Sept. 30, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| In America, we tend to think that the news is all about us all the time. | ||
| At some level you really can't blame us though. | ||
| Just turn on CNN or Fox News or MSNBC and all you get these days is endless election coverage with like a tiny bit of national news and maybe a minute an hour on the international front. | ||
| Occasionally when something big flares up the talking heads will focus on Syria or North Korea or Iran for a couple days, but then it's quickly back to the usual grind. | ||
| Even when something huge like Brexit is happening we barely talk about it in the US until the very last second when suddenly every pundit who hasn't mentioned it once in the past year is supposedly an expert. | ||
| Beyond hearing about terror attacks, we barely even talk about the countries we have the most in common with once the initial response to the attack is over. | ||
| Has anything happened in the UK since Brexit? | ||
| What's been happening in France since the Paris attacks? | ||
| How are the tapas in Spain or the pasta in Italy or the cheese in Denmark? | ||
| You might know and I might know, but I bet it's from alternative news sources and social media and not from mainstream television. | ||
| The danger of only hearing about other countries when bad things happen like terror attacks, riots and scandals is that you begin to think that's all that there is to these other places as well as the citizens that live there themselves. | ||
| Imagine if other countries only associated Americans with our current election. | ||
| Many already do, and that is pretty shitty, although possibly warranted. | ||
| Every country on Earth, every single one, has elements in it that are good and that are bad. | ||
| This doesn't mean that every country or every culture is equal. | ||
| Obviously, this is not the case. | ||
| But every country is made up of all sorts of people with all sorts of beliefs. | ||
| As I've said often on this show, the ultimate minority is the individual. | ||
| Judging an entire group as a collective will almost always assure you dismiss huge amounts of people who don't fit the stereotype or the narrative. | ||
| I've said this before and I'll say it again, one of the things that I'm most proud of about the Rubin Report is that our audience is truly worldwide. | ||
| When we did our fan show a couple months ago, we got messages from people in over 60 countries. | ||
| We chose people based on their individual attributes, not because we expected them to represent an entire nation. | ||
| While our mainstream media does a pretty poor job of showing that we have more in common than what separates us, I find that people like you, the ones watching this right now, do an incredibly good job of it. | ||
| The conversations I see you having in the comment sections right here, on Twitter, on Facebook, or even on your own YouTube videos are connecting people from all over the world. | ||
| I see you guys constantly trying to cut through the nonsense and have real conversations and | ||
| find some common ground. | ||
| Together is the only way that we'll have a chance to truly be heard. | ||
| My guest this week is Australian journalist Rita Panahi. | ||
| Rita grew up in Iran in a Muslim family and emigrated to Australia when she was 6 years | ||
| She's now a fierce defender of Western values and spends much of her time writing about the same issues I talk about on this show. | ||
| We're going to talk about her childhood in Iran as well as her life in Australia. | ||
| Is there more to that giant island country than just boomerangs and kangaroos? | ||
| I suspect there might just be. | ||
| To prove my earlier point, when was the last time you heard anything in the news about Australia since the terrorist attack in Sydney almost two years ago? | ||
| They had a nationwide election about two months ago, but I think I only heard about that because of a random link on Twitter. | ||
| If you're watching this, you've already shed much of the mainstream nonsense, but our work is still cut out for us. | ||
| Let's keep talking to interesting people from all over the world. | ||
| And if you've got suggestions, well, there's a comment section right down below. | ||
| Rita Panahi is a journalist who was born in America, spent her first years in Iran, and | ||
| has lived in Australia ever since. | ||
| Rita, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Greetings from Melbourne. | ||
| Greetings from Melbourne. | ||
| Greetings from Los Angeles. | ||
| I want to dive into some Australia stuff, because we never hear anything about Australia in America. | ||
| I mean, since Crocodile Dundee 2, we haven't heard anything from you guys. | ||
| But let's start a little bit with your history, because you have a really interesting history. | ||
| You were actually born in the United States, but you never lived in the United States, correct? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| I spent my first couple of years there. | ||
| My parents were there. | ||
| My dad was studying. | ||
| He was getting his degree in Arkansas. | ||
| So I was born down in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. | ||
| And then we moved back to Iran, which was always the plan. | ||
| And then the Islamic Revolution happened. | ||
| So things went pear-shaped in Iran quite quickly. | ||
| And we're sort of trapped now in a country that was entirely different to before the | ||
| revolution and ended up in Australia and I'm really grateful to be here really. | ||
| It's a wonderful place. | ||
| I know you guys think America's the centre of the world but I really think Australia | ||
| is the lucky country as we call it and anybody can do well in this country. | ||
| Yeah, and I've heard you say that in speeches before, that you really think Australia is the true place of tolerance and where everyone can come and make a better life and all that sort of stuff. | ||
| So your parents, so they moved to the States, your dad was teaching or something, right? | ||
| Well, when he was in the States, he was getting his degree. | ||
| So he was at university and as soon as he graduated, they moved back. | ||
| That was always the plan. | ||
| And then when Iran went to hell after the Islamic Revolution, They started looking at how they could get out because they were fairly persecuted there and they, well it just wasn't safe. | ||
| We had family members locked up, we had family members killed. | ||
| It was really hell on earth for our family so we were looking to leave and the plan was always to come back to the States but my dad had a brother in Australia and We ended up here. | ||
| It wasn't the plan, but it was a lucky chance. | ||
| People don't realize that before the Islamic Revolution, Iran was a widely secular state, in a lot of ways much more secular than it is now. | ||
| I know you were really young when you were there, but what are your memories from being five or six years old? | ||
| Look, I've got fairly limited memories, but I mean, yeah, it was one of the more, more Western parts of the Middle East. | ||
| You know, you look at pictures of Tehran back in, before the revolution and, you know, you see women in miniskirts and, you know, men and women mixing freely and women at beaches. | ||
| You know, we, we used to live by the beach before we were in Tehran. | ||
