Trump vs. The Neocons
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oh 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 thank you everybody for listening how are you today roberto appleton wisconsin my friend just a couple days away and i didn't realize this was the uh branch of comedy clubs that has the good whiskey oh that's right yeah i did know that but i forgot that's right we're going to the good whiskey comedy club that you know what that means watch out ladies

Me and Rob are going to be puking all over Appleton, Wisconsin. Yeah, I'm excited to go there. It's our first time. My first time, I think, ever going to Appleton. I don't know about you, but definitely the first time we've done comedy out there. So yeah, come on out. There's still some tickets available. Go to ComicDaveSmith.com to grab them. Looking forward to a nice weekend of comedy shows.

And then you got a bunch of stuff going on, right, Rob? Oh, my God. So many porches, Lord and VA, Virginia Beach, Morristown, New Jersey, and then Austin, Texas and San Antonio and one other Texas spot. Porch store dot com. A lot of porches going on.

There you go. There you go. All right. So as you find people probably know, we did not have an episode yesterday. I do apologize for that. I will try my best to see if we can't make that one up. But of course, I was up in Maine recording with Tucker Carlson. We recorded it yesterday and it came out late yesterday. Great response so far. And it's just...

I can't say enough good things about Tucker Carlson. I just love that guy. I could talk to him for for 10 hours. Just such an interesting guy. And I really you know, I've been I've been a big Tucker fan for a long time. And I think I might be wrong about this. I believe I was the first guest here.

that was on it. Like that was my third time. And I think I'm the only one who's been on three times. So that was kind of a cool, uh, little thing, unless I'm wrong about that, but don't correct me if I am. I want to live in the world where I'm, I'm right. Uh, numbers. Just let Dave have this. Yes. Yes, that's right. Uh,

But anyway, it was just it was really great. And I really appreciate the way he's had my back on on so many of the the more controversial opinions that I've taken, but really enjoyed the time up there. And I'm glad so many of you enjoyed the episode. If you haven't seen it already, it's up on on on Twitter and on YouTube. And so you go find it if you want to. All right. Let's jump into some stuff, because I did talk a little bit about some of this with Tucker.

Um, but I thought like me and you kind of got to discuss this a little bit. And it's, again, it's one of these things. It's like, there's a lot of this with Donald Trump as president. Part of it is because Donald Trump is such an unorthodox president. Um,

And as we've discussed a million times, you know, you always got to kind of take everything he says with a grain of salt. You never know which way things are actually going. You know, like it's it's it's very, you know, when Obama first came in. Right. And he ran on health care reform. And there was a little bit of a debate over.

You know, like at first, if you remember back to these days, Obama was very critical of the public option. Hillary Clinton actually ran on a public option and Obama criticized her for it. Obama actually he one of his famous lines, which was a very good line in the debate, said,

Because he said to Hillary Clinton, he goes, mandating that uninsured people buy health care makes about as much sense as writing a law to mandate that homeless people buy homes, which I always thought was a great line. Like, yeah, that doesn't really solve the problem. Just forcing someone to purchase something if they're not purchasing it, it's probably for a reason, meaning like they can't afford it might be a good one. Anyway, Michael.

My point is that generally speaking, you knew Obama was going to attempt to pass some type of health care bill. Now, it ended up having the public option and you didn't know whether that was going to be the case. You didn't know if he was going to go for universal health care or just settle for the Obamacare that he settled for. But you kind of knew the direction of.

he was moving it with donald trump you never know i mean you don't you just don't know and we might get into this a little bit on the show too but you don't know like if by the end of the year we're going to be living in a lower tariff environment or a higher tariff environment you know like even though he's staking out this position as like i want to raise tariffs you you feel like there could be a reversal you know it's um donald trump of course in his first four years had a

tremendous turnover rate within the people around him. It hasn't been quite as crazy in the first hundred days, but he has already gotten rid of his national security advisor. And anyway, so which is related to all of this, but so taking all of that into account, taking all of this with a grain of salt, there does seem to be some real friction between the Israelis and

the war party and Donald Trump right now. And it seems things are looking much more promising than they were a month ago when things looked quite bad. And it seemed like a strike on Iran was imminent. Now it does not seem that way. And it seems that there's been some pretty good reporting on this, that there really is this...

There there's a fallout between Netanyahu and Donald Trump, which is just very interesting And look, I don't know for certain how true any of this is but a lot of people on the inside are saying that this was also Had it was a big part of why Mike Waltz got got fired and that he was basically going behind Trump's back to Netanyahu Donald Trump found out about this and and cut him loose

The reason why I'm tending to think this is real is just because of the way the neocons have been flipping out over the last few days. They are very upset about a few major developments.

Obviously, there was the big one, which we talked about, that Trump flat out rejected Netanyahu's war plans for going to war with Iran and then started engaging in direct talks with them. However, what really sent them over the line was that then Trump started engaging directly in negotiations with Hamas without Israel being involved.

This has led to a bunch of people freaking out on Witkoff, who of course, Trump's envoy who originally negotiated the ceasefire. He was the one doing the negotiations with Hamas and now he is getting called all types of names by Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro. So that's always a good sign. When Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro are attacking the Trump administration, good rule of thumb is something positive is probably going on.

