 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Once again to Mises Weekends. It's Christmas time, so Merry Christmas to all of you who are celebrating this week. Trying to keep it upbeat and happy, and we do have some happy news today in the last couple of days, and that leads to our guest, comedian Dave Smith, the great comic from New York City, a lot of you know his work, and he's joining me to talk about all these things that are going on with Trump and foreign policy this week, and as I mentioned, there's actually some bright spots with respect to Syria, and maybe just maybe as of this recording on Friday afternoon, according to Jake Tapper, there might be a coming bright spot with respect to Afghanistan, but Dave, not everybody sees it that way in our commentary on Twitter, as you may have noticed. Yeah, it's the amazing thing about Donald Trump, and obviously this is one of the best things he's done, if not the best thing, but it's amazing that he kind of like, however you feel about Donald Trump from a libertarian perspective, he really, he cuts the grass and lets the snakes show. Yeah, well let me ask this, some people may not know you're a new father, you just had a little girl, a week or so back. Let me ask you a loaded question, do you think in her lifetime, she will witness more wars or fewer wars than a little American girl born in let's say 1918? Well, man, I sure hope it's fewer. It's gotta be fewer, doesn't it? If you were a little girl born in 1918, you saw some bad ones, and I honestly think there's that, it's an Albert Einstein quote that I'm gonna butcher, but he said something like, I don't know what weapons will be used to fight the Third World War, but the Fourth World War will certainly be sticks and rocks. So I just think, a lot of it because of the technology we have, I don't think we'll ever see those type of conflicts again, because the elites know that they're vulnerable to nuclear attacks as well. And hopefully maybe, this is what I used to be very optimistic about during the great Ron Paul revolution moment, that now with technology and mass communication, it's gonna be harder and harder for the elites to sell these wars to the general public. And I do think we're seeing a lot of that. Yeah, interesting though, don't you think ordinary people versus elites and nationalism versus globalism are more interesting questions and left versus right, at least for us? Well, I mean, there, even the questions that I would want to be more interesting like statism versus voluntarism or something like that, whatever questions we may like to think of in abstractions, those are the actual fights that are going on right now. And I agree. I mean, there's like, there's this really great comedian, this left-wing guy, Jimmy Dorr, who's like a complete left-winger. I mean, he's like, I think probably his biggest issue is like climate change. He supports a minimum wage. He probably has a million issues that I would disagree with him, you would disagree with him on, but he just adamantly opposes these wars, opposes the elite, opposes the two-party duopoly. And more and more, I look at a guy like that as an ally. I mean, I don't really care. It's almost like that other stuff seems to just be not as important. It's like, do you wanna stop the genocide in Yemen? You wanna, okay, then we're on the same team. Yeah, when you see some of the photos of children who have been killed or hurt, that's when you start to drop some Obamacare lawsuit as the most important be all end all here. So, and as you mentioned, there have been some people on the left who have been really good this week. I noticed Caitlin Johnstone, I'm sure you're familiar with her, has been really good on Twitter. And I noticed one of the founding ladies of Code Pink has been saying, ignore what the Democrats are saying. This is a wonderful development. But here's what a lot of Democrats are saying. Let me lay this out for you. This is Trump capitulating into Putin. Russia is now gonna have this enormous influence across the Fertile Crescent. We're handing the Kurds over to Erdogan. And this is all part of Trump's weakness. I mean, it's really sickening if you think about it. Yeah, it's just unbelievable. And it's the effect that Donald Trump has had on the Democrats and the left broadly speaking has really been incredible. I mean, they're like cold warriors now. This to me was the most, the development that I would never have been able to predict in my lifetime, that you would see left-wing Hollywood types who seem to think that like transgender bathrooms are the moral issue of our time. But they've completely abandoned even the pretense of being anti-war. Yeah, it's something else to behold, but there's a mania against Trump. There's a psychosis that they will literally resurrect a cold war with Russia. And everything that means to hurt this guy politically. And that's my sense of it anyway. And I don't think that can ever be defended. