Oct. 30, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
47:18
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Years ago, when they started this censoring thing on Twitter and on Facebook and on Google and so on, I said, no, no, you have to, you have to make regulations. | ||
| It's a new industry. | ||
| Every human interaction is regulated by the law and conservatives are going, no, they must have freedom of speech. | ||
| I thought, absolutely not. | ||
| You know, this, these guys are basically, uh, what do they call them? | ||
| Common carriers. | ||
| They're like the phone company. | ||
| If I'm, if I'm on the phone to you and they, Operator comes on and says, excuse me, sir, you can't say that to Dave and Dave can't. | ||
| But, you know, no, that guy gets carried away because there's a regulation against that. | ||
| We need to do that now. | ||
| We're just catching up with it. | ||
| I feel it's happening. | ||
| It may happen in the Supreme Court session. | ||
| It's certainly their laws now in Texas that have been supported by courts where the court just said in Texas, no, you know, they don't don't have a right to violate free speech. | ||
| It's a new thing. | ||
| Almost everything we're going through is traceable back to the internet, in the same way that everything during the Reformation is traceable back to the printing press. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the host of The Andrew Klavan Show on The Daily Wire, as well as author of the brand new book, A Strange Habit of Mind, Andrew Klavan. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Great to see you, Dave. | ||
| Andrew, you've done many things in your career. | ||
| Screenwriting, many books, Daily Wire, but you opened for me during the Don't Burn This Country book tour. | ||
| Would you say that was the highlight of the whole operation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And why even continue working after that? | |
| I struggled with that question after opening for your act. | ||
| I thought, you know, I'm now so covered in shame that maybe there's no possibility of going on with any self-respect at all, but I've managed a little bit. | ||
| How many books have you written? | ||
| Every time I bring you on, I ask you how many books, and I'm still not even sure how many books. | ||
| It's a lot of books. | ||
| Well, it's a lot of books. | ||
| But when they published it, they said it was my 36th, so I'm just going to go with that. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| I mean, that is really something. | ||
| Do you feel like each one, when you finish a book, do you feel like it's your last and then suddenly something, the well, there's some more in the well? | ||
| Or how do you feel usually? | ||
| Now, the only time I ever thought of giving up was after writing a book called Empire of Lies. | ||
| which was a very difficult book and a very emotional book and it really wrecked me. | ||
| And I walked in and I said to my wife, that's it, I'm done writing novels. | ||
| And she said, sit down and have some dinner. | ||
| It wasn't even a second where she thought that I might be telling the truth. | ||
| It's kind of like an addiction. I can't stop. | ||
| All right. So I want to get into the book. | ||
| So we just got a copy this morning, so in full disclosure, I have not read it yet, but I've read the synopsis here. | ||
| And obviously between big tech and billionaires and espionage and all sorts of stuff, there's a lot that's relevant to our political stuff of the day. | ||
| So there'll be plenty for us to talk about. | ||
| But first off, you, like me and so many others, are a California expat. | ||
| You are a refugee of what is now, I would say, communist California. | ||
| You're feeling pretty good. | ||
| Do people know publicly where you live, sort of, roughly? | ||
| Yeah, I'm in Virginia in the D.C. | ||
| area, and yeah, it's the smartest thing I ever did. | ||
| I mean, it was the zombie apocalypse by the time we left. | ||
| I was living in the Hollywood Hills, which is a very ritzy neighborhood, and by the time I left, I was patrolling my backyard at night with a gun to make sure nobody had moved in. | ||
| You know, I had friends who had found homeless people in their apartments, friends who found them in their backyard. | ||
| And you know, it's nothing against the homeless, but there's nothing compassionate about letting people live on the streets. | ||
| It's not compassionate to them, and it's not compassionate to the people who come to a city to find a way of life that's, you know, pleasant and uplifting. | ||
| I don't think you can do that when your city is overrun by people, not just homeless people, but also criminals who are not being restrained in any way. | ||
| It's just amazing to me. | ||
| It is absolutely amazing to me that A state like California, which is paradise, I mean, if you take the people out, it's just paradise, can be destroyed at that level, and yet people go on voting for the people who destroyed it. | ||
| I once asked Larry Elder why he thought that was so, and he said they just don't connect the policies to the apocalypse. | ||
| It's all policy. | ||
| I mean, New York was like that in the 80s and 90s when I lived there, and then Giuliani came in, changed the policies. | ||
| They called him a racist every single day in the New York Times. | ||
| He cleaned the city up and made it one of the most beautiful cities, one of the safest big cities in the world, if not the safest. | ||
| It took two years to destroy all that work that was kept in place by Bloomberg all those years. | ||
| It took just two years of left-wing policies to destroy it. | ||
| It's hard to understand. | ||
| Like, people will not turn the corner. | ||
| I don't know whether it's the feeling of virtue that leftism gives them, but I'm just so happy to be out of that place. | ||
| It was absolutely disgusting by the time I left. | ||
| Do you see any hope? | ||
| Because, you know, we had a couple dinners in L.A. | ||
| before, you left first, wisely, and then I followed a couple months later, but all of our friends left. | ||
| And from everything I've seen in basically the nine or so months that I've been gone, it's just It's getting worse. | ||
| I mean, what, how should we feel? | ||
| The people that leave, like, should we feel, oh, maybe they will turn it around or should we be hopeful? | ||
| Or is it just like, you know what, enough already. | ||
| That's what you guys want. | ||
| Then just keep running with that. | ||
| Well, you know, I always hope it is one of the United States. | ||
| I always hope that it'll come back, you know, online. | ||
| And in the past, because so much of the industry is creative, there's Hollywood and there's, you know, Silicon Valley. | ||
| So these are people who are creative, they're capitalists, they like to pretend they're not capitalists, they like to make speeches at the Oscars about not being capitalists, but they're the most capitalist people in the world. | ||
