July 1, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| All right, we are live on the world wide web, people. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, this is the Rubin Report, and it is Friday, which means it's time for another roundtable panel extravaganza, all in celebration of America. | ||
| on her upcoming 246th birthday. | ||
| She looks pretty good, despite what's going on with the people in charge right now. | ||
| Joining me today are a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Chris Ruffo, host of the Young Heretics show, Spencer Clavin, and opinion editor of Newsweek, Josh Hammer. | ||
| Chris, Spencer, Josh, welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having us. | ||
| Great to be back, Dave. | ||
| All right, guys. | ||
| America on her 246th birthday, July 4th, just a couple days from now. | ||
| And you may remember this. | ||
| We've got to show you something right up top. | ||
| From last year on July 4th, it was very exciting because we all saved 16 cents. | ||
| On our July 4th barbecue. | ||
| Look at this tweet from the White House. | ||
| Planning a cookout this year? | ||
| Catch up on the news. | ||
| According to the Farm Bureau, the cost of a 4th of July BBQ is down from last year. | ||
| It's a fact you must heard. | ||
| Hot dog, the Biden economic plan is working and that's something we can all relish. | ||
| The cost of a 4th of July cookout in 2021 is down 16 cents for last year from last year. | ||
| And then there was this video. | ||
| This is a year ago. | ||
| I think today, Peter Doocy, who is a rare journalist that I can say the word journalist without putting air quotes, he asked Jen Psaki about these whopping savings. | ||
| Okay, on another subject, the official White House account tweeted yesterday the cost of a 4th of July cookout is down 16 cents from last year. | ||
| 16 cents? | ||
| There has been a reduction in some of the costs of key components of the 4th of July barbecue. | ||
| That was what the tweet was noting. | ||
| So does the White House think that $0.16 off a barbecue has more of an impact on people's lives than gas being $1 more this time? | ||
| I would say if you don't like hot dogs, you may not care of the reduction of costs. | ||
| You don't have to like hot dogs. | ||
| You can't buy a hot dog for $0.16. | ||
| That's like a bite of a hot dog. | ||
| I will say that what we are most focused on is the fact that we've created now more than 3 million jobs since the President took office. | ||
| That's what we're focused on and continuing to implement Additional components of his economic Build Back Better agenda. | ||
| So I'm a big fan of showing these old throwback videos because I think we forget how inept these people are. | ||
| We forget about all the people that got here. | ||
| Even watching Saki just now, I forgot what she was like after, you know, we have our new press secretary, who you have to say she's a black lesbian every time you bring her up, Jean Corinne Pierre. | ||
| 16 cents! | ||
| Josh, what'd you do with your 16 cents before we get to this year and the price increase? | ||
| What did you do with your extra 16 cents last year? | ||
| Dave, you know, look, I mean, maybe it went just a little extra relish my 4th of July hot dog or something. | ||
| But I mean, like, you know, to your point, I mean, I just had a flashback in my mind literally just now to that clip that went viral a couple weeks ago of the new, as you say, black lesbian press secretary at the White House. | ||
| You remember this when she was literally flipping through the binder about the baby formula shortage? | ||
| It was like literally like nails on a chalkboard silence. | ||
| This administration just continues to redefine incompetent each and every day that ends in Y, which obviously is all seven days of the week. | ||
| I mean, it's hitting a new low basically every weekend. | ||
| You know, this stuff is just crazy. | ||
| I'm not sure when they signed up kind of Jewish dad humor to be writing these kind of White House tweets. | ||
| I mean, I might, you know, my 65-year-old father could have written that tweet, but I'm not sure it's very presidential. | ||
| Catch up with the news people. | ||
| Spencer, 16 cents. | ||
| I mean, putting aside again, we're gonna get to the increase this year, | ||
| which is significantly more than 16 cents, but just the gall that they had to do that, | ||
| like put that tweet out there, 16 cents, as if that means anything. | ||
| Well, it's the layers of cringe for me, right? | ||
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It's the... | |
| (laughs) | ||
| To that point, Chris, Chris, do you think that this stuff works on anyone? | ||
| Do you think that there was literally one person last year? | ||
| I mean, I really mean this. | ||
| Do you think one person saw that tweet and said, boy, I saved 16 cents. | ||
| Thank you, Joe Biden. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| And if you kind of pull back, it's really interesting. | ||
| And basic communication strategy, you always want to lead with the best news that you have, the strongest kind of brag about what you've been up to. | ||
| And they looked at the whole White House, looked around at the country and said, all right, this is what we go with today. | ||
| This is the best news that we can possibly come up with. | ||
