July 26, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:17:15
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| One of the hearings I chaired, we had testimony from a guy named Dr. Epstein. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I know about it. | ||
| And he's a psychologist, used to be the editor of Psychology Today. | ||
| He's an academic. | ||
| He's, by the way, not a conservative. | ||
| He's a liberal Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and openly supported Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And he did empirical research on Google's manipulative search outcomes. | ||
| So it's interesting psychology. | ||
| When you type in a search, the auto-correct, the auto-fill-in, not the auto-correct, but what automatically populates, makes a huge difference. | ||
| And the first few stories that come up make a huge difference. | ||
| And there was a dramatic differential between when you typed in Hillary Clinton, it would auto-populate good things. | ||
| Yeah, all good things, yeah. | ||
| When you typed in Donald Trump, it would auto-populate bad things. | ||
| And the stories that would come up would be predominantly good stories for Hillary, predominantly bad stories for Trump. | ||
| And what was interesting is Dr. Epstein did the study and he concluded that in 2016, Google's Deceptive search outcomes shifted 2.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And he said this as a Hillary Clinton supporter, but he was horrified. | ||
| But he also projected, he said in 2015, he said big tech is getting worse. | ||
| It's getting more aggressive. | ||
| They could move as many as 15 million votes to the Democrats in 2020. | ||
| And so I think it's a huge threat. | ||
|
unidentified
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(music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| Quick reminder, everybody, to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that notification bell so that you maybe, just maybe, actually see our videos in your feed. | ||
| And joining me today is a Republican senator from Texas, the co-host of the Verdict podcast, and a man who uses almost as many Star Wars references on Twitter as I do, Senator Ted Cruz. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, it's great to be with you and I will say I'm learning already as you start with telling people to subscribe on YouTube. | ||
| So I'm a much newer YouTuber and podcaster and so that is good tutelage. | ||
| Yes, well, I'm going to need you in the Senate to fight the battles that I have been fighting on YouTube for quite some time. | ||
| All right, so we're obviously gonna get into big tech. | ||
| I also should mention we're dressed virtually exactly the same, which is a little weird, but you've rocked the Texas boots. | ||
| Well, and look, I told you, these are Lucchese ostrich, which are tough to beat, and I've had these resold several times. | ||
| But they're good. | ||
| Alright, here's something interesting. | ||
| We were talking a minute ago about how you grew up in New York. | ||
| Do you know where I started wearing cowboy boots? | ||
| Well, I'm going to guess New York for some reason. | ||
| Jersey. | ||
| Why Jersey? | ||
| Jersey, cowboy boots, what? | ||
| It's a weird story. | ||
| So I grew up in Houston. | ||
| And in Houston, but I was, you know, as a sort of junior high and high school kid, was kind of a preppy kid for a while, had long hair, had a spike for a while. | ||
| I mean, went through these different phases. | ||
| But, you know, I was a city boy, and so I didn't wear boots in school growing up. | ||
| And then I went to college at Princeton in New Jersey, and I was 17, and I was away from home, and I just got homesick. | ||
| And so I said, all right, I'm gonna go buy a pair of boots, and it was sort of a way for a 17-year-old to kind of hold on to your home, and so I started wearing boots as a freshman in college, and I've worn them ever since, but it took going to New Jersey, which is a little ridiculous, to start wearing boots. | ||
| So you were basically the Texas boots guy at Princeton University. | ||
| So I remember I had a car that my grandfather had given me. | ||
| It was a 78 Ford Fairmont. | ||
| We called it the Green Bomb. | ||
| And I remember digging that car out of the snow using the heel of my boots. | ||
| Which, by the way, doesn't work very well. | ||
| It's a really bad idea, but as a Texas teenager I didn't know any better. | ||
| We got it out, but it was... | ||
| But here we are. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Moving on from boots for a moment. | ||
| The one other important thing that we have to get to before all the issues. | ||
| The beard situation. | ||
| Because I think, like me, you've now become more beard than man at this point. | ||
| Something happened. | ||
| How long have you had the beard? | ||
| About a year and a half maybe? | ||
| Yeah, a year and a half. | ||
| So it was Thanksgiving two years ago. | ||
| Okay, so about two years. | ||
| Something happened to me when I got the beard, which is about three years ago or so. | ||
| I sensed a change in me. | ||
| Do you sense that change? | ||
| You seem to have gotten a little more feisty on Twitter since the beard. | ||
| Is there a connection? | ||
| There's a little bit of just kind of screw it. | ||
| Alright, so what prompted? | ||
| Why'd you grow the beard? | ||
| I go off the grid every August. | ||
| I shut down. | ||
| No phone. | ||
| No TV. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| No news. | ||
| And I've done it for three years. | ||
| I'm about to do it in a couple weeks. | ||
| And the first time I did it, I just decided not to shave. | ||
| I came back. | ||
| Everybody said they loved the beard. | ||
| And then, you know, it took over. | ||
| Like Black Spider-Man. | ||
| I know you're also a comic book guy. | ||
| So actually, my beard story is very much the same. | ||
| It was Thanksgiving. | ||
| I mean, holidays, I never shave. | ||
| And so I would always sort of grow a little bit of stubble during holidays. | ||
| And it just kind of over Thanksgiving, I said, all right, pack with it. | ||
| I'm not going to shave. | ||
| And it was not, you know, there was no profound statement. | ||
| It was just kind of like, eh, this will be interesting. | ||
| And then Twitter likes it, and you pretty much have to, you know, bow to the mob. | ||
| The guy who runs my political operation, he emailed me when I came back and his email was like, worst idea ever. | ||
|
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So I had to be like, all right, to heck with you. | |
| Then I'm definitely keeping it. | ||
| Yeah, you're also a Simpsons guy. | ||
| I mean, we could do every reference, basically every 80s and 90s reference. | ||
| We could just set aside politics and do that the whole time. | ||
| I don't think I've seen Twitter get more angry than when I said a couple of years ago that I thought every character but Lisa Simpson was right of center, that Homer, Marge, Barton, Maggie | ||
| are all conservatives and libertarians and Lisa is the self-righteous leftist. | ||
| And what was interesting, I look, I was mostly just kind of riffing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But the Twitter world went nuts. | ||
| Like they could not handle and they're like, "Don't you understand Lisa's the hero?" | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm like, "Yeah, except she's self-righteous and criticizing everyone in a pain in the ass." | ||
| Look, Homer is every man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he's- - He's basically a libertarian, right? | ||
| Bart clearly is a libertarian rebel. | ||
| I mean, that, Maggie, do you remember the episode? | ||
| Maggie is in the Ayn Rand School for Thomas? | ||
| Oh yeah! | ||
| And then they do the Great Escape music and she escapes from it, so I'm calling Maggie. | ||
| And by the way, Maggie's also a gun owner because she shot Mr. Burns, so you know. | ||
| And then, alright, Marge is... Yeah, so Marge, that's the tough one here. | ||
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But look, Marge is... Oh, she's traditional. | |
| She's traditional, she's the anchor of the family, she keeps... | ||
| She keeps everyone together. | ||
| She gets Homer to be a good dad. | ||
| Marge is the one that there's the fewest indicia, but it... The left hates when anything in pop culture, they want to own it all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, you know, it's good to have fun. | ||
| Now that we've gotten the important stuff out of the way, let's talk about big tech, because you've been right in the center of this thing. | ||
| As you know, I've been fighting it from my garage for the last five years. | ||
| Trump did this executive action, 230 is the, what do you call it? | ||
| It's not a bill, it's a... So it's section 230 of a bill called Communications Decency Act. | ||
| Right, so basically what he did was strip some protections from the big boys, from Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. | ||
| Now, my personal preference, and I think we're pretty close on this, the libertarian side is you don't want the government running around sending regulators to these companies, because that's not going to do good. | ||
| But stripping protections, to me, seemed like the right idea. | ||
| Do you agree it was the right idea? | ||
| Is it enough? | ||
| Is it not enough? | ||
| Et cetera. | ||
| So I think it is the right idea. | ||
| It's something I'd been urging Trump to do for three years, so I'm glad that the administration did it. | ||
| Listen, I agree with your sensibility. | ||
| Nobody wants government free speech police. | ||
