April 7, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
17:58
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Yeah, I mean, one, I think obviously there are certain people in the Biden administration who should be impeached, right? | ||
| Mayorkas has clearly violated his oath of office. | ||
| I think Garland has violated his oath of office. | ||
| I don't know if any of these guys have done something criminal, but certainly if you reveal | ||
| something criminal, even if you're a very powerful official, maybe especially if you're | ||
| a powerful official, you should suffer criminal consequences because of it. | ||
| All right, it's day three of three here in Washington, D.C. | ||
| I'm still Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is still The Rubin Report, and joining me today is the junior senator from Ohio and the new guy in this crazy town, J.D. | ||
| Vance. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks, Dave. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| First time we've sat down in person. | ||
| We've done this digitally a couple times. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You are the new guy in town. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| How are they treating you, man? | ||
| You know, it's not too bad. | ||
| I'm having a good time. | ||
| And the thing I've learned about D.C. | ||
| is that, yeah, it is the swamp. | ||
| Yeah, the crime rate is out of control. | ||
| You saw, of course, the news that happened with Rand Paul's staffer, which is just awful. | ||
| And thank God he's going to be okay. | ||
| The work of the Senate, despite the fact that Republicans are in the minority, Still actually precedes the pace, and we're able to get some things done. | ||
| We've killed a couple of very bad Biden administration nominees. | ||
| We've gotten some good legislation, I think, starting to move through the congressional process. | ||
| Biden will probably veto a lot of it, but we're at least getting some things done. | ||
| And at the very least, we'll force Biden to answer for some of his veto decisions over the next couple of years. | ||
| Do you feel like a politician now? | ||
| Because for people that, for people that know you, and we'll link to the original interview so they can, if they don't know, they can check out your bio. | ||
| I mean, you are clearly not what a general politician is thought of. | ||
| Yeah, no, not at all. | ||
| I don't feel like a politician. | ||
| I mean, eventually I assume that I will, or at least I'll have to start saying I'm a politician once you run for office. | ||
| You have staff members, so I guess. | ||
| I have like 30 staff members, so yeah, eventually you start to feel like a politician. | ||
| But no, I mean, I guess I still feel this sense of awe about it. | ||
| It's very easy, I think, especially when you're conservative and you're just so frustrated with what happens in DC. | ||
| It's very easy to get cynical about politics writ large, but when you walk through the halls of Congress and you see, you know, oh, there's John F. Kennedy's desk, there's Richard Nixon's desk, and you realize that A lot of the great and bad moments of American history happened in what is your new office. | ||
| It's hard not to feel some sense of awe on it. | ||
| And I think that when you're a politician, you probably don't feel that at all. | ||
| You feel just entitled to it. | ||
| I hope that never happens to me. | ||
| Yeah, that's going to be the trick, right? | ||
| To make sure that it never gets old. | ||
| So one of the things that I've been saying for a couple months is that I sense the Republicans maybe Starting to do the right thing. | ||
| It feels like it's happening. | ||
| I sat down with McCarthy yesterday. | ||
| He laid out an actual agenda. | ||
| I sense from all the guys that I'm talking to, the guys and gals that I'm talking to in the Senate, Congress, that it might actually be happening. | ||
| Do you believe that the Republicans can get something done and that the never-ending swamp and deep state and all that just won't expand and eat you all up and all of that? | ||
| Yeah, but I feel optimistic about it, but it's going to require some more work and some more progress. | ||
| I think, obviously, the guys in the house, because they have the gavels, right? | ||
| They have the majority. | ||
| They have investigatory powers. | ||
| I think we're going to learn a lot about what's going on with the Department of Justice. | ||
| I think we're going to learn a lot about why the Attorney General is harassing political opponents instead of doing the job of law enforcement. | ||
| I think we may even see some consequences for some of the people who have done some things wrong. | ||
| What would that look like to you? | ||
| Because I've been asking everybody about that, that we do the hearings, we find out people lie under oath and sort of nothing happens. | ||
| What would consequences actually look like? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, one, I think obviously there are certain people in the Biden administration who should be impeached, right? | ||
| Mayorkas has clearly violated his oath of office. | ||
| I think Garland has violated his oath of office. | ||
| I don't know if any of these guys have done something criminal, but certainly if you reveal something criminal, even if you're a very powerful official, maybe especially if you're a powerful official, you should suffer criminal consequences because of it. | ||
| But I think even just knowing what's going on is a big part of the equation here. | ||
| And we still have no idea behind the scenes what's really going on. | ||
| You know, just take one example, right? | ||
| When the Department of Justice was harassing parents who were peacefully protesting last year, critical race theory being taught in those schools. | ||
