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Jan. 27, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

01:11:38

Real Racism, Trump, Fake News, and More | Larry Elder | POLITICS | Rubin Report

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		(upbeat music)
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You're not gonna believe this, but we have to talk about the regressive left today.
		I've actually been trying to get away from discussing the regressive left lately, and instead talk about the ideas of classical liberalism which I believe in, but current events keep dragging me back.
		I see on social media that people are using the phrase regressive left a bit less lately, and replacing it with terms like bigotier, the control left, or the illiberal left.
		Whatever name you use for this well-meaning yet painfully misguided set of ideas is largely irrelevant.
		We needed this phrase to identify this backwards ideology which puts groups before people, and sometimes you need a label to get people to understand an idea.
		The portion of the left which is no longer progressive, meaning for progress, but regressive, meaning going backwards, has been identified, and now we're clearly bringing people to the side of reason.
		All of you who talk about this with friends and family, who use the regressive left hashtag on Twitter, and share these videos are part of this political awakening.
		Yes, it seems like these backwards ideas are getting stronger in some circles, but at the same time, finally, for the first time in a long time, those of us who are liberal and open to new ideas are coming together and being heard.
		Whether or not you like Trump, his win was a huge rejection of the identity politics of the left.
		But don't take my word for that, Bernie Sanders said it himself.
		The only thing which can replace the regressive dissent of the left is a return to true liberalism.
		A liberalism which defends free speech and expression, a liberalism that is for liberty and rights of the individual, and most importantly a liberalism that is one for human liberty.
		I now believe that this regressive ideology is the biggest threat to freedom and western civilization that exists today.
		With the rise of Trump and the constant comparisons they make of him to Hitler, the left now has the perfect boogeyman to use to excuse anything.
		If your opponent is a vile racist, then you can use violence and any means necessary to stop him.
		The regressive left has already begun using violence as a tactic and I fear that that's just getting started.
		If you're only now getting up to speed on what the regressive left is, allow me to recap quickly.
		The regressive, control, liberal left, whatever you want to call it, is a group of people who place identity, usually based on immutable characteristics, in a pecking order of social importance such as race, gender, and religion, where victimhood is the highest virtue to be had.
		This oppression olympics allows groups to compete for who is the most oppressed Thus the most virtuous.
		And if someone isn't as oppressed as you, then you have full authority to oppress them accordingly.
		So Black Lives Matter can protest a gay rights march in Toronto.
		White gay men can be banned from leading LGBT organizations on college campuses.
		Pro-life women can be kicked out of women's rights marches and so on.
		This backwards ideology, which demands we judge each other not on the content of our character, but on the color of our skin or some other baked-in trait, puts the collective ahead of the individual.
		It loves all of its minority groups to behave as monoliths, so if you're a true individual, meaning you don't subscribe to the ideas that the group think has attributed to you based on those immutable characteristics, you must be cast out.
		Many of the guests on my show have suffered from this backwards backlash.
		Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maajid Nawaz, Sarah Hader, and Ali Rizvi all have felt abandoned by the left because they speak out about the problems within Islam.
		They dare to fight for a more tolerant, more truly progressive Islam in tune with the modern society and basic liberal values, and for that they're labeled bigots or worse.
		The Southern Poverty Law Center even labeled Majid as an anti-Muslim extremist.
		In reality, Majid is a former Islamist who has devoted his life to trying to reform Islam from the inside, to try to reconcile his faith with the modern world, fighting for gays and atheists and women and any other free thinkers living under theocratic rule.
		For this, he is called a porch monkey and other vile names by supposed progressives, while at the same time he is admired by many on the right for being outspoken.
		This is the absolute height of absurdity.
		But it all makes sense when you value groups over individuals.
		The individual must be sacrificed at the altar of the collective.
		So when any of these people dare speak out and call for true tolerance, they find their tolerance met with intolerance.
		The left loves diversity in skin color, not diversity in thought.
		Of course, this regressive ideology isn't just tied to Islam at all.
		My guest this week is Larry Elder, a black conservative who has had every label and smear thrown at him.
		Again, like with the previous guests I just mentioned, these slurs come from people on the left who would rather silence and dismiss their opponents than actually engage them in an honest way.
		People often ask me which interview I've done that's changed my views the most, and I almost always say that it was the first time I sat down with Larry Elder.
		He challenged my views on systemic racism, as well as the need for a strong family, and was one of the people that helped sell me on why small government is important.
		If you haven't seen the video, we'll post the link right down below.
		Larry challenged me, and I wasn't ready, so I can't say that it was my best moment on camera, but I listened and learned, and just as importantly, we didn't edit any of it out.
		So I'm looking forward to picking up where Larry and I left off.
		And as for where we left off, this is where I feel there might be nothing left for me on the modern American left.
		You all know most of my positions on important issues.
		I'm for free speech, even for white supremacist Richard Spencer to speak and not get punched in the face as happened just a couple days ago.
		And I'm still a card carrying liberal by the way.
		I'm for gay marriage, I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-legalization of marijuana, I'm against the death penalty, and the list goes on.
		At the same time though, I'm against this oppression Olympics, I'm against safe spaces and trigger warnings, I'm against labeling all my opponents bigots and racists, and I'm against deplatforming speakers, especially at colleges where ideas are meant to be challenged and debated.
		I'm also for states' rights, for following the Constitution, and most importantly for having a limited government that gets out of the way so that you can live your life to the fullest.
		I've said a few times on the show that defending my liberal principles has become a conservative position.
		Interestingly, I've also heard conservatives like Andrew Klavan and Dennis Prager say that they are conservatives because they really are liberals.
		This is where we might get lost in the definition of liberal in the modern sense versus classical liberal.
		So if you're still confused about that, check out a video I did a couple weeks ago called Why I'm a Liberal.
		We'll put a link to it right down below.
		The point is that if the issues I care about most, free speech, rights of the individual, and limited government designed to maximize liberty, now have almost nothing to do with the modern left.
		My positions basically haven't changed, but I've watched as my team has gone off the deep end.
		The battle of ideas always gets to a tipping point, and I sense that we're closing in on one right now.
		If we can't rein in this madness on the left, then Donald Trump will be all too happy to show them his authoritarian side.
		Both sides are ramping up for a showdown.
		So, while I absolutely believe that the new center, filled with liberals, conservatives and libertarians and others, is rapidly growing, maybe I've lost the left and maybe that's okay.
		But to end this direct message, I now kick this back to you guys.
		If you're liberal, is there anything left for you on the left?
	Or are you left out?
	Is it now the conservative position to truly be liberal?
	Let me know in the comments right down below and we'll see if there's anything left to discuss.
unidentified		(upbeat music)
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Joining me this week is an author, a television pundit,
		host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and now most importantly,
		a returning guest in that very chair.
		Larry Elder, welcome back to The Rubin Report.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Dave, thank you for having me.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I appreciate it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I am looking forward to this because I mentioned at the top of the show that I don't know that any guest that I've ever had on challenged me directly as much as you did and actually managed to change some of my feelings.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's got to feel pretty good for you.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Well, I had a lot of good feedback from the interview, and people complimented me, but I said the compliments should go to you, because you were asking questions, and unlike a lot of interviewers, you really cared about the answer.
		You listened, then you responded.
		And so, I think that's what made the interview so great.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		For you to sit down with a liberal, and I think last time we literally didn't know each other.
		I think maybe we had met for 10 seconds before you sat in the chair.
		You sit down with a liberal, and I think that you were ready to go.
		So when I said something about systemic racism, like you were ready to pounce, and you did, and my guys said to me after, we had only been doing the show for a few months, you know, do you want to edit that part out?
		Because there's a part where you really kind of catch me in like a moment where I don't know, and we'll link to it right down below.
		I want people to see this.
		I think it's important.
		How hard is it for you to sit down with liberals, generally speaking, and have an honest conversation?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Depends on the liberal.
		If it's an open-minded liberal who really cares about what you have to say, it's pretty easy.
