that this thing was a wrap.
And I was wrong.
And I'm happy I was wrong because this is the job I comment on this stuff and they tried to assassinate the president.
They cooed the other one.
They put up the biggest idiot in the country telling you that she has the most widespread popular support you've ever seen.
The media is turning on her at the moment to say, hey, why aren't you taking an interview?
You're only making this worse for yourself.
The longer you go, the bigger and more spectacular this fail could be.
You got to get in front of us.
And then noteworthy Democrats are flipping and saying the Democrats are just too evil.
They've taken away free speech.
They have changed our country for the worse.
And I'm abandoning ships.
So I couldn't have been more wrong.
And I will take that L.
Well, it is there.
There is something to this, right?
Because this is what we were going to start with.
And by the way, also, that's good.
It's okay.
Yeah.
And so it's good to admit when you were wrong about something.
I've had a few, you know, and it's like, yeah, no, that's, that's, that's a healthy thing.
Um, I, by the way, I'll, here, I'll tell this story just since you uh took an L. How about this one?
So this is before you were on the podcast.
This was many years ago.
I mean, this is, I want to say this was 2013.
This is the very beginning of doing part of the problem.
And back then, in 2013, like Ron Paul had run for president in 2012 and he was still in the Congress.
And in those days, for anybody who's, you know, has been in the libertarian world for as long as I have or longer, you might remember that Ron Paul and his people owned CPAC, the conservative political action conference thing that they have every year.
It was dominated by Ron Paul people.
They used to bust young Ron Paul supporters into it.
And it was, he won the Ron Paul won the presidential straw poll at CPAC every year.
Round Paul even won it one year, I think might have been that year in 2013.
So it was just, it was dominated by our people.
And Donald Trump came, and this was when he was first just starting to flirt with like politics and kind of talking about how he might run.
I think this was 2013, maybe 2014, but it was still a very Ron Paul crowd.
And so Donald Trump comes and he starts giving his whole speech about China's currency manipulation and immigration and Barack Obama's birth certificate and all this stuff.
And it was just a lot of stuff that I was just like, I don't know what this isn't going to appeal to anyone.
I was pretty behind on the immigration stuff.
It took me another year or two to really kind of like catch up.
But at the time, so anyway, at one point, he's saying, he goes to the crowd, he goes, we need somebody who's going to make America great again.
We need somebody who can bring back blah, blah, blah, drain the swamp or whatever.
And then the crowd starts heckling him.
And they start going, Ron Paul, Ron Paul's the guy.
And then he goes, he goes, listen, I like Ron Paul.
He's a nice enough guy, but he can't win.
He could never win.
And the crowd starts booing him because he said that.
He goes, he could never win.
He can't, he can't get elected.
And I went on the podcast the next day and I did a whole thing where I was like, Donald Trump, you're going to say Ron Paul can't get elected?
Like the guy's been elected 13 times to Congress.
You know who will never get elected is Donald Trump with your dumb message about China's currency manipulation or whatever.
So anyway, the long of the short there is that, yeah, I took a pretty hard L on that one too.
I predicted that Donald Trump could never get elected.
This was many years ago before I had a big audience.
So this would have just died and no one would know about it if I wasn't reminding you right now.
But just to say, we all take some L's sometimes.
Anyway, one of the thing that you were talking about there, which is going to be the topic we're getting into at first, which is these former Democrats who are supporting Donald Trump.
There are, by the way, this is always powerful.
This is something that, look, Fox News loves nothing more than a Democrat who agrees with them.
You know, they love bringing that Democrat on.
Look, even this Democrat is admitting that the Democrats are crazy.
MSNBC loves nothing more than a Republican who's a never Trumper.
Half their staff is never Trump Republicans.
That Nicole Wallace lady and the, what's his name, the black dude who's the former head of the RNC?
They've got just a ton of them.
There's something powerful about those people because they can be, you know, they can be used to say, look, even the sane people on the other side are saying their own side is so crazy or has gotten so crazy.
I will say that there, okay, so there were a few never Trump Republicans at the DNC.
Clearly they saw value in that also.
There's just not nearly as anywhere in the same universe as much power behind the never Trump Republicans as there are these former Democrats who are supporting Trump now.
And part of that is because nobody, again, when Liz Cheney is against Donald Trump, nobody actually feels like she's taking some brave, courageous stand or really separating with her party.
It's all nonsense.
You're not really separating with your party.
You're for the war party.
You're for the same party you were always for.
Sure, you liked the Republicans when it was run by Dick Cheney, your dad, and you like the Democrats when they're following all of your dad's policies.
It's not really...
However, having Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., people like this, they are really seen, and I think rightfully so, as like outside of the machine, somewhat independent-minded, critical thinkers, and who have a real profound problem with where the Democrats are going.
I think these of the turncoat thing where you go, here's a Democrat against the Democrats, here's a Republican against the Republicans.
