June 27, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
50:49
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Yes, we failed. | ||
| We failed. | ||
| Conservatives totally failed on this because the left is offering a vision of society. | ||
| Basically, the radical left's vision of society is just the inverse of whatever the vision used to be. | ||
| In the 1950s, if you were a communist, you would be cancelled. | ||
| You would lose your career in Hollywood. | ||
| You could be prosecuted. | ||
| I mean, it was illegal under the Smith Act. | ||
| Today, you'll be cancelled if you're an anti-communist, right? | ||
| So it's just, you'll still be cancelled, but it's just the total flip of it. | ||
| But they're actually putting forward that vision of society. | ||
| What is the conservative vision on this? | ||
| The conservative vision is to defend now, and this is only over the last 20 years or so, to defend free speech in the abstract, right? | ||
| Or to defend freedom of belief in the abstract. | ||
| It's always in the abstract. | ||
| But they won't ever get down to the brass tacks of What should we say? | ||
| What do we believe? | ||
| What are we offering people other than nothing? | ||
| And this is why, on the occasions that Republicans have won elections in the last 20 years, all we've ever managed to do, almost without exception, is cut taxes a little bit, and maybe cut regulation a little bit, but actually maybe not, And that's it. | ||
| And so I guess the question you have to ask yourself is after the Reagan revolution and even the Trump revolution and the Gingrich revolution, we won all these elections. | ||
| Would you say the country today is more conservative, more free than it was 20 years ago? | ||
| No way. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, thank you for having me. | ||
| It's good to be with you. | ||
| I felt my intro there was very professional broadcaster-y because you're a professional broadcaster and I felt that you enunciate very well with the posture and the whole thing. | ||
| How'd I do there? | ||
| I was very impressed. | ||
| And look, the book, the whole book is about words. | ||
| Your diction, your articulation. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
|
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Beautiful. | |
| All right. | ||
| Let's get the stuff we got to get out of the way right up top. | ||
| You screwed me. | ||
| Everybody knows you screwed me. | ||
| It's been talked about many times. | ||
| I'm brought on other shows. | ||
| They ask me about it. | ||
| We were having drinks last spring. | ||
| You were at my house with your lovely wife and we were drinking whiskey and eating steak. | ||
| And we decided in a drunken stupor that we were both going to stay and fight in Los Angeles and dethrone Gavin Newsom and keep the union together. | ||
| And it was very exciting. | ||
| And then the next morning it was announced that you were moving to Nashville. | ||
| Well, yes, that was now in my defense, Dave, I was very excited. | ||
| I was filled with pure vitriol against Gavin Nusselini. | ||
| We had imbibed quite a bit. | ||
| We were in your beautiful home. | ||
| Oh, we were ready to go. | ||
| Then I walk in, and you know what happens here at the Daily Wire? | ||
| I walk into the room. | ||
| You know what they say? | ||
| Jump. | ||
| And you know what I say, Dave? | ||
| Hell high. | ||
| That's what I, hell high. | ||
| And I jumped so far that I'm in Tennessee. | ||
| You are in Tennessee. | ||
| I saw you, you're settling in. | ||
| How's it going for the Daily Wire in Tennessee? | ||
| Are you guys happier now that you've left Los Angeles? | ||
| Left me, you left Dennis Prager, and the one other decent person in this craptastic town. | ||
| There's gotta be one. | ||
| I'm sure there's at least one. | ||
| Well, Gary cities. | ||
| Yes, Gary and Sinise would be there. | ||
| Adam, Corolla? | ||
| Corolla's here. | ||
| No, see, there are some people left, but it's true. | ||
| A ton of people are fleeing, and they're fleeing to three places. | ||
| Tennessee, Texas, and Florida. | ||
| Florida now is truly the last bastion if it's just going to break off and float into the Atlantic Ocean. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| My little newborn son, who was born here, is going to have a little southern drawl. | ||
| The first Knolls probably ever to have one. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| I have guns. | ||
| I have money. | ||
| I breathe the sweet air of freedom. | ||
| People are nice and normal here. | ||
| It turns out that that little part of America, the little part between New York and L.A., you know, you might have heard of it, it's actually a pretty nice place. | ||
| You mean we shouldn't just think of it as flyover country? | ||
| There's actually some decent people there and decent customs? | ||
| No, you can land a plane actually. | ||
| It's not, you can actually land it here and there's like stuff to do and people and it's nice, yeah. | ||
| Just absolutely incredible. | ||
| Do you think, I mean, now that, you know, some time has gone by, almost a year actually since we had that conversation at my house, do you think I'm bananas? | ||
| I mean, what do you think of the remaining people who are trying to keep, you know, these states not from going into complete progressive lunacy? | ||
| Although maybe it's done already, I don't know. | ||
| I think you are bananas. | ||
| I know the kind of the formal excuse for this sit-down was that we were going to talk about the book or whatever. | ||
| This, Dave, this is an intervention. | ||
| Your friends love you very much. | ||
| We want to see you happy. | ||
| We don't want to see you hurting yourself. | ||
| And every minute that you stay in that hellscape in California, you, that is, you're inflicting harm on yourself and on society. | ||
| You gotta get out. | ||
| You gotta come to the sweet land of freedom. | ||
| Plus you had fried bologna there, which was really something. | ||
| Not just the air and the money and whatever else you said. | ||
| It was also the friability. | ||
| All right, before we get to the book, let's just do a little recap of what's going on in the world, because we haven't sat down together in a while. | ||
| It's been, well, I did your show when I was in Nashville a few weeks ago. | ||
| We got drunk in the middle of the day. | ||
| That was fun. | ||
| But the last time we sat down was when I came back on the grid and you welcomed me back in September. | ||
| So a lot has happened, obviously. | ||
| The world has just completely been at us. | ||
| What's your grade? | ||
| If you had to grade the state of the world right now, what are you feeling? | ||
| Well, I think it resists letters. | ||
| I think if we're doing A through F, no, no, no, and we go down to Z, no. | ||
| And you try the Greek alphabet, they're renaming all the COVID variants. | ||
| It's no longer the Indian variant or whatever, that's politically incorrect. | ||
| So now they're using Greek letters like Omega and Pi, and they're saying that's much simpler. | ||
| It even goes beyond the Greek alphabet. | ||
| What is happening right now is we're seeing an inversion of reality, right? | ||
