Part of the Problem
Episode number: 1306
Premiered: September 20, 2025
Dave Smith brings you the latest in politics! On this episode of Part Of The Problem, Dave discusses his new opinions about Jimmy Kimmel being fired for his Charlie Kirk comments, how this plays into the broader values of libertarianism, and more.
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What’s up? What’s up everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I am Dave Smith. I am rolling solo for this episode. Thank you guys so much for joining. I really appreciate it.
I’ve got some stuff that’s on my mind that I thought I would rant about today. And it’s something that I’ve been—you know, I talked a bit about this over the last week. And we talked a bit on the members-only stream about it yesterday.
So we were talking a bit yesterday about the firing of Jimmy Kimmel and a little bit of a larger conversation about free speech. Over the last week there’s been all types of these topics coming up. First of all, the fact that Charlie Kirk stood for free speech so much and that he was executed for that—in many ways for that. Then there have been conversations about people getting fired for TikTok videos they make celebrating it.
Now this Jimmy Kimmel one has really been kind of the biggest example in all of this. And then there’s another interesting angle, because of course the chairman of the FCC really blatantly threatened ABC before they fired Jimmy Kimmel. So it just adds in other elements.
Now there’s a big conversation raging about right-wing cancel culture, free speech, government intervention, hypocrisy of the people who have been opposed to cancel culture now celebrating it. A lot of different people are giving their takes on this.
And I just want to say—I think I have a little bit of a different take the more I’ve been thinking about this than anyone else I’ve seen so far. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think it’s different than anyone I’ve seen so far.
In other words, this rant is guaranteed to satisfy no one. But I still think it’s important. So let me go in saying that. And I would preface the entire thing by saying I’m not—on this episode I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m not trying to—as I often am—but on this one, I’m not trying to convince you that I’m right and you’re wrong, or this is the correct way to think about it and this is the incorrect way to think about it. I’m not trying to sell you on anything today.
I’m trying to give you something to play with and give you something to grapple with, and kind of maybe, you know, perhaps think about these things in a different way. It’s kind of interesting, I guess, for libertarians like myself when there are these moments when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it seems like normies care about talking about our values.
This almost always only happens when liberals are attempting to use your own values against you. So, you know, this happens a lot. Like whenever there’s a liberal who’s threatened by cancel culture, they immediately go, “Oh, free speech, you don’t believe in government intervention,” or something like that. It’s in the same sense like when they’re standing up for abortion, they say my body, my choice. They make a libertarian appeal, but they only care about it as far as it serves their interests. And then obviously they will abandon that.
But you know, literally I remember hearing pro-choice activists say my body, my choice as they supported vax mandates in the middle of the pandemic. It doesn’t bother them that they’re being hypocritical, because they’re just attempting to manipulate you.
And I guess I would start by saying this—kind of like to zoom out about the moment that we’re in right now, which is particularly what’s appalling to me about the liberals who are trying to needle right-wingers for celebrating Jimmy Kimmel being fired, or for celebrating even just people who lost their job for making TikTok videos and stuff like that.
I think it’s worth saying at the beginning of this that the way I see things in the big picture here is that the most remarkable part of, say, the last week—since Charlie Kirk’s assassination—the most amazing part of all of this is that there’s been no violent retaliation. And that’s really great. Like it’s really, really good. That was the most important, the most dangerous part of this moment, and the biggest potential for disaster and escalation. And there’s been no retaliation.
Right-wing America, broadly speaking, deserves a lot of credit for that. A lot of credit. There have been a lot of influential right-wing people who have encouraged calm and discouraged any type of retaliation. And there’s also, obviously, Christianity is a major force in the right wing in the United States of America. Whatever else, everybody involved in not having a violent response to this deserves a lot of credit.
So in this moment, when there’s tremendous anger, tremendous frustration, tremendous pain on the right wing in America, the fact that there hasn’t been any type of violent response should be, I think, applauded. Instead, the reaction is to be mad at them for celebrating the fact that this disgusting Jimmy Kimmel got kicked off of the air. I just think that’s an unreasonable standard to place on right-wing America.
