June 21, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:03:29
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| This is the big lie that you have spoken out against for a long time. | ||
| You should feel very vindicated over the past few weeks. | ||
| I'm feeling pretty vindicated lately. | ||
| Because the big lie we've always heard is, oh, these college campuses, these are just a bunch of idiots. | ||
| Just wait until they get out into the real world. | ||
| Well, I'm looking around the real world now and I'm seeing the consequences of those college | ||
| campuses as the buildings are burning down all around the country. | ||
| Don't forget to subscribe to that YouTube channel we've got over there and click the notification bell. | ||
| And joining me today is the host of The Michael Knowles Show on The Daily Wire and a best-selling author, Michael Knowles. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, thank you for having me. | ||
| How have we not done this before? | ||
| Something doesn't seem right here. | ||
| Like the universe is sort of lining up right now, but how did this not I like that it took a pandemic for us to really do, and I don't, are we allowed to shake hands? | ||
| I don't know if, can we use this? | ||
| I'm gonna shake your hand on camera because you know this, I think, but the rest of the world doesn't know this. | ||
| On Super Tuesday, which was, what was that? | ||
| February, was that March? | ||
| It's like March 2nd? | ||
| It was a while ago. | ||
| That was like right at the beginning of Corona. | ||
| Super Tuesday, I'm with you guys at The Daily Wire, just as Corona's bubbling up. | ||
| You are the last hand that I shook. | ||
| As I was walking out of there, I shake Shapiro's hand, I shake Clavin's hand, whoever else in the crew, and then I walk out of there. | ||
| You're the last one that I shake. | ||
| And then we went into lockdown the next day. | ||
| So short of David, I have not touched another human being. | ||
| I am the last one. | ||
| And according to the latest medical science, if you ever get coronavirus, it's my fault, I think. | ||
| I'm pretty sure. | ||
| Well, the best part of that is that then it turned out that I guess a few days before you were at, where were you? | ||
| It was at CPAC. | ||
| You were at CPAC and it turned out somebody at CPAC shook somebody's hand. | ||
| And I'm like, man, I'm gonna get coronavirus now because Knowles was at CPAC. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| He shook my hand, but yet we're both here and we're both healthy. | ||
| We both survived. | ||
| It is so funny because right after that, the reason that became a big story at CPAC is I was there with Senator Cruz and we were doing this live show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're in the green room and there were There were a lot of important people in the administration. | ||
| There was Kellyanne Conway, it was Ronald McDaniel as the head of the GOP, all these in this very small room, and one guy tested positive for coronavirus. | ||
| So all of a sudden you have all these people locking down, quarantining for weeks and weeks, and I thought I've just ruined the Rubin Report because I'm the last guy that he touched. | ||
| But not only the Rubin Report, if any of this had had the veracity that they told us it was gonna have, you would have taken out the Daily Wire, you would have taken out half of Los Angeles, and yet we're all here. | ||
| Well, because we found the cure. | ||
| You know, we found the cure to coronavirus, which it turns out is nationwide race riots. | ||
| Racism. | ||
| Yes, I thought it might be hydroxychloroquine. | ||
| I thought it could be they maybe get a vaccine. | ||
| Nope, turns out race riots, that's the cure to the virus. | ||
| Although you're being slightly sarcastic there, you know, we've had public officials that have said that. | ||
| That have literally said, if we get the second wave of corona, it will not be because of the disease itself. | ||
| It will be because of racism. | ||
| This is what one of the health commissioners of New York City said. | ||
| Not just one. | ||
| There was this letter that came out a couple weeks ago, I think. | ||
| It was about 1,200, over 1,200 public health officials who said, There are riots, they didn't say riots, they said there are protests going on right now. | ||
| Peaceful. | ||
| Peaceful, very peaceful, social justice protests against racism. | ||
| Those should be encouraged from a public health perspective. | ||
| But the protests that went on a few weeks before against the lockdowns, those must be discouraged because they are mostly white. | ||
| And frankly, I don't even know if that's true. | ||
| And this was the kicker. | ||
| They said, from our perspective as scientists, we know that white supremacy which is totally a real thing. | ||
| White supremacy is a public health threat that exacerbates coronavirus. | ||
| This was a shock to me. | ||
| We don't know that much about the virus, but we do know that. | ||
| How do you feel being a pundit in the stupidest town? | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| I've been thinking a lot about this. | ||
| I think this is the best time to be a pundit, to be in politics, because we've been living in this fiction for actually a number of years now, which is that there is science, right? | ||
| And science with a capital S, trademark over the E, is you can't argue with science. | ||
| Science tells you what to do. | ||
| We bow down and pay obeisance to the god of science. | ||
| And what we're finding out is a lot of this science is not so certain. | ||
| It's actually a little bit more political than all that. | ||
| I mean, obviously, in coronavirus, they've basically admitted it. | ||
| Are you telling me that the WHO, the World Health Organization, could potentially, occasionally, possibly be wrong about things? | ||
| I would never want to contradict the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| We are on YouTube. | ||
| I don't want to... Yes, I don't... Exactly. | ||
| But this is the issue. | ||
| But that sort of thing, where it's like, I mean, because we're so in the same world here, I mean, that we have to believe these people the second they say something, even though two weeks later they say the complete reverse, related to masks or whatever it is, and then we are doing this on YouTube, and I'm sure they're gonna suppress the views on this, but the simple truth is, YouTube said you can't contradict the WHO, which contradicts itself all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| What the hell are we doing here? | ||
| You see it on the masks. | ||
| Surgeon General of the United States said, do not buy masks. | ||
| They will harm people if you buy the masks. | ||
| Don't buy masks. | ||
| Then later, you have to buy the masks. | ||
| The disease will be spread on surfaces. | ||
| The disease won't be spread on surfaces. | ||
| The disease will be spread by asymptomatic people. | ||
| The disease won't be spread by asymptomatic people, right? | ||
| The list goes on and on. | ||
| And actually, it gets to a distinction you talk about a lot, the distinction between, say, progressives or leftists and classical liberals, right? | ||
| Well, what the progressive project has been telling us for a hundred years now is forget about politics. | ||
| Forget about debate and persuading your fellow citizens and engaging in questions and making ethical choices. | ||
| Just pick some experts. | ||
| In lab coats. | ||
| They are going to find the indisputable answer. | ||
| They're going to tell you all how to live your lives. | ||
| And even if they contradict themselves the next day, we just have to do what they say. | ||
| And I think what we're beginning to learn now is, no, we actually have a right to speak about this too. | ||
| We're not just going to blindly follow you. | ||
| What do you think the psychological underpinning of that is with progressives? | ||
| Because I get it. | ||
| I've thought a lot about this. | ||
| I wrote about this. | ||
| What do you think it is about the progressive mind that they pretend they're anti-authoritarian all the time, and yet they love authoritarian voices, actually. | ||
| All their policies are authoritarian. | ||
| Every time there's a study that proves what they want, then that's the right study, and everybody else's is the racist study, or something like that. | ||
| But do you think there is a psychological reason to it? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I think it's a philosophical and a psychological reason. | ||
| And it goes back to Karl Marx. | ||
| And it actually goes back to this idea of science. | ||
| So if you go all the way back to the word science, science just refers to knowledge. | ||
| It comes from the Latin word for knowing things, right? | ||
| And yet now the word science has been minimized. | ||
| It's been truncated into this little tiny aspect of material inquiry and empirical inquiry, right? | ||
| Everything else that we have to say about knowledge is kicked out of that. | ||
| And what Marx said was he discovered a science of history. | ||
| And this is what progressives say. | ||
| It's right there in the word progressive, is we're progressing toward something. | ||
| It's inevitable. | ||
| Barack Obama used to always quote Martin Luther King Jr., who would always say, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. | ||
| Basically meaning we're inevitably hurtling toward this progressive utopia. | ||
| And you can stand in the way for a little bit, but you're not really going to stop it. | ||
