Smith, Dave

libertarian comedian and podcast host, Part of the Problem

Dave Smith: Israel, Hamas, Ukraine, Russia, Conspiracies & Antisemitism

Lex Fridman Podcast · Apr 8, 2025

• Dave Smith
• libertarianism
• Ron Paul
• Israel-Palestine
• Hamas
• Ukraine war
• NATO
• Jeffrey Epstein
• antisemitism
• Joe Rogan

Core ideas

Smith locates himself in the Murray Rothbard/Ron Paul strand of libertarianism (closer to anarcho-capitalism than the Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman mainstream), and describes Ron Paul — whom he reveres "on the level of the founding fathers" — as formative because Paul fused small-government economics with anti-interventionist foreign policy at a time when American political culture kept those two commitments artificially separate (small government at home, empire abroad for conservatives; skepticism of war but comfort with domestic big government for liberals). He credits Paul, and Pat Buchanan's "they don't hate us for our freedom" framing, with giving him — as an 18-year-old living through 9/11 in New York — the first account of the War on Terror that actually made sense: American bases in the Muslim holy land and decades of intervention generate blowback, not abstract hatred of liberty. He extends this into "insurgent math" (a term coined by General McChrystal — "10 minus 2 equals 20"): each drone strike that kills civilians recruits more fighters than it eliminates, citing Yemen/AQAP's growth throughout the 2009–2015 drone campaign as a direct illustration, and frames both 9/11 and October 7th as expressions of the same primal "some other tribe killed our people, now we kill theirs" logic — a human universal he says is compounded, not caused, by a self-perpetuating military-industrial complex (intelligence agencies, weapons manufacturers, sympathetic media) that manufactures public consent for wars with no organic constituency (the 1991 Gulf War being his go-to example).

On China and Taiwan, Smith argues America has no standing to "allow or disallow" what China does with Taiwan any more than China would have standing over a hypothetical US invasion of Mexico, and notes that in every US war-game scenario, a conventional US-China war over Taiwan is lost; if TSMC dependency is the real strategic concern, the answer is domestic chip manufacturing capacity, not military posturing. On just war theory, he holds that killing innocents is never a moral right, only sometimes an excusable last resort under extreme, provable necessity — a standard he says almost no modern war (including the War on Terror and the Gaza campaign) comes close to meeting, and that the "onus" must always fall on the party using force to prove no other option existed, rather than treating a stated end goal ("Hamas must go," "Saddam is a new Hitler") as license for any resulting civilian toll.

On Israel/Gaza, Smith condemns October 7th unambiguously as terrorism that never justifies targeting civilians (rejecting Osama bin Laden's logic that citizens of a democracy bear responsibility for their government's crimes), while arguing October 7th was itself an indictment of the post-1967 occupation and, specifically, of Netanyahu's own long-documented strategy of funneling Qatari cash to prop up Hamas in order to keep Gaza and the West Bank divided and forestall any two-state pressure. He argues Israel cannot simultaneously blockade Gaza since 2007 (barring even "dual-use" items like sugar and potatoes) and disclaim responsibility for Gazan welfare — comparing this to the principle that kidnapping someone and refusing to feed them is a worse crime than the kidnapping alone — and that reputable international aid organizations, not cash transfers to a militant government, were the available alternative. Pressed to steelman Douglas Murray's "democracy vs. death cult" framing, Smith argues Israel cannot accurately be called a democracy while 5–6 million Palestinians under its control have no vote, no fair trial, and no freedom of movement — an arrangement he calls, "not to be inflammatory," an apartheid state — and that a death-cult framing sits awkwardly next to a roughly 20-to-1 Palestinian-to-Israeli death toll across the conflict's history. His moral through-line: whether killing civilians is done "cleanly" via sophisticated weaponry and declared regret, or crudely and celebrated, the underlying act — killing people you know will die, over and over, as policy — is the same crime a domestic court would call first-degree murder, and stated intentions don't change that once the pattern is foreseeable and repeated. He sees paths to peace (Saudi/UAE/Jordan/Egypt normalization contingent on a genuine two-state resolution, akin to the Egypt-Israel land-for-peace deal that ended their wars) as real but requiring Israel to relinquish control ("take their boot off the Palestinians' neck") despite legitimate security fears, comparable to abolitionist-era fears about freed slaves.

