Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - 2024 Recap
Aired: 2025-01-01
Duration: 01:02:04


=== The Craziest Year Yet (09:06) ===

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[00:00:33]  All right, let's start the show.
[00:00:41]  What's up, what's up, everybody?
[00:00:43]  Last episode of 2024.
[00:00:47]  Of course, I'm Dave Smith, and I'm joined by Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
[00:00:51]  How are you doing?
[00:00:51]  Happy New Year, sir.
[00:00:53]  Happy New Year's, Mr. Smith.
[00:00:55]  It's 2024 is going to be over in, well, a few hours.
[00:01:06]  It is, wow, what a year.
[00:01:08]  What a year it's been.
[00:01:09]  This is our, this has become a tradition on the show where on New Year's, we do a year in review episode.
[00:01:16]  And, you know, I'm not sure we can cover everything from this year because this has been a wild one.
[00:01:23]  I think, I think it's safe to say that this was the craziest year that we've been covering this stuff.
[00:01:30]  Me and you have been doing.
[00:01:32]  So I started this podcast in, I believe it was in 2012 when I first started it.
[00:01:42]  And I was fairly inconsistent with it at the beginning, and then I stopped for a little bit.
[00:01:46]  Then I came back to doing it.
[00:01:48]  I want to say, was it 2017 that you joined the podcast?
[00:01:56]  I want to say sounds about right.
[00:01:58]  I want to say it was somewhere around there.
[00:01:59]  I remember, I mean, I remember doing the reaction episode to the 2016 election with Mike Brancatelli, who was in Rob's slot years before Rob came on.
[00:02:15]  So it must have been the next year in 2017 when you came on.
[00:02:18]  So we've been at this together now for a while.
[00:02:21]  It's been quite a while of me and you doing the show together.
[00:02:25]  And I just never, I remember after 2020 thinking like, well, this is the craziest year we've ever covered.
[00:02:35]  And nothing could ever top that.
[00:02:36]  You know, like the year of lockdowns and riots and all of this crazy shit.
[00:02:42]  It was just wild.
[00:02:44]  And I was thinking about this earlier today.
[00:02:46]  And I don't know, Rob, I mean, you tell me.
[00:02:47]  I think 2024 topped it in terms of like a crazy year.
[00:02:51]  As crazy as COVID and lockdowns and all of that stuff was, this year, just as I'm almost like, as we're going back, like, what are the big events to cover?
[00:02:59]  You're like, wow, this one, to me, was the craziest year of politics to be covering and doing a show about.
[00:03:06]  It really was just truly wild.
[00:03:08]  I don't know.
[00:03:08]  What do you think, Rob?
[00:03:09]  2024 or just a year?
[00:03:10]  It sure is a loony year of assassinations, presidents with dementia, stirring up wars.
[00:03:16]  But if I had to pick one, I would go the primetime COVID year when they shut down.
[00:03:21]  I guess in terms of one story, probably there's nothing as big as shutting down the country.
[00:03:28]  But in terms of like every story, well, look, we'll jump into it as we wrap up this year.
[00:03:35]  And I have a feeling 2025 is going to be a pretty interesting year too, although in a different way.
[00:03:40]  It does, it feels to me, Rob, and I'm not a kook.
[00:03:48]  people who listen to show, I'm really not like, in terms of like, I'm not like, I mean, I, I'm sure I would be considered a conspiracy theorist by some people, but really, I think just an anti-Semite.
[00:04:02]  Well, that's, that's clear.
[00:04:05]  If my Twitter replies are any indication, I've been informed by many people that I'm a self-hating Jew.
[00:04:12]  But there something, like, I'm not, I don't get into kooky conspiracies.
[00:04:19]  Anybody, listen, if you're paying attention, you're a conspiracy theorist to some degree.
[00:04:22]  Or if you're paying attention and being honest, you to some degree believe in conspiracies.
[00:04:27]  But I don't get into like real kooky stuff.
[00:04:30]  And I don't like, I don't, like, talk a lot about spirituality or things like that.
[00:04:36]  I will say there was a feeling, particularly from like November 5th on, then the end of this year, but even a little bit before that, it did feel like, you know, when people talk about like the fourth turning or like, it felt like there was like some new chapter that we entered where like almost like there it was a massive realignment politically, culturally.
[00:05:04]  Like Donald Trump is about to be sworn in as president again, and there's not even that much hysteria about it.
[00:05:10]  It seems like it's just kind of been accepted.
[00:05:13]  And I don't know, it's just, it's, it's wild to me.
[00:05:17]  And it was something that I got wrong, which I'm not known for doing.
[00:05:22]  But something I got wrong this year was that I just, to me, it seemed like all of the signals, like coming into 2024, I was like, look, all the signals are they're not going to allow this guy, Donald Trump, to win the presidency.
[00:05:37]  Like they'll do anything to steal it from him.
[00:05:39]  And it certainly does seem like they tried just about everything and it failed.
[00:05:45]  But then Trump made peace with Nets and Yahoo.
[00:05:48]  Well, yeah, something, something happened.
[00:05:51]  But anyway, that's just like kind of my, almost like my biggest takeaway from the year is that it seems like we've just entered a new chapter where there's a whole different dynamic.
[00:06:02]  And now, you know, we're getting ready to go into a second Trump term without the hysterical left, it seems.
[00:06:09]  It looks like the Trump temper tantrum has come to an end.
[00:06:13]  And on top of that, I believe, at least for now, it feels like we're done with the woke nonsense, which is particularly relevant for what I've come up with now from, I guess, year eight to year 12 in comedy, or maybe even earlier.
[00:06:28]  Let's go year six or seven in comedy to year 11 or whatever the hell I am.
[00:06:32]  I don't really keep track of these things.
[00:06:35]  But there was definitely the woke landscape and having to, you know, pick if you want to be completely outside of the mainstream and just do what you're going to do, which was kind of nice that I relegated myself to that early.
[00:06:46]  But it does seem like the wheel is turning and that we're kind of done with that shit.
[00:06:51]  I think that quite possibly the two biggest results of 2024 are the death of wokeism and the corporate media.
[00:07:05]  And those are, you know, look, you never know for sure with any of these things.
[00:07:10]  And it's, you know, perhaps they both re-emerge in some way.
[00:07:14]  I don't think they will.
[00:07:15]  I think they're kind of, I think they've both seen their heyday and are now in real trouble.
[00:07:23]  But there's this.
[00:07:24]  It'll be like grunge music.
[00:07:25]  You'll still have some people holding on to it.
[00:07:28]  Yes, that's right.
[00:07:28]  There'll still be some people today who swear to you that Nirvana is one of the greatest bands that ever existed.
[00:07:34]  But then there'll be the broad consensus amongst adults.
[00:07:37]  It's like, no, they are not.
[00:07:39]  They were.
[00:07:39]  They're certainly not the greatest.
[00:07:40]  I don't want to shit on Nirvana.
[00:07:41]  I like Nirvana.
[00:07:43]  They had some good songs.
[00:07:44]  I'm not even trash.
[00:07:44]  I'm not trashing Nirvana.
[00:07:46]  I'm just saying they're not what they were built up to be by their most hardcore fans.
[00:07:50]  I'm sorry, I'm pissing a demographic off unnecessarily on this.
[00:07:54]  I don't even have that strong opinions on that.
[00:07:55]  I don't think there's that many people holding on to Nirvana as number one.
