So it does seem like in addition to everything, first of all, Dave, thank you.
As always, we're late because we just had such a long breakfast, two and a half
hour breakfast. I hope this conversation could be as interesting as our
breakfast just was. But in addition to everything else changing, you made such a
smart point a minute ago about the means of convincing the public. The
propaganda machine is completely broken. And so what does that mean? You're in
the middle of a war. You're in the middle of a massive power shift globally.
Everything is changing, the economy, military strength, everything. And it's
impossible to know who is telling the truth. Who comes out more credible in
this, in the media? Who are the people you listen to? What's that look like?
Well, I think everybody who's being authentic, I think, is who's coming out
ahead of this. It seems like if you look at like the podcast numbers, you know
what I mean? Like it's the people who are being critical of the regime's
policies. It's the people, you know, from my perspective, the people who are
telling the truth. And so in the media world, I think there's been this, you
know, as you know, because you were in the old media world for so long. Only 35
years, not a big deal. There you go. Okay, not that long. A little bit. You put
a little bit of time in. I'm implicated, yes. Look, I always thought, and I mean
this, I used to watch you back on your MSNBC show, and you were always one of
the very few kind of authentic people. Even when you were wrong about stuff and
things that you look back on and you're like, oh, I've changed my mind about all
that. But it's an incredibly phony world. Like news in general, there's
something about it that's very, you know, it's very, welcome back to the six
o'clock news. And, you know, like it's just like, what is that? That's not how
you talk. Credibility doesn't derive from being right about everything.
Credibility derives from being honest. Yes, yes. But so I think after the first
20 years or so, first 15 years of the 21st century, and, you know, at this
point, we're 26 years into the 21st century now. It's the government, every
single crisis that's happened, and we've had quite a few, you know, at 9-11, and
we had the global war on terrorism. We had the huge financial crash in 2008. We
had COVID. We had that. Okay, so on every single crisis, the government and the
media just lied through their teeth to the American people and got exposed.
Like, it's not like anyone now thinks, like, maybe Saddam really did have
weapons of mass destruction. Like, we all know. We all know if you get the
vaccine, you can get COVID. Turns out you can get COVID even after having the
vaccine, as everyone who got the vaccine also got COVID, or just about. And so
it was like all these phonies in media lying us, on behalf of power, lying to us
about these policies. And at the same time, as they were getting exposed for all
of this, and I do think COVID did it almost more than anything, because the
global war on terrorism was over there, but COVID was over here and affected
everyone. Also, obviously, the, you know, covering for a clearly senile
president was a pretty easy one for everyone to see through. But so, while all
that was happening, also, the technology, you know, simultaneously got to a
point where, you know, you can do this for a reasonable amount of money. You
know what I mean? Like, it's not, in 1980, if you wanted to set up your own TV
studio, you needed a corporation to get behind you, because who had the
resources? Whereas everyone now can open their computer, if you have a phone,
you can record yourself and put it out there. So, the technology allowed for
tremendous parity, and the lying us into all of these disasters resulted in
people really craving authenticity. And so, you know, it's just, like, the
propaganda machine got broken. Now, to your point, the policies are still going
on, and that just creates a very interesting new time. Like, there just, there
never was, I cannot imagine if, while George W. Bush was trying to, you know,
push the war in Iraq, let's say for all of 2002, they spent the full year
building the case for what? Well, imagine every day, Bill O'Reilly and Sean
Hannity were calling out George W. Bush for his lies. Like, the people who
George W. Bush voters trusted the most were hearing their favorite newscaster
calling it, telling the truth, doing news. Well, you can't even fathom what that
would be like. Well, that's what it's like now. Now, that's the situation. And I
don't know what that means exactly, but I know that governments all around the
world have invested heavily in propaganda campaigns for a reason, because they
think that's really important. They think it's important that they don't just go
invade Iraq, but that they convince you first that he's got nuclear weapons and
he's in bed with the terrorists. Condoleezza Rice, we don't want the warning to
be in the form of a mushroom cloud from the bomb that doesn't exist. His
terrorist friends who he hates, who he's not friends with at all. But, but so
now we're in this new world and it's very exciting as someone who's a part of
it. And it's, it's an exciting moment to be alive, but it is certainly a
dangerous one. You know, they say the most dangerous time for a woman to leave
an abuse, the most dangerous time for an abused woman is when she tries to
leave. Yeah. Right? Like, that's when he might kill you. And that's kind of how
I feel about the government right now. I think you're, I think that's so, first
of all, so well put and also so true because it can't actually last that much
longer because the disparity in power is too great. So I think a lot of people
who have podcasts, I've been in so many different kinds of media, it's hard to
remember what this one's called. It's podcasting. It's the same, you know. Sure.
It's a kind of silly term that doesn't really make sense. It doesn't. We don't
have iPods anymore. I don't know why it just, if that one just stuck for
whatever reason. It's so true. But people who have, you know, in independent
media feel like they have a lot of power. Oh, I've got so much power. They have
no power. They don't control the medium, really. They don't control YouTube.
They don't have the FBI. They're disposable. They don't have nuclear weapons. So
actually, they are powerless. And through a quirk of history, because we're in a
change moment, that's not obvious. But it has to be obvious. There's too much at
stake, right? Yeah. There was a- Don't they have to be crushed? I think it was
the CNN lady. She used to work for Vice, I believe, but the girl who was, like,
known for interviewing, like, the alt-right figures. Oh, yeah. She interviewed
Tim Dillon last year, and it was right after Trump won his election, or shortly
after, and she said, you know, something like, you guys are the real power
center now, you know? And she's like, yeah, you podcasters, you guys are the
ones with power. Because I guess, well, okay, more people watch these shows than
watch the traditional shows, and Trump came and did a bunch of them, and then he
won re-election, and Kamala Harris was too scared for wisely. People say, that
was a real mistake, she should have done Rogan. No, it wasn't. It was a really
good call. It was a really, really good call by her team to not do Rogan,
actually. It's like after 2016, when they were like, you know, Hillary Clinton's
campaign is so stupid, she didn't visit Wisconsin more. And you're like, you
really think they're that stupid? No, her numbers went down every time she went,
so they were like, stop going. They didn't like her, that's why she didn't go.
It was actually, her best chance was that. But anyway, but so the, so, you know,
they say, oh, you guys, you know, since you guys got President Trump elected,
you're the real power center now. And it's like, pretty sure the CIA still has a
little bit of power. I think there's still like a little bit hanging on in the
Pentagon. I'm not quite sure. It's all in Theo Vaughn's hands at this point, you
know? But yes, so that's the dynamic. So it can't continue. I mean, let's be
totally honest. If you, what everyone forgets about Tank Man and Tiananmen
Square is like, we probably got, we don't even know what happened to him. We
don't know his name. Probably crushed by the tank, actually. Almost certainly,
yes. I'm not laughing. I am laughing because just the delusion that people have.
I've got a voice. It's like, no. Well, but that's the weird, it's very strange
for both these things to be going on at the same time. That's why I said to you
at breakfast, my, my analogy is the, you know, on the Roadrunner cartoons when
you run off the side of the cliff. Yeah. But you're still in air for a moment.
And then you look down and realize, oh, it's like, we're there. Like, how can
you keep doing this? So those people, I mean, and, and, you know, obviously
from, for me personally, like, it's kind of fascinating because I've been in
this world. And over the last two and a half years or so, I've done, I mean,
like, if you count, like, all the, you know, debates and that Pierce Morgan
debates or Oxford style debate, I've done like 35, 40 debates on, you know, just
Israel or the warfare state or whatever it is, Ukraine, a lot of these things.
And I've never, it's like the side, broadly speaking, because there's a lot of
differences amongst people who disagree with, say, the war in Iran or U.S.
support for Israel destroying Gaza. But broadly speaking, it's not only like
we've won the debate, we've like just crushed the, you know, it's not just me.
There's lots of people involved in this, you more so probably than anyone. But
when you see, like, you look at the polls, there was this one poll I saw, and
that this is just one poll, but there's a lot that back this up, but that it was
before October 7th, they'd ask, who do you sympathize with more, the Israelis or
the Palestinians? And it was plus 48 for the Israelis. It's now plus one for the
Palestinians. In the U.S. In the U.S. And to just think, so basically a 50-point
shift in a little over two years. And Tucker, I mean, I don't know, you've been,
you were doing this for longer than me. When does that ever happen? When does
any issue ever swing by 50 points in two years? It would be like, if you, if I
were to tell you in two years, this country would be 95% pro-life, you'd be
like, it's like, whoa, what happened in those two years? Well, I mean, the
pro-lifers must have really won the argument, you know what I mean? Like, and so
now that we've had, for the first time ever, a media environment where, say,
Israel is not completely protected, like, what were the debates about supporting
Israel on MSNBC or CNN? No, they don't exist. They never happen. You're not
allowed to have those debates there. There's not, maybe like one kind of
critical of Israel host will slip in here or there, but if he says too much,
he's getting fired pretty quickly. And so, so we essentially won the debate. We,
it's not close. It's not, there's not a question of, yes, in a very short period
of time, because there was actually a fair open media system now where, you
know, it was really democratized in a way. And so, you can't look and go, does,
you know, are, you're bigger than you've ever been before. Candace Owens is
bigger than she's ever been before. I know I'm bigger than I've ever been
before. Ben Shapiro is weaker and more of a laughing stock than ever before. You
know, like, it's just very, but then, at the same time, who won the policy game?
Mark Levin, you know, the president is tweeting, go watch Mark Levin's show
today. And his, his base, his voters are going, I think I'll check out Tucker
Carlson, you know, I think I'll, and so, so anyway, there's just this very weird
thing where like, we won the argument. We had the national debate, we, and we
won, and yet we're at war with Iran on behalf of Israel. And I think what you're
getting at is like, that does just feel totally unsustainable. Like, there's
either you got to clamp down on these guys like us, or you got to reverse the
policy. And I'm really hoping it's the latter. So, the weather is warming, which
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excellent. People don't like to be criticized for their mistakes, and I know
this from having a wife and children. Totally fine to be, you know, criticized
for something you feel confident is the right thing. But if you screw something
up and someone says, say, say, I told you, you want to shoot the person. It's
very hard for people to deal with that, and so if you have a war like this,
which is obviously, you know, this is one of the most profound moments of my
lifetime. This is much more profound than 9-11, I think. Thankfully, relatively
few Americans have died, but you can see that this is the end of something, and
the consequences are very, very serious. But in the middle of that, to criticize
the decision to start the process that led to this, it feels like you're going
to be punished for that. Yeah. Do you feel that? Yes. I know exactly what you
mean. And I, you know, I almost, like on some, I don't know, in some way I feel
like the political thing or the wise calculation here would almost be to be
like, Mr. President Trump, you did such a phenomenal job with this, and it's
such a success that we should just stop right now and declare victory or
something. You know what I mean? But I'm just no good at being a political
operative. I'm only good at telling the truth. Like, it's all I, I only have one
speed. You know, Ben Shapiro called me out recently and called me a bunch of
names, and then said, she said, I know, I can hear Dave right now saying, debate
me, bro. If you believe this, why don't you debate me? And he goes, no, no, I
don't debate with, but he's kind of right in a way that that is my response. I
mean, I only have one speed. It's all I know how to do. Like, come podcast with
me. Like, I don't know anything else. So, um, well, because you're rooted in
kind of the old America where, you know, there was a free market, not just in
the economy, but like intellectually free market of ideas. Yeah. We're supposed
to have it at least. Um, yeah, that the whole country is built on that. Yeah.
And so, but, so that Ben Shapiro and et cetera, they don't share that view at
all. He knows the ideas can't hold up. I mean, he'll, he'll debate a 19 year old
gender confused kid because he knows he can win that debate. You know, it's not
that that kid's more serious than me, you know, that's not really. The issue,
but the, but anyway, I guess. So just to that, like, I only have one speed. I
only know how to just tell you what I think is, is really going on here. And,
and I think you're right. I think it's, this is such a disaster because Donald
Trump, first of all, it'd be very difficult at this point, even if he wanted to
just stop the thing, which I think he does at this point want to stop the thing.
Um, I think he, it seems to me like he believed this could be quick and easy,
like Venezuela and we're way past that at this point, but he can't just stop
now. Well, but obviously there's the Iranians and the Israelis are involved in
this too. And it doesn't, it doesn't seem like either of them want to stop right
now. Um, so there you got a big problem, but also look, this isn't Venezuela.
There there's, uh, I don't know what the latest CENTCOM numbers are. I thought
13 dead Americans was the last I saw the 150 plus wounded number came out weeks
ago. I don't know what that's up to now are our bases. And, you know, the, in
the region have been very badly damaged, the damage to the global economy. So
it's not Venezuela, you know, you can't just come out of this and then pretend
something really great happened. If he stops right now, then it's like, oh, you
just started a disaster for no reason on behalf of a foreign country. Like this
is just awful. And then there's a couple of factors. I've seen this play. I know
you've seen this over the years, certainly during the global war on terrorism,
where there is, I guess what you could call like the sunk cost fallacy of war,
which is the worst of all sunk cost fallacies, you know, but it's, you go, uh,
you go, well, those boys died for nothing. If we don't finish the job. And it's
like, oh man, is that a bad trap to get into? Cause the reality is that those
boys died for nothing. That's over. And if you continue this, more boys will die
for nothing. That's correct. And so no one, you know, uh, um, Pierce Morgan had,
uh, a panel once or a debate between Scott Horton, who is the, as you know,
you've had him on the show, the most incredible foreign policy guy in the
country. Like just unbelievable levels of brilliance and his books, enough
already, uh, fool's errand, which are about the global war on terrorism are the
best books written on the subject. His book provoked about the war in Ukraine is
the best book written on the subject. Literally exhaustive. I only know Scott
Horton because of you and what, uh, improvement to my life. Yeah. I mean, he's
the, he is the, he has been such an incredible resource. Like he's a good, great
friend of mine. Uh, one of my closest friends, but he's also just been, he's
like my mentor in the foreign policy stuff. And he's just so great because he's
like, he's such a tool because he's got a photographic memory. So like I can
literally just call him at any point and you'll just be like, when Iran invaded
Iraq in 1980, the 1982, weren't they fighting here? And then he'll just be like,
yeah, they were fighting here and here. And then this guy has all their names
and everything. It's really incredible. But so he was debating Wesley Clark on
Pierce Morgan's show to talk about the new media world that we live in and how
crazy it is. Now that Scott Horton gets to square off with the four star general
and Wesley Clark, who, you know, look, I have my issues with him, but he did
give us that great, uh, admission about the seven countries in five years. So
I'll always kind of be grateful to him. Now he tries to walk that back, but we
all heard what you said. Um, but he goes at one point talking about, uh, I
believe it was Gaza. If I'm getting this correct, he, and he said this was while
it was still, you know, intensely going on. And he goes, but if we just leave
now, then Hamas gets to say they won. And you're like, sir, general, that's your
opinion on war, but that's a recipe to be in forever war. Always. We can't ever
leave anywhere because so what happens is you get this thing where it's like,
there's the sunk cost fallacy. We can't leave now because we have to win. And
then Donald Trump is now, of course, he put his entire presidency on the line
for this, which was really foolish. And so now he's just, he's, he's got to get
a win. Let me get a win. And then I can get out, you know, so let's do a big
thing. But then you do a big thing and they respond with a big thing and then
you go, shoot, now we got to respond to that. And this is the escalation trap,
right? Like that. And this was what people like me and you have been talking
about for years. And the, all the war hawks in the country really enjoyed
mocking me and you for the last seven months or whatever it's been from between
the 12 day war and, and this latest war in Iran going, oh, you guys were acting
like this was going to be a disaster. And look, it wasn't a disaster. Okay.
We're back in it now. And it's a disaster. And precisely zero of those people
are going, oh, I guess I was wrong about that. No, no, they'll, they'll be
clamoring for you to be arrested and imprisoned. Yeah, of course. Because, you
know, your existence is a mark of shame because you, you remember, right? So
anyone who remembers has to be taken off the board. I'm just interested not, I
never think about, um, you know, those, those people, the Mark Levin, I say a
prayer for Mark Levin every day because it's my religion I'm supposed to, but
he's not, I mean, Mark Levin's an idiot. He's not pulling any strings. He's a
tool of larger forces. Yes. What I'm fascinated by are the assumptions that,
like, ordinary non-Mark Levin Americans have about the United States, the nature
of power, history that allowed us to make the greatest mistake of my lifetime,
which is this war. What are those, and a lot of this has to do with the Second
World War. Yeah. So we're reading the wrong lessons into that, and I just want
to say for the hundredth time, I'm the opposite of pro-Nazi. I'm against
authoritarianism in all its forms. But why is it that we look at the Second
World War and then make a bunch of false assumptions that get us into
engagements like this that hurt us? Well. What is that? What are the myths?