| And then things changed. | ||
| Dramatically. | ||
| It really brings home just how quickly things can degenerate into what we see now. | ||
| Iran's progressed a little bit from when the revolution first happened as far as its treatment of women, but it's still pretty bloody poor. | ||
| I remember having to go to school and then suddenly going from being fairly carefree and not having to cover my hair To being at an age, we went at five, six years old, where, you know, that was the time I had to wear the hijab. | ||
| That was a requirement and it was just completely dehumanizing and I just loathed it. | ||
| I loathed that change, even just in my little life, from when I was running around with the boys and being a regular kid to being Expected to observe these moral codes like making sure my hair is covered and behaving in a certain way. | ||
| So even at a tender age, I felt the force of it. | ||
| Always knew I was an American citizen. | ||
| So for me, I always identified as someone other than someone who had to live the rest of their life under that oppressive system. | ||
| So it was It was significant for me and I was like one of the original anchor babies. | ||
| I was like I can get out one day when I'm 18. | ||
| I'm not going to have to be here. | ||
| So that really was a source of comfort to me even as a very young child that one day I'd get out of this. | ||
| What a fascinating time to grow up, because it's not like people having their formative years when there isn't change, where you just were going through what you had to go through, but to go from, even though you were very young, to having memories of freedom, and then as a five-year-old or whatever, that you knew something was wrong with being forced into that kind of system. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And you know, and even now, there are kids there, particularly young girls, you know, for the first few years, they don't have to cover up and they can run around and they don't have these obligations on them. | ||
| But when they start school, then the hijabs have to be worn and, you know, they are, you know, not the best things when you've got a stinking hot day, never mind the rest of the year. | ||
| And yeah, it breaks my heart when I see that, when you see the kids The girls in particular having to, you know, transition from just being a kid and to being, you know, part of the regime. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was it like to actually get out? | ||
| I mean, you said your dad had a brother in Australia, but I assume the regime probably didn't want their bright young people to leave. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| We were really lucky to be accepted in Australia. | ||
| My mum was a midwife. | ||
| Actually, she was the head midwife at a hospital there that was attended by the royal family before the Islamic Revolution. | ||
| So there's a lot of pictures of her showing the royal family around The facilities, you know, that was a fairly regular thing where they'd come and visit and she'd be the one responsible. | ||
| She was a bit of a glamour puss and, you know, looked the part. | ||
| So they really feared for their life because there were publications and pictures of her with the royal family and you'd think that might be a minor thing. | ||
| People got killed for that, you know, people we know got imprisoned. | ||
| So we were lucky to, like I said, the intention wasn't to stay in Australia but We ended up staying here and we were granted asylum and it was just, you know, forever indebted to the country because of that, because it gave us a chance at a new life. | ||
| Yeah, what kind of culture shock was that? | ||
| Like a six-year-old going from Iran in the Middle East to an island with, you know, people in boardy shorts and boogie boarding and all that. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| And the language was a shock, too, because even though I was born in the States, I had zero English because I'd been brought up in Iran. | ||
| So I had like two words, hello and tea, which is a weird combination of words to know. | ||
| So I had to learn the language very quickly. | ||
| But it's such a welcoming place. | ||
| And thankfully, English is a very simple language for a child to learn. | ||
| So it only took a few months. | ||
| Yeah, it is a bit of a culture shock, but Australia's not that different that you guys imagine. | ||
| I know you guys think that, you know, we've got kangaroos, you know, just hopping down. | ||
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Boomerangs. | |
| I assume you have a boomerang within reaching distance of you right now? | ||
| Always! | ||
| I'd never leave home without a boomerang. | ||
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You never know when you need it. | |
| It was a culture shock, definitely, but you immediately felt safe and very quickly you realise this is a really welcoming, wonderful place to grow up and so much opportunity. | ||
| Yeah, did you experience any discrimination or anything like that or really was it just simply you were there? | ||
| Over the years, I mean I've been here now for like over 30 years, so you know I have seen occasional discrimination but really it is minor and it's been quite often The discrimination I see are from your, you know, your bloody social justice warriors as opposed to being the most tolerant, you know, open-minded people in the world. | ||
| But if you don't conform to their idea of what a brown person should be saying and doing and thinking, then they are quite often really vicious and beneath that thin veneer of goodness is a bigot. | ||
| And I've seen that quite a lot on Twitter and that's probably the most racism I've ever faced has been on Twitter from I don't even call myself ex-Muslim. | ||
| Right, because somehow you're a brown, do you identify as Muslim? | ||
| Do you consider yourself ex-Muslim, or do you consider yourself Muslim? | ||
| I don't even call myself ex-Muslim. | ||
| My family are Muslim. | ||
| Like if you ask them, "What's your religion?" | ||
| That same Muslim. | ||
| But they're very, very relaxed about it. | ||
| They're Muslim in the way most Australians are Christian. | ||
| That's one big difference between Australia and America. | ||
| We're a lot less religious than you guys. | ||
| Early as I could remember, I identified as atheist. | ||
| I just didn't believe. | ||
| So for me, there wasn't a real big transition from being a Muslim to being an agnostic or an atheist because I never was practicing. | ||
| I don't think my parents have ever been to a mosque. | ||
| Certainly not for me. | ||
| So they're not at all devout. | ||
| So that's interesting that the discrimination which you face, which you're describing is very little and mostly on Twitter, which is not reality. | ||
| I keep trying to remind myself that Twitter is not reality, but you're getting the discrimination from the social justice crew because you're not their type of brown person because you do speak your mind. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It is extraordinary that these people who supposedly spend their lives fighting for the For the minorities that they see as perpetually oppressed, even in countries like Australia, when a minority actually speaks up and has their own thoughts, and it doesn't conform to their world view, they are absolutely appalling in their response. | ||
