Nov. 21, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| You've got to speak up. | ||
| This thing about dropping our voice, you know, I used to go into movie studios for meetings and I'd be sitting out in the waiting room, you know, you sit for a few minutes before they call you in and Almost every time, somebody would come up to me and drop his voice and say, I saw you on Hannity. | ||
| I saw you on Beck. | ||
| And I would always say the same thing. | ||
| Why are you whispering? | ||
| You're in the right. | ||
| And I understand the fear and I understand, you know, we famously had this supposedly secret organization, the Friends of Abe out in Hollywood. | ||
| And I kept saying to the leaders, you know, we've got to go public and they wouldn't do it because they didn't want the working guys to get caught, the gaffers and the guys who are not movie stars and all this. | ||
| But I just thought if you don't, if you're, if you act in secret, then you look like you're ashamed. | ||
| And if you act in secret, you look like you're afraid. | ||
|
unidentified
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[MUSIC] | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a prolific screenwriter, a host at The Daily Wire, a multi-time author, | ||
| an author of the brand new book, When Christmas Comes. | ||
| Andrew Klavan, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Good to see you, Dave. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| I am just fine. | ||
| I feel that we have to just get some stuff out of the way right up top, though, because last I saw you was here at my house. | ||
| I had a dinner party right before you made your exodus and left California, left Los Angeles. | ||
| And it was a wonderful evening. | ||
| Michael Knowles, several other, you know, far right figures. | ||
| And we were going around the table and you wanted whiskey. | ||
| And I said, no, no, I want you to try this tequila. | ||
| And you said, no, no, I like whiskey. | ||
| And I demanded that you try the tequila. | ||
| And then an hour later you admitted to me, you just didn't like the tequila. | ||
| And I've been sitting on this for like six months. | ||
| I feel bad about this. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It was your going away thing. | ||
| Sure, you abandoned me here, but I made you drink tequila and I feel bad. | ||
| You're a whiskey guy. | ||
| You know, I'm a creature of habit. | ||
| What can I tell you? | ||
| I discovered Macallan 12 many years ago, and the guy at the store, I lived in England, and every week I'd go in and the guy would say, you have to try something else. | ||
| And I'd try something else. | ||
| I'd think, yeah, I really like that Macallan 12. | ||
| And I'd go back the next week, he'd say, you've got to try something else. | ||
| That went on for about three months. | ||
| And finally I said, you know, Macallan 12 is the best. | ||
| And the guy said, yeah, you're right. | ||
| You know, I like it. | ||
| I stick with it. | ||
| You conservatives, you love whiskey. | ||
| Now, I know I'm the new guy here. | ||
| I would consider myself sort of a new school conservative, but I bring tequila in. | ||
| It freaks people out. | ||
| You guys, it's all about whiskey for you people. | ||
| Yeah, the tequila is just a little edgy for us, you know? | ||
| I mean, whiskey, you know where you're going with whiskey. | ||
| You're going straight down the tubes. | ||
| Great time. | ||
| And it goes well with steak, which we're also very big on. | ||
| Steak and cigars and whiskey are really perfect. | ||
| Yes, you are all men. | ||
| It's very obvious you're men. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| You're doing your thing. | ||
| All right, so you did leave me here. | ||
| You've been gone for what? | ||
| About six months now. | ||
| Life is good for you. | ||
| You're happy. | ||
| You've left and nothing good is happening here. | ||
| Fair to say? | ||
| It's fair to say I turned Virginia, I single-handedly turned Virginia red. | ||
| I moved to Virginia and because it's kind of between the Daily Wire and my publishing life in New York and you know within months I just managed, I'm Spartacus, I just said you know all right follow me everybody we're gonna turn this state and they rushed into the voting booth and now we're a red state. | ||
| So for real, what was it like for those couple weeks before the election and then that night? | ||
| I mean, it was really, I think, a huge moment if we're going to get any wins. | ||
| I think that was the one that we needed. | ||
| I had been saying it for weeks. | ||
| That's the one. | ||
| Keep an eye on this one. | ||
| And it actually happened. | ||
| And I think a lot of people have hope now. | ||
| Well, you know, it's interesting. | ||
| When I got to Virginia, I live in Northern Virginia, which is the liberal, the blue part of Virginia. | ||
| And several people said to me, oh boy, this is a really liberal place, this is really left-wing. | ||
| And I was looking around, and having come from Los Angeles, I was thinking, eh, you know, not really so much. | ||
| It's not the same thing. | ||
| There are a lot of military people. | ||
| A lot of people who are Democrats in the old kind of sense of the word that, yes, they want a welfare state or some kind of, you know, normal thing that two people might argue about around the 50-yard line, as they used to say. | ||
| But it was not that crazy L.A. | ||
| thing where any idea that comes out, oh yeah, men are women now. | ||
| OK, but that's good. | ||
| You know, everybody, we're racist. | ||
| Everyone's racist. | ||
| So we got to teach children to be racist. | ||
| Yeah, good idea. | ||
| This was this is like a normal American state with with Democrats and Republicans in it. | ||
| And when they found out, oh, you know, we're teaching your children that it's OK to be a pedophile or actually the the the object of pedophilia. | ||
| It's okay to, you know, to hate people because they're white or the black people are like, I'm sorry, what? | ||
| You know, where did that come from? | ||
| Where in LA people just go like lemmings off the cliff. | ||
| In Virginia, not so much. | ||
| So it was very, it was very tense. | ||
| I thought it should have been 80% to 20% and it was only two or three percentage points. | ||
| And to be honest with you, I was worried about the kind of Trump contingent, you know, I'm good friends with Sebastian Gorka who just loves Donald Trump and he was picking on Youngkin and I was saying to him, you know, it's a purple state, you know, we're not going to get everything we want. | ||
| But Youngkin was a talented guy and because of Trump, I think, Because of Trump, he understood that he had to fight the culture war. | ||
| That you don't fight the culture war, you can't win. | ||
| You don't fight over abortion. | ||
| You don't fight over marriage. | ||
| But to fight teaching racism in school, yeah, you can do that. | ||
| And so I think that Donald Trump taught him something, but he managed to excite the Trump contingent without linking himself to Donald Trump. | ||
| And in fact, there was one hilarious story that when Trump That troll that he is said he was coming to Virginia. | ||
| Yunkins people called him up and said, no, don't come to Virginia. | ||
| So he really found the right note as we didn't in the recall in California. | ||
| And that's exciting because it means, you know, Ronald Reagan said basically, and this is a paraphrase, but he said Republicans fail when they turn out not to be who they said they were. | ||
| Democrats fail when they turn out to be who they say they are, and when they go too far all the time. | ||
