Tucker Carlson Show: w/ Dave Smith on Trump’s Critical Next Move in Iran (Transcript)

It’s an exciting moment to be alive, but it is certainly a dangerous one. They say the most dangerous time for an abused woman is when she tries to leave. That’s when he might kill you. And that’s kind of how I feel about the government right now.

Independent Media: Power or Illusion?

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s first of all so well put and also so true, because it can’t actually last that much longer because the disparity in power is too great. So I think a lot of people who have podcasts — I’ve been in so many different kinds of media, it’s hard to remember what this one’s called. It’s podcasting. It’s the same, sure, it’s —

DAVE SMITH: A kind of silly term that doesn’t really make sense.

TUCKER CARLSON: It doesn’t.

DAVE SMITH: We don’t have iPods anymore. I don’t know why. It’s just that one just stuck for whatever reason.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so true. But people who have independent media feel like they have a lot of power. “I’ve got so much power.” They have no power. They don’t control the medium, really. They don’t control YouTube. They don’t have the FBI at their disposal. They don’t have nuclear weapons. So actually they are powerless, and through a quirk of history, because we’re in a change moment, that’s not obvious, but it has to be obvious. There’s too much at stake. Right?

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, there was a —

TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t they have to be crushed?

DAVE SMITH: I think it was the CNN lady. She used to work for Vice, I believe, but the girl who was known for interviewing the alt-right figures. She interviewed Tim Dillon last year, and it was right after Trump won his election, or shortly after. And she said something like, “You guys are the real power center now.” Like, “Yeah, you podcasters, you guys are the ones with power.” Because, I guess, more people watch these shows than watch the traditional shows. And Trump came and did a bunch of them and then he won reelection, and Kamala Harris was too scared — or wisely, people say, that was a real mistake, she should have done Rogan.

No, it wasn’t. It was a really good call. It was a really, really good call by her team to not do Rogan, actually. It’s like after 2016, when they were like, “Hillary Clinton’s campaign is so stupid, she didn’t visit Wisconsin more.” And you’re like, you really think they’re that stupid? No, her numbers went down every time she went. So they were like, stop going.

TUCKER CARLSON: They didn’t like her. That’s why she didn’t go.

DAVE SMITH: It was actually her best chance was that. But anyway. So they say, “Oh, you guys, since you guys got President Trump elected, you’re the real power center now.” And it’s like, pretty sure the CIA still has a little bit of power. I think there’s still a little bit hanging on in the Pentagon. I’m not quite sure it’s all in Theo Von’s hands at this point. But yes, so that’s the dynamic.

The Illusion of Having a Voice

TUCKER CARLSON: You can’t continue. I mean, let’s be totally honest. What everyone forgets about Tank Man in Tiananmen Square is — he probably got — we don’t even know what happened to him. We don’t know his name. Probably crushed by the tank, actually.

DAVE SMITH: Almost certainly, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not laughing. I am laughing because just the delusion that people have. “I’ve got a voice.”

Winning the Argument but Losing the Policy

DAVE SMITH: It’s like, no. Well, but that’s the weird thing. It’s very strange for both these things to be going on at the same time. That’s why I said to you at breakfast, my analogy is the Roadrunner cartoons, when you run off the side of the cliff. You’re still in air for a moment, and then you look down. Oh. It’s like, we’re there. Like, how can you keep doing this?

So those people — and obviously, for me personally, it’s kind of fascinating because I’ve been in this world, and over the last two and a half years or so, I’ve done — if you count all the debates, Piers Morgan debates, Oxford style debates — I’ve done like 35, 40 debates on just Israel, or the warfare state, or whatever it is, Ukraine, a lot of these things. And it’s like the side — broadly speaking, because there’s a lot of differences amongst people who disagree with, say, the war in Iran or US support for Israel destroying Gaza — but broadly speaking, it’s not only like we’ve won the debate, we’ve just crushed it. It’s not just me. There’s lots of people involved in this, you more so probably than anyone.

But when you look at the polls — there was this one poll I saw, and this is just one poll, but there’s a lot that back this up — before October 7th, they’d ask, “Who do you sympathize with more, the Israelis or the Palestinians?” And it was plus 48 for the Israelis. It’s now plus one for the Palestinians, in the US. To just think — basically a 50-point shift in a little over two years. And Tucker, I don’t know, you’ve been doing this for longer than me. When does that ever happen? When does any issue ever swing by 50 points in two years?

It would be like if I were to tell you in two years this country would be 95% pro-life. It’s like, whoa, what happened in those two years? Well, the pro-lifers must have really won the argument. And so now, for the first time ever, we’ve had a media environment where Israel is not completely protected. What were the debates about supporting Israel on MSNBC or CNN? No, they don’t exist. They never happen. You’re not allowed to have those debates there. There’s not maybe like one kind of critical-of-Israel host who will slip in here or there, but if he says too much, he’s getting fired pretty quickly.

And so we essentially won the debate. It’s not close. It’s not a question. Yes, in a very short period of time, because there was actually a fair, open media system now where it was really democratized in a way. And so you can see — are you bigger than you’ve ever been before? Candace Owens is bigger than she’s ever been before. I know I’m bigger than I’ve ever been before. Ben Shapiro is weaker and more of a laughingstock than ever before. It’s just very — but then at the same time, who won the policy game? Mark Levin. The president is tweeting, “Go watch the Mark Levin show today.” And his base, his voters are going, “I think I’ll check out Tucker Carlson.”

And so there’s just this very weird thing where we won the argument, we had the national debate, and we won. And yet we’re at war with Iran on behalf of Israel. And I think what you’re getting at is that does just feel totally unsustainable. Like, either you’ve got to clamp down on these guys like us, or you’ve got to reverse the policy. And I’m really hoping it’s the latter.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy of War

TUCKER CARLSON: People don’t like to be criticized for their mistakes. And I know this from having a wife and children. Totally fine to be criticized for something you feel confident is the right thing. But if you screw something up and someone says, say, I told you, you want to shoot the person. It’s very hard for people to deal with that.

And so if you have a war like this, which is obviously one of the most profound moments of my lifetime — this is much more profound than 9/11, I think. Thankfully, very relatively few Americans have died. But you can see that this is the end of something, and the consequences are very, very serious. In the middle of that, to criticize the decision to start the process that led to this feels like you’re going to be punished for that.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you feel that?

DAVE SMITH: Yes, I know exactly what you mean. And I almost, on some level — I don’t know, in some way, I feel like the political thing or the wise calculation here would almost be to be like, “Mr. President Trump, you did such a phenomenal job with this, and it’s such a success that we should just stop right now and declare victory.” Something like that. But I’m just no good at being a political operative. I’m only good at telling the truth. It’s all I have — I only have one speed.

Ben Shapiro called me out recently, called me a bunch of names, and then said, “I know I can hear Dave right now saying, ‘Debate me, bro. If you believe this, why don’t you debate me?'” And he goes, “No, no, I don’t debate with it.” But he’s kind of right in a way — that is my response. I mean, I only have one speed. It’s all I know how to do. Come podcast with me. I don’t know anything else.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, because you’re rooted in kind of the old America where there was a free market — not just in the economy, but like an intellectually free market of ideas.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. We’re supposed to have it at least.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. The whole country was built on that.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. And so, but so that Ben Shapiro —

TUCKER CARLSON: — and et cetera, they don’t share that view at all.

DAVE SMITH: Well, he knows the ideas can’t hold up. I mean, he’ll debate a 19 year old gender confused kid because he knows he can win that debate. It’s not that that kid’s more serious than me — that’s not really the issue.

But anyway, I guess, just that I only have one speed. I only know how to just tell you what I think is really going on here. And I think you’re right. This is such a disaster because Donald Trump — first of all, it’d be very difficult at this point even if he wanted to just stop the thing, which I think he does at this point want to stop the thing. It seems to me like he believed this could be quick and easy like Venezuela, and we’re way past that at this point. But he can’t just stop now.

Obviously, the Iranians and the Israelis are involved in this too, and it doesn’t seem like either of them want to stop right now. So there you’ve got a big problem.

But also, look, this isn’t Venezuela. I don’t know what the latest CENTCOM numbers are. I thought 13 dead Americans was the last I saw. The 150 plus wounded number came out weeks ago. I don’t know what that’s up to now. Our bases in the region have been very badly damaged. The damage to the global economy — so it’s not Venezuela. You can’t just come out of this and then pretend something really great happened. If he stops right now, then it’s like, “Oh, you just started a disaster for no reason on behalf of a foreign country.” Like, this is just awful.

And then there’s a couple of factors. I’ve seen this play — I know you’ve seen this over the years, certainly during the global war on terrorism — where there is, I guess what you could call the sunk cost fallacy of war, which is the worst of all sunk cost fallacies. You go, “Well, those boys died for nothing if we don’t finish the job.” And it’s like, oh man, is that a bad trap to get into? Because the reality is that those boys died for nothing. That’s over. And if you continue this, more boys will die for nothing.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s correct.

Scott Horton and the Escalation Trap

DAVE SMITH: And so no one — Piers Morgan had a panel once, a debate between Scott Horton, who is, as you know — you’ve had him on the show — the most incredible foreign policy guy in the country. Just unbelievable levels of brilliance. And his books, Enough Already and Fool’s Errand, which are about the global war on terrorism, are the best books written on the subject. His book Provoked, about the war in Ukraine, is the best book written on —

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re literally exhaustive. I only know Scott Horton because of you, and what an improvement to my life.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I mean, he’s been such an incredible resource. He’s a great friend of mine, one of my closest friends, but he’s also just been like my mentor in the foreign policy stuff. And he’s just so great because he’s got a photographic memory. So I can literally just call him at any point and be like, “When Iran invaded Iraq in 1980, in 1982, weren’t they fighting here?” And he’ll just be like, “Yeah, they were fighting here and here.” And he’s got all their names and everything. It’s really incredible.

But so he was debating Wesley Clark on Piers Morgan’s show. Talk about the new media world that we live in and how crazy it is now — that Scott Horton gets to square off with a four-star general. And Wesley Clark, look, I have my issues with him, but he did give us that great admission about the seven countries in five years, so I’ll always kind of be grateful to him. Now he tries to walk that back, but we all heard what you said.

But at one point, talking about — I believe it was Gaza, if I’m getting this correct — and this was while it was still intensely going on — he said, “But if we just leave now, then Hamas gets to say they won.” And you’re like, “Sir, General, that’s your opinion on war, but that’s a recipe to be in forever war, always. We can’t ever leave anywhere.”

So what happens is you get this thing where it’s like, there’s the sunk cost fallacy — “We can’t leave now because we have to win.” And then Donald Trump, of course, put his entire presidency on the line for this, which was really foolish. And so now he’s just got to get a win. “Let me get a win and then I can get out. Let’s do a big thing.” But then you do a big thing and they respond with a big thing, and then you go, “Shoot, now we’ve got to respond to that thing.” And this is the escalation trap.

And this was what people like me and you have been talking about for years. And all the war hawks in the country really enjoyed mocking me and you for the last seven months or whatever it’s been — from between the 12-day war and this latest war in Iran — going, “You guys were acting like this was going to be a disaster. And look, it wasn’t a disaster.” Okay? We’re back in it now and it’s a disaster. And precisely zero of those people are going, “I guess I was wrong about that.”

The Myths of World War II

TUCKER CARLSON: No, they’ll be clamoring for you to be arrested and imprisoned. Because your existence is a mark of shame — because you remember. So anyone who remembers has to be taken off the board.

I’m just interested — not thinking about those people, the Mark Levins. I say a prayer for Mark Levin every day because it’s my religion and I’m supposed to. But Mark Levin’s an idiot. He’s not pulling any strings. He’s a tool of larger forces. What I’m fascinated by are the assumptions that ordinary, non-Mark-Levin Americans have about the United States, the nature of power, and history — that allowed us to make the greatest mistake of my lifetime, which is this war. What are those? And a lot of this has to do with the Second World War.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: We’re reading the wrong lessons into that. And I just want to say, for the hundredth time, I’m the opposite of pro-Nazi. I’m against authoritarianism in all its forms. But why is it that we look at the Second World War and then make a bunch of false assumptions that get us into engagements like this, that hurt us? What are the myths?

DAVE SMITH: Well, the way I look at it — and this is, I’ve defended Darrell Cooper quite publicly, quite often for what he said on your show, which really — it was, by the way, so revealing and totally proves his point, the response to that, because there’s just no reason why that should have been such a huge thing. But the thing is —

TUCKER CARLSON: Hey, Daryl Cooper — did Hitler kill a lot of Jews? Yeah, he did. He did, like, hours of podcasts on it. Yes, of course Hitler killed a lot of Jews. I mean, what? That’s not even —

DAVE SMITH: He just put out episode two of his new series on World War II, which I have not — I heard the first one, I’ve not gotten a chance to listen to the second one yet. The first one’s so good.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re all so good, really, about that. I don’t think any sane person — I’ve never heard anybody in my life say Hitler didn’t kill a ton of Jews, or Hitler loved the Jews. No, Hitler hated the Jews, killed a ton of Jews. That’s bad. Everyone agrees with that. It’s not really the Holocaust that they’re mad about. That’s not —

DAVE SMITH: Well, look, I mean, the threat, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: So —

DAVE SMITH: World War II was, objectively speaking, the worst thing that’s ever happened in the world.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, right.

DAVE SMITH: It’s the biggest bloodbath in human history and destroyed Europe. And it’s just so horrible. You think about that — that humanity reached such a height in the 19th century. There are two things that happened that could not have been predicted, that would have seemed insane if you had predicted them beforehand. Probably the two greatest achievements in human history are — well, there’s the Industrial Revolution, and for the first time ever there’s economic growth. If you look at economic growth on a chart, it basically doesn’t exist until the Industrial Revolution. And then it changes.

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s different apportionments of wealth.

The Hollowing Out of America’s Victory

DAVE SMITH: Yes. So for the first time ever, human beings escaped the back-breaking poverty of nature, you know what I mean?

TUCKER CARLSON: Or they escaped zero-sum economics.

DAVE SMITH: Yes, they were right. Zero-sum economics. But just where people got rich by

TUCKER CARLSON: looting, now you can get rich by creating things that didn’t exist.

DAVE SMITH: And we could raise the standard of living in a meaningful way in very basic ways. And also there was the abolition of slavery, which just would have seemed like that was the way of the world for all of human history. And I’m saying the abolition of slavery in the west, obviously there are other parts of the world that still had it. The Industrial Revolution was in the west also. But these amazing things happen. And then in the 20th century we take that industrial capacity to go to total war with each other. And in the case of the First World War, just over nonsense. I mean, over a political assassination. It’s not even clear. Yeah, it’s not like somehow this thing spins into this catastrophe.

But so after World War II, that’s even bloodier than World War I, which was supposed to be the war to end all wars and it wasn’t. It was the war to create the conditions for the worst war in human history. And of course, as you’ve talked about and gotten a lot of heat for, civilians were targeted on all sides. Now of course we didn’t go genocidal in the way that Adolf Hitler went, but we targeted cities when we knew the military was out. Targeting women and children, dropping nuclear bombs on cities.

And also the kind of the military industrial complex, the national security apparatus were truly created in the aftermath of World War II. Like, there were intelligence, but the CIA is created and the form of government that we actually live under was kind of erected during and after World War II. And so you’ve got the most profoundly awful thing that’s ever happened, and this new government, plus a new government in Israel a couple years later that are created.

And so when you have something like that, you really got to tell yourself a damn good story about why that is justified. And that’s not. When you say this, sometimes people go, “Oh, so are you saying the Holocaust didn’t really happen?” It’s like, no, no, it really happened. It’s not about the Holocaust. It really happened. The point is that the Holocaust happened in a context of 60 million people dying. You know what I mean?

