Dave Rubin hosts a panel with Adam Carolla, Richard Grenell, and Elisha Krauss to dissect California's "dystopian state" and the recall effort against Governor Gavin Newsom. While Carolla notes residents fleeing for Texas and Florida, Krauss defends staying in Los Angeles despite criticizing teachers unions and mask mandates. Grenell highlights logistical fraud risks from the mail-in ballot system and warns that over 1.5 million collected signatures face invalidation by the new Secretary of State. The group debates school choice as a bipartisan fix and urges citizens to sign recall petitions by hand at recallgavin2020.com, suggesting only coordinated action can reverse the state's decline. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Dave Rubin and this is another Friday Rubin Report panel extravaganza.
Today, we'll be talking about the dystopian state of California and the upcoming recall of our governor, Gavin Newsom.
I'm very excited.
Joining me today, our host at The Washington Examiner, Alicia Krauss.
Former ambassador to Germany and former acting director of national intelligence, Rick Grenell, and author of I'm Your Emotional Support Animal and host of the Adam Carolla Show, Adam Carolla.
I may not only be the only one amongst us who was born in California, I may be the only person that was born in California, because I've never met anyone except for Dr. Drew.
You know, I always look at California as a beautiful blonde in high school who just kind of got by in her looks and always had a date and never had to study.
And life was pretty good.
And now that blonde is 46 and has some crow's feet and actually needs to do something.
And the thing is, it's like, hey, we got the ocean, we got the mountains.
We got Malibu.
We got Disneyland, even if it's shuttered.
So we don't really have to do anything because we're so attractive.
You know what I mean?
Like they don't have to hustle like other States with bad weather and bad topography.
So they've got to kind of earn it.
Whereas we've always just went like, Hey, we'll just hang around.
We'll just flutter our Eyelashes and the boys will come to us.
And we're getting a little long in the tooth and we're not as attractive as we used to be.
I gotta say, I think for me, you know, my husband and I are practicing evangelical Christians, and for us, we currently feel like our purpose and our calling is to be here and to raise our girls here.
They're of the ages 11 to 18 months.
There's four of them.
I'm homeschooling because Newsom and the teachers unions don't care about our schools, but we can get to that in a moment.
They don't care about our schools or our kids.
And so for us to uproot, we kind of, the motto that we've said, and I respect everyone's individual decisions and kind of risk assessment that they're taking, but we didn't want to flee in fear and we didn't want to stay because of pride.
And we are very plugged into our local community and our local church.
My husband is a business owner here in the state and we wanted to be able to potentially make a difference.
And we feel like if we just leave, We're not going to be able to change anything in this state.
And, I mean, Jerry Brown once infamously said it, as goes California, so goes the rest of the nation.
And I'd like to hopefully shift California so that that is a positive thing and not negative for the rest of the nation.
Here's the problem is if you leave California, you find yourself in not California.
And that's a worst state of affairs.
I just love this state, and we've got to do something to fight back.
I went to elementary school in Redwood City, and back then, San Francisco, Bay Area, or as we used to say, we lived between San Francisco and San Jose, and now it's just the entire Bay Area, and it's a shell of what it once was.
We've got to keep up.
And we've got to be able to support the middle class, the people who love California, who are here not because they're a Hollywood star or they did a gift, you know, a technology that got them to be billionaires.
And so now they live in the Hollywood Hills.
There's a whole bunch of people that make California great.
And I have to say that I don't believe, I'm not one of these people that believe that anyone in California and the majority is partisan.
I think the majority of people are not partisan.
We're so far away from Washington.
We just always try to be at the cutting edge and want to do something different.
And that's why I think they are leading the nation with getting rid of the governor who has had him on lockdowns more than any other governor across the country.
Yeah, as we're recording this right now, I just read this morning that we are now the last state when it comes to reopening gyms.
So they, I mean, they don't even want us, it's not they don't want us going out to eat and seeing each other.
They also want us, I guess, fat and unhealthy.
