March 19, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and it's time for another Friday panel extravaganza. | ||
| Today, we're gonna be talking about whether things are actually getting back to normal in 2021, as the mainstream media promised us. | ||
| Joining me today, our political commentator and former Rubin Report guest, Lauren Chen, chief video director of the Daily Caller, Richie McGinnis, and host of the News and Why It Matters on Blaze TV, Sarah Gonzalez. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report, everybody. | ||
| Thanks for having us. | ||
| Alright, so I thought an interesting way to start would be, as you guys know, I am here in crazy Los Angeles. | ||
| As Sarah, you're of course in Dallas, Texas. | ||
| Sane Dallas, Texas. | ||
| Lauren, you are in completely bananas Montreal, Canada, although you were just in Florida And Richie, you are in the isolated, desolate D.C. | ||
| So I thought that would be a good place to start that. | ||
| We are all in very different places at the moment. | ||
| Sarah, I'm going to go to you first because you're in a free, happy place. | ||
| How's that going for you? | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I was just discussing this off-air. | ||
| You have people come in and visit and they're just, they don't know what to do when they see people's full faces. | ||
| They don't know what to do when they go to a restaurant and people are relaxed and happy and laughing and they're like, what is this weird world where people are laughing right now and smiling? | ||
| It's very bizarre and I think I've actually been A little bit spoiled with it because it really hadn't occurred to me until we had all of these out-of-towners come in how awful it is everywhere else. | ||
| So you know I feel bad for taking it for granted and now of course our mask mandate has officially been lifted and I have seen a lot of the businesses that I've been going to that have been slowly removing their signs from their windows. | ||
| So all good here. | ||
| All good here. | ||
| Richie, I was in DC in December and it truly, it looked like the beginning of a zombie apocalypse. | ||
| It was completely locked down to the point that the only people I saw on the street basically were homeless people. | ||
| That's not really an exaggeration. | ||
| Yeah, you're actually pretty correct there. | ||
| Sadly, a lot of the businesses are still boarded up here, which is just crazy that, you know, they've been boarded up for almost a year now. | ||
| And now we're back to we got indoor dining. | ||
| So that's a big step just in time for the end of winter. | ||
| But also, there's this Capitol fence, which is there, and you know, thousands of National Guard. | ||
| So there's not really any tourists in DC. | ||
| I mean, there have been a lot of I think families coming out kind of on the weekends at the mall. | ||
| But it's during the week, it's really just a somber place. | ||
| Not a lot of the businesses are opened up, like half the bars that I used to frequent are shuttered. | ||
| So it's It's a little bleak out here and it's raining today. | ||
| And what are the National Guard defending against again? | ||
| Because it's unclear to me at this point. | ||
| Well, it's unclear to me too because their rifles actually don't have magazines in them. | ||
| So it seems to be more of a message than anything else. | ||
| And obviously I was out here on March 4th, which was supposed to be, I guess you call it, Q day or whatever whatever everyone in the media was calling it it turned out to be a complete nothing burger Despite the media talking about it for the entire week leading up to it and you mentioned the homeless Actually, I was on Tucker last week discussing or two weeks ago discussing the situation in DC and I pointed out a homeless man that I Interviewed who was actually fortifying his tent literally right next to the Capitol fence and he was he told me that he was told by Park Police that he wouldn't be | ||
| If he was molested, if he went there, he wouldn't be harassed by law enforcement. | ||
| So there's basically a homeless encampment right next to that fence in front of the Capitol. | ||
| And trust me, we got plenty of that in LA. | ||
| If you build a physical structure on public property, they have decided they just won't do anything. | ||
| So we've got homeless people that are actually building compounds at this point. | ||
| Lauren, you were tweeting from Florida and people know when I tweet from Florida, I'm very happy. | ||
| That's happy, Dave. | ||
| Now I'm back in LA, Dave, but you were very happy in Florida. | ||
| You're back in Montreal. | ||
| Montreal is crazy right now. | ||
| It is crazy. | ||
| I mean, I was just telling you all earlier that we have had our 8 p.m. | ||
| curfew now kind of put forward until 9 30 p.m. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Total freedom land over here. | ||
| But yeah, gyms are, I think, finally going to start reopening. | ||
| Dining is still a no go. | ||
| They're only doing takeout. | ||
| And it's just it was such a difference going to Florida. | ||
| I so needed that just mentally. | ||
| And I know, like Sarah was saying, I was one of those weird people who didn't know how to act in the normal world anymore. | ||
| I was at an event and there was a waiter who was passing around food and I was like, can I take this? | ||
| Like, what do I do? | ||
| Where do I sanitize my hand? | ||
| And it was just nice to be around normal people. | ||
| I'm actually, I'm heading right back out tomorrow, back to Florida, hopefully do some house hunting. | ||
| Cause I can't take this anymore. | ||
| I'm like at the end of my rope. | ||