Any thoughts on any of this, Rob? Oh, my God. I got a lot. Let's start with you never know what the hell is going on with Donald Trump. He seems to have he does two things and they work really well for him. One is he drops extreme anchors in negotiating. So he takes purposely unreasonable positions knowing that he's going to walk it back. And then the other thing he does is he never gives any specifics. He never actually lays out any like specifics.

real intellectual theory behind his plan how it's going to work instead it's always it's me so it'll be great and because he plays both those cards he can always walk back from anything or anything can work out and he can go that's exactly what it was supposed to be it worked out perfectly so he does a very good job of kind of creating chaos and never having to own a position

which is what allows for people to say, oh, it's 4D chess and he's always right. And isn't it just please, please don't forget your thought there. But isn't part of that. And what's so interesting about that dynamic is that Donald Trump has no ideology. He has no like he's not he's not a thing. He's not a conservative. He's not a libertarian. He's not a liberal. He's not anything. His only ideology is like winning, right?

And so no matter what he does, he can always spin it as that. Yeah, no, I'm holding true to my stated principles, which is I'm great and we're winning. That's always it. I'm sorry. Keep going. Like, just take tariffs. If you really wanted a concerted plan for more factories within the United States of America and can... So...

can you outline to me how the tariffs are going to bring us more and so if tariffs are going to bring us more why would you walk it down with china to 30 are you now turning your back on the idea of tariffs building more manufacturing with the united states of america is there some reason why 30 is actually the perfect number the point is he's always flying off the seat of his pants and he's gotten out for declaring a victory and he changes his mind quite a bit uh but seemingly with the israel thing

I'm just going to take a wild, speculative guess here that something happened behind the scenes between Netanyahu and Trump. And Trump said, no, you are not going to be bossing me around. And the other thing that that happened the other week was they negotiated a ceasefire with the Houthis that the Houthis will no longer be striking American ships and we will no longer be attacking the Houthis. But we worked out no deal for Israel and that arrangement.

and then uh speaking to the the new plan or the new agreement which got the last american hostage home i mean talk about making nits and yahoo look bad we didn't have to bomb a single kid to do it and we didn't have to get a single concession to do it we just had to tease that we might back them for further ceasefires as far as i understand as long as there was a goodwill gesture from hamas to showcase the fact

that I guess they were willing to negotiate or willing to engage in a ceasefire. And I mean, you want to talk about a black guy to Netanyahu who's been bombing the hell out of kids saying that he wants to get rid of Hamas. You've got just as many Hamas fighters at the start of the war, 80% of the tunnel network still intact.

and the claims that they can't negotiate or deal with Hamas, or I don't know why they couldn't get these sausages home, but the fact that the Trump administration, in one attempt of direct, not even direct communications, through some back channels, was able to get it done, really leaves some explanation to the Netanyahu team on why they've taken the strategy that they have and why they can't get the other ones home.

Well, right. I mean, look, it's any time. And this is something that's interesting. And I've tried, you know, because I've done a lot of debates on this subject and I've tried my best to parse this out at times, because what will happen is people who are defending the Israeli assault on Gaza, there are two very separate and at times.

you know, in competition, there's two separate objectives that they always bring up. And one is retrieving the hostages and the other is taking out Hamas. Now, the people who support the war, Benjamin Netanyahu included, you know, and like all the way down to everybody who's just supports what Israel's doing. They like to invoke the retrieving the hostages.

Because, of course, you know, when you're defending the morally indefensible, that's the better one to bring up. It's much easier to be like, hey, we have to do what we have to do to get our people back because our people are there. But, of course, these are two different goals. And what happens a lot in life when you have two different values, when they're in competition with each other, you find out which one you value more. Right.

This happens all the time, you know, whatever to us in life, you know, you might you might really want to go grab some food at your favorite restaurant, but like your brakes aren't working in your car and you go, yeah, I'm not I don't feel comfortable to drive this thing. So I'm not going to go to the restaurant.

You know, it's like, yes, you did value going to the restaurant, but when it comes to it, you actually value your own safety quite a bit more than that. And so you're like, no, I'm not willing to risk my safety to go get this other thing I want. Now, as far as this has been pretty obvious, I think, from the beginning of the conflict, but you don't if your number one priority is getting the hostages out, you don't start leveling the place.

Obviously, no one would ever do that if it was someone they loved in Gaza. You wouldn't flatten Gaza. That'll get my father out safely. So another one of the things that's interesting here with all of this is that repeatedly and there's been a lot of reporting on this as nothing that I figured out. But Hamas has.

on multiple occasions offered to release all of the hostages. Now, what they've demanded for that is a permanent ceasefire. So they're basically saying we'll release all of the hostages on the deal that the war's over, that you got to stop bombing Gaza. And Benjamin Netanyahu has been very clear that he's like, no, no.

We're not going to do that. He said in his own words that he goes, the primary objective is still to eliminate Hamas. And so this is a perfect example of where these two goals are in conflict. And it's very clear what the Israeli government values more.

They're like, no, we like I think maybe they'd like the hostages out, but they are like, it's more important to us that we get to continue bombing Gaza. So, you know, one of the things that's been interesting here is that.

This has just been very revealed. And in fact, I think it's been very revealed how little your hardcore Israel-supporting favorite influencer actually cares about getting the hostages out. And the reason I say this is because, look,

Benjamin, excuse me, Ben Shapiro, my mistake. Ben Shapiro just put a video out attacking Witkoff, saying that he doesn't think he knows how to negotiate anything and he's making a mess of this whole situation. Witkoff is the envoy saying,

who went over and got the ceasefire, the original ceasefire negotiated in phase one of that ceasefire, something like 20 hostages were returned and there was supposed to be more return in phase two, but Israel violated the ceasefire. But like 20 people's lives were saved over that deal. Who, who sitting here could argue that that wasn't a good thing.

