April 27, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| In case you've been hiding under a rock, or if you just don't have Twitter, bless your heart, | ||
| Kanye West made his return to the platform and proceeded to crack the internet with seven dirty words | ||
| which would have put even George Carlin to shame. | ||
| Last Saturday, Kanye tweeted, I love the way Candace Owens thinks. | ||
| If you don't know Candace Owens, she's a black conservative woman who originally went under the YouTube moniker Red Pill Black. | ||
| Candace caught fire online around the summer of 2017, and my interview with her, in which we discussed her evolution from a lefty to a conservative, is one of the moments that really put her on the map. | ||
| It was the first time that she had been able to explain herself in her own words in a long form conversational setting. | ||
| I don't want to rehash the whole thing right now, but Candace is no stranger to controversy, and you may remember that infamous debate that I had with Candace and Blair White late last year. | ||
| The whole thing was a debacle, I make no bones about it, but hashtag Save Dave trended on Twitter, so who am I to complain? | ||
| 2018 has already been a huge year for Candace as she was hired as Communications Director for Turning Point USA, the largest conservative college group in America. | ||
| Since then, she's been touring the country with Charlie Kirk, talking to young people, particularly young black people, as why they should embrace the victor mentality rather than the victim mentality. | ||
| This has included directly attacking the Black Lives Matter movement as well as Democratic policies, which Candace argues has decimated the black family and the black community. | ||
| Just last week, Candace, Charlie and I spoke at Berkeley to a wild crowd. | ||
| I'm proud to say that we had agreements and disagreements, and even though our styles are different, no doubt Candace certainly goes for the jugular more than I do, I always enjoy doing events with her and seeing her evolve politically, something I know a bit about myself. | ||
| She's learning as she goes, and as she said to me in our interview, if I had swallowed the red pill, then she had snorted it. | ||
| Beyond any of the politics though, Candace is a friend and our differences don't define us, they actually bring us together. | ||
| Alright, back to Kanye for a second. | ||
| Beyond the headlines, I don't know a ton about him, although I'm obviously aware enough to recognize what a transcendent cultural figure he is. | ||
| Not only is he hugely successful in the music world, he has a hugely successful fashion line, and is married to Kim Kardashian, who has her own empire. | ||
| You may not like the guy for whatever reason, but make no mistake, he is an absolute mogul. | ||
| I may not like or even respect the influence that celebrities have over culture these days, but Kanye is truly someone who can move people's minds with what he raps or tweets. | ||
| This is exactly what happened with these 7 words. | ||
| Immediately after Kanye's tweet in support of Candace, the internet went ablaze. | ||
| Twitter Moment's lead story was about Kanye's support for far right Candace Owens. | ||
| Candace was called anti-gay and racist, something I'm still confused about as she's had dinner here with me and my husband at our home where her anti-gayness never seemed to leak out. | ||
| As for racist, there's nothing like a white lefty telling a black person who doesn't think as they demand that they do that the black person is the actual racist against their own race. | ||
| Irony is truly dead, folks. | ||
| On Monday this week, Kanye refused to back down despite hysterics from the media. | ||
| He tweeted out a bunch of videos by another former Rubin Report guest, bestselling author and Dilbert creator Scott Adams. | ||
| In essence, these videos were Scott talking about what a free thinker Kanye is. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Next thing you know, the usual suspects like Buzzfeed, Mediaite, The Daily Beast and others were labeling Scott Adams as far right. | ||
| We've seen this script a million times before with anyone who dare challenge leftist orthodoxy, be it Candace, Scott, Colin Moriarty, Jordan Peterson, or even little ole me. | ||
| When mainstream media has moved so far left that this wide collection of people are all smeared with the same charges of far right racism, you know that the Overton window hasn't just shifted, it's shattered. | ||
| The authors of these pieces aren't journalists, they're activists. | ||
| Or, as Candace says, they aren't journalists, they're hitmen. | ||
| To recap, we have a new player in Candace who is fearlessly saying how she believes that the Democrats have used the black community for decades and that the victimhood mentality of the left is the root of this problem. | ||
| This, by the way, is similar to what plenty of other conservatives have been saying for years, and yes, this includes even black conservatives like my former guests Larry Elder and Thomas Sowell. | ||
| The voices of black conservatives and others espousing similar ideas has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, however, and that is exactly why everyone is freaking out about Kanye's tweets. | ||
| He just gave oxygen to a set of ideas that the Democrats and the mainstream media don't want you to hear. | ||
| And since they've controlled the narrative for so long, they've relied on the usual smears of racism, homophobia and bigotry instead of strengthening their own ideas. | ||
| Your ideas get fat and lazy when you don't have to work them out because you've owned the narrative for so long. | ||
| This is where the modern left finds itself right now. | ||
| If Candace's views are far right, then that means that about 40% of America, if not more, falls into that category. | ||
| I do want to address a different lurking danger here, however. | ||
| I know Candace, and I believe her to be forthright and passionate as she figures this all out. | ||
| I obviously don't know Kanye, nor any of his political beliefs. | ||
| So we have an interesting match here, where Candace is now the rocket, and Kanye is the jet fuel. | ||
| If Candace doesn't do the intellectual work to really figure out what she believes and why she believes it, all the while being under the insane microscope of the media that's going to be praying for her to fail, well then the rocket will be faulty and this experiment will blow up. | ||
| What if Kanye says something absolutely crazy tomorrow, which is not only possible, it's probable, or something that's counter to everything else that Candace believes? | ||
| He's been known to stir the pot, and I can only assume that something like that will happen, either intentionally or by mistake. | ||
| Does her rocket ship run out of fuel in mid-flight? | ||
| Where does that leave this incredible momentum? | ||
| Over the past year, when I've talked to people like Eric and Brett Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell, and many others, what I'm most impressed by is how complete their outlook on politics, and more broadly, on life is. | ||
| They don't jump from conclusion to conclusion depending on the political climate, they try to really understand what they fundamentally think, so as new issues arise their responses are complete rather than conflicted. | ||
| This is something I've really tried to incorporate into my thinking and something I know many of you are trying to do as well. | ||
| This will also be Candace's challenge now, and I think she's up to it, but only she can decide that for herself. | ||
| It blows my mind that every conversation we have in this room seems to become more and more relevant as time goes by. | ||
| For all I know, we'll have Kanye in that guest seat soon enough. | ||
| Whether he is just rocket fuel to boost ideas, or is he the rocket ship that will get us to the solutions remains to be seen. | ||
| But make no mistake, the issues around free speech, political correctness, and the uncomfortable truths that might be the answers to those questions have just been leveled up. | ||
| Are the players ready for the next level? | ||
| We'll soon find out. | ||
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| Joining me today is a national security expert, the best-selling author of "Defeating Jihad" | ||
| and a former, albeit brief strategist to President Trump, Dr. Sebastian Gorka. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, David. | ||
| I'm happy to have you here, sir. | ||
| First off, that voice. | ||
| Have you ever done any voiceover work at all? | ||
| Don't tell anybody, but it's my dream. | ||
| When I wrote Defeating Jihad, I asked about the audiobook, and I said, I'm going to get to do the audiobook, right? | ||
| My publisher said, you can do the prologue, then we'll get a pro. | ||
| I was crushed. | ||
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What? | |
| So the next book coming out in June, Why We Fight, I'm sorry, if you're listening Margie, I'm doing the voiceover. | ||
| I really can't believe that. | ||
| So first off, we have already spent a good amount of time talking about Star Wars. | ||
| Yes, I am very impressed. | ||
| Your Green Room and that post, I had never seen that Macquarie poster before on the LP, so I'm impressed. | ||
| That is the original 1977 poster. | ||
| I wonder, do you think, because we're obviously going to talk a lot about national security and foreign policy and all that, do you think any of your thoughts related to foreign policy have Anything to do with Star Wars? | ||
| Because I do think at some level, some of the way I view the world has been shaped by some of the lore. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure if it's cause and effect, but absolutely in terms of good and evil. | ||
| I mean, totally. | ||
| I mean, the first three movies are about good versus evil before they become this social justice warrior absurdity. | ||
| So yeah, sure, but as much as being the son of people who lived under Nazi and then Communist dictatorship, these things kind of flow together. | ||
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So Star Wars and growing up under... The child of people who escaped from dictatorship. | |
| Right, there you go. | ||
