Julian Assange Walks Free
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What's up everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I am Dave Smith. He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein. What's up brother? How you feeling today? I'm doing good. Fresh back from the porch. Minnesota was one of the best ones yet. Oh nice. Nice. And what do you got coming up next? We got a whole weekend out on the road. Bethlehem, PA, Johnston, Pittsburgh, Virginia Beach, Richmond, Raleigh, North Carolina, and then down to Texas. Oh man, we're really going to see...

We're going to see how much more juice that car of yours has in it, huh? Not driving to Texas. Going to leave my car in Myrtle Beach. I assumed that one probably you'd want to take a flight to.

And then me and you, we're going to overlap there, right? You're going to be around? Yep. I'm going to hang out at the mothership on Saturday, shake some hands, kiss some babies. Come on out. You want to get your baby kissed by Rob Bernstein. This is your opportunity. Saturday at the company mothership. I'm real excited to do that. That was like one of my, that might be my favorite headlining weekend I've ever done last year. So I'm very excited to go back and do that. I'm not on the shows, but if they let me, I'll be drinking in the green room.

I'll tell you. Well, listen, you will 100 percent be drinking in my green room and you will get you on the shows. That'll be that'll be fun. All right. So. Oh, yeah. And then we got a bunch more stuff for the end of the year. I should just rattle off some of these real quick. If you sorry, one second. Let me pull up my Web site because I don't have anything memorized in my head except stuff about politics.

Okay, so Comedy Mothership is July 12th through 14th. Me and Rob will be at Nashville Zanies for the first time later in the month of July, which I'm very excited about. I've heard like so... I've never done the club before, but I love the Zanies in Chicago and Rosemont and they're...

I've heard from like everyone that this is one of the best clubs in the country. So very excited to go do that. Um, then, uh, I will be speaking at the young Americans for Liberty event in Orlando. Uh, in, in the event is August 1st through 3rd. I got to double check to find out which day I'm speaking down there, but I'll be down there if you're doing that, then we'll be back at hyenas in Fort Worth and Dallas. We had a lot of fun down there. Uh,

last year looking forward to going back new york comedy club out in stamford is august 15th that was the date that had to be uh rescheduled but we're i told you we'd make it up and we are we're coming back out there and then we got oklahoma city tulsa detroit kansas city bunch of bunch of fun stuff coming up comicdavesmith.com for all of those ticket links all right

So the big news, which is actually a really great piece of news. We're usually here bringing you bad stuff, but for this one, it's actually pretty, pretty awesome. Julian Assange is a free man.

It seems that there's a few formalities, I think, that have to be finished up. But he is back in Australia and he is going to be free. They worked out a plea deal. He's pleading guilty to conspiracy to obtain and distribute classified information. But he gets to live out the rest of his days as a free man in Australia. Really, I can't overstate how wonderful that is.

the guy, you know, I mean, there's, there's a lot of things you could say about Julian Assange. None of them will be terribly original to me, but the fact is that the guy exposed war crimes and sacrificed well over a decade of his life for that. I think it was 12 years total that he was locked up between Ecuador and, and England. And he,

He, you know, his crime was doing journalism and he's not just, he wasn't just a journalist. He's the best journalist of the 21st century. And then he did re he really exposed legit war crimes, um, legit, uh, political corruption, um, on many different levels where you can get into some of the stuff that, that he exposed, um, one in particular that I wanted to mention again in a little bit, but, you know, and of course what,

What could be a better just like microcosm of how this whole thing works? That the guy who exposes the war crimes sacrifices his life, essentially, you know, for 12 years at least to do it. And the people who committed the war crimes...

Not a single one of them has had a charge brought against them. And so they all walk free. There's never even a discussion about whether they'll be held accountable. The whole discussion is about what, you know, how much Julian Assange has to suffer. Anyway, he he made this sacrifice so that we could all know a lot more about what's going on in the world. And to me, I just don't know if there is any.

nobility to the profession of being a journalist, I don't know who could be at a higher level than Julian Assange. So the guy's in my book a hero and it's great that this

heroic sacrifice that he made to bring us the truth. Thank God he, that part, the suffering part of that at least seems to be over. So I would, I would start with that. Any, any thoughts, Rob? Cause there's a lot to get into about the kind of political dynamics of this, but any thoughts on, on Julian Assange being freed other than that? I think it's great. I think the fact that he had to take a guilty charge kind of sucks. Uh,

You know, I used to in the Wall Street Journal in the second section, they used to always have every single I just stopped reading it. But there was always the fines that banks were playing paying for whatever scheme they were pulling. But they never had to admit guilt. And you're like, well, that's that's a bribe. That's what that is. Right. If you get to get away with the crime and hand over a paycheck to the government to not admit guilt.

That's what we call a bribe. And in this case, you kind of have the opposite where the guy, there's no additional penalties coming his way. If anything, he gets out of jail, but he has to admit guilt.

which it kind of, to me, says two things about why they're letting him free. One, I think it's they didn't want to give political points to Donald Trump or anyone else who could talk about the topic. And at this point, if he's admitting to guilt and he served out the time that he already did in jail, I feel like they figure they made the example that they need out of him.

enough of a price has been exacted for what he's done that if he's willing to admit guilt, then they can let him free. I also don't know if that creates bad precedent for potentially future cases of people engaging in journalism and exposing the government.

