Feb. 23, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:02:43
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| It's challenging to go to the UN and participate in the system where the UN says, you know, we have this formula and every country gets to have a certain amount of people get jobs at the UN. | ||
| So they look at the formula and they say, oh, well, how many people do we have from Nigeria? | ||
| Oh, we need more. | ||
| Go hire people into the system from Nigeria. | ||
| It tends to not be whether or not someone is qualified or has the skill set, it is are we being fair and equal on the disbursement of jobs. | ||
| We're hearing a lot of this idea lately, all over the place. | ||
| Right, and that's where it breaks down, because you're hiring people that really don't know what they're doing and they waste money and the UN becomes a jobs program. | ||
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| As always, guys, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that notification bell so that you have a small chance of actually seeing our videos in your feed. | ||
| And more importantly, joining me today is the former U.S. | ||
| spokesman at the U.N. | ||
| and currently the American ambassador to Germany, Rick Grenell. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Pretty amazing. | ||
| This is really cool. | ||
| Pretty amazing. | ||
| This is really cool. | ||
| I got to tell you, I thought and my team thought we're bringing in our first ambassador, the ambassador to Germany. | ||
| Big country, important, powerful guy. | ||
| We thought you were going to be in a sharp suit. | ||
| You'd bring us German chocolates and treats, things like that. | ||
| I have never had a more casual guest in this studio, Mr. Ambassador. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say that this is because of you, right? | |
| Because I figured I'm in a suit all the time, but if Dave is gonna interview me, I better be pretty casual. | ||
| I know your crowd is pretty casual. | ||
| My crowd is casual. | ||
| I feel like I should be wearing, I have that same UGG hoodie. | ||
| Should we stop right now? | ||
| But do you have the same t-shirt? | ||
| I don't have the gay mustache t-shirt. | ||
| Available at Target. | ||
| Is that a Target? | ||
| Yeah, it's Target. | ||
| You truly are a man of the people. | ||
| All right, we got a lot to talk about. | ||
| So I realized yesterday when I was doing a little research on you, because that's what I do. | ||
| Don't believe it. | ||
| Don't believe it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Everything they say about you must be true, right? | ||
| I'm pretty sure that's how it works online and Wikipedia. | ||
| They're not messing with it or anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But even though we've been friends for a couple of years now and I know you pretty well, I realized that I actually don't know anything about your life, like childhood or anything. | ||
| I don't even know where you're from. | ||
| And then I started doing some reading and I was like, nah, I'm just gonna, let's pick it up here. | ||
| Cause you're the ambassador to Germany. | ||
| Where the hell are you from? | ||
| How did this whole thing happen? | ||
| I was born in Muskegon, Michigan. | ||
| My parents moved, I'm the youngest of four kids. | ||
| And so my parents moved to California and Redwood city actually. | ||
| And so I went to elementary school in Redwood city, moved back to Michigan in seventh grade. | ||
| So I went to junior high and high school all in, in Jenison, Michigan. | ||
| And then I went, my parents are evangelical, which I know you know. | ||
| I grew up evangelical. | ||
| I went to Evangel College, which is the National Liberal Arts School for the Assemblies of God, evangelical movement. | ||
| Great school, had an amazing experience. | ||
| Small, it's in Springfield, Missouri. | ||
| And then worked on Capitol Hill for a little while. | ||
| Worked for a presidential campaign of 92. | ||
| And then went to the Kennedy School and got a master's at the Kennedy School and then kind of kept doing political stuff. | ||
| Were you always into politics as a kid? | ||
| Yes, which is crazy. | ||
| I love the media. | ||
| I loved watching the news with my dad and we'd sit down together and watch the news and talk about these issues. | ||
| My dad was pretty political in the sense that he liked to talk about politics and would always be involved in the local congressional race of supporting somebody basically and stuffing envelopes. | ||
| And so he gave me that kind of excitement. | ||
| I like the pure competition of it in many ways. | ||
| I'm a very competitive person. | ||
| There's nothing like having two campaigns that are jostling and then there's an election day, right? | ||
| There's like a finish line. | ||
| There's a day that everybody votes. | ||
| Who did it better? | ||
| And who do I like? | ||
| And that pure competition. | ||
| Well, that all depends on what the Russians decide. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But I like that whole competition thing about politics. | ||
| And I think a lot of people go into it because of the pure fun and political competition of it. | ||
| I also am geeky and care about policy, and I love to dig deep on policy and make change, make the world a better place. | ||
| Does it shock you the amount of people that are in politics that are endlessly miserable related to politics? | ||
| I see so much of that now, where it's like these people who think that all of their life and their whole salvation is politics. | ||
| It's like it only can lead you to disaster or depression somehow, where if you have a certain different look where it's not everything, Yeah. | ||
| It's not everything. | ||
| Then you can kind of have a smile on your face when you talk about it. | ||
| You know, I think that it's largely if you live in Washington, D.C. | ||
| I mean, it's an incestuous town of people who, you know, on both sides of the aisle, their kids go to the same school and they go to the same church and so they protect each other. | ||
| And they live in Washington and they just kind of flip when it's the Obama administration. | ||
| Oh, my Democrat friends are connected and they include me in the local dining experience and social circles. | ||
| And then when my guy is in and they're out, I'll take care of them and lobbyists are all there and the whole city is growing. | ||
| It's such a terrible place. | ||
| The real world outside of Washington DC I think gives you perspective and so I have worked in the political realm for like more than 25 years. | ||
| I've only lived in Washington from 1993 to 1995. | ||
| I got out, I can't stand going back and I think that gives you perspective. | ||
| It's not unlike here in LA where we both live. | ||
| If you're a part of Hollywood and you're working at a studio and all you live and breathe is the blogs and the TV media, you know, Hollywood stuff, you don't get a very good perspective. | ||
| It's the actors who moved to Atlanta, or who moved their production companies to Chicago or Montana, who I think have better perspective and they do better work, because they have just a different view. | ||
| How has then being in Germany, living in Germany as our ambassador in Germany, changed your perspective on American politics, when you see it from not just not living in DC, but actually living abroad? | ||
| Yeah, so I actually asked for the job to be Ambassador to Germany, and one of the reasons why is my eight years at the UN taught me this kind of lesson. | ||
| If you've ever been to the UN and you walk into that huge General Assembly Hall, 193 placards looking at you, it feels like the Super Friends, the Hall of Super Friends. | ||
| I took the tour when I was in like ninth grade, that's the only time I was there. | ||
| It does feel like the Hall of Super Friends, but as an American- It's more like the Legion of Doom though. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| When you walk in that hall and you see 193 countries, as an American, you quickly say, where are my European friends? | ||
| Because we view the world the same way when it comes to democracy, rule of law, human rights. | ||
