May 10, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
58:02
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today is an Iraq war veteran, a political analyst, and America's favorite black gay Republican, Rob Smith. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| America's favorite black gay Republican. | ||
| That's a lot of pressure to put in a Twitter bio. | ||
| You know, it's a lot of pressure. | ||
| I feel that About a year ago about this time, because I came out as conservative a year ago. | ||
| Came out as conservative. | ||
| It's a fascinating phrase that we're going to talk a little bit about. | ||
| We'll get into that, absolutely. | ||
| But when I came out I said, I want something pithy and catchy and kind of funny, because it's a joke, you know? | ||
| America's favorite black gay Republican. | ||
| I want there to be a sense of humor in it, because as you know, you use humor to bring people in, then you hit them with the facts. | ||
| So a lot of people are going to be going, wait a minute, wait a minute, these guys are supposed to hate identity politics, but he's saying he's America's favorite black gay Republican. | ||
| Well, here's my thing with that. | ||
| I think that there's, number one, all politics is identity politics. | ||
| So everybody does identity politics. | ||
| The left does it and the right does it. | ||
| I think that since coming out as a conservative, the way I play identity politics is this. | ||
| I'm black, I'm gay, I'm an Iraq war veteran, I'm all these different things, and they don't matter about my politics because I can be all of these things and still love America. | ||
| And the way the left plays identity politics is we hate you evil white men, or this is my 72 genders, or all this stuff. | ||
| So I feel like they use identity politics not only in a super negative and controlling way, but as a way to get people's votes. | ||
| It sucks, though, to kind of have to do a little bit of what they do to throw it in their face, right? | ||
| Because any time, I don't mention that I'm gay that often, but any time that I do, I have no problem mentioning it. | ||
| I'm more than happy to talk about it. | ||
| But anytime that I do, it really only is to throw the use, the way that they use gay people, it's to throw that back in their face. | ||
| Like, I have no, I don't want special credit for it, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's no special credit. | ||
| I think that for me, when you get into my history and, you know, I'm an Iraq War veteran, I protested against Don't Ask, Don't Tell. | ||
| And I came out at 19 kind of like to myself and a couple of friends of my mother, but when I got out of the military at around 21 years old, because I had to serve under Don't Ask Don't Tell, I said I'm done with closets. | ||
| So I'm gonna be out as gay. | ||
| So being gay to me has always kind of been a political act. | ||
| And when I was protesting against Don't Ask, Don't Tell and getting arrested at the White House and doing all these different things, it was always a political act for me to be gay. | ||
| So even coming out as a conservative and being on the right, and I'm proudly on the right, being gay is still a political act because I have to go into these spaces and say, I'm gay and this is why that matters and this is how we can change the party and change the idea of conservatism to bring more people in. | ||
| Do you ever find that conservatives have problems with gay people? | ||
| 'Cause people keep telling me that all these conservatives hate gay people, and I go to events all over the place, | ||
| all over the country, all over the world, and I meet all these conservatives. | ||
| I'm not saying there are none. | ||
| I have no doubt there's a certain sect of Bible thumpers, obviously, that still do. | ||
| Or some people that have different religious beliefs. | ||
| You know, Ben Shapiro, from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, not thrilled with gay marriage, | ||
| but now takes a libertarian approach to civility, I don't need him to bow to my beliefs. | ||
| But I don't find that there's any real pushback against gay people from conservatives anymore. | ||
| I just don't see it. | ||
| This is what I've seen, and I've seen very, very little in the way of people having some problem with me being gay. | ||
| In my experience, and I've been, God, I spoke at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City, and I speak at these Republican events all over the country, And it's not so much, I have a problem with you being gay, it's some people say, one person came up to me and she said, you know, you're so good looking, and you're black, and you know, you're all these things, like, why do you have to talk about the gay thing? | ||
| And I told her, I was like, I talk about the gay thing because it's very important for me to talk about it because people need to know there are gay conservatives out there that follow me right now that are afraid to come out. | ||
| And so I need to take this gayness to this space and let them know that it's okay | ||
| and also let you guys know that you're missing out on a base of millions of voters | ||
| by doing things that can even be construed as anti-gay. | ||
| You think it's one of those things where it's sort of, you have to do it so that it can get to the point | ||
| Is that really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I was having this conversation with Candace and I shared this at the Blixit rally over the weekend as well. | ||
| Doing identity politics, you do it now so that at a certain point we don't have to do it anymore. | ||
| So we have to say that I'm a gay Republican or I'm a black Republican or I'm a gay black conservative or whatever you want to say because as Americans we have to break all that stuff down and figure out what our identity as Americans is and that's the point for me. | ||
| Yeah, alright, so I want to talk about what it's like coming out as a conservative, as a gay black man, the rest of it, but let's just back up all together. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about growing up, your family, that kind of thing. | ||
| So, I am from Akron, Ohio. | ||
| One of the biggest things that people like to say to discredit black conservatives is that we were all born wealthy. | ||
| We were all born upper middle class and what we're doing is we're just trying to protect our privilege. | ||
| I'm from Akron, Ohio. | ||
| I was in Akron, Ohio. | ||
| So you weren't in Bel Air. | ||
| I was not in Bel Air. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I was in Akron, Ohio. | ||
| And check the stats on Akron, Ohio. | ||
| Anybody that doesn't know where that is went to the worst, one of the worst public school | ||
| systems in the state. | ||
| You can look on the website right now. | ||
| Akron public schools are rated D plus. | ||
| So I came from a single, you know, mother household. | ||
| You know, I came from all this stuff. | ||
| And my mother tells me this story. | ||
| Now, I was too young to remember, but obviously I went to kindergarten in a school that was in my neighborhood. | ||
| And my mother tells me this story about going to see me in kindergarten one day. | ||
| And it was this, you know, it was a 99% black school. | ||
| People were just running around crazy. | ||
| And she said, I had to pull you out of that school because I knew you weren't going to learn anything. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Send me to school all the way across town. | ||
| The school was mostly white. | ||
| That doesn't make it better. | ||
| What made it better was the property taxes, and it was just a more funded school. | ||
| So I was able to get that kind of base. | ||
| Went back to my side of town for middle school and high school, which was just a terrible experience. | ||
| And I tell people all the time, when they ask me about, you know, sort of things in the world and Western civilization and all that, I'm like, look, I went to Akron Public Schools. | ||
| There are so many things that I just do not know. | ||
| And so I had that experience, but in those days, and probably still today, somebody that looks like me that comes from where I come from, if I'm not dribbling a basketball or doing whatever, they don't know what to do with you. | ||
| So I was not tracked into college. | ||
| I wasn't tracked into any of these things. | ||
| I graduated high school at barely, I think it was either 16 or barely 17, and just had no path. | ||
