Dave Rubin and Glenn Beck dissect Donald Trump's executive order, clarifying it targets seven specific nations rather than all Muslims, excluding 750 million people while pausing vetting for 90 days. They debate the media's "Muslim ban" label versus constitutional concerns over bypassing Congress, contrasting modern progressive big government with classical liberalism and Jeffersonian history. Ultimately, the dialogue advocates for a human movement grounded in natural rights and humility, urging admission of mistakes over forced agreement to restore genuine connection across political divides. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, we have to talk about the so-called Muslim ban today.
Before I say anything else I want to be absolutely 100% crystal clear on one simple fact.
I am completely and fervently against any ban on immigrants based solely on their religion, whatever that religion may be.
I will always judge people as individuals, not as the collective, and I certainly don't plan on stopping that now as this fight over refugees and immigration is just heating up.
Within any group there are subgroups of people, and often it's these very subgroups that contain the most vulnerable populations such as free thinkers, gays and atheists.
So just so the trolls get it absolutely right, I, Dave Rubin, am 100% against any blanket ban which targets all Muslim people and I would feel exactly the same way if it was targeting any other religion.
OK, so we know that this refugee issue is one of the topics where no matter what anyone says, and definitely in my case, I'm going to get hate from both the extreme left and the extreme right.
Actually, the more hate that I get from both sides, the more I realize that I'm doing the right thing because nuance, honesty and logic are completely lost.
on those who stay on the dogmatic fringes.
So before I share my thoughts, I thought it would be important that we actually separate
some facts from fiction and discuss what's actually in Trump's executive order.
I've got the whole text of the order right here and yeah, I actually read the whole thing
unlike most of the people screaming about it online.
So despite what the hashtag on Twitter might tell you, this is not a Muslim ban.
First off, the word Muslim isn't in the text of the order, not even once, and you'd think that if you were exclusively trying to ban people of one religion from entering the country, you'd have to cite which religion you're talking about.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the ban doesn't include any of the five most populous Muslim countries, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria.
So if this was exclusively a Muslim ban, it does stand to reason it would include these nations, which add up to roughly 750 million people.
So if it's a Muslim ban, it's excluding more than half of the Muslims in the world.
This doesn't mean that there aren't some valid questions about the list of countries which are banned, as well as some glaring omissions in this executive order.
The 7 countries listed in the order are Syria, Libya, Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Somalia and Iraq.
All of these countries are involved in heavy sectarian violence, some of which is a direct result of American intervention without question.
To be clear though, no major terrorist attack has happened on American soil from anyone from these 7 countries currently on the banned list.
At the same time, there are omissions on the list, most notably Saudi Arabia, which 19 of the 21 9-11 hijackers were from.
The argument I've heard on this is that the ban applies to current conflict zones, and as odious as the Saudi government may be, the country isn't a war zone.
I don't really see how this is related to whether extremists are coming out of the country, but that seems to be the argument being made.
There are also many questions as to whether Trump's business ties in countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia were at least part of the reason they were left off the list.
We know for a fact that Turkey is letting ISIS fighters into Europe through its borders, and we know that Saudi Arabia is home to the world's most fervent strain of Sunni Wahhabism.
So, a quick recap so far.
We have a ban on nationals from countries which are currently hotbeds for terrorism, though the list is incomplete at best and arbitrary or ill-conceived at worst.
Up next is whether this is an actual ban or not.
From reading the document, and again, I read it, as well as analysis from other sources that I generally trust, there is no way that this order, at the moment, as it is written right now, is some kind of permanent ban on people from the countries listed.
It's a 90 day ban on people from those 7 countries and a total temporary stop of our refugee admission system for 120 days so the vetting system and other processes can be reviewed.
The one exception to this temporary stop is for Syrian refugees who are being banned indefinitely.
Perhaps this will lead to Trump trying to actually ban all foreign nationals from these countries or even expanding it to other countries, but at the moment It's a temporary ban while we figure out what's going on at our borders.
Simply put, whether you like it or not, this is one of the promises Trump made during the campaign season.
