Dave Smith vs. TRIGGERnometry 2

Like, we kind of thought it would go this way, but, like, we weren't exactly sure. And I don't know, it's really, I really do value it. You know, obviously, when we make these things, we put them out. It's kind of not up to us what that was anymore. Everyone's got an opinion on it, and that's fine. But I think to all three of us, we were like, yo, that was cool. That was cool that we were able to do it in the way we did. I saw, you know, it's so funny after it, man, because you have the reaction that kind of we all had. And then you see the way other people take it. First, I saw people, you know, you never try to, obviously, you guys might do a show where there's a million views on it, and there's 5,000 comments.

the comments don't reflect the majority of what the people who watched it think necessarily they they reflect kind of the loudest but i saw people being like how could you guys be friendly with dave you know and then i saw i saw my supporters being like dave destroyed those guys and your people being like they destroyed dave and you're like guys just to be clear none of the three of us think any of this happened like literally no one none of the three of us think anyone got destroyed nobody really thinks that like it was um and and also i don't know i guess it's just it was kind of crazy to me to see people be angry at you for just being cordial with me which at least from what I know your show has kind of been your calling card the entire time like that's what you do that is what we do but a lot of people most people i would say just want their opinion reflected back at them and that will be true of your audience as it is it's just everyone but actually the thing that we always try and do is have people on from the political spectrum but the reason it was so rewarding for us speaking with you back then by the way we're going to get to our disagreements of course i hope so but the reason it was so rewarding is that increasingly now when we talk to people

from positions that they don't agree with us this is particularly true of the progressive left i have to say because it's factually accurate is they don't even know what a conversation is anymore it's like you're having a discussion and all they want to do is interrupt and derail and okay in a 10 minute pierce morgan debate this is the only way to do it and i get it But once you're sitting down with somebody for two hours, which is what we often do, it just like it's like, oh, like, why are we doing this? Like, what is the point? Yeah. The thing that I noticed, and I've seen this in several of your interviews with with more left leaning people, which I got to say, I only see this with the progressive left.

And I will say at some times maybe with elements of like the Warhawks, like the worst of the Warhawks, but where they they do this thing. It's very hard. It's very frustrating because you can't really prove it. but you're like you're actively intentionally not hearing the point that i'm making like you're working hard it's not even like you're you're not you're working to not hear the point that i'm making and you know you're doing that and like it's just a very frustrating thing so yes i do i also i think whatever it is i think the three of us have this is a similarity despite very different views maybe this is more of a personality trait but it's almost a thing where like i want I don't want to just like win the exchange I want to actually be correct you know and like the way to be correct right is for me to have a good counter to what your argument is so like I want to hear the best version of your argument and it's gonna bother me if I don't have a good counter to that and by the way you might change your mind if you hear a better argument I mean for example uh if we move on to like issues and stuff I mean the war in Iran hasn't gone well and we've been saying that from basically day one which is very counter to what people expected us to be saying but

we talk to people and we ask them questions and we went i actually don't have a better answer than the one that robert papes just sat there and gave right right and we interrogated him for like two hours trying to like find the chink in the arm i couldn't find one yeah i mean i've i'm almost like my the only chink in robert papes armor that i can kind of find is just any time an academic is ever going, I have the model and it's gonna work this way, I immediately go like, hey, don't speak with certainty on that. There's a lot of different factors here that none of us are ever going to be able to create a model where we account for every single factor. That being said, the way he's mapped out how an escalation trap actually works, I mean, it's been enormously beneficial for me to read his stuff.

Also, by the way, I just gotta say, because he's blown up off the escalation trap thing, and I don't know if ever, I found Robert Pate back in like 2008, 2007. All right, we get it. You're a political hipster, Dave. So I was, when no one was buying tickets to Robert Page's shows, I was out there jamming with, I actually don't like his later stuff so much. I do like the Escalation Travel a lot, but his first book, I'm sorry, I shouldn't know this is his first book. This is the first book I read of his. I don't know what his first book was, but his book, Dying to Win, it's like the biggest study on suicide terrorism is just phenomenal really highly recommend it i believe i gave you a shout out on rogan for this but it may have been wrong you and this is something that's very interesting to me you were like the only guy i saw who supported the 12 day war who once this war launched was like ah no i don't think so now there might be how that happened well sure but i'm just saying there's one just find it very interesting you would just kind of think there would be a lot of people in that camp and yet i don't see almost anybody else because from my perspective as you could imagine when i'm arguing about the 12-day war the the defenses that so many people who were

defending the war gave me are all destroyed by this war you know no u.s troops have died it didn't cost a ton of money it hasn't turned into a disaster like all these things and so it would have just made sense to me that a lot of the people using those defenses when they all were different with this war would have been like well wait this is a different thing and yet i don't know maybe i'm wrong i can't think of another prominent person besides you two i think i i've certainly met a lot of people that yeah that would say some more more privately or maybe paul's would suggest there's a lot of people who feel that way right we're okay with the 12-day war but aren't okay with this one but in the commentary podcast to stand class yeah i just all the all it seems like all the people, the Mark Levins and the Ben Shapiros, all the people who are defending this, what are defending the 12-day war, very explicitly, like, on the grounds, mocking people like me, you're all concerned about what we're living through right now happening. Just from, you can understand, from my perspective, I was getting mocked last year for being worried about what we're living through this year, and none of them seem to be fazed by it. Well, look, there is a

steelman version there which which we can talk about which i think um so so the reason for example that we we're perfectly happy to be pro the 12-day war and anti this war is i don't think these things had to happen like you could have done the 12-day war and even if you realize we didn't get all the nuclear material you still go well taking this next step doesn't make sense right so those things don't have to be connected there's nothing in the laws of physics that said we had to go to this war because we did the 12-day war however if people like me were like warning and people like say paper warning about an escalation trap warning that like we shouldn't have gotten involved in this at all because it does make it that much easier to get more and more and more dragged in there's probably a point to that too like it's probably so your point is absolutely correct it does not like you could have done the 12-day war and stopped there there's nothing there's no laws of logic or physics let's say you couldn't have stopped there it's also probably true that you're more likely to get this war after the 12 day war maybe maybe but but i don't think it's a causal relationship the mentality of a president who would do the 12

day war to begin with you're more likely to have there's a reason why no other president did the 12 day war or this war donald trump did both of them there's something to that the fact that he was willing to go to war with iran once that same guy went back again but see i'm not being argumentative for the sake of it but to me they're just completely different situations like Like, if I know you have a gun in your house and you're planning to shoot me with it someday and I send in an elite unit to snatch the gun out, that's one thing. If I start a gangland war in our entire district, that's like a whole different.

Based off the gun after you claimed you already smashed the gun last year. Yeah, that makes it a little bit tougher. I'm not denying that's a little bit tougher. It's a whole different kettle of fish. Which brings us to the other thing I was going to raise with you about this, which is I can see the. So this is what I want to explore with you on this issue, because I actually think it's genuinely interesting. The answer that we're going to get Robert Payne back on the show. And the thing I want to explore with him is about the nuclear weapon thing, because the rationale from the people who support dealing with dealing with Iran.

Right. Is. Well, look, look, Dave Smith. Dave Smith's a clever guy. And his argument is if Iran had a nuclear weapon, like, they'd be really safe, right? And that's why they want a nuclear weapon, right? I'm sorry. I'm just not lying. My argument is that if they had a nuclear weapon, they'd be safe. Well, I think you'd agree that, for example, North Korea has nukes because from the perspective that you have, they want to be safe from foreign aggression, right? Well, I mean, is that just my perspective? I think we'd probably all agree that, yeah, a deterrent... It's at least part of the reason why all these...

Right, that's fair. And also, certainly, with maybe the exception of... Well, obviously, with the exception of what's going on in Ukraine, with the exception of the drone bomb campaign in Pakistan, but overall, like, say, since World War II, since nuclear proliferation, we don't really mess with nuclear-owned countries. Nukes make you say. That's true. Yeah, that's totally fair. But what I mean is everyone would agree on that, right? Sure, sure. So then the question is, from an American and Western perspective more broadly, is are we okay with Iran? having that level of safety from our ability to do stuff, given that their actions are incredibly hostile?

Well, I guess it's like the word okay there is doing a lot of the lifting, like, are we okay? I mean, I don't know. Are we prepared to tolerate a nuclear run? The question is, are you going to launch a war of aggression to stop that? And look, no. If that were the question, if it was, to me, from my perspective, If it was Iran is dead set on getting a nuclear weapon, they are breaking out, let's just say hypothetically, you know, before the 12-day war, they had kicked the IEAE inspectors out. They had announced we're breaking to weapons grade and we're building a nuclear weapon. No, I wouldn't say launch a war over that.

I don't think it's worth it. We sat as a country and watched Joseph Stalin develop nuclear weapons. We watched Mao Zedong develop nuclear weapons. We watched Kim Jong-il develop nuclear weapons. We didn't launch a war of aggression over any of them. These are it is I just don't think you can convince me that these are not the most evil regimes ever. Now, say Tong had nuclear weapons like this is. No, I wouldn't say launch a war. But that being said, as I think we argued about this last year and we can do again, that's not what the situation was. I mean, it just wasn't that we had a situation going into the 12 day war where we had IEA inspections. We had we had verification of what was going on.

We had our own CIA, Mossad, an annual threat assessment, all saying that they had not made the decision to start getting nuclear weapons yet. So launching a war over that, to me, is really crazy. To your point, no, I don't like nuclear weapons at all existing. And I think, you know, I don't know, to get into, like, abstract libertarian theory or something like that. But it's not a just weapon. It's not like a gun. A gun can be used with a just purpose. Even maybe you could argue a bomb can be used with a just purpose. a nuke really can't a nuke is civilians being destroyed by definition or its uses um i guess that's not true but typically that's where you're going to drop a nuclear weapon so no i don't like the idea of iran getting nukes i think u.s policy has pushed you know incentivized but you would you would accept that happening over fighting a war right yes and there are people but so this what i'm saying is there are people who have a different threat assessment of that they believe that Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be very dangerous for the Middle East.

It would upset the balance of the Middle East. It would mean that Saudi Arabia would need to get nuclear weapons. And effectively, you get escalation throughout the world now, and now everyone's got nuclear weapons, right? I mean, someone could make an argument, sure. But that's a reasonable argument. Well, I don't know if it's a reasonable argument to say this is the way it would happen, for sure. I mean, I remember, I'm old enough to remember. But the Saudis said, if Iran gets nuclear weapons, then we will have to. If Saudis get a nuclear weapon, then other people in the region will speak to do this.

Yeah, but China got nuclear weapons and Japan didn't. And they may have said... Because America prevented them. Yeah, perhaps. I'm just saying lots of things like that could happen. Perhaps America prevents Saudi Arabia from getting them. I don't know. I mean, I'm just saying, like, it's not a given. I don't... I'm not trying to downplay the dangers of nuclear proliferation. That being said, there's also, like... I don't know. I remember... I'm old enough to remember people horror stories about if india and pakistan get nuclear weapons then this is going to be like a heart they you don't understand it's a blood feud they hate each other they will use the nuclear weapons like there can also be alarmism about what will happen if a country develops nuclear weapons and quite often like in the case of north korea Essentially, what it just means is no one can mess with them now.

Now, that's not great in the case of North Korea. I mean, I'm not saying I want outside nations to mess with them, but it's allowed them, I guess the regime is in question at the moment, but it's allowed them to continue oppressing their people all this time. It's not great. I don't think George W. Bush invading North Korea would have been a better alternative, though, you know?

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you overhaul the health system like how this works out is gonna be part of your legacy and the the

on the last two weeks before it's all over. The Democrats take the House back, and you already know what the next two years of politics are going to look like. It's just going to be relentless impeachments, trials, shows, you know. It's crazy. So I guess the question following on from that is, is this the end of MAGA? Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by MAGA and what, you know, like MAGA at this point has come to just mean the people still supporting Trump, at least that's what it seems like to me.

