On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, we discuss the recent plane crash in Ukraine, and the impact it may have on the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia. We also talk about the pro-Kremlin propaganda machine, and why we should be worried about what's happening on the ground, and how it could impact our understanding of what's going on in the Ukraine conflict. We also discuss why the "pro-Ukrainian" narrative seems to be shifting in favor of Russia, and what that could mean for the future of the conflict, and whether or not it's really as bad as it's being portrayed by the media and the leftist media. And we answer the question, who's going to pay the price for all the losses? Joe and the crew discuss this, and much more, on the latest episode of The JOKER Experience! Subscribe to the JokER Podcast on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our other podcast, The Joker Experience. Enjoy this episode and the rest of our upcoming episodes! Enjoy & spread the word to your friends about this podcast! Cheers, Cheers! -Jon Sorrentino and the JOGER Crew! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's up? 2: What do you think of this episode? 3:30 - What does it mean to you? 4: What would you miss? 5:15 - What are you looking for? 6:40 - How do you care about the conflict? 7:00 8: What's the worst thing you're going to do in Ukraine? 9:00 | What's your opinion on this week? 11:30 What's a good day? 12:40 13:30 | What are your worst enemy? 15:00 -- What's more? 16:30 -- Is it possible? 17:00 // 16: Is it better? 18:00 Is it worse? 19: Is there a better country? 21:00 / 16:40 | What do I care about Ukraine s 17? 22:00 & 15: What is your opinion of the Ukraine podcast? 26:00 + 17:30 // 15:30 & 16:00 ? 27:30 + 16:10 21)
00:01:30.000At first, they were spinning it like he was pissed off about the war, but that never really seemed to make sense to me.
00:01:37.000I think some type of power struggle, and he kind of went for it in a pretty major way, started destroying equipment and moving his forces toward Moscow, and then they reached some agreement, and they backed off.
00:02:32.000It's like, how many more soldiers do they have left?
00:02:36.000How many more people can they force to fight that war?
00:02:39.000Like, what is the truth in terms of what are their losses?
00:02:42.000Because what you hear from people that are the true believers in the leftist movement is that Ukraine is winning and that Russia is doomed.
00:03:17.000It's always hard, like, in the fog of war to know exactly how many people are dying.
00:03:20.000It's usually not until after the fact, and they do the, like, excess mortality numbers, and then you kind of figure out, like, how many people actually died here.
00:03:29.000I think there's no question that Ukraine is doing better than Russia.
00:03:36.000Would have been expected, like say in the year 2010, if you had said, okay, Russia's gonna invade Ukraine, I think?
00:04:10.000That kind of leads to the question of like, wait, but if Russia still wins at the end of this, which it looks like they're going to, short of like U.S. intervention, direct intervention, then what did we accomplish here other than just getting way more people slaughtered and drawing the war out way longer to kind of sacrifice Ukraine in an effort to hurt Russia?
00:04:33.000And it's crazy that the same people who support this war supported claiming that they really care about the Ukrainians.
00:04:39.000But if you really cared about them, why would your move be to prolong the conflict and let more of them die?
00:04:56.000This shifting of the polls that sort of seems to have happened politically, where it doesn't matter what the actual facts of what you're supporting are, as long as what you're supporting is endorsed by the ideology.
00:05:11.000And that ideology is, this leftist ideology is that, you know, we have to have a Ukraine flag in your Twitter bio, you have to support, and regardless of, and you're not even looking at it, The objective data to try to figure out what happened here?
00:05:28.000I've never heard anyone other than you and a few other people online even discuss the 2014 coup.
00:05:36.000It's interesting because the narratives kind of change.
00:05:41.000And one of the things that's interesting about the Maidan revolution is that, and I've played the last couple times we've been here, we've played clips of what people were saying at the time.
00:05:51.000And at the time, there were several people who were basically admitting what's going on.
00:05:55.000And they're like, yeah, we're stealing Ukraine away from Russia.
00:06:13.000Like it was him and John McCain and Victoria Newland and then Chris Murphy was kind of this younger senator.
00:06:18.000And he just said the quiet part out loud on a C-SPAN interview back then where he just went, he goes, oh yeah, it was American policy that overthrew Yanukovych.
00:06:27.000Without us, he wouldn't have been overthrown.
00:06:29.000And so like, but now, like they would admit it then.
00:06:32.000But now, when you talk about it, they're like, oh, no, no, no, that's not helpful to the narrative.
00:06:36.000So don't mention that we were involved in overthrowing a government that was more pro-Russian and putting in a government that was more pro-West.
00:08:18.000And that all of a sudden means you're like on their side.
00:08:22.000Because you're no longer, we're good guys, he's bad guys.
00:08:24.000I'm like, no, actually there's a lot of bad guys involved in this conflict.
00:08:28.000Yeah, you were detailing last night, it was really interesting, with Ahsan, you and I were sitting in the green room, and you were detailing the coup and then the connection between the Bidens.
00:08:43.000Like how this all happened with Hunter.
00:08:46.000Well, so the company Burisma who hired Hunter Biden.
00:08:51.000So Joe Biden at the time when he was the vice president under Barack Obama, he was the point man on Ukraine.
00:08:56.000That was like one of his big tasks that he was given by Obama.
00:09:00.000And like Victoria Nuland was talking about how Joe Biden would get on the phone to give an attaboy to the protesters who ultimately overthrew Yanukovych.
00:09:31.000To kind of, instead of bribing the new Ukrainian government, they just went right to the source and bribed, you know, decided, oh, here, we'll put the vice president's son on our board, give him a huge check, and then that kind of, like, protects us against...
00:09:48.000The threat, perhaps, of this new government cracking down on us, because they're not going to want to piss off who the real puppet master is, which is D.C., as always.
00:10:00.000And that's the thing that's so crazy about the war in Ukraine, is hearing all of these people in the corporate press and the political class talk about how Vladimir Putin's an imperialist.
00:12:25.000It seemed like they really convinced him that Assad had been gassing his own people and that convinced Trump to bomb Syria a couple times.
00:12:35.000I don't know exactly what the conversations were like.
00:12:39.000I do know that if he really wanted to be the guy who was ending all of the wars and he wanted to be the guy who wasn't giving into the military industrial complex, It makes no sense for him to have people like Lindsey Graham in his ear.
00:12:51.000It made no sense for him to make Mike Pompeo his Secretary of State.
00:12:55.000It made no sense to have these guys like Mattis.
00:12:59.000He put the war party into all of these positions.
00:13:03.000And then he's like, man, they're undermining me at every turn.
00:13:55.000My own intelligence agencies, who are supposed to work for me, are actually working to undermine me.
00:14:01.000Which they clearly are, and many have admitted at this point that they were.
00:14:06.000I'd be really interested to hear what he has to say.
00:14:08.000Well, there's no better evidence than the, was it 51 intelligence officials that signed off on the fact that the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation?
00:14:19.000Yes, I believe, including four former heads of the CIA. And there's really, it's really something, because there's no, like, demand for accountability for those people.
00:14:30.000You know, like, how did you sign off on this?
00:14:32.000Blatant election interference, you know?
00:14:35.000And that's, It's one of these things like, this is why when the Trump supporters who say that they stole the election, believe that the election machines were rigged or that there was ballot stuffing, it's like, even if they're not right about that,
00:14:50.000which I don't know, I mean, I've never seen compelling evidence that that is the case, but it's kind of like, I use the example of if you're cheating, On your wife, and then she's like, you're cheating on her, and then she's like, I know Friday when you were out,
00:15:06.000I know you were cheating on me, and you weren't that Friday cheating on her.
00:15:10.000Even though she's wrong, she's really right.
00:15:13.000She might be wrong about that specific day, but she knows you're...
00:15:16.000They know this whole thing is illegitimate.
00:15:23.000I mean, they suppressed the October bombshell that would have very likely tipped the election in Trump's favor.
00:15:32.000And tried to make it seem again that Russia was, you know, stealing our elections, which is another major factor in the whole Russia-Ukraine conflict.
00:15:43.000First of all, what an insane provocation of Russia it was for the last six years to have not just people in the corporate press, but like the former head of the CIA, you know, like on TV every day saying Russia attacked our democracy.
00:16:01.000They interfered in our election and then also claiming that they were in a partnership with Donald Trump to steal it from Hillary Clinton.
00:16:34.000You know, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed nations, and they're out there saying, you just committed an act of war against us.
00:16:45.000I mean, like, that's quite an aggressive posture, particularly when they all knew it was bullshit.
00:16:51.000They all knew from the very beginning.
00:16:53.000And so you had all of that, and then they tried to do it again in 2020, claimed this was a Russian operation to, you know, interfere in the election.
00:17:01.000And meanwhile, all of it It's so crazy.
00:17:14.000It's so crazy that this is not a mainstream narrative and that the news ignores this.
00:17:20.000They also ignore During the debates when Joe Biden was saying that, you know, my son didn't make any money over there and I have nothing to do with my son's business.
00:17:37.000And of course, if Trump, you know, like the moderator doesn't push back during that debate and say, excuse me, Mr. Biden, that's just not true.
00:17:46.000Like we know there's no pushback on that.
00:17:49.000And he gets to stand up there and say, hey, look, all of these intelligence officials, they tell them they're backing up my story that this laptop is Russian disinformation.
00:17:59.000And I don't know exactly what it is now.
00:18:02.000But I remember they had opinion polls on this after the Mueller investigation, and it's still an enormously high percentage of Democratic voters believe that Trump and Putin were involved in a conspiracy to steal the election.
00:18:17.000They still believe it to this day because they heard Trump-Russia collusion every day, nonstop.
00:18:22.000And that is a huge part of why they support this war in Ukraine, because they think we're fighting the country who overthrew our democracy and gave us Donald Trump for four years.
00:18:31.000It's all just complete bullshit, but they believe it.
00:18:34.000It's crazy how prevalent it is because people are just headline readers.
00:18:39.000And the mainstream news is completely captured.
00:18:43.000To some degree, I'm sympathetic to people who get propagandized by this stuff because we do, in general in life, we outsource the overwhelming majority of knowledge to other people.
00:18:58.000My hot water heater broke down and I just hire a guy to replace it.
00:19:04.000I don't know anything about hot water heaters, but I just trust, I don't know.
00:19:43.000Especially if you're a career person, you want to stay on the air, you want to keep things going.
00:19:48.000Just look what they did to Tucker Carlson, who was the number one guy on television.