Adam, why is it, we've talked about this before, I actually want all of your opinions on this, but Adam, why is it that people in California, as someone that's lived here your whole life, I cannot seem to grasp the concept that the people that they vote for have something to do with the bad policies that they are surrounded by.
They hate the schools, they keep voting people in.
They hate the homeless situation, they keep voting for people that bring these things.
Yeah, I think there's some delusion going on, but I think a lot of it, Started when we started getting into the real ad hominem stuff where we were like, you people on this side of the aisle are bad people.
You're not people we disagree with.
We do disagree with you, but you're also bad people.
And our people are good people.
So when you have your people who you've labeled as good people, Doing bad things.
You just become like this mom who's a horrible mom, but you go, but she loves her kids, but she loves, you know, she loves those kids.
And it's like, right, but she's feeding them crap for breakfast.
The house is a mess.
There's no insurance.
There's no alarm.
Her car isn't insured.
I know, but she loves, she loves those kids.
So I believe if they removed all these sort of good and bad from the equation, And they just went, look, just brass tacks.
Here's what these people are doing.
Here's what these people are suggesting.
Then we could do it because as long as you think your side is good or virtuous, then you're just going to vote for your side, no matter what they do and what they do is bad.
I mean, Adam is inspiring me with all of his analogies, although I wish he'd use a male analogy every once in a while, but it almost reminds me, you know, piggybacking on what he's saying.
It's almost like a parent that is enabling the drug abuser.
It's like, well, if I give them more money, maybe they'll help themselves one of these days instead of the tough love.
And I think that people, really, with the recalled Newsom, and I think credit to the awful pandemic that we've all lived through, thank goodness, and we have the t-shirts to show it.
This has really been a bipartisan issue of frustration in the overreach of government, and definitely with regards to the hypocrisy of government.
And so I think that I even have hardcore leftist friends and people in Hollywood that are definitely leaning to the left that are messaging me, oh yeah, I signed the petition, but I'm afraid I'll be outed.
Or I donated to the recall effort, but I'm afraid I'll be outed, as we've seen with some of the other people that were funding the effort.
I think that we are at a breaking point, and I am hopeful, even though some of what I'm seeing is only anecdotal, personal experience, that people are realizing, all right, we need to be engaged, we need to be involved, because you also see people on the other side of the aisle that tend to only vote for the, you know, president, vote for a couple of props here and there, where they maybe saw Sophia Bush in an ad talking about how to help the children, and then they ignore the down-ballot races that are crucial, because politics is local, and what is affecting your local schools Are the people that you're voting for here at the supervisor level, whether or not you can open restaurants, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think that this is an example in a basic case and how our education system has failed people of completely understanding how government works.
And hopefully this is a wake up call for them to realize that they need to get involved.
So if the wake-up call doesn't happen, at least at like the super local level, Rick, you've been probably as outspoken on getting rid of Newsom as anybody.
Do you think, well, A, it sounds like there are the votes, right?
We know that we already have, or there are enough signatures.
We know that we have over 1.5 million.
They're gonna contest some of them, so the goal is probably to get 1.8 or 1.9 so that it happens.
But do you think the people will have woken up enough to go, oh, we shouldn't just vote him right back in after we recall him, we gotta actually find somebody else?
Okay, I think first of all, let's be honest, we're going to need well over two million because the entire system, this is a one party system.
And we've got a brand new Secretary of State, she's never been involved at all in these issues.
And she was just placed there by Gavin Newsom.
And now she's going to be in charge of collecting all of these signatures validated from the counties.
So there's going to be a whole bunch of game playing.
Gavin has already announced that mail-in ballots, mail ballots, will be sent to everybody on the voter list.
Now, I can tell you those voter lists are atrocious, and that's why they want to send a ballot to every single person on that list.
Because in California, we move a lot.
People are transient.
That list is crap.
And I can tell you it's crap because in Los Angeles County, They sent two ballots to my neighbor's parents who had been dead for 10 years and 12 years.
And the Twitter community relations people, what did they do?
