Feb. 17, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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Participants
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[outro] | |
| I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is The Rubin Report, and we've got another Friday roundtable extravaganza for you. | ||
| Joining me today is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the new book, When Race Trumps Merit, Heather MacDonald, and essayist for Noble Truths with Rob Arora. | ||
| Rob Arora, Heather, Rob, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
|
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Fabulous to be with you. | |
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Great to be here. | ||
| I'm really glad to have you both on. | ||
| I said to you right before we started that, you know, Heather, you've been cracking and hitting and smacking around DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and all of these race stats and crime stats and all of these things for many, many years. | ||
| And Rob is sort of on deck now, doing it right now. | ||
| So I thought you guys would make a great duo today. | ||
| And we have plenty of stuff in that department to get to. | ||
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| All right, let's get to it. | ||
| So Heather, before we start here, I realized we have not spoke in quite some time. | ||
| I haven't had you on since before COVID. | ||
| You are in New York right now. | ||
| So this wasn't really the point of today's show, but would you like to comment on what's going on in New York City before we get to it? | ||
| Masks. | ||
| People are still wearing masks outdoors. | ||
| They're wearing masks in my apartment. | ||
| They get on the elevator. | ||
| They're still using their keys to press the elevator buttons. | ||
| Now, it's not as insane as it was before, but I despair. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I am at this point fighting to hold my tongue, to not accost people on the street, asking them, what will it take to get you to take off your mask? | ||
| Squalor everywhere. | ||
| There's scaffolds erected around buildings because of a ridiculous law that requires building inspections of every brick on a facade for every five years. | ||
| Way over-regulated. | ||
| We have these grotesque restaurant shanties that are covered with graffiti, reflecting tape all over that nobody's going to take down. | ||
| So it's really turned into a dystopian urban environment at this point, in large part, but not exclusively, because of the pandemic, just betrayal of decent risk conscious rational policy during COVID, but also because of the issue of crime and the reluctance to enforce the law, because it would have a disparate impact on minority criminals. | ||
| Unfortunately, I don't think anyone listening is surprised by anything that you just said there. | ||
| Rav, before we get into it, you are up in Vancouver in Canada. | ||
| I know it's a little crazy in Canada these days. | ||
| I'll give you the same opportunity. | ||
| Anything you want to just say about what's going on in Canada before we get to it? | ||
| Yeah, well, the big thing here was the vaccine mandates that was preventing people from traveling And for a long time, going to restaurants, gyms, large gatherings, weddings, and traveling that is, by the way, internationally and domestically on an airplane and train. | ||
| So they got rid of that several months ago. | ||
| So we're, you know, we're back to where we were before. | ||
| But there are still some people who refuse to take off their mask at our grocery stores and outside and university campuses. | ||
| You can still find people. | ||
| Who are engaging in this, you know, very risk averse behavior, but but I will say I. My, my overall observation is that most people, even those that were fairly alarmed. | ||
| Irrationally alarmed about cobit have now kind of just moved on. | ||
| Because it's no longer a big issue anymore. | ||
| They got vaccinated if they wanted to and now at this point, it's. | ||
| Not really a big issue anymore. | ||
| And there's still a push by, you know, FDA, Pfizer, CDC, you know, the new bivalent boosters and just continuing push towards more and more medicalization. | ||
| But I think most people now realize that, you know, it's over now. | ||
| The pandemic is over. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, we're going to get to what Pfizer is up to in just a second. | ||
| I know we shouldn't be surprised by anything these days, but I'm continuously amazed when I get on planes now where they no longer force you to wear a mask simply because one 35 year old Trump appointed judge said no more masks on planes one day and then everyone took it off. | ||
| COVID did not explode. | ||
| I mean, that in and of itself should have told us everything we need to know. | ||
| But on planes now, as I'm sure you guys have both noticed, they always say, you know, masking is no longer mandatory, but please respect the choices of the people sitting around you. | ||
| Which, oddly, they never said before, right? | ||
| When they were forcing us, somehow choice was not relevant. | ||
| But let's get cracking. | ||
| Pfizer, since you both mentioned, or since you mentioned Pfizer there, Rob, they are still pushing out ads Okay, I know I'm talking to every parent out there. | ||
| Life with little kids can be a juggling act. | ||
| Not only people, you know, let's say middle-age-ish, but for young people and pretty much everybody. | ||
| And they've got celebs doing the hawking for them. | ||
| Here's John Legend. | ||
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Okay, I know I'm talking to every parent out there. | |
| Life with little kids can be a juggling act. | ||
| Luna's got dance, Miles has basketball, plus they both have school and their own personalities. | ||
| And now we've got a little baby in the house. | ||
| But I wouldn't trade being a dad for anything in the world. | ||
| I love being there for my special moments with my kids. | ||
| That's why my health is such a priority to me and why I got an updated COVID-19 booster. | ||
| My family did too. | ||
| I encourage you to talk to your healthcare provider and go to vaccines.gov to check eligibility and schedule an appointment today. | ||
| All right, a couple things here. | ||
| I don't know how much he got paid for that, but it was obviously a paid advertisement, even though it didn't look like an advertisement. | ||
| It just looked like a selfie video, in essence. | ||
| Just on a personal note, my partner, David, my husband, David, has COVID right now, as do our two, a six-month-old and a four-month-old. | ||
| And we spoke to our pediatrician, and basically she said, Just keep giving them breast milk, a lot of love, a little fresh air when you can. | ||
| Make sure they're elevated a little bit when sleeping if possible. | ||
| And they're already all on the mend. | ||