00:19:55.000And whatever feathers he ruffled, whatever people he pissed off, I don't believe he's openly discussed it yet, because he's probably got some sort of a lawsuit going on.
00:20:05.000They removed him because he was a problem.
00:20:08.000The way he was discussing things was a problem.
00:20:11.000Well, it's very interesting that if you – we've talked about this before when we played clips about CNN talking about you and stuff.
00:20:19.000But if you listen to CNN, the way they talk about you or the way they talk about Tucker Carlson – not that you guys are in different – I think?
00:20:45.000How are you guys viewed as controversial, but CNN is talking to an audience of 200,000 people and letting you know people are very skeptical of these guys.
00:20:55.000These are the most popular figures, and it's because people can at least smell that...
00:21:03.000You're not bullshitting them the way these guys are.
00:21:06.000And that was always one of the things that I really appreciated about Tucker, was that he would break with the Republican Party and have a completely different view from them.
00:21:13.000He would break with everyone else on the network, which is like, that's so unheard of today.
00:21:19.000In MSNBC, if you look down the whole lineup, at CNN, if you look down the whole lineup, you cannot point to one host who has a drastically different opinion on an issue that matters than the hour before them and the hour before them.
00:21:31.000But if you look at, like, You know, the daytime at Fox News where they were on the war in Ukraine versus where Tucker was, or where they were on lockdowns versus where Tucker was, is a night and day difference.
00:21:41.000And so, of course, they removed the one interesting guy.
00:21:44.000Well, he was kind of doing podcasting on TV. He had gotten to the point where his show was so huge That he could kind of get away with it.
00:21:54.000And he incrementally kept ramping it up.
00:22:28.000Well, look, even with this Trump thing, man, it's like I was saying how so many people still believe the Russia collusion story, which was all made up, man, and you can go follow this whole thing.
00:22:56.000Let me just preface it briefly to kind of set up what's so amazing about it.
00:23:01.000There are these occasional moments where even, like I said, the thing where Chris Murphy just happens to blurt out like, oh yeah, our policy's overthrown Yanukovych, right?
00:23:10.000There are these moments where kind of like these rare moments of honesty from the kind of leaders of the regime.
00:23:25.000And just so you know, Donald Trump has been elected, but he's a president-elect here.
00:23:32.000So it's after the election, but he's not president yet.
00:23:34.000So this was about him tweeting something here.
00:23:37.000But he's taking these shots, this antagonism, this taunting to the intelligence community.
00:23:43.000Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.
00:23:48.000So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this.
00:23:54.000What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were moving into it?
00:23:57.000I don't know, but from what I am told, they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them.
00:24:05.000And what happened right before that is that Rachel Maddow goes, she goes, all right, I'm sorry to put you on the spot here, but Donald Trump just tweeted this thing about the intelligence community.
00:24:40.000You know the Steele dossier and all that stuff and then they were spying on Carter Page who was like a pretty low-level advisor in Donald Trump's campaign and the allegation was that the Russians had offered him a huge stake in like one of their biggest energy companies if he could get Donald Trump to remove all of the sanctions That we had at the time on Russia,
00:25:07.000which on the face of it made no sense, because he's like a low-level advisor on the campaign.
00:25:17.000No, this was based off the Steele dossier, which was opposition research that Hillary Clinton had funded, where she hired this British spy to go, like, dig up dirt on Donald Trump.
00:25:29.000And they put together this whole dossier alleging that he was...
00:25:34.000You know, he had been in bed with Russia for years.
00:25:52.000But just to understand, like, the idea of trying to bribe a low-level advisor on a campaign to then somehow take over the administration once he got...
00:26:02.000It'd be like on the level of if someone was like, we're going to bribe the door guy at the mothership to make sure that the Joe Rogan experience only talks about these subjects.
00:26:14.000I mean, even though there's a loose connection between you and the guy who works at the mother, the idea that he would ever then be able to come in and take over the show and control, it just made no sense.
00:26:24.000But we now know that the CIA told the FBI... That Carter Page was a good guy, that he was a CIA informant.
00:26:35.000So they told the FBI, they're like, no, no, no, he's not a spy.
00:27:11.000And he came right back to us and told us about it.
00:27:14.000And then when they were putting in the application for the FISA warrant, the FBI said he was approached by these Russians and the CIA confirmed it.
00:27:23.000So they said that the CIA confirmed that he was approached by these guys, but they left out the part that the CIA said, and he came right back to us and told us about it.
00:27:32.000So that one guy was the only guy who got charged.
00:28:31.000Why would any of this be coming down right now?
00:28:34.000All those other people in January 6th, they got charged and arrested immediately.
00:28:38.000We were talking about that Vivek interview, which is very interesting, where this woman on CNN, that same woman that did the town hall thing with Trump, What's her name?
00:29:14.000What I said was that the government lied to us about 9-11 because the Saudis were involved and they knew they were involved.
00:29:23.000And she kind of glossed over that and was saying something in the lines of, don't you think that you saying that the government lied to us about 9-11 supports baseless conspiracy theories, you know, like supports the idea that the government orchestrated,
00:30:33.000And by the way, continued propping up that regime to this day, continued like funding and doing business with the same government that had high level people involved in the attack.
00:30:45.000And they knew it and suppressed that from the American people because it would have been, you know, if you put yourself back in that time.
00:30:51.000It would have been such an outrage if Americans had known.
00:30:55.000And in fact, one of the first things George W. Bush did immediately after 9-11, even when all the flights were grounded, was get high-level Saudis out of the country.
00:31:17.000They keep going back to the company narrative.
00:31:21.000What's the ideological left narrative?
00:31:24.000The left narrative is anybody who questions 9-11 is a nutter.
00:31:27.000And you're a nutter and you're trying to run for president.
00:31:30.000And he does a very good job of she repeats the question, he repeats the answer.
00:31:36.000She repeats the question, he repeats the answer.
00:31:39.000And she's trying to catch him in this, and it's like, see if you can find that.
00:31:43.000So I'm looking it up, and what I'm seeing online is that the story has turned a little bit, that The Atlantic has posted audio from the interview.
00:31:57.000Yeah, it says they released it, and it says The Atlantic did not put any words in his mouth.
00:32:01.000I'm trying to find the audio so we could play it, but it's behind a page.
00:32:03.000So he was saying that they put words in his mouth?
00:32:06.000Yeah, but then what I'm also seeing then in the Daily Beast article is that despite them releasing the audio, it says Ramaswamy's campaign somehow declared victory.
00:32:19.000So I guess they're saying he said it, but his team is also saying it's still been taken out of contact.
00:32:23.000But what are they claiming that he said?
00:32:25.000I'm trying to find the transcript, and I haven't gotten that far.
00:33:27.000Why can the government not be transparent about something that we're using, terrorists, or the kind of tax-accused by terrorists, if we find that there are hundreds of our own in the ranks of the day that they were I think it is legitimate to say how many police,
00:33:49.000how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the twin towers.
00:33:52.000Like, I think we want, maybe the answer is zero.
00:33:54.000Probably a zero, for all I know, right?
00:33:56.000I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.
00:33:58.000But if we're doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9-11, we have a 9-11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to.
00:34:58.000In an email to CNN after that audio was published, his spokesperson said, The audio clearly demonstrates that Vivek was taken badly out of context, and even this small snippet proves that.
00:35:10.000We continue to encourage The Atlantic to release more of the recording rather than their carefully selected snippet so that the full context and reality is exposed.
00:35:19.000I should note that spokesperson did not explain how he was supposedly taken out of context.
00:35:25.000The reality is that Vivek Ramaswamy is running to be president of the United States.
00:35:29.000He will be on that debate stage tomorrow night.
00:35:32.000And he says this is a central message to his campaign.
00:35:37.000This campaign is founded on the truth.
00:37:02.000Look, Ray, the FBI director, was asked, and one of the other top-level Justice Department people were both asked when testifying before Congress whether there were any federal agents or assets involved in January 6th,
00:37:37.000If you were running the FBI and there was something like this march on the Capitol and a bunch of people were saying that the election was rigged and people were storming the Capitol or they're going to be on the lawn outside of the Capitol.
00:37:56.000Wouldn't you want to have federal agents out there?
00:38:34.000So if there were just FBI agents embedded in some type of protest, To, you know, watch out for criminal activity, and then if there was some, like, arrest the person or whatever, that would be reasonable.
00:38:48.000But if they're in there to try to provoke criminal activity, that's a whole different story.
00:38:54.000And if the case was that they were sending the FBI in there because they were worried about violence and they wanted to, then you'd also wonder why was it that the Capitol Police didn't get the reinforcements that they had requested?
00:39:05.000And, like, why is it that there were these other two...
00:39:27.000You know, CNN, they do this thing where as soon as you start, like, inquiring about these things, they try to smear you as, like, this is, you know, you're some type of conspiracy nut or something like that.
00:39:41.000And the funny thing about it is that, like, look, we all know that elites conspire, and, you know, intelligence agencies conspire, and they've carried out tons of operations throughout the years.
00:41:27.000There was no threat that this was going to happen until you guys lured this really sad, in most cases not very bright, guys into doing this thing and then arrest them.
00:41:51.000The purpose of it was to kind of paint this picture of the anti-lockdowners as being this violent threat and so that this would then hurt Donald Trump in his election campaign.
00:42:02.000So it's not just like that they were just doing this.
00:42:04.000It's like they were doing this with a political, like, motivation.
00:42:08.000This is what's so, like, this is the thing that's so creepy and what so many people are waking up to.
00:42:13.000As part of the reason, look, man, this is the reason why that Richmond, North Richmond song blew up so big.
00:42:19.000Because so many people today, and it's kind of what's exciting about the current moment, it's also a little bit scary, but that so many people are just kind of waking up To how corrupt this whole thing is.
00:43:33.000Like, you're telling me we found out that there was a ring of, like, a child rape ring with the most powerful people all involved in it, and you're not just demanding every day that we get to the bottom of this?
00:43:47.000And in fact, we know that that one ABC reporter had the story suppressed.
00:43:52.000When she first broke the Epstein story, right?
00:43:54.000She was on a hot mic talking about it.
00:44:40.000The new, now the CDC, or the FDA rather, can't stop doctors from approving ivermectin for COVID. There's this giant wave of COVID right now that's happening, supposedly.
00:44:57.000Well, according to Alex Jones, he has information.
00:45:02.000He said he talked to, like, high-level NSA guys.