The Load-Bearing Myths of World War II

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just so funny. It’s all reduced to the. Okay, just to be totally clear, not denying the Holocaust. Okay, it’s not about that. The thing, the immediate post-war changes that you just listed, the deindustrialization of the west, the partition of India, the creation of the national security state, if I could say an authoritarian national security state in the west, delivering half of Europe to the Soviets, the partition of Germany, like, these are all the genocide of German civilians after

DAVE SMITH: the war, mass ethnic cleansing, mass rapes and murders and all types of horrible stuff.

TUCKER CARLSON: So none of it’s not a defense of Hitler, whom I oppose, to say all of those are bad. It’s just kind of interesting that this war, which was supposedly so great, gave birth to things that are just objectively the worst things.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, and what is that? Well, look, it’s a disaster of government, total power. But look, even if you say, if you’re talking about the Revolutionary War, let’s just say back in the 1980s or something like schoolteachers teaching kids about the Revolutionary War. They don’t go like, “Well, the King of England was taxing a little bit more than he should. And then the framers kind of had these wild conspiracy theories about what he was going to come do. None of that was really true.” And anyway, they got into the. You know, they tell you George Washington never told a lie, and when he chopped down the apple tree, he said to his pa, “I can’t lie to you,” because human beings just need this narrative that makes.

And so what ended up happening was that the very. When you challenge World War II orthodoxies, you’re challenging what Darryl calls the load-bearing myths. The load-bearing pillars of the existence of the most powerful forces in the world. And look, it’s very clear. The reaction to Darryl is the proof of the claim. Like, what is this? If somebody were to say, you know, this is how you find out what the national religion really is. I could sit here and trash Thomas Jefferson for raping his slaves.

TUCKER CARLSON: Doesn’t matter. What.

DAVE SMITH: It doesn’t matter. This isn’t going to generate any outrage at all. In fact, it might generate some applause from different quarters. But you talk about this and it’s very, very different. And then as you’ve seen, as we’ve all seen, it’s used to justify every subsequent war. Like, everybody is.

TUCKER CARLSON: To justify authoritarianism.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, that’s right. Everybody is Adolf Hitler. I’ve lived through, it’s Saddam Hussein was Adolf Hitler. Noriega was Adolf Hitler. Bashar Al-Assad is Adolf Hitler. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. You’re Adolf Hitler. Nick Fuentes is Adolf Hitler. Every time they want to smear someone, that’s the smear they go with. Donald Trump got the same treatment. And anytime you oppose a war, well, you’re Neville Chamberlain. If I think like, “Hey, we should just put in writing that we’ll never bring Ukraine into NATO because man, this is causing all these problems.” Okay, Neville Chamberlain, you would have just given Czechoslovakia. It’s like, dude, that’s not the only lesson in history. The only lesson in history is not always go with aggression, never go with de-escalation. But so that’s kind of what this has been turned into. And I do think, but I would

TUCKER CARLSON: just say big picture, if it was such a victory, why are all the winners falling apart less than 100 years later?

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s like what I don’t. Again, shut up, you’re pro-Hitler for the fifth time. Not pro-Hitler in any sense. Well, what’s the answer to that question?

Sometimes When You Win, You Really Lose

DAVE SMITH: Well, there was a brilliant philosopher named Rosie Perez and in the film White Men Can’t Jump, she said, “Sometimes when you win, you really lose.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE SMITH: And it is such a simple but very, very true statement. And there is something about. Well, isn’t it kind of interesting that the United States of America started as the experiment in restrained government?

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

DAVE SMITH: Like there had really never been a government that was created that was so restrained. And the whole idea of it was like, we’re going to take the power of a king and then we’re going to scatter that amongst three different branches in the federal government. And the federal government really only oversees all these state governments that have their own autonomy. And we are these United States of America. And even as we became more centralized, obviously the Articles of Confederation got overthrown and the Constitution gets put in.

But even say, like, if you look after this from the end of the Civil War, this was always the best stuff about, like Milton Friedman books and stuff. But there in this part, I really think those Chicago guys got it right, that if you look from the end of the Civil War, so like, excuse me, 1865 to around, say, 1910, in this period of time, the U.S. government, the federal government spent like maybe like one and a half or 2% of the national income, a tiny amount. There was no mass federal regulation or anything like that. There was no central bank, there was no income tax. Just try to imagine, like this was truly the closest to a real experiment in free market capitalism that humanity had ever seen.

And the result of that was the biggest economic expansion in human history, the greatest raising of the lot and life of the average person. Where the average person could actually have a pretty nice life and you could work at the factory and your wife didn’t have to work, and you owned a house and you sent your kids to college and you drove a couple cars, you played poker on the weekends with your buddy, like you had a good life.

And if you look at the United States of America today, it is the most powerful government in the history of the world. Like, somehow this thing that started as an experiment in the smallest government became the biggest government that the world’s ever known. And so there’s almost something where. Well, what happens is these free markets create so much prosperity that there’s so much more of a tax base. And now the political class can tax you more and more and more, and you’re still living a pretty good life, even though they’re getting fat off of you. You know what I mean?

And so similarly, sometimes something like after World War II, you see this with America, and then you really see it after the collapse of the Soviet Union, where it’s like, because you win, you get so much power. But as Lord Acton said, that power tends to corrupt. And so you get all this power, but then it totally corrupts your own soul. And I think that’s kind of the

TUCKER CARLSON: story of America, and I think it’s the story of our lives. I mean, the number of men I know who’ve gotten what they wanted, what they worked for, the job, the exit, sale of whatever they built, all of a sudden they win, and then they fall apart. I’ve seen that so much. I’ve felt it in my own life, by the way, for sure. Easy success is not good for you at all. Struggle is good for you. And so I wonder if the United States was hollowed out by its own victory, this loss. And unfortunately, I think we can say already it’s hard to imagine getting out of this without being diminished.

Chaos in the Persian Gulf

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I mean, what is a victory here? I mean, it’s also a terrible situation where victory might be the worst case scenario. Like, if the whole goal is to topple the regime, you’re like, okay, but every other time we’ve toppled a regime in this neck of the woods, it’s led to migrant crises and death and terrorism.

TUCKER CARLSON: You can’t topple a regime in the Persian Gulf because the world’s energy supply needs to move through it. You have to extract it, refine it, make it into petrochemicals, do whatever you fertilize it, do whatever you want in the Persian Gulf, and then you have to get it out of the Persian Gulf. So that means you have to have a controlling authority. You have to have strong governments there or else some rebel group, Houthis, with drones, will shut the whole thing down. You have to have. You can’t have chaos in Iran.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, they call it the Persian Gulf for a reason.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. Even if you call it the Arabian Gulf, the other half is Persian. It doesn’t matter. Chaos in the Persian Gulf means no energy or fertilizer from the Persian Gulf period. So you’re going to piracy there. So the option to that is keeping an Iranian regime in place. And that means that Iran is more powerful than it was when the war started. This is also obvious. Unless you nuke them, which is, I think, an option. And then you set off a chain reaction that you know is the worst thing imaginable.

So anyway, I think there’s no way to see this as a win. I pray it is, but I don’t see it. If it is a loss, maybe that is not all bad for

DAVE SMITH: the U.S. Well, there is, I think sometimes things need to get really bad before they get better. Things need to get bad so that people wake up even more. There’s no question people have woken up a lot, but maybe people just need to get angrier. And I don’t know, I don’t know.

The Moral Weight of War and Its Consequences

TUCKER CARLSON: What I’m trying to see this in the fullness of history and God’s plan, but I just. Because it feels like such a disaster, it’s affecting my sleep. I love America. I have kids. I don’t want this to happen. I’m not in control, obviously.

But I do think that you’re often surprised by the downstream results of things. I think people who return from Normandy would be shocked by the condition of the United States and Great Britain 80 years later. They, I mean they are shocked whenever you see them interviewed. Some hundred year old guys like, “We died for this.”

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, no, it’s totally. I mean, talk about just disgracing their sacrifice, you know, it’s the greatest disgrace.

TUCKER CARLSON: Our self-abasement is an insult to their sacrifice on our behalf. But I wonder if the opposite isn’t also true. That maybe in your defeat there are things that — I know this is true for me every time I’ve gotten sick or gotten fired. I just understand the world better and I become more joyful and stronger. Do you feel that?

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, no, I know for sure. I mean, many times in my life. Yeah, you learn a lot more from your losses.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Your defeats are actually your victories in that respect.

DAVE SMITH: That’s right. But the problem is, man, we’re just playing with fire with this thing because it’s so dangerous. What worries you most? Well, I guess I’d say number one, what we’re doing to those people over there. I mean, I think it’s just horrible. And I don’t say this as like, I’m not trying to virtue signal that I care so much more than other people, but when your government takes your money and just starts slaughtering people in poor countries compared to us, it’s just so profound.

TUCKER CARLSON: What you do to others will be done to you.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a physics principle. You can’t get away from that.

The Danger of Normalizing Violence Abroad

DAVE SMITH: Well, imagine there was a guy who was a convicted pedophile and he had molested a bunch of Iraqi children or a bunch of Iranian children. And then you were like, “Well, I’m going to have him babysit my kids. He only does it over there.” You know what I mean? Like, he only — what? No, dude, he’s hurt children. You can’t let him anywhere near your children.

Okay, well, these same monsters in government are the ones who are ruling over me and my family and my country. And the idea that you just go kill — I said this on Rogan’s show the other day about the school that we hit where we killed like 165 or 170 little girls. And then people give each other, “Those numbers haven’t been verified. That’s just the claim of the Iranian government.” Well, our government’s not denying it. And in fact, they did an investigation and concluded it was almost certainly us. It was a Tomahawk missile. What’s the question here? We know where this came from. The only question left is, who gave it those coordinates, or did it miss, or was that intentional? Whatever, but killing a whole bunch of eight year old girls? I mean, Jesus, man, is there anything more evil you could do than that? So just on a basic human level, there’s like anyone who would do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think it was clearly accidental, but I also think having done a lot of accidental things, it’s essential to apologize for it.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And anyone who doesn’t apologize for it is a dangerous person.

DAVE SMITH: Well, also, even do that to them —

TUCKER CARLSON: You’ll do it to my kids?

DAVE SMITH: Yes. And it also stretches the definition of accidental a little bit. Because even if very specifically we were trying to hit this building, but instead we hit this building — there’s a point I’ve been making largely through Israel’s destruction of Gaza, which was not that at all. They were just leveling the place. But you go, look, man, you start dropping bombs on people, you start blowing things up, and you know innocent people are going to end up dying in that. So in that sense it is intentional. And maybe you didn’t mean to hit that exact target or kill that many people. But if you blew up a building that you suspected somebody else was in, but then it turned out that there were a bunch of little kids there, it’s still a pretty profound crime.

The Risk of a Wider War

But then of course, on top of that, I really worry about getting trapped into a broader war, a wider war. I don’t think this is going to be like Iraq or Afghanistan. I think already this is very different than Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq and Afghanistan did not have the ability to do what Iran is doing right now, for one.

Number two, I don’t think it’s going to be that. I think it would be more the Libya or Syria model than the Iraq or Afghanistan model, which did require a small amount of ground forces. So we used head-chopping bin Laden nights in both of those cases and put the bin Laden nights in power in Syria.

But just to be clear, our country would not survive another Iraq or Afghanistan. There’s no United States of America coming out of that. We don’t have a 20-year catastrophic ground invasion. It will bankrupt the country, it will destroy the culture of the country. So that’s a very scary thing.

In the launch of the global war on terrorism, we were coming out of the 1990s. This was a different country in the 1990s. Anyone who was alive then — people lived here. Yes, different people, different culture, different economic realities, different military realities.

The Threat of a Shiite Jihad

Now, the other thing that I really worry about with all of this is that we’ve never really dealt with a full Shiite jihad war against the West. Our beef was always with the Sunni radicals. Those were the terrorists we had to worry about — Al Qaeda and ISIS and stuff like that. And that was quite a big problem. We had a lot of terrorist attacks in America and in Europe, particularly ISIS-inspired attacks, Al Qaeda as well.

And I’ve called out some of these people. I’ll do it again here because they’re some of the biggest frauds in the country. These pretend intellectuals like Sam Harris and Gad Saad and guys like this who have spent a career demonizing Muslims. Their entire career has been talking about what irrational, violent people Muslims are, how awful the religion is. And look, there’s been some points that I agree with them on. If someone writes a cartoon about Muhammad, you don’t have the right to kill them. Sorry, if you want to be in the West, these are our rules here. We value free speech. And I can make a cartoon about whatever the hell I want to make a cartoon about.

Okay, but if you spent your whole career arguing how violent and irrational the Muslims are, what does killing an ayatollah mean? That’s not just a political figure. You murder an ayatollah and his entire family. And we’ve already had a couple of terrorist attacks over here that at least seem like — there was the shooting in Austin, Texas, that came like the day after we launched the war. And the guy was wearing an “Allahu Akbar” T-shirt. I’m assuming that might be related.

And then you have this real issue where in the old controlled American media, and all the people like Mark Levin and all these guys, when they talk to their audience, whatever audience they’ve got left, they always love to talk about how Iran chants “Death to America,” which they do. And I’d like it if they stopped doing that. It’s not the nicest chant. But none of them ever even try to approach the question of why. Why do they chant “Death to America”? Why do they hate us so much?

TUCKER CARLSON: And this was for our freedoms. Yes.

DAVE SMITH: Right.

Why They Hate Us: The Historical Roots

TUCKER CARLSON: So the older you get, you realize how fast everything can change. One day everything is fine, it’s great, and the next day things change, are not great at all. That’s just the nature of it.

DAVE SMITH: This was after — this is so funny. It is so funny. That was funny in a dark way. But that was actually the question. I remember I was 18 when 9/11 happened. I remember asking that question with all sincerity, and that was actually the national conversation. That was the first question before it got answered. When 9/11 happened, the average Joe Six Pack American went, “Why do they hate us?” That’s how ignorant we were of our own position in the world. We didn’t even know there was a beef.

We thought Bill Clinton’s time was the time of peace and prosperity. That’s what Americans considered that time — the time of peace. Iraqis did not consider that a time of peace. Hundreds of thousands of them were getting killed due to the blockade, Clinton’s bombing campaign. It wasn’t peace in Serbia. But to us it was like, oh, just little wars. They didn’t really mean anything.

Now all you’ve got to do is ask that question. And I’m sure it’s almost like implicitly in the Mark Levin world that, “Well, why do they hate us? I don’t know, because they’re crazy durka durka people and they hate us. They’re Islamo-fascists. I don’t know. That’s what they do. They hate.”

But if you ask Iranians — and not the ones who are paid by Mossad to promote wars — they’ll tell you very quickly why they hate us. The whole beef goes back to 1953. We overthrew their government. We installed a dictator who they did not like very much, who was not very kind to his political opponents, to put it mildly.

And then the other big thing that they point out all the time is that in 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq. Now, a lot of people from my generation remember this because this is actually what the neocons would vaguely cite when they were trying to push the war against Iraq. They’re like, “He used chemical weapons against civilians.” Yeah. What they leave out is that they were backing him when he did that. They facilitated the sale of those chemical weapons to him. And they backed and gave the green light for Saddam Hussein to invade the country.

Iranians remember that. I think 500 or 600,000 Iranians died in that war. They remember this very well. By the way, another lesson from that war is they never surrendered even after taking losses like that. These Shiites are not playing around when it comes to matters like that. They fought and fought and fought. And so anyway, I say all that just to say that these things do inspire hatred, and they inspire hatred for generations. And that’s real.

Osama bin Laden’s Letter and the Question of Motive

TUCKER CARLSON: It turns out in 2002, a letter emerged written by Osama bin Laden, who of course was then still alive, that he had written right after 9/11 in Kandahar before he fled to Tora Bora. And it came out a year later in the Wall Street Journal. And I worked at CNN at the time and I read it on the air to answer that question — what is this about? Why did he do this?

And the letter, which briefly became famous before it was pulled off the Internet, said, “I’m mad that you have troops in Saudi where Mecca and Medina are, and I’m mad about your support for Israel. And that’s why I did this.” I wasn’t trying to justify 9/11. It can’t be justified in my opinion.

DAVE SMITH: That’s right.