Oh, I think absolutely it does. I mean, that's why I think that's why it's such a big deal. And that is the kind of whatever not silver. What's the opposite of a silver lining? That's the bad part of all of this is that, though, there is a there's a major difference between pardoning Julian Assange and basically working out a deal where you admit that this was a crime.

that you're guilty of this crime and we'll let you go free and the the truth is that it's it's absurd the idea that he you know that what they're trying to claim is that he was involved in some conspiracy where he was actually involved in the collection of classified information but that's just totally wrong there's that there's never been any evidence to suggest that bradley manning

took classified information and gave it to Julian Assange. But Julian Assange has a right as a free human being to report on this correct information. One of the things that's really interesting about the Julian Assange saga, and there's a lot, but one of the things that's really interesting is that nobody amongst his critics is disputing that the information was correct.

like that that just doesn't even come up as an issue the the question they would they would assert um was that he put people at risk or something like that they always pretend like it's mission impossible with the knock list it's always he exposed sources and people

When we left Afghanistan, how many people that we were working with got killed because we just left them to die? We do it every single time we leave a country. And then all of a sudden you get a journalist and it's like, yeah, who exactly? Who's this CIA asset who ended up getting eaten alive because of what he released? Well, yeah, there's a couple things on that. And you're absolutely right. Number one, if you're going to make those claims, the onus should be on you to demonstrate it.

And they never do that. It's just kind of this vague appeal to sources and methods that people, you know, like people on our side, the good guys could get hurt because of this. And then they never have to actually demonstrate how anyone was hurt. But even beyond that, I would say that when you have government secrecy, if this is if this is being abused, right.

So, in other words, let's say that there are some sources and methods and things like that that are vulnerable if classified information is released. But let's say on top of that, then there's also just a bunch of government corruption that is being kept secret forever.

Under the guise of this is we're just protecting sources and methods. You know what I'm saying? And you reveal all of that. I would argue that's on the government then. That's on them for abusing their government secrecy. And that if some sources are compromised in the process, like, sorry, that's still on you. That's still that's still on you that you were doing all this shady stuff. And look,

just think about it like this when they say like oh the only reason government has these

you know, classified information. The only reason why government has to keep secrets from its people, which by the way, totally. I mean, look, one of the major themes of this show for many years has been that the whole, you know, illusion of government is in fact that an illusion and all of the narratives and kind of mythology of like government of foreign by the people is all imaginary and doesn't exist. But,

But if any of this were true, you know, is that the people in the corporate media are ranting about democracy every day and how democracy is under attack. Democracy is on the ballot in November. Well, just think about right away that the government gets to lie to its people.

and not tell them what's really going on or what they're really doing. Well, that seems to be a bit of a contradiction. How can we be, you know, how can we be an experiment in self-governance if the people don't even get to know what the government's doing? So then...

the narrative becomes, well, it's only because like there's a good guy spy who's doing something that has to be kept secret. And so we just keep that classified because if you knew about it, this guy would die and he wouldn't be able to do the good guy thing that he's doing. The problem with that is like, okay, why are the JFK files still classified? It's from 60 years ago.

none of those guys are still out in the field you can't tell me for a second that the you know i mean literally all of them kennedy's dead castro's dead the soviet union doesn't exist anymore like all of the players involved with alan dulles is dead like what you know what i mean he's still alive who is sean connery is he

I think so. Maybe. Now I think he died. Oh, yeah. Then you could totally let us know that he did it. You could do it. It's fine. Even Sean's got it. I don't know about it. Double check me on that. But you know what I'm saying? So it's obviously – no, you're just covering up government corruption and government crimes. And so anyway, I don't think – so anyway, back to my point.

If you're going to even if you were going to argue that Julian Assange put lives at risk, which nobody has ever demonstrated. But even if you were going to argue that, I would say, well, did he expose government corruption? Did he expose war crimes? Did he expose all that? Well, in that case, then doesn't matter. He still gets to do that. That's journalism. If what he's saying is the truth, then he's doing he's doing his job.

Okay, anyway, so one of the things that's kind of interesting about this case is the, like, why this happened. And that, of course, has to do with politics. And, you know, Julian Assange, the political environment has shifted so much from the, say, in the Bush administration, when Julian Assange first became famous for exposing war crimes. And at the time,

The Republicans really hated his guts, including Republican voters, because they were all in on the war on terrorism. And he was seen as a guy who was, you know, the mentality at the time was like, oh, you're basically on the terrorist side. If you're trying to hurt our war effort, then you're on the other side. Because, of course, in these days, these were the George W. Bush days and the real dark days for Republicans where they fed into, you know, all the dumbest things.

uh talking points that you could imagine and

So he was an enemy of the state and an enemy of a large percentage of the American people. Back then, it was always left-wing, with some libertarians as well, but primarily left-wing publications that would be defending Julian Assange. The Nation or something like that would stick up for Julian Assange. But every mainstream media outlet and many...

Almost all of the establishment of the Democratic Party and, of course, of the Republican Party hated his guts. This dynamic changed quite a bit when Julian Assange in 2016 dumped the DNC and Podesta emails, which really damaged Hillary Clinton.

And one of the things that was fascinating about that time was that Republican voters, at least, had kind of been coming out of this trance that they were under for the war on terrorism. And all of a sudden, in hindsight, it didn't seem like such a moral crime to have exposed that these wars were all bullshit. You know, at this point, Donald Trump is up there saying all these wars are bullshit. And

Derek, he's exposing Hillary Clinton, so now he's doing a pretty great service if you're a Republican voter. And the Democrats, although the Obama administration had been very tough on Julian Assange, Democratic voters never really hated him the way that Republican voters did during the Bush years. I'm sure they didn't like that he damaged Hillary Clinton, but –

You know, Democratic voters, it's not as if that was really something that like got them white hot angry. The Democratic establishment certainly was and the Republican establishment certainly was. So you cut to the Trump years.