00:45:06.000I'm sorry, TSA guys, who told him that, like, masks in airports are coming back and that there's going to be a big ramp up in COVID. And I was really hoping this would fall into the Alex Jones wasn't right category.
00:46:43.000But there's enough people out there that are just headline readers that are going to listen to that, that haven't had these discussions, that don't know this information, that are just going to take it.
00:46:54.000Well, yes, but there are some things that are encouraging.
00:46:57.000You know, to me, it's very encouraging how much noise RFK has been making and that he's been like, even within the Democratic primary, he was polling at like 20% in several polls amongst Democratic voters.
00:47:10.000And if you look at the rate of the vaccination rate, It was the initial double jab and the Johnson& Johnson, like when they initially rolled it out, they got up to, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of like 75% of the adult population got it.
00:47:25.000And this was with a lot of coercion, you know, not just like people just got it.
00:47:29.000It's like a lot of people had their jobs threatened if they didn't get it and had pressure from family and stuff like that.
00:47:35.000And then if you look at the boost, the rate, the first booster, it was like half of that.
00:47:41.000And then the next round of boosters, it was, like, way lower than that.
00:47:44.000So most of the American people maybe did get the original double jab, but they have not been buying into this, like, booster regime of, like, I have to keep getting more and more.
00:47:55.000Well, they all probably got COVID, too.
00:49:13.000And then as soon as the vaccine, you know, as soon as Trump lost the election, as soon as that the vaccine rollout started again, it's just like the thing in Ukraine.
00:49:23.000You know, it's just like the thing with Al Qaeda.
00:49:27.000All that stuff we were admitting five minutes ago, you're a crazy person if you say that now, because now there's the new agenda.
00:49:32.000And this is how the propaganda goes from that.
00:49:34.000I will say, man, I think that if they're going to do this, if they're going to bring back mask mandates, if businesses are doing this, I... I think, like, the thing that happened with Budweiser,
00:49:50.000or with Bud Light, when they put that Dylan fella on the can, and, like, we need that times ten.
00:50:01.000Like, I completely support people's right to stop drinking Bud Light if they don't like what's on the can, you know?
00:50:06.000You don't have to have a cultural thing forced on you that you don't agree with.
00:50:08.000But, like, there's got to be some type of response where, like, if you're bringing back mask mandates, we're boycotting your business.
00:50:14.000Like, we're just not, we're not fucking with people who are going to try to force this all down our throat again.
00:50:33.000Like, if you're very sick and you're concerned about COVID, then all right, fine.
00:50:39.000You can, like, kind of isolate yourself.
00:50:41.000But let the rest of people, like, live a life and go back to all this insanity again.
00:50:47.000It's crazy because it's once people have accepted it and once it's a thing that happened, it can happen again.
00:50:53.000And it seems like they kind of want it to happen again.
00:50:55.000At least some people want it to happen again, regardless of what the information is about the effectiveness of masks, regardless of the very low fatality rate for this new strain.
00:51:07.000Regardless of that, they still want to go back to where we were.
00:51:10.000And they want to be able to say that they did the right thing, that they protected people.
00:51:15.000Yeah, it's so weird how into it a lot of people got with the COVID thing.
00:51:20.000Like, they got into being on lockdown.
00:51:22.000They also got into enforcing other people's, you know, people's, like, when you have a bunch, like, one of the things in LA they were doing, they were turning people in for having parties.
00:51:52.000You get people that act like prison guards.
00:51:57.000You know, they're a little special because they can catch you doing the thing that you shouldn't be doing that everybody should be fighting back against.
00:52:05.000Yeah, well, it's like, you know there were like the Milgram experiments where they get people to zap them until they think they're dead?
00:52:12.000Because the person in a white coat tells you to keep zapping them and they're screaming in pain and most of the people would just keep doing it even after it looked like they were dead.
00:52:19.000And that kind of gave this, like, image of, like, oh, so this is, like, kind of how authoritarianism works.
00:52:24.000Like, there's this authority figure, and then people just comply, and they just follow it, and they just follow orders.
00:52:31.000And, like, there's an element of that, obviously.
00:52:33.000I mean, they demonstrated that in the experiment.
00:52:35.000But then it's like, it's almost more like the Stanford prison experiments.
00:52:38.000That's really more the complete picture.
00:52:40.000That like, everyone gets into their little role.
00:53:06.000It's kind of like, that's the real sick thing.
00:53:08.000When your neighbor, just little things, man.
00:53:10.000I remember in April of 2020, going to visit my mother, and being in her apartment building, and her, like, one of the neighbors, this kind of like busybody, Like,
00:53:31.000I'm bringing my kids to see their grandmother.
00:53:34.000And I'm not doing that because you're weird.
00:54:15.000It's just such a weird thing that people bought into.
00:54:18.000Is there any compelling data that masks have an effect?
00:54:22.000They had a couple studies that seemed to indicate it, but then when they kind of broke it down, it's like, oh no, they really manipulated these studies and they left out all of these other areas that kind of showed that it didn't work.
00:54:34.000I don't remember right offhand, but there were major studies that indicated that the mask compliance rate And the spread of COVID had no correlation to each other.
00:55:04.000But there was a major study that came out that also showed that there was no correlation in the lockdown, in areas that locked down versus areas that didn't lock down.
00:55:19.000You kind of can't really stop that from happening.
00:55:22.000And the best thing to fight against it has always been, this has now been proven empirically, but would have been easy for anyone to figure out before, is natural immunity.
00:55:31.000That's the best protection you have, is if you can get COVID and get over it.
00:55:36.000And they were trying to say that natural immunity was a myth.
00:56:36.000And it's like, it's crazy because it's only a few years later, but this is how this stuff happens.
00:56:41.000You know, even like we were just talking about how like, oh, that old thing that we used to admit, you're not allowed to admit that anymore.
00:56:46.000But it's almost like you give a pass for all of these things.
00:56:49.000Like, do you remember that like, oh yeah, they just made...
00:56:53.000Like, they made Cuomo the hero governor, and every day he's on TV, and what, he won a fucking Emmy, or whatever, for it.
00:57:02.000People are saying they were Cuomo-sexual.
00:57:05.000And they just try, oh, he's so presidential, Donald Trump is leading, he's leading, then two seconds later, he's out.
00:57:11.000But they let his brother interview him every day on CNN. Like, that they wouldn't even pretend there's a journalistic integrity issue with having the brother Of the governor sit down and just congratulate him every night?
00:57:25.000While we're in the middle of the biggest crisis, that's what you do to hold power accountable?
00:57:31.000You let him sit down with his brother every day?
00:57:33.000I can't believe, even as corrupt as I know all the corporate press institutions are, I can't believe there wasn't someone there who goes, this is too much of the appearance of, like, we're not even pretending.
00:57:46.000Let's have someone else interview him.
00:57:48.000Let Don Lemon do the Andrew Cuomo stuff, you know?
00:58:29.000There was a lot of people that were saying that guy could be the big guy to challenge Trump.
00:58:35.000I don't think it was the nursing home thing.
00:58:37.000I don't think it was any of his track record on COVID. Newsom has a terrible track record on COVID, but they're not turning on him over that.
00:58:45.000I think it's like pissed off some powerful people behind the scenes some shit like that happened because it was a concerted effort like he was being propped up like the next guy and then they were like we're pulling the floor out from underneath this guy just like that.
00:58:58.000It was crazy during COVID how many of those things happened where like you know they'd go like with very little time in between they'd go from being like okay like you can't leave your house they were like demonizing kids who were on the beach You know,
00:59:14.000being like, look how reckless these kids are being.
00:59:16.000They're out on the beach with their friends.
00:59:18.000You know, MSNBC's like, this guy's not wearing a mask.
00:59:21.000You know, like demonizing anyone who went outside.
00:59:23.000And then it was like, well, if you're protesting for Black Lives Matter, that's totally cool.
01:00:26.000And it's not exactly clear, I guess, because the deal hasn't been made, but it was something like a $200,000 bond is what they were saying.
01:00:34.000And then it looks like he's going to have to actually go into the jail.
01:02:28.000But what's particularly interesting in this case is that this just smells a lot like election interference, because from the political standpoint, if this is the biggest national story, Of a presidential race.
01:02:40.000And Joe Biden can say whatever he wants about it, or the Democrats can say whatever they want about it, but Trump isn't allowed to defend himself?
01:02:47.000Like, he's not allowed to comment on it at all?
01:02:49.000That seems like you're rigging the system.
01:02:51.000It sounds like the conditions are more about intimidating witnesses and stuff like that.
01:02:58.000And I don't think we know all the details of this, but what the judge says was that you can't post anything that would be intimidating about this case.
01:03:07.000But where exactly do they draw those lines is a question.
01:03:12.000Limited to posts on social media, reposts on social media.
01:03:16.000A post made by another individual on social media.
01:03:23.000As part of the conditions, Trump will be prohibited from doing anything a judge could interpret as an effort to intimidate co-defendants or witnesses, or otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.
01:03:37.000You know, what it reminds me of is when when Mueller finally released that report where he basically said they had no evidence of any conspiracy with Russia.
01:03:48.000But then as like a to throw a bone to the establishment to not make them look as bad as it made them look.
01:03:54.000He said, well, well, here's 10 instances where he could have maybe obstructed justice.
01:04:00.000Like, he didn't, like, say he did, but he was like, here's the instances, and one of them was, and I shit you not, you can go read the report, one of the ten instances was that he kept referring to it as a witch hunt.
01:04:11.000So, like, the fact that he kept saying, this is bullshit, like, I'm not involved in a conspiracy with Russia, and everybody knows that, that was him potentially obstructing the investigation.
01:04:25.000So it's like, if I say, you murdered somebody, and you go, that's absolute bullshit, I didn't murder anybody, and you're like, you're right, you didn't, but you just obstructed justice.
01:04:36.000We did make that up about the murder thing.
01:04:38.000But when you said you didn't murder anybody, you know, they said firing Comey was one of them because he fired the FBI, the director of the FBI who was investigating him at the time.
01:04:47.000But then Comey said that he told Trump he wasn't investigating him.
01:04:51.000Maybe Trump figured that out, but he had told the president he wasn't investigating him, even though he was, and Trump fired him.
01:05:18.000The first time they meet, Comey presents him with the Steele dossier.
01:05:23.000And he goes, you know, just wanted to let you know we have all of this information and all the stuff, the P, you know, and all the being involved with Russia and all of this.
