Sept. 1, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me today is an author, the political editor of townhall.com | ||
| and a Fox News contributor, Guy Benson. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| I am looking forward to talking to you, but we've got to say first, Fox News contributor, a certain amount of people are going to hate you already. | ||
| Right out of the gate. | ||
| What do you do with that kind of information? | ||
| Well, I think it's interesting how some people use labels as a substitute for argument. | ||
| So I'll make a point on Twitter, for example, and someone on the left will check my bio and just respond, oh, well, Fox News contributor, as if that means anything, as if that's a response to anything that I've actually argued. | ||
| And I'll say, good point. | ||
| You know, like, where are you going with that? | ||
| And usually they sort of Scuttle off somewhere. | ||
| But I'm very happy to work there. | ||
| I've been proud to work there for four years. | ||
| It's a great platform. | ||
| And one thing that sometimes people ask me about it is, you know, there's elements that are very pro-Trump and others that aren't. | ||
| And are you ever told or encouraged to think something or say something on the air? | ||
| And the answer Hand to heart is no, never, which I value greatly, and I think if that were different, I would probably not want to stick around, and that's never happened. | ||
| Full editorial independence, which is, I think, crucial for a thriving network, and I've been afforded that. | ||
| Yeah, and I will back you on that much. | ||
| I haven't done as much Fox's stuff as you have, but I had been on O'Reilly, I've done Tucker, I've done Gutfeld. | ||
| They let you go on and say whatever you want, and the chips will fall where they may, but in terms of editing, you know, a lot of this stuff is live, and it kind of is what it is. | ||
| But people just have a feeling that somehow there's something evil. | ||
| Or that there's an editorial line that we somehow get a memo at the beginning of every day. | ||
| Here's what we think about this today. | ||
| I mean it's ludicrous. | ||
| I think a lot of the critics of Fox don't watch Fox. | ||
| They see short clips of it on the Daily Show or on Samantha Bee or | ||
| whatever highlighting a particularly preposterous moment | ||
| and they say, "Well, it must be that 24/7," | ||
| and that's not how it is. | ||
| And sometimes when people are really skeptical or cynical about the network, | ||
| I'll encourage them to watch Brett Baier's show, "Special Report," and I say, "Give that a shot for a week. | ||
| "Watch two or three episodes and then come back to me "and let me know if you have the exact same perception | ||
| "of Fox News." | ||
| Do they ever do it? | ||
| Do they ever actually do it? | ||
| He's pretty center, that guy. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes they do, and they're like, all right, this is a legit show, and I'm like, okay, this is progress. | ||
| That's a small amount of progress, right? | ||
| Thank you for watching. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so we're gonna talk a lot about your book, End of Discussion. | ||
| We met briefly about two years ago at the after party at Realtime with Bill Maher, and the hardcover had come out. | ||
| The softcover, which we have right here, just came out. | ||
| So before we get into the book, though, you're gay. | ||
| Are we breaking this news on the Rubin Report? | ||
| It says it right there. | ||
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unidentified
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Does it? | |
| Well, the card can't be wrong. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is a blue card. | ||
| We're typing on it. | ||
| Yeah, on televisions or whatever. | ||
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unidentified
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Wherever. | |
| We're sending this out to something. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You're gay and you're a Republican. | ||
| I just dropped my cards because of that. | ||
| How could this possibly be? | ||
| I would consider myself more of a conservative than a Republican. | ||
| I tend to vote Republican because the Democratic Party, to me, is a completely inhospitable place for me based on my beliefs and my worldview. | ||
| But the party, the Republican Party, frustrates me deeply on a frequent basis. | ||
| So I feel like I'm less attached to the R label than I am to the conservative one. | ||
| So let's do that part first, actually. | ||
| So tell me, what does being a conservative mean to you? | ||
| Then we'll get to the gay stuff. | ||
| Great. | ||
| To me, it just means that I believe, fundamentally, that the government, especially the federal government, isn't particularly good at doing very many things at all. | ||
| And they do too many things, and they do them badly at great expense to all of us. | ||
| And I think they should do fewer things, do them better, and preferably the things that they are required to do under the Constitution and not a constantly expanding array of tasks that they accumulate. | ||
| And it costs a lot of us a lot of money. | ||
| So a small government conservative is sort of where I come from. | ||
| Foreign policy, I'm somewhere in the middle of the party or the conservative movement. | ||
| I'm not A hardcore hawk, but I'm not a non-interventionist either. | ||
| And on social issues, it's just a complete mixed bag. | ||
| It's hard to pin me down. | ||
| Pro-gay marriage, pro-life, sort of all over the map. | ||
| And given that panoply of issues, and I look at where the parties stand, You know, or where the movements are in this country. | ||
| I do agree with the left on some things, but it's just outweighed by the right. | ||
| On most issues, I lean to the right, and therefore I tend to vote Republican. | ||
| Yeah, so by conventional thinking, though, people would say, wait a minute, you can't be a gay conservative. | ||
| How could you have fought for gay marriage, for example, from a conservative perspective? | ||
| How do you answer something like that? | ||
| I just think it's a completely false premise. | ||
| The idea that someone has to prioritize their politics based on their identity I think is a toxic, corrosive, lefty construct that I just completely reject. | ||
| If I wanted to be a gay person who's against gay marriage, I have every right to think that way. | ||
| I happen to support gay marriage. | ||
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I hope to get married, but... And there are some of those that exist, by the way. | |
| Yeah, they're out there, for sure. | ||
| And if that's, you know, let's have that discussion. | ||
| I'm not gonna call you self-hating because you don't support every single one of the agenda items of a political party or a political movement or the LGBT community or whatever it might be. | ||
| To me, I look at my priorities In terms of the elements on policy that animate me, that I think about the most, that I am concerned about the most, and if I sort of weigh them... | ||
| It tilts in the rightward direction, which is why I am a conservative. | ||
| That doesn't mean that I think the Republican Party represents me perfectly or even particularly well on gay rights issues. | ||
| I also think it's an odd vantage point or an odd demand that some people on the left try to make that if you are a certain way, if you're in a certain column or a category of people, You have to then vote for a certain party or what have you. | ||
| Would you prefer that there is nobody on the other side of the aisle making arguments to perhaps modernize the platform, for example, the Republican Party, or to introduce the idea that there are gay people that are not all that scary? | ||
| I mean, in this process of being on the book tour for two years and speaking to a lot of conservative audiences, I have been really struck by just the kindness and the sweetness that I've encountered from a lot of traditional conservatives who are not necessarily even on board for gay marriage, but are sort of like, | ||
| Maybe we're sort of rethinking some of this a little bit. | ||
| One story that comes to mind in particular that I enjoy telling was I was at an event in Denver a year and a half ago maybe and we were doing a book signing. | ||
| This was the hardcover back then and fortunately there is a long line so people were coming up and they're wanting photos and that sort of thing and there's this woman who is probably in her 60s And she approached me and she got the book signed and she | ||
