Dave Rubin critiques the mainstream media as a hyper-partisan cabal manipulating reality to protect figures like Joe Biden while destroying others, citing the New York Times and CNN as key players in this mafia-style protection racket. He argues that outlets like MSNBC and CNN have shifted from centrist to dishonest positions, exemplified by the Russian collusion hoax, while contrasting genuine bias with calculated agendas used to promote Stacey Abrams or ignore public opinion regarding Gretchen Whitmer. Rubin frames his own attacks as a "red pill moment" that strengthens values, suggesting that honest voices must eventually expose these fabrications to fix current media madness. [Automatically generated summary]
The media, and I don't mean every single person in media, of course, but by and large, the mainstream media, the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, and the rest of it, they have been unmasked.
There has been a slow unmasking over the last couple of years.
It's not even partisan, because partisan isn't strong enough of a word.
They have decided that they are going to pick the winners and losers.
They are going to destroy some people for one thing while saving some people for another, right?
So a great version of that right now is what happened with Brett Kavanaugh, you know, a
year and a half ago versus the protection racket, really a mafia style protection racket
that they've run for Joe Biden just until the last couple of days of us taping this.
And I am glad to be covering chapter eight, which is called Learn How to Spot Fake News, which was my second favorite chapter of this book.
My favorite was Your Travels with Jordan Peterson, which was really the highlight.
And I can see why you ended on that one.
This actually has my when I was reading this book, I was taking notes in the back.
And I actually wrote here a plus because this has my favorite line in the whole book.
And I was like, yes, he gets it.
Let me read it to you.
And let me hear you expound on whether you think this was, um, rhetorical tongue in cheek or whether it's true, but really putting my mild exaggerations aside, the media truly is a cabal of hyper-partisan habitual liars who are destroying an entire industry from within.
Now that sounds like a quote from something I would say.
So I would say it was a little bit of everything, meaning it was a little bit of factual, a little bit of tongue-in-cheek, probably a little underserving as well.
But before I fully do that, let me just say one thing, Malice.
The reason I knew you were the guy to do this chapter with is that I think you, perhaps more than anyone else in my circle, have been like an acute studier of not just fake news, but internet culture that led to fake news.
Because people think of fake news as like that's the whole thing in and of itself, that the media is just not that good anymore.
But actually it was the internet culture and the trolling that you, I think, are like the master of explaining.
that led to the culture of fake news.
So we'll unpack some of that stuff.
But as for that line specifically, yeah, it was a little sarcastic, it's a little over the top, but the heart of it is exactly true, which is the media, and I don't mean every single person in media, of course, but by and large, the mainstream media, the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, and the rest of it, they have been unmasked.
There has been a slow unmasking over the last couple years of It's not even partisan because partisan isn't strong enough of a word.
They have decided that they are going to pick the winners and losers.
They are going to destroy some people for one thing while saving some people for another, right?
So a great version of that right now is what happened with Brett Kavanaugh, you know, a year and a half ago versus the protection racket, really a mafia style protection racket that they've run for Joe Biden just until the last couple of days of us taping this.
And it's become a cabal in that they're all in on it together.
They all protect themselves.
When they see a pylon coming for a random person, they all get in on it.
When somebody says something that is perfectly sensible, when I released the book, we did a live stream where I had Ben Shapiro, and we were talking about opening up the economy, and he, in effect, said that we're gonna have to weigh some costs and balances, and it might be a little more dangerous.
Not only that, but anyone with one flickering brain cell would know that opening is going to have some cost.
So when these politicians and media people get up there and say, well, we can't open until there's no risk whatsoever, because any risk would be too much risk.
It's like, that's not reality.
Those are nice words you've put together.
And you strung them into a sentence, which is pretty impressive, but this is not reality.
And then you watch, you know, Media Matters then clips it, and then Vox and HuffPo and all the usual suspects that you talk about all the time, they all get in on it.
And that is why, although I don't directly quote you, what you refer to as the cathedral, we're watching the machine break down right now.
Yeah, I just got handed my ass handed to me just today, and I'm glad to admit it, just like you were talking with Larry Elder.
