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Oct. 21, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
27:15
Breaking up Google & Watch Black Politician Denounce BLM & CRT | DIRECT MESSAGE | Rubin Report
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dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Alright people, this is the Rubin Report Direct Message for October 21st, 2020.
I am Dave Rubin, and we are less than two weeks away from the day that ghouls and goblins will run amok in the streets.
That's right, people.
Election Day is only 13 days away.
There's also Halloween.
But I'm pretty sure they outlawed that, so we're gonna stick with Election Day.
All right, the craziness is being ramped up, so we're gonna cover three stories for you today.
And actually...
Two of them have nothing really to do with the presidential election in and of itself.
I thought that would escape us a little bit.
They sort of ancillarily do, but not directly about the election.
And one of them is just about a bananas person who is, for some reason, a public person too.
So the three stories we're going to knock out today.
The Department of Justice has announced a lawsuit against Google, basically, And this is all about breaking up their monopoly.
There's a lot to discuss here philosophically, depending on where you fall and what level of government involvement you want.
And do you think the government has any right to break up a monopoly?
Most on the purely libertarian side would say no.
Some on the sort of More classical liberal side would say okay maybe you don't want government regulators but you might want to break them up because you do want to be wary about some power.
On the conservative side now I see a lot of people saying absolutely break them up and regulate them and do whatever you got to do because if we don't this is our last chance to stop them.
That's generally not a conservative position usually It's the Democrats, it's the lefties who want more government involvement and are sort of more anti-business, but in a certain level at this point, it's hard to figure out if Google is the government or not, or if they're at least more powerful than the government.
So we'll talk about all of those issues and more.
Then there was a fantastic video that went viral yesterday by a conservative MP in the UK by the name of Kemi We're gonna show you the video and talk a little bit about what she said.
And the reason I wanted to show it was because, you know, most of the stuff that I do here is from an American perspective, but these terrible ideas of critical race theory, of identity politics, these collectivist ideas that have been the wrong ideas for millennia, From the beginning of time, basically, the things that have caused, you know, tribes to kill other tribes because they looked a little different and they were obsessed with skin color and ethnicity and everything else.
These bad ideas are everywhere, right?
It's not just an American phenomenon.
We know it's happening in every, well, it's happening in every country, but it's happening in every Western country to some degree where people are told to be guilty about their skin color or where they're from.
Or what their religion is or the rest of it.
We know it's happening in Canada.
It's happening in Australia.
It's happening in the UK.
It's happening in Ireland.
I mean, Australia, it's happening absolutely everywhere.
So it's always good to see when a politician actually stands up for the truth and fights it.
I'm sure the mob is going to come for her, but we're gonna show you that video and talk about that.
And then finally, You remember this guy, Keith Olbermann?
I remember Keith Olbermann because when I was in college, I wanted to be a broadcaster.
I actually wanted to go to Syracuse University, which was sort of the broadcasting capital of the world.
That's where you went.
I'm pretty sure Marv Albert went there and Bob Costas went there.
And it was like, that's where if you wanted to be a broadcaster of any kind, not just a sports broadcaster,
that's where you'd wanna go.
I ended up going to SUNY Binghamton, which is a state school in New York,
which is only about 40 minutes away.
And I visited Syracuse a couple of times and really did wanna go there.
But I wanted to be a SportsCenter anchor.
That's not exactly what I'm doing these days, but I guess I'm ballparking,
sort of doing something, anchoring something, right?
But Keith Olbermann was a great anchor on SportsCenter.
Those of you of a certain age will remember him with Dan Patrick on the big show and they were funny and irreverent and interesting and everything else.
Well, that was already about 20 some odd years ago, about 23, 24 years ago, which seems like a lifetime ago.
And then over the course of the last 23 or so years, he became sort of just like a progressive hysterical nutbag.
That would be what I would put under his chyron.
A progressive hysterical nutbag who's had a show, a couple shows, I think, on MSNBC, and then he had a show on Current TV, and then he had a show on the GQ network, whatever that is.
All his shows fail, and he just screams like a complete lunatic.
But he had a video yesterday that was so ridiculously over the top, calling for the death penalty for Donald Trump, that I just wanted to show it.
Not even really to mock the guy, but I want to show you just sort of some of the tricks that the people who are in this business, the business of talking to the camera, some of the tricks that they use to outrage you and confuse you and everything else.