If at the end of 120 days we have a stronger vetting process, not based on blanket bigotry, but rather on informed decisions about each person individually, then we can finally start to have an honest discussion about how many refugees we can or should let in.
On the extremes we now have people calling for totally open borders, which is national suicide, and we also have other people calling for zero immigration, which is the antithesis of what America stands for.
Another important piece of the order is the deference that's being given to religious minorities who are under persecution.
I find the anger against this quite confusing.
The left is supposed to be for minorities, but in this case, giving priority to Yazidis, Kurds, Christians and others who are being wiped out as we speak is somehow being flipped as if this is supposedly anti-Muslim.
The truth is that these religious minorities are the most vulnerable communities in the entire Middle East.
It doesn't matter if you're a believer or a non-believer to understand that protecting the most at risk is the right thing to do.
An interesting point to add here is that the Obama administration let in 12,000 Muslims from Syria in 2016, but only 100 Christian refugees.
I don't know the reasoning behind this policy, but where was the outrage when Obama left Christians behind if this current outrage is really about protecting minorities who are in harm's way?
The order also limits the amount of refugees to 50,000 per year, which is basically in line with where we've been at over the past 15 years or so.
For example, in 2003, 2006 and 2007 we admitted less than 50,000 refugees per year under George W. Bush.
Obama bumped that up a bit to 70,000 people in the last two years of his administration, but in the previous three years before that he was right around that 50,000 mark as well.
Without getting too lost in the numbers here, the point is that Trump's proposal isn't far off of previous administrations, especially if you remove the little bump under the last two years of Obama.
Of course you can argue that American action or inaction in Syria has led to many of these refugees in the first place.
So again, where was the outrage when we were dropping bombs, not just temporarily limiting refugees?
Of course the last few years also coincide with a jump in worldwide jihad, especially in countries which have taken in many refugees.
I think if you could ask the people of Germany, France and Belgium if they might rethink some of their immigration policies over the past few years, there would probably be a resounding yes.
These countries now have to deal with homegrown terror as well as the influx of refugees which has created a new set of problems both economically and culturally.
None of this is a reason not to let sensible amounts of properly vetted refugees in, but it does lend credence to a temporary pause while we figure out if our vetting system is effective and sensible.
The rollout of this order was no doubt absolutely chaotic and confusing, but I'm not sure if any real change to our system could be done without a certain amount of chaos and confusion, especially because of a media that thrives on emotion over fact.
Finally, there also seems to be some confusion as to whether people who currently reside in the United States with green cards from these 7 countries would be able to come back to the country after leaving.
At first it sounds like they wouldn't have been allowed to get back in, then it sounded like they could get back in, and now it sounds like it'll be done on a case by case basis.
For example, my friend and former guest Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, who is a refugee from Iraq who now lives in America and has devoted his life to fighting Islamism and for secularism, could possibly be locked out of the country if he was to go do a speaking gig in Canada with my friend and former guest Ali Rizvi, a Muslim reformer himself.
This portion of the order still seems to be in flux, which is evidence of an unprepared rollout.
Of course this is 2017 and unfortunately facts seem to take a backseat to fiction and hysteria at every turn.
So some protesters are protesting without really knowing what's going on at all.
New York Senator Chuck Schumer is crying and talking about a Muslim ban when he must know full well that that isn't what this is.
People are now either drinking more Starbucks or boycotting Starbucks because Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said he would hire 10,000 refugees.
Elon Musk, who publicly offered on Twitter to take people's concerns directly to Trump, is being attacked by people as if he's enabling a Nazi.
As I predicted a few weeks ago, misguided outrage is taking the place of real discussion.
So when politicians scream about a Muslim ban, which this is not, it feeds the fire to Trump to do whatever he wants because no matter what he does, he knows they are going to be outraged.
This is why the regressive left and the Trumpian right are a match made in hell for each other.
We have one side which refuses to debate Islamism and immigration honestly, and another side that will be all too happy to circumvent our intended legislative process with the stroke of a pen.