| So I joined the military right out of high school because I needed a path, I needed a job, I needed something to do. | ||
| I wish that I could say, and my military service is great and I love this country, and that five years that I spent in the military is probably the greatest thing I'll ever do. | ||
| But I can't lie and say that at 17 years old, I was so patriotic, I wanted to serve my country. | ||
| It was a way for me to move beyond. | ||
| Yeah, wow. | ||
| Alright, well before we get to that, I can't let anyone mention basketball. | ||
| I got a boy. | ||
| You got any skills? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I'm the worst black man ever. | ||
| I, like, am terrible at basketball. | ||
| I don't want to brag, but I won Most Improved Player of the New York City Gay Men's Basketball League. | ||
| Did you? | ||
| In, I think, 2012, when I was already, like, 37, which you beat Most Improved Player at 37. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not bad. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| It's really funny that they have that gay basketball league there. | ||
| There's a part of me that has always wanted to try it, but I know it'd be so bad. | ||
| Dude, there are guys dunking. | ||
| I mean, it's a serious league. | ||
| And it's funny, because I always, for me at least, and I wonder for you, my sports and my sexuality had nothing to do with each other ever. | ||
| I never brought my sexuality out on the court in any way, you know what I mean? | ||
| It wasn't like that. | ||
| The only reason I joined that league was at that point in my life when I came out late and I finally was like, ah, let me just meet some... I didn't really like the bar scene or like... There's nothing there. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't like that, and I was like, oh, if there happened to be some gay people that also like basketball, maybe I'll find some friends. | ||
| And I did find some friends there, and half of them, it's like, you're gay, really? | ||
| When a guy dunks on you. | ||
| It's crazy, and some of those guys almost went pro. | ||
| That's how good they are. | ||
| The weird thing about being gay, and not only am I gay, I also used to be a fat kid as well. | ||
| Boy, you're really going for it here. | ||
| You got everything. | ||
| Did you have a limp at any point? | ||
| I didn't have a limp. | ||
| No limp. | ||
| I did not have a limp. | ||
| I thought he was like fat, like some fat black gay kid, was not athletic at all. | ||
| So I didn't discover, because there are some sports I'm good at. | ||
| I played in the gay volleyball league in New York City for a couple of years and now I'm a pariah since I came out as conservative. | ||
| Oh jeez. | ||
| But I thought they were all tolerant. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| New York City gays? | ||
|
unidentified
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They're not very tolerant? | |
| No, not so much. | ||
| I am shocked. | ||
| But I discovered that I am athletic, and I discovered that I'm great at volleyball, great at tennis, you know, like lifting weights, like being in shape, but that's kind of what I discovered about myself, kind of like, I don't want to say later in life, but definitely post-30, that I actually, you know, have some sports skills. | ||
| Yeah, all right, good. | ||
| So when you joined the military, were you already sort of out to yourself? | ||
| Now I'm talking about sexuality, not politics. | ||
| Not politics, no. | ||
| It was certainly not a conservative thing. | ||
| I was out to myself, I think, in the way that a lot of gay teens are. | ||
| I knew that I was kind of feeling a way about guys that I was supposed to feel about girls, but I don't know if I could really kind of quantify it in that way. | ||
| And when I went into the military, in those days, they actually asked you, are you gay? | ||
| And I said, "No." | ||
| Not only because I didn't know how to define it at the time, but also I knew that that was a barrier | ||
| to what I wanted to do. | ||
| So being in the military, I came out to myself, started exploring my sexuality, exploring all of that stuff. | ||
| And like I said, when I got done with the military coming out, it was like a political act. | ||
| I was like, no more closets. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Were you finding other gay people in the military? | ||
| Like what is that? | ||
| What was that like then? | ||
| I mean, now, now where it's more accepted and don't exist and whatever. | ||
| The thing about, um, it's really funny how it is now, is that there are entire Instagram accounts dedicated to gay guys in the military. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| It's called Gay Military Dudes, and I love the fact that these young gay men in the military are so open about, you know, their sexuality, and they're posting thought pics, and they're doing all this, and I'm like, great. | ||
| And you're saying the military hasn't crumbled since, and it's not causing demoralization, or everyone's still okay? | ||
| Everybody's still good. | ||
| But back then, there was this underground movement of gay people, gays and lesbians, that were in the military. | ||
| And I remember The very first Pride I went to, I was stationed in Fort Carson, Colorado, so like right on Colorado Springs, and my very first Pride was Denver Pride. | ||
| So I went there, I think it was like maybe 19 or 20 at the time, and that was my first time being around lots of other gay men at the same time, and it was the first time that, you know, I was getting attention from men and people were looking at me. | ||
| And I was like, oh, he's cute. | ||
| And I was like, oh, so this is what this is like. | ||
| So there was a thriving underground gay culture in the military. | ||
| Were you afraid to go out and go to a gay pride parade while you're serving? - Absolutely, absolutely. | ||
| Because it's like, don't ask, don't tell was tricky because it was not only you can't tell somebody | ||
| that you're gay, but if you were discovered to be gay, then people would go up the chain of command | ||
| But the thing about it is, and this is what we always realized, that nobody would care because there were plenty of guys in my unit that knew I was gay. | ||
| And a funny story, there was a club called, I think it's now defunct, called Hide and Seek in Colorado Springs. | ||
| And they used to be open to people under 21 after 2am. | ||
| after 2 a.m. so I would be yeah yeah yeah yeah it would be open to 21 it would be | ||
| open to people under 21 after 2 a.m. because it'd be like open till 5 and | ||
| they wouldn't be serving any booze so I was young in the military I was like | ||
| maybe 20 years old I would take a nap at 1030 and I'd wake up at 130 I would put | ||
| on I had like like leather pants and a tank top it's insane crazy and then | ||
| drive to hide-and-seek and dance all night and it was kind of it was a more | ||
| gay crowd but it was mixed as well and I saw a couple of my sergeants there Wow | ||
| one time at the club and they saw me so you and they saw me and and they saw me | ||
| and they were like okay this is interesting and they saw me kind of like | ||
| dancing with some redhead and you know feeling my oats yeah I mean feeling | ||
| myself but Remember being terrified that weekend that they were gonna out me that they were gonna like tell my superiors or whatever it never did Well, but you had it on them too, right? | ||
| I mean, no, they weren't gay. | ||
| Oh, they were they were just like they were their girlfriends because it was Wow, I just had a completely different story going on in my head for the last 30 seconds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, they were there with a girlfriend. | ||
| Yeah Our spot. | ||
| Oh, yeah, gotcha. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well and so they did they didn't bust me out in A lot of these guys are still my friends to this day, my Facebook friends, and they see all the stuff that I'm doing. | ||
| I'm here, I'm there, I'm coming out as a Republican, I'm doing all this, and they're like, Smith, you know, we always knew you were gay. | ||
| We just didn't care. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because you're a good soldier. | ||
| So I know what most gay people feel about being in the closet, just how you can be as a person. | ||
| It's just, you know, you're I always felt like I was lying all the time, accidentally. | ||
