July 14, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:06:48
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me today is an author, a screenwriter, the host of "The Andrew Klavan Show" | ||
| and one of the few sane people on the internet. | ||
| Andrew Klavan, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| It's nice to be here. | ||
| I love your new studio. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Well, you were one of the last guests Yes, before we built this home studio. | ||
| And we had you on at a very odd time, because it was right before the election, but we were gonna air it after the election, because I had to pad some shows, because we were building this. | ||
| So I, and perhaps you too, went on the assumption that Hillary was gonna win, and then people immediately, after we aired it, said, you gotta get Clayton back on, because you guys gotta clean this whole thing up. | ||
| So you ready to do some cleaning? | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
| I'm here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So where I want to start first is I do consider you one of the few sane people that I... That speaks ill of you. | ||
| But I consistently, every time I watch one of your clips or I see what you're tweeting about, you strike me as just, you basically strike me as decent, which these days I think has a correlation between decency and sanity. | ||
| That's a lot of pressure I'm giving you. | ||
| No, it is sad that being decent actually elevates you above the herd these days. | ||
| But you know, the thing with me is that I can state what my principles are, I try to follow my principles, and I try not to get too mixed up with personalities, which in this day and age, with a president like Trump, with the people around him, Makes things a lot clearer, you know, because that's what people are paying attention to. | ||
| They're paying attention to the big faces, they're paying attention to the he said this and she said that, and I'm just like trying to follow that principle, which I know what it is, and I'm trying to follow that thing. | ||
| Yeah, so I think I come from a similar place, and I think, you know, our politics, which do line up in a lot of ways, not fully, but that's what I try to go for. | ||
| Where do you think that comes from within you, that you don't go for all that other stuff that so many people do? | ||
| Well, in me, it's actually a matter of time, observing over time what works, what doesn't work, and also, you know... | ||
| It's just been a basic, maybe it was the time I was raised in, but it has been a basic principle of me, of mine, that people should be free. | ||
| That you should be free. | ||
| That you are, you know, made by God to be a free person. | ||
| That the things that are happening inside you, that are expressed in your, in the things that you like, in the things that you want to say, in your opinions, that all those things are Uniquely valuable. | ||
| And even if you're a jackass, even if you're saying stuff that makes me want to strangle you, you know, if you're a racist or something like this, I think that there's something uniquely valuable about that. | ||
| And I know that it's more important than some guy in Washington who knows better than you. | ||
| And I think that that's always been my assumption. | ||
| I was raised in that all-American way. | ||
| I was raised in the suburbs in the early 60s, you know. | ||
| That was the civic religion. | ||
| And it always seemed good to me. | ||
| When things changed, I would listen to the arguments. | ||
| And I've changed, I've developed, and things are different over time. | ||
| But certain principles stay the same. | ||
| And if you stick with that, you basically, I don't know, you know, it's a question of actually enjoying other people. | ||
| And even when they can be jerks sometimes, I like them, you know, I like people. | ||
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unidentified
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You mean you can enjoy sitting across from someone that you don't agree with? | |
| Are you saying that you can do that? | ||
| This is the thing, you know, whenever I see on YouTube it says, | ||
| "So and so destroys someone else." | ||
| I like when it says, "So and so talks to someone else." | ||
| Big letters, you know. | ||
| Because, yeah, when you talk to people you disagree with, if they don't get angry at you, and they're not shouting at you, you learn a lot of stuff. | ||
| And you hone your own arguments. | ||
| And sometimes, on occasion, you change your mind. | ||
| I mean, I would say if I had to place myself on the political spectrum, I'd be a libertarian. | ||
| But one of the reasons I changed on abortion, took 20 years, but I had an argument with a guy and I lost it. | ||
| And I thought, like, you know what? | ||
| I can't defend my position against this guy. | ||
| Which is a great teachable moment. | ||
| It's a real teachable moment, and it reminds you to listen to people. | ||
| I like that you just used the phrase civic religion, because one of the things I've been talking about on here is that, to me, leftism has become a secular religion. | ||
| I've had a couple people mention this idea, Peter Boghossian was on a couple weeks ago, who really explained it well, but that basically this has become this infallible doctrine that you must never leave, and if you do leave, you're going to basically have a fatwa on your head. | ||
| But a civic religion is an interesting phrase, because basically your civic religion in that regard was just live and let live. | ||
| Well, pretty much, yes. | ||
| And the idea that the more government there is, the less of a person there is. | ||
| The fact that a woman comes into a town and says, oh, I know how to do people's hair, and the government says, well, you need a permit for that. | ||
| You need a permit to do hairdo, you know, that's, it's just a kind of ongoing-- | ||
| This is a bald guy issue, right? | ||
| (laughing) | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, exactly. | |
| Well, you know, you read those occasional stories where some little kid has a lemonade stand | ||
| and the police pull up, you know, 'cause he doesn't have a permit. | ||
| I mean, that is the stuff that is so offensive to me. | ||
| And it's like, I guess over time, I've kept watching people who told me | ||
| that they were trying to make the world more free and more fair. | ||
| But it always turned out, not always, but it often turned out that what they were really trying to do was take the power away from someone they thought was oppressing them and take it themselves so that they could oppress the person who had been oppressing them. | ||
| Steadfastly maintained that like I want the world to be more free and more fair I'm perfectly willing to accept that somebody's been marginalized and needs to be included But I'm not willing to force this other guy to like it or to include him or to serve him or do anything else It just seems to me that freedom is a balance, you know Yeah, you mentioned something very briefly about God. | ||
| Now, last time you were on, we did sort of your whole evolution, which is really kind of fascinating. | ||
| You were born Jewish, then you were atheist for, what, a bulk of your... 35 years, right? | ||
| For 35 years. | ||
| Agnostic atheist. | ||
| Yeah, and then about how old were you when you then... I was about 45 when I became a theist, when I started to believe in God, and I was just about 50 when I was baptized, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so how, I just had your friend Dennis Prager on, and my friend Dennis Prager, and Michael Shermer. | ||
| Do you know Michael, by any chance? | ||
| Michael who runs Skeptic Magazine. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| And we had a great conversation about belief and morality with God or without God. | ||
| It was really great, and at the end we all agreed, wow, how nice we can sit in a room and not agree on everything, and we might have dinner together, you know? | ||
| But for you, as someone that's, you know, traveled in and out of religion, How important is the idea of religion as a foundational belief for society? | ||
| The only reason to believe in religion, as far as I'm concerned, is because it's true. | ||
| That's the only reason. | ||
| So the idea that it's good for society, or conducive to law and order, conducive to politeness, I'm not interested in believing in a fantasy just because it works. | ||
| And I've always hated arguments based on practicality when it comes to metaphysics. | ||
| To me, you can be a nice person, obviously, without being a theist at all. | ||
| There are plenty of nice atheists, lovely people who are atheists. | ||
| But I do believe that most of what you think is true is illogical without religion, without God. | ||
| And many people don't follow their own thoughts down to the ground. | ||
| And this is true of both atheists and believers. | ||
| And I do believe that... Here's what I think has happened to us. | ||
| I think that, you know, right around the 17th century, science became science, became what we know it to be. | ||
| And certain questions were put aside. | ||
| In order to do science. | ||
| So, in other words, you had people saying, hey, I can measure this, and I can predict this, and then I can heal this, and I can build this, and all these things are such a great, you know, obviously such a great benefit to society, from the iPhone to penicillin, whatever you're talking about, all this stuff has revolutionized human life. | ||
| It was assumed, and it was argued, that there was an underlying logic to science which precluded God, which eliminated God, even though most of the people who invented science were Christians. | ||