| All right, so you are in California because you were talking to a couple conservative groups here in California. | ||
| People don't believe that conservative groups could exist in California, but I mentioned to you before, we just had Governor John Kasich on. | ||
| He was talking with Arnold Schwarzenegger at some conservative groups here in California. | ||
| So it seems like something is happening in California. | ||
| I don't live here, but I come in and out to do these events. | ||
| Something's happening. | ||
| Something clearly is happening. | ||
| The energy I felt at the events here is like the energy I feel at events in Virginia or elsewhere, like Texas. | ||
| And there's a commonality. | ||
| Whoever you speak to, they keep mentioning the same things. | ||
| They talk about the gas tax. | ||
| They talk about sanctuary cities. | ||
| They talk about the burden on businesses. | ||
| When you get these things repeated enough times, you realize something is happening in California. | ||
| Who knows where it'll go, but this isn't the state—you know, I used to say, you know, the People's Republic. | ||
| Just lost forever. | ||
| I'm not so sure anymore. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So do you think this could be something that could happen as soon as our next, our gubernatorial election that's coming up now? | ||
| Or do you think this is sort of long term, maybe presidential election 2020? | ||
| All I'll say is the following. | ||
| With the election of Donald J. Trump to president, the political rulebook has been shredded. | ||
| Burnt, buried, and then Donald Trump jumped up and down on it. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| So any past expectations, any trend lines, are irrelevant. | ||
| I mean, I traveled with the President to, we flew on Air Force One to Youngstown, Ohio, back in June. | ||
| And this is Steel Valley, right? | ||
| This is the heart of blue-collar Democrat manual laborers. | ||
| And we arrived at the stadium. | ||
| And the President was in the back. | ||
| I was, you know, doing selfies with, you know, the crowd. | ||
| You do love the crowd selfie. | ||
| I've seen many crowd selfies of you. | ||
| Oh, look, what does it cost me? | ||
| They want a selfie? | ||
| Yeah, sure, why not? | ||
| So I got to engage with these people. | ||
| And I realized that in this stadium of, I don't know, 20,000, 25,000 people, everybody was either a former registered Democrat, their parents, their grandparents were all Democrats. | ||
| And then what happens when the President, when the First Lady, Melania, comes out onto the stage? | ||
| It erupts. | ||
| The building erupts with chants of USA, drain the swamp. | ||
| And this is Democrat territory. | ||
| Now if that can happen in Youngstown, Ohio, who knows what can happen in California. | ||
| Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about your history and your parents and growing up that you just mentioned. | ||
| But as long as we're on the first part of the Trump portion of this, let's just keep doing that. | ||
| I heard you at the Turning Point USA event in December give a speech, which I really thought was wonderful. | ||
| And you described Trump as the icebreaker. | ||
| And what I've been saying around here is that I view him as the bull in the china shop. | ||
| We wanted a panther to knock over a few things, but we got the bull. | ||
| And I think that it's really the same analogy that we're using there. | ||
| Just further on that a little bit. | ||
| So the United States was covered for at least 30 years in this massive permafrost layer of ice, which is political correctness. | ||
| And it had frozen over the media, education, politics, all of it, to the extent that by the Obama administration, federal government was telling you who could use which bathroom. | ||
| So just insanity. | ||
| And then along comes a guy who, the first day I met him in Summer of June 15 in his office in Trump Tower. | ||
| The first thing I knew about this man is he's the kryptonite of political correctness. | ||
| I mean, he couldn't care less about what the New York Times or CNN says about a given issue. | ||
| So along comes this man, layer of ice, frozen over the country. | ||
| Bam! | ||
| Slams into it like an icebreaker and smashes through the ice. | ||
| So he breaks a pathway for the nation to open up that sea lane. | ||
| And my argument to conservative audiences is that this is great, this is monumental. | ||
| The Panther could never have won. | ||
| It had to be the bull. | ||
| It had to be the icebreaker. | ||
| But if you know your physics of icebreaking, you can send that thousands of tons worth of ship in there with its tungsten hull, rides up on the ice, slices through it. | ||
| But if you don't have the flotilla behind it that comes up and keeps that passageway open, what actually happens in real life? | ||
| You send one ship in, breaks a path, almost instantaneously the ice comes around the bow and re-knits itself right around the ship and re-seals. | ||
| So this is the moment in the conservative movement where we have to get serious about what does it mean to be a conservative in the 21st century, what's the role of government, how does national security look, so on and so forth. | ||
| Donald Trump is the catalyst. | ||
| Now we have to do the heavy lifting of ideology and politics and policy. | ||
| Yeah, do you think he will, years from now when we look back, be anything other than the catalyst? | ||
| Like how do you consider his ideas compared to traditionally conservative ideas? | ||
| 'Cause just in the last couple months after signing the Omnibus thing, | ||
| right now when we're taping this a few days before we're gonna air it, but there's a big mess in Syria. | ||
| We're not sure if there's gonna be more intervention or not. | ||
| He seems to be doing some things that are probably a little more big government than perhaps you want, or certainly than his base seems to want. | ||
| So where do you think he fits, actually, between Catalyst and the flotilla? | ||
| So first things first, I hate labels, personally. | ||
| I think labels is lazy thinking. | ||
| And in the case of Donald Trump, Very relevant. | ||
| They have no application. | ||
| I'll credit Monica Crowley, my friend, with this. | ||
| The weekend after the election was David Horowitz's Restoration Weekend in Florida, which was either going to be a wake or the party that it was. | ||
| And Monica gave a great speech in which she said, look, Everybody misunderstands who this man is. | ||
| He was never an ideological candidate, because you simply cannot put him in a box, because of what he does, whether it's his attitude to gay marriage, whether it's... He's just such a mixture. | ||
| He was never an ideological candidate. | ||
| He was an attitudinal candidate, and she nailed it. | ||
| Now, what does that mean? | ||
| Look at the last 40 years. | ||
| This guy's 71 years old. | ||
| He's not going to change. | ||
| He is who he is. | ||
| What has he done for the last 40 years as a professional? | ||
| He's been committed to one thing, excellence. | ||
| Whether it's a golf course in Scotland, whether it's a skyscraper in New York, it's excellence. | ||
| And all he's done is he's taken that concept and translated it into excellence for America once more. | ||
| And that doesn't fit into neat neoliberal, neocon, paleocon. | ||
| It just doesn't fit. | ||
| He's about getting stuff done and being the best. | ||
| So how do you link that to what the general conservative movement is? | ||
| Now, I get what you're saying about labels, and I say it all the time. | ||
| The labels now, especially because of Trump, the labels are all needless at this point. | ||
| But the thing that I'm struggling to fully grasp about the Trump thing is how does this connect to, you know, when I see, right now you have a huge split, right? | ||
| We've got the Trump base, and then you've got the never Trumpers, and these people are, that should be kind of lining up. | ||
| They can't quite get there. | ||
| And how do you connect those things? | ||
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You're never going to connect the Never Trumpers. | |
| The Never Trumpers are pathological. | ||
| I mean, pathological. | ||
| When Bill Kristol, who's all obsequious and oligogenous to me in the green room at Fox, when he tweets out, actually tweets out in a choice between the deep state and President Trump, I choose the deep state. | ||
| Yeah, I saw that tweet. | ||
| Bill, you're not a conservative. | ||
| You're a subversive, right? | ||
| Get out of the tent! | ||
| Get out of the tent! | ||
| So that's never going to happen. | ||
| The broader question of what does conservative mean today? | ||
| We can't answer that because... | ||
| Have you seen a good article, a really good article, which understands first principles, founding principles, about what Trumpism is or should be? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| I've seen a lot of people who think they know what they're talking about, but who've never met the president. | ||
| So I think there's a lot of work to be done, but it's not going to be done by conservative establishment individuals. | ||
| The NRO is not going to tell you who Trump is. | ||
| And the NRO is not going to revitalize the conservative establishment, right? | ||
| This is a new era. | ||
| It's exciting, but we have to get to work to define what it means to be a conservative. | ||
| So that, to me, is why it seems so obvious that you're so passionate about this, that nobody else was going to do it. | ||
| And I think that's all, so that's sort of what Monica was saying, and it's sort of what Horowitz has been saying for a long time, even when he sat right there, that no one else was gonna break through, and now it's imperfect, but at least there's some hope. | ||
| You know, brutally candid. | ||
| I grew up in the UK to Hungarian parents who escaped communism. | ||
| I went through the private school system in the UK. | ||
| Stiff upper lip and all that stuff at the debating club. | ||
| So the President's style is not exactly the style I'm used to. | ||
| I have to get used to it. | ||
| And I understand when people have issues. | ||
