Michael Knowles hosts the returning Rubin Report, analyzing how Democratic policies like mail-in voting and lockdowns exacerbated societal decay while boosting Trump's polling. They critique media narratives surrounding the Jacob Blake shooting and Richard Spencer's endorsement of Biden, contrasting them with ignored scandals involving Democrats. The discussion highlights the erosion of shared reality through radicalized social media, the normalization of explicit content, and government overreach, concluding that reversing these trends requires individuals to uphold traditional values against an extreme left-wing agenda driving current civil unrest. [Automatically generated summary]
So first off, in a weird way, even though obviously whatever you're about to tell me about, like you could almost tell me anything at this point.
You could tell me aliens invaded.
You could tell me Joe Biden's head exploded.
You could tell me coronavirus was a hoax.
You could tell me half the country has it.
You could tell me almost anything and I could pretty much believe it because that's how bananas the world has become.
But oddly, getting off the grid this year, and this is the fourth time I've done this August off the grid thing, In a weird way, this was the easiest, because in years past, I traveled, I went to the gym, I went to public places, restaurants, and in those places they often have televisions where they're showing the news, or I was in an airport.
I was home this whole time.
We moved, but I was home, so I had no people around me anywhere.
And in other years, if I went to the store, people would come up to me like, Dave, I know you're off the grid, but come on, you have your phone on you, don't you?
Like literally, keeping me honest.
I'm not kidding, I would do that.
I'd pull my pockets, I'd be like, I got nothing.
But now, because I'm in a mask when I'm out, nobody came up to me.
So I have had almost no human communication.
Even this morning when I got here, just to say hi to the security guard,
I was like, whoa, that's what it's like to be with like a human.
'Cause I've been with David basically and our dog.
Were you... I am excited to be back and I'm excited to be sitting here with you and this is gonna be fun and like people are gonna get the reactions in real time and then I'll get right back in the fight tomorrow.
First off, the reason we're doing this here at The Daily Wire is because I moved and we rebuilt the Rubin Report studio, which will debut tomorrow separately.
One of the things that was different this year is that in years past when we've gone away, and I'm laying at the beach and I'm reading and whatever, is my phone is literally locked in a safe.
We couldn't do that this year because I had plumbers and electricians
and people working on things and things like that.
But also, the way we're connected actually really struck me this year more than past
because I have Sonos music in my house, the Sonos system.
So if I wanted to listen to music, I actually needed my phone.
So I took out an old iPhone and it wasn't connected to the cellular network,
but it just had my wifi to make sure I wasn't gonna get notified.
Like these weird things.
Or to turn on Nest air conditioning, you need your phone.
I also feel that whatever you're going to tell me, and this is what I thought a lot about over the last couple of days, Is that I think what I've realized is the reason that this is important to do that for especially for guys like us and and in a weird way everyone's become like us right like meaning creatures of the news because this is now taking over everything and in the public too right everyone's in the public if you have any kind of social media account you are a public facing person right so while we do it with fancier cameras and things like that everyone is like in this fight right yeah everyone's in this thing and what I realized is
When you wake up every day, and I try not to have my phone in my room anyway when I'm on the grid, when you wake up and you're always in the fight and at any given moment somebody could say something horrible about you or that this media thing, like that keeps you in this like, it sounds cliche almost, but like it keeps you like a rat or a hamster on a wheel and your brain is just going all the time and it's just like this endless thing that it's always like, feed me, feed me, feed me.
And I feel like I really do have some better perspective right now.
Like whatever you're going to tell me, again, World War III could have started.
Because every time someone would come into my house and I had to announce to plumbers and electricians and everybody else, guys, just don't, because the news comes.
It's like, why would a plumber come into your house and tell you about the news?
Except we live in this bizarre world where everyone talks about it all the time, right?
So I would literally, someone would come into my house and be like, listen, I know it's going to sound crazy.
They don't know who I am.
So, you know, so, but like, don't tell me about the news.
Okay.
But that idea that it could slow down or it could stop, there's just no way.
Because every time I told somebody what I was doing, people would be like the same thing.
Everyone said the same thing every time.
Oh, it's much worse now.
Oh, God, it's worse now.
You're not going to believe it when you get back what happened this time.
Wait, you don't know about that?
And then I have to stop everyone.
They couldn't stop him.
So I don't know anything about the news.
But you don't you must know about that.
And I was no, no, no.
And then so so the idea that it could stop the idea that the machine could somehow reverse like that's what I think what we all want.
But I was thinking, like, is there any chance like a Democrat got up in the convention and said identity politics is bad or rule of law is good or or the Constitution is good or America is kind of decent?
Well, like, is there any chance that happened?
I'm sure not.
And I'll just say one other thing, and then we should get going here.
So I had no news, no nothing, but one thing, one little thing happened, which is one night we were watching Netflix, and we X'd out of Netflix, like went back into Apple TV, and something happened for, it was two seconds.
We somehow got onto the, I guess it was the Democratic National, the convention, and all I heard, this is exactly what I heard, Yeah.
was Bernie Sanders.
I saw his giant head after not seeing anything for 20 days.
unidentified
And he goes, "Joe Biden will fix our crumbling infrastructure."
