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All right! | ||
We are live! | ||
Had some technical difficulties there. | ||
All good, people. | ||
New live stream for you. | ||
Clyde is in the house, as you can see. | ||
How you doing, buddy? | ||
unidentified
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Oh, there you go. | |
Really getting in on this. | ||
He gets very camera shy. | ||
I tried to get him on Fox News the other day. | ||
He wouldn't do it. | ||
But I guess for a YouTube live stream, he's all right. | ||
All right, buddy. | ||
How you doing? | ||
Okay, so we are doing our Monday live stream. | ||
I'm doing these every Monday and Wednesday at 8.45 a.m. | ||
Pacific, 11.45 a.m. | ||
Eastern, and this is my way of just getting my thoughts out to you on a Monday. | ||
It's just nice to get a couple thoughts out to start the week, and Wednesday, middle of the week, all right, you don't have to chew my head. | ||
And I just want to, you know, last week we did two books that are important and relevant. | ||
Right now I did 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson, and we did Peter Your teal's zero to one, so we'll do books sometimes, sometimes we'll do what the latest in the news is. | ||
We're always going to do Q&A with you guys, and we're only taking questions from community members at RubinReport.com. | ||
We're not doing YouTube questions or Twitter questions or anything like that, so you guys can join us at RubinReport.com. | ||
We've got ad-free video and you get full episodes five days early and a whole bunch of other stuff, but what I wanted to talk about Today was the sort of ever encroaching power of the government that we see happening right now. | ||
And look, I try to frame everything in a very simple way, the classical liberal lens that I'm always talking about, which is that I care about individual rights and you know how to live your life the best way. | ||
How? | ||
You may not do it all the time, but it's up for you to decide how to do it. | ||
And the government should protect your life and it should protect your property. | ||
things should be done at a local level as much as possible, states' rights, and then there are | ||
limited things that the federal government's supposed to do, like control the borders and | ||
immigration and things like that. Now, we all know this isn't exactly how the system works, | ||
and I think our founding fathers, who wrote some pretty freaking incredible documents, | ||
would be seriously depressed and annoyed and angry, to put it lightly, at how the government | ||
actually works, and also what a giant, money-sucking, endless albatross of a system we | ||
we have sort of hanging over all of us all the time. | ||
But in moments of crisis, this is where people always say to me, well, Dave, what's the difference between a classical liberal and a libertarian? | ||
most libertarians, when you take that to the nth degree, you really want the government doing | ||
virtually nothing. Yeah, protecting life and property, but then you don't want them stepping | ||
in to fix industries and things like that. I don't love those ideas, but I do think in a time | ||
of crisis, financial crisis, that often the government causes in the first place, | ||
in this case, a pandemic, medical crisis that is worldwide, that this cannot be, | ||
excuse me, this cannot be controlled by a state, that the federal government does have to do | ||
something, but I would try to leave as much to the states as possible. Now, unfortunately, | ||
I live in the People's Republic of California over here in Los Angeles, and | ||
And our government officials are doing all sorts of stuff. | ||
So I want to talk about today, are the politicians going to use this crisis to grab emergency powers? | ||
And then once they do, and once they're doing it already, by the way, I mean, this is happening right now, | ||
will they ever give these powers back? | ||
Unlikely, right? | ||
I mean, a politician, they find a crisis, never let a good crisis go to waste. | ||
So there's a whole bunch of things happening here right now. | ||
Our governor, Gavin Newsom, who was the mayor of San Francisco, | ||
and he turned San Francisco into a literal shithole. | ||
I mean, there's an app that you can download, that you're recommended to download, actually, | ||
when you go to San Francisco to watch, to make sure that you don't step in human poop on the | ||
street. | ||
It's people that are tracking human poop from all the homeless people and the drug addicts. | ||
And he was the mayor there in San Francisco. | ||
And then California said, oh, you did such a good job there. | ||
San Francisco is absolutely disgusting. | ||
I don't know when the last time any of you were there. | ||
I was there a few months ago. | ||
We were doing some fundraising for locals. | ||
Which I mentioned to you guys last week. | ||
