Sept. 4, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:07:11
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Hey, I'm Ben Shapiro, and welcome to a very special edition of The Rubin Report, one Jew replacing another. | ||
| Joining me today on his new set after 34 glorious days off the grid is the host of The Rubin Report, Dave Rubin. | ||
| Welcome back, and I'm sorry, dude. | ||
| Shapiro, I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone right now. | ||
| Truly, I really do. | ||
| I mean, first off, you're hosting my show. | ||
| We're on a new set here, new chairs, new carpet, new table, new art, new everything. | ||
| I have no, I genuinely, Genuinely, genuinely, I have no idea what's going on in the world since August 1st. | ||
| I know one thing that I found out two days ago because my dad could not control himself in an idiotic phone call. | ||
| So I know one thing. | ||
| I suspect it's a pretty big thing that has happened. | ||
| I know you have a list of things. | ||
| We have a list of 20 things here. | ||
| 20 things that you missed during the last month because, as we all know, one month of time in Trump world is actually seven years of regular time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But let's talk first about what it was like to actually be off the grid for 34 days. | ||
| I do it like once a week, but you did it for 34 straight days, which has got to be both wonderful and also now you have to feel like you just jumped directly into a cesspool of crap. | ||
| Well, I haven't jumped in yet. | ||
| I think we're about to. | ||
| I will usher you in, my friend. | ||
| There's the cesspool of crap right there. | ||
| I mean, first off, I just, I feel great. | ||
| I genuinely mean that. | ||
| I'm laughing because I'm going to end this real fast for you. | ||
| I'm going with a little bit of like, runway here and then you're gonna you know take us off into the ditch but like just in terms of like how I feel as a human being right now I my mind feels clear I feel good I feel positive I feel very grateful for the things that I have this last month I mean really I don't know that I heard the word Trump | ||
| More than three times, truly. | ||
| Like, you know how every conversation now that anyone has anywhere, and I'm not even just talking about the world we live in, but just everywhere, people talk about Trump all the time, talk about politics all the time. | ||
| Everyone thinks World War III is starting tomorrow, or the Russians, or just like this endless, like, rancor monster of insanity. | ||
| And I didn't have any of it for a month. | ||
| I'm telling you that every interaction that I had with a human being since August 1st and today's September 4th It was good. | ||
| It was decent. | ||
| Whether I was talking to cashiers or waitresses or the girl at the hardware store who I've told you about, who every time at this local hardware store I go to, she always goes, Oh Dave, I love you, but I really love that Ben Shapiro. | ||
| It turns out that the hardware store is closing. | ||
| And I said to her the other day, I said, well, good luck in whatever you're going to do. | ||
| And she was like, ah, don't worry about it. | ||
| I'm going to grad school now. | ||
| And it was just like talking to different people. | ||
| And I tried to do all that anyway and not be online all the time and not focus on the hate and all the monstrosity. | ||
| But I just I feel freaking clear, man. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| And I'm psyched that we that we did all these changes around here. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, thank you for coming in and doing this. | ||
| Well, I mean, I couldn't resist. | ||
| I'm a sadist. | ||
| And I sort of feel like, you know, the guy who read the Game of Thrones books and then was waiting for the rest of the world to catch up on the Red Wedding? | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Get ready, my friend. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| This is going to be the red show. | ||
| Oh, it's pretty wild. | ||
| But first, I want to ask you about, like, how hard was it to actually You know, shut yourself off, to actually put that phone in that safe, because even for me, I do it once a week, but the rest of the week, I find myself with the phones in my pocket, I'm checking Twitter almost as a reflex at this point. | ||
| How hard was it to actually put it down for a month? | ||
| Well, first off, I want to give a little credit to the Orthodox Jews out there, because perhaps this Shabbat thing has, well, I guess it's not just an Orthodox thing, but has figured something out with getting off technology. | ||
| Because, yeah, so score one for God, right? | ||
| Because, look, I do, I try to do the weekends off in general, but I struggle with it sometimes. | ||
| And a lot of times if I'm on the road, you know, I've been on the road with Peterson for the last couple of months. | ||
| So like, if I'm on the road, it's like, yeah, what else am I going to be doing? | ||
| You know, I can visit some tourist stuff and have some dinners or whatever, but I'm fiddling around. | ||
| You know, I did this thing last year, last August, and it was basically, you know, the first couple days | ||
| going into your pocket all the time. | ||
| Like, literally, you feel your phone there. | ||
| You get those phantom vibrations, all of that stuff, and you feel like you need it. | ||
| Or you know what I noticed was weird? | ||
| Like, if I was just waiting for somebody, like when's the last time you just, like, | ||
| waited on a corner for somebody? | ||
| You automatically look at your phone. | ||
| You don't just stand there, even for 10 seconds. | ||
| You don't just stand there and kind of like look around or people watch or just think or look at the sky or anything. | ||
| You literally just go to your phone that moment. | ||
| So that sort of thing I noticed that in the moments of quiet where I was doing nothing if I was in between things Ben, even if I was taking a shit, I'm on my phone usually. | ||
| I am. | ||
| And I suspect you are too. | ||
| It's unsanitary. | ||
| But everyone's doing it. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| I was pooping phone free. | ||
| And then you have moments to think! | ||
| I mean, I know this all sounds sort of... Nothing but you pooping phone free, and I'm sorry that we did this, but... Well, it just... Look, even this. | ||
| Like, avoiding the news in general is also work, because what I realized is, when you're off this for a little while, we are slammed with this nonsense all the time. | ||
| And when I say nonsense, I don't mean the important things that I think you and I and a bunch of other people are trying to talk about and trying to deal with the difficult questions of the day, and I'm sure we're going to get into some of that, but just the endless 24-hour news cycle of just drivel that keeps everybody angry at each other and confused about truth and distracted and clicking and all that. | ||
| Even Avoiding CNN, when you're not looking at television and don't have a phone, was hard. | ||
| CNN is wherever a muted television is, period. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| Airports, it's at the gym, it's at the local, you're gonna go to a burger joint, it's playing, or a diner, or whatever. | ||
| Everywhere. | ||
| I went to get my car tuned up, it's playing in the lobby there. | ||
| And I had to literally avoid watching, you know, because everything's breaking news and none of it's really breaking They're actually breaking news, but you know, I had to | ||
| actually avoid that. | ||
| So I was at the gym and they have all these TVs up there and I had to literally do cardio | ||
| with my head down because I didn't even want to avoid that. | ||
| So we're just like slammed with all of this stuff. | ||
| And I think when you step away from it a little bit, and I know you're very excited to get | ||
| me back in, but when you step away from a little bit, it does give you a little perspective. | ||
| And I was also thinking about things like, I mean, as I said, every interaction I had was positive. | ||
| Like this idea that we live in this country of like endlessly racist, evil people. | ||
| When you're out there actually talking to real people, you know? | ||
| And again, I do this, I try to do as much of this as I can normally, but then we're also in this digital thing. | ||
| It's like, it's not like that. | ||
| People are good. | ||
| People want the same things. | ||
| I so fundamentally believe that, and I've always believed it, but I really, really believe it now. | ||
| I used to think that the hope for the country rested in, you know, the 40% of the population that was following this stuff closely. | ||
| And the more I view this stuff now, I'm starting to think that the future of the country rests with the 60% who really do not follow this stuff closely. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| It's like, well, what do you do then? | ||
| Because part of me, literally like a week ago when I knew I was about to come back, I was like, man, like, why ever come back? | ||
| Go find something else to do. | ||
| I wanted to be in the NBA. | ||
| Like, find something else, you know? | ||
| I mean, you know how much. | ||
| You really know how much I love this, and I think what we're doing is so important, and I think I'm a better person now, and all this stuff. | ||
| And after being on tour with Peterson for months, where for months I've been performing in front of thousands of people every night, and it's this great love fest of people who are getting their lives together and disagree on what the marginal political issues are, but all of that greatness, and it's like, I could see because of all the evil that is out there. | ||
| And when I say evil, I mean just like the hate and all the people that want to keep you clicking and angry and distracted and fighting with everybody. | ||
| I could see why a lot of good people that we really need would just be like, I'm out altogether. | ||
| I'm never going to post again. | ||
| I'm never going to read this. | ||
| And that's a real problem because then if we push out all the good people, now you have The middle majority that's endlessly just being slammed by one side. | ||
| Dare I say that's partly why I think this whole intellectual dark web thing has taken root and has some meaning now. | ||
| It's because I think for all of our differences, which we've discussed many of them, including abortion and death penalty and a whole bunch of other things, It's like we're trying to basically live in the same society together and and not hate each other for whatever those differences are and as I said to you last time you were you were sitting here it's like on something like abortion where we disagree it's like you know what hopefully for the next 50 years we'll do this and then maybe when I'm a little older than you so I'm 92 and where are you gonna be in 50 years? | ||
| I'll be... | ||
| 84. | ||
| And you're 84, like maybe one of us will have moved one of us one way or another. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And I know you're looking at me going, Ruben, you're not going to move me. | ||
| But, you know, who knows what happens over the course of time. | ||
| But the only thing that will allow that... I'm more looking at you like, I don't know if I'm going to be alive in 50 years. | ||
| Well, that's why I would recommend a digital detox. | ||
| I'm telling you, I feel better. | ||
| My heart feels better. | ||
| My head feels better. | ||
| I know this is a little corny, but I genuinely do feel that way. | ||
| And it was also just making me want to reinvest in everything I'm doing. | ||
| That's why we have a new set now and a new website and all this. | ||
| It's like, I really like, I believe in this thing and I wanna sort of take now these pieces | ||
| that I just absorbed of the world over the last month and now apply them to all the stuff that we. | ||
| Well, you're so calm and you're so. | ||
| Talk about all the time, Shapiro. | ||
| And now I'm going to take out the implements of torture. | ||
| Okay, here we go. | ||
| And let's go to work, my friend. | ||
| I mean, this is the, you were promised a tsunami of news and so it shall be. | ||
| So, when you knew of the story, what was the last thing that you saw in the news | ||
| so we know exactly what we're leaving off? | ||
| So, the last thing that I know of was the day that I got off the, shut down everything, | ||
| the last thing that I heard was that the New York Times hired that writer, the female Asian writer, | ||
| and apparently she had tweeted a lot of anti-white. | ||
| Right, Sarah Jean, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Okay, so I know nothing. | ||
| For all I know, she doesn't have a job now. | ||
| She does have a job. | ||
| She has a bigger job than ever. | ||
| She has a show on CNN. | ||
| She has a job. | ||
| She has a job at the New York Times. | ||
| Right, and there was blowback on anyone who suggested that she was a racist. | ||
| A lot of the left came out and said that she couldn't be racist because racism is actually discrimination plus power. | ||
| Yeah, which is nonsense. | ||
| Right, so she still has a job, and that's totally okay. | ||
| Let's be very clear on this because I am feeling clear-minded right now. | ||
| Racism is hating someone because of their race. | ||
| It has nothing to do with power. | ||
| That was my impression. | ||
| You can be black and hate white people and you're a racist. | ||
| You can be white and hate Asian people and you're a racist. | ||
| And you can be Asian and hate Latino people just because of their skin color and you are racist. | ||
| No, not according to the New York Times. | ||
| The New York Times is wrong. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's the end of that story. | ||
| Meanwhile, Alex Jones got banned from Facebook. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| So she still has a job there. | ||
| So I saw a bunch of the tweets. | ||
| The only one of the, the one tweet, look, I've joked, you know, before I sort of woke up politically, I used to joke about Republicans being old white men a lot and whatever. | ||
| And it was just stupid jokes. | ||
| And I, I don't regret them because it's just part of, That's what made me me, sort of. | ||
| I think they're stupid and they were short-sighted and maybe not very informed at that time. | ||
| But the one tweet that I did see, and I think this might have been quite literally the last thing I saw before I shut down, was there was something about she like hated, she loves making old white people cry or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I thought that, that kind of strikes, That kind of strikes me in a different way. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So there was a big argument that took place over Sarah Zhang, not just over her actual comments, but over whether she should be fired based on Twitter mobbing. | ||
| So there was a big sort of discussion that happened about social media mobbing and people piling on and whether people ought to be fired and lose their jobs over old stuff that they've tweeted. | ||
| And of course, that followed in the wake of the James Gunn stuff, which you were still here for, James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy. | ||
| You remember this whole thing? | ||
| Right, so that happened just as I was getting off and I was what? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So James Gunn, who's Guardian of the Galaxy director, he lost his job because there were some old tweets of his that were, you know, making jokes about pedophilia and such. | ||
| And so there was a lot of talk about Twitter mobbing and then the Sarah Jean thing happened and that was a Twitter mob. | ||
| And so there was a lot of talk about whether, not whether she should have been hired, which is a separate conversation, but whether people should lose their jobs based on people digging up crap you did 10 years ago and now coming after you. | ||
| So let me get this straight. | ||
| So she still has a job, despite all that stuff. | ||
| Roseanne Barr does not have a job because of one tweet, which I actually do believe that Roseanne didn't know that Valerie Jarrett was black. | ||
| Roseanne's a crazy person. | ||
| Roseanne is what she is, right? | ||
| I mean, she's a self-described crazy person. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, it depends which person you're talking to, because there's a lot of people in there. | ||
| But I just want to understand all this, because when you step away, it does seem a little odd. | ||
| Sends this one tweet, which she apologized for, said she didn't know that she was black. | ||
| There's no reason to think that Rosanna has a history of racism. | ||
| She's always been fighting for lefty causes forever, actually. | ||
| So she gets fired from the number one sitcom in the country. | ||
| Then this girl, sorry, one more time. | ||
| Sarah Jean. | ||
| Okay, Sarah Jean, because I'm out of it a little bit. | ||
| She maintains her job. | ||
| She maintains her job. | ||
| And Gunn got fired. | ||
| Yeah, Gunn got fired. | ||
| There was an attempt to bring him back, but that kind of failed. | ||
| Because it turns out there are pictures of him at some, like, joke, pedophilia-themed party. | ||
| The women were overage, but they're dressed as schoolchildren and such. | ||
| So Disney was not going to maintain his job. | ||
| I don't even know what to do with all that. | ||
| But I think partly, I guess, And I guess this is from stepping away for a little bit. | ||
| It's just this sort of, when we apply the standard. | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| And I think that's what's driving people crazy, probably mostly conservatives and people on the right. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Because it seems to always weigh much more heavily on you, evil people. | ||
| Right, well, one of the facets of this, so Candace Owens then tweeted out everything Sarah Jean had tweeted, but with reversing the races, and Twitter immediately suspended her. | ||
| Before they realized what she was doing. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Good move, Candace. | ||
| Yeah, so that was good. | ||
| Okay, so meanwhile, Alex Jones gets banned from Facebook and iTunes. | ||
| There's a coordinated hit on Alex Jones between, I believe it was Facebook and YouTube and iTunes to demonetize him and deny him platforms, basically. | ||
| Wow, all in the same day? | ||
| All in the same day. | ||
| I think it was within 48 hours. | ||
| So it's fun to break this stuff to you. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Wait, so just demonetizing him? | ||
| No, I think YouTube actually took down his entire channel. | ||
| Oh wow, wait, so Alex Jones is not on YouTube? | ||
| I believe so, I haven't checked recently, but yes, that was the story. | ||
| And they all did this on the same day? | ||
| Within 48 hours. | ||
| So it was obviously a coordinated hit. | ||
| obviously coordinated it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so they took him down. | ||
| They gave various reasons why, but they didn't give any sort | ||
| of objective reason why. | ||
| So it wasn't like some of them said it was because he had threatened violence in the past. | ||
| Some of them said that it was because he had said unpalatable things in the past, but there | ||
| was no clear standard. | ||
| And so there are a lot of folks on the right saying, listen, even if you don't like Alex Jones, you know, people, | ||
| I said this, I'm no Alex Jones fan. | ||
| I mean, he threatened me personally many times, right? | ||
| But you got to at least articulate a clear standard for how you're going to police the boundaries here. | ||
| Otherwise, everybody ends up in the in the throw them overboard category because these boundaries are randomly expanding. | ||
| So, yeah, Alex Jones got hit. | ||
| He hasn't really paid any serious monetary price because he has alternative distribution channels. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And he's and he's insulated himself. | ||
| But if you lose those things, you get a massive hit. | ||
| Oh yeah, no, I mean, he obviously took it seriously, although his listenership, I'm sure, is up because people are tuning in because of that. | ||
| So where do you stand on this now? | ||
| Because you know, for the last two years, I've been saying relentlessly, the answer is not government intervention. | ||
| I just don't think that the government policing Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and all those things, that that will help anything. | ||
| I think it would muck things up even worse. | ||
| It would give more power to just middle management bureaucrats, and since the government's not very good | ||
