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Feb. 2, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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Did Jen Psaki Just Encourage Big Tech Social Media Censorship? | DIRECT MESSAGE | Rubin Report
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[Outro]
dave rubin
I'm Dave Rubin.
This is the Rubin Report Direct Message 4222021.
That's February 2nd, 2021.
And we're doing an Ask Me Anything Q&A.
You guys submitted tons of questions at rubinreport.locals.com.
That is the only place I take questions.
I don't take questions from you psychotic lunatics on Twitter or the YouTube commentators.
Commenters, commentators, commenters?
Whatever you people are, I don't take questions from you.
It's only at reubenreport.locals.com.
We got a whole bunch of questions here.
Some politics, some not politics.
And I just quickly took a glance about two minutes ago.
I haven't even seen them all.
So I'm gonna be doing this all on the fly.
Before we get to that though, I want to talk to you about this little video that went viral yesterday.
Jen Pisacki, who is the White House Press Secretary, she said something that strikes me as a fairly big slip-up, potentially maybe a huge mistake, although the mainstream media is not going to cover it, on the relationship between the White House and the big tech companies.
Let's take a look at this video.
unidentified
As you know, President Trump has been barred from a lot of social media sites.
I'm just curious whether you think his absence has made your job any easier or the White House's job any easier as it kind of goes forward on these COVID negotiations.
jen psaki
In what way?
unidentified
Well, he'd create a lot of noise, right?
He would have certain gravitational pull with Republicans who may be more inclined to take a harder position.
I wonder if that's been anything that you guys have thought about or kind of considered.
jen psaki
This may be hard to believe.
We don't spend a lot of time talking about or thinking about President Trump here.
Former President Trump, to be very clear.
I think that's a question that's probably more appropriate for Republican members who are looking for ways to support a bipartisan package and whether that gives them space.
But I can't say we miss him on Twitter.
unidentified
Does President Biden support the continuing ban of President Trump on their sites?
jen psaki
I think that's a decision made by Twitter.
We've certainly spoken to, and he's spoken to, the need for social media platforms to continue to take steps to reduce hate speech, but we don't have more for you on it than that.
dave rubin
Okay, so the last line there is the interesting part of that.
They're talking about Trump being banned from all the social media sites.
You all know about that.
Let's put that aside.
Let's not even make this about Trump.
When she talks, when she says this thing that he's spoken to or we've spoken to, the implication is that we've spoken to the big tech companies about guarding against hate speech.
Now, first off, let's just be very clear about this.
There is no such thing as hate speech in the United States, according to the Supreme Court.
Now, that isn't to say that speech cannot be hateful.
You can say mean things.
You can say mean things about groups of people.
You can be a bigot and a racist.
I would prefer that you not be.
But you can be, and that is your God-given right, and it is protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Hate speech, the idea that you If you say mean things that that is somehow a violation of the First Amendment, it just doesn't exist.
The Supreme Court has decided that.
That is what enables us to speak freely, right?
Because what's one man's hate speech is another man's freedom speech, right?
Okay, this is a beautiful thing, it's a messy part of freedom, but we don't have hate speech laws.
And that's good!
The issue here is that the implication of what she said is either that Biden directly has potentially spoken to the big tech companies about hate speech or the administration has.
And whether they have or have not specifically, we know that these that the administration, the government and the big tech companies are pretty tight, right?
We know that they're pretty tight.
So if the administration Actually said to Twitter or to any of the other big tech companies, hey, you guys better start guarding speech.
You better do something about hate speech.
Well, then that would strike me as a violation of the First Amendment.
And if Biden himself said it, if meaning if Biden got on the phone or someone from the administration got on the phone And said, oh, you guys at Twitter and Facebook, you have a responsibility to do this about speech.
Well, in essence, that would be a violation of the First Amendment because it would be the government coercing a private business to do something about speech.
This is what I've heard a couple of people call the outsourcing of tyranny.
