March 5, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
33:04
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
(Music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and it's time for another Rubin Report Friday panel extravaganza. | ||
| We'll be focusing on burning books and mashing potato heads today. | ||
| And joining me are author and journalist Nancy Rommelman, host of the book club at PragerU and author of the upcoming book, Speechless, Michael Knowles, and author of the occasionally banned book, Irreversible Damage, Abigail Schreier. | ||
| Guys, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Great to be with you, Dave. | ||
| Thanks for having us. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Michael and Abigail, I've had you guys on the show before, so I want to just kick this off quickly with Nancy, just so she can intro herself to the good people if they don't know her. | ||
| Nancy, can you give me a life recap in 45 seconds? | ||
| 45 seconds. | ||
| I am a journalist and an author. | ||
| This trend of people getting rid of things they don't like or don't understand sort of by mobbing happened to me a couple of years ago when I had a podcast that some employees of my my husband's former business didn't | ||
| like and they decided to sort of cancel him and me Weren't able to cancel me. I've been reporting all summer | ||
| for reason magazine on the protests in portland Uh that's been sort of unpopular too to talk about what's | ||
| actually happening as opposed to what people want to believe to be happening | ||
| So I'm sort of always very popular. | ||
| I think that kind of sums it up. | ||
| And you had an incredible PragerU video about what happened to you. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| Not how to be brave. | ||
| It's how to be a dangerous person. | ||
| And what's interesting is like I had, I really had never interfaced with Prager at all. | ||
| I'm not exactly like the same politics so much. | ||
| They were the nicest people. | ||
| They were so understanding and their fans, man, were amazing and still write to me. | ||
| I was happy to be there. | ||
| I thought they did a great job trying to tell the story. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a funny thing for people like Abigail, for people like you, for people like me, that somehow you start talking about free speech, next thing you know, all those crazy right-wing maniacs like Michael Knowles and Dennis Prager are saying, hey, you want to come over and talk to me? | ||
| And then they don't hurt you and they don't poison you. | ||
| It's very bizarre, but look, this has obviously been a particularly crazy week. | ||
| It seems like every week is nuts, but the Dr. Seuss thing this week, where the publisher announced they are no longer gonna publish six of the books, and that's their right to do as a private company, obviously, but then suddenly places like eBay are saying they're not gonna carry the books anymore, and now libraries are having very important meetings to decide whether they can have the books in stock, in the libraries or not. | ||
| It seems like the crazy is just getting ramped up And ramped up. | ||
| So first, I guess my first question would be this. | ||
| As all of you have dealt with some version of cancel culture in your own lives and professional careers, are we even close to the end or is this just, are we just still like smack dab in the middle of it? | ||
| Abigail, your book got temporarily banned from Target and then you were back on. | ||
| Are you on today? | ||
| Have you checked this morning? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm back off. | |
| They deleted it. | ||
| Oh, you're back off? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| After there was public outcry in response to public outcry, they put it back on and then they quietly deleted it again. | ||
| So we are, let me tell you, they're just getting started. | ||
| And frankly, all the publishers, everybody's dependent on Amazon. | ||
| You're talking about a company, it's not just a private company, a company that controls over 80% of the marketplace for books. | ||
| So, you know, they do what they like and they can make books disappear. | ||
| And that's what they're doing. | ||
| So wait, you were kicked off Target because like one person was upset. | ||
| Then there was an outcry to the outcry, so you got back on. | ||
| But are you saying you're not in Target now or you're not on Amazon? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's gone. | |
| My book is gone from Target.com, even though it was selling very well. | ||
| But you still are on Amazon, at least at the moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For the moment, yes. | |
| For the moment, I'm on Amazon. | ||
| Knowles, you wrote a book with no words. | ||
| Your upcoming book, Speechless, is gonna have a few more words, I presume. | ||
| I don't have the advanced copy yet, but you're the type of guy that it would be very easy for them to just take out. | ||