| Do you guys think normalcy or normality, those are the two words they keep telling us. | ||
| They promised this was going to be the year we got back to normality. | ||
| That's what the infallible Fauci says all the time. | ||
| Do you think normal, whatever that means, once we actually do basically fully open up, Do you think anything resembling the world of pre-2020 is coming back, Richie? | ||
| I don't really think so, no. | ||
| I mean, I think there are certain, you know, things that kind of the pandemic made people realize makes sense. | ||
| Like, you know, going to the office every day. | ||
| We used to go to the call or newsroom, literally we had to be there by 8 a.m. | ||
| and we had to be out by, you know, maybe five or six. | ||
| So, The caller's productivity actually has gone up in terms of the reporters and how much they're writing, just because they're spending more time working and less time commuting and doing all those types of things involved with getting the office in D.C. | ||
| I mean, the Metro is definitely no fun. | ||
| So I think in that respect, you know, there are some positive changes. | ||
| But in terms of the government control, I mean, we saw the same thing happen after 9-11, the Patriot Act. | ||
| As far as I'm concerned, I don't think that that's been pulled back at all since It was written in the early 2000s, and I think we're going to see a similar situation here, which is that, you know, a lot of the control that the government has over where we go and what exactly we're doing, well, that'll remain. | ||
| Yeah, Richie, it has the word patriot in it, so that automatically means it's good, don't you know that? | ||
| If you hate it, you hate America. | ||
| Lauren, what do you think? | ||
| You think we're going to ever get to something... I don't even care for the word normal that much. | ||
| Normal ain't that great, but just something that feels a little better than this new thing? | ||
| Well, what really worries me is that they keep moving the goalposts as to when we can start to open back up and have Like reclaim more of our freedoms, right? | ||
| Do you? | ||
| I mean, it was two weeks to slow the spread. | ||
| And you know, then it was talking about, oh, well, we want to get like over the first hump. | ||
| And then it was talking about like, oh, well, we want to get past flu season because we don't want it to, you know, flu plus COVID. | ||
| And then it was until the vaccines. | ||
| And now it's like we have vaccines. | ||
| People are being vaccinated. | ||
| They're saying, yeah, well, we're still going to, even with vaccination, need to wear masks and social distance. | ||
| Now people are talking about COVID passports to Travel places and enter businesses and it's like I don't I think there are people out there who have a vested interest in keeping things the way that they are whether it's for control or financial means well whatever and so I think if we do want to get back to like quote-unquote normal we're actively going to have to fight it because it's like with the income tax once the government puts on a new restriction it's very very rare that they just you know willfully give it up. | ||
| Sarah, our buddy Glenn Beck is always talking about this, the sort of ever encroachment of government and that there's a lot of people who gained a lot of power during this thing and they probably don't want to give it back. | ||
| And this was just the beginning. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what I kept trying to warn people of whenever we did go through 15 Days to Slow the Spread is, hey guys, do you recall a time in history where the government has willingly just relinquished the control that they have already taken? | ||
| They never take it back. | ||
| We see them constantly fight that. | ||
| All they want is more and more and more. | ||
| And, you know, of course that fell on deaf ears at the time because everyone was so panicked and scared. | ||
| of the promising of a virus that was going to wipe us all off the face of the planet. | ||
| So here we are a year later, and of course they're not going to give it back willingly. | ||
| That's why we've seen the teachers unions fight actually going back to work and teaching | ||
| the children. That's why we've seen so many things keep going. Just as Lauren mentioned, | ||
| we have a vaccine now. And even if you get the vaccine, they warn you that you still | ||
| have to wear a mask and you still have to socially distance and you can't actually get | ||
| back to normal life. | ||
| What were you thinking once you got the jab you were actually going to be able to live life again? | ||
| Please that's not the case. | ||
| So I think that it really is I agree with Lauren that it's going to take us really moving and shaking things and letting the | ||
| government know we will not accept this for us to get some aspects back to normal. But | ||
| I also do agree with Richie that I think that there are certain aspects of this | ||
| that maybe private businesses have learned, hey maybe we are more | ||
| functional operating I think that the American public is increasingly getting fed up with all of this government control, all of the doublespeak. | ||
| But I think that, you know, private businesses are much different than government control. | ||
| And unfortunately, we are going to have to move mountains to fight them on this. | ||
| But I think that we will. | ||
| I think that the American public is increasingly getting fed up with all of this government control, all of the | ||
| doublespeak. | ||
| And I think eventually I don't think it will happen this year, but I think eventually it will happen. | ||
| Yeah, I was just going to say, Sarah, one of the benefits of where I live, this whole covid thing has finally | ||