| And so, right this minute, when Democrats are being everything they say, and they're ruining everything, everything they touch goes bad, this is a good moment. | ||
| It's a good moment to remind people that a little bit of common sense, a little bit of good business, a little bit of family life, you know, not such a bad thing, and you can build a very nice country and a very nice life off that. | ||
| Wait, are you saying that the people on MSNBC who told me that it was all because of those middle America white supremacist women, that's what they were saying? | ||
| It's all the women who are always voting in white supremacists? | ||
| Are you saying that Joy Reid is not telling me the truth? | ||
| I mean, we got this lieutenant governor who's a gun-toting black lady who was in the Marines, and it's like, and everybody loves, this is the thing, everybody loves her, and they're telling us, oh yeah, but she is white supremacy. | ||
| This is the mark of white supremacy when you vote for a black person who doesn't agree with us. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And so, you know, at some point, you just gotta hope that there's enough common sense and courage in the American people where they stand up to that, because it's not just common sense. | ||
| A lot of people I know, including Democrats, are saying to me, you know, this woke stuff | ||
| is bad. | ||
| There's something wrong with this. | ||
| But you also have to have courage because they will throw you off Twitter. | ||
| They will throw you off Facebook. | ||
| They might get you fired from your job. | ||
| They might get you canceled. | ||
| So you've got to have the courage to say, you know, out loud, we don't want this. | ||
| And what they did in Virginia was they attacked people's kids. | ||
| And that will turn a lot of moms and a lot of dads into very brave people. | ||
| You know, you get the mama and papa bears will just rip your head off before they let | ||
| you ruin their kids. | ||
| So as a guy that spent, I think you spent a couple of decades here in crazy L.A. right? | ||
| How long were you here for? | ||
| Well, I was only in LA for seven years, but I was in, before that I was in Santa Barbara for 15 years. | ||
| So all in all, I got the California experience for two decades. | ||
| So as a guy that was around that and also was around Hollywood and, and, you know, doing movies and Clint Eastwood, although he's one of the few sane ones we've got, but, but you've been around the machine. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Have you been able to really unpack, maybe now that you've stepped away from it, what is it that causes that groupthink amongst these people who so often seemingly vote against their own interests? | ||
| They cannot be happy that the homeless people are now climbing up the Hollywood Hills like we're in Walking Dead. | ||
| No, it is absolutely true, but, you know, there are certain things, there are certain, like, breaks, walls between them. | ||
| For instance, in San Francisco, the rich people are living in Silicon Valley, you know, the rich people are not living in the places that they let go down the drain. | ||
| There is, you know, it's a funny thing because in a way, in a way, it's a part That's a point that Marx, Karl Marx himself might have made. | ||
| You know, Karl Marx basically believed that your wages had not gone, you hadn't become richer if there was now a bigger divide between you and the really rich people. | ||
| He believed that it was all relative, you know. | ||
| So even though you were doing better, if the next guy was doing ten times better, you were going to be unhappy. | ||
| And there's a lot of human truth to that. | ||
| I mean, that's, you know, it's envy, it's covetousness. | ||
| Those are just human traits. | ||
| And so we have got a moment now when some of these wealthy people are so wealthy and so detached and so surrounded by other people like themselves and so disdainful of the ordinary men and women who just want to do their jobs and have some fun and, you know, get married and have kids. | ||
| They're so disdainful of that life that they really have no idea what people are talking about. | ||
| Some of these people who are accusing, look, I lived out of the country for seven years. | ||
| This is the least racist country on earth. | ||
| It is the least racist country on earth. | ||
| And when they talk about systemic racism, it's the least systemic racist country on earth, because obviously there are always going to be racist people. | ||
| They don't know it. | ||
| They don't know it. | ||
| When they talk about, oh yeah, these people are just racist, they believe it because they never see them. | ||
| They never meet them. | ||
| They never talk to them. | ||
| They never listen to them. | ||
| Some of the stuff that you and I talk about on what is now called conservative media, they've never heard. | ||
| They have never heard it. | ||
| And when they discover it, they're absolutely shocked. | ||
| I mean, Russell Brand, the comedian, who's a very bright guy, but he is kind of left of center. | ||
| When he found out that the Russian collusion thing was a hoax, he went on the air and he said, I'm gobsmacked. | ||
| I'm flabbergasted. | ||
| Who knew? | ||
| Well, we knew, you know, we knew. | ||
| And we said it all the time. | ||
| And a lot of stuff that we know ultimately becomes mainstream, but they never stop and say, oh, gee, the right wingers were telling the truth. | ||
| And the New York Times and CNN and NBC were all lying. | ||
| They just never say that. | ||
| Think of all the people that they made into idols. | ||
| Andrew Cuomo, you know, What was the other guys? | ||
| Michael Avenatti, you know, was that his name? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now Dr. Fauci, you know, torturing dogs, eating the faces of dogs. | ||
| Literally, like, you cannot make this stuff up. | ||
| Eating the faces off dogs that they don't let their paws go to. | ||
| I mean, it's just insane. | ||
| And these are their heroes, and you'd think at some point they would say, hmm, maybe we're not that good a judge of character. | ||
| Maybe we ought to take another look at Ted Cruz. | ||
| Maybe he's not a bad guy. | ||
| Maybe picking on Mike Pence for being true to his wife isn't really a great look for us. | ||
| They never do. | ||
| They never listen to us. | ||
| They're so separated. | ||
| They're so sequestered by their wealth and their cultural power more than anything else. | ||
| Their cultural power has sequestered them that they do not know what they do not know. | ||
| And that's basically the kind of stuff that the rest of us are talking about. | ||
| You and I don't agree on everything. | ||
| Me and Ben Shapiro don't agree. | ||
| And Michael Mills. | ||
| We all have these big arguments. | ||
| We have a range of opinions on the right. | ||
| They've just got this one opinion, but they hear it again and again and again, and they think everything else is evil. | ||
| So what's the trick? | ||
| I mean, you know, when I do my weekly Q&As on Thursday, there's always like 10 questions of the same variety, which is, what are the tricks to wake up my friend? | ||
| How can I bring them back? | ||
| I can't get them to sit down and watch a PragerU video. | ||
| Or, Dave, now you're too scary for them. | ||
| So I assume you're on the scary list too, Andrew. | ||
| Like, what are the tricks? | ||
| You got any tricks? | ||
| I mean, you were around a lot of these people. | ||
| Yeah, you know, two things, very important. | ||
| One is you've got to speak up. | ||