If you value liberty over authoritarianism, then neither one of these positions is tenable.
In an effort to make sense of some of the madness surrounding this executive order, I have a few interesting conversations planned for this week, and I also want to share two articles by people I truly respect, though they are often at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Below you can find links to an article Ben Shapiro wrote about the executive order, as well as a blog post by Sam Harris.
In addition to those sources, in case you missed it, I did a live stream with Faisal yesterday, who is directly affected by this order, and you can find a link to that below as well.
And finally, my guest this week is no stranger to controversy himself, and also someone who often finds himself in the crosshairs of people on both extremes.
Glenn Beck will be joining me in studio today to discuss refugees, Trumpism, the modern conservative movement, online media and more.
I agree with Glenn on some issues and disagree with him on some others, but I generally find
him to be willing to have the hard conversations which right now we need more than ever.
I don't deserve the vitriolic hate and I don't deserve the adoration.
It's weird.
Because A, I don't feel like I deserve either of them.
But I'm willing to take the bad.
I'm willing to...
Sit and listen to the people who have the bad to say about me, because some of it I understand their perspective, some of it I made huge mistakes, just wrong on, but I'm willing to take my share of what we're now living, and in hopes that other people will go, okay, wait a minute, what have I done?
Even just a Facebook post.
What am I doing to contribute to the incivility that we have?
Yeah, well I'm glad you mentioned a Facebook post, because now we live in a time where if someone absolutely hates you, or absolutely loves you, and as you said, you may not deserve either one of those, they can get to you immediately.
I mean, I've done radio, this is In March will be my 40th year in broadcast. I've done it
for 40 years When I did it to get into radio you had to have a test and
get a license I mean it was it was hard to get a job and there's only a
small pool of people that could do it now Everybody has the same voice
If you have something that is appealing, there's no gates you have to go through.
You can now write the president.
You can tweet.
He might read it and retweet it.
So everybody has the opportunity to have their voice heard that is miraculous and a chance for me to write to the president or to Elon Musk or anybody and have them respond to me is truly remarkable.
What we're missing is but because you have that power it also requires responsibility and uh... because I did radio for forty years and my Radio worldview was really shaped during the beginnings of Howard Stern.
And I mean the early Washington before anybody knew him, Howard Stern.
I was raised in that era of stunting and, you know, entertainment.
And what I did was I mixed the two.
Trouble, trouble.
And I didn't see a problem.
It was a natural evolution.
That has taught a whole generation of, that's the way you do it.
I remember watching you when you were on Fox News, and you have the board, and you're drawing arrows everywhere, talking about the government's this, and God's here, and people are replacing government, and blah, blah, blah, blah, and all this stuff.
And I remember being half entertained, Half, I was like, wow, this guy is nuts.
I can't believe this is on television.
And then half going, there's actual information here.
So when you started doing that stuff, was that really the goal?
How many people now keep checking their Facebook page to see how many likes they get?
I mean, moms at home, how many likes do I get?
It's the same thing.
And if you're not careful, you'll find yourself caught up in those likes.
Early in my life out being an alcoholic before I sobered up I do anything for a rating point that Drove me rating point success money fame.
Yeah, I crashed Thank God for that crash or I would have Probably still be at Fox and I'd be a monster but the crash taught me that That can help you on goals.
Don't let it control you.
So yes, my first priority, my job, was to get ratings.
How many of the people, as someone that's been in cable news, now you're on the frontier of the digital stuff, how many people that we actually watch in cable news do you really think know what they're talking about?
This is something that I'm finding more and more often.
There are so few people when I turn on the television, any of the cable news channels especially, but I think this person really is sort of intellectually honest or really Most of them are television people.
You remember the lady Paula Zahn?
that stuff or are they just television people and we should just view them that way?
But it used to happen every time a star would off themselves or have a drug problem.
You know, Robert Downey, quit it, call Glenn!
And so, she didn't really know who I was, she just knew that I knew about alcoholism and I was an alcoholic.
And her question was so insipid, it was, what could we have done to prevent this?
As an alcoholic, nothing.
