Nov. 19, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Outro Alright internet people, we are live on Rumble, YouTube, | ||
| and the Blaze, and And obviously, the big news of the day is the Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty verdict, which dropped about 20 minutes ago. | ||
| If you're watching me right now, I doubly thank you, because I know that everyone online is live right now. | ||
| Everyone's talking about it. | ||
| Everyone's screaming about it. | ||
| Everyone's crying about it. | ||
| Everyone's applauding. | ||
| Clauding it, whatever your position might be, but we're gonna try to unpack it in the sanest way possible here for about 20, 25 minutes. | ||
| And joining me today to break down the trial and the reaction and some of the media shenanigans along the way is author, senior columnist at townhall.com and lawyer, and my buddy, Kurt Schlichter. | ||
| Kurt, it's your first time on the Rubin Report. | ||
| How did this happen? | ||
| Why did it take so long? | ||
| I don't know, Dave. | ||
| I'm a little concerned. | ||
| You said we're going to break it down with sanity and clarity and yet you have me on. | ||
| I'm a little confused. | ||
| I am overjoyed. | ||
| You know, as a guy who's worked in the justice system, I grew up in it. | ||
| My mom became a lawyer at 36 in the 70s on the kitchen table. | ||
| She became a district attorney. | ||
| She became a judge. | ||
| And her pithy comment on Kyle was, I don't even know how they filed these charges. | ||
| And then I've been a lawyer for nearly 30 years. | ||
| And I know that just because they call it the justice system doesn't mean that it's necessarily a place you go to get justice. | ||
| Justice was sort of served today. | ||
| It would have been better served if this kid hadn't been put through hell for a year. | ||
| Yeah, so, you know, the way I've tried to cover this over the last two weeks is I actually did not do a ton on it, and people kept asking me why I wasn't touching it as much. | ||
| I was covering more of the media circus around it. | ||
| I was talking, you know, we played some of the stuff like when the prosecutor got basically smacked down by the judge for saying that Kyle didn't have a right to silence, to not incriminate himself, some really crazy stuff. | ||
| What would you say was sort of the craziest thing that happened during the trial? | ||
| The whole thing was an unbroken series of insane events, Dave. | ||
| This is not how trials usually go. | ||
| I mean, trials are usually very boring. | ||
| They come in, they put on their case, and then the jury renders a verdict, and then everybody goes home except maybe the defendant if it's a criminal case. | ||
| This was something completely different. | ||
| This was a series of I'm being charitable. | ||
| Errors by the prosecutors, one after another after another. | ||
| And you're thinking, how can these guys do this? | ||
| To comment that a defendant didn't speak when he had the option to exercise his right to be silenced? | ||
| I mean, that's like bar exam stuff. | ||
| It's not hard. | ||
| You just don't do it. | ||
| Uh, shenanigans involving evidence like the drone footage. | ||
| Witnesses not being identified. | ||
| Remember the mysterious guy who kicked Kyle? | ||
| They said, we don't know who he is. | ||
| But apparently they did know who he is. | ||
| Lying to the jury. | ||
| I mean, blatantly. | ||
| Making idiotic, asking idiotic questions that you don't know the answer to. | ||
| And having witnesses go, no, he said blank you and pointed the gun at him. | ||
| I mean, I'm looking at that, and it's just, these guys are supposed to be professional prosecutors. | ||
| I mean, if they had been professional, they wouldn't have charged him in the first place, but they just, it is a series of unprofessional, inept, incompetent screw-ups. | ||
| I think, you know, I mean, you know, look, far be it for me to defend the justice system, but they're really giving the justice system a bad name here. | ||
| I mean, the prosecutor really was extraordinarily bad. | ||
| Not only the stuff that you just mentioned there, but at one point he blamed violent video games and that Kyle plays video games. | ||
| He also said the thing about, oh, well, he brought the gun, so in essence, he's automatically the bad guy, as if just because you have a gun in and of itself. | ||
| This guy, like, could it have been any worse? | ||
| Could he have been any worse? | ||
| Well, you know, I think if he convened a council of renowned bad lawyers to vet every option and | ||
| see if they could find the worst possible decisions to make. Perhaps they could have done a | ||
| worse job. But, you know, he did pretty well all on his own screwing this up. Look, a | ||
| professional prosecutor, first of all, would have looked at it and said, this is a sure loser. I | ||
| just don't see myself getting 12 citizens to find beyond a reasonable doubt on any of | ||
| these counts. | ||
| I mean, two of the counts got dismissed at the threshold. | ||
| One of them because it simply didn't apply as a matter of undisputed law. | ||
