Aug. 30, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| They have reached their final stage. | ||
| This is literally of this era that they're in right now. | ||
| This is their final stage in saying race, racism, race is the problem, race, black people, race, race, race, systematic racism. | ||
| That's why you're not successful. | ||
| Elect us. | ||
| We will help you. | ||
| So this is kind of the final stage of this. | ||
| And if it wasn't, then there wouldn't be so many voices like, like mine, like, like our friend, Candace Owens, like, So many other black voices, Ayanna Pressley, our voices are still black voices, and there's so many of those voices that are saying, wait a minute, this stuff isn't necessarily true. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| Do yourself a favor, everyone, and subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that notification bell so you might just see our videos. | ||
| And joining me today is an Iraq veteran, host of Rob Smith is Problematic, and the author of the new book, Always a Soldier, Service, Sacrifice, and Coming Out as America's Favorite Black Gay Republican. | ||
| Rob Smith, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| Wordy title, Rob. | ||
| Wordy title. | ||
| It's a wordy title, but I think the main thing is always a soldier, and the subheading is America's favorite black gay Republican. | ||
| I have to put that in there. | ||
| Peaks people's interest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| All right, well, we're gonna talk about that black gay Republican thing, obviously, and we've talked about it before, and you've been on the show, and we're buddies, but if I'm not mistaken, you've been doing lockdown in Brooklyn. | ||
| That's like ground zero of this crazy thing. | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| Terrible, actually. | ||
| New York is, you know, it is very, very bad. | ||
| It's bad for your physical health. | ||
| It's bad for your mental health. | ||
| It's a very, very weird, situation that's going on in New York City right now. | ||
| And look, there are some signs that people are returning to normalcy. | ||
| We've got dining on the streets, which is nice, but when you walk around and everybody's wearing the mask, it's like you're in a zombie movie. | ||
| And you see people driving around solo wearing the mask, and you see people walking around in the fresh and open air in the mask. | ||
| It's weird, and it sort of engenders this sense of hysteria that is not particularly warranted. | ||
| Yeah, does it strike you as, depending whether you're wired to just sort of listen to authority and no matter what they say, you're gonna do it, or if you're someone with a little more of a rebellious streak, you're gonna be a little more questioning of it. | ||
| Is that really just the divide we have in society right now when it comes to this? | ||
| That's the divide, because here's the thing. | ||
| Now the mass issue has become so politicized. | ||
| So now there's the good people and the bad people, right? | ||
| So if you're good, you're wearing a mask all the time, you're always social distancing no matter what. | ||
| I had dinner with a buddy of mine, and his husband is good, you know, he's good. | ||
| And he was just like, we can't share, and we have social distance, we have to do that. | ||
| So it is, and the thing that strikes me the most is there are people out there, not to get too heavily into politics, but there are people out here that utterly hate the government, hate the administration, hate all of this stuff, and yet, yet, they will follow these rules to the T, and it's just strange to me. | ||
| It's bizarre. | ||
| Did you just say you don't want to get too deep into politics? | ||
| Do you know what show you're doing? | ||
| Oh, I know what show I'm doing, but I think when I say I want to get too deep, like, I don't want to sit here and talk about the president for the next 45 minutes, but just even deeper than that, it's the rebels that are out here that are saying, OK, look, you know, we know the science of this. | ||
| I probably don't need to wear a mask when I'm in my car driving by myself. | ||
| And that's the divide that we have on right now. | ||
| It's strange. | ||
| Do you sense that people in New York are gonna have some point where they snap, where they go, oh, maybe Cuomo wasn't as great as the media portrayed him to be at the beginning, and he sent all those people back into the old age homes, and the fact that these rolling lockdowns continue and everything else? | ||
| I mean, I think that people are asking the conversation, but what you have to understand about Cuomo is that there is such an infrastructure protecting him right now. | ||
| When you talk about the mainstream media, where is most of it is based? | ||
| Most of it's based in New York, right? | ||
| So this is why we have this narrative right now that's going on where it's saying, oh, well, now Florida is the epicenter of coronavirus. | ||
| And the numbers in no way, shape, or form when it comes to hospitalizations, when it comes to any of any of those metrics, That they introduced, you know, in those 15 days to slow the spread that ended up being whatever day we're on right now. | ||
| So, Florida is not hitting any of those metrics at all, but yet the narrative has changed to make Florida the epicenter, to make Florida the bad guy, to make Ron DeSantis the bad guy, because of course he's a Republican, and Cuomo is going to be their kind of great hope, they think, for 2024, because I believe that they know that Biden has problems, and they know that he's not likely to win. | ||
| So they're protecting Cuomo right now. | ||
| It's really unfortunate, but I think that more people see through the nonsense now than before. | ||
| So that gives me a little bit of hope. | ||
| Yeah, as of our taping this, because we are holding this for a little bit, it's something like 10 times the death in New York than there are in Florida. | ||
