June 23, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:08:16
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[MUSIC] | |
| So last Friday, the progressive website Mother Jones included me in an article about a quote, | ||
| "new extremist media industry that is further to the right than Breitbart." | ||
| In the piece, the author referred to me as quote, far right, citing interviews I've done with Mike Cernovich, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Lauren Southern to back up his accusation. | ||
| He cherry picked these guests to fit his narrative, yet somehow missed the endless amount of liberals I've had on the show, and some of the progressives I've hosted as well, including Margaret Cho, Hilary Rosen, Mark Duplass, John Fuglesang, and Michael Ian Black. | ||
| The article also attacked Patreon, the crowdfunding platform which myself and my team's livelihood depends on, for being tolerant of people with quote far right views such as mine, though of course nowhere did it include any of my purported far right views. | ||
| Earlier in the week Forbes called the Rubin Report a conservative talk show, but immediately retracted the statement when I contacted them. | ||
| Ironically, I've been saying for a while that defending my liberal beliefs is becoming a conservative position. | ||
| Although I don't think being called a conservative is somehow a pejorative, it clearly isn't a proper descriptor for this show in which I have hosted people from across the political divide. | ||
| For Mother Jones to accuse me of being an extremist Further to the right of Breitbart is obviously an inflammatory and demonstrably dishonest statement. | ||
| I've been around many people over the last few years who have been unfairly maligned, and I'm all too familiar with how this goes. | ||
| Whether it's Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Colin Moriarty, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Brett Weinstein, each attack is virtually never based on what these people have said, but is instead crafted out of straw man arguments with the words racist and bigot tossed around like candy. | ||
| Suddenly, the onus is on the people who aren't racists or bigots to disprove this accusation, usually slung by a misguided celebrity or a malicious newspaper or website. | ||
| The move, then, is on the accused. | ||
| Should they spend the time and energy defending themselves from accusations which aren't true, only to bring more attention to the accusations themselves? | ||
| Or should they ignore them, hoping that the false claims will go away over time? | ||
| I think there are solid arguments to be made for either tactic, and it truly depends on the situation at hand and the person involved. | ||
| In this case involving me, I went on the attack. | ||
| I decided this case was too egregious to ignore, and I contacted the article's author via Twitter, screenshotting pieces of his article and asking him to defend them. | ||
| Of course he couldn't defend his own words, that's the thing with truth, it's hard to work around, and eventually he made slight changes to the article, like including a tweet of mine in which I defended myself from his claims, and he removed the word far in front of the word right before referencing me in the article. | ||
| Putting aside the rest of the specifics of the article itself, I was happy to get a strong defense in public from many friends all over the political map. | ||
| People like Joe Rogan, Colin Moriarty, Faisal Sayed Al Motar, Brett Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, Michael Shermer, Peter Boghossian and many others offered strong defenses of me just as I've offered for others when I've seen them unfairly attacked. | ||
| I even got a public defense from Donald Trump Jr. | ||
| Putting my friends and public allies aside though, it's incredibly inspiring and humbling to see literally tens of thousands of people offer their voice when they feel you've been unjustly attacked. | ||
| And that's the key to this whole thing. | ||
| It's not me or Sam or Jordan or Brett that they fear. | ||
| What they really fear is that all of you will start saying what you think because their strength in numbers. | ||
| By Monday I wanted to put this whole story behind me, my dog had a health emergency which actually put this whole thing into perspective, but I admit I did get sucked back into the story very briefly. | ||
| Over the course of another Twitter exchange, I got the writer of the piece, Josh Harkinson, to publicly admit that I am NOT Further right than Breitbart, though of course he didn't change the title or have Mother Jones issue any sort of public correction. | ||
| One other interesting piece to all this is that the writer, Josh Harkinson, is one of the 40 people that James Hodgkinson, the shooter of the Republican baseball team last week in Virginia, followed on Twitter. | ||
| I can't draw a direct link there, but we know that Hodgkinson was a far lefty who was obviously driven to political extremes. | ||
| So when this very same writer does a hatchet job on me, calling me further right than Breitbart, which is clearly a code for racist, I can't sit back there and take it. | ||
| This is exactly why I've been saying you can't punch Nazis. | ||
| Call everyone you oppose a Nazi and a racist and then eventually you will see violence as the next logical step. | ||
| It's not a crazy exercise to think that this is partially what drove James Hodgkinson. | ||
| In hindsight, his attack on me was the next obvious step in where this whole collectivist movement is going. | ||
| I've talked for a long time about how if you can't debate ideas, you use lies and buzzwords. | ||
| Having it turned on me shouldn't have been a surprise, especially from a leftist site like Mother Jones, yet somehow it did still surprise me. | ||
| Make no mistake, there is a thinkquisition going on here, and it can come for anyone At any time. | ||
| If you ally yourself with people who value the movement, in this case a political movement, over you as an individual then eventually it is inevitable that they will come for you. | ||
| And if they don't come for you, you're probably the one coming for them. | ||
| This thinkquisition will come after anyone who bucks the trend and the stereotypes and dares think for themselves. | ||
| It's why they accuse Ayaan Hirsi Ali of being anti-Muslim. | ||
| It's why they slander Bill Maher as being a racist. | ||
| It's why they call Larry Elder an Uncle Tom. | ||
| And it's why, apparently, they can brand me a far-right extremist. | ||
| Those who are a part of this inquisition fear you thinking for yourself, that you won't bow to their collectivist demands more than anything else. | ||
| The way to beat this witch hunt is to be yourself and fight for what you believe. | ||
| You are the antidote they fear most. | ||
| I hope that next time you see me fighting back and getting some cover from my allies, it'll inspire you to fight back, specifically with words, not violence, as well. | ||
| Joining me on the show this week is one of my aforementioned allies and a friend and | ||
| author and professor Peter Boghossian who's going to help me dissect some of the madness | ||
| of 2017 and much more. | ||
| Joining me today is an author and a professor of philosophy at Portland State University | ||
| and a man who strives to be a good human every day. | ||
| Peter Bregozian, welcome back! | ||
| It's great to be here, thanks, and thanks for the striving to be a good human. | ||
| You'd never know it from what people have been saying about us recently. | ||
| Well, certainly about me. | ||
|
unidentified
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About you. | |
| You've really been through the wringer in the last few days, and I would love to get to that and talk about that. | ||
| I suspect we can get to that, but strives to be a good human being. | ||
| The reason I threw that in there, because that seems to me, you were on the show about a year and a half ago. | ||
| We had never met before that. | ||
| We've since become very good friends. | ||
| Very good friends. | ||
| We hit it off instantly. | ||
| Just like that, and when you were on the show, and we'll link to it down below so that people can see the initial sit-down, I felt that it was one of the episodes where so many of the things that I had been thinking about, about the left, about politics, about religion, so many of the things sort of all came together. | ||
| I actually, they really did, and I felt richer after, and I do often in some interviews, some interviews I feel dumber, but this was one where I felt richer. | ||
| And since we've become friends, but you do strive to be You're pretty decent. | ||
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unidentified
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I do. | |
| You said, how should I introduce you in the beginning? | ||
| I don't ask that normally. | ||
| The only reason I ask is because we're friends and I thought maybe there's some personal little antidote or something that you wanted to tell me. | ||
| I'm really just striving to be a good person. | ||
| I think that that's one of the things that matters, that kindness, that compassion. | ||
| I think we've so lost it in acrimonious. | ||
| We're so hyper-partisan and the college craziness and everything that's been going on. | ||
| And the attacks, and people don't give you an opportunity to respond to those attacks, and the negativity on social media. | ||
| So, yeah, I'm just trying to be a good guy. | ||
| I'm just trying to live a good life. | ||
| A good life. | ||
| So, in the last couple months, you lost your dad. | ||
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unidentified
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I did. | |
| That was one of the seminal events of my life. | ||