So one of the things that I do is when I'm doing cardio and I did cardio, I did about an hour of cardio every day for the last month.
That's how I would pretty much start my mornings.
I'd have some coffee, I'd jump on the, elliptical machine, and I watch old NBA games.
I watch 1990s, you know, Jordan Peak years NBA games, and there's a crowd, and people are screaming, and it's fun, and it's all people.
And I said right before I went off the grid, because I watched like a few minutes of one of these games in the dome, or whatever they call it, you know, their place where there's no people, and you're watching millionaires yell at referees, and it all feels very dystopian and evil.
It's like, why would Why would anyone want to pay these people at this point?
Why would you want to give your hard-earned money to these people?
You know, one of the things that I was thinking about a lot this month, and I think when you get away from it, you can kind of see it a little clearer, is that I know guys like us do complain about the media a lot, and I know that more and more people are waking up to it, but it really is an evil machine.
But he came armed because he said, look, there are rioters in the streets.
We have it on video that these BLM and Antifa guys are attacking this kid, kicking him in the head, going after him.
Takes his gun, shoots three of them.
Shoots three.
Now, these three guys who are now being hailed as heroes, as saints, one of them was a serial domestic abuser, the other was a convicted child molester, one guy was chasing him with a gun.
And the media narrative is that they're the good guys, that this kid is a white supremacist based on absolutely nothing.
And the biggest change that's happened since you've been away is the media initially, and the left, and the universities, and the elected officials, Yeah.
Well, that's what they were telling us about Portland.
All they've got left is that the rest of us are white supremacists and we're not.
And that isn't to say that there aren't some white supremacists.
There are, but I'm going to go out on a limb here, Knowles, after being off the grid for a month and guess that this kid who was cleaning up is probably not a white supremacist.
And I'm going to guess he wasn't looking to shoot people that morning.
So the president, to his great credit, comes out and says, the kid was acting in self-defense.
Now, could you imagine any other politician of either party actually going out on a political limb and saying like, uh, rioters bad, uh, rioters attacking people bad, self-defense totally justified.
So Trump goes out there and says this, but this is the way it's being framed.
And do you see, do you see the contradiction there that the media are trying to work out?
Totally peaceful, no violence at all.
All the violence is being caused by white supremacists.
I thought there was no violence.
What do you mean all the violence is?
And if you look down, obviously, how many white supremacists are there in the country?
How many times can they pull the same trick before we all wake up?
And that is what I will tell you.
You know, one of the things that I actually did get to do is, I'm sure like you, I get a lot of emails that are nice and people say nice things about me.
I read your book or whatever.
But I get a lot of handwritten letters, and I usually don't have a lot of time to be reading them, but I did read a lot of handwritten letters that people sent me.
And almost every time, people include the phrase, wake up.
Like, I woke up.
It has something to do with some of the things that you've talked about, or people.
And it's like, this type of stuff, it's like, of course!
And it's like, I'm sure you're going to tell me another city something happened.
I honestly don't know if restaurants are open right now or not.
I know I can go to the supermarket, and I went to CVS the other day, and a guy yelled at me because I was walking into the store without my mask.
I did put it on as I was entering, like I was entering an airlock.
So I would guess that it all is worse.
I would guess that the The vision of it that we all hear or see is worse because that's what the media has to run with, at least through the election.
I don't know if it's, like, I'm guessing you're not gonna read me numbers right now that show me it's much worse or suddenly lots of young people are dying or something like that.
This is what I'm talking about, about the rat race and what they get you to do.
You can find videos, I'm sure you have similar ones too, you can find videos of me saying two weeks into this thing that when they say flatten the curve, that I guarantee you once we flatten the curve, that they will pick some other arbitrary thing down the road.
And I remember when Newsom, our governor here in California, when he said, okay, we're gonna lock down till August 1st.
I remember saying on air, people can find the videotape.
I remember saying, well, there's no reason to think they'll open up then.
And now they'll just come up with some other arbitrary thing and some other arbitrary thing.
And we all keep playing along.
We all keep playing along.
And again, that's not to say it's a hoax.
It's to say, There's something wrong with the information system, or something like that.
6% of people who died of COVID died specifically of COVID, which brings the number from around 180,000 down to about 11,000 who died specifically from COVID.
Okay, so a day or two before I went off the grid, Politico leaked out that it was going to be Kamala Harris, and I sort of felt that was like a little too obvious, even though he said it had to be a woman, and we know he's... He said it had to be black.
Did he in fact say it had to be... He said a woman of color.
Do I think that Kamala would help him or hurt him?
Well, it can't really... Well, first off, the polls at this point, it's like... Who knows what the polls mean?
It can't really help because the Democrats hated her.
Nobody voted for her.
Nobody likes her.
And the crazy lefties that are running the show right now, the Antifa-Bernie coalition of Marxist lunatics, they all hate Kamala Harris because they think she's like a corporatist sellout.
You remember that moment at one of the debates when she was still in it, when the question was asked to Biden about would you use an executive action to ban assault weapons or do something on guns?
And Biden said, people can find this.
Biden said, "Oh, well, it would have to be constitutional."
And Kamala Harris looks at him laughing.
And she says, "Joe, can't we just say, yes, we can."
