9/18/20 Dave Smith on the 2020 Election and the Death of RBG

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing the great comic Dave Smith, who's also my friend.
And of course, he hosts the show Part of the Problem and is part of the Legion of Skanks.
And someday we'll be touring around doing stand-up comedy on stages near you.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good, man.
How are you?
Good to talk to you.
Are you touring around doing comedy at all right now?
No, I think I'm going to start going out over the next month or two, but that's assuming that they don't shut the world down again as the weather starts getting cold.
Yeah, I guess we'll see.
But yeah, it should be all right.
I don't think they can do that again.
Yeah, well, I think they've seen the results of the last ones and even the wonderful elites who run the show are a little concerned about it.
So I'm so jealous of you, man.
I always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, but I'm not quite funny enough, just like almost.
But no, I mean, I'm a lot funnier than a lot of stand-up comics, but that's not good enough for me.
You know what I mean?
Being better than them isn't necessarily good enough to actually get up there, I don't think.
But yeah, I think you're probably right about that.
I think like 40% of the population are stand-up comedians at this point.
Yeah, it's a huge thing.
Everybody figures.
In fact, I forgot who it was.
I saw it might have been Rich Voss or one of these things.
I've been watching a lot of those battles that you guys have done up there.
I think it was Big Jay and Rich Voss were talking about how people would look at Richard Pryor and George Carlin and be like, I could never do that.
Forget it.
But now they look at all these comedians and they're like, oh, I could do that.
Everybody and their dog up there trying it.
And the sad thing is that they're right with most of the comedians they see today.
It's like, yes, you could do that.
If you're willing to have five roommates in Brooklyn and make $9,000 a year, you basically could do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe that would be worth trying.
No.
Okay.
For sure not.
But yeah.
No.
Lucky you.
I don't send you all the jokes that I think of that I think, oh, man, I should send that today.
But I never do.
I appreciate that.
You just send me notes on what's going on in Yemen or something like that.
You know, that shit ain't funny, man, I'll tell you.
That's for sure.
Anyways.
So, yeah.
But, you know, I saw, I don't know who it was, but it was on Netflix, I guess, or one of these YouTubes or something, where a guy went to Houston and did a thing right out, you know, as soon as they legalized it again in Texas, you know, after the worst of the lockdown there at the beginning of the summer.
And he went and he's like, whoa, man, am I rusty, boy, have I not done comedy in a while.
And he went ahead and had his notes like right there, like I would probably, you know, to read off and was like, geez, hey, don't hit me if my jokes don't land here, because, boy, have I not done comedy.
And I just wondered, and I guess I've heard Joe Rogan talk about that, that you can't be a good comedian unless you've been doing it every week for the last 10 years straight.
And if you stop doing it at all, then it'll be like a huge setback.
You got to stay at it constantly to stay good and all this kind of thing.
So I wonder if you think that that's a thing or you'll be just fine.
I don't, you know, I don't really buy into that as much as some guys do.
I mean, it's like you do get rusty.
It's like anything else.
You know, it's like if you stop writing for a while, you won't be as good as if you're writing regularly or broadcasting or anything else like that.
But I don't know.
I'm not I'm not too worried about it.
It's also one of those things to me where it's like easy to get your rhythm back once you just once you start doing it regularly again.
So, I mean, this is the longest period that I've ever not done stand up since I started like about 13 years ago.
So yeah, I'm sure I'm sure it'll be a little bit weird the first couple shows back.
But I'll jump back into it.
Yeah.
Oh, speaking of which, Libertas is now on YouTube where everybody can watch it.
Yeah, that's right.
They the guys that Gas Digital Network, they they produced the whole hour for me.
I filmed it in 2017 and they yeah, they put it up for free on my YouTube channel.
So go check that out if you haven't already.
Yeah.
Because I had only heard it before and then I got to see it.
And so it was a whole new experience.
Oh, yeah.
Look at that.
And now it's you know, it's it's you know, like the theme of the whole thing in 2017 was like how hilarious and crazy the whole world is.
And now you listen to it and it's like simpler times.
Yeah, exactly.
It sounds all quaint like back in the days of black and white.
Yeah, really?
Yeah.
Well, so this is sort of more or less kind of why I had you on the show actually is just because, you know, I'm jealous of my old self, which is the younger me at the same time, who used to do live radio three, three hours a day, every day, and I got to say whatever I wanted about everything.
And I did a lot of interviews, too.
But I always got to say whatever I wanted to say, too.
But I don't do that anymore.
And I really miss it.
And one of the main things that I really miss covering is presidential elections and stuff like that.
So I thought, well, you know what I'll do is I'll get my buddy Dave on and we'll talk about Donald Trump and Joe Biden and Joe Jorgensen and all the things going on and all the riots in the street and everything I know is something that you're paying a lot of attention to and what all that means for politics and all of these things.
So you want to start with the Libertarians here?
What do you think's going on?
Oh, God, I really don't.
But I will because it's your show.
What's going on with the Libertarian Party?
I mean, it's just it's a mess and it's it's another squandered opportunity.
I really thought, you know, much like 2016 when you have I mean, what what could you have asked for for a better opportunity?
You know, you have Trump and Hillary Clinton on the ballot.
All the polling shows they're the most disliked candidates, both of them who have ever run since they've been taking polling.
And you've got all of these problems.
And as me and you know, the Libertarians have something great to say about pretty much every major problem in the country.
And what do they do?
They run Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, Gary Johnson, you know, who's like a decent enough guy, but really not up to the challenge of that moment.
And then Bill Weld, who's essentially just a neocon pretending to be a Libertarian.
And their their message was basically, whoa, there's all this populist energy.
Let's come back to the middle and have a couple of Republican governors from blue states who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
And everyone was like, what?
Talk about being out of step with the moment.
It just you know, it didn't do anything for the liberty movement.
And then it's like, OK, so now you couldn't have imagined an equally great opportunity for the message of liberty where you've got somehow that you still have Donald Trump and now not as outsider Donald Trump, but with a track record of really not coming through on any of his promises.
And then you the best the Democrats were able to figure out was this this senile old corrupt politician.
And so now the message of the part the message of the campaign of Joe Jorgensen has just been completely fumbled and all over the place with no coherent message when it's pretty obvious what the Libertarians should be running on.
I mean, everything in 2020 has handed the Libertarians a layup.
You have I mean, like I mean, guys like me and you have always talked about, you know, through the Bush era or other things like, you know, shredding of the Constitution.
But you want to talk about shredding of the Constitution.
You've got governors just by fiat dictating whether you're allowed to go to a park today or if your friends can have a play date.
I mean, overreach, you know, that couldn't have been imagined last year.
You've got all types of corporate bailouts and the Federal Reserve going crazy.
You've got a protest against police brutality.
But that's also, you know, led to like riots and property damage and all these things.
And they don't seem to have a coherent message on any of it.
Yeah.
You know, I guess I kind of have to mention because I think I had said publicly before that I was sort of an unofficial advisor to her.
I was talking to her on the phone a little bit and I had sent a bunch of emails, including stuff that I had sent to Gary Johnson before.
I was very much an unofficial advisor to him as well.
But just look, man, here's what you need to know about nukes and Syria and whatever this kind of stuff.
But also, you know, really what you're talking about, the top 10 issues that all Americans agree are the biggest issues, whatever they think of them, in terms of the war, the police, state health care costs and budget deficits and lockdown politics and all these things.
And so really and of course, the culture war, which is just permeates everything to such a degree.
And what I tried to suggest was to position yourself above all that and say, look, people are very divided about all kinds of things.
But the reason why is because everything is so politicized and what we can agree on is freedom.
If we stop, you know, centralizing all decision making in D.C., then we don't have to fight like dogs over who has the power to decide about all these things.
And then, of course, the specifics on the issues, but really saying that instead of having the Hillary Clintons and John McCain's as the center, as the so-called moderates, these crazy extremists, the conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, that we have libertarians as the center where instead of being for every horrible thing, we're against every horrible thing.
And we can compromise on that and settle on that.
And so not to pander to both sides of the culture war, but to appeal to them that we don't have to fight it, really, if we can, you know, call a ceasefire and be friends and let each other live how we want and this kind of thing.
And then I thought that she was listening and that kind of deal, but she hadn't called me or emailed me back about any of those things in a very long time now, two or three months now.
So I don't know what happened.
I had really hoped that, you know, I'm not like the type to make up campaign material and stuff like that.
I'm just trying to get her to see it my way and hope she could take it from there, you know.
But I guess she's got a lot of people competing for her attention and I'm not, you know, I'm waiting around to hear from her and I hadn't, so.
Yeah, you're an unofficial advisor.
You're so unofficial that she doesn't listen to any of your good advice.
And I know you and I know the good advice that you're giving her and she would have really benefited to listen from to listen to it.
And yeah, you can't.
The thing is that, look, we are in the middle of a white hot culture war.
Like it's really and it's getting to the point that it's getting really, really bad.
I mean, you got these like like militia groups out in out in Portland who are basically they're like playing pretend civil war, I guess.
You know, it's not exactly a civil war, but they're kind of playing pretend civil war.
And this is a really dangerous game.
And people are.
And so if you're going to get into commenting on the culture war, you have to be really careful and precise about how you you do that.
And it's what you just said right there, that the libertarian answer has to be like, hey, we're not on the right side or the left side of this culture war.
We're flying in ten thousand feet above it and explaining what's led to this culture war and why the the the thing that's going to solve all of this is liberty.
You guys in in Alabama, you guys in Brooklyn or Portland, you don't all have to be best friends.
But there's no reason why you can't peacefully coexist.
You certainly don't have to be at war with each other.
And it's like when she waded into these things, it was just one blunder after another with the anti racism tweet, with this this thing about the woman being fired for saying all lives matter, which, by the way, she just doubled down on the other day.
She brought it up on a campaign speech again.
And she and she even says beforehand, maybe she's thinking about you personally.
I don't know.
But she goes, now people have told me not to talk about this.
But you know what?
I'm going to talk about it.
You know, this woman was fired for for Facebook posting all lives matter.
And that just shows you how great the market is at solving these problems.
And you're like, Joe, I mean, like you just are you this woke stuff?
I guess that was actually the last thing that I had said to her was just, you know, you could bring that up to say now that's probably going too far.
But it goes to show how reactive businesses are to these kinds of pressures.
So you could even still use it and go up.
In this case, they might have gone too far, but it still goes to show my my point that maybe this kind of, you know, public pressure in the marketplace is even more effective than you think something.
But no, still, it is a unequaled good.
Yeah, but like that, even that that's definitely better.
But even that I mean, look, this is the example you would bring up if you wanted to argue against the free market.
