Charlie Kirk Was Right. Our Leaders Ignored Him.

Charlie Kirk suspected immediately that October 7 was an Israeli false flag. Our leaders ignored him, which is why our empire is now being destroyed by Netanyahu-led wars. Dave Smith on this generation’s 9-11. Dave Smith is a comedian, political commentator, radio and tv personality. He is the host of ‘Part of the Problem’, a libertarian podcast about current events and the evils of government and the corporate media. Paid partnerships with: Mars Men: For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, free shipping, AND 3 free gifts at Mars Men at MenGoToMars.com Preborn: Help Provide Ultrasounds Dial #250 and say “BABY” or visit https://preborn.com/TUCKER American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. Average savings based on borrowers who save over $199.99. Call 800-685-5696 or visit http://www. AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Last Country Supply: Global supply chains are unreliable. Make sure you've got what you need at https://lastcountrysupply.com/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Today is October 7th, 2026. It's the third anniversary of the most horrifying, certainly the most widely publicized attack on mainland Israel in its history. Three years ago today, of course you remember, forces of Hamas, the militant group, also the, at the time, government of Gaza, the Israeli-controlled, semi-technically-independent area south of Israel, taken by the Israeli government in 1967 and run ever since. Fighters from Hamas rolled over the border into southern Israel, into famously a music festival, into a kibbutz, several, and began killing people and taking hostages.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  1,200 people were killed, the majority of them civilians, a lot of them at that music festival. And the world was horrified by this, instantly horrified by it, because it was obviously horrifying. The majority of people killed, to repeat, were civilians. They were not IDF soldiers, they were just Israelis. And a lot of them were women and young people, and they were killed. And people across the world, even people who aren't generally on Israel's side, paused to acknowledge, all good people did, that this is awful, there's no excuse for this, and that no one can ever defend the murder of civilians at any time, at any place. And so that was the reaction, the gut reaction of most people, certainly my reaction, certainly

• 1:29Speaker 00

  everyone watching this, probably felt exactly the same way. What only a few people understood immediately were two things. One, this is pretty weird that this could happen, what was this? And two, this is the beginning of a change, not just in Israel or in Gaza, though it was both of those, but in the world, and not just the Middle East. That this event was likely to set off a chain reaction of events that would change the world that you live in, no matter where you live. And so far, over the last three years, that has proven true. That attack has given way directly to at least six separate conflicts in five different countries.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Wars in which many hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. And there's no sign that those conflicts are ending anytime soon. In fact, as we speak, they are accelerating, and they're becoming, well, we don't know what they're becoming, but they are reshaping the world. So as our descendants look back on this time, they will see, we believe, October 7th very much like they see 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, as the beginning of a pivot point in the life of the world, of nations. This is when things began to change, and we can trace that change to one day, to one violent act or series of acts. In this case, October 7th, 2023, in Israel by Hamas.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  So as noted, the two things that a lot of people, me included, didn't perceive immediately was, this is very, very strange. How could this happen? And it turns out, the more you know about Israel, the way the country is run, how it's laid out, the geography of Israel, the security situation in Israel, the more confusing this looked to you. And one of the very first people to notice this was a woman called Ephraim Fenigson, who was unknown to most non-Israelis before that day, but who had served, like most Israelis, in the IDF, and shot a video, a couple of videos, from her apartment in Israel, and basically said, "I'm not sure how this could happen, because I'm very fluent in how this country is defended, and this doesn't make any sense.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  How could these foreign fighters get across the most heavily-guarded border in the world, some of them in gliders? It doesn't make sense to me." Now, from what we understand, she has not lived in Israel since, but she was one of the very first people who the rest of us saw question the official account of October 7th. The second person most of us saw make these obvious remarks was Charlie Kirk. Five days after October 7th, he went onto a podcast and said, "This doesn't make any sense." Here's Charlie Kirk from five days after that tragedy.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  I've been to Israel many times, the whole country's a fortress. When I first heard this story, I still have the same gut instinct that I did initially. I find this very hard to believe. I've been to that Gaza border. You cannot go 10 feet without running into a 19-year-old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun that is an IDF soldier, right? The whole country is surveilled. And so let me just kind of go through this. We don't talk about Israeli politics very often, and most Americans don't know this. The last nine months, Israel was on the brink of civil war. It's not an exaggeration. This judicial stuff, there were hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets because Bibi Netanyahu was basically redefining the Israeli constitution. That's not an exaggeration, right? He said the judicial branch has too much power.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  There were protests planned this week against Netanyahu, where they anticipated tens of thousands of people to take to the streets. That's all gone, Patrick. Netanyahu now has an emergency government and a mandate to lead. I'm not, I'm not willing to say, to go so far that saying that Netanyahu knew or there was intelligence here, but I think some questions need to be asked. Was there a stand-down order? Was there a stand-down order? Six hours? I don't believe it. Israel's the size of New Jersey. When I took a helicopter ride from Jerusalem to the Gaza border, it's 45 minutes.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Six hours. They're live-streaming the killing of Jews. Did somebody in the government say, "Stand down"? That is a legitimate, non-conspiracy question.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  I'm not saying Netanyahu allowed this to happen, because he was going to lose power if it didn't happen. Well, of course, that's exactly what Charlie Kirk was saying. That's exactly what you just heard him say. Of course, he just explained the political situation in Israel on the eve of October 7th, and it was basically curtains for the ruling government, the Netanyahu government. But because of October 7th, Netanyahu remained in power, and in fact, does to this day, three years later. Charlie Kirk knew enough about internal politics in Israel to know that. Most Americans had no clue. And was, of course, close enough to many people in Israel as a longtime Christian-Zionist defender of Israel to feel that he could say that out loud without being called an

• 6:28Speaker 00

  anti-Semite. Needless to say, he was immediately denounced as an anti-Semite by a number of figures on the right, all of whom are now extolling his memory and telling you that Charlie Kirk thought things that he didn't actually think, people who are now close to the Trump administration. But at the moment that he said that, he was denounced by American shills for Israel for asking those questions. But they were then, as they are now, entirely legitimate questions. What did the Israeli government know about Hamas's plans to attack mainland Israel? And of course, we can fill in some of those blanks, and in a moment, we're going to speak to Dave Smith, who has been following this since the day it happened, and has those answers.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  But we know a lot more than Charlie Kirk did when he said that three years ago. But he knew enough about what was happening in Israel to raise those very obvious questions. But of course, they were almost entirely ignored by America's political class. But that's not all he said in that interview. Here's a clip from the second part of the interview, which is even more prescient and jarring to listen to three years later. Listen.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Bibi and the Israeli hard-right government has a mandate, I've got to be careful the way I say this, to, they're going to try to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Yup.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, and I don't use that term lightly, okay? They're talking about basically removing 2.5 million people from there, okay? And honestly, they have a mandate to go seek justice and revenge. They do. There is, this idea that they need to have a truce or a peace treaty, that's morally crap, after you see women and children be burned alive and dragged to the streets. But there are some serious questions here, Patrick, and let me tell you, my pattern recognition over the last five years has become pretty sharp. Covid, Maui fires, you know, Epstein. When I see a story and it doesn't click, our guts are usually right.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Wait a second. Did Charlie Kirk just defend

• 8:37Speaker 00

  the idea that Netanyahu knew that this was coming? Did he just compare the Israeli government to the Epstein cabal? Did he compare October 7th to the hoax of COVID? He just did. Did he just tell you five days after this that the Israeli government will use these attacks as a pretext to quote, "ethnically cleanse Gaza"? You just heard him say that. And it's interesting to hear Charlie Kirk say that, not like Norman Finkelstein, because Charlie Kirk is now remembered as a stalwart defender of Israel, someone who stood with Israel side shoulder to shoulder, no matter what.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  And in fact, many of his longtime friends today sent out tweets

• 9:26Speaker 00

  telling you that anyone who questions the Israeli government's response to October 7th in Gaza is an anti-Semite, in fact, a Nazi. The HHS secretary sent out a tweet saying that today. Comparing anybody who calls the Israeli government's response, it's ethnic cleansing in Gaza, calls that a genocide, which of course it is, it's ethnic cleansing. Compared that person to Joseph Goebbels, a Nazi, claiming that you're Qatari funded if you say that. But there's Charlie Kirk saying it five days after the attacks. Well, how did Charlie Kirk know that? Well, because it was obvious, because he knew a lot about Israel, because he knew the prime minister of Israel and cabinet ministers in Israel,

• 10:11Speaker 00

  because he'd been there a lot, because that's the world that he lived in. And so he knew exactly what was coming. Now, why don't we remember that, that Charlie Kirk thought that? Well, because the moment, not an exaggeration, the moment he was murdered in Utah last year, his memory was, well, kidnapped by some unscrupulous figures, beginning with the prime minister of Israel, and used to defend all of the things that he hated and warned against, very much including the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. So one of the first people in the world, and certainly the first head of state, to tweet condolences after Charlie Kirk was murdered was Benjamin Netanyahu.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  And then he kept tweeting about it. Charlie Kirk, stalwart friend of Israel, he stood shoulder to shoulder with us. My close friend, Charlie Kirk. Well, you just saw Charlie Kirk accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of a false flag that resulted in the deaths of 1,200 of his own citizens. Doesn't sound like a close friend talking, does it? Doesn't sound like a friend of the Israeli government, actually. In fact, if you said that now, you would be immediately classified by the Trump administration, under the IHRA definition, as an anti-Semite. You would be, as the HHS secretary said today, "tan him out to a Nazi for saying that." But the guy who said that was celebrated by the guy he accused of doing it as his closest friend. That's weird. That is weird behavior.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  The current president's first tweet about Charlie Kirk in the hours after he died, and you should pull it up if you haven't seen it, is Charlie Kirk with an Israeli flag. So the one thing you're supposed to remember about Charlie Kirk, who was a particularly well-informed and incisive and pretty unrestrained critic of Israel, actually, you just saw the tape. The one thing you're supposed to remember is that he was at all times a defender of Israel. It's the opposite, actually, of the truth.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  But everyone kind of united to tell that lie, and three years later, it's prevailed, as lies do. If you tell them enough, loudly enough, aggressively enough, and if you penalize people who refuse to repeat them, over time, history records them as true. Everyone's saying it, it must be true. Charlie Kirk, one thing we know about Charlie Kirk, he loved Israel. Well, did he really? He accused the Israeli government of allowing 1,200 of its own people to die? Hmm, doesn't sound like love. It sounds like biting criticism.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  No one remembers. And nobody, and this really is the point, took time to answer the questions that Charlie Kirk raised at the time, beginning with, how did this happen? And who benefits from it happening? But how did this happen? How was the most secure border in the world in what is a military police state? That's not a criticism, that's a fact, and if you've been there, you can confirm it. You know that's true. How did that country allow guys from one of the poorest places on earth, Gaza, to fly over in gliders and start murdering girls at a music festival?