| It's something around there, which you would think maybe the media would pick up on, but only those far right websites are big on that. | ||
| Yeah, those are far right. | ||
| I know we could talk about Corona the whole time, but I have some notes here, and according to my paper here, you are black. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| That is correct. | ||
| I am black. | ||
| Okay, I vaguely remembered that. | ||
| I vaguely remembered that from the last time we were together. | ||
| Let's talk about race, because nobody else is talking about race. | ||
| Let's talk about race a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, nobody else is talking about it? | |
| There's a lot of weird stuff going on about race. | ||
| Suddenly, America's the most evil, racist nation in the history of the world. | ||
| You've got, you know, the whole... | ||
| I would say Democratic machine is running on the idea that Trump has just proliferated racism, but also the system was deeply racist before him, which is quite a condemnation of Biden and Schumer and Pelosi and everybody else that's been around forever. | ||
| What do you feel is the temperature right now, just in a broad sense? | ||
| I mean, I feel like, honestly, the temperature when, there are two different worlds here, right? | ||
| There's our social media world. | ||
| In the social media world, on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and everywhere else, it's constantly at each other's throats. | ||
| There's all this division. | ||
| There's all this. | ||
| Because the powers that be, particularly on the left right now, they want that division. | ||
| They think that ginning up that stuff is going to push them back into power. | ||
| But there's also the real world as well. | ||
| And I think, and maybe this is just my unabashed optimism for America, but I think that There's a conversation that is happening in the real world that is nowhere near as elevated and heightened as the conversation on social media. | ||
| But look, I think that what you have going on right now is the Democrats and the left, they have reached their final stage. | ||
| This is literally, of this era that they're in right now, this is their final stage in saying race, racism, race is the problem, race, black people, race, race, race, systematic racism, that's why you're not successful. | ||
| Elect us, we will help you. | ||
| So this is kind of the final stage of this. | ||
| And if it wasn't, then there wouldn't be so many voices like mine, like our friend Candace Owens, like so many other black voices, Ayanna Pressley, our voices are still black voices. | ||
| And there's so many of those voices that are saying, wait a minute, This stuff isn't necessarily true. | ||
| And that gives me hope that there can be a more elevated conversation. | ||
| But let me tell you, I hope and I truly do pray that they lose in November. | ||
| Not because I am praying so much for the Republicans and the president is going to save our republic, although there's a big part of that. | ||
| But they have to realize that This is not the way for power. | ||
| This is not the way for votes. | ||
| And I think that they have to get shellacked a couple of times to really figure it out. | ||
| And there's going to be a lot of collateral damage in the form of the vines of some of the young African-Americans that they are literally destroying by selling this message that racism is the number one problem in their life in order to get votes for Democrats. | ||
| It's destructive. | ||
| It's insidious. | ||
| And I think that people are starting to wake up to it. | ||
| I like the way you describe that, because it does feel like we're sort of getting, if this is a video game, we're getting to the big boss. | ||
| We're getting to the final boss, where for eight levels, they've just ramped up the racism, racism, homophobia, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And now we're there, like this election is it. | ||
| And it almost seems to me that all they've got to run on is that America is racist. | ||
| And if they don't have that, It's like, I don't think anyone buys any of the policies. | ||
| And unfortunately, just the way the media operates right now, this isn't gonna be an election about policy. | ||
| This is an election about basically racism and socialism versus capitalism and freedom, something like that. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it is. | ||
| And Dave, the thing that always strikes me, because I watch some of the left-leaning stuff, and God, I see this, you know, never-ending clown car of the black liberals that come up and they talk about stuff. | ||
| So case in point, So the McCloskey situation, where this couple was defending themselves from an angry mob, who had, by the way, broken into private property. | ||
| And on the left, with the black pundits, this somehow becomes about race. | ||
| And this somehow becomes the idea of these people inflicting their white supremacy on these black protesters. | ||
| Number one, those protesters are not peaceful. | ||
| Number two, they were not all black. | ||
| And number three, the last time I checked, the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms is for everybody. | ||
| It's not just for white people. | ||
| So I'm struck when I see these conversations how quickly and how easily they remove all agency from Black people in America and from African-Americans in general. | ||
| All of our agency is removed in these conversations. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's also incredible because they try to paint the McCloskeys as evil for defending their property as we're watching all this stuff burn down. | ||
| But it's not like the McCloskeys woke up that morning and were like, we're gonna go shoot people. | ||
| They had those guns for a long time. | ||
| It sounds like they were actually Democratic donors, at least at one point, and supported Black Lives Matter. | ||