| Some sort of artificial basket of goods like Ruta Vegas and something obscure where they could say, well, the price is actually down, not up in comparison to everything that you'd see at the store if you would go today. | ||
| But more seriously, this administration's kind of key playbook is to suppress reality with these false images. | ||
| So I think very similarly to this, you look at the guy with the high heels and the dress and the bald head doing the kind of pup kinks taking over the nuclear waste disposal. | ||
| And you say, well, what is the substance? | ||
| The substance is that our nuclear energy program hasn't advanced in decades, | ||
| but at least you get the bald, pup-kink guy, you know, flexing his heels in the White House photographs. | ||
| And so they're trying to kind of replace any substantive, tangible good for actual real-life people | ||
| with these fake images, whatever they may be, day by day. | ||
| Yeah, that's a great point because, you know, we're talking about Jean-Claude Pierre, too, and there was that image of her a few weeks ago with Rachel Levine, and it's like, they're there, and it's Pride Month, and they're very happy. | ||
| And we've got the first black lesbian and the first trans whatever. | ||
| And it's like, well, are you guys qualified at your jobs? | ||
| Is this pup person qualified to be a nuclear? | ||
| I guess the pup guy does have some pedigree. | ||
| He seems somewhat qualified, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he's at least somewhat qualified, I suppose. | ||
| Anyway, all of this leads us to what's happening this year in the world of reality. | ||
| And yeah, you're not saving 16 cents anymore. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
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We're less than a week away from America's birthday. | |
| On the celebration menu... We get together with the family and have a barbecue. | ||
| Burgers and hot dogs. | ||
| Going on the cob. | ||
| But shoppers, brace yourselves, because according to the American Farm Bureau Federation Market Survey, Americans will be spending, on average, around $70 for a 10-person July 4th menu, up 17% compared to last year. | ||
| There's some shenanigans going on. | ||
| Economists explain the shenanigans as inflation. | ||
| We like showing local news every now and again because it's such a time warp, isn't it? | ||
| I don't have a TV anymore, but when you see those clips and they get the people outside, it's like, there's something oddly refreshing about it in our bizarro world these days. | ||
| So Spencer, we went from saving 16 cents, very exciting, to prices going up 17%, not 17 cents, 17%. | ||
| Will you be splitting one hot dog? | ||
| I'll be actually... | ||
| Yeah, I'll be carving it up into little slivers and giving it out to the guests at my party. | ||
| No, I mean, actually, what I like about that, yeah, that news clip is how refreshing it is. | ||
| And, you know, it's sort of heartbreaking to see regular Americans. | ||
| It's like, oh, right. | ||
| That's what normal people look like, you know, and they have | ||
| Well, I think we might have lost we might have lost Spencer for just a second | ||
| Josh, pick it up. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| 17% higher costs right now. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, everywhere you go, Dave, I don't need to be the one to tell you. | ||
| You know, I mean, you're my fellow... Sorry, is Spencer back? | ||
| Go ahead, Josh. | ||
| We'll figure that out. | ||
| Uh, sorry. | ||
| No, I mean, you're myself learning here. | ||
| I mean, like, look, the price of gas at the pump here in Miami, Dave, as you know, I mean, I look at these numbers and I'm like, is this my phone number? | ||
| Is this my area code? | ||
| I mean, I mean, like what, what is going on here? | ||
| I mean, it really, it really is crazy. | ||
| And obviously it's not just the price of gas. | ||
| I mean, like, you know, I was at a restaurant just last night, actually. | ||
| It was out to dinner with our friend, Carol Markowitz, Dave. | ||
| And everything on the menu, I mean, is just like dramatically different than what like I can just | ||
| bare remember it being just a few months ago. I mean, the sticker price effect, I think on the | ||
| basic menu every single day at this point is already real. | ||
| So what this administration is doing with all these catchy videos, I mean, it's just a | ||
| constant exercise. And Chris made this point earlier. It's just a constant exercise in goalpost | ||
| shifting. They're just constantly trying to shift the goalpost to try to establish the fact | ||
| that they're not quite as terrible as the median American, which we saw in these videos. | ||
| The median American obviously recognizes, I think, just how bad it actually is out there. | ||
| Chris, are you kind of happy that their messaging is this bad? | ||
| Because, you know, so many of the policies are bad, so at least they're messaging them poorly, and more and more people seem to be waking up. | ||
| On one hand, I'm obviously sad that the messaging is bad because it reflects an underlying reality of what they're doing to the country, which is bad. | ||
| But in the sense of pure politics, looking at their actual communication strategy, I think it's just really an eye-opening thing to see. | ||
