"The More I Learn About That Guy, The More I Don't Care For Him"
Thoughts Tangential To A Viral Video
Prologue
Our title today is a Norm Macdonaldism:
However, some people, apparently, are willing to trend in the direction of absolving him of the brunt of the blame for the start of World War II. Obviously, a “chief villain”, so to speak, of this trend is Darryl Cooper. I’m not interested in talking about him, but I do have thoughts to share about someone in his circle.
Based on the happenstance of how my still-modest audience has been constructed, I suspect that roughly two-thirds of you are fans of one Dave Smith, and that roughly the other third haven’t or have barely heard of him.1 Even if you’re in the latter third, he’s no rando, with 750k Xwitter followers, 300k YouTube subscribers, and multiple exposures to Joe Rogan’s audience of millions.
So, I don’t really have much to gain with this post, but here goes. The main claim: Even if you do agree with Smith on some, most, or all things, you might want to look elsewhere for the same takes. I’ll explain why—and I would say the same thing about anyone who was revealed to make the errors he does.
Myself, I think I had heard of Smith, but only in passing, prior to this train wreck—a train wreck for which, among those likely to have seen it, Smith was not responsible.
But that’s not what I want to talk about, per se. In fact, I’m mostly done talking.
Forget about the title of the following video, I don’t agree with it necessarily.2 But fast forward to the 38:55 mark and watch for about 15 minutes.3 I couldn’t help but come away agreeing with those who have asserted that Smith relies too heavily on out-of-context pull quotes in making his points.
It’s not only this brutal takedown that has me going from not particularly aware of what Smith has to say to not particularly interested, but that’s when the switch flipped.
Smith might characterize all of this, as he did with the viral “you’ve never been?” moment against Murray, as a “non-argument.” Sure, it’s not an argument against his positions—but it is an argument against his methods. And those matter.
Surely there are more careful proponents of Smith’s positions out there, right? If so, why aren’t such proponents better known? And yet, if there aren’t—what would that say about those positions?
Epilogue
And I agree with him on at least one thing—it would be great if there were no more wars ever. At the highest level, perhaps even the Smith–Murray fracas is a disagreement on means (and whodunnits) rather than ends.
What was meant, and I don’t know if I agree with this either, is that Smith conceded several substantive points—substantive points (and now I’m sharing something I do think) that did exist within the conversation, but which got far less attention than the much more clippably obvious strategic error(s) made by Murray.
Less, if you’re like me and play your longform videos at 1.25x or 1.5x speed.
Anyone looking for an out will probably take it at the ChatGPT reference, but you can get the same gist, with far more extra detail, here. Smith’s timeline is simply and inarguably off, and each of the four “fact checks” (they don’t use that term) in the 15 minutes reflects increasingly badly on him.