Transcript
Dave Smith (0:00)
Foreign what's up? What's up everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I am Dave Smith. I am rolling solo for this episode and we got a bunch of stuff to talk about. So let me, let me just quickly get a few some business out of the way. So I, of course tomorrow me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein will be in Louisville, Kentucky. There is the show is damn near close to sold out. I think there might be like seven seats left right now. So if you're listening to this live, if you want to come out to the Louisville shows tomorrow night, make sure you go do that immediately. Comicdabesmith.com has the ticket link. It's the first link up there. And then there are still a few seats left but they're selling very quick in Fort Wayne, Indiana. So hope to see a bunch of you guys out there this weekend. Really looking forward to, to these shows. And then we've got I believe Key west is the next one coming up after that. And then there's alt Buffalo, Chicago, Boston. A bunch of dates are up on, on the site comicdavesmith.com the other thing is reminder, February 11th is fast approaching. I will be debating Josh Hammer, the senior editor at Newsweek over the U.S. israel relationship and its effects on U.S. policy. That'll be here in New Jersey at Princeton University. There still are some seats left for that last I heard, which was yesterday, but they were selling very fast. So both of those things, if you want to come to them, move quickly. And for the, for the debate in Princeton, I believe it is if you're not in the area, it is going to be live streamed and it's, I, I'm pretty sure I had a meeting about this yesterday, but I'm pretty sure they said that like you'll, the live stream will also be able to participate in the Oxford style debate. So like you'll get to vote before and after. So you're like involved. And I think you can also submit questions for the question and answer segment so you can like still participate even if you're not in the New Jersey area. Looking forward to all of those events. So yeah, hope to see some of you guys out there. Okay. Now I want to for today's episode, as we speak, Bobby Kennedy is going through his Senate confirmation hearing. So we're going to talk a bit about that. And then of course Tulsi Gabbard and Cash Patel are coming up next. So I thought maybe we'd preview those a little bit. This is, it's, it's very Interesting. For people like me who are kind of, you know, unhealthily obsessed with all of this stuff, it's, it's a particularly fascinating chapter in American history. There is, I, I guess maybe the first thing I would say. I, I have some clips from what's happened this morning in Bobby Kennedy's Senate confirmation hearings, which I thought were. Would be worth, you know, playing and, and discussing a little bit. I guess the, the thing I would say up top is it just can't be overstated how different this is than anything that's happened in politics in my lifetime. It's just nothing in modern American politics has ever been quite like this. We've never seen a Senate confirmation process of somebody to run the Health Department, who has basically been. I mean, he, he ran for president and has been an activist for many years before that. And his whole thing was championing, you know, being against the corruption in the Health Department. Someone like Tulsi Gabbard, whose entire political career has been about criticizing the, the corruption of the intelligence agencies, is now up for the job of being in charge of the intelligence agencies. This, this is not. There's no other comparison. There's. There's simply just nothing like this that's happened in my lifetime. And so that right away is very interesting. And the, the reaction to that, of course, is interesting. You know, I was on. I just recorded with. With Emily from. From Breaking Points. I was just recording with her a few minutes before we started this show, and one of the questions she asked me was cut, by the way, I think she's great. I always really enjoy talking to her, but one of the questions she asked me at one point was like, you know, t, we'll get to Tulsi in a little bit. But we were talking about her a lot, and she was saying, like, you know, this is really kind of unprecedented that she's getting so much pushback on her confirmation, and she may not even make it out of the Senate Intelligence Committee's confirmation, let alone even get to the Senate. And, and I was just like saying, like, well, that's not really the surprising. The, the thing that's unique about this isn't that she's getting this pushback. The thing that's unique about this is that she's even up for confirmation at all. And I think it's important to understand that. And a lot of this, it really gets to the heart of why I ended up ultimately supporting Donald Trump, and I think why, while a lot of. Of more dissident type of people ended up supporting Donald Trump, even people like me who didn't support him in 2016, didn't support him in 2020, and were very critical of his first administration. The reason why a lot of us ended up going, you know, in some ways kind of like crap, I think I got to support this guy this time, is because it's just a unique opportunity. And the only way we get here is if Donald Trump had won this election. And I think that, look, it's the reason why this never happened before. The reason why there was never somebody appointed to be the. The HHS director whose entire career was criticizing the corruption in the. Of U.S. health, and particularly in the U.S. health Department. The reason why this never happened before is because, first of all, it would have been unthinkable for any of the previous presidents, including Trump in his first term, to actually put people like this up, and there's just zero chance they ever could have been confirmed. I mean, there is no. There is. If you were to think of, you know, like, my entire lifetime, if you were to think of George H.W. bush or Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama or, like, obviously they never would have picked people like this, but then on top of that, there's just no way they would have been confirmed. They try. Imagine Bobby Kennedy trying to say the stuff he's saying now in the year 1999 or something like that, or 2000, or it just. It never would have resonated. They would have been. The Senate would have immediately rejected them. The, The. The only reason, like, the reason