| The biggest thing people have issues with on the right are his tweets. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| Who is going to defeat Hillary? | ||
| It wasn't Jeb Bush. | ||
| It wasn't even Senator Cruz. | ||
| None of them were going to. | ||
| The only person who could cut through that miasma, who could break through the ice of political correctness, was this rank outsider from Manhattan. | ||
| And whether you like it or not, to say philosophically, he was the necessary but not sufficient cause of victory. | ||
| You don't have to like it. | ||
| But it had to be him with that start. | ||
| We tried to do Marquess of Queensbury rules for 30 years. | ||
| Where did it get us? | ||
| Where did it get us? | ||
| Mitt Romney? | ||
| Come on, guys. | ||
| So it had to be Donald Trump. | ||
| Now we have to backfill what it means. | ||
| Yeah, and that seems to be where I think you and so many of these other people that are either part or formerly part of the administration. | ||
| So you had a very brief stint at the administration. | ||
| Longer than some. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Years from now, they'll go, my God, he was there for 90% longer than everybody else. | ||
| But a pretty brief stint, seven months. | ||
| First, can you just tell me how you got involved? | ||
| Because you had only, you just mentioned, you only met him a little bit before the election in the first place. | ||
| And then sort of what happened that had you leave? | ||
| Because that will really tie into the media, which I think we're very much aligned on what's going on with the media right now. | ||
| So, summer of 15, I get a phone call from a guy called Corey Lewandowski that I'd never heard of. | ||
| And he said, Candidate Trump is prepping for the big fall GOP presidential debate on national security. | ||
| He'd like to talk to you. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I took the plane, flew to New York, went to Trump Tower. | ||
| It was just the three of us in Donald Trump's office. | ||
| And we had this incredible blue sky discussion on national security issues. | ||
| You name it, from the Civil War up to the Middle East to nuclear weapons, all kinds of topics. | ||
| How knowledgeable did he seem about things? | ||
| Because this is one of the parts that I think people, we have no handle on, like, does he really know about these things? | ||
| Passionate, really interested. | ||
| Not a guy that you're gonna debate what happened in Karbala in the ninth century, but really interested in this stuff, and with opinions. | ||
| And halfway through this discussion, and he was sitting closer to me than you are, and Corey's over here, and he does a classic Trumpism. | ||
| He goes, he just stops the conversation and goes, Corey, I like this guy. | ||
| Let's hire him! | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| He asked me to help. | ||
| It wasn't part of the campaign, but I became an advisor, wrote policy papers that he used in the briefings, and we stayed in touch, but I never joined the campaign. | ||
| And then, as things progressed, and the field whittled down to what it did, I kept meeting General Flynn at events. | ||
| I was a participant, I was just in the crowd and I kept bumping into General Flynn. | ||
| And I'd known him from when he was director of the DIA and eventually we just, he pulled me in and by October, the month before the election, I don't know if you're familiar with the system, in the presidential election, the last two runners get support from the federal government before the election. | ||
| And they get offices near the White House to create transition teams, to prep. | ||
| And so Hillary got one story and the President got another story of this building. | ||
| And I was pulled into the... That's hilarious, it's in the same building? | ||
| Oh yeah, and if you talk in the elevator, you're like... So I got pulled in and asked to work on the National Security Council transition team for General Flynn. | ||
| And my wife, who has a background in the issues, was pulled in to work on the DHS team. | ||
| And so I became part of the official transition team. | ||
| And up till the very last moment, the week before, maybe the week of the inauguration, I was going to be doing counterterrorism stuff for General Flynn in the NSC. | ||
| And then Steve Bannon, who knows me, reaches out at the last minute and says, no, you're going to come and work for me in the office of the chief strategist and strategist to the president. | ||
| And that's how, you know, at 12.01 on January the 20th, I became a deputy assistant to the president. | ||
| Yeah, so the second that happened, basically, the media just went bananas on you. | ||
| I mean, every story... I mentioned to you that right... No, no, no. | ||
| No, the act, when they went bananas... Was it even before that? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| They didn't go bananas until the travel ban dropped. | ||
| And I realized things were not going well in terms of communicating the travel ban. | ||
| So I said to Steve and I said to Sean, guys, I've done a bit of media in the past. | ||
| I can be the face of this stuff if you want. | ||
| I mean, we've got the NSC communications team, but I'm prepared to go on CNN and debate these guys. | ||
| And so they threw me into the fire, and I loved it, and the left went nuts. | ||
| They just absolutely went insane. | ||
| And it was once I was vehemently representing the president on television | ||
| that out came the hit pieces and the lies. | ||
| Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit, because I see this happening to almost everyone | ||
| that I have any degree of respect for. | ||
| I see it happen. | ||
| It's a metric, right? | ||
| It's coming to me now, too. | ||
| I mean, I see this to almost anyone that I think is trying to be somewhat honest, the endless effects. | ||
| I mean, you know, there were just an endless slew of things that you're an anti-Semite and all of this craziness. | ||
| I mean, at the Turning Point event that I saw you speak at, you gave one of the strongest defenses of Israel that I've ever heard. | ||
| But they almost take everything and do the complete reverse of it. | ||
| What do you make of that tactic specifically, where it's literally the reverse of what the truth is? | ||
| It's not just like, we're going to take a line and make it seem a little different. | ||
| We're going to do something that's absolutely counter. | ||
| You've got a big viewership. | ||
| I know your Why I'm No Longer a Progressive thing has got, I don't know, how many millions of views now. | ||
| And I'll open up a little bit, despite the size of your audience. | ||
| I have a reputation for being a scary dude and being a hard ass. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But after the seven months that I went through and my family went through, every time, every few weeks, I have the same emotional response. | ||
| And it probably surprises you or others. | ||
| As a human being, I want to try and understand how another human being Who's never met me, who knows nothing about me or what my family has been through, can write what they wrote about me or say what they say about me. | ||
| It leaves me speechless that you can have such venomous hatred for somebody and peddle so egregious sets of lies. | ||
| And you not only call yourself a journalist, but you actually think you're a human being. | ||
| I was attacked, and that's fine, because I'm a politically commissioned officer of the President. | ||
| I'm a proxy. | ||
| I was a proxy for Steve. | ||
| I was a proxy for the President. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| But hey, why don't we debate the policies? | ||
| They never wanted to. | ||
| Never wanted to debate the policies. | ||
| It was ad hominem attacks and lies. | ||
| And secondly, it's okay to attack me. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| It's not okay to attack my wife. | ||
| It's not okay to attack my dead mother's reputation. | ||
| And it's not okay to attack my teenage, high school age son either. | ||
| These people are reprehensible. | ||
| And they're out of control, David. | ||
| And they're not learning, they're doubling down. | ||
| So that's the part that I'm concerned about right now. | ||
| People always ask me, I did an event in Irvine last night, and the question I'm getting more and more now is, is this thing turning around? | ||
| Now I sense, my sense is that there is something brewing against it. | ||
| There's something brewing, finally. | ||
| And I think any of us in this space are a little piece of it. | ||
| But to me, it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. | ||
| And that's what I'm concerned about. | ||
| You're nodding already, so I suspect you agree. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| Under what conditions does something like that change? | ||
| If we rule out violence, right? | ||
| We don't want to have violence, okay? | ||
| The worst war we ever had was our civil war, okay? | ||
| 600,000 Americans killed. | ||
| Even though they're subtly condoning violence. | ||
| They are! | ||
| The CEO of Twitter is condoning it. | ||
| So let's pray to the good Lord that that's not where we're going. | ||
| What's the other option? | ||
| What's the other scenario? | ||
| That they look in the mirror and they stop. | ||
| But why would they? | ||
| They reward each other for the lies. | ||
| I mean, look at Time Magazine's latest issue. | ||
| It's just a farrago of lies. | ||
| It's all opinion pieces. | ||
| It's not journalism. | ||
| When they look at the people who they celebrate at their get-togethers, they're not journalists. | ||
| I mean, there's maybe six journalists left in this country that are actually doing investigative research, like Sarah Carter, right? | ||
| Like Molly Hemingway. | ||
| When are they going to be recognized by the Washington press corps? | ||
| Never. | ||
| Never. | ||
| Because they don't comport with the narrative that we're Nazis and the president is a dictator. | ||
| This is a man whose grandchildren are Orthodox Jews. | ||
| Can you wrap your heads around it? | ||
| New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed. | ||
| You're reprehensible. | ||
| For calling this administration what you call it. | ||