And he, as a sort of just like Nothing.
Faux, angry, pretend newsman.
I think he's like the epitome of what's wrong with all this stuff.
I don't even know that anyone's really watching.
I think he has a show on YouTube now.
I don't know that anyone's really watching it.
So in a weird way, I'm drawing attention to it by showing it.
But trust me, people, grant me a little leash here.
Grant me a little leash, and I think you'll see why I wanted to do it.
Okay, so let's start with this Department of Justice lawsuit against Google.
The House and Senate, As of yesterday, they have brought a lawsuit against Google.
This is an antitrust lawsuit, which is basically saying that it's using, it, Google, is using its power to preserve its monopoly.
And there's a couple of interesting numbers I can throw at you here.
Right now, Google, over the last couple of years, controls nearly 90% of all general search queries in the United States, and 95% of mobile search queries.
Let's put aside the breakup and regulate stuff for just a second.
Let's just talk about the information side of it because I think that that's probably the most important thing.
And also let's not forget you're most likely watching this on YouTube.
And if you are watching this on YouTube, YouTube is owned by Google.
And Google can decide at any moment which videos they want to get out and which videos they don't.
It's sort of annoying for me to have to talk about the inner machinations of what's going on on Google and YouTube, but we have a, for the Rubin Report channel, we have a creators panel where we have all of the tools.
They can show us what's happening with our channel and what monetized and what didn't and how many people are watching and where they're from and how long they watch for and all of these things.
And then they also show us, oh, this video, more of your subscribers saw it.
Or this video, it was recommended more, or a series of these things.
But in essence, when they're showing us those things, what they're saying to us is, we have a certain set of rules, this algorithm that nobody can really define nor know about.
And I'm not going to sit here and pretend I'm an expert in the algorithm.
At this point, I don't think there's any expert in the algorithm.
I don't know if there's one person on Earth, truly, at this point, who could honestly, with a straight face, tell you that they really understand the Google algorithm.
Let's not forget, this thing was built by engineers over the course, now, of multiple decades, and many of them, and they come and go, and it's like we've sort of lost control of the algorithm.
If you want a simpler version of that, I would say watch the movie I, Robot, with Will Smith, about how you lose control of these things.
But in essence, they can say, oh, the video that you put out yesterday, Rubin Report, this one, more of your subscribers watched it.
Now, does that mean it's because they sent it to more of our subscribers or more of our subscribers were interested in it?
We don't know.
Sometimes they'll say it was watched more when it was recommended more.
Well, it's...
Okay, do you mean you, the algorithm, recommended it more, or did people recommend it more to their friends?
So that's very similar to what's going on with the search situation.
If you are favored by Google search, and it does seem that you can become favored either by money or political favors or probably a series of other things, well then if you search someone's name and someone wants good things to come out about them, then You'll get pages of good things.
If they don't like you, or let's say you're not woke, perhaps, because we do know that wokeness has infected this entire system, then they're gonna show bad things.
A simple way to do this, put Joe Biden in the search bar and see what comes out, see if it's generally positive or negative, and then put Donald Trump in the search bar and see if it's positive or negative.
So this is where, now to bring it to the antitrust part, the breakup the companies, the monopoly part, the regulate part, this is where it gets really tricky.
I'll try to do this as cleanly as I possibly can.
The purely libertarian side of me, and I'm not a pure libertarian, the purely libertarian side of me, this is where, say, the Ayn Rand people, so like a guy like Yaron Brook, who I've had on the show many times, who I love and think is a great thinker, This is where Joe Jorgensen, the libertarian candidate for president, who I had on a few weeks ago, this is what their position would be.
The government has absolutely no right to do anything here.
Google is a private company, they can do whatever they want, and only competition can solve these problems.
And anytime the government gets involved in anything, it makes the problems worse.
I think that that is a legit, position to hold.
I don't think that is a dishonest position.
I think it's probably the most honest position, and it's probably the sort of most cleanly intellectual position you can hold on this.
The government getting involved in these things rarely makes it better.
I think it was Ronald Reagan who said, there's no problem that the government can't create and then make worse.
That's a loose quote there.
Or there's no problem that the government hasn't created that they can't make worse.
And I think that's the general idea.