Well, I think the way, the way I look at it, right, and, um, this is, you know,
I've, I've defended Daryl Cooper quite publicly, quite often for what he said on
your show, which really, it was, by the way, it's so revealing and totally
proves his point. The response to that. It was insane. Because there's just no
reason why that should have been such a huge thing, you know? But, like, the
thing is that- Hey, Daryl Cooper, did Hitler kill a lot of Jews? Yeah, he did.
He did, like, hours of podcasts on it. Yes. Of course Hitler killed a lot of
Jews. I mean, what? That's not even a- He just put out episode two of his new
series on World War II, which I have not, I heard the first one. I have not
gotten a chance to listen to the second one yet, but the first one's so good.
They're all so good. But it's not really about that. I don't think any sane
person, I've never heard anybody in my life say Hitler didn't kill a ton of
Jews. or, like, love the Jews. No, Hitler hated the Jews, killed a ton of Jews.
That's bad. Everyone agrees with that. It's not really the Holocaust that
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supplements. Join Blokes. Get your edge back. So, World War II was, objectively
speaking, the worst thing that's ever happened in the world. Yes. Right? It was
the biggest bloodbath in human history. And destroyed Europe. It's just so
horrible you think about that. Humanity reached such a height in the 19th
century. The 19th century, there's two things that happened that could not have
been predicted. It would have seemed insane if you had predicted it beforehand.
Probably the two greatest achievements in human history are that, well, there's
the Industrial Revolution. And for the first time ever, there's economic growth.
If you look at economic growth on a chart, it basically doesn't exist until the
Industrial Revolution. There's just different apportionments of wealth. Yes. So,
for the first time ever, human beings escaped the back-breaking poverty of
nature. You know what I mean? Or they escaped zero-sum economics. Yes. Well,
right. Zero-sum economics, but just- Where people got rich by looting. Now you
can get rich by creating things that didn't exist before. And we could raise the
standard of living in a meaningful way, in very basic, you know, ways. And also
there was the abolition of slavery, which just would have seemed like that was
the way of the world for all of human history. And I'm saying the abolition of
slavery in the West. Obviously, there were other parts of the world that still
had it. And the Industrial Revolution was in the West also. So, you know, but
these amazing things happen. And then in the 20th century, we take that
industrial capacity to go to total war with each other. And in the case of the
First World War, just over nonsense. I mean, over a political assassination.
It's not even clear. Yeah. It's not like somehow this thing spins into this
catastrophe. But so after World War II, that's even bloodier than World War I,
which was supposed to be the war to end all wars. And it wasn't. It was the war
to create the conditions for the worst war in human history. And, of course, as
you've talked about and gotten a lot of heat for, civilians were targeted on all
sides. Now, of course, we didn't go genocidal in the way that Adolf Hitler went.
But we targeted cities when we knew the military was out, you know, targeting
women and children, dropping nuclear bombs on cities. And so and also the kind
of the military industrial complex, the national security apparatus were truly
created in the aftermath of World War II. Like there were intelligence, but the
CIA is created. And, you know, the form of government that we actually live
under was kind of erected during and after World War II. And so you've got the
most profoundly awful thing that's ever happened and this new government plus a
new government in Israel a couple of years later that are created. And so when
you have something like that, you really got to tell yourself a damn good story
about why that is justified. And that's not – when you say this, sometimes
people go, oh, so are you saying the Holocaust didn't really happen? It's like,
no, they don't. It really happened. It's not about the Holocaust. The point is
that – yes, the point is that the Holocaust happened in a context of 60 million
people dying. You know what I mean? Like it's – It's just so funny. It's all
reduced to the – okay, just to be totally clear, not denying the Holocaust.
Okay. It's not about that. The thing – the immediate post-war changes that you
just listed, the deindustrialization of the West, the partition of India, the
creation of the national security state, if I could say an authoritarian
national security state in the West, delivering half of Europe to the Soviets,
the partition of Germany. Like these are all the genocide of German civilians
after the war. Mass, mass ethnic cleansing, mass rapes and murders and all types
of horrible stuff. So none of – it's not a defense of Hitler, whom I oppose, to
say all of those are bad. It's just kind of interesting that this war, which is
supposedly so great, gave birth to things that are just objectively the worst
things. Yeah, and – What is that? Well, look, I mean, it's a disaster of
government, you know, total power. And there – but look, even like if you say
like – if you're talking about the Revolutionary War, like let's just say like
back in the 1980s or something like it's a schoolteacher's teaching kids about
the Revolutionary War. They don't go like, well, you know, the king of England
was taxing a little bit more than he should. And then the framers kind of had
these wild conspiracy theories about what he was going to come do. None of that
was really true. And anyway, they got into the – you know, they tell you George
Washington never told a lie. And when he chopped down the apple tree, he said to
his pa, I can't lie to you. Because like human beings just need this narrative
that makes – and so what ended up happening was that the very – when you
challenge World War II orthodoxies, you're challenging what Darrell calls the
load-bearing myths, you know, the load-bearing pillars of the existence of the
most powerful forces in the world. And, you know, look, it's very clear. Like,
again, the reaction to Darrell is the proof of the claim. Like, what is this? If
somebody were to say, you know, this is how you find out what the national
religion really is, you know? I could sit here and trash Thomas Jefferson for
raping his slaves. It doesn't matter what you say about him. It doesn't matter.
This isn't going to generate any outrage at all, you know? In fact, it might
generate some applause from different quarters. And so – but you talk about
this, and it's very, very different. And then, as you've seen, as we've all
seen, it's used to justify every subsequent war. I mean, like, everybody is
Hitler. To justify authoritarianism. Yeah, that's right. Everybody is Adolf
Hitler. I've lived through the – you know, it's – Saddam Hussein was Adolf
Hitler. Noriega was Adolf Hitler. Bashar al-Assad is Adolf Hitler. Vladimir
Putin is Adolf Hitler. You're Adolf Hitler. Nick Fuentes is Adolf Hitler. Like,
every time they want to smear someone, that's the smear they go with. Donald
Trump got the same treatment. And anytime you oppose a war, well, you're Neville
Chamberlain. You know? If I think, like, hey, we should just put in writing that
we'll never bring Ukraine into NATO because, man, this is causing all these
problems. Okay, Neville Chamberlain. You would have just given Czechoslovakia.
It's like, dude, that's not the only lesson in history. The only lesson in
history is not always go with aggression. Never go with de-escalation. But so
that's kind of what this has been turned into. And I do think – But I would just
say big picture, if it was such a victory, why are all the winners falling apart
less than 100 years later? Yeah. Yeah, that's a fair point. I don't – again,
shut up. You're pro-Hitler for the fifth time. Not pro-Hitler in any sense.
Well, to quote – But, like, what's the answer to that question? Well, there's a
brilliant philosopher named Rosie Perez. And in the film White Men Can't Jump,
she said, sometimes when you win, you really lose. And, you know, it is such a
simple but very, very true statement. And there is something about – well, isn't
it kind of interesting that the United States of America started as the
experiment in restrained government? Right? Like, there had really never been a
government that was created that was so restrained. And the whole idea of it
was, like, we're going to take the power of a king and then we're going to
scatter that amongst three different branches in the federal government. And the
federal government really only oversees all these state governments that have
their own autonomy. And we are these United States of America. And even as we
became more centralized, obviously, the Articles of Confederation got overthrown
and the Constitution gets put in. And then, you know – but even, say, like, if
you look after this – from the end of the Civil War – this was always the best
stuff about, like, Milton Friedman books and stuff. But in this part, I really
think those Chicago guys got it right, that if you look from the end of the
Civil War, so, like, 19 – or excuse me, 1865 to around, say, 1910, okay? In this
period of time, try to imagine that this was our government, okay? The U.S.
government – the federal government spent, like, maybe, like, 1.5% or 2% of the
national income, a tiny amount of – there was no mass federal regulation or
anything like that. There was no central bank. There was no income tax. And just
try to imagine – like, this was truly the closest to a real experiment in free
market capitalism that humanity had ever seen. And the result of that was the
biggest economic expansion in human history, the greatest raising of the lot and
life of the average person, you know, like, where the average person could
actually have a pretty nice life. And you could work at the factory, and your
wife didn't have to work, and you owned a house, and you sent your kids to
college, and you drove a couple cars, you played poker on the weekends with your
buddy. Like, you had a good life. And if you look at the United States of
America today, it is the most powerful government in the history of the world.
Like, somehow, this thing that started as an experiment in the smallest
government became the biggest government that the world's ever known. And so
there's almost something where, well, what happens is these free markets create
so much prosperity that there's so much more of a tax base. And now the
political class can tax you more and more and more, and you're still living a
pretty good life, even though they're getting fat off of you. You know what I
mean? And so, similarly, sometimes, something like after World War II, you see
this with America, and then you really see it after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, where it's like, because you win, you get so much power. But as Lord
Atkins said, that power tends to corrupt. And so you get all this power, but
then it totally corrupts your own soul. And I think that's kind of the story of
America. And I think it's the story of our lives. I mean, the number of men I
know who've gotten what they wanted, what they worked for, the job, the exit,
you know, sale of whatever they built, all of a sudden they win, and then they
fall apart. I've seen that so much. I've felt it in my own life, by the way. For
sure, you know, easy success is not good for you at all. Struggle is good for
you. And so I wonder if the United States was hollowed out by its own victory,
this loss, and unfortunately, I think we can say already it's hard to imagine
getting out of this without being diminished. Yeah, I mean, what is a victory
here? I mean, you know, it's also a terrible situation where victory might be
the worst case scenario. I mean, like, you know, like victory, like if the whole
goal is to topple the regime, you're like, okay, but every other time we've
toppled a regime in this neck of the woods, it's led to migrant crises and death
and terrorism. You can't topple a regime in the Persian Gulf because the world's
energy supply needs to move through it. You have to extract it, refine it, make
it into petrochemicals, do whatever you want, fertilize it, do whatever you want
in the Persian Gulf, and then you have to get it out of the Persian Gulf. So
that means you have to have a controlling authority. You have to have strong
governments there, or else some rebel group, Houthis with drones, will shut the
whole thing down. You have to have. You can't have chaos in Iran. Yeah, they
call it the Persian Gulf for a reason. Even if you call it the Arabian Gulf, the
other half is Persian. It doesn't matter. Chaos in the Persian Gulf means no
energy or fertilizer from the Persian Gulf, period. So you're going to piracy
there. So I just, so the option to that is keeping an Iranian regime in place,
and that means that Iran is more powerful than it was when the war started. This
is also obvious, unless you nuke them, which is, I think, an option. And then
you set off a chain reaction that, you know, is the worst thing imaginable.
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see this as a win. I pray it is, but I don't see it. If it is a loss, maybe that
is not all bad for the U.S.? Well, there is a—I think sometimes things need to
get really bad before they get better. You know, things need to get bad so that
people wake up even more. There's no question people have woken up a lot, but
maybe people just need to get angrier, you know? And I don't know. I don't know
what the result of this is. I'm trying to see this in the fullness of history
and God's plan, but I just— Because it feels like such a disaster. It's
affecting my sleep. I love America. I have kids. I don't want this to happen.
I'm not in control, obviously. But I do think that, like, you're often surprised
by the downstream results of things. I think people who return from Normandy
would be shocked by the condition of the United States and Great Britain 80
years later. I mean, they are shocked. Have you seen them interviewed? Some
100-year-old guys like, we died for this? Yeah. No, it's—and it's totally, I
mean, like, talk about just disgracing their sacrifice. Oh, it's the greatest
disgrace. Our self-abasement is an insult to their sacrifice on our behalf. But
I wonder if the opposite isn't also true, that maybe in your defeat there are
things that—I mean, I know this is true for me. Every time I've gotten sick or
gotten fired, like, I just—I understand the world better and I become more
joyful and stronger. Do you feel that? Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, many times in
my life. And yeah, you lose—you learn a lot more from your losses in life. Yeah,
your defeats are actually your victories in retrospect. That's right. But, you
know, the problem is just this is, man, we're just playing with fire with this
thing because it's so dangerous. You know, it's— What worries you most? Well, I
guess I'd say, number one, what we're doing to those people over there, I mean,
I think is just, like, horrible. And I don't say this as, like—I'm not trying
to, like, virtue signal that I care so much more than other people, but, like,
when your government takes your money and just starts slaughtering people in
poor countries compared to us, you know, it's just so profoundly wrong. What you
do to others will be done to you. Yeah. That's a physics principle. You can't
get away from that. So that's just true. Well, imagine, imagine, like, there was
a guy who was, like, a convicted pedophile and he had molested a bunch of, like,
Iraqi children or a bunch of Iranian children, and then you were like, well, I'm
going to have him babysit my kids. He only does it over there. You know what I
mean? Like, he only—you're like, what? No, dude. He's hurt children. You can't
let them anywhere near your children. That's right. Okay, well, these same
monsters in government are the ones who are ruling over me and my family and my
country. And the idea that you just go kill, like, you know—I know, I said this
on Rogan's show the other day about the school that we had where he killed,
like, 165 or 170 little girls, and then people, you know, give me shit. Those
numbers haven't been verified. That's just the claim of the Iranian government.
He goes, well, our government's not denying it. And in fact, they did an
investigation and concluded it was almost certainly us. It was a tomahawk
missile. What's the question here? We know where this came from. The only
question left is, like, who gave it that coordinates, or did it miss, or was
that intentional? Whatever. But, like, kill a whole bunch of eight-year-old
girls? I mean, Jesus, man. Is there anything more evil you could do than that?
So just on a basic human level, you know, there's, like, this is horrible—
Anyone who would do that, I think it was clearly accidental. But I also think,
having done a lot of accidental things, it's essential to apologize for it. And
anyone who doesn't apologize for it's a dangerous person. Well, also, even— If
you do that to them, you'll do it to my kids. Yes, and it also—it stretches the
definition of accidental a little bit. Because even if very specifically, like,
we were trying to hit this building, but instead we hit this building, and this
is a point I've been making largely through Israel's destruction of Gaza, which
was not that at all. They were just leveling the place. But you go, look, man,
like, you start dropping bombs on people. You start blowing things up, you know
innocent people are going to end up dying in that. So in that sense, it is
intentional. And maybe you didn't mean to hit that exact, you know, target or
kill that many people. But, like, I'm just saying, if you blew up a building,
you know, that you suspected somebody else was in, but then it turned out that
there were a bunch of little kids there, it's still a pretty profound crime, but
then, of course, on top of that, I really worry about getting trapped into a
broader war, a wider war. There is not—and I don't—I'm not saying that I think
this is going to be like Iraq or Afghanistan. I think already this is very
different than Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq and Afghanistan did not have the
ability to do what Iran is doing right now, for one. Number two, I just don't—I
don't think it's going to be that. I don't think—I think it would be more the
Libya or Syria model than the Iraq or Afghanistan model, which did require a
small amount of ground forces. So we used head-chopping bin Ladenites in both of
those cases and put the bin Ladenites in power in Syria. But just to be clear,
our country would not survive another Iraq or Afghanistan. There's no United
States of America coming out of that. We don't have a 20-year catastrophic
ground invasion in us. Like, it will bankrupt the country. It will destroy the
country culturally. So that's a very scary thing. We don't have—you know, in the
launch of the global war on terrorism, we were coming out of the 1990s. This was
a different country in the 1990s, you know? And anyone who was alive then knows
this. Different people lived here. Yes, yes. Different people, different
culture, different economic realities, different military realities. Now, then,
the other thing that I really, really worry about with all of this is that we've
never really had—we've never dealt with a full, like, Shiite jihad war against
the West. You know, our beef was always with the Sunni radicals. Those were the
terrorists. We had to worry about the al-Qaeda and ISIS and stuff like that. And
that was quite a big problem. You know, we had a lot of terrorist attacks in
America and in Europe, particularly ISIS-inspired attacks, al-Qaeda as well.
And, you know, so I've kind of called out some of these people—I'll do it again
here because they're, like, some of the biggest frauds in the country, these,
like, pretend intellectuals like Sam Harris and Gad Saad and guys like this who
have spent a career demonizing Muslims. Their entire career has been talking
about what irrational, violent people Muslims are, how awful the religion is.
And, you know, and look, there's been some points that I agree with them on. You
know, if someone, you know, writes a cartoon about Muhammad, you don't have the
right to kill them. Sorry. You want to be in the West. These are our rules here.