Make America Great Again, which was not Trump's original, I think some, I think Reagan used it or something, it was used before him, but he jumped on it and made it his, it's a really brilliant, you know, never think about it, it's really incredible, it's four words that convey at least four crucial thoughts like one crucial thought per word it's make america great again i'll let you know in one like little thing we used to be a great country we are no longer a great country the situation is fixable and i'm the guy who's gonna turn it around like it's so much information in one little thing it was a brilliant you know political strategy donald trump is a to say he's a unique figure is like the understatement of the century i mean there it's like who could have taken out the bushes and the clintons who could have you know against the will of the obamas against the will of of brennan's deep state and clappers nsla who could have done this well you know like almost if you were writing it on paper it's a video game we need to draft a player who can do this okay make him the richest guy ever and the brashest guy ever and the most famous guy ever and the most callous guy ever and the most camera ready guy ever and like it's such

a so when you say like is that well yeah trump's gonna be done something else has to come after this um i think like much of the principles much of the things that donald trump ran on and got americans excited about there's still mass support for i think that you know i'd like to think the areas where i really do look at us as like brothers in arms like soldiers like the areas like like i mean this very sincerely even though this sounds kind of douchey to say it like this but like the people fighting against woke insanity with big platforms are like i don't know man there's a really important service done in all of this this is like absolute societal madness that has swept the western world over the last 15 years and it needs to be combated and it also can't stand up to daylight you know and so that's like what's so amazing about guys who do what you do uh with like topics like that but anyway that we still won that fight like it's 80 but try reintroducing trans and kids today in america dude there it's unpopular like so i don't know someone who's against that can still be popular in elections the open borders is still unpopular trans and kids is still unpopular fighting stupid wars is still unpopular debasing your currency is unpop

So, like, we just kind of need, like, there is potential there for that movement to continue, I guess. I mean, the old adage, the very famous adage is it's about the economy, stupid. And you're looking at the American economy, you're looking at diesel prices. Diesel prices are affecting his base because these are people, you know, who've got, you know, they work in haulage, they work in farming, they work in manual labor. these are the people who need diesel the most and these prices rising are going to affect them yeah i mean it's uh whatever percentage of people who just have a pickup truck you know i mean not every pickup truck takes diesel but a huge percentage of them do um and and of course you know the as you guys know well like the price inflation was such a huge part of his mandate you know to uh for success or excuse me for his second term and i've always felt politically speaking you know joe but like if i want to be completely fair here if we want to give the devil his due you know donald trump benefited a little bit from the fact that he lost the election in 2020 went away as the ramifications for the year that were 2020 kind of came due in 2021 like in 2020 and i don't know as much about the way uh england handled it but we locked down 49 out of

50 states for at least some period of time we put like tens of millions of people out of work and we printed like i think five or six trillion dollars and passed like five trillion extra dollars of spending bills in the congress just to like hold things over my point being the next year there was going to be some price inflation no matter who was sitting in the oval office and yet joe biden inherited that and then all the trump supporters got to say look at how bad this biden economy is now biden kept printing the money and spending the money so he kept making the problem worse but anyway as donald trump comes in here now all those guys that you're talking about they've not only had to deal with the price inflation of the last few years which is still with you the prices haven't gone down they've gone higher under trump the wages going up are like pathetic uh and and now you have higher diesel prices so it's like yes it's literally being told that the like people whose families are falling apart who are slipping through the cracks that you're gonna have to tighten your belt a little bit more when explicitly i think that's what you know so much like what what you talk about, like the climate agenda, the woke agenda. So much of that was always telling

people to tighten their belt a little bit more over both that, like sacrificing for something that isn't even this grander, you know, like that's the climate like demand essentially. Right. It's like you sacrifice your standard of living for this, which, by the way, won't make a difference. It won't even make a difference in the greater scheme of things. I think that's the way a lot of people feel about the wars as well. How many of these projects do we got to sit here And wait, when does the, you know, when Benjamin Netanyahu guaranteed me in 2002 these positive reverberations that were going to sweep through the region?

Well, we've been launching his wars ever since. Well, it brings us to the interesting part of this conversation here, because with all of this stuff, and like with the Israel-Gaza debate, the only reason I personally get involved in it is I really dislike people being dishonest. And right now, I'm seeing Trump basically using Zelensky to divert attention away from his Iran. I mean, that's what's happening. Oh, clearly. Like, the diesel prices have fuck all to do with Ukraine. And he's done this amazing deal with Russia. It does nothing. Yeah, I was just reading about it the other day. Like, it's not even a blip.

In this month, they will deliver 0.27% of global monthly diesel supply. Like, it's literally got nothing to do with Ukraine. Dude, it's so crazy, because I've been on... And I mean, I don't know that we... i wouldn't maybe we're not exactly at this point on polar opposite ends of it but at a certain point we certainly were on polar opposite ends of the issue with ukraine but man i gotta say and and my politics much more would have been like we shouldn't be backing ukraine in this flight we shouldn't have entangling alliances we should do business with everyone including do business with Russia because we have 90 percent of the world's stockpile.

nuclear weapons let's have good relations between the country is kind of my default starting place but like you said it's also just to after years of first of all ukraine didn't just pick a fight with russia okay ukraine has been told explicitly since at least 2014 by the entire west we got your back hey if you have this fight we got your back and i'm sorry like as i've been saying by the way you don't need nuclear weapons well well look and this is after that i'm talking about way after they they denuclearized which i don't know exactly how that would have worked like around you know ukraine staying a nuclear state there were lots of problems with that but even way after they denuclearized no we're saying like stand up to vladimir putin who's trying to put all this pressure on you to join his economic deal join the eu instead we got your back he won't mess with you you're with us don't worry okay even if we can't give you nato membership we'll give you joint military exercise if he attacks you we'll back you up like it's it's literally going to a bar with your your smaller friend and being like anyone messes with you i got your back for years and years and years i've been i've been talking about the moral hazard that comes with this type

of policy for years but then at the end of that when you're still in the fight to snake you in the back and do business with the other guy just like as you said just so you can have a headline not even to solve the problem but just so that a couple weeks before midterms there's a headline that says big diesel deal maybe the markets react by coming down a little bit some voter the guy you're talking about who's struggling a little bit goes i just read in the paper trump made a big a big diesel deal because if they read into it the way you did they'll find out it's nothing it's like that's dirty man i'm sorry i'm i got to agree with you on that there is now you have steve whitkoff in the kremlin calling vladimir putin a humanitarian and you're just going like shut up like you just this is just dishonest and it's despicable it really is also it would i would have respected it more man if like as you know because you you know you you followed this thing for years it's not as if there wasn't a conflict going on through trump's first four years right like i mean vladimir putin had not invaded the country yet but there was a there was a civil war vladimir putin had certainly spent sent forces and maybe hadn't invaded with the whole army but

was certainly there were russian special ops or whatever the hell they call special operations forces over there in the country there was russian money and weapons flowing in there was a hot war going on where people were dying right so like donald trump in this period of time in his first four years sent weapons into ukraine uh uh tore up treaties with russia put additional sanctions on russia he's also been in this time for two years he's had to do he's doing this right before midterms my point is almost like hey if you wanted to break with u.s policy of like supporting ukraine and you wanted to have they taunt with russia and rearrange it there you had all the opportunities in the world and you just didn't have the courage you just didn't ever want to spend political capital on any of this so it's uh particularly kind of cowardice i think to do it at the last well that it's interesting that you use that word because it is a word that i think is appropriate and and the thing is he's it's not only about the headline of big diesel deal it's also about the headline of zelensky being unreasonable so you can put the blame on him when the blame does not belong there well i've always thought i've always you know um when john meersheimer said in uh 2015

i guess it was and i always give him credit for this because like in the context of 2015 at least in the western media i mean everyone was celebrating at this point the success of the made on revolution and and the i guess the yanukovych i'm sorry the um the uh um why am i blanking on his name who's the guy who followed yanukovych um yes the order that he might have Poroshenko was probably involved in there at that point. Poroshenko was before. Yes, he came right before. But so they were celebrating. Victoria Nuland was talking about how they've joined the EU. This is now, they're now part of the West.

They're a European force. Everyone was celebrating it. Gideon Rose was bragging on the Colbert Report about how he stole Robin away from Batman. And John Mearsheimer said... The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path. And I remember that phrase because I had to look up what primrose path meant. And I was like, that sounds awfully nice. What does that mean exactly? Like, you could almost kind of figure out what it meant with Shakespeare, like leading you down the path to your death that has nothing but beautiful roses next to it. I'm sorry, I'm not a well-educated person. But I was like, oh, that's a beautiful way to put it. But that's kind of been my perspective this whole time. And so I don't look at it like, you know, is Zelensky, Zelensky is a leader. I, you know, political leader, as we said last time they're all mafioso leaders i'm not saying any of them are angels they're all corrupt but like no like the west used ukraine very clearly like used ukraine as like a thorn to kind of jab russia with and this ended up getting ukrainians just like absolutely decimated and you know to turn around and and blame zelinski for it now yeah i don't know i don't but this is what i'm saying is i don't even think it's about blaming zelensky because trump is really trump

he's just using him to distract from the consequences of his war that he's actually having said by the way that he would end the war in ukraine on day one and by the way my view is he actually had the opportunity to do that when he came in for a second term the only problem is he cut off his leverage at his own knees with his rhetoric because the way to end the conflict was to say to putin look we can do a deal that neither you or zelensky are going to be happy with now or i actually will give them all the support that you you fear um and again you might say risks escalation i would say this is negotiation one-on-one one-on-one which trump is very familiar with and regularly uses which is big threat big reward and yeah i mean like in pure theory it's not that threat versus reward like a carrot and a stick can't be used in negotiations effectively but i mean i guess i'd be a little bit skeptical after the huge weapons packages that biden and the EU had poured in there that that was going to get him to back down. I think at that point, he had kind of understood, like, I'll win at grinding it out. And Vladimir Putin doesn't seem to very much care how many people got to get grinded out. And, you know, I think that

perhaps, you know, probably because Donald Trump, I don't think really has a deep knowledge of any of these things, but he probably knew that there was a point early in the war where Vladimir Putin was willing to make this deal if you'd carve him off the Donbass. And so Trump probably just figured i'll be willing to do that i'll carve him his little piece of ukraine and that's how easy it'll be to solve this whole thing you can solve it in a day the problem is that by the time donald trump got in there vladimir putin was saying was going you're offering to give me what i already have that's not really anything like there's not and then i do i also think that once once he got sucked into the talk about the mineral deals and all of that it ended up just being so convoluted and corrupt and now just getting more and more entangled into this situation it's just you know i don't know it's the i guess it's just like he never came in with a clear vision of like this is what my parameters are this is how we're going to make this piece it was always just the war wouldn't have happened if i was there then i'll solve it and sorry it's going to require a little bit deeper of an understanding and speaking of the deeper understanding i think it's worth

explaining to people that the reason uh ukraine can't do what trump is asking is they're basically they've made a defensive position called the fortress belt in the Donbass. Putin doesn't have all of the Donbass. That's true. No, he doesn't have all of it. He does have other territories in addition. But the Ukrainians are effectively defending the most effective defensive line that they have. Right. For them to give that away in this negotiation so Trump can lose slightly less badly in the midterms means the end of their country because they are now unable to defend their country not only now but the next time something like this happens which it will because ukraine has been going through this for centuries right so but but what trump's doing is putting pressure on the guy he actually has leverage over uh to try and do a deal That he can't do because it would be suicidal for Ukraine to do that deal. Anyway, what's interesting to me is, returning your compliment about being honest, is you're one of the few people, I think because you're not wedded to MAGA, that can say this, whereas loads of people, as we know from speaking to people in America on the right, think this was a terrible mistake, but don't quite say it in the way that you have.

Yeah, I guess that's right. I guess it's because I just never was. I don't I never saw Donald Trump in the same way a lot of Americans saw him where they got super emotional about him. He was either Hitler or he was the savior. It was never any of that to me. You know, I had already decided that I hated everyone. They were all a bunch of criminals who lied us into war and they were all just there to extract wealth from the people and benefit their friends. So when Trump came along to me, it was always just like, oh, well, this is funnier than it was before. This is more entertaining. And also, yeah, I'm just I guess I'm I'm much more wedded to my principles than I am to any politician.

