Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin dissect the 2016 election's alt-right influence, debating whether Trump represents a genuine movement or a "team sport" of tribalism. They analyze media credibility collapse, arguing that "fake news" often masks political losses while private gatekeepers like YouTube threaten free speech. Addressing Russian hacking allegations, they note no evidence shifted the outcome despite DNC breaches. Ultimately, they warn that nationalist populism centralizes power, creating a dangerous environment where even moderates may succumb to absolute authority, making the destruction of government instruments difficult within a system everyone desires to control. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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 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.
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.
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 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?
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.