No one in their right mind believes Joe Biden is a racist.
But then you throw it out there, and for anyone that's on the fence about politics that's watching this happen, it's like, when you see them do it against their own and it's a lie, does it make you wonder when they call everybody else?
It was, the only question is, were they, was it actually going out live or was it, Did Biden get out of the basement, or did he literally do it from the basement?
So, he did.
He actually did somewhat well in his acceptance speech.
He slurred some words, but that's par for the course.
They're setting it up, knowing that Biden's brain is going to explode or something, but she doesn't want people, they haven't done it for four years, these last four years.
So that does, I guess, well, no, I mean, I suppose I could envision a situation where she's tipping to the people, you know, if our guy wins, let's make sure he accepts it.
So they do it because obviously the DMC is now just totally secular totally atheistic and you were right Hillary Clinton of course I love I love that it is more believable that Trump brings peace to the Middle East than that Hillary Clinton says respect the election and not only is it believable it's true Hillary Clinton went out there and said Joe Biden should not concede this election.
They are trying to start a war.
Under any circumstances.
Not just he shouldn't concede, it's closed, it'll be a little... Under any circumstances.
That happened at the DNC thing, short of Biden burning the American flag, like right up there, like, you see, let's just do it, everybody, that I wouldn't have believed because I don't, I hope maybe more people are realizing how evil and corrupt and anti-American and everything else this thing has become.
And I look forward to criticizing the Republicans in just a moment when you tell me a little bit about what happened there.
But there's nothing, we've discussed this a million times in the last year, there is nothing the liberals can do.
The good, decent liberals who are scattered throughout the galaxy, and there's very few of them left, there's nothing they can do to stop this thing.
If you think that Joe Biden is the thing that's gonna stop Antifa and the rot that is AOC and the rest of them, And I just, I say it all the time, but I can't wait till it takes out Bernie.
That when it comes around for Bernie and they're dancing as they destroy him, which they will.
Well, remember when she said the thing about when she got caught off mic or she got on a hot mic after she was on some show where she said, you know, I understand.
She's like, I've never gotten the hate from the right that I get from the left, which is her own side.
And she goes, I understand why the conservatives call them godless.
And it's like, it does make sense.
They don't believe in anything other than power.
Yeah, yeah.
That doesn't mean every single one of them.
I don't think they're all awful people, but Biden, who I think is probably a decent man,
And so he arrives at this conclusion based on a false premise.
So that was the DNC, all vague, all whatever.
The reason that the Democrats are still pushing all of these race riots and stoking all these race riots Because the RNC did a great job of black and minority outreach.
In a way, it was like almost pandering.
You thought, oh my gosh, it's like every black Republican in the world is coming and speaking at this thing.
But they wanted to make the point that Democrats are calling us racist.
We are manifestly not racist.
The RNC, I got to tell you, I think it's because of Trump.
Well, you know what it is? You can't bullshit people forever.
Because eventually the masses wake up.
The bullshitters aren't that good at bullshit.
I think that that's starting to become what is real.
So it's like, if your whole narrative is, America is evil, it was founded on racism, 1619 project, systemic racism, everything's evil, we're an oppressive state, the patriarch, all of these things, well then you'd go, alright, if all of those horrible things are true, I guess they had something to do with the time before Trump.
You know what I mean?
You can't suddenly blame it all on Trump.
So in a weird way, their own logic or their own nonsense, the nonsense that they were peddling about how evil we all are and how evil the system that has freed more people than any other country ever, the more they've peddled that nonsense, in a way, it actually is telling you that Trump isn't the horrible, evil thing.
Because it's like, oh, I guess Obama was pretty evil.
He was part of it.
And I guess Biden was part of it.
And that Nancy Pelosi, you haven't told me anything about Pelosi's.
If your whole story is how horrible America is, which I suspect, and has always been, which is what I suspect most of the DNC, what the convention was, well in many ways you're actually saying, okay, well then Trump's not to blame for any of it.
He's just a new guy.
You may not like him, but he's a new guy who, by the way, at his last State of the Union was talking about all-time low black unemployment, and the Congressional Black Caucus sat there like this.
I thought that was a good thing, but what do I know?
Well, my reaction is just personally having been to Liberty University and spoke there at convocation.
I mean, it was an absolutely incredible moment and I don't think that just hearing you tell me that doesn't change any of the reality of what I saw there with the students and with the staff and the dean and everything else.
You know, what's interesting is there were two, I'm going to blank on at least one of the guys' names, but there were two stories about Democratic, the donor, who was the guy, Buck?
Andrew Gilliam, who lost, he was almost gonna be governor of Florida.
Yeah, he was that, yeah.
He got caught doing meth and having sex with a bunch of guys and whatever.
I don't begrudge him doing anything.
I'm not for legalizing meth, but I don't begrudge people for doing stuff and I don't begrudge people for having consensual relations.
But again, it's to your point of if that was a Republican or if that was a Christian, Then we know these things get blown up, but they're Democrats, so somehow they can get away with everything while also making sure that everyone else is destroyed for it.
That right there is the thing that we have to get past as a nation.
All the good people have to get past this thing where the double standards stay intact.
As they're leaving, though, so that one convention, the RNC, ends on the White House lawn,
because you're not allowed to do it anywhere else, right?