| Even the DA said, yeah, I guess he could have a gun legally. | ||
| I mean, every time I see these guys, circus music plays in my head. | ||
| So going on the assumption that most of the people watching this, and let's say most of the people that aren't purely partisan hacks, think that roughly the right thing happened today. | ||
| What do we do about the split in the media? | ||
| Because this just happened 20 minutes ago, but for the 10 minutes that I was sitting here before we started, I'm looking at Twitter, MSNBC, they're melting down, all of the lefty blue checks, they're screaming, this is about white supremacy. | ||
| Again, he was a white kid who shot three white people. | ||
| I mean, this thing, It's just so extraordinary. | ||
| But what do we do about this split? | ||
| I'm much more concerned about that, really, than the specifics of the trial. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That we're really living in two different worlds right now, and that, most likely, it's going to be a pretty violent couple days in Kenosha. | ||
| Well, look, Dave, I think, figuratively, we need to beat their brains in. | ||
| Again, figuratively, I don't want to be accused of promoting violence, but I I do accept the accusation that I want to use this as a club to figuratively club the media into submission. | ||
| They have been a disaster on every level. | ||
| They have foregone any pretense of objectivity and gone full activist. | ||
| But of course I could have said that two years, three years, four years ago. | ||
| The fact is we need to use this as a teaching tool for people who are not Uh, red-pilled, so to speak. | ||
| We need to use this as a training aid for folks to understand what the media is all about. | ||
| The media wants to support the liberal Democrat establishment in the giant class war that is roiling through America right now. | ||
| And, you know, when we got 12 people, normal people, People who didn't find an excuse to get out of jury duty, but in their own kind of beautiful, naive, credulous way said, I'm going to show up and do my citizen's duty. | ||
| And I'm going to try and figure it out. | ||
| Look, these guys didn't walk in there and go, screw them! | ||
| You know, we're finding them not guilty and walk out. | ||
| That would have been making a statement. | ||
| I think what they did was their job. | ||
| And I find this too when I do trials. | ||
| Juries really want to, by and large, do the right thing. | ||
| They take this stuff seriously. | ||
| And I gotta tell you, if you ever have a chance to go down to a courthouse, even a civil case, you know, an auto accident, a rear-ender, and watch the jurors talk, and you'll see this cross-section of Americans, especially in a place like Los Angeles, many of them are naturalized citizens. | ||
| And the thing you get, I mean, we're jaded and cynical because we wade in this cesspool all the time. | ||
| You know, we see the garbage. | ||
| We see the lies. | ||
| But, you know, these people get there and they go, they'll say, you know, it's hard for me to give up a week or two of work. | ||
| But this is what I'm proud to do this because I'm an American citizen and this is what we do. | ||
| And I want to find the truth. | ||
| And I think that's what these people did. | ||
| They asked questions. | ||
| They reviewed the evidence. | ||
| They brought home the jury instructions, which had me shaking my head. | ||
| I didn't get that. | ||
| But it's pretty clear they took this job very, very seriously and really wanted to come to a decision that they could live with. | ||
| Thank God it was the right decision. | ||
| But, you know, I'm kind of proud of them because they had to know that they're going to go through hell. | ||
| You know, we had MSNBC following them, trying to track them down. | ||
| They're going to be hassled. | ||
| They're going to be lied about. | ||
| Joy Reid's going to talk about how there are tools of white supremacy. | ||
| The fact is, they're just regular Americans who still believe that the system works. | ||
| And while I might have some arguments with that, especially considering what's happened the last few years, there's something beautiful about that kind of normal American patriotism that makes them want to go in and do a tough job and try, really try, to get to the right decision as they see it, based on the evidence. | ||
| Yeah, you know, that's a really nice way to frame it because I think people look and they go, oh, they've got seven women and four white people and dah, dah, dah. | ||
| And it's just like, they're just robots. | ||
| They're not actual people. | ||
| And they're only there to serve their own political interests. | ||
| And I don't think that that is what the average person is. | ||
| You mentioned the MSNBC thing. | ||
| I mean, they're in a lot of crap because they basically sent a journalist. | ||
| It's a little unclear how it all happened to follow the jury van. | ||
| I mean, just absolute insanity. | ||
| But are you worried that for the people that want to burn the system down and want to burn our cities | ||
| down that because the outcome was in our view, correct. | ||