| And so when their business gets undercut to a certain degree, you think that they're going to come back and elect a Reagan or even a Schwarzenegger, somebody to sort of change things up. | ||
| The problem now is that because we live in a world where we can be connected like this, like you and I are connected right this minute, there's not that much difference if you leave. | ||
| You can build an industry anywhere. | ||
| You can run an industry from anywhere. | ||
| And so my concern is that now people will simply move to Nashville. | ||
| If you go to Nashville, everybody there is from L.A. | ||
| You know, people will simply move to other places and just let the place sink into the sea. | ||
| You think eventually eventually the absolute destruction of a brilliant economy will will Back up on them. | ||
| You think that people will only stand it so long, and yet the fact that they have stood by, well, for instance, San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, has been turned into a hellhole, is just amazing. | ||
| It is just amazing. | ||
| So I don't know if it's gonna come back. | ||
| It's interesting, because more and more people are talking about what is the United part of the United States of America. | ||
| It's like, I keep saying it, but I honestly feel like I moved to a different country, not to a different state, But to a different country and that I guess that leaves us with the question of what makes us united. | ||
| And I think there's a lot of, you know, conservatives or whatever you want to call broadly people on the right that are just like, there's nothing left. | ||
| There's nothing left. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| Well, that is a thing conservatives do. | ||
| You know, that's kind of a kind of a knee-jerk thing. | ||
| Conservatives say it's over. | ||
| It's all over. | ||
| I give up and all this. | ||
| And, you know, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, I just reminded people, you know, that things can change. | ||
| Amazing work can be done. | ||
| It takes a long time. | ||
| It took the left 60 years to take over our institutions and bring the country this low. | ||
| It's going to be a long fight to take it back, but it can be done. | ||
| My hope is that we become more federalist. | ||
| We let the states independently become laboratories of democracy, try different things. | ||
| And as we do that, the good ideas will spread. | ||
| The alternative scenario to that is we become more federalist, we split apart, and eventually we find ourselves at each other's throats. | ||
| But I hope that's not going to happen. | ||
| In fact, one of the things that I hope will help is the repeal of Roe v. Wade. | ||
| I hope that because of that, cultures are going to form that attract and repel people. | ||
| And I think that, you know, right now it's the economy. | ||
| People go places for the jobs. | ||
| They go places to get away from the homeless and from the crime. | ||
| But soon, people are going to go places to live with other people like themselves. | ||
| And as one way of living works better than others, I think maybe more states will turn over. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| You know, I should tell you that here in Miami, I did finally see one person with the Charlie Crist sign. | ||
| And I almost knocked on their door and offered them free mental health services for a year. | ||
| It's like, what are you doing? | ||
| You're here in heaven! | ||
| And you've got the... | ||
| Charlie, Chris, thank you. | ||
| Yeah, that's the big cue that they'll bring California with them. | ||
| So we're taping this just a little bit before these midterms. | ||
| I mean, are you basically feeling like this, you know, conventional thinking is red wave and the House and the Senate, they're gonna get everything back, win a couple of governorships, and then we'll reverse all this Biden insanity. | ||
| Are you on board conventional wisdom? | ||
| No, I'm hopeful, but I'm not certain. | ||
| I think we're gonna win the House. | ||
| I think the House looks pretty good, but the Senate is really tough and it's a tough map For one thing, and then there's the fact that, you know, they keep blaming Donald Trump for picking certain candidates, Oz and Blake Masters and guys like that. | ||
| But the question is really, is that the problem? | ||
| Or is it that the GOP won't support those people? | ||
| They seem to have pulled money out of Arizona, a very winnable state. | ||
| And I'm concerned that maybe Mitch McConnell is thinking, I'd rather keep the minority and not have these people come in and defy me and rebel against me. | ||
| Then let's take the Senate back. | ||
| Hard to really know. | ||
| First of all, it's always hard to know what Mitch McConnell is thinking. | ||
| It's hard to know where his interests lie. | ||
| But at the same time, you know, I also feel a little bit like we're being gaslit. | ||
| The polls are telling us no. | ||
| You know, the Red Way is coming back. | ||
| Nancy Pelosi is saying, oh, we're going to keep the House. | ||
| You know, I wonder if we're being gaslit a little bit and maybe the Red Way will, in fact, appear in spite of some of the narrowing polls. | ||
| But I am concerned. | ||
| I'd like to see the Senate go back. | ||
| I think Donald Trump has been incredibly selfish with his money. | ||
| He's got something like $100 million that he has raised, and he seems to be keeping it either for his legal fees or for his next campaign. | ||
| And I think if you're going to be the leader of a party, then you've got to pour some of that money into the races that you, in fact, created. | ||
| You always worry with Trump that he's only thinking about getting personal revenge for the people who didn't support his Stop the Steal movement. | ||
| And I think that that's, you know, I think Trump was a really good president, but I think he's been a bad ex-president, and I'm sorry about that. | ||
| I think it's hurting the party, which needs to reformulate itself around some of the things he taught them, but can't do that as long as he's getting in the way instead of helping out. | ||
| Is that your way of saying you'd be sort of Team DeSantis if they have to make that decision ultimately for 2024? | ||
| I would love to see DeSantis run, and yeah, I would support him. | ||
| that Trump with the kind of person, I mean, this is truly what they call wish casting. | ||
| I wish he were the kind of person who would say, I did my job, I came in at my moment, | ||
| I changed things around, which he really did. And now I, you know, ordain that the | ||
| Santas will be my, will inherit my mantle and move on. The Santas is a kind of mini Trump, | ||
| there's no question about it. But he also is a statesman. | ||
| He's also a politician. | ||
| And one of the things people like to say about Trump is he's not a politician, | ||
| but that's a profession. Being a politician is a profession. | ||
| And you know, you have to know how to do it. You have to know how to wrangle | ||
