Dec. 27, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
14:13
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We had a truly incredible year here at The Rubin Report, so we wanted to end 2017 with some of my favorite moments over the last 12 months. | ||
| Your support is what makes this show happen, and I hope you are as proud of the conversations we've had as I am. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When I look at people talk about intersectionality and all, you know, this whole identity politics thing, what I see is taking the human being, Magnifying a biological attribute and then putting them aside, putting them in a corner as victims of oppression. | |
| And in a way I feel sorry for them. | ||
| I happen to be black and I happen to be a woman and I happen to be a minority in the United States. | ||
| I even happen to be an apostate. | ||
| You're really going for the whole thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For the whole thing, yeah. | |
| So talk about intersectionality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But none of that defines me as who I am. | ||
| I'm more than all of that. | ||
| And I most certainly don't see myself as a victim. | ||
| And knowing people who grew up in Africa, who grew up in Muslim countries, | ||
| You probably know also some gay people who had to struggle and go through adversity. | ||
| I think when you come out of it you come out as a proud survivor. | ||
| There is a tendency for people, I think especially religious people, to identify so strongly with their ideas, with their religious ideas, that they think that to criticize their religious ideas, to criticize their beliefs, is tantamount to insulting them personally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's tantamount to saying, you've got an ugly face. | |
| And this is so wrong, and it's so retrograde, because ideas are there to be criticized. | ||
| You must be able to defend your ideas if they're any good. | ||
| Then you should say, I believe this because... I believe this because so-and-so, because X, Y, and Z. You cannot just say, oh, you've insulted me. | ||
| You've mortally offended me by criticizing my ideas. | ||
| Again, to quote Christopher Hitchens, he said, You're offended by what I've just said. | ||
| I'm still waiting to hear your point. | ||
| Even in a day you'll see that you have choices in front of you and sometimes you don't know what to do. | ||
| Life is suffering. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| There's malevolence. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Meaning is the antidote to that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's not... | |
| It's not some kind of fragile epiphenomenon. | ||
| It's the deepest thing. | ||
| So people need to know that. | ||
| It's so important to know that. | ||
| Even when you're disagreeing with someone, try your best. | ||
| No matter how much you disagree with them and everything that they're saying, leave them with a door open. | ||
| Right, to save some face, to maybe realize that part of what they were thinking, there is a misstep there. | ||
| Because when you put someone in a corner, all you're really confirming, or all you're really doing is locking them down in their belief, right? | ||
| I've been there, right? | ||
| In the past, if I've been talking to someone and they hit me with something that proves something I previously thought was wrong, It almost feels like I'm being attacked, or I'm being told I'm stupid, and it's not a great feeling. | ||
| So when you're arguing with someone, if the real intent is to hopefully promote truth, hopefully promote the right thought, hopefully then you're leaving the door open for them. | ||
| The pace of progress isn't what people expect. | ||
| I did not expect to have tremendous progress. | ||
| I was not responding to them as I did with the thought that they were going to turn around in that instant. | ||
| But I did think it might plant a seed and that they would come around over the course of days or hours. | ||
| If they had interactions that didn't line up with the narrative that they've been sold, that they would be forced to think consciously about what explains the fact that this person that we've been told is a vile, transparent racist doesn't sound like one. | ||
| And, you know, I think when I watch that video, which I don't love doing, but when I watch that video, I see hints of that. | ||
| And then I had interactions later in the day where I also saw hints of it. | ||
| But there's also this overwhelming gravity coming from the argument that describes itself as pro-equity that erases progress. | ||
| So even when you partially reach somebody, they get reeled back in so quickly. | ||
| The developing world thinks that the West would be crazy to give up on itself. | ||