| This is just more proof to them that the whole thing is corrupt and evil and a patriarchal white supremacist | ||
| monstrosity. | ||
| Well, I don't worry about that Dave, because everything that happens or doesn't happen | ||
| is going to be interpreted by them in a way that they see as increasing their power. | ||
| So it's irrelevant what objectively happens. | ||
| We know how they're going to spin it. | ||
| What's important for the... What happened today is not important for the people who hate us. | ||
| Because they were going to weaponize it one way or another. | ||
| It's important for the people who aren't in the struggle yet. | ||
| Who don't... Who really don't want to be in the kind of cold civil war that I think we all agree we are in. | ||
| These are normal people. | ||
| I wrote a book about them. | ||
| Militant normals. | ||
| They're normal people who just want to live their lives. | ||
| They don't like quote-unquote politics. | ||
| They don't like people arguing and being obnoxious to each other. | ||
| They just want to live their lives, have their houses, watch their TV, take their kids to soccer, walk their dogs, and live normal lives. | ||
| What this shows is that There are forces out there who want to disrupt that, and the forces aren't the guys like Kyle. | ||
| The forces are the people who interfere in juries. | ||
| I mean, you know, almost everybody's been dragged into jury duty, and everybody understands how serious it is, and everybody understands instinctively how wrong it is to try and tamper with a jury, which I don't think that's an unreasonable way of characterizing what MSNBC did. | ||
| So this is a teaching moment For the un-based, the un-conservative woke, the people who have been able to stand out of the fight. | ||
| As for the people who are in the fight, like I said, they're going to weaponize it anyway. | ||
| It's white supremacy if they lose. | ||
| It's white supremacy if they win. | ||
| They will move on to the next faux outrage that they're going to leverage. | ||
| To increase their own power. | ||
| We need to be aware of their game. | ||
| And we need to block them. | ||
| And today we blocked them. | ||
| And tomorrow we've got to find another way to block them. | ||
| We can't give up the fight. | ||
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Right. | |
| Well, I suppose the first way to block them going forward, at least for the rest of today, is make sure that there's law and order on the streets, not only in Kenosha, but in the other cities. | ||
| So we'll see about that. | ||
| What do you think Kyle's legal options are now? | ||
| Because let's not forget he had his GoFundMe that was up to raise funds for his defense, was taken down by GoFundMe. | ||
| The quote-unquote president of the United States, Joe Biden, called Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist. | ||
| Again, it doesn't matter what you think about this trial. | ||
| There is absolutely no evidence that he is a white supremacist. | ||
| I have no doubt that he is not. | ||
| What do you think his legal remedies are at this point in terms of defamation suits, going after GoFundMe, et cetera, et cetera? | ||
| Well, let's talk about the defamation angle because there have been some defamatory things said about him. | ||
| Look, I defended defamation cases. | ||
| I helped, and it's out in public, so I'll talk about it. | ||
| I defended Ben Shapiro in Texas in the Clockboy lawsuit. | ||
| We won that, and won a judgment in Ben's favor. | ||
| I've also brought defamation actions, and I've taken them to trial. | ||
| I've got multi-million dollar verdicts. | ||
| When I look at a defamation case, when people bring them to me and say, Kurt, have I been defamed? | ||
| I said, maybe. | ||
| But you have a terrible case and you're going to lose. | ||
| And after that I ask for the facts of the case. | ||
| Because defamation is properly the hardest kind of lawsuit to win. | ||
| It's just very, very hard. | ||
| And it should be because of the First Amendment. | ||
| Does he have a case? | ||
| He may. | ||
| I have a feeling, just a gut, that in some venues, particularly conservative ones, defamation cases are going... | ||
| It's going to become easier to get defamation cases through. | ||
| The problem with defamation cases is often, is this a fact or an opinion? | ||
| An opinion is protected no matter what. | ||
| Hey, if I say, you know, Kyle Rittenhouse is a scumbag, okay? | ||
| Protected, no matter what, because you can't really measure that. | ||
| If I were to say, Kyle Rittenhouse is a member of the American Nazi Party. | ||
| He has a card and has paid dues. | ||
| And that's not true? | ||
| Well, that's a fact because that can be proven or not proven. | ||
| And maybe that is a defamation action. | ||
| There's some other elements to it. | ||
| What a lot of these things are is generic name-calling like white supremacy. | ||
| The simple fact is, what's white supremacist mean now anyway? | ||
| I mean, can you actually measure it? | ||
| Everybody's a white supremacist to these acts. | ||