I also kind of got dragged into supporting Donald Trump. Not that I exactly got dragged in, but it was like I called it at one point the most unenthusiastic vote in human history. You know, like I just I don't like politicians. I don't like Democrats or Republicans. i didn't i was so disgusted by the democratic establishment and what they had handed us over the years and i i still stand by being disgusted over all that stuff uh that definitely contributed to it there were some signals you know to suggest that maybe he wouldn't go in this direction i do think it's been a bit shocking what's happened over the last year i think perhaps part of it is like uh like an incentive kind of snowball thing you know like once you've lost tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, but Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin still love you. You might as well play to them instead of playing to the people who don't like you or something like that.

But it's almost just seemed like it's gotten crazy how, like, where we are now from where we started. I don't, I think that Donald Trump, you remember, this is kind of painful to admit, right? Even though we all knew this was true. You know, liberals would stand up 10 years ago and they'd go he's a disgusting person you know what a creep and you're like well yeah okay we know that we know but you're running hillary clinton and he's calling her out for what a fraud she is and i'm kind of enjoying this creep pointing out that actually she's acting like she's such a creep your husband's a creep too like i don't know there was something where what but look i'll tell you the one that really got me um was when when joe kent resigned uh over the war let's feel however you feel about that this is the counterterrorism director there's a very high position to be resent you know we've seen a lot of wars a lot of innocent people have died over the last 25 years over wars we were lied into um that's maybe the highest level of resignation we've ever seen i don't know is there a higher one i know some people resigned on biden over gaza but nothing that high level um so he resigns he goes i can't be a part of this i'm sorry like i just can't be a part this is a guy

who's a decorated veteran himself who lost his wife serving in in a war under donald trump donald trump's response to that is to immediately talk about what a loser he is and then talk about how he remarried too quickly dude that woman died in syria under president donald trump's watch and he immediately like what like dude that is a disgusting piece of shit human being and i'm just not gonna not say that you know what i mean like i don't care what i voted for last like i it's not to me the thing that really and me and you have talked like off air about this a little bit but like the thing that motivates me more than anything else about this podcast to stay on space and whatever it is that we're doing where the three of us have these conversations and make way too much money for it whatever this is there's a public record and my son is going to be a man someday and he's going to know where i stood you know like in what i said and like the idea that i would just like bite my tongue on the other side.

On that, not point out what a horrible man you are. Like, just as a man, as a man who's married with kids, someone lost their wife, dude. You should never talk. Your president of the United States should never talk about their wife that way. But she died under your watch in a war we never should have been involved in that you promised to get us out of and then failed to. I mean, I sometimes I wonder, like, are people not afraid of God? Are they not afraid that God exists? Like, if I ever did something like that, it would terrify me that my son's going to know this one day. and that I'm going to be confronted by my maker and have to explain this.

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And I wear them. The quality is genuinely excellent and they last. Get 15% off your first order at TrueWork.com with code TRIG. That's TrueWork.com with code TRIG. T-R-U-E-W-E-R-K. built like it matters because it does for me it was a rob reiner oh yeah that was bad too man yeah and you know and you know him and rob they disagreed but the fact that his son who was a paranoid schizophrenic murdered his father and his mother and then trump came out and basically you know shat on both of them you're like yeah this guy just died you're the president of the united states and to be clear it's that part because it's like i'm a stand-up comic i know you guys started and you still do stand-up like there's i'm not against shane gillis in a night club or tony hinchcliffe down at a comedy club making some vicious joke about it because you almost go in there going like listen we're coping with obvious tragedy here but yeah dude and also man this is this is the most boomer thing i'm ever gonna say that you guys got on record here but rob reiner was part of americana man like forget what the local the the latest little fight over the latest fad for five minutes is but like a part of america just died man that's rob

reiner all the family like for just i mean i don't know it's just for that it's such a sad thing when something like that happens i actually forgot about that till you just brought it up but yeah the kent one got me more because it's just like she died under you as the commander-in-chief but So also, as I've been saying for years, like, I'm against all these wars because I'm really against them. I'm against government spending because I'm really against them. I really believe in all these things. And from my perspective, Trump has been terrible. It's just a travesty of an administration. I mean, the one thing that he has done that's undeniably impressive is dealing with the border.

He's done great with that. That's incredible. But I want to come back. I mean, you bring up Joe Kent, and it speaks to a very important portion of this as well, because i feel that i said what pisses me off is when people are being dishonest and i have to say when i look at the narrative of israel tricked america it tricked donald trump specifically into war to me that's just a cop-out and a lot of people in maga use that cop-out now because they don't want to acknowledge the reality donald trump wanted to go into this war It's like my four-year-old, it's me saying, you know what, you know what happened, Dave?

My four-year-old tricked me into buying ice cream for him yesterday. Oh my God, I just got so tricked. Well, if your four-year-old was Benjamin Netanyahu, people might believe it more than they would. Benjamin Netanyahu is a more effective politician than my four-year-old, but you get the point. A country of nine million people, right, very little power, actually, along with every other country in the world, tries to quote-unquote, air quotes, trick America. Every country in the world is trying to trick America into doing whatever. Hold on, let me finish my point, right? Every country in the world is trying to influence America because it's the hegemonic power.

Of course you are. Every country in the world is trying to influence China in its direction as well, right? Donald Trump went into this war, and this is why we changed our opinion over the time because I mentioned you want to hear how we got to our view on Iran. We came to the US, and the first thing we did was we went on Rogan, and we were talking about this, and people can look this up. And I'm there going, the coin's in the air. We don't know how this is going to end. And my thing was, like, there is a plan. There's got to be. There could be a plan. There could be a plan. And, you know, the American military, the American, all of these giant institutions, they have massive budgets.

You know, a lot of people outside America like to make fun of Americans as dumb and whatever. There's a lot of dumb Americans. But the smartest people in the world that I've met have been in the world. Yeah, we got some geniuses, too. you've got some geniuses too right so a lot of these geniuses are working in these big well-funded departments crafting and thinking of and then we spend three weeks in america actually talking to people close to the halls of power people who are in the room or just outside the room or talk to the guys and we quickly realized there is no plan this was just somebody who got carried away after venezuela very excited by the possibility of like doing cool and look at how powerful we are and whatever and that's basically and we were like we spent three weeks going like no that can't no that can't be the reason that the world's most powerful nation ever launched the war halfway across the world because the people at the top just got together in a room and there's a bit of group think and the guy has made sure that he's surrounded by people that agree with him so information that's counter doesn't really reach him but that is exactly what putin got that's why putin is in a four four and a half year three day special military

operation in ukraine i mean they really did and i've i mean i've read a lot about this and i really am pretty convinced that the neoconservatives really believed that if you put a hashamite king into iraq that the hashamite king with control of iraq could convince uh hezbollah to be friends with israel like they really bought but that's at least a plan but i'm just saying okay but the plan here was right this is it's a dumber plan but the plan was it'll work no it's not no no it's not a plan it's more of a hope okay but like yeah i mean honestly it's kind of just a hope that a hashamite king put into iraq would get hezbollah to be friends with israel like my point being that i would say don't underestimate the hubris that men in positions of power can find themselves in you know it's like a thing that we're very vulnerable to power and we're very human beings i mean general like men in the we're vulnerable to power and we're vulnerable to hubris and we're uh especially you know like say like look coming off something like venezuela it is like i'm just saying don't underestimate how much that can play a factor of being like yeah i'm on a roll oh i i don't underestimate that anymore i don't even like yeah audience but but that was shocking to us

yeah i well i agree but that is all right that is our understanding of what actually happened right so so why is it israel tricked america this is a bit i really don't let me just real quick I want to answer that, but I just real quickly want to say on the Joe Kent thing, and the reason why maybe I'm a little bit more forgiving of him than that, because I do certainly agree with you that in the tone of a lot of things I've seen him say, he's almost excusing responsibility for Donald Trump. You know, like, it's almost like the president was, like, almost as a force that did it, you know, the Israel lobby. I'm not talking about Kent specifically, it's just the narrative is. But I want to make the point specifically about Kent, which is that I did notice him doing that quite a bit. And then he would almost be kind of ass kissy with trump where he'd be like you and only you sir can walk away from this right now and you have the unique strength and all this but i always did take that as like look this is the only way you're going to maybe reach donald trump and this is his former counter like this isn't just me on a podcast saying this this is literally a guy who he picked to have the most important job keeping

americans safe from terrorism so like maybe that's the way to play it from that percent there was a while before tucker broke with trump where tucker was very clearly like against all the things trump was doing but still wasn't quite bashing trump and i think it's a little bit of a weird thing jd vance is in this position too you're in a little bit of a weird position if you're at all in trump's orbit and you want to continue to have his ear then yeah yeah you can't bash him or you're you're done that's a separate that's a separate thing that's fine but the broader point that you're saying like should uh trump you know have his agency or whatever diminished or should he Well, clearly my position is no on that. I mean, Donald Trump is responsible no matter what exactly, is the story of how he got it.

Now, the official story from the newspaper of record in the United States of America is that it was Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of Mossad who convinced him that it would be easy and that they could get the guy over. They didn't convince him. Nobody knows who convinced him. What we know is that they made the case and that they presented information to him. We know that they presented information and that nobody else in his cabinet really bought into it. Even the most war hawky of the people in his cabinet were like, Marco Rubio said fanciful. Right. Or whatever the New York Times language was.

But that makes my point, which is nobody convinced anybody. Well, we don't know. Hold on. Hold on. So if all of his cabinet thought this is BS, right, he is the outlier here, right? It's not about him being convinced. He clearly wanted, like you said, he was on a roll and he was like, let's do this as well. Let's see. I'm not I'm not admitting that that's a huge part of the story here. But you're also can't just completely omit, which is just objectively true, that first of all, Netanyahu immediately afterward bragged. He was just bragging his major pitch to during his election right now to Israel is what his 5000 hours on American television and meeting with American presidents culminated in this war in Iran.

He said this is the culmination of my life's work. Lindsey Graham, the late Lindsey Graham, was on record talking about going to Israel and meeting, coaching Netanyahu on how to get Donald Trump to be persuaded by this idea of going to war. The Israel lobby in this country has been advocating for this war for 25 years. This is the neoconservatives crown jewel. Wesley Clark, seven countries on the list of seven. So now, listen, none of that is a direct argument about exactly what convinced Donald Trump in that room this time to go. However, I think when you omit all of that, it's not as if people are just making something up out of thin air.