So, they do it on the White House lawn.
As people are leaving, they get mobbed.
They get absolutely... The people who are congressmen, senators, get mobbed by BLM and the Antifa.
To the point that Rand Paul at one point is grabbing a cop to help the cop, because the cop was being attacked, and Rand Paul jumps in.
Rand Paul... They try to kill Rand Paul every six months, and he somehow survives.
And so he's, you know, helping everybody out.
But these were very provocative situations.
The rioters, who were largely BLM, and there was one very shrill white woman targeted...
Congressman who lost his legs in Afghanistan and were like threatening him, and this guy's obviously dealt with the Taliban, he's not worried about these shrimps.
They, you could hear them, you could hear them a little bit.
Oh, wow.
But that was the way out.
I mean, frankly, it was the biggest show of any of the conventions, watching this unfold in real time.
But one thing that was so amazing is, and you might have seen this before you left, there was this phrase that kept cropping up, say her name.
And they were talking about the killing of Breonna Taylor, which, by the way, this was presented to us as this woman was totally innocent, and she had no role in any of these crimes, and it was just a killing and a murder by the police.
Turns out that wasn't true.
Turns out leaked court documents are now saying that she was involved in these drug crimes, she was part of this enterprise, and so, as always, this is a much murkier situation than anyone thought.
They're screaming, say her name, at Rand Paul.
who authored a bill naming Breonna Taylor and trying to put an end to no-knock warrants.
So they're smart, actually, to have not done a convention, A, because he probably shouldn't be out there in front of people, but B, because their own base would have burned the freaking thing down.
And how would the media have then spun that?
You know what I mean?
Like the BLM, progressive, Marxist, blah, blah, Yeah.
Yeah.
They hate Biden, they hate Kamala, they hate Hillary, they hate anyone that could be thought of,
they hate Pelosi, you know, they like AOC and I guess Ilhan and they like...
The squad.
Right, the squad.
They like that and that thing will destroy itself as we talked about before,
but it was a pretty shrewd move then to do it all virtually.
You know, your month away actually gave you a perspective that I did not consider.
Because it seemed to me, you know, there had been rumblings, okay, we're going to do it virtually, we're going to do it online, but you still didn't know, is it going to be in Charlotte, is it going to be in Jacksonville, is it going to be in Milwaukee?
I had just assumed, because the left has been so aggressive against the conservatives, that shutting down the conventions was about shutting down the Republican convention.
I mean, right before I went off, the big thing was mail-in ballots, which I think is the idea that with a pandemic and with a race riot and general state of chaos and nobody believing anything, the idea that we'd suddenly alter significantly our voting system That seems, as the kids say, problematic to me.
That seems like you don't add in another crazy element.
Unless the whole freaking game, whatever we're talking about here, is designed to just make everyone crazy all the time.
The polls have shrunk such that Trump and Biden are basically in a dead heat.
Ronald Reagan won 49 states in 1984.
He didn't win Minnesota.
Minnesota is a stubborn state, and now they're running even.
And where's the next riot?
In Wisconsin.
So it creates this problem, doesn't it?
That the riots, which have clearly been encouraged by the Democratic Party, and you've got videos of Ayanna Pressley, of Hillary Clinton, of Nancy Pelosi, all these people saying, Yeah, go out, burn it down.
Maxine Waters, mob people, get in the streets.
Chris Cuomo, protests don't have to be peaceful.
Well, they've encouraged it.
But now, wherever the protests, the riots are happening...
Trump's numbers are doing great, and Biden's numbers are going down.
By playing with fire, literally, the average person, the average person who's not purely political, the average person that just has a job and wants to raise kids and have a house and that's it and, you know, play video games or whatever the hell it is they do with their free time, If their choice is, oh, we can either burn the whole thing down, literally, we will watch our stores burn down, we will watch the economy collapse, we will watch the whole system just crumble in front of us.
Or, orange man who's a little weird with the hair and he talks kind of funny on the Twitter, They're going to all choose that.
It's just so obvious.
Now, I'm not saying that's really what the choice is, but if that's what we're being given, if that's what the funnel has, you know, the funnel of ideas or whatever you want to say has just like left us with these choices, one or the other, I think you're probably, I will say it right now, I think we could be looking at a Reagan re-election situation.
We actually could, and it's this odd thing where you have to ask yourself, and maybe you have insight, because you're at least a former Democrat, or I guess still a registered Democrat.
Why would the Democrats encourage these riots that are going to kill their poll numbers?
Knowles, as you know, I just moved and several times in the last year I took videos and I posted screen captures of people literally stealing mail out of my mailbox.
I don't know if they were just kids trying to find credit cards.
Who the hell knows what they were?
But the point is, like, if you want to make the system even more weak or have even more people not trust the system, then you would alter the system right before an election.
Yeah, they they actually will take that photograph and say, well, because a mailbox was closed in Burbank, Trump is trying to steal the election through the vulnerable mechanism that we have been foisting on the country.
That's where we're at, is that reality is on trial.
When we were driving over here today, David was saying to me, you know, you're going to sit down with Knowles and get all this, like, how do you feel about all this?