| And don't forget history. | ||
| You'll be on the wrong side of history, right? | ||
| All of this language basically turns politics into a science. | ||
| And the reason it does that is so that you can't disagree with it. | ||
| And science is always right. | ||
| You can never disagree with it. | ||
| And what we're learning now is that was just an excuse. | ||
| That was a facade to cover up their political choices. | ||
| I think the authoritarian impulse there comes because they know that we're going to paradise. | ||
| They see the utopia right ahead of us. | ||
| And so if you stand in the way of utopia, you can only be one of two things, really evil or extremely stupid. | ||
| And either way, we shouldn't be listening to you. | ||
| And the funny thing about this is they think the word utopia means the best place. | ||
| But it doesn't mean that. | ||
| The word actually means no place. | ||
| It doesn't exist. | ||
| And I think a lot of people are waking up to that. | ||
| Well, there's a semi-autonomous zone in Seattle that I think is their utopia, or whatever the hell is going on there. | ||
| How old are you, if you don't mind me asking? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm 30. | |
| A lady never tells, but I'm 30. | ||
| Okay, you're a young fella out there in the political world, and I always find it interesting when I meet younger conservatives, so especially now at college when I meet younger conservatives, because I think Although I do think this is changing now, for at least a decade, really more than a decade, probably a couple decades, to be a young conservative was like, you're just sort of this dorky, stuffy, whatever, you're a nerd, you care about numbers, you don't know anything about culture, you're not funny, you don't like comedy or any of these things. | ||
| Were you always a conservative? | ||
| How do you see that sort of changing right now? | ||
| Because I really see it changing at the moment. | ||
| I see it, I mean, I think we're in the midst of it changing pretty radically. | ||
| I basically came out of the womb smoking cigars with parted hair, even wearing penny loafers. | ||
| That must have been a difficult birth. | ||
| It was tough. | ||
| My mother's a saint, you know, there's no question. | ||
| 1996, I campaigned around my first grade classroom for Bob Dole for president. | ||
| I was the only person in America, including Bob Dole. | ||
| Did you have a pen? | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| Bob Doleman. | ||
| No, I don't know why I liked him. | ||
| I think I liked him because he was a war hero. | ||
| Clinton was a draft dodger. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I had this conservative impulse. | ||
| I went through a liberal phase. | ||
| It was short, maybe 14, 15, something like that. | ||
| Second and third grade. | ||
| Second and third grade, yeah, and then I totally found myself. | ||
| What was that liberal phase for you, though? | ||
| You know, I think it came about because I grew up in a very liberal place, I went to a very liberal school, all my friends were liberals. | ||
| It was simply not... Where were you from? | ||
| From New York, from Westchester, New York. | ||
| Oh, right, you're from Westchester. | ||
| That's right, right, you know. | ||
| It's just not acceptable. | ||
| It wasn't even a possibility to be a conservative. | ||
| And so I went along with that, and then I started slowly questioning things. | ||
| I mean, I was an atheist from 13 to 23, basically, a 10-year period there. | ||
| And those religious questions tie into some political questions. | ||
| I think over time, it became clear to me that there were more possibilities. | ||
| And this is something I actually have a lot of pity for left-wingers who live in left-wing places and go to left-wing institutions, which is they don't know what they don't know. | ||
| See, conservatives do know. | ||
| We see the other side of the argument 24-7. | ||
| You can't help it. | ||
| And so because your ideas are constantly under attack, you've got to refine them. | ||
| You've got to change them. | ||
| Maybe you throw some out. | ||
| Maybe you double down on some. | ||
| The left doesn't have that. | ||
| that privilege, you know? | ||
| And so I think part of the reason why they scream and they shriek and they set up autonomous zones in Seattle | ||
| is because they don't really know why they think what they think. | ||
| And you know, conservatives, we have the fortune of being able to think through that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I've talked about that a lot because it's like you guys own culture | ||
| and then on top of it, you also created safe spaces. | ||
| What did you think was going to happen when all the people over the last, you know, five years were yelling at guys like us for talking about what was going on on college campuses? | ||
| Oh, it's just a bunch of kids! | ||
| You know, and it's like, actually, you do know that this is leaking out into society and these people are graduating and they're starting to take down institutions. | ||
| Literally, you have young editors at publishing houses that are getting books canceled. | ||
| At the New York Times. | ||
| And the New York Times has been taken out. | ||
| Do you think this thing is going to destroy virtually every liberal institution that we have? | ||
| This is the big lie that you have spoken out against for a long time. | ||
| You should feel very vindicated over the past few weeks. | ||
| I'm feeling pretty vindicated lately. | ||
| Because the big lie we've always heard is, oh, these college campuses, these are just a bunch of idiots. | ||
| Just wait until they get out into the real world. | ||
| Well, I'm looking around the real world now, and I'm seeing the consequences of those college campuses as the buildings are burning down all around the country. | ||
| The issue with the institutions you bring up is an interesting one, because We've been told for the past few weeks that all of these protests are about institutional racism, right? | ||
| But then it occurred to me. | ||
| The left controls every major institution in America. | ||
| Controls the media. | ||
| Controls higher education and lower education. | ||
| Controls Hollywood. | ||
| Controls big tech. | ||
| Controls administrative government. | ||
| Controls basically other than talk radio and some little parts of the internet. | ||
| The left controls every institution. | ||
| So if there's institutional racism, whose fault is that? | ||
| Well, not only whose fault is it, but they are the ones Putting it into the institutions. | ||
| They're the ones making it systemic. | ||
| Harvard. | ||
| Harvard says we want less Asian people because you guys have had it too good through hard work and education. | ||
| So we're going to institute a racist policy. | ||
| I don't know if you saw it. | ||
| I just tweeted last night or this morning, this thing in Tacoma, Washington, Where they're now, it is going to be in practice that if you have lost your job or need housing because of COVID, they're only going to help people who identify as people of color. | ||
| I think you might have something to say about that. | ||
| I might, you know, the Sicilians are always in a little wiggle room here. | ||
| Right, I mean, you saw this with Uber Eats, right? | ||
| Uber Eats, they come out, they say, if you're ordering from a black-owned business, Whatever that is. | ||
| I mean, are you going to measure the equity here? | ||
| A black-owned business, there's no delivery fees. | ||
| But if it's a white-owned business, there will be deliveries. | ||
| So they are the ones actually injecting racism into the system? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| You know, it occurred to me, I thought, A friend came up to me the other day and said, Michael, it's almost like they want us to be racists. | ||
| The mainstream media, the left, they're ginning up this racial division. | ||
| It's like they want us to be racist. | ||
| And I realize, they do. | ||
| They actually need you to be racist because so much of liberalism is about overcoming this oppressive past, right? | ||
| So the whole story of liberalism is... Yeah, it can't end. | ||
| It can't end. | ||
| You've always got to be freeing yourself. | ||
| But look around. | ||
| You remember early on in the riots, the mainstream media tried to blame white supremacists. | ||
| How many Klansmen are there in America? | ||
| Like four left or something? | ||
| I didn't see a whole lot of white hoods out there. | ||
| I saw a white hood on the governor of Virginia, the Democrat Ralph Northam. | ||
| I didn't see it in the riots. | ||
| So they have to either create this boogeyman or actually try to create racists. | ||
| If only to have a villain to then overcome. | ||
| Well, also, when they're going through these cities, destroying everything, we were talking about West Hollywood, which is literally the gayest place on earth. | ||
| They have rainbow crosswalks. | ||
| The entire West Hollywood, right now as we tape this, is boarded up. | ||
| I used to live there. | ||
| I went there a couple days ago. | ||
| It is boarded up. | ||
| It looks like a third world nation. | ||
| And on every sign outside, it says BLM. | ||
| The implication being, don't destroy our business. | ||
| We're for you, Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Watch what I can do here. | ||
| If it was white supremacists that were rampaging through the neighborhood, wouldn't you be writing, like, white power on the side? | ||
| Because then you'd go, oh, I'm a white supremacist. | ||
| You're a white supremacist. | ||