That Israel persuaded Trump to go to war. I'm not saying the Israelis didn't present Trump with information that they believe to be accurate, I imagine, about what would happen if he started this war. but what i'm saying is there will be chinese delegations going into the white house for last 25 years saying we we really think this would be in the best interests of america and there will be russian delegations there'll be chinese uh british delegations somali delegations going we need more learnings whatever right uh there will be lots of this going on it's ultimately up to the president united states to make those decisions 100 and it's also that's responsible look if i have a tough time buying that there's not something more to the story than either us have just brought. Like, it's just he got convinced that this would be easy. It's just, it's a bit tough. Perhaps that's true. Perhaps that's the case. It's a bit tough for me to go, but really? You never thought to yourself, like, I'm really rolling the dice here, and what if the regime doesn't fall, and what? I mean, there must have, also, I know reading, because this has been much more detailed, but I know that I've read a bunch, in fact,

John Mearsheimer wrote a bunch about this, and Scott Horton, in his book Enough Already, has a great portion on this stuff where in 2007, you know, when Dick Cheney was trying to get George W. Bush to invade Iraq, like George W. Iran. I'm sorry. Iran. Iran. I'm sorry. So this is by late in Bush administration. He's like, we got to go for Iran now. Well, this is the George W. Bush has finally like had it with Cheney at this point. And, you know, he's like, everyone hates me because I've been listening to you this whole time, you know. So but I know for a fact that like the pentagon really sat george w bush down and we're like hey here are the real hardcore react now you got to remember this is also at a time when the war in iraq and afghanistan were going on so we had hundreds of thousands of troops in the region so like what you're seeing right now is nothing compared to what the targets around would have had but i i just it's hard for me to imagine no one gave donald trump this like you're telling me no one in the pentagon got to him and went what we would have known you know like you were just talking about how impressive some of these people in the Pentagon are, no one went, so they will close this trade

for most. So they will touch our bases. So this will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. This will not, you know, there will be casualties. There will, like, that just seems hard for me to believe. But I guess perhaps that's true. Either way, whether that's true, look, if there was something else that persuaded Donald Trump, or if Donald Trump, let's say in the most conspiratorial version you have, Donald Trump is a pedophile in the Epstein files, and they have evidence that he was a pedophile, and they're blackmailing him to get him into the war it's still 100 percent his fault okay don't go into a war come out and admit they're blackmailing me like i so no matter what the scenario is i am holding donald trump 100 responsible for it that being said i don't think he's a pedophile who was caught in the epstein fuzz i certainly don't have reason to believe that i do think that the lakudniks the neocons and the broader israel lobby are very largely responsible for why we're in this war why we're even um wait in this conflict to begin with no that doesn't make sense dave because sure it does you just said i hold him a hundred percent responsible and then you say the lakudniks

the nuclear Iran. But I think what you might be leaving out there is that there's other concerns about Iran that have nothing to do with the nuclear program. And in fact, one of the things well, one of the things that Israel likes about the nuclear program is that that's the thing that moves Americans to be concerned about Iran. And in fact, this is why Benjamin Netanyahu specifically freaks out every time a deal might be made. It freaks out every time that they might be halting

that nuclear program because it removes the pretext for war which is what he's always really wanted dude they were the ones and it was all the hawks and this is where i'll say there is something to be said for like the argument that the israel lobby or whatever maybe if you want to call them like is advocates of israel in america when when donald trump was in the negotiations for the first round before the 12-day war if you remember donald trump had said publicly at one point which he repeated again the week that we were doing the memorandum of understanding they're like they can have some nuclear program we're not going to say they can't have a nuclear program the way all normal countries have nuclear programs for energy and medical you know radiation they can have a nuclear program and it was the hawks insistence that no it must be zero enrichment and ultimately they convinced him and that was where he went with the you have 60 days we got to get to zero enrichment and that was just like a non you know but i'm saying to me the only reason why you would have insisted on sneaking a poison pill like zero enrichment because none of you guys care if Iran enriches to 3% so that they can have...

No, that's not true. That's not true. Well, you don't care. You care if they have a nuclear program just for civilian power? Well, it's... These two things are connected. Civilian power is very easy to convert into military. Yeah, but it's also very easy. Once you have the scientists who know how to do it and you've mastered the fuel cycle, they can break out if they want to. I mean, listen, I'm not saying like bombing the bunker busters doesn't do any damage or set them back. The point being more that, like, I think if your real concern was the nuclear weapons and you had the opportunity to have a deal that would bring in IAEA inspectors, lock them in at a low enrichment rate and monitor the situation.

Seemed like you'd be happy about that. No, I take your issue off the table. Again, see, I'm all I'm doing is I'm not even expressing my own opinion, particularly. here. I'm just passing what you're saying for logic. And what fails for me here is adopt the position of someone who thinks that Iran having nukes is a terrible threat to the world. It's not an unreasonable position. Sure. Right. From that perspective, you want to hold them back in the journey towards nuclear weapons as far as you can, as far as you possibly can. therefore we know a civilian nuclear program is a facilitator for a military nuclear program because you create the front the possibility of enriching etc right so from a maximalist position of iran having nuclear weapons is the worst threat in the world it's perfectly logical to want to keep them to no nuclear program whatsoever i guess i'm making the point that it's not i'm not suggesting that it's not logical if you don't want iran to have a nuke to not want them to have a nuclear program at all. I'm saying that in the context of the reality where you know that this is going to kill the deal, they're not going to accept 0% enriched uranium because no country is going to accept that. And they're no different than that. But knowing that they have

just a few years ago accepted 3.5, they're at the negotiation table. You've got a real chance for that. The fact, my point is the fact that you'd rather blow up the deal than get it down to 3.5 demonstrates that your number one concern isn't the nuclear program. So you're not taking on the But I also I think there's also a challenge to that, which is if you are someone who is really concerned about Iran developing nuclear weapons, that seems to me, my experience, highly correlated with also thinking that Iranian regime leaders can't be trusted. OK. All right. Fair enough. I'm just saying that I think it is not that unreasonable, given this entire track record, to assume that, like, yes, Israel, the Israelis are savvy enough to be well aware that the decapitation strike probably was not going to take out the regime.

and that they were going like, yes, we still want to push for this war regardless. I don't find that to be like wild speculation. A little bit speculative. Yeah, well, we don't know the answer to that, but maybe that's possible. Moving on from that, one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about, Dave, is something that a lot of people aren't talking about. We're focusing on MAGA. We're focusing on Trump. We're focusing maybe on the collapse of MAGA. We're not really talking about the Democratic Party. So what's going on with that? I don't know, man. Doesn't look good to me. Well, so there's what's going on with the Democratic Party is interesting. You know, 10 years ago in this country, there was essentially politically speaking a civil war on the left and the right in the presidential elections. Right.

enormously popular issues at this point you know every bit like i think people on the center right or people on the right got to be honest if we're just admitting what's going on here every bit as much 80 20 issues as the trans and kids and the open borders and all the 80 20 issues that we love

that we're on the right side of? Well, opposing the U.S. supporting Israel's destruction of Gaza and opposing this war, those are 80-20 issues in this country as well. Are they? Yeah. I mean, if you... Now, support for Israel overall, maybe 70-30, but support for Israel's destruction of Gaza... Not being douchey, I'm genuinely curious. Billy, would you check that? Yeah, yeah, sure. Would you check that on Venice AI? And check the popularity for the war, too. I mean, I might be slightly hyperbolic if I say 80-20, but 75-25. So the war, if it was 80-20, wouldn't surprise me, although I don't think it's probably that high.

But, Billy, can you check U.S. support for Israel? Is that a fair question? I think that's what, yeah, I think, if I'm right, I think it should be somewhere in that ballpark. But carry on. But I could have gotten that wrong. Again, not being douchey at all, just curious, genuinely. So I think, and then either way, within a democratic primary, there are very, very popular issues. And so I think all these guys have the wind at their back to some degree. You know, a guy like Mamdani has the wind in his back by just being against this stuff within his own base. And then it seems to me that there's been a very, which clearly seems a very conscious pivot to like the democratic socialism stuff, the economic populism stuff that we're going to get away from.

You know, even AOC is out there saying woke one was crazy or whatever. so they're kind of saying we're going to get away from that and we're going to go toward um running on the unaffordability crisis uh unaffordability which i just just drives me crazy it's like it's currency debasement we already had a term for this anyway but that seems to be what they're going with and i gotta say at least as of right now electorally it seems like that's a much better game plan than anything that the kamala harris uh camp had and that does concern me because i have a lot of worries about who some of these people are well why do you have concerns about them um all right well let me say it like this this is where i usually start first of all i think there is something so fundamentally dishonest that all these guys call themselves democratic socialists and don't run as socialists and then also say um you're creating a boogeyman if you call it socialism it's like very strange like okay so mom donna you're a democratic socialist so your your position here is that we should what democratize the workplace and like uh um nationalize the means of production no we should open four more grocery stores like with 30 cheaper meat wait that's socialist so it's already a moving target like what are

you even saying you stand for are you saying you're a welfarist who wants slightly more welfare than the big welfare state that we already have because that's what you call a moderate democrat what do you mean you're a socialist okay and then number two it's um they do the thing that i do think uh really liberal democrats who hate the socialists have no one to blame except themselves for this but they do the thing where they just pretend government services are free and that you're against free stuff that seems to be the basic thing i'm for free stuff for people and you're against it so you're a bad guy and like you're like that's the extent of the conversation so like why am i not mamdani has this proposal you know it's like the minimum wage reducto absurdum arguments mamdani has a proposal for four supermarkets with 30 percent cheaper grocery okay i say we do six 40 percent cheaper am i a better socialist am i a better person you know so it's um there's a lot of that and then i'll also say at the risk of being maybe a little bit more controversial and i know this does bother some even some of my own audience when i talk like this but like um i don't know i find there being something a little bit weird about new arrivals being revolutionaries i don't really

like it i don't really like people who are brand new to your country telling you how we should reorganize the whole thing you know if the ever hits the fan in this country but like i'm pretty damn convinced i was born here i'm gonna die here and i'm gonna raise my kids in this country but if this thing ever falls apart to the point that i really decide like you know i gotta grab what i can in my family and i gotta get out of here and like japan is kind enough to let me in and let me be in their country and i'm thriving the last thing i would ever do is be like let me tell you about how you have to revolutionize everything they tell you about what's wrong with everything like dude you just got here um no I'm not saying I'm me I'm not saying I would shut up and I'd still be like hey I think I got some really good points about economics and stuff like that but I just don't like kind of revolution being led by people who are very hostile to the country and very new to the country and the question that I think is on everybody's lips is this it's You see Mamdani and you see the Democratic socialists. How much support do they have away from the Metropolitan, from the New Yorks, the L.A., the Columbia graduates?

Is the average American going to vote for these people or do they just see them as socialists and therefore crazy loons? I, you know, it's such a good question. And, you know, even perhaps even we don't even know, say, Mom Donnie. We didn't even really have an experiment of him running here in mayor that wasn't against Andrew Cuomo. Like it is so it is hilarious. Like it's something out of a Monty Python sketch that the best the establishment could come up with was the face of lockdowns who went down for sexual harassment and had a Me Too violation whose side hobby is being best friends with Benjamin Netanyahu.

And the way he attacked Mamdani in the Democratic primary was to go, you won't promise to go visit Israel right now. Like, just the dumbest, I mean... While we're on that, shall we bring up the stat, Billy, about Israel support? Yes, roughly a few stats, around 36% of Americans support Israel, which is quite a sharp downshift in three years earlier when it was 54%. So it's fallen from 54% to 36%. But 36 percent supporting Israel. I was more saying supporting U.S. financial support of Israel's destruction of Gaza more. So I was saying that would be like 10 points lower than that. I imagine if you're willing to say in the present climate that you support Israel, you're probably.

Maybe you're right. So maybe I maybe I over it. But it's but certainly still super majorities oppose. Sixty five. OK, sure. Fair enough. Yeah. So, anyway, and then within the Democratic primary, I think, I mean, I've seen polls that said 75% call it a genocide. So, to your same point, if you're calling it a genocide, you're probably not supporting your money going toward it. That would be real weird if you met that one person. It's genocide and I'm in favor. I think his name is Ben Gavir. But, anyway, yeah, it's Ben Gavir and Smotrich might actually meet that camp. But, I'm sorry, what? We were talking about the Democratic Socialists and we were talking about...

Yeah, so now, even, like, it wasn't even, Cuomo didn't even come at him like, hey, man, And like, there's Jewish New Yorkers who are worried for their safety. There's synagogues that have armed guards. Like, he didn't even come at him with like an American. He went, you won't commit to going to this foreign country. So my point being, let's just say it had just been a Democrat. Not responsible for lockdowns. Not tied with Israel. Not Me Too violations. Not murdered old people by forcing them, the senior citizens, to take in COVID-positive patients as they screamed for help and pleaded, please don't do this.