| I know the president. | ||
| Not that he doesn't have a racist bone in his body. | ||
| He doesn't have a racist molecule in his body. | ||
| The stunning thing, and this is why it was such an honor to work for him. | ||
| The stunning thing about Donald Trump is, and look, I've got a Bible in my pocket. | ||
| I can swear on it. | ||
| I'll swear on this Bible. | ||
| This man wants only two things for all Americans. | ||
| He wants you and your family to be safe, and he wants you to prosper. | ||
| Which is what all American presidents should want. | ||
| But you know what's stunning, David? | ||
| He wants that for you, whether or not you voted for him or not. | ||
| He doesn't care whether you voted for Hillary. | ||
| He doesn't care whether you wanted Bernie to win. | ||
| He doesn't care whether you stayed at home and ate Doritos. | ||
| If you're an American living here legally, he wants you to be safe from harm, from gangs, from terrorism. | ||
| And he wants you to prosper like he has prospered. | ||
| And the left, this is the answer to your question, the left will never ever believe that. | ||
| Although it is true, and I attest to it. | ||
| So when they put you out there, and as you said, you willfully went out to go for the ban, the Muslim ban, when we talked about it on the show... The travel moratorium! | ||
| what you just said there. | ||
| When they put you out there, and as you said, you willfully went out to go for the ban, the Muslim ban. | ||
| When we talked about it on the show-- | ||
| The travel moratorium. | ||
| Right, okay, so-- | ||
| But I'm going forward to their narrative. | ||
| Okay, so we talked about it a bunch on the show. | ||
| I did a bunch of videos. | ||
| I tried to be very fair. | ||
| I have Muslim friends. | ||
| I've had Muslims on the show, and ex-Muslims, and I've had people that are critical of religion, | ||
| and people that are religious, and the whole freaking thing. | ||
| Look, most of the countries, most of the most populous countries of Muslim people were not included on the ban. | ||
| Indonesia, Egypt. | ||
| The original list came up by the Obama administration, all that. | ||
| So I tried to talk about it as fairly as possible, but it seems to be one of those issues. | ||
| And then I think this will sort of lead us a little bit into your book as well. | ||
| Talking about radical Islam and trying to make the distinction between Islam as a set of ideas versus Muslims as people, and of course you shouldn't be prejudiced and all of that, this seems to be basically the stickiest thing that we have going right now, right? | ||
| It's just quicksand to even talk about it. | ||
| You mean the threat of jihadism? | ||
|
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Well, just trying to... I mean, freedom of speech, there's all kinds of things that are really sticky right now. | |
| Right, so the quicksand of trying to make the distinction of we have to be able to talk about ideas and why we have to fight for good ideas and against bad ideas, but at the same time make sure that we're not being prejudiced towards people and making sure that America remains the open, pluralistic society that it is. | ||
| Look, the argument in my book, Defeating Jihad, is a very simple one. | ||
| We live in the only country ever created on the principle of individual freedom and liberties. | ||
| And granted to us, not by the government, but by our Creator because we are made in His image. | ||
| The Founding Fathers said, you have dignity because you are made in the image of the Creator, not because Washington says you have dignity. | ||
| And that concept of the individual's dignity and the freedom that it provides Is antithetical to the spectrum of politics that says man is perfectible and perfection can be created. | ||
| My first degree was philosophy and theology and I studied at this event here in California. | ||
| All ideological differences can be summarized in just two camps. | ||
| It doesn't matter which country you're in or what era. | ||
| Two camps. | ||
| Those that believe truth is objective And those who say, no, man can define truth and perfection can be created here on earth. | ||
| This statement, that man defines truth, leads to the gas chambers and to the gulags. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Now, social justice warriors don't realize that they're walking down the same path, but it's the same concept to say, I'm going to perfect the world and there will be justice and equality. | ||
| No, you won't if we are free. | ||
| There will never be justice for all, and equality for all, as long as we are free. | ||
| Because evil is real. | ||
| Evil exists. | ||
| Man is fallen. | ||
| And jihadism is just the latest version. | ||
| My book is a very simple argument. | ||
| There's a connective tissue between Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and the Nazis of the Third Reich, and the Communists of the Soviet Union. | ||
| Yes, they worship different things. | ||
| One worshipped an Aryan race, one worshipped the working class, the other worshipped their version of Islam. | ||
| But guess what the connective tissue is? | ||
| They're all totalitarians. | ||
| And if you disagree with them, guess what? | ||
| You're going to be enslaved or murdered. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| And if you deny that reality, and I've trained, I don't know, six, seven thousand federal officers. | ||
| I've trained more than that in the military. | ||
| When a military professional, an FBI agent, understands that his government is telling | ||
| him what he can or cannot say about the threat group he's supposed to be protecting us from, | ||
| then we have problems. | ||
| When President Obama says in 2011, writes a memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs | ||
| and the then attorney general, all counterterrorism training of FBI agents and the U.S. | ||
| military must not mention Islam and especially must not mention the word Jihad. | ||
| Well that's like saying we're about to storm the Normandy beaches and guys, make sure your M1's loaded and your boots are tied up, but whatever you do, don't mention the word Nazi because you could offend a German. | ||
| It's a bad SNL skit, David. | ||
| It's insanity. | ||
| And the fact that we weren't allowed to talk about it truthfully, that gets people killed. | ||
| Political correctness. | ||
| eventually can lead to good people dying. | ||
| Yeah, so that also explains why there's such craziness in Europe right now, right? | ||
| I mean, we're gonna see, it seems to me that we're gonna consistently see the rise of right or far-right parties, but it really is just the symptom of not being able to talk about these issues honestly. | ||
| Let's differentiate between the rise of two different things. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, we've just had an election in Hungary, we've seen elections in Italy and elsewhere, and we've seen Brexit. | ||
| Let's not conflate two issues. | ||
| There's the rise of very disturbing groups like Jobbik in Hungary that are really crypto-nationalists and feed off a long-seated anti-Semitic kind of irredentist sentiment in the country. | ||
| So these are the true sort of, they're not all white nationalists, but the true sort of, they want ethno-states, right? | ||
| Well, it's complicated because there's history there. | ||
| There's Trianon, there's Versailles, but they're bigots. | ||
| They're bigots. | ||
| Then, you mustn't conflate that with the Trump phenomena and things like Brexit's original causation. | ||
| And I don't even use the word populism. | ||
| I reject the word populism, unless your definition of populism is those kinds of politics that the elite disagrees with. | ||
| That's a good definition of populism. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that's not the standard definition. | ||
| For me, this isn't populism. | ||
| Trump winning or Brexit happening, this is a reassertion of democracy. | ||
| Why did Trump occur? | ||
| Because people on the left and the right looked at DC and said, You know, I don't know the difference between Sunni and Shia, but guess what? | ||
| It's broken. | ||
| I don't know what a federal budget should look like, but we're spending like drunken sailors. | ||
| So it's the reassertion of accountable politics, vice faceless bureaucracy or uniparty swamp dwellers, whether they're in DC or whether they're in Brussels. | ||
| So for me, we should welcome it. | ||
| With open arms. | ||
| This is a reassertion of accountable government. | ||
| But for the left that wants uniformity of thought and bigger government, it's fascism. | ||
| So how does the right, how do you police that? | ||
| I know that you don't like that idea of policing and government coming in and fixing it, but how do you make sure that the part that you're worried about doesn't lead to the good part? | ||
| Because I think, at least from the way I see it, the left is always led now by its worst parts. | ||
| And that's why they purge everybody. | ||
| The video that you mentioned that I did on PragerU, that's what I talked about. | ||
| I mean, anyone that steps out of groupthink, you get purged, and that's why I think there's such a movement towards libertarianism or classical liberalism or whatever you wanna call it. | ||
| So I see what the left's doing on that. | ||
| How do you make sure that doesn't happen on the right, where the far right that you're worried about, you think it's a fair estimation to call it the far right? | ||
| Yeah, I don't even like the word alt-right. | ||
| I think it's bogus. | ||
| I think that's a new label for nationalists or irredentist bigots. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| They're re-wrapping themselves to be salon fake, to be fit for polite company. | ||
| Well, I hate to tell you on your Wikipedia page it calls you alt-right, of course. | ||
| Wikipedia, enough said. | ||
| The page that doesn't allow the subject To correct, right? | ||
| When I try to correct the lies, it's frozen. | ||
| Interesting, Wikipedia. | ||
| Yeah, I told you right before we started, but your Wikipedia, out of all of the ones, because I usually just glance there, not for fact, but just to get a sense of what's going on, yours is such a mess. | ||
