Dec. 16, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| All right, before I get to what's going on in the world this week, | ||
| I wanna once again thank all of you who support what we do here on The Rubin Report. | ||
| I'm thrilled to finally be able to show you our brand new home studio today. | ||
| It took a tremendous amount of blood, sweat, tears, and yeah, even money to build it, and we simply could not have done it without you. | ||
| Of course the main thanks goes out to all of you who donate monthly to the show on Patreon, as you guys give us the budget to create content as we see fit, with no executives, bosses, or middlemen between me and you. | ||
| Beyond our patrons, I also want to thank all of those who have given one-time donations on PayPal, as well as to all of you who watch, like, comment on, and share our videos. | ||
| With our new home studio, we can fully expand on everything we've been building here, including more shows, longer interviews, and new segments. | ||
| I truly believe that the ideas of classical liberalism, logic, reason, and individual liberty are the only solution to the authoritarian and extremist problems we're seeing all over the world right now. | ||
| I'll continue to have conversations with people I both agree with and disagree with. | ||
| And just as importantly, I'll continue to listen to you. | ||
| From my Patreon one-on-one chats, to group Google Hangouts, to emails, and yeah, even Twitter, you guys consistently amaze me at your insight and desire for truth. | ||
| My commute is now just 10 steps down the hall from my bedroom. | ||
| And I promise to use that newfound time to make this show even better than before. | ||
| You've truly helped my dreams become a reality, and somehow we're right back at the beginning. | ||
| In the course of the month that we were building this studio, basically a million things happened. | ||
| I'm not sure if you heard about this, but we had an election in the United States, and Donald Trump is now the president-elect. | ||
| While most of the media seemed to be completely blindsided by the results, I can honestly say that I wasn't. | ||
| I talked to and listened to people like Scott Adams, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Mike Cernovich, and whether I agreed with them or not, I realized that there was a real political movement behind their words. | ||
| When you couple this reality with moderate liberals and moderate conservatives who are sick of identity politics and outrage culture, Trump winning actually seems kind of obvious in hindsight. | ||
| I'm trying to do my best not to judge Trump's actions until he's actually in office, because until then, everything people are saying are just guesses and conjecture. | ||
| As I said in my direct message right after the election, I'll be the first to hold Trump's feet to the fire once he's in office, but the simple fact is that he's the president-elect now and we've got to give him a chance. | ||
| That's the rub of democracy. | ||
| Your team doesn't always win, but you can't burn down the system just because you were on the losing end this time. | ||
| Regardless of whether you hate or love Trump, there's no doubt that something good did come out of this election. | ||
| People seem to be engaged in a whole new way. | ||
| People are talking politics, fighting for what they believe, and getting involved in the conversation, maybe even more now than when Obama ran for the first time back in 2008. | ||
| I think we're going to get a whole new crop of political leaders out of this chaos, and I hope some new political movements as well. | ||
| As I've been saying for a year now, if you're an old school liberal, then an old school conservative is no longer your enemy. | ||
| I really think a new center can arise from this, and if Trump is smart, he can actually make that happen. | ||
| Trump is a populist, and that means he wants to be popular. | ||
| Most of us are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. | ||
| Most of us are not the alt-right or the regressive left. | ||
| Most of us don't care what you do in the privacy of your own home and we want government to take less instead of giving more. | ||
| I think we can actually push Trump towards these ideals. | ||
| But if not, then maybe we'll just have to create our own movement to do so. | ||
| Actually, maybe that's already begun. | ||
| With all this in mind, I've got the perfect guest for you this week, radio host and columnist Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Ben is what I would consider an old school conservative, which, like me as a classical liberal, is a strange place to be these days. | ||
| Does he fit in with the new Trump led Republican party any more than I fit in with the identity politics driven Democratic party? | ||
| Not so sure. | ||
| We're both on the outside looking in, and that's exactly where I think we can start building bridges. | ||
| I was on the Daily Wire livestream with Ben on election night, and I got to see as he was alternately thrilled that Hillary lost, but also totally dismayed that Trump had won. | ||
| A couple hours and a few beers later, we both managed to survive the evening, even if we didn't see eye to eye on the whole thing. | ||
| There is huge opportunity for all of us to shape the future of the country right now, but there's no way it can change if we just complain about the system instead of getting involved. | ||
| The rhetoric on Russia, fake news stories about fake news and outrage after outrage are not only going to keep coming, But they're gonna get stronger and stronger. | ||
| The only way we'll stop them and cut through the noise is to figure out what we believe and to fight for it. | ||
| I've got a new studio and a new commitment to continue that fight, and I hope that you'll | ||
|
unidentified
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join me. | |
| Joining me this week is a radio host, columnist, editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com, and most importantly, Now two-time Rubin Report guest, Ben Shapiro, welcome back. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| I thought you would be the right guy to have for the first show in our new studio. | ||
| I don't know what you're thinking, but sure. | ||
| Well, because a lot has happened since we last spoke, probably, I'd say roughly about a year ago. | ||
| And I was with you on election night, you had me over at the Daily Wire studios, and we had a great time, and we had some beers, you were eating a lot of M&M's. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh yeah, gotta keep that sugar intake up. | |
| Now, the thing that I found most interesting was that you did not like Hillary. | ||
| Fair to say, did I say? | ||
| Yeah, no, I think she's awful. | ||
| Do not like Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Clearly do not like Donald Trump. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, so far I'm good? | ||
| You're right on the money. | ||
| So, watching you throughout that evening, the rollercoaster of emotions that you were going through, going from when I sat down, when it still looked good for Hillary, to then it's starting to look like Trump, then realizing it was inevitable, but before they called it, and everything else. | ||
| I mean, you went through every emotion known to man. | ||
| Bizarro world. | ||
| Yeah, it was definitely weird because, you know, I was, as you know, I was sort of rooting for both of them to get left adrift in a rowboat somewhere, but unfortunately one of them was going to be President of the United States. | ||
| So there was a lot of up and down going on, meaning that I was overjoyed that Hillary was not President of the United States. | ||
| Anything that kept Hillary out of the White House I was very happy about. | ||
| And then I looked at who was actually entering the White House and I went, well, this I have some trepidation about. | ||
| I'm not sold on this whole Trump thing, because I hadn't been. | ||
| I didn't end up voting for either of them. | ||
| I left the top of the ticket blank. | ||
| Neither of them fulfilled my basic requirements to be President of the United States. | ||
| So now, you know, I was wrong about where I thought Trump would be. | ||
| I thought Trump was going to lose, just like everybody else who was looking at the polls, from Nate Silver to Larry Sabato. | ||
| And I was clearly 100% wrong on that. | ||
| So now I just hope that I'm wrong about him as a person and a president. | ||
| Because if I'm right, then it's going to be a long four years. | ||
| I have a feeling that no matter what happens, it's going to be a love affair. | ||
| Whether he does good stuff and people come along for the ride, or whether he does bad stuff and they don't. | ||
| But at least if he does good stuff, then I can feel good about it, right? | ||
| I'm hoping that he does some good stuff. | ||
| But at this point, you have to, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Even if you don't like any of the positions he's taken or the moral center that seems to be all over this, you do root for him as a president. | ||
| Well, so I root for him to do good things. | ||
| I don't like the phrase, people use this with Obama also, root for him. | ||
| I don't root for Trump. | ||
| I don't root for Obama. | ||
| I didn't root for Hillary. | ||
| It's not a team sport. | ||
| I like the White Sox and the Bears and the Celtics. | ||
| I root for them. | ||
| I would like to see them win. | ||
| But in politics, it's not just about winning. | ||
| It's about what you do to win. | ||
| It's about the policies that you implement that constitute winning. | ||
| Like, how do you actually gauge winning? | ||
| So for me, when Trump makes a bad deal that's good for him politically, That's not something I'm in favor of, right? | ||
| I'm not rooting for him, even though it helps him politically. | ||
| I'm rooting for him to do good things. | ||
| So I'm rooting for me, right? | ||
| I'm rooting for the country. | ||
| I'm rooting for him to do the things that'll help the country more than me, because I'm fine, but that'll help the country. | ||
| But what I fear is that I think people are rooting for him or rooting against him. | ||
| And if that's your, I said this on my podcast today, if your moral center is basically good for Trump is good for the country, or bad for Trump is good for the country, you need a different moral center. | ||
| Right, so that seems to be the place that we're at right now, where Trump said, I'm gonna win, I'm a winner, and that force of will was almost enough. | ||
| In and of itself, to make him a winner. | ||
| So is your version of winning, which would be having a moral code and an ethical code, whatever, whether we agree on every little policy is irrelevant, but can you win on that anymore? | ||
| Now that we've seen how Trump won, do you honestly think that a conservative can win playing the game that's out there? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I do think that. | ||
| I think that some of the things that Trump did, and I said this very early on, I mean, very early, before he started kind of making an ass of himself repeatedly, I said that actually there was a good shot that he would be a better nominee in terms of winning than Marco Rubio, because I thought that he spoke a moral language about politics a lot of the other candidates didn't. | ||
| I mean, you can go look back at my speech that I gave at University of Missouri in like October 2015, and I said that Trump might be stronger, especially among blue-collar whites in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. | ||
| So I got it right then, I got it wrong a year later, right? | ||
| The idea there is that Trump speaks in terms of morality. | ||
| There are good guys and bad guys, right? | ||
| Whether you agree with his morality is another thing. | ||
| But for him, all politics breaks down into good guys versus bad guys. | ||
| Unfortunately, very often it's just, I'm the good guy. | ||
| Everybody who opposes me is the bad guy. | ||
| But that's the way that people think about politics. | ||
| And I think that if you had the actual proper moral content to that sort of narrative, then yeah, you could still win based on that. | ||
| It's so funny that everybody sort of, because everybody's a binary thinker, everybody broke it down into, Trump is the only one who can campaign aggressively. | ||
| He's the only one who can speak this moral language. | ||
| No, I wasn't against Trump campaigning aggressively or speaking this moral language. | ||
| I just thought that he was applying it incorrectly. | ||
| I mean, if you watch me in debate, I'm constantly applying moral language. | ||
| I'm constantly aggressive. | ||
| But I disagreed with Trump. | ||
| You can do both at the same time. | ||
| Yeah, so are we at a point then of post-truth? | ||
| Because if you look at what he says, now again, most of the criticism I get right now is that I'm being too kind to him. | ||
| I've been saying for weeks now, we have to see what happens. | ||
| I can't get outraged about appointments yet. | ||
| I have to wait to see, you know, you can get a a sense of what's going on. | ||
| No, that's right. | ||
| But let's see what happens. | ||
| I think that's right. | ||
| I'm not outraged about the appointments. | ||
| What he does and what he says, I can be outraged by. | ||
| And I think that there's an incentive structure that has to exist, where if he does something bad now, | ||
| now I criticize him. | ||
| The argument was made during the election cycle for people on the right. | ||
| Well, if he says something bad, shh, be quiet, Hillary might get elected, right? | ||
| And my view was, that's not my job. | ||
| My job is to, as somebody who actually believes in something that's truthful, my job is to say what I think is true, whether he's saying it or not. | ||
| But now, especially post-election, Hillary's no longer in the picture. | ||
| So the question now is, if he does something that's false, are you going to call that out, even if you're politically on his side overall? | ||
| And that's the real question for me. | ||
| So my job still is the same as it ever was. | ||
| When he does something good, I praise him. | ||
| When he does something bad, I don't. | ||
