Sept. 26, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| And I've said this many, many times. | ||
| LeBron James is a basketball player. | ||
| He's not that smart. | ||
| Listen to him talk. | ||
| Go read his Twitter feed, his Instagram. | ||
| He can barely spell. | ||
| But y'all think this guy is some kind of thought leader, public intellectual, whatever. | ||
| And then the number one thing, because his lack of grammar and all that, I can almost deal with that. | ||
| But what the media ...won't deal with is that Muhammad Ali, whether we like the Nation of Islam or not, he was connected and controlled by a religious sect. | ||
| And Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, whether we like them or not, very smart people. | ||
| Ahead of the curve. | ||
| They controlled. | ||
| Muhammad Ali said what they told him to say. | ||
| And did what they told him to do at that time. | ||
| LeBron James ain't connected to nobody but Nike and Phil Knight. | ||
| Phil Knight is not Elijah Muhammad or Malcolm X. And so, who's advised? | ||
| Adam Mendelsohn? | ||
| And I know Adam Mendelsohn, the PR guy that works for him. | ||
| But he ain't Malcolm X or Elijah Muhammad. | ||
| These athletes can barely keep up with their baby mamas. | ||
| How the hell are they going to keep up with what's going on in the rest of the world? | ||
| We keep putting them in this position, and we keep, oh, who gonna be the next Muhammad Ali? | ||
| And we have to accept those days are gone. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is a sports analyst, a culture critic, and host of the fairly new show, Fearless, on Blaze TV, Jason Whitlock. | ||
| Welcome to round two on the Rubin Report. | ||
| I thought this was round three, but maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| Maybe, you know, your interviews are so long they just feel like two rounds. | ||
| Oh, he's starting in with a hook. | ||
| I'm pretty sure this is round two. | ||
| I think it's round two. | ||
| All right, well, I got another hook shot I'm about to throw. | ||
| You're the sports guy. | ||
| You guys love stats. | ||
| You guys love stats, you sports people. | ||
| Let me throw another jab before you get started. | ||
| I just want everybody to know, watching at home, a month ago, Three weeks ago, I asked Dave to come on my show to consent to an interview. | ||
| Dave puts me off. | ||
| I'm on vacation, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. | ||
| And somehow, I end up on Dave's show before he comes on my show. | ||
| Dave doesn't say anything about, you know, I'll return the favor or anything like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's just Dave being Dave, I guess. | |
| So here I am. | ||
| I just wanted to get through this one, make sure it works out okay. | ||
| We're off to a good start, and then I'll gladly swing by over there. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, I'm probably going to talk about the stuff I want to talk with you about. | ||
| I'm probably going to talk about it to now, and it'll be over. | ||
| We'll just run a replay of this interview on my show. | ||
| But anyway, go ahead. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm going to shut up and listen to you. | ||
| It's your show. | ||
| I know, I have a feeling we'll find some other things to talk about, | ||
| but there's actually a ton I wanna talk to you about because when I had you on, | ||
| and I'm pretty sure it's only been once, but when I had you on in studio in LA a couple years back, | ||
| it's probably a good three years ago already. | ||
| I mean, time flies, especially these days. | ||
| It sort of felt like sports was in the midst of this weird meltdown, | ||
| but it didn't feel like it had fully melted down and the racialization of everything | ||
| and the gender and football is gay and all of the stuff that is out there now. | ||
| So I guess my first question really is, what's your general take on what has happened to sports in general in the last couple of years? | ||
| I think I told you that I don't watch anything anymore. | ||
| I do not watch professional sports anymore. | ||
| That's very sad to me. | ||
| I just can't take it anymore. | ||
| Dave, I just had this discussion on my show on Wednesday about, because the NFL right now is bragging about, hey, week one ratings were up 7% over a year ago, and the NFL is back, and look at the TV ratings, and what I'm arguing is, like, the NFL, in particular, is America's comfort food. | ||
| And America is in desperate need of comfort right now because of COVID and because of the racial meltdown we've had, we're looking for anything that reminds us of the way things used to be. | ||
| And so I think the initial kind of rush back to sports and football and filling up stadiums and let's have fun, I think that's what's happening. | ||
| People are looking, they want some nostalgia, they want some comfort. | ||
| I do think, and I argued this on Wednesday, and Uncle Jimmy and the guest we had on, Dennis Evans, they both pushed back against me, but I do think the passion for sports has waned and faded. | ||
| I see it in myself. | ||
| I don't like or respect the athletes the way that I used to. | ||
| And it's never that I used to think these guys were the smartest guys on the planet, But I also didn't think they were the dumbest guys on the planet, or the easiest to control, or totally controlled by groupthink and social media. | ||
| I didn't think they were frauds and phonies who were just willing to say and do anything to stay in the good graces of social media and the elite overlords. | ||
| And that's what I think now. | ||
| So, I still watch the sports? | ||
| I don't feel as good about the athletes, and eventually, and I made this analogy, it's like the old B.B. | ||
| King song, the thrill is gone. | ||
| And sometimes when you're ending a relationship, you go through this part where you're not quite separated, you're still living in the same house, you're still going through the motions, but everybody knows it's over. | ||
| And that's kind of how I feel about Uh, professional sports, I still watch, I still somewhat, I love them, I love the games, but the passion for the athletes just isn't the same as it used to be, and eventually I'll just spend less and less time with sports. | ||
| On a personal note, how much does that suck for you? | ||
| I mean, not only is this your job, and you got into this stuff because you love it. | ||
| I mean, I was never a sports analyst, but I grew up watching the same games you were watching, loving that stuff, and it kind of sucks. | ||
| When I'm flipping on YouTube and I'm watching old NBA games when it wasn't political, and then they show me a new one, I'm just like, no, I just don't want to do it. | ||
| And it kind of sucks. | ||