| I mean, that would be a terrible outcome. | ||
| Well, some people do, but... | ||
| Nobody who's not insane, and that's a qualifier. | ||
| We can talk about some more because there are a lot of people that fall into that category. | ||
| But government free speech police would be a terrible outcome. | ||
| But what big tech is doing, it's deliberate, it's conscious, it's naked, it's abusive, and it's dangerous. | ||
| I think it's the single biggest threat to free speech and democracy we have in this country. | ||
| Because big tech has become a monopoly, controlling the instruments of communication. | ||
| And, you know, I've chaired multiple hearings in the Senate on big tech censorship. | ||
| And one of the hearings we talked about a document that Google had prepared. | ||
| It's called The Good Censor. | ||
| So they prepared its PowerPoint, about 50 page long. | ||
| And it talks about how the old vision of the Internet, Was the free speech laissez-faire internet, where people could speak and say what they wanted. | ||
| And then it talked about the new vision of the internet, and this is Google's own words, is the European-style censorship model. | ||
| And by the way, the four companies that Google identified as implementing it were Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. | ||
| This is a conscious decision and the dangers are enormous. | ||
| So the question is, how do you fix it? | ||
| If it is a problem, we have a long discussion about whether it's a problem, although they're not hiding it anymore. | ||
| Yeah, I think most sane people at this point would agree that they're, even people that disagree with us politically on this, I think most people realize that the extraordinary amount of power is a problem one way or another. | ||
| So I will, it's interesting the political debate though, one of the talking points of big tech and the left is they don't engage in censorship. | ||
| And the reason they say that is they say well there are no objective data that prove we do. | ||
| And it's, you know, there's the old aphorism of the guy who kills his parents and then pleads mercy on the court because he's an orphan. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| There are no objective data because Big Tech controls all the data. | ||
| And there's zero transparency, zero accountability, so you can use anecdotes. | ||
| And I've gone through lots and lots of specific anecdotes. | ||
| But every time you ask Big Tech, and I've done it in writing, I've done it in hearings, Simple questions. | ||
| All right. | ||
| In the 2018 election cycle, how many posts from Republican candidates for office did you block or shadow ban? | ||
| How many posts from Democratic candidates for office did you block or shadow ban? | ||
| There are objective answers to that. | ||
| I mean, there is a number. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they know the number and they refuse to answer it and then say there are no data. | ||
| And so how do you fix it? | ||
| I think one way to fix it is getting rid of the special immunity from liability that Big Tech has that Congress gave them. | ||
| So that's 230, right? | ||
| That's 230. | ||
| And the reason 230 was passed, Congress believed Big Tech would be a neutral public forum. | ||
| In other words, it wasn't fair to sue Facebook For a comment made by an individual commenter because it wasn't they weren't the speaker it was someone else and so that was that was Congress's reasoning so we're gonna give Big Tech this immunity from liability because it's third-party speakers and we want to see the internet grow. | ||
| Well, what's happened is Big Tech changed their mind. | ||
| They said, we're not going to be, to use the language of the Google document, the laissez-faire free speech place anymore. | ||
| We're going to censor. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| If they're going to silence views they disagree and promote views they agree with, they don't deserve, I don't believe, as a public policy matter, a special protection vote for liability. | ||
| There's also the antitrust laws. | ||
| Google is a monopoly. | ||
| By any measure, Big Tech Is richer, stronger, more powerful than AT&T was when it was broken up under the antitrust laws? | ||
| They're bigger than U.S. | ||
| Steel was. | ||
| A line from the Godfather, we're bigger than U.S. | ||
|
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Steel. | |
| Well, they're bigger than U.S. | ||
|
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Steel. | |
| And that abuse of power. | ||
| So I've also, you want to talk about the real, What the Trump administration did on Section 230 will be challenged. | ||
| It's at the FCC. | ||
| There'll be litigation. | ||
| The real bite here is federal antitrust litigation, which I have I've urged the President to pursue. | ||
| I've urged the Vice President to pursue. | ||
| I've urged the Attorney General to pursue. | ||
| I've urged the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission to pursue. | ||
| I've urged the White House Chief of Staff to pursue. | ||
| I've urged the White House Counsel to pursue. | ||
| To force the transparency, to get the answers, and to stop their naked bias. | ||
| Are you worried, though, that as we sit here right now in the middle of July, only three, four months before an election, that in a certain way that the ship has already sailed, the damage that they've done, and even if you could get everything you wanted tomorrow, past tomorrow, by the time the processes and the systems are implemented, congratulations, the election's passed. | ||
| I am deeply worried about it. | ||
| One of the hearings I chaired, we had testimony from a guy Uh, named Dr. Epstein. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I know about it. | ||
| And he's a psychologist. | ||
| Used to be the editor of Psychology Today. | ||
| He's an academic. | ||
| He's, by the way, not a conservative. | ||
| He's a liberal Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and openly supported Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And he did empirical research on Google's manipulative search outcomes. | ||
| So it's interesting psychology. | ||
| When you type in a search, the auto-correct, the auto-fill-in, not the auto-correct, but what automatically populates, makes a huge difference. | ||
| And the first few stories that come up make a huge difference. | ||
| And there was a dramatic differential Between when you typed in Hillary Clinton, it would auto-populate good things. | ||
| Yeah, all good things, yeah. | ||
| When you typed in Donald Trump, it would auto-populate bad things. | ||
| And the stories that would come up would be predominantly good stories for Hillary, predominantly bad stories for Trump. | ||
| And what was interesting is Dr. Epstein did the study and he concluded that in 2016, Google's deceptive search outcomes shifted 2.4 million votes. | ||
| To Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And he said this as a Hillary Clinton supporter, but he was horrified, but he also projected, he said in 2015, he said big tech is getting worse, it's getting more aggressive, they could move as many as 15 million votes to the Democrats in 2020. | ||
| And so I think it's a huge threat. | ||
| So as a sci-fi guy, because I know you're a sci-fi guy, in a certain way doesn't it feel like we're already in the dystopian future that we're always worried about, that so many great movies are about, that in a way we're kind of there already? | ||
| We are, because the power And ubiquity. | ||
| I mean, what makes social media different, look, there's all sorts of biased media outlets. | ||
| The New York Times is ridiculously biased, but you can pick it up and you can say, okay, this is a partisan rag and you can know it. | ||
| What is so, such a game changer with social media is that it's invisible. | ||
| So if they don't like what you say, you can post and it just fades into ether and you don't know. | ||
| You have no idea. | ||
| So I've got, you know, on Twitter, I think my personal Twitter, I think we've got 3.7 million followers. | ||
| I have no idea to this day. | ||
| And I've asked, by the way, the CEOs, when I post something, what percentage of the people who have chosen to follow me see it? | ||
| They won't answer that. | ||
| Did you know that that shadow banning is actually in the Twitter terms of service? | ||
| I have not seen that. | ||
| I'll show it to you after this or my guys can maybe pull it up and we'll show it right now. | ||
| In their terms of service when they renewed it on January 1st because they know nobody's paying attention, it actually says that they can throttle accounts and not throttle accounts. | ||
| So they're telling us in their own terms of service that it's in there. | ||
| And then the guys get up on Capitol Hill and they tell you we don't do anything. | ||
| It is the magnitude of the power. | ||
| And you know, you talk about dystopian worlds. | ||
| The hard left. | ||
| And I'm interested, Dave, so you used to be a man of the left. | ||
| Nobody's perfect. | ||
| You're not now. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I'd be interested in... | ||
| My audience has heard it many times, but I'll give you the bumper sticker version was one day it just hit me that it could not possibly be true that everyone I disagree with is a bigot and a racist and a homophobe. | ||
| And I know that sounds almost cliche to say, but every argument of the left came down to that. | ||
| And I could not believe somehow that I was so morally right about every position that I had come to. | ||
| And that everyone else was so ridiculously evil. | ||