| You've seen Democrats, for example, even this week, really lighting their hair on fire, screaming and going into kind of hysterical fits, talking about packing the courts and abolishing the Electoral College and eliminating the filibuster, while at the same time they control the House, the Senate and the presidency. | ||
| All of these things are a sign and a reflection of a deeper ineptitude on behalf of the political left. | ||
| And for that, I am, in some ways, somewhat grateful because they're giving us a lot of openings to start planning the counterattack in 2022 and then the big counterattack in 2024. | ||
| Spencer, actually, why don't you bring us home on that point now that we got you back? | ||
| That something does seem to be turning. | ||
| I think it's becoming more obvious to the average person their level of ineptitude and whether it's intentional or just complete incompetence. | ||
| So there's some hope there, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, yeah, the Feds got to me earlier, but now I seem to have returned. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
| I do think, you know, you will look at the reaction to this Dobbs decision. | ||
| And you see people, not only who have no idea what the actual substance of the question on the table is, what's been decided, how our system works, who've been, had their brains essentially scooped out with a melon baller, but they're also, they've become these rage puppets of the regime. | ||
| You know, they've, they've, they've triggered now. | ||
| They can, they can sort of snap like dogs on cue at their leashes and you see them screaming and twerking and just degrading themselves in public. | ||
| And you think, you know, That looks miserable. | ||
| I wonder how that's working out for you. | ||
| That can't be living your best life. | ||
| And it can't be how the vast majority of Americans want to see themselves, want to think about their country or think about their future. | ||
| And so many people have been trapped for so long, feeling like there was no way out for them. | ||
| Except this kind of democratic, mad Bacchanal. | ||
| And the crazier that gets and the freer we become on the right to speak our minds, to have fun, right, to actually just point to reality and say, regardless of your prior political commitments, like something's not working here. | ||
| It's a huge opportunity. | ||
| We have to push this advantage. | ||
| We have to just this is not the time to back down. | ||
| Or squish out or be afraid to talk about any of these culture war issues because they're winning issues and people are waiting to be liberated from this sick and pathological cycle that the Democrats have them trapped in. | ||
| It's really sad to look at and we have a way out. | ||
| Spencer, well said and you gave me a perfect segue into the next segment because yes, I think people are sick of the gender stuff. | ||
| I think people are sick of the race stuff and the rest of it. | ||
| I think people want to go back to just viewing Americans as Americans and individuals and being judged on their merit and say not their skin color. | ||
| There was this guy a long time ago who didn't want his kids to be judged on their skin color. | ||
| I always forget his name. | ||
| But speaking of people who don't like that, there's this guy, Mark Lamont Hill. | ||
| And Chris, you had a rather spectacular incident with this guy. | ||
| So he's a big progressive lefty. | ||
| He's got a show on some network or something. | ||
| I want to throw to this clip Name something positive that you like about being white. | ||
| this on our 4th of July show is because your defense of what really is American in the face of sort | ||
| of the accusations of racism is just absolutely perfect. | ||
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Name something positive that you like about being white. | |
| Well, sure, I'll answer with a thing. | ||
| There's a lot of documents that are floating around public schools that say things like timeliness, | ||
| showing up on time is a white supremacist value or a white value, white dominant value. | ||
| Things like rationality, things like the enlightenment, things like objectivity. | ||
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These are very strange things to be ascribed to a racial identity. | |
| My view is that these actually should be ascribed to every individual human being, regardless of whatever racial category we impose on them. | ||
| Christopher, that doesn't answer the question, no. | ||
| You're telling me you're making straw men about things that are ascribed to whiteness that you think are wrongfully ascribed to whiteness. | ||
| I'm saying if whiteness isn't a negative thing, and there's something that you actually, and that whiteness actually shouldn't be constructed as all negative, name something positive about being, that you believe is positive about being white. | ||
| Again, I don't buy into the framework that the world can be reduced into these metaphysical categories of whiteness and blackness. | ||
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I think that's wrong. | |
| I think we should look at people as individuals. | ||
| I think we should celebrate different people's accomplishments. | ||
| I think of myself as an individual human being with my own capabilities, and I would hope that we could both judge each other as individuals and come to common values on that basis. | ||