| No, it sucks big time, Dave. | ||
| For someone like me, there's two things that have shaped my worldview. | ||
| The church, my grandmother and mother raised me in, and football, and playing sports. | ||
| In high school, I played track and field, played a little basketball, intramural or whatever, played football. | ||
| I was into sports, and the values taught in sports, and the values taught in my church, there was great synergy and alignment between them. | ||
| I'm looking at sports Betray all of those values. | ||
| And it irritates the heck out of me. | ||
| It bothers me immensely. | ||
| And so, this sucks to see something this central to your core beliefs completely pivot and give in to Marxism and, you know, authoritarian, everybody must get the vax, or you face these harsh penalties. | ||
| I just don't like any of it. | ||
| And yeah, it just... | ||
| It sucks big time. | ||
| So the newest thing, speaking of the Vax, in the last couple days now, the NBA has reached a deal somehow, even though they have over a hundred employees, that the players will not have to be vaccinated. | ||
| I don't understand how that makes any sense. | ||
| I'm not for mandating Vaxes, just so you know that. | ||
| But they've gotten this exemption, but it appears that the people who go to the games will have to be vaccinated. | ||
| Now I'm fairly certain NBA players might sweat on each other, spit on each other. | ||
| Do they have some sort of protections we don't know about? | ||
| They don't. | ||
| This sounds similar to what the NFL. | ||
| You don't have to be vaccinated in the NFL, but you do face all these different set of rules that the vaccinated players don't face. | ||
| That sounds like what the NBA is going to do. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| It's no different than last year when No one was vaccinated. | ||
| They're all in arena. | ||
| The coach is wearing a mask for no reason. | ||
| He pulls it down every time he wants to really be heard and say anything important. | ||
| And it was the masquerade theater that we've been seeing for the past 18 months. | ||
| And they were doing it in the NBA. | ||
| So a guy has to sit in a different place in the locker room. | ||
| Maybe he has to fly somewhere differently on a plane. | ||
| But when you get out on the court, sweat. | ||
| And bump into each other and slap high five and sit next to each other on the bench, sweaty as you want to be. | ||
| That's all fine. | ||
| But when we go in this locker room, go sit over here because you're not vaccinated. | ||
| It's just stupid. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure you've heard the same crazy rumors that I've heard about when the NBA was in the bubble, right? | ||
| It was called the bubble about all of the girls that were getting smuggled into the bubble. | ||
| Like it's not like these people did not live. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure it didn't become a COVID super spreader event. | ||
| And I hope I'm not cracking an inappropriate joke. | ||
| I don't, I can't, but I'm not sure if you're aware. | ||
| I'm not sure if you're aware, but I've talked to Dr. Fauci about this personally, but the COVID virus cannot live inside of a vagina. | ||
| So when the women were coming into the bubble and, and you know, their vagina is completely pure and bacteria free, COVID free. | ||
| And so that was perfectly understandable and safe, Dave. | ||
| I'm just going to make note of that. | ||
| COVID cannot live in the vagina. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We got our promo out of you, Whitlock. | ||
| Which sport, you know, we're talking about the NBA now, but you mentioned the NFL. | ||
| Those seem to be the two that are having this meltdown. | ||
| And by the way, when you mentioned the 7% increase, I'm guessing that the year before, ratings were considerably more down from the year before. | ||
| So it's sort of like a not as great number, right? | ||
| When they're talking about that. | ||
| But which sport do you think has suffered the most from all this? | ||
| It seems like the NBA to me, but I'm a little out of the loop. | ||
| It's hard for me to say who has suffered the most. | ||
| I would probably argue, I'm not going to say sports, NFL players have suffered the most. | ||
| They allowed ownership to jam a collective bargaining agreement and a salary cap down their throat before the TV deals were struck. | ||
| And it was all under the excuse of COVID and, you know, we're not going to generate as much money. | ||
| And so even with all the money the NFL players are making, and they're making a ton compared to what they used to. | ||
| And, you know, guys like Patrick Mahomes and Dak Prescott are making more than $40 million a year. | ||
| They're not making what they could and should be making if the COVID charade, if they hadn't damaged their business with the George Floyd, Colin Kaepernick, let's piss off our traditional fan base. | ||
| And so I'm not sure if I'm quite answering your question, but I would say over the course of these five or six years, the Kaepernick charade, George Floyd charade, and now COVID, I don't think any sport has been more damaged than football players and football. | ||
| And again, I I say that saying the full impact of what they've done over the last five years is going to play out over the next ten years. | ||
| Everybody right now is, you know, early on. | ||
| Football, I love it. | ||
| I'm going to these games and it's screw Fauci. | ||
| We're partying and acting like it's 1999. | ||
| When that dissipates and when people are sitting there-- | ||
| week one of the NFL, I'm sitting around watching football. | ||
| It's what I was built in this life to do-- | ||
| watch football, talk about it. | ||
| Used to play a little bit of it in college. | ||
| But I'm just not as passionate. | ||
| And eventually, that lack of passion, once the thrill is gone, the love is gone, | ||
| and people understand, like, man, I'm just really putting money in some ungrateful idiot's pockets. | ||
| I'm tired of doing this and I'm going to spend time with my wife and kids or family. | ||
| I'm going to go hunting. | ||
| I'm going to go fishing. | ||
| There's other things to do than watch people that you don't respect play a game that's been softened up and dramatically changed. | ||
| The point I was arguing on Wednesday on my show is like, the NFL has made a bunch of decisions over the past 10 years under Roger Goodell to satisfy its critics. | ||
| Changed the rules because of head trauma, and the New York Times beat them up over CTE. | ||
| They allowed kneeling because of Colin Kaepernick. | ||
| Because of George Floyd, they plastered all these Marxist social justice slogans all over everything. | ||