| at anything, I don't think it would be very good at. | ||
| So President Trump has, this is one of the other stories, President Trump has sort of jumped into this | ||
| and suggested regulation. | ||
| So Trump's still president. | ||
| He's still president. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, okay. | |
| He's still president, so congratulations to you. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| You came back in time. | ||
| You didn't miss the big finale. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I didn't miss number 20 there? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But he was suggesting regulation. | ||
| Some other Republicans have sort of put it out there. | ||
| I don't agree with regulation, but I do think that we're gonna have to come up with either some market-based solutions or we're going to have to recognize and force Facebook and Twitter to be treated as not platforms, but as actual publishers, Which is the real controversy over Facebook. | ||
| Is it a platform or is it a publisher? | ||
| Like over at Daily Wire, which I run, if we print something that is libelous, we'll be sued. | ||
| I mean, legally libelous, we'll be sued. | ||
| If Facebook puts up an article by us that is libelous, then Facebook doesn't get sued. | ||
| It's a platform. | ||
| But if they're not policing what can be put up and what cannot, at what point do you start saying, well, you're just like the Daily Wire or the New York Times or CNN, and you start getting policed that way? | ||
| I think that Facebook either needs to demonstrate Yeah, so you're right, and you're being consistent with, I think, what your other views are in this department, but there's this piece of me that's like, did we miss the boat in a weird way now that I've stepped away for a bit? | ||
| Like, with the amount of people that are watching Rogan and watching you and me and Sam and everybody else, it's like, why don't we have a network already? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like I know there's endless discussions about it. | ||
| We've had discussions about it. | ||
| We've met with people. | ||
| But it's almost there's something it almost is like there's some other weird thing here. | ||
| Like the amount of power that these companies have now amassed over us is bizarre. | ||
| And it's like if if the crew of us can't figure out how to do it. | ||
| Who can figure out how to do it? | ||
| I don't know what the answer to that is, but it does, I'm a little, I mean, this is where, of course, I'm for the market dictating it, so it's like, yeah, it's on us. | ||
| So let's get on it, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, like, let's get crackin', because at the end of the day, look, forget Jones. | ||
| He's irrelevant, I think, in the scheme of whatever, but it's like, at the end of the day, you get rid of him, well, now you've moved the bar. | ||
| There's a lot of people that think that you're an extremist. | ||
| Oh, by the way, so I do wanna mention this real quick. | ||
| So one of the, there were a couple, Two or three little things that were rattling in my head about current events while I was away. | ||
| And one of them was, a few weeks before I went offline, was the Mark Duplass thing with you. | ||
| And for some reason it was really sticking with me while I was gone. | ||
| Because for those that don't remember, Mark Duplass basically... Mark Duplass, who's a friend of mine, who's been on the show, who is a lefty and a... | ||
| Extremely decent human being. | ||
| Yeah, he seemed like a nice guy. | ||
| I had breakfast with him like two weeks before the tweet was sent out. | ||
| He is a really nice guy. | ||
| He's trying to bridge the divide. | ||
| Yeah, he came to the office. | ||
| We spent an hour and a half together. | ||
| He seemed like a nice guy. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| He's just a nice guy trying to do some nice work. | ||
| He mostly does comedy stuff. | ||
| So he tweeted out, basically, that Ben Shapiro isn't the devil. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, exactly. | |
| That's basically what he tweeted out. | ||
| I had good intentions, and I was a nice guy. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| And basically that people should take a look at you. | ||
| Something like that, with an open mind. | ||
| Yeah, give him a follow if you're looking for somebody who's honest on the other side of the aisle or something. | ||
| Yeah, so this happened a little bit before I went off the grid. | ||
| And he deleted it, and he tweeted an abject, malice apology. | ||
| So the mob comes after him. | ||
| He then tweets this thing about how he doesn't stand for homophobic or racist views, implying basically that you're a racist. | ||
| Racist, sexist, bigot, homophobic. | ||
| All the usual nonsense. | ||
| And I don't want to make this about Mark because I think he's a good guy and I don't know what pressure came to bear on him, either from studios or the mob. | ||
| And it scares people. | ||
| You don't want to lose your job. | ||
| I texted him when he deleted the tweet and I said, I totally understand why you do that. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| And then the next morning, he tweeted it out. | ||
|
unidentified
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That was the second thing that happened. | |
| So, good times. | ||
| But that was really rattling in my head, because as I've stepped away, it's like, I know, and this goes to what I said earlier, we need these middle, decent people who are willing to figure some things out. | ||
| And it's like, they basically took him out. | ||
| And when I say they, it's like, who knows what that is? | ||
| Is it just the mob? | ||
| Is it studios? | ||
| I don't know exactly what it is. | ||
| But those are the types of people that we need. | ||
| And this is why I would link it back to the Alex Jones thing. | ||
| Yeah, they're shrinking the Overton window. | ||
| The Overton window will continue to shrink. | ||
| It's like, alright, we get rid of Jones one day, and no one wants to defend Jones, so fine, okay, he's gone. | ||
| But they'll keep moving it, and they'll keep saying that Shapiro's this, or Rubin's that, or whatever it is, and eventually we'll be on the outside of that thing, too. | ||
| And that's very much on my mind. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Okay, so in other news, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez continues to sort of gain steam as this... Really? | ||
| So she's gaining steam in a good way? | ||
| Well, I think she continues to gain sort of public prominence. | ||
| She made a bunch of gaffes while you were out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She suggested the middle class doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| She suggested that everybody in the country, even though the Economic statistics are good. | ||
| That's only because everybody has two jobs. | ||
| I saw that one. | ||
| And then there was a bit of a tiff because I offered to host her on my show or debate her. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, right. | |
| And I offered to drop $10,000 for the privilege. | ||
| And she suggested I was catcalling her. | ||
| So that was her response, was that I was catcalling her. | ||
| And there were mainstream editorials in the New York Times suggesting that it was sexist for me to offer her. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| No, no, that was good times. | ||
| Not a major story, but drove the news cycle for probably a couple of days. | ||
| So you, I know you well enough, you offered to debate her. | ||
| You offered to debate her or interview her? | ||
| Either one. | ||
| Either one. | ||
| I said, whichever one you want. | ||
| I said, I'm happy to have you on the Sunday special, which you've been on, for a discussion. | ||
| I've had on a bunch of people I disagree with. | ||
| I had on Sam on that special. | ||
| I've had on Eric on that special. | ||
| I've had on a bunch of people with whom I disagree on a variety of issues on that special. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I said, I'll give $10,000 to charity or to your campaign or a super PAC, whatever you want, or we can do a debate, whichever format you choose. | ||
| And she tweeted back that there's no reason for her to respond to, this is the equivalent of men catcalling women, which is like, I don't know how they catcall women in the Bronx. | ||
| No, that's the equivalent of men treating women equally. | ||
| That's what it is, right? | ||
| You're not viewing her, you're not going, I want to talk to this woman | ||
| because she's a woman so I can destroy her. | ||
| You're going, this is somebody who I disagree with or at least I want to explore their ideas a little bit more. | ||
| We'll do it either way you want. | ||
| Also, catcalling in me. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Weird, weird move. | ||
| So that was kind of a minor story and I don't want to hover on that one too much | ||
| because it's too self-centered. | ||
| But it does go to sort of a bigger thing that these people are put out there | ||
| with their ideas that all sound good. | ||
| All of this, I mean, this is another thing that was rattling in my brain a lot, but all of this leftist stuff that I used to buy, you're for gays, you're for this, you're for poor people, it's all bullshit. | ||
| It's all epic, endless bullshit. | ||
| Horseshit. | ||
| I mean, that really is all it is. | ||
| You're not four gays. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It doesn't even make sense to say you're four gays, because gays think differently. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| You'll never believe this. | ||
| You get 10 gays in a room, they probably have 12 different opinions. | ||
| And to say that you're four black people, or you're four black conservatives, I mean, I know you know this stuff, but again, when you step away from it, it's like, in a weird way, and I really hate to do this, But in a weird way, Catherine Burble-Singh, who's the last guest I had on last week, but we had taped it at the end of July, she's an educator in England. | ||
| She had taught in the inner cities for a long time and basically realized that all these guilty liberals were just kept throwing money at things that were keeping minorities oppressed. | ||
| And she said something that really hit me, and this is the last thing that I did before I left. | ||
| She was basically saying, these people are the racists. | ||
| They're the modern racists. | ||
| And they're always screaming that we're all the racists. | ||
| And I don't want to become them. | ||
| So I don't want to sit here and be like, oh, you know, these lefties are all the racists, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But the racist ideas of the day are not coming from conservatives and libertarians. | ||
| They're really not. | ||
| And they're certainly not coming from classical liberals. | ||
| They're coming from the progressives. | ||
| That actually is just true. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| Okay, Shapiro, keep going. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Okay, so let's do a bunch of Mueller updates, because there was a bunch of news on Mueller land. | ||
| But you've already told me Trump is still president, so they didn't storm the castle yet, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| The latest generic congressional ballot has Republicans down. | ||
| I think it was the NBC ballot today has them down 18. | ||
| Do you buy that? | ||
| I buy that Republicans are down. | ||
| I don't think they're down 18, but I think the Republicans have some serious problems in the midterms. | ||
| Democrats have a lot of motivation to turn out. | ||
| And they have since the election, because they feel like if they had turned out, they would have won the last election, which is true. | ||
| So that's been building. | ||
| So here's what happened. | ||
| I'm going to lump these all together, because there's a lot. | ||
| So Peter Strzok got fired over at the FBI. | ||
| So Peter Strzok, as everyone recalls, is the guy who is texting with his paramour Lisa Page and leading the Russia investigation and the Hillary investigation. | ||
| And he was fired for Essentially sullying the reputation of the FBI. | ||
| So he ended up being fired. | ||
| President Trump revoked security clearances for people like John Brennan, the former CIA director. | ||
| There were rumors that was going to happen. | ||
| Yes, he did that. | ||
| He revoked his security clearance. | ||
| So what do you make of that? | ||
| Because I kind of... | ||
| I'm not an intelligence analyst at the highest levels here, but the idea that Brennan and some of these guys | ||
| were taking classified information and clearly leaking it to the media | ||
| or the Times or whatever. | ||
| Like forget what the information was, forget that Trump is president. | ||
| If anyone was president and former officials who still have clearance, | ||
| which is also a little unclear to me, why as a former official would you have clearance? | ||
| Right, so I guess the basic idea is that a former official, if I go to you for advice, | ||
| I need to be able to ask you about that stuff, and it's still a crime if you leak | ||
| classified information to the press, even if you no longer work for the government. | ||
| That said. | ||
| Right, so that's a real windy road. | ||
| Yeah, there shouldn't be, in my opinion, there shouldn't be like a blanket security clearance | ||
| you get to maintain after you leave office. | ||
| It seems silly to me. | ||
| So who else was in anyone else's report? | ||
| I'm sure Brennan was probably the biggest one. | ||
| Brennan was the biggest one. | ||
| He threatened to do it to Comey, who I think no longer has clearance, and a bunch of others. | ||
| Basically, what it looked like was a coordinated political hit by Trump, because Trump then went on Twitter and said, like, everybody I hate should no longer have a security clearance. | ||
| And so people said this is misuse of power, which, of course, President Trump doing everything in the dumbest possible way. | ||
| It sort of is. | ||
| But that said, should these people have security clearances? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| That was the minor news in this area. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I mean, that's huge in a certain respect, but okay. | ||
| Here's the major news. | ||
| The major news is that Michael Cohen, the President's former personal attorney, pled guilty to eight different crimes, including violation of campaign finance law. | ||
| And in that plea of guilty for violation of campaign finance, this is the red wedding part, | ||
| he suggested that the President of the United States ordered him to violate campaign finance law. | ||
| Ordered him before he was President, so just as. | ||
| So here's what happened. | ||
| He goes to pay off Stormy Daniels via basically David Pecker over at the National Enquirer. | ||
| The idea was that this was a campaign finance contribution, that he had bought the story of Stormy Daniels | ||
| from the National Enquirer in order to silence it. | ||
| Pecker bought Stormy Daniels' story and then Team Trump buys the story from David Pecker, reimburses Pecker for the story to keep it quiet. | ||
| Whose money was that? | ||
| So it was Michael Cohen's money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it looks like a campaign contribution and then Trump backfills the amount of money that Cohen paid over the course of coming months. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, the question is whether Trump Knew that he was violating campaign finance law when he did | ||
| that. So in other words, there are two ways He could have just legally speaking there are two ways that | ||
| he could have avoided this being a campaign finance violation | ||
| He could have flat-out written the check. He could have written the check directly | ||
| And then you would have had to report it as a campaign expenditure presumably. Why a campaign expenditure? | ||
| Why couldn't he have just written a check? | ||
| He can write a check, but he has to report that to the FEC. | ||
| Or he can have Michael Cohen write a check. | ||
| He would have to do it personally, or he'd have to show that he basically used Cohen as a pass-through, and then report it to the FEC. | ||
| But there was no report to the FEC. | ||
| So basically the idea was that they found a back channel to pay her off. | ||
| just so it wouldn't be reported a week before the election. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so the idea is that he was essentially avoiding the reporting of the Stormy Daniels thing | ||
| a week before the election by paying off a porn star. | ||
| That's, and Michael Cohen was saying that Trump knew all of this and Trump ordered all of this. | ||
| And that's why he did all of this. | ||
| So. | ||
| How are we supposed to get any truth out of this? | ||
| This is the type of thing where it's like, again, stepping away, it's like, all right, we can do all the little legal loopholes, the little minutiae and look back on two years ago and who did this and that. | ||
| But it's like Michael Cohen probably wants to save his butt now from certain amount of jail time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There are two ways in which Trump could defend himself. | ||
| under the bus. I have no doubt that Trump probably did some things out of more | ||
| out of just like bravado and stupidity than like intention. | ||
| Like do you think he really was like the crime that they're gonna get Trump on | ||
| was that $250,000 payout to a porn star? Like how stupid is this whole thing? | ||
| So there are two ways in which Trump could defend himself. | ||
| One he could say listen I path ladies all the time so this isn't a campaign | ||
| expenditure at all. | ||
| This is just me paying off ladies. | ||
| Do we know, is there any history of Michael Cohen doing this for him before? | ||
| So there's a history of Michael Cohen kind of threatening people before, but we haven't seen evidence that he's paid off a bunch of ladies before. | ||
| And the other thing that Trump theoretically could do to avoid all of this is he could say, well, Michael Cohen's the lawyer. | ||
| I didn't tell him to violate campaign finance law. | ||
| It's his job to make sure that I'm in compliance with campaign finance law. | ||
| I'm an idiot. | ||
| So what do I know about campaign finance law? | ||
| I just said, Michael, go settle this thing up. | ||
| I mean, that's the Hillary email excuse, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I'm an idiot. | ||
| And it's not implausible, right? | ||
| That's a plausible defense. | ||
| That said, his personal lawyer is testifying in open court that Trump told him to violate campaign finance law. | ||
| Does that mean Trump gets prosecuted? | ||
| No, because you can't prosecute the former president. | ||
| You can't prosecute the current president of the United States, just legally speaking, in all likelihood. | ||
| But will that be ground zero for any impeachment charge? | ||
| I'm sure that it will be. | ||
| The same day that happened, by the way? | ||
| Because we're all living in a TV show. | ||
| The same day that happened, Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, also pled guilty to eight felonies, none of them having to do with campaign Trump, but having to do with former campaign finance violations and representing the Ukrainian government and all of this kind of stuff. | ||
| And then Trump starts tweeting about how Manafort's a good guy because he kept his mouth shut. | ||
| Which is because President Trump has diarrhea of the Twitter. | ||
| Well, first off, so wait, so Cohen's going in there and saying Trump told him to violate campaign finance? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Campaign finance? | ||
| I mean, that sounds actually insane. | ||
| So if that's actually true, like if Trump actually sat him down and was like, here's the check, let's violate some campaign finance, like, now we're veering into like truism. | ||
| Is that plausible? | ||
| That sounds completely bananas, but. | ||
| It depends how much, Plausible deniability you need, right? | ||
| If Trump said, here's a check for $130,000, go settle this up. | ||
| And Cohen said to him, well, we need to report that to the FEC. | ||
| He said, well, let's do cash, right? | ||
| And then you've got a problem. | ||
| But we have to see what that looks like. | ||
| And it hasn't been taken to that level yet. | ||
| The SDNY is still checking into that. | ||
| So how do you, so a guy that's doing your show every day, talking about this stuff every day, I know you research thoroughly all of that. | ||