We value free speech, and I can make a cartoon about whatever the hell I want to
make a cartoon about. Okay, but if you spent your whole career arguing how
violent and irrational the Muslims are, what does killing an Ayatollah mean? You
know, that's not just a political figure. You know, you murder an Ayatollah and
his entire family, and we've already had a couple terrorist attacks over here
that at least seem like there was the shooting in Austin, Texas that came, like,
the day after we launched the war, and the guy was wearing, like, an Allah Akbar
t-shirt. I'm assuming that might be related. And so, you know, then you have
this real issue of, like, there's, unfortunately, in the old, like, controlled
American media, and all the, you know, all the people like Mark Levin and all
these guys, when they talk to their audience, whatever audience they got left,
and they always love to talk about how Iran chants death to America, you know?
You know, which they do, and I'd like it if they stopped doing that. It's not
the nicest chant. But none of them ever even try to say, to even approach the
question of why. Why do they chant death to America? Why do they hate us so
much? And this was always... Well, they hate us for our freedoms. Yes, right. So
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This was after, this is so funny that it is so funny that that was, funny in a
dark way, but that that was actually the question. I remember, I was 18 when
9-11 happened. I remember asking that question with all sincerity, and that was
actually the national conversation. That was the first question before it got
answered with, they hate it. When 9-11 happened, the average Joe six-pack
American went, why do they hate us? That's how ignorant we were of our own
position in the world. We didn't even know there was a beef. You go, what are we
talking, we thought Bill Clinton was the time of peace and prosperity. That's
what Americans considered that time, the time of peace. Iraqis did not consider
that a time of peace. Hundreds of thousands of them were getting killed due to
the blockade, Clinton's bombing campaign. It wasn't peace in Serbia. You know
what I mean? It wasn't like there, but to us, it was like, oh, that has little
wars. They didn't really mean anything, you know, but it wasn't. Now, all you
got to do is ask that question. And I'm sure it's almost like implicit in the
Mark Levin world that, well, why do they hate us? Well, I don't know, because
they're crazy Durka Durka people and they hate us. You know, they're
Islamo-fascists. I don't know. That's what they do. They hate. But if you ask
Iranians and not the ones who are, you know, paid by Mossad to promote wars, but
like if you do, they'll tell you very quickly why they hate us. And the whole
beef, right, goes back to 1953. We overthrew their government. We installed a
dictator who they did not like very much, who was not very kind to his political
opponents, to put it mildly. And then the other big thing that they point out
all the time is in 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq. Now, a lot of people from
my generation remember this because this is actually what the neocons would,
they would often like vaguely cite this when they were trying to push the war
against Iraq. They're like, he used chemical weapons against civilians. You're
like, yeah. What they leave out is that they were backing him when he did that.
They facilitated the sale of those chemical weapons to him. And they backed and
gave the green light for Saddam Hussein to invade the country. And so, you know,
Iranians remember that. Like, they remember that. There was, I think, 500 or
600,000 Iranians died in that war. Like, they remember this very well. By the
way, another lesson from that war is they never surrendered, even after taking
losses like that. These Shiites are not playing around when it comes to matters
like that. They fought and fought and fought. And so, anyway, I say all that
just to say that it's like these things do inspire hatred. And they inspire
hatred for generations and generations. But cause and effect is real? Yeah, it
turns out. In 2002, a letter emerged written by Osama bin Laden, who, of course,
was then still alive, that he had written right after 9-11 in Kandahar before he
fled to Tora Bora. And it came out a year later in the Wall Street Journal. And
I worked at CNN at the time. And I read it on the air to answer that question.
What is this about? Why did you do this? And the letter, which briefly became
famous before it was pulled off the internet, said, you know, I'm mad that you
have troops in Saudi, where Mecca and Medina are. And I'm mad about your support
for Israel. And that's why I did this. I wasn't trying to justify 9-11. It can't
be justified, in my opinion. That's right. But I think it's important to know
why things happen, because you don't want them to happen again. Well, a group of
rabbis got together and called me an anti-Semite, which I wasn't then and I'm
not now, and tried to get me fired from my job. I'll never forget that. And CNN
called me, the corporate lawyer called me, you know, they're all mad at you. And
I'm like, I wasn't attacking anybody, of course. I just think it's more than
Americans don't know. I think they've been prevented from knowing that, you
know, actions have reactions. Well, that's why, you know, the term blowback that
was coined by the CIA and what they described it as was it's not just like we do
a thing and then there's a reaction to it. It's that we do a covert thing and
then there's a reaction to it and then the American people have no idea what
this is even in response to. It's just like, whoa, out of nowhere, these guys
attacked us. And, you know, when that. But we're going to need a police state to
protect ourselves from the blowback of this war. I mean, that's a real concern.
That's the problem. Yeah, that's a real concern. We're so vulnerable. I mean,
this country is wide open. All of our infrastructure, our energy infrastructure,
our food, our water, all of it's unguarded and the only way to protect ourselves
from the inevitable blowback, the Shia terrorism that we're going to get, of
course, after killing the Ayatollah is going to be to turn this into a
surveillance state even more than it is. Yeah. And of course, also, on top of
that, coming off of the Biden years where we don't even know who's who's here,
we have no like I mean, it's just the mix of these policies, like the mix of the
of having forever wars and open borders is just got to be the the welfare state.
Yeah, I know. I mean, like, just throw everything in and a drug war on top of
that, too, and a drug war so that drugs are illegal. There's a black market. The
gangs want to smuggle the drugs and like every single policy on top of it just
makes this situation like so much worse. But yet, you know, when that when the
Osama bin Laden's letter to America went viral on TikTok before it was many,
many, many years later. Yeah. Oh, yeah. My aborted to bring it to the country.
Yes. To be clear, this is written in 2002. It was like a couple of years ago
when it went super viral on TikTok and all the young leftists were like sharing
it and they were going like, oh, my God, look at this. Turns out now, of course,
they're leftists. So it always they always think to collectively. Right. And so
I saw a bunch of people going, turns out he was right or he was the good guy.
And you're like, no, no, no, that is not the takeaway from this. Like, you know,
there was that that one time the guy Hassan Piker, who's like a left lefty, like
a streamer. And he had said that America deserved 9-11. And that was like what
got him in a lot of trouble for it. And it's like, but no, stop speaking like a
leftist. We're not we're not collectively we're individuals. And the individuals
who had nothing to do with these policies did not have it coming. Having
breakfast at Windows in the world and get killed. Yeah, you deserve it. No, you
don't do the whole point. Now, what Osama bin Laden said, I don't think this was
in the letter to America. I think it was in it might have been it was either
that or in his declaration of war. He had two declarations of war against
America also. But what he said is that civilians are fair game because you vote
for, you know, you vote the Bill Clintons and the George Bushes in who slaughter
all of our children. And so you're fair game. Now, that's the logic of Osama bin
Laden, the psychopathic, you know, terrorist. And that's and the whole point of
why we're against all this shit is because we reject that. We don't agree with
that. That's not. And you know who else use that same logic? Every goddamn
Zionist who said they elected Hamas in Gaza. And by the way, they don't even
have regular elections in Gaza. They had one election 20 years ago where Hamas
won with pluralities. But that was enough for them to say to kill their
conscience. And so so, no, the whole point is that, no, it does. You don't have
the right to take vengeance on innocent people. That is the standard of
civilization. I have said that, you know, pretty consistently for the past
couple of years. And I thought that was like just a baseline understanding that
everyone in America knew and believed. I thought that was the whole point of
America. That's what civilization is. You can't punish the innocent. Right. And
that turns out to be incredibly anti-semitic. I didn't know that. By the way,
I've never up until recently, all the Jews I knew were 100 percent on board with
that. I mean, I can just like hear a rabbi going, you can't kill the innocent.
Amen. Brother. Except in this one. But now it's like all of a sudden these, you
know, I don't know. I don't think it's about any specific group. In fact, by
definition, it's not. It's a human standard to which we should all be held and
do our best to hold others. You can't kill the innocent. Yeah. And also, it's
not, you know, it's not about one specific group because. Well, by definition,
it's not about one specific group. It's about all humans. It's also just not,
you know, and this is the problem where when people try to make it about the
Jews. And it's so weird, the dynamic, because you, I watch you, you literally
bend over backward to say that it's not about the Jews as much as possible. To
the point, to the point, and as someone who's like a Jewish fan of yours, I find
myself going like, you could stop making that point. Like, you've said it
enough. You know what I mean? But you do every opportunity. You go, I don't
believe in blood guilt. It's not because I'm afraid of Jews at all. No, you want
to be clear. I'm not afraid of anybody. It's because I think it's the standard
that we have to uphold. Well, also, everyone is insisting that that's what
you're really saying. And so you want to go, no, I'm not saying that. I just,
that's why I've been defending Muslims. It's not because I'm Muslim or taking
money from Qatar. Too late now. We rent their economy. But it's because I think
these are human rights bestowed by God. And they apply to every person because
they're inherent in every person because every person is created in the image of
God. That's the point I'm trying to make. Yeah, and I completely agree with you.
I also think it's just, frankly, inaccurate. I mean, it's not, look, I know, I
saw one poll today that said 60% of American Jews support the war in Iran,
which, hey, that's a lot higher than the general population. But that means 40%
of them don't. You know what I mean? And so, like, that's a huge, huge
percentage of them. I think a third of Jews in New York voted for this Mamdani
guy. Now, I'm annoyed with them for other reasons because he's a crazy
socialist. But they're clearly not on board with the Israel lobby's plan here.
And then, of course, as you've done a better job of exposing than anyone I've
ever seen, there is a lot of, like, Ted Cruz's and Mike Huckabee's out there
who, as you, I think, correctly pointed out, are different animals, right? Like,
Ted Cruz is a cynical, lying politician. Mike Huckabee is, like, a true believer
of sorts. I'm not sure which is worse. They're both pretty rough. And both
totally humiliated themselves when you interviewed them. But there's also, like,
the point is that the Israel lobby encompasses a lot of non-Jews. And then
there's a lot of Jews. There's the Max Blumenthal's and Norman Finkelstein's and
Glenn Greenwald's. So it's just, to just say it's, like, this group, nah, you're
missing the point entirely. Well, I would say that the advocates for the war are
primarily responsible for that. And speaking of blowback, speaking of blowback,
I mean, it's hardly my job to, like, defend Jewish Americans. But I want to
defend all Americans. And I definitely want to defend the principle that we
should be judged on our own terms, not by people who look like us or we're
related to. Like, I think that's the most important thing. But, I mean, I do
think you often go, oh, anti-Semitism's on the rise. I agree with that. Yeah.
And I wish it wasn't true. But that is absolutely real. And I know that I'm
blamed for it. Okay. But I'm against it. I think you're one of the... I'm really
against it. I know people will mock me for saying this, but I genuinely think
it's true. I think you are one of the leading fighters against anti-Semitism in
the country. I think so. And I think I do what I can to be that as well. I think
if you really want to see a decrease in Jew hatred, then I think maybe it would
be good to have Jewish people saying, hey, I am totally against this. I am not
for this. But also, it is, and I'm not defending collectivism of any stripe, but
it is very predictable, and it is just human nature. You know, if you have...
That's why it's so scary. Yes. Because it is human nature. That's exactly right.
If you, if there, let's say you just have a neighborhood, okay? There's like a
neighborhood, all things being equal or whatever, and a bunch of black teenagers
or black young men are going around and mugging and beating up people. Do you
think anti-black racism is going to go up, go down, or stay the same? Crime
causes racism. I said that for years ago, and he'll, shut up! Yeah, but now, is
it fair to the black guy who didn't mug or beat up anyone that there's right?
No, it's not fair to him. It's also a predictable and, frankly, at times, an
understandable response from someone who was the victim of getting mugged and
beat up. And so, if you're, you know, if you're a black person who's, like, in
the public eye, it might be reasonable at that point to go, hey, guys, we gotta
stop mugging people and beating them up. Otherwise, they're gonna hate us. And
the way I always looked at it, this always just came very natural to me. Like,
this was so obvious. I'm Jewish. I love Jewish people. I love Jewish culture.
It's who I am. It's a big part of me. And I think some of the best things about
me I got from Jewish culture, valuing intellectual curiosity and family and hard
work and humor and a lot of things that really define who I am are very much a
part of Jewish culture. Total refusal to go along with whatever else is saying.
Yeah, for sure. For sure. Also, just whining about things, complaining,
fetching. You know, this is all part of me. It's what I do for a living. It
turned it into a pretty nice career. But that being said, it's like, I just look
at it, I go, okay, so we're, all the stories I've heard from my family and our
history are how we were brutally oppressed here and killed here and kicked out
of here and relocated here and then we came to America. Now, I have grown up in
the United States of America. This is where my kids live. It's where they're
gonna grow up. As you say all the time, that's the only thing that matters to
me, is that my kids have the best life I can give them. Literally, the only
thing that matters to me. Everything is a very distant second from that. And I
go, okay, so I'm, we're 2% of the population in America. We are, by all
objective standards, thriving. We're doing great. Jews are not an oppressed
minority in America. We're doing better than the average American is doing,
substantially. And I've never once, I mean, I don't know, I've had, like, people
on Twitter say things to me or something like that. But there's never once been
an obstacle put in my way because I was Jewish. I never couldn't go to this
school or couldn't get this job or couldn't do anything like that. And I've had
a really great life here. In fact, probably the most, like, anti-Semitism I've
ever dealt with is from the pro-Israel people who call me, like, a capo every
day because I don't support another reckless war. So... Capos were the Jewish
enforcers. Jewish collaborators with the Nazis. In the ghettos. Yeah, yeah.
Right. So, um, which is a really nasty thing to call somebody. But whatever.
That's the game we're in. So, so my perspective is like, okay, so you're telling
me the whole world treated us like crap. We've come here to America where we've
been just very successful and treated very well. My default position is to love
the country for that. Like, oh, well, then we should be really grateful to this
country. That should be the attitude. Not going around lecturing people about
whether they've been to the museum about our suffering from decades ago. Like,
what is that? It just seems like such a... And, and look, again, I'm not... A
lot of the critics of Israel are left-wingers. I'm not coming at this from a
left-wing perspective. I'm a crotchety old right-winger. Like, I don't agree
with any of that. I'm sitting here and saying, if we, if any self-respecting
conservative or self-respecting right-winger saw any other minority group
complaining about their mistreatment in another continent, in another country,
in another century, you'd go, hey, shut up. Get over it. Pull yourself up by
your bootstraps. That's like what I'm saying. And then, by the way, with Jews,
like, oh, you already did. You pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. So, like,
what are we even talking about here? And I don't think, I don't think, like,
obsessing over past trauma is always the correct answer. And certainly not
insisting that everybody else suffer over or obsess over your past trauma. So, I
just always, it was always very natural to me that, like, I'm on Team America.
I'm rooting for this country to succeed. The country that fought the Nazis, by
the way. Yeah, right, yeah, right. Lost a lot of Americans fighting the Nazis.
Why are you lecturing me about the Nazis? Yeah. My country fought them. And to
almost anybody, like, anybody at Fox News. Now, again, maybe I talk about, like,
Mark Levin and Fox News and these guys, like, too much. Like, they really are
irrelevant. But I guess it's just that I'm stuck in the old, you know, I'm the
age I am. And so, to me, it's still like, hey, this is Fox News. But any one of
them would completely agree with me on this if we were talking about any other
group of people. You know, if we were talking about any other group of people
talking about victimhood or any of that. You know, if they were – if there was
some black, you know, guy talking about how racist this country is because of
slavery, they would have made your exact point. They'd go, we fought a war to
end slavery. Hundreds of thousands of us died. You know what I mean? Like, they
would right away – And I wasn't even here, so back off. Yeah, right. What? Yeah,
no, I couldn't agree more. And underneath all of this, and the reason that I
really do worry that the country is going to become, like, openly tribal, and
that leads to violence every time, is that a lot of the same people who are
upset about the rise in anti-Semitism, which, again, I think is real. I mean, I
can tell it's real, and I don't like it either, are the ones who abetted all the
anti-white hate for so long, which is still not being addressed. The Trump
administration sued Harvard over its anti-Jewish discrimination, which is like –
it's deranged. What a slap in the face to white people, man. Well, it's
unbelievable. Oh, my God. And, of course, the anti-white hate is still totally
embedded at every level of our government and in business and, most famously, in
schools. So that's like an attempt to hurt people on the basis of their race,
and no one has said anything about it. And my point is these are either
universal principles – they apply to every human being endowed with human rights
by the creator – or they're just preferences. It's just your tribe against mine,
and then I'm allowed to fight your tribe for the benefit of my tribe. And it
just devolves into Rwanda. So, like, I think we could diffuse a lot of this if,
like, the head of the ADL would be like, I'm every bit as opposed to anti-white
hate as I am to anti-Jewish hate. We could all just agree that it's all wrong,
then we decelerate. But until then, how can I take you seriously? Yeah, and I
think along with that is we have to stop fighting wars on behalf of Israel, and
we have to have some type of separation. I mean, I'm not saying that, like – I'm
not saying we should be enemies with Israel or that we should go to war with
Israel or anything like that. But it just – the relationship, the special
relationship between the U.S. and Israel is so freaking weird. And now in this
new media environment, it's been exposed. I don't think you can put that
toothpaste back in the tube. No, you can't. It is something that I think a lot
of people were kind of happy to look the other way about for years. You came on
my show. You came to Maine a couple years ago to do something on Ukraine, and
Greenwald, too, who I love and I've known a long time. And both of you had a
moment where you're like, yeah, Israel's probably – I'm like, ugh. I agree, but,
like, I don't want to – you know, there's – I just want to pretend this isn't
happening. It's not worth it. I don't want to be denounced by Chabad or
whatever. I just don't want to have the fight. Well, you let me or Glenn
Greenwald in your door, and that will not be happening. I was – Yes, I get it.
