Dave Rubin hosts Jimmy Dore and Felicia Michaels to dissect the GOP debate, Trump's fascist rhetoric, and Hillary Clinton's centrism. They critique Bernie Sanders' donor reliance, condemn media bias, and demand constitutional amendments against money in politics. The trio debates religious influence, secularism, and the dangers of excessive political correctness, arguing that self-censorship erodes necessary counterculture while acknowledging the need to eliminate racist humor. Ultimately, the episode suggests that restoring honest discourse requires dismantling financial corruption and resisting ideological conformity. [Automatically generated summary]
I want to do something different for our third show.
We're going to get away from atheism and religion today, believe it or not, and we're going to focus on another passion of mine, politics.
Real quick, though, I should thank all of you that listened to last week's Direct Message and actually took it into action.
You guys are calling out the bullshit artists on every social media platform like I've never seen before.
As I said last week, when you guys are engaged, we can focus on other things and not just have the same conversation over and over.
I've really only been intimately involved in this conversation for a couple weeks.
Fighting the lies is not only exhausting, but it has also affected a couple of my friendships.
I really do think that part of the plan by these people is to tire out the good guys into giving up.
Your part in this debate is beyond crucial.
But enough of that, let's talk politics.
I was at the GOP debate at the Reagan Library last week.
I've never been to one of these things before, and I really had no idea what to expect behind the scenes.
We had a booth in the spin room right alongside CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.
The fact that they call it the spin room really tells you all you need to know about this thing.
This is where campaign people and candidates go to spin their message.
I went to the truth room next door, but nobody was there.
Weird, huh?
We were able to snag surrogates from pretty much every candidate except for Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump because neither of them sent any reps to the floor.
I even got to ask John Kasich a question about gay marriage and Scott Walker a question about money in politics.
Come to think of it, maybe that's what caused him to drop out of the race earlier this week.
What I realized by being on the inside of all this is that there are some unspoken rules to how the game is played.
I talked to Mike Huckabee's campaign manager about gay marriage, and she basically just danced around it.
Had I pushed her to the breaking point, I probably would have never gotten access to her again, and then word would have traveled fast that I'm someone that they shouldn't talk to.
So with that in mind, I tried my best to navigate all the interviews with some basic questions, and then some deeper probing.
I asked pretty much everyone about campaign finance, and I really pushed on social issues.
It was a big learning experience, and we'll figure out how to engage with the candidates and the representatives in an even more incisive way beyond the spin and the soundbites.
Hopefully as the show gets bigger, we'll get to more of the debates.
Candidates will eventually realize that I'm going to be tough but honest, whether we agree or not.
We're plotting out our plan to go to the first Democratic debate in October right now, so stay tuned for that.
So for today's show, we're going to jump back into the political waters.
I've got two comics I like and respect, Jimmy Dore and Felicia Michaels.
I agree with them on some issues and disagree with them on some others.
What I know more than anything else, though, is that comedians have a way of holding themselves to a high standard of truth.
Sure, we'll get things wrong, but the good ones have a fearless desire to say controversial things and let the chips fall where they may.
As Billy Wilder said, if you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they will kill you.
I guess you could say that comedians are guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, just like the Jedi.
Well, except comedians usually smoke a lot more weed.
All right, so I am with two of my favorite political comics, Felicia Michaels and Jimmy Dore.
Most of you guys probably recognize them from our old show, but they are new to the all-new Rubin Report.
What I do actually enjoy listening to Donald Trump speak is because every once in a while, you know, I'm in the mood to watch a Hitler documentary, but I want to hear it delivered by Gary Busey.
Right, so let's talk about the people that you mentioned, these people that are digging this, because I know you.
You rant and rave about politics all the time.
You hate the system, right?
I hate the system.
And what I think people are attracted to is that he's calling the system out on their bullshit.
So should we at least grant him that much that he has, you know, in the first debate when he said, well, I donated money to Hillary so she showed up to my wedding?
Like, we should give him a little credit on that kind of thing, right?