You know, Trump had been accused of saying that he was speaking about white supremacists as very fine people, when in that literally the rest of the sentence he goes, I'm specifically not speaking about white supremacists.
I had thought that, believe all women, Was a right wing talking point and I tweeted this.
I thought I said they said believe women, which is something we should do.
People do tend to tell the truth more than often.
They lie and we should give people the benefit of doubt so they feel comfortable telling their story.
And I tweet this out and Molly Hemingway within minutes was like, no, no, no, no.
The hashtag literally was believe all women.
And it wasn't, you know, Twitter randos.
This is people like Carolyn Maloney, who's a very powerful congresswoman from New York and some others.
And I was shocked to see how That just seems stupid because women are human beings.
They're capable of lying.
And now, like you said, on Joe Biden, the same people are just pivoting without a batting an eye.
I've always argued that they've always been this bad.
And now I'm starting to wonder if they've gotten worse.
I see that's so interesting and that shows how we all look at things from our own perspective and then it's why you need to talk to people because you have to map your reality against theirs.
So I've usually taken the counter which is that they used to be better and that's something about the Internet.
And the ability for the rest of us to now expose them has just completely ripped their filter off, on top of the fact that you see all these, they say they're journalists, and then you see their pieces, what they're writing, but then if you look at everything else they're tweeting all day long, it's like it's very obvious what your political biases are.
You guys don't even hide it, you know what I mean?
You'll have New York Times in your byline, and you'll tweet some articles that lean a little lefty or whatever, but then everything else in your feed shows exactly what you are.
So I've always believed that it had something to do with the internet and exposing the ideas and that we can see unedited videotapes.
Look, what you just said there about the very fine people moment, Joe Biden literally launched his campaign with a video that quotes Trump saying very fine people.
And Biden, the implication is that Trump is talking about white supremacists.
Which, as you said, is exactly the reverse of what he said.
But there's a reason he does it, because he knows the media will cover for him, right?
So who tweets about it then?
When it comes out, Scott Adams tried to unpack it.
I retweeted it.
You probably did something.
A few of us that go, it's not even about liking Trump so much.
It's just about, what's reality here?
But they all do it together.
So Biden tweets it out, and he knows no media's gonna call him on it, so he can just keep doing it.
And I think perhaps, And because we're holding this video for a little bit as this Biden story is just breaking, maybe by the time we release this in about a week and a half, I think it's possible that the Biden one almost feels like it could collapse the whole system because all of the Me Too people are exposed right now.
They all said, believe all women, and they're all supporting Biden.
And it's like, now what is left?
What do you people have left?
That's the purpose of this chapter, that fake news is not just fake headlines.
One of the things I was curious about, you know, as someone you had a, you know, you came from the Young Turks and had a leftist background, you talk about this very often.
When you are front page in the New York Times and you and Ben Shapiro are, but I'm being serious, are like next to an article that's implying that you lead to Nazism, right?
Or just even just a hatred of any kind, maybe not literal Nazism, haha I'm Jewish, but like white supremacy and so on and so forth.
You know that everyone you've grown up with, everyone you went to college with probably reads the New York Times or a large percentage of them do.
on a personal level.
And you know, some of them are just gonna do, you know, they're not gonna care.
I went to high school with Dave Rubin, they're gonna see this and they're gonna put you--
Well, you know, when I interviewed, or when you interviewed me for the book,
which we'll link to below, because you asked me some of,
I think the most biting pointed questions about all of this.
There's the portion of the book where I talk about losing a ton of my hair because when I first got hate, I was getting hate from the people that I thought were my friends.
I just started saying, hey liberals, let's be a little bit better.
Let's care about free speech.
I mean, you can see all those old videos.
It wasn't like I was saying anything I am glad that I went through it.
"all these horrible things to me "and people who were invited to my wedding
"are now calling me a Nazi."
And I literally lost about 40% of my hair and I was spraying freaking hair on.
People can watch that "Why I Left the Left" video.
I am bloated and bags under my eyes and I look freaking terrible
and I felt even worse than that.