| Like, it was basically a math equation, and I was like, the math doesn't work here anymore. | ||
| It can't be right. | ||
| And then the bizarre thing that happened, and I'm sure four years ago, I was saying all sorts of crazy things about you, and I was saying all sorts of crazy things about Rand Paul, and a bunch of people... And only half of them were true. | ||
|
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Exactly! | |
| But a bunch of... But once you... | ||
| Suddenly look at the other side and you go, holy cow, you know, these conservatives, these libertarians, they really just want to get out of your way in most respects. | ||
| Once you see that, it's very welcoming. | ||
| So it's like, I know we have political disagreements. | ||
| We disagree on abortion, for example, and I'm more than happy to talk about it if you want to, but I know that you want to live in the same country as me. | ||
| And the left has created this odd thing where if you don't agree with them on everything, you're out, man. | ||
| And I just don't want to have anything to do with that. | ||
| Look, I get that, and particularly in this time, and listen, the age of Trump, everything has gotten personal and angry and it's a morality play. | ||
| You know, you have, we're so pulled apart. | ||
| But, look, one of the differences that I get really frustrated with the left, they are willing to use government power to impose their worldview on everybody, and to punish anyone who dares dissent. | ||
| This is true in the censorship world. | ||
| This is true... It is... At the end of the day, the left are statists. | ||
| They believe in government power. | ||
| You know, I'm someone who cares deeply about the Constitution and Bill of Rights and free speech, and that means the right of people who disagree profoundly with me To speak and engage, and I agree with John Stuart Mill, the cure for bad speech is more speech. | ||
| So don't silence views you disagree with. | ||
| Engage with them on the merits and actually have, ideally, a civil, decent, respectful conversation. | ||
| And you're right, you know, immediately starting with, you know, if every conversation begins with, you're a Klansman, that sort of dampens the next step of the conversation. | ||
| Yeah, you don't get much further than that. | ||
| I gotta show you, I have a copy of On Liberty in my nightstand, so I'm with you on that. | ||
| All right, I'm gonna tell you something very funny. | ||
| So you and I, before the show, we're talking about the Houston Rockets, and I'm a diehard Houston Rockets fan. | ||
| One of the stranger things I own, when I was, I think I was in college, and I was on an airplane, and Hakeem Olajuwon, I already love this story, wherever you're going. | ||
| He was sitting up in first class. | ||
| I was back in the cattle car. | ||
| He was up at a time when I guess NBA players didn't fly private everywhere, but he was sitting there. | ||
| And I was sort of starstruck. | ||
| And so I went up and asked for his autograph, but the only thing I had is I was reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| And I had a red pen that I was underlining it with, so I got it home. | ||
| I'm not sure where it is, but I have a Hakeem Olajuwon, number 34, signed on the title page of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. | ||
| You literally have my whole life in a book. | ||
| Basically, that's absolutely incredible. | ||
| I told you that 95 Rockets team is my favorite team of all time. | ||
| All right, so wait a second. | ||
| So let's push a little further on this. | ||
| So because the left wants to use state power in a way that, generally speaking, the right doesn't want to, or at least that you don't want to, if we're to go on this dystopian future idea, are you worried that If these guys really take power, I mean, they're going to start jailing political opponents. | ||
| They are going to use, we know they've already used the IRS to do all sorts of crazy things. | ||
| I mean, these are things that are sort of conspiracy theories, and then suddenly, at this point, nothing feels like a conspiracy theory. | ||
| But it's all justified in the, there's a self-righteousness to it. | ||
| We're right. | ||
| Anyone who disagrees is evil. | ||
| Therefore, anything is justified to suppress the evil. | ||
| You see that with cancel culture, where people get driven out of the public discourse. | ||
| In college, I was a college debater. | ||
| Yes, I was one of the cool kids. | ||
| But, so I was in college, I was the chairman of the conservative group in the debate society, and one of my closest friends was the head of the liberal group. | ||
| And we would have arguments about free enterprise and socialism. | ||
| Like, what works? | ||
| What actually benefits humanity? | ||
| And actually, that question's an important question. | ||
| Too often people start with the assumption the other side wants humanity to suffer. | ||
| If we start with the premise, okay, most people of goodwill would like people to be happier and more well-off and more prosperous. | ||
| We start with that premise. | ||
| Then we can have a conversation about, okay, what systems produce More prosperity, more opportunity. | ||
| A couple years ago, I did three CNN town hall debates with Bernie Sanders. | ||
| And they were 90 minutes long. | ||
| And Bernie, look, to Bernie's credit, he's an unabashed socialist. | ||
| I disagree with him, but he's honest. | ||
| And we can have a conversation about socialism. | ||
| I think if you look across the world, it doesn't work. | ||
| It's produced misery, poverty, suffering, death. | ||
| You know, my family fled Cuba, and so I'm more than happy to take the American free enterprise system, or as the left derisively calls it, capitalism, and put it up next to communism or socialism or any dictatorship they've implemented in any country on earth. | ||
| And people are better off, they have more opportunity, and in particular there's the mobility. | ||
| You know, you look at the dystopian Dystopian worlds. | ||
| One of the elements of it is everyone is frozen in their place. | ||
| Socialist countries, communist countries, they're rich people. | ||
| They're powerful people. | ||
| What you don't see is new rich people. | ||
| What you don't see, you know, when my dad in 1957 was a teenage kid from Cuba, couldn't speak English, washing dishes, making 50 cents an hour. | ||
| Why did he come to America? | ||
| Because this is a country where you could be a teenage kid washing dishes and climb that socioeconomic ladder. | ||
|
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Kind of worked out for his kid. | |
| If someone had told my father in 1957 that 50 years in the future, his son would be in the Senate, that teenage immigrant could never have believed it. | ||
| But if we can have conversations, then we can say, all right, what works? | ||
| What doesn't work? | ||
| The left is afraid to have those conversations. | ||
| Their ideas don't work. | ||
| All right, there's a joke I tell sometimes, which is, how many radical leftists does it take to screw in a light bulb? | ||
| How many? | ||
|
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That's not funny! | |
| Guys, just relax. | ||
| Lighten up. | ||
| I was talking about in college, when we were debating, we'd go, He'd call me a fascist, I'd call him a communist, then we'd go get a beer. | ||
| Not all of life has to be, I must destroy my enemy, and there's a lot of that right now. | ||
| But do you think there's a fundamental reason for that? | ||
| I think there actually is. | ||
| That lefties now, And not always. | ||
| And I actually want to ask you about what it used to be like when there was a sort of sane Democratic Party. | ||
| But there's a fundamental reason for the anger and the outrage and the perpetual craziness, which is they believe government is everything. | ||
| And that, you know this as a senator, it's a pretty freaking messy, probably often miserable game that you have to play. | ||
| To be a politician in America, or probably anywhere, and that because their whole worldview is through politics, as opposed to a religious or some other spiritual worldview, well, of course you're gonna be endlessly miserable. | ||
| Do you think I'm ballparking something there? | ||
| So I do, and it's, you know, it's interesting, I was talking the other night to a gentleman, he and his wife came from Cuba, and came from Cuba, fled under Caster and he was talking about it. He said, "You | ||
| know, Ted, you talk about the Constitution quite a bit." And he said, "I think there | ||
| are a lot of people like me who came from countries where the Constitution was | ||
| meaningless and they don't necessarily understand why that matters. And they're a little bit | ||
| skeptical of why should the Constitution make a difference." And I was agreeing with him in that we | ||
| need to explain that more. | ||
| power. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| The history of humanity is largely a history of government oppressing the people. | ||
| Now you need some government. | ||
| I'm not an anarchist. | ||
| You need government to protect your fundamental rights to life, to liberty, to property. | ||
| John Locke wrote about the fundamental natural rights. | ||
| You need government to impose rule of law. | ||
| And we see countries that don't have that are disasters. | ||
| But the more power government has, the less liberty you have. | ||
| And Jefferson had a great way of putting it. | ||
| He described the Constitution as chains to bind the mischief of government. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty profound. | ||
| You know, free speech is not about silencing those who disagree with you. | ||
| Religious liberty. | ||