No, I get it. I was part of that. Like, it's just not worth it. Well, look, even
the – in my opinion, the greatest living American hero, Ron Paul, used to – even
he would kind of, like, try to say it in a gentle way. Yeah. Like, he would go,
well, look, let's let them fight their own fights, and we'll just kind of be
over here being non-interventionist. Because, of course, on one hand, it's like
– look, there's a lot of things. First of all, I don't know if people who are
listening to this show can appreciate this, but you know this much better than I
do. But there was a time – you know, Donald Trump will kind of say this out
loud. He'll say that, you know, AIPAC used to totally control Congress, and now
they don't control them anymore. Like, he'll just say it, which is so wild. They
give me hundreds of millions of dollars, and I do whatever they want. It's like,
all right, dude. You're just saying that out loud. I thought that was like an
anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, not just something the president says. He said
it in the Knesset. Yeah. Of all places. Oh, my God. But the thing is, right, in
the old order, before there were podcasts like this – and look, if you think
about – like, I used to always point to the example, because I thought it was so
interesting, about where the technology, where social media was. When Bill
O'Reilly was the number one show at Fox News, the number one show in cable news
at the 8 p.m. hour, you were also the number one show at Fox News, the number
one show in cable news at the 8 p.m. hour. When they fired Bill O'Reilly, Bill
O'Reilly went from being, like, one of the biggest voices in the national
conversation to being, like, relegated over to the sidelines who was like – you
know, he still has a show somewhere, but he's not, like, really moving the
needle at all. You got bigger than you were there. And part of that was who you
were, who your audience was. No, it was technology. But a big part of it was
that you had another platform to go right to. I would be fly fishing full-time
if it weren't for the technology. So maybe – and that's – maybe the technology
ruined your life. You could have just gone and had a happy life. They pulled you
back in. But I don't know that people appreciate how much – in the old order, in
the old days when getting fired took you out of the conversation with Bill
O'Reilly days or whatever before that. Getting the Israel lobby on your back
would ruin you. It would absolutely ruin you. It was the one thing you couldn't
do. It didn't matter who you were. You could absolutely sleep with the makeup
artist. Yep. You could not fight with the ADL. That's right. I mean, that was
just it. That was just it. I mean, and there's so much – I mean, whether it's
the ADL or the Southern Poverty Law Center or APAC or whatever, the American
Enterprise Institute or National Review. I mean, the Israel lobby is like this
huge, powerful thing. And back then – I mean, it didn't matter. If you were Pat
Buchanan, you're like, dude, I'm Pat Buchanan. I've been in four White Houses. I
won the New Hampshire primary. I won the New Hampshire primary. I've been in
four different presidential – three or four different presidential
administrations, a New York Times bestseller, a fixture in America. I mean, he
hosted Crossfire when Crossfire first started. You know, it doesn't matter. They
could take you out. They could take Ron Paul. They could take all – and so there
was, for many years, almost I feel like a leftover residue of like, you just
don't want this fight because, man, is this going to get ugly and you're going
to be smeared as every vicious name in the book. But at a certain point it was
like, oh, well, you know, you kind of can talk about these things now. And in
fact, the people who do talk about them are being rewarded by their viewers
because it's refreshing that someone's talking about the thing you weren't
allowed to talk about. But now that that has been exposed and the toothpaste
can't be put back in the tube, it's too – it's just too much. You cannot have –
and I know you talk about this a lot. You look at examples like – and these
examples are countless. You look at Ted Cruz saying to your face, as he said in
other places, that the reason he ran for Senate was to be Israel's number one
defender. You got Tammy Bruce saying America's the second best country to
Israel, kind of tongue-in-cheek, still a really weird thing for an official from
the administration to say. You got Donald Trump saying that Sheldon and now
Miriam Adelson give him hundreds of millions of dollars and all they want. They
come in every day asking for stuff on behalf of a foreign country and he gives
it to them. Which they love more than America, he said. Well, Sheldon was on
tape. Have you seen this? Yes. He was on tape. He said his greatest regret in
life is that he wore the U.S. military uniform rather than the IDF uniform. Now,
I'm sorry. That is intolerable from any just sane perspective. This has nothing
to do with hating Jews or even hating any other country. If people were talking
like this about Norway, we'd be like, yo, what are you doing? This isn't Norway.
This is America. Move to Norway. Yeah. Like, fine. Go ahead. But no, you can't.
And then to have people like Mike Huckabee saying that God promised Lebanon and
Saudi Arabia to Netanyahu. Like, I'm sorry, but there's just no, this is simply
not how public policymaker, I guess it's not a policymaker, but a politician, an
ambassador to this country. You can't be talking this way. This is insane. Like,
we don't let anybody just dictate their policy off God told me to do this and
then a very weird God told me something on behalf of a foreign country. So I
think we're at a point where if, and this is kind of my rejoinder to a lot of
those, you know, people who call me and you anti-Semite, I guess I'm a
self-hating Jew and you're an anti-Semite, because listen, man, there is a rise
of Jew hatred. And if you really do care about that, the only way to combat that
is that we got to end this, you know, like the same way we needed a separation
of church and state so we don't fight religious wars anymore. We need a
separation of the Israel lobby and the United States of America. I think it's
tough. I think it's tough. As a non-Israel hater, I don't hate anyone. I'm not
going to allow myself to hate anyone, period. But I'm just being as honest as I
can be, you know, we're very enmeshed, like more than people understand
representatives, official and non-official of the Israeli government throughout
the U.S. government at every single level, state and federal. Okay, there's that
in our institutions. That would include the Pentagon and CIA are biggest and
most important. And then there's the question of, like, what does that mean for
Israel? Like, do they just allow the United States to be like, you know, you're
just like, whatever, France now or Spain. We're going to treat you like, you
know, an ally, but not a sibling. I think that we get punished for that. People
are afraid of Israel. That's the difference between Israel and Spain. Everyone
loves Spain. It's great. The Spanish, we can have bases there. You can put
missiles there. It's all great. But no one thinks if you pull back aid from
Spain, they're going to hurt you. But everyone is afraid of being physically
hurt by Israel. Maybe they're overstating it. Maybe they're all anti-Semitic and
paranoid. I don't know. I can just tell you from living in D.C. there is a fear
of them. Real fear. And anyone who says this country is freaking lying. No, it's
like saying there's a fear of the intelligence agencies. Like, that's a fact.
It's a fact. I think we're pretty out in the open about that now. Yeah. Well,
that's right. That's right. And it's, you know, so if that's the case, that it's
almost like our leaders are just too afraid to do something. Well, of course
they're afraid. And I don't know the genesis of that fear. Like, maybe, again,
maybe they're all just reading the protocols of the elders of Zion. And maybe
they're all anti-Semites. And they're overstating the influence of Jews or
whatever. I mean, that's totally possible. People do make crazy calculations.
Maybe there really is a physical threat. But it's not arguable that U.S.
policymakers at every level are afraid. This is not all voluntary at all. Yeah.
Well, it's – there's something about, like, the – you know, I – like, Megyn
Kelly, I think she was the one who said this. I don't know if she coined the
term, but she was the first one I heard say it. But she – I think it was with
you. Where she said the Israel firsters. And that was how she described it. I
was like, oh, that's a good – that's a really good term for them because, you
know, the thing is that, you know, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, like, they
call it the Israel lobby. But then when you say that, a lot of people just think
you're talking about AIPAC. But they're not just talking about AIPAC. They're
talking about this whole different – all these different organizations and
individuals. The Heritage Foundation. Yes, yes. The Washington Post and, you
know, everybody. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and, you know,
all of these organizations. And then all these individuals who clearly are here
to – that is their number one issue. And the thing I almost resent most about
them is like – it's like, just admit that. Just admit that this is what you care
about more than anything else, Barry Weiss. Clearly you do, right? Like this –
so – I agree. Because then, in effect, you are like a foreign spy. You're kind
of like an agent for a different government. And the point is that – you know,
because people will try to argue the technicalities of this. But the point is
that all of – the whole global war on terrorism was all a bunch of Israel
firsters who pushed the administration into that at every level. You know, this
is – by the way, you'll like this just because some people don't get this. But
you'll – so David Wormser, who, you know, worked for Dick Cheney and was – he's
the author of the Clean Break memo. So he – so I talk about this all the time, a
lot of different podcasts on yours, on Rogan's. I brought up the Clean Break and
how – that's what this whole real strategy is. It's what the Clean Break morphed
into. It's essentially – and you could look at this. David Wormser and Richard
Perle and Douglas Fyfe wrote the Clean Break memo to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
He first became prime minister for his first term. And he had written a book,
which is worth reading, called Fighting Terrorism. Very easy read, by the way.
It's a little book that Benjamin Netanyahu had written the year before. And
essentially, the break was from Oslo, was from the peace process. The break was
from Yitzhak Rabin, who had now been murdered by a Benjamin Netanyahu fan after
Benjamin Netanyahu really pushed – I mean, that's a whole other can of worms, by
the way. But I know – Yitzhak Rabin's wife, I believe, still blames Benjamin
Netanyahu for his death. Many in Israel do. Yeah, he was – And now there's a
lobbying campaign to get the murderer out of prison who killed – Well, they –
so, I mean, they were – he was given anti-Rabin, like, marches, and they were
holding coffins before he died. Like, they were, like, implying, like, someone
should kill this guy. Because he had said – not that he was really ever going to
do this – but he had said, we got to find a two-state solution. We got to give
the Palestinians their own state, and we'll start working toward that. Now, the
clean break was the neoconservatives' brilliant idea, the Israel firsters here,
that, well, no, no, no. See, you got this all wrong. You think you need to make
peace with the Palestinians because that's the only way that you'll have –
you'll normalize relations with the broader Arab world. But no, no, no, no, no.
We just got to go topple the broader Arab world and overthrow all those
governments. And then you never have to make peace with the Palestinians, okay?
So it's essentially a blueprint for greater Israel, and this was their whole
strategy pre-9-11. And for regional hegemony. It's not just about controlling
the West Bank. It's about controlling the Middle East. That's right. That's
right. And so now, because we live in this crazy world we live in now, David
Wormser did a podcast where he responded to me. Now, from my perspective, I'm
little old me, some stand-up comedian who just talks about all this stuff. This
is David Wormser. This is the guy who's the author of the Clean Break Memo. But
to the new internet world, he has like 300 followers on Twitter. Nobody saw
this. Nobody knows about it. But so David Wormser, and he's there to debunk my
interpretation of the Clean Break Memo. This is the funniest thing I've ever
seen in my life. And so the host brings him on to be like, oh, this Dave Smith
guy's out here saying that all these wars were about Israel and blah, blah,
blah. And this is ridiculous, right? So why don't you just tell them that this
is all not true? And his response was he just goes into like a monologue about
how Israel is the cradle of civilization. And that all of Western civilization
is downstream from Israel and that we always must protect. So anyway, in the
attempt to prove me wrong, he just totally exposes that like, yeah, this is the
mentality that all of these guys have. So if Mike Huckabee supports a war for
Israel, in his mind, that's not selling out your country for another country.
This is God's plan. You know what I mean? Like this, so they're all so, it's
like the fish doesn't know he's in water. Like they don't even realize they're
the Israel lobby. They go, what are you talking about? So this is what Jeff
Sachs said to me, Jeff Sachs, who's often attacked, Jeff Sachs is really smart.
And I think Jeff Sachs is a decent guy. And we don't agree on everything, but
like he's an honest guy. Like he just says, so I say to him, you've been
watching this all these years. What do you think this is about? Why does this
tiny country have so much control over our giant continent-sized country? And he
said, well, you know, a lot of contributions, there are threats, there are
questions about the Kennedy assassination. Like they're willing to use force in
assassinations to get what they want. He goes, but I don't think that, I don't
think that explains it. I don't think either one of those bribery or threats,
carrot or stick, I don't think that actually is the whole picture. There's a
spell of some kind. There's like a supernatural quality to this. Good people,
like I don't think Mike Huckabee is like in favor of genocide. I just don't
think that. Pretty nice guy, very nice guy actually. But he believes with this
fervor that suggests that he's not thinking clearly. Like there's another
quality here. And do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, no, 100%. And I
think Jeff's ex is a pretty secular guy, by the way. I don't know, but I don't,
Jeff's not a religious extremist, that I can say that. For sure. Right, okay.
Yeah, but everyone recognizes, like I told you last time, there's no such thing
as atheists. They think they are atheists, but no one really is. But you were an
atheist. No, but I wasn't. But I thought I was. But you never really are. It's
not like you can't. Why did you think you were? Well, because I would just say,
I don't really believe in any of that. And I don't think that that's real. But
of course, like, as I told you the story last time I was here, then when my
daughter's born and I'm worried about her life, I immediately find, and it's
like, I always knew. That was always in there on some level. So I remember one
time hearing this debate, and I wish I could remember who it was, but it was
like a theist-atheist debate. And it might have been Christopher Hitchens or
something like, I don't know, maybe not. But it was one of those, like, does God
exist debates. And so the guy arguing that God does exist said something about
how there are spiritual forces in the world and blah, blah, blah, or there are
evil spirits, he said. There are evil spirits. And then the atheist guy goes, he
goes, look, like, we all know that there is depression and there's this and
there's this. We all know that there's dark forces in the world, but you don't
need a supernatural explanation. I'm like, did you just say dark forces? Like,
dark forces? I mean, what is that? You're saying the same thing in a different
language, man. Like, it's just like, there's actually no gap here between,
anyway. But so, yeah, I do think there's a spiritual component to all of this.
It feels that way because I don't want to be the kind of person who imputes the
worst motives to my opponents, okay? But I am because most people are, like, why
is this person doing something that's insane, doesn't make sense, it's
irrational, getting paid. Like, that's always the first explanation that people
come to, and I have myself thought that. But then if you know someone really
well, I don't, I'm not intimate with Huckabee, but I've known him for so many,
you know, 30 years, more than, it's like, I don't think Huckabee, you know, he's
into money, I get it, but I don't think he's, like, totally motivated by greed.
I just don't believe that. No, I think there's, well, look, I think- And I don't
think he's evil, but he's defending evil, so what is that? I think a few things
can be true at the same time, right? So it could, it can be that you're under a
spell, that there's a spiritual aspect to it. And then it can also be that
there's soft incentives for you to continue being under that spell, right? And
so the, you know, the history of Jewish influence, Israeli influence, I mean,
look, obviously, much of this goes back to the fact that Jews dominated finance
for many years, and part of this was because Christians weren't allowed to lend
money and credit, right? But there is, now, there is a form, obviously, of,
like, abusive usury, right? There are loan sharks out there. There are, some of
them are even credit card companies that will charge you, like, 30% interest or
29.9, whatever they're allowed to do on, you know, which is, like, kind of a
crazy interest rate, and they kind of prey on desperate people. Now, they're not
necessarily, like, even the loan shark or the credit card companies, they're
just kind of benefiting off your desperation, because it's not like, if the
credit card company wasn't there, it's not like, oh, now everything's okay. The
reason they're putting necessities on the credit card to begin with is because
other conditions have, you know, led them to this desperate place. Totally. But
the problem, so then you had, for much of Christendom, right, it's completely
banned to lend money at any interest, which is that, you know, I do not think is
abusive to have any interest rate on your money, because that's actually a very
necessary part of an economy. There are people who have a very good idea, but
don't have any capital, and then there's people sitting with capital, and they
go, well, look, I can't just give this to you, because if you lose it, then I
just lose my money. And if you pay me back, all I've gotten is that I get my
money later rather than having it right now. Oh, so if you have my money, then I
can't use it for whatever thing I want to build. Right, right, exactly. So
there's a cost to me to lending you my money. However, if I go, hey, I'll lend
this to you, but you pay me back a little bit of interest, this actually really
facilitates economic growth, or just good businesses being created, because
like, oh yeah, the guy with a good idea, but with no capital, now can do it. So
anyway, so Jewish bankers ended up kind of filling this void, and then you had
very powerful Jewish groups who became very, very wealthy in banking, and yada,
yada, a lot of things later, banking got very, very corrupt. But again, it's
important to keep in mind, this wasn't most Jews, most Jews were living in
poverty, this was, but like, the Balfour Declaration is written to the
Rothschilds, right? Like, it's not, the creation of Israel was at least part,
they had international finance backing them. And so that's also true in America,
that much of the largest banking institutions had some Jewish influence. It's
also the case that after the creation of the state of Israel, you have the
Mossad, right? Or you have Israeli intelligence. And now, Jews are smart, not
like that much smarter than everybody else, but they're a pretty smart group.