| What decision was made? | ||
| Who made it? | ||
| Was it motivated by political persecution? | ||
| Was it just an innocent, albeit terrible mistake? | ||
| Knowing the answers to these questions is something the American people have been totally closed off on. | ||
| So that's where you say if Garland wrote it himself, and I guess it's maybe a little unclear who actually wrote the memo, that that It's unclear if you wrote the memo, it's unclear if you directed it. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, if you're the Attorney General and you're sicking your law enforcement officials after appearance for peacefully protesting, that to me is a criminal act, right? | ||
| You have to suffer consequences for that. | ||
| But, you know, we'll see. | ||
| And that's one of the good things. | ||
| I think dismantling some of these bureaucracies is a really core part of this. | ||
| I do think you're going to see In the debt ceiling negotiation, this is, you know, my colleagues in the house, they really have a pen on this, but I think it would look like really defunding some of the more woke sides of the bureaucracy. | ||
| And I'd say that includes the Department of Defense, where you have a lot of the senior leadership, not the troops, but the senior leadership, the Department of Defense has gone really in for a progressive social agenda. | ||
| Do you believe that there's really a chance to do that? | ||
| I mean, this is one that you hit hard, how it's affected our military specifically. | ||
| This one in particular, I do think it's possible, because here's the thing. | ||
| A lot of these ridiculous DEI bureaucracies within the federal government, they cost money, okay? | ||
| And so the debt ceiling negotiation is a perfect opportunity for us to say, look, We're not going to fund these things. | ||
| It's good policy. | ||
| It's also good budgetary sense. | ||
| And so, yeah, I do think there's some chance of progress. | ||
| Do I think we're going to get everything? | ||
| No, of course not, right? | ||
| I'm a realist. | ||
| But I do think that we're going to be in a much better position with a much less well-funded DEI bureaucracy in the federal government. | ||
| So I wanna get to some specific stuff that you're doing, and obviously East Palestine especially, but one more generally. | ||
| I told you right before we sat down that I'm sitting down with about 20 Republicans. | ||
| We finally got one Democrat to at least respond to us, but of course it was a no, but 19 or so did not even respond at all. | ||
| You mentioned one guy who maybe we could sit down, I don't know if he's even, his name mentioned right here, but how's that going for you? | ||
| Are you able to find some Democrats that you can work with and talk to and that sort of thing? | ||
| Yeah, you know, absolutely. | ||
| The way that I put it is that there are specific issues where you can find some Democrats that you agree with. | ||
| You know, on the energy issue, for example, I think, you know, some of the folks in West Virginia are not so supportive of Joe Manchin being anti-energy. | ||
| So we can maybe apply some pressure to permitting reform. | ||
| We happen to think, by the way, David, the main reason why we have inflation is an energy supply issue. | ||
| We've really destroyed the American base of energy. | ||
| I think that's as important as all the other drivers of inflation. | ||
| Maybe the single most important issue. | ||
| I keep asking everybody, is it intentional or is it ineptitude, do you think? | ||
| You know, man, it's a very good question. | ||
| I don't have a good answer yet. | ||
| My bias is always never assume malice or stupidity is a good enough explanation. | ||
| I do think you have some pretty dark figures within the Biden administration who are doing a lot of bad things. | ||
| But I think the way that they have so much power is probably incompetence rather than malice of the senior officials. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| Part of the reason why these investigations are so important is we need to understand what's driving, what motivates the senior leadership of the federal government. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's get into some of the specifics that you're dealing with. | ||
| So obviously East Palestine, so this accident happens, and then really nobody outside of Ohio, and then a couple people on Twitter, I guess, were talking about it for the first 10 days. | ||
| Then finally, it bubbled up, people started talking about it. | ||
| You obviously were down there and showing what's going on with the water and all that. | ||
| But now, two weeks later, or three weeks later, we're not talking about it again. | ||
| So I guess, give me an update, and how bad was the response by this government? | ||
| Yeah, so this is a big risk, right? | ||
| As people forget about it, the politicians and the cameras stop showing up, and so everyone goes home. | ||
| And that would be really bad for the people of East Palestine. | ||
| By the way, that's what they're terrified of, right? | ||
| Is they're going to be forgotten. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There are a few different things going on. | ||
| So in the initial stages of the cleanup, both the Biden administration and Northrop Southern almost couldn't be bothered to do the things they needed. | ||
| Northrop Southern is the train company that caused the crash. | ||
| It's like whack-a-mole. | ||
| What I found over the past eight weeks is every two weeks, it's something new. | ||
| So five weeks ago, I would have told you Norfolk Southern needs to get off its rear end and actually get this cleanup finished because they bear responsibility for it. | ||
| Three weeks ago, I would have told you that the EPA was making it harder for Norfolk Southern. | ||