| was, I could tell she wanted to say something else. | ||
| And she didn't know if to say it or how to say it. | ||
| And finally she just sort of blurted it out, whispered a little bit. | ||
| She goes, "I have a nephew who's the way you are." | ||
| And it was just this very cute way of sort of trying to just say, you know, and I love him. | ||
| And that was her way of trying to communicate about it and just sort of pat me on the shoulder and say, you're welcome. | ||
| You're welcome here. | ||
| And, you know, we've got your back. | ||
| And there's been some of that. | ||
| And frankly, my favorite response that I've gotten from conservatives Since I came out in the book, actually, two years ago. | ||
| So the timing was all, I mean, you did this sort of in lockstep. | ||
| Well, and I can explain that in a second, but I was just going to say my favorite response has been ambivalence. | ||
| People just being like, noted, moving on. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's the best response to me, because the reason that I didn't come out publicly sooner is because I felt like it was no one's business. | ||
| This is my personal life. | ||
| Anyone who knew me closely, my family, my friends, my colleagues, they all knew. | ||
| I just wasn't publicly gay because I didn't want to pigeonhole myself right out of the gate in my career as the gay whatever. | ||
| I wanted people to start to read my work, see me on TV, and get a sense of the content of what I put out rather than viewing me through an identity lens immediately. | ||
| But because we delve into some of these issues, gay rights and religious liberty and so on, in an entire chapter of the book entitled, Bake Me a Cake, Bigots, I felt like at that point, if I'm going to write 10,000 words on an issue, I should probably disclose, just journalistically, that I'm gay. | ||
| So I did it in a footnote. | ||
| In the book, and I felt it was the right time for the right reason. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you go on the tour, and you're meeting now these conservatives, and you're doing book signings and things like that, and most of them don't care, do you think that's the best way to actually change people's minds on your part? | ||
| Is that all you did? | ||
| Do you put in a footnote? | ||
| Okay, now here I am. | ||
| Let's go ahead. | ||
| Did you get any blowback? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| But it was like some legit people I mean maybe from some haters on Twitter But was there any because I get this all the time because people because I think we're gonna agree on the on the cake I'm pretty sure we have a gay cake thing and I'll say well people you know people say to me well See you're tolerating the these Republicans who hated you all these years, and I'm like well. | ||
| They've changed a lot actually There's been a huge Sea change I also don't except that someone having a political disagreement | ||
| or not wanting to participate in a gay wedding equates to hating me. | ||
| So I try to be more generous in spirit on that sort of thing. | ||
| But you're also allowed to hate people. | ||
| I mean, you are. | ||
| It's kind of uncomfortable. | ||
| That's true. - We don't like it. | ||
| I would rather that not-- | ||
| I don't encourage that. | ||
| Yeah, I don't encourage it. | ||
| I would rather it not happen. | ||
| But you are, even for bad reasons, you are allowed to hate. | ||
| You're not allowed to hurt people physically, but you are allowed to have your own bigoted views. | ||
| It's just how it is, you know? | ||
| I'd like to change those views, but... And that's part of, I think, what you do, right? | ||
| That's just doing the show and reaching out to new, especially younger audiences. | ||
| They're sort of like, oh, trying to open people's minds in a society where we seem to be trending in the other direction, the wrong direction. | ||
| But your question reminds me of another stop on the tour. | ||
| This one was in New Mexico, I believe. | ||
| And my co-author is Mary Catherine Hamm, who's like a very, very dear friend. | ||
| We've been, we're almost like siblings at this point. | ||
| And she's at CNN now. | ||
| So we were in Albuquerque, and during the Q&A we had done our normal spiel about the book, and someone asked her, it had just been, remember the day without women? | ||
| where there's a strike just to show the impact of women in society. | ||
| So a woman asked her during the session, "How did you spend your day without women?" | ||
| And then I think she thought, like, "Oh, well, I should maybe just ask Guy anyway, | ||
| because I don't want to only ask a question of Mary Catherine." | ||
| So Mary Catherine gave this great answer about the day without women, | ||
| and she was very charming and very funny, and then she tossed it to me. | ||
| She's like, well, what did you do with your Day Without Women? | ||
| I'm like, that's sort of every day for me, am I right? | ||
| And in my mind, I was like, is this a joke that I should make? | ||
| Like, this is just a straight-up, self-deprecating gay joke in front of an older, conservative audience. | ||
| Got a huge laugh, sort of punctured any awkwardness about that, and it was like, done. | ||
| Most people don't care, which is Definitely progress. | ||
| And that's also why, you know, just to have you here and have this conversation. | ||
| People don't get this kind of conversation too often between two gay people that come from things from a slightly different political perspective. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I know when I've had Milo here who, you know, comes from a completely other political perspective. | ||
| He's been in that very, it wasn't in this room, but he's been in that very chair. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Which will now taint you, I'm sure, in some way that you'll never be able to, you know, come back from. | ||
| I'm going to leave that one alone. | ||
| But point being that when we've talked, even though we come from things from a different perspective also, That it's refreshing for people to hear gay people talk about issues that aren't just about fashion or whatever the things that Bravo is telling you all gay people should care about. | ||
| So, this is actually a story that I've never told, but when I, in the process, and like every gay person has gone through the process of coming out, and like the first step is coming out to yourself, right? | ||
| And then you sort of, for me, I expanded the circle of trust, so to speak. | ||
| One of the conversations that I was most dreading was with a very close group of guy friends from college. | ||
| Went to Northwestern and we were all at a bachelor party weekend in Montreal for one, you know, one of our buddies was getting married and I just sort of felt this was the time. | ||
| We were all together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I told them and they sort of were shocked and they interrogated me for an hour in the hotel like, what do you mean? | ||
| And I could sort of get the sense from the line of questioning a little bit. | ||
| They were like, so the person that we've gotten to know, like, is that all real or all fake or what's going on? | ||
| I'm like, no, no, like, I'm the conservative Christian sports fan that you know. | ||
| I just happen to like dudes. | ||
| That's the only thing that's different. | ||
| Because there is this stereotype of what we are supposed to like or dislike. | ||
| And as I have sort of grown into being gay, you start to meet more gay people and you're just sort of like, oh, these stereotypes are beyond. | ||
| Yeah, they're silly. | ||
| Some of them, I mean, some of them are fair, but a lot of them are silly. | ||
| And I think now that it's more, we're in a more tolerant and open society, gay people, LGBTQ people come in all shapes and sizes. | ||
| And I'm hoping that's, Becoming not just more mainstream for average America, but also within the gay club. | ||
| There's a little bit more Openness to some diversity. | ||
| At least that's my aspiration here. | ||
| Interesting, because my next question was sort of going to be the reverse of that, which is that right now I see the gay community, I see two things happening, and they're happening at the exact same time, sort of in parallel with each other. | ||
| One, I see a community that used to be really irreverent and fun and over-the-top and drag queens and any Politically incorrect joke and all that I see that starting to crumble because of some of the stuff that you talk about in this book About the political correctness now steeping in so the people who used to be the outsiders are now sort of the insiders And they're becoming politically correct, but then I also at the same time I see because of that that I see a certain amount of gay people are starting to shift away from leftism Because they're going wait a minute | ||