[00:08:01]  Probably not that many.
[00:08:02]  But there was a time when lots of people would have sworn that they were number one.
[00:08:07]  Anyway.
[00:08:08]  And I've heard Eddie Vetter pitch abortions too many times to think that guy's cool anymore.
[00:08:13]  Yeah, there you go.
[00:08:17]  I will say, so the death of wokeism and the death of the corporate media, or at least they're being tremendously damaged this year.
[00:08:27]  And of course, there's something about them where they kind of go hand in hand.
[00:08:30]  And obviously, like the corporate media used wokeism as a tool constantly.
[00:08:36]  But it does seem to me that there is something where both of them needed to die in order for us to have a chance at anything.
[00:08:48]  Now, that doesn't mean that all the problems are solved because they're gone.
[00:08:54]  And it doesn't mean that there aren't bad alternatives that can also rise up.
[00:08:59]  But they both had to die because you can't even start to have a conversation with those forces around.

=== Why Wokeness Must Die (04:12) ===

[00:09:06]  Like the kind of at the core of wokeism is in opposition to free speech.
[00:09:20]  And one of the things, you know, this was like one of the points that early Jordan Peterson used to make.
[00:09:26]  And early Jordan Peterson was great before he became political and went to the Daily Wire and all this stuff.
[00:09:31]  But like when he was just a cultural figure.
[00:09:32]  We have to protect the Jews.
[00:09:34]  The Israel doesn't have enough.
[00:09:37]  Yeah, it's well, look, man, I mean, he's like said it himself.
[00:09:40]  Get your act together and give money to Jews.
[00:09:43]  Right, right, yeah.
[00:09:47]  Well, he's look, he's made the point himself before, but sometimes being like being highly intelligent, particularly high verbal intelligence, is a great quality, but it's also a dangerous one.
[00:10:02]  And there's something dangerous about a person who has very high verbal intelligence because they can take a bad position and rationalize it very well and make very compelling arguments for very bad positions.
[00:10:16]  And anyway, but one of the points that he made, which I always thought was very interesting, this is early Jordan Peterson.
[00:10:21]  And of course, he rose to fame for anybody who doesn't know that he was battling wokeism on college campuses and well, in Toronto.
[00:10:29]  And then more generally, just kind of got into, you know, I don't know, picking fights with, you know, trans activists and stuff like that.
[00:10:38]  I shouldn't say picking fights, responding to their insanity.
[00:10:41]  But one of the points that he would make at the beginning was, you know, there was this bill.
[00:10:47]  It was a bill C16, I believe.
[00:10:50]  And it was about like it was compelled speech was his big beef with it.
[00:10:55]  That it was essentially it was a law that was like mandating that you call people by their preferred pronouns or something like that.
[00:11:02]  And he took a big stand against this.
[00:11:04]  And he was like, listen, this is not a small deal.
[00:11:07]  This is a huge deal.
[00:11:08]  You cannot have compelled speech laws.
[00:11:11]  And he started talking about freedom of speech.
[00:11:15]  And I think I always had the attitude that, which I still do, but I always had the attitude that freedom of speech was a good in and of itself.
[00:11:26]  That like I don't need, you know, in the same sense that like the Declaration of Independence just says God wants people to be free.
[00:11:34]  And it's like, there's no more explanation needed than that.
[00:11:37]  Like liberty isn't something that you should even have to debate.
[00:11:41]  It's your birthright.
[00:11:42]  It's a natural right.
[00:11:44]  And same with freedom of speech.
[00:11:46]  You have the right to say what you want to say, and that's a value in itself.
[00:11:49]  And what I mean by that is that it would be evil to stop somebody's ability to say what they want to say, regardless of whether it's a good point or whether it's true or what it doesn't matter.
[00:12:02]  You're a human being.
[00:12:03]  You're not a slave.
[00:12:04]  You're a free man.
[00:12:05]  And you have the right to express yourself and women too.
[00:12:10]  If women could do it a little less, we would all appreciate it.
[00:12:12]  But whatever, you do have the right to do it.
[00:12:15]  But the point that Jordan Peterson made, which I thought I remember at the time being like, oh, yeah, there's really something to this, was that he was like, freedom of speech is also necessary for consequentialist reasons.
[00:12:32]  That you can't, you need to have freedom of speech so that we can figure things out.
[00:12:38]  And then if I can't say whatever I want to say and then you can't respond to that and you, we can't synthesize and get to the best idea.
[00:12:44]  Like we can't get there if we're anyway, my broader point is that what wokeism would do is that they, what's known as woke, you know, these days, is that they would lay down landmines all around any controversial opinion.
[00:13:02]  So it's like there'd be these things where it's like, okay, whether it's trans kids or, you know, tax policy or war or whatever it is, if there are all these landmines around and everybody feels like they can't speak their mind, then we can never get anywhere, you know?

=== A Revolutionary Election Year (10:51) ===

[00:13:19]  And so like wokeism almost has to die in order for us to even have a shot to start thinking through these ideas and talking about them.
[00:13:28]  And then also with the corporate media, they just had to die.
[00:13:33]  It's just like this state-sponsored propaganda machine that's purpose is to ruin anybody who might be a threat to the regime's power.
[00:13:44]  And so I will say that while, look, America is still a mess in a lot of ways.
[00:13:52]  We have two very dangerous proxy wars going on.
[00:13:55]  We're $35 trillion in debt.
[00:13:57]  We have a very dumbed down culture and still very kind of hot racial and political and cultural divides in this country.
[00:14:10]  The dollar is in bad shape.
[00:14:12]  We've got a lot of issues.
[00:14:14]  But I do leave 2024 feeling very optimistic.
[00:14:19]  Like I think that coming into this year, if I had gotten to see at the beginning everything that happened, it'd be like, whoa, this was really a remarkably revolutionary year in this country.
[00:14:35]  And I do think we go into 2025 with, like, I would say the prospects for liberty, the prospects for prosperity are just, to me at least, look better than I could have imagined.
[00:14:48]  Like, I feel better about the future of the country than I have at least since the COVID insanity.
[00:14:56]  I don't know how you feel, Rob culturally and from a freedom of speech perspective and maybe putting the deep state a little bit on its toes, except for the whole Israel war funding thing, all seems exciting.
[00:15:09]  However, Trump, he's a low interest guy, and he wants to spend as much as anyone's ever spent.
[00:15:15]  And it seems like we're coming to the end of pretending like we're in a good economy here.
[00:15:21]  With, I don't want to get into much trouble with Gene, but boosted job numbers.
[00:15:24]  I'll just float it.
[00:15:26]  I'll take an angry email.
[00:15:28]  An angry Epstein email.
[00:15:32]  I just wonder when the, I mean, the problem with screaming about the bill coming due on all the government spending and what it's done to prop up the markets and when some of these bubbles are going to burst, you become a broken record who seems to be wrong for over a decade.
[00:15:46]  But I feel like that problem continues to linger.
[00:15:50]  And I don't think Donald Trump's any better on actual fiscal policy.
[00:15:54]  So I think that's a problem coming into this next year.
[00:15:57]  But a lot of the biggest stupidity of the woke culture, censoring the internet, having an open border, and a lot of the other shenanigans that we've had to deal with does seem to be going away.
[00:16:09]  Yeah.
[00:16:10]  Yeah.
[00:16:10]  No, I think I agree with all of that.