| And people call me a sexist pig, but they're decorating their officiating crews with women. | ||
| They're coaching staffs with women. | ||
| They're executive officers with women. | ||
| And they're doing all this to stay a step ahead of the Me Too feminist movement. | ||
| And they're just piling on people. | ||
| And I'm not saying... I know some women who love football. | ||
| But they're just pacifying people whose hearts really aren't in the game. | ||
| And they're pacifying the people that don't really love the game. | ||
| And they're doing nothing to satisfy me. | ||
| They're A1 Ride or die, football fan, what about me? | ||
| They just take me for granted. | ||
| And eventually, guys like, I'm gonna join guys like you to just say, you know what? | ||
| I got better things to do. | ||
| So when they said the NFL is gay, did you have any clue as to what they meant by that? | ||
| I mean, they literally, it was a commercial, the NFL is gay. | ||
| I know a little bit about that, but I couldn't put it all together. | ||
| Uh, Dave, and I want to be respectful, but I have to say there's an alphabet mafia. | ||
| BLM, LGBTQ. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you. | ||
| That's the mafia now. | ||
| And it's, everything is being done to say, don't attack me. | ||
| Black Lives Matter, LGBT movement, don't attack me. | ||
| And so the NFL is going to say, I'm gay. | ||
| I'm Marxist. | ||
| I'm going to say the cops are out randomly killing black people. | ||
| I'm going to say whatever I think is necessary to keep you off my back. | ||
| And listen, I grew up as an idiot in a football locker room, as an athlete. | ||
| I can't say I was as dumb as all the guys I played sports with. | ||
| But I certainly remember, I'm 54 Dave, I certainly remember in my era, guys that were less masculine than the standard were mistreated. | ||
| And I am really glad and thankful that that has changed and we're going a different direction and everybody, that kind of bullying should not have been tolerated then and I'm glad we're not tolerating it now. | ||
| I still think there needs to be, I can't be made to feel bad. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Because maybe I'm a little, I got a little bit more masculinity than the normal person. | ||
| And I'm just, football is a masculine game. | ||
| It's not about your sexuality. | ||
| For someone like myself, Dave, I think we've all gone overboard with our sexual identity. | ||
| And we're all wearing them on our sleeve. | ||
| And it's like the first thing we tell people, I'm heterosexual. | ||
|
unidentified
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And boy, do I like vaginas. | |
| And I'm gay. | ||
| Plus with the COVID thing you told me before, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Dave, the key to saving this country, because I do believe the country's at stake. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| We have to go back to, hey, I'm a Christian or I'm an American. | ||
| Let that be your initial identity rather than your sexual identity. | ||
| Because I just don't think what arouses us sexually is all that important. | ||
| And I'll say this as a Christian and who was someone who I think as a kid and as a young person could be accurately described as homophobic. | ||
| And I regret that. | ||
| And I regret that as a Christian because Regardless of what I think about homosexuality, it's no different for me as a Christian than my promiscuity outside of marriage. | ||
| And so it was wrong to try, us as Christians that have these certain beliefs, to try to say our sin isn't as bad as their sin. | ||
| It's how we have created, and I blame us as Christians for not being more tolerant and more understanding. | ||
| We've created this backlash and the alphabet mafia, and now I've seen people, rather than admitting their flaws and then doing the right thing, I see the NFL and other sports leagues bending over backwards and doing things that they really don't believe. | ||
| to pacify social media, the Twitter mob, and all the other people that are allegedly on the right side of history. | ||
| Yeah, well, Jason, let me say this. | ||
| As an American, you get no judgment from me on any of your past judgments. | ||
| Let me just be very, very clear about that. | ||
| Was it not Joe Namath who said I was a gay Marxist? | ||
| Was it not him? | ||
| Wasn't he a big gay Marxist or am I confusing him with somebody else? | ||
| Joe Namath did not. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| It wasn't Joe Namath? | ||
| No. | ||
| Was it Joe Namath? | ||
| Let me ask you, I'm guessing you talk to players in these leagues, probably on the DL, but | ||
| I have a friend or two that's in the NBA, and I know that guys are not happy about this. | ||
| They are not happy about the politics in the sports. | ||
| They're not happy about the influence of China. | ||
| There's a couple people that privately will talk about this, not many that will talk about it publicly, and certainly most of the coaches and Steve Kerr and Popovich and LeBron, obviously, just loving on China all day long. | ||
| But do you sense players are angry about all of this stuff too? | ||
| I think where players have gotten more aggressive, and it's still not aggressive enough, The vaccine push has really pushed guys to the brink. | ||
| And it's like, this is a bridge too far. | ||
| And I bit my tongue and held my thoughts on the political stuff, and everybody's sitting around acting like America's the most evil place on the planet. | ||
| They struggled with that, but they were able to... But now it's about injecting things into my body When you're talking about some of the youngest, healthiest, most in-shape people on the planet, the death rate, the damage rate for COVID for these people is virtually non-existent. | ||
| And so I have seen a growing discontent there, and I think it's helping them realize, like, oh, so when we accepted the Neiline and the National Anthem, We never thought it would get here, and now they're starting to, yeah, that's why you gotta draw a line in the sand on all this stuff, because eventually it is going to come for you. | ||
| And so I do think there's a lot of players that know like, man, you know what I'm able to do for my family because of football and basketball and America's passion for sports? | ||
| Why are we sitting up here like we Are the people the most irate and think America is evil? | ||
| Yeah, I've heard from enough players, particularly during this vaccine thing, that it's going too far. | ||
| And they know how hypocritical it is. | ||
| They know that it's driven by the players who are addicted to social media and would rather die than do anything that didn't get a thousand likes. | ||
| And 500 retweets. | ||