| How do you stay a good person throughout that? | ||
| Not that losing someone's gonna make you a bad person, obviously, but you're still trying to work. | ||
| You're still trying to be a public person and to write. | ||
| How do you manage not just going nutty in the course of it? | ||
| Yeah, and I had some health issues. | ||
| I was in the emergency room three times the last few months. | ||
| I have Crohn's disease, so that's not doing me any favors either. | ||
| Without getting too deep, I mean, you were in the hospital today. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| I don't know if you wanted me to tell that to people. | ||
| No, that's fine. | ||
| You've had some stuff going on. | ||
| I'm open about it. | ||
| And I think that that really does make every moment of your life precious. | ||
| And when my dad died and my mom died, I don't know, it's kind of a combination of feeling More circumspect, and I've always had in the back of my mind my parents' approbation of what my dad think or my mom think, and it's kind of really given me an opportunity to, I'm trying to frame it positively, it's given me an opportunity to reflect on what they did for me in my life and try to do that | ||
| For my kids, but yeah, when living, navigating that reality when your parents have died is very intense. | ||
| It's very, you know, even little things like you get in the car, you should always get in the car and just call my dad or I call my mom and I don't do that anymore. | ||
| And I think one of the, that's why I was thinking today, I don't like the idea that someone passed. | ||
| They're dead. | ||
| They've died. | ||
| There's a permanence to that and that language. | ||
| And I am always thinking to myself, like, oh, my mom would like that. | ||
| My dad would like that. | ||
| And real quick, when my mom died, it wasn't really until her funeral that I understood that she died. | ||
| Like, really grokked it. | ||
| Because someone fell asleep in her funeral. | ||
| And I thought, God, my mom would think that's hilarious. | ||
| She would love that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then I realized, like, I could never tell her that. | ||
| I could never tell her anything again. | ||
| And those pillars in your life that you can't go to in times of joy, in times of stress. | ||
| You know, I was in the hospital for another time for my Crohn's disease. | ||
| My dad stayed up with me all night. | ||
| He was there. | ||
| And that part of my life is gone now. | ||
| Yeah, so as a philosophy professor and as a well-known and outspoken atheist, when you're challenged with something like the death of a parent, do any of your beliefs get challenged? | ||
| I mean, is there a moment right after your dad passed where you thought, Man, I want to believe, or did you maybe have a dream that seemed different? | ||
| Something like that, because you know my feelings on belief, and I'm not a believer in the traditional sense, and yet occasionally things happen that I go, what was that? | ||
| After my grandma passed, who I was very close with, I had some very vivid dreams that seemed to me she was telling me something. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying I buy it for all it is, but it has some value to me. | ||
| Did you have any of that? | ||
| No, I was just incredibly bereaved and I was, I mean it was just a shattering of a type of reality for me. | ||
| But it also made me realize that it really is true that every moment of life is precious. | ||
| You just have to be so grateful, go through life with a sort of gratitude for the experiences that you have. | ||
| So when you hear someone like me that you know pretty well say, well, you know, my grandma passed away and then, I mean, I could tell you about the dream. | ||
| I was in her apartment. | ||
| She looked amazing. | ||
| She was like glowing and she was wearing all black and she had these like green neon streaks in her hair and she was like running in place really fast. | ||
| And she was telling me how excited she is and she has all these things to do. | ||
| I mean, it was, and it was vivid and powerful and whatever. | ||
| And so when you hear me say something like that, as a non-believer, what do you think of that? | ||
| I think it's totally normal and totally natural. | ||
| I think different people grieve in different ways and I think it was... | ||
| When my grandfather died, I had a similar experience. | ||
| I had a hyper-vivid dream about him. | ||
| I think these moments in life, life, death, they're really, they give you a kind of clarity sometimes, but they also, so here's, so for my dad, when he had died and I was holding my dad's hand at his death and my mom's hand at her death, so I was incredibly fortunate, you know, they saw me into the world and I saw them out of the world. | ||
| I was just irreconcilable. | ||
| I mean, I was just, I was a complete mess. | ||
| I was sobbing, and the woman who comes in, the social worker, what have you, said, you know, normally we have grief counselors here, and normally I would suggest to say, but in your case, I really think you have to go see the grief counselor. | ||
| I'm sending the grief counselor in. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And I think part of that was so hard for me is precisely because they don't have those metaphysical beliefs like that's the finality like that's it. | ||
| So then did you have moments through these? | ||
| So you didn't I guess you're saying you really didn't have a moment where suddenly you thought maybe I got this wrong or or I want to believe in something that I can't prove but That's a great line. | ||
| it's really that locked for you? | ||
| Oh no, it's not locked. | ||
| I just never bartered my hope for anything. | ||
| That's a great line. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I never bartered my hope for anything. | ||
| Yeah, it's true though. | ||
| I mean, I never, and then you go through the long, you know, I was living in his house, | ||
| I was driving his car, I was wearing his clothes, 'cause right after we did the event | ||
| with Christina Hoff Summers, the next day that I went out there to see him, | ||
| but it was fortunate. | ||
| And you know, one thing that people really don't want to talk about, I think the left and the right has their own blind spots, but Parenting, I am absolutely convinced, is a prophylactic to bad behavior good parenting. | ||
| And if you look at the data, kids are more likely to commit violent crimes if they're in a certain age group. | ||
| I just read this and I was reading Matt Thornton's manuscript about violence. | ||
| and if there are males, and if there's no adult male present in the home. | ||
| And just as the left doesn't want to acknowledge that and talk about that, so too does the | ||
| right have particular blinders about structural inequality and such. | ||
| But I think parenting and good parenting and being thoughtful and what that means. | ||
| When I was driving down here, the Uber driver told me that—I'm not going to mention | ||
| I'll get 50,000 emails. | ||
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unidentified
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You hate these people. | |
| Give me the same hemisphere. | ||
| Southeast Asia. | ||
| Was telling me that they come from a traditional family and I asked, why don't your kids go to see your ex? | ||
| And she said, well, he used to spank them. | ||
| I thought, wow, I've never raised my hand to my children ever. | ||
| I have raised my voice on occasion. | ||
| I've never lost my temper. | ||
| It doesn't speak to me. | ||
| You've smacked me once or twice in an argument. | ||
| More than that. | ||
| But that's the other thing. | ||
| It's this idea about Verbal violence, it's the idea. | ||
| It's a complication, but I think parenting, I think we've overlooked how important that is. | ||
| Oh, one more thing. | ||
| One thing since we're talking about this. | ||
| I didn't plan on talking about this. | ||
| I have no plan here, Peter. | ||
| The nurse said something really interesting to me. | ||
| She said, I bet you he was a wonderful father to you. | ||
| And I said, well, you say that to everybody. | ||
| And she said, actually, no, I don't. | ||
| I can tell by the way the kids treat their parents when they come to the hospital. | ||
| And it was so sad. | ||
| So I would walk into this hospital every day and I would see all these people who were | ||
| literally dying and they were alone. | ||
| And they had nobody. | ||
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unidentified
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And it just made me... | |
| What a kind of a loneliness, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that the funny thing about non-belief, that you've so obviously had a transcendent experience, but it's all based in actually what happened? | ||
| Yeah, it's based in reality. | ||
| Like, I had a father. | ||
| He was a physical person. | ||
| He lived in my home. | ||
| He raised me. | ||
| Oh, and there's two things. | ||
| What did I do when my father died after, you know, sobbing, and the first person I called was my childhood friend, like, the next person who had known me for the longest time, and he cheered me up, and it was good. | ||
| Or he tried to, you know... | ||
| That's connected to the family thing, don't you think? | ||
| I've mentioned this a couple of times lately, that I think now, at 41 next week, I've started to really understand. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| I've started to understand why the family thing is so important, and that I'm so proud that my parents have been married for 40-some-odd years, and I still go home to the same childhood home, and my family friends are all still there. | ||
