John Fugelsang critiques the media's profit-driven focus on Donald Trump and warns that demonizing Hillary Clinton over Bill Clinton's infidelity risks a Republican victory. He argues voter ID laws suppress turnout for minorities and advocates for online voting, while criticizing the two-party system as a duopoly that stifles third-party options like Gary Johnson. Fugelsang distinguishes faith from religion, defending personal belief but opposing religious justification for discrimination, and suggests Bernie Sanders might need executive orders to enact reforms. Ultimately, he compares current political rancor to historical feuds, noting the erosion of the American Dream due to deregulation while advocating for decency within the U.S. system. [Automatically generated summary]
Concerned mainly with broadening a person's general knowledge and experience rather than with technical or professional training.
Alright, being open to new opinions and broadening your knowledge both seem like good ideas, right?
With these two definitions in mind, you can understand why liberals have been on the forefront of the civil rights movement, workers' rights, women's rights, and marriage equality.
Sometimes to get everyone to a place of equality, you have to throw out the societal norms and be willing to accept a new normal.
Conservatives often argue that change isn't good, or at least change that comes too fast isn't.
I think in certain cases there can be some truth to that mentality, but if you're the black person sitting in the back of the bus, or a woman trying to vote, or the gay person who can't get married, change can't happen soon enough.
I mention all this because I don't want to lose my cred as a real liberal.
Since I've had some conservative guests on the Rubin Report, I've seen people suddenly calling me a conservative or claiming that I'm a Republican.
As I've mentioned before, I've never voted for a Republican for any major office, so if I'm a Republican, I'm a pretty bad one.
Just because I talk to Ben Shapiro or Milo Yiannopoulos or Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute doesn't mean I share any or all of their beliefs.
And that's exactly the same as when I talk to left-leaning guests like Jimmy Dore or Reva Martin, or my guest this week, John Fugelsang.
I listen to people, push back when I see fit, and see where the conversation goes.
I know some of you want me to electrocute my guests every time they say something I disagree with, but there's a litany of legal reasons we just can't do that.
But beyond the legal reasons, I'm a firm believer that good ideas always beat out bad ideas if you let the light shine on both of them.
It's not liberal or even decent to shout down or silence ideas just because you don't like them.
That has been and always will be the driving force behind the Rubin Report.
I view liberal thinking and liberal ideas as generally good.
Over the past few months, as I've explored classical liberalism with its focus on civil liberties and economic freedom, I've come to realize in many cases liberal ideas aren't that far from libertarian ideas.
You can make excellent arguments for racial equality, gender equality, and marriage equality all from both liberal and libertarian points of view.
The main difference is how you think the role of government should be applied in any of those cases.
A liberal may want marriage equality because they believe that a gay couple deserves to be treated the same as a straight couple.
A libertarian may want marriage equality because they don't believe the government has the right to tell any two people what kind of contract they can partake in.
The silent majority of us have much more in common than we have apart, especially if you're a moderate on either side or just a good old fashioned centrist.
I tend to think that most of you who watch the Rubin Report fall somewhere on that spectrum.
I don't pretend to have every answer because it's preposterous to do so.
Unfortunately, not having an answer doesn't stop most talking heads.
I prefer to analyze each situation with the same level of critical thinking that I apply to the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, many liberals have taken a turn into stifling dissent with cries of racism and bigotry every time they hear an idea that they don't like.
To me, being liberal is a constant evolution of ideas as time goes on.
This concept doesn't mean changing my ideals or my morals from day to day, but it means that I can change as the world changes.
I see the world in shades of gray rather than black and white.
The world is constantly changing, and I'm not ashamed to admit that my opinions have changed along with it.
That isn't the position of a man without conviction.
It's a position of a man with a conscience.
As liberals, we must be brave enough to have our ideas challenged just like we challenge the ideas that came before us.
At the end of the day, this isn't about right and wrong.
It's about having the bravery to defend your ideals.
So to my liberal friends who have chosen censorship over ideas and smearing over debate, I challenge you to be brave.
If our ideas are good and our cause is just, we shouldn't be afraid to defend them.
John Fuglesang is a comedian, host of Tell Me Everything on SiriusXM Insight, and a good buddy of mine.
John, it took a while, but we've got you on the show.
We really should have recorded what happened for these last six or eight minutes, because we had- I think it's pretty good for your viewers that you didn't record what just happened.
We had a little miscommunication whether we were doing this at 1130 a.m.
or p.m.
Long story short, we just followed you as you ran across the SiriusXM hallway with your laptop screaming like a crazy person.
