Feb. 9, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:04:51
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| What I am doing, and what I do on a professional basis every day, is I take the meme culture world, the meme world, prequel memes, Star Wars memes, I mean some of the best memes out there are Star Wars memes, and you apply that to politics, and you are able to get an intersectional point where you can get a young kid or some young person who might know Star Wars but doesn't quite understand what's going on with impeachment, and you can frame it, the world for them, based on Star Wars and actually bring them into the political process, which is very important. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and according to the Wikipedia editors, this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| As always, guys, make sure that you're subscribed to our channel by clicking subscribe over there and clicking that notification bell. | ||
| And more importantly, joining me today is the chief creative officer for Turning Point USA and meme maker extraordinaire, Benny Johnson. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| This feels very overdue, man. | ||
| How has this taken so long to happen? | ||
| You're a busy guy. | ||
| You're a busy guy. | ||
| You're a busy guy going around the world, Jordan Peterson. | ||
| It's like, you know, like I cut his IQ in half. | ||
| He got me. | ||
| You're half of Peterson's brain. | ||
| I have a very room-temperature IQ. | ||
| Room-temperature IQ? | ||
| Very room-temperature IQ. | ||
| Very comfortable. | ||
| Well, I have wanted you on for a while. | ||
| I'm glad we're finally doing this. | ||
| And before, you know, normally when I start an interview, I kind of ask people their background, a little framing of the interview. | ||
| But I thought, first, what we're gonna do is we're just gonna throw to this video that you just put up on Instagram. | ||
| This is you going to, this is outside of the impeachment hearings? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Outside of the impeachment hearings, you're asking questions about politics and Trump and impeachment all through the lens of a little movie called Star Wars. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Hey everyone, Benny Johnson here at the United States Capitol, where the impeachment trial of President Trump is ongoing. | ||
| The Capitol has tens of leftist protesters gathered at it, calling for the impeachment of President Trump. | ||
| Specifically, we're asking them if Star Wars references about President Trump are worthy of having him be impeached. | ||
| I am the Senate. | ||
| We're going to see if these leftist protesters believe that the president should be impeached, for instance, of killing a fictional general, General Grievous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello there. | |
| General Kenobi! | ||
| I can't wait to hear what they have to say! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's go find out! | |
| Many people felt a disturbance in the force when General Grievous was killed. | ||
| What do you think about the killing of General Grievous and why, you know, was it right or wrong? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Nobody say that he was a good person. | ||
| But there are a lot of bad people in the world. | ||
| And we have laws. | ||
| Everything what we do with our military should be according to law. | ||
| I love them, obviously. | ||
| With new X-Wing technology, though, there's no telling what we can accomplish. | ||
| I mean, you can get anyone anywhere. | ||
| yes yes absolutely uh... do you think that it was right or not right to kill | ||
| general grievous [MUSIC PLAYING] | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it was clearly an assassination. | |
| Oh, I don't think so. | ||
| People are saying that a thermal detonator was used for the assassination, and these are very dangerous weapons. | ||
| Do you have anything to say on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You seem to care a lot about this. | |
| Technically, I can't tell you... I'm not sure about that yet. | ||
| Because he's holding a thermal detonator! | ||
| This is just like the kind of music that was being sang at Mos Eisley Cantina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's beautiful. | |
| General Grievous was killed by the administration, by Trump. | ||
| They were saying that was illegal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you believe in those kind of killings, or do you not? | |
| We have a rule of law. | ||
| If that rule of law says, if I think you're a bad guy, then I should be able to kill you, right? | ||
| That's not our rule of law. | ||
| I killed them. | ||
| I killed them all. | ||
| Our rule of law is if I think you're a bad guy, I'm supposed to take you to trial and prove that you are a bad guy. | ||
| That is our rule of law in the United States of America. | ||
| You can't! | ||
| He must stand trial. | ||
| Apparently he was killed with a thermal detonator. | ||
| That's just like, concerning to a lot of people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the rule of law, either we have it and we need to live by it, both the citizens and our government, or we don't and we don't give a crap one way or the other. | |
| My lord, is that legal? | ||
| I will let it. | ||
| All right, so that's just a small portion of this video that you put out there, and I think now my audience understands why I wanted to throw that before we do anything else here. | ||
| Now, that one gentleman at the end did make a good point. | ||
| Should we not have taken General Grievous in and put him on trial? | ||
| I mean, he was the leader of the Separatist Army. | ||
| He had just taken over from Count Dooku, who's a horrible human being. | ||
| It's a good point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's true. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| I mean, if it was the Obama administration, definitely would have taken him out with a drone. | ||
| Would have never seen it happening. | ||
| You know, he could have even been an American citizen. | ||
| Would have been, boom, General Grieve is gone. | ||
| When you do these videos, because I know most people watching them are going, oh, come on. | ||
| He must have had to go to 1,000 different people to get the five, 10 guys. | ||
| First five. | ||
| First five people. | ||
| Not a single, I kept asking about General Grievous. | ||
| And you can see in the video, I keep pushing him like, people felt a disturbance in the force. | ||
| It's very much a dark side to have this technology with a thermal detonator and X-Wing technology to kill this general. | ||
| No one. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I even say later in the video that Trump should just execute an Order 66 and dissolve the Senate, and then he can just get rid of this impeachment fiasco. | ||
| What does this tell you about these people? | ||
| Before we get to the Star Wars element of it and why Star Wars memes really do work, What does this tell you about a lot of the activists that are out there and people that are purporting to know everything about politics? | ||
| I'm not even talking about these five people specifically, but these people that are just out there protesting all the time, and then whenever you see them challenged, Crowder's really good at this, they just suddenly know nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the purpose of a video like this is never to actually make fun of anyone. | ||
| What I'm trying to do is to show that there is a bankruptcy when it comes to the understanding of why we are impeaching this president. | ||
| Why are these people actually out there protesting? | ||
| Every person in the video is protesting for Trump's impeachment. | ||
| Yet even when asked if they should impeach Trump for killing General Grievous, which was my question, should we impeach Trump for killing a fictional Star Wars villain? | ||
| They said yeah. | ||
| And so what I am doing, and what I do on a professional basis every day, is I take the meme culture world, the meme world, prequel memes, Star Wars memes, I mean some of the best memes out there are Star Wars memes, and you apply that to politics, and you are able to get an intersectional point where you can get a young kid or some young person who might know Star Wars but doesn't quite understand what's going on with impeachment, And you can frame the world for them based on Star Wars and actually bring them into the political process, which is very important. | ||
| So what is it about Star Wars? | ||
| Because I meme the hell out of Star Wars probably only second to you, right? | ||
| And there's something particularly about the prequels that the memes just, you know, how does democracy die with thunderous applause and I am the Senate and all of those lines, they seem so powerful right now. | ||
| And it's like, what do you think it is about Star Wars specifically? | ||
| that leads to this, where other movies, you can meme some things from other movies, | ||
