May 13, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:01:07
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| Let's talk about the L word today. | ||
| No, not that L word, the other L word, liberal. | ||
| I've always considered myself a liberal, probably before I even knew what the word actually meant. | ||
| As a kid, I remember thinking that liberals were the good guys. | ||
| Liberals were looking out for other people, liberals wanted a fairer society, and liberals didn't care about race or religion. | ||
| Before I go any further, you guys know I love definitions, so let's actually define the word liberal according to the Oxford Dictionary. | ||
| 1. | ||
| Open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values. | ||
|
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2. | |
| 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. | ||
| Thank you very much, Dave. | ||
| It's a pleasure to be back on your 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. | ||
| Well, the good news is my evening is now free. | ||
| I thought you were taping at 5.30 p.m. | ||
| your time, or 8.30 p.m. | ||
| your time, so I apologize for the poor grasp of the details, but my defense is that I went to public school. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'm bringing you on to defend liberalism, to defend the left. | ||
| And we've already had a time problem, which has set us up here. | ||
| But first, before we get into anything, so you are at SiriusXM, that's where your show is. | ||
| You actually tape your show out of my old studio, is that correct? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| When I first met you, it was a very different studio, and I was doing it from They just moved us to another one and they're remodeling here. | ||
| But many times I have done pre-tape interviews in your old studio and I always think of you. | ||
| And I always scour the room for, you know, narcotics you might have left behind. | ||
| Do you dedicate each show to me? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| In my heart I do, Dave. | ||
| In my heart I do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Go. | ||
| Fuglesang 101. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Oh, my. | ||
| Where to begin? | ||
| Start at the beginning. | ||
| I'm an actor. | ||
| I'm a stand-up. | ||
| I come from a curiously Catholic 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 yeah, it's a pretty schizophrenic resume, but that's kind of... Not many people can say they replaced Bob Saget, but you did. | ||
| Oh, I could never replace Bob Saget. | ||
| Even his wife agreed with that. | ||
| But I was happy to take over for the show for a little... It was only going to be for like six weeks, and it wound up being a year and a half. | ||
| So it was a fun little gig, and it taught me that that wasn't what I needed to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| That's a great question, because I think that we, you know, one thing that we don't talk about too much is the separation of church and faith. | ||
| The fact that religion and belief are two completely different things. | ||
| And religion is a culture of middlemen, whereas faith is just between the believer and the deity of their choice. | ||
| You know, I always had problems with religion, even when I was devout. | ||
| And it wasn't until I went to college in NYU at the NYU Catholic Center, and it was a very progressive community. | ||
| I was actually asked to help teach a course for converts along with the pastor. | ||
| And it was a church that welcomed gay people openly. | ||
| And I remember bringing my parents to the church I went to in college, and they were so inspired by seeing how gay couples were welcomed and loved. | ||
| This is in the 80s. | ||
| And that kind of made me realize, well, That's not the usual policy for this unauthorized fan club of Jesus. | ||
| It was really when I saw my dad give a lecture at a college once about Martin Luther and the Reformation that I was like, why are we Catholic? | ||
| Why aren't we Lutheran? | ||
| These are all the critiques you have of the Pope. | ||
| And so that was what really made me be not a Catholic. | ||
| I still consider the Catholic Church to be my asexual orientation. | ||
| But over the years, I found the farther I got away from organized religion, the more interested in theology and faith I got. | ||
| And so now I get to alienate everybody because half of them think I'm an atheist and half of them think I'm a cult member. | ||
| Right, so you're making a really interesting distinction there. | ||
| So you're not into organized religion as it stands, but you are a believer, correct? | ||
| Yeah, I'm a believer, sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's kind of where I come from. | ||
| Although, I do enjoy mocking hypocrites. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| I mean, if anyone wants to talk to me about it, I will. | ||
| But generally, my faith is such that I don't pretend to know all the answers. | ||
| And they often say the opposite of faith is doubt. | ||
| I think that's rubbish. | ||
| I think doubt is an integral part of faith. | ||
| The opposite of faith is certainty. | ||
