April 19, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
04:02
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unidentified
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[music] | |
| The question I get asked more than anything else lately is, "How can you possibly say that Revenge of the Sith was a | ||
| good movie?" | ||
| But after that, and I do have my reasons, the next most asked question is who do you trust in the media? | ||
| I'm finding this question harder and harder to answer these days, which is yet another indication of how screwed up our political and social system is right now. | ||
| At the same time, it's hard to know just how screwy our world is, or whether it's just the loudest and craziest voices that consistently get amplified on social media. | ||
| Maybe the American Revolution actually was a bit nuttier than the history books would tell us, but we'll never know because George Washington didn't have the chance to live tweet it. | ||
| Without trust, we really don't have the basic underpinnings for a free and pluralistic society. | ||
| We have to trust our elected officials will do the jobs they're sworn in to do and carry out the promises they said they would deliver upon. | ||
| We have to trust that our media will keep the political elite in check and not just suck up to the powers that be. | ||
| And we have to trust that our institutions are strong enough to withstand corrupt politicians and totalitarian ideologies that would strip us from the very freedoms our system was built upon. | ||
| Of course trust, without doing the necessary work to make sure it's based in logic and reason, is really just faith. | ||
| Having faith that our politicians will do the right thing, or that our media will hold the politicians to account, or that our system will just function as it should, is basically a recipe for disaster. | ||
| Slowly but surely our freedoms will be chipped away at because faith isn't what guarantees our freedoms in the first place, it's the Constitution that does so. | ||
| Trust is built over time by repeated evidence that you can actually believe that when someone says something, it's what they mean. | ||
| You don't believe it simply because they say it, you believe it because of a track record of a person consistently following through on their word. | ||
| This is the opposite of faith, which is built on the idea of believing in something without evidence. | ||
| We usually talk about these existential issues in the context of God and religion, but I think it would serve us all well to ask some important questions about these issues right here and right now. | ||
| So now let me kick the question back to you. | ||
| Who do you trust in the media? | ||
| I'm guessing it's a pretty short list, though if you've got some good names I'd love to hear them in the comments section right down below. | ||
| Let's go a step further with that. | ||
| Who do you trust in politics? | ||
| If you're the biggest Trump supporter out there, do you truly trust everything he says? | ||
| Or do you accept his untruths because you believe in his wider agenda? | ||
| Accepting a certain amount of untruth may be the only legitimate way to view politics and politicians, but when you add a distrust of the media to a distrust of politicians and then toss in a heavy dose of social media craziness, we end up with this confused conversation in which we can't even agree on basic facts. | ||
| This spot, where nothing is really true, and what we feel overrides what's provable, is fertile ground for those on the extremes to take root. | ||
| So who do I trust? | ||
| Well there's a wide range of people, from Sam Harris, to Ben Shapiro, to Larry Elder, to Eric Weinstein. | ||
| Trusting these people doesn't mean that they are infallible, or that I agree with everything they say, but it does mean that I see they have a commitment to the truth and they have consistently done their best to put it out there. | ||
| They don't have all the answers, and I certainly don't either, but I think we're doing our best to find some truth in the sea of craziness. | ||
| For those of us who genuinely want to figure out how to combat the forces who want to burn down the system, or give in to authoritarian tyranny, our work is cut out for us. | ||
| As for me, I trust that it'll work out because I see more and more of you speaking out every day. |
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