| but not like the endless amount from Star Wars that just feels right for the moment all the time. | ||
| Star Wars was, if you go, if you rewind the clock back to George Lucas, he based the empire on Nazis, | ||
| and he based the rebellion on fighting Nazis. | ||
| And so for people like us, particularly, you were able to find these moral threads | ||
| that you can pull out of the basic Star Wars story. | ||
| The evil of oppressive, overarching, brutalist government, how it tries to squash hope, how hope must rise in order to fight that greatest evil, which is an oppressive, overarching, massive, usually by emergency powers government that can take take over all of our lives. | ||
| And that is the truth that this was based on. | ||
| And I think it hits at a human truth. | ||
| Truth that goes all the way back to our founding and much of the Renaissance good that comes from | ||
| the idea that man is man and man wants freedom and man has liberties that should not be corrupted | ||
| and oppressed by a government. | ||
| Well it's funny because even though you're doing it in a funny way there, we could talk about the idea | ||
| that should the Jedi have captured Grievous, He was the leader of the separatist army, right? | ||
| So he was an insurgent, but should they have been allowed to just kill him as Obi-Wan did, or should they have captured him and taken him in for trial? | ||
| That actually is an interesting philosophical point that we debate all the time, because that's to your point, that when we killed Soleimani, everyone was saying, well, you can't just kill the guy. | ||
| You have to bring them in for trial or the rest of it. | ||
| That really all does add up to why memes work. | ||
| Yes, correct. | ||
| Memes are a piece of non-corporate, non-establishment media imagery that reflects a moment in culture and reflects something that we're all going through and explains it in a very simple and shareable way. | ||
| All right, well, I'm pretty sure we could do the Star Wars thing the entire way, so let's just do a little bit more, though, in case there's anyone out there watching this that doesn't have the appreciation of the Star Wars meme meeting point that we do. | ||
| You mentioned something really interesting to me right before we started about how the way the Star Wars movies have progressed, or regressed, I suppose, depending on which way you look at it, is really reflective of internet culture in general. | ||
| Can you talk about that? | ||
| Because I think it's really super interesting. | ||
| We as consumers of the product have more value than we have ever had in the history of the creation of a thing. | ||
| So you've democratized the consumer base for things like Star Wars and Star Wars, the fandom, Menace, has actually saved Star Wars from itself. | ||
| The fandom Menace, I got it. | ||
| The fandom Menace is a real thing and we can The feedback mechanisms are now available in a decentralized universe where the studios have to listen to the consumers and where we are able to online demand something or ask for something or consume at a rate where it's a | ||
| instead of them just making a Star Wars and hoping we like it, they make a Star Wars | ||
| and then we tell them if we like it, right? | ||
| You can hear what happened after The Last Jedi. | ||
| And the studio heard it, and then desperately JJ comes in to try to like fix it. | ||
| And there are four to five different moments in The Rise of Skywalker where they papered over | ||
| what Rian did, and that's because of the response online. | ||
| And so this mechanism can actually make you more powerful than the studios producing these things, | ||
| these things and the general, I love democracy. | ||
| The democracy of the fandom is actually a wonderful thing. | ||
| Palpatine would be very proud. | ||
| Palpatine would be thrilled at internet trolls, basically. | ||
| It's really interesting, though. | ||
| I mean, that concept is actually kind of cool because, you know, studios come out with certain things that often are not good, and I think the best version of this in terms of internet culture is the all-female Ghostbusters. | ||
| It had nothing to do with it all being women, but it was a patently terrible movie. | ||
| And then the audience goes crazy, and then you get the next layer of this, | ||
| which I wanna talk to you about, which is suddenly the media that runs protection | ||
| for bad movies, right? | ||
| And then starts attacking the audiences. | ||
| And that's what happened in Ghostbusters. | ||
| We saw that happen in "Last Jedi" too, where they say it's all angry white male trolls | ||
| who hate "Last Jedi" or hate Ghostbusters, and it's racist Trump supporters who hate these things. | ||
| And it's the media then attacking the fan base at, I don't know, is it at the behest of the studio, | ||
| or is it just because the whole machine just kinda works like that, or what? | ||
| I think it has everything to do with what's going on in society right now. | ||
| I cover politics, but the election in 2016 was precisely this bubble. | ||
| The same thing that happens with a Star Wars movie or Ghostbuster happened in 2016, where you have a group of people that are so insulated in their own virtue signaling and woke-tivism and slacktivism, and they must insert that into everything | ||
| in their lives, and it blinds them to understanding what an actual normal consumer wants. And | ||
| so then you have the rise of something, of real anger, that the things that we cherish are being | ||
| destroyed, and one of the last few good things out there was Star Wars. And from both sides, | ||
| you have this kind of yelp, this anger from the base when we watched The Last Jedi and realized | ||
| that it's now just a serving dish for someone's political worldview, and you must eat it. | ||
| And it's like, dammit, no. | ||
| I mean, the orcs are not just at the gate. | ||
| They've, like, come in and they've desecrated the temple. | ||
| One of the last few things that we actually all could come together on was that we all kind of loved Star Wars. | ||
| And then that's destroyed, and you're going to get backlash. | ||
| This happened in 2016, you got the election of President Trump. | ||
| And this is happening now when it comes to our entire culture, | ||
| whether that be Star Wars or Ghostbuster or national politics. | ||
| What do you think about the idea that because big studios now run so much of our | ||
| entertainment that that also has fed all of this? | ||
| Like the Star Wars posters look exactly like the Marvel posters. | ||
| It's always the same thing, the big guy in the middle, it's Iron Man in the middle, or Rey in the middle, and then everybody else smaller after, and they look exactly the same, like the branding is the same, the messages start becoming the same, that we don't have new stories anymore. | ||
| And I said to you right before we started, I hate to say that in a way, because it's like, I want these stories to continue, and Mandalorian was totally fine, Yeah. | ||
| And that is something that I think people are very much hungering for on a national level. | ||
| Like the world has moved on from George Lucas having to look at World War II | ||
| to then create these characters, you know? | ||
| Yeah, and that is something that I think people are very much hungering for on a national level. | ||
| And you're watching now people running for, speaking of new stories, I mean, look at the number | ||
| of people who've never been in politics that are now running and winning | ||
| and becoming very, very famous. | ||
| I don't like AOC. | ||
| I don't like AOC in the squad. | ||
| I think they're going to wreck the country if you give them power. | ||
| Listen, they have become heroes now because there's a new story, there's a new narrative out there. | ||
| And of course, the opposite of that would be multiple people who have never had any experience on the conservative side of the aisle running for office and following a Trumpian model of I am the outsider. | ||
| And the idea that there's a new story out there really gravitates, it really brings people in. | ||
| And again, you have a president who's pretty much Our version of that elected outside of the media bubble, outside of the groupthink that occurs, inside of the Acela Corridor between D.C. | ||
| and New York, and the groupthink said, like every Marvel poster looked alike, every poll looked exactly the same in 2016. | ||
| Every poll. | ||
| Hillary Clinton, remember the Huffington Post? | ||
| 98% chance Hillary will win, right? | ||
| Take it to the bank. | ||
| You've seen the same compilations I have. | ||
| And so it's like every poster looks the same and people start rejecting it and wanting a new story. | ||
| And now you have... | ||
| Arguably, I mean very easily, the most powerful man in the world, the President of the United States, has been elected because people were so desperate and hungry for a new story, and rejecting the same stuff that's been forced on us for decades. | ||