| people and- Pass laws and not just pass executive orders that can be swept away by the next guy with a pen. | ||
| I know I can ask you about the the wokesters and the crazy lefties all day long and we could do hours and hours on it and I've watched your videos on Instagram where you watch videos of them doing weird things and all that stuff but let me ask you one thing about that because of someone as you mentioned you lived in the Hollywood Hills you you were in the Hollywood machine as a screenwriter and as an author I'm guessing that you probably had representation with some of those big organizations and all that kind of stuff Did it feel like it was gonna fall apart? | ||
| Did you always sense that it would fall apart in that way? | ||
| I don't mean California specifically, but the industry and just the way the culture war has just exploded because they decided to not give us anything remotely honest or reflective of how people felt about the world. | ||
| Well, I was warning about it for 20 years. | ||
| I was saying that it's not, you know, we pour all this money into some, you know, house | ||
| race in Ohio, but we don't pour any money into creating novels, into creating movies, | ||
| into creating the infrastructure that the arts need. | ||
| You know, everybody is on the right is celebrating the failure of that movie, Bros, but it's | ||
| one thing to celebrate failures of movies that offend your sensibilities. | ||
| It's another thing to make your own movies and to also give awards to artists and encourage | ||
| them to artists and intelligent reviews to artists. | ||
| Some of that's happening now. | ||
| It has been a long, slow slog. | ||
| But yeah, you can vote for people all you want, but if you lose the culture, this is | ||
| the kind of thing that's going to happen. | ||
| And I've been thinking as I read the news now and watch the things, one of the greatest | ||
| arguments for Christianity is the people who lose it become utterly evil. | ||
| I mean, they're butchering children in the name of a weird left-wing gender theory that has absolutely no scientific backing. | ||
| They keep, you know, people like Rachel Levine, you know, who's, to me, a walking Monty Python routine. | ||
| You know, he comes out, he says things, well, the data, the data, and nobody ever says to him, show me the data. | ||
| Show me, because there is no data. | ||
| There couldn't possibly be data supporting the butchering of children. | ||
| But Andrew, they are the science. | ||
| That's why you're not supposed to question them. | ||
| They are science. | ||
| You know, when Vladimir Putin is screaming about the Satanism of the West, Vladimir Putin, who I think is a terrible, terrible human being and an awful dictator and a colonialist and all these things, but he's saying that and I'm thinking, well, I have to agree with him there. | ||
| He does have a point there. | ||
| So the culture is really at a nadir. | ||
| And what I see coming forward is basically a division between people who opt to be human beings and people who opt for a technocratic world. | ||
| Eventually they'll build synthetic wombs and women will actually become obsolete as mothers. | ||
| And it's going to be people who choose to say, no, you know, actually women are essential as mothers, that mothers are essential to our humanity. | ||
| And we cannot farm this out to these technocrats. | ||
| And that's what I see in the future. | ||
| I'm hoping basically they'll give me another 20, 30 years if I can get out of here and leave you guys, the younger people, to deal with it. | ||
| But I do see that coming eventually. | ||
| Yeah, well that's sort of why I was asking you the question about what do you want to happen to California or what do you think will happen, because I agree. | ||
| I think, although we will remain united in that, I don't think we're going to have a civil war in some sort of traditional sense. | ||
| I just think the things are just going to diverge. | ||
| It just is what it is. | ||
| We've tried very hard, sane people, to reverse the wokesters. | ||
| They've made it very clear they're not going to reverse, and unfortunately the institutions have shown that they don't have the defenses to defend against it. | ||
| So it's just going to continue to go in that direction. | ||
| Yeah, and there's the question of money because what happens in leftism all the time, and I guess we can call this leftism, it's some kind of part of leftism, is that the middle class is destroyed or moves away. | ||
| So you have the poor and you have the powerful. | ||
| And that's what happens every single time. | ||
| And that means that you don't have a tax base. | ||
| And so in order to feed the programs that keep you in power and keep the poor from coming and burning your palace down, you basically have to shift money from other places. | ||
| And so you're going to see a move by the federal government to try and take money from prosperous places like Florida and like Tennessee and move it to places that are dying of leftism like California. | ||
| And that's when the clash is going to come and if that is prevented if that kind of shift of money is prevented. | ||
| Then I don't know, I just think things fail. | ||
| You know, leftism fails everywhere it's tried. | ||
| Scandinavia, Russia, you know, Cuba, everywhere it's tried. | ||
| It's a much harder, it's much easier to enslave in a little island like Cuba than it is to enslave Westerners and people who have a history of freedom. | ||
| Listen, I can tell you in the very international city of Miami that I'm in, you meet a couple Venezuelans and a couple Cubans and they will tell you what that oppression was like. | ||
| But let's shift to the book a little bit because, as I said, we just got it this morning. | ||
| I want to read just one of the bullet points on this because I thought this was just fascinating as I was just reading it right before we started. | ||
| The world of big tech is full of eccentric characters, but shamanic billionaire Gerald Byrne may be the strangest of the bunch. | ||
| The founder of Burner, a global social media platform, Burn is known for speaking with vague profundity and for dabbling in esoteric spiritual practices. | ||
| He wears his hair in a long black ponytail to reveal a large flower tattooed on his neck. | ||
| He's universally admired as a visionary, a philanthropist, and a devout husband and father, and every person who gets in the way of his good work seems to die. | ||
| Now, There's a lot there because obviously I'm reading that. | ||
| The imagery of Jack Dorsey from Twitter is popping in my mind with his beard and weird things. | ||
| There's all these, you know, we've got Elon Musk and we've got the Amazon guy, Jeff Bezos. | ||
| You know, there's this weird billionaire class of these sort of strange characters. | ||
| How do you come up with a character like this? | ||
| And who's it really based on? | ||
| I couldn't possibly comment on that. | ||
