Dec. 22, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
03:15
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The end of the year is upon us, so we're going to be doing a little progress report here. | ||
| I hope you guys had a chance to check out my interview from last week with Peter Boghossian. | ||
| For those of you that might have missed it, my intention with Peter was to focus on atheism as well as critical thinking. | ||
| These are ideas that Peter wrote his book about, spends most of his time talking about, and are obviously topics That I'm interested in. | ||
| I think I had about 13 questions prepared for Peter, but like many of my interviews, the conversation pretty much just took a life of its own. | ||
| In last week's case though, something particularly interesting happened. | ||
| No matter how far I tried to steer the conversation away from the regressive left, and I tried many times, all roads kept leading back to them. | ||
| I've mentioned to you guys a couple times now how I want to talk about all kinds of things on this show, from science to politics to spirituality and much more. | ||
| I've also mentioned to you guys how I don't want to solely focus on the regressive left, primarily because it doesn't necessarily solve anything. | ||
| Still, I find myself incredibly torn about this topic. | ||
| On one hand, until the last couple months, we hadn't even diagnosed the problem of the regressive left, right? | ||
| Clearly huge numbers of those of you on the left were upset about how your team was being hijacked, but there wasn't a place to come together and talk about it, much less a whole group of like-minded people willing to share their experiences and tell their stories. | ||
| For that reason, I've wanted to keep this conversation going. | ||
| It's important to realize how many of us are actually out there. | ||
| There are a lot. | ||
| We want to fix the left, but I don't think we can without getting to critical mass on the issue. | ||
| On the other hand, I don't sense that we can actually change these regressives. | ||
| As I've also mentioned before, since we've started doing the show, I've seen these guys continue to lie and smear opponents, only to be caught and then doubled down or even more. | ||
| Some people are fighting back against these lies with facts and logic. | ||
| Fortunately, I've had several of these people on the show, like Maajid Nawaz, Sarah Hader, and Gad Saad. | ||
| Others I know only from the online space, such as my guest this week, Ali Rizvi. | ||
| Ali's an atheist Muslim who's constantly writing about and fighting against regressive ideology. | ||
| Growing up mainly in Saudi Arabia and ultimately leaving religion for secularism, he should be a natural hero of the left. | ||
| Sadly, he's not. | ||
| That's one of the many things that we're going to talk about. | ||
| I go back and forth between thinking that fighting the regressives by putting time and energy into discussing them is what will ultimately do the most to change the landscape of the left, and then just thinking that if we ignore them, maybe they'll go away. | ||
| I tend to think that most of you will tell me that we have to keep amplifying real liberal voices, and that by ignoring them, we'll only let their influence grow. | ||
| That's pretty much what I think, too. | ||
| I must say that I'm incredibly inspired by the fact that half the time when I see anything that they write, tweet, or whatever, there's an army of people ready to combat their bullshit. | ||
| A few people have mentioned to me that they believe that this whole regressive situation and the fuel that it gives to the right is only going to get worse before it gets better. | ||
| Unfortunately, I think these people are probably correct. | ||
| Until the real, legitimate, true voices of liberalism can come back to the forefront, this conversation is always going to be stuck between the regressives and the Trumps. |
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