“

I remember one time my younger brother…who’s 13 years younger than me…I think he was 3 years old, so I was 16 and I was watching the Knicks game. I’ll never forget this 3 year old kid and he comes over to me and he was like asking about it and I was like here come watch the game with me. And so we’re sitting on the couch, he’s 3, we’re watching the Knicks game, and he looked at me and he went, “Which one is me?”

And I was like, “What do you mean which one is you? I was like, we’re rooting for the team in the blue shirts.” And then he kind of accepted that. Like, OK.

But I just remember always thinking there’s like this…it’s so profound that that’s what’s in us. It’s like, OK, you want me to like, get into this like, kind of project abstraction, so, who am I? What defines me? Like that’s so important to people. It gets right to the core of everything. Who am I, like as a person? Like what’s my identity?

And I think that for, look you saw this with, broadly speaking liberal America. Well, during covid it’s like, they’re identity, they’re whole identity, is that they’re the scientific people. You know, you guys are the backwards roobs who believe in superstition and religion, but we believe in science and reason. This is what makes us better. That’s their identity. So once you tell them that the science says this…it was so easy to get them in. It’s why it’s so easy to get them in on climate change.

And then with like more conservative America, they’re who identity is that like, they’re the tough ones who defend the country. Who aren’t wusses. Who will defend the constitution. So as soon as you fed them a narrative that gave them that identity it was so easy to fool them will all this other stuff.

So I do think that’s a big part of, they’re very good, that’s what the propagandists do at their best — is they play off your sense of self. Your identity.

Dave Smith

Dave Smith: Tim Walz Exposed and the State of the 2024 Race, The Tucker Carlson Show, ~2:05