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All right, let's get back into the show. It seems like a rich claim when you actually have success and you get a hostage home. And especially for America first and there's American hostage over there and you're able to retrieve the guy. That sounds like a success. I don't know how you possibly sell that is disastrous negotiating when it's one more hostage that's out. I mean, if I was outside of a bank with hostages and I got one out.

That's one more that's out. That's one better, yeah. Yeah, I think what it points to is this constant narrative that the Jews would love to have peace, or Israel would love to have peace, but the other side won't engage in a conversation, and we can't possibly... And so when you actually have a conversation with them and you get a hostage back, that undermines this message of, hey, we need to be in there embalming kids.

And that's what Ben Shapiro is actually complaining about. Well, especially when you're trying, like essentially what just happened now, right? Like again, look, let me say, because sometimes often the rejoinder will be, people go, oh, so you trust Hamas or something like that. It's like, oh dude, I don't trust anyone involved in this situation, by the way, including my government, including the Trump administration. I don't trust anyone involved here, but like,

You put a ceasefire into effect. Hamas did release 20 hostages in the first phase of it.

there's kind of no reason to think like once they follow through with that, there's no reason to think they wouldn't have followed through with their deal to release all the hostages if for a ceasefire. Now, I don't know, maybe they wouldn't have, but it seems at least like it would be worth pursuing that. But so what happened here, which is just, I think to your point is like what made it so clear is that, so first you have these, you have these rounds of negotiations with Israel, Hamas, Israel,

and the Trump administration. By the way, in order for Witkoff to get that ceasefire, it was Israel who he had to put the pressure on, not Hamas. Hamas agreed it was the same deal that Biden had been sitting on since last May. So it wasn't like they were the ones who needed to be pressured. Then after whatever flare up between Netanyahu and Donald Trump,

They cut Israel out and Witkoff just negotiates with Hamas and gets the American out. Now, there's a few things to say on this, but at least look from everything that's being reported, Witkoff essentially said to Hamas that he was like, look, Donald Trump's coming to the Middle East. He's at, he's in the Middle East right now. I believe he's still in Saudi Arabia. We got a clip from him over there that we're going to play in a little bit. It was very interesting comment he made, but he goes, look, Donald Trump's coming to the region. He's coming to the Middle East.

It would do a lot for goodwill if you'd release the American citizen who's being held. And they agreed. They got nothing in return. This is what's being reported everywhere, as you just alluded to, Rob. The US didn't give up anything. They just basically asked him pretty please, will you let the American go? And that will buy you some good faith in the negotiations going forward.

and they got him out. Now, when I see all of these neocons who are furious about this, it does seem to me...

that perhaps they preferred this American being in captivity over there. Now, when I say American, we can get into that in a second, because I do actually feel like this is almost necessary to state. But you can understand where they really did like the talking point that there's an American being held there, too, because that kind of makes...

That that makes America more involved, that frames Hamas as America's enemy, not just Israel's enemy. And it does seem like they really do not like the fact that the Trump administration through Witkoff was able to talk directly to Hamas and and, you know, negotiate the release of this hostage. And obviously, like, you know, it's kind of common sense that Hamas

If you're in a conflict with a group and then there's a third party who's backing you in this conflict, the last thing you want is that third party who's backing you having direct negotiations that are bearing fruit with the group that they're funding you to destroy. So anyway, the whole thing is very interesting. I did think one thing that should be mentioned because I do look, I understand.

If nothing else, to remove that kind of pretense of, oh, look, Hamas has an American citizen that's that's a, you know, a hostage right now. I would you know, the guy, first of all, the guy is a dual citizen. He's an Israeli citizen and an American citizen. And he was also serving in the IDF.

And I just, whatever, I'm glad he's free. I don't want anyone to be hostages, you know, even soldiers. But...

Anyway, you get my point where I'm going with this, Rob, right? Like, it's just a little bit different. I do think that, like, if the United States government is to exist and if it has any role, then, like, yes, if there's a U.S. citizen who's held in some other country, we should be trying to negotiate back for them. The calculation on that does change a little bit when you put on a different country's military uniform. I'm sorry. I just don't view that in the same way. If an American went to go serve in the U.S.

it's different because russia's not really engaged in pure terrorist attacks but if you if the american citizen went over let's say to serve in syria he's serving in syria and he gets hot and he get then he got taken over by you know what al qaeda or isis out there you could say an american citizens being held by al qaeda or isis

But it's not like Al Qaeda or ISIS stormed an American compounder, just went in and took a citizen. That's not – it's the wrong way to describe it. To your point, if an American were to say, hey, I'm going to go volunteer and join the Ukrainian armed forces, and they throw on a Ukrainian army uniform and they go to war, and then like –

Putin, you know, one of his soldiers kills that guy. It's not like Putin killed an American citizen. Like, yes, technically he did, but it's not as if they found some American citizen and just killed him and had no regard for the fact that he was one of ours. It's like, no, you put on an opposing military uniform. And likewise, you know, the situation, however you feel about it,

Israel has been occupying, I know they say it's not an occupation, but it is. Israel's been occupying Gaza this whole time. If you're an occupying force and you put on that military uniform, you are in a different category than an innocent civilian. And sorry, this has always been accepted that there's a difference between military combatants and civilians. I'm like, no, you got into a fight.