All right, well, let's get to it here, because you are one of my favorite comics.
You're actually one of the only guys that can drag me to do stand-up.
Pretty much the only time I do stand-up these days is when you say, all right, I'm in town and I'm doing one of my shows, and you do these great comedy nation shows that are mostly about politics and free speech and religion.
I mean, all the things that I like talking about.
So, before we get into comedy, let's just talk about your history, because you have an incredible upbringing, your parents' background.
My parents are both former Catholic clergy members, my father being a Franciscan brother, my mother being a nun who spent many years as a nurse working with lepers in the jungles of Malawi, Africa.
With a background like that, I could never afford the therapy I actually needed, so I got into theater and stand-up.
And over the course of my career, I've hosted adult literacy shows for PBS.
I've been murdered on CSI.
I've gotten Drama League nominations for off-Broadway solo shows.
I've worked on MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN.
I hosted my own program for the late, lamented Current Channel.
I once got Mitt Romney's advisor to call Mitt an etch-a-sketch.
And I once got George Harrison to play his final on-camera performance.
And I hosted America's Funniest Home Videos with Daisy Puentes.
So I like doing a little bit of the pedigree stuff because it's important to know, you know, I feel like there's so many talking heads and nobody knows what their backgrounds are, what they studied, where they came from.
And it's, uh, it's nice knowing that.
So this religious upbringing that you had, when did you sort of realize, as you said, you couldn't afford therapy, so you went into acting and comedy.
When did you realize that maybe some of the constructs of religion weren't for you?
But I don't think God's an invisible man with a beard and a penis in the sky who throws down lightning bolts when he's in a moody situation.
You read the Old Testament, it's like the alcoholic step-god.
It's like this big cosmic game of candid camera and God's Alan Funt.
So yeah, I make a distinction.
I was asked to go on Kamau Bell Show and debate Jamie Gilstein about atheism versus belief, and I was like, well, I'll never tell an atheist they're wrong.
My definition of faith is It doesn't involve telling other people that they're wrong.
When I got to the studio, they wanted me to defend religion.
And I'm like, no, no, no.
I'll defend anyone's right to worship.
And as long as you're not bothering anybody else's person or property, you're putting somebody down in the name of Jesus, then good for you.
God bless.
Find the fan club that works for you.
But I'm not going to defend religion.
I'm going to defend faith and belief.
And they were like, well, no, no, don't do that.
I said, I'm sorry, I can't.
And so Jamie and I just told jokes and it got a million hits on YouTube.
Because I think people are really tired of the whole, my God can beat up your God thing.
Some of the best Christians I know are atheists.
Some of the most godless heathens I know are heathens.
And even atheists can go crazy, you know?
I mean, there's fundamentalist atheists.
I mean, I love the Atheist Handbook.
It's a great set of rules for people who are tired of religion's set of rules.
For me, it's like, you know, my faith is such that you believe what you want to believe if it makes you a better person.
The Dalai Lama said the purpose of religion is to improve yourself, not criticize others.
Yeah, you love mocking hypocrites, and that's a lot about, you know, what your stand-up's about, and when I see you going back and forth with people on Twitter, hypocrisy, and that's the main thing usually that comedians call out.
So, when it comes to faith, so your faith is just, your faith to you, I sense, is just something private.
You don't, you're not even defining what your faith is, really, right?
Well, I don't know if anyone needs to hear anything I do.
I never really felt that.
I just knew that the first time I saw George Carlin live, he made me feel less alone.
And I knew I wanted to do what he did.
I wanted to come out and rail against injustice and nonsense and lies, but I didn't want to just be a propagandist.
I wanted to do it creatively.
I wanted to find ways to be funny and make it entertaining.
And I've always tried to adhere to a principle of entertaining first, informative second, and preachy last, which is easier on stage than it is on Twitter.
But I've always, you know, Carlin was really it for me.
I was a fan of his before I saw him live.
But once I saw him live, I knew that that's what I wanted to do.
And I so admired how he went after politicians and religious leaders and just creeps in general and did it using humor rather than hate or just propaganda.
And so for me, I love doing standup that's just silly and nonsense.
But I also really love to To work out logic through penis jokes.
Well, you know, to me, the real beauty of Carlin was that he was the most political you could possibly be, and yet at the same time, very rarely commented on politics of the day.
You know what I mean?
Like right now, if he was alive, I don't think he would be commenting that much on the,
the race horse that we're all caught in of, you know, the Trump Hillary Bernie, this, that, the other thing,
but he would be commenting on the bigger pieces of it.