| You've said scary things in your day. | ||
| And I say very scary things in my new book. | ||
| So I actually have been telling people on my show, I hope that you pre-order the book. | ||
| I won't be surprised if the book is then taken off. | ||
| I hope that it will be available somewhere else. | ||
| But I do think that the book is scary to them. | ||
| Because one thing that conservatives have been pointing out is they're getting rid of Dr. Seuss, right? | ||
| eBay is clamping down on Dr. Seuss. | ||
| They won't even publish certain Dr. Seuss books. | ||
| But they allow Mein Kampf. | ||
| To be sold on Amazon, they allow Mein Kampf to be sold on eBay, so what's the deal with that? | ||
| The deal with that is that Dr. Seuss is actually a far greater threat to the liberal establishment than Mein Kampf is. | ||
| Nobody takes Mein Kampf seriously, and the left calls all of us Nazis anyway, so the only way that that calumny is going to have any effect is if people know what Nazis are, if they keep Nazis top of mind. | ||
| But people like Dr. Seuss, people like Abigail, who writes a perfectly mainstream scholarly book, | ||
| people like Ryan T. Anderson, who wrote the wonderfully titled "When Harry Became Sally," | ||
| another scholarly work on the transgender moment, that actually is a threat. | ||
| That's off Amazon right now, for the record. | ||
| Now that's been kicked off Amazon, that really is a threat to the dominant liberal regime | ||
| because they don't have any answer for the arguments that Abigail or Ryan have made in those books. | ||
| So the only thing that they can do is kick it off. | ||
| And I don't think it's getting any better because I don't think that we're fighting it | ||
| in anywhere near the right way. | ||
| If anything, I think that conservatives and libertarians are basically playing into their hands. | ||
| Yeah, well, by the way, when all this craziness happened this week, | ||
| I went into the garage and I found my copy of... | ||
| Of all the places you'll go, which pretty much everyone gets when they graduate college. | ||
| And if you read this book, this, Knowles, is the true threat to the establishment. | ||
| Because you know what this book is about? | ||
| Individual responsibility. | ||
| That you might be able to accomplish something for yourself in your life. | ||
| And the government doesn't have to do it before you. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| But Nancy, you've... | ||
| As you said before, you've sort of lived through the mob attacking you and survived. | ||
| And then you find some strange bridges to build, maybe in places you didn't think. | ||
| Do you think we're still right in the center of this thing? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| First of all, I mean, I'm obviously against banning everything. | ||
| And I think the impulse comes from people who don't, they don't trust other people to make decisions for themselves. | ||
| So they don't trust themselves to make decisions for themselves. | ||
| So they're like, well, I'm gonna hand that over to whether it's, you know, Amazon or the government or the New York Times or whatever. | ||
| But I've been reporting a lot for the past three weeks on the whole Donald McNeil situation at the New York Times and how he was sort of like shuffled out the door by a more, you know, angry activist contingent that doesn't want certain words said. | ||
| They do not want certain ideas explored. | ||
| And I mean, I see it as ambition disguised as, you know, do-goodism. | ||
| But here's a question for you guys, and it has to do with Amazon or the New York Times. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Someone's book is making a lot of money. | ||
| The Dr. Seuss books or Abigail's books, potentially. | ||
| And they're like, well, no, we've got to go along with the crowd. | ||
| We've got to get rid of it. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| What if their bottom line starts to suffer? | ||
| And they see someone going and buying Abigail's book someplace else. | ||
| And they're like, huh, we just lost $800,000. | ||
| What happens at the New York Times when they stop running? | ||
| They really still do incredible journalism. | ||
| But when they really can't do that anymore because the people in the building are upset, what happens when their bottom line starts to drop? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I don't actually think that will work at all, because you're talking about companies with monopolistic power. | |
| Amazon's monopoly is so complete that they control over 80% of books bought and sold in the U.S., including secondary markets, by the way, of used books. | ||
| They were all deleted for Ryan's book. | ||
| What that means is that no book that has a heterodox idea in it will now Get published, okay? | ||
| Why would a publisher ever take a chance on a book that can be vaporized tomorrow by Amazon? | ||
| They won't. | ||
| The effects on free speech are profound. | ||