| Yeah, which really is not what many people... People don't want that. | ||
| No, people... I mean, it's fine. | ||
| But do they not want it? | ||
| Because I suspect they want it. | ||
| It's what I'm trying to do. | ||
| I know it's what you're trying to do. | ||
| I mean, it hasn't hurt me, you know, with... I think with most people. | ||
| Most people are refreshed when they hear somebody like you or like me say, okay, here's the truth. | ||
| You know, and I'm putting my own political interests aside in the interest of the person who's at risk here, then here's what's true and here's what's not. | ||
| But there's a large contingent that's going to resist that in a major way because, again, it has become such team sport. | ||
| It has become, well, if you say something bad about Trump, then you're a cuck and you're undermining him. | ||
| And it's like, well, again, Bill O'Reilly said that about George Will. | ||
| George Will criticized the carrier deal. | ||
| And O'Reilly comes out and he says, George Will is just undermining Trump. | ||
| I said, wait a second, he's not my dictator. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's my servant. | ||
| It's not right. | ||
| It's not the opposite. | ||
| I'm not his servant. | ||
| He's my servant. | ||
| He's a public servant now. | ||
| I know that he's been in private business his whole life, but he's running for the job of public servant. | ||
| Now it's his job to serve the interests of the American people. | ||
| It's not my job to service his political interests. | ||
| And so, you know, it's been very weird to watch people kind of invert that. | ||
| And I thought that that was unique to the left. | ||
| So I've been disabused of that pretty radically. | ||
| Yeah, so that's really interesting, and maybe my feelings about what's happening with the left just kicked in a little bit more, a little earlier than yours have kicked in about the right. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| Because you are seeing this, and it's pretty obvious. | ||
| I mean, to me, the issue will be that once these Trump people, who have been all for, you know, against political correctness, and free speech, and all of this stuff, and say what you feel, and blah blah, which I'm for all of that stuff. | ||
| Of course, am I. But once, on January 20th, once those are the guys that are in power, Will they be as for fighting the power? | ||
| I somehow suspect not. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| No, I mean, Kellyanne Conway today, right? | ||
| I mean, Kellyanne Conway was out there criticizing, I think it was Bret Stephens from the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Bret Stephens from the Wall Street Journal was making fun of Carly Fiorina because she went to Trump Tower. | ||
| And he says, like, five minutes ago, you were saying he was the worst person who ever was, and he was making fun of your face, and now here you are at Trump Tower. | ||
| And Kellyanne Conway tweets back at Bret Stephens, and she says something like, that's really sexist, what do you think? | ||
| And then she tags Rupert Murdoch, right, who owns the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| I mean, so is this the way that this is gonna go now, that we're gonna go to the bosses of the people who we don't like what they're saying? | ||
| Right, that's someone literally in the incoming administration tagging someone. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Sean Hannity did the same thing today. | ||
| Somebody, Red State criticized him, didn't like something that he did, so he immediately tagged the heads of Salem Communications, which owns Red State. | ||
| I mean, like, is this something that we want to engage in? | ||
| This is not, like, I disagree with people all the time. | ||
| I generally don't call for them to be fired. | ||
| I mean, that's, There was a point where I suggested that if leftists were going to apply certain tactics, then you have to apply those same tactics to people on the left in order to create a sort of mutually assured destruction. | ||
| But that's not what's going on now. | ||
| Now what's going on is you criticize certain people, and those people just say you ought to be fired just for the criticism. | ||
| In fact, I've never blocked anyone on Twitter. | ||
| I don't mute anybody on Twitter. | ||
| So all the evil, terrible tweets that I receive, I've never called for anybody to be banned from Twitter, even though I was, according to the ADL, the number one recipient of anti-Semitism. | ||
| We'll get to that. | ||
| I mean it's it but I've never but that's not my thing but watching people on my own side do it now it's like well you should shut up because because Trump no no sorry that's not the way it works yeah Can you win that battle? | ||
| I mean, I think your answer is yes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, as you know, you wouldn't be in this business, I wouldn't be in this business if I didn't think the battle were winnable. | ||
| I think that in the afterglow of an election, it's very difficult for people to get past the team sport of it and the warm feeling and the excitement. | ||
| So I immediately, I mean, as you mentioned that night, I kept going from excitement to trepidation to excitement to trepidation to, oh my God, I can't believe this was the election. | ||
| But a lot of people just went straight to, we hate Hillary Clinton so much, everything is now hunky-dory, no problems anymore, Trump's here, I alone can solve. | ||
| And I think that'll last up until the point where the pedal hits the metal. | ||
| And then we'll see what kind of policies he actually implements and whether people are willing to stand up. | ||
| My bet is that a lot fewer people will be willing to stand up and not back him when he does bad things than you would have thought a year ago. | ||
| Yeah, I guess we shall see. | ||
| What's next? | ||
| Okay, so he becomes president. | ||
| He starts doing whatever he's doing. | ||
| The left automatically, and this has been my fear all along, is if you demonize someone to the point where even if they do good, you have to keep demonizing them, because if he's a racist bigot, even if a racist bigot does good things for the economy, well, you can't be nice to him, right? | ||
| Because he's the scum of the earth. | ||
| What happens after this? | ||
| Because it seems to me that I think we're going to start seeing more of a trend of violence and the state coming down on more violence. | ||
| It just seems like this is where this has all been led up to and he's the guy to lead the fight against. | ||
| Well, I mean, the level of radicalism that's emerged on both sides in terms of the wild intolerance for people with differing political opinions is pretty extreme, as you're saying. | ||
| You know, I think that if Democrats were smart, they would actually see this as kind of an opportunity. | ||
| My guess is that Trump's going to govern as more of a centrist Democrat than he is as a hardcore right-wing Republican. | ||
| I mean, he's talking about trillion-dollar infrastructure packages, and he's talking about tariffs, and he's talking about a lot of Bernie Sanders kind of policies. | ||
| Right, that's right. | ||
| And so what you could see Democrats doing is doing exactly what they did to Herbert Hoover. | ||
| Let's say things go bad. | ||
| If things go well he'll be re-elected because a president who's president when things are going well generally is re-elected. | ||
| But let's say for the sake of argument things don't go well. | ||
| Let's say that just as every eight to ten years for the last several decades in this country there's some sort of recession and Democrats blame Trump for it. | ||
| What they could do is they could campaign on tripling down on the populism, right? | ||
| I mean, they actually have that opening now, whereas they didn't before. | ||
| And they could actually do FDR to Hoover. | ||
| They could say, you know, Hoover kind of implemented a lot of soft FDR policies, and then FDR came in and tripled down on everything and gets elected four straight times. | ||
| You can see Democrats doing this. | ||
| Things shift really quickly in the country, and Hillary did win by about three million popular votes. | ||
| So this isn't quite the massive majority that Republicans are banking on. | ||
| But I do think that If their rhetoric is this extreme, you know, during the campaign, the question is going to be whether they ratchet it up or whether they sort of ratchet it down and wait to see what happens. | ||
| I'm seeing some of both. | ||
| I'm seeing some of both. | ||
| I hope you're right. | ||
| Like Harry Reid, for example, came out and he says, so far Trump's not that bad, which is something that should make conservatives a little concerned. | ||
| But Harry Reid says that you could see Democrats move in that direction. | ||
| He's not that bad. | ||
| And then things collapse. | ||
| Oh, told you he was that bad. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But the other, 'cause they wanna get some liberal policy out of him, | ||
| some lefty policy out of him. | ||
| But on the other hand, what's going on in university campuses and the sort of extreme response, | ||
| that I think is gonna get a lot worse. | ||
| So I think Democrats in government will likely treat him with more moderation | ||
| after the election than they did before the election, 'cause that's sort of been the pattern. | ||
| But the typical public is gonna treat this as like, we're now in end of times politicking. | ||
| Right, so I guess that's an interesting distinction that the sort of leadership, whether it's the media | ||
| or the political leadership may be willing to work. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And actually you're seeing that battle play out in the Democratic Party right now. | ||
| You've got the people who want to double down on all the kind of identity politics rhetoric like Keith Ellison, right, who's gonna double down on that and he's gonna keep saying race is sexist, bigot, homophobe. | ||
| Let's get our coalition together, the Obama coalition. | ||
| We'll run somebody who's not an old white lady next time. | ||
| We'll run Cory Booker or Kamala Harris and then we'll just sweep back to victory using this new coalition that's demographically growing. | ||
| And then you've got people like Joe Biden and some of the old guard Democrats who are saying, well, hold on just a second. | ||
| Like, why are we abandoning all of these blue-collar white voters who were voting for us until very recently, right? | ||
| A lot of these counties went for Obama the first time. | ||
| And why don't we try to draw them in by maybe working with Trump and then hitting him when we think that he's overly selling something or hitting him when things go bad. | ||
| And so that conflict will really play out at the DNC level. | ||
| I mean, I would bet everything that they're gonna go the Bernie-Ellison route. | ||
| I would think so too. | ||
| And they're gonna dump everybody else. | ||
| Do you think there's any room for those people left? | ||
| You know, for a Jim Webb, Biden... I mean, those happen to be two older white guys. | ||
| But even anyone in that general line of thinking, Blue Dog, Democrat, is that... | ||
| Not Jim Webb, right? | ||
| I think Jim Webb's toast. | ||
| Biden still tries to straddle that gap a little bit, and he gets away with it because he's part of the Obama administration. | ||
| But it's, yeah, I think they're gonna be gradually dragged to the left, because, again, in our entire life, the left has been gradually dragged further and further to the left. | ||
| I'm waiting to see the moderates. | ||
| Since Clinton, they've been dragged that way. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| I think for a long time that the right got dragged further and further to the right, but this election, clearly, they weren't. | ||
| No, they weren't. | ||
| They were dragged to the left, actually, pretty hard. | ||
| They were, I mean, Trump doesn't, it's obvious he doesn't care about gay marriage. | ||
| I don't think he cares. | ||
| No, social issues? | ||
| I don't think he cares about abortion. | ||
| I don't think he cares about weed, I think. | ||
| Even some of the tax stuff, I think, is going to be a little more... As I said, I think he'll be a centrist Democrat. | ||
| I think he's going to govern a lot more like Bill Clinton than he would govern like Ronald Reagan. | ||
| And that's the danger, though. | ||
| If you demonize somebody to that nth point, and then even if they are with you on so many of the things that you've been screaming about for so long, you've painted yourself into the corner. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| And I think the Democrats have painted themselves in a little bit of a corner, except that they're just banking on the growth of the Obama coalition. | ||
| They keep looking at those demographic numbers and they keep thinking, okay, in 2020, 40% of all voters will be of the millennial generation. | ||
| Those people broke heavily for Hillary. | ||
| So what's to stop us now? | ||
| And demographics are not quite destiny. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, demographics are like... What a sad way that would be to live as a society. | |
| That we would only be following the demographic trend. | ||
| But that's what we are right now. | ||
| I mean, we've moved in such a tribal direction, too. | ||
| I mean, it's easy to look at this election cycle and look at, did he win on policy? | ||
| I don't think that Trump won on policy so much as rejection of tribalism in favor of another sort of tribalism. | ||
| Like, if you look at how blue collar white voters voted in this election cycle, By percentage, white working-class people voted more for Trump than Hispanics voted for Hillary Clinton. | ||
| People are constantly talking about the idea that Hispanics are a voting bloc. | ||
| Okay, well then so are white blue-collar people, presumably. | ||
| And they voted precisely the reverse. | ||
| They voted 71% for Trump. | ||
| Again, I don't have a problem with people of any group voting however they want to vote, but if it starts to look like a voting bloc, like our group interest, solidarity, I don't think that's totally what's happening. | ||