| The idea that I would be injecting them with anything or would have injected them with this stuff beforehand is completely insane. | ||
| Heather, it's just never gonna stop, right? | ||
| I mean, I think that's sort of what you're alluding to and what you're seeing in New York City, that the ads, the behaviors, it seems like we've crossed some bizarre threshold here, even though Rob is saying, you know, some people are putting some of it behind, but the general movement of this thing seems like it's just gonna keep going forever. | ||
| Yes, the New York Times still publishes its weekly coronavirus update that purportedly shows hotspots in the country. | ||
| There are none. | ||
| You know, there's these little sort of Cloudy dots here and there that have maybe like three people with COVID or five people in the hospital. | ||
| Of course, we still are counting hospitalizations with COVID as hospitalizations for COVID, same with the death rate. | ||
| But yes, there's a core constituency committed to safetyism. | ||
| It runs universities. | ||
| It's highly female, and they are not willing to allow people to go back to a sense of Individual risk calculation or governments to go to a sense of rational policymaking that balances costs versus risks and celebrates entrepreneurship and risk taking. | ||
| Instead, we're all supposed to cower under the thumb of our government overseers. | ||
| Yeah, Rob, I assume you see it in a somewhat similar light, that even though you're seeing some degree of people moving past it, that, you know, especially for young people, that's the crazy thing. | ||
| The 21-year-old who's supposed to be a rebel, like, man, they are just asking for more and more. | ||
| It's such a sad state of what human aging and the phases in life that you're supposed to go through are all about. | ||
| Yeah, I just want to respond to the John Legend thing, by the way. | ||
| I mean, that was just absolute lunacy. | ||
| I mean, I've been covering COVID, particularly vaccines and the approval and the development and the process in which they were distributed to the public for over a year now. | ||
| I mean, it's just been so egregious what's been happening that I've had to just focus there exclusively and sort of put previous crime and race issues on the side. | ||
| But, you know, this John Legend thing, it's like, you know, it makes no sense. | ||
| He's like, You know, I love being a dad. | ||
| I want to be there for my kids. | ||
| I want to support my family. | ||
| Therefore, I've gotten this highly experimental fifth shot with no randomized clinical evidence, no evidence of how this is going to benefit me. | ||
| No idea about adverse safety events. | ||
| I mean, one CDC official, when asked about what the safety profile of the bivalent vaccine is, particularly the myocarditis issue, which Disproportionately affects men up until the age of 40 at least. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| I've been writing about this a great length on my sub stack because no one else will. | ||
| The CDC official said, we don't know, but we accept, we expect a similar safety profile for the myocarditis. | ||
| Similar. | ||
| And if that's true, you mean you're compounding, you know, one in 2000 or one in 3000, you know, myocarditis risk over the first, second, third, Fourth, fifth bivalent booster shot. | ||
| I mean, they have no idea what they're doing. | ||
| And so to like, this is just pure propaganda at this point on Twitter, this big celebrity, you know, moving from I love my family and want to protect them to get this highly experimental, unproven pharmaceutical product where we don't know the benefits and we don't know the safety profile. | ||
| And it just makes no sense for anyone to get this thing unless they're, you know, highly, highly sick. | ||
| And even then, you know, the case to make for getting the biobased booster | ||
| is difficult because we don't really know how long this will last. | ||
| You know, the best observational data is showing like two, three months. | ||
| You know, my last year will be at 50% efficacy, but it's just so much uncertainty at this point. | ||
| And you can see in that John Legend video, I saw it on Twitter a couple of days ago. | ||
| It was like 2 million views and like 100 likes. | ||
| It's like, no one's getting this thing either. | ||
| I mean, last I checked, the bivalent booster uptake was something like 20 to 30 percent. | ||
| And among people under 40 to 50, it was lower than that. | ||
| Right, it's really incredible because nobody's buying, not nobody, but the large majority of people, many of whom who don't really get it still, even they are not buying it. | ||
| I had Dr. Robert Malone on two weeks ago, who owns more mRNA technology than anyone. | ||
| I mean, he basically invented this thing. | ||
| And what he said is that he thinks, no, he said, I don't think it. | ||
| He said, I know it, that the vaccine injuries are going to get much worse than what are being reported right now. | ||
| And by the way, I have a friend who's a young guy in his early 20s right now, who, since he got vaccinated, has been having heart problems. | ||
| And right now, for two weeks, he's in the midst of wearing a heart monitor so they can monitor him to figure out what's going on there. | ||
| I mean, I know that's just one example, but it's like this is happening all over the country. | ||
| But let's continue with Pfizer. | ||
| Yeah, Heather, go ahead. | ||
| The fact that males are more susceptible to setbacks and disease from this is a feature, not a bug. | ||
| I mean, we've seen how the vaccine policy previously was put to equity ends and nothing is more equitable for society than getting rid of males because we know that they are the source of all evils, particularly white males. | ||
| And we saw vaccine policy, you know, some jurisdictions not wanting to give a priority to elderly Americans who are the only ones really that had much to worry about from COVID because they're disproportionately white. | ||
| So this whole COVID thing has been, has an upside of being able to call populations that are less politically favored at this point. | ||
| I would just say, Dave, and you know, I'm not one to at all second guess Rob's research, but I do think that the anti-vaxxers are somewhat at risk of using the same flawed thinking as the pro-vaccine people now were before of Seizing on single cases without necessarily a randomized controlled experiment. | ||
| So I fully, I fully accept that. | ||
| I'm giving just one example that happens to be in my life. | ||
| I actually do have a couple other examples of young people that I know and people roughly my age that are having vaccine injuries, balancing problems like shingles, like some weird, weird stuff. | ||
| But I fully accept that. | ||