I mean, I'm sorry.
I think pretty much any normal person who hears that someone some lady was ruined and publicly humiliated for the crime of on a private Facebook message, not even like a company thing, just on her Facebook page saying all lives matter.
Most normal people look at that and go, well, they shouldn't be allowed to do that.
I mean, that's horrible.
Like I don't know.
I don't I'm not somebody who says all lives matter.
I think it was a kind of dumb, dismissive, you know, like counter slogan to Black Lives Matter.
But someone some lady should be fired over that.
Like that's that's insane.
And to continually invoke that is really something.
Oh, my God.
I mean, and and it's just it shows an overwhelming tone deafness to to the moment that we're in where everybody let's say not even just like everyone to the right of center, everyone to the right of the leftists and some leftists.
I mean, I know good leftists who are like furious about all this woke stuff.
This guy, Ben Burgess, who I've had on my show a few times, he's a democratic socialist, but he's the title of his new book is I don't have it exactly, but it's like canceling comedians while the world burns or something like that.
Just just critiquing the left like, what are you guys doing here?
How is that?
To say that this woke stuff, this kind of like critical race theory and all of this stuff that they invoke.
This turns off a huge portion of of potential supporters that are just like, well, I don't want any part of that.
People are sick of it.
They're sick of this woke stuff coming from the corporate press, from academia, from Hollywood, from professional sports, from politicians like it's all around them.
And it essentially is, in my opinion, it's kind of like what what Rothbard basically broke down about the progressive era, that it's basically the the right wingers hijacking a left wing cause.
And that's why you see, you know, JPMorgan Chase and all these guys like, you know, pushing like we're sending all of our execs to diversity training and all of that.
It's like, here you go, leftists.
Here's a bone for you.
If we do the diversity training, can we keep all of our ill gotten profits, you know?
And so it's in our entire system of the way we do things around here with this and that pipeline to prison and so forth.
Yes, exactly.
So they never have to give the left any of the good, tangible things that they might want.
And instead they give them this nonsense token nothingness.
And so now and people are turned off by that.
And so obviously, even if you're if you're going to do outreach to the left, which is a great thing to do, do it to like the principled left that actually stands for something.
That's right.
I mean, that's the whole thing of it.
Right.
It's like pandering to 2020 era leftist politics sends the entire, even no matter what it's about, it sends the entire wrong message about libertarianism.
When the correct message about libertarianism is that we are already here.
Like Bill Hicks used to say, he do the crickets chirping.
What's that?
Oh, that's Bill.
He's waiting around the evolutionary bell curve for the rest of you people to catch up.
You know, so we're already here.
We've already been saying that cops should go to prison for killing people for a long time.
We've already been saying that the drug war and the terror war is a horrible way to militarize the police and turn them into an occupying army, which will drive all kinds of civil unrest.
We've already been against inflationary money and world empire and all of these things this whole time.
So why in the world should we have to phrase it their way when the point is, is that, you know, to, to demonstrate that, look, Hey, look, you got something, right?
This is what we've been trying to tell you is essentially how it should be phrased.
Not to patronizing, you know what I mean?
But like, yeah, these leftists make a real good point, not, gee, let me see if I can make the point that the leftists are making and see if that'll make them like me, you know?
Yeah.
It's giving them credit for figuring out what we've been trying to tell you.
That's the angle, you know?
And so, and it does go to show too that, and, and you know what?
I am a Rothbardian class analysis guy on this stuff too.
So yeah, all this critical race theory crap is not what it's about.
It's all, I'm a George Carlinian is really what I am, right?
They try to divide you about anything in the world that said, who's got all the money and power versus, and then, but they want you and me to fight about every other little thing that we can fight about from sports to race, to sex, to whatever it is.
We're supposed to hate each other to keep us divided.
And so when you talk about these militias on the ground, it was like, all of these guys are from like essentially adjacent neighborhoods in, you know, lower middle class neighborhoods and working class neighborhoods are all these protesters, black and white, right wing and left wing.
And then they're all going, Hey, you better stop what it is that you're doing when really they ought to be arm and arm, not necessarily armed.
They ought to be one movement of the people of the country versus the power elite.
That is the division, not left and right, but the permanent establishment of what everybody knows are the biggest special interests, the banks, the arms dealers, the insurance companies, and et cetera, like that, who rule the whole thing, the biggest firms who, you know, control the policy of the national government and all of that.
That's the war party versus the democratic Republicans, the people of the country.
And that's the division.
How could anybody get that wrong and fight over this stupid culture stuff and not see that, you know, what, and, and by the way, I interviewed this guy, Ford Fisher, the journalist who's covering a lot of these riots and so forth.
And he's covered quite a few things with the black lives matter guys and the Boogaloo guys and three percenter types get along just fine and talk to each other just fine and respect each other.
And you got three percenter.
I'm sorry if I'm getting the names of the different militias wrong, but the white right wing militias are doing the black power fist in solidarity with these guys, the black lives matter people who are, you know, in there in solidarity of the innocent victims of police violence and these militia guys are saying, you're damn right, you have the right to not be killed.
We're with you on that.
And so there are seeds of this, but it should be as obvious as hell to everyone that this whole thing about, you know, essentially putting the cart before the horse about whose side you're on, presuming whose side you're on before you've even listened to the other side yet.
You know what I mean?
When all of this power should, all of this, um, unorganized mass out here, all of, all of our, um, anger and resistance should be facing up toward the greatest power in the national government.
Sorry for going on so long, but in that obvious as hell, oh, you're, you're spot on.
And this of course is exactly what the libertarian should be saying.
And in addition to that, uh, the, those, those powerful people who you want to put the spotlight on, there's a reason why they love this critical race theory stuff.
And they love all the, these distractions that keep people at each other's throats because then you never end up looking up.
I mean, like if you're just furious at your neighbor, well, he's a lot closer to you and a lot realer to you than some, you know, powerful guy who's running, you know, like the, the, some banking cartel, like, well, how are you ever going to get your hands on him?
But you could sure fight your neighbor.
And that's why it's so damaging and why the, the black lives matter movement, which in theory could have been a really powerful, important movement in this country.
It's so damaging when they get overtaken by this kind of narrative where it's like, well, you know, the real problem is, you know, what's in every white person's mind or heart and the entire system, everything has to be viewed through the lens of white supremacy.
And if you actually get into like critical race theory or black lives matter, the organization, they do believe all of this stuff.
That's not to say that every person marching on the street is even aware of this, let alone believes the nonsense, but everything, I mean, the nuclear family is white supremacy.
And you know what I mean?
Popcorn is white supremacy.
Like everything is, and then yes, right.
Like everything.
And then you see like all these movements to like, Oh, get like, you know, answer aunt Jemima band or whatever, you know, like take statues down or all this nonsense when it's like, Oh, okay.
But like that does nothing to hold killer cops accountable, which is actually a real problem.
Which by the way, did you see this one where, um, Maryland officials wanted black leaders to stop using the term police brutality.
And there's a suggested instead, of course, to replace it with systemic racism.
In other words, to generalize it so much that now it's everybody's fault and nobody's responsibility.
We're not talking about grand juries and peddit juries and judges and prosecutors putting murderers in prison.
Now we're talking about you got to stop being such a racist, presumably somehow, because somehow it's your fault that ultimately through the democracy, you hire killer cops.
And if only you weren't such a racist, Dave, uh, then you wouldn't vote Democrat or whatever County you live in, whichever party controls your Sheriff's department.
I mean, the whole thing is completely crazy.
Yeah.police brutality is we're going to abolish prejudicial feelings.
And then in 700 years, when we're done with that, we're going to get rid of the police brutality because the cops won't be racist anymore.
Because of course, racism is the only reason that a cop would ever brutalize anybody.
We've already begged that question, you know, and, and of course the thing that's like kind of, I don't know, ironic or maybe just, just ridiculous about this whole thing is that truthfully speaking, the racism part of it isn't even really what matters.
What matters is like the human life.
What matters is that somebody's rights are being violated and it doesn't matter what color they are.
And it really isn't even that important what the motivating factor was for it.
The fact is it's wrong.
If you killed some innocent black guy because you're racist against black people, or you killed some innocent black guy because you just felt like doing it.
I mean, either way, that guy's family is grieving over his loss.
So really that's, you're focusing on the issue that isn't even really the important part.
And of course the, you know, the power, power brokers love this stuff.
It's just like everything else.
It's just like the war on terror or the war on drugs.
It's like these ideas of like equity and like all this stuff.
Big statists love this stuff because it's something that can never actually be achieved.
It kind of leaves just this permanent justification to always be enacting whatever the policy that you're trying to push at the moment is, but like they'll always be terror somewhere.
And so there's your justification for keeping the war on terror.
They'll always be someone using drugs.
And so there we can keep fighting this war.
And it's the same thing like systemic racism when it's so broadly defined meets the same thing.
Like, yeah, as long as one person has bad feelings about another race in their heart, then that means we get to continue whatever the policy they're pushing now is.
And it's all, it's, you know, it's, it's terrible.
It's, it's really tragic.
And I know me and you talked about this, I think when you were on my show, but the thing that I see that's so tragic about all of it, aside from of course, just like the loss of life and the assaults and stuff like that.
But there was a real opportunity after George Floyd was killed to, you know, like right wingers had been really getting red pilled on the cops for the last few months.
They were furious about how the cops were like arresting people for, you know, going in, uh, having a catch with their kid in the park and all of this craziness and keeping their businesses shut down and all of that.
And then they saw, saw this George Floyd guy and almost, I mean, I'm not gonna say unanimously, but the vast majority of even right wingers were like, yeah, that is messed up.
Like that's wrong.
I mean, uh, you don't see any, any leader or movement really sitting there saying like George Floyd deserved to have some guy put his knee on his neck for nine minutes.
It was horrible.
No one's, no one's upset that those guys were indicted there, you know, like that was, but and then of course, immediately the riots and the violence and the looting and all of this stuff.
Well, it put it, it, it not only put the right wingers right back into the side of, of the cops.
But actually I think it, it pushed most of the country to be like, okay, well we need, we need the cops to, to stop this stuff cause this is just insane.
Yeah.
Who else is going to protect us from the riot that they caused by murdering these innocent people that they have a monopoly on it.
We can't fire them or replace them with a security force that didn't murder anybody.
And so I guess we need more of the murderers cause who else do we got?
And in fact, let's forget the fact that they're the ones who started the ride in the first place and let's completely ignore that.
And let's just say, boy, good thing the cops are here because apparently if they weren't here, these people would be burning down our side of town too.
What the hell?
Well look, and, and maybe they don't have the root cause completely down, but you can understand where they're coming from once it's already gotten to that point.