In other words, it's not the government that will directly come for your speech,
but if the government can use their power to pull the levers, which would then enable
big tech companies to silence your speech, well, then it kinda is the government that does it.
So her language there, you'd have to really parse every word,
but if Biden has gotten on a call, and someone will find out,
or if someone from the administration has gotten on a call and said, "Oh, we have to get rid of these Trump supporters,"
or, "We have to silence these conservatives,"
or whatever language they might use, "We have to shadow ban," whatever it is,
but if the government in any way pressured a tech company to silence people, to me,
that strikes me as an impeachable offense.
If you guys want to play the impeachment game, we're going to impeach presidents post-presidency, well then it seems like that might be an impeachable offense.
We shall see.
Anyway, I thought that was worth showing because you're not going to see that on the CNN.
All right, guys, I wanna hit the Q&A.
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And now back to me.
All right, Q&A.
Here we go in no particular order.
Tom asks, Dave, let's put together a Reuben Report adventure.
What's your take on something like that?
So, you know, I did this live meet and greet with the Reuben Report community in Dallas, and it was fantastic.
We went to a bar, we ate, we had food, we had drinks, we hugged.
We took pictures, we shook hands.
It was really lovely seeing actual human beings.
And what was really cool about it is that, you know, we're watching the destruction of community across social media, across, you know, just our lives, watching just everything kind of disintegrate and melt down right now.
And to sit at a bar, we took a whole section of the bar.
Originally, we were all standing at the bar.
They didn't want us standing.
That is one of the regulations related to COVID even in Texas.
So we had to just sort of take a section of the restaurant.
But I saw people exchanging phone numbers with each other and saying, hey, let's go out, let's get a drink.
Oh, you know, couples that were meeting and people that were meeting.
And it was just great because that's how we will rebuild things.
It's not just locals.com online.
It's your local community.
So as for a Rubin Report adventure, yes, I would love to do maybe like a cruise situation Or we all go somewhere, perhaps the beaches of Florida or something like that.
We will do more of those type of things.
I genuinely love meeting you guys.
And it's not just because people say nice things to me.
It helps me frame what I'm talking about when I meet you guys so that I don't get too lost in just the media bubble and the part of this that's the public part of it.
So I'd love to do either a cruise Or a weekend getaway somewhere.
We're definitely going to do more of these meet and greets as I start traveling again.
I'll probably do the next one in LA over the next couple weeks and then we'll look at my travel schedule and I think there's some Florida stuff coming up so stay tuned on that.
Nuclear Patrick asks, have you had any recent communication with Jordan Peterson?
He's just endured another character assassination from the odious Times of London.
Yeah, Jordan and I have been texting a little bit.
For those of you that are wisely not on Twitter, he has been tweeting a bit more, so he's slowly getting back into it.
His next book comes out in March.
I will be interviewing him.
I wanted to do it live in Canada.
That's where he lives in Toronto.
But there's all sorts of crazy COVID regulations right now in terms of quarantining and even getting into the country and everything else.
So it doesn't sound like we can do it there.
So unfortunately, I think we're gonna have to do it via the pipes of Skype.
But I can tell you that he's getting better.
He's not 100%.
I don't wanna say anything that hasn't been shared publicly by either him or his team.
But I think he's coming back just, In the nick of time.
And, you know, I think, let me just say one other thing about Jordan, which is that, you know, although he helped hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people clean their rooms and better their lives, he didn't pretend to be the perfect man.
And he was open about some of the things he was struggling with.
And his wife got sick, as some of you know.
You know, I was even with him.
I think we were at a restaurant in Iowa when he got the call that he was told his wife has terminal cancer.
We continued on the tour.
He did a show that night.
And all of the struggles, the fame, the love, the hate, all of the stuff and dealing with anxiety,
stuff that he was open with and had said he was taking a little bit of this Klonopin
and then it just got out of control.
Again, he's not a perfect human being.
He's just a human being who did the best he could and will continue to do the best he can in life.
He will be back.