| My best friend in the world is still the same guy that I met before kindergarten when we were four years old. | ||
| Those connections, Have incredible value. | ||
| That's what, you know, what is the meaning of life? | ||
| Well, you know, whatever you make the meaning of life be. | ||
| But Aristotle talks about that and here's what I would throw out to you and to the audience is that you can have the richest, deepest, most rewarding friendships. | ||
| If you're a person of virtue, and the person with whom you're friends with is a person of virtue. | ||
| Aristotle says it's the highest form of friendship between two virtuous people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, what does that entail? | ||
| And it really does entail a kind of Greek cop heresy, speaking truth in the face of danger. | ||
| So, and I've told you a few things, and you've told me a few things. | ||
| Hey, I think you're wrong about this, or what have you. | ||
| And if that is sufficient to decide that we're gonna part ways, then either our friendship wasn't that strong in the first place, or I would like to think that we have the sort of relationship that we can be completely honest with each other, and even really, I wouldn't spare your feelings about something, frankly. | ||
| Yeah, which is what you want! | ||
| That's what true friendship is about. | ||
| Right, and then I would expect that you would expect that I wouldn't spare your feelings, that I would just say, hey, look, man, this is how it is, you did this, and I have to say, and then whatever it was. | ||
| I was telling you about this right before we started, so without even saying the sex or name of the person, certainly, or anything like that, I got into a bit of an argument with a friend of mine, a public person, just yesterday, and we really got into it on the phone, and I made it clear, and I've done this a couple times lately, made it clear with people that even if we're They're apoplectically angry at each other. | ||
| This is not going to end the friendship, at least for me. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| And I feel very, that comes very easy for me to say that. | ||
| It really does. | ||
| And I don't know why that's so hard for other people to do, that we're so now willing, and maybe it is a social media thing and a short attention span thing or something, like we're so willing to just shred things that we've had. | ||
| Yeah, it lends itself to a really interesting question. | ||
| What would be, Since we're talking personally, if I may, what would be a deal breaker for a relationship? | ||
| And I was at dinner with my family a few weeks ago, and my son, you've met my son. | ||
| Yeah, he's a great kid. | ||
| I almost always keep my family's names and stuff. | ||
| Started talking about one of the things he's learning about in school is gender and social constructs and sex changes. | ||
| And he said to my wife, if dad decided to become a woman, would you still be married to him? | ||
| And my wife, without an instance of hesitation, said no. | ||
| And both my children were flabbergasted by that. | ||
| They couldn't, they couldn't. | ||
| And then they kept pressing her and she said, basically, you know, this isn't what I signed up for. | ||
| And it just made me think, so what are the limits of friendship? | ||
| Like, what would the limits of friendship... I mean, I can think of a few things. | ||
| Well, if I found out that you murdered somebody, that you were a cold-blooded murderer, or you had done something so duplicitous, directly related to me... Or even, I would add, maybe even to someone else, or... | ||
| Oh yeah, it doesn't have to be directly related. | ||
| We could make a scale, like what if I started filling my pockets when you were in the kitchen with grapes that I saw in the fridge? | ||
| I told you you could have anything out of that. | ||
| I know, I know, right? | ||
| The funny thing is we'd have a relationship, I didn't ask, I was going to take it anyway. | ||
| You did. | ||
| So like what if I went into your bedroom when you were gone and went through your drawers? | ||
| There are, you know, what those limits are are different, but I would, I'd suggest that it really comes down to virtue and trust and those sorts of relationships give your life so much meaning and are so fulfilling and are so profound, they make for a life worth living. | ||
| And that's, I think, what we need to put front and center in our lives. | ||
| And even the stuff on addiction is fascinating. | ||
| My wife's an addiction medicine doctor, and she gave this really interesting presentation about how one of the reasons that people become and stay addicts, and all the studies, and this is out of my area of expertise, but basically, she does these studies on rat parks, and when rats are given wheels and fun things, habit trails, whatever rap's like, | ||
| they're much less likely to choose narcotics than if they're not. | ||
| And one of those things is these relationships that we develop and we nurture throughout our lives. | ||
| And I guess I would like to be the sort of person for whom being a person of integrity and virtue | ||
| and having those deeply fulfilling relationships enhances my life and my friendship. | ||
| And then when you call me and you say, "Hey, this is up." | ||
| Thanks for that I appreciate you did this and that was a massive dick move. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| I appreciate that So I know we've talked about, we've definitely talked about this privately, but I think we may have talked about it last time also, but I think it would be good to retouch. | ||
| If someone does exactly what you just said, to find that virtuous life, but needs to do it through belief, but does the exact same thing, do you think that that is somehow still an inherent problem with the proper, not the proper way to be a human, but just, what's the problem then, if somebody does that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, there are two issues with that. | |
| One is, what's the problem, does that cause a problem with your relationship to somebody? | ||
| So, I have a friend who's, not only is he a hardcore Christian, he writes children's books trying to indoctrinate people into Christianity. | ||
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Phil Vischer, the guy from VeggieTales, he's become a very good friend of mine, Texan and such. | |
| So this shows you can be friends with someone. | ||
| You can, and I've confided in him about things, and I trust him, and I have told him in no uncertain terms, I think he's harboring a, not a misconception, but a delusion about the nature of reality, and we've had a civil talk, no one threw fists to cuffs, no one, we talk about that in the context of our friendship. | ||
| But that wasn't sufficient for him to end the fall. | ||
| I never had any idea we were talking about this today. | ||
| That wasn't sufficient for him to withdraw from the friendship or end the friendship. | ||
| And that's a core belief. | ||
| I mean, that's an antithetical belief to what I've devoted my professional life is to helping people think clearly and critically and overthrow dogma and ideology and morally motivated reasoning. | ||
| But I think the problem with that is It depends on what you want to have, what your relationship to truth wants, what you think it should be. | ||
| There would be something to me, if somebody was friends with me, and a genuine friend, and a virtuous friend, only because they feared that if they would not do that, they would go to hell, there would be something suspect in that for me. | ||
| But what if it wasn't that? | ||
| What if they just had some belief? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, whatever it is. | ||
| Zeus or Flora. | ||
| They just had some belief that you couldn't prove. | ||
| Karma. | ||
| Right, okay, karma's a great thing. | ||
| So they just believed in karma. | ||
| What they're gonna put out there is gonna come back to them. | ||
| Thus, because of that, they become the virtuous type of person that you aspire to be. | ||
| It's a great question. | ||
| I think I've shifted my stance on that over the years. | ||
| I guess, I'm having trouble with the question because I don't really think someone can truly be virtuous if they harbor beliefs based on a faulty epistemology. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So we could sort of get lost in the definition of virtue. | ||
| But let's just say that's the case. | ||
| The world would be better off and human flourishing would be contributed to if more people had this false belief view than if we resorted to this Hobbesian state. | ||
| Yeah, I guess the problem would be if they alone believe that and didn't try to institutionalize that, I think it would be less of a problem than I would have said even two or three years ago. | ||
| Yeah, and I think perhaps, and I'll watch the video again myself, I think you might have answered that a little bit differently, which shows a flexible mind. | ||
| Do you ever fear that as a public person? | ||
| You say things, you tweet things, you do interviews, you go on podcasts, all those things, that people are gonna be like, ah, you see? | ||
| Two years ago he said something else and it's like they just want to get you. | ||
| So that should be a virtue. | ||
| It should be a virtue that you change your mind. | ||
| I will admit, it's hard for me to admit but it's true, it's so difficult when you're constantly under attack and constantly under siege to say, It's far more difficult, not only to say I made a mistake, but like, look, I really thought about this, and then you get, that's why I've stopped reading my Twitter mentions or Facebook, and none of that, I don't read any of it anymore, because it's just so filled with hate and rage, and even if you look at the terms we use, the moral valence of terms have like flip-flopping. | ||