Hey man, an arson fire on TV at night, you know, where it's, that's the only light you can see.
That's a really impressive thing.
Now that happening in real life in your town where you can see it not just on TV, but whoa, they're burning right over there.
I could see why people would become a right wing nationalist very quickly and, and completely forget or even if they remember George Floyd and remember that it was the cop's fault that started it, they're still just going to essentially forget that for intents and purposes anyway, that thank goodness the cops are here to prevent that.
And the right wing arguments that the Democrats would, would let these people come and get you rings true to them.
I think a lot, I'm pretty sure that's part of why Trump's going to win, which actually leads me to a question I wanted to ask you, which is, you know, depending on what, how organized you think a lot of these protests and riots and things are, I wonder if despite Donald Trump's narratives, I wonder if you think that ultimately they know and don't mind that they're going to actually end up helping to reelect Donald Trump here because they don't give a damn about Joe Biden.
They're not Democrats at all.
They're way to the left of Democrats and that maybe this is a way to, you know, maybe they are collapsitarians in their own way and would rather pick a worse fight and continue to sharpen the contradictions between us and them and these kinds of things.
Or maybe they're just stupid and think that if they set a bunch of stuff on fire, people will think, boy, we better vote Democrat to appease these idiots or something.
I don't think they think that.
I mean, I've known leftist kids like this before and, you know, electing Al Gore was not their mission.
I know that.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Although it does seem like defeating Donald Trump might be more in line with their mission.
But you know, I got to say, I think that a lot of these leftist types, the kind of Antifa more violent types, are number one, they're very idealistic.
And you know, I think that goes hand in hand with being a leftist anarcho-communist type.
And I think that at least from some of the interviews I've seen with some of them, I think some of them really believe in their minds that they're like leading some type of revolution and that this is going to bring down capitalism or something like that.
I think many of them are very distorted.
I also think that like, personally, I think that both the protests and the riots cannot be completely seen outside the lens of reactionary to the lockdowns.
And I think that, you know, certainly it's I'm not suggesting that like Black Lives Matter wasn't already a thing and that people were outraged about the killing of George Floyd and all of this stuff.
But it seems a little bit too coincidental to me to be after three months of shutting down everything, all of a sudden you see this mass movement in the streets over the death of this poor guy.
You know, and it's, you know, I think that's lower class and working class people are the ones who get laid off and fired the first, you know, and have and their bosses have the least cushion to even try to give them some space to stay, you know?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And look, I think civilization is fragile.
And to just say, hey, we're gonna take, you know, we're gonna shut down your job.
We're gonna leave you in a situation where you're terrified for your health.
You're terrified for your, your, the future, you know, your economic future.
You have no idea what's going on.
You can't see your family.
Your neighborhood bar is shut down.
You can't go to your friend's house.
Sports are shut down.
Your barbershop shut down, like everything that you have in life has all been taken away from you.
And then all of a sudden, you know, you, you see the, the, these cops just, you know, and by the way, like I've seen, you know, we've all seen like pretty horrific things that cops have done, but there was something particularly about the callousness of the Floyd situation with this guy, you know, this guy who's in cuffs, face down, cop knee on his neck.
And then, and then just to see the way it exploded into these mass movements.
I think a lot of this is like letting off steam from all of that.
And you know, I mean, I don't know exactly, obviously everyone's an individual and could be psychoanalyzed by someone qualified, unlike me, to do it.
But I, I don't know that it's exactly in the front of any of these people's minds about how, you know, setting this fire is going to affect the presidential election.
I do think that it is helping, it has helped Trump enormously and put Joe Biden in a very difficult situation.
Like that's the effect of it, at least from my, my, it's my take on it.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, the Democrats have a point that, well, this is Trump's America where all this stuff is burning.
It's pretty hard to blame it all on Biden.
And Trump is making what I think is a pretty far-fetched claim that the two most right-wing Democrats in the party probably are right in line with them.
Biden and Harris represent the radical left and, you know, he's now a communist and she's, I guess, one of the leaders of the revolutionary Black Panther party and stuff like that.
But does anybody believe that?
I mean, her name, the left immediately calls her Kamala Harris is a cop.
That's her name.
And they hate her guts.
And the fact that she's a woman and black doesn't impress them whatsoever.
Why should it?
At the end of the day, as you were saying, even all this woke stuff is only one part of the left and a lot of the progressives and socialists and so forth, they're not going to be bribed off by her identity in that kind of superficial way when she's clearly a monster on every issue of importance and especially even from their own point of view, not just ours.
Well, yeah, I mean, look at the evidence from the Democratic primary.
I mean, first of all, you know, Kamala Harris was just as much of a black woman back then as she is now.
And that was pretty much what she ran on, you know, in the first debate calling Joe Biden racist.
And she was on the second round of busing and all this and that and the voters didn't respond to it.
They didn't care for her.
Elizabeth Warren went hard on the woke stuff, you know, saying these things like, well, as president, I'm going to read the name of every transgender that's been murdered in America.
And she she had a tweet, one of the tweets that I just liked making fun of where she said that that black transgender women are the backbone of this country, which like I feel like even like black transgender women would be like, what are you I don't pander to me like it's really not for black transgender women.
It's really for upper middle class white women to feel good about themselves.
Yeah, all the people who really at Castro was another one who really bought into the woke stuff.
They all crashed and burned.
No one.
And at the end of the day, even amongst the Democrats, they were debating between the two rich white old guys like it had not.
So I don't really think this stuff is very effective in terms of buying off votes.
And certainly amongst real hard leftists, I don't think you're going to do a good job.
I mean, like there's a there's a strand of them, the kind of like gender studies majors, you know, at like Everbright Evergreen or something like that.
But I don't think that's really large numbers.
So I don't think that's going to work very well.
I do.
I would say that I think that Joe Biden's argument that this is Trump's America is a little bit of a tough sell because truthfully, I mean, like, OK, yes, it's technically true.
And in the same sense that you could say, well, look, stories about Russian collusion.
That's Trump's America, you know.
But people kind of know that it's not Donald Trump and his base who's putting this stuff out there.
And I think it's going to be very hard for Joe Biden to blame the riots on the Trump and Trump supporters.
Like clearly, Black Lives Matter and Antifa are not Trump supporters.
So that, you know, it's there's some nuance to it.
But I think that's tough.
I also think the fact that they the fact that this was not mentioned, the riots and the violence were not mentioned once during the Democratic National Convention.
And then it was the center theme of the Republican National Convention.
And a week after the RNC, Joe Biden comes out and gives this big speech denouncing the violence.
And I got to say to me, that's a real sign that they botched their convention.
And that even that even like Joe Biden advisers were realizing, man, we really messed up by not addressing this, because most normal people see businesses being destroyed and people being beat up and fires being set and are like, yeah, no, like, we don't want that for our country.
So that to me, I thought was a very bad sign for the Biden campaign.
And now, of course, like your point is true.
Nobody thinks that Joe Biden or Kamala Harris are these like, you know, far left wing, violent socialist anarchists or something like that.
But I do think that the them not calling it out at the convention hurt them.
And I got to say that I was really just disappointed if I can be.
I mean, I think Barack Obama is a war criminal who should be tried and put in jail for the rest of his life.
But the fact that he didn't say anything, I mean, he's one guy who still has a little bit of street cred in the Black Lives Matter crowd, because no matter what they may not like about him, he's still the first black president in the United States of America.
And that'll always be something.
And he didn't say anything about it.
And I really thought there was an opportunity just to kind of like be a legit leader and try to help the country that he could have said like, hey, listen, you need to knock off this violent stuff.
And he didn't.
He just lectured the country on how, you know, racist everybody is.
Well, the whole thing where all of this has to go through, you know, be filtered through advisors and focus groups and and, you know, big staff meetings on Zoom about how do we approach this thing instead of just the obvious things say exactly what everybody else says.
Look, man, everybody's on the side of George Floyd and his people.
Everybody's on the side of people protesting for freedom and justice because our republic ain't perfect yet.
Everybody is with that.
However, everything that includes violence and destruction is on the other side of the line and everybody agrees on that, too.
It's as simple as that.
You just say that you have to focus group that you have to ask 15 different people how you think you should mince that into a point where it doesn't even make any sense anymore.
What are they afraid of?
They're afraid of denouncing people who are setting fires to.
I mean, they think that out in the suburbs, people are really rallying behind the arsonists or what?
Well, it's a weird thing that the you know, and it's it's it's kind of like a theme over the last decade, really, but particularly over the last five years or so, where there is this shocking inability of the corporate press and the political establishment to adapt to what's going on in the country like they just can't deal with the situation.
And so the the corporate press is for months denying that any of this is happening.
They're saying, oh, it's all peaceful protests.
It's the peace that the protests are largely peaceful.
But of course, everybody who has the Internet is watching videos of this stuff.
So it's almost like they're pretending that you still have to get all of your information through them, which just isn't the case anymore.
So people are seeing a video of like an old man being like soccer kicked on the ground and having the crap beat out of him.
And then CNN is like, no, nothing to see here.
And then as soon as it starts showing up in the polling, they switch the narrative around and they're like, oh, yeah, I know the violence is a really big problem.
But this is Trump's America.
And this and I just think that not that the American people are that savvy, but they're savvy enough to see through this.
So it's just it's very strange.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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Yeah, I mean, I really think it's a pretty ham-handed act, the CNN and Democratic Party side in this whole pro-wrestling shtick, which let me ask you about that, man.
You may have seen or heard of this, oh you must have actually, it's a pretty big story, the leaked audio there of Michael Cohen in league with Jeff Zucker from CNN and Zucker giving them and talking about how he talks with Trump all the time and he doesn't want to email him and put it in writing, but they're like best friends and he says, oh, here's the advice.
They're going to call him a con man.
Someone should warm him up all day by calling him con man over and over and over again.
So when Rubio says it tonight, he won't react, which is sound advice from a guy who might as well be on the Trump campaign at that point, but right, that's still during the primaries before they turn around and turn on him.
I think Matt Taibbi does a great job of, in his book Hate, Inc., of equating all of this to pro-wrestling where Trump is the heel and the Democrats are the face, but they never have their heroic moment.
He just keeps pummeling them and so he stays the favorite for now.
Like when people cheered for Hulk Hogan, even when he was the bad guy from the new world order, you know?
Yeah.
Well, you know, something that people, you know, like people who subscribe to Austrian economics and as both me and you do, you have to know that, you know, incentives matter.
I mean like incentives really matter a lot and you can't ignore the fact that Trump is great for CNN and MSNBC.
He's like the best thing that's ever happened to them.