| It was presumed that there was an underlying logic. | ||
| So, in other words, they say, there's evolution, and if there's evolution, everything is random. | ||
| And you go, well, okay, there's evolution. | ||
| But random, you can't tell randomness from within a system. | ||
| You can't say I'm in a system and it's random because obviously the order of every system comes from outside the system. | ||
| I believe that logic is starting to collapse. | ||
| I believe that logic has played out and I believe it has been sold to us in the materialism, basically materialism, that everything is material. | ||
| Everything has a material cause. | ||
| The material explanation is better than that. | ||
| That, I believe, is toxic. | ||
| Because it doesn't make sense. | ||
| Because you cannot get from morality to materialism and from materialism to morality. | ||
| That, I believe, has had a toxic effect on our society. | ||
| And so I don't want to replace materialism with theism because I think It's toxic. | ||
| I want to do it because I think the truth is healing and liberating. | ||
| So without going too far down, just specifically the rabbit hole of belief, because we've done it a bunch on the show, and I think I find that even for atheists and believers, everyone kind of gets to a point where it's like, all right, well, the good ones at least get to a point where it's like, all right, well, that's what I believe. | ||
| And it frames some other stuff, so let's talk about that. | ||
| So without going too far down that rabbit hole, if you think that those systems are collapsing, is that really a metaphor or a bridge to why so many systems seem like they're collapsing right now? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Media, politics. | ||
| I think that's exactly what's happening. | ||
| I will sit here and predict to you that I believe in the next, actually I believe it's happening now, but I believe it will erupt at some point, that there is going to be an intellectual revival of It's really Aristotelian thought, the idea that we're here, we have a purpose, that that bottle has a purpose, that this body has a purpose, this mind has a purpose. | ||
| That is already coming back. | ||
| And when you talk to people, it's really interesting, when you go in to the top universities and you talk to the young people there who are the best minds of the country, they're all believers. | ||
| They all believe in God. | ||
| Which wouldn't have been true, I think, 30, 40 years ago. | ||
| And this is because ideas play themselves out over time. | ||
| And this idea that the world is material is ending. | ||
| And yes, I think a lot of the craziness we're seeing. | ||
| You know, I hate talking about some of these extraordinary political things because it sounds like you're being mean. | ||
| Like, it sounds like when I say if a man has an operation and turns himself into a woman, he's not a woman. | ||
| That's a statement of fact to my mind. | ||
| It doesn't mean that he should be abused or bullied or hurt or anything like that. | ||
| It's a totally different question. | ||
| But some of these questions where reality is starting to disappear, I think are built into the fact that this idea is collapsing. | ||
| It's so interesting because I do believe that trans people exist. | ||
| I mean, I'm not saying... So do I. Yeah, I don't think you said that they don't exist, but I believe that it is an actual Yeah, it's an actual existential thing for this particular person, but yet I can still go with you in that place because it seems like the hysteria constantly surrounding it is making people question everything. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like if you don't accept trans people the second that everyone else accepts them, or not even accepts them, because I think most people accept them, but if you don't celebrate it immediately or wish for a trans child, it's like they will turn on you as you're a transphobe. | ||
| I think some of the things that to give a child hormone treatments or any kind of operation based on some kind of stated preference, that I believe is abusive. | ||
| That I believe is wrong. | ||
| But for an adult to decide that he wants to live his life in any way he wants, as long as he's not hurting anybody, it means nothing to me. | ||
| I mean, it just means nothing to me. | ||
| But when he says to me, you must call me a woman, then he's taking away my right to experience reality as I experience it. | ||
| And that's where he loses his rights. | ||
| So this strikes me as you're sort of like a mature Republican. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's what it strikes me as. | ||
| Because everything you just said makes sense within a conservative viewpoint, within a libertarian conservative viewpoint, except there's so few conservatives willing to say that, what you just said. | ||
| Well, you know, it's funny, you asked me at the very beginning how I kept, Hold of some of these principles. | ||
| And it didn't occur to me until just a moment ago as we were talking. | ||
| One of the things is, I'm a novelist. | ||
| I've lived most of my life writing novels. | ||
| And when you're a novelist, what you do is you create characters. | ||
| And each one of these characters has a full, complete existence and a full, complete justification. | ||
| Even when you're inventing the bad guy, you realize that in his mind the world makes perfect sense. | ||
| And he makes perfect sense in that world. | ||
| And I actually think of people that way. | ||
| Maybe that's a novelist training, or maybe you start out with that and it turns you into a novelist. | ||
| But I actually think of people that way. | ||
| I actually think of somebody who says to me, I'm having this inner experience of being alienated from my sex, or whatever it is. | ||
| That doesn't offend me. | ||
| I feel it might be painful, and it offends me if he says that I have to react in a certain way, or this guy has to react by law in a certain way. | ||
| But his experience is like it's it really is part of the kind of fabric of the world and I think I think that there has been too many people on both sides have conflated what government does with how we live. | ||
| So, in other words, I've had this argument with conservatives a lot, where they'll say, well, they want to legalize marijuana, and I'll say, fine, just don't let people drive with marijuana, you know, and like, you want to poison yourself, I think it's bad for you, but, you know, it's none of my business, go ahead. | ||
| Do you think marijuana is bad for you? | ||
| I do think it's bad for you, but what I've read, it's bad for you, but I don't use it, so I don't really know that much about it. | ||
| And you don't seem to want to stop someone from using it. | ||
| Why would I want to stop somebody from using it? | ||
| Except if it were you, I might say, Dave, you know, I've read some articles, not good for you, whatever. | ||
| But then you know it's coming from me and you can say... With the vape pen, there's virtually no... Well, it's not even for the lungs, come on. | ||
| But this is the thing. | ||
| Government should not have the right to approve or disapprove. | ||
| It only has the right to protect me from you. | ||
| It shouldn't protect me from me. | ||
| If I want to throw myself off a bridge, you know, do I think that's right? | ||
| No, but I should be able to throw myself off a bridge. | ||
| What I shouldn't be able to do, the best example I always use is the seatbelts versus a cell phone. | ||
| You know, when you use a cell phone in a car, you're endangering me. | ||
| When you don't use your seatbelt, you want to fly through the windshield? | ||
| That's none of my business! | ||
| And that, you know, I know that libertarians take some extreme, crazy positions. | ||
| But in general, free markets, free minds, seems to me the way forward. | ||
| So I do see the freedom thing gaining traction, for sure. | ||
| Even the way that I've talked a lot, obviously, about classical liberalism and libertarianism and all of this. | ||
| I see that now. | ||
| I see it. | ||
| I just see it in society and on social media. | ||
| More. | ||
| In a cooler fashion than it would be if it was maybe coming from Ted Cruz or something. | ||
| Like I see it's gaining a little traction in a bigger way. | ||
| And certainly not all because of me, obviously. | ||
| All because of you. | ||
| But I like what you said about that there'll be an intellectual resurgence, too, because I am starting to see a little bit of that. | ||
| That it's starting to feel cool to have knowledge again, as opposed to the 15 years of endless reality TV and just the worst of us constantly, and endless bickering and one-upping. | ||
| I think we're starting to turn a corner on that, which I've been waiting for for a long Well, I mean, it's an awful, you know, I recently spoke, I don't get to speak too often at places, partly because I ignore the requests, and now I have somebody who does it, so maybe I'll be speaking more, but I spoke at Oberlin recently, which is a deeply, like, the heart of liberal darkness, as far as I'm concerned, and I went in there and | ||
| I felt that these children, who at my age, they now look like children, | ||
| I felt that they were being almost abused by their heritage of knowledge, of wisdom, | ||
| was being taken away from them. | ||
| You should come out of college, you should have read some Shakespeare, | ||
| and you should have read some of the great writers, you should know some of these great thinkers, | ||
| Plato and people like that, and you should know them without the professor | ||
| standing between you and the guy. | ||
| Shakespeare has traveled through time, 400 years, to bring you the wisdom, a unique vision of the world. | ||
| I don't need a professor doing anything but explaining the context to me, | ||