| But you mentioned, you mentioned the diversity, equity and inclusion Let me throw to this image, because since John Legend is doing this for Pfizer, Pfizer, of course, also is big on DEI, and as you can see what it says right there, diversity, equity, and inclusion, who we are. | ||
| Everyone has something to offer. | ||
| Diverse teams are more collaborative, more accepting of different perspectives, and more representative of the world we share. | ||
| Rav, nothing about diverse teams being better at research and maybe making sure that the vaccines work. | ||
| Am I just old school on this one? | ||
| Yeah, I just want to quickly respond to something Heather said. | ||
| I'm absolutely concerned with a certain kind of anti-vax sentiment that you would see on the fringes of the right and the left. | ||
| across the political spectrum. | ||
| You know, there are certain people who think millions of people are dying from the vaccine. | ||
| And I think that's just ludicrous. | ||
| And there's certain people on Twitter, who every time someone dies, they're like, oh, it's the vaccine, people are dropping dead from the vaccine. | ||
| So that's absolutely a knee jerk ideological response that I think is quite irrational. | ||
| And I know, I know many people who have fallen into that trap. | ||
| But I always think the peer reviewed evidence and for the The risk of heart inflammation, for example, about 1 in 3,000 for young males after the second dose. | ||
| Like, that's absolutely alarming given the low infection fatality rate. | ||
| And the only reanalysis of the initial Pfizer and Moderna safety data done by Freeman and colleagues in the peer-reviewed journal Vaccine, top scientists from Stanford and UCLA, they found a serious adverse event rate of 1 in 800 from the initial clinical safety data. | ||
| And that's in comparison to all other vaccines that are about one per million or one per two million for serious adverse event rates. | ||
| So, you know, I stick to the evidence and according to the best evidence, there's a lot to worry about. | ||
| And there are a lot of concerns that we're still trying to figure out. | ||
| With respect to the diversity, equity and inclusion stuff, I mean, you know, that's one great way to bolster confidence. | ||
| I mean, now not only am I considering and looking at A pharmaceutical product that was heavily financially incentivized and developed under Operation Warp Speed, which has its benefits, arguably, in an emergency situation for elderly people. | ||
| But for younger people, the risk calculus is totally different. | ||
| A product developed in rapid speed fashion, no long-term data initially. | ||
| The only initial trials, the endpoints of those trials, was symptomatic infection, not severe disease. | ||
| Most of the severe disease data that we have is observational. | ||
| And now on top of that, the people that were creating this, you know, perhaps, or, you know, however they're going to launch this DEI stuff for future doses, now I also know the people behind this stuff are also going to be potentially selected based on skin color, based on immutable characteristics, rather than, you know, the best pharmaceutical and scientific researchers to create this product. | ||
| Heather, surely a lesbian, latinx, black woman with a limp would be better suited to be making vaccines than a middle-aged white guy. | ||
| Well, you know, science is about the scientific method and the absolute perversity of our current age is that we're making it all about scientists. | ||
| It is the enlightenment triumph of Elevating reason beyond the particularities and the trivialities of race and sex and gender, which I hate to have just used that term because it's a complete fake recent concoction. | ||
| But now that's all that scientists are talking about. | ||
| I can't tell you, Dave, every single day I've got an oncologist who sends me the latest Racism is the heart of science message from Nature Magazine, from Scientific American, from JAMA, from his own pediatric facility. | ||
| It is an absolute obsession. | ||
| And here's the key, Dave. | ||
| Diversity is code word for racial preferences. | ||
| At some point, you have to look at this and say the lady doth protest too much. | ||
| Why do we keep talking and talking and talking about diversity? | ||
| I can guarantee you if there was not a large academic skills gap, and this is very taboo to mention, we have to swallow hard and realize we're talking about averages, not individuals. | ||
| If there was not a large academic skills gap that is impeding racial proportionality in institutions, nobody would be talking about diversity. | ||
| The reason we talk about diversity is it's a covert way to to import massive, massive racial preferences, which are threatening our competitive edge, threatening our scientific capacity, and will eventually put lives at risk. | ||
| To dumb that down completely, I'm just not for discriminating against young Asian men who work very hard and try and do everything right. | ||
| And I don't think Harvard nor any medical school or any business should be discriminating against them, quite simply. | ||
| But to really drive your point home, I saw this video yesterday. | ||
| This is ab Absolutely mind-blowing. | ||
| So this is from Columbia University. | ||
| This is Columbia University medical students chanting about critical race theory and a whole bunch more. | ||
| Listen to the tone, the tenor of all of this, the repetitiveness, the droning of these clones. | ||
| I mean, this is absolutely wild. | ||
| Enjoy. | ||
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unidentified
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We enter the profession of medicine with appreciation for the opportunity to build on the scientific and humanistic achievements of the past. | |
| We also recognize the acts and systems of oppression affected in the name of medicine. | ||
| We take this oath of service to begin building a future grounded in truth, Restoration and equity to fulfill medicine's capacity to liberate. | ||
| I promise to take care of my future patients by engaging in dialogue, listening to their lived experience, and tailoring my recommendations to their unique circumstances. | ||
| I acknowledge the past and present failures of medicine to abide by its obligation to do no harm and affirm the need to address systemic issues in the institutions I uphold. | ||
| I promise to critically examine the systems and experiences that impact every person's health and ability to receive care. | ||
| I vow to use this knowledge to uplift my patients and disrupt the injustices that harm them as I forge the future of medicine. | ||
| I promise to self-reflect diligently, to confront unconscious prejudices, and to develop the skills, knowledge, and character necessary to engender an inclusive, equitable field of medicine. | ||
| And then they all drank the Kool-Aid and dropped dead. | ||
| Rob, I mean, I started scribbling down some of the things wrong that we heard there, but how about just the general tone of that? | ||
