May 4, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| When I came out of the closet... | ||
| As gay, there was almost no backlash. | ||
| You know, some people were kind of surprised. | ||
| I got probably what you got, which is a lot of people said, well, you don't seem gay because they want you to, you know, have taffeta and sparkles and something. | ||
| But I didn't get like a lot of anger, really. | ||
| But coming out politically, coming out politically, suddenly I had friends turning on me. | ||
| I didn't have any friends that turned on me about being gay. | ||
| If anything, it strengthened my friendships, right? | ||
| Because we were being more honest with or at least I was being more honest with them. | ||
| But when I came out politically just saying I'm frustrated with the left, it wasn't that I had said I'm a conservative or whatever you want to call it. | ||
| But suddenly I was getting a ton of hate. | ||
| I mean, I'm talking about people that were invited to my wedding, people that I had been lifelong friends with saying, you know, all sorts of terrible things. | ||
| And that is kind of weird. | ||
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[MUSIC PLAYING] | |
| Hello, I'm Douglas Murray. | ||
| And welcome to the Don't Burn This Book book club. | ||
| I am here today talking with Dave about chapter one of Don't Burn This Book, which is on coming out. | ||
| And I suppose, first of all, Dave, I should ask you, well, first of all, congratulations on the book. | ||
| Second, there are two comings out you mentioned in this chapter. | ||
| Maybe we could talk a little about the first because I was very struck by it. | ||
| Every gay man has a coming out story. | ||
| Every gay woman has a coming out story. | ||
| But you know, it's a reminder of how tortuous, difficult, and in some cases delayed It's interesting, because, you know, it's one of those things, it's like, like you, I talk for a living, everyone knows what I think about everything, but it is a part of my life that I don't talk about. | ||
| That often. | ||
| And I liken being closeted about my sexuality to what I think many, many people right now are suffering from, which is being closeted about their political views. | ||
| And I don't mean that in the context of some really racist political view or even fringe political view. | ||
| I mean, people that have views that 10 years ago were very moderate and decent now are just simply afraid to say what they think. | ||
| So in terms of my sexuality and coming out, I mean, it's a true story that I mentioned in there | ||
| that the first person that I ever came out to was a friend of mine who was a standup comic, | ||
| who was a, he was openly gay comic. | ||
| I hate the phrase openly gay, but he was openly gay comic named Mike Singer | ||
| in New York City, and I was 25 years old. | ||
| So I mean, that's late, especially, you know, I think for young people now, when they hear, | ||
| oh, you didn't come out till 25, that sounds crazy to them 'cause they're out at like 12 | ||
| or at least talking about it as if it's not a bad thing, something like that. | ||
| But the first person I came out to was it was September 11th, 2001 at about 1230 a.m. | ||
| in the Times Square subway station. | ||
| So almost everyone that's watching this can probably picture that it's the most famous subway station probably in the world. | ||
| And we were right at the shuttle train. | ||
| That's all the shuttle does is go from Times Square to Grand Central back and forth. | ||
| So you're in this odd sort of purgatory place. | ||
| And I blurted this thing out, what I thought was this horrific secret that I couldn't hide anymore. | ||
| And then literally about seven or eight hours later, America was under attack. | ||
| I mean, I woke up from a phone call from my dad who could see the first tower had been hit. | ||
| And he worked in New York City. | ||
| He could see it from his office. | ||
| And I kid you not, I mean, I genuinely thought it had something to do with me releasing this That's very difficult in and of itself. | ||
| it into the world. And the way I liken that to the political part is that it's really hard to live | ||
| one life, just as a human being, just to be who you are and put your life out there and find some | ||
| purpose and all that. That's very difficult in and of itself. But if you're closeted about something, | ||
| in this case your sexuality or your political thoughts, you will lie without even realizing | ||
| You will live more than one life. | ||
| You will have two sets of friends. | ||
| You will have family members that don't know who you are. | ||
| All of these things. | ||
| And I think people really do understand this now from the political side, because I hear this all the time. | ||
| Someone will come up to me at a college gig or something and say, you know what, I'm a libertarian. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Or even the scary one, I'm a secret conservative. | ||
