May 24, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
05:33
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| So last week, Sit Down with Brigitte Gabriel received quite possibly the most positive reaction | ||
| that we've ever had to an interview. | ||
| I'd say that well over 90% of the responses that I saw on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook were appreciative of our discussion of her incredible story growing up in Lebanon during the civil war, about the roots of radical Islam and what living in a free society is really all about. | ||
| People were in awe of Brigitte's personal story, amazed by her passion, impressed by her candor, or some combination thereof. | ||
| If you haven't seen her episode yet, but you only have a few minutes, check out the last 5 minutes of our chat to see what a true love of liberty and freedom is all about. | ||
| We'll put the link to that right here in the description below. | ||
| Oh, and for the record, I wasn't tearing up because of her impassioned speech, it was because of these damn bright lights. | ||
| They were getting to my retinas, you know how it can be. | ||
| I mentioned the reaction to our interview with Brigitte because it reiterates a lesson that I've consistently learned while doing this show. | ||
| Before we had Brigitte on, I talked to my team about whether we should have her on at all. | ||
| After all, Brigitte is hated by a lot of people who call her the usual buzzwords like racist, bigot, far right extremist and so on. | ||
| While we all know that the people who are using these words are becoming the new boy who cried wolf, and that these words themselves are losing their meaning by the minute, the chill effect these words have still remains in certain quarters. | ||
| Even in my case, when I'm selecting my guests, I do have to think for a moment if there's going to be some sort of cost for me to sit down with someone. | ||
| I still get a ton of hate for talking to Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Tommy Robinson, Paul Joseph Watson, and a couple other people. | ||
| In none of those cases do I regret having the conversations, regardless of the blowback these interviews may have caused me, but it does bring to light an important topic. | ||
| It's not just those who are being targeted as bigots and racists who are in the firing line of those who would like to silence us. | ||
| It's also the people willing to talk to those people and hear them out. | ||
| This guilt by association is incredibly dangerous because it can bite any of us for having a family member or even a friendship with someone who shares political views that fall out of the mainstream. | ||
| Should we disown people with views different than ours? | ||
| Should we defame them? | ||
| Should we publicly humiliate them? | ||
| All of these are small steps towards reporting them to the authorities for wrong think. | ||
| We should also note that in the online world, there is an information battle constantly happening. | ||
| When you put Brigitte's name in Google, the first site that comes up, which isn't one that's directly affiliated to her, is Islamophobia.org, which is part of CARE, the Council on American Islamic Relations. | ||
| Think back to my interview with Brigitte for just a second. | ||
| What was the bigoted part? | ||
| After living through everything she has, does she strike you as the problem in society? | ||
| Does she strike you as a bigot or a racist or a right wing nut? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| What I think is most interesting about the assault on conversation is how recent this phenomenon is. | ||
| My friend and mentor Larry King has built his legendary career on talking to people from every walk of life and from every part of the world. | ||
| On 5 days of any given week, he could talk to a member of the Ku Klux Klan, then Louis Farrakhan, then the cast of Friends, then Magic Johnson, and then the Pope. | ||
| Nobody ever accused Larry of sharing all their beliefs just because he talked to all of them. | ||
| Actually, this very concept would have been seen as totally ludicrous. | ||
| I'm proud to say that I know Larry pretty well, and it's his curious mind and real sense of wonder that made and still make him want to talk to all sorts of people doing all sorts of different things. | ||
| As you know, it's my policy that sunlight is the best disinfectant, that people with bad ideas will eventually hang themselves if given the room to do so, and I consistently try to do that. | ||
| This growing sense of guilt by association is just the next level of what the regressive left has built. | ||
| It's not enough just to label someone a bigot anymore. | ||
| Now we have to tar and feather them so that other people will be afraid to talk to them as well. | ||
| And if you're willing to talk to someone outside of their accepted group, they'll tar and feather you too in an effort to shut down any furthering of conversation. | ||
| And yes, unfortunately I do see this phenomenon far more on the left than on the right these days. | ||
| It's almost as if when you cut through the hysteria and the screaming and the slandering that they don't even believe their own ideas in the first place. | ||
| So they don't want counter ideas heard, but they also want to make sure people aren't entertaining other ideas in the first place. | ||
| This is incredibly dangerous, and it's not a game that I'll be taking part in. | ||
| We can't give them an inch because they will keep taking and taking until there's nothing of us left. | ||
| Between this silencing of those who veer from the mainstream and the YouTube demonetization that I discussed last week, those of us who really are fighting for free speech have our work cut out for us, and I am up for the challenge by the way. | ||
| Fortunately, we're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week, and joining me is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Tampa, Abby Hall. | ||
| Abby is also an affiliated scholar at the Mercatus Institute and a research fellow with the Independent Institute, a non-partisan educational think tank. | ||
| We're going to talk economics, war and peace, the drug war, our militarized police, and much more. |
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