| Yeah, I've tried, I've tried to correct it. | ||
| Friends have tried to correct it, then they froze it, and then forget about it. | ||
| So what do you do, though, to make sure that those two things... | ||
| We need a spine. | ||
| So those of us that have a podium, those that are out there, those that wish to see the principles we believe in in terms of the founding come back and be celebrated in this country, we have to call them out. | ||
| We don't believe That you use legislation. | ||
| I mean, hate speech? | ||
| Give me a break. | ||
| I mean, either you're inciting violence or you're not. | ||
| Either you're committing a crime or you're not. | ||
| We don't need extra labels and we don't need censorship. | ||
| Call them out for what they are. | ||
| We need people on the right who say, you know what, he's a racist. | ||
| That all right thing, that's just bigotry. | ||
| That's just the KKK wrapped up in a new bow. | ||
| It's up to us. | ||
| Do you think that's happening enough? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| The left's not going to do it, right? | ||
| They're going to use it. | ||
| They're going to use those people to silence the majority. | ||
| Do you think that... | ||
| Not enough. | ||
| No, not enough. | ||
| By far. | ||
| We have begun, but there's a lot of work to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does everything that's happening in Europe right now, and there's definitely a distinction to be made between what's happening in Eastern Europe versus Western Europe, and Eastern Europe I think is dealing with some of their existential crises a little bit better, perhaps, because Western Europe's still a little behind on the political correctness stuff that you're talking about. | ||
| Does everything that's happening in Europe right now, does it all come down to immigration, do you think? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Immigration was the blue touch paper on the firework. | ||
| No, it's the death of representative democracy. | ||
| I mean, I watched this because I grew up in the UK under Margaret Thatcher. | ||
| For me, Maggie, the Gipper, blessed St. | ||
| John Paul II, these were my heroes. | ||
| I remember riding to school on the bus in the morning in West London. | ||
| And the bus driver would be Jamaican. | ||
| I'd be with my Indian or Pakistani school buddy. | ||
| I'd be with this Polish guy next to me. | ||
| I mean, it's a super heterogeneous part of London. | ||
| And as far as I was concerned, these are all Brits. | ||
| The guy might have had the thickest Jamaican accent possible. | ||
| My friend Martin's mom cooked the best Indian curries. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| We're all British. | ||
|
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Gone! | |
| You know, when Tony Blair came in, when Clinton came in, this idea that, you know, the West is guilty, and words like British are pejorative, you're a Gujarati, you're Welsh, you're whatever. | ||
| That was the death of these countries. | ||
| I mean, why do you think I'm in America? | ||
| I'm a proud American citizen now. | ||
| Because they lost the plot. | ||
| The things that the GIs fought for, that the Tommies fought for. | ||
| I mean, safe spaces? | ||
| Really? | ||
| You've got 19-year-olds that are being blown up over Berlin in bomber planes and you want a safe space? | ||
| This is in the space of 70 years. | ||
| I mean, what's going on in London right now? | ||
|
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This is the land of Churchill. | |
| It's shocking. | ||
| So I saw, I'm sure you saw this, but just in the last couple of weeks, they said London's crime, violent crime, has now surpassed New York City's for the first time in history. | ||
| And then Sadiq Khan, who's the mayor, issued a statement saying you can't carry knives. | ||
| I mean, first off, people are walking around with Swiss Army knives. | ||
| A woman that might want to protect herself might want to have a knife in her pocket. | ||
| I mean, it seems like a mass mental disorder to me. | ||
|
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It does. | |
| But that's what happens. | ||
| That is the natural progression when you deny objective truth. | ||
| If everything is plastic, then you will get wrapped around your own axle in absurdities. | ||
| And for a mayor of one of the most powerful cities in the world, a financial center, to say, no one should ever have a knife on them and nobody needs a knife. | ||
| So every plumber, every tradesman, every person working at a fish market is suddenly out of a job. | ||
| Sadiq Khan, you're insane. | ||
| So what does Britain, or Europe in a wider sense, have to do to reverse the tide on some of this stuff? | ||
| I said to people like Nigel Farage, I don't know. | ||
| Look, the saying crops up in every nation. | ||
| Every country deserves the politicians they elect. | ||
| Don't bitch and moan. | ||
| Get out there. | ||
| I mean, I see it where I live, outside D.C. | ||
| I mean, you know, the conservatives who's so fed up and they're constantly posting stuff on Facebook. | ||
| What have you done to do something about it? | ||
| Have you gone out with leaflets? | ||
| Have you given more than $5 to your local candidate? | ||
| Have you given up and surrendered? | ||
| I see this all the time, that people who say, well, greatest nation on earth, and then they say, well, you know, we're going purple, and so many bureaucrats moved in, and what are you going to do? | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Would you have said that in 1776? | ||
| The Founding Fathers have said, what are you gonna do? | ||
| No. | ||
| Is this just a symptom of the success of the West? | ||
| That we've just become so successful that, you're right, we kind of sit there and we sit on Twitter and we complain all day, but we're all talking, we're not doing anything. | ||
| Like, it's all talk, it's not do. | ||
| It's much more than that. | ||
| It's deep. | ||
| I mean, I went to the Jesuits. | ||
| I studied philosophy under them. | ||
| It was painful, but I won't regret a minute of it. | ||
| Identity is a function of history and culture and values. | ||
| And if you don't study Western civilization in your schools, in your colleges, this is what happens. | ||
| If you don't understand why people have dignity, just that they do, oh, unless they're conservatives, right? | ||
| This is where you arrive at. | ||
| And you know who's responsible for this? | ||
| I don't blame the left, David. | ||
| This is not the left's culpability. | ||
| It's ours. | ||
| It's the conservatives. | ||
| The radicals, when they saw Paris in fire in 1968, believed that they could do the same in America, that we could have a left-wing revolution. | ||
| This is what students from a democratic society believed. | ||
| And when Bernardine Dawn and Bill Ayers took over the SDS and tried to execute the Chicago Days of Rage, what happened? | ||
| Because Americans are not rabble-rousing leftists, It died. | ||
| It was a damp squib. | ||
| Their Maoist revolution, the Prairie Fire Manifesto, died instantly. | ||
| So what did they decide? | ||
| They'd read their Trotsky. | ||
| They'd read their Lenin. | ||
| They even knew what Hitler said. | ||
| Give me their children and I'll own their future. | ||
| So these people actually became tenured professors in Chicago. | ||
| They became high school teachers. | ||
| And what did we do on the right? | ||
| We let them. | ||
| People who avowedly believe America is evil were allowed to influence our education system to the point at which they pretty much owned it. | ||
| With the exception of Hillsdale and Grove City, they own the education system. | ||
| And what was our response? | ||
| Homeschooling. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I mean, I love the movement, but you're not going to save... But that ain't enough. | ||
| That ain't enough. | ||
| So it's going to be a hard slog. | ||
| It's going to be 20, 30 years of saying, guys, America means this. | ||
| And it's nothing to do with your skin color. | ||
| It's nothing to do with your sexual preference, your social class, your gender. | ||
| America is eternal values. | ||
| And that's going to be a lot of work. | ||
| All right, so I want to shift a little bit to foreign policy because I think that's sort of one of your, would you say that's one of your main strengths? | ||
| My claim to fame is counter-terrorism and stuff like this, but really deep down I'm a strategy wonk. | ||
| Grand strategy is my thing. | ||
| Okay, so we'll talk in the lens of strategy then. | ||
| So as we're taping this right now, I mentioned earlier, it's gonna sit on the shelf for a couple days. | ||
| So I don't want to get too lost in anything that happened today. | ||
| But at the moment, it's a little upside down in Syria. | ||
| There might have been strikes already from when we're taping this. | ||
| Hungary just had elections. | ||
| In your Wikipedia that I referenced earlier, it says you worked for the guy who just won. | ||
| Apparently you never worked for him. | ||
| I worked for his party. | ||
| I wasn't Viktor Orbán's advisor. | ||
| Which is what it says on Wikipedia, at least. | ||
| What's your general thoughts on foreign policy strategy? | ||
| Like, what is a sensible policy? | ||
| And is Trump applying that view? | ||
| First things first, the great irony of our nation is that we are the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. | ||
| And until recently, we have been the dumbest and most astrategic. | ||
| I mean, we haven't done, we haven't thought Or acted strategically since about 1989, November the 9th, when the Berlin Wall fell. | ||
| And this is, you know... How have we acted? | ||
| What would you say that since then, it's just been choice to choice? | ||
| The 90s was just this kind of confused, what is national security about? | ||
| Lurching for the snooze button. | ||
| Who are the threats? | ||
| Is it China? | ||
| Is it weapons of mass destruction? | ||
| Is it Yugoslavia? | ||
| It was just a mess. | ||
| And then we had 2001 and 9-11, and we had just... | ||
| It's neocon disasters. | ||
| It's not an accident that these guys were former Trotskyites, because they're so naive at the way they look at the world. | ||
