Dave Rubin hosts Glenn Beck, Stu Burguiere, and Sarah Gonzalez to dissect Big Tech's conservative purge and the looming threat of civil war. They contrast Florida and Texas's localist COVID approaches against California's mandates, warning that federal overreach resembles "digital gulags" while AOC's media shutdown calls signal dangerous censorship precedents. The group critiques scientific arrogance regarding multiverses and alien disclosures, noting a societal shift toward compliance rather than critical inquiry. Ultimately, despite fears of worsening conditions before improvement, the panel concludes with a hopeful belief in humanity's resilience against digital oppression and political divisiveness. [Automatically generated summary]
I actually intentionally did that because I was trying to give you a little more cultural significance, like some sort of... We have a foreigner with us?
I got nothing because I thought if I can't figure out what to talk to you guys about for a half hour then I'm not worth my salt.
We are in a crazy time.
I've done shows with all you guys in the last couple days about everything.
So I'm going to start this away from politics specifically.
Like, how are you feeling just generally about the state of the world?
Because I think that's what most people are thinking about.
Like, they're looking at the GameStop thing.
They're looking at the executive actions.
They're looking at the lockdowns.
And for the average person, Which I only consider myself an average person.
It's like, it all adds up to your life.
How are you feeling, just like, the state of the world right now?
unidentified
I feel like we're getting closer and closer to a national divorce, quite frankly.
I know Glenn here talks about civil war a lot, and I have to hope that it doesn't come to that, but the more, you know, every day there's just something that's more and more divisive that comes out from, you know, the leaders of our country, and it's a scary time.
Why We Left Big Tech00:15:02
unidentified
I was just telling them off air, you know, I have a four-month-old baby, and Who's here!
Yeah, if you've ever lived in my head, which Stu will tell you, you don't want to.
He's been there since 1997 and he's therapy like crazy.
It's a dark place where we're headed and I have to tell you that I I believe in God, but I also believe in man.
He will find a way to survive in the worst.
And we aren't... I mean, if you think of what people went through in Poland...
And they, I mean, real oppression, real gulags, all these things.
We're talking about digital gulags.
They found a way to communicate.
They found a way to spread the message.
They found a way.
We're not even close to that.
And I think that with what we saw with Wall Street, that's telling a lot of the people, especially the people who Watch their parents go through 2008, maybe lost their business, lost their house, whatever, lost a lot, lost their jobs, and they saw the big banks being bailed out.
Then they've seen it again with COVID.
All the big guys get bailed out, but mom and dad lost their jobs, lost their fortune, you know.
Those people who have seen that, They know it's the big players that are the problem.
And when you tell them directly, you can't win.
You can't win because we will take away your tools.
The 20-somethings are not people like me, who I'm like trying to figure out the remote control.
They will find a way in, and we will have a new birth of freedom that will actually mean something again.
Because my generation doesn't know what...
Real freedom is, and we don't certainly know what real captivity is.
Well, the irony, of course, is that when the young people find those new means of freedom, which is exactly what happened with the Robin Hood app, they were finally getting in on the game, the system comes in and literally shuts down the app, shuts down the groups.
Do you think we have to just totally rethink our relationship with big tech?
That we had this thing for 20 years that was free, except it took our souls, and now finally we're realizing Oh yeah, what was cool 20 years ago about reconnecting with your, you know, 7th grade friend, now you realize that, in essence, you hate them or they hate you because of some political issue, which is to your point about local.
You hate them over some thing that neither one of you have any power over.
unidentified
Yeah, I do think that you're right.
We are at a crossroads where we need to figure out what, you know, what big tech looks like from now, you know, going down the road.
But I think that the problem is going to be what kind of hands government has in that, right?
Because they're... You painted that yourself, you just told me.
That it's, you know, Jefferson said, it's wrong of us to impose our will At the end of our life, on the next generation, every generation needs to choose it for themselves.
That's why they had the amendments and that ability in the Constitution, because another generation would come and say, those are old ideas, I don't like it, let's change these things.
The next generation is not...
The hippie generation, which is now in charge, the hippies from the 60s, they're just grabbing on and they're holding with everything that they have and forcing it down everybody's throat.
It's not my generation.