You know, it's like you can't if you if you jump into a bar fight and start throwing punches, you can't be like appalled when a punch comes back at your chin. Like it's not the same thing as if you were just sitting at a bar and someone just hits you. It's just different.

So anyway, there is that little detail. Sorry, go ahead. I think that it's just an aside to the fact that for a while we've been hearing Israel is the most strategic ally and that we need to have full support for them and that the Donald Trump administration seemed like it was going to be as bad as the Biden administration and blanket support for Israel. And, you know, there was a lot of chatter of he might walk back the Ukraine war, but it looks like the Iran war might be on. And I don't know what happened behind the scenes in the last two weeks, but

But this feels like when you're at a job and you've got a team that's been working on a project for two years and then some other guy finally goes, no, I can close this deal and just gets on a call and makes the whole team look bad. And so it seems like the Donald Trump administration, I don't know what happened behind the scenes. Maybe it was that Netanyahu got busted talking directly to that guy or maybe he tried exerting pressure in another way that Donald Trump's like, no, you're not doing that. But it seems like at least at the moment, the Donald Trump administration is putting

pressure on the Israelis for, hey, you're not dictating American policy. And part of that was getting the American hostage out and saying, look, your whole your whole thing about the only way of dealing with this situation and saving the hostages is by bombing the region is clearly not true. Yeah, well, that's right. Yes. And there's

You know, it's interesting. Again, this is speculation. But one of the things that's interesting, a very interesting dynamic, is just who Donald Trump is and who Bibi Netanyahu is. And, you know, I guess the question has always been,

You know, like what level of control does Israel have over the Trump administration? I mean, obviously, Mary Madelson gave Donald Trump one hundred million dollars or something in that ballpark. There is obviously like Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee. And there's people in his cabinet who are like.

committed to Israel. And then, of course, there's always like the wild card of like, you know, what type of, you know, who was on what plane when and what dirt they have on anyone. But just in terms of personalities, you couldn't find more of like an oil and water combination because Benjamin Netanyahu is just so

so brash and so insistent on flaunting, like on flouting, what's the word I'm looking for? But just on like any time, if you remember, he would do this to Biden constantly, where Biden would publicly say, we've asked Israel not to do this. And then they'd go do that. And like they'd constantly be like almost publicly humiliating the U.S. government was something they like to do.

And you're like, Jesus, that is not going to fly with Donald Trump. I mean, how could it? And of course, you know, you add in the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu threw him under the bus after his first administration, congratulating Joe Biden before he was even declared the winner of the 2020 election. And you would just imagine that you're like, oh, this is the type of shit.

That's going to piss off Donald Trump. I mean, you know, it's, this is the guy who flipped out on Zelensky and we all were like, oh yeah, yeah, dude, you can't talk to Donald Trump the way Zelensky tried to. Um, but yeah,

Perhaps maybe we are kind of at that point. Now, it does seem like Donald Trump still is. I saw reporting earlier today that he does seem to want to go through with this plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza. Netanyahu also just said recently that the Gazans have to go. This is the Israeli goal is to ethnically cleanse the entire strip. And Donald Trump seems willing to help with that.

But it seems like war with Iran, continued war in Yemen was was a bridge too far. And you were very you were absolutely correct to point out that there was real significance when Donald Trump announced that he had reached the peace agreement with the Houthis, that he said they won't be attacking American ships anymore.

Because really, what happened was they were attacking a bunch of Israeli ships. We started bombing them because of that, and then they started attacking American ships. And

And then they made a deal that was like, hey, you stop attacking American ships, we'll stop bombing you. But there was never an agreement that they'll stop attacking Israeli ships. And so there is there does just seem to be a little bit of daylight between where the regime in D.C. and where the regime in Tel Aviv are. And that, I think, is a very positive thing.

sign. So we'll see what happens. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Monetary Metals. This is an amazing company. They've really revolutionized the precious metal space and they're run by great people. I highly recommend them. As many of you know, gold has hit all time highs in the last year. Now, a lot of people are interested in owning physical gold or physical silver. But typically what people do is they either store it in their house or they have it

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in additional ounces of gold or interest on your silver paid in additional ounces of silver. This is really a game changing kind of revolutionary idea. Check it out. If you want to learn more, go to monetary dash metals.com. That's monetary dash metals.com. All right, let's get back into the show. Anyway, um, the me and Tucker talked about this a little bit, but, uh, it was so Steve, uh, Whitcough was in an interview, uh,

And he said, this is the quote from him. He said, the neocon element believes that war is the only way to solve things. And Trump believes that his force of personality, the way that he is going to respond to situations can bend people to do things in a much better way. I believe in that, too.

That was Steve Witkoff's comment. Mark Levin quote tweeted this and said, by the way, neocon is a pejorative for Jew. Unbelievable. It's not. I mean, it's yeah, of course it's not. But it's so...

You're like, this is, but saying that when you're a Jew, when, when every single framing of criticizing everything is, Oh, it's just antisemitism. So we can't have a discussion about policy. That's real Jewy.