| It's not like they were just sitting there waiting to start some stuff. | ||
| It literally showed up at their door and then they defended themselves. | ||
| But that's actually a good transition to media, You're a media, what can I call you, assassin, I suppose, as well. | ||
| You've just had it with the mainstream media, too, because this is the stuff they're endlessly peddling, right? | ||
| Well, it is, and a lot of people don't realize, Dave, that, so I went to Columbia Journalism School. | ||
| I got my master's degree from Columbia. | ||
| I worked in media and production for years before I decided to come out and say what I really thought and do all this for myself. | ||
| So I know all the games, dude. | ||
| I know about crapping a tweet and leaving half of the quote off. | ||
| I know what fake news is, because sometimes fake news, or actually most of the time, fake news isn't an outright lie, but more a half-truth. | ||
| And so you see past all these games. | ||
| When I first came out as conservative, one of the first friends that I lost got deeply offended when I told him, and not in a condescending way at all, told him that I've been working in this at that point for about five to six years, and I know these games, and you're not media literate enough to see this. | ||
| And he got deeply offended by it, and then that was it, and it's just like, it's whatever. | ||
| But people didn't realize these games, and I think the deeper we get into this, we see it over and over and over again. | ||
| And folks like you and I, when there is an outright lie, and I mean a whopper, It has to be shut down so quick, because if you don't, then it becomes part of the lexicon and it becomes common knowledge. | ||
| Case in point, Trump's very fine people comment, which has been debunked so many times, but it is canon among the left. | ||
| And that's because, and that was a failing on the right, because they didn't shut that down immediately. | ||
| Immediately when they shut us. | ||
| You know, what's interesting about that one is that for people that don't know, a minute, not even a minute, 30 seconds before Trump said very fine people on both sides, he absolutely condemned the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists. | ||
| But what's really amazing about it is that Biden, when he launched his campaign, that's the video he used, the very fine people. | ||
| And he's talking about America being racist and everything else. | ||
| And he knows he can get away with it. | ||
| Because nobody in the media is gonna do anything about it. | ||
| And then yeah, us on Twitter, we'll hit back, but he knows CNN and MSNBC and everybody else is gonna run cover for him. | ||
| Of course they knew it. | ||
| And honestly, he knew it when he played the video. | ||
| Look, at a certain point, and I think that media bashing is definitely, it's a fun pastime that a lot of us like to do on the right. | ||
| But at a certain point, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time. | ||
| And what is going to happen on the left is people are going to start asking questions. | ||
| They're going to start asking bad questions. | ||
| They're going to start asking questions that they shouldn't have asked before. | ||
| And then they will be excommunicated, just like you were, just as I was. | ||
| And so I think, and you have been way at the forefront of this, because you saw all of this stuff coming for a long time before the rest of us. | ||
| And so then the same thinking people are going to have to figure out What do we create that is new, that is fact-based? | ||
| And you can be, look, some of my best friends are liberals. | ||
| You can be a liberal and not be an insane leftist, right? | ||
| Just like you can be a conservative and not be super crazy far right. | ||
| But at a certain point, the grown-ups are going to have to take control of the conversation here. | ||
| And that's what I'm trying to do, and I know that's what you have been doing. | ||
| Yeah, so, all right, let's make this about us for a second. | ||
| So if you take two guys like us, you take Dave Rubin, you take Rob Smith, and you go, wait a minute, these guys sort of seem like what would be, I think you could call sort of new conservatives, something like that. | ||
| We don't look like, you know, we're both married to dudes. | ||
| That's a little different than, you know, traditional conservatism. | ||
| What do you think, Our kind of new role, or the younger, newer conservative role, is within the conservative movement. | ||
| Okay, so this is what I think, and I think about this a lot, and it's like, everything that I'm doing from here on out, with everything that we'll be talking about in a little bit, is about this. | ||
| How do we usher in the conservative movement into this new era where you got more black people, you got more people of color, you got more gays, you got whatever. | ||
| And I think that what we do is we define a love for country and a love for America. | ||
| That is not completely uncritical, but it is not based in some sort of idea. | ||
| That it was created to permanently and perpetually keep people like us in some way oppressed. | ||
| Because I think that the, um, and I was speaking with, uh, with, uh, Laura Trump earlier about this thing. | ||
| So this is about creating a more perfect union. | ||
| So this is not about pretending that America was always perfect. | ||
| This is about. | ||
| This is about perfecting this union. | ||
| And we have to open up this idea of the American experiment to everybody. | ||
| Because what the left says right now to people like you and people like me and a lot of different people is that America was never for you. | ||
| America is not for you. | ||
| You cannot survive here. | ||
| You cannot exist here. | ||
| This system is racist. | ||
| And the only way that you will ever be free or be successful is if you join with us in tearing this all down via socialism, leftism, whatever you want to call it. | ||
