Michael Knowles and Dave Rubin dissect how progressive ideology threatens American institutions, arguing that campus radicalism fuels violence while public health officials shift narratives to enforce authoritarian mandates. They critique the Black Lives Matter movement as a Soros-funded attack on the nuclear family and express skepticism regarding Joe Biden's cognitive decline amidst the Democratic nomination chaos. The discussion highlights a cultural realignment where independent podcasters bypass mainstream gatekeepers, noting that blunt communication now supplants establishment vagueness. Ultimately, they suggest conservatives must embrace political risks to regulate big tech, emphasizing that effective leadership requires humility over pride to defend constitutional principles. [Automatically generated summary]
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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."
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.