| It wasn't even intentionalized. | ||
| People would ask me something, and I could immediately, you know, where were you last night? | ||
| And I could just lie without thinking. | ||
| It's really twisted, dark, it's not fun to think back on that kind of thing. | ||
| But for someone in the military, don't ask, don't tell, do you think that affected your ability to function as a soldier? | ||
| I think it did, because I think that to me, The biggest thing about being closeted in the military was that it affected the relationships that I was able to have with my fellow soldiers. | ||
| There was a wall there. | ||
| And if I was able to just be gay and nobody cared, that wall wouldn't be there. | ||
| And it's so important when you're serving with people to be able to be close to them. | ||
| Like literally to be able to bring your full self to work. | ||
| Because not only were we serving together, I mean, we deployed together. | ||
| You know, I did a tour in Kuwait, I did a tour in Iraq. | ||
| These are the people that you're with. | ||
| These are basically your family. | ||
| And you have to hide a part of yourself. | ||
| And all the times that they were hanging out or doing things that we could become closer, I was separating myself from that. | ||
| Because I knew that there was a part of me that had to hide. | ||
| And so, when I bring all of that stuff now, to being gay and being open as a conservative and everything. | ||
| It is so important for me to be open in that way because I can't have that wall there between me and other conservatives and me and other people in the movement. | ||
| And the younger conservatives have been like, these kids don't care. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| Some of the older ones need to kind of be brought around a little bit, but man, they don't care. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think it's just because young people somehow have started to embrace a more libertarian view of the world? | ||
| I mean, it's like we've got sort of Crazy leftism on one hand, which seems to be catching fire all the time. | ||
| It's really pushed on us by the media. | ||
| But then I see, and I guess it's a little selected by who invites me to these schools, but I see such a strong libertarian spirit with these kids. | ||
| Not meaning that they're all politically libertarians at every level, but they wanna live their lives, they wanna love who they love, they wanna smoke whatever they wanna smoke, or whatever. | ||
| And I'm very enthused by that. | ||
| I think that the generation right now, they really do just, they just want to let people live. | ||
| And they want to let people do their thing. | ||
| They don't care about gay, they don't care about transgender, they don't care about any of these different things. | ||
| They just want to let people live. | ||
| And it's really funny, like the conversation I had last night at UCLA, I had an event. | ||
| And it's so funny because when I was protesting against Don't Ask, Don't Tell, I was, you know, doing a lot of lecture work and I was talking with the young LGBT student groups and I was just like, you know, you can be anything you want to be. | ||
| Let's empower you. | ||
| Like, let's do all this stuff. | ||
| And I'm having these same conversations with young people who are afraid to come out as conservative. | ||
| Same thing, Dave. | ||
| Yeah, no, it is, all right, so, all right, let's just dive into it then, because I really do feel this now, because I know what the closeted thing was like in terms of sexuality, but I see this now, the amount of emails that I get, and when I meet people on the street, and they'll kinda whisper to me, you know, it's not even, they're not even saying, yeah, well, they'll go, Dave, and then they'll go, it's not even that they're saying they're a conservative, per se, they're basically just saying they're not a progressive, that they're not, they don't come from the woke, Monster, you know what I mean? | ||
| And they're walking around with that, that feeling that you described a moment ago related to sexuality, where you can't be fully there with someone. | ||
| And I think there are quite literally, I think there are millions of people in the United States that are walking around in a closeted state, not because they're Nazis or white supremacists or haters or racists, but just because they happen to have either some conservative beliefs or some libertarian beliefs or something like that. | ||
| And I see it all the time, and I'm sure you probably get ten times as many messages as I do, but you see it. | ||
| And when you go have these conversations, it is the same conversations that I was having with young gay kids that were afraid to come out. | ||
| I had a conversation with a kid last night. | ||
| He was just like, man, how do I come out to my friends as conservative? | ||
| Or how do I come out to my friends as somebody who's not a leftist? | ||
| And this is what I always say to them, you know, the real ones will stick around, the fake ones will go. | ||
| I promise you that. | ||
| And when, like a year ago, I remember sitting, I was visiting my best friend in Vegas, and I was thinking about, I know from my experience, you know, being very prominent in the Don't Ask Don't Tell thing, That when you come out as something, like you're coming out to make a statement, and it has to be a media moment, and you have to get your face out there, because that's what gives other people the strength to come out. | ||
| And I was like, man, if I don't do this, somebody else is going to do this. | ||
| Because I know I'm not the only black gay Republican out there. | ||
| I have fans that are black gay Republicans, and Latina, lesbian conservatives, and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| But I was like, if I don't do this, somebody else is gonna do this. | ||
| And somebody needs to do this because these people need to know that it's okay. | ||
| And when I take the hits, and you take the hits, and Candace takes the hits, and all these other people takes the hits, it makes it easier for these other people to come out. | ||
| So I've asked a lot of my guests that have taken those hits this question. | ||
| I usually ask it at the end, but what do you think it is about you that allows you to want to take the hits? | ||
| Or maybe not even want to, that you do, whether you want to or not. | ||
| I'm telling you, the Army builds something that is indestructible. | ||
| Indestructible. | ||
| I served for five years. | ||
| I saw some things in Iraq. | ||
| I saw some things overseas. | ||
| And not even outside of that, what the basic training does is it just builds you up into somebody that has a lot of discipline, that can take a lot of hits. | ||
| And I know enough about media, and I know enough about the people that are making the moves right now, I know that it is important for me to do this. | ||
| Because, and I'm telling you Dave, and you've probably seen the shift in the past five to seven years since you've been doing this and have really been blown up and traveling all the world, there's a shift that's going on. | ||
| Yeah, it's real. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| And in three to five years, me being a black gay conservative, it's just going to be like, you know, whatever. | ||
| And I hate the fact that the gay community, I'm kind of, I'm like, I'm excommunicated now. | ||
| You know, so I'm not getting invites to the Glam Media Awards. | ||
| They ain't thrilling me either. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We should start our own awards. | ||
| We totally should. | ||
| The Gay Freethinker Awards. | ||
| But you get excommunicated, and they're very high-level people that, I mean, I used to get invited to all the stuff in New York City because I was a gay person in the media. | ||
| And when I came out last year, it was like silence. | ||
| So what does that really tell you about these organizations and sort of like GLAAD and these other organizations? | ||
| They're for gay people, right? | ||
| They're supposed to be for gay people and if they subscribe to intersectionality, they should be for black people and the rest of it. | ||
| But you're saying you were in that. | ||
| They loved you. | ||
| You come out as conservative. | ||
| We're done with you. | ||
| What it tells me is, number one, that these organizations are not for all LGBTQ people. | ||
| They're for LGBTQ Democrats, first of all. | ||
| These are leftist organizations. | ||