| Norfolk Southern was starting to do what they needed to do, but the EPA was making it harder for them. | ||
| And that's kind of been the way that our offices approach it, is look, each problem, let's just try to solve each discrete problem, because that's the job of senators, to solve problems for your constituents. | ||
| What I worry about are the next two big things that I worry about for the people of East Palestine. | ||
| Number one is, we have to provide the long-term health screen, right? | ||
| When you talk to people in East Palestine, they're not worried they drink the water and they're gonna drop dead tomorrow. | ||
| They're worried their grandkids are gonna drink the water for 10 years and develop a rare form of cancer. | ||
| There is no bureaucracy. | ||
| There's no, this is crazy, something I didn't know a month ago. | ||
| There is no apparatus within the federal government, all of the CDC and public health bureaucracy, to test for chronic exposure to blues. | ||
| We just don't have that capability in the federal government right now. | ||
| What is it that the EPA does then? | ||
| If not test water that's almost glowing when you put a stick in it? | ||
| Well, their argument is they test for acute toxins. | ||
| They can tell you whether you're going to drink this water and there are toxins at a level that are going to cause sickness the next day. | ||
| They have no real apparatus to test for chronic exposure. | ||
| That's the big problem here. | ||
| So number one is, you've got to do the long-term health screening for the people of East Palestine. | ||
| And again, they're terrified they're going to be forgotten. | ||
| Here's the other crazy thing, Dave. | ||
| So imagine you're a farmer in East Palestine. | ||
| You grow chickens, you sell farm fresh eggs, you sell hay. | ||
| Does anybody want to buy your stuff if you're in East Palestine? | ||
| What about if you paid off your house? | ||
| You've been living there for 40 years and the home value has fallen through the roof by 50%. | ||
| So we're going to have to deal with the economic devastation of this. | ||
| And I hate to say it, Dave, I think the Biden administration doesn't care about this issue because they know the people of East Palestine are not their voters. | ||
| And we have to make them care. | ||
| And that's one of the things I have to focus on, not just for the next few weeks, but the next few months. | ||
|
unidentified
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Doesn't it really suck to believe that? | |
| Like Trump goes down there, and to me, that's Trump at his best. | ||
| It's like, no nonsense. | ||
| He's there for the people. | ||
| He gave away stuff. | ||
| He brought attention to it. | ||
| Can you contrast that with then about three days later, then Pete Buddha Jed shows up. | ||
| I suspect the reaction was a little bit different. | ||
|
unidentified
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He looks like he looked like my toddler, the hard hat dress up. | |
| That was my initial reaction when I saw him. | ||
| I guess, you know, just partially the young looking guy. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm surprised they didn't have him on the bike going into town. | |
| But the crazy thing is the complete lack of earnestness or urgency from the President of the United States. | ||
| I can't think of... I really don't believe if this had happened in a community with a Democratic interest group that you would have had complete ignorance, complete refusal to show up, to show any real leadership for the Biden administration. | ||
| But that's really what we've seen. | ||
| And I hate to say it, but I do think that the, you know, Whether it's Biden himself and the people who work for him, you never know with Joe Biden, whether it's actually him, you know, who's driving the wheel, none of us actually know. | ||
| But the problem is they have this friend-enemy distinction in politics. | ||
| And you've really seen this with the way they've gone after political opponents. | ||
| But if you're not on the right side of their political ledger, they don't feel like they have an obligation to you. | ||
| I think it's a complete inversion of constitutional government in our country. | ||
| But it's unfortunately what we've seen a lot for the past couple of years. | ||
| Yeah, as I'm sure you know, I mean, yesterday was, was it yesterday? | ||
| The day before Matt Taibbi was testifying about government overreach and the IRS literally showed up at his house during the hearing. | ||
| I mean, just crazy. | ||
| This is, this is weird. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's, it's, it really is banana Republic stuff, right? | ||
| That gets thrown around too much, but you know, if you're, you're Matt Taibbi, I don't know. | ||
| And he's a lefty. | ||
| He's a lefty, but of course he said things that are offensive to the Biden regime. | ||
| And I, and I use that word specifically. | ||
| I do think it's, it's a bit of a regime. | ||
| But look, you have agents of the government showing up at your house who have subpoena power over you, have the power to take your money away. | ||
| And that happens when you dare speak up against government authority. | ||
| That is not the United States of America. | ||
| But again, it is what we're seeing a lot from the Biden administration. | ||
| And it's not just that. | ||
| I mean, you see with pro-life activists, and we could go through the number of examples Where the Biden administration just conveniently, just coincidentally happens to send government agents against their political opposition, but it happens so frequently that I don't think many people who are paying attention are blind to what's actually going on. | ||
| So we have somewhat limited time here. | ||
| So let's just do a couple of the other ones that you're talking a lot about. | ||