| You're not trying to convince European countries that they shouldn't shove a gay person off a building. | ||
| We have relatively the same perspective. | ||
| I found that in my eight years at the UN, in dealing with the Europeans, we tend to, as Americans, negotiate with what we call the E3, the British, the French and the Germans. | ||
| Our experience with the E3 became that the Germans were the weakest of the E3. | ||
| They were dragging down our negotiations with the Europeans. | ||
| Can you give me an example of how they would do that sort of thing? | ||
| So, I'll give you a recent example. | ||
| I would say when the UN finally came around and gave a second report that Bashar al-Assad had gassed children and gassed people and we, the West, the Western Alliance, wanted to respond to that, the Americans approached the British and they said, we're in. | ||
| We approached the French and they said, what do you need? | ||
| We approached the Germans and they said, we don't like war. | ||
| We're against war. | ||
| You know, we've had this special history. | ||
| And so we really don't want to participate in war anymore. | ||
| And so I've actually said to Chancellor Merkel and to the foreign minister and to lots of people in Germany, that's the wrong lesson of World War II. | ||
| The lesson of World War II for the Germans is that they should be the first ones to recognize a madman who's gassing children, and that they should be in the front of the bus, and they should say, let's form a coalition. | ||
| Now, I get that because of their special history, they don't want to do it alone anymore. | ||
| And so they literally want to be surrounded by multilateralism. | ||
| Great. | ||
| But you had that with the French, the British and the Americans. | ||
| And they still couldn't participate. | ||
| So I think we're in a slide over the last years. | ||
| And one of the things I wanted to solve was this Germany first economic model, but Germany wanting to have a Switzerland foreign policy where they're going to be friends with everybody and just cash in. | ||
| I mean, Germany is really the first country in terms of the economics to be a Germany first policy. | ||
| And America first is only coming along a little while later, but the Germans have been doing it for a while. | ||
| So that's a pretty big split sort of if Germany's going Germany first economically, but then on the world stage we kind of got a dip out because of our history. | ||
| Did Merkel respond to you in a positive way when you said, you know, we should be more or you should be more involved? | ||
| Look I think the Chancellor does have an innate good reaction to say we should do more and we should participate and we should pay our NATO bills even though they're not and try to get to that spending. | ||
| I do think that she thinks that that's important but that it's a lofty goal because They really want to bring the public along first, and no politician in Germany wants to step out and be a leader. | ||
| Now remember, the German word for leader is Fuhrer, which is too close to the word that they used for Hitler. | ||
| And so many times, talking about being a leader conjures up really negative stereotypes. | ||
| And so try being the US ambassador to Germany, Asking the Germans to do more without using the word leader. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| How do you say be a leader? | ||
| You can't say be a leader. | ||
| You have to say step out and and you know, what do you say? | ||
| You can't even say lead by example. | ||
| Do you think there is like an actual sort of psychological condition then that they will ever be able to get out of? | ||
| Do you think it's just like so embedded in the ethos of what it means to be German now because of the history? | ||
| I mean, first of all, let's just say what it is. | ||
| It's pretty serious. | ||
| It's an incredible monumental stain that lasts through generations. | ||
| And I'll tell you one of the things, the dynamics that we've experienced in Germany is that there are now young people who are trying to be tech entrepreneurs or run businesses. | ||
| And you hear little whisper campaigns of to say, oh, you know, they have their money or their house because they were sympathizers with the Nazis. | ||
| Or they didn't stand up against the Nazis. | ||
| So there is still this very societal competition of finger pointing who was good and who was bad. | ||
| And imagine if we had to talk about our grandparents as whether or not they stood up or whether or not they took cover and they tried to, you know, do what they had to do. | ||
| Pretty incredible, kind of monumental things to think about. | ||
| And so I would say One of the things that I see is we as the Westerners, when we hear never again, we all think never again means never again will you slaughter people and get to the point where your hatred becomes the systematic killing, right? | ||
| Never again, for many Germans, means never again are we gonna have any military role. | ||
| They don't necessarily believe that never again means you can have a working military that defends your country and participates in good around the world, and never again just means don't let it get out of hand. | ||
| But for them, in many ways, never again just means no military operations whatsoever. | ||
| We could do show upon show on that. | ||
| I'm sure in Germany they're doing that all the time and trying to work through that. | ||
| You'd be surprised the German media is pretty groupthink. | ||
| Not many step out. | ||
| Well, I told you last night about my experience with the German media. | ||
| I could have solved that for you so easy. | ||
| If you would have just said to me, I got a call from a Spiegel reporter, I would have said, Dave, hang up now. | ||
| I mean, come on, they've made up stories about Americans constantly. | ||
| They got caught making up stories. | ||
| And then they took them a year to kind of admit it. | ||
| And the whole time they're saying, oh, we have the best fact checking system in the world. | ||
| They couldn't fact check to save their life. | ||
| For the people that don't remember, they put a picture of me on the cover of the magazine saying I'm the grand illusionist of the alt-right, and you can see my big American flag over there. | ||
| And I was sitting in front of the American flag like this, and it looks like I'm some alt-right leader, and they're talking about my Scandinavian furniture, which is Ikea, and my fancy Italian coffee maker, which is Nespresso. | ||
| I mean, the whole thing. | ||
| All right, anyways, sidebar. | ||
| All right, well, let's go back. | ||
| I could have saved you that pain. | ||
| I know, yeah. | ||
| How did I not call you? | ||
| Idiot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, let's back up for a second because you mentioned your evangelical upbringing and then you showed me your gay mustache shirt, Rick. | ||
| I thought this is not possible. | ||
| I thought evangelicals can't be gay or Christian theology and homosexuality are at odds or all of these things. | ||
| You strike me as a decent functioning person and we've had dinner with you and Matt and all that good stuff. | ||
| So make some sense out of this. | ||
| You know, I think being gay makes me a better Christian. | ||
| To be honest, I'll tell you this. | ||
| I have felt guilty, this is an admission, that when I had cancer and I was really kind of down in terms of my physical outlook, I felt like I prayed more. | ||
| And I was closer to God because I was in need, right? | ||
| I feel guilty about that as I go through life and, of course, the ups and downs of life when things are going well. | ||
| You don't pray as much. | ||
| You don't really think about God or the existence of the Creator. | ||
| And I started to feel really guilty about that. | ||
| And so I just think that every person needs to have, you know, whether it's a group of people or a philosophy of some sort, that keeps them in check. | ||
| That kind of questions what life's ups are about. | ||
| And so, for me being gay, I think I get so much challenge that you can't be gay and be a Christian. | ||
| that it makes me a better Christian. | ||