| Do you find the ability to talk about the ins and outs honestly without Without giving enough room where people are just going to guess on all of these things. | ||
| Because even that right there, that's some real nuance that that's not going to be put on CNN. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I mean, on CNN, it's, he violated campaign finance law. | ||
| This is a federal violation. | ||
| He should go to jail. | ||
| And the answer is, well, that depends on the credibility of Cohen. | ||
| It depends on Trump's defense. | ||
| It depends on a lot of stuff. | ||
| Trump doesn't help himself because he goes on Twitter and just says shit, right? | ||
| I mean, that's his thing. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| I have not seen a Trump tweet in a month. | ||
| Well, good for you. | ||
| I mean, that's a daily relief, I'm sure. | ||
| Shapiro, 34 fucking days! | ||
| I haven't seen a Trump tweet! | ||
| Well, I mean, get ready, man, because there's some more coming. | ||
| So that was the big story, because now the Democrats think that... But how old is that story? | ||
| That story's two weeks old. | ||
| So it's like, is it already running out of steam? | ||
| I mean, everything kind of... | ||
| Kind of, although maybe it's contributing to the congressional ballot, for example, because it feels like there's a level of corruption that is being exacerbated by another political story, which is two Republican congresspeople are being prosecuted for corruption right now. | ||
| Duncan Hunter down in SoCal in San Diego, he's being also prosecuted for looking like he basically took a bunch of campaign funds and used them on personal expenditures. | ||
| And Chris Collins over in New York, these were the first two congressional candidates who backed Trump. | ||
| And Collins came forth and supposedly was engaged in some sort of insider trading deal. | ||
| So both of them are now going to be prosecuted by the Sessions DOJ, which has led President | ||
| Trump to attack Jeff Sessions, the DOJ, and literally this morning tweet out, or last | ||
| night tweet out, that Jeff Sessions is killing Republican congressional chances by indicting | ||
| Republican congresspeople. | ||
| So that's all. | ||
| Look, the president, he has his right to free speech. | ||
| He's going to end up probably screwing himself over with all his exercising on it. | ||
| But like all of that, like when I'm hearing this, it's like, man, this is all just a great reason to ultimately be a libertarian. | ||
| It seems like none of this works. | ||
| None of this actually works. | ||
| Like, if it all worked, if there was a slim trim operating government | ||
| that didn't have too much power and could just move things on the margin | ||
| and not try to redistribute and all of these things, it's like, and it worked and it wasn't always, | ||
| all government does is investigate itself. | ||
| All it does is throw money at things. | ||
| It doesn't do anything. | ||
| So all of these things, as you're telling me, I know these are important, relevant things, and when I fully dive back in, they will- But in six months they may not be, and in two weeks they may not be, because- But at least understanding the issues behind them are important. | ||
| But this general thing of, oh, this guy campaign finance, this guy that, this is all they do. | ||
| This is all they do. | ||
| And if you think Democrats are somehow better than Republicans, you're wrong. | ||
| They're all doing it together. | ||
| I'm sort of grouping these into political, and then there's a bunch of cultural stuff that sort of happens. | ||
| Other political stuff, the Kavanaugh hearing is happening literally as we speak right now. | ||
| The Democrats tried to shut down the hearing from the beginning by calling for an adjournment until they could read the documents, even though they've already come out and said they're not voting for Kavanaugh. | ||
| Linda Sarsour got arrested because she showed up and started yelling at Kavanaugh and at the Republicans, and so it kind of devolved into the spectacle we all knew that that would be. | ||
| You know what, in the spirit of my 34 days off the grid, I'm not going to say a word about Linda Sarsour. | ||
| Good for you, dude. | ||
| That is some inner peace right there, man. | ||
| Wait, wait, pause though. | ||
| So there's nothing they can do to stop Kavanaugh, right? | ||
| So that's going to happen. | ||
| So you can, for the record, people can find this video somewhere, but when I was on TYT way back when and Harry Reid used the nuclear option and I was still progressive, lefty, liberal, blah, blah, blah, I said this is a bad move. | ||
| This is a bad move. | ||
| You do not want to give this kind of power because it'll be used against you. | ||
| And a bad move it was. | ||
| So there are two anti-Trump books that have come out. | ||
| The first was from Omarosa Manigault. | ||
| The media went nuts over this. | ||
| She had recordings. | ||
| She had taken her cell phone into, like, throughout the West Wing and recorded a bunch of conversations | ||
| with pretty much everyone. | ||
| Is that legal? | ||
| Um, maybe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| There was nothing classified on the recordings. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's basically she had nothing to sell and she sold whatever she had. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it was non-stop on cable news for 24 hours a day for a week and maybe two weeks. | ||
| But she didn't get him saying anything. | ||
| And then he tweeted out that Omarosa was fired like a dog and something like that. | ||
| And once he called her a dog. | ||
| You're getting better at this. | ||
| It's improving gradually. But once he called her a dog, then it turned into, | ||
| is Trump a racist? Because he called her a dog even though he has called half of | ||
| humanity members of the canine species. So we enjoyed two weeks of almost | ||
| semantical talk. Calling someone a dog is actually an upgrade over what I think of most humans at the moment. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And then Bob Woodward's book comes out this week, and there are a bunch of sort of typical Trumpian stories. | ||
| John Kelly saying this place is miserable to work, and James Mattis saying Trump is basically a nut who wanted to pull completely out of South Korea and ask for preemptive military options against North Korea. | ||
| And various, and I think it was Gary Cohn, like sneaking documents off of Trump's desk so he wouldn't sign them and Trump not notice. | ||
| All the things that you would expect in the Trump White House. | ||
| So all that's coming out in Woodward's book, so expect Trump to tweet about that a lot this week. | ||
| And then we get to some of the cultural issues. | ||
| So at the VMAs, a bunch of stars bash Trump. | ||
| No shock there. | ||
| Wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| You're telling me Hollywood people at an awards show were anti-Trump? | ||
| I know, shocker. | ||
| That was a big one. | ||
| Ben, this changes everything. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Asia Argento, who's a leader in the Me Too movement, was implicated in her own Me Too scandal. | ||
| So there's a 17-year-old boy who had once played her son in a movie, I guess, and when he was 17 and she was 38, I believe, they went to a hotel room and she schtupped him, which is statutory rape in the state of California, and he said that basically he'd been intimidated into it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And she was hit with this Me Too stuff also, and then Rose McGowan came out and said we should wait until all the evidence is in, which provided all sorts of fodder for people who say, you know, maybe we ought to wait for all the evidence to come in. | ||
| So it's interesting, now that it's turning on its own people, now we should wait, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like Trudeau was like, we have to believe all women, then it came for him, now we have to wait. | ||
| It comes for one of the Me Too people, now we have to wait. | ||
| So this is bizarre. | ||
| So that happens, and Sarsour, she was part of Me Too, so this is a bad day for her. | ||
| Yeah, there's also a story with, I think it was a New York University professor, who was like a performance artist, who's a lesbian, but she was accused of sexually harassing a gay man, and it's relatively credible. | ||
| A lesbian was sexually harassing a gay man? | ||
| She's not a very good lesbian. | ||
| This is a terrible lesbian. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| She's bad at the lesbianism. | ||
| So the entire academy came out to defend her, of course, because she's of the left and that's the way this works. | ||
| But see- How is a lesbian sexually harassing a gay man? | ||
| I mean, she was sending him sexual messages. | ||
| I mean, they have the text messages. | ||
| So again, not good at the lesbian act. | ||
| Think how stupid this whole thing is. | ||
| I mean, look, of course you gotta get the bad guys, the Harvey Weinsteins, of course the people | ||
| that genuinely do the bad things, that you have to get them. | ||
| But the thing that we're creating here, where people are gonna be afraid of their own shadows, and you know, we're in L.A. | ||
| here. | ||
| I have a friend who's been in, I don't want to give away too much, who's been in the biz on the other side of the camera for a long time, who's a white male in his probably late 50s. | ||
| He's done extremely good work for a long time. | ||
| He's worked on a million TV shows that you know well. | ||
| He's now, you know, the way it works with these shows is you usually work a season or two and then you move on to something else, or there's huge gaps in between seasons, or sometimes you just work for a studio and they throw you in all these different places. | ||
| He's telling me now that he's being told by executives that as a white male, as a straight white male, that basically he should either start looking for other work or just don't expect to work anymore. | ||
| I mean, think how actually dangerous that is. | ||
| Like, dangerous to people who have... This is a good, decent man who has worked his whole life, who's an extremely professional, competent person. | ||
| But even if he was completely incompetent, you should not hire him for incompetence, but not hire... No, don't not hire him because... Well, I mean, Henry Cavill, I mean, I think this is before you left, you remember Henry Cavill said about dating, that he's only gonna date women he knows because he's afraid that he's gonna get caught in a Me Too situation just because he's rich and famous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he got killed for that. | ||
| And I don't blame him for that. | ||
| I mean, honestly, I can't blame somebody. | ||
| Like, if you're famous and you have money, ditch it. | ||
| Like, the Pence rule works well for everybody, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The much-maligned Pence rule. | ||
| Like, this is stuff that seems to work. | ||
| Right, it's like Pence isn't harassing anybody. | ||
| But one other thing on this, you know, they also don't realize how backwards this is actually gonna work. | ||
| Because, so for example, I was just telling you, we just hired a new full-timer here, so I have a new assistant, Helen, who's wonderful. | ||
| And when we were hiring, it did pop in my brain for a second that I would not want to hire a gay man. | ||
| I don't want to—not because I'm going to harass them. | ||
| I'm not going to harass them. | ||
| But why would I hire someone who might one day turn on me and then be like, Dave, harass me? | ||
| Now, I happen to be gay, so it seems that if I was going to harass someone, it would be a gay man, right? | ||
| But I guess it could be a straight man, too, or whatever. | ||
| But it's like—so in a weird way— Oh, my mom—listen, my mom isn't working Yeah. | ||
| I mean, she literally worked while my dad stayed home. | ||
| And I remember when I was young, she said, if ever you have an assistant, hire like a blue-haired old lady. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Specifically because she was saying this like 20 years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's Betty White looking for work. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So let's see. | ||
| What else happened while you were out? | ||
| Oh, well, OK. | ||
| So this was a big controversy. | ||
| So Molly Tibbetts was a 20-year-old Iowan student at University of Iowa. | ||
| And she was kidnapped and murdered by a guy who turned out to be an illegal immigrant. | ||
| And this became a major cause celeb because President Trump commented about it, talking specifically about border policy. | ||
| A lot of people on the right jumped on it, specifically about border policy. | ||
| Where was it? | ||
| It was in Iowa. | ||
| And the left suggested, of course, it had nothing to do with illegal immigration. | ||
| It was bad to talk about it. | ||
| We should never talk about this sort of thing. | ||
| You know, the same left that says every time there's a mass shooting, we have to talk about gun control now. | ||
| They say when it comes to this, you can't talk about illegal immigration. | ||
| President Trump tweeted incessantly about it. | ||
| He cut a bunch of videos, like from the White House lawn, talking about it. | ||
| And this became kind of political fodder. | ||
| The family said, like, we don't want any part of this. | ||
| Please don't politicize it. | ||
| She was on the left. | ||
| Her family's on the left. | ||
| And it turned into a bit of a brouhaha. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So where are we at with this now? | ||
| I mean, the investigation, the guy's been arrested. | ||
| He's going to go to jail, presumably. | ||
| But the sort of battle is less over what happened in the case and more over the politicization of particular situations. | ||
| Like, should we be talking about broad-based policy based on individual circumstances? | ||
| Is it cynical to do so? | ||
| When is it appropriate to do so? | ||
| So it sort of generated that conversation. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is one of the ones where it's like, this is exactly why I do this show, to talk about ideas and not every little instance of a thing that happens. | ||
| Now, of course, this sounds absolutely horrific, but the way, like, one thing that I really don't miss after being away is, like, the three days that everyone cares. | ||
| And then we don't care. | ||
| Net neutrality is going to destroy the world. | ||
| We scream about it for three days, then we forget about it. | ||
| Children being separated, we scream about it for three days. | ||
| And it's also like, everyone's screaming, not doing. | ||
| All the people that are getting 20,000 retweets on all the things that they're tweeting out, It's like, are you doing anything about it? | ||
| Now, I get it. | ||
| It's important to share your thoughts and to talk. | ||
| But one of the things that I really want to do over the course of the next year is figure out how do we put some of this stuff into action? | ||
| Because all we do is go from one crisis to another. | ||
| We pick this. | ||
| It gets politicized by Trump for immigration purposes. | ||
| It gets politicized by the other guys for open borders or whatever it is. | ||
| And it's like, nothing got better after that, actually. | ||
| We just kicked the can down the road to hell. | ||
| So we have a couple more kind of minor ones, and then there are a couple major ones to finish up with. | ||
| The other minor ones, Ron DeSantis, candidate in Florida, so he won his gubernatorial primary. | ||
| The guy who ran against him, who won the primary on the Democratic side is Andrew Gillum, who's a black guy. | ||
| And when DeSantis, he did an interview very early on talking about how Gillum was a good candidate, who had out-debated folks, and he said, you know, we have a good economy now, we don't need the guy who's a socialist, because Gillum is very far to the left. | ||
| Gillum, he says, we don't need somebody who's a socialist to come in and sort of monkey things up for the state of Florida. | ||
| And this became a 48-hour news cycle in which DeSantis was accused of being a racist for using the phrase, monkey it up, in regards to socialism screwing with the capitalist economy. | ||
| But he'd used the phrase monkey as a verb. | ||
| And therefore, he was obviously race baiting and dog whistling to the evil racists who now are going to realize Andrew Gillum's a black man. | ||
| Right, so allow me to play the simple son to my Jewish friend here. | ||
| Is there any evidence that he's an actual racist beyond this comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So this is like, remember when Howard Cosell, it's a little before our time, but Howard Cosell got fired I think by CBS News because during a football game, even though he was thought of really as the greatest sports broadcaster of a generation, he said there was a black, it happened to be a black football player, like a running back or a I think it was a running back, jumped over a guy, and he said something about, like, he's monkeying over him or something like that, and everyone started calling him racist. | ||
| Now, this is well before our days of, now everybody's a racist, and he got fired because of that. | ||
| It turned out that that's what he called his grandchildren all the time, if I'm remembering the story correctly. | ||
| He was always saying, oh, you're monkeys, you're jumping all over each other, and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So this thing about a word, and that if we can get you on a word, we now know what your whole, because it's not only your political ethos, that we know what your whole humanity is. | ||
| Man, that is so dangerous. | ||
| Everyone has mucked up a word every now and again, and that you know everyone's intentions all the time. | ||
| I mean, this is one of the things that when Sam Harris was first getting attacked relentlessly by the left, it was like they always would go after the way he—it would be a toe. | ||
| He said that word that way, or he said this word, but, you know, if you would have put a comma there—and it's like, Man, you guys, you want to live in a world where we will all be afraid to speak because we will all get to the point where, I mean again it gets back to where we started, but all the good people will check out. | ||
| You will never want to have a political conversation with anyone. | ||
| The areas for us to just be human, I know you've talked about this a little bit, To just be okay. | ||
| It's why I can't watch SportsCenter anymore. | ||
| So here's the big sports story. | ||
| Yesterday, Nike released its new ad campaign, the 30 year anniversary of Just Do It. | ||
| Its face, Colin Kaepernick. | ||
| And its slogan, believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. | ||
| Hashtag just do it. | ||
| So he's the new, he hasn't played in the NFL for two years. | ||
| He is, he obviously is famous for kneeling for the flag, but apparently he sacrificed everything. | ||
| He's gonna get multi-millions dollars in his own line of clothes in the Nike brand. | ||
| This of course has created great consternation. | ||
| So that's the big story of the last 24 hours. | ||
| I mean, does this just prove, and I think a few other people, I think, What's his name? | ||
| Oh, man, I'm blanking. | ||
| I'll get it in a second. | ||
| That this social justice thing just ruins everything. | ||
| Like, it really did ruin ESPN. | ||
| And that every time you turn on- Clay Travis is, yeah. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry, Clay Travis, of course. | ||
| That's really how removed I am for a second. | ||
| I can't remember a friend's name. | ||
| That it just ruins everything. | ||
| That you're handing out Sportsman of the Year awards to Caitlyn Jenner and you're doing all of these things in the idea that you're being tolerant and good and you're actually doing nothing that has anything to do with what your mission statement is. | ||
| What is Nike's mission statement? | ||
| It's to put shoes and I guess, you know, sports shirts on people so they can be the best athletes they can be. | ||
| And I'm not saying they should be completely apolitical, like they should, and again, they can do whatever they Well, it's a capitalist move. | ||
| And if you look at the statistics, you see why they're doing it. | ||
| But does it ever work? | ||
| Does that ever work? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because this will drive, first of all, it's viral marketing. | ||
| Second of all, Nielsen shows that the people who are most likely to engage in viral marketing on behalf of brands are actually black folks in the United States. | ||