He quite possibly saved both of those businesses that were doing really bad in the Obama years.
And so from that perspective, you could understand why.
I mean, if you remember Trump in the 2016 primary debates, which is the time we're talking about here.
I mean, he just from an entertainment and ratings, you know, point of view, he breathed life into the whole process.
How boring would it have been to just hear Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio go at it, but now all of a sudden there's this Trump guy and everyone's got to watch it because you don't know what he's going to say and he'll say these wild things.
And I think that, you know, that as was revealed in the WikiLeaks emails, I think that most people thought, oh, if you get Trump through the primary and make him the nominee, then Hillary Clinton's guaranteed to be president so we can get all of the ratings and still not, you know, ruffle any powerful feathers.
And this is the perfect solution.
And of course, you know, hilariously, it all blew up in their face.
Yep.
That Pied Piper strategy, they called it, which is just too perfect, you know, for being hoisted on your own petard.
They even have a cute little name for it and everything, you know.
And the Pied Piper, which who's he?
He's the guy that leads rats away and then all these things.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah, it was.
There's some interesting stuff revealed in those dumps.
Oh, Russia.
No, it's Russia.
No, I'm just kidding.
So listen, I don't wonder if anybody believes that anymore.
But now.
So, I mean, I think to skip a couple of steps here, it's pretty clear that all the momentum is with the incumbent, as is usually the case and is, I think, the case here.
And a lot can happen between now and Election Day.
And Lord knows that's true with Trump.
But I guess I wonder, I guess I could ask you both.
But, you know, first of all, what do you think America is going to look like if Trump is reelected?
And how do you think, you know, that's going to go down?
And then I guess the same thing for Biden.
In fact, what do you think of all the controversy about both sides pre accusing each other of stealing this election when it's still only September?
Well, so let me OK, let me first address the Trump one.
I think if I think if Trump gets reelected, you're going to see mass nationwide rioting.
I mean, I just don't see any way around that.
I think it's going to there's going to be a lot of people.
There's going to be people who get killed.
A lot of property is going to be destroyed.
I totally disagree with that, you know, because the same thing we talked about before, these leftists don't care about supporting Joe Biden and they're not going to write any more than they're already writing.
The people who riot would be the liberal Democrats.
But what are they going to do?
They're just going to march around in pussy hats.
They're not going to do anything.
I think that Trump getting reelected, even though they don't care about Biden getting elected, I think Trump getting reelected would be a big middle finger to them.
And it would be the guy who supports the cops, the guy who is the embodiment of racism and white male privilege and all of this stuff wins.
That's that.
My guess is that the riots will get much worse.
I also think right now, I think right now there's a lot of people looking for an excuse to riot.
The rioting is like an energy that's different from political discourse.
You know what I mean?
This is it's an energy where, like, people are furious and they've seen already that they can kind of get away with it, at least to some degree.
And another excuse.
And they'll go do that.
And you see that when there's another example of like a cop shooting or something like that, where it's like they're not even really waiting for the details of it to come out or anything.
It's like, no, this is an excuse.
We're pissed off.
We're going to go riot more.
It happened just the other day where the guy really did have a giant knife and the cop was running for his life and shot him and they still went out and protested.
Like there is no more clear cut case of self-defense you could have imagined than that.
Yes, yes.
And on a totally legitimate call, not pulled him over for a taillight, but the sister called because he's threatening his mother.
You know, that's a pretty legit call.
Oh, yeah.
No, it was a legit call.
And that cop.
And believe me, I'm as against the cops as anybody.
And yeah, you really you've got nothing in this case.
I mean, the freeze film of the body cam footage, you literally see him with a giant knife cocked back charging the guy.
I mean, you know, OK.
If anybody, cop or not cop, shot someone in that situation, I think that's legit self-defense.
Look, what I think I was kind of thinking, right, like that Trump's going to end up winning this.
I think that he's actually closer in the polls in most of the swing states than he was with Hillary Clinton.
I thought the riots had thrown this thing in his direction.
And I actually think now that I might have been getting all of this wrong and not really understanding what's about to happen in in November.
And so now that I've been looking into it more, I mean, they're they're projecting that 80 million people are going to vote by mail.
This is going to be a shit show.
This is going to be unlike anything we've ever seen in a national election before.
We're not going to know who the president is the night of Election Day.
It's going to be much worse than the year 2000.
OK, so I haven't read much about that.
Is there not a deadline for when you have to mail it by?
So yes, there should be there by Election Day instead of weeks later.
Yes, supposedly it will be.
But then there's going to be all types of like the problems with the mail in voting.
They're going to have to recalculate to make sure that the ballots are all legitimate and that they're coming from the right places.
There'll be ballots that are lost that then have to be accounted for.
I think this thing is going to be it's going to be dread.
Hillary Clinton said something the other week that really stuck out to me.
Hillary Clinton did like one of these like Zoom calls that with with that lady, I'm blanking on her name, who is like one of her campaign managers in 2016.
And Hillary Clinton said she said, and I quote, that Joe Biden should not concede to Donald Trump under any circumstances.
And then she went on to say that she believes that Joe Biden will eventually win the election weeks later through the work of lawyers.
And I just thought like even for someone like Hillary Clinton, I mean, that's a very strange thing for the last Democratic nominee to be saying a month and a half before an election where you're guys up by 10 points nationally.
Not that we're going to win.
We got this in the bag.
Do not concede this election because lawyers will eventually win it for you.
And I think this is going to come down to a fight between lawyers.
I think that fight favors the Democrats.
And I think that what's very possibly going to happen is that it comes down to some stuff like that.
Joe Biden ends up winning from basically by lawyer and the Democrats really are the party of lawyers.
I mean, the Republicans are too, but the Democrats really are the party of lawyers.
And if that happens in some way, I think it's really going to change the country in the sense that not like the way the Democrats have been saying they don't respect the results of 2016.
I think that Trump supporters are truly going to feel like this was stolen from them.
Joe Biden is not the legitimate president of the United States.
And it's going to really split the country apart.
I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, but I think it's going to change the country.
Yeah.
I mean, the problem is there is no North-South type, well, let's just separate thing.
We're talking about the difference between town and country in every town and every country site in America.
This is not going to go very well when it comes to secession unless we're going to have, you know, 150 city states or a few hundred.
But anyway, yeah.
And of course, you know, every president just wants to be Abraham Lincoln and prevent something like that from happening at any cost.
What an opportunity.
But you know, and I don't know if you're aware of this, but you really should look at this where Rosa Brooks, who is funny, there's so many different hilarious tangents to go on there.
Anyway, here's what she is.
She's a professor at Georgetown University and a law professor, and they have been running all of these war games basically about the election.
And they've had Bill Kristol play Trump and his group.
And they have Podesta from the Hillary campaign and all of these people.
And they ran all these scenarios about what might happen with the election.
And essentially, of course, they frame it all as this is all Trumpian aggression that they're defending from is the way that they set it up.
Essentially, they say worst case scenario, anything other than an absolute clear cut landslide victory for Biden.
And it's chaos because, of course, presuming that they will have to fight because they will not accept that they lost and they will have to essentially put on some sort of color coded revolution and this kind of thing to force it through, as in, you know, lawyers won't be good enough.
They'll have to have the public on their side that Trump's trying to steal it and all of this.
And yet, yeah, I just don't think that they're going to be able to do that.
Because again, with the pussy hat riots and this kind of thing, that that's the best liberals can do.
They can't support a color coded revolution.
And America certainly supports every banana republic in the world, but it's not really one.
In other words, the law here is powerful enough that whoever actually wins the election, I think, is going to take the chair.
So I don't know about all this, man.
I certainly think that they're setting it up.
They're framing it like that.
But then again, I think that that Trump is going to completely obliterate Biden by however many a bigger margin than he did Hillary, just because he's already the incumbent.
And Biden is bringing nothing to the table.
And Trump has a fanatical base of supporters who are going to turn out for him no matter what.
Well, the other.
Yeah.
No, I listen.
I get your point.
The other point that actually I quote someone who me and you are.
That's no endorsement, by the way.
Just I'm sorry.
But just in case anybody misunderstands me, you know, I vote for nobody.
I'm a Ron Paul guy here.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just I'm Howard Cosell calling the score.
That's all.
Yes.
Yes.
Just analyzing the situation.
Well, I'll quote Victor Davis Hansen or not quote, but paraphrase him, who neither of us would probably be a big fan of.
I mean, he was like, you know, a horrible, you know, supporter of Dick Cheney and George Bush and all those guys.
But he's at least one of the more thoughtful neocons.
And he's been somewhat interesting to to read through the Trump years because he's unlike the kind of hysterical neocons.
He kind of understood the rise of Trump a little bit more.
But he said the other day, I listened to a speech he gave and he said something that I thought was true, that he said, you know, he's never really seen an election, a presidential election in modern times where there was a candidate like Joe Biden who you really felt like every time he opens his mouth, he could lose the election right now, like he just could have a moment where he loses it all right now.
And there's going to be it looks like they're not going to be able to avoid having these debates with Trump.
And I certainly think that there's a fair possibility that in those debates, Biden could just perform so terribly that he gives Trump a landslide victory that that can't be ignored or altered or, you know, cheated out of.
That being said, look, I tend to agree with what you said about the idea of having some type of coup.
But I would just maybe give the caveat that, you know, there really was an attempted coup against Donald Trump in the first two years of his presidency.
And this wasn't a joke.
I mean, you can make the point that they weren't successful in it and they weren't able to pull it off.
But you had the top guys in the Justice Department, admittedly, talking about invoking the 25th Amendment, talking about different ways they could get him out of there, even when he was a prosecutor.
Yeah.
Sorry to interrupt.
Very importantly, for what you're saying here, even after the election, but before the Electoral College was held, they wanted to have the acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Morell, brief the Electoral College that the Russians had stolen it for Trump and that they had to give it to Hillary Clinton, or at least they had to pass it to the House of Representatives so they could give it to Paul Ryan or Colin Powell, of all people.
And this and they really meant it.
And they put on the front page of The New York Times and the Hillary people said, yes, we support this effort.
This is exactly what we want to do right now.
And they weren't ashamed of it.
They were going for it.
Yeah.
But there's something you know, there's something really fascinating about that, because there's almost two different lessons to be learned from this.
So the first one that jumps out at you is almost like the Alex Jones lesson, like, oh, my God, the conspiracy is real and they're really trying to overthrow a duly elected president.
But then the other lesson is like, oh, but they couldn't pull it off.
Like actually, it turns out they're not as all powerful as some conspiracy theorists like to believe that they are.
They tried.
It was a really lame attempt.
It didn't work for anything because actually, the Electoral College system was designed in a way that it was really impossible for them to do that.