| I'm an imperfect follower of Christ. | ||
| I fail every single day. | ||
| But for me, what's the beauty of this is that the Bible talks about having new mercies every morning and grace every morning. | ||
| I get up every morning and I just think, Thank God that I believe in the Creator and that every morning I have a new beginning and a new chance to prove myself in this totally human state that fails every day. | ||
| And so, I was made this way, right? | ||
| And the Bible says everyone is fearfully and wonderfully made. | ||
| I was made this way. | ||
| I was born gay. | ||
| The fact of the matter is that I fully embrace the fact that I was made this way in the image of God, and you can be gay and be a Christian, and there's no problem with it. | ||
| I think the world is also changing within the Church, that the Church really believes that. | ||
| And when you look at the biblical mantra about this, you really have to go back to the original language, the original Greek. | ||
| and really understand what the words were when the translation in the 1950s somehow takes the word homosexuality and puts it into a different context. | ||
| I don't know if you know Peter Gomes, he passed away, but Peter was the minister at Harvard Memorial Church and he was conservative and black and gay and a minister and he was an incredible Just literally an incredible mentor to me to think about how God made me and what the Bible says about really a whole bunch of these kind of 20th century issues, the subjugation of women, immigration, all these. | ||
| He wrote this book called The Good Book and he takes all these issues and goes back to show how both sides of the argument over the years have used the Bible in their favor. | ||
| They've said things like, you know, God has told me to, you know, have this position. | ||
| And you manipulate it on both sides, and he kind of showed, look... | ||
| Stop with the manipulators and look at what the original language says. | ||
| I love things like that. | ||
| It's like an exogenesis of the words and the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that something particularly good or interesting is happening with the evangelical community generally? | ||
| I was telling you last night, I mean, I spoke at Liberty University in front of 14,000 people. | ||
| They know that I'm gay. | ||
| I didn't sense that one person cared in some sort of negative sense. | ||
| I walked around campus, everybody was incredibly nice. | ||
| The amount of emails that I get from evangelicals in the middle of the country who actually, most of them say, they usually say they don't care that I'm gay or they don't even know often. | ||
| They'll say I was watching you for two years until I even found out and they'll say I don't even care, which is sort of how you want it to be. | ||
| And now you've really blown my cover here with your gay mustache shirt. | ||
| But do you sense that something has shifted with evangelicals where maybe, you know, during the George W. Bush re-election year, where they made gay marriage such a wedge issue, and suddenly evangelicals were not behaving maybe Christ-like or however you want to put it. | ||
| So I think there's two issues in there that I would confront. | ||
| One on the political side, yes. | ||
| It's completely changing. | ||
| I went to the 1992 convention in Houston, and I've been to every convention since then. | ||
| And let me tell you, the 1992 convention, when speeches got up there and were very anti-gay, It's much different. | ||
| So this is, that was Bob Dole? | ||
| No, that was Bush-Quayle re-election. | ||
| Oh, okay, okay. | ||
| And so, we've made dramatic changes. | ||
| Every four years I could see the convention and the political process completely changing. | ||
| But let's also talk about the fact, you know, my brother is a very well-known evangelical minister. | ||
| I've got nephews who are evangelical pastors, and so I know this crowd really well. | ||
| And I think there's a difference between the political nature of the issues by them embracing things like the decriminalization of homosexuality around the world. | ||
| They don't think countries should arrest someone for being gay or kill someone for being gay. | ||
| Evangelicals believe that. | ||
| They say, no, no, no, you shouldn't do that. | ||
| It's quite different, though, to say, are you going to jump up and down and be happy that two men are getting married? | ||
| And do you approve that? | ||
| I don't necessarily need the answer to the second question. | ||
| Yeah, I don't either. | ||
| I don't go around and approve the marriages of people in my own family or people that come into my life. | ||
| I don't sit there and say, you know, I don't know if this should work. | ||
| We all know plenty of straight couples like that, but I don't wander around all day worrying about it. | ||
| Or if you did bring it up every single time you were around them, you probably wouldn't have a very good friendship when you were at dinner with them to say like, I don't get how this works. | ||
| You're an accomplished person and you're a slouch. | ||
| You just don't say things like that and we don't judge other people's Marriages, so to speak. | ||
| And so, that's worked with me. | ||
| I just say to people, I don't need applause. | ||
| I don't need you to jump up and down and scream happiness that, you know, I am gay. | ||
| I just want to be equal. | ||
| And so, I think there is an element, I hate to say it like this, because this is way too simple, but it is an agree to disagree. | ||
| Well, as long as the rights are equal, I'm fine. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| You can think whatever you want. | ||
| I mean, this is, you know, people get pissed because I'm friends with Ben Shapiro. | ||
| And it's like, he has his Orthodox Jewish perspective on gay marriage. | ||
| He's not trying to stop me from being married. | ||
| He may not be thrilled personally that I'm married or have his own religious belief attached to it. | ||
| Everybody's not denying you your rights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So what do I expect in this world? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Or what do I expect in this country, in a free country? | ||
| I went to the 1993 March on Washington for when Bill Clinton and Al Gore had taken over. | ||
| And that march was incredible because there... I'm going to get the number wrong and somebody's going to come at me. | ||
| Oh, they'll come at you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it was like a million people, right? | ||
| Gays and lesbians and straight supporters all came out to Washington and marched. | ||
| And it was dramatic in that I think it was at that point That things became political on gays and lesbians and the LGBT movement. | ||
| Before then, we kind of all were on the outs, and so we were together. | ||
| In Washington, you know, people, Republicans and Democrats, were not making this the wedge issue. | ||
| But I will say that the march on Washington left our community with a sense of, we just want equality. | ||
| And if you go back to that march, Dave, The mantra was tolerance and diversity. | ||
| We recognized that other people were not going to agree with us, and our whole request, our ask, was just embrace diversity. | ||
| We know you don't agree with everything that we stand for, but let's just be tolerant of each other. | ||
| Remember, hate is not a family value, was this whole thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The entire leadership of the LGBT movement in Washington DC is all about cancel culture and absolutely pushing people out of the argument to say, I don't even want to be friends with you if you voted for Trump or you're a gay conservative. | ||
| I can't even fathom being friends with you. | ||
| Well now they also want to take your gayness away, right? | ||
| So they'll write articles, that famous article in Out magazine about how Peter Thiel is not gay. | ||
| Enough. | ||
| Because it's because it's not who you have sex with or who you love that makes you gay. | ||
| It's actually a political way of thinking that makes you gay. | ||