It's like the funny thing about it is, is that I was talking about this with with Tucker a little bit. But the thing that's so funny is that, like, for for those of us who are like old enough to remember, it is it's interesting when, you know, like there are these terms like like woke is a good example of this, where woke is a term that.

is almost, in everyone's mind at this point, it's almost thought of as a pejorative. Like, you're insulting someone when you call it woke. You're like, oh, this is woke bullshit. This is more woke insanity. People almost forget that woke started as...

as a term. Like it was people self-identified as woke. It actually started as like a black awareness thing. And then it became more of like the social justice thing. The same thing with social justice warrior. These were terms that people used themselves. And then they kind of like embarrassed themselves. And then people started using it as a pejorative. And now that's what people remember. A similar thing is true with neoconservative. Now it's used for

almost exclusively by people like us who are criticizing neoconservatives. But like, I'm old enough to remember when that was the name they chose for themselves. They were self-identified neoconservatives. And it wasn't until they hijacked U.S. foreign policy and every single one of their policies was a complete catastrophic disaster that they started running away from this. But it's really funny to see now them turn around

and say that, you know, like it's a racial slur to call someone a neocon. I mean, I'm not even, it would be on the level of if me and you got complete control of US federal government policy, everything was a complete disaster. And then someone went, these libertarians ruined everything. And we went, whoa, whoa, whoa, libertarian?

that's actually an anti-Semitic slur to say libertarian. You were like, dude, that was your label for yourself. Go look at it. Go read any of the documents from the Project for a New American Century. They called themselves neoconservatives. They were a bunch of leftists. They were all a bunch of Trotskyites who

who left Trotsky and let, stopped following him and came over and started pretending to be conservatives. But they called themselves the neoconservatives. So don't give me this bullshit about how that's a slur. It's only a slur because they fucked everything up. And then we started calling them out for it. But also just the idea that this is somehow, you know, again, it's,

I'll just say this. If you really do hate Jews, then you've got to love this framing. Who is this a gift to other than Jew haters to say that, oh, if you're America first, if you think it's better that we move away from a war of choice rather than toward a war of choice, that means you hate Jews.

Just think about that. Think about that narrative to hand someone. It's unbelievable that people like Mark Levin, it's like, oh, dude, you're doing more to promote Jew hatred than anyone I could think of. But isn't that something? Witkoff, the guy who just saved the life of a fucking IDF soldier who saved 20 Israelis before that, this guy somehow is a Jew hater.

For saying, yeah, we should be negotiating the release of these guys and not waiting for Israel to fuck the whole thing up. And by the way, Israel is actively trying to fuck the whole thing up as it's going on. It's truly unbelievable.

Well, they try and spin it however they can. And sometimes when nothing else fails, just declare them anti-Semites. Yep. It is. It is also interesting to me how much, you know, I mean, it's just Twitter, but Mark Levin just getting wrecked on Twitter for for posting this. Everyone's seeing through this bullshit.

Wasn't Mark Levin in some sort of advisory role to the administration specific to Iran? Wasn't he granted? Maybe. I don't remember. I'm not sure. Maybe we can look that up. But anyways, we can move on.

Yeah, but there does seem to have been some progress with the negotiations with Iran. And it does seem like Donald Trump's being fairly reasonable about it. It'd be interesting. We'll see where all of this goes. But I do, I want to play... How does Mark Levin's... I'm going to have to listen to this show to hear how he sells this one because it's just so funny. And when you brought that guy home and removed him from the tunnels, you endangered our entire country. It's just, how do you even sell this one? And the anti-Semites who were able to negotiate a deal...

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it'll be something like, I'm glad he's home. It's wonderful that he's home, but you cannot negotiate with Hamas. They're animals. You can't negotiate with animals. Like, okay, well, he just did save the guy's life. This is all the, um,

There was an old Dick Cheney line about, so essentially for people who don't know. So, and Scott does a really good job covering this in enough already, or maybe it was in fool's errand. Actually, I can't remember now. But so, you know, when nine 11 first happened,

And essentially the Taliban were the ruling regime in Afghanistan and they had given, they had let Al Qaeda stay. That was their crime. They were about as guilty. I always say as like a landlord is if one of his tenants murders somebody like they didn't do anything, they weren't involved in nine 11. They just like gave them a place to stay. And the, um,

And the Bush administration demanded that that they extradite Osama bin Laden and his men directly to the US, that they hand them over. No questions asked. And the Taliban said no.

And this is ultimately why we invaded Afghanistan. And so the Taliban said no, but they offered to extradite them to like a third country. I forget what their thing was, but they were like, well, we'll send them to Egypt or whatever it was. And who clearly would have just sent them to us. Like we could have just done that. And Dick Cheney said, you can't negotiate with evil.

That's why his argument was you can't even talk to it because they're evil. All that stuff, this is the bullshit that war hawks love to hide behind. You can't negotiate with evil. Meanwhile, they negotiate with every evil regime on the planet. If you can't negotiate with evil, then you can never resolve any conflict because most governments in the world are pretty fucking evil.

So that's whatever. It's all just bullshit. I do want to play it. Natalie, I sent you the video. Let's play Donald Trump's comments today in Saudi Arabia. I thought this was was very interesting, especially with all the stuff that we're talking about kind of going on in the background while he's saying this. So let's let's play that clip. I'm not getting any volume on this. There we go. Let's just bring it from the beginning.

And it's crucial for the wider world to know this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or...

flying people and beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affair we boosted more I can't really heard marbles of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders neocons or liberal non-profits like those who spend trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop

Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way. It's really incredible what you've done.