| This thing about dropping our voice, you know, I used to go into movie studios for meetings and I'd be sitting out in the waiting room, you know, you sit for a few minutes before they call you in and Almost every time somebody would come up to me and drop his voice and say, I saw you on Hannity. | ||
| I saw you on Beck. | ||
| And I would always say the same thing. | ||
| Why are you whispering? | ||
| You're in the right. | ||
| And I understand the fear and I understand, you know, we famously had this supposedly secret organization, the Friends of Abe out in Hollywood. | ||
| And I kept saying to the leaders, you know, we've got to go public and they wouldn't do it because they didn't want the working guys to get caught, the gaffers and the guys who are not movie stars and all this. | ||
| But I just thought if you don't, if you're, if you act in secret, then you look like you're ashamed. | ||
| And if you act in secret, you look like you're afraid. | ||
| And so all of us, because all of us, you know, it's not just artists who are part of the culture. | ||
| It's not just media people. | ||
| Everybody is part of the culture. | ||
| Everybody has a little piece of it like a, you know, a candle in their hand. | ||
| You have got to speak up. | ||
| You've got to. | ||
| You've got to say it politely. | ||
| You don't have to scream at people. | ||
| You don't have to get in their faces. | ||
| You don't have to be Donald Trump. | ||
| You just politely say, you know, I disagree. | ||
| And if we don't start doing that, if we let them cow us and silence us, we have no choice, chance. | ||
| And the other side of it also is right-wingers think that the truth is so important. | ||
| The facts are so important. | ||
| That you don't have to be nice about them. | ||
| That you can scream an ugly truth in someone's face. | ||
| And Paul Simon said, you know, I don't want you to lie to me, but I want some tenderness beneath your honesty. | ||
| And right-wingers got to learn that trick. | ||
| Because the left are ugly. | ||
| They're mean. | ||
| They call people names. | ||
| They're disgusting. | ||
| They cancel people. | ||
| They bully them. | ||
| If we don't have a sort of civilized attitude, but when I say civilized, that doesn't mean keeping your mouth shut. | ||
| It means speaking bravely and clearly in a polite way. | ||
| Then we're just the same as them. | ||
| We get lost in the crowd. | ||
| So if we don't develop some communication skills and some courage, You know, we'll be lost, we'll be swept away, because they own the media. | ||
| You know, it's so funny, because I obviously agree with the sentiment, and then there's this part of me, as someone that's, you know, sort of new to this thing on the right, let's say, that when you see them lie, and lie, and lie again, and know they're lying, and we know they're lying, and everyone knows the Sultan, it's in quote, and they just keep going, I can somehow see how decent right-wing people, that are moderates really, start sounding like crazy, angry kooks, Because the years go by, you try to rationalize, you try to be open, you try to have conversations, they keep lying, things keep getting worse, they're dragging you to hell with them, next thing you know, you're screaming on the radio for four hours a day about whatever it might be. | ||
| So I'm sympathetic to, even though I get your point, I am sympathetic to the people that sort of sound like they're nuts at some level. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| They also gaslight you. | ||
| So for 30 years, they call you racist, they call you sexist, your God stinks, your country stinks, your history stinks, everything about you stinks. | ||
| Then Rush Limbaugh comes on the air and he says, well, these feminazis and everybody goes, where is the civility? | ||
| What has happened to the civility in this country? | ||
| So they gaslight you. | ||
| But if you listen, one of the things that happened to me when I came back from England, where I was living, I started listening to Rush just to hear what the fuss was about. | ||
| And he was so happy and so funny and so kind of sweet-natured with all the stuff that he said that I thought, no, wait a minute. | ||
| All the stuff I heard is untrue, and I want to listen to what this guy has to say. | ||
| They called him uncivil, and he could sometimes go off, obviously. | ||
| But he was actually a happy warrior, and he was a wonderfully funny and warm person. | ||
| The one time I talked to him in person, he was kind of shy and sweet-natured and all that. | ||
| It was kind of a shock. | ||
| But still, he had a knack for that. | ||
| So you're absolutely right. | ||
| I have total sympathy for why people do it. | ||
| I know why they supported Donald Trump. | ||
| You know, I told people who were appalled by Donald Trump, you know, think of him as the voice of people who have been just insulted for 50 years. | ||
| You know, that's what he is. | ||
| That's why they came up with him. | ||
| And, you know, he had his flaws. | ||
| I think they really hurt him in the end, but they also helped him get where he was and they made people love him because he spoke for them. | ||
| But I think we need, you know, the thing I liked about this guy in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, is he is Civilized, he's direct, but he says what he has to say, and I think that that's really the trick. | ||
| I think it's the trick for all of us, because if ordinary people aren't speaking... | ||
| We seem like we're afraid, and we seem like we're ashamed. | ||
| Yeah, and since you brought up Trump, I will credit you, I've credited you many times for this, but on election night 2016, and I was not voting for Trump, I voted for Gary Johnson, but I was with you Daily Wire guys, everyone drinking whiskey, and the results came in, everybody was shocked, but you said something to me that really, I think, lit a fire under me about the state of the world, which was that, look what just happened in America. | ||
| The thing that nobody said was gonna happen, that everyone said couldn't happen, it just happened. | ||
| And that is the true beauty of America. | ||
| That's what we sort of seem to be forgetting at the moment. | ||
| You know, I have this conversation, especially with conservatives. | ||
| Conservatives have a knack. | ||
| It's a natural thing, and it's one of the reasons they are conservative, is they can trace any change to disaster. | ||
| So, you know, whatever changes, it's like, oh yeah, well, he's going to knock over that domino, and then the wall will fall down, and once the wall falls down, the savages come in and we're all dead, you know? | ||
| They do this all the time. | ||
| But just because having been around so long, I've seen a lot of stuff. | ||
| So I saw New York when it was a cesspit, like it's becoming again today. | ||
| And I thought this is the end of New York. | ||
| And no, Giuliani came in. | ||
| One man came in. | ||
| They called him racist every single day of his administration, and he turned it into | ||
| the most beautiful city in the world, the best city in the world, for about 20 years | ||
| with the help of Bloomberg, who kept it that way. | ||
| And now they've just driven it back into the ground. | ||
| The same was true with the country. | ||
| The country in the '70s and '80s was in a terrible state. | ||
| I mean, people were just so unhappy, and the gas, the lines to get gasoline, just like | ||
| it is today, with the inflation and all this stuff all coming back. | ||
| And Ronald Reagan came in and said, "You know what? | ||
| I'm going to cut taxes. | ||
| We're going to change that. | ||
| And we're going to—and, by the way, we're going to win the Cold War." | ||
| And, you know, people today say, "Well, it wasn't Reagan. | ||
| You know, it was this. | ||
| It was that." | ||