| But what most people are doing, and this is, the players are following the lead of Roger Goodell, the executives in the NFL, the owner. | ||
| Everybody's just trying to do what's best for them in the moment. | ||
| Roger Goodell, he doesn't want to do what's best for football. | ||
| He wants to do what's best for him to survive in a job that pays him $40 million a year. | ||
| If he can squeeze six, ten more years out of that, who cares? | ||
| And if football's in a mess when he leaves, that's someone else's problem to fix. | ||
| He's made his money, and that's what players, mimicking the leadership they're seeing from Roger Goodell, mimicking the leadership they see from ownership, If I can stick in this another five, ten years and the value of this franchise goes up, I can sell and get out and turn it over to someone else. | ||
| No one's doing what's best for the games anymore. | ||
| There's so much money at stake, and it's no different than what we see in politics today. | ||
| All the politicians, they're doing what's ever best, however long their political career lasts. | ||
| They can make enough money or set themselves up to make enough money on the other side. | ||
| Can I get that TV job at MSNBC or CNN or Fox News? | ||
| Everybody's just doing what's best for them. | ||
| No one. | ||
| Dave, I think about this all the time. | ||
| John F. Kennedy in 1961 asked not what your country can do for you, asked what you can do for your country. | ||
| We're so far away from that, that no one asked themselves that question, and if they did, they would get thrown out of politics. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I always say it. | ||
| It's the 180 from what Bernie and the left have been selling. | ||
| If he went on stage and said that, or any lefty went on stage and said that, they'd basically be strung up. | ||
| They say, what can we give you? | ||
| Hey, let us know. | ||
| We'll give you some stuff. | ||
| So what would you do if you could take over? | ||
| I mean, if you could take over for Goodell or, what is it, Adam Silver at the NBA? | ||
| Give me like one or two things that you might do that would help the league for longevity's sake and not just for the immediacy of cashing out. | ||
| What I would do, Dave, to be honest, and this is particularly as it relates to football, because football is the most powerful thing in popular culture. | ||
| It's the number one show on five different television networks by a mile. | ||
| And so that makes it far more powerful than Michael Jackson or whatever entertainer, the Cosby show, whatever was ever used to be the most popular, nothing compares to the NFL. | ||
| Number one show on five different TV networks. | ||
| And so my mentality as it related to the NFL as commissioner would be, and I really would, how can I Use football to help improve America. | ||
| That would be at the top of my agenda. | ||
| And then, what could I do to serve my ownership and put football in the best position possible? | ||
| And so, I would use football as my bully pulpit, and I would take all the slings and arrows, and there's nothing we would do that would be satisfying the Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Football is about unity. | ||
| Every coach goes into the locker room. | ||
| It don't matter what color you are. | ||
| It don't matter what neighborhood you came from. | ||
| It doesn't matter if you're rural, a city kid, whatever. | ||
| If your parents were rich, if your parents were poor, we come together as a team. | ||
| My message as the NFL, that's what we're about. | ||
| We're not, oh, you're black? | ||
| There's a special little set-aside program we have for you. | ||
| And we have to make you feel special and blah. | ||
| Football's never been about that. | ||
| America, and I don't care what people say, by Declaration of Independence and by Constitution, I'm not talking about how people actually ignored what was in the Declaration of Independence, ignored what was in the Constitution, but America was set up that way. | ||
| I don't care what color you are, I don't care. | ||
| That's what America's intent is, to operate the way sports have traditionally operated. | ||
| That's why there was always so much racial progress in sports, and sports used to be a leader in this country. | ||
| Jackie Robinson, in 1947, breaking the color barrier, that's what inspired Dr. King and the civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s. | ||
| Sports used to be a leader in America, and now we're followers of big tech. | ||
| And we're followers of the globalist corporations that are far more worried about China than they are about America. | ||
| And that's why I think football's in such a unique position. | ||
| The NFL doesn't need China. | ||
| And it can still be a leader. | ||
| And so I would, you know, go back and lean back into what Pete Rozelle, the greatest commissioner in all of sports, What he did, he attached football to Americana and to patriotism. | ||
| And he did all these things, because that was their way of undermining or surpassing Major League Baseball. | ||
| And I would just lean back into all those traditional values that made football great and made it what it is, and I would stand firm. | ||
| And I mean, the difference between me and Roger Goodell is there's none of these idiots at ESPN, There's none of these idiots in the New York Times. | ||
| None of them can out-talk me on race. | ||
| They can't do it. | ||
| I've listened to them. | ||
| Hannah Nicole Jones and the little stupid 1619 Project. | ||
| I can go all day with these guys and crush them. | ||
| Ta-Nehisi Coates. | ||
| That's why they're all cowards. | ||
| These people, they won't come on and engage with people that disagree with them. | ||
| They can stand toe-to-toe with them. | ||
| They won't be mesmerized by their little word salads. | ||
| And we'll just keep it real. | ||
| You get one of these black clowns or liberal clowns that go on TV and say, oh my God, the police are doing this and that. | ||
| And I'm like, what hood have you been in? | ||
| Because I can tell you where I came from. | ||
| I can tell you where my daddy's business was in the hood. | ||
| And we spent no time talking about, oh my God, the police may kill me tonight. | ||
| That's some bullshit. | ||
| And I would call it out. | ||
| You can't run-- you're a little suburban Ivy League Negro who's speculating about what | ||
| goes on in the hood. | ||
| I actually lived there. | ||
| I actually understand. | ||
| I still got family there. | ||
| It's not something I just go visit maybe at Thanksgiving or whatever. | ||
| And so I would clown suit the media and anybody else who challenged me on these issues. | ||
| I would still be writing a column as the commissioner of the NFL, and anybody that opened up their | ||