In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.

Peace, prosperity and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly.

So interesting comment there. Donald Trump takes a shot at neoconservatives and interventionists. I mean, he called them interventionalists, but that's OK. We'll let that slide as long as you're trash and neocons. He talked about how the nation builders destroyed more nations than they ever built.

took a shot at the kind of liberal interventionism. Just, I don't know. You know, look, it's Donald Trump. You can only ever judge him so much by what he said today. But I would say, yeah,

Number one, he's in Saudi Arabia. You know, a president's words, even Donald Trump's words are a little bit more meaningful when you're delivering them to a foreign audience. He's not just riffing like this is what he wanted to say to them. And number two, it's just with all of the stuff that we just mentioned going on. It is interesting that that's where his mind is, that when he went there, he was like, you guys can build this up better than we ever could. And we shouldn't be involved.

I think what happened is, uh, some Jew told Donald Trump that terrorists were a good idea. He nearly trashed his presidency and now he's going the other way. Uh, listen, I, I, like I said, I can't prove it. I think something happened behind the scenes between Netanyahu and Donald Trump takes extreme positions, particularly when he's trying to bully someone. And I don't know what happened over the last two weeks. And I don't know how that might change next week. If you see another attempt on a Donald Trump's life, uh,

But it does seem like at the moment, Donald Trump is really poking at Netanyahu and saying, you're not bossing us around. And that perhaps the cooler heads within the Donald Trump administration have had his year last because he's a little bit ADD and it's who last spoke to him. We've seen incidents of that before. So it could be at the moment that, uh,

some of the cooler heads have gotten his ear, and that's why... I don't know that this is going to be his position in two weeks from now. But at the moment, he seems to be beefing with Netanyahu, and he's going full Trump of, hey, you're not going to push me around, and we're going to start exerting some pressure on you guys to get what we're looking for. Yeah, it does... Right, it seems like that. Again, it's... Look, these things are...

It's Donald Trump. So you just never know. You never know who might, he might fire the awful person who he was listening to and then start listening to the good person. He might fire the good person, start listening to the awful person. You just don't know, but it's hard to not look at this and go, all right, that's pretty good. He does seem to be moving in the right direction. And, you know, there's, um,

It was Joe Biden who told Netanyahu early, early last year, if you remember, Rob, he said, you have days, not months to get this done because the whole global opinion was turning so hard against what Israel is doing to the poor people of Gaza.

Anyway, years later, nope, turns out they're just like, nope, sorry. And the U.S. has been backing them the whole time. And I do think that while this has always existed...

um, it does seem like the hubris and the kind of, um, uncompromising demands, unwillingness to even take the most modest steps to just not hurt us interests. Even if that's just optics, you know what I mean? The, uh,

I think that probably is really catching up to Netanyahu. I agree with you. My read of this is that somewhere behind the scenes, that guy Trump just had enough of this guy, like kind of trying to alpha him in a lot of ways. All right, let's switch gears here for a moment because I do, we just, I think we haven't really talked about this and I do just think it's really, it's worth mentioning because I find this to be fascinating. But so,

Jake Tapper has written a book

about Joe Biden's cognitive decline and the cover up about it on both sides of it make money on uh selling the fact that he's completely sharp and then make money on how how dare the administration lie to us because you're a journalist and you're supposed to do your own journalism not just feed the information that the propaganda that the administration gives to you to the American people

And so you're really just outing yourself for not doing your job. Well, that's looking at reality and going, hey, the information that you're giving me doesn't really align with what I'm seeing right in front of my face. Well, what a remarkable complaint to go. Oh, the administration lied to me when they gave me propaganda talking points and the propaganda talking points turned out weren't true because I wasn't doing my job. That's what you're telling us.

Pretty much. Pretty much. You know, I've said for a while now, and I got in an argument with some people ahead of time, but I really think I was pretty clearly have been proven right on this prediction that I said that Donald Trump winning again was going to just be the death of the corporate media. And

people would point out that like, oh, they had very high ratings when Donald Trump won in 2016. And I was like, yeah, but so much of that relied on the fact that they were telling you that they had the biggest story in the history of the nation, that Donald Trump was a Russian spy. All the evidence was about to come out, but you got to stay tuned in to find out what the latest evidence is. And so, but then when that flopped and then COVID, it was like, dude, I don't think they can go back to this well again. But the truth is that

probably just as big as those two, even as big as COVID, was the cover-up of Joe Biden being senile. Because it was just so... It was such a transparent lie. It's really a more... It's a more unbelievable lie than even the COVID stuff or the Russiagate stuff, because you could just see it. You could look right in front of you and be like, obviously, like, it is... Like...

You they'd have to make you think you're crazy to convince you you're not seeing what you're seeing. Anyway, here is let's go, because it's pretty funny to watch these. Well, let's watch them in the order that I sent them to you, Natalie. So let's watch. The first one is the the Geiger Capital tweet. Here's Jake Tapper on on on Biden's cognitive decline.

