2299 - Dave Smith

High-Level Overview

Comedian and libertarian commentator Dave Smith, host of Part of the Problem, returns to The Joe Rogan Experience for a sprawling, fast-moving conversation about American power at home and abroad. Starting from the vandalism of Teslas, the two range across the machinery behind protest movements, the long paper trail behind America's Middle East wars, the Signal chat leak about bombing Yemen, the Israel-Palestine conflict, George Floyd and policing, immigration and deportations, the backlash against Darryl Cooper, and the rise of independent media. Smith brings the history and the footnotes; Rogan brings the gut checks, the jiu-jitsu expertise and plenty of jokes.

The tone is irreverent and profane but often angry and serious, especially when Smith talks about civilian deaths in Yemen and Gaza. Smith is openly critical of the Trump administration's early foreign policy even though he voted for Trump, and he ends on a surprisingly optimistic note: he believes the propaganda that corrupt governments depend on has finally broken. The conversation swings between detailed foreign-policy history, comedy-club banter and big-picture reflections on media, freedom and the future.

The Discussion Explores:

• How money and intelligence agencies can switch protest movements on and off, from Tesla vandalism to Ukraine's 2014 Maidan revolution
• Wesley Clark's account of the "seven countries in five years" plan and the 1996 Clean Break memo
• The Signal chat leak, the bombing of Yemen, and the long, mostly untold history of US involvement there
• Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, the rise in antisemitism, and whether US policy is making it worse
• George Floyd, chokes, policing for profit, and how unrest produces demands for more state control
• Trump's second term: border success, controversial deportations, and Smith's growing disappointments
• Darryl Cooper, cancel culture's failure, and the case for understanding history from every side
• Why Smith thinks legacy media's propaganda has broken, and what podcasts, AI and transparency mean for the future

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

The Protest Machine and "Organic" Revolutions

Rogan opens by marveling at how easily people can be wound up with a narrative, pointing to activists setting Teslas on fire. Smith finds it surreal that the left is attacking the most successful electric car company, supposedly the thing that would save the planet, because Elon Musk pointed out corruption in federal spending. He recalls a Time magazine piece from after the 2020 election, titled The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, which he says openly described coordination around social media censorship and the protest movements, and he is struck by how easily that "protest machine" can be turned on and off. Rogan's explanation is simpler: it's money. He jokes that at 21 he would happily have held a sign at a rally for $400.

Smith connects this to how he thinks intelligence agencies work, always moving things at the margins. When he calls the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine a US-backed coup against a democratically elected president, critics accuse him of denying Ukrainians' agency. His answer is that there were real people in the streets, but that the US poured about $100 million into keeping the protests going through a Ukrainian winter, with heat lamps, celebrities and concerts, until the president had to flee. He recommends Scott Horton's book Provoked, which he calls the best history of the build-up to the war in Ukraine, and praises Rogan's interviews with Mike Benz about USAID, which Benz describes as doing work too dirty for the CIA. Smith's point about scale: the US government spends six to seven trillion dollars a year, so a few billion dollars that seems small in Washington can move mountains in a small country.

The Unfalsifiable Counterfactual and the Roots of the Terror Wars

Rogan asks the "Mike Baker" question: what happens if the US stops cultivating friendly leaders and China or Russia fill the gap? Smith says war hawks almost always rely on an unfalsifiable counterfactual. Against that he sets the actual record of the last 25 years as he sees it: four to five million dead civilians, entire nations destroyed, $8 trillion spent, a $36 trillion national debt, and tens of thousands of veterans lost to suicide. The burden of proof, he argues, is on those who claim things would have been worse. He adds that Russia and China face wealthy rivals of their own, from Western Europe to Japan and South Korea.

He argues the war on terror could have ended by Christmas 2001 if special operations had finished off al-Qaeda and caught Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, and suggests bin Laden was allowed to escape because officials already had their eyes on Baghdad. He then describes a Piers Morgan debate between Scott Horton and General Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander who had earlier told Amy Goodman about a post-9/11 plan to take down seven countries in five years. In the debate, Smith says, Clark added that he first saw such plans in 1991 from Paul Wolfowitz, that Brent Scowcroft shelved them, and that they were revived later with Richard Perle's involvement. Smith ties this to A Clean Break, a 1996 paper by Perle and others written for Benjamin Netanyahu, which he describes as a strategy to abandon the Oslo peace process and instead overthrow hostile regimes in the region, something only the US could do. After 9/11, he says, there was no cautious elder statesman at the top, only Dick Cheney, and Iran is the one country on the list still left.