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Fair enough. | |
| Fair enough. | ||
| Chris, I often say on this show that when you hear something true these days, it's just so refreshing because everything is just such layered nonsense all the time. | ||
| But that clip, you know, imagine if you had said the reverse to him. | ||
| And that's what I think people are fed up with and have had enough with. | ||
| America, individualism. | ||
| It's pretty good, right? | ||
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That's right. | |
| And I think the bait that he was trying to lay for me was for me to buy into the same framework that maybe he has bought into. | ||
| Reducing people to racial categories, pitting them against one another in this kind of eternal conflict. | ||
| And look, that's how the world worked for most of its history. | ||
| And it's actually a magical thing that we've been able to transcend it as much as we have. | ||
| I think we still have a way to go. | ||
| We need to kind of depolarize and rise above some of these divisions in this country. | ||
| But I think we can do it. | ||
| And I think that we have done it. | ||
| And we shouldn't let people like Mark Lamont Hill drag us back down. | ||
| And whoever you are, if you are black, white, Asian, Latino, straight, gay, let's start to treat each other equally and respectfully and give each other a sense of dignity as individuals. | ||
| Because what we learned in the 20th century, just like the centuries before, is that when you provide people with totalizing identity categories, things can get very ugly and very destructive in a very quick manner. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I would say we don't have very far to go, actually. | ||
| We just have to start ignoring these people. | ||
| I think we all got there, and then they unearthed it again. | ||
| We don't really have to do much on that. | ||
| Josh, you're in Miami, as I am in Miami. | ||
| We live in one of the most multicultural cities in the United States. | ||
| I hear as much Spanish as English. | ||
| I've got a couple Honduran guys working in my kitchen right now. | ||
| Nobody cares who's gay. | ||
| Nobody cares what language you speak, as long as you can figure out a way to communicate with each other. | ||
| It's all good here in America. | ||
| These are the guys who are bringing it all back. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's funny. | ||
| Oliver Weissman, who's an editor of The Spectator, he had an essay in City Journal, Chris's publication, a few months ago. | ||
| It was about the city of Miami, and the title of the essay was The Least Woke City in America. | ||
| It's a very interesting essay. | ||
| I would encourage the viewers to go ahead and check it out. | ||
| And what he basically says, Dave, is kind of what you said here, is that I view what's happening here in Miami, what's happening here in our backyard, what's happening here kind of in Florida, perhaps, to go a little further in general, It really is ground zero of a broader American realignment. | ||
| And what you are increasingly seeing is Hispanics, to a slight lesser extent Blacks, but really kind of just working class, middle-income people all across the country who have just totally had it with the woke nonsense. | ||
| They have just totally had it with the imperious, moralistic, high-handed nature of our purported would-be woke superiors who refuse to countenance the possibility that their opinion might not be gospel truth | ||
| or Moses descending from Sinai with the tablets. | ||
| I mean, it is really not that difficult to understand here, but you're really seeing it play out to your point | ||
| right here in Miami. | ||
| I mean, I live walking distance from Little Havana. | ||
| I mean, you walk over there, you see MAGA, Trump 2020, Trump One signs, literally everywhere you go. | ||
| Joe Biden stuff, nowhere to be found. | ||
| You will see a lot of Let's Go Brandon stuff though. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| There is a lot of Let's Go Brandon stuff here floating around in Florida. | ||
| And our governor does refer to him as Brandon. | ||
| Spencer, it's like, what else do we have to do? | ||
| I think you're the youngest on the panel. | ||
| What else do we have to do with the young people to completely get rid of these ideas? | ||
| Well, thank God. | ||
| Last time I was not the youngest, it turned out and I was very disappointed in that. | ||
| But yeah, now I've retained my status. | ||
| And, you know, look, we're here for the Fourth of July. | ||
| It is a momentous occasion for reflecting on the history of our country. | ||
| And one of the things that fills me with the most sorrow when I hear these clowns get up and say things like, you know, America is founded on systemic racism, there's racism in the DNA of the country, right, is, you know, we've been through this before at the cost of much blood and treasure. | ||
| And, you know, when when somebody says America's founded on systemic racism, you know, there is somebody that I hear echoed in the background from the history of our country. | ||
| And it's not George Washington, and it's not Abraham Lincoln. | ||
| It's Stephen Douglas, right, the famous opponent of Lincoln, who got up and said that this country was founded on the white basis. | ||
| And he was advancing an interpretation of the meaning of our country | ||