| Flip-flopping is a negative thing. | ||
| You change your mind, but you should change your mind. | ||
| What if you're commander-in-chief and the situation on the ground changes and you don't have access to that? | ||
| Oh, he flip-flopped about troops in Iraq or Guantanamo. | ||
| Well, we live in a dynamic world where things are in flux and they change. | ||
| But I have found, I have definitely found that Being that sort of person who's not willing to change my mind, but the open admission of that on Twitter or Facebook has become more difficult as people ramp up their personal slanders and attacks. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm very aware of that. | ||
| And I'm dying to talk to you about this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dying to talk to you about what's been going on with you. | ||
| I've had some strange things going on. | ||
| We'll get there in just one second. | ||
| You also had another sort of attack on you. | ||
| It was sort of similar to what I had on me. | ||
| But that, but I think you're really onto something there that I don't think it's, if someone, you know, sometimes people will say, well, you said this three years ago, or you used to believe this. | ||
| They'll look at some of my tweets when I was a far left progressive, and they'll go, you used to make fun of white people for this. | ||
| And I go, Yeah, you're not proving me, what are you trying to prove? | ||
| You're proving that, yes, I evolved out of something. | ||
| Right, you've changed your mind and you say, wow, this guy had took in information and as a result, isn't that what, that's what rational people do. | ||
| That's what you're supposed to do, but you're also right about the other point, which is that when you're under attack from people, when you feel like everything you're gonna say is gonna be like, then you stop having those nice moments of mea culpas and contrition. | ||
| And you know what else you stop doing, which is interesting? | ||
| You stop asking questions. | ||
| And you might ask the questions yourself, but you don't want to articulate those questions, or you don't want to articulate those rebuttals, because you really don't want to receive 500 emails and shift through all of them telling you you're a shithead, and you should go die and kill yourself, and people write your name in the walls as a Nazi. | ||
| So you stop doing that. | ||
| I mean, like, to give you an example, this film I was in with Michael Shermer, Reasons to Believe. | ||
| And I made a comment about pussy hats, these people having pussy hats, and I basically said, look, this is not the image you want to portray. | ||
| And someone, I got an unbelievable amount of just crazy talk about that, but one of the things I thought was, I almost said, I came so close to saying, do you think Martin Luther King Would have been more respected or less respected if he had a pussy hat on. | ||
| I mean it would have been the perfect thing to say but I didn't say it because I didn't want hundreds of emails and tweets about me being a racist. | ||
| So I think we're in a precarious situation right now and I think Sam is getting this in crazy amounts, asking questions, opening conversations. | ||
| We need to have those conversations. | ||
| We need to ask those questions. | ||
| You're talking about Sam Harris, just in case that-- | ||
| Yeah, Sam Harris, yeah. | ||
| You know, you had Charles Murray, even Gary Tollum's the guy who, the anti-sugar guy. | ||
| So what do you do then, if you were in my position or in Sam's position, when I see some articles | ||
| written about him and say, well, Reuben talked to this guy or this guy or this gal, and they think this, | ||
| and Reuben didn't ask them this, and all this stuff. | ||
| And Sam gets this too, by the way. | ||
| I mean, Vox did a really hatchet job misrepresenting what him and Charles Murray talked about. | ||
| Salon hit pieces. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And Slate just wrote something about you. | ||
| We're going to talk about the conceptual penis shortly and what happened with Salon. | ||
| All of those things, they add up to us not having any more conversation. | ||
| Because at some point it's just like, all right, well then I'll just talk to people. | ||
| I'll just talk to, it's not that I'll talk to people I agree with, I'll just talk to people who say nothing. | ||
| Because then I've completely insulated myself and no one will really dial in anyway. | ||
| So this is, I think, what we need to do. | ||
| I think we need to figure out, everybody, James Lindsay actually gave me this idea and I think he's absolutely right, co-author of The Conceptual Opinionist, The Social Contract. | ||
| We need to figure out whose voice matters. | ||
| Certain people matter and in general this hate and vitriol comes from the least accomplished people who, there's a really nice Nietzschean frame to talk about this, there's kind of I'm oversimplifying, but they're slaves. | ||
| Their situation in reality is they're slaves, and they discharge these primal urges on people. | ||
| It's like the Australians have this term, tall poppy syndrome, when something grows high, you just cut it down. | ||
| So as Reuben grows, and subscribers, and the Twitter, just cut Reuben down, you know, fuck him, just cut him, that Nazi, white, supremacist, homophobe. | ||
| Gay, married, Jew, Nazi homophobe. | ||
| It's so much, it's so much, Pete. | ||
| It's overwhelming, but we have to figure out whose voices matter, and then we need to have those friendships of virtue, so when people come to us and say something, we can really listen. | ||
| But the way to not do it is to look at, as you've said repeatedly, to look at an egg on Twitter. | ||
| Alright, so sort of couched around everything we're talking about so far is sort of good and evil. | ||
| The tactics that some people use to be involved in a conversation, the motives that we have. | ||
| Whether it be because you're a believer or a non-believer or anything else, I've come to a place where I think, right now in 2017, we're in a strange spot where the institutions that used to help us keep some of this stuff in the lanes, what is acceptable, what's not acceptable, what's right and wrong, what's real and not real, whether it's true or not, that these institutions are crumbling, and by that I mean that media's crumbling, our political institutions seem to be crumbling. | ||
| Our academic institution. | ||
| So that's the one I really want to get into with you. | ||
| All of these things are starting to crumble. | ||
| It's partly because information has changed so much. | ||
| I would argue they're even worse than crumbled. | ||
| What? | ||
| You would say they're decimated already? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I would argue that the academy, certain sections of the academy, the sciences I think are doing very, very well. | ||
| The humanities are in shambles, certain departments, anything tainted by post-modernism, particularly gender studies, the conceptual penis. | ||
| Okay, so let's pause for a sec. | ||
| Let's just go to the conceptual penis. | ||
| As a social construct. | ||
| As a social construct. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| A hoax paper with James Lindsay. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And you got this published. | ||
| That we thought was extremely funny. | ||
| I mean, I read it. | ||
| It's jaw-droppingly ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, and it argued for climate change, being responsible for the conceptual penis. | ||
| And I thought it was really funny. | ||
| It was a satire. | ||
| Sort of the main takeaway of it is that the penis is not really a real thing. | ||
| It's just this sort of amorphous idea. | ||
| And we threw in a lot of moral jargon. | ||
| We appealed to their moral sensibilities. | ||
| Okay, so why, Pete? | ||
| You're an academic. | ||
| Why would you write a hoax paper? | ||
| Why would you mock the very institutions of which you are a member? | ||
| Because I think that there are departments in the universities that are making a mockery of our institutions. | ||
| So when you said crumbling, I don't think that's... | ||
| That's not the word I would have used, although it's accurate in a sense, but these people are fabricating not only their own knowledge bases, they're writing things in journals that they then cite that becomes knowledge, they're manufacturing Ideas that are totally untethered to reality. | ||
| This is how crazy this is so So look I'm gonna explain it. | ||
| I'm gonna try to explain this you reel me in if this is unclear Okay, but this is idea is so crazy that anybody listening to this and say that's that can't possibly this this can't possibly be true So this is the idea and then I'm gonna give you you're asking you a belief. | ||
| I'm gonna give you An analog in theology. | ||
| What these people do is that they have moral intuitions based upon Marxist thought, basically. | ||
| I'll get to that in a second. | ||
| So what they do to justify this is they manufacture their own epistemology, their own way to know that justifies the conclusions that they have, so then they can go out and become activists. | ||
| Now, quick detour. | ||
| One of the biggest problems facing the left right now is anybody who calls out a bad idea is viewed as somebody on the right. | ||
| We've got to stop that. | ||
| I know a little something about this. | ||
| You know a little something about this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot about this. | ||
| So let's, I'm gonna give you an analogy in theology. | ||
| So this guy Alvin Plantinga is a Christian philosopher. | ||
| So he has these They're actually more than that. | ||
| They're claims about reality and about Jesus being the Son of God. | ||