I mean, you know, he spoke extensively about the Reagan administration.
He talked a lot about Clinton versus Dole.
I mean, if you listen to the albums from the 80s, what am I doing in New Jersey?
And then, of course, I think Jammin' in New York is his best album.
And Back in Town, the one that followed it, is almost as good.
I think he would have flip-flopped the two.
But even like You Were All Diseased was an album where he Talked about Bush and, you know, he talked a lot about supporting Governor Bush after 9-11, even though he didn't like him.
He would only call him Governor Bush.
I mean, Carlin, he didn't make his whole sets about it, but he more or less took on the inner douchebag in all of us.
And politicians were very often the starting point where they jump off into just social hypocrisy
Right, you gotta get right to that line and toe it properly, and then you can tell some people the truth, because if you tell them the truth and you're being funny, that's good, but if you tell them the truth and you're not, that's when the pitchforks come.
I mean, ten years ago I got called a liberal because I supported gay marriage, I supported decriminalizing marijuana, I thought Bush's economic plans weren't going to work, and I was against the Iraq War.
It turns out I wasn't a liberal, I was prematurely mainstream.
And throughout history, I think prematurely mainstream is what liberals have been.
They've been the ones who fight for social change, generally.
But you know, everyone I know, every interesting person I know, is liberal in some areas and conservative in others.
If you're all just one or the other thing, it doesn't mean anything.
You become a guy at a Star Trek convention.
So I get asked this question, and I don't really know what liberal means anymore, but when I read the dictionary definition of the word, I aspire to be that, you know, like I was on the show on Fox News and they kept trying to get me to admit I was a liberal.
And I said, I aspire to be a liberal the same way I aspire to be a Christian.
I don't know if I would ever self-identify as either of those two words.
And you weren't connected to us on Skype when I did the intro to the show, but I actually took the deck, the literal definition, the dictionary definition of liberal.
And I read it out.
And it's someone who's basically if your ideas are evolving, if you're willing to challenge The status quo, then you are a liberal.
And it's so funny to me.
I remember back in 1992 when I was 12 years old and we were doing a mock election when Dukakis was running against George H.W.
And he certainly, you know, the state didn't put him to death, and the conservative religious bosses of their day didn't put him to death because he didn't rock the boat enough.
We could have more than one PBS and we could have a PBS for liberals and a PBS for conservatives.
I think we could have presidential debates every week on PBS where it's not about profit.
You know, I don't resent a corporate media from having to be responsible to their shareholders.
That's just how the culture and the industry has evolved.
Once you can admit that, You know, Donald Trump seems to think that all his ratings and all this airtime mean people love him.
What Trump, and I think a lot of folks in the media haven't realized, is a lot of these ratings that Trump generates is because a large number of people are actually hate-watching him.
He is the True Detective Season 2 of politics, and a lot of people just come out watching, you know, to see how horrible he is, the way you slow down for a car wreck.
I don't think that necessarily translates into love.
But, you know, I do think that MSNBC is doing great in their ratings now, but I think it may be because people are just fascinated that this Trump thing is actually happening.
I mean, as a novelty act, historically, it's never happened before.
It'll probably never happen again.
And so in that sense, I think it's newsworthy in much the same way I think the Malaysian plane going missing or the OJ case was newsworthy.
So isn't it a little bit of both with Trump, though?
Because there's obviously the spectacle and the sort of carnival atmosphere and all that.
But at the same time, I read the other day that I think at this point he has more votes than any other Republican in the primaries, or at least he's going to certainly break I think it's more than Romney's record or George W. Bush's record by the time California runs around.
I think it's more than Reagan already.
Now, part of that is just demographics change and all that kind of stuff.
But the point is that people are actually voting for him.
So if you were a conservative, if you were a Republican right now, and you weren't a Trump guy, what would you do?
Because I find that they're in a real bind right now.
Because if you're a mainstream establishment Republican, I don't think you can go into that convention and say, we're going to steal this thing away because we don't like it.
It would expose such a horrible flaw in the system and really be undemocratic.
And at the same time, they're giving up their party.
I mean, I don't believe the Republican Party is against government at all.
Government is how, in my lifetime, they've redistributed wealth to the top 2%.
They don't dislike government.
They dislike democracy.
And we've seen it time and time again.
Look at these ridiculous voter ID laws.
That as soon as the Supreme Court removed the preclearance regulations in 2013, these voter ID laws go up all over the place because they want as low a turnout as possible.