The idea that government regulators, if you're for regulating Google, think what you're saying.
It kind of sounds right.
Well, Google has too much power over us.
We know that they're woke.
We know that they don't like conservatives or right-leaning people.
I've met people.
I've been to YouTube's offices.
I've met a lot of these people.
They're not fans of, let's say, what I'm doing here or what you guys are probably doing.
So I'm not defending that.
But the idea that we're gonna send a government regulator, try to picture The guy who has the job as the government regulator, like this dork in his pleated pants, and he shows up at Google, hi there, I'm here to look at the algorithm, okay?
It's like, this is not gonna solve anything, right?
If that government regulator knew how to do anything, he wouldn't be working for the government, he would be working for Google in the first place, right?
Or he'd be working for his own startup, more likely.
So regulating them, I don't know if it's right.
And also, you know, you put in regulations.
And then what happens is these companies, this is just human nature.
The companies, just like you would, if someone gave you a set of rules and you didn't like them, you'd figure out a way to skirt around the rules, right?
So this is just human nature.
So I don't think regulation works.
Now, one of the things that Trump did was he He called out section 230 of the Communications Act, which gave certain protections to these companies, right?
It gave certain legal protections to these companies.
And I think there was something, by scaling back some of their legal protections, perhaps it could encourage them to be more fair.
I think that's probably the right idea here, but let's not forget, what do I say, 20 times a day?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
So I think Trump's intentions here were good.
Let's scale back some of their legal protections so hopefully they will self-regulate.
The problem is now, if they have to be looking at the content on their platforms, YouTube, Google, Twitter, et cetera, if they have to be looking at it more critically because now they're open to lawsuits, well then they might actually be worse when it comes to free speech.
So you gotta be careful about that.
So then the third option is that you break these companies up.
And this, I think, maybe there's some version there.
Again, this is not the purely libertarian take, but ultimately, Well, I consider myself a realist.
I don't view the world as I want it to be.
I view the world as it is.
And if we are to have a government, which I think most of us agree we have to have, and those of us that are leery about power usually would say, well, you don't want a big, endlessly powerful government, but we also don't want companies that can become immeasurably more powerful than that government.
And I don't think the founders could have ever envisioned companies like Google that have extraordinary, really unmatched, unparalleled power over our lives.
The information we get, the way we think about things, the things that they can make disappear, the things that they can put in.
And again, this is why I've been saying over the last couple of weeks, we are in a reality war.
That is the war that we are in right now.
You could say we're in a political war.
You can say we're in a cultural war.
But both of those sit within the idea that we're in a reality war.
People are getting catered information to them that is making them think one way, We're making them think another way or maybe making them think a third way.
But then it's constantly being reinforced by companies and algorithms that we don't understand.
And then when you throw in the toxicity of wokeness, you can see why we're in such a big problem.
So the idea that Google has so much power over the way we think, if we can't think clearly, then how can we possibly elect people to govern clearly?
I think there's something probably there.
And by the way, some of the people that will be involved in the hearings on this, like Ted Cruz, who I've had on the show and discussed this stuff, it's like, this guy's a brilliant constitutional lawyer, and I think he will be able to elicit these arguments correctly and hopefully keep all of these things in mind.
I would say I fit probably firmly within the space that Ted Cruz is on this, where you're sort of, your belief system is more on the libertarian side, but then there's like this other thing out there, which is also I can't just let powerful companies decide everything about my life, you know.
It's just not right.
It's just not right.
And it's sort of, that's where you gotta kind of grit your teeth and be like, all right, the government maybe does have to do something.
Anyway, I would love to know what you guys think about this because my thoughts are evolving on it as well.
And if you do wanna share your thoughts with me, this is exactly why we created the Rubin Report community.
So join us at rubinreport.com.
And we've got thousands of people in there commenting and sharing videos, and you can share memes.
And everything else, and I have a much better chance of seeing what you're gonna say because it's somewhat of a gated environment instead of the Wild West that is the Twitter and YouTube comment section.
All right, let's move on to the second story.
This is a really, this is really interesting out of the UK.
So this conservative MP, conservative member of parliament from Saffron Walden, She's the Treasury and Equalities Minister.
She gave a really, I would say, impactful speech on the floor of the House of Commons yesterday, and it went viral, so let's take a look.
unidentified
What we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted fact.