| And I trust anybody who's searching for the truth. | ||
| I generally don't trust people who claim they have it. | ||
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Right. | |
| So it's interesting because me and you were sort of splitting hairs on this. | ||
| I would say I'm not a believer. | ||
| I wouldn't believe in something without evidence. | ||
| But that said, I don't mind. | ||
| I know a lot of a lot of atheists don't like people, don't like religious people or think that they're really just diluted or whatever it is. | ||
| And to me, I would go with sort of what you just said, which is I don't mind if someone's religious. | ||
| Because I won't pretend to be more moral than anyone or living some better life than anyone else. | ||
| I just don't want them pushing it on me or beheading me or throwing gays off roofs. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want them using their personal faith as an excuse to put somebody else down. | ||
| And that's something I take very seriously. | ||
| There's no part of the Bible you can ever use to justify discrimination against LGBT people. | ||
| And I have this debate not infrequently. | ||
| Again, there's no part of the Bible anyone can honestly use to justify any sort of discrimination. | ||
| And when you're starting to use Jesus... | ||
| When you're starting to use Christianity as a cloaking device for douchebaggery, that's when I have to call you out. | ||
| Again, I've known wonderful conservative religious people. | ||
| I think that very often conservative Christians can be more liberal with kindness than lots of liberals. | ||
| You'll find a lot more liberality of warmth and love at certain Baptist meetings than you'll find at Upper East Side cocktail parties. | ||
| But for me, I'm in love with the mystery. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And my definition of God does not involve a man with a penis. | ||
| And, you know, I think that the Bible, the main character of the Bible, Jesus, is a guy who spoke in parable and metaphor. | ||
| I don't know why it's so hard to read the Bible as parable and metaphor. | ||
| There's a lot of truth in the Bible, not necessarily a lot of facts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I feel good about our start here. | ||
| We sort of see this a little bit differently, but I respect where you're coming from. | ||
| And that's sort of what both of us... Yeah, I just want to be vague enough to sucker people into my cult. | ||
| No, you're quite good at it. | ||
| And by wearing all black and with the long hair, the whole thing's very effective. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I've got a beautiful compound that I want to invite all of your viewers down. | ||
| You'll have to turn over some account numbers and wear robes, but it's a really a great faith community. | ||
| I think you'll love what we do there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we'll put the link in the description down below. | ||
| Don't worry about that. | ||
| Okay, so let's shift a little bit to comedy before we jump right into politics. | ||
| So, when did you really decide, okay, I've got something to say and people need to hear it? | ||
| Because that's a crazy thing for a person to do, and I say that as someone that has done stand-up for a long time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's my morality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you kinda, you kinda take the same approach. | ||
| 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 | ||
| that the politicians are just figureheads of. | ||
| So he did single out, and Clinton he went off on a lot. | ||
| I once saw him in Vegas where he was just railing against the Bush family and just said, | ||
| "I hope the whole family dies in an airplane fire." | ||
| And people were walking out in droves, but it was a pleasure to watch him | ||
| work out his material that way and separate the anger from the humor, | ||
| It's anger from the outrage because anger doesn't work in comedy, but outrage does. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| I mean, Billy Wilder said it, Dave. | ||
| Billy Wilder said, if you're gonna tell people the truth, make it funny or they'll kill you. | ||
| And I keep that quote around. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| All right, so let's jump into some political stuff. | ||
| You are a through-and-through liberal. | ||
| You're one of my left friends that I still understand. | ||
| A lot of what I've been doing on the show, I've lost a lot of my people on the left, but I consider you a good liberal. | ||
| Do you consider yourself a liberal? | ||
| Does that have any meaning to you anymore, the words? | ||
| I don't know, to tell you the truth. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, well, I love that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Bush and George, what's that? | ||
| That was 88. | ||
| I'm sorry, that was 88. | ||
| That was 88. | ||
| 92 was Clinton. | ||
| And George H.W. | ||
| said, you're a liberal and Dukakis said, I'm not a liberal. | ||
| And that was the Democrat. | ||
| Because liberal became was a dirty word back then. | ||
| Yeah, I give myself credit for that. | ||