| Ukraine, Russia, I don't know that we can do somewhat quickly, but I think your basic position is, hey, we're endlessly funding something that there's no end game here. | ||
| Is that pretty much? | ||
| The simplest version of it? | ||
| There's no endgame and nobody's articulated what we're actually trying to accomplish. | ||
| You really ask the people who are driving our Russia-Ukraine policy, what are we trying to do? | ||
| Nobody can actually tell you. | ||
| I think it's really telling, by the way. | ||
| You know I've endorsed President Trump, but it's really telling to me that both President Trump and Ron DeSantis, the two clear frontrunners for the Republican nomination, nobody else has really any chance. | ||
| Both of them are saying we need to be a little bit more cautious about our Russia-Ukraine policy, and yet the entire establishment in Washington has taken the opposite view. | ||
| I think it's a terrible mistake. | ||
| But let me sort of make one very important point here. | ||
| The argument that I make about Russia-Ukraine is that there is a clear conflict between our interest in East Asia and our interest in Eastern Europe. | ||
| So if we want to prevent the Chinese from invading Taiwan, Cutting off access to semiconductors, tanking our economy, making it possible for us to manufacture modern weapons of war. | ||
| That's what an invasion of Taiwan would do. | ||
| We need to focus on East Asia. | ||
| Weapons that we are sending to Ukraine mean weapons that we cannot send to Taiwan. | ||
| And because America doesn't manufacture enough of its own artillery, enough of its own missiles, There is a clear conflict. | ||
| It's not, it is unfortunately a zero-sum dynamic. | ||
| The more we focus on Ukraine, the more empowered China is in East Asia. | ||
| And anybody who ignores that reality is not being serious about trade-offs. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Unfortunately, we only have time for one more, so I'll let you choose it. | ||
| We can either do ESG, big tech, or border and fentanyl, which obviously I know is big. | ||
| Let's do big tech. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So big tech. | ||
| I mean, are we going to fix any of this? | ||
| Elon obviously is at least loosening some of it and we're getting a little more info. | ||
| Yeah, so this is another area where I actually, this is one of the few places where there are enough Democrats where you might actually be able to do something big here in the Senate. | ||
| On the House side, I think that they're going in interesting directions too. | ||
| But to me, I continue to believe that we have to think about this as an antitrust problem. | ||
| The technology companies are individually too powerful within their markets. | ||
| And what they have ended up doing is imposing this ideological regime from the top down. | ||
| And look, this is a little bit weird, I think, for a lot of conservatives, a lot of people who believe in the free market, right? | ||
| They say, well, these are private companies. | ||
| And my counter argument to that, Dave, is always, well, they're private companies, but they've achieved their market power through an unbelievable accumulation of government favors, of legal carve-outs, of liability protections. | ||
| So these are behemoths created by the power of the U.S. | ||
| federal government. | ||
| And I think they can only be curtailed by the power of the U.S. | ||
| federal government. | ||
| So I really think that we need to go into trust buster mode, break up some of these companies, make them less powerful. | ||
| Some of this, even the threat of antitrust, I think, is making these companies less ideological and less progressive. | ||
| Obviously, Twitter is, I think, a really good thing. | ||
| I think what Elon did is, frankly, heroic. | ||
| But you still have Facebook, you still have Google, which is probably the single biggest problem. | ||
| I think the threat of action is making these companies a little bit less crazy, but I think real action would restore some sanity to our process. | ||
| One thing, and I know we're a little short on time here, but one quick thing on this. | ||
| So the way that Google is most powerful, you maybe have heard this, so stop me if you had, is it really biases... Other people are watching this too, so... | ||
| But it really biases fundraising to Democrats over Republicans. | ||
| So if you look at the way that Gmail filters Republican fundraising emails versus Democratic fundraising emails, I just went through a campaign, man. | ||
| That's how you pay for the TV advertisements that reach the middle of the road voters that every person needs. | ||
| Even in a deep red state. | ||
| So if Google is biasing their own email client to left-wing activists, that's going to have major ramifications for our political system. | ||
| I think it already has. | ||
| I think it's one of the reasons, frankly, Blake lost in Arizona. | ||
| I think it's one of the reasons First World didn't do as well in Georgia is because the massive fundraising advantage the left had. | ||
| If you don't fix that problem, you can't send good people to Washington The best you're gonna get is, frankly, establishment low-hards who don't do anything. | ||
| The worst you're gonna get is far-left Democrats. | ||
| To actually have a real America-first movement, you have to solve the big tech fundraising problem. | ||
| All right, this was somewhat brief, but we'll do it again. | ||
| And my challenge to you always will be that you gotta still be excited when you walk in there, because I can sense a lot of people aren't, and that is part of the problem. | ||
| Yeah, agreed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks, Dave. | |
| Good to see you, man. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless drivel, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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