We know they don't care about the will of the people based on Bush v. Gore.
Yeah, would you be for just like a basic voter ID registration thing, just that you just have to have some level of identification, some government issued identification?
Because I get you on that, but I don't think you should just be able to walk in with nothing and just sign.
Right, I would say there's gotta be some way that it can be subsidized to just give everyone some card that proves who they are, even if the numbers are incredibly low and then you register and then you have some card that has your picture on it and the government paid for it and that's it.
You get a voter registration card every year to your home address, but you know, for me it's like...
This whole thing with the voter ID laws is just more proof of how undemocratic the entire process is and I really think that what we should be talking about is how to make it easier to vote, not harder.
Why do we only vote the first Tuesday?
In November.
Well, it's because we're still living by 18th century standards in an agrarian economy.
We were mostly farmers and you were planting your crops up until, you know, you were harvesting up until the end of October.
And then the presumption was the first Sunday in November, you'd go to church.
And then Monday it would take you one full day traveling by horse or mule to get to the nearest polling station and then you could vote on Tuesday.
So we're being controlled by the living habits of people who've been dead for over a hundred years.
Instead of having it be like Motor Voter where you get your registration as soon as you get your license, why can't we have a holiday to vote?
We should be trying everything we can do to drive up voter enrollments, to drive up voter participation, have people manage their own democracy.
But since the beginning of this country, when the founding fathers thought only land-owning white men should be allowed to vote, we've always talked the talk.
I mean, I'm a Bernie guy, yeah, just if you go by policies alone, but I mean, no candidate's ever gonna...
You know, we have these purity tests for our politicians and no politician, no lover, no relative, no artist is ever going to match your entire checklist.
I mean, every rock star you've ever admired has released a bad album or done something embarrassing.
You know, every great filmmaker has a club.
No politician is going to match your purity tests at all.
And I see the Democratic Party, which I'm not a member of.
I'm independent.
I always have been.
I'm not a Democrat.
Republicans generally force me to vote that way.
But I see this civil war where it's like, you know, mom's friends fighting with grandpa's friends.
And it's so ugly.
I don't want to watch Margaret Thatcher beat up Five-ish Finkel in a cage match.
This civil war of the left is the most depressing thing about a generally depressing election year.
And I have a lot of issues with Hillary Clinton, but I don't really think that I'm ready
to hand the nuclear launch codes over to Donald Trump just yet.
I mean, exploiting the murder of these four people.
I'm pretty sure that it was terrorists who did it, but we've seen this whole process
of how can we take these corpses and use them against politicians we don't like.
First it was Susan Rice, then it was Barack Obama, Now it's all Hillary Clinton's fault.
These folks have never blamed the terrorists, they've never held the CIA or Petraeus responsible for what happened there, and we're never gonna know, because most likely, I mean, Petraeus' mistress said in a speech that there was a black site prison in the basement of that consulate, so we're never gonna know the whole story.
You know, for me, I find half my day is spent defending Hillary Clinton against unfair attacks.
I think blaming a woman for her husband's infidelity?
I mean, I hear people bringing up Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broderick again.
Well, this has nothing to do with policy and Bill Clinton's not running, but Donald Trump has been accused of rape, Ronald Reagan was accused of rape, Bill Clinton was accused of rape.
So this goes to that purity thing that you mentioned, because it seems to me that the far left has taken Bernie, and they've basically said, Bernie's our Jesus, we love all of these ideas, and at the same time, we love them so much that we have to destroy Hillary.
And what I see the problem there is, is that ultimately, you could end up ushering in President Trump.
I mean, even the way you're describing, not that you're saying you're supporting her, but even the way you're talking about her is sort of just like, it's like a tepid defense, right?
Man, Fuqua's saying, I got to tell you, it is so refreshing to talk to someone on the
left with a little nuance, because this is what I've been talking about for months, that
it seems to me the left has lost their mind.
Every time that you disagree with sort of the mainstream progressives, You are a racist, or you are a bigot, or you are a homophobe, and they've made good, decent people that are basically liberal, or basically centrist, or even a little conservative, they've made them all look crazy, and that is fueling Trump.
So this is the exact conversation I've wanted to have with someone that I consider simpatico on this stuff.
Well, thank you for one of the reasons why I've never joined a political party, because people just lose their damn minds over this.
And I look at Facebook, which has just become like, it's become like electronic Bosnia.
And everyone's at war with everyone.
I kind of feel like y'all are going to have to get along and share this earth with each other after November of this year.
And so I don't want to really be a part of the hate or the rancor.