| This isn't fun anymore or something. | ||
| They've taken away something very special that the gay community had. | ||
| Do you see that? | ||
| Yeah, although I think probably some of it is just a backlash to political correctness, and that's by no means exclusive to the gay community, right? | ||
| I think part of the reason we have the president that we have is because people got so tired of this stifling, weaponized political correctness from the left that eventually a lot of people on the right said, we've had enough. | ||
| If they're going to bully us culturally endlessly, we're going to go hire our own bully. | ||
| And is he's orange? | ||
| And we're going to hire him. | ||
| And that's who we have. | ||
| I think a lot of this is a cultural backlash. | ||
| And that, of course, extends to a certain number of gay people as well. | ||
| And there's also just lots of good reasons to be a conservative if you're a taxpayer. | ||
| I don't care what your sexual orientation is. | ||
| If you think the government is taking too much of the money that you earn, if you think the military should be strong and defeat our enemies, If you believe like I do in the pro-life cause, there's lots of different reasons why someone can end up... | ||
| Within the conservative movement, I do think that for people who are LGBT, the Republican Party's platform and a lot of their rhetoric, especially in the past, has been a barrier to entry, which I completely understand. | ||
| I think the rhetoric and the toleration is getting better. | ||
| It's by no means perfect, but it's getting better, and I think it's also a generational shift in a lot of ways. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, interestingly, Trump is the first president that ever came in on a first term basically being for pro-gay marriage, right? | ||
| I mean, even Obama the first time was. | ||
| He doesn't care. | ||
| He just doesn't care. | ||
| I mean, Peter Thiel spoke at the convention. | ||
| Trump, the week before the election, was on stage with a rainbow flag. | ||
| Again, I have no idea what he thinks about gay people. | ||
| I just don't think he thinks it's an issue, and I think that that has sort of just trickled down to people, where they're just like, Big damn whoop. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's done some things as president that I know have really inflamed the gay community, | ||
| but overall, I think it is, and I'm, as you know, I'm not a huge fan of the president all the time. | ||
| I try to be fair to him. | ||
| And one of the things that I think is, you have to say is, indisputably, | ||
| he's the most pro-LGBT Republican president ever. | ||
| It's not even close. | ||
| And the fact that he had a gay supporter on stage at the RNC talking about being gay | ||
| and being proud of being gay and getting a standing ovation. | ||
| Get a standing ovation. | ||
| That's unheard of, even rewinding the clock four, five, ten years for sure. | ||
| So, you know, he's asked about gay marriage, he's like, I'm fine with it. | ||
| And if you look at public polling, there's been heavy movement on same-sex marriage in terms of public opinion, particularly among self-identified Republicans. | ||
| And I do think that probably Trump has helped give some people sort of a mental permission slip to be like, oh, like, well, we like Trump and he doesn't seem to care about this. | ||
| Maybe we've got bigger fish to fry. | ||
| Maybe, maybe I'm OK with this now. | ||
| So do you think the anti-gay stuff for the Republicans, you know, we can sort of parse down where it eventually came from and did Karl Rove use it as a wedge issue with George W. Bush or any of that stuff, but that there was an odd alliance between the Christian conservatives that were gonna be socially conservative versus the small government Republicans, and I sense you're sort of both of those, but that alliance didn't fully make sense because Republicans should've, I think, taken, they could've taken a moral, on how government should operate | ||
| and said we shouldn't be involved in this and how two people wanna go about a private relationship. | ||
| Yeah, it's part of the coalition, all right. | ||
| They just got crushed into this thing that here we are. | ||
| And I think the label of socially conservative is a tricky one, especially for our generation | ||
| and younger people, because if you look at a lot of the public polling data, and we talk about this | ||
| in end of discussion, throughout much of the modern era of American punditry. | ||
| People talk about social issues. | ||
| They're really talking about two. | ||
| They're talking about abortion and gay rights. | ||
| And there's been this lazy assumption that they're a package deal. | ||
| And people who, you can predict what someone will believe about one issue based on what they believe about the other. | ||
| Wait, let me pause you there for a second because I'm pro-gay marriage, obviously. | ||
| Not only am I pro-gay marriage, I married a dude that's That's very pro. | ||
| That's very pro. | ||
| You are really on the record. | ||
| Very, very pro. | ||
| But I am pro-choice, begrudgingly, as I say every time. | ||
| And you are pro-gay marriage, not married, so we'll see if you really put it into action. | ||
| But you're pro-life, but that's the point, so it doesn't always work. | ||
| And if you look at the polling data for younger people, we have moved heavily to the left or the libertarian direction on gay rights, but are really the most pro-life generation aside from senior citizens. | ||
| We are more pro-life than Xers. | ||
| We are more pro-life than boomers. | ||
| And so these are not a package deal. | ||
| They're not linked together. | ||
| And I think, I've thought a lot about this, and I think some of it comes down to the argument about fairness and people's rights. | ||
| I think the right or the anti-gay marriage right really got its clock cleaned when it came to explain to people why gay marriage is really a problem. | ||
| Who is that harming? | ||
| Go! | ||
| And the arguments are weak. | ||
| And I used to believe it because I was sort of a lockstep conservative. | ||
| I checked all the boxes. | ||
| And then you start, you know, in college I started to think critically about stuff. | ||
| I'm like, okay, well, Here I am making these arguments, and they suck. | ||
| These arguments really suck. | ||
| Like, I know they suck, I'm gonna keep making them, and I'm sort of like, alright, I can't. | ||
| I have to abandon them. | ||
| There isn't a concrete victim to gay marriage that is persuasive to the American people, whereas on abortion I think you can make an ethical, scientific, moral case that there is clearly a wronged victim party in abortion, that people are willing to listen to that and at least think about it, whereas With gay marriage, it's like, well, my brother's gay, my friend is gay, my, you know, cousin's a lesbian, what are you talking about? | ||
| So I think that's part, it's the paradigm of human rights that I think Makes these issues diverge for a lot of young people. | ||
| Yeah, so my audience knows that as we air this, I am off the grid completely. | ||
| So this is airing a couple weeks after I've been gone. | ||
| So I'm trying not to do too much topical stuff with you. | ||
| But as we're taping this right now, we're in the middle of this thing with Trump's ban on trans people in the military. | ||
| Because we're both gay, that people probably want to get some answers out of us. | ||
| And I always think it's kind of funny, you know, when they put these letters together, LGBT, I have no more inherent knowledge of what it's like to be a trans person than a straight person does by default. | ||
| So first, do you agree with that premise, that you as a gay person don't have any sort of innate knowledge of trans issues just on its face? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Although the one thing I would push back on is There's probably a little bit more empathy. | ||
| Empathy, yeah. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people in America who really have trouble wrapping their mind around same-sex attraction generally. | ||
| It's just not something that they've ever experienced. | ||
| That's just, I don't understand how someone could be like that. | ||
| I think that's also true for even more people when it comes to trans folks. | ||