| and the meaning of our founding documents. | ||
| And it was only by putting forward the true interpretation of those documents | ||
| that Lincoln was able to stand up and say, no. | ||
| And one of the things that he did is he appealed to the Declaration, | ||
| this idea that all men are created equal, which we celebrate on this weekend. | ||
| And he said, most Americans, they may be indifferent to slavery | ||
| because it doesn't affect them. | ||
| They may indeed, in some cases, feel they have to hold slaves. | ||
| But in their hearts, they know what's true about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| They know that all men are created equal and they know that the rest of this stuff that this Douglas guy is saying is utter garbage. | ||
| And as Chris was pointing out, you know, that's not a given. | ||
| Americans are an amazing people in this way. | ||
| We have, you know, beaten into us by our history, by the suffering that our forebears had to go through in order to win this precious nation. | ||
| We have a sense innately in us that is taught to us from our traditions. | ||
| that all of this woke stuff is regressive. | ||
| It's the most profoundly primitive regression away from what this country is supposed to be. | ||
| And, you know, God help me, for all that our elites have attempted to erase that | ||
| from the public view, I still think that when they go out into those parking lots | ||
| and they talk to those folks in those grocery stores, I hear the voice of America. | ||
| It doesn't matter how old you are. | ||
| People are still suspicious of this stuff, and it's obvious who's on the right side here. | ||
| Chris, what do you think the win actually looks like? | ||
| Like, is the win just political, like, okay, Republicans get this big red wave, we reverse a little, or a whole bunch of what's going on in some of these states, et cetera, et cetera? | ||
| Or is there something else that we should be looking to as, oh, wow, we really did, you know, exercise wokeism from the mainstream, and we really did defeat it and get rid of it, and it's out of the schools, et cetera, et cetera? | ||
| Yeah, I think you have to make it so unappealing and simultaneously allow people, allow the public to start speaking openly against it. | ||
| And then you shift the incentive so that there is no incentive to adopt this kind of ideology wherever you might be. | ||
| And you know, one thing that I think about, especially on the 4th of July, is the television image from 2020. | ||
| It was in the middle of the pandemic, first round of lockdowns. | ||
| It was kind of just on the tail end of the most destructive BLM riots And I remember seeing this drone footage on local news in Los Angeles, not exactly a right-wing place. | ||
| And the government had said, no fireworks, you can't do it, it's banned. | ||
| And yet they have this drone footage of the entire city, millions upon millions of people. | ||
| The whole sky is lit up with these mortar fireworks. | ||
| And it showed me one thing. | ||
| One, Americans still have the spirit to rebel. | ||
| against unjust authority. | ||
| And also most Americans, even in a deep blue place like Los Angeles, still love this country. | ||
| We have to tap into that sentiment, telling people from all different identity backgrounds | ||
| and all different geographical backgrounds. | ||
| This is still a great country. | ||
| Join us, participate with us, and vanquish this evil ideology that has spread too far. | ||
| Josh, to that point, since you're running the Newsweek op-ed page, and we want to give the devil his due, there are people that obviously believe completely the reverse of everything that we're saying here. | ||
| How do you go about managing to say what voices should and shouldn't be heard related to all of this? | ||
| Well, look, I mean, on a personal level, you know, I oversee a team of five editors. | ||
| I have four deputies, one of whom, Badi Ungar-Sargon, has kind of made a bit of a name for herself over the past year, year and a half, as kind of an outspoken anti-woke liberal of sorts. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, we are trying to do something that now is counter-cultural and really is kind of counter-historical, given the current moment, which is trying to actually kind of give all sides a fair hearing. | ||
| So I kind of just go out there and I, you know, I give it my all. | ||
| I mean, my column just out today, actually, you know, to your question, Dave, earlier, what do we do next is actually focusing specifically in kind of the legal judicial arena, which is kind of my area of specialty in the aftermath of this, you know, real string of consistent Supreme Court victories, where we go from there. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, we'll platform any of other people as well. | ||
| I just want to highlight one other thing, though, because Spencer touched on, you know, Spencer's a good Claremonster, of course, for invoking Abraham Lincoln on whose birthday I'm born. | ||
| That's my favorite figure in American history. | ||
| But to your point, Dave, we really don't have to go back very far. | ||
| You know, I wrote a column back when I was at the Daily Wire a few years ago. | ||
| Lincoln really is the seminal figure that we need to look to on July 4th, because he really did cherish the Declaration. | ||