[00:16:12]  I think that's spot on.
[00:16:13]  All right.
[00:16:13]  So let's just get into it.
[00:16:15]  Biggest stories of the year.
[00:16:18]  I think I got to start with the number one.
[00:16:20]  I just think the biggest story of the year is the Trump assassination attempt.
[00:16:25]  And I think that's the problem.
[00:16:26]  I think the analytics are behind you.
[00:16:28]  Yeah.
[00:16:28]  Well, I mean, look, like Donald Trump, the man who has you kind of can't overstate this, right?
[00:16:36]  Like, and that's why I like to do these episodes sometimes because when we do the show three days a week, four days a week now, you know, you're in the news cycle.
[00:16:44]  You're talking about the latest thing.
[00:16:45]  But it's good sometimes to try to zoom out and look at the big picture, as I regularly try to do.
[00:16:51]  Donald Trump in 2016, you just can't overstate how incredible what he pulled off was.
[00:16:58]  Donald Trump is the, however you feel about him, 2016 was historic.
[00:17:04]  He was the first president in the history of the United States of America who had zero political or military experience.
[00:17:13]  The only one.
[00:17:15]  There was no other.
[00:17:16]  Every single president in the history, you know, you go look on, you know, they have like those rulers with all the presidents on the back of them.
[00:17:24]  Every single one of them was either in the military at a very high level, like a general, like Eisenhower or something like that, like a five-star general, or they had a bunch of political experience.
[00:17:35]  They all came from kind of like political royalty.
[00:17:39]  Donald Trump's the only one.
[00:17:41]  And in order to win in 2016, he had to defeat the two most powerful political families in modern American history.
[00:17:51]  In my lifetime, no question about it.
[00:17:53]  He took out the Bushes and the Clintons.
[00:17:57]  It's just an unbelievable accomplishment.
[00:18:00]  Okay.
[00:18:01]  So he does that in 2016.
[00:18:04]  He is then, after the year of 2020, he loses to Joe Biden.
[00:18:08]  People can feel however they feel about that election, but the final result was that, you know, Joe Biden became president.
[00:18:18]  Less than two months after that, you have January 6th.
[00:18:23]  After January 6th, Donald Trump is finished.
[00:18:29]  I mean, as finished as any political figure could be.
[00:18:33]  He even had to come out and denounce January 6th and throw his own people under the bus and then admit that Joe Biden will be the president.
[00:18:41]  He gets on a plane, doesn't show up to the inauguration, the first president in my lifetime to not even show up to the inauguration for the next one.
[00:18:48]  Even amongst Trump voters, most of them are just tired and over it.
[00:18:54]  After the year that was 2020, just such a disaster.
[00:18:58]  The guy whose big pitch was, you'll get so tired of winning.
[00:19:01]  And in his last year was nothing but losing.
[00:19:05]  Then he loses the election.
[00:19:06]  Then there's this thing that they make out to be an insurrection.
[00:19:11]  And he is done.
[00:19:13]  He's done.
[00:19:15]  Then on top of that, he's got the legal system weaponized against him.
[00:19:20]  His home in Mar-a-Lago is raided.
[00:19:22]  He's convicted of felonies.
[00:19:24]  He is just, and he comes from that position to come back and throw in one more victory.
[00:19:31]  And bad midterm elections in which most of his picks did particularly bad.
[00:19:37]  Good point.
[00:19:38]  Which seem like, hey, is this the end of the Donald Trump run?
[00:19:41]  And does the Republican Party need to move on from him because he just cost us the midterms.
[00:19:46]  So, right.
[00:19:47]  So this guy somehow is, that's a very good point.
[00:19:50]  That 2022 was a disaster for Donald Trump.
[00:19:54]  So this guy comes back and wins this historic presidency.
[00:19:57]  It's the greatest political comeback of all time.
[00:20:00]  I mean, people were, before this, people used to say Richard Nixon was the greatest political comeback.
[00:20:04]  And just it doesn't even compare.
[00:20:07]  I mean, Trump's comeback is so much more impressive.
[00:20:10]  You know, Nixon's like, oh, he lost to Kennedy and then he came back and won.
[00:20:14]  Like, oh, all right, whatever.
[00:20:16]  That's nothing.
[00:20:17]  But Nixon wasn't contending with the Democratic Party that went full retard.
[00:20:21]  Yeah, well, that's also, that's also true.
[00:20:24]  Although he was contending with the deep state.
[00:20:27]  But that's a whole other show for another day.
[00:20:31]  But so in the middle of this process, as Donald Trump is coming back, or not even the middle so much as kind of the end of it, he is nearly assassinated on national television.
[00:20:45]  I mean, this was something that it was the biggest moment of the year.
[00:20:50]  It was the, and I'm talking about the first assassination attempt.
[00:20:54]  Obviously, there was the second one too, and all of them are very shady, which we talked about before.
[00:20:58]  But when I'm reviewing the year, I'm talking about the first one where he's actually, you know, if you watch the trajectory of the bullet, like they've done all these cool things online, it's about to blow his freaking brains out until he just happens to turn his head and it nicks him in the ear.
[00:21:13]  An unbelievable moment that really did, I think, I just think it changed the landscape of everything in this country.
[00:21:22]  You know, Tucker Carlson spoke at the Republican National Convention, which was only, what was it, a couple weeks after Donald Trump's assassination attempt?
[00:21:31]  It was very, it was very soon after.
[00:21:33]  And the thing he said there was he goes, the first thing we got to recognize is that we live in a new world.
[00:21:38]  This is a whole new world now after that.
[00:21:40]  I do think like it was, there was, it was shocking to see.
[00:21:46]  It was, there's a lot of crazy things have been happening in this country in the last 20 years, and then particularly in the last 10 years, and then particularly in the last four years.
[00:21:58]  But political assassinations on that level felt like something that happened in the 60s.
[00:22:05]  That's not something you really deal with anymore.
[00:22:08]  But it was, in many ways, it felt to me, it was kind of similar to the way I felt on 9-11, where, you know, I'm showing my age here now, but I was 18, 9-11, so I was old enough to like think about this.
[00:22:24]  And I remember, you know, coming out of the 90s and being a kid of the 80s and the 90s, when 9-11 happened, it almost felt like this reminder that history is real and that we're also humans and that we're also a part of this.
[00:22:40]  It almost, it felt like before 9-11 that something like that, this is what you'd read in a textbook happened in 1941.
[00:22:47]  You know what I mean?
[00:22:48]  But like, this couldn't happen now to America.
[00:22:50]  And then when it happens, you're like, oh, we're actually human.
[00:22:53]  We're actually part of history.
[00:22:54]  You know, we're not like sitting above it looking back at the rest of it.
[00:22:58]  Like this is, we're participants in this.
[00:23:01]  And, you know, to think that like in the 1960s, you had high profile assassinations of beloved American leaders.
[00:23:12]  I mean, you had obviously the biggest one being Jack Kennedy getting his brains blown out on national television.
[00:23:21]  You had Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Bobby Kennedy.
[00:23:25]  I mean, these are like really influential leaders who were all taken out, you know?
[00:23:31]  And that always seemed in modern America, just seemed like something that can't happen.
[00:23:39]  And when Donald Trump got shot, you were kind of like, oh, that's like a real possibility that's on the table that somebody could be assassinated.
[00:23:47]  And I do think in many ways, it shook up America.