| Look, I mean, Wells Fargo. | ||
| Should Wells Fargo be able to ban you from getting a mortgage because you have a Hillary sign on your front lawn? | ||
| Well, they control far less of the market for mortgages and private loans than Amazon does for books. | ||
| This is a big, big deal. | ||
| You can't just go to other places. | ||
| Publishers will not take you if Amazon won't distribute your books. | ||
| I actually think there's almost something more perverse than that. | ||
| It's that they actually now care about social justice, or whatever you want to call it, more than they care about their bottom line. | ||
| I actually think, in many cases, those people that were protesting at the New York Times, you know, the people that in effect got rid of Barry Weiss and that now have created this new situation, that they would gladly destroy their own businesses. | ||
| It's sort of like with the NBA players. | ||
| destroying their, we know what's happening to NBA ratings, the more they talk about social justice, | ||
| to the point that the NBA put Black Lives Matter on the court thinking it was a good idea, | ||
| then they saw the ratings drop and now they got rid of it. | ||
| I mean, did they solve racism? | ||
| I guess not, but I think they will all gladly destroy their own properties. | ||
| Knowles, what do you think about that? | ||
| This is such a good point, Dave. | ||
| I think that you've really hit on what they're doing here and why we as conservatives, as libertarians, | ||
| classical liberals, why we've been so ineffective. | ||
| We have bought the lie that political correctness, or wokeism, or leftism, whatever you want to call it, has laid for us. | ||
| What political correctness is, is a way to destroy all the old standards, right? | ||
| I'm actually willing to say this. | ||
| I think the left understands free speech much better than conservatives and libertarians do. | ||
| I think what the left says, Herbert Marcuse wrote this famously in an infamous essay called Repressive Tolerance, where he basically said, we can't tolerate intolerant people, so you've got to shut up the conservatives and encourage the leftists. | ||
| But it's not just Marcuse. | ||
| John Locke said this. | ||
| John Locke in the letter concerning toleration said, the father of liberalism in the most famous letter on toleration, he says, we've got to tolerate everybody. | ||
| Except for atheists. | ||
| We can't tolerate them at all. | ||
| John Milton, Areopagitica, most famous essay or speech, I suppose, on free speech in the English language. | ||
| He says, we gotta tolerate everybody and have all free speech. | ||
| Except for Catholics. | ||
| And the thing is, they were sort of right at the time, given the political circumstances. | ||
| The reality that the left understands is that all speech regimes have some limits. | ||
| In the United States, from the very beginning of our country, we have outlawed whole swaths of speech. | ||
| Fraud, sedition, Fighting words, threats, all these sorts of things, right? | ||
| And none of us really contests that obscenity which was enforced until very, very recently and sometimes still is. | ||
| And what the left did is they saw that, this wonderful American free speech tradition that allows so much speech, so much more than so many other traditions, and they said, okay, there are some exceptions here, there are some boundaries, we're just going to transform those boundaries and have them work for us. | ||
| Such that in the 1940s and 50s, if you published communist subversive material to overthrow the government, that would be banned? | ||
| I think it's perfectly understandable that that would be banned. | ||
| Today... | ||
| Forget about the communist material, you publish Dr. Seuss, that's what's gonna be banned. | ||
| So I think while we need to defend free speech in the abstract, I totally agree with that, what we also need to do is defend the particular speech that is being banned right now, because what I think the left is doing is just totally shifting the standards to uproot our entire American speech tradition. | ||
| So with that in mind, go ahead, Abigail. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was just gonna say, I think it's important to note that this really isn't a right-left issue. | |
| To the extent that anybody who has ever had a heterodox idea can be banned right now, and everyone who's ever been wanted to be exposed. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of reasons to want to read Dr. Seuss, including just, or Huck Finn, including just to understand what the world was like then. | ||
| You don't need to agree with a book to read it. | ||
| You just have to have an open mind and a curious mind. | ||
| And your ideas are being banned right now. | ||
| You won't be able to get access to them. | ||
| Amazon is quietly shutting them down, in addition to controlling all the web services. | ||
| I mean, they got rid of Parler for that reason. | ||