| All right, so before we go too far into the Trump thing, and I wanna talk impeachment and how this is all related to media and all that, now let's go to where I usually start the interviews, which is, how the hell did you get into this whole thing? | ||
| Like, what brought Benny Johnson to sit here right now and talk to me about Star Wars? | ||
| I was raised in Iowa, and Iowa's a magical place where you can really see candidates up close. | ||
| One of the things that we force every candidate who wants to be president to do is eat pork chop on a stick. | ||
| You want to dehumanize someone, and you really want to break them down to their core elements, right? | ||
| Force someone like Hillary Clinton to eat a pork chop on a stick on a 120 degree humid day in the middle of the Iowa Remember that picture of Michelle Bachman eating the corndog and Romney trying it? | ||
| Romney was one of the worst ones. | ||
| No one looks good eating a corndog. | ||
| No one looks good eating a sweaty pork chop on a stick. | ||
| Did you grow up going to those fairs and going to the straw polls and the rest of it? | ||
| The real human being behind the politician. | ||
| You got to see little quirks, little things of them. | ||
| As a young guy in politics, I was just in student government at my college and at my high school, you would get taken out to Subway. | ||
| By Mitt Romney, right? | ||
| He would take you out to Subway. | ||
| You get to watch the man eat his Subway sandwich. | ||
| You get to see the human side of the politician. | ||
| And it was something that was always lacking because they always came off as such a stiff veneer, right? | ||
| When you see him on stage. | ||
| And so I began to really gravitate towards telling stories differently for the political class and inside of the political bubble. | ||
| And that began a career in making viral content about politics. | ||
| I've done this for now over a decade, and I've always wanted to bring and mesh the worlds | ||
| that a lot of young people understand, which is the cultural world, | ||
| and mesh that in with politics so that people understand the political world around them, | ||
| because quite frankly, that's the most important thing you can understand as an American. | ||
| So as a Iowa guy, is it shocking or strange or backwards, or is it the way it's supposed to be | ||
| that in just a few weeks, this straw poll, which seems so antiquated and ridiculous in so many ways, | ||
| is the thing that is going to set the next eight months in motion, really? | ||
| You know, we're just in the lead-up. | ||
| We're in preseason right now still, even though it all feels crazy, but the straw poll starts this whole thing and someone could get momentum out of nowhere and You know, if Biden does really bad, he's no longer the front runner and the rest of it. | ||
| Does that seem crazy to you as someone that grew up in Iowa? | ||
| It's like the various gladiator feats of strength, okay, to get there. | ||
| Federalism. | ||
| I mean, it's one of the last cherished things of federalism is that every state is different. | ||
| And the way that this was supposed to work is every state was supposed to be their own actual governance, and the states wouldn't have even come together and signed the Constitution if we didn't write, as a libertarian you know this, very firm grounds of federalism that each state was unique. | ||
| Iowa is- Which we're washing away very quickly. | ||
| Very quickly, horrifyingly. | ||
| Horrifyingly so. | ||
| Iowa, you're gonna have to go eat pork chop on a stick and appeal to Iowans to get the Iowan vote. | ||
| New Hampshire, you're gonna have to go, and what do they do in New Hampshire? | ||
| Tap a maple tree? | ||
| Get the special ski slope, maple tree vote? | ||
| What, in New Hampshire? | ||
| I'm not from there, I don't know much about it. | ||
| It's just a special thing. | ||
| To be clear, I'm not condemning Iowa in any way, as much as the process, it's always the same order every year. | ||
| It almost seems like we have to mix up the order, because then it all just becomes so entrenched that the fakery is too obvious, or something like that. | ||
| I don't know much about why the process is what it is. | ||
| I know that every state votes. | ||
| I don't think anyone knows at this point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it is special that you have to go and you have to earn the vote of a specific group of people living in a specific state and appeal to them. | ||
| And I love that process. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| You want to make a crazy prediction out of Iowa? | ||
| I was going to ask you some predictions at the end. | ||
| So are you feeling this thing right now? | ||
| Because there does seem to be like a certain momentum for Bernie right now like that the mainstream media has really tried to take him out. | ||
| Now again, I know you and I We're not fans of his ideas, let's say, | ||
| but the mainstream media has just been going after the guy relentlessly and Warren tried some stuff | ||
| and women aren't gonna be elected and the rest of it. | ||
| But do you feel like he's just got this thing whether the DNC wants it to happen or not? | ||
| Yeah, and Joe Rogan, one of your colleagues, one of the people who are so special | ||
| in this decentralized media industry, kind of said it the best, | ||
| which is the guy's just been a communist his whole life and he's just told everyone about his communism forever. | ||
| And that sort of authenticity is really valuable now. | ||
| Authenticity is the currency of the Internet. | ||
| People know if you're being fake, and people know if you're putting on a show. | ||
| And when someone like Bernie, who's just an old crusty communist, Who has just been an old crusty communist his entire life, honeymooned in the Soviet Union, let's not forget, when he comes into an age that's... | ||
| Internet-centric, then his authenticity really shines through, and people really gravitate to that. | ||
| It's the same thing that brought a lot of people over to Trump, and it's the thing that is really, I think, driving the boom right now for Bernie, that is putting him now up ahead double digits in New Hampshire, up ahead almost double digits in Iowa. | ||
| I think that that, like, I am the same guy that I've always been, is something that is more attractive now than ever. | ||
| Well, that's the funny thing about the Rogan endorsement. | ||
| It's like, just saying that someone hasn't changed isn't in and of itself so great, but I get you. | ||
| There's a consistency there, I suppose, that people like, but you may have all the wrong ideas within that. | ||
| Yes, but authenticity, I mean, people will gravitate towards something authentic. | ||
| More than ever today. | ||
| And it's because we've been trained to do this based on what we like on social media. | ||
| The authenticity that we see into people's lives and we now have access into everyone's life. | ||
| People can figure out what Dave Rubin likes. | ||
| People can follow you on social media and see the things about you. | ||
| and see what you love and what you hate, and they can tell if you're an authentic person. | ||
| And we are now demanding that inside of our politicians, and like it or not, that's part of the reason | ||
| why people just adore the President of the United States right now, is because there's no lying with him. | ||
| You're gonna hear his unvarnished opinions, regardless of whether you love them or not, | ||
| you're going to see directly inside of his brain I've asked a million guests this. | ||
| Everyone has their own theory. | ||
| through Twitter, and that's what endears so many Americans to that. | ||
| We've been trained to want that. | ||
| All right, so how the hell does Trump understand all this stuff? | ||
| I have asked a million guests this. | ||
| Everyone has their own theory, but how does Trump get the meme wars, | ||
| the edgelords, the trolls, the Russians, How does Trump get it? | ||
| I think you have a little insight maybe into what he's thinking, or you've been around him enough, and the turning point world. | ||
| Trump has always been a creature of the media. | ||
| He's always very much understood media. | ||
| and every era that he's lived in, from the '70s, '80s, '90s to today, | ||
| he's understood media and how people consume information. | ||
| Where is the audience? | ||
| And he's always understood audience. | ||
| Now, you have to ask yourself, if you're talking about the modern media landscape, | ||
| what is a media company? | ||
| A media company is where the audience is. | ||
| And Trump has very elegantly navigated to the place where the audience is | ||
| every single iteration of his career. | ||
| And it's been very, very special to watch how the guy, at 70 years old, | ||
| has just mastered the meme wars and just mastered the art of social media. | ||
| of social media and a new generation of kids, that's where they are, that's where they're getting | ||
| their information. | ||
| Do you think the world was just waiting for someone like him, like it didn't actually have | ||