That being said, and this is partly the purpose of the book, I am glad that I went through it.
I made it to the other side and everyone that makes it to the other side,
James Damore, Brett Weinstein, Lindsay Shepard, Ben Shapiro, the versions of it that you've gone through.
Everyone that gets through it, you're stronger after you did it.
I haven't seen anyone totally destroyed.
Now, that isn't to say people haven't lost their jobs.
That isn't to say there aren't people that aren't public people who have had all sorts of things.
But your choice is, either you step up against it and defend yourself.
So like when I invited, what did I do when that New York Times piece came out?
Literally it had my, it, the, you know, YouTube's leading people to the alt-right with my giant, my head was the biggest head right there above it in the New York Times.
My dad has had a subscription to the New York Times for longer than I'm alive, something like 45 years.
He had to go to the bagel place he goes to in Long Island every Sunday to have a friend walk up to him and say, oh, I didn't know your son Dave is a member of the alt-right.
And then my dad has to call me and say, what are we talking about here?
So it's not that, they don't really affect me anymore in that I don't get stressed over it because I think I've come to know it for what it is.
It's sort of like, well, to quote, it's sort of like a red pill moment.
It's scary at first when you make that choice, but then you get on the other side and when you see reality for what it is, it's like, these people aren't going to destroy me, they're going to destroy themselves.
And that's a little bit of what I want to impart on people.
I want them to know either you will step up and it will suck for a while, And, you know, all sorts of bad stuff will happen, but your choice is much worse, because your choice is the frog in the boiling pot.
Your choice is to never live a life that is yours.
Your choice is to never say what you really think.
I just refuse to live that way, and I know you're the same.
It's easy for us to say something like this, because you're married, you're about to start a family, you have a successful show, I'm, you know, kind of happy in my life.
What do you tell someone who's like a Nicholas Sandman?
What do you tell these cadets who there's a headline that says they appear to be throwing white power symbols?
It's really scary when you're a kid and now you're in the news and people are going to just joking be like, hey, Nick, you know, what is the Klan rally?
You hear that 20 times a day.
It's not going to feel nice.
So how would I mean, I don't think it's easy for us to say like, oh, just live your values, but they don't have that power.
Well, first off, we should say it's not that it's easy for us.
It's that we've been through this thing, right?
So it's easier for me now, but it's not like it magically was easy.
But to your point directly, look, Sandman, I've talked to him, Nick Sandman, who everyone knows, he was the Covington kid that got slammed and slurred by the media and the whole thing and it all turned out to be a fabrication.
I don't know that he's thrilled that this thing happened to him, but I know that as a young person, he now saw something.
and I think has a sense of purpose around it.
Another example that I can give you more specifically is Kyle Kashuv, who used to work with me,
or he still does work with us, but now he's in DC, but he was one of the Parkland survivors
who came out as the gun rights advocate, so the media ignored him at first
while they made the rest of them heroes, because the rest of them were against guns,
so they're heroes.
We find the one kid who believes in gun rights, we're gonna ignore him for a while,
and then when we don't ignore him, he's a bad guy.
Well, then what happened to him?
It turned out they found some Google Doc where he was saying some bad words with a bunch of friends.
They were just doing stupid kids stuff that you do when you're 15 or 16 years old.
I know Kyle, I love him.
There's no way he has a racist bone in his body, but they tried to destroy him, and what happened?
Harvard literally rescinded their offer.
He graduated number one in his class.
Now, I can tell you this.
I know that Kyle is stronger now than before.
Now again, these may be outlier cases and it sucks.
I'm not, I think you're asking the right question because I'm not denying that at your job people will look at you differently.
I mean, we're talking about, we're not saying for real Nazis, we're literally saying if you just have some conservative thought, if you just have some libertarian thought, if you just say, oh, I watch Steven Crowder or I watch Michael Malice, that might be enough to have these people turn on you.
So I'm not saying it's easy, but I would also say this, if you're a young person going through this,
meaning especially if you're a high schooler, but if you're a college person going through this,
it's not that you should necessarily come out tomorrow and just expect no consequences.
