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Sept. 25, 2017 - The Michael Knowles Show
50:45
Ep. 32 - Free Speech Hour ft. Dave Rubin

Classical liberal Dave Rubin stops by the studio to discuss free speech as Milo's Berkeley #FreeSpeechWeek flops and President Trump calls out knee-dropping NFL activists. Then, Allie Stuckey and Jacob Airey join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss Anthony Weiner in the can and NPR's lambasting the unfair exclusivity of women's sports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Milo's free speech week at Berkeley is a bust, and President Trump is calling out knee-dropping NFL ingrates.
We will talk all manner of free speech with our in-studio guest, Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report.
How lucky am I? Then, Allie Stuckey and Jacob Berry join the panel of deplorables to discuss Anthony Weiner in the can and NPR's lambasting the unfair exclusivity of women's sports.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Dave, thank you for coming.
Thank you for coming on.
You've made the trek.
It's like three or four blocks all the way.
I made the trek already.
I hear Shapiro and Clayton screaming in the hallway.
Oh, it must be any time of the day.
Yeah.
It must be at any point on any day of the week.
So, by sheer coincidence, by absurd coincidence, you are here.
We'd already booked you.
And all anyone is talking about today is free speech.
The Milo thing, the Trump thing.
One might say it's providential.
You're an atheist.
We will talk about that later.
But, before we get into any of it, you have a beard.
It's an astounding beard.
It's a manly beard.
People are very excited about the beard.
They're very excited.
You've gone on this hermitage, this Thoreauian, Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker hermitage.
What did you learn?
Well, I went off the grid for 30 days.
Literally off the grid.
My phone was locked in a safe.
I did not know what time it was.
I don't have a watch anymore.
You're a very fancy guy with a watch.
I haven't had a watch in probably 20 years.
So for 30 days, didn't know what time it was.
Didn't look at Twitter.
Didn't know about the news.
I was in Mexico.
I was working on my book.
I had some family come over.
Not looking at Twitter sounds like the most fun thing ever.
You know, Twitter is a nightmare.
I mean, it truly is a nightmare.
And I think everyone...
If you say anything about...
Twitter to people these days, immediately everyone kind of rolls their eyes, their body language changes.
Twitter used to be fun, and now...
People are just too nice now, right?
The trolls have taken over.
I like a good old-fashioned trolling, but just the sort of...
Right, exactly.
But the evil people...
It's not the trolls, actually.
It's not the trolls.
It's the truly, genuinely evil people who just want to burn everything down.
And there's just a lot of those people.
So even the good stuff about Twitter where you can get your stuff out there, like just staring at your phone all day and scrolling what some anonymous pink cat said about you, it's like, this is probably not the best.
I need to know.
I need to know.
Yeah, absolutely.
But anyway, so I didn't shave for a month, and then I came back, I did a live stream, and my intention was to shave the next day, but the people have demanded that the beard stay.
I kind of dig it now.
I demand it, too.
It looks great.
Thank you.
I may roll it into Last Jedi in December, you know what I mean?
Because if I keep growing out the hair, the beard comes a little bit more.
I've heard the Hamill thing before.
Well, it can't be worse than that.
The movie before Rogue One, whatever that was, the last Jedi with the girl, and it was just terrible.
You did not like Force Awakens?
That is the most diplomatic way to put it I've ever heard.
It was so bad.
The best acting in it was Peter Cushing, and that was just a computer-generated robot.
No, no, no.
So you're talking about...
I don't mean to insult you.
Obviously, you performed in the movie.
Hold on a second.
Force Awakens.
You're telling me you did not like Force Awakens, but you liked Rogue One?
Absolutely.
So that's very conventional thinking right there.
That's very conservative, conventional thinking.
I mean, Force Awakens was pretty fantastic.
And Rogue One kind of sucked.
Rogue One kind of sucked.
So you liked Rogue One.
That's what you're telling me.
I liked Rogue One.
Name three characters.
I don't know.
Well, okay.
Name three people.
Come on.
Cassidy Andor, Jyn Erso, Baze Malbus, Shira Imwe, and K2SO. I don't know who that is with Google.
Someone's got Google.
Very impressive.
That was impressive.
He did bail me out.
You're right.
I can't name the characters.
The thing I liked about it is that it was new, though.
It wasn't just a remake of A New Hope, you know?
That scene in the middle where Vader comes out and he like sashays out there, don't choke on your words.
It's like, I like a good pun, I really do, but like...
Yeah, it put James Bond to shame.
Yeah.
Anyway, okay, so...
Are we going to do anything else besides...
That's only one point of disagreement.
I need to hear your take.
So I was...
You're a liberal.
You're an old school liberal.
You're not a leftist, a regressive leftist.
You left the left.
You had this great PragerU video.
Now, I was reading a book over the weekend.
It's called Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch.
And it talks about this.
It says there are five decision-making policies.
You could either have the fundamentalist principle, what I say is right and what everyone else says is wrong.
You can either have the simple egalitarian principle.
Everyone has their own idea and it's all fine.
The radical egalitarian principle, only oppressed minorities, only their views matter.
The humanitarian principle, don't hurt my feelings.
And the liberal principle.
Which is, throw out your idea, it's going to be viciously debated, and then the right idea will come out of that.
You fit into the latter category.
Well, absolutely.
Liberalism at its core, classical liberalism, true liberalism, having nothing to do with the modern American left, or the Democratic Party, or certainly progressivism, means live and let live.
I mean, at my core, that's what I believe.
I genuinely do not care What you do in your life, outside of the conversation that we're having right now.
You seem like a nice guy, but like whatever- It's gonna be a deceiving thing, but I have no freaking idea.
But whatever you do in the confines of your home, whatever you do, it has nothing to do with me, as long as whatever you're doing is not impeding on me.
That's actually liberalism.
The idea of the individual and using logic and reason.
This is a beautiful thing, liberalism.
Unfortunately, it's been compounded by leftism and progressivism into this sort of monster that it is now.
But it's funny, I'm a liberal.