| The lifeless tone with which the woman reads, that they read. | ||
| These are supposed to be really bright, young people who are gonna save lives. | ||
| Equitable medicine? | ||
| Sounds like you're gonna have to kill a certain set of people. | ||
| I think Heather was basically alluding to that. | ||
| No, Dave, that just looked like a pseudo-religious service. | ||
| It looked like a ceremony these people are taking part in. | ||
| It reminds me of being little and watching little kids at church having to repeat something that they don't want. | ||
| They don't want to be there. | ||
| They're kind of bored. | ||
| It's like these people, I don't know how many of them actually believe what they're saying, but the fact that they're being instructed to do these things when that's not really their role to examine unconscious biases, institutional corruption, racism. | ||
| You ask any doctor, they're overloaded with so much work to do. | ||
| I mean, so much overwhelming data and, you know, do I recommend a drug here or a behavioral intervention or whether it's exercise or sleep or medication or do this test or that test. | ||
| And now they're also being told to reflect on institutional bias. | ||
| Like, it's completely out of their purview. | ||
| And I don't know why they would start recommending doctors to do this kind of thing. | ||
| Heather, I think you probably do know why, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's because we are terrified of the ongoing racial skills gap. | ||
| And we now would rather blame our own institutions for phantom racism and say that standards are the problem rather than that lack of sufficient achievement. | ||
| And we're tearing down our standards. | ||
| We're tearing down gifted and talented programs. | ||
| We're tearing down standardized tests. | ||
| Some schools are getting rid of the medical school admissions test because they have a disparate impact. | ||
| But here's the facts. | ||
| Again, these are the things, Dave, that nobody wants to talk about. | ||
| But you have 66% of black 12th graders not even possessing partial mastery of 12th grade math skills, skills that are so basic they mean simply doing an arithmetical calculation or being able to understand a linear relationship on a graph. | ||
| So we have that fact that nobody wants to look at. | ||
| And then we say, well, if blacks are not 13% of Harvard medical students, it must be because Harvard is discriminating in its medical admissions, which is a complete deception. | ||
| There's not a single institution that is not according black privilege, not white privilege. | ||
| I don't know of a single black student who's going around checking white on his college admissions or graduate school or law school box. | ||
| But I do know of white students who are wanting to be underrepresented minorities. | ||
| Don't think this is just a bunch of idiot students. | ||
| What this pledge was, this sort of land and race acknowledgement, sounds very much like materials coming out of the AMA, out of the American Association of Medical Colleges, which are going to start certifying medical schools based on whether their faculty can repeat these bromides and whether | ||
| they're teaching their students these bromides and it's all zero sum. Every moment a medical | ||
| student spends learning about intersectionality, which is a ridiculous idea, is a moment spent not learning | ||
| how to save you when you come into that emergency room after a car crash. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's the key point. | ||
| That once you bring this stuff in, you move your eyes off what the core competency of whatever the institution is. | ||
| So ultimately, you will, over time, have worse pilots. | ||
| You will have worse doctors. | ||
| You will have worse engineers. | ||
| And we will wonder why people are dying of heart attacks and why bridges are collapsing and planes are crashing, etc., etc. | ||
| But, you know, as we were playing that video, I said to my guys in studio, I was like, you know, guys, I'm never leaving Florida. | ||
| And I forgot what video was coming up next. | ||
| But we are booting this stuff out of Florida right now. | ||
| That is what DeSantis is doing this very week. | ||
|
unidentified
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Joe Contreras, I'm with the Guardian newspaper and the Washington Monthly magazine. | |
| Among the areas you identify... That's like left of the left, right? | ||
| Can I ask my question? | ||
| No, I mean, you can, but I just... I've seen. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
|
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Why did it take you more than two years, Governor, to suddenly decide that DEI should be abolished in the state university system? | |
| Thank you. | ||
| So it's a good question. | ||
| So one, it wasn't at my direction. | ||
| I didn't know what DEI was a couple years ago as this had taken hold. | ||
| I mean, it sounds innocuous, right? | ||
| I thought maybe diversity of ideas, maybe actually have more than one viewpoint. | ||
| Well, that's not what it is. | ||
| What it is, is it's trying to enforce a political agenda and a political orthodoxy under the auspices of administration. | ||
| And that is something that is not in the best interest of this state. | ||
| But I think if you look to see how it's worked in practice, It's been an embarrassment to see some of the things that have come out at Florida State, at some of these universities here. | ||
| It's not an appropriate use of the administrative machinery of a university that, oh by the way, subsists on the generosity of the taxpayers. | ||
| We introduced legislation to remedy that and we will be the first state in these United States to wipe out DEI at our public universities. | ||
| Heather, I thought there was a nice mea culpa there at the beginning by DeSantis when he said, you know, I didn't really know what this was a couple years ago. | ||
| I thought that diversity meant diversity of ideas. | ||
| Like, this thing has crept up on many, many people, but you've really been writing about this for years and years, so you must be sort of happy that people are coming around now and doing the right thing. | ||
| Oh, you're way too generous to me, Dave. | ||
| Actually, I'm furious that they haven't realized this. | ||
| I feel like, where have you guys been? | ||
| I'm not the only one who's been- I get that. | ||
| I get that angle too. | ||
| I get that angle. | ||
| I feel that's with something sometimes. | ||
| But the fact that he's going to do something about it, that's the point. | ||
| Yeah, better late than never. | ||
| And you know, the thing that is so disgusting about this, leaving aside the overwhelmingly biased and fanciful portrayal of the United States that is the core of DEI ideology, the idea that we are systemically racist. | ||
| Now, I'm not going to deny the white supremacy and systemic racism of our past. | ||