Now, here's Donald Trump, who should have been grateful to Julian Assange. It might be the reason why he became president. That race was close enough that any one major factor could be credited for making the difference. And it was certainly a major factor.

But of course, Donald Trump put nothing but swamp creatures all up and down his administration. And so the Trump administration was actually much harsher on Julian Assange. Famously, Mike Pompeo reportedly had a plan to assassinate him. And thank God that didn't.

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Order as many kits as you need and save $50 on each one, free shipping included. Stock up on these essential food kits at preparewithsmith.com. That's preparewithsmith.com. All right, let's get back into the show. So now you cut to today and you have a situation where they're just amongst the voting base, right?

It's kind of split between people who see Julian Assange as the hero that he is and people who are somewhat indifferent or like ignorant on the topic. But it's not as if there's a real hunger amongst the people to be like, yeah, let's torture this journalist to death. Right. Like it's just it's just awful. And it makes America look awful and all of this stuff.

And however, amongst the ruling class, there is still a lot of political will to hurt the guy because he's an enemy of the state and he committed the ultimate crime in an empire, which is he told the truth. And so basically, this has been the state of things right now. Now, Donald Trump.

after coming to the Libertarian Party convention and promising to pardon Russ Ulbrich, he said they were going to take a long look at Assange. And then he hinted when he was being interviewed by Tim Poole that they would be making a major announcement about this soon. And I think my guess is that he was going to announce that he was going to pardon Julian Assange. I think the Biden team was in, I think this is the situation that they were in.

There had been moves to extradite Julian Assange to America to face prosecution. And I think Joe Biden is caught between, look, number one, this is going to be embarrassing. It's going to be a black eye in an election year to have to deal with this. And it just it totally undermines so much of their narrative about, you know,

Putin being this authoritarian and how we're fighting for democracy and we believe in the free press. Donald Trump is going to shut down the press if he gets in there. And to just be, to have in the backdrop of all of that, the fact that you're torturing to death this aging journalist for the crime of telling the truth was going to look very bad. There was going to be a constant punching bag that

that any critic of the Biden administration could just hit. And there's no real grassroots support for it. It's not like it's winning you any new voting bloc. You know what I mean? Like, it's just it was all just a net negative. And also now Donald Trump would have gotten to say, hey, I'm going to pardon that guy for anybody who cares about this issue. The only people who care about the issue, aside from people at the Pentagon,

want Julian Assange freed, like amongst the voting base, the only people who care about it want him freed. No one's really voting on I want to torture this guy to death. There are again, Donald Trump, Secretary of State feels that way. I'm just saying there's not a big constituency who feels that way. And so I think the Biden administration was just in a position where politically it just made a lot more sense to cut him loose.

to cut him loose and to say, all right, we're not going to pardon him. Well, as you alluded to before, we're going to keep the precedent that you're not allowed to do this. And look at what we did to this guy. We've still probably scared the next would be whistleblower enough. You know what I mean? Or, or journalists, I should say enough to not do this again, but yeah,

We'll we'll let him go and take this issue off the table. Take the black eye that we would have had of him coming here and being charged and take Donald Trump's talking point away from him. You know, Donald Trump can still and he should still say that he would pardon Julian Assange if he's elected. But it doesn't have the same weight anymore because it doesn't you're not saving a man's life, which is what it would have been before then. So that that's more or less my assessment of.

Go ahead. Those were my exact thoughts when it happened. Hey, we've exacted enough of a price here and we might as well not give the political win to Trump. This is a very Rothbardian point, but it's a problem that government does not get in trouble for wrongfully jailing you. So they have all the leverage in this situation where it's like,

listen, we can go to court and at some point and chances are, you know, you could spend your whole life in jail. You got everything on the line or we can continue to stall this and you can continue to be in a maximum security prison or we can let you off tomorrow and you just have to admit that you were at fault here and then the whole thing is over.

you're kind of in a no-win situation because it's like even, I don't know, even if you manage to get pardoned or you manage to get free, it's not like the government's ever got to cut you a check for the fact that you were wrongfully in jail or had to live in an embassy for, you know, 10 years of your life or whatever the amount of time was. Uh, so the government really does have all the leverage in these situations, which, um,

Which, I mean, I don't think we're going to fix that. But it just that's the issue here. They can make it all go away. They can torture you and say, hey, we can let this go away and there will be no further pain if you just admit to guilt. Yeah, no, you're I think you're absolutely right. And it is a very Rothbardian point. But yeah, that's you're absolutely right. That they're obviously just if you were looking at it on paper and you go, well, that system is so inherently corrupt.

Because you can do that. There's no consequences for enslaving an innocent person. Throw them in maximum security jail. Hold them there for two years and say, hey, we'll let you off the hook for this. You just have to say that you were guilty for the thing we accused you of and at least it'll be over. It's as...

or as voluntary as holding a gun to someone's head and saying, give me your wallet. Be like, what? He chose to give me his wallet. You know? Oh, yeah. I mean, there was that guy. Yeah, I was going to shoot him for sure. But, you know, it's that. Look, even in not as extreme a case, but in someone like General Flynn or the way that the legal system is leveraged and weaponized to financially ruin people.

is also insane. The fact that there are people who know that they can just drag you through the legal process and that you're going to have to bankrupt yourself to go through it. And then at the end, it could be found that you're not guilty.

And you don't get the money back. And on top of that, they can gag order you, which makes which makes zero sense. If you're applying justice, you would want it to be broadcasted. If the idea of justice is that we punish people to prevent people from in the future doing those same crimes, you would want to broadcast it as loudly as possible. Look at the justice and the punishment that this person faced. But instead, they want to make sure that if they mistreat you, you're not able to warn other people.