Everybody has their own bottom, nothing.
But, I'll never forget, I started talking about My mother.
She asked some question and it got to my mother's suicide.
And I had not talked about it on National Airwaves.
And when we were talking and I was trying to really explain to her that what alcoholism really is to me, that it's not something that somebody can talk you out of.
She had no interest.
It was like a fog.
The minute I started talking about my suicide, or my mother's suicide, I saw her eyes all of a sudden, like the gears went, he might cry.
Oh, she was locked in interested, but only to try to make me cry to get a ratings point.
It was so crazy and awful, and I remember walking off feeling dirty, and I have met very few, I could count them on one hand, Very few truly intellectually curious and honest.
I think the only one that I can say is intellectually curious and really tries to be intellectually honest is Anderson Cooper.
Guy I don't agree with, but I get along with really well.
He really tries, really tries to get it right.
I don't think he does, but he tries, and it bothers him when he doesn't.
I know him on the air, and I know when he's on with me, it's always intellectually curious and intellectually honest, which I really find Really rare, really rare.
Is intellectual honesty, it's really rare, but I mean, is it like, it's so not rewarded anymore.
I mean, this is what we were talking about right before we started, that people forget, these politicians, these news people, they forget we have YouTube.
We can now watch you say the exact reverse thing.
And that's the question, does anyone even care, or does everyone just pick their side and that's it?
I keep saying that My liberal principles are now becoming a conservative position, and I think I've had a little bit of an evolution.
I'm probably a little more small government than I used to be, but the basic liberal tenets that I've had are the exact same things that I had probably literally 20 years ago.
To take the individual freedom chair away from the table.
If you look at the early progressive movement with Wilson and, oh god here I go,
with Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, they both believed in the big state.
Where does the person who says no I don't want state, both parties said no it's state.
It's either, and this is before these took on dirty names, it's either fascism or communism.
Which one is it?
Fascism or communism?
That was the argument.
And the people that said, no, no, no, constitutionalism, individual freedom, my own choice, my own way of doing it.
No!
So FDR co-opted the word liberal Named the right conservative and that took the conservative that said, I believe in the Constitution, I'm conserving man's freedom, I'm a classic liberal.
It made that go away.
Took that choice away.
So now we have to do the opposite of what the progressives did and retrain people to say no.
They hijacked those words to take what we all It's so amazing, these words never, they always just sounded nice, but they have never rung as real to me as they do now.
There are some things that we find self-evident.
That all men are created equal, and they have certain rights, and they're life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I love that you mentioned Thomas Jefferson because I think he's the best example of someone that lived in a time Where what they believed in didn't quite match up to their life.
So this is a guy, I was at Monticello about a year ago, I've told the story a couple times, where they give you the tour and they fully, I was incredibly impressed with what they do.
You know, it's funny, Seinfeld is still my favorite sitcom of all time, and every night that I'm watching it, seven o'clock right before I have dinner, I'm watching it and I think, man, in 10 years, the pitchforks are gonna come after this show, because every episode dealt with some strange racial thing, or religious thing, or economic thing, or something, and it's like, that's my issue with the progressives now.
If you don't change the second they do, well, now you're a homophobe, you're a racist, you're a bigot, you're an Islamophobe, blah, blah, blah.
I would argue it's probably converted people to be stronger conservatives in a lot of respects, because they turn it on and they go, wait a minute, this isn't true, or this, you know, whatever.
But what else can we hit the right on?
Like, not gotcha in a gotcha sense, but what else has the right sort of missed for you?
Yeah, so that, there's video evidence of me saying the exact same thing, that I was against it when George W. did it, I was against when Obama did it, I'm against it now.
And this is the problem, that if we remove one of the three branches of government, if we just take the legislative branch out, and by the way, it's plenty, it's the fault of the Senate too, because they refuse to meet and do anything and all that stuff.
But that then we've ceded enough power to the president where people don't even understand civics anymore.
Well the progressives took that away so now we have a hundred men who Well, I want to make sure that Schumer stays in or I want to make sure Ted Cruz stays in.