| It's not about forcing everyone to practice your faith. | ||
| It's about saying, look, it's up to you what faith you practice or none at all. | ||
| That's that's that right of conscience that you get to decide that it's not government that comes in. | ||
| You know, you just had. | ||
| All right, you know, you talked about abortion, you know, I may disagree on abortion, but you just had Joe Biden a week ago. | ||
| Say if he's elected, he's coming after the little sisters of the poor. | ||
| No, I'm completely against that, by the way. | ||
| I mean, I've done videos on it, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that is an extreme view. | ||
| You literally have politicians saying those damn Catholic nuns. | ||
| I'm gonna go after them and force them to pay for abortion-inducing drugs. | ||
| And these are nuns who've taken vows of poverty or helping the poor and the sick and the needy. | ||
| And government now for years has been persecuting them Because they must conform. | ||
| And it's just, look, I think being libertarian and live and let live, giving people, like, respecting diversity, solves a lot of the problems we have in the country. | ||
| So speaking of diversity then, do you ever feel, because you mentioned your father and your family's story, because you're a Republican, because you're on the right, that in many ways the people who love to scream about diversity all day long, they've sort of stolen that from you. | ||
| I know you don't wave it as a victim card, but your own personal family story, and because you look white, so to speak, and because you're on the right, you're just a white guy. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Look, on social media, it is amazing you look at some of the angry protesters, who sometimes are angry rich white guys, who are telling everyone, look, the riots that occurred following the horrific killing of George Floyd, Many of the neighborhoods that were burned down were African-American neighborhoods. | ||
| Some of the most poignant and powerful videos were of residents there crying, going, OK, you just burned my only grocery store. | ||
| You know, African-American small business owners whose stores were destroyed, and destroyed by self-entitled, often middle or upper class kids, Look, I grew up... My mom is Irish and Italian, from a working-class family. | ||
| She was the first person to ever go to college. | ||
| My dad, as I said, was an immigrant with nothing. | ||
| When I was in high school, my parents went bankrupt. | ||
| We had a small business. | ||
| It was the mid-80s. | ||
| Oil crashed. | ||
| We lost everything. | ||
| We lost our home. | ||
| We lost everything. | ||
| So I went to college at age 17. | ||
| My parents couldn't pay any tuition. | ||
| I was on my own at 17. | ||
| And I'm grateful for a country that let a kid... Now, my parents gave me a home with love and nurturing, and so in that respect, I was rich. | ||
| I was rich in terms of having a mom and dad who loved me and encouraged me. | ||
| But, you know, I was on my own That's the beauty of this country. | ||
| I think the single biggest lie in all of politics Is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor. | ||
| I think it's absolutely false. | ||
| If you look at Democrats today, they are the party of Silicon Valley billionaires. | ||
| They are the party of Wall Street tycoons. | ||
| They are the party of power and resources. | ||
| And Republicans, the party that I want to be a part of, is a blue-collar party. | ||
| We're the party of Ohio steelworkers. | ||
| We're the party of single moms waiting tables. | ||
| We're the party of Teenage kids like my dad washing dishes. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because opportunity is why. | ||
| The ability of people to have a job and to work is powerful. | ||
| Do you see that as the ultimate irony of what's happened with Silicon Valley? | ||
| Is that, I think, privately, I mean, I know a lot of these guys, privately, they're libertarians. | ||
| Of course they are, because they want to create, they love competition, and they want to be taxed low so that their businesses can thrive. | ||
| And then publicly, what you see them say is completely the reverse. | ||
| Well, look, I mean, Silicon Valley is so bad that, you know, Peter has been a buddy of mine for 25 years. | ||
| Peter and I were friends before he had made his money. | ||
| When Peter and I became friends, it was the mid-90s, and he was a corporate lawyer practicing law. | ||
| Silicon Valley is so bad that Peter was driven out of it. | ||
| I mean, he's moved to LA. | ||
| To Los Angeles! | ||
| You know something's wrong when you're coming to LA for a safe haven from the left. | ||
| Big tech is about power. | ||
| And it's also about virtue signaling. | ||
| It's about showing that you're morally self-righteous. | ||
| And when they're driving someone like Peter Thiel out saying, you are a heretic. | ||
| And it's on view after view after view. | ||
| There is, you know, it's interesting. | ||
| It's a religious fervor. | ||
| It's become the new religion. | ||
| Wokeness is... And by the way, no one can be too pure. | ||
| There's an element of Robespierre setting up the guillotine, where they will come after someone who is only 99% woke, Well, the 1% is coming after them. | ||
| And that... Well, we see that with all these Hollywood people, right? | ||
| Because no matter how much they beg, they think it's going to spare them. | ||
| But it's not going to be the angry Trump supporters who come to burn down their mansions. | ||
| It's going to be these other guys, no matter what penance you offer them. | ||
| But that sort of gets back to what I was asking you before about, do you think that because the worldview Yeah, I'm not sure big tech hates it all that much. | ||
| than politics, that the hole it leaves actually, it leaves you with, you know, | ||
| what people would say is a God-shaped hole, that there is no sort of spiritual anything there. | ||
| So you become the very thing that you hate in essence. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure big tech hates it all that much. | ||
| So I actually think, you know, tech started out as, you know, and by the way, | ||
| my parents are both mathematicians and computer programmers. | ||
| I was raised in a techie world. | ||
| Their small business was a seismic data processing company. | ||
| My mom started as a programmer in 1956, really the dawn of computers. | ||
| I think tech started out, you had people, let's say Mark Zuckerberg, you know, drops out of college, goes and starts Facebook, you know, who they're just trying to build a business and they're doing their own thing and big tech didn't start out all that political. | ||
| It was go, you know, hey, you know, play foosball in the office and, you know, wear shorts and flip-flops and go innovate and be disruptive. | ||
| You know, the whole disruptor thing is a big part of the ethos. | ||
| And early on, I don't see Silicon Valley as deeply political. | ||
| It's more recently, and it's a clothing of protection. | ||
| For one thing, these guys are the modern day robin barons. | ||
| I mean, the vast amount of wealth as these plutocrats live in, | ||
| you know, they're owning islands and flying massive jets and just... | ||
| They've got walls around those houses, don't they? | ||
| And security with guns? | ||
| It's all very confusing. | ||
| I actually don't think they care that much about this, but they don't want to be rejected by the mob. | ||
| I think it's much more a protective shield. | ||
| And the world of social media becomes self-reinforcing where we used to have homogenizing institutions | ||
| of whether it was church or school or the Rotary Club where you might be a Democrat, | ||
| but you knew some Republicans, you might be a Republican, you knew some Democrats, | ||
| you might be Christian or Jewish or Muslim, but you knew people of different faiths | ||
| and it was not... | ||
| All right. | ||
| On social media now, anyone who disagrees gets unfriended. | ||
| And it becomes this echo chamber where everyone has the same view. | ||
| And when I look at our democracy, what I worry about is there aren't shared facts anymore. | ||
| The left is listening to left-wing websites, they're listening to their own facts. | ||
| The right is listening to right-wing websites. | ||
| By the way, Fox is every bit as one-sided, as biased as MSNBC is. | ||
| And neither one of them are actually, like, Having an objective conversation. | ||
| That, I worry about what that's doing to our country. | ||
| Do you ever get invited on MSNBC anymore? | ||
| I haven't been in a while. | ||
| I mean, I've done Chris Matthews. | ||
| He's gone. | ||
| He's gone. | ||
| Yeah, they drove him out. | ||
| You're right. | ||
|
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So the last time you were invited by the guy who they took out. | |
| The last time I did it, Chris Hayes interviewed me. | ||
| We did a thing called Trip Fest. | ||
| The Texas Tribune does this big. | ||
| So I did an hour interview and I agreed to that. | ||
| We actually had a good, actually that was a good substantive conversation. | ||
| It was about an hour long and it, you know, he came at me pretty hard, which is fine. | ||
| I mean that, if we're having a conversation, that's a step in the right direction. | ||
| So do you miss I mean, I think I know the answer is, but do you miss sort of the same blue dog, more centrist Democrat? | ||
| Because I think Biden was the last hope of that thing. | ||
| That's what it strikes me as. | ||
| And clearly he's not going to be the savior, obviously for many reasons. | ||