		If it isn't, if it's somebody who's already decided what they've decided and believe that liberals, that conservatives are mean people, rotten people, cold people, anti-science people, then we're going to be in for a bumpy night.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Okay, so let's, I want to just recap a couple of the things we talked about last time for people that haven't seen it, and then we'll get to all the new stuff.
		So real quick, just tell me a little bit about your political evolution.
		How do you end up here as a conservative?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Well, it wasn't so much an evolution as it was kind of like a series of things that happened to me, people that I've met, books that I've read, and that all together you added up and I ended up being a conservative.
		My father was always a Republican, my mom a Democrat, and so at the kitchen table they would fight all the time about politics.
		And when I was younger I sided with my mom, I think partially because it was just my mom, and when I got older I began to side with my father, much to my mother's consternation.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So going back that, let's say, 50-ish years roughly, what are the types of things that your dad was fighting for as a Republican at that time?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Well, I remember vividly during Watergate, my dad was defending Richard Nixon, which I thought was indefensible.
		I thought what Richard Nixon was accused of doing was suborning perjury and getting other people to lie was deeply wrong.
		My dad thought it was trivial.
		My dad felt that Richard Nixon Had not done anything to enrich himself, that national security was not jeopardized, nobody died.
		Why would you impeach a president over the fact that he was trying to cover up a break-in to the Watergate?
		That was my dad's position.
		My mom's position, of course, was that Richard Nixon was a crook and a liar.
		Fast forward, the polls show that most Americans now believe that Richard Nixon should not have resigned over what he did and feel that what Hillary did was far worse and she did not have to resign.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what does that say about just sort of how, where we've come and where we were, that we're so obsessed with scandal right now.
		I mean, we know right now, Trump's been in office for, as we're taping this, like five days or something.
		And it's like, there is just going to be massive scandal after massive scandal.
		Obama said just a couple of weeks ago that he's very proud that his administration got through without a major scandal.
		Now that depends on what your definition of scandal, I suspect you disagree with that.
		But in terms of like a personal scandal or some real stealing of something or that kind of thing, But maybe you don't see it that way.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I do not see it that way.
		But your question was, what does it say about us?
		Where are we going?
		What it says about us is that when it's a Republican in office, somebody like Richard Nixon that people did not like, there's one level of scrutiny and one level of judgment.
		When it's a Democrat, somebody like Clinton or like Obama, there's a whole different thing.
		For Obama to say with a straight face that I've not had a major scandal, are you kidding me?
		What was Fast and Furious?
		What was Hillary's email server?
		What was denying the non-profit applications of conservatives with the IRS?
		You can have your doctor, you can keep your doctor, and Obama reiterated that line after it was obvious from the regs that you couldn't necessarily keep your doctor or you couldn't necessarily keep your plan.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So that line, didn't he basically say that the ends justify the means?
		That's sort of what he's saying, like, I had to sell it and we kind of knew.
		I'm not defending that particular line, but that was sort of his mea culpa.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I still think it's a scandal.
		For you to say that you're going to bend the cost curve down, people are going to be no worse off, they're going to save money, and you don't save the money, when you know full well that you can't keep your doctor, if you want to keep your doctor, and to say it anyway, that to me, as far as I'm concerned, is a scandal.
		Pulling out all the troops out of Iraq over the advice of his entire national security team.
		Hillary wanted him to keep a stay-behind force.
		His Secretary of Defense wanted a stay-behind force.
		The CIA director wanted a stay-behind force.
		The Joint Chiefs wanted a stay-behind force.
		Our U.S.
		Ambassador to Iraq advised Obama against pulling all the troops out.
		He did it anyway, and the media gave him a pass for that.
		And Ray Odierno, the So is that one of the situations where we're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't?
		could have been dealt with. That to me is a massive scandal for which Obama got a
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		pass and still gets a pass. So is that one of the situations where we're damned
		if we do and we damned if we don't? So that had he stayed, most people and
		I'm guessing you included probably didn't want us to be there forever,
		having left the way he did, they were having Democratic elections right before
		I mean, literally in the months before we left, they were having their first free democratic elections, and now it's an absolute disaster.
		So is that just one of those situations, there was no win, in a way, for him at the end?
		Because either we're gonna occupy them forever, or we're gonna pull out and then some bad stuff's gonna happen, which is exactly what happened.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Okay, now we're talking about kind of the merits of the Iraq War, and whether or not we should have stayed or not stayed, and that's fine.
		Look, I believe that as long as the American public did not have the will to stick it through, because what George W. Bush said was, we'll leave when Iraq can stand up.
		As long as the American people did not have the will to do that, we shouldn't have gone.
		But I'm surprised, I think George W. Bush is surprised, I think Dick Cheney is surprised, that over the advice of all the people that I just now mentioned, Obama pulled all the troops out anyway.
		He envisioned a stay-behind force to make sure that Iraq would be stable.
		I mean, we stayed in Germany, we stayed in Japan, we're still in South Korea.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It takes a while for Democrats... I'm pretty sure we have 30,000 troops in Germany now or something like that.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Something like that.
		It takes a while for democracy to take root.
		And for us to bail out the way we did was incredibly irresponsible and I thought jeopardized national security.
		And again, I am surprised that Obama felt confident enough to walk into the Oval Office and ignore the advice of all these people.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So would your argument be basically that these scandals, these issues that you brought up, basically he got a pass because the media is sort of in on it with the Democrats?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is that the basic idea?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		For him to say, as he said many times during press conferences, I'm most proud of the fact that I rescued the U.S.
		economy.
		Really?
		The major things that were done, TARP and bailing out the auto companies, George W. Bush had set that into motion.
		His stimulus program, most economists don't believe it did anything.
		Obamacare was a brand new entitlement dropped on the back of job creators.
		And notice how he no longer bragged about things like Cash for clunkers and cash for caulkers.
		Cash for clunkers, rather.
		He didn't even talk about that anymore because they were boondoggles.
		They did not work.
		They cost the American people, American taxpayers, money.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so I know that a certain amount of people are gonna hear what you said there and go, that doesn't make any sense.
		And then the other, this is gonna be a very 50-50 split on where people are at before this.
		So let's move to some of the philosophical stuff, which I think is where we can get into the real meat of this.
		So racism, this is the issue that more people contacted me about when I was discussing you than anything else.
		And it's where you challenged me the most on systemic racism.
		So, first off, what does any racism exist in America?
		Not systemic racism, we'll get to that in a sec, but what racism is real?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		We live in a country that's got 330 million people.
		Roughly 8-10% of them believe Elvis is still alive.
		Almost half of them believe if you send Elvis a letter, he'll get it.
		Obviously there's racism.
		There are individuals who don't like other people because of their race.
		No question about it.
		But are there corporations that have a policy of not hiring anybody?
		Are there governmental agencies that have a policy of not hiring anybody?
		The answer is no.
		If you can tell me the company, IBM, Apple, that has a policy of not hiring black people,
		tell me, or brown people, tell me who that company is and we can deal with it.
		I don't know what people mean when they talk about institutional racism.
		If this were the 50s, I would know what you're talking about.
		When there was segregation that was legal segregation in the South, where you couldn't
		marry somebody outside your race in certain states.
		But that is no longer the case right now.
		The racism that people talk about right now, in my opinion, is individual stuff, where
		or some individual doesn't like you, or some individuals don't like you.
		But is it something that is anything akin to what we experienced in the 50s and the 60s?
		Absolutely not.
		And I think it's insulting to people who have fought hard and died in the 50s and the 60s to get us to this point, to act like things are just the same.
		When you have people like Eric Holder saying, as he did, When he was AG, we now have pernicious racism, which he said was every bit as bad as the old racism.
		What the hell are you talking about?
		I mean, it's insulting to me.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what do you do to defeat that idea?
		So again, this is you, you mentioned that in our conversation and really did, you know, you got me.
		I said something, well, there's systemic racism.
		And you said, well, what companies can I just, I just asked you for an example.
		You got me.
		And so I do agree with you.
		There are racist people.
