Uncensored - Piers Morgan - "STILL Claiming To Be The Boot?" Tim Pool vs Dave Smith On ICE
Aired: 2026-02-03
Duration: 32:26


=== Tim As A Bootlicker (14:03) ===

[00:00:00]  When these people come out and go, Tim's a bootlicker for defending ICE, I'm like, no, no, you misunderstand.
[00:00:05]  It's my boot.
[00:00:06]  This is the gayest, cringiest shit I've ever seen.
[00:00:08]  You are an eight-year-old boy playing with action figures right now.
[00:00:12]  If Tim wants to identify as a boot, I will respect his pronouns.
[00:00:17]  Tim, are you still proudly claiming yourself to be the boot?
[00:00:24]  The events of the past few weeks have been emotive and divisive on many levels, including among those who vociferously backed Donald Trump to be president.
[00:00:32]  The attempts to justify Alex Predty's death, for example, sparked debate about the scale and effectiveness of the ICE crackdown, as well as claims of hypocrisy about the right to protest and to carry guns.
[00:00:44]  And Marjorie Taylor Greene summed up the broader MAGA divide in her recent appearance on Bill Maher.
[00:00:50]  MAGA to me meant secure the border, no more foreign wars, no more regime change.
[00:00:55]  We should care about grocery prices.
[00:00:57]  We should care about housing prices.
[00:00:59]  We should care about the next generation.
[00:01:01]  We should care about the national debt, which I think you totally agree on.
[00:01:04]  And we should release the Epstein files.
[00:01:06]  We should have government transparency.
[00:01:08]  That's what we campaigned on.
[00:01:10]  And I don't know how in one year's time, MAGA all of a sudden becomes okay with bombing foreign countries, okay with regime change, against releasing the Epstein files.
[00:01:23]  So that's the split, is there's a lot of people that voted for what we thought MAGA was, and then it evolved into something else.
[00:01:34]  Well, those who've remained in the president's camp have been accused, among other things, of bootlicking.
[00:01:39]  As you've probably seen by now, Tim Poole gave an eye-catching response to this particular claim, and Dave Smith gave an equally eye-catching response to him.
[00:01:48]  Both clips are out-of-context snippets of much broader arguments, but we make no apologies for showing them both again.
[00:01:55]  So the argument right now is this.
[00:01:57]  I'll put it simply.
[00:01:57]  First of all, when these people come out and go, Tim's a bootlicker for defending ICE.
[00:02:01]  I'll be like, no, no, you misunderstand.
[00:02:03]  It's my boots.
[00:02:05]  It's mine.
[00:02:06]  I voted for them.
[00:02:07]  I'm wearing the boot.
[00:02:08]  I'm stomping on the ground.
[00:02:09]  I ain't licking anybody.
[00:02:11]  I'm clapping for these people that I said, please go out and enforce the law.
[00:02:15]  And anybody else who's cheered for, who voted for it too, we're all wearing the boots.
[00:02:19]  You're the one crying.
[00:02:20]  You're the one saying, you're coming in enforcing laws.
[00:02:24]  Tim.
[00:02:26]  Brother, this is the cringiest shit I've ever seen in my life.
[00:02:31]  This is the gayest, cringiest shit I've ever seen.
[00:02:33]  You are an eight-year-old boy playing with action figures right now, but you're an adult broadcasting this to hundreds of thousands of people.
[00:02:41]  Like, this is just so goddamn.
[00:02:43]  I mean, I don't know.
[00:02:44]  Like, dude, this has crossed the line of like, it's not even in political commentary anymore.
[00:02:49]  You're like in some type of fetish right now.
[00:02:52]  You're wearing the boot.
[00:02:53]  I'm wearing the boot and I'm crushing everybody.
[00:02:56]  I crushed you and I crushed you.
[00:02:57]  Like, Tim, what the fuck are you doing right now, bro?
[00:03:02]  Well, we thought it only fair and reasonable to bring the two protagonists together to discuss Bootgate.
[00:03:09]  So welcome to Tim Poole and Dave Smith.
[00:03:14]  How's it going?
[00:03:14]  What's up, Piers?
[00:03:15]  What's up, Tim?
[00:03:16]  Tim, are you still proudly acclaiming yourself to be the boot?
[00:03:21]  Or have you had time to reflect?
[00:03:24]  No, I think the point of that comment was I had made a post on X where I said something to the effect of Preddy was conspiring with a group to obstruct federal law enforcement, did not show up to a protest.
