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April 25, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
44:18
20240425_trump-on-trial-will-he-benefit-bidens-uncle-eaten-
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Biden's Warped View of Minorities 00:14:52
Lying.
Joe Biden has lied multiple times, had to drop out of presidential campaigns because he lied.
Joe Biden has a very, very warped view of minorities.
Joe Biden is the same guy that went and kicked Corn Pop out of the pool because he had too much pomade in his hair.
Corn Pop was a young black man.
I believe Roseanne.
If she says it happened, it happened.
Believe all women.
An important component to a free society.
And so, yeah, leave Roseanne alone.
And I also thought it was quite funny.
Man, that's a big question.
Everybody's like so reactionary in how they view things.
And now you've got the Republican Party who's like, well, you know, screw everything that the Democrats stand for.
Like, we actually think Putin is based and strong, and America's weak, and they have too much LGBT stuff.
I mean, no offense to you, Pierce, personally, on this at all, but I hate the idea of like royalty in politics.
No one even like knows anything about half the people involved, but yet their word means something.
Why are the richest counties in America, eight of the top 10 richest counties in America, all in the circumference of Washington, D.C.?
Why would all of these counties around D.C. be so bloody rich?
Donald Trump is on trial.
He's the first former president in history to face court on criminal charges.
Trump is, of course, accused of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to his alleged mistress, the porn star Stormy Daniels.
But whether he's guilty or not guilty, will it harm or hinder his bid to return to the White House?
Could Trump actually benefit from being once again the undisputed star of cable news day in, day out?
And was President Biden's uncle eaten by cannibals?
A claim made by the President of the United States.
We're returning by popular demand to debate this and more.
Three politically charged titans of YouTube, Destiny, Benny Johnson, and Dave Smith.
Well, welcome to my probably my favorite political trio in world political discourse.
So thank you guys for coming back.
I want to start with a clip of Trump outside the courtroom.
This is yesterday.
It's a kind of random clip of stuff he's been saying pretty much every day.
Let's take a look.
Payment and they call it a legal expense and you heard it today for the first time.
This is what I got indicted over.
This is what took me off and takes me off the campaign trail.
The judges conflicted, as you know.
It's very unfair what's going on.
And I should be allowed to campaign.
And whoever heard of this?
He got indicted for that?
People in the court just said to me, I can't believe it.
This is the case.
Now, Destiny, let me start with you.
Cards on the table.
I've written columns about this in the last week.
I kind of agree with Trump about this.
If they've begun with any of the other three cases, I think there's a far more compelling argument that he should be held to account for them.
But this seems such an obviously politically trumped-up attempt to stop Trump campaigning and to try and make a federal crime out of what is at worst a state misdemeanor.
And ultimately, it involves a possible one-night stand with a porn star between two consenting adults 18 years ago.
None of this makes sense to me to drag in to a courtroom the first ever American president and humiliate him in this way.
But I'm also not convinced if I'm on the left, why would you think this is anything but going to be beneficial to Trump?
Whatever happens, either he walks because one of the jury goes like me, this is ridiculous, or he gets convicted, in which case a lot of middle America, I think, goes, what the hell?
This is ridiculous.
You know, Bill Clinton paid off a woman $850,000 to settle a harassment case when he was president.
He had sex with an intern in the Oval Office.
He never got dragged into court.
So whichever way this goes, I don't see how it does anything but help Trump.
And I just feel like starting this criminal trial litany of cases with this one is a massive strategic error.
Your thoughts?
Well, I mean, when you say strategic error, the implication there is that politics should be a heavier consideration for the particular indictments that he's facing.
I do agree that.
Hang on, hang on.
The prosecutor is a paid-up Democrat, right?
So there is a political dimension before you even... was a Republican and that apparently didn't count for anything.
So I don't know how important the parties are.
I mean, I agree that of the four cases, I agree that this is definitely the weaker of the four.
But I mean, the idea that he's done so much other insane stuff that he shouldn't be held accountable for the less insane stuff he did.
I don't know how that argument holds too much water for me.
I do agree that the misdemeanor charge of it being like a bookkeeping charge is kind of like whatever.
But the reason why it's upgraded to a felony is because the accusation is that this was done in the commission of another crime, which is the obfuscation or the hiding of basically campaign contributions, which I do think is a big deal.
If somebody was donating $100,000 to a campaign effectively and somebody was trying to hide that, I think that if this was a case of like George Soros paying somebody to give favorable coverage or to kill a story for Joe Biden, I think that the Republicans may make a really big deal about it.
So I think that the aspect that these were essentially campaign contributions and that they were done and lied about through fraudulent bookkeeping, I think does make a kind of a big deal.
I think that's worth it to be litigated.
All right, Benny, I mean, my response to that would be, I'll let you do the talking for yourself, obviously, but the catch and kill thing is a time-honored tradition between tabloids and major figures, celebrities, politicians, and others.