| Or they'll say I'm a closeted conservative. | ||
| And it's like, usually a young person at college, and it's like, If you start that path now, when you're young, not saying what you think, it will break you at some point down the road. | ||
| And yeah, I think a lot of gay people just have an extra understanding of that. | ||
| By the way, I mean, also that story you tell, it's a horrifying story about connecting these two events, your personal life and then this terrible catastrophe. | ||
| And it is also a reminder, to me at any rate, of the way in which You know, when we store things up like that, you know, we create these sort of catastrophic ideas in our head of what admitting what we are, whether it's sexuality or your opinions, your political views, what that can do. | ||
| I mean, it means you've run through all of these catastrophes in your brain and then one has actually happened in the real world. | ||
| And so, of course, you've connected the two. | ||
| It's a horrible reminder of what this is like. | ||
| You know, it's interesting because it sounds crazy, right? | ||
| To think that I woke up the next morning. | ||
| That sounds legitimately crazy. | ||
| But it also tells you a lot about what the closet is like. | ||
| You know, I always say that in the closet, there's only room for one. | ||
| And when you are solo, whatever it is that you're not telling people that you think, it doesn't mean you're right about everything, by the way. | ||
| You may have all the wrong beliefs that you're hiding, whatever that is. | ||
| But when you are not telling people who you are, not sharing what you are, The only way we can figure out what's real in life is if we can map that against other people. | ||
| When you say something to other people, you express yourself in some way, and then they can say something back, right? | ||
| I mean, look, you, Douglas, as a writer, you put your thoughts out there, and then you're going to get a certain amount of pushback on some things, and then you might go, oh, well, maybe I wasn't thinking about this the right way, and then you can actually change the way you think, you can look at things in a new | ||
| way. | ||
| And when you're alone and solitary and doing that, it affects every part of you, | ||
| which by the way, I don't go too far into this. | ||
| There's only one chapter actually that we cut in the entire book, | ||
| is when I went really personal on some of that struggle stuff. | ||
| We sort of felt it was just going into another book altogether. | ||
| But it will lead you down a really dark path that I think most gay people know about. | ||
| If you're not yourself, if you are someone else, whoever that other person is, you will do all sorts of things that are not good for the person that you truly are. | ||
| And then that brings us to the other coming out in this first chapter, and the light that your first coming out had on the second one. | ||
| The second coming out, of course, is you're coming out as, well, what would you call it, no longer of the left? | ||
| Well, at least at that time, that's what I thought it was. | ||
| You were one of the first guests on my show at that point, so this is now the fall of 2015. | ||
| And I finally started saying what I thought, and I was doing it from a lefty perspective. | ||
| I was saying, hey guys, it's our side that's having the problem here. | ||
| Everyone can say the conservatives are nuts and they're whatever you want to say about them, but I'm seeing a problem here. | ||
| We're the ones silencing people. | ||
| We're the ones calling everyone racist. | ||
| We're the ones not tolerating dissent. | ||
| Or open inquiry, or any of these things. | ||
| And then suddenly I started by saying it. | ||
| So this is the sort of metaphor to it. | ||
| It's like I started saying that, and then suddenly I had Sam Harris on the first show. | ||
| And then from that, I had Majid Nawazan, who was coming from a similar perspective, despite a very, very different history, right, that Majid had. | ||
| Then I talked to you, I talked to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I talked to Kristina Sommers. | ||
| And it goes back to what I said about mirroring my reality against somebody else. | ||
| Here were these people that were extremely diverse in where they were from and their skin color and sexuality and all of that stuff, but they were feeling the same thing about roughly what our side was. | ||
| And I think from that, you start getting empowered because you go, whoa, I'm not alone. | ||
| There's other people who think like this. | ||
| So again, that does go very much to when you come out of the closet sexually, and then you meet another gay person and you go, whoa, they're not evil. | ||
| They're not this broken, crushed, destroyed thing. | ||
| And then it allows you not to think that about yourself. | ||
| So I started coming out politically, in effect. | ||
| And what I didn't realize was that there was gonna be a whole hell of a lot of backlash to that. | ||