| But yeah, you know, I think one of the things that happens to billionaires, and I've noticed this, I know a lot of billionaires and they never stop talking, they never listen to a word you say, and basically the principle is, if you're so rich, if you're so smart, why aren't you a billionaire? | ||
| Why should I listen to you when I have a billion dollars? | ||
| And they sit around and they really do make these big plans for the world without anybody ever saying to them, you know, You invented a gizmo that made you a billionaire, and that's great and congratulations, but what on earth gave you the license to control the lives of other people? | ||
| Why are you flying to Davos in your private jet to discuss how much gas I can use in my Volkswagen? | ||
| It's a complete disconnect. | ||
| And so what I wanted to do, the character of Cameron Winter, who first made his appearance in When Christmas Comes, which we did talk about, that was his original story. | ||
| And he really kind of caught my imagination. | ||
| And for the first time in my life, literally, I thought, here's a character I can build a series on. | ||
| Because he's a very complex guy with a past that's different than his present, and a future that he hopes will be different than his past. | ||
| He's kind of moving in a certain direction, and he's surrounded by this world. | ||
| It's really kind of coming apart at the seams. | ||
| So it's the story of a man who's trying to learn to be a good man after a past that's not so good in a world that's collapsing, in a world that cannot supply him the values he needs to move forward. | ||
| And that to me just seems like an endlessly fascinating idea. | ||
| So I wanted to put him up against one of these guys where he basically, you know, the people who get in his way get canceled, but they get canceled forever, you know? | ||
| And so you have a guy who's kind of looking, who has done some of this wet work in the past. | ||
| He's done some of the kind of evil things that people have to do in government and in espionage. | ||
| And now he's thinking, no, you know, I want to live a better life. | ||
| But he notices that people around him are starting to do those kinds of things almost without any conscience at all. | ||
| So basically, this is two men facing off. | ||
| I mean, if you picture it as a movie poster, it would just be these two faces looking at one another. | ||
| Gerald Byrne and this kind of English professor that's what he is now and he keeps telling people that's what I am I'm an English professor But he's an English professor with a past that's much more difficult So I wanted to put them off against one another person who? | ||
| believes in the traditions of the past the art of the past the culture of the past is trying to build a Personality based on some of those traditions and values against a guy who basically has reached a point. | ||
| He's not a bad man he's just a man insulated from the from the consequences of his ideas. | ||
| And so I wanted these two guys to face off and they face off with a woman between them | ||
| who is really one of the best characters I think I've ever written. | ||
| He's just an actual good woman who is married to this guy, Gerald Byrne. | ||
| And the question is, how much of what he's doing is she involved? | ||
| You know, it's so interesting that you mentioned the way these people become insulated | ||
| and how they think, because I've gotten to know Peter Thiel quite a bit | ||
| and I heard him give a talk once where he said that when these guys go to Davos | ||
| and to these, you know, massive meetings where they're... | ||
| In essence, discussing how to organize the world, he said that no one's ever representing the individual. | ||
| That it's always that, oh, it's a corporation that's there, and it's a bank that's there, and it's this conglomerate that's there. | ||
| No one is representing the guy who has to put the gas in the Volkswagen. | ||
| So I would say he probably is maybe the exception to the rule on that sort of thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But to, you know, broadly speak, it's like, what does Bill Gates, why does he have the right to tell us we have to eat bugs while he's now the largest farm owner in the United States? | ||
| It is quite remarkable, remarkable the detachment with which they exclude themselves from their own rules. | ||
| You know, there is a reason they built guillotines in the old days, and I think that these guys kind of exemplify that reason. | ||
| I'm very deeply opposed to political violence, but giving these guys a good swift kick in the backside would not be a bad idea, you know? | ||
| I don't wanna kill anybody, but just to humiliate them. | ||
| Well, now I know what Clip Media Matters is gonna find of today's show. | ||
| Well done, Andrew. | ||
| Bloodshed, I just want my footprint on the seat of their pants. | ||
| Do you find that sort of amazing, though, really, like, just at a granular level, that these people have now infiltrated every part of our lives, whether we know it or not, whether it's because you buy all your stuff on Amazon, or because Gates owns all the land, or whatever it might be, that we're all holding this in our pocket and God knows who's in charge of this thing at this point? | ||
| You know, there are two things that keep me from being amazed. | ||
| One is, all throughout history there have been people like this, people who think that they have these global ideas and they think that they are going to impose them on the world and the world's going to be a better place. | ||
| Always a disaster every single time. | ||
| But there's also something else. | ||
| The technological age has raised people who are essentially autistic to the level of kings. | ||
| And these are guys who are completely detached from the inner life of other human beings. | ||
| I don't know if you saw that clip of somebody at Davos saying we can make medicines that | ||
| we can track after you take them. | ||
| And he said, imagine the compliance. | ||
| Well, that's a guy who has lost all sense that you and I have inner lives that are equally | ||
| And in fact, the homeless guy on the corner has an inner life that's equally important to mine. | ||
| I think you're talking about Yuval, what's his name? | ||
| Yuval Harari, I think is his name. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Noah Yuval Harari. | ||
| I don't think that was the guy in the clip, but he's one of these people, definitely, you know, who they can all understand the inner lives of animals. | ||
| They love animals, but they can't understand the inner lives of people. | ||
| And I think that the technological age we're living in has lifted those people to new heights. | ||
| They've always been around, but now they are the guy. | ||
| It's not the guy who dug an oil well and then made so much money that he could hire, build an oil business. | ||
| It's not that guy. | ||
| It's not the guy who came from overseas and built a movie studio and had his hands on the film and then could hire other people to do it. | ||