01:05:33.000And Trump's response to this, at least according to Bob Woodward, was, he goes, take everything you need.
01:05:43.000You have access to all my campaign files, everything.
01:05:55.000I don't know exactly what the details of that meeting were, but to me, what it read like...
01:06:03.000You know, like what J. Edgar Hoover, who was the longtime head of the FBI, what he used to do was like, so JFK wins the presidency, Bobby Kennedy, RFK Jr.'s father,
01:06:20.000He comes into a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, and J. Edgar Hoover goes, hey, listen, just want to keep you up to date on some intelligence.
01:06:28.000I have these pictures of all of the chicks who your brother's sleeping with.
01:07:43.000So, after they fired the FBI director, He said this on a 60 Minutes interview.
01:07:51.000He said that basically they all sat around, all the top people at the Justice Department, and they considered invoking the 25th Amendment, which is getting enough of the cabinet to declare that the president is unfit to serve, and removing him, and that that's what they wanted to do.
01:08:06.000And he said that they basically realized they couldn't get enough of the cabinet, like they couldn't get enough people to agree to that, and so they settled on Mueller.
01:08:16.000They settled on setting up a special investigator.
01:08:20.000And so that's how they got to the whole investigation.
01:08:23.000How much money did they spend on this?
01:08:32.000And the crazy thing about it, too, is that...
01:08:35.000So, Mueller investigates for over two years, through the midterm elections, and this is the time when all you heard on the news every single day was, Trump-Russia collusion, Trump-Russia collusion.
01:08:45.000Let's bring on this next guest who says that Donald Trump may have been a Russian spy since 1986. And all of these different things, you know, BuzzFeed publishes the Steele dossier, they're all citing it and they're all talking about it.
01:08:58.000And then, I don't know if you remember this, at the very end, it's like the last month, Buzzfeed had these two reporters who ran a story that said that they had been shown proof that Donald Trump instructed Cohen,
01:09:56.000Yet they allowed for two plus years every pundit in the world to speculate about whether the sitting president of the United States had committed high treason.
01:10:09.000And he never came out and said, hey guys, that's not where our investigation is pointed at all.
01:10:17.000He let everybody say that through the midterm elections and just through the first two-plus years of Trump's administration.
01:10:25.000Just let that hang over him, even though, clearly, he never had any evidence pointing in that direction at all, which is insane.
01:10:32.000It was like the biggest story in the history of the United States of America, if it was true, that the sitting president is actually a Russian agent.
01:10:40.000Like, there's nothing bigger than that ever.
01:12:29.000The how you get it done part is much more challenging.
01:12:34.000I'd say if you were bit by a venomous snake and whatever the antidote or something is at the top of a really steep hill, and you're like, okay, well the answer is we have to get that and inject it in you.
01:12:50.000But then the real problem becomes like, okay, but how the hell do we get up this hill?
01:12:54.000So, like, the answer is that all these agencies need to be abolished.
01:12:57.000The answer is that, like, you need a drastic reduction in the size and scope of government.
01:13:02.000You need to, like, abolish all of these three-letter organizations and just start over.
01:13:08.000Start over with the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
01:13:11.000That would be, like, that would be about as close to perfect as you could get.
01:13:18.000What you're dealing with is the most powerful entrenched interests in the history of the world.
01:13:25.000The American federal government is the biggest gravy train in the history of the world, the biggest organization in the history of the world, by every metric.
01:14:06.000Like, you need the elites who will actually, like, put their power and influence and wealth behind this kind of, you know, type of movement to try to...
01:14:16.000Look, I mean, what really has to happen is that, and I think to some degree this is what happened with Elon Musk taking over Twitter, you know?
01:14:22.000It's that type of thing where you have a real elite, like a natural elite, too.
01:14:27.000Somebody who wasn't just, like, picked, didn't just win an election, but, like, built something insane, you know?
01:14:34.000I think, at least it seems to me, I don't know Elon Musk at all, but it seems to me like he had a real belief that he's like, we're gonna destroy this country.
01:14:44.000Like, if we don't have kind of some type of free speech platform, this is gonna be our demise.
01:14:50.000And I think you need enough powerful people to realize that, like, you want to keep this thing together, man, because you're doing great.
01:14:58.000Like, this isn't good for you if this whole country falls apart.
01:15:01.000And we're dangerously, like, we're getting dangerously close to that point.
01:15:04.000And, look man, when it comes down to it, it's like, the reason why America is the most successful country that's ever existed is because it was the freest country.
01:15:49.000You know, we were the best at that, at restraining government, having free markets and individual liberty.
01:15:54.000And we need to move back toward that, or we're going to die.
01:15:58.000But the problem with that is that you're trying to move back toward that against people that have This desire for self-preservation and they have their own jobs and they have their position of power that they don't want to relinquish because what would they do now?
01:16:41.000Well, for the first part of it, you know, and, like, I don't have all the answers to this, but I know that, like, when the Soviet Union fell, there were people, I think to this day, but there were, like, people, like, communist, like, government officials who are, like, still collecting pensions.
01:16:57.000Like, they just kind of, like, paid them off.
01:16:59.000Almost like, listen, your services here are no longer needed.
01:17:28.000I think in an ideal world, it would all be kind of like a voluntary private type system.
01:17:33.000But in practical terms, I think that, look, like, it's not as if before the CIA was created, that was just like, the president was just like, we have no intelligence, we're just flying completely blind, you know?
01:17:47.000And, like, what it was created to be was essentially like a newspaper for the president.
01:17:52.000Like, you're supposed to basically deliver, here's the news the president needs to know, like the real important news.
01:17:57.000And what it's become is like a paramilitary organization that starts wars and colored revolutions all around the world, lies the American people into conflict, spies on our political leaders and presidential campaigns and all of this stuff,
01:18:15.000and you're like, yeah, this just became something it wasn't ever supposed to be.
01:18:18.000It was never supposed to be this thing.
01:18:20.000And now you're really the guy's Who are in control.
01:18:24.000I think since Kennedy, that's kind of been true.
01:18:27.000That's really who's running the show here.
01:20:15.000I mean, I don't know even the exact numbers right now.
01:20:18.000I think during COVID, I think we topped off at $7 trillion in total federal spending.
01:20:23.000You have an organization that spends $7 trillion It's like, that is so much power that, of course, everybody's gonna be fighting for who gets to wield that power.
01:20:36.000It's like the Lord of the Rings thing.
01:20:37.000The only answer here is to throw it away.
01:20:58.000You know, that's even like the most, the nicest, you know, like well-meaning democratic socialist type people who some of them I like personally, you know, like I like Ben Burgess.
01:21:11.000Like I don't, there's not one of them who I think would actually be able to wield it.
01:21:15.000Not only that, you're going to have people in your ear, and you're going to have people that supported your campaign, and there's going to have people that you've aligned with, and you've made certain deals with.
01:21:28.000And it's like, look, and there's evil people out there in the world, and they're going to be attracted to that level of power.
01:21:33.000There's legitimately people out there in the world that will make decisions that will make them money and get people killed, and they sleep like a baby.
01:21:41.000That's hard for people to accept if you don't do that.
01:21:44.000If that's not your life, it's hard for people to accept.
01:21:51.000And when you're not a predator, it is...
01:21:53.000We all do this thing where we project ourselves onto others.
01:21:57.000And I think that's the essence of how you have empathy.
01:22:00.000You know, like you put yourself in their shoes and think like, oh, well, I wouldn't want that to happen to me, so I won't do that to someone else.
01:22:05.000But the flaw in that is that, yeah, it's very hard For many of us to actually put ourselves in the position of some, you know, like to think that like, oh, there's someone else who's kind of like me in some ways, but will also like kill children and not lose a wink of sleep over it.
01:22:38.000And even though you know there's like a tally, and you know that there's...
01:22:41.000Do you ever, did I ever mention, I probably have, one of the times I've been on, but that Madeleine Albright quote, when she was interviewed on 60 Minutes, and there was this UN report, this was during the Clinton years, and there was a UN report that said that the,
01:22:57.000because at the time, like the first Persian Gulf War was over, but Bill Clinton had this like massive sanction regime against Iraq, and they had a total blockade around the country, and massive bombing campaigns, and this is one of the things Osama bin Laden Bin Laden cited in his declaration of war against the U.S.,
01:24:53.000It's okay that they killed innocent people.
01:24:54.000It's just like, if you want to understand what's going on here, you have to be able to put yourself In the perspective, ask yourself the question, how would we feel if this was done to us?
01:25:03.000That was my central point with all of the stuff with the war in Ukraine.
01:25:08.000So I just go like, okay, you're saying Vladimir Putin wasn't provoked, but what if...
01:25:13.000What if the Warsaw Pact never dissolved?
01:26:01.000You can't only look at things from the perspective of your country.
01:26:03.000You have to look at things from the perspective of people outside.
01:26:06.000Well, that's the real problem with getting your news from television.
01:26:10.000Because these are very nuanced subjects that require a lot of information to really get a full...
01:26:17.000Picture of what exactly caused this conflict to jump off in the first place and Most people aren't getting that.
01:26:25.000It's just it's a failure of mainstream news But what's cool is like, you know We are living in this kind of through this revolution of all of that stuff where I genuinely don't know how much longer The the corporate press will even be around if it keeps going in this direction I mean it is really wild and it's been very interesting to see a Yeah.
01:27:10.000If the goal is to tell people your ideas and to educate people about what's going on, it's so much better to have An hours-long discussion than to go do a seven-minute segment on CNN. It's kind of ridiculous to ever think you could talk about any complex idea that way.
01:28:11.000But it was pretty interesting to watch the back and forth and how defensive he got.
01:28:20.000At points where Crystal was kind of asking questions that, many of which I thought were very fair questions.
01:28:25.000I mean, I thought part of what she was saying was insane, where she was bragging about how great the government did during COVID and all that stuff, and I completely disagree with her on that.
01:28:33.000But she was asking, like, very fair questions.
01:28:37.000And the one that was the most interesting to me was to get a guy like Chris Matthews, who was really one of the staples of cable news, throughout this whole kind of You know, the last, whatever, 15, 20 years, maybe even more than that.
01:28:52.000And to ask him, like, look, you clearly are like a big critic of the populist movements that have arose.
01:28:59.000Like, he was a big critic of Bernie Sanders, a big critic of Donald Trump, you know?
01:29:05.000Any failures on your part that led to this?