| And so that's where the empathy, I think, for me exists, even though I am by no stretch an expert. | ||
| I'm not even sure if I'm getting the pronouns right. | ||
| There's so many rules. | ||
| And we actually get into it. | ||
| We have a little subsection called transgressions. | ||
| Where we go through how speaking incorrectly with the wrong terms or problematically got people like, you know, Katie Couric in trouble, and then Dan Savage in trouble, and then, to top it all off, RuPaul got in trouble. | ||
| I'm like, we are through the freaking looking glass if RuPaul is now transphobic or whatever, you know, the epithet is. | ||
| And I don't think sometimes the trans community or the LGBT community does itself a great service by getting Reflexively offended by people using words or asking questions, just trying to figure things out and learn. | ||
| Yeah, well, that sort of hysteria and that sort of then lack of sense of humor, too, also goes to what I was saying before about why I see gay people sort of shifting to the center or even to the right now, because they've just kind of had it with that. | ||
| And it reminds me that when we met two years ago, very briefly, as I said, it was at Bill Maher. | ||
| And even since then, by using a word, he got in trouble by the left. | ||
| Even though no one in their right mind thinks that Bill Maher is a racist. | ||
| So where did the genesis for this book come from? | ||
| It's so funny because we've almost exclusively spoken here about gay rights issues and it's only one chapter in the book. | ||
| It's funny because I wanted to get it out of the way and yet it then bleeds into everything. | ||
| Except you've now asked a question. | ||
| The answer is the Brendan Eich Mozilla episode of 2014. | ||
| Yeah, can you refresh people on that? | ||
| Yes, so this was a gentleman out here in California who helped co-found Mozilla, the internet company, and he was elevated in 2014 to CEO of that company and then it was revealed that he had donated $1,000 of his private money to Proposition 8, which here in this state was the one-man, one-woman amendment. | ||
| 2008 passed, by the way, in this backwoods, right-wing place, California. | ||
| This was a thought crime that could not be tolerated. | ||
| Eventually, to make the long story short, he was hounded out of the company that he founded for holding a mainstream political position. | ||
| That Mary Katherine and I happened to disagree with him on, but we were very troubled by how that all went down. | ||
| And that was actually the catalyst to get off of our asses and write this thing, because we're like, can you believe? | ||
| Like, this is scary. | ||
| We disagree with him, but what happened to him doesn't really feel like America to us. | ||
| And they were like, you know, someone really ought to write a book about this. | ||
| We're like, oh crap, it's us. | ||
| That's a lot of work, as you know. | ||
| But it was worth it. | ||
| And now the book just came out in paperback this month. | ||
| And the reason that we finally decided, all right, we need to update this thing. | ||
| So end of discussion came out in June of 2015, one week before Donald Trump announced that he was running for president. | ||
| So his name did not appear in the book once. | ||
| And so the new chapter that we've added to the paperback edition begins with the line, Donald Trump is president and Berkeley is burning. | ||
| Perhaps we should revisit our subject. | ||
| And what finally put us over the top was Mary Catherine got an email From the LA Times, actually, weeks and weeks ago at this point, saying, you know, with everything happening in Berkeley and Middlebury, we'd love for you to write an op-ed about your new book. | ||
| And then 10 minutes later, she got a response email again saying, it has come to our attention, this is not a new book, but it was as red hot, unfortunately, hotter than ever in terms of the topic, which might be good for book sales, but it's bad, bad news for the country. | ||
| Do you see any hope for the counter movement? | ||
| To the end of discussion that's happening in America right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a number of reasons, you know, we anticipated in the book a backlash. | ||
| We had no idea that it would come so quickly in the form of really Donald Trump, who is just this giant middle finger to this entire culture. | ||
| And some people are like, oh, is that really what happened? | ||
| It's not by any stretch the entirety of it, but if you don't believe that political correctness and the backlash against that was not a huge part of the appeal of Donald Trump, I think you're asleep. | ||
| I think it's indisputable in my view. | ||
| So yeah, I think that When it comes to this backlash and some of the hopeful signs, one is there have been increasing efforts at pushback from the Academy, from within. | ||
| Dozens of professors at Middlebury wrote and signed this amazing letter about free expression after that whole incident went down. | ||
| Jonathan Haidt from NYU has started this Heterodox University Academy, which I think is terrific and people are signing up because I think There are people on the left looking over their shoulders saying, I thought I was a liberal in good standing, but who knows who the jackals are going to come after next? | ||
| This is getting out of hand. | ||
| So that's where we really derive. | ||
| Some hope where we're telling folks, and we speak on campuses, and we really wrote the book not to be a right-wing, pound-the-table book. | ||
| We're trying to persuade people not to necessarily agree with us on every issue, but to join us on this fundamental question of, are we going to be a society that can actually talk about things or not? | ||
| And if we can't talk about things anymore, we're not going to solve any of our problems. | ||
| So in a sort of selfish way, but I guess also in a societal way, every time this eats another liberal or lefty or progressive, you must love it, right? | ||
| I mean, like the Evergreen State thing with Brett Weinstein. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| You must have loved it, because this guy is at the furthest left college. | ||
| I know. | ||
| He's the furthest left professor, deeply progressive, as he said to Tucker Carlson, and they ate him. | ||
| So you must be going. | ||
| This is a good sign. | ||
| We told you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You should buy the book. | |
| The one that I get a kick out of still, because it's a few years old now, this example, but one of the things that we argue in end of discussion is that the left is forgetting how to argue even amongst themselves, right? | ||
| It's not just all this demagogic fire at the right. | ||
| That's been true for a while, though it's getting worse. | ||
| This is their form of argument now. | ||
| This is their You know, identity politics and the impugning of motives and outrage has supplanted rational argument. | ||
| And so there was this episode towards the end of the Obama presidency where there was a dust-up on the left over TPP. | ||
| So we are talking about trade policy, okay? | ||
| We're not talking about trans bans or anything. | ||
| Trade policy. | ||
| And Elizabeth Warren... The word trans was in it, though. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| Trans-Pacific. | ||
| So it may have confused a couple people, but that being said. | ||
| Good point. | ||
| Point taken. | ||
| The President, Obama, was on the other side of this issue from Elizabeth Warren, the Senator, who we also really go after in the book in a sort of delicious way. | ||
| But I digress. | ||
| At one point, Obama was asked about Warren's criticism of TPP, and he responded by saying, well, Liz blah blah blah. | ||
| And a bunch of people on the left were like, whoa! | ||
| Did you just refer to a sitting senator by her first name? | ||
| That is really mansplaining and patriarchal and really problematic. | ||
| And including some members of the Senate were attacking Obama for using her first name. | ||
| And so we're like sitting back with a giant thing of popcorn and we're like, oh, um, excuse me, but are you criticizing our first black president? | ||
| Because that seems kind of racist. | ||
| Based on your whole thing? | ||
| And it got into this sexist versus racist thing. | ||
| I'm like, you guys, this is it. | ||
| This is getting bananas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, I don't know, sometimes we try to give those types of examples to say to liberals like, We're not the only victims of this. | ||
| And I also wanna make one other point. | ||
| The left isn't the only perpetrators in this either. | ||
| And that's exactly where I wanted to go. | ||