| and they have this thing called theory and all this. | ||
| You know, at Opeland, there was a black dorm. | ||
| I mean, Martin Luther King would roll over in his grave, you know. | ||
| There were kids who showed up, you know, kind of aggressively displaying their sexual proclivities and then heckling me from the crowd. | ||
| And I kept saying, you know what? | ||
| Hold your question, and I'm gonna discuss everything you wanna discuss. | ||
| And then the minute I finished talking, they ran away. | ||
| And I thought, like, these are- Isn't that something? | ||
| It's just right there. | ||
| And what was interesting was a lot of the liberal kids, who were just ordinary liberals, they stayed, and we had really good conversations. | ||
| Only the hecklers ran away. | ||
| And so I just think these kids are being deprived. | ||
| They're being deprived of their intellectual heritage. | ||
| They're being deprived of the idea That I can't fix their problems. | ||
| What they're being told is that they're unhappy because They're unhappy because of the way I treat them, or you treat them, or society treats them. | ||
| They're unhappy because of things inside themselves. | ||
| There was this gay guy yelling at me the whole time, and at one point I mentioned to somebody else, in another context, that I was actually a supporter of gay rights, and he let out this loud, well, thank you! | ||
| And I thought, you know, you think people don't like you because you're gay, they don't like you because you're a lout! | ||
| Which is, that's what equality is all about. | ||
| That you just want people to be equal so that you can treat them as shitty as you treat everybody else. | ||
| I don't want special treatment for being gay, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, give me equal treatment and now judge me accordingly. | ||
| Exactly, and I think this has come, you know, I see guys like this. | ||
| Ta-Nehisi Coates. | ||
| And he writes these letters to his son. | ||
| You need to be made good for the sins of the past. | ||
| What a terrible thing to tell a child. | ||
| Nobody can solve the sins of the past. | ||
| That's the whole point of the past. | ||
| It's past, you know? | ||
| And you cannot fix the things that were done to people. | ||
| You cannot fix history. | ||
| You can't pay people back for things that happened to people who were dead, you know? | ||
| That's the tragedy of a fallen world, you know? | ||
| That things are written into the fabric of life. | ||
| And to tell somebody that, that he's not going to be happy until he gets paid back for slavery, or whatever it is, It's condemning him to misery. | ||
| Yeah, it's just because it never stops. | ||
| The payback, whatever it is, there's never a moment where you go, okay, well, we got to where we're supposed to get and now we don't need anything else anymore. | ||
| It just, by human logic, it doesn't make sense. | ||
| And this used to be the question of education. | ||
| What is the good life? | ||
| What's conducive to happiness? | ||
| What makes you miserable? | ||
| That used to be what you discussed, and the answer can't be, my happiness depends on you being nice to me, because you're going to be what you are. | ||
| I'm curious, what group invited you at Oberlin? | ||
| It was a bunch of Republicans. | ||
| It was like the 15 Republicans. | ||
| I kind of surprised them. | ||
| They just wanted a 16th guy to finally show up. | ||
| They were like trolls. | ||
| They wanted me to come and make fun of The left and I didn't and I thought they even though the whole thing wouldn't be incredibly well I actually just talked about ideas and people listened and I thought well, that's a victory right but I Felt that the conservatives are so sick of being shouted at that. | ||
| They've just turned into Into trolls they want to mock the other side Yeah, which I think is kind of interesting because I say it all the time, but I only get invited now to colleges by the young Republicans or the Libertarians or tomorrow's Students for Liberty, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| All of these things that are technically right. | ||
| Even though they don't seem to mind that I'm gay married and pro-choice and against the death penalty and a litany of other things. | ||
| And then it's like, well, who is the tolerant side? | ||
| I don't get any invites from anyone. | ||
| No young Democrats or progressives of tomorrow have ever called me and been like, Dave, you know, we actually see you criticizing our side, but let's come and talk about it. | ||
| But I'm getting a ton of love from those other guys, who, by the way, you're right, there's a lot of trolls in that, too. | ||
| They've started being the funny people, too. | ||
| Which is, is that, for you as a screenwriter and a guy that's balanced between Hollywood and politics, is that fascinating to you? | ||
| That the right is starting to become funny? | ||
| It's a joy. | ||
| I mean, I always, my joke used to be that the reason conservatives aren't funny is because liberals have no sense of humor about themselves. | ||
| But it is, it is a joy to see Conservatives becoming funny and becoming the people of freedom. | ||
| Because let's face it, conservatism in the old style did have its oppressive elements and it did have its kind of, you know, whenever people are in charge of the culture, as conservatives were until the 60s basically, you know, they abuse that control. | ||
| That's part of power corrupting. | ||
| And there was that element in And there still is among conservatives that somehow, you know, you are destroying the Republic by not being exactly, you know, a Bible-beating Christian or whatever it is. | ||
| And that's just largely lifted, you know? | ||
| I mean, so this is actually an effect, I would say a positive effect, that The 60s revolution has had on conservatives. | ||
| They, too, have loosened up. | ||
| Nobody wants to go back to wearing ties to baseball games. | ||
| Nobody wants to go back to a rigid life where you can't be... Look, take feminism. | ||
| Feminism right now, to me, like environmentalism, is largely the enemy. | ||
| The feminists are insane. | ||
| They're not about actual sexual relations between people, just like the environmentalists aren't actually about conservation and all this stuff. | ||
| But nobody wants to go back to a world where a woman can't choose what life she wants. | ||
| I mean, I always say to people, if you draw a circle that's called individualism and a circle that's called feminism, in that place, the Venn diagram where they meet, you know, I'll agree with feminism. | ||
| Everything outside of that, I don't agree with. | ||
| But nobody wants to go back to a world where a woman can't be fully whoever she wants to be. | ||
| And nobody certainly wants to go back to a racially segregated world except the left. | ||
| Right, they oddly are the ones that are pushing these things like you just described at Oberlin. | ||
| And so the modern right is to some degree a function of certain things that leftists have also brought to the table and have now become the party of freedom, the party of hilarity. | ||
| You know, I mean, you do not laugh a lot when you're around leftists. | ||
| And when you watch Samantha Bee on television, it's not funny. | ||
| It's not funny. | ||
| It's painful. | ||
| It's da-da-da-da Trump. | ||
| You're the effing Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
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And they have to bleep it because it's on TBS. | |
| So even if the fuck meant anything to you. | ||
| It's not even an exciting fuck. | ||
| This is the funny thing about it. | ||
| When you hear them doing that, the cursing and the anger. | ||
| Not a lot of laughs there. | ||
| So then when you see people on the right, so like a Jeff Sessions, who there's a lot of talk that he's gonna go in and try to close medical marijuana dispensaries. | ||
| Now you just made it very clear, you don't smoke marijuana, you prefer everything being equal if people didn't for health reasons. | ||
| I think there's a lot of debate around that, but I'm just going with what you said. | ||
| When you see that as a small government guy and a states rights guy and a libertarian, That must be the part of the right that you don't like, right? | ||
| Yeah, I don't even know why you would bother with that. | ||
| I mean, I don't know why there should be medical marijuana dispensaries. | ||
| Why shouldn't it just be like a liquor store? | ||
| You know, you can't buy it if you're not 18 or whatever the proper age is, and you can't use it behind the wheel of a car and all those things. | ||
| And then we get to tax it, you know, and get all that money. | ||
| But I don't know why that should be. | ||
| What's bothering him, you know? | ||
| I mean, I really like Jeff Sessions. | ||
| I'm a pro-Jeff Sessions guy. | ||
| I think he's going to be a great AG. | ||
| You know, I think he's going to do... But are you concerned about that state stuff? | ||
| Because to me, that's one of the biggest issues there is. | ||
| The state's rights. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And one of the things that's kind of a joy about the Trump era is all these liberal states suing the federal government, because I think I win that either way. | ||
| I either win because the federal government gets the conservative thing in there, or I win because they get states' rights. | ||
| And that's why the whole, as I've now been saying every week, I mean, the whole chessboard is just thrown up. | ||
| The traditional left-right thing barely makes sense. | ||
| It's authoritarians and libertarians and allies, you know, coming together in some interesting spots. | ||
| I describe it as like being in a room where the gravity has gone out of the room and all the furniture is floating around. | ||