| to be him, but that because of everything you're talking about and the way that things have changed | ||
| and we've watched mainstream media crumble and the internet rise and all that, | ||
| that it was gonna be somebody to do this reckoning and he just happened to be the guy? | ||
| Or do you think that that really is unique about him, the lens that he views the world because of the way he's survived media over decades and all that? | ||
| Yeah, I think we're living in the golden age of memes and politics, and Trump has brought that about. | ||
| And the world was waiting for someone to create the dyad and the force that was the president. | ||
| I'm going to see how many more Star Wars movies you can force in here. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Force in here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love what you just did there, Dave. | |
| The world was waiting for the Internet President, right? | ||
| The President who fully understood the Internet and brought it with him to the White House. | ||
| And Barack Obama bringing in YouTube celebrities, that's one thing. | ||
| But Barack Obama was not the Internet President. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| The Internet President is Donald Trump who hosts the social media summit at the White House. | ||
| I had the honor of being invited to it. | ||
| And you walk into the foyer of the White House. | ||
| I mean, famous. | ||
| It's been in all Hollywood movies. | ||
| It's, you know, from the time of Lincoln. | ||
| And there are huge memes. | ||
| Printed out, on boards, hanging in the grand foyer of the White House, Dave. | ||
| Like, this is the world I've been begging for my entire career. | ||
| You walk around, you look, there's a meme! | ||
| And there's a Game of Thrones meme! | ||
| And they're all there, like, hanging inside of the most sacred house in America, right? | ||
| The most cherished and valuable piece of real estate in the country is the White House. | ||
| One of the most recognizable places on planet Earth is the White House. | ||
| And here are memes. | ||
| Hanging inside of the grand foyer of the White House. | ||
| This is actually the Internet. | ||
| President, I think it's really fundamental that Trump gets audience. | ||
| He understands where an audience is. | ||
| And right now, today, there has been a dynamic shift in where people actually are and where people are Our platforms and where they wanna get their information are platforms and from influencers. | ||
| And Trump is the biggest influencer out there. | ||
| So the last time that we actually saw each other in person was at the Turning Point Student Action Summit about a week before Christmas, couple days before Christmas. | ||
| I spoke that morning. | ||
| You were sort of the emcee of the whole thing, right? | ||
| You're shooting t-shirts into the crowd and you're getting everybody going. | ||
| But you didn't warm up the crowd for me that morning. | ||
| I don't know what you were doing that Saturday morning. | ||
| I wasn't gonna bring this up. | ||
| I don't know what happened. | ||
| I did okay. | ||
| That's not even the point. | ||
| I did just fine. | ||
| The point is that I spoke in the morning and then Trump spoke later in the afternoon. | ||
| And then when he spoke, it was the first time that I ever heard him speak live. | ||
| And it did help crystallize one thing for me, which is, How the media takes an hour and a half speech that he gives and how they really extrapolate whatever they want out of it. | ||
| Because there's a moment that I'm sure you remember where Trump gets up there and he goes, he goes, I know more about windmills than anybody. | ||
| I've been studying windmills my whole life. | ||
| And then he goes on this riff about windmills. | ||
| Now, obviously he doesn't know more about windmills than everybody. | ||
| Obviously he's not studying windmills, but he makes some interesting points about how they build windmills and all of this other stuff. | ||
| Then I saw it happen. | ||
| So he does the speech, and he's sort of basically like a comic, and he's working the room, and he kind of goes off script and then comes back. | ||
| But then it was the next part, and this is where I really, it all kind of crystallized for me, was then later that afternoon, what do I see? | ||
| Of course, Vox, Media Matters, the rest of it, with all of their headlines, Donald Trump claims he knows more about windmills than anybody. | ||
| Donald Trump claims he's studied windmills his whole life. | ||
| And it's like, did he say that? | ||
| He did. | ||
| Is that in context? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you understand sarcasm? | ||
| No. | ||
| And it's like, when you really see it that way, it did shift the whole thing for me to actually be there and then see the headlines. | ||
| There is such a thing as sarcasm, humor, still in the world. | ||
| It's not literate, it's not literal, right? | ||
| Also not literate. | ||
| Both, actually. | ||
| But a good meme is something that takes, that is funny, that uses humor, uses pop culture to connote a greater truth about the world around us. | ||
| And Donald Trump speaks in memes. | ||
| That's what a lot of people I don't think understand, is that this era was actually made for him. | ||
| When Donald Trump looks Hillary Clinton in the eye and goes, "'Cause you'd be in jail. | ||
| That's like an impact font meme. | ||
| That was a meme, right? | ||
| Like that was one of the most memorable, maybe perhaps the most memorable, if you play it on a big screen to an audience, which I do regularly, the most memorable moment in 2016. | ||
| And that was Trump just speaking in a meme. | ||
| Short sentences, understandable dialogue, Joke, right? | ||
| Sarcasm? | ||
| But hitting a deeper truth. | ||
| And that's the way the president speaks. | ||
| And the hyper-literal, perpetually wanting to be offended, corporate media that exists today, they don't get them, but at their peril. | ||
| Because Trump is speaking the way that the internet speaks, and the way that consumers speak, and the way that the audiences of the future speak. | ||
| And the audiences of the future want to get their information from memes. | ||
| I give this speech around the country. | ||
| Tens of thousands of students around the country I speak to every single year. | ||
| And it's a huge privilege of mine to do that, but I ask them with regularity, where would you prefer to get your information? | ||
| Raise your hand if you want to get your information from a meme. | ||
| If you would prefer it in that form. | ||
| Thousands of hands go up. | ||
| I'm telling you, Dave. | ||
| Thousands of hands go up from the students. | ||
| I take a cell phone out of my pocket. | ||
| I do this thought test all the time. | ||
| I take a cell phone out of my pocket, put it on the table, and I say, this cell phone is yours. | ||
| It's free. | ||
| You can get it. | ||
| Free of charge. | ||
| One rule. | ||
| Locked. | ||
| Coded in to the actual iPhone. | ||
| Brand new. | ||
| Is that you can only download one app to get your news and information from. | ||
| What app do you download? | ||
| I ask kids this. | ||
| It doesn't matter if it's 50 kids in a small room or 500 kids or 5,000 kids. | ||
| It's always the same. | ||
| I'm guessing the answer is Twitter, right? | ||
| Don't tell me it's TikTok and I'm going to jump out the window and sit here. | ||
| It's a mix. | ||
| A lot of Instagrams. | ||
| I would say probably eight out of 10 is an Instagram. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Again, these are school-aged kids. | ||
| These are school-aged kids. | ||
| Eight out of 10 is an Instagram. | ||
| You always have your outliers. | ||
| We'll say Reddit. | ||
| Very rarely, but Facebook. | ||
| You get YouTube. | ||
| A lot of YouTubes. | ||
| And some Twitters. | ||
| It kind of depends on the diet of the student. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Here's something that never, ever, ever is said. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| MSNBC. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| CNN. | ||
| Well, CNN, when I give a speech to college kids, CNN, sometimes I say something about CNN, not to be funny, I'm like, well, you know, CNN is one channel, and they laugh when I say CNN as if that's the punchline, because it's so absurd to them, you know? | ||
| I don't think it's even partisan, Dave. | ||
| They don't say Fox News either. | ||
| They want to get their information from, and I'm just going to be complimentary here, you, from a decentralized non-corporate influencer who is going to bring them the information that they trust you, they trust guys like me, they trust influencers. | ||
| We are the new nightly news anchors. | ||
| Our memes are our new news program, right? | ||
| And the new broadcast network are these platforms that they can follow us on and see more of a dimensionality of us and the world around them. | ||
| And that's how they prefer to get their information. | ||
| Isn't it amazing? | ||
| So obviously I agree with you in the broad sense there. | ||
