July 7, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
16:42
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Yeah, yeah, I got multiple notifications on LinkedIn that people working in the Prime Minister's office were looking at my profile. | ||
| More than once I got these notifications, and the first time I was like, okay, what does that mean? | ||
| then the second time, the third time. | ||
| And it was clear to me that I had said some things that were not so good for their public relations team. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I think that's what we're gonna do. | |
| I think that's what we're gonna do. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the Substack essayist for Noble Truths | ||
| with Rav Arora and journalist who I don't have to put air quotes around, | ||
| It's quite lovely. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey Dave. | ||
| It's good to be on and it's good to get that formal Noble Truths with Rav Arora introduction. | ||
| I'm still working on that branding. | ||
| I like the way you said it for sure. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Noble truths with Rav Arora. | ||
| It sounds pleasant and lofty and really the highest compliment that I can give someone these days, the fact that I can call you a journalist and I didn't have to do air quotes. | ||
| I mean, does it get any better than that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And I don't have any formal education. | ||
| So for some people that evokes a lot of skepticism about who this weirdo writing in his mom's basement is. | ||
| But I think, um, I think for a lot of people, it's just, I just kind of just say what I want to say, and I'm just straight with the facts, and I don't try to spin it according to any kind of preconditioned narrative. | ||
| I'm not working for anybody. | ||
| I'm just writing about issues that are important to me, and I don't really identify as liberal or conservative, just kind of trying to make sense of the world, whatever comes my way, and if that means I'm going to sound a little left on something or a little right, I just go for it. | ||
| Well, Rav, I would rather have a weirdo in his mom's basement than someone that went to Columbia Journalism School, so you are good to go. | ||
| Most of my audience probably recognizes you. | ||
| You've been on the show for multiple Friday panel extravaganzas, but you do fine work as a journalist. | ||
| You are up in Canada. | ||
| And the reason I wanted to do this condensed interview with you today, and we're just sort of shooting this on the fly, is because you've gotten into some hot water with your prime minister up there in Canada, Justin Trudeau, who, in my estimation, is the most authoritarian, I would say, world leader from a Western nation. | ||
| And you've been writing a bit about him and what's going on in Canada, and now the government is looking into you. | ||
| You scary person in your mom's basement. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't, I don't know why I'm so threatening. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| My, my, my mom has been funny about this and I can, I can talk about that in a second, but, but, um, yeah, I, I wrote an op-ed in the New York post calling Trudeau basically a horrible authoritarian leader who's violated basic human rights, civil liberties, and constitutional Um, right. | ||
| Uh, specifically with respect to the vaccine mandates. | ||
| And I, and I just talked about how my family were immigrants from India and we came to Canada in search for more freedom, whether that's financial, social, uh, political, vocational, we just wanted more opportunities. | ||
| And that was kind of the idea that my, that my mom and my dad is to give us more freedoms, right? | ||
| Give their kids more freedom so they can pursue what they want to pursue. | ||
| And here we are during the COVID pandemic and. | ||
| You know, yes, there are many issues surrounding keeping people safe, keeping vulnerable people safe. | ||
| And there are various restrictions that perhaps make sense. | ||
| But when it came to just my freedom, it was completely restricted. | ||
| I couldn't go to the gym for the longest time, for several months. | ||
| Couldn't go out to a restaurant and dine in. | ||
| And I couldn't even travel by air. | ||
| I couldn't even fly or go on a train anywhere in the country, let alone leave the country. | ||
| For several months due to the travel vaccine mandates that outright discriminated, outright banned the unvaccinated from traveling anywhere other than if you want to go in your car. | ||
| But, but even, even that you couldn't cross the U S Canada border. | ||
| And I missed out on a lot of opportunities like in December, for example, I was talking to Ben Shapiro's team. | ||
| I've been on his show a couple of times and we were thinking about doing something in Florida actually at the time in person. | ||
| And I just couldn't go because I was banned. | ||
| I was deemed as a second class citizen who was not able to travel. | ||
| And so in this article that I wrote, I just made that point of, in many ways, my freedoms would have been more secured in India, the country that I came from, than here, even though we came here for more freedoms. | ||
| And that, that to me is just a total, a total travesty and really makes us reevaluate What this supposedly free liberal democracy here in Canada, where our freedoms are completely restricted. | ||
| So you write the piece in the New York Post. | ||
| And of course, nothing you're saying is coming as a surprise to my audience, because obviously we've covered a lot of what's going on with Trudeau in Canada and the trucker convoy and freezing of bank accounts and all of that stuff. | ||
| So I think everyone watching this is on board. | ||
| They hear what you're saying. | ||
| But then how did this thing level up? | ||
| You suddenly found some government people were doing a little digging on you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I got multiple notifications on LinkedIn that people were That people working in the Prime Minister's office were looking at my profile. | ||
| More than once I got these notifications, and the first time I was like, okay, what does that mean? | ||