| People really need to understand this. | ||
| I know I say it all the time, but I think that, because people just think Glad is for gay people. | ||
| This is for this person. | ||
| And it's like, no, that's not really what's going on here. | ||
| But it really takes work to get people to fully understand why that is true. | ||
| And there used to be, and we talked about this a little bit before we started filming, there used to be a part of me that wanted nothing more than to be kind of like a gay celebrity. | ||
| I get to go to the GLAAD Media Awards, and I get to go to the HRC red carpets, and now I realize that what I'm doing right now is so much bigger than any of that stuff. | ||
| And I'm doing this not for fame, because the concept of fame has been very strange to me in grappling with this newfound attention, but it's not about being with some D-list gay celebrities on the red carpet. | ||
| It's certainly not about being with, even though I love all the drunk ladies. | ||
| By the way, usually the ones that they're putting on the red carpet, they're not even gay half the time, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I told you, I used to do these red carpets when I had a show on LQ, and so I was interviewing people. | ||
| I was on the other side of the red carpet, and mostly it was just housewives of New York, drunk, these drunk plastic women that are like, oh, I love gays. | ||
| Let me tell you something, and I can tell you a story, and she will remain nameless, But I was at one of these award shows, and this was obviously before I came out when I was still getting invited, and this person was just a drunken sloppy mess. | ||
| And I'm just like, how is this celebrating gay people? | ||
| How is this elevating us? | ||
| And so what you have is With the GLAADs of the world, this is about bullying Hollywood celebrities into thinking that, you know what, if you don't show up to our red carpet events, you're not supporting the LGBTQ community. | ||
| So that's what that's all about. | ||
| The HRC is obviously a leftist organization, like very much so a leftist organization. | ||
| And what irritates me about this entire thing is that these organizations were not started as leftist organizations. | ||
| They weren't supposed to be leftist organizations. | ||
| At that time, they wanted real equality. | ||
| They wanted equality under the law. | ||
| They wanted the things that we have right now. | ||
| But to continue to get funding, to continue to be data centers for the Democratic Party, | ||
| they have to go with whatever far-left craziness. | ||
| And it's the intersectionality cult. | ||
| And it's being lectured by a queer Muslim at the GLAAD Media Awards | ||
| about how gays aren't inclusive enough for Islam and about how the LGBT community | ||
| needs to accept undocumented people. | ||
| It's just like all this stuff that was never, it's never what our movement was about. | ||
| And at the same time, for me, as a gay man, I know that HIV, AIDS rates among young black gay men are still exploding. | ||
| We have a huge problem with meth. | ||
| There's real stuff still going on. | ||
| So what should they have done then? | ||
| Was there a moment that there should have been a course correction, so say gay marriage gets passed, Don't Ask, Don't Tell is gone? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think the organizations, if they had done it right, I mean, do they close up shop? | ||
| Well, I think that's what they were afraid of. | ||
| They were afraid of now that we have this, quote unquote, true equality, they have to close up shop. | ||
| Chris Rock, one of his great lines, the cops need a certain amount of crime. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I think that what happened after Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Repeal, and Marriage Equality were two of the biggest gay rights wins of our generation. | ||
| Like, I think of our lifetime. | ||
| And after that happened, I think that they just needed something else. | ||
| They needed some more funding. | ||
| They needed to continue to be relevant. | ||
| So they've gone into all of this intersectionality, far-left insanity. | ||
| And what I see from being so open and being a gay conservative out here is that there is A large group of gays and lesbians that are conservative that want nothing to do with the leftist nonsense. | ||
| They don't want to vote with their sexual orientation. | ||
| They want to vote for their values. | ||
| They want to vote with their pocketbooks. | ||
| You know, they want to vote based on who they are. | ||
| So you're saying, let me get this straight, gay people are just like everybody else? | ||
| Just like everybody else, Dave. | ||
| Just like everybody else. | ||
| Crazy, right? | ||
| Nuts! | ||
| Insane! | ||
| Yeah, and you'd think... So where are the right gay organizations? | ||
| Are there any? | ||
| I mean, like the Line Cabin Republicans? | ||
| Are there anybody that you're out there and you're like, oh, you guys are doing some good grassroots work related to gay issues if any remain? | ||
| It's never going to be the HRCs and the GLADs of the world. | ||
| It's always the grassroots organizations. | ||
| It's your Columbus Pride. | ||
| It's the Brooklyn Community Pride Center. | ||
| It's like these are the organizations that our money really needs to go to. | ||
| Because these organizations are doing work on the ground to give young LGBT people access to jobs and education and all the stuff that the GLADs and the HRCs of the world claim that they're fighting for, but really they're just paying a lot of bigwigs like insane six-figure salaries | ||
| and trying to get Madonna on a red carpet. | ||
| And God love Madonna, we all love Madonna, but that's not the work. | ||
| So I always try to elevate the smaller organizations because they need the time and the money | ||
| more than the big ones. | ||
| For the record, I'm more of a Tina Turner guy. | ||
| You're more of a Tina Turner? | ||
| I hear she gives an amazing show. | ||
| I haven't been yet. | ||
| I've never, well, I don't think she's going live anymore. | ||
| I think she's done touring. | ||
| She moved to Sweden or something. | ||
| I think she gave up her US citizenship and she's just riding it out. | ||
| But what I will say about Madonna, the gays are going to kill me. | ||
| I saw her one time and it wasn't great. | ||
| I saw her once. | ||
| New York. | ||
| Confessions, Confessions on the Dance Floor? | ||
| It wasn't, it was MDMA. | ||
| Oh, that's the one! | ||
| That was the whole dance album, right? | ||
| No, Confessions was the dance album. | ||
| MDMA was like in 2012. | ||
| I think I was on MDMA when I went to that one. | ||
| I paid a lot of money for those tickets. | ||
| We were at Madison Square Garden, somewhere out in Jersey. | ||
| I was way up there in the rafters, and I was just like, eh. | ||
| I'll wait till the Farewell Vegas tour where she finally does all the things that people wanna hear. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, age-wise, she's getting there. | ||
| Yeah, but you know, she keeps it together. | ||
| She keeps it together. | ||
| She does, she does. | ||
| All right, let's talk a little bit about, I've heard Candace talk about how most black people actually are conservatives, but they sort of don't know it or they can't accept it because of the way the media has treated black people, that the default position is you must be a Democrat. | ||
| Do you sense that? | ||
| I sense that. | ||
| And to get into that, you really have to understand how deeply entrenched this idea that black people have to be Democrats is. | ||
| And I said this a little bit on the Vice thing that I did. | ||
| black celebrities, entertainers, ballplayers, athletes, from the top of the charts to the Insta-Thot | ||
| with 10,000 followers. | ||
| These are all people that are pushing leftists. | ||
| You know, they're pushing leftist tactics. | ||
| And black people, we, more so than I think other races, we look for representation in media. | ||
| And we look for representation in pop culture. | ||
| And these are our heroes. | ||
| These are the people that we want to be like. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why this idea that we have to be on the left is so firmly entrenched. | ||
| So why do you think that is, looking for it sort of elsewhere? | ||
| Do you think that has something to do with the black family and some of the stuff that Larry Elder would talk about? | ||
