May 17, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
10:31
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
(upbeat music) | |
| (upbeat music) | ||
| I'm sure by now all of you have seen the New York Times article on the intellectual dark web | ||
| that ran last week. | ||
| The article was a heavy lift, trying to define something that had been previously undefined, but it was a solid foray into the mainstream for this eclectic group of people. | ||
| For the record, I believe the Intellectual Dark Web is a diverse group of thinkers, interviewers, comedians, and academics who have been thrust together due to intellectual curiosity, a desire for truth, and an absolute respect for our audience's ability to make up their minds for themselves. | ||
| There's an old Groucho Marx line, I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me as a member. | ||
| At first, that was how I felt about this intellectual dark web. | ||
| We've had a pretty great thing going around this loosely associated group of free thinkers, so why muck it up with something more formal? | ||
| What I've come to see, though, is that this alliance, whether we have membership cards and a clubhouse or not, is now one of the most important forces for reason that exists. | ||
| This crew of people, from Harris to the Weinstein Brothers and from Shapiro to Summers, have all come from different walks of life, and from different academic and career backgrounds. | ||
| What I believe to be the one unifier in this group is that we haven't been going for easy answers to tough questions which make great soundbites, but offer little real world value. | ||
| We've all tried, with success and sometimes with failure, to communicate ideas that the mainstream media has either ignored or misrepresented because they often go against mainstream orthodoxy. | ||
| For example, Sam Harris has tried to make a clear distinction between ideas and people, and why we must be able to criticize ideas, such as Islam, without becoming bigoted towards Muslim people. | ||
| Progressive Bret Weinstein has tried to show a progressive university that fighting racism through racist acts, in this case a day of absence at school for white people, was actually itself racist. | ||
| Ben Shapiro has brought basic ideas of conservatism to a younger generation that is being indoctrinated with postmodern viewpoints. | ||
| Christina Hoff Sommers has tried to show people that the original intention of feminism, a true equality for women, has morphed into something about authoritarianism rather than equality. | ||
| All of these conversations are important ones to have because without conversation on these important issues, the only option left is violence. | ||
| It doesn't mean that you have to agree with anyone or everyone in this group of people, but the failure of the mainstream to honestly and maturely talk about these topics is exactly what drove so many of you guys to us in the first place. | ||
| Contrary to many of the think pieces written after the original New York Times piece, none of us in this dark web view ourselves as victims. | ||
| Actually, it's the total reverse. | ||
| We're empowered by our ideas, in my case, the belief in the individual, and want you to be empowered to fight for what you believe in as well, even when you disagree with us. | ||
| I do want to address a few questions related to my role in all this discussion, as well as how I view myself and the Rubin Report as a show. | ||
| One of the criticisms by Barry Weiss in the Times article was in essence about the gatekeeping responsibility that she feels the members of the intellectual dark web should have. | ||
| So where are the lines we draw as to who we talk to, and what are ideas which we won't touch? | ||
| If a conversation we're having could lead you down a rabbit hole of unsavory people, is it incumbent on us to guard you against this journey, or is it on you as the viewer to decide what ideas and which people cause you to draw your own line? | ||
| I think you know my position on this, but I'll say it again. | ||
| I as an individual make the choices which I think are intellectually honest, and then I believe that it is on you, the viewer, to decide which people and ideas you like or dislike, and then follow up on these people and ideas yourself. | ||
| I've always felt this was the right way to look at being an interviewer, but I know that not everyone agrees with this premise, including some people I like and respect. | ||
| I also have said many times before, along the way of making these decisions, I may make mistakes, but I'll always try to do what I think is right. | ||
| There's also an interesting guilt by association situation developing here. | ||
| My friend and mentor Larry King, the true king of interviewing, could spend a week in 1994 interviewing David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, the cast of Seinfeld, Michael Jordan and Frank Sinatra. | ||
| Nobody in their right mind ever felt that that meant he was friends with or endorsed all of these people's views. | ||
| Somehow, and maybe this is just partly because of YouTube and social media, these days if you even talk to someone, a certain segment of people think that this automatically means you stand by everything they've said and done. | ||
| I view this as patently absurd and actually quite dangerous. | ||
| We have to be willing to push the sensible boundaries of people we're willing to talk to, otherwise we're just talking to ourselves and thus furthering the echo chamber mentality that mainstream media fosters. | ||
| This brings me to a couple people who I've had conversations with. | ||
| I seem to get the most guff from having two specific people on the Rubin Report, as well as one interview I did outside of this show. | ||
| I had Mike Cernovich on the Rubin Report in March of 2016, right when the Trump phenomenon was first breaking through. | ||