[00:23:50]  It made us understand how real the game that we're playing is.
[00:23:55]  And the other factor that was so interesting about it, and I remember us joking about this at the time, and I was joking about this on stage that night when Donald Trump got shot.
[00:24:04]  I was at the comedy mothership.
[00:24:06]  I'll be back there in August, by the way.

=== Was It Actually a Coup (08:23) ===

[00:24:11]  But it kind of called the bluff of the Democrats because all of them had to come out and wish him a speedy recovery and denounce political violence.
[00:24:23]  And it was like, oh, so he's not Hitler.
[00:24:27]  So then your whole thing does not actually make sense because you don't wish Hitler a speedy recovery and you don't denounce people for using violence against Adolf Hitler.
[00:24:36]  If democracy is really on the line, then you should actually be happy.
[00:24:39]  You should be upset that the guy missed.
[00:24:41]  That's the only logical conclusion.
[00:24:43]  And so it just had this like double whammy effect of kind of rattling the country and then exposing the Democrats and the corporate media for the liars that they are.
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[00:25:48]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:25:51]  All checks out.
[00:25:53]  I don't know how much to add to that.
[00:25:56]  That lines up.
[00:25:58]  All right.
[00:25:58]  So now the other.
[00:25:59]  It also just made him look, it just made him look super fucking cool.
[00:26:02]  I mean, that's kind of part of it.
[00:26:05]  And part of what just rallied people more to the Trump cause, I think there were two big variables, but one was they did see that the deep state was working against him.
[00:26:15]  And they started to see that so much of the reaction to Donald Trump was actually just a media temper tantrum and everyone actually treating him unfairly.
[00:26:23]  And I've called Trump like the racist old lady being harassed in the street that while she's being harassed in the street, you're going to take the old lady's side and go, why is this person being harassed?
[00:26:35]  And then if you leave the racist old lady alone to say racist comments, you're like, my God, that's a racist old lady.
[00:26:41]  And so I feel like Trump benefits the more he's being attacked because he's not perfect, but the more you attack him, you just kind of show, well, you're not giving the guy a fair chance, which it's hilarious to look at Trump and see him as the underdog that's not getting a fair chance.
[00:26:58]  But that's what they did.
[00:26:59]  And so I think in part, people did realize, oh, the system's being unfair.
[00:27:03]  They let Trump be the underdog.
[00:27:05]  I think that that won him a lot of support.
[00:27:07]  I don't think any of the court cases helped him.
[00:27:10]  I helped them.
[00:27:11]  I think it helped put him in the news and had people going, hey, I don't think that this is the way the system should be working.
[00:27:17]  And then also for, I've said this before on the show, for all the talk of the dignity of the office and that that was the complaint with Trump.
[00:27:23]  I think people did look at Kamala and say, that's just too stupid to represent me.
[00:27:29]  I mean, 100%, 100% with all of that.
[00:27:33]  Yeah, I mean, I think that the, as we said before, I think when they raided Mar-a-Lago is when he won the nomination.
[00:27:39]  I think there was a real shot that he wasn't going to be the Republican nominee.
[00:27:43]  He still might have been, but I think that's what really won it for him.
[00:27:47]  Okay, now the other, the other biggest story right after the Trump assassination has got to be that the sitting president of the United States of America dropped out of his reelection campaign after the most after, okay, let me rephrase that.
[00:28:04]  That there was a coup against the sitting president of the United States.
[00:28:09]  Now, I will say, by the way, you know, I was watching earlier today Noam from the Comedy Sellers had Scott Horton on.
[00:28:19]  And I was watching, yeah, it wasn't very good, but I was watching it.
[00:28:24]  No, I mean, Scott did great, but it's just, you know, anyway, whatever.
[00:28:28]  I like Noam, but I just did not think he handled that interview particularly well.
[00:28:33]  But they were arguing about the Madon revolution, and he was taking issue with me and Scott calling it a coup.
[00:28:43]  And, you know, Scott's just sitting there and he's like, all right, well, call it whatever you want to.
[00:28:48]  Here's what happened.
[00:28:49]  The U.S., through the National Endowment for Democracy and through U.S. AID and all this, poured tens of millions, maybe even over $100 million into a protest movement, then brokered this deal.
[00:29:02]  And he's going through the whole thing.
[00:29:03]  He's like, so what?
[00:29:03]  I don't know.
[00:29:04]  What do you want to call that?
[00:29:05]  So I understand when I say Biden was couped, maybe you're going to argue with me about whether coup is the correct word or not, or was it a coup d'état or a coup d'état?
[00:29:18]  But the point is that like, you know, the point in Madan is that the West backed a movement that overthrew a democratically elected president of Ukraine to put in the people they wanted to get the deal they wanted done.
[00:29:33]  Call that whatever you want.
[00:29:34]  Call it a fuck shit job.
[00:29:35]  Like whatever you want to call it.
[00:29:36]  That's what it was.
[00:29:38]  And whatever you want to call this with Joe Biden, like it is not how the system works or how it's supposed to work.
[00:29:47]  And it is crazy that, look, there's a primary process and there's a 25th Amendment.
[00:29:57]  The Democrats decided to abandon the primary process.
[00:30:00]  The corporate media decided to pretend he wasn't senile.
[00:30:04]  And they all decided, up until this day, not to invoke the 25th Amendment.
[00:30:10]  So instead, they just had all of the big donors and all of the high-profile Democrats force him against his will out of the race.
[00:30:19]  And then he drops out in the shadiest of fashions, the shadiest of fashions.
[00:30:25]  A letter, like not even a, not even an address to the nation, a letter that's not even White House stationary, just utterly bizarre.
[00:30:36]  But this story being, I'll say, second to the assassination attempts, or maybe third to Trump winning on election day and the assassination attempts.
[00:30:44]  But this is right up there as the biggest story of the year.
[00:30:47]  And I'm not even sure which aspect of it, because there's lots of different parts of it.
[00:30:53]  But I'll say, I guess the first part, even before the coup or whatever you want to call it, was just the what I think is even more so than that, even more so than the way they removed Joe Biden, what I think will have a bigger lasting impact was just the corporate media pretending there was nothing wrong with Joe Biden and then that debate performance.
[00:31:17]  Like nothing could have come together more perfectly to just totally destroy whatever remaining credibility the institutions like CNN and MSNBC and ABC News and stuff like this, whatever little bit of credibility they had left was just utterly destroyed.
[00:31:36]  And by the way, I mean, it just, it cannot be overstated.
[00:31:39]  We have a clip here.
[00:31:40]  I saw this.
[00:31:41]  I'm not sure if this is the same one.
[00:31:42]  You said that Trump had tweeted out one of these, but the one I have is from, I believe it was End Wokeness, who is that right?
[00:31:52]  I think it was a New York Post article that had a link to a Truth Social.
[00:31:59]  And the Truth Social was about a two-minute clip of just everyone vouching for how sharp Joe Biden is in meetings.
[00:32:06]  Well, let's, oh, you know what?
[00:32:07]  I think it was, by the way, I should, I guess the, because I'm looking here now and End Wokeness says amazing job to at D Gray Texas 45.
[00:32:16]  So maybe that's the account that actually made the video.
[00:32:19]  By the way, End Wokeness is a great account.
[00:32:21]  Great follow on Twitter at End Wokeness.
[00:32:24]  Anyway, let's play this version of it because it's a fun one.