| These are guys who deal with little, you know, Os and Ones and really have never had the experience of another human being mattering to them | ||
| at the level that people have to matter to you when you are in charge of large areas of human beings. | ||
| It's funny, do you remember a couple months back when Mark Zuckerberg was introducing | ||
| the metaverse to everybody, and he's in the commercial himself, | ||
| and he's walking into this alternative universe, and it's like, first off, you're the guy who runs Facebook | ||
| who has screwed up so much of how we feel about each other these days, | ||
| and has caused parents to hate children, and friends to turn on each other and everything else. | ||
| You also seem like an automaton. | ||
| You don't even seem like a full human and now I'm gonna follow you into your crazy alternate universe? | ||
| And yet, we know that a huge percentage of people are gonna do it. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, one of the things that I think is important to realize is that many people, many more people than you think, are mentally ill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A larger percentage of people... Oh, I think it's quite a high number, actually. | |
| It's a high number, and it wouldn't surprise me... I'm on Twitter. | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| I mean, it really is interesting that they're not dealing with life in a very connected way. | ||
| You know, all this stuff about the golden rule, you know, do unto others as you would have them do, | ||
| love your neighbor, you know, as yourself, that kind of idea. | ||
| There's a reason for that kind of idea. | ||
| It's not because you're a good boy and you go to heaven if you love your neighbor like yourself. | ||
| It's because it connects you to reality. | ||
| It connects you to the world and to this infinite pattern of human beings interacting with each other, | ||
| which is all of the joy of life. | ||
| You get it in your family, with your children. | ||
| You get it in your, you know, in your marriage, but also you get it in your neighborhood. | ||
| And all of that stuff is being dissected and destroyed by people who do not experience the inner lives of others | ||
| because they're essentially... | ||
| At least morally, I don't want to make it a medical diagnosis, but morally autistic. | ||
| And I think Zuckerberg is a great... Do you think there's a way to reverse that? | ||
| I mean, I do sense that there's going to be a real anti-technology revolt at some point within the next decade. | ||
| I mean, it's just so obvious the level of censorship and shadow banning and don't talk about Hunter Biden laptop. | ||
| You can't question this election. | ||
| You can question that one. | ||
| Like, all the asymmetries of it and inconsistencies, I think, on top of just the general endless scrolling and what it's doing to the dopamine in our brains and all of this stuff, I sense there's going to be, like, a real push against this. | ||
| Do you think that that's probably right? | ||
| Yes, I completely agree with that. | ||
| And the reason is because it's happened in the past, during the Industrial Revolution. | ||
| These factories were built, they destroyed families. | ||
| Suddenly children who used to stay home and help you with the farm were going off to the cities to work in the factories and never coming back. | ||
| Families were torn to pieces. | ||
| Women were deprived of all the home industries that made them a powerful economic factor. | ||
| That's why feminism starts to rise at exactly that moment because suddenly women who are called the distaff because they made all the clothes, you know, that was a tool you used for making clothes. | ||
| That's a huge industry. | ||
| They made the food, they planted orchards and all these things, suddenly they had nothing | ||
| except raising children and they had lost their place in society. | ||
| Well, over time, governments started to say, hey, you know, actually you can't put a six-year-old | ||
| or an eight-year-old in a blacking factory, you know, you can't have children working, | ||
| you can't destroy everything in your way just to make a bundle, and they started to regulate | ||
| it. | ||
| Years ago, when they started this censoring thing on Twitter and on Facebook and on Google | ||
| and so on. I said, no, no, you have to, you have to make regulations. | ||
| It's a new industry. | ||
| Every human interaction is regulated by the law and conservatives are going, no, they must have freedom of speech. | ||
| I thought, absolutely not. | ||
| You know, this, these guys are basically, uh, what do they call them? | ||
| Common carriers. | ||
| They're like the phone company. | ||
| If I'm, if I'm on the phone to you and they, Operator comes on and says, excuse me, sir, you can't say that to Dave and Dave can't. | ||
| But, you know, no, that guy gets carried away because there's a regulation against that. | ||
| We need to do that now. | ||
| We're just catching up with it. | ||
| I feel it's it's happening. | ||
| It may happen in the Supreme Court session. | ||
| It's certainly their laws now in Texas that have been supported by courts where the court just said in Texas, no, you know, they don't don't have a right to violate free speech. | ||
| It's a new thing. | ||
| almost everything we're going through is traceable back to the internet in the same way that everything | ||
| during the reformation is traceable back to the printing press. And so this is something we have | ||
| to grapple with and come to terms with. I'm hopeful, just like you, that as a generation grows up that | ||
| knows this stuff better than the older generation. | ||
| They'll start to say, well, we'll curtail it here, we're gonna stop them here, we're gonna do this this way, and it'll start to work out in a better way than it is right now. | ||
| So do you think that this moment that we find ourselves in between the big tech craziness and now just all the exposing of all of the political nonsense, that this is sort of inevitable, that maybe 20 years of the internet was going to have to get us to a place like this so that enough of us could have that awakening That's exactly what I think, and I think that so much is ending right now. | ||
| I said this when Donald Trump was elected. | ||
| This is not the beginning of something. | ||
| It's the end of something that will lead to the beginning of something. | ||
| It's the end of the post-World War II era. | ||
| It's the end of the Reagan era. | ||
| It's the end of the baby boom epoch. | ||
| The baby boomers are all going to die. | ||
| I'm just hoping they won't take me with them when they go. | ||
| And it is the invention of this brand new thing. | ||
| I mean, when you think about the invention of the printing press, and then you have the reformation of the 30 years war, you have the counter reformation, you have the inquisition, you have all this violence. | ||
| Coming about simply because suddenly someone can read the Bible and say, you know what? | ||