I mean, I am gay married, okay?
That's about as liberal as you get.
I'm not even gay.
I just did it to prove a point.
You know what I'm saying?
But that, I'm pro-choice.
I'm pro-legalization of marijuana.
I'm not for nation-building.
I'm for a strong public education.
We'll convince you against all that stuff later.
All of those things.
But the irony is I'm welcomed here in this building where I got Shapiro and Klavan and you and all these guys because you guys actually are tolerant of different thoughts.
And we like to debate ideas and talk about ideas.
Sure.
And I get invites from colleges all over the country, and they're always from conservative groups and libertarian groups.
I have zero invites from liberal, supposed liberal or progressive or democratic groups.
So what does that show you?
I mean, who are the tolerant people?
Who are the liberals?
Who are the liberals, even?
So, all right, now you have to piss off your entire fan base.
What do you think about taking a knee?
What do you think about this Kaepernick, NFL-wide, and President Trump calling it out?
Yeah, well, all right, I have to have consistent principles here.
So look, they are welcome to exercise their freedom of expression and free speech however they want.
Now, at the same time, when you have free speech, that doesn't mean it doesn't have any consequences.
So ultimately, if all these guys take a knee, so again, they can do it 100%, I back their ability to do it and use their own mind to make a decision with what they want to do with their lives.
Okay, fine.
Now, if you're an employer and you realize that the audience is turning against them and may not buy tickets, may not buy as much food, may not watch.
Audience down 8%, 10%.
Which we consistently see.
By the way, the one guy, the Pittsburgh Steelers guy, who did come out, you know, the whole team stayed in the locker room, the one guy came out, now his jersey's selling like crazy today.
So he probably helped his career while some of these guys heard it.
Now, it shouldn't just be about your career and money and all that.
It also has to be about wealth and stuff.
Yeah, of course.
Absolutely.
A true capitalist.
Okay, look, they can do it.
Their employers can then decide if they want to keep them or not resign them at the end of the season or any of that.
As far as Trump, look, I tweeted out yesterday, look, the beauty of America is that the players can do what they want, the employers can do what they want, the president can say what he wants, and so can you.
Now, a lot of people are angry, but the president said fire them.
Look, he can say whatever he wants if he starts putting that into law.
That, you know, demanding.
If he goes to, well, everyone thinks the president's allowed to write laws.
He's actually not, but I've sort of given up on that one.
Barack Obama thought that too, though, in his defense.
No, no, I meant that as a broad sense of what has happened with the office of the president.
They all think that they can write laws, and we've sort of let them.
And Congress is such a bunch of do-nothing losers that they've just abrogated all of their authority to them.
But, okay, that aside, Trump can say whatever.
He has a right to free speech, too.
Now, what he can't do is start passing laws that would infringe on the First Amendment.
They can't start passing laws that would force companies to fire or stop people, jail people for using their free speech.
Or even to stop people from burning the flag, according to the Supreme Court, according to Antonin Scalia.
Which I agree with.
I mean, at the end of the day, I would always err on the side of freedom.
Let's give more freedom.
And guess what?
Sometimes it's going to suck.
Sometimes people are going to kneel and you may not like it.
Sometimes they're going to burn the flag and you may not like it.
But that's the point.
So everything that happened yesterday, while everyone's screaming about, oh my God, this is the most polarized we've ever been.
Actually, it showed the strength of America.
Nobody got killed yesterday.
Nobody got mauled yesterday.
Because they weren't at Berkeley.
Yeah, they weren't.
Right.
Wait till this week.
But the point is, that's kind of a beautiful thing.
Everyone exercised their freedom of expression.
Now, there may be consequences that come from all of that, but the government didn't stop anybody.
Even Trump.
And by the way, when I say that, I don't like what Trump tweeted.
I don't like that he's sort of making it seem like the government is against this stuff.
And I know he purposely goes to the line and he's kind of trolling the media and all of those things.
Certainly, I know.
I would much prefer a president who I think really cared about ideas and I really understood what his political ethos is and all that stuff.
That isn't the president we've got, but it doesn't mean you have to be dishonest in your criticism of him.
That's what I would say.
So NASCAR came out strongly against this.
Hall of Fame driver Richard Petty said, quote, Anybody that don't stand up for the anthem ought to be out of the country, period.
What got them where they're at?
The United States.
I couldn't agree more.
What do you think about the content of this protest?
So they have the right to do it, even though the NFL has fined players for making other protests, wearing socks honoring 9-11, that sort of thing.
Or even dancing in the end zone.
They're not even allowed to dance in the end zone, right?
Yeah, they should not be allowed to do that.
What are your thoughts on the content of the kneeling?
Look, in my opinion, we live in truly the greatest country probably in the history of the world.
More people have come here for more freedom than anywhere else.
Every single one of us, unless you're a Native American or an African American whose ancestors were brought here as slaves, every single one of us came here with nothing.
Our ancestors, I'm sure your great grandparents or whoever it was, came here with nothing as mine did.
They build and build and build.
We build a strong middle class.
Hopefully you'll be able to move up and up and up.
That's a beautiful thing.
Now that being said, are people allowed to protest?
Of course.
I mean, so I think it's slightly misguided in a way.
And now we have the perfect mix.
I mean, this is what it is.
We have the perfect storm of a president who will keep pushing them and this movement that's going to keep pushing this way.
And we just have this perfect...
That's just going to keep blowing up.
But ironically, I think a certain amount of people are just going to tune out.
I think a certain amount of people will just stop.
They'll literally tune out of the game.
That's what I mean.
I mean, even the idea, I used to, I mean, I love sports.
I never watch SportsCenter anymore because basically you're just watching what happened in crime and what happened in politics.
Yeah, exactly.
So I could just watch MSNBC for that.
So I think that there's a short...
Look, the other thing is...
So you take the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The whole team except this one guy did this.
Okay, fine.
Again, they are welcome to do that.
And they may pay consequences from the team.
But how do you backtrack out of that?