| It was horrible, and we don't sufficiently account for it in conservative discourse, in my opinion. | ||
| Nevertheless, that is not our reality today. | ||
| But the other issue is just the sheer bureaucratic cost of these initiatives. | ||
| You have bureaucrats up the wazoo. | ||
| The reason why tuition keeps going up And then you have the federal government saying, | ||
| oh, well, we're gonna take more taxpayer dollars from the people in East Palestine with their fuel spill | ||
| that are working class so that we can spend more on college loans to prop up this whole corrupt phony system | ||
| of ever growing bureaucracies, the bloatedness of these universities | ||
| driven by the DEI bureaucracy. | ||
| The whole thing is just absolutely nauseating and they get away with it and good for DeSantis for saying, you know what, there's something we can do about it and I'm not going to be bludgeoned by the academic left. | ||
| Rob, isn't that something when you hear a politician actually address a problem and then clearly do something about it? | ||
| I mean, he's staffing, right now, colleges. | ||
| Chris Ruffo is here now helping out, you know, where they're going to get rid of DEI in some of the state schools, as DeSantis referred to. | ||
| Like, he's not just saying it, he's actually doing something about it. | ||
| I just want to quickly credit Heather for the work she's been doing for several years on the racial skills gap. | ||
| I mean, that's at the core. | ||
| Of so many of these problems and it's bizarre just how taboo that is. | ||
| And I've written about in Colette and the New York Post before with respect to disparities and income between racial groups. | ||
| And even there, I've gotten a lot of pushback for doing that thing or for engaging in that kind of analysis. | ||
| But I just credit Heather for just continuing to to write about that stuff. | ||
| It's it's it's not written about enough the difference in skills and education. | ||
| With respect to the stuff at universities, I mean, if you look at the budgets for some of these people working in DEI, you know, Chief Diversity Officer, Assistant Treasury Secretary of Equity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| It's like hundreds of thousands of dollars per person, or tens of thousands of dollars per person, at least. | ||
| I think it was Mark Perry. | ||
| I think he's at AEI, and he's posted some graphs on Twitter, some charts showing How much these people are making and it's just obscene, like, what are we doing with all this money? | ||
| Like, imagine if we took all this money, like, I think he was showing for 1 university. | ||
| It was something, it was like, hundreds of thousands of dollars for, like, 5 employees or something. | ||
| And it's like, imagine if we could use that money and, like, help fund. | ||
| Better education and inner city schools, like, help. | ||
| You know, incentivize better programs for education and whatnot, like. | ||
| That would be a far better usage of resources. | ||
| You know, it's funny, I've never been able to find out how many young black people BLM sent to college. | ||
| It's very bizarre. | ||
| You would think that number would be out there, but I'm fairly certain the number is zero. | ||
| Let me just jump to one other thing with DeSantis related to all of this, which is that he's also now pushing a digital bill of rights. | ||
| Obviously, you know, between big tech censorship and algorithmic manipulation, all of the stuff that everybody watching this knows about. | ||
| He's not waiting for the federal government to do anything on it because clearly they ain't going to do anything. | ||
| So here is DeSantis, same press conference. | ||
| So today we're going to be proposing and we're working with the legislature to enact a digital bill of rights which will protect Floridians from big tech harms and big tech overreaches. | ||
| Also taking even stronger action to address threats posed by CCP related entities. | ||
| Like TikTok, but not only TikTok, but doing it much broader than just state government devices. | ||
| So what is the Digital Bill of Rights? | ||
| Well, we want to protect your right as a Floridian to have private in-person conversations without big tech surveilling you. | ||
| We also are going to protect the right to participate in online platforms without unfair censorship. | ||
| We want free speech. | ||
| We want more speech, not less speech. | ||
| We want to protect the right to know how these internet search engines are manipulating search results. | ||
| Transparency in terms of what we're doing so that you can evaluate whether that's a search engine that you want to use or maybe you want to take your business elsewhere. | ||
| Heather, is this federalism at its best? | ||
| I mean, the feds don't seem to wanna do anything. | ||
| The administration, we actually know that they flag posts to silence people's free speech, individual people's free speech. | ||
| So the states are gonna do something, at least some of them. | ||
| Yeah, if this is technically possible, this is way outside of my understanding. | ||
| I don't know if a state has the capacity, I'm not saying the lawful right, I would imagine it does, to make those changes into something as massive as these search platforms. | ||
| But if it can be done, it's great. | ||
| And I know Europe has been, Trying to get more user privacy and control over personal information. | ||
| So maybe there's things that DeSantis can do, but it's certainly a great step. | ||
| I mean, I noticed with that John Legend video for Pfizer, I wanted to see the comments and there was a sign there underneath saying, who can reply? | ||
| People Pfizer follows or monitors can reply. | ||
| So there are censoring there, which is just classic. | ||
| But the worst censorship, of course, is for these tech companies to Silence people who are not taking the correct line on lockdowns or outdoor mask wearing in the absurd idea that they are following the science and they're destroying misinformation. | ||
| Well, you know better than anybody else, Dave, is our biggest free speech advocate, that this is a complete misunderstanding of how the marketplace of ideas works and how truth emerges from conflict and argument, not from suppression. | ||
| You know, the point you made on the comments being disabled, | ||
| or only people who follow Pfizer can comment, that's not nothing because it's happening now | ||
| with almost everyone related to this. | ||
| For example, Bill Gates, when he tweets, shuts off comments. | ||
| The head, Randy Weingarten, the head of the teachers union shuts off comments. | ||
| Pfizer usually does. | ||
| All of these people who were told are our elite thought leaders who know so much better | ||
| about how we should live our lives than we know for ourselves. | ||
| They don't want to hear from any of us, but we ain't gonna stop, are we, Rob? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, I don't have a huge problem with people choosing to turn off comments on their posts, | ||