| Straight out. | ||
| Bigotry. | ||
| And you know, it's like if you're a certain race or if you're from a minority group, you should only vote a certain way. | ||
| You know, you're not allowed the opportunity to think for yourself and decide for yourself who Who you're going to support or where you're going to stand on certain issues. | ||
| And yeah, like I said, beneath that thin veneer of virtue, quite often there's a really hateful bigot when someone is, you know, identifies as a social justice warrior. | ||
| And I've got no qualms about mocking them day and night. | ||
| I just think they are quite often horrid people who deserve to be called out. | ||
| Yeah, and you get a lot of crap for calling them out, but it doesn't stop you. | ||
| But I agree, of course. | ||
| I mean, it's such a dim view of the world that they have that we should all be viewed in this collectivist space. | ||
| But before we go all in on that stuff, tell me a little bit about Australia, because boomerangs and kangaroos and reverse Coriolis effect in your toilet aside, I feel like nobody in the States knows anything about Australia. | ||
| You're a big island. | ||
| That's pretty much it. | ||
| We are, we're a big island. | ||
| Most of the population lives along the coast, a lot of desert in the middle. | ||
| It's a really modern, I think it's a lot like the States, except we're not religious. | ||
| That's one of the things we look at you and we don't sort of identify. | ||
| We've had a prime minister who was an atheist and we had no issue with that at all. | ||
| I mean, she was a terrible prime minister, but not because she was an atheist. | ||
| It had nothing to do with being godless. | ||
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No, that had nothing to do with it. | |
| We've had a lot of Prime Ministers recently. | ||
| We've had a modern history of being really stable, particularly politically, but in the last six, seven years we seem to just keep knifing our Prime Ministers. | ||
| They get elected and then their own party knifes them and then we have another one. | ||
| So that's kind of characterised the politics in recent years. | ||
| We've got a conservative government at the moment but led by a man who many conservatives don't really see as a conservative. | ||
| So it's a really interesting period and he just hung on because a lot of the conservative base abandoned their party and went and voted for minor parties. | ||
| So it's really interesting seeing what's happening around the world with you guys because there does seem to be this Uprising from conservatives where they don't actually think that the major parties or the major establishment, I guess, isn't really representing their interests. | ||
| And in Australia, we had a lot of minor parties, and some of them you'd describe as far right, get a lot of votes in the last election this year. | ||
| Yeah, so I think Americans think that everybody is like us, like, oh, we're a two-party system. | ||
| Even though I keep saying on this show, the Constitution never says anything about only having two parties. | ||
| It's just that the two parties have a stranglehold on our system. | ||
| You guys have a bunch of parties that sort of trade power, and it's not just two parties on top of everything, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Well, we've got Labor, which is a predominant left party, and then we've got the Conservatives, which are Liberal and National, and they are in a coalition together. | ||
| And then we've got a minor party called the Greens, which they get like one in ten votes. | ||
| So in the Senate, our upper house, they have a presence. | ||
| But this last election, the minor parties from all weird facets, you know, our Senate is an absolute dog's breakfast, you know, it is It's going to be fascinating to see how we can govern for the next few years because you've got so many minor parties that have got their own little objectives and you wonder how they're going to work together and agree and pass legislation. | ||
| So yeah, we have a very different system to you. | ||
| It's a party-based system. | ||
| We don't vote for a For a leader, Prime Minister, we vote for a representative in our local seat. | ||
| So, yeah, it's a little bit different. | ||
| But though we don't directly vote for the Prime Minister, whoever is leading the party is significant, obviously, and has a fair deal to do with who gets elected. | ||
| Yeah, so it's kind of, there's benefits and drawbacks to both, right? | ||
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Because here... Oh, definitely. | |
| Yeah, there is, there is. | ||
| And you know, you've got, particularly in the Senate, when you've got so many different parties, you know, you can have the vote diluted. | ||
| And our Senate is a really weird system. | ||
| Every single state is entitled to the same number of senators. | ||
| So you might have a very popular state like New South Wales or Victoria, but we get the same number of senators as Tasmania, which is, you know, nobody lives there. | ||
| So it's not a one vote It's mad. | ||
| I mean, I'd be very much for abolishing our Senate, our upper house, because it's very much obstructionist and unrepresentative, but that ain't going to happen anytime soon. | ||
| It's an argument that's been made for decades and, you know, it's still there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm curious, being an island, the fact that you guys are so big geographically and that you're an island, how much of that actually plays into the national ethos? | ||
| Because when we see what's going on with the European Union and borders and all that stuff, these are people that are landlocked next to each other. | ||
| borders and immigration are important, all that kind of stuff. | ||
| And you guys really have the advantage of water. | ||
| I mean, it really is just that simple in a way. | ||
| But how much does that actually like affect policies and the way people think about the rest of the world | ||
| and all that kind of stuff? | ||
| Oh, look, we've got oceans and yeah, geographically we are blessed to be apart | ||
| from a lot of that turmoil, but those oceans didn't stop 50,000 people coming here | ||
| by boat when labor was in government. | ||
| We had a very strict border control system under the conservative government of John Howard, and when Labor were elected, they completely dismantled that because that's not That wasn't in their thinking. | ||
| They thought it was more humane to be a little bit more tolerant. | ||
| But that tolerance led to hundreds of people, over 1,200 people drowning on our borders, trying to come here from places like Indonesia by boat. | ||
| They weren't Indonesians. | ||
| They travel from typically the Middle East. | ||
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Right. | |
| So they're migrants actually from other countries that use Indonesia. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Typically economic migrants. | ||
| I'm sure there were some genuine refugees amongst them, but the overwhelming majority you would describe as economic migrants. | ||
| And even the Labour Party came to acknowledge that and they started toughening up. | ||