| He referred to it as the electric cord that kind of binds the generations, you know, the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. | ||
| And the Declaration is just a vindication of exactly what Chris has been fighting for in his own work for the past two years, which is that we are all children in the eyes of God. | ||
| We are all equal, citing Genesis 1. | ||
| Whatever your religion is, you can just look at that and just observe the world. | ||
| You can deduce that by pure reason. | ||
| We're all human beings. | ||
| Doesn't matter what color you are, what skin you are, whatever. | ||
| That is the message, I think, of America, and that's what we should be celebrating this weekend. | ||
| Man, and we are pinned as the racists. | ||
| Well said, my friend. | ||
| And actually, you've also given me a perfect segue to the third segment here because in defense of the West and individualism and everything else, I thought there's no one better that we could throw to than Jordan Peterson. | ||
| And Jordan had a bit of an odd week because currently he is suspended on Twitter for saying something about Ellen or Elliot Page, whatever you want to call it. | ||
| Her him whatever and then which probably just got me booted. | ||
| I had a good run though You know I feel like getting booted on the July 4th weekend is sort of right So I want to throw to a clip of Jordan, but not only did that happen that he got suspended But he also announced a massive partnership with the daily wire But here's Jordan on individualism and the West the fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid How about that? | ||
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You know it's not You think it's an accident? | |
| Oh, here's how you find out, okay? | ||
| Which countries do people want to move away from? | ||
| Hey, not ours! | ||
| Which countries do people want to move to? | ||
| Ours! | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| They work better! | ||
| And it's not because we went around the world stealing everything we could get our hands on. | ||
| It's because we got certain fundamental assumptions right Thank God for that, after thousands and thousands of years of trying. | ||
| And because of that, we've managed to establish a set of civilizations that are shining lights in the world. | ||
| We actually value the individual, right? | ||
| The individual has intrinsic value in Western societies. | ||
| Do you know how long it took people to formulate that as an idea? | ||
| And how unlikely that idea is that poor you, you know, useless, powerless you, with all your damn faults, You're actually worth something. | ||
| You're worth something to the point that the law has to respect you. | ||
| God, we don't want to abandon that for some half-witted collectivism, which we're doing as rapidly as possible, because one of the things that characterizes the radical left types is they don't give a damn about you as an individual, or about individuals at all. | ||
| Man, every time I think I'm a halfway decent broadcaster or a sort of maybe okay guy to communicate some ideas, you just watch a little Jordan and it'll put you in your place. | ||
| Spencer, this is sort of your specialty. | ||
| I mean, man, he got it right there. | ||
| We have churned through a lot of bad ideas, a lot of bloodshed, and a lot of pain to get where we're at right now, and we could be on the precipice of giving it away. | ||
| Sure enough. | ||
| Well, you know, you talk about those fundamental assumptions of Western civilization, and You know, as much as I'm a patriot, as much as I am an American who loves his country, one of the things that makes me love the country so deeply is that those fundamental assumptions in the Declaration represent the jewel, you know, the fruit of hundreds and hundreds of years of Western striving and thought. | ||
| You know, the idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with the inalienable rights to life. | ||
| Liberty and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| When the Declaration says that, you know, these truths are self-evident, people think that means that they just fall from the sky. | ||
| Oh, it's just common sense. | ||
| You know, everybody thinks this. | ||
| But this is not true. | ||
| It's not the case, as Peterson is pointing out there. | ||
| You know, this is a rare thing, and it took a long time to figure it out. | ||
| Good civilizations, high and mighty civilizations in the past, did not believe this. | ||
| Sparta left babies to die if they weren't strong enough. | ||
| You know, Aztec human sacrifice, very much a thing. | ||
| And even still today, you've seen people in China under the one-child policy just abandoning babies that were unwanted, that didn't fit the needs of the state, that were economically inconvenient. | ||
| The human heart, man, is full of evil, and to guard against that, we need these fundamental truths. | ||
| They're incredibly precious, and we can never take them for granted. | ||
| We have to understand that they come as a kind of island, you know, in a sea, a howling | ||
| wasteland of human darkness. | ||
| And to protect that, you know, against the folks who are now, as you say, you know, bringing | ||
| up exactly the same alternatives. | ||
| They present themselves as charging forth into this bright, glorious new future. | ||
| They're just pagans. | ||