| I don't think there's a bunch of white people getting together and going, oh, we've got to vote against those black and Hispanic people. | ||
| Just like I don't think that it's all Hispanic people getting together, we need to vote against the white people. | ||
| But there is that growing sense that you're going to vote inside your own bloc, and that is not a good thing. | ||
| Do you think that's actually real, though? | ||
| Because every time I watch John King with the magic wall that I'm pretty sure he's having an affair with during the commercial break, but every time I watch him do that, and I say, well, the white working-class people here, and the black people here, and the Latino people here, and this whole thing, and it's like, not only does that actually sort of sound racist, and I don't... No, it does. | ||
| I mean, it's a trait. | ||
| Like, you're actually just pinning everyone by these traits, but it also, it doesn't sound logical. | ||
| I don't think And maybe I'm really wrong here, but I don't think most people vote on the color of their skin. | ||
| No, I don't think so either, but I think that they vote like their neighbors vote. | ||
| And so if they see that their neighbors are voting a certain way, and there's a certain revenge politics to everything, and this is not unique to one group, it's like the system has screwed us. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| The system has screwed us is one of the ways that politics dies. | ||
| That notion, the system has screwed us. | ||
| And I don't just mean like the government. | ||
| If you can show that the government is specifically disadvantaging your group, that's one thing. | ||
| But when you just say the system broadly is screwing us, and it's us as white blue collar workers, or it's us as black people, or it's us as Hispanics, that's a really damaging thing. | ||
| And that I think is rising pretty dramatically. | ||
| And that's partially because The only way that politics operates, and I've spoken about this at length recently, but the only way that politics actually operates, the only way society operates is through building the social fabric. | ||
| The idea that we are individuals and we're gonna treat each other as individuals. | ||
| We're not gonna treat each other as members of groups. | ||
| The left has spent so long breaking people down into identity group politics that the right responded with its own form of, okay, well, screw you. | ||
| You've already boxed us in, so okay, now that we're in the box, we're in the box. | ||
| Like, that's what it is. | ||
| Right, it's almost like they hated it for so long, but now they're embracing it Which is why I've tried so hard to have the left back away from some of this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, exactly, exactly. | ||
| And I'd like to see the right back away from some of this stuff. | ||
| I think that's what a lot of the alt-right controversy was about, because they're really open about the tribalism. | ||
| But, I mean, there's no question that some of what Trump was doing was a quasi-tribal appeal, right? | ||
| I mean, when he was talking about tariffs, for example, the tariffs that he's talking about, you know, he's saying that Obviously they're equally applicable to people living in the United States, but really who he's talking to, and everybody knew this and it was repeated ad nauseum in the media, was he was talking to white blue collar voters from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and when you say to people that you can indirectly tax other people for your benefit, which is what a tariff is, but it's okay for the white people, but we also don't like the welfare system for the black people, | ||
| Then you start getting into some really, you know, kind of interesting political territory. | ||
| And the idea that it was a totally race-free campaign by Trump is not true. | ||
| I mean, it just wasn't. | ||
| Like, the fact is that Donald Trump was making not overt references to race, but he was making subtle appeals on the basis of... Is anyone saying it was a race-free campaign? | ||
| I think there are people. | ||
| Yeah, Kellyanne Conway is a good example. | ||
| She said there was a big debate between her and Jen Palmieri from the Clinton campaign. | ||
| And Jen Palmieri said that you guys were pandering to the alt-right. | ||
| And Kellyanne Conway said, you're accusing me of being part of a campaign that would pander to the alt-right? | ||
| And Jen Palmieri said, yeah. | ||
| But Kellyanne did the, who me, me, what? | ||
| Yeah, you a little bit. | ||
| And yet at the same time, the Democrats were pandering to everybody. | ||
| They keep saying we don't talk about race, but every other line was about race. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so you have both sides playing the same game now. | ||
| And none of them are playing inside the mentality where I exist, which you put it outside the conservative box for a second. | ||
| I am essentially a radical individualist in the sense that I think that people ought to be treated as individuals, they shouldn't be treated as part of groups. | ||
| And so treating voters as part of a group... You're a classical liberal. | ||
| Yeah, that's right, that's right. | ||
| You admit to that? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'm like a European-style classical liberal. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, except the... I thought you really liked the conservative thing enough even to say that. | ||
| No, I mean, I'm more kind of a conservative-libertarian mashup than anything else. | ||
| I think the government sucks at everything, right? | ||
| I mean, like, we've talked about same-sex marriage before. | ||
| I'm personally against same-sex marriage, but I don't think the government has any business in it. | ||
| I'm personally against smoking marijuana. | ||
| I don't think the government has pretty much any business in it. | ||
| If you're not creating externalities, I don't think that the government has any business messing with you. | ||
| Right, and that's why I can sit across from you and you can say that, and it doesn't... | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Right, exactly, but this is the thing, it's so funny, I was talking to somebody one time and they were saying, you know, as a religious person, you think homosexual behavior is a sin. | ||
| As an Orthodox Jew, right, it's in the Bible, I think it's a sin. | ||
| I know I'm supposed to be offended and probably throw something at you. | ||
| Right, exactly. But this is the thing. It's so funny. | ||
| I was talking to somebody one time and they were saying, you know, | ||
| as a religious person you think homosexual behavior is a sin. | ||
| As a raised and Orthodox Jew, right, it's in the Bible, I think it's a sin. | ||
| Here's the beautiful thing about America. You don't have to give a crap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can think I'm an idiot. That's fine. Right? | ||
| Welcome to America. | ||
| You seriously can completely disregard everything I'm saying because I'm not trying to use a gun to enforce my opinion against you. | ||
| You're not trying to use a gun and actually you're not even trying to use the Bible because you're not trying to govern by the Bible. | ||
| That's exactly what you're saying. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You're saying you have your private beliefs. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| When did we lose this ability to have the private leave? | ||
| Because did you see this about a week ago? | ||
| BuzzFeed did a piece on the two people from that HGTV show. | ||
| Yeah, I wrote about this. | ||
| Blanking on the show. | ||
| I watch it sometimes. | ||
| Yeah, the Gaines couple. | ||
| Yeah, the Gaines couple. | ||
| Joanna and what, I can't remember his name. | ||
| I don't watch the show, but yeah. | ||
| But they, you know, they do this house flipping show. | ||
| It might be called Flipper, Flopper, Flopper, Flipper, whatever it's called. | ||
| But the point is that I've watched the show many times. | ||
| They strike me as too completely benign, whatever, fine people like their job, seem like these are people. | ||
| And the whole piece in Buzzfeed was that they go to a church that's against gay marriage. | ||
| And I thought, this is the worst kind of smear job nonsense. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But when did that become okay? | ||
| So what? | ||
| They go to a church where we don't know what their beliefs are on it, and I wouldn't care, actually. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And even if they believe that, as long as they're not manifesting that in discrimination against gay people, who gives a crap? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, this is ridiculous. | ||
| I mean, first of all, the idea that HDTV is short on pandering to gay people is patently insane. | ||
| My wife watches HDTV. | ||
| Where do you think we learned all this? | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, look how beautifully decorated. | |
| But it is amazing. | ||
| I mean, that sort of thought policing, I mean, that's existed for a couple of decades, probably since the 60s for the left. | ||
| But the fact that it's starting to exist a little bit on the right is what frightens me, is the thought policing that I see because politics become a loyalty test. | ||
| But it's also, it's so selective in what everyone does, because I would guarantee, you mentioned Keith Ellison a moment ago, I'm gonna guess that the mosque that he goes to is probably, the imam is probably not for gay marriage. | ||
| But BuzzFeed, I'm just guessing on that, but I'm pretty sure that- The vast majority of mosques are not, yeah. | ||
| Probably 99.9% of mosques in America are not. | ||
| Okay, that's fine, they can have their personal religious belief, but BuzzFeed would never do a piece on that. | ||
| If anything, they'll whitewash everything he's ever said about Farrakhan and everything else. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So that just shows you how the media has, Again, they said they were fine with Obama's excuse that he went to a church for 20 years where Jeremiah Wright was preaching the most insane crap imaginable from the pulpit, and they just went, okay, well, you know, that's his church. | ||
| Nobody says he has to believe that. | ||
| I said, wait a second. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| That's okay for Obama, but it's not okay for Gaines? | ||
| Obama's like, he's gonna actually run for president. | ||
| Like, if at any point the guy's views are going to be relevant, you would think it's | ||
| more that than, I don't know, are you going to knock out a barrier and create an open | ||
| kitchen concept on HGTV? | ||
| But it's pretty wild how far things have gone. | ||
| I think that a lot of people who are hoping that Trump is going to be a blowback against that, that there will be less thought policing under Trump, but that also has to apply to Trump. | ||
| That has to apply to Trump himself. | ||
| Which if when Kellyanne Conway is tagging people If you have bosses on Twitter that they don't like, that's not a good sign. | ||
| I mean, Donald Trump was making those noises all throughout the campaign, right? | ||
| He said he wants to rewrite libel law, which for people in our business is like, I mean, all we do all day is sit and give opinions on people. | ||
| And the idea that we're gonna be sued for giving those opinions is a pretty frightening thing in the United States. | ||
| Yeah, but isn't so much of that though, and I think you've already said this, but that it's just a reaction to the lunacy. | ||
| Yeah, Trump's a reactionary, and the reaction to him is reactionary. | ||
| There's no question, but reactionary politics is bad politics. | ||
| The reaction to the left has been breaking people down by race and by identity politics is not, well, screw them, let's do identity politics too. | ||
| If they can do it, we can do it. | ||
| That's not the way that you ought to play the game. | ||
| I mean, if you think that's the only way we can win, then we're bound for a European style politics. | ||
| It's the end of American politics. | ||
| Like what America used to be about was the idea that as individuals, we disagreed about a lot of things, but we agreed that we were going to be treated as individuals, or at least that was supposed to be the promise that we were attempting to fulfill. | ||
| In Europe, it all breaks down according to demographic lines, and you just have a battle between the big government right and the big government left, and are you going to let in immigrants this time, or are you not going to let in immigrants this time? | ||
| And I think that we're in danger of moving that way. | ||
| We're going to schadenfreude our way right into something really ugly. | ||
| Yeah, in a weird way though, this presents a tremendous amount of opportunity, right? | ||
| I was telling you right before we started, I was with you a couple weeks ago, Dennis Prager had a fundraiser and I thought he gave a really great speech about basically saying the world is in a really nuts place right now and maybe we have to find allies in other places and that's what I think I've tried to do. | ||
| So there is, for all the chaos of it, Yeah. | ||
| There's some real opportunity. | ||
| I mean, I hope so. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| And I hope that it's a, I think it's a good opportunity for, when I do my podcast, I actually keep a physical shoe on the side and I, and I hold it up and I say, put this on the other foot, right? | ||
| Whenever Trump does something and say, just put this on the other, if Obama did this, how would you feel? | ||
| And it's a good opportunity for people on the left to do the same thing. | ||
| I think that if we all sort of take the shoe and put it on the other foot, like now you're very upset with what Trump's doing, but how were you with it when, when Obama was doing it? | ||
| If you think it's bad when Trump's doing it, maybe it was bad when Obama was doing it. | ||
| And for the right, if you were really pissed off about it when Obama was doing it, and now Trump's doing it, maybe you should be pissed off when Trump's doing it. | ||