| We're going to create democracy at the end of a gun barrel in a country with 36 languages that defeated Alexander the Great and the British Empire and the Soviets? | ||
| You couldn't be stupider if you tried! | ||
| So, you know, we've done some very, very foolish things because we haven't stuck to the basics. | ||
| Strategy, at the end of the day, is about one thing. | ||
| It's about prioritization based upon interests. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You've got to say, some things are more important than others. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Some countries are more important than others. | ||
| And in a post-modern secular world, you're not allowed to, oh no, all countries, oh, Vanuatu is as important as Turkey. | ||
| Wrong! | ||
| It's not. | ||
| I mean, I love the people of Vanuatu, but no, it's not a geostrategic import to the country of America. | ||
| So, number one, we have to prioritize, and I think this administration I doff my cap to Nadia Shadlow, HR McMaster's deputy. | ||
| She held the pen in the meetings that I was in on the new National Security Strategy of America. | ||
| And I tell you, David, it is the first document of that name in 30 years that deserves the name National Security Strategy. | ||
| Every administration has them. | ||
| This is the first one that says, this is what we stand for. | ||
| These are our values. | ||
| These are our friends. | ||
| These are our enemies. | ||
| And this is what we're going to prioritize. | ||
| Prior to that, it was laundry lists of Well, we're going to have two front wars, we're going to save the whales, and you know, no. | ||
| So, you have to prioritize. | ||
| And finally, this administration is about America first. | ||
| We are not isolationists, nor are we interventionists. | ||
| This really annoys me. | ||
| If you're a conservative, for 20 years you were given two options. | ||
| Button A, invade other people's countries and occupy them. | ||
| Button B, be a Rand Easter and close the curtains on the Pacific and the Atlantic and say, we don't care about anybody else. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| As the most powerful nation in the world, there's a large palette of options between the two. | ||
| There's got to be something in the middle there, yeah. | ||
| So it's about being smart, and it's about our interests, and To summarize the President's approach, this isn't official, but I like it. | ||
| We have numerous former generals and active generals from the Marine Corps at the highest level of the administration. | ||
| The Joint Chiefs, Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense. | ||
| And the interesting thing is they all come from the same Marine Corps division. | ||
| Not just the Marine Corps, the same division. | ||
| And that division has a motto. | ||
| No better friend, no worse enemy. | ||
| That's America First. | ||
| So when you see someone like John Bolton being now part of the cabinet, and if you were to look on, not that you can get truth out of Twitter, but the day it was happening, everybody's saying this is gonna start World War III, just the general hysterics, and now John Bolton is definitely, I suspect, more of a neocon than you're comfortable with. | ||
| I don't think it's fair to call him a neocon. | ||
| I don't think he's ideologically driven. | ||
| If you watch the videos that were recorded of his speeches 20 years ago, he was sounding very much like Trump. | ||
| We're American. | ||
| We have interests. | ||
| You want to work with us? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| If you don't, there's a problem. | ||
| And I think it's very telling that within 40 minutes of the president's tweet about John coming on board, Ambassador Bolton gave an interview on Fox, and they asked him about what he was going to be like as a National Security Advisor, and he gave a very interesting answer. | ||
| He quoted Dean Acheson, the doyen of foreign policy in America. | ||
| I don't know if this is a true story, but John said, Dean Acheson was once asked, how do you have such a good relationship with the president you serve? | ||
| And Dean Acheson said, well, it's very easy. | ||
| We may disagree on policy issues, but at the end of the day, I never forget who was elected president. | ||
| And it wasn't me. | ||
| That's a John Bolton 2.0. | ||
| He understands that unlike his predecessor, H.R. | ||
| McMaster, he's not there to lecture the president or foist his of what you should do onto the Commander-in-Chief. | ||
| He's there to be an honest broker and provide a palette of options | ||
| because guess who gets to decide? | ||
| The person who is elected president. | ||
| So I am very excited about John and I'm as excited about Mike Pompeo | ||
| coming from the CIA to the State Department. | ||
| We are in very good hands, David. | ||
| So how do you make sure, if it's between the pure isolationists | ||
| and the neocons or something, something like the nation builders, something like that, | ||
| how do you make sure that not everything that you do outside of our borders | ||
| becomes something much bigger? | ||
| I mean, look, we're still at war in Afghanistan. | ||
| I don't think anyone knows why. | ||
| I mean, can you tell me why we're at war in Afghanistan? | ||
| Can anyone tell us at this point? | ||
| I'll tell you why we went to Afghanistan in October of 2001 is the only reason we should be there today. | ||
| Nothing's changed, okay? | ||
| The idea that girls go to school, I love it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| And that people can listen to music freely and the Taliban won't execute you. | ||
| My parents lived under communism. | ||
| My father suffered under fascism. | ||
| He protected his fellow Jewish classmates during the occupation of Budapest. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I don't like those kinds of systems. | ||
| But there's only one reason we're there. | ||
| to make sure that that piece of land mass would never ever again be used to execute mass casualty | ||
| attacks in Manhattan | ||
| in Washington or in a field in Pennsylvania. | ||
| End of story. It's not about building a ring road around Kabul that not even | ||
| the Soviets could finish. It's not about building hospitals. | ||
| I'm sorry. You never make the ideal the enemy of the good. What the president | ||
| does is he looks at things | ||
| as questions of possibility. | ||
| You cannot be a massively successful realtor in the toughest market in the world, which is New York real estate, if you have a filter that distorts reality. | ||
| I mean, either this square footage is worth X or it's not worth X, according to the market, and that's how he approaches these issues. | ||
| So Afghanistan's only important to make sure bad guys don't use it again to kill Americans in America. | ||
| So you would say, or at least if you had to I don't have to guesstimate, I can tell you that. | ||
| that he believes that still keeping us there at the moment is still accomplishing that goal. | ||
| Yeah, oh, I don't have to guess, I can tell you that. | ||
| Yeah, so you believe that as well? | ||
| 'Cause it just seems unclear to me. | ||
| It has nothing to do, he will never, I tell you right, this 71-year-old man, | ||
| who is now the most powerful man in the world, will never, ever, ever buy into a nation-building scenario | ||
| anywhere outside of the United States. | ||
| Not happening for the next seven years, end of story. | ||
| And the idea that you have my followers on Twitter tearing their hair out, | ||
| that Bolton's going to have us invade Syria. | ||
| Guys, get a grip on reality and stop talking about crisis actors and tinfoil hat garbage. | ||
| It's not gonna happen while the president's the president. | ||
| Well that's, I tweeted something to that effect the day of the Bolton thing because it also reminds me that people don't understand basic deterrence. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That you have to bring in people that, you know, talk a big game so that perhaps- North Korea, hello! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The man who was going to take us to war, what did he do? | ||
| I think the success in North Korea today has in large part been thanks to his tweets. | ||
| Because that's how you deal with dictators. | ||
| You make fun of them, they hate that, and then you ridicule them. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And then you do what? | ||
| You scare them. | ||
| Oh, and lo and behold, they want to negotiate for the first time in 65 years. | ||
| Well, isn't that interesting? | ||
| Do you think there's any chance he would ever give up his nukes? | ||
|
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About 3%. | |
| Because at that point, what leverage does he have left, right? | ||
| But you still think it's worth having the talks to figure out what we can do? | ||
| Absolutely, because what's happened for the last 25 years? | ||
| Escalation, escalation, escalation. | ||
| We have given into nuclear blackmail since Bill Clinton. | ||
| At the end of the day, we have to remember, 1953 was not a peace treaty. | ||
| 1953 in Korea was a ceasefire and an armistice. | ||
| That is actually a war that's just simply been frozen for 65 years. | ||
| Would be nice to have a little bit of a peace treaty or something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How much of what's happening in the world right now You must be thrilled, I assume, with everything going on at the UN, that Nikki Haley has basically walked in there and- John Bolton 2.0. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, she strikes me as, I almost wonder, did Trump really know what he was getting with her fully? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| Yeah, did anyone know? | ||
| I don't think anybody did. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Do you know her at all? | ||
| Where do you think that comes from? | ||
| No, I don't know. | ||
| It was a friend. | ||
| She found herself. | ||
| She found herself, and more power to her. | ||
| What usefulness do you see in the UN at this point? | ||
| Because it seems like, truly, it seems like the most corrupt, backwards... It should be pushed into the river, I mean, really. | ||