| And right now they're, well, they say they back all the border protection policies that the conservative side have. | ||
| and you know, they're not going to dismantle everything because it led to | ||
| enormous suffering not just the 1200 people Who drowned trying to get here women and children amongst | ||
| them, but also all our detention centers filled You know, we have 50 that we have just 50,000. I think even | ||
| more than that in detention centers, you know effectively locked up and | ||
| Since we've managed to take regain control of our borders those detention centers have emptied out. There's not | ||
| people drowning on the border And we still have a refugee program. We still have a | ||
| humanitarian intake In fact, we've increased it, but we select people who are | ||
| waiting and observing the rules because you know what people | ||
| There was a period where people would argue that there are no queues to come here. | ||
| You know, these programs don't exist. | ||
| But as we know, they do exist. | ||
| And there's people floundering, waiting in camps, who don't have the resources to hop on a plane to Indonesia and then pay a people smuggler to come by boat to Australia. | ||
| And they're now a priority. | ||
| So our refugee intake, I think, is something to be really proud of, because we are very generous with that. | ||
| And, you know, this isn't just simply porous borders. | ||
| This is a proper humanitarian program where these people are brought here, they're given housing, healthcare, education, and, you know, help to become integrated into society. | ||
| But Rita, Rita, I thought you were supposed to be a cold-hearted, heartless conservative who wants to close borders and all that, but it sounds like you're actually okay with immigration, as you were an immigrant yourself, but you just want reasonable standards Absolutely, and we've got, with this country, | ||
| Particularly economically needs our economic migrants. | ||
| They bring a great deal of wealth and you know we're an aging nation we need people to who are working age and come here and are productive and contribute. | ||
| Well our humanitarian intake we've got to be honest it costs us a lot of money but it is something I think that as a rich nation we're obliged to do and I'm proud of that. | ||
| However that doesn't mean that it's a free-for-all and whoever you know can just break the rules come here can come here first. | ||
| Also, we've got to be mindful of where those refugees are coming from because of late there has been issues with Some not integrating as they should and as immigrants decades before them have integrated. | ||
| So there is a lot of debate in this country about where should these refugees come from? | ||
| You know, where do we do we prioritize Christians who are being persecuted in the Middle East, Yazidis? | ||
| Or do we not consider religion at all and just bring in whoever's deemed the neediest? | ||
| There was a poll just this week that was published that was absolutely blowing people away. | ||
| It was a poll that was by one of the more left-leaning pollsters, so there can be no sort of accusations. | ||
| It was published in The Guardian, so there can be no accusations that this was some sort of rogue poll to try to change public sentiment. | ||
| But it showed one in two Australians Supports an immediate ban on Muslim migration. | ||
| Now this has absolutely shocked so many people. | ||
| Who just refuse to accept that this sort of sentiment is out there. | ||
| And it's there because people don't talk about this issue. | ||
| People pretend that terrorism isn't happening. | ||
| That it doesn't have a religion. | ||
| And most Australians are smarter than that. | ||
| Now, I don't actually agree with the immediate ban on Muslim migration. | ||
| I'm not for that at all. | ||
| But I can understand. | ||
| And the poll didn't surprise me because I don't exist in this little tiny echo chamber that so many of the media seem to exist in. | ||
| I just think we need to talk about these things openly, because when you don't, that's when you have sentiment like this rising, and I don't think it's particularly healthy. | ||
| So isn't that the ultimate irony of your position? | ||
| For you particularly, because as an immigrant from the Middle East, it's extremely personal to you. | ||
| But for me and the people that are in our space that we see on Twitter that are talking about this stuff, that aren't doing it from a bigoted place. | ||
| that want to help people when we can and all that, but also want a proper vetting, | ||
| they've put us in a really bizarre situation. | ||
| And for you, I mean, I've seen you go on TV and I saw something where you were on TV | ||
| debating this guy, an anchor, and he kept implying you were saying all Muslims, | ||
| repeatedly, even-- - Oh. | ||
| Even though you never said it. | ||
| We'll link to it below so people can see it. | ||
| You never said it. | ||
| It was the age-old argument that we have all the time here. | ||
| And it's like, man, she's from the Middle East. | ||
| She was born to Muslim parents. | ||
| She immigrated properly. | ||
| Now she's trying to stand up for the very values that this country is for. | ||
| And they're doing this to you, too. | ||
| This bizarro alliance between the regressive left and Islamists, it is prevalent everywhere, you know, in the UK, the US and even in Australia. | ||
| And it is bloody sick. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| The only sense it makes is that they share a common enemy, conservatives. | ||
| But I think you're talking about an appearance on morning television where I had written a piece about, you know, This terror has a religion, and we've got to acknowledge it. | ||
| Again, I was at pains, as we always are, to say, I'm talking about Islamists, I'm talking about the extremists, I'm not talking about the entire Muslim world. | ||
| You know, all those qualifications were made, but no, nevertheless, you know, even just talking about it, even identifying what is happening that is clear to anybody who hasn't got their head buried in the sand, was abhorrent to this dude. | ||
| And it brought up Christian terrorism, you know, bombings at abortion clinics, which I think, you know, the last one was he could find was about 15, 20 years ago. | ||
| But nevertheless, you know, you can't talk about Muslim based or Islamist based terror without mentioning the Christian. | ||
| You know, it's just. | ||
| He also, it was pretty great because you asked him when the last one was and he had no idea. | ||
| Then he busted out his phone and a few minutes later came back and yeah, it turned out to be 15 or 20 years ago. | ||
| I'm curious, you know, because you guys haven't been hit with terrorism really until about two years ago in Sydney and there was that hostage situation and all that. | ||
| How much did that actually change the discussion for you guys? | ||
| Because you were seeing it everywhere else again. | ||
| Surrounded by water, seemingly safe. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Did that really change the discussion in the country? | ||
| Look, it did. | ||
| The Lint Cafe siege in Sydney did. | ||
| As did, I mean, there's been other events. | ||
| Just a short time before that, there was a young kid in Melbourne who was radicalised and he tried to kill a couple of police officers, stabbed them repeatedly. | ||