01:29:10.000Like, do you get why people are so upset with the establishment Democrats and Republicans?
01:29:16.000And he seemed to have, like, no answer to it.
01:29:19.000And that's just – it's one of those things where, like, I think so many people in that game in the corporate press world, it's like – Whatever they'd be criticizing you or someone like that, and you're like, but do you guys ever just sit and ask yourselves,
01:29:35.000well, why is it that the people abandoned you?
01:29:39.000And went over to this other, you know, like, in this completely other direction.
01:29:45.000Wouldn't you at some point, I remember Tucker Carlson said this once, I think it was in his book, Ship of Fools, but he was like, like, if your wife leaves you for, like, a guy, you know what I mean?
01:29:54.000Like, your wife leaves you for some guy, like, at first, yeah, you're like, oh, screw her, you know, or whatever.
01:30:01.000But, like, at some point, you might, like, reflect on that and go, like, well, what happened there?
01:30:10.000And like, there seems like there's none of that with them.
01:30:13.000And it's fairly easy to figure out, which is like what we've been talking about.
01:30:17.000It's like, oh yeah, the system was so incredibly corrupt.
01:30:20.000And it was screwing over regular people.
01:30:23.000Well, if you're someone whose business is mainstream news right now, especially like cable news, You've got to be concerned with the limitations of your platform.
01:30:33.000Because one of the things with people having access to instantaneous video now, whether it's YouTube or Rumble or whatever it is, is like you can instantly get things on your phone.
01:30:45.000There's no need to be sitting through all these commercials.
01:30:48.000There's no need to be tuning in at a specific time.
01:30:51.000There's no need to have something like, unless you have TiVo or whatever it is, a DVR, you can't pause it and rewind it.
01:33:39.000And then the response to that from Barack Obama when he got in was what they called the Obama recovery.
01:33:45.000But the Obama recovery was basically created by lowering interest rates to zero and jacking up government spending to the highest levels it had ever been.
01:35:15.000It's not such a mystery why they went for that guy and why they rejected the entire corporate media who had been basically lying to them for the last 20 years.
01:35:26.000It was almost like Crystal was asking Chris Matthews, do you have...
01:35:36.000And he was just completely shut off to even entertaining.
01:35:40.000What failures of the establishment might have led to this new populist moment that we live in today?
01:35:46.000Well, they had a big moment where she was talking about taxing the rich.
01:35:50.000Yeah, I think she was wrong about all that stuff.
01:35:52.000Yeah, she was talking about how, you know, during the pandemic, certain acts were passed that essentially eliminated childhood famine, right?
01:36:07.000Yeah, she was making some point about the child tax credit or something like that.
01:36:13.000The problem with all that, and I think Crystal Ball and a lot of the left-wingers are just out to lunch on this stuff, is that, like, listen, during COVID, 2020 and 2021 were, like, the absolute worst years of It's not like the government did something that really made everything wonderful.
01:36:32.000And in the midst of that, what the government really did in its response was give crumbs to people while giving trillions to, like, big corporations and big banks.
01:36:47.000The trillions and trillions of dollars that they spent that year, the vast majority of it went to big business.
01:36:53.000So, this idea that, like, and of course, you know, she can talk about the spending and how, like, okay, you can say the spending, well, it helped for the people who got the money, and it's like, yes, and then they had to feel the inflation from all of that.
01:37:36.000Well, listen, I mean, that doesn't solve the problem that people can't work.
01:37:39.000But for working people, that would give them enormous relief.
01:37:42.000And then, you know, of course, all these other things is like, it's a result of the lockdowns that now you've kicked all of these people out of work.
01:37:49.000So now the argument is like, well, we have to give them something.
01:37:51.000But the real answer there is that we never needed to do the lockdowns to begin with.
01:37:55.000The real problem is that it really reinforces the tinfoil hat brigade because then you say they're trying to weaken America and they're doing this on purpose.
01:38:31.000And then, like, it won't, there won't be so much traction for conspiracy theorists, which I will admit, sometimes get pretty nutty, and you're like, yeah, I don't think you can really prove any of that.
01:38:42.000But I understand why when the government is so corrupt and they lie so much and they screw over average Americans so much It leads to an environment where conspiracies spread.
01:38:56.000And then the other thing is that there are a lot of really legitimate conspiracies that really are conspiracies.
01:39:01.000I mean, it's pretty clear that there was...
01:39:15.000And so, you know, again, it's like my, you know, analogy of like, it's like if I heard Sam Harris said recently on a podcast that he said something, he goes, and he was being critical of you and RFK, I think,
01:39:34.000And he said, he goes, well, these guys are over here talking about how bad the mRNA vaccine is, how bad COVID restrictions are, but I'm trying to sail where I understand that we're losing trust in these institutions, but we also need institutions that we can trust.
01:39:50.000And my thing is almost it's like the analogy of the if you're cheating on your wife and your wife catches you cheating on her and then you go, you know, your response is like, you know, the real problem here is that there's not trust in this marriage and we need a marriage with trust.
01:40:20.000That'd be great if during a pandemic there were a bunch of medical experts who could get us accurate information, be honest, and spread that information around.
01:41:45.000Exposed a lot in people that they don't want to admit it exposed them because they keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into these holes trying to find ways that they were right.
01:41:57.000There's so many people that are just trying to reinforce with their previous statements regardless of whether or not they're easily disproven now at this point.
01:42:29.000Like, Fauci ain't saying that anymore.
01:42:30.000Even he knows, like, we've abandoned that talking point.
01:42:33.000But then people, you hear it enough and they believe it.
01:42:36.000And that's one of the things with all this stuff, it's part of how propaganda works, I guess like the big lie type deal, that if you just repeat something often enough, it does stick with a lot of people.
01:42:48.000There's a certain percentage who it's just like, yeah, but I heard that a lot, so there must be something to it.
01:42:54.000And it's a disturbing amount of smart people.
01:42:57.000Smart people that are just unwilling to go outside the boundaries of the ideology.
01:43:02.000There's a thing that you're supposed to say, and they say it so you don't get attacked, and everybody's like, yeah, thanks for saying that.
01:43:09.000Yes, and then there's also a weird reaction.
01:43:11.000It's like people get into binary thinking a lot.
01:43:14.000They want to put everything into a neat box.
01:43:16.000I remember I tweeted something about Sam Harris when he had that clip, And just the amount of responses I get, people who are agreeing with me, but they'll say things like, they're like, this guy is such an idiot.
01:44:27.000And that you have to recognize when you're holding on to ideas because you have made this connection that you have said this thing and this thing is a part of you.
01:44:39.000And if you say that this thing is incorrect, then you failed.
01:44:42.000And you're wrong and you're not as good as you were.
01:44:46.000So you try to find a way where you were good.
01:44:48.000And you try to find a way where you can kind of manipulate language and maybe even...
01:44:55.000Maybe even fucking change the information.
01:44:58.000Like, let's imagine if the information was different.
01:45:01.000Let's imagine if 10% of the people died.
01:45:22.000Let's look at what actually happened and you should be apologizing.
01:45:26.000Yeah, it's like we could play your imagination game in a few minutes, but first let's just talk about what really happened and who was right and who was wrong.
01:45:32.000And how are you discounting this 40% increase in all-cause mortality?
01:46:46.000And look, by the way, I'm not even, like, ruling out the fact that, okay, I think alcohol consumption maybe went up during the lockdowns, and that could be a contributing factor to this.
01:46:53.000But you're telling me the starting point has to be we rule out this brand new, like, medical intervention?
01:49:58.000You should be a good guy and join our team.
01:50:00.000And I had smart people that I respect tell me I should get vaccinated after I got over COVID. I'm like, are you not paying attention to any of this?
01:50:41.000I think we mentioned this before when I was on, but it was one of the episodes that I was on, which back in the height of it, I don't know, like three times ago that I was out here, was the one that went to Fauci, responded to you.
01:50:57.000And the thing that they found appalling was that your advice to young people was to be really healthy.
01:51:03.000You were like, listen, get yourself in really good shape.
01:51:51.000And that's not like, oh, he got it wrong.
01:51:53.000There was no scientific evidence to, like, argue that.
01:51:56.000They never even tested it on transmission.
01:51:58.000Not only that, when you go over the trials that they did when they first were investigating the efficacy of this drug, one of the people in the COVID group that got the vaccine died of COVID. So they knew that.
01:52:59.000And he was like one of the loudest anti-lockdown voices back when the lockdown started.
01:53:05.000And did a great job of putting together all the data and all the arguments on how this isn't actually working and it's like an insane policy.
01:53:12.000And then was solid on the vaccine and all that all the way through.
01:55:27.000And it's even worse than just like private businesses because they're private businesses in this heavily corrupted, regulated field.
01:55:35.000So even like down to like certification of need legislation where you kind of have to get approved by other hospitals in order to open a hospital.
01:55:45.000So they like kind of keep their competition out.
01:55:48.000And then they try to make as much money as they can.
01:56:05.000There's all this shit that just makes the whole thing very corrupt.
01:56:08.000And of course, the whole insurance system is very corrupt, where it's this very phony- Market of prices where you're never seeing anything and these prices are marked up super high.
01:56:21.000So the doctors in the hospitals can make money and the insurance companies get reimbursed, but then they charge you it in your premiums.
01:56:27.000So you're totally removed from what the costs of things actually are.
01:56:53.000Financial incentives to get people to take medication that they might not really need and probably shouldn't take.
01:56:58.000And, you know, goddamn, I mean, if nothing else, I really think it's great that RFK is at least, like, getting a conversation started on a lot of this stuff, because it seems like almost nobody else was going to bring up this stuff.
01:57:09.000You know, one of the things that I thought was really interesting about the...
01:57:16.000When you had him on the podcast and that created a huge storm and then there was the thing with the Hotez guy refusing to come on and debate him when you offered it.
01:57:26.000The pot was up to like $2 million or something like that.
02:00:25.000The only people he follows can respond.
02:00:29.000So it's just like he's got this little echo chamber he's got going on in his tweets now.
02:00:36.000Post me inviting him to have a debate with RFK. Dude, the thing that drove me crazy about that was that then he turned it around and started playing the victim and going, you know, like Joe Rogan's led this harassment campaign against me and all these people on Twitter all day are like,
02:00:55.000you know, like I'm being demonized by this whole group.
02:00:57.000And you sit there and you go like, yeah, you know, as an unvaccinated person, I have no idea what that's like.