| It was this, it was that. | ||
| He was the only person who said that. | ||
| I mean, everybody else, all the intellectuals were like, what do you mean? | ||
| And Reagan said, I mean, we win, they lose. | ||
| And so all of these things can change in a heartbeat, but they don't change if people hide. | ||
| They do not change if people will not, you know, make that change. | ||
| I mean, my parents, lifelong Democrats to the day they died, They voted for Giuliani the second time because they said, you know, oh, the city was terrible and now it's nice. | ||
| And if we don't have at least that much common sense, it's hard to make those changes. | ||
| But it's true. | ||
| As long as we still have an operational democracy and we can get the word out and Facebook and Twitter and all these people are not censoring us completely, you'd be shocked at what can happen. | ||
| So I want to talk to you a little bit about where faith falls into this because you have a really interesting, we've discussed it a couple of times publicly, a really interesting journey of faith for yourself personally, but I think it also does frame a lot of your politics and I've sort of come to the conclusion That in many ways my frustration with the last sort of sane liberals is that they've disconnected everything from faith, thus they end up in this constant political fight trying to find meaning in something that can offer no meaning. | ||
| And I do find that very different than conservatives who don't find their salvation in politics. | ||
| I don't think that politics is everything or that the culture war is everything or that the here and now is everything. | ||
| And I think the sort of last libs They kinda do. | ||
| I think Jordan Peterson was really trying to move that for them, and I don't know that it quite got there yet. | ||
| Take that away. | ||
| There's the statement. | ||
| Run. | ||
| I mean, I love Jordan. | ||
| I know you love Jordan. | ||
| You know, I think he gets caught sometimes in what I call the reason trap. | ||
| You know, reason is a wonderful thing. | ||
| It is a wonderful way of figuring out the reasonable part of the world. | ||
| But there is a part of the world that's extraordinarily important and goes beyond that, which is the inner human experience, the inner experience of just being here, which is reason, emotion, Love, you know, all the things that make life worthwhile, you know, that actually work. | ||
| And it's in that place where you start to sense after a while that, oh, you know, it's not that I can prove. | ||
| Here's the leap of faith for me. | ||
| I can't prove that it's better to give a beggar bread than to torture a child to death for fun. | ||
| I can't prove that. | ||
| You can't prove it. | ||
| There's no place of reason where you can say, gee, if you enjoy torturing a child to death, why not do it? | ||
| But you know, You know, the same way that you know that your father should be just, the same way that you know that your mother should be tender, you know that it is better to do one thing than it is to do another. | ||
| That is already supernatural in the sense that physical actions, natural actions, have a meaning above themselves. | ||
| That's a supernatural thing. | ||
| When I say supernatural, I mean literally above nature. | ||
| And if there is something that is better than something else, then there is something toward | ||
| which it tends. | ||
| There is an ultimate good, something that is the measure of all good, a sovereign good. | ||
| And if there's a sovereign good, it has to be a consciousness, because only conscious, | ||
| free consciousness can choose good. | ||
| A hurricane is neither good or evil. | ||
| It may do bad things, but it's not doing them for moral reasons. | ||
| So it makes sense if we believe, if we take, it's not even a leap of faith, it's kind of a little hop of faith, you know, where you just say, if we believe that some things are good and some things are not as good, Uh, that we have to invest in that. | ||
| And once you do, once you do, the whole thing starts to make sense. | ||
| Suddenly you say like, Oh, I just had, I just had to affirm what I believe, what I knew was true. | ||
| And I always tell people, don't believe what you don't believe. | ||
| So if somebody, somebody says to me, you know, well, Rachel Levine is really a woman. | ||
| I think like, yeah, you don't, you don't believe that. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| You know, Ben Shapiro can put on a cowboy hat. | ||
| He's not a cowboy. | ||
| I've seen him with a cowboy hat. | ||
| He's not a cowboy. | ||
| He's not a cowboy. | ||
| The only difference is Ben will tell you that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you know Rachel Levine is not a woman, so why say it? | ||
| What is the benefit you're getting from believing something you don't believe? | ||
| No one believes. | ||
| No one believes that morality is relative. | ||
| No one believes it. | ||
| You believe it until somebody punches your kid. | ||
| Then you know that, no, there are certain things that are moral. | ||
| And once you have a worldview that makes sense, you kind of relax into the fact that there is something beyond yourself and something beyond this petty fight that we're in. | ||
| And it makes it easier to kind of love your neighbor a little bit, you know, and the joy that comes with that is intense. | ||
| It is an amazing thing simply to make sense, simply to live in life and say, like, yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| And this doesn't make sense because you have a standard by which to judge it. | ||
| For me, it became Christianity at first because I thought all my values are coming out of this book. | ||
| But now I sort of see that Christianity is the faith of the Word, that what we are, that what you and I are, is we are a kind of language. | ||
| It's not like we're a body with a soul inside, like Casper the Friendly Ghost is floating around and inside, you know, inside Dave, there's the real Dave, there's invisible Dave. | ||
| It's not that at all. | ||
| It's that you are a word that speaks, Dave. | ||
| And that Dave is an idea in the mind of God, as it were, you know. | ||
| And so, and that, once you understand that, then everything that you do becomes kind of beautiful. | ||
| It all becomes a work of art. | ||
| If I give a beggar bread, I'm not just giving a beggar bread. | ||
| I'm actually doing something good, you know, in this supernatural realm. | ||
| It's incredibly liberating. | ||
| It is an incredibly liberating, joyful way to live. | ||
| And when I say joy, I don't mean you walk around happy all the time. | ||
| That would be crazy. | ||
| What I mean is you live life with a new gusto because just like when you watch a movie and there's a sad scene in the movie and you're crying and all, you still love the movie, you know? | ||
| And life kind of becomes like that. | ||
| You start to, because you start to see it has a meaning beyond itself. | ||
| And so even when you're tense and things are going badly, and even when you're grieving, | ||
| you understand that there is this beauty to it, this beauty of creation that's going on | ||
| all the time. | ||
| And it's the creation of you, it's the creation of your soul becoming more and more what it's | ||
| supposed to be. | ||
| So yes, to go back to what you said, I just totally agree that when I see these guys telling | ||
| me that, oh, you know, if only everybody will agree I'm a woman when I'm a man, if only | ||
| everybody will agree that, you know, it's, I'm You only hate me because I'm black, even though I'm holding you up with a gun. | ||