| Well, the building's basically on the river. | ||
| Now they're gonna quote that and go, you see, he was calling for a building to be knocked into the river. | ||
| Look, the idea was a good idea. | ||
| In 1945 in San Francisco, let's have an organization that stops us from killing 60 million people again. | ||
| But when you lock in dictatorships like China and Russia into the Security Council with veto power, and then you create this empire of UN organizations. | ||
| I mean, has there been a year in the last 20 years that we haven't seen a UN scandal? | ||
| Whether it's money for oil, whether it's UN troops raping children in Africa. | ||
| Have we seen it one year without a UN scandal? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Try and reform it, and if you can't, question the validity of what it does. | ||
| Forget, I'm not talking about the children's rights organizations and food security. | ||
| I'm talking about its main mission, which is stability and safety. | ||
| It's failed abysmally. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of the endless obsession with Israel, that something like 47 of the last 51 resolutions are against Israel, and usually voted on by countries? | ||
| I'm sorry, but that alone is a reason to dissolve the UN. | ||
| I mean, what a lack of moral compass. | ||
| What an utter bankruptcy of the morality that there are nations in the world that actually still have slavery going on. | ||
| Slavery. | ||
| Where basic human rights for individuals are not guaranteed based upon sex, based upon lifestyle choices. | ||
| And you're going to lambast Israel? | ||
| The only real democracy in the Middle East? | ||
| Yeah, I think you nailed it. | ||
| I mean, that in and of itself is reason enough to question the... | ||
| Future of the UN. | ||
| So is the US sort of in an odd position where it's like if we don't do anything, nothing can get done, sort of, and that that then puts us endlessly in these quagmires or at least in these positions where we can either watch the world burn or get involved in things where we may end up adding to the burning in the first place. | ||
| Like, for example, you know, with Russia going into Crimea, you know, they gave up their weapons, right? | ||
| They gave up the weapons. | ||
| They said, all right, NATO is going to take care of us. | ||
| But what that really means is the United States is going to take care of you. | ||
| And I'm not saying we should have gone in and done anything there, but that we're in this endless situation now where it is either us, there is no international fighting force, really, right? | ||
| But again, you've got to be super careful not to get caught in a binary dichotomy. | ||
| You can absolutely say a world without American leadership is a more dangerous world, because it was for the last eight years. | ||
| Look, I mean, we had a government that actually said we're going to lead from behind, which is an oxymoron. | ||
| You cannot lead from behind. | ||
| We're going to have strategic patience, which means we do nothing and allow others to act. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| You name it, from China building fake military bases on fake islands, to ISIS, to Russia invading, it was just a disaster. | ||
| Egypt, we back the guy, then we back the other guys, then we back the other guys. | ||
| So, to say that a world without American leadership is more dangerous, It's true, but that doesn't mean that we have to fix everybody's problem. | ||
| And that's where smart strategy comes in, where you say, look, we have a moral duty to espouse certain values, but that doesn't mean we are responsible for all human beings, because the American Revolution says the opposite. | ||
| Each nation is responsible. | ||
| The citizens are responsible. | ||
| If you don't like your system, do something about it, because guess what? | ||
| We did against the most powerful empire in the world! | ||
| So, again, it's about finding that happy medium in the middle and being smart about it. | ||
| And again, without being callous, being realistic. | ||
| There are atrocities everywhere, from Rwanda to Yugoslavia. | ||
| Are American taxpayers going to pay for fixing all of them? | ||
| Are we responsible? | ||
| Are they responsible for what's happening in their country? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Are there times when we could perhaps help them? | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| But it's a balance. | ||
| It's a balance. | ||
| All right, so let's shift back to your book. | ||
| So, defeating jihad, it seems to me that the The main sort of narrative on this is not that we can defeat it, but we should live with it. | ||
| That there's a degree of it with which we should just live, which is, don't carry knives in London, and it's, you know, we're gonna put up more barricades so that trucks can't be driven into buildings or into shopping centers or just down the street and killing people. | ||
| That we can't really defeat this ideology, we just have to manage it. | ||
| I suspect you do not agree with that premise. | ||
| No, because we've defeated ideologies before. | ||
| Look, there are idiots who run around with swastika armbands today. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| So Nazism hasn't disappeared. | ||
| But we have made it so anathema that if you walk down the street with a Nazi flag, you will be rejected by society instantly. | ||
| The same thing with the KKK, right? | ||
| sadly not with Che Guevara, with the hammer and sickle. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But there are ways to defeat ideologies or to put them in a box where they're laughable | ||
| and everybody shuns them. | ||
| We have to do the same thing with jihadism. | ||
| This is my argument, this is the conclusion of the book. | ||
| We have to be as effective in delegitimizing the message of jihad, 'cause very simply put, | ||
| killing jihadis is great, but at the end of the day, body bags is a metric, not a good metric. | ||
| It didn't work in Vietnam, doesn't work today, because guess what? | ||
| If you've got a recruiting pool that's massive, they'll just recruit new jihadis. | ||
| So what's your victory condition? | ||
| Your victory condition is when the lifestyle of jihad is no longer sexy. | ||
| From Brussels to San Bernardino. | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| You make a laughing stock. | ||
| You discredit that value system. | ||
| Not us, I mean a white-skinned Catholic isn't going to do it. | ||
| But we help President Sisi, we help King Abdullah of Jordan, we help MBS in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| MBS, the historic things he said, I mean massive, about Israel in just the last few weeks. | ||
| That's how we win because sooner or later enough people say, No, those guys are losers. | ||
| That's how we win. | ||
| But you only do that if you get to talk about it truthfully. | ||
| You've got to be able to talk about the Koran, what jihad means, the history of the religion. | ||
| Because if you can't talk about it honestly, you're never going to treat it accurately. | ||
| Yeah, we're not very good at that though. | ||
| Well, thanks to political correctness. | ||
| I mean, imagine if you're a doctor. | ||
| And you've got a patient that comes in with third stage lymphoma, but your hospital administrator, because it's a scary word, has banned the use of the word cancer. | ||
| You can't say it. | ||
| It's just not allowed. | ||
| And then you have to tell the patient what? | ||
| Well, you know, you're dehydrated, go home, drink some water and take some aspirin. | ||
| What happens to your patient? | ||
| They die. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| If you can't diagnose a geostrategical issue accurately, however much money you throw at it, you will not solve the problem. | ||
| So are you concerned at all that just even if it's purely because of the way the media frames things, that perhaps Trump is not the right person to lead the fight against this, that for whatever he's gonna say about jihad or radical Islamic terrorism or the rest, that even if he said everything the exact way that you wanted it to be said, cleanly and clearly and correctly defined and all of that, That he may not be the right messenger on this, just because of the filter it has to get through to get to reality. | ||
| He's not the right messenger domestically because of what political correctness has wrought in our country, but he is absolutely the right messenger internationally. | ||
| Watch the video of his Riyadh speech. | ||
| Don't watch him. | ||
| Watch the 53 Muslim Arab heads of state and their body language, because, man, did he Guys, you've got a problem in your mosques, in your societies. | ||
| Extremism. | ||
| You have to deal with it. | ||
| It was tough. | ||
| And you'd think they'd be all negative and arms crossed. | ||
| They were beaming, right? | ||
| Sisi, Abdullah, were going, oh, finally, a guy who understands our problem and what is giving us tough love. | ||
| So, yeah, he is absolutely the right guy to fix this internationally, which is where it needs to be fixed. | ||
| Domestically, no, the political correctness thing is going to get in the way. | ||
| And the media, insanity. | ||
| So do you think he has more support from foreign heads of state than we'll ever have a sense? | ||
| I mean even at the G8 there was a feeling of like that actually these guys kind of liked him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh I can tell you, yeah. | |
| I told people before the inauguration you have no idea, even if you voted for him, you have no idea how successful he will be internationally. | ||
| Because he's a straight shooter. | ||
| Because he's An alpha dog. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| In a lot of places outside of Berkeley, they like that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because they know what you're talking about. | ||
| They don't have to walk on eggshells. | ||
| They understand your direction. | ||
| So yeah, internationally, our prestige as a nation Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So I know we could do a whole other show on this, but very quickly, just on Russia and collusion. | ||