| So he realizes that there's no evidence that can take him there. | ||
| Excuse me, so what does he do? | ||
| He manufactures his own epistemology. | ||
| He said, well, you know, we're going to say that there's this thing called the God Censor, and the God Censor, some people have it, and it allows you to, just as I apprehend the color red, so too do I apprehend God. | ||
| So he makes an epistemology to justify these insane claims about the nature of reality. | ||
| So just as he has done that, critical theory is that epistemology that is used, and I can explain that. | ||
| This is complicated. | ||
| I'm afraid we're going to lose people because we've got a lot of terms we've got to throw out. | ||
| It's very complicated. | ||
| But what I would like to attempt to do in this segment is to link the madness on campuses right now to the intellectual engines driving that madness. | ||
| And make no mistake about it, these Departments tainted by post-modernism are absolutely filled with zealots and morally motivated ideologues. | ||
| Okay, so let's so I'll do a little catch-up so that in case anyone's missing it. | ||
| So first let's let's talk about what is post-modernism? | ||
| I know I know most okay, but let's just let's just do a couple definitions quick. | ||
| Okay, so let's do the definition so Okay, so the Frankfurt School has this idea of, let's even go back, let's go back to Karl Marx. | ||
| Karl Marx was a philosopher. | ||
| Oh, here's a bonus question. | ||
| Why did Hitler hate Karl Marx? | ||
| I feel like there's a good punchline. | ||
| Well, it's not a joke, it's actually true, because he was a Jew. | ||
| Anything the Jews touched were poisonous. | ||
| But otherwise they would have loved each other. | ||
| I thought they were a great guy. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Okay, so Marxist economics, and these people aren't Marxists, they're more Marxian would | ||
| be a better term. | ||
| Marxist economics looks at the world in terms of economic oppression. | ||
| There are oppressor classes, etc. | ||
| So they have, and then we'll get to the idea of postmodernism, it's simple and complicated. | ||
| So they've taken this idea of These Marxian notions of oppressor classes and looked at them in terms of gender and race and for example the patriarchy and then they have hierarchically prioritized people within that list. | ||
| So the patriarchy is white, heterosexual, cisgendered, which is a thing, males. | ||
| You're at the top of this! | ||
| You're a badass motherfucker! | ||
| I am absolutely talking to you. | ||
| But that's the other thing they do. | ||
| Just like religion, they have their own defense mechanisms, and that's what they say. | ||
| Well, you can't criticize it because you're a cisgendered, white, heterosexual male. | ||
| And is the ultimate irony of this that that is prejudice? | ||
| That is pre-judging you, because I could then sit here and go, wait a minute, Peter Boghossian, a white, straight, cisgendered male, where I can pre-judge you based on your immutable characteristics? | ||
| Okay, so this is indispensable to talk about. | ||
| So, you are using words Based upon normal, ordinary definitions. | ||
| I'll give you examples from where it's like, so when you use racism, it's the way I use it, it's the way most people who aren't in, haven't been indoctrinated by gender studies in the postmodern left. | ||
| It's the idea that you do not judge people, particularly negatively, but you don't make judgments about people based upon an immutable characteristic like their skin color. | ||
| But they've changed that definition to make it systemic racism. | ||
| They've changed that definition to put in a power vector, a hierarchical power vector that only flows one way. | ||
| So for example, in this, blacks cannot be racist against whites. | ||
| So they have snuck, it's very sneaky, they've taken a normal word, It added a moral component to it and changed the definition of a word. | ||
| You know, here's some, if I may give you some more examples, like equality. | ||
| Equality is a good thing, but they've shifted from equality to equity. | ||
| Now, what does equity mean? | ||
| Equity means, well, we need a certain number of people representative of the general population, 70% African Americans, we need to have 17%. | ||
| But the problem is that that That, they also want to take into account historical discrimination and a kind of reparations for that. | ||
| So those numbers are even higher. | ||
| So it's, I think it can be summarized in Ruth Bader Ginsburg's quip or joke or whatever it is, how many female Supreme Court justices do you think there should be? | ||
| Nine. | ||
| So it's not just, right, it's not just that we want equal representation, we want More, because of past injustices. | ||
| Go ahead, because this is, we gotta talk about deconstruction, we gotta talk about violence, we gotta talk about why. | ||
| All these things, when you understand them from this mindset, they're all coming from the same school of thought affected by critical theory. | ||
| That's why the most... So now, let's define critical theory. | ||
| Yeah, so critical theory is this idea that you, that traditional power dynamics and traditional, | ||
| and this is oversimplified, but it's a general idea from which we can have a starting point for a conversation. | ||
| See, that's again, I thought to myself, I'm gonna get 500 emails, and I'm just trying to, | ||
| and it makes me, again, it makes me self-censor, and then I'm like, come on. | ||
| But that's real, that's a real, I don't wanna get lost in that. | ||
| That is a real thing. | ||
| I mean, I find it for myself sometimes. | ||
| I try to talk broadly about things because I wanna communicate big ideas and hopefully people will then read some books or watch some other videos or follow some other people on Twitter or whatever. | ||
|
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And then even if you talk broadly, we'll be, wow, you see, he swept over that thing or he didn't know this. | |
| Why didn't he talk about the Frankfurt School? | ||
|
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He didn't mention Horkheimer once or Adorno or all these guys or that guy. | |
| And you know, you just get to a point where, All of that self-centering, it just, it's not, it diminishes the message, it's not good for you, it's not good for conversations, it's not good for, okay, so anyway. | ||
| That's why I mentioned the thinkquisition at the time of the show. | ||
| And I think that was, I heard that, yeah, I think that was. | ||
| There is a thinkquisition right now. | ||
| If you think for yourself, and you are not afraid to buck the trend, they will come to get you. | ||
| It's exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| So, critical theory. | ||
| So it's the idea that it's basically a Marxist idea. | ||
| It's the idea that there are these entrenched power structures and entrenched power dynamics and one of the things that we need to do is we need to recognize these and then we need to overthrow them. | ||
| We need to deconstruct these traditional hierarchies to make society more That's the thing. | ||
| More equitable, more fair. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| So these kids protesting at Evergreen, they don't just ex nihilo, just get this idea that they're just going to... No, they get this. | ||
| These are coming out of specific departments. | ||
| In the university, and when they're asked, you know, why do you do this, or what is this, they talk, well, my professor said this, and then, this is the insane part that gets back to the conceptual penis again, that these people have their own lines of literature that is, these are intellectual cesspools. | ||
|
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They have, that's gonna get, yeah, no. | |
| Hashtag intellectuals. | ||
| Right, that's what I was gonna say. | ||
| That they have manufactured what they think, that's why they have to, like with cultural appropriation, | ||
| they have to import ideas like power, because it isn't, the whole thing is made up, | ||
| it's completely fabricated, because they wanna use, they wanna overthrow these traditional hierarchies. | ||
| So these kids get this idea from their professors who then get promoted in tenure, | ||
| because they publish in journals and their stuff is almost never cited by anybody. | ||
| But yet, that's how you rise up. | ||
| And then what happens is, you have a whole canon of knowledge, and you go out and teach people. | ||
| And then you have diversity training. | ||
| And the shame of this whole thing is that there is legitimacy to white power. | ||
| There is legitimacy to some of this stuff. | ||
| Metastasized, almost, doesn't allow any kind of liberation. | ||
| It does almost the exact opposite of what they want to do, because it gets you people like Trump. | ||
| But one more thing I want to say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then what happens is, it goes to colleges of education, and then they start teaching, and I think I told you my son has, in his geography, he has geography, Civics. | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| I'm looking at stuff. | ||
| They've never even opened a map. | ||
| They've never opened a map. | ||
| They've never in civics class how many Supreme Court justices, legislative branch, how many senators. | ||
| None of that stuff. | ||
| But he knows everything about the Black Panthers. | ||
| But he knows everything about the civil rights. | ||
| The civil rights movement is extremely important. | ||
| Wonderful stuff. | ||