It's not a matter of regulation, deregulation.
It's not a matter of who's in power.
We're entering a completely new time where The internet and technology will either be the greatest slave master or the biggest Moses.
And, you know, Dave, I started The Blaze in 2010 because I saw this coming.
We were just way too early.
The time is right now, but at least we have the infrastructure, but we don't have all of it.
You are working on really important tech, and together all of us are working on even more important tech down the road that may take five or ten years and billions of dollars, but that's the secret.
If we can have enough time and enough brains and enough people that see a greater good than just getting rich, putting something together Then we win, because the reason why tech is so large and in charge is because they buy or destroy everybody who competes with them.
So we've got to stop that.
We have to be dedicated to do it and quietly build it, and we'll dismantle Oppression.
You know, I think there's a... I am really optimistic about a lot of this stuff, you know.
I mean, I'm a big believer in free markets, and I do think that they, generally speaking, provide the solutions.
There's a level of government crackdown that can stop that.
But like, you know, the question you brought up about how much involvement do we want government involved in big tech is such an interesting and difficult one for conservative conservatives in particular, because we all see what they're
doing and it's wrong.
And we can all stand up and say that this is wrong.
They're silencing these voices.
And there's that temptation to go and say, like, you know, maybe legislation is the right
way to go.
This is these people are such bad actors.
We have to do something.
But I go back to something that's that happened just as Biden was taking office, which was,
you know, AOC.
That's right.
You know, everything was cured.
You know, AOC and others were talking about what happened, you know, over January 6th.
And they were, of course, tying it to every conservative that ever wanted low taxes and
talking about how we have to shut these media sources down and and and find ways to expand
the FCC to do these things and all this.
And it reminded me of when Trump was in office.
And he was arguing for a widening of the libel laws.
And all of us would agree that people were lying about Donald Trump, 100%.
But if he was successful in that effort then, how would AOC be using that today?
We always lose when we give the government more power.
So this is what we talked about on your show right over there a few minutes ago.
So what do you do if we all believe in freedom, okay?
And I think most people, I actually think if most people truly understood the issues and if they really could distill how they live their lives, actually most people are live and let live.
I think it's just that we have this small minority of hysterical people amplified by algorithms and media that just keeps us all crazy.
But for those of us that live that way, what do you do in a time when the other people don't?
Even if it's not a ton of people, but the machinery just keeps moving on you.
We talked about this on my show when I was last in the studio.
But what do you do?
What do you do?
unidentified
I mean, it's a good question.
I think that, you know, you just have to keep Keep on keepin' on, for lack of a better term.
I mean, I know that's kind of an old, tired phrase, but you know that, you know, big tech... Well, let me take, for instance, I know someone who is also a BlizzTV host, Elijah Shafer.
He's been getting hit recently a lot on, you know...
Many things, but one being that he's sharing real facts, real statistics about what is going on in the Biden administration, about the jobs that are being lost.
And he's really getting hit hard by big tech for, you know, missing context or whatever the case may be.
And, you know, you've got to keep on getting the word out.
You've got to keep on living your life.
You've got to Be secure in the idea that freedom is, I think, an innate concept.
I think we are born, you're not born thinking that you should be ruled by, you know, big government or, you know, slave to someone else.
I think that freedom is this innate concept within us.
I think as long as we're, you know, the louder we vocalize that, the louder we vocalize these ideas that I think everyone can relate to, I think it will become easier to talk to one another.
Because I think that people on the other side are very caught up in the idea that everyone who is a conservative is racist and homophobic and xenophobic and all of the phobics.
If you're generally a freedom-loving person, how do you hold your stake in the ground and do exactly what you said before, which is, okay, I'm going to focus on my local community, I'm going to focus on my family, that sort of thing, if the other guy is just always moving on you?
Yeah, first of all, it's very difficult, and we stay and we fight in all of these arenas as hard as we can.
It's interesting though, when you look at the conservative worldview generally, what do we think the best thing to do for a policy is?
It's not go to the federal government and have them come up with this grand idea that controls all of it.
It's local communities, and all the way down to the smallest community being your family.
We tend to, when we get into political conversations, go up to that high level to try to think of, like, what's the right sort of grand unifying theory that will, like, let all of our little blocks come into place around the country.
