Nov. 3, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
12:26
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unidentified
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[MUSIC] | |
| All right, we are live at NatCon. | ||
| Senator Ted Cruz just spoke in the main room. | ||
| We're out in the conference hallway over here, and I have Douglas Murray. | ||
| We're going to count this as a Rubin Report appearance, which makes this your 672nd appearance on the Rubin Report. | ||
| I think you may have overtaken Gad Saad as of today. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, wow. | |
| He'll be livid. | ||
| He will not be happy about it. | ||
| How you doing, man? | ||
| I'm good, yeah. | ||
| You are here in America these days. | ||
|
unidentified
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I am. | |
| I am. | ||
| What do you make of this crazy place? | ||
| Well, we're in Orlando, Florida at the moment. | ||
| And as people watching will know, I mean, it's a different state to state, which I think is one of the great advantages of this country. | ||
| I mean, at least you don't have this sort of completely monolithic arrangements with COVID or anything else. | ||
| You know, people can Pretty much choose where they want to be and what they want to put up with. | ||
| Do you really sense that here? | ||
| I mean, as someone from the UK, where now you're in New York a lot, but we're here in Florida. | ||
| I've seen you in LA and you've bounced around the country. | ||
| How different it is and how good that is versus... Because I don't think Americans realize it's not like that in other countries. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| In a country like my own country, the United Kingdom, it's... | ||
| The same rule with some regional differences. | ||
| The regional differences tend to be to compete with each other to be even more hardcore with the regulations around COVID. | ||
| But if you're in most countries across Europe, you know, you have one set of rules, you've got to obey them across the country. | ||
| Same in Australia, same New Zealand. | ||
| I like the flexibility in America. | ||
| I think it's one of the geniuses of the founding of this country that you have that flexibility within the nation. | ||
| How do you feel as a guy that basically has predicted all of this? | ||
| I mean, if we were to look at, certainly Madness of Crowds, but all of your writing over the last however many years, and from as long as I've known you for about five years, I mean, you've been saying this stuff is coming. | ||
| You've been saying the barbarians are at the gate, and as I always quote you, we're going to be debating what gender pronouns to call them. | ||
| Like, is it going to get much worse if you're in the prediction game? | ||
| I don't like to think I am in the prediction game, because predictions are for fools. | ||
| But you've got a pretty good track record. | ||
| Well, I never talked about pandemics. | ||
| I never wrote about pandemics. | ||
| I think that's a failing, because obviously it was something we should have thought about more. | ||
| I always thought of it as one of those sessions in conferences about security issues which one ducked out of. | ||
| That's for the crazy people. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's one of the ones you can miss. | ||
| I mean, it was for a small number of people. | ||
| It was their thing. | ||
| Their thing turns out to have come around. | ||
| So I never particularly thought about that. | ||
| And in a way, I mean, I've avoided a lot of the COVID discussion in the last 18 months because I don't like to throw myself into issues that I haven't thought about deeply already. | ||
| But, I mean, you're right in that some of the things I've written about, immigration, Wokerati, the crowd stampedes on social issues and others, they have got a lot worse since I wrote about them. | ||
| I don't always contribute Endlessly to those debates because I try to sort of say my piece and then leave the field in a way in the hope that other people come in and they have. | ||
| I'm much enthused by the way in which now lots of people have picked up some of the issues I've written about. | ||
| I don't know if that means they get better, but there's certainly more people in the fight, and that's a good thing. | ||
| Do you sense things might turn around kind of soon? | ||
| Like, I think this election tomorrow in Virginia is key, although it's ironic because as a Californian, at least for now, I shouldn't really care about a Virginian election. | ||
| As someone from the UK, you shouldn't really care about a Virginian gubernatorial election, and yet here we are. | ||
| Well, there's a reason for that, isn't there? | ||
| Which is, I mean, if we were in a suburb of Athens at the moment, discussing Athenian politics would be Interesting, maybe. | ||
| Gossip worthy, quite possibly. | ||
| But essentially, apologies to any Greeks watching, essentially unimportant. | ||
| That's not the case in the United States of America. | ||
| The reason why every inch of land is fought over politically so hard is because every inch of land does matter. | ||
| And that's because this is the still point of the turning world. | ||
| I mean, this is the place Where if you get it wrong, the whole next century goes wrong. | ||
| If you get it right, the next century can go better. | ||
| I mean, that's why it's important to be in the United States. | ||
| That's why it's important to fight every inch of the terrain. | ||
| What happens here will affect everywhere. | ||
| We were discussing this over dinner last night, but do you think any of the institutions now can be saved, or do you think the ship has sailed sort of across the board? | ||
| No, I'm sure they can be. | ||
| I mean, yeah, part of what we were discussing, and I wrote about this recently at The Spectator, is that I am very struck, being an American, by the way in which Conservatives in particular have really turned on the institutions. | ||
| Now, there is a good reason for that. | ||
| I think the people who run... Well, let me just go back. | ||
| Five years ago we might have talked about, for instance, the corruption of the media, the mainstream media. | ||
| That's been a discussion in America for More than 20 years. | ||
| I mean, Bias was out 20 years ago. | ||
| Kulture and others writing about this 15 years ago. | ||
| The media thing was sort of a familiar issue. | ||
| You might say the same thing about American universities. | ||
| But this is an old discussion by now. | ||
| I mean, you know, Alan Bloom wrote Closing the American Mind, which exposed the problems in American universities in the 1980s. | ||
| People born long after that now in political sentience. | ||
| You know this is the issue. | ||
| That's not new. | ||
| It's really old hat now. | ||
| I'm worried about the fact that not much has been done about either of these things, although something's been done about the media. | ||