Well, you shouldn't have be connected unless you're in the state of Texas or in the state of New York.
So they changed that basic fundamental principle and then, most people don't know this, Do you know where the Supreme Court used to meet before FDR made this big edifice of the Supreme Court with the big columns and Moses up at the top?
The Supreme Court played such a small role that when they built the Capitol, they looked at each other and went, Crap, we forgot about the third branch.
They met until the 1940s in the basement of the Capitol, okay?
They were nothing.
They were just there to go, yep, constitutional, not constitutional.
But again, the progressives made them into this, to now, they're the final word.
Well, they can't be dictators, the president can't be a dictator, and neither can Congress.
So, okay, so let's just talk about one of the executive orders, the one that everyone's going crazy about, the so-called Muslim ban.
Now I did a piece at the top of the show today talking about that this is not a Muslim ban because If you took the top five most populous Muslim countries.
Because as he's signing it, he's talking about banning Muslims.
What the hell are you doing?
What are you doing?
I think he's either just so sloppy with his language, which is really easy to do, or he's sending a message to those people that did vote for him, who's like, yeah, I want you to ban all those Muslims.
I don't know.
I don't know how big of a number that is.
So he started calling it a ban.
The press started calling it a ban.
So there's two sides.
One, he made the mistake of saying that.
If you want to be President of the United States, You have to be careful with your language.
I was sitting in with George W. Bush because I really disagreed with the way the war was being fought.
And he called me into the Oval Office and read me the Riot Act.
And he sat down, we sat in those two chairs by the fireplace, and he sat down and he said, you know, A lot of people think they know what it's like to be the President of the United States, but they have no fucking idea what it's like to be the President.
I was like, this is going to be the longest hour of my life.
Never heard him swear, never saw him angry.
He was pissed.
He said, let me tell you something.
And he started in on Five o'clock in the morning, he took phone calls.
He told me the names of the people that had died, where they died, what they were fighting for, what their parents said when he called them at seven that morning.
And then he told me about how the war was going.
And I said, and he was passionate.
He wasn't the, well, you know, a shoe.
He wasn't that guy.
And I said, no offense, Mr. President, But this is the guy that should be talking to the American people.
Where is all this?
He said, when you're president, just shifting your eyes is being watched by the Chinese, by your enemies, by your friends.
When you say something, and if you just shift your eyes, there is somebody in the world going, what does that mean?
We have a guy that they've painted as Hitler versus a media that we know will not act honestly.
There are some actors within that that will act honestly.
But we have a perfect storm where no matter what he does they're gonna go nuts and no matter what they do he's gonna hate them.
So like we've created now a situation where it gets to what I first wanted to start with.
Have you ever seen a period of time in your life where everyone seems like they're going nuts at the same time?
Because that's what it seems like to me.
Everyone that I'm talking to, and everyone's saying it.
People are starting to say it to each other.
You feel like everyone's going crazy?
Oh yeah, everyone's going crazy.
I mean, there really seems to be like, I think this is what you're talking about with the 80 year thing, that there's like this sort of, we're pulling the string on the fabric of what keeps us together.
So let me give you one thing that might not make you feel good and then something that will make you feel good.
One, you say about Perfect Storm.
A reoccurring phrase on my show at Fox and the Chalkboard was Perfect Storm.
And it was a president that would happily decree things through executive order, a press that was completely either in the pocket or untrustworthy, and a people that were angry, and one more element, economic collapse.
If you put real economic depression-like hardships there, look out.
It's going to fall apart and it's going to get nasty ugly.
Now let me give you the part that'll make you feel good.
I don't know why.
But I feel a tremendous pull or calling to stand for people who are being persecuted one way or another.
I don't know how that plays out, but it's why I have said, it's why I stood with Bill Maher two weeks after 9-11.
He doesn't even know this.
Here I am, talk radio, right after 9-11.
It's not popular to stand with a guy who says, you know what, they're braver than our soldiers.
And I stood with him saying, ABC, what part of the name politically incorrect don't you understand?