| And if everybody applied that sort of intellectual honesty, I think, to whatever our politicians do, we'd be significantly better off. | ||
| Because the fact is that it's the team sport of it that ruins it. | ||
| It's the team sport of it where you end up with, I'm going to root for my guy, no matter what he does, no matter what rules he breaks. | ||
| And this is why I've said it's not team sport. | ||
| Politics is not team sport. | ||
| Like, as a White Sox fan, there was a catcher who caught for us named A.J. | ||
| Perzinski. | ||
| And AJ Perzinski was a player that everybody hated and still hates in the major. | ||
| I think he plays for the Braves now. | ||
| And they despise him, because he was this guy who'd cut any corner to win. | ||
| And when he's not on your team, you hate him. | ||
| And then he's on your team, and you love him. | ||
| He's the greatest. | ||
| He'll do anything in order to win. | ||
| The problem is that when you apply that to politics, and it's, if he's on my team and he'll do anything to win, that's awesome. | ||
| Well, except for it isn't, because now you have to be standing up for people doing bad things. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the strange thing. | ||
| I mean, look, for all these people that are upset that, Trump might be a warmonger or might be against the press. | ||
| Now he might be, but he didn't run certainly on a pro-war policy. | ||
| But B, Obama has been doing drone strikes in Afghanistan, drone strikes in Pakistan. | ||
| Ask Edward Snowden how he's been for press freedom and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| So regardless of how you feel about Snowden. | ||
| Obama's been terrible for press freedom. | ||
| So it's like, wait, nobody, why weren't you guys saying anything? | ||
| You'd have a little more weight to your words now. | ||
| Exactly, I said this on Brian Stelter's show on CNN. | ||
| They were going nuts over, this is when Trump was tweeting against Hamilton. | ||
| And I said, let's be fair to both sides. | ||
| If Obama had done this to a NASCAR event, like some NASCAR event in 2011, Boud Michel, and he'd gone on and said, these NASCAR people should shut up and apologize, basically. | ||
| He would have been applauded by everyone. | ||
| He would have been applauded by the left, and now Trump does it on Hamilton, and it's just the end of the world. | ||
| Oh my God, he's going to shut down our beloved Hamilton. | ||
| And by the way, he's right, it's an overrated musical. | ||
| But on the other side... I haven't seen it yet. | ||
| On the other side, you had people on the right, and they were like, yeah, look at Trump, really punching, really taking it to him. | ||
| I was like, right, but when Obama did exactly the same sort of stuff, when he was calling out Fox News by name and saying that It was that they were destroying the political process. | ||
| We were saying, wait, the president of the United States shouldn't be going out and attacking specific news outlets for how they report. | ||
| That's really gross. | ||
| So funny, I had somebody tweet me saying, why didn't you ever say this stuff about Obama? | ||
| And I linked directly to a video from 2013 where I said exactly this about Obama. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's in... | ||
| You could probably spend your whole life trying to correct the things that people tweet. | ||
| But that's what happens is that people get into this mode where, yeah, when Obama did it, it was the Democrats didn't care. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, but that argument also applies to you. | ||
| You did care when Obama did it, and now you're pretending not to. | ||
| So the hypocrisy argument cuts both ways. | ||
| It's double-edged sword. | ||
| You can't claim the Democrats are hypocrites about Trump at the same time that you're being a hypocrite about Obama. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's shift away from a little bit of the horse race politics stuff and just some broader themes. | ||
| So the free speech stuff, you have been in the thick of this. | ||
| I mean, truly, truly, truly in the thick of this. | ||
| You get protested at pretty much every, when's the last time you were at a university that you weren't protested? | ||
| I mean, I would say half the universities I go to, I'm not protested. | ||
| I mean, I go to a lot of universities. | ||
| I've spoken at 10 in the last two months, I would say. | ||
| I guess I only hear about the ones that you protested at. | ||
| Yeah, right, you only hear the headlines about the ones where there are heavy protests. | ||
| I'd say maybe a third of them I get heavy protests. | ||
| Okay, so about a third of them, you're getting heavy protests. | ||
| Now, I would venture to say that for everyone that's listened to this interview so far, whether they agree with you or not, you don't seem to be a hate monger or some sort of white supremacist or Jewish supremacist or some other Nazi related something or other. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What are these people thinking? | ||
| What do you really think is going on for these people? | ||
| Because it's a lot of misguided nonsense. | ||
| And I spoke at UCLA with Milo, which is a whole separate crowd than your crowd, obviously. | ||
| But they're protesting him, too. | ||
| For the most part, people, I don't assume my own level of notoriety, so I think that most of the people who are protesting me have never heard anything that I've said or read anything that I've written. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| They have no idea. | ||
| They see a flyer and they go... Yeah, exactly. | ||
| When I was at Wisconsin, like, one of the things that a lot of the flyers come out, and the flyers put, like, the most provocative title they can to get people to come. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And usually they're fine, but for example, Wisconsin, I had people getting up and chanting, I had a guy right at the beginning stand up and say something about how I was enabling Hitler. | ||
| And I was like, dude, do you see the yarmulke? | ||
| Like, what are you even talking about? | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| And then they were chanting F white supremacy at me. | ||
| It's like, I've been spending this entire election cycle under assault from the white supremacists, right? | ||
| Because I told them that they're wrong and I think that they're evil. | ||
| And I'm getting protested. | ||
| You are quite literally the number one online target of the, Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But I'm getting protested by the BLM crowd. | ||
| I think that it comes from ignorance. | ||
| I think it comes from this place where any opposing view must be attacked. | ||
| And we don't even have to do our research. | ||
| We don't have to try and debunk it. | ||
| Debunking it actually takes effort. | ||
| Going and yelling about it doesn't take any effort at all. | ||
| And that's why whenever I do these lectures, the first thing I do when we do Q&A is I say, if you disagree with me, you get to go first. | ||
| All people who disagree go to the front of the line. | ||
| Because that's always more interesting. | ||
| And I treat the people who disagree with me actually with respect. | ||
| If you're not yelling at me, and you're not flipping me off and shouting, F white supremacy, I'm happy to treat you with respect and have a civil discussion. | ||
| I do it all the time. | ||
| And that's the one you can win over. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So in a way, it's selfishly rewarding for you because that's the guy who's on the fence that might come to your side. | ||
| Or at the very least, we can have a discussion where the person gives a point, I give the counterpoint, and now the whole audience is smarter for it. | ||
| The audience is not smarter for having these people chant and stand in front of the stage and try to disrupt an event, and me write morons on the chalkboard behind them. | ||
| I mean, it's fun for me, and I think it's fun for the crowd, but it's not informative in any way except to show that there are these people who are out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How does it feel, just on the personal level, when this stuff's happening? | ||
| Because there are threats. | ||
| I mean, again, when I was at UCLA, there was a bomb threat. | ||
| People were bashing on the door. | ||
| Seemed like they were coming in screaming. | ||
| Like, we didn't know if anything violent could happen. | ||
| Like, all that stuff. | ||
| Just on a purely personal note, you are a person. | ||
| You're a relatively new father, I think. | ||
| Yeah, I've got two kids in three years, yeah. | ||
| Okay, so just on that note, putting yourself out there like that, what do you make of that? | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't tell my wife about it. | ||
| Is she not on Twitter? | ||
| She doesn't even have a computer. | ||
| No, she does not go on Twitter, she does not do the Facebook thing. | ||
| She should be off everything. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| She's kind of protected from it. | ||
| I feel like I'm usually the safest person in the room. | ||
| I'm the only guy there with security, right? | ||
| So I've got my own private security that we contract to do these things. | ||
| The first time we did it, I was like, why are we even doing this? | ||
| And it turned out that was Cal State LA, and there was like an actual riot there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So, yeah, now I've got security guys who come with me. | ||
| I'm always relieved when it's not that, because again, I would much prefer to have just a normal, | ||
| like I'm not looking for the, I really am not looking for the headline | ||
| that says, "Protesters come "and Shapiro finishes protesters," or whatever. | ||
| Honestly, that's easy for me. | ||
| It's not hard. | ||
| These people have a combined IQ in single digits. | ||
| It's not difficult to make stupid people look stupid. | ||
| It's more difficult to actually have a conversation with somebody who has a point of view and some facts to back them up. | ||
| It's more interesting. | ||
| But as far as the personal safety aspect of it, It doesn't concern me too much. | ||
| I don't even mean your physical safety as much as just sort of your mental... I'm mostly puzzled by it. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm like, what? | |
| Why? | ||
| Like, what am I saying? | ||
| Like, I'm here preaching decency and non-identity group politics and I'm getting protested for that? | ||
| Like, I have people yelling at me and threatening violence because of that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I can understand if I were coming here and I was saying something that's, you know, actively calling for violence or something or even implying that violence is okay in any way, but half of my speeches are about why violence is never okay. | ||
| Why you don't get to hit people if you disagree with them? | ||
| And then to prove my point, they come and they try and hit people who disagree with | ||
|
unidentified
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them. | |
| It's just like, it's so bizarre. | ||
| Where were you with Christina Hopp-Somers? | ||
| That was at DePaul, yeah. | ||
| At DePaul, which DePaul has banned Milo. | ||
| Right, well, they banned Milo and then they immediately banned me on top of that. | ||
| Like I was even there. | ||
| And first of all, it's absurd they banned Milo. | ||
| Everybody knows about the disagreements that I have with Milo, but it's absurd Milo getting banned from campuses. | ||
| I'm sure it makes Milo really happy because it's a headline, but it's stupidity of the highest order. | ||
| If you disagree with him, go and debunk him. | ||
| If you disagree with him, don't show up. | ||
| I mean, that'd be the worst thing you can do to Milo is just not show up for one of his lectures. | ||
| But they banned me on top of that at DePaul. | ||
| What are they saying to you at that time? | ||
| like their only excuse was the security. | ||
| And it was like, you can't control your own students. | ||
| That's not my fault, that's your fault. | ||
| Your university should be doing that. | ||
| And then you can go view the video. | ||
| They actually, we announced that Christina was gonna be speaking there | ||
| and I was going to accompany her and they wouldn't let me in the building as a guest. | ||
| They wouldn't let me in the building as a member of her team. | ||
| They wouldn't let me in the building and just sit in the audience. | ||
| But what are they saying to you at that time? | ||
| Are they saying because people are threatening violence? | ||
| No, there were no threats of violence. | ||
| That was what was amazing at the public. | ||
| We walked up and the whole day, they'd been telling my security team | ||
| that if Shapiro shows up, that we're going to arrest him. | ||
| If he shows up, then we will literally, and at the place-- - For what though? | ||
| For trespass. - Okay. | ||
| Right, so I mean, that would be the crime is trespassing on their campus. | ||
| They literally went out and got a sheriff from Cook County to sit there | ||
| to facilitate the transfer of arrest. | ||
| If the campus police arrest you, they have to have somebody from the county | ||
| actually because they actually had the guy sitting there in the lot, no protesters anywhere, none, right? | ||
| I mean, it's 30 police officers and security guards and me. | ||
| And I walk up and I was like, really? | ||
| Like I hand, like, so if, and I said, you know, if I take two steps forward, are you gonna arrest me? | ||
| And the guy said, yeah. | ||
| And he, giant guy. | ||
| Yeah, people were like, you should have, you should have gotten arrested. | ||
| It's like, well, you know, at that point, I'm really not so hot on spending the evening | ||
| in a Cook County prison. | ||
| Like that's, Cook County jail for the- - You stand up for your beliefs, | ||
| but not to the point of a night in Cook County jail. | ||
| Well, again, like it's, again, they actually have the right to arrest me. | ||
| It's a private university. | ||