[00:32:26]  I mean, they're all great.
[00:32:27]  But anyway, just let's play this just to remember that this was this year.
[00:32:31]  This was earlier this year.
[00:32:33]  It's unbelievable.

=== Lessons from the Next President (13:51) ===

[00:32:34]  Does the president have the stamina physically and mentally, do you think, to continue on even after 2024?
[00:32:41]  Don, you're asking me this question.
[00:32:43]  Oh my gosh, he's the president of the United States.
[00:32:46]  You know, he, I can't even keep up with him.
[00:32:49]  The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented and focused.
[00:33:01]  I can testify because I've been working very closely with this president for the past two years.
[00:33:05]  I've been knowing him for 30 years.
[00:33:06]  And I'm telling you, this guy's tough.
[00:33:08]  He's smart.
[00:33:09]  He's on his game.
[00:33:10]  Joe Biden has vision.
[00:33:11]  He has knowledge.
[00:33:13]  He has a strategic thinker.
[00:33:16]  The president is focused.
[00:33:18]  He's detail-oriented.
[00:33:19]  He's always thinking about the big picture.
[00:33:22]  He is engaging.
[00:33:23]  He is capable.
[00:33:24]  He has an incredible record as president.
[00:33:27]  And I'm often with him on foreign trips.
[00:33:30]  He's at the top of his game.
[00:33:32]  So he has a vision.
[00:33:33]  He has knowledge.
[00:33:34]  He has judgment.
[00:33:36]  He has a strategic thinking.
[00:33:38]  I met with the president, I don't know, five or six weeks ago, and he seemed fine to me.
[00:33:42]  I have complete confidence in the president.
[00:33:45]  I have watched him expertly guide meetings of staff and cabinet members.
[00:33:51]  I could not have more confidence in the president.
[00:33:54]  I would just tell you that I meet frequently with the president.
[00:33:58]  And every single time I meet with him, he is just fine.
[00:34:03]  But he is, again, knowledgeable, wise.
[00:34:07]  Incredibly sharp, incredibly probing, incredible command of the details.
[00:34:13]  He is sharp.
[00:34:14]  He is on top of things.
[00:34:16]  There is nothing to these challenges, these suggestions that somehow he's not sharp and he's not capable.
[00:34:22]  We see Joe Biden up close.
[00:34:24]  We know how attuned he is to the issue.
[00:34:27]  And you're going to see how smart he is and the experience he has.
[00:34:30]  I say his age is an asset.
[00:34:33]  He's wise.
[00:34:34]  Yes, he's wise.
[00:34:36]  He has wisdom.
[00:34:36]  He has experience.
[00:34:38]  And his experience, because of his age and his wisdom, has been invaluable to this country.
[00:34:45]  A lot of countries, people who've been in office a longer period of time are praised for their wisdom.
[00:34:50]  I have seen a lot of 72-year-olds not as capable as this 80-year-old.
[00:34:57]  It is hard for us to keep up with this president.
[00:35:00]  His mental acuity is great.
[00:35:02]  It's fine.
[00:35:03]  It's as good as it's been over the years.
[00:35:05]  He's fine.
[00:35:06]  All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong.
[00:35:10]  And this kind of sense that he's not ready for this job is just a bucket of BS that's so deep your boots will get stuck in it.
[00:35:20]  All right.
[00:35:21]  I mean, it really is always just invaluable to take a stroll down memory lane and just remember.
[00:35:26]  Cause it's even, I will say, it's like even for me and I'm me.
[00:35:32]  And even, you know, I live in this world much more than I would ever expect the average person to or desire the average person to.
[00:35:40]  But it's like, even as I watch it back, I'm like, oh, these motherfuckers.
[00:35:46]  Are you kidding?
[00:35:47]  You know, and it does, I know I probably bring this up too much, but there's something kind of weird about, you know, the fact that Sam Harris called me out.
[00:35:55]  But, you know, like, doesn't it go back to that thing?
[00:35:58]  It's like, it's like, oh, we're listening to comedians, you know, and like Dave Smith, like he's the authority on this.
[00:36:03]  And it's like, yeah, I know, right?
[00:36:05]  But the one advantage that we have that these guys don't is that we are not fucking liars.
[00:36:12]  Like every person on there is lying through their fucking teeth.
[00:36:16]  It's so unbelievable.
[00:36:18]  You can't even believe they'd have the gall to make up such an outright lie.
[00:36:22]  Like you could really just say this and attempt to sell it and sound like you really mean it.
[00:36:27]  First of all, half the people up there, Nancy Pelosi hates Joe Biden's guts.
[00:36:31]  Listen to the way she talks about him now, that he sabotaged the whole thing.
[00:36:35]  But we're think about, I mean, guys, anyone who's ever seen a video of Joe Biden already knows where Joe Biden is at.
[00:36:43]  This idea that I've said this before, but I don't know.
[00:36:46]  I'm kind of fond of it as an analogy, but it would be on the level of me telling you, like, listen, Rob, I've met privately with Chris Christie and the guy is shredded.
[00:37:00]  He's ripped.
[00:37:01]  He's in really good shape.
[00:37:03]  I don't know.
[00:37:04]  What are you falling into this right-wing conspiracy that he's an obese man?
[00:37:07]  Dude, that's, yeah, you've seen a couple clips here or there that make it look like he's obese, but go sit down with that.
[00:37:13]  Go do sit-ups with this guy, man.
[00:37:15]  You just cannot keep up.
[00:37:17]  I mean, that's the biggest struggle of going to workout with Chris Christie is I'm just like, will I be able to keep up with him?
[00:37:24]  Like, we're going to run laps.
[00:37:25]  And, you know, obviously he's going to lap me a few times, but like, if I could just keep it within a few laps, like, it's on the level of that.
[00:37:32]  What the fuck are you talking about?
[00:37:35]  That is a senile man.
[00:37:36]  We have seen him.
[00:37:38]  And then, of course, this all culminated in the debate performance that was, I mean, geez, what can you say?
[00:37:45]  You know, I remember saying, I was on Piers Morgan, I guess, the, like, the day after the debate, or maybe a couple days after the debate.
[00:37:55]  And I remember I said, and you know how it is on that show, it's like a panel.
[00:37:58]  So you get a little time and then it goes to the next guy to the next guy to the next guy and then back to you.
[00:38:02]  But I remember I said at one point that I went, it was the, it was the worst debate performance in the history of televised presidential debates.
[00:38:12]  And then it like went to the next person, the next person, the next person.
[00:38:14]  And then when it came back to me, we were on a different topic.
[00:38:17]  And I remember thinking to myself being like, oh, that's, that's so understated.
[00:38:22]  You know what I mean?
[00:38:23]  Like, I should have said something more than that because yeah, it, it clearly is the worst performance in the history of televised presidential debates, but there's not even a close second.
[00:38:33]  There's just nothing that's even comparable.
[00:38:36]  I mean, like if you look back at the debates where people say, oh, this person did a really bad job, had a really bad debate.
[00:38:43]  There were, it was one of the, you know, Obama versus Romney.
[00:38:47]  One of them, they said Obama had a really off night.
[00:38:49]  And Nixon versus Jack Kennedy, they say Kennedy did really good with the television audience.
[00:38:56]  But it was.
[00:38:58]  From the moment Joe Biden started speaking, I remember watching the debate.
[00:39:04]  I was watching it with my wife in our bedroom.