| The vulnerability and the chilling effect of free speech that Amazon can have is profound. | ||
| I don't understand why they don't want to allow history to exist. | ||
| Okay, let's say you're and you do something really stupid on the ski slope | ||
| and you fly off and you hit your head. | ||
| Well, the next time you go skiing, you're gonna say, "Maybe I'm not gonna do that. | ||
| "That wasn't a great idea." | ||
| I mean, what do they say about the Holocaust? | ||
| Never forget, right? | ||
| Never forget. | ||
| Do not scrub over history. | ||
| It's a bad idea. | ||
| I mean, we all know, let the bad ideas lose, let the good ideas win. | ||
| I know I'm the continual optimist, but as we were talking before we went on, | ||
| yes, things are pretty awful with Amazon scrubbing things and with not being able to get ideas across. | ||
| I still believe that people are going to create new ways for us to tell stories. | ||
| And we've seen Dave do this, and we've seen this on other platforms. | ||
| They don't have hegemony now, and we may feel sort of, you know, constricted by what's going on now. | ||
| But I just think if you keep, keep, keep insisting on putting good work into the world, It will reach where it wants to go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, you guys know my feelings on that. | ||
| Like human ingenuity is always the one thing that will save us. | ||
| And that's also why I've kind of been against regulation. | ||
| Cause to me, if you regulate these things, you just calcify them forever. | ||
| But Michael, can you address Nancy's point there? | ||
| Because we did the PragerU book club, we did 1984 together. | ||
| And what she's talking about there is the memory hole. | ||
| Why do they actually memory hole things? | ||
| And I think there, there is a specific reason for it. | ||
| Well, because if you control the past, you control the future. | ||
| That's the first part of it. | ||
| And it goes so much deeper. | ||
| I notice the left always gets very angry when the right invokes 1984. | ||
| And they'll say, well, George Orwell was a democratic socialist, which is sort of true, but also George Orwell's definition of that was very different than we might define it as now. | ||
| But the parallels are so striking. | ||
| The erasure of history. | ||
| Orwell writes at length about that process. | ||
| new speak, which we might call political correctness, this total changing of the language to change | ||
| our minds. And then most notably, and I think this actually ties in especially to what Abigail | ||
| writes about, is double think. Orwell writes that the Big Brother regime relies, perhaps | ||
| most of all, on double think, this idea that the citizens need to hold contradictory ideas | ||
| in their head at the same time. Because if you have to hold those contradictory ideas, | ||
| You totally lose your ability and your willingness to reason and to fight back. | ||
| And so this is why I think that the left is pushing feminism on the one hand and transgenderism on the other. | ||
| Those two ideas obviously undercut one another, but it doesn't really matter because the point of this entire regime is not to put forth a substantive positive left-wing vision. | ||
| It's just to destroy all the old history, all the old standards, all the old ideas, and all our old way of life. | ||
| So Abigail, do you think that even though your book obviously did incredibly well despite dealing with some of this censorship stuff, do you think that that complicates a publishing house from picking you up for the next book? | ||
| Because it's just like these ideas are in the system now. | ||
| You know, they tried to, I had Jordan's book on my table right before we started, but they tried to stop Jordan Peterson's The newest book, which came out this week, even though 12 Rules for Life sold something like six million copies and basically kept everyone at Penguin Random House, which is my publisher, by the way, it kept pretty much everyone there employed and they tried to stop, you know, some employees tried to stop the second book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that they are absolutely, they don't care about how well a book is selling because my book sold incredibly well. | |
| I mean, I've got over 2,400 reviews of my book on Amazon. | ||
| People love the book. | ||
| But they can't, they won't be able to get it if Amazon disappears it. | ||
| And anybody who is, you know, every publisher is subject to Amazon. | ||
| It's a big deal. | ||
| And we're going to see people, you know, not expressing themselves if YouTube could drop them, not interviewing people that YouTube might, if YouTube might disappear their channel. | ||
| I mean, this is, you know, the effects are profound and we're all reliant on these big techs. | ||
| I mean, they are dominant utilities and they're shutting off the power. | ||
| So Nancy, you want people to be dangerous. | ||
| What can they do? | ||
| Forget us, forget somewhat public people that are authors and YouTubers and the rest of it. | ||