Let's say Trump does a few things that they want him to do, whatever that is, right?
Or the atmosphere changes a little bit.
Well, how do you in three weeks from now show up and you're all out there again, as if it all got better?
So they're all pinning themselves into an intellectual corner, which I think is dangerous.
That's exactly right.
And you make the great point, too.
The country has allowed people to have this thriving middle class, to ascend.
It's ever more fair, ever more free, ever more equal.
And the fact that they can take this protest without facing consequences from the government is evidence that they shouldn't protest the country.
They should maybe protest the cops or protest this or whatever they want.
Well, I also think that the danger is that politicizing everything is incredibly dangerous.
People watch sports to escape, right?
Why do you watch sports?
Why do you play sports?
Imagine if you were playing basketball.
That's a difficult thing to imagine, but sure, I'll do my best.
Work with me here for a second.
Imagine if you were playing basketball, okay?
You're dribbling the ball, you're playing ball, and now guys are screaming about politics while you're on the court.
You would never play with those guys again.
We need a break from politics.
I think this whole example actually is another reason why I believe in limited government.
We need a government that's small enough that if it's going to make decisions, it can't affect us in that many huge ways.
I think that would be a much better government to have than the government that is willing to overreach.
So again, Trump, yeah, he's towing the line of what I think is legal and what I think is right.
But as far as I know, he's not pushing any laws.
And unfortunately, people just don't understand what the basic, you know, you tell people, well, First Amendment and that free speech.
I saw all these people, Chris Cecilia, what's that guy's name?
Oh, yeah, he's gone completely, Chris Cecilia's completely gone off.
The guy who's wrong about everything, but he's talking about, he was tweeting about, you know, you have the freedom to not have consequences or something.
You have the freedom, and it's like, no, that's the reverse of what you have.
I'm slightly butchering what the exact tweet was, obviously.
Yeah.
But people just don't understand the basic concepts.
It's almost as if we're not smart enough anymore because of the failure of our education to deal with difficult issues.
So I would say this is all a flaw of education, actually, more than anything else.
Yes, absolutely that's right.
And it brings us into this other issue today, which is Free Speech Week.
We were all looking forward to it.
We'd all gotten all the tweets about it and invitations and things like that.
And it's completely fallen apart.
This was Milo Yiannopoulos' plan, his big comeback.
Thank you.
One, would there have been a purpose to this free speech week?
And what is that purpose?
I like your little pause there, because it was like you had eight questions to ask at once.
I have a lot of questions.
Without throwing anyone near the bus.
Look, I don't know what the purpose was.
I think maybe they were going to intentionally try to make more crap happen and just get more violence and all that stuff.
You know, it's funny.
You know, Ben, obviously, who's become a friend of mine, who I'm sure you're a friend with, and I've had him on my show.
You know, he went to Berkeley.
It cost them $600,000.
It was like the president came to town.
They shut down the city.
So Ben, who I think is in this building right now, this is what I've said publicly.
He's welcome to burst in here and attack me if he doesn't like any of it.
Ben basically is a mainstream conservative thinker.
All the positions that Ben stakes out are just mainstream stuff that's on the right, basically.
Some of it I agree with, some of it I disagree with.
People were saying after the event, they were like, well, you know what, it actually wasn't that violent because only, you know, five people were arrested and only one ATM was destroyed in a couple windows.
They were like, oh, so it shows tolerance and it's pretty good.
But that's after $600,000 had to be spent to secure this.
So what the real threat is, it's not only that eventually, for a guy like Ben or for many other people, that they just won't want to deal with it.
You know what I mean?
Jerry Seinfeld doesn't perform at colleges anymore.
Seinfeld, who no one knows his opinion on anything.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Try to think of one political position.
I don't see a lot of Seinfeld political rants anymore.
Yeah, and yet he thought that colleges were too politically correct.
So the idea is you either just people, you know, not everyone will have the intestinal fortitude of Ben Shapiro to keep showing up to these things and staking out unpopular positions, but also the schools simply won't be able to afford it.
So the threat about free speech and free expression is now coming from many directions.
Ironically, very few of these directions are because of the government.
So I fear more that we are taking it away from ourselves.
We're allowing college students to dictate what they're taught.
You know what I mean?
We've allowed this diversity stuff, the James Damore memo, we've allowed this to just infect everything.
And it's actually the reverse of what we need.
What we need is more people willing to talk it out and say, all right, we agree, we disagree, but that's the point.
I would much rather live in a society where we disagree on some stuff but we don't kill each other than the society where we all just accept nonsense because we've been guilted into it.
It was amazing with Bennett Berkeley.
$600,000.
They still destroyed a bunch of stuff.
They called him a Nazi.
I guess a Nazi Jew is what Ben is.
A Nazi Orthodox Jew.
Yeah, yeah.
He didn't vote for President Trump.
I was at a dinner with Ben a couple weeks ago.
He brought his own kosher food.
I'm pretty sure that Nazis don't bring their own kosher food.
But when I see...
Ben gave a speech, and there was a lot of content to the speech.
He made arguments about abortion.
He made a lot of different arguments.
When I see you speak, you make arguments.
Arguments about free speech, about classical government.
For some people, it seems to me the speech is just about the speech.
There isn't actually a speech to give.
You're just waiting for these crazy kids to jump up and yell and then you make fun of the chubby lesbian or something.
Well, yes.
So there's a certain amount of people that are just flamethrowers, right?
And you remember in the second Batman, when Heath Ledger's Joker, you know, Michael Caine is discussing the idea behind the Joker, what this guy's trying to do.
He says, some people just want to see the world burn.
So I think we actually do have a lot of those type of people right now, which I think is really unfortunate, especially in the system that we live in that has given so much to so many people.
You know, think about it.
If you're watching this show in America right now, Pretty much you can go to your supermarket, your local supermarket, and find food there.
That's pretty good.
Pretty much there's water running at your house.
Except if you live in Flint, Michigan, there's a problem.
But pretty much in a society of 350 million people, this thing's basically working.