| And so our job is to reach out to not only to people like us, but also these mainstream conservatives that look like your typical conservative. | ||
| Those people make up a lot of the people that follow both of us. | ||
| And to kind of bring everybody into this idea of what is America and how do we love America from all vantage points. | ||
| Yeah, I think the hard part for some people when they see what, you know, people like we are doing, people like us, I think the hard part is they go, well, wait a minute. | ||
| There's still such a strong religious bent to the right that this just doesn't make sense. | ||
| They think you guys are sinners. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| And people go, well, Ruben, how can you be friends with Shapiro? | ||
| And it's like, yes, he has a different view of biblical marriage, but he's not trying to legislate my life. | ||
| It does put a cap on our friendship, right? | ||
| I can be friends with you in a way that I can't be with him because of that thing, but it's, but it doesn't, but I know he's way more tolerant than all the other people that are screaming about tolerance all the time. | ||
| But what would you say to a young, a young gay person that is trying to become part of this or understand this, what would you say to them about that? | ||
| I would say to them that, first of all, just like you articulated it pretty well, is that a difference of opinion and actively legislating against things are two different things, right? | ||
| And, you know, it gets into the religious freedom conversation, which is a whole other conversation as well. | ||
| But this is what I say to the younger gay person that is reaching out to me that may be leaning conservative and that has problems with the religious thing. | ||
| First of all, I tell them, number one, you know, you're Jewish. | ||
| I'm Christian. | ||
| I think that the left and the far left uses, they use this idea that most evangelical Christians are super far right, hate gay people, all of that stuff, to separate them from the gift that is having a connection to whatever your belief is. | ||
| For me, it's that belief in Christianity and the belief in God. | ||
| And they would want to separate these guys, these young gays and lesbians from that, So that they can worship at the altar of leptism, so that they can worship at the altar of politics, so that they can worship at the altar of, as I always call it, the LGBTQ cult. | ||
| So they want these kids worshiping at that altar and not at the altar of their creator, whoever they believe that they may be, if that makes any sense at all. | ||
| And I'll tell you furthermore that I have made inroads with a lot of these conservative Christians and they'll say, look, I still believe like you and Ben Shapiro, even though you and Ben Shapiro are both Jewish. | ||
| I'll have these conversations with these conservative Christians and they'll say, my belief is that marriage is between a man and a woman. | ||
| That is what I believe. | ||
| But you go ahead and live your best life. | ||
| And if neither of us are hurting each other, we can coexist. | ||
| And that is tolerance. | ||
| That is tolerance, that is America. | ||
| You know, it's like, I spoke at Liberty University, the largest evangelical college in the United States in front of 14,000 kids. | ||
| It was like a true political rally, the biggest crowd I've ever spoken in front of, and they freaking loved me. | ||
| And I went around campus all day long shaking hands and hugging people, and it was great. | ||
| And it's like, those are the intolerant people? | ||
| I think we're doing something backwards over here. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| And it seems like nowadays, like, look, the most intolerant people are on the left. | ||
| These are the people that are the most intolerant. | ||
| These are the people that are the most likely to throw out slurs, you know, homophobe, racist, Nazi, all of this other stuff. | ||
| The people who even slightly disagree with any of this stuff or even gently call out leftist policies. | ||
| This is what they do. | ||
| These are shut down terms. | ||
| I hope that they start to mean less As we move into this new world we're trying to get into. | ||
| Yeah, so I know you hate sort of the phrase community, whether we would say the black community or the LGBT community, because we are all individuals ultimately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But sometimes we just need some of these words to explain situations. | ||
| But do you sense a really weird tension in the black community? | ||
| related to identity because of color and then the sexuality thing because it seems to me and we keep seeing videos of this pop up online where there'll be black people that are suddenly they're stuck in this intersectional thing and they're suddenly going no i have traditional you know beliefs and i'm not down with all that lgbt stuff And these things have been sort of morphed into a very weird thing where suddenly if you're, you have to be, suddenly black trans lives matter. | ||
| I'm personally fine with black trans people, of course, but suddenly they create this thing where it's just like, you have to be for all of these things, no matter what your other set of beliefs are. | ||
| So that is the rub right now with Black Lives Matter, because when you go to the Black Lives Matter, the organization's website, right? | ||
| And I'm not talking about, you know, the Don Lemon's running cover for them in the media. | ||
| I'm not talking about when you go to the organization's website, they say things like they're in favor of abolishing the nuclear family, centering LGBTQIA plus queer people, all of this stuff. | ||
| All of this stuff That the vast majority of regular working class Black Americans are not super into or even down with. | ||
| So there is a lot of that tension there. | ||
| And this is the problem with when you let brands, organizations, and corporations define Blackness. | ||
| Because Black Lives Matter does not define Blackness. | ||