• 13:17Speaker 00

  No one seemed to ask that question. And because they didn't ask that question, because they allowed obvious lies to go unchallenged,

• 13:26Speaker 00

  those lies were followed by more lies. And it was, as it always is, a kind of contest among our political class. Who can tell the most florid and flamboyant lie? Who can overstate the truth the most dramatically?

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Who can make a claim that's so wild that you'd think the audience would laugh, but when they don't, you just keep going? And if you do it long enough, you wind up where we wound up with people like Mike Huckabee, the Fox News contributor turned U.S. ambassador to Israel, comparing what happened on October 7th, which was awful, by the way, to the Holocaust. He actually said that. Listen to this.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Israel had people murdered in the most vicious, horrible way that we've seen, and I wanted to say since the Holocaust, but in all candor. As awful as the crimes were in the Holocaust, they weren't worse, and in some cases, they weren't as malicious, cutting off the heads of babies, putting babies in ovens.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Correction. What happened on October 7th wasn't like the Holocaust. It was literally worse than the Holocaust. It was worse than the Holocaust. It was probably the worst thing that ever happened in human history. So rather, and this is probably pretty familiar, rather than just saying, yeah, it was terrible, like, there's no excuse ever for killing innocent people, girls at music festivals, children, ever. Well, of course, no one's ever going to say that, because that would be a universal principle to which the country that just suffered this crime would have to abide. In other words, if you say it's always wrong to kill innocents, then that constrains Israel and its response. So what you say instead is, this is a unique evil. Nothing like this has ever happened anywhere. No country has ever suffered this much.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Which is, if you think about it, not really a criticism of killing innocents, it's instead permission to kill innocents, which is exactly what it turned out to be.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Now, you may ask yourself, okay, there's a longstanding dispute between the government of Israel and the Palestinians. And, you know, people have different views on this, and, you know, the facts tell a pretty clear story. There was this region of the world controlled after the First World War by Great Britain called Palestine that had been called a lot of different things over the past 2,000 years, but had pretty much, as far as we know, the same population. And a bunch of people from Eastern Europe showed up and said it was theirs and kicked a lot of them out. Now, that's just a fact. That happened, provable, of course, through the census numbers, like, what happened to all those people? What happened to all those villages? Well, now, a lot of them are public parks in Israel.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Now, whatever you think of that, whether you think it's justified by the Bible, whether you think it's an atrocity, if you're an American, you're kind of looking at it from thousands of miles away, and you're identifying yet another ancient rivalry between peoples who want the same piece of land. And this is, you know, this is a story of every region in the world, really, and always has been. So you may ask yourself, despite, you know, whether or not you take a side or which side you take, what does this have to do with me? So, you know, a bunch of Palestinians killed a bunch of Israelis, and now Israelis are killing a bunch of Palestinians, and it's all bad, but like, why do I have to take a side in this? Why is it my concern?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  And as if anticipating this question in the minds of most Americans, the Israeli government began to explain it's your concern for a couple of reasons. One, because this is far worse than anything that has ever happened to you. And so if you're a humane person, you just can't sit back and allow this to happen to us, because it's just unimaginably bad. Like, your imagination is not big enough to contain its badness. So how do they do this? So 1,200 people were killed. And we still don't know who killed them all, by the way. Some of them were clearly killed by the Israeli military, either intentionally or not, but that seems to be a fact, and Dave Smith will have more on that in a minute.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  But it doesn't matter, they died, and it's sad. But it's about 1,200. 735 of them ish were civilians. So that's a lot, and it's terrible, but that's not how the prime minister of Israel explained it to American audiences, including to the U.S. Congress. He said, "Look, 1,200 people may not seem like a lot to you, but that's 40,000 Americans. That's 16 9/11s." Well, how does that work? Well, it's proportionate. You know, we have 10 million people, you've got 340, so proportionally. But of course, what he's really saying, and subsequent events have proven what he really was saying, was one Israeli life is worth dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands

• 18:22Speaker 00

  of the lives of other people. Our lives are worth more. And we're not guessing that that's how he feels, because the subsequent three years have proven that. So there have been, by official estimates, that even the Israelis don't discount, about 80,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. But it seems very obvious that the real numbers, which can't be known with certainty, because no journalists are allowed into Gaza, no one from outside of Gaza, who's not under the control of the Israeli government, can assess the situation. But from satellite photographs, it's very obvious that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli government in Gaza. So even if you were to imagine that all of them were Hamas fighters, but of course, the overwhelming majority were not.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  They were non-combatants, they were children, they were women, they were the elderly. They were not in Hamas, they were not hiding in tunnels, building bombs, repairing their gliders for a new attack, just like normal people sitting at dinner, and they got murdered. Hundreds of thousands of them. Even if they all were Hamas fighters, you would say to yourself, 1,200 versus 190, 200,000. Is that a proportionate response? Only if you think the lives of one group are worth exponentially more than the lives of the other group. And of course, we as Americans and inheritors of Western civilization reject that on its face, because we believe to restate, and this is the basis upon which our country

• 19:51Speaker 00

  was founded, that every human being was created by God, and therefore, regardless of ability or appearance, or whatever difference that we have with each other, our lives, our souls, are of identical value, because every one of them was created by God. So in order to defend a response that disproportionate, you would have to reject that idea, which is the core tenet of Western civilization. It's the basis upon which we have our justice system, which punishes the individuals for his crime and not his family for his crime. So repeatedly in public, the Prime Minister of Israel told us that he rejects that idea, the foundation of Western civilization, and instead told us, and then proved that he

• 20:34Speaker 00

  meant it, the life of one Israeli soldier is worth many non-Israeli lives. Well, that is a much criticized principle that was in operation on the Eastern Front during Operation Barbarossa. And when the German army was attacked by partisans moving through Ukraine or Poland, and then mainland Russia, it famously killed 10, 50 partisans for every German soldier killed. And for the last 80 years, we've been looking at that standard, and we have said to ourselves out loud, that is immoral, because the life of every person has identical values.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Therefore, when one of your guys gets killed, you can't in good conscience kill 50 of their guys, because by definition, that's wrong. And yet, it's happening again. And because no one in the United States, in its political class, has been willing to say out loud, this is immoral, and instead have moved for the last three years to fund that ethnic cleansing, that genocide, the people promoting that genocide have been able to both tell obvious lies without any pushback at all about the events of October 7th and the subsequent events that have been justified by October 7th, and two, they

• 21:58Speaker 00

  have been able to infect the American political class with their thinking. And this really is the virus that causes the terminal condition among nations, is the way you think. The idea that it is okay to murder innocents, well, it's of course not okay. Morally, it is always wrong, always and everywhere, but it is also a guarantee of your own destruction, because what you do to others will be done to you. This is not simply a religious precept, it's of course a Christian idea, it's an Eastern idea, often called karma. It's very close to a physics principle, it is just always true.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  You will be treated as you treat others. And so, if you murder innocents, you can look forward to a very tough future, in which people you care about are murdered despite the fact they are innocent. And so, wise nations don't behave this way. They also calculate threats on a realistic basis, they don't become hysterical, they don't go insane. They understand that, yes, it's a dangerous world, but not everyone wants to kill you. And your entire gross domestic product is not to be taken up with preparing for some war or other. And if it is, you will guarantee having that war or other. These are obvious things that wise people understand, that of course, you need to be prepared, and of course, it's true to some extent that, you know, strength is a good

• 23:24Speaker 00

  defense, you wanted to deter opportunistic attacks on your nation, obviously, you want to leave the back door open with valuables on the counter, of course. But if you become obsessed with war and killing, and imaginary foes seeking your downfall, you will create more foes seeking your downfall, and you will have the wars that you worry about, of course. And this is the way that Israeli politicians live. These are the lies they've told their own population, we're a permanent war with every country in the region, with every nation in the world, they all hate us, but that's their problem, because they're infected with this ancient virus of antisemitism, they're

• 24:05Speaker 00

  totally irrational, nothing we do is wrong, everything they say is a lie. That kind of thinking gets you nowhere other than destroyed. And underneath all of it is the main thing that any sensible country should avoid, which is the total proliferation of lies. You have to have a system in place in which telling the truth is at least conceptually, conceivably, theoretically rewarded. You have to say, you told the truth, that's a good thing, because we're basing our whole system on things that we at least pretend are true. You can't allow everything to become a lie, both because you get led so far off course, you have no idea where you are, you're marching without a map if everything is a lie, there's

• 24:50Speaker 00

  no North Star at all, but also because you devalue your own authority to the point where no one listens to you, you're a joke, you're a buffoon who happens to have control of the guns. But, you know, the second you don't have control of the guns, you're in trouble. It's not an enduring way to run a country, because there's no trust whatsoever. But because our political class allowed Israel's political class, not simply to mourn the tragedy of October 7th, which would be just and correct, they should, and we should join them in mourning it, because it was awful, but allowed them to take that tragedy and use it as a pretext to murder other people's kids, and tell endless lies about it.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  It corrupted both of us, that's the truth. And one of the first lies they told was, this was an attack on America. Well, no, actually, it wasn't. It was an attack on Southern Israel by people who are mad at your country for a very specific list of things that they claim you did, maybe you didn't do them, but this is your dispute, not ours. So how'd they rope us into it? Well, by telling us that a lot of the victims of those attacks were Americans. Well, actually, no, they weren't, they were dual citizens. In fact, we checked today, and we could not find a single American citizen killed on October 7th who didn't have Israeli citizenship. Doesn't mean they deserved to die, they didn't deserve to die, and we mourn their deaths.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  But that's not the same as rolling into a music festival in Miami, it's totally different. The hostages, we were endlessly told, a lot of them were Americans. What we weren't constantly told was, oh, yeah, some of them had American citizenship, but they were Israelis, serving any foreign military, doesn't mean they deserved to be kidnapped, and we hope they're okay, as we hope every person in this conflict is okay. But don't tell me this implicates my people or my country. Why are we allowing American citizens to serve in a foreign military in the first place? That's very unwise, it's offensive, actually. The idea that an American citizen with a blue passport could be serving for someone else's military?