We do not do this with communism, we do not do this with socialism, we do not do it with capitalism.
And I want to speak about a dangerous trend in race relations that has come far too close to
home to my life, and it is the promotion of critical race theory, an ideology that sees
my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression. I want to be absolutely clear,
this government stands unequivocally against critical race theory. Some schools have decided
to openly support the anti-capitalist Black Lives Matter group, often fully aware that they have a
statutory duty to be politically impartial. Black lives do matter, of course they do,
but we know that the Black Lives Matter movement, capital B-L-M, is political.
I know this because at the height of the protest, I have been told of white Black Lives Matter protesters calling, and I'm afraid I apologise for saying this word, calling a black armed police officer guarding Downing Street a pet.
That is why we do not endorse that movement on this side of the House.
It is a political movement and what would be nice would be for members on the opposite side to condemn many of the actions that we see this political movement instead of pretending that it is a completely wholesome anti-racist organisation.
There is a lot of pernicious stuff that is being pushed and we stand against that.
We do not want to see teachers teaching their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt.
And let me be clear, any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police, without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Ah, Kemi, I didn't know you until yesterday, but I love ya.
Okay, there's a lot there.
I do wanna mention that you may have noticed we had a little edit, a minor, minor edit in there where we did cut out about 10 seconds, and I wanna be totally transparent with you as to why we did it.
She did quote what a Black Lives Matter activist was calling a black police officer, and she used language that if we were just to play that clip, this clip, this Rubin report clip would automatically be demonetized.
That sort of gets directly back to the first story we talked about.
So we just cut out that 10 second portion where she actually said that word.
And that's sort of a whole other thing about policing and language and big tech
But there's a lot of good stuff that she said in there.
And I wanna go through a bunch of it.
What she said at the beginning, that first part was really brilliant.
She said, what we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas.
We don't do this with communism, et cetera.
Now, think about this.
What we're against is the teaching of contested political ideas, Marxism.
Critical race theory, identity politics, wokeness, all of these things that I know you guys know all about, these are contested political ideas.
They're contested because in a free society, you don't get to just say, I'm right, everyone else is wrong, and I will rule over you.
That being said, the people who are pushing these ideas, they want them.
to be more powerful than every other set of ideas, including in the United States, the set of ideas that is our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.
So they want these things taught, critical race theory, they want it taught at the expense of teaching a truly liberal arts education.
They want it to be taught at the expense of teaching true history, right?
They want the 1619 project, which even now the New York Times is slowly being forced to admit
was in many ways a work of fiction.
They want that to be taught in history classes instead of teaching true American history.
Now you can say, okay, but maybe we've made some mistakes in teaching American history.
I'm not even making that argument, but you could say it.
But the idea and the key word, we're teaching contested political ideas.
They're not right just because they say they're right.
So if you want to teach traditional American history and then make mention, there's this thing in the 1619 Project, in the New York Times, called the 1619 Project, and it also has been criticized and blah, blah, blah.
Well, that would basically be okay.
But what's happening is, and this is what she's getting to, these things are actually illegal because they are seeping into all of our institutions.
Now, let's remember, Who's the guy that took critical race theory out of our federal institutions, right?
So there was the whole IDW crew and all of the interesting YouTubers and podcasters that have broken out over the last couple years.
We were all rallying against identity politics.
We were all rallying against critical race theory.
And railing against it and talking about it is one thing.
And I often would say, you know, a year or two ago, you know, what do we do after we're done talking about it?
After we've woken up enough of you guys that are watching this and people have gone from woke to awake, well, what do you actually do?
And I don't know that we ever got a good answer on it, but the answer is that you actually have to do something about it.
And the irony, I think, for the remaining sane liberals, the six or seven of them that are left, Well, Donald Trump is the guy that saw critical race theory being leaked into our system, and he said, we will not teach this at our federal agencies, and we won't even do business with companies that are.
That is an extraordinarily powerful move.
You may not like Donald Trump, but he did it, and you gotta give credit where credit is due.
These things not only should be not being taught in our schools, or at least should be taught with a counterpoint, showing that they're contested political ideas.
Right?
Capitalism is a, I believe it's the best economic system for us to be free, but it's a contested political idea.
So you can teach capitalism the same way you could teach communism and hopefully you'd go into the history and go, you know, boy, it's something else.