[00:03:36]  He showed up to an operation to obstruct federal law enforcement, resisted arrest.
[00:03:40]  It was an unfortunate circumstance where the agents yell gun, gun, gun.
[00:03:46]  One guy sees Freddy holding a phone in his hand.
[00:03:49]  A gunshot goes off.
[00:03:50]  I don't think anybody was going to that day.
[00:03:53]  This is the gist of the argument.
[00:03:54]  I don't think the agents were trying to murder someone that day.
[00:03:56]  I don't think Predty went there with the intention of murdering everybody.
[00:03:59]  And by saying that, I have these people tweeting that I'm a bootlicker because I'm defending ICE because they went out and, you know, and you've got a spattering of some libertarians that are arguing this is a peaceful protest or just filming, and many liberals making the same claim.
[00:04:13]  And so my response is: I voted for ICE to go out and do this.
[00:04:18]  I was promised in 2024 that Donald Trump was going to employ ICE CDP.
[00:04:23]  They were going to make these arrests.
[00:04:25]  So it's not that I'm defending and licking their boot as they go out and do this.
[00:04:30]  It's literally me saying, gentlemen, please, would you go out and engage in these operations?
[00:04:35]  Now, I'm not happy that Predi died or these conflicts are happening, but these are these are agents enacting the political will of me and many others who voted for it.
[00:04:46]  Dave Smith, your response?
[00:04:49]  Well, I would just first off say that Tim knows that I love him.
[00:04:52]  And we did make up on Twitter there.
[00:04:55]  Can we not start with a mollifying comment like that?
[00:04:59]  Pierce.
[00:05:00]  Piers, you really are.
[00:05:02]  Even in recovery, Pierce is still just sparking fights.
[00:05:05]  I love it.
[00:05:05]  I'm glad to see.
[00:05:06]  I'm so glad to see you.
[00:05:07]  Joe Rogan.
[00:05:08]  Joe Rogan, if I may say, in between, he had Andrew Wilson on a couple of days ago.
[00:05:14]  And in between mocking me for my injury and suggesting I have a 10-year lifespan now as a result of having a new hit put in and saying I was in no shape and that's why this happened to me.
[00:05:27]  Notwithstanding that, he did say that I'm the best cat wrangler in the world.
[00:05:33]  By which he meant I bring guys like you together and I wrangle as you go at it.
[00:05:39]  And so starting from such a peaceful position doesn't appeal, Dave, to my cat wrangling skills.
[00:05:46]  Well, I second Joe, Joe, and Andrew's opinion there.
[00:05:50]  Not the 10 years part, the cat wrangling part.
[00:05:52]  But if Tim wants to identify as a boot, I will respect his pronouns and I will try to be respectful here.
[00:06:00]  I think that I think, look, what the Predty shooting, again, as we know, we've all been burned on things like this before.
[00:06:09]  Sometimes there's information that isn't available, context that isn't available in the video.
[00:06:13]  What we have in the video of him being shot looks about as bad as any shooting could look.
[00:06:20]  He wasn't resisting arrest.
[00:06:21]  He wasn't being violent in that moment.
[00:06:24]  And it doesn't really matter what happened 11 days earlier.
[00:06:26]  Like eight officers have him on the ground, disarm him.
[00:06:30]  Yes, one of them starts frantically yelling gun, and then they like pump nine bullets into a guy who's not a threat to anybody.
[00:06:36]  So the shooting itself looks very bad.
[00:06:39]  If you want to get into the details of that, the real question, which no one seems to be addressing, is what happened right before that that warranted shoving a woman in that manner.
[00:06:50]  For any man to ever put his hands on a woman in that manner, you better have a damn good reason for doing it.
[00:06:56]  And no one's offered one, but what the administration has done is had all of its top spokespeople lie through their teeth, including the head of the FBI claiming that it's illegal to bring a gun to a protest and the head of the Department of Homeland Security claiming that he was there to assassinate a bunch of officers and do as much damage as possible.
[00:07:16]  I think it was Stephen Miller who called him a domestic terrorist.
[00:07:18]  This stuff is absurd.
[00:07:20]  And the broader picture that I think everyone's missing here is that ICE and Border Patrol are not doing what Tim voted for them to do.
[00:07:29]  Mass deportations are not happening.
[00:07:31]  Donald Trump walked away from mass deportations over a year ago when he said they won't be deporting people from hospitality and farming.
[00:07:39]  Translation, in other words, big business likes the cheap labor and they don't want those people deported.