| But, you know, Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot, that you want this healthy tension between the left and the right. | ||
| And it's like, look, I know I'm new to the right. | ||
| So maybe I don't see some of the problems that you guys had been around. | ||
| So you see, But what I see is this pretty diverse group of the real Trump people, the more libertarian people, that are all sort of trying to fight for what the future is. | ||
| On the left, I just see purging. | ||
| Do you miss the old school, you know, I know JFK is before your time, but do you miss an old school Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan? | ||
| JFK is a great example. | ||
| Scoop Jackson on foreign policy, who believed in standing up to communists. | ||
| You look at JFK. | ||
| I often quote JFK. | ||
| You read his speeches, for example, what he says on religious liberty. | ||
| You read his speeches on cutting taxes, where he campaigned in 1960 on, we're going to cut your taxes, and we're going to cut your taxes, that's going to produce more jobs, more prosperity, that's going to benefit everyone. | ||
| Those speeches, he would be driven out of the Democratic Party like some crazy heretic today. | ||
| You look at the tax cut we passed in 2017. | ||
| You know how many Democrats voted for it in the House? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| In the Senate? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| There was nobody. | ||
| I'll give you another example. | ||
| One that the media refused to cover, but it's one that I got very passionate about. | ||
| The Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment in the Senate to repeal the free speech protections of the First Amendment. | ||
| Now, this was following the Citizens United case, which Citizens United has become this totem. | ||
| So Hillary Clinton pledged, every justice I appoint is going to repeal Citizens United. | ||
| Joe Biden said the same thing. | ||
| Do they know when they say that about what the Supreme Court nominees are gonna do in the future, that that's not really how government works? | ||
| I mean, everyone does this across the board, right? | ||
| For Democratic nominees, it largely does. | ||
| So I've got a book that's coming out in October called, One Vote Away. | ||
| And it talks about how one vote on the Supreme Court can change history. | ||
| And it goes through the history on the left. | ||
| So on Citizens United, Citizens United, by the way, like a lot of people don't know what the case was about. | ||
| It was about a movie maker, Who made a movie critical of Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And the Obama administration wanted to punish the movie maker for daring to criticize Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And the Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment. | ||
| The first version of the constitutional amendment would have given the federal government what's called plenary power. | ||
| Plenary is a legal term that just means blanket, raw, total. | ||
| Plenary power to regulate any expenditure of money for political speech. | ||
| That would mean if a little old lady spent $5 on a poster board and a stick and put it in her front yard saying, vote for Joe Biden or vote for Donald Trump, Congress could make that a crime. | ||
| That would mean, by the way, look, we're sitting here in a room where you've bought this furniture, you've got TV cameras there. | ||
| This is expending money. | ||
| That would mean Congress could regulate With total impunity. | ||
| So we debated it extensively in the Senate. | ||
| I asked Democrats and Judiciary Committee three questions. | ||
| Should Congress be able to ban movies? | ||
| Should Congress be able to ban books? | ||
| And should Congress be able to ban the NAACP? | ||
| NAACP is a corporation. | ||
| So their second version said we'll just give them total power over corporations. | ||
| Corporations Aren't people? | ||
| They're collections of people. | ||
| My answer to those three questions are no, no, and hell no. | ||
| When we voted on it, do you know that every single Democrat in the Senate voted to repeal the free speech protections of the First Amendment? | ||
| I mean, there used to be, liberals used to defend, there's a famous case that went to the Supreme Court, where a guy wore into a courthouse a jacket that said, F the draft, although he didn't abbreviate it. | ||
| It went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court rightly upheld his right to wear that. | ||
| And one of the justices said, one man's obscenity is another man's lyric. | ||
| There are none of those liberals left in politics. | ||
| There are a handful in the world, but in politics... | ||
| They don't believe in free speech anymore, and that's scary. | ||
| Can I give you the Star Wars reference that you can use for this going forward? | ||
| It's Order 66. | ||
| That's what the progressives did. | ||
| They executed Order 66 on the liberals, and they hunted them down, and there's a couple in hiding. | ||
| Bill Maher, maybe three or four other guys, what would have been formerly me, I would say, and that's kind of where we're at now. | ||
| You are right. | ||
| And look, Yoda escaped. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| That has you hiding out. | ||
| But there is a rapid intolerance. | ||
| So the left demands conformity. | ||
| And you think about it. | ||
| Socialism. | ||
| Socialism is about the government being in charge of everything. | ||
| That demands total conformity. | ||
| You take something like federalism. | ||
| I'm a massive believer in federalism. | ||
| We have 50 states. | ||
| Who would expect California to adopt the same laws as Texas? | ||
| And that's okay. | ||
| That's why we have 50 states. | ||
| You can choose. | ||
| I think the laws of each state should reflect the values. | ||
| So let's take something like drug legalization. | ||
| So, personally speaking, I'm not in favor of drug legalization. | ||
| But I think it's a state question. | ||
| I think it's perfectly fine for different states to come to different answers on it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Totally agree. | |
| And for there to be a diversity and to see what works. | ||
| The left doesn't like that diversity. | ||
| And I'll give you an example. | ||
| Here's a question very few people ask. | ||
| Socialized medicine. | ||
| So it's become the new mantra that everyone has to support socialized medicine, Medicare, care for all. | ||
| There are 50 states in the Union. | ||
| How many have adopted socialized medicine? | ||
| Is it maybe three? | ||
| Is it zero? | ||
| What about Massachusetts? | ||
| Didn't they do something? | ||
| No, they did Romneycare, which was the predecessor to Obamacare. | ||
| But let's take California. | ||
| California, there's a Democratic governor, a Democratic supermajority in the legislature. | ||
| They could adopt socialized medicine tomorrow. | ||
| You know why they didn't? | ||
| Because they ran the numbers and it bankrupt the state. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, when Obama had a supermajority himself as president, he didn't do it. | ||
| Vermont, Bernie Sanders' home state, they don't have socialized medicine. | ||
| Here's part of the reason why. | ||
| If California adopted it, and there's nothing, Republicans can't stop them. | ||
| It is the Democrats who have decided that we should not have socialized medicine in California. | ||
| And the reason is, the taxes they would have to impose would crush small businesses even more. | ||
| It would cause them to flee the state and move to Texas. | ||
| So what does the left want to do? | ||
| Here's our solution. | ||
| Let's impose it on the whole damn country. | ||
| So you can't flee unless you're willing to go to New Zealand. | ||
| If you're going to stay in the United States, there's no place to go. | ||
| My view, look, under the Constitution, if California wants socialized medicine, knock yourself out. | ||
| I think it's a bad policy, but prove me wrong. | ||
| Go show me that it works. | ||
| But it is the view everyone must conform. | ||
| That I think's really dangerous. | ||
| So you mentioned the debates that you had with Bernie Sanders, the couple on CNN. | ||
| I saw them. | ||
| And when people say to me, well, Dave, you seem so different politically than you did five years ago, I always say the one thing that I really did shift on was economics. | ||
| So I'm way more right libertarian on economics. | ||
| Most of the other things, actually, I still believe I'm standing up for my true liberal beliefs, not the way liberalism has been butchered now. | ||
| When you had those debates with him, do you think Bernie now slightly regrets what he has unleashed here? | ||
| Because I think you could look at the crazed Marxist lunacy and the squad and identity politics and the hatred of America. | ||
| I mean, every Bernie debate, what was it? | ||
| He kept saying political revolution because he knew if he just said revolution, that means heads on spikes, which that's coming, but give it a little while. | ||
| But do you think he maybe regrets some of what he has led to here? | ||
| Or do you think he's just riding it out? | ||
| Now I'm also, I will say one other thing, which is I'm a firm believer they will take him out too. | ||
| Because eventually he will just be an old failed white guy who played by the system. | ||
| Played by the rules. | ||
| I don't think he regrets it. | ||
| So Bernie is a true believer. | ||
| And I prefer honesty. | ||
| Um, a lot of Democrats for a long time pretended they weren't socialists, even though they voted like it. | ||
| Bernie's changed that party and changed that party dramatically. | ||