That's what they're doing. Yeah, that's right. And you can't defend yourself in the court of public opinion. You just have to allow... Everybody else can smear you, and you can't stick up for yourself. It's totally...

It's totally antithetical to the idea of like a free society in any way. So, yeah, it's it's it's pretty outrageous and just such a huge flaw in in our legal system. So one of the things is just on my mind today. And then I saw that Liam McCollum.

just posted about this. By the way, if you guys don't go follow Liam, it's at M Liam McCollum on Twitter. He's great. Liam is one of the, the brightest young stars we have in the, in the Liberty movement. And he's, you guys should all go check him out and support him. He's really great. But anyway, he, I was literally just thinking this cause I got a, a Ukraine debate yesterday.

tomorrow on breaking points um which I haven't done a debate on Ukraine in in quite a while um still wants to defend that one well I it is um that's almost like my uh I was I got to fight against that attitude because I am kind of going into the debate with the attitudes like wait still like

I know two years ago you might have been able to defend this, but you're telling me still. You're still now defending that we should keep throwing money at Ukraine so they can keep

and then still lose. Anyway. Putin's getting ready to take all Europe. It's just been the two-year adjustment period of the war of attrition. But once he really figures out the way that we try and defend Ukraine, he's taking the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, no kidding. But anyway, so one of the things that Julian Assange is famous for publishing that we would not have known about if it wasn't for him is the nyet means nyet.

memo. And so I did think that this was, especially since there's been these kind of like escalations in the war in the last couple weeks, which is something that we should talk about, that this was all because of Julian Assange. And I know I've brought this up on the show before, but it's worth reminding people. So in 2008,

This was the final year of the George W. Bush administration. And at the time, William Burns, who is currently the CIA director, at the time, he was the U.S. ambassador to Russia.

And he sent a private cable to Condoleezza Rice, who was the secretary of state at the time. So, again, to be clear, the only reason we know about this is because of Julian Assange. He leaked a couple of Burns memos from that year. And this so this is not.

for public consumption. This is what the Russian ambassador is saying to the Secretary of State behind closed doors, like so she knows what's going on. Okay. And the the most famous passage from it is, is this and I'll read it. Okay. So this is from the current CIA director in 2008, when he was the ambassador to Russia, writing back to the then Secretary of State. And he said,

Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences, which would seriously affect Russian security interests.

Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership could lead to a major split involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

This is from our current head of the CIA and the guy who's been the head of the CIA throughout this entire war. And isn't that kind of amazing? Like that it shows you that right there, that back in 2008,

not just Vladimir Putin, but all Russian officials are telling Burns, look, dude, you can't expand your military alliance to Ukraine because this is going to create a whole situation that might force us to have to invade. We might have to intervene in Ukraine and we don't want that. We don't want to do that. And

And so why is Burns writing this memo back to Condoleezza Rice? It's to tell her like, hey, look, there are serious consequences associated with flirting with this idea of incorporating Ukraine into America's military alliance. And two months after that, at the Bucharest summit, they announced that both Georgia and Ukraine were joining NATO.

This is really where things all start to go off the rails. Again, just one little piece of information that we wouldn't have had if it wasn't for Julian Assange. And now you can and you can see why the war party hates him so much. Right. Because like it totally destroys their narrative. Just that memo. There's a series of memos that they leaked from him and they're all pretty revealing. But just that memo totally destroys the narrative. Right.

It totally destroys the narrative of the war because all of them, and believe me, because I've been talking about this on some pretty big platforms over the last few years, I've heard all of the feedback. All of them who support the war say, number one, it has nothing to do with NATO expansion. Number two, it's just because Vladimir Putin wants this so much, right? Like he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. He wants to take over Ukraine. He wants to then move on Poland or the Baltic states or whatever. Right.

But this just shatters all of that, that even our own CIA director knows that actually he didn't want to do any of this. He didn't want to. And all he was asking for was one simple concession that their biggest neighboring country cannot be a part of America's military alliance. It's like, listen, I'm a radical libertarian.

I'm not pretending that any of these nation states are run by good guys or that, you know what I mean? We're in a world of we're obviously in a world of bad choices. But does anybody does anybody seriously think that Mexico or Canada could join a military alliance with China or Russia if they wanted to?

Do you think that's just their option to do that? What do you think DC would do if Mexico decided they were in a military alliance with China, which included China being able to move military hardware into Mexico? What do you think the response from DC would be to that? I think we all know what the answer is. We would overthrow that government in a second and put in a government that did not want to join that military alliance. Right?

Right. You want to sneak fentanyl and criminals over our border and make some money in the meantime. Go for it. Someone's got to get drugs in here. But do you try and do military alliances? Forget it. Yeah. I mean, look, that's that's it. And of course, you know, look, Jack Kennedy in an example that I think almost is almost universally true.

viewed as heroic in the Cuban missile crisis. Technically, you know, if you believe in national sovereignty or something like that, you say, well, Cuba has the right to have whatever missiles they want pointed at America and Russia has the right to do business with Cuba. But do they really? No. And in fact, I think most people, even strict libertarians like us, would agree with that.

Like, no, I mean, Jack Kennedy literally said he will blow up the world as you get these nukes the fuck out of Cuba or I will blow up the world. And I mean, that's like kind of the official history version of it. But that's enough for all Americans to go. Yeah. Yeah. Can't we can't tolerate a knife in our throat.