[00:07:45]  And Donald Trump backed off as he has done basically throughout his entire five years of being president, sold out the American people on behalf of big business.
[00:07:53]  And, you know, this stuff in Minnesota, this is all theater.
[00:07:58]  There's like maybe 200,000 illegals in all of Minnesota.
[00:08:03]  They sent 3,000 agents into Minneapolis.
[00:08:08]  We're not getting huge numbers of people here.
[00:08:11]  And instead, what you're getting is you're getting left-wing activists who are looking for a fight.
[00:08:15]  And then Pierce, as I'm sure you've seen, Tim, I'm sure you've seen, which in a lot of videos, ICE and Border Patrol agents who are also looking for a fight, who are going around intimidating regular people, lying to them about what their constitutional rights are.
[00:08:28]  I've seen dozens of videos where these ICE agents are telling people that it's illegal to film, threatening to put regular people on a list of domestic terrorists.
[00:08:37]  Their faces are covered.
[00:08:38]  They're not identifying themselves.
[00:08:40]  They're grabbing people at random Walmarts and dropping them off eight miles away.
[00:08:45]  This is all we're getting out of this is a bunch of violence and a massive provocation of the worst elements of the left-wing activists.
[00:08:52]  It's a huge loss for all of us.
[00:08:55]  Yeah.
[00:08:55]  And Tim, you know, what I think is so sort of weird about this is that there's not a lot of difference between Donald Trump's view of the immigration issue and Barack Obama's.
[00:09:07]  There are plenty of clips doing the rounds at the moment of Barack Obama talking like Donald Trump about immigration, right?
[00:09:14]  Obama, as we now know, deported over 3 million people, but he didn't get anything like the attention that Trump's deportation record is getting.
[00:09:23]  And as Dave just said, he's not deporting anything like the same numbers.
[00:09:27]  I don't understand having had a thumping win on the southern border, Donald Trump, pretty much shutting it down after the ridiculous farce of four years of Biden just opening it up.
[00:09:39]  Having got that big win, why he didn't just do what Obama did a lot of the time, which is he went to the governors of individual states and he said, right, how many illegal immigrants do you have in prisons who've committed other crimes?
[00:09:53]  We're going to deport them all.
[00:09:55]  And that's apparently a large number of the people that he deported were those types of people.
[00:10:00]  Most Americans would agree with that.
[00:10:02]  If Trump just did a deal with every individual state governor to deport undocumented people in prison for other crimes, I think most Americans would agree with that.
[00:10:15]  So why is he, why is he, why has he allowed himself, I think, by people in his administration, like Stephen Miller and others, to be sucked into a much wider, much more problematic program of masked ICE agents running around like a bunch of fascists, as many people have called them, you know, just bashing doors down, running into Home Depot, seizing anyone who might be there undocumented.
[00:10:42]  That's a far more complex thing and far less popular.
[00:10:47]  There's a lot to break down just with what David said and what you've said.
[00:10:51]  And I'll start here with you mentioning the masks.
[00:10:54]  I had heavily criticized the DHS and the Trump administration going back to the election, saying that we should not live in a country where our law enforcement are masking up and we can't see their faces.
[00:11:03]  We don't want to live in a country like that.
[00:11:05]  The argument I got largely from Trump supporters is that, well, they're threatened by domestic terrorists.
[00:11:10]  They'll come to their homes.
[00:11:11]  They'll kill their family.
[00:11:13]  And my response is, guys, if we are actually at the point where you genuinely believe leftists are going to shut to the homes of ICE agents and murder their families, then the problem of immigration is much smaller, right?
[00:11:26]  We're in civil war at this point.
[00:11:27]  And there are some arguments that we have seen in Minnesota.
[00:11:30]  They went to the homes of suspected federal agents.
[00:11:32]  They smashed vehicles.
[00:11:33]  They stole weapons.
[00:11:34]  So all of those things are pushing us to this point where the hardcore Trump side is never going to give up on, you know what, we're fighting demonic force or whatever.
[00:11:45]  We're going to mask up and do these things.
[00:11:46]  I think that's a dangerous prospect.
[00:11:49]  I will say then to your point about Trump cutting deals with the governors, I believe that was actually the point of contention with Minnesota.
[00:11:54]  In many of these other states, Trump just cut a deal with these governors.
[00:11:58]  And I believe the reason for the initial deployment was a combination into Minnesota, was a combination of the Somali fraud story being massive.
[00:12:04]  Trump probably wanted to win.