| They're 44% more likely, I think, according to Nielsen. | ||
| And black folks in the United States are also significantly more likely to be buying clothing as a then then non-white folks in the united states according to the study from university of chicago clothing i was it's about it and i think that's what they're going to make them for a per per income level per income level uh... and there's an interesting something to talk about that he added that the studies and it's really interesting yeah and uh... you know is that a legacy of of one of the theories on that is that it's a legacy of | ||
| If you can't afford to show how rich you are by buying an expensive car, instead you buy an expensive pair of shoes and it's $300 as opposed to $35,000 for example. | ||
| But there's a lot there and obviously in terms of disproportionate sports watching, young black men watch a lot more sports than people of other races. | ||
| So it makes a fair bit of marketing sense, but the funny part is the left falling into the trap | ||
| of now backing a massive international company, right, that is most famous for running sweatshops in Asia. | ||
| And so capitalism wins again, right? | ||
| I mean, that's basically the story. | ||
| But it's also obviously happening because Trump's president right now. | ||
| This happened two years ago. | ||
| If Hillary Clinton were president, they would not be doing this with Colin Kaepernick. | ||
| They're doing it. | ||
| So last night, it was my last night, right? | ||
| And I have again... And now you're sad, right? | ||
| I haven't watched... I hope we've almost sufficiently ruined your life. | ||
| There are a couple more headlines. | ||
| I think you have a chance to ruin it a little bit. | ||
| No, but this is what it's all about, right? | ||
| This is why I got off the grid. | ||
| This is why I wanted to do this with you. | ||
| So the only thing that I did do, so it's not that I watched no TV, but I watched movies. | ||
| So I watched Netflix or whatever. | ||
| So last night I watched Avengers Infinity War. | ||
| I hadn't seen it before. | ||
| I thought the movie was spectacular, basically. | ||
| I'm sure you've probably written a critique of it. | ||
| I don't want to go too far into that. | ||
| My only critique of it was, we all know they're not dead, so what the F? | ||
| That's exactly what I said to David at the end. | ||
| It's like, no, Spider-Man didn't just die. | ||
| They didn't wipe off Black Panther, their $1 billion intellectual property investment. | ||
| Completely right, but putting that aside, I thought it was a pretty great movie and the way they could link everything together was great, but the way I link this back to what we're talking about right now is, so Mark Ruffalo, who plays the Hulk in it, he's a huge lefty, progressive, whatever, and he's babbling on politics all the time and on Twitter and whatever. | ||
| Now, you know I don't like attacking people, so I don't really want to make this about him. | ||
| I think he's a pretty bad actor in general. | ||
| Like, I find him very irritating as the Hulk. | ||
| I thought Edward Norton was a lot better in the previous incarnation. | ||
| But after being away from everything for a while, watching him, knowing that here's this guy that, like, really, like, politically, I just think is just so annoying and gets all these retweets on, like, stupid stuff and just shares all these what I think are really bad ideas and whatever, and of course he can do it. | ||
| But, like, I was, every scene that he was in, I was like, ugh. | ||
| Like, it actually kind of, like, I love, yeah, like, and then David said something which was interesting. | ||
| He was like, he's like, it's, you know, actors, of course they can do whatever they want, but it's like, if these guys would just shut up and you didn't know anything about them, then they'd be doing their craft properly. | ||
| You know, like, and I think there's probably, like, people that do that, that really avoid, I mean, this was the studio theory for literally decades, was keep their personal life away from the papers and just the only thing you see on the screen is the person on the screen. | ||
| Yeah, or some of them could be more famous. | ||
| Like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. | ||
| There's like a separation. | ||
| But even there you see how his career took hits and ups and downs because of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston and then the Jolie stuff. | ||
| He's now with Jolie and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| Right, but that's more about their relationships and whatever. | ||
| So that's one thing, but these overtly political people all the time, especially, you know, I haven't thought about any of these people in a long time, but a lot of the comedians that I used to like that have now gone off the deep end politically, it's like, you guys have ruined what I thought of your comedy because of the way you act and behave all the time. | ||
| On a side note, Louis C.K. | ||
| is back. | ||
| No shit! | ||
| And getting crap for it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Wait, what do you mean back? | ||
| He performed at a stand-up club. | ||
| Okay, well that would be the natural way to start. | ||
| He got a standing O, but people on the left were very, very, very upset because he's not allowed to come back yet because he hasn't served his proper penance yet. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So for a guy like you, so a conservative, I know obviously the actions that he did, I'm sure you find reprehensible and all that, but I know you do believe in forgiveness. | ||
| I also think that there are levels of reprehensible. | ||
| So I think that what he did is pretty reprehensible, but what he did is not in the Harvey Weinstein category of reprehensible, from what I can see, right? | ||
| So would you argue then that a guy like Harvey Weinstein, there's no, I know he's probably not getting- He's an actual rapist, right? | ||
| I'm an alleged actual rapist. | ||
| Nobody's alleging actual rape against Louis C.K. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They're arguing that he brought women into his room and then jacked off in front of them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then people... Wait a minute, let me get this straight. | ||
| You'll say jacked off, but you won't say fuck on camera? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's your policy? | ||
| I loosen virtually all my policies when I'm on your show. | ||
| It's your show, so I curse a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll say shit on your show, I won't do it on mine. | ||
| You won't say fuck, you'll say shit. | ||
| It's a policy. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| It's like network TV. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| So it's, but yeah, I think that if there's a market for him to come back, there's a market for him to come back. | ||
| I mean, that's my general feeling for this. | ||
| And if people want to sue him, then they should sue him. | ||
| And if people want to, like, this is how, this is why we have a system of torts. | ||
| This is why we have a system. | ||
| I mean, he apologized for it. | ||
| Presumably these women, if they think that they can find evidence that they were actively denied jobs because of Louis C.K., they could sue him. | ||
| Then go for it. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But this idea that we're going to put people into kind of excommunication until they come back. | ||
| And then we, again, it's this variable excommunication, right? | ||
| If you're if you're Mel Gibson, it's a certain amount of time. | ||
| And if you're Louis C.K., it's a certain amount of time. | ||
| If you're Louis C.K., it's like eight months. | ||
| And if you're Mel Gibson, it's like eight years. | ||
| And then eventually you come back in daddy's home or something. | ||
| But is it? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But I find all of that... Pile of anti-Semitic filth, by the way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't see it. | ||
| But there's something interesting there, because it's like, if you don't like Louis C.K., let's say you don't like him as a comic, don't go to his shows. | ||
| If you don't like him as a person, don't go to his shows. | ||
| If you don't like what he did, don't go to his shows. | ||
| Don't watch any of it, don't appear, don't give him two drinks and the cover charge, all that. | ||
| Just don't do it! | ||
| But this is so fundamentally why I believe that live and let live is the only way to actually have a functioning society. | ||
| That all you can do is defend our ability to be different. | ||
| That's basically it. | ||
| Because otherwise, should the man never be allowed to work again? | ||
| I mean, they say, a lot of people say yes, right? | ||
| So should his wife be allowed to work? | ||
| Should his children be, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, this is sort of like... The question is, when does repentance actually take place? | ||
| Bill Clinton is still held in wide esteem for doing a lot worse than Louis C.K. | ||
| That's the crazy one. | ||
| We'll get to that now. | ||
| We have three more headlines. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Headline number one is Aretha Franklin died. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yes, that's a big story. | ||
| She had a huge funeral. | ||
| It was a 10-hour funeral, I believe, something like that. | ||
| It was really insane. | ||
| They just got every great singer to perform. | ||
| Yeah, they got a bunch of singers in there. | ||
| The politically oriented headlines, Al Sharpton got up and bashed Trump. | ||
| And then Bill Clinton was sitting on stage next to, in order to his, it would have been to his right, so it was Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Yeah, sitting next to all three of them. | ||
| So that was one Clinton-related headline. | ||
| The other Clinton-related headline was more humorous, which was Clinton, who is a dirty old man, was a dirty old man when he was a dirty young man. | ||
| Ariana Grande sang, and when she came up, there was video of him. | ||
| Legitimately checking her out, like up and down, full on, smiling, giggling, like really going after it. | ||
| Find you somebody who looks at you the way Bill Clinton looks at anybody who's not his wife. | ||
| Okay, so let's pause on that one because we all know Bill Clinton likes women. | ||
| Right, that's just a joke. | ||
| Pause on that one. | ||
| Let's go to the other one. | ||
| Forget Jesse Jackson, obviously, and forget Al Sharpton. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Forget that. | ||
| They're both anti-Semites, but the lesser of three anti-Semites there. | ||
| You know, I think if Jews have learned one thing over the millennia, it's kind of like, you gotta pick the big anti-Semites to deal with it, whatever. | ||
| But like, what? | ||
| He was on stage two or three seats away from Louis Farrakhan? | ||
| From Farrakhan, yeah. | ||
| After this is two, I mean, it was only two or three months ago, those insane tweets about Jews being the devil and all that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Man. | ||
| So he was there, and then that was juxtaposed with this. | ||
| And who, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| Was there any, so of course conservative media called him out. | ||
| Was there any? | ||
| Nobody else cared. | ||
| So nothing. | ||
| He probably didn't even make it on NBC Nightly News. | ||
| Not as far as I know. | ||
| It was sort of just seen as part of the thing. | ||
| You know, they're all at the funeral together. | ||
| This is the bullshit that people can't take anymore. | ||
| This double standard epic nonsense that every time a Trump supporter does something, everyone on the right should apologize or whatever. | ||
| And that this type of bullshit, the ex-president sits with what I would argue is probably the The foremost anti-Semite. | ||
| I was going to say preeminent anti-Semite. | ||
| That's probably too laudatory. | ||
| Legitimately, a disgusting human being who would, by choosing to group up any group of people in a specific way, is the very definition of prejudice and racism and all that. | ||
| This is what the left is supposed to be against. | ||
| This is their whole thing. | ||
| But that's what was going on. | ||
| So that was juxtaposed. | ||
| But that happened on the same day as the other big story was that John McCain died. | ||
| So that was, I'm sure, the one that you heard about. | ||
| OK, so this is the one that I didn't know this until about two days ago. | ||
| And I was on the phone with my dad. | ||
| And I said, you know, we were talking about being off the grid. | ||
| And I said, you know, and I don't know anything. | ||
| And it was as if he just, like, I don't know what happened. | ||
| He couldn't stop himself yet. | ||
| But he goes, but you know John McCain died. | ||
| And I was like. | ||
| So did you know about all the follow-ups around that? | ||
| So I know nothing other than he died. | ||
| So first off, I don't even know when he died. | ||
| Did he just die? | ||
| So he died two weeks, a week and a half ago? | ||
| He died a Saturday before last. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I came back from Sabbath and that was the news. | ||
| So he passed away. | ||
| President Trump, obviously not a fan. | ||
| So Trump didn't issue any official statement for two days. | ||
| And then he—the basic rule of thumb is that when a sitting senator dies, you lower the | ||
| flags to half-staff until the person is actually buried. | ||
| Trump did the statutory minimum. | ||
| He lowered the flag for 24 hours, and then he raised it back up again. | ||
| All the other federal flags were lower, but you could see a picture over the White House | ||
| of the flag back up at full staff. | ||
| And then, at the Washington Monument, which you can see behind it, you see all of them | ||
| down at half-staff. | ||
| He then reversed himself, lowered the flag again, issued a statement. | ||
| And then, at McCain's funeral, he was not invited because McCain didn't want him there, | ||
| which—can't really blame McCain for that. | ||
| And then at the funeral, George W. spoke, Obama spoke, Meghan McCain spoke. | ||
| All three of them took shots at Trump. | ||
| So Meghan McCain said, we didn't need to make America great again. | ||
| America was already great and kind of really went hard after Trump. | ||
| And then Obama got up and he said, our country was about all these things, the American creed, and we're all part of the same America, and taking pretty obvious veiled shots at Trump. | ||
| And then Bush did some of the same sort of stuff. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So that was yesterday or something. | ||
| Well, so a couple of things there. | ||
| First off, on the flag thing, I mean, this is the type, look, you know, I think I've been pretty freaking fair on Trump, and I get a ton of shit for it. | ||
| I think you've been pretty fair on him. | ||
| You get a ton of shit for it. | ||
| This type of thing, like this flag thing, that's just like the nonsense. | ||
| It's childish bullshit. | ||
| That's just the childish nonsense. | ||
| It's like, this should not be. | ||
| It just should not be. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| So let's just move past that one. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| First off, just quickly on Meghan McCain, I've got to tell you, I know Meghan a little bit. | ||
| We've met a couple of times. | ||
| There's a clip of her, probably about six years ago, if not more at this point, on Realtime. | ||
| Did you ever see this? | ||
| Where she says something, she gets in an argument, Paul Begala, is he a Democratic strategist? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| is on the other side and they get into an argument and she says, | ||
| oh you're just attacking me because I'm young and I don't know everything about World War II or something. | ||
| He's like, I wasn't alive during the French Revolution, but I know about that. | ||
| And it gets huge applause and it's a great line and it's like you can't use your excuse of, | ||
| if you're a pundit or whatever, then be a pundit. | ||
| You can't, the second it gets hot in the kitchen, you can't be like, | ||
| well I'm young, I'm not supposed to be here. | ||
| So I was very unimpressed. | ||
| That was the first time I probably ever saw her publicly, and I was very unimpressed with her. | ||
| I've gotten to know her a little bit, and I've watched some clips on The View, and my mom keeps calling me and telling me that she's a sane conservative. | ||
| And I gotta tell you, I'm very impressed by her. | ||
| Actually, I'm very impressed by her. | ||
| She and I used to be very much at odds, and in the last, I'd say, year and a half, we've become... | ||
| At least friends. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. | ||
| And that's because of this. | ||
| I mean, I think that she's shifted. | ||
| We've all shifted since we were young, but I think that she's shifted too. | ||
| Wait, let me ask you something. | ||
| So I assume that the day he died, that there was the endless people dancing on his grave nonsense and all that? | ||
| There was some of that, but mostly the left was praising him because he was the anti-Trump, right? | ||
| The anti-Trump. | ||
| So after spending most of his life crapping all over him, he suddenly became a hero. | ||
| Right, the guy who was racist when he ran for president and incompetent and old. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Then he was a great hero because he was anti-Trump, and so his entire life was defined by the fact that he and Trump didn't get along. | ||
| So there was a lot of that. | ||
| My own take on this was that the funeral, while I understand Meghan McCain's a grieving daughter, she gets to say whatever she wants, but that said, let's say that you actively want to undercut President Trump. | ||
| Let's say that that's actually your goal. | ||
| Your goal at this funeral is that you don't like what Trump stands for and you want to undercut him. | ||
| Almost the worst thing you can do is get George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Meghan McCain up there bashing Trump. | ||
| And the reason for that is because what Trump is a response to is a sense that there are a bunch of elites who get together in back rooms and party with each other, and then they pretend to disagree with each other for the cameras. | ||
| That's kind of true. | ||
| Which is kind of true, right? | ||
| But in reality, they're back-slapping each other, and they're all best friends, and they're civil, and we all get along. | ||
| And then we, who are kind of the commoners out here, we're like, wait a second, these issues actually matter to me. | ||
| Why do I care about your golf club? | ||
| I don't care about George H.W. | ||
| being friends with Clinton. | ||
| I want to know, like, who wins this political argument because it affects me, right? | ||
| I don't care about, like, how you guys get along. | ||
| And so it was this feeling like there was a video that was going around of George W. handing Michelle Obama a piece of candy and it was like, well, this is what politics used to be. | ||
| And I just kept thinking, no, it didn't. | ||
| I'm old enough to remember when Barack Obama was labeling George W. Bush essentially a war criminal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so you're going to do this whole Trump is a departure from everything that politics has ever been. | ||
| It just felt really disingenuous. | ||
| Not because the criticism of Trump was uncalled for, because I think some of it is called for, but because it was creating this image of politics that didn't exist and then contrasting Trump with this image of politics that's not actually real. | ||
| So isn't that an interesting example of why the 24-hour news cycle, or whatever you call Twitter now, 24-hour news cycle sounds crazy to me, we need something else, this hyperspeed insanity, of why it really, it's a threat to our ability to think clearly about things. | ||
| Because the very people who you hated eight years ago, now I'm not saying it was warranted, I regret, I don't know if I've ever said this publicly, I regret not voting for McCain. | ||
| In retrospect, I think that we'd be in a very different place right now. | ||
| He may be the last decent man that we had running for president, at least for a long time. | ||
| I think Romney's a decent guy, but yeah. | ||
| If you remember, he always wanted to go high. | ||
| He refused to go with the Jeremiah Wright stuff. | ||
| He called off his campaign in the last month because of the economic collapse. | ||
| It's a great frustration of a lot of people. | ||