| kicked my grocery store into gear and allowed us to have delivery. | ||
| So online delivery for our groceries. | ||
| So I essentially never need to leave the house, which usually would be a good thing for me, but now it's been so long where I'm like, okay, but now I want to leave the house. | ||
| Well, and Texas too, during this whole thing, they finally made legal to-go alcohol orders, which has been tremendous for me. | ||
| So, you know, I was pregnant and now I'm not anymore and I'm really enjoying the to-go alcohol delivery. | ||
| Right, so as, since I think we have at least one 20 year old in here, rough, in the 20s, one, at least one in the 30s, I think I'm the elder statesman here in the 40s, but we've got, we've got three generations or three decades covered here. | ||
| I'm worried that just the, that basically I always say to, to my producer and my director who are in their early 20s, like you guys are going to be the last people to ever remember the old world as adults. | ||
| That if you're a 15-year-old growing up in this thing, it's like, you're not going to remember that world that now seems so precious and kind of long gone to us. | ||
| Are you worried about that, Richie? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know we were talking a lot about the government control, and I did mention that some businesses, you know, there are positive effects. | ||
| I think the most concerning thing to me, actually, and what I saw, you know, at all these protest zones over the last year is the real human suffering that's resulted from this massive transfer of wealth from basically small businesses that, you know, were open and thriving prior to the pandemic and now are completely shuttered. | ||
| I used to bartend for years in D.C. | ||
| and, like, all my friends who I used to bartend with, like, have just basically been on unemployment this entire time. | ||
| That's what's most concerning to me is it's easy for us, you know, working in the media, we've continued to work, but, you know, all these people sitting in their studios, basically telling everybody to stay at home and slow the spread. | ||
| It's, they're not the ones losing their jobs in these situations. | ||
| And those are the people that I've seen out on the street and like actually seeing that, you know, that human suffering acted out through protest and civil unrest is really, it's heartbreaking to see. | ||
| Yeah, where do you think the general state of critical race theory, identity politics, all the stuff that I know the four of us have been yelling about for years, that now kind of everyone gets, where four years ago everybody was like, oh no, it's just on college campuses, it's not real, it's not really gonna happen. | ||
| How do you think that plays into the fact that we're all so disconnected and stuck online? | ||
| Because I think it has a big role in it. | ||
| Sarah, what do you think? | ||
| Yeah, I would agree with you, and I would also say that, you know, when we're looking at, you know, our children, like I have an eight-year-old son, and I'm thinking, I don't know what he's going to remember about this particular Time in history. | ||
| And then I've got a very young baby and I'm thinking to myself, how is life going to be so different for him? | ||
| You know, we have this generation who's growing up with, you know, learning the teachings that you're talking about, critical race theory, identity politics, but also growing up in a time of government control. | ||
| And I think that that really shapes your perspective anytime. | ||
| Like, I remember when, you know, we had the first graduating class of people who had not remembered 9-11. | ||
| And it really shapes your perspective, not actually living through these events, not remembering these events. | ||
| I remember these people, it was so foreign to them, the idea that, you know, we could have that kind of terrorism happening on our own soil to that extent. | ||
| And so I think you're going to see the same thing taking place with these children. | ||
| Richie, I'm not calling you a child, but with the other children. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm 31. | |
| 31? | ||
| You're 31? | ||
| 31, yeah. | ||
| Lauren, am I allowed to ask you how old you are? | ||
| I'm 26, I don't mind. | ||
| Okay, Lauren's the baby then. | ||
| Lauren's the baby. | ||
| So, not calling you a child. | ||
| Yes, not calling you a child, Lauren, but I think that we are going to see a lot of people growing up who, this is scary to say, but they don't know anything else other than big government control, other than the government making up their mind for you, other than the government saying the science is settled, therefore the science is settled. | ||
| Other than the government saying the critical race theory is the, you know, this is what we're learning and this is what they know and they won't know anything else. | ||
| And it really, really scares me. | ||
| You know, especially like I said, having two young children, it really scares me. | ||
| But I fear that that is where we're headed because that's just what happens when you don't have that kind of perspective. | ||
| You haven't lived through it. | ||
| It can't shape your narrative. | ||
| It can't shape your perspective. | ||
| And unfortunately, I think that's where we're headed. | ||
| So Lauren, you're the youngest on the panel. | ||
| You're the kid here. | ||
| What's going on with the young people in the midst of this? | ||
| Well, I think Sarah's exactly right. | ||
| The way you grow up really does influence what you think is acceptable. | ||
| And I know I've even seen like Gen Zers on Twitter argue that, oh no, going to church, that's not a right. | ||