And I was kind of like, not nervous, I don't get nervous for any of these things, but like, I had this vision that we would be in this position
where you would say like a whole bunch of things to me.
And then it would all be like, well, okay, we're all just gonna view the world
very differently than each other.
You'll find some people in your world who will view the world in a similar way.
And the issue that you have, I don't know if the first one of these happened before you went off the grid, but you had an image of an MSNBC reporter standing in front of a burning... Oh, Ali Velshi!
But actually, what you're probably saying is, though, The only way that would work is if the school district charged the parents more money to come use the schools which are closed to do the online learning from the schools that you can't go to, right?
That would... That would make sense.
So, in order to use the remote learning centers at the schools, parents have to pay $140 a week plus a $35 registration fee.
Unless you're a bureaucrat who works for the government, in which case you get a discount.
It actually... The song actually does have a point.
The thesis of the song is that all women are prostitutes.
That's actually the thesis.
She says, yeah, I got my man by... And she describes sexual acts that I know, look, we're young, hip millennials, okay, we've done all sorts... Like, that you've never thought of.
I mean, in this kind of... It's... I didn't know that pornography... Having a slop bucket when you're...
When everyone can screw up something so perfectly, it's actually kind of miraculous.
So she, because she didn't show in effect the WAP, apologizes to the people who show the WAP, OnlyFans drops the price, the cap, So that basically she can't blow those guys out of the water, so to speak.
And now... Well, this is... I think we're mixing metaphors, but they are creating a lot of images, yes.
And lest you think that a movie star, who's already a millionaire, going on and trying to make another quick couple million by becoming a pornographic actress, lest you think the WAP, lest you think all of that is the bottom of our sexual decay, What's the last sexual taboo in the world, at least in our country?
That's what I'm saying when I say there's a war on reality.
It's almost like we're getting We're sort of in a Boy Who Cried Wolf, but it's more perverse than that, because it's almost like we need more shock value every day to keep us going.
And again, that gets back to that rat race thing.
We've dumbed this all down and we've made it all so crazy that...
I was reading, you know, one of the things that I read over the last month, I read Common Sense by Thomas Paine and a bunch of his other writings.
And it's like, I was in the middle of one of the paragraphs, I stopped and I was like, my God, if a politician spoke like this.
You know, if I found, as you say, if I found out coronavirus doesn't even exist, I'd say like, huh, okay, yeah, I guess so, whatever.
But it just seemed to me like kids, you know, that I, you'd think that's off limits, but when you see the kind of craziness with shutting down the schools, shutting down, you know, the, the, all of these kind of drag nine-year-olds and whatever, all these kinds of things, it has been building such that there are no more taboos, but the way you put it is so right, which is, You're in that hamster wheel, you gotta get a little more, you gotta go a little faster, you've gotta get more insanity.
Yeah, well, it's like, when I say it's a reality war, it's like a thought war, sort of.
So it's like, I was even, I tweeted out that we're doing this right now, but I haven't looked at Twitter yet.
I haven't looked at my feed, obviously, and I haven't looked at my mentions.
But if you think about what Twitter is, which drives so much of this, this thing that we're talking about, Twitter is just people having thoughts all day long, and the second they have Thought, thought, thought, thought, thought.
And you're banging these thoughts all around all day long.
And someone across the world who you've never heard of could have a thought that has no value in any way, but could somehow trigger you into launching an attack on them.
And then next thing you know, there's a problem at the embassy.
Because we already had a, we had a problem with big tech, we had a problem with information, we had a problem with truth.
And then what did we do?
We said, oh, the vehicles that you get all this information, they're going to become exponentially more important to you, meaning you don't go to a bar anymore to meet a stranger to talk about things.
Yeah, well, you know, that crazy guy who works in this building, that Shapiro guy, what did he trend on Twitter for a little bit before I went off?
When he said what we all know to be true, which is what actuaries do every day by, you know, guarding risk versus reward, in essence, that we are going, as a society, we are going to have to decide what amount of people being sick or what amount of people dying is acceptable.
We don't want it.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's the simple truth to what is acceptable for us to then continue with human society
We are in the streets going crazy but I guess for something else.
But like this idea that just because I moved I was walking around the neighborhood and there's some nice restaurants that are there that I had never seen before and I'm looking and they're all closed and it's like That we've taken away, it's not just that you can't go to a restaurant, it's that somebody started that restaurant.
There was a little Italian trattoria by me and I walked by, it looked so nice inside, like had a little bar that you'd go to just have a glass of wine and and uh like just some fun old Italian posters and things and I was like this is the type of place I would love to walk to and and be fun and it's like somebody built that place.
That was somebody's life, that was somebody's livelihood, probably their family, all those things.
We've just ripped that away from people.
And I'm not saying, again, that I'm not saying it's a hoax, but the cost on the other side is like, why are we afraid to talk about that?
Why are we afraid to push back and say, sorry, Gavin Newsom or whoever, or Andrew Cuomo or whoever, you don't get to decide whether I'm going to have a life that has purpose or not.
And speaking of Cuomo, so Cuomo implemented, I actually don't know, I don't know if he implemented it before you left, but he certainly maintained it, which is the quarantine.
Oh, I was gonna say, remember when he did the thing, which was right before I went off, where you could be at a bar, but then certain, but wings don't count as food, because you have to order food at a bar, and then people started ordering wings to get away with it.