And if you travel outside the country, I was just in Cuba, people traveled all over, there is no poverty in America.
There is relative poverty because people are so rich in America.
There is no real poverty in America.
And that doesn't mean that there aren't poor people.
There aren't people that need help.
Who are struggling.
All of those things.
But we have to figure out how to have an honest conversation about that.
Not just either throw money at everything where we consistently find it doesn't work, which we consistently find.
The more money you throw at things, the less it actually works.
And you actually create a decision where people are now dependent on this and never want to get off it, which is a horrific position for anyone to be in.
So there's so many things, but this is what the debate's about, and that's what I'm afraid of right now, is we're really, I mean everyone's talking about this, but it's significantly worse than it was two years ago.
We are all cordoning ourselves off in our little teams, and I think one of the reasons that what I'm doing is working is I'm really trying not to do that, and I'm trying to spend as much time with a guy like you as I would with a lefty, and I'm trying to find some answers there.
I think sometimes maybe logic and reason is going to be the sacrifice in this thing.
That might make you a trans-political thinker.
You go from one side to the next.
Does that get me any social justice credit on that?
I'm a trans-thinker?
Yeah, how about that?
You'll get your own safe space on YouTube.
The issue that I think it seems like a trivial issue, it seems completely unimportant, but it's where a lot of the cultural battle is, and the language battle and the battle over free speech, The pronouns.
Yeah.
The pronouns.
Do people have a right to insist that you call them by a pronoun that doesn't match their actual biological sex?
Well, I would completely on this one take Jordan Peterson's position and I'm sure much of your audience knows Jordan.
Has he been in here?
Not yet, but we do want to get him.
Okay, okay.
I will gladly, if you don't, you know, if this thing doesn't burn down by the end, I'll put in a good word for you.
I thought the apocalypse was today.
Is it today?
Well, we'll see.
Oh, right, some guy said it was today.
It was supposed to be today.
It's always every day.
We'll see.
What egomania to think the world is going to end on your, all these people that are like, oh, the nuclear war is coming, you know, North Korea is going to nuke us now, or all the religious people that think, oh, the end of time.
You know what?
The world's been going on for a long time.
George Carlin did something about this.
Don't worry about the planet.
It's the people.
The planet's going to be fine.
Anyway, in answer to your question, I would take Jordan Peterson's position on this, which is, first off, I have trans friends.
I know trans people.
Yeah, me too.
I do not go out of my way to offend anybody, ever.
Well, I go out of my way to offend everybody.
That's one difference, but I'm sorry.
No, no, that's fine, though.
So, okay.
Let's say you're walking down the street, right?
And somebody's walking towards you.
They drop their wallet.
And you're like, sir, you dropped your wallet.
Now, if that person turns out to be a woman, but you thought it was a man, well, it's not your fault.
You know what I mean?
Like, I think what we're getting caught up in is all just language nonsense here.
But what if it is, this is the real issue, because we have friends who identify as transgender, man to woman, or woman to man.
It seems to me that a man cannot become a woman simply by wishing it because he has a psychological condition that makes him think he's a woman or makes him very much want to be a woman.
So let's say he's a man but he wears dresses and maybe he undergoes some surgery even.
Nevertheless, he is a man.
My view of the world, my view of reality tells me he is a man and it's not good to play into a delusion that he isn't a man.
It isn't good for him or anyone else.
But my politeness tells me, call him a banana if he wants to be called a banana.
Well, I think that's going to get you in trouble.
I've already been demonetized.
Well, I'm the king of demonetizing.
There you go.
Look, I would say there's two things.
There's something in general, like we have two realities, which is one is what the law is.
I'm not talking about with pronouns specifically, but we have what the law is and then how we function as people.
And those things aren't the same.
So when people talk about the free speech thing, for example, Yeah, we have the First Amendment and the First Amendment protects the government from, you know, taking away our free speech.
But then there's also just how we have to all behave within.
Manners, yeah.
There's basic societal things that you can be part of or not be part of, but that there's a sort of unspoken social contract in being a member of society.
So I would say basically...
If you see someone and you...
I would say do your best to treat them the way you would want to be treated.
But certainly I'm not going to pass any laws like they want to pass in Canada that are going to...
Or that they have it as policies at universities right now.
You'd be in trouble if you use the...
Yeah.
Wrong, read, write pronoun to refer to somebody.
Yeah.
All of these things are complete nonsense.
I mean, all of this language policing and any law that you would put in or any statute that you would put in on a college, of course this is just...
Not only is it abject drivel, but also for the people that will be sympathetic to trans people, which I think is a perfectly fine and just cause, You're going to actually drive a lot of them away.
Of course.
When you come in with some sort of authoritarian thing and you're going to have to say this, and if you don't, by the way, we're going to call you a transphobe or a bigot or a racist or all these things that don't even make sense.
Trans isn't a race, by the way.
But of course, all of these things, everything gets lost in all of this nonsense.
So I would say, yes, try to be a decent person, but in no way should we be making laws about this.
Of course, yeah.
We should all be equal under the law.
That's it.
The law doesn't say anything about how someone has to treat you.
And guess what?
People are allowed to be, what's the language?
Offensive.
I was going to go dirtier there, but what's the language policy around here?
We're very politically correct and family-oriented, absolutely.
Try to be decent.
That's all I would say.
But you know what?
If you're not decent, as long as you're not doing anything illegal, Alright, what am I going to do?
Because it seems there's this...
The premises of it.
I worry with this.
You did a great interview with Blair White.
I love watching Blair White's videos.
I think he makes very good points, but he would probably prefer to be referred to as she.
And I struggle with this question of...
It's a small point.
But if in a public space like this, if we give the premise, if we grant the premise of transgenderism and of subjectivism, of the relativity of reality, then haven't we given away the whole farm?
So this is where I think that you as a conservative and me as a liberal have just a different view of the world.
And see, it's funny, because I know a certain amount of people would watch you say that.
Now Blair, if you look at Blair, she looks like, you know, she's beautiful, she looks like a woman, okay.