| Like, yeah, it's like a right, but it doesn't mean you have to do it or that it's essential. | ||
| It's like, ah, founding fathers would disagree. | ||
| Like they're actually trying to argue that rights are non-essential. | ||
| No, it's terrifying. | ||
| And recently, you know, I met with this other young couple and they had a baby or a toddler who I think was about two. | ||
| And, you know, the kid was wide-eyed looking at this crowd of people and he said, Oh, sorry, like he's a COVID baby. | ||
| This is the most people he's ever seen in his life. | ||
| And think about that. | ||
| There are children who were born last year and they've really never seen more than maybe four people in a room together because they haven't been allowed to get that exposure to see their extended family members. | ||
| It is just so sad. | ||
| And the people who are all for shutting down schools and these social events in the name of saving people, I don't think they appreciate the cost of, like Richie was saying, Keeping these lockdowns going and as someone who I'm hoping that within the next year I'll have at least one kid of my own, I'm really worried and that's part of why I'm thinking I just can't stay in a place where I'm not going to be able to raise my kid in a normal environment. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| Yeah, let's shift a little bit to the media portion of this because I know all you guys love to critique the media as much as I do. | ||
| Richie, you worked for the Daily Caller right before we started. | ||
| I retweeted the Daily Caller because I think you guys do something close to what was known as journalism once. | ||
| There ain't much of it left. | ||
| How bad do you think mainstream media is at this point? | ||
| Well, it's actually interesting because I started basically working in the professional media in 2013. | ||
| So I was working at NBC from 2013 to 2015. | ||
| And then I actually went from NBC to Mark Levin. | ||
| So I kind of flipped on the ideological spectrum. | ||
| But back then, I think things weren't the way that they are now in terms of the way that Everything that comes out of either Joe Biden's White House or previously Trump's White House is just viewed through this lens of it's either, you know, it's it's you're either on this side or that side. | ||
| And that kind of like, you know, trench warfare approach to media is something that I think is is a new phenomenon. | ||
| And I think the Daily Caller, you know, one of the reasons why I ended up working here is because our role in the media landscape is very much to put that in check and to, you know, try our best to call out when media narratives don't match the reality of the situation. | ||
| So, you know, obviously that whole Q insurrection phenomenon, I mean, that was just, that was completely made up. | ||
| And, you know, My city has been shut down for all this time as a result | ||
| and my friends are all unemployed. | ||
| So I don't take it very lightly at all. | ||
| Yeah, Sarah, you're over there in Dallas with my buddies at the Blaze | ||
| who are actually doing something reminiscent of old school journalism | ||
| and trying to analyze stuff honestly. | ||
| Do you think they're just pushing more and more people to us at this point? | ||
| Like it's hard to gauge how much influence they actually have at this point. | ||
| I'm always saying on the show, it's like, I feel like I have to talk about CNN | ||
| and correct their nonsense. | ||
| And on the other hand, I'm like, ah, maybe if we just stopped talking about them, | ||
| maybe nobody's really paying attention. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I would agree. | ||
| I think I just saw a headline fly by me when I was looking on my phone earlier about CNN having such low ratings post-Trump, which was what was so peculiar about them wanting Trump to be out of office. | ||
| I'm like, guys, this is why your ratings are as good as they are, and that's not even to say that they're good. | ||
| It's just that this is all that you can talk about. | ||
| What's going to happen when he leaves? | ||
| I think that we're seeing that and I think that for as much as we love to talk about, I mean, big tech has its problems and I'm not here to tell you that they don't, but one at least silver lining of having social media around, of having the Twitter and the Facebook and all of these places you can go to is that we actually get these tidbits of the truth. | ||
| We get to see these videos that aren't played on the news. | ||
| And I think that that has been really important for opening up people's eyes and having them | ||
| realize wow, maybe the media isn't telling us the truth. | ||
| But I will say I think the media right now is going through this internal battle. | ||
| And I think it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. | ||
| Because while we saw that obviously their common goal was to get Trump out of office, | ||
| and they were successful in that goal. | ||
| Now they're faced with either continuing to carry water for the Democrat Party and for a president who very obviously, you know, I call him the dementia patient in chief. | ||
| He very obviously does not belong in the position that he's in. | ||
| So they can either continue carrying water, knowing that that's probably not the right move, Or they can turn themselves into the star, into the celebrity. | ||
| And I wonder if their narcissism is going to actually win out in the end. | ||
| And that's what we've been seeing with, they're actually, some of them are publishing stories about what's happening on the border. | ||
| They're publishing stories saying there's a 729% over legal capacity of these migrant facilities. | ||