| If it were a public university, I would have walked. | ||
| If it were a public university, I would have made them arrest me. | ||
| But they do have the university. | ||
| They do have the legal right to ban whoever they want. | ||
| It just demonstrates how ridiculous they are that they're willing to arrest me. | ||
| Yeah, and the fact, again, that they're taking everyone from you to Milo, | ||
| That's showing real intolerance, because it's not just a sliver of an ideology. | ||
| It's people that disagree wildly on things. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Except if they are remotely construed as right-wing. | ||
| So if you're a terrorist convicted in Israel, you can speak at... They had one speak in 2014, I think, in DePaul. | ||
| So you have to be within a certain spectrum. | ||
| But they refuse to even acknowledge a spectrum, right? | ||
| Although DePaul actually did, right? | ||
| DePaul came out later and they tried to distinguish kind of what I say from what Milo says, which is kind of interesting. | ||
| But that didn't change their behavior enough to actually let me speak. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's just do the Milo thing quick. | ||
| I don't want to dwell on it, but so many people ask. | ||
| So for the record, with you sitting here right now, I will fully say what I've said many times on Twitter, which is that Milo had the original idea of doing it. | ||
| He sent an email to our team, said, let's do this debate, me and Ben, Dave will moderate. | ||
| You immediately responded, yes, you gave dates. | ||
| And then Milo basically dipped out. | ||
| That says the truth as much as I know it. | ||
| No, that's exactly right. | ||
| And then went around the country proclaiming that I had chickened out and trying to drive this rivalry with me that I could not care less about. | ||
| I wish nothing but success to Milo based on the good things he does. | ||
| I hope nothing but failure for him for bad things that he does, just like anybody else. | ||
| That's quite a wish. | ||
| And I'm not going to play Lucy and the football with him. | ||
| I mean, he ducked out. | ||
| He chickened out. | ||
| And I mean, look, the fact is that even the fact I was willing to do it in the first place after he was tweeting pictures of me, a black baby, on the day that my son was born because I'm a cuck. | ||
| It was a bit generous, but now I'm not gonna play that game. | ||
| That's not my game. | ||
| And the thing is, I genuinely like both of you, and I think we could have done something really good. | ||
| Milo's coming back in in February. | ||
| I think my guess is that the ground is a little too scorched. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not interested. | ||
| Again, I'm not interested in doing the Charlie Brown Lucy routine, so that he can go around the country proclaiming that he's brave after having chickened out. | ||
| And for the record, when he comes in in February, I'll say the exact same thing to him, and he can say whatever. | ||
| Do his shtick, yeah, that's fine. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| It'll be very sophisticated and British though. | ||
| The alt-right thing. | ||
| Now I have done a couple videos on the alt-right. | ||
| My general feeling, although I think something is changing now that Trump is in power, is that for the months leading up to the election this was mostly a bunch of shit posters, it was mostly a bunch of anonymous Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| and Reddit people, it was not really white supremacists and neo-Nazis, there were some of these people | ||
| in the mix of it, but it was just people who were home in their basements or wherever | ||
| that were tweeting at people in power, media people, politicians, to upset everybody, | ||
| to get them retweeted, to get everyone to show, I'm such a victim, look at me, | ||
| look what's happening to me online. | ||
| And basically what I've said is if we deal with some of these issues honestly, | ||
| like immigration or Islamism or something, that's how we'll defang some of the rhetoric | ||
| around all this stuff. | ||
| So I think there's truth to that. | ||
| Now I think it's starting to shift a little bit now that Trump won the election. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I think there's truth to that. | ||
| So what I've distinguished in interviews where I've talked about this is the alt-right philosophers and promulgators. | ||
| Milo's a promulgator of the alt-right. | ||
| And he denies it, but he likes to play the clown nose off, clown nose off routine, clown nose on, clown nose off routine with the alt-right. | ||
| Yes, I'm not really a member of the alt-right. | ||
| I just write stories expressing their viewpoints. | ||
| But the piece that he wrote for Breitbart about the alt-right is a really definitive piece about what the alt-right is. | ||
| And I think that for the most part it's pretty accurate There the the alt-right philosophy is a lot of people who | ||
| consider themselves alt-right are not technically all right They are as you say shit posters, right? | ||
| They're people who have been drawn in by the idea that they're being politically incorrect and they're violating taboos | ||
| And it's kind of fun to do that and it's very teenagery and all this kind of stuff | ||
| The people who are actually hardcore alt-righters People who Milo he knows their philosophy and he talked | ||
| about it in that piece, right? | ||
| The people the Richard Spencers and the Jared Taylors and all those group those people are actual honest-to-god white | ||
| supremacists And there's a line in that piece where he talks about about | ||
| Civil is Western civilization being inseparable from ethnicity, which is white supremacy | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That is definitional white supremacy. | ||
| So that's the philosophy. | ||
| But a lot of people consider themselves alt-right have been dragged into that by people who have been inaccurate in their definitions of the alt-right. | ||
| So instead of just saying, OK, there's the people who actually believe this white supremacist crap, and then there are a bunch of people who are just posting stupid stuff online to get a rise out of people. | ||
| They conflate the two. | ||
| And then what's even worse is that you get people who are legit conservatives who don't know what the alt-right is. | ||
| And so they assume that everybody who is anti-establishment is alt-right. | ||
| And so that gives them a number that they don't actually hold, right? | ||
| The number of people who are really alt-right, like people who actually believe in white nationalism or white superiority, that's a really small number of people. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And then they've built themselves out They've kind of built this, there's the core and then there's the chaff. | ||
| They've built this kind of large chaff sphere around themselves. | ||
| And one of the, I think, tasks we have is to try and separate the core from the chaff and say, OK, you know, all you people who are anti-establishment, listen, I'm anti-establishment too. | ||
| I think Mitch McConnell's terrible. | ||
| I was not a fan of Paul Ryan. | ||
| But that's not the same thing as being alt-right. | ||
| And so, you know, what I'm fearful of Is the Winks and Nods to the actual alt-right? | ||
| Like I think when I say Winks and Nods, and I've been saying this for a while, like when Donald Trump was on TV and he was asked about the KKK, he said, I don't, I don't, KKK? | ||
| I've never heard of them. | ||
| What are you talking? | ||
| We all know that you've heard of the KKK. | ||
| We all know you've heard of David Duke. | ||
| Your microphone didn't malfunction. | ||
| It was two days before the Louisiana primary and you didn't want to alienate voters who thought you were going to win in the Louisiana primary. | ||
| That's what was going on there. | ||
| That was a wink and a nod. | ||
| When Donald Trump was retweeting white nationalist accounts, when he's granting legitimacy to some kind of I wouldn't say fully alt-right figures, but people who are very popular with the alt-right, the Alex Jones crowd. | ||
| That's the kind of stuff where you're getting into kind of a gray area. | ||
| But do I think they're an upwardly mobile threat? | ||
| No, because I think their philosophy is so repugnant that the vast majority of people think that's stupid. | ||
| but I think it's easy to sucker people into thinking they're all right. | ||
| And the game there is if you sucker people into thinking they're all right, | ||
| and then people like me attack the alt-right, then they go, "Oh, he must be attacking me." | ||
| It's like, I'm not attacking you. | ||
| Okay, so you post a peppy meme. | ||
| Like, okay, so I think you're stupid, but I don't think you're all right. | ||
| Right, I think that, but as I said before on your show, and I got a lot of flack for it, | ||
| if you tweeted me something that's indistinguishable from David Duke, it's not my responsibility | ||
| to determine your motive. | ||
| Like it's a tweet. | ||
| I'm gonna treat that the same way that I would treat a tweet from David Duke. | ||
| It's an idiotic tweet from an idiotic person. | ||
| So how much of this then is just related to the internet culture in general? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A lot. | |
| So when I saw the, was it Spencer in DC a couple weeks ago? | ||
| Yeah, with the Hail Trump, yeah. | ||
| Okay, so I've had family members on both sides, my dad's side and my mom's side, die in the Holocaust. | ||
| I suspect you probably did as well. | ||
| So I don't take kindly to that in any way. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| I'd rather not see neo-Nazis and all of that stuff. | ||
| However, I saw that and my thought was, these are 200 losers and unfortunately, We've now, the media will now run this. | ||
| It'll be on CNN all day long. | ||
| Everyone will keep talking about it, talking about it, talking about it. | ||
| People tell me all the time, talk about it, talk about it more. | ||
| And it's like, all we're doing is inflating this thing that these people have always existed. | ||
| Hate is always going to exist. | ||
| I can't make every person not hate black people. | ||
| I can't make every person not hate Jews or gay people or whatever else there is. | ||
| It's human nature. | ||
| You may not like it, but it's human nature. | ||
| And I think we're inflating this stuff. | ||
| I agree with that, and I've argued against sort of the inflation of it. | ||
| By the same token, I think that there's been empowerment of the fellow travelers, people who the alt-right sees as sort of ideological forebears, people like Pat Buchanan. | ||
| I mentioned Alex Jones. | ||
| Alex Jones probably isn't technically alt-right or wouldn't consider himself thus, but when he talks about Jewish influence in the media in his rants, he's obviously granting them a lot of credibility and he's giving them some Ammunition to feel like they have allies. | ||
| There are a lot of people who seem to be okay with benefiting from the shit posters and the alt-right groups if they can gain traffic. | ||
| That was my main critique of Breitbart, by the way. | ||
| Like when I said that Steve Bannon was appealing to the alt-right, that's because he called himself Breitbart, a platform for the alt-right. | ||
| And the idea was that he was, and this has always been my critique of Steve, and the left doesn't understand anything remotely approaching moderation. | ||
| So my critique of Steve and Breitbart was always that what had happened was that Breitbart had been Yeah. | ||
| moved in a direction where they were willing to pander to some of the worst people on earth | ||
| by posting material that appealed to those people. | ||
| And that demonstrates to me a tremendous will for power from Steve | ||
| and a willingness to work with anyone to get there. | ||
| And that's my main critique. | ||
| And the left immediately sees Don, "Oh, well, he must be an anti-Semite, he must be a racist." | ||
| And it's like, "No, that's not what I said. I said he's an opportunist." | ||
| You've gone out of your way to say that you don't think he's an anti-Semite. | ||
| No, I don't have any evidence at all that Steve's an anti-Semite. | ||
| No, I think Steve's an asshole, but I don't think Steve's an anti-Semite. | ||
| Right, so what do you make of that then? | ||
| So you worked with the guy, he was technically your boss, right? | ||
| Sure, he was chairman of the company, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so he was technically your boss, you have no evidence that he's an anti-Semite. | ||
| You, as the ADL said, you were the number one recipient of anti-Semitic abuse online, so you were aware of the idea of it for sure. | ||
| And I will say, again, there are people who promulgate this following. | ||
| So for example, when Milo was banned from Twitter, my anti-Semitic feed went down 70% immediately. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| But see, the question to me is... So were those actual anti-Semites or shit posters? | ||
| In all likelihood, they're shit posters. | ||
| Yeah, I would guess that 90% of them are just shit posters. | ||
| But what you are doing is you're mainstreaming the idea that this sort of rhetoric is okay, because, and this was always my critique of sort of the notion that it's the same thing to be politically incorrect as it is to just be a bad person. | ||
| The whole point of fighting political correctness is so you can say true things in order to promulgate better ideas. | ||
| You're not doing the world any good by just shouting the n-word. | ||
| You're not doing the world any good by just tweeting people pictures of black kids because you're a cuck. | ||
| How has the dialogue become any better because of that? | ||
| You certainly have the right to do it. | ||
| I'm not arguing you don't have the right to do it. | ||
| But you also have the right to slap yourself in the face with a frying pan. | ||
| You have the right to do lots of stupid things. | ||
| The question is, there are people who are making the affirmative case that this is making the country a better place and making the dialogue more open, when in reality what you're actually doing is you're breeding the resistance to the dialogue. | ||