I mean, look, dude, when George Floyd got killed, there were billions of dollars in property damage done as a response, and dozens of people were killed, and hundreds at least were assaulted and injured and things like that. There was a lot of violence in response to that. There’s been none in response to Charlie Kirk. And Charlie Kirk was not like a career criminal who died by some freak thing. However you feel—I know, we’re not even going to get into that, I know there’s the competing autopsy reports and all these other things and you can feel however you feel about a cop putting his knee on a guy’s neck and all of that—but like if a cop did that to a hundred people in a row, it is unlikely that anyone would die from it. It’s a little bit of a freak thing that that would end up killing you.
Again, not saying you shouldn’t do that or nothing like that, not saying I want anyone to do that to me or I want to do that to anyone else. But what you had was a career criminal, a man who had—what was it, he had robbed a pregnant woman or something like that—and you know, okay, by the way, none of that means you should be mistreated by a cop or anything.
But the point is that Charlie Kirk never did nothing like that. Kirk was just a Christian who liked to go to college campuses and talk, and he didn’t happen to die by something that normally won’t kill you. He was executed by something that will kill you 100% of the time.
So just saying—the fact that there’s been no violence in response, you’d think that ought to be something that would be at the top of everyone’s list. Like, okay, that’s the most important thing, kudos for that. But that’s not what’s going on here.
Instead, this seems to be an attempt at a rallying cry of like, “Oh, Jimmy Kimmel was a victim, he’s a free speech warrior who was persecuted for standing up to the regime,” or something like that. And you know, like Stephen Colbert, he said the other day, we are all Jimmy Kimmel now, which is really—I mean there is something to that. I was making this point on the members-only stream yesterday. But like, that’s your comment? We’re all Jimmy Kimmel now? Not we’re all Charlie Kirk? We’re all Jimmy Kimmel? Like you see that as the most egregious violation of free speech in the last week? ‘Cause I thought it was the guy who went to college campuses to talk about ideas and got executed.
Anyway, I want to talk a little bit about how I think about these things. Again, I’m not trying to sell you — I’m just trying to give you this to pick around and see what you think. Often I think for people in the position I’m in — podcaster or pundit or commentator — we tend to think that our views on policy are the most important thing, whereas I think typically for podcasters or pundits, the way you’re thinking about things is the most important thing. The way you talk about things with other people, the way you get people thinking about things is actually much more important than even what policy you stand for, because if we’re being honest, we’re not in the business of making policy. That doesn’t really matter, but we are in the business of getting people to think about things. So in some ways that’s more important.
Now, by the way, to protect my libertarian street cred here — and I mean this — I’m against the FCC existing. I’m against the FCC threatening companies. I think it was counterproductive and just wrong and incredibly stupid for the FCC chair to start threatening ABC the way he did. In some ways it takes away what otherwise would be a win for right-wingers. It’s almost like cheating at a game that you can win straight up. If you cheat, you just took that away from yourself getting the clean win and now everyone can see that you cheated and it almost doesn’t count the same way. You should have just let me get the win. That’s kind of how I feel about this whole thing.
But I don’t necessarily agree with some other libertarians who are arguing that Jimmy Kimmel’s free speech is being violated here. This might upset some people when I say it, but I’ll try to explain my thinking. Once again, I’m not exactly trying to convince you. I’m more just trying to think about things together. I would say that Jimmy Kimmel is, in effect and function, part of the regime, and he has been for a long time now. I view things differently. I don’t view the regime as having rights the way all the rest of us do. It’s almost like if you kidnapped a child and then someone stole that child from you — have you been victimized? Obviously the answer is no. Even though a child was taken from you, it wasn’t your child to begin with, so you’re not the victim here. You joined the criminal kidnapper class and now someone else in the criminal kidnapper class out-criminals you. You don’t care — you’re not a victim anymore in this game because you already crossed that line.