| but the larger issue on social media. | ||
| Which I've been reporting on for a year now has been, you know, mainstream pro like even pro vaccine scientists tweeting peer reviewed studies done by Ivy League scientists showing risk of adverse events on vaccines being labeled misleading or their accounts censored. | ||
| Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, obviously at Stanford, he's a great guy. | ||
| His account was blacklisted because he was on the wrong side of lockdowns. | ||
| Tweets being labeled misleading by, I think, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, the co-signer of the Great Barrington Declaration. | ||
| This tweet labeled misleading for saying that not everyone needs the vaccine. | ||
| Like, this is the level of censorship we've seen online. | ||
| This very disturbing collusion between big tech, the government, the FDA, Pfizer, CDC, all coming together as this collective entity that polices what is right and what isn't, and deems one side as safe and following the science, and the other side which lumps in, yes, anti-vaxxers on the far right, but also like scientists from Stanford, scientists from Harvard, epidemiologists who had alternate perspectives on lockdown and on vaccine safety, for example, who were censored. | ||
| But I'm glad Elon Musk has taken over and is reversing some of those things with the Twitter files and with changing policy. | ||
| What I find so amazing is the ignorance and naivete of the pro-censorship left, especially on campus. | ||
| These students that want to ban speech under the banner of hate speech, and the underlying conceit for all of this is the safetyist conceit that these wealthy, privileged students are just going around barely hanging on for their lives because they're so traumatic, traumatized, and so oppressed. | ||
| And so therefore hate speech is going to just push them over the edge and they're all going to commit suicide or be killed. | ||
| But that they think that they will always control the reins of power in order to define what hate speech is. | ||
| And they have no understanding of what one hopes is still neutral principles that were their ideological enemies to get hold of that power. | ||
| They would use that censorship power against them. | ||
| And so the only safe haven for this is to have complete viewpoint neutrality and let | ||
| the sides duke it out. | ||
| But when you start designating certain types of information as misinformation that you | ||
| have the right to suppress, at some point the tables will turn, one hopes, and that | ||
| same extraordinarily dangerous and violent power will be used against you. | ||
| That's a great segue, actually, because speaking of viewpoint neutrality, so DeSantis comes | ||
| in and he says, hey, we want to keep the internet, the promise of the internet to be what we | ||
| all thought 20 years ago, that you'd basically be able to get on here and say what you think, | ||
| and we want to remove from the schools this indoctrination instead of... | ||
| education, which is what's happening with this AP African American Studies course that | ||
| we've been covering all week, where they were also including gender queer theory and a whole | ||
| bunch more. | ||
| So listen to how the ladies at The View, and I always have to apologize to my audience | ||
| before we play a clip from The View, but here we go. | ||
| Listen to how the ladies of The View are describing what DeSantis is doing this week. | ||
| You know, Ron DeSantis went to Harvard and Yale. | ||
| Yes, he did. | ||
| So he's got a very good education. | ||
| Now he doesn't want anybody else to have it, you know? | ||
| And that's famous, right? | ||
| I mean, I took it seriously when Donald Trump said, I love the undereducated. | ||
| The poorly educated. | ||
| The poorly educated. | ||
| He said that specifically and I think that Ron DeSantis is taking, you know, that page out of that playbook because the less people know The easier it is for those people to sort of gaslight them and snooker them. | ||
| And I think what's so offensive to me, and Whoopi, you kind of just alluded to it, is that he only targeted African American APs. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| Everything else was fair game. | ||
| You could learn about Latinos. | ||
| You could learn about Japanese. | ||
| You could learn about Asian. | ||
| Everybody, but not black folks, which are the very foundation of this country. | ||
| Well, those are the ones... But that's the black... The black community in this country has suffered from slavery. | ||
| That's why he doesn't want us to talk about it. | ||
| Well, we built this country for free. | ||
| He doesn't... I know that. | ||
| Are you telling me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But, I mean, he doesn't want people to know that because it'll make white people feel bad. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And we want our reparations for it, and he doesn't want to pay us. | ||
| All right, putting aside that Joy looks drunk, everything Sunny said there was a lie. | ||
| Every single word out of her mouth was a lie. | ||
| She did not tell you what was going on in that African-American studies course. | ||
| They refused to. | ||
| They covered it every day this week. | ||
| They refused to say anything about the gender theory stuff. | ||
| And also, I don't know. | ||
| Are there AP courses in Asian-American history? | ||
| I don't know that it even exists. | ||
| No! | ||
| It's all complete nonsense. | ||
| Heather, go first. | ||
| I can see you're jumping at this one. | ||
| Yeah, it's just, it's amazing. | ||
| It is such a race hustle. | ||
| I'm happy to be colorblind, but as long as this race hustle is one-sided, at some point people are going to have to say, we're not putting up with this any longer. | ||
| We refuse to be Mao Maoed. | ||
| We refuse to be guilt tripped. | ||
| She's lying. | ||
| There is not, this is the first AP course in a particular identity or race. | ||
| It's precisely because we all go around so terrified of black anger, that we've created this course that is, were it not political, of course, African-American history is an extraordinarily important part of this history. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I assume it's already being taught, but that- Of course it's already being taught. | |
| It's being taught in every high school in America, without question, without question. | ||
| But what made this course so completely unacceptable was its embrace of the most shallow Ignorant academic theorizing that has nothing to do with historical scholarship, which is simply the rote repetition of a particularly jargon-ridden academic discourse that is made out of air and whose only purpose is to keep white people feeling guilty so they keep shoveling benefits and destroying their own standards. | ||