| Yes, it's got more entertaining dances or better food or some rich and storied history and great narratives and art. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is that the West has probably more attraction for those people than any other place. | ||
| Our amplifier is what distinguishes us. | ||
| We have done everything more powerfully than every other group. | ||
| And so it's not whether or not what we're doing is right or wrong, because every culture does right and wrong. | ||
| But our amplifier is bigger. | ||
| So if you plug in a Stratocaster to a huge stack, build for a stadium and you make a | ||
| mistake, I guarantee it, they're going to hear it three counties over. | ||
| On the other hand, if you play a fantastic solo, that's there too. | ||
| And I don't understand, when did we give up on the West? | ||
| We live in a country that's got 330 million people. | ||
| Roughly 8-10% of them believe Elvis is still alive. | ||
| Almost half of them believe if you send Elvis a letter, he'll get it. | ||
| Obviously there's racism. | ||
| There are individuals who don't like other people because of their race. | ||
| No question about it. | ||
| But are there corporations that have a policy of not hiring anybody? | ||
| Are there governmental agencies that have a policy of not hiring anybody? | ||
| The answer is no. | ||
| If you can tell me the company, IBM, Apple, that has a policy of not hiring black people, tell me, or brown people, tell me who that company is, and we can deal with it. | ||
| I don't know what people mean when they talk about institutional racism. | ||
| If this were the 50s, I would know what you're talking about. | ||
| When there was segregation, there was legal segregation in the South, where you couldn't marry somebody outside your race in certain states. | ||
| But that is no longer the case right now. | ||
| The racism that people talk about right now, in my opinion, is individual stuff, where some individual doesn't like you, or some individuals don't like you. | ||
| But is it something that is anything akin to what we experienced in the 50s and the 60s? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| And I think it's insulting to people who have fought hard and died in the 50s and the 60s to get us to this point, to act like things are just the same. | ||
| When you have people like Eric Holder saying, as he did, When he was A.G., we now have pernicious racism, which he said was every bit as bad as the old racism. | ||
| What the hell are you talking about? | ||
| Let me just ask you a question. | ||
| You raised a child, right? | ||
| So I just want to ask you, how many times do you feel, roughly, you told her, say thank you? | ||
| 10,000? | ||
| No, not that many times. | ||
| I think you just have to nudge him a little bit. | ||
| Nudge him a little bit? | ||
| Oh, please. | ||
| But the research on child development shows that... I told my sons, each of them, at least 10,000 times in their life, say thank you. | ||
| If they were inherently good, they would, first of all, never have to be told the first time. | ||
| And certainly not many other times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not black and white, they're all good or they're all evil. | |
| No, no, no. | ||
| No, no, but don't say we can learn that we have this great built-in sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We do, we do. | |
| Then why did the world stink? | ||
| Read Paul Bloom's book. | ||
| Why is slavery universal? | ||
| Rape universal? | ||
| Murder universal? | ||
| Goodness is rarer than all of these terrible things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it's been changing. | |
| And there's a reason for that. | ||
| And the reason is reason. | ||
| People can be interested in whatever they like, but I also have the right to tell them I think they're wasting their lives. | ||
| Gender pronouns, all this sort of thing. | ||
| There is, by the way, behind all this, something very strange I started to notice. | ||
| Among all the fascinating things about this, one of the ones that interests me most is why you get this introduction to almost every discussion As if we as human beings are sort of solvable things. | ||
| I find this fascinating. | ||
| Most of the trans stuff is, you know, identify that you're of the wrong gender at an early stage. | ||
| By the way, I'm very suspicious about all that. | ||
| But let's say in the case where somebody actually does genuinely feel that they are in the wrong body and so on, that there is just this awful thing in it, as in so many other discussions at the moment, of... And if you nix that, You'll be right. | ||
| And I think, no, no, no, once you sort that out, you'll face all the same problems everyone else faces in their lives, and maybe some new ones. | ||
| But this is, I hear this in the race discussion in America, I hear it in the gay discussion in America, in a whole set of them. | ||
