Dave Rubin and Michael Ian Black dissect Twitter's ban on Milo Yiannopoulos, arguing that while private platforms control speech, inconsistent enforcement threatens free discourse. They contrast this with Black's "Nazi hunter" strategy of exposing extremists rather than silencing them, while analyzing Trump's appeal as an attack on political correctness rather than policy. The conversation critically examines Black Lives Matter for lacking legislative direction and fostering violence, alongside concerns over police militarization and campus safe spaces. Ultimately, the dialogue highlights deep cultural polarization, contrasting serious political analysis with Black's comedic observations on white guilt and the absurdities of modern media culture. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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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 protesting 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.
And the free exchange of ideas.
So first off, this is not a First Amendment issue.
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The First Amendment of the United States means the government can't come for your free speech.
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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Gay people, people yell, I get fag and Jew fag and blah blah blah all the time.
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 gonna like a guy like Milo 'cause 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've 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.
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 gonna see is Is not about what happened yesterday and today 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.
Yeah, but they're very vocal and my sense is there are...
More sympathizers than actual participants, and so I feel sort of duty-bound to hold them up as idiots so that those who may be inclined to sympathize go, oh wait, they're idiots.
Well, I think there's absolutely a case to be made for that, but I think it's more important From my point of view, to show that they're there and to just say, look, this is who we're living among.
And in the context of the current political climate, I think it's important to let people know that these people exist and that Given the right circumstances, more of them could pop up.
So, I always think of you more so as, or until the last year or so, I always thought of you more as like social commentary, all the I love the 80s stuff, all that stuff in a lot of the movies you've been in.
Sort of more like personal social commentary.
Did you ever think you were gonna be more in the political sphere?
And you sort of dismissively waved in a very— Because it was embarrassing for both of us.
As a first class—I've only flown first class once, and it was on a little plane from Detroit to New York, so it was like eight people, and first class was just that I was in the first seat.
It wasn't anything special.
But as a first class flyer, do you feel that we shouldn't be allowed to look at you?
I always feel like when I'm walking through, I shouldn't be allowed to look.
You're misunderstanding part— Maybe the main joy of first class, we're seated first, so that the people walking back are forced to look at us already ensconced in our blanket, already ordering our beverage of choice, maybe already asleep, maybe getting massaged from the chair, like there's all kinds of things that it's important
For the business model of the airlines and for my own self-esteem that you see walking back to steerage that I have that you do not.
That's interesting because I always thought there should be one-way glass so that you could gawk at us, but that we wouldn't be able- I have no desire to see you.
On that JetBlue flight, though, JetBlue lets you get your own soda, you know, you can go up to like a thing, and I was almost going to peek around the curtain and just like nudge you.
I was at a bookstore and I saw a book about Hillary Clinton, a sort of children's book, a rags-to-riches story about Hillary Clinton, an inspirational tale directed, I think, at young girls, and it made me Chuckle a bit to think about what that would be like if you were to write about Trump, because he's not an inspirational figure in any way, shape, or form.
He's just a toad.
And so, I just thought, well, let me try to do that.
And I feel like I can kind of grasp the outlines of what that piece is.
Which is, to me, the larger story is sort of what is fueling all of this.
And I think there's, look, I'm not particularly savvy about this, I'm just probably regurgitating what I've read, but it really does feel like we're at a moment where the foundations of capitalism are crumpling.
It feels like something that there's like a real shift happening right now.
And it's almost like we have no leaders.
Even if you love Trump, and if you have loved Clinton, and Obama's on the way out, but even if you love him, that we don't have leaders who talk to us in an honest way.
And that that's part of the problem.
Like, we're all walking around like, Could somebody—like, I feel like everyone's looking around—could somebody help here?
Is there anyone we could look to, for a little honesty?
Well, first of all, I don't think Trump understands the problem better than, let's say, the average citizen.
He knows how to exploit it, but I don't think he understands it.
But I agree with you that there is not— No sort of global leader has stepped forward in an articulate, non-condescending way to say, this is what we're going through.
And here's where I think we need to move.
It would be great if somebody would do that.
I'd love for Hillary Clinton to spend an hour just talking into the camera and saying, this is where I think we are, this is why I think we're here, this is where I think we need to go.