| We're seeing, we all kind of had a basic understanding of the world and we all, you know, we quibbled over whatever, but we, that now has been completely turned upside its head. | ||
| And I think actually the great example of this is the, it's why everyone's talking about this gender issue. | ||
| It is the insistence that we must Go along with this ideology that says a man is a woman and a woman is a man. | ||
| It's only one minor issue, but it's a symbol of the broader problem. | ||
| I mean, we are told by the Dr. Fauci's of the world, these people who have no accountability to the people whatsoever, that if we question what they want us to do, that changes every single day in political calculations, that we are anti-science and Anti-democracy. | ||
| They'll say if we, the people, question what these totally unaccountable elites do in contravention of the laws, that we are threatening our democracy. | ||
| And I often think of Angelo Cotevilla, who's the scholar at the Claremont Institute, who pointed out that whenever they refer to our democracy, what they really mean is their oligarchy. | ||
| It's totally, totally the opposite. | ||
| So we are just in the upside down. | ||
| Right, I know I can drop a Star Wars reference with you, but it was only a few weeks ago that Fauci said, if you're against him, you're against science, which is very Palpatine-I-am-the-Senate, you know? | ||
|
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It is. | |
| I always assumed... I thought Palpatine would be like Joe Lieberman or something, you know, they kind of bear that physical resemblance. | ||
| No, it's Tony Fauci. | ||
| That's the man. | ||
| The lockdowns, you were pretty much against all of it from the beginning, right? | ||
| Like, you were. | ||
| I'll give credit where it was due. | ||
| You were pretty much against all of this from beat one. | ||
| Did you have a little window? | ||
| What were you doing in that two week to flatten the curve thing? | ||
| No, I had no window. | ||
| I mean, I've been licking doorknobs since this virus was announced. | ||
| I was willing to entertain the idea that the government has sort of emergency powers during a pandemic. | ||
| So when they said two weeks to slow the spread, I said, this is a bad idea. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| I'm against the masks. | ||
| I'm against all of it. | ||
| It is within our political tradition for certain governments, and ideally more local governments, to take these kinds of actions. | ||
| But the problem with it, and I knew it from the top, and I think you knew it, and a lot of us knew it, is... | ||
| It was never what they said it was. | ||
| They said that it was about two weeks to flatten the curve. | ||
| We knew the minute you give them this kind of power, it's not gonna be two weeks. | ||
| It's not gonna be 15 days. | ||
| It's not gonna be 15 months. | ||
| It's still going on right now. | ||
| They said that the reason we need to wear the masks, well, sorry, after they told us not to wear the masks, when they told us we had to wear the masks, they told us the reason for that is it will help us get back to normal. | ||
| But I knew, as I think anyone with common sense knew, The masks not only won't help us get back to normal, they will ensure that we never get back to normal, because when you see someone wearing a mask, that symbol does not tell you, oh good, everything's normal again. | ||
| That thing, we've never been in a culture where everyone is covering their face and muzzling themselves. | ||
| That tells us we are living in extraordinary and extraordinarily dangerous times, and all the normal rules of engagement have to be suspended. | ||
| And that has continued, there are still people wearing those muzzles today. | ||
| Isn't it interesting how they, at first, were saying, oh, we'll get back to normal, meaning two weeks to flatten the curve, then we'll get back to normal, but then it did shift. | ||
| A certain amount of months in, it shifted to, no, there's a new normal. | ||
| Those are very, very different things. | ||
| They told us there's a new normal, and I asked scientists, even scientists who are broadly more conservative, you know, who are more in the center, and I said, so what's up with these masks? | ||
| Is this ever going away? | ||
| And I kid you not, some of them told me, well, Michael, look, yes, it'll go away as a permanent measure. | ||
| But, you know, maybe every flu season the masks come back. | ||
| I mean, Mike, it's really crazy. | ||
| Before, before we were so crazy, we shook hands with people. | ||
| Oh, that's we can't return to that. | ||
| We didn't wear masks on airplay. | ||
| I mean, you know, so some of that is just that's the way we're going to live now. | ||
| And I thought you people have lost your minds. | ||
| Have we watched just a complete collapse of, well, I think all of our institutional elite and all that, I think you're in agreement with me on that, and our educational elite and blah blah, but just sort of like, the average guy that used to be somewhat sensible, like, where is everybody? | ||
| That's what I, every day I'm like, just where is everybody? | ||
| I guess they're just locked up at home. | ||
| They're locked up at home and they're quite afraid. | ||
| And this is what was so brilliant about the political strategy of the masks and the lockdowns. | ||
| And don't forget, we talk about how it was a scientific strategy. | ||
| Public health officials are part scientist and part politician. | ||
| The health part is the science and the public part is the politics. | ||
| Public and politics are synonyms. | ||
| And as a political strategy, It's very difficult for people to organize and oppose the ruling power if they're not even allowed to gather, right? | ||
| I mean, you were not permitted to see anyone outside of your home, so they isolated everybody. | ||
| Then when you could go in public, you had to wear this sort of secular keffiyeh, you know, this kind of modernist burka where you're covering your face. | ||
| Yeah, just wait until they get rid of the secular part. | ||
| That's coming next. | ||
| I don't want to freak everybody out. | ||
| That's on the heels. | ||
| But then even you say, okay, well, I'm not allowed to gather physically. | ||
| I'm not allowed to see my friends. | ||
| Well, at least we can we can correspond online, right? | ||
| No, you can't. | ||
| In the heat of the 2020 election, which is what all of this was about, let's not kid ourselves, in the heat of the 2020 election, if you found an article on the New York Post that had very pertinent information about the election, You couldn't message your friends. | ||
| The function to direct message someone, to send a message on Facebook, that was shut down, that was disabled if you said something that the regime did not approve of. | ||
| Namely, if you pointed out that Hunter Biden had all of this evidence of illicit activities that also may or may not have implicated his father. | ||
| So they alienate us physically, they alienate us digitally. | ||
| Is it any wonder that the conservatives are having a hard time coming back to common sense? | ||
| And is it any wonder, watch this segue, that we've all become speechless. | ||