And then the Mossad had an advantage over every other intelligence organization
that would really be a dream for any intelligence organization. But the Mossad
had a diaspora of people all spread out in the world that were Jewish, right?
And so, and also, there was this wide cultural belief amongst Jews that the
Holocaust is what gave birth to the state of Israel, and that the state of
Israel is the guarantor of another Holocaust not happening. And so you could
very, like, imagine the CIA had that. Imagine you just had little Americans in
every single country, you know, little groups of Americans, maybe not every
single country, but you had pockets of them in lots of different places, and
they really passionately believed that the existence of the United States of
America was the most important thing in the world. What an advantage for them.
Go around, hey, find any American somewhere. You want to serve your country? You
want to do this? And so I think between finance, between the Mossad, and then
the neoconservatives, who really were not old money when they first came into
it, right? Not at all. Like, if you know the first generation of
neoconservatives, they were having their debates at City College, not at
Harvard. You know what I mean? Literally, City College. Yes, these were
middle-class guys. Working class. They weren't the Rockefeller guys or the
Morgan guys. They weren't at the Council on Foreign Relations, but what they did
was they went and they made their relationships with the military-industrial
complex themselves. And a lot of this was, you know, the problem is that you
create this empire, you create this military-industrial complex, this big
government scheme, and then it's ripe for someone to take it over. And if you go
look at, like, every last one of those Bill Kristol think tanks, Bill Kristol
needs to have 16 think tanks. He doesn't have a thought in his head, but he's
got all of the- Never had one. He couldn't even write a New York Times column.
Like, his dad was smart for all his problems, but Bill Kristol was never smart.
He was revered as the smart guy. Never said anything smart. Dan Quill's brain.
Yeah, literally. But every last one of those think tanks is funded by Lockheed
Martin or, you know, Raytheon or whatever. So it's like, the thing is that a lot
of times in government, there's, it's a very different thing to be, like, swim
with the current than to swim against the current. You know, there's no such
thing as a Fabian libertarian. You don't, you know, you have, you might have
some hardcore communists, and then you have, like, an AOC who's like, I want
incrementally more government. You can't get incrementally less government
because there's no, that's asking the government to have less power. Now, if
you're the neoconservatives and you come around with, like, hey, I've got a plan
to fight forever wars. You know, I've got a plan to go topple all of these
different countries. You're going to get some money from weapons companies. And
so, anyway, just saying, aside from the spiritual- How is this different from
fascism? I thought that's what fascism was. I mean, leaving aside the
anti-Semitic component of the Nazis, which was a big component, but the idea of
fascism that the state, you know, merges with the industrial powers, with the
private sector. Yeah, this is what it is. And also just swap out the Jew hatred
and make it Muslim hatred or make it German hatred or Russian hatred or whatever
it is. You know, they always pick another thing, some ethnic hatred. So, yeah,
it's not, but that's exactly right. Fascism won. Man, it's so ironic. It's the
same when, sometimes when you win, you really lose. You know, you could, they
could say on paper, and I'm sure there's some historian professor who would say,
no, like capitalism and communism won the second world war and fascism was
defeated. Except what arose out of it was the fascist model for everybody,
essentially. Right. Which is, and again, it's fascism is kind of ill-defined,
but- Kind of ill-defined. Yeah. Well, but broadly speaking, I mean, what are we
talking about? The FDR and the entire progressive movement, the original
progressive movement, this is what they were advocating for, right? It's like,
it's, we, we got to get away from laissez-faire free markets. We're not going
total communist, but we need a strong, powerful state, powerful enough to
regulate the economy and the country, and then also fight wars abroad. I mean-
Without majority support. Yeah. I just don't really see what, and we can cling
to this idea of democracy, which is always really an illusion. You know, it's
never really true. It doesn't really, in fact, there was a study done, I want to
say this was at Princeton, if I'm remembering correctly. This was like 15, 20
years ago. But they did a study where they said, they just concluded that we're
an oligarchy, not a democracy. And they literally just went through it
empirically and were like, the American people's feeling has no impact on
policy. You could say we have elections, and if you really don't like George W.
Bush, you can vote for Barack Obama instead of John McCain. But what'd you vote
for him for? Because he said he'd close Guantanamo Bay and end the wars.
Guantanamo Bay is still open today, and we're on the seventh war of Wesley
Clark's seven wars in five countries. And none of that stopped. What did we get
during Obama? We got a massive escalation in Afghanistan. We got wars in Libya,
in Syria, in Yemen, drone bombing campaigns in Pakistan, continued the war in
Iraq, ended the war in Iraq, then reinvaded Iraq when his pet ISIS left over
from the war in Syria. So I think you're describing the upside of all of this.
Again, I haven't slept eight hours in a month. I'm so distressed. I'm in no
sense for this. I argued against it, obviously. But it's happening, and this is
the end of the empire as we knew it. Hopefully it'll shrink back into something
manageable that serves our interests. But who knows what'll happen. But we're
definitely not going back to where we were a month ago. We know that. So what
are the upsides? Well, one upside is you might wind up at some point with
presidents who want to run the United States. No president wants to run the
United States, because why would you want to run the U.S. when you can run the
world? By the way, you don't know the people you manage when you run the world.
They don't come to your office and complain about your treatment of them. It's
like there's no cost. It's all upside. You're the king of the world. I don't
think future presidents will have that option. And so maybe we'll get people who
are like, you know, LaGuardia Airport smells. The Miami Airport is like an
atrocity. Maybe we should fix that. Don't you think? Yeah. Maybe this will cause
like a reorientation back to what matters, which is our country. Yeah, quite
possibly. And that's the yeah, that's really the best case scenario. And, you
know, like I try to well, I look at models like, you know, when the Soviet Union
collapsed, right? There's I remember there was a so Murray Rothbard talked about
this in a speech once. Murray Rothbard, for people who don't know, is in my
opinion, like the most brilliant political theorist of the 20th century is a
genius. And he was, you know, of course, he ended up supporting Pat Buchanan in
1992. Yeah, yeah, I remember. He was an economist and a historian and a
philosopher. And so he was talking about, I guess this was like the speech he
gave shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he was talking about
how he had seen like a video of a Chinese family under Chinese communism at the
time. I guess maybe this was back. He was talking about from like before Mao
Zedong died. And he said that the, you know, the interviewer asked him
questions. They were just talking about how much they love the regime. And he
said, would you rather your kids had a, it was something like, would you rather
your kids had a prosperous life or were loyal servants of the regime and had a
very difficult life? And he says, loyal servants of the regime and a very
difficult life. No problem. And so Murray Rothbard said he watched this and he
was like, my God, I mean, this is just so horrible. Like they've actually done
it. They've created the communist man and destroyed the human soul. And then
he's talking to his buddy, who's another genius who went to China a lot and was
like a China expert. And he goes, no, that's what they say when the cameras are
there. That's all that is. It's like, guy doesn't believe that. You know what I
mean? They just know this is on tape. You can't say anything else. And so that's
what you say. And then they go about their day, not really caring what the
regime says. And so like when the Soviet Union collapsed, from all that like
I've read about it, like that was essentially the state of the Soviet Union was
like no one believed the government anymore. They just all knew they were liars.
That's right. They all knew this was bullshit. That's right. And they were
really actually- We're in the Brezhnev era here. Right. And so now, of course,
the war hawks and the neoconservatives, they always viewed us luring the Soviets
into Afghanistan and getting them bogged down there fighting the Mujahideen in
Afghanistan, including the foreign Arab Mujahideen and Osama bin Laden, who we
were supporting. But they always viewed this as a great success because it
brought down the Soviet Union. And I don't know enough about what factor led to
what. I mean, communism is not an effective economic system, but I'm sure the
war did hurt them a lot. I know how costly wars can be and how much they can
degrade our country. I know wars in Afghanistan can degrade your country. So I'm
sure that was part of that. But my point is that it wasn't like America went in
and toppled the USSR. Like they collapsed on their own, partly as a result of
fighting foreign wars and partly as a result of, you know, just government lying
and terrible economic policies. But at a certain point, like the soldiers just
weren't willing to fire. You know, like there were attempted- Counter coups.
Yes, there were attempted coups in the past where they did fire and they were
like, no, you're not leaving the Soviet Union. But by this point in 89 or
whatever it was, as the people started rising up, they were like, we're just
not, we're not doing this anymore. They themselves don't believe it anymore. The
government. And so I guess it's a long way to get to what I'm saying. But like
at a certain point, we might just, we might hit a point where like the people
just aren't believing this anymore. the law enforcement, whether military or
police, just aren't going to crack down on the American people in that way. And
that would maybe lead to a rise of a real president who actually ran the
country. And I don't know, I think if I'm not mistaken, I believe in, um, when
there was like German reunification, they didn't, from what I understand, I
don't think, they didn't really punish like the people in the communist
government. They kept them on their pensions. They went kind of, and I feel like
we almost need something like that. I know Curtis Yarvin's talked about this a
bit, but something where it's like, look, man, I think there are some people at
the absolute top who need to be criminally prosecuted, but like, we got to find
a transition from here to there. Like if we're, if we're buying off bureaucrats,
that would be cheaper than continuing this system. You know what I mean? Like
there's almost something where if a president could come up and say like, Hey,
all you guys working in the intelligence agencies who were working to undermine
presidents, you all have amnesty, but you got to pack up and go home right now.
Like that's it. In, in a weird way, we need, as you said, we need an actual
president who's actually running the country and who can restore peace here. I
mean, I think older Americans believe their country is more united and cohesive
than it really is. You've got an entire generation of people who weren't born
here, whose parents weren't born here, who came here on the promise that can't
be fulfilled, which is that, you know, of a better life economically. And I
think it's going to be tough to make good on that promise, honestly. And so what
do you do with that? What do you do with dashed expectations at scale? Millions
of people who kind of thought they were getting something and didn't get it. A
country where half of all households get a government check, half of all
households. And the average age of the first time homeowner is 40. Yeah,
exactly. So you've got a lot of issues here and all of our attention is there.
It's in the Persian Gulf or China or Venezuela or wherever. But once you
readjust and start thinking about how does this country deal with dashed
expectations and remain coherent, how does it prevent the rise of like a truly
dangerous demagogue? Yeah, yeah. Well, also, it's not like the two – it's not
just that we're focused over there and so we're not taking care of what's going
on here. It's the focus over there is destroying over here, right? A hundred
percent, as it always does. Okay, so the angriest I've ever been at you was when
you said that – you said Lindsey Graham's views are war everywhere and Austrian
economics at home. And I was like, no, Tucker, no, Austrian economics – no, but
look, I mean, because – and it's not just – I don't care about just like the
term, but it's the – the idea is that essentially what's going on here –
Monopoly capitalism here. Yes, yes, but the opposite of Austrian economics. Big
government, central banking, record high government spending every single year.
And so what happens essentially is – and this is what also – I'm so furious at
this administration over – over this stuff and, you know, I don't know – it's –
you're in more of a – you're in a tougher position than I am where you were the
guy in Trump's ear trying to convince him not to do this or one of the guys who
got to meet with him and convince him not to do this. I think the only one.
Yeah, I think so. Well, the last one is no longer with us. So, you know, there's
that. And – yeah, yeah. So – but, you know, so the thing is, like me – like I'm
no good at being a political strategist, like I said. I'm just good at being a
podcaster. Sorry, I just had a flash of rage that was so intense I lost – I lost
my vision. Yeah. No, I understand. Well, it's worth it. There's some things
worth being that angry over. I'm sorry. But – so, you know, I kind of go – I
don't know political strategy stuff, but I go, I think you should just, like,
you know, try your best to stay being able to. At least he has one person who's
telling him to do this. But the thing is that I'm just not capable of doing
that, and I'm not close to the administration, so I'm just, like, red behind the
eyes furious. But one of the big things I'm furious about is that they're
handing this country right back over to the Democrats, who really are every bit
the threat that we were making them out to be over the last decade. And they're
race haters, too. And they're going to come in more authoritarian and more angry
because they are furious that we disobeyed them and put Donald Trump back in the
White House. There's all – and, like, all their – I mean, look, we saw what they
did through COVID. We saw what they did with tech censorship. And I don't want
to find out what a central bank digital currency looks like and what carbon, you
know, social credit scores look like. And the thing is that what – look at – you
watch the Democrats as they're winning now, right? Like, you could look at the
races when Mom Donnie won in New York, when the new governor won in New Jersey,
the new governor in Virginia. There have been a couple races in Texas where they
were, like, outperforming what they should be performing in Texas. Every last
one of them is running on what they now call unaffordability. It's like they
just made up a new term because they – and literally none of them – I don't – I
just really don't think if I had one of them sitting where you're sitting right
here and I was grilling them and I could go, what is unaffordability? I don't
think one of them has an answer. I don't even think they know the term currency
debasement. I don't even think they know that that's what it is. And they have
no respect for human rights at all. Oh, no. None. So here in Virginia, which was
conservative or normal 20 minutes ago, they bring in some guy literally born in
India from another country to lead the effort to confiscate people's guns and no
more self-defense in the state. This just happened. I mean, it was like not long
– I mean, a year ago they had a Republican governor. So it's an evenly – not
much of one, but still it's an evenly divided state. The second they take power,
you can't defend yourself. And just to humiliate you, bring some guy from
another country to lecture you about your country where your family was born,
you don't have the right to have a gun? Yep. No, it's such an outrage. I mean,
it's just like unbelievable. But look, but the thing is that – It's going to
happen fast when they take over. Running on unaffordability is winning for them,
obviously, because that is the issue, right? Now, they don't understand that
unaffordability means price inflation. It means that you've debased your
currency, right? And so this is – so the thing is now we're handing them this
thing to run on. While Donald Trump is talking about, you know, working with the
Ayatollah about the Strait of Hormuz or whatever, your local Democrat is going,
hey, why are your grocery prices so high? Why is that – by the way, all the
price inflation from the Joe – you know the way this stuff works. It's
cumulative. So Donald Trump – we live in an inflationary economy because of the
central bank. It doesn't matter what – Because inflation means an inflation of
the money supply. Right, because they will, no matter what, print enough money
so that we don't fall into a deflationary, you know, economy. They're going to
do that. And they're just – they're not even printing the money. They're just
typing into a computer these days. So they can get ahead of it. And so Donald
Trump might brag that the CPI is only at 2% and not at 9% where Joe Biden was,
but for every regular American, we lived through all of those price increases
and now it's just 2% more expensive than it was under Joe Biden. So you haven't
been helped any. The prices aren't going down. They're just going up at a slower
rate. It's like – I think it was Michael Malice who had the phrase where he goes
– when they go, they go, we cut inflation in half. And they go, it's literally
on the level of if you knew somebody who gained 100 pounds in a year and then
the next year they gained 50 pounds and they go, I'm getting thinner. And you're
like, no, you are not. You are getting fatter, sir. Like the goal is not to slow
down how much weight you put on. But it really does just come down to this,
right, is that we have a government that we cannot afford. We cannot even come
close to affording the size of government we have because it's the biggest
government in human history. It's the biggest organization in human history as
you often point out. And that organization is parasitical in nature. It gets its
money from taking that money – from expropriating that money from the American
people – but you can't tax them enough and you can't borrow enough. And so we
have to print the money. And so we have to print the money because we can't
afford the size of government. And so then that makes the price of everything go
up and up and up. And so essentially the point I'm getting at – and this is why
I just point out that to say it's Austrian economics gets – because what guys
like Memdani can come in and do now is say, hey, look, everything's so
unaffordable. And you know what the answer to that is? A government program.
More control. More government. More control for me. More free buses and
government supermarkets. And on the surface that kind of probably sounds
reasonable to some people. But the thing is that we're here because government
is too big. That's what's got us to this place. And so like I think it's
important to just like point that out to people. That it's like, no, this is –
the thing is that we cannot afford – here's the real hard honest truth that
Americans don't want to hear. or at least maybe the first part they want to
hear. People are okay with me saying this. We can't afford the world empire. We
can't afford it. We don't have the money for it. We're pretending we have it.