| I don't think the Pope is right about this. | ||
| You know, some clown in Germany can read the Bible and say, you know, actually, this doesn't actually sound like what the Pope is saying. | ||
| That's, that's how things fall apart. | ||
| And that's what's happened here. | ||
| Essentially what Coleridge called the clerisy, the, you know, this chattering classes have suddenly had their monopoly of information taken away from them. | ||
| And so the counter-reformation is basically, the inquisition that's going on is, | ||
| is you're thrown off Twitter, you're thrown off Facebook. | ||
| Google's only gonna show you climate change information that agrees with what the elites want you to think. | ||
| Didn't work in the inquisition, didn't work in the counter, it's not gonna work now. | ||
| Eventually, this is the democratization of information. | ||
| We're gonna learn how to handle it. | ||
| We're gonna learn how to sort misinformation Basically, if it's coming from the government, it's misinformation. | ||
| And then everything else is open to question. | ||
| But, you know, we'll learn to sort it and we'll stop them from censoring us. | ||
| And I think ultimately, yeah, that'll smooth out. | ||
| Let me ask you one, someone on the personal side of how we both go about doing the political thing relative to what you're talking about. | ||
| It's getting harder and harder to find people on the other side that are willing to have these conversations. | ||
| I would say it's almost impossible at this point. | ||
| Are you able to find anybody to talk to, to take the counterpoint and do it without murdering each other? | ||
| In two ways I'm able to do this. | ||
| First of all, older people can still do it. | ||
| Discussions with older people where, you know, because I have a lot of old liberal friends who are like, what happened to you? | ||
| You know, and I'll sit down and I'll explain to them what happened to me and they'll go. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I kind of feel some of that too, even though I'm more, you know, I'm wedded to my Democrat party or whatever, you know, we have those conversations. | ||
| We have them in a friendly way, an intense way, somewhat, sometimes in a friendly way. | ||
| But the other thing is, is that there is now going through the left, the Democrat, the central left, They're quietly appalled. | ||
| They're quietly appalled by some of this gender stuff. | ||
| They're quietly appalled by what's happening in schools. | ||
| They understand that this shutdown over COVID was a big mistake and really hurt them. | ||
| They have kids. | ||
| They see their kids being hurt. | ||
| And they'll say it, but they're afraid. | ||
| And that's what we have to get past. | ||
| That's why The Daily Wire, you, anybody who's willing to bring on alternative voices and who's willing to take the heat is so important because the people who don't have our platforms, the people who aren't protected as we are by the First Amendment and can be fired by HR for not agreeing, you know, with their stupid policies, those are the people who are afraid. | ||
| We need to bring them out into the open. | ||
| We need to let them know that they shouldn't be afraid. | ||
| We need to fight the powers that make them afraid. | ||
| And then I think we'll be able to talk again. | ||
| Do you think that that fear thing is maybe connected to a spirituality deficit within liberals, let's say? | ||
| I mean, you have an interesting spiritual journey yourself. | ||
| You were born Jewish, you're Christian, but that liberals who tend to be more secular, they then, for some reason, you could sort of see it with COVID, they were all about fear basically overnight, and now that's sort of permeated through everything. | ||
| Yeah, there's just no question about this. | ||
| This is the other thing that's always at the core of everything. | ||
| You know, we have been taught to think about history without God in it. | ||
| So, you know, we'll say God is dead, you know, and that's a perfectly fair statement to make comparing the Middle Ages to the 19th century. | ||
| But you have to understand that what that means is he's dead in our hearts. | ||
| He's dead. | ||
| Our churches are failing us. | ||
| It doesn't mean he's actually dead. | ||
| And so we have to start thinking about what it is we're doing here as human beings. | ||
| Because if what we're doing here is trying to live as long as we can before we die, then when, you know, Jake Tapper comes on CNN and says, no, you must be afraid. | ||
| You must be fearful. | ||
| Then, yeah, we should be fearful. | ||
| Because as Andrew Cuomo said, what's what could be worse than death? | ||
| But when we start to say, no, we're actually part of a greater spiritual journey. | ||
| And sometimes just like the guys who, you know, invaded Normandy beach, sometimes we have to face death and even accept that as part of that journey. | ||
| Then, then you have a very different way of looking at things. | ||
| You know, I'm, I'm fortunate that I'm like a, you know, a chattering guy like you, I'm a writer and all that stuff. | ||
| I don't often have to dodge bullets or run onto a beach being sprayed by machine guns. | ||
| But I wouldn't for one second restrain what I say because people might cancel me. | ||
| I know that because I've done it. | ||
| I've been kicked out of Hollywood, basically. | ||
| And I would never, ever do that. | ||
| It's not because I'm brave. | ||
| It's because in God I'm fearless. | ||
| As long as I'm in God, as long as I'm centered in God, I know that I just have to do what's right and I will be okay in the long run, even if that long run is eternal and not within my lifetime. | ||
| So, yes, when you lose that, when you lose that hook into something bigger than yourself, everything becomes fear. | ||
| How can it be anything else? | ||
| Because we're all just these fragile little people who are here today and gone tomorrow. | ||
| And if we're not part of something eternal, what's the point of ever putting your head over the edge of the trench? | ||
| It's so interesting, because when people come up to me, like at the store or something, and they'll be, Dave, you're so brave, you're saying all the things that I want to say, and I always have two thoughts at the exact same time. | ||
| One is, well, A, I'm not being shot at, I'm not in war, so I'm not brave to that extent, that it's just not a real comparison. | ||
| And B, I don't know that it's bravery that causes me to say the things that I believe. | ||
| Sometimes I think it's just, I'm like, I'm nuts. | ||
| I guess maybe I'm just kind of nuts. | ||
| Like, I don't know, everyone seems to be afraid of this thing, yet I seem to be one of the people doing it. | ||
| Like, I don't know, maybe I'm crazy. | ||
| I don't know if that makes you brave. | ||
| I always remind myself that we do have an extra layer of protection because we speak for a living. | ||