• 26:58Speaker 00

  It's not even worth explaining why that's absurd. It's obviously insulting to the United States. But in practical terms, it becomes very complex, and can be used to lure us into conflicts that don't benefit us, fit us at all, because you can wind up with politicians telling you that we have to get involved, because they've attacked Americans, without mentioning that those Americans weren't actually American, they're Israelis, serving in someone else's military. Watch our president celebrate the release of an American from Hamas custody.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Very happy to announce that Eden Alexander, an American citizen who, until recently, most thought was no longer living, thought was dead, is going to be released in about two hours, actually.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  So that's great. I mean, look, everybody in captivity, including the tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who are in Israeli captivity tonight, facing no charges at all, but just endlessly held in prison cells, we wish all of them freedom. Free the captives. All good people feel that way, people who are held without charges, who are held for no good reason, who have been found guilty of no crime by a legitimate court and being held, that would include this guy Alexander, grateful when all of them are released, including him. But the guy was not an American, he wasn't even technically an American. Today, Max Blumenthal at The Gray Zone, proved in a piece that this guy, Alexander, who

• 28:39Speaker 00

  was born in Israel, lived in New Jersey at some point, was back in Israel fighting with the foreign military, when he, the IDF, when he was kidnapped, has, subsequent to his kidnapping, after he was kidnapped, applied for American citizenship, back in the United States, and then announced publicly, I'm moving back to Israel to fight with the IDF again. So of course, you wish him well, as you wish every person well, but if you are an actual American, you have to ask yourself, are we being used here? Maybe a little bit? Here's a guy who's not an American citizen, everyone's lying, including the President of the United States, and telling us he is an American citizen, and they're using that lie to get us involved in somebody else's conflict, and by involved, we mean paying

• 29:22Speaker 00

  for it and putting our soldiers' lives at risk, and now a bunch of them have been killed defending Israel. And like, why wouldn't you resent that? Because it's a lie. But when you don't stop people from telling lies, when you don't stop your leaders cold and say, wait a second, what you're saying is untrue, don't lie to me, I have self-respect, you can't do that to me, when you don't do that, it just gets worse, it gets crazier, and people get crazier.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  And all of a sudden, you have American politicians starting to imagine that Israel's wars are our wars. Israel's enemies are our enemies. Israel's on the brink of destruction at all times for the past 80 years. Okay, okay. But they start to imagine that we are too. We face all these threats. So if you watch Netanyahu long enough, you start to feel sorry for him. I mean, obviously, the guy's a liar. He's committed genocide. Very few things to recommend it, but there is one thing on which you can feel some sympathy for him. He is really wound up. This is a guy who feels that the world wants to kill him at all times. And maybe he's right. That's not healthy. You can't make good decisions when

• 30:31Speaker 00

  you see the rest of the world is your enemy, when every other person is a potential murderer of you. You don't want leaders like that at all. You want calm, wise leaders, longitudinal thinkers. But all of a sudden, you're seeing American politicians acting like they're Israeli politicians who are on the brink of getting killed by all of our enemies. And they seem to really believe it. Here's Rick Scott of Florida. Watch this.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  Prior presidents had basically appeased our ground. They've been killing us for 47 years. They were close to a nuclear weapon. So when somebody wants to have a nuclear weapon to kill you, it's probably not a choice. You probably better do something to stop yourself from being killed. I don't want a nuclear weapon. I mean, I don't want my kids or grandkids killed by a nuclear weapon. I don't like high gas prices, but I don't want to be killed by a nuclear weapon.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  So that's kind of your choice. You get high gas prices or you get killed by a nuclear weapon. They've been killing us for 47 years. Who are they exactly? The Iranians have been killing us for 47 years? When and where? What are you even talking about, you lunatic? But as you watch that, especially those of us who know Rick Scott, don't think he's a genius, but don't think he's evil or anything, you start to suspect that maybe he really thinks that. Maybe he's been listening to too many briefings. Maybe all of his donors have convinced him that he's actually living in a world where you get nuked at any minute, including by countries that don't have nuclear weapons or the means to deliver them. Iran doesn't have either one and never has. But maybe if you sit and listen to people lie at you for long enough and never call them out on their lies, you start to absorb and internalize those lies

• 31:58Speaker 00

  and you believe them and they infect you. And it seems to be what's happening. October 7th, in addition to causing the deaths of 1,200 people, 700 at least of them innocent people who did not deserve to die, in addition to that, which is just inherently a tragedy, has turned entire populations crazy, crazy, which is a bigger tragedy. It has brought out latent extremism. Extremism. Extremism is one of those words that's so overused. The IDL is issuing a report every week. The Department of Justice, same thing on extremism, extremism. Extremism is almost always defined as any view that gets in my way. Oh, you're an extremist.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  But there's also a technical definition of extremism. Right? We can measure it because we have public opinion polling. An extremist view is a view that is shared by only a tiny percentage of the population. That's by definition, an extremist view. A majority would view would be, hey, stop killing kids. An extremist view is, hey, let's go kill some kids. And that view has become not just more prevalent in Israel, it has become the dominant view. And that has happened. You know, whatever you say about Israel, that was not the dominant view in Israel even three years ago. There were plenty of people in Israel who had humane views, even about the Palestinians, maybe not enough of them. But there were some and they had a voice.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  But since that day, you have seen people who have genocidal views, who openly admire and call for mass murder, seem to be speaking without competition at all. And here's one of them. The man you're about to watch, I think, was the deputy speaker, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. He certainly served there. He's in Netanyahu's coalition. He's a well-known guy in Israel. And he was asked recently, I think this is just two days old, was asked recently on Israeli television in English, should we really kill everybody in Gaza, like including the kids? Listen carefully to his response.

• 34:04Speaker 05

  Is it a Jewish, you know, point of view to like wipe out all of Gaza, though, and get everyone out of there and annex and annex the West Bank? Like, do you believe that?

• 34:14Speaker 06

  Hundred percent.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  And you think that everything should be annexed completely?

• 34:19Speaker 06

  In Gaza, they shouldn't. Look.

• 34:23Speaker 05

  What about international response to this?

• 34:25Speaker 06

  Before we talk about international response, okay? You have to realize, Keshet, the baby that will be born, I'll say something very tough now, okay? Excuse me for saying that. The baby that will be born tomorrow in Gaza, the Arab baby, notice that I'm not saying Hamas. I'm not saying Palestinian. There's a so-called national entity that we created in Gaza, okay? The enemy is Gaza, not Hamas, okay?

• 35:05Speaker 06

  The baby that will be born in Gaza tomorrow will do exactly the same. God forbid, to your birth baby, they'll be born tomorrow in Jerusalem. There's no other way. That's the reason they live for. Okay? That's what they learned with their mother's milk.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Did he just say that we should kill all the babies? Because they are born hating Israelis? It's in their blood? Therefore, the babies are guilty? Did he actually just say that? Yes, he did just say that. Now imagine saying that about any other group. If you said that about Jews, we need to kill all the Jews because they're born hating this or the, all the Arabs, you would be, you would be rightly attacked for being a Nazi lunatic. But when someone says that about the Palestinians, that person should also be rightly attacked as a Nazi lunatic. And by the way, this is a guy who's praised Hitler, weirdly enough. And look it up if you don't believe it, a lot. But he just said that.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Now, this is a guy who's running for office right now, who's in Netanyahu's coalition. So where was the response from Netanyahu? You would think, imagine an American politician saying of any group, we should kill them all, including the babies. You have to kill the babies. Have to. I mean, I may not want to, but you got to. Well, that person, you would hope, would have no place in American politics. Except increasingly, you are hearing people who used to be on the fringes of American politics and now are getting rides in Air Force One, saying that about the Arabs. In other words, they've imported this worldview from Israel into American politics. And all of a sudden, you have people defending and laughing about genocide in the United States. That's not good for us.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  When you have a sitting member of Congress from Florida, Randy Fine, laughing at a picture of a dead child in Gaza, it's not simply Randy Fine who suffers. I mean, he'll have to answer for that at some point. He doubtless doesn't believe in that God, but that God exists and that's his problem. But the rest of us are diminished by it. That's our leader. This stuff happens incrementally and you wake up one morning and all of a sudden, there's the guy. There's the Netanyahu ally sitting in an interview saying, no, we need to kill all the babies. And even the interviews host seemed a little bit confused with it. Really? She asked, what are you suggesting? Like nuking them? And here's what he said. Watch.

• 37:45Speaker 06

  You know, if we would have done what I said needs to be done, if we would have done Gaza, what the British people did in Hamburg and what the Americans did in Nagasaki, okay?

• 37:57Speaker 05

  To blow it up, you're saying?

• 37:58Speaker 06

  To finish that, okay? This movie, Naza, that just came out?

• 38:02Speaker 05

  Right.

• 38:03Speaker 06

  Would never came. The world would have been with us just as they were with us after we won the Six-Day War.

• 38:09Speaker 05

  But you don't think about, you know, blow, just blowing it up, let's say, as you're mentioning, like the the children that are there, the babies?