| Don't bust up my business. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And also, it's worth noting, this is Pride Month, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Call me crazy. | ||
| I'm not an expert. | ||
| I thought this was supposed to be the month to celebrate West Hollywood and the LGBT community. | ||
| Progressivism changes so fast that now Pride Month is canceled and now Pride Month is BLM Month. | ||
| What's it going to be next year? | ||
| You remember a couple years ago at Toronto Pride when BLM stopped the march and said, you guys can't march any further unless you sign our edict or our whatever it is. | ||
| And basically they did and they let them march and a bunch of us talked about it and they said, oh, here you go again. | ||
| Here you guys go again. | ||
| This issue of the intersectional politics, it's an interesting one here | ||
| because you're almost seeing the return of more of an old school Marxism. | ||
| You know, for the past 10 years, you've been hearing about how the gay community | ||
| has something in common with the trans community, which is kind of ironic, | ||
| 'cause those two communities sort of contradict one another. | ||
| Either there are individual sexes and same sex attraction is having to do with the two sexes, | ||
| or there's no such thing as sexes, and so that contradicts the G in the LGBT, right? | ||
| But those have something to do together. | ||
| You can have Gloria Steinem, radical feminist, holding hands with Linda Sarsour, an Islamist, | ||
| at the Women's March, that makes sense. | ||
| But now you're seeing that, I think, begin to fade away a little bit | ||
| into more of an old school, the Black Lives Matter interest is not the LGBT interest, | ||
| and the BLM one is gonna take precedence. | ||
| Even though all of it comes down to a sort of radical Marxism. | ||
| And this is the part that I think some of the squishy types don't get, because they'll say the word Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Nobody disagrees with that. | ||
| Here's my evidence that nobody disagrees with that. | ||
| Everybody posted the black square on social media. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| In government, in media, in corporate America, in all your friends. | ||
| They all did it. | ||
| No one disagrees with that statement. | ||
| Even people that didn't want to do it, not because they're not for black lives, but because they don't like being bullied into things, they did it too. | ||
| They did it too. | ||
| But then you look at the Black Lives Matter website, the About Us section, and it's not just about Black Lives Mattering. | ||
| At one point it says we exist to destroy the, quote, Western-prescribed nuclear family. | ||
| What does that have to do with police brutality? | ||
| It's obviously, and you can see the founders of BLM come from radical leftist organizations, which get their funding from the Open Societies Foundation, which is run by George Soros. | ||
| That's not a conspiracy theory. | ||
| Can I also say, it's not anti-Semitic to say that. | ||
| I don't even know, how would it be anti-Semitic? | ||
| George Soros has lived his life to basically fund every Jew-hating thing there is, pretty much, right? | ||
| He would love to have Israel wiped off the map, so the idea that saying that George Soros funds these things is anti-Semitic is complete nonsense. | ||
| Right, it becomes, what the left wants to pretend is that this is a racial issue primarily, and it's not. | ||
| The left uses race all the time, but it's not. | ||
| You can see when you look at the About Us section of the BLM page, when you look at who's funding it, It's primarily ideological, and I think there's some squishy conservatives and Republicans who want to go along with it because they're afraid of being called racist, even when they're not at all racist. | ||
| But that's a very bad deal to get into, because then you're accepting radical leftist premises that are going to undercut everything you stand for. | ||
| In many ways, though, do you think the ship has sailed to the point that We don't have enough power to fix this thing. | ||
| That you're laying out sense and thoughtful analysis, and people are waking up to it. | ||
| And I do think a ton of people are being red-pilled right now because just reality is red-pilling them, right? | ||
| I've got Hollywood lefties, friends that are calling me and they're like, where do you get a gun? | ||
| So it's like, so something's happening here. | ||
| But in many ways, do you think that the destructive force of this thing has, has so infiltrated everything that nothing can return. | ||
| You've hit the nail on the head, which is we're beginning to see more people than just conservatives or classical liberals or just normal people are seeing, yikes, something has gone seriously wrong here. | ||
| And yet very little is being done to stop it. | ||
| You see even the president of the United States More or less, all he can do is tweet about it. | ||
| And people are saying, OK, enough tweeting. | ||
| You've got to actually do something. | ||
| But it gets back to the institutions issue. | ||
| The left controls the institutions, which means the left controls the levers of power. | ||
| The only institution that we've got on the right is talking. | ||
| And so we can talk until we're blue in the face. | ||
| We can point out hypocrisy until we're blue in the face. | ||
| And the left says, yeah, okay, you've pointed out my hypocrisy. | ||
| I still have the levers of power. | ||
| I think what is required now of the right and of conservatives is to take back actual institutions of power. | ||
| And, perhaps even more importantly, to be willing to exercise that political power when we have the ability to do so. | ||
| So what does that mean? | ||
| Rubber meets the road. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| Like, actually start separate universities? | ||
| I mean, there are some more conservative-leaning universities, and some of them have thrived in the midst of all this. | ||
| And University of Chicago, although it's not conservative per se, but they have actually instituted, like, an actual defense of free speech, and they probably won't burn as quickly as the rest of these other places. | ||
| But what do you actually mean by that? | ||
| Like, what does institution building look like? | ||
| So that would be a wonderful thing. | ||
| I mean, unfortunately, I could probably count the conservative universities on one hand, and they're really great universities. | ||
| I guess the silver lining in the storm cloud of the coronavirus lockdown and some of the riots is that you're seeing a collapse in many ways of this decrepit educational infrastructure that not only does not give people an education, and it does not give people an ability to have a career, And it does saddle them with a lot of debt. | ||
| All it does is indoctrinate them in a very modern sort of politics, which is not worth the cost of admission. | ||
| So at least you're seeing that crumble. | ||
| But I think there's a change in mindset that's got to come about a little bit. | ||
| Conservatives, maybe in their nature, are a little bit timid. | ||
| And so this is what you'll hear a lot. | ||
| Whenever we're talking about some kind of political change, we'll say, well, We conservatives can't do something about it. | ||
| Let's talk about censorship on social media as a good example. | ||
| We can't do anything to rein in the big tech companies. | ||
| Because if we allow the government that we control to rein in the big tech companies, then the left, when they get into power, they're going to use that power to censor us. | ||
| I understand that in principle, but what that really boils down to is we can't do anything to stop the left's current censorship of us because maybe someday the left will censor us. | ||
| They're already censoring us. | ||
| It's already happening. | ||
| So what do you do then? | ||
| I mean, you know I'm big on this topic and I started a tech company in the midst of this whole thing. | ||
| So what is the right answer? | ||
| Because I understand the original premise you laid out there and I understand the counter to that. | ||
| Because it's happening right now. | ||
| And the simple truth is, right this second, although maybe it's slightly altered because of Trump's executive action, but they could do digital assassinations on all of us today. | ||
| Right now, they could shut down Daily Wire, they could shut me down, they could shut down everybody. | ||
| Could Trump really fight that? | ||
| Would he really fight that? | ||
| So what is the answer? | ||
| So, Trump is at a slight disadvantage because the administrative government, the bureaucratic state, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, They stay around when the elected people come and go. | ||
| They are there, and the elected people don't have actually a ton of power over them, all the alphabet people, you know, the different agencies. | ||
| One thing he could do is push an argument that Senator Cruz has been pushing for a long time, which is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act creates this distinction between platforms and publishers. | ||
| So this is what he did, though, already, right? | ||
| Isn't this what the executive action was? | ||
| Yes, he took an executive action through an executive order. | ||
| But the executive order is more or less just a letter to the administrative agency saying, please consider doing this. | ||
| That, I hope it works out, but ultimately, you know, an executive order is often only as good as the paper that it's written on. | ||