| As someone that has been around the administration, you've mentioned some of these people already, Flynn down the road. | ||
| What can you tell me about that, and is there anything that people should be worried about? | ||
| Or do you think this is all gonna actually point just back to the Democrats, which every time it seems to point to Trump, you go a little bit further, and then you're going, oh, whoa, wait a minute, that was actually the Democrats doing it. | ||
| My good friend has the best morning show in D.C., Chris Plant, the radio host. | ||
| It's actually nationally syndicated now. | ||
| And I have to credit him with this. | ||
| He says it's the last scene from the Hunt for Red October. | ||
| When the bad Captain Tupolev launches the torpedoes against Sean Connery on the Red October, and he takes the fuses off. | ||
| And then what happens? | ||
| Remember his XO says, You idiot! | ||
| You've killed us! | ||
| The thing comes back and sinks them. | ||
| This is the most hilarious boomerang in history. | ||
| I'll tell you what the President told me in the Oval Office, just the two of us. | ||
| He was very frustrated one day, I think maybe Jared had just testified or given his speech, his little press conference, and he said, They will not find anything, because there is nothing. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I take that to the bank. | ||
| There is no Russian collusion. | ||
| How could there be, after the last 15 months, from arming the Ukrainians, to the XL pipeline, to ANWR, to finally, after 30 years, the first president to ever get NATO, to finally stump up the 2% of GDP that they promised they'd spend on defense, to our own military expenditure increases, Every significant policy decision this president has taken with regards to Russia has been bad for that former KGB colonel. | ||
| So the idea that we're colluding, you have to be on drugs or be so ideologically blind to believe that. | ||
| Well, then what do we do with this layer, you know, whatever, that you referenced, deep state before? | ||
| Oh, what do we do with deep state? | ||
| Yeah, what do we do with this thing? | ||
| You know, look, we have an ongoing, the investigation to me, the Mueller investigation, what seems odd to me, is that I don't know what the actual, I don't know that they ever laid out what their mission is, other than to find something. | ||
| What was the crime? | ||
| Collusion to conspire in a crime, but what's the crime? | ||
| Because if it's Russia misrepresenting itself or perverting the truth on Facebook, well then Zuckerberg should be charged. | ||
| Anderson Cooper should be in the dock. | ||
| What are the charges that have been brought? | ||
| Outrageously ridiculous. | ||
| Lying to federal investigators. | ||
| You, you would probably be able to be caught in a perjury trap today. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Because not everybody remembers what they did and how they did it. | ||
| Perjury traps about what you said to somebody irrespective of Russia? | ||
| That's not Donald Trump's problem. | ||
| Wire fraud? | ||
| Eight years ago? | ||
| When Manafort worked for the Ukrainian president? | ||
| What's that got to do with Russian collusion. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| My worry is that Mueller is not a good actor. | ||
| If you look at who he's hired, it's clear that there's massive bias. | ||
| And this report he's writing for Congress is simply going to be a political weapon in the elections. | ||
| And that's not how justice is served. | ||
| That's not rule of law. | ||
| That's a So that's what I'm concerned about also. | ||
| Whether you think something, for the people that are watching this that think something happened or didn't happen, what I'm more concerned about is that we're entering this new phase where whether it's Trump that's president or it's a Democrat that's president or it's a different Republican or whatever, that we're just gonna We can endlessly also have this layer that all it does is investigate itself, waste money, just constantly just be keeping us all in this state where we never know what's real, because if you listen to half of the pundits on television, I mean, their implication is that Russia has installed our president, in which case that's probably the single biggest act of war in the history of the world, and what are you actually saying? | ||
| Do we take Trump out, and then do you take out Pence, and now should Paul, I mean, if you take it to its logical conclusion, Do we have Paul Ryan as president then? | ||
| Where are you really taking this? | ||
| And that's what I'm worried about, is that we're just going to end up in this constant state where, yes, we'll have a Democrat and then a Republican, but we'll really be caught in just, all government can do is investigate itself, really, more than anything else. | ||
| I see myself as an optimist, but you're giving me a real challenge with that last one. | ||
| I see myself as an optimist, too, but I think I'm a realist. | ||
| For months and months and months, I refused to use the phrase deep state. | ||
| I really thought that was a tinfoil hat-y kind of thing. | ||
| For the record, I don't even know that I've even said it once on this show. | ||
| It sort of pops up in ancillary ways. | ||
| I use it now because I've seen it. | ||
| I've seen it inside the administration. | ||
| When you go to enough National Security Council meetings that are classified, that is the pinnacle of policymaking in America outside of the Oval Office, and this is where policy is made. | ||
| Everybody's in the room from the NSC, then you've got the outstations on secure VTC from DIA, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, CIA, State, you name it, right? | ||
| You sit there as a newly appointed political and you listen for two hours on a big issue, ISIS, Russia, whatever it is. | ||
| And not one participant mentions the name of the president, or what he said yesterday in Warsaw, or what his objective is given that specific issue. | ||
| And you see this happen again and again and again. | ||
| And you're the guy at the end of the conversation with the funny accent who says, excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, you do know what the president said about X yesterday. | ||
| Can we actually do that? | ||
| The deep state is real. | ||
| When you've got GS-15s and SESs saying, well, I've been here for 20 years. | ||
| I know this guy's going to be here for four. | ||
| I know better. | ||
| That's bad for democracy. | ||
| So to be clear, though, you don't think it's some sort of massive underground conspiracy. | ||
| You think it's just the apparatus, it's just the old Washington apparatus. | ||
| I don't think, you know, these people who think Obama's sitting in a cave somewhere with a joystick. | ||
| He's lazy. | ||
| He'd never be a mastermind. | ||
| He's not Specter, right? | ||
| It's not Blofeld. | ||
| But, no, there's a culture in government that's antithetical to and undermining the president on a daily basis. | ||
| But there is concerted effort in the media. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| I mean, Ben Rhodes brags about it! | ||
| Yeah, that guy's unbelievable. | ||
| When he says, my buddies, the left-wing journalists, are morons, and they're my echo chamber. | ||
| He built this machine that was this incestuous connection between people in the West Wing, people in the think tank community, and their buddies in the media. | ||
| I mean, look at the attack pieces on anybody, me or whatever. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| Somebody should do a case study at a journalism school. | ||
| One attack piece will drop at 7 a.m. | ||
| By 2 o'clock in the afternoon, 30 have been written, which are simply cut and paste. | ||
| But if you don't know that, it looks as if, oh my gosh, Gork is a fascist. | ||
| No, it's one guy's article that was written because Ben Rhodes told him to write it, that comes and multiplies. | ||
| On the right, how do we react? | ||
| Well, I got my op-ed into National Review this month. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's a gulf in terms of managing narratives. | ||
| The left built a whole ecosystem and we're still in the 1980s. | ||
| Oh, we'll take out a full page ad in the Washington Times. | ||
| Well, that's why when discussing it, yeah, I think it's so important to not, I think most people, especially just because of the way social media works, they immediately go to the full-on conspiracy of Obama with the joystick or just some other, you know, the globalist thing and this whole, where to me it's like, what you just described seems more realistic to me, that there's an apparatus there that then is still connected to the media. | ||
| That seems, We can discuss that in a sensible way. | ||
| With one addition, and I appreciate this now having been in the target hairs of the crosshairs for so long. | ||
| They have an advantage because our side is predicated on what, David? | ||
| The individual. | ||
| Manifest destiny, the rugged individualism. | ||
| We believe in the individual. | ||
| The left, by definition, is a collective entity. | ||
| I mean, there are elements of the Borg in the left, and it truly is a collective mob mentality. | ||
| A friend of mine, Omri, if you're watching, I mean, thank you. | ||
| When one guy goes after Gawker or Bannon or whoever, the president, there's this massive collective pylon. | ||
| It's not a conspiracy, but they're all on the same hymn sheet. | ||
| They don't need direction, but they say, oh yeah, let's go after him. | ||
| Which puts us on the right of the disadvantaged. | ||
| Yeah, so this is just sort of an emergent group thing. | ||
| It's a cultural thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| We're going to do this again. | ||
| I hope so, this is so much fun. | ||
| Yeah, this was an absolute pleasure. | ||
| For more on Dr. Gorka, I feel like I have to say... Sebastian. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, I'll call you. | ||
| I'm a pro when I'm doing that. | ||
| Later, I'll call you Sebastian. | ||
| But I feel like Dr. Gorka. | ||
| I mean, you should be a Star Wars character. | ||
| It's all in there. | ||
| For more on Sebastian, follow him on Twitter. |
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