| What can the average guy do that owns a shop or owns a coffee shop, whatever it might be? | ||
| Think for themselves. | ||
| Oh, but besides that, I will say, you know, having covered the protests in Portland, and if you guys read Reason Magazine, it got a big piece in the May issue. | ||
| These are people there, I mean, it's a very small portion of the population, but just like, you know, The arguments that people have online that we're trying to push against, they seem to control the narrative. | ||
| But in my experience, they're super, super, super good at tearing things down and destroying things, but they're not good yet, as far as I can see, on building anything. | ||
| And I wonder if you guys think that, I mean, I see that, you know, if the people in Portland get their way, they're just going to continue to cannibalize each other because that's what they know how to do. | ||
| It's going to be the same at the New York Times. | ||
| If you've become super, super good at like sharpening your knife and I can get rid of Barry Weiss or I can get rid of, you know, James Bennett, OK, you get rid of these people. | ||
| Well, now you're a knife sharpener. | ||
| You're going to use your knife. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you're going to start cannibalizing each other. | ||
| And then I think new things get built. | ||
| I mean, that's what I hope. | ||
| I mean, I hope people can stay, you know, independent. | ||
| And also, when someone comes at you and says something to you like you're a racist, You know what? | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| And I'm just not going to play that game with you. | ||
| I'm just not going to do it. | ||
| Period. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I totally agree with that. | |
| I mean, I would just say that I think things will get well. | ||
| You know, Dave, you're obviously doing a great thing with locals and things are getting built. | ||
| The problem is I just don't want to live in an America where people can't talk to each other, when people can't explore ideas because they're so afraid that they'll lose their business over it. | ||
| And that's where we are. | ||
| I just fear, though, don't you think the issue is even more fundamental? | ||
| I hate to be the pessimist on the panel here, but I think I'll live up to my reputation as the knuckle-dragging... No, you don't. | ||
| You don't hate being a pessimist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on, Matt. | |
| I will be the knuckle-dragging conservative here. | ||
| It seems to me that what's at the heart of a lot of this is we can't talk to one another, one, because these big | ||
| tech companies, which now control the public square, which they in many | ||
| ways attained through fraud, which William Barr used to talk | ||
| about when he was attorney general and some of the DOJ had been looking into, | ||
| but let's assume that's going to be in the courts for years and | ||
| years and years. | ||
| Part of it is this technical problem that big tech shuts us up | ||
| and therefore in a republic where politics is speech, The way we govern ourselves is by talking to one another and persuading one another. | ||
| Therefore, they have all this political power. | ||
| But the other problem is we don't speak the same language. | ||
| The issue of political correctness and wokeism is they totally change the language. | ||
| I can no longer pronounce the word woman or Latino because there are all these sorts of consonants in there now that I don't even know how to pronounce. | ||
| And this gets to the transgender issue. | ||
| If I'm having a conversation with somebody and I refer to Caitlyn Jenner as he, And my friend refers to Caitlyn Jenner as she. | ||
| We are speaking different languages. | ||
| We have fundamentally different views of the world. | ||
| I don't even know how we can communicate anymore because if symbols don't refer to objective reality, if we're undermining objective reality itself, if we can't say this is good and this is bad and this is right and this is wrong, There's no way to communicate, and so of course they're gonna control the language, and frankly, I think that was the plan all along. | ||
| I have to kick that to Abigail, because I was about a year ago, I think maybe I told you this when I interviewed you, Abigail, I was at a dinner with a friend of mine who's, or I think we're friends still, I'm not exactly sure, but who's a bit, you know, lefty, lefty, okay, and we got into the thing about the trans And all I said, all I said, which is what I always say, | ||
| I want these people to be treated with respect, equality under the law. | ||
| I hope they find someone that loves them. | ||
| As adults, they should be allowed to identify however they want, transition, whatever they want to do. | ||
| All I said is there's a biological difference between men and women, male and female, | ||
| and we should just be able to acknowledge that. | ||