| Oh, there you go, segue, ask the question. | ||
| Great, well, no, I'll let you do it, but what I wanted to know is because that's what people say to me all the time, that I'm now, because I've so exposed this thing and I've so focused on this intersectional monster that will eat everyone and it will pit, actually, black people against gay people and at the Oppression Olympics and we've all, you know, victimhood is virtue and this whole thing, That somehow I've let the right off the hook here, so hook that right for me. | ||
| We do. | ||
| Yeah, so tell me. | ||
| We do, and one of our goals was to be intellectually honest. | ||
| And in fact, in the process of writing the book before, this was initially, 2015, before we submitted our final manuscript, A very good buddy of mine, actually my ex's brother, he is one of the most well-read, sharpest guys I know. | ||
| And he's an attorney, he's done very well, his credentials are impeccable academically. | ||
| And I asked him, I said, We're going to be submitting this manuscript. | ||
| We want to be intellectually honest. | ||
| I know you're not going to agree with me on policy issues, A, B, or C. Would you do us the favor and the honor of reading the manuscript and giving us feedback, not about where we're wrong, but where we are not fair to people on your side, where we have intellectual blind spots that would potentially turn someone off from being persuaded by us. | ||
| So he read the whole thing and he came back and he said, This is actually quite well written. | ||
| I was like, thanks. | ||
| He said, it's funny and I'm persuaded, but here are six examples of things where I think that you would lose some credibility. | ||
| And we went through all of them and said, this is legit. | ||
| And we changed the manuscript beforehand because we really wanted to be Fair and honest, and that includes being critical of our side and even ourselves. | ||
| We give an example in here where we have contributed personally to this problem as well. | ||
| Yeah, so where have you contributed to it? | ||
| So I remember, and part of this is just sort of the imputing of motives and just the over-the-top outrage. | ||
| I was on the air in Chicago. | ||
| I had a radio show, my first sort of gig out of college. | ||
| I had a weekend show in Chicago, and I was on the air on a Sunday night in March of 2010 when Obamacare finally passed into law. | ||
| And I had spent month after month fighting this thing, and for good reason. | ||
| I was worried we would never be able to uproot it, and it seems that that was a well-founded fear. | ||
| And I had really poured my heart and soul and intellectual all into this fight, and then I was watching it go down Live on the screen while I'm live on the air and I remember the phone lines on my radio show were absolutely jam-packed. | ||
| Ten lines from 15 minutes before the show started until well after the show ended. | ||
| People were so emotional and so was I. And I went on a rant During the show about, and I called out every single Democratic congressperson from Illinois and the surrounding states who had voted for it and was doing a roll call of who we had to beat in the next election. | ||
| By the way, we beat almost all of them. | ||
| But I took it a step further and I was talking about punishing their families and not giving their kids jobs and not writing letters of recommendation for their children and it was too much and it was unhinged outrage. | ||
| And that was, you know, part of this outrage environment that gets the best of our rational discourse discussion sometimes. | ||
| So that was sort of an example that I gave about myself. | ||
| And then we also do this, like, during the Iraq War, there was this unfair conflation of being against the war and being against the troops. | ||
| That's a dishonest way of arguing. | ||
| Criticizing Israeli policy is sometimes immediately called anti-Semitic. | ||
| There's crossover, believe me, but I think making that argument right out of the gate is unfair. | ||
| And then there is this impulse, I think, on the right also to say Black Lives Matter is an anti-police or pro-cop death organization. | ||
| There's a lot of demagoguery about that, which I think is Grossly mischaracterizing how many people who are associated with that movement feel and what they believe and what their genuine grievances might be and why. | ||
| And so both sides argue this way. | ||
| The reason that we go harder after the left is because they control the tastemaking institutions in this country. | ||
| They control academia, they control most of the media, and they control Hollywood and entertainment. | ||
| And when you have that heft on your side and you can sort of impose the culture | ||
| much more easily, they are the bigger part of the problem. I have no doubt | ||
| though if the roles were reversed, human nature | ||
| and bad authoritarian impulses are not relegated to one side. | ||
| We would be doing the same thing, I think. | ||
| I completely agree, and it's why people every now and again, I'll say something on Twitter and someone will find something that I said five years ago that I said the other way, and they'll be like, gotcha! | ||
| And I'm like, no, no, no. | ||
| Actually, circumstances change, the power change. | ||
| I evolved, which I think is a little something of how humans are supposed to operate. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that power corrupts and that suddenly you lose your moral compass when you're suddenly magically in power. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| I was tweeting about, because during the healthcare debate, this most recent healthcare debate, Just the rhetoric on the left was unreal. | ||
| It's like the Republicans are going to kill thousands of people, 20 million people, and strip 22 million people from their health care. | ||
| It was just like detached from any fair reading of reality, but it was, you know, we have to beat this no matter what, we'll say anything. | ||
| So I was objecting to this, you know, They blame our rhetoric for stuff that has nothing to do with our rhetoric. | ||
| And then a week after Steve Scalise gets shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter, Sanders is out there saying the Republican health care bill would be like nine 9-11s every year. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| Like, what are the standards here? | ||
| So I was objecting to something that Hillary Clinton had said, saying that the Republicans would be, you might as well rename them the Death Party or something like that. | ||
| And I was like, wow. | ||
| And some lefty blogger found a piece, a short blog post that I wrote in college, like 11 years ago, praising a book by Ramesh Ponnuru, which was called The Party of Death, and it was about abortion. | ||
| And he was just like, bang! | ||
| Gotcha! | ||
| Gotcha! | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| It's sort of tough to make a life comes at you fast meme when it's like 11 years apart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I remember even at the time asking Ramesh, like, do you think this title might turn some people off? | ||
| Anyway, I get it. | ||
| I mean, that's Twitter culture, and we're not gonna be perfect. | ||
| Like, that's why we say it in a discussion. | ||
| We are not the exemplars of pristine public discourse at every turn. | ||
| We're just trying to be better about it, and we're hoping to encourage others To join us. Well, it's funny because I always find that I'm | ||
| basically within these four walls in this room I'm pretty much at my best in terms of my intellect how I | ||
| treat people all those things. It's all Twitter Twitter You know, I'm pretty good in my private life, too | ||
| But Twitter often brings out the worst in me suddenly I'm fighting with someone that I don't really care about | ||
| You know, you see these outrages all day long. | ||
| I've been doing it less and less. | ||
| But just the other day, I saw somebody had tweeted something about basically all the white interns now at the White House. | ||
| And you retweeted it, and you grabbed, I guess, from their own company's website, how many white people, there were basically 0% black interns, was it black interns? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| leadership team. So he had said look at all these white male interns that | ||
| Trump has and I just went to his bio, clicked on his own website of the | ||
| company that he founded and it's like meet the team. And the team was | ||
| mostly white dudes and no black people so I just mirrored his tweet but with | ||