And they weren't able to invoke the 25th Amendment.
They weren't able to get him out of there with the Mueller investigation.
So, you know, it's hard to say for sure.
But I do think that if there's a possibility to try, I think they will try something like that.
I don't put that beyond them.
I also think, you know, it's interesting that you hear so many of these like liberal voices who are out here saying Trump won't.
And they project a lot.
Like in 2016, they said Trump won't respect the results of the election.
But of course, it was Hillary who ended up not respecting the results of the election.
And they're saying Trump won't leave.
Even if he loses the election, he's he won't leave.
And then there's all these stories coming out where they're kind of trying to be a Trump called the military losers.
And Trump didn't want to you know, Trump didn't care about Putin, you know, you know, targeting putting bounties on American soldiers heads.
And it does seem to me like they're trying to drive a wedge between Trump and the military.
And they're trying to it seems like they think that they're going to need the military on their side.
That's not is not going to come to that.
There's no way it's going to come to that either direction.
You know, I don't know.
No, I would assume they're crazy.
There is I think they're as crazy as they are, you know, just completely ridiculous with the way that they framed all of this stuff.
You know, well, it's one of the interesting dynamics today.
Right.
I remember Tucker Carlson said once, I just thought it was so funny and it really stuck with me.
But he was like, he goes, he was like, Look, I'm not a populist.
I have no problem with elites.
I just believe in impressive elites.
And like all elites aren't impressive.
And there's really something to that.
Like you're it's easy to be anti elitist.
And but the truth is, every society is going to have elites, like no matter what you had an anarchist libertarian society, a minarchist society, a socialist society, even like a freaking anarcho communist society, if that is even possible, you're always going to have elites.
That's just the nature of humanity.
There are certain people who are like, you know, brilliant geniuses who rise above others.
And there are certain people who consolidate power and all these things.
But there have throughout history been impressive elites.
I mean, even if they weren't good people, you know, like Thomas Jefferson was really impressive.
Like Eisenhower was impressive.
Like there are people out there, you know, even Obama in his own way was kind of impressive.
But so many of these elites are just unimpressive people.
And so I think that a lot of them believe they can pull off some of these schemes.
But they really can't.
And it's interesting.
I mean, even look, just the fact that after, you know, the day after Election Day 2016, the Democrats had to be thinking, Okay, who are we going to run against Donald Trump?
I mean, this guy is half the country hates him.
At least a third of his own base only tolerates him, but really is rolling their eyes at half the shit he does.
They've got like, you know, he's a guy who, although he is somewhat instinctually brilliant at times, is a complete ignoramus.
You know what I mean?
Like doesn't understand any policy issue, doesn't understand how to run government.
And what did they come up with to run against him?
This guy who's borderline senile.
It's really like you can't even believe that our elites are this unimpressive.
Yeah, well, and they absolutely are.
And on the question of do we beg and try to get Republicans to cross the aisle led by the War Party and George Bush's foreign policy staff and John McCain's staff to lead the Republicans to support Biden, and that's his margin of victory, while at the same time telling the left half of the Democratic Party, which is probably two thirds of them, to all screw off.
And that that is their brilliant election strategy, rather than doing even anything to appease their liberal base that doesn't believe in them.
Which frankly, after all, Obama rigged it.
Obama and the rest of the DNC rigged it to essentially have everybody withdraw before Super Tuesday and throw all their weight to Biden in order to stop Bernie and stop the actual primary season from playing out in a way that could have benefited him.
Yeah.
And they didn't even they didn't even want to throw a bone to the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.
I mean, they like Bernie Sanders has basically just been kept at arm's distance.
I mean, the guy looked like he was good before all that stuff you were talking about leading up to Super Tuesday.
He looked like he was going to quite possibly wrestle this nomination away from Joe Biden.
I mean, he represented a huge movement within the Democratic Party.
Certainly, the entire left half of the Democratic Party was sympathetic to him, if not like enthusiastically supporting him.
And they picked Kamala Harris.
I mean, they they're not even throwing him a bone.
They didn't even like go in like with like an Elizabeth Warren type who maybe kind of spoke the language of the you know what they call Democratic Socialists, which are really just kind of more progressive, not true Democratic Socialists.
Bernie isn't really a true Democratic Socialist.
But but no, they're not even interested in kind of pandering to them.
They'll pander to Black Lives Matter.
They'll pander.
And again, not in any real way.
But yeah, because, you know, again, back to the point I was making before, what they like about that stuff.
This is, to me, why, like the critical race theory stuff is so popular amongst the elites is because they like to be able to make token gestures that don't actually cost them any money or power.
Exactly.
And they like to be like, well, how about if I how about if I throw up a fist or if I take a knee or if I put on some song or if I do that, is that good?
Does that work?
But the Bernie Sanders wing of the party represented something much different.
He was like, no, no, no.
We want wealth.
We don't care about any of that.
We want a wealth tax.
We want the banks broken up.
We want health care for everybody.
We want like so.
And that stuff to them is like a no deal.
So then it comes down to is the margin of hate enough to get those people to support Biden, despite all that, just to try to stop Trump?
That's right.
Which, as you're saying, it's amazing that we're even having this discussion when you're looking at what a complete boob the sitting president of the United States is right now.
Even if you don't know anything about the genocide in Yemen and you're just looking at him on the surface, not the CNN version, but just, you know, the best TV reading you could have of the guy, he's pretty paper thin and bad on a lot of things.
And yet, yeah, this is the best they could do, which, you know what they were.
Their narrative was Sanders can't win.
That's why we have to rig it for Biden, because only Biden can do it, because Sanders definitely can't.
And I think that may well be true that Sanders would have lost, too.
But at least Sanders had a movement and something to say for people to believe in.
I would have been on YouTube every day this whole time talking about it should be this way and it should be that way and have something to say in a way that just completely blows Biden out of the water.
Right.
Well, say whatever you want about Bernie Sanders.
I mean, I certainly think, you know, I disagree with him on pretty much all of his economic stuff, which is the center of what he he stands for.
He's good on some other issues on the peripheral, but, you know, his economics are terrible.
But Bernie Sanders wants to talk about issues.
I mean, that's that's just a fact like Bernie Sanders.
You know, when he was challenging Joe Biden, it would be all issues based.
That's it.
Listen, I'm for universal health care and you're not.
You voted for the war in Iraq and I voted against it.
I'm for yada, yada, yada.
Down the list.
Like these are all policy issues that I disagree with.
One of the things that's really been remarkable about watching the establishment Democrats try to deal with Trump is that all of them, you know, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, all of them, they do not want to talk about any issues at all.
Like they have nothing.
Hillary Clinton had nothing in her record that she was proud of, that she wanted to run on.
It's just this kind of like so they're left with the token kind of, you know, well, let me say something about, you know, how bad racism is or sexism is or something.
I mean, Joe Biden's his camp, his speech at, you know, at the DNC was about the soul of America and how Donald Trump is divisive and how he's so bad.
And remember what happened in Charlottesville?
I mean, he didn't say the right thing right after Charlottesville.
And you're watching it and you're like, wait, are you talking about a riot type thing that happened in 2017 while cities are on fire as you're giving this speech?
I mean, like what?
Like, who cares?
This is all you've got.
Well, and this is the thing, and this is Trump's real advantage, right?
And I don't know if people are really thinking about it in this way, but, you know, he didn't just defeat Hillary Clinton.
He defeated Jeb Bush, too.
And it was more than symbolic.
These are the two families who have ruled America since the end of the Cold War.
And I mean, Obama was nothing but Hillary Clinton.
He even had her as his secretary of state slash war in his first term there and her exact same sort of right wing Democrat policies, Joe Biden type policies there.
And it was a repudiation of all of that.
And on the three major planks, whether you or I agree with them or not, on immigration, trade and the wars, and that these idiots have ruined everything and that's why things should be different.
It's not like he was attacking the Federal Reserve or anything, but these were the issues that they ruined everything.
And that's why him.
And of course, the narrative has been that, oh, no, Putin cheated is the only reason he won.
By the way, there was no repudiation of us that happened whatsoever by the American people, no matter what you might have been told.
We actually really won that thing.
And that if Trump loses now to Biden, the narrative will be that, see, what's wrong with America is Donald Trump.
And now he's gone.
Everything's back the way it was supposed to be.
And Biden is essentially might as well be Hillary.
And thank God for that.
And this is, you know, again, thank goodness America's back in the hands of our responsible centrist neoliberal slash neoconservative establishment here.
And everything is OK again.
And and especially because it's Biden himself who was, you know, a right hand man to Bill Clinton and this whole agenda this whole time.
Whereas if Trump wins again and after four years goes down in history as one of the worst ever and all those kinds of things, at least whoever they run as the Democrat then will be younger and new and something different in a way, hopefully not more communist or whatever.
You know what I mean?
But just at least not part of the Clinton group and not some kind of ratification of this idea that everything is OK now, again, because it's back the way it was supposed to be.
And that kind of narrative, because I think it would really suck.
There's no reason to vote for Trump or anything, but I just think it would really suck if Biden won.
And then that was the narrative that carried forward that, yep, see, orange man bad.
And so now at least we're safe from that and everything is fine again.
And then go forward with this kind of with Harris as the inheritor of the Bill Clinton legacy really here, you know?
Yeah, no, that's for sure.
That would that would not be a good scenario.
And of course, you know, as you mentioned on those three planks that that Trump ran on, I mean, there there is one that we really agree with him on.
And that is like the most important issue to us.
So there's that, unfortunately, you know, he just hasn't he wasn't really up for the challenge or just didn't really care enough to actually try to get that done.
My take on Trump, more or less, is that he's this kind of like he's this very like surface level perception of what a tough guy is.
But when it comes down to it, he's just not really that tough.
I think like it's like from like I think Ron Paul was much more of a man than Donald Trump is like.
Donald Trump will call some woman a fat pig.
But that's not really true masculine toughness.
True masculine toughness is like not compromising on your values.
And so when Donald Trump says, OK, I'm going to pull the troops out of here and then they circle the wagons and the media blasts him for weeks and the military people come in or whatever, he just goes, oh, OK, I guess we're not going to pull the troops out, you know, like that's.
And so he didn't deliver on what this moment was supposed to be about.
But I agree with you that going back to the neocon neoliberal establishment, not only is it would that be horrible to be the narrative, but it also genuinely scares me.
I mean, the you know, Joe Biden is like he's not going to know what's going on.
He's going to get all of these Susan Rice type people back in there and they're going to be hunting for for new wars.
So that's that's a pretty grim prospect.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's a real wash, though.