| You could use the DOJ to start investigating maybe anti-monopolistic courses of action when it comes to big tech. | ||
| But this must kill you as a conservative though, right? | ||
| I mean... Yes and no. | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| It kills a certain kind of right-wing consensus that developed from the 80s and 90s and 2000s, which is that all government action is bad and you just have to reduce government action. | ||
| That's not the whole of conservative thought. | ||
| You know, I mean, that was a sort of conservative thought that certainly you see in classical liberalism, but there's more to conservatism than that. | ||
| And I think we want to be able to use the government well for justice. | ||
| I mean, it comes down to a little bit of a disagreement you see in the origins of our country, in the Federalist Papers. | ||
| What is the end of government? | ||
| Is the end of government merely to maximize individual liberty? | ||
| We all love individual liberty. | ||
| James Madison says in The Federalist, the end of government is justice. | ||
| And so when you've got these big tech companies probably breaking the law, flagrantly violating, you know, certainly some regulations, controlling the flow of information around the internet in our republic, That doesn't seem very just, and so I think it's perfectly conservative to use the means at our disposal to stop that. | ||
| See, it's interesting, because I'm with you on the argument, but I don't know that the machine that you're describing that is so broken and corrupt could do it. | ||
| And I think by empowering it to do it, you will only make the problem worse. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| I mean, you're running a risk, and this is, I think, why some conservatives haven't wanted to actually exercise the political power | ||
| that we the people give them every so often. | ||
| And it's because conservatives, naturally, are a little bit risk-averse. | ||
| And I think there is a type of conservative or right-winger who would rather lose gracefully | ||
| than risk being wrong and doing something wrong and not looking good in the history books. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| That's a fair fear. | ||
| Is that what you would say about the Never Trumpers? | ||
| Or I'm sure you have more to say about the Never Trumpers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I mean, you know, I think there are about two Never Trumpers left on earth, you know. | ||
| I mean, you got Frum and Bill Kristol. | ||
| And it's like, man, you guys really love each other. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To me, it made perfect sense to be skeptical of Trump in 2016. | ||
| A lot of people thought the guy was a Democrat or he'd be a left-winger, so I kind of get that. | ||
| Now, I think it's much harder. | ||
| He's been, in many ways, the most conservative president in modern America. | ||
| But there are still a few hardcore people who say, no, it's so icky. | ||
| I don't like that we have to risk anything to try to accomplish something. | ||
| But that is the point of politics. | ||
| And the left is not afraid. | ||
| The left is not afraid of using the political power that is given to them by the people. | ||
| I mean, that's what politics is. | ||
| Politics is not abstract. | ||
| Politics is not pure philosophy. | ||
| It's a messy thing. | ||
| There's the line from Bismarck. | ||
| He says, you know, we all like sausage, but we don't want to see how the sausage gets made. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I think conservatives need to be more willing to take a risk, to risk how they look in the history books, to risk maybe the government doing something they don't like in the future, because you can't win by losing. | ||
| You can't win by, okay, we're going to lose this battle, we're going to lose this issue, we're going to lose this election, but then in some distant future, when everything is perfect and pure, then finally we're going to win. | ||
| That's not how politics works. | ||
| So I suspect I know your answer to this, but do you think these things should be fought on multiple fronts? | ||
| Meaning there can be a more conservative answer, there can be a more libertarian answer that's more free market. | ||
| I mean, that's why I started Locals. | ||
| I've had this disagreement with Tucker Carlson on his show where he wants the government to do it, and I said, well, I'm gonna try the free market side. | ||
| I don't have a problem with that argument, because it's like, maybe we all have to hit it in different ways. | ||
| Look, the PragerU guys that you work with, they got into a lawsuit with YouTube. | ||
| Is Dennis's, or, I don't wanna speak for Dennis, but is the PragerU ethos, like, let's use the law to stop companies from doing something? | ||
| Of course not, but we're all trying to navigate very murky waters. | ||
| And isn't that the freest market of all, is to try all of these different solutions to the problem. | ||
| You're not going to be able to take down this monstrous left-wing edifice. | ||
| with one little narrow, pure solution. | ||
| That one little narrow, pure solution might help, but you're gonna need a lot of different strategies, a lot of different tactics to undertake, and so certainly everything should be on the table. | ||
| You don't wanna do anything that is objectively wrong. | ||
| I'm not advocating that in any way, but if one strategy- You mean we shouldn't just burn down the Google servers? | ||
| I think they're somewhere in Utah. | ||
| We shouldn't just go there and- And light them on fire. | ||
| Put masks on. | ||
| In the name of social justice. | ||
| Yeah, that's- Yeah, no, we probably shouldn't do that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But certainly, I mean, what you've done with Locals is a great example, right? | ||
| Certainly we can innovate, we can create, try to create our own institutions at least, create the beginnings of our own institutions, and enforce the law that is already on the books. | ||
| Those two things are not contradictory to one another, and actually, if we do enforce the law, if we do have a credible threat of enforcing the law, if we do have a credible threat of a competitor to one of these organizations, That is going to increase the likelihood of success on all fronts. | ||
| You know, when you've got something like a Google. | ||
| And when you add in all the other tech companies, they control the flow of internet. | ||
| That is an amount of power that I don't think anybody who cares deeply about the country, or any of the founding fathers, or any of the people who have thought about how this republic is supposed to work, I don't think they would be comfortable with that kind of power being consolidated, whether it's in technically a private company or not. | ||
| Yeah, does some of your belief that these things can be stopped, is there a biblical sort of bedrock beneath that? | ||
| I mean, I always say if David could be Goliath, then maybe Dave could be Google. | ||
| Like, I really do believe that, that there is, it is so embedded in us that the little guy can beat the big guy, that that makes me crazy enough to try to start my own tech company in the midst of all this. | ||
| Yeah, that's such a great point, because I don't know that they can be beaten. | ||
| I don't know that the destructive left that has wrecked our institutions and our political traditions and our civil society, I don't know that they can be beaten or beaten in my lifetime. | ||
| But I do know I should try, and I do know I have no reason not to try. | ||
| I mean, I guess that would be maybe the biblical basis of it, is what do I have to lose? | ||
| What would I gain by playing along and saying things that I don't believe in and being bullied into posting whatever I've got to post on social media if I lose my integrity, if I lose my dignity, if I lose the things that I care about, so I have a slightly more pleasant life? | ||
| That's not a compelling argument. | ||
| Well, I think a lot of people watching this would say, well, I don't want to lose my job. | ||
| Yeah, and it's a real fear. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure you get this question all the time at college campuses. | ||
| Kids will say, hey, I'm a conservative, I'm a libertarian, I believe in certain things, but I'm afraid of saying it in class. | ||
| Should I say it in class or not? | ||
| I say, well, are you willing to get the bad grade? | ||
| What they're asking is, how do I do what I want to do without paying a price? | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| Everything has a cost. | ||
| For me, I've spoken out, I've said what I believe, it has cost me certain things. | ||
| I go to bed at night, I'm grinning ear to ear, I sleep like a baby. | ||
| I think probably you do too. | ||
| It's worth it to me, but there is a cost to that. | ||
| It's interesting, because I get that question all the time, or at least when we were allowed to travel to colleges, remember the old days? | ||
| And I had once heard Ben Shapiro obviously give an answer on that which was that if you're in college that in your core classes So meaning if you want to be a doctor in your core classes, you probably shouldn't speak up because you do need to move ahead Yeah And you don't want to be screwed but in some of your other stuff, you know Like lesbian dance theory like there you maybe could speak up a little bit more because it probably won't take you out There was some version of that. | ||