| mouth and wanted to give me any lip, I'd just light them up in a column and explain to them, | ||
| OK, deal with that. | ||
| Dave, I've seen people, this is one of the craziest things I saw in the media. | ||
| I saw a guy on TV that told a story, I think during the height of the George Floyd or Eric Garner, one of these moments, went on TV and said that he and his wife had decided that they would no longer let their 18-year-old son drive a car because they were so petrified of the police. | ||
| And I was just sitting there, and again, if I was the commissioner of one of these sports, I would clown suit this guy. | ||
| I would just go, You're so afraid of the police that you're not going to let your black son drive a car. | ||
| Are you going to let him go to a party with other black boys? | ||
| Because statistically, his chances of being killed by somebody are 1,000 times greater by another 18-year-old black boy than the police. | ||
| So maybe you should pass a rule. | ||
| You can't run around with black boys. | ||
| Now, go ahead and respond to that. | ||
| And they would have nothing to say. | ||
| America could see these are clowns. | ||
| These are people that are just saying shit on TV to draw attention to themselves, to make sure that the checks come in from MSNBC, China, Nike, whoever. | ||
| But this isn't the truth. | ||
| And so, if I was a commissioner of the NFL, I'd just stand on truth. | ||
| But Roger Goodell, he's not equipped for this argument or this time. | ||
| Ownership, scared. | ||
| But at some point, Dave, men are going to have to be men again. | ||
| And men that understand how good this country has been to us and our families are going to have to stand up and fight this fight and quit hiding. | ||
| It's one of the main reasons I left corporate media, because I wanted to get in the fight for real. | ||
| I want the gloves off. | ||
| And let's pick up these muskets and let's mow down some of these idiots that are trying to tear this country down. | ||
| So I'm guessing you're not getting any calls from good old Joanne Reed over at MSNBC for these conversations. | ||
| I wish she would call me, Dave, because what I would like to... I'd like to introduce her to a beautician who could get her to settle on a hairstyle, because every time you turn on that damn TV. | ||
| She got a new hairstyle, new wig. | ||
| She's culturally appropriated from every race on the planet with her hairstyle. | ||
| One day is Wilma Roonaw. | ||
| Wilma, hold on. | ||
| Is it Wilma? | ||
| Flintstone, Flintstone. | ||
| Wilma Flintstone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| What was, who? | ||
| Barney Rubble. | ||
| Rubble, Rubble. | ||
| You just never know from day to day who she gonna culturally appropriate from, hairstyle to hairstyle. | ||
| And then, I mean, and she's one of the biggest phonies. | ||
| On TV, her old blogs are what she really thinks. | ||
| This woman was raised in a church just like me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She's on TV lying, pretending that she's some kind of leftist. | ||
| And it's all to collect a check. | ||
| Those are the real sellouts. | ||
| Those are the people selling out what they really believe for money. | ||
| And then they sit around and they want to call Tim Scott. | ||
| They want to call him an a**hole or a c**t. | ||
| So yeah, no, I won't be getting a call from Joy Reid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I, you know, not that, not that Twitter is much of a barometer of anything other than the general hate of the world, but you know, I see what people say to you. | ||
| We, we talked about it last time, you know, you, you'll make a political comment or a sports or a societal comment. | ||
| And then the things that they will say to you as a black man, the supposedly tolerant people, it's, it's just extraordinary. | ||
| And it just, it just never ends. | ||
| Dave, I've said it for a long time and I've got some Awesome liberal friends. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I have always faced discrimination, bigotry, jealousy from white liberals. | ||
| That's been the story of my career. | ||
| Now there have been some that have been tremendous to me and I've written about them, called them out by name, but overall, what the white liberal, how they feel comfortable helping black people It's like, oh, can I bend over and help you out, poor Negro? | ||
| And then when I help you out, make sure you put it on your resume that I helped you out. | ||
| And I'm gonna tell everybody, and you know what? | ||
| For me helping you out, never say a word I disagree with. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Because if you do, you've sold me out, and you're an ungrateful person, and I just... | ||
| I don't want to generalize about conservatives, but what conservatives have generally done in this business, as it relates to me, is like, oh man, how can we make money? | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| It's like, what you need? | ||
| How can we make money? | ||
| With the liberal, it's, hey man, you gotta pledge allegiance to everything that I believe in. | ||
| We can make some money. | ||
| But you better thank me every day when you come in here that I allowed you to make this money. | ||
| And... I just... That's what I think, Dave. | ||
| No, I gotcha. | ||
| I gotcha. | ||
| You'll appreciate this. | ||
| A couple days ago, because I told you, I don't watch the new games anymore. | ||
| I watch these old games on YouTube. | ||
| And I was watching the 92 finals. | ||
| You know, that's the Jordan Shrug Year. | ||
| And they're interviewing Clyde the Glide. | ||
| I've got a ball sign from him right behind me here. | ||
| And they start asking him about race. | ||
| Out of nowhere. | ||
| And you may remember Clyde never had an opinion on anything. | ||
| He never really commented on anything. | ||
| It wasn't his thing. | ||
| And they keep trying to get him to comment on race and then they go... It's a white interviewer by the way. | ||
| He's still in the biz. | ||
| I'll tell you who he is after. | ||
| We don't need to throw him under the bus right now. | ||
| And he goes, well, Jordan, you know, with all his success and all his influence, like, shouldn't he be doing more to make sure racism doesn't exist in America and everything else? | ||
| And Clyde, who never said anything really interesting outside of basketball, he goes, you know, he's a basketball player. | ||
| He's working on his craft. | ||
| He's not a politician. | ||
| And I was so freaking relieved to hear it, that this guy who I love because of his skill said something sensible. | ||
| And that was 1992, 30 years ago. | ||
| You could say something sensible and you wouldn't be. | ||
| Now he would be called a sellout for saying that, basically. | ||