Yes, he gets a little credit on that, but you would say what the genius of Donald Trump is, is that the genius is that he knows how to appeal to people who are not geniuses.
Right.
Right, so he's not appealing to smart people, just like Ben Carson, right?
So Ben Carson also, but I respect Ben Carson more than I do Donald Trump, and I don't respect Ben Carson at all.
The only thing I want to say about when I watch Donald Trump is the makeup that he has on his face.
And I'm being completely serious.
He's had three baby mamas.
They are all gorgeous women that know how to apply makeup.
And the fact that he doesn't turn to his wife or one of the former baby mamas and go, do you think this is too much orange, too much white under the eyes, says to me, this is a person that doesn't give a shit about anyone else's opinion or doesn't care.
No, I'm serious.
I'm completely serious.
To me, as a silly woman that I am, I'm all like, there's something wrong with that guy that he can't turn to his woman and say, what do you think?
He's not going to be able to do that with any subject.
So, and that's why Bernie Sanders has such traction, and that's why she's doing such a bad job.
But I will say, the email thing, it just goes to prove you, because they just came out and said that there was, if you don't commit a crime, it will haunt you for the rest of your life.
Okay, so they've said, so I guess the State Department has said that she actually didn't send any classified emails.
I don't know what to believe at this point, but to me the whole thing is sort of nonsensical, because one day we're just going to have a point where I don't think necessarily that she's running a terrible campaign.
It could be a lot better.
their bad shit by just talking to people.
You know what I mean?
So to make it about the emails itself is sort of...
It's the wound, not really what's the underlying problem.
I do like, and I was telling him earlier, I have a picture from a gig 15 years ago of Hillary and me in the backstage, and I'm like, I just want her to be president for that picture.
I mean, that's a funny answer to the seriousness of the question.
The thing is, she's had so much bad news over the past two or three months on headlines about Benghazi all the time, about those emails, and it's just insane how much people in America don't want establishment candidates.
And that's the problem with her, is she's too establishment.
Yes, that is exactly what, you know, not that I want to defend Hillary Clinton, but, you know, you have to in this situation because the New York Times has had like a frickin' vendetta against her over these, and there was nothing, by the way, you talk about email, Hank Paulson, who was the Secretary of the Treasury when everything went belly up, right, when the whole thing cratered, He never even used emails.
Right, and by the way, we know that even when you lie under oath, we've talked about this a thousand times, like James Clapper, who was the head of the CIA, and they asked him, are we, you know, doing this mass data collection?
And he said, not wittingly, as he was scratching the top of his head, because that's where you scratch when you're in your big lie.
So we know that even when you lie, right, they're not going to really do anything to you.
Or the, I don't know, the complete corruption of the political process.
But then no reporter ever says, hey, what's your plan to fix that?
Nobody ever says, hey that was great the way you showed everybody, how you buy all these guys on stage, what's your plan to fix that?
Right.
So he's also at the same time revealing the corruption in the political process, he's revealing the corruption in the news media, right?
So the news media, Chuck Todd had him on and he asked him the Muslim question, right?
And he started out, this was just Sunday, and he said, you know, you say that you don't have to respond to everybody who says something, and I agree with you on that.
That's how he started his question.
So Chuck Todd just interviewed Donald Trump after the biggest gaffe that you could ever imagine, right?
Some guy says, let's round up Muslims.
And by the way, the president's a Muslim, and Trump says yes to both of them.
Chuck Todd, the number one political reporter in America, has him on his show.
Alright, so I think your answer, the original question was what about Bernie, and I think you got there in a long way because he is talking about those things.
So basically, do you think that the media just has a vested interest in really not showing him?
So for example, the other day, Bernie and Trump were both giving speeches at the same time, and even MSNBC, which you'd think would be—you know, they're supposed to lean forward, or I guess they did until two months ago.
Now they lean backwards, I'm not sure.
But even they were covering Trump instead of covering Bernie.
Well, I saw he did a promo for the Nightly Show and he said, on fleek.