It was easy to gin up that enthusiasm for Obama because, as he himself said, he was a blank slate.
Hillary has a 25, 30-year record, and it's very easy to cherry-pick what you like and cherry-pick what you don't like and say she's a villain, say she's a hero.
She's a flawed human being, as we all are.
We know what her flaws are.
So it's like, you know, it's like getting back together with an old girlfriend or something.
So is that a little, that's kind of a dangerous thought, though, because Obama came in with the blank slate, and whether you like him or not, the idea that we'd only be okay with blank slate people is sort of... Well, that's the appeal of Trump right now.
Even though his slate actually is full of stuff, again, whether you like it or not.
And I've even had his—I've had ardent Trump supporters sit here, like Milo Yiannopoulos, sit here and basically tell me it's not about the policies, it's about this one thing that I'm going to tell you.
And I at least get this part, which is that this is a cultural election this time.
It has almost nothing to do with policy, but the one thing that he's getting with people—and I've seen this when I've been to colleges and liberals are coming up to me and saying this—that he's cracking this political correctness thing.
Now, the irony of that is I don't think he's going to be some major free speech beacon because he talks about suing reporters all the time.
But I do get the level of people are feeling very repressed right now, like they can't say anything and they're always screamed at and called racist and all that stuff.
I think when Milo talks about political correctness, That term, political correctness, has come to mean, I think in those circles, nativism, racism, xenophobia, and what have you.
When you say he's cracked political correctness, what he's cracked is the agreement that we had been coming to as a society, and that agreement was, Diversity is a benefit to the nation, and tolerance is a benefit to the nation, and having different points of view is a benefit to the nation.
That has all gotten lumped into—that agreement has gotten lumped under political correctness.
And when he says he's cracked political correctness, what he's—what I think he means is he has—he's attempting to unravel that agreement.
And what's left is white nationalism and nothing else.
Because Trump's appeal is not policy-based.
He has none.
It's not judgment-based.
He seems to have no better judgment than anybody else and possibly worse.
It's not principle-based.
He has none.
It's not character-based.
He has very little to none.
All he has Is on day one, starting with Mexicans are rapists and whatever else he said, that's what he has.
And he's built on that from that's been his entire campaign has been divisiveness and hatred geared towards angry white males.
And it feels very calculated, and it feels very Machiavellian to me, and it feels very put on, and it... And he is allowing himself to be used, I think, as a...
A tool by the intolerant right and the fact that he's gay, for example, makes it all the more appalling to me because he's giving them moral license to say, well, we like this guy, you know, we like this crazy Brit, this crazy flaming Brit or whatever, and that is I think an unconscionable use of moral licensing and that he's allowing himself to be used in that way.
You might have done any number of things that make us human, make us flawed human beings.
You know that stuff's going to come up.
You know you're going to be vilified.
You know.
So if you're thinking about running for office, somebody like Ted Cruz, for example, who's been thinking about being president his entire fucking life, he's lived his life in such a way to make his resume The resume of a future president, or at the very least a senator.
But I can't imagine subjecting myself to the kind of public scrutiny that is required, knowing that there's people whose job is to dig up shit on you, just about your personal life.
That has nothing to do with your ability to make good policy decisions.
Right, but doesn't that show, it's like, they all want to be stars, too.
And I say this, it's probably with some due irony, two people that are public people and share our opinions, but it's like, they all want to be in, right?
They go to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, they all want to have dinner with these people and go to the parties and all that.
That's, to me, one of the biggest problems we have in the whole country.
Well, the political star-fucking, I guess I don't really have a problem with it.
It doesn't upset me maybe the way that it upsets you, because I do feel like in any profession, most people in any given profession are trying to do a good job.
Like, when I see Anderson Cooper reporting on something, I feel like most of the time he's doing a pretty good job, you know?
So when you wrote that book, and that's actually when I had you on my SiriusXM show many lifetimes ago, when you wrote that, and I think I had Megan on maybe the next week or something, what made you think, like, oh, I should talk to her, because she's obviously, she's in it, her dad's a pretty powerful guy who ran for president, and, you know, but she's on the right, and I, do you consider, I mean, do you consider yourself on the left?
I think there's a certain percentage of the population that will look at the coverage of Brexit and be curious enough to want to understand more what that means.