And by that same token, I'll defend Donald Trump, too.
I mean, I find myself defending people I don't support who are unfairly attacked more than anything.
And it's really depressing, but it kind of shows how we got where we are.
By that same token, The very fact that Bernie Sanders can go this far in a campaign.
I mean, he packed in 20,000 in a stadium in California in Sacramento last night with 10,000 outside.
Of course, the media didn't cover this.
But the very fact that a Jewish self-described democratic socialist can do that well.
In this day and age shows the power of the internet and online social media and it shows how far we come as a people.
I mean the strides LGBT people have made in my lifetime from when I was a teenager moving to New York in the 80s and seeing the beginning of AIDS activism to a sitting president endorsing marriage equality during a heated re-election battle.
That's why I still believe in the American dream because I've seen people, not politicians, but people make this kind of change happen.
Yeah, and you know, it's funny because right where you were, probably ten feet from where you were when I had my show on SiriusXM, I think it was the first time we had met, or maybe we did stand up one or two times together, but you came on my show and we were talking about marriage equality, and you were laying out such a good case for it, but it was four years before it happened, and it seemed sort of edgy, where now it seems the norm, and that's what liberalism is supposed to be.
I mean, look, it was liberals in the Republican Party who ended slavery, right?
I mean, it was, you know, liberals of both parties who fought for civil rights.
It was conservatives of both parties who fought against the civil rights movement.
You know, it's messy.
And like I said at the beginning of this conversation, I think we're all progressive in some ways and conservative in other ways, at least most sane people I know.
So, you know, I've seen a lot to be inspired by in my life.
And I try to remind myself that I am a recovering cynic.
And I don't ever want to go back to being so dark again.
And I'm catching a lot of heat for it because, you know, in talking about Donald Trump, who is not a conservative Republican, he's just not.
He's a horrible human being.
but if you would ever told me david if you never told me that there'd be a guy
on stage at a republican presidential debate
that bush lied us into war saying the planned parenthood as a lot of good
things for for women saying that uh... that hedge fund managers and
billionaires like himself should be taxed more i i i wouldn't believe it
i mean grover norquist is clutching his pearls at and a lot of this but again
the third right to the same thing And I think anyone who compares people to Nazis is worse than Hitler.
But I will say, the Third Reich rose to power by running against the Weimar Republic and promising so many conservatives and so many liberals whatever they wanted that people just kind of got...
caught up in the emotion of it and this feeling of national pride,
that's not to compare the Obama administration to the Weimar Republic, they're much more competent.
But the parallels are really, really similar 'cause Donald Trump has promised
as much good progressive stuff as he's promised conservative stuff.
Okay, and basically you said to him, you know, you guys have been saying all this bad stuff about each other in the Republican primaries, and how do you move forward?
That was sort of the gist of it.
And he said, well, it's an Etch-A-Sketch, right?
And you can just sort of forget all that stuff and reset.
Do you want to clean up the mess that I just created for you there?
I mean, it was, it was pretty, it was a bit sneaky on my part because I, I knew, That I wanted to ask a question that I hadn't heard asked before.
And at the time, everyone was saying, is Mitt Romney conservative enough?
That was where all the mainstream media was going.
You've got Gingrich and Singatore.
Is Mitt Romney really conservative enough?
Because most mainstream media will never stop chasing Fox News' audience.
And my whole thing was, isn't Mitt Romney too conservative?
Hasn't he Hasn't he painted himself into an ideological corner in this campaign by, you know, it was easier to run against McCain in 2000, but now these guys in 2008, I'm sorry, in 2008, now in 2012, you know, you're up against Gingrich and Santorum, you're trying to be something you're not, and it's the same problem that every Republican nominee is going to have for quite a while when the Tea Party is controlling your nominating process.
It's sort of like the GOP is going to have a tough time getting non-lunatics
nominated for president.
Democrats have a different problem.
Nobody shows up to vote midterms.
So both parties are kind of screwed, and that's why we're looking at potentially
a generation of Democratic presidents and Republican congresses.
But, you know, so I asked it in a very wordy, newsy, BS kind of way.
And to my shock, he came out and said, oh, no, you get to the midterm,
you get to the general.
And it's like a reset button.
It's like an Etch-a-Sketch.
And I couldn't believe it.
He had just admitted that Mitt Romney had the ideology of the guy from Memento.
The guy slept like a crack house mattress.
He changed positions like a yoga teacher on tainted meth.
And I went home after the taping.
I was doing mornings every day on CNN.