		There are a certain amount of people that don't like black people, that don't like Jews, that don't like gays, et cetera.
		We live in a free country.
		You're allowed to not like people.
		It may be odious and unpleasant, but you're allowed to.
		You can't harm them, but- Correct.
		But what do you do to stop the idea of what you're talking about, that things have changed for the better, and that there's a certain amount of people that want that oppression?
		Tell the truth.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		That's how you fight it.
		Tell the truth.
		I mean, this movement called Black Lives Matter.
		I think we talked about that a little bit.
		It's as bogus and as phony a movement as the notion that O.J.
		Simpson is innocent from having killed two people.
		It's a fraud.
		Most cops simply want to do a good job and come home.
		Most cops, frankly, are more hesitant to pull the trigger against a black suspect than a white suspect.
		There have been a couple of studies that have shown that recently.
		One of them was an economist from Harvard named Roland Fryer.
		And he is apparently the youngest tenured professor in the history of Harvard.
		And he's a tenured professor in the Department of Economics.
		And he did a study to find out about police brutality.
		He assumed he would find the opposite.
		And he was shocked, he said, when he found out that most police officers
		are more reluctant to use deadly force on a black suspect than a non-black suspect.
		And the reason, in my opinion, is pretty obvious.
		If you shoot a black person and there's any question whatsoever about it, you're going to be under the gun.
		You're going to be possibly prosecuted, maybe lose your pension, maybe go to jail.
		Cops are deathly afraid of being perceived as engaging in racial profiling.
		There was a recent poll that just came out And it turns out 75% of cops say that they are more reluctant now to engage with citizens than before, before the Black Lives Matter movement.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what's the disconnect then?
		When you see these cities, when you see Atlanta, and you see Chicago, and you see Ferguson, and all of these places that are usually under Democratic control, they usually have Democratic mayors.
		The group think would tell you, wait a minute, Democrats are helping black people.
		So, where is the disconnect coming from?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		A lot of people are not thinking critically, Dave.
		They're just not.
		Take Baltimore.
		Baltimore was run by a black mayor.
		She got 85% of the vote.
		What kind of politician gets 85% of the vote?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think Gaddafi got 85% of the vote.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I think Stalin got 105%.
		And the top two officials running the police department were black.
		The command staff, majority black.
		All the city council Democrats, majority black.
		The state attorney, the one who brought the charges against the six officers, is a black female.
		And yet and still they're still talking about systemic racism.
		The fact of the matter is a lot of black suspects are engaging in bad conduct and the police are doing their job.
		And often the bad conduct is against another black victim.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, does this all come down to education for you?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because at the end of the day, if you can teach people properly about history, and if you can teach them properly about what the role of government is and all those things, that that's really how you untie this stuff from just the screeching people on both sides.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I think so, but it's also all about rationally connecting the dots.
		Is it really true that a young black man is more likely to be pulled over by a cop than a young white man.
		And if it is true, another question is why?
		And you cannot have a meaningful discussion about any of this without talking about behavior.
		I think maybe the last time we were here we talked about a National Institutes of Justice study.
		That's the research arm of the DOJ.
		They did a study that came out in 2013 called Traffic Stops and Race.
		And it turns out that whether you're talking about driving without a license or driving while drunk or driving With a busted tailpipe or driving without a seatbelt or driving without a car seat in the back.
		It turns out black motorists were more likely to commit those crimes than a white motorist.
		And the study said that the differences in stopping have to do with differences in offending.
		If you can't have a meaningful discussion, unless you have a meaningful discussion about behavior.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Now I suspect that some people on the left would hear that and they'd say, well, black people have been oppressed economically.
		So they are more likely to have a taillight out or some other thing.
		You would just say that's nonsense.
		You would just say that's individual responsibility.
		You got to drive a car that's supposed to be the one that's on the road.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		Also, there's more poor white people in the country than there are poor black people.
		But it's black people that complain about being disproportionately pulled over.
		Half of all the homicides in this country involve black victims.
		Almost all of the black victims were killed by other black people.
		I don't know what that has to do with cops being racist.
		It has to do with the fact that a disproportionately large percentage of crime is committed by a small percentage of people, usually males, usually young black males, often against their peers.
		And that is because of the lack of fathers in the home.
		I didn't say it, Obama said it.
		A kid raised without a father is five times more likely to be poor, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in jail.
		The number one problem facing this country is not bad cops, not Obamacare, it is the large number of children raised
		without fathers.
		That is a product of the welfare state.
		Between 1890 and 1920, 1930, believe it or not, a black kid was slightly more likely to be born to mothers
		and fathers married to each other than a white kid.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what's the connection there?
		What's the 1920 connection?
		So the welfare state starts and why does that harm the black family more?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		The welfare state really got kicked off in the mid-60s.
		25% of black kids were born outside of wedlock in 1960.
		Right now it's 73%.
		And what happened is literally Lyndon Johnson launched a so-called war on poverty and he sent workers, literally knocking on people's doors to apprise
		women of their right to welfare provided there was no man in the house.
		And so what we've done is change the culture.
		We've incentivized women to marry the government.
		We've allowed men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility.
		It is a neutron bomb dropped on this country, all because of the war on poverty that was
		done by Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats, and with tacit support by Republicans as well.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Do you think the intentions were good?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		One quick thing.
		We know that there is a negative incentive because in 1996 when Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, welfare declined by over 50%, far steeper than anybody predicted.
		It turned out there was a bunch of able-bodied people Yeah, do you think the intentions are good?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So when Lyndon Johnson pushes this, when the Democrats sign it, the Republicans who got on board, were their intentions, we're going to help people get out of poverty, or is there really something more nefarious going on?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		No, the intentions were quite good.
		FDR talked about the corrosive effect of government dependency when he launched the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson talked about getting people off of government dependencies and making them more self-sufficient by launching the War on Poverty.
		Those were their stated goals, and I believe them.
		But human nature is such that if you allow somebody an easy out, some people will take an easy out.
		And that's what we've done with a lot of people.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So basically we've said to a certain subset of people, and it I guess is a disproportionately amount of black people, we've said you can get a certain amount of government handouts.
		And basically your argument is that this is now just leaving people in the status quo.
		Because if you can get something, subsidized housing, whatever it is, food stamps, And you don't have to do anything, you'll just take it.
		it. That's not a black characteristic, that's a characteristic of what any human might be.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Of human nature. And there was a poll taken in 1986 by the LA Times. They asked poor people
		and non-poor people a bunch of questions. And one of them was, "Do you believe that
		poor people have additional children to get additional money from welfare?"
		The majority of non-poor people said no.
		They probably thought it was insulting, if not racist.
		64% of poor people said yes.
		Also, they were asked this question, poor people were, do you believe that welfare is a crutch, a great dependency, or do you believe it's a means to get you to stand on your own two feet and go forward?
		More of them said it was a crutch that created dependency than it was a means to get you on your own two feet and go forward.
		These are poor people responding to this poll.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so basically guilt has a lot to do with this.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The guilt, sort of white liberal guilt in a way, has actually subjected black people to a, not all black people of course, but a certain subset of poorer black people to a set of circumstances that they almost can't get out of.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I think that's part of it, but also I think part of it is people that are comfortable and wealthy and well-educated look around to figure out how they can perfect the world.
		And they forget that part of getting anywhere is overcoming obstacles and struggling.
		And if you make things real comfortable for people, some people are going to take the easy way out.
		So I think it's a kind of mindset, a kind of mentality.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, when did we get to that point where fighting for what's yours, fighting that no one should give you anything, that the government isn't supposed to give you anything, and no one should, that it is your life to live, it is your job as a human to pursue what makes you happy and take what you can.
		That doesn't mean destroying everything around you, but finding what makes you happy.
		When did that get crossed up?
		Is it all connected to this, do you think?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		That's a good question.
		I think the Founding Fathers intended for for us to have what people have characterized
		as rugged individualism.
		Article one, section eight of the constitution set forth a handful of things
		that the federal government should do.
		They did not include social security.
		They did not include Medicare.