Yeah, but wings, that's not- And then he decided wings isn't a meal.
This is one of the things, this is where we've talked about this many times.
What my frustrations are with my last remaining liberal friends is they seem to think that there will be some point that it will get so nutty with the left that at some point logic and reason will be forced to be accepted.
But that is the reverse of how this thing will work.
Every time they're proven wrong about something, they double down on it more because it proves to them that the system is evil.
You understand, like, for example, so Trump became president.
Trump in a sane world would probably not be president, but you would think that the lefties would have been like, man, maybe we really did screw some things up.
Right, and think about, and that's, by the way, I was doing a million videos about that because I considered myself a lefty at the time and going, guys, we should rethink this as lefties.
What are we doing?
And return to the roots of liberalism.
But what I found was, all they wanted to do, it was proof That they were right.
The loss was proof that they were right.
So everything forces them to double down into their own bullshit, or crapulence, as Mr. Burns might say.
Everything is a proof, a further proof of their theory, as opposed to, oh, what would a rational person do, or a businessman do, or someone that has to be functional in society?
You keep doing things that screw up, you might go, oh, maybe I am doing something wrong, but they actually operate on the reverse thesis.
I mean, what did people think was going to happen when a bunch of us were like, hey, you know, if you have a penis, you're a male.
And they said you're a bigot or I don't know what the hell they said.
But they were all making it sound like, oh, it's just a bunch of us crazy people on YouTube saying that this stuff matters when they go for this.
And yet now we're seeing it.
Now we're seeing it.
Oh, well, if that doesn't matter.
By the way, wasn't there, isn't there some law being passed?
Someone passingly mentioned this to me.
So I sense something might be happening in California now where they're actually trying to institute racial quotas at companies or something like that.
You and I actually, we had several dinners where we both discussed it.
I decided to stay and there were several things Career wise and everything else happening, but what I really thought, what it really boiled down to more than anything else, more than the weather or any of that stuff, was that if someone like me cannot live here, cannot live in California, like it's become so extreme that someone like me can't live there, then the American experiment, the union,
The states, the whole federal project, then it really is over.
And then really what we're saying is, okay, we're at civil war.
Like the states really are going to just fray.
And if you believe this, you'll live here.
And if you believe this, you'll live here.
I'm not willing to give that up yet.
And I will tell you one other thing, which is that during all this, I watched on Netflix
while I was off the grid.
I watched this two-part documentary on Netflix.
It wasn't "Cutie Pie" or whatever that was.
It was a Frank Sinatra documentary, two two-hour episodes.
It was phenomenal, and I love the old crooners and all that.
And one of the interesting things about Sinatra that you forget about because of the voice
and because of the rat pack and all that stuff is that he was a huge Democrat for a long time,
What happens when California fully goes bankrupt and then the feds are under pressure?
The fed is now under pressure to bail it out.
Every single person in Texas who lived in within their means is going to want to kill people from California and you wouldn't even know you wouldn't be able to blame them.
So we have to fix some of this from the inside.
Ronald Reagan was governor of California before he was president.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was a Republican governor of California not that long ago.
Like maybe some of this stuff can get fixed and I'm gonna freaking try to fix some of it.
And I mean, we mentioned a little bit earlier this case of a Kyle Rittenhouse, this guy who defended himself with a gun.
Now they're saying it's open warfare.
The president's defending him.
But, you know, up until now, it's really only been left wing violence.
And now you've got a right winger defending himself against the left wing violence.
And it's not just people getting knocked out.
This does kind of remind you a little bit of the 1850s, right?
I mean, whenever people have brought up civil war, I've just thought, no, it's not going to happen.
But if even in the month you've been gone, things have gotten so much worse.
There have been videos that have come out in just the past week or so of people posting to say, white lives don't matter.
And it's a young black guy goes up to a middle aged white guy, knocks him in the head with a brick.
There was a story that just came out a couple of days ago, a black A customer at AutoZone goes up to the middle-aged white employee, just stabs him, starts stabbing him.
And when he was asked why did he do it, he said, I watched a bunch of videos on the internet of police brutality and I felt I had to go out there and kill a white guy.
But actually, we now have firm evidence of all of these social media platforms radicalizing people toward the left, toward racial division, toward racial hatred.
See, the problem with discussing this is I know already there's some idiot at Media Matters or somewhere that's going to clip this and say, OK, so here's Rubin and Knowles denying coronavirus.
We're not.
We're not.
What we're talking about is what is it that you do in the long term health of a society?
when you just train everyone to behave a certain way and do all of these things that,
for as much as we can tell, aren't necessarily scientifically proven,
whether you have a box on someone's head with an opening up here,
but that you just train children to just follow orders like robots and all of these things.
I'm much more interested in that discussion than whatever the political machination of the day is,
but there's a certain set of people out there that are making it, that it is their job,
and they are well-funded often, to try to make sure we can't have those conversations,
so you'll just keep accepting it.
They'll keep feeding you crap, and you'll keep eating crap 'cause you'll forget.
That's what I meant before about how February seems so long ago to us.
It's like it really does.
Try to remember February.
Everything was pretty good.