| It has everything to do with what Larry Elder is talking about. | ||
| Larry Elder will tell you, and I'm pretty sure he did, that the number one issue... Larry Elder kicked the shit out of me. | ||
| That's what woke me up. | ||
| But Larry Elder will tell you that the number one problem in the black community is black fatherlessness, right? | ||
| That we don't have men in the homes. | ||
| And so when there's not a man in the home, when there's not a man to raise that young man in the home, they look to athletes, ballplayers, the Colin Kaepernicks, whoever. | ||
| And so when Colin Kaepernick, just to give an example, is some kid's hero, right? | ||
| And he sees Colin Kaepernick taking a knee. | ||
| For black lives matter. | ||
| And that's where he's getting his politics from. | ||
| Because that kid doesn't know who I am. | ||
| That kid certainly doesn't know who Larry Elder is. | ||
| And the fact that that kid is not going to know who Larry Elder is, is a shame. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And so that's the message that we get. | ||
| Even though black people do tend to be a little bit more conservative. | ||
| Just in terms of If you, for example, said that black people need fathers in the home, and we need to stop having kids out of wedlock, and we need to start doing all of these things that will elevate ourselves, you're a racist by supremacist. | ||
| I would say everyone, regardless of race, should have those things. | ||
| things to the best of their ability, not to say it can't happen otherwise. | ||
| You just said you were raised by your mother. | ||
| I was. | ||
| You turned out pretty good. | ||
| I turned out pretty good. | ||
| So of course there are those outlier cases. | ||
| Yeah, but at the same time, I went to the military for five years. | ||
| And so the military taught me, the military gave me a male influence, multiple male influences. | ||
| The military taught me how to be a man. | ||
| The military taught me discipline. | ||
| The military taught me courage. | ||
| The military taught me self-control. | ||
| The military taught me reliance. | ||
| All of the things that a father is supposed to teach you. | ||
| And so now, me as a gay black man saying these things, you know, if you're a white person, you know, you're a white supremacist, you're whatever, but I'm... Sorry about that. | ||
| I'm the Kuhn. | ||
| I'm the Uncle Tom. | ||
| I'm whatever. | ||
| And there is this very huge movement of very far left gay black men who it seems like they have these large online platforms And it seems like their entire goal in life is to just tear down straight black men, or tear down the idea of masculinity, or tear down the idea that our boys need men in the homes to teach them how to be men. | ||
| So they want to tear that down. | ||
| And when I look at their platforms and I look at the things that they say, and sometimes they come after me and I ignore it, because none of those people are my enemy. | ||
| There is nobody that is out there that's a public figure that looks like me that is not my enemy. | ||
| That is my enemy. | ||
| These people are not my enemy. | ||
| But when I look at the platform that they have, I say, you have so many people listening to you. | ||
| Why are you always preaching divisiveness and hatred? | ||
| Why are you trying to tear down black men? | ||
| We should be lifting each other up. | ||
| We should be empowering each other because, you know, our community needs it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it seems to me that mostly, and it's not just with, say, those black men, but anyone that buys in to the far-left ideology, they want conformity. | ||
| There is some sort of, as I say all the time, Peter Boghossian, who's been on the show many times, calls this postmodern ideology a secular religion. | ||
| And they don't want apostates. | ||
| And they especially don't want apostates that look like you. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I've never really heard that. | ||
| I mean, I've talked about that idea in some of my lectures, but I've never heard it said quite like that. | ||
| Because this is my thing, and one of the best things that happened for me over the past year is that I found religion. | ||
| And I found God. | ||
| Because I will tell you, and you probably know, there, and I don't know what your religion is, but for me, there's a lot of people that are running after Twitter followers and fans and Instagram followers and fame | ||
| and money and all this other stuff and Not there's not an amount of Twitter followers or fame or | ||
| any of that stuff that is gonna fill that hole that you're looking to fill | ||
| And Twitter followers don't fill the existential void Do not in the black hole of existence, you're not filled by | ||
| Instagram light It is not. | ||
| And you've got like 10 times my following. | ||
| And when things started taking off a little bit last year, like when my life started getting bigger, and in some other ways, I had to make things smaller. | ||
| And so I made my circle smaller, and I tried to get closer with my husband and my best friends, but I also found God. | ||
| And it is. | ||
| Were you not religious before? | ||
| Were you not? | ||
| Were you were you specifically not a believer before? | ||
| No, not not at all. | ||
| I was raised in the church, African Methodist Episcopal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the AME church, like I was there. | ||
| And when you're young and black in the church, church is a full like an all day event. | ||
| I'm there at 10 a.m. | ||
| for Sunday school. | ||
| And then you do the service and then it's two thirty dinner. | ||
| You're like, you're not out of there till after dark. | ||
| But I think that in my first 11 years in the city, when I was kind of doing some of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell activism and trying to find my path, I was looking for fulfillment in all of those things that I told you before. | ||
| And when I started getting those things, I realized that, not that it wasn't enough, but there needs to be something else to ground me. | ||
| And one of the biggest things that the super far left tells young gay people is that God is your enemy, and Christians are your enemy, and evangelical Christians want to put you in conversion camp, and just all of this crazy stuff. | ||
| to separate them from religion so that this far-left ideology becomes their religion. | ||
| And I say that, you know, God is a gift in my life right now. | ||
| And I say that. | ||
| And I'm not embarrassed by that anymore. | ||
| And I don't feel like that's something that I should be ashamed to talk about, even as a gay man. | ||
| and somebody described me on Twitter, and I think it's funny, | ||
| and they said, "Former military leftist turn "right wing Bible thumping Trump tard." | ||
| And I thought that-- - That's a lot of words. | ||
| That's a lot of words. - I thought that was hysterical. | ||
| I showed that to my husband, we both cackled. | ||
| I don't hear you Bible thumping. | ||
| No, I mean, I'm not-- | ||
| You may be a Trump tard and a blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, right wing Trump tard. | ||
| I don't Bible thump. | ||
| I just, I talk about... | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| religion in my life and how it's grounded me and how it's become just a really powerful guiding force. | ||
| And it is fulfilling and it is grounding in a way that, let me tell you something as a young gay man, like all the sex, all the partying, all that stuff, like I did it all. | ||
| And there's nothing in that. | ||
| And for me, it is becoming grounded in religion and God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think a lot of gay people have, like, an extra struggle when it comes to sort of the existential questions? | ||
| Because I know I definitely did. | ||
| Like, that you are something that society tells you at least... How old are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh? | |
| How old are you? | ||
| Am I allowed to ask how old you are? | ||
| Did I just get to the one question that I can't answer? | ||
| That's the one question you can't answer! | ||
| I'm in my 30s, Dave. | ||
| You're in your 30s, wow! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| All right, so that's how it is. | ||