He has a right to say this.
So I try to stand with the people who are standing on principle and even if I disagree with them.
But this has manifested itself with me about five years ago.
I took my children to Auschwitz and I wanted my family to decide who we would be before any trouble would come.
And I said, someday I hope not, but history seems to repeat itself, and I feel like we're headed towards this where it's only heroes or villains, and depending on whose side wins, they're going to be villains.
And they could be the Japanese, they could be the Germans, they could be the Jews, they could be us.
Don't know.
But who are we going to be at that time?
So we went through Auschwitz, which was an amazing experience, and then I found a woman who was one of the righteous among the nations.
She was one who saved about a hundred Jews.
She was 16 at the time when she did it.
And her story is phenomenal.
But the last thing I asked her was, my kids and everybody had left, and I said to her, I'm on television and radio, and I believe these times are coming again.
I believe everybody has the seed of righteousness in us, but it has to be watered.
So I asked her, how can I water that tree of righteousness?
How can I water it in people to make it grow?
She said something that I thought was profound then, but as we are entering these times, how you just described it, it makes more sense than ever.
She said, You have to remember, you're looking at it from your time, not our time, not the time when I was doing it.
She said, the righteous didn't suddenly become righteous.
They weren't superheroes.
They just refused to go over the cliff with everyone else.
So you don't, we're in that time where everybody's like, oh my gosh, the world is going insane.
So what are some of those things that we could slowly untie?
So if you want the government to actually be smaller, if you want people to have more individual liberty, a little more money in their pocket, a little more control over their lives, what are the things that you can without destroying the system.
'Cause now I sense there's people on both sides that want the whole system to blow up.
And I think for all its faults, it's a pretty damn good system.
With that freedom comes responsibility, but that's their job, not the government's job.
They must try to be responsible.
Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to defend yourself.
This one would be a little harder because there are a lot of people who are against guns, but if you state it this way, where do laws come from?
If somebody says the government Then we have to have another remedial conversation.
Who gives the government power?
And how can I, if I don't have the right, would it be right if I moved into a neighborhood and somebody down the street was doing all these, just making tons of money, and I got all the neighbors to get together and I said, you know what?
Because the people in the neighborhood don't have the right themselves to take it.
You can't appoint somebody and give them a badge and say, oh, you now go take it.
You can't do that.
Because he has the right to his stuff, his property, his happiness.
When it comes to guns, no one, if I told you a story that this guy, and he's a really nice guy, he's wonderful, everybody loved him, He's Robin Williams, okay?
A guy, no one can say anything bad about Robin Williams, right?
And I tell you this story that Robin Williams went into the woods and he was tracking baby bears and he went into a cave and he saw this cute little baby bear and mom was sleeping over the side and he picked up that baby bear and here's Robin Williams just hugging and saying sweet things to this baby bear.
Then mom got up and killed Robin Williams!
Would we say, that damn bear?
Or would we say, what the hell is wrong with Robert Williams?
I think I finally understand what you were drawing on the board now.
(laughing)
10 years later, I think--
See? - I think I got it.
So what would you say then to the people who would say, but, they could say, okay, I hear ya.
I got liberty, I got individualism, I get that, but the way the system is now, the people at the top just keep getting more and the people at the bottom keep getting screwed.
How do you reconcile that with Okay, so here's the problem that I have had for the longest time, and it took somebody from the Ayn Rand Center to, which I disagree with Ayn Rand on selfishness, okay, me personally.
Yeah, so, and I've said, okay, help me out because the progressive movement started with, there are some people the robber barons that strangely how come all of our
libraries and art museums are named after these robber barons.
Anyway, so there comes a time when people get so rich and so powerful, George Soros,
and they begin to affect policy.
I was with a billionaire in Texas who will remain nameless, but a name everybody knows.
And I just moved to Texas, and he calls me up and he said, hey, I want to show you a part of the community, because we were thinking about building studios.
I want to show you a part of Texas you need to see.
So he took me up his helicopter, and he's showing me this land.
And he owns, I don't know how many acres.