| And you know, you don't know where it's going to land, and I understand some of these guys, National Review and even my pal Ben Shapiro, you know, I understand they're worried about where the furniture may fall. | ||
| I'm kind of optimistic, and I'm not sure how much of that is constitutional and how much of it is observational, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That good things are coming. | ||
| I look to the generations down the line and what I see coming up is kind of a cultural liberalism, which I agree with, but an understanding that freedom is economic and freedom is governmental and if the government can tell you what to like and what to do, you're not free. | ||
| And they're not that smart. | ||
| I'm gonna give you a rare choice here. | ||
| Do we wanna go media first or Trump first from here? | ||
| This is a choose-your-own-adventure show. | ||
| That's really interesting, because it's kind of the same thing. | ||
| Let's start with Trump. | ||
| All right, let's go Trump first. | ||
| So when I hear you talk about Trump, so I was with you on election night, actually. | ||
| We were at the Daily Wire offices, and it was me, you, and Shapiro, and who else? | ||
| Bill Whittle was there. | ||
| And it was a funny night, because we were all having very mixed emotions. | ||
| I voted for Gary Johnson. | ||
| I didn't really want either one of them to win. | ||
| Ben was alternately thrilled and depressed, because, you know. | ||
| But he didn't vote for Trump. | ||
| But he didn't vote for Trump. | ||
| Has he publicly said who he voted for? | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure. | ||
| I actually don't remember. | ||
| You did vote for Trump, right? | ||
| I did vote for Trump at the last minute I made this very public decision, and I explained my reasons and all that. | ||
| Yeah, and then the fourth guy that was with us, Bill Whittle, was a huge Trump supporter, and he was talking about the things that we're talking about now, that this whole thing has been flipped, and that there's room, and okay. | ||
| So since the election, when I watch your videos, you strike me as one of the only people making any sense on Trump. | ||
| Because you don't strike me as a pure fanboy and think that he can go out into Fifth Avenue and shoot someone. | ||
| You might turn on him for that. | ||
| But you also don't strike me as just what most people are at the moment, which is just this hysterical lunacy. | ||
| It is hilarious. | ||
| I write columns a lot of times of PGA Media, and I'll say, well, Trump has done this right and this wrong, and I get this. | ||
| vicious attacks of, you know, you're an anti-Trumper and you're a cuck, whatever that is, you're a cuck. | ||
| And then I go to work and everybody there who is kind of anti-Trump yells at me for selling my soul. | ||
| And then I get it from all sides. | ||
| People always think we're selling our souls. | ||
| Doesn't that seem odd to you? | ||
| Well, people think if they disagree with you, their reasons are rational, your reasons are personal. | ||
| That's what they think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You're always doing it for money or for some other reward somewhere, but they do it just for business. | ||
| It's pure intellect that has gotten them to this rational thing, but you don't have that intellect. | ||
| And it is funny, too, because a lot of the guys I work with are younger than me, and I always look at them and think, Do you think maybe it's occurred to me to examine my own motives? | ||
| Well, that concept, though, before we dive fully into Trump, that concept of impugning your intellectual opponent's motives, I think is such a sad thing that's seeped into everything. | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
| It doesn't teach you. | ||
| I mean, there are some people, obviously, who are so corrupt that it's obvious and true, but people are trying to find their way. | ||
| Most people in the middle are trying to find their way. | ||
| So Trump, okay, so make some sense out of Trump. | ||
| Okay, well, I voted for Trump because I genuinely thought that Hillary Clinton was a threat to the American experiment. | ||
| I mean, I'm not, I usually don't talk in those big terms, but she did not believe in free speech. | ||
| Her hatred of the Citizens United ruling was just indicated to me that she believed the speech should be controlled. | ||
| There are four justices on the Supreme Court who have signed on to a theory of the First Amendment. | ||
| That says essentially that it does not guarantee you the right to speak, what it guarantees is that the government should control speech so that our values continue to be upheld. | ||
| That's a very dangerous, sick, stupid, and wrong theory. | ||
| One more judge, and I don't believe all of them would sign on, but one more judge, and obviously there was an open seat, And we could have lost the First Amendment. | ||
| I don't believe that was the most likely thing, but it could have happened. | ||
| So can you take the counterpoint on that, just for devil's advocate, the people that would argue against you on Citizens United? | ||
| Well, Citizens United just says that if you form a corporation, if you and I form the Rubin-Clavin Corporation, we don't lose our right to free speech. | ||
| I mean, what happened was Citizens United put out a documentary against Hillary, And they said, well, that's campaigning, so you can't put it on the air. | ||
| And they said, it's free speech, we can. | ||
| And they said, well, you're a corporation, so you don't have the rights. | ||
| And the New York Times signed on to that. | ||
| The New York Times said, no, our corporation has free speech because we're a press corporation, but your corporation does not have. | ||
| You know, it's nuts. | ||
| And it's typical of the left because, as I say, I believe they're Their logic is collapsing so they have to shout you down. | ||
| They can't invite Dave Rubin to Oberlin to talk with the left. | ||
| They can't because they know their argument is over. | ||
| So I voted for Trump. | ||
| 5% of my mind, in my mind, 5% I was thinking the guy is Hitler. | ||
| There's a 5% chance I am making the biggest mistake of my life. | ||
| Pretty high percentage if you're going Hitler. | ||
| When Reagan was elected, I remember having friends call me up and saying, is this the end? | ||
| I said, no, he's a good guy. | ||
| He'll be fine. | ||
| He'll be on the other side for a while. | ||
| You won't die. | ||
| When people called me up with this, I was going like 95% sure. | ||
| You know, like you said, that's a big percentage if you're talking a genuine authoritarian tyrant. | ||
| I just thought the bet was worth it because I thought that Hillary was the end of the American experiment in the peacefulest possible way. | ||
| Like, you know, there's something in sports called losing comfortably where you don't even notice you're losing and then the game is over and it's done. | ||
| That's what I thought she was. | ||
| And so I thought it was worth the risk. | ||
| And I have been largely Delighted with how good he's been. | ||
| Now that doesn't mean I think he's been great. | ||
| It just means that I was really worried that he was going to be really bad. | ||
| And instead he's been pretty good, you know? | ||
| Crazy things about him that are hard to get over, the mean tweets, the personal tweets, all that stuff. | ||
| I don't mind the mean tweets, but I'll tell you three things that he has done that have really lifted me. | ||
| I really just felt like, wow! | ||
| Obviously Gorsuch, that's the obvious one. | ||
| I mean, that's a big deal. | ||
| And people who, on the right, who don't like Trump keep saying, oh, you keep bringing up Gorsuch. | ||
| I'm gonna keep bringing it up until I'm gone, you know? | ||
| That's a big, big Supreme Court appointment, and he did a great job. | ||
| It's also kind of a funny one to diminish, regardless of what side you're on, because guess what? | ||
| The Supreme, the courts are a third of the government. | ||
| That's right, that's right. | ||
| That's one of the three branches. | ||
| And the left has been using them as a super legislature, and Gorsuch won't do that. | ||
| He's opposed to that. | ||
| The other one, and this is a little wonky of me, but I was talking about it way before the election, so I feel I come by it naturally, is he's been rolling back regulations. | ||
| And we were talking about this before, the idea that you need a permit to be a hairstylist, a permit to sell lemonade on the street, you know. | ||
| He's been rolling that back, and there was a deluge. | ||
| That was Obama's kind of, you know, Parthian shot as he was leaving office. | ||
| He just left all these regulations in place, and he's been repealing them. | ||
| And I think that that is a huge deal. | ||
| The regulatory state Is a genuine threat to our freedoms. | ||
| You know, just the fact that you need to ask permission of the government to do anything is a bad thing. | ||
| And that's, to me, I mean, it really is uplifting to me. | ||
| And the third thing, and this is why I wanted to talk about Trump first, is that he has driven a truck | ||
| into the structure of a corrupt, biased, intellectually poisonous media. | ||
| And it was rotten, the structure was rotten, but he's the one who drove the truck into it. | ||
| And I don't think anybody else had the charisma or the viciousness or that understanding | ||
| that comes from being a TV star to do what he has done. | ||
| So I'm with you, especially on that one. | ||
| I like the regulations also. | ||
| This is somewhere where I have shifted a little bit, right? | ||
| I get it now, the government regulations for these nonsensical things, and as a small business owner, I so understand those type of things now. | ||