Which, if you've ever heard Bernie Sanders say, on fleek, it was actually pretty funny.
But yes, so how much of that is it?
That he's the outsider guy, so he should be getting the Obama, the first time Obama went around, he should be getting that excitement.
But Bernie himself, he's a 70-something year old white guy from Vermont.
He's not that exciting.
You should shave the sides.
But really, how much is just that, that maybe his personality, sadly, in 2015 in America, that his personality doesn't match up in the way we want to vote for somebody, the way his rhetoric, which I think a lot of people agree with.
You know, it's funny that he's the big outsider on the left and Trump is the big outsider on the right, and one of them spends zero time on their hair, and one of them spends all day long on their hair.
I would like to ask Donald Trump, does he have a long-form birth certificate for that fucking hair piece?
No, I think the reason why the Democratic Party hasn't rallied around Bernie is because he's not in bed with the big money donors.
And so the Democratic Party no longer responds to their voters, they only respond to their donors.
And so their donors are telling them, get rid of this guy.
Right?
We gotta get rid of that guy somehow.
They don't want—the donors want nothing to do with Bernie because they can't control him, just like the donors don't want anything to do with Donald Trump because they can't control him.
So in that sense, they're very much alike, and that's exactly what's happening.
We do live in a banana republic where we don't really have a responsive government.
I mean, the Sandy Hook taught us anything.
Ninety percent of the people in America wanted some kind of gun legislation, and we didn't get it.
So no longer do our representatives represent our interests.
They only represent the donors.
And that's why Bernie's winning, and that's why he gets 30,000 people Until when he shows up to speak.
I'm back to let's make it fun and entertaining and do it like The Voice.
Canada comes on, he has three minutes to talk, everyone, Wolf Blitzer, they all have their back to him, and as soon as he says one thing that they like, they turn around and he's in.
By the way, Jake Tapper, he just announced that they're going to start doing fact checking of politicians with factcheck.org because apparently at CNN they don't know how to do that so they had to hire an outside organization to teach them how to fact check.
at CNN. Nobody on Jake Tapper's staff really knows what they're doing.
So what that is and why there was no real questions and why there was no
follow-up, there was no Candy Crowley moment at this debate where they
corrected Carly Fiorina for being a crazy person and saying blatant lies
about Planned Parenthood. The reason they don't do that is because they
don't want to alienate any of the viewers that like these people. So what
they'll do is they say, "Hey, Jeb Bush said this, Donald Trump said that, what do
you want to say to him?" Instead of saying, "Hey, the facts are this and you said this."
How do you... They don't do that. So they're not doing journalism, they're doing
Eddie Haskell-ism and they're trying to get people to pick fights with each other.
It had to be addressed because it was just another absurdly misogynistic thing that Trump did.
But interestingly, doesn't that then get more of the play the next day than anything that might be more important, such as foreign policy or immigration?
I mean, really, can you think of any headline the next day that was related to policy?
All right, so we haven't had a Democratic debate yet.
We have one in a couple weeks in Vegas.
As I said in our Bernie segment, you know, the Democrats are supposed to be the big party.
That's what everyone says.
They're supposed to be the big party.
But they've really only got two people running, for all intents and purposes, right?
Hillary and Bernie.
And then there's Jim Webb and O'Malley.
But it's really only two people that anyone's talking about.
Should we give the Republicans a little credit for at least they have 20 clowns in their clown car, while in the Democratic clown car there's really only two people?
I think that that guy who's polling at negative 60, that nobody knows who he is, I think he has a little bit of a chance.
Because I think they're all going to get equal footing, and people are so sick of Hillary.
Yeah, and I think he's a good-looking, middle-aged guy, and I think he's a pretty decent guy, and I think people are suddenly going to go, who the hell is this guy?
The irony is that it was Howard Dean whose idea was to limit the number of Democratic debates, because he saw what happened with all the Republican debates last time, and how they ate each other, and how it was just a clown show, and so he didn't want that to happen with the Democrats, so they made them limit them.