| You see what I did there? | ||
| Professional. | ||
| I've been doing this a little older than you know, a little older, a little older, though you are professional. | ||
| All right, let's talk about the book. | ||
| You screwed me again because, you know, you left L.A. | ||
| Then you email me or you text me a few months back, Dave, Dave, I'd love to put you on the back of the book. | ||
| Can I get a blurb? | ||
| I'm going to send you the manuscript. | ||
| Read it if you like it. | ||
| Say something nice about me. | ||
| And I said something nice about you and I don't have the book yet. | ||
| It's en route, but I do have, we printed it out. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We printed it out. | ||
| I have the full book. | ||
| I have part of it right here. | ||
| Apparently, I did not make the back cover. | ||
| So now, look, in my defense, Dave, I am but a lowly writer. | ||
| Now, I send these things in, and I say, OK, here are these blurbs. | ||
| And the publishers, they were very excited about your blurb. | ||
| It's in there. | ||
| It's in the book. | ||
| But then I look at the back cover. | ||
| You got beaten out of the cover by Shapiro. | ||
| You got beaten. | ||
| Claven! | ||
| Andrew Claven, they put. | ||
| I know, it's outrageous. | ||
| You might say it's a sort of digital book burning of your quote, which is very relevant to your body of work. | ||
| It is a digital book. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| Let's not make it about me. | ||
| I did make it into the front of the book, so it's okay. | ||
| Okay, speechless. | ||
| Look, you put words in a book. | ||
| This is something new for you. | ||
| Your last book, obviously, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, you didn't put any words in. | ||
| No words. | ||
| Very clever, by the way, probably the greatest money-making scheme in literature history. | ||
| But how was it? | ||
| How'd you like the writing of a book that you were gonna include words? | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| I'd actually like to quote, at length, your blurb. | ||
| I want people to know that Dave read this. | ||
| This is the only nice thing you're ever gonna say about me. | ||
| Michael Knowles has become one of America's most fearless and important political thinkers in a time of unparalleled censorship. | ||
| The fact that he put actual words in his book. | ||
| Is proof of that. | ||
| And I will tell you, Dave, I'm never going to make that mistake again. | ||
| Because it's so much time. | ||
| Oh my gosh, I wrote my first book in about three minutes. | ||
| And that was only because I couldn't figure out how to format the little bottom where I put the page numbers, you know. | ||
| And this thing took a long time to write. | ||
| It took a long time to research. | ||
| And it actually did change some of my ideas. | ||
| I went in and I knew I wanted to write a book. | ||
| I felt there was not really a very accessible history. | ||
| Of political correctness, which now we also call wokeness or cancel culture. | ||
| And I said, OK, I just want to write that. | ||
| I'm curious for my own sake. | ||
| How did we get here? | ||
| Because the harder we fight against political correctness or wokeism or whatever you want to call it, it seems the more ground we lose. | ||
| So why is that? | ||
| And I went into the book with this preconception that conservatives and classical liberals, I would lump together in this, understand free speech and censorship much better than the radical left does. | ||
| And I was quickly disabused of this notion. | ||
| I actually think now, if you take these radical leftist theorists seriously, the people who, you can trace it step by step, the people who gave us this current cultural mania, I think they understand speech and censorship much better than we do. | ||
| I think that's how they are so much more successful at shaping it than we are. | ||
| And I think we ignore that to our own peril. | ||
| So I like the part of the book where you mentioned just that, and that's actually where I was gonna start with my, I've got highlights too. | ||
| The idea basically that they're willing to use structures of power to do things that those of us, let's say on this new right, are not necessarily willing to use. | ||
| This is where you will always say to people, I always see you saying on Twitter to people, well, I'm not a libertarian, and I do occasionally wanna use some power. | ||
| Can you talk about that a little bit? | ||
| Yes, because you'll always hear this response whenever you say that we should have standards at all or, you know, that drag queen story hour shouldn't be able to twerk for toddlers. | ||
| And you say, maybe this isn't the greatest thing in public libraries. | ||
| They'll say, well, I thought you were for small government. | ||
| And I say, I'm not for small government. | ||
| I'm for limited government. | ||
| But I'm not. | ||
| There's no such thing as small government. | ||
| In a country of 330 million people that has overseas holdings in the Pacific, okay? | ||
| There's no such thing that goes from Puerto Rico to Guam, right? | ||
| You can't have a very small government, but you can have a limited government that is within its own just power. | ||
| And moreover, when on the rare occasion that Republicans are given power by the people through our constitutional system, When we get that power, Republicans seem totally unwilling to wield it. | ||
| They seem to think that any use of political power is somehow unjust. | ||
| And I think part of it is because we have made a big error, and it's something that the Founding Fathers were very precise about, and really all great statesmen are, which is we have conflated liberty and licentiousness. | ||
| We have conflated the right to do what we ought to do with Just being able to do whatever you want at any given time. | ||
| And the example I give of this is the heroin addict. | ||
| Right? | ||
| According to the real definition of liberty, the heroin addict According to the modern liberal definition of liberty, he's the freest man in the world, right? | ||
| He's got a couple bucks in his pocket, he can shoot up whatever he wants. | ||
| But we know he's not. | ||
| He's a slave to these really base appetites. | ||
| I don't think he really wants to shoot up the heroin in terms of his higher rational will. | ||
| And so we conflated those two things, and we kind of gave away the game. | ||
| The fact is, all societies are going to have standards, okay? | ||
| All societies are going to say that you can say some things, And you can't say other things. | ||
| And we've got a great speech tradition in America, but from the very beginning, there are whole swaths of speech that you are not allowed to engage in. | ||
| Fraud, sedition, fighting words, direct threats, obscenity. | ||
| Those things have been illegal for the whole history of our country, and for good reason. | ||
| Because those things, if you protect that with free speech, they actually undermine free speech. | ||
| If you protect fraud, then nobody can trust anything That's the thing anybody says. | ||
| If you protect obscenity, to a large degree, people are going to just become, you know, roiling sex machines that aren't thinking very well. | ||