| But that last one, to me, is the one that's really resonating with people, even the way you just said it. | ||
| That's the one that is catching fire with people, and that's the one that I think really most people just intuitively, they understand, do you think he truly He truly, truly got it right from the beginning. | ||
| Do you think that really all came from him? | ||
| That's the part, you know, I said before the election, I just don't know what his moral center is. | ||
| I still don't know what like his real, sort of the ethos of this man is. | ||
| Do you think he really, really understood that? | ||
| Like that was just from being an outsider and mocked at the old White House press correspondence things and being on reality TV and New York media? | ||
| I think he got it because he's them. | ||
| He's one of them. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| I was a reporter. | ||
| I was in radio news and all this stuff, and I would see what was going on and how people thought. | ||
| When you're surrounded by people who agree with you, you become biased. | ||
| I think he's got a talent for it. | ||
| I used to talk to Andrew Breitbart, and I would sit there and go, like, I've never heard somebody who understands the flow of information. | ||
| That it's going to be here at this moment, at 12 o'clock, and it's going to be here at 2 o'clock, and it's going to be here at 3 o'clock, and this is the way it's going to work. | ||
| Trump's like that. | ||
| He has a natural genius for understanding the flow of information. | ||
| Sometimes he will do, he'll send out a tweet, and everybody will say, why did he distract everybody from, he realized that he was losing control of the narrative, and he seized it back. | ||
| And does he do that, like, sit up in his Mount White House and say, aha, now it's 10, 12, 15? | ||
| I kind of doubt it. | ||
| I don't know him, so I don't know. | ||
| But I think he has a natural feeling for the way this works. | ||
| And he understands, you know, he'd be a fool not to understand that he's under fire unfairly. | ||
| And I think he knows how to fight back, and it's a pleasure to watch. | ||
| All right, so Trump drives a truck through this thing. | ||
| I like what has happened there, and we're gonna get to that in CNN in a moment. | ||
| But let's talk about that 5%. | ||
| Do you still fear that 5%, or have those fears been allayed just because time has gone on and you haven't seen anything that absurd? | ||
| They have been allayed to almost entirely. | ||
| Everything that I thought about Trump, Turned out to be true, in terms of my assessment of his personality, but none of it turned out to be his worst manifestation. | ||
| So, it really did bother me, for instance, that he would use violent language at rallies, say, punch this guy, if you see that guy, punch him in the face, and all that stuff. | ||
| And he does have that side to his personality, but it didn't manifest itself in actual violence. | ||
| You know, he's the opposite of an authoritarian if you consider the fact that one of the most incompetent parts of his administration is he has been | ||
| unable to fill a lot of the positions in the government, in the permanent | ||
| government. He hasn't taken over the permanent government, which is what an | ||
| actual authoritarian would do, you know, an actual Hitlerian | ||
| figure would come in and make sure he made all the appointments and put his guys | ||
| in there. | ||
| He's too lazy to do that. Is that lazy though or is that just a function of | ||
| he... because there is some reason to believe he's just having trouble | ||
| getting the right type of people. | ||
| I think that he probably is having trouble. | ||
| He has this unfortunate habit, one of his really unfortunate habits, of wrong-footing his own people. | ||
| You'll go out and you'll say, well, President Trump said this, and he'll say, I didn't say that, and you get stabbed in the back by your own guy, and I think a lot of people don't want to sign on for that. | ||
| He's erratic, and he is emotional, and I think that that's dangerous for the, you know, the best people. | ||
| That said, he has appointed a tremendous cabinet, I mean, an unbelievable cabinet, and a cabinet of people who are at odds with the agencies that they are appointed to lead, which I think is part of my hatred of Of regulation. | ||
| Of agency and regulation. | ||
| So when you see things like, so something like the Paris Climate Accords, I suspect you were fine with us getting out of it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thrilled. | |
| I think it's nonsense, yeah. | ||
| Nonsense in that it was non-binding and whatever else, or that we had to burden the load, or what? | ||
| Yeah, I think the Paris Accords were only going to get us into legal trouble. | ||
| They were only there so people could sue us. | ||
| There was nothing binding about it, but it would give a lot of legal problems to the government. | ||
| And I also believe the global warming as it's posed I'm not saying that the world isn't getting warmer. | ||
| I'm just saying that global warming is an hysterical environmental disaster. | ||
| I'm almost positive it's a nonsense. | ||
| Where do you go for information on global warming? | ||
| Because this is one of the ones where I find that when I'm talking to conservatives and where I know that there's so much ground to agree on some stuff that I do believe in climate change. | ||
| We don't have to call it global warming, climate change. | ||
| Well, the very fact they changed it to climate change from global warming tells you... I've heard this argument. | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| I mean, we're on a rock that's spiraling into an atomic explosion. | ||
| It's not a steady state. | ||
| It's not a secure environment. | ||
| We're not living... And we've gone from ice ages to, you know, lava, the world being basically molten, you know. | ||
| I mean, the climate changes. | ||
| So, we know the climate is changing. | ||
| We know it's gotten warmer over the years. | ||
| I mean, going back in time, there were years when the Thames froze and people skated on the Thames. | ||
| And so, we know that there's changes. | ||
| There is no way to, A, know how much of this is human endeavor. | ||
| And, B, to know how much, how this goes into the future. | ||
| When people say science, there is no science for predicting the future. | ||
| There is no science for predicting the future. | ||
| When people are telling you what's going to happen in the future, what's coming out of their mouth is nothing. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| When people say, this is what's going to happen ten years down the line, I have arguments like this about politics, too. | ||
| When somebody says, well, if we do this, then in four years, you go like, ah, stop, stop right there. | ||
| I'll give you until Thursday, and then that's it. | ||
| Well, I love that, because every time they show anything, they'll go, well, the CBO said that in 10 years this is gonna cost 20 million lives, and you're like, has that ever happened? | ||
| They're always doing this. | ||
| And by the way, you're the same people who got everything wrong before the election, now you suddenly can prognosticate perfectly. | ||
| Yeah, and when you hear the phrase, if present trends continue, it's like everything after that is nonsense, because that never happens either. | ||
| Right, so without getting too far into the climate change thing, do you think there's some role for government to play With dealing with other nations when it comes to climate? | ||
| I can't think of anything, I mean, except like, you know, I do believe in preserving our environment and taking care of things. | ||
| You know, this is the thing, is the left always takes these rational issues, where there's a true good to be gained, and they turn them into hysteria, so give us all your power. | ||
| I mean, look, I'm a religious guy. | ||
| If a guy comes on TV and says, Jesus is coming tomorrow unless you send me a check, I get suspicious, right? | ||
| So when these guys say to me, if you don't give the government all power and essentially fulfill every socialist need, the world is going to be destroyed in a hail of fire, I feel the same way. | ||
| It's like, yeah, I'll turn on something else and see if there's an old Yogi Berra rerun on. | ||
| Yeah, which there usually is. | ||
| You go up into the really high channels, like around 130 or so. | ||
| Okay, let's talk about the media because you because you can talk about we can talk ourselves into a Trump style Yes, fidget spinner and it's not gonna get us anywhere. | ||
| So The media he drove this truck through it. | ||
| I do think it's great I think it's helped voices like yours like what we're doing here like many other people who are not promising all the answers, but at least promising discussions and some Some lines of thought that maybe weren't getting out there in the mainstream. | ||
| Do you think that there is a risk in that too? | ||
| That we are just going to filter ourselves into oblivion to the point where, instead of having three news channels, we're now going to have a gajillion of them and we're all going to hate each other for a zillion new reasons that we didn't even realize? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| There's a definite moral hazard here. | ||
| As these liars in our press keep saying, a free press is important to a free society. | ||
| And you do want, I mean, another thing that's working well under Trump is that everybody, that the press is attacking the people in power instead of what they did during the Obama administration, where they kept their hands over their eyes and said, oh look, he's scandal-free. | ||