But now we realize, hey, there's actually going to be a real debate now, so maybe we should do more of these, because this is just Free advertising for the Republican Party, and we're not getting any for the Democrats, and people still don't know who Bernie Sanders is.
I mean, what do you— Well, it used to be that the League of Women Voters used to organize debates, and other people used to—and then they got smart, and they were like, hey, we can't let other people choose the people who are going to ask us questions.
We want to control everything.
So they created this presidential commission on debates, and now there isn't any more League of Women—so it's all them controlling everything, which is why they suck.
So somebody has to stand up, like maybe women, or some other big organization, and say, hey, we want to have our own debate.
Like the NAACP members, say, hey, we're going to have our own debate at our thing, and we're inviting people, and then it'll be telling who doesn't show up.
Well, I did notice that when I asked some of the campaign people this, and even when I asked Scott Walker, they just link a couple words together to make a sentence, and then you move on.
Because they know they're not going to be asked this, and they know no one cares.
That's what I really realized.
That when I asked them that, there was a sense of, ah, that stupid question, like, nobody cares about that.
That's the organization I'm a part of that helps get money out of politics.
And what you have to do is you have to pass a constitutional amendment, right, to get money out of politics.
Hillary Clinton, by the way, said she's in favor of it.
So that's good to hear.
Also, the Senate also, the United States Congress, also passed a resolution to open debate on this.
So that's a good thing.
And three states, since we've been trying to push this, have already passed it, California being one of them, Illinois, and I think we have New Hampshire and Vermont.
That's what you need to do.
You need to get the states—you have to go out—because the state level, they have much less control, for whatever reason, on the state capital.
Right, so I had a little inspiration from you first, because it sounded like it could happen, but then I just thought, well, if we get Hillary as president, or let's say we get Jeb Bush, I'm pretty sure they're not making that speech.
Well, I was googling this topic matter earlier and I saw that the Boy Scouts don't allow atheists In the Boy Scouts, right?
And I was thinking, it's—people don't want to trust other people who aren't religious or can pretend to be religious, you know, with decisions that are going to impact them.
I kind of get it.
But on the other hand, have you ever been around... I have aunts that are so religious, they are evil.
And when I look at the Republican spectrum out there, the candidates, I'm like, oh my God, these people are evil.
You know what I mean?
If you have blinders like this about religious and how everyone has to follow the same religion or the same thing that you're doing, I mean, that is just as bad as someone who has a void of it.
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It's just as bad as those horrible atheists who don't want to hurt anyone.
Because you said your question is how do we get religion out of government and my whole thing is they should be made to go to a, religious people should have to take an irony class.
We have Kim Davis, who's thrice divorced, making a religious stand for the sanctity of marriage.
And now the Oath Keepers have promised to defend her if they want to lock her up again.
She's so grateful, she promised to marry three or four of them.
And so when she came out, and she got in trouble for that because Survivor doesn't want to use that song, but she said she liked that song so much, she's going to play it at her next three weddings.
And Trump—not that I ever want to defend Trump, but you know, they asked Trump about the gay marriage thing, and he said, look, the Supreme Court made a decision.
I would have to abide by the Supreme Court.
That shows a better understanding of how government works than Santorum or Huckabee, who want you to just pick which laws.
Yes.
I think we could all just pick, well, I'm not going to pay taxes.
It's not his, and ultimately it's not about the speaking money per se, as much as just the influence, that he will just run the Christian right, like be the next Billy Graham or something.
But I want to back up to something that you said earlier about this atheist thing, because the first two episodes of the show we had Sam Harris, who's probably the most outspoken atheist that I know.
One of my all-time favorite atheists.
I love them.
And Cara Santa Maria, also an atheist.
And we talked a little bit about atheists in politics, and every poll shows that people would never vote for an atheist, people hate atheists.
Why are we so afraid of secularism?
I think this is sort of what you were saying before, but why are we afraid of people that would base their decisions on the law of the land and not The imaginary, yeah.