Rather than say, wow, don't you think we should contact Los Angeles County and tell them that they're sending ballots to dead people?
No, they kicked me off Twitter for two days because I shared the information.
They shot the messenger as community relations people.
So big tech is now working To mess this whole system up, mail ballots to people who don't know they're coming.
Ask yourself why Ohio and Florida, 60% of the people, Did mail-in ballots and there were virtually no problems.
And that's because you have to request the ballot.
We are all for mail-in ballots.
But if you live somewhere, you need to tell the county what your address is and that you want the ballot so you know it's coming.
Then we can have mail-in ballots.
This reckless system that Gavin just signed off on of mailing ballots out to the current voter rolls.
The current voter rolls are a mess.
And this is just asking for fraud, and it's gonna be the way that he can figure out a way to stay in office.
I don't wanna get kicked off YouTube or Twitter, but David and I got mail-in ballots to our old address that we had moved from months before, and then we voted from our new address, but we didn't even have to show ID.
I actually took my ID out thinking you have to do something, and the guy was like, no, no, no, put that away.
Adam, you think they're gonna get him?
You tweet about your frustrations with this place every day.
You think something could actually turn with Newsom?
For me, one of my greatest laments is how passive all the citizens have become, how sort of sheep-like, how the government just sort of says jump and we just sort of say how high.
I am, you know, the fact that it's been a year And businesses are still shuttered and schools are still shuttered.
And I'm not hearing an uprising or pushback.
So, you know, I think to me, the real disappointment isn't in the government.
I don't really trust the government.
I feel like they're just doing what they're here to do, which is bigger, more control, more power over you and a bigger part of your life and telling you what to do.
I'm really devastated and kind of shocked and surprised that the people haven't stood up and said, enough is enough.
This is the United States.
This is not how we roll.
And to take it a step further, not only are they not stepping up, they're trying to cancel out people who do step up, which is now we're getting into some weird Orwellian territory.
So if the people would just, Be a little more pragmatic and a little less, you know, visceral or use their head instead of their heart a little bit and realize what is going on in this state and how it just gets progressively worse every year and step up and vote.
Vote.
Let's just be a little more pragmatic.
Let's just use math.
Let's just use math instead of Our heart or compassion or empathy or all this BS that everyone bandies about.
I've never heard more talk about empathy from politicians, but they know they're dealing with dumb people in California who are very married to these, to these themes.
So for me, I wish that people would just step up, admit they were wrong.
You made a mistake.
You voted for Gavin Newsom.
He is an imbecile and there's something wrong with him.
He's either a pathological liar or he doesn't, his vessels don't contain blood or whatever you want to say about him, you idiots of California, you made a mistake and you voted for an imbecile.
Now write this ship, admit you were wrong and go another direction.
So Alicia, to Adam's point, what I'm kind of worried about, because it is a one-party state, is that there is just a true culture of fear in that people, like I was just in Florida for the last 10 days, people were happy.
People were out and about.
I was in restaurants where there were 85 and 90 year olds, a lot of old people in Florida, and they were having dinner and making decisions for themselves, but that the culture of fear around here, so many people afraid to let their dogs now say hi to each other, like that thing is, that is more scary to me than the policies in a way that the people, literally my neighbor, like three houses over had a baby shower, 10 or 15 people there, and a neighbor called the police on them.
That is the thing that we have to fear, in a weird way, more than the stupid policies of Mr. Synapses-Aren't-Working-Newsom.
You know, anything, though, I appreciate that it now lets me know, like, the level of brain power that someone does or does not have.
Like, if I see somebody driving down the road, and they're in their car by themselves, and they're not an Uber or Lyft driver, Ask with their windows up.
I'm like, you know what?
We ain't going to be friends.
But when I see somebody on a hike and they don't have a mask on and I don't have a mask on, it's like you do this little head nod like, you're logical.
I'm logical.
We should be friends.
