Dave Rubin and Peter Boghossian dismantle postmodernism as a "secular religion" that replaces dialogue with grievance, contrasting it with Boghossian's proposed "unionality" for cross-identity coalitions. They critique the "thinkquisition" culture fueling self-censorship, defend against false "far-right" labels from Mother Jones, and debate the dilution of symbols like the rainbow flag. Ultimately, they argue that evidence-based decency and personal friendship must supersede ideological purity tests to restore trust in eroded institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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--
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.