| So you're protected by the first amendment in ways that a guy Who works in the clothing industry or the car industry is not protected in the same way. | ||
| And they can say to him, you didn't sign the HR paper saying that, you know, a man can become a woman. | ||
| You're fired. | ||
| So we're a little bit more protected. | ||
| But yes, I also think that that is what the times require. | ||
| So it's people like us who remain because that's what the time required. | ||
| If you're not able to do that, you're not going to be doing what we're doing. | ||
| What do you think a reformation for the Democrats, your old friends that you can talk to, what would it look like? | ||
| What do you think could happen over there that would reverse the insanity? | ||
| To me, right now, there's a decent fight on the right. | ||
| There's like, OK, are we going to go the Trump route? | ||
| Are we going to go the DeSantis route? | ||
| I think there's good arguments for both. | ||
| Either they're gonna have to figure it out on the DL, or it's gonna happen out publicly, and I think either one probably is fine. | ||
| But on the left, it's hard to figure out, like, what are you people gonna do with this monster that is there? | ||
| Yeah, see, I think that the delusion that the left is living under, the nice people on the left, and there are many, many of them, many good people on the left. | ||
| The delusion is that, yes, the people who are butchering children may have gone too far, but there is a version of this where that doesn't happen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's not true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's all one thing. | ||
| And so, look, there is something called liberalism, which maybe supports More of a welfare state, for instance, and I would support I would think I would like to see more things done by private charities. | ||
| I would like to see the Great Society dismantled. | ||
| I think it's been a disaster. | ||
| I think that all of the stuff that people are attributing to the police which have not who have nothing to do with it really can be attributed to the Great Society which destroyed black families and made black people dependent and basically Funded all kinds of bad behaviors that have destroyed black communities. | ||
| You know, I'd like to see all of that go away, but I can imagine a liberalism that sort of like Friedrich Hayek says, you know, we need a little bit of a welfare state so people won't be afraid to take chances and take risks and all that stuff. | ||
| If you can recreate that liberalism that was the liberalism that I grew up with, yeah, then you'll have sanity on the left again, but either they're going to follow these people To the point where their children are taken away from them because they won't let them wear a dress or because they won't cut a healthy girl's breasts off. | ||
| You're either going to follow those people or you're going to have to side with us and it's going to be tough. | ||
| You know, that's that's another reason, by the way, where I think I have real misgivings about Donald Trump, because he offends the sensibilities of those people. | ||
| And the people on the right who say, oh, mean tweets, mean tweets. | ||
| Well, you know, Human beings are not logical creatures. | ||
| They don't necessarily say, well, that policy is working. | ||
| Therefore, I'm going to take this guy who I can't stand and vote for him. | ||
| You know, politics is partly showbiz and you've got to be able, you've got to be appealing to these people and convince them. | ||
| I think they vote for Ron DeSantis. | ||
| I think there are a lot of Democrats who would vote for Ron DeSantis once they saw him. | ||
| I'm getting a lot of that on the DL from people, the few that'll still talk to me that couldn't vote for Trump, or some of them maybe did, but it was private, that they could do the DeSantis move. | ||
| It's interesting when you mention that about the welfare state and what it did to the black family and all of that stuff, but the Hayek argument of there could be some sane version of this. | ||
| This is where I always quote a great line from Thiel. | ||
| He always says, if any of it worked, I wouldn't be a libertarian. | ||
| But the human part of it, once you get humans into the machine, this is, Thomas Sowell has talked about this a lot, you know, you tell the government that their stuff isn't working, and they tell you we need more money for it, and then it just expands the stuff that's not working. | ||
| Yeah, they never give up their power. | ||
| You know, Jeremy Boring, the guy who runs the Daily Wire, he called me up when they said 15 days to slow the spread, and he's a much younger man than I am, and he said they'll never open again. | ||
| And I laughed and I said, you know, 15 days is not such a bad idea. | ||
| And I had to go back and say, you know, you were basically right. | ||
| They will open again, but two years, 15 days that becomes two years is not acceptable. | ||
| But that is the way the government now works. | ||
| Didn't used to be like that, but it's the way it works now. | ||
| And we seem to, a huge percentage of us seem to want more. | ||
| More of the, thank you, sir, may I have another? | ||
| Just more of the control. | ||
| And they would, there's a bizarre, I honestly think that probably something | ||
| like 40% of the people, it might be something around there, would be glad if all the craziness came back. | ||
| And I think that maybe is connected to a spiritual thing, that they're just living for nothing | ||
| at the moment or something. | ||
| Well, it goes back to what I said before about like connecting with the inner lives of other people, | ||
| which is kind of what I do for a living. | ||
| But it's also like my spiritual practice is understanding that I'm not talking to a face. | ||
| I'm talking to a human being whose inner life is just as important. | ||
| You know, when you lock people in a room and they're suddenly saying, oh, you can be educated online, you can work online, you can see everybody online. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| And it's hiding away from life. | ||
| And I think, as we said before, I think there are a lot of people who are happy to hide away from life because they don't do life well. | ||
| And I think that that's why so many people are on antidepressants. | ||
| A huge number of people think that they can drug their way to happiness. | ||
| It never occurs to them to say, it does occur to a few of them, but it doesn't occur to enough people to say, you know what? | ||
| That's not happiness. | ||
| Taking a drug and feeling better is not happiness. | ||
| I've got to find another way to do this so that I'm still a human being. | ||
| And like I said before, I think in the end we're going to divide along those lines. | ||
| It's not going to be left and right. | ||
| It's going to be human or inhuman. | ||
| It's going to be drugged or doing yoga and spiritual practice. | ||
| It's going to be, you know, cooking a baby in a box and then having it raised by machines or at, you know, a daycare or whatever and saying, no, we've got to form families. | ||