| They're doing things that you wouldn't normally see them do because they wanna make themselves the story. | ||
| And the only way to do that now that Trump is out of office is to actually do a certain level of journalisming that I don't think that they're used to doing. | ||
| So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. | ||
| Journalists being forced to do journalism. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| Lauren, you gotta kind of be digging it, right? | ||
| Like you're a new media star, like you're doing your thing, you're free. | ||
| You gotta be happy watching them crumble, right? | ||
| At least at a personal level. | ||
| I am happy about that, but it's also, I mean, I've mentioned I'm pretty blackpilled on most issues now, and I think for a while I was under the impression that the media is just the most biased it's ever been, but I'm more and more starting to think perhaps we're just more aware of the bias, and it's always been like that. | ||
| I mean, it's kind of hard to say which might be the case, but definitely new media is filling a role that I think more and more people are looking for, because I think there are a lot of people who, for example, with COVID, might turn on to CNN or something like that and see all | ||
| this panic, panic hysteria, but then look around at their own neighborhoods or towns and cities | ||
| and say, okay, well, our hospitals aren't actually overflowing, but I do see | ||
| unemployment going up. And then because of the disconnect that they see between what the media is | ||
| reporting, what they're seeing, maybe go seek out other forms of information. I hope that's what's | ||
| happening. | ||
| And I think at the very least, we're going to be seeing a decentralization of media control. | ||
| But I mean, at the end of the day, I don't think we can kind of dismiss the media yet entirely, because if we look at the effect they had at the recent election fiasco, you know, they still obviously have a lot of establishment power. | ||
| They still consider themselves the people who get to call elections, determine what is and what is not a conspiracy theory. | ||
| I don't think we're out of the woods yet from getting out of their control. | ||
| Election fiasco. | ||
| You're really trying to get me booted from YouTube, aren't you? | ||
| That was the gentlest thing I could do. | ||
| Very clever, Laurie Chen, trying to take out the competition. | ||
| Very clever, very clever. | ||
| Well, I like what you said there, though, about that they're trying to make us be unable to see things that we can see, because I keep bringing up that one moment to me that crystallized it so well. | ||
| When all the riots were happening over the summer, and Ali Velshi's standing out there on MSNBC saying that these are largely non-violent protests, and there's a building blowing up behind him, and it's literally like it was in Fallujah, as if a bomb had just been dropped, and he's telling us they're largely peaceful. | ||
| Richie, you guys- It's the whole don't believe your lying eyes thing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right. | |
| Well, that's it. | ||
| So how do you guys decide what is and what isn't important to actually cover? | ||
| Cause there's just so much. | ||
| So we developed, like we were talking a little bit earlier about Eli who works over at the Blaze as well, but there was actually like a small kind of, we call it the Riot Squad. | ||
| We traveled around the country basically from hotspot to hotspot because there was so clearly such a blind spot in the corporate media, even like Fox News. | ||
| You know, you'd see their guys going out there and chats and saying very much a party-like atmosphere. | ||
| Back to you. | ||
| And then, you know, that's at 2 p.m. | ||
| Maybe they do one hit in primetime. | ||
| They have an entire security force and they have these big cameras. | ||
| And then they go back to their luxury hotel and they're like, yeah, that's what's going on. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Back to you. | ||
| And so we would go out there from, you know, 2 p.m. | ||
| to 3, 4 a.m. | ||
| and just sit there and use our cell phones, you know, very low key, fly on the wall and just show America what was happening. | ||
| And, you know, Eli, the first time I met him was in the Chazz. | ||
| And basically from there, you know, everything, you know, the toothpaste came out of the tomb, I guess you can say that. | ||
| But it's funny you mentioned the Velshi clip because actually there was also the CNN correspondent in Kenosha where the Chiron, that famous meme now, fiery but mostly peaceful. | ||
| And, you know, we're talking about the human suffering that's resulting from, you know, all these lockdowns and just the shutting down of businesses and all of the mental health Uh, byproducts of basically people being shuttered up. | ||
| I actually literally had, you know, a mentally unwell person literally die in my arms in Kenosha. | ||
| And so when I hear, you know, these, these narrative media narrative platitudes about, you know, this protest or that protest, and they're really viewing them through their own partisan lenses, be it Trump supporters, uh, protesting or BLM. | ||
| And for me, like I, I view them as two different Parts of the same problem, which is this economic suffering and people feel like they have, they don't have that American opportunity that has always been, you know, the real thing that binds us all together. | ||
| And if we don't have that, I don't know what we have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we're not allowed to see things that we can see with our own eyes. | ||