I think these have been some of the most powerful voices.
And of course, they just got another major name in that list, who is, of course, Tulsi Gabbard.
Here, let's go to the clip of Tulsi Gabbard from her press conference the other day.
Or speech, I should say.
Because I am confident that his first task will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war.
We cannot be prosperous unless we are at peace.
And we can't live free as long as we have a government that is retaliating against its political opponents and undermining our civil liberties, weaponizing our very institutions against those they deem as a threat.
Kamala Harris has done this over the last three and a half years.
She won't hesitate to continue that if she is elected as president.
President Trump has been their first and foremost target in this because they don't want us as voters to even have the option to vote for him.
I've been their most recent target.
Added to a secret domestic terror watch list after exposing the truth about what kind of dangers we would face if Kamala Harris is elected as president.
We as Americans must stand together to reject this anti-freedom culture of political retaliation and abuse of power.
We can't allow our country to be destroyed by politicians who will put their own power ahead of the interests of the American people, our freedom, and our future.
I am proud to stand here before you today, whether you're a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent.
If you love our country, as I do, if you cherish peace and freedom as we do, I invite you to join me in doing all that we can to save our country and elect President Donald J. Trump and send him back to the White House to do the tough work of saving our country and serving the people.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Mr. President.
All right.
So there you have it.
Former Democrat, former presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, endorses Donald Trump.
I will say, as I've been saying for a while, endorsements should always, in terms of the weight that they hold, they should be taken with a grain of salt.
Endorsements don't seem to do a whole lot.
Even from very popular political figures, it doesn't guarantee a transfer of support or anything like that.
I will say that what Donald Trump's doing now, when you have people like Elon Musk, like RFK, like Tulsi Gabbard, it's more than just any one endorsement.
There's an entire narrative that's being built here, which is very detrimental to the narrative that the corporate media and the political class would like you to have, which is that Donald Trump is such a radical threat to democracy that everyone's got, if we could all agree on one thing, we could agree on the fact that this guy can't get in.
This really undermines that, where you have a lot of people who clearly disagree with Donald Trump on a lot of different issues, essentially making the opposite argument that actually our republic is in serious jeopardy if Kamala Harris is able to win.
Like, I don't know exactly what this means.
I got to say, this seems to be pretty powerful.
And I do think this is going to have an impact that Donald Trump is now almost in a way, now he is a guy who essentially centrist types who are not connected to the machine, or at least not in lockstep with the machine, are finding a home supporting him.
What do you think, Rob?
I think the young cool kids just said the Republicans are actually the pro-freedom party and that the Democrats are the censorship machine that are pushing war.
So if you'd like to kind of keep the America that you knew and love, even though, I mean, the Bush administration was 20 years of war, but the censorship is newer to the more modern administrations and what happened with COVID and ESG scores and whatnot.
But the point just being, we've been hearing the machine yell as loudly as possible that Donald Trump's a dictator.
Government Interactions With Meta00:17:22
He won't give up power.
If you want to maintain our democracy, you have to vote against Donald Trump.
And now you've got some of the more younger and more modern voices, which is RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
I would say that they are definitely winners in the new media machine coming forward and saying, no, if you'd like to preserve the little bit of freedom that you have and get rid of the censorship that exists here and try and walk us back from these wars, Donald Trump's a safer bet.
I don't think I think amongst the people that both sides are looking to win over now and trying to win the narrative war with, I think that's a big and good week for Trump.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And also that it's coming directly on the heels of the DNC is very well timed, that he's kind of stealing back, I think, a lot of the thunder and a lot of the, you know, getting back to what Donald Trump does when he's being successful, which is dominating the news cycle.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Monetary Metals, an incredible company doing amazing stuff in the precious metal spaces.
And if you want to unlock a 12% return on silver, you got to check them out.
Now, of course, silver isn't just a precious metal.
It's a tangible asset and a great way to diversify any investment portfolio.
With monetary metals, however, you don't just own physical silver.
You own silver that works for you to generate more silver, growing your total ounces over time.
And right now, you can earn 12% annual interest on silver paid in silver in their latest offering.
If you're an accredited investor, just click the link in the episode description or head over to monetary-metals.com.
Monetary metals is revolutionizing the way you invest in gold and silver.
They've been paying interest in silver and gold for over eight years, helping you grow your wealth in real tangible assets.
Finally, there's a true alternative to saving in dollars, a yield on gold and silver with monetary metals.
This is the first true silver bond since 1834.
You earn 12% annual interest on silver paid in silver.
Remember, you must be an accredited investor to participate.
It's a three-year term.
The bond is financing a publicly traded mining company located in the western United States.
So just click on the link in the episode description or head to monetary-metals.com for more information on how to participate.
All right, let's get back into the show.
By the way, speaking of this, this censorship point that you were making, and Frank, I just sent you another video that had been in the list.