| He was shot dead. | ||
| That was probably, you know, our first taste of it. | ||
| Lint affected the public. | ||
| It wasn't just targeted at police. | ||
| But we've been really fortunate in this country. | ||
| We've had our counter-terrorism officers and authorities foil several plots. | ||
| We've just had someone imprisoned for what was called the Anzac Day terror plot, a really significant day within our calendar. | ||
| The plot there was to run over a police officer, behead them, take their gun and shoot more people. | ||
| We've had a Mother's Day plot that's before the courts now, which was again, you know, going to be targeting the public from the information that's out there. | ||
| And the biggest one we had was about a decade ago, if not longer. | ||
| about a decade ago, which was quite advanced plans to bomb the Melbourne Cricket Ground, | ||
| which is our biggest sporting stadium here. So we've been really fortunate that these plots have | ||
| been stopped in their tracks, but those lone wolf attacks, as we call them, they're not so easily | ||
| stopped. And there has been, we had a police member shot in Sydney last year in an attack by a | ||
| young kid, I think it was 15, 16, who was again radicalised. | ||
| So we've had a taste of it but nowhere like places like France and Belgium where their issues seem to be so advanced that you wonder how they're ever going to get on top of it. | ||
| Yeah, is that the irony too, is that it's like the better that our security services are, the more things that they stop, and often we don't know that they stop them until sometimes months or years later, and then at the same time it makes the threat seem lower, so then people want to be more tolerant, and again, tolerance basically is good, but you don't have a full picture, and I guess that's really what the big issue is. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You can become complacent. | ||
| You know, we don't live in fear here. | ||
| We don't think, you know, we're going to be blown up around the street corner. | ||
| But again, you've just got to be awake to the reality of what's happening around the world and that we are not immune from it. | ||
| You know, the terror deniers around here will bring up things like, oh, you've got much more chance of, you know, dying in a car crash. | ||
| Of course you bloody do! | ||
| You know, we drive around everywhere, we've got millions of cars, but do we not think about terror and we don't worry about that and make sure we're doing things to counter it? | ||
| Do we not worry about domestic violence because more people are dying on the roads from car accidents? | ||
| I mean, it is just a stupid argument. | ||
| There is just so much that is intellectually dishonest and just Fraudulent in my mind when it comes to this space because people will do anything not to talk about it People will do anything to deny that it's even an issue and it obviously is an issue and this poll that came out this week | ||
| Shows that it is an issue, and people are thinking about it, even if our elite media and politicians aren't willing to discuss it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you think of anything else that we're so paralyzed to talk about? | ||
| Because I really can't, in 2016. | ||
| Is there anything else that we treat with such kid gloves that is of such importance? | ||
| And I get email from people literally all over the world, from almost every country, saying that their governments are doing the exact same thing. | ||
| Yeah, every Western nation seems to be dealing with it. | ||
| In Australia, I think the other issue that seems to be taboo, but is a significant issue, is what's happening in a lot of our Indigenous communities. | ||
| Again, it's something that people don't talk about, because if you do talk about it, you can get labelled a racist very quickly, even though You care enough to want to actually do something about it and to at least put it on the public, to publicly discuss it. | ||
| We've got kids who are being really mistreated, neglected, and they're not being saved by the authorities. | ||
| They're not being taken into care at the same level as you would expect. | ||
| I mean, sorry, let me rephrase that. | ||
| They actually are taken into care at greater rates than the non-Indigenous community, but At the point where the authorities take them seems to be a lot higher than, you know, no white kid, I don't think, would be allowed to be mistreated in that way for so long before they are saved. | ||
| And we've got this stolen generation, narrative in our history that the authorities are scared | ||
| now to actually save kids who are being abused. | ||
| Because of that political correctness, because they don't want to create another stolen generation | ||
| of Indigenous kids taken from their parents, those kids are condemned to just terrible | ||
| lives. | ||
| They repeat the cycle. | ||
| I think that's just such a great shame. | ||
| There is a really significant gap in living standards, in life expectancy, in outcomes | ||
| for our Indigenous community compared to the non-Indigenous community. | ||
| I believe a great deal of that has to do with these politically correct policies where we | ||
| can't talk about what's happening. | ||
| We can't talk about the rights. | ||
| Rampant abuse, sexual abuse, we can't talk about the alcoholism, the drug use, because to even start discussing it is racist, you know? | ||
| The arguments will come up, well what about all the drug use and alcoholism in the non-Indigenous community? | ||
| Well yes, of course, but that doesn't stop, yeah, it's exactly the same sort of Um, phenomenon happening there and it's just as destructive and it actually hurts the people that they are trying to protect from discussion. | ||
| Right, and we see that exact same thing when it comes to the discussion on Islam, because if we don't talk about it, then who are you hurting the most? | ||
| You're actually hurting Muslim people who are living under these theocracies and all that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| The people who are killed the most and oppressed the most are other Muslims. | ||
| And, you know, Islamic State looks at Shiite Muslims, like my family, as infidels no different from Jews or non-believers, gays, you know, they think they're deserving of nothing other than death as well. | ||
| Extremist Islamists have been killing other Muslims at a rate that is extraordinary for decades. | ||
| And we just don't, it's almost not on our radar anymore because it happens so often. | ||
| But Rita, what about the abortion bombing and the Crusades? | ||
| Well, that's it. | ||
| Well, yeah, what about the Crusades? | ||
| I mean, for God's sake, some of the arguments that are thrown up are just, they're just too stupid. | ||
| But you've got to acknowledge them and you've got to counter them because They're being taught in universities, you know, I've had these sort of arguments with university lecturers and journalists and, you know, academics who are on the public purse and are just spewing forth bullshit and it's maddening. | ||
| Spewing forth bullshit. | ||
| That could be the title of a book that we should probably co-write that book. | ||