| I thought people were gonna be like, "Oh yeah, let's do it." | ||
| And by the way, a lot of people did. | ||
| I mean, that's where it all started bubbling up and it sort of got me to where I am now. | ||
| But I didn't realize that, you know, it's like when I came out of the closet as gay, | ||
| there was almost no backlash. | ||
| You know, some people were kind of surprised. | ||
| I got probably what you got, which is a lot of people said, well, you don't seem gay because they want you to, you know, have taffeta and sparkles and something. | ||
| But I didn't get like a lot of anger, really. | ||
| But coming out politically, coming out politically, suddenly I had friends turning on me. | ||
| I didn't have any friends that turned on me about being gay. | ||
| If anything, it strengthened my friendships, right? | ||
| Because we were being more honest with or at least I was being more honest with them. | ||
| But when I came out politically, just saying I'm frustrated with the left—it wasn't that I had said I'm a conservative or whatever you want to call it—but suddenly I was getting a ton of hate. | ||
| I mean, I'm talking about people that were invited to my wedding, people that I had been lifelong friends with saying, you know, all sorts of terrible things. | ||
| And that is kind of weird, you know, when you just start saying, hey, here I am, and then people go, well, now you're evil. | ||
| Well, it's kind of connected, isn't it? | ||
| I mean, I'm not surprised that you say that, you know, when you came out as gay, you didn't have much pushback. | ||
| And I mean, of course, there are people who do growing up in other areas of the country and other parts of the world, as we know. | ||
| But I'm not surprised that you didn't have much pushback then. | ||
| But if you had gone back a couple of decades earlier or several decades earlier, you would have had a very similar thing to what you're experiencing politically. | ||
| And it seems to me that the common factor is But in the not so distant past, one of the objections to having gay people around was the sort of idea that basically gay people made other people gay in some way. | ||
| Particularly younger men. | ||
| That you would somehow, you know, the proximity to a gay, it was somehow catching in some way. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
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And, you know, it's like, would that it were. | |
| But no, but the political fact in this is the same thing. | ||
| It's this fear. | ||
| These people who are around, who have these ideas that aren't absolutely in lockstep with a particular dogma of the day, other people are going to catch it, you know? | ||
| If we're not careful, our kids will grow up not far left, and then where will we be? | ||
| There's something about the toxic idea. | ||
| Yeah, that's really interesting. | ||
| And I probably, and maybe it'll be for a next book or an essay that you'll write, that concept really should be extrapolated a little bit more because I think you're right. | ||
| It's like, you come out of the closet and it's like, your friends don't suddenly turn gay, right? | ||
| Like everyone, if they're straight, they're straight and that's it. | ||
| I never met a friend that I came out to and suddenly they were like, well, I'm gay too. | ||
| Although I guess you could have a closeted friend too or something like that. | ||
| But you're not gonna convert someone. | ||
| It's not a thing. | ||
| But you are right that when you start coming out politically and you start talking to people that know more things about you—so I started talking to Thomas Sowell about economics. | ||
| I started talking to Larry Elder about racism. | ||
| These are dangerous people. | ||
| These are highly dangerous people with deeply contagious ideas. | ||
| But what happens is, in that case, yes, And that must be the real threat, that it's not just you that they're trying to take out at that point. | ||
| It's not just you that they want to silence. | ||
| It's that they might go, holy cow, some of these ideas aren't that bad. | ||
| But they have, unfortunately, and this was my frustration with the left from the beginning, they had become so rigid in their thinking. | ||
| And of course, when I always say this, I don't mean every single leftist, but I mean broadly lefties these days. | ||
| And it goes in cycles, right? | ||
| Like, you know, 20 years ago, it was John McCain and Joe Lieberman who were Republicans that were trying to get video game violence to be, you know, they didn't want Mortal Kombat in video game stores. | ||
| So these things are cyclical for sure, and it may eventually turn around again. | ||
| But I think you're right. | ||
| The idea is you come out politically and you start saying just some of the stuff that I now say. | ||
| I talk about low taxes. | ||
| I talk about states' rights. | ||
| I talk about individual rights. | ||