| Without commenting on Romney specifically, I think by all measures, McCain, for whatever his flaws may be, and maybe he was a little more of a neocon than I would care for, or whatever else it is, It's like, if you don't think he was a decent man who really loved his country, like, you're actually crazy. | ||
| And this goes to when you demonize people to the nth degree who don't deserve demonization, then you get the real demon. | ||
| And I'm not even saying Trump is the real demon. | ||
| But the way they flip history, so it's like you hated him forever and you wanted to destroy this guy forever. | ||
| Now he hates your new demon because you're always finding new demons. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So now we got a new good guy. | ||
| And it's like, that's not, that's partly because we cannot remember history anymore because we're slammed with three-day news stories that, you know, I said it's 24-hour news, but it's really, it's more of like a three-day thing. | ||
| We care for three days and then we expunge, you know, and I think that that now is becoming like the real threat right now. | ||
| Okay, so final news story for you, and this will be the one that really | ||
| has ruined everybody's day, and can ruin yours now. | ||
| Okay, that's great, okay. | ||
| So there's a big scandal. | ||
| We don't have booze on the set anymore, I don't think. | ||
| Yeah, you can pop open that bottle of wine there. | ||
| But yeah, you're not gonna want wine for this one. | ||
| So basically, there was a big scandal in Pennsylvania. | ||
| There was a state attorney general report that suggested that over the course of 30 years, | ||
| 1,000 children had been molested by Catholic priests, and that these priests had then been shuttled around. | ||
| And then following on that, there's a guy named Archbishop Vigano, | ||
| and he was the papal nuncio, I believe, to the United States, and he came forward | ||
| with an 11-page letter in which he accused, essentially, the entire Vatican hierarchy | ||
| of being complicit in covering up child molestation, child rape, | ||
| and what he suggested was a growing, in his terms, homosexual subculture in the church, | ||
| which he mean, by which he meant that there were particular cardinals | ||
| who had been accused of actually seducing seminarians and all of this sort of thing. | ||
| Wait, let's just pause for a sec. | ||
| Those two things are not linked. | ||
| Okay, but I don't mean to sound glib here, but how is this sort of new? | ||
| So it's only new in that he is accusing Pope Francis of actively covering it up. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So he's saying that there's a Cardinal named McCarrick who was apparently accused of child molestation, or at least molestation of underage seminarians, basically. | ||
| And this guy, Archbishop Vigano, said Pope Francis not only knew about it, he reinstated McCarrick, and Benedict had basically Put the guy in silence and prayer, and that Francis had brought the guy back and made him a public figure again, and had done so with multiple other similar figures. | ||
| And because, Francis, the accusation is soft on homosexuality inside the Catholic Church, that's his accusation, Vagano's. | ||
| And then, by extension, soft on people who had then molested seminarians and also happen to be homosexual, or practicing homosexuality. | ||
| There are a couple things that have been conflated here. | ||
| One is people are suggesting that the reason that this is all happening is because anti-gay feelings in the church are leading people to go after Francis or leading people to go after McCarrick. | ||
| And that's a weird argument because really what we should all be able to say is that a few things can be true. | ||
| There's no statistical linkage between homosexuality and child molestation, obviously. | ||
| Two, that a disproportionate number of the people who have been molested inside the Catholic Church have been young boys, which is also true. | ||
| It's four out of five. | ||
| And three, that any pope who covers this crap up should be criminally liable, basically. | ||
| And the media- Well, it's like Paterno. | ||
| Exactly, and this exists in pretty much every major institution, secular or religious, | ||
| there's always an attempt to cover up sins inside that particular institution. | ||
| This is true for every religious institution that I know about. | ||
| Pretty sure it's true for every institution, period. | ||
| Yeah, every institution, public schools, like legitimately every institution. | ||
| I think the DNC tried to cover up the whole trying to take out Bernie thing. | ||
| That was trying to be a cover-up. | ||
| So the part of this story, the twist to the story, the part that's new, | ||
| is not only that for. | ||
| So Francis has stayed silent. | ||
| He's refused to respond to any of the allegations. | ||
| The allegations have been backed by a bunch of other testimony. | ||
| Bishops are basically going to war with one another for the first time in 500 years. | ||
| They're openly criticizing each other. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I think the most shocking thing is that the media are running full-scale editorials attacking the quote-unquote ultra-conservative wing within the Catholic Church for going after Francis. | ||
| So the same media that back in 2003 was going after John Paul II, and Benedict, and saying, these guys are responsible for all of this, and now they're defending Francis, specifically because they think that this is a conservative attempt to oust Francis, because Francis is a liberal pope. | ||
| So, okay, so basically the media is trying to, because he's a little more pro-gay, so to speak, whatever the hell that means. | ||
| And pro-environmentalist, and redistributionist, and illegal immigration, and all this stuff, yeah. | ||
| So the media, oddly, is trying to protect him. | ||
| Man, I mean, this again, it goes to this thing of like, our enemies will be our friends the second we need them, and then we'll throw them out. | ||
| Well, I mean, this just sounds awful and gross. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| Yeah, I mean. | ||
| But it's like a 500-year, it could cause a 500-year schism in the church, like the worst schism in the church since maybe the Protestant Reformation, because there's like an entire wing of the church, because you can't impeach the pope. | ||
| There's an entire wing of the church going, the Vatican hierarchy covered this stuff up, because they cover this stuff up, and now he's being defended by a bunch of people who aren't real fond of Catholics in general, but somehow have now found enthusiasm for Pope Francis. | ||
| And you were a real believer, but obviously didn't stand for any of this, of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But let's just say you're the average Catholic out there who's a good, decent person. | ||
| You happen to be a believer. | ||
| I would assume the way you believe in Judaism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's right. | |
| Okay, so let's say you're that. | ||
| Now Judaism, I know, doesn't have a structure like that. | ||
| Yeah, my feeling is any rabbi who's responsible for... But what would you do? | ||
| I'll say in the Jewish community, because I don't know how Catholic doctrine works, because we don't have papal infallibility in Judaism. | ||
| Any rabbi who is complicit in the cover-up of child molestation should immediately go to jail. | ||
| I have no tolerance for this kind of bullshit. | ||
| And the fact that this has not only been tolerated, but forwarded by certain members of the press is an astonishing thing. | ||
| These are the same people who are giving Spotlight an Oscar. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like five years ago, right? | ||
| Because it was so important to uncover all the stuff happening within the church, and now it's, no, hands off. | ||
| I mean, Francis is a really important figure, and the fact that all these people are attacking him, we can't take it seriously for political reasons. | ||
| We have to suggest that it's just a hit job against Francis. | ||
| Do you think there's like, sort of like, this is just another extension of as we've, over the last couple years, just watched all of these institutions crumble, like we've watched mainstream media crumble, we're watching our political institutions, I don't know if they're quite crumbling, but they're, They're teetering, certainly, but shifting in nature, and also the legislative branch is basically becoming a useless nothingness as we're handing everything over to the king. | ||
| Another good reason to be for small government, either a classical liberal or a libertarian, etc. | ||
| But that this with the church, without making it too specific about these specific things, that it's just another one of these things that these giant institutions that used to be able to control narrative, control gatekeeping and all of that, they actually cannot withstand things anymore, sort of. | ||
| I mean, this is where I've been sort of critical of the internet and the way we're all behaving on there, but like truth does find a way. | ||
| So then we watch These institutions try to attack the people because the people have a better essence of what the truth is than the institutions. | ||
| Am I getting something there? | ||
| No, that's exactly right. | ||
| And the fact that it's the most shocking performance by the press that I've seen, including anything with regard to Trump, to shift on a dime and start going, well, you know, let's not check out these allegations of child molestation because we really like this pope. | ||
| It's like, whoa. | ||
| That's pretty amazing stuff. | ||
| And I'm not talking about the editorial boards. | ||
| I'm talking about objective news coverage. | ||
| Objective news coverage. | ||
| There was a headline in The New York Times that said, Pope Francis takes high road as conservatives pounce. | ||
| Over allegations of covering up sexual abuse of seminarians and minors. | ||
| It's totally wild. | ||
| I mean, I think this is just part and parcel with what we've watched sort of happen to the New York Times over the last couple of years. | ||
| I mean, you know, I've said this many times, but I'm pretty sure the New York Times didn't cover Brett Weinstein. | ||
| at Evergreen once in the pages of the paper, but did three or four editorials about it. | ||
| You know, they constantly do this type of thing, where it's like they're editorializing | ||
| their entire coverage, often by what they're not covering. | ||
| And so to watch this, what was an important institution, I think, for a long time, kind of crumble like that, | ||
| and this gets us back to, that was story 20, this gets us back to story one, | ||
| where now you're gonna bring in people to actually, this is where, when people say, | ||
| Dave, you attack the left too much, much you don't attack the right it's like the the right | ||
| this isn't about institutional power anymore | ||
| At some level, Trump's the president, I get it, but the left has all this media power and all everything else, and you're willingly bringing in people that truly are racist, or if, without calling these people specifically racist, have terrible ideas. | ||
| And you're saying this is part of what mainstream should be. | ||
| So you're mainstreaming what are really radical ideas. | ||
| Shit! | ||
| I got you. | ||
| I got you there at the end. | ||
| So now Dave's back. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| OK, so submit your questions for me and for Dave on Patreon and Super Chat right now. | ||
| We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back with those questions. | ||
| Oh man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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| No, sorry, it's the Dave Rubin Report, but I'm hosting today because Dave is just back. | ||
| And if you missed it earlier, we went through all of the news. | ||
| So Dave is markedly more depressed than he was an hour and a half ago, which makes me happy since I'm a sadist. | ||
| So let's go. | ||
| You run a tight ship, by the way. | ||
| When I do the breaks in between the interview and the live show, it ends up being like, I always say we'll be back in 30 seconds. | ||
| It's like seven minutes. | ||
| You were like. | ||
| Well, come on. | ||
| I mean, we gotta make money. | ||
| You talk fast and you move fast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's exactly right. | |
| So we've got Patreon questions and Super Chat questions. | ||
| So let's start with a Patreon question. | ||
| Dave, do you think there's any turning back from the politicization of literally everything fun, or is this the new norm now? | ||
| I think for now it is the new norm, and I think that we have to get through this, and I think we can get through it. | ||
| I'm telling you, as I said to you an hour ago, I spent the last month talking to real people all over the place, literally on the street. | ||
| If I was just standing there, I was just talking to people. | ||
| I really felt like I could be a little more connected to people. | ||
| People don't want everything to be politicized all the time. | ||
| They don't want, why do you watch sports? | ||
| It's not for politics. | ||
| Why do you watch the Avengers? | ||
| It's not for politics. | ||
| Why any, most of the things you do, it's not for politics. | ||
| And the fact that they've let this creep into everything, it's just another, and when I say they, it's like this amorphous thing. | ||
| And the media, the sports media particularly. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't know that it's a, you know, a fully, I think there is some level of coordination in different ways. | ||
| But like, I'm not saying there's like a group of five guys sitting in a room like, Like how do we divide America and destroy everything? | ||
| Maybe there is, I don't know. | ||
| But like, but this endless thing where we just are gonna hate each other all the time. | ||
| And this is why I've said it before. | ||
| But like, this is why I truly, truly believe, I believe it now more than ever, | ||
| identity politics is the biggest threat that a free society has, and particularly our free society, | ||
| because we've done the melting pot better than anybody. | ||
| We did a melting pot. | ||
| We did it right. | ||
| We blended this thing right. | ||
| Everyone still wants to come here for a better life. | ||
| All these celebrities that always tweet they're gonna leave, nobody ever leaves. | ||
| And the same people who will tell you what a racist, evil, patriarchal. | ||
| Homophobic, transphobic society America is they're the same people who want open borders because they want apparently everyone to come in and share in the horrors. | ||
| So I think it's truly it is a threat, but yes, I think we will get past it and the reason I'm hopeful is because when we look at all of the the mainstream media that's peddling this stuff crumbling and we look at the amount of people that are listening to long-form conversations | ||
| and getting what their ideas are. | ||
| I mean, when I go to these Peterson things and people come up to me and say, | ||
| I started watching your show and then I saw Shapiro on there | ||
| and Harris and Peterson and blah, blah, blah, and I started thinking about things differently | ||
| and then I bought Peterson's book and you know what, I stopped smoking weed. | ||
| And I'm not even saying smoking weed is bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know we have a difference of opinion on that. | |
| People change their lives based on this stuff, for sure. | ||
| So I really believe that while you can't see it if you just look at that online tier, that in reality I think there is something incredibly good happening. | ||
| Okay, so here's a super chat question for you. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| It says, this one's interesting, love the two of you. | ||
| You both converted as socialists into a libertarian conservative. | ||
| Awful question. | ||
| Shapiro, will you bake Rubin a wedding cake? | ||
| Well, I'm married already. | ||
| He's married already. | ||
| It was my anniversary last week. | ||
| An anniversary cake would have been nice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the answer is no. | ||
| And the reason I won't is because as a religious Jew, I do not participate in activities that I believe are sinful. | ||
| But again, we live in a free country and Dave knows this. | ||
| He doesn't have to care what I think about sin. | ||
| And as long as I'm not bothering Dave, I don't see why it's a problem. | ||
| Does Dave have a husband? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are we friends? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And are we going to go out to dinner sometime in the near future? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's a difference between me just being friends with Dave and me actively participating in an event that I feel is religiously sinful. | ||
| And I think this is how most religious Christians and most religious Jews feel, and while that's awkward, we're still friends in spite of it, which is why we're friends. | ||
| If we couldn't be friends in spite of it, then it would be a bad thing. | ||
| Well, look, when I did your interview show, which, by the way, I mean, yeah, you jacked the idea of an interview show from me, it's all right, but nobody had done it before me. | ||
| But you said that to me, and I truly mean this, if you think what I'm doing is sinful, It sounds glib, but I don't care. | ||
| And my view is you don't have to care, right? | ||
| It's a free country. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| And it's like, look, look, there is, of course, someone's going to go, well, wait a minute, if you really think his marriage is sinful or something, of course, there may be a place that in the nature of our friendship, maybe that we can't quite get to that I would be able to get to with someone that didn't think That is very possible and it goes both ways, right? | ||
| Like I then look at you and I go, well, why? | ||
| Like that's a kid. | ||
| You don't want me teaching your kid about the nature of family, perhaps, right? | ||
| I mean, like there's certain areas. | ||
| Possibly, but you're probably a pretty good dad. | ||
| Like, you know what I mean? | ||
| But why is it that we're able to do this and most people can't do this? | ||
| That's what I'm curious about. | ||
| Because we go home at night and we can have our own lives. | ||
| And I think part of friendship, by the way, is that. | ||
| We go home at night and we just have our own lives. | ||
| I'm not married to you, right? | ||
| My wife and I have to agree on these issues. | ||
| You and I don't have to agree on these issues in order for us to share a common space together, and that's really the important thing to me. | ||
| Do you think your wife and you have to agree on all of these issues, or just the sort of The more foundational ones. | ||
| The foundational ones. | ||
| But I do think that, you know, how you raise your kids religiously and with regard to things like sexual morality does actually have to be at the root of how you teach your kids. | ||
| So if you have deep divisions with your spouse on these issues, I think that, and you're looking to build a family anyway, then I think that these are issues where building on a bad foundation is a bad move. | ||
| Okay, so if you wouldn't bake me a cake, that's okay. | ||
| And now, because it's 50-50, I can't bake you a cake, which David's an incredible chef, and he would have done it kosher the whole thing, man. | ||
| I feel bad. | ||
| He would have done it for you. | ||
| You got me this close. | ||
| Putting that aside, you can't have David's kosher cake now. | ||
| If we were having an anniversary party, would you come? | ||
| If I was inviting all the crew that we all know, and we were just an anniversary party, we're just having a party, and I'll even throw in some kosher food for you to make sure you don't have to bring your own food. | ||
| You know, honestly, I'd have to think about it. | ||
| I'd have to think about it. | ||
| So that's interesting to me, because that's a different thing. | ||
| Well, not really, because again, if you're a religious person, and again, take it from the religious perspective, from the religious perspective, the question is, are you glorifying something that you think is sinful? | ||
| So if it's a party for something that you think was originally sinful, can you participate in that? | ||
| So from a religious point of view, that's an actual serious moral question. | ||
| What I got to dinner with you, the answer is yes, right? | ||
| Because that's not actually, like, let's celebrate something that I feel that you're doing is sinful. | ||