• 38:18Speaker 06

  I'm saying again, because I'm Jewish and I guess I'm a little bit weak morally, I don't want to see babies killed, okay? Morally, that's what should have been done, okay? Because of everything I explained so far. But because I'm Jewish with soft heart, I would open the borders and let them all go, but no one can stay.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  So morally, we should kill all the babies morally. Well, that's the point at which the interviewer says, hold on. What moral scale are you using? What religion do you believe in? Where are you getting that? According to whose moral code is killing all the babies a good idea? You're not buying into the Amalek thing, are you? But of course, he is. And so is the prime minister of the country, who days after October 7th compared the Palestinians, not just Gaza, in Gaza, but all Palestinians, Arabs, not just Hamas leadership and their tunnels with their bombs, but the kids too, to Amalek. And of course, that's a direct reference to the Amalek of the Torah, the Old Testament,

• 39:29Speaker 00

  opponents of Israel who were murdered down to the last baby and the livestock per command of God. So the prime minister of the country called for total genocide days after October 7th and the political class in the United States ignored it like, oh, that didn't happen. He didn't say that. So he said it again and again and again. And then he told us 1,200 of our people were 40,000 of yours. And we ignored that too. And continued to send him bombs to commit the genocide that he promised he would commit. So once again, that's not simply an attack on the prime minister of Israel or his political allies, like the one you just saw, calling for killing every baby

• 40:10Speaker 00

  and scolding himself as morally weak for not being on board with killing every baby. What about our politicians who are signing on to this in our name? This is polluting and destroying the soul of our country. And that's the real cost. It's to us as we stand by and fund this and applaud it and attack increasingly anyone who disapproves of it.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  We are being destroyed and our own justification for ruling the world becomes totally untenable. If you're the country whose leadership applauds genocide, on what grounds do you have the right to rule? Well, none, actually. At that point, it's just who's got the more powerful military? And I would remind you that ours is totally incapable of getting anywhere near the Iranian coast or near the Houthis in Yemen. So for all the self-congratulation about the most powerful military in the world, ours has limits and they're on display now. So without the moral justification, without the aircraft carriers to enforce our will, what do we have? The US dollar? You can see how empires and the nations that sustain them collapse pretty quickly when they've got nothing propping them up.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  And increasingly, we don't because of this, because we are signing on to a project that is totally indefensible, that God does not approve of, that history will condemn, and that the rest of the world looks on at in disgust, rightly so. So what do you do about this if you're the American ruling class? You've signed on to something that everybody hates and no decent person could ever defend. Killing children? No one could ever defend that. They didn't do anything wrong. You can't kill them. And yet, our political class is on board, both parties. So what do you do about the fact that like, I don't know, 75% of your population finds it repugnant? Do you change?

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Do you admit that actually, no, killing kids is bad? No. You punish people for disagreeing. You invert the moral scale. You get caught doing something horrible and you attack the person who caught you as the real criminal. It's, if you've ever lived with a narcissist, you're very familiar with this. It's always your fault. You catch them doing something appalling, no matter how appalling. In fact, the more appalling, the more it's your fault. So you, you call out someone calling for the murder of babies and all of a sudden you become the criminal, the thought criminal. You're a hater!

• 42:43Speaker 00

  And if you marry that narcissistic impulse to the largest and best-funded government in the history of mankind, which would be the US government, you've got a pretty powerful force. So watch the Trump administration's new antisemitism czar explain that they have weaponized the Department of State and our entire immigration system to punish people for criticizing the Israeli genocide in Gaza. They just say it out loud. Watch this.

• 43:12Speaker 07

  As antisemitism surges globally, the president took unprecedented measures. On day one of the administration, he signed an executive order and protected the students on college campuses, that antisemitism is something that cabinet officials can deal with. We've implemented a rigorous visa vetting process. Over 250,000 visas have been revoked.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  250,000? A quarter million American visas have been revoked for what? Antisemitism. Well, now is the point in the conversation when someone should feel the moral obligation to defend the term antisemitism. Because if we're going to punish people for a crime, it's incumbent on us to explain what the crime is so that other people have a chance not to commit it. But unfortunately, no one has fully explained what antisemitism is. So we just move on apace punishing people for this thing that no one will describe in any great detail. The only real systematic attempt to describe and define what antisemitism is comes from

• 44:23Speaker 00

  the IHRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, we think. And it's been adopted by the majority of states and 100 nations around the world, and we think the US Congress, if memory serves. And according to that definition, the majority of examples of antisemitism are in fact criticism of the state of Israel, the government of Israel. The secular government of Israel, which by the way, has Arab parties in the Knesset, so it's not even entirely Jewish. Technically, criticizing the behavior of that government now qualifies as antisemitism. Well, a lot of us saw this happen and thought, it's just like another commemoration of putting a ribbon on a post office. It's ceremonial, it doesn't mean anything.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  But all of a sudden, here you have this czar in this post that most people don't know exists, that you're paying for, Yahuda something or other, saying that we are actively penalizing people, a quarter million of them, for this crime that we won't define, but whose only real definition that we can find appears to mean criticism of a foreign government. What the hell is going on? What do you do with that? Well, if you're like most people, you ignore it. And if you think about it for a minute, you think, well, that seems a little crazy. But you console yourself with the thought that, well, it's not Americans this is happening to, these are visa holders, we've got too many people here anyway, and that's of course true. So it's like people are trying to come to our country or working here, maybe they're

• 45:53Speaker 00

  H1B people, we're taking my kids' jobs anyway, so like, that's fine. They probably are all radicals anyway, they're probably all Hamas sympathizers, like, who cares? Maybe you ask yourself, you know, it kind of, kind of nice, maybe, if, as long as we're going after bias and hatred, that someone said something about anti-white hatred, which is the operational hatred of our entire ruling class, and we know that. Because how many books are there on Amazon about whiteness and we got to exterminate it? How many pro-white genocide books are there on Amazon? Like, a lot? How many are assigned in America's top colleges? A lot? How many of our leaders have lectured you, including presidents, about white people are the problem? A lot? So if you're going to identify an ethnic hatred in America, we probably should at

• 46:36Speaker 00

  least acknowledge, if not try to do something about it, or at least rebut. It might be anti-white hatred, which is like everywhere. If you're trying to figure out like, what kind of bias actually harms people in measurable ways, prevents them from, I don't know, getting jobs or federal contracts or getting into college, it might not be antisemitism. I haven't seen the study that shows that it is. It would probably be anti-white or anti-Christian bias, obviously. Who would deny that? So if you're going to have an anti-hate czar, maybe you could address that too? No, it's too much, too much to ask. You just live here, you're just part of the tax farm, fine. Okay, but at least they're only doing this to foreigners. So like, they don't really have the same rights we do.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Okay, got it, got it, got it. Forget about it, move on to everything else. But what if they were to employ that same principle against American citizens? What if, just throwing this out here, the Trump administration were to institute an identity politics witch hunt against American citizens on behalf not of a press group, like a poor group whose ancestors were once enslaved, like, against identity politics, but as long as you're going to do it, maybe it should be against, on behalf of the weak, you know, the weakest, I guess. It's always wrong, but at least you can kind of justify it. But what if the Trump administration, the administration you voted for so you wouldn't

• 48:03Speaker 00

  have to live under the Kamala Harris administration, which is clearly going to go bonkers with identity politics, lecture you about slavery and civil rights movement and Edmund Pettus Bridge and bloody Sunday and like, ah, stop. You voted against her because you're sick of that crap, just treat me like an American, okay? Stop with the race stuff. So what if you voted for the alternative to Kamala Harris, but instead of getting a respite, relief from identity politics, they doubled down and weaponized it, but the identity politics jihad was waged on behalf of not the poorest people in the country, but some of the richest? Like, what if they told you that like, the real victim here was Leon Black? Huh.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  That would be pretty hard to take, wouldn't it? What if in a country where the idea of colorblind, equally administered justice was fast disappearing, the Attorney General of the United States actually took the time to shoot a video, let's just say today, telling you that the real problem in America is your hatred, Americans, it's your hatred of Jewish people? To which you probably say, I don't, I don't hate Jewish people, but I think what the Israeli government's doing to the poor Arabs, what the strong are doing to the weak is disgusting. You're an antisemite, it's hate! What if they actually did that? Then you might wonder like, what is the upside of voting for Trump over Kamala? A lot of people voted for Trump precisely so they wouldn't have to watch, to endure,

• 49:33Speaker 00

  to be subject to yet another identity politics jihad because we're sick of it. But what if we got one anyway? What if Attorney General Todd shot this video today? Watch this.

• 49:47Speaker 08

  Our nation is at a pivotal moment. In recent years, we have seen a disturbing rise in antisemitic rhetoric and acts of hatred against fellow citizens. Let me say this, hate has no place in America, and this Department of Justice remains committed to confronting it wherever it appears.

• 50:07Speaker 09

  This tour is proof of our continued efforts. We are bringing together government agencies, faith leaders, and community members across our nation to root out hatred. We are meeting with those targeted by hate in their homes, places of worship, and schools, and we remain proactive in defending our citizens' liberties wherever they come under threat.