As for the piece in the Times of London, Jordan released the full audio of the interview on his YouTube channel because they did change some of the context and it's just the same old thing.
I tweeted at him and I said, you know, it's like things didn't change that much while you were gone.
The media is still awful and he'll have to figure out how to play that game and how much he wants to be in on that game.
Here we go.
Formerly Al says, do you think the Democrats will actually go through with all the things they have said in motion already?
Stacking the Supreme Court, ending the Electoral College, making DC a state and so on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They like power.
They feel like they have power right now.
They're on the attack trying to get the rest of us silenced.
And they want to make sure that they don't lose power.
I mean, I think you could argue that this was probably a deficiency of Trump and the Republicans.
You know, if your goal as a conservative is not to always expand power, then when the other guys come in and do it, you kind of look Like you're standing there with your hat.
You know what I mean?
That's the challenge that all of us that are liberty-minded have to deal with all the time, which is we don't want to use state power to do everything we want, but there's another set of people that do.
And how do you balance that?
So I think the Democrats, they're telling us they want to expand the courts.
They're telling us they want to end the electoral college.
They're telling us they want to make D.C.
a state.
I think some things are in motion on that already.
They're telling us they want to give 11 million illegals Citizenship, like why wouldn't they do those things if they can, if it will, in their mind, help them keep the grip on power.
So I suspect that they will do as much of it as possible, but I always like to give you guys the silver lining.
And the silver lining is every single day, I think more and more people are being red-pilled.
I think there's a lot of buyer's remorse with Biden.
I think even for my last 20 good liberal friends, the public, Liberals that are not totally crazy leftists.
I think they're all somewhat publicly, but more so privately going, man, this is even worse than we thought.
And was that, maybe that Dave guy wasn't as bananas as we thought.
Likeafox says, cryptocurrency, yay or nay?
Definitely yay.
Look, we are living in a crazy time.
We're living in a transition of the old world versus the new world.
We're heading more into a digital world for better or worse.
The future is coming.
It's here now.
We're sort of in a dystopian future right at this very moment.
What would a dystopian future have you doing?
It might have you living in your house because of a disease and wearing masks outside and only being stuck talking to people online.
I mean, we're basically in an episode of Black Mirror right now.
I believe having some crypto, I have a little bit of Bitcoin and some of the other stuff.
I'm not an expert in it, obviously, but I think diversifying, whether that's gold also, I think whatever it might be, just diversifying some of your finances in this very weird time is probably a good idea.
Let's skip down.
Philip H says, "If a movie is based on 'Don't Burn This Book'
"would you want to play yourself?"
Who would you want to play yourself in the movie and why?
No, I would not want to play myself.
I did, I don't want to brag people, but I did take about three months of acting classes,
probably in about 2007 or so.
I was actually in class with Melissa Rauch, who's a good friend of mine from my standup days,
who you may know as Bernadette from "Big Bang Theory."
There's a little insider information for you.
Who would I want to play me?
I mean, it's fairly obvious, Denzel, obviously, right?
I mean, it's like, clearly it would be Denzel.
No, how about Chris Pratt?
People say that I look a little bit like Chris Pratt.
I get that a lot, especially with this, when he's going with the half-shaven look.
And also, Chris Pratt is a conservative who's hated by the Hollywood elite.
I can appreciate that.
So Chris Pratt, you're playing Dave Rubin in Don't Burn This Book, the movie.
And by the way, I am working on the second book right now, and we'll announce some more stuff on that in the next little bit.
Laura says, how are you feeling about the recall right now?
I am all in, baby.
Total recall.
Recall, recall, recall.
Let's get rid of Gavin Newsom.
We're pretty damn close.
I believe the finishing date on that thing.
They have to have the 1.5 million signatures is March 15th.
Maybe we can double check that.
And it sounds like there's already about 1.4 of the 1.5.
Now I'm guessing they got to get it to probably something like 1.8, 'cause they'll pull all sorts of shenanigans.