| And it just derailed from there, you know, and to the point where about 10 minutes in, | ||
| he said, "You don't understand quantum physics." | ||
| And I said, you're right. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| I said, you're right, but I don't think you do either. | ||
| But I think that gets to Knowles's point about we're not even speaking remotely the same language. | ||
| And I think you've had to deal with this quite often in the last year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| There are a lot of lies being told right now. | ||
| I mean, I totally agree with Nancy. | ||
| Look, people ask me, aren't you afraid of being called a transphobe? | ||
| And I just say, well, I'm not. | ||
| I mean, not only do I fully support rights for transgender people, I have a lot of transgender friends. | ||
| I mean, I fully support not only rights, but the ability to transition for mature adults. | ||
| This is just game playing. | ||
| Look, Jezebel ran an article yesterday in which they covered The biologically male runner who is now being recruited by all the top schools as a female, okay? | ||
| He will take some girl's spot at a top college as a runner. | ||
| This was a middling runner on the boys' team, okay? | ||
| And they talked about him. | ||
| They said, as a young girl, Andrea Yearwood always dreamed of being a runner. | ||
| But of course, he was never a young girl. | ||
| He transitioned after middle school. | ||
| They just lie. | ||
| They just make stuff up so that we can't have a conversation. | ||
| And someone reading the article might genuinely have thought he was a young girl at some point, which he never was. | ||
| So, Nancy, since you mentioned the New York Times before, I mean, I think they've been basically almost the prime purveyor of all of this nonsense, and that type of line is exactly what would get in the New York Times. | ||
| What do we do for the people that only read that stuff? | ||
| I mean, you know, I can't send them Knowles videos. | ||
| They're not going to watch them. | ||
| And if I say, OK, well, I interviewed Abigail Schreier about the trans stuff. | ||
| Oh, that transphobe. | ||
| Well, first of all, I think that you would say, look, maybe you don't, maybe you've never even seen Michael Knowles. | ||
| Maybe you think like certain things about him, but like, he's kind of a funny and smart guy. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| Like, don't be afraid. | ||
| Don't be afraid, Michael, now. | ||
| Don't be afraid to take a look. | ||
| And I think that people who, who like refuse to, who hate without even investigation, they're just showing that they're scared, right? | ||
| They're showing that they're actually scared of ideas or they're in curious about ideas or they feel You know, protected in their little Teflon womb with everybody else that's speaking the way they are. | ||
| And we're all sometimes guilty of that. | ||
| Like you're around people. | ||
| It's like, yes, yes, we're right. | ||
| We know this. | ||
| I think that the New York Times, if they continue to only run and let me say, the New York Times still does some of the most incredible journalism around because they have the resources, too. | ||
| But if they continue to just say, No to this idea, no to this word, no to this person writing any other story except about that kind of person and how they live. | ||
| They are not going to be incisive and moving. | ||
| And I think people will look other places. | ||
| And one thing I just want to give a pitch for, which was I'm trying to do, I got a new little media company. | ||
| What we're trying to do is like, yes, things are terrible and we got to push back, but also let's just create lots of new beauty, right? | ||
| Create something new that's beautiful. | ||
| Like maybe you turn somebody's head. | ||
| Uh, and you, and you appeal to them in a way, like, it gets kind of, um, we all get tired to listening to this all the time, right? | ||
| We, we want to fight it, but you also just want some new beauty. | ||
| So that's, like, my pitch is, like, for new beauty. | ||
| I won't ignore the other stuff, but I'm gonna try to create some stuff over here. | ||
| Nancy, I love this point. | ||
| I, I, this point is the essential point to me, because I love Complaining about these things. | ||
| I love criticizing them. | ||
| I like writing essays about what it means and all the historical precedents. | ||
| But ultimately, what do I want? | ||
| What is my vision for society? | ||
| What am I hoping for? | ||
| I want... | ||
| Good, true, beautiful societies. | ||
| That's what I want. | ||
| And I think sometimes we get so wrapped up in debating what can we read, what can we see, what can we watch, that we don't have any time to go see the beautiful painting, read the beautiful book, in part because these publishers are taking them away from us, digital platforms are taking them away as well. | ||
| But this gets to this point of the argument that I always try to come back to. | ||