| And look, I think Bernie is grumpy that he's not the savior that he wanted to be. | ||
| So look, a lot of revolutionaries In Cuba, Fidel Castro was about Fidel Castro. | ||
| He wanted the power to be the dictator. | ||
| I think Bernie is unhappy. | ||
| There's a particular kind of bitterness. | ||
| You look at how Bernie deals with, say, Elizabeth Warren, who is a younger interloper, and both of them look at AOC and go, who the hell are you? | ||
| Now, they're all on the same team, but it's sort of, Except I don't think, I agree he's a true believer, but I don't think he had this sort of true, true fundamental hatred of all of our institutions. | ||
| AOC, Ilhan Omar, the others, now again, I'm not saying I'm totally right about this, but I sense a real let's destroy the whole damn thing with them. | ||
| And I think Bernie was the thing that allowed it into the system. | ||
| Well, and you look at, for example, let's take statues that are being torn down. | ||
| So the debate started with Confederate statues, and we can have a conversation about that. | ||
| Look, I'm one that believes we shouldn't erase history, but I also believe slavery is the original sin of America, it is a grotesque evil, and our nation fought a bloody civil war Where 600,000 people died to end slavery. | ||
| And our journey to civil rights, it has been a long journey. | ||
| It's been an imperfect journey. | ||
| We continue on that journey, but as Dr. Martin Luther King said, the arc of history bends towards justice. | ||
| But it started out as a discussion of Confederate monuments. | ||
| Then it became a discussion of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, It became people defacing statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant because, you know, they were such big Confederates. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Frederick Douglass! | ||
| So the ignorance of it. | ||
| Frederick Douglass. | ||
| Like, the angry mob at some point, when you're attacking Washington and Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, it's not that you hate slavery. | ||
| It's not that you hate racism. | ||
| You hate America. | ||
| So what I'm trying to figure out, though, when I see today's Democrats, it's even Pelosi, when she's now nodding to them, like, oh, well, people have legitimate grievances, and it's like, I don't think she believes it, but she's just trying not to get her mansion burned down. | ||
| Do you think it's that bad? | ||
| It seems to me that that's obvious at this point. | ||
| I think it is... There's a video I saw on Twitter of... | ||
| Some college kids, I think they were in New York, and there was a riot, and then- We're on your side! | ||
| We're on your side! | ||
| I mean, it was, no, no, no, don't burn us down. | ||
| Yeah, so they throw the rock through their window, and they're supposedly cheering them on, and it's like, nobody's, there's no side, because it's a- And you look at, look, you look at the angry Marxists who want to destroy this country. | ||
| And I worry, I worry about our education that people don't understand what we have in America is unique in the history of the world. | ||
| Most of history, look, free speech, free speech doesn't exist in many countries on earth today. | ||
| We're not training our kids to know, to understand the degree to which they're just being told everything is systematically racist. | ||
| You know, we just had a debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee where all these Democrats are saying, nothing has changed in the 50 years. | ||
| I'm like, what utter garbage? | ||
| Nothing has changed. | ||
| We had Jim Crow laws. | ||
| We had segregated schools with segregated water fountains. | ||
| You're saying the march in Selma didn't do anything? | ||
| I mean, that is, and the problem is it's a lie. | ||
| If people don't understand the journey towards justice, towards protecting people's rights, Then they want to burn it all down, which ends up hurting everybody's rights. | ||
| So, OK, so the obvious question there is, are the two, as we watch now, mainstream media burn down and the institutions burn down. | ||
| So you're a Harvard guy, you're a Princeton guy. | ||
| These are institutions that are on fire right now. | ||
| I would say rightfully so. | ||
| The New York Times, rightfully so. | ||
| The 1619 Project, let this thing freaking burn. | ||
| The amount of hit pieces that they've done on me, that they've done on people in my circles, that I'm sure they've done on you. | ||
| But are you worried that if all of these liberal in the right sense of liberalism Institutions burn down, that we will have nothing that will allow us for national cohesion, because you sort of hit on that earlier. | ||
| Yeah, I'm deeply worried about it. | ||
| They're no longer liberal in any real sense of the word. | ||
| They are authoritarian. | ||
| The New York Times fired their editor because he dared write an op-ed from a U.S. | ||
| Senator. | ||
| No, he didn't write it. | ||
| He just allowed it to be published. | ||
|
unidentified
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He allowed it to be published. | |
| Think about for a second, look, actually, you know, look, the op-ed that Tom Cotton wrote, it was okay. | ||
| I actually didn't agree with a lot of the stuff he said. | ||
| I thought it was a bit much. | ||
| But if you disagreed with it, write something saying it's wrong. | ||
| Like, why are you, part of it is, It's a testament of fear. | ||
| You don't believe in your own ideas. | ||
| Free speech, and by the way, you hear people in the Senate all the time say, well, speech that's offensive shouldn't be allowed. | ||
| That's exactly what the First Amendment is about. | ||
| You don't need the First Amendment for speech that everyone agrees with. | ||
| If the majority agrees with it, you don't need the First Amendment to protect your rights to say puppy dogs are nice. | ||
| At least right now, nobody is stopping the pro puppy dog. | ||
| Patience, patience. | ||
| You know, Sprint Court in another famous decision, Skokie, Illinois. | ||
| The Nazis wanted to march. | ||
| Sprint Court rightly said, you've got a right to march. | ||
| Now, by the way, when it comes to Nazis, I'm perfectly happy to say they're evil, ignorant, bigoted morons. | ||
| And I'm not scared of them saying whatever idiocy they want to say because Now, I think we have a moral obligation to engage in it, to say why it's wrong, but government shouldn't silence them. | ||
| Why should we be afraid of the Klan? | ||
| The Klan are idiots, and we need to demonstrate why what they're saying is wrong. | ||
| But inevitably, the mob calls everyone a Nazi or Klansman, and they use it to justify regulating You know, J.K. | ||
| Rowling now can't say women exist. | ||
| That is deemed the same as Adolf Hitler. | ||
| Okay, that's just a little nuts. | ||
| Like, we can have a respectful civil conversation, but you're right, there are no... Walter Cronkite. | ||
| Look, Cronkite leaned left, but not in a virulently partisan way. | ||
| Some of it is the media. | ||
| Trump broke the media. | ||
| They hate him so much. | ||
| There is no longer, there used to be five years ago, the media pretended they're impartial. | ||
| Remember they would argue there is no bias in media? | ||
| Have you heard anyone make that argument? | ||
| Yeah, nobody says that anymore. | ||
| Because it's so obvious that they've decided we're not... They no longer hold out impartiality as an objective to which when the New York Times... Well, because impartiality is now proof that you're somehow racist or something like that. | ||
| The 1619 Project. | ||
| It is a fundamentally racist, bigoted endeavor. | ||
| And the New York Times admits to redefine history. | ||
| And the real danger of the 1619 Project is going to be all the little tyranny of leftists in the school boards that begin teaching in the schools. | ||
| This is propaganda. | ||
| that is of Orwellian proportions. | ||
| So Senator Cruz, are you telling me that the United States didn't invent slavery? | ||
| We didn't invent slavery? | ||
| I mean, we also got rid of it pretty quickly. | ||
| They don't really want to get that, and it was going on for thousands and thousands of years, and it's still going on in parts of the world. | ||
| Somehow that's inconvenient. | ||
| And listen, the abolitionists... So one of the rich ironies is the Democrats who moralize on questions of race. | ||
| The Democratic Party is an absolute friggin' train wreck on race. | ||
| It was Democrats who founded the KKK. | ||
| It was Democrats who wrote Jim Crow. | ||
| It was Democrats who implemented segregation. | ||
| The party I'm a member of, the Republicans, was founded to oppose slavery. | ||
| Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president. | ||
| The reason we were founded. | ||
| Now, here's the Democratic narrative. | ||
| Well, yes, that was true then. | ||
| Nathan Bedford Forrest, who's the founder of the KKK, was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1860. | ||
| The media narrative is, yes, that was then, but the Democrats changed. | ||
| Well, interesting. | ||
| Let's go to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. | ||
| A lot higher percentage of Republicans supported that than Democrats did. | ||
| It was the Dixiecrats. | ||
| Bull Connor was a Democrat. | ||
| The guys with the dogs and the clubs beating the civil rights protesters, without exception, were Democrats. | ||
| And they said, well, OK, fine. | ||
| That's true up to the 60s. | ||
| But magically, it changed. | ||
| Dave, right now, today, as we sit here, the sitting governor of Virginia chose to put in his yearbook a picture of a Klansman. | ||