		They did not include Medicaid.
		They did not include charity.
		But we've gotten away from that.
		I think because as people become more and more affluent, they look around and try to perfect the world.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, would you roll back all of those things?
		I would.
		Do you consider yourself a libertarian?
unidentified		I do.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You're basically a libertarian, right?
unidentified		Yes.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Small ale libertarian.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I'm a law and order libertarian.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So you think there should be driver's licenses?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so you're not like, well because it's an important distinction to make because there are plenty of libertarians that don't.
		So what makes you not a classical liberal then?
		Because this has become one of the themes over the last year here.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I am a classical liberal in the John Stuart Mill sense of it.
		Absolutely I am.
		Somebody who believes in maximum personal freedom, but also you have to believe in maximum personal responsibility.
		And that is to deal with the consequences of your choices.
		And a lot of people don't want to do that.
		They want to shield people from the vestiges of the world, of life, and when you do that, you also will create some other kind of reaction that will be worse.
		My father used to say, when you try and get something for nothing, You often end up getting nothing for something.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what sort of social safety net should there be then?
		Or do you not think that there should be?
		And this may be the difference between a small-l libertarian and a classical liberal.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		think most classical liberals would feel the way I feel, and that is that the safety net
		should be provided by other individuals, not by government, but by churches, non-profits.
		One of the things that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about in Democracy in America were all
		of these what were called mutual aid societies that were set up. This is before Social Security,
		before Medicare, before Medicaid. Believe it or not, a black person living in Chicago
		in the 1920s and 1930s was more likely to have health care insurance than a white person
		because he joined these mutual aid societies that provided that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Alright, so let's circle back to the family stuff because I remember you said the family stuff last time and the importance of a two-parent family.
		My parents are still married 40 some odd years.
		I just went back to my childhood home in New York, and for the first time I did have, I think I saw a little more tangibly what you were talking about.
		To go to my parents' house, to feel that it was the same place that I grew up in, the same community that I was part of, I visited family, friends, and some relatives that were nearby, and it did feel like it connected me to something that was important.
		It's sort of an ephemeral thing, it's something that's not quite tangible, but something that's important that does, it lays your roots so to speak, and that you can sort of figure out who you are from that.
		Is that really what you're talking about with the family, that it's not just that there's a breadwinner, but something else, something that's sort of bigger than that, that really can lay out what a life is supposed to be?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		It's not just an additional check, as you pointed out.
		It's also being a role model, watching your father get up, go to work when he doesn't feel like it, watching him live up to his responsibilities.
		And, you know, the three arguably biggest leaders in this country, black leaders in this country, are Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan.
		And all of them had difficult, if not... That's a trio, huh?
		All of them had difficult, if not non-existent relationship with their own fathers.
		Jesse Jackson's mother was a teenager who was impregnated by the married man who lived next door.
		And when Jesse Jackson was raised in South Carolina, kids taunted him, Jesse ain't got no daddy, Jesse ain't got no daddy, because that's how rare it was in those days to be raised without a father.
		Al Sharpton had a nice middle class life until his father abandoned the family and then down to the ghetto.
		And in the case of Farrakhan, his mom was estranged from her husband, had a boyfriend, took back up with the husband, got pregnant, didn't want the boyfriend to know, and tried to abort Louis Farrakhan with a coat hanger.
		So all three of these men, in my opinion, have deep psychological issues because of a lack of relationship with their own fathers.
		And that is one of the reasons why, in my opinion, they're so angry despite the fact that things have gotten so much better in terms of race relations in this country.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So basically, they can't let go of that pain.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, not to fully psychoanalyze them, but they're dealing with a personal pain that is extremely painful, for sure, and they can't let go of that pain, so now they're kind of projecting it In my opinion, again, I'm not a psychologist, but if I were, that's what I would say.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Now a lot of people have had bad circumstances and have not been that sour because of it.
		My father, I think we talked about him before, my father does not know who his biological father is.
		The man named Elder was the man who was in his life the longest.
		He was an alcoholic who abused him and abused his mother physically.
		And my dad was literally thrown out of the house when he was 13 years old by his mother's
		then boyfriend who sided with her boyfriend when he and my dad got into a quarrel when
		he was 13 years old.
		He came home from school and he was making too much noise.
		The boyfriend got mad.
		My dad said something to him.
		His mother sided with the boyfriend.
		Out of the house he goes.
		13 years old, Jim Crow South, Athens, Georgia, right at the beginning of the Great Depression.
		My father was never angry though.
		My father said to us, always us meaning my two brothers and me, I picked up the cars,
		I dealt with them the best that I could.
		What did he do?
		A series of whatever anybody would pay him to do.
		Cleaning this, cleaning that.
		Ultimately he got a job with the Pullman Porters.
		They were the largest private employer of blacks in those days.
		And he was able to travel around the country, that's how he ended up in California.
		He came here one time, it was sunny, people smiled, it seemed more friendly.
		And after the war was over, my dad relocated to California to try and get a job as a cook.
		And he was told that he had no references, which was California's way of saying we don't hire black people.
		Right.
		And my dad ended up being a janitor, worked two full-time jobs as a janitor.
		He saved his nickels and dimes, started a little cafe near the Pico Union area, which he ran until his 80s.
		In fact, I wrote about this in my last book.
		It's called Dear Father, Dear Son, Two Lives, Eight Hours, because my father and I did not get along.
		I thought of my father as grouchy and honoree, and I couldn't understand why he was so ill-tempered until I got 25 years old.
		We stopped talking to each other when I was 15.
		We didn't speak to each other for 10 years.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		And my dad and I sat down for what I thought would be a 10 minute conversation.
		It ended up being an eight hour conversation.
		And that's where I wrote the book, Dear Father, Dear Son, Two Lives, Eight Hours, about this conversation.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that, despite what you've said about President Obama, do you think that now that he's out of office, maybe he could step into the role that you'd like to see him in?
		So instead of America turning to Jesse Jackson and Farrakhan and Sharpton, Maybe they can turn to you, but if not to Larry Elder, but if not to Larry Elder, that maybe Obama, when you disconnect it from politics, can actually talk about some of those things.
		I mean, you addressed it a second ago.
		You said he did mention the family and mentioned fathers and all that.
		So is there a chance?
		Do you think there's a chance for that?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I'm not optimistic because in his last press conference, he talked about we still have a great deal to do on race.
		By the way, when people talk about a great deal to do on race, all they really mean is how black people feel about white people and vice versa.
		They don't care about Hispanics, they don't care about Asians, they really care about the relationship between blacks and whites.
		And Obama has, throughout his eight years, in my opinion, when he could have ignored the race card, or put it in perspective, picked it up.
		Whether it's Cambridge Police, or whether it's Trayvon Martin, if I had a son he would look like Trayvon, whether it's invoking Ferguson.
		Whether it's hiring somebody like Eric Holder who's lecturing the country on race and racism.
		Obama, I think, believes that racism remains this huge, massive problem in America despite his election and despite his re-election.
		And I don't.
		And so I don't think he's going to say the right thing and do the right thing.
		I think he's encouraged black people to think of themselves as victims.
		As opposed to saying, look at me.
		I busted my butt.
		My parents made sure I had a good education.
		I didn't make bad moral mistakes.
		I got married before I had kids.
		Follow my model and you'll be fine.
		He has not said that at all.
		What he said is, we have real problems in this country.
		He embraced the Black Lives Matter movement.
		I mentioned Trayvon Martin.
		I mentioned some of the other things.
		In my opinion, The reason that a lot of people voted for Obama was because they thought he was going to do exactly what you suggested, which is to heal us, put things in perspective.
		Tell young black people they ought not be angry when they're pulled over by a cop.
		All the cop is doing is his job.
		Instead, he did the opposite.
		So I'm not optimistic at all that he'll play that kind of role that you suggest.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so the way we've demonized... I hope I'm wrong.
		Yeah, I hope you're wrong too.
		I don't know, but the way we've demonized cops as part of this, I agree.