| Which I guess is, one, the name of my high school band, and two, the kind of way that we've become in the society. | ||
| So I just think the left understands there's always got to be some limit, and they've used it, and they've totally transformed those limits to their advantage. | ||
| And meanwhile, what do we do? | ||
| We throw up our hands. | ||
| And it's actually, it's even worse than that. | ||
| There are two ways that we respond to this, generally, as conservatives or libertarians. | ||
| The one is, you've got the squishy types. | ||
| The squishies just, they go along, whatever the new rule is, they just go along with it. | ||
| But then, just as bad, are the stubborn, you know, my-freedom, my-conservative types, who, they say, I'm not going to go along with the new standards. | ||
| I'm going to get rid of standards altogether. | ||
| Totally, absolutely whatever you want. | ||
| Do absolutely whatever you want. | ||
| What I think they fail to realize is, the whole point of political correctness is to destroy the old standards. | ||
| The whole point is to destroy the old way of life. | ||
| As Marx said, the ruthless criticism of all that exists. | ||
| It's where you get things like critical theory and critical race theory. | ||
| And so, either way you respond, in that system, you actually advance the purpose of political correctness. | ||
| All right, you gave me a lot there. | ||
| So first you're talking about sort of freedom from versus freedom to, that's your heroine guy argument. | ||
| Have conservatives then just failed? | ||
| I mean, is this just like a failing of you nice conservatives that now I talk to who are seemingly very friendly and not nearly as scary as I was told? | ||
| Yes, we failed, we failed. | ||
| Conservatives totally failed on this because The left is offering a vision of society. | ||
| Basically, the radical left's vision of society is just the inverse of whatever the vision used to be. | ||
| In the 1950s, if you were a communist, you would be cancelled. | ||
| You would lose your career in Hollywood. | ||
| You could be prosecuted. | ||
| I mean, it was illegal under the Smith Act. | ||
| Today, you'll be cancelled if you're an anti-communist. | ||
| You'll still be cancelled, but it's just the total flip of it. | ||
| But they're actually putting forward that vision of society. | ||
| What is the conservative vision on this? | ||
| The conservative vision is to defend now, and this is only over the last 20 years or so, to defend free speech in the abstract, right? | ||
| Or to defend freedom of belief in the abstract. | ||
| It's always in the abstract. | ||
| But they won't ever get down to the brass tacks of what should we say? | ||
| What do we believe? | ||
| What are we offering people other than Nothing. | ||
| And this is why on the occasions that Republicans have won elections in the last 20 years, all we've ever managed to do, almost without exception, is cut taxes a little bit and maybe cut regulation a little bit, but actually maybe not. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| And so I guess the question you have to ask yourself is after the Reagan revolution and even the Trump revolution and the Gingrich revolution, we won all these elections. | ||
| Would you say the country today is more Conservative, more free than it was 20 years ago? | ||
| No way. | ||
| What do you think about this, Knowles? | ||
| I think you're making the argument of our anarchist friend, Michael Malice, who always says that conservatism is liberalism at the speed limit. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, I think that's a great observation. | ||
| I would disagree with our friend Michael Malice in that he is an anarchist. | ||
|
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Are you guys friends? | |
| I just included you in the friend thing. | ||
| I don't know, I just... I have been a great admirer of Michael ever since he has one of the greatest book titles of all time. | ||
| Dear reader, his book, citing the leader of North Korea, very politically incorrect. | ||
| You probably couldn't do it these days. | ||
| But my answer to this, and I think this is where a conservative would depart from an anarchist, is the anarchist is sort of, you know, get off my lawn, let's | ||
| dissolve all these sorts of bonds. | ||
| And I just think that that is a utopian political vision. | ||
| It's the flip side of the coin to socialism, right? These are both atomizing visions of | ||
| society that have a, what I would call a false anthropology, a false understanding of human nature, a | ||
| false understanding of how society works. We're not born into the world as free floating atoms, | ||
| totally unbound. We're not born totally with entitlement and only with rights. We're also | ||
| born into a real family, the bedrock political unit in a real. | ||
| in a real community, in a real state, in a real country, and we have not only rights, but obligations to those | ||
| things and we have not only freedoms, | ||
| but responsibilities to use those freedoms carefully. | ||
| And the civilization, the society as a whole has the right to put certain limits on there. | ||
| And not only the right to do that, but I think the responsibility. | ||
| So is that really the main takeaway in some ways of the book, | ||
| that standards and just having some limits really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is basically the key to the whole thing, that we're now at the point | ||
| where we've degraded it all to the point where we have drag queen story hour. | ||
| And as I've told you, no gay person that I know is happy about drag queen story hour. | ||
| If anything, they're more annoyed than, say, a traditional conservative like yourself, because it makes gay people look bad. | ||
| It gives you a bad name. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But once you remove any level of standard, it's like now, I mean, we've talked about this, now I'm at the point where I'm like, there is nothing too crazy. | ||
| Every morning I wake up, I look at Twitter, Drag Queen Story Hour, you know, Cartoon Network, Trans This, you know. | ||
| Nickelodeon. | ||
| Just the whole thing, where it's like, there's nothing that could surprise me at this point, because there are no standards anymore. | ||
| Right, there are no standards. | ||
| It cuts at the heart of self-government because what the argument being made by the liberals and by libertarians and a great many conservatives is, well, Michael, if you enforce some standard, well, look, that's just your opinion, man. | ||
| That's just your preference and your value. | ||
| And look, as one of the squishes on the right, he's no longer really on the right, but he used to be, as he very famously said, Drag Queen Story Hour is one of the blessings of liberty. | ||
| If we tell drag queens and radical organizations that they are not permitted to twerk for toddlers at the public library or in the school, why, they'll tell us that we can't go to church on Sunday. | ||
| And the flaws here are... Wait, hold on. | ||
| I think you're talking about David French, if I'm not mistaken? | ||
| I wanted to be nice and not name him, but... | ||