| Then the second time, the third time, and it was clear to me that I had said some things that were not so good for their public relations team. | ||
| And I don't know who it was that looked at me, whether it was just some You know, 27 year old intern at the public relations office or or whether it was somebody higher up. | ||
| A lot of people think it's somebody perhaps higher up who for them like this is really bad press. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's obviously not my goal. | ||
| My goal is not to just shit on Trudeau. | ||
| You know, my goal is to just say what I honestly want to say and talk about some of the disturbing authoritarian trends in this country. | ||
| And it just it seemed to have rung an alarm for them and they wanted to look into me. | ||
| And I don't know what the implications of that is other than I'm on the prime minister's radar | ||
| and I should probably put that on my Twitter bio. | ||
| It should be on your Twitter bio for as long as you're allowed to be on Twitter. | ||
| I know a little something about how tenuous that can be. | ||
| But can you just talk, like, joking aside for a second, can you just talk about the chilling effect of that? | ||
| I mean, look, you're outspoken publicly, you're a young person trying to make your bones, make your career, you are publicly un-vaxxed so you could not leave the country, you're critical of the government, and now you have government agents, in essence, Looking closely at your work. | ||
| I mean, you know, you're in your mom's basement, as you said. | ||
| It's not, it's not the most fun thing in the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I, some people have mentioned to me that I should take this a bit more seriously than I am. | ||
| And I think that's just, just my personality is like, I, I don't take these things super, super seriously and lose sleep over them. | ||
| I mean, if, if Trudeau is losing sleep over me, you know, that's fine enough. | ||
| I don't want to lose sleep over making Trudeau lose sleep, but, but no, no, in all seriousness, it is, It is very chilling that one article can have that kind of effect, especially given that I don't really have like a massive platform yet. | ||
| I'm still growing. | ||
| I'm still a young person. | ||
| And I mean, even just on Twitter, too, with that article that I posted, there were so many journalists, government funded journalists, by the way, working for the CBC, working for Global News, the Toronto Star. | ||
| that were pointing out that this op-ed is total balderdash and he should just get vaccinated and he's just whining about his freedoms. | ||
| And a lot of people, by the way, weirdly enough, were saying, oh, he should just go back to India. | ||
| Why is he even here? | ||
| Like people like that were saying. | ||
| And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. | ||
| Why did we just go like Trump suddenly? | ||
| Like why? | ||
| Like I thought this was the rhetoric that, you know, was associated with Trump. | ||
| And then that was one of the points of that essay and a couple of other essays that I've written before, too. | ||
| It's like the direction we went in In the name of safety, diversity, inclusivity. | ||
| It's, it's exactly what we feared would be, um, of the other side. | ||
| Like Trudeau genuinely has become this monstrous discriminatory authoritarian leader that we all feared Trump would be. | ||
| And I'm no Trump defender. | ||
| I'm not gonna, uh, you know, defend him or openly support him or any of that. | ||
| But what Trudeau is displaying is true authoritarianism. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Stripping people away from their constitutional rights and their civil liberties. | ||
| And it's, it's, you know, when you're a young journalist, you know, I'm, I'm definitely, um, not, you know, part of the conventional narrative because I'm, I'm not writing for the CBC. | ||
| I'm not writing for any of these traditional outlets. | ||
| I'm just an independent writer. | ||
| And it seems to me there's, there's a weird shortage of that here in Canada. | ||
| Like otherwise it's mysterious why I've, I've risen, whereas other, Journalists haven't. | ||
| It's like there aren't enough independent journalists who are willing to say what I'm willing to say because they rather get their journalism degree and work for the CBC and get paid a certain salary and spew out the same political narrative over and over again. | ||
| But for me, it's like that. | ||
| I don't want to be anything close to that. | ||
| I want to be my own independent voice and raise these concerns about my country. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you bring up a couple of interesting things. | ||
| I mean, first, this idea that Trudeau, in essence, has become what they purported Trump to be. | ||
| Trump turned out not to really be those things for all his faults, and now you've got Trudeau who's actually doing many of those things and exercising that state power. | ||
| But to your latter point about these journalists that go work for the CBC and everything else, you guys have a major problem right now in Canada that we don't necessarily have here yet, or at least so obviously, which is that the government not only does fund a huge amount of your journalism overtly, here they do it more subtly, But now, independent journalists like you and Ezra Levant over at The Rebel and a bunch of other people that are trying to do some interesting things in Canada are going to be held to sort of untenable standards when it comes to your work, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| There's a very small minority of journalists who are doing what me and Ezra and I'm trying to think who else I'd put in that category. | ||
| I mean, Rex Murphy writes for the National Post, so he writes for an established outlet that's conservative-leaning, and he's been on Jordan's podcast a bunch to talk about Canadian politics. | ||
| But I think the incentives are so stacked. | ||
| Like, if you're a young journalist, right, my age or a bit older, and you're conservative-leaning or libertarian-leaning, and you're really dissatisfied with what the government is doing right now, it's like, Why would you ever want to do this? | ||