[00:39:07]  And I'm laying in bed and I, you know, like had a snack and I'm put on the debate.
[00:39:13]  And the first words that Joe Biden spoke, you went, oh my God, they didn't give him whatever cocktail they needed to give him or it's not working or whatever.
[00:39:25]  But you, I mean, literally, the first, it was the first sentence that he spoke.
[00:39:32]  And you were like, this is it.
[00:39:34]  He's ruining.
[00:39:36]  This is the moment we've all been waiting for.
[00:39:39]  And this was, I, you know, I had a bit about this.
[00:39:41]  I don't know if it made my last special or not, but I was doing a bit about this in my act that I was like, that's the exciting thing about Joe Biden is that every time he speaks, you're like, this might be the end.
[00:39:54]  Like he might collapse so bad here that there's no recovering from it.
[00:39:58]  And we all knew that.
[00:39:59]  I remember, you know, I could, I have to go back and tweet, but I tweeted something about this the day of the debate, before the debate, that I was like, this might be it.
[00:40:07]  This might be the one where Joe Biden just completely collapses and can't recover from it.
[00:40:11]  And then it was very clear to everyone from the very opening of it that it was in fact that.
[00:40:17]  It was not a bad debate performance.
[00:40:19]  It was a senile old man who had no business being out in public.
[00:40:25]  He didn't look like somebody.
[00:40:27]  Again, Rob, right?
[00:40:28]  Like you can't overstate this.
[00:40:30]  The guy who we saw at the debate and the guy we've seen every day since that, every day that he's been visible, which hasn't been that much, the question wouldn't be, is he sharp in private meetings?
[00:40:45]  Is this guy capable of being president of the United States of America?
[00:40:49]  The question would be, does this guy need assisted living or not?
[00:40:54]  Can he live on his own?
[00:40:55]  Or does he need a full-time nurse with him?
[00:40:58]  That's the question you'd be asking about Joe Biden.
[00:41:01]  That's just a fact.
[00:41:02]  That's just where we're at with him.
[00:41:04]  That's the debatable question.
[00:41:06]  Can this guy live outside of a nursing home or does he need round-the-clock 24-hour supervision?
[00:41:12]  And they're going to sit there with a straight face and tell you it's right-wing propaganda and that this guy is sharp as attack.
[00:41:19]  Just, man, if it wasn't for so many other crazy things this year, that should be the number one story of the year.
[00:41:25]  But, you know, Donald Trump almost got his brains blown out.
[00:41:27]  So it falls down to like number two or number three.
[00:41:30]  It was fun how long that was just sitting out in the open and that if you watch politics on a regular basis, you saw these moments of him wandering off stage.
[00:41:39]  Like there were all these things that the normies just weren't aware of.
[00:41:42]  And I used to say it to people in casual conversation of, you know, that guy has demanded.
[00:41:46]  No, no, what are you talking about?
[00:41:47]  Like people, when you said that, that was, you might as well have said, hey, aliens are actually running the White House.
[00:41:53]  It was total conspiracy nonsense.
[00:41:56]  And he could not have failed harder on the biggest stage in that a lot of people who even just casually follow politics, they'll tune in.
[00:42:04]  It's a little bit like the Super Bowl.
[00:42:05]  You know, you cannot watch a game all season, but people watch the Super Bowl.
[00:42:08]  People will not watch politics for four years, but they'll tune in for the debate.
[00:42:12]  And so if you needed to get your shit together for an hour and a half and just come off okay, that was the an hour and a half to do it.
[00:42:21]  And from the first stutter step that he took, it was, oh, they, they, uh, the drugs aren't working or he didn't take them, just as he said.
[00:42:30]  And he couldn't have failed better.
[00:42:32]  But I mean, we still need an investigation of the cover-up that existed for his dementia and who's actually been making decisions.
[00:42:41]  100%.
[00:42:42]  100%.
[00:42:43]  It is, it's wild that that guy was allowed to be president still.
[00:42:52]  And all the way since that debate.
[00:42:54]  I mean, it's just so crazy.
[00:42:56]  And I think that was one of the, you know, there's, you know, what you're talking about when there would be the, you know, talking to normies and they'd be like, what are you talking about?
[00:43:02]  He's senile.
[00:43:03]  It's almost like, yeah, because the thing is that for most people, I think, I think it's the majority, certainly for large portions of the population, they have to be given permission in order to believe something.
[00:43:18]  It's just the way it is.
[00:43:20]  They have to be told that you're allowed to feel this way.
[00:43:22]  And then if they're told that, then they'll go, oh, yeah, okay, I see it now, you know?
[00:43:26]  But in the same way that everyone, you know, you think about the war in Ukraine breaks out and everyone has a Ukraine flag in their Twitter bio, you know?
[00:43:34]  Black Lives Matter protests happen.
[00:43:36]  Everyone's got that black fist in their Facebook profile.
[00:43:38]  It's like these people, the people who put the Ukraine flag in their bio right away.
[00:43:43]  What percentage of them do you think know anything about the history of Ukraine?
[00:43:46]  What percentage of them know anything about the history of this conflict?
[00:43:49]  Like if I just sat down and just asked them basic questions, not even like what your opinion is.
[00:43:53]  Just like what happened here?
[00:43:55]  What date was this?
[00:43:56]  When did the Soviet Union fall?
[00:43:57]  When did NATO expansion happen?
[00:43:59]  When did the MADON revolution happen?
[00:44:01]  When did the, you know, like ask them any, they know nothing about it.
[00:44:04]  All they know is that I've been told this is the thing now.
[00:44:09]  And so now I'm going to do this.
[00:44:11]  It's just for better, for worse, it's the way people in modern society, at least in this one, the way they work.
[00:44:18]  And so they needed to be given that permission.
[00:44:20]  But the issue is that once they were given that permission, it was over, you know, and there was just no, and there really is something where I think even to just like normies, once you admit that the guy's too senile to run for president, it's going to be really hard to explain to them why he's not too senile to be president.
[00:44:42]  You know, it's not as if there was something.
[00:44:45]  It'd be one thing if, you know, like he got diagnosed with some degenerative disease and they were like, in two years, this is going to be really bad.
[00:44:56]  And that's why he has to drop out.
[00:44:59]  You know, like he's fine now, but in two years, this three years, it might be really, really bad.
[00:45:03]  So he can't sign up for another four years.
[00:45:05]  But that's not what happened.
[00:45:07]  What happened is you couldn't get through this debate tonight.
[00:45:11]  You're not, like, how could you possibly argue that somebody who can't handle a 90-minute debate can handle being commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world, which is involved in two white-hot proxy wars right now?
[00:45:29]  If anybody has an answer to that, if anybody can answer that argument to me, I'd love to hear.
[00:45:34]  I would love to hear anybody attempt to make the case that you can be incapable of debating Donald Trump, yet capable of being commander-in-chief.
[00:45:46]  An argument for that simply does not exist.
[00:45:48]  It's just too absurd of a proposition.
[00:45:51]  And so that, again, was another thing that really just exposed the whole game, exposed the whole racket for what it is.
[00:46:00]  So yeah, that was a huge story, a wild one to live through and to cover and talk about with all you fine people.
[00:46:06]  It's, man, luckily for me, the world has always has handed us a lot of shit to talk about, but that was a wild one and one that I think will, the damage that it's done to the corporate media and the Democratic establishment is just it's immeasurable right now.