[00:12:06]  Stephen Millie probably wanted to win, some kind of show of force, but also that Minnesota was not cooperating in the same way.
[00:12:13]  So the supposed drawdown, which I don't know we're actually getting, where he brings out Bovino, he reassigns Christy Noam, was predicated upon, okay, Tim Waltz called me on the phone and we're going to try and work out a deal.
[00:12:23]  Homan said, just give us the criminals from the jails and then we can be done with this.
[00:12:28]  So what I will then say to all of Dave's point is 90% agree.
[00:12:34]  Trump, I said, Trump needs to stand down or suit up.
[00:12:37]  These half measures are ridiculous.
[00:12:39]  You're getting these videos of ICE agents falling for leftist agitprop, making these perfect PSAs to make Trump look bad.
[00:12:48]  And honestly, they just is looking bad.
[00:12:50]  When, as Dave pointed out, these guys are saying, I'm going to put you on a domestic terror watch list.
[00:12:55]  I watched one video where a guy was filming an immigration stop from his porch and an ICE agent, or it might have been CBP, walks up down to his porch to stop him from filming.
[00:13:04]  I mean, these go way over the line.
[00:13:07]  So yes, Trump needs to, he needed to either just stop the protests, cut a big deal, or insurrection act, none of this stupid stuff, or just back off.
[00:13:18]  And I think either play works.
[00:13:20]  I think the backing off wholly would be good.
[00:13:23]  My proposal to Trump actually was very, very simple, not literally to Trump, but just in general.
[00:13:27]  And that's visit Minneapolis, visit the Twin Cities.
[00:13:31]  No insurrection act, no DHS, no military.
[00:13:33]  Just literally say, I'm going to come down, have a meeting with the mayor and the governor.
[00:13:37]  And what that would do is it would de facto lock down these violent protests that we're seeing, these riots.
[00:13:43]  It would stop these occupations that we're seeing where's checkpoints, because then you get a natural security presence.
[00:13:48]  And Trump doesn't have to say, I'm putting the boot down.
[00:13:51]  All he has to say is, I want to talk to the governor about how we tone things down.
[00:13:55]  He hasn't done that.
[00:13:56]  And I also want to throw heavy criticism towards this argument that Predty was trying to massacre people was ridiculous.

=== Locking Down Minneapolis Riots (02:13) ===

[00:14:03]  I think what we saw with the Predy situation, where I disagree with Dave, is he is clearly resisting arrest.
[00:14:08]  It doesn't mean he deserves to die.
[00:14:10]  It doesn't mean the agents were good.
[00:14:12]  I don't think the agents were like, let's kill a guy.
[00:14:15]  I think it's a crowd of people, largely the agents, overreacting.
[00:14:19]  I imagine it's due to being, I think the report was 50 people had been stalking them and obstructing them that day.
[00:14:25]  Predty was just being one of them.
[00:14:27]  And these guys are on edge.
[00:14:28]  Now, I've made the argument: DHS, law enforcement need to be beyond above board because of the scrutiny they're going to face.
[00:14:35]  I've argued they should be wearing polo shirts and khakis.
[00:14:38]  They shouldn't be going out with masks and armor because the most important thing is the American people know that we're doing this lawfully and by the book.
[00:14:45]  I think these guys went out there after this ongoing campaign where, you know, if you watch the videos even from today, you've got these leftists masked up.
[00:14:55]  You can't see any part of their faces and they're pulling vehicles over, demanding their paper, saying, show me your IDs and prove to me you are who you are.
[00:15:02]  Jorge Ventura's got a video where they walk up to a Somali driver and then ask him to confirm he's not ICE because he's in a database.
[00:15:09]  So certainly I can criticize Trump, but the things these people are doing on the ground is insane.
[00:15:16]  So I can imagine you've got CBP agents hot on edge, terror attacks against the ICE and CBP last year.
[00:15:22]  People are being killed, or at least they're trying to kill, and they're overreacting.
[00:15:27]  That is their responsibility.
[00:15:28]  I'm not going to cut any slack for overreacting, just to point out that they are.
[00:15:34]  And the circumstance around Predi's death was unfortunate, shouldn't have happened.
[00:15:38]  I look at this from a, what ingredients have you thrown to the pot?
[00:15:41]  You've got leftists organizing, creating databases, going on shift.
[00:15:45]  Predi was on a shift.
[00:15:46]  He was on duty.
[00:15:47]  They have a list of people.
[00:15:49]  You are assigned a duty.
[00:15:50]  He went out there with the intention of obstructing and conspiracy to obstruct and obstruct are felonies.