And often, as we know with Trump, with the National Inquirer already from David Pecker's testimony, it's being used with them, between Pecker and Trump, to kill off untrue stories, including him supposedly fathering some child of a woman in an apartment block.
So it's not always used to kill off true stories.
It's just used to suppress damaging information.
Trump, regardless of his run for president, was a massive star, one of the biggest stars in America.
You'd have people trying it on all the time like this.
So to me, there's nothing particularly damning about the fact that he may have had a cozy relationship with a tabloid editor.
It just so happened he then ran for president.
Yeah, you're right.
This is just common practice.
These are called nuisance lawsuits.
Celebrities deal with them all the time.
But I think we're missing the greater overall point here, which is that the judge here, Judge Murshan, is a Democrat activist.
He funded, helped fund Joe Biden's election campaign in New York, which went for Joe Biden.
The jury pool being pulled from New York went for Joe Biden.
I just looked it up.
85 points for Joe Biden.
Joe Biden won New York with 85% of the vote.
It's hard to find a more blue district with a more Democrat judge who donated to Joe Biden.
He should recuse himself.
His daughter does campaign fundraising for people who want to put Donald Trump in prison.
She's raised hundreds of millions of dollars to put Trump in jail.
Her social media avatar is a picture of Donald Trump in jail, a Photoshop.
So my question is that we know that story was fake, right?
That was a fake.
My question to Destiny is this.
My question to Destiny is this.
Oh, so wait, hold on.
So his daughter doesn't take campaign contributions to put Donald Trump in prison.
Yes or no?
That particular Twitter account?
Does his daughter?
I'm going to answer a random question.
I'm responding to what you just said was that story that puts out by Laura Loomer that no, no, that's not a fact.
Go look it up.
You can Google it.
These are facts.
So is the judge a Joe Biden donor?
I don't know, and I don't care if the judge is a Joe Biden or donor.
But the Twitter account that you referenced is not the Twitter account of his.
I don't care.
I don't think that somebody's being supportive.
I think the standard should be that every single judge that's donated to any politician must recuse themselves in every single criminal trial.
Hang on, well, let me answer that.
What's the statement there?
Destiny, you've actually hit on the real problem of this.
This is why I don't think any American president should ever go through a prosecution of this kind.
Because the answer obviously is, yes, of course this judge is not impartial.
Of course he's going to have a view against Trump.
Of course it will affect all his decision making.
He's a paid up Democrat.
So that's the problem.
Let me come to Dave Smith here.
Dave, you know, you're neither left nor right.
You kind of sit in the middle as a voice of, I don't know, common normality, perhaps.
Let's call it that.
Not to denigrate my two other fine guests, but on this, I just find I'm really struggling with both the reality of prosecuting a president for such a trivial matter on what I think are jumped up or trucked up charges driven for political reasons, but also just really bad strategy by the political people driving this, thinking this is going to help them.
Trump has been sitting in that courtroom like a martyr day in, day out.
He then comes out, he goes up to Harlem to the scene of a particularly ugly crime where a shopkeeper got framed for murder, then got acquitted and so on.
He then comes out and he's beated by crowds chanting four more years.
He's turning it into a running campaign thing, but he's also getting all the oxygen of publicity on television.
It's all wall-to-wall Trump.
I was in New York last week.
It's not all anyone's talking about.
None of that can be anything, I don't think, given that Trump has proven before his celebrity power can propel him to the White House.
None of this seems to me good politics, never mind the fact the law itself appears to be being misused here.
Yeah, well, look, I mean, I completely agree with you on that.
So almost if we're separating these two things in terms of like the political strategic aspect to it, I think there's no question that it has backfired so far.
If we're talking about the political strategy, you also have to kind of zoom out and look at the optics of the fact that the entire corporate media and the entire Democratic Party told us for years that this guy had committed treason, was involved in a conspiracy with the Russians.
He led an insurrection.
He attempted to overthrow democracy.
And yet when we come down to the trial, it's about falsifying business records, about hush money to a porn star.
So just if you're just talking about like the optics and the strategy there, I think it looks pathetic, which it is.
But in terms of the argument that you guys were just talking on, like there's a very interesting question about whether someone like Donald Trump can get a fair trial in the United States of America.
And it's not, I don't think, as simple as Destiny saying like, oh, if you had ever contributed to the Democratic Party, then could you never be the judge against a Republican?
There's something kind of unique about Donald Trump where he has been elevated in the minds of Democrats to such a unique evil that they will openly tell you, we have lost our democracy if he is re-elected.
You know, literally Hitler has been said thousands of times.
If he is that bad, how could anyone who has that mind state not be doing just whatever they can to try to ruin the guy?
And it does make you question whether it's possible that under that in that environment, he could ever get a fair trial.
Right.
And there's another side to this, which is Joe Biden, right?