| Which is why GLAAD has this whole like immigration and it's a movement beyond Anything that has to do with gays and lesbians. | ||
| And I think they're trying to survive, right? | ||
| Well, is that just the cops need a certain amount of crime type of thing? | ||
| It's like, we got equal rights, and not to say everything is perfect. | ||
| But I work around the world, let me tell ya. | ||
| People around the world who are fighting for equality, and I really mean this, they are totally annoyed at the New York Hollywood, West Hollywood gays who raise a lot of money for black tie events and aren't doing a thing to help our brothers and sisters in Lebanon who are getting arrested. | ||
| Or look what happened in Zambia. | ||
| They literally prosecuted two guys for being gay, and the court said, oh no, we're doing this because they're gay. | ||
| They didn't make up some pedophilia thing. | ||
| No, no, but if you say something about that, you're somehow racist, right? | ||
| Or you're a xenophobe or something like that, because you're pushing your values, but some values are better than others. | ||
| That must be the number one thing you have to fight all the time, right? | ||
| At the UN, or over the years at the UN, that you had to fight that now as an ambassador? | ||
| Well, I'm now fighting this thing at the State Department where, when it comes to the decriminalization campaign, So you're spearheading this thing, right? | ||
| I'm spearheading this thing. | ||
| There's 69 countries that criminalize homosexuality. | ||
| 10 will kill you for being gay. | ||
| And we've launched a process, we've done a whole bunch. | ||
| We're trying to stay out of the media in terms of telling them every little thing because the media's pretty hostile to something like this. | ||
| We're making great progress. | ||
| The media's pretty hostile to something like decriminalizing. | ||
| From the Trump administration, honestly. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, we'll get to that. | ||
| I was about to tell you a second ago that we've talked for about a half hour or so, and until about a minute ago, the T-word had not come up yet, which I think is a record. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we'll get to that in a second, but sorry, go ahead. | ||
| But the decriminalization campaign, we're making so much progress. | ||
| Granted, this is going to be a long fight, trying to convince 69 countries to do a change in domestic laws to not criminalize homosexuality. | ||
| And that's all this is, is step one, is just to work on criminalization. | ||
| Others are working on step two through 20. | ||
| I felt the need to do step one because when I look around the world step one wasn't really being pushed | ||
| I've been working with no, this is gonna be bad because they're probably gonna go after them | ||
| But I've been working with Stuart milk of the Harvey Milk Foundation who's fantastic who's totally focused on this | ||
| problem And so what we're trying to do is to have 69 different | ||
| Campaigns basically because you've got to work with the local | ||
| community remarkable stories that I could just go in over and over | ||
| that I don't because I don't want to highlight it and Scare people away that are working in these countries | ||
| But suffice to say this was a fight that needed to happen that was not happening and right now I have to face at the State Department resistance from people who don't want Americans or Westerners to go into other countries and take a stand for the decriminalization campaign because literally there are | ||
| countries that believe that the West, and specifically America, have imported into their country | ||
| being gay. And so they're like, "Oh no, no American should talk about this because you're | ||
| going to emphasize." My position back is that's the stupidest idea that Americans brought in the gay. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There were no gay people before America. | ||
| It's only about a 200 year thing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So I'm not going to actually be silent on that and participate in letting them silence me because they've got some crazy conspiracy theory. | ||
| I'm going to bust the conspiracy theory wide open and say, you're wrong. | ||
| How do you decide, though, when to use extra pressure to get a country to do something? | ||
| Because I know as generally as a conservative and from what I know about you, you don't love the idea of telling countries what to do. | ||
| It's not really in the conservative ethos. | ||
| And yet I understand, you want people to be free. | ||
| So how do you decide when we can apply more pressure? | ||
| Such a good question. | ||
| I get one, I get one every interview. | ||
| That's the one. | ||
| I would say that I have this philosophy that as a diplomat, I am working at the State Department, and I have to be successful in order to avoid war. | ||
| Because if you have diplomats who are not successful, that file of a problem gets transferred over to the Pentagon, and they don't negotiate. | ||
| They just solve the problem. | ||
| And so I firmly believe that diplomats should be at the forefront of pushing and prodding and demanding talks and demanding that we have a table to air our grievances on. | ||
| If we're planning to bomb, if DOD is ready to attack, I would hope that we have brave diplomats that are saying, wait a minute, I got one more chance. | ||
| Let's sit down. | ||
| Let's try the diplomacy thing. | ||
| So I get hit constantly for, oh, you're undiplomatic or you're too tough. | ||
| And I thought, That's what you want in a diplomat, because you want to have somebody that's working hard to avoid war through talk, through pushing and prodding, rather than transferring the file over and having a problem solved through military action. | ||
| Has some of that been tough for you, though? | ||
| Because you used to fight on Twitter more, be more of like a battler there, where you're an ambassador now, you're a guy in a hoodie. | ||
| You've calmed it down a little bit. | ||
| I still think that I pick my fights. | ||
| I don't feel like I've backed off. | ||
| What I do think is that I want to make sure that someone is in that fight, and so I look to see, you know, like on a media bias issue, I still get really charged up. | ||
| If the groupthink in Washington or the political circles is one way and nobody's challenging that, I'm Willing to jump in. | ||
| I don't care if I have the title of ambassador. | ||
| I'm still going to jump in and try to push and correct the record where I see fit. | ||
| If others are doing it, and thank God you're in there to do it, then sometimes I can let it go and look for the next problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about just generally what the state of the UN is and what it was like to be there? | ||
| And you know that so many people think that it's like this sort of perfect thing that the countries come together and figure out what's right for everybody. | ||
| Like they love the idea of it more than I think functionally how it works. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or does not work. | ||
| Well first of all the I always try to correct people that the UN doesn't really exist. | ||
| The UN is member states, right? | ||
| So when somebody says, oh, the UN says no, I always say, the UN doesn't say no. | ||
| Members at the UN, maybe Russia and China got together in the Security Council and said no, but the UN doesn't take a position. | ||
| And so I try to not just reflexively blame, oh, the UN stopped something because it's really member countries. | ||
| That's the first thing. | ||
| The second thing is, is the UN does not work unless the US is leading it. | ||
| Whether it's the World Food Program, UNICEF, UNDP, you know, the development programs, whatever it is, the US has to be there. | ||
| Otherwise the UN does not work. | ||
| The UN system is based on every country is equal. | ||
| Not every person is equal. | ||
| It's every country. | ||
| And that's where I think, as Americans, we say, that's just fundamentally not true. | ||
| Every country is not equal. | ||