[00:15:55]  Again, not saying it justifies him being killed or anything like that.
[00:15:58]  The agents are on edge.
[00:15:59]  Everybody's boiling over.
[00:16:01]  And when you put all these ingredients into a pot, you show up with a SIG to obstruct police.
[00:16:07]  When they shove you and push you and then try to arrest you, you resist.
[00:16:10]  And I'm not saying he was risking like punching cops, but it's clearly not submitting, laying down and putting his hands behind his back.

=== Ingredients For The Pot (04:37) ===

[00:16:17]  You know what?
[00:16:17]  I hate to say it, but it sounds like there was a defective SIG discharge, which resulted in them freaking out and shooting him.
[00:16:25]  Well, we don't know that yet.
[00:16:26]  And what we do know is that one of the agents took away, one of the agents took away the guy's gun.
[00:16:32]  You can see that before they start shooting.
[00:16:34]  So the whole thing was a complete fiasco.
[00:16:37]  And he said we've had the benefit of watching this.
[00:16:41]  Exactly.
[00:16:42]  So a shot is fired.
[00:16:43]  Price got a black object in his hand.
[00:16:45]  And the other agents after the shooting yell, where's the gun?
[00:16:48]  Where's the gun?
[00:16:49]  They just don't know.
[00:16:51]  I think we have to wait for that because apparently this particular type of gun has got a track record of sometimes doing that.
[00:16:58]  Let's wait and see.
[00:16:59]  Others say there's been no suggestion it fired at all, but we'll see.
[00:17:04]  I broadly agree with a lot of what you just said.
[00:17:06]  Dave, one of the problems with this is because of these two back-to-back incidents involving ICE, a lot of ICE hatred has built up now, fermented as very predictably by the celebrity world, by Hollywood.
[00:17:19]  We saw the Grammy Awards, everybody queuing up to pound ICE.
[00:17:23]  But you also see people like Billie Eilish, who's a fantastic talent.
[00:17:27]  I absolutely love her as a performer.
[00:17:29]  But she says this.
[00:17:31]  No one is illegal on stolen land.
[00:17:44]  And yeah, it's just really hard to know what to say and what to do right now.
[00:17:51]  And I just, I feel really hopeful in this room.
[00:17:55]  And I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting.
[00:17:59]  And our voices really do matter.
[00:18:04]  No, the problem with that is obviously she's got a lovely home in California.
[00:18:10]  So what she's now given is anyone who wants to go in and veagle their way into her home a license to do it because her own home is on illegal land, right?
[00:18:20]  So once you take the premise that all of this land was illegally acquired, then there's no such thing as an illegal immigrant.
[00:18:27]  Then you're back to the Biden era on steroids where 20 million, 30 million, 40 million can come in because actually none of this is illegal.
[00:18:38]  And when you've got a major pop star saying that, it's very, to me, that's really problematic.
[00:18:43]  That will fly around TikTok.
[00:18:45]  It will fly around where young people get their news.
[00:18:48]  And before you know it, this becomes the agreed young perception of this whole issue.
[00:18:54]  When in fact, that is not the reality of the illegal immigration problem.
[00:19:00]  Yeah, well, right.
[00:19:02]  I mean, look, she's a child, right?
[00:19:05]  I mean, I don't know how old is she.
[00:19:06]  It's ridiculous what she's saying.
[00:19:09]  I think that kind of the, look, if you, if you take this like from a year ago to today, one of the things that was really amazing about the Biden administration was that it moved Americans further to the right on immigration than would have been previously imaginable.
[00:19:24]  And a big part of this is because we had just never had such an influx of people come in in such a short period of time, just millions and millions.
[00:19:30]  No one even knows exactly.
[00:19:32]  They estimate around 10 million came in, but we don't really know.
[00:19:35]  Most of that is going off of how many border apprehensions there were and then trying to figure out, well, if they got this many, how many might have come in.
[00:19:43]  But so Donald Trump inherited a society when he became president for the second time where mass deportations had support of a super majority of the American people.
[00:19:55]  And of course, that's reasonable because most Americans are like, yeah, you broke the law.
[00:19:59]  That's not okay.
[00:20:00]  We're a nation of laws.
[00:20:01]  The thing is that we also still have the United States Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
[00:20:07]  So Donald Trump was always in a tricky spot here of how do you, you know, the estimates of total illegal immigration is like between 30 and 50 million.
[00:20:15]  Well, how do you, how do you remove 30 to 50 million people?