Now a certain amount of people are going to watch you and go, wait a minute, wait a minute.
He's just going out of his way.
He's going out of his way to be mean to this person.
To just kind of be mean or whatever.
Okay.
Now, I know Blair decently well.
That was the first time we had met in person, but, you know, sort of nowhere.
Now, look, you gain nothing.
I think that, and I think this is a fair liberal position, you gain nothing by doing what you did there.
You know what I mean?
Like, you just don't.
Like, I get what you're saying, that, yes, this person...
First off, I think that trans is still listed as some sort of psychological...
It clearly is a disorder of some sort.
Your psychology doesn't match your body.
So look, if Blair was sitting here, I'm pretty sure she actually wouldn't be offended by you.
Blair would agree with that, yeah.
She would argue, no, but even by you calling her he or whatever, I think she would have a principled position to argue against.
And I would say, this is the best example of why it's about the individual.
That if you were sitting here, and you and Blair were having a great political discussion about anything, I think by the end of it, you would...
Go, you know what, next time I will have no problem calling you she.
Call you whatever you want to be calling.
Yeah, because it's about the individual.
So yes, at some level, I get it.
I get what conservatives are kind of doing here.
And this is also what I think conservatives missed on gay marriage, which is that now it's funny.
All the conservatives now, they all take the libertarian position, which is, oh, I didn't want the government involved, blah, blah, blah.
But none of you were saying that before.
You don't want a defensive marriage act.
Not you specifically, but the whole slew of conservatives, who many of them I'm friends with now, nobody was taking the principled position.
Rand Paul, who's more of a libertarian obviously, he could have taken the most principled position ever and been like, you know what, I don't particularly...
I don't care one way or another about gay people, but I want everyone to be treated equally under the law.
I don't care what you do in your own bedroom.
And if two people want to enter a contract, it doesn't matter what sex they are.
It would have been a great principled position and something that the right and that I think conservatives and limited government people all could have latched onto in an honest way.
So I would say in this case...
It doesn't really matter.
So I guess maybe your pushback is that somehow, what, societies were chipping away at a little inherent truth or something?
That there's a question of who gets to define Reality.
Whose premises do we have to believe?
The premise that says that a man can become a woman by sheer force of will, or the people who say there are difficult facts and there are difficult psychological conditions and we ought to be compassionate and we ought to walk with people and be as nice as we can without changing definitions of reality?
So I think you can actually meld both of those into one thing, which again, it's about the individual.
So of course, if a biologist was sitting here, they would say you can't change your chromosomes.
I don't think that most, even the most, patients, patients, right.
But I don't even think the most far left trans advocate is saying that they're changing their chromosomes.
But I would say what you can do is try to treat the individual with respect.
Of course, yeah.
I think that's really the fertile ground that we need to be spending more time in as Americans right now because we're all just, we're picking positions, we're fighting from places of sort of an intellectual high ground.
It's intellectually interesting but socially irrelevant.
Yeah, I just don't think it's that.
I think 20 years from now if trans people, it should be what's happening to gay people right now.
The left is turning on gays right now because they don't view them as oppressed enough anymore.
I like that.
I'm okay with that.
You don't look oppressed to me.
I'm not oppressed.
But you know what?
But three years ago when I didn't have the same ability to get married that you did, well then there's something to fight for because we weren't equal under the law.
But guess what?
You and I are completely equal under the law right now and that means you can treat me as crappily as you want to.
That's the beauty of America.
We should be treated equal under the law so you can treat everyone.
But if you have a group that is not treated equally under the law, well then they have something to fight for.
Get us to that base level, and then everyone can be totally awful people to each other if you so choose.
It's not how I operate, but you're allowed.
Absolutely.
Now, speaking of the morality of being completely awful people to each other, we have to get into a segment.
I've constructed it just for today.
This is a segment that I have dubbed Save Dave's Soul.
Now, Dave, you're an atheist, vaguely an atheist, agnostic.
I'll give you the 30-second recap on that.
I had never publicly said that I was an atheist.
Then I had a bunch of well-known atheists on my show.
And then I had Milo on the show.
We were talking about atheism, and he rails against atheism.
And basically my belief is that if you told me...
I just don't believe in things without evidence.
So if you told me that LeBron James dunked from half court last night, I'll go, well, I need to see the video on that.
I can't just take your word for it.
So I don't think that there's some magical being out there that cares who I have sex with or is watching my every move or anything like that.
That being said, I kind of said that that's what my atheism is.
I just don't believe without evidence.
I don't want to get too lost in atheism versus agnostic.
That's the Bertrand Russell argument.
You would say, if you get to heaven and God is there, and you say, why don't you believe in me?
He says, well, there wasn't enough evidence.
Right.
And I could agree with Bertrand Russell on almost everything.
So there you go.
What I would say is, just a couple weeks ago, after I did this little hiatus that I did, I got back and I said something how I don't want to use the word atheist anymore, because there are moments.
I mean, there are moments in life when you have beliefs in things that you can't quite experience.
The moment of the numinous.
We all just can't literally explain every little thing.
That being said, I will play along with your game to the best of my ability.
It is providential that we brought up Bertrand Russell.
So what I'm going to do, I'll just run down a few arguments for God.
See if they push any buttons.
See if you have a rebuttal to it.
This was an argument that Bertrand Russell, an atheist to the day he died, said that he couldn't find the logical flaw in.
He famously threw his tin of tobacco in the air.
He said, the ontological argument is sound.
And then he said, well, but I don't know.
I'm not convinced anyway.
Should I have brought my lawyer for this?
You should have...
This is only your divine lawyer.
Yeah, I should have had a priest, a rabbi, an imam.
That would have helped.
So this is the argument.
Yes, let's do it.
You might be familiar with it.
The argument is, we'll define God as the maximally great being.
He comprises all of the great-making characteristics and none of the corrupting characteristics.
Just the most basic definition.
Then in modal logic, as a principle of modal logic, there are necessary truths...
And contingent truths.
So this is necessarily a mug, and the mug is on the table.
