Notes from Upstream: Dave Smith Is Not Funny

With fair-weather 'friends' like this, who needs late-nite lefty comics.

Communist Saul Alinsky is supposed to have said, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

For some people, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Jews.”

One of three newspapers I rely on for coverage of my home country America is the London Daily Mail. Last week I came across an odd item. It seemed that one major supporter of Donald Trump had turned on Trump because of Trump’s willingness to take military action against Iran.

This major supporter was named Dave Smith. I had never heard of him, but if the Daily Mail knows about Dave Smith from all the way over in London, he must be an important American political figure.

Major American Political Figure

The Mail referred to him as “comedian” Dave Smith. To learn more, I watched a YouTube comedy video called “30 Minutes with Dave Smith.”

It was a long half-hour. Smith relies on cadence and rhythm to tell the audience where a punch line might be. That’s how they know when to laugh, to the extent they do laugh, since Dave shows a most plentiful lack of wit. I watched the entire thirty minutes, waiting for something funny to happen, but it never did.

Smith started by declaring himself a “Jew,” but that is the last time anything Jewy came up. What defines Dave is that he’s from “the nineties.” He complains that contemporary Gangsta Rap is insufficiently ugly compared to the authentic article he listened to as a kid. His complaint establishes him as a kind of tough guy.

It has always struck me as revealing that the actual tough guys who fought World War 2 listened to sentimental songs full of beauty and emotion. They had experienced more than enough violence and ugliness in real life. Weaker men prefer listening to violent and ugly sounds to establish their toughness.

To add to his tough guy credentials, Smith drops a lot of obscenities. He also poses as a daring taboo breaker, but in his entire half hour he utters only two “forbidden” words: “faggot” and “retarded.” He repeats those words over and over. To hear Smith tell it, there are a lot of “faggots” and “retards” out there.

Of course, in the “bro” world Smith inhabits, the abuse of these particular slurs is generally more required than taboo.

One sentence in particular reveals Smith’s underlying malice. About politicians, he says, quite seriously, “They’re all blood-soaked monsters.”

What could be funnier than that?

But the Daily Mail treats Smith as a significant Trump supporter. Why?

We all remember kids like Dave from school. They chase popularity by hanging with the already popular.

Recently Smith has popped up on all sorts of venues, including the Tucker Carlson podcast, some rigged “debates” against Konstantin Kisin and Natasha Hausdorff on the Piers Morgan podcast, and frequent appearances with his good buddy Joe Rogan.

Smith’s debate with Hausdorff was instructive. She is an accomplished attorney with decades of experience in international law and a deep grasp of the subject. For example, unlike Piers Morgan or Dave Smith, she knows what is meant by the legal term of art “proportionate.”

None of her knowledge made a dent on the two rude and sneering punks who ganged up on her. Smith’s contribution was to sit smirking like a spoiled teenager as Piers Morgan interrupted her over sixty (60!) times.

Emphasis requires that I repeat that. Sixty interruptions.

Insufficiently celebrated.

Some suggest that Piers Morgan shut her down because she’s a woman. Maybe in part. But I think it was because she is lower in the celebrity hierarchy than Piers Morgan. Morgan never interrupted Jordan Peterson, whose opinions on Israel differ little from Hausdorff’s. But Peterson is more famous than Morgan, so Peterson got to speak while Morgan nodded along, pretending to listen and learn.

Morgan is a classic bully who is subservient to anyone higher than him in the celebrity hierarchy and abusive to anyone lower.

The Piers Morgan debacle was similar to Rogan and Smith’s behavior toward Douglas Murray, who dared to ask if either of them actually knows anything about Israel.

Knows what he’s talking about.

To Rogan and Smith, that made Murray a target of ridicule. Their logic was clear. Experts misled us about Covid, the Iraq War and many other issues. Therefore, all experts are frauds, and the more expertise a person possesses, the more fraudulent the person.

By that logic, ignorance is a positive credential. Since Dave Smith is reliably ignorant, we should all listen to him and not to the guy who’s been there and knows what he’s talking about.

After all, you don’t need to have been to Nazi Germany to know it was evil. Of course, we know Nazi Germany was evil only because of the evidence provided by millions of witnesses with firsthand knowledge.

Rogan never disrespects expertise in a subject he knows something about, like MMA. When it comes to MMA, Rogan interviews only people who know what they’re talking about. We have a word for those people; we call them “experts.”

If Rogan were consistent, he’d interview Murray on MMA, a subject about which Murray is likely as ignorant as Smith is about Israel.

But Dave Smith needs no knowledge. He has passion. When challenged in a debate by anyone who defends Israel, he exercises his passion by shouting and sneering and interrupting.

His debating style is the standard style of the fanatic. He simply ignores all inconvenient facts and blitzkriegs his opponent with randomly shouted irrelevant and untrue facts intended to overwhelm his opponent with noise. That’s what he tried with Konstantin Kisin in another “debate,” and after Kisin cooly exposed Smith’s nonsense, Dave begged Piers Morgan to bail him out like a true little “retard faggot.”

Of course, Morgan did as Dave begged.

Cool

Some of Smith’s arguments are downright idiotic. Smith has labeled Israel’s Gaza operations as “intentional murder,” arguing, “If you know civilians will die, you’re intending to kill them.”

Civilians do die in wars. Two million German civilians died during World War 2. By Smith’s reasoning, every American who put on a uniform for World War 2 or any other of our wars is guilty of “intentional murder.”

Besides illogic, another trademark of the fanatic is inconsistency. For example, according to the Mail, Smith blamed Trump for being a warmonger.