| I mean, by the end of that campaign, Dukakis finally said, yes, I'm a liberal in the tradition of JFK and all that. | ||
| And Bush celebrated and said, wonder of wonders, he finally admits it. | ||
| And I give Bush credit for making a word that means empathetic. | ||
| And open-minded and caring about the least of us. | ||
| A word that pretty much sums up Jesus, if you go by the dictionary definition. | ||
| And Bush Senior, I think, gets the most credit for turning it into a dirty word. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's no way you can say that Jesus wasn't a liberal, if you go by the dictionary definition of the term. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He did not want change, right? | ||
| This is a guy who wanted some change, exactly. | ||
| But by that same token, you know, that definition you bring up, it's the greatest proof that we don't have a liberal media. | ||
| Our friends on the right are fonder saying it's a liberal media, and I've just been like, well, this year is proven if the media was liberal. | ||
| I mean, for a while, we've known if they were liberal, they'd probably cover an anti-war rally as much as they cover a Tea Party event. | ||
| But if the media was liberal, I think they would have given Bernie Sanders a bit more And then 180th the airtime they've given Donald Trump. | ||
| The media is profit-driven. | ||
| There are a lot of liberals who work in the media, but the media itself is ratings-driven. | ||
| It's profit-driven. | ||
| That's not necessarily a bad thing. | ||
| That's just how it is. | ||
| And a lot of liberals and conservatives can't admit that. | ||
| Right, so I love that you made that point because yes, it's profit-driven and people want clicks and people want views. | ||
| We all understand that. | ||
| I don't know what a better model would be. | ||
| I don't know that the government coming in and saying everyone should have exactly equal time I don't know that that really makes sense. | ||
| I'm not a huge government guy, so I don't really love that. | ||
| And at the end of the day, if more people are watching Trump and he's just using the system, it's kind of shitty, but it's sort of where we're at. | ||
| What else can we do? | ||
| We could restore the fairness doctrine. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I stopped watching True Detective Season 2 after one episode. | ||
| Unfortunately, the country hasn't quite caught up to me on that. | ||
| I stayed to the bitter end like a Kennedy wife. | ||
| You know, I'll never get those 10 hours back. | ||
| 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. | ||
| These are things that have never happened before. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| And I really begrudge the population for leaning in to watch a spectacle that our grandparents couldn't have imagined. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's not just the media. | ||
| Yeah, he's at 51% now, approval of the GOP. | ||
| That means, Dave, that Donald Trump is so popular, he's got 50% of 28% of the American population. | ||
| Hillary and Bernie combined have gotten more votes than Trump. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But I think they've already exposed that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We know that they don't care about democracy. | ||
| But government, they're not really against that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If you've registered, your name is on a registry when you go in to vote. | ||
| Right, but shouldn't you have to prove that you are that person? | ||
| That shows up in votes in your place. | ||
| You know, the fact is, you're going to say that this is a right unless you get a photo ID, and many of these photo IDs you have to pay fees to get. | ||
| So in reality, that's a poll tax. | ||
| And so, you know, a lot of folks say that gutting the Voting Rights Act of 2013, which was done, by the way, the same week They greenlit Sharknado 2. | ||
| That was just the end of our country in my view. | ||
| Total coincidence. | ||
| It doesn't just keep African Americans from voting. | ||
| It was designed to keep seniors, low-income people of all races, and college kids from voting. | ||
| There's districts in this country where you can vote with an NRA ID, but not a university ID. | ||
| And the right-wing response to that is, Well, yeah, but foreigners can get college IDs. | ||
| Well, yes, Skeeter, but foreigners can't register to vote. | ||
| So that's not a problem. | ||
| More people are killed by televisions every year than vote illegally. | ||
| The New York Times did an extensive study and found that out of over a billion votes cast, far less than 1% were fraudulently cast. | ||
| There's voter registration fraud. | ||
| There's not voter fraud. | ||
| It's designed deliberately to make people vote less. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, that to me is the number one one. | ||
| Take the day off. | ||
| Yeah, or be able to vote online. | ||
| I mean, we should make it a lot easier. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We haven't walked the walk. | ||
| And so I'm a big fan of democracy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, democracy is good. | |