In the same sense, if you’re somebody who’s against murder — as most of us should be — but the Bloods and the Crips start killing each other, it’s not the same as the Bloods killing innocent people. Two gangs fighting it out is different than gangs terrorizing innocent people. I almost view things like that: two gangs I don’t like are fighting it out. In that case, you want to think more about being strategic than any moral consideration. If two groups of killers are killing each other and one group vows that once they’re done killing this gang they’ll stop, and the other says as soon as we’re done killing this gang we’re going to kill all the rest of you, you might root for the first gang because there’s no principle involved anymore — it’s all killers at this point.
I’m not randomly assigning “regime” to Jimmy Kimmel. I think he joined the regime a long time ago. For anybody — not just libertarians, but anyone opposed to the current regime — it’s important to think about things this way. I remember back around 2010, shortly after I got into political stuff and the Ron Paul revolution blew my mind and I started reading radical political books. In the first couple years there was the School Sucks Podcast — Brett Veinotte? — apologies, I liked those guys. They had a viral video that blew my mind. This was early on the internet; YouTube wasn’t as big then. The video might have had a couple hundred thousand views, but it felt huge. It was a different world. It blew my mind and I had to read about it, and it turns out a lot of it was true. It’s probably a red-pill moment for me.
Basically, what he was talking about was his interest in the rise of the Nazis and how the hell that happened in Germany. There’s lots to the story, but here’s one part that rarely comes up: about a hundred years before the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, there was the Prussian Empire — the geographic and cultural precursor to Nazi Germany. The Prussian Empire was the second Reich; Adolf Hitler tried to start the Third Reich. The Prussians were having a big problem where their conscripted soldiers would do crazy things like run away, piss themselves and then get killed on the battlefield, or refuse to fight. That was a major problem for the Prussian elites.
And they ultimately came up with a solution for the problem. Their solution was that they would start what became known as school.
The idea was that they would get your kids at a really young age and school them to be loyal subjects of the king. So by the time they were 17, 18 years old, they had been totally propagandized by the government. They would be loyal subjects to the king, go fight in his wars, and not think about silly little things like themselves and whether they wanted to do this.
By all accounts, it was largely successful — so successful that it was exported to the United States of America. This is why we still call it school. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about that before, but you’re like, “Why is it all these German-sounding names? Why am I dropping my five-year-old off at kindergarten?” It’s because that’s where it comes from.
And Horace Mann, the godfather of American education, explicitly wrote about this — that we are adopting the Prussian system because it’s so effective for the Prussians. He had some line in there about, “Well, they use it for autocratic means, but we will use it for good Republican means,” something like that. But if you just look at it for what it is — and this is why it was kind of a powerful red-pill moment, at least especially for me in 2010 — you’re like, “Oh my god, this whole thing is a brainwashing mechanism.”
If libertarians are going to conceive of the existence of the state, you can’t not think about that too. Like, oh my god, this is a whole huge other component of it.
Tom Woods had this great speech right around that time too, around 2010. It was the first time I ever heard him use this analogy. He was talking about government school and said: think about it. By the way, they didn’t call them education centers, they called it school. What they’re doing there is not educating, they’re schooling you.
Tom Woods’ thought experiment went like this: just imagine that Walmart ran all the schools. Imagine it’s anyone except the government. Imagine a private company running the schools. Walmart is in charge of all the schools, and the first thing they have your kids do every morning, from age 5 to 18, is pledge allegiance to Walmart.
Then in the classroom there would be pictures of all the Walmart CEOs around the classroom, and they’d make up all of these stories. Like, the first Walmart CEO was such a pure man he never told a lie. One time he chopped down a cherry tree and said, “Dad, I did it, I could not lie to you.” Obviously, this is made-up shit about what heroes and wonderful people they were.
“This Walmart CEO was the great emancipator,” and so on. Meanwhile, if you look back, you’d find a lot of them killed a whole lot of people and did messed-up stuff, and in fact they all told a lot of lies. But if Walmart was praising Walmart and making young children pledge allegiance to Walmart, we would all immediately look at it and say, “This is sick. This is cult-like behavior.”