| So in the General Assembly, when we pretend that these small island countries get the same vote as China or the United States or the bigger economies, that's kind of laughable, to be honest. | ||
| I get that we want to have a General Assembly where people have the ability to talk, but I don't love the idea of one country, one vote, which I think is balanced by the Security Council and the idea that the substantive work goes to the Security Council. | ||
| So I get the kind of separation, but it's challenging to go to the UN and participate in the system where The U.N. | ||
| says, you know, we have this formula and every country gets to have a certain amount of people get jobs at the U.N. | ||
| So they look at the formula and they say, oh, well, how many people do we have from Nigeria? | ||
| Oh, we need more. | ||
| Go hire people into the system from Nigeria. | ||
| It tends to not be whether or not someone is qualified or has the skill set, it is are we being fair and equal on the disbursement of jobs. | ||
| We're hearing a lot of this idea lately, all over the place. | ||
| Right, and that's where it breaks down, because you're hiring people that really don't know what they're doing and they waste money and the UN becomes a jobs program. | ||
| Is the UN better at certain things and worse at others? | ||
| So like, when it comes to food disbursement or helping development, that kind of stuff, it seems like they're probably pretty decent at. | ||
| And then the Security Council or a lot of the rest of it seems like 90% of it is just voting against Israel for, you know, moving Iraq. | ||
| Yeah, I think you hit it on the head is that, you know, we pay 25% of the UN bill and that's for the Secretariat and the kind of UN administration. | ||
| And all the parking tickets, right? | ||
| Isn't the whole thing just parking tickets? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Isn't that what they say? | ||
| It's just ambassadors. | ||
| You get to park wherever you want. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But at the same time, there are these what they call extra bodies, independent bodies, and those are funded through voluntary contributions. | ||
| So World Food Program and UNICEF, they don't get monies from the general fund of the 25% money that we give. | ||
| UNICEF only gets its budget by appealing to people to say we've got a crisis, we need to go out, and who wants to write us a check? | ||
| The Europeans, the Germans, the Americans. | ||
| We fund the most on those World Food Program UNICEF type independent bodies. | ||
| That's why they're well run, is because we demand management, transparency and accountability in these independent bodies. | ||
| We don't have that ability to do in the UN General Assembly. | ||
| So you get this kind of really blob type management. | ||
| And mission from the actual UN operations. | ||
| What is the obsession with Israel, with the General Assembly? | ||
| I mean, every time you look at that chart, it's like 90% of the condemnations. | ||
| Well, you know that there's only one country that can't serve on the Security Council, and that's Israel. | ||
| I'm outraged by it. | ||
| I'm telling you, I think that the US government should just put its foot down and say, we're going to clear the deck and Israel should be on the | ||
| Security Council, just to prove a point of getting them on the Security Council. There's this fascination | ||
| with condemning Israel. It's why we got out of the Human Rights Council is because, you know, | ||
| you've got nine resolutions on Israel and and nothing on Iran or, I mean, the word is out. | ||
| If you don't wanna be condemned by the UN and you're a human rights abuser, | ||
| then go run for the Human Rights Council so you can protect yourself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Trump somehow just gets all this? | ||
| Like he really has fixed a lot of this. | ||
| Or is in the process of fixing it or something? | ||
| He's not of the political establishment, and so he's willing to be a disruptor. | ||
| We all know about disruptive technology and people who go in and say, gosh, everybody has groupthink and you're missing the big... | ||
| You know, reform effort. | ||
| I think Americans really want Washington to be disrupted or the UN. | ||
| They look at it and they say, what a waste. | ||
| You know, why are we spending all that money? | ||
| But the system in Washington filled with lobbyists and all the people that take care of each other, they don't want an outsider coming in and somehow wrecking their good fortune. | ||
| You know, and and we see that in Hollywood. | ||
| We see that same thing in Hollywood. | ||
| And so I want to to applaud and do everything I can for President Trump, because first of all, he's got really thick skin. | ||
| All of the people who just constantly come at him for thank God we got a president who's just really tough on that and doesn't care. | ||
| And two, he sees it for what it is. | ||
| And he's not really that partisan. | ||
| I mean, I look at what I'm starting to to call the Trump doctrine. | ||
| Which I think is the Trump doctrine to foreign policy, which is a dual approach to every single issue where you use every tool of the US government, economic tools, sanctions, pressure to change the behavior of a country, and you really utilize that pressure in a strong way. | ||
| At the same time, there's this separate path to say, let's talk. | ||
| Let's sit down and have a diplomatic talk. | ||
| He's doing it with Kim Jong-un. | ||
| And the neocons and the traditional Republicans did not like him saying, I'm going to just go talk to Kim Jong-un. | ||
| They only want to do the squeezing. | ||
| They don't always want to say, well, why not talk to see if we can test this? | ||
| Talking is a tactic. | ||
| It's not the goal, right? | ||
| So when you see, then, like the never-Trump conservatives, so like the Bill Crystals, or just those guys that have sort of been around forever and who usually have gotten everything wrong always, are they different privately? | ||
| Like, are they privately kind of like, yeah, I like what he's doing, and he's doing more? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think they're creatures of Washington. | ||
| I think they live in Washington, DC, and they want people to play by the rules. | ||
| The people who benefit from the rules, and they want everybody to come in and play by the rules, are on both sides of the aisle. | ||
| This is not a partisan thing at all. | ||
| It's you got to come to our city and play by our rules because we got lobbyists to take care of and we've got a system and everybody is participating in the system. | ||
| Marco Rubio actually talked about this just the other day and I thought it was really good. | ||
| He was saying, look, when I came to Washington and I didn't go to their cocktail parties, I eventually didn't get invited to their cocktail parties. | ||
| And then they started sniping at me because I wasn't going to their cocktail parties. | ||
| And they recognized that I wasn't playing by their rules. | ||
| And he said, Trump has done it tenfold. | ||
| He's come in and completely doubled down on that. | ||
| And I think it's right. | ||
| I think we're getting senators, you know, Ron Johnson, I think, is another great senator who doesn't play that game. | ||
| And he comes from Wisconsin and plays a different tune, which is, I'm fighting for the people of Wisconsin. | ||
| Marco Rubio, I think, is doing that. | ||
| Senators that are beginning to do that and challenge the system And I think it's what the people want So what's it like when Trump Donald Trump New York businessman Donald Trump the guy becomes president then I assume your phone rings one day and he says Looking looking to send somebody over to Germany. | ||
| Is it a phone call? | ||
| Is it an email? | ||
| Does someone else reach out to you first? | ||
| How does that all work? | ||
| Well, I so I had been in and around the campaign quite a bit. | ||
| And so there's always a constant conversation. | ||
| And there's also, I think, a question of like, who's loyal, right? | ||
| Who was here before all of the jobs were available? | ||
| Who was committed? | ||
| And I think they saw that I was very committed in the campaign. | ||