Not only should you expect the consequences, but you can figure out ways to tease it out to your friends so that you're getting stronger over time.
You don't have to say to all of your friends at once, I've been red-pilled and let's fight about it all day long.
You might try it with one friend first, test it out, work it.
Everyone has to do it with their own rhythm.
That's sort of consistent with the message that I put forth in the book, which is, I'm not trying to tell everybody what to do.
I'm really not.
I'm trying to give you some guidelines that I think can help get you through this madness.
A lot of this, look, the truth is that a lot of this is sort of Jordan Peterson-esque in that it's like if you're gonna make a decision in life to be who you are, it's gonna come with some cost and you better know how to stand up for yourself in the process.
No, I think, I think you're ballparking it pretty well.
She's a good example of this thing, because she has no resume, per se, other than losing the Georgia gubernatorial race, which she claims she won, and the media and many other progressive politicians claim she won, while at the same time claiming that Trump is the one that doesn't accept the results of an election, of which they are the ones that still don't accept the results of the presidential election as well.
So I think it's probably a little bit of mix of both.
But again, this is where once unmasked, it just allows them to destroy themselves.
There was an article, you probably saw it in Politico in the last couple of days, about Governor Whitmer in Michigan, who's become sort of the face of the authoritarian governors right now.
She doesn't want people planting seeds and doing landscaping.
And Politico ran a puff piece on her that said, it said something to the effect, I'm going to slightly butcher the words, but this will be pretty damn close because I'm not trying to give fake news here.
It said something to the effect of, you can't find anyone in Lansing, Michigan who disagrees with her.
I mean, honestly, I don't want to name names, not because I'm afraid, but I don't want to add fuel to the fire, because there are literally people that watch everything I do praying that I will say their name.
I mean, it's sad.
The funny thing is, even as we're talking here, and I try to do this, and we all make mistakes, but I always try to talk about ideas, not about people.
When I mentioned Governor Whitmer a second ago, I think that doesn't include politicians.
In politicians, I think you sort of have to go after them.
Now, hopefully, you're going after their ideas.
I didn't attack her personally.
I talked about her ideas, but I think politicians, it's a little bit of a different rule.
There's a certain set of people that are on YouTube or podcasts or Twitter, whatever it is, that just I'm good for clicks.
I left the left and survived.
They don't want survivors.
I mean, that really is the truth, right?
It's easy for them to attack Ben or attack anyone that was a conservative the whole way through, because it's like you were supposed to be the enemy the whole time.
But when someone wakes up and walks, and not just walks, but I've succeeded in the process of that, I've thrived in the process of that.
I've come up with a cohesive set of views and I say what I believe and people enjoy that.
That's the scariest thing to them.
So I have no need to give those guys quarter other than that's just a matter of what the internet has sort of become.
And by the way, it's also partly why I started Locals.com and Michael Malice has one of the most thriving communities on Locals.com and he owns it and sets the rules and can do whatever the hell he wants there.
But I'm telling you that because that shows that it's authentic.
You could literally watch videos.
You can find them of me before the 2016 election going, I'm a Bernie supporter.
Hey, liberals, let's fix this thing.
What's happening to our side?
All of those things.
And then when that Why I Left the Left video came out, the PragerU video, that was sort of me saying goodbye to the left and let me see what I can do with the right.
And by the way, there's been great stuff happening on the right for quite some time now.
And sometimes I think sort of what you said before, maybe I was wrong about the right the whole time.
It doesn't mean the right's perfect, but what you said before about maybe I was wrong about the media the whole time, maybe I was wrong about the right for a certain period of time.
But that's hard to accept because it's hard to accept, oh, the guys that I kept calling racists and bigots, they're not racists and bigots.
Maybe I was part of the thing that was racist.
Racist and bigoted?
That's a real problem.
So could they think of me as a traitor?
Well, I have left their set of ideas, and I have openly spoken about why I did it, and I have found new alliances on the other side.
So if that makes me a traitor, then I suppose I'm a traitor.