| Well, I, as an elder, I am 42 years old. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, you know, when I was in, say, high school and college, you know, this is way before gay marriage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, during Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I never really saw sort of a functional future. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not that I saw a dysfunctional future. | ||
| I just saw no future. | ||
| I was just like, I'm now, and I'm just gonna keep living now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I do think for a lot of gay people, it causes like this weird belief schism | ||
| or something like that. | ||
| So it's interesting to hear that just in the last year, you've come back to some of this stuff. | ||
| And I think a lot of people have, by the way. | ||
| I think they are and I want them to. | ||
| And it's like, so we tell the, I guess, I don't wanna say right-wingers anymore | ||
| because I guess I'm a right-winger now. | ||
| But they always say that you can't call gay a lifestyle because it's my sexual orientation. | ||
| It's not a lifestyle. | ||
| But there are elements of it that are very lifestyle oriented. | ||
| The party lifestyle, the circuit party culture, the gay culture, like all of that other stuff. | ||
| I don't like any of that stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like the Golden Girls. | ||
| Who doesn't like the Golden Girls? | ||
| That's like gay enough for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| I watch three hours of the Golden Girls on a Sunday morning. | ||
| I'm very happy. | ||
| But the cool thing right now is that people like you and people like me can reach these young people and they can see something that is outside of all of that messiness. | ||
| And I come to it as not somebody that judges it, but as somebody that did it all. | ||
| Now, I never did drugs. | ||
| I was never a druggie. | ||
| I don't even like smoking weed. | ||
| They say that people that are a little neurotic, and I'm a little neurotic, they say weed doesn't go well with us, and it doesn't go well with me. | ||
| So I never did the drugs. | ||
| You haven't found the right indica, but I get it. | ||
| You're a conservative now, it's too late. | ||
| No, it's not even that! | ||
| And it's really funny, I'm like to the right of some people on marijuana legalization, but that's a whole other issue. | ||
| We can go there, but go ahead. | ||
| But I did all the partying. | ||
| I did all the circuit parties, and I traveled, and kissing boys, and having lots of sex, like I did all that. | ||
| And I fundamentally know that there's nothing there. | ||
| And I think that the problem with reaching these kids right now is that I am like, it feels lonely. | ||
| Because it really does feel like I'm one of maybe three or four people that like have these large platforms, and obviously you as well. | ||
| But They see people that are like, you know, they see the drag queens and the Hollywood celebrities and all that other stuff. | ||
| I just really want these kids to see that they can have a more grounded life. | ||
| And not that I'm trying to be anybody's role model in a way, because I'm like, my thing is I did all the mess so you don't have to. | ||
| Yeah, I feel very, even though I didn't do the, I mean, I did do my own mess in a way, and I did do the drugs, and I did do all that, but I wasn't really into the scene, let's say, but I do feel that, too. | ||
| I'm not trying to be anyone's role model at all, 100%. | ||
| You were setting yourself up for failure. | ||
| Yeah, and I lived through, if anything, I would say I lived through shit. | ||
| To get to where I am so that hopefully the next, that gay kid that's 18 doesn't have to do it, you know what I mean? | ||
| Or live through less shit. | ||
| Yeah, right, because everyone's got shit going on, right? | ||
| And the people that came before me lived through far more than that. | ||
| But there's an interesting... | ||
| Parallel here with the way Hollywood treats all of this because you mentioned something about just a moment ago you mentioned how That black culture puts more emphasis on Hollywood and these figures and everything and I was thinking like even just in the Oscars last year that Black Panther Yeah, was nominated for an Oscar now. | ||
| I've seen every so so I think we're gonna have a little difference here because I I've seen every Marvel movie. | ||
| I just saw Endgame a couple days ago. | ||
| Yeah It's gonna make me go see that this weekend I don't want to say anything right now, but I've seen every one of the movies. | ||
| I love superhero movies. | ||
| I love Star Wars. | ||
| I love all that stuff. | ||
| Black Panther was a very average movie. | ||
| There was, in my opinion, there was nothing... Racist. | ||
| For shame. | ||
| For shame, racist. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| Larry Elder said it, too. | ||
| But he's a self-hating black guy, so you just can't win here. | ||
| But my point is that if Within the scheme of superhero movies, none of them get nominated for anything. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| But it was very average, in my opinion. | ||
| It was just a very average movie, and it got nominated for all these things. | ||
| And I saw the media was like, ah, see, Black Panther got it. | ||
| Like, it was some major win. | ||
| That that would somehow make people more equal or feel better, or now we can look at the numbers and go, this many black films this, and this many white films this. | ||
| And I was like, it just seems to me that the aim is just so off of where you should go for the prize, | ||
| the real prize. | ||
| No, and I agree with you on that. | ||
| First of all, I love Black Panther. | ||
| I really do, I'm a huge fan, so I can't agree with you on that. | ||
| I thought it was perfectly fine, but not an Oscar award winning nominated film. | ||
| I think that you make a really good point in minority communities, and specifically the two groups | ||
| that I'm a part of, blacks and gay people, we always look for representation in the media | ||
| as some sort of barometer of progress, and that's a trap. | ||
| It's a huge trap. | ||
| It's a big trap. | ||
| Why don't Chinese people do it? | ||
| Yeah, because they're focused on making money, and I'm all about it. | ||
| And when I go give these lectures and I tell people that the biggest way for any group of people to achieve any kind of power is financially. | ||
| It is not through Oscar nominations, and that stuff is great and it's amazing, but it's kind of like these are false idols. | ||
| Because Black Panther is great for visual representation, and it's great that all those people are on the stage, and I personally think it's an amazing movie, but what that does for the young black kid that's struggling in the high school that I went to right now, not much. | ||
| Not much, right? | ||
| And we do it as gays and lesbians as well. | ||
| If somebody comes out, and look at the Buddha judge thing right now. | ||
| Look at how people, and this is somebody that is I mean, I'm not a Buttigieg hater at all, but it seems to me, you know, I see the game, I see what's going on, and I see the way that he picked the fight with Pence to ingratiate himself to the far left. | ||
| Like, I get it. | ||
| I see it. | ||
| But just the idea that any power comes from media representation, it's false hope, and it also separates the people from what should be the end goal. | ||
| Because I think that empowerment for any of our communities only comes through entrepreneurship. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| That is your name on that sign. | ||
| You're an entrepreneur. | ||
| And if somebody had given me the message about entrepreneurship when I was 17, 18, 19, 20, God knows where I'd be by now. | ||
| And one of the biggest things that I've gotten out of becoming a conservative and kind of moving over to the right is the fact that entrepreneurship and capitalism is not a bad thing. | ||
| And both of our communities need more of it, but especially my black community. | ||
| We need more entrepreneurship. | ||
| We need more job creators. | ||
| We need to stop looking for representation in the media to elevate ourselves or to make us feel good about ourselves. | ||
| So when you see then the Democrats, so just in the last couple weeks, there's now this debate suddenly about reparations. | ||
| And I saw the video of Senator Elizabeth Warren talking about reparations and she's gonna commission a panel about reparations. | ||