		I mean, I see a lot of times people are just screaming about how evil cops are and they're hunting people down and all of this stuff.
		I don't know a ton of cops, but I knew some in New York and I know a couple here.
		Generally, they're trying to do good, right?
		I mean, do you have any experience in which... Have you ever been pulled over and had a bad experience?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I probably have been pulled over maybe more than almost anybody you know.
		I got my driver's license when I was 15 and a half, my learner's permit, and then when I was 16, I was able to drive by myself.
		And I probably looked like I was 12.
		So I got pulled over probably a hundred times.
		And with the exception of one or two instances, the encounter was brief and professional.
		One time, a cop told me to take my head out of my ass.
		That was the first time I got pulled over, by the way.
		I was driving, and there was a light behind me, and I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, so I just kept going.
		The guy pulled over and screamed at me, and he goes, why didn't you pull over?
		And I said what I said to you.
		Well, officer, I didn't think I did anything wrong.
		And he said, whenever you see some lights behind you, you pull over.
		Get your head out of your ass.
		And he was right.
		I should have had my head out of my ass.
		You know, the instances in which cops kill blacks has declined 75% in the last 45 years, according to the CDC.
		While the instances in which cops kill whites has pretty much flatlined.
		And so, it's going down.
		It is very, very, very rare for the cops to kill anybody, let alone an unarmed black person.
		Of the 965 people that were killed by the police in 2015, less than 4% were white cops killing an unarmed black man.
		It is very rare.
		By contrast, 400 people were injured by lightning last year, but only 250 black people were killed by police.
		So it's very, very rare.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So how much of this, I know you talk about fake news and I wanna get to that, but how much of this is
		because the media is complicit in all this?
		So for example, just this morning, I think the Oscar nominations were put out.
		I haven't even seen them yet, but apparently there are more minorities this time.
		I guess there are some more Latinos and Dev Patel and some more black people.
		And for the last couple of years, there's been this Oscars so white thing.
		To me, and I can only speak for myself, this is like, your eye is just off the ball.
		You're just paying attention to the wrong thing where--
		It's nice to have people nominated for these things, but they're irrelevant in the scheme of what's important.
		What you should be caring about is education and all that.
		But the media has made such an importance out of this that it's like it's getting the black community's eye off what's actually important, which would be education and family and some of the other stuff.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I couldn't agree with you more.
		I have an actor friend and I said, why is this important to you?
		And he said, because it provides role models and enhances the self-esteem of black people.
		That's what he said.
		I said, are you aware that black boys and black girls have higher self-esteem than white girls and white boys?
		This has been tested for decades.
		It's been the case for a long time.
		And there are very, very few Asian actors and actresses, yet Asian Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, and Korean Americans On a per capita basis make more money than virtually anybody else in this country.
		So it's utterly irrelevant.
		And for us to pay attention to this?
		It's also not true.
		If you look at the last 15 years or so, roughly 10% or so of the nominees for the major categories have been black people.
		There have been a couple of years where there's been a shutout, but add it all up, it's about parity with population.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so that's the irony.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It actually, it's within a couple of percentage points, it actually has been a parity.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		And Jamie Foxx, who got an Oscar for Ray, said, in connection with this Oscar, so white movement, he said, act better.
		Be better.
		Raise your game.
		Don't demand, don't yell, don't scream.
		Get better.
		Act better.
		He got an Oscar.
		And I think part of the reason he said that is because it kind of demeans his Oscar.
		You're complaining that Oscars are so white.
		How did I get one?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I was lucky?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Maybe, just maybe, I was excellent.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So do you think that, at times, visibility is important?
		So for example, I've had Jack A. Harry on here.
		She was the first black woman, I think she won for Best Supporting Actress in 227, around, I guess it's around 1989 or so.
		At that time, do you think that a certain amount of visibility may have been more important than it is now?
		Because finally a black person did it.
		Even if you don't think that the thing in and of itself is important.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I don't think so.
		I remember some years ago there was an Olympic black skier named Debbie Thomas, I believe was her last name.
		And she was the first black Olympiad in ice skating.
		And she would constantly ask, "Who are your role models?
		Who are your role models?
		Who inspired you?"
		And finally, to me, out of exasperation, she said, "I don't need to see somebody black do something
		before I think I can do it."
		And that's how I feel.
		If I wanna do something, what's holding me back from doing it
		other than my own insecurities or inadequacies?
		Just get up, make it happen.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		How exhausting is this conversation to you?
		I don't mean this literal conversation right now, but just this thing, you know, so much of what you talk about has to unfortunately be framed around something that you don't even think is real.
		You know what I mean?
		It's something that you think should be put behind us, that actually is behind us, and yet you have to talk about it a lot.
		Just on a personal note, how does that feel for you?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		It doesn't bother me.
		I think there's a lot of feeling that race and racism remain major problems in America.
		And I think that you're approaching this with sincerity and real concern.
		I just don't think it's that big of a deal.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		By the way, I've emailed DeRay McKesson to have him on, who's I think the quasi-leader of Black Lives Matter.
		He hasn't responded, but I will ask him again.
		So I'm not just playing favorites here.
		I'm just putting that out there.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		No problem.
		This is America.
		There are Cubans who are braving shark-infested waters to get here.
		There are people from Central America coming up here.
		Why do people come here?
		Why do so many people want to come to America?
		And it's because it is the land of the free and the home of the brave.
		It is a place where you can go from nothing to something faster than at any time and anywhere in all of human history.
		That's why we're here.
		And to me, again, you are Yeah, I suspect I know your answer to this, but what do you make of all these people that now want to look back on history and label everyone racist from back then?
		You know, I was at Monticello, which was Thomas Jefferson's home.
		about race and racism.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I suspect I know your answer to this, but what do you make of all these people
		that now wanna look back on history and label everyone racist from back then?
		You know, I was at Monticello, which was Thomas Jefferson's home.
		Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, who was sleeping with at least one slave,
		I think several who they, by the way, at Monticello, I took the tour,
		this was only about a year and a half ago, they fully owned up to everything.
		They did not, I thought it was incredible what they did.
		They said this man was writing the laws to free the slaves at the same time.
		He was sleeping with his slaves, which I think you could probably make an argument was rape in a certain respect because they weren't equals, right?
		Now, I'm not saying he's a rapist in the conventional sense, but I can see that argument being made.
		But what about that concept that we're gonna look back, that what I think the left is now trying to do is look at all of our founding fathers and take them out of the, give our 2017 morality to them who lived very complex lives.
		I mean, without Thomas Jefferson, the slaves do not get freed as quickly as they did.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think the idea of going back and airbrushing history and looking at history through the filter of today's morality is pretty silly.
		I think all a state can be is just in its own time, and that's what we're trying to be and trying to do right now.
		And people are right to call slavery America's original sin, but without a compromise you wouldn't have had an America.
		And there were 750,000 people, both sides, who died in order to free the slaves.
		And people don't really have an understanding of the scale of the sacrifice that people made.
		750,000 people at a time when this country was just 10% the size of what it is.
		So that's like 7.5 million people dying in order for there to be an outcome when slaves are freed.
		And those are the people that died, not the ones who've been injured.
		It was a horrific thing that America went through.
		And on the other side comes the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, the Civil Rights Movement, and all the things that have happened since then.
		But this was a country that went to war over this proposition.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		What do you make of this intersectional thing that we have going on now?
		And I think we saw a lot of it at the Women's March this past weekend, where there's a certain amount of people that are trying to conflate trans issues with black issues, and then Muslim issues with women's issues, and just this whole thing where, you know, I talk about all the time, this oppression Olympics, and now they're all tied together by this oppression, but they all have to kind of beat each other in oppression to be the winner.
		This is a toxic mess, huh?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		It is.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		It's what I call the victocrat culture, where everybody has a grievance, and everybody's making demand on the government to solve that grievance, when in fact, we have far more in common than we have apart, and we ought to celebrate our similarities, and we're not doing that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so let's move to Trump then.
		I think what you said there is an interesting segue to Trump.
		So, there seems to be this feeling that the white supremacists are back.