You'll kill people. That's that guy. Let's say it was just cardboard Democrat. We don't even know if Mondani beats that guy. So to your question of, like, out of the city, we don't even know necessarily if he wins. We haven't even really run that experiment. The general election was pretty close, actually. My guess, to your question, tends to be I don't think it has that much play. I think a lot of this left-wing stuff plays very, very well in specific areas, but is gonna turn people off the the broader you get in the american voting base that's kind of my feeling about it um but i'm not entirely sure and i think that there's a lot's been done over the last five six years particularly with the covid stuff to kind of upend like the traditional you know where the american voter is exactly and what the constituencies are so i'm not sure but i think that it's quite possible that after particularly after these midterms the next two weeks i think probably the republicans are gonna have a really really bad day um they're gonna lose the house i think they might lose the senate as well and i think that there's probably going to be a lot of feeling um amongst the left like they may get a little cocky over the next couple

years and be like yeah this socialism stuff is really popular everyone hates donald trump we're on the ascendant but we'll see how that goes in in 28 because the interesting thing is i look at the democrats and i don't see a figurehead yeah i don't see a figurehead i don't really see anybody who i think that's the potential to be you know the next leader i mean who really is there no if you go through them it's like you could just tell you all the reasons why they won't work you know what i mean like each person you could go well this is why this won't be aoc here's why it won't be gavin newsom here's why it can't be this guy um i think that yeah that's real it's really interesting and i actually think on both sides to some degree even though you know the republicans have jd vance and marco rubia some people who kind of like logically would make sense it's kind of wide open on both sides it's really amazing that no one kind of established themselves as the leader or even a major leader of kind of the leftist movement right now i think AOC was kind of positioned to be it, but she just kind of lost it by not, she, she didn't become kind of like the face of the pro-Palestinian movement. She kind of wanted to like ease into

it and not upset the establishment too much either. And then it wasn't until it was really, really popular that she kind of like came into it. And I think that hurt her a lot. I think that's kind of like why Momdani and El Saeed have become kind of like the leaders where she was more positioned bernie's just too old and gavin is just too tied to california and too much of a snake too much of an obvious traditional politician you know the democrats need like their own trump they need someone who can like credibly be like i'm against this whole thing that's what they're looking for and but they they've never been able to identify that guy you know and and that to me is the real very sexist well i mean let's be real they've tried it the other way yeah but but they've never but they've never identified there are options you could go half and half right you go trans so it's kind of a bit of both oh that's true that is true depending on what year it is I don't know what you are isn't it wild though I do think there's something to like you know is it true by the way fact check me on this but isn't it true that AOC took her pronouns out of her twitter bio that is true and there's a couple of them

and I think like a couple of them did And there is, there's something about that. Do you find, I'm sorry, from your perspective, right, because you're probably kind of similar to me on this, when guys like that do something, and you've been a guy, you gave the speech at Oxford, you've been fighting wokeism, like, professionally on a high level for years, you know? And then you see something like that. Like, the tide has turned, man. Like, after losing and losing and losing and losing, oh, shoot, this take that was very unpopular. You know, I remember someone just shared, this actually made me proud, but someone just shared a clip of my podcast from April of 2020, when I'm just railing against the lockdowns and how all the numbers solve it and blah, blah, blah, all this, and I'm like in, I'm in my mother-in-law's house while I'm doing it, like, right there.

And we can see why you were angry. Yes, I was. Listen, you want to get me angry? You don't want me to rant. I'm running my phone in my mother's house. Anyway, I actually like her. She's cool. But, and I'm like, oh, I'm proud of that because it was so unpopular at the time. You know what I mean? And it aged so well. So it was like a lot of that. But there's a feeling, so you're almost like, dude, this was so unpopular. I stuck my neck out there. Now it's the supermajority consensus, and they're taking their pronoun bias. And there's a part of it that you almost feel like good. But then there's also a part of you that goes like, you coward.

You liar. No, go down with it. You pin this to you forever. It should be tattooed to your forehead, your pronoun, every one of you. Like, no, you have to defend this because you acted like you really believed it. You not only acted like you really believed it, you acted like we were Nazis for opposing it. and i i do think that there's something that trump captured that jd vamps does not capture that aoc does not capture that's you can't be that you can't be the person who puts your pronouns in and then takes them out when they're not popular either go down with this that either go down believing in this or don't ever do it at all it's it's going to be very hard to like lead a movement if you don't have that like perceived authenticity billy give us the fact check so we know whether the last five minutes was all based on the complete fabrication so she does not have her pronouns in her twitter or her linkedin but she used to have them in her instagram okay oh she's really making sure she did used to have them on her twitter so it's like all right look man you're still i get points for that still totally i get half points for the first one full full score but it makes sense because when when when elon took over twitter you know what happened right it's

like all the people who were left leaning they basically went to instagram yeah right all right So there, well, there you go. So it's not risky over here. It's like, it's like when the Coca-Cola will have like their pride flag in their, you know, their, their billboard here, but then their billboard in Saudi Arabia, you know, they don't got none of that. Instagram is the Saudi Arabian. I would actually argue, I don't think woke has gone anywhere. I just think what happens is it moves on to the next issue. And the next issue is economic populism. Yeah. Well, it's Israel and economic populism. And I think this economic populism has got the potential for way more traction than any of the other previous issues because people are feeling the pinch.

People are feeling the pinch, and the stats in some ways are undeniable, Dave. You know, the ever-growing gap between rich and poor, the people who can no longer afford to make ends meet or barely, and they did nothing wrong, the fact that there's a group of people getting richer and richer and richer, et cetera, et cetera. ai i mean look this is fertile ground here let's be honest oh no oh and and and um well look like the major hole that it plugs up moving to like the economic populism is that you're just uh one of the major problems with wokeism as a political strategy is that it was all um bollocks well it well yes but it was all uh it was upper middle class white women world like like um hierarchy of priorities you know like the which is and again not for nothing like nothing against being like an upper middle class like woman and you know in fact i i'm married to one and i support her and i really like her quite a bit um and i like that but like as you i'm sure no right there's just the things you're dealing with like say in your day when you're say like you know are just different and the problems that a college kid has might be who offended them but that's not the problems that like a guy on the job site has

that's not the problems that a guy in the military has that's not a you know it's like and one of the major electoral issues that wokeism had is that just like the gender decisions of three-year-olds or climate change or microaggressions are not on the top ten of anyone's issues. Like, no one really cares about these issues. I think one of the problems the Warhawks have is that the Iranian nuclear program is not on the top ten of anybody's issues, you know? People care about, like, how... What we all... By the way, the only reason we care about all of these more kind of abstract issues that we're spending this whole show talking about is because all of our immediate issues are taken care of.

Like, if your wife was not okay, if your kids were not okay you'd be much more concerned with that than you are with any other issue and most people who are living paycheck to paycheck are gonna be most concerned with like the price of their mortgage the price of their health care their grocery bills they're like their immediate life making sure their kids are okay and so yes when you're doing economic populism you at least are speaking to those issues and i will say that like you're right in the sense that a major major issue of our time and i think it's probably the same in the uk but

always printing the money you know the fed is targeting two and a half percent they're trying to keep the goal is inflation but just like not too bad that it crushes you so you want to keep it in fact but then of course what that does is it forces everybody to speculate now you're losing money on your you're losing value on your money if you're just holding money you got to give it

to wall street you got to speculate you invest into things that you wouldn't otherwise have invested into it creates like all this malinvestment and of course in an environment where prices are going up and up and up and up and up people who own assets do fine they benefit from the price inflation at times but who it destroys is the more vulnerable and of course the young the people coming into the workforce who don't own anything they're the ones who get it the worst yeah and one of the reasons i think it doesn't really get talked about i mean we talk about it all the time And you've got, I think, a very good articular summation there.

But let's be honest, the majority of the people want this. This is what they want. It's the same in our country. People will say that they are against tax and spend. If you poll people on tax and spend, they're against it, like 30-something percent. It's the lowest it's ever been in the UK or the lowest it's been in decades. But if you ask them about specific measures, should we cut this? Should we cut that? Should we lower taxes? oh no no no no no no no no no they want more tax and they want more spend and that's right and it's um you know like this is stuff that you know i know the stuff is a little bit dry and maybe boring especially in today's like kind of sensational internet we're gonna get to winston church like i'm telling you the jews killed charlie kirk just bear with me for a moment but if we could just get if we could just get through thomas hole's basic economics here you know like it's like there is like the the fact is that look something like uh like there's old Milton Friedman stuff, right? But it's really true. Something like the sugar quota. You know, you have like a sugar quota where this might mean that all of us pay like $7 a year more for sugar than we all otherwise would. But for the sugar industry, dude, this is worth like $100 billion.

I mean, not that much, but like it is worth billions of dollars. And so how can we ever compete when like just one little inch of spending is such a concentrated special interest and it's only screwing everybody else over like this much you know and this is true with every inch of government it's true look we saw this with uh donald trump his big mass deportation you know effort right so you have this thing where really joe biden moves the country to the right on immigration further than really imaginable in my life by the end of joe biden like the majority of the country support mass deportations they're like screw this open borders NONSENSE.

And then almost immediately, like a few months in, Donald Trump announces that we're not going to be deporting farmers and people who work at hotels. Well, ain't that a random choice, right? Like, why did you read? Oh, in other words, big business likes the cheap labor. And we just ran up against, you know, you. So this is the problem is that you create, as Milton Friedman would have said, when you have government spending, you create this thing that is against the general interest, but is very in this special interest or this special interest. and they will fight like hell to keep that little privilege that they have so it's a very difficult situation that's big business and special interest i'm just talking about the ordinary person oh yeah and people also want their benefits people also don't want you know people um you know i thought it was very interesting which you know of course it became like a like a trending kind of hot button issue but you know when there was that 20 burrito uh thing like a few because there's an interesting thing for young people where look there is a point and i even understand i'm very harsh on boomers in general but i do understand where boomers at a certain some of them will look

at this and go dude do you know how much harder my life was than like a 23 year old's life is today and in many cases that really is true like they just the amount of luxuries that like a 23 year old today has this boomer and also by the way this boomer's like getting beat with a belt was like had a very different life than you you know led um that being said boomer could get a summer job and pay for his college boomer could get a job pretty easily and you could support a family off that and so it almost becomes a thing where it's like yes you've got a much cooler tv you have much better medicine you have much better you know food but it's really hard to say how do you weigh that verse being able to own a house because i gotta say in my life you know as as with you guys right we're kind of lucky we get to have cool careers we do a career that like you know this is kind of like a dream job you get to do what you really love to do and it's a very narcissistically rewarding job you're in front of the camera you have fans you walk down the street someone recognizes you hey you're the guy from that show that i like you know it's cool but like if i had to compare that to like dude just how cool it is being the head of a household

is just, like, the most awesome thing, man. Like, being a dad is just the best. Being a husband and a dad, like, I'm the man of this house. I'm, like, the benevolent king of my little fiefdom. I got little people who just adore me, like, in this insane way. Like, the cutest little seven-year-old girl in the world just runs up and adores me. And this wife who adores me, for some reason, puts up with me. Like, that's so much cooler. And I don't know, it is really sad that that's the thing everyone can have. Not everyone can have this. not everyone's gonna have like a kind of be a quasi celebrity or something but like everyone can have their own little fiefdom everyone could be the you know that and so i do just think there's something like that was almost missing from that whole burrito debate where it's like it's not either or dude it's not it's not like like who had it tougher or hey like there is something to be said for like well hey dude if the burrito's 20 then like cook at home you know you're 20 i don't know you know how broke i was at 20 it's a but at the same time you kind of can't downplay how much has been robbed from them and that has been robbed by policy of politicians who have gotten filthy rich as they've done it yeah well it's not about i guess

what you're saying it's exactly the same in our country it's not about the 20 burrito it's about the million dollar two-bedroom apartment yeah right why does an apartment cost that much and i and i i remember in fact i really apologize if i said this last time we were on the show but i but there is i just this stuck out with me that i bought a house like four years ago and i got uh maybe a year and a half ago i got a letter from just like the realtor so this isn't like an official appraisal but just like the realtor who sold me my house goes we've estimated that your house has gone up like two hundred thousand dollars and something and i'm thinking about this and at the exact same time i got my baby brother is moving out of new york to go to a cheaper city.