The Blowback Problem and Civil Liberties

TUCKER CARLSON: But I think it’s important to know why things happen because you want them to happen again. Well, a group of rabbis got together and called me an anti-Semite, which I wasn’t then and I’m not now, and tried to get me fired from my job. I’ll never forget that. And CNN called me, the corporate lawyer called me. You know where they’re all mad at you. And I’m like, I wasn’t attacking anybody. Of course.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I just think it’s more than Americans don’t know. I think they’ve been prevented from knowing.

DAVE SMITH: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: That, you know, actions have reactions.

DAVE SMITH: Well, that’s why the term “blowback” that was coined by the CIA — and what they described it as was, it’s not just like, we do a thing and then there’s a reaction to it. It’s that we do a covert thing, and then there’s a reaction to it, and then the American people have no idea what this is even in response to. It’s just like, whoa, out of nowhere, these guys attacked us.

TUCKER CARLSON: But we’re going to need a police state to protect ourselves from the blowback of this war.

DAVE SMITH: I mean, that’s a real concern.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the problem.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, that’s a real concern.

TUCKER CARLSON: We’re so vulnerable. I mean, this country’s wide open, and all of our infrastructure, our energy infrastructure, our food, our water, all of it’s unguarded. And the only way to protect ourselves from the inevitable blowback, the Shia terrorism that we’re going to get, of course, after killing the Ayatollah, is going to be to turn this into a surveillance state even more than it is.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. And of course, also on top of that, coming off of the Biden years, where we don’t even know who’s here — I mean, it’s just the mix of these policies, like, the mix of having forever wars and open borders has just got to be the —

TUCKER CARLSON: And a welfare state.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. And just throw everything in. And a drug war on top of that, too. And a drug war so that drugs are illegal, there’s a black market, the gangs want to smuggle the drugs. And every single policy on top of it just makes this situation so much worse.

Osama bin Laden’s Letter and the Logic of Collective Punishment

DAVE SMITH: But, yeah, when Osama bin Laden’s letter to America went viral on TikTok —

TUCKER CARLSON: — many, many years later.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Aborted attempt to bring it to the country.

DAVE SMITH: Just to be clear, this is written in 2002. It was a couple years ago when it went super viral on TikTok, and all the young leftists were sharing it, and they were going like, “Oh, my God, look at this.” Turns out now, of course, they’re leftists, so they always think too collectively. And I saw a bunch of people going, “Turns out he was right,” or “He was the good guy.” And you’re like, no, no, no, that is not the takeaway from this.

There was that one time the guy, Hasan Piker, who’s like a lefty streamer, and he had said that America deserved 9/11. And that was what got him in a lot of trouble for it. But no, stop speaking like a leftist. We’re not collective, we’re individuals. And the individuals who had nothing to do with these policies did not have it —

TUCKER CARLSON: — come to breakfast at Windows on the World, you get killed.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, you don’t. The whole point — now, what Osama bin Laden said — I don’t think this was in the letter to America. I think it was in his declaration of war. He had two declarations of war against America also. But what he said is that civilians are fair game because you vote for, you know, you vote the Bill Clintons and the George Bushes in, who slaughter all of our children. And so you’re fair game now.

That’s the logic of Osama bin Laden, the psychopathic terrorist. And the whole point of why we’re against all this s* is because we reject that. We don’t agree with that. And you know who else used that same logic? Every goddamn Zionist who said, “They elected Hamas in Gaza.” By the way, they don’t even have regular elections in Gaza. They had one election 20 years ago where Hamas won with pluralities, but that was enough for them to say —

TUCKER CARLSON: — kill their kids in conscience.

DAVE SMITH: And so no, the whole point is that you don’t have the right to take vengeance on innocent people. That is the standard of civilization.

You Cannot Punish the Innocent

TUCKER CARLSON: I have said that pretty consistently for the past couple of years. And I thought that was just a baseline understanding that everyone in America knew and believed. I thought that was the whole point of America. That’s what civilization is. You can’t punish the innocent. And that turns out to be incredibly anti-Semitic. I didn’t know that, by the way. I’ve never, up until recently, all the Jews I knew were 100% on board with that. I mean, I can just hear a rabbi going, “You can’t kill the innocent. Amen, brother.”

DAVE SMITH: Except in this one.

TUCKER CARLSON: But now it’s like all of a sudden these, you know. But I don’t know. I don’t think it’s about any specific group. In fact, by definition it’s not. It’s a human standard to which we should all be held and do our best to hold others. You can’t kill the innocent.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. And also it’s not, you know, it’s not about one specific group because —

TUCKER CARLSON: — by definition, it’s not about one specific group. All humans.

DAVE SMITH: It’s also just, you know, and this is the problem where when people try to make it about the Jews. And it’s so weird, the dynamic, because I watch you, you literally bend over backward to say that it’s not about the Jews as much as possible to the point — and as someone who’s like a Jewish fan of yours, I find myself going, you could stop making that point. You’ve said it enough. You know what I mean? But you do. Every opportunity you go, “I don’t believe —”

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not because I’m afraid of Jews at all. No, you aren’t afraid of anybody. It’s because I think it’s the standard that we have to uphold.

DAVE SMITH: Well, also, everyone is insisting that that’s what you’re really saying. And so you want to go, “No, I’m not saying that.”

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s why I’ve been defending Muslims. It’s not because I’m Muslim or taking money from Qatar — too late now, we ripped their economy. But it’s because I think these are human rights bestowed by God and they apply to every person because they’re inherent in every person, because every person’s created in the image of God. That’s the point I’m trying to make.

Anti-Semitism, the Israel Lobby, and Collective Blame

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, and I completely agree with you. I also think it’s just, frankly, inaccurate. I mean, look, I saw one poll today that said 60% of American Jews support the war in Iran, which, hey, that’s a lot higher than the general population. But that means 40% of them don’t. And so that’s a huge percentage of them.

I think a third of Jews in New York voted for this Mamdani guy. Now I’m annoyed with them for other reasons because he’s a crazy socialist. But they’re clearly not on board with the Israel lobby’s plan here. And then, of course, as you’ve done a better job of exposing than anyone I’ve ever seen, there is a lot of Ted Cruzes and Mike Huckabees out there, who, as you correctly pointed out, are different animals. Like, Ted Cruz is a cynical, lying politician. Mike Huckabee is like a true believer of sorts. I’m not sure which is worse. They’re both pretty rough and both totally humiliated themselves when you interviewed them.

But the point is that the Israel lobby encompasses a lot of non-Jews. And then there’s a lot of Jews — there’s the Max Blumenthals and Norman Finkelsteins and Glenn Greenwalds. And so to just say it’s like this one group, now you’re missing the point entirely.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I would say that the advocates for the war are primarily responsible for that. And speaking of blowback — I mean, it’s hardly my job to defend Jewish Americans, but I want to defend all Americans. And I definitely want to defend the principle that we should be judged on our own terms, not by people who look like us or we’re related to. I think that’s the most important thing. But I mean, I do think you often — oh, anti-Semitism is on the rise. I agree with that.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I wish it wasn’t true, but that is absolutely real. And I know that I’m blamed for it. But I think —

DAVE SMITH: I think you’re one of the —

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m really against —

DAVE SMITH: I know people will mock me for saying this, but I genuinely think it’s true. I think you are one of the leading fighters against anti-Semitism in the country.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think so.

DAVE SMITH: And I think I do what I can to be that as well. I think if you really want to see a decrease in Jew hatred, then maybe it would be good to have Jewish people saying, “Hey, I am totally against this. I am not for this.” But also it is — and I’m not defending collectivism of any stripe — but it is very predictable and it is just human nature. If you have —

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s why it’s so scary. Yes, it is human nature. That’s exactly right.

DAVE SMITH: If there’s, let’s say, just a neighborhood — all things being equal or whatever — and a bunch of black teenagers, black young men, are going around and mugging and beating up people. Do you think anti-black racism is going to go up, go down, or stay the same?

TUCKER CARLSON: Crime causes racism.

DAVE SMITH: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: For years, no one shut up.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Now, is it fair to the black guy who didn’t mug or beat up anyone that there’s racism? No, it’s not fair to him. It’s also a predictable and, frankly, at times an understandable response from someone who was a victim of getting mugged and beat up. And so if you’re a black person who’s in the public eye, it might be reasonable at that point to go, “Hey, guys, we’ve got to stop mugging people and beating them up. Otherwise they’re going to hate us.”

Jewish Identity and the Cost of Speaking Out

DAVE SMITH: And the way I always looked at it — this always just came very natural to me, like this was so obvious. I’m Jewish. I love Jewish people. I love Jewish culture. It’s who I am. It’s a big part of me. And I think some of the best things about me I got from Jewish culture — valuing intellectual curiosity and family and hard work and humor, and a lot of things that really define who I am are very much a part of Jewish culture.

TUCKER CARLSON: Total refusal to go along with whatever.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: For sure.

DAVE SMITH: Also, just whining about things, complaining, kvetching. This is all part of me. It’s what I do for a living. It turned into a pretty nice career.

But that being said, I just look at it and go, okay, so all the stories I’ve heard from my family and our history are how we were brutally oppressed here and killed here and kicked out of here and relocated here, and then we came to America. Now I have grown up in the United States of America. This is where my kids live. It’s where they’re going to grow up, as you say all the time. That’s the only thing that matters to me — that my kids have the best life I can give them. Literally, the only thing that matters to me. Everything is a very distant second from that.

And I go, okay, so we’re 2% of the population in America. We are, by all objective standards, thriving. We’re doing great because they’re not an oppressed minority in America. We’re doing better than the average American is doing, substantially. And I’ve never once — I mean, I don’t know, I’ve had people on Twitter say things to me or something like that. But there’s never once been an obstacle put in my way because I was Jewish. I never couldn’t go to this school or couldn’t get this job or couldn’t do anything like that. And I’ve had a really great life here.

In fact, probably the most antisemitism I’ve ever dealt with is from the pro-Israel people who call me a kapo every day because I don’t support another reckless war.

The U.S.-Israel Relationship and the Rise of Tribalism

TUCKER CARLSON: So capos with the Jewish enforcement,

DAVE SMITH: collaborators with the Nazis in the ghettos.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, yeah, right.

DAVE SMITH: So it was a really nasty thing to call somebody, but whatever. That’s the game we’re in. So my perspective is like, okay, so you’re telling me the whole world treated us like crap. We’ve come here to America where we’ve been just very successful and treated very well. My default position is to love the country for that. Like, oh, well, then we should be really grateful to this country. That should be the attitude. Not going around lecturing people about whether they’ve been to the museum about our suffering from decades ago. Like, what is that?

And look again, I’m not. A lot of the critics of Israel are left wingers. I’m not coming at this from a left wing perspective. I’m a crotchety old right winger. I don’t agree with any of that. I’m sitting here and saying if we, if any self respecting conservative or self respecting right winger saw any other minority group complaining about their mistreatment in another continent, in another country, in another century, you’d go, “Hey, shut up. Get over it. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” That’s like what I’m saying.

And then by the way, with Jews, like, oh, you already did. You pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. So, like, what are we even talking about here? And I don’t think obsessing over past trauma is always the correct answer, and certainly not insisting that everybody else suffer over or obsess over your past trauma. So I just always, it was always very natural to me that I’m on Team America, I’m rooting for this country to succeed.

TUCKER CARLSON: The country that fought the Nazis.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, by the way, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Lost a lot of Americans fighting the Nazis. Why are you lecturing me about the Nazis? Yeah, my country fought them.

DAVE SMITH: And to almost anybody, like, anybody at Fox News, now again, maybe I talk about Mark Levin and Fox News and these guys too much, like they really are irrelevant. But I guess it’s just that I’m stuck in the old, I’m the age I am. And so to me it’s still like, hey, this is Fox. But any one of them would completely agree with me on this if we were talking about any other group of people.

If we were talking about any other group of people talking about victimhood or any of that, if there was some black guy talking about how racist this country is because of slavery, they would have made your exact point. They’d go, “We fought a war to end slavery. Hundreds of thousands of us died fighting.”

TUCKER CARLSON: They would right away, even here, so back off.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, right.

Anti-Semitism, Anti-White Hate, and Universal Principles

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. And underneath all of this, and the reason that I really do worry that the country is going to become openly tribal, and that leads to violence every time, is that a lot of the same people who are upset about the rise in anti-Semitism, which again, I think is real. I mean, I can tell it’s real, and I don’t like it either, are the ones who abetted all the anti-white hate for so long, which is still not being addressed. The Trump administration sued Harvard over its anti-Jewish discrimination, which is deranged.

DAVE SMITH: What a slap in the face to white people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s unbelievable. And of course, the anti-white hate is still totally embedded at every level of our government and in business and most famously in schools. So that’s like an attempt to hurt people on the basis of their race. And no one has said anything about it.

And my point is these are either universal principles, they apply to every human being endowed with human rights by the creator, or they’re just preferences. It’s just your tribe against mine, and then I’m allowed to fight your tribe for the benefit of my tribe, and it just evolves into Rwanda. So I think we could diffuse a lot of this if the head of the ADL would be like, “I’m every bit as opposed to anti-white hate as I am to anti-Jewish hate.” We could all just agree that it’s all wrong. Then we decelerate. But until then, how can I take you seriously?

The U.S.-Israel “Special Relationship” Exposed

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, and I think along with that is we just have to stop fighting wars on behalf of Israel and we have to have some type of separation. I mean, I’m not saying that we should be enemies with Israel or that we should go to war with Israel or anything like that, but the special relationship between the US and Israel is so freaking weird. And now in this new media environment, it’s been exposed. I don’t think you can put that toothpaste back in the tube. It is something that I think a lot of people were kind of happy to look the other way about for years.

TUCKER CARLSON: You came on my show, you came to Maine a couple years ago to do something on Ukraine, and Greenwald too, who I love and I’ve known a long time, and both of you had a moment where you’re like, “Yeah, and Israel’s problem,” and I’m like, I agree, but I don’t want to, there’s, I just want to pretend this isn’t happening. It’s not worth it. I don’t want to be denounced or whatever. I just don’t want to have the fight.

DAVE SMITH: Well, you let me or Glenn Greenwald in your door and that will not be happening. I was, yes, I get it.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I was part of that. It’s just not worth it.

DAVE SMITH: Well, look, even in my opinion, the greatest living American hero Ron Paul, even he would kind of try to say it in a gentle way. Like he would go, “Well, let’s let them fight their own fights and we’ll just kind of be over here being non-interventionist.”

Because of course, on one hand, there are a lot of things. I don’t know if people who are listening to this show can appreciate this, but you know this much better than I do. But there was a time, Donald Trump will kind of say this out loud. He’ll say that AIPAC used to totally control Congress and now they don’t control them anymore. Like, he’ll just say it, which is so wild. “They give me hundreds of millions of dollars and I do whatever they want.” Like, all right, dude, you just said that out loud. I thought that was like an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. That’s just something the president said.

TUCKER CARLSON: In the Knesset of all places.

The Old Media Order and the Israel Lobby’s Power

DAVE SMITH: But the thing is, right, in the old order, before there were podcasts like this. And look, if you think about, I used to always point to the example, because I thought it was so interesting about where the technology, where social media was. When Bill O’Reilly was the number one show at Fox News, the number one show in cable news at the 8pm hour, you were also the number one show at Fox News, the number one show in cable news at the 8pm hour.

When they fired Bill O’Reilly, Bill O’Reilly went from being like one of the biggest voices in the national conversation to being relegated over to the sidelines. He still has a show somewhere, but he’s not really moving the needle at all. You got bigger than you were there. And part of that was who you were, who your audience was. But a big part of it was you had another platform.

TUCKER CARLSON: I would be fly fishing full time if it weren’t for the technology.

DAVE SMITH: So maybe the technology ruined your life. You could have just gone and had a happy life. They pulled you back in. But I don’t know that people appreciate how much in the old order, in the old days, when getting fired took you out of the conversation, with Bill O’Reilly days or whatever before that, getting the Israel lobby on your back would ruin you. It would absolutely ruin you. The one thing you couldn’t do, and it didn’t matter who you are.