| And it may or may not have been him. | ||
| Yeah, may or may not. | ||
| Now think of the pathology of the media for a second. | ||
| So Ralph Northam, who's a Democrat, he's an elected Democrat today, not 50 years ago, not 100 years ago, today in 2020. | ||
| He put in his yearbook a picture of one guy dressed as a Klansman or another guy in blackface. | ||
| Now what an indictment of the media that everyone freaked out about the blackface. | ||
| Now look, Alright, I can accept that blackface. | ||
| I can understand why that would be seen as disrespectful. | ||
| I think the media is a little freaked out about it. | ||
| Like every late night comic is dressed in blackface. | ||
| And I don't think it was a big deal in Texas. | ||
| I don't think I've ever known anyone who's dressed in blackface. | ||
| It seems like in Virginia every elected politician just about did it. | ||
| But it was weird that between the two they have this hysterical fit about the black face and no one comments about the Klan outfit. | ||
| And Ralph Northam's comment the day after it broke, it was the most revealing, it was before they had gotten their talking points down, he said, he acknowledged that he could have been one of those two people and he didn't say which one. | ||
| If you're in elected office and you cannot say categorically, I have never in my life dressed as a Klansman... | ||
| You're talking about cancel culture? | ||
| As far as I'm concerned, if you don't know if you've been a Klansman, I'm more than prepared to vote you out of office. | ||
| So is that Trump's greatest skill? | ||
| Because you guys went at it pretty hard in 2016 and now you've become one of, I would say you're one of his biggest allies in the Senate. | ||
| But you guys were going after each other and said a lot of mean stuff about each other and all that. | ||
| But would you say his greatest skill Is that, well, you said it earlier, that he broke the media, but that he broke the inequity in the system. | ||
| The inequity in the system meaning that culture just teaches everybody, you're a Republican, you're a conservative, you're on the right, you're bad, you're a Democrat, you're a lefty, whatever, you're good. | ||
| And that Trump broke the whole damn thing. | ||
| And that that is why we're all kind of crazy right now. | ||
| But in my view, at this point, it was a necessary move. | ||
| So yes, I think there are a couple of things. | ||
| I think one- By the way, we've been talking for almost an hour. | ||
| We only said Trump like twice. | ||
| I think we just set some sort of record here. | ||
| That's pretty impressive. | ||
| Look, I think 2016 was a giant screw you to Washington. | ||
| I think working class voters were fed up with Washington. | ||
| You want to understand the 2016 election, it's blue collar workers across the country. | ||
| There's a reason why in 2016, Trump and I, in almost every state in the primary, either he was one and I was two with blue-collar voters, or I was one and he was two, and it's almost perfectly correlated. | ||
| The states where I was one and he was two are the 12 states I won. | ||
| The states where he was one and I was two are the states he won, and no other Republican won more than a single state. | ||
| It was a blue-collar revolution. | ||
| Who even won one besides you? | ||
| Kasich won Ohio, Rubio won Minnesota, Trump and I won the other 48. | ||
| And by the way, remember at the beginning there were 17 Republicans. | ||
| Conventional wisdom. | ||
| If you were ranking those 17... | ||
| Nobody in Washington or New York would have said Trump had a chance. | ||
| And no one said I had a chance. | ||
| We might've been 16 and 17 on the ordinal rankings of who had a shot. | ||
| And by the way, you had men, women, black people, Latinos, white people, the whole thing. | ||
| What did they have on the other side? | ||
| I remember a bunch of reporters. | ||
| I was in South Carolina and I was doing a press gaggle and a bunch of reporters said, what do you do about the fact that Republicans are a bunch of old white guys? | ||
| And I stopped and just started laughing. | ||
| And I said, number one, Have you looked at the Democratic field? | ||
| They're literally septuagenarian socialists. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| Do you know how many Hispanics have ever won a presidential primary in the Democratic Party? | ||
| A presidential primary? | ||
| Well, I'm guessing zero. | ||
| A state. | ||
| I'm talking about a single state. | ||
| Even a single state? | ||
| I'm going to guess it's zero. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Julian Castro was complaining that we shouldn't have Iowa voting because no Hispanic can win. | ||
| Well, I pointed out, look at the 2016 field. | ||
| We've got an African-American world-famous neurosurgeon. | ||
| We've got a woman who was a CEO of a Fortune 50 company. | ||
| We've got two sons of Cuban immigrants who are in their 40s. | ||
| I mean, you want to talk about, like, But the press still described us as old white guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And the old white guys who were socialists at their Bolshevik reunion as somehow, you know, Elizabeth Warren just said, we need new leaders. | ||
| Do you know how old Joe Biden, do you know when Joe Biden was sworn into the Senate? | ||
| 37 years ago, something crazy. | ||
| 1973. | ||
| I was two when Joe Biden took his oath of office. | ||
| He's been presiding over an awful lot of problems. | ||
| Do you find it hilarious then when, as the primary was rolling out, the Democratic primary, that every time someone that was a minority or a perceived minority dropped out, they basically said that their own party was racist? | ||
| You'd say, well, we're not diverse enough. | ||
| It's like, well, it's your base that's voting you guys out. | ||
| You can't blame this. | ||
| But somehow the media spins it that you suddenly like, oh, I guess the Republicans are racist. | ||
| It's facts don't matter for their narrative. | ||
| They are, it is a propaganda effort. | ||
| So I think the Trump election in 2016 was number one, a screw you to Washington. | ||
| Number two, it was working class voters. | ||
| Under Obama, the Democratic Party made a choice. | ||
| It was a very conscious choice. | ||
| Between two traditional favored children of the Democratic Party. | ||
| You were talking about the old Democrat where there were Blue Dog Democrats. | ||
| The Democrats made a choice between California environmentalist billionaires and the jobs of labor union members. | ||
| Now look, the Democratic Party used to be FDR, it used to be the working man, the union party. | ||
| And under Obama, the party decided it wanted the money from the Tom Styers of the world, more than it wanted the steel workers and the truck drivers in Pennsylvania to have jobs. | ||
| And so they consciously, and their view was the union bosses will deliver the votes. | ||
| Those used to be our foot soldiers. | ||
| We're going to vote to shut down the Keystone Pipeline. | ||
| Screw the jobs. | ||
| Okay, those guys don't get jobs because it makes us feel better as we are Living in multi-million dollar mansions and it doesn't affect our life, it makes us feel better to give away their jobs. | ||
| I think the working class roar back at Washington was a big part of 2016 and I also think, look, It's interesting though. | ||
| I don't think the phrase cancel culture existed in 2016. | ||
| It was called political correctness. | ||
| But the fact that Trump would say, would stand up and speak out and he'd go around the gatekeepers. | ||
| It's why social media has gotten more vigorous. | ||
| They're mad that anyone got around the gatekeepers. | ||
| So they're trying to close off the avenues of communication. | ||
| Okay, so I know we're crunched on time here, and I wanna get a couple video game minutes in with you, so we'll try to do this quick. | ||
| So do you think, and I don't mean this as a shot to you, but do you think Trump, the reason Trump won was because he was willing to do stuff that you would not have done? | ||
| Because I think there's a sense of that. | ||
| Remember there was that moment when Marco Rubio tried it for a day? | ||
| There was literally that one- Yeah, and it didn't work. | ||
| And it just blew up in his face. | ||
| But do you think, and maybe that's not a shot to you, or it's, I don't know if it's credit to Trump or just a, It has something to do with how we're all wired or something like that. | ||
| So inauthenticity doesn't work. | ||
| People can smell it when you're a fake. | ||
| Trump won the primary in 2016 because the media gave him $3 billion in free media. | ||
| And it has no precedent in the history of politics. | ||
| $3 billion in free media. | ||
| But do you think that was because he was willing to do something, meaning just blow apart the system? | ||
| I actually think it was fundamental corruption on the part of the media. | ||
| So I think the mainstream media, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, they all wanted Hillary to win. | ||
| And they believed Trump was the easiest candidate for Hillary to beat. | ||
| And I think they made a very conscious decision. | ||
| All Trump, all the time. | ||
| Because they wanted Hillary to win. | ||
| I think they were corrupt. | ||
| I think that they had that same corruption, but the consequence... I mean, we've had over two centuries of politics. | ||
| There's never been a candidate worth $3 billion of free media. | ||
| It became a tsunami that in the last 30 days there was $500 million of free media, and we couldn't be heard anymore. | ||
| And I do think people were fed up with Washington, and that's what 2016 was, was a statement about that. | ||