| Why would you ever want to get into this career path where the odds are so stacked against you that if you want to have a well-paying job, if you want to put food on the table for your family, you have to apply to the CBC, the Toronto Star, and you have to continually perpetuate and regurgitate these same narratives. | ||
| Otherwise, you're not going to be making a lot of money. | ||
| I mean, even with Uh, even with local outlets here, like I live in a small city called Chilliwack, about an hour away from Vancouver, and the editor of the Chilliwack Progress, he's openly called me like an alt-right conspiracy theorist, a right-winger, somebody who's, uh, who's covering for white people. | ||
| Like he's openly blocked me on all platforms. | ||
| He's called me alt-right and horrible names. | ||
| And it's like, like our, local newspaper, which is thankfully dying, and it's not doing that well. | ||
| Even there, there's a very established, deep established narrative, even though we live in a fairly conservative area, actually. | ||
| But even the local media outlets, let alone the national, the federal, the provincial level outlets, they've also established this given narrative. | ||
| And so you you have a lot of people who might be interested in becoming journalists, but they just see that that this is not going to be financially sustainable. | ||
| So then they become professors, they become Accountants or lawyers or doctors or whatever that that's kind of where it's at but so it's it's very rare for people like me who are young who Have kind of taken this risk and maybe because I'm young I'm more able to take a bit of that risk because I have Certain freedoms, you know living with my parents still and doing these kind of things where I can take these big risks and speak out for what I want to say, whereas whereas other people just financially given the media ecosystem just aren't able to and | ||
| How much longer do you think the situation in Canada is sustainable? | ||
| I mean, look, you've got people like Jordan Peterson, who are outspoken critics of the government, and I think Jordan is at least considering leaving Canada altogether. | ||
| Gad Saad, who of course, Professor at Concordia, one of my best friends, you know, he is often talking about leaving Canada. | ||
| Viva Frye, another big, actual journalist, lawyer, he just left, he moved to Florida this week. | ||
| I mean, the brain drain on a society like that Can't last forever. | ||
| No, no, it's... Again, I've already talked about journalism, but it's the same with academia. | ||
| You know, you go, like, even my local university, you know, I've already mentioned my local newspaper. | ||
| They hate me. | ||
| The local university, there's also professors there who... There was one think tank that I wanted to be part of that was about having young people talk about real political issues, particularly about race. | ||
| And I wanted to get into this and the professor openly said to me, like, no, no, you're not welcome. | ||
| Like, we don't want any of your views here. | ||
| You know, like the dominant narrative within universities, it's so centralized, it's so narrow minded that people who even are outside of the norm, they're immediately excluded and they're immediately marginalized. | ||
| So there's this big intellectual dominant force that's very left leaning here in Canada across universities. | ||
| And I'm not going to say like all universities or everybody's like that. | ||
| There are wonderful professors that I work with, although more about like religion or psychology or other things that aren't as politically affected, you might say, but for journalists who are coming up right now and for people in academia and the humanities and the liberal arts, it's like there's an increasing ideological monoculture where you have to abide by these certain Religious precepts with regards to gender, with regards to race, with regards to inequality, with regards to vaccination status. | ||
| And if you don't toe that line, then you're immediately an outsider. | ||
| And it's making people like myself think about potentially moving too. | ||
| I don't know what will happen, but I think I'll definitely want to move here at some point in the future. | ||
| I don't know if you've heard, but the sun is always shining here in the free state of Florida. | ||
| Hey, I would consider it. | ||
| I would generally consider that. | ||
| All right, well, we'll take this offline. | ||
| All right, well, I wanted to do this quickly with you just so that people could hear about this because you are fighting the good fight up there. | ||
| I didn't know you were doing it from your mom's basement. | ||
| Now, it seems doubly cool what you're doing, so keep fighting, and we'll link to your substack down below so people can... Yeah, hey, it's a nice basement here. | ||
| It's a nice basement. | ||
| It's not... You got a window in the basement. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty good. | ||
| I got a window. | ||
| It's not like she's just throwing fish heads down there once a week. | ||
| By the way, I'll just quickly say too, my mom has been very fearful and discouraging me from ever writing anything bad about Trudeau. | ||
| She's been like, Rav, do we need bodyguards outside? | ||
| You have little siblings, Rav, who go to school. | ||
| Don't ruin their reputation by being this supposed scary right winger. | ||
| She's like, maybe we have to move places or change addresses. | ||
| Don't write anything bad about Trudeau in her very Indian mom kind of way. | ||
| I'm like, Mom, I'm going to move out. | ||
| And she's like, fine, do it. | ||
| I'll move with Dave Rubin. | ||
| Look after his kids in August, maybe. | ||
| The only thing is we don't have basements in Florida because of the storms, the flooding. | ||
| So let me see what I can do. | ||
| I'll get back to you on that one. | ||
| Yeah, you got to expose some racial diversity. | ||
| They need to see some brown faces. | ||
| Indeed, indeed. | ||
| All right, Rob, keep up the good work, man. | ||
| All right, thanks. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about the media instead of nonstop yelling, check out our media playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out the full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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