So if we could get that one ready, because I found this to be very interesting.
But I know you saw, Rob, we briefly talked about this off air, but you saw that there was this letter from Mark Zuckerberg written to Jim Jordan in the House, the House of what committee?
The Judiciary Committee, the House Judiciary Committee.
He's the chairman of that committee.
And Jim Jordan, as you guys probably know, is like that.
You know, he's a real shark of a lawyer and he's probably the best guy in Congress at like grilling people and kind of going into prosecutor mode like that.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up right on the heels of that conversation is that obviously Zuckerberg didn't like come out and endorse Donald Trump or anything like that, but there does seem to be a very clear, like a change of tune that he's having.
They recently reinstated Donald Trump on Twitter and excuse me, on Facebook and Instagram.
Those are the ones Zuckerberg owns.
But anyway, let me read this letter and then we could talk about this a little bit more because this is also kind of very interesting, kind of on the same topic.
So this is a letter from Zuckerberg to Chairman Jordan of the House Judicial Committee.
Zuckerberg writes, I appreciate the committee's interest in content moderation on online platforms.
As you are aware, Meta has produced thousands of documents as part of your investigation and made a dozen employees available for transcribed interviews.
Further, to our cooperation with your investigation, I welcome the opportunity to share what I've taken away from this process.
There's a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position.
Our platforms are for everyone.
We're about promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way.
As part of this, we regularly hear from governments around the world and others with various concerns around public discourse and public safety.
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our team for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our team when we didn't agree.
Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.
I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.
I also think we made some choices that with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today.
Like I said to our team at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction.
And we're ready to push back if something like this happens again.
In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.
That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.
It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation.
And in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story.
We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again.
For instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact checkers.
He goes on, apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure.
The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they need to help people vote safely during a global pandemic.
I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
They were designed to be nonpartisan, spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities.
Still, despite the analysis I've seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other.
My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another, or to even appear to be playing a role.
So I don't plan on making similar contributions this cycle, respectfully, Mark Zuckerberg.
That I found that very interesting.
And that, look, it's not quite like making an endorsement of Donald Trump, but I got to say, it takes some courage for Mark Zuckerberg to have written that letter.
It's this letter happens because of a lot of shifts in attitude.
I don't believe that this happens if Elon Musk hadn't bought Twitter and kind of turned Twitter into a more free speech platform than it previously was.
I think that there's a lot of like energy that Elon Musk tapped into because of that and has made himself much more the center of the story, has made X the center of the story.
And there's a weird almost like market pressure for Zuckerberg to write this.
But look, we already had him on record on Rogan's podcast saying some stuff about this, but it is pretty, it's pretty crazy to see it put in black and white on a letter, like acknowledging what happened back in 2020 and 2021.
And what are your thoughts on the letter?
I think everyone's sorry when they get caught.
And so in the last at the beginning of this administration, there was a ton of pressure on these companies from the government to basically engage in censorship, which they did.
If I remember correctly, Facebook even had an internal commission to monitor the COVID stuff that Peter DeSac, the guy who purchased the virus from World Health or whatever it was.
I forget the United.
I forget the name of his group, but that guy was put in charge of the content moderation team over at Facebook.
They knew what they were doing.
They were playing ball with the administration because they felt like they had to.
From what I remember, Facebook was more neutral until I think Boner kind of shook him down.
He realized he had to start contributing to the system.
I think as long as you pick a side, they kind of leave you alone, but you don't get to stay on the sidelines.
And I think two things happen.
I think sometimes the government interferes with your business, like what just happened with the automobile companies.
They're forced to make these electric vehicles.
They get to a point where the government, the mob, doesn't make good on their part of saying, don't worry, we're going to force everyone to buy these or we're going to have the credits for them.
We're going to get everything in place to make sure that you make your money.
And you turn around four or five years later and your business isn't doing as well and you're losing your market share if you've lost what you've liked doing.
And so I think there's a mixture of that there's an actual investigation into what happened here and Jim Jordan's shaking him down to actually investigate, hey, what happened?
So he's trying to get himself out of, in other words, he was in trouble with the old administration and now he's in trouble for what he did.
And I don't think, and at the end of the day, I think he's just trying to run his business and figure out how to make some money and keep Facebook relevant.
And the whole, hey, we're going to be in 3D and put goggles on our face.
I don't think that one's, I don't think that investment thus far is working out.
So I think everyone's sorry when they got caught.
And that's what this letter is.
But in terms of trying to highlight, hey, the administration did strong arm these organizations, especially as the Supreme Court dropped the case on standing.
Any victory you can get to highlight that they absolutely did censor speech is a win.
So as far as I'm concerned, highlighting that the current administration is a danger for free speech.
I mean, this is definitely as black and white as you get.
Hey, we were certainly censored from the last administration.