| But more striking to me is the way in which, yes, the institutions have been hollowed out and turned against in a different way. | ||
| It's very worrying to me that, for instance, we see this wholesale Dislike of, for instance, the top brass of the American military. | ||
| Now, there's good reason for that. | ||
| Not just national security failures, but General Milley and others talking about critical race theory whilst they lose Afghanistan. | ||
| They've made themselves sort of not just dismissible figures, but unlikable figures and indeed deridable figures. | ||
| That's very, very dangerous. | ||
| Much worse is the same thing happening with the NSA, the CIA, the FBI. | ||
| effectively the infrastructure, the security infrastructure of a country. | ||
| That is new that conservatives have turned on that. | ||
| And I say there's good reason for them to have turned on that, | ||
| but it's very, very worrying. | ||
| And I would urge people not to throw out the whole thing. | ||
| I think you basically don't have a conservative movement if you believe that every single institution in the country | ||
| is so rotten that you've got to chug it out, Because you were saying last night that, in effect, it would be hard for you to imagine this happening in the UK, where people would be openly sort of against MI6 or something like that, and you're not saying there isn't good reason for it, but it's like, I guess the question is, how do we mitigate the craziness and still not burn down those institutions? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, the example I was giving over dinner was you couldn't have a conservative movement in the UK or anything like it that believed that the top of the military were all corrupt and ridiculous, that MI5, MI6 and GCHQ were all basically corrupted institutions. | ||
| You couldn't have a conservative in the UK who also believed that the electoral institutions were wholly corrupted, that the judiciary was corrupted. | ||
| And so on and so on. | ||
| I mean, what exactly at that point are you conserving? | ||
| And there's this additional there, which I think I mentioned, which is that America is in this particularly powerless position, because, you know, take a country like France. | ||
| There are many disputes going on, particularly at the moment within France, and many interesting contests going on, but... | ||
| The French do not believe that the Quai d'Orsay is against France. | ||
| Whereas, you know, there is a very significant swathe now, a popular swathe of American public opinion, an opinion on the American right that believes that, you know, the State Department's not on your side. | ||
| This is a very, very hard thing to row back from. | ||
| I do think it's salvageable, but my God, a lot of work needs to be put in. | ||
| And that's going to have to be much harder work than the Trump administration era will put in. | ||
| You know, a lot of what I think happened in the Trump years was you had this sort of critique from the top and nothing happened. | ||
| You know, the institutions just continued doing their thing. | ||
| There wasn't the interest in the minutiae, in getting people in at the right level, anything like it. | ||
| There was a sort of... It was like doing up the penthouse whilst the whole rest of the building was rotten. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you go along with that critique that I've just outlined. | ||
| No, it's going to be work to not burn them down, yet also understand that something is wrong. | ||
| Yeah, I mean you can't realistically just tear everything down and rebuild from the ground up. | ||
| Usually you can't do it with platitudes or with, you know, incendiary comments. | ||
| You'd have to put in the work. | ||
| Is there a movement willing to do that? | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| It's in its very nascent movements. | ||
| In the meantime, you've got to reform the institutions you have. | ||
| But that is a very unappealing prospect for most people, I think. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a lot of work. | ||
| It might be happening a little bit right here, right now. | ||
| That's what a lot is about. | ||
| Now that we have a big crowd out here since the conference just let out, I thought it was because we were talking. | ||
| And it's definitely because we're here talking about this stuff. | ||
| Give me your final one minute classic Douglas Murray, what's going on in the world. | ||
| You always end all of these just on that perfect note. | ||
| Now I'm really handing it to you. | ||
| I have a colleague, a spectator in London, who writes our Low Life column, called Jeremy Clark, who some years ago said to me something. | ||
| He said to me, he said, you seem to be somebody who knows what's going on, Douglas. | ||
| I said, oh, that's very kind of you. | ||
|
unidentified
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And he said, so what's going on? | |
| I said, you're going to have to narrow that question. | ||
| You're going to have to narrow that question a bit. | ||
| I think I'd say the same with you. | ||
| I will accept that as the answer. | ||
| There's so much going on, particularly in America. | ||
| I think that people have got to tend to their backyard, tend to their own garden, tend to the patch around them a lot better. | ||
| I think we see that in America. | ||
| One of the reasons I'm unusually optimistic about the situation in America is that actually you do have movements of people here who want to tend to the thing in front of them and around them. | ||
| You see this thing with parents applying for roles, I'm told, unlike school boards that don't exist sometimes. | ||
| I mean, there's just so much desire to... | ||
| Get involved and to turn around some of the crazy things like the CRT craziness. | ||
| There's a lot of will in the public in America to get involved and that's the solution. | ||
| And that's the solution is, you know, very few people can affect the politics at the highest level, make much difference, change about the local governor or let alone the president. | ||
| But they can do something about the patch right around them. | ||
| There's a willingness in America to do that. | ||
| That's why I'm You find me in America unusually optimistic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we just like hearing these things from a Brit, frankly. | ||
| You always sound like you know what you're talking about, no matter what. | ||
| I mean, the thing about it, that's not just the sound. | ||
| Ah, there you go. | ||
| All right, we're going to swap mics. | ||
| I'm going to bring in Chris Rufo. | ||
| Good to see you, Douglas. | ||
| Great pleasure, as always. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of non-stop 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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