Don't you think that actually takes something very special away from childhood?
That, you know, I played with G.I.
Joe or He-Man or Transformers and the imagination I got to use my imagination to make up this world and, you know, figure out things that I thought and whatever, where now you're going to make everything so realistic for these kids and aware them of every fear and everything that might upset them that you're going to send a bunch of robots—and by the way, they're drugged, right?
They're all on every drug known to man because of, you know, whatever—that we're going to send them out into a world drugged and afraid of everything.
You know, getting back to the PC thing, you are correct that some people are too knee-jerk and cry racism or whatever, anti-Semitism, but there are, there is racism.
So that, for example, that would be when the right will say that Christians are actually the most under attack in America, which is, of course, completely insane.
When are the Christians going to have their day in America, Dave?
Someday they're going to have a guy maybe in the White House to run things.
Yes, you know, the thing that Jerry Seinfeld, right, so that came up with, he was complaining about PC culture on campus.
I haven't been in colleges in a year, but I, I mean in a couple of years, but I noticed when I used to play colleges that the higher the tuition, the more freedom I got to say whatever I wanted.
So is the bigger fear... I used to fear that the First Amendment would disappear, that the government would take our free speech.
But what I'm starting to fear now, although I am no big fan of the government in any capacity, what I'm starting to fear now is that ultimately we're just going to take our freedoms away.
We're going to get so afraid of saying anything.
And I see this happen all the time now.
I get emails, not that I'm the most politically incorrect person there is, but I get emails now, people saying that I'm saying things that they wish they could say, and it seems to me that people are censoring themselves already, so I fear that.
I fear the self-censorship because of all this, more than I fear that the government's going to come in and take away our right to free speech.
All I want to say is I was just working Vegas last week and there was one set where I was having, it was a little, the crowd was tight and a guy was sitting with his arms crossed and I, for 15 years, have always said, oh, you know, are your nipples cold, do you want to let them go?
Or, you know, three guys sitting, you guys, where's your girls and all that.
That's interesting because Sarah Silverman said something to that effect this week in an interview and I think she was directing it at Seinfeld because Seinfeld basically was saying, you know, I used to make this gay joke about a French king and his loose, you know, his hand like this and now they think it's too offensive.
But I would always veer on this, I don't know, to call Seinfeld politically incorrect, I don't know what he thinks about anything.
Because there comes a time, right, like so now we've come a long way with how gay people are treated in our society in a positive way, but there's guys who were born at a certain age, like Alec Baldwin, they grew up using gay terms as slurs and insults.
And then when that lizard brain gets activated when you're angry at someone, those things come up, right?
And so Alec Baldwin got in trouble for calling a guy a cock-sucking faggot, right?
And I feel like it's not cool to fight the system anymore.
You're thought of as crazy or something or something.
I think it has a lot to do with that most comics are liberal.
Most comics really, at least at the beginning, really liked Obama.
So everybody would say, ah, it's tough to make jokes about this guy because he's rational and speaks clearly and he's not making all the grammatical errors that Bush was making.
Now it's changed and I think people don't necessarily like Obama as much or at least people on the left that feel that he's Bin more right-wing.
I think certainly that's what you think.
But we don't have a real counterculture anymore.
Do we need a Republican in office to have a true counterculture?
Would that actually help the country?
To have someone that I believe in nothing that they actually stand for.
So what, by Barack Obama being the head of the government, he splits the opposition because half the people are loyal to him, and then the other half, the people are telling the truth or wanting to push back and protest against, you know, a tyrannical government or bullshit that they see in the government, and so it doesn't happen.
That's exactly what's happening, and that is what happened, and that's why there is no counterculture.
Well, I was watching Bill Maher the other night, and he was, of course, making fun of Republicans, and George Pataki was on there.
And it's gotten to the point where, yeah, you want to have one Republican in the mix when you're talking politics and doing the counterculture thing, all that.
But even George Pataki's like, well, my party.
And it's just an indication of we've just all moved.