| I will agree with you on that one. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about the Democrats a little bit. | ||
| I suspect, but I can't totally confirm, you're a Bernie guy, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, so let's unpack that a little bit because I'm fully on board that. | ||
| That one of my problems with the left right now is they have gone out of their way | ||
| to demonize Hillary to a point that they're making it sound like she is a neocon, | ||
| that she wants to build nations and fight all these extra wars. | ||
| Now I get it, she did vote for Iraq. | ||
| She did vote for the Iraq war. | ||
| She was Secretary of State when Benghazi happened, but Barack Obama was president. | ||
| Barack Obama's president right now. | ||
| We have some troops now in Syria. | ||
| We have Afghanistan. | ||
| Benghazi's the most disgusting thing they've got. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Good luck getting female voters with that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Because the left will be, they've demonized her to the point that all these young people are just not gonna vote, right? | ||
| Yeah, I'm voting for nuance, I think. | ||
| You know, like, I don't blame Ralph Nader for George Bush becoming president. | ||
| I thought it was great that Nader ran and I think he had a right to run and I think that he had the best policy position of any candidate that year. | ||
| I do blame 90,000 idiots in Florida Who knew they were in a battleground state and voted for Nader anyway. | ||
| See, I'm voting for nuance. | ||
| I like Bernie a lot on paper, but the magic number of this campaign, Dave, is 147. | ||
| That's Ruth Bader Ginsburg's age. | ||
| This year, you're voting for the Supreme Court, possibly voting for three judges on the Supreme Court. | ||
| Would you rather have Hillary Clinton appoint someone who respects women's reproductive freedoms, | ||
| or would you rather have Donald Trump put Omarosa or Gary Busey on the court? | ||
| This is what we're looking at right here. | ||
| And so I think that what's probably gonna wind up happening is Hillary Clinton will get a lot of people's votes. | ||
| She won't get their enthusiasm. | ||
| Well, that seems pretty obvious. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, I keep saying on all my shows, tepid is the new black. | ||
| You know, again, it's like I think that there's a lot of folks who don't like Hillary personally or don't like her policies, and I get all of that. | ||
| I will say that if she means half of what she said on this election trail, the 2016 Hillary is a much better candidate than the 2008 Hillary. | ||
| I've been very, very impressed with the positions, and I give Bernie Sanders a ton of credit for forcing her. | ||
| take these moral positions that would actually help the middle class and help our economy. | ||
| I think Elizabeth Warren gets a lot of credit, too. | ||
| It's clear Secretary Clinton has read Senator Warren's book. | ||
| But I have a lot of issues with Hillary. | ||
| And let me tell you, I posted a couple of jokes defending her against these sexist attacks | ||
| against her because of her husband's infidelity, which I think is one of the tackiest things | ||
| you can do. | ||
| And the amount of progressives who came after me over it is dispiriting because I don't | ||
| consider Monica Lewinsky to be a victim. | ||
| I think what Bill Clinton did was wrong and unprofessional, and I think he's paid a deep | ||
| price for it. | ||
| But I don't consider Monica Lewinsky to be a victim. | ||
| And by having that point of view, because it was a consensual relationship between two | ||
| adults, by her own testimony, she pursued it. | ||
| And I happen to think that none of that is our business anyway. | ||
| But when you start trying to use a woman's husband's infidelities against her to say | ||
| that she's unfit to serve because she kept her marriage together and didn't leave, I | ||
| don't know what their marriage is. | ||
| arrangement is. And I don't judge anybody in this life for what system of love works | ||
| for them. If they both have their own people on the side, they're staying together, fine. | ||
| It's so hard to make a relationship work in this world, so hard to make love work in this | ||
| world. Hillary Clinton's been married, I believe, one-third the times Donald Trump has been | ||
| married. And I don't get to judge someone's relationship or how they love. It's all a | ||
| sham marriage, fine. It works for them, whatever. I'm going to vote based on the issues and | ||
| not based on someone's personal life. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So talking about Trump and sort of running on emotion and not policy and kind of giving everybody | ||
| everything they want and being to the left of what most conservatives are yet still winning | ||
| the Republican primaries and all that, you had an interesting moment that you touched on | ||
| right at the top, the Etch-A-Sketch moment of the Mitt Romney campaign, | ||
| where basically you were on CNN and you questioned, was it Romney's campaign manager? | ||
| Who was it? | ||