| My Blackness is not defined by Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Any of their founders or any of the people that have You know, put themselves in the position to speak for this organization. | ||
| Like I said, this is an organization, this is a corporation, this is a business, and they don't speak for me. | ||
| So there is a lot of tension there. | ||
| And furthermore, so I talk a lot about, I say LGBTQ cult a lot, right? | ||
| So there are gays and there are lesbians and there are bisexuals and there are transgender people, most of which are law-abiding, tax-paying citizens that just want to live their lives and Pretty much be left alone. | ||
| Then there is the LGBTQ cult. | ||
| And the cultists say that you will listen to whatever we say, whatever we change is the idea. | ||
| So if we want to use pronouns, this is what you call us, or else we will fine you. | ||
| If you do not agree with adding transgender women to the spaces for actual women, you are now transphobic. | ||
| And it is all of that stuff that is going crazy. | ||
| And it's stuff, and I break this down, there's a whole chapter in this book called Escaping the LGBTQ Cult, where I kind of break all that stuff down, and that is the stuff that most people are not down with. | ||
| Most people don't care about gays and lesbians. | ||
| We're past that point now. | ||
| But they see all the cult stuff, and they think that that represents all of us, and it just doesn't. | ||
| Yeah, so let's talk about the cult stuff a little bit, because we've talked about this privately a bunch. | ||
| The T part of this, the transgender part, you and I as gay people, we have no more insight into what it is to be a trans person than a straight person does. | ||
| We were born in the right body. | ||
| We have same-sex attraction, but that's not being born in the wrong body that you identify with, let's say. | ||
| Yet the T thing has sort of now taken over the entire movement. | ||
| And you were telling me last time I saw you that you think it's actually rabidly anti-gay. | ||
| And I think it's a pretty interesting theory. | ||
| Yeah, so look, the transgender movement as we know it today, especially the very hard left transgender movement, is one of the most homophobic movements I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Because it is this idea that If you are a gay man or even a gay boy, because now, you know, a feminine little boy is now being pushed towards transition and puberty blockers and all of this other stuff by the radical leftist transgender movement. | ||
| So it's this idea that if you are in some way not conforming to typical standards of gender, then you must be the other gender, right? | ||
| The literally other sex. | ||
| So if you're a little femme gay boy, then no, you're really a woman. | ||
| If you're a masculine, sort of like butchy, you know, lesbian, then no, you're really a man. | ||
| And from what I've learned about some of the, you'll call them, they call them radical feminists that are really fighting against that ideology, is that this transgender movement and the radical elements of it are affecting Teenage girls the most. | ||
| And so you have a high preponderance of teenage girls who basically are just going to end up being lesbians, right? | ||
| Because you realize that most gay and lesbian tweens, teenagers who are gender non-conforming in some way, upwards of 80% of them just end up being regular gays and lesbians. | ||
| But the idea is to stop all of this in its tracks. | ||
| Before puberty is actually done, so that we can create more transgender people in this, there are going to be some people that are watching it that think that I am absolutely crazy, right? | ||
| But this is happening before our very eyes, and the mainstream media is so afraid to stand up against that lobby, they do not report that. | ||
| I worked very hard on that chapter of my book that deals with this, and there are documented stories about, God, when you want to talk about Women who were born men in women's prisons, sexually assaulting female inmates, documented. | ||
| And you have somebody like Joe Biden that is literally running on, your gender is what you say it is, and if that's so, then they should be put in women's prisons. | ||
| And this is something that Joe Biden has literally said. | ||
| It's in the book. | ||
| It's a real thing. | ||
| And it's another way the media is running cover for them, right? | ||
| Yeah, just to keep going with that for a second, the twisted part of it is that they, in many ways, are the ones who are conforming more so to traditional ideas of gender because they're the ones that are going, oh, if you're a boy but you act a little more feminine, so you're five years old and instead of playing with G.I. | ||
| Joe's, as I did, you play with Barbie. | ||
| Well, then we must transition you to a girl. | ||
| So oddly, it's their view of gender that in many ways is more traditional than someone just saying, OK, he's a boy, he plays with Barbie and he'll grow up to love whoever he loves. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The more insidious thing about the far left trans movement that's going on right now is that they have They are starting to align themselves with the more hardcore homophobic elements of the religious right. | ||
| So we're talking far right, the people that haven't really gotten over their homophobia. | ||
| Because in some of these people's minds, they would rather have a transgender daughter than a gay son, right? | ||
| They would rather have a trans son than just a daughter that is lesbian. | ||
| And you see a lot of that stuff happening right now. | ||
| So there's this very weird sort of alignment. | ||
| that's happening on the fringes, on the very far left and the very far right. | ||
| It's homophobic. | ||
| It has obviously no basis in real science. | ||
| And look, I take a lot of stuff when I really dig deep into this, but I fought, okay, for the rights of gays and lesbians for my entire career. | ||