| I'm not totally sure if that's what he feels now. | ||
| And for like four or five years ago, what I would say is just suck it up and get the grade | ||
| 'cause you wanna get out. | ||
| But about four years ago, I completely changed and I started saying the absolute reverse. | ||
| You must speak up. | ||
| If you don't speak up, if you're in college, the world will never be easier for you. | ||
| You're not gonna get out of college. | ||
| You're not gonna get out of college and have a car payment and a mortgage | ||
| and a wife and a dog and all of these responsibilities, plus all the endless nonsense of the world | ||
| and suddenly be like, "I'm gonna get brave today." | ||
| Time to lose my job. | ||
| Let's roll, yeah. | ||
| So you'll never do it. | ||
| So that's what I push now. | ||
| It doesn't mean it's easy. | ||
| In fact, actually it means it's the reverse. | ||
| This is the same argument as don't worry about the snowflakes when they get to the real world. | ||
| No, the real world gets realer and realer and realer. | ||
| And I understand prudence is a virtue and politics changes with time. | ||
| Politics is about circumstances. | ||
| So maybe it made more sense at one time to keep a little bit quiet and then you can try to move here. | ||
| But in terms of how How I would live my life with the advice I would give, no. | ||
| I would say speak up. | ||
| Doesn't mean you need to go wear your MAGA hat every time you're at the water cooler. | ||
| But it does mean if you're asked a question about your beliefs, I would tell people what you think. | ||
| I think it's a good habit to get into. | ||
| Let's not forget the virtues are habits. | ||
| And so if you practice them from a young age, you're more likely to be able to practice them at an older age. | ||
| And if you don't, if you say, no, when I turn 60, then I'm going to start practicing the virtues. | ||
| I don't know if it's going to work. | ||
| And the scarier part is that I think a lot of young people think, oh, it's when I turn 22, right? | ||
| Like 60, we can all accept that a 60-year-old most likely, you know, although maybe he's going through like a later midlife crisis and then maybe he's gonna do something nuts, but that probably involves going to Vegas and, you know. | ||
| Not practicing the virtues. | ||
| Right, you're not gonna go the virtue thing. | ||
| You sort of hit on this, but I'm curious what you think The sort of future, how wide a future conservative tent can be, because I'll drop a little knowledge for you, Knowles, I'm already working on my second book, and that's kind of the direction I'm gonna go with it. | ||
| That what I'm really, it seems to me that the right, broadly speaking, has won the big arguments. | ||
| They've won the arguments on individual liberty. | ||
| They've won the arguments on family, on belief at least in the terms of, | ||
| as an organizer of society, maybe not at a absolute individual level. | ||
| I think we have a little disagreement on that, which I'm happy to talk about. | ||
| But that the right basically got the big stuff right. | ||
| And what I think is for someone that's on the more liberal side of that, | ||
| my job is to kind of make sure that they never go off the deep end too far right, let's | ||
| say and start coming around to like, you know, | ||
| trying to get violence out of video games again, like the right used to try to do. | ||
| But I know that there's people on the right that want more of a religious version of conservatism than there's obviously the libertarians. | ||
| Do you think that thing can hold? | ||
| Because I really believe that the future of Western politics, not just in America, in every Western nation, is a center-right future. | ||
| I think we're seeing that happen across the world right now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But how wide do you think that thing can be, not to become too big? | ||
| I think you don't need to worry as much about the breadth as the object, what you're fighting against. | ||
| Because I do think that there is a lot of space on the right, but it's not going to be the same tent that we saw in the Cold War, for instance. | ||
| So you will never find a greater admirer of William F. Buckley Jr. | ||
| and Ronald Reagan than me, okay? | ||
| I really admire those guys. | ||
| They fought their battle. | ||
| They were fighting the Soviet Union, and they cobbled together this coalition that doesn't make a lot of sense. | ||
| The coalition was the social conservative traditionalist religious right, and they hated the atheism of the Soviet Union. | ||
| You've got the libertarians, you know, practical anarcho-capitalists on one side, right? | ||
| They don't really care about the religious right argument at all, but they hate the collectivism of the Soviet Union. | ||
| You've got the blue dog Democrats. | ||
| They don't really care about either of those two things. | ||
| They care about the imperial expansion of the Soviet Union. | ||
| They come together, they fight the Cold War. | ||
| Where do you think Reagan fits in that? | ||
| He's more of like a California conservative that kind of shifted, right, in the midst of all that, right? | ||
| Anybody who tells you they can Analyze Ronald Reagan is lying to you. | ||
| Ronald Reagan is one of the most enigmatic figures in American politics. | ||
| I mean, this is a guy, he liberalized abortion laws in California more than anybody before him. | ||
| And yet he becomes one of the most pro-life presidents in American history. | ||
| It's very, I mean, I know that Bill Buckley had a major influence on bringing Ronald Reagan over to the right. | ||
| I mean, I think there were a lot of people of his generation who said they got mugged by reality. | ||
| And I think that's how you go from a New Deal Democrat into a Reaganite conservative. | ||
| I mean, it's what's happening to these people right now. | ||
| Right, it's happening now. | ||
| And so I think that made a lot of sense then. | ||
| I don't think that makes as much sense right now. | ||
| A lot of that kind of conservatism took on a very, especially in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, an economics-first dimension to it. | ||
| People just said, forget about any cultural issues, any social issues. | ||
| We're just gonna talk about tax rates. | ||
| Yeah, that's what gets people riled up in the mornings, slightly lowering the marginal tax rate. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's ironic that conservatism devolved into that, because the great philosopher of conservatism, probably the founder of what you'd call modern conservatism, is Edmund Burke. | ||
| And in the most often quoted part of the most often quoted book of his, Reflections on the Revolution in France, he said, The age of chivalry is gone. | ||
| That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded it, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. | ||
| And what do we do? | ||
| We become sophisters, economists, and calculators. | ||
| We double down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think that the future of the right is a bunch of egghead people on spreadsheets talking about how to more efficiently move markets. | ||
| I think we care about- But you don't think those people are part of it. | ||
| It's just not the heart of it. | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I think they certainly can be part of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think what we've got to be motivated by is the threat, and the threat right now is not the Soviet Union. | ||
| The threat is the woke left, the radical left that is literally burning down cities as we speak. | ||
| Now, who opposes the woke left? | ||
| The religious right? | ||
| Catholic Integralist, you know, as far social conservative as you can imagine, and Dave Rubin. | ||
| Last time I checked, you're not a Catholic Integralist. | ||
| Not yet, at least. | ||
| And yet, both of those groups fit perfectly together in this tent because we do have a common foe. | ||
| The politics of opposition is often derided, but the politics of opposition works pretty well. | ||
| It worked well in World War II, it worked well in the Cold Do you think there's any risk of that in the long term? | ||
| Because that you sort of get these competing interests. | ||
| I sense this. | ||
| I sense this more from the Catholic side of this. | ||
| That they're going to ally themselves with some people that they really don't want to like for this sort of short-term win. | ||
| Even if we all agree that, yes, that's the thing we got to fight. | ||
| But that in the long term, that's not a coalition that can hold. | ||
| Well, in the long term, we're all dead, I guess, as a famous economist once said. | ||
| I mean, I think this anxiety comes from some of the same pathologies that have afflicted politics in recent years, which is that we think politics is eternal. | ||
| We think, and for the left, politics has become a sort of religion. | ||
| Politics is not eternal. | ||
| Politics is just how we all get along together in this civil society of ours, and politics changes a lot. | ||
| It's changed a lot in just the last four years. | ||
| So, right now we have this threat, and we've got this coalition that's come together. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Let's do it, man. | ||
| I'm not going to lose sleep at night because of some hypothetical problem. | ||
| If in the future a different political circumstance arises, then I suspect, as always happens, the political coalitions are going to shift again. | ||
| But let's not lose the fight that we're in right now because of the hypothetical fight that we're going to have in the future. | ||