And as I've told you guys, they make it very difficult to do
because we've supposedly been locked down and we've canceled everything.
And you know, you have to do it in person.
You can't do it online.
And if your pen literally touches another line in there, it's disqualifying.
So they've made it very difficult.
But the fact that they've got the 1.4 already, and now we've got over a month now to get, you know, at least around 100,000, but hopefully we get another like 100, maybe 400,000.
I think we're in good shape.
Let's recall this guy.
And by the way, that doesn't necessarily fix all the problems, right?
Like, we could still vote in another bananas lefty or just some big government Democrat, but I would love to just shake the freaking system right now.
You're not a good man, Gavin Newsom, and I want you to go away.
March 17th, I'm being told, is the last day for the recall.
It seems like we're gonna get it.
It really does seem like we're gonna get it.
Candace says, can we please do a meetup in SoCal Orange County is much more open than LA.
Yes, I'm definitely gonna do some LA stuff.
I was thinking of maybe even for the community having a couple people over here for dinner.
David probably will not be happy if I do that.
Michael's already giving me, no, no, don't do that.
Don't do that.
Why'd he do that?
I don't know.
Just, I feel like if I got, if I, we could vet a couple people and just like have some people over for dinner, that would be fun.
Bad idea.
Bad idea?
All right, I may be overridden right now.
But yes, we will do more in LA.
Let's see, there was a couple here that I wanted to get to.
Oh, this is Shorinryu.
Shorinryu.
Okay, since you were on the left, What perspective do you think you bring to the current political argument that a lifetime conservative can't?
I love this question because, you know, look, most of the people that are now my political allies are solid conservative thinkers, right?
So you got Prager, you got Shapiro.
You got Glenn Beck, like most of the people who I'm in line with politically are conservatives.
There's no doubt about it.
As I've always said, I don't even mind being called a conservative at this point.
I think I'm trying to conserve my classically liberal principles.
There's a book about it somewhere behind me.
And I always said also that Trump in an odd way was defending both conservatism, that was obvious, and liberalism in that we're watching the remaining liberal free thought be destroyed.
By the left.
I think where where I fall into this is I'm obviously on the sort of more libertarian side of the conservative movement, right?
So you've got your more traditionally religious conservatives who may have more traditionally religious beliefs on certain things on some of the social issues and I fit more into the libertarian camp on that.
I would say as someone that was of the left and that was a Democrat, I would say what I can bring is a desire and an openness, let's say, to some of the conservatives on the right who are going, oh, but all those libs, they're all bananas.
Well, wait a minute.
If Dave woke up, then maybe there's a whole movement of them.
And by the way, we know that there is between the walk away movement and we just know the amount of people who were formerly Democrats.
We know, you can look at the numbers from the election, the amount of black support that went up for conservatives, the amount of LGBT support, Latino support.
There is a new growing movement, but it doesn't mean that it fits fully within what is thought of as Typically conservative.
The one that I think is really interesting on this is you can look at a guy like Rudy Giuliani, who's been a conservative and a Republican for the last three decades.
He was a Democrat before that, by the way.
If you haven't seen it, watch my interview with him.
It's pretty interesting.
But Rudy Giuliani was for gay marriage like 15 years ago.
As a matter of fact, when he got divorced, he ended up living with two gay guys, a friend of his and his partner, in New York City.
So he's been okay with that for a long time.
He's also pro-choice, Rudy Giuliani.
He has a cutoff point, I think it's first trimester, and we can get into all of the ethical debates about that, which I do often with my friends on the right, and we can agree to disagree, but try to do that with your friends on the left and you see what happens.
So what I think I can do for the people on the right is go, hey, Really live up to those conservative beliefs about the Constitution, about freedom of speech.
And if you really do that and really manage to say, hey, let's be the wider tent as those guys purge everybody, that's a really beautiful thing.
And if I can play a little bit of a role in that, I think that that's pretty awesome.
Dan Derby, I like this question.
What role do nonprofits play in the radicalization of America?