| And I just want these young gay and lesbian teenagers to be comfortable with who they are. | ||
| Because they are being set down a path that is going to lead down to nothing but permanent unhappiness, and the physical destruction of their body, and this idea that somehow transitioning is going to make them happy. | ||
| And look, the post-transition suicide rates do not bear that out. | ||
| They're very, very high. | ||
| So if this was really, truly making people happy, Then why did the suicide rates go up post-transition instead of down? | ||
| Did you watch the show Transparent by any chance? | ||
| Um, I didn't. | ||
| It was just a little too, I don't know, just like, I wasn't into it. | ||
| It became pretty SJW heavy, but there was an interesting moment where, you know, the story is about the father of this family transitioning, and there's a moment where another trans person says to him something to the effect of, this is gonna destroy your whole family and your life. | ||
| And he basically was like, well, I'm gonna go ahead and do it anyway. | ||
| I thought that was an interest, sort of honest, interesting, moment of this, but that we just celebrate all this stuff without thinking what some of the consequences are. | ||
| And again, that's not to be against someone who genuinely is trans doing what they think is right for them. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean, it is, and it's so funny, that moment, that sounds like a compelling moment. | ||
| It had to have come during the first season before, because I- Yeah, it was. | ||
| I think it was the last episode, last episode of the first season, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| It had to have been, because they were probably creating this show in like a creative bubble, where they were allowing themselves to have those conversations. | ||
| And then once something comes out, and then the far left owns it, and then they dictate what is safe, To say or not to say. | ||
| They dictate what conversations are available to have. | ||
| And remember, speaking of transparent, they got that guy Jeffrey Tambor, the actor, right? | ||
| The lead actor. | ||
| They got him jumped off the show for whatever reason. | ||
| So look, these people destroy whatever they touch, first of all. | ||
| And second of all, that sounds compelling. | ||
| And it's unfortunate that they went over into SJW territory. | ||
| But when the cult gets their clutches in you, there's nowhere else to go. | ||
| Yeah, let's shift to something we've talked about a little bit before, but let's preempt the haters, Rob. | ||
| They're gonna say, wait a minute, how could the subtitle of this book be America's favorite gay black Republican? | ||
| He's using their language. | ||
| He's using identity politics. | ||
| Rob, what's going on here, Rob? | ||
| You know, that is such a common misconception and critique. | ||
| Oh, you say that you're so against identity politics and yet you're America's favorite black Republican. | ||
| Okay, so first of all, I use identity politics in this way because yes, everybody uses identity politics, right? | ||
| So I use identity politics in this way so that I can tell other gay people, other black people, and some people that like me are both, that they don't have to be on the left, they don't have to be Democrats, they don't have to be liberals, they don't have to be leftists, just because of their immutable characteristic that happened at birth, that they have zero control over, right? | ||
| And so that is the idea, because if you can get that broken down in people's minds, then we can actually start talking about ideas. | ||
| And we can start talking about what are the best solutions on the path toward American prosperity or American success or the American evolution, whatever you want to talk about. | ||
| But the more, the more the left is able to engage people that look like me, that have my same sexual orientation, whatever, the more that the left and leftism is able to rein them in their clutches based purely on these immutable characteristics, I think the weaker that we become as Americans and the further we get from that identity as Americans that I'm trying to push us. | ||
| So that is why I use identity politics in this way. | ||
| That is why I call myself America's favorite black gay Republican. | ||
| For anybody that has any problems with that, you don't have to support me. | ||
| You don't have to buy the book. | ||
| You don't have to do anything at all. | ||
| Look at you, you're not gonna force people to support you. | ||
| You truly are a liberty lover. | ||
| Truly, truly. | ||
| So remember all the way back when to like February when we were pre-pandemic and we were having those democratic debates? | ||
| Do you remember that time of life? | ||
| Oh my God, it seems like a million years ago at this point. | ||
| So there was one of the debates when the Democrats were all going on and on, Bernie and Elizabeth and the whole crew, about how racist America was. | ||
| And I tweeted out something to the effect of, I said, you know, I think it sounds crazy, but Trump's gonna get 30%. | ||
| of the black vote, and they know it, and that's why they're freaking out, because before the pandemic, we know that black unemployment was at an all-time low. | ||
| There was that crazy moment at the State of the Union where he actually, Trump actually says that, and you watch the members of the Congressional Black Caucus sit there like this as if... | ||
| As if this is a problem, I thought that's why they have their caucus, because we want people to be prosperous and all that. | ||
| Then we have now these months of race stuff. | ||
| What do you think is gonna happen? | ||
| Which way do you think the black vote is gonna break at the end of all this? | ||
| Well, look, I think that pre-pandemic, honestly, things were going so well for everybody. | ||