“He should be impeached and removed.”…said the comedian, who previously supported Trump’s plan to end “forever wars,” He condemned the president’s response as an “absolute betrayal of everything that he ran and campaigned on” after the Republican vowed to end international conflict during the election cycle.

Practically in the next breath, Smith attacked Trump for being “impotent.”

“Donald Trump telling [Iran] to come back to the negotiating table now is a joke,” Smith said. “I mean what an impotent leader! To be sitting there talking about coming back to the negotiating table. It’s like sitting there after Pearl Harbor and telling FDR now is the time to go negotiate with the Japanese. Negotiations are over now.”

Of course, Smith said all that right before the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program. Events have shown whether Donald Trump is “impotent.”

Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” but in minds as tiny as Smith’s, there is little room for consistency, foolish or otherwise.

So much for logic. Now we must move on to Dave Smith’s main theme: exposing the Israeli conspiracy against America.

According to Dave Smith, the Israelis and their American Jew allies are behind every war in which the U.S. has engaged. They dictate American foreign policy.

But don’t dare accuse him of antisemitism, because he says his grandfather died in the Holocaust.

This may shock some readers, but so what?

Most Jews in America come from families who lived in Europe. That means most of us have family members murdered by the Nazis. I was never raised to believe that this fact makes me an oracle.

If someone is completely wrong, I don’t need to reach the question of his motives. I don’t have to care whether Tucker Carlson harbors antisemitism in the dark recesses of his soul. If he does, that’s his problem, not mine. The same goes for Dave Smith.

Moreover, Smith’s reliance on his “I have a grandfather” canard reveals a fatal misunderstanding.

The Holocaust does not define Jewishness one way or the other. The Holocaust is something that happened to us. It has nothing to say about what it means to be a Jew. Jewishness is rooted in our shared history as a people and values like God and Torah.

There are people with Jewish ancestors who neither know nor care about any of that. They do find their Jewish ancestors handy as credentials in their Jew bashing, that is, to legitimize their slanders of other Jews.

Smith complains a lot about Israel-bashers like himself being called “antisemitic.”

I am not calling Dave Smith antisemitic. Why bother? But since he has raised the subject so many times himself, I will point out obvious parallels with known Jew haters of the past.

Let’s start with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the famous forgery published by the Czar’s secret police in 1903. According to this fake, the Jews have been ruining the countries they infest for millennia, going back to Periclean Greece. The Jews organized the seventeenth century execution of Charles II of England. The Jews prepared the French Revolution of the 1790s. Their Zionist leader Herzl also predicted and planned the destruction of the Turkish Caliphate, which in turn freed up the Zionists to seize Muslim land and set up their Zionist Entity on the land.

In 1939, the foremost Jew hater of all time spoke about Jews and their responsibility for all the world’s wars:

“Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

In 1941, he added the First World War to his list of Jewish crimes.

“This criminal race has the two million dead of the [First] World War on their conscience, and now hundreds of thousands. Let no one say to me: we cannot send them into the mire. Who concerns themselves about our men? It is good if preceding us is the terror that we are exterminating the Jews. The attempt to found a Jewish state will fail.”

Like his predecessors, Smith rants often about Israeli and Jewish responsibility for American wars.

“Name one Middle East war the Israel lobby didn’t push for. Iraq? Check. Syria? Check. Iran next? You bet. AIPAC’s got our politicians on a leash, and we’re the ones paying for it.”

And:

“AIPAC brags about it. They got the receipts. They pushed for Iraq, they pushed for pressure on Syria, and now they’re all in on Iran. The Israel lobby isn’t some secret—it’s right there, making sure we fight their wars.”

And:

“Israel’s lobby makes sure we’re always one step from war with Iran. They got Trump and Biden both parroting their line. It’s not about American security—it’s about Israel’s regional dominance.”

In his recent “debate” with Konstantin Kisin, Smith also blamed Israel and the Jewish lobby for the war President Obama and Hillary Clinton launched against Gaddafi in Libya. We all remember the famous Hillary Clinton interview she boasted “We came, we saw, he died.”

And so it goes. For “Jews,” Smith simply substitutes “Israel” as the source of international war. His substitution may be the only difference between him and the more overt Jew haters he actively pals with, like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper.

After Cooper called for the U.S. to bomb Tel Aviv, Smith called his views “nuanced.”

Smith insists that it’s unfair to suggest his rantings might be antisemitic. He points that his Libertarian “philosophy” is inconsistent with the philosophy of National Socialism.

Does anyone else remember Hugh Hefner’s Playboy “philosophy”? For decades, Hefner published a magazine pushing a sophisticated “philosophy” which boiled down to having random sex with large-breasted women.

Another philosopher, with friend

Just as Rogan now interviews Smith for his libertarianism, once upon a time, college boys read Playboy “for the articles.”

Smith asserts that he attacks Israel to protect Jews. According to him, Israel’s “crimes” fuel Jew hatred.

But he never asks the obvious question. If his accusations of Israeli crimes are false, doesn’t that make him and his fellow liars the ones fueling Jew hatred?

Take his accusation of Israeli “apartheid.” There is no such thing. Yoseph Haddad is an Arab who grew up in Haifa, Israel. He rejects all accusations of “apartheid” in Israel.

Possesses “lived experience”

Naturally, the fabled Oxford Union has greeted Mr. Haddad with open arms:

This is one of my favorite videos. It features another Arab Israeli who has just returned from South Africa. She is asked about her own experience of apartheid.

If Israel being an “apartheid state” would fuel violence against Jews, then every time Dave Smith spouts that lie, he is the one fueling violence against Jews.

I have not said that Dave Smith is antisemitic.

But as Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). He wrote Where There Is No Man, a novel of one Jewish American’s life-and-death struggle against American jihadis.