| The reason we've lost, I think, is because we're always debating in this abstract. | ||
| We're always saying this is about free speech versus censorship. | ||
| And really, I think, it's just about two sets of standards. | ||
| If you want to have this kind of culture that I think, broadly speaking, we all want, you need to articulate a vision for that. | ||
| If you want more beautiful things, you've got to build more beautiful things, and you've got to know what is beautiful, and you've got to know what is more beautiful and what is less beautiful, and you've got to be able to articulate that kind of a vision. | ||
| And I just think Especially on the right. | ||
| I say this as the most knuckle-dragging conservative on the panel. | ||
| I think that the right has basically ceded that ground because we're afraid of articulating that kind of a vision. | ||
| But, Knowles, give your guys a little credit because, look, Gina Carano got booted from Disney, right? | ||
| And what happened literally the next day? | ||
| The Daily Wire announced that they were going to be in production with her. | ||
| That's what we're trying to do here. | ||
| I mean, this is something, you know how much it pains me to say nice things about Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring. | ||
| But my pals here, I mean, they are really doing the thing. | ||
| And they said it, we've been talking about it for years, and they told me about a year ago, they said, we're doing it now. | ||
| We're not just going to comment on culture. | ||
| We're not just going to criticize culture. | ||
| We are going to make it. | ||
| And damn it, if they're going to stop us, we're going to press forward. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think we have to do that. | |
| I think that's a great idea. | ||
| But we shouldn't also cede. | ||
| I mean, when you have companies with monopolistic power that can kick people off for their viewpoint, can erase their books, I think they really should be treated as dominant utilities under the law and we should go after them. | ||
| Because this can't be allowed to stand. | ||
| It can't be. | ||
| The culture of fear that is already setting in America is really something we should fight against. | ||
| I wonder, do you guys think that perhaps the hysteria or the overcorrection or the, yes, we're taking out Dr. Seuss, it's like, it's not just that they've taken out Dr. Seuss. | ||
| They're going for books from literally 1937, 1941, 1947. | ||
| 1937, 1941, 1947. | ||
| It's like, we're so tolerant in 2021 that we take out books a hundred years ago | ||
| in the name of tolerance. | ||
| But do you guys think that the overcorrection might get some of the average people to wake up? | ||
| Like, I think the average person doesn't have a problem with Mr. Potato Head. | ||
| I don't think the average person has a problem with Aunt Jemima, and I don't think the average person has a problem with Dr. Seuss, or Uncle Ben, or the litany of things that I could rattle off the top of my head right now. | ||
| Nancy, what do you think? | ||
| Well, first of all, I think, you know what? | ||
| Culture changes. | ||
| Ideas changes. | ||
| If they want to get rid of Uncle Ben, fine! | ||
| Do it! | ||
| Do whatever they want! | ||
| It's their company. | ||
| I, frankly, you know, we're all on Twitter. | ||
| We're all in the media. | ||
| We all have media friends. | ||
| I think 85-90% of the country doesn't care about this stuff at all. | ||
| At all. | ||
| At all. | ||
| I mean, I know I'm not going to predict what you're going to say, but you're going to say it affects them even though they don't know it. | ||
| That is very true, and that is a problem. | ||
| I agree with you, Abigail. | ||
| You know, if you live in wherever and you've never even heard of Twitter or these wars, but all of a sudden you go to get your book that they heard of and they can't, they're going to say, why? | ||
| And that is important. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it's a big deal because the decisions that are being made are top down. | |
| Just like you said, it's not coming from the American public. | ||
| My book is not a political book. | ||
| I didn't write a political book. | ||
| It's not a conservative book. | ||
| It's not a liberal book. | ||
| And most of the support for it happens to be liberal. | ||
| But you won't get access to those ideas. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| And it's not coming from the American public. | ||
| It's top down from a bunch of monopolies or companies with a monopolistic power. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| And they can virtue signal all they want, but what they're doing is they're destroying our access to ideas. | ||
| But what the left has done very well here, and I'm of course referring to the sort of censorious hard left, What they've done very well is they learned from the 1960s. | ||