| And at the same time, Sarah, they'll tell us that Antifa is just an idea. | ||
| An idea that's caused about $2 billion worth of damage in the last year. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting how an invisible thing can just cause that much in damages. | ||
| And I would agree with Richie that, you know, I think it's important for as alternative media outlets that we are always at the places that the mainstream media refuses to go. | ||
| But I also think that it's important that, and I think that we, you know, I know Richie, you guys over at The Daily Caller do a great job of this as well, but I think we've been great at Blaze TV about Shining a light really on what's going on in culture as well, because as we know, politics is downstream from culture. | ||
| And so, you know, we're, it's funny because I used to do when I first started out, I would do these videos on breaking down, you know, let's say the Paris Climate Accords or break, you know, breaking down all of these big issues, a tax bill or whatever. | ||
| And no one wanted to watch it because at the end of the day, as important as it is to Americans, and it is very important, it's just It's not culture. Culture is what moves people. Culture is | ||
| really what is going to move the needle. | ||
| And I think that we've done a good job of going where the mainstream media will not go, | ||
| where the mainstream media will say, well, I mean, that's not really important. And we look | ||
| at that and go, actually, it is because culture shapes politics. | ||
| And, you know, again, I think that the mainstream media, it's lost on them that kind of idea. | ||
| But I think that that really is what people are wanting to see. | ||
| I think it's what is compelling to them. | ||
| And I think it is what is going to determine our direction as a country, especially right now. | ||
| We're at this, you know, precipice of which direction are we going to go? | ||
| Are we going to just blindly accept the government telling us what to do in conjunction with the mainstream media? | ||
| Or are we going to do this research? | ||
| independently and figure out that, hey, maybe we should be standing up and | ||
| telling them enough is enough. And so I think that it really is important to | ||
| keep getting those kinds of culture stories out to Americans because I think | ||
| it is really is what's going to grab them and move them. | ||
| Actually that's a perfect segue to where I wanted to spend the last couple | ||
| minutes with you guys because obviously the big story of the week was the | ||
| shooting at the massage And Lauren, I think you've had a couple tweets on this that I thought were just perfect, because there's sort of two things happening at once, which is one is what happened. | ||
| This 21-year-old kid did shoot up people. | ||
| Eight people, I believe, were killed. | ||
| But then that's sort of secondary to the media narrative that everyone is spinning now about hate crimes and white supremacy and all the usual stuff that we endlessly hear about. | ||
| So can you kind of sum up where you're at with all this right now? | ||
| Where I'm at is frustrated. | ||
| I mean, you follow me on Twitter, you can probably see that I've been having a real hard time with all of these, I mean, frankly, white progressives Telling me what it is like to be Asian in America and what type of problems the Asian community is facing. | ||
| You know, regarding the shooting, it's very unfortunate what happened. | ||
| You know, my best wishes to the family's victims and all of that. | ||
| But from everything we know from police, that was not a racially motivated crime. | ||
| And I think a lot of people out there cannot distinguish between doing something to an Asian person and doing something to a person because they are Asian. | ||
| And that's the narrative that essentially we're seeing right now. | ||
| Also interesting is that there has been an uptick in anti-Asian assaults and things like that. | ||
| But the media, like you're saying, is trying to spin this into a tale of white supremacy if we actually look at who these perpetrators are. | ||
| They're disproportionately African-American, right? | ||
| So it's kind of hard if you ask me to see a black person attacking an Asian person and blame white people for it, but that's just where we are as a community. | ||
| And I think what we see with all this, like, moral indignation from the left is they are trying to turn the Asian community into another reason why the white supremacy we see from the right or whatever is bad. | ||
| And let me tell you why that is such BS, is that for the longest time, the left has completely ignored or even discriminated against Asians, frankly. | ||
| We have seen Asians get called white adjacent, not real POC. | ||
| We are discriminated against in progressive affirmative action policies for being Asian, right? | ||
| You can't have too many Asians in school because they're too successful. | ||
| Not only that, we've also seen the left fight very hard against merit-based or skills-based immigration, which does disproportionately benefit Asian Americans. | ||
| We've seen them fight hard against lowering business taxes and regulations, which again, Asian Americans are disproportionately entrepreneurs. | ||
| And it's like, the left does not care one iota about Asians except for when they can use them as political props. | ||
| And it's been very insulting to hear from progressives how the hard work that my family | ||
| has gone through to achieve the success they have is really just marginalized by the fact | ||
| that we are white adjacent or whatever it may be. | ||
| So it's just, it's a headache. | ||