On Darryl Cooper (a friend), Smith defends him against "Nazi apologist" characterizations, arguing Cooper's actual long-form work is careful and responsible even when a single hyperbolic Tucker Carlson line ("Churchill was the chief villain of World War II") gets stripped of context; Lex pushes back directly, calling the Churchill claim "dead wrong" and arguing a German invasion of the USSR was likely inevitable regardless of Churchill's role — a disagreement both leave open for a future direct Cooper-Fridman conversation. Smith's broader point is that invoking WWII/Hitler analogies (Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Hamas, even Trump) has become a rhetorical weapon to pre-authorize total war against parties who, unlike the Nazis at their height, control no comparable territory or power — and that even if WWII itself was necessary, the "lesson" (appeasement is always wrong, aggression is always justified) doesn't follow and has fueled real catastrophes since.

On antisemitism, Smith — Jewish himself — says he sees more raw Jew-hatred on X than ever, but argues the loudest online antisemites and the loudest "everything is antisemitic" accusers feed each other, making the term nearly meaningless, and separately theorizes that young men who came of age under progressive identity politics ("if everyone else gets a grievance identity, why not us") supply a demand-side explanation distinct from genuine hatred; he insists people should separate legitimate grievances (US foreign policy shaped substantially around Israel, per General Wesley Clark's account of a plan to topple seven countries in five years) from illegitimate racialized hatred, while personally rejecting the "hysteria" that treats mean tweets as comparable to Nazi Germany given Jewish flourishing in America.

On Jeffrey Epstein, Smith treats the case's specifics (Mossad/CIA ties, unexplained wealth trajectory from Dalton teacher to Bear Stearns partner, the mysterious missing "tapes," Alex Acosta's account of being told to go easy because Epstein was "intelligence," Pam Bondi's unexplained national-security redactions) as less important than what the case reveals structurally: a blackmail-and-abuse network touching the most powerful people in the world produced no resignations, no accountability, and eroding institutional trust across the board — the same dynamic, in his view, as no one being fired over the Iraq War's lies or COVID policy failures. On Ukraine/Russia, Smith holds Putin fully responsible for launching the invasion (using a domestic-murder-trial standard: full moral responsibility rests with whoever "pulls the trigger," regardless of provocation) while arguing NATO expansion was reckless and foreseeable, citing NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg's own admission that Putin sent a draft treaty in 2021 offering not to invade in exchange for a written Ukraine-NATO exclusion, George Kennan's 1998 prediction that expansion would provoke exactly the reaction used to justify further expansion, and CIA director William Burns's 2008 "Nyet Means Nyet" cable warning Ukrainian NATO membership could force Russia into "a decision it does not want to have to make." He sees Trump as genuinely, urgently invested in ending the war (having staked political capital on it) and Putin as having repeatedly avoided maximalist options (not annexing Crimea/Donbas after 2014-15 referenda) as evidence he wants an end, while dismissing Zelensky's demand for a US security guarantee as an entitlement no great power should extend, given the risk of permanent war-footing.

On epistemics, Smith distinguishes between conspiratorial speculation and rigorous claims, using the PNAC "New Pearl Harbor" document (cited by 9/11 truthers as proof of an inside job) and the "Israel did 9/11" insurance-policy theory as examples of evidence that sounds compelling but doesn't actually prove intent, contrasted with what he considers provable — that neoconservatives had an Iraq invasion agenda for a decade predating any WMD pretext. He and Lex converge on the idea that certainty reads as intelligence and confidence as leadership, which structurally rewards dogmatists over people who show genuine epistemic humility, and both admit to feeling the psychological "gravitational pull" of conspiratorial narratives even while trying to resist it. Closing on hope, Smith relays economist Gene Epstein's "case for radical optimism" (no one in 1845 could have predicted Western slavery's abolition within 20 years; no one in 1981 predicted the Soviet Union's collapse within a decade) and argues the "regime" has irreversibly lost its former monopoly on wartime propaganda — the 2002-style universal media consensus that manufactured support for invading Iraq could not be replicated today given Rogan, Tucker, and independent media — making him broadly optimistic about the trajectory of institutional accountability and open discourse.

Excerpts