| But it should not, we need to, I'm looking at the map, kids need to know what countries above Canada, but anyway, all of this stuff gets back to certain departments in the university that are pumping out nonsense, that are indoctrinating people, and exactly like a religion, they have their own defensive structures, they're, you know, being offended is the new thing, inclusion is another word that they've changed the meaning of, so there is a direct line between, is this, tell me, is this clear so far? | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you. | ||
| It's clear to me. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so there's a... I'm a pretty good judge of what the audience... Okay, so because if it's not clear, something needs to be unpacked. | ||
| So they want to overthrow these traditional hierarchies, and they've manufactured their own base of scholarship to do so. | ||
| So how... So that's why it's worse than crumbling. | ||
| Because at least if something crumbles, something worse didn't take its place. | ||
| Like if an alarm, like it's like having an alarm clock that rings randomly. | ||
| So it's worse than just having an alarm clock that doesn't work. | ||
| It's they're pumping out fabricated nonsense that's totally untethered to reality. | ||
| And the moment you call these people out on it, they don't believe in dialogue in any way. | ||
| They'll slander you, they'll write your name on the bathroom wall, they'll scream at you. | ||
| So the only thing to do is you've got to hoax them. | ||
| You've got to have a non-traditional way to deal with people who are so fundamentally irrational that they're not willing to have a conversation. | ||
| And that led you to writing this hoax and turning this thing on its head. | ||
| Alright, there was so much there I want to get to. | ||
| So first off, what's the What's the connection with the religious mind that these people have? | ||
| Because this strikes me as the new religion. | ||
| That in a weird way, politics, but this leftist postmodern Marxist stuff, that this is the new religion. | ||
| They mock everyone else for their beliefs, but they have a belief that is so tethered to their own Being that if you challenge it in any way, they'll hate you, but they'll also outcast anyone who tries to question it. | ||
| 100% correct. | ||
| So what does it say about that kind of mind? | ||
| That is an awesome question. | ||
| Lindsay and I wrote a paper again. | ||
| Privilege is the original sin for the left. | ||
| But there is one fundamental difference. | ||
| You're having Shermer and Prager come into the studio and debate, and it's going to be civilized, no one's going to punch each other. | ||
| They have fundamental, actually very fundamental, moral disagreements. | ||
| One of them, Prager, believes that you cannot have morality without God, and Shermer believes the complete opposite. | ||
| So this is powerful stuff that they've agreed. | ||
| And they're going to have a dialogue about that. | ||
| I don't know if it's a debate. | ||
| I'm not a fan of debate. | ||
| Having a conversation is much better. | ||
| So you have the same mechanisms in this new secular religion. | ||
| You have privilege, which is a type of original sin. | ||
| You have blasphemy laws, which are political correctness. | ||
| Let's just really clear that for people. | ||
| So when you say that privilege is the original sin, that's like saying Jesus died for your sins, basically. | ||
| If you were born white, and especially cisgendered, heterosexual, that shit that you are, there's nothing you can do to overcome that. | ||
| And this is the part that's- Except bow forever. | ||
| This is the part that's the mind blow, and this is the part that makes me unbelievably sympathetic to Christians, in particular, as opposed to other religions, that's really changed my mind significantly. | ||
| Christians have a redemption narrative. | ||
| These people have no redemption narrative. | ||
| If you're privileged, that's it, you're fucked. | ||
| Like, there's no redemption for you. | ||
| You can bow down forever. | ||
| Yeah, you can- Right, that's it. | ||
| Yeah, so there's something about Being able to be redeemed that these people don't have. | ||
| And that's why you see these vitriolic attacks. | ||
| They are merciless on other people on the left, eating other people on the left. | ||
|
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The oboros, you know, the snake that eats itself. | |
| There's a lot there. | ||
| So it is a new secular religion, and maybe we have modules in our brain, I don't know, and maybe it's covariant with culture, there are things in the culture interacting in our brain, and we have the same thing we have in Jonathan Haidt has talked about, so we have purity versus sanctity, maybe we have ways of interpreting reality, but make no mistake, this is a secular religion, and when you call out the Empress for having no clothes, that is that you have committed You are in trouble. | ||
| Right, which I think has a bit to do with the recent hatchet jobs that have been done on me and you. | ||
| So Slate basically wrote a piece about you after this whole thing. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And it really was kind of strawmanning what you did, but the attacks were also kind of personal. | ||
| And that's, there's always, it's interesting, you know, when Salon goes after me, or you, or Slate goes after me, or you, or Sam, Harris, whoever they go after, there's a kind of animus, there's a kind of It's a personal attack that is not just an engagement of the, hey look, you know, you did this, this is why it's not right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's not, oh yeah, maybe it's funny, but... You're wrong about this and here's why. | ||
| No, it's a deeply personal attack on someone. | ||
| So I called them on the phone, I think I emailed them at least once, a few times, and I said, look, you guys wrote this about me, I would like an opportunity to respond to this. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Then I went on Twitter and I said, hey, can I please have an opportunity to explain? | ||
| I won't slay, I don't know what the exact wording was, but can I? | ||
| I'd like an opportunity, nothing. | ||
| I don't know, maybe that's a new thing in journalism. | ||
| You just write hit pieces on someone and then you don't give them an opportunity to say hey. | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| I think what's starting to happen is that because mainstream journalism is crumbling, and I still use that adjective there, and nobody cares about CNN anymore, and even the New York Times I think has gone in a really terrible direction | ||
| 'cause they love a lot of the ideas that you're talking about. | ||
| But since the institutions are crumbling, well now everybody just picks their website | ||
| that they believe. - That's right. | ||
| Those websites are funded by all sorts of different things. | ||
| And if you've got an editor who has bought in to your postmodern bullshit in this case, | ||
| well you know you can say whatever the hell you want about Pete or Dave or whoever else | ||
| and you're gonna get backing. | ||
| So for this whole craziness that happened with me and Mother Jones last week-- | ||
| And truth has been removed from that, right? | ||
| Truth has been removed from that. | ||
| And for them, for this editor, so the title of the thing was about | ||
| the new extremists further to the right. | ||
| We have to talk about that. | ||
| We have to talk about that. | ||
| You'd have to be out of your mind or just a liar of the highest order to think that of me. | ||
| You can criticize me for all you want. | ||
| I address criticism on here if people think I don't ask the right questions. | ||
| And it's not just that he's a terrible journalist. | ||
| He has a religious mindset. | ||
| Like, this is a religion to these people. | ||
| So that's the interesting thing. | ||
| So then I went on the full-on... I mean, I was like, you know what? | ||
| You picked the wrong person to fuck with today. | ||
| And I went on the absolute attack. | ||
| I was defended publicly by you and Rogan and a whole slew of other people to the tens of thousands of retweets and things of that. | ||
| And then, I guess two days ago, he was writing about how, no, he doesn't believe I'm an extremist. | ||
| But he doesn't, you know, there's no public correction. | ||
| They do slight things at the end of the article that no one's gonna ever see. | ||
| Wikipedia's gonna still run with the real thing. | ||
| Exactly. - But he knows, I tagged the editor, this woman Clara Jeffrey | ||
| in all the tweets, she never responds, she's never gotten this much Twitter traction, | ||
| but they don't feel a need to because they know that their monster | ||
| is just gonna keep moving forward. | ||
| And that's what I'm trying to figure out the antidote to. | ||
| So just to be clear, and so what did he say about your show? | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| The title, and you can look at it, maybe it's still his pinned tweet right now, though I suspect he's either deleted it or removed it altogether, was something about the rise of the new extremism, or the new extremists, that are further to the right than Breitbart. | ||
| Then he includes me in that, where he refers to me as far right. | ||
| He then eventually changed that to just right. | ||
| Which the right-left thing doesn't even make any sense anymore. | ||
| I can put all that aside. | ||
| As I mentioned that the top Forbes called this a conservative show last week. | ||
| I've said to you, I think you were the first one I ever said it to, that defending my liberal principles is becoming a conservative position. | ||
| So all of these labels are starting to make no sense. | ||
| And that's just partly what's happened here. | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| So a couple of things here. | ||