| It's become almost meaningless and the law recognizes that and basically says, well, you know, you call somebody a white supremacist. | ||
| No one's really, I mean, it's an opinion and no one's really going to care because everybody calls everybody a white supremacist. | ||
| It's kind of irrelevant. | ||
| So I think you'll have a hard time doing that. | ||
| I don't see him currently having an action against the GoFundMe people. | ||
| Maybe if I look deeper I could find something using some of the consumer laws. | ||
| I think what's going to have to happen with big tech like the GoFundMe folks is new laws | ||
| that basically require access. | ||
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And I'm an advocate of it. | |
| Yeah, all right, so actually let's go there for a second because not specifically about the trial, but just sort of, this all fits with this sort of cold civil war you're talking about and the big tech component of it and the media component of it and everything else. | ||
| Do you sense we're getting some winds here? | ||
| You know, it feels like, okay, there's a cultural moment that's maybe happening today. | ||
| We got a cultural moment and a political moment in the Virginia governor's race a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| That maybe suddenly there is a feeling, oh, we're starting to get a little bit braver. | ||
| We're getting a little louder. | ||
| We're not just going to hand the keys away. | ||
| I think people are waking up, Dave. | ||
| Like I said, there is a, look, Americans by and large, guys like you and me, we enjoy politics. | ||
| We enjoy getting in the, you know, in the oil and wrestling a little bit. | ||
| Most people don't want to do that. | ||
| Most people find that kind of unsavory and kind of tacky and they just want to live their lives. | ||
| But if they are drawn into politics, if they are forced to do it, like those moms in Virginia, a lot of them were Democrats. | ||
| They didn't want to have to go down to the school and spend their evenings yelling at the school board because a little Caden came home and informed them that their lives were meaningless because they were based entirely upon slavery or other racist nonsense that CRT promotes. | ||
| They didn't want that, but they were forced into it. | ||
| People are getting forced into it. | ||
| It's become something. | ||
| This giant woke moment has begun infiltrating people's normal lives. | ||
| That's kind of the line. | ||
| If it's out there at the colleges and it's just college kids fighting among themselves over their bizarre identity politics, okay, they can live with that. | ||
| But when it comes to their house, when it threatens their livelihood, when it starts affecting their kids, Well, then they can't hide from it, and they're not hiding from it, as we saw in Virginia. | ||
| We see politicians jumping on board. | ||
| Eric Schmidt in Missouri, for instance, pushing back at JPMorgan Chase for trying to cut off banking services to a conservative organization. | ||
| JPMorgan backed down. | ||
| We see Josh Hawley candidates like JD Vance. | ||
| Uh, Ron DeSantis pushing back on this, using the law to make it very clear that you can't discriminate on the basis of politics. | ||
| Here in California, there are laws that already protect employers or employees from being discriminated against for their politics. | ||
| And I don't think it is a big step to expect that we will see movement to force corporations not to discriminate on the basis of politics any more than they do on race or gender or sexual identity or any other irrelevant factor. | ||
| We are not going to allow ourselves to become second-class citizens because we don't agree with what the swells in Marin County, Santa Monica, and Manhattan think. | ||
| And they're using their power against us, Dave. | ||
| They're using their corporate power, they're using their legal power, they're using governmental power. | ||
| Well, we got governmental power too, and we're gonna take back the House and the Senate next year, and things are gonna change. | ||
| Kurt, are you saying that we're just nice, they're still not gonna leave us alone? | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| I thought if we're just nice enough. | ||
| This is a fight, Dave. | ||
| Somebody's gotta win, somebody's gotta lose. | ||
| I propose we win, that's my strategy. | ||
| One more for you, because I know you got another hit in a few minutes. | ||
| Are you hopeful that calmer heads will prevail for the next day, couple days? | ||
| Like, you know, there was plenty of time if you were a mayor or a governor in a city or state to prepare for, you know, potential violence here. | ||
| It's a little unclear to me how much preparation people did, or maybe some of them actually want the violence. | ||
| I wouldn't put it past some of these mayors, especially. | ||
| Do you think we're going to see some violence over the next couple of days? | ||
| I don't think we're going to see any violence because I don't think it serves the Democrat Party's interests. | ||