| Well, that stuff does spread once people hear about it because I think it's a much clearer path to happiness in a functional society. | ||
| And if you don't want that, well, what do you got to do to those people? | ||
| I guess you got to treat them as apostates. | ||
| And in effect, that's what's happened to me and a lot of other people. | ||
| Deviants! | ||
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That's what people are. | |
| Political deviants. | ||
| It's a very interesting thing. | ||
| It tells us a lot about a society. | ||
| We know it's sort of commonplace to say it, but you learn a huge amount, if not everything, about a society by finding out what is effectively taboo or what is sort of deemed to be socially unacceptable. | ||
| And one of the oddities about this journey you describe of of coming out as no longer on the left. | ||
| And the oddities of it, of course, is that loads of people are not on the left. | ||
| Governments keep on being elected by majorities, by populations who are not of the left. | ||
| So one of the things that always throws up is how does a political side that in many ways has kept on losing still have this stranglehold That means that people are as fearful as ever, perhaps more fearful, of coming out as not being of a particular part of the leftist tribe. | ||
| Yeah, it's super interesting. | ||
| I know you've talked about this a bunch too. | ||
| And I think, you know, I go into it further later in the book, but I think mostly what it is, is that the left really did the culture game better than the right. | ||
| You know, if you're on the right, your basic idea is you sort of want individual rights, and then you don't really want the government involved. | ||
| So you don't feel this need to be part of everything outside of your family or your work or your community, something like that. | ||
| But on the left, It seems to me that no longer on the left is there a unifying principle. | ||
| It's very obvious that on the right, it doesn't mean they always hold that ideal properly, but the ideal is individual rights. | ||
| If you're a member of a society, you should be treated equally. | ||
| It doesn't mean we all have the same starting point. | ||
| It doesn't mean some of us don't work harder or aren't luckier or a series of other things. | ||
| But on the left, it seems to me that there isn't a unifying principle that brings them together, so that leads to the hysteria. | ||
| It leads to a certain religious nature of, if you aren't exactly what I am, when I am. | ||
| It's also that you have to change the second they change, right? | ||
| So it's like, if the second they're for gay marriage, everyone better be for it that day. | ||
| So, you know, Barack Obama ran first time around against gay marriage. | ||
| And the progressives of 2040 will hate that man. | ||
| They will say he was a bigot because he didn't change, you know, and they'll also do it retroactively when they weren't even alive and have any understanding of what it was like to be alive in 2012. | ||
| But I think that thing leads to a constant, oh, I feel something about something right this moment, and that's good enough for me to put forth to the world. | ||
| So if you don't agree with it at that moment, you're screwed or you're evil or the rest of it. | ||
| So then that leaves an awful lot of good people Just going, all right, maybe the right isn't that terrible. | ||
| And generally what you find, I mean, you know this, is that they're not that terrible. | ||
| One of the other interesting things about that, by the way, is this thing of excommunication. | ||
| It strikes me as being very interesting. | ||
| I mean, there have been, as you know, I read about this in my latest book, The Madness of Crowds, This thing of trying to excommunicate people from the church of gay or from the, you know, from being black if they've not got the right views and so on. | ||
| This madness that has been going on in recent years. | ||
| But it's interesting that this excommunication trend also, it exists in my experience, pretty much solely in politics on the left, in that to be told, as you were told by people, you know, you're not any longer of our tribe. | ||
| Because you've effectively apostatized. | ||
| You've broken the rules. | ||
| You're out. | ||
| Now, one of the things that always strikes me as being interesting about this is, I mean, I may be wrong, there may be countries where this happens, but I've never seen this happen on the right. | ||
| Because, I mean, I don't know about you, but if somebody said to me, you know, Douglas, I don't think you're a real conservative. | ||
| I would be like... | ||
| That's fine, you know. | ||
| You're not really going to be on the right. | ||
| We are going to excommunicate you from the right-wing group. | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| What gave you these magical wand-waving powers? | ||
| But it does happen and it does work, this excommunication, these magic spell words. | ||
| It works on the left. | ||