| If we don't form families, we're nobody. | ||
| We have no government of our own. | ||
| And that's where I think the division is going to come. | ||
| So actually, this was gonna be a complete non sequitur, but then you mentioned family, so you get me to the ending nicely, because we've talked about this a bit before, but most of my audience knows your son, Spencer Clavelin, who, I just got his book today, too, it's downstairs, and Spencer got married, he happens to be gay, he got married to a dude a month or two ago, unfortunately I couldn't go, because Justin was born that day, literally, so I didn't get to upstage you in the speech, that's what I heard, I was so happy you weren't. | ||
| I didn't have to follow you on. | ||
| It was like the last thing I wanted to do. | ||
| But you're a conservative. | ||
| He lives in Nashville in Tennessee. | ||
| Josh works at the Daily Wire. | ||
| These are conservatives. | ||
| They're not supposed to like gay people. | ||
| You're supposed to disown your son. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And yet I sense it was a pretty great day and life is good and it wasn't a lot of hatred. | ||
| It was a lovely day and obviously I love Josh and I'm thrilled to have him become part of my family. | ||
| I'm also thrilled to have my son grow up in a time when he doesn't have to skulk around or worry about the law coming after him for who he is. | ||
| But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be allowed to talk about things without being called names. | ||
| You know, there were people at Spencer's wedding who think that gay marriage is the end of the world. | ||
| They came to the wedding because they love Spencer and they love Josh. | ||
| As I said in my toast, I said, you know, you didn't lay your principles aside. | ||
| You prioritized your love. | ||
| Once you do that, once you say, I understand, you know, that, that you're a person and you have to have, want to seek a happy life and you're not responsible to me, as long as you're not hurting anybody, then you start to talk about what, what is, you know, obviously to just have a sign outside your door that says love is love. | ||
| Is as stupid as it's possible to be. | ||
| There's obviously a difference between a man and a woman in a marriage and two men in a marriage or two women in a marriage. | ||
| We should be able to talk about that. | ||
| We should be able to talk about why nature gives us men and women as a model. | ||
| I think it does. | ||
| You know, I think we are created male and female. | ||
| We are men and women are meant to be together. | ||
| The fact that not everybody can participate in that but models But sees that model as a good thing. | ||
| I always thought it was kind of a positive development. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| I don't know if you haven't. | ||
| The first thing that I did with Jordan Peterson as part of Daily Wire, I did like a two-hour sit-down with him discussing just this. | ||
| And people were like, oh, it seems like Dave's saying somehow that gay marriage isn't equal. | ||
| And it's like, no, but there is a thing that Western society has been built on and you want to give Room for decency and respect and the things that are a little bit on the margins, but we should be able to talk about that. | ||
| The fact that you just said, and I know because I spoke to Spencer and Josh before the wedding, that they invited people who are not personally okay with gay marriage. | ||
| It's like, do you think that those people left maybe a little bit more open-minded? | ||
| Probably, as opposed to just being called homophobes and not invited, then which way would they be tilting? | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| And it's so dumb. | ||
| I mean, it's so dumb. | ||
| If your idea of your philosophy is there are people who agree with me, and then there are people who are racist, sexist, phobic of some sort, you're an idiot. | ||
| I mean, you're an idiot. | ||
| You know, like all of us have ideas. | ||
| But enough about Kamala Harris! | ||
| That's beyond idiocy. | ||
| But no, obviously, if you're going to have a conversation, you have to Make room for other people's ideas. | ||
| Even if those ideas make you angry, you have to be able to see what people of goodwill. | ||
| Some people are not people of goodwill, but people of goodwill disagree and you have to let them disagree and you have to see what they have to say. | ||
| I think the Christian right has a lot to say about gender that's not being heard that we | ||
| should listen to because obviously the opposite of what they're doing is a mess. | ||
| But that doesn't necessarily mean I have to set people on fire when I disagree with them. | ||
| It doesn't mean that I have to destroy them or hate them. | ||
| And I think in this case, I mean, this was something I was on board. | ||
| People always say that I changed my mind because of Spencer, but that's just a simple untruth. | ||
| I always felt this way, that being gay is a very specific thing. | ||
| It's not a choice people make. | ||
| People have died and been imprisoned because they were gay. | ||
| It's not, you know, it's not something you wake up in the morning or you're a little kid and think, I want to grow up to be gay. | ||
| That's not the way it works. | ||
| It is something that people are, and it comes with, you know, a lot of ramifications that are worth talking about between people of goodwill. | ||
| I mean, it just, when I hear Christians say, well, it's okay as long as they're celibate, Yeah, it's okay with me, as long as you're celibate. | ||
| How about you try that and get back to me? | ||
| You know, I think, I think just a little bit of, you know, I hate to use the word love, like it matters, but it does matter, you know, a little bit of love between us, a little bit of compassion for each person's sensibility, and then you can start to trust one another to discuss things at a level beyond Bile, you know, level beyond sloganeering and hatred. | ||
| I think these are important issues. | ||
| I think gender is a hugely important issue. | ||
| I think it's a hugely complex issue, but that doesn't mean you take a 16 year old girl and cut her breasts off. | ||
| You know, I mean, we got it. | ||
| You have to have decades of conversation and philosophy before you even think about making moves like that. | ||
| And we just don't do it anymore because our press is so corrupt and our academies are so corrupt. | ||
| And our government and our businesses are so corrupt that they basically shut the conversation down. | ||
| Andrew, you are a true professional who knows how to close down an interview. | ||
| You're a great gal, by the way, and A Strange Habit of Mine is on sale right now. | ||
| We will link to it down below, and I hope to see you soon, my friend. | ||
| Always great to see you, Dave. | ||
| 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. |
Export Selection