So everything with Locals is actually going really great and RubinReport.com is the first project of Locals and we've brought on a whole bunch of great people. | ||
But we were fundraising in the midst of when coronavirus was exploding and the stories were breaking and everything else and it was like we were trying to like get out of Dodge City because I did not want to be stuck in San Francisco of all places. | ||
Anyway our fundraising went quite well and we're building and it's all good. | ||
But anyway, the people of California said, oh, you did such a great job with San Francisco, Mr. Mayor, that we've decided to make you governor. | ||
And the only reason Gavin Newsom's governor is because he has nice hair and good teeth. | ||
I mean, we all know that. | ||
It has nothing to do with his ideas. | ||
But Gavin Newsom had a wonderful Wonderful quote. | ||
I love this, uh, that he sees COVID-19 as a quote, opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern with more progressive policies. | ||
So you really need to understand that, that what many of these people try to do, they see a crisis and then you go, Oh, crisis time. | ||
We can almost do anything we want. | ||
And that's sort of like when we saw the stimulus package and there's 25 million, um, to the arts center, the Kennedy Arts Center, | ||
and all of this pork, it's nothing, and we all know it has nothing to do with helping people. | ||
Right, you wanna help people, you either make sure that they can stay in their jobs | ||
by helping the companies directly that hire them, so you incentivize companies not to fire people | ||
so that people can keep paying their bills, or you give money directly to the people. | ||
Now, again, I know you all know this, My preference would be before all of that, that you would have just been taking much less money from the people so that they could save more and do with their money what they want to do in the first place. | ||
But I think the ship has mostly sailed on that one, certainly in this state. | ||
So all of these guys are basically jumping in. | ||
And saying, well, how now we have an opportunity. | ||
People seem to want more from the government. | ||
How can we sort of stick all of our pet projects in? | ||
And there was an incredible Periscope video by that wizard, AOC, and she was just going on and on. | ||
She's making a margarita. | ||
You probably saw this a couple of days ago. | ||
She's making a margarita and she's going on and on about how the government can never do too much. | ||
She's like, has the government ever done too much for you? | ||
Nobody says that. | ||
And you really have to think how reverse to the true liberal position this is. | ||
John F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
asked not what your country can do for you, asked what you can do for your country. | ||
AOC says the polar opposite of that. | ||
And we really need to understand that, that what the progressives and socialists want | ||
right now, in many ways, they want the system to collapse because they've wanted it all | ||
along and now they see a sort of weak underbelly because of a crisis. | ||
And as I said earlier, you don't want to let a good crisis go to waste. | ||
So here's a couple of things that are happening in this wonderful state of California. | ||
We're about to release 3,500 nonviolent inmates early now in and of itself nonviolent. | ||
There's probably a way that it makes sort of sense, but to any of these people have | ||
coronavirus, are we testing properly? | ||
If regular citizens can't get tests properly, are we really testing properly in the prisons | ||
where we know that these populations are on top of each other? | ||
Also, right now, even if they're non-violent criminals, often people become more violent in prison, and we know that we have governors and mayors saying that we're not going to arrest you for petty crimes or turnstile jumping or a series of other things. | ||
So, would this be the right time to put more criminals, violent or not, on the street? | ||
That's for you to decide. | ||
Let's see what else. | ||
An extra $37 million in additional funding for L.A. | ||
homeless housing, plus extra money to buy or lease hotels and motels. | ||
And L.A. | ||
will get 660 travel trailers to isolate homeless. | ||
I mean, look, this is one of those things that, like most progressive policies, it sort of sounds right. | ||
Like, obviously, especially right now, we're in cities that we have a lot of homeless people. | ||
You would want to help them, even if you don't want to help homeless people in general. | ||
Let's say you just don't think it's the state's job. | ||
Well, you might want to do more right now because we have a public health emergency, right? | ||
So if everyone is social distancing, everyone's not going to work, everybody's doing everything that they're supposed to do, but now you have an uneducated population and people that are down and out often with mental health problems and drug problems and everything else. | ||