Signalgate, Yemen and the War Few People Covered

On the leaked Signal chat in which senior officials discussed strikes on Yemen and accidentally included a journalist from The Atlantic, Rogan can't get over how anyone could add the wrong person to a chat that sensitive. Smith thinks Mike Waltz should be fired and points out that Waltz claimed never to have met the journalist before photos of them together surfaced. He also wonders, given how Trump's own government sabotaged him in his first term, whether the leak was intentional. But, much like the leaked Victoria Nuland call where the scandal became her swearing about the EU, he says the real scandal is being ignored: the content. In the chat, he says, only JD Vance offered mild pushback, the officials cheered leveling an apartment building to kill one target at his girlfriend's home, and Tulsi Gabbard, whom he had strongly supported, joined in. He wonders aloud why no one in the room even asked whether there was a way to do this without killing a whole building's worth of people.

Smith then lays out the history as he tells it. From 2009, Obama ran a then-secret drone campaign in Yemen against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which killed Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son, both American citizens, and in which, by the estimates he cites, around 95 to 96 percent of those killed were not the targets. The result was what he calls "insurgent math": each innocent death creates new recruits. Obama paid off Yemen's dictator, Saleh, who turned US weapons on the Houthis and lost. When Saudi Arabia invaded in 2015, the Obama administration backed it to placate the Saudis, who were angry about the Iran nuclear deal and the Iraq war. Smith describes a full blockade enforced with US Navy help, US refueling of Saudi jets, and the bombing of farms, wheat silos and irrigation, which caused mass cholera deaths and what he calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis until the war wound down around 2021. They play a clip of former press secretary Robert Gibbs recalling that he was told "you're not even to acknowledge the drone program."

Smith argues the Houthis survived all of that and are now attacking shipping over Gaza, and that a few Tomahawks won't break them. He notes that Trump himself once mocked Biden for bombing the Houthis, saying diplomacy could work, and that the Houthis stopped their attacks during the ceasefire Trump's envoy negotiated. The options, as he sees them, are diplomacy or another catastrophic invasion. The two also discuss drone operators, who Rogan and Smith suspect suffer a unique kind of trauma from watching targets for days, seeing them hug their children, and then striking from a safe distance.

Israel, Gaza and the Rise of Antisemitism

Rogan asks how peace could ever come after October 7th and Israel's response. Smith offers his half-hopeful answer: England and Ireland, France and Germany, and Egypt and Israel all once seemed like permanent enemies and now aren't. But he stresses that Israel has controlled Gaza and the West Bank since 1967, nearly 60 years, and that Palestinians there lack freedom of movement, trade and voting rights. In the West Bank, he says, an Israeli settler in a dispute gets a civilian trial while a Palestinian faces a military court with a conviction rate of about 99 percent. You can't expect people to be subjugated forever without some of them fighting back, he argues, and nonviolent resistance gets met with violence too. He calls Trump's talk of taking over Gaza and turning it into a Mediterranean-style resort a call to finish ethnically cleansing the territory.

On antisemitism, Smith, who is Jewish, says it is clearly real and has exploded since the Gaza war, though he sees several drivers: trolling for a reaction, and young white men who grew up in a woke era when he says every powerful institution accepted racialism against them. Rogan notes this is new on the left and that some campus protests look funded rather than organic; Smith recalls a Jewish Columbia grad student who found the protests annoying but not threatening. His central argument mirrors the drone war: if you want less antisemitism, stop funding and arming the conflict that fuels it, and stop a system where American politicians can't criticize a foreign government that has helped pull the US into so many wars. He notes that Netanyahu told Congress in 2002 that toppling Saddam would spread democracy across the region, and has warned for decades that Iran is years away from a nuclear weapon.

The pair also discuss the Sunni-Shia divide that Saddam kept in check, and Smith, who says he is not a Christian, finds it baffling that anyone could reconcile Jesus's teachings with supporting every war. He recounts a Princeton debate against Newsweek editor Josh Hammer, who called Libya a separate liberal interventionist war, and Smith's reply that it was a remarkable coincidence that Libya was on Clark's list. Rogan adds that Libya went from one of Africa's richest countries to a failed state with slave auctions, and Smith says its collapse fed Europe's migrant crisis.