TUCKER CARLSON: Absolutely. Sleep with the makeup artist. You could not fight with the ADL.

DAVE SMITH: That’s right. That was just it. Whether it’s the ADL or the Southern Poverty Law Center or AIPAC or the American Enterprise Institute or National Review, the Israel lobby is like this huge, powerful thing. And back then, it didn’t matter if you were Pat Buchanan. You’re like, “Dude, I’m Pat Buchanan. I’ve been in four New Hampshire primaries. I won the New Hampshire primary. I’ve been in three or four different presidential administrations, a New York Times bestseller, a fixture in America.” I mean, he hosted Crossfire when Crossfire first, you know, doesn’t matter. They could take you out. They could take Ron Paul, they could take all.

And so there was for many years almost a leftover residue of like, you just don’t want this fight because, man, is this going to get ugly and you’re going to be smeared as every vicious name in the book. But at a certain point, it was like, oh, well, you can kind of talk about these things now. And in fact, the people who do talk about them are being rewarded by their viewers because it’s refreshing that someone’s talking about the thing you weren’t allowed to talk about.

But now that that has been exposed and the toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube, it’s just too much. You cannot have, and I know you talk about this a lot, you look at examples like, and these examples are countless. You look at Ted Cruz saying to your face, as he said at other places, that the reason he ran for Senate was to be Israel’s number one defender. You got Tammy Bruce saying America’s the second best country to Israel, kind of tongue in cheek. Still a really weird thing for an official from the administration to say.

You got Donald Trump saying that Sheldon, and now Miriam Adelson, give him hundreds of millions of dollars, and all they want, they come in every day asking for stuff on behalf of a foreign country, and he gives it, which they love more than America. Well, Sheldon was on tape. Have you seen this?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

DAVE SMITH: He was on tape. He said his greatest regret in life is that he wore the US military uniform rather than the IDF uniform. Now I’m sorry, that is intolerable from any just sane perspective. This has nothing to do with hating Jews or even hating any other country. If people were talking like this about Norway, we’d be like, “Yo, what are you doing? This isn’t Norway, this is America.” Like, fine, move to Norway, go ahead. But no, you can’t.

And then to have people like Mike Huckabee saying that God promised Lebanon and Saudi Arabia to Netanyahu, I’m sorry, but there’s just no. This is simply not how public policymakers, I guess it’s not a policymaker but a politician, an ambassador to this country, you can’t be talking this way. This is insane. We don’t let anybody just dictate their policy off, “God told me to do this,” and then a very weird God told me something on behalf of a foreign country.

So I think we’re at a point where, and this is kind of my rejoinder to a lot of those people who call me and you anti-Semitic. I guess I’m a self-hating Jew and you’re an anti-Semite. Because listen, man, there is a rise of Jew hatred, and if you really do care about that, the only way to combat that is that we have to end this. The same way we needed a separation of church and state so we don’t fight religious wars anymore, we need a separation of the Israel lobby and the United States of America.

Fear, Enmeshment, and What It Means for Israel

TUCKER CARLSON: I think it’s tough. As a non-Israel hater, I don’t hate anyone. I’m not going to allow myself to hate anyone, period. But I’m just being as honest as I can be. We’re very enmeshed, like more than people understand. Representatives, official and non-official, of the Israeli government throughout the US government at every single level, state and federal. Okay, there’s that, and in our institutions, that would include the Pentagon and CIA, our biggest and most important.

And then there’s the question of like, what does that mean for Israel? Like, do they just allow the United States to be like, you’re just like whatever, France now or Spain, we’re going to treat you like an ally, but not a sibling. I think that we get punished for that. People are afraid of Israel. That’s the difference between Israel and Spain. Everyone loves Spain.

DAVE SMITH: It’s great.

The Israel Lobby and the “Spell” Over U.S. Policy

TUCKER CARLSON: The Spanish. We can have bases there. You can put missiles there. It’s all great. But no one thinks if you pull back aid from Spain, they’re going to hurt you. But everyone is afraid of being physically hurt by Israel. Maybe they’re overstating it. Maybe they’re all anti-Semitic and paranoid. I don’t know. I can just tell you from living in D.C. there is a fear of them. Real fear. And anyone who says this country is freaking, lying.

DAVE SMITH: No, it’s like saying there’s a fear of the intelligence agencies. That’s a fact. It’s a fact.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think we’re pretty out in the open about that now.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, well, that’s right. That’s right. And so if that’s the case, it’s almost like our leaders are just too afraid to do something about this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course they’re afraid. And I don’t know the genesis of that fear. Like, maybe, again, maybe they’re all just reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and maybe they’re all anti-Semites and they’re overstating the influence of judgment or whatever. I mean, that’s totally possible. People do make crazy calculations. Maybe there really is a physical threat. But it’s not arguable that U.S. policymakers at every level are afraid. This is not all voluntary at all.

The “Israel Firsters” and the Clean Break Memo

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, well, there’s something about the Megyn Kelly. I think she was the one who said this. I don’t know if she coined the term, but she was the first one I heard say it. But I think it was with you where she said the “Israel Firsters,” and that was how she described it. I was like, oh, that’s a really good term for them.

Because, you know, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, they call it the Israel Lobby. But then when you say that, a lot of people just think you’re talking about AIPAC, but they’re not just talking about AIPAC. They’re talking about this whole different — all these different organizations and individuals.

TUCKER CARLSON: The Heritage Foundation, Washington Post, Washington Institute —

DAVE SMITH: — for Near East Policy, and all of these organizations, and then all these individuals who clearly are here to — that is their number one issue. And the thing I almost resent most about them is like — it’s like just admit that. Just admit that this is what you care about more than anything else. Bari Weiss, clearly you do. Right? Like this is —

TUCKER CARLSON: So I agree.

DAVE SMITH: Because then in effect, you are like a foreign spy. You’re kind of like an agent for a different government. And the point is that, because people will try to argue the technicalities of this, the whole global war on terrorism was all a bunch of Israel Firsters who pushed the administration into that at every level.

You know, this is — by the way, you’ll like this just because some people don’t get this, but — so David Wurmser, who worked for Dick Cheney, he’s the author of the Clean Break memo. So I talk about this all the time on a lot of different podcasts — on yours, on Rogan’s — I brought up the Clean Break and how that’s what this whole real strategy is. It’s what the Clean Break morphed into, essentially. And you could look at this. David Wurmser and Richard Perle and Douglas Feith wrote the Clean Break memo to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, when he first became prime minister for his first term.

He had written a book which is worth reading, called Fighting Terrorism — very easy read, by the way. It’s a little book that Benjamin Netanyahu had written the year before. And essentially the break was from Oslo, was from the peace process. The break was from Yitzhak Rabin, who had now been murdered — by someone Benjamin Netanyahu found after Benjamin Netanyahu really pushed. I mean, that’s a whole other can of worms, by the way. But I know, like, Yitzhak Rabin’s wife, I believe, still blames Benjamin Netanyahu —

TUCKER CARLSON: — as many in Israel do.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Now there’s a lobbying campaign to get the murderer out of prison.

DAVE SMITH: Well, they — so I mean, they were giving him anti-Rabin marches and they were holding coffins before he died. Like they were implying like someone should kill this guy, because he had said — not that he was really ever going to do this — but he had said we got to find a two-state solution. We got to give the Palestinians their own state and we’ll start working toward that.

Now the Clean Break was the neoconservatives’ brilliant idea. The Israel Firsters here said, “Well, no, no, no, see, you got this all wrong. You think you need to make peace with the Palestinians because that’s the only way that you’ll normalize relations with the broader Arab world. But no, no, no, no, no. We just got to go topple the broader Arab world and overthrow all those governments, and then you never have to make peace with the Palestinians.” Okay? So it’s essentially a blueprint for Greater Israel. And this was their whole strategy pre —

TUCKER CARLSON: — 9/11 for regional hegemony. Now it’s not just about controlling the West Bank, it’s about controlling the Middle East.

DAVE SMITH: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

David Wurmser Tries to Debunk the Clean Break Narrative

DAVE SMITH: And so now, because we live in this crazy world we live in now, David Wurmser did a podcast where he responded to me. Now, from my perspective, I’m little old me, some standup comedian who just talks about all this stuff. This is David Wurmser — this is the guy who’s the author of the Clean Break Memo. But to the new internet world, he has like 300 followers on Twitter. Nobody saw this, nobody knows about it.

But so David Wurmser is there to debunk my interpretation of the Clean Break Memo. This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And so the host brings him on to be like, “Oh, this Dave Smith guy’s out here saying that all these wars were about Israel and blah, blah, blah. And this is ridiculous, right? So why don’t you just tell them that this is all not true.”

And his response was, he just goes into a monologue about how Israel is the cradle of civilization and that all of Western civilization is downstream from Israel and that we always must protect — So anyway, in the attempt to prove me wrong, he just totally exposes that, like, yeah, this is the mentality that all of these guys have.

So when Mike Huckabee supports a war for Israel, in his mind, that’s not selling out your country for another country. This is God’s plan. You know what I mean? Like, so they’re all — so it’s like the fish doesn’t know he’s in water. Like they don’t even realize they’re the Israel lobby. They go, “What are you talking about?”

The “Spell” Over American Leaders

TUCKER CARLSON: So this is what’s happening. What Jeff Sachs said to me — Jeff Sachs, who’s often attacked. Jeff Sachs is really smart and, I think, a very decent guy. And we don’t agree on everything, but he’s an honest guy. And so I say to him, “You’ve been watching this all these years. What do you think this is about? Why does this tiny country have so much control over our giant continent-sized country?”

And he said, “Well, a lot of contributions. There are threats or questions about the Kennedy assassination. They’re willing to use force and assassination — state what they want.” He goes, “But I don’t think that explains it. I don’t think either one of those — bribery or threats — I don’t think that actually is the whole picture. There’s a spell of some kind. There’s like a supernatural quality to this.”

Good people — like, I don’t think Mike Huckabee is in favor of genocide. I just don’t think that. Pretty nice guy. Very nice guy, actually. But he believes with this fervor that suggests that he’s not thinking clearly. Like there’s another quality here. And do you know what I’m talking about?

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. No. 100%.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I think Jeff Sachs is a pretty secular guy, by the way. I don’t know. But Jeff’s not a religious extremist, that I —

DAVE SMITH: — can say for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Okay.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. But everyone recognizes — like I told you last time — there’s no such thing as atheists. They think they are atheists, but no one really is. I thought I was. But you never really are. It’s not like you can’t —

TUCKER CARLSON: You were.

DAVE SMITH: Well, because I would just say I don’t really believe in any of that, and I don’t think that that’s real. But of course, as I told you the story last time I was here, when my daughter is born and I’m worried about her life, I immediately find — and it’s like I always knew that was always in there on some level.

So I remember one time hearing this debate — and I wish I could remember who it was, but it was like a theist-atheist debate. And it might have been Christopher Hitchens or something. Maybe not, but it was one of those “does God exist?” debates. And so the guy arguing that God does exist said something about how there are spiritual forces in the world and blah, blah, blah, and there are evil spirits. He said there are evil spirits.

And then the atheist guy goes, “Look, like we all know that there is depression and there’s this and there’s this. We all know that there’s dark forces in the world, but you don’t need a supernatural explanation.” I’m like, did you just say “dark forces”? Like, dark forces. I mean, what is that? You’re saying the same thing in different language, man. Like, there’s actually no gap here between — anyway.

But I do think there’s a spiritual component to all of this.

Incentives, Influence, and the History of Jewish Finance

TUCKER CARLSON: It feels that way, because I don’t want to be the kind of person who imputes the worst motives to my opponents. Okay. But most people are like, “Why is this person doing something that’s insane? Doesn’t make sense. It’s irrational.” Getting paid — like, that’s always the first explanation that people come to. And I have myself thought that.

But then if you know someone really well — I don’t, I’m not intimate with Huckabee, but I’ve known him for more than 30 years — it’s like, I don’t think Huckabee, you know, he’s into money, I get it. But I don’t think he’s totally motivated by greed. I just don’t believe that.

DAVE SMITH: No, I think there’s — well, look, I think —

TUCKER CARLSON: And I don’t think he’s evil, but he’s defending evil. So what is that?

DAVE SMITH: I think a few things can be true at the same time. Right. So it can be that you’re under a spell, that there’s a spiritual aspect to it, and then it can also be that there’s soft incentives for you to continue being under that spell.

And so the history of Jewish influence, Israeli influence — I mean, look, obviously much of this goes back to the fact that Jews dominated finance for many years. And part of this was because Christians weren’t allowed to lend. Usury was credit. Right. But there is now, there is a form obviously of abusive usury. Right. There are loan sharks out there. Some of them are even credit card companies that will charge you like 30% interest or 29.9%, whatever they’re allowed to do — which is like a crazy interest rate. And they kind of prey on desperate people.

Now, they’re not necessarily — like even the loan shark or the credit card companies — they’re just kind of benefiting off your desperation, because it’s not like if the credit card company wasn’t there, everything’s okay. The reason Americans are putting necessities on the credit card to begin with is because other conditions have led them to this desperate place.

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally.

DAVE SMITH: But the problem — so then you had, for much of Christendom, it’s completely banned to lend money at any interest, which — I do not think it is abusive to have any interest rate on your money, because that’s actually a very necessary part of an economy. There are people who have a very good idea but don’t have any capital. And then there’s people sitting with capital and they go, “Well, look, I can’t just give this to you because if you lose it, then I just lose my money. And if you pay me back, all I’ve gotten is that I get my money later rather than having it right now.”

TUCKER CARLSON: So if you have my money, then I can’t use it for whatever thing I want to build. So there’s a cost to me to lending you my money.

The Rise of Jewish Influence in Finance and Intelligence

DAVE SMITH: However, if I go, hey, I’ll lend this to you, but you pay me back a little bit of interest. This actually really facilitates economic growth because, you know, or just good businesses being created because like, oh, yeah, the guy with a good idea but with no capital now can. So anyway, so Jewish bankers ended up kind of filling this void. And then you had very powerful Jewish groups who became very, very wealthy in banking and yada yada, a lot of things later, banking got very, very corrupt.

But again, it’s important to keep in mind this wasn’t most Jews. Most Jews were living in poverty. This was. But like the Balfour Declaration is written to the Rothschilds, right? Like, it’s not. The creation of Israel was at least part. They had international finance backing them. And so that’s also true in America that much of the. The largest banking institutions had some Jewish influence.

It’s also the case that after the creation of the state of Israel, there you have the Mossad, right? Or you have Israeli intelligence. And now Jews are smart. Not like that much smarter than everybody else, but they’re a pretty smart group. And then the Mossad had an advantage over every other intelligence organization. That would really be a dream for any intelligence organization. But the Mossad had a diaspora of people all spread out in the world that were Jewish, right?

And so there was this wide cultural belief amongst Jews that the Holocaust is what gave birth to the state of Israel, and that the state of Israel is the guarantor of another holocaust not happening. And so you could very, like, imagine the CIA had that. Imagine you just had little Americans in every single country. You know, little groups of Americans. Maybe not every single country, but you had pockets of them in lots of different places. And they really passionately believed that the existence of the United States of America was the most important thing in the world. What an advantage for them. Go around, hey, find any American somewhere. You want to serve your country, you want to do that.

The Neoconservatives and the Military Industrial Complex

And so I think between finance, between the Mossad, and then when the neoconservatives who really were not old money when they first came into it. Right. Like if, you know, the first generation of neoconservatives, they were having their debates at City College, not at Harvard, you know what I mean? At City College. Yes. These were middle class guys, working class. They weren’t the Rockefeller guys or the Morgan guys. They weren’t a Council on Foreign Relations. But what they did was they went and they made their relationships with the military industrial complex themselves.