He can afford it because he's not my baby brother anymore. He's in his 30s, and he won't take money from me, and he won't come live at my house, and so he wants to make it on his own. So he has to leave New York in order to be able to afford to make it on its own. And at the same time, I just got an extra couple hundred grand of net worth for nothing other than the privilege of living in an inflationary economy and being in the owner class. And so it does look, man, this is where the socialists almost have a point, but they're idiots for being socialists. There is a socialism to the current system that is favoring the rich over the poor. You know what I'm saying? Like, that is essentially welfare that I just got. I didn't earn. It's almost a quarter million dollars. I didn't earn it. I just sat on owning a thing.

and there is something being said you you got like okay so there's a younger brother who's coming up in the world very bright kid very good kid by the way but is not financially established yet has to work hard i'm the older one who is established doesn't need the welfare and we're giving it to me like that's kind of insane and so there i don't know there's something to that no there definitely is there definitely is look everybody's been waiting for it let's talk about churchill i'm not even the church i'm just the proxel the proxy to daryl cooper way too much agreement so far right and this is i've literally just i'm the best people to speak to all of your friends right this is outrageous okay well what happened now what is the latest controversy with the latest controversy did he get us in another war it's the same controversy okay right about winston churchill the worst blah blah blah he's putting in another nicotine you're probably going need to make you're gonna put a bunch in right nothing these are tucker's patches they'll get me through this tucker carlson jacob reese mogg all this look we we believe in free speech everyone should have whatever opinion they want but if we came to your country right and started slagging

off george washington and saying he was the greatest villain of american history no that's not cool i i don't think you'd respect that i didn't like i didn't like that very much as we ran that experiment i didn't care yeah i bet you didn't the accent did make it worse yeah yeah well exactly okay but your accent is superior anyway my point is george washington is such a badass man he won the revolution it's a purely defensive war he gave up the presidency it could have been king gave it up you know i don't deny that because i'm historically literate but these historically illiterate people with whom you you are friends right it's just too what do you know okay let's Let's just say, listen, I want to be objective here.

And I don't even think me and you necessarily have that far of a disagreement on this. There is something comical about, in this conversation with the three of us, calling Daryl Cooper a historic illiterate. Just objectively speaking, the guy has forgotten more about history than any of the three of us know. That's true. You may say he's gotten some things wrong, and that's fine. Having only reading one side of the conversation. I promise you he has not only read one side. I promise you, I promise you, this is just a, it's nothing we could ever solve. I promise you, Daryl Cooper has read more mainstream history about World War II than everyone in this room combined.

I promise. Whatever. Come back to, first of all, you said George Washington, really cool, right? What do you know about Winston Churchill and how cool he was? I can tell you. Dude, if you want my, listen, dude, I have the utmost respect for functioning alcoholics. and I just want to make that clear I want to make that very clear on this podcast like I just do think they are, that is actually what keeps a society running and they're one of the most demonized and underappreciated groups. The line as a comedian, the line that you'll still be ugly in the morning but I'll be sober is almost we should all just stop trying, like comedy's already been done like no one even needs to come out with another special. If I may say, you're looking at some of the superficial aspects of his career I would really argue, I think this is very substantive.

I'm sorry, the functioning drunk thing? Okay, so what is it you want to argue about? I don't want to argue about anything on this. I just, I don't think people in America who talk about this stuff appreciate why we all get triggered, right? Because it's incredibly inaccurate and disrespectful the way that people talk about a man that we as a country voted as the greatest living Britain, in the same way that George Washington probably would be, right? Winston Churchill became an MP at the age of 24, 25 for the first time. He was a war hero, served in war. He has written more words in the English language than anyone, including Shakespeare.

Is that true? Really? Wow, that's pretty crazy. He has a Nobel Prize for literature. Okay. And this is where we might disagree. He single-handedly kept Britain in the war long enough that things would change on the ground. Get the Americans in. That was part of it, for sure. long enough to win the war against the greatest evil of the 20th century. Well, I think any time you're conducting a war to try to get another country into a war, there's going to be criticism for that. You didn't conduct a war to get another country. Oh, I was going to say, well, you just said that's part of it. I'm sorry, you said that was part of it.

No, Churchill's strategy was... Well, let me see. Hold on, but this is one part of the historical literacy. Churchill wasn't in charge of Britain when World War II broke out. No, I'm well aware of that. Churchill was deeply unpopular for saying we need to confront Hitler. Yes, he was an advocate for confrontation for Hitler and then later became. He was an anti-appeasement advocate. Sure, sure. The appeasers were in charge. They were in charge. They pursued the policy of appeasement, which. Well aware of this. But I think the people who are talking about this don't seem to get this part of it.

Tucker Carlson is one of these people. Well, I don't know. They don't seem to understand that Churchill didn't cause World War II. Churchill was the voice in the wilderness who everyone mocked for saying this will happen. And then it did happen. And they said, oh, you were right. Come and run the country now, please. That's what happened. Sure. Sure. Let me just say, by the way, just like to preface any of this conversation, because despite the accusations of Douglas Murray, I don't actually think I'm guilty of what he accused me of. So I do just want to disclaim. I think I've read three books ever about World War Two.

I've probably seen 25 documentaries about it because it's the most documentary-tized thing ever. And I'm currently listening to Daryl Cooper's series on it. But so I just, just to disclaim, I don't really have a very high level of expertise on World War II, and I've never read like a biography of Churchill. But if you want to recommend one, I will read whatever you think the best documentary of Churchill is. So video, Andrew Roberts, Walking with Destiny. I, okay. On our show, and his book is called Walking with Destiny. I've never, I have a, I have a, what was it, he wrote the Rothschild book, right?

The House of the Rothschilds? I don't know, maybe. I might be wrong about that, but I have that book. I think it might be him. But anyway, walking with destiny. So I would say this. First of all, I think, obviously, like, Daryl and Tucker are aware that Winston Churchill was not the prime minister in 39. They don't act like it. Okay, maybe not. But I also think, certainly, Daryl, I know, has talked about this quite a bit. But yeah, look, there's no question that Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler humiliating Neville Chamberlain were a huge factor that led to the war. And it's really, I think, even Adolf Hitler, I'd say up there with one of the worst things he did, even with somebody like Adolf Hitler, who is guilty of the worst crimes in human history, because Neville Chamberlain was the most powerful figure in Europe who desperately wanted to avoid a war and he humiliated him in front of the world and I think that that was probably pretty devastating to the prospects to not fighting the war but so look I'm aware of all the stuff you said my take on World War II is more kind of this and this is more broadly speaking there is a strange dynamic and there's reason for this dynamic but world war ii is radioactive in a way that no other war is you know if i were

to come on your podcast and say we never should have fought world war one which i've actually read a bit more about than world war ii that would not be controversial at all in fact i'd be right you should both agree with me the war was stupid it was destructive it was horrible never should have fought vietnam you know you might get some pushback if i say we never should have fought the war in korea but it's not going to be radioactive pushback world war ii is different world war ii is this it is the it is the worst calamity in human history it involves the holocaust in it too it involves the creation of the u.s empire it involves the creation of the state of israel like it is such a powerful kind of force that it just sets off a reaction when you talk about it almost unlike any other issue and also it is weaponized to justify every war i don't know if you guys watched which i don't even recommend it's a waste of time none of you watched me debating alan uh um uh for the very reason you articulated i'm afraid it was not a good debate listen man i really do like the good ones more than the it wasn't like a show and like it didn't like turn like i mean he called me an anti-semite and flipped out at one point calling me names but

it was kind of whatever um but literally and i'm not exaggerating when i say his entire argument was world war ii his entire argument is we're living in 1930s this is germany and so my beef with it i find the you know the period in time like i shouldn't even say i haven't read by the way i've read a lot about the holocaust particularly but that's almost like a different thing than just reading about world war ii um it's a fascinating period in time it's a the most horrific period of time ever and it is what's used constantly to justify more and more military activity. And so that is kind of like what I find interesting about the whole thing.

Well, I know when I wrote about what I termed the war cry, it's a very controversial term, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But my central argument was, and I think this applies to you, actually, the reason you have to undermine the World War II narrative, it's the one counter example to the overall worldview that you have, which is war is always bad, right? No, I don't think, my worldview isn't that war is always bad. But, no, I mean, I don't necessarily agree with that. I mean, World War II isn't as if it's like some example where, like, look, everything worked out well here. It's like, no, things went really horrible, and you could argue they would have gone even really more horrible without the war, but it's certainly not as clean-cut of an example.

No, it is a clean-cut example, because we know what the alternative would have been. We know. Well, it's a clean-cut example of what? It's a clean-cut example of there is a time and a place, just like in your own life, and you're someone who's courageous and, you know, there's different forms of courage. I don't know if you'd be the first running into battle with a machine gun, but you speak up for what you believe. This is something a lot of people fear doing, right? You're a courageous person, and you're prepared to make a stand on things you believe in, and I believe if a portion of your audience wanted you to go in a direction that you didn't agree with, you would not go in that direction.

you would actually stand up to that, as we have done on numerous occasions on our show, right? Yes, that's for sure, yes. So in the same way that sometimes you stand up for something that you believe in or what is the right thing to do, even though it might cost you, right, it might cost you heavily even, we admire people who do that, and the outcome of that is the terrible thing doesn't happen as a result of that. World War II is the perfect example of why sometimes you have to fight, even though it's horrible even though the losses are catastrophic because the thing you are preventing would have been way worse even than that um i don't know i just don't know if i agree that it's a clear example let me let me just say no look first of all i would just say that i think and this is what i have read a bit more on but i think the pretty obvious takeaway from all of this is that there was the intervention in world war ii the total victory the treaty of versailles I'll see you next time.

international humiliation of the Germans that perfectly kind of led the table for all of this to happen. And so, no, what starts is you have Woodrow Wilson saying he's going to make the world safe for democracy. You have this huge intervention explicitly with the goal of policing the world and democracy spreading that works out in the catastrophe that results in the rise of Lenin, Stalin, and Adolf Hitler. So you already, if you start there, no, you don't have a perfect example of why intervention is the case. In fact, it's a real, like, non-interventionist example of how we never should have got now if you want to say after making this horrific intervention after making all of these bad decisions but we get up to this point and we can't change the past anymore so we're right here if you want to argue that world war ii was a just war at that point and the examples would have been worse there is a real argument there i'm not denying there isn't look obviously so you're basically saying you agree with that argument i'm saying if you want to say that when adolf hitler was uh in 34 or something like that if england had just invaded and toppled adolf hitler at the time or whatever maybe england invading wouldn't have been the

most logistical whatever yes probably in hindsight knowing everything we know yeah that probably would have presented prevented a lot of human suffering also when the bolsheviks were just 12 guys reading das kapital in a basement somewhere if you had put a bullet in every one of their heads probably would have saved a lot of uh you know suffering in russia it's hard to know these things at the time you know and we can't prosecute future crime but yes no i'm not denying that like I'm not saying that intervention or aggression could never lead to a better result than non-intervention would. I think that would be a silly claim to make.

But there is a point where people very intentionally try to extrapolate the lesson of World War II is that the guy who doesn't want to fight the war is always the appeaser. And the guy who does want to fight the war is always the guy getting Adolf Hitler in the basement before he becomes Adolf Hitler. And I'm not, like, saying, like, some guy on the Internet used this logic. I'm saying Harvard law professor, president of the Israel lobby, Alan Dershowitz, uses this. George W. Bush used this justification. The neocons have called everyone Hitler who they don't like. And every single war that I've opposed, which in my young career, I already got, like, seven under my belt.

Every war that I've opposed in real time, I've been called Neville Chamberlain for opposing it. So that's the mythology that I think most people want to blow up. whether you think world war ii look and i'll just say this my last thought on it one of the books i've read on world war ii was pat mucannon's uh book which i kind of left it feeling like i don't know that his thesis is correct i think he's got a reasonable case in the same way that people argue hey if we had taken him out earlier it could have maybe led in this direction his argument is that the war could have been avoided if you didn't have the war you wouldn't have the how could the war have been avoided well you got to read the book but his argument his argument essentially is that um the war guaranteed to poland is what led to all the the yeah this is again i'm not prepared to like make the argument i'm saying the guy wrote a book on it i read the book i thought it was compelling if people who are more uh um have counter arguments to that have superior arguments i'm willing to look at them i did see which douglas murray recommended i did see that big debate that pat mucannon uh did where he said he got destroyed and i didn't see it that

way but it was a very interesting debate i didn't think he got destroyed at all in it well you say yourself you it's not an air of expertise no it's not mine no listen i'm way more like if it's again this is why i invoke the douglas murray thing like i will like if we're arguing about the iran war the iraq war things that i just feel like hey i really do feel like i've done my due diligence here and i'm very convinced of my position i'll argue it this one i'm like i don't know because i do grant that yet look you have a point and you have so look there's also there's another whole angle without it even being like an argument between the two of us on is that dude if adolf Hitler, which it's almost always the case right if he had just chilled a little bit he probably could have won it wasn't really his nature no no but that but isn't it a thing but there is a thing about that that it's almost like like even like you look at someone like bernie madoff dude like you could have been like a hedge fund manager but that's you did this to yourself dude if hitler just hadn't declared war on america and hadn't invaded uh russia right he probably could have controlled europe and none of us would have done nothing and this is why we have the disagreements or

you have disagreements with people who think Iran really must be dealt with because what they would say is your framework of seeing the world does not include the fact that some people will not stop you say basically that Iran is run by people who are rational acting in their own interest and we would act in similar ways if we were in their position and so we do tit they do tat right so we escalate in this way, they escalate in this way. And the reason that there are people who disagree with you about these issues, and again, I'm not even committing myself to that position, I'm just trying to explain why World War II matters in all of this, is that we recognize through history that sometimes there are people who will act in ways that are not rational, but who will do things in perpetuity if they're allowed to get away with it, right? And so the The reason World War II matters here is precisely what you described, which is Hitler was not the sort of person who would be reasonable and stop, because all this shit that Tucker Carlson says about how, well, you know, the Sudetenland was actually populated by Germans and it was taken from Germany afterwards.