• 50:26Speaker 08

  The Department of Justice is doing more than just speaking about important goals. We're taking concrete action and partnering with local leaders to deliver real results for the American people in the fight against hate. And we will use every tool at our disposal to confront hatred, prejudice, and discrimination wherever and however they arise.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  A war on hatred? A war on an attitude? A war on other people's opinions? That's what you're getting from the Department of Justice? How about a war on the people who are putting fentanyl into our society? How about a war on behalf of the 100,000 people or 70,000 last year died of drug OD's? Why don't you fight a real war against the people who are killing our citizens? But instead, you're lecturing us about our bad attitudes about a foreign country? And you're gonna go, community to community on some kind of tour that we're paying for to tell us that we're the problem? Our bad attitudes are the problem? It's hard even to talk about this without using obscenity. You, you, you, you wanna use obscenity in response.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  No government official has a right to tell you what attitude you can have. Ever, in a free country. You can have any attitude you want and come to any conclusion that you want. What you can't do is commit violence against other people, and you shouldn't. And you should oppose the use of violence against innocents, always. Including the use of violence by Israel against the Palestinians. Including the use of violence by the United States government, by the Trump administration, against fishermen off the coast of Venezuela. Against girls going to school outside Tehran. That is wrong. It's wrong when it happens here. It's wrong when it happens there. It will always be wrong. And no lecture from the people who are doing it and making excuses for it will ever change its wrongness, or take away my right to acknowledge that it's wrong. How did we get here? And that's really the point of this.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  We got here because of October 7th. Because a terrible thing happened, and the rest of us refused to learn the obvious lesson. Which is, terrible things happen in every age. The perpetrators are from every religion and every color, over time, from every culture. Because people are capable of horrible things. And that's why we have absolute standards about human behavior, that apply to every person, regardless of whether he is Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist. Regardless of whether he was black, white, or Asian. Those standards remain in place, always, they are immutable. People didn't think them up, God laid them down. And we have one job, which is to obey them, and to judge others by those standards. Regardless of how much money they have, or how much money they've given to Donald Trump,

• 52:58Speaker 00

  or whether they're friends with Attorney General Todd, or not. And on the basis of those standards, what happened to Israel on October 7th is wrong. It's immoral. It's disgusting. And what Israel did in response to what happened to Israel on October 7th is also wrong, disgusting, and indefensible. And that will always be true. And calling it hate does not change the fundamental truth of that. But failing to acknowledge those absolute standards will destroy this country. And we hope that we get back to universal standards. Soon. So having normal testosterone is fine, but optimal testosterone? What does that even mean? Well, it means a better life. Leaner muscles, stronger bones, happier wife.

• 53:42Speaker 00

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• 54:26Speaker 00

  That's mengotomars.com/tucker. 50% off, three free gifts at checkout. And after you purchase, feel free to say you heard about Mars Men from us. So our friends at Preborn, who are actual friends, by the way, just asked us to thank the listeners of this show for supporting the pro-life cause. A lot of people do, all of a sudden, trust me. Because what's happening is crazy, and the people are waking up to that. The president of the group is our friend, Dan Steiner, and he wants Americans to know how much of a difference they have made. This year's donations have helped save 50,000 babies from abortion. That's enough to fill a professional baseball stadium. 50,000 lives saved, as well as generations that will follow them. Preborn wastes zero money.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  We're not big on charities, because a lot of them waste money. Preborn is not. It uses every tax-deductible gift to rescue babies and share the hope of Jesus with their moms. In 2026 alone, over 8,000 women made the decision to follow Christ. The generous support of Preborn's donors made that all possible. $28 to provide one life-saving ultrasound. Just giving expectant mothers the knowledge that they have a baby that they're carrying. $15,000 could place an ultrasound machine in a pregnancy clinic where it can save countless lives. Dan Steiner's message is really simple. Thank you for helping. Your generosity is literally saving lives. To help Preborn save more, dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby. That's pound 250 baby.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  Or visit preborn.com/tucker. Preborn.com/tucker. And so with that, Dave Smith, who's a good friend of ours personally, and also someone we respect enormously for the way that he thinks and for the rigor of his scholarship on current events, joins us now to assess what exactly has happened to us and to the world since October 7th. Dave Smith, thank you for coming on.

• 56:18Speaker 10

  Oh, Tucker, thank you so much for having me, and that was incredible. I mean, I just, that was just so spot-on, and, and so many good points that I wish we had 10 hours to respond to all of it. But let me just say, you know, first of all, before we even get into this, I will tell you, you know, when this war first started, and you, you know, at this point famously broke with President Trump, and then it came out that the MAGA Republicans supported this war 100%, because that's how we always measure polls. We always looked at Hope and Change Democrats, or, you know, whatever. Because, you know, we always looked at this. So, and, and I remember Ben Shapiro said, "The lesson from all of this is that Tucker Carlson doesn't matter."

• 57:03Speaker 10

  It meant nothing that you broke from the president. And I remember, now, as you know about me, Tucker, I, I follow Ben Shapiro in everything in life. He's always right about everything. I always take your vaccine, dopes, it's an experimental jab, you're an idiot if you don't want to. He always gets it right. And I remember, right then and there, I said, "Well, I guess I'll never go on Tucker's show again." I mean, the guy doesn't matter. Why would I go on his show? Now, now, there was, there was contrary evidence. At the time, I looked at the podcast rankings, and, and they told me your show was number one. But, as I know, Ben Shapiro's right about everything, so clearly you didn't matter, and I decided I wouldn't go back on your show. But then, you see, the other day, I saw Ben Shapiro tell me that you are the reason the Republicans are gonna lose the Senate. That you've, you've cost the Republicans the Senate.

• 57:47Speaker 10

  And I thought to myself, "Well, that guy must be pretty important, if he's costing the Republicans the Senate." And so I turned it around. I, I told my people, I said, "Tell them, tell them I changed my mind, I will do the show." So that is what brought me here today. Now, I had thought-

• 58:01Speaker 00

  I'm grateful.

• 58:03Speaker 10

  My baseline assumption was that it was the Trump administration launching the most unpopular war in American history on behalf of a foreign nation, and then losing it. I thought that's what was gonna cost them, the midterm elections. But again, it turns out, no, that's not it. It's, it's you for pointing this out. For pointing out that we're doing this. It is, look, but as I, as I listen to this whole thing, you know, October 7th, as you, as you said, it radically transformed American politics.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 58:34Speaker 10

  American politics. I mean, look at where we are right now. Look at the divides between, say, all of us, all, I mean, putting you and, and, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massey, and Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens, and Alex Jones, and all, you know, just all the people who were supporting Trump, who are no longer. Now, on the left in America, of course, we have the exact same dynamic here, where there's this huge split between the establishment and the grassroots. It's all over this issue. It's all over the genocide that followed, and then the war against Iran that followed, that are all, obviously, very, very related. And I gotta say, well, obviously, first and foremost, on a day like this, you think about the horrible nature of the day, the people who have died. You know, I was reading, again, like you talked about, the stories that they've made

• 59:17Speaker 10

  up and, and stuff like that about the beheaded babies. They never needed to. You could just read through the real stories. I was getting emotional reading through a few of them today. One about a 22-year-old girl calling her parents as she's bleeding out, like the most horrific thing you could imagine.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 59:32Speaker 10

  Just absolute terror. Okay, that's horrible. But when you're talking about an event that radically transformed American politics-

• 59:41Speaker 10

  It is just so crazy that it's a terrorist attack that didn't happen here.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 59:46Speaker 10

  I mean, I'm sorry. I, look, we all kind of accept at this point that our country kind of lost our minds after nine 11. I mean, it's the overwhelming consensus that we did things that we shouldn't have done, like the Patriot Act and torture and, and, you know, Abu Ghraib and Iraq and just so many things. Um, okay, but you accept that that's a price that comes along with, you know, people are going to get emotional and crazy about a terrorist attack that happens on our soil. I cannot imagine anyone losing their mind this way about a terrorist attack in Europe. Well, you know, we've seen several ISIS attacks in, in Europe, maybe not on this scale, but no, never even came close. Like it's just so already that was so exposing. It's so bizarre. And I gotta tell you, today, as I'm, I'm watching kind of the reaction, it's first off, this is a terrorist attack that

• 1:00:31Speaker 10

  didn't happen here and it's the three year anniversary. Like we've had some time and as you said, a orders of magnitude more horrific event has happened in response to this. And the way, you know, so I see Mam Donnie, uh, I don't know if you saw this, but this went, this went viral on Twitter this morning. So Mam Donnie, the mayor of, of New York, he posted a thing where he said, he basically had like three sentences talking about how horrible October 7th was. Um, he called it a war crime. He said October 7th was a horrible war crime. There are horrible innocent people were killed. New Yorkers feel for these people and blah, blah, blah, something about how horrible that was. And it was awful. Then he had a long paragraph about how terrible the Israeli response to it was, and something

• 1:01:14Speaker 10

  about how a lot of New Yorkers are outraged about that. And, and at all, and man, the way Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin and, you know, all the usual suspects, Nikki Haley and all these people are shaming him for not having more of a super emotional reaction for, for about this terrorist attack there. The, the fact that, first of all, they're mad Tucker that he called it a war crime because that implies that a war was already going on, which is obviously correct, objectively true. At least Tucker, they're making me stand up for a socialist. Do you understand how angry this makes me? Do you know what this does to me?

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  Oh, I know the feeling.

• 1:01:49Speaker 10

  Tucker knows me personally. I'm sorry. I forgive me for this because I know this is a little bit off topic, but I can't. I, it's my, by my free market street credit, if I'm going to defend a socialist, I just have to. I hate the fact that democratic socialism is where the, the energy on the left that has opposed this genocide has gone. What a disaster. I mean, for, for me to have to sit here, Tucker, after the, the biggest, over the last 25 years, objectively, the biggest experiment in big government and money printing in human history. That's what we've lived through. I, I mean, if you, I read, you used to cover this back on your show all the time, but all those like quantitative, you know, like when you would measure M3 and see how it shoots up, you know, after COVID,

• 1:02:34Speaker 10

  you can't even measure that stuff on the chart anymore because the COVID money printing dwarfed all of that. We've just printed money and printed money and printed money and had government spending more than ever, uh, in, in human history. And now when that turns out to be a disaster, they come in and go, we need government doing more stuff. That's the big problem here. All this free market capitalism. Oh, it just drives me crazy. Leftists, put this together. Big business owns our government. And what do we have? A deregulated economy and low government spending and no taxes? No, we have a progressive income tax, huge regulations, but more government spending than ever before. Okay. Anyway, sorry. This is so off topic, but

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  You're right.