why Bobby Kennedy's message is resonating so much right now is largely because of COVID and because during COVID the biggest scientific institutions, not just in America, but worldwide, just completely discredited themselves and just nobody trusts them anymore. And, and the corruption was so apparent that when somebody came out and was pointing a finger with a lot of people, you can only. You can only have the entire scientific community. I mean, think about it like a moment when most people, most regular people, don't really pay attention to the scientific community that much. They don't really pay attention to the CDC or the NIH or the Health Department or any of this, the World Health Organization, any of. But there's this moment in time where they demand that everybody pay attention to this. You know, I liked Candace Owens, did one debate on Piers Morgan show about Israel, and I loved the way she put this, but she goes. She goes, you know, a lot of us never really paid attention to Israel. And then after October 7, the demand was that we pay attention to it and then we started paying attention to it. And a lot of you people who were demanding we paid attention to work to it now sure wish we hadn't. And I think that was that real. It was really profound in its simplicity. I think that's what happened during COVID A lot of people start, it was demanded of them that they start paying attention to science in a way that they never had before. And most people, myself included, had never done deep dives on virology and you know, like never really thought about mmr, not mmr, excuse me, RNA vaccines. You know, this was kind of hoist upon us. And then in this moment where you demanded that we all pay attention to it, as we started paying attention to it, we noticed that you guys were all lying every goddamn time your mouth moved. And you know, this, you know, like really basic lies that you just can't, you can't get around them. They come out 15 days to flatten the curve was not 15 days, it was quite a bit longer than that. This all, you know, all the mass compliance, the outdoor masking and people were pushing outdoor mask. It's the most anti scientific policy ever. Makes absolutely no sense. This is the, there was and this was confirmed in a big New York Times piece and several other major peer reviewed studies. But they are, it is not, there is not one proof in case of COVID being transmitted from outdoor casual interactions. Not one. Like it's just, it doesn't happen yet. You're supposed, you were supposed to wear a mask everywhere. It was totally anti scientific. And then of course the stuff with the vaccine where they just lied through their teeth and just said, hey, there's this vaccine, it's a cure, it's 100% effective, it's safe. If you get it, you, you can't be vaccine injured, you can't get Covid and you can't transmit Covid. And then everybody, you know who got the thing got covet after it. I mean that's enough that you can't even hide it from normies who don't pay attention that much. And so then when Bobby Kennedy came along and said hey, you know how they were cooking the books on that vaccine? They were doing that on a lot of the other vaccines. This message just resonated. So the, the point is this message never could have resonated in, in any previous era. And the Senate would have just rejected somebody like this because they're, they're there to protect powerful interests. We live in a little bit of a different moment. Right now. And now it's not just that the, it's not just that this message is resonating. But now you've got a new president in there who's been burned by the system in a, you know, about as serious a way as you can be and, or about ever in every way that you can be. And now the Senate is in a little bit of an interesting position because they are still political creatures and there is always, there's always a small d. Democratic influence on government. No matter what type of system of government you have, you know, in, in some sense, we always live in a democracy. And what, what I mean by that is, I'm sure some of you have heard me explain this before, but what I mean is that let's say you're in a country with, under a dictatorship, okay? This is not a democracy. This is an authoritarian dictatorship where the dictator rules with an iron fist. And let's say that there are some protests. Let's say there's a huge protest movement. There are 500,000 angry civilians outside the dictator's palace demanding policy X. You know, it's not going to be too long until that dictator goes, I've thought about it and I'm instituting policy X. Now I don't mean that when I talk about this democratic spirit. I don't mean that you hold regular elections necessarily. It's just that the, the bottom line is that there's way more of us than there are of them. And this is the game of ruling. They're aware of that. This, by the way, is why the most powerful people in our society are constantly pushing issues that divide the American people. This is really at the heart of where there's the obsession with trans bathrooms and stuff like this. Abortion issues like this, issues that are, that are white hot culture war issues that divide the population are constantly pumped out through from every single power center, everyone. The reason is this is what they call divide and conquer, right? You, you have to divide people if you're going to rule over them because there's so many more of them than there are of you. And if they ever get united and realize that, hey, somebody's ruling over us and they're screwing us over, then they might come for you. Then really, at the end of the day, there's only, you know, there's only so many billionaires, there's only so many rulers, there's a lot more. But of the people who are ruled in this country, there's hundreds of millions of us. And so the Senate is in this position where the, the people have kind of spoken and now they have to try to find a way to protect powerful interests while not pissing off the masses, which is a much more dangerous proposition for them. And I mean, you know, we were talking about on the last show, the immigration data or the immigration polling data, which is just like, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable how far the Biden administration pushed this country to the right on immigration. And it's not just immigration, but when it comes to like probably maybe like four or five big issues. Immigration, foreign wars, woke