| So jumping back for a second, talking about Australia's role in the world. | ||
| What is the Australian sort of ethos about what you feel your role should be? | ||
| Obviously you guys aren't that interventionist, but you've been part of coalitions and things like that. | ||
| What is the feeling there of what your purpose in the world should be? | ||
| We're pretty laid back about most things. | ||
| We don't try to sort of set the agenda or, you know, enforce our belief systems. | ||
| But yeah, we have been a good corporate...corporate? | ||
| We've been a good global citizen. | ||
| Oh man, that Freudian slip is going to be replayed many, many times. | ||
| But yeah, I think, you know, our history, we can be quite proud of our involvement in World War II, our involvement, you know, with the Allied forces. | ||
| And I think, you know, we do feel a little bit removed geographically. | ||
| We are so far from so much of what's happening around the world. | ||
| But these days, you know, it's all there in your hand, in your phone. | ||
| It's immediate. | ||
| You know what's happening. | ||
| As soon as it happens, you know, we're living in a time where, you know, those borders don't seem to mean as much. | ||
| So I think we're fairly relaxed about our place in the world. | ||
| You know, we do have those amongst us, as you have in every community who want to set the agenda, they want to be, you know, We had a carbon tax for a while and the rationale was there. | ||
| We're going to lead the world in an emission trading scheme. | ||
| We're going to be the standard bearers in fighting global warming and that government got thrown out really quickly. | ||
| So yeah, that didn't last too long. | ||
| So I think overall, Most Australians recognise that we're pretty lucky. | ||
| We've got a very good standard of living. | ||
| We've got our own concerns. | ||
| All sorts of issues from housing affordability to the threat of terror. | ||
| But I think we're pretty happy with Saying what's happening around the world and feeling fortunate that it's not happening in our backyard yet. | ||
| Yeah, I'm telling you, it's that water thing. | ||
| Being big and surrounded by water, it's pretty good. | ||
| What do you make of our crazy election here? | ||
| Not only what do you make of it, but what kind of coverage in Australia, just in mainstream media, is our election getting? | ||
| Because it's all we have here. | ||
| Any of the cable news, 24-hour days, that's all we talk about. | ||
| Oh, we're getting a lot, a lot more than previously. | ||
| There is a lot of American election coverage in our mainstream news, particularly television, a great deal of it. | ||
| And all of it, almost all of it, is pretty much what you'd expect. | ||
| It's very much, you know, Trump is this maniac who's a racist and sexist and, you know, some of the reports I've seen, which is mostly just straight news reports, have been Again, extraordinary in being little, you know, editorials that are absolutely biased. | ||
| Personally, I don't know what, I mean, I've got a great deal of thoughts. | ||
| I'm not a fan of any other candidate. | ||
| I can't be enthusiastic for Trump, but I completely understand the phenomenon. | ||
| I understand people being utterly fed up and wanting an anti-establishment figure. | ||
| And I know why he appeals to people. | ||
| I think a lot of things that the media sees gaffes and sees huge errors in his character are actually enormous assets and of what appeal to a lot of people. | ||
| So it's been just fascinating. | ||
| I would love to be there for the last month or two and just see how it unfolds. | ||
| But, you know, Trump, some of his greatest enemies are, again, his greatest assets. | ||
| You look at what's happening now with the protests in Charlotte and the protests that were happening at his rallies. | ||
| You think the average American looking at that would actually sympathize with him, would understand some of the | ||
| things he's been saying about what the country has turned into. | ||
| Charlotte is just extraordinary. You've got a black cop shooting an, seems to be an armed black man. | ||
| And the place is being torn apart, and now a black protester's shot another black protester. | ||
| But it's- In a city with a Democratic mayor. | ||
| Yeah, but it is Whitey's fault. | ||
| Somehow, you know, this black-on-black violence that's happened has somehow caused for just looting and beatings and just mass mindless violence that's been characterized as some sort of a protest that's got some purpose. | ||
| And it doesn't. | ||
| It is just mindless looting and violence and it should be called what it is. | ||
| And again, I think the public can see what it is, but the media narrative is trying to paint it as something other than that. | ||
| And I think that is a great, I think it's something else we have in common in Australia and America, Europe is the media being out of touch with its readers, viewers, listeners, they are just, | ||
| increasingly there's a gap between members of the media and the mainstream population. | ||
| And I think that's not healthy. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's interesting that you use the phrase out of touch. | ||
| 'Cause I think one of the debates we're constantly having here, | ||
| and the reason that online shows are working, is that it's, is it out of touch? | ||
| Or is it that they're actually in it with the politicians? | ||
| Do you think it's like a sort of generational thing and just a technology thing and you know we're all walking around with phones so now we're all on the ground journalists? | ||
| Or is it that they're actually in it with the people in power so they have a vested interest in keeping that game going? | ||
| Or maybe both? | ||
| Well, in the U.S. | ||
| it may be a bit of that. | ||
| In Australia, I don't think it is that. | ||
| I don't think it's because they're part of the establishment or the elite. | ||
| I think it's just the ideological disposition of a great number of the members of the media. | ||
| A great many of them are not, you know, they look at the mainstream, well one, they don't acknowledge the mainstream is actually mainstream, you know, they think, quite often think because they're surrounded by like-minded people that their views are the prevalent views and they're not. | ||
| Or they just look at the mainstream with sort of condemnation as if they're too stupid to believe what they believe. | ||
| And I think it's, again, really unhealthy at a time where the mainstream media needs its audience more than ever to be poles apart from what the great majority of the population thinks, I think is really Unfortunate, yeah. | ||
| In Australia anyway, I think it's just a simple matter of the politics of the individuals within the media. | ||
| It tends to be very much on the left, as it has been for generations. | ||
| The rest of the population is a lot more diverse than that. | ||
| It's a lot more nuanced than that, you know, and their views aren't being properly reflected. | ||
| Of course, there are conservative commentators and writers and journalists, but very much in the minority and not reflecting the number of voters who are leaning that way. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| How much of this stuff do you think is actually just purely the fault of education, be it in Australia or be it here or wherever? | ||