| And so the conversation to me was, you know, where do you see yourself in the administration? | ||
| Or do you want to join the administration? | ||
| And so from the beginning, I just said, you know, some sort of a foreign policy role, you know, let's discuss. | ||
| And then we had that conversation. | ||
| And eventually I was like, I think Germany is a good fit. | ||
| Yeah, so let's actually back up because it's sort of related to what you just said there. | ||
| So you, at one point when Romney was running, you were an advisor for foreign policy for the campaign, right? | ||
| When Romney was the nominee. | ||
| Yeah, when he was the nominee. | ||
| Yeah, and so what was that, 2012? | ||
| And this is now, it was really only for a couple weeks because then some strange stuff happened, which is so related to everything else we're talking about here. | ||
| Yeah, I mean the reality is that it wasn't a couple of weeks because I had been in the primary doing all this work, so I had been with him for a long time. | ||
| They made it official once he got the nomination with a big title. | ||
| But I had already been there and doing all this work just because, you know, I've worked in foreign policy for a long time. | ||
| And as a spokesman, I know the media, so I know kind of how to define the issue and what the media are thinking is the issue or how they define it. | ||
| And then being on the inside, understanding where we want to go. | ||
| Having somebody to help you get there, right? | ||
| If the goal is here and the media are here, how do you educate? | ||
| And so, with the relationships that I had with many reporters, it seemed like a natural fit to be on the campaign as the spokesman. | ||
| But then, as you're pointing to, I, of course, have been out for a very long time and had written about, I wrote an article called The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage before the fight, when we were fighting it. | ||
| And many social conservatives at the time didn't like the fact that Mitt Romney had hired a openly gay foreign policy spokesman. | ||
| And so they came at me pretty hard and the campaign pretty hard by saying, Sky is for gay marriage. | ||
| You're not. | ||
| How is this gonna work? | ||
| You gotta finish that story, though. | ||
| So the story ends with you stepping down voluntarily, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I needed, in that instance, I needed somebody to say, this is irrelevant. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| He's our foreign policy spokesperson. | ||
| So you were looking for Donald Trump then, actually. | ||
| I was. | ||
| I was looking for somebody that would define the issues for the conservatives as, you know, this is my campaign and this is my beliefs. | ||
| and to make the case. | ||
| And clearly the campaign knew that I was gay before they hired me. | ||
| That shouldn't have been a secret. | ||
| And so I was just looking for a protection. | ||
| And once I saw that this is gonna be a complicated issue for the campaign, that they don't know how they view this, | ||
| and their reaction to me was, it's best if you just stay quiet | ||
| and not make any waves for a while. | ||
| Let's let this blow over. | ||
| My reaction was, well, it's not going to blow over because I'm gay. | ||
| And two, it's not going to blow over because it's a campaign. | ||
| People like to inflate issues on campaigns. | ||
| It's now in your lap. | ||
| You're going to have to solve this. | ||
| And what I eventually saw was that it was too complicated of an issue for them. | ||
| They couldn't detangle it and they just wanted me to stay quiet. | ||
| And as the spokesman, you can't stay quiet. | ||
| You're the spokesman. | ||
| The quiet spokesman, yeah. | ||
| So I consulted with a couple of my mentors and they just said, you know what? | ||
| Just resign and give them the ability to go do what they want. | ||
| And so they never replaced me, actually. | ||
| on that campaign. | ||
| So it's funny, because I can see you're being honest, obviously, but also slightly diplomatic here, right? | ||
| Because you're not trying to throw Romney under the bus. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But without maybe speaking to him specifically, is that thing that you're talking about exactly what you're describing Washington is? | ||
| That complete inability to grapple with something straightforward, let the media do whatever they want, and then all the good people who are trying to do something real are the ones that have to resign or get thrown under the bus or the rest of it. | ||
| I mean, I hope I'm not like that guy that's like, oh, I'm the purest and I'm the best and everybody should be like me, because that certainly is not the case. | ||
| I think though, Dave, that it's a good question and I would say that the answer is more, I joined this kind of conservative movement in 1992. | ||
| And I had been seeing movement. | ||
| And I'm somebody who the glass is always half full. | ||
| And so I always try to make sure that we're growing and changing the party from the inside. | ||
| And so I think the answer is I felt like there was change always happening. | ||
| That we were on a right trajectory. | ||
| And that even being hired was a great moment. | ||
| And I'm not the candidate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So so I don't want to be the story. | ||
| I really don't want I want to help the candidate. | ||
| And so I recognized that I had pushed as far as I could in that particular situation. | ||
| And, you know, I wrote an article I think a week later I'm saying how I think that that Mitt Romney would be a better president than Barack Obama and that I fully endorsed him. | ||
| So I'm not sure that I'm being diplomatic as I am being more truthful about the progress and maybe I mean some people I think could say you're jaded right because you've been on the inside too much that you weren't a purist and and it's probably true I'm more of Let's have small improvements. | ||
| And as long as we're making improvements and the goal is up here, I can kind of justify why I'm a part of the process. | ||
| So Trump, okay, so let's just sort of piecing this all together then. | ||
| Now you have this guy who you don't have to walk that tightrope with. | ||
| We had 17 candidates in the primary. | ||
| And Donald Trump really just suck out. | ||
| And so I was really excited to work for him. | ||
| I mean, look, this is a guy who was very clear in the campaign that he wanted to treat everybody the same. | ||
| He really did. And, and so I liked working for him because he was challenging us on the Iraq War | ||
| implementation and saying, you know, I thought it was a disastrous decision. He was critiquing | ||
| Bush and McCain and Romney's positions on the Iraq War in a Republican primary. Now, everybody | ||
| around me had said, Oh, he's done. But that was all the Washington type people who were playing | ||
| by the rules. And if you took their rules, he would have been done. But the primary is really | ||
| about the people outside of Washington. And And that's where I felt like I was reading the situation better than what they were. | ||
| Because my sphere wasn't what the Washington crowd was saying about he's done and he's not acting like a Republican. | ||
| It was what the Republican base or the people and how they were responding to, yeah, that's an obvious, the Iraq war management didn't go well. | ||
| And so that was an honest assessment of, you know, some people say touching the third rail of politics, of saying the things you're not supposed to say. | ||
| And I like that. | ||
| But Rick, I don't understand. | ||
| Everybody says, if you listen to the mainstream media, that everyone in the world, they don't respect us anymore and they think he's a buffoon and all of these things. | ||
| Could that possibly not be true? | ||
| I mean, that's what the New York Times is telling us. | ||
| I mean, really, joking aside, what are you seeing now, as an ambassador, when you go to all the NATO things and all the places you go to and all the meetings, do you sense that people suddenly don't respect us? | ||