And by that afternoon, The clip had been shown everywhere.
I was sitting in a cafe with my wife and baby, and I saw myself on TV.
Everyone began running it.
It was on The Daily Show and Colbert that night, and all the big networks.
I was getting calls from Europe.
Etch-A-Sketch sales went up, I believe, 16,000% on Amazon that night.
I did not get a cut of that, but I was assigned lots of Etch-A-Sketches for the next two years at every one of my tour dates.
I guess I was proud to be a minor historical footnote, but you know, it is the sort of thing that Republican voters, and Democratic voters as well, need to be wary of, especially in a season when so many don't trust Trump or Hillary.
Right, so basically what you did with that question was you pulled the mask off of the endless bullshit, because you basically said to him, you had to say some stuff To get through, and look, the Democrats have the same problem.
I get you with the Republicans and the Tea Party, they've dragged them to the right.
I think the Democrats have the same problem now, where they're being led by the far left, and that goes to the point what we were talking about with Hillary, where they are gonna demonize her and then depress their actual people from showing up.
So I think both parties have this problem, but you expose this thing, and it seems like four years later, Trump has just blown the whole thing apart.
Like, there is no more, uh, we-have-to-pretend-we're-this-or-that.
Trump is just like, I say whatever I want, you all love it, and I'm just gonna keep doing it, even if I change my position every week.
I'm not so sure that Bernie has led the whole party to the far left.
I kind of think Bush and Cheney push the country a lot more left, to tell you the truth.
And I don't think Bernie Sanders has said anything too outrageous.
He's really advocating for things that have worked in other countries that are our capitalist allies, and for things that have worked here in the past under President Eisenhower.
Well, interestingly, I don't think that Bernie necessarily is leading it, but I think that that movement that's behind him is leading him in a way that I don't know that he fully grasps.
I think that some of the social justice stuff and just the behavior of the far left is not behavior that he uses.
I tweeted once, I wish that I liked Bernie's supporters as much as I like Bernie.
I think he is a pretty decent guy, but I think he's being led by I don't know if he's being led.
I think his campaign is being tainted by some of his followers, but there's a few circumstances here.
Number one, we have no idea how many of these online trolls are actually Republicans pretending to be Bernie supporters because they're trying to wound Hillary.
Mom always said, don't talk to strange eggs, all right?
You know, there have been studies showing that women over 45 have waited their whole life For a woman president.
And they've worked for this.
And they really want this to happen.
And I respect that.
But the same studies show that women under 45 know that in their lifetime there will be a woman president.
And they don't go for Elizabeth Warren in a second.
They don't totally trust this woman candidate.
So it's a real reckoning that our country is going to have to face.
I kind of am inclined to believe, David, that whoever gets the job is going to be a one-term punching bag.
Because I don't know...
Who could enact the kind of sweeping reform we need to actually restore the middle class?
We're sort of in the golden age of gradual improvement that's hailed as sweeping reform.
I think if Bernie Sanders was smart, if I was advising him, I would tell him to take a one-term pledge and then just say that once he got in there, he was just going to executive order us into having a middle class again and then leave.
What Trump has done- But would you be okay with that, really?
The executive branch getting more and more power?
Because almost every president at this point takes more power for that branch.
And even if you think about the emphasis that we put on the presidential election, they're only a third of the government, right?
But we barely ever talk about the Senate and the Congress, right?
We barely talk about the Supreme Court.
So the idea of giving the president more power, do you fear that- because somebody that you didn't like could then get into office and you wouldn't be happy about it, right?
There's no argument for filibuster reform, you know?
I mean, all the Democrats who were demanding that Harry Reid end the filibuster, you know, when the Democrats had the Senate, they're now so grateful they didn't because it gives the Democrats some leverage.
We've never had this level of obstruction before in congressional history.
Bill Clinton broke the record for the most filibusters against the President in U.S.
history.
He had more than every other President combined.
And under Obama, it's already topped Clinton.
In Obama's first term, it topped Clinton.
So this isn't, I'm not talking about big government, I'm talking about good government.
And you know, I know that things move slow, things are designed to move slow.
But I just spent a couple years of my life working on a film for PBS about the American dream.
We retraced Alexis de Tocqueville's journey in 1831 and interviewed over 200 people.
in 55 cities in 17 states about what the American dream was and what it is now.
And it's one thing for me to sit in a radio or a TV studio and be lofty about this, but
actually having been on the road for a couple of years, the American dream is not what it
once was.