| I would argue there's a little bit of an overcorrection happening. | ||
| An overcorrection, no question about it. | ||
| But that's because they're so corrupt. | ||
| I mean, that's why. | ||
| So, I do believe in a, I can't remember the word, but a press that basically stands up to power. | ||
| I do believe in a free press. | ||
| We don't have a free press. | ||
| We have a press that has been corrupted beyond its purposes. | ||
| And that doesn't mean there are no good reporters. | ||
| That means that a good reporter on the New York Times is basically doing the wrong thing, because he's giving credence and credibility to a sophomoric, left-wing college magazine. | ||
| Can you give an example of that? | ||
| I attack CNN all the time. | ||
| I've seen some bad stuff lately out of the New York Times. | ||
| Where the headline leads you one way, and then when you read it, it really isn't what it said. | ||
| They've been doing a lot of corrections lately, which usually no one reads the corrections, so you never see any of that. | ||
| But when I do attack the New York Times, people give me more shit. | ||
| Like CNN, it's like everyone's in on the joke now. | ||
| But New York Times, it's a little bit different. | ||
| So when you describe it as a sophomore... | ||
| Well, I mean, if you read their op-ed page, which I now call Knucklehead Row, you know, if you read their op-ed page, it really is like a bunch of eight-year-old girls in a room where a mouse has gotten loose, all screaming and yelling, everybody running around hysteric, and that's really unfair to eight-year-old girls. | ||
| And if you read, I mean, just yesterday they ran a story, Donald Trump Jr. | ||
| met with a Russian lawyer and all this. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| I mean, who cares if Donald Trump Jr. | ||
| met with a Russian lawyer to get Because he thought she had information on the opposition. | ||
| And everybody, you know, faints. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| I saw celebrities, well-known people saying, this is it. | ||
| This is the collusion we've been looking for. | ||
| It's a page 30 story. | ||
| It's called opposition research. | ||
| Everyone does this. | ||
| Do you think Hillary didn't meet with people to see if they had information on Trump? | ||
| And only in an organization where no one is sitting next to you who says, "Dude, that's not a story, that's a 30 page, 30 story." | ||
| Only in a place where everybody thinks we've found the smoking gun, | ||
| can you make a fool of yourself like that? | ||
| In other words, you want somebody to say to you, "You know, I know you're a conservative, | ||
| "but there is something to not letting people starve "to death in the streets." | ||
| You go, "Oh yeah, I forgot about it." | ||
| And the opposite is true. | ||
| You know, "Yeah, I know you're a left winger, "but everybody does oppo research, | ||
| "and the fact that she was from Russia "doesn't mean a thing." | ||
| And by the way, as far as I know, he didn't buy anything from her or take anything from her. | ||
| It was a ruse to get him to talk about this ruling, you know, that limits the way they can use banks and all this stuff. | ||
| You know, we've been listening to this stupid story for six months, this Russian It is not a story. | ||
| I mean, it's just not. | ||
| And even the Russian meddling with the election, which I believe happened, is kind of like finding a spy. | ||
| You know, we go, oh my goodness, there's a spy. | ||
| Who would ever spy on a country? | ||
| You know, can we bring our spies back for a couple of years? | ||
| That's what this is like. | ||
| We do it to them and all this and they do it to us. | ||
| So, the New York Times has become, it's dishonest. | ||
| They use good reporters and good reporting to tell a dishonest story. | ||
| And the fact that they think, that they even can conceive of the idea that they're not a leftist rag, shows you how far gone they are. | ||
| I mean, that they cannot, you know, take just any day, pick up the Wall Street Journal, and pick up the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal you're talking to an adult, the New York Times you're talking to a child. | ||
| Well, it's interesting that you made a point of saying the op-ed pages, too, because obviously you expect opinion on op-ed pages, so that's separate than the editorial side. | ||
| But their op-ed page, the reaction to some of the things that they're doing has gone insane. | ||
| So they brought Brett Stevens from the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| He writes that one piece basically just about skepticism, didn't even really say he doesn't believe in climate change. | ||
| I think he may have even said the opposite. | ||
| But then there were immediately people demanding he be fired and all of this craziness just for having an alternate opinion on their op-ed page. | ||
| But the one that I thought was more interesting, did you see the one a couple weeks ago about Brett Weinstein from Evergreen State? | ||
| And it was all about campus free speech, but basically the thrust of it at the end was, we as liberals better start caring about this because it's coming for us. | ||
| And I thought, what an odd admission. | ||
| You're now admitting that you didn't care about free speech because it was coming against the other people. | ||
| Now it's finally turning on a guy who's left, left, left, super progressive, so now we better start caring. | ||
| That was a strange admission. | ||
| It was nice, it was refreshing, I suppose. | ||
| It is, but I think the New York Times has just gone so far down this hole that an article like that stands out. | ||
| When you read an article like that in the Times, you go like, wow, even in the New York Times, they're now for free speech. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| The New York Times should be for free speech every day, for everyone, every day. | ||
| The New York Times should have conservatives on the desks where the news decisions are being made. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal is anti-Trump in its news pages, sometimes unfairly, I think, but not crazily. | ||
| They have people obviously correcting their opinions. | ||
| You know, there comes a level, there comes a time when the level of corruption gets so bad that audacity becomes a kind of a brag. | ||
| So you see this in governments all the time. | ||
| You see it in Illinois, places like Chicago and things like this. | ||
| Remember the boss tweet and the little tin box and all this stuff? | ||
| Yeah, I put the money in a little tin box. | ||
| That audacious corruption comes from a sense that we are so corrupt that no one can touch us, okay? | ||
| When you put George Stephanopoulos, a Clinton hack, at the top of your news team, he is your news guy, that's a sign that you have become corrupt. | ||
| It's not that he's not... That's ABC News. | ||
| Yes, that's ABC. | ||
| It's not that he's not a nice man or whatever he is. | ||
| He's a guy who once said to Hillary, I love you, Hillary. | ||
| He can have a role in your news department, but he should not be running your news department. | ||
| The guy at CBS who just looks like Ted Baxter to me, you know, the member from the Marriott. | ||
| I remember Ted Baxter. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| Scott Pelley. | ||
| who made decisions so biased during the Obama administration that his own | ||
| reporters didn't want their stories going on his air because they didn't | ||
| want to do what I was talking about was serve a biased report. This corruption | ||
| has become so manifest and so absurd that to see it taken down is a beautiful | ||
| thing but you're right. | ||
| We need to replace it with something of value. | ||
| We need to replace it with something that works. | ||
| So is that why they're hitting back so hard? | ||
| So the CNN thing that happened last week with this threat to dox this person who did a perfectly legal thing, it is legal to make memes, By the way, he didn't make it for Trump. | ||
| However, it got to Trump, and it sounds like it was actually a slightly altered version. | ||
| We don't know how it is, but there are millions of people making memes on the internet as we sit here right this second. | ||
| It wasn't just that they were threatening to dox this guy for doing something illegal. | ||
| It was the line after that, where they said he's agreed not to do this offensive blah, blah, blah again, as if they're the church or his parents or something. | ||
| So to me, that was the scarier thing, not the threat of the dox, which of course is wrong, But the threat that they were tacitly saying, or implicitly saying to everybody else, we're watching you too and we're gonna come for all of you. | ||
| And then the internet turned on them in a beautiful fashion. | ||
| Right, but it was only the follow-up and the completion of the logic that went after Joe the Plumber. | ||
| And of course the right mishandled that by elevating Joe the Plumber to some kind of commentator because he'd been attacked. | ||
| But remember, Joe the Plumber went out and asked the question of a political candidate And they went after the guy who asked the question. | ||
| I mean, this is how corrupt they've become. | ||
| And they are thuggish, and this is all of them. | ||
| I mean, I'm talking about the networks, I'm talking about the Times, I'm talking about WaPo, and I'm talking about CNN, which is, in some ways, the least of them, because it's just a small operation that would vanish like that if people cut their cable cords, you know? | ||
| What's that thing they say that if they would get CNN out of airports, it would lose like... It would lose all of its viewers. | ||