| I mean, I was watching the Charlotte riots and there was this guy, you know, they found a protester and he was screaming about Trump. | ||
| And I'll preface this with saying, this is not a defense of Trump, but Trump is not in power now. | ||
| He's not the president or the governor of the state or the mayor of that city. | ||
| And the guy was blaming Trump, and it's like, I'm not saying you should be blaming Hillary, and I'm not even saying you should be blaming Obama. | ||
| But you're misdirecting things at somebody that has literally nothing to do, no power in place, has anything to do with Trump right now. | ||
| And to me, that's an education problem, not a, Very much. | ||
| And yeah, those opinions come from ignorance, but they are supported again by, quite often, by mainstream media. | ||
| And I remember, you know, after even Orlando, there was talk about, you know, Trump, as if he had anything to do with it, you know, after the Orlando massacre. | ||
| It is just absurd to be blaming him. | ||
| I mean, can you imagine how this news would be reported if it was a bunch of Trump supporters who were tearing apart a city, who were bashing bystanders for just the colour of their skin, who were looting and just causing this widespread mayhem and destruction? | ||
| Yeah, it is completely idiotic, but it's become almost a joke, you know, whenever something horrible happens around the world, you know, you blame Brexit, you blame Trump, you blame the Crusades, you know, you can't ever actually pinpoint the blame at the people responsible because that would be, you know, probably racist and gross. | ||
| Gross and racist, we know that. | ||
| I want to back up a little bit to some of your history because you weren't always a public person and a journalist and someone that staked out controversial positions. | ||
| You were actually, you were a private citizen, you were in banking at first, right? | ||
| Boring, yeah. | ||
| What possessed you to go from a normal job to somebody that's out there putting their face with their words? | ||
| I know, I was just thinking, you know, a sane industry with good prospects and good income. | ||
| It just wasn't for me. | ||
| I thought, I want to go into an industry where there's massive job losses and where I'm going to be the tiniest of tiny minorities. | ||
| It wasn't completely planned. | ||
| It was fairly accidental, but it was a happy accident. | ||
| I did a decade in finance and I think I enjoyed most of it, but by the end of it, I just had enough. | ||
| I had my child at that point, too, so it sort of gave me an opportunity to rethink things. | ||
| I went back to university, I did my master's, which was, again, that's kind of cemented some of my thoughts about higher education and just how many junk degrees there are, just completely pointless. | ||
| You've basically said that you think higher education is a waste altogether, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, no, no. | |
| Not a waste altogether. | ||
| I just think in Australia in a particular way, there are so many of these junk degrees that don't qualify you to do anything, that saddle students with big debts, raise their expectations and they come out and they're no more qualified for a job than when they went in. | ||
| And, you know, a lot of it is just lefty indoctrination posing as education. | ||
| It's just absurd. | ||
| And, you know, I'm all for having even more degrees for, you know, Doctors and nurses and architects and accountants. | ||
| Things that actually, you know, teach you how to do a certain job. | ||
| But, you know, bloody Masters in Gender Dance Therapy or something. | ||
| It's just crazy. | ||
| Anyway, so yeah, it was all, again, it wasn't planned. | ||
| It was by chance and just Finding myself, I guess. | ||
| That's such a wanky term. | ||
| But anyway, here I am, and it's worked out well. | ||
| Yeah, so here you are. | ||
| It's worked out well. | ||
| We connected on Twitter, I don't know, maybe six months ago or so, and I thought, wow, here's someone else across the world who gets it, who I sense cares about the same things I care about. | ||
| I see you every now and again, you fight with some of the haters. | ||
| I'm not big on fighting with the haters as a general rule. | ||
| And I see them spewing all sorts of genuinely racist, awful things at you. | ||
| They often think that you're another nationality than you are or religion. | ||
| They always think I'm Indian or Pakistani. | ||
| Yesterday I was copying. | ||
| In fact, yesterday I had someone, I told them I'm not Indian because, you know, all their sort of abuse was framed around me being Indian or Hindu. | ||
| Like never, never, Don't know anybody there, I've never been there. | ||
| And they just refuse to accept it. | ||
| They're like, no, you are Indian, accept it. | ||
| I thought it was hilarious. | ||
| Look, it is a really fine balance. | ||
| I tell people, you know, if I'm giving them advice about Twitter, it's like, don't feed the trolls. | ||
| Don't acknowledge them. | ||
| They're attention seekers. | ||
| They're desperate for any sort of attention. | ||
| So don't give them what they're looking for. | ||
| But on the other hand, every now and then, and I know my followers enjoy it, it's good to You know, call out some filthy hypocrite and just highlight the idiocy, highlight the idiocy and hypocrisy and vileness of some of these social justice warriors who think, you know, that their morals are pristine and who think they're better than the rest of us, but they're quite often fairly vile human beings. | ||
| And I'm happy to mock them. | ||
| I'm happy to, you know, Highlight them to the followers and let them have their fun with them. | ||
| But I acknowledge the other way, your way, which is just don't acknowledge them. | ||
| Because I get literally some days thousands and thousands of mentions and I can't even read all of them and I certainly don't respond to all of them. | ||
| And it does seem like sometimes, you know, the overwhelming bulk are decent comments, intelligent comments that you're not acknowledging and you're acknowledging the lunatic. | ||
| And that seems to be sort of counter-intuitive. | ||
| But I think we've got to highlight the mentality of these people, particularly when they pretend to be morally superior to the rest of us. | ||
| Right, so that's an interesting piece of this, because we've got the social justice warrior class that are moralizing all of us and telling us how racist we are and all this nonsense, and then at the same time, there absolutely is a piece of this alt-right thing that I've talked about a bit on this show where I get it. | ||
| They're Pepe the Frog and Harambe and they're trolling everybody. | ||
| And then they get Hillary to talk about the frog. | ||
| And they're just internet meme posters. | ||
| They're shit posters and they want to upset everybody. | ||
| And I think they're perfectly harmless. | ||
| But I also do see the real white nationalist stuff and I don't know how much of that... So my question to you really is... | ||
| Do you think it's just, I go back and forth, basically, between thinking that it's healthy when they get this stuff out, because then it's not just hidden and secretive, and even though they're anonymous, whatever, they're getting it out. | ||