It's hard to be worse than Mike Pompeo, which I guess, you know, maybe he'd be going.
And Trump has nominated a couple of restraint minded guys just recently.
I'd like to believe that was the start of something more important there.
But you know, here's the thing about it, too, man.
The negatives here for what Biden has done in the past in his whole career, but also up against what Trump has done as president, regardless of all these stupid accusations of treason and whatever.
He is guilty of genocide and war crimes.
And, you know, there's a piece today in The New York Times or maybe it was yesterday.
I think it's today in The New York Times where this is not partisan New York Times BS either.
It's the lawyers in the State Department in the Obama years and in the Trump years saying we're in violation of our treaty obligations here.
We're taking part in a war that's deliberately targeting civilians and we could go to prison.
And that's funny because it's like they're under the fantasy that the law applies to them.
Really?
They think that?
Well, that's funny.
But they're right that they are war criminals and they should be terrified that they could be prosecuted for that.
And I just interviewed Nasser Arabi again today and, you know, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of thousands, certainly more than a quarter million, approaching half a million people.
And, you know, a couple of hundred thousand, at least at this point, children under five years old dying of deprivation in this thing.
And they're the targets of they're not even as bad as all the rest of the wars are.
This isn't collateral damage.
This is the deliberate policy of inflicting as much pain as possible on the civilians and their infrastructure, water, electricity, hospitals, everything.
It's just the worst thing in the world going on right now.
And Donald Trump is guilty as hell for it.
And there's not even, even though it was always bullshit, you don't even have the thinnest of justifications for the war.
Or legal authorization whatsoever.
Right.
And it was Obama and Biden who started it.
Biden claims, I think, that he opposed it at the time.
I don't know if there's any proof of that, but he said he would like to stop it.
And I sort of kind of believe that because I think some of the people, you know, who were in the Obama government wish they hadn't have done that because, God dang, if you look at this thing, it's just absolute chaos.
But Trump has been responsible for it for years here.
And there's no sign of letting up.
And I can't think of, if there's one issue to vote on that outranks every other thing, even, I mean, I think the Democratic Party deserves to be completely obliterated off the face of the earth for their treason and their false accusations of treason against Trump for now going on four years here.
I hate them for that more than anything.
But except for this is so much worse than that.
And really, his treatment of the Palestinians, too.
It's just sickening, man.
Yeah.
No, listen, I agree with you.
And but then again, it also becomes a wash because it's him versus the vice president of the guy who started this war of genocide.
And he's absolutely horrible on Palestine, too, his entire career long.
Now Biden is the worst Democrat on Israel-Palestine.
To be completely fair to Biden, back when he had a functioning mind, I think he was not the worst member of Obama's cabinet or even close.
He was probably one of the better members when it comes to this stuff.
I mean, I know that supposedly, right, like you said, supposedly he didn't really want to do this Yemen thing.
And supposedly he wasn't really for Libya either.
And the Afghan surge, he wanted to do the minimal option on Afghanistan, too.
Right.
So he's like not as horrible as like the Gates and the Hillary Clintons and later the, you know, Susan Rice or whatever.
He's not quite as bad as those people.
But Biden at this point is senile and he's going to put all those same people right around him.
So it's like it doesn't really even matter.
I know that Gates said in his book that Joe Biden was the worst on foreign policy in the administration, which means he's the best.
Like that's what it means when George W. Bush's defense secretary says you're the worst.
That's like a compliment in this weird reality that we live in.
Yeah.
So, you know, like it's like if Hitler says you were the worst on the Jews, you were probably the best person around.
But so, you know, so like that's the dynamic there.
But yeah, I just think that the Democrats, they're they're every bit as bad on the wars.
Their biggest criticism of Trump is that he's not more of a war hawk.
And as you said, I mean, look, I won't vote for either of them.
But I mean, I think Trump should should be tried for war crimes and just like you, you know.
But I will say that the Democrats completely consuming the country in this phony narrative that they knew was a lie, lying through their teeth that Donald Trump's involved in some conspiracy with Vladimir Putin, that they really deserve to lose for that.
I also think that what the just what the Democratic governors have done, just shredding forget the Constitution because the Constitution's been dead for a long time.
But there is at least, you know, like not common law, but I don't know what the term I'm looking for is.
But there's kind of like precedent.
You know what I mean?
That you just kind of like, well, we violated the Constitution a million times, but no one's ever done this.
And what these Democratic governors have done to the country over the last four months truly terrifies me.
I mean, like I'm scared of the virus, too.
But the idea that the government can just you can be watching TV to see your governor, to see whether you're allowed to go to the park today is like a whole new level of of government overreach that truly terrifies me.
And for those reasons, I think the Democrats deserve to lose slightly more than the Republicans.
Yeah, I know.
It's really a hard toss up here.
And that's why I'm glad I'm not a voter.
I mean, I guess the repudiation of the establishment itself, it almost seems like it needs a second term of Trump to really seal it that nope, it wasn't Putin.
It was us.
We hate you.
That's true.
And you can't avoid that.
And they kind of really, really need to hear that.
Then again, yes, you can't really be the guy who's right now sitting in the chair bombing children to death.
And including in this New York Times article, they specify just in the last couple of weeks, they bombed dozens of children to death, including a one week old boy at his welcome home from the hospital.
One week old boy party, you know, this guy, I'm not sure he should be buried under the Supermax before November.
So how are we going to support him then?
You know?
No.
Well, the answer is you're not going to support him.
And I'm not either.
You know, it's just you start to look at, you know, the the truth is that either Donald Trump or Joe Biden is going to be the next president.
And what they're obviously both horribly disqualified from getting either of our support.
But what do we gain?
What is there to be gained from either?
And you know, at least with, you know, at least with Donald Trump, you get a okay, it'll it'll drive all of the bad guys crazy.
And I get to laugh at them.
And then I get this buffoon in there to make fun of and troll the the corporate press for the next four years.
It's not saying that that's a great scenario, but, you know, me and you are libertarians and we're anti war.
So we're pretty used to losing and we lose no matter what.
That's right.
No question about that.
Well, and you know what?
Here, we can end with something positive.
A note to the Jorgensen people, you know, be a great issue to run on.
I know you heard me say this before.
Genocide in Yemen and the fact that the rest of the media is not making that a big issue is not a reason to avoid it.
That's the reason for your campaign to make it an issue.
And then that will be the greatest achievement of all of your lives is that you help make Yemen and the ongoing genocide in Yemen part of the debate in the presidential campaign of 2020.
That's your task.
You take the single worst thing that the USA is doing and you call it wrong as loud as you can.
Well, Spike Cohen was actively posting about the genocide of transgender people in America, because I believe there's been 23 transgender people killed this year.
And he said, we're witnessing the beginning of a genocide.
Now, of course, these 23 people were not killed because they were transgender.
It's just transgender people who happened to be murdered and the murder rates up.
So the number is up.
But it's like, you know, you guys, there are actual genocides going on.
We don't need to invent one that nobody believes is real.
And I would just say my message to their campaign is like, look, guys, this is it.
It's a month and a half to go till this thing is over.
They've clearly failed at doing what me or you would hope that the LP would do already, which is like inspire a big liberty movement.
So that's not going to happen.
And now it's almost like they got to ask themselves, yeah, what do you really stand for?
Because this is it for both of you guys.
You're probably never going to be presidential candidates again.
And this is it.
You got a month and a half left where you're still technically running for president and vice president and you're on the on the ballot in all 50 states and all this.
And so what do you want to do?
What do you want to insert into the narrative?
And what you just said about the genocide in Yemen would be a really great one, a really great one to get in there.
And even in PR terms, maybe you could get somebody to pay attention to you for making such an outlandish claim as this war is deliberately targeting civilians.
Can you back that up?
Why?
Yes, I can.
You know, let's fight.
Put up your dukes, man.
Let's squabble about what's true about this.
And let's see if we can get some attention doing that.
And make it personal, too, right?
Donald Trump is too weak to resist his military's insistence on continuing the genocide in Yemen just because of the money they're making off of the commissions for arranging these bomb sales and whatever it is.
Go ahead and make somebody have to defend themselves on this issue.
Joe Biden says he's against it, but he helped start it.
So let's see you down on your knees begging and crying forgiveness from Jesus.
And then maybe we'll believe you, but probably not even then.
How about that?
Something, right?
Anything.
Yeah.
No, one hundred percent, dude.
One hundred percent.
See, the problem is the people who run the LP, they're nice people and they're good libertarians.
They got principle.
If you ask them about their position on everything in the abstract, they're good.
But they ain't mad because they're not watching what we're watching.
And they're just not outraged about the level of violence and criminality here and the danger that it poses to the future of our civilization.
I mean, this is all empires die and this is what it looks like.
This is part of that.
And we're supposed to be trying to save the goddamn day here, man.
Yeah.
It all comes back to Rothbard.
Do you hate the state?
I mean, like some of these people in leadership positions in the LP, I would happily have them be worse on some issues and hate the state more.
Like if I maybe agree with them on like 90 percent of stuff, I'd take 75 percent of the stuff if they just really hated this, if they just really cared, if they were if they were kind of like red pilled to the true nature of how evil this whole machine is and what it does to real people.
And they were and they had the outrage that logically should follow from from the true nature of this machine.
If they just had that, I'd be OK if they weren't so good on like a trade policy or something like that.
You know, like I just don't even I don't care at this point.
I just, you know, look, I don't I'm not hopeful about the Jorgensen Cohen ticket.
I think they're going to end up doing very poorly in November.
But you know, what are you going to do?
You know what?
I still have a little bit of hope.
I won't say I'm optimistic.
But, you know, I talked with both of them and, you know, I think she's a really good lady.
I think most of the stupidity on her Twitter feed is somebody else's fault.
So, you know, cumulatively, it shouldn't really count cumulatively, but it sort of does anyway.
You know, along with her own real mistakes.
But and, you know, I talked to a Spike Cohen and man, he seems to really understand so many of these things the very same way that you and I do from when I talk to him.
And I don't know that.
Look, if I was running for anything, I have no idea how to take advantage of the position there in media wise in any real savvy way or whatever.
But I know that, you know, in that position, they put the mic in front of your face.
You better say the top six absolutely most important things you have to say.
And that doesn't include all this goofing around.
You know, it's like being on some 50,000 watt radio station.
You know, I have this show in Los Angeles on KPFK.
It's the biggest FM antenna west of the Mississippi River, grandfathered in from back in the thirties or whatever it is.
And man, I do.
I try my best to not waste one second of that time that's worth its weight to me and platinum or however you do a stupid metaphor about that.
You don't, you don't blow the opportunity to do a radio show that all of Los Angeles can hear.