Yeah, so I agree with you wholeheartedly.
And I think that it's not just the acknowledgement of what the regime did to censor American citizens, but it's also a signal that we're not going to be doing that anymore.
Now, that doesn't mean it's guaranteed, but that is a win to even get a signal from a company as big as Instagram and Facebook.
That's a big win.
Sorry, go ahead.
And by the way, the Facebook one's not small because our because of the Facebook inner circle, which, you know, sometimes I just, I think we were banned over comments that were made internally within the group in regards to COVID stuff.
And I bet almost all those things are accurate with the with the hindsight.
You know, I'm still banned from advertising on Facebook.
I'm not allowed to do it because I was a moderator on the Facebook page.
Really?
Is that true?
Yeah, if I have a gig and I want to promote it on Facebook, I'm permanently banned from advertising on Facebook because I was a content moderator on a private group that was sharing information that turned out to be accurate on the platform.
So for people who don't know, so we used to have this group, the part of the problem inner circle, and it was for supporting members of the show.
And it was a Facebook group, a private Facebook group.
Now, by the way, we now have the equivalent over at partoftheproblem.com.
So go sign up there and support the show if you want to be part of that community.
But so it was during 2020 when the lockdowns first hit, you know, obviously this is like what we were talking about all the time in the group and people were sharing articles and information.
And look, I won't even say it's possible that some of it turned out to be wrong.
I know a whole lot of it turned out to be right.
Like there was a lot of stuff there.
And what happened was all like we would, you know, we would get flagged every now and then.
Some post would be, you know, deemed hateful or misinformation or something like that.
But when the lockdowns hit, it started happening just constantly.
Every single day, every single thing that was posted started getting flagged.
Everything.
And then they switched it to a thing where I had to approve or you had one of us, one of the moderators had to approve every single post.
So like you couldn't just post in the group anymore, which is how we always had it, obviously, because it's us.
So we always had it set up like, yeah, this is free speech.
Say whatever you want to say.
And in fact, there were people, I remember there were people who would come to me over the years while we had the group and be like, you should kick this person out of the group for saying something horrible or whatever.
And I was always like, no, I'm not kicking anyone out for saying, I mean, if they're like personally attacking you, that's one thing.
I'm not kicking anyone out for any opinion that they hold.
Like, go argue with them, you know, or block them, whatever, who, you know, but make up your mind.
But once the COVID stuff hit, they, and then I knew they were, they were baiting us.
But then when I had to approve every single thing before it was posted, very shortly after that, they just permanently suspended the group.
By the way, to this day, it still says, if I go on Facebook that we're awaiting our appeal, we just, we appealed it and just forever, the appeal is still going on and they've never gotten back to us with an answer.
But anyway, so I didn't know that about being banned from the ads.
But so I do, you know, I do take this a little bit personally and not really on my own behalf, but that group meant a lot to a lot of people.
And I thought it was really messed up that they banned us for being good about stuff, for not being sheep who just like mindlessly went along with totalitarianism.
But so to hear this, that it's like, oh, okay, the government, and he says in the letter, like kind of, you know, he, as I just read, kind of no excuses.
We still made the decision.
And it's like, yeah, though, that's, that's right.
I mean, part of it is like, yo, it's so insane that as the government is instituting totalitarianism, they're pressuring these companies that control, let's get real, the equivalent of the public square today.
That is the equivalent of where conversations are happening.
And if while the government is instituting totalitarianism, they can go around and pressure people to not be allowed to speak out against it, then we do not have a First Amendment in any meaningful sense.
We simply just don't have free speech in this country.
And then again, he mentions the Hunter Biden laptop situation, which he added, like He had gone on Rogan and said essentially that the FBI had reached out to him and said there was a big Russian disinformation campaign coming and that that's why he turned down the volume on the Hunter Biden story.
They didn't do what the old regime at Twitter did, which was straight up like crazy, where they froze the New York Post's account and they made the link to the article like you couldn't share it.
You couldn't even direct message it to somebody else.
They didn't do that, but they turned down the signal so low that like no one would ever see it.
So almost as bad, basically as bad.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is My Patriot Supply.
This is a great company.
And if you're a little bit concerned about the uncertainty and instability that you see all around you, you got to check out My Patriot Supply.
There is nothing more important than making sure that you and your family are prepared in these uncertain times.
And their mega three month emergency food kits come jam-packed with 33 varieties of filling and delicious food.
Not only does that include creamy chicken flavored rice, old-fashioned Italian spaghetti and savory cheesy broccoli soup, but you'll also get a bonus protein kit with diced beef, flavored chicken chunks, and three varieties of beans, plus nine different fruits, vegetables, and snacks.
Not only are these food kits delicious and filling, but they come in super durable packaging and they last up to 25 years in storage.
So you know you and your family will be covered.
Go check them out at my website, preparewithsmith.com.