02:01:01.000I have no idea what it's like for you to like, you know what I'm saying?
02:01:04.000But not only that, it's bullshit because he said I had neo-fascist leanings.
02:01:31.000You're telling me that the guy who is pushing forced vaccinations on behalf of giant private pharmaceutical companies is calling you a neo-fascist?
02:02:12.000It's like, especially when, I mean, the contrast between me and him physically, like someone who really does take care of themselves and then being lectured by someone who doesn't, that the only way around that is vaccines.
02:03:45.000And if you were very old and or very sick, you really did not want to get this thing, especially the early strains of it.
02:03:53.000You really did not want to get this thing.
02:03:56.000And I think that there is an argument that early on, if you were very old and very sick and had never had COVID, that maybe it did make sense for you to get the vaccine.
02:04:10.000I think it did make sense for a lot of people who offered some level of protection initially.
02:04:14.000But there was other things they could have done as well.
02:04:16.000Sure, but just because it makes sense for that one group, you cannot extrapolate from that now that it makes sense for every group.
02:04:24.000And the ones that are the most obvious would be like, if you're like a young, healthy person who's already had COVID. Because in that case, no, it just doesn't make sense for you.
02:04:32.000Not only that, these same people that are pro-vaccine, anti-doing anything else, where is your outrage about this lab leak?
02:04:43.000Where is your outrage about the source of this thing?
02:04:47.000Why are you upset at the people that are getting sick or the people that choose not to do some sort of experimental medical intervention and choose to try to survive it just with natural immunity and do so?
02:05:03.000Where is your outrage about the source of this thing, which is the whole reason it happened in the first place, why people were forced to make these choices to take this experimental vaccine?
02:05:14.000The whole thing was about this one virus that got released that clearly seems to have some connection to gain-of-function research that was funded by Fauci.
02:05:25.000And funded by the NIH. At the very least, the lab was clearly funded by subsidiaries of the NIH. But that's just factually true.
02:05:34.000The lab was funded by subsidiaries of the NIH. And it looks overwhelmingly like that's where...
02:05:43.000It also looks like they tried to cover it up for a very specific reason.
02:05:46.000And they clearly tried to cover it up.
02:05:47.000And Fauci clearly had his guys writing papers about how it couldn't be from the lab that they've all had to kind of retract now because it wasn't actually a scientific argument.
02:05:58.000And that Fauci was the guy who signed off On the exception.
02:06:03.000That Obama had basically banned gain-of-function research and that Dr. Fauci himself was the one who signed off for the first SARS thing for this being an emergency use.
02:06:20.000This kind of explains in a different way why this guy was so willing to be out there saying, nope, this is the only solution, this is the only thing to focus on, this is what we have to do.
02:06:29.000It's like, oh yeah, because you actually have a lot of culpability in this whole thing.
02:07:39.000I mean, there's just, like, clearly that didn't work.
02:07:43.000And, yeah, dude, there's a thing right now, again, I'll mention again, I think this is something that that kind of Richmond, North of Richmond, like, I think this is why that song caught so much fire, is, like, there's a really large group.
02:07:58.000I think we are a majority of the country.
02:08:00.000But a large enough group that you're talking about like at least like a hundred million like people in this country who like just don't want to do this.
02:08:09.000And I mean that in a lot of different We don't want to keep fighting wars everywhere around the world.
02:08:41.000And there's a large percentage of us, and yet it's being forced, you know, like, we're being forced to live in this world.
02:08:50.000And for the most part, I think it's like most of the people in this group just kind of want their freedom.
02:08:59.000We're like, you know, like, I don't care so much what other people, like, if you want to go live a different way, that's fine.
02:09:04.000If you guys want to all go do lockdown somewhere, fine.
02:09:08.000They're just like, don't force us into this.
02:09:11.000And at least what I think is the positive out of that is that, like, There are a lot of people who are really serious about it.
02:09:19.000And I think there was something really positive about the Bud Light boycott thing and the Target boycott thing, where it's like, we have to have some mechanism by which we can actually, like...
02:09:33.000Give a black eye to one of these powerful organizations who are trying to force something onto you that you don't want.
02:10:12.000And he goes, this is a big black eye for you.
02:10:15.000This is really like, oh man, the guy who you look so stupid now.
02:10:20.000Because you told everyone he couldn't possibly win.
02:10:22.000We had this end of the world podcast in 2016 at the Comedy Store, a live podcast during the election.
02:10:28.000And then afterwards, it was a lot of fun.
02:10:32.000But afterwards, we were all in the back bar watching Jake Tapper have to sort of like solemnly declare that Donald Trump looks like he's going to be the president of the United States.
02:10:45.000And it's very clear that they're upset with this, which is interesting because isn't the news supposed to be the news?
02:11:18.000I mean, look, part of the thing is just that Trump was determined.
02:11:21.000It was determined by the powers that be, you know, the corporate media, the deep state, all of the establishment, that he was unacceptable.
02:12:11.000Which is like a really interesting thing to say if you think about it.
02:12:15.000Like you're on the wrong side of history.
02:12:16.000Meaning like it's a guarantee that history is moving in my direction and I'm telling you how you will be judged in the future based off how you feel right now.
02:12:26.000And they kind of have good reason to feel that way because they have been kind of moving in the direction that they want to move in.
02:12:33.000We just had the first black president, and now we will have the first female president, and of course this throwback, bigot, male chauvinist Donald Trump could never possibly win.
02:12:44.000This is what's going to happen in history now, is Hillary Clinton is the next president.
02:13:57.000And it seemed to me like that wasn't really connecting.
02:13:59.000And then, you know, this was before DeSantis got in the race, but it was heavily speculated that he would be getting in the race.
02:14:04.000And, you know, he was like this guy who has a very good record on COVID, at least compared to all the other governors, just about all the other governors.
02:14:11.000And there just seemed to me like there was an opening there.
02:14:23.000Because as soon as they did that, it was like, oh, now it's like it's shifted right back to this, like, look what they're doing to your guy.
02:14:30.000They want to not give you the chance to vote for this guy.
02:14:32.000They're going to weaponize the justice system against this guy because you like him.
02:14:37.000And they're doing it to him because they want to do it to you.
02:14:39.000It kind of gave him, like, all this energy back.
02:14:42.000And so there's a real dynamic to that, where his numbers go up every time a new indictment comes out.
02:14:46.000People aren't buying into it because it's just so obvious that it's politicized.
02:14:54.000There's an interesting thing about the law.
02:14:56.000People have this conception of what the law is, and then there's the reality of it.
02:15:01.000People have this conception of there's a rule written down on a piece of paper, and that's the rule.
02:15:06.000If you break that rule, you broke the law.
02:15:07.000If you don't break that rule, you didn't break the law.
02:15:12.000In the same way, down to the lowest level, if you get pulled over by a cop, there's times where he could give you a ticket or he could let you off with a warning.
02:15:19.000And sometimes it's just how that guy feels.
02:17:43.000But yet Trump didn't give back the classified information quickly enough even after they asked him, oh, he's got to be indicted for that.
02:17:52.000Even though other presidents have done pretty much the same thing, now he's got to be indicted for that.
02:17:56.000The Georgia thing is interesting because he was going to have a press conference where he was going to reveal all of the information that proves that he was telling the truth about the Georgia election being rigged.
02:18:11.000Well, this is a thing that I got to say is a kind of knock on Trump here that, you know, this is a thing his lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who just turned himself into custody today...
02:18:24.000But they would always say this after 2020. We have proof that millions of votes were stolen from Donald Trump and will be releasing this soon, and then it just never kind of comes.
02:18:33.000So I don't know what he thinks he's going to tell us about that.
02:18:36.000The issue with the thing in Georgia, where I will grant there's like a little bit of a gray area.
02:18:42.000And I think that, look, there is a gray area there.
02:18:46.000It's kind of like when they impeached Trump over Ukraine.
02:18:48.000There was like a little bit of a gray area of like what exactly he did.
02:18:52.000It's just that when you look at things of all the crimes that presidents commit, the idea that you go after a president for this, it's so petty compared to these greater crimes.
02:20:27.000At some level, there's probably some campaign workers that have a vested interest in One party or another, like a lot of these people that are working in these election offices are very biased, right?
02:20:41.000They're very politically active and they're probably not agnostic in their political beliefs.
02:20:46.000They're probably pretty steadfast in that this is, whether it's Republicans or Democrats, that this is the guy that I want and if there is a way Where you know you're getting some votes from a particular county that might be blue or a particular county that might be red.
02:21:19.000A sampling of recent election fraud cases from across the United States.
02:21:24.000The Heritage Foundation's election fraud database presents a sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country.
02:21:32.000Each and every one of these cases in this database represents an instance in which a public official, usually a prosecutor, So,
02:22:32.000So then you're left to wonder how many go unproven.
02:22:37.000And we don't know exactly what that answer is, but my thing is more like, I think if you zoom out and you just say, okay, what was the year that was 2020?
02:22:47.000Well, okay, coming into 2020, Donald Trump is the president.
02:23:09.000Is that because of the policies of the Obama administration about they were coming to fruition or is it because of direct changes that he made?
02:23:20.000But I would argue that it was kind of a bubble economy still, and that it was still propped up off very low interest rates and very high government spending, and that you can make things look good on charts when things are like that.
02:23:32.000But I would argue that he hadn't really fixed the major underlying problems in the economy.
02:23:51.000But you have, that's the starting point of 2020. Donald Trump bragging, you know, he'd brag about the lowest African-American unemployment, the lowest Latino unemployment, and how great the economy was, and how he's doing all these great things.
02:24:03.000He was poised to have an excellent shot at being re-elected.
02:24:07.000And then you have The economy destroyed by government imposition.
02:24:14.000Even if you think the lockdowns were the right things to do, the fact is that state governors decided we're tanking our economy, like we're closing down our economy.
02:24:25.000And then you had a summer full of the biggest riots of my lifetime, which were sponsored not only Financially, where you had big, powerful groups paying bail for rioters to get out of jail, but also just backed,
02:24:42.000completely backed by the entire corporate press.
02:24:44.000You know, this is the voice of the unheard, fiery but mostly peaceful, just making every excuse for these rioters going on in almost every major city across the country.
02:24:54.000During this whole time, anybody who wanted to speak out against this...
02:25:33.000So in this like revolutionary year, we're overhauling how we do everything.
02:25:39.000And then you have the thing with the Hunter Biden laptop story being censored.