It's true. It's absolutely true. And I've often said as someone who's very pro the Western intervention in World War II, obviously, and very anti-Russia and Putin in the current war, Vladimir Putin had as much justification for invading ukraine as as hitler did for invading the so invading uh the sudetan land because basically germany was broken up after world war one right and he was trying to collect the pieces back together i think he had more of a reason but anyway yeah i'm sorry i'm listening similar yeah yeah yeah i get your point but the broader point is are you dealing with a rational actor and actually i think with putin you're much more dealing with a rational actor certainly than you were dealing with Hitler?

Or are you dealing with a one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-century kind of person who is absolutely not going to do that? And by the way, I mean, one of the other things that people like, who are critical of the Allies' conduct and world, what you like to bring up, is the same conversation as it is with Gaza, which is why this all matters so much, that's why I'm bringing it up with you, is the amount of destruction that the West did to Germany and Japan, right? Dropping nuclear bombs, firebombing, all of this. now let's set aside it was a totally different technological environment you didn't have precision blah blah blah the reason that germany got bombed into the ground is that hitler wouldn't surrender which was absolutely the rational thing to do because it was clear they'd lost the war i mean to many people historians would say it's clear they lost the war at the battle of moscow in 1941 right you try to take moscow you fail and from that point on for the next three years you're You're basically doing very, very well, but moving backwards all the time.

And eventually you find yourself within the borders of Germany. Like at this point, a rational leader who cares about his people goes, OK, we might have lost this one, guys. We've got to surrender. Right. But you see with Hamas and Gaza that that is not the case. So what my point is, sometimes you are dealing with people who are not rational actors. and when people talk about World War II as a thing that informs their views about other conflicts, that's what they're pointing to. Whereas your argument is always, well, let's look at it rationally. They do this. We would do this in their position.

This is exactly the same thing that we would have done if we were in their place. I don't think you're summing up my position exactly. I mean, I'm not, well, first of all, I guess it depends on what you mean by a rational actor exactly. I mean, like, like rational, like, like, what do we mean exactly by a rational actor? I'm not exactly claiming that other people are rational actors. And to the extent that I say, like, we should put ourselves in their shoes and say, hey, we'd react the same way if this happened to us. There are situations where I feel that way. But that doesn't mean that I'm saying that we're all the same.

We all have the same motivations, that there aren't enormous differences. So like, OK, to be the reason why I think the the the Israelis or the Israeli government or the pro-Israeli, you know, the Israeli defenders invoking World War Two constantly over the destruction of Gaza. The reason why this has resulted in whatever, it's been like a 50-point collapse in support for Israel in the polls, the reason why this isn't convincing anyone is because on some human level, the only real way to convince people that the atrocities that were committed by the Allies in World War II were justified in the more meta sense is that you have to have Hitler controlled all of Europe.

you have to have how evil imperial japan was and what they did to china you have to have this feeling that at least the argument has to be for this to be justified that something on the scale of this bad was going to happen if we hadn't done that right like there's there's got to be like it would have been so bad in a similar way that i always felt throughout covid uh the great shout out to the great tom woods who wrote the best book on covid diary of a psychosis But, like, he would always say, like, look, dude, when you look at the non-lockdown areas, and they're doing about the same as the lockdown areas, that should devastate the case for lockdown.

It's over. Because you have to, in order to support lockdowns, you have to inherently argue that things would have been so much worse. What exactly that standard is arbitrary. When you have Adolf Hitler controlling basically all of Europe, that's one argument. When you have Hamas that doesn't even really control the Gaza Strip, I just don't think anybody's buying that, like, things would have been so horrible if Israel hadn't destroyed the entire Strip. You don't have the same level of, like, what would have happened over here. Now, to your point, I'm not even denying that some of the people care about the legacy of World War II for the reasons that you're explaining.

What I have seen that I'm aware about is that so many people care about World War Two and protecting this legacy so that they can advocate for the next war and so that they can dismiss concerns about targeting of civilians or treatment of civilians. This is the entire Israeli defense. Hey, you guys did it during World War Two. I've watched Netanyahu use this defense. I don't think it's a very good defense, but I think the point I'm trying to make to you is you don't see the threat to Israel as existential in the way that we would see the threat that Hitler posed and the Japanese imperial armies and project posed.

I think there's no question that Hitler was an existential threat to his European neighbors. And when you say existential threat, I mean, what? Like, that you would take over the country, that they would actually fall. Not just a threat that, like, this could hurt us, but that this could be the end. And the end, meaning the regime falls, I guess I would describe it. The end could also mean the people are slaughtered. The end could mean, you know, could mean several different things. A very significant portion of your population would be killed, including many of its leaders. I certainly think Hitler was an existential threat to France and Austria.

You got me on the record. No, he was an existential threat to Russia. Sure, sure. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I wouldn't. And the entire continent, right? And obviously all the countries that he overtook, for sure. So now look at it from an Israeli perspective. See, you see the Gaza Strip as the Gaza conversation. But from an Israeli perspective, if we zoom out a little bit, objectively speaking, Israel is a country that is surrounded by people who hate them. That's a fact. And not only because, look, we had this guy... Not only for good reason, also for some bad reasons. Well, it's interesting you say that because I was going to do a slightly more steel man version of this, which is we had this guy called Thomas Small on our show, not Thomas Small.

That'd be great if you could get Thomas Small. I think he's like 93. Yeah. Is he alive, Thomas Small? I think he's still alive, right? He is. He's great. So Thomas Small, he's the co-host of the Conflicted podcast. He's a Christian guy who spent a lot of time in the Middle East. And he said, you know, a lot of people talk about Israel being a Western country. And when you do, their actions don't make any sense. Yeah, I think that's a very good point. But if you look at them as a Middle Eastern country, then their actions make perfect sense. So Israel, in his conception, is another country in the Middle East.

Now, if you take that perspective, stop applying Western moral rules and all this other stuff to them. They're basically a country in a region where everyone else hates them. And they don't just hate them for geopolitical and geostrategic reasons. They just hate them because they're Jews. A lot of them do. That's just a fact, right? And Francis, who has, you know, him and I talk about this all the time. He has relatives in the region, or his family is from the region. It's not just Muslims, either. It's just there are a lot of people in that region that do not like Jews, right? So Israel is surrounded by people who hate them, who repeatedly say that they will wipe them off the face of the earth.

and then try to wipe them off the face of the earth to the very best of their ability. And the only reason Israel is still there is it's strong enough to resist that. Now, when it suffers an atrocity like October 7th, it's not unreasonable for the leader of Israel in that situation to go, well, we're actually dealing with an existential threat. This is part of a bigger thing. This is being funded by Iran. And if they could kill us all on October 7th, that is exactly what they would have done. And that's why people make that argument. Yeah. And I just think the reason why the argument isn't persuading a lot of people and the reason why this argument is kind of losing in the marketplace of arguments is because, look, even as we look back now with all the stuff that's that's come out about October 7th, and there's some real questions about what exactly happened. Clearly now, this is kind of weird on the timeline here, but Benjamin Netanyahu, we now know has been, was warned by Egyptian intelligence, also got warnings, it seems like, from the president of the UAE. This, Haaretz had a big piece on this. The New York Times then backed it up. Benjamin Netanyahu, I think, is threatening to sue Haaretz over this. And it's not exactly clear, but it does seem like the timeline kind

of laps up of, like, he's getting all of these warnings. And this isn't just like George W. Bush, like, one in a million, you know, flyers, oh, bin Laden determined to attack. This is like the president of the aeu going like no dude they're planning a thing from gaza that's gonna be really really big um then on top of this is the same time it overlaps with where netanyahu is still sending the head of massad to qatar to beg that the funding keep going in to to hamas then there is this massive security failure on october 7th so like however you want to use this words like existential yes the people who broke out of gaza on october 7th were trying to kill as many people as they could kill. I think there's no question about that. The idea that like October 7th would have just happened again and again and again and again, I think is ludicrous. I mean, Israel had been existing next to Hamas for all of this time. Israel's been living next to Palestine since they've existed. And they've been dealing with Hamas since at least 2005. They've been dealing with 2007 officially. Anyway, they didn't have to do this. It wasn't an existential threat.

Like if we don't do this to them, we will be completely destroyed. I don't think anyone believes that well but you you're you've narrowed it back down to hamas and i am zooming out with you sure to the position of israel as a country within the region israel let's say israel wasn't full of jews it was full of i don't know bluehead people or whatever it doesn't matter and everyone in the region hated bluehead people and hated the blue-haired people stay and had its tensions and whatever and they kept invading the blue-haired people over and over again every single time they could and it's only because the blue-haired people i mean it's a bad example this isn't right this isn't the history blue-haired people aren't great at defending themselves militarily but right but let's say they said that they were you could see why blue-haired people when something like october the 7th happens would say oh me when they said they meant to kill us all they really they really really did right so we can't allow we cannot allow the we have to do and this is what actually israel i think should have said better which is we want to do in gaza what the allies achieved successfully in world war ii which is win the war and then win the peace that's what we want we want

to rebuild society in that part of the world so that the hatreds that animated the beginnings of World War II cannot be allowed to exist. And that means you're not going to be in a place where in Gaza they teach you to hate Jews in school. We can't have that because the result of that is October the 7th. Well, I mean, I guess I couldn't have thought of a better example of using the World War II model to go, oh, so this is what we do now. We just completely destroy civilians. We Well, essentially, that's the World War II model. That's not what happened in World War II. Germany, as I said before, did not have to be bombed into the ground.

It didn't, just like Gaza. Well, parts of it did, but... But, no, it didn't, because if Hitler had surrendered when he was clean, he lost the war. Oh, okay, fine, fine. All right, fine. So, at that point, the same thing could have happened without this. And it's the same with Gaza. Okay, well, let me... But, Dave, it's the same with Gaza. I'm stress-testing the argument here, right, with you. And you know I'm not having a go at you. It's a respectful conversation. No, sure, sure. Sure. So it's exactly the same with Gaza, because you go, well, if Hamas had handed over the hostages and the terrorists who took them and surrendered on the first day of this war, this war wouldn't be going.

And Gaza would not have been bombed into the ground. Yes. But again, you could just as easily go. And if Israel hadn't been occupying Palestine and if like it's perhaps possible that people could have done things different ways. I certainly would have hoped that Hamas would have turned over all of the hostages or whatever, would have made a deal. And then, in fact, there's actually some conflicting reporting about, like, what deals were offered versus what deals were taken. Look, the story that Israel are these nice Jewish communities who everybody just hates because they're Jewish and everybody just...

Wait, wait. I didn't say that. I didn't say that. Your blue-haired history is a cartoonish version of one side being hated purely for existing and then being constantly invaded. Let me just... No, no, Dave, hold on. We conduct this discussion by not misrepresenting each other, and we've done that for two hours. Well, I didn't think I was misrepresented. The blue-haired example? Yeah, because I made it very clear that Israel... Remember when I said, Thomas Small, Israel behaves like any other Middle Eastern country, which basically wants to be dominant in the region and will beat up its neighbors if it feels it's in its interest to do so, and the hatreds go both ways.