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it really is something and I don't think it's actually any policy that Donald Trump has ever pushed or espoused that got them so furious about him. I think it is more of a cultural thing where he just, if you turn on like the Oscars or any of these like award shows, they all kind of like to, they like to pretend that they're humanitarian even as they have these kind of extravagant celebrations of wealth. And there's something about Donald Trump who's just this unapologetic, like, I'm a winner and I got a model wife and I put my name up in big gold plated letters and I'm just an unapologetic straight white man who's rich that just drives them crazy. It's a fascinating psychological phenomenon. Have you seen any of the right wing stuff this week about Syria? Like Ben Shapiro was criticizing Trump. I've seen national review say that this is a terrible mistake. And what's interesting is I've seen some right wingers say, well, he didn't consult his military and intelligence generals and operatives before making this decision. Of course, they're A-okay with the president unilaterally going into any country. But when it comes to withdrawal, all of a sudden this has to be vetted by Congress and the intelligence community. Yeah, it's really wild. I mean, at least more so than the people on the left, you kind of feel like, well, that's where they belong. That's the typical right wing kind of talking point in America that he didn't. It's like, oh, well, if you don't listen to all of the members of the military industrial complex or you don't at least give them a say in it, that's the problem. But the thing I find so interesting about Syria, and I listened to the Ben Shapiro episode on it and it's just, I don't even know what to say. It's different than so many of these other wars where they can't even get their own talking point straight. Like it's not even clear to me what their position of why we have to stay there is. It's like, at least in Iraq, it was like, there were these lies. Okay, they weren't involved in 9-11. They didn't have weapons of mass destruction, but that's what they would say. And then it was like bringing democracy to the region or kind of like, we broke it, we have to fix it. But in Syria, I've heard that we have to stay there because ISIS isn't really defeated. We have to defeat ISIS. I've heard that it's gonna be a win for Iran and Russia. And then the big one that they were trying to sell that, I'm very surprised actually, seems to have been somewhat abandoned over the last couple of days, is that this was all about regime change with Assad and that Assad was killing his own people and that he was this butcher. That one seems almost like they've backed off of it. And I think a big part of that is that, and this is I think because of the internet and the prominence of people outside of the rise of people outside of the establishment media, I don't think anyone really bought that fake Assad gas attack, the most recent one. And so I just think that like, they've almost given up on that talking point, but to me, that's really what this is all about is that this was on the list of regime changes that we were supposed to knock off and they're not gonna get this one. Assad has one. So they can't lay out a justification for us to be in Syria. I would suspect the vast majority of Americans couldn't find Syria on a globe. And yet we're supposed to be so committed to this thing and so freaked out when Donald Trump decides to just withdraw, would it amount to a couple of thousand people out of Syria? But what I love about this, Dave, is it really is bringing home this sort of inside the about way versus outside the about way divide. There's nobody out in America who really cares about this war and is passionate about prosecuting. All the support for this, and I would say all of our Middle Eastern wars really resides inside the about way. I mean, it's remarkable. It's really unholy if we think about it. The American people are either war weary, dissolutioned, uninterested, whatever it is, but they don't care. And they don't believe them. That's the other thing. It's like they just, they don't believe any of these phony excuses. They don't believe the propaganda anymore. This to me is the biggest silver lining out of all of this stuff. And I do think that it's just the, it's like when you see with this stuff with Michael Flynn, where everybody in the mainstream media is like so appalled that he lied. Like this was his great crime. It wasn't even anything illegal when he was talking to this Russian diplomat. It's just that he lied to the FBI about it. And I think even if most of the average person in America outside of the beltway, okay, they're not reading human action and they're not thinking through these things like a lot of the people at the Mises Institute are. But I think just on some very basic gut sense, it's like after George W. Bush sold the Iraq war on weapons of mass destruction, all the lies and false projections and we'd be greeted as liberators. It'd be paid for in oil and he was in on 9-11, just all of these things that turned out to be completely wrong. Obama sold his signature legislative achievement under blatant lies. Like if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. And they've just been lied to so many times that when they try to kind of create this outrage about Donald Trump told a lie or Michael Flynn told a lie, I think most of the American people just kind of roll their eyes at this stuff. Like they don't believe it anymore. Like you said, they couldn't find these countries on a map. It has absolutely nothing to do with their life. And then of course, they've also actually been paying the price for this. And maybe they haven't, it's not like they've been taxed, like there's been a war tax because we've just been borrowing and printing the money, but they're seeing their family members come home, wounded or dead or just depressed. I mean, the amount of soldiers, suicides, it's like you can't add up the human cost of all this stuff. And of course, why would they want to keep doing this? It's insane. Well, I know you know Essie Cop a little bit. She's at sea at Ed. I think you were on her show a few times. But she's been tweeting all this