| If you had an itemized checklist, if you could just write your beliefs down and you could check, you and I would both overwhelmingly fall into the liberal camp, not the left camp. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's why I've been saying liberal is not leftist. | ||
| And that is a mistake people make. | ||
| But just to be clear for you, so without naming the person who wrote the article. | ||
| The guy who wrote the article about me? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Josh Harkinson. | ||
| Okay, is Josh invited on your show? | ||
| Yeah, I invited him immediately. | ||
| No, is he still invited on your show? | ||
| And he wrote something sort of like, why would I? | ||
| First I said, come on my show, I'll give you the first 10 minutes without talking. | ||
| He didn't respond to that. | ||
| Then today, finally, days later, I responded again saying, or the day we're taping this is off of when we're airing it. | ||
| But today I wrote, you know, will you come on the show, you hack. | ||
| So then I was being a little more heavy-handed. | ||
| They were all, "I won't come on 'cause you called me a name." | ||
| You probably wouldn't come on. | ||
| So the hacking was just an excuse. | ||
| But just to be completely clear-- | ||
| To be completely clear, I was gonna sit here for 10 minutes. | ||
| You said, "You come on, you can sit here in 10 minutes. | ||
| "I will sit here and I will listen to everything you say." | ||
| And I invited the editor too, by the way. | ||
| She's welcome to come on and all that. | ||
| But in an odd way, maybe that, and someone pointed this out to me on Twitter, | ||
| one of the strange, odd, sane voices, said, "Dave, that would be the worst thing you could do | ||
| because what you're doing is you're encouraging more people to do things. | ||
| You're encouraging people to say crazy things about you, you then get in a huff puff and you gotta defend yourself, and now what's the next thing? | ||
| Now you gotta sit and take it on your own show, which is completely against the ideas that you care about. | ||
| Like, I don't want my life to be that, you know what I mean? | ||
| I don't want my life to be that either. | ||
| So it's an odd position. | ||
| And yet you don't want to just ignore it. | ||
| It's against human nature to be attacked and to just sit there and take it. | ||
| That's why we talked before about you have to figure out whose voices matter. | ||
| I mean, I don't know anything about this guy. | ||
| But does his voice matter to you? | ||
| I mean, is this guy's opinion... No, he's utterly irrelevant to me, but he wrote a piece in a publication that has some... So the publication has some relevance. | ||
| And by the way, this guy, as I mentioned at the top also, he was one of 40 people that the Virginia GOP baseball game shooter followed. | ||
| So we know that that guy was riled up by a lot of the political stuff he was reading, | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| 'cause you could just look at his Facebook and all that to see that, | ||
| and how much he hated Republicans, whatever. | ||
| So if you're calling me an extremist, there's a cost now, that ideas and intentions matter. | ||
| Which is why I think you can attack the hell out of ideas. | ||
| Not can, you should. | ||
| But it doesn't mean you should be instigating violence. | ||
| And therein lies the rub. | ||
| How do you feel now about all this? | ||
| A day behind you. | ||
| Do you feel angry? | ||
| Well, when it happened on Friday, I was livid. | ||
| I was in New York City and I was walking in the middle of Times Square. | ||
| So I'm in Times Square, the craziest place on earth, like, you know, stimulation, bananas and whatever. | ||
| And I'm just flicking off Twitter and I'm calling people and like, I'm going to destroy them and everything else. | ||
| And, you know, some people said to me, this is the very definition of libel because it's demonstratively untrue. | ||
| He's attacking your income source because of the reference to Patreon, all these other things. | ||
| I don't want to sue the guy. | ||
| By the way, I've been on the record as saying I am for libel laws. | ||
| I'm a free speech absolutist, but there are laws that we have related to libel. | ||
| That's a secondary thing. | ||
| But then on Monday, When it calmed down, when I got home from New York on Sunday night, you know this, because you're in my house right now, I came home and my dog was staggering around, Emma. | ||
| She's 13. | ||
| I love, love, love this dog with every fiber of my being. | ||
| She was a rescue from Hurricane Katrina. | ||
| I've had her for 11 years. | ||
| And she was staggering, and she was having trouble standing, and she looked confused, and her eyes were darting around. | ||
| And then I spent the night, and we had to bring her, and she stayed at the animal hospital overnight. | ||
| We just got her back today, and she has some issues that we're hopefully gonna work on, but it completely put everything in perspective. | ||
| This animal is more important to me than this bullshit, without question. | ||
| It doesn't mean I'm not gonna get riled up about this stuff, but my love of this animal far supersedes that. | ||
| That's what we talked about before, about relationships. | ||
| I have two dogs, two kind of crazy dogs, but those relationships matter and in that sense they Not superseded, not overrided, but it made you refocus on what mattered. | ||
| You could be doing all this stuff like that thing in Private Ryan, that scene where the guy's saying, we gotta do this, we gotta do this, and he gets a bullet in the head. | ||
| Now you have a sick animal. | ||
| Your dog is sick and you love your dog. | ||
| I don't know, I guess it's interesting, I don't know whether or not Having him on would be a mistake or not because it would encourage other people to do the same thing. | ||
| Yeah, well, I know it would because it's a feeding frenzy. | ||
| We know how these guys operate. | ||
| We've seen this before with many friends and colleagues. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think his motivation was? | ||
| I mean, I know you can't say. | ||
| What is the motivation? | ||
| Because I believe that it's exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| That it's this religious Morally motivated? | ||
|
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Secular religion? | |
| what was the word you used? | ||
| There was this religious, quasi-religious or-- | ||
| Morally motivated? | ||
| Yeah, that they-- | ||
| Secular religion? | ||
| Secular religion, right. | ||
| It's this secular religion that they so believe. | ||
| So I veered off the path for these guys. | ||
| It doesn't matter that I'm gay married. | ||
| It doesn't matter that I'm pro pot. | ||
| It doesn't matter that I'm pro choice. | ||
| It doesn't matter that I'm for euthanasia. | ||
| The checklist! | ||
| The checklist all the way down. | ||
| And one side is religious. | ||
| And this is why I talk about the left more. | ||
| Because on the right, even though they know I'm all of those things, I still get invited places. | ||
| I get put on PragerU videos. | ||
| I get invited to college kids that want to talk to me. | ||
| They put aside all the different... I was at a Libertarian Students for Liberty thing. | ||
| I said I'm for single-payer health care. | ||
| Libertarians don't like that. | ||
| They booed me, but then laughed. | ||
| We laughed about it. | ||
| And I kind of mocked them for booing me. | ||
| Guys, we're the tolerant ones. | ||
| Come on, guys. | ||
| And they got it. | ||
| I don't get any invites the other way, so that's why I think that phrase is so perfect, because this is the new religion. | ||
| It is the new religion. | ||
| Why do you think you don't get MSNBC doesn't have you on? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I can't beg them. | ||
| I was on Fox last week, Greg Gutfeld, who I think is a great guy who's gonna come on in here. | ||
| Really doing good stuff? | ||
| We disagree on some stuff? | ||
| Okay, big damn whoop. | ||
| But I can't beg them. | ||
| Why does Fox put on ION and MSNBC doesn't? | ||
| You see, that's a wonderful question that we should demand answers to that question. | ||
| Did you see last week? | ||
| The hearings? | ||
| Last week, Hulk. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| The actor that plays Hulk. | ||
| The actor that plays Hulk! | ||
| Somebody help me here! | ||
| Mark Ruffalo said the thing about, you know, MSNBC's hiring these white conservatives. | ||
| And it's so interesting because he's judging people's political opinions on their skin color, number one. | ||
| Now, he's a white guy who plays a green guy, so there's some apparent, you know, you must as a philosophy professor, there's gotta be some deep shit there. | ||
| But even putting that aside, if they started hiring a bunch of black conservatives, he wouldn't be happy about that either because he would accuse them of being Uncle Toms or something. | ||
| It's like Clarence Thomas. | ||
| We need more Supreme Court justices. | ||
| Would you rather have more Clarence Thomases on the Supreme Court or would you rather have more white liberals on the Supreme Court? | ||
| So what do you think is the antidote to this? | ||
| Because I've been trying to push the ideas of classical liberalism. | ||
| As you know, I believe that the individual is the only antidote to this. | ||
| If you relentlessly stand for the individual, you will always stand for our differences. | ||
| You will always be tolerant of our differences because you will realize that you're different than the next guy. | ||
| You won't look at somebody and prejudge them based on color or say, I have to treat them like they're some animal because they have this level of oppression. | ||
| Okay, so you put your finger on the problem. | ||
| So let's talk about the opposite of the problem. | ||
| Intersectionality is the problem. | ||