You do your best and forget all this stupid chicks with dicks and whatever the hell they're distracted with here.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah.
No, I agree.
And you also, you have to look, I mean, you, I don't know.
It's just stupid to me that the, the first thing you, you would do right.
Like the problem.
And you can say that it's like, it's, you know, it's the person running Joe Jorgensen's Twitter and this stuff and like, yeah, okay.
Like there is some, some truth to that.
But you know, this all still falls under the umbrella of your campaign.
And when you have enough things that start to kind of pile on, you go, okay, so you have the, we must be anti-racist tweet.
You have the, this all lives matter comment.
You have the thing where you praise Biden for picking Kamala Harris for being a woman and it's so nice to see another woman there.
You have the, you have the, um, let her speak the I'm with her, the, all this kind of identity politics stuff.
You have spike tweeting about or posting about transgender genocide.
And what you've done now with all of these issues is you have needlessly for absolutely no benefit split your base.
You've split your base of libertarians.
Now the left libertarians kind of like you and the right libertarians are all so turned off by all of this stuff.
They're so tired of being lectured about being racist.
They're so tired of this woke propaganda that they're all rolling their eyes at you.
And what benefit has it gotten you?
Nothing.
There may be a handful of people were brought over by this, but that's nothing.
Look, if you look at the, obviously any libertarian, if you were running, I mean, and by the way, tragically, the time is ticking on the clock because all of a sudden 2012 was eight years ago.
You know, that's not so recent anymore.
2012 was eight years ago.
But the first thing you do if you're a libertarian running for national audience is you go, okay, how much of the Ron Paul revolution is left?
Whatever's left.
I'm getting, I'm getting them all on my side.
Like here's a bell to you guys.
I'm your leader.
Now all of you get on board.
Now let's all start getting more people on board.
You unify your base, you bring them all together and then you try to reach out to other people.
So what they did right away was they split their base.
They made, they made a, at least half of it completely unenthusiastic about the ticket.
And then it's also like, you know, there's a real problem with the fact that like I listened to Joe Jorgensen's campaign speech from the other day, the one where she brought up this all lives matter thing again, and she's giving a speech that literally could have been the same speech she gave in 1992.
It's just the same thing, you know, and it's fine.
Like some of it's good.
I'm against the war on drugs and I'm, you know, against, you know, the universal healthcare and this is why the market's better and taxes should be lowered and blah, blah, blah.
But like basically it's like not even really addressing this year and this is the craziest year of my lifetime.
Like you can't not address this year.
It's just makes no sense.
I mean, if this makes sense, no, it makes sense because you know, look, there are all different kinds of libertarians, right?
I'm the foreign policy guy and you're a comedian while you're kind of a jack of all trades.
But a lot of people really specialize, right?
You have people who are really into Austrian school economics and people who are into economic history and people who are into specializing on college title nine policies.
And you have people who are libertarian party, functionary types, and you have people who, you know, many libertarians, not that there's something wrong with, it's just a different kind of us, right?
There are many libertarians who their, their concept of libertarianism is how it should work in the libertarian United States that hovers in their imagined just above and in front of their head there that like, yeah, you would have low taxes and no drug war on this and that kind of thing.
But then, but who don't read the news, who aren't plugged into really what's going on, who don't understand the culture war, don't understand why everybody's driven so crazy, who don't understand, even like you were saying at the very beginning, we got the libertarian answer happens to be the answer for all the things everybody's most concerned about right now.
Like we're ready to go.
And, but they don't really know that because they're not really dealing, as you said in this year, they're not dealing in this country on this planet at this point in space time at all.
They're just talking about a country would be better if it had lower taxes.
You could be talking about the USA or anywhere else, America.
She was asked about her foreign policy.
America should be like Switzerland instead of like, listen, I know a lot of people really think that America has to be the dominant force militarily on the planet to keep the peace.
But that's really not true.
We're causing more trouble than it's worth and we don't have the right and we have to bring our troops home because all empires fall and that's what's happening to us now.
We're supposed to prevent that by reeling it in before it's all too late and the whole thing crumbles, right?
This is an emergency.
This isn't a laboratory experiment about what if you had a republic that never did turn into an empire, but without talking about the actual empire, you know?
I don't know.
Anyway, but it's, so I'm angry about it or whatever.
I'm frustrated by it, but I understand it that it's just a different kind of, of like speciality of libertarianism really is just sort of working on that sort of a plane of ideas and not really grappling with, yeah, no, people are dying because they don't have health insurance because we have a fascist health insurance system.
And so it's not just that, gee, it'd be nice if we had a free market in healthcare.
It's a, people are dying because we don't and it really sucks.
And who's going to do something about it to save the people from the problem?
You know, it's never, it can't be framed that way because they just can't feel it that way.
They just don't see it that way.
Yeah, no, I think you're right.
And I think also that a lot of like my limited experience in the LP, I've realized that the, one of the major differences between the liberty movement and the libertarian party is that the libertarian party types are much more insulated in this LP world where they kind of just, I think don't talk to regular people or don't have their finger on the pulse of what regular people are thinking and don't know how to move them and kind of like pull them into something.
And so they kind of go around and they give these, these speeches that you're talking about and it gets a really good response within the libertarian party.
And then they think, okay, well that's it.
I got it.
Right.
And it's like, yeah, the people in the libertarian party don't exactly, you know, I love them, but they're not exactly normal.
And uh, it's, it's, you got, you have to like actually, especially, it's a very different thing to give a speech to somebody who already believes in the full platform than it is to wake somebody up who has no idea what you're talking about.
And in order to wake somebody up and challenge their whole worldview, saying something like, you know, the two party system is no good, it's just not going to do it.
That's not like, you know, it's like, no, you've got it.
You've got to really kind of jolt them into awareness about how dire this situation is.
Ah, well, at least we can watch the train wreck together, Dave.
Well, we sure will, buddy.
It's a lot of fun.
I'm sorry, I'm over time and I got to go, but thank you so much for doing the show with me today, dude.
It's been great.
Absolutely.
My pleasure.
Good to talk to you, brother.
Doodle-oo-loo.
Doodle-oo-loo-loo.
Okay.
Time travel.
Now it's the next morning, Saturday morning, and we're tacking on this addendum to the interview because the dang old Ginsburg died there, the Supreme Court justice.
And so Dave's got some things to say about that.
Welcome back to the show, Dave, some more.
It's good to be back.
I'm glad that this was one of those things like, I'm glad you hadn't put the episode up yet so we could tack this on because I hate, it's like the bane of my existence.
And I think for all people who do, you know, radio and podcasting and stuff, but you hate when you record something and then literally a couple hours later, some thing breaks and you know, everyone who listens to this is going to be like, oh, okay, they're going to talk about RBG dying.
And then it just never comes up.
Right.
Yeah.
That happened to me last week with the Bahrain deal.
I interviewed Ted Snyder all about the UAE deal.
I hung up the phone and then the news breaks.
They got a Bahrain deal, too.
Oh, thanks a lot.
Now I can't interview Ted again till Thursday.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's so frustrating.
And of course, it happens to us all the time.
That's part of the part of the business.
But but anyway.
Yeah.
So I guess I'm glad we could add this on.
You know, the one thing I was thinking after we got off the recording was that I meant to say that I do think there's going to be some type of October surprise.
I still think there will be.
I'm not saying this is it, but I still think there's going to be like some tape of Trump or something.
I just I don't know.
I just I just my spidey senses tell me that 2020 is going to have an October surprise before the election.
So I wanted to say that.
So now I get to say that, too.
But yeah, this is now going to characterize a big portion of the next few months, which is going to be a crazy fight in the Senate to try to get a judge appointed and confirmed in the next, you know, 40 days or whatever, 45 days, whatever they have till the election.
And if anything, you know what we saw with the Kavanaugh hearings, it's going to be pretty intense.
There's also now, of course, the precedent that Mitch McConnell set with Merrick Garland, where they can.
And by the way, Chuck Schumer has already tweeted this, that he's already using this this this defense of just, well, we're going to let the American people decide.
So let's see.
Let's wait till after the election.
So this is going to get really ugly.
It also the Supreme Court, for whatever reason, is very effective at working people up to kind of push them further into their Democrat or Republican camps, because this really matters and yada yada, all that stuff.
So this is going to be a big part of the fight going forward.
And I don't know, it's it's just going to get it's just going to make things uglier and more divided.
Well, I mean, at least part of it will be entertaining, I guess.
But, you know, I think the Kavanaugh hearing is a pretty good, you know, guess of what we're looking at.
You know, whoever it is, it's going to get raked over the coals.
But then ultimately, they will be confirmed because the Republicans control the Senate.
But I think the Merrick Garland thing, that's not going to happen because, again, the Republicans control the Senate.
So the Democrats can scream and cry about it and accuse whoever of sexual harassment or or that kind of thing.
But at the time that Mitch McConnell did that, it was the Democrat appointee.
And he was the majority leader and was able to do that.
So if Chuck Schumer wants to cry that he's a hypocrite, I'm sure that he'll cry that he's a hypocrite.
And I'm sure that McConnell will be a hypocrite and is probably already getting the ink on his rubber stamp ready to go.
So sure.
Well, the funny thing, it's such it's such a typical like classic politicians like type thing where Chuck Schumer will cry that he's a hypocrite and in the process will himself be a hypocrite and not even think twice about it.
So they said it was such an outrage when they did this to Obama's appointee.
And now they'll say, OK, well, we're going to do the same thing to whoever Trump nominates.
So it's all just none of them believe in anything except power.
And that's, you know, on full display here.
I agree with you.
But I think ultimately, they'll probably be able to rush this through and confirm it.
And you got to think also that Trump doesn't just have the until Election Day.
I mean, he actually has till January.
So he's they've they've got enough time to get this done and confirm it.
And it will drive liberals crazy because the liberal worldview insists that Trump is just supposed to be a four year aberration.
And then we go back to everything as normal.
The only reason why there's this crazy mood in the country is because Trump is so uniquely evil.
And that's why Joe Biden getting back in there will bring us back to sanity.
And now they're going to have to deal with the fact, whether they like it or not, that Trump has had some pretty lasting effect on the country.
I mean, getting getting three judges in four years is a lot.
That's that's a lot more than usual.
I mean, Obama only got two in eight years.
W only got two in eight years.
So to get three and in four years is a lot from my perspective.
And I assume you'd probably agree with me.
It really isn't nearly as consequential as everyone makes it out to be.
I mean, it's like it's not as if the like Republican appointed judges.
I mean, what's his name?
Roberts is the reason we have Obamacare.
It's not as if they really hold anything down for, you know, the free market or conservative values.