02:25:42.000And then the result is that Joe Biden wins the election.
02:25:47.000Given all of those factors, there's just no conceivable way that an overwhelming majority of Trump voters weren't going to feel like this thing was stolen.
02:26:19.000And the problem, and the thing, and I think we're past the point of no return on this, for better or for worse, is that even if you think Donald Trump committed all of these crimes, and that it's right for them to bring down all these indictments, at least acknowledge that this is...
02:26:34.000It's kind of over for the right half of America to ever believe in this process again.
02:26:39.000Because the way they're going to look at this is like, oh look, you wouldn't give them a fair shot again.
02:26:44.000Once again, you wouldn't just let him have a fair shot.
02:26:47.000You wouldn't just let the American people vote.
02:26:50.000If you believed in democracy, if you believe in this country, if you believe in trying to unite us in any way, wouldn't it be so obvious at this point?
02:26:57.000It's not as if every one of the charges Donald Trump is being faced with is like some novel legal theory where they're twisting a statute to try to make him guilty of this crime.
02:28:35.000My basic view is that all these politicians are criminals.
02:28:42.000At least I try my best to be like, let me understand what's happening here.
02:28:46.000I'm more or less, I'm on the side of the American people and against the American political class.
02:28:51.000You know, like, that's kind of my bias, if anything.
02:28:54.000But it's just people get so dug in that they're just going to jump to their points that'll shape their narrative.
02:28:59.000The truth is that, look, what happened, like, January 6th, say...
02:29:03.000Look, what's easy to put in the rearview mirror that everybody's kind of forgetting about is that they were boarding up Washington, D.C., and not out of concern of Biden winning.
02:29:28.000You know, and like, so the thing is that, okay, January 6th happened when Biden won, but a whole bunch of rioting and stuff would've happened if Trump had won.
02:29:36.000The truth is that the country was just at a point that no matter what happened there, It was gonna be somewhat ugly.
02:29:45.000If Trump wins in 2024, the way I would legitimately think, if you looked at how it went down, it's almost better for us as the American people to see All the steps that they did to interfere with the public narrative of who he is and the election.
02:30:08.000Whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop thing or the Russia collusion thing, it's almost better for us to see that naked and then also see Them push Biden through.
02:30:19.000Biden get in and see what a disaster it is.
02:30:25.000If I was in Trump's camp, I would say, look, this is, other than the indictments and all this, all the crazy, it's actually better this way.
02:30:32.000Because now people have a real understanding that at least some of the things that he was saying are accurate.
02:30:48.000And people see it, and they know it, and it scares the shit out of them.
02:30:53.000It scares the shit out of them that they just want to continue doing this to us.
02:30:56.000And if they did it with the Hunter Biden laptop thing, what else are they doing it about?
02:31:01.000It's also, and I think for people like us, I think it's...
02:31:07.000It's hard to exactly understand because you're also talking about the Donald Trump supporters are, generally speaking, not our demographic exactly.
02:31:16.000Like, they're a different type of people, you know?
02:31:57.000But these people, the ones who went to the Tea Party, these conservative Republicans, these were the people who carried around pocket constitutions with them.
02:33:02.000So I remember, it always made me laugh, but it was like Sean Hannity said at some point during the Russiagate thing, he goes, for the first time in American history, the FBI has been politicized.
02:33:18.000But that summed up almost the conservative view of it.
02:33:49.000But that's like, it's like when you're, and also you gotta picture this like being in like, you know, like the 1930s or 40s or 50s or whatever, you know, in his whole reign.
02:34:28.000Because you know that you're, like, supposedly exposing that in other people, but you're guilty of it yourself, and you're out there wearing women's shoes.
02:34:58.000And it's interesting, too, because it kind of represents the whole transformation.
02:35:03.000In the 20th century, there's this real transformation of what the United States of America's federal government is.
02:35:11.000And J. Edgar Hoover was there for a really interesting part of that with the FBI, where they start off as just this, like, basically there was no constitutional authority for a federal police.
02:35:20.000So they kind of start off as, like, they're, like, basically have, like, a pad of paper and a pen.
02:35:25.000Like, you can go around and ask questions.
02:36:42.000It's just, like, very free market conditions.
02:36:45.000And it builds up, like, the richest, most powerful government in the history of the world.
02:36:49.000And it's so rich and powerful compared to every other country that then they can kind of get away with, like, all right, well, now we go to the progressive era.
02:36:59.000And the way the income tax was sold in 1913, 1914, 1914, I believe, was they go, well, listen, this is only going to apply to, like, the richest people, and it'll only be, like, 1% or 2% of their income.
02:37:10.000We'll just take a little bit from them and help the little guys out.
02:38:34.000It says this lady was trying to sell the story to Esquire for a while, and then someone printed it in a biography about him in 1972. How did they put it in the movie?
02:40:15.000And he's like, just none of this is true.
02:40:16.000I remember right after 9-11, he was going into this thing about how we're going to get in a nuclear war because Iran already has the nukes and they're going to use them.
02:40:25.000And he had this whole thing about how, like, he goes, Iran has nuclear weapons.
02:42:14.000It does kind of like – you start to kind of ask these questions where you're like, okay, so there are these people who are comfortable making decisions that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.
02:42:27.000And we know in many cases they're making these decisions based off profit.
02:43:44.000They were doing this thing where they were moving pythons from this place in Florida.
02:43:51.000And they got to this place, and he took all this video footage of this elaborate satanic ritual setup that they had down there, where they had things written on the wall in Latin, and they had a girl's bloody dress,
02:44:08.000and they had a chair that was covered in something red.
02:44:13.000They were trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, and he wound up getting out of there.
02:44:17.000But then He found out that the history of that lab itself, that the guy who founded that lab, was an open Satanist.
02:45:55.000With the Epstein thing, I mean, I guess it's not exactly this, but you remember the, like, the pictures, the paintings that they found from him?
02:46:02.000There's one with George W. Bush where he's, like, a little kid and he's playing with the blocks that are in the towers.
02:46:47.000And if you were a guy who is supposedly, the conspiracy is that he was part of the intelligence agency, that he was something, Mossad or something.
02:46:57.000Either Mossad or CIA or a combination of those two.
02:47:00.000If you're that guy, you probably get a real thrill out of having all this dirt on these incredibly important people and then have pictures of them looking stupid in your house.
02:48:19.000The next day you're like, oh, she was 16, I have it on tape, and you're going to be voting yes on the legislation next week type deal.
02:48:26.000But you could see where, let's say you were a very powerful interest behind the scenes, you could see where if there were people who say were pedophiles or who like cheated on their wives or just you had dirt on them, where you'd be interested in promoting that person because now you can control them much more easily,
02:48:44.000And so you could see where it would maybe come to be that they would kind of like these really sick, fucked up people in these positions of power because then they're that much easier to control.
02:49:10.000I apologize, man, because I should give you credit because this is such a good tweet.
02:49:14.000But someone said, someone tweeted that Pizzagate aged better than Russiagate, which is just like the best.
02:49:22.000Like, it's just so funny when you think about it like that, that there was this wild conspiracy theory in 2016 that when the Podesta emails got dumped.
02:51:03.000And there are people that are guilty of it, man.
02:51:05.000It's a fucking heinous thing that does exist.
02:51:07.000As much as you and I as regular people, especially as parents, we don't want to ever admit there's someone out there that literally wants to fuck a baby and wants to film people fucking babies and have guys jack off to it.
02:51:57.000And if I download these videos and put them on my hard drive and someone arrests me and they search my hard drive, say, oh, well, you have videos of people murdered.
02:53:01.000Yeah, including media accompanied by content that laughs at or otherwise mocks the deceased and takes pleasure in the suffering of the deceased.
02:53:26.000But they're like, why is it like, well, they're kind of almost implicitly saying, like, they're like, I mean, if you can't identify them, you know, if you can't identify them and you're not laughing at them, have at it.
02:53:54.000Yeah, and I think there's something about that, too.
02:53:58.000The craziest thing about the Gaddafi thing, and I mean, that's the craziest thing, but he had totally waved the white flag to America, abandoned his nuclear program, gave up all his chemical weapons.
02:54:10.000Right after 9-11, he was like, look, I'll help you in any way I can.
02:54:15.000Like, I don't want this, and I know America's coming to kick some ass around here.
02:54:51.000And then, by the way, according to Bill Perry, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, he says that Vladimir Putin believes that the U.S. has a program to attempt to assassinate him,
02:55:08.000that we're actively trying to kill him.
02:55:10.000And I don't know if that's true or not.
02:55:12.000But he said that's what Putin believes.
02:55:14.000I wouldn't be surprised if that were true.
02:55:16.000Doesn't sound like it's outside the realm of possibility.
02:56:01.000And, you know, that's the one thing I'll say.
02:56:04.000The thing Trump said, and I remember you were talking about this with Duncan, too, but when Trump said, I want the dying to stop, you know what I mean?
02:56:54.000Yeah, like, I mean, the idea that, let's say after all of this, let's say Russia, like, what seems to be the best case scenario that the establishment is claiming, so let's say Russia is utterly humiliated in Ukraine, there's a devastating victory for Ukraine,
02:57:12.000Ukraine takes back all of the territory, all of it, they get Crimea back, you know, they get the entire territory back, and then Vladimir Putin is overthrown.
02:57:22.000Do you think that in this most humiliating of moments for Russia and knowing the political realities in Russia, what would you say is more likely that will rise up in Vladimir Putin's place?
02:57:35.000Will it be a Jeffersonian Republican liberal who now says we're going to institute a bill of rights, you know, or something like that?
02:57:44.000Or do you think it's more likely going to be probably someone substantially to the right of Vladimir Putin who will be even more of an authoritarian?
02:57:53.000You know, it's kind of obvious which one is more likely.
02:57:57.000And that never seems to be anything we think about when it comes to war.
02:58:01.000Unless they believe they could do what they did in Ukraine.
02:58:43.000It was right around when Yanukovych fled and the new government took over and was immediately recognized by the U.S. And it starts with her and Jeffrey Pyatt, who's an ambassador.
02:59:13.000Like going through all the people and all the players who should be in the new government and who shouldn't.
02:59:17.000And then she says that Joe Biden's going to call them to give him an attaboy, to congratulate him for doing it.
02:59:24.000And look, there are people who argue, and I've heard this argument, I don't think there's really any evidence for it, but people argue that she wasn't talking about overthrowing Yanukovych, she was talking about making a deal with Yanukovych.