=== The Gaza Humanitarian Crisis (10:08) ===

[00:46:26]  Okay, let's uh unless you have uh anything else, let's move on because there's a couple other things that I think need to be hit.
[00:46:33]  Obviously, there's there's we're we only have an hour show here, so I we won't hit every big story of the year, but I did uh yeah, I mean, I guess since we haven't talked about it yet, we really should talk about just for a few minutes Israel-Palestine.
[00:46:51]  Um, you know, this latest war started technically in October of last year, um, but it's been going on every single day this year.
[00:47:03]  And so, really, the bulk of it has been in 2024.
[00:47:08]  I think that while in many ways, in terms of I'll say this, and I think this is very in line with the prediction that you made, Rob, late last year, um, very, very early.
[00:47:23]  I believe it was in October, I'm almost certain when you made the prediction where you said you basically said Israel is just not going to be able to get away with this PR game.
[00:47:33]  Like, they're not going to be able to sell this.
[00:47:35]  There's too much, there's too many videos, there's too many, like it's just too easy to see what's going on there.
[00:47:41]  And I would say that after now having had this, you know, again, I hesitate to even call it a war because war, war to me kind of, and maybe I'm wrong, I could look up like the actual technical definitions here, but war to me seems to imply that there's a government here and a government here and a military here and a military here, and these two militaries are having a conflict.
[00:48:08]  That's not what's going on in Gaza.
[00:48:10]  There is no government in Gaza.
[00:48:12]  There's no state in Gaza.
[00:48:13]  There's no military in Gaza.
[00:48:15]  And it's not as if...
[00:48:16]  And there's no hospitals left to bomb.
[00:48:18]  Well, that's there's, and then at this point, there's not too many hospitals.
[00:48:22]  There's, it's not as if Hamas militants are engaging with the IDF and that's what's going on.
[00:48:29]  What's going on is a captive people who have been occupied since 1967 are being slaughtered.
[00:48:36]  That's what's happening.
[00:48:39]  I would say that kind of my bigger takeaway on what is the result of all of this is that you kind of have almost, if you look at this in two different ways, like politically speaking, Israel is winning.
[00:48:56]  No question about that.
[00:48:58]  Israel is getting more funding than they've ever gotten before.
[00:49:02]  And they're the largest recipient of foreign aid from America in our history by far.
[00:49:09]  They're getting more funding than they've ever gotten before.
[00:49:12]  They're getting more logistical intelligence support, all of these things.
[00:49:17]  They're destroying Gaza.
[00:49:19]  In that sense, they're winning.
[00:49:23]  They had this very successful covert special ops attack on Hezbollah.
[00:49:30]  They got their regime change in Syria that they've been after since at least 1996.
[00:49:39]  In many ways, politically speaking, they are winning.
[00:49:44]  Culturally, they have lost so badly that it would have been like if you had if you were predicting in September of 2023 that the reputation of Israel would take such damage in the next year and a half, it would have been, you would have sounded nuts.
[00:50:09]  You'd have been like, there's no way this is about to happen.
[00:50:12]  But Israel, I do believe, has been exposed in a way that I don't think they're ever going to recover from.
[00:50:20]  And interestingly enough, you know, all of the people who are so concerned with anti-Semitism and the fate of Jewish people and the ones who say that Jews are in such a precarious position and anti-Semitism is such a big threat and another Holocaust is around the corner don't ever seem to recognize that this policy that Bibi Netanyahu has embarked on has actually put Israel in jeopardy in a way that I think would have been impossible for any other outside force to do.
[00:50:47]  Because there were always people who weren't very big fans of Israel.
[00:50:50]  But the way that they, the conversation about Israel has just dramatically changed from what it ever would have been.
[00:50:59]  In the popular consciousness, Israel was like, oh, this was like a homeland for the Jews, the biggest victims of the 20th century.
[00:51:07]  And then they got their own little homeland here.
[00:51:09]  And this is like, come on, leave these nice Jewish boys alone.
[00:51:12]  And now the conversation is constantly about like, how can you justify doing this to the Palestinian people?
[00:51:19]  This has been a real, you know, what's the term?
[00:51:24]  Watershed moment or something like that.
[00:51:26]  But this is really, I think, I think essentially what I'm saying is that your prediction came more true than probably even you could have imagined and that they've just totally lost the PR front.
[00:51:40]  Yeah, by the way, I mean, there was a bad joke, but there was footage last week of Israel.
[00:51:47]  I mean, it was reported took out the last hospital in Gaza.
[00:51:51]  So, which, you know, I don't even know what goes on there now if someone's having a problem.
[00:51:58]  I don't know because this stuff is not for the scattered images you get on Twitter, you don't get great reporting past that to, you know, quite give us the numbers of civilian casualties and I guess what people are going through.
[00:52:13]  It's amazing every time you see an image, it looks like it's the Hollywood set for a single World War II scene that you would film.
[00:52:20]  You know what I mean?
[00:52:21]  It doesn't, it's like, it seems like you can get a picture of any one block and just everything's bombed out.
[00:52:26]  It's, I don't know.
[00:52:29]  It's seems what what's happened over there is pretty terrible.
[00:52:33]  And I wonder if we'll ever get the full picture of it.
[00:52:36]  Yeah.
[00:52:37]  Well, I mean, now we're two years in the running.
[00:52:39]  It's just ongoing.
[00:52:40]  Yeah, I mean, this whole time.
[00:52:42]  I mean, it's just so, and the more time goes on, especially seeing as how there is, like, if you follow it at all, you know, like even just a little bit, it's like almost everybody, every major player, you know, aside, I'm not even talking about politicians.
[00:52:58]  I'm more talking about like intelligence and the war cabinet and stuff like that.
[00:53:02]  They all admit that they can't get rid of Hamas.
[00:53:05]  Now, Hamas has popped back up and all, just like we predicted, you know, that this type of action is only going to create more Hamas or Hamas-like groups.
[00:53:13]  And so when you realize that that mission is inachievable, it's kind of in some sense like Iraq or Afghanistan.
[00:53:21]  It's like, well, once you realize you can't spread democracy there, well, then what the hell are we doing?
[00:53:26]  What is this?
[00:53:27]  And it's just so indefensible, man.
[00:53:32]  It's like the fact, it still blows me away that people can even try.
[00:53:36]  I mean, watching, you know, I've done over this year, or I guess starting late in 2023, and then this year, I've done a bunch of debates on this topic.
[00:53:48]  And it never, like, every time I'm always just like, I can't believe, even when I see people on social media defending it, it's like the pretzels that you have to twist yourself into to try to justify this shit is just like, it's eye-opening.
[00:54:05]  It's eye-opening because you realize you're like, oh, I kind of get it now.
[00:54:08]  You kind of get how like throughout human history, there have been all these atrocities.
[00:54:13]  And at every single turn, there's somebody willing to rationalize it or justify it or tie themselves into knots, you know, doing mental gymnastics to find some justification.
[00:54:25]  But the bottom line is like, you just can't do this to people, man.
[00:54:28]  It's just so evil.
[00:54:30]  You know, the one, I mean, I've seen so many images of dead kids over there and just like unspeakable suffering.
[00:54:40]  The one thing that I remember always stuck with me was there was this interview of a doctor.
[00:54:46]  He was an American who had just returned from Gaza.