So you would think that the Democrat nominee for president would be absolutely milking this in a masterful way to propel himself to stay in the White House.
But this is what Biden said yesterday.
In a sense, I don't know why we're surprised by Trump.
How many times does he have to prove we can't be trusted?
Now, he meant to say, how many times can he prove he can't be trusted?
But Destiny, once again, he's incapable of finishing a sentence that makes any coherent sense.
And this is the major fault line for the Democrats' chances of winning the election.
It's whatever happens to Trump, we know that Biden's popularity is at an all-time low.
We know that most Democrats, two-thirds of Democrats, nearly three-quarters of Democrats, don't think he should be running again because of his age and clear cognitive acuity issues.
When you see a clip like that, and they come every day with Biden, do you not think that it would be smart of the Democrats to somehow persuade Joe Biden to step aside and get a younger, more dynamic person who might have a better ability to capitalize on what's happening with Trump?
I don't know what the backfired thing is coming from.
I don't know if it's just like because we see a lot of crazy tweets on Twitter or X or because of certain talking heads or opponents or whatever, but Biden's popularity on the recent polling has continued to rise.
It is slowly rising.
I think like I said for months now, I don't think there's anything good that happens for Trump from here to the election.
And as long as the economy can recover, as long as inflation is under control, I think it only gets better for Biden from here on out.
I don't think a lot of people are seeing Trump in the courtroom or his crazy antics on Truth Social and think like, wow, this guy is such a martyr for the cause.
All of the sycophantic fanatics that follow Trump are still following Trump.
And the people that really like him still really like him.
But all those people that are kind of like more moderate or kind of not the most extreme Trump fanatics are slowly starting to drop off.
I think Biden's popularity is continuing to rise.
And I don't know why you would throw away an incumbent who's already beaten Trump before and try to run a totally new untested candidate when you have no idea what the opposition research or anything like that is going to be on him.
I agree that Biden definitely has problems, but I mean, Trump has so many problems and he's already lost to Biden.
Why would you run anybody else?
Benny, I mean, there's some good points there.
You know, Biden has beaten Trump before.
This is his argument, apparently, for continuing to stay in this race.
And the economy is beginning to perk up in America indisputably.
And the polls are closing indisputably.
Why shouldn't Biden run?
And why wouldn't he have a good chance of beating Trump?
Yeah, because he's a tyrant who has no base of support.
I went to that event yesterday.
I was physically there.
It was in Tampa.
So I actually went to the community and we spent the entire day there in Tampa at the community college hunting for a Joe Biden supporter to try and find a single Joe Biden supporter since Joe Biden was physically there speaking.
Not sure he was totally awake, but he was there, right?
The physical man was there.
Couldn't find a Joe Biden supporter.
We found thousands of protesters from the Democrat left, leftists protesting Joe Biden, saying he should be locked up for human rights abuses, calling him genocide Joe.
We went and interviewed a bunch of them.
We couldn't find anyone.
We talked to the students.
Nobody even knew Joe Biden was there.
The students were like unaware that the resident of the United States was physically there.
There was more energy and enthusiasm at your local nursing home during activity hour where there's extra cinnamon for the applesauce than there was for Joe Biden yesterday at an actual presidential event.
And this was in Florida.
And I think it has a lot of shit spot to go to Florida and think you can flip this state.
This state went for Trump twice.
But I guess this is my question to Destiny.
Is this state in Florida is a place where the Biden family had a lot of business, a lot of corrupt business in this state.
The DOJ, the FDI have looked into the Biden business practices in this state.
They've had to pay big penalties.
Florida Corruption and Immigration 00:08:03
Would you be in favor of a district in this state that voted for Donald Trump, 85 points for Donald Trump, and a judge that donated to Donald Trump and whose kids are in the business of locking up Joe Biden?
Would you be in favor of Joe Biden being brought to trial for bookkeeping in a county like that?
You would be okay with it because you just said this doesn't matter.
So you'd be all right with that scenario.
Unless the judge themselves have made specific comments about the candidate themselves that somebody can like show me and you can see a clear bias, then no, I wouldn't have a judge recuse themselves there.
The idea that we cannot trust our state, district, our federal judges to do the jobs that we entrust them to do, that we think that they can't give an impartial trial to somebody because they were an ex-president.
Well, then why should we have any faith in our justice system delivering fair trials to anybody at all?
What about a black person?
What about a woman?
What about a trans person?
What if they know you're a registered Republican?
What if they know that you voted for Trump?
What if they know that you supported Bernie Sanders?
Like, no, we should be able to entrust that our justice system will deliver fair results going through the processes that they go through.
If somebody's made a particular comment about Trump or Biden, I would hope they would recuse themselves in that case.
But if they haven't and they just tend to support a particular political party, then we would hope that their allegiance to upholding justice in the United States is true.
And also, this idea that you can walk on a college campus and figure out who's going to win the presidency.