I'm just curious as to whether or not this kind of trying to hide what was happening with the president at the time had an impact on the press corps. Like, why didn't we hear some of these details from what they actually saw and were dealing with trying to get information? Well, Alex Thompson and I were on the case, as were lots of other reporters, trying to figure out what was going on behind the scenes. But

Bottom line is the White House was lying, not only to the press, not only to the public, but they were lying to members of their own cabinet. They were lying to White House staffers. They were lying to Democratic members of Congress, to donors about how bad things had gotten. And in fact, Alex and I started writing this book.

after the election of 2024. And we spoke with more than 200 people, most of whom, almost all of whom were Democrats, and almost all of whom wouldn't be honest with us or wouldn't be candid with us until after the election. And then after the election, we found out all of these things that when you looked at what was going on with President Biden at the time, it probably

It doesn't surprise you the extent to which he was deteriorating. But now we have anecdotes and facts about what was really going on behind the scenes with details that Democrats wouldn't share with us until after Election Day.

All right. So this is what Jake Tapper is saying now. Again, Rob, I mean, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head before we even got into the clip, but this is already, even if we didn't have the track record of what Jake Tapper was actually doing, which we're going to play a little clip of in a second, but this is just, it's so transparently pathetic that,

I mean, like, this is how you're going to attempt to shield yourself from criticism and place all of it on the Biden administration, which is very convenient because the Biden administration is gone now. So they can be the fall guy. Right. I mean, they already fell in the worst way possible. He had to drop out of the race, couldn't even finish the his election. Right.

And then, of course, Kamala Harris got blown out. But like, again, Rob, this is on the level of if you go like, oh, well, I had no way of reporting on the fact that Rob is bald because he told me he had big, beautiful hair.

And all the people around him said he had very long hair. And you're like, yeah, but you could have just looked at it and told the truth like we did. This isn't rocket science like we do this. Like it's very easy. How many times over the years did we play clips of Joe Biden and just be like, yeah, obviously he's going through severe mental decline. We were talking about this in 2019. Yeah.

in 2019 when he first announced he was running for president we could all obviously see that like yo this was a different guy than the guy who was vice president um and i it got much worse between 2019 and 2024 but it was very clear already it was very clear that the guy was losing it by the end it was just impossible to deny but for you to say this oh it turns out they were lying turns out they did know

Shocker. What a what a shocking admission. Oh, they were aware they were aware that this clearly senile man was not up to running for president again. It's I'll tell you, too, the issue that they have is we kind of address this on the last show, especially now when you see Joe Biden go out. And this is going to be something that, man, is it.

It's devastating to the Democrats and the corporate media that Joe Biden could still go is still an ex-president and might go do some interviews like he just did with The View, because you've got to look at that and think to yourself, right, that this where he is right now would have been 100 days into his second term that they were all trying to get him to run for it. You're telling me this dude still has over three and a half years left as president? Yeah.

I mean, what do you think Joe Biden's going to look like in three and a half years? And this is not with the as grueling of a schedule as he would have had if he was president. The answer is not good. It's not going to look good.

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All right. Let's get back into the show. Anything else you want to add, Rob? Yeah, I would love maybe maybe I can speak to the people in the back of the website. But there were for sure moments on this show where I had said that there should be accountability for those that covered for Joe Biden. In the same way, if you had a relative who was working as a lawyer or a doctor and they had dementia and you covered for them so that they could continue to make their paycheck.

And, you know, they messed up. They messed something up that cost a client or someone's life. There should be accountability for the family members. And there was a whole squad of people that saw things that we did not see that showcased severe dementia. I'm sure behind the scenes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They should have to. They should be held accountable. And this is classic news where they'll tell you the truth, where it's no longer relevant. And also.

while absolving themselves of any guilt of it. You know, like in four years from now, if the topic comes up again, they can go, no, we covered the fact that he was clearly, uh, yeah, not when it was relevant, when things are no longer relevant, you're happy to comment on it. It's exactly right. So that in two years from now, when you go, well, no one ever said anything about Joe, but he can go, Jake Tapper wrote a whole book about this. Yeah.

What are you talking about? It's like, right, right, right. Yeah, he did, but he didn't, you know? Anyway, let's play this next clip because it's just, it's, it's, there is something where it's like one of the most fascinating details about details. One of the most fast, not details, but one of the more, more fascinating kind of overarching themes of where we are exactly in the state of our politics and news. Is that like,

It does seem like the corporate journalists just cannot adapt to the new world. They just cannot adapt to the new reality. And one of the, you know, I like using this example a lot, but it was the, with the Tony Hinchcliffe thing when they were trying to go, you know, a speaker at a Trump rally made a comment and not, you know, a shock jock commiserator.

comedian was roasting everybody at a place, you know, which you could argue is inappropriate, but you can't pretend it's a person making a, but when you look at this thing and like the Trump rally is streamed live to YouTube, millions of people watch it. It's then chopped up. It's all over Twitter. I mean, by the time if you could try to account for all of the clips, I mean, it's in the tens of millions of people have seen it.

Tony Hinchcliffe do his thing. Tony Hinchcliffe also has one of the biggest shows in the world. Every week he gets more views than pretty much anybody in cable news. And so like people know who Tony Hinchcliffe is and they've seen the act before.

And then you're trying to go on TV and go, it was a speaker at an event trashing Puerto Ricans. And you're like, dude, but like so many more people have seen this already. It's also like they haven't figured out that there's like that game that you were just alluding to where if in three years they go, no one in the media ever said this. And then you go, what are you talking about? Jake Tapper wrote a book on this subject that kind of would have worked at one time. But now we live in the era of internet clips, right?