| You know, if only everybody will agree to support the lie that gives me self-respect. | ||
| That lie will become the truth. | ||
| You know, you're sad for them, but you're not even tempted to pretend to agree. | ||
| And that's just liberating. | ||
| It's freeing. | ||
| So how do we connect some of what you just said right there to politics? | ||
| Because as you were saying it, I was thinking, man, and I've thought this many times when I was on tour with Jordan, that that rough message basically is what we have to get across to people to live more flourishing lives, and yet we're arguing about 3.5 trillion equals zero and boys are girls and all of those things. | ||
| We're not even doing a semi-good job of connecting meaning to politics. | ||
| And that seems to me to be the biggest problem right now. | ||
| Man, I can't, I could not agree with you more. | ||
| And I think, you know, the left does do this. | ||
| They just do it for bad ideas. | ||
| You know, they, the left does make a moral, we're always sitting around with a pointer saying, you'll make much more money. | ||
| And this, like this Ayn Rand mentality where we think money is everything, it's so untrue. | ||
| And it's left our, the people who want to follow us empty and, and wandering. | ||
| And the left comes along and says, no, it's right. | ||
| It's good to believe these stupid things that we're telling you. | ||
| To me, the connection with politics, and there's no, I don't believe there's Christian politics. | ||
| I believe that a Christian person can be in a range of politics as long as he's not oppressive and dishonest and evil. | ||
| He can have a range of politics. | ||
| But to me at the core of Christianity is something I call the Great Speculation. | ||
| And the Great Speculation is this, that your inner life is as important to you as mine is to me. | ||
| That's the Great Speculation. | ||
| And that's true whether you're a garbage man, whether you're a homemaker, whether you're a dancer, singer, whatever you are, the speculation is that your inner life is as important to you and as real to you and as urgent to you as mine is to me. | ||
| And once you come to that Once you take that guess, first of all, you begin to see that it's true. | ||
| You begin to realize that people have a right to be left alone. | ||
| They have a right to live out the meaning of their lives, you know? | ||
| And when they do that, when you commit to that, then you want them to be free. | ||
| And when you want them to be free, you start to think, well, what are the conditions of freedom? | ||
| Obviously, some of the conditions of freedom have to do with morality. | ||
| You can't murder people. | ||
| You can't steal from people. | ||
| You can't defraud them. | ||
| You can't lie about them. | ||
| Those are the Ten Commandments. | ||
| That's where they come in. | ||
| These are rules that are not made so you'll be a nice guy. | ||
| Like, don't do that or we'll punish you. | ||
| That's not why they're made. | ||
| They're made to liberate you. | ||
| So that you can be free. | ||
| Every one of the founders, John Adams said it best, but every one of the founders said this is a constitution for a moral and religious people. | ||
| Not just moral, but a moral and religious people. | ||
| And the reason for that is you start to understand that the other guy's freedom is as important to him, you know, as yours is. | ||
| Sometimes I hear people talking and they'll say, well, you know, For instance, Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Black Lives Matter has cost thousands of black lives. | ||
| It's gotten thousands of black people killed. | ||
| Their attacks on the police have made the black neighborhoods more unsafe. | ||
| Children are being shot by random gunmen. | ||
| It's a nightmare what they've done, and yet they continue to do it because they have an idea that it's good. | ||
| If for a moment It occurred to them that these actual black lives that they are ending with their policies are just as important to the people who have them as their life is to them. | ||
| Maybe their policies would start to seem less important to them. | ||
| And without religion, without that great speculation, which is a religious idea, the idea that your neighbor is as worthy of love as you are, Without that speculation, it's so easy to get involved in your ideas and the goodness, you know, oh, yes, we must bring justice and therefore we're going to kill anybody who gets in our way, which is part of, you know, that's another part of Karl Marx. | ||
| He basically said, yes, terror and killing is fine as long as you get to the place you have to get. | ||
| So do you think then to that end that people are believers whether they believe it or not? | ||
| I think that's an idea that Jordan's been talking a lot about lately and I've sort of come to that conclusion that you end up saying no no I'm purely secular I just believe in this and we can just order society this way but that in and of itself is a type of belief that's then driving your decisions. | ||
| Right because this is this is the power of narrative there's another thing the left knows about more than us you know it's like we live in a time when It's uncouth to say, well, you know, let's consult God. | ||
| Let's see what God's will is. | ||
| Let's see if this is a demonic path we're saying. | ||
| We don't say those things anymore. | ||
| And there's a good reason for it, but that good reason has become outdated. | ||
| The good reason is science. | ||
| You know, when lightning used to strike, they used to think that demons were sending the lightning so they would ring the church bells to chase the lightning away. | ||
| That meant the monk had to climb up to the highest part of the church and ring the bell, and of course he'd be hit by lightning and killed, right? | ||
| And when Benjamin Franklin put a lightning rod on top of a steeple, it was much safer, but it also was kind of a symbol of a materialistic philosophy that was going to replace the spiritual philosophy. | ||
| And now it's actually called the science, as if it were the Wizard of Oz, you know, it's like, it's like home and worship, the science. | ||
| For a while, it made sense for people to say, oh, all of our speculations about demons and about supernatural and all these words that we don't like to use anymore were all wrong. | ||
| But that's not true anymore. | ||
| Science has now progressed to a point where we see it's not actually as mechanical as we thought it's going to be. | ||
| It's kind of weird. | ||
| And it shouldn't be here. | ||
| It looks, by logic, like life shouldn't be here, creation shouldn't be here. | ||
| We shouldn't be able to understand creation. | ||
| And all those things are true. | ||
| And so it's time we stopped. | ||
| Doing that, because I think you're absolutely right. | ||
| People believe whether they want to believe or not. | ||
| And it's one of the reasons that when you let go of that belief, people become evil. | ||
| You know? | ||
| They start to teach children to be willing victims of pedophilia. | ||
| They start to teach you about race. | ||
| Those are wicked things to do. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Those are wicked things to do because they've let go of that sovereign good that is the living God. | ||
| And in a way, if you listen to the way we talk, We don't even say, I was happy anymore. | ||
| We say, I had an adrenaline rush. | ||
| We use these materialist terms all the time. | ||
| We don't say, oh, that's right, because it's obviously right. | ||
| We always have these kind of evolutionary explanations, and you know, yeah, so with some, it's game theory and all that stuff, none of which makes any sense, by the way, but leave that, be that as it may. | ||