| It's as if, it's as if if we get the formula right, I just think this is a fascinating mistake. | ||
| I don't think we live our lives as solved or solvable beings. | ||
| And we are engaged, it seems to me, particularly in this society, in America, in this strange attempt to sort of get the minutiae right. | ||
| And apart from being deeply navel-gazing, it seems likely to me that we may be missing all the really important things that are going on. | ||
| I have this sort of haunting view always that we'll feel like we've really sorted out every aspect of LGBTQI rights. | ||
| Just as China becomes the most important power in the world. | ||
| I like to go back to Kill a Mockingbird, which now is getting banned in the state of Mississippi because of, you know, it's too... It's insanity, right? | ||
| We're in like a book-burning era almost, it seems. | ||
| But, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch puts Mayella Ewell on the witness stand. | ||
| And he aggressively questions whether or not she was raped. | ||
| And by virtue of that aggressive questioning, we find out that she made up the allegation that she was raped by a black man, Tom Robinson. | ||
| The jury still convicts him because that's the broken system of Southern jurisprudence in a pre-Civil Rights era. | ||
| But it's a powerful moment because that's where we have an adversarial system. | ||
| You don't automatically assume that somebody is telling the truth because of their race or because of their gender. | ||
| And we have so swung, I believe, from an era where a black guy is automatically guilty in the South because he's black to a black guy is telling the truth because he's a black guy. | ||
| Or a woman's not telling the truth because she's a woman to a woman's telling the truth because she's a woman. | ||
| I think you have to look, and this is a crazy, I can't believe I have to say this, but I think you have to look at the facts of every individual case. | ||
| I think that rape happens. | ||
| I think it's awful. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that I think every time a woman says she was raped, it's true. | ||
| I think that racism is awful. | ||
| It shouldn't happen. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that every time somebody says something racist happened, that you have to believe it. | ||
| In Iraq, all kinds of people have the right to have their faces, to have their full identity, without fear. | ||
| You have the militias groups in Iraq, Hezbollah, they come up to people with their faces, with their identities. | ||
| And you have the other side, the terrorists in Iraq as well. | ||
| They act freely in the country, but for people like me, I didn't hurt anyone. | ||
| I didn't, you know, treat anyone in a bad way. | ||
| So why should I hide my identity? | ||
| I mean, it's very important for me to declare who I am, because everyone has the right to declare who they are and what they do believe in. | ||
| For me, it's very important to say that I am an atheist, because in my country, Everyone is calling that we are Muslims, we are Sunnis, we are Shia, and we practice what we want. | ||
| But for me, it became, in the recent years, very important to share my thoughts. | ||
| You never really own freedom, David. | ||
| We only take care of freedom and preserve it to the next generation. | ||
| And I am doing my part, as an American, As a brave American, in the home of the brave, to make sure I follow in the footsteps of our founding fathers and do my part as they entrusted me with that which they have created. | ||
| I feel it is my duty to make sure to preserve it, to pass it to my children and their American children and many generations to come. | ||
| That's why we fight. | ||
| And I am so fortunate that through this fight, and it is a fight for freedom, for liberty, for democracy, for security, for human rights, I am privileged to meet the most amazing people that I would never otherwise meet, like sitting here with you today, and meet friends that have become lifelong friends, literally like family. | ||
| To me, that I would never have otherwise met if it wasn't doing for what I do. | ||
| So do I get depressed doing what I do, talking about terrorism and national security? | ||
| Of course I do. | ||
| I'm human like everybody. | ||
| Sometimes I cry. | ||
| Sometimes I'm completely depressed over things that are happening. | ||
| Sometimes I hurt deeply by people who stab me in the back or say bad things about me or even reading my Wikipedia profile. | ||
| But what keeps me so energized is the American people and the American spirit knowing that we are making a difference. | ||
| We are growing. | ||
| We are changing our country. | ||
| We are fighting. | ||
| We have a purpose. | ||
| So when you and I die on our deathbed, we can look back and we can say, I made a difference as we take our last breath. |
Export Selection