We were raised to believe that we were in a country where you could work hard, play
by the rules, and you would prosper, and your children could know that they were going to
have a higher standard of living than you.
After 35 years of deregulation, of outsourcing, of deindustrialization, of automation, of
jobs being shipped away that are never coming back, that's not the American dream anymore.
It's gone from prosperity to survival.
For millions, retirement doesn't exist anymore.
The middle class is now just the top of the bottom.
And it doesn't have to be this way.
And if policies got us here, policies could get us out of here.
But I fear, we being the slow learning monkeys that we are, it's gonna have to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Yeah, that's been a theme that I've talked to a lot of people about, that a lot of people that I really respect and like are saying that it's gonna get worse before it gets better.
And everything you just described, Whether you are on the left or the right, it explains both Bernie and Trump.
Because it's about people are voting or at least expressing themselves about the broken system, not the policies.
That's why it doesn't matter what Trump says, he's just saying something.
And for the Bernie people, it doesn't matter whether the president actually has the authority Yeah, it's a presidential candidate talking about it as a platform position.
So it's just, you know, if you vote for that, it's the American people saying, that's what we want.
But we know that the government doesn't care about democracy.
Go back to Obama.
Look what the American people voted for twice.
Closing Gitmo.
American people voted for a public option.
The American people voted for higher taxes on the wealthy.
Obama had to wait until he was elected twice before he could just restore tax codes to Clinton levels.
You know, they run on these things.
And then, of course, once they're in office, they're not allowed to.
And I'm like, well, what about the will of the voters?
So that does come into it.
In the case of Trump, it's fascinating because he's proved once and for all that nobody hates Republican politicians more than Republican primary voters.
Right, and there's something sort of beautiful about that.
That's why I'm conflicted about the whole thing.
Because it's like, I don't like the idea of this person that I don't know really what he believes in and is using the media in such a crass and sort of...
Dishonest way.
And then at the same time, all of these leaders, I wasn't a fan of any of the mainstream Republicans beforehand, so watching them all kind of crumble and watching all the talking heads on all the cable news networks, watching the same people who got everything wrong six months ago, now they're afraid, right?
You can see fear in them.
When I watch them on, yeah, I watch them on CNN and I go, man, you could tell they're afraid for their jobs now because they've all been phoning it in for years for the system.
And now they're afraid, wow, this guy could come in, we could be out of a gig.
I mean, watching the Republican race is like watching Batman v Superman.
I don't know who I'm rooting for.
I just want it to be done.
And, you know, in that sense, it's revealed a lot of the discontent.
We can't forget that the first ever third party president got into the White House with only 38 percent of the vote.
And he was a Republican.
And it was Lincoln.
And the two-party duopoly is what a lot of people don't trust.
And, you know, maybe Trump could have done better if he'd run as a third-party independent.
Although he did that before, I believe, and, you know, didn't get anywhere with it.
But, you know, that was before he became a reality TV star.
Right.
It's interesting.
I guess if I was advising the Republican Party, I think the smartest thing we've heard It comes from William Crystal.
What kind of liberal are you?
I have broken clocks that are right more than him.
The fact is, William Crystal is leading this consortium of Republicans trying to persuade a mainstream, well-known Republican leader who's out of the game to make a third party run.
Their fear is that even more Republicans are going to stay home this year than stayed home for Romney in 2012.
Let's not forget Gary Johnson, two-time elected governor of New Mexico, who was only invited to, I think, two or three GOP debates in all of 2012, ran as the Libertarian Party candidate, got a million votes.
Mark my words, Dave Rubin, Gary Johnson's going to get more than a million votes this year.
And they're terrified of more disaffected Republicans staying home.
So the movement, and the New York Times wrote a whole piece about it, is to get, say, a Rick Perry.
to run as a third party, knowing he'll never get it, to fall on his sword.
But their fear is that Donald Trump is not just going to cost them the White House.
They're writing that off.
They're afraid of losing the Senate.
So if you can get a Rick Perry or an attractive, well-known conservative to run, to at least get the social conservatives out of the House so they'll still vote, and then vote R all the way down ticket, that could help them save the Senate.
I probably shouldn't be saying this because I want them to lose the Senate, but it is a smart strategy.
God, it's such intricate little moves and machinations of the system and that you're agreeing with the ideas of Bill Kristol to sort of take down Trump.
So those types of things, though, would just be if you're a purist libertarian.
Like every party, there's ways of taking the sort of ideals of libertarianism, of limited government and freeing up business more and things like that, without necessarily destroying Social Security and still allowing for some safety net and things like that.