| Communications director, Eric Fernstrom. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, you got it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did you get a cut of that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and he will continue to change positions. | ||
| He's already done it this 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Talk to any eggs with 20 followers because they're trolls and, you know, whoever owns them has a whole basket. | ||
| Also, you know, a lot of these same situations apply to Hillary Clinton supporters as well. | ||
| There's uncommon hostility towards Bernie supporters from tons of Hillary supporters. | ||
| And the generational divide in Hillary Clinton's campaign has been fascinating. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think it's the smartest thing he could do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't agree with the idea, but I think it's a smart idea if they want to keep the Senate. | ||
| Right, so I like that you brought up Gary Johnson. | ||
| I've had Gary Johnson on the show. | ||
| I think he is an extremely decent human being. | ||
| I've watched, I think I was one of the two people that watched the Libertarian debates. | ||
| What's your line on Libertarians? | ||
| You've got a good line on Libertarians. | ||
| I've got a bunch of lines on Libertarians. | ||
| They're liberals without a something, or? | ||
| No, I think Libertarian is just Latin for embarrassed Republican. | ||
| Okay, so I like that. | ||
| They're like my cat, you know? | ||
| They're like my cat. | ||
| Look, I know you're too stupid to get this. | ||
| Better if we'd all just be more selfish dicks. | ||
| Oh, look, food appeared magically before me, and I did nothing for it. | ||
| I'm that special, and no one else had a role in bringing my food to me. | ||
| You want the Ayn Rand book? | ||
| I've got nine more. | ||
| You know, I mean... You know what? | ||
| I had the president of the Ayn Rand Institute on last week. | ||
| You're gonna have to watch the show. | ||
| Maybe I'll have you guys on together to battle it out. | ||
| Love to. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, how's Somalia doing? | ||
| The fact is, even if a libertarian became elected president, which won't happen, First off, you can believe in religion and science. | ||
| You don't get to claim you follow Ayn Rand and Jesus. | ||
| Rand Paul, by the way, ran away from libertarianism faster than Ayn Rand ran to the mailbox for her Social Security check. | ||
| No president is ever going to want to be the president who does away with Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and the entire social safety net. | ||
| It's never going to happen. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, we'll see. | ||
| 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 think this year, what? | ||
| Once before she's run. | ||
| Only once before, okay. | ||
| 172, whatever it is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Someone, let us hear another idea. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, but I think that's nothing new. | ||
| I mean, you know, look back to how vicious Jefferson Adams were against each other in the press. | ||
| I mean, Adams called out Jefferson for selling his own children into slavery 200 years ago. | ||
| You know, Lincoln was so despised. | ||
| Roosevelt and Eleanor were as hated as the Clintons are. | ||
| All of this rancor is really nothing new for our country or our species. | ||
| And I think that You know, like George Carlin said, when you're born, you get a free ticket to the freak show. | ||
| The trick is to not grow up and join the freak show. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's the point. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| So, we've only got a couple minutes left. | ||
| Who do you think's doing it better than us? | ||
| Is there a country that you look at right now? | ||
| Because, you know, Europe's got a whole slew of other problems. | ||
| Western Europe and Eastern Europe. | ||
| There's all over the world. | ||
| Everyone's got problems. | ||
| Is there any system that you go, those guys, that's the way we should be doing it? | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was going to ask you another question, but that's kind of a pretty decent way to end the show, Johnny. | ||
| Well, thank you, Dave. | ||
| It's a pleasure to be here. | ||
| I hope it wasn't... I'll bring lots of dick jokes next time, I promise. | ||
| Yeah, next time we'll work blue. | ||
| And I look forward to coming on your show again. | ||
| And you, as I said at the top, you are the one that drags me to stand-up. | ||
| I need to be doing more stand-up. | ||
| You should be doing more stand-up, Dave. | ||
| You're really good on stage. | ||
| You should be doing a lot more of it. | ||
| We need your voice out there in the theaters as well as on the air. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| I'm also on the road touring across the country right now. | ||
| I've just made my 21st out-of-state trip in 2016 already. | ||
| I want to thank you and the entire team that puts your show together. | ||
| I love what you do. | ||
| I love the show. |
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