If that was true, then the last election would have been Bernie Sanders versus Andrew Yang.
Since when do we go to college campuses to determine the overall popularity of a presidential candidate?
Okay.
Dave, I mean, I knew in 2016 Trump was going to win because I was down in Middle America a lot doing crime documentaries in Florida, Texas, Alabama, and Poland.
I could feel tremendous heat for Trump and loathing for Hillary Clinton.
So I was telling everyone Trump's going to win and he won.
This time, I have no idea what's going to happen.
I don't think anybody does.
We are into completely uncharted territory.
But for the Democrats, is it smart politics to stick with Biden given the age issue, which is not really about his age, it's about his ability at his age to do the job?
Is it sensible of them to let him continue as a nominee, or should he, as two Democrat incumbent presidents have done since World War II before, which is pull out and let somebody younger take over?
Well, I think he should pull out.
I think if anybody was around him who loved him, they should try to convince him to pull out.
It is elder abuse, what's being done to him.
It does, it feels like we're living through the emperor's new clothes when people pretend they don't see the issue with Joe Biden every time he speaks.
That, you know, I think the logistics of how they would get him out when he's determined to run again and who they would replace him with are challenging.
But the, you know, Destiny made the point that Joe Biden has beat Donald Trump already once, and that's true.
However, it was a very special year.
There was COVID, so he had this excuse to not actually campaign.
And it could be seen as being the reasonable, you know, like the safe choice, or he's following the experts or whatever.
And there's just many differences now.
And the biggest two, according to all the polling, it's immigration and the economy.
The inflation, which I will say, by the way, Joe Biden, look, a lot of the inflation was caused by how much money was printed in 2020.
And then that was felt on Joe Biden's watch.
But, you know, he was still president at the time, and people tend to blame the guy who's in charge for that.
And the immigration thing is just, it's a killer for him.
I mean, after years of being so critical of Donald Trump, for all of the Democrats were for his immigration restrictionist views, to then see the disaster of this de facto open border is very bad for them.
And this is why you've seen a huge shift in many key demographics toward Donald Trump that Joe Biden cleaned up with in 2020.
You've seen huge gains for Donald Trump amongst minorities, amongst young people.
And so this is a whole different race.
We're not running back 2020.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I want to play you, Benny, a clip because I just think it'll make you laugh because you'll know what it is.
And it made me laugh.
Although it's kind of gain a serious point to it.
This is Joe Biden claiming his uncle had been eaten by cannibals.
And my uncle, they call him Ambrose Brosy, they call him Bosey, my uncle Bosey.
And he became an Army Air Corps before the Air Force came home.
He flew those single-engine planes.
He got shot down in New Guinea.
And they never found the body because there used to be a lot of cannibals for real in that part of New Guinea.
There were two problems with this, Benny.
The Pentagon dug into this and it was confirmed that the plane was not shot down.
It actually had technical failure, which led it to it crashing into the ocean, which is almost certainly where Uncle Bosey died.
But there's certainly zero evidence he was ever eaten by any cannibals.
In fact, the leaders of Papua New Guinea now have been outraged by this categorization of their people as a bunch of cannibals.
Yes, that's exactly right.
So two things that trend perfectly for Joe Biden here that he has followed him effectively his entire career and he's built his career off of.
One, lying.
Joe Biden has lied multiple times, had to drop out of presidential campaigns because he lied.
And two, Joe Biden has a very, very dark. and very warped view of minorities.
Joe Biden obviously wrote the 1990s crime bill that disproportionately locked up hundreds of thousands of young black men for having a scintilla of crack cocaine on their persons, whereby his own son had mountains of crack cocaine on him and he has yet to face any type of prosecution for that.
I'm very interested in hearing Destiny's take on this, but Joe Biden has always tracked along these lines.
Joe Biden is the same guy that, according to his own stories, went and kicked corn pop out of the pool because he had too much pomade in his hair and was willing to fight corn pop with a rusty razor blade and a chain.
Corn pops was a young black man.
Joe Biden is a racist.
He says you cannot vote.
You cannot be black if you vote for Donald Trump.
And it's this type of conversation and these types of policies that are leading to, as Dave just alluded to, the largest support for any Republican in my lifetime among minority communities.
That is a fact.
Okay, Destiny, I mean, the trouble with the cannibals thing is that so much of what Biden says from his memory turns out to be completely untrue.
I'm not suggesting he deliberately lies.
He just constantly seems to forget key parts of his life.
And then they don't even apologize.
I mean, the White House press secretary was given the chance to apologize by Fox News, by Peter Doocy, and refused to do so.
Would it not be right for the White House to just, when they get things wrong like this, just to say we're sorry?
The president spoke wrong.
He said the plane crashed in the water.
Okay.
Who says cannibals can't swim?
All right.
We don't know that.
Listen, I understand the spectrum.