| Versus, on another hand, in the last year, I have seen more blatant, true hate than ever before online. | ||
| So I'm not sure which one, whether I think this is actually healthy or not. | ||
| Yeah, I haven't set my mind to that too. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I mean, it does seem like an absolute sewer at times, Twitter. | ||
| more so than any other social media forum. | ||
| It seems to be just a bile-filled sewer full of people who are miserable, | ||
| who just want to fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And yeah, those really nasty Nazi types. | |
| I don't know what else to say. | ||
| nasty Nazi types. | ||
| I haven't encountered too many. | ||
| I've had a few and I've just blocked them. | ||
| But there have been very few in numbers as far as the ones attacking me. | ||
| So I'm not sure of the size of that population. | ||
| I don't think it's anywhere near the size of the the other side but yeah any sign of them isn't healthy and | ||
| again I think they should be treated with absolute disdain, they should be | ||
| called out, they should be mocked and that's what I tend to do. I don't try to you | ||
| know convince these people, I don't try to re-educate them, I just mock them | ||
| because that's all they deserve. They don't deserve your time, they don't deserve | ||
| you know and I think Twitter is a really dumb forum for in-depth arguments. | ||
| You just can't have them. | ||
| That's not the place for discussions. | ||
| You try to frame your point of view in as few characters as possible. | ||
| And if you're actually trying to have a proper discussion, I just don't think that's the forum for it. | ||
| Do you see a new center sort of lining up all over the world? | ||
| Because I think even a year ago, People were barely talking about this. | ||
| I'm talking about the people that are not the far-right, true white supremacists or racists or whatever you want to call them, and you know I don't like using all the buzzwords, and not the regressive left and all the SJWs and all that, but that there is some sort of new center lining up, and it's because of the internet, because people like us have been able to connect. | ||
| My friend Olly Risby up in Canada, who's an atheist Muslim, Do you sense that this could actually become a political movement? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think political parties are starting to recognize what the electorate cares about. | ||
| You've got to think that Republicans have to regroup over the next decade and recognize that they abandoned their base. | ||
| They had so many people so desperately unhappy with them and so eager to jump on the Trump train. | ||
| In Australia as well, in the last election, something between one or two million voters, and that's a significant figure here, we're a small country. | ||
| Conservative voters took their vote elsewhere from the mainstream conservative-liberal national coalition. | ||
| So I think there is this new centre and where it is, is the question. | ||
| I think it's far more to the right than the media class would want it to be and acknowledge it to be. | ||
| I don't mean they're right wing, I just think that in their economic point of view, in their attitude to borders and immigration and national security, they're far more conservative than the media class would like them to be and acknowledge them to be. | ||
| The politicians have no choice but to acknowledge it. | ||
| They can't ignore it. | ||
| Their political survival depends on it. | ||
| But whether you actually see the emergence of a new party is something else to ponder. | ||
| I'm not sure about that. | ||
| But there's talk of that in Australia. | ||
| There's talk about an actual new conservative party that will bring in all these minor parties, voters. | ||
| But it hasn't happened. | ||
| It's something that's been talked about, but whether it actually eventuates is another question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's interesting that, you know, a second ago you started to say that they're more right, but you really meant conservative and then you fixed it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| When I say right, I do need to change. | ||
| But no no no but I bring that up only because it's like even people like you to make your point you still want to be so concerned about the language and I feel that too because we're we're so just under this thing where if you say one thing wrong and imply that the conservatives are really far right or that that everyone will be all over you and that what a what a crazy place for people like us to be in. | ||
| Oh, it's insane. | ||
| People are just so hypersensitive, you know, and so looking to be offended by something or take something out of context that you do. | ||
| Sometimes, you know, even someone who doesn't want to It doesn't give us stuff about political correctness. | ||
| You find yourself qualifying things and explaining things, over-explaining things. | ||
| I guess we're not immune to it either. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We live in that world and we have to acknowledge it. | |
| I wish we were over. | ||
| I see people on Twitter telling me sometimes, Dave, we can see it. | ||
| Get over yourself, like, you know, just stop. | ||
| But, you know, I'm still trying to be a person that, a good person that exists in 2016. | ||
| So my last question for you is, taking everything that we've discussed here, What do you think the best thing for people that are hearing our messages, whether they're a little more right or conservative or a little more left or liberal or whatever it is, for all of these people that are hearing this and seeing the same trends that you're talking about all over the world, what is the best thing that they can do to help fix some of this stuff? | ||
| Be brave. | ||
| Be bold. | ||
| Say what you think. | ||
| I think that's the message to take out of it. | ||
| Don't be afraid. | ||
| Don't be bullied into silence. | ||
| Don't feel like your point of view isn't worthy of being aired and discussed. | ||
| And don't worry about, you know, if you say something You're going to be unfriended on Facebook by someone you went to school with 20 years ago. | ||
| I just think people need to be braver and be interested. | ||
| I wouldn't force anybody to become political nuts, but if you care about this stuff, get interested. | ||
| Read different sources. | ||
| Find out what's really happening and don't be shy about putting your two cents in. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's what I say on the show every week, so I will co-sign that one. | ||
| All right, well, Rita, it was a pleasure. | ||
| I'm so glad we finally connected. | ||
| We were supposed to have you a couple of days ago, and our internet blew out. | ||
| I think somebody's watching us, and they didn't want us to connect. | ||
| Well, I don't believe that was just coincidence. | ||
| There's obviously some sort of left-wing conspiracy to silence us. | ||
| I don't think there's any other explanation possible. | ||
| It's definitely some sort of left-wing conspiracy. | ||
| Anyway, you guys can follow Rita. | ||
| It's at Rita Panahi on Twitter, and you can follow her writing over at the Australian Herald Sun. |
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