• 1:03:13Speaker 10

  I got it. But now I gotta defend, uh, the democratic socialist on this. There was a blockade on Gaza since at least, since 2007 directly. That's a war, that's an act of war. There was a war going on. There was a military occupation going back to 1967. Israel had been dominating these people, keeping them captive and stateless the whole time. It, a war crime is a legitimate way to describe this. And, and then the reason why he talked more about the response is because the response has been orders of magnitude worse. Exactly like you said, for the same reason that we're horrified by what happened on October 7th, were orders of magnitude more horrified by what the response is because it was just that on, on a much higher level. And I, I'll say finally, I'll, and I'll wrap

• 1:03:58Speaker 10

  uh, this way too long rant up on this, but there is a bias, I think. Now, one of my favorite things that you've done in this period of time, particularly in your recent um, um, interview, uh, with the, uh, British former minister over there, but you've been doing this for years, is really talking about kind of these basic questions about the morality of war and even, you know, reexamining the holy war of World War II and then reexa, you know? And the, the idea of like, how is it that we are so, I mean, look, even if you're gonna like argue with us and say, there is some scenario where it's okay to kill innocent people. Man, shouldn't the bar for that be awfully high? And it sure doesn't seem at all like it is. Um, but in, in this environment, where kind of like

• 1:04:42Speaker 10

  some of these questions are at least being asked again, I do think,

• 1:04:50Speaker 10

  well, I, I guess I'd say this, there's a, there's a big opportunity to, to really move the needle i- in terms of like how people view a lot of these things. And I think that's been done enormously. So I, anyway, I just think it's very important that we're, we're having these discussions and kind of pinning down on this. The, the bottom line here is that there is, Charlie Kirk, at least was right, and we can get into more about that stuff. Charlie Kirk was at least right in the fact that they did ethnically cleanse the Palestinians out of there.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:05:21Speaker 10

  They destroyed the whole place and, um, there's, and, and they're saying openly that they're not going to be able to come back. Those people are out of where they were. They have been cleansed, right?

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  No, it's literally, and he saw it. What's interesting, um, to me, I've been brooding about it recently, is not that the Nazis were bad, obviously, but why were they bad? And I feel like we've talked about the Nazis for 80 years being bad without explaining why. So the conventional view is they're bad because they hated the Jews. No, they were bad because they hurt people, including a lot of Jews, who did nothing wrong. So there's a universal principle to be learned from the behavior of the Nazis, and it's because they violated that principle that they are bad. But because no one has ever been taught that, and I think they haven't been taught that for a reason, which is to allow latitude for other people to behave just like the Nazis without being called out for it. But I don't think people have a framework for understanding what was bad

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  about the Nazis. So every time you bring this up, like you defending the Nazis, it's like, oh no, I'm very opposed to that behavior. When the Nazis did it, very opposed, and when the Bolsheviks did it, and when any other, when our government has done it at Nagasaki, like, I'm always against it and they can't deal with that. I don't know why. It's almost like, it's almost kind of weirdly getting, letting Hitler off the hook, kind of.

• 1:06:38Speaker 10

  Oh, absolutely. And, and look, I, I mean, I think I would even go maybe a little bit further with the example of say Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or, or people like that. You know, one of the reasons why we particularly think of them as, as evil figures is not just the people that they killed, but that they did it to their own people.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Well, that's

• 1:06:59Speaker 10

  Yeah, there really is something about that, that, you know, it's, it's, and, and don't get me wrong, because they may have not recognized those people as their own people. I mean, Hitler certainly did not recognize the Jews as his own people and the commies did not recognize the kulaks as their own people or whatever. But we look at that and go, no, they were your people because you're their monopolized defense force.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:07:18Speaker 10

  You're their state. It's a different calculation, at least to some degree, I suppose, when there's two nation states going at each other. And part of that is just logistically, like, you don't have the ability to do police actions, I suppose, in the same way that you do within your own geographical area, or you're not, you know, kind of monopolize the defense force of those people. So like in this, like, even in America, right? But by our logic, I think we would say that bombing, um, Baghdad, because we want to get some bad people morally, really can't be any different than bombing Chicago because we want to get some bad people because morally it's killing people and you can't really change those laws just because politicians said so. However, there is a reason why even the American people

• 1:08:01Speaker 10

  would be much more appalled if we just bombed Chicago before, because in some sense, they'd be like, hey, we thought you can't do that. But we say, no, the Jews were helpless. They were captive. They, it was your responsibility, Adolf Hitler, that you weren't allowed to, to do this to them. And

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  You can't kill people you're in charge of. There's something more, yes. No, that's such as, I, by the way, I've never thought of that in all the time I've spent thinking about this. There's something uniquely offensive about hurting the people you're in charge, like you have total control over these people.

• 1:08:31Speaker 10

  Yeah.

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• 1:10:50Speaker 10

  Yes, yes, of course. You have total control, control over them. They don't have, like, again, it's not even the situation in Gaza. And, and look, on some level, try to be as charitable as I can be to, like, some of the people who say, like, this is not a genocide. You know, they say, oh, what are you talking about? If Israel wanted to genocide them, they would just kill every single person there. And you're like, oh, first of all, that's a really dumb argument, because Israel has cratered, like, 70 points in approval. They've become a global pariah by doing what they're doing. It's not so clear that, like, if they just did some even more heinous version, it actually wouldn't destroy them immediately. So that it's not a very good argument. But there, there is, I suppose, a point to being, say, like, even when you said before, we don't really

• 1:11:32Speaker 10

  know exactly how many people are, are, are dead at this point. You look at these pictures, and, you know, the Gaza Health Ministry is officially saying 70,000. The Israelis, after every single one of them denying that for years straight, that the, we can't trust the, the Hamas numbers, very quietly said, yeah, we agree with the Hamas numbers, because it's, it's clearly much more than that. But there were 2.1 million people there. And, like, if you looked at those pictures, you might think, did they kill all 2.1 million people? But no, they moved a lot of the civilian population. They forced a lot of them out of there, killed a whole bunch of them in the process, and then they just destroyed the entire place while they had the civilian population out of there, just destroyed one of the most continually inhabited, oldest places, and every mosque, every school, every

• 1:12:16Speaker 10

  playground, every hospital, in the most, like, crazy way. Now, that very clearly meets the, the international legal definition of genocide. But if what you picture in your mind is, like, they killed every single civilian, or they exterminated the entire people, like, okay, I guess they've got a little bit of a case that that's not exactly what they did. And maybe that is what, you know, that is what Adolf Hitler was attempting to do. So you know what I'm saying? Like, if they want to say there's a slight difference in the nature of these genocides. But I think the bottom line is that it's your people, they're captive, you put them in this situation, you created this. Listen, the Israeli state created the conditions by which October 7th happened, just basically meaning every single

• 1:13:01Speaker 10

  one of those, every single militant, violent member of Hamas who committed an act of violence on October 7th, was first brutalized by the Israeli state. And that doesn't mean it's okay for them to go take that out on some innocent civilian. But there is something there. And I will say, there is a bias, another bias that humans have, that I think it makes some sense psychologically and sociologically, but it's really worth examining. And it's that there's a bit of a bias toward the more sophisticated, um, uh, party. So for

• 1:13:40Speaker 10

  us in America, if you hear about an IDF soldier, what you're hearing he did is kind of similar sometimes to our boys, pushing a button, pulling a trigger, perhaps, but dropping a bomb, doing something that is at least, like, he got orders from a general, he followed his orders, he did this. A Hamas militant, you're hearing about a savage, running up and randomly killing people. And what clearly, you know, like, um, I think this is the way our, our mutual great friend Daryl Cooper put it. He goes, you know, you'd prefer one of those to be your neighbor than the other. You know, like, there is a difference between those, those two people. And there is a difference in kind of the primitive barbaric nature

• 1:14:22Speaker 10

  of Palestinian terrorism versus the, you know, like, advanced, systematized nature of the IDF.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  AI-driven drone warfare.

• 1:14:32Speaker 10

  Yes. You know, you're coming in with night goggles on a sky. There were no battles in Gaza. You know what I mean? It wasn't, it wasn't like they were battling an opposing military or something like that. There's this crazy asymmetry in sophistication. And, and look, there's, it's easy for people to have a bias in that, especially when they get into all this clash of civilizations stuff. But Tucker, again, let's zoom out here and remind ourselves that, like, think about all the great classical musicians that came from Germany. You know, you're talking Bach and Beethoven. Do I need to bring up Russian writers or something like that? That doesn't take away from how brutal those regimes were. You know, the fact that they were far more sophisticated than some of the countries

• 1:15:12Speaker 10

  that they were crushing. Like, at the end of the day, that's still a human baby underneath a building with a real mother screaming about how they lost their kid. It doesn't matter whether it was a barbarian or not.

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  I find that actually, that's the best part of this whole story. So we were told my whole childhood, there was something uniquely evil about Germans, and they were able to, to do the Holocaust because they were uniquely evil. But then you see, like, Rwanda in 1994, and you see Gaza, and like, you see this as the substance of history. This is the human story. And then you realize, wait a second, there's, is no population that's unique in that it's not capable of genocide. Every pop, under certain circumstances, every human being is capable of murdering his neighbor. And then there's a kind of universal truth there, but also universal connection between all people. It's like,

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  you become in some ways less judgmental of any specific example, more empathetic, like, this is something that we should acknowledge, that we are all capable of great evil. And we're united in that. I don't know why no one wants to say that, and you're attacked for saying that. But I don't think the Israelis are the only people capable of committing genocide, or the Germans. Like, that's not true.

• 1:16:26Speaker 10

  I also just, um, you know, on, on a personal note, I suppose, just as a, as a father, I always, and I know this, like, we've talked about this before, like, we're both, we're both dads, and we're both, like, family men at heart, which is really much more important than, than anything else. But it's like, it's really just not that hard. You know, you have the thing as a parent, where there's always, like, there's like this white-hot energy of the thought of something bad happening to your kid. And it's almost hard to even keep your hand on it for too long, because you just kind of shut down and go, okay, okay, let's think about something else, because the thought of this is, like, too devastating. But like, all you gotta do, it's very easy for me to just go, um, okay, I'm the dad of one of those girls who was at that music festival on October 7th.