I mean, I like Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party as well.
I would love to see at least one debate where all the third party, major third party candidates get to be on the stage with the big two.
Because what we're seeing here with both Bernie and Trump is a massive American discontent With this, you know, snake with two heads that's taken over the whole game.
People don't trust the two-party system.
And believe me, we're all going to be so sick of seeing that picture of the Trumps and the Clintons at the wedding laughing together.
Because it's the ultimate signal of just how there's us and there's them.
And most of the Republicans and Democrats in this country are part of the us.
Yeah, well that's also why, yeah I had Gary Johnson on the show, but I've tweeted several times and I've tried to put the message out there that even if you don't love this guy, even if this isn't your guy, if you guys get him to 15% once the general election is on, they have to put him in the debate.
So it's probably not going to happen for Jill Stein because she's run what, 72 times already?
But Gary Johnson, I do think there's such discontent that there's a chance that at some point they could just get him to 15% and they'd have to throw another voice in there.
So I'm not even making it about him as much as just give us another voice, give us another option.
Honestly, if the DNC wasn't walking around in clown shoes, they would pour a lot of money into the Right to Life Party, because there's so many social conservatives who only vote for the Republican Party because of the abortion issue.
The Republican Party will never allow abortion to become illegal.
It is their number one fundraising tool, and trust me, as long as politicians have mistresses, abortion will remain legal in this country.
And I could talk about that issue all day long, but you know to me why more conservatives don't bail on the
Republican party and go ahead and vote right to life if you're already a single
issue voter and by the way a grotesque hypocrite because Jesus spoke
out against the death penalty never mentioned abortion
and God's technically the least pro-life character in the Bible but that's a
whole other matter right to me you know the Bush family was never against
abortion rights never against abortion and Donald Trump's not against
abortion of course not. So you know they put on this charade they
shuffle it around and these social conservatives
I mean Alabama keeps voting for these people over and over and over again and
nothing changes. Howard Dean was really smart with the 50-state
strategy when he ran the DNC
and a smart charismatic Democrat would try to make inroads down there
trust me if social conservatives who watch Fox News could hear a Bernie
Sanders speech unedited they find themselves nodding every bit as much as
they did with Trump only with Bernie it's policy with Trump it's just
personality So how much of this, when we talk about the personality thing, that I really believe this election is gonna be won on the personality thing and not on substance in any way, how much of this is just the times we live in?
It's just that we're all at Twitter expressing ourselves all the time.
It's all that everyone's on Facebook posting articles and fighting with people and banning people and muting people.
How much is just noise?
Do you have trouble, I mean, when you're doing your show even, sort of separating the noise from what's actually real?
And so, you know, yeah, there's a lot of folks who are going to have to patch up a lot of friendships once this campaign is over.
And, you know, I appreciate my conservative and progressive brothers and sisters who were able to talk about this stuff like grown-ups and not let hate get in the way.
Yeah, there's not many of us though, or I guess there are, but we're the silent majority.
That's what I said at the top of the show, that I think actually most people don't feel like you have to have a political purity test to be friends with someone, but there do seem to be sides that want that to be.
And I think actually most people are willing to do this and say, all right, Fuglesang said a couple of things that I agree with, and Rubin said a couple of things I agree with, and that's all right.
I mean, there's a lot of people who are doing, the American dream has become the Scandinavian dream.
And those are capitalist societies with strong safety nets where you pay higher taxes, but you get stuff for your taxes.
Here, we think we pay low taxes, but we pay high fees for everything else.
Yeah, you might pay lower taxes than our European friends, but then you're paying for your health care, you're paying for your senior care, you're paying for your college loans for the rest of your life.
Michael Moore is coming on my show today here at Sirius XM, and I highly recommend his new film.
Nobody saw it.
It's called Where to Invade Next, and the idea of it is him going to different countries and stealing their good ideas and claiming it for America.
Because these other countries do the American dream better than we do.
There's still upward mobility in these nations.
Finland and Sweden, and of course Denmark, which is considered the happiest country in the world.
You know, I believe in America, though.
I'm not going to abandon this country for another one, and I'm going to stick around here and fight for decency and love and common sense.
Well that's exactly how I feel about you so I want to thank my guest John Fuglesang for joining me on the show today.
You can hear more of John on Tell Me Everything every Monday through Friday from 2 to 5 p.m.
Eastern on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121.
Johnny, thank you for doing this and next time we'll get the Skype times right and we'll work it all out and you'll be in a fancy studio and you'll look great and all that good stuff.