We're just devaluing our currency and therefore, by the way, destroying young
people's lives. Now there are days I know a bunch of young people like in my
family and friends who are literally like good people go to work every day, make
70K a year. And they're like, how am I going to settle down and start a family,
dude? I mean like the average house around me is going for 800 grand. You make
70 grand a year. That math simply does not work. And this is not – I'm not
saying the bum on welfare. I'm saying like the young man who's getting up and
going to work every day. And so we cannot afford this empire. And the other
thing is, which no one including Republicans ever wants to say, we also can't
afford the entitlement programs. No way. And they're insane. They're the most
indefensible thing in the world. I mean leaving aside Medicaid for a second, but
Social Security and Medicare are from a different time, from a different country
that are totally indefensible. They were indefensible then, but they're really
indefensible now. Yeah. You're telling me you have a wealth transfer program
from a poorer group to a richer group? I'm sorry. The seniors aren't the ones
who need the help right now. That's for sure. It's the young people. And I think
that I would love if some politician – I think Ron Paul is the only one I've
ever seen. I'm sure Massey would agree with me if I said this to him. But I wish
somebody would just run on that. I'm like, yeah. You know, they used to say
that's the third rail of politics. Like, why? Because boomers just need to get
everything. Everything has to be rigged in favor of them. I mean, I'm sorry.
Like, the thing is, you kind of have these like abstract political debates
sometimes, which I'm a nerd for this stuff. I really like them. But so you'd
have like a – you know, you'd have like a Keynesian debate a Chicago school guy
or you'd have a socialist debate a free market guy. And like the free market guy
would argue that, you know, there's a better allocation of resources in a free
market. And then the socialists would argue that some people fall behind. And so
you need redistributive policies to take from the wealthy to give to the people
who have fallen behind. But who argues that you should have a redistributive
policy from the poor to the rich? That's the whole United States of America.
That's all of central banking. That's all of government spending. All it is is
they take money from the working people and they give it to millionaires. Go
look at any of the suburbs of Washington, D.C. None of them make anything.
They're all in $3 million houses because government spending is north of $7
trillion. Of course. Well, that – unfortunately, it's getting to the point where
that kind of is our economy. Yeah. Yeah. So you'd really need to reorder things
on the – beginning with the foundations. Yeah, well – But two good things are
happening. One, the empire is by necessity shrinking. And so that's a cost
savings. And that's a reorientation back where the attention belongs, which is
here. And two, you have the baby boom going away, which is 1946, 1964. So people
born in the middle in 1956 are now 70. Yeah. So they'll be 80 in 10 years. So
you – that generation, clearly, I think everyone agrees. Not everyone in it, but
as a generation, destroyed the country. Oh, yeah. Just the worst. And annoyed
the country. With some notable exceptions. Of course. My mom included. She's
cool. But the rest of them. Oh, many. Many notable exceptions. I know a million
baby boomers that – not a million, but I've met baby boomers I like. Well, I
just couldn't – I mean, the thing about it – Not that many, though. There's –
Jeff Deist is a really, really brilliant guy. He was the – he ran the Mises
Institute for years. He's over at Monetary Metals now. But he's a really, really
brilliant guy. He had this speech one time where he was talking about the
boomers and, like, the evolution of the generation and what they believed at the
time. And it's – so it is just the most self-absorbed, selfish generation ever.
I mean, they literally – their slogan was don't trust anyone over 30 until they
turned 30. Exactly. And then he does – like, Jeff Deist, like, went through the
whole thing. I don't remember all of it. But then by the end, they were the ones
pushing COVID. Like, they started out as the don't trust anyone over 30. And
then they said, shut down the schools so that I don't get sick. Like, take from
my grandchildren's generation so that I'm protected. And, yeah, I mean, these
guys – But the dumbest, too. I mean, the thing about – narcissism is the core
sin. Like, that's their main problem is they're all about themselves. The thing
you notice about people who are all about themselves is how unwise and badly
informed they are because they don't pay attention to other people. Therefore,
they never learn. Therefore – and I've noticed this since I was a child because
these were my teachers, the baby boom – they'll fall for anything. They're the
most easily manipulated people who've ever lived in this country. They are the
most dominated by their herd instinct. Like, all the kids are wearing masks. All
the kids are taking the shots. All the kids are going into finance. Whatever all
the other people are doing, they will do. They're the Mickey Mouse Club
generation. They are truly without creative impulse. They're just not impressive
in addition to being super annoying. One of the least attractive generations.
Like, there's a lot about them that we can – the least attached to their own
children. You've got two houses, but your kids have no house. How does that
work? Oh, yeah. The generation of no-fault divorce, the generation of I've got
to be me, I've got to pursue my own happiness when you've got little kids. But
you is not that interesting. Yeah. But the more you think about you, the dumber
you get. That's just what I've – I've just always noticed that. It's like one of
the most profound ironies in life, like this kind of counterintuitive thing
where, like, if you're only concerned with yourself, yourself is going to suffer
for that. It's really true. And you watch this all the time with people who
really have, like, really bad depression and are just, like, miserable, and
they're constantly talking about their mood today. It's like, hey, step number
one, stop thinking about your mood. Your mood is not that important. Here's step
number one. Start thinking about other people. How about this? Try doing
something productive for someone else other than yourself, and don't think about
your mood once while you're doing it. You know, I'll tell you, I've, you know,
I've been on this earth for about 43 years, and I haven't learned that much.
I've got a few things. There's – I've never been anywhere near as happy since I
got married and had kids. Like, once my life became about a family and not just
about me, you know what I mean? And I think I was in this generation that was –
Did you expect that? No, man. I mean, I don't know. I always thought before I
met my wife, it was always, to me, like, everything in my mind was, like,
professional success. Right. You know, like, that was – I wanted to be a
successful comedian, and I wanted to talk about politics and all of this stuff,
and I wanted – I always wanted that. And, you know, it's weird now because I've
kind of – like, I've kind of gotten everything I really wanted in all those
years. And it's nice. Don't get me wrong. I really love my career. I love what I
do. I love this. I love doing shows with you, and it's great. But, like, it's so
unimportant compared to family. I mean, you know, like, it's just not even –
it's not – the older you get, the more you realize it's, like, that's all that
really matters. All that really matters are your wife, your children, the close
friends that you have around you, like, the good people in your life. Connection
to other people, connection to God. That's all that really matters in life. All
the rest of it is kind of just part of the journey and part of the thing. Yeah,
you do your best, knowing you're probably not going to move the ball. Yeah,
well, you know, I read this – there was this really great book by, I believe,
the author's name – you know, I don't know if I've ever actually heard it
pronounced. I've just read it, but it's, like, Jean Twenge or Twenge or
something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I don't know about her. I think she was on
Bill Maher's show recently, and she said one thing that I thought was really
stupid, and I turned it off because I was like, I really liked her book. I just
don't want to – I don't want to know. You know how you feel sometimes? You're
like, I don't want to – don't – but she wrote this book called – I think it was
called The Me Generation. Generation Me, something like that. It was really
great. I thought it was a really, really good book, and it was kind of about my
generation who was raised by the boomers. And, you know, the way I was raised –
and again, I'm not – I had a really great mother. She was really great and
instilled a lot of really good things in me. This was bigger than her. This was
just the culture. But we were raised – and I didn't think it was so unique at
the time, but I was really kind of a child of the – you know, a child of the
unipolar moment, I guess you could say. And then a teenager, young adult. A
post-Berlin Wall. Yeah, well, I mean, I was – I remember watching it, watching
the Berlin Wall come down. I was at my grandfather's house, and my grandfather,
as I told you before, was from Germany. And I just – my only memory of it was I
was a little – I was born in 83, so I guess I would have been six years old when
this happened. So I'm a little kid. And I just remember I was being a little kid
and probably being loud in the living room or something or walking in front of
the TV, and I remember he snapped at me and went, shh. And I just remember being
like, oh – How old was your grandfather when he left Germany? He would have
been, I want to say, like 15 maybe or something like that. Oh, wow. So old
enough to remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Old enough to
remember some really vicious things. He got out in 1938. But – so anyway, he –
so – so I just remember like, oh, this is really serious to grandpa, what's
happening. And it was the Berlin Wall being coming down. Yeah, it was a big deal
to him. I'm not sure he liked it that much. I think he was a little concerned
about German reunification. Many were. You know, as you could imagine. But – it
turned out to be a good thing. But anyway, so, you know, I was – I kind of grew
up in that time, in the 80s and the 90s. And there was – we didn't have things
that I think almost every other generation had. Like, we weren't raised with,
like, God, chivalry, nation, country. You know, there wasn't this – it was like
you go to school and, you know, get your homework done so no one's mad at you.
And then you can go play basketball outside. Or there's a new video game out. It
was – let's hang out with our friends and have fun. There wasn't, like, this,
like, purpose, you know, like, put into your life, which most people have in
most of human history. Even if it's just their – They call it culture. Yeah,
culture. Religious views, you know, important things. And I think there were a
lot of people in my generation were like that. That it was almost – again, like
we said before, you can't take God out of the equation because something else
just becomes God. And in a weird – like, I know I've heard you say this before,
but it's so true. It's like the desire to worship is so hardwired into the DNA
of the human soul that you just can't – you can say you're an atheist if you
want to, but then, like, I'll find out what your religion is pretty quickly. And
oftentimes it just becomes yourself. You know, when you don't have other things,
it becomes like, well, let me have fun. Let me go get this. But that is – like I
said, 43 years, I haven't learned much in life. One thing I have learned for
certain is that if your highest goal in life is your own pleasure, you will be a
miserable, miserable human being. Yeah, well, I've learned that. I've learned
that too. So as you look around at 43, among people you know who are your age
grew up in the same world you grew up in, how many are thinking about the
existence of God right now? I think a lot more than ever were as kids. Did you
ever know any religious people growing up? Yeah, I mean, I knew some, but it was
very few and far between. Like, there were really, like, religious or talked
about it or what – you know, like, I knew – you know, even, like, I went to,
like, Hebrew school, but I went for, like, a year to – like, my mom wanted me to
be bar mitzvahed, but it wasn't really, like, a deep religious conviction. It
was more like, this is what our people have always done, you know, and, like,
out of respect to your father and your father's father and your father's
father's father, you know, like – and, like, I could kind of understand that.
And so I went, but it was, like, a reformed, you know, temple where I went
there. And I remember even the rabbi, like, you know, like, some of the kids
would be, like, well, do you believe in God? And he's, like, yeah, you know,
everything that's good is God and everything, you know, like, it was just total,
like, Jewish, you know, like, essentially atheism. I grew up around so many
people like that. Yeah, so it was just – you know, there was just a lot of that.
And I don't – you know, I certainly think that one of the things I really focus
on as a father – and I have little kids, but I will focus on this more over the
years – is, like, instilling the idea of purpose, instilling the idea of, like,
God – and not just God, but, like, what that represents. It represents that,
like, hey, you're, you know, you're here. We're all here in this life together.
This life is a little bit of a mystery. We don't know everything about it.
That's exactly right. We do know that, like, we – other people exist, too, as we
exist, and human beings can be – we have this amazing capacity to be demonic or
angelic. You know, like, you can really – one person – you know, there's little
moments in life where, you know, whatever it is, like, you're at the post office
and it's 5.01 and you had to get this letter out today or you're getting fired.
And you're, like, you know, my life is ruined if you're talking to some person
on the other end. Can you please just take this one package? You know, I'm just
coming up with a scenario. And that person could go, all right, come here. Give
me the package. And you're, like, yo, you just saved my life. You know what I
mean? Like, you have no idea what you just did for me. And, like, you can do
that for other people. You can try your best to throughout your day and your
career and your life be, like, yo, let me help this guy and be that person. Or,
you know, you can be what Benjamin Netanyahu is to the Palestinians, you know,
like, just. A monster. The guy who just, like, ruined their family's life. And
so if we're kind of given this world and we don't have all of the answers to it
but we kind of know that we have, like, an ability to be either one of those
things. Hey, really focus on being the angel for people. Really focus on trying
to help others. And I think that makes you a much happier person the more you
focus on that. Completely. And do you find that people you knew in the secular
world growing up are reaching similar conclusions? Yeah. I think I know several
people like that. And I do. I think that, you know, he had an amazing meteoric
rise and a really tragic fall. But I think this is why Jordan Peterson was such
a phenomenon for years. That it was, like, you know, going around and telling
young men that you should search out purpose and search out God. And, like, it's
amazing how, like, powerful that is. I love that. Yeah. Me too. He takes a lot
of abuse and, you know, I think he's against me or whatever. I don't even, I
could care less. But I will always appreciate that about Jordan Peterson. Yeah,
me too. That he did that. Yeah, you know, I, like, I, in a way, he was a guy who
I always really wanted to talk to and never did. He was, you know, obviously, I
mean, him joining the Daily Wire and going on that side was just a really,
really tragic mistake. And I think he threw away all of the credibility that he
had with the younger generation when they really could have used his voice, you
know. Yes, I totally agree with that. He was never much as a political actor. He
was always something else. No, he's like a Canadian psychologist. Yeah, like,
this wasn't, you know. Sit that part out. He missed the mark on a lot of his
political points. But, I mean, you know, when you're on record telling Benjamin
Netanyahu to give them hell, that's really hard to come back from. But he came
on, you know, he came on Joe Rogan's show the episode after I debated Douglas
Murray. I believe it was the next one was Jordan Peterson. And I remember
watching it and I did feel like I was like, oh, man, I think he's going to,
like, say, you know what I mean? Like, I think he's going to say something, you
know, nasty about me because he's Ben Shapiro and Netanyahu's guy now. And they
just had this big debate. And he didn't. He kind of said, oh, I thought he
didn't name me. He mentioned Douglas and Joe. And he said, I thought I thought
everyone involved did a good job. Good for him. So I was like, OK, that kind of
that was nice to me in a way that I was like, oh, he had, you know, from someone
at the Daily Wire, that's about as good as I can expect. He was a pretty
charitable guy. I mean, you know, I thought he had flaws, but I was never. I,
you know, I always said charitable and still do have charitable feelings toward
him. Douglas Murray, however. That's a different one. What happened to Doug? Is
he still living in this country? No, he's doing great. I think he got a gig
writing speeches for the Israeli government. Oh, he did. From last I heard.
Yeah. He did. Can I just, I don't know if I've, have I said this on your show
before? I don't think so. Because I think last time we spoke was right after
that debate or last time we spoke on the podcast, not spoke in life. But last
time we were doing the show was right after that debate, but before this came
out. And it was Ryan Grimm and the guys over at DropSite who published this. So
if you remember the famous, you've never been argument, well, I'm sorry, I
should not call that an argument. It's not an argument. Didn't rise to the
level. But what he said, what he was trying to say, which was really, you know,
kind of silly, but he was like, you know, he goes, well, he said, I have the
journalistic courtesy of visiting a place before I talk about that place. This
was, he was lecturing me about journalistic ethics. Now, I'm not a journalist,
Tucker. I'm a stand-up comedian. You've been a journalist for many years. So
maybe you can fill me in on this. I don't, I'm not an expert in journalistic
ethics. What are the ethics of covering a country and not disclosing that you
work for the government? Is that up there? Is that framed upon? I would have to
consult like a professor of ethics like Sam Bakeman-Fried's parents. Yes. I
think his mother does that for a living. So we have a whole infrastructure
designed to answer complex questions like that, Dave. Also, by the way, how
about I have the courtesy of not advocating for wars that I'm not willing to
fight in myself. That's my professional courtesy. That is a much better
standard. Well, who spends, I mean, what type of person, and look. But he kind
of went away, didn't he? I mean, Douglas Murray was like, I took him seriously.
So, by the way, I knew him well, and I thought he had, you know, there were
things about him that I felt sorry for him because of them. But in general, I'm
smart, and I never had a problem with him at all. Had a couple fun dinners with
him. That debate, which you were proclaimed the loser of by a lot of people, I
think that just destroyed his life. Yeah, well, again, it was like no one except
the people who already had made up their mind that Israel is the greatest
country ever. No one except them thought that he won the debate. A few of them
seemed to celebrate that. The comment section under the video was just torching
him. Like, every regular person went, oh, he just destroyed himself. And then I
will say, a lot of people, including some prominent people who you, listener,
know, including Charlie Kirk, by the way, texted me after that debate and were
like, yo, dude, he just destroyed his credibility. Or you, like, that was crazy
that he came at you like that. I had people, you know, whatever, I won't name
all of them because I don't want to give out private information. Maybe I
shouldn't have. I mentioned that about Charlie Kirk because Candace months back
had called on me to, like, to release whatever private communications I have
that might be relevant. And I thought one of the things was relevant was that he
said after the debate that he largely agreed with me after the Douglas Murray
debate. Well, he certainly did. I talked to him on this topic. Yeah. I'm, yeah.