And a lot of this was, you know, the problem is that you create this empire, you create this military industrial complex, this big government scheme and then it’s ripe for someone to take it over. And if you go look at like every last one of those Bill Kristol think tanks. Bill Kristol needs to have 16 think tanks. He doesn’t have a thought in his head, but he’s got all of the, literally never read a New York Times column like his dad was smart for all his problems, but Bill Kristol was never smart. He was revered as the smart guy. Never, never said anything.

TUCKER CARLSON: Dan Quayle’s brain.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, literally. But every last one of those think tanks is funded by Lockheed Martin or, you know, Raytheon or whatever. So it’s like the thing is that a lot of times in government there’s, it’s a very different thing to swim with the current than to swim against the current. You know, there’s no such thing as the Fabian Libertarian. You don’t, you know, you have, you might have some hardcore communists and then you have like an AOC who’s like, I want incrementally more government. You can’t get incrementally less government because there’s no, that’s asking the government to have less power. Now if you’re the neoconservatives and you come around with like, hey, I’ve got a plan to fight forever wars. You know, I’ve got a plan to go on top of all of these different countries. You’re going to get some money from weapons companies. And so anyway, just saying aside from

TUCKER CARLSON: the spiritual fascism, I thought that’s what fascism. I mean, leaving aside the anti-Semitic component of the Nazis, which was a big component, but the idea of fascism that the state, you know, merges with the industrial powers.

Fascism, Democracy, and the Illusion of Choice

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, this is what it is. And also just swap out the Jew hatred and make it Muslim hatred or make it German hatred or Russian hatred or whatever it is. You know, they always pick another thing to some ethnic hatred. So yeah, it’s not, but that’s exactly right. Fascism, one man. It’s so ironic. Sometimes when you win, you really lose. You know, you could. They could say on paper, and I’m sure there’s some historian professor who would say, no, like, capitalism and communism won the Second World War and fascism was defeated, except what arose out of it was the fascist model for everybody, essentially. Right. Which is. And again, it’s. Fascism is kind of ill defined, but.

TUCKER CARLSON: Kind of ill defined.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Well, but broadly speaking, I mean, what are we talking about? The FDR and the entire progressive movement, the original progressive movement. This is what they were advocating for. Right. It’s like, we got to get away from laissez faire free markets. We’re not going total communist, but we need a strong, powerful state, powerful enough to regulate the economy and the country and then also fight wars abroad.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, without majority support.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I just don’t really see what. And we can cling to this idea of democracy, which is always really an illusion. You know, it’s never really true. It doesn’t really matter. In fact, there was a study done, I want to say this was at Princeton, if I’m remembering correctly. This was like 15, 20 years ago, but they did a study where they said they just concluded that we’re an oligarchy, not a democracy. And they literally just went through it empirically. And we’re like, the American people’s feeling has no impact on.

TUCKER CARLSON: No bearing whatsoever.

DAVE SMITH: You could say we have elections and if you really don’t like George W. Bush, you can vote for Barack Obama instead of John McCain. But what’d you vote for him for? Because he said he’d close Guantanamo Bay and end the wars. Guantanamo Bay is still open today, and we’re on the seventh war of Wesley Clark. Seven wars in five countries. None of that stopped. What did we get during Obama? We got a massive escalation in Afghanistan. We got wars in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, drone bombing campaigns in Pakistan, continued the war in Iraq, ended the war in Iraq, then reinvaded Iraq when his pet ISIS left over from the war in Syria.

The End of Empire and a Possible Reorientation

TUCKER CARLSON: So I think you’re describing the upside of all of this. Again. Again. I haven’t slept eight hours in a month. I’m so distressed. I’m in no sense for this. I argued against it, obviously, but it’s happening and this is the end of the empire as we knew it. Hopefully it’ll shrink back into something manageable that serves our interest, but who knows what’ll happen. But we’re definitely not going back to where we were a month ago. We know that.

So what are the upsides? Well, one upside is you might wind up at some point with presidents who want to run the United States. No president wants to run the United States, because why would you want to run the US when you can run the world? By the way, you don’t know the people you manage when you run the world. They don’t come to your office and complain about your treatment of them. It’s like, there’s no cost. It’s all upside. You’re the king of the world. I don’t think future presidents will have that option. And so maybe we’ll get people like LaGuardia Airport smells. The Miami airport is like an atrocity. Maybe we should fix that. Don’t you think?

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, maybe this will cause, like, a reorientation back to what matters, which is our country.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, quite possibly. And that’s the. Yeah, that’s really the best case scenario. And, you know, like, I try to. Well, I look at.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, you’re right.

Lessons from the Soviet Collapse

DAVE SMITH: Models like, you know, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Right. There’s. I remember there was a. So Murray Rothbard talked about this in a speech once. Murray Rothbard, for people who don’t know, is, in my opinion, like, the most brilliant political theorist of the 20th century. He’s a genius. And he was. Of course, he ended up supporting Pat Buchanan in 1992. He was an economist and a historian and a philosopher.

And so he was talking about. I guess this was like the speech he gave shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he was talking about how he had seen a video of a Chinese family under Chinese communism at the time. I guess maybe this was back. He was talking about from, like, before Mao Zedong died. And he said that the, you know, the interviewer asked him questions. They were just talking about how much they loved the regime and how they said, would you rather your kids had a. It was something like, “Would you rather your kids had a prosperous life or were loyal servants of the regime and had a very difficult life?” And he says, “Loyal servants of the regime and a very difficult life. No problem.”

And so Murray Rothbard said he watched this, and he was like, “My God, I mean, this is just so horrible. Like, they’ve actually done it. They’ve created the communist man and destroyed the human soul.” And then he’s talking to his buddy, who’s another genius who went to China a lot and was like a China expert. And he goes, “No, that’s what they say when the cameras are there. That’s all that is. The guy doesn’t believe that. You know what I mean? They just know this is on tape. You can’t say anything else. And so that’s what you say.” And then they go about their day not really caring what the regime says.

And so, like, when the Soviet Union collapsed, from all I’ve read about it, like, that was essentially the state of the Soviet Union was like, no one believed the government anymore. They just all knew. They were liars. They all knew this was bullshit. And they were really.

TUCKER CARLSON: Actually, we’re in the Brezhnev era here, right.

DAVE SMITH: And so now, of course, the war hawks and the neoconservatives, they always viewed us luring the Soviets into Afghanistan and getting them bogged down there fighting the mujahideen in Afghanistan, including the foreign Arab mujahideen and Osama bin Laden, who we were supporting. But they always viewed this as a great success because it brought down the Soviet Union. And I don’t know enough about what factor led to what. I mean, communism is not an effective economic system, but I’m sure the war did hurt them a lot. I know how costly wars can be and how much they can degrade our country. I know wars in Afghanistan can degrade your country. So I’m sure that was part of it.

But my point is that it wasn’t like America went in and toppled the USSR, right? Like they collapsed on their own partly as a result of fighting foreign wars and partly as a result of, you know, just government lying and terrible economic policies. But at a certain point, like, the soldiers just weren’t willing to fire. You know, like, there were attempted counter coups. Yeah, yes, there were attempted coups in the past where they did fire and they were like, no, you’re not leaving the Soviet Union. But by this point in 1989 or whatever it was, as the people started rising up, they were like, “We’re just not, we’re not doing this anymore.” They themselves don’t believe it anymore, the government.

A Path Forward: Transition and Accountability

And so I guess it’s a long way to get to what I’m saying. But, like, at a certain point, we might just hit a point where, like, the people just aren’t believing this anymore. The law enforcement, whether military or police, just aren’t going to crack down on the American people in that way. And that would maybe lead to a rise of a real president who actually ran the country. And I don’t know. I think if I’m not mistaken. I believe when there was, like, German reunification. They didn’t, from what I understand, I don’t think they didn’t really punish, like, the people in the communist government. They kept them on their pensions.

TUCKER CARLSON: Absolutely.

DAVE SMITH: They went kind of. And I feel like we almost need some. Something like that. I know Curtis Yarvin’s talked about this a bit, but something where it’s like, look, man, I think there are some people at the absolute top who need to be criminally prosecuted, but, like, we got to find a transition from here to there. Like, if we’re buying off bureaucrats, that would be cheaper than continuing this system. You know what I mean? Like, there’s almost something where if a president could come up and say, like, “Hey, all you guys working in the intelligence agencies who are working to undermine presidents, you all have amnesty, but you gotta pack up and go home right now. Like, that’s it.” In a weird way, we need, as you said, we need an actual president who’s actually running the country and who

The Economic Crisis at Home: Dashed Expectations and Government Overreach

TUCKER CARLSON: can restore peace here. I mean, I think older Americans believe their country is more united and cohesive than it really is. You’ve got an entire generation of people who weren’t born here, whose parents weren’t born here, who came here on the promise that can’t be fulfilled, which is that, you know, of a better life economically. And I think it’s going to be tough to make good on that promise, honestly.

And so what do you do with that? What do you do with dashed expectations at scale? Millions of people who kind of thought they were getting something and didn’t get it. A country where half of all households get a government check. Half of all households, so.

DAVE SMITH: And the average age of the first time — the first time homeowner is —

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, exactly. So you’ve got a lot of issues here, and all of our attention is there. It’s in the Persian Gulf or China or Venezuela, wherever. But once you readjust and start thinking about how does this country deal with dashed expectations and remain coherent, how does it prevent the rise of, like, a truly dangerous demagogue?

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, yeah. Well, also, it’s not just that we’re focused over there and so we’re not taking care of what’s going on here. It’s the focus over there is destroying

TUCKER CARLSON: over here. 100%, as it always does.

DAVE SMITH: Okay. So the angriest I’ve ever been at you was when you said that. You said Lindsey Graham’s views are “War everywhere and Austrian economics at home.”

TUCKER CARLSON: And I was like, no, you’re right, you’re right.

DAVE SMITH: No, but look, I mean, because — and it’s not just — I don’t care about just the term, but it’s the idea that essentially what’s going on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Monopoly capitalism.

The Cost of Empire and the Threat of Democratic Authoritarianism

DAVE SMITH: Yes, yes. But the opposite of Austrian economics. Big government, central banking, record high government spending every single year. And so what happens essentially is — and this is also why I’m so furious at this administration over this stuff. And I don’t know, you’re in more of a — you’re in a tougher position than I am, where you were the guy in Trump’s ear trying to convince him not to do this, or one of the guys who got to meet with him and convince him not to do this.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think the only one.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I think so. Well, the last one is no longer with us, so, you know, there’s that. And yeah. So, but, you know, the thing is, I’m no good at being a political strategist. Like I said, I’m just good at being a podcaster.

TUCKER CARLSON: Rage. That was so intense. I lost my vision.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, no, I understand. Well, it’s worth it. There’s some things worth being that angry over. But so, you know, I kind of go, I don’t know political strategy stuff, but I go, I think you should just try your best to stay being able to — at least he has one person who’s telling them to do this.

But the thing is that I’m just not capable of doing that, and I’m not close to the administration, so I’m just red behind the eyes furious. But one of the big things I’m furious about is that they’re handing this country right back over to the Democrats, who really are every bit the threat that we were making them out to be over the last two. And they’re going to come in more authoritarian and more angry because they are furious that we disobeyed them and put Donald Trump back in the White House.

And all their plan — I mean, look, we saw what they did through Covid. We saw what they did with tech censorship. And I don’t want to find out what a central bank digital currency looks like and what carbon, you know, social credit scores look like.

And the thing is that, look, you watch the Democrats as they’re winning now. You could look at the races when Mamdani won in New York, when the new governor won in New Jersey, the new governor in Virginia. There had been a couple races in Texas where they were like outperforming what they should be performing in Texas. Every last one of them is running on what they now call “unaffordability.” It’s like they just made up a new term because they — and literally none of them — I really don’t think if I had one of them sitting where you’re sitting right here and I was grilling them and I could go, “What is unaffordability?” I don’t think one of them has an answer. I don’t even think they know the term currency debasement. I don’t even think they know that

TUCKER CARLSON: that’s what it is. For human rights at all.

DAVE SMITH: Oh, no, no.

TUCKER CARLSON: Here in Virginia, which was conservative or normal 20 minutes ago, they bring in some guy literally born in India from another country to lead the effort to confiscate people’s guns. And no more self defense in the state. This just happened. I mean, it was not long ago. I mean, a year ago they had a Republican governor. So it’s an evenly — not much of one, but it’s still an evenly divided state. The second they take power, you can’t defend yourself.

DAVE SMITH: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, but look, humiliated. Bring some guy from another country to lecture you about your country — your family was born here — you don’t have the right to have a gun. Yep.

Unaffordability, Currency Debasement, and the Failure of Big Government

DAVE SMITH: No, that’s such an outrage. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. But look, the thing is that running on unaffordability is winning for them, obviously, because that is the issue right now. They don’t understand that unaffordability means price inflation. It means that you’ve debased your currency.

And so the thing is, now we’re handing them this thing to run on. While Donald Trump is talking about, you know, working with the ayatollah about the Strait of Hormuz or whatever, your local Democrat is going, “Hey, why are your grocery prices so high?” Why is that, by the way? All the price inflation from Joe — but you know, the way this stuff works, it’s cumulative. So Donald Trump — we live in an inflationary economy because of the central bank. It doesn’t matter what they will means

TUCKER CARLSON: that inflation or the money supply.

DAVE SMITH: Right. Because they will, no matter what, print enough money so that we don’t fall into a deflationary economy. That’s what they’re going to do, and they’re just not even printing the money. They’re just typing into a computer these days, so they can get ahead of it.

And so Donald Trump might brag that the CPI is only at 2% and not at 9% where Joe Biden was, but for every regular American, we lived through all of those price increases, and now it’s just 2% more expensive than it was under Joe Biden. So you haven’t been helped any. The prices aren’t going down. They’re just going up at a slower rate.

It’s like — I think it was Michael Malice who had the phrase where he goes, “We cut inflation in half.” It’s literally on the level of if you knew somebody who gained 100 pounds in a year and then the next year they gained 50 pounds, and they go, “I’m getting thinner.” And you’re like, “No, you are not. You are getting fatter, sir.” The goal is not to slow down how much weight you put on.

But it really does just come down to this, right? We have a government that we cannot afford. We cannot even come close to affording the size of government we have because it’s the biggest government in human history. It’s the biggest organization in human history, as you often point out. And that organization is parasitical in nature. It gets its money from taking that money, from expropriating that money from the American people. But you can’t tax them enough and you can’t borrow enough. And so we have to print the money. And so we have to print the money because we can’t afford the size of government. And so then that makes the price of everything go up and up and up.

And so essentially the point I’m getting at — and this is why I just point out that to say it’s Austrian economics gets — because what guys like Mamdani can come in and do now is say, “Hey, look, everything’s so unaffordable. And you know what the answer to that is? A government program.” More control, more government, more government, more free buses and government supermarkets. And on the surface, that kind of probably sounds reasonable to some people. But the thing is that we’re here because government is too big. That’s what’s got us to this place.

And so I think it’s important to just point that out to people. The thing is that we cannot afford — here’s the real hard, honest truth that Americans don’t want to hear. Or at least maybe the first part they want to hear. People are okay with me saying this: we can’t afford the world empire. We can’t afford it. We don’t have the money for it. We’re pretending we have it. We’re just devaluing our currency and therefore, by the way, destroying young people’s lives.

The Generational Burden: Young People Left Behind

Now, these days, I know a bunch of young people in my family and friends who are literally good people, go to work every day, make $70,000 a year, and they’re like, “How am I going to settle down and start a family, dude?” I mean, the average house around me is going for $800,000. You make $70,000 a year. That math simply does not work. And I’m not saying the bum on welfare. I’m saying the young man who’s getting up and going to work every day.

And so we cannot afford this empire. And the other thing is — which no one, including Republicans, ever wants to say — we also can’t afford the entitlement programs. No way. And they’re insane. They’re the most indefensible thing in the world. I mean, leaving aside Medicaid for a second, but Social Security and Medicare are from a different time, from a different country, that are totally indefensible. They were indefensible then, but they’re really indefensible now.

You’re telling me you have a wealth transfer program from a poorer group to a richer group? I’m sorry. The seniors aren’t the ones who need the help right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s for sure.