| They used to respect us, they don't, or we're not the patsy anymore, perhaps? | ||
| What is the real temperature? | ||
| So I think what you're really asking is, does his style work or does it not work, compared to Barack Obama's style, which is much different. | ||
| I think we should be honest and say, we got two different styles, absolutely. | ||
| Washington rulemaking will tell you that Trump's style does not work because he doesn't participate in what their rules are. | ||
| But let's look at that. | ||
| Let's look at whether or not his style works, because I'll take this argument all day long. | ||
| I don't want to be political here, but let's just talk facts. | ||
| Barack Obama was wildly popular in Germany. | ||
| Wildly popular. | ||
| They loved him. | ||
| Didn't he give that speech before he was president? | ||
| When he was campaigning, yeah. | ||
| To like a million people or something crazy. | ||
| And he maintained his popularity. | ||
| People loved him. | ||
| But he didn't get any of his signature programs or policies through. | ||
| And I mean that. | ||
| You look at TTIP, which was the economic signature program of the Obama administration. | ||
| The Germans killed it. | ||
| They literally led the fight to kill it. | ||
| Nord Stream 2. | ||
| We said, don't build it. | ||
| They went ahead and built it. | ||
| Giacopoli, the Nazi prison guard living in New York City for 12 years. | ||
| The US courts said, get him out of here. | ||
| He lied to us. | ||
| We want him back in Germany. | ||
| The Germans wouldn't take him. | ||
| The entire eight years of the Obama administration, they asked, will you take this Nazi prison guard back? | ||
| They ignored him. | ||
| Defense spending. | ||
| We asked in very nice ways. | ||
| Can you raise your defense spending? | ||
| You know, we think that you should be a better NATO member. | ||
| They largely didn't do it. | ||
| And so all of those issues were solved under the Trump administration. | ||
| So I've actually said to Chancellor Merkel and to the foreign minister and to others in Germany, You're gonna have to deal with some tough tweets. | ||
| You're gonna have to deal with some pushing and some ribbing because the only way that we can read this is that the Donald Trump style has worked. | ||
| Do you think they secretly like it, but sort of publicly? | ||
| I don't mean Germany specifically, but generally that countries and leaders They have to sort of pretend that they don't like Trump, but as they see the U.S. | ||
| sort of reassert itself, and maybe even as he forces them to pay a little bit more, actually pay their share, that in a weird way they almost do like it because it helps give them a little bit of their sovereignty back, or a little leadership to look for. | ||
| No, that's 100% for sure. | ||
| I think the publics in Europe like to have the ability to have their sovereignty back. | ||
| They love, and President Trump has said this to Chancellor Merkel, I don't blame you for not paying your NATO bill and for buying cheap Russian gas and having a $69 billion surplus over us and having a surplus and 50,000 American troops protecting you. | ||
| I don't blame you. | ||
| Who wouldn't do that if you were the Chancellor of Germany? | ||
| But then he says, but now it stops here because you're outsmarted all these other presidents and now I have to stick up for my people. | ||
| So if Trump is right about all this stuff and now countries are paying more and all of these things... Which he is totally right. | ||
| Billions, hundreds of billions. | ||
| Right, so suddenly countries are starting to pay their share. | ||
| Is it just... | ||
| Is it just what you're saying, that it was just the way Washington always worked? | ||
| Or is it just that we refused to use any influence on countries? | ||
| That it was just always easier to just be like, ah, we'll pay for everything. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I think some of it is our own fault. | ||
| And you're getting at that a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, I guess that's what I'm asking, that it was just we kept bringing in people that just were always like, oh, we're paying, and why wouldn't we pay? | ||
| Yeah, and we gotta be nice, and oh, they're pushing back, and we wanna be pro-European, and so let's just have a dinner party. | ||
| Man, these people are having a lot of parties. | ||
| Yeah, and sitting in European capitals, and really, we have all of these people in European capitals working at our embassies. | ||
| Look, I think our embassies should be mini-commerce. | ||
| sections. You know, I've got a whole bunch of people at the embassy who are super smart | ||
| and very committed to the United States and do great public service. But I have come to | ||
| the conclusion that having a whole team of people watching the German political system | ||
| and reporting back to Washington by writing cables about what's happening in the governor's | ||
| race, minister president's race, in a state in Germany, and all of that stuff. | ||
| Super interesting, completely irrelevant in many ways. | ||
| We can get that information off the internet after it happens. | ||
| We don't need reporting officers to do that. | ||
| What we do need are economic specialists on LNG, liquid natural gas, or economic specialists on medical devices to help us get U.S. | ||
| companies growing in Europe. | ||
| I think that our embassies need to be transformed. | ||
| Less on the political side, less about the politics of the country that we can get through the internet. | ||
| All this was established before we had the internet. | ||
| And now we need to turn these embassies into America first, economic models, just like what other countries do. | ||
| We're the only country in the world that gets in trouble for pushing ourselves forward. | ||
| Everybody's doing it, but we're the one that gets in trouble for saying, oh, how dare you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you by any chance read that book that I've got right there, Jérôme Harzoni, The Virtue of Nationalism? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because his whole idea is that... I am reading Douglas Murray's, though. | |
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| Well, there's plenty. | ||
| There's a couple of good Douglas Murray books over here. | ||
| But the basic premise of the book is that strong nations, that you have to be a strong nation first, so be America first. | ||
| Be Germany first, be whatever your country is first, and that's how you, by being a strong nation first, then you can create some sort of international community that makes sense, but that really we're just doing it all backwards, or we've been doing it backwards for decades, which is we put ourselves down and thinking that we're achieving some higher goal or something, and then we end up screwing over everybody. | ||
| Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and sometimes you have to be able to put forward in a pushy way your position in order to get things done and that doesn't mean that the relationship is ruined but it just means that this is a priority and so you're going to push it harder. | ||
| I think that's been one of the problems that we've had is just this kind of status quo. | ||
| You're supposed to say what you want and I'm supposed to say what I want and then We kind of cut the baby in half and we go away and go to lunch. | ||
| To me, that's not diplomacy. | ||
| I mean, we have to be able to push forward our agenda. | ||
| By the way, I've never, I've been in thousands of diplomatic discussions. | ||
| Thousands. | ||
| I've never been in one where the other side doesn't ask for something and we ask for something in return. | ||
| It happens all the time. | ||
| This is called diplomacy. | ||
| What do you want? | ||
| What do I want? | ||
| You know, it's this whole thing. | ||
| And the idea that you're asking for something is not a quid pro quo. | ||
| It's called diplomacy. | ||
| This is exactly what we do. | ||
| We show up to a meeting and we give our agenda of what we'd like you to do and what we need. | ||
| And then you do that and we pick and choose. | ||
| And when you make it a priority, this is what I would say on the Jaka Pali, the Nazi prison guard thing. | ||