But that just is normal to all of us when it comes to the state, because that’s just the way it’s supposed to be done.
Over the last decade or so, a lot of people started coming to the conclusion: “Oh my god, public schools have been turned into indoctrination centers.” And it’s like, no, they have not been turned into indoctrination centers. They have switched up the indoctrination curriculum to something more particularly egregious to you — and understandably so. But nothing’s changed. They’re just indoctrinating them, because that’s been the goal the whole time.
This has to be understood along with the more fundamental, 101 libertarian understanding of what the government is. You’d think it’s a pretty important thing to understand, but liberalism in many ways is allergic to this understanding. Still, it’s the foundational libertarian insight about politics. And it’s not even particularly libertarian in nature — it’s just objectively true.
This is why, when people have these conversations — “Well, it’s different if private people do it, or if the government is involved, it violates the First Amendment if the government is involved, but it doesn’t if it’s not the government,” and all that — I think very few people in this broader conversation have really examined the foundational building blocks.
So number one: what is the government? What is the state? As libertarians know well, there’s only one coherent, objective definition for government. Government is a group of people who hold a legal monopoly on the use of aggressive violence. That really is the only definition that actually describes what it is.
You can do pretty much anything a government can do except the aggressive violence. You can even, in most parts of this country, use violence to defend yourself. You just can’t do it aggressively. You can’t use aggression — and they can. That’s the difference. I mean, you could write laws. You could even come up with a tax code. You just can’t enforce it.
They can enforce it. If you were to do what the government does, it would be considered theft, murder, threats, imprisonment, kidnapping, torture.
When they do it, it’s called war, taxation, collateral damage, detainment, official letters from a court. But if you did it, you’d be arrested — and so, okay, this is essentially the nature of government. To be a libertarian is to reject that and to embrace something else, but to understand that is just to get things correct. That objectively is what the government does.
If any private individual did what the government does, they would be arrested and spend a long time in jail if not get the death penalty. So when you’re talking about the government, you’re talking about an instrument of force.
There is a tremendous tendency, particularly among liberals, to pretend that government is something else — that government is the referee in the game or that government is all of us collectively or that government is the nation. None of that’s true. You could disprove it just by thinking it through.
Murray Rothbard, in his phenomenal work Anatomy of the State — which I highly recommend everyone read if you haven’t — makes the point that the government is essentially a gang that took over and gained legitimacy in the popular imagination of its people. That’s essentially all the government is.
But it’s more than just the actual government. He gets into the marriage between the government and the intellectual class and how there’s a huge reinforcement mechanism between the two. The intellectual class doesn’t command much value in a true marketplace — you probably won’t become a multimillionaire off teaching sociology. However, when the government builds public universities and libraries and backs student loans, they make a market for these intellectuals that’s much more lucrative than the market otherwise would be. In return, the intellectuals find a way to justify the role of the state.
Much like school itself, the role these intellectuals play is essentially brainwashing — propagandizing the country into accepting the regime’s policy. Thinking of them as separate from the state is substantially less helpful and accurate than thinking of them as part of one apparatus. Curtis Yarvin called this the “cathedral” — encompassing the actual government, all the shadow parts of the government, corporate media, academia, Hollywood — because they’re all used together.
Take academia: many people who work at private universities are not government employees, but the whole industry is a government program. The whole thing only exists because the government backs the loans or gives legal protections to the schools, and it ends with everybody spouting approved government propaganda.
If you think about it like this: remember when it came out that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab in China?
Well, it wasn’t them, right? If you remember, it was a subsidiary. They gave a grant to a company, that company gave the money to the Wuhan lab. But I think all of us should feel comfortable saying the NIH gave that money to the Wuhan lab. Because if you don’t conceive of it that way, then all you’re acknowledging is that all the government has to do is say, “Well, we gave it to—” all they have to do is have a private company do it and then say, “That was done by a private company, it wasn’t done by us.”