| And my first thought, the first thing that just popped into my head as I was watching it, was holy shit, Candace did it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like whatever anyone thinks of Candace, she created enough of a crack In the words of the great Candace Owens, fear and handouts is what they have to offer black people this cycle. | ||
| that they're not Democrats. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That now the Democrats are like, "Oh shit, what do we got left? | ||
| Here's money. | ||
| Could you take some money? | ||
| How about some money?" | ||
| In the words of the great Candace Owens, "Fear in handouts" | ||
| is what they have to offer black people this cycle. | ||
| And it is no mistake, first of all, that Donald Trump got more African American votes than | ||
| the two previous Republican nominees combined. | ||
| That is just a fact. | ||
| And it is no mistake that, you know, people say a lot about the Blexit movement, and they say it's not real, it's not that. | ||
| And what I tell people is that you're going to see Republicans make a bigger play for the black vote than you have ever seen before, I think, in the history of this country. | ||
| And it's not going to come through fear and handouts. | ||
| It's going to come from talking to the people that are the real job creators and the real | ||
| entrepreneurs and saying that these policies will help you create. | ||
| And the fact that reparations is even a conversation right now among the Democrats means that they're | ||
| scared. | ||
| I just did a video for Turning Point about reparations, and not to spoil any of that, | ||
| but none other than Bayard Rustin, who is one of the architects of the March on Washington, | ||
| a huge civil rights leader, who by the way was black and gay in the 60s. | ||
| They interviewed Baird Rustin about reparations in 1969, and he said this idea is ridiculous. | ||
| And the quote is something like, if my great-great-grandfather picked cotton, then reparations are owed to him. | ||
| But he's dead, and nobody owes me anything. | ||
| But this is how they're gonna try to buy the black vote. | ||
| It's also just a crazy way of dividing us against each other. | ||
| I was at a cousin's wedding on my husband's side this past weekend, and was with a young guy who's 21, 22, and he was telling me about how woke it is in college now. | ||
| This is a kid who grew up, his mother died when he was very young, he grew up, he had no money, bunch of different homes, all sorts of crazy history in the family, and it's like, The idea that this kid has privilege because he's white and we're gonna take from him. | ||
| I mean, in essence, that's what he was saying to me. | ||
| And it wasn't specifically about reparations, but just this idea that this kid is somehow guilty or somehow privileged just because of the skin color, having nothing to do with everything he's lived through. | ||
| But that's what they're pushing on everybody. | ||
| I mean, you know, that's what they're pushing. | ||
| And there's not a lot of pushback to that idea. | ||
| And I just feel that There's a correction going on right now and there's a correction because you're seeing a lot more conservatives that are younger and browner and whatever and there's a really different movement right now. | ||
| And the leftists, it's like, I call it the intersectionality cult. | ||
| The intersectionality cult will eat itself. | ||
| Because there's all these things that you cannot say on the left right now, and there's somebody who I'm not gonna name, but this person has a platform as a feminist, right? | ||
| And this is a male feminist, and I'm like, great, you know, do what you gotta do, but... | ||
| Don't call me transphobic for defending women's sports or women's spaces or lesbians who now feel pressured into having relationships with transgender women when you call yourself a feminist and you're not standing up for lesbians and not standing up for women in that way. | ||
| You can call me whatever you want to call me, but I'm always going to stand up for lesbians and stand up for women in that way. | ||
| But like I said, the intersectionality cult, there are things that they can't say. | ||
| There are things that they can't say about radical Islam, you know, when they run into a gay bar and kill 49 of us. | ||
| They can't say that. | ||
| You got Jonathan Capehart running around talking about, oh, this guy was a closeted gay, and this guy was this, and this guy was that. | ||
| And I'm like, that is completely ridiculous and not true. | ||
| And we know that that's not true now. | ||
| But the intersectionality cult will eat itself. | ||
| It is becoming to the point where there are too many things that they can't say. | ||
| So people like you and I have to say the things that they can't say. | ||
| Is that doubly tough then for you as a gay black man? | ||
| Because the culture, if we're talking about black culture and gay culture, there's so much humor, richness there, political incorrectness. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. - All of these things. | ||
| So for someone like you to be fed these ideas, you've obviously rejected now, | ||
| but to be fed these ideas that would stop you from joking the way you wanna joke | ||
| or saying something politically incorrect and the rest of it, it's like, | ||
| like I remember when I would go to gay bars and there would be like a drag queen. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. - So again, I was never into it. | ||
| I thought drag queens were all bad comics. | ||
| Like they all struck me as just hack comics. | ||
| That being said, they would say a ton of politically incorrect shit. - Absolutely. | ||
| They would mock gay people. | ||
| I mean, they would mock everybody. | ||
| That was the point. - Yeah. | ||
| Where now it's like, I don't know what's going on in the... | ||
| Drag queen world these days, but it's like, I'm guessing it's gotten pretty bad, because they're probably really afraid. | ||
| To say anything, to be irreverent. | ||
| I mean, I think that right now, I mean, I love drag, I love RuPaul's Drag Race, I'm all about it, you know, my husband and I are big fans. | ||
| When I voted in the last election, I ended up voting for Gary Johnson, but I used to live in West Hollywood, so I had to go over there to vote, and I was standing behind RuPaul at the voters' booth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Not in drag. | ||
| And you wanna talk about like, and you wanna talk about how crazy the left is. | ||
| Let's talk about RuPaul. | ||
| Let's talk about the crazy blue check crazies on the LGBT left coming after RuPaul. | ||
| Like, forgive me for being gay, mother, as they would say. | ||
| You come from mother, and you say that RuPaul is transphobic or she doesn't represent gays or whatever. | ||
| What was it that she said exactly? | ||
| This is about a year and a half ago. | ||
| This is about a year and a half ago. | ||
| RuPaul did an interview where she said she doesn't, well RuPaul he, because RuPaul's a man, | ||
| RuPaul said he doesn't believe in transgender women in drag because drag is supposed to be a male's | ||
| elevated and comedic idea of what a woman is. | ||
| And so they came after RuPaul for that. | ||
| They came after, there was a segment on Drag Race called She Male, ooh girl, you got She Male, | ||
| you know what I mean? | ||
| And so the blue checks came after RuPaul for that. | ||
| And so it's really funny when I look at the RuPaul situation and we'll look at somebody who has done more | ||
| for LGBT culture than maybe anybody walking on this earth right now. | ||
| And the fact that people are attacking him after everything that he's done. | ||
| Tells me that these people are insane. | ||
| Tells me that there's not enough. | ||
| And if there's one thing that I wouldn't use... I don't know if this is a critique, because I love RuPaul. | ||
| And by all accounts, I hear people say that Ru is amazing. | ||
| It's that Ru kind of bended the knee a little bit. | ||
| Oh, because he apologized for it. | ||
| Roo-Roo bended the knee a little bit to people coming for him. | ||
| And I wanna get to a point where we are not bending the knee to the mob anymore. | ||
| They came after Ellen DeGeneres. | ||
| What lesbian on this planet has done more for freaking gay and lesbian visibility | ||
| than Ellen DeGeneres? | ||
| And they came after Ellen. | ||
| Just because she sat down with-- | ||
| For having the conversation with Kevin Hart. | ||