| It's all of these guys, and it hasn't even occurred to one of them, not one of them, has said, well, you know, Trump is being a jerk, and Trump is not, it's not fair what he does, and it's really wrong when he attacks our reporter in terms of her face or whatever, you know, like, but he has a point. | ||
| You know, we need to reform our industry. | ||
| There's a reason that the people People believe Donald Trump more than they believe us. | ||
| There's a reason that people hate us so much. | ||
| So it really is that they've just been drunk on power for these last, whatever it is, 30 years. | ||
| They've been drunk on power for so long, and now they finally have someone throwing it in their face. | ||
| And now the people, the actual people, are rising up against them too. | ||
| I saw, you saw probably Chris Cuomo, who of course his brother is the governor of New York. | ||
| His father was the governor of New York. | ||
| And he's an idiot, he's like Fredo from the Cuomo. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| He really, I mean, every time you see the guy, he's just another-- - It's embarrassing. | ||
| Yeah, but he tweeted something about these hateful memes and should we release the information | ||
| because the guy's tweeted some other racist stuff and all that, and then he ended up deleting it. | ||
| But I retweeted him and I said, would you say that a meme or a gif is worse | ||
| than Linda Sarsour calling for Jihad? | ||
| Now, we talked about it briefly before we started, but regardless of whether she meant her own personal Jihad, | ||
| but she's talking about the white supremacists and Islamophobes in the White House, | ||
| and everyone knows if you're using that word, you're trying to gin up a certain something. | ||
| And my tweet got way more retweets and everything than any of his do. | ||
| He has a million followers and almost no interaction, which also tells you a little something. | ||
| But I bring this up because it's like, of course he doesn't respond. | ||
| Because they think they're beholden to nobody, too. | ||
| where it's like we actually are beholden to our audience. | ||
| You know, when I was a newspaper man, I was a newspaper man in a small town | ||
| with a very powerful and somewhat corrupt sheriff. | ||
| So it was like out of a movie, you know, and I would badger the guy. | ||
| And I remember saying to one—I had some sources in the department, | ||
| and I remember saying to one of them, "Look, we work for this—we both work for the people." | ||
| And he turned around and he said, I work for the people, you work for a corporation. | ||
| And I thought, my God, he's right. | ||
|
unidentified
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The minute he said that, oh, that's true, you know, that's true. | |
| They don't understand that they're just mouthpieces for big corporations which love big government because big government hurts the little guy. | ||
| You know, that's all they're doing. | ||
| They're just standing up for these powerful corporations in the name of all the leftist, you know, bywords and all this stuff. | ||
| You know, they really have lost any real sense of themselves and it's just, it's pitiful to watch in some ways, but it is good to see it getting exposed. | ||
| And what I would like to see on the right, I feel on the right we have a lot of really good people like you and me and Ben and all these people expressing opinions. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't consider myself part of the right, by the way. | |
| Yeah, I would say, you know, I'm still a liberal, which is a fine line between that and a libertarian, but yes, I hate to even pause you there to say that, but I know a certain amount of people start screaming at me, but I consider I'm more than happy to talk to all you guys. | ||
| But I say it all the time that I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that, like, I would like to see us start to gather information. | ||
| And that's expensive, and you need people to back you, and you need it to somehow make it profitable. | ||
| But we need to start sending people to the hot spots, because for me to get the facts, I have to go to the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and CNN, and all these places, because they hire reporters. | ||
| And opinions are great, and insights are great, and there is now, because the press is so corrupt, there is an actual need for people like us to say, they're telling you the facts mean this, but the facts actually might mean this. | ||
| That is an actual profession now. | ||
| It's a real profession that needs to be done. | ||
| But I would like to see the right go after, have people in Iraq, have people in the hot spots | ||
| of the world, have people in Washington, D.C. | ||
| The best news program on television is Brett Baier's special report | ||
| because they gather news and because they're fair. | ||
| Even though they tilt to the right, they're very fair about what they cover. | ||
| Are you shocked by the breadth of it, just sort of the amount of activists | ||
| masquerading as journalists? | ||
| Because that's what I think they are, truly. | ||
| These people are not. | ||
| I mean, I've seen just some of the recent hit pieces on me. | ||
| And it's like, no matter how much I plead my case or defend myself or show them evidence to the contrary of what some Mother Jones calling me an extremist to the right of Breitbart. | ||
| Yeah, real doozy. | ||
| And it's like, You know, they don't correct anything, they don't care, they know their job is safe, and it's like, forgetting all that, you're not a journalist. | ||
| I tweeted the guy something to that effect, like, I just want you to admit you're not a journalist. | ||
| Write what you want, even though I probably had a decent case for a libel, write what you want, but can you admit what you're doing? | ||
| And it's like that sort of, that lack of self-awareness. | ||
| You know, I've now been saying this to the right, for 10, 15 years about our loss of the culture. | ||
| And that's what this is. | ||
| This is the result of our loss of the universities, of our loss of TV stations, women's magazines. | ||
| Every woman's magazine is left-wing. | ||
| Every comedian on television, every late-night comedian, every single one is a left-winger. | ||
| Not one, not one woman. | ||
| And when one of them made a joke, was nice to Donald Trump, he was basically pilloried. | ||
| He had to take it back. | ||
| Right, with Jimmy Fallon. | ||
| that was the one you know i was hard to tell the difference between all the | ||
| same you know they're all exactly Everyone, how do we let that happen and why don't we respond? | ||
| And I always say to conservatives that telling them about the culture is like trying to explain to my wife when she buys something on sale, it still costs money. | ||
| And she always looks at me and says, you know, you're a cute guy and I like you, but I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| And that's the way conservatives look at me. | ||
| How did we How do we get to the point where we have people talking like a hundred-year-old men going, I don't go to the movies anymore, I just turn on Turner, Cloutier, and Doris Day is good enough for me. | ||
| You know, I mean, that's insane. | ||
| And how do we get to the point where we start making stuff that educates people, not to be right-wingers, but simply to open their minds a little bit. | ||
| So I don't know what your feelings are on Milo, but I suspect after hearing you say that you must at least love Much of the movement behind him, right? | ||
| Because isn't he that? | ||
| Isn't that thing that you're now saying, we're winning the culture war back? | ||
| I mean, he talked about that all the time, right here. | ||
| You know, that is such a great question. | ||
| It really is a great question, because Milo gives me fits. | ||
| I've only spoken to Milo once. | ||
| We had a long conversation about video games when he was on Gamergate. | ||
| And I like the man, you know? | ||
| I mean, I got along with him. | ||
| He has done some stuff that's so vicious, partly to my friend Ben Shapiro, which I resent because he's my friend, and anti-Semitic, and he's given shelter to anti-Semites, which I always feel, the minute I see anti-Semites, it is the canary in the coal mine. | ||
| You know, that's where evil dwells, basically. | ||
| They usually go for the Jews first. | ||
| They go for the Jews first. | ||
| So, there's stuff that he's done that I just think is great and I wish that he would find himself in a somewhat better place. | ||
| Because there is such a thing, even though I believe everyone should be allowed to speak, there are some things that when spoken are reprehensible. | ||
| Yeah, well there's consequences for your speech. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And when I hear him, I don't know, the Jew remarks and the kind of They're kind of hateful, allowing hatefulness to be cute, allowing it to be ironic, saying, you know, I've heard him say, for instance, I've heard him say, when our generation is anti-Semitic, they're just being ironical, and I think like, yeah, that's a snake that's gonna bite back, you know, I don't really buy into that. | ||
| And so, I like what he's doing, I don't always like the way that he's doing it, or what he's doing it in service to, but certainly, when he had, what was it called, the dangerous faggot You know, I laughed out loud. | ||
| I thought, I want more of those guys. | ||
| I mean, it was Breitbart and I used to have this conversation all the time. | ||
| You know, when I first met Breitbart, he kind of enlisted me into the L.A. | ||
| Right, as he did almost all of us. | ||
| You know, I said to him, I want to tell you right up front that I'm not going in for this gay stuff, this anti-gay stuff, because I think we're going to lose. | ||