And they're doing all the wrong things. | ||
You might want to do some things to help them. | ||
But this is one of those things where it just sounds good and it's like, 37 million? | ||
Oh, well, of course, of course. | ||
Now, of course, the next politician comes in and says, 37? | ||
What are you, cheap? | ||
What are you, a right-wing maniac? | ||
Let's make it 45. | ||
But the bigger issue is it's just throwing money at everything. | ||
Just, oh, just, it just sounds good. | ||
We're gonna throw money at it. | ||
Let's see if it works. | ||
And we know these things don't work because why are the places Los Angeles! | ||
San Francisco! | ||
Berkeley! | ||
Why are the places where we put the most into helping homeless people, why are they the places where homelessness flourishes the most? | ||
There's a million reasons for that, and it generally does not work. | ||
Here's just a couple of the things. | ||
That the Democrats tried to jam into the federal stimulus bill. | ||
They wanted expanded Medicare, which Bernie's been pushing forever. | ||
Now, you might be somebody who says, I want everyone to have health care. | ||
I want everyone to have health care right now in a time of pandemic. | ||
And again, this sort of sounds right. | ||
But then you have to think, well, can a system support it? | ||
Is there money for it? | ||
will, once the government takes over, will people get proper care? | ||
Are you telling me that someone who has a ton of money in private health insurance has | ||
to be on the same plan as someone that is government subsidized? | ||
And this was a debate that the Democrats were having for a long time. | ||
Could you even have private insurance? | ||
And many of them said no, which is absolutely insane. | ||
How could they stop you from buying a policy for yourself? | ||
They want massive student debt forgiveness, which we know has been a thing the entire | ||
time, which to me is completely insane. | ||
I think there's some version where you could forgive some of it or you could forgive some | ||
level of interest. | ||
But when you just forgive all of the debt, well, first off, you're taking a hell of a | ||
lot of upper middle class kids who went to a. | ||
obscenely expensive schools, 30k a year pop, so you get, let's say, 120 grand in debt, | ||
and then you're going to bail them out? Why should the average taxpayer be bailing out | ||
some kid who went to Syracuse at 35 grand a year? And not only that, why would you punish all the | ||
people that actually worked off all of their student debt, right? David went to Penn State, | ||
and he had a ton of student debt. And over the years, we paid it back. And the last year, | ||
we finally made the last payment. That's what you're supposed to do. So you actually start | ||
punishing people who play by the rules. But again, it sort of sounds good until you think about it | ||
for two seconds. They want tuition-free higher education. I don't know what that has to do | ||
With coronavirus, if anything, we're learning right now that people that are in trades, that people who have basic skills, that people that are doing things like Instacart, and that people who are programmers and all sorts of other things who are going to build us a new internet to free ourselves from this nonsense, those are important things. | ||
Why would we be giving tuition-free college right now? | ||
It's so strange. | ||
There's a crisis and their answer is just the exact same thing that they were preaching the entire time. | ||
Um, let's see, diversity inclusion legislation, and you have to have that because, you know, unless you really care about your doctor's sexuality or gender, you're a racist bigot. | ||
Don't forget that one. | ||
Unemployment can now be higher than your previous pay. | ||
That's what they wanted to get in there. | ||
That's a real doozy. | ||
So if you got fired, we're actually gonna give you more money than you were making. | ||
Seems to make sense. | ||
They wanted universal childcare, progressive taxation, and affordable housing. | ||
So some of these things, they all sort of sound good at some level, | ||
but what we really need to be watching out for is just all of the people | ||
who think they have the easy answers. | ||
And then in a time of crisis, what we do, we all kind of freak out. | ||
We're all dealing with, you know, going to work all the time. | ||
Suddenly you're in your house with your spouse and your kids. | ||
You're worried about where you're going to get food. | ||
You're worried about people getting sick. | ||
You're worried about your grandparents, whatever it might be. | ||
And then they can just do all these things. | ||
And before you know it, the world is very different than it was two months ago. | ||
And I think it's becoming obvious at this point. | ||