I think, unfortunately, that silencing culture that you just referenced or that fear culture that you just referenced has come from a lot of time the rich and the powerful that are, you know, running fashion, running finance, running the tech industry, running social media, and running Hollywood.
And I hope that there's going to be a small but silent and even mighty level of people in the state that rise up and say, no, we're not going to put up with this crap anymore.
And I don't know.
Once again, this is anecdotal, but I'm seeing the Restaurant Association push back.
I'm seeing public school teachers that are against the unions that are starting to push back on social media.
I'm seeing parents that are saying, hey, you know, what are we going to do with our kids?
How come private schools can do this well, but public schools cannot?
that are asking these questions.
You're seeing restaurants that decided to remain open, like Joe's down in Redondo Beach, and fight against the LA County Health Department, and got tons of support from the local community.
I went down there and 80% of the crowd were registered Democrats and Biden voters.
And so I see hope in those instances of true humanity saying, government, get out of our way, shut up, and let us do what we need to do for the betterment of ourselves and our families.
And I think agreeing with Adam, I wish it would spread, but even as it does, the mainstream media is not going to cover it because it goes against the narrative of fear that they are trying to spread.
Yeah, Rick, you must love that last portion of what she said there because I went to a whole bunch of Trump rallies in Beverly Hills, and obviously you were in the administration and you were out on the campaign trail for Trump.
There were a ton of people that I met that were not Republicans.
They were not conservatives.
They were, these were apolitical people or they were restauranteurs mugged by reality or something like that, that I actually do think maybe there's a chance that it wouldn't just be that he would get replaced by some other, you know, sort of whacked out progressive, but maybe a guy like Rick Grinnell?
Look, I think everybody's frustrated in California, no matter where you go.
Every neighbor that I have is a liberal.
I have great friends who are on the left.
I have friends, very close friends, who campaigned for Gavin Newsom, who are now collecting signatures to recall him, because they realize that he has mismanaged, from a political standpoint, just his pure management tactics.
are what's convincing people that he's not up to the job.
I mean, let alone, you know, we don't have a timber industry and we have forest fires.
We keep telling people to conserve water.
We live on the ocean.
We are, you know, the California has no LNG terminal.
Think about that.
We have exploded liquid natural gas, natural gas industry to the point where it's transformed our economy.
And we've got no terminal in all of California because the governor thinks That somehow it's bad, and therefore we're not able to participate in the LNG explosion and sell to China, which would also help on climate issues.
So we now are seeing liberals who say, this governor doesn't know what he's doing.
But I think Adam's point is a good one, is that everybody silently doesn't like this guy and sees the mismanagement and sees the homelessness.
But then they're not speaking up.
Yes, when you're mugged by reality and you own a restaurant, you do.
Or you have kids that are in the government-controlled schools and your neighbors go to Catholic schools and you're like, wait a minute, why are they going and my kids in the government schools don't get to go?
So I would say if we could just tell people to speak up and say what's on your mind, whether you're liberal, conservative, declined to state, whatever you are, If you feel that Gavin Newsom has mismanaged the state, you are not alone.
You know, I think we have instilled such a climate of fear and we have shown so many examples of people being canceled that these people who aren't the most heroic by nature to start with, you know,
they're not firefighters or loggers, they're actors, you know, so most of them have a nice yellow streak
running down their spine from birth.
And now we're asking those people to jeopardize their career because the left
has done a wonderful job of silencing people.
You know, it's sort of like what the left did is they do one of those movies,
like in those movies like "Die Hard" or something where they have all the people hostage and.
And, uh, the bad guy, the heavy, like walks in and he points at the secretary and he goes, come here.
I want to tell you something.
And then he just puts a bullet in her head and she falls to the ground and they go, okay, any more questions?
So we saw that one person drop that now that's enough to keep the other 30 people in, in line in that room, except for it's not one person.
It's every day.
We see somebody new canceled in Hollywood from the bachelor host To Gina Carano or whoever.
I mean, the list is too long for us to remember.
So the left has done a fantastic job in silencing people because they've removed them from their livelihood.