And of course, typically speaking, with maybe the exception of Gorsuch, but in general, the Republican appointed judges are just awful on the national security state and spying and all of this stuff.
And it's only the left wing judges who are decent on that at all, like Sotomayor or something like that.
And same for police abuse and that kind of deal, you know.
But I was just.
No, absolutely.
But I was just making the point about the spying stuff, because that ultimately is really what what destroyed the Trump administration's first term.
Right.
And so they won't even connect the dots there and realize that it's what your Republican appointed judges have allowed to happen is the reason why the deep state was able to go after Trump in this manner.
So I don't see it as being actually that important or consequential.
I look at things, you know, through the Rothbardian lens, which Murray Rothbard in Anatomy of the State, which is still my favorite piece to recommend to new people who are interested in these ideas that at War, Peace in the State and Anatomy of the State are my two favorite little Rothbard essays or pamphlets or whatever.
Left and right.
The prospects for liberty.
Yeah, that's a fantastic one.
But that's a little bit longer and more.
That's like one of the next ones that I'll recommend to people.
But I always say start with Anatomy of the State or War, Peace in the State.
But you know, different people come in different ways.
But but that's a fantastic one as well.
But he makes the point in Anatomy of the State, which is really so true that the Supreme Court is just it's one of the major pieces of like the Constitution that's actually just flawed on paper.
Like it's not even like, oh, it went in this bad direction, but it's such an obvious flaw that you're going to have this body that is responsible for checking the government.
So they're going to check what the president and the Senate or what the president and the Congress does.
And yet they have to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
It's like so it's like if me and you were having some dispute and we were going to go to court and I'm like, OK, but I get to appoint the judge and then the judge is confirmed by my wife.
Right.
Like it's obviously this judge is not going to be a neutral arbiter between me and your dispute now.
In fact, I just in my Reddit group just this morning, somebody posted a thing that says as of 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court has held 176 acts of the U.S. Congress unconstitutional.
Out of what, like 500 million laws they passed or something, probably I'm just guessing I'm estimating to the nearest 10.
But that's pretty close, I think.
Yeah, exactly.
And so that's kind of the game that we're up against.
It's like, you know, expecting any of these courts to actually step in and control the government when it's, you know, exceeded its constitutional bounds.
I mean, I don't know.
Just look at the history of the United States of America.
How good has the Supreme Court done in reigning in state power?
You know what Jefferson said, too, after Marbury versus Madison, where, you know, they made their decision, but they also claim the authority to make these decisions.
Jefferson said, oh, this is completely crazy, doesn't say in the Constitution anywhere that they have this authority that they're, you know, abrogating to themselves right now.
And this decision of theirs ought to be trotted out in front of the people of the country and declared not law.
He couldn't stand the idea that they were going to say that, oh, they get to decide what's constitutional from now on in all cases.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's just it's really it's an unworkable system and we see that.
But it does have an effect on people.
Like it does have an effect on on the more outside of the establishment, conservative right wing types.
And I think on a lot of the left wing types, too, to draw them back in to support for for the duopoly like that.
That has been very effective.
I mean, this is like what got Pat Buchanan to ultimately support Herbert Walker, you know, was like, OK, well, I'd rather him picking the Supreme Court justices than than the Democrats.
And, you know, so it's like, OK, well, if you ever want a shot at overturning Roe v.
Wade, you're going to have to support this Republican who you hate on everything else or all these other policies.
And then the same with the left, where it's like, OK, but if you want to protect a woman's right to choose, then you're going to have to vote for Joe Biden, you know.
And so it does have an effect of of getting people who would otherwise be disillusioned with their party to fall in line.
And, you know, I've always thought this was misguided for those people to fall in line based on the Supreme Court.
But there's no denying that it really does have that effect on people.
Absolutely.
So.
So, you know, there's that.
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Well, and of course, the right has been jerking their base around on abortion for decades.
And in the last thing in the world they want to do is outlaw it.
And look at when Bush and Trump had a conservative majority on the court and a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, neither of them even tried to outlaw abortion.
The Congress and the president didn't even try, because they need that issue to whip all of their stupid voters into lining up to vote for them again.
It was one of the funniest things.
So that someday they can do something about it, like it's the two-state solution or something, you know?
Yes, exactly.
That's a great analogy.
It was so funny when Kavanaugh was being grilled, and aside from the, you know, all the sexual assault allegations and stuff, but when they were grilling him about abortion in the original confirmation hearing, and they, you know, he basically said he's like, I have no interest in changing Roe v.
Wade as far as I'm concerned.
That's the law of the land, and the Supreme Court's already ruled on that.
And everyone on both sides was like, well, obviously he's lying.
So everyone on the left is like, he's just saying that, but he really wants to overturn Roe v.
Wade.
And everyone on the right is like, he's just saying that, but he's got our back, and he's going to do it.
And it's like, you guys are all insane.
He just told you this isn't even an issue on his radar.
And of course not.
I mean, feel however you feel about abortion.
The idea that the Supreme Court is going to come in and overturn that, this would fracture the country in an unthinkable way.
And it's just obvious, as you pointed out, it's obvious there's enough time.
They never even make moves to do this.
This is not going to happen.
And I think one of the reasons Ruth Bader Ginsburg is like a hero to the liberals is because she did, I mean, not that abortion was ever really in danger in her time on the Supreme Court, but she did write the decision on one of these cases that like, you know, shut down restrictions on abortion or something like that.
So anyway, yeah, I agree with you.
I think it's just a great issue for people to use to kind of polarize the country and make them feel like they have a really big stake in whether the Democrat or the Republican gets in.
And of course, it is one of those issues where people are, you know, it's pretty irreconcilable.
I mean, you know, if you have one group of the country who looks at this as a fundamental right of women and the other group who looks at it as murdering babies, it's pretty hard to get into a room and hammer out a resolution on that.
So it's the perfect issue to constantly use to keep people in their camps.
Yeah.
Well, it ain't my issue.
My issue is much more what the cops can do to us on the side of the road.
And as you were saying, well, as I was interrupting there, that Sotomayor and those types are much more likely to side with a human being against a cop on questions like that, whereas the conservatives always side against human liberty and in favor of state power.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No question about that.
I mean, when it comes when it comes to the police state, both domestic and foreign, the Republican appointed judges are just horrible.
And, you know, it's like one of those things where all of these things, you know, are connected.
And I would I hoped that when when Trump, you know, had to deal with all of the the, you know, spying from the NSA and the CIA and the FBI, that maybe some some right wingers would wake up to this.
And maybe some of them have a little bit, but you're you're not going to have this, you know, this this kind of like national security apparatus directed at the American people.
And then ever have anybody be able to some right winger be able to to take the office and really, you know what I mean, like remake the country or drain the swamp the way Trump promised to as long as you have.
And this is, by the way, what we were also outraged about as Obama was was building up the spying apparatus.
I mean, I, you know, W did a lot, too, but really under Obama, it went crazy.
And, you know, it was like it was just so obvious to all of us that, like, well, the reason this is so important is that if you ever were to get a Ron Paul type guy in there, they would they would be able to ruin him.
And particularly going forward into the future.
I mean, now that everybody's entire life is is captured by metadata and, you know, it's all over social media and all this stuff.
I mean, if there's ever some really great leader who tries to to run for high office again, they're just going to be able to destroy this person.
They'll have everything on them.
And so that's that's a big part of it.
And as long as there is, you know, it's like it's the same way as like the people who supported like like the Pat Buchanan types who supported the Vietnam War, but then hated so much the cultural revolution.
And you're like, yeah, but don't you see that these things are related?
Like you can't have this war without the cultural revolution.
So shouldn't you just be against the war if you want to protect, you know, the social order that you like?
Well, in the same way, if you if you hate these Black Lives Matter uprisings and stuff like that, it's like, OK, well, you can't have the police state and not have that.
So pick what do you want?
Do you want your police state or do you want to not have these you know, the culture like being torn apart like this?
And same for the individual cops.
You know, a friend blogged at the Libertarian Institute about I think it was the one where the guy got shot seven times in the back trying to get in his car there.
And and the guy said, look, if you're a cop doing this job at some point, you got to ask yourself no matter how bad you want to murder this guy, you murder in here.
Is it really worth it if you're going to get your town burnt down?
Yeah.
You know, if if if life in your city isn't going to be the same again for years and, you know, in in in horrible negative ways, arson fires and killings and riots over just because you want to hunt down some guy so bad, you got to shoot him with your Glock instead of your taser.
Whatever it is, you know, is it that important to you to get a kill on your belt?
Yeah, well, it's it's it's the it's the dynamic that right wingers have to deal with, and I really do see it almost identical to the the idea of like the the Pat Buchanan cold warriors who wanted the war in Vietnam but didn't want the cultural revolution.
It's a great analogy.
OK, well, you're going to have to pick one.
You're going to have to pick one.
And we want all these wars, but we're sick and tired of all of these immigrants from, you know, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Iraq.
I don't know what these countries have in common, why their people keep moving here, but I wish they'd stop, they say.
Yeah, well, exactly.
What do you want?
Do you want a Europe that doesn't have, you know, African migrants flooding into it?
Or do you want to overthrow Gaddafi?
Which one?
Which one's more important to you?
And dear God, I hope you pick.
I really hope you pick protecting your own country over now.
But whether whether consciously or not, in effect, the decision has been now we're going to need to kill those people over there.
So it sure does suck.
But we're just going to have to deal with that.
So, you know, hopefully it'll be somebody else's problem that they don't ever have to deal with.
It's really it.
Right.
Yeah.
But, you know, maybe it takes it becoming your problem in order for for people to be motivated to to think that through a little bit.
But yeah, anyway, I don't you know, I don't think my guess would be Trump's not going to appoint someone who's pretty good.
I mean, I think actually Gorsuch was probably pretty good for who he would have appointed.
And Kavanaugh was substantially worse.
Not talking about any of the others, just judicial record, you know.
And I think that trend will continue and he'll appoint someone worse this time.
Yeah, he's not going to want to appoint someone who's going to be, you know, like he'll just be politically incentivized to appoint someone who won't get out the vote from the left.
So he's going to probably try to, you know, appoint a pretty acceptable, you know, bipartisan figure, which is, you know, are always the worst.
Yeah.
You know, the most moderate guy at the Federalist Society or whatever.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like that.
Same old stuff.
Harvard or Yale.
Flip your coin.
That's right.
All right, Dave.
Well, listen, man, I won't keep you any longer on a Saturday morning, but I think you're right about this.
And I'm glad we had a chance to talk, too.
Yeah, me too.
Go enjoy a Saturday with the fam and I'll do the same.
All right.
See you, bud.
Later.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.