| All right, so I said two more, but I'm gonna throw in one more extra so there's still two. | ||
| What do you make of the Never Trump crew? | ||
| Like this Lincoln Project, these people who are now supporting all Democrats. | ||
| And now we're talking about, it's not just about taking out Trump anymore. | ||
| Now it's that we're gonna find the congressional candidates and the candidates in the Senate. | ||
| What do you make of these people who, Trump, like him, don't like him, orange, big hair. | ||
| It's like he's doing the things that conservatives want done. | ||
| So whenever anyone tells you it's not about the money, it's about the money. | ||
| Look, these Lincoln Project guys are a bunch of political operatives who are making millions. | ||
| Who also got everything wrong always, forever. | ||
| Bill Kristol. | ||
| Look, they have been operatives for a long time. | ||
| So, you want to look at the pattern? | ||
| They've run a lot of losing presidential races. | ||
| Losing to Democrats. | ||
| They're very good at losing to Democrats. | ||
| In significant part, you look at all of these guys. | ||
| So I think the real divide we have is not racial, it's socioeconomic. | ||
| It is the difference between wealthy elites and working class voters. | ||
| All of these so-called anti-Trump folks are the people who've been saying screw you to the working class voters for 20 years. | ||
| And they're still echoing that. | ||
| And by the way, I think now they're just making a buck. | ||
| They're printing money to put money in their own bank account. | ||
| And listen, when it comes to Trump, there are a lot of things Trump says and does I don't like. | ||
| I agree with many of the policies he's implemented. | ||
| And I think he's shown real backbone. | ||
| And the role I've tried to play the last four years is to encourage the president to go in a positive direction. | ||
| To encourage him. | ||
| Let's take social media. | ||
| You know, this order. | ||
| I had been urging the administration for three years for them to do this. | ||
| So I'm glad they did it. | ||
| It took a lot of work. | ||
| And I'm grateful. | ||
| I'm grateful. | ||
| As a president, I think his best characteristic is that he has a backbone. | ||
| He's willing to make decisions. | ||
| That many Republicans wouldn't make. | ||
| Things like moving our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. | ||
| I urged him to do that. | ||
| Both the State Department, Defense Department didn't want him to do that. | ||
| They argued against it. | ||
| His own State Department, Defense Department. | ||
| And every president had run on saying they were going to do it for him. | ||
| Democrats and Republicans had broken that promise over and over again. | ||
| Pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. | ||
| Again, State and Defense said, don't do it. | ||
| I urged him to do it. | ||
| He did it. | ||
| Look, that took balls. | ||
| I'm grateful for that. | ||
| Do I wish he didn't send some ridiculous tweets? | ||
| Of course I do. | ||
| There are times when it ends up being less effective. | ||
| You know, on Capitol Hill, the reporters run to you and they want to comment on every tweet, and I tell them, I said, look, I have a rule of thumb, I don't comment on tweets. | ||
| Because I'm not interested in just playing media pundit and responding to, you know, at 10.07 a.m. | ||
| the president tweeted this, at 10.09 a.m. | ||
| I don't need to do that. | ||
| You want to talk about substance? | ||
| Let's talk about free speech. | ||
| Let's talk about religious liberty. | ||
| Let's talk about the Second Amendment. | ||
| Let's talk about securing the border. | ||
| Let's talk about rebuilding our military. | ||
| I'll talk about substance. | ||
| But... | ||
| And I think that substance, we've gotten a lot done. | ||
| All right, so now I got one more for you. | ||
| We did now 70 some odd minutes. | ||
| My guys are gonna shoot me, and I know you gotta get over to PragerU after this. | ||
| We didn't talk about COVID at all. | ||
| So if you could just kind of couch how you're feeling we're doing at this very moment, the states' rights part of this, and I guess most importantly, and this will be sort of a good ending, Do we ever get out of this phase, this thing that we're all feeling right now, between COVID, between the protests, between the oncoming election, do we ever get out of this thing and back to something that feels more normal or is, to bring it back to sci-fi, are we heading to a brave new world, a dystopian future, something like that? | ||
| Yes, we'll come out of this. | ||
| How about a question like that when you only have like three minutes left, but you do what you gotta do. | ||
| This actually connected to where we started. | ||
| This is a good place to wrap up about how polarized and tribalized we are. | ||
| One of the things I find bizarre about this pandemic is how people look at it through a political lens. | ||
| It's all politics. | ||
| So, you know, my view on the virus, it's serious, it's deadly, We need to take serious steps to combat it. | ||
| And I've laid out a whole series of steps and been advocating for it, whether it's increased testing, whether it's investments in vaccines and treatments, that we need to use common sense to stop the spread of the virus. | ||
| But at the same time, People's jobs matter. | ||
| 44 million people losing their jobs. | ||
| That produces real suffering. | ||
| It produces death. | ||
| You talk about mental illness and depression, alcohol and substance abuse. | ||
| Destroying people's livelihoods is a problem. | ||
| We need a balance. | ||
| And what's weird is the idea of balance. | ||
| The idea of let's use some common sense. | ||
| It feels kind of lonely saying that. | ||
| Because, all right, let's take for example masks. | ||
| Masks have become this bizarre virtue signal. | ||
| So, listen, on the right, there's some people like, never wear a mask, no matter what! | ||
| I'm like, okay, that seems a little out there. | ||
| On the left, there are Democrats who, their social media picture has a mask. | ||
| I remember one, Sherrod Brown, the senator from Ohio, gave a floor speech in the Senate a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| He's wearing a mask during the whole speech. | ||
| There's no one within 20 feet of him. | ||
| He's standing alone on the Senate floor with a mask because it's a sign, I am righteous. | ||
| I am wearing the clothes of the high priest. | ||
| Now look, you and I talked about it. | ||
| I've got my damn mask in my pocket. | ||
| It's a Houston Rockets mask. | ||
| You didn't make up the Elijah Juan story. | ||
| You know, I believe in, you know, do things that are sensible and use common sense, but it, Viewing it all through a political lens. | ||
| By the way, I have a prediction. | ||
| If, God forbid, Biden wins, the day after the election, everything will be better. | ||
| The day after the election, everyone will say, go back to school, go back to work. | ||
| Oh, the COVID, at the COVID level. | ||
| The disease won't suddenly be cured. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Everyone, like the people who are saying, shut it down. | ||
| There's a political urgency. | ||
| They want the Great Depression because they want to defeat Trump. | ||
| They won't even wait until Biden is sworn in. | ||
| If Biden is elected that week, they'll say, all right, everyone needs to go back to work and go back to school. | ||
| So you believe they're deliberately tanking the economy. | ||
| I mean, I've tweeted something to that effect. | ||
| I believe that Gavin Newsom here in California is trying to destroy the economy, so either the feds have to bail us out or... They hate Trump so much it's all-consuming. | ||
| And the angry left, they've convinced themselves that Donald Trump is Hitler. | ||
| So everything is justified in terms of defeating Hitler. | ||
| And it's just like, Okay, that's... And by the way, the answer, the politicized answer on either side, shut everything down forever or everyone go back to perfectly normal and don't, you know, pretend there's no pandemic, neither one of those make a lot of sense to me. | ||
| But listening to medical professionals and following common sense and also respecting people's jobs, in the media world, who's advocating that? | ||
| You don't get If you're not advocating an extreme position, it doesn't exist. | ||
| Senator, I feel like we just started here, but it has been 80 minutes and you got a busy day ahead of you, but I promise- We gotta close the way you started though, which is reminding people to go subscribe to the Verdict Podcast, either on the podcast- Oh, you've really become a podcaster now. | ||
| Or on YouTube. | ||
| Give us a five-star rating, subscribe. | ||
| Look, Verdict Podcast, as you know, we launched it during impeachment. | ||
| It became the number one podcast in the world. | ||
| When we launched it. | ||
| And so come sign on. | ||
| And what we're doing every week is having conversations, trying to actually understand what's going on in the world and address real substance. | ||
| And have fun too. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure that that Michael Knowles guy is standing on the other side of that door right now, because we're going to do a little pickup for Rubin Report. | ||
| It was a pleasure. | ||
| I hope you come back to talk about your book in October when it comes out. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| And may the force be with you. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| 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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