That's preparewithsmith.com.
And if you go there right now, you can get $300 off the mega three-month food kit.
The Google Intelligence Scandal00:14:52
You got to check out this deal.
It's a limited time only.
So make sure to go to preparewithsmith.com right now for $300 off the mega three-month food kit.
All right, let's get back into the show.
But in this one, he actually says that they came to him saying there was going to be a Russian disinformation campaign involving the Biden family and Burisma.
It says that they specifically mentioned Burisma, which of course, if you guys don't remember, is the Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter Biden a ton of money to bribe the new regime, which they were kind of acknowledging was really propped up by the U.S. because it was.
That is wild.
That is really wild to have that acknowledgement that they somehow the feds knew about the laptop ahead of time.
And to get ahead of the story, which look from their perspective, they weren't, they didn't think this was a Russian op, right?
Like they knew it wasn't, but to get ahead of a story because it was going to be politically damaging for the candidate they wanted to win, that the FBI would pressure Facebook from censoring into censoring this stuff is it is pretty wild.
Pretty wild to see that.
I think the FBI should be more neutral with our campaign cycle.
And so to pressure an organization to remove a story, I guess on the basis that it under all that talk, Russia undermining democracy and then going to an online platform, hey, we need your help with this storyline because it's Russian disinformation.
I mean, to talk about firstly, all of the people that had put out, it had all the hallmarks and that was the big talking point was that, you know, you had the bigwigs of the, what do they call it?
Our intelligence agencies were saying that it had all the classic hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Firstly, none of those people should have security clearance anymore.
And I know Donald Trump isn't talking about trying to investigate anybody, but that should be low-hanging fruit of, I mean, that's not politicians.
That's straight up the deep state.
People unvoted, decided to get involved in an election, made false claims about information, had it censored and removed from the internet.
I mean, talk about things that should be investigated.
Yeah, 100%.
But the FBI made this phone call.
And it gave Joe Biden the talking point that he needed.
So when Donald Trump brought it up at the debate, Joe Biden goes, listen, 56 or whatever it was, different intelligence officials, including four former heads of the CIA, have looked at this thing and said it's a Russian disinformation campaign.
So what do you, and then that's enough for the moderators to go, yeah, this has been discredited.
This is not a, and then Donald Trump is left to go, you're telling me this is another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.
I mean, come on.
But there's at least a defense there where for the normie who's watching it, they could go, well, okay.
I mean, look, Mary's got 50 intelligence officials who all agreed with him.
But very clearly, what was this?
What was going on here?
This is the deep state, as you said, unelected bureaucrats and spies interfering in an election, which already is a huge scandal, but not even interfering in an election because they wanted to shield America from bad information or the American people, you know, they wanted to shield them from some type of misinformation, not because there was a policy objective,
like we want to win this war and we can't have this information about this war come out or something like that, but simply because they wanted Biden, not Trump.
And this was going to hurt Biden.
That was it.
That was the extent of the analysis.
It was that we are putting our thumb on the scale because we want this guy to win, not this guy to win.
And the this guy who they didn't want to win was the sitting president of the United States of America.
It's substantially worse than just some candidate.
It's like this is a scandal on its own.
It's a scandal that they're interfering in elections at all, a huge scandal.
It's a much worse scandal that they're interfering just because they want one guy and not the other guy.
And it's a much, much, much worse scandal because the guy they didn't want was their boss, was the commander in chief who they're supposed to say sir, yes, sir, to when he gives them an order.
Like it's just, it's wild that they're, they're literally, while they complain about democracy being on the ballot, they're usurping the power of the democratically elected president of the United States of America.
And who's doing that?
As you point out, Rob, a bunch of unelected deep state agents.
And yet they still scream about democracy.
It's really something.
Here, let's play that clip that I just sent you, Frank.
I thought this was great media reaction to Meta going a little easier on Trump.
An important point, I think.
Some of this probably is reaction to criticism that they've received, trying to be balanced.
Well, he is running for president.
We've got to give him another chance.
We don't want to be attacked by conservatives as being anti-Trump and all the rest of it.
So clearly some of that factors into this as well.
As though you can satisfy that part of the country or the electorate.
I think that's a fool's errand as well.
But John has made a good point too here, which is that you don't want to, whether you're a company or an institution, you don't want to hand over the keys to democracy to have someone destroy that democracy.
So do you want to be that institution that really helps take down the country?
I mean, this is a business.
So yes, it's a little bit different than a public institution, but we should still be asking the moral question.
I mean, if this was years ago, we would ask moral questions.
Do we want a chemical company as a chemical company?
Should we be supporting weapons of war?
I mean, these are questions that are not new in American history, but we should be asking them.
And Facebook may not have or Meta may not have the same responsibility, you know, as a business and it has a responsibility to its shareholders.
Fine, but we can still ask those moral questions and we should.
And autocrats have.
