July 20, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
07:05
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| All right, everybody. | ||
| I'm doing something a little different with the direct message this week. | ||
| I'm actually in the suburbs of DC at the moment. | ||
| You can probably hear the cicadas in the background. | ||
| I wanted to do a direct message about the RNC and everything that's going on in Cleveland right now, but then last night, you all have heard this already, Milo Yiannopoulos was officially banned for all time for the rest of human existence. | ||
| He was banned on Twitter. | ||
| You know, he had lost his blue verification check a while back. | ||
| Obviously, Milo and I, we've become sort of comrades. | ||
| We're friends. | ||
| We don't agree on everything. | ||
| I've brought him on the show twice and we've done a couple other things where we've had a healthy exchange of ideas. | ||
| We've gone to UCLA together where we were protested for exercising our right to free speech. | ||
| I've gone out of my way to show some of the differences that I have with Milo. | ||
| For example, I always make the distinction between the doctrine of Islam and the various people that are of Muslim faith who practice their faith completely differently. | ||
| Some totally nominally, and some that are violent jihadists. | ||
| All the different things that are in there, right? | ||
| Now, Milo was banned from Twitter, and there is a free speech issue here. | ||
| And as you guys know, I'm all about free speech. | ||
| So first off, this is not a First Amendment issue. | ||
| The First Amendment of the United States means the government can't come for your free speech. | ||
| I've said many times before, at the moment, in 2016 in America, I'm not that afraid that the government's coming for my free speech. | ||
| I think we're taking it from ourselves, and I think this is a good example of it. | ||
| You know, Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat and the rest of these things, they've become almost too powerful And their ability to control speech. | ||
| Because these are now the roadways, right? | ||
| These are the super highways for us to communicate with each other. | ||
| Beyond our ability to pick up the phone and call a friend and talk to people on the street and scream from town square, our ability to communicate with literally thousands and thousands and in Milo's case hundreds of thousands if not millions of people On these platforms, it's hugely powerful, and there is something that's happening right now where it's not necessarily about the government, but it's about companies. | ||
| Now look, they're a private company. | ||
| They're publicly traded, right? | ||
| But they are allowed to instill their own terms of service, which they did. | ||
| And if they say he violated them, then yes, they can ban him. | ||
| So I'm not saying Twitter can't do what they did. | ||
| I'm not saying the government is involved in this in any way. | ||
| I'm just talking about the principles of the free exchange of ideas and free speech. | ||
| These things are under threat right now. | ||
| Look, obviously. | ||
| Look, forget the nitty-gritty details of what happened in the last day or so. | ||
| I'm not even fully aware of what happened. | ||
| There's a lot of tweets. | ||
| I can't follow everybody's tweets every second to see exactly what happened. | ||
| But the point is that Milo is a provocateur. | ||
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unidentified
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He intentionally shitposts and gets people riled up. | |
| And look, some people respond to that and some people respond to something a little more nuanced, right? | ||
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unidentified
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Like I might do and get into an idea a little bit differently. | |
| But the point is, you know, on Twitter there are all kinds of Nazis. | ||
| Look at the responses that Ben Shapiro, Milo, who has fought with Ben Shapiro all the time, and I was trying to moderate a debate with them. | ||
| I hope it's still gonna happen. | ||
| Ben Shapiro, who is an Orthodox Jew, posts anything on Twitter, he gets a zillion Nazis photoshopping his head in ovens and horrific picturing him in Auschwitz, all kinds of horrible stuff. | ||
| Muslim people get all kinds of horrible imagery shown to them. | ||
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unidentified
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Gay people, people yell, I get fag and Jew fag and blah blah blah all the time. | |
| Look, this is their exercising their free speech. | ||
| If these people are not calling directly for violence or acting on violence... As far as I know, Milo has never called to harm anybody. | ||
| He has never directly called for violence in any way. | ||
| He's a provocateur sharing his thoughts. | ||
| And we have to understand the difference between just words and actions. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, just somebody sitting in their basement sharing a Nazi meme, and Milo saying this or that, even if it's directed at a person saying, well, I don't like what you're doing to the girl in Ghostbusters, or I didn't like the movie, or whatever it is, and then he can't control whether his people say mean things to her, but that's what the mute button's for, and that's what the block button's for. | ||
| The point is we have to figure out how to have a healthy exchange of ideas and realize that not everything that happens in that online world is transferred directly into the real world. | ||
| If real people started using, if people started, if a Nazi party appeared and started saying we're gonna kill all Jews, we're gonna kill all Muslims, all of this stuff, then you have a problem, a direct call for violence. | ||
| But right now that's not where we're at and there's an issue here, so there's a couple issues here, but to me the primary issue is the power that these social media companies have. | ||
| And we can't pretend that they don't have a political agenda, right? | ||
| These are all pretty left organizations. | ||
| So of course, they're really not going to like a guy like Milo, | ||
| because it's easy always to attack stodgy old conservatives and Republicans. | ||
| Milo represents something different. | ||
| He's young and cool and gay and British and blonde, and has this huge groundswell of support. | ||
| By the way, his support is from conservatives and liberals and all sorts of other things. | ||
| I know that because when I went to UCLA with him, I had liberals in the audience. | ||
| Kids. | ||
| College kids from UCLA saying that they Don't agree with anything he says, but they were there to defend his right to free speech. | ||
| So this strikes me a little bit of what Obi-Wan said to Darth Vader, you know, if you strike me down, I'll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. | ||
| By striking him down here and banning him from Twitter, they're probably making this movement that much stronger. | ||
| Anyway, it's complex, and there's a lot of things here. | ||
| I would love to talk to someone from Facebook about this, because they banned a couple people just in the last week. | ||
| They banned my friend Faisal and my friend Melissa, both who've been on the show. | ||
| They've been reinstated since. | ||
| I would love to talk to Jack from Twitter. | ||
| I'd love to talk to any of these tech people, so they're welcome to come on the show. | ||
| I'm not trying to inflame anything any further. | ||
| I genuinely want to have this conversation. | ||
| And by the way, right now you can go on Twitter and you can check Ayatollah Khamenei's Twitter account. | ||
| He regularly calls for another Holocaust. | ||
| You can see what's going on with the President of Turkey, who right now is in the midst of literally just disassembling democracy there. | ||
| And arresting protesters and sacking judges and not letting people leave the country. | ||
| They have no problem with him being on there. | ||
| So there's just, there's an inconsistency in the way they apply these rules. | ||
| There's just a lot of stuff here. | ||
| So let's try to have a mature discussion about it. | ||
| And my guest this week, so as I said we normally do this from the studio in Los Angeles. | ||
| I'm in DC right now. | ||
| My guest this week is Michael Ian Black, comedian, actor, writer. | ||
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unidentified
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Great guy. | |
| He is big in fighting the trolls, and we have a really interesting discussion about fighting trolls and Twitter Nazis. | ||
| We talk about Milo. | ||
| Now, we shot this last week, so everything that you're going to see is not about what happened yesterday and today. | ||
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unidentified
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We shot it last week, but it's a great discussion about these very issues. | |
| So the timing is perfect, and I appreciate it, and I'll be back in studio soon enough. | ||
| And as always, thank you guys for your support. |
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