| At the time, I saw a lot of support online for Trump, but I couldn't find any mainstream people willing to talk about it. | ||
| Cernovich was one of the few vocal supporters of Trump, was a published author, and was catching fire on Twitter. | ||
| My conversation with Mike was totally civil and actually quite interesting to me, as I hadn't heard anyone articulate sensible support for Trump before that point. | ||
| As the next two years unfolded, Cernovich was a central figure in conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, while also being at the front of Hillary's health issues, which the media ignored until she passed out in front of her SUV on that fall day in New York City in 2016. | ||
| Let's not forget that Donna Brazile, the former head of the DNC, actually confirmed Cernovich's reporting when she said that the DNC was thinking about replacing Hillary at one point during the campaign. | ||
| I didn't know about some of Mike's distasteful blog posts which were written before I sat down with him, and I certainly can't be held accountable for what anyone does after they've been on the show. | ||
| What I can be held accountable for is the way I conduct myself in an interview with a controversial person, which thus far I'm absolutely proud of. | ||
| One of the reasons I wasn't surprised by the election of Donald Trump was because that very conversation that I had with Cernovich led me to believe it was going to be a possibility. | ||
| So, while mainstream media ignored figures which were deemed deplorable and felt that Hillary was a shoo-in, I dared have the conversations which allowed me, and hopefully you, to see the future more clearly. | ||
| The other interview which people were upset by was my chat with Stefan Molyneux. | ||
| Stefan is heavily focused on race and IQ, which is not a discussion I'm a pro at, nor one that I care to focus on that much. | ||
| Actually, I asked him this very question during the interview. | ||
| What is it about race and IQ that you feel the need to talk about it so much? | ||
| His answer, in essence, was that he talks about it because he finds it so troubling. | ||
| His answer is for you, the viewer, to either accept or reject. | ||
| Perhaps I could have poked or prodded in another way, but I felt trying to figure out why he thinks as he does is what my job is. | ||
| The other important one to address here is an interview I did on the Alex Jones Show back in February of last year. | ||
| This was right after my Why I Left the Left video came out from Prager University and I was getting a ton of press requests. | ||
| That week I also did Tucker Carlson on Fox News and would have been just as happy to do MSNBC or CNN had they invited me. | ||
| My feelings, as I've said in a bunch of live streams since, was that if I went on Jones' show and it was aired live and unedited, I might be able to bring my message of conversation and classical liberalism to Jones' audience. | ||
| I know it worked, by the way, because I've received dozens of messages from Jones' fans who said how nice it was to hear a different perspective, and since then they've been challenged by other interviews we do right here. | ||
| The criticism of course is that I somehow legitimized Jones by doing his show in the first place. | ||
| I don't see it that way myself, but I'm sympathetic to the argument, and as Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, with great power comes great responsibility. | ||
| I didn't think that a year ago I had great power, but as things have ramped up around here, it appears that I do these days. | ||
| I should also remind you that there are plenty of people who wouldn't want me to sit down with Jordan Peterson because they say he's alt-right, or Sam Harris because they say he's anti-Muslim. | ||
| Charges that I, and you, know absolutely to not be true. | ||
| This is the dangerous place we're all in when we all act like the gatekeepers of others' capacity to make decisions for themselves. | ||
| With all this in mind, I'd like to offer up three Rubin Report rules going forward. | ||
| One, I will keep the focus more on ideas than on people. | ||
| This won't always be totally possible, but I'll always do my best to honor that principle. | ||
| Two, I'll continue to interview potentially controversial people, but will increase my efforts to shed light on ideas they have that I'm concerned are unsavory. | ||
| I'll give them a chance to explain themselves, as I believe sunlight is the best disinfectant. | ||
| If I'm cordial to someone, it doesn't mean I endorse them. | ||
| I think we're in serious danger of eliminating conversations that are necessary to understanding the big picture because some of us may feel compromised by simply listening. | ||
| Trump's election and Brexit were only surprises if you turned up your nose to listening to half the electorate. | ||
| 3. | ||
| I'll keep trying to build bridges in some places where others would reflexively burn them down. | ||
| This is always tricky because I naturally don't want to legitimize bad actors, but I'll always try to see if there's room to make inroads with someone where I may have been trained to think they were my sworn enemy. | ||
| My bridges won't be built everywhere though, we've got to have some standards of decency to make sure that the ideas we want to build upon here aren't sitting on a mound of quicksand. | ||
| As what we do here gets put more into the spotlight, I have more of a responsibility to live up to the ideals that I've laid out here. | ||
| I'm never going to make everyone happy and it's why at the end of the day I can only answer to my own conscience. | ||
| I believe that we are starting to win in the public square and this will now bring all sorts of new people our way. | ||
| 2018 is undoubtedly the year of unusual alliances. |
Export Selection