We’d all kind of recognize that’s pretty ridiculous, right? I mean, imagine there was a secret act passed by our government to create another government department, but it was secret, and they didn’t tell the public it was a government department. Would that make it any less of a government department? In other words, does it matter what we call it, or what the government calls it? Or does it matter what function they’re serving right now?
Especially with college campus stuff — if you’re being funded by the government, your whole industry is propped up by the government, and you’re regurgitating government propaganda. Okay, in some technical sense you’re a private person who isn’t a government employee. But in a much more real sense, you are part of the regime and should be regarded as such.
This is how all types of things work. A great book on this to read is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Great book. It talks all about the private companies the CIA uses to do their dirty work. If we’re going to say that’s not the government, then I don’t know — you’re just giving the government an obvious end-around. There are no restrictions on government at all, because the thing is obviously still a part of it.
It’s the same as what they say about the Federal Reserve. “The Federal Reserve is private.” What are you talking about? There’s a private company we created through an act of Congress. They just happen to have the power to print the money. But what is that? Let’s use Walmart again. Say Walmart was created by an act of Congress, and every few years the president appointed the CEO of Walmart. Would you consider Walmart a private company at that point, or would you go, “I think you’re part of the government now”?
Same thing with weapons contractors. What is the Brookings Institute? Is that just a private organization? Does it make sense to think of them as such when they’re funded by a mix of foreign governments and weapons manufacturers? That makes them a private company? No — not really, not in any true spirit, not in any true sense of that term.
Another example: NGOs. Isn’t it interesting the first two words they have to put are non-governmental? If you ever start a company, you probably wouldn’t think those need to be the first two words of your company, because it’s actually non-governmental, so you don’t need to say it. But NGOs take U.S. taxpayer money and go form pro-democracy Ukrainian media companies that urge people to take to the streets to overthrow the Yanukovych government. Am I supposed to look at that George Soros NGO as just the free market?
So again, I do think you come back to a thing where — I’m not saying it’s perfect, and obviously it’s a little bit arbitrary in some cases what exactly you consider the regime and what you don’t. But just for example, let’s say, hypothetically, in Washington, D.C. you had a think tank funded by weapons manufacturers that argued for war. Now, I know that’s crazy, we’d never find that in the real Washington, D.C. But let’s just say hypothetically there was a think tank funded by weapons companies going to government with policy papers saying why we need a big buildup in the defense budget.
Here you have weapons companies — creatures of the taxpayer. They literally just sell their weapons to the U.S. federal government, which buys them with our money — money they took from us by force. The weapons company creates or funds a think tank. The think tank argues for more of our money to be spent on weapons. Now let’s say, hypothetically, a president or a dictator or a politician — someone who’s an official government employee — says, “I’m proposing a new law.”
That you’re not allowed to do that. Like, Mr. Think Tank guy, shut up. You’re not allowed to write papers anymore that say you want a higher defense budget.
Is it so obvious that the libertarian position in pure theory and morality is that that’s a violation of free speech? I actually don’t think so. I don’t think so at that point. Now, I understand, I can hear the pushback already. Remember, I’m trying to get you to play with an idea. I’m not trying to sell you on anything. And people can say, “Well, that’s not Jimmy Kimmel exactly.”
You know, I think when you’re really at Jimmy Kimmel’s level — especially through COVID — when he’s at that position where he decides, I’m going to stop being a comedian and I’m going to start being a mouthpiece for the regime. I’m going to literally mock my fellow Americans, advocate that they don’t get health care if they haven’t gotten the COVID vax… Remember, what did he say? “You can go die now, wheezy,” or whatever his comments were.
You do put yourself in a different category, in my opinion. You made yourself part of the cathedral. In the same sense, if you came to me and said, “Oh my god, there’s a strongman political leader going up there and saying these think tanks who are taking money from weapons companies and advocating for more war, we’re shutting them all down,” would you say this is a violation of free speech? I don’t know. I don’t think so.