| We eat, we're all materialists, and so And yet, we know we don't live in a materialist world. | ||
| We sense it, we feel it, we're born with the knowledge of it. | ||
| Like I said, there's no evolutionary reason why we should know our fathers should be just. | ||
| Why do we expect our fathers to be just? | ||
| And yet, when they are not just, we know they have failed at some essential task. | ||
| So, we all know it, but we have gotten caught up in this narrative, this materialist narrative, that I think is out of date. | ||
| I just think, I think people are living in the 20th century, really, and in the 21st century, a lot of scientific paths have shown that they can't explain this without a consciousness coming first. | ||
| The only thing they have to admit is that consciousness comes before matter, and I think that's an obvious truth. | ||
| You're saying I shouldn't light my Anthony Fauci candle every night before bed? | ||
| Is that what you're telling me? | ||
| He's not some sort of saint, that man? | ||
| The highest paid person in the federal government? | ||
| If you just want to watch him burn and melt... | ||
| I can understand why you might want to just watch him melt, you know, and say, that's for the dogs. | ||
| What does it also, what does that tell you, though, about the psychiatry, the psychological makeup, I suppose, of groups where it's like we see these people that get so much wrong consistently, and now we have the video footage to prove it. | ||
| Fauci saying one thing about masks publicly, another thing to his friend about, oh no, you can go on vacation and don't worry about masks, because you'll touch your face more. | ||
| Or the vaccines mean we're gonna open up. | ||
| Now they don't really work and you still can transmit. | ||
| Everybody knows the a million examples that I can use here. | ||
| But a certain percentage of people keep going to it. | ||
| They keep going, oh, well, I forgot. | ||
| I don't like, is it a memory issue? | ||
| Is it like, what is it? | ||
| What is it about humans? | ||
| You know, there's a line in Dostoevsky, and I can't quote it from memory, but the line is something like, when you make people free, when you set people free, their first order of business is to find something to bow down to. | ||
| I think, you know, we're made to love God. | ||
| We are made to bow down to God. | ||
| And I think that, you know, after a while, after you live the religious life a while, | ||
| you start to realize that all your attachments to things and to people are pathways to God. | ||
| You know, they're not, they're symbolic of the love of God. | ||
| Your love for your father is love of God. | ||
| Your love for your mother is the love of the feminine side of God. | ||
| All these things that you're looking for that people fail you in are because they cannot be | ||
| the perfect thing you're looking for beyond them. | ||
| And once you attach yourself to that perfect thing beyond them, it becomes so much easier to love the imperfect people with their flaws, uh, and forgive them for the ways they can't be what they can never be. | ||
| Uh, and, and so, you know, guys like Fauci are there because people are just desperate for that thing and no one will give it to them. | ||
| And by the way, when I, when I talk about this and I talk about being religious, I think our churches have failed us. | ||
| Utterly, you know, almost all of our churches have failed us utterly. | ||
| So don't think that I'm saying, oh yeah, you got to go down and follow that priest. | ||
| I mean, personally, I think we should start. | ||
| I'm lucky I found a great new church that I love. | ||
| But personally, I think a lot of people should just start to gather together in their homes and start from the beginning because our churches have really abandoned the plot. | ||
| So linking some of this stuff together, I just spoke a couple weeks ago at the National Conservatism Conference and Teal spoke and Ted Cruz and J.D. | ||
| Vance. | ||
| It was a really great sort of powerhouse event. | ||
| And what they were really trying to do there is figure out how conservatism in many ways can link back to all the stuff we're talking about here and link back to belief, but then will there be room for the outsiders, for the people that are not religious, or for the gay people? | ||
| And there was a very, I think the panel of the entire thing was me and Douglas Murray, we both happen to be gay, speaking with Sohrab Amari, who of course I'm sure you know, Catholic thinker and author, and Yoram Hazoni, Orthodox Jew, trying to figure out, can this thing fit? | ||
| Can we fit this thing together? | ||
| Now I'm curious because you're talking about faith and all of this stuff. | ||
| Your son Spencer, who's a good friend of mine, who I think is like one of the all-stars of like the future conservative movement, he happens to be gay. | ||
| It does not matter to me. | ||
| But as you're talking about this, as a father and then as a Political communicator, how do you piece all of this stuff together? | ||
| I know you guys have discussed it publicly once or twice, but. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, no, and my opinion of this has never changed. | ||
| My father explained this to me once when we went to a party when I was a little kid, and I saw a gay couple, and he explained it to me. | ||
| And in those days, saying that this was a psychological disorder was the liberal point of view, that was the accepting point of view. | ||
| And that's what he said to me, and I remember shrugging, saying, they're not hurting anybody. | ||
| And I still feel that way, but actually, I feel that God is a lot more hilarious and creative than we think He is. | ||
| And a lot of the kind of, you know, pinched, mean, you know, like, you have to do what I tell you to do, is not really in the Gospels. | ||
| And I know people get so ticked at me when I say this, but it really isn't. | ||
| And there's a much greater sense of, like, Abundance of beauty and abundance of creation. | ||
| I think we need, it helps political people to talk about a vertical world of good and evil. | ||
| But in fact, there is good and evil, there is such a thing as good and evil, and there is that vertical axis. | ||
| But there's also a horizontal axis of centrality and outwardness. | ||
| And I, for instance, I'm an artist. | ||
| I've lived my life as a novelist and artist. | ||
| I'm not at the center. | ||
| You know, if your garbage man disappeared, you would miss him way, way, way before you missed me. | ||
| I'm here to serve him. | ||
| I'm here to entertain him, to beautify his life, to beautify the life of ordinary people, or central people, I should call them, because they're not ordinary, but central people. | ||
| And I feel this way about sexuality too. | ||
| I think the center of human life is a man and a woman having children. | ||
| I think if without that, you know, forgive me, but without that, you don't have a world, you don't have that central kind of polarity. | ||
| Yeah, I get it. | ||
| I don't disagree. | ||
| I don't disagree. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But just because something is not at that center doesn't mean it's not beautiful. | ||
| And it doesn't mean it's not part of creation. | ||
| And this is one of the things, I mean, you look around, one of the things about Spencer is I knew when he was three years old, I started to think, you know, this kid could very well be gay. | ||
| And, you know, I'm going to teach him to be a man because I think he should be a man. | ||
| And I hope I did. | ||
| And I think I actually believe he's a wonderful man. | ||
| He's a terrific man. | ||