I think they do. Sure. So the blue-haired people, I'm not saying, I mean, no country in the Middle East is innocent. They're all fighting for... Like every other country, they're all fighting for survival, whatever. but it's also undeniably the case that their neighbors absolutely can hate them and it's not the leaders as much as it is the population this is why a lot of muslim countries actually kind of pro-israel the leaders are but they are very wary of their populace on these issues because their populace hates jews yeah our sock puppet governments we bribe them to be friends with israel but their population 100 percent of them hate it we don't no we don't bribe them The governments of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, they're not pro-Israel because they have been bribed.

They're pro-Israel because they perceive it to be in the national interest of their country, which they're trying to take in a different direction. They don't want to be in... Be a weird splitting hairs. I mean, I guess we can, we're both just arguing over what their motivations are. But I would just say that it's like, look, like, again, if you want to say Israel is just another country in the Middle East, and they aggress against their neighbors sometimes, like, sure, I guess I would agree with that. I'm certainly not painting any of the other countries in the Middle East as being angelic or something like that.

I just think that, look, Israel, you kind of can't remove from the project of Israel that it really has depended, at least in 67 and before that on western you know backing them up like this is a this is a project of western power that is propping up this country in this part of the world and so like look if you want to say well look from the israeli perspective uh this is how they feel it's like okay that's probably true they probably perceive these people circling them as a threat from the palestinian perspective they have a lot of reasons to perceive the israelis as threats you know i'm looking at this from the american perspective and i'm saying this is not first of all i do as you said i don't look at a middle eastern country with middle eastern values as we all do we look at middle eastern countries with western values and we are like outraged at the way they fall short of those western values um israel is explicitly claiming that they are a western country even by your own you know like construct here they're lying claiming there's something they're not in order to get this unique funding and this unique relationship.

I personally think that what Hamas did on October 7th is horrific. I would never want my government supporting any organization who would do something like that. I also think Israel's destruction of all of Gaza is horrific, and I don't want my country supporting that. I'm not the blue-haired people or the other-haired people. I'm the American over here. You just don't want to be involved at all. Yeah. And what if, just a hypothetical, but i mean we are talking about one small country surrounded by a hell of a lot of countries that don't like them what if um as a result of america's withdrawal the entire population of israel is slaughtered by its neighbors well i certainly wouldn't want the entire population of anything to be slaughtered and if you were going to say that like the um the withdrawal process you know like if you compare it to like leaving afghanistan or something like that you really will try try to do it in the way that doesn't get as many people killed as possible you know try to like at least protect this on the way out but if you're telling me that this experiment that this this country started in 1948 and we're now in 2026 and they're not only dependent on foreign aid but you're

telling me like the second this aid stops everyone's getting slaughtered i'm not saying then if that's the case i'm not saying let everybody get slaughtered like okay we got to figure out some other type of transition plan here but there is information in that and the information is that this whole project has failed if you if you still are at the point where you are relying on us supporting a country which is unpopular our people do not support your country or what you're doing to your neighbors but you need our support or your whole not only your nation falls apart but you're saying like worst case scenario all your people are slaughtered then this is not a sustainable project well no i i actually personally think israel needs to get to a position where it's not relying on western support not least because i don't think it's going to have a lot of Western support for the foreseeable future. But I was asking you more of a hypothetical, because in your conception of foreign policy more generally, it's like non-intervention. So I guess what I'm getting at is if 10 million people get slaughtered as a result of non-intervention, is it still the right thing to do? Well, I mean, you got to get real

specific, I guess, about what that case would be. All the neighboring countries of Israel invade and say, it says in our holy book that we'll find the Jews and kill them, so we're killing them. It's kind of hard. Like October 7th, but they have air superiority. Look, something like that, like, Israel is militarily the most powerful country in the region. It is also just very hard to imagine going from not only the place of, like, complete, full, unconditional support, special relationship to not only... Are we not giving you, you know, it's so hard to fathom us just cutting off the financial aid or cutting off the military support. But the idea that, like, if actually Israel is about to be slaughtered, we just don't lift a finger and just allow it to happen. Look. But that is what you believe, isn't it? I'd say, look, in pure theory, I don't think like, and this is philosophical theory.

Yeah, I don't think the role of, I think the role of government ought to be the protection of liberty of its people i don't think the role of government ought to be the policeman of the world and i do think that like one of the moral issues that look obviously you've created like this is really interesting thought experiment stuff you've created a very real thought experiment like hey this non-intervention will lead to this amount of deaths and the the problem on the other end of this equation right is that if you if you accept that the role of government is that like okay just in those worst case scenarios when there's a genocide about to happen we we go in and we intervene in that right well now you've put the most powerful people in society you've given them the power to decide when to use it so already just like with the free speech issue that we always have you got this major problem of who decides what is and isn't hate speech who decides what is and isn't because if you want this is the the brilliance of uh maybe not technically a founding father but one of our most brilliant sons of a founding father uh john quincy adams i think he was the worst villain of world war ii so that one hurts uh he said you know if you want

to look around the world for monsters to destroy you'll find no you'll find a limitless supply it will become the dickatrice of the world but will no longer be the rule of our of our own spirit i think there's real wisdom in that you know you're gonna you're you're there's always catastrophes going on all around the world so number one you've now given a blank check to government to all you could all right now if you just on that stage well we got sudan we got gaza we got ukraine we got i mean there's a ton of things in the world we'd have to right and then Then on top of that, you create this moral condition by which, look, if there's a humanitarian crisis going on halfway around the world and I I turn to my neighbor to ask him to to help like, hey, man, I know things are tough for you, but can you contribute a little bit to this effort?

I think there's nothing wrong with that. But like, by what right do I have to compel him by force to threaten to, you know, when you're talking about what we use government for, you're talking about like, what are we ready to throw someone in a cage for? this is why i'm very libertarian on all these issues so it's not so much if you want to get very specific it's not so much that like there couldn't be an example where intervention might you know like i said with the killing the bolsheviks when they're reading das kapital like there's an example where maybe it could save lives i think there's a recognition with the understanding of like what the founding fathers had the understanding of limited government small l libertarianism that like creating this power is going to do more to undermine liberty and prosperity than restricting the power of government would so in a more general sense not applied to israel like there's a genocide going on over there do i think we should intervene generally no i kind of don't think so i know it's a very like that's a very bitter pill to swallow and i will say like just with the caveat of like not all government interventions are equal there might be some you know there was um hold on can we just pause that yes i'm so by that logic

you're perfect you believe israel is committing genocide in gaza you while you don't approve of genocide if if america wasn't giving israel help you'd be like well that's not that's not our issue yes yeah and you wouldn't be complaining yeah no that's right i mean look i mean i'm not saying i wouldn't be complaining about it like i might say something about it or yeah if you ask me if you ask me about what's going on in sudan i'm quite happy to i didn't it sounds like a no no no it's not no i think it's a fair question and i i do think it's like a tough you know there's a weird i had um recently a very like kind of christian conservative said to me that they go you know the flaw in libertarianism is that you have to allow you have to legalize all this stuff that you know is bad that you know you hate whereas like my system i can have all the liberty good stuff, but I can also outlaw all the bad stuff. So this is a problem you have with your system. And I, my rejoinder to that was like, no, this is a problem we all have with every single system. Even if you go to North Korean style communism, you still have this problem. So, and I asked her, she's a Christian conservator. I said, are you going to outlaw lying? Are you

going to outlaw coveting your neighbor's wife? Are you going to outlaw adultery? Are you going to, you know, like there's a million sins that you're not. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, but actually I don't you know they might want to say they were on twitter but it's all larping kind of i'm not saying this person particularly was larping but i just mean that like no like look it is a bitter pill to swallow if you believe in a free society that like someone has a right to ruin their life someone has a right to do something really really you know and likewise in the non-interventionist idea which is the same thing not intervening the government domestically and not intervening abroad look if israel if israel was just doing what they were doing and they were able to do it without western support number one i would find there to be something more honorable about just doing it on your own than doing it with other support um i would still be against what they were doing okay yeah i think that's horrible i don't think you should just bomb a building because you suspect a terrorist is inside of it but yes it would not be the issue that i'm spending all my time on it wouldn't be i'm an american i'm i'm to the degree i'm trying to affect any type of

thing it's like i want to talk to my fellow americans about the policy of our government you know so that's because otherwise i mean there's just always tragedies going on all around the world you'll never find an end of them dave it's been an absolutely brilliant interview thank you so much for coming on final question is always the same what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be hmm all right i gave you the last time you asked me i gave you the debt so i'm not it's still a good answer but i'm not going to give you that one but i will say man and maybe this will be the more controversial one i think you guys have talked quite a bit about this but the big thing is the complete demographic change of all of western civilization it's just kind of happening it's it is it's it's a weird kind of like you know boiling frog thing i don't even know if that experiment actually works but i know it's a good uh thing to bring up in there but there is something that like you know if you had ever told anyone in 1965 that the london immigration policy and the demographic policy was going to be what it is like but you know like they would have lost their minds about that but because you did it to them slowly it's just kind of been

accepted i think we live at too high a standard of life that no one's really going to be revolutionary or violent over it but very slowly the greatest thing that's ever happened to humanity which is western civilization is like completely being erased demographically i find that to be a pretty big deal i mean i think there's a couple eastern european countries that have like a replacement rate and just about everybody else like the irish people are going to go extinct i mean this is like a a tragedy that's hard to put into words and meanwhile during the rise of like when it became clear that all of these demographic changes are are taking place happened to be during the rise of wokeism when no one was allowed to talk about any of it and if you even tried to talk about it it was only the people who said all right screw it i'll be alt-right i'll be an alt-right nazi only those people were allowed to talk about the issue and every other reasonable person just got shamed as a nazi if you ever even brought it up if you ever even went like hey is this a good idea this seems like a big change well i think that's going to shape a lot of our politics going forward it's interesting you say that because to me that's a very european concern whereas the united states

from my understanding as an outsider and correct me i'm wrong has always been a country that didn't have a rigid demographic profile that is kind of being eroded but we were always much more fluid that's for sure well look i mean america i think unlike european countries where european nations are kind of true nations in the traditional sense of the word like they're a people you know there's the irish are a people like said before you've talked about this like it's not just that like british are racist and that's why if you're born in saudi arabia you can never really be british it's like you're just not the it means this group of people and you're not one of this group of people italians ira like oh now america has the united states of america has had demographic upheaval its entire history and it's always had like a radically open definition of what it is to be an american and you know i think Like sometimes when people look back and if they see the language of like, what is it in the initial like 1801 immigration statute, you know, where it said like all white men, all European white men of good standing can come to America.

And people today might look at that. Daryl Cooper makes this point a lot. People today look at that like it's restrictionist. You know, they see it today through the modern woke lens and go, oh, so just white Europeans. You don't understand how radically open that was for the time. It's like when people read quotes of Abraham Lincoln being racist, and they think he was a racist. And you're like, no, dude, for the time, that was like the most progressive thing where he was like, look, I'm not saying black people are equal, but like they should have some rights. You're like, no, that was cool. At the time, that was really, really cool. So America, we had massive waves of immigration. We had massive demographic change from blacks in the South moving up to the North. We've always been reinventing who we are. However, who we are was always kind of like 90 percent European white, nine percent black heritage of slaves, one percent other. So even though the definition of American identity was not as clearly rigid or defined as British or Irish or something like that, it wasn't nothing. And now that has just been, you know, kind of like now in one generation, we've transferred that from being what we always

were our entire history, to being completely different demographically. So it's not like, I guess it's not as clear as like, oh, the Irish are going extinct. But there is something, I think, radically transformational going on. Yeah. Dave, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure as always. Make sure to follow us on Substack where you get to ask Dave your questions. Let's imagine a world where your foreign policy is implemented and the US announces that they are no longer going to police the world. Do you believe that no other country will step in to take that role on a global or regional level?

Or is that just something you're willing to accept? Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at mintmobile.com.