| Well, I think in this case, I don't like making about people, but it is because I remember seeing that Twitter thread and I was like, if this is what conservatism is, then that's not what I am now, I'll tell you that much. | ||
| Yeah, and I think, you know, David has always been nice to me, but I guess the niceness is sort of the problem, isn't it? | ||
| Because if conservatism means that drag queens can twerk for toddlers, somewhere one has lost the thread. | ||
| And I think what it also fails to recognize is one, They're already telling us that we can't go to church on Sunday, right? | ||
| They told us that for about a year. | ||
| They left the marijuana shop open, but they shut down the churches. | ||
| So they're already doing it. | ||
| They're already telling us that we're not allowed to practice our religion in a really public way. | ||
| You saw this semantic shift from freedom of religion to freedom of worship, right? | ||
| It was a subtle shift, but political correctness is about subtle semantic shifts. | ||
| And freedom of worship is something that happens in your head, right? | ||
| Or it happens maybe somewhere on a Sunday. | ||
| Freedom of religion is different, right? | ||
| And it makes certain claims of the world. | ||
| So, I think as a practical matter, their argument is just ridiculous. | ||
| But moreover, at the heart of that argument is this assertion that we can just never know anything about morality or philosophy or the way things are supposed to be. | ||
| We can't know. | ||
| It's all just preferences. | ||
| But the thing about self-government is, You've got to know. | ||
| The whole point of self-government is that we, persuading one another, having debate, having discussion, using our speech, we will persuade one another of how we want to live and we will make certain moral conclusions. | ||
| I know it's very popular these days to say, you can't legislate morality. | ||
| That is a meaningless statement. | ||
| All laws legislate morality. | ||
| Any law on murder, any law on the death penalty, any law on a parking ticket, for goodness sakes, is making moral claims. | ||
| It's referring to the moral law. | ||
| So if we can't actually know stuff, if we can't rely on our faculties of reason and our conscience, Which now are being explicitly denied by the radical left. | ||
| They're saying that the idea that you have objective truth or factories of reason is somehow bigoted or white supremacist. | ||
| But if you don't have that, then you can't govern yourself. | ||
| You can't reason through these things. | ||
| And it's what's led to the Fauci's of the world. | ||
| It's what's led to this bureaucratic state that's just going to make decisions for us because we no longer have the right to or the ability to discuss them. | ||
| Do you think there's also a misunderstanding of how they're playing the game by people, let's say, on our side in that when someone like French says, well, if we don't give them drag queen story hour, then they're not going to give us freedom to worship or something like that. | ||
| That what I think he's really fundamentally misunderstanding is they don't want to give you anything no matter what. | ||
| You can give them drag queen story hour, and then the next crazier thing, and then the next crazier thing, but that's not, I think they sort of think like, oh, it's giving them enough penance so they'll be nice to us. | ||
| But it never turns out that way. | ||
| Yeah, the sort of squishy side of this argument is fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of our political opponents who truly don't care. | ||
| They don't care about how nice and genteel we are. | ||
| They actually see that as a weakness. | ||
| But they also misunderstand everything. | ||
| They also misunderstand the history of conservatism and conservative thought, as well as the history of the United States. | ||
| Now we are told that really what conservatives need to stand for, I'll use the university for an example, is we need to stand for academic freedom. | ||
| And you can teach anything you want, and if you object to the radical critical theorist in the classroom, then you are threatening our sacred principle of academic freedom. | ||
| William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the modern conservative movement, founder of National Review, right? | ||
| He launched his career and the conservative movement with a book called God and Man at Yale. | ||
| Everyone remembers that subtitle. | ||
| The superstitions of academic freedom. | ||
| He refers in that book to academic freedom as a hoax. | ||
| It's a farce. | ||
| It only cuts in one direction. | ||
| And Buckley makes this point. | ||
| He says, the Yale Department of Sociology would never hire someone who gave lectures on the biological superiority of the Aryan. | ||
| They would never hire a neo-Nazi, nor should they. | ||
| They have a standard, they have an understanding of the world, and they have a responsibility to fulfill their mission as educators. | ||
| Now, many of the people who claim the legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. | ||
| love this idea of academic freedom, but it remains a hoax. | ||
| It's a farce. | ||
| It only ever goes in one direction. | ||
| So is this where, when you see that, you know, some of the states, in many cases, led by Chris Rufo, who I've had on the show, have you talked to Chris? | ||
| I have, yes, he's doing great work. | ||
| Doing incredible, like, he's not just talking, he's doing, when you see these states taking actions to keep critical race theory out of the schools, this is an application of state power you're okay with, obviously. | ||
| Of course, because it's necessary. | ||
| When I say that we need to have standards, I'm not just saying, you know, come on, guys, you've gotta, I'm saying, Inevitably, we will have standards. | ||
| Inevitably. | ||
| Inevitably, the state will have something to say about education. | ||
| They run the education system. | ||
| And let's say it's even a private school. | ||
| Inevitably, someone is going to set the curriculum. | ||
| There's a very popular expression these days, they'll say, a lot of conservatives say it. | ||
| We don't want to teach students what to think, only how to think. | ||
| And you say, okay, good, I'm with you, except In order to know how to think, you need to know what to think. | ||
| In order for me to know how to think about mathematics, I need to know that 2 plus 2 equals 4. | ||
| And that is a coercive exercise. | ||
| When the teacher tells the student that, if the student says, no, actually 2 plus 2 equals 5, The student will get a bad grade. | ||
| They'll be punished for that. | ||
| Because you need to know those facts. | ||
| And it's true not just in mathematics, it's true in history, it's true in philosophy, it's true in ethics. | ||
| So, education is always going to be a coercive exercise. | ||
| Sometimes you'll hear now, same kind of people will say, we should educate students, not indoctrinate them. | ||
| The words are synonyms. | ||
| They mean the exact same thing. | ||
| One has a negative connotation, one has a positive connotation. | ||