| So what would you say, then, to the conservatives who would say, all right, We got a guy like Rubin who we're aligned with and all the mugged lefties and the old school liberals and blah, blah, blah, but a decent percentage of them, as you know, I describe myself as begrudgingly pro-choice. | ||
| This is the big one for you guys. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| And by the way, in many ways, I think it's the biggest one, but all right, it's up there, let's say. | ||
| In my book, that's the argument I make, 12 weeks, and I don't deny it's a life and the whole thing, but if you want to live in a pluralistic society, okay. | ||
| I did not get any hate from anyone on the right, by the way, for this. | ||
| I got literally hundreds, if not thousands of emails and certainly thousands of tweets, basically people just saying, Dave, I love the book. | ||
| I'm just not with you on the abortion one, but it's all good. | ||
| And most of them say what you kind of said, which is, you'll get there. | ||
| You'll get there, we'll get there. | ||
| Something like that, okay. | ||
| But putting that aside, I think there will be a certain set within that that'll be like, no, no, no. | ||
| That's a bridge too far. | ||
| And I think what's happening is, a lot of the disaffected lefties, they're going, I can never call myself a conservative because of the abortion one. | ||
| That, for them, is like the one that scares them and keeps them in the closet on the other side. | ||
| Well, one of the great political thinkers, Cardinal Manning, said that at bottom, all political conflict And all human conflict is theological. | ||
| It comes down to religious questions. | ||
| And you know, St. | ||
| Andrew Breitbart, the patron of Hollywood conservatives, he had a similar saying, which is, politics is downstream of culture. | ||
| And then we know that cult and culture come from the same root word. | ||
| What a culture worships defines that culture. | ||
| And so at the bottom you have these religious questions. | ||
| Some people write off religious questions and they say, well, I prefer science. | ||
| Well, in the way that these modern liberals are using the word science, it's a synonym. | ||
| They're using it in the same way, to talk about eternal questions. | ||
| And the question is, what is a human being, what is a human being for, and what does a just politics do to innocent human beings? | ||
| So, I would imagine that years ago, you would have called yourself more pro-choice than you do now. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| You've come over in... | ||
| How could I be upset that you've come closer, to my opinion, on the question of abortion? | ||
| Why would I be angry about that, that you, in my view, have become more correct on that question? | ||
| Well, I always tell Ben, when I've debated this with him, I'm always like, listen, you're making good arguments, but it's the bananas lefties that are pushing me out. | ||
| When they say you can't be pro-life and be a Democrat, or when they say you can have an abortion at eight months, it's like, I got nothing to negotiate with you guys over there, at least with you guys. | ||
| I mean, Glenn Beck, who of course is pro-life, I've discussed this many times with him, and even though we've come to different conclusions, I find our logic actually is the same to get there in many ways, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, we're both trying to keep the state out of people's lives, and then we can talk about life and all that. | ||
| But that, so I think I get your, Your conclusion there, because it's like, all right, we can at least do something here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if you're going to tell me that an eight-month abortion, just because someone feels like it, is okay. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| What can I do? | ||
| What can I do? | ||
| And talk about using every tool available to us. | ||
| You know, we were talking about that with big tech. | ||
| Well, you can apply it the same way here. | ||
| I think the philosophical arguments for abortion are extraordinarily weak. | ||
| I don't think there are much arguments at all. | ||
| I think all of the arguments against abortion are very strong, philosophically. | ||
| Theologically, it's not even close. | ||
| It's not even a question. | ||
| And then there are scientific arguments, and it's hard to make scientific arguments because What are you gonna say? | ||
| Okay, when the baby has its right arm, then it deserves not to be killed. | ||
| But before it has its right arm, then it deserves to be killed. | ||
| That's not very compelling. | ||
| By the way, I don't know if you read my book, but I do make that concession. | ||
| I do make that concession. | ||
| And so, when you see it, I think, to me, this is even more important, maybe, than the arguments. | ||
| And this is where science plays a role in it. | ||
| Because of the advance of medical technology, You can see the baby. | ||
| And this is why I think you would say, you see the baby at eight weeks. | ||
| You say, I can't kill that. | ||
| I can look at that and see that that's a human being. | ||
| Maybe you can see that at seven months, maybe you see that at six months, maybe you see all the way back. | ||
| To me, that's very persuasive. | ||
| Because don't forget, we're not just brains floating in the air, right? | ||
| Politics is not just pure philosophy floating in the air. | ||
| We're human beings. | ||
| We're flesh and blood. | ||
| We're moved by images. | ||
| And those images, I think, are very helpful. | ||
| And if some of those images move you all the way back to 12 weeks, To me, that's something worth celebrating. | ||
| And maybe now, then we can go a little bit further, too. | ||
| So with that very pleasant way you describe that, with the smile on your face, I want to talk about civility a little bit, because somebody actually, not realizing that I was having you on the show today, somebody in the Rubin Report community put up a post about civility, and they said, Dave, you and Michael Knowles are two of the best at it. | ||
| Oh, that's very nice. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| Somebody likes you. | ||
| All right, I'll take it. | ||
|
unidentified
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You believe it? | |
| Pretty great. | ||
| But basically what they were saying in terms of debates, because you have a zillion videos of you debating leftists and all those things, and you don't put them down, you know, you occasionally do some jokes and that kind of stuff, but you do engage in ideas. | ||
| I've never seen you, unless there's something I haven't seen, I've never seen you try to destroy somebody or any of the rest of that stuff. | ||
| Where do you think civility from you comes from? | ||
| Because do you think it's just sort of temperament coupled with knowing what you're talking about or do you think it's one or the other more or something else? | ||
| I think politics is much more pleasant if you begin from a place of humility. | ||
| Now our politics starts from a place of pride, right? | ||
| I've got to get my way about everything and if you don't give me everything I want, even a little bit, I'm going to burn your city to the ground. | ||
| That's what we've been seeing. | ||
| Or at least start my own city within your city. | ||
| Or at least start my own city. | ||
| At the very least, yeah. | ||
| And build a lot of walls and start a police force. | ||
| These guys love walls! | ||
| They do. | ||
| Only some. | ||
| So I think it's good to begin with humility. | ||
| You'd be a great example of this. | ||
| You've changed your mind on a lot of issues. | ||
| I've changed my mind on a lot of issues. | ||
| So when I'm debating some left-winger, whether it's a 22-year-old college kid or whether it's a 52-year-old Democrat who goes on cable news, I can look at that person and say, there but for the grace of God go I. Maybe I would have thought that thing if I hadn't had this conversation ten years ago with this person. | ||
| I was in favor of abortion until I had lunch with a bioethicist and she convinced me my arguments were wrong. | ||
| Then I changed my mind. | ||
| So I think, well, maybe I could have that influence down the line on somebody else. | ||
| I don't get angry, really, in politics. | ||
| You know, there's that expression, don't get mad, get even. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And if I can, I'll get even. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But you are Italian. | ||
| I am Italian, you know. | ||
| These are important rules they teach us when we're two years old. | ||
| To me, that's much more productive. | ||
| It's just not my style, really, to smack somebody or ruin them or get really personal or anything. | ||
| I just don't care that much. | ||
| I want them to come around to the right point of view. | ||
| I want to have a good politics, but I don't need to pull my hair out and ruin my life for that. | ||
| This is still our life, and if you're going to spend it being miserable and angry all the time, You're probably doing it wrong. | ||
| Is that the most dangerous thing, in a way, that these people, these lefties, who now have become religious in their anti-religion, they've become religious in their anti-racism, they've become racist, but that their whole worldview is politics? | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| What do you guys have besides politics? | ||
| I try not to tweet on the weekends. | ||