| It's like all the mainstream media then had to do was sort of incorporate some of us And instead of trying to destroy all of us, which is what they chose to do instead, right? | ||
| They decided to say we're all bigots and racists and all the rest of it and try to crush our jobs and crush our reach on top of big tech and everything else. | ||
| But all they had to do was bring on a couple guys. | ||
| ABC, all they probably had to do, or forget ABC, CNN, you know, six years ago, your phone could have rang and they could have been like, can you be the guy that takes us into the, There's an industry story about Blockbuster's valuation and Netflix's valuation. | ||
| You've seen the same chart that I've seen. | ||
| Blockbuster could have buried Netflix for a decade of Netflix's existence, but instead they chose to laugh at them. | ||
| And they said, we're Blockbuster. | ||
| You're gonna mail those things to these people? | ||
| Right. | ||
| No one ever wants a DVD in the mail. | ||
| This is not a problem. | ||
| And now we are looking at 2020 and Netflix is winning Golden Globes and may win Oscars this year, right? | ||
| And isn't there one Blockbuster? | ||
| There's one left in Alaska. | ||
| It's in Alaska? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that right? | |
| Yes. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| And there's this inflection point Where your industry gets overtaken and people no longer need gas lanterns, they have lightbulbs. | ||
| Are you worried about that though? | ||
| Does any level of that worry you? | ||
| So something that has been interesting about the demasking of corporate media, specifically on places like CNN, is that you're able to see, in the era of Trump, who they always were. | ||
| You're able to see, like a viral clip that's going around right now is this clip of Don Lamont. | ||
| We're gonna play the clip. | ||
| All right, so why don't we play this clip first? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So this clip is from about a week ago. | ||
| I mentioned this when I had Michael Malice on last week. | ||
| We did a little dissection, but I think it would be great to get your dissection too. | ||
| So this is Don Lemon's CNN program. | ||
| And obviously it's false. | ||
| And look, he also knows deep in his heart that Donald Trump couldn't find Ukraine on a map if you had the letter U and a picture of an actual physical crane next to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He knows that this is an administration defined by ignorance of the world. | |
| And so that's partly him playing to their base and playing to their audience. | ||
| The credulous boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump. | ||
| That wants to think that Donald Trump's a smart one and y'all elitists are dumb. | ||
| You elitists with your geography and your maps and your spelling. | ||
| Your math and your reading. | ||
| Yeah, your reading, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your geography, knowing other countries, sipping your latte. | |
| All those lines on the map. | ||
| Only them elitists know where Ukraine is. | ||
| Sorry, I apologize. | ||
| It was Rick's fault. | ||
| I'm sorry, Rick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my God. | |
| But you know what? | ||
| It was Rick's fault. | ||
| I blame Rick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my God. | |
| But in all honesty, you know what NPR should do? | ||
| Why not? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry, hold on. | |
| Wait, wait. | ||
| Give me a second. | ||
| Hold on, hold on, hold on. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| That was good. | ||
| That was a good one, I needed that. | ||
| It's so deeply fake. | ||
| The laughter is fake. | ||
| Nobody's laughing that hard at that joke. | ||
| The banter is fake. | ||
| The whole damn thing, fake! | ||
| Right. | ||
| News! | ||
| Someone said fake news somewhere at one point? | ||
| Fake news! | ||
| So why should you be... That rightfully makes a lot of people angry, that clip. | ||
| But why you should be encouraged by that clip, actually, is that it happened a week before it really went viral. | ||
| So few people were watching Don Lamond's show that no one even noticed. | ||
| They were just screaming into the abyss. | ||
| They were screaming into the woods. | ||
| The tree fell and no one heard it. | ||
| And I know for a fact, I know for a fact, because I can pull the Nielsen ratings, that good videos that we make at Turning Point get more viewers than CNN's entire nightly lineup. | ||
| This show, Dave Rubin's show, gets more viewers per video than many headline news shows on CNN. | ||
| A good video with you and Shapiro and Peterson will get more viewers than CNN's entire ratings the whole week! | ||
| For a month, probably. | ||
| Yes, correct. | ||
| In some cases, yeah. | ||
| And so what is this inflection point? | ||
| It's really special. | ||
| It shows the one thing that is so important in media's audience. | ||
| Where is your audience? | ||
| Who has it? | ||
| And where is the audience going? | ||
| And the fact that that can happen and no one even knows that it's happening because so few people are watching this news show. | ||
| Let's remember, to make you sick to your stomach, that's a news show. | ||
| That's listed as a, that's in the CNN news lineup, Don Lamond's show. | ||
| I know you don't say it Don Lamond, but it makes him angry, so it's funny to say. | ||
| That's how depressing it is, and if you're looking, young people are not watching that. | ||
| People that are, the clip would have gone viral instantly if people had actually been watching the show. | ||
| But what do you make of the cognitive dissonance of these people? | ||
| The same people who said the deplorables, thus thrusting Trump to victory, are now doing that, making fun of people's accents, making fun of people's education, all of those things. | ||
| When it's like, let's say these people are, let's pretend for a moment that they're less educated and that's why they're voting for Trump. | ||
| Aren't you supposed to be a good lefty who would want to help educate these people? | ||
| I mean, the smugness of it is, I think, the most, you know, I get the media side of it, but it's the detachment from what they purport to believe, politically or philosophically, that I find more disturbing. | ||
| So that's going back to Authenticity being the currency of the internet. | ||
| People want to know where their information is coming from. | ||
| I am a conservative. | ||
| You are a libertarian. | ||
| People understand that who are tuning in to this show. | ||
| And that's okay. | ||
| The demasking is showing clips like that, where they are now unvarnished, presenting themselves as the leftist propagandists that they actually are. | ||
| And that veneer of objectivity has been utterly destroyed. | ||
| The carpet has been rent. | ||
| The curtain has been ripped. | ||
| There is no such thing as objectivity anymore, and that's okay, as long as you're prepared for the new thing coming. | ||
| Which is this, which is understanding that Dave Rubin is a libertarian, and he's gonna come at it from a libertarian point of view. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| And you're also gonna watch us work through it in real time, which is one of the things. | ||
| It's why I do the events that I always do at Turning Point, where I go up there and I always make a point of saying, guys, I'm gonna say a few things that I know most of you disagree with. | ||
| And not only do I get invited back, but if anything, I think that's why I'm getting invited in the first place. | ||
| Yeah, so you're one of the most popular speakers. | ||
| And maybe 40% of your speech is not necessarily the exact thing that the audience believes. | ||
| That's okay, they love you. | ||
| Half of my speech last time was about Star Wars, because it had just come out. | ||
| The funny thing is, I ended up, I didn't want to lead too much, remember? | ||
| So I was like, I wasn't talking too much about Star Wars. | ||
| Then we do Q&A, and I always say to the kids, kids, students, whatever, I always say, if you disagree with me, come up first, and yet all the questions were about Star Wars, and I was like, wait a minute, guys, let me get this straight. | ||
| I give a political speech, the President of the United States is speaking here in an hour, and you're asking me about Star Wars, and everyone was like, going crazy. | ||
| This is why you gotta ask questions about General Grievous, right? | ||
| This is why you have to use Star Wars, use the billions that have been put in to tell the Star Wars story, to tell a story about politics, about the things that are going on in the world today. | ||
| And the people that really understand that are the people that understand where audience is going. | ||
| And this is where audience is going. | ||
| Whether they can laugh, They can laugh and they can be Nero and strum the harp while Rome burns, which is what I get when I watch a clip like that. | ||