| Look, I guess what those people would argue is that the system has become so rigid and so afraid of everything and every idea that the only way, and I think Milo actually said this to me on my show, which was a year before the election, that this was the only way we were gonna break any of this political correctness. | ||
| But even Milo knows he's lying. | ||
| When Milo's on, ask him one question. | ||
| If he thinks that's true, ask him to say the N-word on your show. | ||
| That's the most rigid taboo in American society. | ||
| Ask him to say the N-word. | ||
| If he really believes that all taboos ought to be broken, because taboos are worthy of being broken and we have to break down the system, ask him if he has the balls to say the N-word on your show. | ||
| I will do that. | ||
| I guarantee he says no. | ||
| All right, so I'm gonna guess that we can't solve the entire alt-right thing right here, but I think something we can possibly solve is the media question related to all of this, because mainstream media is absolutely crumbling. | ||
| Everyone knows it. | ||
| When I was on with you on election night, what I kept saying was we've watched the mainstream media slowly crumble as the online media has risen, and I think as of the election, it's actually starting to tilt, and now, The online guys are kind of winning, which is why you're seeing all the stuff about fake news, not to say that some people online aren't pushing out fake news. | ||
| I get that they are. | ||
| But what do you think, first, of the meme of fake news? | ||
| It seems pretty obvious to me, although I don't know the full conspiracy behind it, that someone in power is pushing out this idea because they lost control. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's a conspiracy so much as somebody says there's one story that comes out of fake news and everybody seizes on it, right? | ||
| Which is usually how, like, being in the right-wing media, that's how it works. | ||
| It's like, it's a, you know, it's a shark scrum. | ||
| Like, the chum is in the water, all the sharks come. | ||
| So, somebody says fake news, they go, ah, that's a great excuse for why Hillary Clinton lost, because everybody believed all these fake things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's a conspiracy of basically lazy people. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And I think that, again, that's not to say there isn't such a thing as fake news. | ||
| There is. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of stupid headlines that go around that are not true and that we spend time debunking from the right and from the left, things that are just... | ||
| Patently false. | ||
| And Trump himself was a rather large promulgator of things that were false. | ||
| And it was important to try and debunk those. | ||
| But the media had so shredded its own credibility that it couldn't fairly debunk any of this stuff because they were saying things that were false were true for years. | ||
| And then along comes Trump. | ||
| And he basically runs a post-truth campaign. | ||
| So you have two candidates running post-truth campaigns, the media insisting that only one is running a post-truth campaign, and then everybody going, wait a second, like, you don't get to be the arbiters of truth because you blew all your credibility a long time ago. | ||
| Well, the problem is that now no one's an arbiter for truth. | ||
| So the media certainly wasn't. | ||
| So I'm glad to see them come down. | ||
| What I would like to see take its place is, OK, now let's honestly analyze what's true and what's not true. | ||
| as opposed to what serves our interest and what doesn't. | ||
| So the Washington Post called me recently and they asked, if you're trying to determine whether a news source is | ||
| credible or not, what are sort of some quick keys? | ||
| And I said, well, the easiest thing is, are they open with their bias? | ||
| And do they run stories that counter their bias? | ||
| If they're a news outlet and they only run left-wing stories, and they're left-wing sites, they only run left-wing stories, they never run a story that counters anything that they say, then you should double-check for sure. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| They're probably just a propaganda outlet. | ||
| But if they're a site, like I think the Washington Post is actually better than the New York Times this way. | ||
| The New York Times is entirely one perspective. | ||
| The Washington Post, I'm not talking about their opinion columnists, I'm talking about the news that they break. | ||
| Like, the Washington Post was actually breaking some anti-Hillary news in the past, in the last three weeks before the election cycle. | ||
| So, you know, I think it's important to distinguish those. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, when there's no gatekeeper, the good news is there's no gatekeeper, the bad news is there's no gatekeeper. | ||
| Yeah, so what do you do? | ||
| It's not a fully great thing because nothing has emerged yet that acts as a, that, and maybe that's just because we're demanding more of people, but people have to demand more of it. | ||
| I'm not saying there should be somebody who, like, I'm not the gatekeeper, you're not, no one's the gatekeeper. | ||
| But I'm my own gatekeeper, right? | ||
| I analyze the news for myself, and I don't just believe every headline that I see on Facebook. | ||
| And that I do think is a concern, because that's gonna polarize the news. | ||
| If you're just picking the headlines that reinforce your bias, then you're not likely to achieve anything remotely resembling the truth. | ||
| And it almost seems obvious that this is where we were gonna end up, because everyone, this is what everyone does on Twitter. | ||
| You cater things to yourself. | ||
| I try not to do that, but every now and again, something gets to me to the point where I'm like, I cannot follow Yeah. | ||
| Usually the best indicator is if somebody's hated by both sides. | ||
| That's a pretty good indicator that they're at least baseline honest. | ||
| wow, that's why I unfollowed this drivel. | ||
| But even that, there's a risk in that. | ||
| By slowly just filtering everything into your own little ideology. | ||
| Usually the best indicator is if somebody's hated by both sides, that's a pretty good indicator | ||
| that they're at least baseline honest. | ||
| That's like that there's a level of honesty. | ||
| And what I mean by that is not people who are obviously conspiratorial, but people who are getting flack from every side because they don't please one side all the time. | ||
| It's not a foolproof test, but it's an okay test for people who tend to be more honest. | ||
| Yeah, so you exist sort of in both worlds. | ||
| Do you consider yourself more mainstream than, you kind of straddle it both, because you're on Fox a lot, and you're on CNN a lot. | ||
| They actually don't have me on that often, because again, I have the troublesome quality of not, they don't know what I'm gonna say, so it's a little bit, it's hard for them a little. | ||
| They'll have me on, like I'm on Fox News once every three weeks maybe, and I'm on CNN. | ||
| Once a month, perhaps, but I'm not like a regular guest on any of these places. | ||
| So if they continue to crumble, and if the online thing grows, and as you're saying, when there's no gatekeeper or anyone's in and this is a problem, now, okay, as you said, it can be on us. | ||
| It can be on each of us individually. | ||
| It should be on us, yeah. | ||
| But most people don't have that. | ||
| But there's a real risk there too, right? | ||
| Well, people are lazy, right? | ||
| And so that laziness is going to apply, except there's not even a shred of gatekeeping. | ||
| So the problem with a lot of the news, the problem with the fake news critique, is that it's encompassing a lot of angles on the news. | ||
| So it's not that the news itself is wrong, it's angles on it. | ||
| It's like how PolitiFact does their analyses. | ||
| So PolitiFact will say about, Mitt Romney will say, | ||
| this happened during the campaign. | ||
| Hillary Clinton said something about, she liked open borders. | ||
| Trump goes on stage and says, Hillary Clinton says she likes open borders. | ||
| PolitiFact analyzes it and gives it a half true. | ||
| Right, and he's just repeating exactly what she said. | ||
| They say, ah, but his implication was that she was saying X, Y, and Z. | ||
| He's like, well now that's, you're calling his stuff fake news, | ||
| but you're the actual fake news 'cause you're reading implications | ||
| that you're reading into him. | ||
| Once you get into reading other people's implications, you end up in some pretty dicey territory. | ||
| But it used to be that, When there was actual fake news, people lost their jobs, right? | ||
| Like Jason Blair promulgated fake news and lost his job at a publication that we on the right hate, the New York Times. | ||
| But there's a difference between that and the angle on the news is wrong. | ||
| Are the facts of the story right and the angle is wrong? | ||
| That's not fake news, that you don't like the angle on the story. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, but the left and the right should recognize this. | ||
| Not everything that comes from the Washington Post or New York Times is false. | ||
| It may just be that the angle that they're giving you is an angle that you don't like, or an angle that doesn't reflect underlying truths. | ||
| But are the facts of the story right? | ||
| Yeah, the facts of the story are right. | ||
| So when the New York Times reports something like, you know, when the New York Times reports If they'd reported the hands up, don't shoot thing, | ||
| just straight, that's fake news. | ||
| If they report that a black guy was killed by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri, | ||
| and then they would proceed to report it as though it's a serious problem all across the country, | ||
| the fake news part of that is their angle. | ||
| It's not that a black guy was shot by the white guy in Ferguson, Missouri, and what I've seen | ||
| is that people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. | ||
| So it turns out you can't believe anything the media says. | ||
| Right now you can't believe their angle, you can't believe anything they say. | ||
| So if they say Donald Trump hasn't turned over his IRS reports. | ||
| He hasn't turned over his tax returns. | ||
| There's a tendency from people to say, that's fake news. | ||
| And it's like, no, that's not fake news. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| You may not think it matters. | ||
| You may have 10 excuses why it's stupid, but that's not fake news per se. | ||
| When everybody just calls stuff they disagree with fake news, and it's happening now, again, on both sides. | ||
| I've never felt simultaneously less bipartisan and more bipartisan in my life than I have in the recent past. | ||
| And again, that's where I think opportunity is because there's so much being reset right now. | ||
| What do you think about the risk of, It's not coming from the government, in some ways, censorship right now, but we know what's happened with PragerU videos, where they've been put on restricted lists. | ||
| I did an interview with John McCain, who is on cable news every single day. | ||
| YouTube decided to demonetize it. | ||
| I did my interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, they demonetized. | ||
| Yeah, it's a problem. | ||
| I was against it. | ||
| As I say, I was against the ban. | ||
| That's a problem. - Even Milo being banned. | ||
| I get it, Twitter can do what they want to a private company. - I was against it. | ||
| As I say, I was against the ban. | ||
| Yeah, so all of this stuff is starting to add up to something, right? | ||
| Yeah, it is. - Like, that there's something cracking down on this new Wild West out here. | ||
| And I think that you've seen Twitter pay for some of that in market share. | ||
| It's going to be incumbent on people on the right to build an alternative structure to these things, and that's very expensive. | ||
| And people on the right don't tend to think in terms of media too much. | ||
| So we invest a lot of money in politicians, and we invest a lot of money in think tanks, but we don't invest all that much money in media. | ||
| There are a few kind of people who will invest money in media. | ||
| But the number of like, we gave a hundred million dollars to somebody to start a business, very low. | ||
| You'll see a lot of people who spend like five to ten million dollars to start something, but to start an actual Twitter, you know, that requires enormous expenditures of capital. | ||
| And most people on the right don't see that as a winning business proposition because people on the right tend to think in terms of ROI and Twitter hasn't even seen an ROI, right? | ||
| Twitter is losing money still. | ||
| And also, it's hard to go up against a behemoth like YouTube. | ||
| There have been some attempts to go up against YouTube before. | ||
| There was a conservative attempt to go up against YouTube. | ||
| It didn't do particularly well. | ||
| Because the problem is that it was billed as the conservative attempt to go up against YouTube. | ||
| It wasn't billed as open to everyone. | ||
| And so you sort of have to do the open to everybody routine in order to really succeed. | ||
| But you are at a systemic disadvantage. | ||
| YouTube has existed forever. | ||
| But, again, YouTube is just what the New York Times was 30 years ago. | ||
| They're the only thing in the space. | ||
| As things progress, I think that you're, I mean, the truth is that YouTube is just a search service with a lot of big, with a lot of servers that provide space for the videos. | ||
| I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Ask Jeeves was a thing. | ||
| Right, and then Google ate it. | ||
| So, or Hotmail. | ||
| I mean, like all- I would dial up Prodigy. | ||
| That's probably before your time. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| All these things look, Insurmountable at the time, and then over time, the market destroys them, right? | ||