| During corona, it has not been going well. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because now we don't know when weekends are, right? | ||
| What is a weekend? | ||
| I do my August off-the-grid thing. | ||
| Getting out of... | ||
| the day-to-day minutiae, I view as, it's like more, I can't imagine how important it is right now, you know? | ||
| People get angry when they don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| People who know what they're talking about tend not to get angry because very often | ||
| they know what you're about to say. | ||
| They kind of know the counter arguments and they can refute the counter arguments. | ||
| So they've just done it before. | ||
| They see where this is going. | ||
| The people burning down cities, the people screaming at you on Twitter or wherever, they don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| Just from a practical level, when you get angry, You don't think as clearly. | ||
| And I know, there have been a few times I've done it where, I mean, I like to think I can count them on one hand, where I've sent an angry tweet. | ||
| I said I wasn't going to tweet on the weekend and I got, something got me really angry. | ||
| You little bastard! | ||
| Those are the only tweets I regret. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those are the only tweets that I've sent that I think, I don't actually... | ||
| Stand by that. | ||
| Just from a long scale of your life, it's not going to be good if you live your life angry all the time. | ||
| But even just from a tactical position in politics, if that's the way you're conducting politics, you're going to make more mistakes. | ||
| So since we've talked a lot about the conservatives and we've talked about just sort of like the general lefty lunacy that's going on, let's just do a little bit on like the political side of what's happening with the Democrats. | ||
| Well, first off, do you think Biden's going to be the nominee? | ||
| Just simple yes or no. | ||
| I watched him yesterday wearing, he was wearing a mask. | ||
| This was a while ago. | ||
| He was wearing a mask dangling from his ear. | ||
| It wasn't on his face. | ||
| It didn't go to the other ear. | ||
| It was just dangling down. | ||
| That's not going to protect him from the virus, just from a practical medical perspective. | ||
| I think he's got to figure out how to do the mask, otherwise he's not going to do it. | ||
| He doesn't seem like he's in it for the long run. | ||
| However, without getting conspiratorial about anything, there's a master plan to kick him out of the convention. | ||
| Who are they going to replace him with? | ||
| I mean, he ran against, what was it, 25 or 27 other people, and he beat them all. | ||
| I get that he's a horrific candidate, but I don't really see anyone replacing him. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, I mean, I've been saying for months now, I think that the plan sort of was we just get through the election to get him there and then he's not in charge. | ||
| I mean, this guy, he obviously, I mean, this other thing where they just simply, the mainstream media simply refuses to talk about his cognitive decline. | ||
| It's like, that is a type of fake news. | ||
| We all see something and you guys won't let us see it. | ||
| So that's one thing. | ||
| So I think, I don't know, you bring in Elizabeth Warren or, well now I know, you know, he'll obviously bring in a black woman. | ||
| So it's like, all right, do you bring in Condi Rice? | ||
| Look, Condi Rice I think is actually way better. | ||
| Not Condi Rice, sorry, not Condi Rice. | ||
| You just did a racism. | ||
| I did. | ||
| You did a racism, here we go. | ||
| No, who the hell am I talking about? | ||
| Not Condi Rice. | ||
| Dave got cancelled on my episode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just my luck. | |
| Who am I talking about? | ||
| Susan Rice. | ||
| Susan Rice. | ||
| You're talking about Susan Rice, not Condi Rice. | ||
| Condi Rice, that'd be pretty good. | ||
| Maybe I could wake up. | ||
| No, I could vote for Condi Rice. | ||
| Susan Rice is making a play for it. | ||
| She's writing New York Times op-eds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a good thing I cleaned that up. | |
| Which, you know, Susan Rice could be a real candidate. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Even Rubin thinks they're all the same. | ||
| That's what they're going to say. | ||
| But this was more of a Rice issue. | ||
| That was a Rice issue. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That wasn't a... Jerry Rice! | ||
| I was going to say Jerry Rice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Phew. | ||
| That was close. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We don't edit for content, right? | ||
| I mean, that could be a more serious choice because the other options for women, they said Amy Klobuchar. | ||
| Amy Klobuchar has some baggage when it comes to criminal justice. | ||
| Kamala Harris has the same thing. | ||
| Stacey Abrams is a punchline. | ||
| She is best known for losing an election. | ||
| Before that, she was a Georgia state rep. | ||
| Come on, give me a break. | ||
| So, you know, Susan Rice would be a real choice. | ||
| The other problem Biden has is Often you want to balance a ticket, so you've got the conservative Reagan and you've got the more establishment, more liberal George Bush. | ||
| Because we see the cognitive decline of Joe Biden, I don't think that's going to work. | ||
| It's not going to make Biden voters feel better if there's some radical leftist on the ticket. | ||
| You've got to have a candidate who's just kind of a younger, perhaps blacker, perhaps more feminine, perhaps whatever version of Joe Biden, a more establishment candidate. | ||
| And someone like Rice would fit that bill. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The only problem with that, though, is that then the base of these radical lunatics will gladly destroy the entire party, which I think is going to happen either way. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like you could pick mini Biden to stave it off, but that only delays it slightly. | ||
| Or you pick one of the crazies and congratulations, now you've burned the whole thing down. | ||
| So either way, it's just a movement of destruction, I think. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Like, it's inevitable. | ||
| Basically, I just think the Democratic Party is over. | ||
| Like, the socialists have taken over, in effect. | ||
| You know, but the thing you've got to remember about the Democratic Party is it's endured for a long time. | ||
| You know, they say they're the longest living extant political party in the world. | ||
| And part of the reason they're good is because they don't have a ton of principles. | ||
| You know, this is why they're able to last. | ||
| Bill Clinton, a man who believes in nothing, right? | ||
| He runs as a left winger. | ||
| I know he likes cigars. | ||
| Come on, you're a cigar guy! | ||
| I am not that kind of cigar guy, okay? | ||
| I'm not that kind. | ||
| So he runs as a liberal, you know, a left winger in the early 90s. | ||
| Then, by the end of the 90s, he says, the era of big government is over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Because he lost the midterm election and Newt Gingrich took over the House. | ||
| He has no principles, he'll go whichever way the wind blows. | ||
| Joe Biden is, in many ways, this kind of a candidate. | ||
| Joe Biden had an actually pretty good crime bill in the 1990s, which would probably be the most popular thing he could run on right now, and yet he's running away from it, and Trump is hammering him for it. | ||
| That shows you how crazy our politics has gotten. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, he's running away from all his old positions. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| He's running away from his old abortion positions that were more moderate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And also, correct me if I'm wrong, but he was vice president. | ||
| Am I right on that? | ||
| No. | ||
| And he was in the Senate for like 50 years? | ||
| No. | ||
| You know what it is? | ||
| This time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now. | |
| It's incredible. | ||
| Now he can affect change. | ||
| Have you seen that meme where it's like, you know, Biden's been in for 40 years. | ||
| Schumer's been in for 40 years. | ||
| Pelosi's been in since the 1600s. | ||
| It's like, oh, you guys are all going to suddenly do all this shit. | ||
| I'm gonna say shit. | ||
| I'm gonna say shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You said it. | |
| I've been trying not to say it because I think that usually gets us demonetized. | ||
| Just a simple, a simple curse word. | ||
| They'll just look for an excuse to demonetize you. | ||
| Yeah, they're always, oh well I'm already, I got you on, I'm done anyway. | ||
| It's not a chance. | ||
| But like the people that like fall for it, like what What is that? | ||
| People that fall for it every single freaking time. | ||
| So this is what shows you what Trump is up against. | ||
| Because Trump is a weird candidate, right? | ||
| Trump is in no way part of a Republican establishment. | ||
| I don't think the guy was a Republican for much of his life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he comes in and he has shaken things up in a way that other Republicans were not able to do. | ||
| In the way he speaks, in the way he looks at immigration, in the way he looks at trade, in the way he looks at other matters of foreign policy, all sorts of things. | ||