| If you would have asked me that question pre-pandemic, I would have said, oh, yeah, you know, 30, 40%, whatever. | ||
| You know, that was probably a little high even before pre-pandemic. | ||
| But I think that what you're saying right now, this race war that the left is fully behind and really wants to happen and all of this idea of race and all this stuff, you have to understand that these people are freaking They are terrified that Black Americans are really starting to see past their game. | ||
| When you look at a millennial like me, I have lived through a little bit of this, and I used to be on the left, and I've made no bones about that. | ||
| But it just gets to the point where you've seen this all before. | ||
| So you've seen this story play out over and over and over again. | ||
| So you get to the point where you're like me, and you're post-30, and you're just looking at this stuff, And then you start saying, wait a minute, and you start thinking differently. | ||
| And then you amass a platform where people actually start listening to your thoughts. | ||
| And there are people like me, and God, there's so many people out there. | ||
| There's me, and Candace, and Brandon Tatum. | ||
| There's more than I can count right now, which is great, which is a good thing. | ||
| And that freaks the left out, because they can only control the black people that they've ushered into positions of power And in their sort of media control groups, right? | ||
| So the CNNs and the MSNBCs of the world. | ||
| But there's a lot of conversation that is happening with us. | ||
| And I will tell you, Dave, my social media, when all of these riots and all this stuff started happening, exploded. | ||
| And when I tell you the following in all platforms just completely exploded, and it tells me that people are hungry for a different perspective. | ||
| So back to the black vote. | ||
| I think we're looking at somewhere between, and to be completely honest and 100% real, I think we're looking at somewhere between 12 and 15%. | ||
| And even if we get to 12%, that's a 33% jump from 2016. | ||
| And if you get to 15 and 16%, that is double what he did in 2016. | ||
| 33% jump from 2016. | ||
| And if you get to 15 and 16%, that is double, all right, what he did in 2016. | ||
| And Democrats cannot win national elections without upwards of 90% of the African-American vote. | ||
| They know this. | ||
| This is why they did not win in 2016, because black people just stayed home because they didn't want to vote for Hillary because of a lot of different reasons. | ||
| And yet they do the same thing. | ||
| They trot out another deeply unpopular, super-establishment candidate that's been around forever and say that this is going to be our change candidate. | ||
|
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So they make these same mistakes over and over and over again. | |
| The guy who's gonna change all of the systemic racism is the guy that was in the Senate for like 30 years and was vice president for eight years. | ||
| This time, he's gonna do it right. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| Yeah, this time he's gonna do it right. | ||
| And it's the same guy that didn't want integration in schools because he said that it would turn schools into a quote, racial jungle. | ||
| Yes, Joe Biden said that, look it up. | ||
| Yeah, what a weird thing. | ||
| Do you sense the gays are gonna have a similar crack? | ||
| The gays. | ||
| Oh, the gays. | ||
| God, Dave, the gays. | ||
| The gays. | ||
| I try my best with the gays. | ||
| I honestly really don't know. | ||
| You can only judge by the following that you get, and you can judge by the DMs and the emails and stuff that I get. | ||
| But also, I'm in Florida right now. | ||
| The gays are generally more conservative-leaning. | ||
| I think that there is a subset, and there always has been, Of gays and lesbians that are working and law-abiding citizens and they look at some of this stuff and it just doesn't jive with them, you know? | ||
| And I hope and I pray that the gays wake up. | ||
| I think that a lot of them privately are not into the cult stuff. | ||
| I think that a lot of them privately either don't vote for liberals or possibly even vote for Republicans, possibly even vote for Trump, but they would never dare say it. | ||
| Because they would never want to be excommunicated, like I said, which is what happened to you and I. Yeah, I think we talked about this last time, but I honestly can't remember. | ||
| The closet thing, you know, coming out as a gay person versus coming out as conservative or on the right or basically anything non-woke at this point, which was harder for you? | ||
| When you come out as gay nowadays, right? | ||
| You know, you, everybody loves it and it's so accepting and it's all good and it's whatever. | ||
| Coming out as conservative was one of the most disruptive life events I've ever had in my life. | ||
| And you're talking about somebody, you're talking to somebody that's been to war, right? | ||
| So coming out as conservative- Right, literally, yeah. | ||
| Literally, literally been to war. | ||
| So coming out as conservative was such a disruptive life event. | ||
| And I talk about this a little bit. | ||
| Losing all your friends, Um, having some family members say, what, what are you doing? | ||
| People that were at my wedding no longer talk to me. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Um, the, the best man at my wedding no longer talks to me. | ||
| So it's just, it's a very disruptive event. | ||
| So if I had to say which one was harder for me, it was coming out as conservative because you're coming out as gay. | ||
| People are just like, oh, okay. | ||
| Well, you know, sometimes there's a problem with that. | ||
| Um, most times there's not in 2020. | ||
| But when you come out as a conservative, this stigma that is thrown on your shoulders is that you are basically Hitler. | ||
| You are basically supporting the worst, most racist, xenophobic, homophobic, the worst of humanity, as I was called on social media. | ||