It goes on and on and on and on, as far as you can see.
And he said, Here's the airport that I just built and see the corridor is coming through here and this highway, this little dirt road, this highway is actually going to link up and that's why I built the houses so far away because there's an actual, you know, ten-lane highway that's coming here.
There's nothing there.
And I've already laid the fiber and blah blah blah blah blah.
And as he's telling me this I'm thinking to myself, well this is how the rich get richer.
Because he's gone to the government of Texas and said, look, Where are you going to build the highways?
And if I made a case to you that you should build it here, you know, build your highway here because I'm going to provide all this infrastructure.
And so a deal's made, whether it's a clean out in the open deal or behind the door deal.
There is no freedom when somebody's up at the top going, hey, we're going to do this.
So how do you solve that?
The only way to solve that, because that's the real problem when somebody else is starting to graft the government, is to dismantle the size of the government and to bar any influence from them.
They can contribute all they want, but if there's a quid pro quo at all, Over.
That Trump now, because this is so over the top, I now see progressives for the first time arguing for states' rights.
He's only been in office for a week and suddenly they're going, whoa, whoa, whoa, the president has this much power?
We better get some power back to the states.
This is a beautiful thing.
And this goes to where we started also about how everyone's picking a team, but you can't pick a team, you have to pick a principle.
Because otherwise you're just going to be arguing the complete reverse of what you argued six months ago.
So in a weird way, could Trump end up smashing some of the stuff that you hate on the left just by doing stuff that you don't want him to do, authoritarian stuff you don't want him to do from the right?
The progressives exist and I wrote a book called Liars and Trump is on the cover.
And so is Hillary Clinton.
And so is Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.
It's a book about progressives.
It doesn't matter what side they're on.
This is their view and historically here's how they get it.
So there is a difference.
So many people call themselves progressives and they're not Like the actual progressives who know what that system is.
A progressive into what was called in the 1940s after Roosevelt by Stuart Chase, System X. Because communism had been discredited and so had fascism.
But they knew they wanted to have big government, so it's System X. Those people are dangerous.
But the people who are like, I really care about the planet, so do I. I really care about children and education, so do I. I care that the rich don't have a double standard, believe me, so do I. That everybody has access, not equal outcome, but access, so do I.
If those people come together, if that is indeed the center of this country, we're going to, coupled with Silicon Valley and what's happening now with technology, we're going to be the source of freedom for more people than the history of the world combined.
More people will be free because of the true American idea.
Coupled with this technology, world changes forever in great ways.
If we fail, the world goes into profound darkness like I can't even imagine.
You scared the hell out of me before, then you bet it was positive, and then you gave me a little caveat at the end.
We only have like four minutes left because you have a hard out here, but I suspect we're gonna do this again one way or another.
Give me just one to just wrap this whole thing up.
Can you think of one person in your life that you really took from ideas that that were rotting them, that you got to some clarity and someone that you just couldn't get.
So if you take that attitude and say, I'm coming unarmed, and I'm not trying to change your opinion, I just want to understand.
Help me.
Help me.
I have found, I mean, you're doing the same thing.
You're like, okay, I'm finding myself in a weird place, I don't know how I got here exactly, I don't know where this is going exactly, but how can we connect?
You're gonna find that people are starting to connect, and it comes from... This came to me when I was sitting in church, and this is one of the things that I don't like about... I'll just take on my faith.
I don't like, and they don't mean it this way, but it almost seems like our goal is to get people into the club.
I gotta get you baptized.
I gotta get you into the waters of repentance.
And then you're a member and we're together and then we'll go find other people.
What?
What is that?
That's not what they mean.
But that's the way it comes off.
And sometimes people say, you know, I was, uh, Kind of like your question, how do we get people in?
How do we change their minds?
Well, gotta be their friend, so be their friend.
That bothers me so much.
How about we're just honest?
How about I really find things that I like about you, if I can.
And if I don't, I'm not your friend.
And if I find things that I like about you, I'm your friend.
And maybe someday you'll go, this is really a good guy.