| And so, when I say that we need standards, when I say that we need just and prudent censorship, I'm not saying this is an arbitrary exercise of will, or it's just a way to own the libs and punish our enemies. | ||
| I mean, that's all well and good. | ||
| But I'm saying we need to, using our faculties of reason, not doing anything immoral, following standards of justice and truth, we need to Express those things and tell people, no, actually, some things are true and some things are false. | ||
| What I'm saying is that in order to save free speech, we must embrace censorship, which is inevitable. | ||
| And I don't want the crazy radical left censorship that's not going to let me say true things. | ||
| But we need to recognize there must be some guardrails here, because otherwise you're not going to have free speech at all. | ||
| Do you remember, Knowles, a few years back when we first started doing shows together, and I said to you, I will become the furthest right of all of you people. | ||
| You people, that's what I was calling you conservatives at the time, and I was talking about, I was sitting in a room with you and Clavin and Shapiro and everything else, because I know what this thing is. | ||
| I was in it. | ||
| And that's why I think you're so interesting at the moment, because we've really... | ||
| sort of met somewhere here that I think represents what the future of the right will be. | ||
| You go into the book, you also talk a bit about religion and atheism, and you talk about John Locke and his feelings towards atheism, and I'm with you there too. | ||
| This secular, this purely secular thing that we seem to be doing at the moment, it ain't working, huh? | ||
| Well, this is such an important point here, because what I'm going to hear, I know that I'm already hearing this in the book. | ||
| The big criticism is that I am pushing an illiberal, authoritarian, theocratic view of the world. | ||
| I don't know where they got that from, but it's in there, that's what they say. | ||
| I like this with the theocratic. | ||
| This, that's the theocratic, I know, wag my finger. | ||
| The fact is that John Locke, the father of liberalism, has a much more restrictive view of speech than I do. | ||
| In John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, Letter Concerning Toleration, he says, you know, we got to tolerate people, that's really good. | ||
| Except for atheists. | ||
| Atheists cannot, they cannot be tolerated because they undercut the entire vision we have of society. | ||
| John Milton, who wrote probably the most famous defense of free speech in the English language, it's called Areopagitica. | ||
| He defends the free speech and the free press, and everyone has to have free speech, Except for Catholics. | ||
| And by the way, I see his argument. | ||
| He's saying that these years of political strife and turmoil, if you allow these tensions to really fester, the whole society is going to fall apart. | ||
| It very nearly did in John Milton's lifetime. | ||
| And so he's saying there have to be some limits to things that we all agree on for the very purpose of having free | ||
|
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speech. | |
| I'm glad they didn't outlaw, well I suppose they did, but I'm glad here we haven't outlawed Catholics from speaking, | ||
| otherwise I wouldn't have been able to write this book. | ||
| But obviously there are some limits here. | ||
| And when you talk about religion, another one of these very silly sayings that you hear from the left today, | ||
| and from some on the squishy right, is they'll say, "We need a firm separation between church and state." | ||
| This is a secular country. | ||
| And where did the Founding Fathers say that? | ||
| Well, that's kind of hard to find. | ||
| Actually, you don't really see a lot of examples of it, but we definitely need that. | ||
| And when I say that we need to take religion seriously in public life, I am not even saying this as a normative statement. | ||
| It's not a rallying cry, necessarily, so much as it is a descriptive statement. | ||
| I'm just saying all political arrangements make religious claims. | ||
| There's always got to be some relationship between religion and politics because your polity, the way you view your citizens, the way you view your laws, Those refer to the moral law, those refer to our understanding of human nature, of what humanity even is, which, by the way, you're seeing challenged now in the sort of transgender ideology, because that's positing a vision of human nature that says that one's body has nothing to do with who one really is. | ||
| You know, I could look like a man, I got the Adam's apple, I have the deep voice, but if I say that somehow I'm a woman, It's not even that it's complicated, which is how life really is. | ||
| It's not even that it's 50-50 or something. | ||
| I just am a woman, right? | ||
| Because that's a vision of human nature. | ||
| And that you should just go for it at that very moment, which is even more disturbing. | ||
| Jordan Peterson's talked about that a lot, that you have to still think about all of the things that are going to change in your life. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Not every eight-year-old can figure that all out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, when we're talking about the children, it's preposterous. | ||
| We say that I mean, first of all, we have age of consent laws for a reason, because children have not come to understand their freedom, right? | ||
| They have not had education, they're not capable of perfect or even remotely adequate reason. | ||
| So we're saying, okay, if a 17-year-old girl sleeps with her 19-year-old boyfriend, that is rape, that is illegal in certain places, that is a very heinous crime. | ||
| But if a seven-year-old decides to hack off perfectly functioning organs and pump themselves full of cross-sex hormones, that is not only permissible, that is actually mandatory. | ||
| And if parents don't let the kids do that, they are going to call Child Protective Services and have the children taken away. | ||
| Those two views obviously can't be held at the same time, but it's because of fundamentally a religious confusion and an inability to make moral claims in politics. | ||
| So okay, so then let's back up to the atheism thing for a second, because when I was reading what you had in there with some of the quotes from John Locke, this idea, his argument in essence seemed to be that if you were to let the atheist worldview flourish, that the amount of destruction would sort of, you just wouldn't be able to build anything after. | ||
| I'm sort of loosely doing it there. | ||
| that kind of feels right to me, which is why the atheist movement that was really powerful | ||
| online, say five years ago or seven years ago, has been completely obliterated. | ||
| And I don't know one public atheist that's really making any sort of political sense. | ||
| I mean, Richard Dawkins apologized to the mob because of this trans thing. | ||
| And he had no problem standing up to radical Islamists for his whole career, and now he's apologizing | ||
| over young children transitioning. | ||
| Yes, I mean, the kind of recent movement of atheists in the 2000s never made much sense at all, | ||
| but atheists generally don't make a lot of sense. | ||