Unrest, Control and the George Floyd Case

Rogan argues that civil unrest is useful to those in power because frightened people will accept new measures that erode their liberties, and points to the UK and Germany arresting people over social media posts. Smith quotes the late libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne, who used to say "the government breaks your leg and then offers you a crutch," and then convinces you to be grateful for it. His example is 2020: when the George Floyd video first appeared, even his Fox-watching father-in-law wanted the officers charged with murder, but after a summer of riots, many of the same people wanted the military sent in.

Rogan brings his grappling experience to the debate over whether Derek Chauvin's knee was really on Floyd's neck. He is emphatic that weight on the neck can put someone to sleep and restrict breathing, especially someone in poor health with an enlarged heart and drugs in his system, noting that fighters have been choked unconscious with one arm. They look up the toxicology numbers during the show (11 nanograms of fentanyl, alongside a low level of meth) and Rogan explains how LD50 works and why a chronic user may tolerate high doses. Both call Chauvin's conduct brutal and unnecessary, while Smith questions why this one incident became a national racial story when a few hundred similar incidents happen every year. Rogan argues police should keep chokes, since a quick rear naked choke and cuffing would have been safer than four minutes under a knee, and both acknowledge how dangerous and thankless police work is, including traffic stops that suddenly turn into shootings.

That leads into policing for profit. Rogan describes a cop friend who called himself a glorified revenue collector under ticket quotas. Smith recalls a New York police slowdown over stop-and-frisk in which officers threatened to only arrest violent criminals, crime didn't rise, but revenue fell, and the city pushed them back to writing tickets. He also points out that a flat $75 ticket falls far harder on working people than on the wealthy.

Immigration, Deportations and Trump's Second Term

Smith credits Trump with dramatically cutting border crossings, and repeats Trump's State of the Union line that "the democrats kept saying we needed legislation to close the border turns out we just needed a new president," which he calls shockingly true. He agrees that a nation needs borders. But he argues the administration is squandering a hard-won public consensus for deportations by sending people without due process to a notorious prison in El Salvador, getting some of them wrong, and targeting legal residents over pro-Palestinian op-eds. Just as the civil rights movement won by forcing Americans to watch dogs and firehoses turned on peaceful men in suits, he fears televised cruelty could turn the public against deportations. He also criticizes Tom Homan's response to due process questions, noting that murder victims don't get due process precisely because murder is illegal.

Rogan argues that Democrats brought migrants into swing states, supported by NGOs and housing such as the Roosevelt Hotel, to build a lasting voting base. Smith says commentators openly bragged years ago about demographic change delivering permanent Democratic majorities, then called it a Nazi talking point when others described it. They also mock the claim that voter ID is racist, recalling Governor Kathy Hochul's remark about computers and noting that vaccine mandates required ID too. Smith observes that Trump won a larger share of Latino voters than any Republican in his memory, even after Tony Hinchcliffe's Puerto Rico joke, and that progressive diversity politics often means imposing "white lady values" on minority communities that, in his and Rogan's experience as comedians, take a joke far better. They also discuss the special hostility aimed at Black conservatives such as Candace Owens.

Smith is candid about his mixed feelings on Trump. He calls him "a once in a century type of figure" who dealt devastating blows to the Republican establishment, the Democratic establishment and the corporate media. But he is dismayed by the Yemen strikes, the Gaza talk, and Trump's push to primary Congressman Thomas Massie for voting against a spending bill while backing Lindsey Graham. He says that if Trump invades Iran and starts another war, he will apologize for voting for him; short of that, he still thinks it was the right call because the "astroturfed" Kamala Harris candidacy had to be exposed.

Darryl Cooper, Cancel Culture and Seeing History Whole

Smith, who says he promoted Darryl Cooper's podcast early, describes the outrage after Cooper's Tucker Carlson appearance and the labels thrown at Rogan for hosting him. Cooper's remark that Churchill was in some ways the villain of the war was, Smith argues, framed as a provocation to a friend and meant only that Churchill turned a smaller conflict into a larger bloodbath, not that he committed the worst atrocities. He issued his "non woke challenge" to critic Constantin Kisin: listen to half an hour of Cooper's Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem on Jewish suffering and say whether a Jew-hating Nazi sympathizer could have made it. The smear campaign failed, both men note, and only sent Cooper up the charts. Rogan praises Cooper's empathy, including his series on Jim Jones, a one-time civil rights activist who descended into drug-fueled madness.