[00:20:19]  We only have like 20,000 Border Patrol agents in total.
[00:20:23]  So, okay, how do you go about doing that?
[00:20:25]  And it was always, I was talking about this on my show last year.
[00:20:28]  It was always a big question of like, okay, the American people support mass deportations in the abstract, but what will they really support in order to achieve that goal?
[00:20:38]  What level of violence are you going to need?
[00:20:40]  And so the last thing in the world you want, if you're, if you're on the side of being an immigration restrictionist, is a huge show of violence that's going to turn a lot of people off that doesn't even result in a large number of illegals being deported.

=== Removing Fifty Million People (07:23) ===

[00:20:54]  So like, I just, I think on any level, there's like no debate here.
[00:20:57]  What are we talking about?
[00:20:58]  If we, just to be clear, if we got every single illegal alien out of Minnesota, you wouldn't even make a dent in one year of Joe Biden's open border.
[00:21:09]  So there's just the juice isn't worth the squeeze here.
[00:21:12]  And what you're doing essentially is you're handing a giant talking point to all those people in that ridiculous event last night to sit around where they're all worth $50 million and they're in a five, you know, $50,000 dress and $10,000 shoes, but they talk about the struggles of, you know, this is their own weird psychological projection of not being able to deal with the fact that they're very, very privileged.
[00:21:37]  But again, you're just handing them a talking point.
[00:21:39]  What's in what about that?
[00:21:41]  What's in it for us?
[00:21:41]  Well, we also have nothing.
[00:21:43]  Right.
[00:21:43]  And we also saw, Tim Paul, the lionization over the weekend at the Grammys and the parties around the Grammys of Don Lemon, the Martin Luther King now of the modern era.
[00:21:56]  What do you make of the Don Lemon saga?
[00:22:01]  Well, I read the criminal charges, the paperwork, and he's not just a journalist.
[00:22:09]  There's a few things that he did that crossed the line.
[00:22:11]  First is he provided instruction and advisement to these individuals on OPSEC.
[00:22:17]  I don't want to make it sound like Don Lemon's this crazy terrorist or anything like that.
[00:22:20]  No, but he violated the FACE Act.
[00:22:22]  He didn't just show up the film.
[00:22:24]  He told these people to stop talking, otherwise it could expose their operations.
[00:22:28]  I said, we shouldn't say these things.
[00:22:29]  You're freaking subscribed.
[00:22:31]  He entering this church, which is arguably a public accommodation.
[00:22:35]  However, though it is open to the public, you don't have a right to go in and disrupt someone else's first amendment activities.
[00:22:41]  He did two other things.
[00:22:42]  He obstructed the point of egress after these protests had gone in and peppered the individuals with questions.
[00:22:49]  And he approached the pastor with questions.
[00:22:52]  And despite being asked to leave, he refused to do so.
[00:22:54]  And I think outside of the criminal allegations, the most shockingly offensive thing to me is when he gets up in the pastor's space, I don't want to just, I want to be reasonable.
[00:23:04]  And the pastor brushes against him.
[00:23:05]  He says, please don't push me.
[00:23:08]  This guy showed utter disdain for the rights of the individuals in these churches.
[00:23:13]  The extremists that went in to do this, and I don't want to use protester because they're not out in the street having their voice heard.
[00:23:19]  They entered a private place of worship.
[00:23:21]  They obstructed access to the child daycare area.
[00:23:24]  Apparently, I've heard that someone may have gotten injured.
[00:23:26]  I'm not entirely sure what happened.
[00:23:27]  There's children crying.
[00:23:29]  And as they're trying to leave, Don Lemon is standing at the door asking them questions, making insinuations about U.S. immigration policy.
[00:23:35]  It's all very antagonistic.
[00:23:37]  Now, you know, the way I put it is like this.
[00:23:39]  If Don Lemon got private information that a group of protesters were going to block an intersection, no one would care.
[00:23:45]  Don Lemon's not going to be charged for that if he filmed it and knew it was going to happen, even if he was giving advice to these people.
[00:23:51]  It's a minor, petty thing.
[00:23:52]  Activists get a slap on the wrist.
[00:23:54]  Now, let's scale up to the next extreme end.
[00:23:56]  Let's say a group of people were going to rob a bank and Don Lemon said, I have private information to these, this bank riot that's going to happen.
[00:24:03]  And on the way there, he's saying, hey, guys, make sure you don't talk about certain things that could expose your bank robbery.
[00:24:09]  There's no way he's going to get anything other than locked up as an accomplice.