| I mean, you look at what's happening with Dobbs, you know, now there are going to be | ||
| states that will, you know, politicians that will stand there and advocate for babies to | ||
| to be aborted like up to two weeks after birth. | ||
| You know, I'm not even exaggerating. | ||
| I read articles in journals of medical ethics and philosophy of science that argue for things called something called post-birth abortion, otherwise known as infanticide. | ||
| And, you know, you think you look at this and you think it's some sort of shocking horror. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's just the state of the human heart without the protections that we enshrined in our Declaration and our Constitution. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Like, we get into this defensive crouch sometimes because they call us racist, they call us nasty, and we just try to fight for the bare minimum. | ||
| Oh, we're not racist. | ||
| We're not nasty. | ||
| We're okay. | ||
| That's not enough. | ||
| We're good, man. | ||
| We're the best that's ever been, and we ought to preserve this country because it's worth it. | ||
| Not bad. | ||
| Not bad, dude. | ||
| You can come back. | ||
| Hey, alright. | ||
| Chris, is the point, is the real point that Spencer's making there that nothing is self-evident anymore. | ||
| That the things that you're always fighting with people about and trying to expose at Disney or at our schools, that boys are not girls, that there is a difference between being racist and non-racist, all of this stuff, we don't take anything for obvious anymore. | ||
| There's nothing real anymore. | ||
|
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Yeah, that's right. | |
| And we shouldn't take anything for granted. | ||
| You've seen it just even with the economy in very simple kitchen table terms. | ||
| The economy doesn't run itself. | ||
| It's actually an incredible accomplishment to have clean water, plentiful electricity, a large comfortable home, a car or maybe two cars in the garage. | ||
| These are not natural conditions. | ||
| These only exist in a very tiny sliver of human history for a very tiny sliver of human beings. | ||
| And it was all invented and sustained here. | ||
| And so everything from our system of government to our economic way of life, to our faith and traditions, | ||
| these things need to be fought for and renewed. | ||
| And I think in some ways, what makes me optimistic about these fights that we're having, | ||
| like with Mark Lamont Hill or with Ibram Kendi or with the kind of crazy gender people | ||
| is that we're returning to the fundamental questions. | ||
| And I think if we can re-answer these fundamental questions, which we've really not had to answer in recent years | ||
| because we've taken them for granted, we can maybe get to that point of renewing | ||
| those more fundamental pillars of our society. | ||
| And so that's really the task that we have up for us today. | ||
| We're not debating about 20% versus 28% tax rates. | ||
| We're not debating those technical terms. | ||
| We have to go to the philosophical roots of our situation, our condition, our country. | ||
| And I think that we have to have good answers, just like Jordan Peterson does, in order to win. | ||
| Josh, I feel like you love that answer right there. | ||
| Like, whoa, let's actually confront things. | ||
| Let's know history and let's have this out. | ||
| I love both of these past answers from my two friends, Spencer and Chris. | ||
| I mean, Spencer, after your answer there, Dave, I almost kind of jumped off after Spencer's answer there. | ||
| I tried to pump some Toby Keith courtesy of the red, white and blue or something like that. | ||
| No, this is great stuff. | ||
| Look, I mean, Dave, my entire kind of public facing like role in this broader center right political | ||
| constellation that all of us inhabit is basically to encourage | ||
| conservatives to do exactly what Spencer and Chris and myself | ||
| are all saying on this panel, which is do not be content with a defensive posture. | ||
| Do not be content with playing defense. | ||
| Neutrality is not ultimately the goal. | ||
| I wrote this directly in my column in Newsweek today. | ||
| Neutrality is an uninspiring goal for a political movement. | ||
| The actual goal is victory. | ||
| The actual goal is to subdue our opponents when our opponents are people like Ibram X. Kendi, | ||
| critical race theorists, when they are people that are trying | ||
| to chemically castrate children. | ||
| Those people can roughly be described as domestic enemies. | ||
| Those are our political foes. | ||
| And we have to be willing to just assert that. | ||
| They are going to call us racist, sexist, bigot, homophobic, whatever. | ||
| You know, as Andrew Breitbart once said, walk towards the fire. | ||
| Embrace it. | ||
| Just deal with it. | ||
| Or else, just don't be in this fight, obviously. | ||
| But there is no point in just being in a weak position, just pleading tolerance, tolerance. | ||
| Those days are so over. | ||
| Maybe you will buy yourself one more day of charity from the New York Times editorial board if you plea for help. | ||
| But the forward way that we actually make progress in this country, again, is not to pursue some All-star panel today. | ||
| Absolute all-star panel. | ||