And there's a much larger percentage of the population that understands the headline of what Brexit is and doesn't need to pursue that any further.
And then there's a certain amount of the population who doesn't give a shit.
It's always been the case that, you know, I don't, if anything, I feel like we're more engaged as a nation than we've ever been, almost because we can't help but be.
And I think that's good and bad.
I think what's going on in the country right now, there's absolutely a Pollyanna-ish way of looking at it and saying this is actually quite good what's happening.
That there is, I mean, aside from people just being gunned down in the streets, which isn't great, So you're saying that the issues that are being earthed up are good.
The issues that are being dredged up are necessary issues.
And they're being brought to the fore by two imperfect messengers.
So as we're taping this right now, Black Lives Matter is in, like, the throes of—there's a lot of stuff going on, I mean, between the shootings of the black people that has obviously been going on for quite some time, but these last few in particular, and now the protests against it, and then the cop shootings and everything else.
Where do you kind of fall on all of this stuff?
Because I find it very hard, and even as I'm prefacing this, I know that no matter what we say right now, a certain amount of people are going to hate it.
You know what I mean?
Even if they agree with us on 99%, if we say one word the wrong way, people will start freaking.
So I haven't talked about it that much because I find it's very hard to decipher what's actually happening by watching little clips of things.
The blatant denial people are the ones that drive me nuts.
Because you could say that, we can get to the other part of this too, you can say there's some legitimate issues there, but it's the people that no matter what happens, no matter what evidence they're shown, they immediately go to that.
And then the other side is that violence gets redirected towards police, and I haven't heard anybody defend that in any way, shape, or form other than A couple crazy people on Twitter just being idiots.
The two ideas are not opposed.
We shouldn't be killing people.
Let's just start with that central premise.
People are dying unnecessarily.
And I believe that there is an incredibly entrenched There's no polite word for it.
Racist culture in police culture.
I've seen enough evidence and read enough accounts and spent enough time looking at it and into it to suggest that that is a problem.
A real problem.
A genuine problem.
Probably a plethora of historical and cultural reasons.
So something's broken with policing.
And I think always has been.
But now we're just seeing it.
That needs to change.
The idea that The police force we've come to think of more and more as a militarized force, as an extension of the military.
If you need a tank, pick up the phone, call Gomer Pyle, have him bring the tank.
There's no reason the police forces need them, but what it does is it inculcates an us-versus-them mentality, both from the police's point of view and from the community's point of view.
And the idea of community policing is lost.
The idea of to protect and serve is lost because it's become a—these police precincts, I think in many communities, have come to feel like occupying forces, as opposed to extensions of the community.
It's a real problem.
routinely recruit from the military, I think is a problem.
There's no real linkage between those two organizations.
The police are paramilitary to a certain extent.
But the local police force, in my mind, should be essentially liaisons from the law,
And when you recruit from the military to fill out your police ranks, I have a hard time believing that they're not going to bring that mentality to policing, and it infects the entire culture.
So what do you make of—because one of the things that I've struggled with is when I see the protests and they're in the middle of the street where they're not supposed to be, on highways and things, And, you know, when they've been burning cars or whatever it is or looting sorts of things.
Look, those things are not legal.
You're allowed to protest, but you can't shut down highways and all that stuff.
And usually the cop, usually, not always, of course, but usually you see the cops basically trying to keep law and order.
So it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy here, right?
Because you create something, you do something illegal.
Even if the intentions are good, your motives are good, but you shut down a highway, which you can't do.
Now the cops have to do something, and now you've created this stalemate here, and now of course everyone's got cameras in everybody's face, and they're just waiting for the pin drop to set the whole thing off.
Both are illegal, but one is causing Property damage and destruction, and is essentially a violent act, versus the non-violent protest of sitting down in the middle of a highway.
I may be annoyed at the people sitting in the middle of the highway, but I don't have the same reaction to that as I do to people being destructive in their community.
And I think sitting down in the highway is a perfectly viable non-violent demonstration.
Where I think Black Lives Matter is falling short, And I was reading this commentator on Twitter, Oliver Willis, who was talking about this all night.
Without a directed legislative agenda, it's so much smoke.
But there's no—it can't catch fire.
There's no substance there.
And I think that's true.