Can we, we got a comment on this experience?
I mean, well, what is it?
That's the end of the clip.
You could turn it off there.
What?
You wanted to comment on that diarrhea that she just vomited out all over the place that meant absolutely nothing?
No, it's an authoritarian argument that Donald Trump can't win because then we don't have democracy.
And so you're not allowed to vote for Donald Trump.
And any freedom, including information that might lead people to make their own decision and like Donald Trump is dangerous.
And so what we need is full control over the media, not even the media, but all of the internet so that you can't share your own thoughts and beliefs, opinions, or even real news stories, such as it's dangerous for people to know what happened at the border.
It's dangerous to know that Kamala Harris doesn't know any information about what's going on in Russia-Ukraine.
It's dangerous for people to know anything because they might just know their opinions.
It's dangerous to know Joe Biden's senile.
It's dangerous to know that Joe Biden's son is involved in corrupt business dealings with foreign governments.
It's all of this.
Look, it's what she's saying without being willing to admit it, but she's clearly saying it is she's like, look, our model requires censorship.
What she's saying is that's the deal over you.
And if anyone has a different opinion other than me and my friends lording over you, your opinion is dangerous and it needs to be censored from the internet and you need to be punished because the only way that we can continue to exist as a democracy, and she doesn't mean a democracy, but as a authoritarian regime that favors me is if I'm able to lord over you and you're not allowed to have your own opinions.
That's what she's saying.
Yep.
And there was something really interesting in her first comment, which is really, I don't know, I found it very revealing, but she said something to the effect of, you know, if you're trying to win those people back over, I think it's a fool's errand.
Like as if, first of all, as if the decision is that we're trying to win those people back over rather than just a rejection of censorship and a belief in free speech.
But the idea that if you're trying to win those people back over, well, those people are not like some fringe tiny group.
I mean, like Donald Trump got 70 plus million votes last time, right?
Like that's a huge chunk of the American people who essentially you're just like, their attitude is they should get nothing.
That's how that's the believers in democracy is that those people are so, you know, evil.
The deplorables are so evil that they get nothing.
Like, why are you even trying to give them anything?
Oh, their president should get to speak?
No, he shouldn't.
It's a fool's errand to try to give these people anything.
They have to just be told that they're evil.
Just condemn them and silence all of their leadership.
Okay.
What's that a recipe for?
But it is, look, I mean, look, I said this when I was on Tucker's show, along with a few other things.
I essentially gave some advice to Donald Trump, but this, This clip, this letter from Zuckerberg, this should be right at the center of Donald Trump's campaign.
Donald Trump should be making this entire election a referendum on free speech.
And that the only way that this that we save free speech in this country is if we elect him.
That should be what he's running on.
There should be like a few things that he really picks and focuses on.
Obviously, the war stuff, the weaponizing of the justice system against him, just in general, like, you know, opposing the establishment.
But this one right here, and he, you know, if he was just a little bit wiser and a little bit smarter, like he, he would just find a way to articulate this fairly briefly, that it's like, yo, look, like, this is it.
We're all on a, you know, on this journey together into whatever this new age is.
And this new age is like, hey, look, man, if, if the government can pressure a small handful of companies, I mean, who are they?
It's like, it's Google, it's Meta, it's Twitter, and a couple others, right?
But like, if the government can pressure them into not allowing free speech, then we've lost the whole thing.
That's it.
That's the new world we're in now.
And you see, you know, these games, I don't know if you've seen like Elon Musk shared like several screenshots about this, but like the games that Google's playing.
Have you seen that?
Are you referring to with the news searches coming back with the paid for results?
Yeah, like if you falsify the news stories.
If you search for the assassination attempt, it takes you to like an article about Reagan or something like that.
If you search for, there was a point where like if you search for Donald Trump, all this pro-Kamala Harris stuff came up at first.
There's just little games that Google's playing.
These little things where they can put their finger on the scale.
And like, if I were Donald Trump or if I were in charge of the Donald Trump campaign, what he should be doing is threatening the shit out of Google every single day.
Just go, hey, like in a very, in a serious and credible way where he would just go like, you know, hey, listen, as president, you can't get everything you want done done, you know, but usually you could only pick like two or three top priorities that you can get done.
And Google, I promise you, I only have one priority that if I, and I'm not saying to make this threat for once he gets in, he goes, if between now and the election, you are interfering in this election in any way, when I am president, I'm going to wake up every single morning.
And until I go to sleep that night, I will be working on nothing but making you pay for that.
Like he should do, because that's what'll get him to back off.
And that's one of the things you see here in this letter with Zuckerberg and all this other stuff is that, look, the whole tech censorship thing happened because government intimidated these companies into doing that.
They intimidated them into, as Zuckerberg just admitted, into like launching this censorship regime.
And the only way you're going to get out of it is for them to think there's also going to be a price to pay for censoring.