| Uh, in order to placate black rage. | ||
| Rav, do you think that they actually believe what they're saying? | ||
| You know, I'm getting tired of sort of, I always try to go out of my way to not impugn people's motives, but at some point, like, are they just complete idiots or liars or is it like half and half? | ||
| Like, do they really, do you think, have no idea? | ||
| I know you're not inside their brains, but like, what do you think's really going on here? | ||
| There is an executive producer of that show. | ||
| Who I'm going to try to get on this show. | ||
| I tweeted at him. | ||
| Obviously, he's not going to do it. | ||
| Brian something his name is. | ||
| Get me his name when you can. | ||
| By the way, we checked. | ||
| They are part of ABC Entertainment, not ABC News. | ||
| But what do you think is really going on there when they're doing this every day? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the way that that course was branded, right? | ||
| I mean, AP African American Studies. | ||
| I mean, oh, if you're if you're against that, then Of course, I mean, aren't you against black people? | ||
| Like, I mean, it's a very surface level, like reading where someone just doesn't have the brainpower to actually look like, oh, this is not just black history. | ||
| This is like they're teaching about intersectionality in this course. | ||
| That's not rigorous historical scholarship. | ||
| I mean, that's a, you know, made up theorized concoction within academia that That is far more pervasive than I thought, by the way. | ||
| I mean, this stuff, a lot of people genuinely believe these things. | ||
| I mean, I've had many, many encounters with people at my own university. | ||
| I'm. | ||
| I decided to go back to school, by the way, and I'm a halftime. | ||
| A student there here locally, and it's like. | ||
| Time and time again, I have these encounters. | ||
| I mean, there was 1 professor a couple of years ago. | ||
| They were going to. | ||
| Create some kind of club or some kind of roundtable for students to come and talk about race issues. | ||
| And one of the core elements of this roundtable was systemic racism. | ||
| And I asked this professor, whose name I'm escaping, she was also South Asian like me, and I said, hey, I don't exactly agree with the premise about the structural racism. | ||
| I think it's too simplistic. | ||
| Am I still welcome at this table? | ||
| And she was like, no, sorry, no, no, no, you got to accept. | ||
| As this, as the biblical foundational truth of Canadian history. | ||
| Otherwise you're not welcome here. | ||
| And it's like, I wanted to make this point earlier about like Jordan Peterson. | ||
| He's coming on campus or he's coming to Vancouver on Tuesday and there were talks about inviting him on campus. | ||
| One professor who's an old school liberal who actually disagrees with Peterson on many things and agrees with other things. | ||
| He just tossed around the idea, like maybe we should invite him on campus, like behind the scenes in a staff meeting. | ||
| And the younger professors in the sociology and political science departments, obviously, said, well, we'll hold a protest if you're going to invite Peterson on campus. | ||
| So how dare you? | ||
| How dare you even suggest that idea, given how, you know, racist and transphobic and whatever Jordan Peterson is? | ||
| And meanwhile, I'm having other encounters with philosophy professors in my classes who are saying, like, Peterson is this, like, hardcore anti-intellectual who doesn't know how to read. | ||
| I mean, this is the extent to which academia is just plagued by this D.E.I. | ||
| woke ideology. | ||
| I mean, I thought that it would be far less pervasive than it's turned out to be in my case. | ||
| And I'm just continually just troubled by this ideological monoculture where if you just step outside of it, if you just disagree a little bit, then suddenly you're a heretic. | ||
| The idea that a professor, of course everyone's allowed to protest, but the idea that a professor would be protesting because Jordan Peterson, probably the most serious academic, certainly the most well-known academic we have in the world, who has brought more good ideas, just the biblical stuff alone, back into the world, more than most religious scholars all combined in the last 50 years have done, And that they'd be wasting their time protesting him is absolutely insane. | ||
| By the way, the EP, the executive producer of The View, I'll look at the camera, Brian Tedda, executive producer of The View, I would love to have you on the show. | ||
| I will do it without notes. | ||
| We can do it live whenever you want to do it. | ||
| We can air it during The View or after The View or before The View, and I'd like to talk to you about your journalistic integrity when you set up the show every day, what topics you give to the girls and what research goes into it, and whether you have any opinions on the fact that they share misinformation every day. | ||
| So, Brian Tedda, you are welcome on The Rubin Report at any point, and that's a good segue to our final clip, which of course is from The View, and listen to the high-level discourse on what's going on here in Florida. | ||
| You just saw Al Sharpton there. | ||
| These people, these fascists out there like DeSantis, they think that we're just going to sit back and let them do whatever they want. | ||
| No! | ||
| We're not. | ||
| We've seen this movie before, okay? | ||
| Those of us who lived in the 60s and 70s, we saw this movie. | ||
| There were many, many fascist tactics coming down the pike from Nixon and the rest of these fascists. | ||
| That's what they are. | ||
| And we protested, and we protested, and we ended a war that was illegal. | ||
| And we did stuff, and it's happening again. | ||
| That's the good news. | ||
| And it's not happening enough in Florida. | ||
| First off, wait, I've said it many times, but I'm told that I live about five minutes away from Ana Navarro, and I just cannot wait to meet this woman somewhere. | ||
| Why is she living in this fascist state? | ||
| Why doesn't she leave? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| But Heather, it's like, what the high hell is Joy talking about? | ||
| What fascist takeover is Ron DeSantis doing? | ||
| What war does Ron DeSantis want us to go to? | ||
| All he's doing is pushing back. | ||
| It really is that simple. | ||
| I guess Bahar is like in some time warp. | ||
| She doesn't look like it, but she seems to be maybe still a 14-year-old. | ||
| Her level of intellectual sophistication is, you know, that low. | ||
| And these were the people who were complaining at the beginning of DeSantis not wanting people to be educated. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I mean, the lack of knowledge of what fascism actually means, this is just absolute knee-jerk smear. | ||
| Now, I'm always asking myself, Dave, They would say the same about us. | ||