That's exactly what Vladimir Putin said, by the way. His exact words were about NATO entry, Ukrainian entry into NATO, is he said, this is like a knife against our throat. We cannot live. The brightest of red lines, Burns said in another memo to Condoleezza Rice. And I think that's it. Now, what actually happened in the real history of it is that Jack Kennedy got on the phone with the Russians and they made a deal. And their deal was...

that we pulled back our missiles from Turkey if they pulled back their missiles from Cuba. And we both agreed. And that saved the world from being destroyed, right? So like even within...

You know, even if you wanted to get into the technical like arguments about like, well, do we have a right to put missiles in Turkey if the Turks are willing to have them there? Or do they have the right to put missiles in Cuba if the Cubans are willing to have them there or whatever? It stopped the world from being exploded. So let's just start with that's a good thing.

It was we were dangerously close to exterminating the human species. And that deal prevented that. Why? Why would you not be looking for something similar in this vein? And all you had to do, the crazy thing about it was that all you had to do back then in 2008 was just say, OK, all right, we'll stop pushing it. We'll stop pushing it with Ukrainian entry into NATO.

Could have avoided this whole goddamn thing. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Nevin Eyewear. You got to check these guys out. It's the best place to get sunglasses. These sunglasses are a steal. Crisp lens and a ton of styles at fantastic prices. If you're like me, you've bought really expensive sunglasses and lost or broken them. Or if you just grab a pair at the gas station or convenience store, they don't look

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One last thought is it's also just creepy that there was a rape charge that they had every will in the world to prosecute this guy and find him guilty for something. And for some reason, a rape charge both appeared and disappeared.

which we also saw happen to Governor Cuomo, which my theory is that maybe he was becoming politically too viable and they didn't want to have a conversation about him maybe stepping in for Biden in this election. So they took him out or some other reason behind the scenes of why he had to go.

But culturally, we've seen quite a few rape charges ruin careers. And obviously, in cases of rape or illegal activity, it should always be prosecuted. And it's probably a blight on America that it took so long for Weinstein and Epstein to go down. Like in cases of criminal behavior. Well, certainly and certainly a blight on like the elite Hollywood circles that like ran with this guy and knew he was a creep and kept defending him.

But we also have a problem where it seems to be used as leverage where I guess the cases didn't exist or rights unanswered for why charges are being brought up against people to force them out of jobs and then the charges are disappearing. Yeah, 100 percent. And that's exactly right. You know, also, if you looked into the it's been years since I read about this, but if you the Julian Assange like.

The accusation was something, it was something along the lines of like during a night of sex, like consensual sex. At one point he did it without a condom, without telling her. Like that was like the accusation. And, and look, I'm just to be clear, that's like, that's not okay.

You know, you got to like you got to get consent before you have unprotected sex. But it's also I'll say that is not exactly what the image that's conjured up when you say rape. You know, like when you say that word, which I think you're not supposed to say, we might have to bleep that out. But when you say that word rhymes with grape, what what most people

people envision is like, you know, a woman screaming no as you force yourself on her. And it's one of these things where there's a visceral reaction to

that comes with that accusation. And this is something that not just, I mean, women have a visceral reaction to it because I think in many ways it's like the deepest fear of most women that could be taken from them with, you know what I mean, against their will. And then most men, like their protective instincts really kick in and it's like, you know,

you know, I got a wife and a daughter and a mother and a sister and stuff like this. And you just think to yourself, like nothing could get you more furious than a man doing that to them. And then you want revenge on them. And so number one,

It evokes a primal type of reaction, you know, and a primitive reaction for understandable reasons. And then number two, the by its nature, particularly when it's in the realm of what's broadly called date grape production.

Um, there, you have a situation typically speaking where two people are alone in a room. This is not done in public. There's typically not a ton of physical evidence. Um, you know, there, there can be, if like you've done a, a,

a kid or a test like immediately after, but usually in these more gray area claims, you don't have that. And so it's very easy and convenient when there's somebody who you want to damage to just have, Oh, look, he's been accused of a thing.

And then just leak that out into the public. And now everyone's talking about that. I mean, look, look at this Russell Brand situation that seems to have kind of come and gone. But it was so clear that, oh, this guy became an enemy of the state. And then this was our counter to that. The guy's been around forever when he was a beloved movie star and wasn't speaking about how criminal governments are while he was like a drugged up sex addict or whatever.

Oh, there was no problem with it then. But now that the guy is sober and clean and not living like that, but he is railing against like government corruption. Oh, all of a sudden we got something on the guy. And there's a real problem with that where these like accusations are weaponized. It's happened to a lot of people. And again, much like the thing we were saying before, it's a similar type of dynamic where people,

You try, you slander somebody. And then when the accusation falls apart, it's like, okay, it's over now.

But there's never like an accounting for what people did. You know what I mean? Like, doesn't it just seem that like, okay, either Julian Assange should have been convicted for the, you know what I mean? Either like it comes out that he did do it or someone else has to get in trouble, right? It can't just be that all you newspapers who ran this, all you people who made accusations, all of this, you guys just walk away and live your lives as if nothing happened.

Like, that's just not there's something not right about that situation inherently. That's obvious to anyone, you know, like it shouldn't be a situation where I'm allowed to say, you know, Rob, you committed a horrific, violent crime. And then you go, no, I didn't. And then I go, I'm going to go give 10 interviews about how you committed a horrific, violent crime. And then at the end of it, I go, no, that actually didn't happen. OK, no harm, no foul. We all walk away.

It's like, no, you did something. You essentially, you tried to get people to enslave someone. You tried to get this person's life ruined. How is that not a crime? It all just doesn't, it's all just...