| There was this famous phrase, the long march through the institutions, which came from this German radical, Rudi Deutschke, who himself sort of took it from the Italian communist leader, Antonio Gramsci. | ||
| Gramsci considered kind of the founder of this cultural movement, a rip-up society, political correctness. | ||
| And what Gramsci understood was the reason that Marxist revolution did not happen is because conservatives had the common sense. | ||
| And the left loses the common sense when they do things like ban Dr. Seuss. | ||
| Now, he gave a path forward, and I detail this at length in my book Speechless. | ||
| The path forward was the difference between a war of position and a war of maneuver. | ||
| War of maneuver is you advance, you go back, you shoot, shoot, shoot. | ||
| A war of position is you take the institutions, you infiltrate these positions of power, and then you use them gradually and then suddenly to implement your cultural agenda. | ||
| It would seem to me we're in the suddenly phase of that now. | ||
| This was a process that went on for about a hundred years, probably 70 years without anyone noticing, and then people started to notice, and now they have so much institutional power that I fear we're entering into a kind of new normal. | ||
| I fear we're entering into a period where people will actually say, gosh darn it, that Dr. Seuss, he was pretty racist. | ||
| I sure am glad we got rid of those books because, you know, norms come from normality, you know, however long this sort of thing persists. | ||
| The likelihood that it remains in perpetuity is greatly increased. | ||
| Well, Michael, don't worry about that because the infallible Fauci told us that we can get back to normalcy in a year or two. | ||
| So, you know. | ||
| Peace be upon him. | ||
| Alright, so I want to allow you guys to all give a sort of a positive Closing statement, if you've got it. | ||
| There's actually been a sort of theme. | ||
| I think, Nancy, you've been pushing it the most that we just have to create. | ||
| Is that really just like at the end? | ||
| If you're the average person watching this, you're not in that hysterical sliver of people that seem to have all the power. | ||
| It's just create. | ||
| Create. | ||
| Look toward the sunshine. | ||
| Look toward the joy. | ||
| And one positive thing, my daughter, I have a young adult daughter, and she texted me the whole Seuss thing yesterday or two days ago. | ||
| And she's just like, oh boy. | ||
| She is a young person that you would think would be part of this clump pushing for these things that we think are crazy. | ||
| She's not. | ||
| She and her friends are not. | ||
| So these young people exist too. | ||
| Yes, for the young people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think, you know, we do have to create our own institutions and institutions for free thinking people, not for left or right, for just people who want to discuss ideas in an open way where we don't just label each other. | |
| And I think we're starting to do that, you know, both with locals and with Daily Wire is doing. | ||
| I mean, you're seeing this and we just we just really need more of it. | ||
| You know, I look at this, the liberals saying nice things about you people. | ||
| That's what I know. | ||
| This is a wonderful thing. | ||
| This is what gives me the most joy, is that I agree with Nancy and Abigail here. | ||
| And I think there's this other thing, which is people are waking up to the craziness of the language. | ||
| You know, you hear this language from the liberal left, the tolerant liberal left, and they say that we just want to expand the curriculum. We just want diversity and inclusion and | ||
| equity. And you realize that's not true. They just want to kick William Shakespeare out of | ||
| the curriculum. They just want to exclude, they want to include some people and exclude a lot of other | ||
| people for their beliefs. | ||
| Actually, this is a finite thing and they're just trying to boot out all the things that | ||
| we cherish and like and add their own extraordinarily dangerous ideology to it. | ||
| I think people are waking up to that and they're finally willing to take more of a cultural stance, both pushing back and, as Nancy points out quite beautifully, creating new beautiful things. | ||
| All right, well, listen, all three of you are all stars in this place, so I thank you for doing this. | ||
| We are gonna link to your books and upcoming books right down below. | ||
| And Knowles, I told you, Abigail might be coming to my house for an illegal party next week. | ||
| Nancy, if you wanna hop on a plane, you're welcome. | ||
| But Knowles, you can't come anymore. | ||
| You can't come, Knowles, I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm gonna be in the name of inclusion and tolerance. | ||
| I want you to let me in when I fly to LA. | ||
| Oh, right, right, right. | ||
| Because we need diversity of thought when we do this thing. | ||
| Thank you, guys. | ||
| It's been a pleasure. | ||
| Have a good weekend, everybody. | ||
| Thank you. |
Export Selection