| AOL was the big thing, and now nobody uses AOL. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the thing is, look, this show is on, one of our main method of distribution is YouTube, so I want YouTube to work. | ||
| So do I. I want the algorithm to work fairly. | ||
| So do I. And I think that it's a very interesting debate. | ||
| I will say it's an interesting debate when people look at private companies like YouTube and they say, well, they shouldn't ban anything. | ||
| And it's like, well, you can make the argument that YouTube should ban certain things, like a graphic terrorist video, for example. | ||
| Should they have the right to do that? | ||
| Now, for me, I'd rather err on the side of everything goes up than certain things come down, because I don't really trust people in charge of anything to do that. | ||
| This is why I'm more libertarian, even when it comes to things like YouTube. | ||
| But I see the argument. | ||
| I mean, not all forms of speech are created exactly equal, at least in their merit. | ||
| They are in terms of your right to say them, but they're not necessarily in terms of merit. | ||
| And when you're in the private sector, you're speaking about merit. | ||
| You're not just speaking in terms of right to say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think there could be a First Amendment issue related to all this? | ||
| Now, I get it. | ||
| It's the government. | ||
| I know people try to make the utilities argument. | ||
| I don't think it's a particularly good argument. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because to me, it seems maybe not fully because we don't own it. | ||
| It's not a public utility. | ||
| But there's something else going on. | ||
| So it's not utilities, but I would argue that the Yeah. | ||
| owners of these companies, the people on the board, you know, Jack and Zuckerberg and all these people, | ||
| they are so intertwined with our politicians right now that now it actually, | ||
| I'm not saying it's directly a First Amendment thing, but there's something there | ||
| because it's almost collusion with the government. | ||
| So I agree. | ||
| And the solution to that is to downsize the government radically. | ||
| Not to have, you know, our guy do it. | ||
| That's what I'm seeing generally. | ||
| It's our guy doing it, so it's okay now. | ||
| But yeah, of course, I think that Zuckerberg working closely... Here's the thing. | ||
| Zuckerberg wouldn't be working with the government if the government were powerful. | ||
| We spend a lot of money on the government. | ||
| We give money to political candidates. | ||
| We spend all of our time talking about Trump or Hillary because the government's powerful. | ||
| I don't think anybody spent tons of time talking in 1836. | ||
| About the national election. | ||
| I'm sure they spent some time talking about it, but it wasn't dominant the way that it is now. | ||
| The idea that people were just, the most important decision was people not dating, right? | ||
| Destroying their lives. | ||
| Because who won the presidency when it was Franklin Pierce? | ||
| Nobody was doing that. | ||
| And part of the reason is that the federal government just was not particularly powerful. | ||
| So what do you care what some bureaucrat in Washington DC is doing? | ||
| It doesn't affect you. | ||
| So that really, I've said this a couple of times, to me, that's the best argument for small government. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| Which is, if you don't like Hillary and you don't like Trump, it's not, well, then I should vote for more Democrats or vote for more Republicans, it's get these idiots out of our lives. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| And that's, I think, the only smart thing that Rick Perry said in his presidential campaign in 2012, is he said, you want to make Washington, D.C. | ||
| insignificant in your life. | ||
| I was like, yeah, that sounds great to me. | ||
| You couldn't remember anything else. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I say this on college campuses all the time. | ||
| On college campuses, kids are constantly thinking, oh, there's so many obstacles to what I want to do. | ||
| And you see in politics now, Trump keeps saying, there's an obstacle to what you want to do. | ||
| And on the left, Hillary says, there's an obstacle, and I'll knock down all obstacles. | ||
| We're all going to knock down all the obstacles. | ||
| And they erect new obstacles, right? | ||
| And what I've always said is, nobody gives a crap about you. | ||
| No one cares about you. | ||
| No one's sitting around going, Dave Rubin, I gotta stop that guy. | ||
| How do I stop Dave Rubin? | ||
| But there's a couple people out there who would like to take me down. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But as a general matter, if you weren't even in politics, if you were just a guy, nobody would be sitting around going, how do I stop Dave Rubin from becoming a successful accountant? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Nobody's doing that. | ||
| Except that the government does do that, actually. | ||
| And so, if we could apply that same sentiment to the government, like, it's nobody's business what you do with your life. | ||
| Leave me alone. | ||
| Solve your own problems. | ||
| Those few sentences in conjunction would solve a lot of problems, right? | ||
| Solve your own problems. | ||
| Get the government out of your life. | ||
| Nobody cares about you. | ||
| Except, like, you and your family and your friends. | ||
| No, nobody's actively plotting against you. | ||
| I know that we all live in our own little movie, and we do. | ||
| We all live in our movie where there are great villains, and you're the great hero, and we're all like this. | ||
| Every human being is like this, which is why movies are successful. | ||
| But in reality, how many people in a lifetime actually have active enemies who are attempting to thwart their every move? | ||
| How many people just have like the jerk of a boss who's bothering them? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Although, oddly, in our space now, for public people, the idea of the enemies is growing, right? | ||
| Like, now, I get it. | ||
| For the regular person, you know, it would be nice to think that, you know... Right, and when you say regular, we don't mean, like, lesser. | ||
| We just mean people not in politics, exactly. | ||
| I think people that are probably doing much more worthwhile than we are, but... | ||
| But the idea that you stake out a position now publicly and you immediately have enemies. | ||
| I mean I see all the time now things will be written about me that I know are absolutely not true and they'll call me a far-right winger and all these things what I've said about this or that and they misquote me or any of this or a partial quote and it's like I could spend the rest of my life fighting this stuff or I can ignore it and I usually try to ignore it because I gotta live some life while I'm doing this too. | ||
| And again, it's just because these topics have become so intense because there is so much control over how these | ||
| things go. | ||
| And also, when the government's very small, everyone on the inside's a little bit fascist. | ||
| What I mean by that is everybody wants to be the king, right? | ||
| It's just you don't want anybody else to be the king. You want to be the king. | ||
| You'll be a good king. | ||
| Right, you'll be the good king. | ||
| You'll be the one person in human history who's been an excellent, excellent king who is always generous with power and decent with everybody. | ||
| You're going to be Daenerys Stormborn. | ||
| You're just going to go around breaking chains and everything's going to be spectacular. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so when politics was small, That didn't matter because the best that you could hope for to be your own, you know, your fiefdom was your house, your fiefdom, your home was your kingdom, your fiefdom was your family, right? | ||
| It was your, those are the people you were, those were your subjects and those were your citizens, right? | ||
| Those were the people you took care of. | ||
| And now government is so big that you actually have a shot at being king. | ||
| When people think they have a shot at being king or at least getting into position, a person who's going to be the king for them. | ||
| Then you're an obstacle to their utopia, right? | ||
| If Trump is utopia and I'm not voting for him, I'm an obstacle to their utopia. | ||
| If Hillary is utopia and she's going to be the great chain breaker and I'm standing in her way, then I'm an obstacle to utopia, right? | ||
| Everybody either becomes, as I've said before, a tool or an obstacle to utopia if you think the utopia is realizable on a political level. | ||
| If you don't think that, then you're a fool. | ||
| One of the things that I've I think there are certain areas where just in life you become more mature as you get older a little bit and you see more of this. | ||
| And one is that when you're 18 or 19 or 20, you're utopian. | ||
| You think, how do I solve this problem and this problem won't be a problem ever again. | ||
| And then you read more history and you deal in politics more and you realize there's never a problem that actually goes away. | ||
| All the problems come back. | ||
| And it's just a question of can you push the ball a little bit this way? | ||
| Can you push the ball a little bit this way in favor of human liberty? | ||
| Can you push the looming disaster a little bit further down the road? | ||
| And when you do that, you become a problem for people who want utopia because utopia requires a lot of people to be willing to sacrifice their present for a future that doesn't exist. | ||
| And that's a scary thing. | ||
| I think everybody's a little bit utopian now. | ||
| Everyone's feeling that on both sides, right? | ||
| Because you could argue that the Trump people are feeling it. | ||
| He's gonna bring all the jobs back to Ohio. | ||
| All of them are coming back, right? | ||
| He's gonna make sure that we never have a terrorist attack on American soil again, and he's gonna do it with his magic wand, right? | ||
| And he's gonna do it by not trusting the CIA or the FBI, but still we'll get it done somehow. | ||
| Yeah, we should pause there for a second, because what do you make of that? | ||
| Just for one minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Everything with Russia. | ||
| I have no, this is an example where I have literally no idea what to believe. | ||
| So yes, I think Russia hacked the DNC. | ||
| But exposed things that were, so the evidence, the contents of it, you think was legit, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the Democrats have basically acknowledged that the contents of it were real. | ||
| They weren't making things up. | ||
| So I think Russia was behind the hacks. | ||
| Do I think that shaped the election? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I think Hillary would have lost anyway. | ||
| I did a piece a few minutes ago about this where I think that there's some evidence to that effect. | ||
| One is that Hillary's unfavorable ratings in January of this year, before any of the WikiLeaks stuff happened, her favorable ratings were, I think it was 43% favorable, sorry, 38% favorable, 56% unfavorable. | ||
| November 4th through 7th, right before the election, she was at 43% favorable, 56% unfavorable, so she did not move at all, right? | ||
| There was no point where she built. | ||
| She was consistently unpopular all the way across. | ||
| It wasn't WikiLeaks that made her unpopular. | ||
| The big thing that hurt her in the last couple of weeks was the Comey thing, was the FBI director saying that he was reopening the investigation, and that had nothing to do with WikiLeaks. | ||
| That had to do with Anthony Weiner's computer. | ||
| So it wasn't the WikiLeaks that actually shifted things, right? | ||
| It was a lot of other things, but it wasn't the WikiLeaks per se. | ||
| That said, again, this is a case of shoe on the other foot. | ||
| If the Russians had hacked the RNC and Trump loses by 80,000 votes in three states, Are we crying bloody murder? | ||
| Would Michael Moore be up in arms? | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And would we be? | ||
| People on the right would be crying bloody murder. | ||
| It'd be the end of the world. | ||
| Again, the hypocrisy on both sides is pretty astonishing. | ||
| On the left going, oh, those evil, evil, evil Russians. | ||
| They're so evil. | ||
| I hate the Russians. | ||
| In 2012, Obama was openly saying, caught on microphone, I can give flexibility to Russia if they help me out in this election cycle. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Which was within months of when Romney said, they're our biggest geopolitical foe, and everyone mocked him. | ||
| Right, and also within months of Obama backing off the red line in Syria, and within two years of him backing off of the Ukraine stuff, right? | ||
| And so they didn't care about Russia four years ago, but now they care deeply about the threat of Russia. | ||
| And on the right, the same people going, Russia's our major geopolitical foe in 2012, going, I don't see the problem with Putin. | ||
| Why can't we be friends with Putin? | ||
| How's this a problem? | ||
| My goodness, I mean, if your beliefs switch that fast, I'm gonna go with you really had not a lot of core. | ||
| Yeah, so to me, because I can't really figure out what the actual truth is, I don't think anyone really knows exactly what happened. | ||
| Right, we haven't seen the intel, so... Right, I don't think anyone really knows. | ||
| The question is, do you believe the CIA and the FBI, or do you believe self-motivated people on both sides? | ||
| Right, although right now it sounds like the CIA and FBI aren't even in complete agreement on what happened. | ||
| So one thing they're in agreement on, they both do agree that the Russian sources were behind the attacks. | ||
| They just don't agree on what the motive was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So the FBI says it was to undermine the election integrity, and the CIA says that it was to get Trump elected. | ||