ideology and overall government corruption. The American people have spoken, you know, like, it's just overwhelming. They're against this corruption. And to me, this is what Bobby Kennedy now finds himself in this situation of representing all of that. You know, one of the things I was talking to Emily about earlier today is that to some degree we live in kind of a post ideological world right now. No, I don't, I don't mean that entirely. And I, I certainly think that there, I'm not, I'm not saying that like ideology doesn't matter. I still am in my heart of hearts. I'm a theory guy. I mean, I, I, I believe in like libertarian philosophy. So I'm not saying none of that matters. It's just that in many ways the real divide right now is not left or, and vers right or even authoritarian versus libertarian. In many ways, the divide right now is just corruption versus honesty. It's, it's kind of as simple as that. You know, people wonder sometimes. It's like, look like, obviously for people who know, Bobby Kennedy was on the podcast twice. They were two of our biggest episodes we've ever done. And the first time, it was just like a love fest. I just loved everything he was saying and we just had a great time. The second time we really got into a pretty heated argument over Israel. And you know, I don't know, it's, it's. Things got a little bit uncomfortable there for a minute with us. Although I think our relationship is actually pretty good now. And I've, we, we've texted back and forth several like, nice things since that happened and he, he reached out to me after I debated Chris Cuomo and told me that he thought I did a, a great job on that and I really appreciated that and I've reached out to him several times including I, I shot him a text today just giving him like a give him hell, we're behind you type text. Haven't. He didn't respond, but he was pretty busy today. So I'll, I'll let that one slide. But you know, one of the things that I think e. Even though obviously me and Bobby have major foreign policy disagreements. Well, when it comes to Israel, not really when it comes, I'm, I'm right there with him when it comes to the Ukraine stuff. But it's not, first off, he's at the health department, so it's not, it was kind of nice in a way. I could just go back to loving the guy because he's not, you know, making foreign policy decisions. He's making decisions on the issue that he's great on. But I think that the real appeal of Bobby Kennedy and the reason why so many like MAGA people are getting behind him and why so many libertarians are getting behind him, it's not that, you know, because people will point out sometimes they'll say like, but he's a liberal. I mean, he's an old school Democrat. So why would conservative Republicans like him? Why would libertarians like him? Why do you guys all support a guy who doesn't even have your same ideology? And, and the thing that they're missing is that we live in a post ideological world in a lot of ways. It's not about the fact that we have the same ideology. It's not about whether, you know, he might believe that. The answer is more regulation over certain areas, whereas I believe the answer is less regulation. It's a matter of the fact that he, it's that he's not part of the corrupt swamp. That's the whole point. And the reason why so many MAGA people and so many libertarians are behind Bobby Kennedy is because you look at a guy like Bobby, this is the most impressive thing about the guy. And he's an impressive guy. Like just objectively speaking, he's an impressive guy. He's a guy in his 60s who can do more pull ups than most guys in their 20s. You know, that's. However you spit, that's objectively impressive. The guy is, has a wealth of knowledge on a wide range of issues. It's impressive. But the thing that's most impressive about Bobby Kennedy is that he's a Kennedy. He's a part of American royalty, or as close as you can get to it, certainly American political royalty. And then he's married to like a beloved famous Hollywood actress. And so the point is this guy had it made. He's got. Now listen, I'm not trying to downplay, obviously there's, he's, you know, he's had personal tragedies in his life. The guy's father and uncle were both murdered as young men, and his family's just had a lot of tragedy in it. So I'm not trying to, like, downplay that. I'm just saying that, relatively speaking, the guy had a good life guaranteed to him. I mean, he's in at every fancy cocktail party. He's beloved by the powerful. He's like, got it made in the shade. And then he chooses to take a stand, that's going to get him completely alienated in that world. Now people can, you know, and especially the people who are, like, just obsessed with theory. I get this from libertarians sometimes, but he's not a real libertarian. You know, it's like, okay, what have you ever sacrificed that's on the level of what Bobby sacrificed in order to fight for something that you believe in? You know, that is impressive. And I think that's what draws a lot of us to him. And look, whether you believe in more regulation or less regulation or whatever, who can just deny the ungodly amount of corruption that's at the center of our health industry in America? It's unbelievable. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is my Patriot Supply. Guys, the last few years have seen a lot of instability. And though a lot of people are optimistic about the new administration coming in, the truth is nobody can protect you from every foreseeable emergency. And that's why I always like to make sure that I have my family protected with a four week emergency food kit from my Patriot supply. Their four week emergency food kit gives you the nutrition you need to stay strong in a crisis. With 2000 calories per day and 100% of your daily value of 12 essential vitamins and minerals, this kit keeps you going when every meal matters. And right now, they're offering $50 off their four week food kit. So go to preparewithsmith.com to get your four week food kit today. All right, let's get back into the show. Okay, all that being said, people are freaking out about Bobby Kennedy. The former Vice president, Mike Pence has been working relentlessly on this campaign of trying to make sure he's not confirmed. It's been wild to see. Let's check in. We got a a few clips here lined up. Let's just start playing some of them so we could get a little bit of a taste for what's been going on today on the Senate floor.