week about this stuff. And she really strikes me as the perfect example of a pundit who's sort of clueless both ideologically and in terms of facts on the grout, but nonetheless holds a very strong opinion on this. And there's, again, there's something unsettling about seeing people in the same Talibs version of the world have no skin in the game, be so bloodthirsty and call for these wars to just go on and on. Yeah, it's really, it's a shame because it's Essie's worst issue. It's the issue she's the worst on and it's the one that she's most passionate about. And it used to just drive me crazy because I would argue with her all the time on this. And it would just seem, it was like, you know, like trying to punch a brick wall, like you just never make any progress at all. And I would say these things to her like, you know, I remember her talking about it like, the way she phrases it is pretty much that Assad started killing all of his own people. He's just some bloodthirsty maniac. And then we had to go in to try to prevent that situation from getting worse and to also try to deal with ISIS. But again, I mean, I just think it's like people can just Google this stuff. It's, you can just Google Operation Timber Sycamore. This happened before Assad was killing anybody. We had plans to overthrow him. It was a CIA, Saudi led operation. And this is, it's just so obvious that we created, you know, this situation would not have happened without Western intervention. The idea of arming every anti-Assad rebel and then, you know, directly funding an arming ISIS or what became ISIS. And Assad did respond in brutal fashion and called in the Russians and the Iranians and all this other stuff, but it really is amazing to just see how wrong they get it and how passionate they are. And then the other thing that, and we'll see how this goes, and this might be the bad part, you know, for us, which is why we gotta be cautiously optimistic. But of course, if anything bad happens now, this is gonna get played out. You know, it'll be completely exaggerated and it'll all be blamed on Donald Trump. So if you have this Operation Timber Sycamore that Obama and the CIA and the Saudis launch and the result of it is years and years of civil war, somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 people dying, children dying, just an absolute disaster, that never gets blamed on the intervention. But when we leave and the Turks are about to come in and start fighting the Kurds and you know, whatever happens there is gonna happen. Any death, like if anyone gets a paper cut over there, it's gonna be blamed on Donald Trump leaving. Well, when Essie Cupp says we, I think she means the royal we. That's right. I think Christmas time at Park Slope will be largely unaffected by our actions in Syria. You know, I wanted to ask you, if you saw this tweet today from Trump saying, does the USA wanna be the policeman of the Middle East getting nothing but spending precious lives and trillions of dollars protecting others who in almost all cases do not appreciate what we are doing. I saw a lot of people retweeting this and it just shows you Trump's uncanny ability to radically change the story in just a day or two. When things appear to be going horribly for him on the border wall or midterm elections or Mueller's probe, you know, he just has this ability to shift gears and throw all media into some sort of hyperdrive and distract him. Yeah, so it's so strange and it doesn't seem like Donald Trump is, he's certainly not like a deep thinking intellectual, but he's got these instincts for how to control a narrative and how to kind of work a room. And the thing that's crazy is that, there's different ways he could have played this because truthfully speaking, and you know this, better than I do, but he could have bombed another country and that would have gotten more positive press in the mainstream media. It would have gotten more of the establishment on his side than ever before. That would almost be the safer move, but he's going the other route and saying, I'm just gonna appeal to the people and go over your head, like that dynamic you were talking about, the Beltway versus regular people. He's going, I'm going with them and I'm gonna start pulling out of these wars and see how you like that. And now he puts them in the position of saying Donald Trump is crazy because he doesn't want us to be the policemen of the Middle East. And then like most people are looking at him saying, like, yeah, but wait a minute, why are we? Why are we doing that again? Because Al Qaeda attacked us in 2001, but we're on the same side as Al Qaeda in every conflict that we're in in the Middle East right now. So it's pretty impossible to defend. Well, he's writing these tweets himself, clearly. Yeah. And he's scheduling them and deciding to tweet and God knows, probably up at 4 a.m., pounded Diet Coke and watching Fox News and just issuing these tweets. It's an unbelievable thing to watch. Have you followed at all some of the fallout from the weekly standard closing, which I think is tangentially related to this because it suggests that neoconservative foreign policy influence is potentially waning or at least facing a lot of pushback. Rand Paul got involved in that a little bit. Did you see him tweeting sort of a crowing about the death of Bill Crystal's baby? Yeah, I did see that. And then I saw some, the Ben Shapiro and other other Ben Shapiro types kind of going back and forth with Rand Paul. I mean, I think it's great. I think that it's weird. Again, it's the same divide you were talking about, but the neocon following has been dead