| And I really understand, I put this out on Twitter as well, why it is that when a Hispanic | ||
| or a black conservative speaks out against the woke left, they go the hardest. | ||
| It's because they have to deal with this pandering, patronizing attitude all the time, and I feel bad for them. | ||
| It's frustrating. | ||
| Yeah, man, I mean, you just hit pretty much everything related to all of this. | ||
| So like yesterday on my show, we played the clip of Jen Psaki basically blaming Trump's rhetoric. | ||
| And then what we played right after it was a great compilation that we found of, you know, all these MSNBC and CNN. | ||
| Journalists, quote unquote journalists, calling it the China virus and the Wuhan virus and everything else. | ||
| Not that that in and of itself is causing racism, right? | ||
| It's just the place, it's the city that it came from in China. | ||
| We understand all that. | ||
| But Richie, how do we flip that narrative? | ||
| How do we get more people I don't want everybody to be black-pilled, I want them to be red-pilled first and then we'll work with that. | ||
| How do we get them to flip on that and go, oh, it's not just racism and white supremacy, there's actually some other stuff going on here, all the things that Lauren just addressed. | ||
| Well, I think, you know, that whole knee jerk reaction, I think we've obviously seen that over the last four years, like a lot more of that. | ||
| And perhaps the system was broken before that, but it's certainly gotten worse. | ||
| But with respect to this most recent shooting, I mean, when I'm on the ground with our folks, | ||
| we're basically telling all of our reporters, okay, you'll get more likes and retweets | ||
| if you call whoever's in Black Block a BLM rioting terrorist, right? | ||
| Because the people who wanna see that kind of narrative spun up will retweet it. | ||
| But if you just call them a protester, basically it's never very clear, | ||
| even the word rioter implies that that person went out there to riot. | ||
| Whereas a lot of times, you know, things get, a protest gets unruly and it gets declared a riot. | ||
| And it's not clear who gets caught up in that, that chaos and who is actually out there with, with bad intentions. | ||
| So I always tell folks, both of the sides, you know, also the same goes for, uh, during the Capitol riot, same use the same term protesters. | ||
| Cause it wasn't clear, you know, to us, I wasn't able to interview these people and ask them, you know, why they were there. | ||
| And so, And in that kind of chaos, you really, you can't make these assumptions. | ||
| It's extremely dangerous. | ||
| And especially when you're dealing with an American national tragedy, you can't just like throw around, you know, charges of racism, just willy nilly. | ||
| And I think we're at that point. | ||
| And that's, what's really concerning to me is that like, you know, the quote unquote establishment corporate media used to be the kind of purveyors of, of fact-checking and, you know, using multiple sources and no, no single source anonymous reporting, which we've seen a lot of recently. | ||
| So I think, This is just the latest iteration of, you know, after Kyle Rittenhouse, after that shooting, you know, you saw the same thing happen. | ||
| And it's really more about what narrative you want spun up, given whatever side you're on, than it is about, you know, the facts at hand. | ||
| And just like, how about you just wait for them to play out? | ||
| And they basically, our politicians and the media, they basically don't care when they get caught red-handed, like all of the politicians and all of the media members who said that the Jesse Smollett thing, proof, that's proof, we got the proof, America's a white supremacist nation, and then here they go again with this story. | ||
| So Sarah, how do we communicate this to people? | ||
| You do a news show every day. | ||
| How do you do it so that it's not just the people watching, all four of us, but so that the other people can really start understanding that most of the discrimination, in any sort of tangible sense, actually is coming from the left these days. | ||
| That's just the sad truth. | ||
| Well, I think that, unfortunately for the left, I think that they are, as they often do, overplaying their hand in that. | ||
| And I think that, you know, we saw it with the recent election. | ||
| Now, the results were not, of course, what I think all of us would have liked for them | ||
| to be. | ||
| But there were still a record number of black Americans, minorities, I think Asian Americans. | ||
| I mean, there were record numbers of people who voted for President Trump, who voted for | ||
| conservative ideals. | ||
| And I think that a lot of that stems from the fact that Democrats have overplayed their | ||
| They show these people that they're using them as pawns, and the ends justifies the means. | ||
| And I think that the more that they continue to do that, the more that they continue to show that they are the divisive party, and the more that an average American, I think, you know, Lauren mentioned this regarding coronavirus, but the average American looks around and goes, well, I don't, I'm not a white supremacist. | ||
| I don't know any white supremacists. | ||
| I don't personally know anyone who, you know, is waging violence against Asian Americans. | ||
| The more they think about, hold on, this isn't happening to me or anyone around me. | ||
| Is this really accurate? | ||
| Combined with the more that the Democrats continue to just overtly use people for political gain. | ||
| I think that we're already seeing people wake up. | ||
| I think that, you know, we're already seeing a lot of the minority communities say we're tired of being used. | ||