| But I'd have to think about that one. | ||
| And I'm being a perfectly honest, like, as straightforward as possible on this topic. | ||
| See, that's so interesting to me, because it's like, if I threw a regular party, just having a party at my house and all the guys... But that's for a gay wedding cake also, right? | ||
| Like, I'd bake you a cake that had nothing to do with a gay wedding. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I would go to a party with you that has nothing to do with gay marriage. | ||
| Should you bake me a regular cake? | ||
| Could I just have a third cake? | ||
| Yeah, sure, I'll give you a cake. | ||
| Well, hold on. | ||
| I mean, my baking sucks. | ||
| I'll just buy you one. | ||
| I want a shittily baked Shapiro cake, and then once I get it here, I can do whatever I want with it. | ||
| I mean, it's not gonna be good, but it'll be there. | ||
| Alright, let's see. | ||
| There's a lot there. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| But this is what we'll keep talking about forever, and it's alright. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Alright, let's see. | ||
| So, Ben, huge fan. | ||
| Why do Asians overwhelmingly support the left in spite of their cultural values, and how do we change this? | ||
| Also, how are you explaining to your kids why it's wrong to lie? | ||
| Are you using religion or reason? | ||
| So, on the first question, why do Asians overwhelmingly support the left, I think that there is a misperception that is bolstered by Republican inability to talk about issues of race, which is that you have to overcome the basic presumption that Republicans are evil racists. | ||
| And once you get over that presumption, then people tend to vote More conservative. | ||
| Then Asians might vote for their own economic interests. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And for their own college education interests. | ||
| I mean, it's the left that's trying to ban Asians from higher education at places like Harvard. | ||
| But the right has a reputation as being racist, and it is not forwarded by Intemperate remarks from the President of the United States on these sorts of issues. | ||
| And the right also, you know, should be willing to... I think that there's this weird conversation about race that goes something like this. | ||
| People on the left say, there's been historic racism in American society. | ||
| And people on the right read that as, what you're saying is, there's historic racism in American society, and that means you want affirmative action. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so people on the right go, I don't even want to talk about that. | ||
| And people on the left say, well, you don't want to talk about that because you're a racist. | ||
| Because what they read the right saying is, I don't want to talk about it at all because you're a racist. | ||
| When the conversation really should go like this, the left says, there's historic racism in American society. | ||
| You go, right. | ||
| And then the left says, and now I want affirmative action. | ||
| You say, nope. | ||
| And then you have a conversation about the actual policy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But we conflate the questions because we're all reading each other's minds and it's a dangerous game. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because one of the things that people say to me all the time when I do public speaking events and I talk to people after, they'll always say, you know, the huge amount of people say to me, I was a lefty. | ||
| I was just like you. | ||
| I then evolved sort of the way you did. | ||
| And I can't tell you the amount of friends that I have that now think I'm a racist because I believe in low taxes or blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And it's like the way they've been able to conflate policy with racism is crazy. | ||
| Because they think, the average lefty out there, and I'm just doing something broad for the purposes of a conversation, thinks that if you say low taxes, you mean you don't want to give money to poor people. | ||
| Now, that is actually true, but that doesn't mean it's racist. | ||
| You think that there are better ways to help poor people than just taking money from some and giving it to others. | ||
| So they've really, there's an incredible trick that they've pulled there, that these are not racist. | ||
| The amount of conservative and libertarian college things that I go to, and all these things, and I never meet racists. | ||
| Or I'm meeting some pretty damn shady racists, because I can't figure out that they're racists, and they keep inviting me. | ||
| All right, let's see. | ||
| On that second question, how am I explaining to my kids why it's wrong to lie, religion or reason? | ||
| I mean, the answer typically is both, right? | ||
| You say that God doesn't want you to lie because you are... and why doesn't God want you to lie is the reasonable question, and the answer is God doesn't want you to lie because it is a fundamental disrespect of another person as made in God's image. | ||
| I think that virtually all of Western civilization is built on one verse in the Bible that human beings are made in God's image, and from there springs an enormous amount of good. | ||
| There are things in religion that have Broad about an enormous amount of bad, but that is one aspect of religion that I don't think you can get to simply through scientific materialism, but this is a Sam Harris debate that we've had a thousand times. | ||
| Right, this is the Sam U. Sam Jordan one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| That's what it all whittles down to that. | ||
| Can science and reason and your own consciousness get you there at a human scale? | ||
| Speaking of which, here's a Patreon question for you. | ||
| It says, Dave, did you find out what the dark enlightenment is? | ||
| Oh, you know, someone asked me about the Dark Enlightenment once on a Patreon feed, and I think maybe somebody sent me some info. | ||
| I honestly don't remember. | ||
| I think basically the idea of the Dark Enlightenment, for those who are sort of unaware, is that what Pinker will do is he'll basically say, all the good stuff that I like from the Enlightenment is the Enlightenment, and everything else is the counter-Enlightenment. | ||
| Oh, I see, I see. | ||
| And the Dark Enlightenment is basically, well, no, Rousseau was part of the Enlightenment, too, he just happened to suck. | ||
| And so trying to look at the downsides and the upsides of the Enlightenment is actually a worthwhile... | ||
| So this is sort of like, I remember right before I left, there were a couple people really attacking the Enlightenment as this racist movement. | ||
| So this is sort of that? | ||
| Some of that, but also there's a perspective on the Enlightenment that basically says that the Enlightenment's move toward individual values was simultaneously a move away from virtue. | ||
| So if you look at sort of more ancient philosophy, ancient philosophy says that your goal as a human being is to act in accordance with natural law. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Natural law being the things that reason dictates, essentially. | ||
| This is sort of the Aristotelian natural law argument. | ||
| And then in the sort of modern period, people say, well, but everybody has a different idea | ||
| of what's good for them. | ||
| So this is a libertarian idea. | ||
| And so what we need is limited institutions so that people can do whatever they want. | ||
| And so the idea of the dark enlightenment, basically, is that if you take that libertarian | ||
| ideal to its extreme, where there is no social fabric that combines us anymore, then you | ||
| either end up with sort of this atomism, where everybody is on their own, there's no shared | ||
| sense of belonging, and no shared sense of values. | ||
| And on the other hand, if you believe that reason rules everything, but that individual human beings don't mean anything, then Marx is a part of this enlightenment ideal to where reason is the head, and all we have to do is reorganize society along the lines that we see fit, and we can create a better man. | ||
| Right, so I believe in it within the prism of, I think that's how human flourishing and human freedom will expand the most. | ||
| believe in that libertarian idea. | ||
| But you're John Stuart Mill guy. | ||
| Right, so I believe in it within the prism of, I think that's how human flourishing | ||
| and human freedom will expand the most. | ||
| I believe you have to be left basically to your own ideas, but I don't wanna live in Mad Max at the same time. | ||
| And I understand, this is where, this is a great- This is the Patrick Dineen critique, right? | ||
| Patrick Dineen has a book called Why Liberalism Failed, and his basic critique is that we erred too much on the side of liberty without enough focus on the social fabric. | ||
| That if you don't focus on the social fabric, you don't focus on virtue, you only focus on rights, well you end up with this bunch of people who are non-virtuous who think everything is their right, basically. | ||
| You know, it's funny, I mean, you know my thoughts on most of these political issues, and we just spent the last hour and a half talking a lot about virtue and a lot about the social fabric. | ||
| So whatever that is, You're for it. | ||
| That's where I'm at. | ||
| Okay, here's a Patreon question. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Okay. | ||
| What, if any, success could President Trump have where the media would give him credit without a backhand dilution or anything else? | ||
| Do you think there's anything Trump could do where the media would give him credit? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I mean, they've painted it, look, they've painted him as Hitler. | ||
| I mean, the first video that I did the day after the election, sitting in my backyard, I said, you know, the risk here is that, and I was even saying this before the election, if you keep calling someone Hitler, you can never acknowledge when anything is good. | ||
| And that that will keep pushing you further one way and potentially pushing the other person the other way, | ||
| or at least the supporters that way. | ||
| Because you can't be like, oh well, the economy's doing well, good for Hitler. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| In fact, everything that you do that's good is actually worse for you. | ||
| Is actually evil. | ||
| And this is also where you get this sort of, a guy who I agreed with for most of my life, | ||
| who I now have some disagreements with, but I had nothing but respect for, | ||
| Bill Maher, you know, a couple months ago when he was talking, | ||
| you know, because he has real Trump derangement syndrome, And he was saying this thing about how if we, if the economy has to fail to get rid of this guy, that's what we need. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, that's easy to say when you probably have a hundred million bucks and I'm not, I love Bill Maher and I hope he'll sit in this seat one day and I'll be there and you, you know. | ||
| And I can leave, yeah. | ||
| No, but you were on his show not too long ago. | ||
| And it was the same thing. | ||
| But I don't want to be in a position where you root for the failure of the country because you want the failure of this one man. | ||
| If he fails, you know, Sam did a piece right after the election, as much as Sam hates Trump, he said, look, now he's the pilot of the plane. | ||
| So if you want the plane to crash, well, you're on it. | ||
| So that ain't great, right? | ||
| So I would say there's probably nothing that they would really ever give him credit for. | ||
| But I think at the same time, what they create is most people in this country, two years into a Trump presidency, if you remove the tweets, if you remove just the generic sort of screaming thing all the time, well, what actually is happening? | ||
| The economy's still pretty good. | ||
| Does anyone think Trump's gonna start nation building? | ||
| I actually think some of our alliances are stronger, even everyone else says they're weaker. | ||
| I think some of the trade stuff actually could start working in our advantage. | ||
| I don't know exactly, but I don't think there's anything that they could really... You can't. | ||
| I mean, I think you probably mostly agree with that. | ||
| No, I definitely agree with that. | ||
| Okay, so I want to ask you this one because I think it's a good question. | ||
| This is from your Super Chat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So talk about the art in the studio. | ||
| What's the new art? | ||
| Oh, I'm glad that came up. | ||
| So, a spectacular artist, her name is right there, Kaylin Rose-Janet, painted this painting that's behind you, and then the painting that's behind me is sort of inspired from that, and one of the things that she did, she knows how much I love coffee, so you can see sort of the texture, the texture right behind her, that's actual coffee grinds that are in there. | ||
| I think her website is Kaylin Rose, C-A-Y-L-I-N, rosejanet.com, and she's done like, there's tons of artwork in my house that she's done, we have this huge Millennium You're a coffee guru. | ||
| What coffee do you like? | ||
| Do you have a coffee machine? | ||
| Well, I do French press and I grind it in the morning and the whole thing. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I have like an espresso machine or something. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I have an espresso, but that's really for the guests. | ||
| I don't find espresso there. | ||
| I could see you drinking Keurig. | ||
| Because you're the type of person who wouldn't put the effort into that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I didn't drink coffee until like a month ago. | ||
| Wait, you've been talking this fast for all these years without... Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| And then I was getting no sleep one week and I had coffee and my show was markedly better. | ||
| And I was like, okay, well then I guess I have to addict myself to cocaine. | ||
| I mean, that's the only way this is possibly going to continue to work. | ||
| Listen, even though you won't make me a cake, I will brew you a cup of coffee. | ||
| Well, I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I mean, that's all I'm asking from you. | ||
| And also leave me alone if I don't want to make you a cake. | ||
| I like to turn the other cheek. | ||
| By the way, quick note on that. | ||
| I would also mention that in Judaism, it's not just gay marriage that's off limits, it's intermarriage that's off limits. | ||
| So if a member of my family were to intermarry, marry somebody who's not Jewish, I wouldn't go to the wedding. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So even if that, let's say it was your sister, for example, even though I know she just got married and I met the guy and he's a nice guy, even if that would do irreparable damage with your sister? | ||
| In my view, the irreparable damage is being done by the fact that if you're brought up | ||
| with a certain sense of values and rules and then you abandon those values and rules, | ||
| then that's an irreparable damage. | ||
| It's so interesting, I really. | ||
| Intellectually, I really kind of understand that and I think that we are living in a society that's, because of the loss of what clarity is, that's part of why the fraying is happening. | ||
| But it's like when we went out to dinner that IDW night, we were at that steakhouse and we all had these, Joe got this like, you know, giant tomahawk that was for two people. | ||
| He ate it himself, of course. | ||
| And Jordan had like the biggest steak I've ever seen. | ||
| And Eric and I split this porterhouse and it was so freaking delicious. | ||
| And you brought your dinner because you're kosher, so you're obviously not gonna eat there. | ||
| And you wouldn't even eat on their plates and all that. | ||
| And I respect you making that decision for yourself. | ||
| I truly do. | ||
| I truly do. | ||
| And I have family members who are kosher. | ||
| As a religious person, there is a constant conflict between your role as a religious person | ||
| and what you may feel in your heart, right? | ||
| So the fact is that I wear a kippah everywhere. | ||
| There are certain rules about, like, when I'm supposed to wear a yarmulke. | ||
| Like, if I walk into a place and I'm not obviously carrying my own lunch, it's actually a problem. | ||
| Like, because people might think the restaurant is kosher, for example, now, and then they're going to eat there because they saw this famous orthodox Jew walking into a non-kosher restaurant. | ||
| So that's something that you have to take into account, is that how much are you conveying that your religion approves of a particular activity when you actually engage in the particular activity, and that applies to a wide variety of things. | ||
| It's so interesting to me, though, because when I came home that night, I swear, you can ask David after, I was like, I was sitting there and I was like, and Ben brought, I think he brought a burger or something. | ||
| Yeah, he did bring a burger, yeah. | ||
| You're eating your burger, and I know how delicious this steak is. | ||
| And it's like, I really was like, why would Ben deny himself just this truly, truly. | ||
| Oh, it smelled delicious, yeah. | ||
| Delicious thing, but you do, and that, it doesn't. | ||
| Because it's part of a holistic lifestyle in which you make choices about what you want to | ||
| participate and what you don't, but that doesn't change | ||
| even necessarily how you feel about the people who are engaged in particular activities. | ||
| It's just saying, like, I as a religious person cannot stamp with imprimatur that this is okay with me | ||
| as a religious person, but that doesn't mean that I care about you any less, for example, | ||
| or I would care about my sister any less if she did something that I didn't like. | ||
| Just in terms of importance, I'm gonna move the steak away. | ||
| I'm not gonna force you to eat a steak. | ||
| I still, I think I'll be able to get you to smoke a joint at some point, and I definitely am gonna be able to get you to say fuck on camera. | ||
| That's the order. | ||
| I'll let you, you want your poacher steak, okay, fine. | ||
| The last one is actually not that far a leap. | ||
| If I had a blue version of my show, No, I know, we... Dude, it would be unbelievable. | ||
| I have some idea. | ||
| Submersion of my show would be unreal. | ||
| Well, Shapiro, perhaps some of the people we've been talking to have some ideas for some new shows, and maybe there's something already in the works. | ||
| Blue Shapiro would be pretty wild. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay, so a couple more here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Okay, this is a good one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Super chat question. | ||
| Sorry, I want to find all the best ones here. | ||
| No, no, go for it. | ||
| We're doing it live. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, there's no editing. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So I'm trying to read these. | ||
| Okay, so the ancient Greek proverb, if you go to war, you better finish it or you'll leave it to your grandchildren, which I don't think is actually from the ancient Greek. | ||
| You think we didn't finish the war of ideas against Marxism in the Cold War, and that is why we have a rise of Marxism on college campuses today. | ||
| I'll let you field it first. | ||
| I think that my basic answer would be, yes, we sort of let this stuff fester as if it was the cool stuff, but I don't know what the completion of a war of ideas is. | ||
| Like, you stamp things out to the point that no one can speak of them? | ||
| That's not what we want. | ||
| So it's almost an unanswerable question at a certain level. | ||
| I think Jonah Goldberg's answer on this is basically correct, which is that there's a human tendency to buck against freedom. | ||
| And that human tendency is, why can't we control the world around us? | ||
| Why can't we get together and solve all of our problems? | ||
| Why is it that free markets are counterintuitive. | ||
| The idea if you leave everybody alone, your life is gonna be better | ||
| is really counterintuitive. | ||
| Usually the idea is if I can control everybody around me, then my life will be better | ||
| because I can get them to do all the things I want them to do. | ||
| I don't want to control anybody. | ||
| Right, but it's- I want my little piece of the pie | ||
| and I'm gonna do good work here and- But that's it, but that's a- | ||
| a cultivated idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| As a child, when I look at my children, my children want to control everything around | ||