I think a huge role.
And I think that this is something that will probably change over the next, Decade or so, you know, you've got these these non-profits that are, by the way, you can work for a non-profit and make a hell of a lot of money, right?
And you can own a non-profit and make a hell of a lot of money.
But you've got these non-profits that are basically dedicated to political causes.
So the the most obvious one is Media Matters.
Now, I know that the children at Media Matters watch this show and they just wait for me to say something that they can selectively edit and then put out there, and then they can then get fundraising off of it.
So, and they watch Daily Wire all the time, and they watch all the Blaze stuff, and they watch Fox News endlessly.
And now remember, they are nonprofit, meaning that the people that fund them, so you get millionaires to fund you, they get it as a tax write-off.
You fund a political organization aimed at destroying your political opponents.
I mean, go to the Media Matters Twitter for a second, or go to their website.
Their entire goal is not to, is not for media literacy, right?
Not to make media matter, that we should have a plethora of media, we should respect other opinions and all that.
It is to destroy any sort of conservative or libertarian or right-leaning thought.
So I would say they've radicalized a lot of people because they selectively edit all of these clips.
They constantly try to cause boycotts and get people fired from Fox and get Ben Shapiro taken out and to lose advertisers and the rest of it.
And it very rarely works.
I mean, this is the irony.
The more that they do this, Michael Knowles always tweets about this.
He's like, every time they go after me, like we get more support, we get more subscribers and the rest of it.
So I think that does add to the radicalization.
And by the way, there are organizations on the right that do similar things.
There's a plethora of them on the left that seem to be dedicated to this sort of thing.
HappyPants says, what is the best way to convincingly show that authoritarianism is a losing game for everyone?
So I like this question because...
You know, I think one of the things that we're seeing right now, if you look at just what's happened with GameStop in the last couple of days, is that a lot of us do have similar beliefs.
Like, we saw people on the right and people on the left both sort of angry at the system, right?
Angry at the hedge fund guys.
So, you know, I've tried to say for a while that it's not really a left-right thing anymore.
It's not really a conservative...
Liberal thing anymore that it's an authoritarian libertarian thing and and this is where the lefties I just think make a mistake So when I say libertarian, I don't mean that you have to be a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party what I say libertarian I mean, do you basically believe people should live free?
Do you believe you should keep of most of what you learn that the government shouldn't have that much to do with you?
They can take care of roads.
we can make sure that there's a police department and a fire department,
and that you want a bottom-up way of looking at the world.
Authoritarian is, oh, if there was just this system in place, right?
If we could just give this system enough power, it would do good things for us.
I think, and that's the mistake of socialism in essence.
It's the mistake of Marxism.
It's the mistake of all the big government people, all of the bad things.
This is the direct answer to your question.
All of the bad things that have happened in history, in essence, have been done by governments that grew too big, right?
Nazism, all of the bad things of communism, these are governments that, in essence, promise people a lot of things.
And often it's ushered in then with racism and bigotry and plenty of other bad stuff.
But in essence, they don't come in saying we're the bad guys.
They come in saying we're the big guys.
We're the good guys.
Just give us enough power, we'll fix societies.
Now, I don't believe that that is how things work.
So when I've gotten into debates, a lot of times privately with my more left-leaning friends, what it always sort of ends up coming down to is they seem to have what I would argue is a mistaken belief That we imperfect humans can create perfect systems to help us.
I don't believe that.
And I actually think you can show that to these people.
So for example, if you were to say to, and try this, if you were to say to one of your progressive friends, well, tell me, can you name five politicians that are great and what they've accomplished?
Well, I guess if you're a progressive, well, you'd say AOC is great, Bernie's great, blah, blah.
Okay, well, what has Bernie actually ever done in his 30 years of the Senate?
He's really done nothing.
I think he got like a post office named after him or something, but he doesn't have major legislation.
Now, yes, he's done things outside of the government in that he's helped usher in some of this horrible big government stuff just through the messaging of Bernie Sanders.