| We haven't talked about that, but that there is grievance jockeying, Gad said, the oppression Olympics, etc. | ||
| We need the opposite of intersectionality and we need unionality. | ||
| And there's a line of literature called superordinate identities. | ||
| Let's unpack that real quick. | ||
| Have you seen the Heineken commercial? | ||
| Yes, it's incredible. | ||
|
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I love it. | |
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's everything that I've tried to do here. | ||
| So that's what we need. | ||
| We don't need... Can you just lay it out real quick? | ||
| You lay out the Heineken commercial. | ||
| They just basically get people together who you'd think have nothing to do with each other or should be enemies. | ||
| Political enemies or personal enemies. | ||
| And they sit down over a drink and do it. | ||
| And they have that conversation. | ||
| They're not sex. | ||
| No, no, they do some tasks, right? | ||
| They have some hard tasks, and then at the end they say, do you want to have a beer? | ||
| And they say yeah, and then they talk. | ||
| It's an example of a, of unionality as opposed to intersectionality. | ||
| We're not grieving, we're not trying to find out who has the most strikes against them, who's the most oppressed, and then they get the most They get the rights to talk, the BLM can talk through the Pride March or what have you. | ||
| What we need to do is, or the shooting in Virginia right now, we need to appeal to larger identities and we need to coalition build and I see the left over and over again continuing to dig down on identity politics, continuing to use intersectionality to find the most marginalized and | ||
| oppressed groups, and then to attempt to change either the nature of words "either/or" and the | ||
| structure of the rule sets in our institutions to privilege these folks. | ||
| John Rawls had this whole thing solved. | ||
| But I think superordinate identities, finding identities in things that we have in common | ||
| and working to build coalitions—and I think if the left continues to do that, we'll | ||
| either get another four years of Trump or that other lunatic Pence. | ||
| It's so funny that you describe it that way, because you're talking about post-modernism, you're talking about cultural Marxism, all this stuff, and yet, so people will go, well, Pete must be a right, he must be on the right, he must be some sort of evil conservative, whatever, and yet you're not. | ||
| No, and the more I think... And by the way, I don't want to use conservative, as I said at the top of the show. | ||
| I don't want to use it as a pejorative. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so that's the thing. | ||
| I don't feel at home. | ||
| I no longer, and maybe it's because I'm oddly situated. | ||
| That's another word they love. | ||
| I'm oddly situated in the academy in Portland, which is very leftist center anyway. | ||
| Even though the overwhelming majority of my beliefs I would self-identify as a classical liberal, I no longer feel at home. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With anything to do with things that are even broadly the left, and you and other people have called for the new center, I think that might be what we need. | ||
| I certainly don't feel at home in the right, again in terms of that checklist of beliefs they have. | ||
| So I feel that I'm, it's interesting because I kind of feel like when I live in Albuquerque, I feel that I'm wandering, not wandering, I feel that I don't have a home. | ||
| And I don't feel comfortable anywhere, but one of the consequences of not feeling comfortable is when you meet people who share those beliefs, you have a kind of ideological kinship. | ||
| You have a kind of, wow, we're really on the outs here, right? | ||
| We're really trying to figure this out. | ||
| We're really trying to We're trying to live a good life. | ||
| We're trying to be decent people. | ||
| We're trying to make decisions on the basis of evidence. | ||
| And yeah, we change our minds. | ||
| But we're not at home on the right. | ||
| We're not at home on the left. | ||
| We're being excoriated on the left for calling out... Never make calling out somebody's bullshit. | ||
| A right-wing thing. | ||
| The moment you've done that, you've become a farce, a caricature of yourself. | ||
| It's a farce. | ||
| You know, it's so interesting. | ||
| You've hit on so many things, because I love what we're doing here, because we're talking about sort of these broad issues, but then also how they're directly related to us as people, and that's what I think really matters. | ||
| And even, you know, just a week ago or so, and I think it was in Philadelphia, they unveiled their new gay pride rainbow flag, but now it has a black and brown Hmm. | ||
| a color bar, you know, two new color bars to represent people of color. | ||
| And this is the height of absurdity. | ||
| The rainbow flag represented all gay people, white gay people, Asian gay people, Muslim gay people, | ||
| Jewish gay people, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| There was no racial connotation to it. | ||
| And the gay community, at least from what I can tell, is pretty good on most race issues. | ||
| You see more couples, I think, that are racially different or diverse or all that stuff. | ||
| But now, because they had to bow to whatever that, I don't know if it was directly related to Black Lives Matter or whatever, but because they had to bow to them, they've literally ruined the rainbow. | ||
| We know what the rainbow is. | ||
| Now they're telling us the rainbow is inherently part of the patriarchy or racist or any of that stuff. | ||
| But here's the personal part. | ||
| So I thought all this, obviously. | ||
| I don't think I'm blowing anyone's mind when I say this. | ||
| They understand what I think. | ||
| But I didn't even wanna tweet about it, because I didn't even feel like getting involved on this one. | ||
| It's like, I had to pick my battles. | ||
| And if I was gonna say, well, someone's gonna say, you're racist. | ||
|
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You don't want a black bar and a brown bar on it. | |
| But my point would be, there was no racial connotation. | ||
| You're now making it racist. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Somebody, years from now, is gonna have some other thing that they wanna put on there, and they're gonna have to make sure they're more oppressed than you. | ||
| And this is the endless snake-eating itself. | ||
| Something, man. | ||
| Just within that, I'm just thinking about Emma being sick. | ||
| I think that's one of the things that people don't see when they attack you. | ||
| I think that's one of the things that people don't... Like, you're just a guy living your life. | ||
| You've got a dog, you've got a husband. | ||
| You're trying to make it through the day like everybody else. | ||
| And I think people need to take a step back and realize that we're actually people. | ||
| Like, Dave Rubin is a guy, and he's a good guy. | ||
| And he likes Heineken, or you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, and I'm a flawed guy! | ||
| And we're flawed people. | ||
| And if you have a problem with somebody, it's much better, and it's not necessarily the tone of the criticism. | ||
| And I feel weird saying, don't attack Dave Rubin. | ||
| You're not saying don't attack me. | ||
| People can do whatever they want to do anyway, but I think that you would get more mileage and more attention if those criticisms were devoid of personal attacks. | ||
| And you said, Ruben said this, this is why I think it's wrong, and you lay it out. | ||
| Well, that's what I said before. | ||
| When people have attacked me and said, well, Dave, you didn't ask this question, or you asked the question the wrong way, or you, you know, my policy on interviewing is I like to give rope to let people hang themselves. | ||
| Look, I just asked you a lot of really broad questions. | ||
| If you didn't know what you were talking about, you would have hung yourself. | ||
| In this instance, I don't think you did. | ||
| But I've had guests that I think do. | ||
| But those are criticisms I'm more than happy to address. | ||
| And I hope that five years from now, I'm so much of a better interviewer that I look back on this and think, this is shit. | ||
| I want to be better. | ||
| I want to be better. | ||
| But if you're gonna jumping off point is this guy's a right-wing extremist, well then we're not gonna really do this. | ||
| I think what we've done here for the hour is pretty good. | ||
| We're going to wrap this thing. | ||
| We're going to dinner with some friends. | ||
| We didn't make up this friendship thing. | ||
| No, it's legitimate. | ||
| It wasn't an artifact of a... Say again? | ||
| You want to get drunk or what? | ||
| Probably, probably. | ||
| I'm only supposed to, because my diet, I'm on a low-sugar diet, which is interesting. | ||
| So I'm only supposed to drink Pinot Grigio now. | ||
| So I've been drinking a ton of that. | ||
| So I think that's our... I like the red, but I'm gonna let you drink that. | ||
| All right, it was a pleasure, as always. | ||
| We have to do these more than once a year, because I think it's a good catch-up, and it's a good, I have no problem you grading whether I've moved forward or regressed or whatever. | ||
| I think it would be a fun thing Yeah, and who knows where our ideas are gonna go, who knows how our beliefs will change when we're confronted by new evidence, but here's what we do know. | ||
| If either one of us thinks that we've gone off the rails or that we've made a mistake, we're gonna call it out to the other one, and we're gonna do so in the context of a friendship. | ||
| Well said. |
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