The mug could be on my microphone, the mug could be on my head.
Put the mug on your head.
And the mug is on my head because of the whimsy of the cosmos.
Now, if God is a maximally great being, then he exists necessarily, right?
He wouldn't exist as a matter of contingency.
He would exist necessarily.
So if he exists necessarily in some possible world, Then he exists necessarily in all possible worlds, right?
If he couldn't be the maximally great being and only exist in some possible world, it would have to be in all.
Now, if he exists necessarily in all possible worlds, then he exists necessarily in this world, which is among all possible worlds.
Therefore, God exists.
And Bertrand Russell was reacting to a different version of that argument, basically the same thing.
He said it's impossible to point out the flaw.
Have I made you a Christian?
Are we going to church together this Sunday?
Well, you did say if a lot in that.
There's a lot of ifs there.
Those are a lot of ifs.
I mean, these are premises that can't be proven empirically.
So if I'm willing to go along with that logic, then I suppose you have something there.
What I would say is this.
I had Dennis Prager on With Michael Shermer, debating God and morality.
It was one of my favorite hours.
If you haven't checked it out, you should go over it.
Google this, the Prager and Shermer debate on Ruben Shermer.
It was really interesting.
And by the way, two guys who I totally respect, who I've broken bread with both of them.
I mean, I think we did something really nice, something that I think we need more of.
The crux of the argument to me, I thought, got to one place that I still am not totally sold on, which is, Dennis said to Michael, you know, Michael's talking a lot about science and rational belief and not, you know, things that you can't prove that you shouldn't believe in and all that.
And Dennis basically said, you know, that's all good.
What Dennis was arguing was that on a macro level that society needs these sort of These unspoken or these bigger than, you know, these ideas bigger than just the literal things to keep society going.
This is a little bit of what Peterson's talking about, by the way, and this map of meaning that he talks about.
It's useful.
It's useful to society.
And I think that's really interesting, that at the micro level, we can all use our brains to figure all this stuff out and hopefully find morality and all that stuff.
But perhaps on the larger scale, on the macro scale, that we do need a little bit of this.
I'm kind of, I'm 50-50 on that, truly.
I wish, I'd like to believe that if we all just relied on our intellect and science and logic and reason, that we could build a functional society that way.
I don't know that there's really any evidence that we have.
There's plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Yeah, although, you know what, all the good things about America, you know, which a lot of times people say these are just Judeo-Christian values, these are really Enlightenment values.
If we could really grab onto Enlightenment values, I think we could build a great society.
I don't know that it has enough legs in a day where so many people want to burn the system down, so many people want to be hysterical.
I don't know that being a calm sort of centrist who's open and decent and is willing to debate.
Yeah, willing to debate what has got it.
It's almost pointless to me.
I mean, really, there's so many things happening right now that whether...
God is sitting here judging you one way and judging me another, or whether he's playing racquetball somewhere else.
He's judging Marshall the most.
Definitely judging Marshall.
I don't know that I answered your question in even the slightest.
No, a little bit.
A little bit you did, because you're right.
Everyone wants to burn down these Enlightenment values, and I think part of that is because the Enlightenment values are undergirded by The Judeo-Christian religion by Christianity.
The natural rights come from natural law, and natural law comes from Christianity.
So without that, one wonders if the society that's based on that, all of the good things that came out of that, can continue in those good things if it's no longer animated by the same thing that created them in the first place.
Well, so that I think is really interesting because the question really is, so do we have God-given rights or does the government give us rights?
Now, so without getting too lost in what God is, whether it's this conscious being or...
He is a gigantic fat man with a beard.
That is what he is, all right?
I think we've proven that.
Right, so for a huge amount of people, that's what he is.
But whatever he is, whether it's the Buddha, whatever that God is to you...
The unmoved mover outside of time and space, unfathomable.
Meaning that we have rights as human beings, and this is a science and enlightenment argument, that by the very essence of your birth and your ability to have a brain that can think, that you have rights.
I like that.
You have dignity.
You have rights to be in this cosmos and that freedom is the right.
I think I'm about to quote Optimus Prime.
Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.
I watched Transformers last night.
I cannot believe I just quoted Optimus Prime.
The argument from Prime.
The prime mover argument.
He was a pretty powerful Autobot.
The point is, but that freedom and your ability to think and all these things, these are God-given.
Now, whatever you want to say God is, but that they're before government.
A giant fat man in the sky with a beard shirt.
Yeah, but it's before government.
I like that much more than I like that the government is giving us these things.
The government is just a construct of man.
So the idea that the government is giving me my freedom.
Right.
No.
No.
We can deal with what the government gives us.
I think it should give us a lot less.
But the government doesn't give me my right to be a human.
So again, this is where, whether you're talking about the Judeo-Christian God or whether we're talking about, you know, I'm sure there are thinkers...
That may be a little more left-leaning or a little more not so interrelated.
I haven't encountered them, but sure, yeah.
I mean, hypothetically they might exist, sure.
But there might be people that are a little more atheist in their thinking that would agree with that concept without it having to do with sort of a conscious God.
And I would fall somewhere into that category.
Now, that's all right.
We'll move you over.
On the...
I like how you think you have work to do.
Yeah.
I do notice that with you conservatives now that I hang out with you people.
Oh, I know.
You all think there's work to do with me.
Come on, the water's nice, Dave.
Come on in here.
Wouldn't it be funny if I was actually making you guys all more liberal and you didn't even know it, but it could be...
I feel it happening.
I think I've made you people a lot more tolerant.
I know.
I feel it happening by the moment, you know?
Yeah.
You bring up science.
We all talk about science these days.
People, I think, forget that Western science is a product of the church, basically.
Copernicus was a priest.
They all knock the Catholic Church because of Galileo.
But Galileo was kind of a jerk man.
The church was very nice to Copernicus.
My question here is, some of the compelling arguments for God these days...
Are more science-based.
It was a Catholic priest who discovered the Big Bang, George Lemaître.