I think, at this point, the black lives matter.
Because it's not really, it's not an organization.
Right.
It's whoever wants Black Lives Matter can claim it.
You can claim yourself to be a member of Black Lives Matter, and you are.
But it needs more directed leadership.
It needs to have some stated legislative and policy goals.
Otherwise, all you're doing is you're raising awareness for something that people already know exists.
Is the inherent problem with that, though, that they feel the system has failed them?
Sure.
Are they true or not?
So their goal is to make waves, not necessarily—like, they're trying to change the system in a way that the system doesn't want to change.
Like, that's where this thing's at loggerheads, right?
Yeah, but the only— Like, if a guy came out and said, I have this legislation that's going to do this and this and this, it's almost like, well, the protesters wouldn't be down with that.
We'll do five minutes of it, and then we'll finish back with all this stuff.
So first off, I was telling you right before we sat down that you were in Wet Hot American Summer, which I hadn't seen until about a year ago, even though I went to one of those camps.
I went to Camp Shanawanda up in Pennsylvania, and I thought it was one of the most absolutely hilarious movies I've ever seen.
I watched the series on Netflix, which now you just told me you're writing for season two, right?
Yeah, is that hard for you in a movie like that where there's so many of your friends obviously writing and you didn't get to write but you have to just act it?
Is that harder than if you're writing for it and acting in it?
And now, I mean, I'm nervous writing for it, because I feel like I have something to live up to as a writer, which I didn't have just showing up on set.
So I'm conscious of not fucking up something that I think is really funny.
But you were like—it was almost as if that whole genre of stuff, which, you know, they did a zillion shows after that at Best Week Ever, and I Love the 70s, I Love the 90s, I Love the 20s, or whatever else.
And now every channel has those shows, too.
But you were sort of the one that, like, got it. Did you kind of real, like, you figured out what
that thing was, that commentary thing was. I think in a way that some of the other people maybe
Because I do sometimes think, man, like there'll be something that I want to say, like really, and even just, I'll be like, I gotta change this one word.
Not because it's really what I mean is any different, but because the mass.
I mean, when I've gotten in trouble on Twitter, it's generally because I've been too hasty in terms of how I say something, not really about what I'm saying.
I have no problem with there being consequences for people saying stupid shit.
The First Amendment allows you to say whatever you want, but it doesn't protect you from the consequences of your speech.
You're in front of 500 people and that's what you came up with.
And that's my problem with a lot of what's going on on the colleges.
It's like these people don't even know what they're protesting.
Right.
They just hear something that they kind of don't like and then they freak out and they want safe spaces and trigger warnings and all this other nonsense.
But I do think The college campus thing has gotten—from what I read—I mean, I don't know, because I'm not experiencing it, but it feels like it's gotten very intolerant.
I mean, you don't think, like, that just a generation of these people who have been sort of coddled into this safe space thing, that they're gonna be the 20-year-olds that are 25 and 30 and 40?
You know what I mean?
That eventually they'll have been so used to never hearing anything that they didn't like, or everything that they don't like is hate speech, in their eyes, that they've diminished the ability to do this.
With very few exceptions, a lot of people can make a claim.
You know, their claims are not without merit.
Whether you're black, Hispanic, Muslim, female, gay, whatever it is you are, you can make an argument.
Like, you have faced some problems, and you have to deal with them.
And there's nothing wrong, I think, in asserting and stating your case and saying, this is where I feel like society is coming short and dealing with us.
But there's no, as you're saying, there's no, there's no positive Movement beyond that.
That's funny because I've had, I don't really like Hillary and I don't like Trump and I don't know what, I may vote for Gary Johnson, I'm still not sure, I'll say something in a couple weeks I guess, but like, I've defended Hillary at times because I think the attacks from a lot of the Bernie people were totally unfair, like making it sound like she's truly this warmongering neocon, it's like she's not calling for war against anyone, you know what I mean?
I know she's made some bad choices, but Obama was the president for a lot of those bad choices,
too, like, you know, Libya and whatever else and a lot of the Syria stuff.
But it's like, every time I defend her, then people say, "Ah, you're a Hillary supporter,"
and then I make a bad joke about Trump, and then they say, "You hate me."
Like, it's like, it's just, it's a lot of noise at the end of the day.