March 15, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
07:10
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| Is it just me or is internet culture, the trolling, the outrage, and the endless hate | ||
| starting to eat itself? | ||
| This election obviously brought out the worst in almost everybody from real people to twitter eggs and anime avatars. | ||
| People are constantly attacking others online and saying things they would never dare say to someone's face in real life. | ||
| The really scary part of this though isn't the words, you guys know I love free speech, but there seems to be no bottom to this hole of anger. | ||
| Just think about your Facebook and Twitter feeds for a moment. | ||
| Are they enlightening, interesting and bringing joy and goodness to your life? | ||
| Or are they an endless cascade of rants and raves, psychotic ramblings, endless fighting and nonstop virtue signaling? | ||
| I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that for most of you, the answer is the latter, not the former. | ||
| And yes, there are also a lot of baby pictures on Facebook, which can be quite annoying. | ||
| What I think is most interesting about our constant state of bickering isn't the obvious fact that the internet can bring out the worst in all of us, but that it seems to me that this behavior and the reaction to it is now bleeding out into the real world. | ||
| I'm slammed with emails every day in which people explain to me how they are suffering real world consequences for what they post or even what they don't post online. | ||
| People are getting fired over tweets, losing friends over Facebook posts, and God only knows what's happening on Snapchat. | ||
| But perhaps worse than all of this is the chilling effect that this state of outrage has on the rest of us. | ||
| This is why I've said it before and I'll say it again, the biggest threat to free speech is that we are actively silencing ourselves, not that the government is silencing us. | ||
| The threat to free speech isn't just that protesters are violent at a Milo event, it's the trickle down effect that that has. | ||
| Now they're violent at events for people like conservatives and libertarians such as Ben Shapiro and Charles Murray. | ||
| But of course it won't stop there either. | ||
| Eventually they'll come for liberals too, while at the same time plenty of other people who just won't want to deal with the threats simply won't accept invitations to speak in the first place. | ||
| The outrage machine will just dull us all down to the point where we won't share any original thought because we just won't want to deal with the repercussions. | ||
| This is exactly what's happening with Trump right now. | ||
| The mainstream media and the twitter brigade go bananas every time anything happens. | ||
| The result is that people won't be able to gauge the proper outrage if he does do something that truly warrants it. | ||
| Yes, he eats his steak with ketchup while it is well done. | ||
| That sounds horrible to me, but you've got to deal with it. | ||
| Remember the boy who cried wolf? | ||
| Now we've got the media who cried Trump. | ||
| You think I'm being alarmist here? | ||
| Well, do we seem more politically correct or less politically correct than 5 years ago? | ||
| What about 10 years ago? | ||
| Do you find yourself censoring yourself more or less now than you did even last year? | ||
| Who is forcing you to censor yourself? | ||
| Is it the government? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I bet you need only look in the mirror. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| This creep of stifling speech for fear of being ostracized isn't going to magically reverse itself. | ||
| We have to proactively fight it and we should have started this a long time ago. | ||
| Take a minute and think about our current television programming. | ||
| Could all in the family, arguably the best sitcom in television history, with a bigoted yet lovable Archie Bunker possibly be on network television today? | ||
| The beauty of Archie was that we all know someone like him whether that person is white, brown, or blue. | ||
| Only through seeing these people, poking fun at them, and showing the short-sightedness of bigotry can we change our society to be more thoughtful and decent for everybody. | ||
| Even when I watch Seinfeld, with all of its quirky racially based characters, jokes about gays, women and everyone else, I think that the authoritarians will come for the show about nothing, which was really a show about everything, one day as well. | ||
| It won't be the government kicking Jerry and the crew off the air, it'll be the next generation of social justice warriors Upset about the episode where George wanted a black friend, or where Kramer wouldn't wear the AIDS ribbon, or the ones with characters like Ping, the Chinese delivery guy, or Babu, the Pakistani restaurateur. | ||
| Beyond the outrage machine, there is another nefarious layer here, which is a whole group of people who get off on the outrage itself. | ||
| This is the group of people who react to anything and everything so to get clicks and ultimately money from our constant state of outrage. | ||
| So when PewDiePie makes a stupid joke about Jews as he did a couple weeks ago, the bigger reaction is from those who want to capitalize on the moment Rather than those who are actually outraged by the joke itself. | ||
| Then the mainstream media gets involved, with the Wall Street Journal writing about the incident, which subsequently led Maker Studios to end their contract with PewDiePie. | ||
| This destructive force will take anyone down who has moved up too far. | ||
| The YouTubers attacking PewDiePie wish they had his 55 million subscribers, and the Wall Street Journal sees how his influence, believe it or not, is now dwarfing their own. | ||
| As online culture gets woven into every facet of our lives, it's vital we all pick up and choose our spots when to fight and when to be outraged. | ||
| If we're outraged at everything, then we're outraged at nothing. | ||
| If we spend all day online trying to find enemies, well then guess what? | ||
| Enemies will present themselves. | ||
| Making some intellectual point over an opponent has value, but we have to be careful that the value isn't because of the retweets and the favorites it garners. | ||
| I'm sure I could be better at some of this myself, especially on Twitter. | ||
| Trolls are always going to troll, but those of us who want to change things for the better have to actually be better ourselves. | ||
| Final thought, I was a guest on the Alex Jones Live show last week as some of you may have seen. | ||
| I'm not even fully familiar with Alex beyond the little bites I see of him screaming and generally going nuts. | ||
| That said, the guy has a huge audience and is clearly influential as mainstream media crumbles and online media rises. | ||
| As I've said before, this comes with both positives and negatives, but regardless, the fact is, the guy is talking to a huge amount of people. | ||
| Immediately when I got the request to be on the show I thought that I shouldn't do it because of the ton of hate that I was about to get. | ||
| Then I realized that if I didn't do the show I would only be holding myself hostage to the very same ideas which are silencing so many other people right now. | ||
| So I did the show, with no preparation or advanced questioning, and Alex let me say what I wanted to say. | ||
| While I got the usual hate from the usual haters just for appearing on the show, I also know that I got some of the ideas that I care about to be heard by his large audience. | ||
| Now, maybe some of them will come here and learn more about the issues that you and I care about. | ||
| If you're one of those new viewers, welcome. | ||
| I don't yell as much, but I think you'll dig it around here. | ||
| But, for the record, I do not believe that a secret group of lizard people are leading a shadow government which is trying to undermine our freedoms. | ||
| Obviously, it's actually a group of frogmen led by Pepe and they're actually a bunch of freedom fighters. |
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