That no matter what happens now, even if this thing ends next week, which it's not going to, but even if this thing ends next week, the world is going to be fundamentally different. | ||
I think there's tremendous opportunity here. | ||
I think all of us, those of us with our heads on straight, and I suspect most of the people watching this, I hope you've been using this time to figure out really what you want to do, what kind of job you want, what kind of relationship you want to be in. | ||
Do you want to live in a city or in a rural area? | ||
Do you want to commute to work? | ||
Can you work from home? | ||
Just all of these things. | ||
Do you wanna grow food on your land? | ||
Do you wanna be more off the grid? | ||
I mean, there's so many big questions to be thinking about. | ||
Do the systems and institutions that we've all just thought would always exist and always work, | ||
will they always exist? | ||
Will they always work? | ||
I mean, there's great opportunity here to figure out what kind of life you wanna live. | ||
Unfortunately, these are not the conversations you're gonna hear on CNN or New York Times or anywhere else. | ||
unidentified
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Okay. | |
Oh, here's the most dangerous of all of them. | ||
This is just beyond imagination. | ||
So, our mayor here, LA's Eric Garcetti, He is starting a policy where you can actually get paid to | ||
snitch on your neighbors. | ||
Matt, if you're watching this, can you throw up just any of the direct quotes from Garcetti | ||
on that? | ||
I don't think I see him right here. | ||
Oh, here we go. | ||
Oh, here we go. | ||
He wants to report violators of the stay-at-home order. | ||
And his quote is so perfect. | ||
You know the old expression about snitches? | ||
Well, in this case, snitches get rewards. | ||
Now really think about that. | ||
This is a tactic of Soviet Russia. | ||
This is a tactic of communist states. | ||
This is a tactic of Nazi Germany. | ||
Neighbors watching out for neighbors. | ||
Now again, You have to be responsible. | ||
And by the way, I'm seeing responsible people. | ||
Every day I walk the dog a couple times and I see responsible people staying distance from each other. | ||
I see people wearing masks, all of those things. | ||
But now if I was to see two neighbors hug each other, The mayor of the city that I live in | ||
wants me to snitch on them and then get a reward for it. | ||
Think how insane that is. | ||
There was video, was it in Santa Monica a day or two ago? | ||
It was at the beach here in California somewhere where someone's paddle boarding | ||
and then the cops come get them. | ||
It's like, I'm all for the social distancing and we all have to be responsible and all of that stuff. | ||
But when we start turning on each other and act as government agents against each other, we have seriously, seriously lost the plot. | ||
And that's what the mayor of this city that I'm in wants us to do. | ||
That is deeply, deeply dangerous. | ||
Actually, I was literally walking Clyde yesterday. | ||
and I saw two women across the way and they hugged. I saw them hug and I was like, oh, | ||
that's interesting. But maybe it's a mother and daughter, they live together and whatever. | ||
And then they got in separate cars. So I suspect that they don't live together unless they were | ||
both leaving to go to different places and then meet at home. And it's like, | ||
should I have snitched on them? Does that solve the problem here? | ||
I mean, it's really, really dangerous what we're up to over here. | ||
Okay guys, so I want to get to a couple of your questions at RubinReport.com. | ||
As I said, we're not doing a live chat on YouTube, which is just a bastion of awful stupidity. | ||
I am trying to create something around here that is a little bit more of a mature internet, internet 3.0, where it's real people having actual, honest, decent conversation. | ||
And that's what we're really building with the Rubin Report community. | ||
And we've been doing movie afternoons. | ||
We did The Matrix yesterday and had a live chat. | ||
We did Happy Hour where we got like a hundred people on Zoom at once and we all had a drink together. | ||
We're doing all sorts of cool stuff. | ||
Plus you can get ad-free video and you get five-day advance release on our full episodes and all sorts of stuff at RubinReport.com. | ||
And that's where I'm taking the questions from. | ||
Benjamin asks, do you believe that in the next few weeks that the states might begin to take matters into their own hands? | ||
Well, I think we're seeing some versions of that. | ||
I just gave you a couple bad versions of it from here in California and more locally from LA specifically. | ||
But I would like to see each state sort of making more decisions for itself. | ||
So let's say, I mean, I'll give you just like a basic version of this, would be New York is in a tough bind right now. | ||
Now, New Jersey, which shares a border of New York, New Jersey is actually in a bit of a tough spot, too. | ||
