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Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté

Dave Smith: A Jewish Libertarian Comedian Walks Into a Lefty Podcast

Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté

Useful Idiots, LLC

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.54.6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Click here for the full interview with Dave Smith: https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/dave-smith-a-jewish-libertarian-comedian?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: Trump Pins January 6 On Hezbollah https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/trump-pins-january-6-on-hezbollah?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

For $6 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and bonus content at http://usefulidiotspodcast.com

Join us LIVE on Youtube every Monday at 10am EST for Monday Mourning, where we watch the Sunday morning news shows so that you don't have to.

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Dave Smith is Part of the Problem. He’s a Jewish, anti-Zionist, libertarian comedian who makes a lot of people mad – but today he’s on Useful Idiots to make us laugh. And you’ll see very quickly how his no-nonsense approach to foreign policy matches almost perfectly with the progressive anti-war mindset.

“My beef with Israel,” Dave explains, “has nothing to do with how I feel about Jewish people. I just think you can't occupy a group of people and then indiscriminately slaughter them. That's not cool.”

And here’s where the libertarian comes in: “And why on earth should I be forced to fund that, especially when it's so clearly at the expense of my country and my country's interests? Syria is the perfect example of this. On one side you have Al Qaeda, the enemy of the American people. And on the other side, you have Bashar al-Assad, the enemy of the Israeli government. And who are we picking? We're picking the enemy of my country's people. It's such an outrage.”

But as Useful Idiots knows all too well, speaking out brings a flood of outrage and name calling. But outrage and names, Dave explains, is about all they’ve got.

“If that's the counter argument then you really must be on weak ground. You know whatever I'm a Putin-apologist or I'm a terrorist-lover or a self-hating Jew or a Nazi or whatever you want to say. It's just so dumb, are we in the third grade?”

But his common-sense, anti-war argument is far from mainstream, especially in places where the government can dominate thinking in both the media and the culture itself. “It’s the dynamic under the U.S. dominant culture,” he says. “If joe Biden or Donald Trump or Barack Obama were to drone bomb a wedding in Yemen, which is something they tend to do, and they kill like six children and fourteen adults and a couple hundred others were wounded; and then that same day they gave a press conference and they said ‘I don't believe [x culture issue],’ what would be the big outrage of the day?”

Subscribe for the full interview with Dave Smith for his takes on Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Jake Shields, how Israel has created more antisemitism, and a progressive vs libertarian debate on welfare.

00:00 Intro

01:58 Ro Khanna admits Dems sold out workers

07:37 LA mayor cut LAFD funds (and gave them to the LAPD)

12:22 Trump thinks Canada should be honored to be annexed

18:37 Biden makes the wildfires about himself

20:56 ABC reporter's wardrobe trick busted during LA fire

23:16 Dave Smith interview

24:09 Trump and Obama BFFs

27:45 Dems are changing their messaging

31:04 Is MAGA a cult?

35:31 Trump is untouchable

41:21 Chomsky or Trump?

43:45 Why Dave rejected Zionism

50:25 Welfare: Progressive vs Libertarian Debate



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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

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0:53.6

it's about keeping everything secure.

1:00.8

Hello and welcome to useful idiots. I'm Katie Helper. I'm Erin Matei, and I'm also very happy to

1:08.7

announce or re-announce, because we've already announced it once, but

1:12.4

there's never enough times to celebrate the fact that we've recently passed 150,000

1:17.3

subscribers on YouTube. Thank you so much for making that possible.

1:21.7

Unbelievable. Yeah.

1:22.7

No thank you to the powers that be that I'm sure have been suppressing us and been keeping

1:27.1

us under 150,000 for so long. But you, the audience, you beat the powers that be that I'm sure have been suppressing us and been keeping us under $150,000 for so long.

1:28.9

But you, the audience, you beat the algorithmic suppression.

1:32.3

We're very grateful to you and to another 150 more, which I'm sure will take, I don't

1:37.7

know, 25 years due to the, due to the aforementioned algorithmic suppression.

1:42.8

But very thankful.

1:44.1

And to support the show, keep us going.

1:46.0

You can go to useful idiots, podcast.com.

1:49.3

Keep us going and get bonus content.

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