And so, of course, people have gone and found all this stuff. So let's play this next this next clip just to give you a taste of how Jake Tapper is right now saying it was the administration. They lied to us, absolving the media of blame. Here's Jake Tapper himself when it mattered.

How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that? It's very clearly a cognitive decline. That's what I'm referring to. It makes me uncomfortable. You are no. It's so amazing. It's so amazing to me that try and figure out an answer. A cognitive decline. Biden embraces his stutter talking about it while Trump mocks it, exaggerates it, belittles it. He's sharp physically.

I mean, mentally. Yeah. I think the question is physically, right? Right. More so? Right. Right. And the guy who's his chief opponent is only three or four years younger than him. Exactly. I mean, you have questioned President Biden's age, mental fitness, ability to lead of those supporting Biden. You said, quote, shame on all of you pretending everything is okay. You're leading us and him into a disaster. Do you worry that you damaged him at all? I don't doubt that you got hugs and handshakes behind closed doors today and maybe even publicly some of them because they like you personally. But...

But I've heard a lot of really nasty stuff about you from your Democratic colleagues. I mean, just like, what is he thinking? Exercise and narcissism. I mean, false claims to The Wall Street Journal about President Biden's mental fitness and acuity. He's 81 and his memory, you know, it doesn't seem great. It's not horrible, but I don't understand the outrage. Well, behind closed doors, Biden's shows signs of slipping. Unquote. The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp, which is run by.

They're Murdochs. Beyond the headline, there is some critical nuance here. The article is mostly based on observations of Republicans with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the only one going on the record. They do note in the article that most of the criticism comes from Republicans. Have you heard?

Any concerns from anyone who has met with President Biden about him seeming a little slower? No. The Russians are trying to do to make us and the public not trust our election integrity. Joe Biden has dimension, all this stuff. All right. Rob, what can you say here? He had his marching orders to sell a story. And so until the election, he was selling the story of...

how dare you uh make someone with a stutter feel bad firstly if you have extreme stutter maybe the presidency is not the best job for you but listen you know how dare you make someone with a stutter feel bad that's not meant that's not mental decline that's a stutter and that's the extent by which he was going to sell this story and not actually look

at reality and be honest, the American people. So look at him. He's profiting on both sides. When he was told to go sell it, he went ahead and sold it. And then the second that, uh, you know, he got different marching orders. Now he's turning around and going, how dare they tell me to have sold that story? It's, it's really unbelievable. It's like, look, dude, like you, you can sit here and, and again, it's, I guess we've seen examples like this before. I,

I guess it just never, you know, which really I suppose I should get over. I mean, it's kind of like a me issue or something like that. But you're like, it reminds me of like Fauci saying he never recommended lockdowns. Like you, you really think you can just come in here. I'm sure when I was on television, but not me. That was the other organization. And it's like when you know it's on video, you know, it reminds me of Chris Cuomo.

telling me that he never mocked Joe Rogan for taking ivermectin. And then they played the clip of him doing it. It's right here. We have it on video. What do you think you could get away with this? It's unbelievable. But there it is. It's not that the administration was lying. It's that

you were lying. And not only that, but that you... If you're going to say the administration was lying and they just didn't tell us, it's like, okay, but then anytime anyone tried to blow the whistle, you could count on Jake Tapper to be the attack dog who was going to put them in their place and say, oh my god, what you're doing is terrible. You're mocking someone for having a stutter. There's no evidence. I mean, sure, there's some physical decline, but there's no mental decline or something. It's just...

It's so absurd. And it's just a, it's fascinating to think that there's any chance that they can brush the stink of this off them. And there's just, I really think there's just no way they can. It's not there. The one, you know,

As corrupt as Russiagate was, as corrupt as COVID was. And don't get me wrong. I mean, COVID, there's nothing quite like it. It touched everybody's life in a way that really no government policy in either of our lifetimes can even come close to. Right. But there is on the surface.

There's a certain like plausibility for people who have not done deep research into the topics where you could maybe plausibly say, oh, they got it wrong.

with Russiagate. You know, they thought there was a thing that didn't end up being a thing. And with COVID, there certainly still are a number of people. I think almost everyone now will acknowledge that it was wrong, but you could think, oh, they got it wrong. You kind of got to look deep into it to really understand that they were lying, which they were in both of those examples that they, they clearly knew a lot more than they were telling people and they were lying about it. Um,

The Joe Biden being sharp as a tack. There's something different about that one where every person, like you don't need to be informed on the subject at all. You don't need to read these three great books. You don't need to read the declassified documents or Fauci's emails or put together a timeline of what they were saying publicly versus what they knew privately. It's so much more simple and straightforward.

It's so much. It's literally somebody telling you Chris Christie is thin behind closed doors. It's like you. This is you're obviously lying. You're obviously full of shit. Nobody thinks that Joe Biden's stutter got drastically worse as he entered his 80s. This is fucking ridiculous.

Like it's just it's too insane. And so there is something beautiful about this one. Like I actually love that Jake Tapper in his attempt to absolve himself of blame is bringing up this topic again with his book because anyone with any like one inch of common sense could tell that they're just lying through their fucking teeth.

Okay, we're going to wrap up there. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Come catch us in Appleton, Wisconsin this weekend, comicdavesmith.com for the ticket links and come on out to the Porch Tour. What's the Porch Tour website again, Rob? Porchtour.com. Nice and simple. There you go. All right. Thanks for listening, guys. Catch you next time. Peace.

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