But let's say the real hot spots of this thing, which seem to be Queens and New York City, I mean, these places where they're densely populated, it's very hard to do social distancing. | ||
You share elevators with people. | ||
I mean, think about the people that are in these giant high rises in any city, you know, 30, 40 story buildings where there's four elevators to get thousands of people up and down all the time. | ||
It's almost impossible to social distance. | ||
And not only social distance, but then you're touching elevators and doorknobs and hallways and a series of other things. | ||
So the cities, the big cities right now really have some stuff that they have to work out. | ||
And New York City is particularly in a precarious position because they have their socialist lunatic mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is telling people to go out just a few weeks ago, right? | ||
And get down to Chinatown and a whole bunch of other stuff. | ||
I mean, these people are, these people are not wise. | ||
Now, I would be all for the governors saying we're dealing with it a certain way in our city, our state, and our cities, however that is, and the governor is taking as much control. | ||
Now, it's not perfect, and this is why we do need a federal government, because obviously a virus doesn't mind, doesn't See a border and go, oh, I'm not going to jump over that border. | ||
But if each state decides what their policies are, I think that's how you get the experiment that our founders wanted, right? | ||
The American experiment of all of these different states figuring out what's best for them and then how they can work together. | ||
And then occasionally we have to figure out what the federal government can do. | ||
So I do think we'll see more of that. | ||
And it seems like right now, by the way, that even though New York is struggling quite a bit, that Cuomo, Right. | ||
Andrew Cuomo, who's the governor of New York, he seems to be becoming one of the stars here. | ||
Now, it's a little unclear if anything he's doing is working, but I think he is giving people a sense of reassurement. | ||
He does seem like a professional. | ||
He seems like a competent executive. | ||
Again, I don't know about the specifics of everything that's happening there, but I could honestly see at this point, I mean, Biden, it's just, it's just ridiculous. | ||
I don't want to get into all that right now. | ||
But it's like, you know, the Democrats might just be like, all right, Joe, just get out of the way. | ||
Or Joe will just say, I can't do it. | ||
Or Joe will pick somebody as his VP, although he said he had to pick a woman as a VP. | ||
You know, this is the same guy who also said, if you're going to jail, it's not what your birth gender is. | ||
It's whatever gender you identify as to which jail you're going to go to. | ||
So maybe he could pick Andrew Cuomo. | ||
The whole thing is so stupid. | ||
But it seems to me that the Democrats are in a really tough spot right now because the Biden thing is just, an abject disaster. These videos that he's putting out are | ||
depressing and confusing and crossed up and nutty. | ||
And, uh, I got it, I got it. Um, and there you go. All right, so we'll see what happens with Cuomo, but I would | ||
like to see more state control as a general level. | ||
Um, James asks, as a as a classical liberal, do you think there are any | ||
circumstances where the government can suspend constitutional rights? Right now, some states | ||
are violating the First Amendment, freedom of religion and assembly, and the Second Amendment, | ||
banning gun purchases. | ||
So the gun purchases one, just very clearly, I'm completely against. We are in a time right now | ||
that we're watching an unprecedented moment happen, and people absolutely, without question, | ||
have the right to protect themselves. | ||
You have the right to protect yourself, you have the right to protect your family, your property, and everything else. | ||
So these states and cities that are banning gun sales, that absolutely, I see almost no legal way around it, I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see a real legal way around how this is not a violation of the Second Amendment. | ||
As far as the First Amendment and freedom of assembly, There is. | ||
This is this is the push and pull between between freedom and public safety. | ||
Right. | ||
I mean, this is where they've had a couple edicts put out there. | ||
And who was it? | ||
It was de Blasio. | ||
I think it was de Blasio. | ||
Of course, it was de Blasio who said that he said temples and churches that let people get together could be permanently closed. | ||
Now look, we should be advising all of these communities to follow the six foot social distancing order and the rest of it and not doing big congregations and figuring out ways to do things digitally and all that. | ||