DAVE SMITH: It’s the young people. And I think I would love if some politician — I think Ron Paul is the only one I’ve ever seen. I’m sure Massie would agree with me if I said this to him, but I wish somebody would just run on that. They used to say that’s the third rail of politics. Why? Because boomers just need to get everything. Everything has to be rigged in favor of them.

I mean, the thing is you kind of have these abstract political debates sometimes, which I’m a nerd for. I really like them. But you’d have like a Keynesian debate with a Chicago school guy, or you’d have a socialist debate with a free market guy. And the free market guy would argue that there’s a better allocation of resources in a free market. And then the socialist would argue that some people fall behind, and so you need redistributive policies to take from the wealthy to give to the people who have fallen behind.

But who argues that you should have a redistributive policy from the poor to the rich? That’s the whole United States of America. That’s all of central banking. That’s all of government spending. All it is, is they take money from the working people and they give it to millionaires. Go look at any of the suburbs of Washington D.C. None of them make anything. They’re all in $3 million houses. Because government spending is north of $7 trillion, of course.

Reordering the Foundations: The Baby Boom and What Comes Next

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that, unfortunately, it’s getting to the point where that kind of is our economy.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’d really need to reorder things beginning with the foundations. Yeah, well, but two good things are happening. One, the empire is by necessity shrinking. And so that’s a cost savings and that’s a reorientation back where the attention belongs, which is here. And two, you have the baby boom going away, which is 1946 to 1964. So people born in the middle in 1956 are now 70.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So they’ll be 80 in 10 years. That generation, clearly — I think everyone agrees, not everyone in it, but as a generation — destroyed the country.

DAVE SMITH: Oh, yeah, just the worst.

TUCKER CARLSON: And destroyed the country.

DAVE SMITH: With some notable exceptions, of course. My mom included. She’s cool. But the rest of them — oh, many, many notable exceptions.

TUCKER CARLSON: I know a million baby boomers — not a million, but I’ve met baby boomers I like.

The Boomer Generation and Narcissism

DAVE SMITH: Well, I just couldn’t. I mean, the thing about it, not that many though. Jeff Deist is a really, really brilliant guy. He ran the Mises Institute for years. He’s over at Monetary Metals now. But he’s a really, really brilliant guy. He had this speech one time where he was talking about the boomers and the evolution of the generation and what they believed at the time. And it is just the most self-absorbed, selfish generation ever. I mean, they literally, their slogan was “don’t trust anyone over 30” until they turned 30.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

DAVE SMITH: And then Jeff Deist went through the whole thing. I don’t remember all of it. But then by the end, they were the ones pushing Covid. Like they started out as the “don’t trust anyone over 30.” And then they said shut down the schools so that I don’t get sick. Like, take from my grandchildren’s generation so that I’m protected. And yeah, I mean, but the dumbest too.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, the thing about their narcissism is the question. That’s their main problem — they’re all about themselves. The thing you notice about people who are all about themselves is how unwise and badly informed they are. Because they don’t pay attention to other people, therefore, they never learn. And I’ve noticed this since I was a child because these were my teachers. The baby boom. They’ll fall for anything. They’re the most easily manipulated people who’ve ever lived in this country. They are the most dominated by their herd instinct.

All the kids are wearing masks. All the kids are taking the shots. All the kids are going into finance. Whatever all the other people are doing, they will do. They’re the Mickey Mouse club generation. They are truly without creative impulse. They’re just not impressive. In addition to being super annoying, one of the least attractive generations — there’s a lot about them that we can say. The least attached to their own children. You’ve got two houses, but your kids have no house. How does that work?

DAVE SMITH: Oh, yeah. The generation of no-fault divorce. The generation of “I gotta be me, I gotta pursue my own happiness” — when you got little kids.

TUCKER CARLSON: — is not that interesting. Yeah, but the more you think about you, the dumber you get. That’s just what I’ve always noticed.

The Irony of Self-Absorption

DAVE SMITH: It’s like one of the most profound ironies in life. Like this kind of counterintuitive thing where, if you’re only concerned with yourself, yourself is going to suffer for that. It’s really true. And you watch this all the time with people who really have, like, really bad depression and are just miserable and they’re constantly talking about their mood. It’s like, hey, step number one, stop thinking about your mood. Your mood is not that important. Here’s step number one: start thinking about other people. How about this? Try doing something productive for someone else other than yourself. And don’t think about your mood once while you’re doing it.

I’ll tell you, I’ve been on this earth for about 43 years and I haven’t learned that much. I got a few things. I’ve never been anywhere near as happy since I got married and had kids. Like, once my life became about a family and not just about me. And I think I was in this generation that you expect that. No, man. I mean, I don’t know. I always thought before I met my wife — it was always, to me, like, everything in my mind was professional success.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

DAVE SMITH: You know, like, that was what I wanted — to be a successful comedian. And I wanted to talk about politics and all of this stuff, and I always wanted that. And it’s weird now because I’ve kind of gotten everything I really wanted in all those years. And it’s nice. Don’t get me wrong. I really love my career. I love what I do. I love doing shows with you. And it’s great. But it’s so unimportant compared to family.

The older you get, the more you realize that’s all that really matters. All that really matters are your wife, your children, the close friends that you have around you, the good people in your life, connection to other people, connection to God. That’s all that really matters in life. All the rest of it is kind of just part of the journey and part of the thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: But yeah, you do your best knowing you’re probably not going to move the ball that far.

Growing Up Without Purpose

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, well, I read this really great book by — I believe the author’s name, I don’t know if I’ve ever actually heard it pronounced, I’ve just read it — but it’s like Jean Twenge or Twenge or something. Now, I don’t know about her. I think she was on Bill Maher’s show recently and she said one thing that I thought was really stupid, and I turned it off because I was like — I really liked her book. I just don’t want to know, you know, how you feel sometimes. You’re like, don’t. But she wrote this book called — I think it was called The Me Generation or Generation Me, something like that. It was really great. I thought it was a really, really good book. And it was kind of about my generation who was raised by the boomers.

Again, I’m not — I had a really great mother. She was really great and instilled a lot of really good things in me. This was bigger than her. This was just the culture. But we were raised — and I didn’t think it was so unique at the time — but I was really kind of a child of the unipolar moment, I guess you could say. And then teenager, young adult —

TUCKER CARLSON: Berlin Wall.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Well, I mean, I remember watching the Berlin Wall come down. I was at my grandfather’s house, and my grandfather, as I told you before, was from Germany. I was born in 1983, so I would have been six years old when this happened. So I’m a little kid, and I just remember I was probably being loud in the living room or something, or walked in front of the TV, and I remember he snapped at me and went, “Shh.” And I just remember being like —

TUCKER CARLSON: How old was your grandfather when he left Germany?

DAVE SMITH: He would have been, I want to say, like, 15, maybe. Oh, wow. So —

TUCKER CARLSON: Old enough to remember.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, oh, yeah. Old enough to remember some really vicious things. He got out in 1938. But so anyway, I just remember, like, oh, this is really serious to Grandpa, what’s happening? And it was the Berlin Wall coming down. Yeah, it was a big deal to him. I’m not sure he liked it that much. I think he was a little concerned about German reunification, you know, as you could imagine. But it turned out to be a good thing.

But anyway, I kind of grew up in that time, in the 80s and the 90s. And we didn’t have things that I think almost every other generation had. Like, we weren’t raised with God, chivalry, nation, country. There wasn’t this — it was like, you go to school and get your homework done so no one’s mad at you, and then you can go play basketball outside or there’s a new video game out. It was, let’s hang out with our friends and have fun. There wasn’t this purpose put into your life, which most people have had in most of human history.

TUCKER CARLSON: Even if it’s just culture.

The Desire to Worship

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Culture, religious views, important things. And I think there were a lot of people in my generation who were like that. It was almost like — again, like we said before, you can’t take God out of the equation because something else just becomes God. And I know I’ve heard you say this before too, but it’s so true. The desire to worship is so hardwired into the DNA of the human soul that you just can’t escape it. You could say you’re an atheist if you want to. But then I’ll find out what your religion is pretty quickly. And oftentimes it just becomes yourself.

When you don’t have other things, it becomes like, well, let me have fun. Let me go get this. But that is — like I said, 43 years, I haven’t learned much in life. One thing I have learned for certain is that if your highest goal in life is your own pleasure, you will be a miserable, miserable human being.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, well, I’ve learned that too. So as you look around at 43, among people you know who are your age group in the same world you grew up in, how many are thinking about the existence of God right now?

DAVE SMITH: I think a lot more than ever were.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you ever know any religious people growing up?

Searching for God and Purpose

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I mean, I knew some, but it was very few and far between — people who were really religious or talked about it. I went to Hebrew school, but I went for like a year. My mom wanted me to be bar mitzvahed. But it wasn’t really a deep religious conviction. It was more like, “This is what our people have always done,” and out of respect to your father and your father’s father and your father’s father’s father. And I could kind of understand that. So I went. But it was a reformed temple where I went. And I remember even the rabbi — some of the kids would be like, “Well, do you believe in God?” He’s like, “Yeah, you know, everything that’s good is God,” and everything — just total, like, essentially atheism.

TUCKER CARLSON: — and grew up around so many people like that.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. So it was just, you know, there was just a lot of that. And I certainly think that one of the things I really focus on as a father — and I have little kids — is instilling the idea of purpose. Instilling the idea of God. And not just God, but what that represents. That, hey, you’re here. We’re all here in this life together. This life is a little bit of a mystery. We don’t know everything about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s exactly right.

DAVE SMITH: We do know that other people exist too, as we exist, and human beings have this amazing capacity to be demonic or angelic. One person — you know, there are little moments in life where, whatever it is, like you’re at the post office and it’s 5:01 and you had to get this letter out today, or you’re getting fired and you’re like, “My life is ruined.” If you’re talking to some person on the other end — “Can you please just take this one package?” — that person could go, “All right, come here, give me the package.” And you’re like, “You just saved my life. You have no idea what you just did for me.”

And you can do that for other people. You could try your best to, throughout your day and your career and your life, be like, “Let me help this guy,” and be that person. Or you can be what Benjamin Netanyahu is to the Palestinians — just a monster, the guy who just ruined their family’s life. And so if we’re kind of given this world and we don’t have all of the answers to it, but we kind of know that we have the inability to be either one of those things, hey, really focus on being the angel for people. Really focus on trying to help others. And I think that makes you a much happier person the more you focus on that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree with that completely. And do you find that people you knew in the secular world growing up are reaching similar conclusions?

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I think I know several people like that. And I do think — he had an amazing meteoric rise and a really tragic fall — but I think this is why Jordan Peterson was such a phenomenon for years. He was going around and telling young men that you should search out purpose and search out God in life. It’s amazing how powerful that is.

TUCKER CARLSON: I love that.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, me too.

Jordan Peterson and the Daily Wire

TUCKER CARLSON: He takes a lot of abuse and I think he’s against me or whatever. I don’t even could care less. But I will always appreciate that about Jordan Peterson. That he did that.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, me too. You know, in a way, he was a guy who I always really wanted to talk to and never did. He was, obviously, I mean, him joining the Daily Wire and going on that side was just really, really tragic mistake. And I think he threw away all of the credibility that he had with the younger generation when they really could have used his voice. I totally agree with him. He was never much as a political actor. He was always something else.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, he’s a Canadian psychologist.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, like this. This wasn’t, you know, set that part out. He missed the mark on a lot of his political points. But, I mean, you know, when you’re on record telling Benjamin Netanyahu to give them hell, that’s really hard to come back from.

But he came on Joe Rogan’s show. The episode after I debated Douglas Murray, I believe it was. The next one was Jordan Peterson. And I remember watching it, and I did feel like I was like, oh, man, I think he’s going to say something nasty about me because he’s Ben Shapiro and Netanyahu’s guy now. And they just had this big debate, and he didn’t. He kind of said, oh, I thought. He didn’t name me. He mentioned Douglas and Joe and he said, “I thought everyone involved did a good job.” So I was like, okay. That kind of. That was nice to me in a way that I was like, oh, he had. You know, from someone at the Daily Wire, that’s about as good as I can expect.

Douglas Murray and the Debate

TUCKER CARLSON: He was a pretty charitable guy. I mean, you know, I thought he had flaws, but I was never. You know, I always had charitable, and still do have charitable feelings toward him. Douglas Murray, however, that’s a different one. What happened to Douglas? Is he still living in this country?

DAVE SMITH: No, he’s doing great. I think he got a gig writing speeches for the Israeli government from last I heard. Yeah.

By the way, can I just. I don’t know if I. Have I said this on your show before? I don’t think so, because I think last time we spoke was right after that debate, or last time we spoke on the podcast. Not spoke in life. But last time we were doing the show was right after that debate, but before this came out, and it was Ryan Grim and the guys over at Dropsite who published this.

But, so if you remember the famous “you’ve never been” argument. Well, I’m sorry, I should not call that an argument. It’s not an argument.

TUCKER CARLSON: Didn’t rise to the level.

DAVE SMITH: But what he said, what he was trying to say, which was really kind of silly, but he was like, well, he said, “I have the journalistic courtesy of visiting a place before I talk about that place.” This was. He was lecturing me about journalistic ethics. Now, I’m not a journalist, Tucker. I’m a stand-up comedian. You’ve been a journalist for many years, so maybe you can fill me in on this. I’m not an expert in journalistic ethics. What are the ethics of covering a country and not disclosing that you work for the government? Is that up there?

TUCKER CARLSON: I would have to consult like, a professor of ethics like Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents.

DAVE SMITH: Yes, for a living.

TUCKER CARLSON: So we have a whole infrastructure designed to answer complex questions like that, Dave. But I.

DAVE SMITH: By the way, how about I have the courtesy of not advocating for wars that I’m not willing to fight in myself? That’s my professional courtesy.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a much better standard.

DAVE SMITH: Well, who spends. I mean, what type of person?

TUCKER CARLSON: And look, but he kind of went away, didn’t he? I mean, Douglas Murray was like, I took him seriously, by the way. I knew him well and I thought he had. You know, there were things about him that I felt sorry for him because of them. But in general, smart. And I never had a problem with him at all. Had a couple fun dinners with him. That debate, which you were proclaimed the loser of by a lot of people, I think that just destroyed his life.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Well, again, it was like no one except the people who already had made up their mind that Israel is the greatest country ever. No one except them thought that he won the debate. A few of them seemed to celebrate that. The comment section under the video was just torching him. Like, every regular person went, oh, he just destroyed himself.

And then I will say a lot of people, including some prominent people who you listener know, including Charlie Kirk, by the way, texted me after that debate and were like, “Yo, dude, he just destroyed his credibility,” or like, “That was crazy that he came at you like that.” I had people, you know, like this, whatever. I won’t name all of them because I don’t want to give out private information. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that about Charlie Kirk because Candace months back had called on me to release whatever private communications I have that might be relevant. And I thought one of the things was relevant was that he said after the debate that he largely agreed with me after the Douglas Murray, which was.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did I talk to him on this topic? Yeah, I’m. Yeah.

DAVE SMITH: So I did think that was relevant into, like, where his mind state was. But other people, like, I think a lot of people kind of expected him to be like. They were like, “Okay, Dave, you’ve been blowing through these debates, but this is the best guy on the other side. So he’s going to come, really giving him a consent.”

TUCKER CARLSON: So there was no chance that someone from Brooklyn was going to beat him?

Trump, Mark Levin, and the Neocons

DAVE SMITH: Well, yeah, I guess that’s the first advantage that he had. But, you know, there’s a weird thing where, again, kind of back to what I was saying before, you see this thing where, so after that debate happens, I have this huge groundswell of support from people. Then Donald Trump tweets out, “You gotta go get Douglas Murray’s new book,” like two days after the debate or something like that.