| When I watch a clip like that, I think about Rome burning and about Nero playing his harp. | ||
| And I think that's just them laughing and cackling, being the last little elitists on their little pedestals. | ||
| As their ratings are crumbling, as their advertising dollars are going through the floor, and as people are tuning out in record numbers, and as they're being beclowned, quite literally, on a daily basis, that is Rome burning. | ||
| Do you ever think when one of these clips is going viral, and again, I think you made a really interesting point that this existed for a while before it went viral, which shows you that no one is really watching this stuff, but do you ever think, ah, maybe we should just let it be and I shouldn't jump in on it on every clip? | ||
| Because sometimes I feel that, because, you know, you see these things happening on Twitter and you see everyone kind of doing their thing and making it bigger. | ||
| And then there's this other part of me that's like, you know what, if we all just started ignoring all of this, That we could really be maybe better focused on whatever it is that we individually are trying to build rather than | ||
| Taking that thing down. | ||
| Do you think about that ever? | ||
| Well, you brought it up, that you're attacked. | ||
| They call you a racist or a Nazi for being on something other than a corporate media platform, right? | ||
| Instead of inviting us in and having to do the hard thing, which is diversity of opinion, and actually lean in to diversity of opinion, they do the thing that losers do. | ||
| And I'm not saying that in the sense of like losers, I'm saying that in the sense of these are tactics of people that are losing. | ||
| They're losing their base, and they're losing their cultural war, and when you see them cackling about Trump supporters and mocking accents and Southern accents and things like that, mocking people's careers and jobs, that's the tactic of a loser. | ||
| That's not the tactic of a winner. | ||
| That's the tactic of a losing side that's attempting to score cheap points on someone who's already defeated them. | ||
| Right, like who are you bringing over when you're doing that? | ||
| Does anyone watch that and go, oh, these guys, they really get it? | ||
| Like, I guess, yeah, there's the sliver of the base that's in on the joke or something like that, but do you get anyone Anyone that they would want to bring over to them. | ||
| I am thrilled when liberals slide right into my DM and talk about how much they hate me and my content. | ||
| And this happens, of course, you know this, this happens on a minute-by-minute basis, but if my content is reaching them, the Star Wars video pisses off a ton of people, right? | ||
| You tricked them into thinking General Grievous was killed in Iran. | ||
| You also piss off the star, you're ruining Grievous' good name. | ||
| Of course, like everyone knows the thermal detonator wasn't used to kill General Grievous, right? | ||
| Like, what are you thinking? | ||
| If I can just bring you into the conversation... | ||
| If I can just bring you into the conversation, and we can start that dialogue, that's a huge success for me. | ||
| So as a conservative, and a relatively young conservative, are you kinda shocked? | ||
| Relatively. | ||
| Relatively, I don't know, you wanna say how old you are? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm 33. | |
| I'll leave that up to you, 33. | ||
| I'm ancient. | ||
| But for a conservative, you know what I mean? | ||
| If you listen to MSNBC, conservatives are supposed to be stodgy old white men. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| So as a relatively young conservative, though, Are you shocked how sort of wide the conservative tent is becoming right now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, look at conservative heroes, right? | ||
| Viral heroes. | ||
| Let's start off. | ||
| You have Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Like, he comes from a very specific and very unique minority worldview, right? | ||
| With Orthodox Judaism, you have Candace Owens coming from a very specific, very, very, like a worldview that is It's almost dynamic to itself, right? | ||
| You're not able to mix people like Andy Ngo, who's doing the best reporting on Antifa, Scott Pressler. | ||
| The young roster of conservative heroes is so diverse, it really is... | ||
| Gives you hope for the future. | ||
| I work with Charlie Kirk every single day. | ||
| I know he's been on this show. | ||
| And it's amazing to think, like, my god, he's 26. | ||
| So something interesting happened a couple months ago. | ||
| There started to be this, like, rise of what I would say are genuinely sort of far-right People that were going after Charlie, going after Turning Point, showed up to my events, probably showed up to things you were doing. | ||
| And one of the things that I was super impressed by was the level of fight that I saw people on the right fighting these people. | ||
| Where what I see on the left, and my audience knows how I feel about this already, obviously, that the left, there's nothing too far left, right? | ||
| Ilhan Omar's not left enough, and Sarsour's not too left, and you're never too left or bananas to be associated with on that side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| The right does set limits. | ||
| And I think that was pretty damn impressive, I say by you guys, because it was a real attack | ||
| on turning point. | ||
| And it didn't, and you guys fought back, and I would say won in whatever the hell. | ||
| Shapiro was there to help. | ||
| I mean, Ben gave, I think, a very Churchillian speech, right, to really break it all down. | ||
| Charlie did this multiple places. | ||
| They went after you. | ||
| It was a sudden group of, I would say, real race-focused nationalists, something like that. | ||
| I think that's what separates us from the left, though, is having the courage to say, | ||
| you're not part of our party. | ||
| We disown you, right? | ||
| We disown you, and these views, we do not want inside of our tent. | ||
| By the way, did you see that? | ||
| I'm sure you saw it, that stelter clip on CNN where they show these race realists protesting Donald Trump Jr., with Charlie on stage with him. | ||
| They're attacking Trump Jr. | ||
| Trump Jr. | ||
| is fighting against the racists. | ||
| The guys that are screaming about all this stuff. | ||
| And then CNN says Trump Jr. | ||
| is fighting against the conservatives. | ||
| It was something like the real conservatives or something like that. | ||
| To imply that real conservatives are racist and somehow Trump Jr. | ||
| was sort of the good guy. | ||
| It's all so confusing. | ||
| It's too confusing, but it's very basic in its element, which is that if you are a racist or if you are an anti-Semite, you have no quarter in my movement. | ||
| Those are things that I don't, Play footsie with. | ||
| And we will disown you. | ||
| And if those are the things that, if that's your worldview, then that's not going to be part of the movement that we are creating. | ||
| It's as simple as that. | ||
| CNN can try and conflate that, and people can try and conflate that all they want, but it's just really clear when you lay out the words that are being said and what is being said. | ||
| It's really stark, but it takes bravery to do a thing like that and it also takes a little bit of | ||
| moral courage and it'd be really exciting to watch that type of a disownment of anti-semitism and of | ||
| the views that play footsie with or just openly embrace terrorist regimes and anti-semitic | ||
| tropes to happen on the left to happen on both sides. | ||
| Isn't this one of the few things we should agree on, Dave? | ||
| Well, that's why the thing that happened with Rogan was so crazy. | ||
| It's like you've got lefties screaming that Bernie has to disown Joe Rogan, but he doesn't have to disown Linda Sarsour. | ||
| He doesn't have to disown Ilhan Omar. | ||
| Or Rashida Tlaib, who's out on the campaign trail with him. | ||
| Out on the campaign trail with him on a regular basis, someone who says the Holocaust gives her a calming feeling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is just shocking that Rogan is the guy who needs to be deep-sixed. | ||
| Yeah, we gotta take Rogan out of this crew. | ||
| But we're all going to embrace Michael Moore and we're going to, you know, literally communist Michael Moore, communist AOC, and open anti-Semite Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. | ||
| Let's shift a little bit to this impeachment thing. | ||
| Have you heard about this? | ||
| You heard that something's going down? | ||
| You know what's funny is that I live in D.C. | ||
| I've lived in D.C. | ||
| for 10 years. | ||
| I made my bones in Washington and I like being close to my subject matter, right? | ||
| It's very important to understand how these people tick behind the scenes. | ||
| So I have a very firm pulse on D.C. | ||
| and Washington and how it works. | ||
| I pride myself in this. | ||
| I set myself. | ||