| And they came for Ellen. | ||
| And so this is what I say. | ||
| If they're coming for RuPaul and Ellen DeGeneres, they'll come for you and me. | ||
| So I will never bend the knee. | ||
| We were supposed to have an LGBT conservative panel at the LGBT center in New York City. | ||
| And when people found out about it, we got excommunicated from the center because we were all racist and alt-white and transphobic and all of that other stuff. | ||
| And so I will never apologize for things that I say. | ||
| I don't try to offend people, but you're certainly not going to control my tongue. | ||
| And I'm not going to bend the knee to these people. | ||
| And I'm really glad that Ellen didn't. | ||
| And I hope RuPaul never does again, because these are two people that have done more for this community than anybody on the planet. | ||
| certainly not some blue check mark that writes for some blog. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But we create this reverse, or this perverse, I should say, incentive structure, | ||
| where it's like there's a lot of value for those blue checkers to go after them, | ||
| 'cause it's like, oh, you can wound one of the heroes? | ||
| Even if they were the ones that paved the road for you? | ||
| Wow, if you can build your castle on their blood? | ||
| Yeah, you know, Cardi B says, they do anything for clout. | ||
| Clout chasers, that's all they're doing. | ||
| And the fundamental critique that I have with a lot of these people, | ||
| the clout chasers, is that the platforms are always built on destruction. | ||
| It's cancel culture. | ||
| So everything is always built on, if I build a platform of, let's say, | ||
| like 100,000, 200,000, 300,000, And my platform is completely built on tearing people down. | ||
| Like, I'm gonna go after Dave Rubin because he's got 10 times my following and he said something I don't like, so maybe I'll get some attention for tearing him down. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So if your platform is built on that, then you always have to look for new things to be offended by, new people to destroy, new cloud to chase. | ||
| And I don't think that it goes anywhere. | ||
| Well, it's also sad, right? | ||
| It's deeply sad. | ||
| I mean, I see this with some of these, this crew going after me all the time, | ||
| and I just ignore it, but it's like, the idea that you're waking up in the morning | ||
| and going, what did Ruben say today so I can get some clicks, it's like, | ||
| man, there's so many things going on in the world. | ||
| Isn't that pathetic? | ||
| Yeah, and it's like, I'm not perfect, and I've made mistakes in this very room, on this show, | ||
| but it's like, if you're waking up going, this is the guy we gotta go after, | ||
|
unidentified
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it says more about you than it says about me. | |
| It does, and I feel sorry. | ||
| I feel sorry for their life because there's nowhere to go from that, and I would like to use these opportunities that I'm getting right now to, I want to engage people, but I also want to empower people. | ||
| I want to empower my people. | ||
| As much crap as Candace Owens gets, and man, she gets a level that I couldn't even dream of, She is a true believer. | ||
| She is really out here trying to empower people. | ||
| She is really out here trying to wake people up. | ||
| And I saw a Brene Brown special, I think her name is Brene Brown, on Netflix. | ||
| So she's this apparently enormously huge motivational speaker who I'd never heard of. | ||
| So she just got promoted to me on Netflix. | ||
| So I decided to watch a little bit of the special. | ||
| And she said that, and I think this is a Theodore Roosevelt quote, | ||
| she said that, "Don't worry about critiques that come from people who are not in the field." | ||
| Who are not in the battle, who are not putting themselves out there in some way and trying to affect change in some way. | ||
| And now that I've seen that, that's how I try to live my life. | ||
| Because you can't take all these critiques. | ||
| There's a point where You can get 90% of love from people, and we'll focus on the 10% of hate. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| When I was really doing stand-up, I always remember I could be killing, like 300 people laughing hysterically. | ||
| If there's one guy looking at his phone, it's like, that's the guy I'm looking at. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| There's a guy that was asleep in my lecture last night. | ||
| Did you call him out? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I didn't call him out directly, but I was like giving my speech, and I was like, you know, and I think that everybody needs to have conversations, even that guy that's sleeping over there. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Did he wake up? | ||
| He did. | ||
| He did? | ||
| I'm sorry we didn't do more of this earlier, but tell me a little bit just about your service, having nothing to do with gay, black, any of that stuff. | ||
| Yeah, just, you know, my service in general, I think that When I look back at the military service what I regret is that you know people come up to you when you're a veteran and they thank you for your service and like people call me a hero and all that other stuff and I'm always uneasy by that because I didn't do anything particularly heroic. | ||
| I was a young kid just just trying to make it from one day to the next. | ||
| I mean I was doing things that I believed in but When I look at some of these kids that are serving right now, and they're the same age I was, you know, 19, 20, 21 years old, it's so much for a young person to take on. | ||
| But for me, when I look back at it, and it just, it, you know, I lost weight, and it gave me discipline, and it gave me kind of that strong male influence that was missing in my life. | ||
| And when I talk about my service, it's not so much the day-to-day of what I did, because it was really You know, I did one tour in Kuwait. | ||
| I did one tour in Iraq right after the invasion. | ||
| You connect those dots, you can get to that age question that you had. | ||
| Okay, now I can put this all together. | ||
| Yeah, connect the dots. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But when I look back to that, we were just, I was just trying to do the best that I could. | ||
| And everybody that I served with, we were just trying to do our best. | ||
| And the people that are serving the military, they are heroes. | ||
| From the guy who captured Osama bin Laden and these great men that you see these books from and all that stuff. | ||
| But just the people that give up 3, 4, 5, sometimes 20 and 25 years of their life to be of service in some way. | ||
| Like there is a very heroic element to that. | ||
| And I think that with me and my service, I talk about it a lot and I talk about loving America because it has given me so much. | ||
| Just that service has just put me onto a path that Just sitting here with you right now and coming back from being with Candace and going to events in the White House, what poor black kid from Akron, Ohio could see that vision for himself? | ||
| And the military put me on the path to doing all of these things. | ||
| So I don't look at myself as heroic, but I look at all the people that are serving now as heroic. | ||
| To me, it's very strange. | ||
| I feel like I'm not giving you an answer. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's very hard to reconcile who I am now with who I was then and to see that as anything other than a scared kid doing the best he could. | ||
| If that makes sense. | ||
| It does make sense. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And that feels like a nice ending. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| I think that's a great ending. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I don't know what I'm doing later, but there would be something if we just showed up at the Abbey in West Hollywood tonight, just the two of us. | ||
| Oh my God, are you kidding me? | ||
| Could we find some other banded, deplorable freaks? | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| We should make it happen. | ||
| We should make the conservative gay meetup or something like that. | ||
| We should make it happen. | ||
| Classical liberal. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Classical liberal. | ||
| Come on in. |
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