But first off, I don't know what order he thinks he can put out there that would permanently close A congregation, a temple, a church, a mosque, or anything else. | ||
I don't know that that exists. | ||
Permanent closure? | ||
What if they went ahead and did it, and then they got fined, and then they fired the whole leadership team there? | ||
You're going to still permanently close them? | ||
I mean, it's just dangerous language that you're using. | ||
It's sloppy and dangerous language. | ||
But the Freedom Assembly point is interesting. | ||
We do have freedom of assembly. | ||
So in some way right now, is the First Amendment under attack? | ||
if we can't assemble. Well, I think there is some legitimacy to that. And this again is where we | ||
have to all, I would want as much of this to be on us. And if, let's say if it was found out that a | ||
temple or a church or a mosque or a community center or whatever it was, was doing secret | ||
underground meetings of 20 people, my preference would be that you break it up and, you know, | ||
maybe for a week you don't let them congregate there. | ||
Now we know that they're going to congregate somewhere else if they really want to. | ||
You can't legislate human behavior away. | ||
I mean, this is what I always say about the big government socialists and progressives. | ||
They want to build a perfect system where we'll all behave perfectly, except we're not perfect and we're the ones building the system. | ||
And that's why they always end up killing a lot of people, right? | ||
That's why the thumbnail for this video, we thought Thanos was the right guy because he wanted to accumulate a lot of power. | ||
And then what do you have to do? | ||
You have to take out a lot of people to build your perfect utopia. | ||
So in many ways they're acting like Thanos. | ||
Okay, I'll get to one more question real quick. | ||
We're trying to keep these to 20 minutes because I know you guys are overloaded and it's like we're not trying to belabor everybody and I want you guys to find a multitude of places to get information and feel sane and the rest of it. | ||
Real quick. | ||
Do you think it's possible, this is from Kent, do you think it's possible for this situation to become militarized? | ||
I pray not. | ||
I think from what I've seen over the last couple of days, there is some hopeful stuff out there. | ||
There are some, you know, it's a little hard to trust which models you're paying attention to and all of that stuff. | ||
But it does seem like, from what I'm seeing, that over the next two weeks we may actually see the peak of this thing and then slowly the numbers will go down. | ||
It seems like perhaps Italy is seeing a little bit of that right now. | ||
And it's really hard to figure out who to trust. | ||
So could it become militarized? | ||
I pray not. | ||
I don't want soldiers on our streets. | ||
But this goes back to why I wouldn't want neighbors snitching on neighbor. | ||
Once you start doing that, then you're saying, OK, well, now the police should show up to people's house. | ||
And then once it gets bigger than that, well, then it's like, all right, now the military should show up to people's houses. | ||
And should people be allowed to tweet what they want in their houses if it's misinformation? | ||
I mean, you know, misinformation, I use quotes around that because often misinformation is just the stuff you find out | ||
is true a couple of months later. | ||
Anyway, a lot of things to think about. | ||
Join us at rubinreport.com where you can submit questions and the rest of it. | ||
It's Monday. | ||
Have a good week, everybody. | ||
Try to get... I would say this. | ||
I don't mean this to be criminally negligent, but if you can, take a walk. | ||
Sit in the backyard, you know. | ||
Just a couple little tips for you guys, because, you know, I work from home. | ||
This is my home. | ||
So although we're in an odd situation like everybody else, my director Matt is now directing from his home, and we've got David running all our equipment here, and I don't have any of our crew or anything else here. | ||
We do normally work from home, and my home is not only my studio, but my office. | ||
But like a couple little things, like have a glass of water when you wake up before you do anything else, just a couple glasses, like a couple gulps, just kind of stand there, let your body reset for a second. | ||
I think another really nice thing to do is find some morning music, I like sort of like some light jazz. | ||
I like some ambient stuff. | ||
There's this band Schwarz & Funk that I found on Spotify that I love. | ||
I think having a little something playing in the background. | ||
I like a lot of stuff without words in the morning just to kind of like let the brain go. | ||
Make sure, yeah, get some fresh air. | ||
Like it's going to be raining in LA the next couple days, but get some fresh air when you can. |