| them including me. | ||
| If you believe that if we all get together we can build this giant edifice together, | ||
| why can't you just get on board? | ||
| Just get on board. | ||
| Then Marxism has a certain kind of particular draw, especially when you look at the fact | ||
| that there are rich people, there are poor people. | ||
| When you say to people, well, right, there are going to be some rich people and some | ||
| poor people, but overall we're getting richer. | ||
| That is more counterintuitive than why can't I just steal that guy's money, put it in my pocket, and I'm better off. | ||
| And so I don't think that Marxism can ever be fully stamped out. | ||
| That said, I think the conservative movement has failed markedly to make good arguments against Marxism, and they've basically made arguments on the basis of efficacy rather than morality. | ||
| They've said basically Marxism, it's a moral idea, it just is bad in administration. | ||
| And I think Marxism is a deeply immoral idea that's also terrible in administration. | ||
| Yeah, so do you think that's also why guys like Like, me and you get so much hate because someone like me, I was once something. | ||
| I had a certain set of ideas. | ||
| I've shown you can escape and survive. | ||
| And now there clearly is a massive movement behind that. | ||
| I mean, I know it. | ||
| I know it is real. | ||
| The amount of young people that are waking up and are going, this thing that they're going to jam down your throat in college and in high school is not good. | ||
| It is not real. | ||
| It is not true. | ||
| And there aren't many examples of people escaping. | ||
| There was David Horowitz, you know. | ||
| 30 years ago or whatever but there's not very modern examples so that's why for the for the it's not like I put out a lot of hate but I seem to get a lot of online hate and I think that's the reason I think partly for you it's it's similar to a different degree you get it because you're willing to talk to people like me and Sam and whoever else so they're going The real hardcore people that hate all that stuff don't want you to do it, even though they love you, but they don't want you to do it because they think that might give a little oxygen to that. | ||
| Okay, so somebody wants you to do a Trump impersonation for the memes. | ||
| Very important. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does he do? | |
| I don't even know what he does anymore. | ||
| You're fired. | ||
| I honestly don't know. | ||
| You gotta work on that stuff. | ||
| Do you do any good impersonations? | ||
| Do you do any good impressions? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I'll come back with some decent... I used to do a great Cosby impression, but then he became the greatest serial... Oh, now you can do... You see, I'm making the chocolate cake for the children who went to the dentist... Okay, close enough. | ||
| Close enough. | ||
| There's only so much we can do here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It says... Let me put the roof in... I knew this was gonna go south so fast. | |
| Hi, Ben and Dave. | ||
| Can you define what rights are? | ||
| I think there's a disconnect between the left and the right on what rights are. | ||
| Well, I believe you are born free. | ||
| You have the right to, and in this country, you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| And then the Bill of Rights lays out what your other rights are. | ||
| The government has to protect those rights. | ||
| It did not give you those rights. | ||
| And I think that's the most important thing. | ||
| The government did not give me my freedom. | ||
| The government can take away my freedom, but it did not give it to me. | ||
| So we have rights that are very clearly laid out. | ||
| And again, this is why I don't want big government. | ||
| Big government in every way will trample on those rights. | ||
| We have a beautiful system of rights. | ||
| Free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to privacy, all of those things. | ||
| These are incredibly powerful things, but it's not because the government gave those rights to us. | ||
| It's protecting what I think, so I know this is where conservatives usually would say these are God-given rights. | ||
| I think you can just say they're innately human rights, that you are, as a human being, it is your birthright, you are born Free. | ||
| Can someone grab you right out of the womb and put you in jail? | ||
| Yes, but you were born free. | ||
| I think that's how I view it. | ||
| So the basic Lockean argument for the philosophers in the room is that basically you are born with particular rights and these rights adhere to you by virtue of you not having to get something from someone else. | ||
| So you have a right to speak free because that's not an imposition on anybody else, right? | ||
| Hey! | ||
| A negative right versus a positive right is the typical language that is used. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey! | |
| Conservatives believe in negative rights, people on the left believe in positive rights. | ||
| This would be like the right to education where you can say to the sky that you have | ||
| a right to education, but unless you're actually forcing a teacher to teach, then there's no | ||
| right. | ||
| The same thing, right to housing, right to healthcare. | ||
| The left is very big into declaring- Hey, hey, do you have a right to healthcare? | ||
| I believe you have a right to healthcare. | ||
| Now we got him starting on the impressions and it's not gonna stop, but yeah, that's right. | ||
| Now we got him starting on the impressions and it's not going to stop, but yeah, that's | ||
| right. | ||
| So the idea there is that in a state of nature where no one else is around, | ||
| So the idea there is that in a state of nature where no one else is around, you have these | ||
| you have these particular rights. | ||
| particular rights, you have the right to go out and labor, you have the right to control | ||
| You have the right to go out and labor. | ||
| You have the right to control your labor. | ||
| your labor, you have the right to speak freely, you have the right to free assembly, to worship | ||
| You have the right to speak freely. | ||
| You have the right to free assembly, to worship God how you want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God how you want, you have the right to do all of these I believe you have a right to health care. | |
| You have the right to do all of these things because you're not imposing on anybody else. | ||
| The minute that you're imposing on anybody else, it's no longer a right. | ||
| So the baking cake example is actually a good one. | ||
| There are folks on the left who say you have a right to go into somebody's shop and demand a service from them. | ||
| The answer is you don't have a right to go into somebody's shop and demand a service from them. | ||
| Maybe you'd prefer if they give you that service. | ||
| Maybe it's smarter if they give you that service. | ||
| Maybe it's more moral if they give you that service, but you don't have the right to go and demand service | ||
| from anyone else because rights are things that I am not demanding from you. | ||
| Now the flip side of that is duties, which is because you have a right to life, | ||
| I have a duty not to kill you, but I would have that duty not to kill you | ||
| regardless of whatever you call that right. | ||
| Okay, so while you were gone, apparently there were a bunch of people | ||
| who have been asking about whether you are indeed funded by the nefarious, evil, terrible Koch brothers. | ||
| Oh Lord, yeah. | ||
| So let's give you the opportunity to answer why you're in the pay of the Shekel Masters. | ||
| All right, first off, well, if anyone wants to know if this thing is edited or not, I think there you go. | ||
| Okay, I'm glad you asked, actually, because this is just endless drivel that is, you know, this is partly one of the things about just online nonsense. | ||
| It's like, you could spend all day defending yourself about untrue claims and the attacks that we get, impersonal attacks, and it's like, often, and Sam, when I had him on last time, a couple months ago, he said for the two years that he was under endless assault, he almost views all his defense as wasted time, because often, No, the truth will set you free. | ||
| It's the right thing, the truth. | ||
| But often, if you're debating against, or your protagonists or attackers don't care about truth, then you're just feeding them. | ||
| By giving them anything, you're just feeding more insanity. | ||
| Which is why I haven't... I think I've... | ||
| Maybe I've even addressed this publicly, I'm not even sure. | ||
| Okay, so here's the deal, and I've been completely transparent about this the entire time, it's so stupid. | ||
| So Learn Liberty, which is, they produce one show of ours a month, they've given us incredible professors, like Deirdre McCloskey and Randy Barnett and Steve Davies and Sean Hopwood and people from all, and Thaddeus Russell, people from all over the political map. | ||
| They produce one show a month. | ||
| They give us a list of professors. | ||
| I can pick any of them, and if I don't like any of them, I can pick anyone else. | ||
| They've given us people all over the political map. | ||
| They've sponsored our episode with Phil DeFranco. | ||
| the YouTuber. They had never even met him or had any interaction with him. They just liked him. | ||
| So I said, learn liberty at the top. This episode is brought to you by learn liberty, | ||
| our friends at learn liberty or whatever. And then they donated, they were going to give him | ||
| a little bit of money he didn't even want it. They donated it to a cause that he cares about. | ||
| So I think what has happened here is that learn liberty is a subsidiary or in partnership with | ||
| Institute for Humane Studies, which I think is through George Mason University. | ||
| And I believe that David Koch, one of the Koch brothers, is on the board there and must give some money to it. | ||
| I know for a fact that the person who has funded our relationship, my relationship with Learn Liberty, is an anonymous woman. | ||
| And I know that because they told me that she's anonymous and that it's a woman. | ||
| And I personally wrote her a thank you note. | ||
| I want to be 100% spectacularly crystal clear. | ||
| They have had no control over our content. | ||
| I ask whatever questions I want. | ||
| We never, never edit for content. | ||
| We did once in my hundreds of interviews. | ||
| It was with a celebrity for a reason that is completely irrelevant and not important. | ||
| They have never told me anything to say. | ||
| There is literally nothing untoward here, and I always start the episode by saying we're in partnership with Learn Liberty, so we're funded by Learn Liberty for that one episode. | ||
| Anyway, this is just endless drivel, and it's almost like you can see I'm sort of Yeah. | ||
| It's like, I don't even want to talk about it because it's like, this is all bullshit. | ||
| This is all distracting bullshit. | ||
| And it's like, that's all nonsense. | ||
| And the amount that we get from them, by the way, pales in comparison to what we're trying to build on Patreon and everything else. | ||
| So it's like, no, no one has ever told me to say anything. | ||
| No one has even ever asked me to say anything. | ||
| I've never had contact with the Kochs. | ||
| No one has ever said anything. | ||
| And by the way, I would love to interview the Kochs. | ||
| I would have literally no problem. | ||
| The Kochs fund Lincoln Center, and I think they put money towards PBS and all sorts of things. | ||
| They're actual libertarians. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't have a problem with any of that. | ||
| So just to be crystal clear, for anyone listening to this, or for any of these people that just relentlessly hate me or whatever, I am not funded by the Koch brothers. | ||
| So I guess what you're saying is you're funded by the Koch brothers and obviously in their pay. | ||
| There are millions of people in this country who donate to non-profits. | ||
| And it's like, if you work with a non-profit, you might be—then you're in cahoots and obviously control—it's just so dumb. | ||
| I hope we clean that up, but you know, I know it'll just get endless. | ||
| All right, so here's another Super Chat question. | ||
| Play Prognosticator. | ||
| What are President Trump's chances of re-election in 2020? | ||
| I would say, short of some sort of impeachment thing, and I have to catch up on a little bit of the news that you enlightened me on, I would say basically pretty good. | ||
| If the left's decision to go down the road of identity politics and Social Democrats, Socialist Democrats, whatever the hell they're called now, but the Bernie-Keith Ellison wing, which is basically an extremist wing of a party, then they're gonna be in a lot of trouble. | ||
| Is there any blue dog Democrat left? | ||
| If that thing could come back, a sensible liberal, Believe me, I could vote for someone who's probably a little more big government than I am. | ||
| I wish, and I talked about it for years, I want my, I used to say my guys, I wanted my side, the left, the Democrats, to wake up. | ||
| There's no sign whatsoever that they're gonna wake up. | ||
| Potentially, look, if they get slammed in the midterms, then maybe they wake up, but you're predicting that they won't. | ||
| I suspect it's not gonna be that bad, actually, if you're a Republican, because I don't think there's anyone who voted for Trump that suddenly looks at the left and thinks that they're better. | ||
| No. | ||
| But their numbers may just be depressed. | ||
| They may just not show up and that's always what happens in midterms and it's never good for the incumbent president's party and all that stuff. | ||
| But I suspect generally what they're offering is so, it really is fringe and the only reason we don't think it's fringe is because the mainstream media jams it down our throat every day. | ||
| And if we can get that message out to people, and I think you're particularly effective at doing it, but we need to also get to people that won't listen to Ben Shapiro, right? | ||
| We need to get to people that'll listen to me or whoever else, people that listen to Joe Rogan or whatever, even though I know we all have a lot of crossover. | ||
| If that message could get out there, this thing that's being sold to you as so obvious and good and the government can fix everything and blah blah blah, if we can show them that is a fringe idea, Here are some better ways to freedom than I think, forget Trump for a second, I just think that's a much better path for a healthy system. | ||
| So I'm out of the political prognostication business since I lost $10,000 on the last election cycle. | ||
| By the way, I was with you the night of the election, which I've told many people, I think we've talked about it publicly, but watching you that night, It was entertaining. | ||
| It was like being with eight different people trying to burst out of one body. | ||
| It was really incredible. | ||
| It was very wild. | ||
| I'm more skeptical that President Trump is heading a good path just because his approval ratings are so low, and there's only a referendum on him once every four years. | ||
| So I think that 2018 is shaping up pretty ugly for Republicans. | ||
| The turnout numbers don't look good. | ||
| Democrats are over-representing pretty much everywhere in the early elections. | ||
| Do I think it's gonna be like a 60-seat blowout? | ||
| No, but I think that there's a good shot Democrats win about 35 seats in the House. | ||
| Again, I could be completely wrong here, right? | ||
| Is the scariest part of that, though, that let's, okay, so let's say the Democrats take back the House and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And it's just endless investigation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think it's done for a couple of years. | ||
| Also, here's the thing. | ||
| President Trump is riding on excellent news for the past couple of years. | ||
| He's at like 42% in the polls usually, 43% in the polls. | ||
| He benefited, number one, from Gary Johnson and Jill Stein winning a combined, I think, six, seven percent of the vote in the last election cycle. | ||
| But also, he has benefited now from a great economy and no major foreign policy crisis. | ||
| We're overdue for some sort of economic downturn. | ||
| There's one every eight to ten years in the country. | ||
| It's been since 2008. | ||
| So I'm a little, you know, God willing, we avoid it. | ||
| And it just continues to be strong because it would be good for the country. | ||
| By the way, the idea that the president is so in charge of all of that... He's not in charge of nearly any of the economy. | ||
| I think the president can put a serious damper on the economy, but I don't think that the president can be held responsible for the performance of a particular economy. | ||
| Again, when people say, Obama was great for the economy, it's like, so was the Republican Congress great for the economy? | ||
| Because they were there since 2010. | ||
| All of that said, Yeah, I think Democrats are going to turn out in droves in 2020 in a way they didn't in 2016. | ||
| The real story of 2016 to me was no one showed up to vote for Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Like, we're all focused on Trump because he's the center of the universe. | ||
| But the reality is that was a referendum on Hillary, not a referendum on Trump. | ||
| Trump's approval ratings were absolutely stable. | ||
| They were always between 40% and 44%. | ||
| Hillary's bounced around from 40% to 50% because people would say, oh, well, maybe she'll be good. | ||
| And then they'd look at her and they'd go, oh, God, she's going to be awful. | ||
| And they just wouldn't show up. | ||
| She won fewer votes in the state. | ||
| Donald Trump won fewer votes in the state of Wisconsin than Mitt Romney did in 2012. | ||
| Trump won the state of Wisconsin. | ||
| Romney lost the state of Wisconsin, because no one showed up to vote for Hillary Clinton. | ||
| I think Democratic turnout in 2020 is going to be real high. | ||
| Trump has to win somewhere between 12 and 14 million additional votes between 2016 and 2020 in order to win, because George W. had to win an additional 10 million votes to win, and he only lost by 500,000 in the popular vote. | ||
| So how can Republicans win? | ||
| Democrats can be awful, right? | ||
| I mean, that's what you're basically saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's always a head-to-head matchup. | ||
| If Democrats run, Kamala Harris, Trump will win. | ||
| If Democrats run, Elizabeth Warren, I think Trump probably wins. | ||
| If they run, Kirsten Gillibrand, he will definitely win. | ||
| If they run Joe Biden, I think it's an uphill run for President Trump in the election. | ||
| But think how sad that is, that you'd need to bring in this, I don't know how old, what, 72-year-old? | ||
| He'll be 78. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| He'll be 78. | ||
| Trump will be 74. | ||
| And the two of them will just club each other with their canes. | ||
| You know how many tennis balls they'll go through running on the bottom of those walkers? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, here's one. | ||
| As a practicing Jew and as an atheist, what are both of your thoughts on the swing toward sexual freedom pre-marriage? | ||
| Has it negatively affected long-term relationships? | ||
| Can I hit this one first? | ||
| Well, first off, I would say this is where saying you're a practicing Jew is a little... It's hard to know what that means, because I would say you're on the sort of more... Modern Orthodox. | ||
| But strict side of that, in that you're a practicing Jew. | ||
| I was a virgin until I was married, yes. | ||
| Right, okay, okay, so you were, all right. | ||
| So I would say this, this is another reason where people should basically be for gay marriage, not from the libertarian perspective, although of course that's, I think, the most honest perspective is that the government shouldn't be in your business, but also from a, if you think, you know, I think when the right was really fear-mongering for many years about gays and the Huckabees and the Evangelicals were always, you know, and George W. Bush, because of Karl Rove, you know, used gay marriage as a wedge issue, And they were saying, well, look at the gays. | ||
| They're all having all this sex and they're doing all these drugs. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| If you don't let people have the same ability to love someone that they love, if you don't let people enter the same exact legal protections as everybody else, then people are going to act out in all sorts of ways, sexually, drugs, all sorts of things. | ||