| They can be perfectly fine, lovely people, but... You don't want to jail them, let's just be clear. | ||
| I don't want to jail them, but it does lead to madness, and it's worth pointing out, too. | ||
| Atheism is a good example. | ||
| Our country is premised on the idea that we have certain unalienable natural rights given to us by God, by our Creator, capital C. It's right there in the founding documents of our country. | ||
| So if you come in and you not only deny that that is true, but you actively seek to subvert that, the country can't tolerate that. | ||
| All of these wonderful things we've gotten from our country, this broad defense of speech and all the other rights and institutions we have, are undermined when you undermine the very basis of the country. | ||
| Chesterton has a good line on it. | ||
| He says, there is a thought that stops thought, and that's the only thought that ought to be stopped. | ||
| It's a good line when you think about critical race theory. | ||
| You hear this all the time with critical race theory. | ||
| They say, we need to expand the curriculum. | ||
| When we add these radical racist classes, it's just to expand and open the curriculum. | ||
| First of all, you can't expand a curriculum. | ||
| There's only so many weeks in the semester. | ||
| There are only so many books you can read. | ||
| Every minute you waste on Ibram Kendi is a moment that you're not reading a valuable author. | ||
| But, moreover, you are not enhancing a student's education when you put critical race theory into schools. | ||
| You are undermining that student's education because you are telling students that there really is no such thing as objective truth, that we really can't rely on our reason, that the things that are the very basis of our education, the idea that there's truth and we can try to find it, That that is a fool's errand. | ||
| You undercut the whole point of education, which is why when someone like Ron DeSantis goes in and says, no more critical race theory in schools, he's actually expanding the potential for education, not restricting it. | ||
| He's also being the reverse squishy Republican, which I think is what you're asking for. | ||
| You mentioned at the top that you learned some stuff as you were going through the book | ||
| and coming up with some of these ideas. | ||
| What was something else that you really learned while writing? | ||
| To me, that was the fun part of writing, when I was like, oh, I really have to dive in | ||
| and not just say these things and understand them at a surface level. | ||
| You really gotta get in there and pull out the important stuff. | ||
| I learned that a lot of what we have come to regard as just, and I'm talking on the right, | ||
| I'm talking among conservatives. | ||
| A lot of what we've come to regard as the nature of our American regime | ||
| and the kind of nature of the founding and how we understand ourselves in free speech | ||
| is kind of bunk. | ||
| And it was kind of just, They're just bumper stickers from the last 20 years or so. | ||
| And I came to a grudging respect, even for the most vile of the leftist theorists. | ||
| I'll give a good example, is Herbert Marcuse. | ||
| Herbert Marcuse. | ||
| He was actually mocked in that Coen Brothers movie, Hail Caesar. | ||
| The villain of that movie? | ||
| So Herbert Marcuse was one of the critical theorists, one of the OGs in the Frankfurt School, and he developed a lot of these ideologies in the Marxist tradition, in the Western Marxist tradition, thinking specifically about culture. | ||
| And then he pops up again. | ||
| He goes and he works for the precursor to the CIA for a while, he goes into the Academy for a while, then he pops up again in the 60s. | ||
| As the father of the new left. | ||
| I mean, he's considered maybe the most influential figure during the radical movements of the 60s. | ||
| And Marcuse writes one of the most infamous essays on free speech ever composed. | ||
| It was called Repressive Tolerance. | ||
| It seems like a contradiction in terms. | ||
| And Marcuse says, he's got a lot of like silly jargon that you can kind of ignore. | ||
| Then he comes to the heart of it. | ||
| He says, a liberating tolerance would not tolerate intolerance, which he defines as conservative thought. | ||
| And he observes that the conservatives had cultural hegemony. | ||
| They had sort of control over the institutions. | ||
| They control over the common sense. | ||
| And so what we need to do to correct that is censor and suppress the conservatives and advance the radical leftist thought. | ||
| And he was decried by people, certainly people on the right and people on the left as well. | ||
| But his basic point that you can't tolerate intolerance is correct. | ||
| That's actually true. | ||
| The paradox of tolerance. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| And conservatives need to learn this lesson. | ||
| I think that the conservative vision, I think the American vision of free speech and the way we all live together is a very tolerant one. | ||
| I think it's the most tolerant one basically ever in history. | ||
| That is now being undone, and it's being explicitly undone by the radicals at the 1619 Project, the critical race theorists, and the whole kit and caboodle. | ||
| And by the way, people in elected office. | ||
| I mean, even all the way up to the Biden administration. | ||
| And so that is being undone because we fail to recognize that Marcuse was right. | ||
| There were some things that are non-negotiable. | ||
| Going back to Bill Buckley. | ||
| Bill Buckley's second book was a defense of Joe McCarthy. | ||
| McCarthyism, the anti-communist crusader. | ||
| Shocking, right? | ||
| Years later, I mean, Buckley came to temper his defense of McCarthy, mostly on practical grounds that McCarthy kind of screwed things up. | ||
| But I think it was about a dozen years after that book came out, Buckley was talking to a neoconservative, Leo Chern, and they were debating on his TV show. | ||
| And Chern said, you're for an open society, Bill, aren't you? | ||
| Don't you? | ||
| We want a big open society. | ||
| Coincidentally, that's the name of George Soros' philanthropic foundation. | ||
| So you can see how this has a leftward lurch. | ||
| And Bill said, no, I don't. | ||
| No, I don't think society should be totally open. | ||
| I want the society to be considerably more closed. | ||
| And he used a ridiculous phrase. | ||
| He said, I'm an epistemological optimist. | ||
| And he kind of made fun of himself. | ||
| He said, what that means is, I think that some things are settled. | ||
| I think that some things we don't actually need to rehash. | ||
| I don't think that we need to rehash Nazism. | ||
| I don't think we need to rehash Communism. | ||
| And the point he's making is not just one of practical politics. | ||
| He's actually making a point about knowledge, how we know things. | ||
| Certain things you just have to assume. | ||
| In mathematics, you have to just assume certain axioms. | ||
| A equals A. A plus B equals B plus A. Certain things that I can't prove, but you have to just assume it. | ||
| I have to assume that my faculties of reason are somewhat reliable. | ||