But by the way, the San Francisco Chronicle just wrote an opinion piece that he's a white supremacist, so they'll come and get him, which is very exciting.
But I think you can show these people, hey, guess what?
We do have something in common.
You don't think that there's a lot of good politicians and I don't think there's a lot of good politicians.
And guess what?
I don't think that we need a lot of good politicians.
I think we just need some people to keep a lot of this madness out of our lives.
So I think that's one way that you can tackle that.
Guys, I have to be a little short.
I usually try to do these Q&As in about 45 minutes, but I gotta keep it tight, because I have a ton of locals meetings today.
Angel says, what are your thoughts regarding the rising populist movement?
I think it's very good.
It's not without some risk, for sure, because populism, Can often let in some bad ideas.
This is where you want to make sure that collectivist ideas and truly racist ideas don't seep in.
But populism and nationalism.
I am not afraid of the word nationalism.
I would recommend anyone watch my interview with Jerome Harzoni or read his book, The Virtue of Nationalism.
That it's okay to be America first.
It's okay to want to make America great again.
It's okay to buy American.
I mean, Biden is actually now just importing a lot of the Trump ideas just with different messaging and different labeling attached to it.
You know, our federal contractors are going to buy American.
Oh, we are?
Well, I guess that sounds a little bit like America first.
The idea that we have the people versus the elites.
Well, we got a real problem here.
The elites have a lot of power, and I'm not somebody that wants to burn everything down.
Like, I think if we burn everything down, we're going to look back and go, boy, that February 2021, those were the good old days.
Right?
If you look back at February 2020, before all the lockdowns, before COVID, those were the good old days.
We're going to keep forgetting what the good old days were.
So we have to figure out, well, how can a populist movement that is for the people and against centralized power, how can that mesh with a system that's not just disappearing tomorrow?
It's not just disappearing.
But how can it also mesh with the political system right now that is run by the Democrats that want to infect basically every part of your life and put critical race theory back into the schools, get rid of school choice, you know, do all of these big government programs that we know just don't work.
They just don't work.
All right, let me just do one more real quick.
Oh, well, this is sort of a take off that.
Anya says, with Biden in charge, do you think more people would get blue or red pill?
Conventional thinking would be blue pilled, right?
Like that, oh, well, the Democrats are in charge, and they're just gonna give us a lot of this stuff, and it's gonna make more people blue pilled, and they won't ask questions, and they'll be handed stuff, and that's it.
I don't think that's how it works.
I think the human mind is better than the systems that these guys can create.
And I think a lot of people, as I said before, I've already seen this, a lot of buyer's remorse with Biden and everyone's going, wait a minute, it kind of feels like we're going to end up in wars again.
Was that a thing?
Like we didn't get into any wars with that guy.
And oh, that critical race theory is going back in.
And we're constantly talking about equity and not equality.
And wait a minute, this guy didn't, why didn't he do any of it?
Why didn't he do any of it in the 47 years and in the eight years with Obama?
He should have done some of it, don't you think?
Okay, we are having a panel on Friday all about belief in these crazy times with a couple panelists.
I'll announce more.
Well, you know what?
I will tell you.
I'll tell you two of our panelists.
Our Eric Metaxas, who I've had on the show before, who's a great thinker, and Rabbi David Wolpe, who I've had on the show a couple of times, and then the final guest is TBA.
Also, Andy Ngo's new book came out today, and you're not gonna believe who the guest of the Rubin Report is this week.
It is Andy Ngo.
The full interview is up at rubinreport.locals.com.
Part one is up right here on the YouTube.
And next time we do a Q&A, if you wanna submit a question, RubinReport.locals.com.
That's where I'm communicating with all you guys and I love chatting with you and seeing all the dog pictures and the food pictures and the wine pictures and all of that good stuff.
All right, have a great day, everybody.
I've got a lot of meetings, so I'm gonna be light on the Twitter today, which is probably mentally healthy.
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