| And potentially run out of the NBA. | ||
| He would definitely get a suspension. | ||
| They'd come up with some reason to suspend him. | ||
| How dare you say that racism isn't the number one thing and that Michael Jordan, who's a basketball player, Must take a position on that. | ||
| What Clyde said there is 1,000% sensible. | ||
| Look, it's so hard to compete at the level that Jordan, Clyde Drexler, and these guys did. | ||
| If people think that when Jordan's at the height of his career, that he's also studying up on geopolitical issues and domestic issues, the guy just had some self-awareness. | ||
| I'm going to stay in my lane. | ||
| I'm a basketball player right now. | ||
| Why don't y'all go ask the politicians or the historians or activists or whatever, why are you asking me as a basketball player? | ||
| And it's one of those selfish things that we in the media did because we all, this generation, the generation of sports journalists that didn't get to cover Muhammad Ali. | ||
| Didn't get to cover the impact of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement on America. | ||
| Those of us that didn't, we want to redo it. | ||
| And we want to turn LeBron James into Muhammad Ali. | ||
| And I've said this many, many times. | ||
| LeBron James is a basketball player. | ||
| He's not that smart. | ||
| Listen to him talk. | ||
| Go read his Twitter feed, his Instagram. | ||
| He can barely spell. | ||
| But y'all think This guy is some kind of thought leader, public intellectual, whatever. | ||
| And then the number one thing, because his lack of grammar and all that, I can almost deal with that. | ||
| But what the media won't deal with is that Muhammad Ali, whether we like the Nation of Islam or not, he was connected and controlled by a religious sect. | ||
| And Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, whether we like them or not, very smart people. | ||
| Ahead of the curve. | ||
| They control. | ||
| Muhammad Ali said what they told him to say. | ||
| And did what they told him to do at that time. | ||
| LeBron James ain't connected to nobody but Nike and Phil Knight. | ||
| Phil Knight is not Elijah Muhammad or Malcolm X. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so, who's advised? | |
| Adam Mendelsohn? | ||
| And I know Adam Mendelsohn, the PR guy that works for him. | ||
| But he ain't Malcolm X or Elijah Muhammad. | ||
| These athletes can barely keep up with their baby mamas. | ||
| How the hell are they going to keep up with what's going on in the rest of the world? | ||
| We keep putting them in this position. | ||
| Oh, who's going to be the next Muhammad Ali? | ||
| We have to accept those days are gone. | ||
| The athletes today make millions of dollars, live in gated communities next to people who look like Dave Rubin, and they're not in the hood, they're not connected to the working class black Americans or white Americans the way they used to be. | ||
| These are the elites. | ||
| They've been led into the club. | ||
| That's why they go through these little rituals of putting dresses on like Russell Westbrook and everybody go through these humiliation rituals so they can be let into the club. | ||
| They're not speaking for the working class person anymore. | ||
| They're speaking for Nike. | ||
| They're speaking for China. | ||
| They're speaking for their pocketbooks. | ||
| We need to cut it out asking these guys to do things they're incapable of doing. | ||
| I almost feel sorry for them. | ||
| It would almost be like if somebody asked, hey, spend the night at McDonald's and never eat a double Filet-O-Fish sandwich. | ||
| It's not going to happen, Dave. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| I do like the Filet-O-Fish, that tartar sauce. | ||
| It's tangy. | ||
| It's delicious. | ||
| I want to talk to you about tech and a couple other things, but is there anything else going on in the sports world that's just got you going at the moment? | ||
| I think we got it. | ||
| We got the big stuff, all right. | ||
| Yeah, I think we got it. | ||
| So the tech stuff, let's do a little bit of that, because you, years ago, now everybody's sort of like, oh, Twitter's evil, and it's what's causing all of this chaos, and you know I just did this month off, and what I kept thinking was, I don't mind doing videos, I don't mind being on, posting pictures of food, it's something about Twitter that is making everything melt down. | ||
| How do you feel about the state of tech at the moment, and the way that we are being manipulated, whether we know it or not? | ||
| I think that Twitter's grip on public discourse is leading America and the world straight to hell. | ||
| It has so dumbed down the conversation, and it's so reliant on spectacle. | ||
| And Twitter is not just Twitter, but TikTok, Reels on Instagram. | ||
| Our phones, Have so much stuff loaded into them that's supposed to keep us, our attention away from what's really going on to spectacle. | ||
| And hey, who's dancing on TikTok? | ||
| Whose butt looks the best on Instagram? | ||
| Who has said the most racially divisive thing on Twitter? | ||
| Who has spotted an alleged Karen who has mistreated A black bird watcher. | ||
| We are so hyper-focused on things that don't matter. | ||
| And we're not smart enough to say, hey man, the puppet masters want us focused on things that don't matter. | ||
| And we keep giving them what they want. | ||
| And they keep getting to do whatever they want. | ||
| They're printing as much money as they want. | ||
| They're selling us out to China and God knows who else. | ||
| They're abandoning Americans over in Afghanistan, they're labeling a protest at the Capitol an insurrection, and we're going for it because Twitter said so, and there's this viral video, and if you don't hop on board, oh my God, you're questioning? | ||
| Whether or not you should take the vaccine, oh my God, we'll suspend you from Twitter. | ||
| They are in control of the conversation. | ||
| They're dictating what's appropriate conversation, what's appropriate thoughts to have. | ||
| The whole point, particularly as a journalist, you question everything. | ||
| That's the job of a journalist. | ||
| I was told in college, it was one of the cliches, mantras of journalism, if your mother says she loves you, get a second opinion. | ||
| That's what journalists are supposed to do. | ||
| Twitter, Facebook, all of them now, nah, there's some things you can't question. | ||
| And it's crazy. | ||
| Dave, the vaccine, in my opinion, For overweight people 50 and above like me. | ||
| That's who it's meant for. | ||
| No one should be forcing a 25-year-old in great physical condition, or even if they're in moderate or bad, they shouldn't be forcing a 25-year-old to take a vaccine that's meant for me. | ||