Every capitalist country actually succeeds and thrives and is generally peaceful.
And it ain't the same with the, with the communists and the socialists.
So Trump is the one that did this.
This is very much in line with the idea of what Trump did with Title IX.
We had Title IX that was put in by the Obama administration, where in effect, they took the right to due process away from college students.
So if you were accused of sexual harassment, the school could in effect just suspend you or get rid of you or decide what to do with you without it going through the proper legal channels.
That was an Obama administration, So it's just important to know about this stuff.
A couple other lines that she said there.
She made a point specifically of saying that Black Lives Matter is a political movement.
And I think it's very important for you guys when you get into these debates with your friends, that that's the line.
As she said, we all believe black lives matter.
I want black people to be treated absolutely equally under the law, the same way I want white people and Christian people to be.
That's just, and by the way, that's how most of us think, the wide majority of us think, and that's pretty much how it is in the United States.
And by the way, it's pretty much how it is in the UK as well.
But this is a political movement.
Black Lives Matter is a political movement trying to destroy our institutions and replace them with what I obviously think are bad ideas.
And then finally, she also said this thing about the balance of opposing views.
And of course, that's in line with this idea of the contested views, that we want to teach people how to think.
Instead of critical race theory, we need critical thinking.
How about that?
Let's do some critical thinking.
All right, and speaking of critical thinking, I'm now gonna show you someone who knows nothing about it.
Keith Olbermann, people.
He is the former ESPN anchor, former MSNBC anchor, former Current TV anchor, current YouTube guy, I suppose.
And let's just show a little bit of his rant about President Trump yesterday.
unidentified
We are all tired.
But mostly I'm tired of the needless sickness and the needless death and the needless terror because this mentally incompetent, inhuman, dumb bastard has lied about this disease in a thousand different ways, a different way for each different political need he has sensed.
And I'm tired of the thought that we're now going to repeat the months of March and April in this country, a country that should have learned something, but which in large part has been authorized to wallow and die in its own stupidity because of one man, one dumb bastard, one selfish son-of-a-bitch, one real-life Major French attacking the only hope we have, the science!
And insisting science is wrong, and Fauci is an idiot, and only I can save you, and insisting you can do whatever you want, then the disease affects almost nobody.
Donald Trump should be on trial for 220,000 murders, death penalty for each count.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Okay, everything that's wrong about television and news and current events and media and social media and all, it's right there.
It's summed up.
You only need two words to define it, right?
Those two words are Keith Olbermann.
I mean, it's the horrific language, the call to murder somebody.
I mean, the guy.
The guy is just a lunatic.
But what I thought we'd do here is we took the exact transcript that he has there
and also the fake emotions, right?
It's all fake.
That's the thing.
He's an actor.
I'm not acting here.
The camera's on.
So I'm 5% more of what I would be if I was sitting in my room alone, I suppose, right?
There's some element of I'm performing, I suppose at some level, but this is just me talking.
But he's acting, it's all an act.
So what we did here is we took his transcript, and now I am going to include Joe Biden.
We're gonna say this is about Joe Biden.
For your purposes, if you wanna do it about Barack Obama or whoever else.
But I'm gonna try to read with the anger and emotion that this guy just read.
I'm gonna try to be as morally outraged as he was with the exact same language.
This is gonna be very difficult for me.
But I did take an acting class about 20 years ago for about three weeks.
Little known fact, Melissa Rauch, who played Bernadette on Big Bang Theory was in my acting class.
Okay, here we go.
unidentified
We're all tired, but mostly I'm tired of the endless sickness and the needless death and the needless terror because this mentally incompetent human dumb bastard has lied about this disease a thousand different ways and for a thousand different political needs he has sensed and I'm tired of the thought that we're now going to repeat Months of March and April in this country, a country that should have learned something, which in large part has been authorized to swallow, I think it says there, and die in his own stupidity because one man, one dumb bastard, one selfish son of a bitch
One real little major French attacking the only hope we have of the science and insisting science is wrong and Fauci is an idiot and only I can save you and insisting you can do whatever you want when the disease affects almost nobody.
Joe Biden should be on trial for the 220,000 murders.
Death penalty for each count.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
That was the Rubin Report, direct message for today, October 21st, 2020.
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