And he was mocked because people thought there was a static universe, the Aristotelian universe.
But he said, no, it had a beginning.
It was the Big Bang.
One of the most compelling arguments, didn't get me, but it's a compelling one, is fine-tuning.
That if you change the calculations of the strong or weak nuclear forces by just slight degrees, the different forces in the universe, life would be impossible.
Very minor measurements.
Do those scientific arguments, the prime mover, you need a beginning, a mover that isn't contingent or physical.
Do any of those move you toward a god that isn't just an unconscious thing, as you just said, but has a teleology, a purpose behind it?
Not really.
We gotta get a couple drinks in here.
We can do this after a couple drinks.
Not really though.
I don't know that it is even part of what the human experience is to understand that.
I think we can do...
I think there are people that are religious that can spend their entire lives trying to figure out what the meaning of the universe is.
I think there are scientists who can try to find the God particle or figure out through physics or mathematics what the real design of the universe is.
I think that actually is much more of what being a human is about than knowing it.
Certainly, yeah.
Look, maybe we will get to a point one day where we will know.
There will be a big, booming voice in the sky that everyone is going to suddenly know.
And maybe it'll be alien.
But you know what it could be?
You see?
It could be aliens.
It could be...
You know what I mean?
It depends how far you want to run with all this.
But I would say that not knowing...
It could be metaphysical outside of time and space.
It could be.
I mean, who knows?
Maybe suddenly everyone was going to wake up with a big, like, G on their forehead and we'll all go, well, what happened there?
And it'll be God, you know, I'm sending you a sign or something.
But I would say that the question of not knowing and being okay with that and not having that stunt your growth as a human...
Whether you want to think of things in a religious way or in a scientific way, I think that's what being human is all about.
And you should.
Ideally, you'd meld the two together.
I think a lot of people say that faith and science are in conflict, but of course, that is a very modern idea, that none of the founders of modern science would have said that.
Newton spent 30 years of his life interpreting scripture.
Yeah, well look, Einstein said, you know, God doesn't play dice with the universe.
I think that's an interesting way of saying it because there's an implicit belief there that he's saying, well, something, God, he's saying God doesn't.
And Einstein said George Lemaître's Big Bang Theory, it was so beautiful.
That's what he was, it was so simple and so beautiful.
Yeah, it just all seems kind of like smug and arrogant to me in a way.
Well, that's what I prefer.
Yeah, that's the worst.
You, Michael, know, seem very smug and arrogant.
That's what I'm trying to say.
That's better than what I'm called on Twitter.
That's a lot better than what we get called on Twitter.
I don't even want to look at this thing up.
So there is one final argument.
This one I don't think you could possibly disagree with.
This argument is the argumentus democratus.
The argument is that Hillary Clinton was supposed to be president.
Donald Trump was not supposed to be president.
There was a 99% chance that Hillary was going to be president, according to Princeton University, the night before the election.
Then we got Trump.
Then, and this is just my own empirical observations, my own experiments, a blank book making fun of Democrats became the number one bestseller in the world.
Now Ben Shapiro serenades my dates with roaming millennial.
Tell me that God doesn't exist.
Tell me that it's impossible.
It's an impossible argument.
The mystery of the universe is unfolding right in front of you.
And you just gotta keep rolling with that.
But that doesn't prove that God exists.
It just proves that the universe is here.
And sometimes I think you're a little more in line with it and sometimes you're not.
You had a nice little run here.
And Hillary was not in line.
Hillary was far away.
You got your Trump.
You got your book.
You got your Shapiro.
You got your roaming millennial.
But that just means you're doing things.
You know, like, we always find signs when it works to us.
But all day long, there are signs that have no meaning to it.
It is a wicked generation that looks for signs and wonders.
But it is a stupid generation that ignores signs and wonders.
I hope, David, I've saved your soul.
That was an excellent segue.
I really enjoyed that.
We have got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Listen, guys.
We have so much more to get to.
We have an incredible panel of deplorables.
We have Ali Stuckey.
We have Jacob Berry.
Dave's going to stick around.
Hopefully his meter doesn't run out.
But we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Thank you to all the current subscribers.
If you're a subscriber, go over to dailywire.com right now.
You get to watch the whole rest of the show.
If you're not a subscriber, hurry up, man.
You have like...
Two minutes to do it.
It's $10 a month, $100 a year.
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan Show, you get the Ben Shapiro Show, you get great guests like Dave Rubin.
Forget all that.
That's nothing.
You get this.
You get this.
The Leftist Tears Tumblr.
It is the most beautiful vessel for carrying leftist tears.
Right now, there's a beautiful vintage that we're serving up.
It's ever since Politicon we've been serving up Dave Rubin's old boss, Schenk Uber's tears.
I'll take two of those.
Yeah, we're sending Dave home with some.
Go over there right now.
DailyWire.com.
We'll be right back.
Back to the NFL panel.
Thank you for waiting.
I was too enraptured.
I was lost in Dave's beautiful eyes.
On the NFL, the league has apparently entered into a golden era.
It has now been 23 days since one of its players has been arrested.
The average time between arrests of NFL players is 23 days, but the charges typically include drunk driving, drug offenses...
Oh, I'm sorry, the average time is seven days.
Those other charges include domestic violence, assault and battery, gun violations, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, theft, burglary, rape, and even murder...
In 2013, there were 71 arrests of NFL players.
As Donald Trump Jr.
put it, if only Roger Goodell cared as much about domestic abuse and traumatic brain injury as he does about disrespecting America.
Hashtag NFL. Allie, is there a little man in the mirror issue here?
I'm talking about the man in the mirror.
Is there a connection between these guys' moral defects and their virtue signaling about these race issues?
Yeah, I think absolutely.
And that raises a really good point that we're not just seeing in the NFL, but we're seeing all across America when it comes to virtue signaling.
All of the sudden, because of the polarized politics that we're seeing now, the sense of moral vigilantism has bubbled up in people who before didn't care about morality at all.
And in fact, probably would have said that they are moral relativists.