And we're forgetting that things were pretty good.
No, you go in the box, and then what you do in the box is your business, okay?
I'm not gonna make any judgments.
This was a popular scientific idea.
And when I look at the ridiculous bubble boy, when I look at all these things, I just think, like, people are going to be making fun of this in 50 years.
But as of right now, it's very serious science.
We've all got to take it super duper seriously.
Do you think we gotta shake people out of the science thing?
I mean, you know, now Media Matters' headline's gonna be, Rubin and Knowles, they're against science.
Well, I don't think we have to shake people out of science.
I think we have to shake people into sense.
That really is it.
That is it.
Common sense.
Yeah.
And living within your means and being a decent person and all of the things that we all know are obviously true and yet we somehow, I don't know, I can see it very clearly now after not being in it and I'm really going to try to, I've tried for the last while anyway, but I'm going to really try to
help people make some sense out of this thing because it's the people that think it's just gonna it's
either they I think some people think it's either gonna stop or or that it will reset itself or
somehow that this this messed up thing we're in right now it can't be like it can't last forever.
Yeah. Well I agree it can't last forever but it could it could last for decades.
I've mentioned this on the show a couple of times before.
When I had Giuliani on, I mentioned it to him.
But there have been, my family has had, at times dozens, something like 60 or 70 Reuben family members extended on either side, living in New York City since around 1908, something like that.
There's one person left.
One person left.
My sister and her husband and two kids left in the middle of the pandemic.
That took four people out and now, and then one cousin died in the midst of the pandemic.
Well, first off, we don't want to fight a war with China.
That's number one.
Well, that sort of gets to what I was saying about how do we get out of this sort of thing.
Would it take something horrible?
Does it take a Pearl Harbor or something so terrible for us to turn and look at the person who maybe is our ideological opponent and say, you're a human.
Now, what I can say is that Generally speaking, in the last two years or so, I have found that people on the right are almost always, almost without exclusion, willing to do that.
Willing to give those guys the benefit of the doubt, right?
What I've seen on the left is almost no willingness to do it.
And not only that, but if you see someone else on the left that's willing to do it, you go and destroy them.
One of the things that I, right before I went off, was that guy Matt Taibbi, who's a journalist, lefty, lifelong lefty journalist, who suddenly is saying, you know, something's wrong with the left, guys.
But now, what I remember from just the day or two before I went was where there were all these lefties going, oh, now he's in it for that Coke money and the big right-wing money and the big Knowles money.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's like, come on, man.
This every time someone says there's something wrong here.
Yeah, if you go to destroy them well
then what you will be left with is something that is very sick and twisted and evil and and I think that that's what
they have on their hands at the moment and the question is do you go in and try to
Operate or do you just say this thing is done?
I mean, that's what I think.
I think this thing is done, and there are better places.
If you believe any of the things that I believe, and if you believe in old-school liberalism, or you just think America is decent, or any of those things, like, there's a lot of bridges to build, right in this freaking building that I'm in right now.
I just mean, look, Oakland's always been a little radical.
That, to me, is a level that we haven't seen at least in 40, 50 years, and maybe not ever, that you've now got an entire left, I mean elected Democrats, saying, America was never great.
Yes, and the one thing that Biden said, the one thing that was sort of uplifting that Biden said
was that he's going to bring the light and not the darkness.
I thought, you know, what's another word for bringer of light?
His Lucifer, okay, hold on.
No, no, obviously it's a little complicated, but that was the line.
We're going to bring the light.
We're going to bring the light from the darkness, but it doesn't, that was all just kind of empty words.
He didn't get into anything tangible.
I would actually say the most.
The uplifting part of the convention was a very dark part which was they had this woman whose father died from coronavirus and he liked Trump and I guess he didn't wear the mask the right way or something and so he died very sad and she went on and said Donald Trump killed my dad and what she was really saying is my dad is an idiot who believed Donald Trump and he's what a fool he was he should have listened to me because I hate Trump and anyway it's Trump's fault for some reason.
When was the last DNC where they didn't accuse the Republican of killing somebody?
You weren't allowed... That sounds like something a sane society would do.
Yeah, well, scientific... Well, wasn't there like a whole thing where a bunch of scientists said that racism is more of like a threat than coronavirus or something like that?
I know you know this, but there was a period about a year ago where there was like a month where genuine white supremacists online, whatever that is, it's hard to tell if they're just trolls or whatever, Yeah.
started showing up to some like turning point events and college conservative events.
My events.
They showed up to both of our events.
They showed up to Ben's events and they showed up to Candace Owens events
and a whole bunch of other stuff.
And you know what happened at all those events?
Oh, they showed up to Trump Jr's events.
Yeah, yeah.
You know what happened to all those events?
We all shot them down.
We all argued with them.
Some of us maybe more effectively than others.
But nobody acquiesced to those bad ideas.
No one gave an inch or gave a quarter to any of that.
And yet the media, the only time the media covered it was when Trump Jr.
sort of got a whole bunch of people screaming and mobbed.
And the media, I watched the report on CNN, they didn't know what to do.
Because it was white supremacists angry at Trump Jr.
Now this doesn't make sense.
Isn't his base supposed to be these people?
So they showed it because they wanted to show a mob with Trump Jr.