| his company and that that kind of went a little bit viral. | ||
| Which I don't think that that's over the top. | ||
| Sometimes you've got to fight back on some of this stuff, because they're fake moralizing. | ||
| No, that's the point. | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| I didn't think that this guy's company is morally worse or bad at their work because it's disproportionately fill-in-the-blank identity politics. | ||
| I think there's something really weird in someone's head. | ||
| He was a former Obama official, by the way. | ||
| There's something weird in someone's head when they see a photograph of a hundred and twenty college kids and the first thing they do is like slot these people into like gender and race immediately to make some political point. | ||
| Like if that's the game you're going to play, here's how that might apply to you. | ||
| And I was by no means embracing identity politics, I was ridiculing it. | ||
| And I think ridicule is sometimes One of the better tactics we have. | ||
| Does that show you, though, how well their tactics have worked for so long, because now the thinking has gotten so sloppy? | ||
| So, for example, I saw a recent tweet by Chris Hayes from MSNBC talking about all this Scaramucci stuff, which, again, it's happening right now as we tape this, but it'll be a couple weeks ago by the time we air this, but saying something about how we- Scaramucci might be president by the time this airs. | ||
| He could be president, he could be put to Siberia, like we have no freaking clue what's gonna happen, but- I hear he might have connections in Russia. | ||
| He might have connections in Italy. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| I think that's problematic. | ||
| But the point is, I saw Chris Hayes tweeted something to the effect that if these guys, if these were black people doing this in the White House, everybody would be up in arms. | ||
| I'm loosely quoting him. | ||
| But I thought the idea that you took something, there's no racial... Are people not up in arms about it? | ||
| I mean, how much more up in arms can people be? | ||
| So I may not have been up in arms as the phrase, but point being that you took something that there's no racial connotation to this discussion. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| No one's claiming that Scaramucci's a racist or there's just nothing racial about this. | ||
| And now you're giving it the racial lens just to give the meat to the people that you're talking about. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Right here. | ||
| And that's dangerous. | ||
| I know Chris and I like Chris and sometimes... | ||
| We come at each other with some brushback pitches on Twitter, and that's fine, because just the gratuitous, endless parade of identity politics is just completely exhausting. | ||
| And again, it's a substitute, it's a shortcut to sort of bypass any real debate. | ||
| And that's actually the way that we describe end of discussion. | ||
| It's how primarily the left is trying to win cultural debates and political debates by preventing the debates from happening. | ||
| They want to win by default just because. | ||
| We're bad, we're blankist, and therefore our ideas don't need a fair hearing because obviously. | ||
| It's sort of like this self-fulfilling tautology, they're bad because they're bad because they're bad, and end of discussion. | ||
| And we're like, no, that's not how this should go. | ||
| Who's your kinda Republican? | ||
| If you were looking at all of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh boy. | |
| Sell me on a Republican. | ||
| I am open-minded, truly. | ||
| On any of them? | ||
| Give me somebody that you think is doing this thing right from the Republican perspective. | ||
| Again, you said you're more of a conservative than a Republican. | ||
| Alright, so just from a conservative perspective, who do you think is basically doing it right? | ||
| I really like Ben Sasse, the Nebraska Senator. | ||
| I think he's principled. | ||
| I think he's really smart. | ||
| I think he's got a great sense of what civic duty means and shouldn't mean. | ||
| He has a sense of humor, too. | ||
| He's funny. | ||
| He does this stuff where he goes to his home state and he works a full day on a variety of jobs randomly. | ||
| No press, no cameras. | ||
| He'll go and work at a mechanics shop. | ||
| For a nine hour day and just like, show me what you do, talk to me about your life. | ||
| He drives Uber. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| He drives Uber, it's incredible. | ||
| I just, I think he's really good and I'm sure you can find something where I disagree with him or where I think he's done something wrong, but I think he's great and I really get the sense in meeting with him and talking with him that he means it when he says, The goal of my life is not to be a U.S. | ||
| Senator. | ||
| This is not the end-all be-all of life. | ||
| He's got a really interesting book out, as long as we're plugging books. | ||
| In terms of the Trump administration, I really like Nikki Haley at the U.N. | ||
| I think she did a really nice job in South Carolina as governor. | ||
| She navigated some difficult things quite well. | ||
| She's been willing to step out and Say things that are not necessarily the exact party line all the time, with some moral clarity about some important things. | ||
| And certainly not the UN party line. | ||
| Yeah, definitely not. | ||
| But not even the Trump party line, is what I'm saying. | ||
| So those are two. | ||
| I don't want to exclude anyone. | ||
| There's plenty of people in the party that I really respect and like, even if they have their quirks. | ||
| There's no such thing as a perfect political figure, and when you start to think that there is, you're gonna get super disappointed. | ||
| Yeah, well that's also why I focus on the left, because I came from the left, but also that they seem to have this concept that if they could only get their people in, everything would be perfect. | ||
| So it's never about the principles, it's only if Barney would get in, or Elizabeth Warren would get in, everything will become perfect. | ||
| And that's such a, that hero worship, and again, there's plenty of people that worship Trump, so I'm not saying that doesn't exist, but that sort of hero worship, I think, is the most dangerous thing. | ||
| I would rather take the power away from all of these people, and I think we'd be in better shape. | ||
| No, personality cults are weird and creepy, especially in politics, and I think it sort of robs people of reason. | ||
| Where, and just like the double standards, it drives me... | ||
| It drives me crazy where you have people, and this is tribalism, right? | ||
| People willing to defend almost anything if it's their guy when they would be going apoplectic if it was the other side doing it. | ||
| And there's no real argument for it other than, well that's them and they're bad. | ||
| and we're us and we're not. | ||
| We're good. | ||
| We're for America, okay. | ||
| And it's sort of like, I mean, get with the program or get lost, cuck. | ||
| And it's just like, all right, I mean, great, you've persuaded me. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Anyway, but I don't think most Americans are caught up in the hardcore, like, you know, hero worship thing. | ||
| I do think it's very odd how the left in particular feels like they can Somehow perfect society through political action. | ||
| Government's horrible, it's always messed up. | ||
| If we only had more of it, it would fix everything. | ||
| Socialism's never really been tried properly. | ||
| Right, Venezuela. | ||
| No, but there's reasons it didn't work. | ||
| Yeah, they've screwed that up, but believe me, the principles work. | ||
| We'll get back to us on how. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, well let me ask you a little more difficult question than Republicans that you respect. | ||
| Are there any Democrats that you think haven't gone completely insane? | ||
| No, they're all bad for America. | ||
| No, I mean, look, there are some Democrats that I certainly respect more than others. | ||
| Sometimes I'll play this game with some of my liberal friends like, you know, who's your favorite? | ||
| And there are cop-out answers like, you know, my favorite Democratic Senator was Zell Miller. | ||
| You know, who just gave a wild stem-winder of a speech at the Republican National Convention. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That was the most confusing thing ever. | ||