| I think that we're even seeing, you know, parents look around and say, OK, you're using my children by keeping schools closed for political gain, for teachers unions, and I'm sick of it. | ||
| And I think that the more that they play these games with people because they're so arrogant, they don't think that they will ever A, get found out and B, get held to the same standard that they hold everyone else to. | ||
| I think the more that they continue to do that, the more Americans will wake up because it's actually affecting them. | ||
| And I think that that's where it's really going to be crucial, is that once the Americans who are being fed this BS, once they actually feel it and they feel the pain for themselves, I think it's really hard to turn them away from being, you know, as you would say, red-pilled. | ||
| So what you're saying is our work is cut out for us. | ||
| Lauren, I'm gonna let you bring us home here as the one panelist potentially making the move to America. | ||
| Sell us on the dream. | ||
| Give everybody, I know you said blackpilled before, which for my audience that doesn't know blackpill, that's basically after you've been redpilled and you see reality, but then it's sort of a depressing end of reality sort of. | ||
| But give me something hopeful, because I know you well enough, Lauren, that you couldn't do what you do if you believed it just could never turn around. | ||
| Like, how could any of us? | ||
| So bring us home. | ||
| Well, I was gonna... | ||
| Close with some more doom and gloom, but you know what? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Let's leave it on a positive note. | ||
| For anyone who's just looking around at the world and wondering when everyone went insane, just know that most people don't approve of this type of stuff, right? | ||
| Most people aren't on board with like, oh yes, let's have drag queens in schools reading to kids. | ||
| Let's have lockdowns and curfews at 8 p.m. | ||
| But what the problem is that there is a small group of ideologues who have managed to insert and kind of weasel their way into positions of power. | ||
| And I think if us, the I guess silent majority, normal sane people want to get back to a point where a discussion about politics is really just about politics, not these whole big issues of white supremacy, yada, yada, yada, then we need to start standing up to those bullies. | ||
| Because, I mean, we're essentially being held hostage. | ||
| By a small number of full-time activists. | ||
| And I'm sick of it. | ||
| I'm sick of people having to worry about what they tweet out and getting fired because of it. | ||
| I'm sick of brands having to pander to this or that lobby. | ||
| I want that return to not just pre-COVID normalcy, but pre-woke activism normalcy. | ||
| And the only way that's going to happen is if we start standing up to them. | ||
| Amen, girl. | ||
| And listen, if it doesn't work out, we'll meet you at the Family Compound in Florida. | ||
| How does that sound? | ||
| Yeah, everyone's invited. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For the record, I voted for Kanye, just for the record. | |
| Kanye 2024. | ||
| All right, thank you guys very much. | ||
| I'm going to finish up without you, but you guys, I really appreciate you joining me and have a good weekend, everybody. | ||
| Thanks, you too. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, so thanks to Lauren, to Sarah, and to Richie. | ||
| And for you guys, I wanted to, you know I do it this way, you know I wanted to end on something somewhat hopeful and not blackpilled, because I think there is a temptation right now, and you saw a little bit out of me last week, to just get so frustrated with all this stuff and to just wake up every day and see what stupid thing happened, what depressing thing happened, what thing of the past that we all loved is now evil, while WAP, or WAP, Is the number one song in America or played in the Grammys or just all the endless nonsense. | ||
| But I totally agree with what Lauren said. | ||
| Most people are not like this. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| And that also is the danger of what's happened with the lockdowns because we're becoming more and more disconnected from our neighbors. | ||
| You know, we moved, as you guys know, we moved houses, which is why I'm in a different studio than I was just a year ago in the middle of lockdown. | ||
| And I have obviously new neighbors around here. | ||
| And finally we were walking the dog the other day and a neighbor was like, oh, you guys are the new ones that moved in. | ||
| Why don't we have a drink? | ||
| And it was just so refreshing for a human being. | ||
| We were standing on opposite sides of the fence, but like literally opposite sides of the fence. | ||
| But it was like, it was so refreshing for another human to be like, oh, welcome and let's have a drink and let's get to know each other. | ||
| So I'm going to keep pushing that idea. | ||
| Let's keep getting to know each other. | ||
| As I said, I will be doing some live stand up. | ||
| We're working it out. | ||
| I don't want to tease too much right now because we're still trying to figure out a little bit of the routing. | ||
| But that should be for a couple of days in April in Florida. | ||
| We're going to do a live meet up in OC for all the SoCal people. | ||
| And let's fix this thing. | ||
| I have nothing better to do. | ||
| I suspect you don't either. | ||
| Have a good weekend, everybody. | ||
| And if you wanna see what I'm eating and drinking and listening to and all that good stuff, join me at rubenreport.locals.com. |
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