A little bit of a stretch, Destiny.
Hey, maybe.
Listen, I don't know what they're like.
I've never met that.
Listen, like, there's always the gas and there's everything that's fun to talk about.
But it says something that every time Trump makes a gaffe, I hear this repeated over and over again.
We are not supposed to take Trump literally.
We were supposed to take him seriously.
When Trump says there's an invisible plane, he didn't actually mean that.
When Trump was like on stage, you know, pondering about the injection of disinfectant into your lungs, well, he wasn't serious.
Well, when Trump talks about cyber, you know, he's just like speaking metaphorically.
I don't know, man.
At the end of the day, like Biden is a gaffe machine.
George W. Bush was a gaff machine and he couldn't even blame senility on that.
I agree that his speaking stuff is a problem.
I definitely think that his memory has issues, but I'm more concerned with Trump like on TV, you know, telling the DOJ that they should be jailing political opponents.
You know, I'm more concerned with the fact that Trump, who's not even in office, you know, we were just talking about immigration, which is a real issue.
Trump is literally communicating to people in the House, like, hey, don't vote on immigration bills.
I want to keep the border open so that when I run for president, I can point to that problem existing.
Trump Blocking Border Bills 00:02:39
The fact that Republicans were unwilling to actually come together and work on what was an amazing border reform bill, something that would have increased the amount of asylum judges, something that would have decreased the amount of people that could just come to the border and claim asylum.
Like these things would have been amazing.
Dave Smith talks about a de facto open borders policy.
The de facto open borders policy is not de facto.
It's de jure.
It's by letter of the law.
If somebody comes to the U.S. and they say, hey, I'm claiming asylum, well, you're kind of, you know, SOL.
Okay.
Well, I guess we've got to put you in the U.S. now and we have to process you because that's the policy on the books.
And Republicans were the ones that stood in the way of actually changing that policy in the House because they didn't want to lose their one issue that they could hopefully artificially continue to, I guess, make this country look bad for their upcoming election, which I think is unpatriotic and I think it's damaging to the United States.
And I wish the Republicans were held to account more for that type of self-destructive behavior.
Dave Smith, I want to get your response to the Kennedy family endorsing Biden.
First of all, I want to play a clip from Roseanne Barr, a quite extraordinary clip she's posted of her claiming to have been attacked by President Biden.
Let's take a look.
26 years ago, Joe Biden raped me right here in that dressing room in the SHU department where I went and changed my shirt.
I was in the Shoe department at Bergdorf Bergman.
Are you okay?
No, I'm not.
I need to sue.
I need to sue.
Now, she was obviously mocking the settlement that Eugene Carroll recently got, very, very heavy, I think, $70 odd million dollar settlement against Trump for alleging exactly that Donald Trump had done exactly what Roseanne is mimicking there.
When she got blowback from people online, Roseanne wrote back on X, I would never insult a sexual assault victim while talking about EGE Carroll.
So doubling down, possibly in a way that is defamatory to E.G. and Carroll and the way that she has sued Trump.
What do you think of that?
Are we crossing lines or have we lost an ability to laugh?
In other words, Roseanne is a comedian.
She should be allowed to do this and we all just accept it as a bit of fun or is it more serious?
I believe Roseanne.
If she says it happened, it happened.
Believe all women.
Well, that's the point.
Yeah, exactly.
So this is, yeah, this is a comedian using humor to make a point.
And yes, I think absolutely that's the, I think it's an important component to a free society.
And so, yeah, leave Roseanne alone.
And I also thought it was quite funny.
It made me laugh.
I mean, maybe I shouldn't have done, but it did.
RFK vs. The Biden Family 00:03:05
On the Kennedys, let's watch the clip of Kerry Kennedy endorsing Biden.
My siblings and representing my first cousins, all of whom, with the exception of two, all who are legally able, are supporting Joe Biden for reelection.
And we cannot stand aside when we have, we're up against a man who says he wants to be a dictator.
We need to stop Trump and we need to elect Joe Biden.
Now, it's interesting.
When I watched her with the other members of the family and I compared them to RFK, who I think's been a really impressive candidate in his own way, I'm not sure this is particularly good for Biden.
I mean, there's the Kennedy magic, sure, but actually the most impressive Kennedy out there is RFK.
And it all looks like in the latest polling that his run could be more beneficial to Trump than Biden.
I think I'm right in saying.
So what do you make of this?
Yeah, you'd think that the relatives and children of Ted Kennedy would know a car wreck when they see one and not endorse Joe Biden.
But, you know, hey, it's crazy times.
But what's crazier is connecting the John F. Kennedy or RFK legacies to Joe Biden.
They have absolutely no similarities whatsoever.
JFK was anti-interventionist.
JFK wanted to end the Vietnam War, not accelerate wars around the globe.
JFK wanted to have major oversight over the deep state and over run amok and run wild intelligence agencies.