| The line, like, you never remember lines from convention speeches, but I remember him ripping into John Kerry and saying, what does he think we can defend America with? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Spitballs? | |
| And everyone went crazy. | ||
| She bothers me sometimes, but I have to say that I respect Dianne Feinstein. | ||
| I think that she's not always predictable. | ||
| She's not always a hack. | ||
| I think she takes national security pretty seriously. | ||
| You're just picking her because she's on her way out. | ||
| Well, no, but I think she has respect for institutions. | ||
| I have to confess I like Joe Biden. | ||
| I think that he's just sort of a fun dude that I like to hang out with. | ||
| But when you see a guy like Biden, or even when you see the moderates, what are thought of as more of the moderates, even though they're probably all too big government for you, but when you think of like a Chuck Schumer or a Biden or sort of that older group, Do you think it's over for that wing? | ||
| I'm not sure if Schumer counts as that wing. | ||
| Schumer is somewhere in the middle. | ||
| I have no love lost for Chuck Schumer, but he also voted against, or they didn't really ever vote on it, but he came out against the Iran deal. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm saying, though. | ||
| He's a little more of a centrist. | ||
| He didn't play the party line there. | ||
| I see the left now dragging the Democrats much further to the left. | ||
| Do you see any chance for whoever you think those moderates are, whether you include Schumer in that or Joe Biden, even though he's not in government right now? | ||
| No, I am very worried that we are heading in a European model direction where we have An ever-growing state. | ||
| We have socialists to the left and sort of more nationalists to the right and there's not much of a real home or constituency for limited government constitutional conservatism. | ||
| That is something that I'm concerned about. | ||
| I think for a number of reasons. | ||
| I don't feel welcome. | ||
| We alluded to this earlier. | ||
| I don't feel welcome in the Democratic Party. | ||
| And even when I am at peak exasperation with the Republicans, the Democrats show up and do something where I'm like, well, nope. | ||
| But the Republicans have been trying awfully hard to alienate me. | ||
| And I think part of it is just like, all right, try to stay intellectually grounded. | ||
| Take each issue and circumstance as it comes and evaluate it as best as I can on the merits. | ||
| And that's how I try to go about my job, writing at town hall, giving analysis on Fox News. | ||
| And that's the best I can do. | ||
| And it's gonna make some people unhappy, and that's fine. | ||
| And hopefully some other people are gonna find it refreshing, and I just sort of let the chips fall. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you say Constitution, limited government, all of that, low-tax stuff, all that kind of stuff, what about Rand Paul? | ||
| Just it's the foreign policy stuff that gets you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think he's probably a little bit like, I would take him over as dad any day of the week. | ||
| I don't think, and part of me is also like there's a pragmatism element here as well, like I think there are certain people who are outside of the Overton window of electability nationally. | ||
| Now maybe I'm not the best judge of that because based on all of his polling numbers I thought that the man who was elected president couldn't be elected. | ||
| He had the wonderful benefit of running against a truly historically atrocious candidate who's writing a book about why she lost. | ||
| I'm sure that's going to be really... | ||
| A wonderful, compelling... What's it called? | ||
| What Happened? | ||
| What Happened. | ||
| I mean, what a terrible name for a book. | ||
| It could be a one-page book. | ||
| It could be a one-sentence book. | ||
| I'm terrible. | ||
| The end. | ||
| But, yeah, Rand Paul. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| This last election has made me think long and hard About how many people actually view the world and view the political system the way I do. | ||
| I used to think that people like me were the clear majority within the Republican Party, and I am less convinced of that than ever. | ||
| And so Rand Paul is, I think in theory I'm with him on a lot of stuff. | ||
| I don't know if that is going to sell to the American people. | ||
| I mean, we elected a Republican president who drew a line in the sand saying, I will not touch the entitlement programs, which have to be. | ||
| It's just basic math. | ||
| And George Will had this column. | ||
| If the Republicans are no longer gonna be the party of math, what is the point of them? | ||
| And that's something that I'm worried about. | ||
| So it's interesting, in an odd way, I'm frustrated with the left because I see them going too far left, big government. | ||
| You're frustrated with the right because you see them trending in that direction too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So that's a really interesting spot to be in. | ||
| And I do think there was all this like thumb-sucking analysis for years about how the Republicans were this moving radically to the right and they were unrecognizable and there was very little parallel commentary about what was happening on the left. | ||
| I don't, I'm not exactly sure what the Republican Party is. | ||
| and what exactly it stands for, aside from not the left. | ||
| There's something useful in being not the left. | ||
| I think fighting the left is a useful, worthwhile endeavor, but aside from sort of the | ||
| the anti-left general impulse or sentiment, I'm not exactly sure what the coherent philosophy of | ||
| the party is, which is a weird feeling to have, but that's where we are, I think, for me. | ||
| So one of the things that I've talked about with almost everyone in the last couple months, at least anyone that's political on the show, has been that almost everyone has been satisfied with the destruction that's happening with mainstream media right now. | ||
| You're sort of on both sides of it, because you're a mainstream guy, as we said, you do stuff on Fox, but you do online stuff as well. | ||
| The fact that you have a Twitter presence that's active, you get internet culture, I think. | ||
| Are you as satisfied as I am that mainstream media's crumbling? | ||
| Because I'm pretty thrilled. | ||
| I think there's been such a destructive aspect to it, and to your point earlier of they were all leftists, Yeah. | ||
| And watching that crumble, hopefully something more sane will come out of it. | ||
| I may be wrong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That may give all the power to the Alex Joneses of the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I've always believed in a marketplace of ideas and not this top-down media environment where, you know, for many years, for decades, it was basically two newspapers and three networks decided what the news was and that was it. | ||
| And slowly but surely, people have been chipping away at that with talk radio and Fox News and, of course, now the Internet, which I think this is a positive development for sure. | ||
| And I think that the biased media, that it's so funny that they are always worried about the credibility of other people, and they seem less aware that their own credibility is like a thing that they have lost in the eyes of many people. | ||
| Like when a lot of polling shows the media less trusted than Trump, like that should be a wake-up call, but for them it's sort of like they're on this high horse and it's not penetrating. | ||
| So I take a good Deal of satisfaction in sort of seeing some of that come down because it's earned, they've deserved it. | ||
| I don't think it's an unmitigated positive either though because for two reasons. | ||
| First, I do believe in objective truth. | ||
| I do believe that there is something that is correct and something that is incorrect. | ||
| And I think it is useful to have people who are credible who can call those shots. | ||
| And I'm not saying that the media has epitomized this because they haven't, but we do need those voices. | ||
| Which is why I appreciate people like Jake Tapper or Brett Baier, and there's a number of them. | ||
| We need to value that still and not throw the baby out with the bathwater completely. | ||
| And then the other side of this concern that I have is we, in this current media environment, we can just construct delightful, Comfortable, cocoon-like echo chambers for ourselves, where we pick and choose, like on Spotify, the only stuff we want to listen to and ingest, and then just dismiss everything else as fake, or biased, or right-wing propaganda, or fake news, or whatever the term's going to be. | ||