| But that was who he was and that was clearly who he had been born to be. | ||
| And so I think that like a little bit of just, you know, I really do believe that Jesus wants us to blow the hinges off the doors of our hearts. | ||
| You know, just like, okay, you know, are you hurting anybody? | ||
| Are you preaching evil? | ||
| Are you polluting us? | ||
| Are you corrupting us? | ||
| Or are you living in love and going forward with whatever, you know, You have problems. | ||
| I have problems. | ||
| All God's children got problems. | ||
| You know, that's that's really the thing that unites us. | ||
| And so I think if we could remember as conservatives that there is this horizontal axis and we have a right to prioritize Mommy and daddy families. | ||
| We have a right to say yes, that's the center. | ||
| We need them just like we have a right to prioritize Working people people who do certain things doctors people who do certain things that are essential to human life But that does not mean we should not live in love and appreciate the beauty of other kinds of things that are not Central like art like art again, you know if the great violinist disappears You're going to miss your carpenter. | ||
| You're going to miss the lady who helps clean your house before you miss the great violinist. | ||
| He's not at the center of things, but he's beautiful. | ||
| He makes life worth living, you know? | ||
| And that is the attitude that I really do have. | ||
| That's not a put-on attitude. | ||
| That's not a philosophy. | ||
| That's the way I actually feel. | ||
| I feel that life is a lot more beautiful when you live that way, and it makes evil putrid You know, when you see how beautiful most people are, really, and most relationships are, and then when somebody comes along and says, oh, you know, you should judge that person by the color of his skin, there's like a rank smell in the room. | ||
| And so we need to, I think conservatives need to live a little bit, and you know what the funny thing is, Dave? | ||
| You know, as Spencer is engaged to Josh, this wonderful guy, and he had a house party. | ||
| So I go to the house party, and there's, you know, crazy gay people coming in. | ||
| There's Josh's relatives, who are all these kind of down-home Americans from the Midwest. | ||
| And then there's all the Daily Wire guys, who are all these, you know, kind of cigar-smoking guys. | ||
| And they're all right-wing Republicans. | ||
| Nobody cares. | ||
| Every one of them is like a right-wing Republican. | ||
| And I just thought, you know, we live like this. | ||
| Why shouldn't we think like this? | ||
| You know, don't believe what you don't believe. | ||
| Some of these people who are there, Believe in a philosophical conversation that gay marriage is the end of Western civilization as we know it. | ||
| But they were there. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they love Spencer. | ||
| They love Josh. | ||
| They want them to be happy. | ||
| I think like, well, why not? | ||
| Why not make that your philosophy, you know? | ||
| Why not make the love, put the love at the center of your philosophy and stop sitting around in your head with ideas that, you know, may sound good and may fit together, but actually are not expressing that other part of yourself. | ||
| Well, that's the funny part because it's always the anonymous Twitter and YouTube commentators telling me how much you scary conservatives hate me. | ||
| Meanwhile, we're breaking bread together and having a hell of a time. | ||
| And they're the ones in the name of tolerance and diversity telling me how much you hate me. | ||
| It's quite extraordinary. | ||
| You kind of got to give it credit, you know? | ||
| Yes, they're very good at what they do, and to be fair, they own so much communication territory, it's a little easier for them than it is for us. | ||
| We're always kind of struggling to get our voices heard. | ||
| Yeah, so as long as we're talking about art, I've got your new book here. | ||
| And you know, people in our world, in the political world, I don't think everyone knows that you've been a novelist for decades at this point. | ||
| How many books have you written? | ||
| It's over 30, yeah. | ||
| I lost track, but. | ||
| I mean, that's, as someone that just finished my second, I don't know how you've possibly written 30. | ||
| It's pretty extraordinary. | ||
| And you're writing novels, also. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, I mean, like, this is heavy-duty stuff. | ||
| You write a lot of mysteries. | ||
| How did you get interested in all of this? | ||
| And does some of the stuff, that stuff that you bring to the novels, does that move into the way you approach politics and culture and all that? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, a novel comes out of you. | ||
| It's a vision, you know, and I loved, you know, when I was a kid, I didn't really have any male role models and I was desperate to find them. | ||
| And I found them in writers and most of them were tough guy writers, guys like Ernest Hemingway, But essentially, the ones I really loved were the mystery, the tough guy mystery writers. | ||
| So, Doshal Hamid and especially Raymond Chandler with his kind of knight-like, you know, hero who, he said, down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean. | ||
| And that's where we get the phrase, down these mean streets. | ||
| And I just loved that idea, that the world was corrupt, but you were going to walk through it just like this, you know, just with your eyes on the right, and you were going to do that. | ||
| As a little kid, I just thought, that's who I want to be. | ||
| And so those were the books that kind of inspired me. | ||
| And as I became a writer, I kind of lost the track for a while in my, you know, troubled youth. | ||
| But when I straightened my head out, I kind of came back to that. | ||
| And I consider myself, you know, as good as any mystery writer alive. | ||
| And if I may plug the book. | ||
| We'll both hold the book at the exact same time. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Because I will tell you, I had this book in my mind for, I had the last scene of this book in my mind for 25 years. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And I could not, I could not build the story to get to that last scene. | ||
| And, you know, and I love Christmas and I always wanted to write a Christmas story. | ||
| And I always thought the problem with most Christmas stories are bad. | ||
| You know, really only A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life are good Christmas stories. | ||
| And the reason most of them are bad is they're about you finding something that you want, finding love or finding a home or finding mom and dad or whatever. | ||
| But Christmas is actually about sacrifice and about change. | ||
| It's about what in the Bible they call metanoia, which is turning around and giving something away, you know, giving something that you love away in order to be free. | ||
| And so I wanted to write that story and I had the scene in my mind and I couldn't build a story that got honestly to that scene. | ||
| So my friend Otto Penzler, who is the great American, he's one of the, he is the greatest American mystery editor. | ||
| And we were in the pandemic and he was locked down in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| He's locked down in Connecticut. | ||
| And he called me up and we were having these conversations. | ||
| You know, I was kind of keeping him company. | ||
| And he said, you know, when are you going to write a Christmas book? | ||
| And I said, you know, I said, would you publish it? | ||