JFK wanted a crackdown on the crimes that were actually occurring here.
He was a law and order candidate, and he wanted lower taxes.
And so there is zero, literally zero connection to the legacy of JFK to Joe Biden.
So the Kennedy family is desecrating that memory.
Dave Smith, I mean, does it help Biden really to have a bunch of slightly doddery Kennedys all standing around, some of them looking like they didn't know what they were doing there, when RFK Jr. is, like I say, a pretty impressive operator who's clearly resonating with a lot of Americans?
I don't think it helps Biden at all.
And I mean, no offense to you, Pierce, personally, on this at all, but I hate the idea of like royalty in politics and that there's like, you know, there's this family.
No one even like knows anything about half the people involved, but yet their word means something.
And I'll just say, I mean, look, my first thought about it, and I've been very critical of RFK lately over his position on the war in Gaza.
But as somebody who like knows the guy, it's just, I find it wrong to come out like this against your own family.
I mean, like, I understand if you don't want to support him because you don't agree with him on the issues, but I just could never imagine like if my brother or my sister or something like that were running for something, publicly coming out trying to campaign against them.
Nuclear Weapons and Shared Culture 00:15:37
And I think at least that's that's the way it like it rubs me.
Like I'm a I'm a family guy before any other political opinion that I have.
And it just kind of makes them all feel snaky to me.
Let me ask you, Destiny, about something else.
This is a the big new film in America right now is this Civil War movie.
Let's take a little look at the trailer.
He's American.
100%.
That's what I'm talking about.
Cool.
Just do your dirt shit.
Don't let DC.
Are you serious?
The US states are vaporized.
They shoot us on site in the capital.
I've never been scared like that before.
And I've never felt more alive.
This has got a big debate going, Destiny, about whether there could be an actual civil war, particularly if Donald Trump was to win back the White House with how divisive he is and so on.
It obviously paints a pretty dystopian picture.
People have compared it to the secessionist movements in Texas and other southern states and so on.
But is it a worry of yours that things are so toxic and tribal now in American politics that if Trump was to get re-elected, you could start to see eruptions of civil war?
I mean, I feel like you could ask the question either way.
In some ways, it might be more scary if Trump loses again because we saw what happened last time when Trump lost the election.
The way that I view it, and I don't know, I don't know the beginning, the origination of every single revolt in history.
My idea for the United States is that as mad as people could be, as long as the basics are continuing to run, people have got food, people have got shelter, people have got electricity, I find it hard to believe that people will actually be revolting.
Like there will be open revolt in the streets.
So I'm hoping that, well, actually, no, I'll make that strong prediction because if I'm wrong, nobody's going to be holding me to account for it because society will have to send it into chaos anyway.
So yeah, I would hope that as long as the basics in society function, I don't think we'll head down that Civil War route.
But we definitely have a problem with turning the temperature up on every single political disagreement in this country right now.
Yeah, I mean, Benny, it does seem that way.
And we've got the same issue in the UK.
You know, people just get into their tribes fueled by social media.
They shout ever louder.
They get angrier and angrier.
And you get a sense, which may not be the reality.
Maybe most people are not wandering around steaming with rage about stuff.
But certainly, I think also exacerbated by the pandemic, which I think sent a lot of people nuts and a lot more people online than were online before.
There is a lot of anger in the air.
Now, whether it's real or whether it's slightly misleading because of social media and the noise it generates, but do you worry when you see this movie getting traction?
Do you worry that it may reflect a wider reality about what may happen in America?
So two things here.
One, I can't believe in every single show I find agreement with destiny, but I do hear I like a less politicized America.
And I know that may, that may actually be bad for my career, but it was good for the country, the fabric of the country.
I grew up in the 90s.
I'm 37 years old, born in the 80s, grew up in the 90s.
And I remember a time when you could just, you know, presumably go watch a sporting event without the athletes disgracing the flag, without your beer companies going woke, without your friends deciding that they can't sit next to you because you're wearing a red hat or blue hat.
It really didn't matter.
There were things that we shared.
You could go see a movie without being preached at or scolded or shamed because of who your skin color, your beliefs.
It was a better country.
And to have a country, you have to have something that you share.
There has to be like a shared culture.
And that is quickly being rent in America.
And that is the thing that actually does terrify me.
You need to have things that we all agree on.
And even now, the American flag is divisive to the point that we allow it to be burned in our streets.
And I think that it's a horrible place to grow up.
And so we need to have a shared culture.
And the injection of politics into absolutely everything divides the nation and fractures the place and makes it a terrible place to live.
Now, here's the one thing about that movie that I think is 100% fiction and fantasy is that California and Texas unite to actually fight the federal government.
I don't see that ever happening.
You want to talk about real Hollywood magic?
California, Texas joining teams to go fight a common enemy?
Don't see that happening.
I can't see that happening.