		They're back in business.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		White boys are back.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And it's because of Trump.
		So I saw this.
		Did you see this video of this guy, Richard Spencer, who's the alt-right guy?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		He got punched.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		He got punched.
		I tweeted out that this guy has obviously bad ideas.
		I've had family members on both sides of my family killed in the Holocaust, so I am not a Nazi sympathizer in any way.
		But I have to defend his right to free speech without being punched because that's the whole point.
		You can't just defend it when it's easy.
		You gotta defend it when you don't want to.
		But I saw a lot of people on the left, a lot of famous people, a lot of people with a lot of influence saying, no, it's okay to punch Nazis, which if you just follow their logic through, well, he could have killed him because you could accidentally kill somebody.
		And then if it's okay to punch a random person because of their beliefs, can we blow up his car?
		Can we bomb his house?
		This is a horrifically slippery slope, right?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Of course it is.
		Is it okay for me to burn up a building because I'm unhappy with the way the police treat me?
		Are riots perfectly okay?
		Would it be okay if somebody walked up to John Lewis and punched him because they feel that John Lewis should have attended the Donald Trump Inaugural?
		Where do we go with this?
		Are you kidding me?
		And believe me, it would have been a huge story if there had been somebody like John Lewis who had been punched, as opposed to this Spencer guy that the media doesn't care about and feels is loathsome.
		I understand that.
		But I would have thought there would have been a little more coverage of it, but there wasn't very much.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so I know a certain amount of people are going to watch this and go, wait a minute, wait a minute.
		Here's a black guy and a Jew somehow defending a Nazi's right to free speech.
		He wants to, I'm pretty sure he'd want to kick both of us out of the country or something close to that.
		But it's tough to have principles, right?
		I mean, isn't that the crux of what you're saying?
		Basically the through line of all this is you gotta have some principles.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Wasn't it Voltaire who said, I disagree with what you said, but I would defend to my death your right to say it.
		I mean, we're talking about principles here.
		Free speech.
		And by the way, it's not unlawful to hate somebody.
		You can hate somebody.
		As you pointed out earlier, you can't put your hand on that person, but you have every right to dislike somebody for whatever reason you want.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So I sense that a lot of people think, though, that white supremacy is back, that they feel that there was a link to Trump somehow.
		I don't really see that link, but there was a link that somehow he unearthed this, and now Pepe the Frog, And Harambe the monkey and the white supremacists, they've been unearthed and now they feel it's okay.
		So their only response is to hit back.
		I would argue, which I think you would argue, which is you beat them with better ideas.
		Let this idiot talk and guess what?
		He's gonna show what a fraudulent bigot he actually is.
		But do you think there's any resurgence of actual white supremacy?
		I mean, is that a real issue?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I'm not seeing it.
		Donald Trump got a higher percentage of the black vote than Mitt Romney did, than John McCain did.
		He got a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney did.
		He got a smaller percentage of the white vote than the Republican who ran before him.
		So, I'm not seeing it.
		I am seeing a resurgence in the assertion that white supremacy is back, but I'm not seeing it.
		Look, one of Donald Trump's surrogates was Dr. Ben Carson.
		Is Dr. Ben Carson somebody that's going to cozy up to somebody who's a white supremacist?
		One of my friends, Stephen Miller, is the young speechwriter who wrote Donald Trump's inaugural speech and wrote his RNC speech.
		He's about 30, in his early 30s.
		I've known him since he was a teenager.
		He is not somebody who's going to work for a white supremacist.
		He happens to be a Jew.
		So, Donald Trump's a wrong vehicle to peg that on.
		And John Lewis said that He was not going to attend his inauguration.
		The first time in all of his years being in Congress, he's not going to attend the presidential inauguration.
		False.
		He did not attend George W. Bush's inauguration.
		Now, was George W. Bush a Nazi?
		Was he a fascist?
		Was he a racist?
		What was your argument, Mr. Lewis, if he were here, I'd ask him, for not attending George W. Bush's inauguration?
		I understand Donald Trump's, but explain George W. Bush's to me.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So is that the crazy position that a lot of people have painted themselves into now?
		They've screamed and ranted and raved that Trump and this whole movement is vile and racist
		and all this stuff, where now if he does any good, they're gonna have to lash out in crazy ways
		because you can't have a guy that you've been calling Hitler
		for a year, you can't suddenly admit that he's doing some good stuff, right?
		So they've put themselves in a really tight intellectual box here.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I think they have.
		And again, Donald Trump is a bad vehicle to do that with because if you look at some of his points of view, they're quite populist and quite left-wing.
		He and Bernie Sanders were completing each other's sentences on free trade, and when Donald Trump had that interview with 60 Minutes and he was asked about same-sex marriage, he said it was settled law.
		He could have said the same thing he said about abortion, which was, I'm going to put on a justice who ultimately would turn over Roe v. Wade.
		He didn't say that, but that's what he wants to happen.
		But he could have said that regarding gay marriage, because gay marriage is less settled law than abortion.
		Abortion has been on the books since 1973.
		The gay marriage decision just now came down.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So your argument is that he's actually more for gay marriage than he is for abortion?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		On gay marriage, he said to Steve Kroft, that issue's been settled.
		Really?
		He could have said, I'm going to put on justices that will look at the Constitution and will have all these issues go back to the state, like abortion.
		But he didn't.
		He said same-sex marriage is settled law, which was his way, in my opinion, of signaling to all of the people in the country, especially his critics, that I am okay with same-sex marriage.
		And as I mentioned, on free trade, he and Bernie Sanders were identical.
		And on infrastructure, He wants a trillion-dollar infrastructure investment.
		Chuck Schumer just now said that he's okay with that.
		When you have Chuck Schumer smiling, it seems to me you ought to be worried, but the point is these are left-wing kinds of things, and they felt that Obama's stimulus was too small.
		Well, I think it has to do with just the way he speaks.
		They're giddy over all of that.
		So why Donald Trump is engendering all of this hostility when he has so many centrist,
		if not left-wing points of view is beyond me.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it has to do with just the way he speaks.
		I think, you know, my concern about him from day one is I've said a thousand times on the show,
		I don't know what his moral center is.
		But I don't know that you know what a lot of these guys' moral center is
		A lot of them speak a lot cleaner, so you think you know it, and then you don't know it.
		You'd probably argue that about Obama.
		But for Trump, I don't know what it is.
		That being said, I think the answer to your question is, I think the left no longer has the ability to understand the difference between words and actions.
		So they see his gruff language and some poorly phrased things, and that he speaks not that well, And then they think that translates into action, when in fact he actually did a lot of things that brought them more center.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I think it goes back to what we said earlier, and that's just a lack of critical thinking.
		I think when there's an R at the end of your name, all of a sudden there are certain sets of views that people assume you have, and they go after those views.
		I look at his moral center.
		I look at Donald Trump's family.
		These kids adore him.
		He's had three different marriages.
		It's complicated to put all that stuff together.
		Three different marriages, children from all three of the marriages, and they all get along and they all worship their father.
		How bad a guy can he be?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's funny, I had Donald Trump Jr.
		on my SiriusXM show talking about how he was for gay marriage, this is about a little bit before it got passed, so about let's say three years ago, four years ago, talking about how he personally was for gay marriage even though his dad wasn't and that his dad said, you go out and tell people whatever you want.
		So I thought that's actually a nice marker.
		of sort of what a father should be.
		Do you fear his authoritarian side at all?
		Because as you said, small L libertarian, so you want the government to scale back.
		I sense he is going, yeah, he's gonna lower taxes and they're already doing some stuff with regulations that you're probably for and that kind of stuff.
		But do you sense there could be an authoritarian side, even controlling what businesses can do overseas and that kind of stuff, that you may not like?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		There are things he said that I don't like.
		I don't know that I would label them authoritarian.
		I would label them as stupid.
		For example, saying I'm going to put on a 30 or 40 percent tariff on goods that come in from this country if you've left the country and started a factory.
		All you're doing is discriminating against cheap prices and hurting American consumers.