| I think I could give you probably the most simplest example of what you're talking about. | ||
| I mean, look, I make the case later in the book for several things that are thought of as lefty. | ||
| So let's just throw gay marriage aside. | ||
| I happen to be married to a man. | ||
| That's thought of as a liberal or lefty Okay, so that's one, but that's an easy one. | ||
| I make a pro-choice argument in this book. | ||
| That is going to piss off a lot of conservatives. | ||
| For most conservatives, that is the rail you do not touch, but I do make that argument. | ||
| I am against the death penalty. | ||
| Most conservatives are for the death penalty. | ||
| I'm for some level of public education. | ||
| I went to the State University of New York at Binghamton. | ||
| I believe the state does have some role in education. | ||
| I'm for dignity with death, that you should have the choice at the end of your life. | ||
| I mean, these are things that are thought of as lefty, and I have several others as well, but I get no love from anyone on the left about that. | ||
| Meanwhile, I can sit down with Ben Shapiro, that scary guy, or Glenn Beck, that scary guy, or the scariest of all, Douglas Murray, and we can sit down and not— Yeah, I have a couple of videos on that with you, by the way, that you've just listed, but we'll do that another time. | ||
| All right, we'll have to arm wrestle about those next time. | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| Even if we had some truly intractable political position that we could not get over after 10 drinks and eight hours of doing it, I know you wouldn't excommunicate me at the end, and you know I wouldn't do it to you. | ||
| If anything, I know this, Douglas, because we've done this. | ||
| We've had great political debates, not publicly. | ||
| Where we don't fully get there equally. | ||
| And then, and that's the joy in it. | ||
| Like, that's the joy of like, whoa, maybe, you know, I say this to Shapiro all the time about gay marriage, where his position is a religious position, not a, you know, he's not trying to stop my marriage anymore. | ||
| It's not that he fought for gay marriage, and I'm very open about that. | ||
| But it's like, I believe that if Ben and I keep talking about gay marriage, or not even talking about gay marriage, if the future, if Ben and I can just remain friendly and have conversations about politics, For the next 50 years, I suspect that when I'm 93 and Ben is 89 or whatever it is, he might actually come around and be like, I guess Rubin was kind of right on that. | ||
| But there's only one way to find out. | ||
| And so when you talk about how one side purges you, it's like, how much penance can I give these people if I agree with you on this, I agree with you on this, I agree with you on this, this, this, and then have them just spit in my face, while the other side, I take some of the issues that are most Most heartfelt to them. | ||
| I mean, the abortion one, that is the one. | ||
| You know that for people on the right. | ||
| And yet, I take the counter position and I know, I mean, at the end of the abortion part, I say, now that you all hate me, let's move on. | ||
| But it's like, I know, I know that while they will disagree with me, they will not try to destroy me. | ||
| And that is just the fundamental difference. | ||
| Well, you know, there are two things I just add to that. | ||
| Well, the first is the importance of humility. | ||
| In all arguments and discussions, humility means that we can keep our ears open and keep our minds open. | ||
| And the second thing that often follows on from that is that there is very little in the world, certainly very little in the world of ideas, that is more stimulating than the moment when you realize that you might be wrong. | ||
| And keeping yourself open to that possibility seems to me worth doing. | ||
| I'm conscious that our time's probably up, but we could go on all day. | ||
| But this has been a great show. | ||
| Terrifically enjoyable book. | ||
| Gets off to a racing start. | ||
| Thank you, thank you. | ||
| From you, that is a true compliment. | ||
| And I do have to tell you something publicly that I've said to you privately many times. | ||
| But as I was writing the book, you know, I had just read your last book, and I've read pretty much, you know, I read pretty much anything you put out there. | ||
| And the entire time as I was writing sentences, I always had this thing in the back of my head, would Douglas Murray write this better? | ||
| Would Douglas Murray write this better? | ||
| And I think I did a pretty decent job for round one. | ||
| But let's just keep fighting the fight, man, and I appreciate you doing this. | ||
| So thanks a lot. | ||
| It's a great pleasure. | ||
| See you Dave. | ||
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(gentle music) | |
| (gentle music) | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, | ||
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