| And he said, oh, yeah, I'll publish a Christmas book. | ||
|
unidentified
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So I thought, I gotta figure this book out. | |
| And I took two long walks, and at the end of the long walk, this little bell went off, and I thought, that's the story. | ||
| And it came out, I'm so happy with the way it came out. | ||
| It was number 12 on Audible, and it was number 30 on Amazon, and the reviews have just been ecstatic. | ||
| I mean, people are just like, on the site, not people I know, they're just raving about it. | ||
| And I have to say, I know I'm I don't want to oversell it, but I have to say this. | ||
| We need we need quality art. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| On our side. | ||
| We need stories. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because we have so much right wing cant and so much kind of thundering political propaganda. | ||
| And not enough like just good stories that are imbued with our view of life, which is the kind of view of life that you and I have just been talking about through this whole interview. | ||
| And I will stand by this book. | ||
| I do not believe anyone is going to read this book and say, wow, I got ripped off. | ||
| I think you're going to read this book and just it's a really good Christmas story. | ||
| Well, here's my commitment to you. | ||
| I only got the book yesterday, so I have not read it yet, but I'm hopping on a plane tomorrow, tomorrow, two days, to go to Nashville, and I'm gonna have dinner with your son, and I do most of my reading on the plane, so I will start the book. | ||
| I'm curious, so as someone that's only written, or has only written two non-fiction books, When you're writing a mystery, do you have a freaking big whiteboard in front of you really plotting all the twists and turns or are you just kind of figuring, you like know where you're going at the end and you just figure it out as you go? | ||
| No, there are some writers who actually, Ruth Rendell was one of them, who actually write off the top of their heads. | ||
| I outline everything. | ||
| And sometimes the outline changes along the way. | ||
| You know, when I see that a character won't do what I wanted him to do, I have to change the plot to accommodate the character. | ||
| But if I know where I'm going, Then I get the joy of writing. | ||
| I hate outlining, by the way, and it takes me weeks to do it, and it's just dull. | ||
| It's the only part of my job I really find dull. | ||
| But then I'm free to just write the book and create it, and that's what I really want to be doing, so it's much easier that way. | ||
| It always amazes me. | ||
| The one thing about writers who don't outline is they tend to write the same two or three books over and over again. | ||
| And Ruth Rendell is a wonderful writer, but after you've read, I don't know, five of her books, you've kind of read her books, and like, I don't mean to knock her, because some of her books are just wonderful, especially her Barbara Vine books. | ||
| But I find if I outline, I can say, oh, I've done this before, and throw it away and do something fresh and new. | ||
| And that's really been helpful to me, and I like doing it that way. | ||
| If you read this, if you do read it on the plane, and I trust you, I believe you. | ||
| I will, I will. | ||
| But I hope you will say something online if you like it. | ||
| I will. | ||
| I promise you, if it's good, you will get the Dave Rubin comment somewhere on Amazon. | ||
| For some reason, people believe what you say. | ||
| I'm wondering about it myself. | ||
| Listen, before I let you go, anything else on your mind? | ||
| I kind of didn't want to do too much of the day-to-day politics. | ||
| This is exactly what I wanted to do with you, because I feel like everyone's just going nuts with politics and COVID and everything else. | ||
| Is there anything else that's just sort of been thinking? | ||
| You know, you moved, life seems pretty good, you got a new book out, you seem happy. | ||
| Anything else? | ||
| You know, it's a wonderful time for me and I'm very grateful to have come this far and actually be doing what I'm doing and, you know, loving the people around me and loving the things that I'm doing. | ||
| It really is great. | ||
| And, yeah, the only thing I would say is I would just reiterate what I said before, you know, that, like, We cannot be afraid. | ||
| Almost everything the left does is geared toward making us afraid. | ||
| You know, wear a mask, get a vaccine, wear two masks, wear six masks, you know, put a mask on your children, give your children a vaccine. | ||
| Everything is about being afraid. | ||
| And not only that, but they've made fear a virtue. | ||
| What do you mean you're not afraid of climate change? | ||
| Are you a denier? | ||
| You must be a denier. | ||
| You know, everything is about fear. | ||
| And the reason for that, you know, C.S. | ||
| Lewis, the great Christian apologist, he wrote about this. | ||
| He said that, you know, he said that the devil wants you to be afraid because fear, courage, is the centerpiece of all virtue. | ||
| You cannot be virtuous without courage. | ||
| And this is a moment, I won't lie, this is one of the worst moments in American culture I have ever seen. | ||
| Our art stinks, our music stinks, our movie stinks, our TV stinks, except for mine, many of our novels stink. | ||
| And I think the reason for that is we have gutted our belief system of everything worthwhile, and so people can't create art. | ||
| If we are not afraid, we will pass through this into a better time. | ||
| There's simply no question. | ||
| If we're afraid, and if we surrender, and if we say, yes, sir, no, okay, you know, I won't say anything, please don't call me racist, if we keep apologizing like so much of these cancel fools, they cancel you for something and they say, oh, I'm so sorry, I want to be a better person, and then they just devour you, you know, it's like blood in the water. | ||
| I am actually very hopeful. | ||
| I think we have come to the end of something. | ||
| And it's the end of the post-war era. | ||
| It's the end of a post-war order. | ||
| We need new ideas. | ||
| And I think there are people out there who are coming, Spencer, one of them, coming along with new ideas, new ways of thinking about things. | ||
| And I'm actually very hopeful. | ||
| But we have to start with the courage of all those people I was talking about who are central They have to have courage. | ||
| It can't just be the outlying heroes. | ||
| It's got to be the people at the center who start to say, you know what? | ||
| We're going to speak the truth, even if you torment us. | ||
| Clavin, you finish an interview like you know where it's going, just like a fine novelist would. | ||
| I look forward to you having whiskey and me having tequila in person one of these days, probably not in this town. | ||
| You've got to get out of there, and I can't wait to see you. | ||
| One thing I hate about the media is that I only see my friends on camera. | ||
| The book is when Christmas comes. | ||
| I'm going to read it, and you know what I'm going to do? | ||
| I'm going to read it, and whether I love it or hate it or somewhere in between, I will send you my comment before I post it so that you can make your argument. | ||
| If I don't like it, you can push back. | ||
| If I like it too much, I know you wouldn't want people to think that I'm doing you a favor here, so we'll figure it out. | ||
| I know you'll tell the truth. | ||
| Good seeing you, my friend. | ||
| It's great to see you there. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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