| You wouldn't know impeachment's going on in Washington. | ||
| You can sense when something big is happening. | ||
| Kavanaugh, for instance, this is an example of the entire city being enraptured by a thing that's happening that affects us all. | ||
| You can't go to a coffee shop and you can't take the metro without seeing Kavanaugh's face, without hearing about it, without having someone come up and talk to you about it, people yelling in the streets, people screaming on both sides, ripping signs. | ||
| That's a thing that takes over the entire city. | ||
| Impeachment. | ||
| It's like- Nothing. | ||
| Like, the government took a Xanax. | ||
| Like, everyone's out. | ||
| Cold. | ||
| It feels like the producers, sort of. | ||
| Like, it's a show that nobody's going to. | ||
| That's not exactly what the producers want, but it's like a show that they wanted to fail that then became a success. | ||
| Is this gonna be a springtime for Hitler joke? | ||
| You're trying to work the springtime for Hitler. | ||
| But it's not quite the right analogy there. | ||
| But you know, I can tell you why you're right. | ||
| Because when I was on tour with Peterson, it was the middle of the Kavanaugh thing, and we were doing a Q&A in Ireland, and people were asking us about the Kavanaugh thing. | ||
| And I thought, how bananas is this? | ||
| I'm in Dublin, and people can ask Jordan anything they want, and they're asking him his thoughts on the Supreme Court justice, the potential Supreme Court justice of the United States. | ||
| That has no bearing on their lives whatsoever. | ||
| There's a million other things that this guy could talk about that would directly affect them. | ||
| But it's like, I don't think anyone over there is talking about it because nobody's talking. | ||
| My neighbor, I kid you not, I was walking the dog the other day, the neighbor came up to me and he knows what I am and what I do. | ||
| And he was like, so how about that impeachment thing? | ||
| And the way he laughed was like, I don't even know what his political feelings are, but he laughed as if like, it's just like you would say it to somebody. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything. | ||
| But it's like saying, what's the weather like? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It was just like, that's it. | ||
| It's catastrophic. | ||
| If you look at the polling, if you look at Democrat voters, they don't care. | ||
| And if you want to put a bow on this whole thing, what has establishment corporate media been covering nonstop, 24-7, wall-to-wall, since October? | ||
| Impeachment. | ||
| They have been making the case and doing their best, many of them propagandists for the DNC, making their best case for impeachment of President Trump. | ||
| And a guy like me who has a show where I go out into the streets and talk with people, I went out into the streets of Florida, swing state, very political state, and asked people if they had been convinced or if they even knew why the president was being impeached. | ||
| And the responses I got in two straight hours of asking probably four or five dozen people was, no. | ||
| I mean, quite frankly, no. | ||
| They haven't been convinced. | ||
| They don't really understand why it's happening. | ||
| And all of the full force and weight of full establishment media and everything they've built and their entire kingdoms come together to cover one thing and no one cares. | ||
| And it's not getting through. | ||
| And it's not making sense. | ||
| But you know what does fly? | ||
| A meme on my Instagram about how stupid impeachment is. | ||
| And General Grievous. | ||
| Are you worried, putting aside the reasons that you enjoy the meme wars and everything else, I mean, are you worried that even if Trump wins, that the stage has been set here, that they'll just try another impeachment after this, and they'll just try another, that sort of the ship has sailed. | ||
| They've said, this is the route we're going. | ||
| They're saying, you know, now the new thing is he's not gonna, he won't leave the presidency. | ||
| And that's another reason we have to impeach him. | ||
| He won't leave. | ||
| I mean, they're the ones that won't accept the last election. | ||
| Like, there's so many backwards, you know, they usually tell you more about themselves when they're claiming what Trump will or won't do. | ||
| But are you worried about that just for the health of the republic? | ||
| I'm worried about that, actually, that let's say Trump wins again, which I suspect he will, and that if that happens, that we then just get another four years of this, and we'll ultimately have had six years of just endless nonsense. | ||
| And then how do you ever get out of that? | ||
| How do you get out of it? | ||
| As I said, I had Michael Nelson on last week. | ||
| He loves it. | ||
| He says we should be in that all the time, because he likes the energy of that. | ||
| But you, as an energy guy, like through the internet, does that worry you? | ||
| There's no energy there. | ||
| That's what's crazy about being in Washington, being on the ground, is that there really is no energy there. | ||
| Something happened this last week. | ||
| Two big things, impeachment and March for Life. | ||
| March for Life had hundreds of thousands of people at it. | ||
| The city's a nightmare. | ||
| The city's catastrophic at the March for Life, whether Trump speaks or not. | ||
| Trump spoke. | ||
| Catastrophic. | ||
| Can't get anywhere. | ||
| I mean, it's easier to find a lifeboat on the Titanic than to try to find an open Uber or to try and get anywhere in the messed up grid at the March for Life because there's so many people in the city. | ||
| There were multiple impeachment protests. | ||
| I covered them. | ||
| It was legitimately tens of people showing up. | ||
| I can tell you honestly, I'm not trying to make fun of them. | ||
| I can tell you honestly, less than 100 people showed up to each of these pro-impeachment rallies. | ||
| It is not something that, it's not something that there really is any energy on that level, on the grassroots level, and polling shows this. | ||
| Polling shows that Democrat voters are like, just get it over with, just get it over with, let's move on, this isn't helpful. | ||
| Do you think the Democratic Party survives this thing? | ||
| I actually think this might be the end of the Democratic Party as we know it, and it's gonna split into something else after this. | ||
| Well, I mean, with your past, you would perhaps know better than me. | ||
| But as long as- I have usually been right on what's going on with these people. | ||
| I suspect that they cannot survive this thing. | ||
| This will unearth all of the stuff. | ||
| It will cause the more radical socialists to go their way, and the blue dogs are all gone anyway. | ||
| But like, whatever the decent, whatever, you're a decent liberal, this has nothing to do with you anymore. | ||
| So, decent liberal. | ||
| Such a great point that you just brought up. | ||
| Decent liberal. | ||
| Pete Buttigieg, viral clip this week about him dunking on this pro-life Democrat. | ||
| A lot of Democrats are Catholic, right? | ||
| You're pro-life if you're Catholic. | ||
| So this is at a town hall, and she basically said, is there room for me in the party as a pro-life Democrat? | ||
| And he said, get out. | ||
| I mean, he's nice about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like the Buddha judge. | ||
| Nice guy. | ||
| He said, get out of our party. | ||
| Leave. | ||
| This is not the tactics of a winning movement. | ||
| So take a step back and look at tactics of people who win. | ||
| They can allow diversity. | ||
| They can allow diversity of thought. | ||
| They can be open to the world as it is, and they wish to attract more. | ||
| They wish to bring in more. | ||
| Like, let's create, and let's get unique, and let's come up with new stories, right? | ||
| The tactic of a loser is people who have to censor or control speech. | ||
| People who are horrified of new ideas. | ||
| People that are dogmatic in their belief system politically. | ||
| And who try to expel the people who offend them. | ||
| And what parties do those two worldviews represent? | ||
| And then that's very easy when you crystallize it that way. | ||
| What side is the losing side? | ||
| The losing side right now is Woketivism. | ||
| Activists left who have taken over the host, which is the Democratic Party, to try to push that worldview. | ||
| And it is really isolating. | ||
| And you have a presidential candidate who odds on right now, the betting world says Bernie Sanders. | ||
| Try and run an actual communist in America. | ||
| You think Trump wants that, though? | ||
| It almost seems like that's where we have to get to this thing, to really kill this thing. | ||
| And I did this post on New Year's Day that went pretty viral about how this will be the end year of the woke stuff. | ||
| It never gets fully killed, but I think this will be the year that it fundamentally gets crushed enough to change or cause the split in the DNC. | ||