But because politics has come into play and because it's become popular and trendy and attention-grabbing to take a political stance, all of a sudden we have people who care about these virtues.
And they are exemplifying those virtues by making a political point when they should be honoring our flag.
Ali makes all excellent points.
Why isn't Goodell doing something about this?
He's perfectly willing to punish football players when they honor 9-11 victims and heroes, but he'll stand back on this issue.
Why the silence?
I think it's exactly what Ali was saying.
It's just plain virtue signaling.
I think she said moral vigilantism.
That's perfect for it.
When it comes to things like 9-11 and Dallas cops being killed by Black Lives Matter sympathizer.
It's so tragic and you're like, oh, we just don't want politics, but then all of a sudden Colin Kaepernick takes a knee and we have whole teams doing it.
It doesn't make sense, but it shows to me the disconnect between the people who are upstairs and then their audience who are watching.
It's a disconnect with their fan base.
Absolutely, and Dave is going to cancel ESPN, but that's him going to stop watching the shows.
Okay, we talked about the NFL, too.
I can't pay attention to these guys anymore.
This is the most football that I've ever been subject to in my life.
Anthony Weiner has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for sexting with a 15-year-old girl.
Dave, is Anthony Weiner's continued existence on this earth the final proof that the Clintons don't kill people?
No.
Well, I guess, yeah, technically, they should have taken him out a long time ago or at least gotten rid of the laptops or whatever Huma was doing over there.
Look, you know, let's move on from Anthony Weider.
We have so many problems right now.
this politicization of everything and sports being corrupted by politics and all of the authoritarian stuff and all the social justice stuff.
We have so many problems.
Like when I saw this headline this morning, it was just like, let me just put that one aside, let the guy go to jail, just move on.
You know, we only have so much brain power for all this stuff.
It is too much wienery.
It is wiener overload.
Allie...
You're not going to believe this.
I almost feel sorry for the guy.
He's so pathetic in the court and crying, and he's obviously got this sickness, this psychological disorder.
Should we feel bad for Anthony Weiner?
First, when you said that, I was shocked.
But now when you say that, when you think about the fact that he is actually very sick, maybe in some kind of way, but he also had the opportunity to get help a long time ago.
So you have to think that after this many mistakes and after this much time, if you haven't gotten the help that you need, then it's very hard to feel sorry for you, especially when it comes to children and pedophilia and things like that.
I don't know, forgive me, but I don't have a whole lot of compassion.
Yeah, I always feel bad for the guy, and then I look at the pictures and I think, alright, throw him away, get him out of here.
Never mind.
In an article on Sunday, NPR lamented, quote, gender-segregated professional sports as being exclusive, as being unfair and exclusive.
Allie.
If we start admitting people who are biologically men but identifying as women and on hormone treatments or whatever, if we start allowing them to compete in female sports, is that just the end of female sports?
Well, yes.
So here's the foundational problem with this article.
One of the quotes said something like, oh, the reason why traditionally male and female sports have been separated is because males and females play sports differently.
No, males play sports better.
I have this whole bet with my brother-in-law saying, Do you think that if I train for an entire three years to dunk a basketball, I think I could do it?
And he said no.
He would pay any amount of money to bet that I could never dunk a basketball.
And it's absolutely true.
It's not just because I play basketball differently, but because I play basketball a lot worse than any unathletic male.
It's just true.
And so just to say that there are differences in how we play sports, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how God made the human body.
So unfortunately, women are going to get the Jordan to stick here.
As an unathletic male, I appreciate your confidence in me.
Dave, this appears to be an internal conflict on the left.
On the one hand, there are these immutable, innate identities that we couldn't ever possibly change.
And on the one hand, sex doesn't seem to matter.
You can go from a man to a woman, a woman to a man.
So either it's the core of our identity or it doesn't exist at all.
Is there any way, as our resident former leftist, I suppose always liberal, is there any way to reconcile this conflict on the left?
You know, my Twitter bio says wanted to be in the NBA. So if what this is leading to is the chance that I could maybe play in the WNBA, where I actually think I could be an all-star, then I'm completely for this.
That's number one.
But the truth is, I mean, think about it this way.
I don't know a ton of female basketball players, but if you took Lisa Leslie, who was one of the biggest stars in the league, she could never make it in the NBA, in the men's league.
That is just simply the truth.
She would be crushed simply by the size and strength of these guys.
That is not putting women down.
That's just understanding that we have different biological differences.
So, of course, this was all leading to this.
Of course, now they're going to try to have women play in the NBA. But what are you really saying here?
We have differences.
We can accept them.
It doesn't mean that one's better or one's worse.
It just is.
And it's just reality.
Which I know is scary to people.
I can't believe that we have to end on such a note of horrifying bigotry as reality.
But, panel, thank you for being here.
Ali Stuckey, Jacob Berry, Dave Rubin, the nicest guy in politics, thank you for coming by.
Thanks, brother.
Great to have you.
Now it is time for my final thought.
None of the people disrespecting the national anthem and none of those cheering them on has made a coherent case for the protest, which I suspect is because the protest is incoherent.
Make no mistake, the disrespect shown is explicitly toward the national anthem, which is itself a symbol of the country.
If these football players were to kneel or turn their backs on a police officer, their disrespect would be toward the police and the protest toward any alleged police brutality.
If they were to kneel or turn their backs at the sight or mention of President Trump, their disrespect would be toward President Trump and the protest toward his administration.
The symbol has relation to the symbolized.
But they're kneeling for the national anthem, and so the disrespect and protest are pointed toward the country itself.
There is an irony here.
We pay these grown men tens of millions of dollars per year to run around and entertain us.
These men then turn around without any fear of prosecution and insult the country that has given them more wealth, equality, and freedom than any citizenry has ever enjoyed in the history of the world.
That prosperity, equality, and liberty are not the natural state of things.
They are uniquely American.
They rest on the foundation of America.
To undercut that foundation is to make impossible all that that foundation secures.
To quote Chesterton, there is a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
On that, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Come back tomorrow.
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