for a long time. It's just that they have a lot of influence still amongst the power brokers. But if you wanna actually see who is still of the people are behind the neocon policies or the neocon ideas, all you have to do is look at Jeb Bush's presidential campaign. I mean, that's the amount of support that they have at this point. There is nobody, it is really kind of nice to see that you can only be so spectacularly wrong and have your policies result in so much death and destruction before it's just not that popular anymore. You know what's exciting to me is the article that Rand tweeted was from this newish website called American Greatness. And this was created by the Claremont Institute, which five or 10 years ago would have been ideologically very close to let's say a national review. It's got people like Victor Davis-Hanson, Angela Coteville, but they have really shifted the last year or two and become very pro-Trump. And so you've got these people who on the one hand are Japhites, they're very pro-cult of Lincoln, but now they're kind of pro-Trump and anti-neocon. So it's a huge division in conservatism Inc. And it's really interesting to me, but what shocked me about Rand was that the article, the particular article that he tweeted by a guy named Chris Buskirk was really harsh. I mean, I don't know if you read it, but that was a no holds barred, no going back split between whatever kind of new Trump wing of conservatism is growing if you want to call it conservatism versus the old national review interventionist guys. I mean, this is a real split. There's some real casualties here. Yeah, and I didn't actually read the piece. I saw the tweet, but I had a baby last week. I've been a little bit behind on stuff, but I do think that there's been a huge split. And I think a lot of the credit, even though as you pointed out these Victor Davis-Hanson guys, we certainly have some pretty profound differences with them, but I give a lot of credit to Ron Paul and those two campaigns in 08 and in 2012, where he did kind of split the Republican Party and as people were getting more and more frustrated with the failed neocon policies, he I think made it okay to question everything about the mainstream conservative Inc. And I also think that a lot of these people who are, I guess on cable news, they're somewhat represented by the Laura Ingram wing, Tucker Carlson, people like that where these are conservatives who went along with the neocon agenda for a while who now see how dangerous this is. And it's not that they have some libertarian ideology that they believe in, but they see that this stuff is not a joke. You can actually wreck the country if we go in this direction. And they're getting worried about that and thinking that maybe we gotta rethink what made us great and what might make us a great country in the future. Well, and look, anybody who's against any war for any reason, whether it's just because they hate Trump or because they're from Code Pick, whatever, I don't care, I'll take it. I'll take any ad hoc coalition that gets us out of Syria or Afghanistan, even temporarily, it's fine by me. But I think when you mentioned Ron Paul, I think we have to realize that philosophically, conservatism is dead. It is ideologically incoherent. It's an ad hoc pinball machine bouncing around non-ideology at this point. There's no, you know, Tucker Carlson and Bill Crystal and Donald Trump and Burke and the National Review Guys and Russell Kirk and Bill Buckley. I mean, at this point, they are all as different as they are alike. And so I personally, I'm thrilled at the idea that we might for good and all bury the Republican party and bury this phony conservatism, progressivism driving the speed limit, as Malice says, that we've been hearing about ad nauseam since Reagan. Yeah, no, I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. I loved that Donald Trump came and split up the conservative coalition. I love that he fractured the Republican party. I loved that Bernie Sanders had a similar effect on the Democrats. And of course, look, I would have liked to see Ron Paul win the presidency. I would have liked to see Rand Paul have a much better showing in the presidential campaign. But short of that, it's not so bad that this whole game of, you know, you have to choose between Coke and Pepsi. And basically they taste almost exactly the same. To see that all getting destroyed, I think is a very positive thing. And it's, you know, like with all drastic change, it's dangerous to some degree, but this thing, it had to break up one way or the other. And I agree with you. I mean, those guys, there is no coherent ideological tie between any of those figures that you just named and the whole like era of national review dominating the conservative coalition is that's long over. Well, fortunately, all we have to do is libertarians has remained consistent, be anti-interventionism abroad, anti-interventionism domestically, and the logic of it really takes care of itself. We don't have to worry about the political vicissitudes of the day or who's president or not president. That said, Dave, I want to thank you for your time. Ladies and gentlemen, follow Dave Smith on Twitter. You can go to his website and buy his standup DVD. And you can watch his show, which is called part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network. So I want to take a moment to wish all of you a very, very merry Christmas, a belated happy Hanukkah. Have a great weekend and great talking to you, Dave. Same to you, Jeff. Thanks so much for having me. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.