Actually, I think this is gangster [__]. These are two gangs fighting and I have every right to not care about that. And if you were to ask me, “Oh, Mr. Libertarian, I thought you like free speech,” I’d be like, “Well, I don’t think they’re—” you know what I mean? Like, I don’t think any of this should exist. I don’t think that weapons company should exist. I don’t think that think tank should exist. And I don’t think this politician should exist. But you know what? They all do.
So it’s not so clear from first principles that I’ve got to think these members of the regime are citizens exercising their free speech. I just do not see it that way. And I understand where people can disagree. Like I said, it is kind of arbitrary when exactly somebody becomes a member of the regime.
And I guess to that I would kind of say: yeah, there are lines that are arbitrary that must be drawn in society. You know, it’s not exactly clear when the age of consent should be.
Should you be allowed to have sex and drive a car at 18 or 19 or 20? I don’t know. But there’s got to be a line. Somewhere around there seems just about right. I mean, you could say eight-year-olds can’t be allowed to drive a car and 35-year-olds certainly can. Where do we draw that line exactly? You try to get it as close to right as you think. I’m sure we could all look at some line and go, “No, that’s way too young,” or, “No, that’s way too old.” But you have to draw it somewhere. You have to, because otherwise you can’t move forward. You can’t have a society where children operate vehicles and you can’t have a society where adults are not allowed to. So for function, you have to draw the line somewhere. And yes, it’s going to be somewhat arbitrary where you draw it.
I think Jimmy Kimmel was way over the line — way over the line of just being a member of the regime. I don’t consider that speech rights anymore at that point. I’m not one of these people who’s like, “Oh my god, I have so much sympathy for Jimmy Kimmel because his First Amendment rights were violated.” I just don’t think that’s correct.
I still think it’s really stupid and a bad direction to go down. So essentially, this is why I’m going to make nobody satisfied with this argument. I say all of that to say I still am — if you ask me what policy I support — I think it was a disaster that the FCC chairman gave them that out. What the FCC chairman did was some real gangster []. He literally said, “We could either handle this the easy way or the hard way.” You don’t have to jump — it’s not a crazy stretch to get from “we could either handle this the easy way or the hard way” to gangster []. That’s what they were doing.
Now, I don’t think in this case that’s actually why Jimmy Kimmel got fired. I think Jimmy Kimmel got fired because a big corporation jumped on the opportunity. All the outrage about the dumbass thing he said gave them the perfect out. You have outrage, affiliates threatening, and then the FCC chair threatens — perfect. Now we can dump this big contract which wasn’t justified anyway.
People have a tough time thinking in second- and third-order effects. To my point, this is no longer, to me, a moral liberty issue. This is morally wrong for the government to get involved this way. To me, these are different wings of the government fighting; that’s essentially how I view this. That happens all the time. People make the mistake of thinking of the state as a monolith. It’s not. There are examples where the State Department and the Defense Department are at odds. The CIA and the FBI have had a contentious relationship. Different presidential administrations feud, and there are beefs within administrations. It’s not a single unitary thing.
I’m saying I think of this more as a feud between the CIA and the FBI. Is anyone’s rights being violated? I don’t know. You’re all in a constant, perpetual state of violating people’s rights, so I don’t know.
So it’s not a moral issue. Then what it becomes is purely a strategic issue, and purely on strategic grounds it only hurt the right wing.
What I was saying before with the Rosie Perez thing is that people have a tough time understanding second- and third-order effects and how things play out in the long run. It’s much more challenging to look at that than to just go, “What’s the immediate next step?” Rosie Perez’s dumb line in White Men Can’t Jump was: sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win. Sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose, and sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie.
The point being that in this situation, Jimmy Kimmel was getting [__] up. He was already losing the fight. If you were in a big fight, dominating the opponent — going into the 12th round up 11 rounds to nothing — and you’re like, “I’m just going to keep killing this guy,” do you want the referee to cheat for you at that point? No. It robs your victory. It gives them a talking point.