		I, as a business person, have an obligation To maximize shareholder return.
		And if my biggest cost is labor, and I can go somewhere else and build my widgets for less money, I have an obligation to do that.
		And if I don't do that, my competitor will.
		And for a business person like Donald Trump to tell another business person, I'm going to punish you for seeking profits, to me is outrageous.
		I understand and support his idea that a lot of the reason people go overseas is because we have onerous regulations.
		And high corporate tax.
		Once you lower the regulations and lower the corporate taxation, and I as a CEO have made a calculation that I can make more money by putting my factory in a third world country, how dare you tax me for doing that?
		What gives you the right to do that?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so you would basically argue that if you lowered the corporate tax rates, did everything you could to unregulate business here, you wouldn't need that tax on the overseas stuff, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because you would be humming and purring nicely here.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Well, you wouldn't need to leave the country to set up a factory because you would stay here.
		What we have right now are all these environmental rules and regulations designed to fight climate change.
		We have a very high corporate tax rate, the highest in the industrialized world.
		You deal with those kinds of things, and you'll take away the incentive that some CEOs have to move outside the country.
		But assuming you take all those away, you lower the regulatory burdens that CEOs have to deal with, and they still want to put a factory somewhere, you have absolutely no right to stop them from doing that, in my opinion.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Do you think it's hilarious how we look at certain companies that do the exact same things as other companies?
		Some are okay, some aren't.
		So, for example, Trump made his ties in Mexico, which I kept saying all along, this isn't something you're getting him on.
		He's proving the point.
		He's proving the point that it's cheaper to do there.
		Change the regulations and then he wouldn't have to.
		At the same time, a company, and Trump was mocked relentlessly for doing that, right?
		At the same time, Apple designs their stuff in Cupertino, as they say, and it's all made in China, and they hide all kinds of stuff tax-wise, but we're all walking around with iPhones.
		How come some companies are able to... that's just the cool factor of Apple?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I think so, and I think Al Gore was on the board of directors of Apple at one point, if he isn't now, and here they are manufacturing stuff in China.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, some companies have better PR than other companies.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		He also sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, which is owned by Qatar, one of the biggest exporters of oil in the world, but you know.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		But we digress.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Let's not dwell on that.
		That's right.
		Okay, let's move over to fake news because this is so tied into what's happening with Trump.
		The outrage machine, and then the fake news machine, all of this, you've been all over this.
		I am just apoplectic about what's going on with this, because I see the mainstream media crumbling, I see online media growing, but I see risks in that too, because anybody can put on a tie and pretend they're somebody and get a desk, and that's, you know, it is what it is.
		How bad is this scourge of fake news?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I think we've always had really bad fake news.
		It just got passed off as CBS, NBC, or ABC.
		There have been lots of stories, in my opinion, that have been fake news stories.
		One of them was when Obama was pushing Obamacare, he said over and over again that his mother, who was suffering from cancer as she lay dying in her hospital bed in Hawaii, He said it over and over and over again, a book came out by a woman named Janie Scott, who used to work with the New York Times, therefore it must be a good book, and she said that those bills were promptly paid.
		The only quarrel was that Obama's mom had taken out a policy so that if she got sick she would be entitled to money.
		The law is that if you have been diagnosed, and you try to take a policy out like that, we can challenge it, and that's what they challenged.
		But regarding her medical bills, hospital bills, they were paid promptly, but he said it over and over and over again, and it helped to drive the narrative that if my mother got jacked over, and she has a PhD, and has a son from Harvard with a law degree, imagine what these insurance carriers will do to you.
		It turns out completely not true.
		Another fake news.
		I think I said earlier, when Obama said during his many press conferences, I am most proud of the fact that I rescued the economy.
		Really?
		TARP was done by George W. Bush, the bailouts were done by George W. Bush, and many of the things that Obama has done, including stimulus, actually hurt the recovery, didn't help it.
		Yet he says this over and over again with a straight face, and the failure of the media not to ask challenging questions when he raises that, to me, is fake news.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So that's the issue, so not to split hairs there, but that's the issue, that we've had basically a lapdog media.
		So there's the idea, I think when the left talks about fake news, they're talking about these right-wing sites that are just making up things, right?
		They push a lot of that on Breitbart and we can talk about that if you want.
		But that's different than what you're talking about, which is just a media that just simply got cozy.
		They got cozy with the people in power so they just stopped doing their job.
		You're calling that fake news?
unidentified		Absolutely.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I talked earlier about Obama pulling completely out of Iraq over the objection of his team.
		He also then said, well the reason I did that is because George W. Bush had negotiated an agreement that required me to leave at the time I did.
		Completely not true.
		George W. Bush did negotiate an agreement, but he fully expected his successor to negotiate a stay-behind force.
		And again, Obama has said this over and over again, and the media hasn't said anything about that.
		That, to me, is fake news.
unidentified		Right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So I remember when that happened, and I remember thinking when Obama said it, Yes, they had set the date, but obviously Obama had plenty of political capital at the time.
		If he had wanted to stay, he could have stayed.
		So that's right.
		It's just a conflation of poor media practices.
		And we saw a lot of this with Hillary, right?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Not just poor media practices.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I expect politicians to lie.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's my point.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		The willingness to look the other way because it's a guy that you're pulling for.
		When Obama came into office, he reneged on a deal that George W. Bush had negotiated.
		He negotiated a deal with Poland and with the Czech Republic for them to get missile defense.
		Russia didn't like it.
		Obama thought that he could curry favor with Russia by reneging on the deal, and he did.
		The failure of the media to bring this up and to bring up him saying him pushing the reset button and him saying to Medvedev when I get re-elected I'll have more flexibility.
		The failure of the media to bring this up when they're hitting Donald Trump for being too cozy with Putin is another example of fake news.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so that to me is the monster that we've created.
		They did nothing for so long.
		Now Because they don't like Trump.
		They're trying to be professional suddenly, which I want them to.
		I want them to do true investigative journalism.
		I want them to fight the power.
		But they seem almost ridiculous doing it now because they're watching tweets and getting outraged before we can.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		I just wrote a column about all of this.
		And what I've said is that the media has rediscovered their mission now that the Republican is back in the White House.
		But before that, in my opinion, they didn't do their jobs.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is it almost too late for them?
		Because I think they've lost so much cred that even now is they scurry to get their cred back.
		I mean, for example, yesterday, the day before I watched the second Sean Spicer I thought he basically did a pretty decent job.
		He took a gajillion questions.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		The first official one.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I watched the first official one, right?
		I think it was Monday.
		Right.
		And I watched the entire thing.
		I'm doing cardio.
		That's the only way I can watch it, right?
		I gotta, I have to be moving.
		You gotta run from the bullshit.
		So I'm watching this thing.
		Okay.
		I thought he basically did a pretty decent job.
		He took a gajillion questions.
		He answered them in pretty much the same way that all press people do, which is, you know, half answers.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Partially, and move on to the next one.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and that's what they do.
		But suddenly I saw all the headlines.
		First off, the main Twitter moment headline was saying that he was focusing on the numbers of people there.
		That was just a small portion, and it was only because they kept asking him that same question.
		So that's also fake news, right?
		Where they just keep framing something a certain way.
		Not just what is said, but that you can take an hour and a half thing and go, Well, this was the part that was important, when you know it actually wasn't the part.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Let me say a couple of things about that.
		Spicer not only quarreled with the idea that Trump's audience was larger than what the media reported, he also talked about the fact that a reporter from Time Magazine, not the Buck Tussle Gazette, Time Magazine, said that Donald Trump removed the bust of MLK from the Oval Office.
		Now that to me is a major story, if it were true.
		It is not true.
		Time Magazine, a reporter for Time Magazine tweeted it and it went around the world.
		Rather than focus on that fake news part, they talk about what Sean Spicer said about the crowd size, because that's something they could probably make an argument about.
		But the MLK thing, they can't make an argument about that, so we haven't even talked about that.