Not very fair. So what's your prediction for Julian Assange chapter two? It seems to have money, $500,000 for a flight. Does he go to Australia and shut up for the rest of his lifetime? Does he give the occasional speech at a college? Does he go back to publishing materials? What's your prediction? You know, I don't know what type of state Julian Assange is in. And I heard a lot of

of his, you know, mental state deteriorating, you know, 12 years is a long time to be, you know, kept in pretty bad conditions. So I really don't know about that. He seemed, I saw some of the videos of him coming out and he seemed like, okay, he seemed better than he had seen in, seen in some like short videos that emerged of him in the last few years.

Um, but I don't know. I don't know. I think, I think this guy has done his, he's made his contributions and he might just go, you know, uh, and live the rest of his days with his families. I think he's got kids and stuff. And so I think, uh,

Yeah, it's it's hopefully there's that. Yeah, there's the other stories Brian just reminded me is that he's also been financially ruined. And evidently he had to like borrow half a million dollars or so for a private jet home.

Um, because he was, wasn't able to fly commercial. I think there were concerns about if he had to land in America. So now he owes the, he had to admit guilt and he owes the elite $500,000. That's a great start, isn't it? Well, I mean, I'm, I'm hopeful that, um, that the internet will raise the money for him. I think there's enough Julian Assange support out there that that'll probably be taken care of. Uh, we'll see. That'd be a great thing to contribute to if you can. Um,

So I don't know if they're if they got to go fund me going or something like that. I mean, make sure it's the legit one before you give anyone money. But that probably I'd like to hope that, yeah, he's just able to raise that that money. But we'll see. OK, let's let's shift gears. We got a little time here. There was a an interesting moment on CNN yesterday.

the other day with a Trump surrogate and a CNN host. So let's play that clip and then we can laugh at it. - It takes someone five minutes to Google Jake Tapper, Donald Trump, to see that Jake Tapper has consistently- - Ma'am, we're gonna stop this interview if you're gonna keep attacking my colleagues. Ma'am, I'm gonna stop this interview if you continue to attack my colleagues. I would like to talk about Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who you work for. If you are here to speak on his behalf, I am willing to have this conversation.

I am stating facts that your colleagues have stated in the past. Now, as for this debate, the expectation for... I'm sorry, guys, we're going to come back out to the panel. Caroline, thank you very much for your time. You are welcome to come back at any point. She is welcome to come back and speak about Donald Trump, and Donald Trump will have equal time to Joe Biden when they both join us now at next, early, later this week in Atlanta for this debate. All right, so even though this is just like a brief moment, isn't it just amazing that

Doesn't that just say it all? It's not just that they are so clearly in the tank for one side of this.

ahead of them hosting the debate, you know what I mean? Which is just like, so you're, you're not even attempting to pretend to be objective at this point, but also just like this kind of smug sense of superiority that this like, no, we're not going to hear that. Sorry. Criticizing someone at CNN is over the line. Yeah.

We're allowed to say whatever we want about Donald Trump. You're not even allowed to point out that we say that about Donald Trump. Not even allowed to point that out. We'll cut you off right there. You're welcome back any other time, but you got to follow the rules and the rules are no criticizing us. Is that not just phenomenal?

Yeah, well, the news changed when Donald Trump got elected the first time where they realized that they can't even allow information to get out. That's why I think it was a couple months ago. I remember Trump was saying something at a rally and Rachel Maddow just cut it out and said, hey, we're not we can't watch that footage because the whatever it was, the extreme claims. But that's the way they operate now. They can't possibly let any information.

Any dissent or what might even be truth come across the airwaves because their listeners might hear it and get a little bit of a glimpse of, oh, maybe Jack Tapper isn't completely like they literally nothing. They got it's like dumb and dumber of just yelling over another person. I'm not hearing this. I'm not hearing this because they can't let the viewers possibly see any other information because they might wake up.

Yeah. And look, this is I remember me and you were talking about this like a few episodes back. I think it was around when I did the Cuomo debate, maybe before or after. I don't remember. But we were just kind of like taught, like reminiscing about our process, like individually through covid and how we started to figure out the kind of all this shit was bullshit because particularly with, say, the vaccine.

Aside from mandates and shit like this, which we always would have opposed on principle. But when it was first announced that like they had got they were close to getting the vaccine and then they were going to get the vaccine. I do think that both me and you, our attitude was like, great.

You know, OK, if scientists are saying they have a vaccine for this, great. Can we be done with this nightmare? OK, then like there's there's a vaccine. We don't have to worry about this anymore. And really what we both said, I mean, we both told like our own stories about how we got to realizing what was really going on pretty quickly. But what it started with for both of us was just that everyone selling it was lying their ass off.

And that just immediately – that's like the first step is you go, well, wait a minute. I got to dig deeper now because you're all a bunch of liars in the same sense that like if you're – if you suspected your wife was cheating on you or something like that and that you –

And you were like, hey, where were you last night? And she lied to you. She told you she was somewhere and she wasn't actually there. That, okay, you haven't like conclusively found out that she cheated on you, but it is the first step. You know, it is the first step where you go, oh, holy shit, I can't trust you anymore.