• 1:17:09Speaker 10

  And after that, I, I went flatten the whole thing, flatten all of Gaza and kill all of it. Like, I could totally relate to, to that. But I can also totally relate to being in the position of a, a 19-year-old in Gaza, and I just watched my grandmother get shot by an IDF soldier, and then, you know, spit on my dad, and then arrested my dad for the crime of pushing him after he shot my grandma. You know, you know how many stories there are like that? And then they decided, I'm gonna join up with Hamas. I'm gonna join up with Hamas. Now, I will grant, I will grant that, like, no, I probably cannot put myself in the place of just, like, killing innocents as a result of that. Okay, but also, like, I haven't grown up in that environment. You know what I mean? Like, I, you know, I,

• 1:17:50Speaker 10

  I know, I know people who were good kids, who went to jail, you know, I mean, maybe not good kids in the sense that they did something wrong, but they were reasonably good kids, went to jail and came out never the same. And I was just, like, a couple of years in jail. And they were just tough, hardcore people after that. You know, like, your conditions can transform you. And so, anyway, I just think it is fairly easy to put yourself in both positions, understand why this cycle has gotten so bad with these two groups, but also then realize that, but we're not either of those groups. We are Americans. We are looking at this from a different perspective. And so we should have, we should be able to have cooler heads prevail here. And so then, of course, one of the major things that was exposed over the last three years is the presence of this lobby,

• 1:18:33Speaker 10

  or whatever you want to call it, but this fifth column, where there is this one, you know, all of a sudden, people, you know, people like you and me, we knew that Israel was the third rail for many, many years. You know, however you felt about it, you knew that, like, hey, if I'm gonna make a stand against this, this is, this one's gonna cost me.

• 1:18:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just wanted to stay away from it. I didn't want anything to do with it.

• 1:18:56Speaker 10

  Yeah, your kids, your kids won't go to college, your kids, we have everybody, everybody had seen enough of just what happened to, you know, just enough of, like, hey, where Pappy Cannon and Paul Newman go? That's weird. You know, everyone had seen enough of that. But after October 7th, this thing forced everybody to pay attention. And then, because, because what Israel was doing was horrific enough, a lot of the people paying attention said, hey, that's horrific. And then they were met with, you're a Nazi, because you don't want to kill innocent people. And that's a little bit too much for most people to, to stomach.

• 1:19:33Speaker 00

  But why do we get censored? So Meta has, you know, leaked Meta documents show millions of, of effect acts of censorship on behalf of the Israeli government after October 7th by Meta, the company that runs Facebook. And I'm sure the other social media companies are the same. Now you see the administration with its antisemitisms are punishing people for criticizing Israel's conduct in Gaza. How does that work? How does some foreign conflict reduce my constitutional rights as someone who was born here?

• 1:20:06Speaker 10

  Yeah, well, man, it is such an outrage, you know, and for, for so many of the reasons that you alluded in your, in your monologue. You know, it's like, the, the, this, this is the thing. And I've also, you know,

• 1:20:24Speaker 10

  It's not exactly clear to anyone, I don't think. And people can mock the just asking questions crowd or whatever. But let me tell you something. Every single one of those people who mock people for just asking questions. Those guys have questions too. I promise you, they have questions too. They have questions. No one read the, no one read through the Epstein files and went case closed. Everything answered.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:20:46Speaker 10

  What is this? His urologist mess emailed him bring nine year olds and grape soda. I have no, nothing further on that.

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

  No, I don't think we should talk to urologists. Like, let's not call him to headquarters and ask simple questions. I'm sure there's more billionaires drinking grape soda. Cause a lot of white billionaires drink grape soda. It's kind of par for the course. Like when I'm down on my boat in San Tropez in the summertime, everyone's drinking grape soda.

• 1:21:08Speaker 10

  It's all we talk about. It's all we ever do, man. And it's a weird thing, dude. When you get to the country, the country club and you don't know the latest on grape soda. And you're like, oh man, I look like I'm such an asshole right now. I was hoping we'd talk golf. Geez, um, you know, yeah, it's just too, all of it's just too ridic. And, and look, so how exactly does Israel exercise all of this control? How exactly, you know, did they just like grab the minds of people like, um, you know, um, uh, what's her name? Hemingway, uh, or who's the one, uh, who said, America is the greatest country? Well, maybe besides Israel. Um, obviously there's the religious view that, you know, was on display when you, you grilled Mike Huckabee,

• 1:21:49Speaker 10

  that certain, you know, uh, Christians in this country have certain percentage of evangelical Christians. I don't know. I'm not a Christian. I'm not going to lecture anybody else on their Christianity. But like, if you think there's a giant, huge message in the Bible that Thomas Aquinas just missed, that seems to be a red flag to me. I would humbly suggest maybe, you know, like, maybe you don't understand it better than he did. I don't know. That's, that seems crazy to me. But anyway, um, you know, there's, and then of course there's Jewish people who have a, what, you know, really is a religious, you know, um, attachment to Israel. In fact, I think for, for a huge portion of, of modern Jews, their connection to Israel is, is much more so. The connection to the, the Holocaust and to Israel is much more so a, a real religion than their connection to Abraham or Moses.

• 1:22:35Speaker 10

  That in many cases, not all. Um, and, but then of course, I mean, the levels of control over politicians. Look, you just got to admit, it looks so strange. It's so strange that this country is able to snap and just immediately, you know, kind of like get so many people to, to fall in line. And of course there's really, as you said, there's really no better example of that than this administration. And I gotta say, man, as a friend and a fan of yours, I'm really proud of the way you've handled this whole thing. It has not been easy. I know it hasn't been easy for you. It's not easy to be in the situation you're in. It's not easy to, to back a guy, um, and then be kind of one of the people in his ear and then have him, you know, kind of like,

• 1:23:18Speaker 10

  just over and over again, listen to the worst people with the worst advice over your advice. And you kind of stick around through him doing this over and over and trying to be the only reasonable guy in his ear. And then especially after Charlie's gone, the only reasonable guy in his ear. And then like pushed to the point where you just can't hold back. And you have to say what it is because this is the whole, this is our covenant. This is what we have to do with our audience. We have to tell them the truth. That's the whole thing. Otherwise what's the point of us and why do we do this? Um, but in this, in this moment, I mean, look, this administration, it's betrayal is an understatement. It is, it is unbelievable. It is a Bobby Kennedy, you know, out there today, the, the nerve of this man, the nerve of this man to be demonizing his fellow Americans,

• 1:24:01Speaker 10

  his fellow Americans for, for standing up against hell about our tax dollars going to, to just slaughtering helpless little three and four year old boys and girls while their parents scream when it doesn't have to be done for, and for the reason that Benjamin Netanyahu wants the land, you know, which we can, uh, get into a little bit more. But the fact that Bobby Kennedy, this guy said, he told, he tells me, and not just personally, but publicly in front of them, tells the whole American people that he believes in God. He believes God sent him on a mission. I mean, God sent him on a mission, I guess, to tinker around the edges with the American health issue and then leave us as chronically sick a country as we ever were. Is, was this God's plan for you to sacrifice all of your integrity? And, and like, I'm sorry, he's a guy who just leaves you going, what do they have on you, man? Like, what do they have on you?

• 1:24:45Speaker 10

  You just obviously don't believe any of this stuff. You could have been the third party candidate that broke up this whole thing. If you had just been good on this one issue, if he had just been the one candidate who was against the genocide all of 2024, as the entire American public woke up to this, he was perfectly positioned to be the third party and take that coalition, make him the winning coalition and break up the two party system. But instead he had to sit there and call the Palestinians pampered and immediately defend. I mean, Tucker, he called, think about this. He called, and Bobby Kennedy is not a stupid man. Me and you both know him. He called October 7th, and I quote, "an unprovoked attack."

• 1:25:25Speaker 10

  I mean, yeah. What you know, you're lying, you liar, you lie. Nobody knows anything about the Israel Palestine conflict and could call anything unprovoked. You can't break out of an Israeli prison and attack Israelis unprovoked. I'm sorry, that's just not a possible thing that he believes. It's discussed, there's all of them, man. I'm sorry, Tulsi Gabbard sitting there and holding her mouth or lying us into war. Uh, you know, all of them. Look, I mean, look, it's, it's kind of this basic right now, right Tucker? Donald Trump, everyone knows, there's no one on the other side. Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, everyone. Nobody doesn't think Donald Trump is lying us into war right now and lying us to keep us into war.

• 1:26:08Speaker 10

  His lie right now is that Iran was two weeks away from having a deliverable nuclear weapon and we're going to nuke LA. They know that's not true. None of them thinks that's true. They were hovering at 60% enriched uranium with IAEA inspections and, and an annual threat assessment that said they're still not making the move to try to get nukes. They haven't even made the political decision to start. It's just totally a lie. And also all of you are supporting a president lying his country into war. And like, no, we're not going to do that. Now there, they've done that. They've sacrificed. By the way, it's over at this point. It's over. The Democrats have control and this is the end of Trump's domestic agenda. None of that's going to happen. Of course, his foreign policy agenda, he's free to be as much of a madman as he wants to.

• 1:26:53Speaker 10

  And Congress, of course, will not restrain him on that at all, as we both know. Um, but that's it. We sacrificed this moment, the greatest political comeback ever, all the work that we've done rallying this coalition against the insane woke shit, against all of these wars, against the open borders, against all that, that whole coalition. We, we leveraged that for a war for Israel.

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  So the net effect of this is not, I mean, I don't really care about Israel, but I don't think it, this actually helps Israel in the end at all. I think they're marching toward doom. Um, I hope I'm wrong, but it seems that way. But what I care about is the United States and everything that's happened accelerates the decline of the United States. And, and I think could fairly be seen as an attack on the United States. If you wanted to wreck the country, this is what you would do. And I, and both parties seem dead set on that, on knocking the United States down several pegs quickly, tanking the economy, causing food insecurity, imperiling the entire population with a nuclear exchange. Like this is all real. It's all happening right now. And people don't know it's because they're not paying attention, but it is happening.

• 1:28:02Speaker 00

  And it's like, why do our own leaders want to wreck our country? I, I'm sincerely baffled. Like, what are they doing?