| When I showed up in Germany, And I made this a priority and I said this return of the Nazi prison guard I brought it up in my first meeting with the foreign minister and you know what the foreign minister said to me after I brought it up? | ||
| I've never heard of this case. | ||
| I mean, that's incredible. | ||
| The State Department had told me, oh, we've asked for 12 years. | ||
| It's going to go nowhere, but you should bring it. | ||
| In my Senate confirmation, I got a written question. | ||
| Will you make Giacopoli the return of the Nazi prison guard? | ||
| Will you make it a priority? | ||
| I said, yes. | ||
| And I did it. | ||
| And then President Trump said to me, you should really get that Nazi prison guard returned. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm on it. | ||
| I brought it up in every meeting. | ||
| I made it a priority. | ||
| had to educate them, they returned them. | ||
| Does Trump basically just say, do whatever you want until? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not fully that, but I sense what he does with people is he gets people he kind of likes and trusts and let them do their thing. | ||
| And then he gets involved in some way after that or something like that. | ||
| What I would say is, I'll give you the perfect example. | ||
| He called one day and said, we're getting killed on medical devices. | ||
| And I was like, oh, I don't know anything about it. | ||
| And he goes, I know, but you'll figure it out. | ||
| And I said, I'm on it. | ||
| I'll report back and tell you what we're getting killed on and what I think the solution is. | ||
| And he's like, good, make it soon. | ||
| So suddenly you have a directive from the President of the United States to figure it out. | ||
| So what do I do? | ||
| I immediately go out and I meet with the medical device companies in Germany and then the ones providing jobs in the United States and then the U.S. | ||
| ones, figure out what's your problems. | ||
| I figured out what the problem was, or I should say one of the problems, a big problem, and then we tackle it and we try to deal with the whole FAA and U.S. | ||
| trade negotiator. | ||
| To be an ambassador, I think, you have to be able to know how to work the interagency process of the U.S. | ||
| government. | ||
| You've got to be an expert on the U.S. | ||
| government, not an expert on giving dinner parties. | ||
| You have to be an expert on how to maneuver within the U.S. | ||
| government to help companies. | ||
| I help German companies only if they have U.S. | ||
| jobs. | ||
| I view my job as solely trying to create more economic opportunity for Americans, more jobs, better paying jobs. | ||
| And so that can be done through Lufthansa, the great German airline, who has 15,000 American employees. | ||
| That can be done through Siemens that has 60,000 American employees, BMW in South Carolina. | ||
| So I'm constantly trying to help grow American jobs, but sometimes it's through German companies. | ||
| So I thought it would be an interesting way to end, which is that when we met, so I sort of, we knew each other about five years ago, just through Twitter, the way everyone knows everybody these days. | ||
| But I was a lefty at the time, and I was a full-on progressive. | ||
| I worked at the Young Turks, and I had you on my show one time you came in, and you were the scary conservative, and it was a very different show than this, and we just did hot topic kind of stuff. | ||
| But it was very clear that the other panelists didn't like you, and we disagreed on some stuff, and whatever, it doesn't even matter. | ||
| Who doesn't like me? | ||
| Yeah, well, I remember it was specifically, it was right before Christmas, and we were talking about how everybody's going crazy at stores for Black Friday and everything, and you were saying how great it is, and people are out there, and they're shopping, and blah blah blah, and they were basically saying, oh, you capitalist pig, and blah blah blah. | ||
| Anyway, it doesn't even matter the specifics. | ||
| But I mention all that because I would assume that you must be pretty freaking thrilled at the way the world is tracking, that now it's four or five years later and you see someone like me who was, you know, a former lefty, that even though I think we still have some minor political disagreements, doesn't even matter what it is, but that there really is like this rich thing happening on the conservative side right now. | ||
| And for somebody that was an out gay conservative way before, you know, really there was anybody out there, you must be pretty happy that it does feel like a pretty freaking wide tent right now. | ||
| I also feel pretty old. | ||
| How was that for a question? | ||
| I just lofted you something there. | ||
| I also feel pretty old. | ||
| When I look at being at the 1992 convention, being friends with Andrew Breitbart, when Andrew Breitbart came to me and said, CPAC is not allowing gays to have a booth, the log cabin. | ||
| And I was like, Andrew, it's ridiculous. | ||
| And he's like, what do you think if I boycott? | ||
| And I was like, you'll be a hero. | ||
| And then he did, and then he had this huge party, and it just transformed. | ||
| I mean, so much of what Andrew Breitbart did, and this is not an endorsement of everything that Breitbart.com does. | ||
| It's so sad you have to say that with almost everything these days, you have to like qualify. | ||
| But Andrew, you know, who helped launch the Huffington Post, and I met him when he was working for Arianna Huffington, and you know, I guess the answer is that the fight and debate for making our country better is something that I'm really passionate about. | ||
| And I've seen the utility of the fight and the debate. | ||
| As long as you do it in a respectful way. | ||
| I have to say one of the most hurtful things when I went through confirmation is how the left completely took Yeah. | ||
| you know, two or three of my tweets that were meant to be funny and turned them into a sexist. | ||
| I mean, I became the sexist thing and, you know, Democratic senators took to the floor | ||
| and were like, "He's a sexist. | ||
| They didn't even know me." | ||
| As a matter of fact, some of those Democratic senators I've asked 11 times to meet with | ||
| me and they've refused to meet with me. | ||
| Well, also the whole time during your time. | ||
| Well, first off, they kept delaying your confirmation too, right? | ||
| So they're saying Trump hates gay people. | ||
| Trump's got the openly gay guy. | ||
| He's trying to get confirmed as ambassador to Germany. | ||
| Yeah, Washington is a mess. | ||
| I mean, it's such a mess. | ||
| And so all I'm saying is that I always feel like a thoughtful debate, right? | ||
| Tolerance, diversity, right? | ||
| I can sit, I have so many liberal friends. | ||
| I can sit with my liberal friends, have a good discussion. | ||
| I sometimes learn from them. | ||
| Oh, that's interesting. | ||
| They learn from me. | ||
| This is what happened with, I think, your journey. | ||
| I have some of the same journey. | ||
| I don't have the same views as I had eight, nine years ago. | ||
| Everybody changes. | ||
| If you're listening in the debate, you are absolutely going to learn and change. | ||
| I can't believe it took us so long to do this. | ||
| You had to go be the ambassador to Germany and bouncer all over the world. | ||
| It was a pleasure, my friend. | ||
| Next time, I'm wearing a hoodie and you're gonna wear a suit. | ||
| How does that sound? | ||
| Can I just say that I think you have the best show on the internet. | ||
| We do not have the ability to talk about issues like this. | ||
| Thank you for doing it. | ||
| I know that it's not always easy, but it's huge. | ||
| It's huge, and it's so healthy. | ||
| And for everybody that's listening to these debates and learning, if you're in your car or whatever, I mean, it's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| We need more of this, not less. | ||
| Follow him on Twitter, at Richard Grinnell. | ||
| 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. |
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