And it just. I thought there was an interesting parallel between that and when Donald Trump just tweeted the other day about how great. Not the one to watch the show, but he tweeted last week about how wonderful Mark Levin is and how everyone arguing with him is awful or something like that. And if you look on Twitter, not saying Twitter is everything, but it’s one little glimpse into things. I mean, Mark Levin gets ratioed by random people. Not even like you or Megyn Kelly or someone like that. I’m saying some random guy will just call Mark Levin an idiot. And way more people like his tweet than like Mark Levin’s tweet. He’s out there, he’s feuding with Megyn Kelly, and he’s calling you and me every name in the book. And then the entire audience is just going with us. And then Trump comes out and says we’re all.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I saw that when Trump tweeted that about, you read, you know, Douglas Murray’s dumb books. And I kind of willfully ignored it because I was so focused. Well, because I like Trump, but also because I was so focused on the Iran thing and just have to prevent a war.

DAVE SMITH: Iran, that’s more important.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I don’t know, though. I mean, that was foreshadowing that actually there was a lot of. Why would the President of the United States be promoting Douglas Murray, who is not even American, and he’s totally discredited. Why would the president be promoting him?

DAVE SMITH: Well, I mean, doing Mark Levin is much worse. I mean, look, Douglas Murray, I do think he was ridiculous and he kind of made an ass out of himself in that debate. But Mark Levin has gone to a level of retardation that I’ve never seen out of. You know, like, listen, I was never too. I was somewhat impressed by the first generation of neocons. You know, I think I worked for them. Yeah, well, I know.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I was one.

DAVE SMITH: But I think. Well, sorry, no, but I mean, like. I mean, like Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol and those guys. Right. And, but then I always thought, like, I always kind of went, you know, if you remember the Fox News now, he wasn’t really on your show a lot, but if you remember the reverence people used to have for Charles Krauthammer.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE SMITH: Like, they would all talk about him, like to his face. They’d be like, “The genius is here.” And then I’d be like, I’ve never heard him say anything interesting ever. I just don’t agree. I don’t know what the. But all of those guys. So I was always like, one thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ll say about Charles, who I knew really well, he was a very nice man. And he was a nice man because he had had to reckon with, you know, being paralyzed from the chest down from medical school. And so he just had a perspective on life. I spent hours, hours talking to him and I knew his wife and I really liked him as a man. But his views were, you know, impossible to defend if you cared about the United States.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, that. Right. But anyway, I guess with all of them, I was never particularly intellectually impressed with any of them.

If you want to see, by the way, if you’ve never watched, man, Scott Horton debating Bill Kristol at the Soho Forum, it was. You really exposed just how much Bill Kristol has nothing, no knowledge, no argument, nothing. He literally, I’ve never seen it happen before. He threw in the towel in the debate, essentially. He literally, at one point, Scott makes some argument. There was like a back and forth section and Scott makes some argument and he goes, “Well, we just have fundamentally different worldviews.” And you’re like, yeah, that’s why you’re debating. You have to make an argument. And then he will never explain what his worldview is. And then in his closing, there was still like three minutes on the clock and he just stopped. Anyway, I say all of this to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Say he doesn’t care, though.

DAVE SMITH: I’ve seen some dumb arguments from neocons over the years. I have never seen anyone go full blown Mark Levin, the way he goes. It is. He’s literally just a ranting old man yelling insults unattached to any argument at all. Like, his whole show is just like, “Yeah, this little punk wants to come and talk to me. A little fascist.” Like, it’s like, what is this dude like? And so there is something about Donald Trump promoting that that is several levels worse than promoting Douglas.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, but it’s. So then you have to ask like, well, what actually is it? It’s not designed to win people over. It’s designed to increase hatred. Anti-Semitism, by the way. Absolutely. I mean, if you were, you know, whoever Mark thinks he’s working for, the Israelis, I guess you would look at this and say, “This is not helping us. Don’t do this. Get some articulate, decent, hot woman on there to make the case or whatever.” You do a marketing thing. This is anti-marketing. This is designed to repel people. So why would you want that? I don’t know the answer, but it’s clearly true.

Second, his relationship with the President is bizarre. You think Trump likes that? There was a moment at some stop-anti-Semitism event of some kind or Hanukkah celebration or some Jewish themed White House event where Trump was there with Mark Levin and Levin comes over and puts his arm around the President’s neck and pulls him in. Now I know Trump well. I mean, I wouldn’t like that. And I’m not even the president or a germaphobe. What is that? And under normal circumstances, Trump would never put up with that. You just. What you’re doing is the dominance move over the.

DAVE SMITH: President and over Donald Trump. Not just the president, but Donald Trump, the most dominant alpha male guy.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a dominance.

DAVE SMITH: He does that to other people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: But even Trump, who is very much about dominance, obviously most powerful men are. He would. Trump would never throw his arm around someone and give him a headlock like that.

DAVE SMITH: No, no, he’ll pull you in while he shakes your hand.

TUCKER CARLSON: 100.

The Butler Shooting and Unanswered Questions

DAVE SMITH: Or he’ll do the thing. What did he do at one of the G7 meetings or whatever, where he cuts in front of some other world leader. But like there are — by the way, this is another thing that I am totally breaking the rules, dude. But I’m oblivious to this thing. But this is, as you said, powerful men are like this, where there’s like alpha moves. Like taking your thing and just making it, you know, like whatever. Like if you have a little thing of peanuts here that you’re eating and I just reach in. You know what I mean? Like. But to do that to Donald Trump — I understand, I’m not trying to make too much of a little thing, but that was. There was something symbolic. And then proclaims him the first Jewish president.

TUCKER CARLSON: You gotta think that Trump — he never said this to me, but just knowing him — you gotta think he’s filled with rage, someone doing that to him. Well, look, but he puts up with it anyway, so. And, but why would you do that to him? So if you want to exert influence over someone who’s powerful, like there’s a way to do it. But the last way to do it is to be like, “I’m in charge here. Just so you know, I’m more powerful than the president.” That’s what Levin is saying and Trump is putting up with it. This is either a form of sadomasochism, but it also reveals like the true architecture of power in a way that’s like — what?

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, well, I think —

TUCKER CARLSON: What is that?

DAVE SMITH: Well, here I’ll say this — and I’m just going to preface this, I’m not saying anything other than what I’m saying. I’m not implying something that I don’t know any more than this, and maybe you know more than I do.

But I will say, you know, people used to say when Donald Trump was first rising to political — his political career in 2016, when he was running, when he was first president — I remember liberals used to always say that he’s dog whistling bigotry. And you know, we always thought this was so — always like a dog whistle. It’s like a thing where you kind of — first of all, it’s kind of weird because you’re like, well then wouldn’t you not hear it if it’s a dog whistle? Because wouldn’t only the bigots hear it? Isn’t that the idea? Also, that seems like a very convenient way of saying even though there’s nothing I can actually point to that you said, he’s also racist.

But what I always thought was that what Donald Trump did was he would very often stoke or give a wink and a nod to conspiracies — that he was, look, he went out there about Obama’s birth certificate. He obviously called out the whole Russiagate thing, which was a legit conspiracy to unseat the sitting president. The Q thing — he’d float at it. Obviously the election being stolen. And of course now with Epstein, when it’s not really — well, it is a conspiracy, but it’s a legitimate one. But he’s saying, “Oh, it’s a Democratic hoax.” He is very quick, any time it will help him look good, to be like, “It’s a conspiracy against me.”

Never once with Butler. Never once. And it’s kind of crazy, man. Like, we have no information. They haven’t even attempted to give us a national story that puts a little bow on top of like who this guy was or what happened, how there was such a security failure that could allow a sniper 130 yards away to get a clean shot at a former president and current candidate’s head. No internet history, can’t get into his phones. “He wanted to kill anyone he could.” That’s all. Nothing to see here. And it’s just a little bizarre to me that you would think — like, all other things making sense — you would just think you would hear Donald Trump going, “They tried to kill me. They tried to do this, they tried to do —” But I mean, days afterward he just thanked the Secret Service for what a great job they did. And I don’t know what any of that means.

Tucker on the Thomas Crooks Investigation

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I know a lot about it and I’ll just say this — which we said publicly — I got a call from somebody who said, “I’ve got a lot of material from the gunman.” I’m not disputing he’s the gunman, by the way. Seems like the gunman question is like, was he working in concert with anyone else? Were there other people involved?

DAVE SMITH: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is the same with Charlie Kirk. It’s not a question of — I don’t know anything. But the question is never just, did the guy pull the trigger?

DAVE SMITH: Of course, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Prove or disprove that with the videotape that we don’t have from the Charlie Kirk assassination for some reason. But whatever. The point is that’s only one part of the story. The question was, were there other people involved?

And in the case of Butler, I got this corpus of information from a guy almost off the street. We showed that it was real. Always skeptical of this stuff, very skeptical. But it turns out this was actually from Thomas Crooks’s YouTube account. And the FBI claimed that this didn’t exist. Well, of course they knew it existed. So then the question becomes, look, why are they — since the man is dead in this sole shooter crime, there’s lone gunman and lone gunman’s gone — why would we hold back anything? Any evidence we have. But they did.

And that would include video surveillance of the shooting range where he trained to shoot. It’s a pretty good shot, over 100 yards with a .223. I shoot a .223. That’s like — all these SEALs are like, “That’s nothing.” But like for a non-SEAL, right, it’s a decent shot. So there’s videotape from the shooting range. Did he train alone? Who was with him? Never been released, and the investigation was shut down. So what does that mean? I don’t know, but I mean, like, what is going on?

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. And I gotta say, why can’t we know? Hearing the heroic former director of counterterrorism come on your show and kind of say the same thing does just have a lot more weight to it. When the guy was literally the director of counterterrorism and going like, “Hey, what’s going on here? We have not gotten answers.”

The Connection Between Butler and Iran

TUCKER CARLSON: And he tied those facts — those are facts, he stated facts, by the way. Now we’ve just heard the FBI is not actually investigating him. That was all fake. He retained his security clearance until the morning he left. So if he was under investigation for treason or something, he wouldn’t have held his clearance and have access to the highest level intelligence, which he retained until the day he — the moment he resigned. So, okay, that was all a lie.

But he said point blank — one of the most informed people in the United States, with clearances higher, I think, even than Mark Levin’s — there’s a connection between Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran and these not fully explained acts of violence. He said that. So, okay, before we denounce him as crazy — which maybe he is, I don’t know, doesn’t seem to be, but I hold open any possibility — what is he talking about?

And there has not only been zero interest from like the people in charge of ginning up interest, like the internet, the influencers —

DAVE SMITH: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s been calculated discouragement and attacks on anyone who persists in asking the question. And I haven’t gotten involved because I know everybody and it’s so emotional to me. But at a certain point I’m going to — you know, whatever. I feel like I’ve got a pretty close vantage on all this stuff and I’m getting a little sick of it, because every American has a right to justice, not just for himself, but for any other American citizen. Our whole system rests on the idea that there will be justice affected by the US Government. And we have a right to know. You have no right to keep that from me. On what grounds are you keeping that from me? You can’t browbeat me into it by screaming “Candace Owens” again and again and again.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, that’s right. And look, like — I’ve tried.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s outrageous.

Charlie Kirk and the Personal Cost of Asking Questions

DAVE SMITH: Absolutely. And listen, I’ll say just personally, like — I knew Charlie, and not super well, we weren’t like close friends, but I’d done a show a few times, and we texted a few times. And he had me do that last debate there. And we hung out for a little bit while we were there. And, you know, it’s — I wasn’t as close with him as you were, but it’s even just like, being friends with someone like that — first off, it’s very jarring to see that happen. And then he’s got a wife and little kids. Really tragic, horrible situation.

And, like, my incentives on all of this is like, I just don’t want to believe that this was anything more than like one crazy guy with a transferry boyfriend or whatever like that. That actually is much more comforting to me than it’s some conspiracy. Half of Twitter seem to think I was the one who got him killed or something like that. Or me and you and Megan.

TUCKER CARLSON: I very much, vehemently want to believe that.

DAVE SMITH: Yes. Right. So, like, we don’t want that. I will say — and I have not done, like, deep dives and watched all of Candace’s shows on this or something. But, like, there’s little pieces of information. Just like, it’s been confirmed by a few different people that he was texting them, “They’re going to kill me.” Like, hey, man, that’s got to be totally exhausted and investigated. I mean, what is this here? This is a pretty big deal. You’ve really got to get to the bottom of stuff like that.

And look, as you’re sitting here — you know, it’s almost like sometimes people will call you out for being a conspiracy theorist or something. Or, you know, they say the “just asking questions” —

TUCKER CARLSON: You know what’s worse than being a conspiracy theorist? Having no curiosity about questions that have not been answered.

DAVE SMITH: Well, also, there’s just some —

TUCKER CARLSON: And I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I believe in curiosity and skepticism, and I’ve encouraged that in a lot of people. And some have been very resistant to be curious or skeptical. And there are two sides to this. There’s not simply the people who are coming up with conspiracy theories — some of them obviously fantastical and wrong, I would think. There’s also the government side, which is telling you, “Shut up, we have this solved.” And I think we should apply the same skepticism to their claims as well. There’s no reason that the FBI should get an automatic — on the basis of what? Well, also their track record of always telling the truth to people — like, what are you even talking about? And how dare you threaten me and call me names. I mean, I’m not getting paid for this. I’ve stayed out of it. I’m just getting too mad watching this.

Pizzagate, Podesta Emails, and the Epstein Files

DAVE SMITH: Well, so even before the Epstein files got released, back when Podesta emails were released and the original Pizzagate theory was born — and if you look through some of those Podesta emails, look, they’re clearly talking in code now. What is the code? I mean, people are speculating that it was about children. Now, I have absolutely no reason to believe that. But they’re not planning pizza parties. You know what I mean? Like, they’re speaking in code.

TUCKER CARLSON: Epstein’s urologist, who’s just prescribed him erectile dysfunction drugs, says, “Take the pills and then meet me for pizza and grape soda.” That’s in the Epstein files. Maybe it has nothing to do with sex. Maybe they’re actually — you get wicked hungry after you take a boner pill. I don’t know. But the fact that nobody cares to find out or even interview the urologist or springboard and say, “Hey, what is this?”

DAVE SMITH: That’s right. And I felt the same way back then.

TUCKER CARLSON: He drinks grape soda. What are you even talking about? There’s no white person in America who drinks grape soda. Stop.

DAVE SMITH: I haven’t had — I maybe had grape soda when I was a child. I’m not against —

TUCKER CARLSON: Talk to the urologist.

DAVE SMITH: No, well, right, exactly. So the thing about it is, even with the original Pizzagate thing, the position of the corporate media was to sit there and go, “You’re an idiot if you think this code is —” Oh, you’re a conspiracy theorist if you think — instead of putting a microphone in front of John Podesta and going, “Hey, you’re clearly speaking in code here. People are assuming that that code is for raping children. So clear this up, because it can’t be any worse than what people are speculating. So what is it, sir?” And no one ever even thinks to do that.

The Neocon Infiltration and the Charlie Kirk Question

TUCKER CARLSON: In this, all the hostility is aimed at people who are asking the questions. And that’s a tell, right? There are people here. You have gunshots ringing out in my country, people getting killed or an attempted murder, a couple of attempted murders. There will be more, unfortunately. And anyone who’s interested in finding out, or doesn’t automatically trust the government, which we’re supposed to be skeptical of, that person is the villain.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, that’s right. And in a similar thing there. I don’t know, maybe I’m going to struggle to word this the right way, but there are certain things that in a vacuum might be true, but aren’t true in all circumstances.

So in other words, if you, typically speaking, you’d go, hey, before you want to start believing something, you got to see strong evidence for it or something like that. Or you can’t just start theorizing and speculating about things without some indication or something pointing you in that direction.

But then if me and you both just wake up together and we’re blacked out for the last 10 hours and we’re chained up in a prison somewhere or something like that, and you start going, we got to start speculating about how the hell we got here because this is so crazy. And then I’d be like, hey, my neighbor said something this morning to me about how I bet it’s going to be a rough day. And I’m like, we got to think maybe my neighbor had something to do with this. Now then some skeptic could come along and go, your neighbor saying it’s going to be a bad day isn’t actually evidence. And you’re like, okay, but we’re here.