I think essentially that's what Jim Jordan got out of Zuckerberg.
Now, it's kind of unfair to these companies who are in some ways just caught in the middle of being threatened by government on every end.
But if Trump was smart, that's what he would do because he could force, in a sense, Google to stop interfering between now and the election.
he could scare them out of doing it.
And that is kind of what he needs in order like that, that moves the needle to some degree that's not insignificant.
And I think just making this broader thing a huge part of the campaign, which is just like you can play right to like the true Americanism in every person where almost everyone who's not, you know, under the woke progressive spell is going to go.
Yeah, like it does sound like, which side are you on?
The side of censorship or the side of free speech?
That's a really hard thing.
Aside from like, you know, like left-wing pink-haired communists on college campuses, it's a really tough thing for most people to actually say out loud that they're on the side of censorship.
One Minute Campaign Format00:07:29
That's why even this woman in this clip we just played on MSNBC, she won't even say it.
She won't just say, I'm on the side of censorship.
She has to vomit out this nonsense about how it's like, well, do you really want to be an institution that doesn't protect democracy by allowing another candidate to get their voice out there?
It's all nonsense.
But he should be taking charge of this issue, no question.
And he's not really doing it as of now.
So we'll see.
You got to listen to Tucker more.
Donald Trump.
Mostly just the episodes I'm on.
Nah, there's good stuff on the other ones too.
All right, guys.
I have your chance to win SkankFest tickets courtesy of yokratom.com, home of the $60 kilo.
That's right.
Yo Kratom, our longtime great sponsor, has your chance for three-day all access passes to SkankFest.
All you got to do is go to yokratom.com slash skankfest to enter.
The winner will be picked on September 21st.
And they've got other prize packs like Kilos of Kratom.
Where else on earth can you win SkankFest tickets and kilos of Kratom?
Nowhere only at yokratom.com.
Longtime sponsor of this show and Legion of Skanks and Skankfest and all that stuff.
Great people who run this company.
So once more, if you don't have SkankFest tickets, we have your chance to win at yokratom.com slash SkankFest.
Courtesy of Yokratom, home of the $60 Kilo.
All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, do you want to, let's go to this Kamala Harris video, which is, I'm not sure exactly when this was from.
They're asking about the campaign.
It might be from before Joe Biden dropped out.
I'm not sure, but it's been going super viral the last few days and as more awareness that Kamala Harris has not done an interview or a debate or anything like that.
And in fact, last the last time she had done interviews and debates, she did very, very poorly in them.
But this has been going around and it gives you a little bit of an insight as to why Team Harris is trying to keep her away from interviews.
So here, let's play this Kamala Harris clip.
On a different front, Axios this week reported that President Trump, if he gets a second term, will sort of dial back, for lack of a better term, DEI programs that the Biden administration has put in forth.
I obviously know you disagree with that.
I obviously believe that you don't want him to get a second term.
That said, if that does happen, what do you think that would do to race relations in this country?
Well, let me say we're going to win.
So it's not going to happen.
But I think that, listen, we today is actually, I believe, an anniversary in terms of Dr. King.
Right.
And I was just in Selma.
Can you just pause it already?
It really is amazing.
Like just the way she speaks, it's always this constant thing of like, she's like trying to present it in an articulate way, but it's just awful.
Like, I believe today is an anniversary in terms of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Who would?
Who speaks like that?
What a weird way to say it.
You know what I mean, but she's like to her it sounded a little bit smarter, or more sophisticated, or something.
To say, it's an anniversary in terms of Dr Martin Luther King, like what?
What are you saying?
It's the anniversary of his death.
Was it his birthday?
What was it like?
Just say it.
It's just very, very bizarre.
Um, but anyway, I love already the question being like, what do you think ending Dei would?
What effect would that have on race relations?
And the obvious?
It would make them much better much, much better.
But anyway sorry, she's in the middle of going off on a Harris tangent, let's continue.
Well, acknowledge the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
I think it's really important that we, as Americans, always embrace our history, the parts that we're proud of and the parts that we're not proud of but that we can't forget.
And we should all agree that we should teach history, we should learn history, if we're to ever have an accurate idea of where we want to go and where we don't want to go in the future.
And that means also acknowledging the importance of diversity.
It means acknowledging the importance of of, of the fact that everyone should have equal opportunity to compete and and equity, and then, of course, inclusion.
That you know.
Hey, let's look around the room and see who's not here.
And did we leave the door open?
Wow, that I mean.
Listen, i'll.
I'll say this, I don't think they're going to.
I know we only have a couple months left.
I don't think I.
And clearly their goal is to not have this Kamala Harris emerge at all between now and the election.
I don't think they're going to be able to, and it's going to be glorious when that Kamala Harris makes a reappearance.
Um, where she is just, I mean, it is like.