| I did all sorts of things. | ||
| I never thought I was going to, I never really thought about marriage. | ||
| I just didn't. | ||
| I was closeted for a long time. | ||
| I think I was all sorts of whacked out in many ways, but If you take a certain subset of people and say to them, you can't have the things that other people have that will eventually maybe allow you to have a family or whatever else, and you say, you can't have those, well, then all your sex is going to be premarital. | ||
| So if your answer is, well, because I hear this sometimes, people will say, well, gays should just be, you can be gay, but just be celibate. | ||
| You know, that's one, I mean, it's ridiculous. | ||
| And it's like, you have to, this is why gays, or conservatives, I think, really It's happened already, so it doesn't even really matter. | ||
| But it's like, you should be for gay marriage in a way that actually is for all the other things you're for, because you guys want a certain societal stability and everything else. | ||
| This is the best case for same-sex marriage. | ||
| The best case for same-sex marriage is the one that you just made. | ||
| It's even better than the And this is, by the way, why you guys didn't make this argument before, right? | ||
| easily say, well, the role of marriage between a man and a woman and a man and man | ||
| is a little bit different just because of natural childbearing and rearing | ||
| that occurs in that respect. | ||
| And this is, by the way, why you guys didn't make this argument before, right? | ||
| Like, you weren't pounding the libertarian argument for gay marriage eight years ago. | ||
| I started hitting it in about. | ||
| So that was probably a little bit before most conservatives came around. | ||
| But generally, libertarians even weren't, or I guess real libertarians were. | ||
| My basic idea was basically I want the government out of everything, and the government sucks at everything. | ||
| But as far as the argument in favor of same-sex marriage, if the argument is in favor of stable You know, two-person relationships as opposed to wild promiscuity. | ||
| In every circumstance, that is going to be superior. | ||
| But imagine, imagine telling a subset of people. | ||
| I mean, imagine if the world was worse. | ||
| Gays were the majority and straights were the... And I said to you, Ben, you cannot marry a woman. | ||
| Well now... | ||
| You're gonna do all sorts of things. | ||
| Like, it just is. | ||
| I hear the argument. | ||
| It's interesting, because I think we actually have a slight disagreement here. | ||
| If somebody were to say that to me, then my argument would be, well, I don't understand why societal institutions would make the decision for me as to whether I should live with one person or not. | ||
| Well, of course. | ||
| Meaning that, like, even if society said, like, As a person who is libertarian on the government issue of marriage, my vision is, well, I go to my synagogue and that provides me all the legitimacy I feel like I need with my spouse, which is why I say if gay people want to get married in their church, go for it. | ||
| Enjoy. | ||
| You know, I think it's hard to make the case that promiscuity is deeply connected with lack of same-sex marriage. | ||
| I think that promiscuity is connected with personal decision-making just because what you see is that there's a wild rise in promiscuity in the straight community. | ||
| Forget the gay community. | ||
| There's a wild rise in rates of promiscuity. | ||
| Everyone's swiping right. | ||
| Or I guess you swipe left if you wanted. | ||
| I have no idea, dude. | ||
| I know it's all about a swipe. | ||
| But if you look at the rates of single motherhood, for example, those have been on the rise since the 1960s, and that's in a situation where straight people are allowed to get married, and they haven't been allowed to get married historically. | ||
| So correlating the institution of marriage with promiscuity, I think, is a difficult argument to make, just statistically speaking. | ||
| Okay, so we'd have to see some numbers on that. | ||
| But if the argument is that institutionalizing marriage will make people less promiscuous, Then I think that's actually, that's the best argument for same-sex marriage, I think, that's out there. | ||
| If I were gonna steal a man, the same-sex marriage argument, that'd be the argument. | ||
| You need more stable relationships, you need less instability, you need people who feel that that's actually a positive societal good to live with one person as opposed to living with a hundred other people. | ||
| You know, that's, that's a, you know, that, that I think is the strongest argument. | ||
| So are you saying you're for enforced monogamy? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That whole thing is so stupid. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| But it is true that a society that every social science study ever done has shown that when people live together a long time before marriage, they tend to get divorced at higher rates than they would if they just gotten married, basically. | ||
| And the reason for that is, I think, that if you look at the research on passion and sort of committed love, They move in opposite directions over the course of a relationship. | ||
| So when you first meet somebody, your passion level is incredibly high, and your level of committed love, meaning, you know, I know this person really well, I can count on this person, is really low. | ||
| And then about six months in, passionate love goes like that | ||
| and committed love goes like that, which is why if you've been married 10 years like I have, | ||
| then I'm really passionate about my wife, but to pretend that it's the same level of sexual tension | ||
| with somebody that I'm dating as 10 years later with two kids, of course that's not true. | ||
| That doesn't mean I have a bad sex life, I have a wonderful sex life, | ||
| but it's a different thing than it was at the very beginning. | ||
| Well, if you correlate in your mind that what's great about a relationship | ||
| is the passion level, and then you live together with somebody for six months, | ||
| and then you get married, and then your passion level decreases, | ||
| you mistake the correlation for the causation. | ||
| Oh, it's marriage that caused the passion level to decline, not the fact that I've been living with someone for a while. | ||
| Also, the fact is that the reason people aren't getting married in general | ||
| and in a society where you're allowed to get married, gay or straight, is because you don't want to. | ||
| That means that you've already got an eye on the door in many cases. | ||
| And that's not a real flattering idea for a lot of folks. | ||
| So, you know, I think promiscuity is, first of all, I think that one of the worst lies perpetrated against women is that women and men treat sex in exactly the same way, which Which is absurd. | ||
| The idea that promiscuity is good for women in the same way that it is quote-unquote good for men is fully insane. | ||
| I don't think it's good for either, from a moral perspective, from a spiritual perspective, from a health perspective. | ||
| But I think that the amount of damage that is done spiritually to women, who are promiscuous on average, not for every individual, it's a free country, do what you want, but on average the amount of psychological damage that is done to 16-year-old girls who are promiscuous is not nearly the same amount of damage. | ||
| It's wildly disproportionate to men who are having... | ||
| Lots of promiscuous sex. | ||
| Suicide rates are highly correlative. | ||
| The guy in high school who's, like, banging a lot of the cheerleaders, it doesn't stick with him in a sort of psychological way. | ||
| I mean, the suicide rates are not the same. | ||
| The suicide rates among young men who are promiscuous is not even close to the suicide rate among young... I mean, there's an actual correlation between earlier sex, for young women particularly, and suicide rates. | ||
| And that's because women and men, and we all used to know this, but women and men treat sex differently because women and men are not the same. | ||
| Yeah, we should do a bit. | ||
| Well, I want to do some big IDW panels in general, maybe do some stuff live. | ||
| And I think we're discussing all sorts of stuff and all that. | ||
| But this would be a really rich topic. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Because it does raise questions as to like, what should we promote as a society? | ||
| Forget about government regulation. | ||
| What should we promote? | ||
| What are the basic social institutions that are necessary? | ||
| And is it possible that we totally effed up relations between the sexes and the future of long-term relationships in marriage by separating sex from marriage in a really significant way, which began really before even the 60s? | ||
| I mean, there's a decline in marriage that started before even the advent of the sexual revolution, per se. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Maybe a couple of more? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're a good man. | ||
| I know you have a real job and everything. | ||
|
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Oh, yeah. | |
| And I have to go write a bunch of crap after this. | ||
| So, let's see. | ||
| Another one. | ||
| Let's do the last one here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Does a political scale with statism on the left and anarchy on the right, this is from Patreon, where constitutionalism lies a bit right of center, make more sense than the traditional left-right scale we use? | ||
| Where does liberty lie in the traditional left-right scale? | ||
| I feel like we could do something a little more exciting for the finish. | ||
| But why don't we both do that one in 30 seconds and let's find something a little more exciting. | ||
| The 30 second answer is that statism on the left, anarchy on the right, is basically the American political scale. | ||
| The European political scale is nationalism versus internationalism. | ||
| And we're shifting towards that. | ||
| We are shifting towards that and it's dangerous. | ||
| I think that the political scale that says statism is on the left and anarchy is on the right, I think that that is a better scale. | ||
| I think it's a more accurate scale. | ||
| Yeah, I don't mean to dismiss the question, and I'll do more of it. | ||
| I'll do something on this question on Patreon itself, but for our big finish here, I feel like... Yeah, I agree. | ||
| Or it can come out of Ben Shapiro's mouth. | ||
| Okay, here we go, here we go. | ||
| Would you agree with the idea that, classically speaking, the left and the right have a fundamental disagreement on human nature? | ||
| I.e., man being inherently good or evil, keep up the great work. | ||
| Okay, let's do human nature questions. | ||
| Let's do human nature. | ||
| First, let me just tell you what I believe. | ||
| I believe people are basically good. | ||
| I believe you are born... I pretty much buy into Pinker's blank slate, but I think you're basically born good. | ||
| There's something innately human that you want to do good. | ||
| It doesn't mean we do good all the time. | ||
| We all do all sorts of things. | ||
| We lie and we cheat and we do this and that, and you have moments in your life where we could all look back and go, Those couple years I was really doing some self-destructive shit or whatever it is. | ||
| But I think there is something uniquely human about wanting to do good. | ||
| It's how human flourishing has existed. | ||
| It's not just because of the stuff that we can empirically test and all that. | ||
| There is something else about being human, that little spark that you see in a baby's eye when they know something's funny and they can't even speak. | ||
| There is something else that is That is there that is human that is good and I think | ||
| It's sort of your job to try to enhance that as much as possible. | ||
| At least I see that as my job, and I'm trying, and I will fail often, and I'll continue to fail. | ||
| But I'm really trying to be the best person that I can be while I am here, and I think that comes from something that's way before me. | ||
| That comes from something that I can't prove with tools here and measurements. | ||
| Like, it's just something that is. | ||
| I think that's probably a little bit of what your answer is, but maybe not all of your answers. | ||
| To a lot of folks on the left. | ||
| The idea that human beings are inherently good means that if we just unshackle you from the bounds of society, this sort of the Rousseau idea, that your innate goodness will spring forth and everything will be great. | ||
| Or from the Marxian idea, if you just change the economic system, then we'll all be inherently better and we'll see each other as brothers as opposed to enemies. | ||
| So I am of the kind of founding fathers idea, which is basically a biblical idea, which is that people are not angels and not devils, we're human beings. | ||
| We have capacity for good, we have capacity for evil. | ||
| Well, I love my two-and-a-half-year-old son. | ||
| He's a nutcase. | ||
| And were he an adult, he would be the worst person in the world. | ||
| He wants what he wants, and he wants it when he wants it, and he doesn't care about hitting people. | ||
| So you don't think he's innately good or innately evil. | ||
| You think he just is as a human, and it's sort of your job as a parent and society's job. | ||
| Civilization and inculcating virtue, that's your job as an adult. | ||
| And I think that the danger in the belief that people are inherently good is the idea if you just free them, everything is okay. | ||
| Free them from political institutions is one thing, but freeing them from social fabric and social institutions is a whole nother thing. | ||
| So this is where I would say this is why I still consider myself a classical liberal and not a libertarian, because I do think there is some role for government, and it's to protect those things. | ||
| And for me, it's not even about the role of government. | ||
| I think where libertarians really go wrong is the suggestion that social institutions are the cause of all the world's evils. | ||
| That what we really need is get rid of, knock down all the churches, knock down all of the places that are inculcating virtue, and self-interest alone will dictate. | ||
| I certainly don't believe in that. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| But, you know, somebody asked here about debating Yaron Brook. | ||
| I've invited Yaron on my program for specifically this, because Ayn Rand— Oh, are you guys doing it? | ||
| I know he wants to do it. | ||
| I mean, I'd love to have him on. | ||
| Or I'm happy to do it here. | ||
| I know you want to do it. | ||
| I mean, I think that we disagree on less than... I think that there's some semantic games being played about objectivism and what exactly is self-interest and all this kind of stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's do it. | |
| We'll do it on the next show. | ||
| I'm happy to do that. | ||
| But with that said, I think that... | ||
| Recognizing that human beings are capable of evil is a deeply important thing to recognizing that you have to, as an adult, cultivate your children in a way that they are going to be good. | ||
| So is that different, though, than what I said? | ||
| Because I believe we are born good, but it doesn't mean that evil, you can't act evilly, or that evil can't generate through a lot of people. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm very reticent to use the language, we're born good. | ||
| Because I don't think that babies are born with an innate... I think they're born with a basic, basic innate moral sense. | ||
| But it's really basic and non-cultivated. | ||
| And I think that if you had a baby's morality, if the world were run by babies, we'd all be dead. | ||
| And not just because they're dumb, but also because they're not moral. | ||
| They're not moral creatures. | ||
| They want what they want when they want it. | ||
| I think that that's something that has to be cultivated by society. | ||
| And reason is something that Must be cultivated over time, and that's why it's a constant attempt by anyone who's good to try and say, okay, what is impacting my reason here? | ||
| Is it passion that's impacting my reason? | ||
| Is it bias that's impacting my reason? | ||
| What is it that's making me unreasonable about this thing? | ||
| And the more reasonable we are, hopefully, the better we are as human beings, because we've actually fully considered the ramifications of the policies that we're pursuing and the actions that we're taking in our daily lives. | ||
| So I'm very into the risk of what we call in Judaism the yetzir ha-ra. | ||
| You know this, right? | ||
| There's the yetzir ha-tov and there's the yetzir ha-ra. | ||
| There's kind of the good inclination and the bad inclination. | ||
| And the idea in Judaism is they're constantly at war with one another, and it's your job | ||
| to try and strengthen the yetzir ha-tov so that it overcomes the yetzir ha-ra. | ||
| I think that's the struggle of mankind. | ||
| And it's a Christian notion as well. | ||
| I mean, the idea of the fall. | ||
| Sin is now embedded in you. | ||
| And even after Jesus is coming about, you still have to struggle with that, obviously. | ||
| You still have to struggle with the Satan behind you, basically. | ||
| But I think that recognizing the capacity for evil is perhaps the first step in becoming good. | ||
| And so this is why I'm extraordinarily reticent to say man is naturally good. | ||
| I think man is naturally Neither. | ||
| I think man is naturally driven towards self-interest and nastiness and tribalism and evil. | ||
| And man is naturally driven to fight that sort of stuff in a variety of ways. | ||
| But it requires an act of will in order to overcome all of those other inclinations. | ||
| Yeah, and I can get on board all that, and my fundamental belief is that people are good, but you do have to cultivate it. | ||
| I think people in Western society are good, and I think that's an outgrowth of several thousand years of history. | ||
| A lot of grooming. | ||
| I think if we dropped you in the middle of Afghanistan, you'd be pretty effed. | ||
| I'd be probably very different than I am right now. | ||
| As Peterson always says on this topic, the devil's in the details. | ||
| So, well, I gotta tell you, man, first off, thank you for doing this. | ||
| I know you're busy as hell. | ||
| Oh, you bet. | ||
| And, you know, you were the right guy to sit down. | ||
| Well, thanks. | ||
| As I say, I'm always happy to wreck your day, so. | ||
| I'm glad that we also ended on this note, because that conversation that we just had, I think, is what I think really matters. | ||
| And I think that's why thousands of people are showing up to your live events, thousands of people are showing up to these events that I'm doing with Peterson. | ||
| And by the way, I'll do a live stream later, but we just extended the tour into 2019. | ||
| People don't want this endless bloodshed, this mutually assured destruction. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I'll keep trying to offer another alternative. | |
| And what you learned in the last month is in what is obvious is that headline of the day is less important than the big ideas. | ||
| And so trying to escape headline of the day sounds like it was a good idea for you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| Well, thank you, Shapiro. | ||
| I'm going to go here for one second. | ||
| That's my camera right in my studio over here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So here's what we're going to do. | ||
| We launched a whole bunch of stuff today. | ||
| So I finally got DaveRubin.com after 10 or 15 years of trying. | ||
| So we have an all new website. | ||
| We launched an all new Patreon this morning that I want to do a live stream and talk to you guys about because I really want to start doing some new community building. | ||
| As you can see, we have a new set. | ||
| We have new graphics. | ||
| We have new music. | ||
| I'm sure you're all commenting on all of those things. | ||
| So I'll do a live stream probably in about an hour or two. | ||
| So we'll post that. | ||
| And again, thanks to Shapiro over here. | ||
| And we'll set up that thing with Brooke. | ||
| And what else? | ||
| Can I pimp anything else out for you? | ||
| Go check out my podcast, Ben Shapiro Show. | ||
| Have you heard of the Ben Shapiro Show? | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. |
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