So I did think that was relevant into, like, where his mind state was. But other
people, like, I think a lot of people kind of expected him to be like, they were
like, okay, Dave, you've been blowing through these debates, but this is the
best guy on the other side. So he's going to come really give you a British
accent. So there was no chance that he was someone from Brooklyn was going to
beat him. Well, yeah, I guess that's the first advantage that he had. But, you
know, there's a weird thing where, again, kind of back to what I was saying
before, you see this thing where, so after that debate happens, I have this
huge, like, groundswell of support from people. Then Donald Trump tweets out,
you've got to go get Douglas Murray's new book, like, two days after the debate
or something like that. And it just, I thought there was an interesting parallel
between that and when Donald Trump just tweeted the other day about how great,
not the one to watch the show, but he tweeted last week about how wonderful Mark
Levin is and how everyone arguing with him is awful or something like that. And
if you look on Twitter, not saying Twitter is everything, but it's one little,
you know, glimpse into things. I mean, Mark Levin gets ratioed by random people,
like, not even like you or Megyn Kelly or someone like that. I'm saying, like,
some random guy will just call Mark Levin an idiot and way more people like his
tweet than like Mark Levin's tweet. He's out there, he's feuding it with Megyn
Kelly and he's calling you and me every name in the book. And then the entire
audience is just going with us and then Trump comes out and says, we're all in
with him. So I saw that when Trump tweeted that about you read, you know,
Douglas Murray's dumb books. And I kind of willfully ignored it because I was so
focused. Well, because I like Trump, but also because I was so focused on the
Iran thing and just have to prevent a war with Iran. That's more important.
Well, I don't know, though. I mean, that that was foreshadowing that actually
there was a lot of control. Why would the president of the United States be
promoting Douglas Murray, who, you know, he's not even American and he's like
totally discredited. Why would the president be promoting him? Well, I mean,
doing Mark Levin is much worse. I mean, look, Douglas Murray, I do think he he
was ridiculous and he kind of made an ass out of himself in that debate. But
Mark Levin has gone to a level of retardation that I've never seen. Listen, I
was never to I was somewhat impressed by the first generation of neocons. You
know, I think I worked for them. Yeah. Well, I know. Yeah, I was one. But I
think. Well, sorry. No, I mean, like I mean, like Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol
and those guys. Right. And but then I always thought like I always kind of went,
you know, if you remember the Fox News, he wasn't really on your show a lot. But
if you remember the reverence people used to have for Charles Krauthammer. Yeah.
Like they would all talk about him like to his face. They'd be like the genius
is here. And then I'd be like, I've never heard him say anything interesting
ever. I just don't agree. I don't know what. But all of those guys. So I was
always like one thing I'll say about Charles, who I knew really well, he's a
very nice man. And he was a nice man because he had had to reckon with, you
know, being paralyzed from the chest down from medical school. And and so he
just had a perspective on life. I spent hours, hours talking to him and I knew
his wife and I really liked him as a man. But his views were impossible to
defend if you cared about the United States. Yeah, that right. But anyway, I
guess with all of them, I was never particularly intellectually impressed with
any of them. No, I agree. See, by the way, if you want to see if you've never
watched, man, Scott Horton debating Bill Kristol at the Soho Forum. It was you
really exposed just how much Bill Kristol has nothing. No knowledge, no
argument, nothing. He literally I've never seen it happen before. He threw in
the towel in the debate. Essentially, he literally at one point, Scott makes
some argument. There was like a back and forth section and Scott makes some
argument and he goes, well, we just have fundamentally different worldviews. And
you're like, yeah, that's why you're debating. But you have to make an argument.
And then he will never explain what his worldview is. And then in his closing,
there were still like three minutes on the clock and he just stopped. Anyway, I
say all of this to say I've seen some dumb arguments from neocons over the
years. I have never seen anyone go full blown Mark Levin the way he goes. Like
it is that he's literally just a ranting old man yelling insults unattached to
any argument at all. Like his whole show is just like, yeah, this little punk
wants to come and talk to me, a little fascist. It's like, it's like, what is
this, dude? Like, and so there is something about Donald Trump promoting that
that is that's like several levels worse than promoting Douglas Murray. No, but
it's so then you have to ask, like, well, what actually is it? It's not designed
to win people over. It's designed to increase hatred. Anti-Semitism, by the way.
Absolutely. I mean, if you were, if you were, you know, whoever Mark thinks he's
working for, the Israelis, I guess, you would look at this and say, this is not
helping us. Don't do this. Don't, you know, get some articulate, decent, hot
woman on there to make the case or whatever. You do a marketing thing. This is
anti-marketing. This is designed to repel people. So why would you want that? I
don't know the answer, but it's clearly true. Second, his relationship with the
president is bizarre. You think Trump likes that? There was a, there was a
moment at some anti, stop anti-Semitism event of some kind or Hanukkah
celebration or some Jewish themed White House event where Trump was there with
Mark Levin and Levin comes over and puts his arm around the president's neck and
pulls him in. Now, I know Trump well. I mean, I wouldn't like that. And I'm not
even the president or a germaphobe. Yeah. What is that? And under normal
circumstances, Trump would never put up with that. You just, what, you're,
you're doing the dominance move over the president of the United States? And
over Donald Trump. Are you joking? Not just the president, but Donald Trump, the
most dominant alpha male guy. That's a dominance move. Who does that to other
people. Exactly. Yeah. But even Trump, who is very much about dominance,
obviously, most powerful men are, he would, Trump would never throw his arm
around someone and give him a headlock like that. He's going to do that. No, no,
no. He'll pull you in while he shakes your hand. A hundred percent. Or he'll do
the thing. What did he do at one of the G7 meetings or whatever where he cuts in
front of some other world leader? But like there are, by the way, this is
another thing that I am totally. That's breaking the rules, dude. But I'm
oblivious to this thing. But this is, as you said, powerful men are like this.
Yes, they are. Where there's like alpha moves. Yes. Like taking your thing and
just make it, you know, like whatever. Like if you have a little thing of
peanuts here that you're eating and I just reach in and tail, you know what I
mean? Like, but to do that to Donald Trump, I understand. I'm not trying to make
too much of a little thing. It's not a little thing. But that was, there was
something symbolic and then proclaims him the first Jewish president. You've got
to think that Trump, he never said this to me, but just knowing him, you've got
to think he's filled with rage and someone doing that to him. Well, look. But he
puts up with it anyway. So, and, but why would you do that to him? So if you
want to exert influence over someone who's powerful, like there's a way to do
it. But the last way to do it is to be like, I'm in charge here. Just so you
know, I'm more powerful than the president of the United States. That's what
Levin is saying. And Trump is putting up with it. This is either, it's a form of
sadomasochism, but it also reveals like the true architecture of power in a way
that's like, what? Yeah. Well, I think. What is that? Well, here, I'll say this.
And I'm just to preface this. I'm not saying anything other than what I'm
saying. I'm not implying something that I don't know any more than this. And
maybe you know more than I do. But I will say, you know, people used to say when
Donald Trump was first rising to political, his political career in 2016, when
he was running, when he was first president. I remember liberals used to always
say that he's dog whistling bigotry. Yeah. And, you know, we always thought this
was so always like a dog whistle. It's like a thing where you kind of. First of
all, it's kind of weird because you're like, well, then wouldn't you not hear it
if it's a dog whistle? Because wouldn't only the bigots hear it. Isn't that the
idea? Also, that seems like a very convenient way of saying, even though there's
nothing I can actually point to that you said. Of course. He's also raised. But
what I always thought was that what Donald Trump did was he would very often
stoke or give a wink and a nod to conspiracies. Oh, that he was look, he went
out there about Obama's birth certificate. He obviously called out the whole
Russiagate thing, which was a legit conspiracy to unseat the sitting president
was the Q thing. The Q thing. Yeah. He'd he'd he'd float at the obviously the
the election being stolen. The but all the which and of course now with Epstein
when it's not really. Well, it is a conspiracy, but it's a legitimate one. But
he's saying, oh, it's you know, there's a Democratic hoax. He is very quick to
any time it will help him look good to be like, it's a conspiracy against me.
Never once with Butler. Never once. And it's kind of crazy, man. Like we don't
we have like no information. They haven't even like attempted to give us a
national story that puts a little bow on top of like who this guy was or what
happened, how there was such a security failure that could allow. A sniper one
hundred and thirty yards away to get a clean shot at a president, a former
president and current candidates head. What the just kind of no Internet history
can't get into his phones. He wanted to kill anyone. He could. That's all
nothing to see here. And it's just a little bizarre to me that you would think
like all other things making sense. You would just think you would hear Donald
Trump going. They tried to kill me. They tried to do this. They tried it. But I
mean, days afterward, he just thanked the Secret Service for what a great job
they did. And I don't know what any of that means. Well, I know a lot about it.
And I'll just say this, which we said publicly is I, you know, I got a call from
somebody who said I've got a lot of material from the gunman. I'm not disputing
he's the gunman, by the way. Seems like the gunman. The question is like, was he
working in concert with anyone else? Were there other people involved? Right.
It's the same with Charlie Kirk. It's not a question of, you know, I don't know
anything. But the question is never just did the guy pull the trigger. Of
course, yeah. We can prove or disprove that with the videotape that we don't
have from the Charlie Kirk assassination for some reason. But whatever. The
point is that's only one part of the story. The question was were there other
people involved? And in the case of Butler, I got this corpus of information
from a guy almost off the street. We showed that it was real. Always skeptical
of this stuff. Very skeptical. But it turns out this was actually from Thomas
Crooks' YouTube account. And the FBI claimed that this didn't exist. Well, of
course, they knew it existed. So then the question becomes, well, why are they,
since the man is dead in this sole shooter crime, there's a lone gunman and the
lone gunman's gone. Why would we hold back anything, any evidence we have? But
they did. And that would include video surveillance of the shooting range where
he trained to shoot. It's a pretty good shot over 100 yards with a .223. I shoot
a .223. It's like all these seals are like, oh, that's nothing. But like for a
non-seal, it's a decent shot. So there's videotape from the shooting range. Did
he train alone? Who was with him? Never been released. And the investigation was
shut down. Shut down. So what does that mean? I don't know. But I mean, like,
what is going on? Yeah. And I got to say- Why can't we know? Well, hearing the
heroic former director of counterterrorism come on your show and kind of say the
same thing does just have a lot more weight to it when the guy was literally the
director of counterterrorism. And going like, hey, what's going on here? We have
not gotten answers over these things. And he tied those facts. Those are facts.
He stated facts. By the way, when he- Now we've just heard the FBI is not
actually investigating him. That was all fake. He retained his security
clearance until the morning he left. So if he was under investigation for
treason or something, he wouldn't have held his clearance and had access to
highest level intelligence, which he retained until the moment he resigned. So,
okay, that was all a lie. But he said, point blank, one of the most informed
people in the United States, with clearances higher, I think, even than Mark
Levin's, there's a connection between Trump's decision to go to war in Iran and
these not fully explained acts of violence. He said that. So, okay, before we
denounce him as crazy, which maybe he is, I don't know. It doesn't seem to be,
but I hold up at any possibility. What is he talking about? And there has not
only been zero interest from, like, the people in charge of ginning up interest,
like the internet, the influencers. There's been calculated discouragement and
attacks on anyone who persists in asking the question. Yeah, well, like- And I
haven't gotten involved because I know everybody and it's so emotional to me,
but at a certain point, I'm going to, you know, whatever. I feel like I've got a
pretty close vantage on all this stuff, and I'm getting a little sick of it
because every American has a right to justice, not just for himself, but for any
other American citizen. Our whole system rests on the idea that there will be
justice affected by the U.S. government. And we have a right to know. You have
no right to keep that from me. On what grounds are you keeping that from me? You
can't browbeat me into it by screaming Candace Owens again and again and again
or whatever. Yeah, that's right. And look, like- Sick of this. For me, I've
tried to- It's outrageous, actually. No, absolutely. And listen, I'll say just
personally, like, I, you know, and I knew Charlie and not super well. We
weren't, like, close friends, but, like, I'd done a show a few times and we
texted a few times. He had me at that last, had me do the debate there, and we
hung out for a little bit while we were there. And, you know, it's, I wasn't as
close with him as you were, but it's even just, like, being friends with someone
like that, it's, first off, it's, like, it's very jarring to see that happen.
And then he's got a wife and little kids. Really tragic, horrible situation.
And, like, my incentives on all of this is, like, I just don't want to believe
that this was anything more than, like, one crazy guy with a trans furry
boyfriend or whatever. Like, that actually is much more comforting to me than
it's some conspiracy. Half of Twitter seem to think I was the one who got him
killed or something like that or me and you and Megan or something. I very much
vehemently want to believe that. Yes, right. So, like, we don't want that. I
will say, so, and I have not done, like, deep dives and watched all of Candace's
shows on this or something. But, like, there's little pieces of information
just, like, it's been confirmed by a few different people that he was texting
them, they're going to kill me. Like, hey, man, that's got to be, like, totally
exhausted to investigate it. I mean, what is this here? This is a pretty big
deal. You've really got to get to the bottom of stuff like that. And, look, as
you're sitting here and, you know, it's almost like sometimes people will call,
you know, they'll call you out for being a conspiracy theorist or something or,
you know, they say the just asking questions. You know what's worse than being a
conspiracy theorist is having no curiosity about questions that have not been
answered. Well, also, there's just something. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
And I believe in curiosity and skepticism. And I've encouraged that in a lot of
people. And some have been very resistant to be curious or skeptical. And there
are two sides to this. There's not simply the people who are coming up with
conspiracy theories, some of them obviously fantastical and wrong, I would
think. There's also the government side, which is telling you, shut up. We have
this solved. And I think we should apply the same skepticism to their claims as
well. There's no reason the FBI should get an automatic, on the basis of what?
Their track record of always telling the truth to people? Like, what are you
even talking about? And how dare you threaten me and call me names? I mean, I'm
not getting paid for this. I've stayed out of it. I'm just getting too mad
watching this. So even before the Epstein files got released, back when Podesta
emails were released and the original Pizzagate theory was born. And, you know,
if you look through some of those Podesta emails, look, they're clearly talking
in code. Now, what is the code? I mean, people are speculating that it was about
children. Now, I have absolutely no reason to believe that, but they're not
planning pizza parties. You know what I mean? Like, they're speaking in code.
When Epstein's urologist, who's just prescribed him erectile dysfunction drugs,
says, take the pills and then meet me for pizza and grape soda, that's in the
Epstein files. Maybe there's nothing to do with sex. Maybe they're actually, you
get wicked hungry after you take a boner pill. I don't know. But the fact that
nobody cares to find out or even interview the urologist, just bring them up and
say, hey, what is this? That's right. And I felt the same way back then. Who
drinks grape soda? What are you even talking? There's no white person in America
who drinks grape soda. Stop. I haven't had grapes. I've maybe had grape soda
when I was a child once. I'm not against it. I'm just saying, like, talk to the
urologist. No, well, right. Exactly. So it's the thing about it is, right? Like,
even with the original Pizzagate thing, the position of, like, the corporate
media was to sit there and go, you're an idiot if you think this code is about,
oh, you're a conspiracy theorist if you think, instead of putting a microphone
in front of John Podesta and going, hey, you're clearly speaking in code here.
People are assuming that that code is for raping children, so clear this up,
because it can't be any worse than what people are speculating. So what is it,
sir? And no one ever even thinks to do that in this phony media. And all the
hostility is aimed at people who are asking the questions. And that's a tell
right there. Yes. You know, there's people, here you have gunshots ringing out
in my country, people getting killed or an attempted murder, a couple of
attempted murders. There will be more, unfortunately. But anyone who's
interested in, like, finding out or doesn't automatically trust the government,
which we're supposed to be skeptical of, that person is the villain? Yeah,
that's right. And, you know, in a similar thing, I don't know, maybe I'm going
to struggle to, like, word this the right way, but there's certain things that
in a vacuum might be true but aren't true in all circumstances. So, in other
words, like, if you, typically speaking, you'd go, hey, before you want to
start, you know, believing something, you got to see strong evidence for it or
something like that. Or you can't just start theorizing and speculating about
things without, like, some indication or something pointing you in that
direction. But then, like, if me and you both just wake up together and we're
blacked out for the last 10 hours and we're chained up in a prison somewhere or
something like that, and you start going, like, we got to start speculating
about how the hell we got here because this is so crazy. You know what I mean?