| I said, A, we're going to lose, which is no shame, but we're going to lose and be wrong. | ||
| And that's a shame. | ||
| That's really shameful. | ||
| Breitbart said to me, what I want is more patriotic gay porn. | ||
|
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I have this conversation with people about Milo all the time. | |
| Two straight guys demanding more patriotic, straight porn. | ||
| That's how much you people love the country. | ||
| We were gonna watch it, but we thought it should be there. | ||
| You know, and so I think that, you know, I have this conversation with people | ||
| about Milo all the time. | ||
| I see a good that he is doing. | ||
| I see dangers in the way he's doing it. | ||
| And I think you can be too ironical about too much because there is a moral universe | ||
| and you do not wanna blow yourself through it. | ||
| Yeah, do you think that's kind of the Faustian bargain that you have to play? | ||
| You're getting what you want, what you've wanted here, and you as a guy that's been through the Hollywood machine, too. | ||
| So you're getting the culture wins that really, if he had, let's say he had done, you know, been a little more careful with his language, or not done some of the unnecessary over-the-top stuff, or whatever, that it might've shaved some of the good part that you want. | ||
| It maybe just wouldn't have broke through the same way. | ||
| That's kind of what the Trumpian bargain, I would say. | ||
| That only a guy as uncaring about the niceties would have driven his truck Yes. | ||
| into the media the way he did. | ||
| And I think that, does it come with moral hazards? | ||
| Yes, do people have to speak up about those moral hazards and take the flack from the right when they say, | ||
| you know, oh, you're a cock and you're all these things? | ||
| Yes, we have to take that flack, but it has to be done because I think | ||
| we had reached a tipping point. | ||
| I hate to use a cliched phrase like that, but I think we had reached a tipping point | ||
| where we were sounding very much like a communist country, like there was things that you could say | ||
| that made you persona non grata, that there were opinions you could have, | ||
| that, you know, the trapdoor, like the James Bond villain, | ||
| you had to be dropped through the trapdoor. | ||
| I think we were at a dangerous point, and political correctness is a smothering toxic, evil device for making lying seem like a virtue. | ||
| And if Donald Trump destroys political correctness, he will have done a great thing. | ||
| I mean, a great thing. | ||
| And that moral hazards come along with that. | ||
| I think we shouldn't forget it. | ||
| You know, a good example of this is when they shut down Shakespeare in the Park the other day. | ||
| Now, Shakespeare, that was reprehensible to assassinate the president on stage. | ||
| I really think, you know, as a Shakespeare fan, I think that it was an awful, awful thing to do. | ||
| But they would have done the same thing if it was Obama, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly! | ||
| But to shut them down and to have my friends, you know, writing that this was a good thing, Yeah, I completely agree. | ||
| That's a mistake. | ||
| Yeah, I completely agree. | ||
| Because now what you're saying, it's okay to fight to say, | ||
| well, we've gotta be as tough as the left, but to say we've gotta be as tough as the left | ||
| for things that the left would approve of, like shutting down free speech, | ||
| that doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why both, and that's why, again, these sides, | ||
| the sides are just becoming meaningless and nonsensical. | ||
| I think that that's a really good observation because I do think that, and this is part of the problem I have with the right right now, is I keep saying to them, you know, you're right. | ||
| They're disturbed because the conservative movement has essentially collapsed when Trump swept all those guys off the stage the way he did in the primaries. | ||
| The conservative movement was done for and my response to that is fix it. | ||
| You know, put it back together differently. | ||
| You know, it's a new world. | ||
| Make a new conservatism. | ||
| You don't have to get rid of your principles. | ||
| You don't have to get rid of your big principles, but you might have to get rid of some of the ways those principles express themselves in the world. | ||
| Yeah, so is that just, that's just real politic, right? | ||
| I mean, it seems to me you're just viewing the world as it is, not as you want it to be. | ||
| So if you had a guy like Bill Kristol, where it's like he wants that conservative thing to exist again. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't think you can make that happen, or you certainly can't, it's going to go through several other iterations before it was ever to get back to something like that. | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm interested in guys like Henry Olson, who are basically saying, pointing out that Reagan was kind of an FDR Democrat more than anything else, and he invented kind of modern conservatism. | ||
| I'm interested in guys who say, look, this is the field of play, and this is where we want to get. | ||
| See, this is the thing that I know that I've noticed a lot of commentators don't. | ||
| I know where I want to get. | ||
| I want to get to more freedom. | ||
| I have more freedom now, six months after the election of Donald Trump, seven months after the election of Donald Trump, than I did eight months ago. | ||
| No question in my mind. | ||
| The fact that the EPA can't now rule my sink a waterway. | ||
| And declare that they can now tell me whether I can shave or not, you know. | ||
| I think that that makes me more free. | ||
| But that being said, Trump may not be great on eminent domain, right? | ||
| Because he might want this wall to cut through. | ||
| Who knows where the hell the wall's at now, but I assure you he would have no problem using eminent domain to make it cut through. | ||
| There are all these dangers involved and so I just want to see is the ball moving in the freedom direction all the time and right now it is and you know I definitely see moral hazards. | ||
| I definitely look at a guy, Milo, I mean he's in such a good example because I look at him and there are things that he does that I make me laugh out loud and I just think it's wonderful he's here and then suddenly he'll say something and I'll think except You don't want to give credence to hatred and evil. | ||
| Evil is bigger than irony, and evil will eat irony. | ||
| So you want to be careful about that. | ||
| I feel that could have been the ending, but I'm going to ask you one other thing, which is, do you fear, perhaps, that these forces, which have grown so fat, and were so drunk on their own power and all that. | ||
| Now that it's starting to crumble, do you fear that they will hit back on people like you, and people like me, and whoever, in a way that we may not understand yet? | ||
| In other words, that thing that they did with the Han Asshole solo and the GIF, or the meme, was a warning shot only of the way that they're gonna try to treat the people who go against them. | ||
| Well, I think we've seen it with these leaks from the intelligence community about Donald Trump did this and they turned out some of those leaks turned out not to be true, but the press was perfectly happy to say sources within the intelligence community, former officials. | ||
| And you think, well, what does a former official know? | ||
| Didn't matter. | ||
| They were putting a front page. | ||
| That was the front page on the New York Times, the Washington Post. | ||
| They were, that was the deep state striking back. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| They're going to continue to fight. | ||
| This is a genuine battle. | ||
| This is a genuine battle for I hate to say it, but it's a battle for the future. | ||
| I mean, I think that this global world, which has many good things in it, I think free trade and global communication and all this, also allowed a small group of people to make decisions Unelected people to make decisions for people who had no way to redress their grievances. | ||
| And I think that that can't be. | ||
| You know, if we're going to become a global world, then I want America to take it over. | ||
| Basically, I'm an imperialist in that regard. | ||
| If the world's going to be global, fine. | ||
| But everybody's living under the Constitution. | ||
| That's the way it's going to be. | ||
| If not, if everybody's not living under the Constitution and Saudi Arabia doesn't want to live under the Constitution, Then I want Saudi Arabia to stay in Saudi Arabia, and I want Saudi Arabians to stay in Saudi Arabia, unless they want to come over here to live under the Constitution. | ||
| So those are the choices. | ||
| Right, that's an interesting way to frame it. | ||
| Either it's a global world run by the Constitution or America first. | ||
| A anonymous source on Capitol Hill is telling me right now that this was an excellent interview. | ||
| Oh, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. | ||
| I hope we can continue the conversation. | ||
| You know, I get my anonymous source on Capitol Hill is from Gloria Borger. | ||
| She's always quoting this anonymous source. | ||
| Are you talking to the janitor? | ||
| Who has a source on Capitol Hill? | ||
| It's anybody! | ||
| Well, that's what I want people to understand. | ||
| It's anybody. | ||
| It's all made up. | ||
| It's been a pleasure talking to you, as always. | ||
| And for more on Andrew, check him out on The Andrew Klaven Show. | ||
| Brilliant name, by the way. | ||
| No, it was amazing. | ||
| We worked for ages on it. |
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