This is crazy. I know you're a liar now. Now what's the next step after this? And there's going to be another step, but it started with knowing you're a liar. So in the same sense, there is something about these moments where you're like,

Like, oh, okay. Well, that's the hallmark of someone who's full of shit. Like that right there. That you're not allowed, she's not allowed to make her case. You want to bring this woman on, be adversarial to her. And then when she points out something that a colleague of yours has said, you have to end the segment. And also, by the way, she's right about it. Like she's making something up. And if she was, why couldn't you say she's making something up? You know, as you were talking about, um,

The example with Rachel Maddow, I literally just remembered that after in the wake of the 2020 election. So in Donald Trump's lame duck election.

session. But so before he was out, but you know, before Biden was sworn in, but after the elections, I remember him giving speeches where he was saying the thing was stolen. And the same thing CNN or MSNBC, I think both of them, I can't remember exactly which one I'm thinking of. But that they would both go, we're going to cut away from that. You can't hear this.

We're not going to allow our viewers to hear these lies. And right away, however, it's like the thing with a cheating spouse getting caught lying. However you feel about the election, that's the first sign that you're like, oh, you guys are full of shit.

You're being secretive. And that's not what you would do if you really cared about the truth. Like, I don't care. Look, you're a news organization, supposedly. OK, if you're a news organization and the president of the United States of America is making a claim about an election being stolen, that, my friends, is what we call news.

That's news. That doesn't mean you have to agree with it. And in fact, you can even dispute it. But it's newsworthy. And you would certainly if you were the news, you would want your viewers to see this because they got to see this. They got to know this. And in fact, if you're really confident that this is not true, then you'd be happy. Let him make his case.

Let him make his case and then we'll tear it apart, right? But that's not what they're doing. They're saying, no, we're going to suppress this information from our viewers. In the same way with all of these topics, that's at least the starting point of where you know somebody should not be trusted. That's at least the starting point. You go like, okay, when someone starts lying to you and you know they're lying, when someone starts suppressing the truth, which is a different way of describing the same thing, that means they're the bad guys, right?

Now, another element to this, I'm not exactly sure how much...

how much this factored into this little segment. But evidently, I did not know this, but evidently CNN is in the middle of a major lawsuit with Jake Tapper at the center of it. It's a private security company, I guess, who's suing them for slandering them about the Afghanistan withdrawal. They did something where they had a segment about how that company was making money in a certain way, and they claim they weren't. But it's a big lawsuit.

And Jake Tapper is very involved in it. But the lawsuit is against CNN. Perhaps that had something to do with it. We don't know for sure. But it is pretty interesting that coming up on this major presidential debate on your network.

You're going to boot someone off of a show in the middle of talking about in the middle of their segment because they're bringing up something Jake Tapper said. It's not it's not as if like she just started hurling insults at him, started cursing or something like that. It's just she was just mentioning his track record and what he's said in the past.

How anyone can watch that and not immediately go, "Ah, but it sure seems like you're the bad guys here," is wild. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is an amazing company, Monetary Metals. Unlock a 12% return on silver.

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Let's get back into the show. Also makes you wonder how they're going to actually handle these debates with the microphones off and whether or not you're going to have a lot of the I don't know who's who's the moderator for it. Do you know? It's it's Jake Tapper. And hold on one second. I could tell you right now it is. It's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

It'll be interesting to see to what extent, because we even saw it, the one debate the last time, I was trying to find the specific moment. I couldn't re-find it, but I believe Donald Trump was talking about the laptop being found and the moderator had said, had even interrupted him to say all the intelligence agencies have said that that's not true. And it later turned out to be true. I'd be curious to know if in this debate, firstly, if they pick questions such as focusing on things like abortion or focusing on things like January 6th,

like really just anti-Trump questions of if you win the election, if you lose the election, are you going to give over power? How do you think, you know, just...

Just nonsense questions that are really just the layups for, hey, Joe Biden would like to talk about this and Donald Trump wouldn't. But I wonder if they'll even reinforce Joe Biden's out. So, for example, if they're talking about immigration and Donald Trump talks about how bad it's been under Joe Biden, if they come to support him and go, well, Joe did put forward a plan that the Republicans refused.

And there was a plan that legalized what's currently illegal. But it'll be interesting to see to what extent they are willing to get Joe Biden's back on Joe Biden's lies. Well, one of the things that was interesting is that in the in the last debate in 2020, it was Mike Wallace who.

who was the moderator. And Mike Wallace, of course, had been the longtime host of Fox News Sunday. He had been the Fox News guy. Of course, his father is like a famous, you know, American newsman. And he kind of always had...

a bit of a bullshit air of like objectivity and he's a throwback to a previous time of where there were these straight newsmen enough so that he could be you know believed by your Fox News watch and uncle that like okay there's this Mike Wallace guy he's just a newsman he doesn't have this liberal agenda like these other guys do because he's over here on Fox News and Mike Wallace left Fox News after that

it was like, oh, you can't even play your position here anymore because he's so revealed himself to be no different than any of the other corporate media people. You know, like it was almost like, oh, you got to go somewhere else now because we can't get, you know, it's almost like, it's like, like Donnie Brasco got made or something like that. And you're like, well, we can't have you undercover in this family anymore because they all know who you are now. So, you know, the jig is up as you're back on regular police work now or whatever, you know, like it's just that,

It was too obvious. This time, at least you go in knowing you know exactly who Dana Bash and Jake Tapper are. This, I thought, was kind of interesting quote from Donald Trump. So I had seen a lot over the last few days of like right wing Twitter accounts criticizing Donald Trump for even doing this debate.

And being like, why are you doing this? Why are you going into CNN? What like why? And I understand where they were coming from. They were kind of saying, like, why did the Democrats just get to have this home court advantage? It's obviously like, you know, you going Donald Trump doing a debate with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash moderating it. It's like.