| What you get reminded of when you see a Pelosi or a Clinton or a Biden or a Schumer, that is the establishment. | ||
| The liberals, the progressives, they are the establishment, and they're pretending to be the subversive culture, but actually they control everything. | ||
| And the establishment knows how to protect itself. | ||
| And the minute that you have someone like a Trump who comes in and says, I want to change this a little bit, you have the full weight of the bureaucracy of the Democratic establishment, of the Republican establishment, which in many ways just plays the foil to the Democratic establishment. | ||
| They lose with grace, that sort of thing. | ||
| They turn all of their guns on that guy. | ||
| It's the most, ironically, it's the most radical moment of politics that I think any of us have seen in our lifetime. | ||
| So I'm with you on that, even for my differences on Trump. | ||
| Like, I do believe that is the allure of Trump, and that is in it in a nutshell. | ||
| I'm curious, because you've become friendly with Ted Cruz, and you guys do a podcast. | ||
| Trump was pretty relentless on him in the campaign, and yet he's become one of Trump's biggest allies now. | ||
| In many ways, I always, when I see, well, Cruz has also become a great Twitter person. | ||
| He gets it, he gets memes, he's funny, he gets Star Wars references. | ||
| He fully gets it now, and I actually regret being so anti-Cruz, because there was just something about him that I didn't like. | ||
| It was just too stodgy for me or something. | ||
| But since you've listened to the podcast, you know he's a great guy. | ||
| He is a good guy. | ||
| Funny, I think he's the constitutional conservative in the way that I can get on board, all that stuff. | ||
| Have you guys talked about how he's been able to put some of that stuff aside, like the personal attacks that Trump did on him and the rest of it? | ||
| Well, you know, we started the podcast, the Verdict podcast, during impeachment. | ||
| So this is the hottest moment of the Trump presidency. | ||
| I mean, this is where everyone is attacking him. | ||
| You even had a couple of Republicans trying to turn on him and gain support to throw him out of office too. | ||
| And here you have Senator Cruz, a former opponent of President Trump, now, you know, good stalwart conservative in the Senate, defending him. | ||
| And really what Cruz is doing is defending the Constitution. | ||
| I mean, you had some liberals, people like Alan Dershowitz, who came out and said, I am defending the Constitution here. | ||
| It is not constitutional for you to try to throw this guy out of office. | ||
| And I think it's something I really admire about Senator Cruz is, look, political campaigns get hot. | ||
| People say a lot of terrible things. | ||
| And if you want to accomplish something, you can't take that stuff personally. | ||
| You can't hold personal grudges like that. | ||
| And so I've really admired the way that There's a tough campaign. | ||
| You put it behind you and you try to get the work done. | ||
| Because one thing I've noticed, having spent a little bit of time in Washington doing this show and for other projects, is a lot of people who go to Washington don't care about accomplishing. | ||
| Anything. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| They want to be a congressman. | ||
| They want to be a senator. | ||
| They don't want to do anything that that involves. | ||
| And when you do things, and I've heard this, I heard this from the President's Chief of Staff just a week ago on the Verdict Show. | ||
| When you do things, you don't get invited to cocktail parties. | ||
| When you do things, people are very mean to you and they ostracize you and they kick you out. | ||
| But what's the point? | ||
| Why else go? | ||
| It's not that glamorous a life. | ||
| And so, you know, I think Cruz could not have acted better, you know, since 2016. | ||
| And I'm glad at least there's one or two conservatives in the Senate because a lot of people go wishy-washy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| I got one more for you, Knowles, which I think will tie this up in a nice little bow. | ||
| Let's see if we can do it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| As somebody that now is in this world of punditry, like we are so in the center of the center of everything right now. | ||
| The things that we talk about, the things that we've been talking about, | ||
| we've started to build relationships with some of these people, | ||
| like you are now friends with Ted Cruz. | ||
| How much of all of this seems completely surreal to you? | ||
| Because I do wake up sometimes and I'm like, I can't believe from where any of us started, | ||
| from when I started doing a little YouTube thing, or even before that, I had a podcast like 10 years ago | ||
| when I didn't even know how to download podcasts. | ||
| I didn't even know what a podcast was. | ||
| But now we're like right in the center of this very strange thing that everyone is talking about. | ||
| I'm just curious how that fills your life. | ||
| That's personally very exciting, but this has been surreal for me for a few years now. | ||
| It's been surreal for me since I told this joke. | ||
| I did this joke, I guess it was now, it was only about three years ago. | ||
| It was a blank book. | ||
| It is literally, for the people watching, it is a blank book. | ||
| Reasons to vote for Democrats. | ||
| And incredible, by the way, some of the verbs that you got on here. | ||
| Dennis Prager read this twice. | ||
| That's impressive. | ||
| He is seriously busy. | ||
| Insightful, yet remarkably easy reading. | ||
| Guy Benson, just wonderful. | ||
| Well, thank you for that. | ||
| But, you know, I published this blank book. | ||
| I self-published it. | ||
| I did it just as a joke to irritate my Democrat friends. | ||
| And then the thing jumps and becomes the number one bestseller in the world for like a week and a half or something like that. | ||
| And so I think I'm the only guy in the history of politics to get a show for not writing a book, right? | ||
| And I thought that was actually a great way for that to happen because we were talking about religion earlier. | ||
| It's a great example of unearned grace, you know? | ||
| You like literally don't do anything and then you get a lot of great stuff for it. | ||
| So yes, personally it's very exciting. | ||
| But I think politically, publicly, it's very exciting too because The reason the book took off is because of this weird political moment that we're in, right? | ||
| A lot of the reason the book took off is because all the people who bought it left these really long, deep reviews of it, comparing it to Flaubert and all these kind of really funny things, right? | ||
| The humor really came from the audience. | ||
| Same thing with Trump, right? | ||
| I think we just love that we've cracked this stale, dead political establishment consensus. | ||
| There's something new happening, even if we don't always like what it lets, kind of scary, it's a little weird, but we like that it's happening. | ||
| You know, if what we're doing couldn't have happened 20 years ago, it would not be possible. | ||
| We're living in a world now where a corrupt mainstream media that has lied through its teeth, and then it's lied through its teeth about lying through its teeth for decades, is a punchline. | ||
| People don't watch it. | ||
| The only people who watch CNN are walking through airports. | ||
| We're living in a world in which that kind of silly political talk that you saw from candidates this time around, like Pete Buttigieg, or you hear it from some of the older establishment politicians that say, well, you know, I believe in this, not that. | ||
| I believe in this, not that. | ||
| And you read it, and you listen to it, and you say, well, what does that really mean? | ||
| Because I know he can't mean this, I know he has to, right? | ||
| That's gone, and now we're living in the blunt, direct world of the way that Trump talks, or the way that other people talk. | ||
| That, to me, is what's so much more exciting. | ||
| We've got this realignment where now, instead of having to go through the gatekeeper of the anchor on ABC News who's talking to the establishment guy who's got... No! | ||
| Some guy with a podcast can go talk to some of the most powerful people on earth and you can get a message out that is very different from that which has been approved by the liberal establishment. | ||
| To me, as exciting as it is personally, to me politically, that's the much more exciting fact. | ||
| No, that was a nice ending, but there is one other thing I have to do because as you were the last person whose hand I shook that Then, you know, I never got Corona. | ||
| Now we've done this, and either way we could be passing it to one another. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| So, I just want it to be on camera. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| That, and I think that's a felony in California. | ||
| We just did. | ||
| Oh no, Garcetti's outside waiting for us with the cars. | ||
| Don't worry about that. | ||
| It's been a pleasure chatting with you. | ||
| As always. | ||
| It's at Michael J. Knowles on Twitter, am I right? | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| Right out of the brain. | ||
| No notes here, no nothing. | ||
| All right, that's it. | ||
| 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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