And then I'd be like, hey, my neighbor said something this morning to me about
how, like, I bet it's going to be a rough day, you know? And I'm like, we got to
think maybe my neighbor had something to do with this. Now, then some skeptic
could come along and go, your neighbor saying it's going to be a bad day isn't
actually evidence. And you're like, okay, but we're here, like, we got to – and
so, in a sense, there's, like, okay, yes, you can be skeptical, and it's good to
be skeptical of some of these claims. But at the same time, we're sitting here
watching – it's so crazy to watch, right? But the never-Trumpers are now the
biggest hardcore Trump supporters as they're destroying the coalition that they
were afraid of, right? And they're destroying Trump himself. Right, and so
you've watched this happen, and that does lead you to go, how exactly did they
pull this off? How is it that people – like, you know, so I – you know, look,
I'm a little bit more hot-headed than you at times, and maybe this is because,
you know, I'm a little – I'm a decade younger than you, and I still drink big
glasses of whiskey at night, and I still – and I'm just furious about a lot of
things, and I'm – maybe I should, you know, let some of that go. But, you know,
like, I'm still furious at Ben Shapiro, and the only reason I hate Ben Shapiro's
guts is because he called Ron Paul a Jew-hater back in the day when it was
totally just ridiculous. You read some of these tweets recently, I think. Ron
Paul is up there talking about how it's not wise to fight multiple wars, this is
what brings down nation, and Ben Shapiro goes, I bet you just want to strangle a
Jew. You know, he's like, fuck you, dude, how dare you speak to a man so much
better than you that way? Anyway, but – so I was furious over the 12-day war
last summer. I was too. And I went on Breaking Points, great show, with Crystal
and Sager, who I love very much. He's so smart, man. Great, because I literally
love Sager to death. He's just great. So I'm really happy to call a friend. And
he – so I went on their show right after it, and I called for Trump's
impeachment. I said he should be impeached and removed for this. He's launched a
war of aggression. It's illegal. It's for a foreign country. It's what he
promised not to do. You know, I was very angry. I still stand by that, but I was
angry. And then, of course, all of them, all the guys, you know, Josh Hammer and
Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, they all just start talking shit about me. Look,
this guy doesn't support Trump. Oh, he voted for Trump last time, but he's
calling for his impeachment now. As if I don't remember where all you guys were
in 2016, when National Review was running their Never Trump edition, and Ben
Shapiro promised for deeply-held, principled reasons he could never support
Donald Trump, and Mark Levin was never – all these guys were never Trump. Now
that he's become a war hawk, what he explicitly ran against being in every
election, now that he's become that, they all love him to death. And they're –
like, so anyway, my point is, sorry, sometimes you see facts like that and you
go, that's worth speculating about. I do have some questions I'd like to ask on
how exactly these guys were able to infiltrate this movement, destroy it from
within, and, you know, set our country on this trajectory toward another
catastrophic war. There's a lot that went into that happening. I couldn't agree
more. I guess the only last thing I would say about it is you started by saying
the legacy media covered for the crimes of their masters, the ruling class.
Okay, got it. I mean, that's what they exist to do. That's why we have NBC News.
That's why CNN exists. Yes, yeah, that's right. No, I totally – that's why Fox
is here. But to see people in independent media doing that – and I understand
it's very easy to get sidetracked, like you're mad at one person, and so anyone
who is asking similar questions to that person, like, must be on that side or
something. You've got to retain independence in your head, like, don't get
sidetracked. Certain questions have to be answered no matter who's asking them,
right? Yeah. One of the questions I still can't answer is why is it that all the
neocons are the ones leading the screaming and anyone who asks questions about
Charlie Kirk's death when Charlie Kirk was an enemy of the neocons, like, open
enemy of the neocons, invited you to TPUSA. Like, you don't invite – and he
didn't – it's not because the kids at TPUSA are like, oh, I grew up loving Dave
Smith. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's – I said that. I've said this on other
shows too, but I said this to you, that it's like there was something about
inviting – you know, inviting you or Megyn Kelly. It's like, obviously – Yeah,
we're on Fox News. It's fine, yeah. And huge stars on Fox News, not just like
someone on Fox News, like two of the biggest shows. There's no reason to invite
you to a Turning Point event unless he wants the kids in the audience to hear
your views. Yeah. Which he did because he substantively agreed with them and I
would know because I talked to him about this a lot, like a lot, a lot, over
years. So for the neocons, whom he at best didn't trust and mostly really didn't
like, I never talk about what I think Charlie thought because it feels so weird
because he's gone. Yeah, yeah. But I just have to say this, they're the ones
leading the charge and shut up. Don't ask any questions. It's like, you tell me
what this is. Well, that's – And I'm not going to take orders from them. Who are
these people anyway? This is the same reason why – this is the reason why I read
that text message that he sent me and it was because – well, part of it was
because Candace asked and I'm friends with Candace and she was very – she lost
someone she was very close to. But part of it was that – you know, because it's
a weird thing to do – it's a weird thing to share private text messages with
anyone. Oh, I agree. I agree. Especially someone who just died and I got some
pushback for that and I understand why – like I get their point. Yeah. Maybe I
shouldn't have done that. I'm not sure. But, you know, it was the thing where
like Netanyahu immediately is trying to hijack his legacy. Josh Hammer and all
these guys are immediately trying to hijack his legacy. And so it's kind of like
– And selling their books by the way at the same time. Right, right. Literally,
dude, it's the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life. Josh Hammer did
three interviews immediately after. The only reason anyone's interviewing him is
because he was friends with Charlie Karker. He was close around his circle or
whatever. And every single time he mentioned how much Charlie loved his book.
It's like, Jesus, dude. I mean, I just could never imagine getting here. Yeah, I
think it's a little strong to say Charlie was friends with Josh Hammer. Well,
okay. Well, he had him in his circles or whatever, his handler or whatever it
was. But, you know, I remember, you know, right before Charlie died, he called
me and he said, man, I just wish everyone would listen to your podcast. It's
like, this is so crazy of a thing to say. It's unbelievable. But the reason I
released that is because I'm like, look, I don't know exactly where Charlie was
on his evolution on this topic. Obviously, he had at one point been a diehard
pro-Israel guy. But a lot of people were that and then kind of woke up over the
last couple of years. But I know that he texted me after my debate with Douglas
Murray that he said he thought I did a great job and he really did. He said
something like, I read it verbatim on my show, but he said something like,
believe it or not, I really didn't disagree with almost anything you said. Yeah.
And I'm just saying Ben Shapiro wasn't sending me that text. No. So for people
to try to pretend there was no daylight between the two of them is just not
true. No, there was hostility. Right. Big time. And not just with, you know,
those guys. Hostility. I mean, I don't want to overstate it. I'm not saying he
hated them as people. But, I mean, he did not agree at all. Right. And certainly
didn't agree with war with Iran. At all. And with also, honestly, some of the
Christian Zionist leaders. I mean, Charles was very, he loved Israel as a
country, for sure. And I think he had a complicated theology, which I did not
fully understand and still don't fully understand. But the idea that you would
put another country before your own, like he just rejected that flat out. And
some of those, some of the Christian Zionist leaders men are very aggressive and
shark-like and very money oriented and pushy. And he started talking about that
openly. Well, he talked about it with me a lot. Yeah. Well, he talked about it
on Megyn Kelly's show. I mean, he talked about the reaction he got from the
evangelical leaders. From the evangelical leaders? Well, maybe not from the
evangelical leaders. It wasn't. It was a mix. It was a mixture. Yeah, probably a
mix of both. Of, you know, Jewish Zionists like the guys you mentioned, but also
the people he grew up with who were evangelical leaders. And he was upset with
them. I mean, I talked to him about it at length. I think that I could name
names with who was upset. I'm not going to, but because he's gone. But yeah,
that's just real. And I don't know. I don't even like talking about this, but
I'm just offended by where this is going. And the bottom line is every American
has an interest in every murder getting solved. And not just in getting solved,
but fully solved. And if you have a government agency that's shutting down a
legitimate line of inquiry, at very least you have to answer the question, why
are you doing that? And they, and Joe Kent has said in public multiple times,
including to me, the FBI shut down any effort to look into international
connections here within days of the killing. So someone should ask the FBI,
like, why'd you do that? And no one seems willing to ask. And look, we also know
what we know about this FBI, uh, who I just could not be more disgusted with.
And you know, um, I know you saw when everyone's afraid of them. Well, what Dan
Bongino was talking all types of shit to me on Twitter or whatever, but it's,
it's like, look, man, you just, you, you know, there was a thing where people
were saying, uh, they were trying to go Dan Bongino into debating me because he
was talking shit about me. And you know, as I was, I think I responded in kind.
Um, but the thing is like, he can't Dan Bongino, not only can he not come debate
me, Dan Bongino can't ever do a difficult interview ever again for the rest of
his life because he's ended in one question. I literally one question ends it. I
just go, Hey, okay. So you looked the American people in the eyes and you swore
that you had seen the proof that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Well, it's been
declassified by an act of Congress now. So go ahead and tell us, what'd you say?
What's the proof? It's all declassified. Now there, what it doesn't, it doesn't,
what are the, the few exceptions in the rule? If it's national security or if it
harms the victims or something like that, how would it possibly be any of those
for you to just tell me what you saw that made you comfortable enough to go out
there and swear that you had seen proof that he killed himself? Cash Patel, Dan
Bongino, any, but these guys specifically, and this is one of the big things I
think that really- I just want to interject. I'm not, this is not aimed at
anyone in particular, but, um, you know, we say we know things, but I would
always add the caveat to the extent you can know things. Like I thought I've
known many things. I've turned out to be wrong, you know, so I could be wrong,
but this is sincere. I believe I can say with certainty that Jeffrey Epstein was
murdered. So I, so, I mean, but of course I'm always open to countervailing
evidence, always because I'm ever mindful of my capacity for being wrong. But I
can say if you could x-ray my heart, you would find that I believe with total
certainty he was murdered and the people in the US government knew that he was
murdered. I don't want that to be true, but I believe it is true. So like, it's
going to take a lot. You're going to have to show me that that's false. Well,
the, the reason why I have so much contempt for, uh, Dan Bongino and cash Patel,
particularly, um, and Pam Bondi too, but more so the other two is that these
guys went around and really Dan Bongino. I mean, cash did many podcasts and
stuff, but Dan Bongino got rich doing his show at a really big show and he
flamed that Epstein stuff for so long was like, don't let go of this one. This
is a huge scandal. We're going to get in there and expose it. And I got to say
every bit as much as the war in Iran, maybe not quite as much as this most
recent one, but the covering up the Epstein scandal did so much to damage this
administration. I totally agree. Because it went to something very fundamental,
the fundamental promise of Donald Trump and the reason why Donald Trump, uh, I,
I believe the main reason that he rode to political success and won the
presidency twice was that, uh, was that he said he was going to drain the swamp.
Drain the swamp was an incredibly effective campaign slogan. It was essentially
saying, look, man, on some level, almost all Americans know this. This city in
DC is filled with corruption and the people in political power have committed
profound crimes against the American people and none of them have been held
accountable for it. And we're going to hold them accountable for this. And for
this justice department now to go in and put up zero deep state arrests, I mean,
dude, if you just think about the fact that the intelligence agencies framed the
sitting president for treason for four years, I mean, in obvious deep state coup
to, uh, to overthrow or an attempted deep state coup to attempt to overthrow a
democratically elected president. Like it is, it was an outrage that they did it
to him on the campaign, but it is a little bit different when he's a
presidential candidate than when he is the commander in chief, the president of
the United States of America. They framed him for being a Russian spy. Donald
Trump is a lot of things. He is not a Russian spy, okay? There has never been
one. It was the most ridiculous thing ever. It was all complete phony evidence
and they knew it. They knowingly went forward with that. And, um, uh, Andrew,
uh, Andrew McCabe admitted on 60 minutes that he said their plan was to invoke
the 25th amendment, but they realized they couldn't get enough people to go
along with that. And so they settled for Robert Mueller. They settled for a
special investigation that would tie him down and not let him get his America
first, uh, agenda through. So there's that there's COVID there's, you know what
I'm saying? There's the Epstein stuff. There's all types of crime. I mean, COVID
you think about it. We free, they freaking locked down the country and didn't
disclose that. They made it, they made the germ themselves. Fauci was like the
hero of the response for like a year and a half before they finally came out
that it was him who made it. I mean, just, and, and they have just at every turn
protected power. And again, like with the Epstein thing, man, like you don't
have to, you only have to know, like, I don't know, you just know, like, even if
you know, like five or six things about it, you're like, okay, this is some type
of huge conspiracy, you know, like, I don't know exactly what it is. And by the
way, the files being released did shake up my interpretation of the whole thing.
I tweeted this once, but I kind of, I mean, I was saying it tongue in cheek, but
I kind of meant it sincerely that I used to speculate that Jeffrey Epstein
worked for Mossad. And after the files came out, it's looking a lot more like
the Mossad worked for Jeffrey Epstein. Exactly. I mean, I did not think he was
the, the Rothschilds guy. I didn't realize that, you know? And so like, this
thing is a gigantic conspiracy. It's a, it's an interesting limited look into
how power really works. And, and you know what I mean? Like what's really going
on? It's like looking through a stained glass window. You don't get a clear
picture, but you see the shapes and you realize this is not what I thought it
was. I actually came away from reading a lot of the Epstein stuff with a view of
Israel that was diminished. I thought Israel had less power. I mean, of course
he was working with Mossad. I said that and got called a Jew hater or whatever.
It was just true. So we're also working with CIA and intelligence services from
around the world. But what he really was doing was acting as an employee of
others as a kind of communications hub between the biggest stakeholders in the
West. And so what you really saw was that governments aren't in charge. There's
no meaningful nation state with full sovereignty. Like that's just not a thing.
There's a superstructure whose outlines I can't fully see or even partly see,
but it's clearly there. And it's not all being run from the Levant by Netanyahu
who's probably got an IQ of 110. He's not a genius. Yeah. Like, do you know what
I mean? Yes, yes, 100%. It's way bigger than Israel. Israel is just like a place
to hide out if you've been accused of a crime, get a passport, do some money
laundering, you know, whatever. It's a lot of things, but Israel is not running
the world. Yeah. No, there's something – you're absolutely right. There are
power structures that we do not fully know about that are way more important
than a senator. It's because we bought the biggest lie of all, which is a
competition between nation states, and you know what I mean? Yeah, that's right.
Ghana's got its own interests, but so does Singapore and China and India. And
it's like, yeah, to some extent, but that's not – as soon as you have the free
flow of capital, a globalized economy, then you have a globalized government.
It's just a fact. And by government, I mean a governing body, which may be
informal or have blurry edges, but it's still totally real. It's way more real
than countries. Yeah, yeah. How are countries – like, that's like almost a
medieval view. Countries with kings and armies. It's like so dumb. Yeah, no,
that's right. And maybe it was – you know, it's like it probably wasn't even
true in medieval times, you know what I mean? Well, it literally wasn't, but
like after 1848, like after you had like the creation of like real – the
resemblance or the – maybe the fiction of nation states. I mean, I think it's
more complicated than I'm making it sound, but – Yeah. It's clearly not as
simple as everyone else assumes. Yeah, well, I know – Countries actually in
their own interest. I mean, come on. There's this really great book written by
Murray Rothbard, who I mentioned earlier, called The Progressive Era. And it's
about, you know, it's about – I think it goes from – it might like Theodore
Roosevelt for Woodrow Wilson, FDR. And one of the things that they talk about is
that there was – and this really is true – is that there were like – there were
real people who really like meant well and were kind of, in my opinion, got it
wrong. But, you know, the kind of moderate socialist types or the progressives
who were like, hey, we're such a wealthy country. Right. We should have more of
a managed economy so that we can make sure it's working for everybody. But
really what ends up happening in the progressive era is then all the, you know,
all the titans of industry, all the robber barons, as they call it, they all got
on board with it. And they went, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. We should have a
managed economy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. We'll be doing the managing. You
know, it was all – it was like all the money interest that they supposedly
wanted to rein in were the guys who ended up getting control of the government
anyway. And so this is how it works. Dude, it's Black Lives Matter as sponsored
by Microsoft. Yeah, that's right. That's right. It's always the same. The gay
pride parade has like a Bank of America float coming through it. And you're like
– I mean, I know there is some leftist out there who really believes in the gay
pride parade, but like something bigger is going on than what you're paying
attention to. Dave, no, really, it's liberation. Just trust me. This is going to
be liberation. Don't worry. It's too ridiculous, man. I know. Well, good – thank
you for everything you're doing. Oh, of course. And I'm sorry if that got – I
never get emotional, but I'm sorry to start yelling at you. But that's just
stuff just – I enjoy it. It's literally – nothing makes me happier than to be
held at in agreement. You got me wound up! Dave Smith, you're the best. Thank
you. Thank you, sir. you you you We'll see you next time.