[00:24:13]  This at the church was not a bank robbery.
[00:24:15]  That's just the extreme end.
[00:24:16]  The point I'm making is that there's a line somewhere where you are not just a journalist anymore.
[00:24:21]  And I think Don Lemon crossed that line just ever so slightly enough to where I think he deserves a slap on the wrist.
[00:24:27]  Now, my argument was similar to Bill Mars, that he should be charged with not cool, bro.
[00:24:33]  I would be a little more specific and say he should go to court.
[00:24:36]  He should be found guilty.
[00:24:37]  And the penalty should be court supervision.
[00:24:39]  It should be six months of court supervision.
[00:24:41]  It basically means nothing, but just don't do it again.
[00:24:44]  Right?
[00:24:44]  For the people who actually went in and disrupted this that violated the FACE Act, I think they should get some penalties.
[00:24:48]  But I think the FACE Act itself is ridiculous and was ridiculous when it was made in 94.
[00:24:53]  It's ridiculous today.
[00:24:56]  Okay.
[00:24:56]  Dave, I mean, my view is I've got no great truck for Don Lemon.
[00:25:01]  He came on my show recently.
[00:25:02]  He was a monumental dick, as I told him to his face.
[00:25:06]  However, he's allowed to be, right?
[00:25:08]  In a democratic society, protected by the First Amendment, he could be as big a dick as he wants.
[00:25:14]  And he's building a business on his own, you know, and he's, and this will have propelled him massively in his business aspirations.
[00:25:22]  But at his heart, I just really struggle, notwithstanding, I'm sure, you know, Tim makes a lot of good points, but, you know, as somebody pointed out to me the other day, if this was Alex Jones doing this in a mosque, right, would people defending it rush to defend him?
[00:25:38]  It's an interesting question.
[00:25:39]  In other words, does your perspective on this get determined by who it is and where they're going, right?
[00:25:47]  And I just come down on the fact that I don't like seeing journalists criminalize.
[00:25:52]  You can think of Don whatever you want, but to me, the protesters were the ones who were committing a crime and Don Lemon was reporting what was happening.
[00:26:04]  And the moment we start blurring that line, the whole concept of embedded journalists or journalists going to events or going inside and following these things, that starts to disintegrate.
[00:26:16]  What's your view?
[00:26:18]  Well, I just fundamentally reject the premise that we're going to sit here and pretend that Don Lemon has ever been a journalist.
[00:26:24]  I mean, I'm not even saying that should have, that should have any implications on the legality of any of this.
[00:26:30]  But Don Lemon, and I mean, I never talk like this, but I mean, genuinely, there's just nothing else.
[00:26:35]  Don Lemon is the dumbest human being who's ever had a microphone put in front of him.
[00:26:40]  Like I'm genuinely blown away by it.
[00:26:42]  I don't, I'm like, like Don Lemon is like on the level where like, if he just recites a talking point, I feel like the way I do when my four-year-old has like a long, complex sentence and you're like, very good, Don Lemon.
[00:26:55]  Like those were the words that you were supposed to.
[00:26:57]  But look, in this instance, he's not really doing journalism.
[00:27:01]  He's doing activism.
[00:27:02]  Like it's not as if he was interviewing the pastor and then also going up and interviewing the protesters and asking them tough questions.
[00:27:10]  He is like a part of this protest.
[00:27:13]  And I agree with a lot of what Tim said.
[00:27:15]  I would just add in there, I think the point you made again, which I saw Tim nodding at too, is really almost the most important point here.
[00:27:22]  And this is why I just, it's like strategically speaking, this is really stupid for the Trump administration to go after Don Lemon like this because Don Lemon was an idiot at CNN.
[00:27:34]  And now on the internet, he looks like an idiot who doesn't have his writers anymore.
[00:27:39]  He's just out there just humiliating him.
[00:27:40]  So every appearance that you see from Don Lemon, it just goes viral because everyone's laughing at him, like his interview with Elon Musk or his interview with you or whatever.
[00:27:49]  He just embarrasses himself and he has no audience.
[00:27:52]  It's not like he's a guy like Tucker Carlson who left cable news and kept a huge audience with him.
[00:27:56]  He's got nobody.
[00:27:57]  So this is, it's the Jimmy Kimmel situation all over again.
[00:28:01]  The guy is dying.
[00:28:02]  He's becoming irrelevant.
[00:28:04]  He's just humiliating himself in front of his tiny audience.
[00:28:08]  But then the FCC chairman comes in and kind of threatens him.