| But it seems to me that if you get the Trump-Sanders thing, Then we can sort of put, everyone can just put all their cards out on the table at that point, right? | ||
| It's basically capitalism versus socialism. | ||
| What do you want, people? | ||
| And the entire world will, by the way, be voting for Trump because nobody, no sane person in any other country wants America to become socialist. | ||
| Yeah, that's hard to explain to people in America for some reason. | ||
| This is why there's open warfare right now in Berlin. | ||
| Open warfare. | ||
| Democrat establishment are full of people who are investors, who are very wealthy, who have made money off the capitalist system, and they do not want to lose it all. | ||
| They do not want to give it all away. | ||
| Have I told you my crazy Bloomberg theory? | ||
| My crazy Bloomberg theory is that Bloomberg is running as an insurance policy to ensure that Trump wins. | ||
| I know that sounds nuts, but the idea being that if Bernie gets it, Bloomberg runs so that he can get maybe 5% of the decent Democrats, the old school liberals, thus making sure that Bernie loses because for as much as Bloomberg hates Trump, he at least likes capitalism. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I know that sounds nuts. | ||
| And he likes trade with China. | ||
| He likes trade with China. | ||
| And he likes that trade lane being open. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And yeah, Bernie does not. | ||
| I'll tell ya, if Bloomberg does not, Get the nomination, and if he does not become president, he can still, there's still a position open for him that he will be beloved and cherished throughout the land for, and that I think he's perfect for, which is playing Baby Yoda in the next season of The Mandalorian. | ||
| He's the perfect size, he'd fit in the costume, all right? | ||
| He has like the sensibility, I think he has the sensibility to play Baby Yoda, season two, Mandalorian. | ||
| If you're out there, okay, Disney, if you're listening, Disney, Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That might be a possibility. | ||
| He'd be great. | ||
| Perfectly, perfectly cool design. | ||
| He's a small guy. | ||
| He's so cute. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know nobody likes being in the prediction game, but... So you think Trump's just gonna run away with this thing? | ||
| Like gangbusters kinda? | ||
| I'm an optimist, right? | ||
| But I'm also a realist, and you live in D.C. | ||
| long enough, you get real beaten down as a conservative in D.C. | ||
| over the last couple cycles, and then you look at the actual data that is being produced right now from swing states, from the general electorate, And the same things that have always been true are true still today in the sense that people won't vote against a thing that helps them. | ||
| The American economy is doing better than it's done perhaps in the history of this country. | ||
| There is a lot of data to support that and that certain groups that are typically have a rough go are doing better than they have ever done in the history of this country and that people will not vote against their own interests. | ||
| And right now economically things are just Just going gangbusters, and so it just doesn't matter if Trump kills General Grievous with a thermal detonator. | ||
| People are going to not vote against their own self-interest. | ||
| Is there anything in the conservative movement that you're not happy with at the moment? | ||
| Are the conservatives missing anything? | ||
| Are they coming up short? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where would that be? | ||
| Or what would that be? | ||
| There's still an entrenched establishment in the city that likes communicating in the old way. | ||
| They still like doing things the old way and very much like media is going through their own inception point and changing drastically. | ||
| There is an establishment, there's an establishment conservative in D.C. | ||
| that, if you read the headlines, Trump is always at odds with, that like doing things their own way. | ||
| That way was controlled decline, and I hate that with the very soul of my being. | ||
| So when you say controlled decline, that was basically Jeb, McCain, Romney. | ||
| You kind of play by their rules, but you lose every time. | ||
| We've lost, the worldview comes from this. | ||
| We've lost the culture war. | ||
| We've lost the political landscape war. | ||
| We've lost the colleges. | ||
| We've lost the education system. | ||
| We need to just control the decline of our worldview and stop the boulder from rolling down the hill on us. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| If we can slow it down, it's a huge win, right? | ||
| But it's coming for us either way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's all Bullshit. | |
| That's not true. | ||
| And culture is something that can be shifted on a paradigm and can move quickly. | ||
| And if you play it right, and if you speak the language that the new audiences of the world are speaking, then you can control, you can be the person who creates the culture. | ||
| and who really does paradigm shifts. | ||
| I mean, look at what Kanye is doing right now inside of his industry. | ||
| Dr. Dre is gonna produce a Christian album with Kanye. | ||
| We could do a whole show on all of the dimensions there, but my God, that's a paradigm shift. | ||
| And that happened with Trump, where for the first time in my lifetime, and I was born in the last years of Reagan, first time in my lifetime, it wasn't about controlled decline for conservatism. | ||
| It wasn't about giving up and just stopping the boulder from crushing us. | ||
| It was about, no, we will move the boulder back up the hill. | ||
| And we can put this boulder back up on the hill and put our enemies, put the opposing side on their hindquarters and roll it down on them. | ||
| I like winners. | ||
| fight us for territory. | ||
| And so it's this, I know it's a meme, Dave, I get it, but it literally is winning and | ||
| losing. | ||
| I like winners, they're losers. | ||
| It really is winning and losing. | ||
| If you come at it from a standpoint where you haven't lost entirely, I love that. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| That's what young people are attracted to. | ||
| Young people are attracted to people who win. | ||
| They're attracted to winners. | ||
| They're attracted to optimism. | ||
| They're attracted to your show for these exact reasons. | ||
| And may he rest in peace, Kobe Bryant, I mean, the guy was a winner in so many aspects of his life. | ||
| And he exuded that optimism, and he loved America. | ||
| I found this old viral clip of him talking about being... I shared it. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| ...on Team USA, and it's amazing. | ||
| He was even asked. | ||
| This was a couple years ago. | ||
| He was asked, like, is that cool to say America's the best country in the world? | ||
| It's like, it's cool for me. | ||
| People are attracted to that, right? | ||
| And there's thousands of people down at the Staples Center right now because that attracted people. | ||
| And for the first time in my life, conservatism kind of has that, like that winning sensibility with all of our new heroes and with this new Avengers cast of conservatives and the way that we are conquering the internet. | ||
| We are destroying the left on the internet. | ||
| We are winning the meme wars. | ||
| It's not the clone wars. | ||
| We are winning the meme wars. | ||
| The left can't meme. | ||
| They cannot meme. | ||
| We are winning. | ||
| We are winning for the first time. | ||
| It's very, very exciting. | ||
| And so the people who controlled losing, I don't like that about modern conservatives. | ||
| Sorry for the long answer, but I really feel passionate about this. | ||
| Dude, that's how you end an interview. | ||
| No apology necessary. | ||
| For those of you who are not on Twitter, you might want to follow at Benny Johnson just for the memes. | ||
| But you put him up on Instagram and all those other places. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Where the kids are too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| We'll have to do this. | ||
| Maybe we're gonna have to write a new Star Wars story together. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Is that where this all heads? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I want to. | ||
| With Bloomberg as Baby Yoda. | ||
| With Bloomberg. | ||
| With Bloomberg as Baby Yoda? | ||
| Has anyone done that? | ||
| I mean, has anyone made that where you put Bloomberg's head on Baby Yoda and done a little video? | ||
| I mean, here, I'm handing you something. | ||
| Okay, I have to go. | ||
| I have to go do that right now. | ||
| You do. | ||
| Get the hell out of here. | ||
| That's gonna be right. | ||
| That's gonna be the next thing I post. | ||
| That's gonna be the next meme. | ||
| All right, we're done. | ||
| Bloomberg as Baby Yoda. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
Export Selection