| And so that is very disruptive, and you have to have a very strong sense of self To come out of it on the other side. | ||
| That's why I so openly share my story. | ||
| People get fired from their jobs. | ||
| It was the most heartbreaking thing. | ||
| One of my followers on Facebook reached out to me and her two grown adult children called her a racist Nazi and completely cut her out of their life. | ||
| And those stories make me so sad. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I get many of those messages, and the best you can do is try to slowly bring people back. | ||
| Or you can live on your knees forever, and in many ways that's what they want you to do. | ||
| I just don't think it's a good way for people to live. | ||
| But those are your only choices. | ||
| Yeah, I mean according to what that said, either You agree with me in every single way, in every single capacity, on every single thing that we say, on all issues, or you're one of them, and you're excommunicated, you're kicked out. | ||
| And I say this all the time, when some leftist comes for me on Twitter and I decide to engage, I say, watch out, all right? | ||
| Because one day, you're gonna have a problematic thought, right? | ||
| You're gonna think something different. | ||
| You're gonna think something that is outside of this orthodoxy that you've been boxed into. | ||
| And they'll come for you, too. | ||
| That really is it. | ||
| That, in many ways, is the one thing that'll wake everybody up. | ||
| You're gonna have some flicker of individual thought, and no matter how religiously progressive you are, if you dare say it, it's gonna turn on you, and then you're gonna go, whoops, maybe I shouldn't have called all those people. | ||
| Self-hating black people, self-hating gay people, and the rest of it. | ||
| You just said the word problematic. | ||
| You've got a podcast coming out. | ||
| Another podcast? | ||
| There's another podcast coming out. | ||
| Rob Smith is problematic. | ||
| What are you gonna be doing on the Rob Smith is problematic podcast? | ||
| First of all, I'm gonna be being problematic. | ||
| So problematic, if some of your viewers aren't, you're not so up to the terminology. | ||
| Problematic is what a lot of people on the left like to call people who step outside of these boxes of liberal orthodoxy. | ||
| So, you know, I'm deeply problematic. | ||
| Look, I'm a Black gay Republican. | ||
| I'm about as problematic as you get, right? | ||
| And so what I want to do is I want to, number one, take that word back. | ||
| I want to have problematic conversations about what is going on in the world. | ||
| And I've got this community, we call them the Problematics, because a lot of people that follow both you and I are problematic in some way, shape or form. | ||
| So it's time for us to own that, have real conversations. | ||
| And by the way, this is not particularly a conservative thing, because I'm very problematic to a lot of people on the right as well, because I am gay. | ||
| And so I wanted to create this space to have these conversations, to also define what being problematic is, make people proud of being problematic, and also dig a little bit deeper Into these things that really sort of interest me and a lot of us, talking about the LGBTQ cult, talking about school choice for black kids, talking about the black vote. | ||
| And I think that there's a way to have this conversation that is not angry. | ||
| What we're not going to be doing on the podcast is I'm not going to be railing again. | ||
| I'm not going to be talking about what political BS happened this week between who said what in the halls of Congress of this bill, because people don't care. | ||
| They care about their lives and they care about the big ideas. | ||
| And I want to give people something they can use. | ||
| I want to give them, in the leftist terminology, a safe space to be problematic. | ||
| Oh, Lord. | ||
| Oh, Lord. | ||
| Safe space, problematic. | ||
| Are you going to put a trigger warning? | ||
| I should. | ||
| You should put a trigger warning. | ||
| You know, speaking of problematic, last time you and your husband were at our house, you brought over several bottles of champagne. | ||
| We were going with wine and then suddenly tequila shots got involved. | ||
| I haven't had a hangover in about, I don't know, probably eight years. | ||
| I was extremely hungover. | ||
| I hope you're happy about that. | ||
| Um, you know, I did not give you that tequila, Dave. | ||
| And as a matter of fact, if you remember correctly, did I do tequila? | ||
| Oh, no, I did because I was super hungover the next day, too. | ||
| Yes, because I had Golden Girls shot glasses. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| God, you're always bribing me with the Golden Girls shot glasses. | ||
| And we went to Palm Springs the next morning. | ||
| I was so hungover that entire day. | ||
| It was awful. | ||
| Like, red wine to champagne to tequila, bad move. | ||
| You should know. | ||
| That's a rookie mistake, Dave. | ||
| You should know better. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| The whole thing was problematic. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| Problematic mixture. | ||
| Rob, where can people find the book, Rob? | ||
| Promote yourself. | ||
| Yes, promote myself. | ||
| So you can find this book, Always a Soldier, Service, Sacrifice, and Coming Out as America's Favorite Black Gay Republican, wherever books are sold. | ||
| But seeing as how I am so problematic, you can have an easier time finding it on Amazon. | ||
| For as long as Amazon will let it be there. | ||
| All right, Rob. | ||
| For as long as Amazon will let it be there. | ||
| And if you guys know someone who could appreciate a different viewpoint, be sure to share this video by clicking the share arrow below. | ||
| 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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