[00:28:11]  And now you kind of make him his free speech martyr.
[00:28:13]  Now you give him giant ratings.
[00:28:15]  Now you give him something to be applauded.

=== Accidental Sabotage Of The Left (03:44) ===

[00:28:17]  So I just wish the right wing in America would for once ever get smart about these fights.
[00:28:24]  Like just, this is not like art of war stuff.
[00:28:27]  This is like the opposite.
[00:28:28]  You're just giving your opponents wins for no reason.
[00:28:33]  I know it's not 5D chess, but let's just entertain this because I agree with you, Dave.
[00:28:38]  Now imagine Trump knows Don Lemon is dumb as a box of rocks.
[00:28:42]  And I feel bad saying that because it insults rocks.
[00:28:44]  And he's thinking, let's make this guy the biggest personality on the left and not prop him up.
[00:28:49]  It's almost an accidental sabotage of the left.
[00:28:55]  You know what?
[00:28:55]  I didn't think that's it.
[00:28:56]  That could be the thinking.
[00:28:58]  I want to end, Dave, just by asking you about something you and I have interacted with on X about.
[00:29:05]  But this astonishing revelation that the IDF is now accepting the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry's numbers on casualties in the war.
[00:29:17]  Having, I mean, in my case, pretty much every single pro-Israeli guest for the last two years try to muddy the waters about those numbers and say they're all massively inflated and so on.
[00:29:29]  It's pretty startling that now the IDF just casually comes out and goes, oh yeah, they're kind of right.
[00:29:37]  Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's just unbelievable, Pierce.
[00:29:40]  I mean, what can you even say?
[00:29:41]  And it's, and look, it's like always like this with the war propagandas.
[00:29:45]  Like they, they have this huge talking point that's a complete lie.
[00:29:49]  And then they just quietly abandon that and move on.
[00:29:51]  And it's like we're supposed to forget their entire track record.
[00:29:53]  Because if you remember, Pierce's me and you, I mean, you've done a lot more than me, but I've been on quite a bit.
[00:29:58]  We've done so many of these work.
[00:29:59]  It's not just that they would say that the numbers are wrong.
[00:30:03]  They'd then turn around and accuse people like me of being, you know, a Hamas supporter or something like that because you're repeating their numbers.
[00:30:11]  And then just casually at the end of all of it, now that the genocide's been completed and Gaza's unlivable and now it's just a plan of where we're going to ethnically class.
[00:30:20]  Oh, yeah, by the way, that was right.
[00:30:22]  And the only reason why the IDF is because they're much higher.
[00:30:26]  They're much higher than that.
[00:30:27]  These are just the numbers of identified bodies that have been pulled out of the rubble.
[00:30:31]  The people who died from second and third.
[00:30:33]  My sense is the numbers.
[00:30:34]  This is going to be the hundreds of thousands.
[00:30:35]  Once journalists get in there.
[00:30:37]  I think once journalists get in there, the numbers will be much higher.
[00:30:40]  But we'll see.
[00:30:41]  But the point I kept making to people, which is so ironic now, because I did a bit of research into this, which is something that most people don't like to do in these situations.
[00:30:51]  The research I did very early on was that historically the IDF had accepted the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry casualty numbers in previous skirmishes, flare-ups, and so on.
[00:31:05]  They had accepted they were broadly accurate.
[00:31:07]  And I kept saying to people, you do realize that the IDF historically has generally accepted these numbers that they put forward as being accurate.
[00:31:17]  And I was laughed at and mocked and told of being, I was a Hamas stooge and so on.
[00:31:22]  And yet here we have once again, the IDF once again accepting the numbers are broadly accurate, as they historically have invariably done.
[00:31:32]  I mean, there, right there, it's one of the great ironies of this whole thing.
[00:31:36]  I've got to leave it there.
[00:31:38]  Great to have you.
[00:31:39]  Is there one of them, Pierce?
[00:31:40]  Is there one of them who will admit, hey, I got that wrong?
[00:31:43]  Has one of them come out of all the people who came on your show?
[00:31:46]  I haven't heard a single one.
[00:31:47]  Not yet.
[00:31:48]  Not yet, but I look forward to having them back.
[00:31:51]  Guys, thank you both very much.
[00:31:53]  I'm glad we put an end to Bootgate.
[00:31:55]  It was a very civilized debate.
[00:31:57]  Thank you very much.
[00:31:58]  Thanks for having me.

=== Great Irony And Return (00:25) ===

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