| I have to assume it. | ||
| I have to assume that objective truth exists. | ||
| I have to assume it because otherwise I am rendered Speechless. | ||
| What I mean by that is, you can't make an argument if there is no such thing as objective truth and if we don't have faculties of reason. | ||
| So you have to assume those things and when people come in and try to obliterate your belief in those things, you must resist it and you must suppress that. | ||
| It's so interesting to me because you're basically making the argument for why I can't call myself a liberal with a straight face anymore. | ||
| Because of the objective truth issue that you're bringing up and the paradox of tolerance, which is why the seven remaining liberals that are flailing around right now, you talk about the squishy Republicans or the squishy conservatives, I see them as the ineffectual liberals. | ||
| It's like, you guys let this in, you have now none of the tools to deal with it, but your biggest fear, I mean, I say this all the time, but your biggest fear is that you don't want to be called conservative. | ||
| And it's like, they're not coming for you. | ||
| And you've done this thing, which is not permitted anymore in society, which is you've thought about things and changed your mind on some issues, right? | ||
| Forget about the left, they're not changing their mind either. | ||
| They're quite successful, so why would they? | ||
| But the right refuses to change its mind. | ||
| I think the right had some good ideas, and then they turned those ideas into slogans, and they turned those slogans into bumper stickers, and every bumper sticker is wrong. | ||
| Reality will not be distilled into a few pithy little sayings on a napkin. | ||
| And they refuse to rethink it. | ||
| So the right knows at this point that it's in a losing strategy, right? | ||
| The right knows that it's just losing ground after ground. | ||
| Even when we win elections, we lose. | ||
| But they're not willing to rethink things, look at objective reality with new eyes, and change their mind. | ||
| So I see you flailing your arms, or you're probably shaking people by the shoulders for the seven remaining liberals. | ||
| But one could do the same thing about the conservatives who fail to recognize That the strategy that they may have adopted in the best hopes has not worked because reality was a little different than that theory and we've got to rethink our history, we've got to rethink our philosophy, and we've got to actually | ||
| Try to win again. | ||
| So on that note, Knowles, let's end with this, because I've got a hard-out today, even though I could do 20 hours with you, obviously. | ||
| What does the future that you're writing about in that book, that I wrote about in my book, that we talk about all the time, what does it actually look like? | ||
| What can we be doing? | ||
| What can we be messaging to the people that watch our shows that get it? | ||
| They don't want to be the broken liberals. | ||
| They don't want to be the squishy Republicans, the conservatives. | ||
| What is it that we're building? | ||
| And who's going to help us build it? | ||
| Because that's the whole thing that I'm always going for now. | ||
| The future involves the word no. | ||
| We need to be able to use the word no. | ||
| Only by saying no will you be able to say yes. | ||
| Only by saying no to certain destructive ideologies will you be able to say yes to edifying, to building up again. | ||
| Only by saying no to critical race theory, to radical gender ideology, to this nihilistic secularism that is pervading the culture, only by saying no we will not tolerate that in our schools, in our institutions, in our | ||
| workplaces, by saying no, we will be able to say there is such a thing as truth. | ||
| We can know things, not just physical scientific things, but moral things, philosophical things, even religious | ||
| things. | ||
| We can know that in our politics and we can build up from there. We need to | ||
| stop being so damn nice. | ||
| And we also need to get rid of the premises that our adversaries have foisted on us. | ||
| You know, when the squishes for the last 20 or 30 years have only focused on economic issues, right? | ||
| You hear this a lot, I'm a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal or whatever. | ||
| I don't even know what that means anymore. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything anymore. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything. | ||
| It means you're a conservative who doesn't want to admit it because you're really a guilty liberal or something like that, yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it also, if you say that all I care about is economics, You're saying the same thing as the socialist. | ||
| The socialist views man as essentially an economic being. | ||
| Yes, it's just like stuff, you know. | ||
| And the squishy conservative is saying the same thing. | ||
| We need to say something different. | ||
| Phyllis Schlafly, one of the great conservative leaders of the last century, had a very famous saying. | ||
| She said, we need a choice, not an echo. | ||
| And what we've had so far is a left that is putting forward a vision of society, and we've had a right that basically agrees with them or is unwilling to have the | ||
| courage to stand up to them. | ||
| But one does need courage. | ||
| We need to accept the reality that there is truth and there is a virtue, | ||
| and we need to recognize that the prerequisite virtue is courage. | ||
| It's not enough to lose with dignity as all the undignified people do. | ||
| You have to have the courage to make claims, to enforce those claims, and to win. | ||
|
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Knowles, you've become pretty good at this. | |
| I'll give it to you. | ||
| You've become pretty good at this, you know, when I said to you, well, what painted forward for us, you know, what is it going to look like? | ||
| And you said, well, we got to say no. | ||
| That was your Howard Beale, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore speech. | ||
| If you had been in a jacket coming out of the rain and screaming and you're going to rip your microphone off at the end. | ||
| I think that was it. | ||
| Speechless is out right now. | ||
| It's in your hand, and although I am not on the back cover, I am in the beginning. | ||
| You are there. | ||
| That's just enough for me. | ||
| The first page is Dave Rubin saying very nice things about me. | ||
| If you never do it again, I've got the proof. | ||
| It's right here. | ||
| Knowles, you're invited to my birthday party in crazy LA in a couple weeks. | ||
| I hope you, I hope you're willing to leave Nashville, but I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| You want your fried bologna and your boots and your guitar. | ||
| Dave, there is one thing that could get me to go back to that failed state. | ||
| That is your birthday, but that's the one thing. | ||
| And I'll only stay for the party that I'm going. | ||
| I'm flying back out afterwards. | ||
| Good work Knowles. | ||
| See you soon. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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