| And people should be able to say that over social media without a Twitter mob or getting suspended or Twitter posting, oh, this is misinformation. | ||
| Of course, the same things that Jason Whitlock should do. | ||
| Of course, Cole Beasley or Lamar Jackson are one of these perfectly healthy NFL players. | ||
| They should do the exact same thing. | ||
| That's never been true. | ||
| That's never what America's been about. | ||
| Twitter is the home of groupthink and the home of control. | ||
| It's where the media go. | ||
| Every dumb, fake narrative that the mainstream media, corporate media comes up with, Twitter is its justification for. | ||
| Well, it's trending over Twitter. | ||
| It's, you know, LeBron said black men are getting hunted every time they go out. | ||
| Look, that's the way black people believe. | ||
| And that's the other thing, Dave. | ||
| I don't know if this relates directly, I'm sure it does relate directly to big tech, but we're building a war, Dave, based off of feelings and desires. | ||
| Oh, if someone feels this way, we better make rules to back them up. | ||
| And so, you know what? | ||
| If people feel that the police are killing black men, even though the stats say otherwise, Well, they feel that way, so let's change the laws, let's change the rules, let's pretend like it's a crisis. | ||
| Now, we're gonna step over a thousand dead bodies in Chicago and New York and Baltimore and everywhere, but this George Floyd body, now that's special, and we gotta do something about it. | ||
| Yes, we have just stepped across a 12-year-old kid that was slaughtered by gang violence, a four-year-old little girl that got caught a stray bullet from gang violence. | ||
| We're gonna step over all those, And make sure we address this one thing. | ||
| Twitter justifies that. | ||
| Twitter, the algorithms, it's all rigged up, in my opinion, to make us think that George Floyd is reality, an everyday reality, and some 14-year-old kid getting slaughtered in gang violence, that's lightning, that's getting struck by lightning. | ||
| That never happens. | ||
| Ignore that. | ||
| Right, right, or if you talk about how many people got shot in Chicago, you're the racist for bringing it up. | ||
| That's the other one. | ||
| Because, Dave, I'll just say this. | ||
| What you don't understand, Dave, if we ignore those deaths in Chicago, they go away. | ||
| Those bodies, it's almost like Jesus. | ||
| They're resurrected three days later, and they come back to their communities, change men and individuals, and they turn water into wine. | ||
| Were you shocked at all, I suspect not, over what happened over the last couple weeks with the Larry Elder campaign in California? | ||
| I mean, the media treated him absolutely horribly. | ||
| LA Times, he's a black-white supremacist. | ||
| Joe Biden on stage refusing to say his name, calling him a Trump clone. | ||
| The guy was born in South Central. | ||
| His dad was a janitor. | ||
| Barack Obama doing a hit video on him without even mentioning his name again. | ||
| Did any of that shock you? | ||
| I mean, when you see a black person who happens to fall somewhat in your political space, the abuse, I assume you're beyond shock at this point, right? | ||
| Yeah, I'm not shocked. | ||
| What happened to Larry Elder, though, what shocked me was my initial gut reaction. | ||
| It was like, well, Larry Elder ain't got no shot at this. | ||
| They're not going to recall Newsom. | ||
| And then when I saw the LA Times and everybody viciously going after him, I was like, oh my god. | ||
| He must have a chance to win. | ||
| They've unleashed the hounds. | ||
| It made me take his campaign more seriously. | ||
| I thought you didn't reference, but the woman, the white woman in the gorilla mask that threw an egg at him swung at his security guy and hit him in the face. | ||
| Someone ran up behind that same security guy and kicked him in the rear end. | ||
| Dave, the only thing we can analogize that to is what we saw in the 1950s and 60s And what the black people sitting at lunch counters and people treating them horrendously. | ||
| That's what we were learning. | ||
| This white woman put on a gorilla mask and threw an egg at this man. | ||
| And the hypocrisy of the left to not be apocalyptic about this, to be completely outraged. | ||
| There's not a... | ||
| No, I know, I know. | ||
| It's completely, trust me, I was traveling with him. | ||
| To say it's exasperating, it's not even the right word. | ||
| It's like, how dare you guys? | ||
| Doesn't make CNN, doesn't make MSNBC, doesn't make the New York Times. | ||
| But LA Times, LA Times managed to manipulate a photo of him so it looked like he was hitting a woman as they were claiming there was an incident in Venice, an incident where a gorilla woman threw an egg at him. | ||
| That's what these people do. | ||
| I'm trying to think of what the racial equivalent has been in terms of racial politics over the last few years. | ||
| Have we seen anybody else treated this way? | ||
| And for corporate media to ignore it is mind-boggling, and it's why Trump supporters believe the media is the enemy of the people. | ||
| The media not being a referee, being a fair arbiter, is what creates the racial divide and animosity that's running wild in this country. | ||
| We've turned half the country into the voiceless. | ||
| And it's not just Trump supporters, it's people like me, who my crime is not hating Trump. | ||
| I'm not a Trump supporter. | ||
| I just don't hate him. | ||
| Politics ain't really my thing. | ||
| I don't vote for anybody. | ||
| I never have. | ||
| My crime is, oh, you don't hate Trump. | ||
| And so those of us that either support Trump or don't hate Trump, we have no voice in corporate media. | ||
| I guess Fox News is, but we're so overwhelmed by the rest, and I look at The people that are supposed to be journalists and the outlets that claim they're journalists and the people that think they're doing all the, I'm on the right side of history. | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| Again, you may write, you may have Hannah Nicole Jones and the New York Times write a fake history, but you're not on the right side of history. | ||
| We're supposed, the media should be out Virtually every day. | ||
| What is the frustration? | ||
| Why are people turning to Trump? | ||
| Why did they turn to a reality TV star? | ||
| What are we doing wrong? | ||
| What are politicians not offering the people that Trump is filling that void? | ||
| We should be explaining that and giving these people a voice and making them feel important and like represented in this country. | ||
| And then they would start looking for different solutions. | ||
| But if Trump's their only option, they're gonna take it out of desperation. | ||
| Well said. | ||