One of the questions I always yell at with conservatives is, you guys say that the media used to be better, and then it got bad.
When, in your minds, was the media better?
And usually they don't have an answer.
You actually gave me an answer.
And this is the first person I've heard who actually had a good answer.
And you put it in 1980.
You put it in 1980 when CNN happened and the news happened 24-7.
So now you have to have that much more content.
And inevitably that's going to lead to some journalistic standards declining, if only, and also if only because you're competing with so many more eyeballs in a television setting.
Do you think, um, I've always found that conservatives find CNN To be much more agenda driven and dishonest than MSNBC.
You know, well, first off, let's give CNN some credit for a moment because it's not like you and I do that.
But you do.
Yeah, I do.
Because the point is, I remember I was in, I think, ninth grade during the Gulf War, around 91.
And CNN was on the ground in a war.
It was incredible to watch.
I remember being in school in social studies and we would watch clips and they were doing what appeared to be real journalism and all that.
So I don't want to make it seem like, you know, it was all just horrible all the time and everything else.
To your question about, well, look, I think the reason people attack CNN more than MSNBC is that MSNBC leans left.
They tell you they're leaning left and so be it.
Also, they have some buffoons on the network.
I mean, Al Sharpton was given a show there.
It's like, Maddow spent two years running with a Russian collusion hoax and saw no retribution, or there was nothing that happened to her after in terms of, are we going to change our thought processes or how we go about doing these shows?
CNN was thought of, because it was the first one, it was thought of as more centrist.
And I think what's happened is, regardless of what side you're on, I think you do, even maybe subconsciously, want centrist news.
You want something that feels kind of decent, that maybe doesn't go along with the way you think all the time.
And I think that's why CNN gets it all the time, because they went from being, let's say, thought of as centrist, They moved a little bit to the left, but then the Acosta thing happened, the Brian Stelter thing happened, the activists sort of let's lie about everybody and just dismantle what journalism is.
So the bigger thing that I've been thinking about, and we'll pick this up in a future show,
is that a lot of us, we spend a lot of time talking about CNN, and in a weird way,
it's like if we all just stop talking about CNN, almost nobody's watching CNN.
In a weird way, Trump needs CNN as the rube in this thing.
He needs them as the bad guy.
And I'm starting to think that for the rest of us that have broken free, maybe our next step in breaking free
is actually really letting go of that stuff instead of reacting to it.
I don't know that we're quite there yet because it still can brainwash a lot of people, but I think that might be an effective move for those of us that have just moved beyond this thing.
Chris Hayes earlier this week had a monologue talking about the tariff accusations against Joe Biden.
He went into it at length, very dispassionately, saying, It doesn't matter if you like a person, if they're prominent.
Sometimes these prominent people do horrible things.
You have to look at the evidence and throw your emotions aside.
As a consequence of this, Fire Chris Hayes was trending on Twitter.
So given that his job is a function of the audience and he has bosses that he has to answer to, can't you say, well, it's not really the fault of the press.
It's the fault of the population that are demanding they be told what they want to hear.
I'm not worried right now about the government coming for my speech.
I'm not saying I'm not worried at all, but that's not my primary worry.
My primary worry is that we are doing it to ourselves.
We're actively silencing ourselves because we are the ones who unfurl the mob on each other and, of course, inevitably it will come for you.
As for Chris Hayes, I would say this.
He probably just had his red pill moment and I would say in a year from now the Chris Hayes you're gonna see is gonna be very different and probably far more like Michael Malice than like the Chris Hayes we know in 2020 because suddenly he is going to see that he said something true that we all know is true that you should allegations don't matter regardless of your political partisan situation we all know that's the way it's supposed to work that's all he said and now who wants to destroy him?
It's not the conservatives, it's his own people.
So if he is able to survive the mob, which is exactly what this book is about, if he's able to do that, he's on the journey.
So we should pick it up in one year from today and see where Chris Hayes is.
A guy who, by the way, has gone after me many times and I don't particularly like and I didn't feel like offering him any defense because of that.
But let's just see where his journey goes and I suspect we know where this thing ends.