| And that does not contribute to a healthy society. | ||
| When you have large sections of the country off in their separate ideological silos where counter-arguments don't really penetrate and there's not a devotion to truth and intellectual honesty, that's not I don't think that's a positive. | ||
| So do you think we could have a legit third party then for the refugees of the left that I like, that I think I'm trying to offer what classical liberalism, what real liberalism is, for guys like you that are going, the party's actually not doing the conservative things that I want them to do. | ||
| You just think the machine is too big. | ||
| The machine and then also just like, so, okay, and here's why I'm not optimistic on that front. | ||
| And again, I could be proven wrong. | ||
| I don't think that I, you know, I don't have the last word on any of this stuff. | ||
| Wait, you're saying not everything you say here will prove out to be absolutely prophetic? | ||
| I'd give myself like a 92% accuracy rating, give or take. | ||
| We'll do this again in a year from now with the scorecards. | ||
| Exactly, just like play back the tape. | ||
| I just sit here with a bag over my head. | ||
| But I think the data point I would point to is the 2016 election, right? | ||
| On election day, According to all the exit polling, Donald Trump had a 60% disapproval rating, and he won. | ||
| Hillary Clinton had a 55-56% disapproval rating. | ||
| These are toxic people who most people did not like, did not trust, couldn't relate to. | ||
| It was our two major parties putting out the very worst, really, that they possibly could. | ||
| And they still combined for what, 95, 96% of the national vote? | ||
| I mean, the Libertarians put out a ticket of two former multi-term governors. | ||
| Who sort of crashed and burned and were terrible. | ||
| Jill Stein, sort of a moon bat. | ||
| You know, Evan McMullin has turned out to be super annoying. | ||
| Like, this was the moment. | ||
| This was the moment to be like, these parties are failing, they suck so hard. | ||
| Someone, and it was just nothing. | ||
| So, who knows, someone might emerge. | ||
| You're telling me I wasted my vote on Gary Johnson? | ||
| I don't think it's a wasted vote. | ||
| So I voted for a third party as well. | ||
| I felt like- Well, I assume you mean Gary Johnson, right? | ||
| In 2016- What other third party could you have voted for? | ||
| In 2016, hold that thought, I honestly felt like every person running for president was actively trying to lose my vote at all times. | ||
| I'd be like, I'd watch Hillary, I'm like, God, she's awful. | ||
| Maybe second look at Trump. | ||
| Then I'd turn him on, I'm like, oh God. | ||
| I'm like, all right, Gary, give it to me. | ||
| And it's like, nope, nope, nope, nope. | ||
| It's like the person that I heard from most recently was the one I was most upset with all the time. | ||
| But again, I don't think it's a wasted vote. | ||
| I don't think that anyone just deserves my vote. | ||
| I don't think the Democrats deserve my vote because I'm gay. | ||
| I don't think the Republicans always deserve my vote just because I'm more with them than not. | ||
| It does take a lot for me not to vote for a Republican, but by God it's been happening. | ||
| Yeah, but so who'd you vote for? | ||
| I ended up voting for McMullin. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was on the ballot in Virginia. | ||
| I actually sat in the booth, or stood there in the voters booth. | ||
| There were four names on the ballot. | ||
| It was Hillary Trump, Johnson, and McMullin. | ||
| I actually interviewed Gary Johnson for Town Hall in a sit-down like this. | ||
| Oh, I saw it! | ||
| That was when I finally snapped against him because you did a great job in that interview. | ||
| Except the purpose of the interview was to be like, dude, you're this libertarian and you keep trying to sell Bernie supporters. | ||
| Like, sell me! | ||
| I should be your target audience. | ||
| So they agreed, they came, we sat down. | ||
| And I wanted to ask him about limited government and all this stuff and he jumped down my throat about using the term illegal immigrants and got super triggered by it and told me you can't use that term and started shouting and I was like... | ||
| "Bro, what are you doing here?" | ||
| I'm so glad you mentioned that because I forgot that you were the one that did that. | ||
| And I talked about it because I had about a month before the first debate, | ||
| I publicly did this thing about why I'm gonna support Gary Johnson. | ||
| I just want new ideas out there. | ||
| I want limited government and no taxes to be heard, at least, and individual rights and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And I knew it wasn't gonna work, but whatever. | ||
| I said, "I'm gonna at least try. | ||
| If I can do anything with my voice, let me try at least." | ||
| But then there was the Aleppo thing and he couldn't name the leader he liked. | ||
| But then your interview to me was the one where it like completely snapped. | ||
| And again, he's a decent man. | ||
| But because he kept saying the thing about, because you kept saying illegal immigrant, and he said it's an incendiary term, but you kept asking him, are they not illegal? | ||
| Are they not illegal? | ||
| And then at the end, I mean, correct me, he basically was like, yes, you're right. | ||
| And I was like, that was the worst, I don't wanna pile on the guy, what's the point? | ||
| Anyway, I think where we- You did a nice job there. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| But I stood there on election day, Looking at these four names and I really had this moment where I contemplated checking the box for all of them at some like running through the list and the one that I felt least agita or indigestion over at the time was Evan McMullin although he seems to be working overtime since the election to make me regret my vote for him with just sort of the non-stop | ||
| Russia hysteria. | ||
| And I believe that the Russia investigation is important. | ||
| I am not, you know, automatically inclined to believe that Trump is or his people are completely innocent or whatever. | ||
| I think the way they've handled it has been terrible. | ||
| But the hysteria and the feeding of that fire, it's just, it's too much. | ||
| And he's been at the forefront of that. | ||
| I'm just like, oh man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There were no good options on the ballot for me. | ||
| And I know that's not true for a lot of people. | ||
| There's probably people watching screaming, you know, sort of like, of course Trump was the best option. | ||
| Are you stupid? | ||
| I see the argument for that. | ||
| I could sit here and make the cogent Make America Great Again argument totally, and there are large elements of truth to it. | ||
| Just for me, I found, and we don't have to relitigate this election, it's so depressing, but I thought that he was fundamentally unfit to be president and I thought she was ethically unfit and ideologically unacceptable. | ||
| Well, I like talking to somebody that's trying to, you know, stay true to their morals and their philosophies in the midst of a political thing that's tough. | ||
| All right, well, I think we should do this again sometime. | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
| You know, we were gonna go out tonight, but, and I think we would've had the most boring gay night. | ||
| People think when gay people go out, it's gonna be some incredible, but I don't sense that the two of us could've, we would've had fun, a nice conversation, but it wouldn't have been like whatever they think gay people are doing. | ||
| I don't think we could've got there. | ||
| I mean, I brought... I'm having dinner with friends who have kids now. | ||
| And then I said, maybe I'll meet you after, and you were like, I gotta get to bed early. | ||
| I mean, this is pathetic. | ||
| Well, hang on. | ||
| You're revealing all the secrets here. | ||
| How do you know that I don't have glitter and ecstasy just waiting? | ||
| Well, because the way you said glitter and ecstasy, there's just no chance. | ||
| It's been a long, long day, and I'm very much looking forward to sleeping. | ||
| All right, I can lend you some glitter. | ||
| But I can't go out, unfortunately. | ||
| All right, well, it was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| And for more on Guy, follow him on that Twitter machine. |
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