Smith says Cooper's series actually made him more sympathetic to Israelis by putting the Nakba in the context of 1947: two years after firebombings, atomic bombs, the Holocaust and Stalin's mass expulsions of ethnic Germans. He recounts how Zionist militias like the Irgun openly debated and embraced terrorism against the British, while Chaim Weizmann argued that "we can't achieve a Jewish state by un-Jewish means," and how Menachem Begin, after British soldiers were flogged and killed, declared that Jews would now do the flogging. Smith still considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians inexcusable and favors a two-state solution and ending US funding, but he values understanding the human beings on each side.

He traces his own political origin to watching Ron Paul tell Rudy Giuliani in a 2007 debate that terrorists attacked because of US actions abroad, and that the CIA itself coined the word blowback. He uses the scene in Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon's character chooses the wrench, just to spite his abuser, to explain why people act in ways that look irrational from outside. The same logic, he says, explains angry young men told for years that their masculinity is toxic, and the rise of the Nazis after the humiliation of Versailles. Both argue that suppressing debate about Israel and Gaza creates a "third rail" that makes people more suspicious, feeding the very antisemitism it is supposed to prevent.

Why Smith Thinks the Propaganda Is Breaking

Despite everything, Smith says he is optimistic over the long term. He believes COVID was the single biggest awakening: lockdowns were a form of domestic totalitarianism that Americans felt directly, and the lab-leak story has gone from fringe to mainstream, with Bill Maher recently noting a reported British intelligence assessment in March 2020. He cites Ron Paul's line that "the peace candidate always wins," pointing to George W. Bush's "humble foreign policy" campaign, Obama's anti-war run against Hillary Clinton, and Trump in 2016 and 2024. He credits DOGE with bringing government corruption to the cultural forefront even if its cuts were limited, and notes that interest on the debt was about 1.2 trillion dollars last year. He also sees a parallel with Bobby Kennedy's MAHA movement, which redirected pandemic-era talk of a health crisis toward chronic illness.

Rogan contrasts the US with the UK and parts of Europe, where speech arrests are increasing, and credits the First and Second Amendments. Smith dismisses the idea that rifles are useless against a modern military by pointing to the Taliban, and argues that America's success is tied to being founded on limits on what the government may do to its people.

Independent Media and a Future Where It's Harder to Lie

The conversation turns to Rogan's own show. Rogan insists that no one guides it, that Spotify has no say over guests, and jokes that having Kurt Metzger on proves there is no big money behind it. He says he started the podcast for fun with webcams and a USB microphone, and has turned down offers to buy stakes in it. Smith recalls Tucker Carlson saying Smith is "totally unencumbered by any restraints," and argues that authenticity is the whole secret: the corporate media is like a cheating spouse asking what the faithful partner's trick is. He predicts that long, unscripted podcast appearances will now be expected of presidential candidates, favoring figures like JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard over scripted politicians like Kamala Harris or Tim Walz. He gives Gavin Newsom credit for launching a podcast and invites himself on, but thinks the polished old-school politician archetype has been rejected.

They praise independent journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, and note that cancel culture no longer works the way it did when figures like Milo Yiannopoulos disappeared. On AI, Rogan predicts a world unrecognizable within 20 years and even a reliable lie-detector app, while Smith recalls Rogan once saying it's "gonna be harder and harder to lie." They close by criticizing the Harris campaign's embrace of Liz Cheney, Biden's use of the autopen and his pardons, including Anthony Fauci's reaching back to 2014, and claims around October 7th, such as reports of beheaded babies, that Smith says turned out not to be true, while he stresses that Hamas's attack was horrific. Smith signs off by plugging Part of the Problem, Legion of Skanks and Skank Fest in New Orleans.

Conclusion

This episode is Dave Smith doing what he does best: pairing comic timing with a dense, footnoted case against American interventionism. His through-line is that violence and suppression create the very enemies they claim to fight, whether drone strikes in Yemen swelling al-Qaeda's ranks, the Gaza war fueling antisemitism, or cancellation campaigns turning Darryl Cooper into a chart-topper. He is sharply critical of Trump's early foreign policy and deportation tactics while still defending his vote, and he closes with real optimism that COVID, independent media and a public that is weary of war have broken the old propaganda. Listeners who want the detailed histories of Yemen, the Clean Break memo and the George Floyd debate, along with plenty of Rogan-Smith banter, will find the full conversation worth their time.

This is a summary of "2299 - Dave Smith" from The Joe Rogan Experience, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.