[00:54:50]  And he was talking about how, you know, this is, I guess, when they had one or two hospitals still, Rob, back in the good old days.
[00:54:57]  But he was talking about the anesthesia shortage that was like a big issue there because, you know, they still have a full blockade around the country during this whole war.
[00:55:08]  And they're, you know, they let some humanitarian aid in.
[00:55:12]  And then there's this really unfortunate like coincidence where then they open machine gun fire on the people bringing in humanitarian aid.
[00:55:22]  And we're supposed to believe this is all just an oopsie every single time.
[00:55:26]  Even though it's happened multiple times.
[00:55:28]  But he's talking about if there's an anesthesia shortage.
[00:55:31]  You just like, and then starting to get into what the implications of that are, you know?
[00:55:36]  And you've got Gaza.
[00:55:37]  There were 2 million people there at the beginning of this.
[00:55:40]  I don't know, you know, I don't think anyone knows exactly how many are there now.
[00:55:45]  But one of the things about Gaza that makes it such a difficult situation is that half the population are children.
[00:55:53]  It's a million kids.
[00:55:55]  You know, half the population was under 18, at least at the beginning of this conflict.
[00:56:00]  And so, you know, you imagine you're in a war zone and you don't have anesthesia.
[00:56:05]  This means you're operating on children without anesthesia.
[00:56:09]  Just, you know, this is stuff.
[00:56:10]  It's like biblical levels of evil that you can't even imagine really exist in 2024, but it has existed every single day of this year.
[00:56:22]  So yeah, that's one of the darker things about this year, but it does feel like there's been a real cultural shift that I, again, I don't think they're going to be able to undo.

=== Grateful for This Incredible Career (05:29) ===

[00:56:34]  All right.
[00:56:36]  I guess we could leave it.
[00:56:37]  We could leave it there.
[00:56:38]  Just hitting the big ones.
[00:56:40]  Trump's, I guess the Trump administration coming in.
[00:56:43]  I guess the other thing we should just quickly mention is that Trump's, so far the indications from Donald Trump's appointments and cabinet picks and things like that are essentially, I mean, if I'm reducing it down, a bunch of war hawks and a bunch of COVID dissidents.
[00:57:01]  That's what we got out of Donald Trump.
[00:57:03]  And so, you know, better than we would have gotten out of Kamala Harris, that's for sure.
[00:57:09]  Still far from perfect and a lot of room for improvement.
[00:57:14]  All right, before we wrap up, I do want to say, spend just a couple minutes on more of a personal note.
[00:57:24]  This year has been an incredible year for me.
[00:57:26]  It's been the best year of my career by far.
[00:57:32]  And I just wanted to thank everybody who listens to this show.
[00:57:38]  Obviously, we launched our new site, partoftheproblem.com, and have our own subscription service now.
[00:57:45]  So I'm just so incredibly grateful to everybody who listens.
[00:57:49]  And I'm particularly grateful to everybody who signed up and is supporting the show.
[00:57:54]  We will continue to do what we do and be right about everything and hopefully be entertaining along the way.
[00:58:01]  I do want to thank you, Rob, for another year of being the best goddamn co-host that I could have in this.
[00:58:10]  I want to thank Natalie for coming on and being the producer.
[00:58:13]  And she's done a great job, despite how cruel the live chat is to her at times, blaming her for every goddamn thing.
[00:58:20]  If it snows, Natalie's getting ripped up in that live chat for making it snow.
[00:58:25]  But you've really done a great job, Natalie.
[00:58:26]  You've done a great job as always, Rob.
[00:58:29]  I want to thank everybody with a big platform who platformed me this year.
[00:58:35]  Of course, first and foremost, the legend, the great one, Joe Rogan.
[00:58:41]  Tucker Carlson was just unbelievable for me this year.
[00:58:46]  Like really gave me a boost.
[00:58:48]  And having those two guys particularly, you know, like having the biggest guys in media really not just have me on multiple times, but to really like give me, you know, like their support and endorsement has been, you know, enormously helpful to me in my career.
[00:59:06]  But everybody with big shows, Candace Owens had me on a couple times this year.
[00:59:12]  Of course, Patrick Bett David, you know, debating Chris Cuomo this year was perhaps the highlight of my career and was like just an incredible thing to get to do.
[00:59:22]  And then him having me on his election night show as well was huge.
[00:59:27]  So very grateful to all of those guys and all the other, I know there'll be people I'm forgetting.
[00:59:32]  I really do apologize for that.
[00:59:33]  But Tim Poole, I did that show, I think, a couple times this year and always a great time doing that.
[00:59:39]  Piers Morgan, I got to give him thanks.
[00:59:42]  He's had me on a whole bunch of times and that show just does incredible numbers.
[00:59:46]  So it's been great for me.
[00:59:48]  You know, I'm kind of blown away about this.
[00:59:53]  My career is a bit surreal to me.
[00:59:56]  All of this is, you know, I was always just like, I was just a kid in the Ron Paul army who got in front of a microphone and started talking about this shit.
[01:00:04]  And me and Rob, we were just, we were standing.
[01:00:07]  When me and Rob met, we were stand-up comedians at the absolute bottom together.
[01:00:11]  I mean, the bottom.
[01:00:12]  We were at that LOL Comedy Club that's hanging out, you know, sharing a free beer or something like that.
[01:00:20]  But it's really cool that we've been able to build this thing up.
[01:00:22]  And it's, I just, I'm, it's, for whatever reason, maybe at some point this will change and I'll just get accustomed to all this shit and take it for granted.
[01:00:32]  But I really don't.
[01:00:34]  I really don't, at least as of right now.
[01:00:36]  I think it's so cool that we can go do shows all around the country and around the world and we got fans who come out to them.
[01:00:42]  I'm really grateful for all of you guys.
[01:00:45]  Thank you for listening.
[01:00:46]  And I promise you, going into 2025, I will, you know, if you guys keep supporting, I will continue to put everything I have into this show and make it what I think is really, you know, if I do say so myself, I think a really valuable show in this space.
[01:01:04]  And I think we do a good job of getting a perspective out there that is needed in this country.
[01:01:12]  So again, thanks to Rob.
[01:01:14]  Thanks to Natalie.
[01:01:15]  Thanks to all of our fans.
[01:01:16]  Thanks to all the people who platformed me.
[01:01:18]  Come check us out on the road in 2025, comicdave Smith.com.
[01:01:22]  Me and Rob are traveling all over the country doing comedy clubs in a city near you.
[01:01:28]  So come on out.
[01:01:29]  The live shows are really, really fun.
[01:01:30]  People love them.
[01:01:31]  So come on out and meet us and hang out and grab a drink and all that good stuff.
[01:01:36]  Thank you for another great, great year.
[01:01:39]  Anything, if there's anything else you want to say, Rob, you can jump in here.
[01:01:42]  You want to thank your cat or anything like that?
[01:01:44]  Go ahead.
[01:01:46]  Those were fine and elegant words.
[01:01:48]  Thank you, everyone, for a lovely year.
[01:01:50]  And check out Run Your Mouth Going Live later this evening.
[01:01:53]  I'm a comedy special still out there.
[01:01:55]  And, you know, subscribe, rate, review, masturbate in my honor.
[01:01:59]  And have a great year, everybody.
[01:02:01]  All right.
[01:02:02]  Happy New Year, gang.
[01:02:03]  Catch you next time.
[01:02:04]  Peace.