| Let's face it, Antifa, BLM, the scumbags that Kyle Rittenhouse killed, these guys were part of the militarized wing of the Democrat Party. | ||
| As soon as Biden came in, they disappeared. | ||
| We didn't hear another word out of them. | ||
| Now, I was an officer in the California Army National Guard. | ||
| I had come back from the Gulf. | ||
| And immediately I was dumped into the Los Angeles riots. | ||
| So I know a little about what's going on. | ||
| I know a little about civil support to military operations. | ||
| Wrote a law review article about it. | ||
| Have an ops map up on the wall over there from when I did in San Diego. | ||
| There is an infantry battalion from the Wisconsin National Guard on the ground there. | ||
| Many of those guys are combat experienced. | ||
| If they are allowed to do their job, there will be order on the street. | ||
| But I don't think there's going to be a problem because I don't think the Democrats see an advantage I don't think the establishment sees any benefit from having violence today. | ||
| It was beneficial in 2020. | ||
| They were using it to intimidate people. | ||
| To some extent it worked. | ||
| Now it just makes it look like that desiccated old zombie masquerading as our president will be out of control. | ||
| So I don't think we're going to see it. | ||
| Funny how that works. | ||
| I know, it's very bizarre. | ||
| Something happened, I can't remember what, in the last 10 months, that suddenly the riots and the burning downing of cities and the special autonomous zones, they all disappeared. | ||
| I'm gonna have to think about that. | ||
| Kurt, I appreciate you doing this last minute, and it's good to see you, hopefully, in real life one of these days. | ||
| And I'm gonna continue on for a few minutes without you. | ||
| Kurt Schlichter, we're gonna link to all your stuff down below, my friend. | ||
| All right, guys, so I briefly wanna tell you, you know, I had mentioned yesterday that we were gonna have a lawyer and legal expert, Harmeet Dhillon, on for today's episode, and we were gonna cover the Rittenhouse trial, assuming that the verdict was in, or even if it had not been in. | ||
| We were also gonna talk about the OSHA mandates and the vaccine stuff and all that. | ||
| And then Harmeet actually contacted me about an hour ago and said that there was a little ethical issue | ||
| because she had done a tiny bit of work and conversations with some of the Rittenhouse defense people. | ||
| So she just didn't wanna complicate things. | ||
| She didn't think it was gonna be a major issue, but I didn't wanna create a headache for her | ||
| and she's deeply ethical and decent. | ||
| So that's why we didn't have Harmeet on, but I absolutely will have her on in the next week or so | ||
| to talk about the vaccine mandate stuff, which is now all held up. | ||
| If you work at a company that is demanding you get vaccinated | ||
| because the federal government's telling them that they have to force you to do it. | ||
| It is simply not true anymore. | ||
| So we'll follow up with Harmeet on that stuff. | ||
| But I hope Kurt gave you some insight into a little bit of the legal stuff and he's good on all the cultural stuff and all that. | ||
| I will wanna say one other thing before I let you go for the weekend, which is I'm gonna try my best today not online to add fuel to the fire. | ||
| Even though the result of the trial is obviously in line with what I think was supposed to happen. | ||
| I do not think Kyle Rittenhouse was a murderer who set out to murder people. | ||
| I think he was a good kid who got a little over his head, and some bad things happened, and we live in these very, very strange times. | ||
| And unfortunately, half the country's gonna believe one thing because of the media framing, and half the country's gonna believe something else. | ||
| But I'm gonna try my best, and sometimes it can be very hard, especially on Twitter. | ||
| So, Michael, maybe don't give me my phone back. | ||
| Can you hang on to my phone? | ||
| I don't even know where my computer is anymore. | ||
| I'm gonna do my best not to add fuel to the fire and maybe that will be my message to you guys too as we head off to the weekend because you know everyone's gonna try to score all their political points and cultural points right now but you know for those of us that in this moment We got the win, so to speak, right? | ||
| Like we believe that justice prevailed. | ||
| Maybe, maybe being a little magnanimous in that might be good. | ||
| That's kind of what I'm feeling at the moment. | ||
| All right, guys, I think that's it. | ||
| Have a good weekend, everybody. | ||
| And if you want to play along with dog pictures and food pictures and Music that I'm listening to and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| You can join us at RubinReport.Locals.com. | ||
| And by the way, right now you can get two months off an annual membership if you sign up at RubinReport.Locals.com. | ||
| Have a great weekend and look, sanity prevailed. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| I take that with you on a Friday. |
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