• 1:28:09Speaker 10

  It's, um, it does seem like there's, it's almost, um, like, uh, you know, the rats on a sinking ship or something like that. Like it, it feels like they're just, our, our ruling class, and this has been, had felt true for a while. Although it does seem like it's really accelerating. But our, our ruling class seem to be, uh, determined to extract as much wealth as they can on the way down. I mean, they're all kind of like, this is, it's almost like, um, you know, it, it feels like a venture capital firm that's taken over the United States of America and is like, well, listen, we have no interest in this, but let's strip it of all its resources. And what can we leverage up the debt on this before we get out of here?

• 1:28:49Speaker 10

  Or what type of, you know, everybody, a system that is almost run on just such naked corruption. That's, you know, not even like the pretense of like, there's some values for the country or some, you know, like the idea that Kamala Harris or, or Nancy Pelosi, or anyone like that is like an adult with deep opinions on matters of policy is just totally ridiculous. So these are people who are like getting stock information essentially. Um, why, you know, what? You know, Tucker, you were a lot closer to the whole thing than I was. How on earth Donald Trump was actually persuaded by these guys to do this? What they actually had on him that was the ultimate move that they played?

• 1:29:31Speaker 10

  I mean, obviously, something's missing in the official story. It's not as simple as the New York Times reporting that Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of Mossad said it would be easy and he bought it. I mean, how?

• 1:29:45Speaker 00

  It's absurd.

• 1:29:46Speaker 10

  How is that possible?

• 1:29:47Speaker 00

  I talked to him, he knew that wasn't true. So I don't know the truth, but that's not true.

• 1:29:53Speaker 10

  And, and, and it is, you know, at least according to that New York Times piece, um, there's, you know, it's like, while no one else in the administration goes along with it and, you know, I think it was Rubio even said, ah, this is a little fanciful or something. They're not saying like, sir, do not do this. This will not go the way they're saying it. Well, like, no one seems to be saying that to him, which is kind of crazy. But I can't, I know that he heard that from you and I can't imagine he didn't hear this from the Pentagon. I mean, there's just no way that no one at the Pentagon was able, or no one, you know what I'm saying? Like, no one in the intelligence community was able to get to President Trump that this would go the way it's obviously gone. Anyway, um, that, this is just very hard to believe.

• 1:30:33Speaker 10

  And, and I gotta say, there is something really, you know, I know you saw this up close. It was very interesting. You told me this on the phone and then you said it on your show after that. So I'm not revealing anything, said privately, you said it publicly. And then I heard Donald Trump say it like three more times, but where you said, he keeps saying this thing, it just all works out in the end. It all works out of the, and all this. It just, it sounds like a guy who got boxed into a thing he didn't want to do, who just knows he has no other option. And he's just like, listen, I've, I've, that's what it seems like, like, and, and people can, you know, they can, again, the, oh, you're just asking questions. I'm sorry, this is such a clear cut thing. This guy promised not to fight this war. This guy also, you know, when people say, uh, you know this better than anyone because

• 1:31:18Speaker 10

  you were covering this at the time and you were in contact with, with him at the time. When people say every president in the past resisted Netanyahu trying to drag them into this war, it's true, including Donald Trump in his first term. And when he was very, but like, they put a lot of pressure on him after that drone was downed, after the Soleimani strike, when they retaliated and hit our bases, but didn't kill anyone and warned us. There was all types of pressure from all the same hawks, the exact same players, um, trying to get him into this exact same war, but back then in his first term. And he resisted that. Um, and that gave, I think, people like me and you a bit of, you know, cautious optimism about him resisting it again and made us comfortable enough to, to support him in 24.

• 1:32:01Speaker 10

  And especially because he was saying openly, no new wars this time. He was, he, all his surrogates were saying, if you want war with Iran, vote for, come up, vote for, for Kamala Harris and all this. So it's this clear betrayal on every level, the Epstein thing, just all the promises they have that aren't being kept. And, um, now we're going to deal with, with the ramifications of that, which are going to be the Democrats, uh, uh, taking control of, of the Congress. And I guess we're going to see what woke 2.0 looks like.

• 1:32:30Speaker 00

  So that's my last question. And you don't sound hopeful, but I mean, we're Democrats about to run everything.

• 1:32:37Speaker 10

  Short run, not.

• 1:32:38Speaker 00

  But in the short run, so do you think, I mean, the Democratic Party was rejected conclusively two years ago? And they know that, the smart ones know that. It's not like they have a program that everyone loves. They don't like Trump and Trump is very unpopular, so it's, they're going to get elected. But do you think their program will change? Like they, it's been two years and there are new players. Is it a different party? Like, what are they for? Who are these people?

• 1:33:03Speaker 10

  Well, it's, um, I, I gotta say, what are they for and who are these people is a particularly difficult question to answer. And I think, uh, uh, again, and I really do try, because I've, you know, I've, I've, I've been a Ron Paul libertarian for 20 years. And so I've always swam in the circles where we're, we're friends with anti-war leftists and stuff like that. But particularly over the last few years, you know, much like you and with same, some of the same people as you, you know, I've, I've really kind of like made friends and, and, you know, have come to respect a lot of great people, a lot of the same great people you would like, you know, Max Blumenthal and, and Finkelstein and, and, uh, Crystal Ball and, and, uh, Ryan Grim and, and Anna Kasparian and Cenk Uygur and just, I'm sorry if I'm leaving anyone out, but a lot of people like that.

• 1:33:48Speaker 10

  And I try to even go to like them, like, hey, you gotta kind of admit that this is unfair when it's just so clear what your guys are or what they stand for. Like they, I don't know, it's like, Mom Donnie, like, none of them are doing the woke thing anymore, but they were all doing it a few minutes ago. You know, the Mom Donnie tweets about like, you know, whatever, the trans people's rights or what was it?

• 1:34:09Speaker 00

  Whites have too many houses or something.

• 1:34:11Speaker 10

  Yeah, like all the racialist stuff is still all up there and they were all doing it. Then they all took their gender, you know, uh, pronouns out of their bio and they all decided, as soon as they lost the conversation, it was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, we're not doing that anymore. By the way, it's insane that it took us that long to defeat the, to defeat them soundly. It was boys pretending to be girls. It, it's, this is, this is how hard it is for the right wing to ever have a victory in the culture. It has to be that crazy and it still takes us a decade to, to get the job done. To finally just get back to, oh, look, we can serve like the one little thing. Anyway, um, but so, look, part of it too is like now, look, they, they're smart enough. I think they've figured out that, look, we're going to be the ones who oppose Netanyahu

• 1:34:52Speaker 10

  and oppose the, the war in Iran and we're going to focus on unaffordability. You know, like that is, they have, they've really pivoted to that. And for obvious reasons, that is resonating a lot better than all this other crazy stuff. The problem again that I see with this is that, you know, not a one of them could even tell you why we have an affordability crisis.

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:35:12Speaker 10

  This is, no one even like has a thought about it. It's unbelievable. It's like, it's like when you have that whole debate about with Joe Biden about forgiving student loan debt and the whole talk becomes about, should it be this much or this much? Or who should get it? Is it constitutional? It's this, no one ever just sits there and goes like, hey, why is college so expensive?

• 1:35:28Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:35:28Speaker 10

  How did it get to this point? Why is it like that? Why does it cost so much to like teach a 19 year old about the great books? Like, what do I need? I need a real, I, I need a guy with like 120 IQ and some leather patches on his, his jacket and a classroom and a this. Why should it cause, oh yeah, because government got in the business of backing the loans and subsidizing the colleges and oh yes, they, so they bid up the price. Okay, why are the prices of everything so high? Okay, because we've destroyed the currency. But, but I can say that they're coming in with a new pitch. I will say, number one, I don't really trust the fact that there was never a reckoning with the woke stuff or the COVID stuff. None of them have ever really come around and been like, hey, here's what we got crazy wrong about all of that.

• 1:36:11Speaker 10

  And by the way, demonized you as a Nazi the whole time for being completely right. I'd like a little bit of acknowledgement of that. I know they want to beat us up for voting for Trump, but you know what? At least we're the loudest ones criticizing him as soon as he starts doing wrong stuff. And then the other thing is like, why are you calling yourselves democratic socialists? And then pretending you're not socialists? It's very strange. Not a one of them is running on, not, not a single one of them is running on democratizing the workplace or collectivizing the means of production or anything like that, but they all call themselves socialists. And then they go socialism means four city groceries. Or, you know, and you're like, well, what, what is this? What, what are you talking about? Socialism means free buses and dignity.

• 1:36:55Speaker 10

  Like, it's just this very vague moving target, you know? And while I wanna, I want to appreciate a lot of our left wing friends for, for being good on really important issues over the years. It's like, forgive me if, you know, after seeing what happens, you know, when a lot of you guys are in power, or even like culturally, the way you guys act when you guys are in power, that I'm very skeptical about this. And that's why it's, it's a done deal that the Democrats are going to win the midterms and the Trump presidency is destroyed. And what we need is somebody, you know, maybe someone I'm talking to right now to run for president in 2028. But at, at all seriousness, it would just be amazing if you or Thomas Massey or someone like that did that.

• 1:37:40Speaker 10

  But what we need is someone to kind of pick back up the mantle of this coalition that's still sitting there and waiting to be picked up. And it's all these things are like 80, 20 issues, man. No one wants to fight these wars. No one wants open borders. No one wants a, an unknown amount of, of tens of millions of illegal people living in, in our country. Nobody wants our currency destroyed and all of these high prices. Nobody wants to see ODs like this. We got so many problems that there are real solutions to, and we only can't solve them because we got to focus on this stuff that we shouldn't be doing to begin with.

• 1:38:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then you're not allowed to complain about it or Attorney General Todd will accuse you of hate, you know, using your money to travel to your town to yell at you, get out of my country. Anyway, excuse me. Um, it makes me mad just thinking about it. Dave Smith, thank you for that summary. And unfortunately, you're exactly right and I'm hoping for the best, but preparing for more of the same. So thank you.

• 1:38:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, well, I wish we were in person so we could go talk for five more hours.

• 1:38:39Speaker 00

  I do too, as, as we always do. Great to see you, man.

• 1:38:44Speaker 10

  You too, brother.

• 1:38:45Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you for watching and we'll be back next Wednesday at 6:00 PM.