Dave Smith, I mean, what do you feel about this?
It's interesting that both Benny and Destiny kind of found common ground there.
And that's kind of where we want to get to.
You know, I was struck by, for example, Speaker Johnson, you know, changing his mind about Ukraine, for example, and getting that bill through in the end, doing a deal with Democrats.
I actually thought, whatever your view of the Ukraine part of that, which is obviously a major part of that money, whatever your view of it, it was quite refreshing to see a Republican speaker, you know, crossing the aisle and prepared to do a deal for what he believed was the national interest of America.
And I think Trump actually recognized that because he was quite supportive of Speaker Johnson in a way that, you know, it may not have been expected.
So is that the kind of thing we want to see more of?
Well, no.
I mean, from my perspective, I certainly don't want to see more money going to foreign wars that have nothing to do with the United States of America.
But to the broader theme that you're talking about, I don't exactly celebrate the political parties coming together.
I actually think that's when a lot of the worst things that the United States of America does happen.
I would support the people of this country being more united.
And look, I agree with both of you guys that I think I doubt that we're going to be in a hot civil war anytime soon.
We do kind of seem to be flirting with the concept.
And I think cultural divisions and political divisions in this country are the worst that they've ever been in my lifetime.
And, you know, one of the things that I would mention is a huge component of this is that the federal government, starting under George W. Bush, continuing through Obama, continuing through Trump and continuing with Joe Biden, has gotten enormously bigger and more powerful since the 90s.
Like if you're thinking about what's different then.
And the idea that the founders had of this country was a very restricted government with strong federalism.
And as the government, I mean, look, the government in D.C. is the most powerful organization in the history of the world and there's no close second.
They're spending over $6 trillion a year.
And what happens when the centralized government gets more and more powerful is that who controls it becomes more and more important.
If you have a very small government, it doesn't really matter if your political enemies control it.
When you have a gigantic government, it's life or death.
And I think this is a big part of the reason why, as Benny pointed out, everything is becoming politicized now.
And it's horrible.
Politics is like the worst, most corrupt thing that human beings do.
You want that to be, you know, as removed and compartmentalized as it possibly can be.
You know, the one thing, I think I'm a point of unity for America, because I think the one thing you can all agree on is when you start brit bashing.
Then I find the country comes together extremely well.
Destiny, I want to end with quite an interesting moment this week between a podcast in Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson on Joe's podcast, in which Tucker Carlson was asked about nuclear weapons.
And he said this.
Well, I love, by the way, that people on my side, I'll just say, I'll just admit it, on the right, you know, have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians.
Like, are you joking?
Right.
That's just like prima facie evil.
If you can't, well, if we hadn't done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings like, no, it's wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people.
And if you find yourself arguing that it's a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil.
Like, it's not a, it's not a tough one, right?
Is that a hard call for you?
It's not a hard call for me.
So that was interesting.
There's also another interesting Tucker-related moment this week where Mitch McConnell said this about him.
Sir, I think the demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who, in my opinion, ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin.
And so he had an enormous audience, which convinced a lot of rank-and-file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.
So two interesting Tucker-related things there.
I mean, Destiny, on the first point, what is your view about the morality of nuclear weapons?
Is there ever a justification?
Was it right for America to drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to prevent, as they saw it at the time, potentially millions more people being slaughtered?
Man, that's a big question.
I think that in retrospect, I think that we view nuclear weapons a little bit more special than they actually are.
I think that people had this idea that in World War II, when we were fighting with Japan, we would attack a city and 100 people would die.
We'd do a huge bombing run and maybe a couple thousand people would die.
And then the nuclear bombs dropped.
And it was 40,000, 60, that was like, oh my God, it was an unprecedented massacre.
The reality was the bombing campaigns that happened during World War II were insane.
There are huge death counts.
Dresden, in a single day, I think like 25,000 people were disintegrated for the fire bombings of Tokyo.
I think in one to two days, it was, some estimates are as high as 130,000 people were killed.
So I don't think that nuclear weapons should get a special carve-out in terms of like, was it okay to nuke or was it not okay to nuke?
Because the question is, it really has to do with bombing in general and the civilian cost of any war in general.
And any war is always going to incur any war between two great powers or any two people are going to incur a great deal of civilian death.
It seems to be an unavoidable aspect of war.
And I don't think nuclear weapons are like a special part of that because conventional bombing runs and conventional ground warfare have led to huge civilian casualties regardless of nuclear weapons being used or not.
Regardless of your stance on the Israeli-Gaza war, I mean, there's a lot of civilians that are dead and are casualties of that war.
No nuclear weapons have been used whatsoever.
Right.
I think it's a good point.
And just quickly on Tucker and Mitch McConnell, do you think McConnell had a point there?
Do you think that this weird thing where you have a big section of the Republican Party very hostile about helping Ukraine, which perhaps historically wouldn't have been the case?