Jimmy Kimmel was getting destroyed. His ratings have been tanking. The guy is a laughingstock. Nobody cares anymore. He’s just getting dunked on left and right because his point was the most dumbass, bonehead point. It didn’t even make sense. His argument was, “Oh, MAGA is trying to make it look like it wasn’t one of their own.” Like, no, they’re not. It clearly wasn’t. There’s no evidence pointing to that. It’s as silly as any other conspiracy.
But think about how you just took that victory away from yourself because the dumbass [__] FCC chairman had to go threatening them, and now they can make it out to be a free speech issue. So just purely on strategy, this was a bad move.
I see a few things. A lot of people understandably just want to celebrate this, and they’re kind of like, “I don’t care. You guys started playing this game, so we’re going to play this game too.” I’ve heard a few popular people — people I like — making that attitude: That’s right, we are hypocrites. We’re being hypocritical now. We’re violating free speech. We’re embracing cancel culture.
First of all, as I said before with my cathedral/regime worldview, I don’t even think that’s true. So I don’t think there’s any need to concede you’re being a hypocrite in this case. But on top of that, when people are going, “Oh, Charlie Kirk, that’s what he was doing. We tried it that way and you shot that guy in the neck, so now we’re doing it this way” — first of all, I don’t think it’s a great way to honor the guy’s legacy to say, “We’re going to reject everything he stood for.”
And second of all, what you’re leaving out is that we were finally winning. The anti-woke culture war has finally been paying off over the last few years. A big part of why they were able to win is because they could make the principled argument and win a lot of people over based off that.
So even though I’m telling you I don’t actually view it as such a simple free speech issue, it is going to be perceived that way by most people. And once you go, “Yeah, we’re not being principled either,” then you no longer can persuade the people who are persuaded by principle.
That’s one big thing to keep in mind. It’s important to keep in mind that we were winning this battle. Jimmy Kimmel was losing.
Charlie Kirk was winning. Charlie Kirk flipped the youth vote so much that it got Donald Trump elected and had him win the popular vote for the first time after getting killed in that demographic. He’s now winning that demographic. That demographic doesn’t even know who Jimmy Kimmel is, by the way, because that’s how much the old dinosaur media has been getting killed. So it feels like, on one hand, strategically you’re just giving them a talking point and snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. You’re already winning this — just keep winning this game.
Obviously, for a lot of people out there, I gave the right wing credit for there being no retaliatory violence so far. For many people that might feel good to do that in the short run, but in the long run that’s a disaster. In the long run, it’s such a moral victory for the right wing that there was no violent response. That’s something that will persuade a lot of reasonable people: you keep saying they’re the bad guys, but actually they’re the ones who really showed restraint here. That’s how you win long term.
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All right, let’s get back into the show. I understand feeling this way, particularly after everything that’s happened in the last week and a day. There’s a temptation to feel like, hey, things have gotten so far that I don’t want to hear, “Oh, we can’t embrace this or this could be used against us.” This is already being used against us. This is one area where I really will defend the libertarians, and I think they end up getting dismissed by right wingers.
And I think — look, I’m a libertarian, but I’m the first to admit when there are areas where libertarians are being goofy and right wingers are actually making a point. This is one area where I really think libertarians have consistently been proven right, and still their advice never gets heard.
It really is true that you do not want to set precedents that this model is how things are going to work. Top-down government managing of these things or government intervention in these issues never ends up being a friend of right wingers in the long run. Perhaps sometimes in the very short run, but even if you think about the Bud Light boycott, the Target boycott, or Elon Musk buying Twitter, it was always market-based actions that actually worked to roll back some of this insanity.
After 9/11 and in the following years, it was Ron Paul and the libertarians who were warning right wingers against the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, and the massive spying apparatus that was built up over the decades. Right wingers at the time were like, “No, screw you libertarian [__], we’re doing this because we’ve got a threat and we’re gonna go get that threat. We’re gonna go get the Muslims.”