Joe Biden doing a debate with Steve Bannon moderating it or something like that. Like they're obviously in the tank for you. They're every bit as much Biden supporters as Bannon is a Trump supporter. You know what I mean? Like there's no, it'd be the equivalent of that. And so I understood the thing and people were saying, why isn't Donald Trump, if he's such an enemy of the corporate media and they're clearly,

you know, dying, why even give this to them? Why not do it on Joe Rogan's show or do it with Elon Musk, Twitter spaces or something like that? You know what I mean? Which like could generate far more, uh,

eyeballs on it or ears on it or whatever. And so so why even do this? But Donald Trump had an interesting quote, which not that this was he was responding to them, but it's just something he said that did add a little bit more context to this. So this was reported by the Washington Examiner, and this was Trump speaking about how the debate came about. So the quote is this.

What they did, I'm pretty sure, is that they approached me with a debate that I couldn't take. Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, in parentheses, Trump referred to the CNN anchor as fake Tapper throughout. I don't know why.

It just really makes me laugh. So Donald Trump. Anyway, back to the quote. So he says, I'm pretty sure is that they approached me with a debate that I couldn't take. Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, no audience, sitting down, originally sitting down, a dead debate. Turn off the mics when you're not speaking so I can't interrupt him. They knew I wouldn't accept that.

because it was CNN, Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, and I like an audience, and probably he doesn't. Who knows? So they thought they would present it, I would say no, and they would say we can't debate because Trump said no. So I said yes before they even gave me the terms. So he got roped into it. That's what Donald Trump said. It's an interesting take, right?

I'll confess I had I had not exactly thought about it like that. But there is probably some truth to what Donald Trump's saying, that if he if he turned this debate down or even just insisted on different conditions, then they could say.

We tried to debate the guy and he was being a stickler about all these. He wouldn't agree to do the debate. So what can you say? There's no debates, but it's not our fault. We offered the guy one. So I do think Trump felt like better than having no debate is having this debate, even if the rules aren't what I would prefer they be. I got to say, like, if I'm putting myself, if I was on the Trump campaign team,

If those were the choices, I would probably take this one, too. You got to get the debate because with Joe Biden, it's almost a cost, a toss of a coin that you might win the whole thing right here. You might win the whole presidency on this night or at least knock him out of the race and make them run someone else. So how can you not? However, it is possible.

Such bullshit that this debate, I mean, those rules, even when you hear them, are so in Joe Biden's favor.

I mean, every little detail sitting rather than standing huge for Joe Biden, huge that he doesn't have to stand the mic being cut while he's speaking. Oh, man, that's just ripe to be abused. You know what I mean? Like they can cut Donald Trump's mic now that's been established and no audience there.

That that certainly helps Joe Biden and, you know, essentially campaign surrogates as the moderators also big in Joe Biden's favor. So I guess Donald Trump feels like they kind of were successfully able to box him into a thing where he either had to accept it or give up a debate at all and hand them the talking point that he was the one who wasn't willing to do it.

I don't know. Any thoughts on that, Rob? I was joking around your mouth that the reason that they're cutting the mics is so if Joe Biden says something so stupid, they can cut it and go, whoops, I accidentally turned off the wrong microphone. That's an interesting thing. I didn't even think of that. I'm mostly kidding, but I don't. Yeah, but it's.

I don't think the turned off mics necessarily helps Biden. I think Trump lost the last debate being a little bit too aggressive and trying to rattle him. And he just felt like, hey, why are you being so mean to this old man? So I think Biden having to give full answers, well...

I would think it would derail him. Sometimes Biden's a little bit more focused when he's aggressively lying and he can just go, well, that's not true. And we did this and you know, the back and forth sometimes, uh, can poke away at the lies a little better. Um, but you know, I, I,

I mean, I think we're all going to be shocked if Joe Biden actually gets through this. I mean, clearly they do a good job of drugging him. They got him away now so he can sleep for a couple of days and maybe they got a cattle prod in that chair to wake him up if he falls asleep while he's sitting there. But I mean, how long is the big on? What is it? One hour with commercial breaks so that they can re drug him in between or something. It's got to be longer than that. Is it just one hour? I don't know. I, you know, I should have looked up exactly what the, uh,

what the rules were going to be, but it'll still just be pretty... I mean, God bless the Democrats if they get Joe Biden through a debate. It just seems like such a tall order. Just think about if you were on Joe Biden's re-election team, how nervous you would be right now. It would just be so nerve-wracking to be like, oh my God, we got to send this guy out there to debate Donald Trump.

Just the most vicious, like, confident guy, and you got to send your, like, senile old man out there. Trying to see what, if I can just get the information real quick on how it starts at 9 p.m. Eastern. No, not seeing how long it's going to go. I have a feeling they're going to have to make it. I do know that they're doing commercial breaks, which is not typical, or I don't think is. That's interesting. That is interesting. Interesting.

Yeah, it doesn't say the length. All right. Well, anyway, it does look like that's happening. RFK will not be a participant in it. And we will... There will be debate questions like, so Donald Trump is a known sexual assaulter. Joe, how do you feel about known sexual assaulters being in our election? Yeah, well, there's no question that they are going to try their best to

to frame it in a way that's difficult for Donald Trump to get off. That being said, Donald Trump is a unique force in these, uh, in these debates. And we'll say, we will, uh, I can tell you this. We will certainly be, uh, covering it. And I'm pretty excited to do that. We're figuring out what we're going to do now. Maybe we'll do like a live post debate show or something like that. I'll let you guys know. We'll figure it out. But, uh, that's it for today.

Thank you guys for listening. Come check us out. Robbie, the fire.com comic Dave Smith.com. Go check out run your mouth. Rob's other great podcast. Catch you guys next time. Peace.