Like that's good.
Like something bad's happening on the right.
But what they didn't really show was that he was the one fighting against it.
And the headlines about it in the Washington Post was the headline was about how Donald Trump's niece, not his brother's daughter by the way, that's a different brother, how the niece wrote this tell-all book about how terrible Trump is.
You say, well, what does that niece have anything to do with the brother who died?
It reminded me of that's the treatment that the president of the United States gets.
But when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dies, he's a gentlemanly scholar, an austere religious scholar.
And the big the big pitch from the conventions, the big pitch from the protests, protests, the big pitch from the riots, the big pitch from the people on the coronavirus lockdowns.
What is it?
This is the most important election in our lifetimes.
And you always hear that, and you say, that's a bunch of BS.
I'm just endorsing every single tweet and every single decision he's ever made.
But besides that, The choice now, we're deciding, does reality matter?
Does facts matter?
Does history matter?
Does anything that we thought mattered, that helped build something really great here in America for 250 years, does any of it matter?
If you think that it doesn't matter, then you really should Be a lefty, be a progressive, vote for these guys, destroy the whole damn thing.
But it's just the people, the very people who are destroying the thing, if they only knew how much worse it could be, if they only knew what, I mean, and this, I say this all the time, and I say it in my book, like, they should just, you don't have to do a history lesson, because I know they think history was written by the evil white supremacist.
They should just talk to their parents about what their grandparents lived through.
That's all you have to do if you're an American.
If you're an American and you think it's so horrible right now, Yeah.
Talk to your grandparents if they're alive.
If you're really lucky, talk to your great-grandparents.
The riots are about the election, the lockdowns are about the election, the elections about the election, the mail, all this stuff.
Are there enough liberals, you know, kind of open-minded liberals, to be persuaded?
And will the events of the past month that you have just missed out on, that I have filled you in on, Are they enough to turn public opinion and get a Democrat to vote for that evil orange man, that mango Mussolini?
Well, I would say look at it slightly differently, which is if you, let's just say we repeat exactly what happened last time, right?
So you have the people who voted for Trump and the people who voted for Hillary.
I could see a lot of people right now that are seriously frustrated with the left, kind of just holding their nose and voting for Trump or have fully come around because I've seen plenty of those people too.
Karlyn Borsanko, who you probably know from Twitter, from the knitting group I've had on my show, she's now a huge Trump supporter after being a lifelong lefty.
I think there are a lot of people that are just like, the left has gone completely bananas and I either love Trump or I love what he represents or I'm gonna hold my nose and I'm gonna not be polled and I'm gonna secretly vote for him.
Try to imagine it the other way.
If you voted for Trump, And suddenly you were like, all right, it's now three and a half years later.
What is it that Trump did that would get you to, that would drive you to be like, all right, I'm going to vote for the guys that are kind of endorsing burning the cities down.
Like I, that jump, I would love for someone to explain it to me if they can, but I can't, you might say, you know what?
I thought Trump was going to be more presidential in his tweets or Richard Spencer thought he'd be more of a white supremacist.
Didn't say he was voting for Biden yet, but months ago he said he was no longer supporting Trump, and they announced that on The View.
Joy Behar announced it on The View, and the clowns in the audience, they're all applauding, and it's like, you dingbats, do you realize you're applauding a white supremacist just because he doesn't support Trump?
Well, on the same thing that I've always described myself as, which is I'm a world-weary optimist.
I'm not a wide-eyed optimist, like, oh my God, everything's going to be great and things are going to be spectacular.
I'm a world-weary optimist.
I'm worried about the world.
I worry about the world, you know, like, I mean, the way David and I operate,
he's very detail-oriented and, you know, can plan a lot of things during the day
or if we have people, friends over for dinner, what we're gonna do and all those things,
and it's all great and wonderful.
And I'm, and I always, and he'll always say to me, what do you think about, you know,
should we put the glasses on this side or this, that?
And I'm always like, well, Iran could get the bomb.
Like, I'm worried about these other world things, which is everything that we're sort of talking about here.
So I'm not an optimist in some, like, imaginary way of being an optimist.
And I'm not a pessimist because, you know, I don't think you could do what we do and be a pessimist because you'd kill yourself.
I mean, you really would.
Because every day you'd wake up, you'd go, oh man, more bad stuff.
You'd just be talking about it negatively and it would kill you.
I think that if I mean I said it before, but if enough of us just try to deal with this stuff honestly, and just try to slow down that wheel a little bit, and again just be a little bit better than all the people who would love to destroy us, I think that's the winning ticket.
That's the winning ticket.
Be a Republican.
or be a Democrat, that's just like be a human in a, be a functioning human in a messed up time.
That's right.
Be someone that just thinks about your life and the world you wanna live in,
in somewhat of a serious way.
It doesn't mean you're perfect, obviously.
But like, if you can do that, it's sort of the orgasm box
that you were talking about before.
You know what I mean?
Like, if you can get your--
Always comes back.
If you can get your stuff in order, then maybe, well, forget the orgasm box.
I'll be serious for a moment.
Why did Jordan Peterson want people to clean their room?
The idea was don't clean the world first.
And I think that's what all the social justice warriors and these purple haired.