And it's despicable.
And obviously the same people that never stopped bloviating about McCarthyism are the ones that are just sort of sitting silently by the sidelines right now.
But it's been an incredibly effective tool.
And the only way it's going to work, I mean, I always sort of look at it this way, which is if you are in a prison camp and there's three guards with machine guns and you want to rush them individually at 30 second intervals, you're all going to die eventually.
If you all just bum rush them at the same time, most of us are getting out of here.
Some of us are going to get shot.
But our only shot is the full gang bum rush.
And so I think as people sort of come out, they send their tweets out there, they make their opinions known, they get picked off one by one.
But if there was just a wave, a groundswell of this, they couldn't pick anyone, everyone off.
I mean, you look, think about something like Scientology.
I was doing radio in 1999 and I said some horrible stuff about Scientology.
Alicia, since you mentioned you have young kids, although they're not being taught all the woke stuff just yet at that age, I seriously hope that, and you're teaching them at home.
Yeah.
And homeschool.
What are you hearing, though, from your friends that have young kids that are in the schools?
Because every day I see something on Twitter where it's like, you know, white kids being taught that they're bad, and we want equity, not equality, and all the usual stuff.
And even though public schools here aren't open, specifically in the Bay Area and LA-USD, where we live and have most of our friends, there's the promised land of Orange County, as my husband likes to call it.
It seems the most normal place.
Ventura, other counties for those outside of LA, that's an area just south of us, beautiful coastal areas with more normal people, and you can steal and carry permits.
I am hearing a lot of frustration from parents that they'll walk in on their kids and the teacher is just doing stuff on Zoom or complaining about COVID regulations, but not about the reopening, about wanting to remain closed, telling the kids to double mask, telling them not to visit their grandparents.
Like before Christmas, a girlfriend of mine whose girls are at a very swanky I'm sorry, but if I'm paying $30 a year, it's none of your business to tell my kid anything outside of teaching them reading, writing, and arithmetic.
So unfortunately, it's not just a public school problem, it's a secular school problem, and I think that parents need to definitely explore.
I'm 1000% a fan of school choice, and I think that the California Republican Party and Republican politicians nationwide Are being very remiss to not latch on to the school choice issue right now because it is something that polls incredibly well, even with Democratic minority women in this state, because every woman in the country cares about her children.
Look, this is a long answer, but I think what Alicia said about school choices is such a big issue, and it's fundamentally rooted in some of our problems in California.
I have launched this organization called Fix California, and it's doing three things long-term.
And so I, we can talk about it all day, but, but just to answer your question, I think that too many people have abandoned California and not tried to fix and do the long-term things.
So I'm committed to doing the long-term things.
I've said, I'm not going to think about running for governor in 2022.
I think it's, it's a, you know, you're not going to win in California as a Republican, unless we fix the system.
And the three things that I'm doing with Fix California should fix the system if we can get them accomplished in five years.
So 2022 is out.
Let's see what happens when we get signatures, if we get signatures, and if they don't play games on a recall.
You know, my thing is like, I don't have Hard, fast answers for things.
I like, I will hear what people have to say.
And if it seems to make sense, uh, I will definitely think about it.
I mean, it, it seems insane, but what's been happening is the more shows I do like your own, but even like TMZ, when I'm done explaining what we need to do, the host just pauses and goes, why don't you run for governor?
So, I'm sort of like Arlie Ermey.
Arlie Ermey, Gunny.
Miss that guy, man.
I miss Arlie Ermey.
But he was the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket.
And he originally was signed on to work as an advisor to the film.
You know, so he was saying to the actor who's playing the drill sergeant, no, say it like this.
And, uh, you know, your last easy day was yesterday.
After a while, the director just went, well, why don't you just do it?
And that's how we got the part.
So for me and governor, it's kind of like, I'm sitting around telling everyone how to fix everything and what we need to do and how it should work and who would be a good person.
But at some point, I think some people are looking at me going, well, then why don't you just do it if you're the one with all the answers?