And so in a sense, yes, you can be skeptical, and it’s good to be skeptical of some of these claims, but at the same time, we’re sitting here watching. It’s so crazy to watch, right? But the Never Trumpers are now the biggest hardcore Trump supporters as they’re destroying the coalition that they were afraid of.

TUCKER CARLSON: Destroying Trump himself.

DAVE SMITH: Right. And so you’ve watched this happen and that does lead you to go, how exactly did they pull this off? How is it that people like, look, I’m a little bit more hot headed than you at times. And maybe this is because I’m a decade younger than you and I still drink big glasses of whiskey at night and I’m just furious about a lot of things, and maybe I should let some of that go.

But I’m still furious at Ben Shapiro, and the only reason I hate Ben Shapiro’s guts is because he called Ron Paul a Jew hater back in the day when it was totally just ridiculous. You read some of these tweets recently. I think Ron Paul is up there talking about how it’s not wise to fight multiple wars. This is what brings down nations. And Ben Shapiro goes, “I bet you just want to strangle a Jew.” It’s like, f* you, dude. How dare you speak to a man so much better than you that way.

Anyway, I was furious over the 12-day war last summer.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was, too.

Dave Smith’s Call for Trump’s Impeachment

DAVE SMITH: And I went on Breaking Points. Great show with Kristol and Saager, who I love very much. He’s so smart, man. Literally, I love Saager to death. He’s just great. Someone I’m really happy to call a friend. And so I went on their show right after it, and I called for Trump’s impeachment. I said he should be impeached and removed for this. He’s launched a war of aggression. It’s illegal. It’s for a foreign country. It’s what he promised not to do. I was very angry. I still stand by that, but I was angry.

And then, of course, all of them — Josh Hammer and Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin — they all just start talking s* about me. “Look, this guy doesn’t support Trump. Oh, he voted for Trump last time, but he’s calling for his impeachment now.” As if I don’t remember where all you guys were in 2016 when National Review was running their Never Trump edition. And Ben Shapiro promised, for deeply held, principled reasons, he could never support Donald Trump. And Mark Levin was Never Trump. All these guys were Never Trump.

Now that he’s become a warhawk — what he explicitly ran against being in every election — now that he’s become that, they all love him to death. So anyway, my point is, sometimes you see facts like that and you go, that’s worth speculating about. I do have some questions I’d like to ask on how exactly these guys were able to infiltrate this movement, destroy it from within, and set our country on this trajectory toward another catastrophic war. There’s a lot that went into that.

Independent Media and the Questions That Must Be Answered

TUCKER CARLSON: I couldn’t agree more. I guess the only last thing I would say about it is you started by saying the legacy media covered for the crimes of their masters, the ruling class. Okay, got it. I mean, that’s what they exist to do. That’s why we have NBC News. That’s why CNN, totally. That’s why Fox is here.

But to see people in independent media doing that — and I understand it’s very easy to get sidetracked, like you’re mad at one person, and so anyone who is asking similar questions to that person must be on that side or something. But try to retain independence in your head. Don’t get sidetracked. Certain questions have to be answered no matter who’s asking them, right?

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: One of the questions I still can’t answer is, why is it that all the neocons are the ones leading the screaming? And anyone who asked questions about Charlie Kirk’s death — when Charlie Kirk was an enemy of the neocons, like, open enemy of the neocons — invited you to TPUSA. Like, you don’t invite. And he didn’t. It’s not because the kids at TPUSA are like, “Oh, I grew up loving Dave Smith.”

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Well, I’ve said this on other shows, too, but I said this to you — that it’s like there was something about inviting, you know, inviting you or Megyn Kelly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE SMITH: Who were on Fox News.

TUCKER CARLSON: Huge famous stars on Fox News.

DAVE SMITH: Not just like, someone on Fox News. Like, two of the biggest.

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s no reason to invite you to a Turning Point event unless he wants the kids in the audience to hear your views, which he did, because he subtly agreed with them. And I would know because I talked to him about this a lot. Like, a lot, a lot over years.

So for the neocons, whom he at best didn’t trust and mostly really didn’t like — I never talk about what I think Charlie thought because it feels so weird because he’s gone. But I just have to say this. They’re the ones leading the charge, and “shut up, don’t ask any questions.” You tell me what this is.

DAVE SMITH: Well, that’s —

TUCKER CARLSON: And I’m not going to take orders from them. Who are these people anyway?

The Text Message and Hijacking Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

DAVE SMITH: This is the same reason why I read that text message that he sent me. And it was because — well, part of it was because Candace asked, and I’m friends with Candace, and she was very — she lost someone she was very close to. But part of it was that, you know, it’s a weird thing to do. It’s a weird thing to share private text messages with anyone, especially someone who just died. And I got some pushback for that. And I understand why people — I get their point. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I’m not sure.

But it was the thing where Netanyahu immediately is trying to hijack his legacy. Josh Hammer and all these guys are immediately trying to hijack his —

TUCKER CARLSON: And so it’s kind of like selling their books by the time —

DAVE SMITH: Literally, dude. It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Josh Hammer did three interviews immediately after. The only reason anyone’s interviewing him is because he was friends with Charlie Kirk. He was close around his circle or whatever. And every single time he mentioned how much Charlie loved his book. It’s like, Jesus, dude. I mean, I just could never imagine —

TUCKER CARLSON: Getting everybody — you know, the last Charlie was friends with Josh Hammer.

DAVE SMITH: Well, okay, he had him in his circles or whatever, his handler or whatever it was. But I remember, right before Charlie died, he called and he said, “Man, I just wish everyone would listen to your podcast.” It’s like, this is such a crazy thing to say.

TUCKER CARLSON: Unbelievable.

DAVE SMITH: But the reason I released that is because I’m like, look, I don’t know exactly where Charlie was on his evolution on this topic. Obviously he had at one point been a die-hard, pro-Israel guy, but a lot of people were that and then kind of woke up over the last couple of years.

But I know that he texted me after my debate with Douglas Murray that he said he thought I did a great job. And he really did. He said something like — I read it verbatim on my show — but he said something like, “Believe it or not, I really didn’t disagree with almost anything you said.” And I’m just saying Ben Shapiro wasn’t sending me that text. So for people to try to pretend there was no daylight between the two of them is just not true.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, there was hostility.

DAVE SMITH: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Big time. And not just with those guys. Hostility. I mean, I don’t want to overstate it. I’m not saying he hated them as people, but I mean, he did not —

DAVE SMITH: Agree at all, and certainly didn’t agree with war with Iran at all.

Charlie Kirk’s Complicated Views on Israel and Christian Zionism

TUCKER CARLSON: And also, honestly, some of the Christian Zionist leaders. I mean, Charlie was very — he loved Israel as a country for sure. And I think he had a complicated theology, which I did not fully understand and still don’t fully understand. But the idea that you would put another country before your own — he just rejected that flat out. And some of the Christian Zionist leaders are very aggressive and shark-like and very money-oriented and pushy.

DAVE SMITH: And he started talking about that openly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, he talked about it with me a lot.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, well, he talked about it on Megyn Kelly’s show. Talked about the reaction he got from evangelical leaders. Well, maybe not from the evangelical leaders.

TUCKER CARLSON: It wasn’t. It was a mix. It was a mixture.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, it was probably a mix of both —

TUCKER CARLSON: Of Jewish Zionists, like the guys you mentioned, but also the people he grew up with, who were evangelical leaders. And he was upset with them. I mean, I talked to him about it at length. I could name names with who he was upset. I’m not going to, because he’s gone. But yeah, that’s just real.

And I don’t even like talking about this, but I’m just offended by where this is going. And the bottom line is every American has an interest in every murder getting solved. And not just in getting solved, but fully solved.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

The FBI and the Shutdown of International Inquiry

TUCKER CARLSON: And if you have a government agency that’s shutting down a legitimate line of inquiry, at very least you have to answer the question, why are you doing that? And Joe Kent has said in public multiple times, including to me, the FBI shut down any effort to look into international connections here within days of the killing. So someone should ask the FBI, why’d you do that? And no one seems willing to ask.

The Epstein Cover-Up and the Betrayal of “Drain the Swamp”

DAVE SMITH: And look, we also know what we know about this FBI, who I just could not be more disgusted with. When Dan Bongino was talking all types of shit to me on Twitter or whatever, it’s like, look, man, he can’t. Dan Bongino not only can he not come debate me, Dan Bongino can’t ever do a difficult interview ever again for the rest of his life because he’s ended in one question.

Literally, one question ends it. I just go, “Hey, okay, so you looked the American people in the eyes and you swore that you had seen the proof that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Well, it’s been declassified by an act of Congress now. So go ahead and tell us. What’d you say? What’s the proof? It’s all declassified now. What are the few exceptions in the rule, if it’s national security or if it harms the victims or something like that? How would it possibly be any of those for you to just tell me what you saw that made you comfortable enough to go out there and swear that you had seen proof that he killed himself?”

Cash Patel, Dan Bongino. But these guys specifically, and this is one of the big things, I think—

TUCKER CARLSON: —that I just want to interject. No, no, not aiming at anyone in particular, but we say we know things, and I would always add the caveat: to the extent you can know things. Of course, I thought I’ve known many things and I’ve turned out to be wrong. So I could be wrong. But this is sincere. I believe I can say with certainty that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.

I mean, of course, I’m always open to countervailing evidence. I’m always reminded of my capacity for being wrong. But I can say, if you could X-ray my heart, you would find that I believe with total certainty he was murdered and the people in the US Government knew that he was murdered. I don’t want that to be true, but I believe it is true. So it’s going to take a lot. You’re going to have to show me that that’s false.

DAVE SMITH: Well, the reason why I have so much contempt for Dan Bongino and Cash Patel particularly, and Pam Bondi too, but more so the other two, is that these guys went around and really — Dan Bongino, I mean, Cash did many podcasts and stuff, but Dan Bongino got rich doing his show, a really big show, and he fanned that Epstein stuff for so long. It was like, “Don’t let go of this one. This is a huge scandal. We’re going to get in there and expose it.”

And I have to say, every bit as much as the war in Iran — maybe not quite as much as this most recent one — but the covering up of the Epstein scandal did so much to damage this administration because it went to something very fundamental: the fundamental promise of Donald Trump. And the reason why Donald Trump — I believe the main reason that he rode to political success and won the presidency twice — was that he said he was going to drain the swamp.

“Drain the swamp” was an incredibly effective campaign slogan. It was essentially saying, “Look, man, on some level, almost all Americans know this. This city in D.C. is filled with corruption. And the people in political power have committed profound crimes against the American people, and none of them have been held accountable for it. And we’re going to hold them accountable.”

And for this Justice Department now to go in and put up zero deep state arrests — I mean, if you just think about the fact that the intelligence agencies framed the sitting president for treason for four years. I mean, an obvious deep state coup — an attempted deep state coup to attempt to overthrow a democratically elected president. It was an outrage that they did it to him on the campaign, but it is a little bit different when he’s a presidential candidate than when he is the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States of America.

They framed him for being a Russian spy. Donald Trump is a lot of things. He is not a Russian spy. There’s never been one. It was the most ridiculous thing ever. It was all complete phony evidence. And they knew it. They knowingly went forward with that. Andrew McCabe admitted on 60 Minutes that their plan was to invoke the 25th Amendment, but they realized they couldn’t get enough people to go along with that. And so they settled for Robert Mueller. They settled for a special investigation that would tie him down and not let him get his America First agenda through.

So there’s that. There’s Covid. There’s the Epstein stuff. There’s all types of crime. I mean, Covid — they freaking locked down the country and didn’t disclose that they made it. They made the germ themselves. Fauci was like the hero of the response for like a year and a half before they finally came out that it was him who made it. And they have just at every turn protected power.

The Epstein Files and the True Nature of Global Power

DAVE SMITH: And again, with the Epstein thing, you only have to know like five or six things about it and you’re like, “Okay, this is some type of huge conspiracy.” And by the way, the files being released did shake up my interpretation of the whole thing. I tweeted this once — I kind of meant it sincerely, though I was saying it tongue in cheek — that I used to speculate that Jeffrey Epstein worked for Mossad. And after the files came out, it’s looking a lot more like the Mossad worked for Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, I did not think he was the Rothschilds’ guy. I didn’t realize that. And so this thing is a gigantic conspiracy. It’s an interesting limited look into how power really works. What’s really going on.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like looking through a stained glass window. You don’t get a clear picture, but you see the shapes and you realize this is not what I thought it was. I actually came away from reading a lot of the Epstein stuff with a view of Israel that was diminished. I thought Israel had less power. Of course he was working with Mossad. I said that and got called a Jew hater or whatever. It was just true. He was also working with CIA and intelligence services from around the world. But what he really was doing was acting as an employee of others, as a kind of communications hub between the biggest stakeholders in the West.

And so what you really saw was that governments aren’t in charge. There’s no meaningful nation state with full sovereignty. That’s just not a thing. There’s a supra-structure whose outlines I can’t fully see or even partly see, but it’s clearly there. And it’s not all being run from the Levant by Netanyahu, who’s probably got an IQ of 110. He’s not a genius.

DAVE SMITH: Yes, yes, 100%.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s way bigger than Israel. Israel is just like a place to hide out if you’ve been accused of a crime, get a passport, do some money laundering. It’s a lot of things, but Israel’s not running the world.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, no, there’s something — you’re absolutely right. There are power structures that we do not fully know about that are way more important than US Senators.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course. You bought the biggest lie of all, which is a competition between nation states.

DAVE SMITH: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Ghana’s got its own interests, but so does Singapore and China and India. And it’s like, yeah, to some extent, but that’s not — as soon as you have the free flow of capital, a globalized economy, then you have a globalized government. It’s just a fact. And by government, I mean a governing body, which may be informal or have blurry edges, but it’s still totally real. It’s way more real than countries.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: How are countries like — that’s almost a medieval view.

DAVE SMITH: Well, even—

TUCKER CARLSON: Countries with kings and armies. It’s so dumb.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, no, that’s right. And maybe it probably wasn’t even true in medieval times.

TUCKER CARLSON: Literally, it wasn’t. But after 1848, after you had the creation of the resemblance — or maybe the fiction — of nation states. I mean, I think it’s more complicated than I’m making it sound, but yeah, it’s clearly not as simple as everyone else assumes.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, well, I know countries actually act in their own interest.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, come on.

The Progressive Era and the Capture of Government by Big Money

DAVE SMITH: There’s this really great book written by Murray Rothbard, who I mentioned earlier, called The Progressive Era, and it’s about — I think it goes from, like, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR. And one of the things that they talk about is that there were real people who really meant well and kind of, in my opinion, got it wrong. The kind of moderate socialist types or the progressives who were like, “Hey, we’re such a wealthy country. We should have more of a managed economy so that we can make sure it’s working for everybody.”

But really what ends up happening in the Progressive Era is that all the titans of industry, all the robber barons, as they call them, they all got on board with it and they went, “Oh, yeah, yeah, totally, we should have a managed economy. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We’ll be doing the managing.” It was all the money interests that they supposedly wanted to rein in who were the guys who ended up getting control of the government anyway. And so that’s how it works.

TUCKER CARLSON: Black Lives Matter, sponsored by Microsoft.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, that’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

DAVE SMITH: The Gay Pride Parade has like a Bank of America float coming through it. And I mean, I know there is some leftist out there who really believes in the Gay Pride Parade, but something bigger is going on than what you’re—

TUCKER CARLSON: Dave. No, really, it’s liberation. Just trust me. This is going to be liberation.

DAVE SMITH: It’s too ridiculous, man.

TUCKER CARLSON: I know. Well, good. Thank you for everything you’re doing and, sorry — I never get emotional, but I’m sorry for starting to yell at you. That stuff just—

DAVE SMITH: I enjoy it. It’s literally — nothing makes me happier than to be yelled at in agreement.

TUCKER CARLSON: Dave Smith, you’re the best. Thank you.

DAVE SMITH: Thank you, sir.

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