		And we found out because of WikiLeaks, David, how many of these reporters were in bed with the DNC, in bed with Hillary.
		I mean, a New York Times reporter is doing a massive story on Hillary and gave her veto proof over quotes she doesn't like.
		A power that she in fact used and took out a quote that she'd made about Sarah Palin.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you're not making this up by the way.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Washington Post was doing a story on John Podesta and found out some conflict of interest regarding money and gave him a heads up and told him don't worry about it, we'll bury it in the story.
		Staffers for Jake Tapper and for Wolf Blitzer of CNN contacted the DNC and said we're about ready to interview some Republicans, you have any questions for us?
		Dana Milbank is a columnist with the Washington Post.
		He did a story, a column called the 10 most outrageous things Donald Trump has ever said.
		He contacted the DNC and said, I'm about ready to do this column on the 10 most outrageous things Donald Trump ever said.
		Do you have any suggestions?
		They gave him 10 suggestions.
		He used eight.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Are you kidding me?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You didn't even mention the most egregious one, in my opinion, which is the whole Donna Brazile thing, which is to me the heart, because that one is the heart of how corrupt But at least CNN fired her, but the DNC hired her as interim chair, even after she was outed as having conspired with Hillary to make sure that Bernie Sanders did not win.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what does that say about the Democrats?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		But I think one of the most outrageous ones is a guy named Kurt Eichenwald.
		He writes for Newsweek and tweeted that Donald Trump had been put in a mental institution for some time.
		So this is where people talk about post-truth.
		Now, I know we don't want to be in a post-truth society.
		What's post-truth?
		debunked, but he wasn't fired or even suspended or even chastised.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So this is where people talk about post-truth.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Now I know we don't wanna be in a post-truth society.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		What's post-truth?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, post-truth that at this point, you know, any idiot who's amassed 150,000 Twitter followers
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		has as much influence in a lot of respects as Newsweek.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I'm almost at 150,000.
unidentified		Thank you for calling me an idiot.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I just went above it, that's why I mentioned that number, because I'm any idiot that could have as much influence.
		But really, you could have a set, you could figure out how to do the social media game, and somehow, because of that, you got a little blue check too, now you're an authority on this stuff.
		So that I do see as a major risk, that while I, Wanted the mainstream media to get the lashing it deserved.
		The fact that it's now everyone's just picking their truth wherever they can find it is a huge problem.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		It's both a problem and a blessing.
		It also means that the traditional establishment media can be gone around You can get your ideas out and nothing can stop you from communicating to people.
		But you're right, it means that anybody can communicate and whether or not he or she is credible is left to you as a consumer to figure out.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is there any way that you think Trump can reconcile this relationship with the media?
		Because I think it's almost the most important thing right now, more important than the policies.
		Because it's one thing to just rail against the media all the time.
		Again, I don't like what the mainstream media has done, but do you think he can get to a point where he'll actually do some real sit-downs, do some real press conferences, and not do the same things?
		Be willing to sit down with an interviewer, hopefully it'll be me, but maybe it'll be somebody else, and not demand the questions in advance.
		Be better than all the reasons that you just said the Democrats Well, I don't think it's Donald Trump's job to curry favor with the media.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		I think it's the media's job to be fair.
		And as far as I'm concerned, he has very little risk.
		He is disliked more than Reagan, more than George W. Bush.
		In my opinion, they're out to get him.
		And for him to have a more confrontational attitude towards the media, to me, makes perfect sense because there is no upside in him doing it any other way.
		They're going to go after him like nobody's business.
		They dislike him because of his attitude about immigration.
		They think of him as a racist.
		You think of him as a bigot, as a tyrant?
		If that's your attitude, and you're not going to cut me any slack, why should I kiss your butt?
		And so I have no problem with what Sean did.
		Sean Spicer, his first informal press conference, when he blasted the media the way he did.
		And it does turn out that Donald Trump's audience, which is the word he used to watch the Inaugural, was bigger than any audience in history, in part because of social media.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so a lot of people on Twitter were angry with me over that because I didn't say anything about it.
		But if you listen to actually what he said, he said audience meaning, and then he clarified it on Monday.
		He said, I mean people that are streaming it on Facebook and watching on iPads and YouTube and all that stuff.
		But everybody wants everyone to get outraged all the time.
		It's exhausting, isn't it?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		It also turns out, apparently, that when you look at the pictures of Obama's inaugural and Trump's, Trump's does look thinner, but my understanding is part of that is because of security measures.
		There's certain places you can't stand anymore, certain places you can't go through anymore, so a lot of people couldn't get to the main area because of all these security requirements.
		So you're comparing not apples to apples.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But you'd agree all that is just sideshow nonsense, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Like it's actually completely irrelevant whether, The amount of people I'm talking about, not the lying about it, but just whether there were X amount of people or Y, it's just irrelevant.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Completely irrelevant, except that he's putting media on notice, that you have to be fair to me.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Do you think the media regrets, you know, it's hard to categorize all the media, but when they look back at the way they treated McCain, who now looks like the most moderate, Republican of all time, you know?
		And they were times calling him racist.
		And I think he has an adopted black daughter, if I'm not mistaken.
		Or when they look at Romney and the binders of women and made it sound like he hates women.
		In a way, they created Trump.
		Because any Republican was going to get the cries of racism, was gonna get the cries of misogyny and the cries of xenophobia and homophobia and all that.
		So he brings up Peter Thiel, he still hates gays.
		As Ben Carson, he still hates black people.
unidentified		Right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So in a way, he was the only answer to this absurd equation.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		I think you're right.
		I think the media did help to create Donald Trump.
		People resent the idea that the media has gone after Republicans in a way that they've not gone after Democrats.
		And so there's a distrust.
		And when Donald Trump talked about political correctness and how he was no longer going to be politically correct, A lot of people took that to mean I'm no longer going to think of myself as a racist, as a sexist, simply because I've got normal views and normal ideas that any other guy has.
		And I think Donald Trump has given people like that a certain amount of comfort and credibility.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		All right, so one more for you, which will sort of wrap this whole thing up.
		What happens over the next four years?
		Where do you really see this all going?
		Do you see this endless clash between Trump and the left?
		Is there a way to get the media straightened out?
		Can we get some of this societal stuff?
		No, people see things differently.
		We disagree.
		We disagree about abortion.
		We disagree about same-sex marriage.
		We disagree about taxes, about spending, about foreign policy.
		would take a breath. It seems like everyone's just ramping up more and more now.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		No, people see things differently. We disagree. We disagree about abortion. We disagree about
		same-sex marriage. We disagree about taxes, about spending, about foreign policy. As long
		as we have those disagreements, we're going to have these kinds of disputes. But I think
		what will happen, hopefully, is that we have 4% GDP growth like we did under Ronald Reagan.
		Ronald Reagan was overwhelmingly re-elected, not because people agreed with him.
		They disagreed with him about his nuclear proliferation.
		They disagreed about his going into South America and trying to roll back some of the communist movements there.
		If you go down list by list, there was an article in the New York Times in 1986, It talked about all of these points of views and how
		Americans disagreed with Ronald Reagan, but they respected him and overwhelmingly re-elected him
		because ultimately it comes down to the economy.
		It comes down to pocketbook.
		And 70% of the American people felt that we were on the wrong track economically.
		And that is the primary reason, in my view, why Donald Trump won.
		Worst economic recovery since 1949.
		This has been a 2% recovery.
		The average recovery is 3%.
		And the difference between 2% and 3% is 1 million jobs times the length of the recovery.
		So if Obama had done nothing, had worked on his putting, we'd have 7 million more jobs than we have right now.
unidentified		Yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, he did work on the putting.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		We'd have 10 million more.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
		All right, well, Larry, it was a pleasure.
		We're gonna do a little bonus segment for our Patreon audience, and I thank you for coming back.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		My pleasure.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And we're gonna link to the original one, and people can see if maybe I changed you in some ways, too.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Who knows?
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		Well, I felt the same way leaving as I felt coming.
larry elder ▲ ● ▼		How's that?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Fair enough.

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