| You know, given Trump's stated positions on Putin, which were incredibly warm throughout the campaign, I don't find the CIA's claim implausible. | ||
| But again, their motives don't matter. | ||
| Bottom line is, did they shift the election? | ||
| There's no evidence they did. | ||
| So the reason I guess I'm a little more skeptical is that if, let's say we really knew it was true, wouldn't that basically be an act of war at this point? | ||
| If Obama knew right now, if the FBI and or CIA came to him and said this actually happened, they were in cahoots with Trump or whatever it is, It would be an act. | ||
| I mean, we would have to be laying down sanctions or some sort of military. | ||
| I mean, that would be a true undermining of our democracy at the highest levels. | ||
| So the fact that we're not talking about that, not that I want to go to war with Russia, I would be completely against that. | ||
| But the fact that it's not getting to that level shows me that this seems like more of a game. | ||
| Or political showmanship than something that's real. | ||
| Well, I think it also demonstrates a massive increase in partisanship. | ||
| And the reason I say that is because go back to 1972 and Richard Nixon is bugging the Watergate Hotel in an attempt to get information about McGovern, right? | ||
| And he swamps McGovern. | ||
| It's pretty clear that he didn't need to bug the hotel in order to get the information about McGovern to swamp him. | ||
| McGovern wins like two states. | ||
| So, and then he's impeached by Republicans, right? | ||
| Republicans are getting, he's not technically, he retires, but he's about to be impeached by Republicans. | ||
| Republicans are going to impeach him for that. | ||
| Now you have a foreign power doing what Nixon did, right? | ||
| The exact same thing. | ||
| They bugged the DNC, right? | ||
| That's the allegation. | ||
| And nobody on the right cares? | ||
| Nobody on the right cares? | ||
| I don't think that has to do with, you know, people aren't taking this seriously. | ||
| I think that one of the questions is just "How happy are you that they did it?" | ||
| And when the question isn't, and so I think there are a lot of people on the right going, | ||
| "Well, it's good they did it. | ||
| "I don't mind that they did it. | ||
| "I mean, after all, Hillary had it coming." | ||
| It's like that, so did McGovern, kind of, in the sense that McGovern was awful, | ||
| but that doesn't really change the activity. | ||
| Yeah, well, isn't the other piece of this that if this all happened, | ||
| doesn't it show ineptitude at the highest levels I mean, this, not that Obama himself would be making decisions related to this, but you'd have to fire almost everyone at every security service. | ||
| Well, and at the DNC, right? | ||
| Everybody who's responsible for the security of the DNC. | ||
| But it's been government agencies, apparently. | ||
| There's some hacking of government agencies that's been going on for a while. | ||
| I mean, we're at cyber war with China, and we have been for a long time. | ||
| Yes, I mean, the government, as I've said, sucks at virtually everything. | ||
| And the solution seems to be more government from both sides now. | ||
| The era of small government is over. | ||
| The idea that the government is going to shrink in any measurable way I think is fallacy. | ||
| So on the history repeats itself for a long game idea, there is opportunity here, right? | ||
| Because let it get big so that people will ultimately see that it does not work, and then the era of small government maybe can come. | ||
| Or do you think you can get to a tipping point where you just can't come back? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I do think that you get to a tipping point, but it's not a tipping point where you can't come back. | ||
| It's a tipping point where you actually hit disaster, right? | ||
| You hit the Greek tipping point. | ||
| where at a certain point you must hit the austerity button because otherwise your country is absolutely bankrupt, | ||
| and then you get riots in the streets. | ||
| And so the question is how ugly are things when reality sets in? | ||
| 'Cause the reality is you can't keep affording to pay for all of this stuff. | ||
| Eventually one of two things happens, either wise up or you go bankrupt | ||
| like California's about to do and things get really ugly. | ||
| So the question is which one we head toward. | ||
| And the fact that a lot of the gains of sort of the Buckley Reagan conservative | ||
| small government era have been put behind us in favor of this bigger government nationalist populism, | ||
| that's not a good sign that we're moving in the wising up direction. | ||
| It's actually a sign that we're moving in the opposite. | ||
| Kind of now, okay fine, the government's big, we accept the government's big, what can the government do for me today? | ||
| And that's a problem. | ||
| And this is why people were very intent during the campaign, conservatives, saying Mike Pence, Trump selects him, isn't that great? | ||
| Aren't you enthusiastic about the Pence pick? | ||
| And I was like, yeah, Mike Pence seems good. | ||
| And then you've got Mike Pence now going around to rallies with Donald Trump, this free marketeer, saying that he's okay with tariffs. | ||
| And saying the free market fails when it's tried, and Trump going, every time, every time. | ||
| And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. | ||
| That's Bernie. | ||
| Coming from Trump, OK, Trump's been saying that shtick the whole time. | ||
| But like Pence? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At what point? | ||
| And so we, as I say, we're not going to see really where the Republican Party lies until the first conflict between Trump and the Republicans. | ||
| Are there enough Republicans who are gonna stand up against him? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think so either. | ||
| And I think that Trump is building a machine outside government in order to take down the ones who do. | ||
| He has Kellyanne Conway building apparently this machine that's gonna seek to push his message outside government and maybe primary people who don't grant him the leeway. | ||
| It's such a sad state of affairs because it's like we've never needed a strong independent fourth estate. | ||
| More than this, that's right. | ||
| A media that functions properly now and it's exactly what we don't have. | ||
| Yeah, well, I've been saying this now for several months, and I was saying it during the Obama era too, is that it was clear that the country is ready for a demagogic fascistic leader because they just want something done, right? | ||
| The word fascism always brings to mind Nazis and jackboots and all this stuff, but the truth is that most dictatorial governments Don't start off that way. | ||
| Most of them start off with, we have a breakdown in the political system. | ||
| We need somebody to do something right now, right now. | ||
| There are too many pressing problems. | ||
| Get somebody in there to fix it right now. | ||
| And if you look back at history, most dictatorial governments don't start with the ultimately bad dictator. | ||
| They start with a couple of dictators who actually are not quite as bad, right? | ||
| If you look at like Germany 1930 to 1932, you're looking at people who actually aren't that bad, right? | ||
| You're looking at Brüning and you're looking at von Papen. | ||
| You're looking at a bunch of people who are, Schleicher, people who are Like, basically not terrible, awful human beings, but they centralize all the power here, and then the next person who sweeps in is the bad guy, right? | ||
| So whether you think that Obama was the bad guy, whether you think Trump is the bad guy, once you bring all the power to one place, once you've created, once you've forged the ring of power, then it's only a matter of time before the bad guy gets a hold of the ring of power, unless you destroy the ring of power. | ||
| Because you'll have a bunch of people who are seduced by the ring of power, But eventually the ring of power will make its way back to Sauron. | ||
| So you may think that Trump isn't the guy who's the threat, which is fine. | ||
| Maybe he isn't. | ||
| I assume that he isn't because I don't really see that he necessarily is. | ||
| Maybe you think Obama wasn't the guy. | ||
| Maybe you think that Obama wasn't the true threat to American democracy and liberalism. | ||
| But once you've got this much power in one place, Somebody will be. | ||
| Somebody will be elected at some point who just says screw all of the norms. | ||
| Things have to get done. | ||
| The trains have to run on time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's not only that it may not be the guy you like, it could be someone horrific. | ||
| It could be somebody really, truly terrible. | ||
| That metaphor was pretty good, but can you get that into a Star Wars thing? | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| Can you get that into some sort of story? | ||
| I'm not a huge Lord of the Ring guy. | ||
| There's no good way to destroy the dark side of the Force, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not quite as good, but everybody is seducible. | ||
| Like, when you're a kid, everybody wants to be Darth Vader, right? | ||
| When you're a kid, nobody wants to be Luke Skywalker. | ||
| Everybody wants to be Darth Vader. | ||
| Darth Vader's much cooler. | ||
| He can strangle people with his mind, right? | ||
| It's much cooler. | ||
| There's only one problem, which is that you also have to build this enormous Death Star and blow up planets. | ||
| So, eventually, the power seduces. | ||
| A lot of them had it coming, though. | ||
| I mean, come on, Alderaan? | ||
| Screw those guys. | ||
| Boring. | ||
| Screw those guys. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| All right, one more for you, Shapiro, because I get this tweeted at me a lot. | ||
| People say, Dave, you should run for president in 2020, but on the second part of the ticket, Shapiro should be number one. | ||
| You'd show people that bridges can be built, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Would you ever go into politics? | ||
| Not in California. | ||
| And given the way that our current politics is going, it seems like only celebrities can be elected. | ||
| Well, you'll have that part down. | ||
| I mean, you have your following. | ||
| Yeah, but it would have to be a lot larger following than that. | ||
| I don't think necessarily. | ||
| It's something that I could see doing at some point. | ||
| 2020 is a little soon. | ||
| I'm not averse to the idea of running for office at some point, but it depends on whether you can do more good outside of government or inside government, especially when you want to destroy the instrument itself. | ||
| Not to destroy the entirety of the government, to destroy a lot of the power of it. | ||
| So it sort of could never, in a way, you'd suffer from, although I know you don't agree with Rand Paul on a lot of stuff. | ||
| You'd suffer, you'd suffer... On domestic policy, by the way, I agree with a lot of what Rand Paul has to say. | ||
| Right, but I know on foreign policy and some other things. | ||
| But you would suffer from the same thing that he suffered from, which is, I'm trying to make this thing smaller. | ||
| Even if you're all conservatives, you're still trying to make it bigger. | ||
| So the party can't really rally around you because it doesn't really fit the way people think? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think that to benefit from backlash politics, you have to have, as you say, there could come a point where government is so big that people are actually willing to hear a message of, solve your own problems, screw the government, these people have destroyed lives, and power centralizing in one place is not the answer. | ||
| But, you know, people will have to be convinced of that because Until then, everybody on the inside wants that ring. | ||
| Everybody inside wants the dark side of the force. | ||
| And so my job right now is the same as yours, which is tell people the truth and hope that they awaken to the fact that your life is in your hands. | ||
| And if it's not in your hands, then we need to change the system so that it is in your hands and people aren't taking things away from you or promising you things. | ||
| Because a promise is just another way to take something away from you. | ||
| Sometimes it's your actual Nothing's free? | ||
| I thought if someone gives you something, it's free. | ||
| somebody makes you a promise to give you something and they're taking something | ||
| away from you too. Nothing is free. So if you want to be totally | ||
| self-sufficient then we need an actual place that allows self-sufficiency. | ||
| Nothing's free? I thought if someone gives you something it's free. | ||
| You mean someone else is paying for that? | ||
| It turns out, yeah. | ||
| See, I have to do more research. | ||
| It's that inability to understand that may be screwing all of us. | ||
| Guilty liberal there. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| All right, well, it was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| Great to be here. | ||
| And your office is not that far from my new studio. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| So I suspect- We'll be doing a lot more of these crossovers, I think. | ||
| We could, you know, 2020, I just, I really, I just could never be president. | ||
| I could be vice president. | ||
| Well, it's a cush job. | ||
| I mean, VP, you just sit there and you go to like a nice house and you get to meet Joe Biden. | ||
| Yeah, I'd be very good at that. | ||
| I just, I feel like you'd be much better in terms of the end decisions and that kind of thing. | ||
| Anyway, for more on Ben Shapiro, follow him on the Twitter, at Ben Shapiro, and try not to send him Nazi memes if you could. | ||
| But again, if you do- If you do, I'll frame them, put them on my wall, you know, really just take pleasure in them and enjoy them. | ||
| Yeah, and I know he won't ban you, so there you go. | ||
| That's true. |
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