| All right, I got one more for you, because I know this was on your mind, because this is what you had reached out to me about about a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| And I've been talking a bit about Bill Maher lately on the show. | ||
| You know me. | ||
| I was a big liberal, a big lefty. | ||
| I can't quite say that anymore. | ||
| Actually, in reality, I'm probably still a liberal, but we don't really exist anymore. | ||
| But your argument, I think, is that Bill, at this point, is probably just a conservative, something to that effect. | ||
| It's an argument I've kind of been making for a while too, that on all of the important things, he no longer is a lefty, but he's part of the Hollywood machine. | ||
| And what frustrates me is I always see all the people on the right crediting him every time he says something sane, but then at the same time, he will keep telling people to vote for Adam Schiff and vote for Joe Biden and vote in all of the people that are destroying everything. | ||
| I don't want to lead you too much there, so I'll just hand it to you. | ||
| What do we do with these liberals? | ||
| What do we do with these people? | ||
| Well, one of the things I suggested, Dave, is, and I don't know how I feel about it, I just kind of threw it out as a question, and it ties in nicely to what I was just saying, is Bill Maher, the fig leaf he's covering himself with is Trump. | ||
| His allegiance to the Democratic Party at this point seems to be totally based on hatred of Trump. | ||
| And anytime you argue with somebody on the left, they avoid getting into a substantive discussion with you by playing the Trump card, I like to call it. | ||
| And they just talk about Trump. | ||
| And so I've asked myself the question, like, if Trump backed away and said, you know what, I'm exiting politics, I'm going to help Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, I don't know, whoever, someone else. | ||
| If Trump backed away, would that be like pulling the chair out from underneath the left and making them fall on their ass and make them have to actually deal with the things that they're doing? | ||
| And if they had to actually deal with the things they were doing and they weren't allowed to say Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, because the thing that Put me over the top was Bill Maher's on his show and he's got some woman on from the LA Times. | ||
| She's some kind of Washington correspondent. | ||
| And he's talking about how, like, oh my God, Joe Biden just screwed up Afghanistan. | ||
| There's no way it could have been handled any worse. | ||
| And he tosses it to this woman. | ||
| She goes, well, it could be worse. | ||
| Trump could be. | ||
| And I was just like, well, he ain't there for one. | ||
| And Bill Maher disagrees. | ||
| He's like, what? | ||
| No, it couldn't have been worse for Trump. | ||
| Just cut it out. | ||
| Trump is the only thing they have. | ||
| And I'm just wondering if it was taken away, would they collapse on top of their illogic and idiocy? | ||
| Well you're saying in that regard that he's kinda there because in that case he didn't say it could be worse with Trump. | ||
| I think I would probably argue that back in the day they used to tell you that George W. Bush was a racist and evil and all of those things. | ||
| And let's not forget Mitt Romney hated women, he had a binder of women, like they always got somebody. | ||
| Trump is just the special somebody. | ||
| But for me it's like Get to the end of the road, man. | ||
| Just get to the end of the road. | ||
| The conservatives aren't coming for you. | ||
| You may disagree with them on abortion. | ||
| You may disagree with them on religion. | ||
| But they're not coming for you. | ||
| The other guys are coming for everything you hold dear. | ||
| And so, the thing I wanted to ask you is, do you see similarities between yourself and Bill Maher in terms of, has Bill Maher been red-pilled? | ||
| Is he going down the path Where eventually he's gonna have to admit that he's no longer what he used to be. | ||
| Well let's do this. | ||
| I'll give you the 30 second answer here and then we'll do the rest of it on your show. | ||
| Fair enough? | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| All right, so the 30-second answer is yes, I believe he's basically been fully red-pilled. | ||
| It's so obvious to me it's ridiculous, but he's in Hollywood, he's a mainstay of 30 years, standard bearer of leftism, and he's got a career, and he has a legacy that he's trying to protect, and I think he knows he's in his last couple years of this run, and he's going, man, would I flip? | ||
| At this point, and I've been calling all of these people backwards idiots for being believers and I hate religion and blah blah blah, and suddenly they're the ones that are protecting me. | ||
| He's at the end of what I would say liberalism has wrought, unfortunately, purely secular liberalism. | ||
| And he's up against that, and yet his intellect has been red-pilled. | ||
| So how do you negotiate between your red-pilled intellect and the reality of your life at a certain age? | ||
| That would be my sort of Psych 101, but we can unpack that further on your show. | ||
| Yeah, I think he's in a tough spot because it's not even just Hollywood. | ||
| He'd have to give up probably a lot of his friends and his social circle. | ||
| And, you know, He's... He don't want to do that. | ||
| Well, Jason, I'm pretty sure you know just as well as I know that when you give up some of those people, you actually get better friends on the other side, usually. | ||
| I know that's the case for me, and I guess for you, too, probably. | ||
| You get friends that are actually really with you, and they're not with you over politics. | ||
| They're with you because, you know, content of your character and your heart. | ||
| Whitlock, you are fearless, and I will be a guest on Fearless in the near future. | ||
| I'm away next week. | ||
| I'm away for a couple days, but then I will do the show. | ||
| We'll pick up right where we left off. | ||
| I'm gonna wait for Bill Maher to say something controversial again, and then I'm gonna put the request in. | ||
| And Dave, I gotta be honest with you. | ||
| I put a lot of pressure on you. | ||
| I just gave you my A-plus material for an hour straight. | ||
| And so you gotta return the favor. | ||
| I will caffeinate heavily that day. | ||
| All right, the show is fearless. | ||
| Blaze TV, wet lock. | ||
| I'll see you soon. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about the media instead of nonstop yelling, check out our media playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out the full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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