02:59:39.000One of the top neocons was over-meddling in this country, and all the people who she wanted in government got in, and all the people who she wanted out of government got out.
02:59:55.000By the way, Robert Kagan, she's his wife, Victoria Nuland, and he was the guy who, I believe he was the founder of the Project for a New American Century.
03:00:07.000He was at least one of the signatures of it.
03:00:29.000And so his wife just happens to be over there.
03:00:32.000She's handing out water and food to the protesters.
03:00:36.000She's in the crowd, giving out food and cookies to the protesters.
03:00:41.000John McCain's going over there, speaking with neo-Nazi groups and shit, telling them, your fight's our fight, the Russians are going to lose, you know, all this shit.
03:00:49.000And it was all part of a big plan, which these neocons have said forever, that their vision was always that, like essentially what Gideon Rose said, that you steal Robin away from Batman, that with Ukraine, Russia is a European power, But without Ukraine,
03:01:05.000they're an isolated, you know, like an isolated nation.
03:01:09.000And Vladimir Putin was always pretty damn clear that Ukraine was his red line.
03:01:15.000Our own CIA director, I read the memo last time we were here, the nyet means nyet memo.
03:01:20.000Our own CIA director wrote back to Condoleezza Rice when she was Secretary of State and told her and said, this is his red line.
03:01:29.000He's like, we have our only warm water port here, we have strategic interests here, and we cannot have your military alliance on our border in this border.
03:01:38.000And this is the brightest of all red lines.
03:01:41.000And the CIA director, when he was the ambassador to Russia, he said, this is the brightest of all red lines, not just for Vladimir Putin, but for the entire Russian political establishment.
03:01:51.000Even his sharpest liberal critics agree with him on this, that Ukraine is the red line.
03:01:56.000And then two months after that, they announced Ukraine's coming into NATO. And then just more intervention in Ukraine all the way through.
03:02:02.000And eventually he went, okay, you crossed it.
03:02:07.000There's a funny thing because in the video where you say Gideon Rose goes, when you remember the part where he says, oh, we want to distract him with the Olympics.
03:02:14.000Here's, here's a shiny medal and we'll just take a country away from you and that whole thing.
03:02:17.000And at one point, Stephen Colbert goes, well, what could Vladimir Putin do?
03:02:39.000How do they think this is going to play?
03:02:41.000Behind closed doors when all the fucking walls are checked for bugs, what do they say?
03:02:50.000My guess would be that I think the attitude is what Zbigniew Brzezinski said the strategy was in Afghanistan in 1979. That it was,
03:03:06.000when we were trying to lure the Soviet Union into fighting the war in Afghanistan, that what he said it was to give them their own Vietnam.
03:03:14.000Like we basically saw what Vietnam did to us.
03:03:18.000Let's lure them into a fucking quagmire that breaks their back.
03:03:23.000And from their point of view, they were successful in that, that that's what defeated the Soviet Union, was their war in Afghanistan.
03:03:31.000And now, after getting out of our own 20-year war in Afghanistan, you know, and seeing what that's done to our country, I think, this is what I think, I think they were attempting to lure Vladimir Putin into this war.
03:03:43.000I think that's why they kept crossing his red lines every single time.
03:03:47.000I think they wanted to provoke him into doing this because they want to break Russia.
03:04:35.000So I think I'm very lucky that I found the right people, starting with Ron Paul, who I think is the greatest living American hero, the Thomas Jefferson of our time.
03:04:42.000But then I found all these great people.
03:04:44.000I found Peter Schiff and Tom Woods, Scott Horton, the best anti-war voice in the country, all the guys at antiwar.com.
03:05:22.000So I remember, by the way, I'll say this quickly, you really inspired me.
03:05:27.000I remember when I was first starting, so I started comedy in 2005, 2006, something like that, and then in 2007, 2008, I fell into this rabbit hole.
03:05:37.000And then I just started being obsessed with reading about Austrian economics and military history and all this shit.
03:05:43.000And I remember I was really self-conscious about it.
03:05:51.000I'm, like, pursuing stand-up comedy, and then I'm spending every night until four in the morning just, like, obsessively reading about this shit that has nothing to do with my comedy career.
03:06:36.000So that was like, seeing that was the first time that I was like, because I kind of wanted to take some of these ideas into stand-up.
03:06:42.000But I thought they were like, I was like, I don't know.
03:06:44.000I don't want to get like preachy with it or anything like that.
03:06:46.000But then I saw you in that special and you had like these long, very deep It's about, you know, like the fucking pyramids and what man was like 10,000 years ago, but it was still all punched up in stand-up comedy.
03:06:57.000Like, you weren't just preaching, you were like...
03:06:58.000And I was like, oh yeah, I think that's fucking...
03:07:07.000I remember thinking about it, and I was like, you know, even though it makes no sense on paper that I'm just the dude who's really into fucking the history of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and then we're going to go do stand-up comedy shows, even though that makes no sense, I was like, yeah,
03:07:23.000but your career on paper made no sense.
03:07:27.000If you had ever said to someone 20 years ago, or you were like, okay, I got it all figured out.
03:07:32.000You had some agent who's like, all right, well, if you want to be a stand-up comedian, you got to be an actor, or you got to write, or you got to do this and do these auditions, and you're like, well, I'm just going to commentate on cage fights.
03:07:41.000And then I'm going to do an internet radio show.
03:07:43.000But I'll be like really big in like the fitness community and the hallucinogenic community.
03:07:48.000Like they're all really going to like me.
03:08:01.000At a certain point, kind of like seeing your example, I was like, yeah, I'm just going to do this because this is me, and this is really what I'm interested in.
03:09:36.000Well, you see it in, and by the way, I'm not thinking of anyone specific here, so I don't think I'm trashing it, but you know there's these people that go from, they're like, well, I used to be on the right, and now I'm on the left, or I used to be on the left, and now I'm on the right, and you almost realize that, I'm not even saying that necessarily they're doing that for these reasons,
03:09:55.000but you realize that, let's say you're like, It's so valuable to the other side if you're the person who's switched.
03:10:02.000But I'm saying it's like, oh, look, even this left guy sees how crazy the left is, so now he's over here.
03:10:08.000So if you're, like, let's say, like, in the top 80 political commentators on the left, but then you make the switch, you move up to, like, the top 10 on the right.
03:10:18.000So you just immediately know, you're like, oh, this is a huge jump if I do this.
03:10:22.000And, you know, one of the things that is tough is...
03:10:26.000You have to, like, there are perverse incentives in this game.
03:10:32.000And you've got to always kind of be conscious of that.
03:10:34.000I don't want to just be telling my audience what they want to hear.
03:11:08.000And the fact that you are authentic, and that's what's so interesting about it, is because you really are deeply, deeply invested in this stuff.
03:11:18.000It's not like a thing that you've kind of like, oh, I want to have this debate about this, so I'm going to look at it.
03:11:29.000Sometimes I'll talk to people, and people say sometimes, dude, I don't know how you read all about and focus on all this political stuff, dude.
03:16:37.000There's a really weird dynamic that I do not completely understand, but there's something about the boomer class of politicians who never passed the torch.
03:16:48.000When I was a kid, we had these politicians like, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.
03:17:37.000Yeah, and so and you know even like with the Presidencies, you know, it's like I guess Barack Obama is the exception where he kind of got past the torch although he had to wrestle it away and It wasn't like they were just lining up for him.
03:17:52.000He had to kind of steal it away from Hillary Clinton.
03:17:56.000But then even think that Hillary Clinton was running for president in 2016 when your husband was running in 1992. It's 30 years later.
03:18:11.000There's just something about it, and I do think there's a big problem with it.
03:18:16.000I think there's this boomer mentality about America, and especially because these politicians are so insulated, and they live in such a bubble.
03:18:32.000And it's almost like they still have this—I think they still suffer from not having adjusted to where America actually is today versus where they have it in their kind of post-World War II mind, where they're kind of like, yeah, listen, we said Vladimir Putin can't invade,
03:20:11.000While still maintaining what is, in most people's eyes, a democracy.
03:20:17.000Well, they seem to not be that concerned about maintaining that.
03:20:20.000I mean, the furthest they can go is a limo ride in Dallas.
03:20:24.000And, you know, short of that, they can, you know, perhaps they can get a jury to convict, and he's looking at 20 years, and the deal is either you go to jail for 20 years or you agree to not run for president or something like that.
03:20:39.000I mean, I don't know exactly how they can do it, but...
03:20:44.000Vivek is in this interesting position where DeSantis, his campaign is really tanked and not turned into what anyone thought it might turn into.
03:20:54.000And so now he's just kind of sitting there in the background while Trump is dealing with all these indictments in the system being turned against him.
03:21:20.000I mean, he said the other day, they asked him who should be the Fed chairman, and he said, maybe Ron Paul or Rand Paul, someone from that family.
03:21:28.000And, you know, I'm like, watching, I'm like, are you just talking to me right now, dude?
03:21:32.000Are you just trying to get me to vote for you?
03:22:05.000But in general, I think he is more on the anti-war side.
03:22:07.000He's also just really smart, and he's younger, and he seems to really believe in reducing the size of the deep state, and reducing the size of the administrative state, and that's like...
03:22:19.000That's really nice because we could really use that.
03:22:22.000He seems to believe he has a plan for how he can get it done.
03:22:25.000He got very specific with me when he was on my show about what statutes he would use to fire people in these bureaucrat positions and how the president has the legal authority to do all of it.
03:23:04.000Well, this is one of the things that I think is also just really attractive to me about Robert Kennedy Jr. and about Vivek.
03:23:13.000Obviously, they have some different views on different things, but when you talk to RFK Jr. about a topic, you get this impression that he's read a book about it.
03:23:27.000Oftentimes you get the impression he's read several books about it.
03:23:30.000And you get that impression with Vivek also.
03:23:33.000When you talk to Joe Biden, you're not—not that I've actually had a conversation with him, but when you hear him talk, you're not convinced that he even knows what he's talking about.
03:23:43.000And when you hear Donald Trump talk about something, it always kind of seems like he saw a show about it.
03:23:55.000I don't think it's too much to expect that, like, the President of the United States of America ought to be, like, a somewhat deep thinker.
03:24:20.000But I just, it would like, after, you know, kind of where we've been going lately, it would kind of be nice to see someone, like, who's smart and a thinker.