And that entire apparatus ended up being turned on right-wing Americans. The Department of Homeland Security decided that domestic terrorism was the biggest threat and that MAGA Republicans were the domestic terrorists. Look at the way they went after the people on January 6th. Most right wingers now would probably admit, “Yeah, you guys were right about that one. We should have listened when you said this will be weaponized against us.”
And then the next time libertarians say, “Yeah, dude, you don’t want to do this because this could be weaponized against you,” they go, “Oh, please.” They just never learn. Even if you feel like it’s already being weaponized against you, things can get worse. I promise you, things can get much, much worse. Always think about that. Always think about whether this is really something that won’t have massive counter-reactions against you in the future.
Essentially, I feel that in the marketplace of ideas, if there aren’t restraints on us, we kill these guys every time. Every time. And part of that is that to win this fight — particularly during a crisis — you have to be at your most rational and stick to your principles the most. That’s very important, because these things are going to age a certain way.
I saw I’m not alone in this — Nick Fuentes was also catching flak from his audience for the same reason as me, because we both said there’s no evidence to suggest that Israel killed Charlie Kirk. And the way the lowbrow conspiratorial mind works, everyone went, “Ah, Nick got the call too. Dave got the call, Nick got the call.”
Whatever. None of these things prove either side is right or wrong. But if you would say me and Nick Fuentes are two of the most prominent critics of Israel in the country, and we’re both telling you there’s no evidence here, and your reaction is, “That’s proof they both got the phone call,” isn’t it more likely the opposite? I’m not saying that alone proves anything, but isn’t it more likely there’s just not enough evidence here?
Part of what people are missing is this: if you just jump on a theory with no evidence to back it up, how does that look when the dust settles? Do you think about that at all? Number one, I just wouldn’t want to do it because I think it’s wrong. But on top of that, how’s it going to age? We’re all constantly building our track record — in our personal life, in our public life. You want to think about that too.
There will be a time in the next decade when right wingers want free speech. You want that on your side. You are better off having a track record of being consistent and principled in that realm. Otherwise you’ll never reach people who care about reason and principle. And that’s what I’m all about. Those are the people I want to reach.
That’s something people should keep in mind. It doesn’t help anything, especially when they’re already dying. And as I’ve said before, I think essentially what happened here was the market. Jimmy Kimmel just—look, let’s put it this way: there was a much bigger cancellation attempt on Joe Rogan than on Jimmy Kimmel. It was much more organized, much more central, with celebrities like Neil Young saying he’d take all his music off Spotify and all this other stuff. But Joe Rogan didn’t get cancelled, because Joe Rogan’s numbers were massive.
And Jimmy Kimmel didn’t have any of that protection, so he got—so in some ways I think this was the market. But the FCC threatening the [__] out of him and then essentially taking credit for it afterward kind of robs you of that victory. It’s as if the ref started threatening one team and then after the game started bragging about how they really cheated and won that game. What’s that doing for the side that won? That’s not helping you. That’s robbing you of your victory.
So I don’t think it’s as simple as some people are making it out to be — like, “Well, Jimmy Kimmel’s just a guy, just a comedian telling a joke, and people shouldn’t get fired over telling a joke.” No, there’s a little bit more to it than that. He consciously made a decision to join the regime and be a spokesman for the regime.
Like, you go into a war zone and pick up a rifle, you are a combatant now. It doesn’t matter if you’re officially a member of that military or not. You pick up a rifle and start marching toward an opposing army, you’re fair game now. In the same sense, you made yourself part of the regime.
I don’t care about this on a moral free speech issue level. I don’t. This is the realm of strategy now. And in the realm of strategy, I think this is all wrong. I think right wingers are much better off if they just publicly say, “We don’t want the government involved in this at all, but we’re all turning off Jimmy Kimmel.”
Which, the thing is, you guys already have. I just saw a report on the numbers. The numbers were so bad, dude. This podcast is doing better than Jimmy Kimmel’s show was. And believe me, I do not have a contract like Jimmy Kimmel.
He was already losing. Just something to think about. Something for all you guys to play with.
All right, thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys on Monday. Peace.