| I'll give you guys each one more thought on July 4th, America, maybe what you're eating, what you're doing, where you're lighting illegal fireworks, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Chris, you first. | ||
| Yeah, I just encourage everyone to take this time to spend it with your family, spend it with your neighbors. | ||
| At the end of the day, our lives are not abstractions. | ||
| They're very particular. | ||
| The people that we spend our time with, the place where we live. | ||
| So don't forget that. | ||
| Log off for the weekend, maybe, and spend time with the people that really matter to you. | ||
| Spencer, I have no doubt you will be at the many breweries of Nashville. | ||
| I will be taking a tour, in fact, of the breweries of Nashville. | ||
| I know you guys are Miami supremacists, and I respect that. | ||
| As we were discussing before the show, the FOMO is real. | ||
| I see you guys having those parties out there, and I wish I could come join, but we have a lot of good stuff out here in the great state of Tennessee, and I think what Chris is saying is absolutely right. | ||
| Your neighbors are not, you know, these sort of identity categories that the left and the media have tried to shove them into. | ||
| The whole apparatus of our politics and of our mainstream media basically exists to erase the human individual from view, the neighbor that's right across the street. | ||
| And what does Jesus say? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Love thy neighbor as thyself. | ||
| There's a reason that he puts a human person almost in the place of God. | ||
| You love God and love your neighbor, right? | ||
| The reason for that is that it breaks down all of this garbage. | ||
| And that's part of what this country is about too. | ||
| You may find that there's somebody persuadable if you get out and, you know, | ||
| grill with them in your backyard and have a conversation. | ||
| And, you know, and God bless it. | ||
| God bless this country for making that possible. | ||
| Happy 4th of July. | ||
| Josh, I remember very vividly last year when I still lived in LA and we had a little July 4th party | ||
| thinking, man, I live in a place that's so out of whack with my beliefs. | ||
| And obviously that had been happening for quite some time. | ||
| Now I'm in Florida. | ||
| There are American flags everywhere. | ||
| There are alligator flags everywhere. | ||
| Everyone's free and happy here. | ||
| So I guess I can just take it easy this year, huh? | ||
| Well, I would encourage you to take it easy, but you know, I would also encourage the viewers of this program. | ||
| I mean, look, this is July 4th weekend. | ||
| It's the 246th. | ||
| Anniversary, obviously, of the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| This is a time, I think, just worth contemplating a little bit, that America is fundamentally good. | ||
| I mean, not to get, like, all, like, preacher on a soapbox, but to get a preacher on a soapbox for a little bit, America is a fundamentally just enterprise in Republican self-government among men. | ||
| It is the most just modern government that has ever been instituted in the modern history of political philosophy, in the modern history of kind of tangible day-to-day governance. | ||
| It is fundamentally worth defending against the woke totalitarians who want to burn this thing down. | ||
| But one thing that I think the viewers could do, it's a little tripe, but I'll say it anyway, I would encourage everyone to just read the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| I mean, that seems like a pretty logical thing to do on July 4th weekend. | ||
| And it's very difficult to kind of come away from that very poetic and magisterial document and conclude that this is anything other than a fundamentally just country that is worth defending until the day we die. | ||
| Well, guys, enjoy your burgers, enjoy your dogs and your fireworks and all that good stuff. | ||
| I'm gonna finish up for a couple of minutes. | ||
| Have a good weekend and I'll talk to you guys soon. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Take care, guys. | ||
| All right, people, I think we hit the right tone. | ||
| What do you guys think here in studio? | ||
| Did we hit the right tone for July 4th? | ||
| We did it? | ||
| We did it? | ||
| All right, very good. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I don't know that I need to add anything else other than celebrate this great country. | ||
| Even if you don't live in this great country, even if you're watching this and you've never visited this great country, 246 years, and does it sometimes feel like we're about to give it away? | ||
| It does. | ||
| So many markers, as we just spent the last half hour talking about. | ||
| There are so many markers that good things are happening, that sanity and clarity will prevail, that freedom is good, individualism is good, that states' rights and self-government are good, and I think we can get there. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| So I hope you will enjoy your hot dogs. | ||
| I hope you will enjoy your burgers, your fireworks, and whatever else you do on this July 4th. | ||
| Spend a little less time online, maybe. | ||
| That's my challenge to you. | ||
| And we're off, obviously, for Monday for the three-day weekend, so we'll be back on Tuesday. |
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