| You know, let's just be honest. | ||
| They would say that we are just as knee-jerk in our use of blanket epithets. | ||
| And so I always sort of probe, like, do we do the same thing in calling them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I mean, we call them totalitarians. | ||
| They do want to shut down speech. | ||
| One could debate that. | ||
| I mean, one would need evidence on both sides. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Let's just say in this case, though, It's completely ludicrous, the idea that Nixon was a fascist. | ||
| Again, she's talking like the 60s. | ||
| This was the moment in the 60s when you had the rise of youth culture. | ||
| You had a capitalist system that was so wildly successful that it gave teenagers spending power and power for the first time in all of human history. | ||
| And it went downhill from there. | ||
| You had corporations creating youth culture. | ||
| And these idiots, we still have it. | ||
| Ordering adults around and she never grew up. | ||
| She never gained some perspective of what actual threats of government power are. | ||
| You know, Heather, I think you're making a great point about can we fall into that trap as well, and I'm not saying that we don't, and I call them silly names, especially on Twitter too, but I would say one clear distinction from people on the right and people on the left that I see, almost, obviously not exclusively, but fairly consistently, is that when something like the Don't Say Gay Bill, Don't say gay though. | ||
| I'm using their language. | ||
| That already proves it. | ||
| When it happens, HB I think it was 1447 or whatever it was, which had nothing to do with being gay and it was all about parental rights and education. | ||
| On this show, I repeatedly explained what it was, said my position, and then showed their position. | ||
| My frustration with them is they never say what the thing is. | ||
| They just use the, it's don't say gay, or they got rid of, as Rob said, you get rid of African-American studies. | ||
| Well, who, AP, African-American studies? | ||
| You obviously are racist. | ||
| They never explain the other thing. | ||
| So I don't know that it's like, I don't think it's quite 50-50. | ||
| I'm not saying you were saying that, but I think that is a substantive difference. | ||
| Rob, fascism, it's here apparently in Florida, where everyone I know is happy. | ||
| Yeah, I just want to quickly applaud like what's happening in Florida. | ||
| I mean, the state journal, the state general, sorry, the surgeon general yesterday. | ||
| Yeah, Latipo. | ||
| Latipo sent a great letter to the FDA saying that more and more concerns about adverse events from the vaccine have risen. | ||
| And you should seriously consider what's going on here. | ||
| I mean, Florida has led the way on COVID. | ||
| It's just incredible how many people left and right have supported them in what they've done compared to blue states. | ||
| Um, but this whole thing about language, I mean, one often comes across this allegation of conspiracy theory on the right, which exists on the fringes. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You know, stolen election, anti-vax sentiment, you know, vaccines are killing millions of people, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| But a lot of these ideas are completely deranged conspiracy theory too. | ||
| I mean, again, like this whole racial gap stuff that Heather and I have written about, like every time there's a racial disparity, well, it must be racism, right? | ||
| If you're against this AP African American Studies course, you're obviously racist. | ||
| If you have questions about mRNA vaccines, you're obviously an anti-vaxxer, right? | ||
| That's the definition of conspiracy theory, right? | ||
| When you don't have evidence of a claim and you continually make that claim without adequate evidence supporting your position. | ||
| The left, the far left, continually does that to their opponents, and they continually just | ||
| bend language and throw around allegations without any sufficient proof. | ||
| You know, I would say, Dave, another aspect of our world, and that's a very interesting | ||
| distinction that the right tries at least to lay out what the other side's argument | ||
| is and the facts before getting into its own argument. | ||
| The other thing that I've been going nuts with recently is who owns the default. | ||
| It seems like no matter how radical and lunatic an idea that the left puts forward, it immediately becomes the default assumption. | ||
| And to argue against it, you then have the burden of proof. | ||
| So the locus classicus of this is, of course, trans ideology, that within a few years, All of a sudden, the default assumption in elite progressive circles, which are very, very wide circles, is that, of course, sex and gender are artificial constructs. | ||
| There's something merely assigned at birth by an obstetrician. | ||
| And that children should have their noses rubbed into premature knowledge of sexuality. | ||
| And regardless of what kind of sexuality it is, I think that is child abuse to strip children of that innocence. | ||
| But that now becomes the default as somebody who does still subject yourself to the New York Times. | ||
| I watch this all the time. | ||
| And it is those who argue against it that are seen as marginal. | ||
| It's a very weird and incredibly important move that they're making because in law, we know whoever has the burden of proof in a case, they're up against a higher evidentiary standard. | ||
| You know, what law is all about is often burden shifting. | ||
| You know, can you shift the burden onto the other side? | ||
| And that's one of the things that we're up against when you can issue your challenge to the executive producer of The View. | ||
| But we're still the underdog here, and he can ignore you. | ||
| And the challenge is to get big enough and to control or have access to enough power in the media sphere, in the information sphere, that they do have to answer your challenge. | ||
| Well, last month, we just found out this morning, I got an email from my guy, was our best month ever across every platform by 64%. | ||
| Not 9%, not 16%, 64%. | ||
| So maybe it's happening. | ||
| By the way, what you're describing there, a lot of people call that factory settings, that sort of the factory settings of what we all come out of in the West is a sort of leftist indoctrination. | ||
| And then the rest of us have to constantly be hatcheting away at that thing. | ||
| Guys, I have thoroughly enjoyed this panel. | ||
| I will gladly have you both back anytime you want. | ||
| Heather, thank you very much. | ||
| Rob, thank you. | ||
| We'll link to your stuff down below. | ||
| I've got a post-game show coming up in about 42 seconds. | ||
| We leave you with a cold close. |
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