Is that down to Tucker, do you think?
I feel like everybody, it just feels like we have these reactionary trends where, you know, in the 90s and in the 2000s, conservatives got so mad about, you know, gay people and metrosexuals.
And, you know, progressives are like, okay, well, now we don't even, a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man.
You know, screw you.
And everybody's like so reactionary in how they view things.
And now you've got the Republican Party who's like, well, you know, screw everything that the Democrats stand for.
Like, we actually think Putin is based and strong and America is weak and they have too much LGBT stuff.
And we're going to support every single person that is against America because we think they're stronger, better leaders, and America shouldn't be involved in anything.
And when I look at the Ukrainian-Russian stuff, that's kind of what it feels like to me.
Like I very rarely hear like a principle take on whether or not we should be intervening in that conflict.
It usually just comes down to some weird quasi-libertarian, like, oh, well, we shouldn't be involved in any foreign conflict whatsoever.
And it's like, really?
Is that really the stance we want to take?
Is that how we would have felt in the first Gulf War?
Is that how we would have felt with Yugoslavia or Bosnia?
Is that how we would have felt with World War II?
Is that, you know, should South Korea and North Korea be one country that America never did anything with?
Like, yeah, I don't know.
I don't feel like there's much intellectual thought to mine on the anti-interventionist train of thought that's currently running through the Conservative Party.
Okay, interesting.
Benny, on that first point, the morality of nuclear war, where do you sit with that?
Yeah, so I think also it's very wise to take a step back and look from a 35,000-foot perspective as to what is the industry of our federal government.
Why are the richest counties in America, eight of the top 10 richest counties in America, not Beverly Hills, not Miami, not Wall Street, all in the circumference of Washington, D.C. What's in the circumference of Washington, D.C.?
It is a rat-infested, crime-riddled hellscape that is horrible to live in.
I lived there for 15 years.
Why would all of these counties around D.C. be so bloody rich?
What is their industry?
Their industry is war.
And that is why, in my lifetime, America has always been at war, has been at forever war.
There's always a war that is being concocted and created.
That is the industry of permanent Washington.
And it is evil.
And from a moral perspective, it is evil.
And the older you get, and I have three kids, the more I like think about my kids being draft age, the more I think about like, you know, honestly, F you guys, if you think that like my kids are just cannon fodder for the next for a couple extra points on your Raytheon stock, they're not.
But what about human beings?
And so it's like, you got to step back and say, like, what, why do these people continue to push for war?
Why do they hate anti-interventionism?
And what the hell are we doing in Ukraine?
Because it really is a question.
Is the $60 billion really winning war?
But just on that one point about when America dropped the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they were trying to end an existential threat to Western civilization, the Nazis, was that justified, do you think?
I think ending war is good.
I think ending war is good.
But oftentimes, again, the older you get, the more you realize that war is not a side of like the angels versus the devil.
Oftentimes, oftentimes, war is two different devils fighting for evil causes.
And the people who are caught in the middle are the carnage.
And those are our children.
Those are just normally.
It's never the politicians' children.
It's never anyone in power's children.
America has been led by draft dodgers for my entire life, Piers.
My entire life.
You've had Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Joe Biden is a draft dodger.
John Kerry is a draft dodger.
None of these people have ever served.
As somebody whose brother was a serving Army colonel and brother-in-law was a serving army colonel, you make a very good point.
Very quickly, Benny, just a quick yes or no.
Do you think that Tucker's been the major influence about the anti-Ukraine sentiment?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, interesting.
And a good one and an excellent one.
And something that's really good to shake the conservative side awake and say, which country do you wish to put first?
We're running out of time.
I'm sorry.
We're all running out of time.
Just Dave Smith, just quickly on those two points.
And the morality of nuclear weapons, where do you sit with that?
Okay, well, I just to correct something you said there, we did not drop the nuclear weapons to end the existential threat that was Nazism.
The Nazis had already been defeated.
Adolf Hitler was already dead, and the fighting in Europe was over.
This is why five-star general Dwight Eisenhower was against them.
He said it was horrible, and he also said it was unnecessary strategically, and that Japan was ready to negotiate.
That's an important clarification.
You're right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And on the second point, look, Tucker gets a lot of credit.
He's very influential in the right wing in America.
But no, the reason why the America first movement rose up and why the Republicans have gone more non-interventionist is because of the 20 years of disastrous, catastrophic terror wars, every last one of them being an utter disaster that did nothing but slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, cost trillions of dollars, and leave our bravest young men blowing their brains out by the tens of thousands.
That's what has brought about this non-interventionist streak amongst Republican voters.
Interesting.
Guys, fantastic to talk to you.
Really enjoyed it again.
Let's do it again.
Really enjoyed it.
Thank you very much to Destiny Benny Davis.
Thanks, Pierce, and Dave Smith.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks, Pierce.
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