And we're seeing, I think, like you see during COVID, a great example of localism working, right?
Florida and Texas are running their states a hell of a lot differently than California is, as I know you painfully are aware.
And this is a stack from beginning to end to, you know, all of the services, not just, you know, an app, right?
Like this is every service from, you know, getting on the internet generally at the beginning, ISPs, servers, everything from beginning to end to make sure that conservative voices can actually be heard.
You mentioned your belief in God before, and I've said on the show many times in the last year, I am more of a believer now than I've ever been in my adult life, and I don't think it's disconnected from all of this.
Because I do sense that having belief is connected to the way you view government, the way you view the world... There's a great book by Ben Sherwood called... Ben Sherwood, right?
It came out around 2009 or 10, somewhere in that area.
It's fantastic.
What he did was he went around and he looked at people who had survived massive trauma, whether it was a plane crash, an economic crash, whatever it was, massive trauma.
How did they, who were the survivors?
And he found those who have faith in something bigger than themselves, something, a higher power of some sort, they survived.
The other ones don't because they just go dark inside and they just see no way out, no way to survive.
Those who believe that there is a connection, so Me personally, I've talked to Penn Jillette, he's a good friend of mine, you know, atheist, and I've said to him, you know, Penn, you could be right in the end.
We don't know.
You could be right.
But if this makes me live a more hopeful, positive life, I'm all in, you know?
And so that plays a role.
But when Nietzsche was right, It wasn't celebratory when he said God is dead.
It was a warning to the Germans.
You've killed God.
And once you've killed God, man will replace that with something.
We have hard evidence of extraterrestrial life right now.
The Pentagon has come out with it in the last couple of years.
It's phenomenal what we know.
But they won't question.
And he talks about basically the same thing that Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address, which was, you're going to start to have people that are not driven by curiosity in science and education, but instead are driven by money.
Who will fund?
How can I get money?
How can I get prestige?
And curiosity will be gone.
Curiosity in our society is gone.
And we talked, I mean, here I am yesterday, a God guy talking to an astrophysicist about God.
And I said, you know, he said, we've lost our curiosity.
I said, I think that was the point of Jesus.
Jesus said, come to me as a child.
And you'll have everlasting life.
Come to me as a child.
Well, anybody who has a child, what's the one question they always ask?
What's the one thing they always say?
Why?
You get to a point where you're like, because it is that way!
Why?
That's what we've lost.
We've lost an awe of what time we live in, the things that we can do.
I believe we're going to cure cancer in the next 10 years.
Cure it!
It'll be eradicated.
We've just wiped out one third of blindness.
Just last week it was announced.
We can now take artificial corneas And replace them.
And you have pure eyesight back.
That's a third of all blindness.
Now over.
We have to have the awe of what is happening, but we also have to have the humility to ask, why?
Well, you think I'm this way.
Why?
Why do you believe that?
Why do you think that would be better?
Why do you not think this would be better?
Once we get that mastered, Gratefulness?
Why?
We put those two together, we're right back on track.
unidentified
And I think, too, Glenn, it is curiosity, but also critical thinking.
I mean, that's just, that's completely dead in this society.
Because I, I mean, because I've gone through what you've gone through, what everybody of conservatives is now going through, I was the test rat for that system.
And when you go through that, you do, if you're normal, you do ask yourself, am I that way at all?
What makes people think this way?
And I came to the conclusion that The problem that I have had is when I'm certain.
Certitude is poisonous.
And when you're certain of something, then no one has anything else to teach you.
And I've tried to adopt this mantra now for me of, the only thing I'm certain of is that I'm not certain of anything.
And I think that comes with age and maturity as well.
That, you know, you're so strident, because, you know, when you're 15, I'm going to live until I'm 30, but I'm going out in a blaze of glory, you know what I mean?
I don't know if you saw it, but you guys of course all know Larry King, who was my friend and mentor, and in many ways he was like a bonus grandfather I got in the middle of my life.
So amazing.
I asked him several times in interviewing him what he thought the meaning of life was.
That's exactly what he said.
All I know is I don't know.
And this is a guy who, for as many people as we've all interviewed, this guy interviewed everybody.