It's like having a conversation with your five-year-old who's got like chocolate all over their face about who ate all the cookies, like it's, and they just start like they'll do this thing, perfect.
Where they just start talking and they're just trying to get words out, and you know what I mean.
This is like what I have a five-year-old.
I'm familiar with the tactics, but where it's like, you know, it's like well, what happened was well yesterday, you remember yesterday when we came to you know, it's just like, and it's like you're just, but she's just trying to like filibuster and like she's like I don't know I got to get enough words together where by the end of those words it feels like I answered this question, but she adds in all of these extra things that are unnecessary.
You know what I mean.
Like she'll be like, and you have to teach history and embrace history, and not just the history we like, but the history we don't like.
And then we know where we're going and we know where we want to go and we know Where we don't want to go.
It's like, oh my God, why was it necessary to use all of these words to say that?
It's funny because, you know, you see this, I've seen this a lot.
I know I've talked about this on the show before, but from my, in my time doing like cable news shows, which I've done a bunch of cable news shows.
I do a lot less now, but I've done a lot of them in my time.
And there'd be this weird format where, you know, you have maybe a minute to talk.
Like if you get a minute uninterrupted on cable news, that's pretty good.
Quite often you have less than that.
And quite often you get interrupted in between that time.
But there would be people there who do this for a living.
And they would do stuff like this, where you're almost trying to use filler and just kind of run out the clock.
And you're like, dude, it's a minute.
It's a minute.
I'm over here.
If I have a minute on TV, immediately in my mind, I'm like, how do I cram the five most important things that I want to say into this minute?
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm going to speak fast.
Running Out The Clock00:02:39
I'm going to try to get them all out.
I'm going to try to hit every point I can because it's only a minute.
And this is a topic that obviously you could speak about for five hours.
So you got to cram all of that into a minute.
But then there's these other people who it's like, oh, you just so have nothing to say that even in a minute, you have all of this filler and all of this unnecessary nonsense.
I mean, like, Kamala Harris is asked such a broad question, and it's one of the issues she cares about.
DEI, go.
There's a broad question.
Trump wants to get rid of it.
What do you think?
And you have nothing.
You don't have one point.
There wasn't one point in any of that.
It's all just nonsense vomit.
I'm telling you, I cannot wait for this Kamala Harris to emerge.
At some point, at some point, she's gone.
I know, I know, even inside Kamala Harris, she's trying to keep dumb Kamala Harris deep down in there, but you know, she wants to come out.
You know, she wants to come out and walk around a little bit, see what's going on in this presidential election.
I can't wait till she comes out.
At some point, they all want off the teleprompter.
They start buying what they're selling and going, Hey, I'm smart enough for this job.
I'm going to be president.
Let people, let me tell people what I actually think.
And she's just one news question away from blowing up the whole campaign.
Yeah, it really is.
Well, there's something to that, right?
Like it's a really interesting insight that you made there that there is something about like, it's the way human psychology kind of works, but it's very easy to start buying the hype, especially when you're put in that situation when everybody's talking about you like you're this cultural phenomenon.
Yeah, I am kind of.
You know what I mean?
Like there's a weird, you know, it's like, I'm sure almost everyone's experienced this.
Me and you, Rob, aren't really suit and tie guys, but you've put on a suit and tie before.
And there is something about the feeling when you put on a suit and tie, you just feel a little bit different about yourself.
And you kind of notice it as you walk around.
Like if you put on a real nice suit and you're kind of like, hey, I'm, I'm an important guy in a suit.
It just starts to kind of feel that way.
And I know, particularly from like doing stand-up comedy, there's, there's a certain, like if you can remember back to when you first started stand-up, Rob, there's a, there's a feeling you have almost in your, there's a nervousness that you can't really recreate today.
Cause back then you're almost like, I don't know, dude, am I a fraud?
Like, am I this thing?
I'm pretending I'm this thing, but I'm not really this thing.
But after a while, you're like, yeah, this is me.
Feeling Important In A Suit00:01:12
I don't know.
This is who I am.
This is what I do.
When you go out to do a show now, it's like, yeah, all of these people paid to see you because they know that you're Rob Bernstein, the comedian.
And this is what you do.
And it just kind of becomes natural.
But it's very, you know, it's the old saying of that you were born on third base and you feel like you hit a triple type deal.
Like it's very easy for human beings.
If you put them in a beautiful house and you give them a fancy title and you start telling them they're really great, it's very easy for humans to start going, yeah, I am pretty great.
Yeah, this all feels just about right.
You know what I mean?
And I bet there is some of that happening with her.
And that's what brings out dumb Kamala Harris.
And I cannot wait for it.
I genuinely cannot.
All right.
We're going to wrap up on that.
Thank you guys very much for listening.
I got Nicole Shanahan coming back on the show tomorrow.
So RFK's running mate.
And we'll be talking a lot about this decision to get behind Donald Trump.